The economics of education

Jay Greene Jonathan Butcher uses a passage from an article in the Economist as getting off point for education reform. The article characterizes the cell phone as "the single most transformative tool for development" and attributes its spread to underdeveloped countries, in part, to the "spread of mobile phones in the developed world."

Greene finds support for this in the theories of Hayak, who argued lagging societies advance more quickly if front runners are allowed to innovate and pull ahead:

The over-all speed of advance will be increased by those who move fastest. Even if many fall behind at first, the cumulative effect of the preparation of the path will, before long, sufficiently facilitate their advance that they will be able to keep their place in the march.

This is why the "poor" in America are able to enjoy luxuries that only the very rich had access to a couple of generations ago: air conditioning, cell phones, microwaves, color televisions, cable TV, answering machines, the internet, etc.

The same is true of education, Greene argues:

It is not just tax policy or legislation pertaining to businesses to which this idea applies; other social programs can be improved in the same way, and education is no exception. Charter schools are an excellent example of a public policy that promotes individual liberty and entrepreneurship—resulting in the creation of new ideas that can then be used widely.

Everywhere charters have spread, the new ideas on leadership and teaching, for example, that they carry with them have been copied. Even those opposed to charter schools have decided to combat them using the charter concept. For example, Pilot Schools were created in Boston by existing school leaders in response to charter schools, using concepts central to the charter movement (more freedom over administrative decision making, specialized mission statements, etc.). The result is that parents have even more options than before—more schools to chose from and more freedom.

Yep, exactly.

The free market, warts and all, is an amazing thing.

Scientists fake global warming data

Scientists have been caught cherry-picking data to create a false historical record of the Earth's temperatures. This could have "significant implications" for the climate studies upon which global warming theories are based. In addition, the scientists hid the raw data so other scientists couldn't reproduce the results, and major peer reviewed scientific journals failed to call them on it.

This doesn't foster a lot of faith in "science."

Considerable quote

"Given time, the economy, unless totally crippled by government intervention, will regenerate itself. That's because an economy is not a machine that needs jumpstarting. It is people who have objectives they want to achieve. They will not sit on their hands forever waiting for government to 'fix' things. Instead, they work to overcome obstacles to get what they want. Some banks are struggling, but there are still people who want to lend money and people who want to borrow it. They will find each other without government help."

~ John Stossel

Republicans want you to die

Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) warned Americans that "Republicans want you to die quickly" during an after-hours House floor speech Tuesday night.

This is what passes for research these days?

Joseph Wyatt displays an amazing shallowness of thought and reasoning in his recent effort to criticize the Right for their shallowness of thought and reasoning:

There are people who call President Obama a socialist, communist, pinko, hippie, heathen, Muslim, godless, radical, debt-escalating, wannabe granny assassin from Kenya, or somewhere. Aren't they the souls who earlier in this decade advised us that it is unpatriotic to criticize the president in time of war?

You'd think Wyatt would begin his attack with something substantive and well-reasoned, but instead he opts for vague and sophomoric. No examples of anyone actually saying any of these things. No attempt to address any of the underlying criticisms. Just a tantrum: They said it was wrong and now they're doing it too!

Still, let's see if we can break this down a bit. First, let's start by acknowledging that "there are people" who'll say just about anything, so that's not a serious place to begin a discussion. Nor is it serious to attribute a laundry list of disparate statements to these unnamed people, or, having done so, to cast this phantom army of critics as representative of something larger than themselves.

So, Wyatt begins his attack on poor footing. But let's put that aside and consider his assertion that we were advised that it's "unpatriotic to criticize the president in time of war." I think it's no oversight that Wyatt provides no quote, nor even a hint of who might have said such a thing or in which context it might have been said. He's hiding behind vagueness and general aspersions, knowing it's impossible to prove that no one, anywhere, at any time, said such a thing. (For the record, a Google search of the phrase documents a number of liberals attributing the statement to the Right, but no instances of anyone on the right actually making the statement.)

But let's even put that aside. Even in the context Wyatt presents it, the statement that "it is unpatriotic to criticize the president in time of war" obviously refer to criticisms relevant to the war. One would have to be intentionally dense to take this to mean that the president should be free of all criticism, on any topic, until the war in concluded. And notice, none of the Obama criticisms Wyatt refers to have anything to do with the war or the war effort.

Wyatt continues:

If the law should suddenly require that we pause and acknowledge each instance of our self-contradictions, the wheels of industry, education, religion and government would clank to a halt inside a day. My research staff has provided more examples of the human capacity to reverse field:

Judging by what follows, Wyatt needs to find a new research staff, as there's no evidence of any actual research having been done. And, apparently, no instances of liberals "reversing field" were to be found.

Some are convinced that Henry Louis Gates deserved to be arrested for yelling at cops in his own home. But the majority of those philosophers would do a U-turn in a heartbeat, if only Gates had said he believed the officers were there to take his guns.

Now I see why Wyatt keeps his staff. It had to take a lot of "research" to discern how "some" would react in an alternate reality. Too bad they couldn't sort out the facts (Gates was arrested for behavior outside his home) and look up the definition of disorderly conduct while they were at it.

The irony-impaired, many happily dependent on Washington to pay their doctor bills, want the government out of the health-care business. They possess no impulse to burn their Medicare cards.

This is simply poor logic. If the government takes away my money and starts handing out "free" candy, why on earth wouldn't I take some of that candy? It was bought with my money.

Right-to-lifers, aware that insurance like Medicare keeps people alive, often seem to be the same folks who oppose universal health care.

More poor logic. The goal (life) and the means (Big Government) are separate things. It's not contradictory to accept the goal while favoring a different solution. Perhaps Wyatts research team could look up the phrase "more than one way to skin a cat."

Some say that evil activist judges "make law from the bench." However, those folks defend Bush's lawyer John Yoo who, it will be recalled, wrote opinions saying that torture is legal.

I'll give Wyatt some consideration here, since this largely depends on one's perspective. Yoo, didn't "make law from the bench." He simply offered an opinion as to what the law said, which was his job. I'm not a legal scholar, and I have no idea if Yoo got it right. I doubt Wyatt does either.

Feeling their jobs threatened by environmental regulations, it is understandable that good West Virginians may have adopted a you're-not-from-around-here-so-butt-out philosophy toward certain environmentalists. Those same mountaineers quickly did an about face, as they flocked to embrace speakers and musicians from out of state, at the recent West Virginia Woodstock.

I don't know about the whole you're-not-from-around-here-so-butt-out thing. It sounds like something Wyatt made up. Nor do I know who "those same mountaineers" are; Wyatt once again hides behind generalities. But his failure to distinguish between listening to music and speeches on the one hand and having life-changing laws imposed on the other is remarkable. Is he really this thick?

Now that the Logan County global warming denial fest has come and gone, some clear thinking may take hold. The event, which is said to have been attended by the better part of a hundred thousand souls, was nothing but a well-calculated effort to distract us from noticing who, really, has axed nine out of 10 coal mining jobs in the past 50 years. To avoid taking heat, coal industry wheeler-dealers elevate distraction to an art form as they cry out to the few remaining miners, "Look, there's a tree-hugger who is trying to put you out of work!"

Wyatt lists this as a separate bullet point, but I'm not sure why. Seems like he got fired up about the West Virginians wanting to hold onto their jobs and went off on a ramble. I'm really not sure what it's all about. It would have been nice if he'd bothered to provide a link to something that explains or supports what he's saying. All I can make of it is that 1) he's upset that they disagree with him about global warming; and 2) the evil coal mining companies are the real bad guys. I'm not sure how having a different opinion constitutes anybody "reversing field," which is what this is supposed to be an example of.

The health-care debate has revealed the leaders of the GOP as little more than fear mongers, like the boy who cried wolf. We hear tall tale after tall tale. Their hope is to frighten people into conservative extremism.

Fear mongers? Isn't this the same guy who just suggested that "right-to-lifers" were going to kill people because they oppose universal health care? (See above.) And it seems to me that there's been a fair amount of tale telling done by our Fear-Mongerer in Chief. And why is it "extremism" to oppose a radical shift in governance, which would turn nearly 20% of our economy over to the federal government?

Their loony jabber about death panels, death books and health care for illegals is losing steam. As they pretend to be sincere, they now confabulate concerns that a health-care public option will run us into an Everest of national debt.

What Wyatt dismisses as loony jabber has a good deal of substance to it. It's fair to object to the term "death panel" as provocative and incendiary -- I'm sure it was meant to be -- but it's unfair to dismiss the underlying issue so cavalierly. Obama's proposal for an "Independent Medicare Advisory Panel" was real and that panel would have authority over which medical procedures would be approved. This is rationing, and it's a real concern that should be addressed, rather than mocked. It's revealing that the "death panel" provision of the health care bill was removed after Sarah Palin called attention to it. Perhaps there was something to it after all?

Similarly, the loaded term "death book" describes an actual book which allegedly steers elderly patients toward decisions to end their lives. These are serious issues which Wyatt treats in an unserious way when he discards them as "loony jabber"

As for Obamacare covering illegals, suffice it to point out that Republicans have introduced several amendments to explicitly state that illegal immigrants won't be covered by the bill. All have failed along party line votes.

But those same GOP leaders have yet to explain why, if they are concerned about the U.S. debt, they steadfastly resist any effort to reverse George W. Bush's tax breaks for the rich.

Wyatt's "researchers" have failed him once again. Bush cut taxes across the board and left the rich shouldering even more of the tax burden. As for the rationale behind leaving the tax cuts in place, this is widely known: the solution to debt is a growing economy. Since the economy is driven by the private sector, keeping money in the private sector is a good thing. Taking it out (taxes) slows the economy. This is basic economics. Wyatt may disagree or have other priorities, but he's either grossly unaware or disingenuous to claim that this hasn't been explained.

Republican tax gifts to the Paris Hiltons of the world were based on the absurd notion that we can best help the poor by giving more cash to the rich, a policy for which all of us, except the wealthy, now pay through the nose.

Jesus, who was known for his consistency, likely would have tossed a trickle-down economist out of the temple and into oblivion.

Here Wyatt confirms that he doesn't understand basic economics. In the first place, there's no such thing as "trickle down" economics. That's a term used by those who don't understand supply-side economics or wish to mock it. In Wyatt's world, the theory behind "trickle down" economics is that if rich people have a lot of money, it will eventually work through the system and trickle down to the poor. But that's not how it works.

In reality, trickle up is a better description of what happens. If you give a rich person (or company) extra money (actually, you're not giving them anything; you're just taking away less of what is rightfully theirs) he'll want to invest it, so he can make even more money. (Rich people are greedy, you know.) They key is that the investment comes first; the payoff comes later. So he invests: he expands his store, opens a new location, introduces a new product line, whatever. And he needs help with all these things: builders, designers, salesmen, architects, custodians, real estate agents, salesmen, on and on. All these people see and benefit from the rich guy's extra money long before he does. So, in actuality, the money starts at the bottom, with new jobs, better salaries, and increased opportunities for "the little guy," then eventually "trickles up" to the rich guy who sees his profits last.

I'm not sure what Jesus has to do with any of this, but I bet, as a carpenter, he'd appreciate having a little work come his way.

Public option amendment a ploy?

I just heard on Fox News that an amendment is being voted on today to add a "public option" provision to the Baucus health care bill. Fox's line on this is that, since the Baucus bill is the only Democratic bill that does not include the public option, this amendment is an important test. If it passes, it would mean the Dems have enough votes to push through a final bill which includes a public option.

I wonder if something else is going on here as well. The public option is a hot potato, and even Dems are split on whether it should be pursued. Recent thinking has been that it wouldn't make it into a final bill, and that a even a bill without a public option might be difficult to pass. Perhaps Dems, fearing they will get no health care bill passed, are bringing this to a vote as a ploy. If the amendment fails in a close vote, the non-public option form of the bill can be pumped as a reasonable and practical compromise. The Dems can say, Okay, it was close, but we lost. But health car reform is so important that we're willing to accept that and go with the Baucus bill (with no public option), which everyone can agree is a fair compromise.

This tactic has worked well for Obama. He often points to the most extreme position -- even if no one advocates it -- in order to cast his (slightly less extreme) position as a moderate and reasonable compromise. The Dems are smart. They'd like to get it all done at once, but they know that's not politically feasible. But they also know that, if they can just get government's foot in the health care reform door, the slippery slope will do the rest over time.

20 "inaccurate claims"

Michael F. Cannon and Ramesh Ponnuru document 20 "inaccurate claims" (Joe Wilson might call them lies) Obama made about health care reform in his congressional address. They conclude:

When President Obama makes a factual claim about health-care policy, he does not deserve the benefit of the doubt about its accuracy. We do not know whether he has been badly misinformed or is deliberately trying to mislead. Either way, he cannot be trusted to reform American health care.

Liz Cheney is her own person

The New York Times ran a piece today on Liz Cheney. My favorite line from the piece:

(She declined to be interviewed for this article, saying she was uncomfortable with a story focused on her rather than her policy beliefs.)

Good for her. This is reminiscent of Fred Thompson's presidential run, where reporters relentlessly ignored his trying to discuss the issues while constantly peppering him with questions about campaign strategies and other trivialities. This lost Thompson quite a lot of standing in the campaign as the media reduced him from serious candidate to campaign color man. Part of this was Thompson's own doing, of course. I suspect Cheney, should she run for office, will do better in this regard.

My least favorite line from the piece:

She argues her father’s positions with a cable-ready ferocity reminiscent of her mother...

The turn of phrase between father and mother is cute, but this is entirely condescending. Cheney is a serious person, who speaks for herself, clearly and directly. To characterize her as parroting her father's opinions is a cheap shot -- in my estimation, an intentional one.

Unions take over charter schools

I've written, most recently here, that I don't view charter schools as a long term solution to our educational woes despite their growing record of success. The unions and powers that be simply won't allow it to happen. Today, I came across this, from last April:

Well I’ve just learned — perhaps before reporters have even been able to write their stories, because I haven’t yet found a news link to it — that New York’s Public Employee Relations Board will force the KIPP AMP charter school in New York City to let its teachers unionize.

I hadn't heard about this, but it's not at all surprising. Unions are about power, and charters threaten that power. With word getting out that charters work, unions realize that they can't hold back the tide. In response, they are shifting strategies from fighting the creation of charters to taking them over. Then they will use their strong arm tactics to force charters to function like traditional schools.

Let the kids be damned.

More here: "If you want to know what charter schools will look like in a generation or so, just look at the public school status quo."

Be thankful for Obama's broken promises

Victor Davis Hanson:

Given the recent arrests of several jihadist plotters, we can be thankful that Obama did not, as once promised in various early manifestations, end renditions, wiretaps, intercepts, and the Patriot Act ("shoddy and dangerous"). So far he has not closed Gitmo; and it does not seem that he will do so within the promised year. Then 95 percent of the public was promised either no new taxes or a tax credit; that now seems quite impossible, given the vast new spending proposals and commensurate $2 trillion annual deficit. Given federal shortfalls, we have already seen massive new state income taxes and higher user taxes at the local level; and the crushing deficits will mean higher income or payroll taxes, or else a new value-added tax; the latter would raise taxes on everyone at rates heretofore unknown.

Meanwhile, the health-care bill has gone from a public plan to a public-option plan to no one quite knows what, when, or if — other than if it's passed, taxes will soar there too. No need to go into depth on the sensational promises of new transparency — not when the NEA is trying to run a ministry of correct art, a government website wants the addresses of "fishy" opponents, bills are not posted as promised, and town-hall dissidents are demonized as a Nazi-like mob and, by administration supporters, as racist. On the foreign front, in Iraq we have seen not the Obama "combat brigades out by March 2008" plan, but rather the Petraeus plan. And the grand talk of October reengagement with Iran was predicated, as we know now, on suppressing intelligence estimates of a second nuclear facility whose disclosure would have rendered inoperative the always suspect 2007 "no bomb" National Intelligence Estimate on Iran.

Bottom line? It would have been a lot simpler just to have told the truth, and now to adhere to the truth, rather than all this deceptive hope-and-change hocus-pocus.

Be thankful for Obama's broken promises

Victor Davis Hanson:

Given the recent arrests of several jihadist plotters, we can be thankful that Obama did not, as once promised in various early manifestations, end renditions, wiretaps, intercepts, and the Patriot Act ("shoddy and dangerous"). So far he has not closed Gitmo; and it does not seem that he will do so within the promised year. Then 95 percent of the public was promised either no new taxes or a tax credit; that now seems quite impossible, given the vast new spending proposals and commensurate $2 trillion annual deficit. Given federal shortfalls, we have already seen massive new state income taxes and higher user taxes at the local level; and the crushing deficits will mean higher income or payroll taxes, or else a new value-added tax; the latter would raise taxes on everyone at rates heretofore unknown.

Meanwhile, the health-care bill has gone from a public plan to a public-option plan to no one quite knows what, when, or if — other than if it's passed, taxes will soar there too. No need to go into depth on the sensational promises of new transparency — not when the NEA is trying to run a ministry of correct art, a government website wants the addresses of "fishy" opponents, bills are not posted as promised, and town-hall dissidents are demonized as a Nazi-like mob and, by administration supporters, as racist. On the foreign front, in Iraq we have seen not the Obama "combat brigades out by March 2008" plan, but rather the Petraeus plan. And the grand talk of October reengagement with Iran was predicated, as we know now, on suppressing intelligence estimates of a second nuclear facility whose disclosure would have rendered inoperative the always suspect 2007 "no bomb" National Intelligence Estimate on Iran.

Bottom line? It would have been a lot simpler just to have told the truth, and now to adhere to the truth, rather than all this deceptive hope-and-change hocus-pocus.

The direct approach to reducing CO2

Opponents of reforms such as Kyoto and "cap-and-trade" often argue that these proposals are more about anti-capitalist politics than concern for the environment. As evidence, they point out that these programs would have little impact on the environment while severely damaging our economy. A recent New York Times article adds credence to this view.

Governments are doing practically nothing to study the removal of carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere, but this technology could be a much cheaper form of climate protection than photovoltaic cells and other approaches getting lavish support, according to an article published today in Science.

David W. Keith, a physicist at the University of Calgary, reviews some of the technologies for air capture of carbon and notes that there is not a single government program devoted specifically to that purpose. Dr. Keith estimates that less than $3 million per year in public money is currently being spent on related research, even though it could potentially be a bargain.

If the real goal is to reduce CO2 levels, why are we ignoring the most direct method of doing it? Shouldn't we be looking at air capture technologies instead of, or at least in addition to, less effective, less economical approaches?

Charter schools work, for now

Jay Greene has a nice summary of the growing research showing that charter schools outperform traditional schools. He concludes by confirming something I've been expecting for some time: once the science becomes known and the movement picks up steam, the unions will "jump on board" in order to take control of the movement. As Greene notes, that has begun. With unions in the picture, look for charters to devolve into something that looks very much like traditional schools, with equally poor results.

In light of these high quality studies, it is harder to oppose charter schools on a scholarly basis. And with the clear support of charters from the incoming Obama administration, it is getting harder to opposed charter schools on a political basis — at least at the national level.

But don’t expect to see the teacher unions waving a white flag despite their losses in research and national politics. They don’t need facts or the support of the US Department of Education so long as they continue to dominate local school politics.

And that is exactly why they have focused on organizing local charter schools to neutralize the threat to their grip on local school politics. As my colleague Marcus Winters writes today in the New York Post, the unions managed to organize two successful charter schools in New York City. The fact that union-run charter schools in Massachusetts trailed the non-union charters in performance is not of concern to the unions. It isn’t about student achievement; it’s about keeping their hold on power even as the facts pile up against them.

Oklahoma high school students can't name first president

Here's a short video about the Oklahoma study which had less than 3% of high school students able to pass a simple civics quiz. Only 23% of them knew that George Washington was the first president.

90% of Americans believe the media is in the tank for Obama

NewsBusters:

Almost 90 percent of Americans believe the news media helped Barack Obama get elected president last November.

Beyond this, 70 percent feel the press are promoting his presidency, with 56 percent saying they're pushing ObamaCare "without objective criticism."

Such were the findings of a new national poll taken by Sacred Heart University.

In fact, according to Wednesday's press release, almost half of Americans "have permanently stopped watching a news media organization, print or electronic, because of perceived bias."

All of this represents a continuation of a steepening trend. Now, one can argue whether the American people are hallucinating or whether their perceptions are accurate, but when 90% of Americans believe the media is in the tank for Obama, the media has a huge problem.

What is bewildering is that the media don't seem to be addressing it. My perception is that, if anything, they are becoming even more brazen in their bias. The study indicates that other news outlets are continuing to hemorrhage viewers to Fox News, and that those viewers are specifically seeking less bias in reporting. At what point will financial considerations, i.e. self-preservation, kick in and pull these companies back toward the center? I'd have thought we were well past that point.

"Fixing" the wrong problem

One of the outcomes Obamacare is supposed to achieve is to reduce the number of visits to the emergency room. The thinking is that many uninsured people use the ER in lieu of regular doctor's visits or put off going to the doctor until the condition worsens, necessitating an ER visit. Not so says a Journal of the American Medical Association study.

For a study reported in the October 22, 2008 Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), researchers at the University of Michigan evaluated 127 peer-reviewed articles that made claims about the impact of uninsured patients on emergency room crowding. They concluded that “available data do not support assumptions that uninsured patients are a primary cause of overcrowding, present with less acute conditions than insured patients, or seek [emergency room] care primarily for convenience.”

The JAMA study also found that patients with public insurance, such as Medicaid and Medicare, are more likely to crowd into emergency rooms for minor complaints than are the uninsured. Only about 17 percent of E.R. visits in the United States in the last year studied were by uninsured patients, about the same as their share of the population.

This is both interesting and counterintuitive. More importantly, it suggests that we're crafting health care reform based on faulty assumptions. As the authors of the study note,

If we attempt to solve emergency overcrowding by creating policies based on inaccurate assumptions, common knowledge, or what ‘everybody knows,’ we will waste limited resources, fail to address the root causes of the problem, and potentially increase the barriers to care faced by 47 million uninsured Americans.”

In his inauguration speech, Obama promised to let the facts, not ideology guide his policies. Given that this study was release almost a year ago, I think it's time he scratched this item off of his list of talking points.

Capitalism 101

Economist Walter Williams teaches a short lesson on capitalism:

Capitalism is an economic system characterized by private ownership and control over the means of production. The distribution of goods and services and their prices are mainly determined by competition in a free market. Under such a system the primary job of government is to protect private property, enforce contracts and ensure rule of law.

There has never been a pure free market capitalistic system just as there has never been a pure communist or socialist system, where there is government ownership of the means of production and each individual has equal access to society's resources. However, we can rank economies as to whether they are closer to capitalism or closer to communism or socialism. If one ranked countries according to whether they were closer to the capitalistic end of the spectrum or the socialistic or communistic end, then ranked countries according to per capita GDP and finally rank countries according to Freedom House's "Map of Freedom in the World," he would find a pattern that is by no means a coincidence. The people in those countries closer to the capitalist end of the economic spectrum have far greater income and enjoy greater human rights protections than those toward the socialist and communist end. . . .

"If you're an unborn spirit, condemned by God to a life of poverty but allowed to choose the country in which to be poor, would you choose a country near the communist end of the economic spectrum or the capitalist end?" If you chose the United States, you'd find that according to the government surveys, the typical "poor" American has cable or satellite TV, two color TVs, and a DVD player or VCR. He has air conditioning, a car, a microwave, a refrigerator, a stove, and a clothes washer and dryer, and whether he has health insurance or not, he is able to obtain medical care when needed. Try to find that in Cuba, Russia, China or North Korea. . . .

Social Security, Medicare and its coverage of prescription drugs have an unfunded liability that exceeds $100 trillion. When those roosters come home to roost, they will make the financial meltdown we've been though look like child's play.

Not withstanding all of the demagoguery, it is capitalism not socialism is that made us a great country and its socialism that will be our undoing.

Yep, exactly.

Credit where it's due

This is encouraging:

The Obama administration is committed to the testing and school accountability at the heart of the No Child Left Behind law championed by former President George W. Bush, Education Secretary Arne Duncan said.

In a speech prepared for delivery Thursday, Duncan gave the law credit for shining a spotlight on kids who need the most help. No Child Left Behind pushes schools to boost the performance of minority and poor children, who lag behind their white peers on standardized tests.

Duncan said there is plenty he wants to change about the law. He agreed with critics that standardized tests are not ideal measures of student achievement. Yet "they are the best we have at the moment," Duncan said.

Yep, exactly.

Accountability is absolutely essential to success -- in anything. Testing isn't perfect, but it is a good way of measuring academic achievement, and we must measure academic achievement if we are to have accountability. Kudos to the president for recognizing this and supporting a practical approach to improving education.

Then there's the bad news:

Duncan said kids can't afford more delays. After nearly half a century of direct federal involvement in schools, he said, "we are still waiting for the day when every child in America has a high quality education that prepares him or her for the future.

This isn't surprising. From the outset, there was no reason to believe that direct federal involvement in schools would improve things, and good reason to believe it would make things worse. The notion that bureaucrats in Washington have the talent, knowledge, and skills to efficiently manage an enterprise that serves a nation of over 300 million is fundamentally flawed. This is as true of education as any other industry.

Sadly, we now have 50 years of evidence to prove it. Sadder still is that we will ignore the evidence and cling to the irrational idea that if we just do more of the wrong thing the situation will improve.

Same old news is good news

A new charter school study has come out. This one confirms what other studies have shown: charter schools outperform regular public schools. So, nothing new here, but it's important to continue to note the mounting evidence.

Her new study, "How New York City's Charter Schools Affect Achievement," shows that charter students, typically from more disadvantaged families in places like Harlem, perform almost as well as students in affluent suburbs like Scarsdale. Because there are more applicants than spaces, New York admits charter students with a lottery system. The study nullifies any self-selection bias by comparing students who attend charters only with those who applied for admission through the lottery, but did not get in. "Lottery-based studies," notes Ms. Hoxby, "are scientific and more reliable."

According to the study, the most comprehensive of its kind to date, New York charter applicants are more likely than the average New York family to be black, poor and living in homes with adults who possess fewer education credentials. But positive results already begin to emerge by the third grade: The average charter student is scoring 5.8 points higher than his lotteried-out peers in math and 5.3 points higher in English. In grades four through eight, the charter student jumps ahead by 5 more points each year in math and 3.6 points each year in English.

Charter students are also shrinking the learning gap between low-income minorities and more affluent whites. "On average," the report concludes, "a student who attended a charter school for all of the grades kindergarten through eight would close about 86% of the 'Scarsdale-Harlem achievement gap' in math and 66% of the achievement gap in English."

The New York results are not unique. In a separate study, Ms. Hoxby found Chicago's charters performing even better than the Big Apple's. Using the same methodology, other researchers have seen similar results in Boston.

Charters are also a bargain for taxpayers. Nationwide on average, per-pupil spending is 61% that of surrounding public schools.

Teaching kids that race trumps everything

What are these people thinking?

In a year in which hundreds of district teachers received pink slips, meanwhile, TUSD [Tuscon Unified School District] spent thousands on recruiting teachers from out of state. . . .

The recruiting was prompted by what is fast becoming the consuming passion of the TUSD governing board and its allies - to establish a corps of teachers that precisely mirrors the racial make-up of its heavily minority student population.

Unbelievable. I thought the goal was to teach kids that race doesn't matter -- that whole content of the character rather than color of the skin. This does exactly the opposite, sending the clear message that race does matter, that we can't escape it, that we are defined by it. This is pure idiocy.

But it gets worse:

The board is calling for a two-tiered form of student discipline. One for Black and Hispanic students; one for everyone else.

With the goal of creating a "restorative school culture and climate" that conveys a "sense of belonging to all students," the board is insisting that its schools reduce its suspensions and/or expulsions of minority students to the point that the data reflect "no ethnic/racial disparities. . . . "

The board approved creating an "Equity Team" that will oversee the plan to ensure "a commitment to social justice for all students."

The happy-face edu-speak notwithstanding, what the Tucson Unified School District board of governors has approved this summer is a race-based system of discipline.

Offenses by students will be judged, and penalties meted out, depending on the student's hue.

Certainly, from the point of view of a public-school administrator, such a policy is beyond insane.

TUSD principals and disciplinarians (assuming such creatures still exist) are being asked to set two standards of behavior for their students.

Some behavior will be met with strict penalties; some will not. It all depends on the color of the student's skin.

Once again, the clear message that race trumps everything.

It really is getting to the point where it's impossible to imagine something so stupid that no one could possibly consider it. If it's stupid, and you can think of it, someone, somewhere is already doing it.

CBO continues to contradict Obama

And the hits just keep on coming.

Associated Press:

WASHINGTON — Congress' chief budget officer is contradicting President Barack Obama's oft-stated claim that seniors wouldn't see their Medicare benefits cut under a health care overhaul.

The head of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, Douglas Elmendorf, told senators Tuesday that seniors in Medicare's managed care plans would see reduced benefits under a bill in the Finance Committee.

The bill would cut payments to the Medicare Advantage plans by more than $100 billion over 10 years.

Elmendorf said the changes would reduce the extra benefits that would be made available to beneficiaries.

AP to Obama: It's a tax

San Diego Union Tribune:

The president, appearing on ABC News on Sunday morning, discussed his proposal to require everyone to have health insurance that meets government approval:

For us to say that you've got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase. What it's saying is...that we're not going to have other people carrying your burdens for you anymore.

Right now everybody in America, just about, has to get auto insurance,. Nobody considers that a tax increase.

You just can't make up that language and decide that that's called a tax increase.

This is bunk, says The Associated Press, the largest U.S. news-gathering organization and one of the world's leading suppliers of news.

WASHINGTON (AP) - Memo to President Barack Obama: It's a tax. Obama insisted this weekend on national television that requiring people to carry health insurance -- and fining them if they don't -- isn't the same thing as a tax increase. But the language of Democratic bills to revamp the nation's health care system doesn't quibble. Both the House bill and the Senate Finance Committee proposal clearly state that the fines would be a tax.

Social Security collapose to being next year

Ed Morrissey:

Four years ago, George W. Bush attempted to reform the entitlement program Social Security, warning that the system was accelerating into collapse and would soon run deficits. Democrats scoffed and claimed the Social Security system was solid and wouldn’t have problems for at least 50 years, as Harry Reid told PBS’ Jim Lehrer in June 2005. Just last year, the CBO — under the direction of Peter Orszag, now budget director in the Obama administration — claimed that the first cash deficits in Social Security would not come until 2019.

Now, however, the CBO has determined that Social Security will run cash deficits next year and in 2011, and by 2016 will be more or less in permanent deficit mode.

CBO estimates are almost always low, typically by a factor of 10 or more. As I understand it, this is because the CBO is required by law to address only what is in the actual bill and not factor in practical or realistic considerations. In reality, Congress and regulatory agencies mess with things along the way, the end result being nothing like was promised. Given this, it's not surprising that Social Security is in much worse shape than advertised, but this was predictable.

As the article mentions, George Bush warned of looming SS financial troubles and tried to address them, but he got no support from Congress. During the last presidential election, Fred Thompson continually stressed the urgency of fixing SS, but was ignored by the media. They diligently peppered Thompson with questions about "the horse race," even as he expressed frustration at not being allowed to discuss substantive issues.

The lesson is that, when we're told Obamacare will cost between $900,000,000 (per Obama) and $1,600,000,000,000 (per the CBO using Obama's numbers), the actual cost is likely to be in excess of $16,000,000,000,000.

But don't worry. It'll "bend the cost curve down" and "be deficit neutral."

And if you don't believe this, it's because you are a racist who doesn't want to see a black president succeed.

American health care system on par with others

John Tierney, New York Times:

If you’re not rich and you get sick, in which industrialized country are you likely to get the best treatment?

The conventional answer to this question has been: anywhere but the United States. With its many uninsured citizens and its relatively low life expectancy, the United States has been relegated to the bottom of international health scorecards.

But a prominent researcher, Samuel H. Preston, has taken a closer look at the growing body of international data, and he finds no evidence that America’s health care system is to blame for the longevity gap between it and other industrialized countries. In fact, he concludes, the American system in many ways provides superior treatment even when uninsured Americans are included in the analysis. . . .

This longevity gap, Dr. Preston says, is primarily due to the relatively high rates of sickness and death among middle-aged Americans, chiefly from heart disease and cancer. Many of those deaths have been attributed to the health care system, an especially convenient target for those who favor a European alternative.

But there are many more differences between Europe and the United States than just the health care system. Americans are more ethnically diverse. They eat different food. They are fatter. Perhaps most important, they used to be exceptionally heavy smokers. For four decades, until the mid-1980s, per-capita cigarette consumption was higher in the United States (particularly among women) than anywhere else in the developed world. Dr. Preston and other researchers have calculated that if deaths due to smoking were excluded, the United States would rise to the top half of the longevity rankings for developed countries.

Musing: Responsibility

When conservatives talk about responsibility they mean you have a duty to provide for yourself; when liberals talk about responsibility they mean you have a duty to provide for others.

Making teacher evaluation meaningful

Marcus Winters says the way we currently evaluate teachers is useless because it ignores whether students are learning:

In 2007, only 57 percent of fourth graders in New York City and 44 percent of fourth graders in Chicago could claim even basic literacy according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Yet, in the same year, less than 2 percent of New York’s teachers and less than 1 percent of Chicago’s teachers were deemed “unsatisfactory” in their official evaluations. Clearly, something is missing here.

Current public-school evaluation systems do not distinguish between effective and ineffective teachers. We can dramatically improve these systems by thoughtfully incorporating information gained from student performance on standardized tests.

Winters doesn't argue that student achievement should be the sole measurement of teacher performance, but that ignoring it altogether makes the evaluation process meaningless. He puts some of the blame at the feet of teachers unions, who make reasonable reforms "frustratingly difficult." He says teacher observations happen too infrequently and are unreliable since they are usually announced in advance, giving the teacher a chance to stage a performance.

Further, principals are reluctant to rock the boat by publically deeming a teacher “unsatisfactory,” particularly since (1) they can’t remove a tenured teacher, no matter how unsatisfactory his performance, (2) the rarity of the distinction implies the teacher is not only “unsatisfactory” but egregiously incompetent, which is often a stronger message than the principal intends to send, and (3) the principal himself is not directly accountable for the school’s performance, giving him little incentive to enrage his teaching staff by pointing out the poor performance of a colleague.

I've been discussing teacher evaluations with a friend who recently became an administrator. Her school is adopting something called the "three-minute walk-through," the idea of which is to take frequent "snap shots" of what a teacher is doing rather than rely on longer, infrequent observations. I can see the logic behind this, but a scan of the materials they gave her hasn't left me convinced that this is going to make a real difference.

Observations are important. Teachers need accountability as much as anyone else. But observations, even when they aren't stage performances, provide limited information. They can be unreliable, especially when the observer has little motivation to make them meaningful or has no concept of what good teaching looks like.

At bottom, an observation can't tell you whether the kids are learning and, at bottom, that's what really counts.

The scalability of academic success

In a preview of his upcoming book, We are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism, John Derbyshire writes:

As the Thernstroms point out, a lot of these prescriptions for school reform assume an unlimited supply of “saints and masochists” — teachers like those in the KIPPS schools, who, Mr. Tough tells us, work 15 to 16 hours a day. I am sure there are some people who enter the teaching profession with the desire to crunch their way daily across the crack-vial-littered streets of crime-wrecked inner-city neighborhoods in order to put in 15-hour working days, but I doubt there are many.

That’s ed theorists for you. They love to talk about how the top 1 percent of superbly excellent and inspired teachers can lift up the bottom 5 percent of students. That’s interesting in its own way, but not very important as an issue in education. An example of an important issue would be: What can the average or mediocre teacher do for the average or mediocre student? Why is that question never asked? Because here in the Republic of Happy Talk, there is no such thing as an average — let alone mediocre! — student. “Given the opportunity, most people could do most anything.”

Derbyshire is correct. It's easy to point to a successful teacher (e.g. Jaime Escalante), school (KIPP academies), or movement (charter schools) and conclude that the solution to education is to replicate that success on a mass scale. But rarely do we stop and consider whether these things are realistically scalable.

This is what I was getting at yesterday when I posted on the $125,000 teacher experiment. Suppose the experiment is a smashing success. Then what? The reality is that there is limited number of bright, dedicated teachers, and there is certain a limit to how much we afford to spend on them. There are other practical considerations as well, like the enormous resistance from teachers unions for meaningful reform. The charter school movement has hardly taken off, and already the pressure is on to unionize them and force them back into a place that looks very much like where they came from.

So what's the solution? Derbyshire doesn't hint at one, and I admit that I'm also at a loss.

Lately, I've been doing a lot of reading at an education blog called D-Ed Reckoning. KDeRosa, the main blogger there, has a lot of strong and interesting opinions on all of this. From what I gather so far, his (her?) view is that it all comes down to proper instruction techniques. All the other things we hear about, says he -- parental involvement, socio-economic status, class size, teacher dedication, student responsibility, etc. -- play a part, but pale in comparison to whether we are using reliably effective teaching techniques.

In particular, KDeRosa is partial to a program called Direct Instruction, which professes to outperform other approaches in academic studies. Unfortunately, I don't know enough to tell a good study from a bad study, but I'm cautiously impressed by what I've read about DI so far.

If I'm understanding KDeRosa, he believes that DI doesn't require elite teachers and highly dedicated students in an optimal environment. That's intriguing, because if we can get significant results simply by putting proven instruction methods in the hands of average teachers who are teaching average kids, we've solve the scalability problem.

Too good to be true? Yeah, I'm wondering that too.

Considerable quote

"I place economy among the first and most important virtues, and public debt as the greatest dangers to be feared. To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. If we run into such debts, we must be taxed in our meat and drink, in our necessities and in our comforts, in our labor and in our amusements. If we can prevent the government from wasting the labor of the people, under the pretense of caring for them, they will be happy."

~ Thomas Jefferson

$125,000 teachers

Here's an experiment that asks the question: "What what kind of teachers could a school get if it paid them $125,000 a year?"

It's an interesting idea. I'd assume you could get very good teachers, especially if you spent 15 months on a cross-country search looking for them:

The school’s founder, Zeke M. Vanderhoek, 32, a Yale graduate who founded a test prep company, has been grappling with just these issues. Over the past 15 months he conducted a nationwide search that was almost the American Idol of education — minus the popular vote, but complete with hometown visits (Mr. Vanderhoek crisscrossed the country to observe the top 35 applicants in their natural habitats) and misty-eyed fans (like the principal who got so emotional recommending Casey Ash that, Mr. Vanderhoek recalled, she was “basically crying on the phone with me, saying what a treasure he was.”)

So if this works -- if we find out in a year or two that these kids are doing exceptionally well -- what will we have learned?

That if we hand pick the very best and most dedicated teachers our kids will do better? This strikes me as self-evident.

That if we pay teachers two and a half times more than they are getting now we will attract better teachers? This stands to reason, as we'd be able to pull bright, motivated people in from other industries.

I guess my real question is this: If this works, what are the practical implications? What do we do then? Just automatically start pouring billions more dollars into education?

Is it that easy?

I'm sure I don't know.

Failing our future

I thought I blogged about this story some time ago, but when I tried to pull it back up today I couldn't find it. It's about a Goldwater Institute study where they selected 10 random questions from the US citizenship test and gave them to Arizona high school students. Here are the questions that were asked: (Answers can be found at the link above.)

1.What is the supreme law of the land?

2. What do we call the first 10 amendments to the Constitution?

3. What are the two parts of the U.S. Congress?

4. How many Justices are on the Supreme Court?

5. Who wrote the Declaration of Independence?

6. What ocean is on the East Coast of the United States?

7. What are the two major political parties in the United States?

8. We elect a U.S. Senator for how many years?

9 . Who was the first President of the United States?

10. Who is in charge of the Executive Branch?

92.4% of prospective citizens pass this test, meaning they get at least 6 of the 10 questions correct. Sadly, only 3.5% of the high school students were able to pass. The conclusion is obvious: we're not doing our jobs.

Today, I read that the same test was administered to high school kids in Oklahoma. Not to be outdone, Oklahoma's next generation scored a miserable 2.8% passing rate. Again, we're failing our kids.

Now, we can argue about whether it's important to know who wrote the Declaration of Independence or what we call the first 10 amendments to the Constitution, but lets put that aside. The fact remains that these are very basic facts about who we are and where we came from, and no one can deny that all of this information falls well within the material we have charged our schools to impart to our kids.

The motto for Direct Instruction keeps echoing in my head: if the kids haven't learned it, you haven't taught it.

Simple as that.

Update: Diane Senechal:

Ladner concludes, “These kids wouldn’t do much worse if the pollster asked them questions in Sanskrit instead of English.”

According to a binomial distribution calculator, the chances of getting at least 6 out of 10 questions correct (where each question has 4 options) is about 2 percent. So, no, they wouldn’t do much worse in Sanskrit.

Ignoring the best available evidence

In his recent address to Congress, President Obama threw a bone to opponents of Obamacare by promising to set up a pilot program to look at the benefits of tort reform. There are reasons to believe that this was purely a political maneuver, used to give the appearance cooperation without any real intent to follow through. The administration has a track record of canning pilot programs, even when they are shown to be successful. The defunding of the popular D.C. school voucher program is an egregious example. In addition, Obama's promise to address tort reform by launching a pilot program is suspect because it doesn't acknowledge that we've already seen the results of such a pilot program:

Texas passed significant tort reform in 1995, and more reforms have been enacted since then. A 2008 study from the Perryman Group found that perhaps the most visible economic impact of the lawsuit reforms are the benefits experienced by Texans who have better access to high-quality healthcare. Doctors and hospitals are using their liability insurance savings to expand services and initiate innovative programs; those savings have allowed Texas hospitals to expand charity care by 24 percent.

The total impact of tort reforms implemented since 1995 includes gains of $112.5 billion in spending each year as well as almost 499,900 jobs in the state. The fiscal stimulus to the state from judicial reforms is almost a $2.6 billion per year increase in state revenue. In addition, these reforms are responsible for approximately 430,000 individuals having health insurance than would otherwise, and there has been an increase in the number of doctors, particularly in regions which have been facing severe shortages.

In his inaugural address, Obama promised not to let policy trump science, yet his track record has been the opposite. It's been his SOP to ignore the best available evidence and plow ahead with his agenda in spite of it. Indeed, the very principles of Obamacare have been tried and have failed in states like Maine and Massachusetts, yet he continues to insist that these ideas are sound.

It's an open question whether the president is ignorant, disingenuous, or plain stubborn, but it's become clear that he relies more on rhetoric than reality.

First look at the Obama-Baucus bill

We'll be hearing a lot analysis about the so called Obama-Baucus bill in the coming days. I don't like what I'm hearing so far:

To sum up, the Baucus-Obama plan would increase the cost of insurance and then force people to buy it, requiring subsidies. Those subsidies would be paid for by taxes that make health care and thus insurance even more expensive, requiring even more subsidies and still higher taxes. It's a recipe to ruin health care and bankrupt the country, and that's even before liberal Democrats see Mr. Baucus and raise him, and then attempt to ram it all through the Senate.

Speechifier in Chief

John Miller:

President Obama has just released his revised television schedule for the next few days. Tonight he will host a sports bloopers show on Versus, tomorrow he will make a cameo appearance on Nickelodeon's iCarly, and on Friday he will release a series of YouTube videos with that dude who wears the Burger King outfit.

Not gonna happen

According to Investors Business Daily: "45% Of Doctors Would Consider Quitting If Congress Passes Health Care Overhaul."

Total nonsense. I don't believe it for a second.

Is Obama serving Bush's third term?

Tim Lynch:

Yesterday, President Obama’s lawyers informed members of Congress that the president does not want any provision of the Patriot Act to expire. Turns out that Obama wants to have the sweeping powers. This is just the latest example of the cacophony that pervades Washington. When Bush was in the White House, the Dems postured against his runaway spending, his military quagmires, and his constitutional violations. With Obama in the White House, Bush’s most misguided policies either continue or worsen.

Considerable quote

"If you tax people who work and pay people who don't work, you'll have a lot of people not working."

~ Art Laffer

More on "spiraling"

The idiot I quoted in my previous post extolled the virtues of a "spiraling curriculum" called Everyday Math. Immediately after finishing that post, I click over to Kitchen Table Math to read this:

My kids started Everyday Math this year:

My 4th graders Everyday Math homework worksheet:

Find examples of numbers--all kinds of numbers. Look in newspapers and magazines. Look in books. Look on food packages. Ask people for examples.

Write your numbers below. If an adult says you may, cut out the numbers and tape them onto the back of this page.

Be sure to write what your numbers means.

I am sure glad they didn't have her waste time doing multiplication or something.

Just, damn.

The spiral curriculum

Today I learned about the "spiral curriculum."

I kept coming across references to "spiraling" in my reading on project-based learning and direct instruction, and I finally got curious enough to spend an hour on a tangent and look it up. Here's how one teacher, who advocates "spiraling" describes the traditional approach:

The basic idea behind the traditional approach is that the TIME has come for something: fractions, gerunds, state capitals, the Third Law of Thermodynamics - whatever. Because the time has come, we're going to learn it. Maybe that means we're going to memorize it (like with state capitals). Maybe that means we're going to develop a skill with it (like the addition of fractions with like denominators). Maybe that means we're going to grasp how it affects us. But whatever it means, the time is NOW - for EVERYONE. We're going to work on it for a while. The kids are going to learn it NOW. And then we're going to move on to the next thing that the time has come for...

Okay, he's obviously mocking the traditional approach a bit here, but the concept is familiar enough: you teach an idea or skill, then you have the students practice that idea or skill until they're good at it. This makes plenty of sense to me. Indeed, it's how I learned most things, from math to English, from basketball to the trumpet.

Here's how the teacher describes "spiraling:"

In contrast, a spiral curriculum begins with the assumption that children are not always ready to learn something. Readiness to learn is at the core of a spiral curriculum. And instead of focusing for relatively long periods of time on some narrow topic whose time has come, a spiral curriculum tries to expose students to a wide varies of ideas over and over ago. For a select few, the time for gerunds and infinitives has already arrived by the second grade. And for a few, algebra and geometry make perfect sense by grade three. A spiral curriculum, by moving in a circular pattern from topic to topic within a field like, say, math, seeks to catch kids when they first become ready to learn something and pick up the other kids, the ones not ready to learn yet, later - the next time we spiral around to that topic.

This description is obviously intended to sell me on the idea of "spiraling," but I'm immediately seeing a lot of red flags. For starters, as soon as I read the bit about children not being ready to learn, I'm thinking this is going to become an excuse for not teaching them. I just know that when a student doesn't get it, the tendency is going to be for the teacher to say, she just wasn't ready yet, but she'll pick it up the next time around. But what if that isn't the problem? What if the problem is that you didn't teach the lesson well? What if the problem is that the student didn't get enough practice? You're never going to figure that out if your attitude is that the student just wasn't ready. What if the student actually learned the wrong lesson? She's going to be carrying around incorrect information or bad habits until the next time this particularly topic "spirals" around. You've just wasted everyone's time, or worse.

It is with math that I became involved in a spiral curriculum. My school district began recently implementing a curriculum developed at the University of Chicago called Everyday Math. From the very early grades students are introduced to ideas from algebra, geometry, statistics, measurement, patterns, and so on. The challenge for the teacher? Simple: stay on track. The first time you try and explain what a variable is, NO ONE gets it. You spend the day that the book says to on it and you MOVE ON.

Think about that: You spend the day. And no one gets it. And the teacher's challenge? To move on.

And THAT is HARD for someone from a traditional background. Looking at a group of kids and saying, "No one understood. Some of them will get it next time..." is hard for someone from a traditional teaching background. But there will be a next time. And a next time after that. So if Billy or Suzie isn't ready for converting improper fractions to mixed numbers this week, RIGHT NOW, that's okay.

You're damned right that's hard for someone with a traditional background. That's because they care about actually teaching the poor kids.

But don't worry.

That's okay.

Because there will be a next time. And a next time after that.

And after that?

Pure educational malpractice. This guy shouldn't be let anywhere near a kid.

Considerable quote

"A Democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A Democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every Democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship."

~ Alexander Fraser Tyler

The paper of liberal record

As I noted previously, Mark Levin's Liberty and Tyranny has enjoyed huge success despite being ignored by the liberal media. Today I read that a million copies have been sold, and still there's not been a single review of it in either the New York Times or Washington Post.

Odd, that.

Friends like this...

As an opponent of Obamacare I suppose I should be encouraged that Olympia Snowe has announced that she won't back the Baucus bill. This is the bill that attempts, through compromise, to bring a few soft Republicans on board with Obama's health care reforms without losing the support of the hard Left. But it's difficult to feel optimistic about such developments when I read things like this:

Snowe said she is also concerned with whether Baucus’s bill will do enough to make health insurance more affordable. Snowe and Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) have repeatedly pushed fellow negotiators on the Finance panel to increase subsidies for low-income and uninsured Americans.

Snowe has objected to Baucus’s bill for requiring as many as 4 million uninsured Americans to buy health plans without providing them with significant federal subsidies.

It seems that, for Snowe, affordable doesn't mean cheaper, as in "bending the cost curve down." It means mandates and subsidies, where Americans are forced to buy health insurance, and other Americans are forced to pay more to cover the increased cost.

Less freedom and more taxes -- sounds like a conservative to me!

I look for Snowe to jump back on board as soon as she gets assurances that the bill will extract enough taxpayer money to pay for the freedoms she's willing to strip away.

I don't want people like this "on my side."

Educational myth: learning styles

You're probably familiar with the concept of learning styles, the idea that different people learn differently. Some learn best by seeing, others by listening, still others by doing or touching. Teachers across the nation are implored to identify their students' learning styles and modify instruction to accommodate them. Unfortunately, according to the research, this is a huge waste of time.

Cognitive scientist, Daniel Willingham puts it this way:

It doesn’t work.

It doesn't work--not only for the visual-auditory-kinesthetic theory, but for many other learning styles theories that have been proposed and tested since the 1940s.

Researchers have been conducting experiments on learning styles for 50 years. They’ve been tested with the sorts of materials that kids encounter in schools. They’ve been tested with kids diagnosed with a learning disability.

There just doesn’t seem to be much evidence that kids learn in fundamentally different ways.

Like many educational ideas, learning styles seem to make sense. But this shows that our impressions aren't always the best indicator of what will work. This is why it's vital that instructional techniques be rigorously tested before we invest time, money, and kids' lives in them.

Too often, we buy into some theory some PhD is pushing as the latest, greatest "solution" to our education woes (e.g. bilingual education). And too often, the research on that theory is shoddy or nonexistent. You'd think that educators would have the inside track on conducting and interpreting scholarly research and academic studies, but the more I read the more disappointed I am by the lack of rigor in the field.

[via Joanne Jacobs]

Is taxation moral?

Dennis Prager takes on the moral arguments surrounding taxation:

The very notion of an income tax is morally debatable. On what moral grounds can the state force a citizen essentially at gunpoint to give away his legally and morally earned money? Why isn't taxation a form of legalized stealing? The obvious answer is that common sense dictates that citizens have the moral right, even the moral obligation, to vote to give money to, at the very least, enable a government to fund a police force, sustain a national defense, and help those incapable of helping themselves or of being helped by others. <

But at some point beyond that, taxation becomes nothing more than legalized stealing. Obviously, people will differ over where exactly that point is, but no rational person disputes that such a point exists. No one could argue that a 100 percent tax -- even if it paid for every need every member of the society had -- was moral and not simply a form of theft.

Prager goes on to isolate six specific moral arguments against high taxes.

The union's humble servant

"I am proud and humbled to be your humble servant as labor secretary," she said humbly.

"She" is Secretary of Labor Hilda Scolls, and the "your" she serves is the AFL-CIO.

It strikes me as unfair and unsavory that the federal government should have such an intimate relationship with labor unions. According to Wikipedia, the United States Department of Labor oversees "occupational safety, wage and hour standards, unemployment insurance benefits, re-employment services, and some economic statistics." In other words, with the exception of collecting statistics, the Labor Department exists to protect workers (mostly union workers) from their employers. I think this is unfair and unhealthy.

Calvin Coolidge said, "The man who builds a factory builds a temple, that the man who works there worships there, and to each is due, not scorn and blame, but reverence and praise." I think Coolidge has it right. The employer-employee relationship is a symbiotic, not an adversarial, one. Each benefits the other. It's a win-win.

When billions of government dollars, in addition to millions more union dollars, are set aside to favor one side against the other, it creates a hostile atmosphere. It upsets the natural balance and rigs the game. When you rig a win-win game, everyone loses. In this case, when we force employers, for example, to pay a wage or provide a benefit that is higher than the parties would arrive at without government interference, the employer responds by hiring fewer workers and by increasing prices to cover the added cost of labor. When prices go up, workers, who are also consumers, get hurt. Those who are unemployed because of the artificial hike in wages are especially hurt.

There's no question that our system tips the playing field in favor of labor. Workers are free to organize and conspire, even across industries, while employers are expressly forbidden by "anti-trust" laws from doing the same. This leads to damaging, unintended consequences, as we've seen in the auto industry, where the United Auto Workers have succeeded in securing contracts for their workers which are unsustainable and are a large reason why American car companies are in such bad shape. It's no coincidence that the failing companies are union-dominated companies.

Now, liberals are trying to rig the game even more. Democrats have begun pushing legislation misleadingly called the "Employee Free Choice Act." This act undercuts the use of a secret ballot to determine whether a workplace will be unionized. No longer protected by the secret ballot, workers will be forced to declare openly, quite likely under intimidation, their support for unionization. It's easy to see how this invites corruption into the process, and difficult to see how taking away the secret ballot offers a worker "free choice." It's telling that the legislation tosses aside the vote to create a union but still requires a vote to dissolve one. I guess "free choice" only works one way.

Another requirement of the EFCA is that if labor and management can't reach a contract within a specified time period, they would be forced into binding arbitration. The danger here is that this binding arbitration will be conducted by the Department of Labor. This creates a huge incentive for a union to simply stall negotiations until the clock has run out, at which time the DoL will step in and mandate a labor-friendly contract. For there can be no reasonable pretense or expectation that a department whose job it is to favor one side will render a fair outcome.

One is left to wonder how many other industries will ultimately fail due to the government taking sides and converting a win-win into an everybody-loses.

Update: Some good news:

Meeting with reporters, [Senator Arlen] Specter said the [labor bill] compromise would drop a controversial provision ["card check"] that would give workers the right to form unions by signing cards instead of holding a secret ballot election.

Followed by bad news:

But union leaders now indicate they are willing to drop the "card check" demands in favor of other provisions that would help unions fill their depleted ranks.

Wonder what they're up to now. One thing's made clear by this: This was never about giving workers free choice. It was about taking away their voting rights so that unions could "fill their depleted ranks."

The poltics of counting

Charlie Martin takes a crack at estimating the size of the 9/12 march on Washington. His conclusion: "probably well more than 850,000 in the crowd."

Perhaps more interesting than the actual count is this:

The National Park Service actually has a methodology for crowd estimation; they just were forbidden by Congress from using it after the Million Man March came out to be less than half a million. That restriction mysteriously disappeared for the Obama inauguration, and USA Today published a useful article on it.

Double standard?

Congressman Joe Wilson has been criticized, rightly, I believe, for calling Obama a liar on the floor of the Senate. Gateway Pundit has a video of Congressman Pete Stark similarly calling Bush a liar on the floor of the Senate. Apparently, the Stark incident didn't draw nearly the outrage that Wilson's boorish behavior did. Funny, that.

Much worse than Stark's accusing Bush of lying, however, is his suggestion that we're sending innocent kids to Iraq "to get their heads blown off for the President's amusement."

Think any of the Democrats calling for Wilson to be disciplined made similar calls to discipline Stark for his outrageous remarks?

Nah, me neither.

What if there were no heath insurance?

Thomas Sowell remembers a time when most Americans didn't have health insurance:

There was a time, within living memory, when most Americans did not have health insurance-- and it was not the end of the world, as so many in politics and the media seem to be depicting it today.

As someone who lived through that era, and who spent decades without medical insurance, I find it hard to be panicked and stampeded into bigger and worse problems because some people do not have medical insurance, including many who could afford it if they chose to.

What did we do, back during the years when most Americans had no medical insurance? I did what most people did. I depended on a "single payer"-- myself. When I didn't have the money, I paid off my medical bills in installments.

The birth of my first child was not covered by medical insurance. I paid off the bill, month by month, until the time finally came when I could tell my wife that the baby was now ours, free and clear.

In a country where everything imaginable is bought and paid for on credit, why is it suddenly a national crisis if some people cannot pay cash up front for medical treatment?

That is not the best way to do things for all people and all medical treatments, which is why most Americans today choose to have medical insurance. But millions of other people choose not to-- often young and healthy people, sometimes deadbeats who use emergency rooms and don't pay at all.

Is this ideal? No. But if every deviation from the ideal is a reason to be panicked and stampeded into putting dangerous arbitrary powers into the hands of government, then go directly to totalitarianism, do not pass "Go", do not collect $200.

The many lies about Obamacare

I'll quote George Will via Betsy's Page, since she's already isolated the key passage:

He [Obama] says America's health-care system is going to wrack and ruin and requires root-and-branch reform—but that if you like your health care (as a large majority of Americans do), nothing will change for you. His slippery new formulation is that nothing in his plan will "require" anyone to change coverage. He used to say, "If you like your health-care plan, you'll be able to keep your health-care plan, period." He had to stop saying that because various disinterested analysts agree that his plan will give many employers incentives to stop providing coverage for employees.

He deplores "scare tactics" but says that unless he gets his way, people will die. He praises temperate discourse but says many of his opponents are liars. He says Medicare is an exemplary program that validates government's prowess at running health systems. But he also says Medicare is unsustainable and going broke, and that he will pay for much of his reforms by eliminating the hundreds of billions of dollars of waste and fraud in this paragon of a program, and in Medicaid. He says Congress will cut Medicare (it will not) by $500 billion—without affecting benefits.

He says the nation's economic health depends on controlling health-care costs. Yet so important is the trial bar in financing the Democratic Party, he says not a syllable in significant and specific support of tort reforms that could save hundreds of billions of dollars by reducing "defensive medicine" intended to protect not patients from illnesses but doctors from lawyers. He has said he will not add a dime to the deficit when bringing 47 million people into government-guaranteed health care. But Wednesday night, 17 million went missing: "There are now more than 30 million American citizens who cannot get coverage." Almost 10 million of the uninsured are not citizens, and most of them are illegal immigrants. Presumably the other 7 million could get insurance but chose not to. Democrats propose fines to eliminate that choice. He suggests health-insurance companies are making excessive profits. But since 1996, profits of the six such companies in the S&P 500 have been below the 500's average.

Most of this is old news to anyone who has been paying attention. Unfortunately, millions of Americans still aren't paying attention. They catch a clip of an Obama speech on health care --there have been 123 of them, according to Will -- and he just sounds so reasonable and practical. But under even a cursory examination all the reasonableness and practicality melt away, and you're left with false premises, nonsequitors, inconsistencies, and outright lies.

This isn't a battle of ideas anymore. It's a race to see if those who have done their homework can expose the emperor's clothes before he sells the nation on his new fashion line.

Talk about tone deaf

Am I hallucinating, or did I just hear David Axelrod, Obama's top political advisor, say on national TV that we shouldn't be "distracted" by the million plus people that gathered in Washington to protest big government over the weekend?

Just, wow.

Misleading headline?

The headline of a recent Rasmussen report reads: "Health Care Reform:

Support for Health Care Reform Jumps to 51%, Highest Total Yet."

I found this lead interesting given the explanation that follows:

Fifty-one percent (51%) of all voters nationwide now favor the plan while 46% are opposed. In June, as the public debate was just beginning, 50% favored the plan and 45% were opposed.

So support for the plan was 50% in June and now it is 51%. Given that the margin of error is 3%, how can it be correct to say that anything's changed, let along "jumped?" And in any event, does a 1% increase constitute a "jump?"

I also notice that opposition for the plan "jumped" by 1% as well, to 45% in June to 46% in the recent survey. Presumably that didn't make the headline because opposition was as high as 53% at one point. Fair enough.

Then there's this:

Still, the intensity gap continues to favor those who oppose the plan. Currently, 28% Strongly Favor the proposed reform while 38% are Strongly Opposed. (see day-by-day numbers). In late August, 23% were strongly in favor of the plan and 43% were strongly opposed.

So the "intensity gap" has closed considerably. At the end of August, those who strongly oppose outnumbered those who strong favor by 20%. That margin is now down to 10%, cut in half in just a couple of weeks. That seems like a much bigger, and more significant "jump" than the 1% noted in the headline.

Oh well. They're the experts.

Educational success in the inner city

Mark Hemmingway reviews Crazy Like a Fox: One Principal's Triumph in the Inner City.

Chavis sounds like a real character, probably not someone I'd enjoy being around. But he made a huge difference in student achievement and that should be examined and emulated.

The Left seems to embrace these kinds of raucous, speak-truth-to-power types when they agree with the message, but not so much when the tables are turned. I'm not big on the incendiary language myself. It gives people who disagree a reason to tune you out, and the work Chavis has done here should be tuned into.

That he's done it by discarding progressive methodologies and falling back on "old school" practices may make some uncomfortable, but results are results. It's time to get the politics out of education and adopt practices that are proven to work.

My recent reading about project-based learning has got me questioning how scientifically rigorous some of our teaching methods are. My impression is of a lot of theory being throw into classrooms based on weak empirical support. On the other hand, programs like Direct Instruction, which appear to be backed by more solid evidence, don't seem to be getting as much attention.

This is just another reason to get government out of education. Everything the government does is driven by politics. Seems to me that opening education up more to the private sector would take a lot of the politics out of it. If given real choice in where they send their kids to school, parents will eschew politics in favor of results. We'd quickly find out which methods work and which do not.