sums up Robert Pape's view:
In contrast to the popular assertions that terrorists "hate freedom" or want to build a 21st century Caliphate, Pape documents the true driver of suicide attacks: to compel a democracy to remove combat forces from territory the terrorists prize and/or want to liberate. It is not primarily a function of Muslim extremism, even if Muslim terrorists have embraced the tactic.
Edwards Glaeser explains how you shrink a city:
Detroit has a large number of communities that are dominated by empty lots and vacant homes. Mayor Bing has spoken of providing incentives for the people still living in such areas to relocate, and warned them that “if they stay where they are I absolutely cannot give them all the services they require.” For a big-city mayor to warn that some areas will be no-service zones is radical, but our country is filled with less populated areas that lack public trash removal, bus service and water provision. In a sense, Mayor Bing would just be treating the least dense areas of Detroit like those other less dense areas.
Richard Rothstein joins the discussion:
Ravitch says she was converted because the "facts have changed," but that's not really the case. What has changed is the recent appreciation by her and her colleagues of how incentives to boost basic-skill test scores at the expense of all else inevitably corrupt education. In Death and Life, she describes the familiarity of sociologists, economists, and business theorists with a 1975 observation of Donald T. Campbell that such corruption erupts in any field where simple quantitative measures are substituted for careful evaluation. "Campbell's Law" is expressed when cardiac surgeons, held accountable for raising surgical survival rates, refuse to operate on the sickest patients most in need of intervention; … or when Wall Street traders take reckless risks because they are rewarded only for short-term, easily measured outcomes.
A reader adds:
I’ve been reading the posts on this topic with extreme interest. You see I live in Texas. That’s right – the state that spawned NCLB. I have a son who is a sophomore. I removed him from the Texas public school system between 4th and 5th grade. I now pay more in private school tuition per year than the full load at a local state university. Why? Because while teachers are teaching to the test, NCLB manages at the same time to ensure very few get
pushed ahead.
Everyone is so busy teaching for the tests, especially for the students who struggle, that some schools neglect the kids who need to be challenged. I pulled my son out because he was not a quietly bored kid and I was always at the school listening to the latest escapade story. When he finished one of those tests a few hours early the school refused to let him read a book, but made a 9 year old boy sit in a school desk for 2.5 hours with nothing to do. He hated school. Too often this translates to hating learning. Do we really want to do this to our kids? This year he told me he is finally enjoying school. For his junior year in high school he has asked to register for 5 AP courses.
Best decision I ever made, best money I ever spent.
Today on the Dish we watched Netanyahu dig in, Abe Foxman play the Jewish card on Petraeus, the Greens kept the fires burning in Iran, and more evidence surface against DADT. The WaPo and Bernstein gave Kucinich more attention, Chait bemoaned the debate over process, and Noah Millman outlined how the GOP could reform healthcare in the future. More HCR drumbeats here and here.
Andrew wondered when the pope will resign and addressed Rove's hypocrisy over his gay father. Chris Beam profiled Breitbart (with help from a reader). Ben Wildavsky and Dish readers carried on the conversation over NCLB. And controversy over that Israel map continued.
Crazy talk from Steve King and Ben Shapiro. Cool ad here. Creepy hosts here. Matthew Schmitz hated on St. Paddy's Day while we posted a poem and a comedy skit. Andrew gayed it up with Kathy Griffin.
— C.B.
Holder said yesterday that bin Laden "will never appear in an American courtroom." Matt Steinglass counters:
Call me an Islamofascist symp, but I rather like the idea of seeing the man put on trial in downtown Manhattan on 2,900-plus counts of first-degree murder. There must be some part of my brain that's still frozen in September 10th 2001 mode, because I just can't remember the chapter in American history where we apparently decided that criminal trials are some kind of favour we do for terrorists that proves we're postmodern multicultural cowards who lack confidence in our own civilisation, or whatever. Seems to me that if a trial was good enough for Adolf Eichmann and Saddam Hussein, it's good enough for Osama Bin Laden.
[T]he 24-hour cable net cycle has been stuck on ugly process maneuverings in the vacuum of no score from the Congressional Budget Office and no bill. This meme just adds to the back room aura and sweetheart reputation the legislation has enjoyed for months. You're getting hit on all sides – from the President, the Speaker, constituents, even donors. Oh, and, it turns out most folks really do hate you.
But, oh how quickly things can change. If you pass the bill, next week's coverage is likely to trumpet triumph, the most productive legislative session since LBJ, an historic and seminal victory.
Catherine Tate, genius:
Noah Millman is hammering together a policy platform (here are parts one, two, three, four, five, and six). From the second post:
My own inclination is to say that Obama’s health-care proposal is a step in the right direction, the kind of reform that would make it easier for a subsequent Republican administration to reform it in a direction that will be more open to the kinds of price signals that drive medical innovation and, in turn, actually lower costs. Such reforms are essentially impossible until a functional individual insurance market is created, and the Obama health-care plan, if it works, promises to create such a market. That’s a big “if” – but if it doesn’t create a functional individual insurance market, then it will fail, and the citizenry, rather than demanding repeal, will demand that it be changed to make that market work.
That's my view as well. If I were starting over from scratch, I wouldn't end up where we are or will be.
But we're not starting from scratch, and finding a way to get universal coverage as a moral necessity, while including potentially big cost-control measures and individual insurance markets, is good enough for me right now.
Market-oriented conservatives should, in my view, propose to amend the law in future to expand those things they favor – tort reform – and include new measures, like more price signals for consumers in healthcare. There's a lot in this bill that conservatives could work on; instead they have sought to kill it and then repeal it.
At some point, they'll grow up, and realize politics is not a game to be "won" but a process to be engaged.
A reader writes:
I'd like to chime in on your ongoing series about education reform with a few stories about the company I work for. It is one of the largest providers of online charter programs in the country: we have contracts with 20 states and a private school available to anyone in the country willing to pay for our services. We have a wide range of courses and offer a great deal of flexibility. I agree with your earlier commenter that, on paper, charter schools look great. (I have taught in two rough, inner-city public schools.)
But over the course of 18 months working for this company, I have seen decisions get made by people with doctorate degrees in education that blatantly degrade the quality of our curriculum in favor of cutting costs and avoiding conflicts with parents over terms like "global warming" and "evolution."
My company has bent over backwards to provide courses that don't offend, but also don't challenge students. Recently, all of the subject matter experts in the department that develops curriculum had their positions eliminated in favor of contractors or third-party vendors who provide courses so riddled with grammar and content errors that it surprises me they could put together a course at all. We decreased the number of reading and writing assignments in some of our high school English courses so that parents would stop complaining about the workload. Our students engage their content in what basically amounts to lengthy PowerPoint slides turned into Web pages, and are forced to use message boards (!) instead of Web 2.0 technology to grow and learn. How can we possibly expect to be taken seriously when we eliminate people who have multiple degrees, teaching experience, and content expertise, while subjecting students to technologies that were obsolete in 1997?
Nothing in my life has soured my personality and squashed my youthful optimism like working for this company. If anything, this job has taught me that American parents often don't want to challenge their kids–they simply want them to graduate. I'm sure you'll get lots of readers claiming this isn't true (this is just an anecdote), but I can't emphasize enough how appalled I've been by the utter lack of respect for the goals of education by this company and other charter schools that I read about.
Another writes:
One of your readers wrote:
The way that proficiency is determined through normed testing (which Ravitch fails miserably to properly explain) means that essentially, all the students in the state take the test, and a mean score is determined. Proficiency then means achieving at or above that score.
That is a flat-out falsehood. Proficiency for NCLB purposes is determined by criterion-referenced tests, not norm-referenced tests. What this means is that proficiency is determined by some objective criterion — say, how well you do compared to a state curricular standard — not by how well you do compared to the overall population. In fact, states aren't even ALLOWED to use pure norm-referenced tests for NCLB purposes, because — for obvious reasons — it would be impossible for 100% of students to achieve above the mean on a norm-referenced test. (States are allowed to use so-called "augmented" norm tests, in which part of the test is norm-based, but other questions are based on objective criteria related to a state's content standards.)
It appears the use of criterion- or norm-referenced tests varies by state. Another writes:
I would just like to offer my experience in response to your reader who insists that charters work. The truth is that SOME charters work, but certainly not all. And there is such a ridiculous lack of oversight of charter schools that the ones that don't work, the ones that are drastically under-performing the district they are meant to serve, fly under the radar for so long and when they are finally noticed, the only ones ever held accountable are the teachers.
I teach in one of those charter schools that work. In fact, my school was one of only four charter schools in the state of Missouri to make AYP in the 2007-2008 school year – a year when 84.6% of Missouri charter schools (and 57.5% nationally) failed to make the grade. Even the KIPP school (a name that is often thrown around as the savior of urban schools) did not even come close to making the scores needed to reach AYP. Adequate yearly progress is a questionable way to measure school success, but charter school students consistently under-perform their public school peers on NAEP tests as well.
I enjoy my job and I think we do have a bit more flexibility (sometimes too much flexibility) to change our curriculum to meet the needs of our students and there is more of a professional teamwork atmosphere than I experienced working in larger urban districts. But these conditions apply to my school only, not to charters as a whole. I think we are doing some wonderful things. We also have our problems, not the least of which is failing to retain good teachers. Many teachers will put in their time and move on to a district with better pay, better job security, better retirement, and better hours. Thus we have had three principals in four years and start each school year with about half of our staff new and often as first year teachers.
My husband is a first year teacher teaching Middle School Science, Social Studies, and Math in one of those charter schools that doesn't work. This school has been open for 10 years and has consistently scored below the (pitiful) surrounding district. My husband works with no textbooks and very few materials. Just last night he had to run to the store to buy meter sticks so that his class could complete a science experiment. Meter sticks! Where has the money gone for 10 years that they haven't gotten around to buying textbooks or meter sticks?
And when the scores come back dismal as I'm sure they will, who will be held "accountable"? The students? The parents? The school leadership that prioritized God knows what over instructional supplies? The state university that sponsors their charter? No. The teachers will take the blame, lose their jobs, and another crop of first year teachers will be brought in and expected to teach without curricular, administrative, or behavioral support.
There are some amazing things going on in charter schools across the country. There are also some terrible things going on in charters. Guess what? The same can be said about public schools, or any school for that matter. But the data simply does not show that charters are the answer. Anyone, including your reader and Obama, that embraces charters wholeheartedly without looking at the facts is only doing a disservice to charters, our students, and education as a whole in this country.
Matthew Schmitz has a beef with Saint Paddy's Day. Dreher adds:
It really would be weird to think about an ethnic festival for any of the other major white groups in this country. Can't do English because of their complicated relationship with the founding of America (we fought them, after all). Germans? Self-explanatory. Scandinavian? No fun! Italian? Well, maybe … but we did fight the Axis in World War II, and besides, Italians don't speak English, and are a bit removed from the Anglo-Scots-Irish majority of white people in this country. So it's the Irish by default!
The Dish 