Tag Archives: country

Finally, Obama Denounces America’s Standardized Testing Obsession

by Lien92Bjigz Posted on October 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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Read more about the overloading of standardized tests.

On Saturday, the Obama administration announced that its push towards high-stakes standardized testing had gone too far and urged schools to limit tests to those that were meaningful indicators of progress. Specifically, the administration called for a cap so that no student would spend more than two percent of classroom time on standardized tests, and called on Congress to “reduce over-testing.”

“Learning is about so much more than filling in the right bubble,” the president said in a speech posted on the White House Facebook site.

The announcement represents a significant change in course for the Obama administration, which had been facing mounting bipartisan criticism for focusing too much on tests at the expense of a focus on creativity and critical thinking. According to a report by the Council of Great City Schools which reviewed the country’s 66 largest school districts, students are required to take about 112 standardized exams between kindergarten and 12th grade.

It’s unclear how much a two percent cap on tests will truly affect students; according to the Council of Great Schools report, the tests fall most heavily on eighth graders, who spend 20 to 25 hours, or about 2.3 percent of classroom time, on standardized tests. Furthermore, the announcement didn’t address the amount of time spent preparing for tests.

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If our kids had more free time at school, what would you want them to do with it? A) Learn to play a musical…

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Still, Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, called the announcement a victory. “The fixation on high-stakes testing hasn’t moved the needle on student achievement,” she said in a statement. “We need to get back to focusing on the whole child—teaching our kids how to build relationships, how to be resilient and how to think critically.”

Outgoing Education Secretary Arne Duncan acknowledged that “At the federal, state and local level, we have all supported policies that have contributed to the problem in implementation.” Duncan is meeting with Obama today to discuss how to limit redundant and low-quality testing.

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Finally, Obama Denounces America’s Standardized Testing Obsession

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Opiates Are Killing More People in This State Than Car Accidents. Obama Wants to Change That.

by EmelyBarger Posted on October 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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President Barack Obama announced a new federal initiative to combat the country’s painkiller problem ahead of a speech on Wednesday in Charleston, West Virginia, a place at the heart of an opiate crisis. In greater Kanawha County, of the 65 people who have died from drug overdoses so far this year, 22 people have succumbed to heroin. The same number of people have died from heroin in nearby Cabell County, the epicenter of the state’s drug problem.

For the last half decade, the state has been gripped by the rise of prescription opiates and heroin, just as the rest of the country has encountered the revival of the cheap painkiller as a drug of choice. In 36 states and the District of Columbia, deaths from drug overdoses have outnumbered those from auto accidents, with West Virginia leading the way. Of the 363 drug overdoses in West Virginia so far this year, roughly 88 percent were opiate-related and included multiple substances, with 97 deaths related to heroin overdoses, according to new data from the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources’ Health Statistics Center.

A crackdown on cash-only clinics for prescription painkillers and a flood of pure heroin from nearby cities have contributed to West Virginia’s drug problem. But just how bad is it?

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Opiates Are Killing More People in This State Than Car Accidents. Obama Wants to Change That.

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This One Simple Trick Will Allow You to Make a Killing Betting on the Presidential Race

by ElenaAnivitti10 Posted on October 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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Jim Tankersley examines the presidential odds at PredictWise today and concludes that punters are probably underestimating Hillary Clinton’s chances of winning. Why? Justin Wolfers explains that it’s likely due to something called “longshot bias”:

The favorite tends to win in betting markets more often than indicated by the odds. So if the markets say she’s a 47% chance to be president, history suggests that the true odds are a bit better than that.

….There’s another way to get at this though, which is simply to ask whether the odds make sense. I think the idea that Clinton is only a 75 percent chance to win the nomination is nuts — she’s essentially the only serious candidate running, and it’s now clear that her campaign is not going to implode. With any candidate there are risks that secrets may come out, but with Mrs. Clinton, we’ve had several decades for them to surface. So my (personal!) judgment is that she is at least an 85 percent chance to win the nomination, and maybe 90 percent is a more realistic assessment.

OK. But what I want to know is why the betting markets say that Democrats have a 58 percent chance of winning the presidency, but the combined chance of all the individual Democratic candidates is 63 percent. There must be some way to arbitrage this so that you’ll make money no matter what happens. Right?

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This One Simple Trick Will Allow You to Make a Killing Betting on the Presidential Race

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Chart of the Day: The Kids These Days Are Abandoning TV

by CarmeloO89 Posted on October 20, 2015

Mother Jones

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I suppose this isn’t exactly breaking news, but young people sure are abandoning traditional television in a hurry. Liam Boluk reads the eulogy:

Across all audience segments under 50, television engagement is declining rapidly…. This time is not simply evaporating. Instead, it’s moving to services such as Netflix (each of the company’s 43M US accounts watches more than 2 hours a day), Twitch (15M American viewers watching 30 minutes a day), YouTube (163M watching 35 minutes a day) and scores of other low cost (if not free) digital-first brands and services.

No television network can weather the loss of their younger audiences….Skinny bundles, adjusted affiliate fees, re-rationalized programming strategies, lower costs, declining Pay TV penetration. These can all be managed practically. But without a way of re-engaging youth audiences, all networks are on long-term life support. To thrive, they need to invest in new digital properties, create new distribution models and partnerships and invest in radically different content forms.

Traditional TV viewing among teenagers and 20-somethings has gone off a cliff since 2010. Oddly, though, old folks are watching more TV. It’s easy to understand why TV viewing among seniors might be flat—they’re not interested in YouTube and Netflix and all the other stuff the kids these day are into—but why would it be going up? Have traditional networks well and truly given up on younger viewers and are therefore programming more content that appeals to the Geritol crowd?

I’m no media analyst, so I have no great insights into all this. I just thought it was interesting to see how dramatic the decline has been among younger viewers, despite being told relentlessly that we’re in a second golden age of TV. About once a week I think I read an article telling me that some show I’ve never heard of is probably the best drama on television today—maybe of all time. I guess the kids aren’t listening.

Originally from – 

Chart of the Day: The Kids These Days Are Abandoning TV

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RushCard Locks Out the Poor From Their Money for Ninth Consecutive Day

by YettaBrumfield Posted on October 20, 2015

Mother Jones

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Yesterday I saw the blurb on the right at the New York Times. Russell Simmons. RushCard. On the blink for eight days. That sounds like a drag. I wonder what this is all about? Why haven’t I heard of it before now?

Jamelle Bouie explains:

RushCard, according to its website, is a prepaid debit card that lets users get paychecks up to two days in advance….It’s meant to solve the real problems that come with being unbanked or underbanked. In reality, however, it’s a trap. In exchange for early access to their money, users face a web of fees and charges.

….If RushCard were reliable, this might be a fair price for convenience. But it’s not. Beginning last week, thousands of people were locked out of their accounts following an alleged “technology transition” from the company. As Jia Tolentino notes for Jezebel, these are people with no access to cash outside of RushCard. It’s what they use to live their lives.

….This is a disaster, largely uncovered because of whom it affects.

Yep. If this were a problem with, say, American Airlines mileage awards, it would have gotten about as much attention as the Space Shuttle exploding or the Obamacare website melting down. That’s because lots of upper-middle-class folks use these miles, and so do lots of journalists. But RushCard is mostly used by the invisible poor. It turns out that RushCard’s problems have been big news for the past week in a few places that cater to either the hip hop community or looking out for the poor, but in the mainstream press it’s been mostly ignored. That’s probably because very few mainstream journalists either use RushCard or know a lot of people who do.

The rest of Bouie’s column is about postal banking, which you all know I’m sort of skeptical about. I suspect there are better answers to helping the unbanked. But as a comment on the press and the invisibility of the poor, this story deserves more attention.

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RushCard Locks Out the Poor From Their Money for Ninth Consecutive Day

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The GOP Is the Party of No Escape

by RozellaMccune Posted on October 19, 2015

Mother Jones

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In the print magazine this month (yes! print!) I have a piece arguing that this year’s odd lack of enthusiasm among Republicans for repealing Obamacare—something that many folks have noted—is just a bellwether for wider GOP problems:

Obamacare’s foes running out of steam is just the most obvious sign of a larger trend: A lot of traditional conservative issues are losing their momentum. Gay marriage lost its fear factor years ago….The economy is probably in good enough shape to not be a big campaign issue. Taxes have already been lowered so much that the average family pays only about 5 percent of its earnings to the IRS.

….True, Republicans still have a short list of hot-button topics that inflame their base, but increasingly these are wedge issues that promise nearly as much downside as upside. Immigration is the most visible example….Republican voters aren’t sold on the idea of Iraq War 2.0….Even abortion runs the risk of becoming a wedge issue for the party as activists demand that candidates take extreme positions such as opposing exceptions for rape, incest, or the life and health of the mother—even though these are popular among most Republican voters.

The big Republican problem right now is not that they’re out of ideas. The problem is that just as Democrats were torn apart by their ideas 30 years ago, Republicans are being torn apart by theirs today. All the once-reliable Republican applause lines are fast becoming wedge issues that divide the party regulars from the tea party base. And this is all coming at the same time that Republicans are fighting the headwind of a long-term demographic shift that weakens them further with every election cycle. “In an era when the inmates are running the asylum, it’s not just Obamacare bashing that’s become a double-edged sword for Republicans. It’s nearly everything they’ve relied on for the past three decades.”

Read the whole thing! I’m excited about it. Not because it’s the most astute piece of political analysis ever, but because it’s my first print piece in over a year. That’s right: As of a couple of months ago, I had recovered enough from chemotherapy that I once again had the energy to start writing longer print pieces in addition to blogging. And I just finished another, better one for the next issue. Read it too! (When it comes out.)

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The GOP Is the Party of No Escape

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A Closer Look at 2016 Obamacare Enrollment

by OsvaldoTeague Posted on October 17, 2015

Mother Jones

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Warning: Lotsa numbers ahead. Sorry about that. If you’re not interested, you can skip down to the last two paragraphs for the bottom line.

A couple of days ago, HHS projected that Obamacare exchange enrollment would reach 10 million by the end of 2016. That’s not much higher than the 9.1 million who are expected to be enrolled at the end of 2015. Has Obamacare enrollment stalled?

Maybe. But keep two things in mind:

This is probably a lowball figure. HHS would rather set a low bar and beat it than set a higher bar and have to explain why they missed it.
Charles Gaba, who has a pretty good track record with this stuff, estimates that 14.7 million people will sign up and 12.2 million will remain by the end of the year.

If Gaba is right, that’s an increase of about one-third from 2015. Not too bad. Still, it’s considerably less than the CBO’s original estimate of 21 million enrollees by 2016. Again, though, keep a couple of things in mind:

The CBO figure is for “average annual enrollment.” Since people drop out as the year progresses, this is probably equivalent to about 19 million by year-end.
CBO had estimated a drop of 8 million people from employer and other insurance plans. However, those numbers appear to have turned out lower than CBO’s estimates. This is a good thing—we’d prefer that people stay on their current coverage instead of being kicked off—but it obviously reduces the market for Obamacare enrollment. We should probably reduce CBO’s estimate by 3 million or so to account for this.

In other words, on an apples-to-apples basis, a best guess suggests that we’ll end up 2016 at 12 million compared to a CBO projection of 16 million. It’s still lower than CBO’s original estimates, but not by a huge amount. This could be due to (a) an overestimate by CBO, (b) weak performance by Obamacare, (c) an improving economy, or (d) nothing more than a difference in how fast Obamacare ramps up.

Bottom line: Because of all this, a more reliable metric of success is to skip all the details of who’s insured via what, and simply count the total number of uninsured. CBO originally estimated that the uninsured population would drop to 8 percent by 2016. That estimate changed after the Supreme Court made Medicare expansion voluntary, and CBO now figures that in 2016 the total number of uninsured will come to about 11 percent. The CDC estimates that in the most recent quarter the number of uninsured dropped to 10.7 percent. If Gaba’s numbers are correct, that will decline to about 10 percent or so by the end of 2016.

In other words, once you clear away all the underbrush it looks like Obamacare is meeting or beating its goals. Some of this might be due to an improving economy, but who cares? If the economy is doing well enough that more people are getting employer coverage and fewer are being forced onto the exchanges, that’s a good thing, not a knock on Obamacare.

POSTSCRIPT: Surveys consistently show that about half of the uninsured say they’re not on Obamacare because it’s too expensive. So for anyone who’s truly concerned that Obamacare isn’t hitting its enrollment targets, there’s an easy answer: increase the federal subsidies for the working poor so that more of them can afford coverage.

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A Closer Look at 2016 Obamacare Enrollment

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Friday Cat Blogging – 16 October 2015

by EstelleGariepy Posted on October 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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This morning, Hopper was busily scratching her cheek on this handy chair when a tail walked by. What’s a self-respecting cat to do? Snag at it with feline reflexes, of course. Hilbert was not amused. The funny part about this is that Hilbert attacks Hopper’s tail too, but as near as I can tell she never even notices. I think she must lack nerve endings in her tail or something.

From: 

Friday Cat Blogging – 16 October 2015

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Early Polls Suggest Hillary Clinton Did Pretty Well in Tuesday’s Debate

by LorrineBucher Posted on October 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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Now it’s time to take a look at the Democratic side of the presidential race. Obviously nobody cares about Webb, O’Malley, or Chafee, so let’s zero in on Clinton and Sanders. Who won Tuesday’s debate? Andrew Prokop summarizes the early polls in the chart on the right.

Now, these results are fairly consistent with Bernie supporters thinking Bernie won and Hillary supporters thinking Hillary won—plus a few extra for Hillary. We’ll have to wait for the big national polls to see if the debate actually changed support levels much for either of them. At a rough glance, though, it looks as if most of the folks who prefer Joe Biden in the polls ended up choosing Hillary when the choice was limited to just her and Bernie.

This makes sense ideologically, since Biden and Clinton occupy pretty similar niches, and it makes sense from a name recognition standpoint too. But I’d point out one other thing that we political junkies might miss: Bernie Sanders can sometimes come across on TV as loud and angry. We’re all so used to his speaking style that it doesn’t affect us much, but for people tuning in for the first time, it might have been fairly off-putting. I don’t know if likely Democratic voters feel the same way, but they might. Just a thought.

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Early Polls Suggest Hillary Clinton Did Pretty Well in Tuesday’s Debate

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A Quick Look at Bush vs. Rubio vs. Cruz

by OmaOxleyih Posted on October 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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Who will be the Republican nominee for president? Beats me. GOP voters are obviously in a weird mood this year. But let’s suppose two things:

The folks who are currently polling below 3-4 percent have no chance.
The non-politicians will eventually fade out or implode. No Trump, no Carson, no Fiorina.

If—if!—those things are true, we’re left with Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz. So how are they doing? I was curious, so I took a look at only those three on HuffPost Pollster. I don’t really have any point to make, so I won’t make one. Just consider this raw data.

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A Quick Look at Bush vs. Rubio vs. Cruz

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