So hidden deep in the NAEP data explorer is a variable for school enrollment. Yesterday we saw how Arizona charter schools crushed the ball on the 2015 NAEP science exams, but I was curious- would there be evidence suggesting that small schools of choice perform especially well? NAEP provides such a number in a crosstab for Arizona charter/district by school enrollment. Small district schools in Arizona performance is nothing to write home about, and are probably mostly rural. Arizona’s small charter schools-schools of choice-however, well, that is a different story. These are the 8th grade science NAEP scores for Arizona charter schools with 399 or fewer students compared to statewide averages for all students:
I thought that was interesting, so I checked to see how this would look in the 2015 NAEP Reading exam for 8th graders. Well-
Well but the whole thing would fall apart in the math test. Except, it didn’t:
Obviously this evidence is only suggestive, but do keep in mind that we have a large number of formal studies finding positive outcomes associated with attendance at small high schools. So perhaps high quality education involves authentic community with a shared vision of what constitutes high quality learning, and this process is facilitated by the ability of a child and parent to choose. It certainly appears to be the case out here in the Cactus Patch. Let’s call it the “Cheers theory of learning” in that you want to go where everybody knows your name. If that is you want to learn to read, figure some math, and understand science. If you prefer to fade into the background and then drop out of school- we’ve got plenty of Big Box schools to choose from as well.
So you see dare Normy dare used to be this big Foundation that had a great idea but then…
Ok sports fans, I know you are all chomping at the bit, wanting to know “but Ladner, how do Arizona charter school science gains compare to statewide averages?!?” Oh I am glad you asked, here it is for 4th grade:
Hmmm…almost twice the gain as top ranking Arizona as a whole. Would it be running up the score to note that Arizona would not have done nearly as well without charters? I’ll just skip that part for now. Here are the NAEP 8th grade science gains:
Well, would you look at that-twice as large as the largest state gain. I’m crunching these out on a Prescott Library computer after taking a mountain bike ride on a “day off” but feel free to run the numbers for yourself here. I’ll breakdown subgroups later when I have more than 16 minutes left on my public computer use.
In the meantime I’m just going to go out on a limb here and say that there just might be something to this whole parental choice thing. Just maybe.
So the CeleNAEP continues…Arizona topped the nation by a wide margin in 4th grade science NAEP gains, while Utah came out on top on the statewide gains for 8th grade:
NAEP released 2015 Science results today. More results to come (I am crunching from the public library in Prescott AZ) but for both of you Arizona charter school skeptics out there, take a gander at the above chart. Just as a friendly reminder, AZ charter schools educate a majority minority student population, have very modest levels of funding compared to school systems around the country, and each NAEP exam is an entirely new sample of students, and Arizona charter students rocked all four of them (4r, 4m, 8r, 8m) so far. Now we have two more 2015 measures, and the CeleNAEP just keeps the smooth jam rolling!
Still skeptical? Well let’s check the 4th grade rankings:
Over the last couple of weeks we’ve learned a lot about American politics we would have preferred not to know. We can start with highly placed DNC operatives recruiting and training mentally ill homeless people to bait attacks at Republican rallies. Both of these people were caught on tape expounding monologues like a James Bond super-villain explaining their nefarious plot to ruuule ze vorld. One of them was at pains to explain just how good he was to also see to the medical and legal bills of his goons- it was very touching. The phrase “theoretical conversations” has been trotted out in an incredibly lame attempt at spin, and both men have been fired from their positions.
As the week went on, wikileaks revealed additional details like the DNC chair being provided debate questions in advance, reporters pre-clearing stories with the DNC, and more “pay for play” business from the Clinton Foundation that Bob Woodward described as not just unseemly but corrupt. So the election is rigged right?
Wrong.
Repulsive as these things are, a Presidential election is not Ivy League football. A Presidential election alas more closely resembles SEC football, where the unofficial conference motto should be “If you a’int cheating you a’int tryin!” People age into political awareness and learn about how bad or corrupt things currently stand, and assume that things were much better in the past. Read enough history however and you’ll learn that there is nothing new under the sun. As utterly repulsive as it is to send mentally ill people into rallies in an effort to bait violence, let’s face it there are good ways to deal with this tactic, and bad ways to deal with it. Option one would be to inform the crowd that agitators are in your midst and want to lure you into attacking them, but that you should refuse to take the bait and instead alert security, who can escort them out. Option two would be to encourage people in the rally to punch these people and offer to pay their legal bills…which help me out here but lies in the same ethical neighborhood as the agitators does it not?
As far as I can tell, the election is not even remotely close. If it is remotely close the Clinton campaign team is utterly incompetent in moving large amounts of resources into a style point state like Arizona, which Romney won on his way to a decisive electoral college loss in 2012. There are some national polls that have the race close, but others have Clinton winning in a blowout. I don’t know enough about polling to discern which polls are more credible, but I do know that we elect the President in 50 separate state elections rather than in a national election and that the Clinton campaign is behaving as if the latter scenario is in play. Republicans complain of dirty tricks and MSM bias, both of which are real. Note however that the media today is far more pluralistic than in the past, and that Democrats would be happy to provide their own laundry list of perceived dirty tricks played by Republicans. Don’t complain too much Vanderbilt fan, it’s your choice to play in the SEC so pull up your big boy pants.
I found this piece by David French to be far more disturbing. There is a naive, hopeful part of me that wants to believe that what French describes in this column is another dirty trick by some goon squad black op outfit, or the Russians, or well, anyone other than a disturbingly large portion of my fellow Americans. Sadly at the moment I have no evidence that would support such a belief.
Neither party has taken Uncle Sam’s looming insolvency remotely seriously. To these eyes, one major party fought off a socialist insurgency with dirty tricks by the hair of their chinny chin chins so they could at least stick with a corrupt royalist, who would have lost in landslide if not for the folly of her opponents. The other fell under the sway of a nativist demagogue despite the obvious disaster that would ensue. Personally I’m not anxious to reenact the Spanish Civil War in American politics, and I am not falling for the “you have to support the fascists because the communists are even worse” trick.
What all these have in common is more than just interest rates or TED spreads, even global depression; it is the entire idea of technocracy itself. Since before Plato, people have dreamed of a utopia where enlightened, dispassionate philosophers would govern and guide messy, often awful human existence toward and into “optimum” outcomes. It took until “economics” in the latter half of the 20th century for such hubris to take literal hold; there is an entire branch of the “science” dedicated through statistics just so to determining both “optimal outcomes” as well as the duty to “nudge” people toward them using the power of government if need be.
Economics is where technocracy was tried in widescale fashion first, and where it was thought at one time perhaps perfected. The Greenspan Fed, before the dot-com bust it needs to be pointed out, was believed by far too many the Socratic Ideal brought at long last to our world. So enthralling was the arrogance that it has been rationalized down by reality to what looks more like a cult than anything. Don’t believe market warnings, continue to believe The Fed Chair even though she finally confessed that economists can’t afford to keep assuming how little they know is enough. I am absolutely positive the next great psychological case will be written of the consistently imaginative dissonance leftover from When Policies Fail. It has already been started.
In this time of cynical politics it is refreshing to see something as fantastic as this floor debate in the Florida Senate. Earlier this year the sponsor of a bill to expand Florida’s ESA program for special needs children offers an amendment on the floor to rename the program after Senate President Gardiner, a special needs father and advocate and the original sponsor of the legislation. Gardiner objected and appealed to the Senator to drop his amendment, noting that he had promised to send the bill over to the Florida House without amendment. Not to be thwarted, the Senators secure a release from this promise from the Speaker of the Florida House, and then the Senate co-sponsors the amendment 39-0.
There is still some good in this world Mr. Frodo- and it is worth fighting for.
UPDATE: I am told that after all of this Senator Gardiner still refused to allow the program to be named after him, so the legislature named it after his family instead.
Japan now sells more adult diapers than baby diapers. Remember when someone from Japan bought Rockefeller Center (at an inflated price) and they were going to take over the world? Heh- here is how things really stand:
Japanese GDP and fertility rates are even further under water than those of our poor cousins across the Atlantic. Across the globe the Baby Boom generation has begun the process of entering into retirement, for which no one seems prepared, although some better than others. Watching your fertility rates collapse at the same time your society ages spells trouble.
The United States has a higher fertility rate and is an attractive destination for immigrants. What American states that might follow Japan into an adult diaper age demographic death spiral? Well if you can make it there, you’ll make it anywhere:
All these particular issues, however, underscore a basic point: Chartering has quietly revolutionized public schooling. It didn’t happen through clever, technocratic administrative fixes or a gigantic, rapidly passed omnibus legislative package. Nor did it humbly take for granted longstanding arrangements or merely tinker with the mechanics of existing programs. Instead, chartering took the long view. It trusted families and communities, carved out space for a new approach, and then allowed civil society to slowly create and change the new system. The result has been more individual empowerment, educational options, respect for pluralism, competition, civic-sector activity, innovation, and entrepreneurialism.
I also see much wisdom in the incremental gradualism that has marked the first 25 years of charter schooling, but also a ton of reasons to speed things up.
So tell me if you have ever had this experience- you find some time and think about going to a see a movie. No? Well you may have noticed that we dig movies here at JPGB so play along please…
Yes-okay so you want to see a movie, you go online to see what is playing, you look at the list of films currently screening at the movie houses you frequent and you think “blech I don’t want to see any of this” or some equivalent thereof. Just how much we are held hostage to Hollywood became even more apparent to me a few years ago when I rented a house near Zilker Park in Austin for a month. Austin at the time had five Alamo Drafthouse sites in operation, which meant that there were a consistent barrage of older, offbeat and classic films to choose between. I took the kids to see E.T. and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade for instance, both of which were more fun than the How to Train Your Dragon 2 meh stuff that Hollywood happened to be shoveling out that summer.
The Drafthouse, with their combination of zany programming and out of the box thinking has brought something crucial back to film- soul. Authentic community is a treasure in life, and you simply can’t get much more of it out of a big-box theater. It is therefore with great pleasure that I nominate the founders of the Drafthouse, Tim and Karrie League, for the prestigious Al Copeland Humanitarian Award for showing us a path forward to redeeming cinema from the tedium of the factory farm film making.*
Like many great things in life, this story starts in Texas at Rice University, where Tim studied Art History and Mechanical Engineering, and Karrie majored in Biology and French literature. What do you do with that? How about “revolutionize the movie going experience” for starters. After Rice, the two opened their first theater, a prototype called the Tejon in California in 1994. Located on the wrong side of the tracks, the couple began to develop their carnival style in an attempt to lure people to the theater. They for instance got a live band to accompany a silent film (a later Drafthouse regular.) They brought a pig to a screening of Charlotte’s Web. Unable to obtain a liquor license for the Tejon, Tim and Karrie did what a great many sensible Californians do- packed up and moved to Austin Texas in 1997.
Tim and Karrie set up shop in a former parking garage in the Warehouse district in Austin. They got the liquor license that eluded them in California. The rest is history.
Starting as a single screen, small theatre, Austin fell deeply and passionately in love with the Drafthouse. Local directors started hosting film festivals there, followed by non-locals. Some of the non-local directors bought property and became locals.
Big box theaters noticed that the Drafthouse was earning about twice as much per person and started serving food and beer. That’s all well and good, but what makes the Drafthouse the Drafthouse is culture and programming. Examples include Master Pancake Theater (three comedians mic up on the front row and ridicule a bad movie), Hecklevision (audience text ridicule at a bad movie which appears on the screen), Midnight Blaxploitation (good grief how did this stuff get made?), Sing Alongs and Rolling Road Shows.
So sing alongs, here’s one for the ladies:
and another for Queen fans who want to put on a Freddy Mercury mustache and scream their lungs out with their favorite songs:
You of course already know about rolling road shows like Jaws on the Water:
But they’ve also gone out and about. One of my favorites was a canoe trip with a screening of Deliverance on the shore after a long day of rowing and eating pig sandwiches. They have also gone to filming locations to screen classics:
The Drafthouse is also famous for dealing with certain transgressions firmly and quickly:
Which prompted this gem (NSFW):
which was followed by a similar incident when they had to throw a Sith Lord out:
Anyhoo- thank you Tim and Karrie for making film an absolute blast. I am counting down the days until the opening of Drafthouse Phoenix.
* You may choose to infer an education analogy from this post, but I couldn’t possibly comment.
Posted by matthewladner 
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