Brill on New York City public schools

In this week's New Yorker; read it all and weep. Now, I'm pretty damn liberal, and sympathetic to unions in general — I once marched in a picket line as a member of UAW Local 4121 — but this piece had me frothing for the blood of New York City teacher's unions. As of this moment, I am a supporter of rapid expansion of charter schools everywhere; the sooner the better.

The most maddening thing about the whole conversation is not even the blatant terribleness of the teachers profiled, or the waste of taxpayer money, or the harm to students, but the disingenuousness of the union representatives*:

[Former United Federation of Teachers president] Rudy Weingarten . . . always tries to link the welfare of teachers to the welfare of those they teach — as in "what's good for teachers is what's good for children."

[New York City Department of Education deputy chancellor, Chris] Cerf's response is that "this is not about teachers; it is about children." He says, "We all agree with the idea that it is better that ten guilty men go free than that one innocent person be imprisoned. But by laying that on to a process of disciplining teachers you put the risk of the kids versus putting it on an occasional innocent teacher losing a job. For the union, it's better to protect one thousand teachers than to wrongly accuse one."

. . .

Should a thousand bad teachers stay put so that one innocent teacher is protected? "That's not a question we should be answering in education," Weingarten said to me. "Teachers who are treated fairly are better teachers. You can't have a situation that is fear-based. . . . That is why we press for due process."

Notice how Weingarten completely dodges the question of the cost/benefit tradeoff. Apparently accountability for teachers is synonymous with "fear", and that's unacceptable, full stop.

Sorry, but around the time I became an adult, I realized that, although being held responsible for my actions can produce a variety of emotions, including occasionally fear, this was simply the nature of holding responsibility.

And although it may be better for ten or even a thousand guilty people to go free than for one innocent person be imprisoned, there is surely some number of guilty people going free at which the balance tips. No reasonable justice system can be infallibly free of false convictions; therefore, by allowing a justice system to exist at all, we implicitly acknowledge that some number of wrongful convictions is a price worth paying for protecting society. And that's when the price of a false conviction is putting people in jail. When the cost is merely forcing people to find another job, the balance certainly tilts towards removing more guilty people and occasionally harming an innocent teacher.

It would be one thing for Weingarten to make an argument about where the balance lies, as an empirical matter, in the case of teachers. But she doesn't do that. She simply denies the premise of the question.

And, of course, the willful denial of transparently obvious logic is a huge red flag in any argument. People deny logic when they fear its conclusions, which is to say that they fear truth itself, which is to say that they are both holding an indefensible position, and also aware, on some level, that they're holding an indefensible position. The only remaining question in such cases is whether, in addition to misleading their audience, they're deceiving themselves as well.

Incidentally, this all leads me to wonder if intransigence will ultimately prove counterproductive for teachers' unions in the long run. Treating one's audience the way Weingarten does is insulting to their intelligence; and insulting people is not, as a rule, a good strategy for gaining their support.** I mean, I'm now sufficiently incensed that I'd donate a decent chunk of change annually to any organization that could credibly promise to accomplish nothing at all besides undermining the political power of teachers' unions.

Finally, I should add that the existence of bad teachers is no secret among actual classroom teachers. I was at dinner a couple of weeks ago with a couple of teachers in the Oakland, CA school system and they know who the goofballs are. Talk to a good public school teacher for about twenty minutes about the other teachers at their school, and see if you don't see them roll their eyes about someone or other. Maybe they don't believe that all borderline teachers should be fired, but among good teachers (particularly younger ones) I suspect that you'd find a fair amount of support for booting bad teachers with a much less ridiculously onerous process than currently prevails in New York City.

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p.s. If you harbor some suspicion that Brill's article is unfairly slanted due to his haute-bourgeois disdain for the unionized classes, see this Village Voice article which examines a small slice of the same issue. The Voice ain't what it used to be, but anti-liberal it is not. And the union doesn't really come out smelling like roses there either.

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*Yes, all of these things are more objectively harmful than the union representatives' disingenuousness; I'm just saying that the latter just pushes my personal buttons more.

**This observation may seem ironic because I insult people on this blog all the time. However, I'm mostly indifferent to the support of those whom I insult.

How destructive was Ozymandias's bomb in Watchmen (the movie)?

Attention conservation notice: nitpicky analysis of a detail that you probably don't care about, from some comic book movie.

Finally saw Watchmen on video (missed it in theaters). I noticed something curious about the final explosion. It is clearly centered on Times Square, and produces a perfectly spherical blast; but in a later shot, the Empire State Building is not only standing but largely intact.

From this, we can infer that the explosion's radius of destruction was less than a dozen or so north/south blocks.

View Larger Map

This got me thinking: how big is this explosion, compared to an actual nuclear bomb blast?

According to HYDESim, a 25-kiloton nuclear weapon detonated at Times Square would exert just enough overpressure at the Empire State Building site to demolish a concrete skyscraper. For comparison, according to the the carloslabs.com Ground Zero simulator, the "Little Boy" nuclear weapon detonated over Hiroshima sixty-four years ago was 15 kilotons; if detonated over Times Square, it would have blown the windows out of the Empire State Building, but the structure would probably not be knocked down.

So Ozymandias's bombs appear to create a pressure blast about as powerful as that from the atomic bombs dropped on Japan in World War II.

The nuclear weapons possessed by the U.S. and U.S.S.R. in the 1980's were, of course, vastly more destructive, on the order of hundreds of kilotons; and would have been delivered as batches of multiple simultaneous warheads.

Wikimedia Commons image by U.S. Army; source

Now, regarding Ozymandias's bombs, it's possible that radiation killed many people outside the direct blast radius. But there's no indication in the movie that Dr. Manhattan's electromagnetic emissions are harmful to human life. In my opinion, if one takes the movie strictly on its own terms, Ozymandias has been careful to engineer a relatively small mass-destruction event: only on the scale of a small fission bomb.

Of course, step outside of the movie's fiction, and it seems equally likely that director Zach Snyder simply assumed that most viewers would not be too familiar with the geography of New York. So he had Ozymandias set off the bomb in Times Square, because it's instantly recognizable, and then he left the Empire State Building standing so that viewers would recognize it instantly in the aftermath shot.

NYC log

Got 30 concentrated hours of mostly solitary NYC auto-tourism this past weekend. My Sept. 11-12 travelogue follows. Obvious warning: if you're not one of my friends and have somehow wandered onto this blog for some other reason, the following will, no doubt, be incredibly boring; actually, even if you are one of my friends, the following might still be incredibly boring.

The day begins with a noonish bus into the Port Authority terminal; I descend to the 7 train crosstown to the 5, uptown to 86th. I walk to Tal Bagels on 86 St. between 1st and 2nd. Poppy seed w/ lox spread + Lemon Snapple = my poisons of choice; eaten on steps of the Met while watching street musician, passers-by, and obnoxious pigeons. The Metropolitan's current exhibitions look snoringly dull, so I follow my prior plan to visit the Whitney: a great Ed Ruscha show, a mixed Ana Mendieta show, some semi-interesting Pop Art selections from the permanent collection.

Next I meander indirectly back to a 6 station and ride downtown to City Hall, to visit Ground Zero, which, for various ill-defined emotional reasons, I have been mostly avoiding the past three years. I pass St. Paul's, where a number of uniformed men accompanied by families are entering the memorial service. I heard that the PATH terminal was up and running, but it's still a shock to see the shiny new steps, sprouting directly out of the site, and leading down to the fully functional train station. The site's been cleaned up, and now bears the signs of incipient construction, but nevertheless still feels like a field of ruins. Green brush has started growing out of the mound of earth and gravel by the slurry wall. The viewing fence has been decorated by the city agencies with: tasteful and informative historical poster boards, plus small, iconic, utilitarian placards: "Please do not write on the fence," "Please understand that all items left must be cleaned up." The fence has been decorated by private citizens with: pictures, posters with lists of names, and numerous flowers, the last of these affixed by their stems, poked or sometimes woven between the narrowly spaced fence struts. I nearly bump (literally, physically bump) into Pataki as he walks out of Essex World Cafe by the corner of Liberty St. & Trinity Pl.; I back off in order to avoid alarming his security detail, although this security detail doesn't actually seem too worried about the surrounding crowd. I watch him glad-handle his way through the crowd for a while before I move on, past Ladder Co. 10 FDNY station (like most NYC stations today, a wreath hangs inside the door). I take the steps to the elevated pedestrian walkway, gawk for a while at the procession of uniformed men and accompanying families circulating through the pit, and move on.

Organized or disorganized groups at the site include: Falun Gong protesters, who, for unclear reasons, are out in force all over the city today; nut case with array of cardboard signs explaining that he and the CIA knew about 9/11 in the 1970s (I speculate that this is roughly when he started dropping lots of acid); a large crowd gathered about a solemn trio (one Asian woman, a middle-aged white woman, a taller white man with a thick graying beard) who read aloud sequentially from a book containing capsule biographies of each victim; a platoon of people (leftists? right-wingers? can't tell, though they're mostly young) wearing STOP TERRORISM t-shirts; a mysterious, vaguely funerary procession of women, who wear black gypsyish dresses and are led by a man beating a small drum; a small group of Japanese who have spread out long cloths painted with a manga-ish cartoon Buddha and some writing about Hiroshima, which they seem to be invoking in a spirit of genuine sympathy for tragedy, rather than to embarrass Americans by stirring up guilty associations.

I wander down Fulton St. to South St. Seaport. On the way, I encounter more Falun Gong protesters camped in front of NYU's Water St. residence. I sit on the pier and watch the East River and the Brooklyn Bridge for a little while. Then I get restless once again and wander up to the Chambers St. A/C station; I ride the train to Canal St. Along the way, I fire up my Karma and listen to the Velvets singing about heroin as I walk up through Chinatown, SoHo/NoLiTa, past Haring's Pop Shop, and into the East Village, wondering if Lou Reed ever imagined that these neighborhoods would look the way they do today. I get a double medium latte at Oren's (which, incidentally, still serves better coffee than I've had anywhere in Espresso City) and sit in Washington Square Park reading American Ground for a couple of hours. The relentlessly sobering content is leavened somewhat by the inevitable presence of musicians and NYU students around me.

Dinner: burger and fries at Cozy Soup & Burger (In-N-Out can kiss our collective New York ass). Around this point, I've just about had my fill of solitary wandering; you can cover a lot of ground when you're by yourself, but New York gets to be a lonely city when you don't know anyone. Fortunately, I do. I get a chocolate shake to go, then L-train into Williamsburg for PM and JW's opening party. Nice show. It goes about as well for me as parties ever go: I'm hardly a party person, but I manage to reconnect with old friends, and meet some new people. Most unexpected compliment of the night: S: "You're everything we're looking for." Me: "'We'?" S: "Women." If I were prone to blushing . . . of course, it's a polite lie, but flattery will get you everywhere (to an extent that you wouldn't even believe: see Fogg and Nass, IJHCS 46(5)). Bless you, S., wherever you are.

Party winds down around 4am. I crash on the couch with PM & JW's affectionate/needy champagne half-Burmese curled around my shoulder, his head tucked in the crook of my neck, and awaken sometime in the early afternoon, my (black) shirt covered in (beige) cat hair. My gracious hosts serve me a sesame bagel crammed with a shmear of cream cheese and a fistful of lox. We brunch; I feed bits of leftover lox to the half-Burmese and, eventually, the other cat as well; this offering buys me further love from the half-Burmese, and perhaps an infinitesimal reduction in contempt from The Other One. I help my hosts clean up, walk around Williamsburg a bit, then L-train back to 14th St. & 8th Ave. I walk up through Chelsea and into Hell's Kitchen, enjoying the gorgeous day, and enter the Port Authority. And thus ends my day of semi-homecoming.

We now return to your regularly scheduled programming.

Clay Shirky ♥ NYC

in a big way

New York Times drops ball on Ernest Strada

Today's NYTimes article on the Rice testimony is accompanied by a photograph of Rice embracing a white-haired man (the latter's face is not visible), accompanied by the caption:

After testifying before the Sept. 11 commission, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice embraced Ernest Strada of the Village of Westbury, N.Y., whose son, Thomas, died in the attacks on the World Trade Center.

Ernest Strada? The Mayor of Westbury? The Republican Mayor of Westbury?

The Republican politician who got trotted out for a dutiful appearance defending his party's figurehead on Hardball (talk show of irresponsible right-wing blowhard pseudo-journalist Chris Matthews)? The Republican politician who was tapped for GOP-friendly quotes by reporters at The Washington Times and The Weekly Standard, publications famous for their right-wing slant and distortion?

I have no doubt that Strada's grief at the loss of his son is real. I suspect that his faith in Bush is real as well. But it's a simple journalistic error not to point out that the Sept. 11 victim conveniently on hand for a stage-managed hug with Condoleeza Rice was a Republican Party politician.