Check out this Twitter exchange from Matt Yglesias.
Let’s answer snark with substance.
First question: who?
This is a common theme from Yglesias, that there are lots of critics of school reform who believe that there is no such thing as teacher quality or that it cannot possibly be measured. You can see this most clearly in his original post on “edunihilism”: “If it’s true that we don’t need to shake up the K-12 school system because what happens inside K-12 schools doesn’t alter socioeconomically determined achievement gaps, then the policy remedy is random across-the-board cuts in K-12 school spending.” The problem here is that I know of literally no one who believes that what happens inside K-12 school does nothing to alter socioeconomically determined achievement gaps. This is both a personal interest of mine and an academic interest of mine, and I have not encountered anyone, and certainly no prominent critics of school reform, who endorses an edunhilist philosophy. This lone post from Kevin Drum is the best evidence I can find that anybody in the liberal blogosphere believes it, and it’s unclear to me either from that individual post or from his subsequent commentary that Drum believes in edunihilism as Yglesias defines it. Yet Yglesias flogs the idea again and again and again, without ever being specific about who he is referring to. Don’t just take my word for it. Erik Kain has been asking the same question for months.
One of the undeniable advantages of the web is that it makes citation and evidence a snap. Even on Twitter, it would be very easy for Yglesias to cite specific examples. It’s really easy to critique people when you are actually critiquing a broad caricature that they would never sign off on. The problem is that this is no way to get at the truth. Edunihilism is a strawman, or at best, a very rarely encountered weak man. And, incidentally, I’m not even sure his conclusions proceed logically from his premise. Even if some say that there is a threshold beyond which students cannot achieve because of socioeconomic factors, that doesn’t imply that there would be no negative impact on their performance if you slashed funding. It’s perfectly consistent to argue that there is a plateau beyond which student success is impossible while nevertheless saying that scores would fall if funding were slashed.
(Predictably, Yglesias earned plaudits from the National Review for this post; the school reform movement is intrinsically conservative, as it is primarily oriented towards smashing unions and defunding government programs.)
What the majority of critics of school reform that I am aware of say is not that there is no such thing as teacher quality or that educational outcomes are purely determined by socioeconomic factors. What many say, and what I say, is that talk of an American crisis of education is out of tune with the broader reality, as our deepest problems are largely contained to terribly performing outliers among urban poor black and Hispanic students. This in and of itself represents a major challenge to public policy, but talk of widespread crisis and a need for total reorganization of our public education system is folly. We recognize the rare disadvantages that hurt American educational outputs include a) a mammoth child poverty rate which negatively effect them in international comparisons and make those comparisons of dubious value and b) more controversially and distressingly, a racial achievement gap that is not explained by socioeconomic status and that affects black and Hispanic students across the income distribution. In this context, what becomes particularly difficult is assessing the meaning of teacher effect signal against student variable noise. Epistemology is a big problem, and one of my continuing frustrations is Yglesias’s refusal to consider the difficulty of effective teacher assessment.
I’m not quite sure how seriously Yglesias wants to take an analogy between student educational outputs and the tensile strength of concrete. But let’s roll with it. Simply put, it is vastly easier to assess whether concrete has been mixed correctly than it is to measure a teacher’s input based on student performance. Questions about the efficacy of standardized testing or similar metrics to determine how well a teacher is performing is nothing new. Anyone in an educational or pedagogical field who has tried to come up with dissertation research can tell you that it’s very difficult to test which teacher inputs produce differences in student outputs. There are simply so many confounding variables, the most vexing of which is that students have final agency over what they produce.
The quality of concrete doesn’t change because its parents are getting a divorce; it doesn’t change because it had a stomach ache the day it got tested; it doesn’t change because it just went through puberty and there’s a cute girl in its classroom; it doesn’t change because it has a behavior problem; it doesn’t change because it doesn’t get along with its teacher; it doesn’t change because it just decided to dick around that day. Anyone who has been a student understands the wisdom of this. There are few people out there who didn’t have that one semester in college where their grades were markedly worse than in other semesters, because they broke up with their girlfriend or started doing coke or stayed up all night every night playing Wizards of Warlock. Nobody blames their professors for that. (Indeed, we get on professors if the grades they give are too high.)
If you mix and pour concrete correctly, you get quality concrete. There’s no doubt about it. A teacher can perform his or her function perfectly and students can still fail. Indeed, some number of his or her students are statistically certain to fail regardless of his or her performance. That doesn’t mean that the quality of instruction is immaterial to all the students of that class, or even of the failing students. It does mean that there is simply a limit to the degree of teacher control on that output. And when dealing with the large disadvantages that socioeconomic factors and the racial achievement gap inflict, it becomes even harder to separate signal from noise in evaluating teacher performance. Under such conditions, where teachers have great constraints in how much they can affect student outcomes, and the consequences for failure to produce those outcomes is dire, fraud is inevitable. We are seeing just such fraud now— as was predicted perfectly by critics of school reform.
You could see some of the nuances of the epistemological problems with standardized testing in the now notorious case of Washington DC private school vouchers (PDF), where students showed no statistically significant gains in standardized testing but graduated at far higher rates. There are two possibilities, neither of which are pleasant for the school reform movement: either the students did make marked improvement from participation in the program, which directly undercuts the efficacy of the standardized tests so beloved of school reformers to measure student educational gains; or the students did not improve, but were graduated anyway because their grades were teacher-dependent and teachers felt great pressure to graduate underperforming students.
When I argue this subject online I often find commenters who say things like “surely you can’t think that there are no effective ways to measure teacher output.” I’m not such a defeatist, no, but I do think that a large tradition of evidence gives us considerable reason to doubt our current metrics for teacher performance against the considerable statistical noise of student environment and makeup. Yes, I wish we had more consistently effective metrics, but wishing still doesn’t make it so.
How then to use standardized testing? The only way to reap any benefit from them is to remove the inevitable pressure for fraud, and the only way to assess their efficacy fairly is as part of a broad mixed methods approach of assessment that also includes direct observation and coding of student behavior, tracking of students across wide age ranges, student and parent satisfaction surveys, evaluations by peers and independent arbiters, and a broad commitment to correcting for student inputs. It’s a regime worth trying and testing empirically. Unfortunately, this does not serve the primary interests of school reformers, which long since devolved into “smash unions first.”
When your movement gets to the point where it is more concerned with talking tough and hurting teachers, that is of course the outcome you get– tough talk, worse employment conditions for teachers, and not much else.
The question for school reformers like Yglesias is how much longer we have to wait for these reforms to show their long-promised, little demonstrated positive effects. The school reform movement is decades old, as are voucher efforts and charter schools. The extant empirical evidence (based on the very metrics school reformers champion!) have failed to consistently show repeatable gains, despite the loud assurances of the movement. When do their failures receive the fanfare that public schools’ do, and at what point do school reformers drop their failing solutions? After all, accountability begins at home.
Keith G
Thank you for a detailed and intelligent rebuttal.
I am trying not to be a typical slash and burn web commenter, so I am taking a breath and a moment.
Ok, I know Yglesias’ vita. On paper he is a smart guy, but not necessarily a poster guy for taking philosophy majors seriously. Maybe his private school background robbed him of the chance to develop a liberal pragmatic populism that might help him see this issue better.
As with George Will, just because some one pays him to type out his opinions does not men that those opinions are built on logic and relate to the real world.
Yglesias bio says that he is “a prominent voice in the American liberal blogosphere”.
How unfortunate.
Jebediah
I spent some time in education, and it seemed to me that a lot of lay people’s attitudes about education and education reform spring from hostility towards teachers’ unions and the unshakeable idea that “teachers get the whole summer off and only work until 2 pm anyway.” So when education reform devolves into “smash their unions,” as you point out, folks who can’t be bothered trying to understand the enormously complicated interactions between teacher, school environment, home environment, student ability, student motivation, etc. latch on to what seems to be a simple solution – test the little bastards and take away all those cushy perks from the teachers.
Every one of those asshats should have to read your post – and if they can’t pass a test on it afterward, they must shut the fuck up.
Thanks for the great post.
jon
I’m against all the teacher/student testing schemes for one simple reason: they don’t test what needs to be tested to determine a teacher’s effectiveness.
What has to be done to test that is that the student needs to take a test, then the student needs to be taught, the teacher needs to evaluate how the student learned, and then the student has to take that same test again. If the student learned, it will show some effectiveness. If the student didn’t learn but the teacher knew that, it will show that the teacher is a good assessor of students. And if the test reveals that the student didn’t learn much but the teacher thought he did, then that’s a problem.
The problem with my version of testing is that it might reveal that students don’t try. It might also reveal that some of the students aren’t even ready for their own grade level. And it would show a long and steady problem that didn’t arise in a way we can blame on one teacher or school.
It’s also an expensive proposal, so there’s no way they’ll ever go for it.
Mack Lyons
Evaluating the educational process on student behavior, parental involvement, the effectiveness of both teachers and administrative staff, and the overall interaction of all three to culminate in a total picture of the state of education is too arduous for these folks. They want figures that can be pared down to simple, arbitrary numbers that can be regurgitated whenever necessary. Standardized testing provides those numbers they can play with and pat themselves on the back over.
I imagine the hostility over teachers’ unions comes from the fact that they still have unions, in a world where unions have been successfully excised from most other industries and workplaces. The people who have to work 10 to 12 hour shifts with few off days and next-to-no vacation look upon teachers with envy and anger, in the misguided belief they have it easy. I doubt these people realize how screwing teachers out of a unionized workforce and decent work conditions will only serve to worsen their children’s educations.
I hate to go off on a tangent, but I can see standardized testing evolving into a method of providing students with an assembly line-style education experience, something akin to working behind the counter at a Burger King. It’ll work in the new privately run “charter” schools where the teachers are paid minimum wage, with less training than you would expect from a fry cook. Now that’s a scary thought.
saucy
You are my new favorite education blogger. Please keep these posts flowing, Freddie. One of the reasons Yglesias gets so much attention is that he does flog the same ideas over and over while rarely adjusting his thinking. A strong, consistent counterpoint would be welcome!
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@saucy: Everything is education is recycled over and over again.
iriedc
I have children in a well performing DC Charter school. But I agree with you on the “reform” movement’s hatred of teachers and teachers’ unions. Their screeching demands for investigating the cheating on tests is vindictive and shows an unwillingness to take responsibility for NCLB’s impossible statistcal standards.
geg6
Well, I’ll be a typical blog commenter and say that Matt Yglesius is an idiot. First, no one argues that both teachers and students shouldn’t be assessed. No one. The problem is that using high stakes standardized multiple choice tests is a poor way to do it. They can be one of several ways of assessing teacher and student performance, but to tie everything to them is to fail in accurately assessing anything other than the ability to successfully take a standardized test. I’m a naturally great test taker. Even as a small child, I instinctively knew how to use game theory to boost my test scores. And I used that skill to the hilt throughout my education, getting almost perfect scores even in math, “solving” even calculus questions despite never having taken calculus and being about as math illiterate as one can be and still get a masters degree. Hell, I got perfect fucking score in the math section of the GRE and never took a higher math in college than algebra and stats. That tells me everything I need to know about the efficacy of testing as assessment of ability.
Yglesius is too stupid to figure out that it is inherently more difficult to assess learning and teaching, with all the multiple factors that affect them, than it is to determine whether someone who will be using chemicals and sharp instruments on humans is competent to be licensed to do that. The fact that he wants to get rid of testing and licensing of barbers and beauticians and double down on testing students and teachers is why I no longer read his bullshit. As I said above, he’s an idiot. Perhaps there should be a test for pundits. Sadly, Yglesius would fail that test if for no other reason than that he can’t fucking spell his way out of a wet paper bag.
Matt
To truly make concrete testing like teacher evaluation, one would need to set it up so that the ingredients in the concrete were more or less random (and unknown to the mixer) and then put the mixer’s job on the line if the concrete didn’t “perform”. For added realism, tell the mixer he’s got to deal with 30 batches simultaneously.
I don’t believe one would have many applicants for that job, despite the fact that concrete doesn’t even have behavioral problems. ;)
greennotGreen
Assessing teaching would be like assessing concrete if different installers of concrete were each given twenty-five different cement mixes which they had to mix and install at the same time. Every installer would not be given the same twenty-five mixes, and they wouldn’t be the same over time. How many years of testing would it take to determine which installers were doing superior jobs, and could you ever really be sure their better results weren’t just the luck of the draw?
iriedc
@Raven my mother – retired educator- often chuckles when I tell her about something new the kids’school is trying and then proceeds to share the history of the approach. Sometimes the history goes back decades but just as frequently she takes it back a few centuries.
Lee Hartmann
I know of one test that should be uncontroversial: people who make analogies with testing concrete and testing teaching skills are obviously idiots.
mai naem
I had some teachers who I didn’t think were all that great but by and large I had at least halfway decent teachers. Teachers don’t make much difference. What really makes a difference is parental involvement. Period.
Freddie deBoer
I am in favor of more experimentation with charter schools, provided that they aren’t brought about through attacking the teachers unions. The problem is recognizing that we see as much variation in outputs between charter schools and between different public schools. There’s no panacea.
Kurzleg
@Jebediah: The summers off definitely rub folks the wrong way, and yet most people with kids in school WANT it that way. Kind of bizarre.
iriedc
@Freddie I’m with you. I’m a charter school parent, but I have a lot of questions about how sustainable a strategy it can be on a national level without crappy corporate for-profits charters taking over, and then breaking, our public system.
@mai naem I disagree to a certain extent. Teachers can make all the difference in the world when a child’s parents are useless. I have friends and colleagues who can attest to this. But teachers can only save a few individual children on their own…not a whole school.
Kurzleg
@greennotGreen: Now THAT’S an analogy!
norbizness
Thankfully, he’ll adjust his thinking once
28003 people (thanks to that awful Think Progress/Facebook commenting system) tell him he’s full of shit, because he’s known for engaging commenters, fostering a community, and being malleable in his ideas… which are laudable and necessary things for a man his age.Lojasmo
@greennotGreen:
Don’t forget weather conditions. Making concrete in a thunderstorm sucks.
Dave
In some ways it’s not even worth rebutting these school reformers with facts. They need to be discredited ad hominem and as a movement.
I just learned that “school reform” along the lines of what Yggles is always on about was a facet of neo-liberal reforms in South America. Cf. The Shock Doctrine. It was really stunning to find that Pinochetism had gotten so entrenched in our mainstream discourse.
Anyway, Yglesias deserves a bullet in the head more than long, sensible lectures.
Samara Morgan
oh YAY a triple!!!!
Yglesias, Kain and de Bore in the same post!!!
@Freddie deBoer: charter schools have no proven statistical record of success. Why should we do that?
@geg6:
this typical libertarian posturing.
what they believe.
Why does anyone read libertarians like Yglesias, Kain, and de Bore?
trial and error in the marketplace leds to the Econopalypse that Ate Americas Jobs
@mai naem: for 50 years results have SHOWN (proven statistical results) that parental involved is the largest contributor to student success, and parental SES is the largest contributor to school success.
Samara Morgan
And freddie, cher, you still owe this blog some DATA to support your epic emocutting concerntrolling of the President.
Links please? Showing where Obama did that?
Samara Morgan
@Freddie deBoer:
Like Kain does here?
Dave
@Samara Morgan: You were unaware??
Here, try this.
Zagloba
As a former teacher, I will say that summer break was a sanity saver. (Not for being on vacation, but for not being around the little shits.) On the other hand, it wrought havoc on the learning process, as everyone who ever stepped into Algebra II for the first time in September remembers.
I’d be much more in line with distributing the breaks more evenly through the year, three weeks on, one week off, which would also encourage a more coherently unit-based teaching approach. The teachers would report during the fourth week, but the students wouldn’t.
batgirl
@Mack Lyons:
Isn’t there one teaching program where teachers are required to read from a script and not deviate? In this case, the only job requirement would be literacy.
Can anyone help me out here? I thought I saw something about this on 60 Minutes or something like that.
Commenting at Balloon Juice since 1937
If I wanted to devise a metric for teacher quality I would consult teachers and students and probably some other professionals that could shed light on the factors that allow disadvantaged students to thrive and not an unexperienced professional opinionator, lobbyists for testing companies, right wing think tanks, or Michelle Rhee.
Samara Morgan
@Freddie deBoer:
why, yes. and so certainly you should be able to support your statements.
Libertarians all suck. You, Yglesias, Kain en bank.
The main reason our education system in America is teh sukksorz is guys like you that refuse to recognize the basic problem. The natural evolution of the “freed” market paradigm has led not just to cartels and regulatory capture, but to profitteering on education, and healthcare, and to the overclass farming the middleclass and the poor FOR profit.
I think you should scrap this entire bloviating post and discuss the Heckman Equation.
Samara Morgan
and please note this is proforma freddie. he crits some fellow traveller like Yglesias or Friedersdorf to get the juicers on his side, and then bloviates for a thousand words of nothing, and ends up with a big whopping “i don’t know what should be done” finish.
Samara Morgan
@Dave: i want freddie to back his attack on Obama with linkage.
not you.
Samara Morgan
I know what to do.
James Heckman knows what to do.
A thousand words of glibertarian bloviating about teacher testing and charter/voucher schools isnt going to do a damn bit of good.
@Commenting at Balloon Juice since 1937: a metric for teacher quality?
kinda like NCLB for teachers instead of students?
Samara Morgan
c’mon de Bore.
cowboy up or run away again.
Freddie deBoer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQFEY9RIRJA
Samara Morgan
@batgirl: charter schools are just stealth voucher schools for the libertarian profitteering off of education goal..
its a glibertarian thing.
there is no hard data that charters improve either school or student performance, because charters actually SELECT for parental involvement and parental SES.
and this is the internet, so if there was some, freddie would have it on hand, right?
kay
@Samara Morgan:
ED once held a virtual roundtable on “labor” so he’s a frequently cited expert on unions.
He understands the 150 year old labor movement, he understands the complex decades-long political relationship between the Democratic Party, movement liberals and labor unions, and he learned all of this in 5 weeks sitting at his kitchen table.
He knew it so well he was advising Barack Obama, who is a Chicago Democrat, on what Obama should do to support labor in Ohio and Wisconsin.
Which is breathtakingly arrogant.
Samara Morgan
@Freddie deBoer: chirp chirp
/points and laffs
Samara Morgan
@kay: well, kay, Kain has RETHOUGHT labor since then.
niice, huh? NCLB hasnt done enough damage, now we shall force all teachers in America to be above average, like NCLB forces all children to be above average.
And the only way to do that is teach the test.
Samara Morgan
Why do libertarians ignore the Heckman Equation?
Woody
Not every human endeavor must operate under the Holy Market System.
In fact, I’d argue that medicine, education, and religion do not function particularly well under the profit motive. This is mostly due to something Mr deBoer points out well: outcomes are affected by many immensely complex factors. What’s more, these factors are a bit like a river in that attempting to measure them in stasis (like taking a standardized test) is structurally distorted and is hence only partially useful.
I’m constantly bemused by the market zealots insisting that we improve education by slashing salaries and benefits for teachers, lowering qualifications to teach, and trashing the classroom environment (when school budgets are cut, the custodial staff and equipment take major hits).
Freddie deBoer
http://www.gifbin.com/bin/052011/1304618376_tumbleweed-gif.gif
different church-lady
Shorter Matt Yglesias: “I don’t understand the difference between children and concrete.”
kay
@Samara Morgan:
Unions are the only thing standing in the way of privatizing the public school system. Many charters are already for-profit in Ohio. Every grifter and crook in the state is lining up at the trough. The minute the statehouse or governor’s office changes hands, the conservatives and libertarians swoop in to deregulate, and make a buck. There’s no data in Ohio to indicate charter schools (or private schools with vouchers) are doing any better with poor kids than traditional schools did. They’re kicking the low-performers out of public schools and sending them home to take publicly-funded for-profit on-line programs. WTF? School was the one thing they had.
Thank God teacher’s unions are standing in the way, whatever their motives. School reformers certainly aren’t providing any oversight or regulation.
themanintheguyfawkesmask
Has Matt Yglesias ever spent time in a classroom? Just curious, because otherwise, he might ought to shut the fuck up.
different church-lady
@themanintheguyfawkesmask:
As a teacher? Or as a student?
Personally I bet he smoked in the boy’s room a lot.
PS: Different Church Lady’s Rule of Liberal Internet Pundits #4 — given enough Tweets, every liberal hero will eventually reveal himself to be a blowhard.
kay
Where’s the national regulatory framework for charter schools? How do I know for-profit national outfits like White Hat in Ohio and Florida aren’t stealing public money that was intended to go to children?
I think I’d rather pay a public school teacher or administrator who lives in my community a decent wage than pay consultants, lawyers, managers and shareholders at for-profit charters. How is this a good thing for me? I’m not saving any money. I’m just directing it upwards.
themanintheguyfawkesmask
@different church-lady: Sorry, I should have clarified. Although I’m not sure I would want to wish Yglesias on any classroom of young minds.
iriedc
@kay: As a DC charter school parent, I think that for-profit Charters school are a danger to the Charter School experiment and a Trojan Horse laying the groundwork to destroy the national public school system. I hate arguing with other Charter school parents over this. Granted several (not all) local DC public schools are so terrible, I understand the parental impulse to grab onto anything that looks like a life raft.
Beware school reformers with children in rich suburban or elite private schools.
different church-lady
@themanintheguyfawkesmask: I’m not sure it makes any difference — startin’ to seem like he might have cut class quite a bit.
burnspbesq
@Samara Morgan:
“charter schools are just stealth voucher schools for the libertarian profitteering off of education goal..”
Tell that to my son and the other 1,600 students at arguably the most successful charter school (in terms of achieving its mission) in America, the Orange County High School of the Arts.
kay
@Samara Morgan:
I’m sure they’re crushed by that, by the way, labor unions, that he’s “cooled” on them, after “conversations”. He was such a powerful labor advocate for, what was it? A week and a half? Up to and including insisting Obama intervene in Ohio, despite the fact that actual, you know, labor leaders on the ground here didn’t want Obama to do that.
But what do they know? Have they held a roundtable where thought experiments were conducted? I think not!
Judas Escargot
My issue with charter schools (in my area, at least) is the exclusivity: In my town, you need to have “connections” to get your kids in them. Grades alone aren’t enough.
IMO, just another way for local elites to funnel extra taxpayer dime out of the general public schools, and into “special” schools for their kids.
kay
@iriedc:
I think well-intentioned charter school proponents should take back their movement, because it has gone to the grifters and crooks in Ohio, and Ohio is the state that first went to the constitutional wall on vouchers, and then went for charters in a big way. My clients are not benefitted from on-line for-profit high school. They’re drowning without public school and some sort of order in their lives, and they are poor rural kids. School was the one respite. It was the one place they could go where there wasn’t chaos.
Ohio should be your canary in a coal mine. You need regulation. Now. Your movement is going to be discredited. If you’re well-intentioned, and I believe you are, the reformers (not you: the national spokespeople) need to get out of think tanks and get on the ground.
burnspbesq
@themanintheguyfawkesmask:
“Has Matt Yglesias ever spent time in a classroom? Just curious, because otherwise, he might ought to shut the fuck up.”
Fail. All species of argument that sound in “if you don’t do it, you can’t criticize it” are inherently wrong. In fact there is nearly always value in bringing a fresh perspective to an intractable problem.
Samara Morgan
@kay: like i said, charter schools are just a gateway for market-based voucher schools.
like the Kain/de Boer teacher certification plan is basically No Child Left Behind for teachers.
Heckman has a Noble in economics. the reason glibertarians like de Bore, Yglesias and Kain try to ignore him is that the Heckman equation is a social justice solution to education reform.
wallah.
could social justice actually be better for the country in a recession?
MBunge
@themanintheguyfawkesmask: Has Matt Yglesias ever spent time in a classroom?
I think you could expand that to “Has Matt Yglesias ever done anything to justify anyone paying attention to anything he says?”
Mike
different church-lady
I’m pretty sure I remember an episode of Green Acres where Mr. Haney explains just that.
Samara Morgan
@Judas Escargot: and this goes back to another question that freddie ran from like a scalded cat…..are private schools unamerican?
because the privitization of charter schools like Kay talks about and voucher schools are just stealth private schools.
if the glibertarians and Distributed Jesusland get their way, we will see Klan schools and creationism schools and Anti-AGW schools.
American libertarianism has devolvled to the support of localized mob rule in the name of “trial-and-error”..
kay
@iriedc:
I don’t have any problem with any parent advocating for their kid. Rich, middle class or poor. My experience is that public school are booting the kids I work with (because it helps their test scores, and poor performers are a pain in the ass) and sending them home with a voucher for a for-profit.
They’re drowning. They don’t know how to self-educate, which is why they were poor performers in the first place, and no one is helping them. With the statutory changes brought about by home schooling proponents, we don’t even have a legal tool to intervene. They’re quite literally on their own.
I don’t think any of this was intentional. I think the premise was poorly thought out. Deregulating schools carries risk for the most vulnerable. They need regulatory protection.
MBunge
@burnspbesq: In fact there is nearly always value in bringing a fresh perspective to an intractable problem.
Epic fail. Not everything is a fresh perspective, especially if you keep promoting the same proposition without ever engaging or responding to any of the reaction to said proposition. It’s also true that one of the reasons that problems become intractable is because people who don’t know what the hell they’re talking about keep inserting their ignorance into the debate.
Mike
Samara Morgan
@burnspbesq: anecdote is not statistical evidence.
themanintheguyfawkesmask
@burnspbesq:
Unfortunately, I disagree here. I hear so many people use the bullshit “they only work six hours a day and get summers off” argument, that I have to wonder what the color of the sky is in their alternate universe. There is value in fresh perspectives. Unfortunately, the “reform” movement, and Yglesias in particular, aren’t bringing any fresh perspectives. It’s an age-old perspective with new paint.
People who would never question a doctor’s or lawyers prerogative are all up in teacher’s faces, denigrating their efforts, their passion, their effectiveness. Fuck that noise.
Freddie deBoer
So, look, I try really hard to ignore Matoko, and frankly I don’t know why she’s not IP banned around here. However, you need to understand that all these things she’s saying I believe in– most egregiously for profit schooling– she’s just making up.
Samara Morgan
@burnspbesq: your son would have done well in any school. Like Kay said, its the kids at risk that matt, erik and freddie are planning on throwing under the bus in the name of Profit.
different church-lady
@themanintheguyfawkesmask:
It’s the color of shit. That’s why they’re so cranky all the time.
kay
@burnspbesq:
Well, burns, is it worthy of study? It pontificating on “the labor movement” based on a month’s reading a sort of arrogant proposition? Especially if we’re also nattering on about the value of education, which means “working hard to know something”?
There are graduate studies programs in labor. It’s HUGE. It crosses most of US history, the Democratic Party, liberals, and it exists. Union workers exist. They can be interviewed!
That’s my beef. Anyone can offer an opinion on anything, but should these guys be cited as somehow authoritative? I think that denigrates and demeans people who actually take the time to study something.
Ohio Mom
Two things: One, Matt isn’t “an idiot,” as someone upthread described him, but I do think there is a very good possibilty he is corrupt, at least on the topic of school reform.
It’s worth remembering that his employer is pro educational “deform” and charters (what’s that quote about getting a man to believe something that goes against what his paycheck depends on?), and that his long-term girlfriend is a professional in the school “deform” movement.
In short, there’s a lot in his personal life that acts against him thinking honestly about these particular issues — call them conflicts of interests. I’ve written this before in many other comments because I think it goes directly to his credibility on this topic.
Every education thread of his I’ve read has had many perceptive comments but he either doesn’t read them or doesn’t give them any consideration. I think that’s why people keep harping on his views on this subject, because they expect better of him. We know he is capable of being better and we are frustrated and disappointed he’s not living up to his ideals or his potential.
***************************************************
Two, an often overlooked result of replacing PUBLIC schools with charters is that well, you end up replacing the PUBLIC. Public school systems are a form of local government. They have a certain jurisdiction: just like there are “city limits,” there is a school district. They are governed by an elected board, just like a city or village is governed by a council. They are required to have open meetings and open records (with the exception of records about individual students for privacy reasons).
If you don’t like what your school system is doing, you can speak at a school board meeting, support a challenger running for school board, even run for the school board yourself. That’s democracy!
If you don’t like what your charter school is doing with your tax money — suck it up. You have no say. That’s not democracy, that’s private corporations taking over the role of government. There’s a word for that.
Samara Morgan
@Freddie deBoer: prove it bucko.
Are private schools basically unamerican?
wut Kay said.
you know who else said i should be IP banned?
Kain.
and Hall Monitor Allan.
but please, do mail Cole and tell him.
kay
@Ohio Mom:
The whole reform movement needs a bus trip to Ohio. Desperately. Not the poorly-intentioned ones: they know damn well what they’re doing, but the well-intentioned ones.
Because this has gotten away from them, and they don’t know it yet. I don’t even know how to put the toothpaste back in the tube, once profit entered the picture. Ka-Boom! Here come the grifters and bought and paid for state legislators! How do you undo that, once everyone’s making money?
Samara Morgan
@Woody: yet mister de bore is in favor of “more experimentation with charter schools”.
kay
@iriedc:
The for-profits are going to county court in Ohio. They’re fighting state regulation. Not teacher’s unions. State regulation. They’re fighting sunshine laws, they’re fighting accountability, hell, they’re fighting accounting, like “keeping books that can be examined” :)
I would like to know, as a taxpayer, how I ended up paying lawyers instead of teachers, and I am a lawyer.
PeakVT
@Freddie deBoer: Just install the pie filter. Heck, I installed it just for her. Arguing with a crazy person is pointless.
@Ohio Mom: Good points re: Ygelsias.
Samara Morgan
freddie, heres the whole song.
just for you.
look for where the shoe flies at that fucking WEC retard Bush at 2:28
ichi! ni! san!
MBunge
@Ohio Mom: We know he is capable of being better and we are frustrated and disappointed he’s not living up to his ideals or his potential.
Eh. Not to turn this into a simple “rip on Yglesias” thread, but I’m not sure what potential you’re talking about. He’s not an idiot and he rarely makes the sort of “you’ve got to be kidding me” errors of fact and logic you’ll see in someone like McArdle. However, when you measure him against people like Ezra Klein, Amanda Marcotte, digby or even our own JC, I’m not exactly sure what MattY really offers. He’s not a particularly good writer, has much the same “above it all” tone to his work that embodies neolib punditry and is really terrible when it comes to advancing an argument beyond whatever hobbyhorse of the moment he’s fixated on.
Mike
Samara Morgan
@PeakVT: yes but everyone else will still read my deconstruction of de Bore’s glibertarian crap.
heh
he wont know what im saying.
:)
Judas Escargot
@kay:
One of the ‘dark sides’ of blogging culture is that when someone is perceived to be a good writer, we then give extra weight to whatever other opinions they may have. Which is (of course) BS, but it’s probably how we’re wired. Just because person X can string together sentences better than others doesn’t necessarily imply that the content of those sentences is true or valid.
IMO it’s a holdover from when the barriers to entry were higher. Only 15-20 years ago –back when someone had to have a newspaper column or publish a book to get their opinions out there– this assumption was less dangerous (but no less pernicious).
And no, I don’t want to go back to those bad old days. But IMO folks should always keep in mind that a good writer’s only obvious, authoritative skillset is… good writing. Outside of that, anything they claim is fair game.
Samara Morgan
@MBunge: hes a libertarian.
like Kain is a “neoliberal-liberaltarian” and de Bore is a “civil libertarian”. They are all libertarians.
or they would call themselves something else.
Ohio Mom
Kay: Yup. Especially a trip to that White Hat outfit. Not that White Hat would let them have a detailed look.
I actually think there could be a *small* role for charters in this world. The requirements should include that they are non-profit and that their funding be regularly re-evaluted, similar to the way social service organizations have to reapply regularly for funding from their local United Way and whatever goverments they receive support from. Similarly, they should have boards that reflect their community and that must do private fundraising. In other words, they must be able to prove their worth, continually, to the community-at-large, and not just to the relatively few families they serve.
More importantly, their missions should be restricted to serving populations that are challenging for the public schools and their focus should be on remediation — they must show that they are returning significant numbers of their students to public schools.
Here’s an example: young children with choclear implants. I can see a real value in having a charter for preschool and early primary children with implants. They need specialized services that any one public school might be hard-pressed to provide. Get ’em up to speed and then include them with their typically developing peers in their public schools. Another example might be a school for teen mothers that provides day-care for their babies and toddlers.
I don’t doubt that there are some fine charters out there, but ultimately the real role these schools these school play is giving cover to all the White Hats out there. That they actually educate anybody is just gravy.
iriedc
@kay: DC Charters benefit from strong…wait for it…OVERSIGHT and REGULATION.
(BTW, Kay, I’m not ALLCAPPING at you, I’m yelling at the folks who would be foolish to think that school charters should be “less regulated.”)
I do think that the internal day-to-day functioning of Charters benefit for a certain degree of independence. But bad Charters must be shut-down. And too, I think that Charters are more likely to suffer from thievery and corrupt practices without strong fiscal, academic, and quality-of-life accountability. I don’t even know what to say about flooding “on-line” schools with poor kids except “WTF?” Evidence is coming in slowly about what a disaster that’s shaping up to be.
And too, I take your point about taking back the Charter movement.
Freddie deBoer
Man, this filter is awesome. Much thanks.
Ohio Mom
Spelling alert: cochlear. Sorry.
Hebisner
The testing that NCLB requires is not an effective way to measure teachers, and the people like Ted Kennedy who wrote the bill would have told you that. But it forced states and school districts to develop metrics to try to figure out if what they are doing is serving all their students. NCLB forces states to break out scores to measure how minority students are doing. Those scores were always dirty little secrets hidden by many districts and states because they are so awful . NCLB is not the problem, and teachers and their unions don’t deserve the hate they are getting. But we absolutely need to work on figuring out how to measure student achievement, teacher effectiveness, and whether or not schools are doing their jobs. Most are, but there are too many that are awful.
MBunge
@Samara Morgan: @MBunge: hes a libertarian.
Nah. The one thing you can count on all varieties of libertarians for is an emphasis on the individual. Whether it’s civil rights, property or economic rights, gun rights, whatever. If there’s on thing MattY isn’t overly focused on, it’s the role of the individual in society.
Mike
themanintheguyfawkesmask
@Hebisner:
I read somewhere that TK regretted that vote later. Anyone have a link to him refudiating that?
Samara Morgan
@Hebisner: NCLB is market based profiteering off of education. Schools get funding based on standardized test scores.
NCLB mandates all children in America shall be “Proficient”…ie above average. that is empirically impossible. First principles libertarians like freddie support anti-empirical programs like NCLB.
that is why the proposed Kain/de Bore teacher certification program aka No Teacher Left Behind and the free market colonizing of charter schools like kay pointed out are simply awful for american education.
TR Donoghue
I really can’t stand that smug spoiled twit. I also can’t remember why I ever read him in the first place. Was he always a self-satisfied dim-wit or is this a relatively recent phenomen? I stopped reading him altogether about year and a half ago.
TR Donoghue
I really can’t stand that smug spoiled twit. I also can’t remember why I ever read him in the first place. Was he always a self-satisfied dim-wit or is this a relatively recent phenomen? I stopped reading him altogether about year and a half ago.
Samara Morgan
@MBunge: he SAYS hes a libertarian.
Here is a definition of libertarian.
matty is totally down with this, just like de Bore.
de Bore
but trial and error experimentation like freddie and matt and all the libertarians favor (because its TOO COMPLICATED) just leads to free market (for profit) colonization. Like Kay is talking about.
Stillwater
@kay: I’m not saving any money. I’m just directing it upwards.
The ideological divide in a nutshell.
sj660
Yglesias is another Slate-style liberal. He’s going to convince us that our instincts are wrong and that if we would just listen to the real Americans we would see that they have a point, but he knows how to do it better than both sides.
Education reform asks teachers to do the impossible. Most teachers gladly make a valiant attempt, thinking the reformers are trying in good faith to improve the system. They’re not. They’re trying to create a record of embarrassing failure which they can use to justify more central political control over curriculum, less funding, and cop out solutions like vouchers.
Yglesias is doing what Obama does. He’s giving away half the position before negotiations even begin.
Personally, I would be willing to give up tenure (as long as for-cause termination was still in place, not at-will) if salaries were doubled, permanently. But, what always ends up happening is our side gives up something and never gets anything back. So no.
MBunge
@Samara Morgan: @MBunge: he SAYS hes a libertarian.
People can say anything but I don’t think MattY’s ideology is defined by anything more than what his social circle is talking about at any particular moment.
For example, a while back he was on a jag over how the U.S. needed parliamentary democracy. It was clear from his writing, however, that he supported such a move because it would end gridlock and increase the ease of government action. What sort of libertarian would ever support a move to make it easier for the government to exercise its power and authority?
Mike
sj660
@Samara Morgan: It’s not only empirically impossible, it’s logically contradictory. Only in Lake Wobegon can all the children be above average. Someone has to be average. Someone has to be below.
sj660
@MBunge: This is exactly why no one right, left, or center should really pay much attention to Yglesias.
What has he ever done? He’s a blogger. His whole adult life, as far as I can tell. So he’s always searching for an elegant theory.
The problem with people like that is that they subordinate people and lives to their theories.
Samara Morgan
@sj660:
or any “first principles” libertarian for that matter.
@MBunge: he SAYS hes a libertarian. when someone tells you who they are…believe them. the first time.–maya angleou
@sj660: exactly. and freddie and erik are proposing we make all teachers above average. freddie is also proposing we “experiment” with charter schools. that is federalism, or localized mob rule in action.
cyntax
@Samara Morgan:
Ya know m_c, as a teacher, a non-libertarian, and someone who’s engaged you on the merits of your posts, rather than attack you, I gotta say I really think you’re going after the wrong person here.
Freddie’s take on standardized testing and why it doesn’t work is dead on. I can tell he’s done the work that Yglesias hasn’t to try and understand this issue, so I’m grateful that he’s using this platform to push back on the school reformers’ agenda.
You’re not wrong to say that socioeconomic status is an important determinate, but it’s one that is going to take a long time to change. I really have trouble seeing how attacking deBoer furthers that effort.
Samara Morgan
@MBunge: What sort of libertarian would ever support a move to make it easier for the government to exercise its power and authority?
he doesnt see it that way. he sees it as empowering the representatives.
Yglesias is a first principles libertarian.
Poulos is a first principles postmost modern libertarian.
de Bore is a first principles civil libertarian.
Kain is a first principles neoliberal-liberaltarian.
they all proceed in their reasoning from first principlesn which are actually anti-empirical. for example, trial and error in society leads to mob-rule. Trial and error in economics leads to the Econopalypse that ate Americas jobs.
kay
And, burns, I think you are a good and well-inrentioned person but you and I would raise holy hell if non-lawyers were pontificating on how to measure a publicly paid lawyers effectiveness.
So why is it ok with teaching
Can these two experts weigh in on our profession, or would we object to that
Be honest
Samara Morgan
@cyntax: de bore never answers my questions, and always runs away.
this is a proforma post for him. he crits a fellow traveller like Yglesias or Young Conor with a legit criticism to get audience sympathy, and then tries to push glibertarian eumemes.
He has two here.
He wants more experimentation with charters. But as Kay pointed out, charter schools are already being colonized by profiteers. Like I asked freddie before he ran away again, how does one prevent charters from turning into either creationism schools or Klan schools, or from turning into for profit private schools?
The other eumeme he shares with Kain. the instation of a teacher merit criteria.
that would simply become NCLB for teachers. having failed to make all american children above average, we should now devote our energy to making all teachers above average?
But it simply cant be done.
umm instantiation of the NTLB program.
every post de Bore makes here, he crits something (like say President Obama) to farm sympathy with the like-minded juicers, wallows around bloviating for a thousand words or so, and finishes up by saying he doesnt know what to do.
and then he runs away.
well i know what to do.
Heckman equation. google it.
MBunge
@Samara Morgan: Yglesias is a first principles libertarian.
Poll after poll shows that a plurality or majority of Americans call themselves “conservative”. That doesn’t mean they actually are conservative, subscribe to conservative thinking or even know what conservatism actually entails. In fact, poll after poll shows that while those people call themselves “conservative”, they actually agree with and support one liberal policy after another.
Well, if MattY is a “first principles libertarian”, he is one in exactly the same way all those people are “conservative”.
Mike
Shinobi
This is a great post about why it is difficult to grade teachers. A teacher cannot force kids to learn, give them a better home life, or make them more intellectual by force of sheer will. The grading of teachers is a distraction from dealing with the real issues that keep kids from learning.
cyntax
@kay:
I don’t mind people weighing in on teaching, they have to be able to do that. In a broader sense burnspbesq is right, someone shouldn’t have to do something to be able to critique/evaluate it; otherwise, how could we ever ask people to be jurors for trials?
But as you’re pointing out above and numerous other people have pointed out (love the rebuttals of Yglesias’ concrete metaphor), it’s a complicated and nuanced interaction between student and teacher, and it’d be nice if some people came to the discussion with fewer preconceived notions about how simple it is to teach, or practice law–as the case may be.
kay
Cyntax, lawyers would never put up with it. They would dismiss the whole notion.
Ohio Mom
To add to what Shinobi said:
And a teacher alone can not provide all the services some kids need to suceed in the classroom, even within a school. For example, kids with language issues need the help of the school speech-language pathologist; kids with fine motor issues need the help of an occupational therapist, and maybe some technology (e.g., if a kid can’t master handwriting, a laptop).
About 10%-12% of the students in any given *public* school are going to have some sort of learning “difference” or disability. The teachers and students in well-funded schools get the extra supports they need to do well, those in poorly-funded schools, don’t.
I emphasized *public* because private schools don’t have to accept anyone they don’t want to, and many charters are known to counsel out any kid who provides them with too many challenges (and the threat of the extra expense of support staff).
cyntax
@Samara Morgan:
Well, there might be a reason for that. Is your purpose in posting here to engage in conversation or to have conflict? If it’s the former, you might need to make some revisions to your rhetorical approach.
@kay:
That’s kind of interesting. Does seem to be a bit of a double standard then.
Samara Morgan
@cyntax: i just want him to answer the question.
just like EDK.
@Shinobi:
no, its a steaming pile of glibertarian crap about why we can do nothing.
we can do something. google James Heckman.
De Bore is actually advocating some sort of teacher merit certification in his link to Kain.
de Bore is also advocating more charter school experimentation. yet he runs away when asked if that will not just lead to more of the privitization that Kay is seeing and more of the evolution of charter schools into stealth private schools with Klan or creationism (for example) curriculums that i can predict would happen.
Samara Morgan
@MBunge: no, he is first principles libertarian exactly in the way that Dr. Manzi expalins the paradox of libertarianism that i have linked here multiple times.
i grew up with libertarians.
i cut my blog baby teeth on them.
Samara Morgan
and its extremely frustrating when i have to deconstruct everything he says because people just assume he is saying “good things” be cause he starts out dissing Yglesias or Friedersdorf or Gillespie or whatever fellow traveller he is using for a stalking horse.
Samara Morgan
Do you juicers know why Kain and de Bore get front page spots on a liberal blog?
because mistermix and Cole and even DougJ are desperate to pretend both sides are the same, and that there are “reasonable” conservatives and libertarians that share our values.
But there simply are not. Both conservatism and libertarianism are anti-empirical…they Do. Not. Work.
and it doesnt matter anyways.
Because Team Reaver owns their souls now.
why arent freddie and Kain posting on redstate? because they’d get eaten alive.
the GOP base is no longer persuadable.
so they come here and try to persuade you juicers to reach across the aisle.
/spit
Omnes Omnibus
@Samara Morgan: Christ, what an asshole.
cckids
@Zagloba:
My kids had this (year-round scheduling) from K-3rd grade or so. We LOVED it, all of us. They had 6 wks on, 2 wks off, if I remember, plus one 5-week break at some point in the year. We had some input into which of 5 tracks we were on, & chose to have our long break in the winter. The kids didn’t develop that “oh god, school again” boredom, had more free time to just be kids, and didn’t have the LOOONG summer break for us all to get sick of each other. Sadly, it has been discontinued. I never got why parents didn’t like it, unless they just couldn’t get past nostalgia.
MBunge
@Samara Morgan: no, he is first principles libertarian
Just saying that over and over again doesn’t make it any more correct.
Mike
dollared
@burnspbesq: Oh Jesus Christ on a stick, Burns, a successful charter school in Orange County, one of the richest collection of zip codes in the entire country! That proves everything in the entire debate!
We appreciate your nobility in being willing to label yourself a Conservative Democrat in a land full of Republicans who confuse the Free Market Fairy and their own personal genius with the 50 years of uninterrupted, federally subsidized real estate appreciation that actually explains their amazingly comfortable lives.
However, you cannot possibly extrapolate from your child’s experience to any sort of policy prescription for school reform.
dollared
@Samara Morgan: Samara, post your resume: your experience, your expertise, your policy goals, your political heroes. Explain to us why any of us should read your claptrap.
Samara Morgan
@Omnes Omnibus: you should mail Cole and tell him that.
ichi! ni! san!
Samara Morgan
@dollared: stalker!
dollared
@Samara Morgan: and you are a pretentious, lying sack of shit. You don’t have to give your home number. Just give us one reason why we should read your shit.
dollared
@kay: Thanks, Kay. What people really miss in the whole debate is that the schools already do an amazing job of making up for inequalities in home resources and backgrounds. That’s how we became such a huge industrial and agricultural power.
If they didn’t, the disparities in outcomes would be even more daunting.
Omnes Omnibus
@Samara Morgan: Cole or any of the front pagers can ban you or not as they see fit. Not my concern. You are, however, being an asshole. You may want to consider that, when everyone disagrees with you, there is a possibility that it is you who are wrong. I think Freddie is wrong about a lot of things, but he is a lefty not a libertarian. And, yes, I have read the Manzi post that you spam everywhere; you should understand that it is not the Ur-definition of libertarianism. It is one man’s analysis of what he perceives as a split between typed of libertarians. No offense, but a lot of posters and commenters on this blog have read and thought more deeply on political philosophy than you have. Consider that they might know something.
James E. Powell
@MBunge:
Judging by his writing over the last decade, Ygelsias aspires to be the next David Broder.
iriedc
@cckids: The idea of year round school comes up for our Charter occasionally. None of the parents hate the idea. But the logistics of K-5 child care and/or keeping the older kids occupied during the breaks when the rest of the Metro area’s “school break camps” and summer camp is synchronized around the traditional calendar pretty much stops the discussion. The parents who bring it up repeatedly typically don’t have jobs where they have certain limits on their annual leave requests. To make it work for many families a lot of fundraising would have to be school-driven to give the parents that type of coverage. Fundraising to cover basic K-8 afterschool programming — which is a significant need for most working families’ schedules — is very tough right now as it is.
James E. Powell
I became an English teacher at the age of 50 after twenty years practicing law. When I began, I was open-minded, deferential toward the veteran teachers and administrators, and eager to learn how to teach. By the end of the first year I realized that, as William Goldman said of Hollywood, nobody knows anything.
There are many things I’ve learned that are almost never mentioned in school reform discussions, but that are, in my view, important. First among these is that the general public believes that there was a time when all high school students were educated and that schools today fail to do this. But there is no real consensus as to what ‘educated’ means and there was never a time when the lowest achieving students were ‘educated’ in any sense.
The current understanding is that an ‘educated’ student is one who scores well on standardized tests. This results from the unstated admission that we cannot agree what is important and we cannot measure what is important, so we will take something we can measure and declare that that is what is important.
The truth is that, until recently, no one bothered to educate what I call the lowest quarter of students and no one called that failure. They either dropped out or graduated from vocational programs. They got factory or other blue collar jobs where education, real or certified, was not a requirement. Check the high school graduation rates from 1960.
When no one has ever done it before, is it useful to call not doing it a failure?
Samara Morgan
@dollared:im not the lying sack of shit, freddie is….you guys are just to lazy to read my links.
just mail cole and tell him to ban me.
ichi! ni! san!
freddie is a lefty just like Kain was.
now how did that work out for you, dollared?
HyperIon
@different church-lady:
Ha ha! As a child I was obsessed with Arnold the pig.
(The reappearance of the reply thingy enables completely gratuitous commenting. Yay, i guess.)
Samara Morgan
@Omnes Omnibus:
or the alternative…that you are stupid.
and not everyone disagrees with me– just the cudlips.
:)
Omnes Omnibus
@Samara Morgan: Well, you certainly kept your dogmatic certainty from your days as a right winger.
ETA: I don’t know why I bother. You aren’t as smart and knowledgeable as you think you are. Deal with it.
Samara Morgan
and again, where is freddie?
run run run as fast you can, freddie.
HyperIon
@kay wrote:
That’s my fundamental concern. In the past public schools have accepted all comers (by law). But kids can be rejected from private schools (which i define as NOT a public school). So this leaves the public schools “stuck” with the kids nobody wants. This is a REAL problem.
Samara Morgan
@Omnes Omnibus: its dogmatic empiricism. give me data or give me death.
im a scientist-in-training, membah.
and you are a dumb cudlip that just got spoofed by EDK II.
:)
HyperIon
@James E. Powell wrote:
Yes!
Omnes Omnibus
@Samara Morgan: Do some research. Read some political theory. Learn something. I am done with you for a while again. Cheers.
Samara Morgan
@Omnes Omnibus: i read constantly.
just not first culture intellectuals or Dead White Guy Phailosophy like Hume and Hayek.
its pointless to read that shit.
the world has changed.
this is what im reading now, galtungs book.
21st century philosophy.
Did you know Galtung’s daughter was on Utoya?
she is the girl that lived.
dollared
@Samara Morgan: I don’t find the quote objectionable. I think Freddie is honest and intelligent, and ED’s influence at Forbes is better than nothing.
OTOH, I find you tedious, pretentious, opaque, unintelligible and hostile.
So I humbly suggest you be less so.
dollared
@James E. Powell: Thank you for your public service. And yes, you make the most critical point. That’s the problem with all economic libertarians. They have no solution for the bottom quarter, except for sterilization, starvation or prisons.
unhandyandy
An actual link to the article Yglesias cites would have been nice, instead of a picture of the link.
Samara Morgan
@dollared: chacun a son gout.
i just continue to marvel that a soi disant liberal blog continues to front page union bashers, charter school advocates, firebaggers and Obama concerntrolls.
so glad you agree with emocutting firebaggerery like this
dollareddullard.you are a two digit.
its intellectually flaccid first “principles” glibertarians like freddie and Kain that are giving Team Reaver cover to destroy America.
Samara Morgan
@dullard
hahaha
Kain is about to get shitcanned at forbes for lack of pageclicks.
that is why mistermix is still giving him mercy
fuckslinks in spite of crap like this at his own blog.