… so do yourself a favor, check out this brewing company website, but the first time, click that you aren’t 21. And if you’re a beer fan, maybe you could reward them financially for their awesomeness.
Freddie deBoer
reality check: state legislator recall election history
by Freddie deBoer| 143 Comments
This post is in: Seriously
From the “this is excellent news for Republicans!” file, early indications are that the media are going to spin Wisconsin as a big failure for Democrats and their base. This is about as surprising as Mark Halperin saying something stupid, so I’m not shocked, but to inject a little reality into the discussion– here is …
reality check: state legislator recall election historyPost + Comments (143)
liberals elected Obama, and they can fix the country too
by Freddie deBoer| 510 Comments
This post is in: Politics
Round about late 2004 or early 2005, when things seemed bleakest, a friend of mine got an “Obama ’08” sticker. You might not remember, but those were, in fact, novelty stickers at the time. The idea that Obama might run in ’08 was a sort of earnest dream, a sort of sighing, “if only” kind …
liberals elected Obama, and they can fix the country tooPost + Comments (510)
Politics ain’t beanbag. I don’t care about feelings, and while the ingratitude is galling, I suppose it’s irrelevant. What is relevant is the dynamic that keeps playing out the same way over and over again, and hurts the country. I don’t know how many times I have to tell you this: when you attack the left, you empower the right. So many supporting Obama against left-wing critics– by attacking those left-wing critics, by the way, far more loudly and harshly than they attack the right wing– are trying to thread an absurdly thin needle. They want to attack leftists like myself in the service of attacking Republicans and supporting a president the American people permanently regard as very liberal. You think this country’s political system allows that kind of nuance? There is no such thing as objectively moderate. And even if there were, we have all the evidence in the world that the average American voter isn’t engaged enough to know what that is. The only way you get to be called a moderate in this system is to pass bipartisan legislation– and that is something that is not going to happen. Listen to Mitch McConnell–
“We worked very hard to keep our fingerprints off of these proposals,” McConnell says. “Because we thought — correctly, I think — that the only way the American people would know that a great debate was going on was if the measures were not bipartisan. When you hang the ‘bipartisan’ tag on something, the perception is that differences have been worked out, and there’s a broad agreement that that’s the way forward.”
Give the man credit: it’s working. When you push Obama to be more of a centrist, you are doing exactly what Mitch McConnell wants. He knows that the American people think of Obama as very liberal, regardless of reality, and that there is nothing but political benefit in his side being as intractable as possible. I want to say to many of the commenters on this blog, when you push Obama to move to the right at the same time as the Tea Party pushes Republicans to the right, Mitch McConnell is playing you. I want to say to Andrew Sullivan, Mitch McConnell is playing you. He loves this “responsible centrist” shit. One person pushes towards the center, one towards the right, where does the object go? While you spend all your time congratulating yourself on how sensible and moderate you are, you are losing. Is it worth it?
Bill Maher gets it. He understands that our politics are distorted by one side that allows an extreme and one that doesn’t. This is not calculus. If you don’t care for my deductive explanation, just look around you. John Boehner– who you say you hate, who you say is ruining the country, who you think has to be stopped– he has just gotten, by his own estimation, 98% of what he wanted. 98% of the policy that you say is ruining the country. What is the value of being the responsible party if in doing so you are empowering the irresponsible party and hurting the country? Every time you attack liberal critics of the president, you strengthen John Boehner. But, hey, at least you aren’t shrill!
mistermix said earlier, “I’d say that this kind of West Wing drama is exactly what Joe Klein and all the other political connoisseurs want from a President. Lots of noble words accompanied by noble failure. In addition to being worldly, dirty and un-presidential, messy compromises just can’t be tied up in two hours, so they cut into lazy pundits’ TV and cocktail time.”
I don’t want flowery speeches. I don’t pretend that better speeches from Obama would fix things. But mistermix– those “messy compromises” that you associate with virtue is why our country is the way it is. Because every messy compromise is at least 80% for the wignuts, you end up with a corrupted country. How long do you keep playing that game until you realize it’s rigged? I told you how I think liberal politics can be restored. There have been liberal grassroots movements in this country before and there can be again. But it can never happen if the party leadership forever cuts liberals off at the knees. It cannot happen if we have a messaging machine that refuses to listen to the left wing. It can’t happen if blogs like this one associate our own ideas and our own values with shame rather than with pride.
Or you can keep doing what you’re doing and keep getting the results you say you hate. It’s up to you.
Christian compassion
by Freddie deBoer| 169 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
Here’s Catholic conservative Tim Carney showing that Christian compassion we all know and love, regarding the financial, emotional, and family devastation that is having your home foreclosed on: Remember that part in the bible? It’s like my favorite verse: “Thou shalt increase human suffering if it helps your cousin make money.” I think it’s from …
in search of concrete teaching statistics
by Freddie deBoer| 135 Comments
This post is in: Education
Check out this Twitter exchange from Matt Yglesias. Let’s answer snark with substance.
in search of concrete teaching statisticsPost + Comments (135)
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.
credit where due
by Freddie deBoer| 64 Comments
This post is in: Rare Sincerity
I’ve been criticized for failing to recognize the liberal victories of the Obama administration, and it’s a well-taken criticism. Here’s a good piece from NPR that highlights the Obama administration’s considerable and righteous efforts to make the American federal judiciary a more diverse institution. A justice system can only remain truly fair and impartial if …
theories of politics
by Freddie deBoer| 359 Comments
This post is in: Politics
The long term success of the Tea Parties is yet to be decided. As the man said, though, in the really long run, we’re all dead. I think it is fair to say that they have, for all of my distaste for them, been quite successful in moving politics to the right and in getting …
theories of politicsPost + Comments (359)
I can imagine some complaints or critiques of this theory of political change. But it is, at least, a theory. My question, after reading this blog and how it has evolve in recent months and weeks, is what exactly the alternative theory of political change is.
Let’s set aside all the personal stuff. The invective unleashed around here against left-wing critics of President Obama has been relentless and ugly, in both posts and comments. But let’s stick to structural change. As far as I can divine, the reason many bloggers and commenters around here have been so hostile to left-wing criticism is because they believe that the key for Obama’s victory in 2012 and liberal aims afterwards is for Obama to win the hearts and minds of independents. As much as people may admit (or may not) that legislation like the debt deal are bad for liberalism and the country, the thinking seems to go that it will ultimately be good politics because he demonstrates how reasonable he is. And appearing reasonable, apparently, is the most important thing to independent voters. And independent voters win you elections. That’s the best I can figure it.
There’s a lot wrong there. Probably the most important is that independents don’t actually win elections because there aren’t really that many of them. I can cite you chapter and verse about the myth of the independent voter or the myth of the undecided voter. What’s more, I’m not sure why the world has decided that whatever small number of true independents exist are obsessed about what appears reasonable. Because David Brooks says so? This is the worst kind of Beltwayism, the insistence that whatever the center is between the two parties, no matter how extreme one of them is, represents some sort of ideal of compromise and moderation, and is very popular with the “sensible center.” That this thinking contradicts a vast political science literature about the preeminence of economic determinism in voting hardly needs to be said.
But let’s suppose I even conceded all that, that Obama would be right to pursue the independent vote and that the way to do so was to appear as a sensible, technocratic moderate. It’s never going to happen because the media is not going to permit it. Surely, people who read and write at this blog know that. This blog has been documenting since the early days of his Presidential campaign how he is regarded as a flaming liberal by the media (and not just Fox News) since the early days of his campaign. Surely you all know that he will be painted by his Republican opponent as the Kenyan Marxist anticolonialist, and that the mainstream media will be complicit in that characterization. We’ll get the worst of both worlds: a candidate painted as a liberal extremist without actually enacting the kind of liberal policy platform you’d certainly hope a liberal extremist would attempt. And all of this is to say nothing of the fact that the average American voter is not nearly politically engaged or informed enough to make this complex of a situation in the summer of 2011 define his view of the President in November of 2012.
You can debate the merits of the actual package, although I agree with BJer mistermix that it’s a shit sandwich. You can debate how much choice he had and whether the 14th amendment solution or platinum coin solutions were actually options. But as I read John and a lot of commenters, I’m genuinely unclear what their long term vision here is. When you get past all of the insistence that people like me are just being self-righteous and get to substantive disagreements, the idea is… what? That there’s this big, potentially popular political movement that could be mobilized if only the far left is forsaken? What does all of the verbiage levied against Obama’s left-wing critics accomplish, beyond pushing the debate even more to the right?
People tell liberal critics of Obama all the time: it’s a two party system, and what are you gonna do? Well that goes both ways. It’s a two party system and a country divided by ideology. Obama will always be a liberal Democrat in the eyes of the American people and the media. You either fight for liberal Democratic values and move the center to make things easier on him, or you fight for the center while Republicans fight for the right, and you can guess what happens. Fighting half the time with liberal critics and half the time with conservative ones is no recipe for getting what you want.
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