Tag: Premium

by Chris Bodenner

A reader goes in depth on the subject:

I’m all in favor of later start times for high schools so that students who need to sleep in can, but Suderman’s suggestion that vouchers and school choice will help accelerate solution overlooks two intractable reasons why schedules haven’t changed much: transportation and competitive sports.

Private schools could experiment with later starts, but that becomes difficult if they rely on public school buses, which has been true of most of the Catholic schools and most of the evangelical Christian schools I’ve known in the three states where I’ve lived. These days almost all students ride buses, and the bus routes add considerable time to the school day.

Secondly, sports create scheduling problems at the end of the school day, when public and private school teams compete.

Football is a weekend sport, but basketball, soccer, wrestling, field hockey, volleyball and numerous other sports compete one or two weeknights, and teams that travel to compete may have to miss the end of the school day if their school starts later. Game times are not going to change for private schools or for one or two enlightened high schools, as the New York Times story notes. So it’s nice to think school choice could solve the scheduling problem, but high school athletics are separated from education and transportation issues are resolved, school boards will be limited in their choices. High school sports fans and coaches may also oppose school choice if it leads to recruiting competition in public schools, since public schools already suffer from having private schools skim off top athletes in certain districts.

More generally, I have never been particularly enthusiastic about school choice because I think certain public schools will be left with the students who are discipline problems or costly to educate, such as special education students.

The only way out of the current bind that I see is total upheaval: going to year-round school. My preference would be for schools to run in quarters with a week’s vacation or somewhat more between quarters. (Other people with more knowledge of summer camp programs, church activities, and sports and marching band practice can probably come up with more refined schedules.) I’d also like to see state laws changed to mandate a total number of hours of instruction rather than “days in school.” This would also give schools more flexibility, particularly in high school, to adopt more of a college approach to scheduling where each day doesn’t have an identical schedule.

In order to continue with sports schedules after school, going to year-round school would allow athletes to have shorter days before game nights because there would be more time throughout the year to make up classwork that is currently missed when athletes leave early for games. There are some subjects that can be effectively taught through online instruction or with assistance online, so athletes and other students who want to work could manage class loads more flexibly. Sports should be severed from academics so first, there’s no pressure on teachers to pass students so they stay eligible for competition, and second, so sports teams are geographically based and, while they may compete for a specific school, rules would be in place to limit obvious competitive recruitment. This would allow home-schooled students and students at very small high schools to be part of larger community teams without prejudice.

To provide school choice as Suderman wants, I would favor school vouchers if the vouchers came with strings. Any school that accepts vouchers must accept any student who applies to the school, just as a public school does, and must assign open places based on a lottery the first year of voucher use. In subsequent years, siblings of students in the school would be accepted for open places, and then the remaining places would be open to lottery winners. Private schools can continue to stay private if they wish and reject vouchers, but vouchers would not flow to schools where admission criteria screen out certain applicants. Unused vouchers would be repurposed each year by being pooled and divided up to assist, on a per capita basis, schools with the most economically disadvantaged children.

Separate transportation vouchers would also be issued to each student and distributed, no matter which school the student is attending, to the transportation operation providing bus service or be used to purchase public transport where appropriate, with one big exception: public school districts would continue to serve a designated geographic area. A family outside the district who takes their kids and vouchers and moves them elsewhere would not be guaranteed transportation on a particular bus system. This is just a practical solution. In general, schools will not be able to provide transportation to far-flung students on standard transportation vouchers. Transportation vouchers must also be based on mileage and cost of transportation, not block grants that reward small, densely populated districts at the expense of rural schools.

Finally, along with the upheaval in the school system wrought by year-round school, I would favor another major social change in the U.S.: reduce the standard work week from 40 hours to 36 hours. It would give parents more flexibility and help create more jobs.

Update from a reader:

Your reader went on a short tangent:

I have never been particularly enthusiastic about school choice because I think certain public schools will be left with the students who are discipline problems or costly to educate, such as special education students.

The reader doesn’t need to speculate very much. Through the combination of a shaky public school foundation, suburban flight, extreme concentration of wealth, and an explosion in charter schools, Washington, D.C. has, if not de facto school choice, at least a bevy of options that results in most families opting out of their geographically-appropriate schools. The Washington City Paper ran a great cover story recently that highlighted one case that was fairly representative of the city’s problems with turning the system around.

by Jessie Roberts

Bee Wilson checks in on meat-eating habits across the globe:

Currently, the whole of Asia gets through around 18 billion chickens a year. If consumption continues to rise at current levels, by 2050 this figure will have increased more than tenfold to 200 billion chickens.

But China and India will never be able to live like this – ‘simply because there isn’t enough to go around’. [Farmageddon author Philip] Lymbery appears to hope that higher meat prices will force consumption down, but since meat-eating is a consequence of wealth, prices would need to rise astronomically to have an impact. It would be as easy to persuade Americans to take their turn at eating dal and rice for a few centuries – it’s only fair – as it would to tell the new Asian middle classes not to buy meat for their families.

In Planet Carnivore, an excellent short ebook, Alex Renton looks into how much meat we’d have to give up in order to be sustainable. Renton points out that even though eating meat has become more popular in India, ‘the average Indian consumes a thirtieth of the meat that an Australian or an American does – around 4.4 kg in 2009’ whereas in the US it is ‘120 kg per head per annum, as much or more meat than anyone’. To reduce our consumption enough to mean that intensive farming could be abandoned would entail getting much closer to Indian levels, which for many would feel like virtual vegetarianism.

by Katie Zavadski & Chris Bodenner

From Michael Lemonick’s explainer on the discovery of the “first direct evidence of cosmic inflation” (visualized in the above video referenced by a reader):

[J]ust .0000000000000000000000000000000000001 seconds (give or take) after the Big Bang, the [Inflationary Universe theory] said, the cosmos underwent a burst of expansion so furious that it was briefly flying apart faster than the speed of light. Exceeding light speed is supposed to be impossible, except that that law applies only to something moving through spacetime, not spacetime itself expanding. Just as with gravitational waves, there’s plenty of reason to think it really happened, but again, no proof.

Not until now, anyway. … The telescope the researchers used—the [BICEP2]—is tuned to see the critical kind of polarization in background radiation, but there was no guarantee it ever would. Inflation theory comes in several versions, all of which posit different intensities. “In some,” says MIT’s Alan Guth, who was one of the inflationary universe theory’s original inventors, “the waves are so weak they could never be detected. To see them turn up is beautiful.”

Theoretical physicist Matt Strassler dives deeper. Jamie Condliffe describes how the BICEP2 crushes the competing popular idea of a cyclic universe:

The cyclic model, championed by Neil Turok, director of the Perimeter Institute in Canada, predicted that the Universe expanded and contracted over very long cycles. Starting with a Big Bang and ending with a Big Crunch, the growth of the Universe, Turok reckoned, would be tempered by gravity pulling it pack together, in an endless cycle of expansion and contraction. … The main benefit of the now-debunked cyclic model was that it neatly sidestepped the fact that all the matter in the Universe, every atom around us, had to come from somewhere. As far as it was concerned, everything had been here forever.

The inflation model, however, defines a very clear starting point to our Universe, before which there was… well, nobody quite knows.

MIT physics professor Max Tegmark further contrasts Inflationary Cosmology (IC) with the now-discredited Traditional Cosmology (TC):

Q: What caused our Big Bang?
TC: There’s no explanation – the equations simply assume it happened.
IC: The repeated doubling in size of an explosive subatomic speck of inflating material.

Q: Did our Big Bang happen at a single point?
TC: No.
IC: Almost: it began in a region of space much smaller than an atom.

Q: Where in space did our Big Bang explosion happen?
TC: It happened everywhere, at an infinite number of points, all at once, with no explanation for the synchronization.
IC: In that tiny region – but inflation stretched it out to about the size of a grapefruit growing so fast that the subsequent expansion made it larger than all the space that we see today.

Q: How could an infinite space get created in a finite time?
TC: There’s no explanation — the equations simply assume that as soon as there was any space at all, it was infinite in size.
IC: By exploiting a clever loophole in Einstein’s general relativity theory, inflation produces an infinite number of galaxies by continuing forever, and an observer in one of these galaxies will view space and time differently, perceiving space as having been infinite already when inflation ended.

Q: How big is space?
TC: There’s no prediction.
IC: Probably infinite.

Nature‘s conversation with lead BICEP2 researcher John Kovac is here. He and his team’s discovery finally allows Stephen Hawking to claim victory in one of his famous bets. Sarah Gray looks ahead:

Despite meticulous checking by the [BICEP2] team, there is no way to be 100% certain of these results. The findings have to be verified, but according to Time, several research projects are already underway to test the results. Researchers are also already building BICEP3, which hopes to be operational by next summer. This discovery is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of learning about the expansion of the universe[;] it opens the door to new discovery and helps narrow down possible theories.

by Katie Zavadski & Patrick Appel

With Amazon raising the price of Prime by $20, Yannick Lejacq wonders how far Amazon can push consumers:

Giving up a few beers or a dinner out doesn’t seem like much of a sacrifice compared to all the time and money Amazon Prime has saved me over the past few years. But I have to wonder what the current price jump portends for the future of Amazon. The company knows that I’m an addict. And like any addict, I’m not entirely reasonable when it comes to my spending habits. I say that Prime saves me money, but really I’m just assuming it does. The real convenience is that it saves me from lurking on countless other websites just to find the best possible deals.

So once I’m hooked, what’s another $20? Or another $50? How far can Amazon push Prime before it starts to lose customers rather than continue to gain?

Derek Thompson fits Prime into Amazon’s overall business strategy:

For investors, Prime represents a key lever for generating profits in the future. Many of the analysts I spoke to for my business column last year on Amazon said they didn’t think it could raise prices dramatically on most of its merchandise. Instead, they said Amazon could always raise the price of Prime on its most passionate customers and add hundreds of millions of dollars to its bottom line just like that. …

The power of memberships isn’t just that they represent dependable revenue for Amazon in the topsy-turvy world of retail. It’s also that they’re sticky for customers. Couch potatoes have a hard enough time canceling their $90-a-month gym memberships, thanks to status quo bias and general laziness. It’s even harder to justify canceling a $8.25-a-month membership that gets you free fast shipping to the biggest online store, a great digital video offering, and more, just because the price went up by less than $2 a month.

Jordan Weissmann crunches the numbers:

by Patrick Appel

Ponnuru warns Republicans against it:

Take a look at the Huffington Post’s poll averages. Obama’s net job-approval rating is slightly up since the start of February. His rating on the economy has been improving since early December. He has been rising on foreign policy since late September. While the president is still “upside down,” as the operatives say, on all those measures, Republicans would be foolish to assume that the trend is their friend.

And even if Republicans succeed by taking the path of least resistance, they will be storing up future trouble. What if they win the Senate? In that case, Congress will have to move legislation. Republicans will have to come up with attractive conservative bills then, so that Obama will either feel it necessary to sign them or pay a political price for vetoing them. They will be in much better shape if they have campaigned on some of these ideas.

He is interested in the GOP “coming up with an agenda, selling it to the public and refining it as they go.” Douthat doubts that will happen:

I don’t think you’re likely to see real movement until after the 2016 campaign. The House Republican caucus is just too dysfunctional to unite around anything except modest budget deals and insufficient alternatives, and if they did unite around something more substantial they’re too distant from the White House ideologically to cut a deal. That’s probably still going to be the case after the midterms, and the lame duck phase of presidencies rarely produce much policy movement anyway. So for the ideas currently circulating to actually come up for votes that mean something, I think you’d need a change in the correlation of forces in Washington D.C. – and in particular, you’d need a clear leader capable of pushing them, which basically can only happen if there’s a Republican in the White House.

As for what happens to these kind of proposals if it’s Hillary Clinton in the White House instead, with a Republican House and a divided Senate? Honestly, I no idea – but I can’t say I’m optimistic.

by Jonah Shepp

Agunda Okeyo reviews Maria Shriver’s HBO documentary Paycheck to Paycheck: The Life and Times of Katrina Gilbert:

What makes Gilbert’s story so compelling is that she challenges almost every stereotype underpinning right-wing rhetoric about poverty, single mothers and the underemployed. Gilbert isn’t looking for a government “handout,” and she doesn’t blame others for her plight. She’s also remarkably patient and affectionate with her children, even as she raises them by herself. (As we learn, a significant portion of her childcare burden is relieved by the Chambliss Center , a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week childcare facility that offers a range of educational and counseling services for low-income families on a sliding scale. “If it wasn’t for them,” Katrina declares, “I wouldn’t be able to work because I would just be paying for daycare. How would you pay your bills? It’s impossible.”)

Gilbert’s tale also offers a refreshing reminder to conservative politicians that economic hardship is not the exclusive domain of ethnic minorities. Like Monica Potts’ illuminating feature in The American Prospect, “What’s Killing Poor White Women,” “Paycheck to Paycheck” explores the complex texture of inequality — and examines why white women are an oft-ignored face of poverty in modern America.

But L.V. Anderson worries that by focusing on an exemplary individual like Gilbert, the film undersells the many more imperfect Americans also in desperate need of a leg up:

[F]ew people, be they rich or poor, behave with as much forbearance, compassion, and hopefulness as Gilbert does in Paycheck to Paycheck. This isn’t a criticism of Gilbert—she truly is amazing. But the poor people who are less extraordinary and less overtly likable than Gilbert need help, too. Watching Paycheck to Paycheck, I couldn’t help thinking about the New York Times’ gripping “Invisible Child,” Andrea Elliott’s recent profile of an 11-year-old homeless girl in New York named Dasani. Dasani is surrounded by adults who often make bad decisions, and Dasani makes some bad decisions, too—but Elliott makes it clear that they would all benefit considerably from robust social safety nets.

Earlier Dish on poverty and the GOP here and here.

By Patrick Appel

On Sunday, Robert Costa floated a new Republican GOP health care plan. Kevin Drum points out that the proposal is nothing the GOP hasn’t proposed a thousand times. Jonathan Cohn focuses on the interstate insurance sales component:

[I]f the GOP were to get its way, scrapping Obamacare and replacing it with the yet-unpublished plan Costa describes, the insurance industry would likely evolve just like the credit card industry did, with carriers relocating to states with the least regulations. That would be good news for healthy people willing to carry bare-bones coverage, and for people with enough money to pay for a plan, would love this arrangement. But people with preexisting conditions, the ones who were only able to buy coverage thanks to the ACA’s rules, would be back to the bad old days.

Bob Laszewski piles on:

A new carrier could conceivably come into the market with much lower rates––because it is offering fewer benefits––attracting the healthy people out of the old more regulated pool leaving the legacy carrier with a sicker pool. Stripping down a health plan is a great time tested way for a predatory insurance company to attract the healthiest consumers at the expense of the legacy carrier who is left with the sickest.

He suggests that “supporters of this idea first ask the leaders of the insurance industry if they would even do this under the best of circumstances.”

by Jonah Shepp

The Department of Education on Friday proposed new regulations (pdf) intended to address the high rate of student loan defaults among graduates of for-profit colleges. Ashlee Kieler outlines the proposal:

Programs would be deemed failing if loan payments of typical graduates exceed 30% of discretionary income or 12% of total annual income. Programs would be given a warning if a student’s loan payments amount to 20 to 30% of discretionary income, or 8 to 12% of total annual income. Discretionary income is defined as above 150% of the poverty line and applies to what can be put towards non-necessities.

Passing along the eyebrow-raising chart above, Danny Vinik praises the crackdown on for-profit colleges:

Students at for-profit colleges drop out at an alarming rate and those that do graduate have much higher levels of debt than students in public and private non-profit colleges. For-profits also receive a substantial share of their revenue—more than 80 percent to be exact—from loans and grants from the federal government. In 2012, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, led by Senator Tom Harkin, completed a two-year report into for-profit universities to investigate whether this taxpayer money was being well spent. Across the board, degrees and certificates from for-profit colleges cost significantly more than those from non-profits[.]

Those extra costs are not leading to high graduation rates though. Fifty four percent of students who enrolled during the 2008-2009 school year had withdrawn from the institution by 2010. Only 18 percent had earned their degree or certificate.