Ron Johnson is in some deep shit.
— Felix Holt
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Update: This may be harder to prosecute than TPM makes it out to be. (Consider this, for instance.) But one can hope.
Apparently, Republicans voted to end medicare. Wait, cancel that.
— Felix Holt
At last, Kevin Drum says:
Unfortunately for voucher fans, when kids all take the same test it’s way too obvious that voucher schools don’t really outperform traditional schools. Nor do they outperform schools in poor neighborhoods (that’s the blue line in the chart). At best, they perform about the same, and at worst they perform more poorly. Not only does this undermine the case for vouchers, but it also undermines the case that, for example, it’s the troglodyte teachers unions that are holding back Wisconsin’s kids. That can hardly be tolerated, so the best bet is to simply not allow comparisons to be made in the first place.
Good. That’s step one. Step two is pointing out that union teachers are, on the whole, as good or better than non-union teachers.
— Anti-Cato
Aristotle • Gibbon • Mill • Dawkins. (Also: Cicero • Hume • Mann • Hazlitt • Camus).
— Anti-Cato
Heard on Rush Limbaugh this morning:
Is it even legal for a college student to be on food stamps?
I know he’s an idiot; but, still—fuck you, Rush.
—Felix Holt
Jonathan Chait suggests that Republicans are (inadvertantly, I assume) promoting teacher union power through the shibboleth of “local control of schools”.
“Local control” almost invariably means letting a policy question be dominated by the strongest local economic interest, with no countervailing power. In education, the only real economic interest with skin in the game is the teachers’ union.
The source of this insight? George Will, naturally.
And, while it’s hard to imagine that Will — who has a Ph.D. in something from Princeton — could ever exaggerate the power of labor to determine public policy, this seems incredible. First, unions generally exercise only slight influence on local school boards: in my experience, school management is a much more potent force. (It’s a little like corporate governance: the single most influential force on the board of any major company — even a unionized company — is the CEO.) And school management is typically driven by two incentives: raising test scores and cutting costs.
Second, there actually are good reasons to oppose local control. The main one is that localities typically protect local money, with a view to excluding poor and minority students. “Local control” doesn’t mean “letting a policy question be dominated by the strongest local economic interest”; it means segregation (cf. “states’ rights”). That’s the point of it, obviously.
The good news, I guess, is that George Will isn’t totally racist.
— Anti-Cato
Today Yglesias is saying that the distinctive thing about Finland’s (apparently successful) education system is the prestige associated with the teaching profession there — apparently in contrast with the US.
The key point as far as I can tell is simply that [teacher education] programs are very selective. Lots of people want to be teachers, so it’s hard to get into the programs, so getting into the program makes you seem prestigious, which makes applying to be a teacher desirable, etc., etc., etc. It’s a self-sustaining cycle.
I don’t really know about any of that; but all I can say is that if you want teaching to be prestigious, a good place to start might be not shitting all over the teaching profession all the time.
— Anti-Cato
