andrew plemmons pratt

Next fall I will be teaching secondary school English, and in order to be effective I’m going to need to brush up on my math. As I was starting the process of applying to Teach for America, one of the reasons I kept citing for why I wanted to go into education was that effective schools and programs (like TFA) measure whether they’re successful at what they’re doing. This isn’t an entirely new phenomenon in education, but we’re no where near to realizing the full the power of measuring what we do U.S. schools, seeing if it benefits students, and adjusting things accordingly. Fortunately there are a whole slew of districts, policy shops, and nonprofits working on figuring out what we’re not measuring, determining how to measure it, maintain that information, and act on it.

Take this report that my humble employer, the Center for American Progress, and College Summit released last week. The authors explain that while many public high schools have a rigorous college preparation curriculum that includes Advanced Placement classes and the like, smart successful students often make it to their first year of college and find themselves totally adrift, unprepared for the academic expectations of higher ed. High schools, despite their best intentions, often don’t know whether or not they’re preparing students for success in college because they don’t keep track of how those students perform in their “13th” year. Simply put, they don’t measure the outcome of their work. It’s a matter of counting.

Now, building a data system that follows students from secondary school to potentially far-flung colleges is not trivial, but the principle—take note of what you do, measure, and make adjustments to better meet your goals—is one of those simple ideas that made for a lot of successful projects over the past decade.

The business community is generally out ahead on this whole counting and measuring thing, but it’s also worth noting that much of the exponential growth of web-based and social media technologies over the past 10 years is due, fundamentally, to the ability to use computers to measure what people are doing and craft tools and products that fit people’s needs. Google does this, incrementally, billions of times day. Similar story for most everything else you clicked on around the Internet today. But in a whole variety of other fields, counting has been around for decades, and its impact has snowballed in the face of cheap, fast computing, and the basic acceptance that if you want to understand a problem, you need data.

Atul Gwande’s Better offers a terrific tour of how measurement has improved various corners of medicine since the middle of the 20th century. Hospitals have beaten back onslaughts of drug-resistant bacteria by persuading everyone to wash his or her hands and counting the results. The introduction of the Apgar score, which enumerates on a 0-10 scale the health of newborn infants upon delivery, lead to a dramatic upswing the in the quality of care for infants and dramatic upswing in survival rates, which are now about 8 times better than they were in the 1930s. And the 90 percent survival rates for U.S. combat troops wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan is due in large part to the fact that military physicians diligently record copious information on injuries, treatments, and outcomes—so they can constantly find ways to improve on their success.

The next big step in education and in medicine is to take what we’ve counted, standardize the information, and compare it. That means national testing and data standards for education and interoperable electronic health records for medicine. Fortunately, there’s federal money for both of those projects: $4.35 billion for schools and $19 billion health information technology.

So one day at the farmer’s market over the summer I decided that it was time to learn how to cook with cabbage. I grabbed a tasty-looking specimen from one of the stalls and came home to find a recipe. The index in Bittman’s How to Cook Everything led me to “White Beans with Cabbage, Pasta, and Ham.” I took a chance on it and was genuinely surprised at how tasty it came out with minimal effort.

It’s now a staple go-to dinner dish because this is one of those recipes where you’ll tend to have most of the core ingredients on hand, but you can easily mix and adjust because it’s built on a core of mild ingredients seasoned with broth, onions, and thyme. As well, I make this as a vegetarian dish with small amounts of various fake meats—which I’ve found is a a great way to inject another jolt of flavor. The resulting portions are hefty and you can easily double or treble them, as cooking just involves two saucepans. I’ll run through the Bittman ingredient list and offer my substitutions:

• 3 cups chopped cabbage, preferably Savoy [Never used Savoy myself, which sounds pricey. Part of the point here is just to use a hunk of cabbage you might have left over from something else. One head goes a long way. I find that it only takes about one quarter of a normal size cabbage to get the 3 cups here.]
• 8 ounces small pasta, like cavatelli or orecchiette [Again, just use whatever you have open and want to finish off. You can also up the amount wildly without risk.]
• 2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
• 2 cups chopped leak or onion [Leeks are really good here. Obviously regular onion will do just fine.]
• 1 celery stalk, chopped [I find that getting celery just for this creates a problem because then you have the whole rest of the stalk and, eh, what else are you going to do with celery? I usually use carrots, which help break up the monotone color of the dish anyway.]
• 2 sprigs fresh thyme [The thyme, surprisingly, is really the heart of the dish. I tend to only have dry chopped on hand and gusstimate a substitution—2 teaspoons or so. Again, you can increase that to taste without throwing off the balance. Herb substitutions are 3 fresh units to 1 dried unit according to Google.]
• 1/4 cup chopped prosciutto or 1/2 cup chopped ham [I always make this vegetarian by using fake Italian sausage instead. Trader Joes sells a spectacular house brand imitation Italian sausage and you only need 1/2 of a link chopped small to get a lot of meaty flavor into this dish.]
• 1 cup chicken or other stock [I use 1 cube of vegetable bullion in 1 cup of boiling water—just toss it in the microwave in a Pyrex cup for a few minutes.]
• 3 cups cooked or canned cannellini or other white beans, dried but still moist [That's three cans, which I feel is a little excessive. I'll use as little as 1 can depending on what I have around. Just as good, you can use garbonzoes.]
• Black pepper
• Parmesan or Romano [A crucial garnish. Bear in mind the concentrated stock will be salty, so sometimes a less salty cheese is better.]

Bittman recommends cooking the cabbage first then reserving that water for the pasta. Here are the steps, simplified:

1. Boil salted water for the cabbage. Cook until tender, about 3 minutes. Strain but save the water. Reboil the water and cook the pasta al dente—it’s going to cook some more when combined with the rest of the ingredients.
2. Heat the oil in a separate saucepan or large skillet that can hold all of the final volume of ingredients. Add the onions and celery/carrots. Soften, then add the thyme, imitation sausage, stock, beans, and cabbage. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Toss that for 5 minutes or so to blend flavors. Bittman reminds you to keep it moist but not soupy.
3. Toss the pasta in at the last and then move to your serving vessel. Serve with grated cheese.

Voila! A whole dish based around cabbage that’s not coleslaw. Hearty and just as good as leftovers the next day for lunch.