When threads collide -- ed reform and the new economy

I've been on a sub-thread based on this extraordinary piece of investigative reporting by Cosmo Garvin on Sacramento mayor Kevin Johnson and the huge education/industrial complex he and his wife Michele Rhee have assembled. It's a must read for anyone following the education reform movement and even more essential for those concerned about government corruption. The following is a very minor part of the story, but it does give an interesting glimpse into how some of the new economy hype is generated.

At his peak, KJ was a figure to behold, an urban policy entrepreneur and brander-in-chief selling #Sacramento 3.0, a “world-class” city where kids would take Uber vehicles instead of buses to their charter schools, “never check out a library book,” and have “more smart devices than toothbrushes.”

[much later in the article.]

In 2013 Stand Up employees teamed up with staff on the Sacramento city payroll to advance Johnson’s successful bid to take over the forty-year-old National Conference of Black Mayors.

...

In 2013 a PowerPoint presentation was distributed to the mayor’s City Hall staff, titled “National Conference of Black Mayors: Annual Meeting ‘Coup,’” laying out in bald terms the strategy behind the Johnson putsch. Participants included Aisha Lowe, who worked in City Hall as Johnson’s interim director of African American affairs—a position that doesn’t exist on the city payroll. Instead, she was earning a $100,000 annual salary as Stand Up’s executive director, while “volunteering” for the city.

Among the other plotters were Stephanie Mash Sykes, Johnson’s director of governmental affairs, and Mariah Sheriff, Johnson’s director of government affairs in education. Both positions are phony, but Sykes and Sheriff have presented themselves as employees of the Office of the Mayor. Sheriff even uses the City of Sacramento’s logo on her LinkedIn work history.

Johnson ultimately forced NCBM into bankruptcy, and that legal fight is still wending its way through the courts in Atlanta, where the group is headquartered. He immediately started a competing group, called the African American Mayors Association, and installed Sykes as executive director and himself as president. In short order, AAMA has established itself as yet another pay-to-play arm of the KJ Inc. machine. Perhaps the clearest example is Johnson’s mercenary relationship with Uber.

In June 2014, Uber gave a $50,000 check to the AAMA. In August, Mayor Johnson penned an editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle praising Uber as an exciting part of “Cities 3.0” and arguing against new regulations for such ride-share companies. In September, at the USCM fall meeting in Sacramento, Johnson held an entire session on the “sharing economy,” featuring Uber CEO Travis Kalanick as a speaker. Days before, the Sacramento Kings had announced that Uber was the official ride-sharing service of the Sacramento Kings.

"Will More Transit Actually Ease L.A.'s Traffic?"

Deeply mixed feelings about this. On one hand, we desperately need to spend more money, more effort and more serious thought on public transportation, and it seems almost certain that rail should play a key role. On a more specific note, the proposed extensions of LA Metro Rail should have been done years ago.

On the other hand, there's a lot here that makes me nervous: lack of focus on the fundamental problem of getting commuters quickly, cleanly and reliably to their jobs around the county and back; gentrification; questionable developments that threaten to make congestion worse in certain areas that are already trouble spots (and no, the owners of those upscale condos aren't going to forego driving just because you put an Intelligentsia Coffee on the first floor); and the disturbing signs of muddled and wishful thinking that I've increasingly come to associate with utopian urbanists.



 Gene Maddaus writing for the LA Weekly

The idea is that building high-density projects around stations creates walkable neighborhoods and lessens the impact of traffic while providing much-needed housing. But wherever this theory is applied, it seems to generate a backlash.

In Hollywood, developers have been putting up high-rises and mixed-use complexes around Red Line stops. The proposal for one particular project — the Millennium Hollywood — calls for nearly 500 condos, plus 200 hotel rooms, inside two towers — one 35 stories tall, the other 39 stories. And it has spurred an anti-development revolt.

The project would be about a block away from the subway stop at Hollywood and Vine, and its developers contend that it would help ease traffic by providing convenient transit access. But it also would include 2,000 parking spaces — an indication that no one truly expects residents of the luxury project to give up their cars.

...

The Platform development [in Culver City] — a mix of high-end galleries, boutiques and pastry shops — just opened to the southwest of the train station, on the site of a former used car lot. On the southeast corner, where a roofing supply store once stood, builders are finishing work on a 115-unit luxury apartment complex with ground-floor retail.

On the northwest corner, where there used to be a nursery, developers plan to build the Ivy Station, a 200-unit residential building with office and restaurant spaces, plus a 148-room hotel. Restaurant supply store Surfas has been located on the northeast corner for nearly 30 years. Developers plan to tear it down and put up an 80-unit condo building with creative offices and ground-floor retail.

Some residents to the east of this intersection view this development with alarm.

“The traffic already on Washington Boulevard is atrocious,” says Ken Mand, of the group Arts District Residents for Responsible Development, who argues that the traffic studies for these projects were deeply flawed. “They are far underestimating the reality of traffic as it currently stands. Nothing they did was illegal or wrong. But the reality is it’s all fucked up.”

The city did not mandate that a portion of the housing units be set aside for lower-income residents, and Mand doubts the new residents will take the train.

“They’re just adding a ton of apartments and a ton of retail that is not geared toward Culver City residents,” he says. “Culver City residents are not shopping for $150-an-ounce hand lotion. … It’s all about the Google people that are coming to town. It’s all about pour-over coffee.”

Worse yet, from his perspective, is what’s in the works for the La Cienega train station, one stop to the east, within the Los Angeles city limits. There, developers are planning to build the Cumulus project — 1,200 housing units, plus a grocery store, restaurants, office space and 2,400 parking spaces.

The current height limit at that intersection is 45 feet. The height limit at other transit stations on the Expo route — such as Sepulveda and Bundy — tops out around 160 feet. The Cumulus project will tower 320 feet above the ground.

“It’s pretty crazy,” says Jamie Hall, an attorney for La Cienega Heights, a predominantly African-American and Latino homeowners group, which is fighting the project. “It’s gonna make traffic a lot worse.”

Baseball is kind of a slow game -- maybe it leads to ADHD

Or perhaps there's some lesson here about the way people circumvent rules.

From Drug Monkey:

The question is why [Maria Sharapova] has been taking this since the age of 16 for an "abnormal EKG" diagnosed by her personal physician.

MLB players have *astonishingly* high rates of adult ADHD which requires treatment with amphetamines.

Pro cyclists are cursed, apparently, with almost universal asthma, requiring bronchodilator use.

Location continued

Dean Dad points us to something I wish I had seen before writing the other location, location, location posts.

But with the shift in production has come a shift in geography.  As Joshua Benton’s recent piece notes, jobs in the new journalism are much more concentrated on the coasts than jobs in the old journalism are.  In a recent survey, almost 40 percent of the digital journalism jobs in America were physically based in the New York City and D.C. metros.  That’s compared to less than 10 percent of the jobs in television journalism.  Terre Haute may have a local news team, but it probably doesn’t have a freestanding digital news provider of any size.

I can't really recommend the rest of the Benton piece (too much conventional wisdom for my taste), but he deserves credit for digging up that remarkably telling statistic.

Pretty much all of us news-junkies consume the product on at least two levels: local and national. Ideally, the second should reflect a broad awareness and understanding of the parts that make up the first, not to mention the social and economic strata that make up the parts. This is extremely difficult when the people covering national stories tend to be geographically concentrated, particularly when they also tend to be economically and culturally homogeneous.

Of course,  we have to be careful about overgeneralizing -- there are, for example, food bloggers who just write about local scenes – but digital journalists play a big role in the discussion of national topics like transportation, and those journalists are disproportionately located in those two cities, as are the major print publications that dominate the national discourse. All of this is contributing to debates where not only do all of the participants have the same frame of reference; they are increasingly unable to imagine anyone having a different one.

If I lived in NYC or DC or San Francisco, I could imagine giving up my car and relying on Uber and public transportation. And if I and everyone I associated with lived in NYC or DC or San Francisco, some of the more optimistic Uber business scenarios might strike me as credible.

This is not the mind behind ‘Dilbert’; this is the mind behind the 'Dilberito.'

If you are thinking about going into the corporate world, you will need to be prepared to sit through endless bullshit seminars. You will be exposed to countless PowerPoint slides from overcompensated consultants whose boss managed to sweet talk and/or liquor up your CEO. Most of these start with some fairly commonsense notion like the importance of maintaining a good reputation with customers or the advantages of a positive attitude then so embellish it with buzzwords and extravagant claims as to make it almost unrecognizable.

After one of these seminars, in the break room or a nearby bar, you will generally find strong reactions breaking down at the ends of the gullible/cynical spectrum. Some of the participants will come away absolutely convinced that they have learned the secrets to delighting customers or achieving business excellence or unlocking their personal potential. Those at the other end of the spectrum will point out flaws, list counterexamples, and mock the general silliness of the proceedings (though the more savvy of that group will be careful not to do any of these things around a supervisor).

I have seen people move from one end of the spectrum to the other, but I have never seen anyone occupy both extremes at the same time.

Scott Adams of Dilbert fame, however, does provide proof of concept. Adams has an extraordinary way of combining strengths and weaknesses you would assume to be mutually exclusive. No one is better at spotting and laying out the flaws in business ideas and the absurdities of corporate culture, but his talents are wholly limited to the destructive. When he tries to come up with a new idea or just to offer constructive criticism of the ideas of someone else, it is as if the part of his brain that recognizes the stupid and the silly simply switches off.

He somehow manages to be an idiot savant of satire. I'd suspect it was a piece of performance art if the commitment wasn't so complete. When Adams has tried businesses not directly related to satire, his track record is terrible -- ideas, execution and outcomes. His attempts to create a themed restaurant and launch the previously mentioned Dilberito were pretty much case studies in amateurish entrepreneurship.

Even when he's simply throwing out suggestions and observations, if he strays from destructive criticism, the results are disastrous. Despite having an MBA from UC Berkeley, Adams relies almost exclusively on the kind of business advice you'd expect in a get-rich-quick seminar, not just in terms of the concepts themselves, but also the language, framing and depth (or lack thereof). The first indications of these tendencies came in The Dilbert Future (affirmations play a significant role), but it wasn't until recently that we got the full picture.

It was perhaps inevitable that this inclination would lead to a Trump fixation. Even before he launched the scam university, the mogul had a long history with get-rich-quick promoters. So it isn't that surprising that Adams has taken to predicting that Donald Trump will win the presidency in a landslide and has even gone so far as to suggest that the occasional primary loss was due to fraud.

You can get a pretty good brief summary of Adam's arguments in this Washington Post piece (and trust me, these arguments are best read in the most concise form available). They mostly come down to people being irrational and Trump being a “master persuader” (Adams claims extra insights here because he is, as he often mentions, a “certified hypnotist”). Both points are made through standard seminar-speak. Trump “warps reality” by “anchoring numbers,” “talking past the sale,” and using “linguistic kill shots” that relate to the “physicality of the subject.”

Reading passages like:

“Identity is always the strongest level of persuasion. The only way to beat it is with dirty tricks or a stronger identity play. … [And] Trump is well on his way to owning the identities of American, Alpha Males, and Women Who Like Alpha Males. Clinton is well on her way to owning the identities of angry women, beta males, immigrants, and disenfranchised minorities.”

It's easy to imagine Dilbert and Dogbert tag-teaming Adams, citing supporter demographics and pointing out that, by definition, alphas (let alone alpha males) have to be a relatively small minority (you're pretty much limited to one per group).

None of this is news to the readers of Gawker which has a long running thread on Adams' blogging exploits:


Here's Adams on arguing with women:

The reality is that women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently. It's just easier this way for everyone. You don't argue with a four-year old about why he shouldn't eat candy for dinner. You don't punch a mentally handicapped guy even if he punches you first. And you don't argue when a women tells you she's only making 80 cents to your dollar. It's the path of least resistance. You save your energy for more important battles.

(The "angry women" comment from the Post interview is starting to come into focus.)

The analogy was later removed with the following explanation:

    That's the reason the original blog was pulled down. All writing is designed for specific readers. This piece was designed for regular readers of The Scott Adams blog. That group has an unusually high reading comprehension level.

    In this case, the content of the piece inspires so much emotion in some readers that they literally can't understand it. The same would be true if the topic were about gun ownership or a dozen other topics. As emotion increases, reading comprehension decreases. This would be true of anyone, but regular readers of the Dilbert blog are pretty far along the bell curve toward rational thought, and relatively immune to emotional distortion.

Then there was the sock puppet incident that started when people noticed a certain recurring theme in the comments of "PlannedChaos"

    If an idiot and a genius disagree, the idiot generally thinks the genius is wrong. He also has lots of idiot reasons to back his idiot belief. That's how the idiot mind is wired.

    It's fair to say you disagree with Adams. But you can't rule out the hypothesis that you're too dumb to understand what he's saying.

    And he's a certified genius. Just sayin'.

Followed by this memorable explanation of the deception:

As a general rule, you can't trust anyone who has a conflict of interest. Conflict of interest is like a prison that locks in both the truth and the lies. One workaround for that problem is to change the messenger. That's where an alias comes in handy. When you remove the appearance of conflict of interest, it allows others to listen to the evidence without judging.

And we won't even get into his theories about rape and  about suicide bombers. That's where things get weird.

Location, Location, Location continued -- more outliers

Over at Worthwhile Canadian Initiative, Frances Woolley has an interesting post on transportation views then and now. This picture alone makes it blog-worthy...

... but it's also relevant to Monday's post. For various reasons, some more defensible than others, discussions of housing and transportation are disproportionately focused on geographically small, water-bounded cities like San Francisco and (in this case) Vancouver. Even compared to other port areas like Houston or Los Angeles, these cities are outliers. Their problems are fundamentally different and there's no reason to assume that their solutions will transfer. (L.A. also has some unique terrain-based challenges resulting from its mix of mountain, coast and desert, but that's a topic for later.)

Lessons in reading a business story -- location, location, location

There is a lot of interesting stuff in this article by Chelsea Hawkins on who uses Uber and Lyft and what it costs, but for now there's one aspect I want to highlight.

Whenever you read a news story, pay close attention to where the events take place and where the subjects come from. Think about the areas mentioned (look them up on Wikipedia if they're unfamiliar) and ask yourself is there anything about these locations that might change the way I should interpret the story.

Case in point, check out the four consumers quoted in this story. [Emphasis added]

Here's How Much Money You Can Save From Deleting Uber and Lyft From Your Phone
[Mic]
March 25, 2016


To find out exactly how much people are spending on ride-sharing services — and how much they can save by deleting them entirely — we asked Uber and Lyft users in various parts of the country to calculate their monthly expenses on the apps. Overall, they found that their cab habit cost them hundreds — or even thousands — of dollars per year. 

...

Steve Han, a freelance writer based in Manhattan, said he only uses Uber a few times a week, mostly during rush hour when the trains are too busy.

...

Ana Cosma, 25, who lives in Washington, D.C., said that until recently, her cab expenses were out of control.

...

Lauren Bell, 26, who lives in Boston, said her main reason for using Lyft was convenience.

...

Veronica Glover, 27, who lives in the Bay Area of Northern California, said she started using Lyft for her daily commute to and from work earlier this year. 

We've already mentioned that for a wide variety of topics, particularly transportation, infrastructure and housing, any story or study that uses the Bay Area as an example should be viewed with suspicion. The same can be said of New York City, D.C., and to a lesser extent, Boston. All four land on the far end of the spectra for cost of living, population density, and access to taxis and mass transit. As a result, there are a large number of business plans, policy proposals and generalizations about customer behavior that make sense in these cities and almost nowhere else.

Brooks on Trump -- Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance

I know I said I was out for the weekend and I realize that the Kübler-Ross bit is overdone, but after repeated (if not perhaps sequential) displays of all of the other stages of grief, today's David Brooks column is such a perfect example of acceptance as summarized by Wikipedia ("It's going to be okay."; "I can't fight it, I may as well prepare for it.") that I couldn't let it pass without comment.

The Post-Trump Era

This is a wonderful moment to be a conservative. For decades now the Republican Party has been groaning under the Reagan orthodoxy, which was right for the 1980s but has become increasingly obsolete. The Reagan worldview was based on the idea that a rising economic tide would lift all boats. But that’s clearly no longer true.

We’ve gone from Rising Tide America to Coming Apart America. Technological change, globalization and social and family breakdown mean that the benefits of growth, to the extent there is growth, are not widely shared.

Republicans sort of recognize this reality, but they are still imprisoned in the Reaganite model. They ask Reaganite questions, propose Reaganite policies and have Reaganite instincts.

Now along comes Donald Trump, an angel of destruction, to blow it all to smithereens. He represents not only a rejection of the existing Reaganite establishment, but also a rejection of Reaganite foreign policy (he is less globalist) and Reaganite domestic policy (he is friendlier to the state).

...

That’s where the G.O.P. is heading. So this is a moment of anticipation. The great question is not, Should I vote for Hillary or sit out this campaign? The great question is, How do I prepare now for the post-Trump era?

...

We’re going to have two parties in this country. One will be a Democratic Party that is moving left. The other will be a Republican Party. Nobody knows what it will be, but it’s exciting to be present at the re-creation.

We could talk a bit more about how Brooks seems to have come around to Krugman's argument that Trump may be a "cleansing shock," but that would just be kicking a man when he's down.

Getting an early start to the weekend

Lots of serious stuff in the queue for next week. Until then, let's kick back and watch some videos


I miss James Garner.




This is a cool idea very well executed. New Order's "Blue Monday" is now a radio staple but when it came out in 1983 it was cutting-edge electronic dance music.This group (about which I know nothing) came up with a new arrangement that used only instruments available in the early Thirties yet still captured that weird, modern sound.








We are living in a Golden Age of political satire. I have to admit, I've fallen way behind. This is the first segment I've seen of Samantha Bee's new show. If this is representative, I need to catch up.







A clever sketch from College Humor






And finally to unwind

Quotas

One of the underlying issues of the no-excuses charter school thread is the way badly designed, badly maintained metric-based systems can go awry. Arguably the classic example is the Soviet factory producing unusable products to maximize some unrealistic standard.

Here's an account from economist Paul Craig Roberts (It's from American Conservative and I have to admit some doubts about the publications, but Roberts is knowledgeable and the piece seems solid):

For example, the success indicator for the construction industry was the number of projects under construction. Consequently, Moscow was littered with unfinished projects because all activity was concentrated in starting new ones. The plan produced a housing shortage because the incentive was to start new constructions not to complete ones already underway.

If a shoe factory’s gross output indicator was a specified number of pairs of shoes, there would be plenty of baby shoes, but none for large feet, because the same amount of material could be used to produce one large pair or several small pairs.

If nails were specified in number, there would be small nails but no large ones. If specified in terms of weight, there would be assortments weighted heavily with large sizes. A famous Soviet cartoon shows the manager of a nail factory being awarded Hero of the Soviet Union for over-fulfilling his quota. In the factory yard are two giant cranes holding one giant nail.

If light fixtures were specified in number, they would be small. If in weight, they would be heavy. Nikita Khrushchev complained of chandeliers so heavy that “they pull the ceilings down on our heads.”

I dug up the cartoon and (with the help of Google Translate) added an English caption.

" Who needs such a big nail? "
" Do not worry about it. The main thing is that we have met the quota for nails."

The Wages of Strauss* -- Part II (Josh edition)

[*Joseph (who knows more than a normal person should on these matters) took mild exception to the previous post in this thread, specifically the way I used Straussianism as a crude shorthand for an argument that goes back to Athens. He's right but I don't have the time to do it right. (What do you expect from a blog?)]

A few days ago, I argued that the conservative movement was based on "the assumption that governing must be done by the intellectually superior elite," so they had put in place "strategies and tactics designed to allow small groups to gain and hold power in a democracy" which left them "vulnerable to hostile takeover" such as the one launched by Donald Trump.

If I would have known about this piece by Josh Barro, I definitely would have included the following quotes:

It's not normal for a political party to rent frontrunner status to cranks and charlatans for weeks at a time. Disastrous candidates are supposed to be blocked by validating institutions. Policy experts explain that their proposals do not add up. The media covers embarrassing incidents from their past and present. Party leaders warn that they will be embarrassing or incompetent or unelectable.

The problem is that Republicans have purposefully torn down the validating institutions. They have convinced voters that the media cannot be trusted; they have gotten them used to ignoring inconvenient facts about policy; and they have abolished standards of discourse by allowing all complaints about offensiveness to be lumped into a box called "political correctness" and ignored.

Republicans waged war on these institutions for a reason. Facts about policy can be inconvenient — a reality-based approach would find, for example, that tax cuts increase the deficit and carbon emissions cause climate change. Acknowledging the validity of complaints about racism could require some awkward conversations with racist and quasi-racist voters in the Republican coalition.

Of course, we're now seeing the unintended consequence of the destruction of those institutions and the boundaries they impose around candidate acceptability: In doing so, Republicans created a hole that Donald Trump could fly his 757 through.

Josh Marshall is also making similar points:

If you look around over the last week there are a number of highly sophisticated Republican voices arguing that Donald Trump is the sort of demagogue and potential strongman our political system was designed to prevent from gaining power in our country. ,,, they would be far more credible if so many Republicans - not necessarily the same writers, but countless formal and informal spokespersons including numerous high-ranking elected officials - hadn't spent the last seven years ranting that the temperamentally cautious and cerebral Barack Obama was a 'dictator' who was trampling the constitution.
...

 Trumpism is the product of many things. But a key one of them, perhaps the key enabling one, is years of originating and pandering to increasingly apocalyptic and hyperbolic conspiracy theories, fantasies and fever dreams which put middle aged white men up against the metaphorical wall with a thug, foreign, black nationalist, anti-colonialist Barack Obama shaking them down for their money, their liberty, their women and even their lawn furniture.

Revisiting "The Battle for New York Schools: Eva Moskowitz vs. Mayor Bill de Blasio"

[from the teaching blog]

When following the education reform movement, it is enormously useful to step back from time to time and look at who was saying what a few years ago. As recently as 2009, it was almost impossible to find serious critics of the movement in the mainstream media (to highlight how much things have changed, I put together an e-book collection of my 2010 education posts, annotated but otherwise unrevised).

As far as I can tell, the Washington Post was the first of the major papers to start turning a tough, critical eye towards initiatives like charter schools, Common Core, and Glengarry Glen  Ross incentive systems. Recently, the New York Times has been aggressively investigating problems at Eva Moskowitz's Success Academies, but this is a relatively new position.

This  2014 NYT Magazine piece by Daniel Bergner is interesting on a number of levels, not the least of which being a reminder of how things have changed.

On the topic of scores, the U.F.T. and Ravitch insist that Moskowitz’s numbers don’t hold up under scrutiny. Success Academy (like all charters), they say, possesses a demographic advantage over regular public schools, by serving somewhat fewer students with special needs, by teaching fewer students from the city’s most severely dysfunctional families and by using suspensions to push out underperforming students (an accusation that Success Academy vehemently denies). These are a few of the myriad factors that Mulgrew and Ravitch stress. But even taking these differences into account probably doesn’t come close to explaining away Success Academy’s results.

First off, even at the time "vehemently" did not equate to "convincingly." There was already an enormous amount of evidence behind these accusations. Letting SA's denial go unchallenged did Moskowitz a huge favor, as did the unsupported claim at the end. Little more than a year later, the NYT itself was reporting on the Success Academies' "got to go" lists.

[Diane Ravitch was extremely upset both by how Bergner handled her interview and wrote a stinging post in response.]

As bad as this section was, the really troubling part (at least for me as a statistician) came later.

In talking to dozens of current and former Success Academy employees and parents, the critique with the most staying power involved the schools’ overly heated preparation for the state exams. A former fourth-grade teacher recounted that network employees made a mini­van run to Toys “R” Us and returned to unload a mound of assorted treasures in the back of her classroom. “It was a huge pile,” she says. “We called it Prize Mountain.” She would remind the pupils that a good score on a practice test meant a gift from the mountain.

Teachers also chart students’ results on the practice tests, posting their names and scores on classroom walls. Yet I heard from parents like Natasha Shannon, an African-American mother of three girls in Success Academy schools, that although the public posting could be painful for the children, it was important nonetheless.

...

For her part, Moskowitz asserts that the public charting is one aspect of the network’s emphasis on feedback, not only for the students but also for the faculty. Throughout the year, whether or not test prep is underway, scores on quizzes and writing assignments are analyzed at network headquarters. Each teacher’s outcome is tabulated, and bar graphs are instantly available to all faculty members. The teachers whose classes lag are responsible for seeking out advice from those who top the graphs, just as the students with red or yellow stickers by their names are guided to emulate the topic sentences of those whose stickers are green or blue.

Couple of points here.

1. We can go back and forth on different methods of rewarding academic performance in other contexts, but in this case we're talking about diagnostic tests. Doling out special rewards and punishments can and probably does undermine the quality of the resulting data. The fact that Bergner (and, to be fair, most reporters covering the story) seem completely unaware of fundamental education concepts is disturbing;

2. Even more disturbing (though we can't blame this one on Bergner.) is the fact that one of those model teachers whose advice was being sought was Charlotte Dial.

Musical Accompaniment

I was reading these posts by  Greg Sargent and Charles Pierce on the turmoil in the GOP over the upcoming convention and I realized that a familiar piece of music was running through my mind in the background, particularly when Pierce brought out the old family bible:

And shall cast them into a furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth.

—Matthew 13:42

The wailing is now at a pitch audible only to dogs and the teeth are gnashed right down to the gum line, and it's only March. The roosts are so full of chickens that the chickens are starting to cannibalize each other just to have a place to perch. The conservative movement is trying to govern itself again and the Republican Party, which has in that movement its only animating force, is being ground up by the process. A furnace of fire would be a vacation cabin in the Rockies compared to a spot in the withering wrath of one Erick Erickson and his endless escadrille of up-armored tricycles.

 
Next time you click on one of these stories in the Washington Post or (if you must) in Politico, I highly recommend queuing up this as a soundtrack.

Suspensions and Race

There's a new report on which groups are the most likely to get suspended. For kids who are African-American or who are disabled, the numbers are appalling. You can find my reactions at the teaching blog.

Budget spirals

I've recently gotten mildly addicted to the Trailers from Hell, not because any of them have been tell-all-your-friends great -- so far none have really blown me away -- but they're consistently pretty good and their subjects/presenters and their bite-sized length make them highly tempting (what would a three minute break hurt?). Occasionally, though, they hit on bigger topics like how budgets spiral out of control.

This segment on the notorious 1963 flop Cleopatra ("the only film ever to be the highest grossing film of the year yet to run at a loss") brings up lots of interesting points, starting with the fact that Fox actually had to sell off part of its lot to stay out of bankruptcy.