It has now been one year since we started Jay P. Greene’s Blog: With Help From Some Friends. With no more than an investment of $15 for domain registration and some time from Matt, Greg, and me, I think we’ve done pretty well over the last year.
We’ve written 507 posts and received 2,184 comments. The site has been viewed a total of 121,567 times (and that doesn’t include us obsessively checking for new comments). Readership started out slow but is now around 13,000 per month.
According to Technorati, JPGB is one of the more influential blogs devoted to education policy. JPGB has an authority rating of 100, which is a measure of the number of other blogs linking to our site in the last 90 days. The more blogs that link to a site the more “authority” it is said to have. As you can see in the list below, JPGB has a Technorati authority rating that trails Joanne Jacobs and Eduwonk, but leads most other education policy blogs.
Joanne Jacobs 194
Eduwonk 148
Jay P. Greene 100
Bridging Differences 98
Flypaper 97
Core Knowledge 95
The Quick and the Ed 93
Ed Week’s Politics K-12 89
This Week in Education 85
Edwize 74 (most recent available)
Matthew K. Tabor 65
D-Ed Reckoning 51
Edspresso 50
Sherman Dorn 49
CF Policyblog 31
Ed Week’s NCLB Act II 31
Education Intelligence Agency 22
Swift and Change Able 20
Ed is Watching 14
Reason — Out of Control 13
But our goal has never been to maximize readership. Mostly, we just wanted a platform to express our views directly to others who wanted to see those views. With more than 500 posts, more than 2,000 comments, and hundreds of links from other sites, we ‘ve clearly succeeded.
A close second goal for the blog has been to have an outlet for amusing ourselves and each other. At that we have also clearly succeeded. I’ve had a great time working with Greg and Matt. Thanks for a great year!
Hoth is a reference to the ice planet in Empire Strikes Back. As Hurley tells us, the unresolved conflict between Luke and his father, Darth Vader, leads to all sorts of problems as well as a lame Return of the Jedipopulated with ewoks. If only they had worked out those “daddy issues” much suffering could have been avoided.
Similarly, Lost is filled with unresolved daddy issues. Just about every parent/child relationship that has been introduced is a troubled one: Jack and Christian; Kate and her dad; Locke and his dad, Ben and his dad; Sun and her dad; Penny and Charles; and now Miles and his dad. Hurley is the exception. He’s worked things out with his dad and in doing so has changed the negative fate of unresolved daddy issues, just as he urges Miles to do and just as he does in his rewriting of Empire Strikes Back.
The further evidence that the Island is evil is that it appears to demand or favor those who have failed to resolve conflicts with their fathers or have even killed their fathers. Richard told Locke that he would have to kill his father because the Island demanded a sacrifice. Until now I thought he was misrepresenting the will of the Island. But now I can see that Richard is a faithful servant of the Island’s will. And we’ve seen that Ben (who killed his father) was spared by the Island as long as he follows Locke (who is probably just Smokey and who himself arranged to have his father killed).
It’s an inversion of the binding of Isaac. Rather than sparing the son, the evil Island demands the sacrifice of the father.
Other bits of evidence to support my theory — When Charlotte says this island is death, she really means it. And that was the title of that episode. I think the titles are telling us the truth. And what was Eko doing when Smokey killed him? Building a church.
As hard as Obama, Duncan, and Durbin try to minimize media attention to their efforts to kill D.C. vouchers with language slipped into an omnibus spending bill and Friday afternoon sneaky political tricks, the story just won’t go away.
Since our latest summary of greatest hits, I have an op-ed in the WSJ. Greg has a new piece in Pajamas Media. Shikha Dalmia has a piece in Forbes. Glenn Beck has devoted a segment of his Fox TV show to the issue. Senator Ensign gave a speech describing his fight for D.C. vouchers and vowing to expand federal voucher programs to include special education nationwide. Senator Lieberman will begin holding hearings on the re-authorization of D.C. vouchers next month.
If D.C. vouchers go down, they won’t go down quietly. Politicians who break their word to abide by the evidence, who would deny to others the choices and opportunities they enjoy, and who try to get away with sneaky Friday afternoon political tricks will have to account for their actions.
“Vouchers may lose in D.C., but that doesn’t mean they’re not winning in the long term. Every successful movement loses some battles. Indeed, the more important the cause, the more we should expect the entrenched interests of the status quo to invest in fighting it off. That will inevitably mean some setbacks alongside the victories.
Where would we be today if Martin Luther King’s letter from the Birmingham jail had just said, ‘Well, here I am in jail — I guess I’ve lost the fight’? King knew he wasn’t in jail because he was losing. He was in jail because he was winning.
And the cowards who put him in jail knew it just as well as he did.”
Or maybe his conscience is getting to him and he could no longer betray his commitment to “do what works for kids” regardless of predisposition or ideology. Maybe he was sick before and is now getting better.
Whatever the case may be, let us wish for the physical and policy health of the Secretary so that he does what is right by D.C. vouchers with good body and spirit.
“On education policy, appeasement is about as ineffective as it is in foreign affairs. Many proponents of school choice, especially Democrats, have tried to appease teachers unions by limiting their support to charter schools while opposing private school vouchers. They hope that by sacrificing vouchers, the unions will spare charter schools from political destruction.”
Has Mike become a fan of appeasement and declared that he has reached “education reform in our time”? No, but he believes that his anti-voucher/pro-charter beltway buddies are principled in holding their views:
“I challenge Jay to name one person he knows who supports charter schools but opposes vouchers because he or she hopes to appease the unions. I hang out with a lot of these folks and it’s clear to me that most of them oppose vouchers either because of queasiness over church/state issues or because they don’t want public funds going to schools that don’t face any public transparency or accountability requirements. ”
Of course, there is no way to prove who’s right about this because it involves knowing people’s motivations. If people are willing to let vouchers die because they are eager to protect charters, they won’t exactly go around telling people (or even themselves) that their views are based more on political calculation than principle. They’ll invent reasons for their views, like being uneasy about church/state issues or having concerns about accountability, even if those are not their true motivations.
So why do I believe that the anti-voucher/pro-charter view is largely a political calculation rather than a principled position? Well, because most people who hold this view are not consistent in their principles. If church/state issues are the problem for the anti-voucher/pro-charter crowd, why don’t they oppose Pell Grants or the Day Care Tuition Tax Credit, both of which are vouchers that include religious schools? If their objection is principled, then we would expect them to be consistent in applying that principle.
And if their objection is the lack of public transparency and accountability, why don’t they advocate for whatever regulations on vouchers they believe are necessary and desirable? It is simply untrue to say that current voucher programs “don’t face any public transparency or accountability requirements.” And if people thought even more regulations would be beneficial, the principled position would be to support vouchers with those regulations. After all, there is nothing magical about the word “public” that makes schools accountable or transparent, so whatever regulations people prefer could be imposed on vouchers as easily as on district or charter schools.
Of course, I think much of that regulation is unnecessary for accountability and undesirable for schools whether they are district, charter, or voucher schools, but there is nothing in principle that makes one type of school more impervious to accountability regulation than another. A principled position for believers in choice and competition would be to support charters and vouchers and advocate for a particular regulatory regime, regardless of whether it applied to charters or vouchers.
So if the objections to vouchers among some charter supports are not based on principles, it is reasonable to suspect that they are based on political calculations. We’ve already rehearsed this argument in an earlier post and I’m too polite to name names, but if you think hard it won’t be a challenge to come up with a the names of a bunch of people.
Today’s installment of the ongoing series Questions for Leo features this 1974 photo of Leo Casey on vacation in the Everglades with the then-chairman of the New York City Council education committee.
The Daily Newscoverage of union financial contributions to the puppets on the education committee reminds us how much green the unions have to give. So our question for Leo today is, “Is it easy giving green?”
I mailed him the question (on a cue card, of course) and he replied:
It’s not that easy giving green
Having to wish each day my conscience would leave
When I think it could be nicer
Being a thief, or a con artist, or a pro wrestler
Or something much more honest like that
It’s not easy giving green
It seems you blend in with so many other ordinary lobbyists
And people tend to pass you over
‘Cause you’re not standing out like GSEs that destroy the economy
Or stars in Hollywood
But green is the color of nastiness
And green makes politicians cool and friendly-like
And green can make you big, like a tyrant
Or important, like a monopolist
Or walk tall like you had dignity
When green rolls in from union fees
It could make you wonder why you hate children
But why wonder? Why wonder?
I have green, and it’ll do fine
It’s beautiful!
And I think it’s what you want from me
The Watchmen has a great scene where one of the heroes is unmasked and sent to prison. Needless to say, the place is swimming in criminal anxious to kill him. Our hero, a rather rough-edged sort of chap, is assaulted in line by a prisoner far larger than himself and using a makeshift knife to boot.
Not only does our hero quickly disable his attacker, for good measure, he smashes a plate of glass, grabs a container of hot cooking grease, and douses the bloke who dared to assault him. As the prison guards dragged him away, he growled out “You don’t seem to understand. I’m not locked in here with you…YOU’RE LOCKED IN HERE WITH ME!!!!!”
You can watch this, grisly violence and all, here:
Now much gloom surrounds the fight over DC vouchers. Jay even seems to refer to them in the past tense in the Wall Street Journal. Could it be, however, that we’ve misread things? Perhaps we’re not locked in the prison with Dick Durbin. Perhaps he is locked in the prison with us.
Now Messrs. Obama and Duncan find themselves in a Vietnam-style quagmire. They’ve crushed the hopes and dreams of 200 low-income D.C. families while staking out the otherwise-reasonably-decent position that 1,700 youngsters already in the program should be protected until they graduate. Yet even that outcome is in doubt, as the program’s enemies strive to kill it outright. Meanwhile, both are vulnerable to personal attacks, with the President’s children in an elite private school and the Secretary admitting that he chose a (public) school outside the District for his daughter because he didn’t want to “jeopardize my own children’s education.”
The time has come for both to learn some key lessons. First: though it might look like a teapot, the D.C. voucher program is capable of causing a major tempest that isn’t going to end anytime soon. Second: if you want Congress to cough up funds to keep the program’s current students in their schools, it’s going to take a fight–an affirmative fight by you in defense of vouchers that work for poor kids! And third: don’t fear such a fight, because the facts–not to mention a compelling human narrative–are on your side.
This fight rids us of all illusions- you are either with the kids, or with the unions. Period. You either believe in evidence based education reform, or you do not. No middle ground. If you are a Democrat, you must choose whether you are a hero or a zero. If you want to be a zero, are you willing to throw 1,700 kids under the bus in order to do it?
No amount of complaining by policy wonks, of course, is going to change the political realities on this. It’s not hard to imagine, however, the DC Parents drenching the zeros in the political equivalent of hot grease.
In today’s Wall Street Journal Jay makes a lot of good points about the teacher unions and their true feelings about charter schools. Along the way, however, he says Obama has “done union bidding by killing the D.C. voucher program.” This is likely true, but readers should not think that all attempts to save the program have run their course. Senator Lieberman has stated that he plans to hold hearings about the program in May. Senator Feinstein said in March that if the official evaluation by the Department of Ed found positive results (which it did) then she too would support extending the program. Negative press and public pressure calling on Obama to support reauthorizing the program has been increasing daily.
Congress and, most importantly, President Obama, still have an opportunity to do the right thing, stand by their stated principles, and reauthorize a program that has been scientifically proven to help disadvantaged D.C. schoolchildren improve their lives.
DC kids would tell Jay (although certainly with less cheese):
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