Jay P. Greene's Blog

Antonio Salieri says”I am the patron saint of the Tufts RTF Department…”

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

My Austin sources inform me that McConaughey has started the biggest celebration since the 2006 Rose Bowl.  Now that Jay has been justly cowed by the overwhelming might of the UT Austin film brigade (former UT student F. Murray Abraham also won Best Actor by the way- HOLLA!) we can move on to other important business, like this interesting new study by Jason Bedrick about the New Hampshire tax credit program for the Show Me Institute.  Unlike Jay’s Oscar smack, a 97% satisfaction rate is strong.

Matt threw down the gauntlet in his post bragging about UT Austin alum, Matthew McConaughey, winning Best Actor laurels last night: “So Jay and Greg, how long has it been since your eastern seaboard finishing schools for global technocrats graduates won a Best Actor Oscar?”

Well, I went to Tufts and the answer is 1985, when Tufts grad, William Hurt, won the Best Actor Oscar for Kiss of the Spider Woman.  Yes, that was a little while ago.  But given that UT Austin has 38,463 undergraduates relative to only 5,255 at Tufts, I’d say that each having one alum among the 76 people who have ever won the Best Oscar for Actors is a little more impressive for the much smaller Tufts.

Tufts also has more than its share of well-known actors who haven’t won the Best Actor award, including:

• Hank Azaria, actor and voice actor most famous for his work on The Simpsons and various films
• Jessica Biel (did not finish), prominent film actress
• David Costabile, actor, known for his recurring roles on The Wire, Flight of the Conchords, and Breaking Bad
• Dom DeLuise, actor, most famous for his work in Blazing Saddles and Space Balls and as host of the television show Candid Camera
• Nicole Fiscella, Gossip Girl actress and model
• Peter Gallagher, prominent Golden Globe- and SAG Award-winning actor,best known for his roles in The O.C., American Beauty, and Mr. Deeds
• Dan Hedaya, film actor, best known for Clueless and Blood Simple
• Oliver Platt, Emmy, Golden Globe, and SAG-nominated actor (Huff, Frost/Nixon, 2012)
• Rainn Wilson (did not finish), actor and co-star of The Office

And two Oscar-winning producers:

• David Sonenberg, Academy Award-winning movie producer and founder/head of the music management company DAS Communications Ltd
• Steve Tisch, Academy Award-winning producer and co-owner of the New York Giants with his brother Jonathan Tisch

Rainn Wilson and I went to high school together before both going to Tufts.  In fact, we double-dated to prom, as you can see in the photo above.  Yes, that’s him with the gloves.

And Greg’s doctoral alma mater, Yale, has dominated the Oscars.  Just last night, Yale alum, Lupita Nyong’o, won the Best Supporting Actress Award.  Three-time Best Actress, Meryl Streep, is also a Yale alum.  Other Oscar winners and nominees who attended Yale include: Paul Newman, Sigourney Weaver, Frances McDormand, Paul Giamatti, Elia Kazan, Sam Waterston, Oliver Stone, Jodie Foster, and Edward Norton.

Of course, UT Austin does have Wes Anderson, who is one of my favorite film-makers.  But in general Matt has picked the wrong fight.  There are many things not to like about what Matt calls “eastern seaboard finishing schools for global technocrats,” but failure to produce acclaimed actors is not one of them.

(Guest Post by Jason Bedrick)

What happens when government officials think no one is watching? Sometimes this:

Residents demanded answers at an emergency meeting in Lawndale Tuesdaynight after a series of reports revealed an excessive amount of compensation for the superintendent of the Centinela Valley Union High School District.

KCAL9’s Dave Bryan reports that Jose Fernandez’s total compensation last year was $663,000, all for running a district of three high schools with only about 6,500 students.

The school district also floated a loan of more than $900,000 for Fernandez at 2 percent interest over 40 years at a time when he had already declared bankruptcy, Bryan reported.

Perhaps he’s so well-paid because he runs such an efficient and effective organization?

Hawthorne High School teacher Caryn Charles said the district is giving lavish loans and huge salaries to the superintendent when she has to pay to buy paper for her students.

“It’s really embarrassing as a teacher that we don’t have any paper at our department at our school. With all due respect to all of you, but it’s embarrassing when I have to go to Office Depot and buy paper, and I read that other people don’t have to worry about things like that,” she said.

So how are public officials able to get away with this for so long?

Part of the problem is their timing, explained Claremont McKenna College political scientist Jack Pitney. Centinela Valley elections are held in November of odd years, which means there are no state or national races on the ballot to attract attention and draw in more voters.

And small districts in large metropolitan areas are further challenged because they get limited media coverage, Pitney said. Residents can’t just turn on the TV or open up the newspaper to regularly find out what is going on.

“People just don’t have the access to information about what their locality is up to,” he said. “They don’t even know there is going to be an election.”

Naturally, in response to the citizens’ outrage upon discovering that the school board they had elected was squandering their hard-earned money, the Centinela Valley school board officials did the only responsible thing: they hired a media-relations consultant.

We’ll give Ron Swanson the last word on this story:

The main appeal of most entertainment is simply to escape from the humdrum of regular life.  High school film students will often make the mistake of driving around town with a camera, filming the people and places they would regularly see, thinking that their regular life would be interesting to others.  It isn’t.  Real life typically lacks the condensed story-telling and dramatic arc that good film-making or theater requires.  Of course, the thing that makes theater and film interesting also make it artificial.  Drama may capture some essential aspect of life, but it is not life itself.  If it were, it would be boring.

House of Cards is about as far from real life as one can imagine.  It’s characters are so sinister, so clever, and so competent in their sinister cleverness that the series bears no resemblance whatsoever to real political life.  Real politics is the dullest thing in the universe.

I have met a great many politicians and no more than a handful could be described as clever and none as sinister.  For the most part, politicians are bland, weak-egoed, moderately bright folks who are eager to do nothing daring, exciting, or controversial in their entire lives.

So, House of Cards is an escapist fantasy of what politics would look like if it weren’t so dull.  The show is so cynical and the characters so diabolical that it is sometimes hard to suspend disblelief.  But like watching Itchy and Scratchy, it is so ridiculously unreal that it is fairly entertaining.  And yes, it is very, very dark.  But again, the darkness is so cartoonish that it is hardly menacing.  The darkness of Breaking Bad was more true to real life, but that is precisely what made it so much harder to stomach.

American movies and TV have had a very hard time making compelling political dramas.  Too often they are either hyper-cynical, like House of Cards, or they’re saccharinely idealistic, like West Wing. The reality of politics is closer to high school kids filming while they drive around town… boring as crap.

Perhaps the best political movies are not dramas, but absurdist comedies.  Notice that of the Washington Post’s list of best political movies, a large number are actually absurdist comedies, including Being There, Bob Roberts, Dr. Strangelove, Duck Soup, Election, O Brother, Where Art Thou, and Thank you for Smoking.

That’s the way you should watch House of Cards.  It’s actually a very dark comedy.

(corrected for typos)

We went to see The Glass Menagerie again last night and it was even better than the night before, if that is possible.  There are two more performances, tonight (Saturday) at 7 pm and tomorrow (Sunday) at 2 pm.  It is at The Black Box Theater at Fayetteville High School.  See it before it closes.

Yesterday’s post on the play generated some interesting discussion in the comments, so you may want to check that out.  I also learned from Twitter that Morgan Polikoff played Laura, the same part as my daughter, in his sophomore English class.  I’m discovering more reasons to like Morgan all the time.  And he says there is a video out there to prove it.  I promise to post the video if it ever surfaces.

I just saw a superb production of The Glass Menagerie at Fayetteville High School last night.  Full disclosure: my daughter plays Laura.  Despite that fact, I don’t think my opinion about the excellence of the show is biased.  Every member of the cast, the set, the lighting, and the projection and sound effects were all the quality of a professional production.  Those who can should come to see it at the FHS Black Box Theater tonight or Saturday at 7 pm or Sunday at 2 pm.  Arrive early to buy tickets because it is an intimate space with limited seating.

Given the shift in education away from the arts toward a narrow focus on math and reading skills, it is wonderful to see how Fayetteville School District is actually expanding its attention to the arts.  The performance was held in the new state of the art theater facility at the high school.  In his directorial debut, Trevor Cooper is a recent addition to an expanded drama faculty at the high school that now includes four teachers, led by the fabulous Warren Rosenaur.  The school’s principal, Steve Jacoby was in the audience last night , as were school board member, Tim Hudson, and several teachers.  They come out to see the arts just like they come out to see the football team — both of which make significant contributions to the education of students.

It’s also wonderful that the AP Literature classes saw in-school performances of the play today and yesterday.  I suspect that if they also have the chance to read the play in class, the benefits would be even stronger.

I’ll be able to test my suspicion more rigorously with an experiment I am conducting on the effects of students seeing quality theater.  With an award-winning local theater company, TheatreSquared, I am conducting a study in which school groups are awarded free tickets by lottery to see A Christmas Carol and Hamlet.  We want to how these theater experiences affect students.  In particular, we are collecting information on whether students are also reading these plays to see if the combination of reading and seeing a play is particularly effective relative to just reading or just seeing the play.

But even if you’ve never read The Glass Menagerie, come see it this weekend at FHS.  And then read it.  It’s a beautiful production of a beautiful play.

David Malki ! @malki

better olympic narratives • needs pure gold from medal to save dying spouse • in curling contest for immortal soul • skis are actually feet

Jon Bergdoll @jbergdoll

Ineffectual attempt to get divorced parents back together  • Chasing dream of starring in local furniture store commercial in ten years

David Malki ! @malki

better olympic narratives • actually snowboarding to save community center from developers • little white lie on first date has gone too far

David Malki ! @malki

better olympic narratives • back half of horse costume took a wrong turn • deep undercover narcotics agent • trying to outski her past

Jon Bergdoll @jbergdoll

Lost hunter accidentally wins biathlon.  • Training for Gymkata II: This Time It’s In Snow?

David Malki ! @malki

• country ceased to exist mid-ski jump à la Tom Hanks in The Terminal

Recovering ninja kat @Kouban

Believes winning gold medal will lead to an audience with Zeus

James Webber @james_t_webber

 blindly following guy who keeps getting into bobsleds

Andrew J. Plant @AndrewJPlant

dying father made her promise to never enter the olympics; hates dying father.

————————————————————————————————-

And then @JoshGreenman mocks the hyper-patriotism of the reaction to Team USA’s hockey victory by posting these wonderfully ironic paintings from Etsy

(HT Greg)

Michael Kinsley famously quipped that a gaffe is when a politician accidentally tells the truth — or at least what he or she believes to be true.  Gaffes cause a stir because they are seen as windows into the inner-thinking and motivations of political causes that are normally disguised by carefully “messaged” political discourse.

Paul Reville made just such a gaffe during a pro-Common Core event last week when he declared: “the children belong to all of us.”  Reville, the former Massachusetts education secretary and  current Harvard Ed School professor, is a pillar of both the Left education establishment and Common Core advocates.  He was trying to dismiss Common Core critics as a “tiny minority,” arguing that the state should ultimately control how children are educated since children do not belong to those few parents, but to “all of us.”

Reville’s indelicate phrasing stoked a bit of a political storm because it was reminiscent of last year’s gaffe by a MSNBC host, who said “we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to their communities.”  Many parents recoil at the notion that their children belong to others, especially the government, even if that idea is actually at the core of efforts to centralize control over education.

The view that children in some sense “belong to all of us” has a long pedigree.  Almost thirty years ago, Amy Gutmann tried to articulate and defend the collective interest in children and an active government role in education in her book, Democratic Education.  And here is my brief rebuttal from a recent book chapter:

Amy Gutmann, among others, has used the observation that children are not “owned” by their parents to assert the need for a sizeable role for the state, at least in the education of children. Since the future liberty and autonomy interests of children may be distinct from the plans and preferences their parents have for them, she argues in Democratic Education, the state needs to play a significant role in ensuring that parents do not infringe upon the interests of their children.

But it is revealing that advocates of this view restrict this significant role of the state to education. If they really believed that the state needs to play an active role in ensuring that children’s interests were being protected, then the government’s involvement wouldn’t end at 3:00 in the afternoon. They should want the government to make unannounced visits to children’s homes to ensure cleanliness, adequately stocked pantries, and an enriching environment. The fact that most of us would consider such actions by the government to be unnecessary for children and unreasonable to parents if they occurred after 3:00 in the afternoon indicates how unnecessary and unreasonable they are in education as well. And the fact that Amy Gutmann and others are unwilling to be consistent in advocating an active government role 24 hours a day suggests that they are not so much concerned with safeguarding children’s interests as with rationalizing the status quo in education.

Unlike Gutmann, I am willing to be consistent in deferring to parents in the raising and education of their children. In my ideal vision, we would treat the dominant parental role in education the same way we treat the dominant parental role in raising children generally. In the absence of demonstrated gross parental negligence or malevolence, parents should assume responsibility for educating and raising their children. The state should only intervene if there is evidence of serious neglect or abuse, with respect to education in particular and with respect to child-rearing in general.

And if you’d like to read a broader critique of Gutmann’s book see pp. 85-88 of this book chapter I wrote on civic education more than a decade ago.

Today AEI is hosting an event featuring new pieces of proposed legislation by Senators Lamar Alexander and Tim Scott.  The bills would empower states to “voucherize” much of federal education spending.  The legislation drafted by Sen. Scott would allow federal funds for students with disabilities to flow directly to students and follow them to the school of their choice.  The bill from Sen. Alexander would do the same for the funds for 80 other federal education programs.  States would get regulatory relief and flexibility and money would follow children to the places that their families believed best served their needs.  Sounds like win-win.

I can support this type of federal legislation because it reduces federal control over education and devolves more power to states and families.  You can watch the event unveiling the legislation live right now and it should be available as a recording later.

Here are summaries of the Alexander bill that I’ve seen:

A Bill introduced by Senator Alexander to enable states to use nearly $24 billion in existing federal education funds to expand school choice options and empower low-income parents

What the Bill Does:

 Enables states to use nearly $24 billion in existing annual federal education funds to follow students to the public or private school or educational program that they attend.

 This would provide, on average, $2,100 in annual federal support for each of 11 million students from families living in poverty that their parents could use to pay private school tuition and fees, supplement their public school or public charter school budget, attend a public school outside their assigned school district, or purchase tutoring services or homeschooling materials.

 Allows low-income students in participating states to choose a better or different school instead of waiting for their school to improve in order to have access to a quality education.

 Allows states to use federal education funds to support their own efforts to expand school choice for low-income families, including the 16 states with private school choice programs and 42 states with inter-district public school choice programs.

 Provides states that opt to participate in this program with relief from burdensome mandates and requirements of No Child Left Behind.

Background:

 There are 54 million students in elementary and secondary schools in the U.S., including 11 million school-age children (5 to 17 years old) from families living in poverty.

 In 2011, states spent more than $604 billion on public K-12 education, receiving $75.5 billion from federal resources (approximately12.5% of total expenditures).

 Since 2001, total expenditures for elementary and secondary education have increased by nearly 39%, but have produced only modest increases in student achievement.

 More than half of the nation’s 4 American students continue to be outperformed by many of their peers around the world.

Points to consider:

 The U.S. has the best system of higher education in the world, due to autonomy, high standards, and competition for the approximately $140 billion in federal grants and loans that follow more than half of students to the college or university of their choice each year.

 Federal support for K-12 education has taken the opposite approach – with opposite results.

 These federal dollars typically fund schools or federal programs, rather than individual students, provide limited choices for parents, and are often governed by complicated rules and regulations that restrict how they can be spent.

 Poor and minority students are most likely to attend their assigned public school and are often stuck in schools that fail to meet their educational needs.

 Allowing federal funds to follow students to the school or educational program of their choice would inject competition into the system by letting low-income parents decide how best to meet their child’s educational needs.

The “Scholarships for Kids Act” would:

 provide flexibility to States by consolidating over 80 federal education programs into one $24 billion funding stream to support the education of low-income children; and

 give each state the freedom to use those funds to offer scholarships that follow low-income students to whatever school or supplemental educational program they attend, consistent with state law.

States would receive the same amount of funding regardless of whether they create a “Scholarships for Kids” program. But states creating a “Scholarships for Kids” program would be relieved the burdensome mandates and compliance requirements of No Child Left Behind and have significant flexibility as to how their scholarship programs are administered.

States that create a “Scholarships for Kids” Program would:

 Provide the Department of Education with a declaration of intent to create a “Scholarships for Kids Program” and a description of how the program would be administered.

 Decide the range of schools and programs at which eligible students would be able to use their scholarships. This could include at the state’s option:

o the public school the student attends through a public school choice program (including

o accredited private schools approved by the state to participate in the program;

o other educational programs like supplemental educational service programs, afterschool

o or even simply the public school the eligible student would otherwise attend, in which

 Ensure in all cases that scholarship funds participating schools and programs receive are in addition to any non-federal funds the school or program would receive in the absence of the Scholarships for Kids program.

 Ensure that any private schools participating in the Scholarships for Kids program do not discriminate against eligible students but retain control over discipline policies and teaching mission, including religious instruction.

 Continue to comply with federal civil rights requirements, student privacy protections, and protections for students with disabilities.

 Continue to maintain challenging academic standards, test students in public schools annually in grades 3-8 and once in high school, and report on student achievement by school and student subgroup.

 No longer be required to comply with federal mandates on how they determine whether public schools are succeeding or failing and the specific strategies they use to improve schools identified as low-performing.