(Guest post by Greg Forster)
Coakley didn’t just lose Massachusetts, she failed to carry Hyannis Port. The Kennedys’ home town voted for Scott Brown.
Get out your magic lamps and flying carpets, because it’s a whole new world!
Update: It’s even bigger than that. Brown won every single prescinct in Barnstable, where Hyannis Port is located, racking up 61 percent of the vote in the town at large.
3 Comments | 
politics | Tagged: Greg Forster, Hyannis Port, Martha Coakley, Massachusetts, Scott Brown | 
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Posted by Greg Forster
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
Democracy and reality are intruding into the thoughts of some Democrats on the health care debate. Finally. Admitting that they have vastly overreached and lost the country on health care will be a bitter pill for the Democrats to swallow, but failing to do so would be far, far, far worse for them, and for the country.
We DO need drastic changes in health care policy, but the focus must be on stopping the out of control health care inflation brought on by our current tax treatment of benefits and Medicaid and Medicare. Lack of coverage is a symptom, healthcare hyperinflation is the disease.
The bill in Congress now would certainly make matters worse than they already have been. If you believe any of this business about deficit neutrality, I’ve got a bridge I’ll sell you cheap in Alaska. I hope Obamacare died last night, but even if so, the Right must not replace it with cricket noises until the next time the Democrats regroup and push for a European style bill. Collectively, the Right has done an entirely inadequate job of raising awareness of what the actual problems are in health care, how federal and state health care policies sponsor and promote those problems, and offering solutions to improve matters.
2 Comments | politics | Tagged: health care politics, Weiner on Brown election | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
5 Comments | politics | Tagged: Hitler reacts to Massachusetts election, Massachusetts Miracle, Scott Brown, The Downfall | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner
If there were a Taco Bell everywhere Taco Bell consumers wanted a Taco Bell, there would be Taco Bells everywhere. All retail space would be occupied by Taco Bell because all matter would be made up of Taco Bell, and the only thought would be Taco Bell because the entire universe, all of existence, would only be Taco Bell. So yeah, for the sake of life on Earth, it’s probably best that Taco Bell’s growth be controlled. Not for the sake of me getting some goddamned Taco Bell in Brooklyn, though.
3 Comments | Al Copeland Humanitarian Award, tributes | Tagged: Al Copeland, Glen Bell, humanitarian | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
Interesting chart from Real Clear Markets. Think we may need to reign in DC a bit?
7 Comments | economics | Tagged: GDP per Person, Real Clear Markets | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
An outfit called the Arizona Education Network took issue with a piece I wrote showing that Arizona K-12 spending has increased by 20% since 2000 while math and reading NAEP scores are up by less than 1% during approximate same period.
Unsheathing their flaming sword of justice, they wrote the following:
US Census Department Figures show that the Arizona population increased 28.6% from April of 2000 to July 2009.
During the same period, average daily membership (the term used to refer to the total enrollment of students through the first 100 days of the school year) in Arizona schools increased 22.7%. (According to a report to the Arizona Senate) .
So when special interest groups decry a 20% increase in education funding in the 2000-2009 period, they should notice that this increase did not even keep up with the increase in the number of school children in Arizona during the same period.
**AHEM**
Let me help you out here guys, since you seem new to this whole policy analysis thing. As a rule of thumb, it’s a good idea to read something before you criticize it. Sometimes, that will include clicking on hyperlinks when they are provided.
For example, if you had taken the trouble to do so in this case, you would have gone to an Arizona legislative website and learned that I had used an inflation adjusted spending per pupil number to calculate the 20% increase.
Keep at it though- some day you guys may be ready to swim to the deep end of the pool.
22 Comments | money myth, school funding | Tagged: Arizona Education Network | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
On March 10, Pres. Barack Obama gave a major education speech before the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. In that speech, he declared that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan “will use only one test when deciding what ideas to support with your precious tax dollars: It’s not whether an idea is liberal or conservative, but whether it works.”
On March 13, Senate majority whip Dick Durbin (D., Ill.) wrote of the D.C. scholarship program in the Chicago Tribune:
Allowing the program to continue through end of next school year (2009–2010) will give Congress a chance to examine all the evidence to determine whether or not this program works.
U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman, chairman of the authorizing committee, has promised a timely hearing on reauthorization of this program.
Many benefiting from this program want no questions asked about its efficacy. I think the taxpayers deserve better.
Well, well, well- the results are in: The program works. In fact, the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program is one of the few programs funded by the Department of Education about which we have supportive evidence of the highest possible scientific quality.
Head Start on the other hand sucks wind in producing results when subjected to a random assignment evaluation.
President Obama will surely be calling for the transfer of Head Start funding into the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program any second now.
Leave a Comment » | vouchers | Tagged: Barak Obama, DC Opportunity Scholarships, Head Start | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner
(Guest post by Greg Forster)
You may be tempted to dismiss Pat Robertson’s remarks about Haiti on the narrow and pedantic grounds that Robertson is a crazy man. But before you do, you should know that when Pat Robertson talks about making deals with the devil, he speaks as an expert in the field.
1) He regularly cozies up to bloodthirsty dictators in nations where he has large financial interests – China, Congo, Liberia – praising them on the air as enlightened statesmen and inviting their mouthpieces onto his program to spread their propaganda. China has full and complete religious freedom! Falun Gong wants to eat your children’s eyeballs! It’s turning out that there are some things even Google won’t do for China – but not Pat Robertson.
2) The contract under which he sold his TV network to ABC (it became ABC Family) requires ABC to air his show in perpetuity, no matter how crazy he gets or how low the ratings go. He could be up there telling us to worship Mongo the Martian Monkey God and they’d still have to air it. That’s the price ABC paid to get the network. Rumor has it they’ve tried over and over again to buy the man out, and who can blame them? But he won’t sell – the only two things Pat Robertson loves more than money are his ego and his self-righteousness. And ABC put its blood on the signature line, so they’re stuck with him.
Of course, none of this is to deny that Robertson is, in fact, a crazy man. Check out this archive photo from the early days of his ministry:
It was after he shaved off the beard that his show really took off.
3 Comments | tributes | Tagged: Best of Greg, Greg Forster, Haiti, Pat Robertson | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
Parental choice supporters Gerard Robinson and Bret Schundler have been appointed to lead the Departments of Education in Virginia and New Jersey respectively.
Buckle up- this is going to be fun. Robinson is the President of the Black Alliance for Educational Options. Schundler is the former Mayor of Jersey City, gubernatorial candidate and a longtime parental choice advocate. Both Robinson and Schundler are outstanding people deeply committed to improving opportunity for students. Cry Havoc and let slip the dogs of war!
4 Comments | politics, vouchers | Tagged: Bret Schundler, Gerard Robinson | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner
As I described last week, the Department of Health and Human Services has been sitting on an evaluation of the Head Start government run pre-school program. Well, today the study was released (and it’s not even a Friday!). (Update: HHS moved the link to the study to here.)
As the leaks suggested, the study found virtually no lasting effects to participation in Head Start. The study used a gold-standard, random assignment design and had a very large nationally representative sample. This was a well done study (even if it mysteriously took more than 3 years after data collection was complete to release the results).
For students who were randomly assigned to Head Start or not at the age of 4, the researchers collected 19 measures of cognitive impacts at the end of kindergarten and 22 measures when those students finished 1st grade. Of those 41 measures only 1 was significant and positive. The remaining 40 showed no statistically significant difference. The one significant effect was for receptive vocabulary, which showed no significant advantage for Head Start students after kindergarten but somehow re-emerged at the end of 1st grade.
The study used the more relaxed p< .1 standard for statistical significance, so we could have seen about 4 significant differences by chance alone and only saw 1. That positive effect had an effect size of .09, which is relatively modest.
For students randomly assigned to Head Start or not at the age of 3, the researchers also collected 41 measures of lasting cognitive effects. This time they found 2 statistically significant positive effects and 1 statistically significant negative effect. For the students who began at age 3 they showed a .08 effect size benefit from Head Start in oral comprehension after first grade and a .26 effect size benefit in spanish vocabulary after kindergarten but a .19 effect size decline in math ability at the end of kindergarten. Again, 38 of the 41 measures of lasting effects showed no difference and the few significant effects (which could be produced by chance) showed mixed results.
I think it is safe to say from this very rigorous evaluation that Head Start had no lasting effect on the academic preparation of students.
The study also measured lasting effects on student behavior and emotion as well as the skills of parents. Again, the effects were largely null and the few significant differences were in mixed directions. The few positive effects from these categories were from parent reports and the few negative tended to come from teacher reports.
The long and short of it is that the government has a giant and enormously expensive pre-school program that has made basically no difference for the students who participate in it. And folks are proposing that we expand government pre-school to include all students. Those same folks have some bridges they’d like to sell.
(edited for clarity)
7 Comments | methodology | Tagged: Head Start, universal pre-school | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
Jay P. Greene's Blog 