Tag: Teachers

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April Links: Education and Jobs, The Rent is Too Damn High, Health Care in Its Many Forms, Food Deserts, and More

* Chicago’s plan to match education with jobs; this is long over-due.

* Is charity a major source of deadweight loss? Notice the linked column: “Increasing evidence shows that donors [to charity] often tolerate high administrative costs, fail to monitor charities and do not insist on measurable results — the opposite of how they act when they invest in the stock market.”

* What an awesome office! Uncomfortable chairs, though.

* Affordable housing and hilarious cognitive dissonance.

* Good legal news: Fifth Amendment Right Against Self Incrimination Protects Against Being Forced to Decrypt Hard Drive Contents.

* “Shame Is Not the Solution” for improving teachers. On the other hand, I suspect some of the districts who want to make teaching evaluations and test scores public are doing so out of desperation, or because they can’t build the kind of sophisticated evaluation systems Gates mentions. (For another discussion of this issue, see LA Times Ranks Teachers from Marginal Revolution.)

* The Rent Is Too Damn High Now Available for Preorder.

* The Social Conservative Subterranean Fantasy World Is Exposed, and It’s Frightening.

* The real reason health insurers won’t cover people with pre-existing conditions.

* The Secret to Seattle’s Booming Downtown.

* Let’s hope the MPAA ratings board dies; sample: “[. . .] while the MPAA board pretends to be a source of neutral and non-ideological advice to parents, it all too often reveals itself to be a velvet-glove censorship agency, seemingly devoted to reactionary and defensive cultural standards.”

* Sounds like fun: “With its sex-obsessed young heroine, ‘Turn Me On, Dammit!’ goes where few movies have gone,” and like the rare movie that actually goes where other movies haven’t.

* Why Don’t You Do Something Other Than Sit at Your Computer? (Side question: “Is your computer depressing you?”)

* The idea of the “food desert” is fading. I’m not sure it was ever real, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use it in your proposals.

* $1B of TSA Nude Body Scanners Made Worthless By Blog — How Anyone Can Get Anything Past The Scanners. Wow.

* A short, accurate description of the long-term problems in Europe. This is also, on some level, about how people form groups and act in those groups. (“Americans in Massachusetts and Americans in Mississippi do feel themselves part of the same country, sharing language and culture. Germans and Spaniards do not feel the same.”) See further Jonathan Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind.

* “Most men won’t be allowed to admit this, but the new HBO show [Girls] is a disastrous celebration of entitlement and helplessness.”

* Why you should read Before the Lights Go Out.

* Testing the Teachers, and how do we know what we’re actually getting out of college?

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Late August Links: Unintended Consequences, Multitasking, Government, Stimulus Madness, and More

* Isaac predicted that YouthBuild will run a new competition rather than use earlier grants; it looks like other parts of the federal government have done the same in response to the Stimulus Bill, with the Teacher Quality Partnership Grants Program Recovery Act (ARRA) coming for another round of action.

* Speaking of schools, Steven Brill’s The Rubber Room: The battle over New York City’s worst teachers should be required for anyone interested in schools, teachers, charter schools, or grants related to education; it also describes one of many reasons I’m not a teacher.

* Telecom companies were rushing to meet the Aug. 14 BIP and BTOP deadlines, according to Business Week. This means they didn’t plan ahead: Seliger + Associates was not rushing to meet those deadlines for our clients.

* Speaking of fiber, Ars Technica says rural telcos are rolling out fiber to the home (ftth) while their urban counterparts languish with cable and DSL.

* I sent an e-mail to GAO report author Stanley Czerwinski on the subject of Grants.gov and our many writings about it over the past three years, figuring that he might be interested in people who actually use Grants.gov regularly and therefore probably know more about its flaws than anyone else. A guy named David Fox, who is a “Senior Analyst, Strategic Issues,” wrote back to say:

Thank you for contacting us about our recent report on Grants.gov. My director, Stanley Czerwinski, asked that I respond to your inquiry. We appreciate that you took the time to comment on our report and make us aware of your blog. As you may already know, we have issued several reports on Grants.gov and e-Government over the last few years. We will add your name and contact information to our distribution system so that you receive notice of any future work on Grants.gov.

Thank you again for your interest in our work.

This is an improvement over the e-mail I got from Tom Harrington of FEMA regarding the Assistance to Firefighters Grant Program, but in terms of form it still reminds me of Roger Shuy’s book, Bureaucratic Language in Government and Business.

* More from the busy department of unintended consequences: “The New Book Banning: Children’s books burn, courtesy of the federal government.” This is because the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008 (CPSIA) stops the selling of used children’s good produced before 1985, when lead was banned, unless those products conform to the post-1985 standards. Although lead in children’s books hasn’t been shown to be harmful, the books don’t pass muster anyway.

I am generally not an organized political person who writes angry letters to Congresspersons and such, but this might be worth an exception. Furthermore, see this post regulatory processes at their worst regarding the legislation in question. It’s hard not to admire Mattel’s Machiavellian expertise even as one abhors their ethics or lack thereof.

(Hat tip to Megan McArdle.)

* William Easterly on How it helps to teach NGOs as selfish. One might replace “NGOs” with “nonprofits” and make the same argument.

* No one actually multitasks. I agree.

* The Wall Street Journal warns of unintentional consequences from the Treasury Department’s efforts to regulate financial institutions:

Here’s a stumper: In the Treasury financial reform proposal, who comes in for more regulatory retooling: Fannie Mae, or your average 14-man venture capital shop? If you said venture capital, you understand why one of America’s greatest competitive advantages is now at risk in Washington.

(Compare this to Paul Graham’s comment in The Venture Capital Squeeze, when he says that venture capitalists should “lobby to get Sarbanes-Oxley loosened. This law was created to prevent future Enrons, not to destroy the IPO market. Since the IPO market was practically dead when it passed, few saw what bad effects it would have. But now that technology has recovered from the last bust, we can see clearly what a bottleneck Sarbanes-Oxley has become.”)

* The criminalization of poverty.

* Read Lev Grossman’s novel The Magicians, which is excellent, as further described at the link.

* On criminals and signaling.

* Needle exchanges are effective—and the politics of “ick.”

* It was once a rule of demography that people have fewer children as their countries get richer. That rule no longer holds true.

* Cash for Clunkers is a clunker, says CNN commentator and painfully bad headline.

* Can Jazz Be Saved? The audience for America’s great art form is withering away.

* Stimulus Slow to Flow to Infrastructure, says the Wall Street Journal. The subhead could also say, “Duh.”