TSN Open Mic for the week of 2/6/2023
There’s a phenomenon where someone writes an essay about this or that but someone else wants to discuss something that has not yet made it to Ten Second News.
This is unfair to everybody involved. It’s unfair to the guy who wrote the original essay because, presumably, he wants to talk about his original essay. It’s unfair to the guy who wants to talk about his link because it looks like he’s trying to change the subject. It’s unfair to the people who go to the comments to read up on the thoughts of the commentariat for the original essay and now we’re talking about some other guy’s links.
So!
The intention is to have a new one of these on the Sidebar every week. If you want to talk about a link, post it here! Or, heck, use it as an open thread.
And, if it rolls off, we’ll make a new one. With a preamble just like this one.
The history of science is an interesting new sub-discipline that marries two of my key intellectual touchstones. Problem is, it tends to pull together threads some folks might now want pulled.
To wit – science historians have combed through a trove of internal Exxon scientific documents that became public in 2015, and reached some maddening conclusions:
Why is this important?
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abk0063Report
Exxon has a fiduciary duty to sell as much of their product as possible.
Haven’t you ever wondered why the big fossil fuel makers invest so heavily in Solar and Wind?
They’re both failed technologies (at anywhere above 10% of the grid) that lead to overreliance on natural gas, to the detriment of nuclear power.
Exxon is pretty boring compared to Russia, who bankrolled the German Green Party, in order to increase reliance on Russian-supplied Natural Gas, and remove any remaining nuclear power plants.
Guess who payed for Dark?
Now, guess who payed for The Simpsons?Report
No. Exxon’s fiduciary responsibility is to make a consistent return on its owner’s investment. The rest is greed.Report
A publicly-traded corporation’s board of directors has a shared fiduciary duty to the shareholders to maximize shareholder ROI.
This can be done either through payment of dividends or increases in stock price. Getting there might involve maximizing sales of product. But there are plenty of One Weird Tricks that can get there other ways, too., in our era of complex financial transactions.
Oh, and the duty is discharged if the corporation winds up doing something that plausibly might maximize shareholder ROI, even if in practice it doesn’t work out that way. So one thing that Exxon’s board might claim is “We’re selling less oil today to a) keep our proven reserves available for the future when oil is scarcer and thus higher-margin, and b) investing in other ways to provide energy to match a changing market.” These seem like plausible business justifications to sell less oil.Report
Points well taken. More applicable to a business like Costco, which can plausibly say “we’re going to sell food at cost, and make money on membership fees.”Report
Neo-nazis attempt attack on Baltimore electric substations: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/fbi-arrests-2-suspects-accused-planning-attack-baltimore-power-grid-rcna69324Report
Only the finest people . . .Report
It seems that the government has some highlevel email use problems that transcend political party:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/04/politics/supreme-court-email-burn-bags-leak-investigation/index.htmlReport
Nobody needs to infiltrate personal e-mail accounts, when everybody else around the Supreme Court leaks like a sieve. The Roe v. Wade leak was notable because it was so deuced early. Every major Supreme Court Decision gets leaked — days ahead of time.Report
Really? If you could point me to some other recent examples I’d surely benefit from learning more.Report
Why do you even engage?Report
After I bang my head against the wall like that, it feels really good to stop.Report
Eh? What about “all of them” means that I’m likely to give particular examples?
It’s incredibly important for the “Messaging Departments” to know what’s coming down the pike so that the speeches can be ready before the decision is out the door. (and it’s NOT like this changes the decision — this is “the printshop talks”). Where applicable, it’s important to be setting up the riots before the other side does (or escalating security on the Supreme Court).
Do you really think the CIA/FBI learns about decisions the same day you do?Report
The Trumpiest of Trump’s judges is going to hear a case that asks for a nationwide injunctive ban on the “abortion pill”
https://www.npr.org/2023/02/01/1153593174/mifepristone-abortion-pill-federal-texas-lawsuit-restrict-access-nationwide
Now, I don’t think you can completely get rid of nation wide injunctions because often people sue the federal government in an attempt to get the federal government to stop implementing a federal policy which the plaintiff(s) believes is unconstitutional. However, you can institute reforms like creating a multi-district process for obtaining nationwide injunctions at the district level. So, Judge Trumpy Trump in Texas gets joined by 4-6 other district court judges from across the country (geographic diversity) is required. You can make the judges rule in a super-majority.
But the dirty secret is that a lot of liberal advocacy groups like nationwide injunctions too and seek them from sympathetic judges and this is one of the few areas where BSDI is a real accusation because politicians on both sides want to be able to make hay when those crazies on the other side make nationwide injunction requests but face pressure from their own groups to not do anything that would limit the ability to receive a nationwide injunction.
Yet no one wants to come out and state “I think the benefits of being able to get a nationwide injunction ban outweigh the downsides.”Report
Everybody also likes using nation wide injunctions because the legislative process is slow in the United States and nearly impossible on the Federal level. If Congress was more politically dynamic rather than a constant fight on every little issue, people would focus more on lobbying Congress to get their policy preferences enacted rather than suing them into existence.Report
Surly the plaintiffs aren’t seeking to toss the Commerce Clause are they?Report
The Nation’s Russian Problem, formerly for the Columbia Journalism Review. CRJ nixed it but here it is: https://bylinetimes.com/2023/02/04/russia-and-the-us-press-the-article-the-cjr-didnt-publish/
“Nation employees became uneasy about Cohen’s assertions and who was airing his ideas. “The people who work there, especially the younger staff, are disgruntled about the Russia coverage,” Adam Shatz, a former Nation writer and literary editor, says. A joke began circulating around the office: “We tried to fact check Steve’s pieces but we couldn’t find any facts to check.” (Vanden Heuvel denies that her husband’s work was not checked by normal standards, saying that whether or not something is checked “depends on the complexity of the piece.”)
Some left The Nation or stopped writing for it. Anne Nelson, a former war correspondent now teaching at Columbia University, came to feel that the magazine’s stance on Russia “is destroying a valuable institution on the left.” Subscribers and donors, too, expressed displeasure with The Nation’s Russia pieces. One reader tweeted: “Sounds like the Nation has a pee tape out there somewhere.”Report
Nearly 4000 confirmed dead in the massive earthquake that hit Turkey. Final death toll likely to be much higher.Report
The solution to not burning fossil fuels to generate electricity is not a theorhetical naval gazing exercise anymore. It’s a planning and zoning issue. And if Franc can figure it out, so can we:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2023/02/06/france-solar-parking-lots/?utm_campaign=wp_the7&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_the7&carta-url=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.washingtonpost.com%2Fcar-ln-tr%2F390f10b%2F63e23c731b79c61f87800976%2F59738e7cade4e21a848fe4b9%2F41%2F57%2F63e23c731b79c61f87800976&wp_cu=5471d46db8b7f35fdd491ffd33791772%7C2AE372BEC443EE5DE050007F01004171Report
All hail fossil fuels! They’re the only thing that can patch up the times when the sun is off!
All hail more fossil fuels! Burn more burn more burn more!!!Report
The Club for Growth invites six prospective GOP presidential candidates to their annual retreat: DeSantis, Haley, Pence, Pompeo, Scott, and Youngkin.
https://news.yahoo.com/club-growth-distances-itself-further-130303612.htmlReport
They most interesting paragraph in the story.Report
“Does opposing Trump work?”
GOP Donors: “Haha, no it never works, but people always convince themselves it will.
But, it might work for us…”Report
The only thing you found interesting was the one marginally Trump-supportive paragraph? I think you’re going to find a lot of things boring in the next two years.Report
You keep trying to show Trump’s star is fading. The Club for Growth seems to want to make that happen – except if he wins the primaries they will support him. You can’t dangle that sort of thing around and convince anyone you want him gone.Report
Me or them?Report
Both.Report
So you think I’m a Trump supporter?Report
Seriously, when your takes start leading you to positions you know to be false, you should start rethinking them.Report
I don’t think you are a Trump supporter.
I don’t think the Club for Growth supports him at the moment. But I do think when he’s the nominee you won’t vote for a Democrat to keep him from office.
I also know – because the Club for Growth guy told us in your article – that they will fall in line behind him when he wins the nod.
Which tells me they aren’t serious about dropping him. And also tells me your posting of the article to show us they are may have missed the mark you wanted to hit.Report
No, you’re the typical anti-anti-Trumper.
Sure, 1/6 is bad, Trump’s probably a criminal, but look, somebody at a protest said a mean thing about cops, so sorry, got to own the libs.Report
https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2023/02/07/desantis-history-education/?utm_campaign=wp_post_most&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_most&carta-url=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.washingtonpost.com%2Fcar-ln-tr%2F390f70f%2F63e288ed1b79c61f8780b356%2F59738e7cade4e21a848fe4b9%2F39%2F70%2F63e288ed1b79c61f8780b356&wp_cu=5471d46db8b7f35fdd491ffd33791772%7C2AE372BEC443EE5DE050007F01004171Report
Publishing company will offer free Black history e-books, especially in Florida
https://thehill.com/homenews/3845798-publishing-company-will-offer-free-black-history-e-books-especially-in-florida/Report
New Jersey News:
To be perfectly honest, I’m not sure what “party” indicates in this particular instance.
Are they still going to vote for the same local tax hikes, library projects, and parks/rec funding as they were a week ago?Report
They are trying to be on the “right” side of the putsch when it comes.Report
Are they still going to vote for the same local tax hikes, library projects, and parks/rec funding as they were a week ago?
Or are they going to attempt the Colorado Springs experiment? Parks get maintenance if the residents in the immediate area fund it. Street lights are on if the residents on the street pony up for the monthly bill. Potholes are your HOA’s problem, baby.Report
I suppose that that’d be a good way to keep their jobs after making distasteful spending decisions.
“Hey babe! We’re being fiscally responsible!”Report
As everyone predicted, the Republican censorship regime is expanding:
Florida School District Bans Entire Court of Thorn and Roses Series in New Book Ban
A Florida school district that covers 48 schools serving over 50,000 students on Tuesday released a fresh list of books to be banned from all school and classroom libraries.
St. John’s County Superintendent Tim Forson reviewed books that were objected to by parents and community members, determining unilaterally that some of the titles must be removed from the school libraries.Report
Among 22 other titles, they’re banning the Handmaids Tale, while forcing girls to turn over information about their menstrual cycles to school administrators.
You couldn’t make this up.Report
The link would be helpful . . .Report
https://newrepublic.com/post/170436/florida-school-district-bans-handmaids-tale-new-book-banReport
I look forward to a new Harper’s Letter about all of this, and for everybody involved to commit to as much time in their interviews, writing, Tweets, roundtables, and such to this, as they have over the past 10 years about colleges doing stuff they don’t like or the terrible crime of a wealthy NYT opinion columnist getting dunked on in Slack.Report
Among the points of those criticisms has been concern about exactly this kind of backlash. The Harper’s Letter ends with this, with the last sentence particularly relevant:
This stifling atmosphere will ultimately harm the most vital causes of our time. The restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society, invariably hurts those who lack power and makes everyone less capable of democratic participation. The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away. We refuse any false choice between justice and freedom, which cannot exist without each other. As writers we need a culture that leaves us room for experimentation, risk taking, and even mistakes. We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences. If we won’t defend the very thing on which our work depends, we shouldn’t expect the public or the state to defend it for us.
None of the various illiberal leftist ideas are being vindicated by this. What’s happening is exactly what liberal critics said would, i.e. that conservatives would use it as an opportunity to relitigate a bunch of things they already lost, and use the state to try to impose their own illiberal restrictions.Report
There is really no evidence that the market place of ideas works as a concept. This doesn’t mean that censorship of bad ideas was a good thing but I think we have plenty of evidence that “the way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away” works either.
Despite decades of trying to defeat bad ideas by “exposure, argument, and persuasion” there are still hundreds of millions of people that adhere to bad ideas because of their deceptive simplicity and allure. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion are still a global best seller and hundreds of millions of people believe a nefarious Jewish cabal is manipulating the world despite the fact that this nefarious Jewish cabal can’t do anything to stop anti-Semitism. Misogyny and racism are utterly common despite decades of work.
It is quite possible that there isn’t really anyway to really defeat a bad ideal. Exposure, argument, and persuasion doesn’t really work because it assumes a rationality that simply isn’t there and ignores the attractive allure of the bad idea and that censorship doesn’t work because the illiberals of the right will simply use the tools created in it’s favor. Humanity might just be totally messed up and the best you can do is manage the fact that billions of people believe in incredibly bad ideas.Report
You’re misreading what that paragraph is arguing, which isn’t entirely inconsistent with your point above, even if I’d quibble with it. The point is that if liberal institutions aren’t going to stand up for these ideas and freedoms no one else will. Besides the fact that the illiberal leftism stuff is weak on the merits is the problem that many of the institutions it attempts to capture are public. And in a democracy eventually the public will have a say in them, which is exactly what is happening with this crap in Florida.Report
Another idea that needs to be exposed to the disinfectant of sunlight is the nonsense that what is happening in Florida is somehow the result of leftist illiberalism.Report
While imperfectly implemented, European hate speech laws seems to do a better job of decades in keeping some comments beyond the pale. Allowing the American Nazis to march in Skokie and making witty arguments against them didn’t prevent the American Nazis from passing down their bad ideas to their kids in their homeschools. Most illiberals operate on brute force and arguments against them fail a lot.Report
I think we need to “expose to the disinfectant of sunlight” those who assured us that the Republicans were merely wanting to rein in the “excesses of bad DEI’, or that they simply wanted to “protect children” from pornography.
Those who told us with utmost smugness how “it looked bad” that teachers allowed students to use different pronouns or dress differently in the classroom.
They own this bigotry and intolerance.Report
They may own it, but they are no longer shamed by it. That’s the single biggest problem we have here.Report
Heh isn’t it great that the internet relieves everyone of the need to keep a straight face while making arguments like that?
Of course the worst thing is having to constantly make the case to other people on the left that destroying liberal institutions is a bad idea.Report
There’s nothing in Chip’s stance about destroying liberal institutions.Report
I know you guys think that’s true, but you’re wrong. Every end to blind testing for ‘equity’ or instance of some fool teacher conflating sex and gender to other peoples’ 6 year olds is a swing of the axe.Report
Here is an interesting issue. The Irish playwright Samuel Beckett had some very strong ideas about how his plays were supposed to be performed compared to other playwrights. He enforced this rules by legal suit in his lifetime. His estate still enforces these rules after his death. One of these rules is that the characters in Waiting for Godot must be played by what we would call cis-gendered men and that women or transmen were not be cast. Well, a university production has been cancelled because this goes against anti-discriminatory practices.
https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/stage/2023/02/04/irish-directors-all-male-beckett-play-cancelled-as-only-men-could-audition/
I’m on the side of the university in this. There really isn’t any good reason for the characters to be men besides Beckett’s instructions and there needs to be leeway for modern practices.Report
When I directed a Beckett play (called Play)* as part of my graduate school thesis, I had to sign a contract stating I would do it as Beckett wanted.
*Play features two women and a man, three are in jars, and only their heads are exposed. Their heads are covered in ash, a spotlight goes between the three. The characters speak as the spotlight shines on them. The dialogue reveals the characters were a man, his wife, and his lover. The dialogue also indicates that they might be in hell and their punishment is an endless interrogation about their affair that the characters which to escape and remain in at the same time (“I die for dark and the darker worse. Strange.”)Report
I can understand this if Beckett was alive. He is long dead though. Time to allow for more creativity in staging Beckett plays rather than his direct instructions.Report
You, seriously, need to write some posts about plays, direction, acting, and so on.Report
Seconded.Report
My colleagues at the EPA are generally decent, intelligent moral people. They really do want to leave the world better then they found it, and they take the mission of their agency seriously.
Which is why I am disappointed, frustrated, even indignant that they can’t or won’t value the lives of all people impacted by the global climate crisis the same:
https://www.npr.org/2023/02/08/1152079692/why-the-epa-puts-a-higher-value-on-rich-lives-lost-to-climate-changeReport
Hirsch (thetimes.co.uk) says that the Nordstream gas pipeline bombings were a covert op by the Whitehouse and CIA. This fits in line with Scandanavian sources refusing to share classified findings with Germany (there’s a lot you can tell using a seismograph).
White House and CIA issue expected denials.Report
Lots of countries don’t want to share with Germany because they seem to have a russian spy/ pay off problem.Report
I don’t know why you are responding but all the info came from a single unnamed source and also implicates the Norwegians and Swedes. It is not credibleReport
On the other hand nordstream is famous for its return policy.
Wait, that’s NordstromReport
https://twitter.com/steven_pifer/status/1623505983195721728?s=20&t=dsD-DZiFOrhDGEska1mW2A
“Let’s see. This supposedly involved CIA, US Navy and Norwegian military and was briefed in advance to Danish and Swedish officials. That’s a covert operation?
All based on a single source who remains unnamed.
Of course. 🙄”-Steven Pifer, Affiliated with Stanford’s CISAC & Brookings. Retired Foreign Service officer; former US ambassador to Ukraine. Interests include nukes, Europe & mountains.Report
The alternative explanation is even less credible.
Russia was having great fun with “supply chain issues” regarding Nordstream.
“We can’t ship you more natural gas, a part broke.”
Cue a diplomatic and logistical scramble, to allow Russia to import precisely the part it needs, so that they can get Germany’s gas back online.
Rinse, wash, repeat.
Please bear in mind that there were active American military drills going on. If you’re suggesting the Russians somehow “teleported” saboteurs without any of the active ships in the area noticing… you’ve got a high bar to jump. I don’t think our navy is that incompetent.
Typical of you to not bother with understanding anything, and simply print whatever an “expert” has to say.Report
I dunno. People believe the story that balloons were overflying the United States pretty regularly from 2016 to 2020, and that there was a conspiracy among mid-rank DoD people to hide this from 350 million US citizens and also the entire Trump administration, and that this conspiracy was so successful we only heard about it this year, and that story was also based on a single source who remains unnamed…Report
This thread covers how Sy Hersh’s Wikipedia page has been edited in the last week or so.
Report
Wikipedia is no longer an unbiased source. Hasn’t been in a while. When scientific articles got “edited” for “current truthiness” I stopped considering it a Record of Note.
Now it’s just a circlejerk of “approved sources”Report
Turns out only Trump tried to censor tweets, not Biden: https://www.thedailybeast.com/ex-twitter-officials-confirm-to-congress-that-trump-not-biden-tried-to-censor-tweetsReport
Free speech warriors keeping their powder dry for when some dopey college kids do something silly.Report
From what I could see of today’s “Show Trial As Directed By Armando Iannucci”, it looks like the Republicans brought a rubber spork to a gunfight.
Murders ensued.Report
I would pay good money, well normal movie ticket prices plus the cost of a medium soda and Reece’s Pieces, to see a show trial directed by Armando Iannucci.Report
Oh hey, now it is censorship when the government requests that a private company delete information that shouldn’t be public?Report
Still no.Report
so…Trump didn’t try to censor tweets, then?Report
Trump did what R’s claim D’s did. If its wrong and horrible what D’s and twitter did then it is wrong and horrible when trump did it. Is it wrong and horrible?Report
Yes?Report
Trump asked them to delete tweets.
Tweets that were nothing more than juvenile insults.
This makes him a petty thin skinned bully.
But not a censor.Report
Funny we didn’t hear that in the twitter files. Funny musky isnt’ fuming about that. Funny R’s in congress don’t seem to care.
Ftr some of the twitter files stuff was sketchy and raised issues. Be nice if all the Free Speech Warriors cared about it. But just asking to have something taken down isn’t illegal or wrong depending on what it is.Report
NewsNation Reporter Arrested at OH Gov. Presser – I have no idea if this is justified or not, or any sort of political spin each side is going to put on it. It just looks interesting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHL_eNwlBa8Report
https://deadline.com/2023/02/newsnation-reporter-arrested-mike-dewine-1235254081/Report
https://www.axios.com/2023/02/09/newsnation-reporter-arrested-ohio-governor-press-conferenceReport
Further proof that law enforcement is just a bunch of idiots with guns, in this case aided and abetted by a snowflake posing as a general officer:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/10/us/newsnation-reporter-arrest-ohio-body-camera-video/index.htmlReport
And as predicted, charges were dropped:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/15/us/newsnation-reporter-charges-dropped/index.htmlReport
Suspect In Dallas Zoo Monkey-Napping Was Behind Other Animal Disappearances, And Says He’ll Do It Again – I think it was this site where this story had caught some attention.
https://www.dailywire.com/news/suspect-in-dallas-zoo-monkey-napping-was-behind-other-animal-disappearances-and-says-hell-do-it-againReport
https://triblive.com/sports/pirates/florida-school-district-pulls-childrens-book-about-roberto-clemente-off-shelve/
A Florida School district takes a book about Roberto Clemente off the shelves because it discusses Clemente’s experiences with racism. The DeSantis plan to make white people never feel bad about anything continues apace.Report
Heh. This is one of the two counties that announced they were pulling all their books for review, but I guess that didn’t get enough press, so now they’ve announced that they’re pulling this one.Report
23 Baltimore schools have zero students proficient in math, per state test results.
It might be time to significantly change something.Report
Notice how the article states that every county’s math had a majority of students not performing at a proficient level in map (included with a handy map) but only Baltimore gets picked on by the article and you.Report
I suppose it was somewhat dishonest to focus on the schools that didn’t have a single freaking student proficient rather than pointing out that *EVERY* county has a majority not performing at proficient level.
I feel appropriately called out.
That said, it might be time to significantly change something.Report
Well since you brought it up, we are eagerly awaiting your ideas.Report
First off, I’d look at the funding levels. If the schools are in the top quintile in the country, I think we can say that the problem with not having a *SINGLE* *FREAKING* *STUDENT* be proficient won’t be fixed by moving the funding to the top sextile.
“Replace administrators and teachers” strikes me as a good starting, but not ending, point after we establish where the schools are.Report
Ok, replace them with, what?
And then what happens?Report
Replace them with administrators capable of supporting teachers and teachers capable of creating a *SINGLE* proficient student.
Here’s Genesis 18:16-33 in the NKJV:
I remember hearing that story when I was a kid and boggling.
Not even 10 righteous men? Not even 10? In the whole city?!?
23 Baltimore schools have zero students proficient in math, per state test results.Report
So this assumes that the primary problem is that the teachers and administrators are incompetent?Report
Yes.
We could make arguments about what might be the problem if there were only 33% of students being proficient but these schools, these *23* schools, have proven incapable of delivering a *SINGLE* student proficient in math.
No. Not even one. Not even one.Report
Would it require more or less funding to hire much better teachers and administrators?Report
How much room is there between “what they have now” and “teachers capable of delivering a *SINGLE* student proficient in math”?
Like, if they had teachers capable of delivering 20% proficiency… would you say that those teachers would get a D?
How much funding, do you think, would it take to move from teachers that get an F to teachers that get a D?Report
This is your theory stemming from a topic you introduced so you tell us.
How much funding, do you think, would it take to move from teachers that get an F to teachers that get a D?Report
No, my thesis is that this is a problem that is orthogonal to funding. I said that if the schools are in the top quintile of funding in the country, we’re not going to fix this by moving them to the top sextile.
I said that earlier.
This is why I think that we need to replace the administrators and teachers.
Because this is not a problem that will be fixed by another injection of cash.
I mean, if they were in the bottom 10%? Heck, yeah. We could look at whether funding were the problem. If they’re in the top 20%?
This ain’t a funding problem. If you want to argue that more cash would fix it, you need to demonstrate how.Report
And you believe, based on this article and prior articles and discussions, that what you define as more successful teachers and administrators can be had within the same budget?Report
what you define as more successful teachers and administrators can be had within the same budget
Let me say again:
23 Baltimore schools have zero students proficient in math.
It is not possible to be worse than that. That’s as bad as you can get. We’re not at “Oh, no! 23 schools have only one student proficient in math!”
We’re at “23 Baltimore schools have zero students proficient in math”.
Equally atrocious is the *WORST* option that I could get. Every other single one is better.
Given that I do *NOT* believe that Baltimore is doing the best it can with the cards its been dealt but is actively failing…
Yeah.
I do believe that.
But it’ll require actually, you know, *CHANGING* something.Report
Just repeating the problem over and over doesn’t make your solution more persuasive.
I’m not even opposed to replacing all the teachers.
I’m just looking for a coherent suggestion for how this could be done without costing more.
Like, have you any idea what the supply of qualified teachers is like? How would they be enticed to leave what they’re doing now to work in the worst schools?Report
As of last august – when the current school year started – there were over 36,000 teaching positions open nationally in public schools. Like so many other sectors these days education has a recruitment and retention challenge that static salaries won’t solve. It also has specific education requirements and needs, which we have discussed here before.Report
I’m just looking for a coherent suggestion for how this could be done without costing more.
Because it’s already in the top quintile of the country for funding. It’s *ALREADY* costing more. It’s already costing more than how it’s done in 80% of the country.
have you any idea what the supply of qualified teachers is like?
Well, keep in mind: I am comparing to the fact that I consider *NONE* of the teachers in these 23 schools in Baltimore to be qualified, all I need is ONE SINGLE FREAKING TEACHER CAPABLE OF CREATING ONE SINGLE FREAKING STUDENT CAPABLE OF DEMONSTRATING PROFICIENCY.
That’s what the ask is. Can we get from zero to one?
Let’s go to the google:
Your argument seems to be that of these 85K teachers, not one of them would be capable of teaching a single one of these children to proficiency at the current rate of funding (again: in the top quintile of the country).
That kinda tells me that our colleges are creating teachers that are not proficient in teaching math.
Like, out of the 85K? None of them could teach a single one of the kids at these 23 schools math proficiency.Report
This is a stupendous feat of illogic.
We are already spending a lot of money on unqualified teachers, so replacing them all with better quality will not cost more.
That’s…not logical.
Maybe try repeating the problem one more time.Report
There were over 36,000 teaching positions open nationally in August 2022, presumably AFTER last year’s crop of 85,000 were hired and placed. That’s the milieu Baltimore is in. That’s who they are competing against. SO wehre are you going to get your 1 teachers?
And for that matter, why do you assume that one current teacher can’t do that for one or more students if you change their incentives?Report
You’re the one proposing the solution of just firing and replacing all the administrators and teachers.
So, you are the one who needs to demonstrate why we should think this will work, and why it won’t cost any more.
Right now, your whole argument is just clickbait- “Teachers Are Furious At This One Weird Trick That Solves Education!”Report
So, you are the one who needs to demonstrate why we should think this will work, and why it won’t cost any more.
Because the worst thing that happens is that 23 Baltimore schools have zero students proficient in math and, as it turns out, it was not possible for anybody to do this. No, not a single education graduate. Not a single transplant from another, poorer, part of the country. Not another administrator who would look at funding in the top quintile in the country and have a different idea of how it could be allocated.
The alternative is that we are in the best of all possible worlds and in this best of all possible worlds 23 Baltimore schools have zero students proficient in math.
Which is absurd on its face.Report
It may be absurd – and its definitely maddening – but it’s not out of the question at all in modern America. Especially in a city where economic conditions are so challenging that significant portions of the population are under constant economic stress of a kind that prevents them from helping their kids. There are all sorts of systemic reasons the kids are where they are, and whole sale changing the teachers and administrators absent changing incentives – and incentives include compensation – is not likely to get different results.
Yes that’s a huge problem for those kids and for society at large. But the notion that simply replacing one person with another person without making additional change is gonna solve everything is magical thinking.Report
is gonna solve everything
Ah, perhaps that’s your problem.
You think I’m trying to solve “everything”.
I’m not.
I’m trying to get A SINGLE FREAKING STUDENT PROFICIENT AT MATH.Report
And we are trying to tell you that you can’t “solve” that problem simply by swapping teachers. Because the teachers – amny of whom I suspect are quite anguished by this – are only one dimension of the problem. Maybe not even the most important dimension of the problem.Report
What does “solved” mean, to you? 100% proficiency? 90% proficiency?
For me, moving from “0% proficiency” to “not 0% proficiency” fits in the definition of “solved”. Not the end point, mind… but the starting point definitely involves that.
If “0% proficiency” isn’t *THAT* big of a problem at the end of the day, why not just cut the budget?
Because I can give you 0% proficiency for a *LOT* cheaper than top quintile of funding. I can get you 0% proficiency for middle quintile.Report
I agree. But if you swap people and don’t change incentives you may not produce that outcome.Report
What are the incentives now?
I daresay that something like “achieve 0% proficiency and GET FIRED” changes at least one incentive.
Should we offer “get a raffle entry to win a new X!” for every student who achieves proficiency? X could be a car!Report
For me, moving from “0% proficiency” to “not 0% proficiency” fits in the definition of “solved”.
It used to be true, and probably still is, that the fastest, cheapest way to raise a school’s average on standardized tests is to give the talented kids extra attention.
The same is probably true here. Give the kids who come closest to proficiency a bunch of extra attention. Some of them will reach that goal.Report
That’s what I refer to below, the “Exclusion” component of Punishment, Exclusion, and Escape.
In this case the underperforming ones are pushed out and left to fend for themselves.Report
left to fend for themselves
They’re fending for themselves?
You’d think that there’d be less pushback against the idea that the adults adjacent to them fending for themselves be replaced.Report
Honestly, I’m happy to replace all the teachers with much more skilled and trained teachers.
Let’s do it. You may be surprised at who is surprised by the price tag.Report
much more skilled and trained teachers.
I don’t think that you have to be “much more skilled” than the ones who have achieved “0% proficiency” to get you to “not 0% proficiency”.
Because that’s our baseline, remember? 0%?Report
Not “fend for themselves” unless that’s how you categorize their current situation. The studies I’m talking about, again from years ago, concluded that if you were going to spend extra money to raise the average math score in a school, the best results in that narrowly-defined sense came from pulling the best students out of the regular math class and putting them in a special class not targeted at “average” kids.
Using a 100-point scale as an example, it’s easier to raise a kid who’s already scoring 85 to 95 than to raise a kid scoring 55 to 65. It’s got to be extra money, though, because the kid at 55 has to stay at 55 for it to work.
I’m not recommending it as a plan. Just pointing out that if the goal is JB’s “have some kids be proficient and to hell with anything else”, the cheap easy way to do that is probably to move your highest-scoring students up to the necessary level.Report
Give the kids who come closest to proficiency a bunch of extra attention. Some of them will reach that goal.
Sounds like a plan.
I know that my high school had General, Regents, and Honors.
Go to gym, we were the most diverse in the state. Go to English and you’d think we were a private school.Report
Which then brings us back to the question- Why is proficiency important in the first place?
And what might be the consequences for the taxpayers and citizens of not enough students being proficient?Report
If we don’t give a crap about proficiency, I’m pretty sure that we can not give a crap about proficiency for fewer funds.
I can give you 0% proficiency in math for a *LOT* cheaper than top quintile in funding.Report
What might be the consequences of not giving a crap about proficiency?Report
Looks like our policies to this point are going to let us find out, huh?Report
Once again…You’re the guy who introduced this topic, and seem to have very strong opinions about why it is a problem that a school doesn’t have sufficient proficiency.
Can you explain you think it is a problem?Report
Chip, you misunderstand.
23 Baltimore schools have zero students proficient in math.
This is where we are at. This is our starting point.
This isn’t some hypothetical premise that I’m asking you to pretend is true for the sake of argument.
Is it your position that I have to demonstrate why this matters?Report
Mr. Bird:
It’s MY position that you have to demonstrate that this is not an exceptional outcome due to years of deliberate governmental neglect during COVID-19.
If the issue is “the schools failed to provide 8 hour days where the kids didn’t have to deal with their crack daddies and beat up pimps,” due to mandatory laws that Baltimore could not evade.
That’s a very different issue than “This is every year for the past 10 years.”
If we are dealing with near orphans, whose parents are currently unable to make money (due to COVID19), and thus the kids go home to deal drugs because that’s how they EAT…. that’s a different matter.Report
Yes, that’s exactly what you have to demonstrate.
Why does proficiency matter?Report
There are studies that show that education is an indicator for future success.
Failing to educate students is, effectively, hobbling them.
The whole “future success” thing is why proficiency matters.
Additionally, there are studies that showed that a lack of education is an indicator for unhappiness.Report
Good points.
Which brings me back the question I asked above-
And what might be the consequences for the taxpayers and citizens of not enough students being proficient?Report
And what might be the consequences for the taxpayers and citizens of not enough students being proficient?
And we’re back to “I dunno. I guess we’re going to find out.”Report
Well, if you don’t know, here is a good place to start:
Student reading deficiencies are becoming a generational problem
There are policy debates and reforms to hash out here, but a sense of urgency must be brought to bear on them by what we are losing. A generation that cannot read will not be able to be the next generation of writers. How many of the current crop of students will not be able to make anything by writing because they are inadequately equipped to do so? How is a generation supposed to find its own voice when the foundational blocks of study, learning, and perspective are never laid square to start with?
https://www.fayettetribune.com/opinion/student-reading-deficiencies-are-becoming-a-generational-problem/article_5b4f8fe2-a8d7-11ed-b08e-cf5ba65aff04.htmlReport
Well, I certainly hope that any changes to the school district that is actively harming these children are accompanied by increases in the budget.Report
A few things that strike me as worth knowing. Granted that these students aren’t meeting proficiency standards, just how unproficient are they? Are they dysfunctional illiterates or just somewhat unskilled? In the course of their education, how far did they come from where they started to where they ended up, even if short of whatever standard we consider proficiency? And what is the historical track record of bringing the least-prepared students from disadvantaged backgrounds to some higher level? Was there ever a time when we did a better job of it, or did we just consign them, as many places did in living memory, to the scrap heap and let them fend for themselves?Report
What I do know is that people have been complaining about declining education since I was in elementary school, and that was when the Great Society was brand new and shiny.
And that even back in the “Golden Age’ ( which is customarily defined as the age before one came of age) American education was marked by vast inequality of outcome.
It was the poor educational performance of schools in places like Appalachia and Mississippi which provided the political impetus to LBJ’s Great Society.
https://www.nytimes.com/1985/09/30/us/after-20-years-educational-programs-are-a-solid-legacy-of-great-society.html
What I do notice, is that every couple years an outrage-bait report will come out which shows a shocking statistic, like zero students being proficient in a given school.
But no one ever seems to establish a benchmark or success that was ever attained anywhere.
Like, is the percentage of American students proficient rising, falling, or holding steady over the past few decades?
Very few pundits or politicians ever seem to bother with that- there is always some unspoken assumption that children in some previous era were so much more proficient than they are now.
Maybe they were. But I never see it documented much.Report
Yeah, maybe the kids in these 23 schools and the 20 schools with just one or two students testing at proficiency are full of students who are just a grade behind.
There’s nothing wrong with only being able to do 11th grade math when you’re in 12th grade.
Being able to do 11th grade math is actually quite an accomplishment, when you think about it.
Why is this even a problem?Report
Do you actually know something, or are you just spitballing?
Why do I bother to ask?Report
Me? I’m deliberately trying to downplay the colossal failure.
What are you doing?Report
What is it like saying things about what you’re doing that you must know no one believes?Report
I find that it helps to change the subject away from uncomfortable topics that I’d, seriously, rather not discuss.
Why?
To get back to the whole issue of how these schools don’t have a single kid at proficiency but maybe they’ve got a bunch of kids right on the bubble and we just don’t know… well, I’d wonder about different theoretical schools for a moment.
Let’s imagine three schools.
School A: 80% of the students test at proficiency
School B: 40% of the students test at proficiency
School C: 20% of the students test at proficiency
We want to theorize about the number of kids on the bubble. The ones who came close enough to passing the proficiency test to allow us to say “yeah, we’re not worried”.
What are the percentages likely to be? It seems to me that it’s likely to be somewhere around 10%. So the schools that have 80% at proficiency are likely to have ~8% who came just this close to making the grade. The 12% who are left are likely to need intervention.
Same for the schools with 40%. Or 20%.
The ones with 0%? I’d say that you are shockingly close to having zero students who were on the bubble. The handful of schools that had one or two students per school (20 of them, according to the article) aren’t surprising and it wouldn’t surprise me to find that those schools have a couple of kids more on the bubble than the ones with zero.
But not more than a couple.
This is a horrifying failure on a massive scale.
One of the things that I’d look for at that point is finger pointing about whose fault it is and explanations about how maybe it’s not as bad as what it looks like on the surface.
And questions about whether there are a significant number of students who are on the bubble is the latter.
And transparently so.
And you must know that. You must have known that as you were typing the words.
You knew that… right?Report
Your reading proficiency is not up to standard.Report
Maybe I’m on the bubble!Report
You just keep repeating the problem, without bothering to suggest a solution, other than “The punishments will continue until test scores improve”.
Got anything else? Or is that the only hammer for this nail?Report
I have suggested a solution.
But part of the issue is to acknowledge that this is a huge failure. Like, an institutional failure on a spectacular level.
Coming up with hypothetical explanations about how, maybe, it’s just not as bad as it looks on the surface is a way to avoid how truly horrible this situation is.
As for “The punishments will continue until test scores improve”.
I do not see the “replace the teachers” as “punishment of the current teachers” but a necessary pre-requisite to changing things.
Like, you’re an architect, right? Let’s use a building analogy. The contractors you hired to install a porcelain bathtub dropped it. It shattered into a million pieces. Total loss. Then you bought another one and they dropped that one too.
Would you see firing these contractors as “punishment”?
Because I don’t. You hired them to do a job and they failed, catastrophically, at the job you hired them to do.
Firing the teachers who failed is not a punishment.
The point of these kids going to school is not to provide these teachers jobs.Report
The only “hypotheticals” came from you. If you prefer to argue with the voices in your own head, there’s no accounting for taste.Report
Well, let’s go back to your questions:
just how unproficient are they? Are they dysfunctional illiterates or just somewhat unskilled?
I think we’ve hammered down that these children cannot be helped by changing teachers. Like, there are *ZERO* teachers who could teach them math.
Like, we shouldn’t even contemplate replacing the teachers with new teachers because the children will not be helped by this.
Therefore: I think it’s bad. I think it’s really bad. Like, they’re not on the bubble.
Do you have a counter-argument to this?Report
Where’s the hypothetical?Report
“What if you answered the question that I asked you?”Report
You first.Report
Well, I have to say that I don’t know the degree to which the students are not proficient.
I do know that when I think about a school with 80% proficiency that I am much more likely to come up with large theoretical students on the bubble than when I think about a school without a single student capable of proficiency.
Your turn!Report
So you didn’t know anything. You were just spitballing. Good to know.
Now what was your question? And try to ask for what you actually want to know.Report
I’ll repeat it:
There is a premise that we cannot help these children by changing the teachers and administration.
My argument is that if this premise is true, then the children are not on the bubble.
Do you agree with the premise that the children cannot be helped by changing the teachers/administration?Report
I do not know, and neither, based on what I have seen here, does anyone else.Report
Do you have enough information to ascertain whether a school with high percentages of proficiency can reasonably be said to be better than a school without a single student that is proficient, given that we do not know how many students were *ALMOST* proficient in the latter case and we don’t know by how far the students in the former case exceeded the requirement?
I mean, maybe there’s a two point difference on the test between the two schools!Report
Better how? In results, then the answer is obvious.Though even then it is likely to reflect not what the school is doing but who goes to it. In the ability to bring students from the level at which they arrived to a higher level? Not so clear. You might want to read Freddy’s essay that you so strenuously urged upon us.Report
“Better how?”
Will they help develop the necessary verbal acuity to gaslight others about systematic failure?Report
Probably not. Surely you remember how much work it took to train YECbird in
intellectual dishonesty.Report
Eh, to stop being a YEC just took someone willing to point at the evidence and say that the level of skepticism that I was displaying was intermittent. It was weaponized when it was convenient and non-existent when it was convenient and intellectual honesty required a healthy, but not weaponized, level of being able to look skeptically at evidence and coming to tentative conclusions despite not having what a weaponized skepticism would call “proof”.
I learned a lot by wrestling with that.Report
When you find whoever it is you think you’re arguing with, let us know. It might be interesting to hear what the voice in your head is saying.Report
Well, I’ll let you get back to saying that you don’t have enough information to know whether 23 schools not having a single student proficient in math is bad or not.Report
Reading comprehension again, Jaybird. The voice in your head is interfering with your ability to understand what you read. I’ll let you argue with the voice until you get to something that has to do with me.Report
Yeah, maybe they’re just “somewhat unskilled”?
We just don’t know! I don’t have that information and neither do you and neither do you have enough information to say that “somewhat unskilled” is less likely than “holy crap, this is bad”.
We just don’t know.
We don’t know whether they’ve made great strides to get where they are and we’re paying attention to where they are instead of how far they’ve come!
We just don’t know.
And have people like this ever been able to learn stuff?
We just don’t know that either!
We don’t know anything!
And so people who think that this is a problem are jumping to conclusions.
Maybe things are a lot better than they used to be! Maybe things have always been like this!
We just don’t know.Report
I will say that Season 4 of The Wire was about how bad the schools were. That was 2006.
I know that I have been complaining about this story from 2017 for a while.
Let’s look at the headline real quick:
“Several Baltimore schools report 0 students proficient in math, reading”
And the opener?
“Six Baltimore City schools — five high schools and one middle school — were found to have not a single student who scored proficient in math or reading in 2016, Fox45 News reports.”
Man! Only *SIX*!
And in six years we’ve gone from six to twenty-three.
Things are bad. And they’re getting worse.
I mean, if it’s not the case that the schools are getting better at getting students asymptotically close to proficiency. We don’t know that they’re not doing that, after all.Report
Where’s Wallace?Report
Having some familiarity with the situation in that jurisdiction, I think there are probably two things you could do that might do something over the very long haul. None of it is politically possible. I’m not even sure the totality of it would be morally defensible. But assuming it were, you’d start by merging the city with the surrounding county, which is more affluent and better run. Some times this idea has been suggested by more progressive voices, but the local politics of it are so hostile it will never happen.
Still, say it did, the next thing you’d need to do is legit bulldoze the projects and concentrations of poverty, and relocate as many families as possible. Actually break up the places and the people stuck in this cycle. I’m sure you can imagine what the progressives that advocate merging city and county would think of this on an ethical level (and they wouldn’t be totally wrong about it either!), but the real barrier to it is the massive cost and NIMBY resistance to whatever relocation would mean.
I still think none of that would solve everything for the children involved today, but maybe by diluting the concentration you’d start getting some better outcomes over the next generation or two. But because that kind of extreme action is what it would take, I think rearranging teachers and admins is probably more akin to doing the same with deck chairs on the Titanic.Report
Which is where I agree with the framing of the problem.
The problem that liberal democracies face is how to deal with nonstructural human failure like homelessness, addiction, criminal behavior and households where education is not stressed and failure is accepted.
The historical approach has used three primary methods- Punishment, Exclusion, Escape.
Where people are punished in hopes they will behave better, or excluded to quarantine them, or for the successful to simply flee and escape hoping the problems won’t follow.
One thing that is demonstrated is that any of these solutions is wildly expensive.Report
Sure. But the even bigger quandary is that those people have rights too, no matter how dysfunctional they may be, and so to then do the prople who feel they have done right for them and theirs. If it was solely a matter of money it would have been solved long ago.Report
Right.
I’m of the opinion that in even the most optimal society there will always be some segment of failure- businesses that go bankrupt, marriages that divorce, people who become addicts or criminals, or families that cycle repeatedly through disfunction and abuse.
We often see shocked cries when it is discovered that some vast percentage of resources is devoted to addressing the problems caused by a tiny minority.
But…this actually how things should be. Of course the broken part gets all the repair hours.
I don’t have a magical solution to offer other than the Stoic suggestion that we view some degree of failure as a normal and expected part of any organization.
Not to say we can’t improve things!
But to accept that there will always be some problems to address.Report
Well, since I personally KNOW a Baltimore City public school teacher, I’ve asked her some questions…..
1) When it was PUBLICLY announced on the radio that, post covid, that EACH INDIVIDUAL STUDENT would be tested for proficiency in all subjects to get a baseline status, then AN INDIVIDUAL lesson plan was to be drawn up to get that student up to proficiency, I asked my friend about this news announcement. She’d never heard of it. Months later I asked again. Nothing. It NEVER HAPPENED.
2) The public teachers union is corrupt and only interested in cya. That’s my friend’s comment. Based upon her description of their actions (like scheduling votes for union leadership in the middle of the school day) they have no interest in what the rank and file think.
The above is ONLY a part of the total disfunction of the pubic schools in Baltimore, which is ONLY a part of the total disfunction of Baltimore City as a whole. Crime is up. Murders very much so. City services can suck in many places….I could go on…Report
Baltimore schools have a lot of problems, but the biggest and by far most difficult problem they face, is that they are full of kids from Baltimore. Which is not meant as a knock on the students, they can’t help it, but it’s the hard reality of the situation.Report
The last time I had reason to engage the research on the topic, what it said was that most public schools (if you measure by results, which is probably wrong) are adequate, many are superb, and some are just god-awful. And the most important contributor to the output was the initial input, the incoming student body. It turned out that most schools were pretty good on a “value-added” basis. If student A started out at level 1 (completely arbitrary number) and Student B started out at Level 2, by the end of the year Student A would be at Level 2 and Student B would be at Level 3. Then they’d have the summer off. In all likelihood, Student A watched TV and played video games while Student B read Harry Potter books. At the beginning of the next year, Student A would have slid back to 1.8 and Student B would have advanced to 3.1. Another year of school and A would be at 2.8 while B would be at 4.1. Rinse and repeat.
Really good teaching could alter this, but the funny and surprising thing is that really good teachers are more evenly distributed in the system than one would think. They’re not disproportionately working in “good” schools. (I’ve often wondered what would happen if we switched the student bodies from DeWitt Clinton High School (a pretty OK NYC public school that gave us James Baldwin and Stan Lee) and Bronx Science (an elite exam school two blocks away that gave us Nobel Prize winners.)
Then there’s Freddie’s post that Jaybird highlighted a while back, which repays a read.Report
I find Freddie’s takes on this issue hard to disagree with.Report
This is about right,, that regardless of structural factors, the single biggest driver of student performance is the family support.
Which is exactly the problem all societies have, which is that there is a bell jar distribution of performance where some people excel, most are average and some do poorly.
So the question for us as citizens and taxpayers is how to deal with the low performing segment.Report
Is the argument that these students are incapable of learning math to proficiency due to where they are distributed under the Bell Curve?
And all of these people are clustered together in the same school districts to the point where the school districts do not have a single student capable of being proficient in math, per state test results?Report
I mean, if that’s the argument, we definitely need to change the teachers and administrators but we need to change them to change their emphasis significantly from something around “make these kids proficient at math” to… oh my goodness. I don’t even know what the goal would be.Report
First I’m saying that the students aren’t learning, for a variety of nonstructural factors.
Troubled home life, language proficiency, lack of parental support, or other.
Secondly I agree that it’s unlikely this is happening to every single student.
But it’s equally unlikely that all the bad teachers just happen to cluster in a few schools.
So as with so many things, even once we solve the low hanging fruit like bad teachers or lack of supplies or whatever, we (we as in taxpayers and citizens) are left with how to handle students who struggle with lack of parental support or troubled home life or language proficiency or whatever.Report
But it’s equally unlikely that all the bad teachers just happen to cluster in a few schools.
It certainly seems a lot more likely than “all of the students are incapable of proficiency”.
We aren’t in a place where only one out of 12 students is proficient.
We’re in a place where 23 Baltimore schools have zero students proficient in math, per state test results.Report
We have…generally. People who can, flee the problems and live in the suburbs, or hire security, etc. The isolate themselves from “problem areas”. If they go into the city, say for entertainment, they stay in the “less problematic” areas.Report
This except that 2/3rds of the city is probably fairly described as a ‘problem area’ with little islands of (relative) safety and stability close to the downtown and around the universities. I believe we spend well more per student in Baltimore than anywhere in the state. Unfortunately the best thing for anyone in the public school system is simply to get out of the city. Of course that isn’t really possible for the majority of those people or even something they probably think much about.Report
So Jaybird suggested Punishment as the solution.
Michael Cain showed us that Exclusion has been the historical solution.
Here we have Escape.
What these solutions have in common is a record of unbroken failure. None of them have ever worked, but like socialism and perpetual motion machines, keep being suggested time after time.
Maybe if we punish harder, flee further away, or leave a larger number behind, things will improve…somehow.Report
So Jaybird suggested Punishment as the solution.
You misunderstand.
Let’s say you have a surgeon who keeps having people die while on the table.
“Maybe he’s a surgeon who only gets the absolute toughest cases and every single one of those patients would have died anyway!”
Okay. Maybe. But let’s say that you have a surgeon and every single patients who goes under his knife dies.
Firing this surgeon is not “punishment”.
The point of having a surgeon in a hospital is *NOT* to employ a guy for $500,000 a year.Report
Well to the extent we’re talking Baltimore City specifically, yes, I think the only thing with any hope for the families stuck in at this moment is to get out, either by getting into one of the charter schools or Catholic schools (my guess is that either of those is where all the children that would meet proficiency standards have been moved) or best case just leaving the jurisdiction. Baltimore has its charms. It’s where I went to law school but I couldn’t imagine trying to raise a family there.
You replied to my long term solution up the chain at Feb 10 at 10:22. I just doubt it’s politically possible and even if it were think it would come with a bunch of other trade offs.Report
If everyone moves to a different location, what prevents the same problems and failures from following them?
Wouldn’t you agree that the failures reside within the people- the parents, the politicians, the administrators, the teachers and so on?
Its not like there is some weird Bermuda Triangle of failure that afflicts only people living in that area is there?
So isn’t “getting out” just moving the problems to a new geographical location?
And charter schools and parochial schools are just versions of Exclusion, where they succeed by excluding the ones who need the most help.
And Exclusion fails, every time. How do we know this?
Because that’s what we have now!
There are plenty of students in Baltimore right now who are getting a terrific high quality education. They just don’t go to these particular schools. They are the high performing families that have already excluded themselves from the city school system and currently attend either charters or parochial or private schools.
This school under discussion is a school of the Left Behinds, the ones everyone else is trying to escape from.Report
We’re going in circles now. As I said above I don’t know that you can solve it for the left behind people alive today but if you took pretty extreme action you might be able to dilute it in such a way that over a couple of generations makes a difference for their descendants. Or at least we’d feel better that their descendants were given a real chance, something I’m not sure we can today.
But look, I’ve also said my piece on this debate which we’ve now had here numerous times. I’m not an apologist for the unions or the city’s political class
but it’s ridiculous to talk about school performance in a place like Baltimore as some separate thing outside of the much larger context.Report
I’m agreeing with you more than disagreeing.
Poor school performance can be helped by many things, from increased funding to better pedagogy to administrative reform, but there is always a core of students for whom these aren’t enough.
As with homelessness and addiction and crime, I’m increasingly of the opinion that it isn’t even a government problem and might not have a government solution.Report
Yep. And I’m not really bitching about the Administration or the Union. They are acting in their own interest and that’s, unfortunately, something that happens. I fell bad for the kids, they aren’t to blame, but it’s a terrible situation and it’s not getting better, but likely worse…Report
Is this at all related to the 3 years of “no school” the kids have gone through? Because if kids generally backslide during the summer (and they do), how much more do they backslide if they have to do their homework in the bathtub, instead of in study hall?
(Bathtub and black widows that I’ve heard about came from college students who wanted to put the rent towards their new computer).
It means something a lot different if “Trump/Govt made us stop teaching” than if the teachers just suck so badly that they can’t get one student to “good enough to pass.”
Likewise, if the students are intellectually incapable, we may not want to be spending so much money to “look good and do nothing.”Report
“actually they’re ALL garbage” is maybe not the stunning defense of schools that you’re imagining it to beReport
He’s not defending the schools. He’s counter-attacking the attackers as being dishonest.
If he can paint them as being dishonest enough, it becomes a discussion about the dishonesty of the attackers rather than whether 23 Baltimore schools have zero students proficient in math, per state test results.Report
It would be interesting to look at the scores over the years to see if policy changes could be pinpointed as a cause for the decline.Report
Baltimore Fox 45 reports that Project Baltimore found bad schools, and you’re complaining that they only covered Baltimore?Report
His comment is slightly different. He’s noting that nowhere had majority proficiency (it looks like the best performing jurisdictions were in the high 30s). No idea how that compares nationally but there’s a county by county map in the article.Report
He noted what you said and complained that Jaybird and the article didn’t mention it, despite it being a Baltimore station’s article about a Baltimore group studying those stats. It just doesn’t make sense. Was the Baltimore group supposed to do school-level research for the state? Was Jaybird supposed to? The map you pointed to is county level, but the article was about the 23 Baltimore schools at zero.
ETA: That said, the editor was asleep if he couldn’t figure out how to put Achievement Academy’s zero percent achievement in the headline.Report
I am not sharing his criticism, just making sure we are zeroing in on the right thing.
Still, every time we do this debate I think we are operating under the flawed assumption that the schools can do much about it under current constraints. Not that they probably couldn’t do better on the margins, but it’s hard for me to see how they’d ever get results we’d find remotely acceptable.Report
I agree that the education argument here is a dead end. You and I know the truth about Maryland, that the quality of a neighborhood’s education is as good or as bad as the parents allow it to be. Our state isn’t unique in that except maybe in how dramatic the difference can be.Report
Yea, I’m in what is widely regarded as a ‘bad’ corner of one of the good, albeit slightly diminished in reputation of late counties. We’ve interacted enough here you can probably guess which.
I attribute about 90% of the difference to the fact that the public schools around me have huge EASL populations. It’s the same curriculum and everything as the better rated schools but the ones we’re districted for deal with a different student base with very different family issues. We’ve decided to go with the local Catholic school, but the driver is mainly that unlike the public schools they were actually open during covid which is critical since both my wife and I work. We just can’t risk dealing with something like that again no matter how unlikely it is.Report
I’m more interested in narrowing down your location politically, and your support of Hogan helped a lot in that regard.Report
Oh, hey, another thought. You’ve said that your main problem with conservatism is that it discounts the role of the state compared to other intermediary institutions. (Sorry if that’s a bad paraphrase or a complete botching.) If that is your central objection, it would seem to be big enough that you wouldn’t consider voting Republican even if they did something as huge as stopping the SOTU address. But here’s education, definitely a huge social issue and one where the US has had heavy government involvement, and you’re saying that the problem is outside their scope. How far is that from conservatism?Report
At the risk of sounding wishy washy I think the role of the state in setting up the playing field is critical, but I’m also not a statist. The government is very capable of getting it wrong, and some things it will never be able to do. My big criticism of it in education but also healthcare, housing, and the other big issues for the middle class is how sclerotic we’ve let it get. We have all these institutions creaking along from past eras in desperate need of retooling for the future, which is really what I want.
I mean also keep in mind I’m a pretty moderate, Hogan voting Democrat that could have also probably been convinced to vote for Kelly Schultz had the state Republicans not gone all MAGA. I also just spent the other weekend getting certified for my carry permit because now that I can why not? But I do still buy that cheesy Obama line about not asking whether we need bigger government or smaller government but how we get smarter and better government.Report
Many of us inside the beast want smarter government. If Google can hire in a day, I should be able to hire in less then 18 months. Unfortunately there’s no incentive for the people who control my revenue stream to make big sweeping changes. Hell, we can’t even get them to fully staff the revenue collection agency.Report
Sure, and it’s unrealistic to expect the US government to run like a cutting edge business. I also don’t think we should romanticize what the private sector is actually like either.Report
There is, and should be, a happy medium. Government is not ever going to be efficient, because we lack the profit motive. We do need to be, and largely are, effective. Still, I’d like to have appropriations when my fiscal year starts.Report
Burt Bacharach, writer of probably the most sophisticated easy listening pop, is dead at 94.Report
I imagine most of us will be, too.Report
I’m not dead yet! I feel happy! I think I’ll go for a walk!Report
The Republican pogrom against trans people continues:
South Dakota poised to ban gender-affirming care for trans youth
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/3851907-south-dakota-poised-to-ban-gender-affirming-care-for-trans-youth/Report
It’s interesting that “CHip Daniels” doesn’t get ignored.Report
Mississippi is heading down the same path.
https://www.mississippifreepress.org/30432/mississippi-house-passes-ban-on-treatments-for-transgender-minorsReport
What’s notable is how conservatives don’t bother to delineate a distinction between minors and adults.
They talk about gender reassignment as “mutilation” meaning the very existence of transsexuals is what they want to exterminate.Report
How will Sy Hersh blame this on the Americans? https://twitter.com/gbrumfiel/status/1624004804501508096?s=20&t=xHqj0PinI_MP_bPtopUfXwReport
A bit of local news. And by “news,” I mean “petty abuses of power.”
By way of background, Oregon has state liquor stores. All the booze sold in the state is sold from a single wholesale warehouse run by the Oregon Liquor and Canbabis Commission (the “OLCC,” an acronym people here know as well as “DMV”). OLCC only sells to licensed bar supply companies and liquor store licenseholders, who then resell to the public at the retail level. I think a handful of other states (Pennsylvania comes to mind) use a similar arrangement.* Okay. Good.
Now that you understand that, you can understand how it got to be that a bottle of Pappy Van Winkle 23-year in the possession of a public official is now prima facie evidence of political corruption.
* An arrangement which is obviously well-nigh invulnerable to other, more harmful and dangerous kinds of corruption.Report
That’s where all the Pappy Van Winkle ended up 🙂Report
One of the worst legacies of prohibition still remaining is that state liquor stores are just a thing.
That being said, Pappy Van Winkle is one of the worst excesses of the overblow secondary market for whiskeys and bourbons. It is a 100-200 dollar bottle of bourbons sold at inflated prices because of the secondary market. Hibiki 17 is the same issue.Report
I managed to sample some 23 year old Pappy Van Winkle. It was good. Very good. It wasn’t, in my opinion worth 225 dollars (at the time-retail price-not secondary market) But hey, that’s me. If I ever could find it at that price again, I’d probably get a bottle just to keep around and show it off to folks.Report
California seems to have the most laissez-faire alcohol laws in the entire nation. Giving states substantial powers to regulate alcohol was required to repeal Prohibition though.Report
I’m awarding the W to California here. This Pappy Van Winkle BS would not have happened there. Cal-ABC doesn’t monopolize the wholesale market.Report
Another note, the sort of thing I would once have posted to #lawtwitter, and is probably only of real interest to my fellow attorneys. The background to this is far too long and boring to share. But it’s come up three times in as many months during tense settlement negotiations.
When you’re writing a contract, don’t forget the integration clause. It is not “boilerplate,” it is an important substantive term, and you may well regret its absence one day.
This must be an easy mistake to make.Report
Vox has an interesting story on how the modern chicken industry is basically a result of a shipping accident:
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2023/2/10/23589333/cecile-steele-chicken-meat-poultry-eggs-delawareReport