Tag Archives: chicago

Repeat After Me: Competition Is Good. Competition Is Good.

by EveretteLavalli Posted on January 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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Did you know that companies facing no competition are likely to charge you more? It’s true! But in case you’d like a bit of evidence for this truism, Binyamin Appelbaum directs our attention to a clever study of mortgage rates from the Chicago Fed. It turns out that when the federal government authorized the mortgage refinancing program called HARP, they set up the rules in a way that discouraged anyone from participating aside from the original lender. This meant that, effectively, the original lender had little or no competition for the refinanced loan.

The results are shown on the right. The HARP rules took effect for mortgages with a loan-to-value ratio of 80 percent or higher. Private label mortgages, which didn’t fall under the new rules, show a normal range of interest rate spreads at all LTV values. Loans backed by Fannie Mae, which did fall under the new rules, show a sharp discontinuity upward precisely at an LTV of 80.

In other words, at exactly the point where lenders faced no effective competition thanks to HARP rules—i.e., Fannie-backed loans with an LTV of 80 or above—interest rate spreads suddenly increased by about 0.2 percent. Without competition, lenders were free to charge a little more, and they did.

I know: you’re shocked. And in case you’re tempted to think that 0.2 percent doesn’t really seem like that much, the authors point out that it adds up fast: “While the anti-competitive features of HARP may appear to have curtailed borrower gains by relatively small amounts, they resulted in sizable increases in profitability for a subset of lenders. These results further highlight the importance of restoring full competitiveness to mortgage refinancing markets.”

Quite so. Competition is good. We’ve paid less and less attention to this over the past few decades, and we do so at our peril. It’s the heart and soul of capitalism.

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Repeat After Me: Competition Is Good. Competition Is Good.

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Is Broken Windows a Broken Theory of Crime?

by Celia4704l Posted on December 31, 2014

Mother Jones

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The “Broken Windows” theory suggests that tolerance of small acts of disorder creates an environment that leads to rising amounts of serious crime. So if police crack down on small offenses—petty vandalism, public lewdness, etc.—crime reductions will follow. George Kelling was one of the originators of the theory, and NYPD police commissioner Bill Bratton is one of its strongest proponents. Here’s what they write about it:

New York City’s experience has suggestively demonstrated the success of Broken Windows over the last 20 years. In 1993, the city’s murder rate was 26.5 per 100,000 people….While the national murder rate per 100,000 people has been cut in half since 1994, the rate in New York has declined by more than six times.

….Broken Windows–style policing was pivotal in achieving these results. Left unchecked, street corners can degenerate into criminogenic environments. The bullies take over. They drink alcohol and take drugs openly, make excessive noise, intimidate and shake down honest citizens….By cracking down on low-level offenders, the police not only made neighborhoods more orderly….In the next four years, annual shootings fell by nearly 3,300 incidents—or about two fewer shootings per day.

….Current crime levels don’t stay down by themselves because of some vaguely defined demographic or economic factor. Crime is actively managed in New York City every day.

So here’s the thing: this is almost certainly wrong. Not even controversial. Just wrong: broken windows policing may well have been helpful in reducing New York’s crime rate, but there’s just flatly no evidence that it’s been pivotal. It’s true that crime in New York is down more than it is nationally, but that’s because crime went up more in big cities vs. small cities during the crime wave of the 60s through the 80s, and it then went down more during the crime decline of the 90s and aughts. Kelling and Bratton can dismiss this as ivory tower nonsense, but they should know better. The statistics are plain enough, after all.

Take a look at the two charts on the right. The top one shows crime declines in six of America’s biggest cities. As you can see, New York did well, but it did no better than Chicago or Dallas or Los Angeles, none of which implemented broken windows during the 90s. The bottom chart is a summary of the crime decline in big cities vs. small cities. Again, the trend is clear: crime went up more during the 80s in big cities, but then declined more during the 90s and aughts. The fact that New York beat the national average is a matter of its size, not broken windows.

Now, none of this is evidence that broken windows doesn’t work. The evidence is foggy either way, and we simply don’t know. My own personal view is that it’s probably a net positive, but a fairly modest one.

But this gets us to the core of the issue. Kelling and Bratton write that the “academics who attribute crime drops to economic or demographic factors often work with macro data sets and draw unsubstantiated, far-fetched conclusions about street-level police work, which most have scarcely witnessed.” Why such contempt? Because Kelling, and especially Bratton, want to believe that the things they do affect crime. After all, if crime has declined because of demographics or gasoline lead or the end of the crack epidemic, then all of Bratton’s work—along with that of the cops he manages—is pretty much useless. He’s just been spinning his wheels while huge, impersonal forces have been acting invisibly.

Nobody wants to believe that. What’s more, we don’t want people to believe that. Police officers, like all of us, work better if they think that they’re having an impact. And their bosses, if they want to keep their trust, had damn well better insist that this is the case. When Bratton says that broken windows works, he’s not just saying it because he believes it. He’s saying it because he has to. If he doesn’t, he’d lose the trust of his officers.

Still, the truth is almost certainly more complicated than Bratton says. Crime is down for multiple reasons, and if I had to guess I’d say about 70 percent is due to big, impersonal forces and 30 percent is due to changes in policing, including broken windows. That may not be a very satisfying explanation, but it’s most likely the true one.

POSTSCRIPT: By the way, did you know that the link between gasoline lead and crime was the “trendiest crime decline hypothesis in 2014”? I didn’t. But that’s kind of cool. You can, of course, read more about that here.

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Is Broken Windows a Broken Theory of Crime?

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What Are the Odds Your City Will Have a White Christmas?

by Shayna9349 Posted on December 24, 2014

Mother Jones

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The lighter the shade of blue, the higher the chance of a White Christmas. NOAA/NCDC

This story originally appeared in CityLab and is published here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Those determined to have a White Christmas should grab crampons and a bottle of scotch and prepare for a tough slog. Many places in the lower 48 with a lock on holiday snow are located in rugged, altitudinous climes—the bony ridge of the Sierra Nevada, for instance, and the wind-burned peaks of the Rockies.

That much is clear in this delightful NOAA map plotting probabilities across the US for a White Christmas, defined here as a December 25 with more than an inch of snow on the ground. Based on three decades of climate normals from the National Climatic Data Center, the graphic shows a stark geographic divide when it comes to unwrapping presents in snow-globe conditions: A region of zero to 10 percent probability curves from Washington State through coastal California and then explodes in the deep South and Southeast. Parts of the Midwest also are likely to be snowless, with places like Kansas, Missouri, and lower Illinois having only an 11 to 25 percent chance of a White Christmas.

New York, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C., have piddling shots at this charming weather, though their brethren higher on the East Coast fare better: Boston and Providence each have a 41 to 50 percent chance. Chicago racks a (considering its frosty reputation) low-sounding 41 to 50 percent chance, and Buffalo, home to sudden crashing currents of lake-effect snow, takes it up to 51 to 60 percent.

Aside from the West’s mountain ranges, NOAA says the best-performing powder points for December 25 are Maine, upstate New York, Minnesota, the highlands of West Virginia and Pennsylvania, and almost “anywhere in Idaho.” But even these crystal-crusted locales could shake off the holiday snow this year, the agency says: “While the map shows the climatological probability that a snow depth of at least one inch will be observed on December 25, the actual conditions this year may vary widely from these probabilities because the weather patterns present will determine the snow on the ground or snowfall on Christmas day.”

Here’s another version of the map that’s less smooth, but clearer at delineating regional probabilities:

NOAA/NCDC

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What Are the Odds Your City Will Have a White Christmas?

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The Spending Bill Includes a Huge Insurance Industry Giveaway Too

by Ajax Isaac Posted on December 11, 2014

Mother Jones

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You can add insurance industry subsidies to the list of giveaways being shoved into the massive, last-minute government spending bill Congress is trying to vote on to avert a government shutdown. (Update: The bill passed the House.) A seven-year extension of the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act (TRIA)—which is essentially a government promise to bail out insurance companies after a major terrorist attack—has become part of this appropriations measure. The insurance industry and some of its bigger corporate clients claim renewing the 9/11-inspired law is critical to keeping the industry alive. Critics, citing the industry’s own risk analysis, say it’s pretty much useless.

TRIA, which is set to expire December 31, was approved by Congress after the September 11 attacks. Before then, a major attack was considered such a far-off possibility that terrorism insurance was generally included in commercial policies without added cost. But the attacks were a catastrophe for the industry, costing more than $40 billion in today’s dollars—the greatest loss for a non-natural disaster on record. After those payouts, many companies either stopped offering terrorism coverage or made it enormously expensive, according to a Congressional Research Service report on the subject. In 2002, Congress passed TRIA, which requires insurers to offer terrorism coverage—and promises to bail them out if a future terrorist attack causes losses above a certain threshold. With this law, the government acts as an insurer for the insurers—but it doesn’t charge them a dime for the protection.

The TRIA renewal in the spending bill will shift more of the burden of covering losses due to terrorist attacks to the insurance industry relative to the previous law. The threshold for an industry bailout would double, from $100 million in damages to $200 million, and the portion of losses covered by the government would fall from 85 percent to 80 percent. The law does include a provision the government could use to get some of its bailout money back; it would allow the government to tax policyholders, but this is not mandatory.

Critics, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), have called TRIA a giveaway for the industry. Similar programs exist in Europe and Australia, but those programs bill insurance companies in advance for the protection, instead of giving it away for free and then possibly taxing policyholders after the fact. If the government did charge for TRIA coverage, it could collect about $570 million annually, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The Consumer Federation of America, citing the insurance industry’s own risk analysis, notes that only the owners of “high-risk” terrorist targets— large, commercial buildings in New York City, Washington, DC, San Francisco, and Chicago—and their insurers benefit from TRIA. Although terrorism insurance rates would increase if TRIA were repealed, the group says, few policyholders would see the difference.

If there were a terrorist attack on one of those large commercial buildings, the industry is probably equipped to handle the loss without a government backstop. In the first half of 2014, American property and casualty insurers (TRIA’s main industry beneficiaries) were sitting on a record surplus of $683.1 billion, according to an industry report—enough to cover 15 times the losses endured on September 11.

In a September 8 letter to Congress, 400 companies and trade associations, from AIG to United Airlines and Walt Disney, contended that TRIA maintained “economic stability in the face of ongoing terrorist threats,” and that without it insurance companies would be unable to provide adequate coverage. A few weeks later, the Insurance Information Institute, an industry-funded advocacy group, cited ISIS’s promise to attack the United States as a reason for extending the law.

More than 100 companies and trade associations lobbied Congress on TRIA. Looks like it was money well spent.

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The Spending Bill Includes a Huge Insurance Industry Giveaway Too

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Let the Ass Covering Begin!

by RevaL63sxmlt Posted on November 6, 2014

Mother Jones

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I’m late to this story, but last night I finally got around to reading the big campaign tick-tock in the Washington Post by Philip Rucker and Robert Costa. The part everyone is talking about is the description of bad blood between President Obama and Senate Democrats, and Exhibit A comes via a series of stunningly bitter comments from David Krone, Harry Reid’s chief of staff. Here’s how the reporters managed to put the screws to Krone to get him to talk:

This past Sunday, two days before Election Day, Krone sat at a mahogany conference table in the majority leader’s stately suite just off the Senate floor and shared with Washington Post reporters his notes of White House meetings. Reid’s top aide wanted to show just how difficult he thought it had been to work with the White House.

Look: I get that Obama doesn’t socialize much with congressional Democrats. Even as someone who’s long thought that senators need to get over themselves, there’s no question that this is a real failing of Obama’s. Schmoozing and scheming are part of the president’s job, and if you don’t do it you’re going to end up with a lot of offended allies.

That said, take a look at that highlighted sentence. Apparently David Krone is such an unbelievable asshole that he actively decided to vent all his bitterness and bile to a couple of reporters solely to demonstrate just how hard poor David Krone’s job had been during this election season. He even made sure to bring along his notes to make sure he didn’t forget any of his grievances. As an example of preemptive CYA, this is unequaled in recent memory. To hear him tell the story, Dems would have swept to victory if only Obama had been less of a skinflint and given David Krone more money.

You betcha. Please raise your hand if you think lack of money was even on the top ten list of reasons that Democrats lost this year. Anyone? No?

Then there’s this bit of whinging, which I’ve heard over and over:

Exacerbating matters was Obama’s Oct. 2 speech in Chicago, in which he handed every Republican admaker fresh material that fit perfectly with their message: “I am not on the ballot this fall. . . . But make no mistake — these policies are on the ballot, every single one of them.”

“It took about 12 seconds for every reporter, every race, half of the Obama world to say that was probably not the right thing to say,” said a senior Democratic official. It was so problematic that many Democrats wondered whether Obama meant to say it. He did. “It is amazing that it was in the speech,” the official said. “It wasn’t ad-libbed.”

Good God. Are Democrats really delusional enough to convince themselves that this made even the slightest difference? Aside from the fact that virtually no one outside the political junkie community heard this speech, who cares anyway? Republicans had long since made the election all about Obama and his policies, and it didn’t matter a whit whether Obama acknowledged this or not. The GOP attack ads were going to be same either way. If anything, the truth is that Dems might have been better off if they’d been more willing to face the reality Obama tried to warn them about: that this election was about Obama’s policies whether anyone liked it or not. Instead of cowering in their corners, they needed to figure out a way to deal with this.

Obama has made plenty of mistakes over the past year. The healthcare.gov rollout was obviously a debacle that hurt Democrats. Foreign policy has been occasionally tone deaf, even if it’s been substantively fairly solid. The flip-flop on immigration was inept. But Obama has raised plenty of money. He’s been willing to either campaign or keep his distance as circumstances dictate. His relatively low approval ratings obviously hurt Democrats, but he was far from their biggest problem. They better face up to that sometime soon.

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Let the Ass Covering Begin!

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How Understanding Randomness Will Give You Mind-Reading Powers

by OsvaldoTeague Posted on September 5, 2014

Mother Jones

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In the 1930s, a Duke University botanist named Joseph Banks Rhine was gaining notoriety for focusing a scientific lens on the concept of extrasensory perception, or ESP. His initial research, which he claimed demonstrated the existence of ESP, consisted of case studies of exceptional individuals who seemed to be able to predict which cards a research associate was holding—even when sitting 250 yards away and separated by physical barriers like a wall—with greater accuracy than simple guessing would yield.

But case studies can only take you so far.

One night, Rhine met with Eugene Francis McDonald Jr., the CEO of the Zenith Radio Company. McDonald offered up his technology for what promised to be the largest and most impressive test of ESP yet: a nationwide experiment showing that telepathy is real.

“The idea was that they would have a bunch of people in a radio studio, and they would try to transmit their thoughts to the nationwide radio audience,” explains science writer William Poundstone, author of the book Rock Breaks Scissors, on this week’s Inquiring Minds podcast. “And then people at home could write down what they think they received and send that in, and scientists would look at it and decide if they had shown ESP or not.” The hope, says Poundstone, was that the participation of millions of radio listeners would produce results that were supposedly “much more statistically valid” than earlier ESP studies.

The first few broadcasts were a dramatic success. Most listeners were correct in their guesses of what the “senders” in a radio station in Chicago were thinking. On one episode, writes Poundstone, the thought-senders attempted to use their brains to transmit a series of five Xs and Os—OXXOX—and a majority of the audience members sent in the right answers. “So this seemed very impressive, and the head of Zenith put out big press releases saying that, you know, there’s no way this could be a coincidence,” says Poundstone.

But while it wasn’t a coincidence, a young psychologist named Louis D. Goodfellow figured out that the experiment wasn’t really measuring telepathy. Rather, it was demonstrating something far more interesting about human nature: our inability to behave randomly. It turned out that Goodfellow, who had been hired by Zenith to work on the show, could predict listeners’ guesses even before they had a chance to make them. He started out with the hypothesis that there is no ESP. In that case, the radio audience had to come up with a random sequence themselves. “And he realized that it’s not so easy for a person to make up a random sequence.” says Poundstone. “When people try to do that they fall into certain unconscious patterns, and these patterns are really very similar for everyone.”

In his own laboratory experiments, Goodfellow found that his subjects preferred certain types of sequences when they’re trying to come up with random ones. When he asked people to make up the results of five imaginary coin tosses, for instance, “he found first of all that the most popular first toss was heads,” says Poundstone. How popular? Seventy-eight percent of the study participants selected “heads” as the first result in their supposedly “random” sequences.

What’s more, explains Poundstone, Goodfellow discovered that “people liked sequences that were very well shuffled.” Indeed, the most common sequence chosen by Zenith audiences was heads, heads, tails, heads, tails (or its equivalent in Os and Xs)—they picked it nearly 30 times more frequently than tails, tails, tails, tails, tails. “It’s not too surprising that the least common ones were just five heads in a row, or five tails in a row,” adds Poundstone. “People figured that just wasn’t random.”

So, mystery solved. When the Zenith program transmitted thoughts that matched sequences that were popular with its listeners, “it suddenly looked like the public had a great deal of ESP,” says Poundstone. “But when the sequences were not so popular, then suddenly the telepaths were off their game.”

More recently, psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman proposed the so-called Law of Small Numbers, a theory that accounts for human misunderstandings of randomness. Specifically, we wrongly expect small samples to behave like very large ones. So if you toss a coin five times, you assume that you’ll get some variation of a pattern that includes two or three heads and two or three tails. If your coin lands on tails five times in a row, you tend to believe that it can’t be a coincidence. But in fact, the odds of five tails in a row are 1 in 32—not especially common, but not terribly rare, either. “So we have all these sort of false positives where we figure there must be something wrong with that coin, or maybe the person’s got some magic hot-hand in tossing coins,” Poundstone says.

Understanding these pitfalls can actually help you predict, with accuracy above chance, what someone else is going to do, even when he or she is trying, purposefully, to act randomly. These predictions are at the core of Poundstone’s book, which offers a practical guide to outguessing and outwitting almost anybody—in activities ranging from Rock, Paper, Scissors (men tend to go with rock, so you can beat them with paper) to investing in stocks.

Naturally, the larger the dataset, the more accurately a person—or a computer—can predict behavior. With access to Big Data, large corporations like Target have developed analytics that can predict our behavior with remarkable accuracy, even when we think we’re making decisions in the moment. Siri, your iPhone’s talking app, learns about you and the behavior of all the other iPhone users and uses that information to predict what you’re going to ask her even as you are evaluating your own needs.

And sometimes, the Big Data machine is more observant than even the people closest to us. In his book, Poundstone cites the story of a Minnesota dad (first reported by the New York Times) who complained to a Target manager that his teenage daughter was being encouraged by the company to engage in unprotected sex. The store, he noted, had sent her a mailer littered with photos of cute babies, baby gear, and maternity clothing. As Poundstone writes, the manager apologized and promised that he’d suss out the source of the error. In doing so, he learned that Target analyzes purchases made online and in stores that are predictive of the behavior of an expectant mother. When he called the angry father once again to apologize, he realized just how powerful these algorithms can be. As it turns out, this time the customer was apologetic: Apparently Big Data noticed his daughter’s pregnancy well before he did.

Poundstone draws a direct line between Goodfellow’s debunking of ESP and modern efforts to predict consumer behavior. “It basically demonstrated that a lot of the little everyday decisions we make are incredibly predictable, provided you’ve got a little bit of data to work from,” he says. “And that’s become a very big business today, needless to say.”

But does this predictability apply to everyone? Poundstone knows of at least one person who defies the odds. Computer scientist Claude Shannon built the first computer to predict human behavior. And of all the people tested, he was also the only one who could beat the machine at its own game. When asked how he managed to do this, “he said that he had a very simple secret,” reveals Poundstone. “He essentially mentally emulated the code of the machine and did the algorithm in his head, so he knew what the machine was going to predict, and then he did the opposite.” But Shannon is a special case. “For almost everyone else, mere humans,” says Poundstone, “I think it is pretty easy to predict, at least a good deal of the time.”

Inquiring Minds is a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and best-selling author Chris Mooney. To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. We are also available on Stitcher. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook. Inquiring Minds was also recently singled out as one of the “Best of 2013” on iTunes—you can learn more here.

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How Understanding Randomness Will Give You Mind-Reading Powers

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Fast-Food Workers Arrested In Fight For $15 Minimum Wage

by MichellBidmead Posted on September 4, 2014

Mother Jones

On Thursday, nearly two years after fast-food employees first walked off the job in New York City, workers in dozens of cities around the country are staging a new round of strikes aimed at winning workers a $15 minimum wage and the right to form a union. This spate of walk-outs will see a significant escalation in tactics: home healthcare workers will join the day of action, and some workers will engage in civil disobedience. Several have already been arrested.

“On Thursday, we are prepared to take arrests to show our commitment to the growing fight for $15,” Terrence Wise, a Kansas City Burger King employee and a member of the fast-food workers’ national organizing committee, said in a statement earlier this week.

Employees at restaurant chains including McDonalds, Pizza Hut, and Burger King are walking off the job and staging sit-ins in 150 cities nationwide, from Chicago to Oakland, Pittsburg to Seattle. During the last one-day strike in May, workers protested in 150 US cities and 80 foreign cities, forcing several franchises to close for part of the day.

So far, the massive chains have been resistant to bumping up workers’ wages. Nevertheless, the movement has dealt some serious setbacks to one of the biggest fast-food employers: McDonald’s. The company’s public image was tarnished significantly between 2013 and 2014, according to a recent study quantifying companies’ reputations. McDonald’s sales have fallen over the past year amid ramped up scrutiny from Congress over its poverty wages. And in July, the National Labor Relations Board ruled that McDonald’s corporate can be held liable in worker lawsuits over wage-theft and working conditions. (The company had been arguing that it does not exert significant control over its franchises’ employment practices.)

The Service Employees Industrial Union, which has backed the workers from the start, hopes the addition of some of the nation’s 2 million home healthcare aides to the growing movement will put additional pressure on states and localities to raise their minimum wage.

On Labor Day, President Barack Obama gave the fast-food worker movement a morale boost. “All across the country right now there’s a national movement going on made up of fast-food workers organizing to lift wages so they can provide for their families with pride and dignity,” the president said. “There is no denying a simple truth. America deserves a raise.”

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Fast-Food Workers Arrested In Fight For $15 Minimum Wage

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The Arab World’s Version of the Ice Bucket Challenge: Burning ISIS Flags

by RandyKirwin Posted on September 3, 2014

Mother Jones

On Saturday, three Lebanese young men in Beirut protested the Islamic State by burning the extremist group’s flag, a black banner emblazoned with the Muslim tenet “there is no god but God and Muhammed is his prophet.” The teens then posted a video of the flag-burning online, exhorting others to do the same to demonstrate their opposition to the movement led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. In recent weeks, the Islamic State has allegedly beheaded a Lebanese army sergeant and kidnapped about 20 Lebanese soldiers. The flag-burning campaign, modeled on the viral “Ice Bucket Challenge,” quickly took off on social media under the hashtag #BurnISISFlagChallenge. “I nominate the whole world to #Burn_ISIS_Flag_Challenge. You have 24 hours. GO!!” wrote one Lebanese YouTube user.

Though the campaign hasn’t spread throughout the world yet, it has received considerable attention in Lebanon, where many citizens have rallied behind the cause. But some Lebanese officials are not happy about the protest. Lebanese Minister of Justice Ashraf Rifi has called for the “sternest punishment” for the flag burners for their “insult” to the Islamic religion and its symbols. He contends the flag is a religious relic, not a symbol of the Islamic State. And he claimed the flag-burning could “stir up sectarian conflicts” and, consequently, was illegal under Lebanese law, according to newspaper Asharq al-Aswat.

Nabil Naqoula, a member of Lebanon’s Change and Reform parliamentary bloc, took issue with Rifi and maintained that the protesters who started the movement did not intend “to insult the Islamic religion.” Ibrahim Kanaan, a member of the same group, offered legal support to the three young men who launched the flag-burning frenzy if they are charged with a crime.

The Islamic State’s flag has flown everywhere from a Chicago motorists’ window last Wednesday as he made bomb threats against the police, to the streets of Tabqa in northeast Syria where the extremist group seized a military airbase. The black banner has become synonymous with the group’s radical violence and mercilessness.

Here are a few examples of Lebanese activists taking the flag-burning challenge:

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The Arab World’s Version of the Ice Bucket Challenge: Burning ISIS Flags

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Which States’ Kids Miss the Most School?

by dfdedtcf Posted on September 2, 2014

Mother Jones

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September is upon us, and American kids are filling up their backpacks. But lots of kids won’t be going back to school—at least not very much. The map above shows the results of a national report released Tuesday by nonprofit Attendance Works, which zooms in on a statistic called “chronic absenteeism,” generally defined as the number of kids who miss at least 10 percent of school days over the course of a year. The measure has become popular among education reformers over the past few years because unlike other measures like average daily attendance or truancy, chronic absenteeism focuses on the specific kids who are regularly missing instructional time, regardless of the reason why or the overall performance of the school.

Several studies have shown that missing 10 percent of school seems to be a threshold of sorts: If you miss more than that, your odds of scoring well on tests, graduating high school, and attending college are significantly lower. A statewide study in Utah, for example, found that kids who were chronically absent for a year between 8th and 12th grades were more than seven times more likely to drop out. The pattern starts early in the year: A 2013 Baltimore study found that half of the students who missed two to four days of school in September went on to be chronically absent.

The Attendance Works study, which used missing three days per month as a proxy for the 10 percent threshold, categorized students missing school by location, race, and socioeconomic status. Here’s what they found:

Oddly enough, the federal government doesn’t track absenteeism. Seventeen states do, and, as David Cardinali wrote in the New York Times last week, states have found that school attendance often falls on socioeconomic lines: In Maryland, nearly a third of high school students who receive free or reduced lunch are chronically absent.

In order to work with a national dataset, Attendance Works looked at the results of the National Assessment for Educational Attainment, the nation’s largest continuing standardized test, taken by a sample of fourth- and eighth-graders across the country every two years. In addition to academic content, the test asks students a series of nonacademic questions, including how many days of school they have missed in the past month. If students reported missing three or more days, they had crossed the 10 percent threshold; assuming that month is representative of the rest of the year, the kids qualify as chronically absent.

Obviously, there’s a huge disclaimer here: Students may not remember or accurately report their own absences, and one month may not be representative of an entire school year. But at the same time, the results were remarkably consistent, reflecting conclusions from localized studies: Students in poverty are less likely to come to school, and as the chart below shows, students who come to school less perform markedly worse on tests. (For reference, an improvement of 10 points on the National Assessment for Educational Progress is roughly equivalent to jumping a grade level.)

Phyllis Jordan, a coauthor of the Attendance Works report, hopes that as schools look more into the data, they’ll be able to identify the core reasons for the absence: “If everybody from a certain neighborhood is missing school and they have to walk through a bad neighborhood, then suddenly you say, ‘Oh, we should run a school bus through there.’ If it’s all the kids with asthma and you don’t have a school nurse, maybe that’s a reason. Or maybe it’s all concentrated in a single classroom, and you have an issue with the teacher.”

The good news is that citywide studies in New York City and Chicago show that when chronically absent kids start coming to school more, they can make substantial academic gains. And the simple act of tracking and prioritizing absenteeism can lead to statewide progress: When Hawaii started keeping track of chronic absenteeism in 2012, the state went from having a chronic absentee rate of 18 to 11 percent over the course of a single year.

Original article: 

Which States’ Kids Miss the Most School?

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The NFL Finally Fixed Its Weak Domestic-Violence Penalties

by RusselProby Posted on August 29, 2014

Mother Jones

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The National Football League has drastically toughened its punishments for domestic violence after weeks of uproar over its weak response to the case of Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice. Rice received a two-game suspension after allegedly assaulting his fiancée, while players who tested positive for marijuana—some in states where weed is legal—were handed four-game and even season-long suspensions.

In a letter to NFL owners Thursday, commissioner Robert Goodell wrote that the league had fallen short in “a recent incident of domestic violence” and announced that a first-time domestic-violence offender would now receive a six-game suspension. Repeat offenders, he wrote, would face indefinite bans, with the possibility to apply for reinstatement after a year.

To be clear, there’s no epidemic of domestic violence among NFL players; this graph from FiveThirtyEight shows that NFL players are generally less likely to be arrested than the rest of 25-to-29-year-old American men*:



Rather, this smells a lot like a PR-related move from the league, which has seen its reputation suffer in the wake of Rice’s light penalty. After all, it’s not like the NFL jumped to punish any of the following four players, all of whom were involved in domestic incidents during Goodell’s tenure as commissioner:

AJ Jefferson: In February, Jefferson allegedly strangled his girlfriend and was arrested and charged with assault. The Minnesota Vikings released him hours later, but he was picked up by the Seattle Seahawks this spring.
Chad Johnson: In 2012, Johnson was arrested for head-butting his wife and charged with misdemeanor domestic battery. He pleaded no contest, was sentenced to probation and was cut by the Miami Dolphins.
Brandon Marshall: The Chicago Bears’ star wide receiver has one of the lengthier rap sheets in the league. Since 2004, he has been arrested five times, twice on domestic-violence charges, and has been involved in 10 disputes—many involving violence against women—in which no charges were filed. Marshall was suspended one game in 2009 over charges he’d abused his girlfriend in 2008 (he was acquitted); in 2007, he was arrested after preventing his girlfriend’s taxi from leaving his home, completed anger management, and did not receive punishment from the NFL.
Quinn Ojinnaka: The former Atlanta Falcons offensive lineman was suspended for one game in 2010 after a dispute in which he threw his wife down a flight of stairs and out of their home. (The dispute is said to have begun over Ojinnaka contacting a woman via Facebook.)

Ultimately, the NFL is deeply invested in maintaining a clean, family-friendly image, and Goodell is clearly responding to claims that the league takes smoking pot more seriously than it does violence against women. While it’s good that future domestic-violence offenders will receive more appropriate punishment, the timing of his letter—just a day after a vocal outcry about Rice’s punishment—makes it seem like the move of an embarrassed league looking to crack down on players who embarrass it.

Goodell is burnishing his reputation as an authoritarian who’s concerned with appearances, rather than a commissioner who leverages the league’s reach and resources to actually address issues like domestic violence.

*Note: As commenter Bumpasaurus pointed out, the data from the FiveThirtyEight chart is “adjusted for poverty status.” NFL players are wealthy, and compared to other, wealthy individuals in the same age group, “the domestic violence arrest rate is downright extraordinary.”

Originally posted here – 

The NFL Finally Fixed Its Weak Domestic-Violence Penalties

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