When All Politics is Personal

November 12, 2008

Max Brantley, Arkansas blogger and the editor of the free-weekly Arkansas Times, seems like a fun guy.  While I’ve never met him, I can tell from reading his blog that he enjoys good food and drinks.  He enjoys travel.  He’s devoted to family and friends.  He seems like the kind of guy that you might want to have some beers with as he recounted old stories.

Brantley is also a breath of fresh air in a state that is remarkably averse to open debate of controversial issues.  He’s fearless — a giant-slayer.  He’s willing to take-on powerful interests and actors in a Southern culture that leans heavily toward deference.  These qualities make him quite admirable and at times fun to read.

But Brantley has another, all-too-common, Southern trait that makes him much less than admirable and sometimes awful to read.  For Brantley it is clear that all politics is personal.  He doesn’t seem primarily interested in ideas or principles.  He’s interested in promoting his friends and punishing his enemies — mostly punishing his enemies.  Despite being strikingly and openly leftist in his thinking, Brantley is really not much of an ideologue. He’s a personal networker.

He’ll attack efforts that he might otherwise support if those efforts would help people he’s deemed to be enemies.  See, for example, his recent denunciation of state Rep. Dan Greenberg’s efforts to produce ethics reform in the Arkansas legislature.  If Brantley really cared about the idea of ethics reform, he’d probably back proposals to move things in the right direction.  But personal vendettas matter more to him than principles.

You see, Dan Greenberg is the son of Paul Greenberg, the editorial writer for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.  The Dem-Gaz is owned by Walter Hussman, who bought and basically closed the old Gazette newspaper for whom Brantley used to work in 1991.  After being let go by Hussman, Brantley has been reduced to running a free-weekly that occassionally has great investigative reporting but mostly lives off of gossip, show-listings, and naughty personal ads. 

For nearly two decades Brantley has seethed about this injury, lashing out at anyone connected to Hussman — even when connected with several degrees of separation.  So Brantley hectors Dan Greenberg because he’s connected to Paul Greenberg, who’s connected to Hussman.  I’m sure that Brantley and the younger Greenberg truly disagree on many issues.  But my point is that even when they agree, Brantley’s personal rage and relative disinterest in ideas prevent him from embracing that agreement.

I’ve also been a frequent target of Brantley’s bile.   My sin?  I’m connected to the Waltons, although more loosely than Brantley will admit or understands.  And the Waltons are allies with Hussman on school reform in Arkansas.  So when my department hosted a lecture by Democratic U.S. Senator Blanche Lincoln, Brantley posted this:

Coming to Waltonville

We notice that Sen. Blanche Lincoln(D-Waltonsas) is speaking Thursday at Walton University in a program sponsored by the Walton School of Education Reform.It’s a good forum for a senator who carries so much water for Wal-Mart and the Walton heirs on other matters — estate tax abolition, etc.. No Child Left Behind, “teacher quality” and other education topics will be discussed at this week’s event. Jay P. Greene, head Walton shill and professor of teacher derision at Waltonville, surely will be on hand, perhaps with a script for the senator.

Never mind that Sen. Lincoln agrees with Brantley on most issues.  And never mind that much of what Sen. Lincoln had to say in her lecture was consistent with what Brantley normally supports.  You can watch the lecture here to see for yourself if she was reading from a script that I or someone else wrote.  Brantley nevertheless had to find a way to denounce an event that was connected to people who were connected to other people who were connected to his enemies.  This kind of anger management problem is normally treated with medication and therapy, but Brantley finds blogging to be cheaper and easier.

Brantley may hate me (and a long list of other people) but I don’t feel the same about him.  He can be dangerous and spiteful, but Brantley is also entertaining and informative.  I’m OK with agreeing with him on some things and disagreeing on others.  I don’t feel the need to join his personal grudge-match and extend hatred to everyone with whom he is connected.  I only wish Max Brantley would do the same.

2 Comments | politics | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Starbucks Bailout Needed

November 11, 2008

After experiencing a 97% decline in profit and an 8% drop in same store sales, Starbucks should also get in line for a federal bailout.  The collapse of Starbucks would pose a “systemic” risk to the economy.  Caffeine-deprived workers would fuel a spiraling decline in productivity.  Withdrawal headaches would spark fights in the streets, family disintegration, and general grumpiness.

And let’s not forget the baristas who risk losing their jobs.  Remember that Seattle was built by baristas who passed the tradition from father to son.  Do we want to turn Seattle into another Flint, Michigan?  Besides, how can we retrain them for other work that would still permit their goatees, piercings, and tattoos?

2 Comments | economics | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Who Cares Where Obama’s Kids Will Go to School?

November 10, 2008

Even worse than the tedium of lame election coverage is the tedium of lame post-election coverage.  Did I really have to hear 10,000 news stories on what kind of dog Obama will get? Or how about the 10 thousand million gzillion stories about where the Obama children will go to school? Ugh.

Even worse, education bloggers have joined this lame-fest offering endless opinions and interpretations about the significance of whether the Obama children will attend public or private school.  We’ve seen postings over at Flypaper, Eduwonkette (the posting was actually by Aaron Pallas, a grown man and otherwise respectable scholar who chooses to call himself “skoolboy”), Jay Matthews at the Washington Post, Joanne Jacobs, ….  The list goes on but I got so bored typing it that I dozed off for a while.

So why is the topic of where the Obama kids will go to school politically irrelevant?  Supporters of choice try to use the fact that anti-voucher presidents choose private schools rather than DC public schools as evidence of hypocrisy.  I don’t buy that argument.  There is no more hypocrisy in saying that public dollars should only go to public schools even if I choose to use my own dollars at private schools than in saying that public dollars shouldn’t go to think tanks even if I donate to them with my private dollars. 

Folks hostile to vouchers worry that the Obamas choosing a private school is part of a broader problem where the public purposes of education are being undermined by private consumption.  Skoolboy goes so far as to worry that private education might be contrary to the public goal of “producing citizens prepared for life in a democracy” and entertains the “provocative” proposal from one of his students to “eliminate private schooling altogether [to] reduce both the temptation and the capacity for members of privileged groups to use their resources to maintain their advantages.”  He dismisses the proposal as not “feasible” but we could only imagine how wonderful everything would be if skoolboy and his students ran the world.  Not only could we do away with private schools but we could also all have really cool blogger rapper names, like The Notorious JPG and DJ Super-Awesome. 

Skoolboy seems to believe that private education undermines the public purposes of education, while public schools do not.  And I can only assume that the airtight logic behind his view is that both public education and public purpose have the word, public, in them.  Because if he bothered to familiarize himself with the empirical evidence on the relationship between private education and the production of citizens prepared for life in a democracy, he’d find that private schools better serve that purpose.  Patrick Wolf has an excellent summary of that literature.

Folks may want to score points for or against vouchers with the Obama children, but let’s just leave them alone and ignore them like we did during most of the campaign.

15 Comments | vouchers | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Just the People You Want Managing Schools

November 6, 2008

Five school districts in Wisconsin have sued their investment advisors after losing $1.5 million on a $2 million investment in collateralized debt obligations.  That’s a 75% loss.  According to the lawsuit, the investment was “complex, convoluted, and opaque, and as Stifel and RBC then well knew, beyond the investment knowledge or experience of the School Districts . . . , their school board members, and their administrators.” 

Complex?  Convoluted?  Opaque? That sounds like just the thing that school officials should put the public’s money in.

But don’t worry.  It’s not their fault that they did something foolish.  It was the fault of the people who sold it to them and they are asking the courts to return the money.  And if that doesn’t work, they’ll just take it from you in future taxes.

I wonder if school officials can do the same if they select foolish educational policies.  If that faddish whole language reading curriculum didn’t work can they sue the people who sold it to them to get their money back?

This all reminds me of a great Shel Silverstein poem:

 Smart

My dad gave me one dollar bill

‘Cause I’m his smartest son,

And I swapped it for two shiny quarters

‘Cause two is more than one!

And then I took the quarters

And traded them to Lou

For three dimes—I guess he don’t know

That three is more than two!

Just then, along came old blind Bates

And just ‘cause he can’t see

He gave me four nickels for my three dimes,

And four is more than three!

And I took the nickels to Hiram Coombs

Down at the seed-feed store,

And the fool gave me five pennies for them,

And five is more than four!

And then I went and showed my dad,

And he got red in the cheeks

And closed his eyes and shook his head—

Too proud of me to speak!

Leave a Comment » | economics, scandal | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Why I Vote on Election Day

November 4, 2008

 

A bunch of my friends and family have voted early.  Not me.  I’m voting on election day.  Why?

Look, let’s be clear that it doesn’t make any sense to vote if your goal is to determine the outcome of the election.  The probability that the outcome would be tied in the absence of your vote is so remote as to not be worth your time bothering.  And even in the extremely unlikely event that the margin in a presidential election were 1 vote, the outcome would almost certainly be decided by a handful of unelected judges rather than your vote.  We’ve already seen that even if the margin is a few hundred votes, there is enough imprecision in the casting and counting of votes that the courts will really determine the outcome. 

I know, I know, you can say that if everyone thought that way, no one would vote.  But that’s entirely beside the point.  The self-interested rational thing to do if you are only concerned with determining the outcome is to urge everyone else to vote and save yourself the effort. 

So why vote if it is irrational to expect that your vote will be the deciding one?  Rational people don’t vote to break what they otherwise expect to be a tie.  They vote because it is part of a social, communal experience. 

And that is exactly why I am voting on election day and not early.  I want to go to the polling place, visit with my neighbors, and drink some bad coffee.  Voting is like doing the wave at a football game.  It almost certainly has no effect on the game.  It’s purpose is to participate and enjoy the social feeling of being part of something.  It makes no more sense to vote early than to do the wave while watching the game at home on your TV.  Voting, like doing the wave, is a social experience whose benefits depend upon context.

Besides, politics is becoming more like sports everyday.  People choose teams and root for them, even if there is no obvious benefit to them for doing so.  They watch the returns like looking at the boxscore.  So, I want to be at the game when I vote, just like I’m going to be at Bud Walton Arena, the basketball palace of mid-America, to watch the Razorbacks.  I want to call the Hogs with the crowd.  I want to see them raise the Arkansas flag banner behind the pyramid of cheerleaders (it brings a tear to my eye, everytime).

6 Comments | politics | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Want to Pass A Local School Tax Increase? Open Charters

November 3, 2008

Here’s a neat piece of research posted at Heny Levin’s National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education.  The study is actually by Arnold Shober and it examines whether the presence of charter schools in a district affects the likelihood that voters will support a local school tax increase. 

It has been getting more and more difficult to obtain local support for school tax increases.  But, Shober wonders, might it be easier to pass a school tax referenda in communities that have more options paid by tax dollars?  Maybe people more satisfied with the quality and diversity of publicly-financed schools, including charter options, are more willing to provide extra tax dollars for all schools.

As it turns out, Shober finds that they do.  He analyzed data from 1,111 school tax referenda in Wisconsin between 1998 and 2005.  He concludes:

“Adding one charter school to the district that has none increases the likelihood of passage 4.1 percent; increasing the number of charter schools from 0 to 8 (the maximum for these data) increases the likelihood of passage 30.2 percent second only to the effect of a college-educated electorate (below). This suggests that charter schools do have some bearing on how votes perceive a school district’s responsiveness to active-parent demands. Indeed, authorizing charter schools is the only variable in this analysis that a school district’s administration could directly manipulate (save the actual ballot request).”

It seems that restricting families’ options and forcing them to attend dirstrict schools whether those schools serve their kids well or not is not the best strategy to get those same families to cough up more dough for the public school system.  People are more likely to be supportive of a public school system that helps them find schools that work for their kids — even if those schools are charters.

2 Comments | charter schools, competitive effects | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Obama Wins Arkansas!

October 31, 2008

… at least in the mock election held in many Arkansas schools.  According to the Northwest Arkansas Times, “Statewide, Obama won the mock election for Arkansas with 49, 088 votes, compared to 34, 393 for McCain.”  Does this mean anything for Tuesday’s outcome in the state?  I doubt it.  McCain holds a double-digit lead in multiple polls in the state.  But who knows?

Leave a Comment » | politics | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Pass the Clicker — Pee Wee’s Playhouse

October 30, 2008

Go ahead and make fun, but the fact is that Pee Wee’s Playhouse was the most imaginative, interesting, and funny program ever to appear on Saturday morning TV (with the obvious exception of Bugs Bunny, which was actually made for movie theaters and only appeared on Saturday morning years later). 

Pee-Wee’s Playhouse (PWP) had a budget per episode that was typical of prime time shows of its era rather than the typical budget of some chintzy, bad-animation 30 minute infomercial for a dumb toy (I’m looking at you, He-Man).  With that budget PWP was able to offer a mix of claymation, animation, puppetry, live-action, and a creative set.  And it had a long list of talented actors.  PWP regulars included Phil Hartman, Laurence Fishburne, and S. Epatha Merkerson (of Law and Order fame).  Special guests included Jimmy Smits and Grace Jones in this so awful it is great Christmas special singling Little Drummer Boy.  You have to see it to believe it:

OK, still don’t believe me that this was the greatest Saturday morning TV show ever?  It won 22 Emmys.  And it had this scene where Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne) prepares for a date by practicing with Pee Wee pretending to be Miss Yvonne (I know, it’s a stretch):

And who could resist repeat-gags like the secret word, when everyone would have to “scream real loud” whenever it was said.  Like this “time” when the secret word was “time”:

Don’t forget that Tim Burton also launched his directing career with the movie Pee Wee’s Great Adventure and Danny Elfman did the music for both the TV show and movie.

PWP was not bad-good, like the Harlem Globetrotters cartoon or Shazam/Isis.  It was good-good.

(I should add that I had the honor of meeting the actress who played Chairry this summer.  Barrymore never had Chairry on his resume.)

9 Comments | Pass the Clicker | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

John J. Miller Smacks Half Sigma

October 29, 2008

National Review columnist John J. Miller smacks a blogger known as “Half Sigma” for “dis”ing special education vouchers.  Half Sigma wrote: “Republicans applaud themselves for doing stuff that the left has been pushing for. We nominated a woman for Vice President. How wonderful of us. The female candidate talks about how she’s going to help “special needs” children, and the so-called conservatives applaud the conservatism of it. How wonderful of us. We are going to fight global warming. How wonderful of us.”

Miller then responds on The Corner: “I love those sneer quotes around “special needs.” Would it be better if we called them “retards”?

But that’s just a style point. The substance itself is vaporous. Sarah Palin — oops! “the female candidate” — is calling for the voucherization of special-education spending. This is a very good idea. It’s modeled on one of Jeb Bush’s best market-oriented reforms in Florida, where McKay Scholarships have gotten kids out of lousy public schools and into good private ones, saving taxpayer dollars in the process. School choice has been an elusive public-policy goal of conservatives for a long time; this is a promising path to securing more of it. I urge you to read NRO’s editorial; also this NRO article by Jay Greeneand my article in the Oct. 20 NRODT.”

Besides, The Notorious JPG and DJ Super-Awesome may give Half Sigma a whooping for not having read the post about how bloggers shouldn’t have rapper names

2 Comments | special ed, vouchers | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

The Infinte Regress

October 29, 2008

There is no problem to which more education is not the proposed solution.  Teachers aren’t as effective as they should be?  Increase professional development.  Professional development isn’t as effective as it should be?  Increase training for providers of professional development.  Wash.  Rinse.  Repeat.

So, when Mathematica found that intensive mentoring for first year teachers had no effect on those teachers’ practices or their students’ academic achievement, what did folks have to say?  Improve the training of the mentors. 

Similarly, when Mathematica evaluated a broad range of education technology in schools they found: “Test scores were not significantly higher in classrooms using selected reading and mathematics software products. Test scores in treatment classrooms that were randomly assigned to use products did not differ from test scores in control classrooms by statistically significant margins.”  But, critics of the study said that it “didn’t take into account the critical factors of proper implementation and curriculum integration, professional development for teachers, planning, or infrastructure issues, among others. ”  That is, the results would be better if only we provided more education to teachers and administrators to implement the technology appropriately.  Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

And again when the Department of Education’s evaluation of Reading First showed no advantage for students’ reading achievement, others responded that the schools studied had not properly implemented the program or trained their teachers.

The problem with offering more education as the solution to each failure is that it assumes that the only thing educators are lacking is knowledge of the right thing to do.  If only we bother to tell them, educators are hungry to learn the right thing and implement it well.  But as I’ve argued in the past, educators are also lacking the motivation to learn these techniques and implement them well.

All of these interventions — mentoring, technology, and increased reliance on phonics — may very well be desirable.  But unless we address the incentives that educators have to identify effective practices, learn them, and use them well, no amount of additional education will solve the problem.

18 Comments | instructional reform | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

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