Time to call a lie a lie

One of the most effective rhetorical tools in the education reform movement is the "we're just in this for the children" chant. The implication, of course, is that the people who disagree with the movement's proposals must not be putting the children first. It is an obviously unfair suggestion but it done a spectacular job quelling potential criticism on the left.

Of course, the vast majority of people on both sides of the debate are there because of a concern for kids. I disagree strongly with Jonathan Chait and Ray Fisman (just to name two) but I have no doubt that both men are motivated by a desire to see young people get a better education. (For the record, that's a courtesy that many of those in the movement, such as Chait, have been reluctant to extend to the other side.)

This concern does not, of course, preclude self-interest. As functional adults we expect people to act out of a mixture of motives. When policemen lobby for more cops on the street or our dentists advise us to schedule more appointments, we know that their advice to us is also in their self-interest but, barring evidence to the contrary, we believe that they are genuinely concerned about us as well.

These two facts, that everybody has mixed interests and that their advice should still be given the benefit of the doubt, need be kept in mind during all debates. Acknowledging these facts goes a long way toward keeping things civil and, more importantly, honest. That's why, in the context of recent events, the behavior of Michelle Rhee has been so difficult to forgive.

Rhee has always played an aggressive game and has gone out of her way to portray her opponents in a negative light, but with the formation of her lobbying group StudentsFirst, Rhee has crossed the line into claiming that only she and her allies have pure motives.

Consider this quote from an interview conducted by the painfully credulous Guy Raz on Weekend All Things Considered:

"Over the last 30 years, the education policy has been driven in this country by lots of special interest groups, including the teachers union," she says. "I think that one of the missing pieces is that there is no organized national interest group that has the heft that the unions and the other groups do who are advocating on behalf of children."

The trouble with proclaiming your own purity is that someone will remember those proclamations when you have to make compromises. Rhee's recent role as an adviser/advocate for various conservative Republican governors has made some of these compromises unavoidable.

The recent debate over Florida's education bill provided an ideal example:

Among the amendments proposed and rejected as poison pills:

Requiring superintendents to offer a written explanation for denying a teacher's contract renewal, if test scores and evaluations make the teacher eligible for the renewal.

Let's take a minute and unpack this. First let's keep in mind that Rhee's philosophy is based on the assumptions that you can largely fix the current problems in education by putting better teachers in the classroom and you can accurately identify those teachers through test scores and evaluations. The teachers being denied these letters are, by definition, the same teachers Rhee says we need to keep in the classroom in order to save our school system.

Unfortunately, the main effect of denying that letter will be to force many of these teachers out of the profession forever. As I explained it before, the problem is asymmetry of information. It is incredibly difficult and disruptive to make staffing changes during the school year. This makes administrators very skittish about hiring a teacher who has been fired elsewhere. The administrators would, however, probably take a chance if they knew that the teacher got good evaluations and produced high test scores but was fired for something like budgetary reasons. In other words, that letter might have determined whether or not the effective teacher remained employable.

The effect here is two-fold: effective teachers who find themselves caught in this trap will have a great deal of trouble finding another job and may have to leave the profession; other effective teachers will see that competence and accomplishment cannot protect them from arbitrary career-ending decisions and will consider leaving the field as well. Either way, the law Rhee endorses causes us to lose more of the teachers Rhee says we need to keep.

To be blunt as a sock full of sand, from the students' standpoint this is all bad. There is no possible benefit. You simply cannot argue that causing effective teachers to leave the classroom is good for kids. Despite Michelle Rhee's titular claim, rejecting that amendment puts students a poor second.

This doesn't Rhee and the Florida GOP don't care about the quality of teachers (I'm sure they do), but it does mean that, in this case, other things mattered more. Things such as the money to be saved by firing teachers who are likely to max out the merit pay system and the power that comes from running the education department like a political machine.

If Michelle Rhee were concerned solely with the interests of children, she would have been actively lobbying for rules like the one in the amendment, rules that furthered her stated goal of having more teachers in the classroom whom she considered competent. But, of course, Rhee has to balance the interests of children against the interests of those she represents, an alliance that includes, among others, educational entrepreneurs who stand to make a great deal of money from proposed reforms and conservative Republicans who see the current conflict as a way of maintaining political power and moving back to a period when the country was on the right track.

I have no doubt that Michelle Rhee's concern for children is genuine. Rhee is a professional educator and it is exceptionally rare to find someone who has spent a career working in schools who doesn't care about kids. Nor does the fact that she has sometimes put other interests above those of students (including a particularly notorious case involving her own children) indicate a lack of concern -- making compromises is a necessary part of being an adult.

The sin here is in the lie, in claiming purity of motive and suggesting that only she was trustworthy. That was unfair to her opponents, provably false and terribly damaging to the discourse. Michelle Rhee should be ashamed of herself for saying it and Guy Raz and the rest of the press corps should be ashamed of themselves for not holding her accountable.

"How to Erase $70,000 in Debt"

First, get an income of $140,000...

You know, when Steve Martin and South Park did this sort of thing, they meant it to be funny.

Safety of Energy Sources

Here is an interesting discussion of deaths per terra watt-hour of electricity generated. I have always been surprised that coal plants generate more radioactivity in the surrounding community than nuclear plants do.

I won't vouch for the numbers being perfect, nor do I think that these rates include the risk of massive failures (like a nuclear plant blowing up). On the other hand, the otherwise fairly safe Hydro has a disaster with 170,000 deaths included in it.

This comparison does seem to put the relative level of risk in perspective. Certainly, there is no risk free alternative to power generation and we should really be focused on what non-fossil fuel options we might have.

20 each?

Cory Doctorow's post (via DeLong) on the New York Times' new paywall has me thinking:

New York Times paywall: wishful thinking or just crazy? - Boing Boing: lots of people are going to greet the NYT paywall with eye-rolling and frustration: You stupid piece of technology, what do you mean I've seen 20 stories this month? This is exactly the wrong frame of mind to be in when confronted with a signup page (the correct frame of mind to be in on that page is, Huh, wow, I got tons of value from the Times this month. Of course I'm going to sign up!)

Which means that lots of people will take countermeasures to beat the #nytpaywall. The easiest of these, of course, will be to turn off cookies so that the Times's site has no way to know how many pages you've seen this month

Of course, the NYT might respond by planting secret permacookies, using Flash cookies, browser detection, third-party beacons, or secret ex-Soviet vat-grown remote-sensing psychics. At the very minimum, the FTC will probably be unamused to learn that the Grey Lady is actively exploiting browser vulnerabilities (or, as the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse statute puts it, "exceeding authorized access" on a remote system -- which carries a 20 year prison sentence, incidentally)

I'm running a dual boot operating system (Windows and Linux). Barring Doctorow's recently decanted telepaths, I assume that puts me up to forty a month which is about four times what I expect my monthly demand to be.

A nice post on Education Reform

There is a nice post in the Daily Kos talking about education reform. The whole piece is worth noting but this point seems especially apt:

Those advocating the end of seniority-based retention practices in favor of "performance" based on student test scores have to concede that districts, which must stretch dollars these days like never before, will be tempted to staff their classes in such a way to protect their younger (and, it must be noted, markedly cheaper) staff members.

I will never forget in my third year on the job drawing a Freshman Geography class that felt, on bad days, like a training session for America's Most Wanted. When I half-jokingly teased a counselor about how I managed to draw every wild-eyed boy in the freshman class, she smiled and told me, "But, Steve, we all know how good you are with difficult students."

At the time, I took it for the backhanded compliment that it was. In this brave new world being promoted by the GOP (and an alarming number of Democrats), it would be my ticket to lower pay. Worse yet, it could be my ticket out of the profession.

The worry here is that, in the short term, this approach will save a lot of money. Having a lot of inexpensive and enthusiastic junior teachers will do wonders for budgets (at a time when tax cuts are a priority). While teachers will recognize what is happening, in an environment with unemployment hovering around 10% (and basic things like Health Insurance depending on employment) it is likely that schools will not suffer in the short term. In the long term, the new world of teaching will require much higher pay for equally qualified teachers as we know have to compensate the teachers for the fear and uncertainty in such a system.

Not to mention to concern that class assignments could be used to protect liked but less capable teachers. Do we have a solid plan for preventing this from happening?

Sunday Morning Funnies

Weekend Gaming -- the heated chess/checkers debate

Andrew Gelman joined in the Chess/Checkers debate and added Go to the mix (which was outside of the scope of the original post but is certainly relevant to the discussion). There have been around two dozen comments so far (and Gelman always has unusually thoughtful discussion threads). Definitely worth a look.

Tenure and the end of mandatory retirement (Canada edition)

Frances Woolley has a nice post about the intersection between tenure and the lack of a mandatory retirement age in Canada. It is a different case than the debate in Canada. The background is that salary scales and tenure agreements (at Canadian Universities) were negotiated when there was a mandatory retirement age of 65. The removal of mandatory retirement was a windfall for professors who were already employed as they work under a salary scale designed for workers who would leave at 65.

In practical terms this can have a fairly important impact on budgets as it adds additional years of salary at the highest levels (often 2.5 x starting salary in a Canadian University). Frances has a nice chart here. The short term implications are stark:

Such a pay structure can be profitable as long as the pay structure is similar to the one shown in the diagram above, where the high costs of paying workers between 45 and 65 are counter-balanced by the low cost of paying workers between 25 and 45. But if the terms of the employment arrangement were changed so that workers stayed on until 75, the firm's pay structure would no longer be profitable: the costs of paying experienced workers more would exceed the gains from underpaying junior workers.

I think that there is an important balance between job security and balancing out employment contracts. In this case, due to regulatory changes, I think it would make a lot more sense if tenure elapsed at the traditional retirement age. In this case we have the reverse of what is happening in the United States for teachers -- the employment contract changed in mid-stream. I think it is consistent to argue, in both cases, that a change of contract terms should not result in a windfall for either party unless the change was by mutual consent.

Not all that broken up about the paywall

[I'm working an a post on the Florida education bill but I'm taking my time. The truth here is so ugly that even the slightest over-reaction would be going too far. In the meantime, here's something light and snarky for your Friday afternoon.]

As you've probably heard, there's a paywall going up around America's most over-rated newspaper (I'd put the Wall Street Journal, the LA Times and maybe a half-dozen other papers above it). The limit for free articles is twenty a month though you can still apparently follow blog links after you've run through those so you should still be able to keep up with most of what you're reading now (almost all of which is probably summarized by bloggers like Thoma and DeLong anyway).

As far as I can tell, the big loss will be those articles that catch your eye while you're browsing the site and most of those tend to read like this piece on the spectacular failure of Mars Needs Moms (a bomb that may leave a nine-figure crater).

The explain-the-fiasco story is one of the annoying perennials of entertainment journalism (the object is to explain why a show tanked without addressing the fact that it stank) and even by the low, low standards of the genre, this article by Brooks Barnes leaves much to be desired, consisting of widely-available facts, conventional wisdom and analysis like this:

It is quite rare for a Disney release to flop as badly as “Mars Needs Moms,” which is based on an illustrated book by Berkeley Breathed, best known for the comic strip “Bloom County.” Part of the problem may have been the story. What child wants to see a movie about his mom being taken away from him? But studio executives also pointed to the style of animation as a culprit.

Do the names Bambi and Dumbo not ring any bells whatsoever? Does Barnes not know that early Disney features (Snow White, Pinocchio, Dumbo, Bambi) expertly played expertly on children's fear of being separated from their parents? Or that this template remains popular to this day (Finding Nemo)? More importantly, does this strike you as an insight you'd pay $15 a month for?

If you're in the mood for more fun at the gray lady's expense, check out this amusing bit of mockery from Wonkette.

I'm heading out the door but before I go...

Make sure to check out this post by Andrew Gelman. It's relevant to a number of big but underdiscussed issues in the education reform debate.

New Education Bill

Okay, there was a new law passed today in Florida:

School teachers would lose tenure and see future pay raises based on student performance under a politically charged package of education changes the Florida House sent to Gov. Rick Scott Wednesday on a straight party-line vote.

The new bill:

The legislation will establish a statewide teacher evaluation and merit pay system in 2014 and do away with tenure for new teachers hired after July 1 this year. It also chips away at teachers' due process and collective bargaining rights.

Among the amendments proposed and rejected as poison pills:

Requiring superintendents to offer a written explanation for denying a teacher's contract renewal, if test scores and evaluations make the teacher eligible for the renewal.

In the new system contracts need to be renewed annually. I am unclear how not offering an explanation for failure to renew (for teachers that test well) is an unreasonable requirement. After all, if we trust these test-based metrics than it should be perfectly reasonable to explain why a high performing teacher is being let go (e.g. drop in student enrollment at their school). If we do not trust these metrics to give an unbiased picture of how is an effective teacher then why are we tying pay so closely to these metrics?

It just seems to be inconsistent.

It is also unclear where any money for merit raises might come from in a state focused on tax cuts. Overall, I am underwhelmed.

Mark: Any thoughts?

Cloning Jaime Escalante -- a thought experiment

One of the fundamental tenets of the reform movement is the belief that we could fix all of our schools problems if, through big bonuses and wholesale firings, we could replace all of the lazy and incompetent teachers with great ones. Counterarguments generally point out that our metrics for identifying good teachers were unreliable and that, even with high-quality metrics, trying to restaff a major industry so that, say, 80% of the new recruits were in what had been the top 10% is simply not practical.

But what if we moved past those arguments altogether? What if we could create perfect duplicates of any teacher we want and place them in a million classrooms? Surely that would do it, but who should we pick?

How about Jaime Escalante, the teacher immortalized in the movie Stand and Deliver? Escalante was beyond question a spectacular teacher and he managed to build one of the country's most successful math programs in a very troubled urban school, Garfield High. By the end of his time at the school, he was teaching huge calculus sections (for HS) and producing better than a 90% pass rate on the AP exam. Only four schools in the country had more students passing the test.

So what would happen if you could clone "the best teacher in America" (as reporter Jay Matthews called him) and have him teach your AP calculus class? We can never be sure but I suspect that it would go something like this:

In 1991, he packed up his bag of tricks and quit Garfield, saying he was fed up with faculty politics and petty jealousies.

He headed to Hiram Johnson High with the intention of testing his methods in a new environment.

But in seven years there, he never had more than about 14 calculus students a year and a 75% pass rate, a record he blamed on administrative turnover and cultural differences.

Jaime Escalante was a great teacher, but to achieve those amazing results at Garfield he had to be in the right place at the right time. He needed a compatible and supportive administrator and, more importantly, a unique and powerful bond with the student body and the community. Compatibility and rapport are difficult to measure and next to impossible to predict but they are often the difference between adequate and astounding results.

Krugman joins the nuclear debate

I'm not sure this is the best time to be having this debate (a once in a millennium disaster tends to interfere with the ability to accurately evaluate risks), but Paul Krugman has a good post on the subject:

As Nordhaus’s RA, I spent the summer of 1973 on this project: my days were spent in the geology library, reading Bureau of Mines circulars on the engineering and costs of alternative energy sources, my nights at the computer center drinking vending machine coffee. (These were still the days of big mainframes and punchcards; you handed a deck of cards to the high priests behind the glass wall, then an hour later you got back a huge stack of hexadecimal garbage because you made an error on one of your cards.)

In short, I was in heaven.

Nordhaus’s paper was wonderful. (Sorry, for technical reasons I can’t put up a full version from my current undisclosed location.) But as it turned out, it was much too optimistic. Not his fault or mine: it was those Bureau of Mines circulars.

What was wrong with those circulars? They were much too optimistic about the costs of alternative energy sources, especially alternatives to oil. Basically, the engineers were understating the difficulties involved. Later Marty Weitzman would formulate a law on this: the cost of alternatives to crude oil is 40% above the current price — whatever the current price is.

And hence my skeptical reaction to the new study about the costs of running an all-renewable economy.

To be fair, we probably have much more solid ideas about the cost of wind and solar power than we did about shale oil and coal liquefaction back in 1973: wind is already a widely used technology, and concentrated solar power — probably the main way we’ll use the sun — is pretty well understood too. But there will be surprises, not all of them positive.

None of this is meant to disparage the work, or the need to use much more renewables than we are using now.

More Glaeserian causality

We all occasionally make too much of anecdotes and jump too quickly from correlation to causality, but with Edward Glaeser, this sort of thing is starting to become a habit.

From the New York Times:

Vast public infrastructure projects, like high-speed rail, helped create Spain’s current fiscal morass and did little to revitalize Japan during its lost decade.

Of course, given the magnitude of the demographic and economic forces acting on Japan, it's difficult to say exactly what effect high-speed rail had.

As for Spain, do we really have reason to believe massive spending on public works helped cause the crisis? Here's Paul Krugman's answer:

On the eve of the crisis, Spain was running a budget surplus; its debts, as you can see in the figure above, were low relative to GDP.

So what happened? Spain is an object lesson in the problems of having monetary union without fiscal and labor market integration. First, there was a huge boom in Spain, largely driven by a housing bubble — and financed by capital outflows from Germany. This boom pulled up Spanish wages. Then the bubble burst, leaving Spanish labor overpriced relative to Germany and France, and precipitating a surge in unemployment. It also led to large Spanish budget deficits, mainly because of collapsing revenue but also due to efforts to limit the rise in unemployment.

Wouldn't Glaeser's argument imply that Spain was spending too much and wouldn't that, in turn, show up in the debt to GDP numbers?

If you want to understand what's wrong with American education...

You need to follow stories like this.

The Annotated "Evaluating New York Teachers, Perhaps the Numbers Do Lie"

As promised, here are some comments (in brackets) on Michael Winerip's NYT article on the city's teacher evaluation process.

Last year, when Ms. Isaacson was on maternity leave, she came in one full day a week for the entire school year for no pay and taught a peer leadership class.

...

[One thing that Winerip fails to emphasize (though I suspect he is aware of it) is how common stories like this are. Education journalists often portray ordinary excellence as something exceptional. This is partly due to journalistic laziness -- it's easier to describe something as exceptional than to find something that actually is exceptional -- and partly due to the appeal of standard narratives, in this case the Madonna/whore portrayal of teachers (I would used a non-gender specific analogy but I couldn't come up with one that fit as well.)]

The Lab School has selective admissions, and Ms. Isaacson’s students have excelled. Her first year teaching, 65 of 66 scored proficient on the state language arts test, meaning they got 3’s or 4’s; only one scored below grade level with a 2. More than two dozen students from her first two years teaching have gone on to Stuyvesant High School or Bronx High School of Science, the city’s most competitive high schools.

...

[Everything in this article inclines me to believe that Ms. Isaacson is a good teacher but we need to note that this is a fairly easy gig compared to other urban schools, particularly for someone with her background. Students at places like the Lab School tend to be more respectful and attentive toward academically successful people like Ms. Isaacson. In many schools, this can actually make students initially distrustful.]

You would think the Department of Education would want to replicate Ms. Isaacson — who has degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia — and sprinkle Ms. Isaacsons all over town. Instead, the department’s accountability experts have developed a complex formula to calculate how much academic progress a teacher’s students make in a year — the teacher’s value-added score — and that formula indicates that Ms. Isaacson is one of the city’s worst teachers.

According to the formula, Ms. Isaacson ranks in the 7th percentile among her teaching peers — meaning 93 per cent are better.

[One of the fallacies that follow from this Madonna/whore narrative is the idea that, since you have such a clearly bi-modal distribution, any metric that's correlated with teaching quality should be able to winnow the good from the bad. In reality you have a normal distribution with noisy data and a metric that doesn't correlate that well. The result, unsurprisingly, is a large number of teachers apparently misclassified. What is surprising is that more people didn't foresee this fairly obvious outcome.]

This may seem disconnected from reality, but it has real ramifications. Because of her 7th percentile, Ms. Isaacson was told in February that it was virtually certain that she would not be getting tenure this year. “My principal said that given the opportunity, she would advocate for me,” Ms. Isaacson said. “But she said don’t get your hopes up, with a 7th percentile, there wasn’t much she could do.”

That’s not the only problem Ms. Isaacson’s 7th percentile has caused. If the mayor and governor have their way, and layoffs are no longer based on seniority but instead are based on the city’s formulas that scientifically identify good teachers, Ms. Isaacson is pretty sure she’d be cooked.

[Well, as long as it's scientific.]

She may leave anyway. She is 33 and had a successful career in advertising and finance before taking the teaching job, at half the pay.

...
[This isn't unusual. I doubled my salary when I went from teaching to a corporate job. Plus I worked fewer hours and they gave us free candy, coffee and the occasional golfing trip.]
...

The calculation for Ms. Isaacson’s 3.69 predicted score is even more daunting. It is based on 32 variables — including whether a student was “retained in grade before pretest year” and whether a student is “new to city in pretest or post-test year.”

Those 32 variables are plugged into a statistical model that looks like one of those equations that in “Good Will Hunting” only Matt Damon was capable of solving.

The process appears transparent, but it is clear as mud, even for smart lay people like teachers, principals and — I hesitate to say this — journalists.

[There are two things about this that trouble me: the first is that Winerip doesn't seem to understand fairly simple linear regression; the second is that he doesn't seem to realize that the formula given here is actually far too simple to do the job.]


Ms. Isaacson may have two Ivy League degrees, but she is lost. “I find this impossible to understand,” she said.

In plain English, Ms. Isaacson’s best guess about what the department is trying to tell her is: Even though 65 of her 66 students scored proficient on the state test, more of her 3s should have been 4s.

But that is only a guess.

[At the risk of being harsh, grading on a curve should not be that difficult a concept.]

Moreover, as the city indicates on the data reports, there is a large margin of error. So Ms. Isaacson’s 7th percentile could actually be as low as zero or as high as the 52nd percentile — a score that could have earned her tenure.

[Once again, many people saw this coming. Joel Klein and company chose to push forward with the plan, even in the face of results like these. Klein has built a career largely on calls for greater accountability and has done very well for himself in no small part because he hasn't been held accountable for his own record.]

I've left quite a bit out so you should definitely read the whole thing. It's an interesting story but if anything here surprises you, you haven't been paying attention.

"Jefferson is spinning in his grave"

There's nothing remarkable about this quote until you see why the speaker thought Jefferson would be offended.

The lessons of Motown

Michael Winerip is a much better than average education reporter. He doesn't have a great grasp of the numbers or of the implications of the policies, limitations which have kept him from getting a jump on the story the way, say, This American Life did with the financial crisis, but he has kept up with it while most of his colleagues are still reporting discredited narratives from interested parties.

This article on Detroit is a good example. He doesn't connect some important dots but he does a good job reporting what he sees. (you'll find my comments in brackets):

In 2009, Detroit public schools had the lowest scores ever recorded in the 21-year history of the national math proficiency test.

The district had a budget deficit of $200 million.

About 8,000 students were leaving Detroit schools each year.

Political leaders had to do something, so they rounded up the usual whipping boys:

Wasteful bureaucrats. In 2009, the governor appointed an emergency financial manager, Robert Bobb, a former president of the Washington school board, to run the Detroit district. Mr. Bobb is known nationally for his work in school finance, and recruiting him took a big salary, $425,000 a year. He has spent millions more on financial consultants to clean up the fiscal mess left by previous superintendents.

[A large number of people are acquiring a great deal of money and power through the reform movement. This doesn't mean that these people don't have good intentions or that they are not worth the money they're being paid but it does mean that this group, which includes high profile figures like Joel Klein and Michele Rhee, has a vested interest in these policies. It also means that when Michele Rhee brags about being a counterbalance to the special interests, she's not being entirely honest.]

Greedy unions. Though Detroit teachers make considerably less than nearby suburban teachers (a $73,700 maximum versus $97,700 in Troy), Mr. Bobb pressed for concessions. He got teachers to defer $5,000 a year in pay and contribute more for their health insurance. Last week, the Republican-controlled Legislature approved a bill to give emergency managers power to void public workers’ contracts. If signed by the governor, Mr. Bobb could terminate the Detroit teachers’ union contract.

Traditional public schools full of incompetent veteran teachers. Michigan was one of the first states to embrace charter schools, 15 years ago. Currently there are as many Detroit children in charters — 71,000 — as in district schools. Now there is talk of converting the entire Detroit district (which is 95 percent African-American) to charters. Supporters say this could generate significant savings, since charters are typically nonunion and can hire young teachers, pay them less and give them no pensions.

[Before we go on, this would seem to be an almost perfect test of the large-scale charter school model (as compared to the more limited role I've advocated). Charter schools have been put forward as the solution for this very kind of troubled urban district.]

So now, two years later, how are the so-called reforms coming along?

Not great.

Since Mr. Bobb arrived, the $200 million deficit has risen to $327 million. While he has made substantial cuts to save money — including $16 million by firing hundreds of administrators [Of course, he's spent millions making those cuts] — any gains have been overshadowed by the exodus of the 8,000 students a year. For each student who departs, $7,300 in state money gets subtracted from the Detroit budget — an annual loss of $58.4 million.

[Economic conditions and demographic shifts still trump any educational reform proposed so far. People need to remember this.]

Nor have charters been the answer. Charter school students score about the same on state tests as Detroit district students, even though charters have fewer special education students (8 percent versus 17 percent in the district) and fewer poor children (65 percent get subsidized lunches versus 82 percent at district schools). It’s hard to know whether children are better off under these “reforms” or they’re just being moved around more.

[As mentioned before, there are a number of possible biasing effects (peer, placebo, Hawthorne, selective attrition, etc.) that may be inflating the charter's scores. In other words, they are not outperforming the public schools and they may be doing much worse.]

Steve Wasko, public relations director for Mr. Bobb and the Detroit schools, did not respond to a dozen voice mails and e-mails seeking comment. Those who know Mr. Wasko say he cares about Detroit and is sick of the national media portraying the city as hopeless.

[You have a public relations director who can't work a talk with the New York Times into his schedule. This alone raises questions about the Bobb administration. It also suggests some other options for cost cutting (who do you think makes more, a starting teacher or a public relations director?)]

...

Last spring, Mr. Bobb had planned to close 50 schools with dwindling enrollment. But his list was reduced to 30 after several public meetings at which parents and staff members pleaded their school’s case before the all-powerful Mr. Bobb.

In June, Mr. Bobb held a news conference at Carstens Elementary — one of the schools spared — to announce the 30 closings.

One reason Carstens survived was an article in The Detroit Free Press last March headlined “Carstens Elementary on DPS closing list is a beacon of hope.”

The school, surrounded by vacant lots and abandoned houses, serves some of the city’s poorest children. Thieves who broke into the school last year escaped by disappearing into what the police call “the woods” — the blocks and blocks of vacant houses.

Yet Carstens students perform well on state tests, repeatedly meeting the federal standard for adequate yearly progress.

[As seen before, good teachers and schools often end up bearing the brunt of our current crop of reforms.]

“We try to fill in the holes in our children’s lives,” said Rebecca Kelly-Gavrilovich, a Carstens teacher with 25 years’ experience. Students get free breakfast, lunch and — if they attend the after-school program — dinner.

To have more money for instruction, teachers sit with students at lunch, saving the school from having to hire lunchroom aides. Teachers hold jacket and shoe drives for children who have no winter coats and come to school in slippers. At Thanksgiving every child goes home with a frozen turkey donated by a local businessman. Twice a year a bus carrying a portable dentist’s office arrives, and a clinic is set up at the school so children can get their teeth checked.

Despite all this, teachers worry that Carstens’s appearance on Mr. Bobb’s closing list — even though it was brief — means the end is near. Anticipating the worst, several parents have taken their children out of Carstens, enrolling them elsewhere, including at charters and suburban schools.

Carstens’s enrollment is half of what it was a few years ago. Every hallway has empty classrooms, giving the school a desolate feeling.

Mr. Bobb has set off a vicious cycle undermining even good schools. The more schools he closes to save money, the more parents grow discouraged and pull their children out. The fewer the children, the less the state aid, so Mr. Bobb closes more schools.

[This is a pattern we're seen before. Check Ravitch for specifics.]

Carstens has also been harmed by poor personnel decisions made by the district. Last year, 1,200 teachers took the retirement buyout, and Mr. Bobb laid off 2,000 others in the spring. Then in the fall, he realized he needed to hire the 2,000 back, and chaos ensued.

[Also something we've been warning about.]

At Carstens, a kindergarten class of 30 had no teacher until October; teachers at the school took turns supervising the class. “How do you think parents feel when there’s a different teacher every day?” said Mike Fesik, the current teacher.

It’s hard to understand why any teacher who could leave Detroit stays, but they do. Kim Kyff, with 22 years’ experience, is one of the lead teachers at Palmer Park, the elementary and middle school that opened last fall. In 2007 she was the Michigan teacher of the year. She has had offers from suburban schools, but stays because she believes that in Detroit, she has a better shot at being a beacon of hope.

[I should say more but it's late and I'm already depressed as hell. It's times like these when I have trouble not believing that, not only do we not care about children, we actually go out of our way to screw over those who do care. (yes, that's a lot of 'not's but given the hour what do you expect?)]

Felix Salmon catches me off guard

When I see a headline like this:

Don’t donate money to Japan

I expect it to come from a Rush Limbaugh or some other professional xenophobe. Seeing it on Felix Solmon's site caught me off guard until I realized he was talking about earmarking money for Japan when you give:

We went through this after the Haiti earthquake, and all of the arguments which applied there apply to Japan as well. Earmarking funds is a really good way of hobbling relief organizations and ensuring that they have to leave large piles of money unspent in one place while facing urgent needs in other places. And as Matthew Bishop and Michael Green said last year, we are all better at responding to human suffering caused by dramatic, telegenic emergencies than to the much greater loss of life from ongoing hunger, disease and conflict. That often results in a mess of uncoordinated NGOs parachuting in to emergency areas with lots of good intentions, where a strategic official sector response would be much more effective. Meanwhile, the smaller and less visible emergencies where NGOs can do the most good are left unfunded.
...

That said, it’s entirely possible that organizations like the Red Cross or Save the Children will find themselves with important and useful roles to play in Japan. It’s also certain that they have important and useful roles to play elsewhere. So do give money to them — and give generously! And give money to other NGOs, too, like Doctors Without Borders (MSF), which don’t jump on natural disasters and use them as opportunistic marketing devices. Just make sure it’s unrestricted. The official MSF position is exactly right:

The ability of MSF teams to provide rapid and targeted medical care to those most in need in more than 60 countries around the world – whether in the media spotlight or not – depends on the generous general contributions of our donors worldwide. For this reason, MSF does not issue appeals for support for specific emergencies and this is why we do not include an area to specify a donation purpose on our on-line donation form. MSF would not have been able to act so swiftly in response to the emergency in Haiti, as an example, if not for the ongoing general support from our donors. So we always ask our supporters to consider making an unrestricted contribution.

I’ve just donated $400 in unrestricted funds to MSF. Some of it might go to Japan; all of it will go to areas where it’s sorely needed. I’d urge you to do the same, rather than try to target money at whichever disaster might be in the news today.

At the risk of overselling, when it comes to questions involving money, whether investing it or giving it, Felix Solmon's blog should probably be the first place you click.

Science Fiction Thoughts

In an interesting post, Dominic Lukes asks if science fiction authors dream of dictatorships. It is an interesting question. Certainly one of the examples that he gives, Robert Heinlein (author of Starship Troopers) is a noted Libertarian. So there is certainly something to this.

But I think the key issue is that science fiction authors are, at least partially, about social criticism. Look at the more recent series of Battlestar Galactica, for example. Or the novels of authors like Mercedes Lackey or Elizabeth A. Lynn that dealt with gender in a very sophisticated way.

So I think we can find all sorts of extrapolations and thought experiments in science fiction. This is, in my opinion, the real strength of the genre and its most important function.

[and yes, I am one of those people who sees Fantasy as utterly distinct from Science Fiction; and Star Wars was a Fantasy]

Nobody talks about the Caulfield problem

This is one of those fundamental, difficult-to-resolve questions with important implications that almost no one in the education debate has any interest in discussing. How do we handle students learning things that aren't "on the list"?

There are valid arguments to be made on both sides. Some of the happiest educational outcomes often start with something far from the standard curriculum. (Goosebumps leads to King who leads to Lovecraft who leads to Machen who leads to Joseph Campbell. Puzzle books lead to Gardner who leads to Smullyan who leads to Gödel and Tarski.)

But as valuable as these excursion may be, there is still a case to be made for a body of essential knowledge, things that everyone should know. Not only are things that make it into the curriculum considered more important; the very fact that they are common is itself valuable. A diverse, democratic society functions better when its people have a shared frame of reference.

Those in the reform movement have come down heavily on the side of valuing only what falls within the curriculum. Schools are actually penalized when students go off-list since time spent reading Gödel, Escher, Bach or the Hero with a Thousand Faces is being taken away from learning those things that are being measured. That is a perfectly defensible position but I get the impression that it is largely an unintentional one, that proponents of a system built around standardized testing often failed to think through the implications of their policies.

The paradox of New Haven

Mark has been discussing Edward Glaeser and his comments on how universities can create urban prosperity. Now, I am a big fan of universities and think that they serve an important role in global economic development. However, I am dubious that they make any particular community prosperous. Consider New Haven, CT -- the home of Yale University (recently ranked the #11 university in the world).

According to wikipedia, the poverty rate in New Haven is 24%, which compares unfavorably with the rest of the United States where it is 14%. The poverty rate in New Haven, despite the presence of Yale, is nearly twice that of the United States as a whole.

Now, one might note that many of the poor residents of New Haven are likely to be students. This is true. But these students still use municipal services and thus require the local tax base to support them (in addition to the long term residents). They do not (after they graduate and make additional income) send money back to New Haven so, in a sense, New Haven is actually subsiding the urban communities that Yale graduates move to.

So, it is actually possible that a large university in a small community could be a drag on the economy due to the lower per capita tax base. Plus, you have a large segment of the population with only a short term interest in the community which may make long term planning more difficult. And New Haven, CT is not the only university town that I can think of with high levels of poverty.

Furthermore, if a strong local university (like the University of Washington) is a solution to urban poverty (as it was presented in the Detroit versus Seattle comparison of Edward Glaeser) then it is unclear why a stronger economy has not grown up around Yale which is a strong school by any measure.

This example highlights, I think, that predicting what factors create a prosperous community is a difficult question and not one that has easy answers.

Update: The discussion continues here and here.

Nate Silver takes apart another favorite political myth

I get out of the habit of reading 538 when we don't have an election looming and I miss out on things like this:

There’s Nothing Special About Ohio

Weekend Gaming -- The Game of Gale

As promised, here's an introduction to David Gale's elegant Game of Gale (and, no, Gale didn't come up with the name; Martin Gardner did)"

... Since then it has been a board game (Bridg-it), a programming exercise and a great pencil-and-paper game (or at least, a great colored-pens-and-paper game). GoG is a close relative of Hex and its rules are comparably simple. Start out with a grid of dots like the one below.

Each player gets a color then takes turns connecting his or her dots. The object for the blue player is to draw a continuous path from the top row to the bottom. The objective for the red player is to connect the leftmost column and the right. The only rule is that a red line can't cross a blue and vice versa.

There's a sample game at the site. Here's the decisive turn:



Red gets to go next but it doesn't really matter at this point. Blue has two winning moves for the next turn. Red can only block one of them.

I don't know what to make of this...

From the Monkey Cage (via DeLong):

Does anyone out there know Michael Winerip?

If so, please tell him that he needs to read this discussion on Andrew Gelman's blog. There are things he that he really ought to know.

Folsom Prison Blues

I previously alluded to some threats to California's spectacular university system. The most ominous one is a product, believe it or not, of an alliance between two Republican governors and a public sector union.

NPR did a brilliant job laying out the whole tragic story:

In January 1968, Johnny Cash set up his band on a makeshift stage in the cafeteria at Folsom State Prison in California.

"Hello, I'm Johnny Cash," he said in his deep baritone to thunderous applause. Song after song, the inmates thumped their fists and cheered from the same steel benches now bolted to the floor.

The morning that Cash played may have been the high-water mark for Folsom — and for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

The men in the cafeteria lived alone in their own prison cells. Almost every one of them was in school or learning a professional trade. The cost of housing them barely registered on the state budget. And when these men walked out of Folsom free, the majority of them never returned to prison.

It was a record no other state could match.

Things have changed. California's prisons are all in a state of crisis. And nowhere is this more visible than at Folsom today.

Folsom was built to hold 1,800 inmates. It now houses 4,427.

It's once-vaunted education and work programs have been cut to just a few classes, with waiting lists more than 1,000 inmates long.

Officers are on furlough. Its medical facility is under federal receivership. And like every other prison in the state, 75 percent of the inmates who are released from Folsom today will be back behind bars within three years.

California's prison system costs $10 billion a year. Its crumbling, overcrowded facilities are home to the highest recidivism rate in the country. And the state that was once was the national model in corrections has become the model every state is now trying to avoid.

...

Experts agree that the problem started when Californians voted for a series of get-tough-on-crime laws in the 1980s. The state's prison population exploded immediately. It jumped from 20,000 inmates, where it had held steady throughout the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s. Today there are 167,000 inmates in the system.

Jeanne Woodford was warden of San Quentin during the prison population boom.

"The violence just went out of control," she remembers. "And then the programs started going away. I was there during an 18-month lockdown. It was just unbelievably horrific."

California wasn't the only state to toughen laws in the throes of the 1980s crack wars. But Californians took it to a new level.

Voters increased parole sanctions and gave prison time to nonviolent drug offenders. They eliminated indeterminate sentencing, removing any leeway to let inmates out early for good behavior. Then came the "Three Strikes You're Out" law in 1994. Offenders who had committed even a minor third felony — like shoplifting — got life sentences.

Voters at the time were inundated with television ads, pamphlets and press conferences from Gov. Pete Wilson. "Three strikes is the most important victory yet in the fight to take back our streets," Wilson told crowds.

But behind these efforts to get voters to approve these laws was one major player: the correctional officers union.

In three decades, the California Correctional Peace Officers Association has become one of the most powerful political forces in California. The union has contributed millions of dollars to support "three strikes" and other laws that lengthen sentences and increase parole sanctions. It donated $1 million to Wilson after he backed the three strikes law.

We currently spend as much on prisons as we do on higher education. One of these two has to give.

One way of handling worrisome demographic shifts in the electorate

On the bright side, this does have a certain directness going for it (from Yahoo):

Boosted by major electoral gains in state legislatures nationwide in the 2010 campaign, Republican lawmakers in 32 states are pushing measures that would require citizens to show a state identification or proof of citizenship to vote. Meanwhile, in New Hampshire, GOP lawmakers are proposing new limits on college students who vote in the state, potentially eliminating a key base of electoral support for Democrats in the state ahead of the upcoming presidential election.

As the Washington Post's Peter Wallsten writes, the measures have set off a partisan battle over voting rights across the country, with Democrats accusing Republicans of trying to suppress voters, including young people and minorities, who would cast their ballots for President Obama and other Democratic candidates next year.

In New Hampshire, Republicans are pushing to end rules that allow same-day voter registration in the state, which has often provided key swing votes for candidates from all parties in the state. State GOP lawmakers are also proposing new limits on students, including a bill that would allow them to vote in college towns only if they or their parents had established permanent residency in the state.

Some GOP lawmakers in New Hampshire have billed the measures as an attempt to crack down on voter fraud in the state--but recent remarks from the newly elected GOP state House speaker have suggested otherwise.

In a recent speech to a tea party group in the state, House Speaker William O'Brien described college voters as "foolish." "Voting as a liberal. That's what kids do," he said, in remarks that were videotaped by a state Democratic Party staffer and posted on YouTube. Students, he said, lack "life experience" and "just vote their feelings."

GOP lawmakers in the state have distanced themselves from O'Brien's remarks.

Though not his policies.

A useful table and a few observations

Wikipedia has an interesting article on academic rankings. We could (and probably should) spend a lot of time going over this, but here are a few points to get things started:

1. This list seems to suggest that the USA has the best university system by a good margin. This doesn't mean we shouldn't try to improve it, but this does make a case for being careful about making radical changes. When you're number one, unintended consequences can be a bitch;

2. As Joseph noted, California contains one of the two major clusters of major universities. Most Californians would like to keep it that way. I'm not so sure about most of Sacramento.

3. It's a good idea to go through this list periodically while reading Edward Glaeser (since it's obvious his editors didn't).

Universities and Growth

Mark had a really nice post about one of Edward Glaeser's points. Mark points out that it seems odd that Glaeser overlooked the schools in the Detroit area when he pointed out how important the Univeristy of Washington is to Seattle's success. Curiously, he did not mention Microsoft, which seems to also be an important explanation for Seattle's success. I think the underlying issue here is that simple explanations (location of schools) do not really describe complex phenomenon (relative prosperity) well.

If you look at the the top ranked schools, there are really two major clusters in the United States (one in the Northeast, peaking in Boston and one in California, peaking in San Franscisco). But the causal direction is unclear to me -- did these schools become excellent due to their proximity to vibrant economies or vice versa?

Or are these factors independent, which schools like Princeton might argue for.

What type of instrument or experiment could we use to decide on this?

These questions matter because we care about how to best handle things like economic slumps. It might be that there is no effective policy response (that would be worth knowing). But, at the very least, overly simple explanations should concern us.

If only there were a major university in the Detroit area

Maybe we could put one in Ann Arbor.

From Edward Glaeser:

But there was a crucial difference between Seattle and Detroit. Unlike Ford and General Motors, Boeing employed highly educated workers. Almost since its inception, Seattle has been committed to education and has benefited from the University of Washington, which is based there. Skills are the source of Seattle’s strength.

Part of an ongoing series.

update: Note to self -- unlabelled sarcasm may be a bad idea in a blog.

Felix Salmon shoots the elephant in the room

A few years ago, there was an infomercial for something called the AIM (Automated Investment Management) System. The developer, a disreputable-looking character with a cheap suit, a bad comb-over and the absurdly modulated voice of a smooth jazz DJ, explained to the 'interviewer' that with his system you would automatically sell a stock when it peaked and buy when it bottomed out.

Though the whole thing was scripted down to the last chuckle, you still half-expected the 'interviewer' to ask the obvious question, "If you have a sure-fire way of beating the market, why are you wasting your time selling audiotapes on basic cable at three in the morning?"

Linda Stern's recent column, "Saving up for a big down payment? Sucker!" raises similar questions. Fortunately, Felix Salmon is here to go off script:

This, in a nutshell, is everything that was wrong with the housing market before the crash — everything that we want to avoid going forward. Can’t Linda look around at the current devastated state of many people who bought with little or no money down, and see the dangers here? Evidently not. Instead, she seems to think it’s a bright idea to borrow more money than you need, to the point at which you’re pushing the envelope of what you can reasonably afford. And then take the cash you’re not using for a down payment, and “put your money to work for yourself.”

I barely know where to start on this. Here’s one way of thinking about it: banks are not charities, and that they expect to make money from their loans. They have a cost of funds which is lower than the mortgage rate that you’re paying; the difference between the two rates is their profit. You, however, if you follow Linda’s advice, have a cost of funds which is your mortgage rate: if you wind up getting a lower return on your savings than you’re paying on your mortgage, you would have been better off just using the money for a down payment. Needless to say, if there was an easy way of getting a higher return on capital than the mortgage rate, the banks would have done it already, rather than lending you the money. And it’s pretty delusional, frankly, to think that you can invest better than say JP Morgan. Yes, there are tax benefits to having lots of mortgage-interest payments. But they’re not sufficient to make the difference here.

Firing Teachers

Yikes.

In the same blog post we have:

But I also recognize that this is no panacea. At a minimum, making teachers easier to fire needs to be paired with extensive reforms: a move towards defined contribution rather than defined benefit plans (which make a mid-career job loss catastrophic); elimination of seniority and useless credentials as the primary criteria for setting pay; broadening the recruiting base by eliminating a requirement for ed degrees; and a shift towards paying teachers more, especially in math and science. I also think it's absolutely crucial to set up some sort of Federal bonus to recruit high-performing teachers to the lowest-performing districts--a bonus sizeable enough to attract top teachers, and available only on one-year contracts.

and

Let me start by saying that I think there are some jobs that are too important to let any consideration intrude other than the best way to get the job done. Nuclear power plants, firefighters, poison control--I don't want to let other social goals, no matter how laudable, hamper their mission.


Teaching is one of those jobs. I just can't prioritize making teachers' work environments fair, interesting, or pleasant for them--not if there's any potential conflict with the goal of providing the best possible education for kids. Particularly disadvantaged kids, since I basically assume that educated and competent parents are going to ensure that their offspring are educated and competent. But where there are needy kids, my entire focus is on them. I want to make teachers' lives pleasant only insofar as this advances the goal of helping kids who need a lot of help.

and

Contra E. D. Kain, however, I don't think that all organizations should strive to minimize turnover. Why do fast food restaurants have turnover rates in excess of 100%, when they could lower them substantially by paying higher wages? Answer: because in a dirty, stultifying job like fast food service, it costs a lot in wages to reduce turnover a little, and people won't pay enough for a hamburger to justify those wages.

Okay, this seems like a slippery analogy but let us go with it. Ms. McArdle would like to make teaching into a high turnover profession. Okay, I can deal with that. She also thinks that it is so high priority that considerations like humane treatment are secondary to child outcomes. Curiously, I can deal with that too.

But what are the low job security professions with a high level of responsibility, high educational requirements and no limits on costs? Medical doctors come to mind but it's unclear to me that they represent the wage level that we should be shooting for.

I think a much more plausible story is that we have cut education to the bone. It's a large part of many state budgets (see California as a key example). The lack of resources has been partially helped by using job security and a sense of vocation in order to keep employee costs low. So what precise program cuts are we considering to raise wages or to pay "some sort of Federal bonus"? Or are we talking actual tax increases?

After all, according to Wikipedia, we spend $11,000 per student and have 76.6 million students in the United States. Is this really a place where we want to increase costs from?

Or, is the alterative to make education low cost and low skill? It has had this model in the past in the US (with the one room school house model) but that seems to contradict the importance of teaching. A lot of things are important and should not be trivialized. But is this really the best way forward?

In other words, Good Will Hunting understood sigma notation

From Michael Winerip's NYT article:

The calculation for Ms. Isaacson’s 3.69 predicted score is even more daunting. It is based on 32 variables — including whether a student was “retained in grade before pretest year” and whether a student is “new to city in pretest or post-test year.”

Those 32 variables are plugged into a statistical model that looks like one of those equations that in “Good Will Hunting” only Matt Damon was capable of solving.

I'll have more to say about this later. I don't think Winerip really understands what's going on here but the story's definitely worth a read.

Update: it is now later.

Something else that shouldn't surprise people but probably will

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

TNR's editors might be rethinking that support now:

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

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

Analogy of the day -- it's your funeral

Once again, Mark Thoma gives us an elegant counter-argument to a dubious piece of conventional wisdom:

I keep seeing the argument that the way Social Security is funded -- the young provide the funds needed for the retirement of the elderly -- and the fact that tax collections can be viewed as one big pot of money imply that the government is not providing a service (insurance in this case) as you might see in the private sector:

The confounding problem is that many people believe the payroll taxes they pay go to fund the benefits they will receive, which is completely untrue. The payroll taxes go to pay current expenses of the US government. They are just a tax on labor. The government is spending every penny of those payroll taxes to pay for current expenditures. ... the [government] is free to use your premia to buy fighter jets and space shuttles!!

Some go so far as to argue this means it must be welfare. I disagree.

Consider (and apologies for the example) a firm that provides funeral services. This firm sells burial plots to the young, those still working, and it issues a promise. When the time comes, you have a place to be buried, and your payment will cover the following services (which are listed explicitly).

However, the firm does not take your money and put it into savings for the next however many years. Instead, it uses the money to cover the expenses of current funerals. Your money is used to pay for the services of the old, those who have passed away.

So, the money of the young is used to provide services for the old, just like Social Security. Does this mean that the people whose funerals were paid for when they were younger received welfare? Of course not. Does it mean they received no services from the firm? Again, no. It's even possible that when your turn comes (and hopefully it's far away), the funeral will cost more than you paid in advance -- the firm may have not anticipated future costs correctly. In that case, there will be an income transfer from the young to the old (the young will be charged higher prices to reserve a plot in the future), but that still doesn't mean it is welfare. Fundamentally, this is an advance purchase of a service.

While 'real' news shows were covering Charlie Sheen...

This is the sort of thing that makes me nervous

Having recently discussed the role of tenure and LIFO in preventing political abuses, this quote from Grover Norquist struck me as somewhat disturbing:

"Yes, the McKinley era, absent the protectionism, [is the goal]. You're looking at the history of the country for the first 120 years, up until Teddy Roosevelt, when the socialists took over. The income tax, the death tax, regulation, all that."

You'll notice he didn't say "absent the protectionism and the abuse of government power." Of course, that doesn't mean Norquist and his fellow travellers would bring back the patronage system, but it doesn't give me a warm feeling inside either.

The right likes it better but the left does it better

This Naked Capitalism post, "More Public Infrastructure Sale Tales of Woe," reminded me of an apt observation Felix Salmon made a couple of weeks ago while discussing Scott Walker's privatization proposals:

It probably comes as little surprise to note that the most lucrative privatizations have generally been done by parties of the left: I’m thinking in particular of the UK’s auction of 3G licenses, which netted the Exchequer $35.4 billion at the height of the dot-com bubble.

Right-wing parties, by contrast, are more prone to thinking of privatization as something inherently good, and of monies flowing to the government as a kind of taxation which is inherently bad.

What is this word, 'contract,' of which you speak?

The Daily Show continues its extraordinary coverage of the stand-off in Wisconsin.

Ultrasonic Remote/Observational Epidemiology cage match?

OK, maybe not, but I do have a quibble Brian's otherwise excellent observations:

One of the members of the ART [Algonquin Round Table] was Harpo Marx, one of the few members that not only didn't write, but left school early. When asked why he, a member of a comedy team that many of the members might have considered lowbrow, was a member, he replied, "Well, they needed someone to listen."

Rather than considering them lowbrow, the ART was pretty much packed with the brothers' friends and admirers. Herman Mankiewicz produced their best films, Alexander Wolcott's reviews made them stars, and as for Kaufman, here's a relevant anecdote from Dick Cavett:

In the years I was lucky enough to know Groucho, there was one trait of the elderly that I, at least, never experienced in him. The one where you have to pretend to be hearing an oft-told joke or story for the first — rather than the seventh or eighth — time.

With one exception. Kaufman had known and written for the Brothers Marx — the original Fab Four (then three) — and Groucho worshipped him.

It went: ‘Did I ever tell you the greatest compliment I ever got?”

I said no the first time and, also, the four or five times thereafter over the years. I can hear Groucho’s familiar soft voice in my mind’s ear: “The greatest compliment I ever got was from George S. Kaufman.” I expected a joke.

“George said to me once, ‘Groucho, you’re the only actor I’d ever allow to ad-lib in something I wrote.’ And that’s the greatest compliment I ever got.” (Each time, he teared slightly.)

I loved hearing this treasured story repeated. It was no trouble pretending to hear it for the first time.

Why we forgive him the puns

Today's column in the New York Times is another reminder of why Paul Krugman is so essential. It directly contradicts some of the most cherished conventional wisdom about the relationship between education and economic opportunity, but he doesn't say anything that I haven't been hearing from researchers and academicians.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that education is the key to economic success. Everyone knows that the jobs of the future will require ever higher levels of skill. That’s why, in an appearance Friday with former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, President Obama declared that “If we want more good news on the jobs front then we’ve got to make more investments in education.”

But what everyone knows is wrong.

...

The fact is that since 1990 or so the U.S. job market has been characterized not by a general rise in the demand for skill, but by “hollowing out”: both high-wage and low-wage employment have grown rapidly, but medium-wage jobs — the kinds of jobs we count on to support a strong middle class — have lagged behind. And the hole in the middle has been getting wider: many of the high-wage occupations that grew rapidly in the 1990s have seen much slower growth recently, even as growth in low-wage employment has accelerated.

Why is this happening? The belief that education is becoming ever more important rests on the plausible-sounding notion that advances in technology increase job opportunities for those who work with information — loosely speaking, that computers help those who work with their minds, while hurting those who work with their hands.

Some years ago, however, the economists David Autor, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane argued that this was the wrong way to think about it. Computers, they pointed out, excel at routine tasks, “cognitive and manual tasks that can be accomplished by following explicit rules.” Therefore, any routine task — a category that includes many white-collar, nonmanual jobs — is in the firing line. Conversely, jobs that can’t be carried out by following explicit rules — a category that includes many kinds of manual labor, from truck drivers to janitors — will tend to grow even in the face of technological progress.

And here’s the thing: Most of the manual labor still being done in our economy seems to be of the kind that’s hard to automate. Notably, with production workers in manufacturing down to about 6 percent of U.S. employment, there aren’t many assembly-line jobs left to lose. Meanwhile, quite a lot of white-collar work currently carried out by well-educated, relatively well-paid workers may soon be computerized. Roombas are cute, but robot janitors are a long way off; computerized legal research and computer-aided medical diagnosis are already here.

And then there’s globalization. Once, only manufacturing workers needed to worry about competition from overseas, but the combination of computers and telecommunications has made it possible to provide many services at long range. And research by my Princeton colleagues Alan Blinder and Alan Krueger suggests that high-wage jobs performed by highly educated workers are, if anything, more “offshorable” than jobs done by low-paid, less-educated workers. If they’re right, growing international trade in services will further hollow out the U.S. job market.

As a statistician, I might quibble with the "If they're right."

So what does all this say about policy?

Yes, we need to fix American education. In particular, the inequalities Americans face at the starting line — bright children from poor families are less likely to finish college than much less able children of the affluent — aren’t just an outrage; they represent a huge waste of the nation’s human potential.

This is another point worth dwelling on for a moment. The educational reform movement likes to draw its poster children from poor urban and rural schools. Having taught in both Watts and the Mississippi Delta, I'm usually glad to see attention focused on these areas, but it's clear in this case that the plight of these kids is being used to market general changes in education that have little if any special relevance to the schools that need the help.

But there are things education can’t do. In particular, the notion that putting more kids through college can restore the middle-class society we used to have is wishful thinking. It’s no longer true that having a college degree guarantees that you’ll get a good job, and it’s becoming less true with each passing decade.

So if we want a society of broadly shared prosperity, education isn’t the answer — we’ll have to go about building that society directly. We need to restore the bargaining power that labor has lost over the last 30 years, so that ordinary workers as well as superstars have the power to bargain for good wages. We need to guarantee the essentials, above all health care, to every citizen.

What we can’t do is get where we need to go just by giving workers college degrees, which may be no more than tickets to jobs that don’t exist or don’t pay middle-class wages.

Update: Lawrence Mishel makes some important related points here.

Hoisted from comments: "Well, they needed someone to listen."

Brian of Ultrasonic Remote writes in to provide some historical context to our previous posts (here and here) about Orson Welles, Herman Mankiewicz and the Vidal/Bogdanovich(/Kael**) cage match:

Bogdanovich is, of course, an unabashed fan of Orson Welles, which is no sin in my book. His fandom has sadly blinded him. How is this for a statistic?

No. of Oscar nominations for Welles - 2
Oscar wins - 1

No. of Oscar nominations for Mankiewicz - 2
Oscar wins - 1

The "talented hack" remark rings hollower when you take into account that the second nomination for Mankiewicz was for "Pride of the Yankees", one of the listed films!

By the way, lest you think that I am swayed solely by numbers of awards (Welles has more), here is a funny sidelight. To perhaps emphasize the perfidy of either organization, it should be noted that two of Orson Welles later nominations were for his work in the movie "Butterfly". It was nominated for a Golden Globe for BEST Supporting Performance by an Actor and for a Razzie for WORST Supporting Performance by an Actor.

The other hole in this theory is numbers. Some sexist might say something along the lines of "Men are better musicians than women". Let's look at that statement on the basis of recorded work. While it is certainly true that there are more male names than female ones on lists made by critics and musicians, it is an unfair argument, because, quite simply, many more men have recorded. The more at-bats one has, the greater possibility of hitting a home run.

If one looks at the sheer amount of material Mankiewicz wrote, he wins handily over Welles. It is the select few that can turn out a prodigious amount of material AND have an overwhelming percentage of it adjudged genius level or thereabouts.

Mankiewicz was hired at a time that movies were the ONLY visual medium around. People loved the new medium, therefore many, many people needed to write and write a lot. In Vaudeville, if you had a successful act, you could tour for years and never change it, because it was live, could not be preserved by the amateurs and due to a circuit of theaters, it could not be centralized. Radio and movies didn't slow Vaudeville, it killed it. Radio killed the visual acts and the verbal ones could do their act a few times at best as guests, but if one of these performers got a series, you HAD to have new material. There were hours in every day and every day needed programming to fill some or all of those hours. One man was hired on radio, because someone missed a gig and a panicky station owner literally stopped him on the street and asked him, "Can you do anything!?", and fortunately, he was a pianist; he was hired permanently not long afterwards. Radio also brought about convenience. The entertainment came to you, right into your home.

Movies added the bonus of seeing as well as hearing celebrities and celebrities-to-be. it too needed to be fed a lot of material. They needed people that could write and write quickly and Mankiewicz fit the bill. Did some who found work skate by with a minimum of talent? Yes. Was some of Mankiewicz's work less than memorable? Yes. However, Mankiewicz's career did something that Welles' could not have done, which is to say that it spanned the era of movies from silents to sound. Any number of people lost their jobs because they might have been able to write title cards, but could not write screenplays. Mankiewicz was a journalist, theater critic, playwright AND a screenwriter and a member of the "Algonquin Round Table".*

Is this the resume' of a talented hack?



*One of the members of the ART was Harpo Marx, one of the few members that not only didn't write, but left school early. When asked why he, a member of a comedy team that many of the members might have considered lowbrow, was a member, he replied, "Well, they needed someone to listen."

** Pauline Kael did start this though she had the good sense to walk away when the conversation got silly.

Flashman finds work

Back in the late Sixties, George MacDonald Fraser came up with a wonderful idea for a series of comic historical novels. He took Flashman, the villain from the best known example of Britain's beloved school novels (a genre that includes the Mike and Psmith books, much admired by Orwell, and, of course, Harry Potter) and placed him on the scene at every military fiasco of the Nineteenth century from the Charge of the Light Brigade to Custer's Last Stand.

Had Fraser been a student of business instead of military history and had decided to make Flashman a consultant in the late Twentieth Century, his resume might read something like this:

• Advocating side pockets and off balance sheet accounting to Enron, it became known as “the firm that built Enron” (Guardian, BusinessWeek)

• Argued that NY was losing Derivative business to London, and should more aggressively pursue derivative underwriting (Investment Dealers’ Digest)

• General Electric lost over $1 billion after following McKinsey’s advice in 2007 — just before the financial crisis hit. (The Ledger)

• Advising AT&T (Bell Labs invented cellphones) that there wasn’t much future to mobile phones (WaPo)

• Allstate* reduced legitimate Auto claims payouts in a McK&Co strategem (Bloomberg, CNN NLB)

• Swissair went into bankruptcy after implementing a McKinsey strategy (BusinessWeek)

• British railway company Railtrack was advised to “reduce spending on infrastructure” — leading to a number of fatal accidents, and a subsequent collapse of Railtrack. (Property Week, the Independent)

* Update: Here's a bit more on the Good Hands People, part of our ongoing "How to Lie with Statistics" series (more examples here and here).

Then they made that terrible movie about him with Kevin Spacey

I was going to write up a post on the games of David Gale but my weekend filled up unexpectedly. Fortunately, Sandy Dean has a good paper online discussing Bridg-it (a.k.a. the Game of Gale) and the mathematics behind it.

Weekend Gaming -- Recommending a book and appreciating a publisher

This is a nice little book, cheap if you get it new, probably next to free if you get it used and it has a very useful list of mathematical games ranging from battleship to nine-men's-morris to hex, sprouts and a board version of Eleusis.

The reissue I have comes from one of my favorite publishers, Barnes & Noble. You have heard all sorts of abuse heaped on this company but none it from me. These are damned fine book stores with a business model built around the realization that the strong, steady sales of the classics could be as or more profitable than the unpredictable spikes of the best seller list.

As a publisher, the company has a wonderful track record of bringing back books that ought to be in print but aren't. My copy of Extraordinary Popular Delusions came from Barnes and Noble, as did my collection of Damon Runyon stories and a great anthology culled from the chthonic pages of Weird Tales. All told, I probably have a couple dozen with their imprint and every one's a keeper.

This does explain a lot

From Mark Thoma: