Here's a quiz for people having trouble deciding between Obama and Clinton.
It came up Obama for me, and that was no surprise. I found this quiz on Verbatim, and I have to agree with Karen's comment that she would have liked to have seen the answers broken out by candidate. That said, if you've watched the debates you likely know where the two candidates stand on these different issues.
For most of us, it's a little late to be deciding anyhow. but I love a good quiz.
7 comments:
I got Clinton, although I would have chosen "I don't know yet" on several issues I didn't have an opinion about. Like you, I wish they had displayed a simple chart of candidates and their policies.
I chose Pepsi! I'm so pissed!!
No, I chose Obama, but I wish they would have told me my score. Did I overwhelmingly choose him? Did I miss Clinton by just this much? I don't know, honestly, and some of the questions were worded so vaguely as to be meaningless.
I realize that sometimes candidate positions are also meaninglessly vague, but the problem is that you can't just state one vague position and then negate it as the alternative. Then I'm choosing between two meaningless statements. Better to leave that question out of the quiz entirely.
I'm mostly referring to the weird question about merit-based teacher pay. How are we measuring merit? Test scores? Giving out candy? Observation by a totally objective robot? It matters.
I also thought the wording of the insurance question was somewhat leading (and in Clinton's favor, I might add). If I were not familiar with her position, I might have been mislead.
Maggie and I both had the same exact questions about merit-based pay, separately.
My reaction was to give that one a "no." Because I think merit-based pay is a distraction, and I don't think we have good metrics.
Obama was tentatively for it in one of the debates, heavily qualified. Clinton was for school-wide incentive pay. I lean more toward Clinton on this issue, but Obama specified that teachers would have to agree, and the teacher unions certainly won't, so that reduces to a "no" in the end.
Yeah, that's funny. Merit-based pay sounds like a good thing. But I've been in the schools enough to know:
1) They're frantically trying to get every student in the class able to pass the MCAS;
2) Whether the students pass has little to do with the teacher -- a child of below average intelligence is obviously going to have a much harder time than a bright child;
3) I can totally see political a-holes tying merit-based pay to the MCAS in MA.
Which gives the MCAS even more power in determining our curriculum. It's already bad. The test was supposed to ensure that all school systems in MA taught the same curriculum in the same order, so a child could move from one district to another and not be behind or repeating curriculum. But instead they teach to the MCAS content. I've seen some of those questions and some of them are idiotic. I was helping K do the online prep and one question was so convoluted I couldn't figure out what it was saying. I hate testing.
I hate standardized testing, too. But I was also not fond of my high school English teacher who liked to teach drunk nor the math teacher who was given my advanced math class because they felt he could do no harm there. There needs to be a middle ground and a way to recognize and reward the good teachers.
There doesn't need to be a middle ground. You fire a teacher who teaches drunk.
I agree that good teachers should be rewarded. The problem is that there currently doesn't seem to be a reliable way to IDENTIFY them that anyone can agree on.
Until then, unfortunately, talking about basing pay on merit conjures up alarming images of rewarding the ones who are either easy graders, or whose students score well on standardized tests even if they don't learn anything else.
So until someone explains what kind of merit they're talking about and how they plan to measure it, the promise to tie salary to performance is meaningless at best, and alarming at worst.
I actually think the students would be the best judges of a good teacher. Not with silly questions like "do you like this teacher," but something more quantifiable like "do you learn anything from your homework assignments" (or "what did you learn in this class") and things like that.
But I bet that would be a tough sell, letting kids have an actionable opinion.
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