Mashing stuff up, seeking nirvana

Malcolm's Music

My former colleague and current friend Malcolm Gauld has, for quite a few months, been posting "favorite" songs (numbered consecutively, but not ranked), with random commentary, onto his Facebook status. I have enjoyed this series of updates quite a bit, in part because I really agree with Mal's taste in music, in part because I admire anyone who does something so diligently and well, and in part because I've been exposed to some great music because of these updates.

Recently, I realized that I have missed a good number of the status messages simply because I have way too many FB friends and Mal's status doesn't always make it onto my News Feed ("Home") page or into my awareness. So, I commented on one of his updates:

you got a place where you keep track of all these? the list just gets better and better!!!

His response was characteristic (which you'll appreciate if you know Mal):

The Process: Get coffee. Park self at computer. Start the day's work. Start iTunes. Set Shuffle on. Wait for "Song of the Day" to reveal itself. One of the few things in life (mine, anyway) that works every time!

That wasn't what I was asking, Mal! SO I responded:

Yeah, but do you keep track from day to day?

His disappointing and somewhat surprising response:

Not really. I just try not to repeat myself. (But the memory gets shaky.)

This response was a bit surprising only because Mal is known for his meticulous attention to details (about music, generally, but what he likes, in particular) and his extreme willingness to share his opinions and knowledge with others (including, for a long time, in a column he wrote for a newsletter as Headmaster of the Hyde School in Bath, Maine, where, BTW, I worked with him for a while.

Status History?

Me being the kind of person *I* am, I immediately began thinking of whether there was a way to retrieve all those status messages and compile them into a list, both for Mal's sake, and for mine. Predictably, I turned to Google for some answers, and typed in "facebook status updates history" and learned a few things from the pages I found there.


First, I went to a blog post from early 2008 in which Charles Hudson wondered aloud whether it would be possible to collect the status updates of others and "mine" them for interesting information. Then, I went to Yahoo Answers to look at the answer to the question "How do you delete Facebook's past Status History?," because the excerpt of the page on the Google search page suggested that the answer also included information about getting a list of status updates. But, alas, it did not. However, there was a link on that page to another question, "How do I view my past facebook statuses?," which reminded me that you can keep scrolling down on your own "wall" (or profile) page in Facebook and clicking "Older Posts," presumably continually until you reach some fictional end of Facebook's storage capacity (i.e. back to the beginning of your time on Facebook), although that reveals all the other posts (including who gave you what type of heart or other gift when and whose comment you liked when and every instance of someone tagging you on one of those trendy surveys that appear continuously when), as well as the status messages and everything else you post. In other words, clicking every possible "Older Posts" link on your profile and then Selecting All (Ctrl-A) and pasting that into a word processor and then tediously editing out everything not relevant to your own statuses could, in theory anyway, give you a list of prior status updates. But I wasn't going to suggest that to Mal. He and I have better things to do. (Well, at least HE does....)

Anyway, the question asked was whether there was any OTHER way to do this, and the "Best Answer - Chosen by Voters" (!) was "You can't."


But that answer was more than a year ago, and, well, me being one who doesn't take "No" for an answer, well, I wasn't going to accept that.

So I went back to the Google search. This time, I paid a little more attention to what was on the list. Lo! and Behold! The FIRST "hit" on the page was a link to information about a Facebook application purporting to give you a list of all of your status updates!


("That'll teach me to be so cursory in my examination of the hits on a Google search," I said to myself unconvincingly.)

So I followed that link. There actually wasn't any information there, at all. (Where did Google get the information? I wondered. Perhaps one gets a different page if one isn't perpetually signed into Facebook (as I am)...in any case, I got a dialog box asking me to "Allow" permission for the app to gain access to my information, including (it seems to me) anything they want for any purpose they want (!)...but the app had four stars, so I willingly gave my assent and was immediately taken to a page with....


,,,NOTHING!!!!

But I was not going to give up after getting so close! I decided this was just a glitch in the app, and so went to the little "Facebook" application button in the lower left of the screen

and found the "My status history" link on top of the "Recently Used" section, and clicked, and Voila! ...a list of all my status updates (in either newest to oldest or the opposite order), all 563 of them (I learned later), all the way back to July 23, 2008!!!

(This amazing little application was developed, I learned later, by Herbert 'Herby' Vojčík,a Slovakian computer programer. You can learn more about the app by visiting the application fan page.)

Excel

I quickly selected everything on the page (Ctrl-A), copied it to the clipboard (Ctrl-C), opened up a Word document, then thought better of it and closed the Word document and opened up an Excel spreadsheet (thinking, this is a DATABASE!!!) and pasted it in (Ctrl-V).


Mistake!!! I had selected the entire page contents, all the crap on the top and right and bottom of the page. I tried to delete it all, but couldn't figure out how to delete one small little "Submit" button


(still can't figure out where that came from on the page)

not to mention the stuff at the bottom. So I tried again. This time, I clicked at the beginning of the first status, scrolled down, and then (holding the shift key down), clicked at the end of the last status," then copied (Ctrl-C), then switched to Excel (and a new, blank, sheet), and pasted (Ctrl-V).

Voila!

I quickly saved the file, triumphant!

...

...

But as I looked at it, I wasn't satisfied. There were empty rows in between each message. I had to remove the empty rows. I figured if I sorted the sheet, the blanks would rise to the top (or sink to the bottom). So I clicked the sort button (A --> Z), and, sure enough, the blanks were down at the bottom (i.e., effectively gone). But all of the status messages were now sorted alphabetically as well....which removed the ORDER of the messages, which was crucial if this was going to be a database of any utility.

So I quickly undid the sort (Ctrl-Z) and tried to think of another solution. Surely there was a way to eliminate empty rows from your data!!?! I didn't know....but I know Excel well enough to be pretty confident that if you encounter something you've got to get done, there's a way to do it. I looked around on the various menus.

Finally, I found it! On the "Data" menu was a button that said "Remove Duplicates." I figured all those empty rows were duplicates of each other! And, well, if any of the status messages are duplicates, deleting them probably shouldn't matter (um, right?!?), so I went ahead and selected the whole sheet and hit the button.

Voila! It did leave one empty row (the second row, since it wasn't a duplicate of anything above it), which I quickly deleted manually.

I quickly saved the resulting sheet, again triumphant.

(or is that "demented" :-) )

Data Massaging

But something still wasn't right. Each status message had, at the end of it, a date and time. This wasn't a BAD thing of course (because it might be useful to know when a particular status message had been made, or to know what order they were made in), but the message and the timestamp were in the same cell. Thus, two types of data were mixed, which would make it next to impossible to sort by date or do anything else automatically that was related to the date and time.

I decided to do some data massaging and see if I could separate the text of the messages from the date and time. I certainly wasn't going to do this manually (563 rows, I discovered!!!), and, what's more, I NEVER do anything manually if I can figure out a way to get the computer to do it for me, and I knew (based on past experience with excel) that you could pretty much separate out anything in a cell (or combine cells, or do all kinds of other operations).

I noticed that the date and time in each cell were separated off from the rest of the status message by parentheses. So I knew I had a relatively easy way to distinguish "status message" from "date and time." But the length of each status message was variable. So I couldn't just cut the cells all at the same number of characters and call it a day. However, I could use Excel to COUNT how many characters the left parenthesis was from the beginning of the cell and separate the content at that number minus one (to separate at the space before the parens).

Excel formulas, especially the text function ones) seem incredibly complex and dense if you've never worked with them before, but I have pretty extensive experience going way back to VisiCalc, and have no fear of the RIGHT, LEFT, MID, LEN, FIND, etc. formulas. So I dived right in...

First, I needed to create a formula in column B that would copy only the status message, and not the date/time. Then, I would put a formula in column C that would copy just the date and time and leave the message. Simple, right?

To copy the status message, I knew I needed to use a formula beginning with =LEFT(A1, and then put a number or formula in that would indicate the correct number of characters to copy. I knew I could use the FIND function to return the number of characters before a left paren appears (FIND("(",A1) -- the left paren has to be in quotations because otherwise it will be treated as a left parens in the formula (and return an error) instead of the text I was looking for -- and subtract 1 (to go back to the space). So I put this into cell B1:

=LEFT(A1,(FIND("(",A1-1))))

THAT should work, I thought! I quickly "quick-filled" the formula into the rest of the rows, and, sure enough, my status messages (without date/time) appeared in column B. AWESOME!!!

Then, to get the date and time, I figured all I had to do was take what was left from the formula in Column B. The easiest way I could think of to do that was to use the RIGHT function, along with the number generated by the FIND function in the other formula and the LEN function to return the total length of the content in cell A1. Thus:

=RIGHT(A1,(FIND("(",A1-1)-LEN(A1)))

But that didn't work...it returned the dreaded #VALUE, which says basically that you've tried to compute something uncomputable, so I looked more carefully at what I'd done, and soon realized that the number returned by the FIND function was going to be less than the number returned by the LEN function, and you can't take the leftmost n characters where n is a negative number, so I reversed those, getting:

=LEFT(A1,(LEN(A1)-FIND("(",A1-1)))

That fixed the problem! Now, I had the date and time (in parentheses, with a blank space before it (easily stripped out later) in Column C.

Or at least that was the case in SOME of the rows. Most of them. But there were quite a few rows where Column C included a piece of the status message as well, and, on further look, Column B in those cases didn't contain the whole status message, but only the part up to where a piece was picked up in Column C. What was wrong?

I quickly realized that the rows where my formulas didn't work were ones where the status message itself included a left parenthesis. Those cells got cut at the character or space before the left parenthesis, NOT where I had intended them to be cut. Damn!!!

How was I going to write a formula that would vary depending on whether there were one or two (or more) left parentheses? I thought about it a bit and realized I could use an IF/THEN function, but I was stumped as to how I could know whether the left parens occured once or more than once in the cell.

Short Break

At this point, I was feeling a little fried, so I went to the kitchen and got myself a Diet Coke and a cutting board with some cheese, salami, and Chicago Flats (crackers, of sorts). I returned to my (home) office to find one of the cats starting to puke on my desk (which bothers me like almost anything else!), so I threw him off (so he could finish his puke on the floor), and cleaned up the mess he'd already made on the desk (and the mess he proceeded to make in four places on the floor - ugh).

Then, I washed my hands (more ugh) and returned to my computer, and started in on the lovely blue brie and smoked gouda, and took a very long swig of my Diet Coke. (Yum!)

Upon looking again at the data I was trying to "massage," I was hit by an obvious alternative to my previous (not quite good enough) solution to my problem: the date and time strings in the cells ALL had the same length! (Whoever wrote the code to extract these statuses had been smart enough not to mess with the fixed-length variable used by Facebook's database system, which thoughtfully writes "1:15 am," for example, as 01:15 and "1:15 pm" as 13:15. This is true for the months as well, so January is 01, February is 02, and so on. This is a fixed length also for the day of the week, Sun, Mon, Tue, etc. Smart computers!!!

Including the preceding space and both the left and the right parens, the length of the date and time is 32 characters. Thus, I could write two very easy formulas. In Column B, for the date and time:

=RIGHT(A1,32)

and for Column C, the message itself:

=LEFT(A1,LEN(A1)-32)

TRUE VOILA!!!! :-)

Nirvana

I was happy. I LOVE solving these sorts of puzzles (I know, it's strange). Now, all that was necessary was to convert the contents of columns B and C into values (instead of formulas...so I could do other things with them) - a simple matter of copying them into another column and using "Paste Special..." to paste only values - and to strip out the leading space and parens from the data and time column (simply using Find/Replace twice, once to replace " {" with "" (nothing) and again to replace ")" with "" (nothing). I knew I could proceed to separate the date and time (and even day of the week) into separate columns, too, but I had acheived my fundamental purpose, which was......

??

??

Well I haven't said (other than that I wanted to create a database, and I wanted to figure out a way to help Malcolm (remember Malcolm? This is a blog post about Malcolm....) get his list of daily favorite songs), but I had another motivation. I wanted the texts of all of MY status messages so I could paste them into WORDLE and make a "word cloud" of all those messages so I (and others) could see, visually, what I've been most concerned about, all these months. So, that is what I did. I simply copied the text of the messages (stripped, helpfully, of the data and time, which would have severely messed up my wordle) into the World engine, and VOILA!

Visually, this shows a few things:

• I use the words "one" and "just" a whole lot
• I am concerned with education, students, learning, thinking
• I like, get, wonder, use, think, need, like, party, force, and love
• Obama is the most important person in my life (er, um, or at least my status updates)

But, more importantly, it's just fun to have this, as well as that database of my updates going way back to July 23, 2008. Who knows, I just might keep it updated, and refer to it again, sometime, here, or in a Facebook status update.

And now, you can make a Wordle too, of YOUR status updates. Just follow these totally simple, straightforward, short, and easy directions. Or, if you decide to seek your own path to status-update-Wordle-mashup nirvana, drop me a line, or visit me on Facebook, and let me know how YOU got here.

:-)

Arne Duncan, One Year Later

[Cross-posted from Education Policy Blog.]

In December of 2008, President-Elect Barack Obama nominated Arne Duncan, the Chief Executive Officer of the Chicago Public Schools, as Secretary of Education. I wrote a blog post containing some predictions of what this nomination might mean for the educational policies of the Obama administration. You can find that post here:

http://educationpolicyblog.blogspot.com/2008/12/what-arne-duncan-means-for-educational.html

Duncan "sailed" through his confirmation hearings before the U.S. Senate, and was confirmed on the day that Obama was inaugurated. That was one year ago, yesterday.

One year later, as the nation participates in an appraisal of Obama's first year, the education media are doing the same with regard to educational policies. Education Week, in particular, has a piece entitled "Duncan Carves Deep Mark on Policy in First Year," published in yesterday's print edition. The article focuses on Duncan's management style, his policy priorities, and the criticism he has received.

Reading the Education Week piece caused me to go back and review the reflections and predictions that I made in my post back in December of 2008.

Back then, I listed the following qualifications that may have led to Obama's selection of Duncan despite his lack of teaching experience or advanced degrees in education:

• Duncan is a consummate diplomat.
  
• Duncan is smart. He listens.
• Duncan is a pragmatist.
• Duncan is not only pragmatic, but he is also independent.
• He plays basketball....
• His kids go to the same public school as my son does and daughter did.
  

The last two "qualifications" were intended partly as tongue-in-cheek, and, of course, once Duncan moved to Washington DC the last qualification ceased to be true. However, I believe that the first year has borne out the first four of my qualifications, with perhaps the following qualifications:

1. At the Chicago Public Schools, Arne's primary responsibility was generating a public perception (especially among the middle class) that CPS was working hard to improve some of the most abysmal schools in America. He succeeded in that task by creating "spin" of various kinds of data that emerged about the schools, by being "hands-on" in the sense that he was willing to go out to communities and schools and personally confront outspoken parents and other critics, and by his capacity to strike people as a "nice guy" even while pushing some ideas that are not universally popular, such as closing underperforming schools and increasing the role of corporate and private partners in the schools. To a large extent, these qualities have continued in his role as U.S. Secretary of Education, with one major difference: Duncan is no longer focusing on building up the image of a particular school system; rather, his public-relations challenge is convincing people outside of education that the Department of Education is serious about educational reform. The public at large is convinced that American schools (in general) are pretty bad, and they want Duncan's Department to do something about that, or at least appear to be doing something. Specifically, the public at large is distrustful of educational professionals (especially professors of teacher education and teachers unions, but also including teachers in general and school district officials especially). Duncan has managed to convince many corporate interests that the Department is, in fact, willing to undermine those allegedly entrenched educational professionals, and has managed to use the leverage of new funding to affect educational policies in a number of states, including Illinois. Teachers and (especially) professors of education I know are visibly nervous about the agenda that Duncan is pushing, but this doesn't seem to bother Duncan at all or, for that matter, Duncan's boss. (The impact of this on public support for Obama's policies by these traditionally liberal constituencies should not be underestimated.)
   
   Just as an aside, Duncan's public relations efforts are managed by Peter Cunningham (no relation to this author), who also managed public relations when Duncan was at CPS.
   
   
2. Duncan has proven his intelligence in numerous public appearances before different constituencies. Even when he went to Teachers College in New York to talk about the challenges faced by teacher education, he demonstrated a firm grasp of the history of education (while also generating considerable skepticism about his prescriptions). Also, at least according to the Education Week article mentioned above, he listens, at least to his staff, and to those interests (corporate, philanthropic) that support his policies. The primary group that Arne does NOT appear to be listening to (much) are educational professionals; indeed, Arne's seemingly bullheaded efforts to push his agenda seem to be designed (from a public relations standpoint. at least) precisely to send the message that the usually suspected entrenched interests aren't going to be listened to at all unless they change their tunes. What's more, Duncan's closest advisors are also not educational professionals. Overall, the Department has largely become focused on using its influence to undermine their power. This doesn't appeal to the education professionals, who now commonly speak, as my co-blogger Barbara Stengel put it in a recent comment here, of "the incredible disappoint[ment] that the Obama/Duncan regime have brought with them." But if it's only the education professionals who are disappointed with the administration's policies, maybe that's a good thing from Duncan's perspective.
   
   
3. When I said that Duncan was a "pragmatist," what I meant was that he isn't especially ideological, and embraces ideas (such as corporate-run charter schools and teacher merit pay) that aren't necessarily embraced by liberals. Or, as the New York Times put it with regard to his confirmation hearing, "Mr. Duncan laid out a thoroughly pragmatic and non-ideological educational agenda, vowing to do “anything that works” to raise achievement in public schools." In that sense, Duncan is pragmatic not in the philosophical sense (of Pierce, James, and Dewey), but in the more common parlance of "hardheaded," or "guided by practical experience and observation rather than theory" (http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=pragmatic). Again, I think that's what the public at large wants, because the public largely distrusts educational theory, since theory is what allegedly leads to such "disruptive" and "despised" educational innovations as the Life Adjustment Curriculum and New Math.
   
   
4. Duncan's independence, which I spoke of a year ago, is most concretely demonstrated by his outspokenness, especially when talking to education professionals. As the Education Week article put it:
   
   

   "He told delegates to the National Education Association’s annual convention in San Diego last summer that teachers should be evaluated and paid based in part on student performance and that teacher tenure needed to be changed.

   "In October, he went to the University of Virginia’s education school and delivered some harsh remarks on teacher colleges, describing them as the “Bermuda Triangle” of higher education.
   
   "His outspokenness shows no sign of slackening."

   
   
   Less clear is how independent Duncan is of the corporate and philanthropic interests that he seems to be catering to in his policies and tone. Some (also here and here and here and here) say Duncan is really a corporatist at heart, seeking to further push schools toward becoming the training grounds of workers (including the military) and consumers. Duncan himself denies the label, preferring instead to publicly embrace (as he put it in his speech to Teachers College) "America's need and a public school's obligation to teach all students, all students to their full potential" as the primary element of the "dream of equal educational opportunity."

All-in-all, i think I did pretty well on the qualifications (or, more neutrally, the "qualities") that Arne brought to the Secretary's job. However, I'm embarrassed to say that I flubbed up the most important of my predicted implications:

"1. NCLB will be drastically restructured to focus on supports for improvement rather than negative consequences for failure."

Um, .........what?!? I was flat out wrong on this. Duncan seems very much UN-interested in changing the basic structure of NCLB, and in fact has embraced the notion of standards (and, by implication, standardized tests....even national standardized tests) to a degree that has surprised me and disappointed many. Indeed, it seems right to say (with Henry Giroux) that

"While President Obama and his secretary of education, Arne Duncan, have focused on public education, they have done so by largely embracing the Bush administration's view of educational reform, which includes more testing, more empirically based accountability measures, more charter schools, more military academies, defining the purpose of education in largely economic terms, and punishing public schools that don't measure up to high-stakes testing measures."

This, while appearing to be supportive of innovation and democratic education, at least for the benefit of those who really don't know what the accountability regime does to low-income schools.

My next three predictions fared much better:

"2. Opponents of charter schools have lost a huge battle. Their expansion will continue dramatically.

"3. Urban school districts will receive special attention from Washington.

"4. Washington will now begin to push a longer school day and longer school year, and the public will be gently pressured to force the unions to accept this without getting higher pay."

I think the jury is still out on my fifth prediction:

"5. Funding for educational research will no longer be tied to ideological criteria such as "evidence-based" practices. Rather, research will be judged in terms of its likely benefit to generalized issues of educational practice."

I was quite pleased that John Easton, formerly head of the Chicago Consortium on School research, was appointed to lead the Institute of Education Sciences, because John knows quite well the dangers hidden in the supposedly "scientific" notions behind "evidence-based practice," especially the expectation that all effectiveness research will use randomized control trials. Indeed, John has indicated that he will allow a variety of research methods, but has emphasized that "methodological rigor" will continue to be a primary interest pushed by IES. (What that really means is less clear.) John's primary agenda seems to be to increase the capacity of local schools and districts to conduct their own research, and the emphasis of newly announced grant programs seems to be on ensuring that schools or school districts are the primary beneficiary of IES-funded projects, rather than simply adding to the base of knowledge.

My sixth somewhat facetious prediction was simply boneheaded (although Obama himself had claimed during the campaign that he would do this):

"6. The bowling alley in the White House will be replaced with a Basketball Court."

The thing is, there has been a basketball court on the grounds of the White House since 1991, and the bowling alley (which is in the White House basement under the North Portico) simply doesn't have the ceiling height necessary for basketball.

Finally, and sadly, I was completely wrong on my seventh prediction, that

"Barbara Eason-Watkins, who has been the quiet but effective and resolute Chief Education Officer of the Chicago Public Schools for the past 6 years, will become Chicago Schools Chief."

Instead, Mayor Daley picked another untested person from outside of the education profession, Ron Huberman, who's primary impact on CPS so far has been his strong support for year-round schooling, along with the announcement of deep cuts in staff at the central office, a move necessitated by a looming budget deficit. What this signaled to me is that Daley likes having non-educators as CEO of CPS (Vallas, then Duncan, now Huberman), if only because such leaders have greater appeal with the middle-class voters that Daley wishes to appease. (More on Huberman at another time.)

So, in summary, I think I was right about why Duncan was picked (and I think he's doing exactly what Obama wants him to do), but my success at predicting implications was not especially good, with three being pretty spot on, three being dead wrong, and one still unclear.

Implications

So enough about the accuracy of my predictions and on to more important matters. Should we be disappointed in what we've seen from the Obama administration with regard to education policy? I'd say that question is a complicated one, and it depends (as most policy questions do) on our perspective.

Are we happy with the important role that colleges and universities play in teacher education in the U.S.? If so, we are likely scared and angry about Duncan's efforts to support alternative certification routes, especially those that lack university partners.

Do we think that national standards will lead inevitably to national standardized tests that will further erode the capacity of teachers and local school districts to focus on educational outcomes that are not tested (or even testable)? If so, we ought to be outraged about Duncan's continuing support of the accountability structures of NCLB.

Are we skeptical (or completely derisive) of the claim that educational outcomes will improve only when teachers are evaluated (and paid?) according to the scores their students receive on standardized tests? Then we should be very disappointed in Duncan, and should be doing everything possible to undermine Obama and Duncan, to lessen their impact.

Certainly among my very liberal colleagues in higher education and K-12 schools, fear, anger, and disappointment are widespread. Among this group, this is not "change we can believe in." But this group is also caught in a huge bind: the only viable political alternative to Obama is the conservative wing of the Republican party, whose opposition to health care reform, stem-cell research, gay and lesbian rights, arts funding, and affirmative action programs are even scarier than their all-too-familiar call for vouchers so that public funds can go to religious schools. At least Obama is on the liberal (if politically pragmatic) side of the line on these issues.

So, what do we do? Until the American public understands the the purpose of public schools is primarily to support democracy (in the Deweyan sense of that word), national education policy will continue to be dominated by corporatist and conservative interests whose primary agenda is to remove "entrenched interests" (especially those in Washington) from control of schools. The agenda can be stated simply, in Ronald Reagan's terms:

"I believe that parents, not government, have the primary responsibility for the education of their children. … So, we’ll continue to work in the months ahead for passage of tuition tax credits, vouchers, educational savings accounts, voluntary school prayer, and abolishing the Department of Education. Our agenda is to restore quality to education by increasing competition and by strengthening parental choice and local control."

Reagan's vision is compelling to most people, who love to believe that all parents are better suited to make educational decisions than all educational professionals, that "local control" of schools is always better than federal control (a position well-articulated by Diane Ravitch), and who dismiss the important role that corporations play in shaping parental expectations and beliefs. Education professionals are much less likely to put such faith in parents or to dismiss the pervasive influence of corporations. If we are brave enough to admit it, we will say that we've seen the incredible ignorance and gullibility of many parents, and we've seen the adverse effects on the nation's schools of the legacy of local control, and we've fought again and again to help citizens to understand the pernicious effects of corporatism on American education. But to do so would be to admit to the public that we are, in fact, "liberal" elites who believe that our superior education and awareness of research and time spent in schools gives us a greater capacity to make educational decisions than the average parent. But to do so would be, inevitably and perhaps deservedly, to reinforce the public's perception, articulated so well by William F. Buckley, that ""I'd rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University." The public, you see, just doesn't trust well-educated people.

And Arne Duncan, allegedly the Secretary of Education, but more accurately called the Secretary of Public Perception of Education, understands that.