Charter Schools: A Copper Bullet?

A new report on KIPP charter schools is encouraging. Drum calls KIPP is a "limited success":

KIPP schools demand a lot of their teachers, who work very long hours and are required to be on call at all times. They pay a bit more for this, but only a bit, and this isn't a model that scales well. You can always find a small cadre of dedicated young teachers willing to put up with this, but you're never going to find the hundreds of thousands you'd need to make this work on a large scale.

Yglesias demurs:

How big can this go at the end of the day? I have no idea. But there’s no reason to respond to this track record with pre-emptive pessimism. Instead the proper response is to encourage elected officials in a low-performing, high-poverty school district near you to welcome high-quality charter schools. What’s more, charitably inclined rich people should strongly consider closing their checkbooks to well-endowed universities and opening them to non-profit institutions that do an excellent job of educating poor kids. Institutions like KIPP.

Finally

The only right response:

Police raided the home and office of the recently retired archbishop of Belgium on Thursday, carrying off documents and a personal computer as part of an investigation into the sexual abuse of children by Roman Catholic priests, officials said. Police and prosecutors would not say whether former Archbishop Godfried Danneels was suspected of abuse himself or simply had records pertaining to allegations against another person. The raids followed recent statements to police "that are related to the sexual abuse of children within the church," said Jean-Marc Meilleur, a spokesman for the Brussels prosecutor's office.

North Korea’s World Cup, Ctd

A reader writes:

The blogger you linked to missed the more noteworthy story, which is that all of North Korea actually watched the match you mentioned live on television.  This unprecedented event was likely inspired by the team's fairly good performance against Brazil in the previous game, which they only lost by one goal – a "victory" for them in the same way that a tie against the UK was a victory for the US team.

This is actually quite an amazing story. For a nation that is used to having all of its news censored, and only hearing good stories about the country and the dear leader, to be watching as its team gets wiped out by Portugal 7-0 is a rare dose of reality.

And maybe they miscalculated the risk: North Korea had a much better showing the last time they played Portugal.

Obama: Hostage To Petraeus, Ctd

Was I too harsh? It behooves me, I think, to note that the way in which Obama facilitated this military dispatch was pitch-perfect: classy, presidential, resolute. It also behooves me to note that many things can happen in war and politics and that if Petraeus is seen to manifestly fail in Afghanistan – and retrospectively to have failed to leave Iraq in one piece as well – then things might shift dramatically. One reader offers this meep-meep hypothesis:

Maybe the McChrystal fiasco was a gift to Obama.  He installs Petraeus, blunts GOP National Security attacks during the midterms, then in a "Nixon to China" moment in 2011, announces that Petraeus — God of the military — believes we've done all we can do, that Karzai's corrupt government has to stand or fall on its own and switches the strategy to Biden's — drone and special ops attacks on terrorists, leaving nation-building to the Afghans.  That policy will have much more credibility if it comes with Petraeus' imprimatur than it would have with McChrystal's.

Well, we can hope. And look, I do not want to sound churlish. There were no good options in Afghanistan. I believe, as I believed in Iraq, that speedy withdrawal was the better option than surging and staying to save face. But I am not omniscient. I did not foresee the drop in violence in Iraq – although I did foresee the failure of the surge to achieve political reconciliation. From the beginning of Obama's massive gamble in Afghanistan, I have hoped for the best and would still love to be proven wrong. But I also have to give my best judgment now. That judgment is that this is a disaster waiting to unfold. And that sending young men into battle when the plan is this cockamamie is morally dubious in the extreme.