In February, the English cricket team — virtual demigods in their country after defeating Australia last summer — were attending a reception amid the Rembrandts and Rubenses in the Picture Gallery of Buckingham Palace. Queen Elizabeth had just pinned medals on the athletes' chests signifying their new status as Members of the Order of the British Empire, and was strolling among them, chatting and laughing with their proud families. She was the star of the show, making people grin — indeed, sometimes erupt with laughter — her own face switching between that studied placidity that is her trademark and a really dazzling smile. After the Queen moved on to another clutch of guests, Ashley Giles, one of the cricketers, appeared starstruck. He is 33, used to the pressure of top-level sports and the adulation of crowds. Yet he was visibly moved. "Just coming to Buckingham Palace in itself is an incredible honor for me," he said, shaking his head. "But meeting the Queen makes this one of the most memorable days of my life." Really? That grandmotherly figure who always carries a handbag and never says anything controversial? "She is a living link with our history, which is very important to me. She's also very sharp. I think she does a fantastic job." Then he added, slowly and with feeling: "And she is the most ... beautiful ... woman!"

Chalk one up for the enduring enigma of royalty. Long ago, mystery added to the authority of Kings; now, the idea of monarchy is self-evidently nonsensical. How can one person picked by the lottery of birth possibly embody a whole nation? What can a constitutional monarch like Elizabeth II, prohibited from exercising any real power, actually do to justify her country's steady devotion — the crowds who line up to cheer when she passes, her face on each coin and bill and postage stamp, a national anthem that beseeches God to save her? What does she really do to earn something for which respect is way too small a word? (See pictures of Queen Elizabeth's most stunning tiaras.)

The Queen is 80 on April 21, and in the run-up to her birthday, TIME has been exploring how the institution of the British Crown retains meaning by watching the Queen at work. At her direction, the palace also granted unusual and exclusive access to her senior aides and her son Andrew. But in keeping with her lifelong custom, she granted no interview; she prefers to be observed rather than questioned.

The Queen is acutely aware that the continued success of the monarchy depends on the careful nurturing of popular consent — and that a peculiar danger of being the best-known woman in the world for over half a century is becoming background noise, ubiquitous but forgotten. Her press secretary, Penny Russell-Smith, says that the last 15 years of coverage, focused mostly on the misadventures of the younger royals, has created "a generation of readers and viewers who aren't aware of what the Queen's work is all about." The antidote is more exposure. So not for the Queen a quiet retirement: she plans to keep working, and for people to see her working, as long as she can manage.

What, precisely, is the Queen's job? There is not much she can do entirely at her own whim. Technically, she could dissolve Parliament to get rid of a Prime Minister she disliked, but it would provoke an unthinkable constitutional crisis if she tried. The great 19th-century journalist and constitutional scholar Walter Bagehot said the monarch had the prerogative "to be consulted, to encourage and to warn" the government of the day, but it is one Elizabeth II never exercises in public (unlike her opinionated son Charles). Yet she still derives power from her twin roles as head of state — the one who opens and dissolves Parliament, makes splashy visits abroad and hosts dinners for foreign leaders — and head of nation, a focus for British unity and identity, rewarder of excellence, a visible oasis of continuity in an accelerating world, even as Prime Ministers (she's had 10) come and go. A clutch of other symbolic roles — Head of the Commonwealth, Supreme Governor of the Church of England, chief of the armed forces — reinforce a peculiar kind of omnipresence in public life. In a media-soaked age, that is a fantastic asset. (See pictures of Prince Charles and 10 other heirs apparent still waiting to sit in the throne.)

No matter how irrational may be people's desire to invest their love of country in a single person, the Queen's well-polished routine still resonates. In February she went to Reading, 65 km west of London, to open a hospital wing. She stepped out of the limousine wearing a lime green suit; the townspeople cheered and the hospital's cooks pressed their faces to the windows. As officials and doctors gave her a tour, the corridors were lined with hundreds of staff, patients and families who cheered and waved flags. Teenagers laughed and gave each other high-fives for snatching good snaps of her with their mobile phones. Charles Anderson, who had suffered a mild stroke, said the Queen "is very warm, very easy to talk to. Helluva job she's got. I wouldn't want it." She stopped to chat with Linda Patterson, whose arm was in a cast after breaking her thumb. "I think I'm going to cry, I'm so excited!" Patterson said a few seconds later — and did.

The assistant private secretary on duty, Edward Young, pointed out the Queen's professional skill: at just the right moment she turned to give the cameras a perfect backdrop of happy, flag-waving children. The emotional pitch was not quite the hormonal exchange of former U.S. President Bill Clinton working a rope line, but in her subdued way the Queen is a rock star whose charisma is curiously magnified because she seems to have no desire for the fame she cannot escape. As her limousine crawled away (she deadpanned to the chauffeur who tested it at the factory that its most important quality was how it handled at 5 km/h), she had accomplished her goal, which Young describes as "seeing and being seen by as many people as possible, and for them to go away feeling something special." (See the trees of Westminster Abbey.)

It is a balmy period in her 54-year reign. The tabloid fodder of Charles and Diana, Andrew and Fergie, the death of her beloved mother at 101, are all behind her. Charles is at long last married to Camilla, which according to courtiers has reassured his parents about his long-term soundness; Princes William and Harry appear to be well launched. Robert Lacey, one of the Queen's biographers, says the long-running Windsor saga has resonance with the public once more. She has become a matriarch in autumn, presiding over "a family happy once again, the more credible for the traumas they have been through." Her country is prosperous and generally content with her performance. According to a 113-page Ipsos MORI poll commissioned by Buckingham Palace in January and seen by TIME, only 19% would like to switch to a republic — one more percentage point than in 1969. "This is the most stable measure in British polling," says Robert Worcester, who presented the poll to palace staff. No matter how you break down the respondents — young, old, ethnic minorities, Londoners, non-Christians, local opinion leaders, readers of the Sun tabloid, readers of the "quality" dailies — no more than 25% of any group wants to dump the royals. Even after a decade of tumult for the Windsors, 68% of Britons want to retain them. "That's astonishing," says Sunder Katwala, head of the Fabian Society, a think tank affiliated with the Labour Party. "It represents an absolute failure for British republicanism," to which he is instinctively sympathetic. In fact, there's no real debate at all on the future of the monarchy in Britain. Republicans want to abolish it, so won't discuss reform. The government won't touch the subject with a barge pole. So what should be uncontroversial proposals, like an end to the ban on the heir to the throne marrying a Catholic, are never discussed. Intelligent debate about what kind of monarchy Britain should have in the 21st century has disappeared "into a kind of Bermuda triangle," says Katwala.

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Just a few years ago, few would have predicted such an outcome. That republicanism has no political traction after a period when many Windsors acted less as exemplars than as reality-TV stars is due largely to the Queen. She may be remote, but her dedication to duty gets widespread respect. It could hardly be otherwise. Since 1952, she has received more than 3 million letters, hosted around 1.1 million guests at her garden parties, and made 256 official overseas visits to 129 countries. Asked to explain his mother's relationship with the country, Prince Andrew says: "It's slightly complicated for people to grasp the idea of a head of state in human form, but I would put her appeal down to consistency. In their eyes, she's never let them down."
Still, the battering the Windsors took in the 1990s, especially the emotional gusts during the week after Diana's death when the Queen seemed to be a stonyhearted defender of a hollow status quo, has left the family permanently on guard. According to the Ipsos MORI poll, 81% think Britain will have a monarchy in 10 years, but only 32% think it will in 50. Says one of her senior aides: "One can never be complacent." (Get to know your Royal Wedding party.)
Walk around Buckingham Palace — a combination of family home, hotel for foreign dignitaries, stage set for national ceremony, rambling office complex and art museum that reflects the Queen's jumble of roles — and complacency feels far away. If you think of the palace as Monarchy Inc. and compare its operations to a decade ago, the production line has been thoroughly overhauled — a process begun before Diana's death but accelerated in its wake. "People who view us as a Victorian institution aren't looking beyond the front of the building," says David Walker, an air vice marshal who is now master of the household, responsible for all public and private entertainment. In 2000 the palace didn't have e-mail. Now it has a full-fledged secure network and a snazzy website with an intranet under development. Staff can get BlackBerries.
The average age of courtiers has gone down; their professional qualifications have gone up. Instead of being filled by discreet inquiries at a gentleman's club, the latest assistant private secretary's post was publicly advertised, and attracted over 400 applications. It went to an experienced financier. Focus groups probe whether staff are happy in their jobs; salaries have increased; there are "team away days" and rotations of staff to and from government departments and private industry, from which increasing numbers of senior managers are now drawn. "I think people expect we're very traditional and hierarchical," says Elisabeth Hunka, the human resources chief, who arrived at the palace from the clothing industry — "red carpets, long corridors. But there are a lot of highly able people here and a lot of humor, and it creates a buzz. It's a surprisingly democratic organization, because people pitch in. And the Queen sets a very good example. She's very hardworking and never seen to have airs and graces."
A crucial element of the overhaul has been financial. The palace now directly spends a lot of the money that different government departments used to spend on its behalf, which has allowed it to take control over its own operations, establish budgets and cut costs that might otherwise have continued on autopilot. (One example: the certificates people receive when they obtain honors are now generated by computer rather than calligrapher, saving $27 approximately 5,000 times a year.) There's more public disclosure too, in particular an annual financial report launched at a press conference and published on the Web. Last year the monarchy spent $64 million of public money (2.3% less than the previous year, adjusted for inflation) to fund its activities on behalf of the state, such as royal visits, the upkeep of palaces and official entertainment — the cost, as the palace is now media-savvy enough to stress, of a loaf of bread per citizen. Alan Reid, the former chief operating officer of the accounting and consulting firm KPMG who now serves as keeper of the privy purse, says the goal is "not a cheap monarchy, but a value-for-money monarchy." The Queen's natural frugality (except for her racehorses) is well known: footmen at the palace are told to avoid the center of the hallways to preserve the carpets, and she reminds people to turn off lights. Apart from Prince Charles, whose Duchy of Cornwall estate funds his private and official duties, and Prince Philip, she supports the other royals using her own money. Walker says, "If you look at the number of people and amount of expenditure supporting the head-of-state function, it's much, much cheaper than virtually any comparable country."
To be sure, there is still criticism of the special breaks royals receive. As part of the deal that saw her start paying income tax in 1993, the Queen arranged inheritance-tax exemptions for what she received from her mother, and what she will bequeath to Charles. But disclosure has usefully illuminated the distinction between her personal wealth and the Crown's. She used to be commonly described as Britain's richest person, with a fortune estimated at $7.6 billion by the Sunday Times Rich List in 1993, but last year's list pegs it at $507 million, making her 180th. (See 10 ways Kate and William break the wedding mold.)
What a politician might call "image management" has been spruced up, too. Since 2000, the palace has commissioned annual polls and focus groups to assess how people feel about the monarchy. A research department weighs what kind of trips and events will have the most impact. Press aides labor to plan backdrops so the cameras will take away an image that reinforces the message their boss is trying to highlight that day. A press office whose chief used to be known on Fleet Street as "the abominable no man" now promptly returns phone calls. The Queen's Christmas broadcast no longer has her staring straight into the camera, but uses video clips to illustrate her points. Her Majesty even carries a cell phone inside that handbag. All in all, Prince Andrew says, "I think this organization is very good at change management. We live it, we work it all the time. Change is an almost continuous process" — so much so, "that it's almost imperceptible."
That "imperceptible change" is exactly the sweet spot the Queen is trying to hit, says a senior adviser. Moving glacially, of course, can accentuate the sense that she is out of date. But by background as well as policy, that's the way she wants it. Her "Uncle David," King Edward VIII, loved making waves before he abdicated in 1936, and spooked his successors about playing the reformer too overtly. "No gimmicks!" the Queen has told aides. "I am not an actress!" She wants the monarchy to be a focus for continuity and enduring patriotic values, which make instinctive sense to her. She was never a rebel: she venerated her father, a shy man with a stutter who was thrust into kingship by the abdication but mastered his task through hard work. During her wartime adolescence, the idea of obedience and doing one's duty for the greater good was the norm. She really meant it when she said at age 21 that "my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service," and has not changed her core old-fashioned values. But for the monarchy as an institution, she is averse to risk, not to change itself; she knows staying still has its risks, too.

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The Queen has also subtly refurbished the most public aspect of her work — her interaction with ordinary people. She has never been naturally extroverted, perhaps a reaction to growing up so famous that as a child she had a territory named after her in Antarctica and was immortalized in Madame Tussaud's astride a pony. Her early friend and bridesmaid Pamela Hicks noted the unrelenting press of "intimate strangers" always peering in alongside motorcades. But over the years the Queen has learned to make encounters more enjoyable — and memorable. When she grants honors, she studies biographies of each recipient and writes down a few words which an aide reads to her as the person approaches, allowing her to start an informed conversation — one she knows will be repeated to family and friends. (She reads fast and has a flypaper memory.) Dinners during regional trips used to strand her at the top of a long table with predictable dignitaries; now she will be at a round table with perhaps a nurse, the leader of the local Sikh temple and an entrepreneur. Parties at Buckingham Palace are increasingly built around themes, like honoring transport workers and members of the emergency services after the London bombings of July 2005. She has aligned the palace with the modern world in other barely perceptible steps: relaxing the rules for the 30,000 invitees to her garden parties so that men needn't spend money on a morning suit, and chucking out the old rule that restricted state banquets to married apparent heterosexuals. Malcolm Ross, a kind of chief of protocol in the Lord Chamberlain's Office for 14 years, says the Queen takes a seriously pragmatic approach to ceremony: "Ceremony is meaningful only if it is relevant. It must make sense." (See a history of Westminster Abbey.)
What does the Queen herself have to do with these changes? Does she benignly preside while staffers take the initiative, or is she a hands-on manager? Her staff say that she is almost spookily well-informed and observant. "Her memory of detail, her instinct for what is right, is absolutely superb," says Ross. Hunka, the personnel chief, says "she's obviously not immersed in the details of employment legislation, but whenever an issue gets to her, her feedback is never against what I would say as an experienced human resources person. She's always on the beam; it's uncanny." Prince Andrew says, in some awe, "Here's a quote you can have. The Queen's intelligence network is a hell of a lot better than anyone's in this palace. Bar none. She knows everything. Everything. She just knows. I don't know how she does it." The Queen will spot tiny errors in memos, and approves details as small as bedroom assignments and whether a photographer may stand in a corner at a state banquet. She doesn't usually get cross. "Do you really think so?" is usually enough to signal staff they are proceeding down a dead end. But as for changing the fundamental ways the palace works, she sticks with her instinctive pattern and mostly waits for suggestions. Her biographer Lacey calls her "not an innovator, but a sensitive responder, and she is very well advised. Successful monarchs are great listeners."
She is a consistently popular boss — which has not always been true for all members of the royal family. "There's a lot of esprit de corps here," says Ross. "People stay a long time, and they don't get rich. It's because she's wonderful to work for. You cannot bluff, you cannot pull the wool over her eyes. You get clear direction, never ambiguous, and once a decision is made, it's not changed. The hardest thing about the job is ever letting her down." Hunka says the palace "is almost without politics. I never have to write a memo to cover myself. There's no top job to compete for, and no revolving door of CEOs you have to please." Reid, who climbed to the top of KPMG, calls the Queen "the best person I've ever worked for. She lets you get on with the job, but she and her husband see things with great clarity. Sometimes we look at every conceivable angle; she'll just cut through it all."
And what does she make of it? Does she like her job? Does she never tire of the grind, the rigid code of behavior, the deluge of small talk? Her diaries, carefully tended, may give the answer, but they will not be seen until after her death. She once said she would have liked to be a woman living in the country with lots of horses and dogs. Even today, one of her greatest pleasures is owning racehorses and nipping out to watch the 2:35 at Cheltenham on TV. Most likely, the concept of liking her job would seem odd to her. Prince Andrew explains: "People say to me, 'Your life must be very strange.' But of course I've not experienced any other life. It's not strange to me. The same way with the Queen. She has never experienced anything else. That life, that knowledge, that wisdom is purely natural to her." Pamela Hicks agrees that the Queen, while gratified if people respond to her work, does not seek a conventional sense of happiness in it. Duty is its own reward: "She is very religious, but she is also philosophical. She feels she must do the job she has been given and that it will be for others to judge whether she has succeeded." (See pictures of new hope for Belfast.)
She is naturally curious about people, and observant; this, "plus her fantastic memory, means she is not bored," says Hicks. A dry sense of humor helps. On a walkabout in Scotland, one person told her, "You look just like the Queen!" "How reassuring," she replied. When a visiting head of state managed to slip out of Buckingham Palace overnight, she quipped: "Has he taken his wife?" She can laugh at herself too, as when a new footman pulled back her chair as she stood up after a family dinner, but then immediately went to sit down again to continue a conversation and hit the floor. The whole family found this uproarious (but she also made sure to reassure the mortified footman).
As a child she was upbraided for saying something as racy as "my goodness." But "she's very modern," says Reid. "People don't realize it. Some people who work for her don't." Her granddaughter Zara Phillips has had a tongue stud, lived in sin with a jockey, posed for Hello! magazine and sold the rights, but the Queen is very fond of her. The monarch who said in 1955 (following the government's decision) that her sister, Margaret, could not remain a royal princess if she married a divorced man has had no qualms about her grandson William living with his girlfriend. A senior aide says she is fundamentally an optimist, "a glass-half-full" kind of person, who would endeavor to do a good job even if she did not like the country Britain had become — but "she is very comfortable with modern Britain." One thing she definitely dislikes: people who come to see her when they have colds. She does not want the people depending on her, in a program arranged six months in advance, to get messed around by her having to stay in bed. (See the best royal-wedding souvenirs.)
If she lives as long as her mother, she will preside until 2027. "She is incredibly fit and agile," says Andrew. Watching her hustle down a corridor to a meeting in an electric aqua dress, a rolling mass of corgis and dorgis in tow, she exudes surprising energy. In the country, she rides (helmetless) or walks the hills every day. Her staff is organizing her schedule to keep her visible and active with less strain by hosting more events at Buckingham Palace, and when she travels, seeing more people at slightly fewer venues. Her children will pick up more of her duties. But all who know her say that barring physical collapse, she will not abdicate in favor of Charles.

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Given that she intends to remain firmly at the helm, where will she steer the monarchy now? The polls reveal some directions in which imperceptible change — or more — is needed. Asked whether the monarchy reflects today's multifaith Britain, only 21% agree; 49% disagree. The palace already works to include more ethnic minorities and representatives of non-Christian faiths in the Queen's events, but can be expected to do more of this. Another area the Queen can develop is what Frank Prochaska, a Yale historian, calls the "welfare monarchy": the royal family assisting charities and groups that help the disadvantaged. British monarchs have been doing this since at least Victoria; the Queen is already patron of 620 voluntary organizations. The trick for the royals here is to avoid a patronizing air of noblesse oblige, as well as political controversy. But "they're very good at it, and very good about doing it, but they don't get credit for it," says Worcester. More focus here will help the broader strategy of keeping the royals' work in public view: "The more familiar people are with them, the more favorably they feel."
And what, in the end, does she want as the legacy of her Elizabethan Age? In the way of monarchies, one part of the answer is already determined: Charles, then William. At this stage they appear to be a good bet. But, as the 1990s proved to the Windsors, human bloodlines can be as fickle as horses'. "Self-destruction is their biggest problem," says Prochaska; and that, in the end, will depend on choices the future Kings themselves will make. As for the institution of the monarchy, the Queen's track record reveals what she wants to leave behind: a Crown relentlessly pragmatic enough to stay popular.
(See a TIME video of where Kate grew up.)
Prince Andrew says the legacy question is simply foreign to his mother. It is not in her nature, he says, to intellectualize, to consciously design what her reign will mean. She did not ask for the duties that fell to her, but she has done them, conscientiously, and she will keep doing them for as many days as she is given. "Today is reality. Yesterday is history. Her desire is not to change the future, but to be there, today. Today is what we've got."

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Will Israel's Electric Cars Change the World?

Shai Agassi, the founder of Better Place, the most sophisticated electric-car enterprise in the world, projects the ebullient confidence of a man facing a giant wave of money. "Within less than this decade the No. 1–selling car in the world will be the electric car," he says. "It's the biggest financial opportunity the world has ever seen. We're seeing a $10 trillion shift in an industry in less than a decade. It's the Internet, and add another zero." (See the 50 worst cars of all time.)

In the introduction to Start-Up Nation, Dan Senor and Saul Singer's best-selling paean to Israeli innovation, Agassi was the soft-spoken software wiz who had a brilliant idea and a terrible time locating a backer. That doesn't seem to be a problem anymore. "Not when you've digitized the most expensive molecule on the planet," he says. "We've digitized oil." He pauses. "I'll put it this way: We have people from China here." (Read about how China can take the wheel on electric cars.)

The People's Republic has been busy creating a bourgeoisie, and the middle class does like to drive. Beijing's next five-year plan foresees at least 170 million new vehicles, or perhaps twice that, according to Agassi. The lower estimate alone is as many cars as there are in Germany, France, Spain, Italy and Britain combined. The 8 million barrels of oil that would be required every day to fuel them is about as much as the U.S. imports every day. "Do you know what the price of oil will be in five years if they're not using electric cars?" Agassi asks.

Enter Better Place, the start-up that makes more than electric cars. It also makes an entire infrastructure intended to free automobiles from the stubborn limits of battery life. When the enterprise launches in Israel later this year, drivers should be able to travel anywhere in the country in cars with a battery range of 100 miles (160 km). If they set off from Tel Aviv to the Red Sea, a journey of 200 miles (320 km), they will be able to pull into a Better Place station along the highway and exchange their low battery for a fully charged one. The process should take about five minutes. Otherwise, the car can recharge overnight via a plug that snaps into the little door above the rear wheel where gas would go if the car burned gas. The vehicles can also trickle charge in parking lots where the company's distinctive blue-topped posts are located. (See the history of the electric car.)

Everything you need to know — the locations of switch stations and charging posts, the number of motorists already there, your own distance from each — is visible on a dashboard GPS screen. Employees have been testing the system for weeks, seeing, for instance, how much juice it takes to drive from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem with a car full of fat people, a carload of skinny people or just a car. By July, Better Place expects to begin taking individual orders for the Turkish-made Renault Fluence Z.E. (for Zero Emission), a four-door sedan that looks like any other car. Ordinary Israelis could be driving them as early as November.

"It's going to depend on the price — of the car, and any charge for the battery, or charging the battery," says Dror Aikar, a Hyundai owner waiting for a tour of the Better Place showroom that 75,000 people have already passed through. Within sight of the beach north of Tel Aviv, it was built on the ruins of an oil-tank farm. Aikar wants to help the environment, he says. "But you can't do it if you don't have the money to do it." (Read about electric cars in Los Angeles.)

The pricing will be in two parts: First there's the car itself, which the consumer buys outright, except for the battery. That remains with Better Place, and comes with the "subscription," which is what Better Place calls access to the power infrastructure to run the car. The model is cell-phone coverage, with a variety of rate plans that vary with how much you drive. Rates for Israel are not yet final, but in Denmark, where the company is also setting up, the lowest rate is equivalent to about $300 a month for mileage of 6,200 miles (10,000 km); the highest rate — for unlimited miles — is about twice as much. The customers also pay a one-time fee equal to $2,000, but even so, in both Israel and Denmark where gas runs about $9 a gallon, Better Place calculates that the typical customers would stand to save 10% to 20% against a comparable gasoline car — and enjoy most of its satisfactions. "The car is very, very, very fun to drive," Agassi says. (See the best inventions of 2010.)

The electric sedan Agassi says will change the world, well, feels like a regular car. On the test track, the Renault four-door (a retrofitted Laguna, the Fluences are not yet on site) zooms smoothly down the straight, silent and more comfortable than, say, a Prius. The one similarity is that from a standing start there's a wee lag, more like the Prius than the G-force jackrabbit start of the Tesla, the torqued-up all-electric sports car with a base price of $108,000. "It's sub–10 seconds zero to 60," says Agassi, of his ride. "If you want to go zero to 60 in five seconds you want the Tesla. If you've got another five seconds to spare, I can save you $80,000."

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Why Looking at Overweight People Makes Us Want to Eat More, Not Less

Viewers of The Biggest Loser would probably agree that watching the weight-loss show fills them with inspiration. Seeing the obese contestants struggle should motivate us to eat better, exercise and lose weight too. Turns out, however, that premise is only half right — at least according to a new study that finds that people may actually eat more after seeing overweight people.

"Seeing someone overweight leads to a temporary decrease in a person's own felt commitment to his or her health goal," wrote study authors Margaret C. Campbell and Gina S. Mohr of the University of Colorado at Boulder (which is incidentally the most active city in the U.S.).

But why? It has to do with stereotype "activation," the study says. When people are exposed to members of groups who have stereotypes attached to them, good or bad — like fat people eat a lot, or Asians are good at math — they become more likely to act in a way that's consistent with that stereotype. "For example," the authors write, "college students' scores on general knowledge questions increased after exposure to a professor but decreased after exposure to a supermodel." That's true even if the stereotyped behavior is negative, and even if it goes against the person's own values.

(More on TIME.com: "Can a Mother's Pregnancy Diet Influence Her Child's Future Weight?")

That theory falls in line with a phenomenon that recent studies have designated the "contagion effect" of obesity, which suggests that people who have fat friends are more likely to gain weight too. TIME reported on the seminal 2007 study by Dr. Nicholas Christakis, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, and James Fowler, a political scientist at University of California, San Diego:

According to their analysis, when a study participant's friend became obese, that first participant had a 57% greater chance of becoming obese himself. In pairs of people in which each identified the other as a close friend, when one person became obese the other had a 171% greater chance of following suit. "You are what you eat isn't the end of the story," says Fowler. "You are what you and your friends eat."
...
The obvious question is, Why? Spouses share meals and a backyard, but the researchers found a much smaller risk of gaining weight — a 37% increase — when one spouse became obese. Siblings share genes, but their influence, too, was much smaller, increasing each other's risk 40%. Fowler believes the effect has much more to do with social norms: whom we look to when considering appropriate social behavior. Having fat friends makes being fat seem more acceptable. "Your spouse may not be the person you look to when you're deciding what kind of body image is appropriate, how much to eat or how much to exercise," Fowler says. Nor do we necessarily compare ourselves to our siblings. "We get to choose our friends," says. "We don't get to choose our families."

(Incidentally, the contagion effect also works with weight loss, quitting smoking and happiness, Christakis and Fowler found.)

The current study suggests a different reason for the effect — activation of social stereotypes versus confirmation of social norms — which means that you don't need overweight people in your close social network to influence your behavior. Even a fleeting glance of an unknown overweight person — which occurs more than you probably notice, considering that 67% of the U.S. population meets the clinical definition of overweight or obesity — might trigger stereotypically overweight behaviors like overeating.

(More on TIME.com: "Health-Washing: Is 'Healthy' Fast Food for Real?")

Campbell and Mohr put together a series of five experiments to determine the impact of the mere sight of an overweight person. In the first, the researchers recruited people walking through a lobby on campus, and showed them pictures of either an overweight or normal-weight woman, or a lamp. The respondents, average age 25, were asked to rate the photos for a future studies (a sham task), and then were allowed to help themselves from a candy bowl as a "thank you" for their time.

Those who saw the photo of the overweight woman took significantly more candy (an average 2.2 pieces) than those who saw the normal-weighted woman or the lamp (an average 1.5 pieces).

The researchers' subsequent experiments involved "cookie taste tests." As in the first experiment, participants were first primed with photos of either overweight or normal-weight people, or a neutral image like a tree. Then they were asked to rate cookies by tasting at least one (but up to eight) cookies presented on a plate. People who gazed at pictures of the overweight woman ate significantly more cookies than those who were exposed to the thinner woman. The difference held up regardless of the participants' gender or weight.

Interestingly, however, there were certain factors that interfered with the fat person-induced overeating. One involved using pictures of overweight people actually eating. Although participants ate more cookies after viewing simple portraits of overweight people, they ate fewer when shown overweight people eating. The difference is that the former condition only activates a stereotype — likely unconsciously — while the latter more overtly establishes a link between eating and weight. "It may be necessary for attention to be distracted from the person's weight," the researchers write. "If a consumer considers stereotype membership (e.g., "that person is overweight"), the stereotype effect on...behavior may be attenuated."

(More on TIME.com: "Beware the Office Candy Bowl")

Another way researchers kept people from eating more: simply reminding them of their own health goals. When study participants were asked to write for three minutes about their health goals (versus their home state) before eating cookies, they ended up eating the same amount regardless of whether they viewed a portrait of an overweight or thin woman.

"The findings of our research are consistent with the spread of overweight through social networks," concluded the researchers, whose study was published in the Journal of Consumer Research. "People see, both in person and in photos, the people with whom they have close social ties. When close others are overweight, our research suggests that stereotype activation could lead to increased food consumption relative to when close others are healthy weight since merely seeing someone overweight can increase eating."

Back to The Biggest Loser. Whether the show helps prompt healthier behaviors in viewers may depend on which segment they watch. If you're tuning in only for the end-of-show weigh-ins, maybe not. But if you're also watching the contestants eat and exercise for weight loss, it might actually be good motivation.

The authors' advice for staying on track: be mindful. Consciously thinking about your personal health goals before sitting down to eat may help you refrain from overindulging.

Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2011/04/20/why-seeing-overweight-people-makes-us-eat-more-not-less/#ixzz1KOOYdRfC

For U.S. Economy, Short-Term Good News Is Bad News

It is now conventional wisdom that the U.S. faces an acute fiscal calamity. America's problems are severe: a deficit that is more than 10% of GDP and total debt that is more than 70% of GDP. But all evidence suggests that the U.S. does not face an immediate crisis. Take a look at the simplest indicator: the day that Standard & Poor's raised its now famous warnings, the markets decided to lower America's borrowing costs, and the dollar rose against its principal alternative, the euro. In fact, the real problem for America may well be that it does not face a short-term crisis.

Around the world, people, countries and companies are looking for safe, liquid investments. And the market's judgment is that the safest such investment is Uncle Sam's debt. We all know the medium- and long-term problem with U.S. debt. It's been discussed worldwide over the past few years. And yet during that period, America's borrowing costs have fallen. Markets are still willing to lend Washington more money at astonishingly low rates. The cost of servicing America's debt today is actually lower than it was in 1998, at the height of the Clinton boom. Why? Even though the U.S.'s debt now is much greater, interest rates are much lower, and the result is a lower bill. (See pictures of the global financial crisis.)

Of course, markets can change their views, but for an immediate shift to take place, there has to be a more attractive alternative to U.S. Treasury bills. Imagine that you are the head of China's central bank. You need to invest tens of billions of dollars every year in something secure and liquid so you can get your money back when you need it. There are few good options. You could invest in European bonds, but you've been spooked by the recent series of Euro-crises. German officials have predicted that Greece will default, which, if it happens, could precipitate a new round of panic. It is fair to ask, Will the euro in its current form even be around 10 years from now? Reflecting this uncertainty, borrowing costs for small European countries have risen sharply.

Then there are Japanese bonds. You could invest in those, but Japan has the worst balance sheet of the major countries, with debt at 200% of GDP, slow growth and a rapidly aging population. Plus, you (the Chinese) hate the Japanese, have never forgiven them for World War II and are not likely to do anything to shore up the yen as a global currency. You could buy real assets — mines, oil fields, buildings — but they are illiquid investments that are difficult to sell quickly, and anyway, even if you bought dozens of them, you would still have tens of billions of dollars left over to put somewhere. You could invest in Chinese bonds, but that would drive up the value of China's currency and make exports more expensive, which would mean fewer jobs at China's manufacturing companies. In short, Beijing buys Treasury bills not out of any love for America but for good, practical reasons. (See "What the U.S. Debt Problem Means for the Global Economy.")

The short-term news about the U.S. economy is positive. April's IMF report on global growth confirms that the U.S. is likely to be the fastest growing of the world's advanced economies, behind China and India but well ahead of Europe. The U.S. is the only advanced economy whose GDP is now back to precrisis levels. American consumers are saving at a higher rate than they have in a decade and are also beginning to spend. American companies have $2 trillion in cash on their balance sheets. Of course, problems remain, but the American economy is finally moving again.

In fact, the real problem is that this short-term good news means Washington isn't really acting as if it faces a crisis, no matter the rhetoric. Democrats are still clinging to entitlement programs with no talk of real cost cutting, though the current system is clearly unaffordable. Republicans pretend the U.S. is on the brink of losing the world's trust, but they don't really believe that. If they did, they would not play politics with the vote to raise the country's debt ceiling; they would also agree to raise taxes or just repeal the Bush-era tax cuts. That one step would stabilize America's finances for a decade (though the entitlement system would still need fundamental reform for the long run). Other than the Gang of Six in the Senate, people are still pushing their ideologies rather than fixing the problem. The great danger is that once again, the American economy will outperform expectations and relieve politicians from having to make hard choices about entitlements and taxes. But it will only postpone the day of reckoning and make the crash more painful.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,2066604,00.html#ixzz1KJPZjOm0

Patients Are Not Consumers

Earlier this week, The Times reported on Congressional backlash against the Independent Payment Advisory Board, a key part of efforts to rein in health care costs. This backlash was predictable; it is also profoundly irresponsible, as I’ll explain in a minute.

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

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But something else struck me as I looked at Republican arguments against the board, which hinge on the notion that what we really need to do, as the House budget proposal put it, is to “make government health care programs more responsive to consumer choice.”

Here’s my question: How did it become normal, or for that matter even acceptable, to refer to medical patients as “consumers”? The relationship between patient and doctor used to be considered something special, almost sacred. Now politicians and supposed reformers talk about the act of receiving care as if it were no different from a commercial transaction, like buying a car — and their only complaint is that it isn’t commercial enough.

What has gone wrong with us?

About that advisory board: We have to do something about health care costs, which means that we have to find a way to start saying no. In particular, given continuing medical innovation, we can’t maintain a system in which Medicare essentially pays for anything a doctor recommends. And that’s especially true when that blank-check approach is combined with a system that gives doctors and hospitals — who aren’t saints — a strong financial incentive to engage in excessive care.

Hence the advisory board, whose creation was mandated by last year’s health reform. The board, composed of health-care experts, would be given a target rate of growth in Medicare spending. To keep spending at or below this target, the board would submit “fast-track” recommendations for cost control that would go into effect automatically unless overruled by Congress.

Before you start yelling about “rationing” and “death panels,” bear in mind that we’re not talking about limits on what health care you’re allowed to buy with your own (or your insurance company’s) money. We’re talking only about what will be paid for with taxpayers’ money. And the last time I looked at it, the Declaration of Independence didn’t declare that we had the right to life, liberty, and the all-expenses-paid pursuit of happiness.

And the point is that choices must be made; one way or another, government spending on health care must be limited.

Now, what House Republicans propose is that the government simply push the problem of rising health care costs on to seniors; that is, that we replace Medicare with vouchers that can be applied to private insurance, and that we count on seniors and insurance companies to work it out somehow. This, they claim, would be superior to expert review because it would open health care to the wonders of “consumer choice.”

What’s wrong with this idea (aside from the grossly inadequate value of the proposed vouchers)? One answer is that it wouldn’t work. “Consumer-based” medicine has been a bust everywhere it has been tried. To take the most directly relevant example, Medicare Advantage, which was originally called Medicare + Choice, was supposed to save money; it ended up costing substantially more than traditional Medicare. America has the most “consumer-driven” health care system in the advanced world. It also has by far the highest costs yet provides a quality of care no better than far cheaper systems in other countries.

But the fact that Republicans are demanding that we literally stake our health, even our lives, on an already failed approach is only part of what’s wrong here. As I said earlier, there’s something terribly wrong with the whole notion of patients as “consumers” and health care as simply a financial transaction.

Medical care, after all, is an area in which crucial decisions — life and death decisions — must be made. Yet making such decisions intelligently requires a vast amount of specialized knowledge. Furthermore, those decisions often must be made under conditions in which the patient is incapacitated, under severe stress, or needs action immediately, with no time for discussion, let alone comparison shopping.

That’s why we have medical ethics. That’s why doctors have traditionally both been viewed as something special and been expected to behave according to higher standards than the average professional. There’s a reason we have TV series about heroic doctors, while we don’t have TV series about heroic middle managers.

The idea that all this can be reduced to money — that doctors are just “providers” selling services to health care “consumers” — is, well, sickening. And the prevalence of this kind of language is a sign that something has gone very wrong not just with this discussion, but with our society’s values.

When Math Makes Sense (To Everyone)

In response to Tuesday’s column about Jump Math, an approach to math education that is showing impressive results in schools in Canada and England, a great many readers wrote in to share stories of how they or their children have struggled with math (or, in some cases, were almost traumatized by it). “I failed math as a school-aged boy,” wrote Rob Blake, from New York. “I avoided math like one of the 10 plagues.”

Josh FraserMary Jane Moreau, a teacher at The Mabin School in Toronto, worked with grade 5 children on their JUMP workbooks.

Many asked how they could get more information about Jump. Parents or educators can get teaching guides and lesson plans free from Jump Math’s Web site (registration is required). Workbooks are available for sale; proceeds support the organization, which is a nonprofit. John Mighton, a mathematician who is the founder of Jump, has also written a book called “The End of Ignorance,” which details the program’s philosophy and explains how it contrasts with current teaching approaches.

For the many adults who expressed interest in upgrading their own math skills, Mighton suggested working through Jump’s eighth grade teachers’ guides and lessons. “If people understand the material in that book (fractions, ratios, percents, simple algebra, integers, etc.) they will have an easier time moving on to more advanced math,” he explained. “If grade eight is too advanced start with a lower book.” Jump is also developing an entry-level math program for community colleges that will be ready next year.

Readers were divided on the question of whether all children are, in fact, capable of excelling in math. “I have never found yet a child who does not understand math,” wrote Ambabelle from Paris. “I have found many who do not understand the math taught by the school.” Harry Hoopes from West Chester, Pa., saw it differently: “Some (many) children are just not intelligent enough to learn. Stop talking about possibilities and pie in the sky.” And Al A. from Buffalo, NY, preferred to preserve the tracking approach that has long been in use. “I would suggest that you break the classes up into those gifted in math … and let them move ahead of those that you choose to teach the ‘new math way,’” he wrote.

The question is: To what degree are our beliefs about children’s abilities determined by the results of our current education system? Or, as Mighton puts it, “Our belief in hierarchies is producing the hierarchies.” We may not know what we are capable of achieving. Mighton is a case in point. As a youth, he was fascinated by math, but he wasn’t a natural. He almost failed his first calculus course. But he trained himself to break down complicated tasks and practice them until things that initially confused him became second nature. He went on to do a Ph.D in mathematics.

This path is more common than we imagine. Research on experts – whether in chess, cello or computer programming – indicates that natural ability is less a predictor of success than effort and deliberate practice. A big part of what we call “giftedness” is “task commitment” – and that can be encouraged.

Courtesy of Elisha Bonnis Elisha Bonnis

One bottleneck is that many teachers are uncomfortable with math. They have trouble breaking it down or conveying enthusiasm for the subject. This was the case with Elisha Bonnis, who teaches Jump in the fourth and fifth grades at General Wolfe Elementary School, in Vancouver. Bonnis grew up in a poor family. Neither of her parents finished high school, and because of illnesses as a child, she missed long stretches of school. She fell behind and lost all confidence in her ability to do math. By the time she reached high school, she was failing badly, and acting out. “I really believed I was stupid,” she told me. “I ended up being expelled from two different high schools.”

Bonnis later decided to go to college. Her dream was to become a school teacher. She had to take a math prerequisite – which she struggled through, hating every minute. As a teacher, she harbored a “dark secret:” math terrified her. She felt that she was doing her students a disservice by teaching it.

The turning point was the day she attended a training session given by Mighton, which made her think she could conquer math. She got the Jump materials and began using them in her classes — but secretly, because she was supposed to use a standard textbook. “I found I could understand the lessons,” she said. “For me, that was pretty big.” And she began to see changes in her students.

Courtesy of Elisha BonnisAbdirahman, left, and Mohamed Elmi, students in Elisha Bonnis’s class.

One of them was a boy named Abdirahman Elni, 11, who is now in the sixth grade. I asked Elni about his math experiences. “Before I did Jump Math,” he told me, “I was in Math Makes Sense [the name of his previous textbook] and I had frustrating times and got lower marks.” He got C’s; now he gets A’s. What changed? “The Math Makes Sense gives you ways where you don’t understand how you’re doing it,” he explained. “In Jump Math they actually explain it to you properly.”

In June, Bonnis will complete a master’s degree in mathematics education. When she started using Jump, other teachers questioned her decision; now almost every first to sixth grade teacher in her school uses the curriculum. Jump doesn’t market its materials with fanfare. Where it has spread, the primary driver has been word of mouth by teachers.

A number of readers requested information about the inner workings of the program. Elisabeth, from New York inquired: “How does it work with large classes? What happens with the kids who don’t need the micro-steps? Do they get bored or frustrated with the small steps?” And Ratna, from Houston, TX, was concerned that “the Jump program would bore the heck out of the ‘math naturals.’” Indyreader from Indianapolis assumed that it would require “a lot more individual attention — a lot more teacher-hours and resources … than most schools are able to afford.”

The key to Jump is a balance between step-by-step guidance and encouraging inquiry and problem solving. The main challenge Mighton has grappled with is: How can a teacher implement Jump in a classroom where students are working at multiple levels simultaneously? His approach is to provide teachers an array of bonus questions that step up the level of difficulty. The bonus work needs to be challenging enough to motivate students, but it can’t introduce too much new information – otherwise the teacher will end up spending more time helping the quicker students learn new material than helping the weaker students master the current lesson.

Take for example a fifth-grade lesson on perimeter. The first step may be to have students calculate the perimeter of a simple L-shape made up of three squares, each side measuring one unit. Some kids will spend more time getting comfortable with counting the perimeter correctly. For kids who go faster, more challenges will be layered on. They might be questions like: What happens if you add a square to that shape? Can you do it without changing the perimeter? Can you create a shape where adding a square will reduce the perimeter? Or the teacher may introduce other shapes with multiple sides missing or give examples with lengths in the thousands.

The teacher needs to stay on top of the students, continuously assessing whether they get the current step, and ready with the next level of bonus work when they do. Children who need more time to practice are afforded that time, while faster students go deeper by playing with small variations on the idea. “We don’t rush over things that the kids need time to absorb,” Mighton says. “But they are not passive observers. They are problem solving all the time; it’s just in a manageable way.”

Here’s another example for a fifth grade class: The teacher puts five blocks on one table. On another, she’ll place two blocks next to a bag with a hidden number of blocks inside. The children are told that both tables have the same number of blocks. The first question is: How many are hidden in the bag (5 = 2 + bag)? After the kids get used to that, the teacher will make it more complex: say, make one block visible, and have two bags, each with the same number (5 = 1 + bag + bag). “Once they’ve got that you can really start raising the level of difficulty,” explains Mighton.

The teacher can introduce more blocks and bags, or represent them on the blackboard with circles in a box. To solve problems, the weaker kids can draw circles in the boxes, counting as they go. For stronger kids, the teacher can introduce numbers instead of pictures and eventually replace the boxes with letters, solving for x. The weak kids can take part because they see physically what’s happening; at the same time, the teacher can make the questions harder and harder. “After you replace the box with a letter, young kids think they’re brilliant – being able to do algebra,” says Mighton. “It’s a great confidence builder.”

Students are making discoveries, but they are not left to sink or swim. The teacher is orchestrating a set of challenges to make those discoveries possible. Carefully circumscribed situations that allow students to stretch themselves is what the psychologist Lev Vygotsky called the “zone of proximal development.”

Mighton, who also has an M.A. in philosophy, says Jump’s approach follows in the Socratic tradition. “Socrates was a master of introducing concepts incrementally through a series of questions,” he says. “To do Socratic inquiry the questions have to be very well designed. People don’t recognize in math how difficult it is to design those questions so that the whole class can answer them.”

A number of readers were concerned that Jump would hold back quicker students. But in Lambeth, England, faster kids also accelerated their progress. Tracy Solomon, who led the randomized controlled study of Jump in Ontario, also observed that “kids across the entire spectrum” showed gains. She argued that educators should take note of these results. “When you use a program that veers from the established philosophy and you get significant effects,” she said, “I think it at least suggests that we need to have a broader and more inclusive view of what’s effective for mathematics instruction.” [1]

Teachers say that when all of their students take part in lessons, the class develops a math-learning culture and the kids plow through material. Children feed off the energy of other children. But when hierarchies exist, certain students feel unsuccessful. They may feel anxious; they may tune out or try to disrupt the class – and this can dampen the enthusiasm of the whole group. “There really is only one advantage to putting kids in a group when you’re trying to teach them,” Mighton adds. “It’s easier to get them excited. And when we create hierarchies we throw away the one advantage we have.”

A Chicago parent (32.) wrote: “On a personal level, I cringe when I hear once again that all students are equally capable.” But that’s not the claim here. “What the data suggest is that we can raise the levels of achievement for virtually everyone, so that those differences won’t matter much,” says Mighton. “And children will at least have a choice about whether they want to pursue math or subjects involving math.”

In life, many factors determine success. Whether a scientist will make a profound discovery is not just due to sheer quickness of mind. “Passion, diligence, a willingness to ask unconventional questions, a sense of beauty, and luck — these are all equally important,” adds Mighton. “The point is that if children are all investigators, they are all participating in a beautiful game. As long as they are all contributing, what does it matter if some people are contributing more than others?”

Deep in the Heart of Texas

A number of responses to my column about the education I received at Classical High (a public school in Providence, RI) rehearsed a story of late-flowering gratitude after an earlier period of frustration and resentment. “I had a high school (or a college) experience like yours,” the poster typically said, “and I hated it and complained all the time about the homework, the demands and the discipline; but now I am so pleased that I stayed the course and acquired skills that have served me well throughout my entire life.”

Now suppose those who wrote in to me had been asked when they were young if they were satisfied with the instruction they were receiving? Were they getting their money’s worth? Would they recommend the renewal of their teachers’ contracts? I suspect the answers would have been “no,” “no” and “no,” and if their answers had been taken seriously and the curriculum they felt oppressed by had been altered accordingly, they would not have had the rich intellectual lives they now happily report, or acquired some of the skills that have stood them in good stead all these years.

The relationship between present action and the judgment of value is different in other contexts. If a waiter asks me, “Was everything to your taste, sir?”, I am in a position to answer him authoritatively (if I choose to). When I pick up my shirt from the dry cleaner, I immediately know whether the offending spot has been removed. But when, as a student, I exit from a class or even from an entire course, it may be years before I know whether I got my money’s worth, and that goes both ways. A course I absolutely loved may turn out be worthless because the instructor substituted wit and showmanship for an explanation of basic concepts. And a course that left me feeling confused and convinced I had learned very little might turn out to have planted seeds that later grew into mighty trees of understanding.

“Deferred judgment” or “judgment in the fullness of time” seems to be appropriate to the evaluation of teaching.

‘Deferred judgment’ or ‘judgment in the fullness of time’ seems to be appropriate to the evaluation of teaching.

And that is why student evaluations (against which I have inveighed since I first saw them in the ’60s) are all wrong as a way of assessing teaching performance: they measure present satisfaction in relation to a set of expectations that may have little to do with the deep efficacy of learning. Students tend to like everything neatly laid out; they want to know exactly where they are; they don’t welcome the introduction of multiple perspectives, especially when no master perspective reconciles them; they want the answers.

But sometimes (although not always) effective teaching involves the deliberate inducing of confusion, the withholding of clarity, the refusal to provide answers; sometimes a class or an entire semester is spent being taken down various garden paths leading to dead ends that require inquiry to begin all over again, with the same discombobulating result; sometimes your expectations have been systematically disappointed. And sometimes that disappointment, while extremely annoying at the moment, is the sign that you’ve just been the beneficiary of a great course, although you may not realize it for decades.

Needless to say, that kind of teaching is unlikely to receive high marks on a questionnaire that rewards the linear delivery of information and penalizes a pedagogy that probes, discomforts and fails to provide closure. Student evaluations, by their very nature, can only recognize, and by recognizing encourage, assembly-line teaching that delivers a nicely packaged product that can be assessed as easily and immediately as one assesses the quality of a hamburger.

Now an entire state is on the brink of implementing just that bite-sized style of teaching under the rubric of “customer satisfaction.” Texas, currently in a contest with Arizona and South Carolina for the title “most retrograde,” is signing on to a plan of “reform” generated by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank dedicated to private property rights and limited government. Backed by Governor Rick Perry (yes, the one who thinks secession is a viable political option), the plan calls for college and university teachers to contract with their customers — that is, students — and to be rewarded by as much as $10,000 depending on whether they meet the contract’s terms. The idea is to hold “tenured professors more accountable” (“A&M regents push reforms,” The Eagle, June 13, 2010), and what they will be accountable to are not professional standards but the preferences of their students, who, in advance of being instructed, are presumed to be authorities on how best they should be taught.

A corollary proposal is to shift funding to the student-customers by giving them vouchers. “Instead of direct appropriations, every Texas high school graduate would get a set amount of state funds usable at any state university” (William Lutz, Lone Star Report, May 23, 2008). Once this gets going (and Texas A&M is already pushing it), you can expect professors to advertise: “Come to my college, sign up for my class, and I can guarantee you a fun-filled time and you won’t have to break a sweat.” If there ever was a recipe for non-risk-taking, entirely formulaic, dumbed-down teaching, this is it. One respondent to the June 13 story in The Eagle got it exactly right: “In the recent past, A&M announced that it wanted to be a top ten public university. Now it appears to be announcing it wants to be an investment firm, a pharmaceutical manufacturer, and a car dealership.”

The people behind this cockamamie scheme wouldn’t be fazed by this description or regard it as an accusation. They actively want their colleges and universities to be like car dealerships, with an emphasis on the bottom line, efficiency and consumer choice. This means that the middleman has to be cut out, and in this case the middleman is the faculty member. Jeff Sandefer, whose presentation at a 2008 meeting with Governor Perry and the university Board of Regents established the tone and contours of “reform,” makes no bones about it. Professors, he complains, seem to believe “that our colleges and universities belong to them” (“Public Universities Belong to the Public, Not the Faculty,” Texas Public Policy Foundation, May 6, 2009). It’s time, he says, to stop writing “blank checks” to faculty members who occupy themselves “writing academic journal articles that few people read.”

That of course is an accurate description. Senior faculty members do in fact write articles that only their peers at the top of very rarefied disciplines can read.

The Texas ‘reform plan’ is just that; its so called reforms would be funny were they not so dangerous.

That is what academic research is all about: highly qualified scholars working on problems that may have no practical payoff except the unquantifiable payoff of advancing our understanding of something in philosophy or nature that has long been a mystery.

More than occasionally in these columns I have mocked the pretensions of those faculty members who cry “academic freedom” at the slightest infringement of what they take to be their god-given liberty. But academic freedom does in fact have a meaning and a legitimate purpose: it protects faculty members from external constituencies intent on taking over the enterprise for mercenary or political reasons. The Texas “reform plan” is just that; its so called reforms would be funny were they not so dangerous. And it all began with student evaluations, or, rather, with the mistake of taking them seriously. Since then, it’s been all downhill.

Student Evaluations, Part Two

If there is a dominant message in the responses to my column about the dangers of relying on student evaluations to assess teacher performance, it is, “It’s worse than you think.”

Some posters (like this one from Houston) mean that it is worse than I think in Texas, where, it seems, the plot to turn higher education into a training school for right-wing know-nothings is already well advanced. Others, not from Texas, tell me that the future I predicted as a joke — teachers advertising for customers as if they were shills for a floor show — has already arrived along with the predictable bad consequences.

Still others chime in with personal horror stories — the teacher who, after having moved a class to a morning hour in response to student requests, found himself pilloried by those same students for making them get up too early; the teacher who was negatively reviewed by students who had never shown up (they needed to turn in an evaluation in order to get credit for the class they had not attended).

Even students joined the chorus, expressing disgust at colleagues who anonymously settle personal grievances or retaliate for low grades by trashing instructors unable to defend themselves. These anonymous and accountability-free reasons, a former professor complains (he is “former” for just this reason), “can destroy a career that took a decade to train for.” (vero)

They can also lead to the abandoning or blighting of a career. Posters report variously that they left teaching altogether or moved to a foreign country where the “customer” mentality had not yet set in or stuck it out for 30 years while becoming ever more bitter and disillusioned. Even those who are aware that there is little correlation between student evaluations and effective teaching (the preponderance of studies document this non-correlation) and therefore know that negative comments do not reflect an informed judgment are nevertheless pained and humiliated by them: “Even though I know this, they always manage to hurt my feelings and reduce my own personal morale” (Sarah). It is at once a “joke” and a “nightmare” (vero again), a nightmare because it is a joke with teeth.

The deleterious effects of student evaluations extend beyond the personal injuries these comments rehearse; they infect the entire system of higher education. Teachers who fear (correctly) that student evaluations will determine their fate become stand-up comedians — wave your arms around, praise students excessively and “dress sharp,” advises Dr. Bob — and alter their grading policy in an effort to be liked. Since “student evaluations are driven almost entirely by the perception of grades” (Troglomorphic), grade inflation — “an insidious weed choking out real education” (vince) — “is inevitable.” Once it gets going, grade inflation feeds on itself and initiates a race to the bottom, for “just as teachers in public schools will lessen their effectiveness by teaching to the test, college teachers can lessen their effectiveness by teaching to the evaluation” (Roger Bullard).

Several posters see the ascendance of student evaluations as a reflection of the media-driven obsession with the opinions of the man or woman in the street. It is “part and parcel,” says scottws of “the dreary trend of ubiquitous polling and sampling,” a trend that assumes absurdly that “Katie Couric really cares what I think of BP.” The assumption underlying the soliciting of everyman’s opinions is that expertise is a false currency; we are all, even if we are only 18 years old, the best judges of what affects us: “Who is She or He to say what our policy in the Middle East should be? Just because she’s an expert in it or something ?”(Fulan). After all, the reasoning goes, I know what I like and who are you to tell me anything different? In Craig’s view, this way of thinking is endemic: “people are not willing to be separated into adults and kids anymore . . . This attitude,” he says, “is pervasive and is threatening to destroy not only academia, but with it an important part in human advancement.”

There are, of course, dissenters, and they raise two points: (1) that I display a profound lack of respect for students, and (2) that I offer no alternative to student evaluations and thus seem to leave students, parents and society without protection against bad and unprofessional teaching. (This is a concern expressed by fellow columnist Ross Douthat.) To the first point I would say that I respect students as persons who deserve to be treated with courtesy, which means, minimally, that they should not be harassed or singled out for ridicule or graded up or down on the basis of gender, ethnic, racial or religious affiliation, or sexual orientation. But this courtesy and respect does not extend to their ideas, which may or may not be given a hearing depending on the instructor’s preferred teaching style, and which may be summarily dismissed if they are judged to be beside the pedagogical point. Treat them as human beings with inherent dignity by all means; but don’t treat them as sages before the fact.

And as for ways of monitoring and dealing with irresponsible teaching, here the posters come to my rescue with excellent suggestions. Several propose evaluation forms that determine whether a teacher is doing what he or she is paid to do. “Are grades returned in a timely fashion, does the prof hold office hours, do they show up on time?” (Madison). Questions like that will “detect bad actors” without falling into the error of putting students in charge of their own education.

Another proposal is to base teacher evaluation on student performance in future classes so as “to actually assess whether the learning to be achieved really took place or not” (Thane Doss). John would retain the present practice of evaluation, but with a twist: “May I suggest that Teacher Evaluations be in the form of Essays,” for that would put the burden “on the students’ expository skills and the evaluators’ analytical skills.” A number of posters call for peer review by senior faculty members who would meet with the instructor, offer guidance and constructive criticism and file formal reports that could be reviewed by a chair or dean. (This was the system in place when I was a baby instructor and is no doubt still being used by many colleges and universities.) Each of these ideas deserves consideration, and together they give the lie to the assumption that it is anonymous student evaluations or nothing.

I cannot leave the topic without remarking on the passion voiced by many who took the time to respond. A Teacher lets it all hang out and speaks for many: “Sorry kids, you are not the authority in the classroom. Me Teacher. You student. Me Teach , you learn. End of discussion . . . Education is not a business. You are not my customer. My classroom is not Burger King. You do not get to ‘have it your way.’”

And, finally, I am pleased and amazed to report that one poster actually answered what was thought to be the impossible question: What exactly is good teaching? PES realized years after encountering it that he (or she) had been its beneficiary: “I had learned without knowing it almost, how to see three sides of a twosided story.”

I wish I had said that.

A Better Way to Teach Math

Is it possible to eliminate the bell curve in math class?

Imagine if someone at a dinner party casually announced, “I’m illiterate.” It would never happen, of course; the shame would be too great. But it’s not unusual to hear a successful adult say, “I can’t do math.” That’s because we think of math ability as something we’re born with, as if there’s a “math gene” that you either inherit or you don’t.

School experiences appear to bear this out. In every math class I’ve taken, there have been slow kids, average kids and whiz kids. It never occurred to me that this hierarchy might be avoidable. No doubt, math comes more easily to some people than to others. But the question is: Can we improve the methods we use to teach math in schools — so that everyone develops proficiency?

Looking at current math achievement levels in the United States, this goal might seem out of reach. But the experience of some educators in Canada and England, using a curriculum called Jump Math, suggests that we seriously underestimate the potential of most students and teachers.

Peter BreggJohn Mighton teaching a grade five class at Brock Junior Public School in Toronto.

“Almost every kid — and I mean virtually every kid — can learn math at a very high level, to the point where they could do university level math courses,” explains John Mighton, the founder of Jump Math, a nonprofit organization whose curriculum is in use in classrooms serving 65,000 children from grades one through eight, and by 20,000 children at home. “If you ask why that’s not happening, it’s because very early in school many kids get the idea that they’re not in the smart group, especially in math. We kind of force a choice on them: to decide that either they’re dumb or math is dumb.”

Children come into school with differences in background knowledge, confidence, ability to stay on task and, in the case of math, quickness. In school, those advantages can get multiplied rather than evened out. One reason, says Mighton, is that teaching methods are not aligned with what cognitive science tells us about the brain and how learning happens.

In particular, math teachers often fail to make sufficient allowances for the limitations of working memory and the fact that we all need extensive practice to gain mastery in just about anything. Children who struggle in math usually have difficulty remembering math facts, handling word problems and doing multi-step arithmetic (pdf). Despite the widespread support for “problem-based” or “discovery-based” learning, studies indicate that current teaching approaches underestimate the amount of explicit guidance, “scaffolding” and practice children need to consolidate new concepts. Asking children to make their own discoveries before they solidify the basics is like asking them to compose songs on guitar before they can form a C chord.

Mighton, who is also an award-winning playwright and author of a fascinating book called “The Myth of Ability,” developed Jump over more than a decade while working as a math tutor in Toronto, where he gained a reputation as a kind of math miracle worker. Many students were sent to him because they had severe learning disabilities (a number have gone on to do university-level math). Mighton found that to be effective he often had to break things down into minute steps and assess each student’s understanding at each micro-level before moving on.

Take the example of positive and negative integers, which confuse many kids. Given a seemingly straightforward question like, “What is -7 + 5?”, many will end up guessing. One way to break it down, explains Mighton, would be to say: “Imagine you’re playing a game for money and you lost seven dollars and gained five. Don’t give me a number. Just tell me: Is that a good day or a bad day?”

Courtesy of Mary Jane MoreauThis graph shows the percentile rankings of Mary Jane Moreau’s grade 5 class in 2006, which was before she taught JUMP curriculum, and her grade 6 class after a year of JUMP work. CLICK TO ENLARGE

Separating this step from the calculation makes it easier for kids to understand what the numbers mean. Teachers tell me that when they begin using Jump they are surprised to discover that what they were teaching as one step may contain as many as seven micro steps. Breaking things down this finely allows a teacher to identify the specific point at which a student may need help. “No step is too small to ignore,” Mighton says. “Math is like a ladder. If you miss a step, sometimes you can’t go on. And then you start losing your confidence and then the hierarchies develop. It’s all interconnected.”

Mighton saw that if he approached teaching this way, he could virtually guarantee that every student would experience success. In turn, the children’s math anxiety diminished. As they grew more confident, they grew excited, and they began requesting harder challenges. “More than anything, kids love success,” he says, “and they love getting to higher levels, like in a video game.”

As the children experienced repeated success, it seemed to Mighton that their brains actually began to work more efficiently. Sometimes adding one more drop of knowledge led to a leap in understanding. One day, a child would be struggling; the next day she would solve a problem that was harder than anything she’d previously handled. Mighton saw that if you provided painstaking guidance, children would make their own discoveries. That’s why he calls his approach “guided discovery.”

Courtesy of Mary Jane MoreauThis graph shows the percentile rankings of Mary Jane Moreau’s grade 5 class in 2008, which was before she taught them JUMP curriculum, and her grade 6 class in 2009, after a year of JUMP work. CLICK TO ENLARGE

The foundation of the process is building confidence, which Mighton believes should be the first goal of a math teacher. Confidence begets attention, which begets rich learning. “I’ve never met a teacher who will tell you that a student doesn’t need to be confident to excel in school,” explains Mighton. “But I’ve never seen a math curriculum that follows the implications of that idea rigorously.” Math is well-suited to build confidence. Teachers can reduce things to tiny steps, gauge the size of each step to the student and raise the bar incrementally.

When math is taught this way, surprising things happen.

Consider some of Jump’s results. It’s been used for four years in the public schools in Lambeth, one of the most economically depressed boroughs of London, England. Teachers placed into Jump the students who were struggling most in math. Among the 353 students who entered the program in fifth grade, only 12 percent began at grade level. Most were at least two grade levels behind and the vast majority were not expected to pass England’s grade six (KS2) national tests. But 60 percent did.

In rural Ontario, Jump was recently evaluated in a randomized controlled study involving 29 teachers and about 300 fifth-grade students (controlled studies of math programs are rare). Researchers from Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children and the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education arranged for a control group of teachers to use their district’s standard curriculum while another group used Jump. Each set of teachers was given two days of training relevant to the materials they would be using.

In five months, researchers found substantial differences in learning. The Jump group achieved more than double the academic growth in core mathematical competencies evaluated using a well known set of standardized tests. (The study has not yet been published.) “Kids have to make pretty substantial gains in order to see this kind of difference,” explained Tracy Solomon, a developmental psychologist in the Research Institute at the Hospital for Sick Children who is the study’s lead author. “It’s impressive over a five-month period.”

Solomon believes that the key to Jump’s effectiveness is the way it “breaks math down to its component parts and builds it back up.” And she notes that this “flies in the face of the way math is typically taught.”

Interviewing teachers and principals, I have heard numerous stories of results like these. At times, they seem hard to reconcile with our assumptions about math. Isabel Grant, principal of the General Wolfe Elementary School, in Vancouver, British Columbia, has seen Jump produce impressive results in two schools where it has been used by a variety of teachers. Schools in British Columbia evaluate students based on whether they meet expectations for learning outcomes. “Teachers who used Jump were suddenly finding that they had all of their kids in the ‘fully meeting expectations’ category,” Grant told me. “It was such a foreign experience. It doesn’t typically happen when we’re teaching science or language arts. And they were kind of at a loss. ‘What do we do about this?’”

Another example is Mary Jane Moreau, who teaches at the Mabin School, an independent school in Toronto that does not screen students based on academic ability. Moreau, an experienced educator, dabbled with Jump for a year and started to see progress among her students, so she decided to immerse herself in the philosophy. “I was used to getting a bell curve in the past,” she told me, “but what I started seeing was all the kids getting between 90 and 100 percent on tests, and within months, they were all getting between 95 and 100 percent.”

She decided to see if the results would transfer to the standardized Test of Mathematical Abilities. Moreau teaches the same cohort of kids in fifth and sixth grades. Each September, for four years, the students wrote the test. From 2006 to 2007, the class percentile average jumped from 66 percent to 92 percent. From 2008 to 2009, with a new cohort, it increased from 54 percent to 98 percent.

Notably, the bell curve of the students’ scores shifted to the right and narrowed — which is to say that the performance differences between the “slow” kids and the “whiz” kids began to fade away. Moreau encouraged her sixth-grade students to enroll in the Mathematica Pythagoras contest, which attracts only five percent of Canadian students, most of whom would be deemed “gifted” in math. All but one did. For each group, 14 out of 17 students beat the contest average.

Moreau is a dedicated teacher — and she has the benefit of small classes — but, even so, she hadn’t seen results like this before. And it troubled her to think of students she had taught who didn’t have the opportunity to learn math this way. “When I think about what we’ve been doing for years when we could have been doing something else,” she told me, “I feel like I have to run so hard on this because I’m coming to the end of my career. But if I don’t help to change attitudes, I’ll feel like a criminal.”

Jump is a modest outfit. Mighton has a staff of 10 to create materials and conduct teacher trainings. With decisions about math curriculum highly politicized, it’s difficult for a small group to influence the debate. Big textbook companies and paid math consultants have a big say — and big investments — in what gets used.

It will take independent-minded educators to use Jump and see if its results can be replicated in more classrooms and schools. It’s hard to imagine what society might look like if we could undermine the math hierarchies that get solidified in grade school. These patterns tend to play out across society, often in negative ways. Wasn’t it the whiz kids who invented financial derivatives and subprime mortgages? And how many adults got themselves into hot water with their mortgages because, at bottom, they didn’t really understand the risks?

Even deeper, for children, math looms large; there’s something about doing well in math that makes kids feel they are smart in everything. In that sense, math can be a powerful tool to promote social justice. “When you have all the kids in a class succeeding in a subject, you see that they’re competing against the problem, not one another,” says Mighton. “It’s like they’re climbing a mountain together. You see a very healthy kind of competition. And it makes kids more generous to one another. Math can save us.”

On Friday, I’ll reply to comments, explain how Jump has helped one teacher to conquer her own math fears, and I’ll get into some more details about how the program works — including the vital role of bonus questions.