Background

New Zealand introduced “National Standards” last year. In the past, the curriculum talked about competencies and learning areas in general terms and defined stages through which children would pass. It didn’t say “at this age, children should be able to do X”. That was the gap that National Standards filled. The debate has been around timing (too fast) and how those standard age-based skills were arrived at (not soundly).

It’s important to note that National Standards is not standardised assessment. That is, it’s not the same test taken by every child once a year to determine what the child can do. Instead, teachers use their professional judgement to assess the child however they want, and work together to ensure that all children are assessed in roughly the same way. This process of working together to ensure that a kid in Paihia and a kid in Dunedin are being assessed on the same grounds is called “moderation”.

Failing Schools

I’ve believed for the last year that National Standards would be used to identify “failing” schools and those schools will then be punished instead of supported. Schools are required to report on performance against National Standards, and these reports can (and will) be gathered and sorted into “league tables”. Those at the bottom of the league tables (those with the most kids not reading at or above age expectation) will be labelled “failing” and given fewer funds to motivate the staff and board (and perhaps parents) to change for the better.

On the surface, this sounds reasonable. Kids should know stuff, and schools should be pushed hard to improve if they’re not doing right by their kids. The question is whether this is an accurate measure of “not doing right by their kids”, and whether this push will cause the schools to improve.

If you ask people what they want their kids to be when they leave school, they talk about: confident, healthy, knowledgeable, independent learners, financially literate, curious, creative, global in outlook, aware of their history, comfortable moving between the cultures in the community, fluent public speakers, and so on. All this is covered in the New Zealand Curriculum’s key competencies: thinking, using language, managing self, relating to others, participating and contributing. National Standards only looks at one and a half aspects (“thinking” and “using language”, both important but very narrowly interpreted) and completely omit the others.

So you’ve got two failure modes here: you can have capable confident curious kids who don’t know stuff they should, and kids who can recite the Kings of England but who can’t think independently to save themselves. Both exist and both are problems to be solved. Ranking on National Standards won’t identify the Kings of England problem, and if we want the independent creative financially-literate entrepreneurs who will lift NZ out of its economic malaise, we won’t get them if the grammar schools continue to churn out graduating classes full of children skilled in regurgitation and not digestion.

I think National Standards will successfully identify children who don’t know the stuff they should by their age. What’s needed to turn that around? Sometimes teaching is the problem. But research has repeatedly shown (see John Hattie’s “Visible Learning”) that most of a child’s progress in the year is a result of what they knew at the start of the year and what happens at home. A minority of the possible improvement in kids’ knowledge is a result of what happens at school.

Fixing Failure

So it’s entirely possible that we’ll end up identifying schools in poor areas as having children who don’t progress as rapidly as children in rich areas. This is hardly an earth-shattering conclusion. The question is: what will we do to make change?

A great school can change its environment. Pt England primary school has raised literacy in its entire community. Great schools like this are rare. How can we make more?

The Government today announced the introduction of charter schools, the first such intervention. The upside is pretty good: if a public school isn’t doing well and hasn’t improved over years, then let private or charitable groups to start a new one in competition, with latitude on employment and curriculum that public schools don’t current enjoy. Then parents have choice, can vote with their feet, and the worse school will be starved of pupils and die.

That’s the upside. I’d love to think that we’ll get more Russell and Dorothy Burts starting charter schools that have the effect of a Point England school. That’d be fantastic.

Failing Fixes

The problem is that while there is massive effort to identify and contain the failures of public schools, I don’t see the same thought being put into the downsides of charter schools. That is, if a charter school fails, how will we know and what will we do about it? “Charter schools will be accountable to school sponsors and subject to external review” seems rather vague.

What failure modes might there be? A charter school might not meet national standards. It might omit sex education or teach a bizarre version of it such as abstinence. It might include religious education, so a pupil is forced to be indoctrinated into a different religion in order to get a decent education. It might omit “relating to others” and “participating and contributing” in favour of creating kids who can recite the Kings of England and regurgitate an essay on the use of symbolism in Hamlet.

What’s really frustrating is that we already have a mechanism for assessing and improving schools: the Education Review Office. ERO just finished visiting our school, and dinged us on some things we weren’t doing well. They offered us assistance to improve, and we will. ERO even have the power to depose the board and principal and install a commissioner to run the school and reform the governance and administration (they did that a decade ago for our school, and it worked). Schools have tremendous freedom to meet their communities’ needs (Albany Senior High with its Googlish 20% time, and Auckland Grammar School with its British prep school aspirations are both NZ public schools). What exactly was wrong with that system that requires charter schools?

How is the solution to “this school is failing National Standards” to create a school with “more freedom to set the curriculum” and the ability to hire untrained teachers?

Failure to Fix

This disconnect between National Standards and charter schools is what frustrates me. You’ve got National Standards used as evidence of a problem, and charter schools as a cure that won’t necessarily fix the problem.

It’s hard not to see this as working backwards from a system the politicians want to see in place (charter and private schools), and National Standards with the language of “failing schools” used to justify the installation of that system.

Underneath is the belief that business can and will do everything better than government. This is, however, far from universally accepted (“everything”, really?) and far from necessarily applicable to education. Businesses have their failure modes too (cf Telecom, Enron, News of the World, and any number of finance companies) and should be guarded against as vigorously as public school failures are.

Forced Failure

What I ultimately fear, yet predict, is the introduction of what in America is referred to (without irony!) as “No Child Left Behind”. The process: test often, rank according to test results, those at the bottom of the test results are “failing” and therefore deserve to be punished, so withhold funds, and eventually starve them in favour of semi- or fully-private schools. Americans don’t compare well academically to Kiwis and it seems unwise to import this model (see, for example, OECD’s PISA scores where our kids do better in school but don’t stay in school as long).

How would we get there? We’ve got National Standards with no standardised testing. After a year or two it’ll be possible to say “moderation is blurring the numbers, there’s too much uncertainty and room for fudging, we need the clarity of standardised assessment” and in will come annual national tests. At that point we’re doing what one 19th century reformer called “continually pulling up the plants to see the condition of the roots, the consequence of which is that all good natural growth was stopped.”

I’ll wager a pint of Guinness that within 5 years we’re punishing “failing” schools and talking about, if not living, standardised assessment instead of moderation.

Call me slow, but I just realized what a disgusting cop out this is. “100% Pure” isn’t just a tourism slogan, it’s how we see ourselves. We have a long tradition of believing we’re clean and green, and of trying to act in league with that. It’s a fantastically ambitious high standard to hold ourselves to. If we pollute streams with dairy farming run-off, stop doing that. If we have foully-emitting vehicles, raise emissions standards. If we were going to mine in our conservation estate, don’t do that! Just hold yourself to a lower standard. This is a no-brainer, people.

Resiling from the challenge of stewardship of the environment is lazy and corrupt. If we said “we Kiwis are smart” and then someone pointed out that we weren’t 1st in childhood education in the OECD, would we then say “oh no you’re right, we’re stupid, let’s give up”? Or would we continue to aspire to wisdom, funding and engineering our educational system to live up to that ambition? Somehow, though, we’re happy to back away from the environment. How the fuck did we let that happen?

Sorry, something just slipped into place as I realized what happened, and I had to rant. As you were, back to your cat videos.

In America, largely for historical reasons, residential customers have “all you can eat” plans. Buffet bandwidth is the order of the day, every day. As the number of people online continues to grow, and they do more bandwidth-intensive things (YouTube movies vs all-text web pages), telcos must buy new hardware. “How do they pay for it?” the article asks, and offers up three solutions: charge heavy consumers more (the Australian and New Zealand “metered Internet” solution); charge the people serving lots of data rather than we who consume it (which pisses Google off and starts a “network neutrality” war); or just suck up the costs themselves.

One element missing from this discussion is that every year brings more demand for bandwidth. Over time, we build more sophisticated applications that gain wider use: last.fm, Skype, YouTube, video chat, BitTorrent. To pick a number and say “this amount of traffic is reasonable use and will incur a reasonable charge” is to prevent the uptake of new applications that would drive the network use past the “reasonable” point. Unfettered, I’d expect to see this natural growth in our bandwidth use year on year. However, fetters are exactly what the ISPs have put in place to keep that down.

I suspect that the current ISP charging model is really: “3% of users take 50% of the traffic, so if we just price them out we’ll be able to get twice as many customers without having to buy any more hardware!”. The longer they can keep down our demands for bandwidth, the more customers they can “serve” without having to invest in new hardware.

But capital outlay is what growth is all about. If you want to double the number of customers, you should expect to have to double your bandwidth. One of the ISP CEOs said “I don’t subscribe to the view that network capacity is finite at all …. Optical fibre basically doesn’t run out of capacity, it’s just a question of how fast you blink the bits at each end.” Well if it’s not about capacity, mate, what’s left?

It certainly feels like you want your cake and you want to eat it: you want new customers without having to put in new hardware to increase your capacity, and you want existing customers to stay at their current levels so you won’t have to put in new hardware to increase capacity.

And if that’s not rorting your customers because you’re a greedy bastard, I don’t know what is.

My fellow O’Reilly Radar blogger Brady forwarded a comment from a mailing list that said “Software can’t keep people focused/productive, it has to come either from within or through external forces (deadlines, time limits, etc.)”. I was moved to respond.

Raising kids, in particular one with a “tackle the hard stuff” problem which I’m SURE that I have NO idea where he gets it from, I’ve realized it’s not an either-or.

You need the little switch inside you set to “I will do this!” rather than “I will shirk this!”. Will is not optional. Systems and checklists aren’t a substitute for this switch. However, if your switch is set and you don’t have systems, you run the risk of doing an incomplete or incorrect job. Systems and tools keep state, context, and direction for you.

Any system to keep you from browsing websites isn’t going to work unless you actually want to stop browsing websites. Cognitively, I think the web is candy to our mind’s sweet tooth for novelty. You can easily lose a week thinking you’re accomplishing something when all you’re doing is reading people’s thoughts about other people’s thoughts about things that still other people have done (techmeme and RSS are enablers, the candy racks at the grocery in my metaphor). You’re so far from actual Things Getting Done that you might as well have hibernated in the couch with a bong and your cousin’s collection of exotic porn for all the good that week has done you.

See this WSJ article on why we like the taste of new and newer things, and this New Yorker article on how checklists are useful even to doctors (some of the most determined, focused, motivated, and skilled workers on the planet).

Yes, the irony of blogging a post on the futility of reading most blogs is not lost on me. Hopefully your ability to tolerate hypocrisy exceeds my ability to hypocritise, and therefore you can stay tuned for my coming tweets on “why Twitter is a waste of time”, and the blog meme “what are your most hated blog memes?”.

It began, as all good nightmares do, on the web. I booked a multi-city trip: AKL-LAX, then SAN-LAX-AKL (I drove LAX to SAN). Or, at least, I thought I booked it. Within a few hours I got an email message:

	Subject: 	Unable to ticket reservation
	From: 	  memberservices@travelocity.com
	Date: 	17 February 2008 3:22:37 AM
	To: 	  nathan@torkington.com

Thank you for booking your travel reservations with Travelocity.com.

We are unable to complete the processing of the reservation you
made on our system, until we can obtain some additional information
from you.

We are open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  Please call us at
888-872-8356 and give the agent your 12 digit Trip ID 5551246369.

Your reservation has not been ticketed, so please remember
that no fare is guaranteed until it is ticketed.

Ooookay. I jumped on the phone, though I’m paying international rates (888 = toll free, but it’s $ to call a “toll-free” number from NZ). Indian agent, female, picked up. She was puzzled by the message, her systems showed no reason why such a thing would be generated, but said she’d look into it. “Can I put you on hold for two minutes while I contact the airline?”. Sure. I spent about 10 minutes on hold, then she came back and said the problem was that I wasn’t spending long enough in LAX between the San Diego flight landing and the Auckland flight departing–it has to be two hours and I had only allowed 75m. The airlines won’t ticket unless it’s two hours. Would I like to take a few minutes with her to rebook?

I’d love to, but I had kids to get from school. I figured, I’ll call back when I return and we can sort it out then. I returned with kids and try again. The next agent was not just puzzled by the email I’d received but also by my explanation of what I wanted to do. “You want to book another flight from LA?” No. “You are happy with your flights, then?” No. “So would you like me to book another flight from LA for you, sir?” After ten minutes I managed to communicate my desire to bring forward my SAN-LAX leg. “Can I put you on hold for two minutes, sir?” Sure. Long delay. “I’m showing all your flights in the system, sir.” “What?” “All your flights are in the system, sir.” Okay, perhaps I wasn’t so successful in the communication of the desire. “Yes, I was aware of that, but I need to change the SAN-LAX leg to an earlier flight.” “Oh! Ok, sir. Two minutes!” Fifteen minutes of hold ensue.

Ring ring, click. “Hello, welcome to Travelocity. How can I help you today?” “Um, I was being helped but the phone rang and you answered it.” “Certainly sir, what can we do to help you today?” Repeat the saga. “Two minutes on hold while I–” “Riiiiiight.” On to hold I go for ten minutes.

Ring ring, click. Oh, you are SHITTING ME. “Hello, welcome to Travelocity. How can I help you today?” In clipped tones yet still in the face of provocation remaining polite, I reiterate my simple request to change a leg. “Can I put you on hold for two minutes while I–” “Well, actually, that didn’t go so well last time.” “Well, I have to put you on hold to talk to an airline representative, sir.” Can’t you just use the, oh I don’t know, INTERNET to change my flights? Why does Travelocity have to use the telephone to talk to United? Oh well, “sure, if you think you can manage to avoid losing me, go for it.” Hold.

Ring ring, click. Don’t you dare. “Hello, welcome to United. Mary speaking. How can I help you?” THE FUCK?! “You are NOT going to believe how I came to be talking to you, Mary …”. Mary confirms that they’ve held the seats but not issued tickets. I check my bank’s web site: they’ve got a hold on the account for the money but haven’t put the transaction through. I don’t trust these incompetent pricks by this stage, though, so I get Mary to also hold the seats but not issue tickets. I’ll call Travelocity back and cancel the flights (hopefully easier than changing them!) and thus avoid being stiffed.

So I hang up and call back. After about five minutes someone answers. I immediately ask to speak to a supervisor. “Certainly, sir!” and I’m transferred to an unanswered line. Twenty minutes of not speaking to a supervisor and many swearwords later, Jenine convinces me to get off the phone before I give myself a coronary. I use the customer support part of their website to request they simply cancel the ticket:

	Subject: 	Travelocity Customer Service Request - Change or cancel a trip
	From: 	  memberservices@travelocity.com
	Date: 	19 February 2008 8:14:23 AM
	To: 	  nathan@torkington.com

The following information request was submitted to customer service : 

E-mail : nathan@torkington.com
Message : There is a problem with the flights--the layover in Los
Angeles is not long enough to issue tickets.  I've spent over two
hours on international phone calls with your "customer service"
and nobody has been able to make the simple flight change
without hanging up on me.

So please cancel this transaction.  Do not charge my card.  Do
not issue me tickets.  I will buy tickets elsewhere and I will
never use your "service" again. 

Product : Air
Topic : Change or cancel a trip

The reply comes, less than three hours later:

	From: 	  memberservices@travelocity.com
	Date: 	19 February 2008 11:03:06 AM
	To: 	  nathan@torkington.com

Dear Nathan,

Thank you for writing to Travelocity.

First and foremost I would like to apologize for the frustration this has
caused. 

Per your email, we have checked your reservation and we are sorry
to inform you that your reservation for your trip to Los Angeles, CA is
unconfirmed and not yet ticketed.

Nathan, to cancel the reservation you will need to contact our Customer
Care Center as we cannot change or cancel reservation online or via email.

We request you to call our Customer Service Center at 1-888-872-8356
Outside of U.S. and Canada: 210.521.5871 once again so one of our phone
representative will assist you in canceling the reservation.

We are sorry for the inconvenience and appreciate your patience and ask
that you call back at a later off peak time 10PM to 7AM (CST).

Please forward a day and night phone number where you can be reached
so that we may set up a callback request for you. 

We regret this inconvenience.

We appreciate your patience and co-operation. 

Sincerely,

Victoria T
Travelocity Customer Service

I give up, confirm the flights with United so I’ll have at least one set of tickets, and hope that in a few days the credit card authorization will lapse. It does.

So, to reiterate, Travelocity’s big success in this whole affair was that they failed to book me tickets.

ADDENDUM: I just got a “so how’d we do?!” customer support survey from them. I went through checking all the “suck” boxes, and got to the final “any other comments” field in the form. I’m submitting the following and will consider the matter closed.

I'm actively telling all my frequent flying friends to avoid Travelocity. I spent way too much money and two hours of international phone calls with incompetent customer service staff, who repeatedly proved incapable of operating the phone equipment (an agent would pick up my call, hear my problem, put me on hold while they talked to the airline, then the next agent would pick me up and have no idea who I was and the loop would start again). When I sent mail to the customer service saying, "look, I just want to cancel the reservation and never have to spend another dollar on the phone not being helped", the only answer I got was "sorry, we can only cancel on the phone!"

Up the lot of you. I'm booking through the airlines from now on. I've realized that saving $50/flight isn't worth the international phone calls and two hours of my time on the telephone trying to clean up when Travelocity shits its pants. Your customer service is appalling and the entire division should be lined up and shot. This may already have happened, judging from the 30m lack of answer the last time I tried calling. It wouldn't surprise me: helping the customer is obviously regarded as a cost centre and something to be understaffed, poorly tooled, and generally avoided.

]]> http://nathan.torkington.com/blog/2008/03/17/travelocity-are-incompetent-fuckwits-suckled-at-satans-poisonous-nipples/feed/ 0 http://nathan.torkington.com/blog/2008/03/12/zuckerberg-interview-ffs/ http://nathan.torkington.com/blog/2008/03/12/zuckerberg-interview-ffs/#comments Thu, 13 Mar 2008 01:19:11 +0000 gnat http://nathan.torkington.com/blog/?p=72 Now that Silicon Valley is slowly returning trickling back from Austin, I’d like to post something I wrote during The Zuckerberg Interview Soap Opera …

This is an example of the intellectuanal Ouroboros that hits Silicon Valley in waves. Let’s see what’s wrong with this intarwebs blow up, shall we?

1. Who in their right mind goes to a keynote with Mark Zuckerberg and is DISAPPOINTED when it goes wrong? What the fuck did you EXPECT? I mean, come on, he runs a bloody SOCIAL NETWORKING SITE. That’s like running a “web mall” in 1997! What did you think you were going to learn? The secret of getting a hundred million users? Hint: Zuckerberg would pay to go to a keynote to learn that–Facebook barely has 60M. MySpace passed 100M in 2006.
2. It happened at SxSW, a conference with no discernable purpose other than to meet Texas’s annual quota for bloated pointless panels in two weeks. The only thing worse than hearing people toss off “South by” in person is the flood of tweets from those there: “queueing for Zuckerberg”, “queueing for Google party”, “this blows, anything better happening?”, “I got to touch (some designer you’ve never heard of)!”, …. Please don’t confuse SxSW for real life.
3. Valleywag “broke” it. Jesus Christ, people, have I taught you nothing? If there’s a blog post and it links to Valleywag, you can immediately skip the entire post. This should be built into Google Reader. The only thing worse than reading Valleywag is being ejected into the depths of space, naked, covered in honey and angry fire ants, wearing your kidneys as ear muffs, and with a ticking bomb shoved up your ass. But even then I think most people’s last words would be “thank the sweet merciful Lord that I don’t have to hear about Valleywag again”.

SxSW? Social networking? Valleywag? It’s the trifecta of “for fuck’s sake”. The US economy’s heading down the shitter faster than a Superfund chicken tikka marsala, the web industry is in the clutches of an intellectual stagnation that reeks of death, and you have a government hellbent on burning every last civil liberty in front of a crowd of “WE SUPPORT OUR TROOPS”-chanting pantypatriots. That interview has the approximate news value of an ant chipping a fingernail during Hiroshima.

Dear Intarweb blogging peeps, please pull your heads out of your collective self-absorbed ani and get back to guessing what Apple will release next and drawing captions on cats.

Thanks,

Nat

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