Republans are more politically aware than Democrats

According to recent Pew polls, Republicans are more politically knowledgeable than Democrats. I wonder if these results would be the same if Republicans controlled both the White House and Congress. People tend to pay more attention to negatives than positives, and things look a lot more negative when the other guy is in power.

Obama has no commitment to choice and competition

QandO's Bruce McQuain notes that while President Obama claims to be a champion of choice and competition to improve our health care system, he abandons those principles when it comes to education--specifically in the instance of the popular D.C. voucher program. The result:

After embracing the teachers unions’ anti-voucher stance, the president now finds himself in the uncomfortable and awkward position of denying students access to a program that has strong bipartisan, local support, and that multiple studies say is helping poor African-American children succeed.

The truth is that Obama values nether choice nor competition, but only the advancement of his agenda. He uses free market rhetoric to hock Obamacare, but the specifics of his plan have the effect of decreasing both choice and competition, as he wants to dictate precisely what kind of policies are available, by whom, and at what cost. If he was at all interested in a real free market approach he would be acting to allow health insurance to be sold across state lines, and removing restrictions on the shapes, sizes, and costs of premiums companies are allowed to offer.

The press should be calling him on his lack of truth in advertising. They aren't.

Evidence of gender differences

I've always thought it obvious that men and women differ in fundamental ways, both physical and non-physical. Scientists have been documenting differences in the way our brains are built and work for quite some time. Now this [via Kathryn Jean Lopez]:

In all likelihood, we’d have a better H1N1 vaccine — and more of it — if in our preparations we had accounted for the biological differences between men and women. . . .

Many clinical studies have shown that men and women differ in their responses to several viral vaccines. A recent study demonstrated that women produce as many antibodies in response to a half dose of the seasonal flu vaccine as men make in response to a full dose. Other studies have revealed similar sex differences in response to vaccines for yellow fever virus, measles, mumps and rubella, hepatitis A and B viruses and herpes simplex virus.

Whether vaccines work differently in males than in females is not known. Clearly, more research on sex-dependent immune responses is needed.

Update: On the other hand, there's this:

In her book about gender, Eliot describes a study of 11-month-olds asked to crawl down a carpeted slope. “The moms pushed a button to change the slope’s angle based on what they thought their children could handle. And then the babies were tested to see how steep a slope they could navigate.”

Girls and boys proved equally adept at crawling and risk-taking: On their own, they tried and conquered the same slopes. But the mothers of the girls — unlike the mothers of the boys — underestimated their daughters’ aptitude by a significant margin.

“Sex differences in the brain are sexy,” Eliot writes. And so we tend to notice them everywhere. “But there’s enormous danger,” she says, in our exaggeration. It leads us to see gender, beginning at an early age, only in terms of what we expect to see, and to assume that sex differences are innate and immutable. . . .

Our assumptions “crystallize into children’s self-perceptions and self-fulfilling prophecies.” Girls’ slightly lesser interest in puzzles and building toys is reinforced instead of challenged, and it turns into a gap in spatial skills and map reading. Parents and teachers see a boy lagging in reading and verbal skills and shrug it off with, “But of course, he’s a boy.”

The sexist in me wonders if dads would have done any better at estimating the degree of slope their little ones could handle.

Recommended reading

Sol Stern has a very interesting piece at City Journal discussing educational philosophy in general and reading comprehension specifically. Stern champions the work of E. D. Hirsch, Jr. and spotlights the achievements of his work as implemented in Massachusetts. This article supports a lot of what I've been reading recently at D-Ed Reckoning, where it is frequently argued that higher level skills -- such things as reading comprehension, problem solving, and critical thinking -- cannot be taught independent of robust content. The case is also well made by cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham in a recent Washington Post piece.

Good stuff all around. Maybe there's some hope on the horizon for our education system.

Dem po' black folks just don't know what's good fer 'em

I read on Betsy's Page that Kinston, North Carolina has voted to make it's local elections non-partisan, but the Obama justice department has overruled the will of the majority, stating that "Removing the partisan cue in municipal elections will, in all likelihood, eliminate the single factor that allows black candidates to be elected to office."

How insulting is that? Apparently, Blacks can't be elected on their ideas and qualifications. They need to have a little "D" after their names so that (presumably) other Blacks will have a "cue" as to who they should vote for.

It's outrageous that the feds have the authority to override a local election. Apparently, they can do so due to an artifact of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. This act needs to be amended to make Washington mind it's own business.

It's even more outrageous given that the proposal "won a majority in seven of the city's nine black-majority voting precincts and both of its white-majority precincts." I guess those po' Black folks just don't know what's good for them. They need Big Government to think for them and tell them what's what. This is disgustingly insulting and racist.

So much for Obama being the "post-racial president."

Wishing the undertow would stop

My ever-present depression has been more present than ever during the past week or so. It does that from time to time. I'll be coping, doing my little dog paddle and mostly keeping my head above water. Then suddenly, for no apparent reason, I'm battling high seas and huge breakers. It doesn't take much to pull me under and keep me there, and so I've spent a week tucked in a tight fetal position, sucking down salt water while getting pounded against the jagged rocks.

I've learned from experience that eventually the sea will calm and I'll float back to the surface. Knowing that helps. On the other hand, knowing that resurfacing simply means a return to coping mode and the maddening dog paddle doesn't help. Me, at my best, simply isn't much to look forward to.

I try to remind myself daily of the blessings I have, and I do have them: I live with people who care about me, in a decent house in a decent neighborhood, in a beautiful state in the best country in the history of the world. That, too, helps. But not much, or at least not often enough. The thing is, depression is a result of internal, not external, circumstances. It's my brain that's messed up, not my surroundings.

A blind man's vision isn't improved by his knowledge of the beautiful trees and flowers that surround him. Nor is my disposition remedied by counting my blessings. Indeed, it is made worse by knowing that the very things I should feel grateful for fail to move me.

Still, I fight the good fight, even while I question whether it is indeed good or worth fighting for. And I can't say I understand why I continue to do it. The only thing that occurs to me is that I am a coward, unwilling to give up, not out of strength of character or resolve of will, but out of fear. I have contemplated surrendering my life since I was thirteen. I am still alive today, not because of a desire to live, but because I fear both dying and death.

50 example of government waste

From the Heritage Foundation: 50 Examples of Government Waste

Charter schools: it all depends what we do next

Bryan and Emily Hassel use a spaghetti sauce analogy to make an important point about charter schools:

Say you set out to improve your mother’s beloved spaghetti sauce recipe (treading on even more sacred ground than public education!) You try ten different variations. Despite your best efforts, three are worse than the original. Five are no better, but two are markedly superior. On average, the new batches are a little worse than your mom’s. But—would you say your experiment was a failure, or a success?

It really depends on what you do next. It’s a failure if, the next ten times you make spaghetti, you cook the same 10 trial recipes. But what if instead you avoid the eight bad and OK recipes, make more of the two good ones, and try more new recipes that build on the ones that pleased your palate? Your average experiment in round 1 was a “failure,” but your average meal going forward is going to be pretty tasty.

And so it is with charters. If mixed results means we ignore what we've learned and plow ahead blindly, we'll continue to get mixed results. If, instead, we learn to emulate what works, education will improve.

The Hassels refer to a recent study by Caroline Hoxby, which has gotten some attention in the media. Some of the more important lessons of the study have gone under-reported, however. Yes, Hoxby shows that charter kids do better than their non-charter counterparts. That's important. But also important is that Hoxby identifies those policies which appear to be responsible for the success of those charter schools:

We are confident that the following policies are associated with charter schools' having more positive effects on students' achievement:

• a long school year;
• a greater number of minutes devoted to English during each school day;
• a small rewards/small penalties disciplinary policy;
• teacher pay based somewhat on performance or duties, as opposed to a traditional pay scale based strictly on seniority and credentials;
• a mission statement that emphasizes academic performance, as opposed to other goals.

This isn't the holy grail, of course. There is no guarantee that we can turn around a struggling school simply by popping these policies into place. But it's a start. The data suggest that these things make a difference, so we should implement them as we move forward in identifying other effective policies.

As an aside, the Hoxby study concludes that a long school year is the policy most strongly associated with success in the schools looked at. I read today that President Obama is butting heads with the teachers unions over just this policy; the unions absolutely oppose the idea. With the usual caveats about my wanting the federal government to get the hell out of the education business, kudos to Obama for being on the right side of this issue and for standing up against those who butter his bread. I'm skeptical that any good will come from this, but I have to give credit where credit is due.

The wages of minimum wage

Decades of empirical evidence have shown that minimum wage laws make things worse, especially on the people they are intended to help, yet Congress continues to ignore the studies and vote to hike the minimum wage even higher.

Yesterday's September labor market report was lousy by any measure, with 263,000 lost jobs and the jobless rate climbing to 9.8%. But for one group of Americans it was especially awful: the least skilled, especially young workers. Washington will deny the reality, and the media won't make the connection, but one reason for these job losses is the rising minimum wage.

Earlier this year, economist David Neumark of the University of California, Irvine, wrote on these pages that the 70-cent-an-hour increase in the minimum wage would cost some 300,000 jobs. Sure enough, the mandated increase to $7.25 took effect in July, and right on cue the August and September jobless numbers confirm the rapid disappearance of jobs for teenagers.

The September teen unemployment rate hit 25.9%, the highest rate since World War II and up from 23.8% in July. Some 330,000 teen jobs have vanished in two months. Hardest hit of all: black male teens, whose unemployment rate shot up to a catastrophic 50.4%. It was merely a terrible 39.2% in July. . . .

Congress and the Obama Administration simply ignore the economic consensus that has long linked higher minimum wages with higher unemployment. Two years ago Mr. Neumark and William Wascher, a Federal Reserve economist, reviewed more than 100 academic studies on the impact of the minimum wage. They found "overwhelming" evidence that the least skilled and the young suffer a loss of employment when the minimum wage is increased. Whatever happened to President Obama's pledge to follow the science? Democrats prefer to cite a few outlier studies known to be methodologically flawed.

Unemployment update.

Innocent Bystanders has an update of "the graph," which shows that unemployment is now far worse than Obama warned it would be if we hadn't passed his massive "stimulus" bill.

This isn't the change I was hoping for.

"Rubber rooms" at the US Postal Service

First we heard of the "rubber rooms" in the New York school system. Now we hear that the US Postal Service has its own version of "rubber rooms."

The U.S. Postal Service, struggling with a massive deficit caused by plummeting mail volume, spends more than a million dollars each week to pay thousands of employees to sit in empty rooms and do nothing.

It’s a practice called “standby time,” and it has existed for years — but postal employees say it was rarely used until this year. Now, postal officials say, the agency is averaging about 45,000 hours of standby time every week — the equivalent of having 1,125 full-time employees sitting idle, at a cost of more than $50 million per year.

Tell me again why we want these guys in charge of our health care.

[via Besty's Page]