Amanda Ripley Author of The Unthinkable

Just finished reading Anne-Marie Slaughter’s Atlantic essay on “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All.” I read it, I should say, from home, where I was waiting in a 90-degree room for the air-conditioning repair man to come after I’d dropped my child off at “camp”—since school is, for some reason, closed all summer long.

Having it ALL!

My one fix would have been to update the headline to read, “Why Men & Women Still Can’t Have It All.” Personally, I don’t know any men with young children who don’t experience the same wrenching pull, even if (as Slaughter notes) they may not feel the same level of shame and guilt when they go on business trips. (Besides, who’s to say men don’t feel more guilt than their wives when they fail to deliver at work? Guilt is a fungible commodity.)

Anyway, I applaud Slaughter for wading into this cauldron in an honest and nuanced way—and for proposing at least a couple of tangible solutions, instead of just listing laments, which is how these things normally go.

Here is my favorite tangible solution from the essay:

My longtime and invaluable assistant, who has a doctorate and juggles many balls as the mother of teenage twins, e-mailed me while I was working on this article: “You know what would help the vast majority of women with work/family balance? MAKE SCHOOL SCHEDULES MATCH WORK SCHEDULES.” The present system, she noted, is based on a society that no longer exists—one in which farming was a major occupation and stay-at-home moms were the norm. Yet the system hasn’t changed.

Want to reduce strain on families? Try, for one thing, running schools as if they operate in the real world—and as if what they do matters so much that it has to happen fairly consistently, just like work.

I just checked the calendar for the upcoming public school year in Washington, DC. Kids have 32 days off during the school year. Not counting the summer! That’s over 6 work weeks that parents somehow have to scramble to manage.

Most Americans get about half that in holiday and vacation time. The math is obvious: the tension parents feel isn’t just caused by employers not giving enough vacation time; it’s caused by education leaders who are willfully blind to the realities of families.

Every time my kid has a day off from school, I wish I had a magical Harry Potter map that could show the ripple effects being silently endured all across the city: the tense negotiations with spouses, the white lies to employers, the fingers crossed as mothers and fathers walk away from dropping off their children at dubious childcare centers where they don’t know anyone…. hoping for the best. All this for what? For “professional development” that most teachers will tell you is utterly useless.

Here’s an idea! Perhaps days off should be earned. If a given form of professional development is proven to actually make teaching more effective, then OK, it’s worth the time off. I’ll do anything to support that worthy goal.

Likewise with summer vacation: if, by the end of the year, students are all performing at levels required for young people to thrive in the modern economy, then great! Go home for the summer, kids and teachers, too. Break out the sprinkler. If not, we’ll see you back here on Monday. Which is to say, we’ll see every damn one of you here on Monday.

And now I’m off to the office. Air conditioner still broken. “Camp” ends at 3:30, at which time something called, for some reason, “aftercare” begins!

Medicare is starting to reimburse physicians based in part on the “quality” of their care. To incentivize better results, the theory goes, doctors whose patients’ health improved could get reimbursed at a higher rate

Ah, but how to measure quality fairly? What about all the things that doctors can’t control? Patients who are obese, patients who don’t even bother to fill their prescriptions… Surely a doctor can’t be blamed if these patients fail to thrive.

Sound familiar?

Mathematica released a new paper yesterday on whether docs could be evaluated based in part on value-added models similar to the ones designed for teachers (pdf here). Doctors everywhere shuddered, no doubt.

Here’s the part that makes theoretical sense: Doctors, like teachers, have not historically been paid based on how much they actually help their charges. In fact, doctors are often rewarded to do things that may be directly counter to patients’ interests (like administering tests they don’t need). It would make sense if doctors got a small bump if, for example, their diabetic patients’ glucose levels improved over time. That is a hard thing to do—and it should be rewarded.

The Mathematic paper suggests that Medicare could, for example, compare a patient’s glucose levels from one year to the next, and see how the change compared to the change in levels of similar patients in the same region. After that, of course, things get complicated—just as they do with teachers.

What about patients who have many doctors? What about doctors who see the same patients for many years?

The answer might be the same as the proposed fix for teachers, the paper suggests: Multiple measures!

In education, approaches to increasing the precision of performance estimates include using test scores from multiple years of classes (in other words, increasing the sample size for the estimate); combining value-added scores with other, independent measures of teacher performance, such as principals’ evaluations; and calculating scores at a higher level of aggregation (e.g., for all the teachers in a given subject or for all the teachers in a school, which, again, increases sample size). The following similar approaches could be taken in health: using multiple years of patient’s outcomes; combining value-added measures with other measures of physician performance, such as their scores on clinical process measures; and calculating value- added scores for groups of physicians in a practice.

Soon the model becomes very complex; and if most doctors do not buy in, and I suspect they will not, many will find a way to game the system. They will resent the intrusion. Some may drop low-income, low-performing patients. Others may indeed respond to the incentives—for ego or financial reasons—and actually improve their practice to lead to better outcomes.

Who knows? Maybe the value-added model could work even better with doctors than teachers. Unlike teachers, many doctors get into the profession partly to make money; they may, theoretically (again!), be more motivated by pay-for-performance schemes than teachers. They also have enough schooling that many of them may actually understand the models—unlike most people (including most teachers). And there may be more visibility into what they need to do in order to get better outcomes than there is for teachers.

Or not. So far, there’s not a lot of evidence that using value-added models to evaluate teaching actually improves outcomes for kids in the real world. There’s not a lot of evidence that it doesn’t. Time may tell.

Regardless, thinking about this analogy made me realize that teachers have way more time to try to influence students than doctors have to affect patients. On the high end, let’s say a doctor sees a patient every two months for 15 minutes. Teachers, meanwhile, spend about 5 to 25 hours a week with their students. Over the course of two months, then, teachers have somewhere between 16,000% to 80,000% more time with students than doctors have with patients. (Granted, teachers don’t see their students one-on-one for all that time, but you get the idea: teachers spend a LOT of time with their students.) Opportunity lurks in that time….

Time is something that adults underestimate, I find. Perhaps we think it moves more swiftly because we have less of it left. Kids on the other hand know what it feels like to sit in the same room for 5 hours for 185 days. Much can happen in that time, they will tell you. (Or not.)

This year, for the first time, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security will recognize a regular, non-governmental human (or organization) for acts of superior leadership and innovation—through a new honor called the Rick Rescorla National Award for Resilience.

This is a big deal. For years, schmucks like me have been haranguing the federal government for failing to highlight the stories and wisdom of the regular people who make our country more resilient. Instead of talking about how government is going to make us safe, we ought to start listening—to the t-shirt vendors, the flight attendants, the survivors and the guy in the aisle seat, to the Rick Rescorlas of the world who have shown us how the public can prevent and respond to disasters with grace, courage and initiative.

Well, now DHS is doing it, in at least one symbolic and important way. Please send your nominations asap to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). More details and the nomination form can be found here. The deadline is June 1, 2012.

The award was named after Rick Rescorla, the head of security for Morgan Stanley Dean Witter in the World Trade Center. I wrote about Rescorla in The Unthinkable, and I’ve talked about him around the country. His story is impossible to forget once you’ve heard it. So let me share some of it here, now that we have a good excuse…

Rick Rescorla was one of those thick-necked, former soldier types who spent the second halves of their lives patrolling the perimeters of marble lobbies the way they once patrolled a battlefield. He was disciplined in everything he did, and he understood the power of the human brain to get better through practice.

After the 1993 bombing and the fiasco of an evacuation that followed, Rescorla decided that Morgan Stanley employees had to take full responsibility for their own survival— something that happened almost nowhere else in the Trade Center. He knew it was foolish to rely on first responders to save his employees. His company was the largest tenant in the World Trade Center, a village nestled in the clouds. Morgan Stanley’s employees would need to take care of one another.

From then on, Rescorla started running the entire company through frequent, surprise fire drills. He trained employees to meet in the hallway between the stairwells and, at his direction, go down the stairs, two by two, to the forty-fourth floor. He noticed they moved slowly, so he started timing them with a stopwatch—and they got faster.

The radicalism of Rescorla’s drills cannot be overstated. Remember, Morgan Stanley was an investment bank. Millionaire, high-performance bankers on the 73rd floor chafed at Rescorla’s evacuation regimen. They did not appreciate interrupting high-net-worth clients in the middle of a meeting. Each drill, which pulled the firm’s brokers off their phones and away from their computers, cost the company money. But Rescorla did it anyway. He didn’t care whether he was popular.

When guests visited Morgan Stanley for training, Rescorla made sure they all knew how to get out too. Even though the chances were slim, Rescorla wanted them ready for an evacuation.

On the morning of 9/11, Rescorla heard an explosion and saw Tower 1 burning from his office window. A Port Authority official came over the public address system and urged everyone to remain at their desks. But Rescorla grabbed his bullhorn, his walkie-talkie, and his cell phone and began systematically ordering Morgan Stanley employees to get out. They already knew what to do, even the 250 visitors who were taking a stockbroker training class and had already been shown the nearest stairway.

Rescorla had led soldiers through the Vietcong-controlled Central Highlands of Vietnam. He knew the brain responded poorly to extreme fear. Back then, he had calmed his men by singing Cornish songs from his youth. Now, in the crowded stairwell, as his sweat leached through his suit jacket, Rescorla began to sing into the bullhorn. “Men of Cornwall stand ye steady; It cannot be ever said ye for the battle were not ready; Stand and never yield!”

Moments later, Rescorla had successfully evacuated the vast majority of Morgan Stanley employees out of the burning tower. Then he turned around. He was last seen on the 10th floor, heading upward, shortly before the tower collapsed. His remains have never been found.

Rescorla taught Morgan Stanley employees to save themselves. It’s a lesson that had become, somehow, rare and precious. When the tower collapsed, only 13 Morgan Stanley colleagues—including Rescorla and four of his security officers—were inside. The other 2,687 were safe.

Thanks to the folks at USC’s Master of Arts in Teaching Program for this nice graphic on $ and education around the world.

Via: MAT@USC | Master’s of Arts in Teaching

But this raises another mystery: We’ve known for a long time that more money does not tend to lead to more learning, once you get past a bare minimum (which we did a long time ago). So here’s my question: Where does all that money go in the U.S.??

Why do we spend so much more? Has anyone seen a good answer to this? I’d love to see what percentage of our spending goes to things that other countries’ education budgets don’t have to cover (i.e. health care for teachers). One report (PDF here) states that this difference alone could account for up to 8% of the variation between our expenses and those of other nations. Well, if that’s true, that’s not actually very much.

Has anyone tried to compare countries’ spending while controlling for differences in how non-salaried benefits get distributed from place to place? Also, I’d love to see what percentage of our spending goes to technology compared to the spending in other countries… Anyone ever seen anything that reveals the story behind the money? I may be missing something, but I can’t seem to find any really strong analysis of the money story—even though we are talking about huge sums of money…

On the Titanic, 70% of the women and children survived—but only 20% of the men. Cue the orchestra!

But was the Titanic the exception? A new study investigates whether women and children really do have an advantage on a sinking ship.

It is so refreshing, first of all, to see a study focus obsessively on the thing that matters most in a disaster—the behavior of the humans involved. Naturally, the results show that life is more complicated than the movies.

The study, out of Sweden, concludes that it is in fact worse to be a woman on a shipwreck, based on a study of 18 maritime disasters involving over 15,000 people. The survival rate of women was 27% vs. 37% for men (see Table C1). But children have the lowest survival rate of all at 15%. And crew members have the highest rate of anyone at 61%!

The authors have some compelling data, but their conclusion jumps the shark:

Taken together, our findings show that behavior in life-and-death situation is best captured by the expression ‘Every man for himself’.

Um, really? I look at the same set of facts and make a very different conclusion.

The most important detail in the study is actually the crew survival rate. To me, these figures show that the most valuable asset in a disaster is not gender; it’s experience.

The crew members knew where the life boats were. They knew how to operate them. And they knew how to swim.

They weren’t afraid to take action; they weren’t waiting for instructions; they weren’t down below trying to save the children (a likely explanation for the death of at least some of the female passengers.)

This doesn’t mean that crew members are all cowards who flee in the life boats while passengers die. That may happen sometimes, but the opposite also happens. Crew members, given their roles, may go to extreme lengths to help rescue passengers. And who knows? The passenger survival rate might be even worse if crew members did not have this inclination.

Personally, I think the question of chivalry on a sinking ship is less interesting. There are too many compounding factors in a real disaster to be able to isolate whether people were being gender neutral or not. (Indeed, even more women might have died if the women-and-children-first slogan had never existed. Who knows?)

Anyway, the good news here is that knowledge matters. Under strain, the brain reverts to what it knows best. If you’ve got muscle memory for getting into a life boat, you’ll be better off than someone who doesn’t. This kind of study should encourage cruise ship safety directors (not to mention building and airplane personnel) to give people physical experience trying on life jackets and releasing life boats. These are not onerous tasks; you do them with crew members all the time. Now do them with the rest of us.

Thanks to Freakonomics and @DaniloBalu for noticing the study!

The new book Bringing Up Bebe has got affluent American parents all in a tizzy—again. Why aren’t our kids parfait, aussi?

Good question. I lived in France for a while, and anecdotally speaking, it did seem like French parents were less likely to indulge their children in some ways. My French friends put their children to bed at 7:30 pm and had a civilized dinner with their husbands. (Except for the ones who didn’t, of course.)

I suspect that France is a more pleasant place to parent in 1,000 different ways, as my New America colleague Brigid Schulte explained in the Washington Post recently, notably the subsidized childcare, generous parental leave policies and universal health care.

But putting that aside, I have another question: Are French kids smart? Does all that chic parenting translate into kids who know how to think critically and solve real problems?

The evidence suggests…. Non, pas exactement.

Here is how French 15-year-olds perform on the PISA, which is an international test of critical thinking skills, administered to half a million kids every 3 years by the OECD:

Reading: France ranked 15th in reading in 2009, which is a teeny bit worse than our own kids performed (we ranked 12th), but about average for the developed world.

Science: France ranked 20th in Science in 2009, which is again just slightly worse than our own kids (17th)—and about average for the develop world.

Math: France ranked 18th in Math in 2009, about average for the developed world. That’s the only subject in which their teenagers outperformed our teenagers on the PISA. American kids came in 26th, below average for the developed world.

In other words, French kids do OK on international tests of critical thinking in math, reading and science. But given their low rates of child poverty, they ain’t breaking any records.

What about privileged French kids? The ones Bringing Up Bebe is, truth be told, most focused on?

As with our own rich kids, the picture is mixed. The top-quartile of French kids—the ones with the most material advantages based on PISA’s index of economic, social and cultural status—outperform our own rich kids in science and math (even though they are not as rich as our rich kids).

Still, our rich kids do a bit better than their rich kids in reading. (This is a pattern which holds up around the world. American kids do better in reading than math or science at every income level. Too bad future income is predicted by math skills…)

This suggests that all of our schools, even our rich, suburban schools, are underperforming in math and science. Or else our parents are underperforming math and science… I’d argue that both are true.

Anyway, the point is, France is not doing wildly better than we are—for its rich or poor kids—when it comes to learning.

Low-income American kids AND French kids perform significantly worse than their high-income peers, which is less true in countries like Finland, Korea and Canada. Both the US and France have a problem with disparities in education outcomes, even though France has far less child poverty and far more generous social welfare benefits. Another reminder that a great education system requires more than anti-poverty programs. Beaucoup more.

No matter how many people I interview, no matter how many rewrites I do, I just can’t do what TV can do. There is something about good TV that captures the brain’s attention and doesn’t let it go. This month, a new PBS documentary based on The Unthinkable does what I couldn’t do.

Surviving Disaster deconstructs how the brain responds to life-or-death events—so that we can all learn to do better. The documentary includes many characters from my book, in addition to other survivors of all kinds of trauma, from tsunami to car crashes.

One young survivor describes in unflinching detail exactly what it felt like to get out of a house fire as a little girl in Texas. It is the kind of story you will never forget once you see it, and it is told with a purpose—to help the rest of us become smarter and stronger in our own homes and communities. I am so grateful to the folks at Santa Fe Productions for finding these survivors and sharing their stories.

The film is available for purchase online. Also, PBS affiliates are showing Surviving Disaster at different times, depending on where you live. A handful of the air dates/locations are listed below, and you can find other towns here.

AIR DATES: Surviving Disaster

Chicago—Sunday 3/11/12—9:30 AM (WYINDT)

Cincinnati—Tuesday 3/6/12—9:30 PM (WPTODT)

Philadelphia—Sunday 3/11/12—9:00 AM (WHYYDT)

Pittsburgh—Thursday 3/8/12—9:00 PM (WQEDDT4)

San Francisco—Sunday 3/11/12—3:30 PM (KRCBDT)

*Please check local listings or Surviving Disaster for more locations and times.

What would a playground look like if it were designed the way kids actually play?

I’m collecting a list of the coolest playgrounds in the world. Send me one if you see one!

Here’s a good one from the U.S.A.