Brad DeLong has an interesting approach to the cost of college problem

I don't remember a time when there were more things I wanted to write about. Professor DeLong just added another one to the pile. 

MAKING SENSE OF THE COLLEGE EDUCATION DEBATE: ANDREW KELLY SAYS SMART THINGS: OVER AT EQUITABLE GROWTH: TUESDAY FOCUS FOR JUNE 17, 2014

From an individual point of view, the questions are:
1. Could you finish a two-year program that opens doors in three years or less?

2. Could you finish a four-year program in five years or less?

If the answers are "yes", go for it. If the answers are "no", don't. And if you go for it, make sure you do finish: otherwise you will be behind the eight-ball in what looks to be for the foreseeable future a much worse job market, especially for the young, relative to our reasonable expectations than America has ever seen before. 

For public policymakers, the questions are more complicated and subtle. There are six groups: 

1. Those who would finish college whether or not college were made more affordable, who will be windfall gainers from policies to make college more affordable.

2. Those who would not attempt college unless college were made more affordable, but who would complete it if it were--these are the people at whom the policy is directed.

3. Those who would not attempt college unless college were made more affordable, but who would attempt it if it were but would fail to complete it--these are the losers from the policy.

4. Those who would attempt college but not finish it anyway--these are small gainers because more-affordable college reduces their student loan debt.

5. The taxpayers who pay for government policies to make college more affordable.

6. The academic administrators, faculty, entrepreneurs, and businesses who skim off their share from policies that make college more affordable.

We want policies to make college more affordable that maximize the number of and the value for people in group (2), and we are happy at the reduced debt burden on those in group (4).

We are really unhappy if such policies lead to an increase in the number of those in group (3), and we are also unhappy at the existence of groups (1) and (6), for the redistribution of the money of group (5) to them is a societal bad.

How large are the money flows between these six groups, and how large are groups (2) and (3), and how much extra education do groups (2) and (3) get?

Those are the questions that discussions of education policy should focus on. Yet when I look at the literature, those are not questions the answers to which I find readily.

The LA Times' Steve Lopez on the defenestration of Stuart Magruder

I've never seen a project hit FUBAR as quickly or as completely as John Deasy's iPad initiative has. Almost invariably, when you see something crash and burn this badly, you'll find with a little digging that:

There were people in the organization who anticipated the problems;

They were repeatedly told to shut up.

Supt. John Deasy and the Board of Education have been salivating over the chance to get their hands on some of that money to buy a digital tablet for every student, teacher and administrator. Last year, they began purchasing tablets for classrooms, and now they would like to tap about $1 billion in bond money to finish the job.

But there have been questions about the legality and efficacy of using the bond money for portable tablets with an estimated three-year life span in a district with an estimated $50 billion or so in needed repairs and upgrades. And even more questions about whether the district has a well-considered plan, or a get-out-of-the-way compulsion to plow ahead as quickly as possible, with Deasy leading the charge.

Nobody expressed more concerns than Magruder, an architect who was appointed to the oversight committee two years ago. He thought the district's legal justification for buying tablets was flimsy, and that was just part of his objection.

"My primary concern was that there clearly was no strong pedagogical idea behind this program, and they were literally throwing all this technology and money at teachers and students, expecting great things to happen with no proper preparation," Magruder said.

There's not enough space here to itemize all the issues raised at various times by Magruder and other committee members, along with members of the media.

But to name several:

Why iPads versus other, possibly less expensive tablets or laptops?

Why did the need for detached keyboards, at a cost of millions, seem to be such an afterthought?

Why did the district buy software sight unseen and only partially developed?

Why had there been so little teacher training and preparation?

Why so little consideration of who would be responsible for lost and damaged tablets?

And how useful could the tablets be if, by one legal interpretation, students wouldn't be allowed to take them home each night?

"I'm invested in this," said Magruder, who has two kids in L.A. Unified and got a first-hand look at the problems when his daughter's school was included in an early phase of the iPad rollout.

Magruder didn't find the programming engaging, compelling or linked to a larger curriculum strategy in a way that had been explained to teachers, parents or students.

"Technology doesn't solve problems unless humans and teachers use it well," said Magruder, who noted that the software company did manage to neatly promote itself to students with a logo on its programs.

"Not an 'M' for math or an 'E' for English, but a big 'P' for Pearson," he said.

Scott Folsom, another member of the oversight committee, and Tom Rubin, the committee's consultant, both told me they thought Magruder and others consistently raised important questions in a fair, thoughtful and constructive way, forcing the district to slow down and rethink some of its plans.

But that was Magruder's downfall. In raising inconvenient truths, he exposed and embarrassed district officials. Three weeks ago, the petulant school board threw a little tantrum and refused to reappoint him to the committee, a move that's being challenged by Magruder, the oversight committee and the architect association that nominated him to the board.

The rise and fall of "innovator"

In a positive review of Jill Lepore's recent article on the myth and reality of creative destruction, Paul Krugman wonders if Lepore underestimates just how long 'innovation' has been a buzzword.

Lepore tells us that innovation became a popular buzzword in the 1990s. I guess I thought it came much earlier — I wrote about product-cycle models of trade back in the 1970s, and even then I was formalizing a much older literature.

That sort of question is why god invented Google so I decided to check out what the n-gram viewer had to say. Based on a search of the books in Google's digital collection, it appears that both 'innovation' and 'innovator' took off in the early Forties and continued shooting up through the Post-War era. Nothing surprising there. The Forties, Fifties and Sixties were a period of rapid economic and technological growth and the topics of progress and innovation were very much on people's minds.




What seems strange though is the decline of 'innovator' starting around 1970. My first thought was Apollo but the peak here appears to be 1971 rather than 1972. 'Innovation' also flatlined briefly in the mid-70s but it quickly picked back up. I have a feeling I'm missing something obvious here but I'm not familiar enough with the data to know where to dig.

Putting aside the question of why Cantor lost

What I want to know is how something like this happens.

An internal poll by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor's (R-VA) re-election campaign had him with a 34-point lead over primary opponent economics professor David Brat.

The poll, conducted by John McLaughlin of McLaughlin & Associates between May 27 and May 28 found Cantor with 62 percent to Brat with 28 percent, according to The Washington Post on Friday.

Cantor lost to Brat on Tuesday. With 90 percent of precincts reporting Brat defeated Cantor 55.4 percent to 44.6 percent. It was perhaps the biggest upset of any primary contest in the 2014 election cycle.

I know of a lot of mistakes in the design and analysis of polls (I've even made a few), but I can't recall any that produced results like this. I've seen numerous articles on what went wrong with Cantor's campaign. I want to know what was going on with his pollster.

Well, that didn't take long -- more on Vergara and the perils of legislating from the bench

As mentioned before, one of the problems with legislating from the bench is that it usually entails reasoning backward -- starting with a conclusion then coming up with arguments to justify it -- which leads to bad law. The precedents take on a life of their own. As Harvard's Noah Feldman wrote in Bloomberg View, "The court’s two-part reasoning was thin to the point of being emaciated," and that thin reasoning means that the ruling can be applied in ways that even many of its supporters are likely to object to.

You can certainly argue that California's system for assigning tenure and removing bad teachers is flawed (you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone on either side of the reform debate willing to defend it). Most of those cheering the decision seem to be taking an implicit ends-justify-the-means line -- the policy was bad and the decision made it go away, therefore it was a good decision -- but the sloppiness and the sparseness of the reasoning makes it applicable to a wide range of far more questionable cases.

If you were looking for a state at the other end of the tenure policy spectrum to California, you might pick Connecticut.

Danbury's Deputy Superintendent of Schools William Glass also said the California ruling won't have an effect on the educational community in Connecticut.

"We have a very effective process for dismissing a teacher with cause," Glass said.

"It takes time and we provide support for a teacher to see if they can improve. But if they can't, we are now down to a 10-month process for dismissal," he said, referring to the new reduction in due process.

Glass also said most teachers who are not a good fit will voluntarily resign.

No one wants an ineffective teacher because the principal, the school and the district all are held responsible for that teacher's ineffectiveness in teaching students, Glass said.

"Accountability has never been as clear as it is now," Glass said. "The days of hiding are gone. It's all very visible."

In California, tenure can be earned after only two years in front of a classroom. In Connecticut, it takes four years to earn employment protection.

Connecticut also recently added language to its tenure laws that allow ineffectiveness -- as determined by new teacher evaluation procedures -- to be a cause for dismissal.

Glass may have gotten one thing wrong. When he said the California ruling won't have an effect on Connecticut, he probably should have said 'shouldn't.'

[from the same article]

A California judge's ruling this week that teacher tenure laws deprive the state's children of their constitutional right to a quality education has some wondering if Connecticut could face a similar challenge.

"The Vergara case exposed the fact that children have unequal access to quality teachers in California. This problem exists in Connecticut as well," said Jennifer Alexander, chief executive officer of ConnCAN, an organization that supports school reform.

This is how bad law works

My ed reform ddulite study list

I'm working on a big thread on the the interlocking disasters of the LA school system. Part of that process is reading up and making a reference list. It greatly speeds things up when the actual writing begins and it reduces the chances of me getting my facts badly wrong.

In case anyone out there wants to play along, here are some of the sites I'm using to get a handle on the LAUSD iPad fiasco.

1. An LAUSD introduction to The Common Core Technology Project.

Troubling for its vagueness, motivational-speaker language and lack of insight into the way technology works. All problems that would get worse as things spiraled out of control.

[Though off-topic here, one of these days I'm going to have to come back to the connection between the influence of management consulting and the belief in the miraculous curative powers of standards like Common Core.]

2. The vision statement for the project

,,, because it tells us that the people behind the project are the kind of people who believe in writing vision statements.

3. An early warning about Superintendent Deasy's somewhat questionable relationship with Apple. Spelled out in more detail here.

4. Suppression of internal critics.

5. A piece on where the iPad funds were being diverted from.

6. A devastating comparison with another school district's successful iPad rollout.

7. An inside account of what went wrong from two LAUSD contractors.

8. The comically fast security breach,

9. Failure to anticipate even the most obvious complications.

10. Still more problems.

and a very nice wrap up by Michael Hiltzik.

I've been arguing for a while that ddulites and flaky management theories are doing great harm to our education system. Those arguments are about to get a bit more shrill.

Michael Hiltzik has perhaps the definitive summary so for of the California tenure ruling

Michael Hiltzik has perhaps the definitive summary so for of the California tenure ruling so far. If you're looking to get up to speed quickly, this is an excellent place to start.

If you have the stomach for it, also check out Hiltzik's account of LA's iPad fiasco.

I'll be getting back to this when I'm less disgusted

Diane Ravitch shares a telling passage from a post-trial brief in the Vergara case:

Plaintiffs Monterroza and Martinez both attend charter schools that are not subject to the challenged statutes at all. Beatriz and Elizabeth Vergara both attend a “Pilot School” in LAUSD that is free to let teachers go at the end of the school year for any reason, including ineffectiveness.

Just to be clear, none of the nine plaintiffs could show that they had been assigned teachers who would have been fired if not for the challenged statutes. Four of them weren't even in schools where the statutes applied.

If that weren't enough, here's an example of one of the plaintiffs' "grossly ineffective" teachers.

p.s. I'm still looking for a transcript but in the meantime check out the brief and the original complaint.

I don't think Tyler Cowen is right here, but I hope he is

Elon Musk made a big announcement last Thursday:

Yesterday, there was a wall of Tesla patents in the lobby of our Palo Alto headquarters. That is no longer the case. They have been removed, in the spirit of the open source movement, for the advancement of electric vehicle technology.

Tesla Motors was created to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport. If we clear a path to the creation of compelling electric vehicles, but then lay intellectual property landmines behind us to inhibit others, we are acting in a manner contrary to that goal. Tesla will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use our technology.

When I started out with my first company, Zip2, I thought patents were a good thing and worked hard to obtain them. And maybe they were good long ago, but too often these days they serve merely to stifle progress, entrench the positions of giant corporations and enrich those in the legal profession, rather than the actual inventors. After Zip2, when I realized that receiving a patent really just meant that you bought a lottery ticket to a lawsuit, I avoided them whenever possible.

At Tesla, however, we felt compelled to create patents out of concern that the big car companies would copy our technology and then use their massive manufacturing, sales and marketing power to overwhelm Tesla. We couldn’t have been more wrong. The unfortunate reality is the opposite: electric car programs (or programs for any vehicle that doesn’t burn hydrocarbons) at the major manufacturers are small to non-existent, constituting an average of far less than 1% of their total vehicle sales.

At best, the large automakers are producing electric cars with limited range in limited volume. Some produce no zero emission cars at all.

Given that annual new vehicle production is approaching 100 million per year and the global fleet is approximately 2 billion cars, it is impossible for Tesla to build electric cars fast enough to address the carbon crisis. By the same token, it means the market is enormous. Our true competition is not the small trickle of non-Tesla electric cars being produced, but rather the enormous flood of gasoline cars pouring out of the world’s factories every day.

We believe that Tesla, other companies making electric cars, and the world would all benefit from a common, rapidly-evolving technology platform.

Technology leadership is not defined by patents, which history has repeatedly shown to be small protection indeed against a determined competitor, but rather by the ability of a company to attract and motivate the world’s most talented engineers. We believe that applying the open source philosophy to our patents will strengthen rather than diminish Tesla’s position in this regard.

Tyler Cowen thinks that "this announcement will be discussed in business schools for years to come much like Henry Ford’s announcement of the $5 a day wage." I don't.

My co-blogger Joseph and I have consistently taken the position that, on the intellectual property spectrum with too little protection failing to encourage creation and innovation and too much stifling competition, our laws have long ago abandoned the sweet spot in the middle  and become far too excessive. That puts us in general agreement with Cowen.

Where I, at least, disagree is with the likely outcome. Musk deserves a huge amount of credit for this but given Tesla's size compared with the magnitude of this problem, I don't see it making much of a difference.

For what it's worth, though, I hope I'm wrong.

More on the California decision

A good question:

Rather than gutting hard-won protections for teachers, the next legal case should go after economic segregation itself. Instead of invoking Brown in a broad metaphorical sense, why not bring a state-level suit against actual segregation by class and race? If it is a violation of the California state constitution to have tenure laws that make it hard to fire bad teachers in poor and minority communities, why isn’t it a violation when the state and districts draw school boundary lines in a way that promotes deeply unequal, economically segregated schools that many strong educators won’t teach in?

I am also interested in why the new policy has to be a complete loss of job security.  After all, if the issue is: 

Los Angeles School Superintendent John Deasy testified it can take over two years on average — and sometimes as long as 10 — to fire an incompetent tenured teacher. The cost, he said, can run from $250,000 to $450,000.

Then why not make a new plan where firing a teacher comes with one years salary as a good-bye present?  Or have fast pension vesting as well (say 5 years).  It would bring excessive firing under scrutiny (as it would increase costs), but would save enormous amounts of money compared to the costs above and be cheap compared to the estimates people are making as to harm.  Of course, this presumes that there really is an effective teacher waiting to be pulled into a classroom, which isn't impossible but seems to be less likely in the poorest school districts. 

What this suggests is that the real issue isn't unequal student outcomes but rather these types of measures are aimed at degrading the working conditions of teachers.  Are we sure that this will end well? 

Understanding McKinsey

In style, rhetoric, preferred approaches, and general worldview, it is difficult to overstate how much David Coleman is a product of McKinsey & Company, the extraordinarily successful management firm that launched him. This is nowhere better illustrated than in this Washington Post account of the origins of the Common Core standards.

How Bill Gates pulled off the swift Common Core revolution

The pair of education advocates had a big idea, a new approach to transform every public-school classroom in America. By early 2008, many of the nation’s top politicians and education leaders had lined up in support.

But that wasn’t enough. The duo needed money — tens of millions of dollars, at least — and they needed a champion who could overcome the politics that had thwarted every previous attempt to institute national standards.

So they turned to the richest man in the world.

On a summer day in 2008, Gene Wilhoit, director of a national group of state school chiefs, and David Coleman, an emerging evangelist for the standards movement, spent hours in Bill Gates’s sleek headquarters near Seattle, trying to persuade him and his wife, Melinda, to turn their idea into reality.

As Barry Ritholtz noted in a memorable post, McKinsey & Company has walked away from some of the most notorious corporate fiascoes of the past 50 years while somehow managing to keep their reputation and hourly rates intact.

This is, by no means, a matter of luck. Rather it reflects just how good McKinsey is at their core mission: winning over high-level executives and spinning compelling narratives for the press. As long as the C level executives like the consultants and the consultants make them look good, the executives will happily hand out shocking sums of money.

One of the challenges that management consultants often face is trying to sell a very expensive product or service to a company that is capable of providing something similar internally at a much lower cost. For this reason, firms like McKinsey are very good at driving a wedge between top level management and the rest of the company. If you can convince high level executives that the people two or three tiers below them are incompetent and/or untrustworthy, you can justify charging exorbitant fees for things could that which can be done cheaply and quickly in-house.

At the risk of putting too fine a point on it, Coleman approach to Common Core follow this template exactly. He had a set of radical (and by some standards rather flaky) changes he wanted to make in American education. Instead of building support through research or grassroots lobbying, he approached one of the world's richest and most powerful former CEOs and, having secured his support, mounted a tremendously effective charm offensive on the press.

An essential part of Coleman's pitch has been to undercut the standing and authority of the education rank and file, from partnering with Michelle Rhee to patronizing the statisticians in his own organization, the College Board, to being openly dismissive of teachers who questioned some of his more extreme pedagogical ideas. This last point led a fawning NYT reporter to talk about Coleman's unwillingness to suffer fools (I'm trying to maintain an elevated tone in this post. You can see me addressing the article in a less refined mood here).

None of this means that Coleman is wrong or that his ideas should be dismissed, but if you want to understand what's going on in the education reform movement, you have to understand the culture that produced David Coleman.

An excellent take on Vergara v. California

Dana has a characteristically thoughtful and balanced take on the controversial ruling. It's that balance that makes the final paragraph quoted all the more striking.

Is the premise of Treu’s ruling correct? Will axing tenure and seniority lead directly to better test scores and higher lifetime earnings for poor kids?

Here’s where the judge is right: It is difficult—actually, close to impossible—to argue that California’s teacher-tenure system makes sense. Research shows that most first-year teachers are mediocre at best. But good teachers tend to make huge jumps in effectiveness by the end of their second year on the job, and those improvements are often visible through classroom observation and students’ rising test scores. Yet California evaluates teachers for tenure in March of their second year of work, before two full years of student-teacher data are available.

This means that under current California law, principals are forced to make high-stakes decisions about teachers without enough evidence. This disadvantages students, who might get stuck with sub-par instructors, but it also hurts teachers, who aren’t given enough time to prove their skill. Once a teacher earns tenure, it can cost tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars—and countless administrative and legal man-hours—for a district to permanently remove him from his job. And in the event of budget cuts or school closings, California law mandates that the least experienced teachers be laid off first, even if they are more effective than their older colleagues, a policy known as “LIFO,” or “Last In, First Out.”

[I have a couple of questions about the metrics that determine the effectiveness of those teachers but that can wait for another post -- MP]

California is an outlier. Only 12 states have formal laws on the books mandating LIFO. Nationally, teachers work an average of 3.1 years before they become eligible for tenure. Not even teachers support the idea of tenure after less than two years on the job. A 2012 survey of 10,000 teachers found that, on average, they believed it was reasonable to work 5.4 years before being evaluated for tenure. As Treu noted in his ruling, the arguments in Vergara revealed remarkable consensus between the prosecution and defense on the fact that California’s tenure policies are far from best practices.

But here’s where Judge Reulf’s theory is faulty: Getting rid of these bad laws may do little to systemically raise student achievement. For high-poverty schools, hiring is at least as big of a challenge as firing, and the Vergara decision does nothing to make it easier for the most struggling schools to attract or retain the best teacher candidates.

From 2009 to 2011, the federal government offered 1,500 effective teachers in 10 major cities—including Los Angeles—a $20,000 bonus to transfer to an open job at a higher poverty school with lower test scores. In the world of public education, $20,000 is a major financial incentive. All these teachers were already employed by urban districts with diverse student populations; they weren’t scared of working with poor, non-white children. Yet less than a quarter of the eligible teachers chose to apply for the bonuses. Most did not want to teach in the schools that were the most deeply segregated by race and class and faced major pressure to raise test scores.

Principals have known about this problem for ages. In Chicago, economist Brian Jacob found that when the city’s school district made it easier for principals to fire teachers, nearly 40 percent of principals, including many at the worst performing, poorest schools, fired no teachers at all. Why? For one thing, firing a coworker is unpleasant. It takes more than a policy change to overturn the culture of public education, which values collegiality and continuous improvement over swift accountability. That culture is not a wholly bad thing—with so many teachers avoiding the poorest schools, principals have little choice but to work with their existing staffs to help them get better at their jobs.

I'm not a lawyer...

[It has become a bit of a running joke that when Republican lawmakers say "I'm not a scientist,"  they mean "I'm not a scientist but you should listen to me anyway." When I say "I'm not a lawyer," I mean go out and find someone who knows something about the law and ask him or her about the broader potential ramifications of the topic at hand. The following has no expertise behind it and should be treated strictly as a starting point for a discussion.]

Let's crudely sum up the ruling of Vergara v. California as follows: if there is a reasonable possibility that an incompetent member of a given profession can cause serious and disproportionate economic or personal damage to certain disadvantaged groups, then any law making it more difficult to fire a member of that profession is unconstitutional.

Yes, I realize that's grossly oversimplified and I'm almost certainly missing some important nuances, but for the sake of the discussion, take a minute and think about the logical implications of such a precedent. Can you think of any fields other than education where the broad outlines of this ruling might apply? The police come to mind immediately. All of the major arguments used to argue for reducing/eliminating tenure (the importance of the work, the potential for damage, the likelihood of discrimination) could be used to argue for making all police officers at-will employees. Nor is there any immediately obvious reason this should stop there.

I'm not saying that the lawyers who argued against California's tenure policy, or the judge who ruled against it or the people who support the ruling want to see things go that far. I suspect that pretty much all of them would prefer that this decision is applied narrowly and applied to this specific context, but that's not how precedents work.

One of the many reasons why legislating from the bench is a bad idea is because legislatures have the freedom to be irrational and inconsistent. They can invent nonsensical justifications for their laws and they can change their standards from day to day with little real harm. In court rulings, the reasons are the most important part. When a judge is sloppy or, worse yet, reasons backwards (starting with a desired conclusion and inventing arguments for it), the result is bad law.

 I don't know if that's what we have here. I do know it's something we should be talking about.

Two quotes presented without comment

Far too much of school districts' money and administrators' time has been spent trying to dismiss ineffective teachers — funds and time that could have been spent far more productively on improving education.

LAUSD superintendent John Deasy on tenure (previously discussed here)

Los Angeles schools chief John Deasy has offered to resign in February, according to a proposed settlement obtained by The Times and other media outlets Tuesday.

Under the proposed agreement, which was presented last Friday to Board of Education President Richard Vladovic, Deasy would resign Feb. 1, 2014. He would then continue to be available as a consultant through June 30, 2015. That arrangement would have allowed Deasy to receive his $330,000 annual salary for the balance of his contract.

From a 2013 news story. Deasy, of course, ended up staying.

Accountability is for little people

I'll have more to say about the Vergara trial later but for now I'd like to point out one particularly egregious bit of hypocrisy from LAUSD superintendent John Deasy.

Once tenure was granted, dismissing a bad teacher became burdensomely difficult. And in times of budget cutbacks, the law required that the last teachers hired were the first fired, which robbed administrators of the ability to make layoff decisions on the basis of which teachers were most effective.

As a consequence of these laws, which were challenged in the Vergara lawsuit, too many students throughout the state have been saddled with grossly ineffective teachers, and administrators have had little power to remove them. Far too much of school districts' money and administrators' time has been spent trying to dismiss ineffective teachers — funds and time that could have been spent far more productively on improving education.

It is worth taking a moment to dwell on the sheer chutzpah of this editorial. Deasy is channeling the man who killed both of his parents then threw himself on the mercy of the court because he was an orphan. He complains about budget cuts but omits to mention that one of the reasons that the LAUSD's finances look so bleak is because its superintendent was...

so stunningly arrogant as to propose $1 billion purchase of tablet computers for largely unproven educational approaches, while pushing brutal cuts in the schools...

so ethically challenged that, rather than seeking out competitive offers, he grossly overpaid and awarded contracts to companies with which he and members of his administration had inappropriately close relationships...

And finally, so freaking incompetent that he didn't bother to check the specs for the project before committing the schools to a billion-dollar purchase.

Deasy was a mediocre administrator before this fiasco hit, but even if he had been God's gift to education, there's no way he should have kept his job. Fortunately for him, though, he managed to luck out in at least three important ways: he came in with the right connections (particularly Eli Broad and Bill Gates); most major media outlets (especially, in this case, the LA Times) remain highly sympathetic to the education reform movement; and sadly, we live in a time when holding people at the top of an organization responsible for their failures has gone strangely out of style.