| Wednesday,
March 31, 2010 The Democrats continue to protest that
ObamaCare will save money and will not eliminate jobs, and they continue to
rail against companies that have reported coming write-offs and layoffs
caused by the new Health Care law.
Rep. Henry Waxman, a California Democrat who
co-chairs a subcommittee on oversight and investigations, said he’ll
convene a hearing next month to question company executives about their
moves.
“The new law is designed to expand coverage and
bring down costs, so your assertions are a matter of concern,” said a
letter from Waxman and co-chair Bart Stupak
http://commonamericanjournal.com/?p=12398
The Wall Street Journal puts it this way:
The ObamaCare Writedowns—II
Democrats blame a vast CEO conspiracy.
A White House staffer told the American
Spectator that "These are Republican CEOs who are trying to embarrass the
President and Democrats in general. Where do you hear about this stuff?
The Wall Street Journal editorial page and conservative Web sites. No one
else picked up on this but you guys. It's BS." (We called the White House
for elaboration but got no response.)
In other words, CEOs who must abide by U.S.
accounting laws under pain of SEC sanction, and who warned about such
writedowns for months, are merely trying to ruin President Obama's moment
of glory. Sure.
http://online.wsj.com/article/
SB100014240527023043703045751
51760348759360.html?mod=WSJ_latestheadlines
I suspect that the White House strategists know exactly what they are
doing, and hope to get the rumors going before coming out to say they
understand the situation. It's fairly standard political tactics, and has
been since, I don't know, the G. Washington Administration? Back in the
days of newspapers a good rumor could go a long way before being pursued
by the truth. This isn't what we have all been hoping for, but it's not
change you can believe in either. Just politics as usual. Note too that
Stupak, who seems to have sold his principles for some later to be names
earmarks, is trying to take the high road. Good luck with that.
November continues to offer America an opportunity to turn back and
forsake foolish ways. The first thing needed is to turn the rascals out.
The Creeps have been properly chastised. Now it's time to rid ourselves of
the Nuts -- but to do it without bringing back the Creeps. That can be
done, but it will take some attention from intelligent Americans who up to
now have been content to ignore politics. Of course one can ignore
politics and ideology, but politics and ideology will not ignore you.
===============
We take three newspapers. I generally read two of them, the Wall Street
Journal and the so-called Los Angeles Times which is a Chicago based
newspaper that pays little attention to the City and County of Los
Angeles. Roberta reads the Daily News, which has been transmogrified from
the Valley News into a city paper. Along the way it went from a
conservative paper to one more standardly liberal, but compared to the LA
Times it's right wing.
This morning Roberta found an article entitled "Math experts split on
state's direction" by Sharon Noguchi. I can't find it on line (I suppose
it will eventually appear in Google or Bing) and I probably wouldn't have
noticed it, but Roberta reads everything on education and she pointed out
that it's important. It's about school curricula and just when
multiplication ought to be taught -- third grade as it sort of is now, or
delayed to begin in fourth grade? There are other matters. They all assume
that professors of education know something about teaching mathematics,
which is unlikely.
{Looks like the same article,
different title.
"Math wars" over national
standards may erupt again in California By Sharon Noguchi
snoguchi@mercurynews.com
Howard}
[By coincidence,
Jaime Escalante, who demonstrated that the professors of education
didn't have anything like correct theories, died yesterday. Escalante
demonstrated that you could teach advanced placement algebra at Garfield,
one of LA's inner city schools long used as a symbol of what was wrong
with LAUSD until Escalante made headlines with his "Stand and Deliver!"
algebra program. Escalante's success is generally credited to his
personality, but in fact he built a complete mathematics education
department at Garfield, and much of his success depended on the support
groups he constructed -- and much of it evaporated when his control was
diminished. His departure from Garfield was not as simple as is usually
described, and while his remarkable gifts as a teacher remained, and he
continued to have successes, his fame diminished -- and the educati0n
establishment was happy to credit his results to the man, but to ignore
his methods.
Jaime Escalante, RIP.]
One item in the "Math experts split on state's direction" article was a
quote from Muhammed Chaudhry, CEO of Silicon Valley Education Foundation:
"algebra has become a focus because completing it in eighth grade is the
best predictor of college students." Roberta pointed that one out to me:
on what is this based? What are the studies? On what data? It seems not
unreasonable at first, but in my experience IQ tests -- which are
considerably broader than math skill tests -- are better predictors of
academic success. Of course the education establishment tends to ignore
all the evidence on IQ tests, dismissing them on various theoretical
grounds (including a misunderstanding of how modern IQ tests are
constructed and the mechanisms for compensation for socio-economic
status). That's another discussion for another time, but I would like to
see the data on which Dr. Chaudhry's statement is based.
In the course of her thesis on education Roberta once collected a
number of education studies, and of them all, I found few to zero to have
any kind of valid experimental design. Education researchers don't seem to
understand the actual principles on which statistical inferences are
based, and their experimental designs tend to be wretched at best -- or at
least that was my impression back when I paid more attention to them than
I do now, and I have seen nothing whatever to make me change that opinion.
Teachers sometime rely on education "studies" to justify using methods
that often conflict with their own classroom experience. That would be a
rational thing to do if the "studies" were based on rational designs, but
that doesn't generally turn out to be the case. Pournelle's Law of
research is that you can prove anything if you can make up your data, and
you can prove darned near anything if you get to select your data, your
subjects, or preferably both. Most education "studies" are designed to
"prove" something, not to falsify a hypothesis.
In any event, Roberta is digging into this, but my conclusion is that
the state doesn't know enough to dictate such matters. We don't know
enough about learning to have a one size fits all educational curriculum.
California public schools are not universally worthless, but many of them
are -- and for two decades the California Dictate pretty well destroyed
literacy and reading education in California by making war on systematic
phonics. The then Superintendent of Public Instruction has since
apologized to the generation of illiterates he produced, but that doesn't
correct the problem -- and it's a very good illustration of why it's not
wise to have one big overarching education policy.
Transparency and subsidiarity. Leave matters to local control as much
as possible. But if our masters won't allow that, then intelligent parents
have no choice but to get out of irrational school systems.
It is not the state's responsibility to educate your children. It's
yours.
And on that score, look into the Robinson Curriculum
http://www.oism.org/s32p28.htm
It's a curriculum for bright kids. Whether you home school, send your kids
to private schools, or leave their education to public schools, this could
be the best $200 you ever spent. Well, other than a
subscription to this web site...
More another time. It's lunch time.
Wednesday TOP
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