And, of course... Florida

I realize we've been hammering the charters pretty hard lately, but the intention has never been a blanket condemnation. There are a lot of good ideas here and even more good people, but, at present, the whole enterprise has at least two fatal flaws: a naive approach to metric-based policy and a childlike faith in the power of markets to overcome conflicts of interest.

The result has been exactly what any reasonable person would have expected.

John Romano writing for the Tampa Bay Times

Rep. Erik Fresen ['named “legislator of the year” by Florida’s for-profit college lobbying group, the Florida Association of Postsecondary Schools & Colleges'], a font of smiling insincerity, wants the state to turn most of its school construction and renovation funds over to companies that run charter schools.

Never mind that traditional schools outnumber charters about 6-to-1. Never mind that from 2009 to 2014, charters got $312 million in capital funds and traditional schools got a pat on the head. Never mind that practically 1 out of every 4 charters eventually closes and that taxpayer money is forever lost.

Nope, let's forget all of that for a minute and focus on Fresen, a Republican from Miami.

The guy the Miami Herald reports earns $150,000 a year consulting for an architecture firm that specializes in — I can't make this up — building charter schools. The guy whose sister and brother-in-law are executives with one of the state's largest charter operators.

Now, who thinks that might be a conflict of interest for a politician in charge of divvying up construction funds between charters and traditional schools?

...

The schools were to have "special emphasis on expanded learning experiences for students who are identified as academically low achieving.''

That sounds like at-risk kids. Poor kids. Minority kids.

And yet, all these years later, that's not what's happened.

For instance, based on the data included in the Florida Department of Education's school grades released Friday, 68 percent of the students in traditional Hillsborough County schools are considered economically disadvantaged. And yet, in the county's three dozen charter schools, only 30 percent of the students are economically at-risk.

So maybe Hillsborough is an outlier. An aberration.

Except poor kids also are underrepresented at charter schools in Pinellas County. And Pasco. And Hernando.

In South Florida, where charters are everywhere, the numbers are truly disturbing. Let's look at the schools where more than 80 percent of the students come from low-income families. Can we agree those are the situations where charters might do the greatest good?

Well, in Miami-Dade, more than 51 percent of traditional public schools fall into that category, and only 35 percent of charters. How about the reverse situation? Schools where less than 20 percent of the students come from low-income families? That would be 1 percent of the public schools, and 13 percent of the charters.

In other words, the numbers are opposite what they're supposed to be. Charters seem to be catering more to wealthy families and leaving the poor kids behind. And, as a bonus, the state keeps taking money away from those public schools to give to charters.

...

This is not a knock on charters. Many are truly exceptional, and some are succeeding in situations where public schools failed.

Instead, this is a plea to parents. To taxpayers. To anyone who cares about public schools. Your Legislature has sold what remains of its dark soul to the growing industry of for-profit education. Lawmakers will talk fancy about being fiscal watchdogs, but it's all a ruse to cater to companies that see students as living, breathing profit margins.

Here's more on the story from the Miami Herald.

I should have posted this quote a long time ago

 "[A]chievement tests may well be valuable indicators of general school achievement under conditions of normal teaching aimed at general competence. But when test scores become the goal of the teaching process, they both lose their value as indicators of educational status and distort the educational process in undesirable ways. (Similar biases of course surround the use of objective tests in courses or as entrance examinations.)"

 Donald T. Campbell via Wikipedia.

With that in mind, take another look at this and this.

I don't have time to write this up...

... and I'm not crazy about the central debt metaphor, but Josh Marshall (who has been perhaps the best political analyst on the Trump story) has an essential post on the GOP's loss of control. If you do a search for "Trump" on our blog, you'll see we've been making some similar points for a while now.

We've also talked about the implications of a messy primary fight. In another much shorter post, Marshall nails that one as well.

As you read this, keep repeating to yourself, "second graders"

The following is from Boston area teacher Emily Kaplan's account of her earlier experiences working for a no-excuses charter school. If you've been following the Success Academy story, parts of this will sound very familiar:

 Sixteen seven- and eight-year olds sit in a circle on the floor. On the wall to their left— the first thing they see upon entering and exiting the classroom, always done in complete silence— is a list of individual “Assessment Goals.” (This “no excuses” charter network creates its own high-stress tests, which all students take at least five times per month, beginning in kindergarten.)
...

The teacher speaks to them in a slow, measured tone. “When I left school here yesterday, after working hard all day to give you a good education so you can go to college, I felt disappointed. I felt sad.”

Shoulders drop. Children put their faces in their hands.

“And do you know why?” The teacher looks around the circle; children avert their eyes.

One child raises her hand tentatively. “We didn´t do good on our tests?”

The teacher nods. “Yes, you didn´t do well on your assessments. Our class average was very low. And so I felt sad. I went home and I felt very sad for the rest of the day.”

The children nod resignedly. They´ve heard this many times before.

Suddenly, one child, an eight-year-old who has been suspended for a total of sixteen days for repeatedly failing to comply with school rules, raises his hand. The teacher looks at him. “I am noticing that there is a question.”

The child tilts his head. “What does average mean?” Several children nod; it seems that they, too, have been wondering this, but have been too afraid to ask.

The teacher sighs. “It´s a way to tell if everyone in this room is showing self-determination. [This is perhaps the most maddening part for me. Good teachers live for these kind of pertinent, engaged questions. I don't care if your desk is on fire, you make time to answer them. At the very least, you say "that's a great question, but we'll  have to come back to it later." -- MP] And what I saw yesterday is that we are not. Scholars in Connecticut College” —at the school, children are “scholars,” and classrooms are named after four-year colleges— “are not less smart than scholars in UMass. But the scholars in UMass got a 78% average.”

One girl pipes up. “And we only got a 65%!”

The teacher moves the child´s clothespin a rung down on the “choice stick” for speaking out of turn.

“And the scholars in Lesley got a 79%. The scholars in UMass and the scholars in Lesley are not smarter than you are. They do not know how to read better than you.” She looks around. “They do not know how to write better than you.” Suddenly, her voice rises in volume. “Scholars, what can we do to show UMass and Lesley that we are just as smart as they are?”

The children look to the list of “assessment goals” posted on the wall. They raise their hands, one by one.

“I will read my work over so I don´t make mistakes.”

The teacher nods.

“I will begin every sentence with a capital letter.”

“I will do my best work so you don´t get sad anymore.”

The teacher smiles. “Good.”

This teacher— with whom I co-taught a second grade class— is now a high-level administrator and “instructional coach” at the school. It is her job to ensure that the school’s instructors (almost all of whom are white) to “teach” using these dehumanizing, teacher-focused tactics with their students (almost all of whom are children of color from low-income families.)

...

At this school, children are deprived of a comprehensive, developmentally appropriate, and humane education; instead, they are subjected to militaristic discipline, excessive amounts of testing (well beyond that which is already mandated by the state), a criminally deficient amount of playtime (in a nine-hour school day, kindergartners have twenty minutes of recess) [I take it back. That twenty minutes of play is the most maddening part -- MP], and lack of access to social-emotional curricula— all so that the people who run their schools can make a political point.

Let me go a bit further. I've seen close up a number of educators, schools and programs that provided kids of color from poor families with "a comprehensive, developmentally appropriate, and humane education" and (once you get past the cooked data) did a better job closing the achievement gap than most of the no-excuses charter schools.

Ayn Rand: a continuing saga

An Ayn Rand quote:

Collectivism is the tribal premise of primordial savages who, unable to conceive of individual rights, believed that the tribe is a supreme, omnipotent ruler, that it owns the lives of its members and may sacrifice them whenever it pleases.

One thing that seems to be not well considered is that, in a state of nature, collectivism is also required for survival.  Absent science-fiction (or possibly bleeding edge tech) we all require the efforts of other people to come into existence.  After all, people all had stages with mothers and with early infant care, in which they could not reasonably be an autonomous individual. 

The author of the linked piece on Ayn Rand points out:

The fly in the ointment of Rand’s philosophical “objectivism” is the plain fact that humans have a tendency to cooperate and to look out for each other, as noted by many anthropologists who study hunter-gatherers. These “prosocial tendencies” were problematic for Rand, because such behavior obviously mitigates against “natural” self-interest and therefore should not exist. She resolved this contradiction by claiming that humans are born as tabula rasa, a blank slate, (as many of her time believed) and prosocial tendencies, particularly altruism, are “diseases” imposed on us by society, insidious lies that cause us to betray biological reality.

The trouble here is that biological reality involves dependence.  At the very basic level, people are from families and not individuals that spring into existence (a point I first heard on Youtube).  Is not a natural drive towards cooperation a key element of family?  Which doesn't mean that you can't have vicious competition, both within and between families -- consider the War of the Roses, or the fiction series a Song of Ice and Fire. 

Looking at animal behavior doesn't make things any better.  Most mammals have some degree of child care and assistance for offspring.  That makes a strong biological argument unlikely. 

That doesn't mean Rand is irrelevant -- it's an odd perspective and it can highlight some social conventions that need examination.  But, as a complete system, it starts out on really shaky ground.

The Other Seccret Success Academy Tape*

 [* Until the next one pops up.]
 
As mentioned before, there is reason to believe that at least part of the success Success has had at raising scores on some (though notably, not all) standardized tests can be attributed to selection biases that that effectively filter out many of the kids most in need of help (ESL students, the learning disabled and virtually all of the homeless).

This filtering does not appear to stop with the admissions process, at least when it comes to LD kids. Success is currently facing a wave of damning and credible accusations (not to mention lawsuits) around this issue. Perhaps the best reporting on this story has come from Juan Gonzalez, who has been on this for a long time:

The Upper West Side Success Academy charter school has touted itself for not trying to push out kids with special needs or behavior problems, but a parent has audio to the contrary.
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Friday, August 30, 2013, 2:30 AM

[emphasis added]

The tapes, a copy of which the mother supplied the Daily News, poke a hole in claims by the fast-growing Success Academy chain founded by former City Councilwoman Eva Moskowitz that it doesn’t try to push out students with special needs or behavior problems.
Nancy Zapata said she resorted to the secret tapes last December and again in March after school officials used their “zero tolerance” discipline policy to repeatedly suspend her son, Yael, kept telephoning her at work to pick him up from school in the middle of the day and urged her to transfer him.
...
 “There was a point when I was getting a call every day for every minor thing,” Zapata said. “They would say he was crying excessively, or not looking straight forward, or throwing a tantrum, or not walking up the stairs fast enough, or had pushed another kid.”

What school officials did not do, Zapata said, was provide the kind of special education services that her son’s individual educational plan, or IEP, requires.
...

At one point in the tapes, a Success official can be heard telling Zapata:

“We’re technically out of compliance because we aren’t able to meet what his IEP recommends for him.”
...
 In the tapes, however, another Success administrator is heard acknowledging that Yael’s tantrums are related to his speech disability.

“He is getting really frustrated when people can’t understand what he’s communicating, and you can’t blame him for that,” the administrator tells Zapata.

In a second meeting, the mother asks why Success admitted her son through a lottery but is not providing him all the services he needs.

“If they have those special education needs, you’re absolutely right that they need to be fulfilled,” an official replies, but then quickly adds that the network doesn’t offer smaller special ed classes in kindergarten.

 “We will help them find the [appropriate] DOE placement,” the official says.

In other words, lottery or not, kindergarten kids like Yael who need smaller classes should find a public school that has one.

 A few quick observations on the explicit and implicit here.

Starting with the explicit, the administrators are coming out and saying that they were knowingly violating this disabled student's civil rights by denying him legally required services and that they had no intention of spending the money to fix the problem. What's more, they wouldn't provide even accommodations for any infractions despite the fact that some were trivial while others were, by the administrators own admission, the result of the student 's disability.

On an implicit level, it is difficult to read this as anything other than a systematic and very effective way of getting rid of kids who put a disproportionate drain on the school's time, money and resources and who are unlikely to do much to improve the school's test scores. In particular, the policy of having (in many cases single) parents have to take off work because their kids were crying or not keeping their eyes forward is exactly what I would do if I were in their place and lacked all sense of common decency.

Just when you thought Hulu's anti-trust issues couldn't get any worse

Hulu has always been a great example of two important business principles:

First, that it is nearly impossible to get in trouble for anti-trust violations these days (Hulu was a partnership of ABC/Disney, NBC/Universal and Fox);

And second, no business model is idiot-proof (though it does take a great deal of incompetence to screw up something this close to a monopoly).

Because it has been so poorly conceived (starting with wildly optimistic estimates for advertising revenue) and badly run, Hulu's backers have been backing away for a while now and the company would love to find another pair of deep pockets, and since it has a near monopoly on its corner of the market, it offers potential buyers a unique opportunity to screw over the consumer.

Nathan McAlone writing for Business Insider

Time Warner is deep in talks to buy a 25% stake in Hulu, but the company ultimately wants episodes of current TV seasons to be kicked off Hulu, according to The Wall Street Journal. This isn't a condition for investment, but it puts Time Warner fundamentally at odds with something that has been an integral part of Hulu's business model and has helped the service snag 10 million subscribers (for reference, Netflix has about 45 million US subscribers). [Those two numbers practically meaningless. Hulu has a two-tier model (ad-based and fee-based) so most of its viewers and possibly most of its revenue come from non-subscribers. -- MP]

Why does Time Warner want to cripple Hulu's big advantage?

The company sees "next-day" TV content as something that undermines the value of its pay-TV packages, The Journal reports. Time Warner fears that Hulu's popularity, especially built on the back of current TV seasons, will accelerate cord-cutting, or the ditching of cable subscriptions altogether.

At its core, the argument comes down to whether you believe the big bundle, the 500-channel cable package, can be saved. Time Warner clearly does, and it wants to bulk up its own TV Everywhere packages, which are tied to a cable subscription. From this vantage point, it's easy to see why Time Warner sees Hulu as undercutting its business.

Time Warner is closely aligned with one of the most hated and antiquated industries in the entire economy, cable TV. That industry is being pressured by new technologies. Of those, perhaps the most threatening are services that allow viewers to see the most popular content cable offers a few days later on the internet for free. If those services were split up over a wide range of providers, Time Warner and the cable companies would probably have to deal with the new landscape by rethinking their business models, improving their product, cutting prices, and doing a wide range of other things we'd like to see.  Unfortunately, since so much of this potential competition is concentrated in one horribly managed company, Tim Warner apparently believes it can just buy a stake in the train wreck and force it to stop providing those services to the consumers.

"Slam the Exam" = "Game the System"?

Some 2,300 Success Academy students attended a "Slam the Exam" rally before last year's state English tests. The network goes to great lengths to make sure students are ready for the exams. ( Photo by Success Academy )

Over at the teaching blog:

It is notable and more than a little disheartening that this reporter, like most of his colleagues, seems to see all things that improve achievement scores as equally desirable, even those tactics that only serve to undermine the validity of the test.

Losing money to build market share

This is Joseph.

A remarkable statistic from the Guardian:

A recent article in The Information, a tech news site, suggests that during the first three quarters of 2015 Uber lost $1.7bn while booking $1.2bn in revenue. The company has so much money that, in at least some North American locations, it has been offering rides at rates so low that they didn’t even cover the combined cost of fuel and vehicle depreciation.

These numbers only have to be vaguely correct for there to be serious concerns about predatory pricing.  Because below the cost of fuel and vehicle depreciation is selling at a dead loss.  Of course, Uber is a very smart company and they have created a class of independent contractors to try and make a direct link between costs and revenue tricky to do.

But, I think we can all agree that when losses exceed revenue then the endgame is not likely to be a new system of rides that are more cost effective.  There may be economies of scale, but they are not likely to overcome that kind of problem (not the revenue doesn't exceed losses . . . which is a very long way from profits). 

Just something to ponder when we make direct comparisons between costs of taxi cabs and Uber car services, like here.  These prices aren't going to be this low forever, unless Uber has a clever car plan to reduce costs of acquisition and repair.  And that's the part of the plan that I am most interested in.

While we're on the subject...

Check out the name of this Krugman post:

Working towward a notion of plausibility -- Krugman on models

I know I always promise I'm going to come back later and tie things together, but thiss time I really mean it.

Paul Krugman -- Making And Using Models

And that really gets at my point, which is not that existing models are always the right guide for policy, but that policy preferences should be disciplined by models. If you don’t believe the implications of the standard model in any area, OK; but then give me a model, or at least a sketch of a model, to justify your instincts.

What, after all, are economic models for? They are definitely not Truth. They are, however, a way to make sure that the stories you tell hang together, that they involve some plausible combination of individual behavior and interaction of those plausibly behaving individuals.

Take, for example, the famous open letter to Ben Bernanke demanding that he call off quantitative easing. The signatories declared that “The planned asset purchases risk currency debasement and inflation, and we do not think they will achieve the Fed’s objective of promoting employment.” OK, how is that supposed to work? What model of the inflation process do you have in which an expansion of the Fed’s balance sheet translates into inflation without causing an overheating of the labor market first? I’m not saying that there is no possible story along those lines, but spell it out so we can see how plausible it is.

What I said in my Mundell-Fleming lecture was that simple models don’t seem to have room for the confidence crises policymakers fear – and that I couldn’t find any plausible alternative models to justify those fears. It wasn’t “The model says you’re wrong”; it was “Show me a model”.

The reason I’ve been going on about such things is that since 2008 we’ve repeatedly seen policymakers overrule or ignore the message of basic macro models in favor of instincts that, to the extent they reflect experience at all, reflect experience that comes from very different economic environments. And these instincts have, again and again, proved wrong – while the basic models have done well. The models aren’t sacred, but the discipline of thinking things through in terms of models is really important.

"Some kids don't count"

“The best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans was Hurricane Katrina”

Arne Duncan



For those who haven't been following the education reform debate closely, Duncan's quote tends to come as something of a shock. The idea that the storm was the best thing to happen to any aspect of the city seems too much to consider. Within the movement, though, the Big Easy has long been seen as the perfect test case and its perceived successes have been a source of pride and validation.

To a lesser extent (though gaining ground), New Orleans is seen by reform critics as evidence of fundamental flaws in the movement agenda. They point to draconian discipline, student protests and, increasingly, scandals.

Danielle Dreilinger writing for The Times-Picayune earlier this month.

The former principals of ReNEW SciTech Academy in Uptown New Orleans were accused Friday (Jan. 29) of special education fraud, failing to follow federal special education law and breaking state testing rules. Louisiana Recovery School District officials said the principals, Tim Hearin and Alex Perez, snagged almost $320,000 in public money for the school in the 2014-15 academic year by artificially inflating special education services.

...

Gary Robichaux, the ReNEW group's chief executive during the shenanigans, remains employed by the six-school charter network in an advocacy position at his same $154,000 salary, officials said. That's even though emails released by the state show he knew about some of the manipulations at least as early as January 2015.

...

Recovery Superintendent Patrick Dobard said the issues were very serious; ReNEW is currently in breach of its charter contract, which could result in losing its schools. The Recovery system does not have the authority to recover money SciTech received inappropriately, Dobard said.


...

The special education tricks were big and blatant, intended to fill a $300,000 budget gap that Hearin and Perez knew they were creating at their 730-student school. The Recovery system doles out special education money based on the number of students who need services, their specific diagnoses and the amount of time they need help.

SciTech rushed students through special education evaluations, sometimes without parent involvement, increasing the school's budget by $137,800. Staffers also blew up the education plans of 49 students, adding an average of 1,032 minutes of extra help, which totals 2 1/2 days per week; that brought in $180,000.

...

Paradoxically, at the same time the principals juiced the special education funding, they ignored the special education students, telling staff they were "to be a secondary priority to students who were more likely to pass the state assessments," the report says. Some kids, the principals said, "don't count."

Seventy-seven children were supposed to have some time in a separate classroom, but there was no evidence SciTech did that for any student last year. Nineteen of 76 children received none of the services in their individual education programs, and about 42 received partial help. Federal law requires that public schools give children the services specified in their plans.

Instead, Hearin and Perez spread the money across the school to support increased staffing overall – including "special education" teachers who didn't know they were supposed to teach special education. When one administrator complained, one of the principals insulted them for "conflating law with morality," the report says. The staffer decided three days later not to return to SciTech in the fall.

...

The principals had planned, however. They held back a large number of students going into the fall of 2014 – 15 percent – in the hope of improving test scores. This was one of the violations found in March 2015 at Lagniappe Academies, which the state then shut down. At least one mother didn't even know her child was repeating seventh grade, according to a May 14 email: She "came in today wanting to discuss high school."

SciTech leaders also tried to commit another trick later outlined in the Lagniappe report: giving students test accommodations for a disability even if they did not have a disability. Teachers resisted the request; it was not clear in the report whether any gave in. 

Dreilinger again from back in March

New Orleans charter school Lagniappe Academies illegally deprived special education students of the teaching they needed -- and then faked forms to hide it once the Louisiana Department of Education was on its trail.

Those are just two of the explosive findings in a report released Tuesday (March 3) by the state. More:

    The school held back almost one third of its students last year, sometimes despite spring report cards saying the child did well.
    Administrators refused to screen students for special education services even when families had a diagnosis from a doctor.
    They created a "Do Not Call" list of families whose children they did not want back, and instructed staff to skip them when phoning families with key information about registration and summer session.
    When state officials were to visit, administrators asked staff to move furniture out of a storage space so it looked like the school had a special education room.
    And administrators put in for a very high number of disability accommodations requests when testing time came around --  although almost no students received those accommodations during the school year.
...

In a written response, the Lagniappe board asked for more time to consider the findings. It also submitted an affidavit from administrator denying a handful of the allegations.

Lagniappe board member Dan Henderson called the report "a big distraction" in a Monday email to NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune. "We are continuing to serve all of our 160 students, and look forward to another round of high-stakes testing, showing again our amazing accomplishments."

When the Lagniappe story broke, at least one commenter brought this quote from 2014:

John Ayers, executive director of Tulane University’s Cowen Institute for Public Education Initiatives, said that’s not surprising, considering RSD’s growth over the past few years.

The next step, he said, is for schools with impressive gains to share what worked.

“If we have a pocket of excellence that may be Lagniappe — and they may be very proud of what’s happening — how do we get that innovation to spread?” he said.

“[T]he feeling that you don't believe that black and brown kids can be successful" -- why culture and rhetoric of the reform movement make civil discussion so difficult

More on the fall-out from the latest Success Academy revelation.

Eva Moskowitz and the Success Academies have a long history of putting together what might be categorized as Astroturf events with students, parents and teachers in order to apply political pressure or counter bad publicity. Last Friday's news conference appears to be an example.

Abby Jackson writing for Business Insider.

For many parents at the news conference, last week's article seemed to aggravate a perception of The Times as lecturing minority parents in a paternalistic way. Success Academy has 11,000 students in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. Its website indicates that 93% of its students are children of color, and 76% are from low-income households.

Last year, The New York Times also wrote a piece that was critical of SA. The report included interviews claiming students in the third grade and above were wetting themselves in classrooms because they felt so stressed out and didn't want to lose time during standardized tests. The same article described the public shaming of students for poor grades.

"I'm keeping it civilized, because when I read this thing this morning and was home alone, you don't want to hear what I was saying," Senhaji added before arguing that The Times was overstepping its bounds by suggesting that parents were unaware of what was going on their kids' schools.

Natasha Shannon, a mother with three daughters at Success Academy, echoed this sentiment.

"I don't understand why The New York Times thinks it has to educate me as a parent about the school that I choose to send my children to," she said.

"I'm not some poor, uninformed parent or someone who is not aware of what's available in New York City schools," she added. "I chose Success. I made that choice because it's the best choice for my daughters."

The news conference was punctuated by raucous applause and shouts of "that's right" and "say it again" when the teachers and parents agreed with what one of the speakers had to say about their schools.

"We can't get a fair shake from the so-called paper of record," Moskowitz said at Friday's event.

One of the most boisterous rounds of applause came after Success Academy teacher Candice Seagrave spoke.

"The most heartbreaking part of all of this is the feeling that you [based on the context (see below), referring to the NYT -- MP]  don't believe that black and brown kids can be successful," she said.

While Moskowitz and her staff and advisers have been fairly transparent about using attacks to deflect criticism, I strongly suspect that Seagrave is being sincere, which makes the quote all the more disturbing. The recent stories in the New York Times have questioned the appropriateness and effectiveness of the schools' methods. They did not in any way suggest that the students at the schools were somehow less academically or intellectually capable. On that level, Seagrave's comment would seem to be a total non sequitur.

But I don't think she was making that argument. I've been on this beat for a long time now and I've seen enough similar responses to have a pretty good feel for these discussions and my take is that she was reacting to the criticism on a very general level. To make negative statements about Eva Moskowitz and the Success Academies network was to imply that poor, minority kids were beyond help.

Watching the video below, it is easy to sympathize for the first minute or two, but by the last thirty seconds or so, it is troublingly clear that if you disapprove of Moskowitz's approach or even if you just feel something else is better, there is virtually no common ground.

This Mercury being less interested in carrying messages than in filtering tham

When you spend years consuming way too much news, you start becoming alert to indications that a story is about to pick up speed.

For example, there have been lots of signs that the latest round of criticism Eva Moskowitz and the Success Academies is going to find more and more traction in the near future. (That's the main reason I put out a second post on Friday.) Along these lines, Diane Ravitch pointed out an interesting development yesterday.

From Politico:

Success has switched public relations companies several times over the last year in an attempt to tamp down critical coverage of the network. On Friday, the influential PR firm Mercury announced that it would now be representing Success, a pivot from the internal communications team that has handled the network's media requests for roughly a year.

Mercury is one of the companies you call when things are looking really bad and you don't care how much it costs to fix it. Here's how the company website puts it:

Mercury is a high-stakes public strategy firm. We use our expertise and reach to gain competitive advantage for clients.

Our expertise comes from extensive must-win campaign experience and operating successfully at the highest rung of business, government, politics and media around the globe. Our reach is the ability to use strategic intelligence to mobilize the message and persuade the toughest audiences.

We know what it takes to win in difficult situations. We have proven results for prominent figures, leading advocacy groups, governments, political parties and the world’s most successful companies.

And to give you some idea what constitutes a "difficult situation":

LANSING -- Gov. Rick Snyder has hired the national public relations firm Mercury LLC, where the spouse of Snyder's new chief of staff is a senior vice president, to help with communications during the Flint water crisis.

A very good question

This is Joseph

I like this question a lot:

What's the point of advocating any economic policies (either using left or right wing logic) on the basis that they will boost economic growth and create jobs if as soon as the Fed thinks that there might be upward pressure on wages at some point in the distant future they're going to raise interest rates?

Mostly because it makes it clear that economic feedback cycles are potentially quite complex.  If the government taxing money (as an example) slows growth and thus the federal reserve doesn't have to act to slow growth then do we not end up with public good benefits and the same growth rate?

I am sure it is an oversimplification, but so is the lower taxes will always increase growth.  We have not been seeing that in failed states, have we?  Nor did periods of English history like the Anarchy really help England grow economically, despite the weakening of central power.  Especially if central power is replaced by local power, which is often more arbitrary (ever interacted with a homeowner's association?).

Finally, as Megan McArdle points out, there really isn't that much more to cut with Federal taxes except among the very high earners, unless you want to remove payroll taxes.  Whether or not that would increase growth, it would have a very bad effect on current retirees.

It is certainly worth pondering if we shouldn't refocus on how to make sure that the money collected is spent effectively instead of obsessing about the amount that is spent.