Something else that shouldn't surprise people but probably will

I suspect Seyward Darby spoke for a lot of people on the left when she admitted growing disenchanted with Michelle Rhee (despite Rhee's remarkably consistent educational philosophy). Rhee was, of course, part of the Adrian Fenty administration in D.C. and Darby and the New Republic were big supporters, endorsing him in 2010 with the headline, "Why the fate of education reform rides on the D.C. mayoral race."

TNR's editors might be rethinking that support now:

Speaking on Morning Joe Tuesday morning, Fenty -- whose term in office was marked by battles with organized labor in the city, especially the teacher's union -- said that Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) was "right on the substance" and "right on the politics" when it came to the fight with unions and their supporters in the Badger State.

"I think it's a new day," Fenty said. "I think a lot of these collective bargaining agreements are completely outdated."

Having made fun of Paul Krugman's puns, there's no way I can use the title "Darby's Rhee Lapse"

From the New Republic's Seyward Darby:

The mantra goes, “You either love or hate Michelle Rhee.” In the education world, there is no figure as polarizing as the former chancellor of Washington, D.C.’s public schools, who famously warred with the city’s teachers’ union and left abruptly when her boss, Mayor Adrian Fenty, lost reelection last year. Since then, she has started an organization called StudentsFirst to push for education reform nationwide. She announced the group in a Newsweek cover story, and it raised more than $700,000 in its first week. Andrew Rotherham, an education policy expert, told me, “Do people say, ‘I [am] kind of uncertain about Michelle Rhee’? No way.”

Count me, then, as one of the uncertain few. To be sure, I am generally a fan of Rhee. The world of liberal education policy consists, more or less, of two factions: reformers, who support performance pay, charter schools, and weakening seniority-based job protections for teachers; and opponents of these ideas, who are often allied with teachers’ unions. Like most reformers, I greatly admired Rhee’s tenure in D.C., in which she closed failing schools, fired underperforming teachers, and helped raise student achievement.

But, in reading about Rhee’s recent moves, I’ve felt a nagging sense of disappointment. She is now advising several conservative governors who line up with reformers on certain issues but whose commitment to public education is questionable. Meanwhile, she hasn’t offered robust answers to some of the thorniest matters facing education policymakers. Last week, I put these challenges to Rhee directly. And I came out of our conversation much as I went in: with decidedly mixed feelings about her vision for the education-reform movement.

I have long had decidedly mixed feeling about Seyward Darby (as you can see for yourself with a quick keyword search). Her reporting and analysis of the education reform movement has been, to put it simply, bad (better than Chait's but still bad). She was overly eager to accept the movement's preferred narrative, credulous about its claims, negligent about digging into the research that called these claims into question, and dismissive of those on the other side.

That last trait is still on display even now with the weasel-worded "more or less, of two factions... opponents of these ideas, who are often allied with teachers’ unions." The implication here is that the opponents are shilling for the unions. I don't know the alliances of everyone out there but I can tell you that I'm not allied with the unions (I never even bothered to join one when I was a teacher), nor is Joseph, nor is David Warsh, nor, to my knowledge are most of the people in my corner of the blogosphere. In my experience, it would have been more accurate to say "opponents who question the evidence presented by the reformers."

But there was no question in my mind that Darby is an intelligent, competent and basically honest journalist and that eventually the internal contradictions would start to get to her. One of the ways that people deal with cognitive dissonance is by convincing themselves that things have changed. Rather than question their original assessment and reaction, they convince themselves that they were right then but they are taking the opposite position now because things are different.

Michelle Rhee hasn't changed. She is constant as the northern star. Every point on her career trajectory is collinear. Those who didn't see her current incarnation coming either weren't paying attention or weren't being honest with themselves.

The rest of Darby's article is behind a paywall and I haven't had a chance to look at it. Perhaps something in the piece will invalidate something I've said here. If so let me know and I'll gladly make the appropriate retractions.

Credit where credit is due

Seyward Darby has a thoughtful and balanced piece on education in today's New Republic. Here's the conclusion:

But, even when better evaluation methods exist, is it really a good idea to publish, en masse, the ratings of every public school teacher? I’m not convinced. Yes, the information should be available to those in the public who want it—namely parents. But schools or school districts, not newspapers, should share it with parents in a constructive manner, so that they are able to ask questions and understand fully what the information means. Teachers’ unions and districts should also use it to remove underperforming instructors from their jobs, and to ensure that no school has a high concentration of ineffective teachers, such that its student are getting the short end of the stick. And teachers should use it either to ask for additional training resources—or to gain recognition of the good, hard work that they’ve done.

I’m all for transparency. But a wide-open view of incomplete information isn’t what we need to improve education. What’s more, broadly publicizing even the most thorough of information isn’t always productive; complexities and nuances are often best conveyed in smaller settings, with the stakeholders who matter most.

The media shouldn’t focus on shaming individual teachers, because there are bigger fish to fry. Indeed, across the country, they should focus on shaming the entrenched bodies, structures, and policies that allow poor teaching to continue unchecked, fail to reward good teaching, and don’t provide enough support for teachers who want to improve their skills.

I don't agree with everything Darby says here and there are omissions that bother me (relying on Kyle Spencer's reporting probably didn't help). On the whole, though, this is an entirely reasonable piece of analysis. I complained earlier that there wasn't really an education debate in this country. Perhaps we're about to start one.

Education Reform

I want to very quickly return to first principles. When Mark and I began discussing tenure reform, it was in the context of a "crisis" in education. This terminology continues to this day.

However, the real impact of recent news is that proposed reforms don’t have the potential to make immediate and dramatic improvements in education outcomes. Why does this matter?

Because if there is an incipient crisis and known strategies can directly address them then it would be grossly unethical not to try and address this in the fastest way possible. However, if there is not an immediate crisis the correct way forward is one that addresses all of the stakeholders and not radical top-down driven reform. In other words, Baltimore and not Washington, DC.

In the long run educational reform may be inevitable and positive. One of our well versed commentators (Stuart Buck) opined about the evidence:

It's consistent with any number of stories, including increased quality of teaching, better curriculum, finding a better fit for each individual students (some do better in a smaller school, for example), and the factors that you mention.

In my view, this suggests that we are going to experiment with news modes of education. After all, many people who I respect are strongly advocating for experimenting further with education reform (Jon Chait, Megan McArdle, Matt Yglesias, Alex Tabarrok come immediately to mind).

So why are there concerns about the process by which educational reform is occurring? Because, the discussion began with a question of where to allocate resources. Seyward Darby was arguing that we needed to accept teacher layoffs as part of the price if educational reform:

The president's beef is with a provision to prevent teacher layoffs, which Democrats tacked onto the bill along with several other domestic priorities. To pay for the measure, the House agreed to cut money from some of the president's key education reform initiatives. Obama isn't happy about it. Nor should he be.

Now, if there is a real and immediate crisis in education than, of course, dramatic measures can make sense. But is this really the time to spark a round of teacher layoffs in order to make slow improvements in who decides to apply for teaching jobs? Maybe, but it seems naive to think that we should fuel the testing of educational reform with layoffs at this precise moment. Readers of Felix Salmon may remember this week's jobs report:

Meanwhile, as the school year begins, we have this:

Employment in local government decreased by 76,000 in September with job losses in both education and noneducation.

As states and municipalities around the nation start running out of money, they’re going to fire people; this is only the beginning. And if October is any indication, the job losses in the local government sector are going to be at least as big as the job gains in the private sector.

So the real issue is whether this is the time for radical teacher employment restructuring -- should we lay off teachers to test educational reform? We do have a duty to the future but we also have a duty to the current students as well. The conversation would be different if the net resources for education were increasing but claiming that education is a priority in the midst of layoffs due to lack of funding seems disingenuous.

My interest in this subject grew from two arguments in the blogosphere. One, that the crisis in educational was so bad that the state should massively break contracts without cause. Notice that in cases like AIG and TARP, we were willing to spend a lot of money as a society to preserve financial contracts. Two, that reform has likely to be so important that teacher lay-offs in the midst of a recession were an acceptable sacrifice as the students would be better off.

If we don't accept that there is an immediate crisis then we can still move forward. But then it becomes an American-style bottom-up reform and not a Soviet-style top down reform. I like the Baltimore example -- specific communities negotiating ways to respond to the crisis and continuing to try ways to create a better future for their children. The result of a thousand experiments with engaged communities could very well result in a far better educational system in the long run.

And I think that is a good outcome.

Was I too tough on Seyward Darby?

We've recently had a huge uptick in viewers. This is great (and I'm tremendously appreciative), but I do have to remind myself most of the people in the room walked in on the middle of the conversation.

If you do a keyword search, you would see we've been hammering away at Ms. Darby for a long time and you might get the impression that we are trying to depict her as the mad relative chained up in the New Republic's attic. We're not and she isn't. (TNR's attic position was filled long before she got there.)

Ms. Darby, a talented and well-qualified journalist, takes the brunt of the criticism because she writes the bulk of TNR's articles on education, not because those articles deviate from the magazine's position on, well, anything.

The indispensable Jonathan Cohn has handed his blog over to Darby's education posts while Jonathan Chait, arguably the best political blogger out there, has taken an almost identical position on the subject.

I addressed Chait's uncharacteristic education writing a couple of weeks ago (seems like longer) in "Strange Bedfellows":

There's too much here to cover in one post (I could do a page just on Chait's weird reaction to Samuelson's looks, a topic that I had never given any thought to up until now). I may take another pass at another section later but for now I'm going to limit myself to this particularly egregious bit:

How does Samuelson explain the existence of new charter schools that produce dramatically higher results among these lazy, no-good teenagers? He insists, "no one has yet discovered transformative changes in curriculum or pedagogy, especially for inner-city schools, that are (in business lingo) 'scalable.'" This is utterly false. The most prominent example is the Kipp schools, which have shown revolutionary improvements among poor, inner-city students and have rapidly expanded.

It is strange to see Chait take the pro-privatization side of the debate, stranger still to see him accuse critics of charter schools of having an anti-government bias*, but what pushes this into Rod Serling territory is the spectacle of having Chait, one of the most gifted bullshit detectors of the Twenty-first Century, rolling out the same sort of flawed argument that he has made a career out of dismantling.

In order to be viable, a reform has to improve on the existing system by a large enough margin to justify its implementation costs, but if you accept the metrics used by the reform movement, then you will have to conclude that charter schools do worse than public schools more often than they do better.**

So we have a major push to privatize government services which, after about two decades of testing have been shown to under-perform their traditional government-run alternatives. Rather than show why this statistic is misleading, Chait pulls out vague, anecdotal evidence of a single out-lier. Now, given the variability of the data, we would expect the top schools (or even chains) to do pretty well. That alone rebuts Chait's point, but it gets worse. Self-selection, peer effects and selective attrition*** all artificially inflate KIPP's results. When you take these factors into account, it's hard to make a compelling statistical case that even the best charter schools are outperforming public schools (though the second footnote still applies).

At the risk of over-emphasizing, this is Jonathan -- freaking -- Chait we're talking about, a writer known for his truly exceptional gift for constructing logical arguments and, more importantly, spotting the fallacies in the arguments of others. Under normal conditions, Chait would never fall for a badly presented argument-by-anomally, let alone make one, just as, under normal circumstances, a confrontation between Samuelson and Chait would result in little pieces of the former being scraped off of the walls of the Washington Post.

But Chait loses this confrontation decisively. From his ad hominem opening to his factually challenged close he fails to score a single point. And this is far from the only example of this odd reform-specific impairment affecting otherwise accomplished writers. OE has spilled endless pixels on the reform-related lapses, both statistical and rhetorical, of smart, serious, dedicated people like Chait, Seyward Darby and, of course, Ray Fisman (just do a keyword search). None of these people would normally produce the kind of work we've cataloged here. None of them would normally ignore the defection of one of the founding members of the reform movement. None of these people would normally feel comfortable dismissing without comment contradictory findings from EPI, Donald Rubin and the Rand Institute.

David Warsh has aptly made the following comparison:

Remember the recipe for a policy disaster? Start with a handful of policy intellectuals confronting a stubborn problem, in love with a Big Idea. Fold in a bunch of ambitious Ivy League kids who don’t speak the local language. Churn up enthusiasm for the program in the gullible national press – and get ready for a decade of really bad news. Take a look at David Halberstam’s Vietnam classic The Best and the Brightest, if you need to refresh your memory. Or just think back on the run-up to the war in Iraq.

but along with Halberstam, it might be time to brush off our copies of Cialdini's Influence.

From a data standpoint, the past few years have been rough on the reform movement. Charter schools have been shown to be more likely to under-perform than to outperform. Joel Klein's spectacular record turned out to be the product of creative accounting (New York City schools have actually done much worse than the rest of the state). Findings contradicting the fundamental tenets of the movement accumulated. Major figures in research (Rubin) and education (Ravitch) have publicly questioned the viability of proposed reforms.

As Cialdini lays out in great detail, when you challenge people's deeply held beliefs with convincing evidence, you usually get one of two responses. Sometimes you will actually manage to win them over. More often, though, they will dig in, embrace their beliefs more firmly and find new ways to justify them.

I think it's safe to say we don't have response number one.




* Almost all of the major tenets of the modern reform can be traced back to the Reagan era and were closely associated with the initiatives described in Franks' The Wrecking Crew.

** Ironically, if you consider the intellectual framework of the reform movement to be flawed and overly simplistic, you can actually make a much better case for charter schools.

*** From Wikipedia: "In addition, some KIPP schools show high attrition, especially for those students entering the schools with the lowest test scores. A 2008 study by SRI International found that although KIPP fifth-grade students who enter with below-average scores significantly outperform peers in public schools by the end of year one, "... 60 percent of students who entered fifth grade at four Bay Area KIPP schools in 2003-04 left before completing eighth grade."[7] The report also discusses student mobility due to changing economic situations for student's families, but does not directly link this factor into student attrition. Six of California's nine KIPP schools, researched in 2007, showed similar attrition patterns.[citation needed] Figures for schools in other states are not always as readily available."

[You can find more on KIPP here]

Does Seyward Darby think Seyward Darby should be fired?

I don't. I have always believed that firing is a last resort, but Darby has certainly gone on the record as being for firing incompetent performers even when the metrics for measuring competence are unreliable and the firings would cause severe damage to the economy. Given the quality of her reporting on education, it's difficult to believe she's not currently lobbying TNR to get herself fired for things like this:

But the real star of the show was Waiting for Superman, the much-hyped documentary about school reform that opens nationwide this week. Gregory started the program with a clip from the movie that shows how poorly we rank, education-wise, against other developed countries.

Does the clip really show how poorly we're doing? Let's roll the tape:

Since the 1970s, U.S. schools have failed to keep pace with the rest of the world. Among 30 developed countries, we ranked 25th in math and 21st in science. The top 5 percent of our students, our very best, ranked 23rd out of 29 developed countries. In almost every category, we've fallen behind.

If you've been following OE, you recognize these oft-quoted numbers as coming from the PISA test which can't possibly support the first sentence since it was first administered in 2000.

It would seem that Seyward Darby doesn't know that.

She also doesn't seem to know that the older, better-established TIMSS test has us doing fairly well internationally. Nor is she apparently aware that using PISA to argue for the standard slate of reforms is problematic since at least one of the highest scoring countries (Canada) has adopted pretty much the opposite approach.

We can let David Gregory off with a warning -- this isn't his beat -- but Darby is the education specialist for one of America's best and most respected publications. There's no way for the New Republic to justify keeping an education reporter who can't spot obvious distortions involving one of the two best known measures of international academic performance.

I would suggest immediate reassignment. If Darby would like to argue for her own dismissal, I'd be happy to debate the issue.

[update: you can find some more thoughts on TNR's education reporting here.]

"We've made huge advances in what they're called" -- New Republic edition

This post by Joseph got me thinking. Charter schools are private contractors providing services that were previously provided by the government. Any statement that's true about charter schools should still be true if you substitute in the phrase "some private contractors."

But if you actually make the substitution, you often end up with statements the author would never think of making. Statements like this:

But Mead says ... she’s seen Gray hint that he’d like to more tightly regulate [private contractors]. “We have a law that gives a tremendous amount of autonomy to the [private contractors] but enables them to implement programs that can be effective. If you try to put more regulation on that, if can dissuade people from [privatizing],” Mead says.

Would Seyward Darby normally describe a push for tighter regulation of private contractors as "disappointing"? Would the New Republic normally endorse a candidate because he was against stricter regulation of private contractors? Would everyone take a moment and see if Rod Serling is taking a smoke break in the vicinity?

I strongly believe that there is a place for charter schools in our system, but those schools have to meet exactly the same criteria as other contractors. Two of those criteria are transparency and openness to regulation, and given recent history, it's safe to say that some charter schools are failing these tests.

[note: typo in the title has been corrected]

Implications of the DC primary on education

Mark and I have been talking a lot about education. Today Seyward Darby has an article on the implications of Michelle Rhee leaving. What struck me as most interesting is that there are three concerns raised:

1) The fate of the new teacher evaluation system

2) That performance pay, based on IMPACT score, might not go forward

3) There could be increased regulation of character schools

Mark has commented on issues with a focus on narrow methods of teaching evaluation. But I think it is safe to say that items 1 and 2 depend critically on the quality of the method used.

As for number 3, deregulated private educational entities have geenrated concerns as the quality of instruction is hard to measure.

So everything hinges on how good the IMPACT evaluation score is. Now, this score is a hybrid (as opposed to pure standardized test scores) so it might not be awful:

It rates its teachers based partly on how well they improve student learning from year to year, and partly on intensive classroom observation by their supervisors.

However, it does not address the concern about teachers learning to game the system. Many ranking systems work very well at first and then people learn to optimize against them. Just consider how many articles there are on how to improve your FICO score.

But the core ideas remain to find a way to measure teacher performance on some sort of low dimensional scale and to reduce regulation of private sector competitors. It is unclear that these approaches will get at the key issues, even if (due to an extraordinarily dysfunctional school system) they may produce some improvements in the Washington DC schools.

Seyward Darby -- now not even pretending to think things through

The idea that the proposed educational reforms will magically fix everything has become so ingrained in Darby's thinking she has started writing things like this:

Will states, school districts, and unions also agree to revise, in the long term, the ways teachers are hired, compensated, and fired, hopefully precluding the need for mass layoffs in the future?

Even if there weren't serious problems with the proposed metrics for compensating and firing teachers, even if the changes were to do everything the advocates have claimed, how would these changes have any effect on the pro-cyclic economic policies of states? Has anyone even suggested a relationship here?

And if we're not limited to cases where there is some sort of likely causal relationship, why limit ourselves to lay-offs? Why not have something like this: "Will states, school districts, and unions also agree to revise, in the long term, the ways teachers are hired, compensated, and fired, hopefully ending future violence in the Middle East, curing cancer and preventing future movie version of SNL sketches?"?

What the hell, dream big.

Thinking about teacher layoffs -- the logistics of staffing

Regarding Seyward Darby's recent article on teacher layoffs, you can find posts on why she doesn't understand economics here and here, posts on the questionable data and analysis behind her position here and here, posts pointing out the problems with the movement she endorses here and here (from Darby's own magazine) and an explanation of why the tenure 'reform' she champions would be unfair and unethical here.

But I don't believe anyone has pointed out what a logistic nightmare she wants to get us into.

Let's take the plan that Darby favors and throw in some reasonable numbers:

We take our already somewhat understaffed schools and lay off, let's say, 200,000* teachers selected based in part on some quality metric. We then run the schools severely understaffed for the next year or so until state revenues recover.

That 200K will be made up of three groups, the good, the bad and the better-than-nothing. The good are effective teachers who end up on the list through a combination of bad luck, bad metrics and bad administrators (go here to see how the last two can work together). The bad are teachers at the very bottom of the quality scale. The better-than-nothing are teachers who aren't all that effective but are probably still at least as good as most of the people you could get to replace them.

Given the flaws in our system of ranking teachers and the innate difficulty of the problem, a fair number of good teachers will end up on the list. Likewise, given the problems with recruiting teachers for problem schools, better-than-nothing teachers will continue to make up a large part of it.

The upshot of all this is that, given population growth and the high level of teacher attrition, you will need a substantial number of the people you laid off to come back if you are to have any hope of meeting staffing targets. This wasn't as much of a problem under last-in/first-out for a couple of reasons. First, the attrition rate for new teachers was so high that many of the teachers you laid off wouldn't have been there in a couple of years even if you hadn't let them go. Second, leaving under last-in/first-out carries minimal stigma. For those who really wanted to it was easy to get back into the field a year later.

Under the 'reform' system, there is a serious stigma and a deadly asymmetry of information problem. Keep in mind that administrators are basically stuck with new hires for a year (you try finding a certified replacement in, say, November). They know that a teacher laid off under that system might turn out to be first rate, but do they really want to take the chance?

Let's say 100,000 of the laid-off teachers fell into the need-them-later category. We have screwed these teachers out of contractually obligated compensation, scapegoated them for all the problems in the education system and made them unemployable in their chosen field. Would you come back under those circumstances?

Of course, the impact is not limited those laid off. Other than the satisfaction that comes with the job, the primary attraction of teaching is job security. For generations, teachers have self-selected to be risk-averse. Faculty rolls mainly consist of people who have willingly traded any significant chance of promotion for the stability to start a family, buy a house, and spend thirty or forty years doing something they're good at.

In an industry dependent on a very large number of highly skilled labourers, this is not a bad situation, but putting those bigger, long-term questions aside, what is likely to happen when the economy recovers and we try to start restaffing? We were having trouble maintaining adequate levels before the lay-offs. Then we permanently removed around 200,000 teachers from the pool (many of whom we would have liked to have had back later). Now we are trying to hold on to teachers after having unilaterally removed a valued part of their compensation and established the precedent that contractual obligations to educators don't need to be honored.

Of course, the reformers will assure you that they have a set of programs that will solve the retention problem, but keep in mind these are the same people who have been solving this problem for a decade and their track record is nothing if not consistent.

According to this NCES paper, we were hiring around 200,000 new teachers a year before the economy collapsed. That was a difficult and expensive proposition and we often had to compromise quality to make that number. Now think about doubling or tripling the number of vacancies.

This is not going to work out well.







*without the plan that Darby thinks might merit a veto, 100,000 to 300,000 teachers could lose their jobs.

Wayward Seyward

I mentioned in my previous post that when I saw Seyward Darby had written an article entitled "Obama: Don't Touch Education Reform," I had a bad feeling. Bad and, as it turns out, damned accurate:

But this particular measure has evolved in some decidedly unappealing ways. When it was first introduced, numerous education advocacy groups asked Congress to impose constraints that would effectively compel states to reform their layoff systems. As I explained recently, most states and school districts follow a misguided "last-hired, first-fired" rule. If they must let teachers go for budgetary reasons, they start by booting those teachers who have spent the least time in the classroom. Teacher quality doesn't factor into the decision at all. Congress, though, refused to go along with the proposal—and the Obama administration didn't intervene. "Right now, the most important thing is to stop the bleeding," Senator Tom Harkin, chair of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, said in early May.

That was bad enough. But then, this week, House Appropriations Chairman David Obey proposed that the government pay for the legislation, in part, by taking money from other Education Department funds—and not just any old funds, but the money set aside for some of Obama’s most important school reforms. Under Obey's plan, which the full House ultimately adopted, $500 million would come from Race to the Top, a competitive grant program and probably the most talked-about aspect of Obama's education agenda; $200 million would come from the Teacher Incentive Fund, which supports performance-based compensation plans; and another $100 million would come from money for charter schools. Sounding a bit like Harkin, Obey reportedly said, "When a ship is sinking, you don't worry about redesigning a room, you worry about keeping it afloat."

...

And if the push for other funding fails? The administration will have a tough choice to make. But one thing's for sure: Letting Congress chip away at the education reform agenda now would place it on a slippery slope in the future. And that's something the country can ill afford.

"Tough choice"? Let's review:

1. We are on the verge of adding a Roman numeral to the end of the Great Depression. Under these circumstances, mass layoffs of teachers is insanely pro-cyclic. It doesn't matter which teachers you pick, the immediate economic effect is the same. Even if you had a reliable metric that could identify poor teachers, this would be the worst possible time to get rid of them;

2. You don't have a reliable metric that can identify poor teachers;

3. Much of the threatened reform package is actually a continuation of policies that have a long (sometimes decades-long) and horrible track record.

Uh-oh

Seyward Darby is writing about education reform again. This hardly ever ends well.

Seyward Darby does not understand economics

There are so many things wrong with Seyward Darby's New Republic piece and I have so much to do this week (finishing off big posts, lining up some more work, getting the bugs out of a text-mining tool), that I'm going to limit myself to just one for now.

The story here is not which teachers get laid off; the story is the utter insanity of mass firings by the government during the worst economic meltdown of the Postwar Era. As previously shown, this negates all of our stimulus efforts and comes disturbingly close to replicating Herbert Hoover's response to the Great Depression.

Even if Darby's arguments were sound (and they're not), the article would still be little more than a distraction. We find ourselves in a burning building; Darby wants to stop and talk about radon levels.