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to Reason

Popular election may work fairly well as long as those questions are not raised which cause the holders of wealth and industrial power to make full use of their opportunities. But if the rich people in any modern state thought it worth their while ... to subscribe a third of their income to a political fund, no Corrupt Practices Act yet invented would prevent them spending it. If they did so there is so much skill to be bought, and the art of using skill for the production of emotion and opinion has so far advanced, that the whole condition of political contests would be changed for the future.
    A.L. Lowell, president of Harvard University, 1926. Public Opinion and Popular Government, based on lectures at John Hopkins in 1909.

All the old blogs
are gone now

or the people
are different.

    doctors are dropping patients covered by private insurance at a higher rate than they're dropping those on medicare :

    From the Archives of Internal Medicine, June 27, 2011:

    A number of articles in the lay and medical press report a decline in the number of physicians who accept patients with Medicare ... The percentage of physicians accepting new patients did not vary significantly between 2005 and 2008, ranging from 94.2% to 95.3%. Physician acceptance of new Medicare patients dropped [2.6%]. Physicians in private practice were largely responsible for the declining acceptance of Medicare patients as determined in stratified analyses ... There was a more pronounced decline in physician acceptance of patients with private noncapitated insurance [which dropped 5.5%]. A smaller percentage of adult primary care physicians accepted private noncapitated patients over the study period [dropping 7.4%].

    Rates of acceptance of new Medicaid and private capitated patients were lower than Medicare and private noncapitated insurance, but also showed a decline over the study period. Acceptance of self-paying patients was more than 96% in all years and did not change significantly over the study period.

    While reports in the press highlight physicians’ dissatisfaction with Medicare, we found only a small decline in physician acceptance of Medicare patients between 2005 and 2008. In contrast, the decline in physician acceptance of noncapitated privately insured patients was more pronounced...

    Although physician reimbursement under Medicare is often cited as the reason why physicians turn away Medicare patients, our findings that more than 90% of physicians continue to accept Medicare patients despite marginal increases in reimbursement suggest that anecdotal reports may be overstating access problems.

    The observed decline in acceptance of private noncapitated insurance was unexpected and could be related to reimbursement but also to administrative burden. Acceptance rates of capitated insurance was lower and may reflect lower reimbursement in this model. Finally, the low and declining acceptance of new Medicaid patients is not surprising given the program’s historically poor reimbursement rate. Low rates of Medicaid acceptance may threaten access to care for the estimated 16 million Americans who will receive Medicaid coverage as a result of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

    Nobody in the press reporting the claims of those who insisted doctors were abandoning medicare patients en masse because of the prolonged fight over the "doctor fix" ever spent one second looking at whether it was true, let alone an anomaly. The headline should have been "Doctors opting out of private insurance".


:: posted by buermann @ 2011-06-28 13:00:34 CST | link


:: posted by buermann @ 2011-06-27 17:28:29 CST | link


    I knew new employees at big box stores always have to watch anti-union propaganda, but I'd never seen one. It's like something out of some dystopian sci-fi movie.


:: posted by buermann @ 2011-06-14 14:34:25 CST | link


    carried away by the monsoon countercurrent:

    There seems to be some excited confusion over the distinction between "vengeance" and "justice".


:: posted by buermann @ 2011-05-06 20:36:21 CST | link


    the easiest way to mug you is to be your bank:

    MSNBC: while consumers are switching banks at a slightly higher rate than in the past (8.7 percent last year, compared to 7.7 percent a year earlier), fees and interest rates have almost nothing to do with their choices. "Pricing" impacted only 4 percent of consumers, the study found.

    Gee, I wonder why?

    MSNBC: PIRG conducted an extensive "secret shopper" study to craft the report, “Big Banks, Bigger Fees: A National Survey of Bank Fees.” PIRG sent staff members to 392 banks and credit union branches in 21 states and reviewed online fees at banks over the past six months.

    Only 38 percent of banks produced fee schedules after the first request, PIRG found. After three requests, compliance jumped to 55 percent. Still, about one-quarter of banks provided incorrect information and 23 percent never produced fee information at all, it said.

    "Shopping for banks is harder when they don’t obey the law and provide up-front information about the fees they charge,” said Jon Bartholomew, consumer advocate at PIRG's Oregon office. “Local community banks and credit unions are more likely than national banks to provide fee schedules."


:: posted by buermann @ 2011-04-16 16:08:35 CST | link


    WIN THE FUTURE:

    It's like Samuel Beckett was contacted beyond the grave via quack to consult on the Obama campaign's contributions to mankind's constellation of meaningless political slogans. We have conferred across the pall of death and received this explanation for his choice of words:

    By "the future" I mean that narrow region of space whose administrative limits we have never crossed and presumably never will, either because it is forbidden to us, or because it has already passed us by, or of course because of some extraordinary fortuitous conjunction of semantics. This region is situated ahead of us, in relation to our present, less bleak perhaps, and comprised of the indeterminate, dignified by some with messianic prophecy, by others regarded as no more than the next fraction of a second, and the surrounding seconds. These seconds, or fractions thereof, have, I hasten to say before they arrive, already passed, and so represented, within their fleeting passage, have been won on the one hand, and, having slipped by, lost on the other. In modern rhetoric this is what I think is called the unconditional abstract subjunctive, or indirect future ellipsis, I forget, but there exists to us no logical or meaningful context for such a phrase. And to express it we have another system, of singular beauty and simplicity, which consists in saying Future (since we are talking of the Future) when you mean Destiny and Fate when you mean Future plus its domains and Subsequent when you mean the domains exclusive of the Future itself. I myself for example lived, and come to think of it nevertheless still live, close at hand, hub of the world to come. And in the evening, when I went for a stroll, somewhat further at hand, in the prospect of fortune, to get a breath of fresh air, it was the fresh air of my prospects that I got, and no other.

    Subsequent, in spite of its limited range, could boast of a certain diversity. Schemes so-called, a little design, a few odds, and, as you neared their outcomes, undulating and almost smiling providence, as if Subsequently was glad to go no further.

    But the principal beauty of this phrase was a kind of strangled conquest which the slow grey tides emptied and filled, emptied and filled. And the people came flocking like fattened gulls, unromantic people, to admire this spectacle. Some said, There is nothing more beautiful than these three words. Others, Subsequently is the best time to see the receipts of Fate. How lovely then the leaden flourish, you would swear it was stagnant, if you did not know it was not.

    Here only the inevitable grew in abundance, and a curious bitter imminence fatal to cows and horses, though tolerated apparently by the ass, the sheep and the elephant. What then is the condition of Destiny's victory? I'll tell you. No, I'll tell you nothing. Nothing.


:: posted by buermann @ 2011-04-13 17:35:37 CST | link


    operation infinite forfeit:

    Our little crusade in Afghanistan became an immediate and irreversible military and intelligence failure in December of 2001 when that one guy, whatshisname, escaped to who knows where or what country at the Battle of Tora Bora. There is absolutely no point whatsoever, military or otherwise, for us to continue occupying that country with a bunch of idiots who have been driven murderously insane by the Beckettian anui of continuing to fight in a war that was lost a decade ago.


:: posted by buermann @ 2011-03-28 21:15:32 CST | link


    accumulating minor errors:

    Felix Salmon makes some observations about a wealth inequality survey, pointing out that the 92% of Americans who said they prefer "Swedish" wealth distribution were actually saying they prefer the wealth distribution of some sort of socialist utopia that does not exist anywhere, let alone Sweden. Then he makes an argument that, after looking at the data he had just presented on Sweden and the United State's actual wealth distributions, is nonsensical:

    Wealth is a form of insurance, and when insurance is nationalized, you need less wealth. As a result, people can enjoy the fruits of their money, instead of saving it up for emergencies or for retirement — and only a small percentage of the population really spends a lot of effort in a successful attempt at accumulating more.

    The bottom 80% of Swedes have accumulated 11% more of Sweden's wealth than their counterparts in the US: if you were to measure "effort" by its outcomes the incentive to accumulate wealth seems to be significantly higher in Sweden.

    More directly, if you compare small business and self-employment statistics to get some read on "effort" the United States lags far behind countries with strong social safety nets.

    For the average American suckling at the tits of a nanny corporation, striking out to create wealth is actually physically dangerous, and even if you can afford health insurance on the individual market you end up paying astronomic rates that put you at a competitive disadvantage to established businesses. And because limited liability isn't going to protect your credit rating from medical bankruptcy, any health problems are likely to deal a serious blow to your finances for the better part of a decade, likely ending such entrepreneurial aspirations. Arguably you'd have to be an idiot, or already rich, to take risks like that. Maybe that explains why America has such a wealth of rich idiots.


:: posted by buermann @ 2011-03-25 19:29:02 CST | link


    it's only bad if gaddafi does it:

    The Arab League couldn't send any support to enforce UNSC resolution 1973 because they're preoccupied with their own attacks against, and abuses of, civilians.


:: posted by buermann @ 2011-03-22 13:44:05 CST | link


:: posted by buermann @ 2011-03-18 14:52:33 CST | link


    the barry does not fall far from the shrub:

    Apparently the problem wasn't the constitutional violations or kicking the legs out under the Western world's first baby steps towards civilization, but that it was done too informally. If you're going to trip a toddler, it is proper to do so in triplicate. "Obama creates indefinite detention system for prisoners at Guantanamo Bay":

    Rep. Peter T. King (R-N.Y.), chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said the order vindicated Obama's predecessor. "I commend the Obama Administration for issuing this Executive Order," he said in a statement. "The bottom line is that it affirms the Bush Administration policy that our government has the right to detain dangerous terrorists until the cessation of hostilities."

    He's even got Republican congressmen issuing statements asserting that governments have rights. Gotta respect the crown, bitches.


:: posted by buermann @ 2011-03-08 01:25:24 CST | link | comment (1)


    in which accurately describing his energy policy is in no way an endorsement:

    A cross-comment to Peter Treadway's "hard truths about energy", plus links and a minor correction on renewable tax credits that are now tax grants:

    "The Obama Adminstration’s policy seems to be one of discouraging domestic production of [fossil energy] and offering massive subsidies to less efficient [non-fossil energy]"
    This is just a flat out factually inaccurate boondoggle of a description of the proposed policy changes, both of existing policy and the proposed policy. He's proposed cutting $3.6 billion in massive production subsidies for oil and coal, $2.5 billion in home heating subsidies for natural gas, $6 billion in ethanol subsidies (which were quietly dropped from his budget proposal altogether), and slashing research funding for fuel cell, alternative fossil fuel (like shale "oil"), and hydrogen research. Some of that massive pile of subsidies would be shifted over to expanding natural gas electricity production in lieu of coal, expanding coal industry carbon sequesterization research subsidies, and tripling loan guarantees for nuclear power from $18B to $54B. None of the production subsidies will be shifted to renewables: the budget proposal just extends the already existing 30% tax grants for "qualifying" renewable energy investments.
    "As far as I can tell, ideology – not economics or physics – is driving this policy."

    Here I absolutely agree, the ideology driving this policy is your own, that of a "free market economist". You should be celebrating a $10.9 billion reduction in market distorting subsidies being replaced with a $2.2 billion increase in energy research (through the DOE's EERE R&D program), which only disrupts markets when the product, if there is any, of the research is privatized at some unpredictable point in the future.

    For that matter if you were an actual economist you might have acknowledged at some point the environmental externalities of fossil and nuclear energy, instead of only focusing on the "massive birdkiller" wind industry.

    If you care about birds so much euthanize your cat. Cats kill hundreds of millions of birds every year, orders of magnitude more than the wind industry. And fossil fuels have environmental impacts that also kill birds, and an economist would talk about relative costs, e.g. "wind farms and nuclear power stations are responsible each for between 0.3 and 0.4 fatalities per gigawatt-hour (GWh) of electricity while fossil-fueled power stations are responsible for about 5.2 fatalities per GWh" (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6V2W-4VVW4W3-3/2/c227be169c9bc8fa4765ebb57cb911a1).

    So you don't know what you're talking about here, and then you tell us why: "I would cite Robert Bryce, Peter Huber, George Gilder and Vaclav Smil"

    While Huber and Smil at least have some publishing credentials at conservative think tanks, favorably citing the co-founder of the post-modern creationist movement explains a lot that needs explaining. George Gilder? You're hanging your hat on that anti-science quack while complaining that Obama's relatively free-market policies aren't based on physics? That's just stupefying.


:: posted by buermann @ 2011-03-07 17:48:29 CST | link | comment (1)


:: posted by buermann @ 2011-03-07 15:17:37 CST | link


    simple answers:

    Given that we had a deficit of $1.3 trillion even after taking in $899 billion in total income tax revenues, does anyone in his or her right mind think raising income taxes on everyone or 'raising taxes on the rich’ would solve the problem?

    Yes. In 2008 the total gross adjusted wages of the top 1% were $1.68 trillion *, less $390B in taxes paid, happily leaving exactly $1.3 trillion. Simply returning to the tax schedules of the golden Eisenhower era would, in fact, solve the problem.

    You could also suspend nearly half a trillion a year in tax subsidies for our wealthiest welfare recipients, and suddenly you have a surplus.

    Anybody with a right mind would look at the numbers, mindful of the history the last time our debt reached this portion of GDP, and with the power of basic arithmetic conclude that 'raising taxes on the rich' -- what's the deal with those scare quotes? -- would solve the problem.

    I can only conclude that Kurt Brouwer -- chairman and co-founder of Brouwer & Janachowski, LLC, a financial advisory firm that manages over $700 million for corporations, charitable groups and private investors -- cannot do basic arithmetic. His clients should probably consider taking their investment advice from somebody who can.


:: posted by buermann @ 2011-03-03 18:55:15 CST | link


    reagan on the right to free association:

    Scott Walker's rewrite of history so he could justify being on the wrong side of it is just great:

    This may seem a little melodramatic, but 30 years ago Ronald Reagan, whose 100th birthday we just celebrated the day before, had one of the most defining moments of his political career, not just his presidency, when he fired the air traffic controllers. And I said, to me that moment was more important than just for labor relations or even the federal budget. That was the first crack in the Berlin Wall in the fall of Communism because from that point forward the Soviets and the Communists knew that Ronald Reagan wasn’t a pushover.

    Always with the symbolic gestures, these guys. The independent Polish union movement that began in 1980 actually did something, at great self-sacrifice, to end Soviet communism. You want to talk about first cracks in the Berlin Wall you might start there. I don't remember Republicans ever being more pro-labor than when they were expressing solidarity with the anti-communist trade unions in Eastern Europe, so it's a little sad and ironic that they're rewriting history with this jumble of nonsense that is, effectively, endorsing the same kind of assault on the right to free association that the Soviets utilized in repressing Solidarity in the early 80s. Walker thinks he's emulating Reagan, who supported the Declaration of Human Rights, the one that says "Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests". That's ironic. What would Reagan think of Walker? Here's how Reagan explained his decision to fire the air traffic controllers in '81:

    Let me make one thing plain. I respect the right of workers in the private sector to strike. Indeed, as president of my own union, I led the first strike ever called by that union. I guess I'm maybe the first one to ever hold this office who is a lifetime member of an AFL-CIO union. But we cannot compare labor-management relations in the private sector with government. Government cannot close down the assembly line. It has to provide without interruption the protective services which are government's reason for being.

    It was in recognition of this that the Congress passed a law forbidding strikes by government employees against the public safety. Let me read the solemn oath taken by each of these employees, a sworn affidavit, when they accepted their jobs: "I am not participating in any strike against the Government of the United States or any agency thereof, and I will not so participate while an employee of the Government of the United States or any agency thereof."

    It is for this reason that I must tell those who fail to report for duty this morning they are in violation of the law, and if they do not report for work within 48 hours, they have forfeited their jobs and will be terminated.

    See, it was all about the Berlin Wall... er, a contract violation. Reagan had an awful record on labor rights, but his undermining of labor relations took place through his appointments to the National Labor Review board by stacking it with business interests. He never threatened to end anybody's collective bargaining rights, rather he recognized and defended them, he just rigged the deck at the negotiating table. Scott Walker could learn something from that, but since the unions he's fighting already knew going in the deck was stacked and gave in to all the compensation demands from the start, he could just take all of Reagan's tricks for granted.

    update: As for these scant assholes:

    Tea Party groups organized counter protests in some cities, including Jefferson City, Mo., and Raleigh, N.C. In Madison, however, only a handful of scattered counter-protesters showed up.

    Pete Litzau, 57, a registered nurse from Milwaukee, who came to Madison counter-protest on his own, carried a sign reading, "I Support Scott Walker." He said taxpayers are "sick and tired" of lavish pensions paid to public employees.

    Let's all just enjoy the supreme irony of people who bitch about the government "taking our rights away" and probably have little action figure laden temples set up in their garages dedicated to Ronald Reagan celebrating a governor who is trying to take away core human rights Reagan celebrated. It almost makes you applaud the ones who had the sense to stay home, even if they didn't have the good sense to come out and defend themselves.


:: posted by buermann @ 2011-02-26 08:32:45 CST | link


    who supports "peer review"?:

    Some observations from Kahlenberg's review of "Waiting for 'Superman'" (the title of which deserves a post in my favorite blog):

    The press ... has a fundamental misunderstanding of unions ... [and report that a] ... proposal to weaken tenure protections and pay great teachers more "represented an existential challenge" to the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). "If the union couldn't protect their members' jobs, what was the point of having a union?" In fact, teachers' unions were created to do lots of things: lobby for more funding for public education, increase teacher salaries, reduce class size, improve the ability of teachers to discipline students, and fight private-school-voucher initiatives.

    The AFT also favors plans to get rid of bad teachers, just not in a way that unfairly demeans large numbers of educators. In 2009, Rhee said she had to fire 266 teachers for budget reasons and told an interviewer, "I got rid of teachers who had hit children, who had had sex with children, who had missed seventy-eight days of school." In fact, she later conceded, only 10 teachers had been fired for corporal punishment and two for sexual misconduct since 2007. Just recently, an arbitrator reinstated 75 educators fired by Rhee in 2008 after determining that Rhee had not explained why they were being terminated nor given them a chance to respond to charges. At one point during her tenure, Rhee floated the idea of getting a Congressional declaration of emergency, so she wouldn't have to bargain with the democratically elected representatives of teachers at all. "Cooperation, collaboration, and consensus-building," she argued, "are way overrated."

    But in fact, collaboration can be used to achieve Rhee's objectives—such as getting rid of bad teachers—in a way that elevates rather than demoralizes educators. Several communities, from Montgomery County, Md., to Toledo, Ohio, use peer evaluation and review, whereby expert teachers come into a school, try to help struggling educators, but in the end recommend that some be terminated. This might seem like the fox guarding the hen house. But in both communities, teachers were tougher on colleagues than administrators had been because the 7th-grade teacher is hurt when the 6th-grade teacher is incompetent. Beginning in 2002, 177 Montgomery County teachers were dismissed, not renewed, or resigned in the first four years of peer review, compared with just one teacher who was dismissed due to performance issues between 1994 and 1999. Peer review remains controversial among many teachers, but the AFT has a national policy in support of it.

    Here's the union's position papers on peer review. I'm kind of surprised that they're in support of it, the blurring of management roles in hiring and firing is usually anathema to unions for reasons of morale and solidarity. But there you are, teachers in favor of firing more teachers.


:: posted by buermann @ 2011-02-25 17:30:24 CST | link


    capturing the benefits of unobserved differences in instructional quality:

    This study of teacher influences on student outcomes is really quite interesting. The amount of variation in student outcomes you can actually pin on teachers is, at most, 20%, and usually much, much lower. The strongest correlation between teaching and student outcomes occur in the most disadvantaged districts.

    So let's talk about the free lunch we're being offered as regards those: the study figured that if you had some hypothetical means of accurately assessing teacher performance apart from all the other confounding variables, and you replaced the worst teachers with the best teachers - whom you would apparently entice to the poorest districts by offering them lower pay and a hostile attitude towards their right of free association - you could improve outcomes by a third of a standard deviation. Just to put it in terms we might be familiar with, I know the SATs have a standard deviation of 100 by design, so you're talking about all of 30 points on that exam. Which would be a pretty good improvement if you could capture it year after year, could actually assess teachers accurately, could pull great teachers out of your hat, and could do it all for free. Good luck with that plan, Indiana.


:: posted by buermann @ 2011-02-25 14:25:34 CST | link


:: posted by buermann @ 2011-02-24 18:53:33 CST | link


    if they're elected to fix a phony crisis, don't be shocked when when they invent phony fixes that make the problems we do have worse:

    I like Diane Ravitch's reflections on the charter and testing policies she spent two decades advocating, and watching as they were enacted:

    By demanding that all students reach proficiency by 2014, NCLB incentivized states, districts and schools to cheat and game the system. That is the direct outcome of high-stakes testing. Some states have lowered their testing standards, thus making it easier for students to be rated "proficient." Consequently, many states now claim dramatic improvement in their test scores, but these gains are not reflected on the tests given every other year by the federal government. In Texas, where there was supposed to have been an educational miracle, eighth-grade reading scores have been flat for a decade. Tennessee claimed that 90 percent of its students were proficient in 2007, but on NAEP only 26 percent were.

    In contrast, progress on the NAEP tests has been meager. Billions have been invested at the federal and state levels in testing and test-preparation materials. Many schools suspend instruction for months before the state tests, in hopes of boosting scores. Students are drilled on how to answer the precise types of questions that are likely to appear on the state tests. Testing experts suggest that this intense emphasis on test preparation is wasted, because students tend to learn test-taking techniques rather than the subject tested, and they are not likely to do well on a different test of the same subject for which they were not prepared.

    Despite the time and money invested in testing, scores on NAEP have increased slowly or not at all. In mathematics the rate of improvement was greater before NCLB was passed. In reading there have been gains in fourth grade, but the national scores for eighth graders were essentially the same in 2009 as they were in 1998.

    It is not only the sluggish improvement in test scores that is troubling. Nor is it the frequency with which states and districts manipulate the scoring of the tests to produce inflated gains. The biggest victim of high-stakes testing is the quality of education. As more time is devoted to reading and math, and as teachers are warned that the scores in these subjects will determine the fate of their school, everything other than reading and math gets less time. This is what doesn't count: history, literature, geography, science, the arts, foreign languages, physical education, civics, etc.

    So, the emphasis on accountability for the past eight years has encouraged schools to pay less attention to important subjects and inflate their test scores by hook or by crook. NCLB's remedies don't work, its sanctions don't work and the results are unimpressive. Why members of Congress and Washington think tanks continue to defend this toxic law is a puzzle.

    And a nut from her criticism of the school choice panacea:

    In Harlem, which has a heavy concentration of charter schools, the regular public schools must market themselves to students and families; they typically have a budget of $500 or less for fliers and brochures. The aggressive charter chain that competes with them has a marketing budget, according to the New York Times, of $325,000. The expansion of charters has been mightily underwritten by hedge-fund managers, the Walton Family Foundation, the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation and other major benefactors.

    Wallstreet, Walmart, and the Broads, that's quite the combination. As a completely irrelevant aside, the Broads made their fortune in home construction, before going into finance, transforming life insurance giant SunAmerica into a retirement management company, selling our grandparents variable rate annuities composed primarily of mortgage back securities. I bet those rates have been great. It also participated in a gigantic ponzi scheme, managing to skim profits off the skimmers, which is pretty impressive work. SunAmerica was sold to AIG in 1998, and a decade later we bought AIG.

    You know who I'd invite to the table to discuss improving education in America? A guy who worked both sides of the FIRE sector for over four decades and fled the scene with billions of dollars right before the whole thing went up in flames. Our schools occupy a lot of valuable real estate and take on a lot of loans, so I'm sure the real estate and finance mogul over here is just trying to help them out with his expertise.

    Anyway, one more point from Ravitch, on Wisconsin, that I did not know, because not one of the bazillion stories I've read about the protests up there have thought it worth mentioning:

    Gov. Walker demanded that the teachers pay more for their health benefits and their pension benefits, and they have agreed to do so. But that's not all he wants. He wants to destroy the union.

    I wrote an article about this contretemps for CNN.COM, not realizing that the teachers had already conceded the governor's demands on money issues. They agreed to pay more for their health benefits and pension benefits. The confrontation now is solely about whether public employees have the right to bargain collectively and to have a collective voice.

    I was trying to find an article I ran across a week ago from one of the founders of the charter school movement that started in the 70s, criticizing the one that's been taken over by a bunch of billionaires, and found this instead.


:: posted by buermann @ 2011-02-24 16:03:25 CST | link


    the snake oil is about the same as the hypochondriasis, only worse:

    Charter schools are so super:

    This report presents a longitudinal student‐level analysis of charter school impacts on more than 70 percent of the students in charter schools in the United States.        The scope of the study makes it the first national assessment of charter school impacts.  

    The study reveals that a decent fraction of charter schools, 17 percent, provide superior education opportunities for their students.    Nearly half of the charter schools nationwide have results that are no different from the local public school options and over a third, 37 percent, deliver learning results that are significantly worse than their student would have realized had they remained in traditional public schools.   These findings underlie the parallel findings of significant state‐by‐state differences in charter school performance and in the national aggregate performance of charter schools.

    ...

    Charter school students on average see a decrease in their academic growth in reading of .01 standard deviations compared to their traditional school peers.    In math, their learning lags by .03 standard deviations on average.    While the magnitude of these effects is small, they are both statistically significant

    ...

    this study reveals in unmistakable terms that, in the aggregate, charter students are not faring as well as their TPS counterparts.   Further, tremendous variation in academic quality among charters is the norm, not the exception.

    The mass movement among our learning challenged politicians to privatize public education is a curious thing. I wanted to find some simple statistics on spending per student at the charter schools compared to their public counterparts - the hype is that this is supposed to unleash the power of the market to provide better results for less money, right, so you'd hope we're at least getting these worse results for less money - but there's difficulty getting honest numbers out of the charter schools without lawsuits, and the numbers we do get nevertheless indicate that we're getting worse results for more money. As an added bonus, charter schools are plagued by financial scandals all over the country. So we're getting a reform agenda pushed by politicians backed to the hilt by a financial sector that sees our massive public expenditure on education as a gigantic pool of potential graft and the same obscurantist profit as defense contracting and mortgage lending. That is to say, the charter school movement looks like every other fucking thing in America.


:: posted by buermann @ 2011-02-24 14:16:18 CST | link


    in which researchers are shocked to find the quality of the labor force declined with reductions in compensation:

    I'm glad somebody checked to make sure the blindingly obvious was empirically measurable:

    Many poor countries are initiating teacher contract reforms to meet a growing demand for primary education at a time of increasing government deficits. Key aspects of this reform include reduced salaries and benefits for new, contractual teachers. Using data from Togo, we find that students of regular teachers systematically outperform those of contractual teachers, even after controlling for prior achievement, household-, school- and classroom characteristics. Variation in teaching methods, absenteeism, and resentment over "unfair" pay across contract types do not explain the performance gap. Instead, our findings suggest the reforms triggered a reduction in supply of high quality teacher entrants.

    The solution Democrats and Republicans - the latter only differ over how much violence is acceptable - have been trying to sell us is that they can improve teacher quality by paying them less, and I don't think you need a good education to intuitively understand that we would be idiots if we bought what they're peddling. I take this as more evidence of the chronic failure of our political system to produce leaders who are not mentally disabled. I think it might be easier to fix a few thousand politicians - some of us, we have to hope, must be both qualified for office and of average intelligence - than it would be to improve the aggregate scores of millions of students such that they were no longer "in crisis".

    Either we're going to have to replace them or we're going to have to pay for their remedial educations - and they're constistently performing at a 4th grade level so it's going to be extremely expensive to give them just the equivalent of a GED and bring them up to a level of education where they are capable of having adult conversations.


:: posted by buermann @ 2011-02-23 14:34:10 CST | link


    the permanent education crisis:

    We have been told that there a crisis in education every month of every year of every decade for over a century. You might be able to find a decisive point of change -- that is, a crisis -- in American public education sometime in the past. Perhaps in 1852, when the first state adopted compulsory education, or 1918, when the last state did. But for perhaps Brown v. Board of Education there has been no point of crisis in education during the entire period in which we have been told that we're in one. It's been a century of tinkering at the edges of Frederick II's policies, not a century of crisis.

    Anybody still telling you that education is in a "crisis" is one of the people responsible for bringing down our verbal test scores in international comparisons and needs to be sent back to the fourth grade to re-learn elementary English. Not for their sake, but for ours.

    The systemic failure on the part of our leaders to comprehend the meaning of this word, "crisis", is a vivid demonstration of the chronic failure of our political institutions and the intellectual bankruptcy of the political class, who evidently can find no sufficient justification for their own place in society but the practice of brinkmanship on the putting green.

    While they may themselves serve as anecdotal evidence of how our schools often fail our dimmest students, history demonstrates that the failure has been one of perpetual, everlasting disappointment, and not a sudden onslaught or even a moderately interesting deviation from the moving average.

    Even if we accept the premise that these international assessments actually mean what they say they mean and are being assessed correctly to make such comparisons, we're talking about computed scores rarely more than 20% - and usually much less - below first place among countries that have distinct advantages in child support, structure of school funding, and homogenized populations that make it far easier for them to pound entire generations of children into little standardized boxes for all to see. Inheriting systemic flaws that have been a problem for generations is not a crisis.


:: posted by buermann @ 2011-02-23 11:49:09 CST | link


    unrest in the land of 10,000 cheese hats:

    Democrats in the United States aren't the only folks rather ludicrously comparing Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker to Hosni Mubarak. Hosni didn't openly threaten to start shooting people in the streets, for one thing. Egyptian protesters seem to have had the same idea, implying that Scott Walker is the Hoser Moobarak of Dairy Country, because otherwise this makes no sense to me at all:

    Dégage? Is that some elitist brand of Wisconsin cheese or something? And note the uncanny resemblance:

    Har har. No really, here it is for real.


:: posted by buermann @ 2011-02-20 12:39:22 CST | link


    the pigford "reparations":

    If you aren't familiar with Pigford v. Glickman, it's become the talk of the town in conservative circles, where the crazies are saying Obama pushed through socialist reparations or some shit by paying out a settlement in a 13 year old discrimination case brought against the USDA by African American farmers. Neveryoumind the number of Republicans who have co-sponsored the numerous attempts to pass the bill through congress to pay the claims. This starts back with Andrew Breitbart's campaign to run Shirley Sherrod out of the USDA last year: when that project backfired and utterly discredited Breitbart (or at least should have, like the ACORN nonsense should have, and here he is again with the same bullshit) he kept doing his "research", and found out that Sherrod was the largest claimant to date in the Pigford class action. Since then he's been stirring up his resentful little mob over it with charges that the class action suit is riddled with fraud.

    So I've never read Conor Friedersdorf before, and can't personally vouch for the facts in his story about someone else's Pigford story, having never reported on the matter myself, but I can tell you that the "gap between the number of claimants and the total number of black farmers in America" - 18,500 black farmers in 1997 and 94,000 separate claims of discrimination between 1982 and 1997 - identified in Daniel Foster's National Review article is, pardon the expression, a steaming pile of hog shit.

    For instance, it might occur to someone remotely thoughtful that the discrimination claims go back to '82, when there were more black farmers, and that over those 15 years you don't have just 18,500 farmers, but everybody that entered and or tried to start farming during that time, and since they were being discriminated against by the USDA the turnover among the plaintiffs' farms would be much higher than normal. If you had just 5,000 black farmers entering or trying to enter the business, nationwide, per year you would have a fully adequate explanation for the supposed discrepancy.

    Leaving aside the back of the envelope, one could just google it, motherfucker. Here's how the Congressional Research Service explained it last year:

    Questions have been raised about the number of black farmers who were or are eligible for a settlement under Pigford or Pigford II. Determining the number of African American farm operators who farmed during the period of January 1, 1981, and December 31, 1996, is difficult because of the way in which the Census of Agriculture defined farm operator. Prior to the 2002 Census of Agriculture, only principal farm operators were counted. In the 1982 Census of Agriculture, there were 33,250 African American-operated farms; in 1987, 22,954; in 1992, 18,816; and in 1997, 18,451. Essentially, the number of African American farms was treated as synonymous with the number of African American operators.

    These statistics, however, failed to recognize that many farms are operated by more than one farm operator. In 2002, the Census of Agriculture collected data for a maximum of three principal operators per farm. The 2002 Census enumerated 29,090 African American farm operators. This statistical change more accurately captured the actual number of operators, that is, those who are actually engaged in farming. For example, a single farm may be operated by four or more operators, each of whom could have conceivably made loan applications to USDA agencies. In addition, a farm operator might operate rented or leased land owned by a principal operator. In such a case, that operator renting or leasing farmland would not have been counted as the operator of that farm. Under the term of the consent decree, however, such a farmer could be an eligible claimant because he or she farmed or tried to farm during the requisite time period. The varying Census definitions of farm, farm operator, and farm owner help explain why the number of initial claimants in the Pigford case (approximately 94,000) was higher than the number of farms/farm operators enumerated by the Census of Agriculture between 1982 and 1997 and why the estimated number of potential Pigford II claimants may be greater than the number of farms/farm operators enumerated in those or subsequent Census counts.

    In addition, it is important to note that there may be other reasons for discrepancies between the number of farmers reflected in farm Census data and the number of claimants under Pigford or Pigford II. For example, individuals who attempted to farm but who were denied loans or other farm assistance would not be counted as farmers but may have been or may be eligible to file a claim under the terms of the two settlement agreements. Likewise, the estate of a deceased individual who farmed or attempted to farm during the eligibility period may be entitled to relief under either settlement, but such persons would not be counted as farm operators. Finally, due to fraud or mistake, some individuals who are not eligible may have filed or may file claims under Pigford or Pigford II, but such claims would not be entitled to an award. For example, nearly 7,000 Track A claims in Pigford (31%) were denied relief, presumably because such claims lacked merit or had other defects. Thus, the number of claims filed cannot be viewed as an accurate representation of the number of awards that have been or will be made under the two settlements.

    That was hard, wasn't it? We even have a realistic number of potentially fraudulent claims! How about that.

    I also want to point out that if this country was actually going to pay out reparations for slavery, any realistic number that sought to recompense the progeny of American slaves just for the extorted, uncompensated labor of their ancestors, and excluding other damages, would be in the trillions or tens of trillions of dollars, likely leaving them something approximating an equal share of the net assets of the nation instead of ten cents on the dollar. 1.15 billion dollars for late claims in the Pigford settlement might cover their losses for 15 years of denied farm loans, but it doesn't scratch the surface of the crushing moral debt of our government.

    You'd think a bunch of fuckforbrains who supported the eradication of the death tax estate tax would understand the importance of small inherited estates in building a middle class. You'd also think that in their prostration before the tin god of the free market they'd understand what a disadvantage black farmers suffered, under a blatantly extortionist regime that took their taxes and lent their money back to their competitors at rates they subsidized. No such luck with Michele Bachmann, who should fucking know better given how her family's farm has been kept in business by government subsidies, paid for by the same farmers she's now absurdly, baselessly, fraudulently, accusing of fraud.

    Jesus goat raping Christ, I'm going to go pummel a bottle of whiskey with my face until this goes away or I am no longer capable of adding adverbs to perfectly functional sentences.


:: posted by buermann @ 2011-02-19 19:40:19 CST | link


    robbin the poor to fatten the rich:

    David Cay Johnston writes:

    The tax compromise passed in December has been hailed everywhere as a payroll tax cut combined with an extension of the Bush tax cuts, despite the fact that it raised taxes on a third of Americans. The killing of Obama's Making Work Pay tax credit, which the White House called the biggest middle-income tax cut ever, and the replacement of it with the Republicans' payroll tax cut raised taxes on single workers whose wages come to $20,000 or less and married couples with less than $40,000 in wages.

    That's 51 million taxpayers, the Tax Policy Center estimated. (See Table T10-277.)

    Among the poorest fifth of tax units, whose annual cash income is less than $17,878, two-thirds got hit with a tax increase. On average, their taxes went up $134, which is 1.3 percent of this group's total cash income.

    Consider a single worker who makes $6,000. That was the average wage of the bottom third of workers in 2009, the Medicare tax database shows. Killing the Making Work Pay credit in favor of the payroll tax cut amounted to a tax increase of $252, or 4 percent of total income.

    ...

    the top tenth of 1 percent (more than $2 million) ... got a tax cut worth on average $45,000 each, all financed with borrowed money.


:: posted by buermann @ 2011-02-18 10:34:41 CST | link


    defense budget "cuts":

    The commies in the Whitehouse are only cutting Pentagon spending by $8 billion a year, this is completely retarded. The Pentagon still can't tell us what it spends it all on, even after we spent $20 billion upgrading their accounting software. They wouldn't even be able to tell if their budget was slashed, and instead we're taking food from the mouths of the hungry when there's still 10% unemployment so we can continue spending $32 billion more a year than the Bush administration on a War Department with one less war to fight.

    Some real fucking fiscal responsibility right there. They're not gonna have a country left to protect after they've finished gutting it out hollow.


:: posted by buermann @ 2011-02-15 16:35:22 CST | link


    spies like us:

    Glenn Greenwald really has my sympathies: he gets out of the hospital just in time to find out that he was the target of a bumbling conspiracy hatched by the largest financial institution in the country, only to be rescued from their clutches when the conspiracy is cracked wide open by the inventors of the LOLCat.

    It'd almost drive a guy paranoid if it wasn't so fucking funny.

    Anyway, the long and short of it: Wikileaks has a bunch of incriminating internal documents from Bank of America, so the Department of Justice - rather than taking any interest in the criminal activities of Bank of America, which is hardly surprising at this point - gives Bank of America legal advice, which is to hire three security firms (Palantir Technologies, HBGary Federal, and Berico Technologies) to research legal attacks on Wikileaks. The firms sit on this egg for a bit and decide that what they really need to do is undermine Wikileaks' public support, so they start planning to undermine, blackmail, and attack various journalists and free speech activists, as well as the inventors of the lolcat, who had organized some small denial of service attacks against various businesses that broke their contracts with Wikileaks.

    The super spies at HBGary, running conspiracies within conspiracies, collect a bunch of ginned up information on, well, somebody, or something, then brag to the press about how they're going to rid the internets of lolcats forever when they sell that information to the FBI, and so the next day their network is hacked, the conspiracy exposed, the ginned up information they were going to sell to the FBI published in full by the hackers, along with everything else that wasn't bolted down, in all likelihood destroying their firm commercially, and so Glenn Greenwald is safe (for now!) from the twisted plots of international finance, or something.

    Hollywood would be so lucky to have gold plated shit like this fall out of the sky, now that plodding dramas about software engineers are winning Oscars. Is Peter Sellers still alive? Is he still available for work?


:: posted by buermann @ 2011-02-12 14:23:10 CST | link


    the barry doesn't fall far from the shrub:

    If you look hard you can remind yourself of when Barrack Obama was the constitutional scholar who was going to defend the last few shreds of the 4th amendment against its chronic violation by the Bush administration. I've almost forgotten that brief week or so where there was some hope:

    Obama said there is "little doubt" that the Bush Administration, with the cooperation of major telecommunications companies, "has abused [its] authority and undermined the Constitution by intercepting the communications of innocent Americans without their knowledge or the required court orders."

    "Given the legitimate threats we face, providing effective intelligence collection tools with appropriate safeguards is too important to delay. So I support the compromise, but do so with a firm pledge that as president, I will carefully monitor the program.

    "[The bill] does, however, grant retroactive immunity, and I will work in the Senate to remove this provision so that we can seek full accountability for past offenses."

    Then he went ahead and voted for it a few days later.

    When he became President you could hope against hope that from his new position of authority over the program - now he's the guy running it on naked executive authority, he can live up to his promises on a whim - that he would "seek full accountability for past offenses", but he continued supporting immunity from the Whitehouse, and not only that but now we know that he has been asserting, secretly, that he can continue the programs without oversight or accountability.

    Our Constitutional Law Professor in Chief won't even let us see his legal argument for it. That's just how important open debate is to this President: about as important as the right of the people to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures, which is to say not at all.


:: posted by buermann @ 2011-02-12 13:00:47 CST | link


    the am-siberian:

    Vice President Joe Biden Tuesday proposed that the US government infuse $53 billion into a national high-speed rail network. The announcement was met immediately by deep skepticism from two House Republicans ... House Transportation Committee Chair Rep. John Mica (R) of Florida said previous administration grants to high-speed rail projects were a failure, producing "snail speed trains to nowhere." He called Amtrak a "Soviet-style train system".

    This is a funny thing to say, because American firms and the US Government were in large part responsible for building what became the Soviet train system. Hell, Americans sacrificed their lives protecting that railway from the Bolsheviks - who were the ones attacking trains as the running dogs of the reactionary capitalist bourgeois. Up until 1922 Americans serving in our Russian Railway Service Corps were running those trains and fixing the bridges that said revolutionaries were blowing up. And for all that, when the commies finally stopped dynamiting the tracks and started running the system themselves it served as one of the few economic linkages between the Soviet block and the West, facilitating what little free trade survived Stalinism. A patriot like Rep. Mica would, you'd think, be vaguely familiar with the fact that it was Americans who built the longest rail line in the world, and paid in blood and treasure to protect it. The Soviets inherited an American-style train system, not the other way around.


:: posted by buermann @ 2011-02-10 13:17:17 CST | link


    the licensed triumphs of neoliberalism:

    Obtaining a permit to carry concealed in the State of Texas requires a 10 hour Concealed Handgun License Certification Course

    Well regulated indeed. A well regulated hair salon, being necessary to the comeliness of a free State, should be held to a higher standard than the citizens' militia:

    WSJ: Texas ... requires hair-salon "shampoo specialists" to take 150 hours of classes, 100 of them on the "theory and practice" of shampooing, before they can sit for a licensing exam.

    The WSJ article should be read in full to understand what it means - after half a century of federal policies to deskill the workforce - when we're told we need more training for workers in order to "win the future". Because there aren't any actual skilled jobs left to train people for we instead have to raise barriers to entry into menial service sector jobs in order to justify the large federal retraining grants that are being grafted by second rate community colleges in order to supply the masseuses, manicurists, locksmiths, yoga instructors, barbers, dieticians, cat groomers, personal trainers, and fight promoters that will ultimately be responsible for defeating the imaginary yellow menance of tomorrow.


:: posted by buermann @ 2011-02-07 13:54:40 CST | link


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