Rubin: Conservatives, there's no Common Core conspiracy

To tell the truth, I haven't examined the standards for math and English/language arts (ELA) that are set forth in the Common Core.

I do know that the Gates Foundation was very involved in developing and promoting these standards to states; meanwhile some educators were left out of the development process, which sets off suspicion in some people's mind such as public education activist Diane Ravitch, who believes states and localities should be given maximum control of schools, in the American tradition, not the Department of Ed.  

In a recent blog post against Common Core, Ravitch points out two important facts: 1) "the biggest test-score gaps... are within the same state, not between states;" and 2) "the most reliable predictors of test scores are family income and family education." Fact #2 almost certainly explains #1.

Personally, I don't see how setting a high bar for achievement, by itself, can change anything, no matter who develops or sets the standards. That said, I do think it's perfectly alright and even an international best practice for the national government to set educational standards.  (Consider it from a foreign investor's point of view: if he asks what the average American high schooler -- his potential employee -- is expected to know upon graduation, the answer currently is, "It depends.")

Conservative pundit Jennifer Rubin tells us what Common Core is not.  It is not a "federal program;" and it is not tied to federal education grants.  It's basically a voluntary initiative for each of the 50 states to consider. 

So there does not seem to be any sinister conspiracy here, just a lot of Bill Gates's money and reputation tied up in this thing... Although Ravitch alleges that Microsoft stands to make money selling CC-related software and hardware.

More Common Core silliness

By Jennifer Rubin

June 11, 2014 | Washington Post

Right-wing opposition to Common Core, as I’ve written before, is partly based on a series of blatant misrepresentations (or, to be generous, misunderstandings) as to what it is. That has sent some presidential aspirants on a crusade to “repeal Common Core.” This is daft since there is no federal law, statute or regulation implementing Common Core. It was an initiative undertaken by a large number of states; some have continued with the effort, a few have left and a few never joined. If one is arguing that education is a state matter, it is not only inaccurate but bizarre to campaign for president on the pledge to get rid of it.

But, conservative critics claim that Common Core is being forced down the states throats through No Child Left Behind or via grant applications for Race to the Top grants. This is also false.

States did not have to adopt Common Core to be eligible to compete for Race to the Top funding.

Common Core proponents explain that Race to the Top was a competitive grant with different criteria whereby states could earn points in different categories.  In fact, only a very small portion of the overall application (just 4 percent to 12 percent, depending on how strictly you read it) was related to “higher standards.” States that adopted Common Core got credit for implementing standards, but states that did not want to adopt Common Core could choose to adopt other high standards if they were endorsed by the state’s higher education community.

Regarding the states that had adopted Common Core, received Race to the Top funding (where they listed Common Core on their application) and have now REPEALED Common Core, there was understandable confusion about the Race to the Top funds given that this was included in some states’ applications.

However, Education Secretary Arne Duncan made clear this week that Oklahoma, which pulled out of Common Core, would not sacrifice its funding. (“Duncan made it clear that Oklahoma isn’t necessarily on the verge of losing federal funding because of its decision. He said that Oklahoma and other states that back out of common core can stay in the department’s good graces, as long as they replace those standards with another set that will get students ready for college and the workforce.”)

Indiana, which recently pulled out of Common Core, showed how to operate with its own state standards. Its school officials tell me that the key is providing standards that are “college and career ready.” Options for states include one of two (referred to as Part B of the NCLB waiver): Common Core (or technically “college and career standards that are common to a significant # of states”) or standards that are approved  by a state network of institutions of higher education (which certify that students who meet the standards will not need remedial course work at the post-secondary level). Indiana officials engaged higher education experts for the first time in the crafting of the standards and conducted a review of the new standards by the College and Career Ready review panel (higher ed and business representatives). Participants signed off on standards, within their areas of expertise, as those that would prepare a student to be ready for post-secondary education or transition into a career field, and the appropriate officials related this process to the Department of Education. Have any critics of Common Core bothered to check with a state that actually withdrew to find out if there was a penalty? Apparently not.

In short, conservatives who are grandstanding on “repealing” Common Core have an obligation to explain what they are talking about. There is no federal mandate to adopt Common Core or evidence that any state is being penalized for withdrawing from  or failing to adopt Common Core. Right now, it’s not clear that these critics are doing anything more than pandering to the least-informed voters. States should continue to evaluate whether they want to join Common Core standards or develop their own. Instead of scaring voters, conservatives should be cheering the exercise in state decision-making and experimentation. That is what a true believer in the 10th Amendment would do.

And the most miserable U.S. states are...

So here are the most miserable U.S. states, based on a Gallup-Healthways survey of "2013 health info from 176,000 Americans on 'physical and emotional health, healthy behaviors, work environment, social and community factors, financial security, and access to necessities such as food, shelter and healthcare'".

Notice the overlap of Southern states, Red States and human misery in the top 10:

1.   West Virginia

2.   Kentucky

3.   Mississippi

4.   Alabama

5.   Ohio

6.   Arkansas

7.   Tennessee

8.   Missouri

9.   Oklahoma

10. Louisiana

This is what the Tea Parties are fighting to protect from the influence of godless, socialist bi-coastal liberals!

And here are the 10 least miserable states, in descending order:

40.  New Hampshire

41.  Iowa

42.  Washington

43.  Hawaii

44.  Colorado

45.  Vermont

46.  Montana

47.  Minnesota

48.  Nebraska

49.  South Dakota

50.  North Dakota

On the one hand, Montana, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota and Vermont shouldn't really count because nobody lives there. (Combined population: 5.2 million; the same as Colorado). On the other hand, if true happiness is being left alone, then....

Quiz: Do You Live In One of the Shittiest U.S. States?

By Adam Weinstein

February 24, 2014 | Gawker

URL: http://gawker.com/quiz-do-you-live-in-one-of-the-shittiest-u-s-states-1529505438

Perverse states' reaction to Sandy Hook

It's sickening to think that the real result of the Sandy Hook gun rampage -- a shooting spree that killed eight boys and twelve girls, between six and seven years of age -- was even more lax gun control laws in more states, including: Utah, Virginia, Kentucky, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Mississippi, North Carolina, Indiana, Louisiana, Arkansas, South Dakota and Kansas.

The faces of those shot and killed in Sandy Hook. The price of liberty?

Of course, you won't hear that in the U.S. lib'rul media.  You can only see that in a British newspaper.

If you live in one of the above-mentioned states, you're living among the crazies.  Are you one of the psychos, or somebody who knows the cure?

If you're one of the gun nuts, then none of the insane statistics cited below will matter to you, because no amount of dead children can equal the price of your "freedom" to bear assault-type weapons and semi-automatic handguns with big clips and avoid a criminal background check.

Defenseless little kids shot up at school.  Just as Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and the rest of our Founding Fathers imagined it.  Right.

UPDATE (09.12.2013):  In reply to this post, one of my GOP friends gave me one of the gun nuts' fallback arguments: alcohol kills more people than guns, so unless the Left is serious about banning alcohol, they don't have a right to talk about regulating firearms. 

(Nor should we spend $ billions on missions to Mars while children are starving in Africa, I suppose.)

So I sighed and reminded him that guns have no positive benefits, unlike alcohol. (Two exceptions: law enforcement and hunting; but hunters can pass background checks and they don't need banana clips to kill deer).  You can't shoot yourself or others in moderation. 

Besides, we regulate alcohol purchase and consumption myriad ways, and ban it for citizens under 21. A kid can legally own a rifle but not drink. It's a crime to buy a kid a beer but buying him a handgun is fine. You can't bring beer to a public school or library but you can take a gun. You can't drive while drinking but you can drive with a gun. We have public health campaigns against alcoholism, yet doctors and public health officials must remain silent about the dangers of guns. The state can take your kids away if you're an alcoholic, but not if you keep guns lying around the house. And we impose sin tax on alcohol ... but trying imposing a tax on ammunition!  The gun nuts would explode.

Yes, besides alcohol there are a few things that kill more people every year in America than guns: automobiles, prescription drugs.... Would the gun nuts have us outlaw pharmacies before we can have a reasonable conversation about regulating firearms?

Guns and kids: the youngest casualties of America's infatuation with firearms

By Ana Marie Cox

September 10, 2013 | Guardian

The cover of the recent Children's Defense Fund report (pdf) on gun violence in the United States carries a single statistic:

The number of children and teens killed by guns in one year would fill 134 classrooms of 20 students each.

That's just a more dramatic way of stating an already staggering figure – 2,694 in 2010. Most of the report's 73 following pages are devoted to restating it. Sometimes, this done to illustrate the chilling frequency of such deaths:

• One child or teen died every 3 hours and 15 minutes

• Seven children and teens died every day, more than 20 every three days

• Fifty-one children and teens died every week

Other times, the same set of statistics (all from the Centers for Disease Control) is used to drive home the magnitude of the tragedy, relating it to the kinds of violence we think we understand:

Nearly three times more children and teens were injured by guns in 2010 than the number of US soldiers wounded in action that year in the war in Afghanistan; 82 children under five died from guns in 2010, compared to 55 law enforcement officers killed in the line of duty.

And then, there's the shameful comparison to other countries:

US children and teens are 17 times more likely to die from a gun than their peers in 25 other high-income countries combined.

Put it slightly differently:

US children and teens made up 43% of all children and teens in these 26 countries but were 93% of all children and teens killed by guns.

The report is an exercise in word problem reformatting, a hideous nightmare of a standardized test in which every answer is both "all of the above" and wrong. We have failed. The numbers in the examples change, but the fact they illustrate is big and ugly and refuses cosmetic adjustment: the United States, despite a meekly gratifying downward trend, continues to kill its young people with guns at rate more in line with war-torn nations than the prosperous, peaceful countries we presume to lead. In a different, but equally upsetting report, the World Health Organization observed (pdf):

With the notable exception of the United States, most countries with youth homicide rates above 10 per 100,000 are either developing countries or countries caught up in the turmoil of social and economic change.

The repetitiveness of the statistics reflects desperation, I think. One can picture the authors' frantic oneupmanship in coming up with ways to make the truth as vivid as possible: compare it to war! Compare it to Sandy Hook! And, of course, show us the victims – not via pictures of the violence itself, thank God, but in descriptions of who they were: post-Sandy Hook stories salt the wound:

Steven Curtis, 12, dead after accidentally shooting himself in the head with his father's gun. Caroline Sparks, 2, shot in the chest and killed by her five-year-old brother. Tayloni Mazyck, 11, caught in gang crossfire and paralyzed for life. The list goes unrelentingly on. (As of July, the New York Daily News found 120 children had been killed by gunfire since Sandy Hook; they relied only on news reports, not CDC surveys. The end number will be undoubtedly, horrifyingly larger.)

The report wallops us over the head with statistics because its authors can't reach through the pages and throttle us. The frustration is as understandable as it is evident, for as gruesome as the statistics about violence are, the recounting of what legislation has and has not passed is even more dispiriting. Over and over, the public's willingness (even eagerness) to tighten gun laws has been outmatched by the cowardice of politicians in mysterious thrall to the National Rifle Association.

The whimpering death of the Toomey-Manchin bill has been examined at length; the CDF notes further that, beyond the Senate voting against regulations, a majority of Americans were for (assault weapons ban, background checks):

Several proposals to weaken existing gun violence prevention measures received more 'Yes' votes than the background checks provision. They included a concealed-carry reciprocity proposal and a provision to prevent veterans who are mentally incapacitated from losing their right to own a gun without a court hearing.

The news gets worse as we get closer to home, where state legislatures reacted to Sandy Hook primarily by widening access to firearms andweakening regulation. You read that right: more states passed pro-gun legislation in the wake of Sandy Hook than there were states that passed stricter gun control. Maryland, Connecticut and New York and New Jersey all tightened gun laws; Utah, Virginia, Kentucky, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Mississippi, North Carolina, Indiana, Louisiana, Arkansas, South Dakota, and Kansas all somehow relaxed their gun laws – by extending the number of places one can carry a concealed weapon, by allowing guns in schools, by instituting "stand your ground" laws, or adding the right to own a firearm to the state constitution.

Colorado reigned in some gun rights after the Aurora massacre in July 2012; today, it is at the center of an NRA-sponsored recall, to be decided this week. Another state legislature, Missouri, both liberalized conceal carry and took unprecedented step of nullifying all federal gun laws – outlawing the federal government from enforcing its gun restrictions within the state. The bill was passed and then vetoed. This week, the legislature will meet in a special session to override the veto.

The Missouri proposal goes beyond the kind of passive quasi-civil disobedience of, say, medical marijuana laws, or even those rebellious legislatures that have sought to nullify Obamacare. The Missouri law would punish federal enforcement of legally enacted statutes by setting criminal penalties for federal agents, and prohibiting state officials from co-operating with federal efforts.

This is insanity.

Conservatives and liberals alike can use the tragedy of children's deaths as evidence of the need for their favored policies. After all, gun rights advocates want more guns in schools, they argue, for the greater safety of the children. They might even deny the relevance of concealed-carry laws and stand-your-ground provisions to the issue at hand. What does banning raids from the federal government's "jackbooted thugs" (in NRA president Wayne LaPierre's famous formulation) have to do with those classrooms full of dead kids?

There is only a shuddering half-step between between the general availability of firearms, their lax regulation, and the death of children. States with background checks have 16% lower gun fatality rates.  Child access prevention laws reduce accidental shootings by as much as 23%. Australia passed a strict assault weapons ban and mandatory buy-back program (the US law once on the books had no such program) in 1996 – and hasn't had a single mass shooting since.

I'm not even sure the CDF believed this report would change that many minds: to anyone disinclined to believe that strict gun laws work, the report is just a recitation of bad things happening because of bad guys (even if a lot of those "bad guys" are other children). Perhaps the point of the report was more modest: just to let people know what is happening, what violence is going on beneath surface, as politicians and lobbyists posture. Though, who knows: Missouri has the fourth most gun deaths in the nation, the sixth most deaths by firearm for children under 18 and is a favorite transit point for gun-traffickers (in a July raid that may be deemed illegal next week, federal agents seized 267 illegal weapons) and look what's happening there.

We're beyond the point of "what will it take" when it comes to sane gun laws. The tragedies that should spur protests and marches and petitions happen quietly every day.

Gallup poll: KY most miserable state

Feeling so blue in the Bluegrass State.

Here we see Kentucky ranking last or near-last in yet more national rankings.

In terms of overall wellbeing, Kentucky was second-last behind West Virginia and worse than Mississippi. (No comment.)

In terms of emotional health, Kentucky ranked last.

President Obama's home state of Hawaii had the greatest wellbeing for the third year in a row. Maybe that explains why he is so maddeningly well-adjusted and even-tempered all the time? (Reminds me of that Onion story: "Poll: Happy, Healthy Obamas Out Of Touch With Miserable Americans.")

Maybe if Obama were a little grumpier and more miserable then more Americans would like him? They just can't, like, identify.

Hawaii Still No. 1 in Wellbeing, West Virginia Stuck in Last

By Melanie Standish

February 27, 2012 | Gallup

URL: http://www.gallup.com/poll/152912/Hawaii-No-Wellbeing-West-Virginia-Stuck-Last.aspx

Krugman: Austerity has been a debacle

Krugman is right to remind us that the U.S., with its federal system, has had its own brand of fiscal austerity: states whose constitution requires a balanced budget have been forced to cut back spending drastically. Much of the federal stimulus money has gone to shore up those same state budgets.

The Austerity Debacle

By Paul Krugman

January 29, 2012 | New York Times

Last week the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, a British think tank, released a startling chart comparing the current slump with past recessions and recoveries. It turns out that by one important measure — changes in real G.D.P. since the recession began — Britain is doing worse this time than it did during the Great Depression. Four years into the Depression, British G.D.P. had regained its previous peak; four years after the Great Recession began, Britain is nowhere close to regaining its lost ground.

Nor is Britain unique. Italy is also doing worse than it did in the 1930s — and with Spain clearly headed for a double-dip recession, that makes three of Europe's big five economies members of the worse-than club. Yes, there are some caveats and complications. But this nonetheless represents a stunning failure of policy.

And it's a failure, in particular, of the austerity doctrine that has dominated elite policy discussion both in Europe and, to a large extent, in the United States for the past two years.

O.K., about those caveats: On one side, British unemployment was much higher in the 1930s than it is now, because the British economy was depressed — mainly thanks to an ill-advised return to the gold standard — even before the Depression struck. On the other side, Britain had a notably mild Depression compared with the United States.

Even so, surpassing the track record of the 1930s shouldn't be a tough challenge. Haven't we learned a lot about economic management over the last 80 years? Yes, we have — but in Britain and elsewhere, the policy elite decided to throw that hard-won knowledge out the window, and rely on ideologically convenient wishful thinking instead.

Britain, in particular, was supposed to be a showcase for "expansionary austerity," the notion that instead of increasing government spending to fight recessions, you should slash spending instead — and that this would lead to faster economic growth. "Those who argue that dealing with our deficit and promoting growth are somehow alternatives are wrong," declared David Cameron, Britain's prime minister. "You cannot put off the first in order to promote the second."

How could the economy thrive when unemployment was already high, and government policies were directly reducing employment even further? Confidence! "I firmly believe," declared Jean-Claude Trichet — at the time the president of the European Central Bank, and a strong advocate of the doctrine of expansionary austerity — "that in the current circumstances confidence-inspiring policies will foster and not hamper economic recovery, because confidence is the key factor today."

Such invocations of the confidence fairy were never plausible; researchers at the International Monetary Fund and elsewhere quickly debunked the supposed evidence that spending cuts create jobs. Yet influential people on both sides of the Atlantic heaped praise on the prophets of austerity, Mr. Cameron in particular, because the doctrine of expansionary austerity dovetailed with their ideological agendas.

Thus in October 2010 David Broder, who virtually embodied conventional wisdom, praised Mr. Cameron for his boldness, and in particular for "brushing aside the warnings of economists that the sudden, severe medicine could cut short Britain's economic recovery and throw the nation back into recession." He then called on President Obama to "do a Cameron" and pursue "a radical rollback of the welfare state now."

Strange to say, however, those warnings from economists proved all too accurate. And we're quite fortunate that Mr. Obama did not, in fact, do a Cameron.

Which is not to say that all is well with U.S. policy. True, the federal government has avoided all-out austerity. But state and local governments, which must run more or less balanced budgets, have slashed spending and employment as federal aid runs out — and this has been a major drag on the overall economy. Without those spending cuts, we might already have been on the road to self-sustaining growth; as it is, recovery still hangs in the balance.

And we may get tipped in the wrong direction by Continental Europe, where austerity policies are having the same effect as in Britain, with many signs pointing to recession this year.

The infuriating thing about this tragedy is that it was completely unnecessary. Half a century ago, any economist — or for that matter any undergraduate who had read Paul Samuelson's textbook "Economics" — could have told you that austerity in the face of depression was a very bad idea. But policy makers, pundits and, I'm sorry to say, many economists decided, largely for political reasons, to forget what they used to know. And millions of workers are paying the price for their willful amnesia.

Despite balanced-budget amendments, states still in deficits

Get ready for the U.S. economy to get worse in 2012 as more states continue to have budget gaps, and if the federal government won't bail them out anymore, since austerity seems to be in fashion. (As we all know, government austerity measures everywhere at the same time leads to depression.)

This just goes to show we can't cut our way to economic growth and prosperity. It's not the problem that U.S. states aren't cutting back, or the government sector generally, which shrank in manpower by 280,000 in 2011. The problem is that there is not enough economic growth and resulting tax revenue.

Budget Gaps To Exceed Revenues In Over Half Of U.S. States By July

By Lisa Lambert

January 9, 2012 | Reuters

URL: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/09/new-us-state-budget-gaps-exceed-revenues-states-july_n_1195138.html

Ohio class warfare case study has national implications

FOXNews opinionater turned Ohio Governor John Kasich and his GOP henchmen want to fire Ohio state employees and cut the salaries and benefits of those who remain. Taking Rahm Emanuel's advice never to let a good crisis go to waste, Kasich is using Ohio's projected $8 billion budget deficit as a pretext to fire teachers and cripple unions. Among the provisos which he supports are an end to collective bargaining and binding arbitration for public-sector employees, automatic 1-year continuation of outgoing contracts in the case of a dispute, and making it illegal for them to strike. This despite that fact that strikes in Ohio are extremely rare, and since 2008 binding arbitration has resolved fewer than 2 percent of public labor disputes.

Indeed, an irrefutable study on Ohio's labor force by Rutgers University professor Jeffrey H. Keefe shows that public-service workers are actually underpaid 3.3 percent compared to private-sector workers of similar education and hours worked.

Moreover, according to the 35,000-member Ohio Civil Service Employees Association, state workers have taken five pay cuts in the last nine years and saved Ohio $250 million in its current contract alone.

On February 9 at the first reading of SB5, more than 1,000 firefighters, police, corrections officers and other public workers stormed Ohio's Statehouse in opposition. Why so upset? Because the bill, proposed by GOP State Senator Shannon Jones – which Gov. Kasich said "of course" he supports – would eliminate: (1) collective bargaining for all state workers, including those at universities; (2) binding arbitration for local police officers and firefighters, who also could not strike; (3) health insurance as part of labor negotiations, and require government workers to pay at least 20 percent of the cost; and (4) automatic pay increases and mandatory sick days for teachers from state law.

The Ohio Tea Parties and the rest of the GOP state apparatus naturally support the bill, as they believe that all union members, especially public union members, are lazy and overpaid compared to lean, mean private-sector, non-union workers. And of course state employees and union members tend to vote Democrat precisely because they know Republicans have it in for them -- which makes the GOP hate them even more. Ohio's Tea Partiers are counter-mobilizing as this goes to post.

Yes, state workers' compensation makes up about 1/3 of most states' operating budgets, but in fact recent state budget shortfalls are due to the Great Recession with resulting lower tax receipts and higher demand for state services like Medicaid and unemployment benefits -- not any sudden increas in spending on state salaries. And the more ominous problem of unfunded state retirement benefits -- which Newt Gingrich and other Republicans lately argue calls for national legislation to allow states to declare bankruptcy and erase their liabilities to state workers, bond markets be damned -- has been building up for years. The Wall Street crash just made it worse. State workers are not actuaries, accountants, or elected legislators charged with a fiduciary duty to prudently set aside and invest these funds. Therefore, it is completely unfair to attribute the states' fiscal irresponsibility to everyday state workers. (Source: http://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-states-in-crisis)

Republicans will cut public-sector jobs and wages and cripple public unions in the bad times in the name of balanced budgets -- but does anybody seriously think they're going to undo all that when the economy recovers? No, these "emergency" measures will be permanent. Conservative idealogues smell blood and they're going in for the kill. They are patient but ruthless hunters; now is their time to pounce.

This death struggle is being waged in other budget-strapped states, which show a similar picture as described above.

Ohioans, Americans, don't let them win!

State pension deficits to blame on Wall St.?

Here is how an international pensions expert responded to the blog post referenced below:

"This is partly true, although all can't be blamed on Wall Street.

"State schemes, although not the US Federal Public Service Thrift Plan, are defined benefit schemes which basically guarantee you a percentage of your final salary near retirement for every year you have contributed. This is paid till you die and often a reduced amount is also paid to your spouse till she dies. And all the time the amount is increased either by increases in inflation or wages.

"To fund this the pension fund takes advice as to what contribution rate is needed to be paid to meet the cost. There are a number of key variables but the most important one is the assumed investment return. And whilst Wall Street may do its bit in either meeting or failing to meet the assumptions, it will be interesting in the future, given the willingness of US residents to sue for everything, to see if somebody sues the trustee of the pension fund or the fund's actuary. The main reason for the debt is that assumptions used in most of these scheme have been totally unrealistic. Many States have has assumed rates of return, for every year, of around 7 or 8% above inflation. In the UK or Australia the most optimistic actuary would be saying no more than 4%, many would argue for 3 or less. The result of such high assumed returns is that the Actuary tells the employer that how much he needs to put into the scheme is much lower. And that is where the problem mainly lies. The true funding rate for many of these schemes should be nearly 30% of wages but of course they don't want to pay that much with the consequence that there is a huge deficit and that deficit is then made worse when Wall Street goes south.

"But it seems a very good source of information. Thanks for sending it to me."

Pension Meltdown: Blame it on Wall Street?

January 17, 2011 | Pension Pulse

URL: http://pensionpulse.blogspot.com/2011/01/pension-meltdown-blame-it-on-wall.html