Seniority Does Not Equal Value

Last month, Microsoft founder turned philanthropist Bill Gates gave a speech to the Council of Chief State School Officers, a US-based nonprofit made up of elementary and secondary educational administrators. While a transcript of the speech is available on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s website, most people only heard about the event from a poorly-written New York Times Article entitled “Gates Urges School Budget Overhauls.” Unfortunately, this article glosses over the entire point of Gates’ speech, choosing instead to highlight his controversial comments about restructuring educational budgets without any kind of explanation:

In a speech on Friday, Mr. Gates — who is gaining considerable clout in education circles — plans to urge the 50 state superintendents of education to take difficult steps to restructure the nation’s public education budgets, which have come under severe pressure in the economic downturn.

He suggests they end teacher pay increases based on seniority and on master’s degrees, which he says are unrelated to teachers’ ability to raise student achievement. He also urges an end to efforts to reduce class sizes. Instead, he suggests rewarding the most effective teachers with higher pay for taking on larger classes or teaching in needy schools.

The poor coverage of Gates’ speech lead to some understandably vitriolic but ultimately misplaced outrage on social networking sites like Twitter. The point that Gates tried to make in his speech, and the one that was ultimately missed by the New York Times article, is that school budgets are still constructed based on old and outdated ways of thinking about education. In light of recent advances, Gates advocates a move to a data-driven free-market based approach to improving the educational system for all involved.

Until very recently, it was nearly impossible to objectively measure student achievement, because students are dispersed geographically and come from a wide range of economic, social and religious backgrounds that impact their styles of learning and interactions with both teachers and other students. The introduction of standardized testing, while controversial, has allowed researchers to eliminate these disparate variables and isolate for the one factor that we’re actually interested in: the difference that one year’s worth of study has on student intelligence and accomplishment. After all, what is a school if not a place that we send our children to become more educated and informed members of society?

Once we can isolate for achievement, we can map it against the various factors that might influence it, including teacher salary, seniority, and education level; classroom size, and the ratio of adults to students in a classroom environment. These variables can then be altered and their configurations tested in order to optimize student achievement, thus producing a more efficient educational system that churns out smarter individuals who are more capable of contributing to society in a positive and meaningful way. At the same time, we can be certain that the money that is poured into educational reforms is spent wisely, and can be directly mapped to student advancement.

As Gates points out, these are important concepts, because the American educational system is reeling quickly towards a crisis of both funding and inadequacy. Reforms are required across the board for three main reasons:

1. Since the 1970s, the cost of maintaining the educational system has increased dramatically, while measurable student achievement has stayed essentially flat.
2. In the same period, graduation rates have dropped from 2nd in the world to 16th.
3. The United States now ranks behind 16 countries in scientific achievement, and behind 23 countries in mathematics achievement among students.

Combined with the stresses of the recent financial crisis, schools are being squeezed between a rock and a hard place. They need to change the way that they do business, but can’t afford to do so. This has lead school administrators to react to shrinking budgets by cutting personnel, using old and outdated equipment and text books, and closing down poorly performing schools. Although each of these strategies may help a district to balance its budget in the short term, all impact students negatively over time.

Gates’ argument is that this problem can be sidestepped by addressing the way that we pay teachers for their efforts. As would be expected, a large portion of the educational system’s operating budget is dedicated to teacher salaries. With this in mind, we must consider the two primary components of personnel costs: student to teacher ratios and instructor compensation models. Gates suggests that by changing the way that these two factors are considered, we may be able to better allocate funding, and ultimately, improve student learning.

Past reform efforts have concentrated on reducing classroom sizes. In 1960, the average classroom in the United States put one teacher in front of 26 students. Today, that number has changed dramatically, with one teacher now in charge of just fifteen students. The argument in favour of this movement has been that students benefit from more face-to-face time with teachers. Standards-based testing has shown that this simply isn’t true: There is little correlation between smaller teacher to student ratios and higher student achievement.

Gates also points out that current pay structures reward teacher seniority instead of great teaching. Teachers who have been in the system longer tend to make more money, under the assumption that they get better at their jobs over time. Again, this isn’t necessarily true: studies show that after their first five years of teaching, most teachers don’t increase the positive effect that they have on student achievement, regardless of how many more years they spend teaching thereafter.

Gates argues that by stopping our race to shrink classroom sizes and taking some time to reconsider the elements that influence teacher’s salaries, we can spend educational funding in a more positive manner. In particular, he suggests that teacher salaries be linked to the performance of their students, thus rewarding great teachers and providing constant incentive of lackluster teachers to improve. He makes a point of noting that this pay restructuring wouldn’t mean lower salaries. The average salary of all teachers could stay the same, but those who perform well would be better compensated for their efforts, creating a positive feedback loop that ultimately benefits students. In addition, Gates advocates that the best teachers be paid extra for taking on more or troubled students, which means that his new proposal could even benefit traditionally troubled poorer neighbourhoods.

“Conservative estimates suggest that we can save more than $10,000 per classroom by increasing class size by just four pupils. If we pay some of that money to our best teachers for taking in more students, we accomplish three goals at once – we save money, we get more students in classrooms with highly effective teachers, and we give our best teachers a real raise, not just for being good, but for taking on more work.”

For me, the most important part of this speech was not the claim that Gates made, but rather the reasons behind it. Once you understand why he’s advocating larger classrooms, you can see that the motivations behind such a statement are pure, and start to understand what he would like to accomplish. Essentially, he is attempting to build an economy around great teachers that rewards the best and encourages the others, while always striving to increase student achievement. That’s an admirable goal.

MP James Moore: Please Drop the Rhetoric

We tried to be civil. Unfortunately, Conservative Heritage Minister James Moore has decided to take the battle over Bill C-32 to a new low:

In the video, Moore frames all opposed to his precious copyright reform bill as fear mongers and evil doers who are against any kind of copyright reform. This kind of false rhetorical framing will not result in a copyright solution that benefits all affected parties. Instead, it just muddies the waters and makes it tough to have a real discussion about the important issues that are at hand.

As many have probably guessed from the contents of my website and twitter stream, I am against the current iteration of Bill C-32. That said, I believe strongly that copyright reform is necessary in this country. Our current laws were written before the internet really took off, and need to be modernized in order to effectively deal with new technologies and situations. Most of the proposed bill is quality content, but the Section 41, Technological Protection Measures and Rights Management Information, is not.

Mr. Moore needs to step down from his high horse, cut out the rhetorical bullshit, and join in on the discussion that we are having about his proposed bill. Plugging your ears and screaming ‘na-na-na-na-boo-boo’ just doesn’t cut it when you’re an elected representative of the people.

The Problem with Bill C-32

This past week, the Honourable James Moore, Conservative Minister of Heritage & Official Languages and the Honourable Tony Clement, Conservative Minister of Industry introduced Bill C-32, “Copyright Modernization Act“ at the Electronic Arts studios in Montreal, Quebec. As its title suggests, the aim of the bill is to modernize copyright law in Canada, an admirable goal considering that our copyright laws haven’t been reviewed since 1997. In Internet time, that’s nearly an eternity, and a lot has changed since then. With respect to its stated goal, Bill C-32 is a reasonably good proposal of law. It contains some much needed legislation that will indeed clarify and modernize our copyright code.

For example, the Network Services section provides a safe harbour clause for Internet service providers and other network operators. In particular, the section provides legal protection for hosting service operators whose customers may have uploaded copyrighted works to their servers. Likewise, the Copyright Infringement section sets maximum monetary awards for copyright owners who successfully charge an individual with infringement of works for personal or commercial use. Given the astronomical awards granted by American courts in both the Capitol vs. Thomas and RIAA vs. Tenenbaum cases, this is an extremely important clause.

Unfortunately, these positive aspects of the proposed law are counteracted in the Technological Protection Measures and Rights Management Information section of the bill. In this section, the proposed law explicitly bans the use, manufacture, import, distribution, sale, or rental of any technology or device capable of circumventing any technological protection measures (also called digital rights management, or DRM) schemes that have been placed on the digital content by its distributor. Under the proposed law, any use of the aforementioned technologies constitutes an immediate infringement of copyright, and makes the responsible party liable to all damages outlined therein. The problem with this section is that it effectively removes all of the rights granted in earlier sections of the bill, including Non-commercial User-generated Content and Reproduction for Private Purposes, the two sections that the government is using to desperately peddle this bill as consumer-positive, when in fact it is nothing of the sort. In particular, the latter section proposes that it be made legal to create personal reproductions of copyrighted material so long as a number of conditions are met, one of which is that “the individual, in order to make the reproduction, did not circumvent, as defined in section 41, a technological protection measure, as defined in that section, or cause one to be circumvented.”

And just like that, with a single sentence, all of the ‘rights’ that the government is waving around as they insist that their approach to copyright reform is not bought and paid for by foreign media conglomerates are struck from the record. You see, with an anti-circumvention clause built into our copyright law, the ability to use legitimately purchased digital media in a fair and open manner (generally called fair use in the USA or fair dealing here in Canada) ceases to exist. The reason for this is because an excruciatingly small minority of the digital media that is for sale today is unencumbered by some form of digital rights management. DVDs? Encrypted. Your player contains software that allows them to be read. BluRay discs? Same deal. Video Games? Absolutely. Why do you think the government introduced the law at Electronic Arts’ Montreal studios? Cable television, Netflix digital downloads, eBooks, computer software of all sorts, online television from Hulu and other major providers, and an uncountable number of other consumer media products are all protected by some form of DRM. About the only type of digital media that you can actually buy that doesn’t come coated in some form of protection measure is music, but millions of people who purchased music from the iTunes store prior to January of 2009 still have affected tracks in their music collections. Under the proposed law, none of this digital content can be backed up, moved to a different device, transcoded to a different format, or otherwise tampered with, because to do so would require that its owner break the DRM that has been placed on it, thus making that person a criminal in the eyes of Canadian courts.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about laws of this sort is that they are known to be ineffective at stopping internet piracy. Way back in 1996, before Napster, KaZaa, Limewire, or BitTorrent were invented, a group of countries got together and signed the World Intellectual Property Organization Treaty, a document that required that signatory countries enact laws prohibiting the circumvention of digital rights management schemes. The United States did so in its 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and 12 years later, the Canadian government is seeking to ratify the treaty under pressure from the United States and the European Union by following suit. Unfortunately for the government, a lot has happened since the turn of the century, and many consumers are now aware of the problems that rights management schemes can cause them while trying to use their legitimately purchased media in seemingly acceptable ways. In those same 12 years, the piracy situation has yet to stabalize, and the various media industries still attribute billions of dollars per year in losses to digital piracy. So what’s going on? If anti-circumvention laws were truly effective, wouldn’t the rate of piracy drop in countries where they are introduced?

Allow me to explain with a quote from one of my previous posts, An Open Letter to the Conservative Government of Canada:

Anti-circumvention laws styled after those of the United States’ 1998 Digital Millenium Copyright Act serve only to reduce consumer choice while failing to prevent digital piracy in any capacity whatsoever. Lawmakers would do well to understand that digital rights management (DRM) schemes are no more than the digital counterparts of real-world mechanical locks. There has never been, and will never be, a lock that cannot be broken by any determined party with time, knowledge, and resources on their side. In the digital case, a single defeat of the DRM system designed to protect digital media often results in the widespread availability of that media to any and all interested parties by way of the internet. Therein lies the biggest problem with DRM schemes: One does not have to be a determined hacker to access the media that a DRM scheme is intended to protect; one simply requires access to the internet, and knowledge of a website that distributes media that has been helpfully unlocked by other, more capable parties. The global nature of the internet ensures that the parties most interested in defeating digital rights management schemes need not operate in countries unfriendly to their cause. As such, a government mandate that protects the sanctity of digital locks will not have the desired effect of preventing widespread domestic piracy. Instead, such a ruling will serve only to impact the ability of consumers to utilize their rightfully purchased digital media in a fair and open manner.

Since anti-circumvention legislation has not reduced piracy rates in countries where it has been introduced, and since the digital rights management schemes that it aims to sanctify often do little to stop widespread piracy, but do inconvenience legitimate customers on a wide scale, it is a simple matter to conclude that this type of legislation is not, and never will be, in the best interests of the consumer, who also happens to be the voter responsible for electing the officers of government that attempt to introduce it into law. So why are your elected representatives being complacent in protecting your interests? Perhaps you should ask them about it.

Those readers with an interest in copyright law, internet piracy, and the effects of anti-circumvention legislation are encouraged to read Ripped by Greg Kot and Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars by William Patry, as well as to check out Professor Michael Geist’s excellent Blog.

An Open Letter to the Conservative Government of Canada

To: The Right Honourable Stephen Harper
To: The Honourable Tony Clement
To: The Honourable James Moore

CC: Marc Garneau (Liberal Industry critic)
CC: Pablo Rodriguez (Liberal Heritage critic)
CC: Charlie Angus (NDP Digital Affairs Critic)
CC: Peter Braid (MP, Kitcener-Waterloo)

Dear Members of Parliament:

It is with much consternation that I view the continued efforts of the federal Conservative government of Canada to ‘reform’ Canadian copyright law. I fear that the government has lost sight of the original purpose of copyright law, and has forgotten their sworn duty to protect the interests of their constituents over those of foreign media conglomerates.  This week brought the news that Prime Minister Stephen Harper has ordered the Honourable James Moore, Conservative Minister of Heritage & Official Languages, to proceed in drafting a copyright reform bill that is likely to include strong anti-circumvention clauses and an inflexible approach to fair dealing exceptions. As a Canadian citizen and an entrepreneur in our strong technology sector, I must make clear my view that these types of laws fail to benefit the end users of technology, and Canadian industry as a whole.

In particular, anti-circumvention laws styled after those of the United States’ 1998 Digital Millenium Copyright Act serve only to reduce consumer choice while failing to prevent digital piracy in any capacity whatsoever. Lawmakers would do well to understand that digital rights management (DRM) schemes are no more than the digital counterparts of real-world mechanical locks. There has never been, and will never be, a lock that cannot be broken by any determined party with time, knowledge, and resources on their side. In the digital case, a single defeat of the DRM system designed to protect digital media often results in the widespread availability of that media to any and all interested parties by way of the internet. Therein lies the biggest problem with DRM schemes: One does not have to be a determined hacker to access the media that a DRM scheme is intended to protect; one simply requires access to the internet, and knowledge of a website that distributes media that has been helpfully unlocked by other, more capable parties.

The global nature of the internet ensures that the parties most interested in defeating digital rights management schemes need not operate in countries unfriendly to their cause. As such, a government mandate that protects the sanctity of digital locks will not have the desired effect of preventing widespread domestic piracy. Instead, such a ruling will serve only to impact the ability of consumers to utilize their rightfully purchased digital media in a fair and open manner. Taken to their fullest extent, anti-circumvention laws prevent consumers from watching legitimately purchased films on their computers and from listening to personally owned music on their mobile devices. They encourage a marketplace that limits consumer choice and promotes vendor lock-in; a market that licenses media to consumers instead of selling it. This situation often results in the loss of personal property when DRM servers that consumers rely on to enjoy their media are inevitably shut down for economical reasons.

Last summer, the federal Conservative government conducted public copyright consultations under the auspices of creating what they advertised as a “made in Canada approach to copyright reform.” Unfortunately, it seems as though the thousands of voices that participated in those deliberations were largely ignored by this government, contrary to the very concept of a representative democracy. While we can all agree that copyright reform is necessary, it is important that the reforms that are ultimately enacted accurately represent the interests of the majority of Canadians, whose lives are impacted by their access to media technology on a daily basis. We must remember that the primary purpose of copyright law is provide a monetary incentive for artists to contribute to our society, and not to enrich foreign media conglomerates.

Thank you for your time,

Jonathan Fritz,

A concerned citizen

This open letter was emailed and posted to all listed Members of Parliament. If you are interested in joining in on the discussion and want your voice to be heard by your representatives, feel free to borrow my letter and to modify it as you wish. Alternatively, head over to the website of the Canadian Coalition for Electronic Rights and use their automated form to accomplish the same task.

Democracy? Think Again

This evening, a friend linked me to a post on Jason Hanley’s excellent blog. A graduate of both the University of Waterloo and of Wilfrid Laurier University, Hanley wrote this post regarding the results of the Canadian federal election a couple of weeks ago.

As Ontario voters will know, during the last provincial election, we held a referendum to decide whether or not to replace the existing first past the post voting system that exists in Ontario. Unfortunately, the process was poorly advertised, the question was horribly worded, the conditions for the referendum to pass were too strict, and at the time of the election, most people didn’t understand the issues enough to affect a change to our current system.

The following chart, taken from Hanley’s post, clearly shows the need for a new electoral system in Canada:

Canadian Federal Election Results 2008

The implications of these election results are clearly summarized into a number of alarming points:

• Only 58% of Canadians actually voted
• The number of seats received by each party versus the number of seats deserved by each party according to a proportional (fair) voting system is wildly skewed
• In particular, the Green party received no seats at all, while the Bloc Quebecois received a ridiculously disproportionate 16% of all seats.

It seems clear to me that our system is beyond broken. Of all the democratic countries in the world, only Britain, the United States, and Ourselves continue to use this outdated electorate model. Besides the non-proportional results that our system gives, its other problems can be easily summarized:

• In order to get elected, parties have to maintain not only a strong support base, but one with a small geographic distribution. This means that parties like the Greens, who received 21% of popular support cannot get a single seat, because they don’t have enough voters in any single riding to win.
• In theory, the system is designed for a election with only two parties, as in the United States. In that case, the winner of each riding needs 50% +1 popular votes to win, and a clear majority results in every election. However, with 4 parties in a riding, the number to win drops to 25% +1, meaning that the vast number of votes are essentially unrecognized, and minority governments are common.
• Because of their clustered geographic support, the Bloc Quebecois (a separatist party running in a federal election with no representatives outside of the province of Quebec) regularily win the majority of seats in Quebec, and hold a strong presence in the house due to the high population density in that province. This is nothing short of an absurdity, as they do not represent the wishes of any Canadian not born and raised within Quebec.
• Although there are no studies (that I’ve seen) to support this conjecture, I would hazard a guess that the vast number of Canadians didn’t bother to vote because they saw no clear leader in any of the election preceedings. The entire thing was marginally successful power grab by Stephen Harpers’ government, at a time when the Liberal party was perceived to be too weak to prevent an easy majority win by the Conservatives.

Ladies and Gentlemen, this ‘democracy’ that we live in is merely a sham. If you prefer not to look behind the curtain, continue as you were and allow your ‘government’ to dictate to you how they will run your country. But if you’d rather to wag the tail, head over to fairvote.ca to learn more about the possibilities of electoral reform in Canada, and why it is desperately needed.

I leave you with one of the best skits that the members of the Royal Canadian Air Farce have created in many moons.

Enjoy,

Jon.