Part 8 (1/2)

Moshe Garsiel's chapter ”The Valley of Elah Battle and the Duel of David with Goliath: Between History and Artistic Theological Historiography” appears in Homeland and Exile (Brill, 2009).

Baruch Halpern's discussion of the sling appears in David's Secret Demons (Eerdmans Publis.h.i.+ng, 2001), 11.

For Eitan Hirsch's calculations, see Eitan Hirsch, Jaime Cuadros, and Joseph Backofen, ”David's Choice: A Sling and Tactical Advantage,” International Symposium on Ballistics (Jerusalem, May 21a24, 1995). Hirsch's paper is full of paragraphs like this: Experiments with cadavers and hybrid simulation models indicate that an impact energy of 72 joules is sufficient to perforate (but not exit) a cranium when it is impacted on the parietal portion of the skull with a 6.35 mm diameter steel projectile at 370 m/s. A projectile does not have to perforate the skull, but just crush a part of the frontal bone to produce a depressed skull fracture (at best), or a stunning blow to render a person unconscious. Such an impact produces strain in the blood vessels and brain tissues upon impact to the front of the skull...because the motion of the brain lags the motion of the skull. The impact energy required to achieve these two effects are much lower, on the order of 40 to 20 joules, respectively.

Hirsch presented his a.n.a.lysis at a scientific meeting. In an e-mail to me, he added: A day after the lecture was given an attendee came to me telling me that in the creek on the site where the duel took place one could find stones of Barium Sulphate which had a ma.s.s density of 4.2 grams/cc (compared to about 2.4 in usually found stones). If David chose one of those to use against Goliath it gave him significant advantage in addition to the calculated numbers brought in the tables.

Robert Dohrenwend's article ”The Sling: Forgotten Firepower of Antiquity” (Journal of Asian Martial Arts 11, no. 2 [2002]) is a very good introduction to the power of the sling.

Moshe Dayan's essay about David and Goliath, ”Spirit of the Fighters,” appears in Courageous Actions-Twenty Years of Independence 11 (1968): 50a52.

The idea that Goliath suffered from acromegaly appears to have first been suggested in C. E. Jackson, P. C. Talbert, and H. D. Caylor, ”Hereditary Hyperparathyroidism,” Journal of the Indiana State Medical a.s.sociation 53 (1960): 1313a16, and then by David Rabin and Pauline Rabin in a letter to the New England Journal of Medicine on October 20, 1983. Subsequently a number of other medical experts reached the same conclusion. In a letter to the journal Radiology (July 1990), Stanley Sprecher writes: Undoubtedly Goliath's great size was due to acromegaly secondary to a pituitary macroadenoma. This pituitary adenoma was apparently large enough to induce visual field deficits by its pressure on the optic chiasm, which made Goliath unable to follow the young David as he circled him. The stone entered Goliath's cranial vault through a markedly thinned frontal bone, which resulted from enlargement of the frontal paranasal sinus, a frequent feature of acromegaly. The stone lodged in Goliath's enlarged pituitary and caused a pituitary hemorrhage, resulting in transtentorial herniation and death.

The most complete account of Goliath's disability is by the Israeli neurologist Vladimir Berginer. It is Berginer who stresses the suspicious nature of Goliath's s.h.i.+eld bearer. See Vladimir Berginer and Chaim Cohen, ”The Nature of Goliath's Visual Disorder and the Actual Role of His Personal Bodyguard,” Ancient Near Eastern Studies 43 (2006): 27a44. Berginer and Cohen write: ”We thus surmise that the phrase 's.h.i.+eld bearer' was originally used by the Philistines as an honorable euphemistic t.i.tle for the individual who served as Goliath's guide for the visually impaired so as not to denigrate the military reputation of the Philistine heroic warrior. They may well have even given him a s.h.i.+eld to carry in order to camouflage his true function!”

Chapter One: Vivek Ranadive.

Ivan Arreguin-Toft's book about underdog winners is How the Weak Win Wars (Cambridge University Press, 2006).

”We could not lightly draw water after dark” is from T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom (Wordsworth Editions, 1999).

William R. Polk's history of unconventional warfare is Violent Politics: A History of Insurgency, Terrorism, and Guerrilla War, from the American Revolution to Iraq (Harper, 2008).

Chapter Two: Teresa DeBrito.

Perhaps the best-known study of the effects of cla.s.s reduction was the Project STAR (Student-Teacher Achievement Ratio) in Tennessee in the 1980s. STAR took six thousand children and randomly a.s.signed them to either a small or a large cla.s.s and then followed them throughout elementary school. The study showed that the children in the smaller cla.s.ses outperformed those children in the larger cla.s.ses by a small but meaningful degree. The countries and U.S. states that subsequently spent billions of dollars on cla.s.s-size reduction did so, in large part, because of the results of STAR. But STAR was far from perfect. There is strong evidence, for example, of an unusual amount of movement between the large- and small-cla.s.s arms of the study. It seems that a large number of highly motivated parents might have succeeded in getting their children transferred into the small cla.s.srooms-and underperforming children may have been dropped from the same cla.s.ses. More problematic is that the study wasn't blind. The teachers with the smaller cla.s.ses knew that it was their cla.s.srooms that would be under scrutiny. Normally in science, the results of experiments that are ”unblinded” are considered dubious. For a cogent critique of STAR, see Eric Ha.n.u.shek, ”Some Findings from an Independent Investigation of the Tennessee STAR Experiment and from Other Investigations of Cla.s.s Size Effects,” Educational Evaluation and Policy a.n.a.lysis 21, no. 2 (summer 1999): 143a63. A ”natural experiment” of the sort that Hoxby did is much more valuable. For what Hoxby found, see Caroline Hoxby, ”The Effects of Cla.s.s Size on Student Achievement: New Evidence from Population Variation,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 115, no. 4 (November 2000): 1239a85. For more discussion of cla.s.s size, see Eric Ha.n.u.shek, The Evidence on Cla.s.s Size (University of Rochester Press, 1998); Eric Ha.n.u.shek and Alfred Lindseth, Schoolhouses, Courthouses and Statehouses: Solving the Funding-Achievement Puzzle in America's Public Schools (Princeton University Press, 2009), 272; and Ludger Wossmann and Martin R. West, ”Cla.s.s-Size Effects in School Systems Around the World: Evidence from Between-Grade Variation in TIMSS,” European Economic Review (March 26, 2002).

For studies of money and happiness, see Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton, ”High Income Improves Evaluation of Life but Not Emotional Well-Being,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107, no. 38 (August 2010): 107. Barry Schwartz and Adam Grant discuss happiness in terms of an inverted-U curve in ”Too Much of a Good Thing: The Challenge and Opportunity of the Inverted U,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 6, no. 1 (January 2011): 61a76.

In ”Using Maimonides' Rule to Estimate the Effect of Cla.s.s Size on Scholastic Achievement” (Quarterly Journal of Economics [May 1999]), Joshua Angrist and Victor Lavy acknowledge the possibility that what they are seeing is a left-side phenomenon: ”It is also worth considering whether results for Israel are likely to be relevant for the United States or other developed countries. In addition to cultural and political differences, Israel has a lower standard of living and spends less on education per pupil than the United States and some OECD countries. And, as noted above, Israel also has larger cla.s.s sizes than the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada. So the results presented here may be showing evidence of a marginal return for reductions in cla.s.s size over a range of sizes that are not characteristic of most American schools.”

For a discussion of the relations.h.i.+p between drinking and health as an inverted-U curve, see Augusto Di Castelnuovo et al., ”Alcohol Dosing and Total Mortality in Men and Women: An Updated Meta-a.n.a.lysis of 34 Prospective Studies,” Archives of Internal Medicine 166, no. 22 (2006): 2437a45.

Jesse Levin's research on cla.s.s size and achievement is ”For Whom the Reductions Count: A Quantile Regression a.n.a.lysis of Cla.s.s Size and Peer Effects on Scholastic Achievement,” Empirical Economics 26 (2001): 221. The obsession with small cla.s.s sizes has real consequences. The one thing that all educational researchers agree about is that teacher quality matters far more than the size of the cla.s.s. A great teacher can teach your child a year and a half's material in one year. A below-average teacher might teach your child half a year's material in one year. That's a year's difference in learning, in one year. That suggests that there is much more to be gained by focusing on the person at the front of the cla.s.sroom than on the number of people sitting in the cla.s.sroom. The problem is that great teachers are rare. There simply aren't enough people with the specialized and complex set of skills necessary to inspire large groups of children year in, year out.

So what should we be doing? We should be firing bad teachers. Or coaching them in order to improve their performance. Or paying the best teachers more in exchange for taking more students. Or raising the profile of the teaching profession to try to attract more of the special kind of person who can excel in the cla.s.sroom. The last thing we should do in response to the problem of there being too many poor teachers and not enough good teachers, though, is go out and hire more teachers. Yet that is precisely what many industrialized countries have done in recent years, as they have become obsessed with lowering cla.s.s size. It is also worth pointing out that nothing costs more than reducing cla.s.s size. It costs so much to hire extra teachers and build them cla.s.srooms in which to teach that there is precious little money left over to pay teachers. As a result, the salaries of teachers, relative to other professions, have steadily fallen over the past fifty years.

In the past generation, the American educational system has decided not to seek the very best teachers, give them lots of kids to teach, and pay them more-which would help children the most. It has decided to hire every teacher it can get its hands on and pay them less. (The growth in spending on public education over the course of the twentieth century in the United States was staggering: between 1890 and 1990, in constant dollars, the bill went from $2 billion to $187 billion, with that spending accelerating toward the end of the century. That money went, overwhelmingly, toward hiring more teachers in order to make cla.s.ses smaller. Between 1970 and 1990, the pupil-staff ratio in American public schools fell from 20.5 to 15.4, and paying for all those extra teachers accounted for the lion's share of the tens of billions of dollars in extra educational spending in those years.

Why did this happen? One answer lies in the politics of the educational world-in the power of teachers and their unions, and in the peculiarities of the way schools are funded. But that is not an entirely satisfactory explanation. The American public-and the Canadian public and the British public and the French public and on and on-wasn't forced to spend all that money on lowering cla.s.s size. They wanted smaller cla.s.ses. Why? Because the people and countries who are wealthy enough to pay for things like really small cla.s.ses have a hard time understanding that the things their wealth can buy might not always make them better off.

Chapter Three: Caroline Sacks.

The discussion of the Impressionists is based on several books, princ.i.p.ally: John Rewald, The History of Impressionism (MOMA, 1973); Ross King, The Judgment of Paris (Walker Publis.h.i.+ng, 2006), which has a marvelous description of the world of the Salon; Sue Roe, The Private Lives of the Impressionists (Harper Collins, 2006); and Harrison White and Cynthia White, Canvases and Careers: Inst.i.tutional Change in the French Painting World (Wiley & Sons, 1965), 150.

The first academic paper to raise the issue of relative deprivation with respect to school choice was James Davis's ”The Campus as Frog Pond: An Application of the Theory of Relative Deprivation to Career Decisions of College Men,” The American Journal of Sociology 72, no. 1 (July 1966). Davis concludes: At the level of the individual, [my findings] challenge the notion that getting into the ”best possible” school is the most efficient route to occupational mobility. Counselors and parents might well consider the drawbacks as well as the advantages of sending a boy to a ”fine” college, if, when doing so, it is fairly certain he will end up in the bottom ranks of his graduating cla.s.s. The aphorism ”It is better to be a big frog in a small pond than a small frog in a big pond” is not perfect advice, but it is not trivial.

Stouffer's study (coauth.o.r.ed with Edward A. Suchman, Leland C. DeVinney, s.h.i.+rley A. Star, and Robin M. Williams Jr.) appears in The American Soldier: Adjustment During Army Life, vol. 1 of Studies in Social Psychology in World War II (Princeton University Press, 1949), 251.

For studies of so-called happy countries, see Mary Daly, Andrew Oswald, Daniel Wilson, and Stephen Wu, ”Dark Contrasts: The Paradox of High Rates of Suicide in Happy Places,” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 80 (December 2011), and Carol Graham, Happiness Around the World: The Paradox of Happy Peasants and Miserable Millionaires (Oxford University Press, 2009).

Herbert Marsh teaches in the Department of Education at Oxford University. His academic output over the course of his career has been extraordinary. On the subject of ”Big Fish/Little Pond” alone, he has written countless papers. A good place to start is H. Marsh, M. Seaton, et al., ”The Big-Fish-Little-Pond-Effect Stands Up to Critical Scrutiny: Implications for Theory, Methodology, and Future Research,” Educational Psychology Review 20 (2008): 319a50.

For statistics on STEM programs, see Rogers Elliott, A. Christopher Strenta, et al., ”The Role of Ethnicity in Choosing and Leaving Science in Highly Selective Inst.i.tutions,” Research in Higher Education 37, no. 6 (December 1996), and Mitch.e.l.l Chang, Oscar Cerna, et al., ”The Contradictory Roles of Inst.i.tutional Status in Retaining Underrepresented Minorities in Biomedical and Behavioral Science Majors,” The Review of Higher Education 31, no. 4 (summer 2008).

John P. Conley and Ali Sina onder's breakdown of research papers appears in ”An Empirical Guide to Hiring a.s.sistant Professors in Economics,” Vanderbilt University Department of Economics Working Papers Series, May 28, 2013.

The reference to Fred Glimp's ”happy-bottom-quarter” policy comes from Jerome Karabel's fascinating book The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (Mariner Books, 2006), 291. Karabel comments: Would it be better, [Glimp] implied, if the students at the bottom were content to be there? Thus the renowned (some would say notorious) Harvard admission practice known as the ”happy-bottom-quarter policy” was born....Glimp's goal was to identify ”the right bottom-quarter students-men who have the perspective, ego strength, or extracurricular outlets for maintaining their self-respect (or whatever) while making the most of their opportunities at a C-level.”

The question of affirmative action is worth discussing in some detail. Take a look at the following table from the work of Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor, Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It's Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won't Admit It (Basic Books, 2012). It shows where African-Americans rank in their law school cla.s.ses compared with white students. The cla.s.s ranks run from 1 to 10, with 1 being the bottom tenth of the cla.s.s and 10 being the top.

Rank Black White Other 1. 51.6 5.6 14.8.

2. 19.8 7.2 20.0.

3. 11.1 9.2 13.4.

4. 4.0 10.2 11.5.

5. 5.6 10.6 8.9.

6. 1.6 11.0 8.2.

7. 1.6 11.5 6.2.

8. 2.4 11.2 6.9.