Por: Angelo Du Bois
Todos amamos que los clásicos elementos relacionados al cine sean puestos bajo el martillo; y es que la posibilidad de hacerse con una posesión icónica y de culto es motor suficiente para que saquemos el dinero de nuestras cuentas bancarias y asistamos a las subastas que nos dan la posibilidad de cumplir con tal sueño. Ésta vez le llegó el turno al famoso Lotus Espirit sumergible de James Bond, aquel que debutó en el film ‘The Spy Who Loved Me’ en 1977 y que asombró gratamente a los atónitos espectadores de la película en las salas de cine de aquel entonces.
Será en el próximo mes de septiembre que la reconocida casa de subastas RM Auctions pondrá a disposición del mejor postor tan magna y única pieza de colección, propiedad ficticia del más reconocido de los agentes secretos del mundo de la literatura y el cine respectivamente. El precio base para iniciar la subasta aún no ha sido revelado, pero tú y yo sabemos que no será nada bajo…
Conducido por Bond en una de las escenas de escape más famosas de Hollywood, el Lotus Espirit sumergible es una joya que puede ser sumergida y utilizada en la vida real y de forma perfectamente legal, algo que añade un interés mayor por tan fabulosa creación, sobretodo considerando el año en que ésta belleza fue creada y que deja perplejo a cualquiera por su versatilidad de conducción.
Sin duda alguna, un vehículo por el cual vale la pena gastar hasta el último centavo que se posea… ¿Estás de acuerdo?…
* Fuente de imágenes: ‘luxury-insider.com’
How big would the gap be if they ran KIPP programs in the sbuurbs? If somebody proved that a KIPP school in the sbuurbs raised test scores even more than one in the ‘hood, thus making society even better off, would that be hailed as good news or bad news? I suspect it wouldn’t be hailed at all.We already know the answer to this.As a previous commenter already noted, the DI intervention pretty much ran the board on academic gains for all demographic groups.KIPP is basically a cruder version of DI, but with more marketing savvy and with the financial support from the foundation of the founders of The Gap, as Mathews points out in the book.In Project Follow Through, they did a study disaggregating the results by IQ groups. I guess this wasn’t as unfashionable as it is today.Gersten, R., Becker, W., Heiry, T., & White. (1984). Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 6(2), 109-121. And see as well showing graphs of the results for reading and math. Bear in mind that the progress of the higher IQ children was often sacrificed so that the lower IQ students could be brought up to speed. They were given the best teachers, were given more instructional time when needed, and often the higher performing kids could not be placed in a homogeneous classroom of peers because there weren’t enough of them in the school so they were placed with a lower group.It’s pretty clear that using the more efficient instructional techniques in DI (and KIPP) in the sbuurbs will serve to widen the gap since the more cognitively able students will be able to run even further ahead.Here is what Zig Engelmann, the ceator of these instruction techniques has about this phenomenon:Surprisingly, I chose the unattractive direction. I pretty well cut ties with the middle-class road and focused on working with at-risk kids. Why? Because they needed effective education, while the middle-class kids would be okay without it. I drew this conclusion one afternoon when Carl Bereiter and I were going over the results of our preschool effort. The at-risk kids gained a lot. The middle-class kids that were in the same group learned a lot more. It seemed pretty evident that if both groups received high quality instruction, the gap between middle-class kids and poverty kids would be even greater than it already was. On the other hand, if the at-risk kids received high quality instruction and the middle-class kids received only the current status-quo instruction, the gap could be narrowed greatly.I’ve tried to be true to the cause of narrowing the gap, but my resolve has decayed somewhat recently. The reason is simply that educators are doing a horrible job with middle-class kids, and school systems are designed to fortify this crappy effort. DI and KIPP will not serve to close the achievement gap. Once suburban parents realize that their children are capable of leaning more using similar programs they will start demanding their use.And none of this is in conflict with Murray’s views which are largely accurate, I believe. His only mistake is not being aware of how little in the K12 curriculum is cognitively demanding and that a good curriculum designer, like Engelmann, can break down almost any concept taught in K-12 so that most children can learn it. Murray also underestimates the effects that low IQ parents have on the language skills of their children. See the first six minutes of for a good explanation of that problem.