Author Archives: DaneLabynm

Charter Schools: Great in Cities, Ho-Hum in Suburbs?

by DaneLabynm Posted on November 20, 2015

Mother Jones

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Evaluating charter schools is tricky. Maybe highly motivated parents send their kids to charters and others don’t. The solution is to identify schools that are oversubscribed and track students who won and lost the lottery to get in. That way you get a random set of parents on both sides. But maybe charters kick out bad students after they’ve attended for a year or two. The solution is to tag lottery winners as charter kids forever. They count against the charter’s performance regardless of where they end up later. Fine, but maybe oversubscribed charters are different in some way. What about less popular charters where you can’t do any of this lottery-based research?

Susan Dynarski, an education professor at the University of Michigan, acknowledges all of this, but says we can draw some conclusions anyway:

A consistent pattern has emerged from this research. In urban areas, where students are overwhelmingly low-achieving, poor and nonwhite, charter schools tend to do better than other public schools in improving student achievement. By contrast, outside of urban areas, where students tend to be white and middle class, charters do no better and sometimes do worse than other public schools.

This pattern — positive results in low-income city neighborhoods, zero to negative results in relatively affluent suburbs — holds in lottery studies in Massachusetts as well in a national study of charter schools funded by the Education Department.

Interesting. But if this is really the case, why?

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Charter Schools: Great in Cities, Ho-Hum in Suburbs?

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GOP Lawsuit Says Obama’s Immigration Plan Costs States Big Bucks. That’s Wrong.

by DaneLabynm Posted on February 12, 2015

Mother Jones

The mostly GOP-run states suing to block President Barack Obama’s immigration actions have a shaky legal argument. But politically, their rationale sounds even worse.

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GOP Lawsuit Says Obama’s Immigration Plan Costs States Big Bucks. That’s Wrong.

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What’s Wrong With the Fed?

by DaneLabynm Posted on March 31, 2014

Mother Jones

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That’s the question Ryan Avent asks today. The reason is simple: In 2012, the Fed announced an inflation target of 2 percent per year, as measured by the PCE index. But they haven’t come close to hitting it. Why not?

The chart on the right shows the most recent inflation data. In 2011, PCE inflation measured 2.4 percent. In 2012, it came in at 1.8 percent. That’s a little low—especially during a supposed economic recovery—but it’s easy to see why no one was alarmed. It’s something to keep an eye on, but no one ever said the Fed could fine tune inflation to a few tenths of a point.

But then came 2013. There was a fair amount of monthly variability in the data, but the year-end number clocked in at 1.1 percent. That’s way too low, especially considering that (a) the previous year had come in below target, (b) inflationary expectations were still well anchored, and (c) the labor market was still noticeably loose. What this means is that the Fed has failed to meet its employment mandate for six full years and is now failing to meet its inflation target too. Avent wants to know what’s going on:

This is an extraordinary period of time during which the Fed has failed to meet even the rather lax definition of the mandate it has set for itself by a rather substantial margin. How can we explain this? Some possibilities are:

1) The Fed is technically unable to meet its mandate.

2) The Fed is staffed by incompetents.

3) The Fed is actually pursuing a goal outside its mandate without explaining what that goal is and what the justification is for pursuing it.

4) America’s statistics are all wrong. The Fed knows this but has refused to tell anyone else.

Whichever of the above you favour as an explanation, it suggests a need for meaningful reform, either to the personnel at the Fed or to the distribution of macroeconomic responsibilities across government.

My own guess is a little bit of #1 and a lot of #3. I suspect the Fed really is having technical trouble meeting its goals—at least, in a way it’s comfortable with. But that’s just a guess.

It’s less of a guess that the Fed is pursuing goals outside its mandate. It’s hardly a secret that there are plenty of Fed governors who are still living in the 70s, petrified of inflationary spirals and determined to keep inflation as low as possible. Not 2 percent. As low as possible. What’s more, they consider full employment not a virtue, but a threat. It leads to higher inflation, after all.

I think 2014 is something of a watershed year for the Fed. The hawks can argue that a single year of 1 percent inflation is nothing to worry too much about. This stuff bounces around. But at the very least, they should be on board with getting the inflation rate back up to their stated goal. Given the current employment level and the state of the global economy, this poses little risk. If they aren’t willing to do it, they need to come clean that they don’t really care about their statutory mandates and are simply substituting their own timeworn fears and class loyalties for the expressed will of Congress.

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What’s Wrong With the Fed?

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Can These College Football Players Actually Unionize?

by DaneLabynm Posted on February 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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Last month, football players at Northwestern University took formal steps to organize a labor union and bargain for benefits like guaranteed multiyear scholarships and medical coverage for concussions and other long-term health issues. The first of what will likely be many battles for the unionization effort came this week, with an hearing before the Chicago regional National Labor Relations Board.

The proceeding, which will continue at least through the end of the week, has pitted the proposed College Athletes Players Association and former Northwestern quarterback (and NFL hopeful) Kain Colter against Northwestern. While the university reacted much less strongly than the NCAA when the unionization efforts were unveiled—the official university statement made sure to say that Northwestern is “proud” of its students for being “leaders and independent thinkers”—it is still the theoretical employer of Colter and the other players and thus must face off against them before the labor board. (Head coach Pat Fitzgerald is expected to testify Friday.) Here’s what you need to know about the hearings and what they mean for college football:

What does the union need to prove to win? The College Athletes Players Association, with the help of star witness Colter, is arguing that football players are employees of the university. The group has some strong arguments in its favor, according to University of Illinois law professor and sports labor expert Michael LeRoy. For one, the players work long hours equivalent to a full-time job. Colter testified that football-related activities take up 40 to 50 hours a week during the season and 50 to 60 hours a week during training camp in the summer. The players’ efforts also benefit the university—an economics professor who testified on the union’s behalf said that Northwestern’s football revenue totaled $235 million between 2003 and 2012, while its expenses added up to just $159 million during that time. “It’s a financial benefit, and that’s putting it mildly,” LeRoy said.

What does Northwestern need to prove? The university’s argument is that the players are student-athletes and nothing more. The players receive scholarships worth about $60,000 a year, a university athletics official testified, and a lawyer for the school noted that players also get “a world-class education, free tutoring services, core academic advice, and personal and career development opportunity.” While some of Northwestern’s other counterpoints lacked substance—school lawyers grilled Colter on whether leadership and other skills learned from the football team helped him get a prior internship at Goldman Sachs, a line of thinking LeRoy called “fairly irrelevant” to whether or not college football counts as labor—perhaps its strongest point is that players signed a scholarship contract, agreeing to their amateur status and therefore waiving their collective bargaining power.

What happens now? No matter which side the Chicago labor board takes, the loser will probably appeal that decision to the national board in Washington, DC. That ruling will likely head to a federal appeals court. The entire process could take years, LeRoy said, which presents a unique challenge for union organizers: There’s a chance all the players who signed union cards will have graduated and moved on by the time a final decision comes down. One big question is how other schools and teams will react—while teams at private schools like Northwestern can try to unionize, teams at public schools must adhere to their states’ collective bargaining laws. If players at some schools are able to negotiate benefits that players at other schools are not, LeRoy said, it could fundamentally change recruiting, realign conferences, and lead to swaths of state legislation addressing the matter. “It’s a huge can of worms,” he said. “It’s a showstopper.”

Who’s going to win? LeRoy said he thinks the regional and national labor boards will rule in favor of the players due to the boards’ liberal slant, but that the courts will rule against Colter & Co. That won’t mean the movement was pointless, though—LeRoy expects the NCAA to compromise on many of the union’s core issues by that point. Vitally, the Northwestern players aren’t asking for pay for play, meaning the university and the NCAA could provide them with the scholarship and medical benefits they’re calling for and still maintain its structure and concept of amateurism. Even a formal union doesn’t hold up legally, LeRoy said, we may see a “union substitute” in which the threat is credible enough that the NCAA provides players with more voice and benefits. “I don’t think we’re going to have collective bargaining,” he said. “But I think this is a necessary step.”

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Can These College Football Players Actually Unionize?

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