Amanda Ripley Author of The Unthinkable

I occasionally take a break from writing about risk and human behavior to write about education—a kind of slow-motion disaster. This fall, I spent months obsessing over an old puzzle, using very cool new tools. The question was, What makes some teachers truly exceptional—and others, well, unremarkable? The story, which appears in this month’s Atlantic magazine, is my attempt to solve the mystery.

I had a lot of help. I got access to a treasure trove of data from Teach for America, which has been studying this mystery longer and more rigorously than any other outfit. Then I spent days sitting in classrooms in DC public schools—classrooms that ran like powerhouses and classrooms where time just oozed by, with nothing much happening. I am grateful to all the teachers, principals and students who so graciously allowed me to observe and who talked to me about the realities of their classrooms.

Eventually, I learned that the way to spot a great teacher is not to watch the teacher. The secret is to watch the kids. In great classrooms, the students were in a hurry, and not just some of them. Their eyes tracked the teacher as he or she moved across the room. When the kids got an answer right, they whisper-shouted, “Yes!” and pumped their fists.

In other classrooms in the very same school, I saw the very same students stare off into space. They took extraordinary amounts of time to staple their homework or sharpen their pencils. They danced silent steps in their sneakers on the linoleum floors under their desks. They smiled at me and waved. When I sneezed, they offered me tissues. They were the same kids, but the adult standing in front of them was not.

This all matters because, as Kevin Huffman put it in a Washington Post column the other day:

[T]oo often when we look at the sorry state of public education (on the most recent international benchmark exam conducted by the Program for International Student Assessment, U.S. high schoolers ranked 25th out of 30 industrialized nations in math and 24th in science) we believe the results are driven by factors beyond our control, such as funding and families. This leads to lethargy, which leads to inaction, which perpetuates a broken system that contributes to our economic decline.

By now, the research is clear: the one factor that matters most in a child’s education is the child’s teacher. As kids, we knew this. There were great teachers—the kind who made you believe anything was possible. But we always chalked it up to some kind of magical power that few teachers could be expected to possess. Turns out we were wrong.

Finally, we can identify extraordinary teachers—with data, not hearsay—and investigate what they are doing differently. We can even make more of them. The question is, Will we?

In the Washington Post, Stephen Flynn has a nice round-up of the nation’s Top 5 shared delusions on homeland security. Flynn has spent the past several years tirelessly pointing out the great irony of 9/11: The only people who prevented a terrorist attack that day were regular people. The passengers on Flight 93 likely saved the lives of some of the very same DC politicians and pundits who have, for the past 8 years, utterly ignored the contribution that regular people make to homeland security.

Meanwhile, the Best Comment Award for Flynn’s piece goes to ExportLaw:

“My ancestors who fought the Brits at Kings Mountain and Cowpens didn’t fight for a government capable of protecting them - that’s what the British Crown offered. They fought for a government that was respectful of them and their rights such that they could and would protect their government.”

Nice.

In case you missed it, David Brooks had a cogent critique of the homeland-security hysteria in the NY Times the other day:

In a mature nation, President Obama could go on TV and say, “Listen, we’re doing the best we can, but some terrorists are bound to get through.” But this is apparently a country that must be spoken to in childish ways.

It does seem that we have become a nation of pansies when it comes to terrorism. It’s curious because we don’t expect the same paternalism when it comes to protecting us from other threats—guns, say, or automobiles. But when it comes to airplanes and violent Islamic extremists, there is apparently no limit to the indignities we will suffer.

Case in point: Fred Barnes, executive editor of the Weekly Standard, on FOX on Dec. 29, 2009:

“I agree with Senator Dianne Feinstein [who] said the other day that, look, if you’re going to err in the war on terrorism, err on the side of overreacting rather than under-reacting. The Bush administration’s policy was to overreact. It seems like the Obama policy is to under-react.”

It takes my breath away, it really does.

Terrorists depend upon overreaction to be effective. They can never match their first-world enemies in weaponry or budget, so they target small, psychologically resonant targets to achieve outsized impact. They did it again on Christmas day over Detroit. What Mr. Barnes seems to have forgotten is that they did not succeed. Or did they?

Josh Gerstein at Politico has a nice side-by-side comparing Bush’s reaction to the shoe bomber in 2001 to the Obama’s reaction this week. It’s an interesting notion, since both Richard Reid and Abdulmutallab, the suspect in this latest case, were said to have used PETN, a powerful explosive (more on PETN below). So what happened after that Dec. 22, 2001 bombing attempt (foiled by flight attendants and passengers) on an American Airlines flight from Paris?

[I]t was six days before President George W. Bush, then on vacation, made any public remarks about the so-called shoe bomber, Richard Reid, and there were virtually no complaints from the press or any opposition Democrats that his response was sluggish or inadequate…

...Bush was at Camp David when Reid used similar plastic explosives to try to blow up his Paris-to-Miami flight, which diverted to Boston after the incident.

Like the Obama White House, the Bush White House told reporters the president had been briefed on the incident and was following it closely….Bush did not address reporters about the Reid episode until December 28, after he had traveled from Camp David to his ranch in Texas.

To be fair, that was just three months after 9/11. Americans had not yet forgotten that terrorists were interested in attacking the country, and the bar for major news (and outrage) on the subject was lower. But still, an intriguing comparison.

Oh, yeah: To see what PETN looks like when it blows up, check out this CNN video. Pretty much comports with what the passengers I interviewed from NWA Flight 253 said he saw on the suspect’s lap… A loud pop, smoke—and, a minute or so later, flames rising above the suspect’s head.

I have a rant in TIME Magazine this week about the attempted bombing of Northwest Flight 253—and the ways in which the usual suspects (including the White House, Congress and the media) are totally missing the point.

Our national conversation about terrorism needs to become more sophisticated. We cannot expect zero terrorism attempts to ever happen in our airplanes ever again. We can and must work harder to reduce the chances. But this kind of crap drives me crazy:

“I’d rather, in the interest of protecting people, overreact rather than underreact.”—Sen. Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate intelligence committee.

Really?

Terrorism is a psychological war as much as a physical war. To win such a war, it is essential not to overreact. That is the crux of the matter. If you overreact, you become a force multiplier for the terrorists.

And yet, that is exactly what we are doing. How thrilling it must be for extremists to sit in Yemen and hear about the impact of a failed mission in American skies: The U.S. president is being forced to prove he is not weak on defense (despite the fact that he just helped Yemen bomb the crap out of militants this very month, with decidedly mixed results, and despite the fact that Obama has insisted on staying in Afghanistan over the objections of many in his party); Andrew Sullivan and at least one Congressional Republican have called for the resignation of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano; passengers around the world are being subjected to inane no-blanket rules and invasive frisks, just when it seemed they had no more dignity left to surrender.

Wow. Quite an accomplishment for a young man who did not successfully detonate his bomb.

Our complicity in boosting the terrorism threat was explained well by James Fallows in a 2006 Atlantic piece, “Declaring Victory”:

“Does al-Qaeda still constitute an ‘existential’ threat?” asks David Kilcullen, who has written several influential papers on the need for a new strategy against Islamic insurgents. Kilcullen, who as an Australian army officer commanded counter-insurgency units in East Timor, recently served as an adviser in the Pentagon and is now a senior adviser on counterterrorism at the State Department. He was referring to the argument about whether the terrorism of the twenty-first century endangers the very existence of the United States and its allies, as the Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons did throughout the Cold War (and as the remnants of that arsenal still might).

“I think it does, but not for the obvious reasons,” Kilcullen told me. He said the most useful analogy was the menace posed by European anarchists in the nineteenth century. “If you add up everyone they personally killed, it came to maybe 2,000 people, which is not an existential threat.” But one of their number assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife. The act itself took the lives of two people. The unthinking response of European governments in effect started World War I. “So because of the reaction they provoked, they were able to kill millions of people and destroy a civilization.

“It is not the people al-Qaeda might kill that is the threat,” he concluded. “Our reaction is what can cause the damage. It’s al-Qaeda plus our response that creates the existential danger.”