It is notable and more than a little disheartening that this reporter, like most of his colleagues, seems to see all things that improve achievement scores as equally desirable, even those tactics that only serve to undermine the validity of the test.
A recent article in The Information, a tech news site, suggests that during the first three quarters of 2015 Uber lost $1.7bn while booking $1.2bn in revenue. The company has so much money that, in at least some North American locations, it has been offering rides at rates so low that they didn’t even cover the combined cost of fuel and vehicle depreciation.These numbers only have to be vaguely correct for there to be serious concerns about predatory pricing. Because below the cost of fuel and vehicle depreciation is selling at a dead loss. Of course, Uber is a very smart company and they have created a class of independent contractors to try and make a direct link between costs and revenue tricky to do.
And that really gets at my point, which is not that existing models are always the right guide for policy, but that policy preferences should be disciplined by models. If you don’t believe the implications of the standard model in any area, OK; but then give me a model, or at least a sketch of a model, to justify your instincts.
What, after all, are economic models for? They are definitely not Truth. They are, however, a way to make sure that the stories you tell hang together, that they involve some plausible combination of individual behavior and interaction of those plausibly behaving individuals.
Take, for example, the famous open letter to Ben Bernanke demanding that he call off quantitative easing. The signatories declared that “The planned asset purchases risk currency debasement and inflation, and we do not think they will achieve the Fed’s objective of promoting employment.” OK, how is that supposed to work? What model of the inflation process do you have in which an expansion of the Fed’s balance sheet translates into inflation without causing an overheating of the labor market first? I’m not saying that there is no possible story along those lines, but spell it out so we can see how plausible it is.
What I said in my Mundell-Fleming lecture was that simple models don’t seem to have room for the confidence crises policymakers fear – and that I couldn’t find any plausible alternative models to justify those fears. It wasn’t “The model says you’re wrong”; it was “Show me a model”.
The reason I’ve been going on about such things is that since 2008 we’ve repeatedly seen policymakers overrule or ignore the message of basic macro models in favor of instincts that, to the extent they reflect experience at all, reflect experience that comes from very different economic environments. And these instincts have, again and again, proved wrong – while the basic models have done well. The models aren’t sacred, but the discipline of thinking things through in terms of models is really important.
The former principals of ReNEW SciTech Academy in Uptown New Orleans were accused Friday (Jan. 29) of special education fraud, failing to follow federal special education law and breaking state testing rules. Louisiana Recovery School District officials said the principals, Tim Hearin and Alex Perez, snagged almost $320,000 in public money for the school in the 2014-15 academic year by artificially inflating special education services.
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Gary Robichaux, the ReNEW group's chief executive during the shenanigans, remains employed by the six-school charter network in an advocacy position at his same $154,000 salary, officials said. That's even though emails released by the state show he knew about some of the manipulations at least as early as January 2015.
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Recovery Superintendent Patrick Dobard said the issues were very serious; ReNEW is currently in breach of its charter contract, which could result in losing its schools. The Recovery system does not have the authority to recover money SciTech received inappropriately, Dobard said.
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The special education tricks were big and blatant, intended to fill a $300,000 budget gap that Hearin and Perez knew they were creating at their 730-student school. The Recovery system doles out special education money based on the number of students who need services, their specific diagnoses and the amount of time they need help.
SciTech rushed students through special education evaluations, sometimes without parent involvement, increasing the school's budget by $137,800. Staffers also blew up the education plans of 49 students, adding an average of 1,032 minutes of extra help, which totals 2 1/2 days per week; that brought in $180,000.
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Paradoxically, at the same time the principals juiced the special education funding, they ignored the special education students, telling staff they were "to be a secondary priority to students who were more likely to pass the state assessments," the report says. Some kids, the principals said, "don't count."
Seventy-seven children were supposed to have some time in a separate classroom, but there was no evidence SciTech did that for any student last year. Nineteen of 76 children received none of the services in their individual education programs, and about 42 received partial help. Federal law requires that public schools give children the services specified in their plans.
Instead, Hearin and Perez spread the money across the school to support increased staffing overall – including "special education" teachers who didn't know they were supposed to teach special education. When one administrator complained, one of the principals insulted them for "conflating law with morality," the report says. The staffer decided three days later not to return to SciTech in the fall.
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The principals had planned, however. They held back a large number of students going into the fall of 2014 – 15 percent – in the hope of improving test scores. This was one of the violations found in March 2015 at Lagniappe Academies, which the state then shut down. At least one mother didn't even know her child was repeating seventh grade, according to a May 14 email: She "came in today wanting to discuss high school."
SciTech leaders also tried to commit another trick later outlined in the Lagniappe report: giving students test accommodations for a disability even if they did not have a disability. Teachers resisted the request; it was not clear in the report whether any gave in.
New Orleans charter school Lagniappe Academies illegally deprived special education students of the teaching they needed -- and then faked forms to hide it once the Louisiana Department of Education was on its trail.When the Lagniappe story broke, at least one commenter brought this quote from 2014:
Those are just two of the explosive findings in a report released Tuesday (March 3) by the state. More:
The school held back almost one third of its students last year, sometimes despite spring report cards saying the child did well.
Administrators refused to screen students for special education services even when families had a diagnosis from a doctor.
They created a "Do Not Call" list of families whose children they did not want back, and instructed staff to skip them when phoning families with key information about registration and summer session.
When state officials were to visit, administrators asked staff to move furniture out of a storage space so it looked like the school had a special education room.
And administrators put in for a very high number of disability accommodations requests when testing time came around -- although almost no students received those accommodations during the school year.
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In a written response, the Lagniappe board asked for more time to consider the findings. It also submitted an affidavit from administrator denying a handful of the allegations.
Lagniappe board member Dan Henderson called the report "a big distraction" in a Monday email to NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune. "We are continuing to serve all of our 160 students, and look forward to another round of high-stakes testing, showing again our amazing accomplishments."
John Ayers, executive director of Tulane University’s Cowen Institute for Public Education Initiatives, said that’s not surprising, considering RSD’s growth over the past few years.
The next step, he said, is for schools with impressive gains to share what worked.
“If we have a pocket of excellence that may be Lagniappe — and they may be very proud of what’s happening — how do we get that innovation to spread?” he said.
For many parents at the news conference, last week's article seemed to aggravate a perception of The Times as lecturing minority parents in a paternalistic way. Success Academy has 11,000 students in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. Its website indicates that 93% of its students are children of color, and 76% are from low-income households.
Last year, The New York Times also wrote a piece that was critical of SA. The report included interviews claiming students in the third grade and above were wetting themselves in classrooms because they felt so stressed out and didn't want to lose time during standardized tests. The same article described the public shaming of students for poor grades.
"I'm keeping it civilized, because when I read this thing this morning and was home alone, you don't want to hear what I was saying," Senhaji added before arguing that The Times was overstepping its bounds by suggesting that parents were unaware of what was going on their kids' schools.
Natasha Shannon, a mother with three daughters at Success Academy, echoed this sentiment.
"I don't understand why The New York Times thinks it has to educate me as a parent about the school that I choose to send my children to," she said.
"I'm not some poor, uninformed parent or someone who is not aware of what's available in New York City schools," she added. "I chose Success. I made that choice because it's the best choice for my daughters."
The news conference was punctuated by raucous applause and shouts of "that's right" and "say it again" when the teachers and parents agreed with what one of the speakers had to say about their schools.
"We can't get a fair shake from the so-called paper of record," Moskowitz said at Friday's event.
One of the most boisterous rounds of applause came after Success Academy teacher Candice Seagrave spoke.
"The most heartbreaking part of all of this is the feeling that you [based on the context (see below), referring to the NYT -- MP] don't believe that black and brown kids can be successful," she said.
Success has switched public relations companies several times over the last year in an attempt to tamp down critical coverage of the network. On Friday, the influential PR firm Mercury announced that it would now be representing Success, a pivot from the internal communications team that has handled the network's media requests for roughly a year.
Mercury is a high-stakes public strategy firm. We use our expertise and reach to gain competitive advantage for clients.
Our expertise comes from extensive must-win campaign experience and operating successfully at the highest rung of business, government, politics and media around the globe. Our reach is the ability to use strategic intelligence to mobilize the message and persuade the toughest audiences.
We know what it takes to win in difficult situations. We have proven results for prominent figures, leading advocacy groups, governments, political parties and the world’s most successful companies.
LANSING -- Gov. Rick Snyder has hired the national public relations firm Mercury LLC, where the spouse of Snyder's new chief of staff is a senior vice president, to help with communications during the Flint water crisis.
What's the point of advocating any economic policies (either using left or right wing logic) on the basis that they will boost economic growth and create jobs if as soon as the Fed thinks that there might be upward pressure on wages at some point in the distant future they're going to raise interest rates?Mostly because it makes it clear that economic feedback cycles are potentially quite complex. If the government taxing money (as an example) slows growth and thus the federal reserve doesn't have to act to slow growth then do we not end up with public good benefits and the same growth rate?
Days earlier, Moskowitz had stunned many in this town by asking the state to grant her 14 new charter schools, thus potentially catapulting her network to 46 schools.
The first Success graduating class, for example, had just 32 students. When they started first grade in August 2006, those pupils were among 73 enrolled at the school. That means less than half the original group reached the eighth grade. And just 22 of Friday’s grads will be moving on to the new Success Academy High School of the Liberal Arts, which is set to open this fall, while 10 opted for other high schools.
None of the 32 grads, however, will be attending any of the city’s eight elite public high schools, even though Harlem Success Academy 1 ranked in the top 1% on state math tests this year and in the top 5% in reading — a fact Moskowitz herself proudly highlighted.
“We are incredibly proud of our eighth-grade graduates . . . who are proving that zip code does not have to determine destiny,” Moskowitz said in a written statement.
A network spokeswoman confirmed Tuesday that 27 eighth-graders took the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test last fall, but none scored high enough to be offered a seat at one of the elite high schools that rely on the test, like Stuyvesant, Brooklyn Tech or Bronx Science.
Citywide, some 26,000 eighth-graders took the specialized high schools test in the fall of 2012, and 20% were offered a seat. So you’d expect a minimum of five or six students from Success 1 to score high enough to get into one of the elite schools.
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Still, if Harlem Success students had matched even the 12% admission rate for black and Latino students who take the test, you’d expect at least three of the Moskowitz students to have been admitted.
“We were shocked that none of our students was offered a seat in a specialized high school,” one parent told the Daily News.
One of the things that struck me about the past two presidential elections was how completely the Nixon pivot had been taken off of the table. Both McCain and Romney dutifully followed the first step during the primaries, but whenever they tried to move back toward the center during the general election, the reaction from the base quickly sent them scurrying back to the right.Fast forward to this recent post by Jonathan Chait:
Conventional wisdom saw this in terms of ideological extremism but my take-away was quite different. The GOP base has grown more conservative in the 21st century, but even taking that into account, their willingness to give their nominees any slack is much less than it was at any point in the second half of the 20th Century.
My argument is that this has relatively little to do with ideology and much to do with trust. Many in the base feel (with some justification) that the social contract with the party has been violated. They are no longer willing automatically to extend credit to their party's nominees.
With Trump, however, the Nixon pivot suddenly becomes not only viable but remarkably easy. He has a great personal bond with his supporters, his appeal is not particularly ideological, and he has been able to hold heterodox positions without paying a political penalty.
A pivot to the center would not even require covering any new territory. Trump's "platform" has been so erratic and unpredictable that all he would have to do would be to embrace some of the positions he held then implicitly or explicitly abandoned over the past 12 months. It would seem unlikely that significant portion of his core supporters would abandon him if he changed his mind once again and decided he was for high taxes on rich people.
Trump’s campaign initially emphasized his nativist position on immigration, which caused him to be identified with the Republican right. But Trump has repositioned himself increasingly as the candidate of the populist, disaffected center. Even though Trump has proposed a huge tax cut for the rich, he draws support from Republican voters who are most heavily in favor of raising taxes on the rich. (They have no other candidates to choose from within their party.)* In case you were wondering, "Slowly I turned..." aka "Niagara Falls" was a popular vaudeville routine. Pretty much everyone tried their hand at it.
Trump’s populism has slowly intensified. "I don't get along that well with the rich. I don't even like the rich people very much," he recently said. "It's like a weird deal." He has proposed to let the federal government negotiate lower prices for Medicare prescription drugs, a plan horrifying to conservatives (and drug companies). Like other Republicans, he proposes to eliminate Obamacare and replace it with something undefined but wonderful. The reason Trump’s vague repeal-and-replace stance makes them so nervous is that he once advocated single-payer insurance, and he has emphasized, in a way other Republicans have not, the horrors of leaving people who are too poor or sick to afford insurance on their own. Trump’s shorthand description of the travails of the uninsured before Obamacare — people “dying on the street” — alarms conventional conservatives precisely because it captures the broad reality of the suffering that justified Obamacare in the first place, and which would intensify if the law is repealed. The Republican fear is that Trump’s vague promise to replace Obamacare with something terrific is not just a hand-waving tactic to justify repealing Obamacare. Their fear is that he actually means it. Trump's populist positions may place him farther away from the Republican Party's intellectual and financial vanguard, but they draw him closer to its voters.
As one Hillary booster in Hollywood marveled: “There’s no chance her husband doesn’t understand the problem. The look on his face during her speeches evokes a retired major league All Star watching his son strike out in a Little League game. This is so fixable.”I find it very difficult to believe this is a real quote, that someone not only provided Dowd with the perfect comment for her piece, but actually did it in the same voice Dowd normally writes in, complete with mannered wording (how often do you hear “evokes” in casual conversation?) and clumsy analogy.
Dylan Byers Retweeted Comfortably SmugHave people really never read Walt Whitman before? Do they not understand the concept of anaphora?
That is not anaphora, because it is not the repetition of the first part of the sentence. This important difference explains why Dickens did not write, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” and why Churchill did not say, “We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, and we shall fight in … France.”
Nor is it part of some poetic device that makes sense if you watch the context of the speech, which I did, and which is just Rubio cycling through his standard stump lines rather than repeating them for some kind of literary effect.
And this is why Rubio visibly hesitates when he is about to say “throats” for the second time. It is the horrified panic of a candidate who realizes he has just done the one thing he desperately needs at this moment not to do.
(Actually, I find myself in a very different situation where I like the story -- or at least agree with the conclusion -- but don't buy some of the arguments, but that's a topic for another post.)
You are, of course, free to disagree. But you need to carefully explain why you disagree — what evidence do you have suggesting that these scholars’ conclusions, which are based on history and data, not just gut feelings, are wrong?
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I have some views of my own, of course, but I’m not a political scientist, man — I just read political scientists and take their work very seriously. What I do bring to this kind of discussion, I hope, is an awareness of two kinds of sin that can corrupt political discussion.
The obvious sin involves actually selling one’s views. And that does happen, of course.
But what happens even more, in my experience, is an intellectual sin whose effects can be just as bad: self-indulgence. By this I mean believing things, and advocating for policies, because you like the story rather than because you have any good evidence that it’s true. I’ve spent a lot of time over the years going after this sort of thing on the right, where things like the claim that Barney Frank somehow caused the financial crisis so often prevail in the teeth of overwhelming evidence. But it can happen on the left, too — which is why, for example, I’m still very cautious about claims that inequality is bad for growth.
These points need to be read uninterrupted and in order. All three lose a great deal out of context.
2) But the normal reason to adhere to talking points is determination to advance a controlled message - and to avoid an unhelpful quotation
3) By contrast, Rubio’s 4x repeat was not an act of excessive message discipline. It was a display of panic at a moment of uncertainty
4) Faced with a genuinely new situation, Rubio could not figure out what to do …. and so stumbled into doing precisely the wrong thing
"THE MIDDLE CIRCLE"
"... the second premise of the auteur theory is the distinguishable personality of the director as a criterion of value."
[Andrew Sarris]
Up to this point there has really been no theory, and now, when Sarris begins to work on his foundation, the entire edifice of civilized standards of taste collapses while he's tacking down his floorboards. Traditionally, in any art, the personalities of all those involved in a production have been a factor in judgment, but that the distinguishability of personality should in itself be a criterion of value completely confuses normal judgment. The smell of a skunk is more distinguishable than the perfume of a rose; does that make it better? Hitchcock's personality is certainly more distinguishable in Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, Vertigo, than Carol Reed's in The Stars Look Down, Odd Man Out, The Fallen Idol, The Third Man, An Outcast of the Islands, if for no other reason than because Hitchcock repeats while Reed tackles new subject matter. But how does this distinguishable personality function as a criterion for judging the works? We recognize the hands of Carne and Prevert in Le Jour se Leve, but that is not what makes it a beautiful film; we can just as easily recognize their hands in Quai des Brumes—which is not such a good film. We can recognize that Le Plaisir and The Earrings of Madame De are both the work of Ophuls, but Le Plaisir is not a great film, and Madame De is.
Often the works in which we are most aware of the personality of the director are his worst films—when he falls back on the devices he has already done to death. When a famous director makes a good movie, we look at the movie, we don't think about the director's personality; when he makes a stinker we notice his familiar touches because there's not much else to watch. When Preminger makes an expert, entertaining whodunit like Laura, we don't look for his personality (it has become part of the texture of the film); when he makes an atrocity like Whirlpool, there's plenty of time to look for his "personality" — if that's your idea of a good time.
It could even be argued, I think, that Hitchcock's uniformity, his mastery of tricks, and his cleverness at getting audiences to respond according to his calculations — the feedback he wants and gets from them — reveal not so much a personal style as a personal theory of audience psychology, that his methods and approach are not those of an artist but a prestidigitator. The auteur critics respond just as Hitchcock expects the gullible to respond. This is not so surprising — often the works auteur critics call masterpieces are ones that seem to reveal the contempt of the director for the audience.
An IBM survey found that worldwide, urban drivers spend an average of 20 minutes per trip looking for parking.Is it really such a bad idea to universally charge for parking in public places such that the resource does not become wildly over-used?
Dylan Byers