Suspicious test scores

Michelle Rhee took a corporate-reform approach to getting better test scores and graduation rates from her students. It involved the firing of many teachers and the elimination of tenure. Unfortunately, it also meant that Rhee did not have any education professionals within her leadership circle, nor was anyone experienced at running urban school systems. It appears to have worked, but in April 2013, it turned out that in her first year as Schools Chancellor in Washington, DC, she knew that there was a considerable amount of cheating, erasures of student answers on tests and substitution of correct answers. Reports of this happening went back to November 2008. The ral problem was that the erasures “suggested widespread cheating by adults.”

Unfortunately, that's a predictable response to high-stakes testing that isn't difficult to manipulate. Could she have taken a better approach once cheating was discovered? Perhaps, but “a cheating scandal might well have implicated her own 'Produce or Else' approach to reform.“ Rhee strongly denied that she was pressuring principals to produce results regardless of whether students were actually learning more, but it appears that's exactly what was happening.

Has her system actually improved teacher retention, a key measure of job satisfaction? Actually, no. “For teachers, DCPS has become a revolving door. Half of all newly hired teachers (both rookies and experienced teachers) leave within two years; by contrast, the national average is said to be between three and five years.”

Sadly, “Rhee’s former deputy is in charge of public schools, and Rhee continues her efforts to persuade states and districts to adopt her approach to education reform–an approach, the evidence indicates, did little or nothing to improve the public schools in our nation’s capital.”

[April 2013]

Proposal to reform school funding

In March 2013, Pennsylvania Representative James Roebuck, Jr., proposed to reform the way in which cyber and charter school were funded and how they were called to account for their performance. He estimated the PA school budget could save up to $365 million that way. Included is a chart that shows exactly what would be affected.

Pleading poverty, Philadelphia closes 23 schools

From Channel 6 (March 2013): “Officials contended the cash-strapped system couldn't afford to keep open the 27 buildings, more than 10 percent of the district's schools. Many of them are under-enrolled and in poor condition. But opponents said the move would irreparably damage dozens of neighborhoods and further fuel a student exodus from the district.”

The closures were defended as a response to declining enrollment and a consolidation of under-attended schools. But money was also a factor. Governor Corbett tries (April 2013) to get clever with the school budget so that he can pretend that privatization is necessary. But what's really causing PA to be short of money are Corbett's tax cuts. A study by the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center showed that “corporate tax breaks that will continue to shift costs to individuals and local taxpayers, while failing to restore deep cuts to public schools, keep college affordable for middle-class students, or ensure working families can obtain basic health care.” Backgrounder from Truthout as to how private charter schools are sucking money out of the system and causing public schools to be starved for funds.

Video of reaction in front of the School District Building.

Media summary from PCAPS.

 

Testimony to the Philadelphia City Council on school closing moratorium

Black Radical Congress – Recognized that demographic changes meant some school closings and consolidations were inevitable, but proposed that charter schools should be closed first.

Laura C. Dijilo, PCAPS member - The state of Pennsylvania took over the schools 10 years ago because the schools were in debt. How has the state done? The schools are still in debt and underfunded and even more buildings are in disrepair.

Philadelphia National Writers Union – The PNWU endorses the PCAPS proposals.

UFPJ-DVN Education Committee – We recognize that the charter school movement is not driven by parents or students or even by educators, but by money-seeking corporations. This is an ineffective approach to education.

The Notebook – Summary of the testimony of four public school advocates.

[February 2013]

Privatized school vouchers – unpopular but persistent

Despite the unpopularity of vouchers for corporate private schools, we see a lot of voucher programs persist anyway, programs that take money out of the popular public education system and funnel money into an system that has no real accountability. Think Progress examines the cases of several millionaires and billionaires and their “school choice” front groups.

[May 2011]

Bill Keller and understanding the left

Bill Keller was a foreign correspondent for the New York Times from 1984 to 1988, he then became a bureau chief in first Moscow and then Johannesburg, moving up to Foreign Editor and then Managing Editor and then finally up to Executive Editor, where he retired from the Times in 2011. For such a long-time, experienced newspaperman, I found it very disturbing that his view of how the “left-left” (As opposed to the “center-left”) views economic issues to be so very shallow and uninformed. One would think that with all of the contacts that one with his experience would have, he'd be able to chat with any number of left-leaning people with strong views on the economy.

He does a good, quickie summary of economic inequality, but then tries to tell us how the left views the American economy today, where we get comments like this:

The left-left sees economic inequality as mainly a problem of distribution — the accumulation of vast wealth that never really trickles down from on high. Their prescription is to tax the 1 percent and close corporate loopholes, using the new revenues to subsidize the needs of the poor and middle class. They would string the safety net higher: expand Social Security, hold Medicare inviolate, extend unemployment insurance, protect food stamps, create more low-income housing. They would raise the minimum wage.

I'd call that, at  best, a highly simplified vision as to how the left diagnoses the problem of inequality. The lefty website Daily Kos has a regular Saturday feature: “This week in the War on Workers,” where it examines all kinds of disputes and tensions and battles between workers and corporations.  The progressive left sees unions and worker rights as being really critical to reversing economic inequality.

Keller quotes President Obama as being concerned with “competitiveness and productivity and business confidence that spurs private-sector investment,” but then claims “he would do trade deals to expand our diminishing share of foreign markets; he would shrink long-term deficits and streamline regulations.”

A piece for Salon.com identifies four substantive reforms that don't involve taxes (so that none of them need to involve Congress). The fourth recommendation directly contradicts the suggestion that “trade deals” (NAFTA, TPP, etc.) are of any value to America's middle class whatsoever. Yes, they may make more overseas sales possible, but they also make it easier and more profitable to move production facilities, i.e., middle class jobs, overseas.

Also:

The left-left seems to believe that government investments — roads and bridges, clean energy, education, etc. — and more-generous safety-net benefits can all be had by milking the rich and cutting military spending.

Well, no. We also believe in deficit spending. We believe that deficit spending is not necessarily a good or healthy thing to engage in, but as with say, an unanticipated war,  the spending of borrowed money is vastly preferable to getting overrun by the enemy. To have deficits go up versus having scientific research stall or children to go uneducated or for communities to go without police protection doesn't seem to us to be any sort of reasonable choice at all. In the abstract, everybody likes the idea of cutting “wasteful spending,” but in the actual world of concrete realities, it's very difficult for everyone to agree on exactly what spending is “wasteful” versus “necessary,” with the solution normally being to select the spending that benefits those with the least political power as being the spending that gets cut. The real question for anyone who wants to cut the budget is “Are you attacking weak claims or are you attacking weak clients?” 

I'm not sure that “the left tends to treat entitlements as sacred” so much as we are completely unconvinced that entitlements need to be sacrificed for any reason whatsoever. Our economic analysis in The People's Budget, put out by the Congressional Progressive Caucus, manages to achieve all sorts of positive objectives without sacrificing anything at all in terms of entitlements, i.e., without cutting Social Security or Medicare/Medicaid. I find it kind of amazing that a newsperson with such broad and deep experience is apparently unaware that such a document even exists.

Here's a peculiar charge:

And a third difference between the near left and the far left is the question of making government more efficient. This is not so much a policy dispute as a mind-set. In education, health care, Social Security and other areas, the center seems more receptive to reforms intended to get decent results at lower costs.

As a member of the “far left,” I most certainly don't see anything decent about education “reform.” I agree with the title and subtitle of Diane Ravitch's piece: “School privatization is a hoax, 'reformers' aim to destroy public schools. Our public schools aren't in decline. And 'reformers' with wild promises don't care about education — just profits.”  In short, we don't accept the proposition that privatizing schools is going to “get decent results at lower costs.” Yes, I think it IS a “policy dispute” and that we have strong reason to believe that the policies suggested by right-wingers are really, really awful, terrible ideas. As Ravitch points out:

They believe it is faster, simpler, and less expensive to privatize the public schools than do anything substantive to reduce poverty and racial isolation or to provide the nurturing environments and well-rounded education that children from prosperous families receive. 

Instead, the privatization movement nonchalantly closes the schools attended by poor children and destabilizes their lives. The privatization agenda excites the interest of edu-entrepreneurs, who see it as a golden opportunity to make money. But it is bad for our society. It undermines the sense of collective responsibility for collective needs. It hurts public education not only by attacking its effectiveness and legitimacy but by laying claim to its revenues.

Keller's “decent results” are actually a nightmare for anyone who's truly interested in genuinely improving American society. Privatizing education will fatten a few wallets without providing any real benefit to anyone else. It's difficult to see how health care benefits from keeping it in private hands. Private health care insurance entrepreneurs have left about 15% or one-sixth of the population without any health insurance at all. This one-sixth can be covered by using premiums from healthy people to subsidize care for less-healthy people, but of course that means less profit for entrepreneurs, so that cross-subsidizing will simply never happen under a wholly private system.

Now clearly, Keller has lots of ideological sympathy for the “center left,” that is, the Blue Dog Democrats or the Third Way.

The tension between entitlements and investment is a Third Way obsession. In a column and two blog posts last year (here, and here, and here) I sympathized with the case for imposing some restraint on entitlements. I still do.

So a question here is for those who are trying to decide how to inform themselves on a political issue, specifically on how a particular faction feels about that issue, in this case, on economics. When studying history, we have “primary” and “secondary” sources. A primary source is something like Daily Kos, which supplies us with lefty viewpoints that are delivered straight from the parties themselves. The site also does plenty of in-between pieces that feature lots and lots of direct, lengthy quotations, interspersed with their own commentary.

Keller provides us with a straight, unmixed secondary source. We don't get any quotes from his original sources, we get nothing but his summaries and assessments as to what lefties (As opposed to Third Way partisans) are thinking and advocating. In the first paragraph to this essay, we can see that Keller's resume is very, very good for doing this. He's a newsperson of very wide experience. But as we saw in my review, his actual performance leaves the unaware readers stupider than when they began. Those unfortunate readers now “know” many things that just aren't so.

When studying history, the use of secondary sources is unavoidable as original, primary sources may be in a foreign language or really long-winded or poorly written while still saying worthwhile things. In history, there is value in secondary sources. In seeking an understanding of current political issues, I regard secondary sources as pretty darn close to worthless. I read secondary sources all the time of course, but if I'm really trying to understand why someone feels the way they do or am trying to assess how a faction really regards an issue, there's simply no substitute for a primary source, for the original words that the studied people were using. 

Considering the nomination of Larry Summers for Chairman of the Federal Reserve

“Every dog deserves two bites” - Admiral Chester W. Nimitz

Has Larry Summers already had his “two bites”? I would argue that yes, he has, and that he doesn't deserve any more. First bite is his role in the economic crisis that began with the collapse of the housing bubble in late 2007:

Not only did Summers work tirelessly during his years in the Clinton Administration to undermine regulatory and prudential controls in our financial markets, but he joined Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan and his political sponsor, former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, and public paragon Arthur Levitt, in smearing CFTC Chairman Brooksley Born so as to make the world safe for OTC derivatives.

“The moratorium was a huge victory for Wall Street,” Robert Stowe England writes in his new book, Black Box Casino.  “And a big win for Rubin, Summers and Greenspan,” though he rightly notes that Levitt later expressed regrets over his actions.

And as the economist Dean Baker puts it:

Summers played a major role in creating the economic imbalances that fostered the housing bubble and explain the weakness of the economy right up to the present. This is the problem of the huge US trade deficit, which was in turn caused by the over-valued dollar.

Second bite was his taking part on the Obama Administration to try and correct his earlier errors. In December 2009, Summers was interviewed and:

Summers cheerfully explained to George Stephanopoulos that the U.S. has “walked back from the brink” following the 2008 economic collapse, and that “everyone agrees the recession is over and the question is what the pace of the [job and economic] expansion is going to be.”  

 

Summers' cheerful diagnosis was grossly premature as there was still, as of July 2013, an unemployment rate of 7.4%, a rate that the current Chairman of the Federal Reserve described as “far from satisfactory.” 
 
The case that Christina Romer made for a stimulus larger than the $787 billion that was ultimately passed was missing from the proposal that made its way to the Presidents desk. 
 

At first, Summers gave her every indication that all three figures would appear in the memo he was sending the president-elect. But with less than twenty-four hours before the memo needed to be in Obama’s hands, Summers informed her that he was inclined to strike the $1.2 trillion figure. 

 

Summers' attitude was based on political calculations that may very well have been correct, but submitting the under-estimated proposal certainly robbed the proposal of much of the urgency that Romer quite properly felt that the President should feel. As we later saw, under-bidding was a poor political choice as the Obama Administration never got a second chance to go back and get more stimulus. 
 
So, having made two failed bites, does Summers present any further problems as the nominee for Chairman of the Federal Reserve? Yes, as a matter of fact, he does. To begin with: 
 

Summers is even less popular with Wall Street than he is with liberal bloggers and Democratic senators.

Former President Bill Clinton said about Summers and his advice on derivatives:

“On derivatives, yeah I think they were wrong and I think I was wrong to take [their advice] because the argument on derivatives was that these things are expensive and sophisticated and only a handful of investors will buy them and they don’t need any extra protection, and any extra transparency. The money they’re putting up guarantees them transparency,” Clinton told me.

“And the flaw in that argument,” Clinton added, “was that first of all sometimes people with a lot of money make stupid decisions and make it without transparency.”

We also might remember:

Through the first half of this decade, Meyer repeatedly warned Summers and other Harvard officials that the school was being too aggressive with billions of dollars in cash, according to people present for the discussions, investing almost all of it with the endowment’s risky mix of stocks, bonds, hedge funds, and private equity. Meyer’s successor, Mohamed El-Erian, would later sound the same warnings to Summers, and to Harvard financial staff and board members.

Summers ultimately cost Harvard $1.8 billion (Out of a $6 billion endowment) through bad investments in, among other things, derivatives. 
 

Summers, amazingly, wanted to invest 100% of the university’s cash in the endowment, and had to be talked down to investing a mere 80%. No wonder Meyer and El-Erian tried to talk him out of it: the Harvard endowment was never designed as a place to invest sums of cash which might be needed immediately. Instead, it’s designed to invest for the very long term, taking advantage of the higher returns on illiquid investments.

Summers was playing a high-risk carry-trade game with Harvard’s cash:

Did Summers display other ethical problems? Yes.

So why did Summers lose his job at Harvard? It was because of his protecting a buddy, a fellow economist at Harvard named Andrei Shleifer.

...

Shleifer got in trouble, and the U.S Government sued and won against Harvard and Shleifer.

…

Summers was good friends with this criminal, and used his position to protect him.

..

Summers said conflict-of-interest “issues,” in his Washington experience, were “left to the lawyers.” He said he was sensitive to “ethics rules,” but testified that “in Washington I wasn’t ever smart enough to predict them . . . things that seemed very ethical to me were thought of as problematic and things that seemed quite problematic to me were thought of as perfectly fine. . . .”

Are ethical issues still a problem for Summers? As a matter of fact, yes.

The Lending Club’s rates, says the Times, are apparently “higher than what was available at a credit union or other lenders.” And that’s not the only problem with the outfit:

But Sarah Ludwig, the co-director of the New Economy Project, a nonprofit in New York, expressed concern that the company did not verify all borrowers’ income and employment.

This shows incredibly poor judgment and out-of-control greed from someone who will be regulating businesses to see that precisely these sorts of things don't occur. Oh, and by the way, hey, and how is Summers with women? Ugh!

“It does appear that on many, many different human attributes—height, weight, propensity for criminality, overall IQ, mathematical ability, scientific ability—there is relatively clear evidence that whatever the difference in means—which can be debated—there is a difference in the standard deviation, and variability of a male and a female population.”

…

The Boston Globe reported on the speech on January 17. According to The Globe, an MIT biologist who was in attendance walked out, explaining that if she hadn't, she "would've either blacked out or thrown up." And as The Globe made clear, the anger at the speech was about more than just what Summers said. Up to that point during his tenure, the percentage of tenured offers made to women by Harvard's faculty of Arts and Sciences had severely dropped. In 2004, only four of a total of 32 offers went to women, a result Summers called unacceptable. Following the speech, Summers faced a 218-185 no-confidence vote, and the lingering anger eventually led to his resignation in 2006. 

Is the opposition to Summers' appointment a hopeful sign of better things to come? We sure hope so! 
 

Next to former Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, there is perhaps no more notable public official most identified with Third Way economics than Summers.

…

Occupy Wall Street seems like an minor event today, but if current trends continue in hindsight it is going to look like a turning point in American history. All across the country, opposition to the economic and political establishment and their order is growing. The same people who told us nothing could go wrong with bank deregulation and turning our economy from one of production and innovation to one of flim flammery and an ever growing list of financier's card tricks, are now under growing pressure from the discontent in the country.

…

Ten years ago ... even five years ago ... Summers would have been hailed and feted for his "keen insight" or whatever. Pundits would sing his praises. Everyone would vigorously defend him, from the president on down. CNBC would give us a glowing 1-hour documentary of his life and times. But now he's under fire.

There's also a good piece from Daily Kos imagining a contest between Hillary Clinton and Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) for the presidency. Such a contest between two highly qualified candidates of the same color and gender would enable Americans to focus on the economic principles that Clinton and Warren represent. Third Way corporatism versus true populist progressivism. We need to see to it that Summers does not get to be Chairman of th Federal Reserve, but even more, we need to hold the Obama Administration's current economic philosophy up to the spotlight and to discredit it

Update: The President is gettin' all huffy and irritated and L'etat c'est moi about Democratic Senators who are questioning his choice for the Federal Reserve and feels they oughta just siddown and shuddup and give Summers a rousing cheer and vote him in.