Jay P. Greene's Blog

Ed reform has been going through a bad stretch lately.  Currently dominant reform theories are the result of technocratic thinking.  They seek to identify (and impose) “optimal” topics to be taught, ways to teach those subjects, methods for training teachers, strategies for evaluating and motivating teachers, etc…  An army of economists or economist-wannabes have seized the reins of reform organizations with the hope that their next regression will tell everyone what to do to solve the mystery of improving schools.  They pay little heed to history, which might alert them to the failure of past efforts similar to their brave new undertakings.  And they are unfamiliar with basic lessons from political science on the dangers and failures of technocratic central planning.

Let me offer one political science lesson for ed reformers that I learned from reading Edward Luttwak’s book, Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace.  Luttwak argues that there is a paradoxical logic to strategy.  In the realm of strategy what often seems good turns out to be bad and vice versa.  This is why strategists often say things like: “If you want peace, prepare for war;” “A buildup of offensive weapons can be purely defensive;” and “The worst road may be the best route to battle.”

Both military and political strategy have this paradoxical logic because they involve opponents who can observe your efforts and make counter-moves.  You can’t just run a regression to find the optimal solution and then expect everyone to thank you for discovering what you claim to be better methods.  Education is a political system that involves competing interests and values.  For the most part our problems are not caused by ignorance of optimal solutions, but by these clashing interests and values embedded in dysfunctional systems.

To fix these problems we need to address people’s competing interests and values and not just impose a technocratic solution from above.  In education, as in military and political strategy more generally, the most direct and definitive path to victory often lays the foundations for defeat.  Instead, the indirect and less definitive solution is almost always more effective.

Before turning to education, let’s consider the paradoxical logic of strategy with respect to another policy — gay marriage.  Opponents of gay marriage pursued the most direct and definitive approach to securing the victory of their policy view.  In 1996 they managed to get a bipartisan and veto-proof majority in Congress to pass the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which became law with the signature of President Bill Clinton.  DOMA “barred same-sex married couples from being recognized as ‘spouses’ for purposes of federal laws, effectively barring them from receiving federal marriage benefits.”  Opponents then managed to get 31 states to adopt constitutional amendments forbidding those states from recognizing same-sex unions.

By banning gay marriage at the federal level and in a majority of state constitutions one might have thought that opponents of gay marriage had scored a decisive victory.  But, by seeking to impose their policy view with a direct and definitive approach, the opponents of gay marriage planted the seeds of their own defeat.  Big losses for supporters of gay marriage motivated them to organize and develop inventive strategies for reversing those defeats.  They focused heavily on influencing popular culture and the media.  They went to the courts.

Meanwhile, opponents of gay marriage failed to continue efforts aimed at influencing mass opinion and neglected the debate.  They thought they had won, so why keep debating?  In a diverse, decentralized, and democratic country, there are no permanent political victories or defeats.  Winning a legislative battle or ballot initiative does not make the other side change its mind or go away.  They’re still there, devising ways to come back and win in future rounds.

Supporters of Common Core have made some of the same political mistakes that opponents of gay marriage did.  They figured if they could get the US Department of Education, DC-based organizations, and state school chiefs on board, they would have a direct and definitive victory.  And at first blush it looked like they had achieved it, with about 45 states committing to adopt the new set of standards and federally-sponsored standardized tests aligned to those standards.  Like opponents of gay marriage, the Common Core victory seemed so overwhelming that they hardly felt the need to engage in debates to defend it.

But in the rush to a clear and total victory, supporters of Common Core failed to consider how the more than 10,000 school districts, more than 3 million teachers, and the parents of almost 50 million students would react.  For standards to actually change practice, you need a lot of these folks on board.  Otherwise Common Core, like most past standards, will just be a bunch of empty words in a document.

These millions of local officials, educators, and parents often have reasons for holding educational preferences that are different than those dictated by Common Core.  Common Core may call for things like more focus on “informational texts”  and delaying Algebra until 9th grade, but there are reasons why that is not already universal practice.  It’s not as if local officials, educators, and parents are unaware of the existence of informational texts or just waiting to be told by national elites about when they should start teaching Algebra.  They have interests and values that drove them to the arrangements that were in place prior to Common Core.

Having the Secretary of Education, state boards, and a bunch of DC advocacy groups declare a particular approach to be best and cram it into place in the middle of a financial crisis with virtually no public debate or input from educators or parents did not convince local officials, educators, and parents to change their minds.  These are the folks who need to be on board to make the implementation of Common Core real.  And these are the folks who are organizing a political backlash that will undo or neuter Common Core.  A direct path to victory by Common Core supporters sowed the seeds of  its own defeat.

The unraveling of Common Core makes this flop the most obviously ill-conceived and doomed-to-fail reform effort since the Annenberg Foundation threw $500 million away in the 1990s.  I assure you that while the money was flowing from Annenberg that effort had plenty of defenders, just as Common Core does today.  After Common Core fails, everyone will say how they knew it was flawed, just as they currently do with Annenberg.  Victory has a thousand fathers while defeat is an orphan.

But some of us have been warning of the political naivite of the Common Core effort for some time now.  Rick Hess and Mike McShane at AEI have also done an admirable job of describing the political weakness of Common Core, regardless of what one thinks of the merits of the standards themselves.

Supporters of Common Core may draw the wrong lesson from this post and increase efforts to convince the public and train educators to love the Common Core.  Not only will these re-education efforts be too little, too late, but they fail to grasp the inherent flaw in reforms like Common Core.  Trying to change the content and practice of the entire nation’s school system requires a top-down, direct, and definitive victory to get adopted.  If input and deliberation are sought, or decisions are truly decentralized, then it is too easy to block standards reforms, like Common Core.  Supporters of CC learned this much from the numerous failed efforts to adopt national standards in the past.

But the brute force and directness required for adopting national standards makes its effective implementation in a diverse, decentralized, and democratic country impossible.  This can’t be solved by more professional development and a belated marketing campaign.  Even the Chinese re-education camps couldn’t make the Cultural Revolution reailty — and they invested a whole lot more energy and resources in trying to do so than the Common Core folks ever could.

There is a better, more indirect and less definitive approach to education reform.  In the next post I’ll discuss what that looks like.

Paul Ehrlich is a Stanford University biologist most famous for his 1968 book, The Population Bomb, and subsequent dire predictions about how human population growth would exhaust food and other natural resource supplies, leading to cataclysmic destruction of the human race and all of earth’s creatures.  Ehrlich was not the first to predict that population growth would outstrip food production (the idea goes back at least to the 18th century’s Thomas Robert Malthus), and he certainly won’t be the last.  People love doomsday predictions no matter how often they turn out false.

And Ehrlich’s predictions have turned out to be remarkably false.  Wikipedia provides some examples:

On the first Earth Day in 1970, he warned that “[i]n ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish.” In a 1971 speech, he predicted that: “By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people … If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”

The fact that nearly half a century after warning of  the imminent collapse of civilization and mass starvation Ehrlich’s predictions have not come to pass has done nothing to shake Ehrlich or his most ardent supporters’ confidence in his analysis.  Disaster has merely been deferred, in their view.  Like the members of the cult profiled in Leon Festinger‘s When Prophesy Fails, Ehrlich and his supporters have doubled-down with an increased conviction that human action is about to destroy the planet.

Of course, it is always possible that humans will eventually destroy themselves, but this does not appear to be imminent.  Ehrlich’s analysis has been and is likely to continue to be flawed because he grossly under-estimates the ability of human ingenuity to innovate and adapt, avoiding resource shortage catastrophes.

The economist, Julian Simon, articulated this argument in his 1981 book, The Ultimate Resource.  Simon explains that price is the most efficient mechanism for avoiding shortage catastrophes.  When rising demand begins to make a resource more scarce, the price rises.  Rising prices provide strong incentives for people to find substitutes for the scarce resource or to innovate and develop techniques for producing more of that resource.  Catastrophic shortages tend not to sneak up on us.  Prices anticipate future shortages and give us time to innovate or adapt.

To prove his point, Simon actually made a wager with Ehrlich about how innovation and adaptation would make shortages less severe over time, causing resource prices to tend to decline in real terms.  Here’s how Wikipedia describes the wager:

In 1968, Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, which argued that mankind was facing a demographic catastrophe with the rate of population growth quickly outstripping growth in the supply of food and resources. Simon was highly skeptical of such claims, so proposed a wager, telling Ehrlich to select any raw material he wanted and select “any date more than a year away,” and Simon would bet that the commodity’s price on that date would be lower than what it was at the time of the wager.

Ehrlich and his colleagues (including John Holdren, later an advisor to President Barack Obama for Science and Technology) picked five metals that they thought would undergo big price increases: chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten. Then, on paper, they bought $200 worth of each, for a total bet of $1,000, using the prices on September 29, 1980, as an index. They designated September 29, 1990, 10 years hence, as the payoff date. If the inflation-adjusted prices of the various metals rose in the interim, Simon would pay Ehrlich the combined difference. If the prices fell, Ehrlich et al. would pay Simon.

Between 1980 and 1990, the world’s population grew by more than 800 million, the largest increase in one decade in all of history. But by September 1990, the price of each of Ehrlich’s selected metals had fallen…. As a result, in October 1990, Paul Ehrlich mailed Julian Simon a check for $576.07 to settle the wager in Simon’s favor.

I am not nominating Paul Ehrlich for The Higgy because he’s been wrong.  A lot of scientists have been wrong about a lot of things and there is no harm in advancing an argument that turns out to be mistaken.  Nor am I nominating Ehrlich because he has stubbornly adhered to his theories despite considerable evidence to contradict them.  This is a remarkably common flaw among scientists when they are proved wrong and also does relatively little harm.

Instead, I am nominating Ehrlich because his arguments have provided intellectual support for oppressive government policies to reduce population growth.  As Ehrlich wrote in The Population Bomb:

“We must have population control at home, hopefully through a system of incentives and penalties, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail. We must use our political power to push other countries into programs which combine agricultural development and population control.”

As it turned out, resource shortages have not produced the catastrophes Ehrlich expected, but government-orchestrated population control efforts have almost certainly been far more destructive, let alone oppressive.

China’s One Child Policy is the most glaring example of the devastation produced by this mistaken, authoritarian approach.  Since 1979 China has imposed fines on families that have what the government considers to be too many children.  This “system of incentives and penalties,” as Ehrlich suggested, was effective at reducing population growth in China… but at what cost and for what benefit?

Because families are pushed to have only one child and because there is a strong preference for boys, girls have become an endangered species in China.  Between 2000 and 2013 there were 117 male babies born for every 100 girl babies, likely the result of selective-sex abortions.  In addition, neglect, abandonment, and outright infanticide are skewing China even more towards boys after birth.  According to a Chinese government commission, there will be 30 million more men than women in 2020.  In short, there has been a female genocide in China with hardly a peep from American feminists pre-occupied with what they consider more important matters, like whether they need to Lean In to avoid being called “bossy.”

The gender imbalance produced by China’s One Child Policy is also far more likely to lead to social instability and war than the imaginary resource crisis it was meant to prevent.  Having tens of millions of young men unable to find wives is likely to create a violent mob whose untamed aggression Chinese leaders may wish to divert toward conquest and war rather than against their own rule.

The severe decline in birth rates is also creating a demographic disaster of enormous proportions.  Elderly Chinese are dependent on a shrinking number of younger Chinese to support them in old age.  If young Chinese men are not driven toward violence by an inability to find marriageable women, they may well be by the crushing burden of having to work harder and longer to support a much larger number of older Chinese.

And of course, it is hard to imagine a more severe intrusion on personal liberty, including women’s reproductive rights, than to have the government coerce people to have only one child.  Again, where are the developed world’s feminists on this issue?

The Chinese government has begun to notice the disaster they’ve created and are starting to relax the One Child Policy in a variety of ways.  Unfortunately, government technocracy is not nearly as efficient at anticipating and adjusting to the future as price mechanisms are.  There is a government-induced shortage of young people, particularly young women, that cannot be as quickly corrected by tinkering with China’s family policy as other resource constraints could be handled by allowing price to encourage adaptation and innovation.

Ehrlich is worthy of The Higgy because he advanced the catastrophically wrong notion that central planning could more efficiently manage resources than could price mechanisms.  And he is further worthy because his views rationalize the enormous infringements on human liberty that central planning produces.

(Guest post by James Shuls)

What would it look like if Hollywood put teacher tenure on trial on the silver screen? I imagine the closing arguments would look something like this, although probably condensed to 3 minutes. This is video of the closing argument of Marcellus McRae, lead co-counsel for the plaintiffs in Vergara v. California. It is just shy of an hour, but is well worth a watch.

I’ve taken the liberty to pull out some of my favorite quotes.

McRae notes that the teacher credentialing period can actually be longer than the period provided to determine tenure decisions. He says:

“Teachers can actually receive notice that they are being reelected for a tenure teaching position and then subsequently fail to successfully complete the induction program necessary to obtain a clear credential. That’s like telling somebody, we’re going to go ahead and let you get out on the highway and endanger everybody else’ lives for two months and then we’re going to tell you that you failed your driver’s test.”

He goes on to refute the idea that principals can gather enough information in the 16 month period allowed to make tenure decisions.

“There’s not enough time. There’s not enough data. There’s not enough processing time to get an informed view about who can achieve learning gains. So, that you’re deluding yourself if you think you actually have visibility into whether or not this is an informed decision. What you’re doing with your drive by observations in the classroom, what you’re doing in this 16 month, unduly compressed period is making tenure decisions based on impressionism rather than realism. And that is not good enough for the children in the state of California.

How long does it take to remove a tenured teacher who is grossly ineffective? Too long.

“LAUSD has never completed a performance based teacher dismissal hearing in less than two years. Your honor, think about that. We have litigated this case, and we have brought it from the filing of the complaint trough demurs, through discovery, through summary judgment in less time than it takes to dismiss a teacher for unsatisfactory performance in California. That is insane.

But there are ways of getting around tenure laws, there is a ‘workaround.’

“How many times does someone devise a workaround for something that isn’t broken? You can’t make sense out of nonsense.”

He points out the insanity of the “Last In, First Out” (LIFO) layoff policies, which resulted in a teacher of the year being laid off.

“What kind of system do we have, where your prize, your reward, for being teacher of the year is to receive a layoff notice?”

The defendants argued that LIFO was good because it was objective. He points out how the absurdity of this claim.

“…touting something as objective as if that’s virtuous, well height is objective. I mean, alphabetical order is objective. You could have a layoff system based on who can dunk a basketball. I don’t think we want that either, just because its objective doesn’t mean that it has any merit to it and it points out that it is an absurd untenable argument.”

But, but, tenure just gives teachers due process.

“This is not an effort to attack due process. What the teachers under the dismissal code have is not due process. They have excessive, bloated, unnecessary statutory protections. What California state employees have, including teachers, like classified employees, that’s due process.”

And last, but not least:

We have Serrano which acknowledges that funding is an essential component to educational equality. We have the Buck case that acknowledges that time in school is an essential component to educational equality. Let’s place Vergara in that same vain and acknowledge the obvious, that teachers are an essential component to educational equality.

——————————

James Shuls is the Director of Education Policy at the Show-Me Institute. Follow on Twitter @shulsie

The Edu-Pundit Industry loves faux-business-like measures of their effectiveness, so here’s one for you — the Return on Tweets.

In my first “Narcissus” post about Twitter I suggested that Twitter encourages some people to talk much more than people actually want to listen.  So I developed my first faux measure of the ratio of Tweets to Followers to capture that.

In my second “Narcissus” post I suggested that there is perhaps an unhealthy compulsive nature to high-frequency Tweeting.  So I developed another faux measure of the number of minutes on average during people’s waking lives between each tweet.  I identified “The Lost Threshold” to highlight folks who Tweet more often, on average, than once every 108 minutes of their waking lives.  As with the characters in Lost who believe they must enter The Numbers into a computer every 108 minutes, it is ambiguous whether they are engaged in an incredibly important activity (like saving the world) that is worthy of this compulsive behavior or maybe suffering from a manic delusion.

In this third post I calculate how many tweets people have sent between April 2, 2013 and March 27, 2014 as well as the change in “Followers” each person has experienced during that period.  Dividing the number of new tweets by the change in followers, I get the Return on Tweets.  If tweeting is influencing the world, rather than just enjoying listening to oneself talk, then more people should be attracted to listen, or follow, as people talk, or tweet.  People who have to issue more tweets for each new follower have a lower Return on Tweets.

I’m constrained to use the same list of people as I used in my initial post because they are the only ones for whom I have historical information on the number of tweets and followers.  The list for the initial post was identified from Mike Petrilli’s ranking of the most influential education policy Tweeters.  In addition, recent tweet and follower counts have sometimes become less precise when they are large numbers because Twitter has rounded that information to the closest hundred or thousand.  But this is good enough for a faux measure in a dumb blog post about a dumb activity.

As you can see, Alfie Kohn, Michelle Rhee, Vicki Phillips, Wendy Kopp, Sara Mead, and Diane Ravitch have a very high Return on Tweets.  Kohn gets almost 50 new followers for every tweet.  Diane Ravitch may tweet on a near-constant basis, but she attracts new followers even faster — almost three new followers for every one of her 11,102 tweets over the last 359 days.

On the other end of the spectrum are some folks with a very low Return on Tweets.  They send many tweets for each new follower. Sherman Dorn issues almost 17 tweets for each new follower; Morgan Polikoff almost 13; RiShawn Biddle almost 11; Sara Goldrick-Rab more than 9; and Neal McClusky more than 7.  I actually enjoy “following” many of these folks, but that may be an acquired taste.

It is no accident that “powerful people” with money to dispense or popular programs to trumpet show better Returns on Tweets than do scholars.  Maybe Twitter just isn’t the right place for scholarly exchange.  It’s fine for telling a joke, sharing a link, or following breaking news, but as a place for serious policy discussion Twitter seems to have a very low return on investment.

Dude.  You should check out Pat Wolf’s review of Chris and Sarah Lubienki’s new book claiming that public schools academically outperform private schools.  Despite decades of research, including rigorous experiments showing the opposite, the Lubienksis discover a public school advantage by 1) restricting their analysis to standardized math scores (reading, graduation rates, college attendance, incomes, etc…don’t fit their story so they ignore those measures),  2) controlling for participation in government programs, like free lunch and special ed, which are not comparable across public and private schools because privates participate and identify students for those programs at much lower rates, even when dealing with the same exact students, 3) arbitrarily excluding from their longitudinal analysis students who switch sectors.

The net effect of these three methodological choices, plus the fact that standardized math results are more closely aligned with how the subject is taught in public than private schools, strongly skew the results in favor of public schools.  The beauty of randomized experiments is that their results are not so easily manipulated by bizarre choices of what is controlled.  But the Lubienski’s don’t like randomized experiments.  Advocates for quack medicine also tend not to like randomized experiments.  They don’t let you selectively control for things until you get the answer you want.

Dude, let’s go bowling.

One of my personal heroes, Kinky Friedman, appears poised to win the Democratic nomination to be the party’s candidate for Texas Agriculture Commissioner.  According to today’s Wall Street Journal, Friedman knocked out the party establishment’s candidate and is facing a run-off against a little-known cattle rancher who has no plans to raise money or campaign for the office.  Kinky’s prospects in the general election may be weak, but it looks like he has a good shot at the nomination.  And Texas Agriculture Commissioner is no small job.  The WSJ describes it as “a powerful position that oversees an agency with 700 employees and a $550 million annual budget.”

Kinky’s likely nomination warrants national news coverage for two reasons.  First and foremost, he’s a very atypical political candidate.  He’s primarily known as a musician, comedian, and general rascal.  According to Wikipedia, his band,  Kinky Friedman and The Texas Jewboys, “toured with Bob Dylan in 1975-6. His repertoire mixed social commentary (“We Reserve the Right to Refuse Service to You”) and maudlin ballads (“Western Union Wire”) with raucous humor (such as “Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in Bed”). His “Ride ‘Em Jewboy” was an extended tribute to the victims of the Holocaust. One of his most famous numbers is “They Ain’t Makin’ Jews Like Jesus Anymore,” a song in which Kinky verbally and physically beats up a drunken white racist who berates blacks, Jews, Greeks, and Sigma Nus in a bar.”

His political views are also eccentric.  Again, according to Wikipedia: “On capital punishment, he previously summed up his position, ‘I am not anti-death penalty, but I’m damn sure anti-the-wrong-guy-getting-executed…. The system is not perfect. Until it’s perfect, let’s do away with the death penalty.'”  On gay marriage: “I support gay marriage. I believe they have a right to be as miserable as the rest of us.”  And: “According to Cigar Aficionado magazine, Friedman plans to roll back ‘any and all smoking bans’ if elected. One of his favorite quotes comes from Mark Twain: ‘If smoking is not allowed in heaven, I shall not go.’ Friedman supports the decriminalization of marijuana, though he doesn’t advocate making its sale legal. ‘I’m not talking about like Amsterdam,’ he noted, ‘We’ve got to clear some of the room out of the prisons so we can put the bad guys in there, like the pedophiles and the politicians.'”

But beneath Kinky’s politically incorrect music and public pronouncements is a serious agenda.  Watch the video above and you’ll learn that Kinky was an early Peace Corps volunteer in Indonesia.  And he’s concerned about President Obama’s lack of leadership in the Middle East and failure to connect with the “common man.”  He admires Winston Churchill and Harry Truman.  He’s a champion of the little guy.  Sure, his ideas are not carefully crafted, but that’s the point.  He’s a Jewish cowboy who pokes fun at everyone, including himself.

The second reason Kinky’s likely nomination is making news is that it’s posing problems for other Democratic candidates in Texas who had hoped to present a unified front in the coming general election.  How will they handle a candidate who has used campaign slogans such as “How Hard Could It Be?” and “Why The Hell Not?”

At the very least it will be very entertaining.  And if you’d like some entertainment in the meantime, enjoy this live performance from Ireland of Kinky Friedman and The Texas Jewboys performing “They Ain’t Makin’ Jews Like Jesus Anymore.”  Remember, he’s joking, but he’s also making a serious attack on racism.

The new SAT will be like totally awesome.  As David Coleman, that righteous dude who was Gates’ majordomo for writing Common Core and now re-writing the SAT, said, the old SAT had “become disconnected from the work of our high schools.”  Yeah, it had a bunch of bogus vocab words that only brainiacs use in literature, poetry, and other useless stuff.  

No man, the new SAT will test for words people really use when they are all-like career and college ready,  like “drill-down” and “synergy.”  As that excellent SAT company says “the SAT will focus on words that students will use consistently in college and beyond.”  Yeah, like “bong” and “extended unemployment benefits.”

And the new SAT will be all equal and stuff.  It’s no fair when people get an edge cuz they know more things.  We can’t have that.  So the new math test won’t have no pre-calculus stuff that nobody but some foreign kids know how to do anymore.  Don’t we have computers for that stuff?  The new test will just cover “linear equations, functions, and proportions,” man.  Maybe I can get extra points for writing a little note on the math problems about how they make me feel.

And there’s no penalty for guessing anymore, so I finally have a chance.  Totally excellent!

(edited to add typos)

UPDATE — Cora Frazer at The New Yorker has found some of the items from the new SAT.  Here’s a taste:

2. Student-produced-response math. According to an electronic sign in the subway, an uptown 2 train is arriving in 3 minutes. You lose a game of Tetris on your phone and see that 4 minutes have gone by, at least. The electronic sign says that a 3 train is arriving in 0 minutes. 0 minutes go by. Do you just say fuck it and walk from Barclays?

10. Short-response logic. If you wear your high-heeled boots, you will be as tall as or taller than your date. But, if you don’t wear your high-heeled boots, you will feel less cool. Should you stay at home and watch anything featuring Connie Britton?

11. Improving sentences. You receive the following text message: “You’re an animal.” This is an autocorrection of:

(a) “You’re almost at Ludlow.”

(b) “Young Leo DiCaprio.”

(c) “Do we need eggs?”

(d) No autocorrection.

12. Optional-essay response. Choose one of the following writing prompts and respond in essay form, drawing on what you have read, your observations, and your experiences.

• Write a letter to your building’s superintendent explaining that although it was you who left the roof entrance open the other night, because you wanted to show that “you’re not old yet!,” you are nevertheless a responsible tenant who puts the recycling in the right bins, unless the bins are empty and it’s unclear which is which.

• Write a controlled yet scathing Yelp review that conveys just how profoundly wrong your waiter was to refer to you and your friends as an “especially large” party, causing this waiter deep moral shame and personal fear.

• Write for as long as you can, in as many words as you can, in the space provided.

Last night’s performance by the Razorback basketball team was the most impressive showing I’ve seen in college basketball.  The Hogs destroyed Ole Miss 110 to 80.  Anthlon Bell scored 23 points in 12 minutes of play with 7 three point shots.  Mardracus Wade had 18 points with 5 three point shots.  In total the team was 17 for 30 from beyond the three point line, 37 of 77 overall, and 19 of 20 from the charity stripe.  I’ve never seen the Razorbacks shoot like that.  And the Razorback defense was ferocious, forcing 18 turnovers and blocking 2 shots.

These stats understate how well the Hogs were playing because after they were up 43 points, Coach Mike Anderson began playing everyone on the bench, especially seniors in their final home game.  Ole Miss didn’t look so bad.  We just looked awesome.

I don’t want to count our dance partners before they’ve come a-calling, but it looks like we are headed toward the Big Dance.

Here’s how Razorbacks render the old Mac Davis song:

UPDATE —  Of course it gets easier to be humble when you get whooped in the next game.

Pat Wolf has a superb post over on Choice Words about the hypocrisy of President Obama calling for program’s to advance the education of African American men while at the same time wrongly describing the results of voucher programs  that do precisely that and attempting to cut funding for those programs.

Here’s the money quote:

Given the results of these three studies, one which was overseen by the U.S. Department of Education and two which were recognized with the Department’s highest award for rigor, we might expect President Obama to receive a swift response regarding his call for the federal government to search for programs that boost educational outcomes for African American men. The U.S. Department of Education need not search far and wide for such initiatives: they have already found one. Research shows that private-school choice through vouchers or scholarships is one of our nation’s most effective dropout-prevention programs for African Americans. It should be number one on the list of programs that President Obama encourages My Brother’s Keeper to support. But, apparently, it isn’t.

In fact, President Obama’s 2015 budget proposal includes no program funding whatsoever for the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program, even though his U.S. Department of Education found it to be highly effective in promoting educational attainment for low-income African Americans. Why would the President use his phone to encourage nonprofits to promote educational opportunities for African Americans, but then use his pen to defund a federal government program already proven to do just that? Certainly that is not the sort of action one expects from his brother’s keeper.