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Is it Time to Replace the Cult of Finland With the Cult of New Jersey?

by JonathonSundber Posted on April 3, 2014

Mother Jones

Vikram Bath takes on the cult of Finland today. What’s that? You didn’t realize Finland had a cult? Well, it does in the education community, where Finland’s consistently high scores on the international PISA test make it the go-to destination for education writers looking for agreeable junkets they can turn into long-form thumbsuckers about how American schools are doing everything wrong.

But Bath points out that Finland isn’t actually the world’s top performer on the PISA test. Shanghai does better. So does Hong Kong. Now, maybe those are cherry-picked examples that owe their success to government authorities who game the tests, and therefore deserve to be ignored. But Japan does better too. And South Korea. And Taiwan. So why have they fallen out of vogue lately in the popular press? Why do we hear endless tributes to Finland instead? Bath suggests the reason we like Finland is fairly obvious:

“Be like Shanghai” is for the Wall Street Journal crowd. Shanghai is rote memorization and beating your kids and no bathroom breaks and pretending you aren’t numbed by classical music. Finland is culture and castles and liking classical music because you’d be a better person and maybe windmills.

Fine. Asian countries are culturally different. Maybe it makes sense to look instead at countries that are more similar to America. The problem is, Finland isn’t really much like America either. It’s ethnically pretty homogeneous and has extremely low rates of poverty. Obviously tackling poverty would be great, but facts are facts: we’re not likely to reduce our poverty rate to 3 percent anytime soon. So does that mean we’re stuck with no place to aspire to at all?

No. There is still a much, much better non-Asian model. It’s Massachusetts.

14% of children in Massachusetts live in relative poverty. That’s still below the US average, but much more American-like than Finland.

Unlike Finland, Massachusetts has already figured out how to deal with all the existing regulations imposed by the US government.

Unlike Finland, Massachusetts has figured out how to cooperate productively with US teachers unions.

Unlike Finland, Massachusetts has demonstrated how to get results from US-trained teachers rather than masters holders from Finnish research schools, of which the world only has so many.

Unlike Finland, Massachusetts has experienced success teaching real American students who go home every day to be subjected to American parenting styles.

I’d add a fairly large caveat to this: When you disaggregate scores, Massachusetts still does well, but not spectacularly well. Judging from the latest NAEP scores for eighth graders, Massachusetts does a great job with its white students, a good job with its black students, and a fairly mediocre job with its Hispanic students. Overall, they perform pretty well, but part of that is due to the fact that Massachusetts has a very high proportion of white students and apparently does a superb job of teaching them.

Nevertheless, Bath’s point is well taken. But you might want to choose a different state: New Jersey, which has a high composite score not because it’s mostly white (it’s about 60 percent white), but because it does an outstanding job of teaching kids of all colors. Judging by NAEP scores, it ranks among the top four states in both math and reading for whites, blacks, and Hispanics.

Of course, New Jersey’s poverty rate is pretty low, and we know that poverty is a prime cause of poor educational outcomes. This helps account for New Jersey’s high scores, and also acts as an object lesson in not fetishizing particular countries, states, or programs. This stuff is complicated, and there’s no point in just substituting one simplistic analysis for another. That said, I’d say Bath is worth listening to. We should take good ideas from wherever we can find them, but there’s not much reason to go haring around the world looking for educational lodestars to emulate. We have 51 laboratories of democracy right here at home, all of which are more culturally similar to each other than any foreign country is. And some of them do pretty well, already working within the framework of American culture, American laws, American ethnic makeup, and American parents. Why not study them instead?

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Is it Time to Replace the Cult of Finland With the Cult of New Jersey?

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Google Bus Protest the Most San Francisco Thing Ever

by BettinaYLPM Posted on April 1, 2014

Mother Jones

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This morning, a few dozen housing and inequality activists from Heart of the City surrounded a Google shuttle at 24th and Valencia Street in the Mission District of San Francisco. The purpose: to draw attention to a proposed tax hike on San Francisco’s Municipal Railway (Muni) public transportation system and to get the Bay Area’s technology companies to pay more for using public bus stops to pick up shuttle riders. It was the latest in a series of attempts to raise awareness about the tech industry and its effect on the city. What followed was a unique bit of performance theatre that might just be the most San Francisco protest ever.

As an April Fool’s day parody, protesters announced that Google would unveil a “Gmuni” program. They handed out fake bus passes to bystanders, set up a microphone for a Gmuni spokesperson, and surrounded the Google bus with a dancing team of colorful acrobats—one dressed as a Google surveillance camera on stilts, while six others in futuristic clown costumes toted yoga balls emblazoned with a logo fashioned from the search engine’s omnipresent typography.

Clad in a pinstripe suit and fake Google Glass, Judith Hart, the acting President of Gmuni, took over the loudspeaker.

“The Gmuni program is here today to offer free privatized bus service to the citizens of San Francisco. The Muni program is in decline because of underfunding. They’ve been cutting lines. We thought, you know what, let’s try a pilot program and see if we can use our customary bus service to go ahead and provide service to all the citizens of San Francisco.”

After a round of cheering, she added:

“Everyone in the entire Mission—in the quad, really—should be able to get on the bus with one of these passes. As you can see,” she announced, pointing to a stranded bus, “the Muni is not adequate enough to stop at their own stop—the Google bus got here first, so we’re just trying to let people on.”

The crowd then jokingly asked questions about the program, “Excuse me, will there be regular coffee or gourmet coffee?” “Gourmet coffee, absolutely–it’s all Blue Bottle.” “Will there be yoga?” “Will there be yoga on the bus? Currently, there is no plan for on-bus yoga practice; however, we have been looking into a development study about what we can do with the luggage compartment.”

Throughout Hart’s speech, several people tried to board the real Google bus with their fake passes, but were quickly stopped by the driver and police. After about a 20 minute delay, the police pushed back protestors far enough to allow the bus to roll along its way.

Following the speech, organizer Amanda Ream dropped the tongue-in-cheek circus act to explain the move. This afternoon, the Board of Supervisors are considering a series of transportation changes, including a Muni fare hike and a proposal to generate $1.5 million by charging tech companies $1 a day per stop. Ream and the other activists would like tech companies to pay more. “While we appreciate the proposal and that Google funded the free Muni for Youth program, we want to see that the tech industry in San Francisco pays their fair share and actually pays taxes so the people of San Francisco can fund Muni.”

Deepa Varma, a housing rights attorney and spokesperson for the protest, elaborated. “Today, there are hearings about Muni increasing their fares and that’s happening at a time when wages aren’t going up for most people in the city, but they’re going up for the people riding the free buses. To pay even more for transportation to just get to and from work is not viable and it’s not fair.” As a result, she says, many people are being displaced.

She went on to explain that the Google bus is largely a symbolic stand-in for issues of gentrification and fare hikes, and that the protests aren’t directed at employees of Google or any other tech giant. “It’s absolutely not a housing activist against tech worker dynamic. It looks like that right now, but it’s more about trying to draw attention to the fact there is this disparity in terms of how people are treated and in terms of what people have access to at city hall.”

Ream agrees, “We want to stop the gentrification, and the displacement, and the Ellis Act. We believe that all these issues are tied together. The tech industry has an opportunity to show real leadership and be a good neighbor and make it possible by paying taxes for Muni to actually be affordable and accessible to people all year round—not just with their gift to the city.”

According to polling by EMC Research on behalf of the Bay Area Council, San Franciscans are generally positive about tech buses, although 48% of those surveyed do believe employee shuttle buses are contributing to gentrification and 38% think they’re causing the growing gap between rich and poor.

For more on the protest, our friends at Mission Local have a great video of the demonstration here.

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Google Bus Protest the Most San Francisco Thing Ever

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An Important Question About April Fools’ Day

by EulahWhitten Posted on April 1, 2014

Mother Jones

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Let’s take a break to discuss something important: Is it April Fools or Aprils Fools’? According to the AP style guide, it’s April Fools’. However, Google’s Ngram Viewer, which counts occurrences of phrases in books, tells a different, more nuanced story:

April Fools has been more common than April Fools’ for the entire past century.
However, April Fools’ Day has been far more common than April Fools Day.

So there you have it. Basically, you can probably punctuate it any way you want. Either way, though, I have some bad news for you: the usage of both terms has skyrocketed since 1960, increasing about 3x relative to everything else. This suggests, sadly, that we’ve all gotten way more obsessed with stupid April Fools jokes in recent years.

But there’s also some good news: usage peaked around 2000 and has gone down over the past decade. Unless this is an artifact of Google’s algorithm (which it might be), perhaps it means that we’re finally getting tired of the whole thing. That’s a nice thought, though I quail at the prospect of what’s probably replacing it in our collective id.

BY THE WAY: The increasing popularity of trying to outfox April Fools-savvy readers by playing jokes on March 31 is no longer clever. Knock it off. If you really think you have something good enough to fool people in an amusing way, it should be good enough to work on April 1.

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An Important Question About April Fools’ Day

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LA Times: 9.5 Million Newly Insured By Obamacare

by EstellaMassie Posted on March 31, 2014

Mother Jones

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So how many people are newly insured thanks to Obamacare? Noam Levey of the LA Times provides the current best estimate, based on the latest enrollment and survey data:

As the law’s initial enrollment period closes, at least 9.5 million previously uninsured people have gained coverage. Some have done so through marketplaces created by the law, some through other private insurance and others through Medicaid, which has expanded under the law in about half the states.

The tally draws from a review of state and federal enrollment reports, surveys and interviews with insurance executives and government officials nationwide.

….Republican critics of the law have suggested that the cancellations last fall have led to a net reduction in coverage. That is not supported by survey data or insurance companies, many of which report they have retained the vast majority of their 2013 customers by renewing old policies, which is permitted in about half the states, or by moving customers to new plans.

Rand’s latest survey data suggests that the share of uninsured adults has declined from 20.9 percent last fall to 16.6 percent as of March 22. Gallup has also shown a decline in the uninsured, and its March poll will show a further decline, according to Gallup Editor in Chief Frank Newport. More details at the link.

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LA Times: 9.5 Million Newly Insured By Obamacare

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Health Insurance Rates Are Going Up Next Year, But It’s Nothing to Panic Over

by LazaroWorley Posted on March 30, 2014

Mother Jones

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The LA Times has a piece today about the next battleground for Obamacare: rate increases for 2015. The warnings are already coming thick and fast:

WellPoint Inc., parent of California’s leading health insurer in the exchange, Anthem Blue Cross, has already predicted “double-digit-plus” rate increases on Obamacare policies across much of the country.

…. Health insurers aren’t wasting any time sizing up what patients are costing them now and what that will mean for 2015 rates. Hunkered down in conference rooms, insurance actuaries are parsing prescriptions, doctor visits and hospital stays for clues about how expensive these new patients may be. By May, insurance companies must file next year’s rates with California’s state-run exchange so negotiations can begin.

I hope everyone manages to restrain their Obamacare hysteria over this. Here in California, we’ve played this game annually for years. Health insurers in the individual market propose wild increases in their premiums—10 percent, 20 percent, sometimes even 30 percent—and then dial them back a bit after consumer outrage blankets the media and the Department of Insurance pushes back. But even then, we routinely end up with double-digit increases. Just for background, here are the average annual rate increases requested by a few of California’s biggest insurers over the last three years:

Anthem Blue Cross: 10.7%
Aetna: 12.1%
Blue Shield: 15.4%
HealthNet: 12.0%

And this doesn’t include changes in deductibles or out-of-pocket maximums. Add those in, and the annual proposed increases are probably in the range of 15-20 percent. Obamacare, of course, limits both those things, which means that in the future insurance companies will have to put everything into rate hikes instead of spreading the increases around to make them harder to add up.

Bottom line: if we end up seeing double-digit rate increases, it will be business as usual. Insurance companies will all blame it on Obamacare because that’s a convenient thing to do, but the truth is that we probably would have seen exactly the same thing even if Barack Obama had never been born. So let’s all keep our feet on the ground when the inevitable huge rate increase requests start flowing in. It’s mostly an insurance company thing and a healthcare thing, not an Obamacare thing.

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Health Insurance Rates Are Going Up Next Year, But It’s Nothing to Panic Over

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Friday Cat Blogging – 28 March 2014

by HildredRudd Posted on March 28, 2014

Mother Jones

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This week, in a feat of breathtaking middle-aged athleticism, Domino leaped into the empty laundry hamper and then leaped out a few minutes later. All by herself. I honestly didn’t think she still had it in her. But she seemed to enjoy herself for the few minutes she was in there, and then followed me around to find out what happened to all the clothes that had been taken out. Later on, of course, she curled up and took a nap on the fresh laundry. Quite a life, isn’t it?

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Friday Cat Blogging – 28 March 2014

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In the Future, Home Appliances Will Be as Smart as Your Phone

by KianBittner Posted on March 25, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Estimates vary, but by 2020 there could be over 30 billion devices connected to the Internet. Once dumb, they will have smartened up thanks to sensors and other technologies embedded in them and, thanks to your machines, your life will quite literally have gone online.

The implications are revolutionary. Your smart refrigerator will keep an inventory of food items, noting when they go bad. Your smart thermostat will learn your habits and adjust the temperature to your liking. Smart lights will illuminate dangerous parking garages, even as they keep an “eye” out for suspicious activity.

Techno-evangelists have a nice catchphrase for this future utopia of machines and the never-ending stream of information, known as Big Data, it produces: the Internet of Things. So abstract. So inoffensive. Ultimately, so meaningless.

A future Internet of Things does have the potential to offer real benefits, but the dark side of that seemingly shiny coin is this: companies will increasingly know all there is to know about you. Most people are already aware that virtually everything a typical person does on the Internet is tracked. In the not-too-distant future, however, real space will be increasingly like cyberspace, thanks to our headlong rush toward that Internet of Things. With the rise of the networked device, what people do in their homes, in their cars, in stores, and within their communities will be monitored and analyzed in ever more intrusive ways by corporations and, by extension, the government.

And one more thing: in cyberspace it is at least theoretically possible to log off. In your own well-wired home, there will be no “opt out.”

You can almost hear the ominous narrator’s voice from an old “Twilight Zone” episode saying, “Soon the net will close around all of us. There will be no escape.”

Except it’s no longer science fiction. It’s our barely distant present.

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In the Future, Home Appliances Will Be as Smart as Your Phone

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The Strange, Suicidal Odyssey of Dave Camp’s Tax Reform Plan

by CorneliusDowse Posted on March 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Dave Camp’s tax reform proposal, and I was predictably dismissive. It was decent effort, I said, but it was DOA before Camp even officially announced it. Still, “I’ll be interested in following the reaction as everyone figures out just whose ox would be gored by his various bullet points. Should be fun.”

In reality, I just forgot about it entirely. But it turns out that the biggest ox being gored by Camp’s plan was Wall Street, which was very much not amused by his proposal to levy a small tax on large banks. They threatened to cancel all GOP fundraisers as long as the bank tax was on the table, and this was enough to bury Camp’s proposal once and for all.

So far, so boring. Camp’s proposal never stood a chance, and the fact that Wall Street happened to put the final nail in the coffin is basically just a footnote. Jon Chait, however, gets at something more interesting:

The whole point of the push-back from Wall Street, which has reinforced a wildly unenthusiastic reception within the GOP, is not only to prevent Republicans from striking a deal with Democrats…. It’s to murder his plan in a public way so as to prevent it from becoming the baseline for any future Republican agenda. That effort seems to be meeting with predictable, depressing success.

It leaves unanswered the basic mystery of why Camp thought he could write a plan like this in the first place. Sources I’ve asked believe Camp was playing a kind of double game, an interpretation that closely fits all the public reporting. He promised Republicans he could produce a tax reform that would lower the top rate to 25 percent, a holy grail of GOP policymaking, and which would produce a massive windfall for the rich. He had also given lip service to make sure his reform did not decrease tax revenue or increase the tax burden on the poor and middle class.

Meeting all these goals was arithmetically impossible. But Republican fiscal proposals usually come face-to-face with arithmetic impossibility. It is their oldest and most bitter foe. Usually they step around with some kind of evasion or chicanery. Camp actually gave in and acceded to his other, un-emphasized goals of revenue and distributional neutrality (that is, ensuring his plan raised the same amount of tax dollars and didn’t shift the burden downward). Nobody outside of Camp and a handful of allies seems to have realized this until the plan was already out in the open.

Unfortunately, this still leaves the basic mystery unanswered. It’s true, as Chait says, that the usual Republican promise—we can lower top rates to 25 percent and make up for it by closing tax breaks—is plainly impossible and everyone knows it. It’s a nice applause line, but it only works as long as the tax breaks are never spelled out, something that requires even more than the usual amount of smoke and mirrors we expect from politicians.

But here’s the thing: obviously Camp knew this. Just as obviously, he knew that making the math work out would produce a plan that Republicans and their interest groups would hate. In the end, he could reduce the top rate only to 35 percent, and only at the cost of killing or reducing some very specific tax breaks that rich people didn’t want killed or reduced.

Camp has been in Congress for more than two decades. He’s hardly an ivory tower naif, and he must have known perfectly well that his plan would do little except to expose Republican hypocrisy on taxes. So why did he do it?

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The Strange, Suicidal Odyssey of Dave Camp’s Tax Reform Plan

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Sorry, the Dog Ate My Homework

by DJFAdamugtikmj Posted on March 13, 2014

Mother Jones

Apologies for the radio silence. I had an adventure-filled afternoon. My first adventure prompted me to call for help, and I discovered that my iPhone’s contact list had mysteriously disappeared. No calling for help for me! Eventually everything got sorted out, and when I finally got home I restored my contacts via iCloud. So no permanent harm done. Still, when my car strands me, I always figure my phone will bail me out. That’s what a phone is for. Right? But what do you do when your phone mysteriously decides to strand you at the same time?

And what did I do to deserve all this, anyway?

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Sorry, the Dog Ate My Homework

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The British Economy Is Not a Poster Child for Austerity

by CarmeloUBYX Posted on March 12, 2014

Mother Jones

Keith Humphreys notes that economic growth over the past year has been similar in Britain and the United States even though the two countries adopted very different responses to the Great Recession:

But don’t expect the similar levels of growth in the two countries to shake many people’s faith in their economic views. Most of the “slim government” crowd will argue that Britain didn’t cut enough (or that the U.S. growth isn’t real) and that’s why the U.K. hasn’t left the U.S. in the dust. Most increased government spending supporters will see proof that the stimulus wasn’t big enough (or that the U.K. growth isn’t real) because if it had been U.S. growth would be dwarfing that of the sceptred isle.

Many people seem to have stable preferences about whether they want government bigger or smaller. They will point to current economic conditions as the reason for why their preferences should prevail, but their preferences do not change when those putatively justifying economic conditions fade away. Neither are most people fazed when the government spending policies they support (as well as those that they oppose) deliver different results than they expected. Motivated reason is such a force in this particular policy area that rather than arguing over what current economic conditions particularly require, debaters are probably better off cutting to the chase and arguing directly about the real issue: Disagreement about how big or small we want the government to be.

I don’t think this is fair. If you want to compare Britain and the US, you have to look at their entire growth trajectory since the start of the recession. The chart on the right is taken from OECD numbers, so it’s an apples-to-apples comparison. And really, there is no comparison. As of 2012 (the most recent figures available from the OECD) Britain’s GDP was still 3 percent below its 2007 level. By contrast, US GDP was 4 percent above its 2007 level.

We can argue all day long about what caused this divergence, but I think the raw data is fairly unequivocal. Whatever the reason, the US economy really did suffer less and recover more robustly than the British economy.

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The British Economy Is Not a Poster Child for Austerity

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