Hilarious. Tom Lee at DCist points out that newish DC mayor Adrian Fenty's school reform program appears to be substantially plagiarized from the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school system in North Carolina.
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In The Cookie Jar
09 May 2007 11:24 am
Comments (11)
tms: I generally agree with that sentiment. But others have pointed out that the Charlotte-Mecklenburg system is too new to be considered a success yet.
I'm not a plagiarism apologist (I thought the whole Ian Mcewan affair was pathetic.) But really, who cares? You don't get points for originality in a policy proposal. It's like when people accuse Microsoft of ripping off Linux in updating Windows. Who gives a shit? Just improve the OS.
I agree with tom. They're banking pretty heavily on an unproven solution. Otherwise I don't see any big deal. Giving credit would certainly make it easier to evaluate the merits of the proposal, but it's not as if that's really standard practice.
Plagarism is 90% of good staff work.
Anything has got to be better than the DC public school system.
American public education suffers from the opposite problem: too much emphasis on originality. Teachers, for example, are constantly taught to make up their own lesson plans rather than to use lesson plans that have already been shown to work well. Similarly, school administrators award each other prestige on innovating rather than executing.
The underlying problem, though, is that nothing much has been shown to work particularly well, especially at the NCLB problem of closing the performance gaps between demographic groups. So that encourages a lot of magical thinking in education: if we all make up stuff off the top of our heads, then some genius somewhere will surely come up with something that will close the testing gaps!
If you suggest that maybe nothing will close the testing gaps and instead we should concentrate on doing the best we can with the students we have, well that just proves you are a racist and nobody will listen to you. Now, back to magical thinking!
But this is what I don't understand, Steve. You don't like being called a racist (or so I take it from this comment). But you are very open about thinking that some racial minorities, and blacks in particular, are inherently intellectually inferior to whites. And while I'm willing to quibble on the exact definition of racism, I can't imagine one which doesn't include that kind of thinking.
So what gives? Do you define racism in some radically different way than I do? Or are you just unhappy with the consequences of your beliefs?
I really want to read the answer to this.
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Comments closed May 23, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
I don't see the problem. As long as the Charlotte system works better than the DC system, plagiarize away. Wouldn't it be a good idea if we "plagiarized" the French health care system?
Posted by too many steves | May 9, 2007 12:19 PM