U.S. Senate
See Full Big Line
(D) J. Hickenlooper*
(R) Somebody
80%
20%
Governor
See Full Big Line
(D) Joe Neguse
(D) Phil Weiser
(D) Jena Griswold
60%
60%
40%↓
Att. General
See Full Big Line
(D) M. Dougherty
(D) Alexis King
(D) Brian Mason
40%
40%
30%
Sec. of State
See Full Big Line
(D) George Stern
(D) A. Gonzalez
(R) Sheri Davis
40%
40%
30%
State Treasurer
See Full Big Line
(D) Brianna Titone
(R) Kevin Grantham
(D) Jerry DiTullio
60%
30%
20%
CO-01 (Denver)
See Full Big Line
(D) Diana DeGette*
(R) Somebody
90%
2%
CO-02 (Boulder-ish)
See Full Big Line
(D) Joe Neguse*
(R) Somebody
90%
2%
CO-03 (West & Southern CO)
See Full Big Line
(R) Jeff Hurd*
(D) Somebody
80%
40%
CO-04 (Northeast-ish Colorado)
See Full Big Line
(R) Lauren Boebert*
(D) Somebody
90%
10%
CO-05 (Colorado Springs)
See Full Big Line
(R) Jeff Crank*
(D) Somebody
80%
20%
CO-06 (Aurora)
See Full Big Line
(D) Jason Crow*
(R) Somebody
90%
10%
CO-07 (Jefferson County)
See Full Big Line
(D) B. Pettersen*
(R) Somebody
90%
10%
CO-08 (Northern Colo.)
See Full Big Line
(R) Gabe Evans*
(D) Yadira Caraveo
(D) Joe Salazar
50%
40%
40%
State Senate Majority
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DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
80%
20%
State House Majority
See Full Big Line
DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
95%
5%
February 27, 2010 04:02 PM UTC
134 Comments
Isn’t that exactly what Scott McInnis has been talking about when he opposes tax cutting legislation that will result in job losses in Pueblo and across Colorado?
I posted the correction within minutes (7:04:35 a.m.) of the first post.
I didn’t read the entire page before responding to your surprising statement!
and Scott McInnis is no Abe Lincoln.
want to ’emancipate’ the oil and gas industry from ‘burdensome’ requirements–like protecting Colorado’s land water and people.
I should have said tax increases that results in job losses – I need a second cup of coffee.
and I don’t think the majority of todays’ Republicans actually put the “man before the dollar”. The current health care stall being perpetrated by the GOP in Congress is a case in point.
But in the case of healthcare I don’t think it’s the dollar before the man:
1) No one knows if the proposed bill would help. It’s a gigantic leap in the dark and the million compromises required to get it passed make it’s effect even more problematic.
2) The republicans have focused more on cost containment while the democrats have focused more on expanding coverage. Both are important but without cost containment this country is hosed.
3) The republicans are playing this for maximum political advantage, even to the detriment of the country. That’s putting politics before the man, not the dollar before the man. It’s equally reprehensible, but it is different.
advocated for universal single-payer healthcare, which has been empirically demonstrated to be the most efficient and effective system yet in effect anywhere (thus forcing the debate into the realm of suboptimality from the get-go). And the reasons why have to do with a vision of America as a place of disintegrated interests in “free” competition with one another (rather than a place in which both those freedoms and that competition have to be framed by an institutional architecture which ensures both the reality of the freedom, and the robustness, sustainability, and fairness of the political economy). In some cases this commitment is little more than a pretext to favor some of those disintegrated interests that are already fat off of their parasitic profiteering on the defects of our current system.
That means that they are indeed putting the dollar before the “man”.
It was a bright shining moment of true bipartisanship. I’ll agree it should be considered – but both sides deserve blame here.
might have opposed it in its own right, for the most part it was taken off the table pre-emptively on the basis of the belief that it was too radical for the Republicans to even consider, and as an unfortunate gesture of an overly eager spirit of compromise (a spirit which was returned with a spirit of obstructionism).
If I were determined to sell something to a particular buyer who was the only potential buyer (in other words, were it a situation in which a bilateral agreement was necessary between two particular parties), and I knew that the item was worth $10,000, but also knew that the buyer was both wrongly convinced that it was worth only $1000 and was unwilling to accept evidence to the contrary, I might offer to sell it at a price well below what I considered to be its actual value, in order to avoid undermining the negotiations altogether. To then say that we both took its actual value off the table would be literally accurate, but substantively erroneous. The same is true in this case.
Just because Republicans repeat a particular economic falsehood incessantly, does not make it any more accurate.
1) In reality, there is very little that government can do, within the range of things that government actually does, to affect job creation or destruction.
2) Both institutional economic theory and empirical evidence have demosntrated that government is, under certain circumstances and for certain purposes, a more efficient economic actor than markets or firms.
3) To the extent that job creation is a by-product of a robust economy, and a robust economy is a by-product of most efficiently utilizing our resources, then taxing to the extent necessary to finance those government functions that government performs most efficiently is necessary to job creation.
4) Job creation isn’t the only variable that must be considered. Hypothetically (and improbably), for instance, if we could create more jobs by eliminating the police and military, eliminating the police and military still probably wouldn’t be the best of ideas. When deciding what government functions to finance, job creation is only one among many vital considerations.
Absolutely and on both sides of aisle. I don’t think I’ll take on the congress this morning (actually I can’t. I have to be out of here in 45 minutes) but I did think the Week-end Open Thread spoke to where Scott is coming from.
Scott cares about himself–he’ll say whatever he thinks he needs to to get elected. Term Limits? Sure he’s for them until he’s elected.
Pro-choice–sure he’s that too, until he isn’t when there is a primary.
Repeating lies, after having it shoved in his face that they are lies–not to worry, if it means money for his climb to power, Scott will lie through his teeth.
Scott McInnis has always had “jobs” as a priority since he ran for the state legislature and when he was Majority Leader (I worked for him at the time.)
On Term Limits I was one of those that reminded him “only a fool never changes his mind”, particularly in congress where seniority is the only way you can actually get anything done for your constituents. The voters in the 3rd overwhelmingly agreed.
On pro-choice/pro-life, Scott has always been pro-life with health related exceptions.
Calling him a liar because you disagree does not make it so CT.
If he would tell us how the state budget could be balanced this year and next without eliminating the tax exemptions.
He might have some credibility then.
even with the exemption eliminations.
Freudian slip or coffee deprivation, could you tell us if Scooty opposes President Obama’s ARRA stimulus and the tax cuts for 95% of Americans? If he does oppose the President’s efforts, then Scooty “opposes tax cutting legislation“, may be accurate.
And you forgot to mention that all those new government jobs Scooty is clamoring for will have to be paid for with tax money.
“The U.S. economy will bottom in the next two years. It will need 15 to 17 years to recover fully, if past recessions and depressions can be used as guides.” -Scott McInnis
“Three or four years from now, we’re not going to have a conversation about jobs and all of that kind of stuff.” -Scott McInnis
Just got a call from my mom – they have to be up the hill at Kalaheo High School within the next 4 hours. She’s packing up business records, family pictures, etc.
I hope everything is okay.
4 hours and everyone’s at home (not work) – plenty of time to evacuate. If the waves hit Oahu at say 10′ their house will get wet and at 20′ their house is toast. But odds are it will be a couple of feet.
And I can guarantee there will be some
surfersidiots off shore hoping to catch the largest wave of their lifetime..
generated by 8.8 quake in Chile.
http://www.gazette.com/news/st…
.
http://voices.washingtonpost.c…
http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/obs.s…
If I’m reading them right it’s a ½ meter spike as the tsunami passed the buoys off Peru. Granted ½ in the middle of the ocean can be large when it hits the shore. But this will probably be very dependent on exactly how the wave hits the shore and how the shore is configured at each spot.
If I were in Hilo I would be very worried. But Kailua bay is pretty shallow for about a mile out so the wave could spend a lot of its force just getting to shore.
I’m pretty sure (dredging up earth science class from 40 years ago.) Tsunamis are not a wave of rolling water like surf. They are an up/down motion traveling in a direction, like a Slinky. So when they hit shallow water, they become higher. And to look at the converse, in the wide open ocean, as you just point out, there’s barely any action.
The NYT story an hour ago said that they are expecting 2-3 along most of the state’s shore, but ten to fifteen feet in the harbors.
Tsunamis have extremely long wavelengths (measured crest-to-crest). They travel at speeds of 200mph or so. In deep water, their height is very small – ships in deep water don’t feel them at all.
When the wave enters shallow water, it slows down, wavelength shortens, and the wave height builds. Thus, a wave that’s half a meter high in deep water can grow to 10 meters when it strikes.
The height it builds depends on many factors, primarily the bathymetry. The tsunami center models this.
Arguably if Krakatoa exploded in a similiar manner today, we could put off addressing global warming for 50 or so years.
by climate engineering advocates is to simulate that effect. Another is to move the Earth farther from the sun, so not all climate engineering advocates are thinking within the bounds of practical reality….
She’s up on the northwest tip (gold coast side)
near Kapaau so she should be fine since they are quite a bit above the coastline and inshore some, too. Still, I’d really like to hear from her. When the earthquake hit a couple of years ago, their house sustained a sizable amount of damage.
If you can stream, the Hawaiian TV stations are streaming. Just search Hawaii TV.
The sirens have been going off since 6:30 a.m. so she went down to the local store and stocked up on water. She’s inland from the coast and lives almost at the northern tip of the island (the rainiest part) so she’s in no danger. I just had visions of her picking today of all days to take herself and her five year old down to Kona.
Thanks for that tip, Pam. Appreciate it.
Significantly south and little east of Hawaii.
This is according to NOAA
Sending good thoughts her way to stay safe.
I was about to go to bed when I heard about the 8.8 mag quake in Chile. Then I went to Twitter and followed the #Chile postings for a while, and eventually turned on CNN. When they announced the tsunami warning for the Pacific rim and Hawaii, I was floored.
Let’s hope everyone gets out OK. Hope your family is already to higher ground.
I’ve not heard one word about the tsunami and Alaska. Alaska has been hit hard by tsunamis many times. I think it was about 1964, total devastation on the coast.
Oregon has issued tsunami warnings. I imagine Alaska will.
in Southern California
She’s still packing up the car. Wanted to let me know my baby pictures will be saved. I swear, a mother’s mind is unfathomable at times. The fire department is going around telling everyone that they must be out by 1:00 our time (10:00 am HST).
My sister is over at command central. She’s the head of the Department of Land and Natural resources which is in many ways the prime cabinet office for this. Among other things they’re really the only state police. So if you see a news feed interviewing Laura Thielen – that’s my little sister. (And she got away with everything as a kid!)
Anyways, it sounds like things are well in hand and the government has its people out getting everyone ready. The guessing is it will hurt 1 or 2 places which have deep water most of the way to shore.
The bulk is headed for the Big Island on the southeastern side:
She’s up by Castle Hospital (for those that know Hawaii). She says that the Pali highway is packed with cars on the side and people out to watch the wave come in. It sounds like everyone is as ready as can be. And a lot of people are treating this as their entertainment for the day.
It would be cool to see live.
My friend Mel was dying to zip down to Kona to watch it come in but her husband nixed that idea. 🙂
The Red Cross Newsroom will be posting information about the Chili Earthquake and after effects; including the Tsunami information for Hawaii.
From Craig Hughes, reads in part:
Is this not disingenous? MB has the President, Udall, the DSCC, and Organizing for America (the other email today, they are going to help train MB’s caucus goers). But it’s implied AR is the one who has the political machine?
Andrew Romanoff is a career politican. There’s nothing wrong with that – they usually become better politicians with experience, something Andrew has.
But there’s some truth to it. Despite Bennet’s support from the national political machine (Obama’s Organizing for America is there, but the DSCC is only helping in the capacity of an outside 3rd party fund raising source) and most of the state’s Congressional delegation, Romanoff has an innate advantage at the caucus in the form of the activist Dems who are supposed to be his core base of support.
I don’t know how much of a machine it is exactly–after all, it is the Democrats–but Romanoff already had a mechanism in place from his time in the state legislature.
But if I was you, I wouldn’t be spinning this as disingenuous, I would be using it as a way of showing that Romanoff has more experience in state politics. Hughes is admitting that Bennet lacks support among a lot of the state’s activist organization.
Rather, I think Romanoff owns a lot of that support (or ought to). Andrew ate an awful lot of rubber chicken at an awful lot of Jefferson-Jackson dinners in order to help county parties raise money. They owe him.
That’s a two-edged sword. I think it increases expectations about his caucus performance.
Maybe we’re saying the same thing, I don’t know.
In the caucus you raise hands – everyone knows who you are voting for. But then comes the county vote and that’s by secret ballot. I remember what happened to JFG at the CD2 convention – she got a lot less than expected.
If Romanoff “owns” support, that can disappear as soon as we hit the step where it’s a ballot.
Caucus is public, but can be private ballot by request
Afte that it’s all public- cause the delegates represent others.
And while you are bound to vote at each step based on your commitment in the caucus – they were all secret ballots. I do know the CD-2 results were way different than expected.
Dem. Party Rules from national on down forbid secret ballots in anything other than the caucus, and then they are only if someone requests them.
To be sure of an accurate record of the vote, ballots are used at assemblies, but you have to put your own name as well as who you are voting for on them. Those ballots ae then available to be reviewed by any interested party.
do you know about “rounding up” that was done in ’08 to ensure broad representation? Can you post a link?
And I getting on the road pretty soon so will not be near a computer until tomorrow afternoon sometime. Happy to answer then if you want to explain what you’re asking about.
Maybe you’re right that it’s not that Bennet lacks support per se, but when Romanoff entered the race, people basically had their minds made up for them. There wasn’t even a question who they were going to support.
That’s what Bennet is trying to combat, and I think that’s what Hughes was trying to convey to the intended audience of Bennet supporters and unintended audience of opposition researchers. 😉
Man, all the time I’ve wasted herding cats…
Federal level party support for Senator Bennet.
State executive Dems seem to be divided.
Support for Andrew Romanoff at the state house and senate district level.
Support for Senator Bennet at the Obama volunteers/ new Dems level.
Which of the lower levels you call “grassroots” is really a reflection of your perspective, I think. I am not saying I agree or disagree. I have friends on both sides saying their candidate represents the “grassroots”.
That is very strongly Romanoff
According to the Politico, the head of the House Republicans has endorsed teabagging. In fact, he wants all Republicans to teabag:
Listen to them? Ok, here’s what they’re saying. Now, please walk with them and take those tinfoil hat issues to the voters.
They’re all teabaggers now.
I’ve goota say your post tracked right down the line with a typical progress now action blastfax.
PS YOU’RE THE ONE ON THE BOTTOM 😉
what’s with repressed homosexual pic?
I’m not feeling owned by anyone, let alone a bunch of crazy people who’s idea of a good time is putting on a wig, carrying a grammatically incorrect sign around while shouting random nonsense into the air.
Why do you hate homosexuals … you refer to this as a “repressed homosexual pic” … its actually two men wrestling with the word “OWNED” above it.
Why do you feel its right to repress homosexuals or any other group in America?
Why do you feel the need to shout down, with derogatory terminology, those in Boston hundreds of years ago or those in Austin, Chicago, Denver or Boston today?
“He’s a little crackpot,
Short and stout,
If you flick his on switch,
Endlessly he’ll spout.
Though he knows nothing,
He won’t shut up;
And though he keeps on pouring,
Still empty is his cup!”
We luv ya, Tatterbell!
I’m shocked…shocked! Also relieved that you aren’t an absolute saint after all. That was kind of almost a little teensy weensy bit mean. Thank you! And glad Hawaii seems to have dodged the bullet.
But it was nice while it lasted! Thanks BC.
Why do I hate homosexuals? Are you fucking kidding me? When you and your party actually lifts their bigoted policies toward the gay and lesbian community then we can talk.
And do not use your right-wing revisionist history to compare real American patriots with these tinfoil hat freaks from today who “pretend,” yes pretend to be something they’re not. Theses fat old white people project their insecurities of a black President, attack their neighbors with misinformation and lies, and think Glen Beck is actually a teacher since he uses a chalk board.
As I said in my diary, I hope you encourage these freaks to run for office on the issues of birth certificates and teleprompters – since those are such patriotic positions.
real teachers use dry erase boards. When Glen Beck does that, well, then I’ll be convinced…. 🙂
As a teacher, I learned that it was a mistake to wear black.
because people dressed like that then. Believe it or not, Tadpole, fashion sense is set by changing mores…
But they look ridiculous now.
good going there Libertarded!
open all the way.
But I’ll look it up later.
Apparently the press doesn’t seem to think the campaign is over. And he’s as big as liar today as was during the campaign.
The President is obviously rushing to the Hawaii tsunami disaster site!
from Windward Wrocks – the rest are funny but this one is sad…
note: it is unknown if this is legit – but no one has trouble believing it could be. And that’s sad.
where Dinosaurs came from. I had a little book on them, and knew they were hatched. My kindergarten teacher was incensed. “Dinosaurs don’t come from eggs!”
Thus began my journey of questioning authority.
I still demand door-ro-door Chritianity salespeople to tell me where Cain’s wife came from.
Thus began my journey of questioning religion.
(Catholic school) came home and told me his teacher said there was no big bang because it wasn’t in the Bible. I asked him what he thought of that. He rolled his eyes (for the first of thousands of times) and said, “Well, SHE’S wrong.”
And thus began his lifelong belief that authority figures (esp. Catholic ones) don’t know shit.
The teacher told us the earth gets colder as you go toward the center. I raised my hand and said that the book says it gets hotter. When the teacher told me it did not, I showed her – it was on the page before the page we were on.
She then asked me if I wanted to teach the class. That’s when I learned that teachers do not want their errors pointed out to them.
(She was truly evil). Got lots of signatures. The principal called me into the office and said that while he admired my effort Elementary School was not a Democracy but an Autocracy. Thus my political education continued.
But then, I don’t think all teachers are morons.
I understand that as a teacher you take this discussion personally. But you look at each of us discussing a single teacher and you turn that into “all teachers.”
were taking his singular experiences at his software company and extrapolating them to every human endeavor, no matter how dissimilar. Funny how that works.
We all do that at times. We also all tend to give more weight to singular data points that we personally observe. Fortunately in my case I have you helping me out when I make that mistake 🙂
That he is doubtful the letter is real, but perhaps is skepticism compared to yours is because sxp doesn’t start from the premise that all teachers are morons.
sxp wasn’t turning the discussion, he/she was challenging your premise.
The letter is doubtful and we all have had teachers who were less than great or had bad days.
Again, I think SXP converts my view that not all teachers are perfect and turns that in to all teachers are morons. I think the teachers in any district, just like any large group of people, fill a bell curve.
I do think because of the ironclad job security, the curve is higher at the low end than it would be if the incompetents were fired. But either way, it’s a continuum.
not missing that….or something.
I like the bell curve imagery.
I think the curve is distored too. Too few at the upper end because for too long the profession benefitted from a captive audience. Women. When the only honorable professions open to women were nursing and teaching, teaching got to recruit top talent without paying commensurately for it. This imbalance is starting to be corrected in some places, but it still distorts the bell curve, and it inclines toward recruiting the middle and fat tail of the curve.
Equality for women in the workplace was devastating for public schools.
Apparently you both somehow got me to lose an argument with myself by putting various opinions in my mouth. Neat trick.
My point was that the letter seems fake. It’s got a bit too much “Mwahaha” to it. I think you’d have to have a really negative opinion of teachers to not be a little suspicious of it.
But I think almost anyone who went through schools (public or private) has had at least one teacher like this. Doesn’t mean the letter is legit, but it does make it believable.
Can you prove your candidate didn’t murder a prostitute and dispose of the body sometime in the 1990s? As David would say, in the most passive voice possible, “it is unknown if this is legit.”
I thought it was both stupid and wrong when done to Glenn Beck and I think it’s uncalled for here. There are plenty of valid reasons to pound McInnis for.
And the difference between making shit up and the letter is 1) It exists and 2) it’s been investigated.
There might not be direct evidence proving it’s fake, but the circumstantial evidence leads me to believe it’s not real. It’s a fun kind of urban legend though, for the reasons that article describes.
And I didn’t intend to speak for you- I thought I got it: the letter is a fake, but those predisposed to believe there teachers are weak will use it to beat up on teachers.
in a non-linear world. You’re (still) ignoring the feedback loops, combined with the relationship between supply and demand. (@David, for those who have not followed the previous iterations of this debate).
Occam’s razor Steve – Occam’s razor
Occam’s Razor doesn’t mean that you solve differential equations with addition tables. Nor does it mean that a spit and a prayer, as simple as it may be, is generally the best solution to a complex problem.
You repeat this article of faith of yours that, in isolation, giving principles the authority to fire teachers at will automatically improve the overall quality of the pool of teachers. You arrive at this conclusion by applying a false premise by faulty logic to a context different from the one from which you derive your premise.
1) The false premise is that, in the private sector, giving managers greater rather than lesser authority to fire employees automatically leads to a higher quality labor pool. In fact, it doesn’t. Some managers fire people for the wrong reasons, even in the private sector, and do their firm harm in the process. In the private sector, such firms tend to disappear, and so, to you, are invisible.
2) The faulty logic is that, even were your false premise true, the fact that such authority leads to a higher quality labor pool under the conditions which prevail in the private sector does not automatically mean that it will have the same effect in the public sector, where the lathe of competition does not prevail, and those firms that are poorly managed lose to those that are better managed. You do not couple your article of faith with any insistance that education be restructured to simulate such competitive pressures, but rather argue for your article of faith in isolation.
If you did make the stronger argument that such authority, coupled with a competitive environment, would lead to the creation of a higher quality labor pool, then you would have to confront the vexing problems of measuring outputs that are difficult and dangerous to reduce to easily measured quantums, and avoiding the cosmetic improvements coupled with substantive stagnation or lowering of quality that could well take place under such a regime.
According to your version of Occam’s razor, David, all I have to do is close my eyes and wish for things to be better. After all, what could possibly be simpler than that? Occam’s razor does not just counsel simplicity, it also counsels adequacy. And it is on that latter measure that your article of faith fails.
Of course, maybe this time faith would prove to have gotten it right, and reason to have gotten it wrong. But that’s not something on which reasonable people should bet.
Creating convoluted arguments does not mean you’re correct.
1) Giving managers the authority to fire works in the private sector. If it didn’t, then the most successful companies would be ones that did not let their managers fire poor performers.
2) We are bringing competition to public schools where the poorest performers are being shut down.
3) Yes it’s hard to measure which teachers are doing the best job. Guess what – it’s also real hard to measure how good a job marketing people running social media efforts is doing. But we put in the effort to figure it out (I would estimate 1/3 of our marketing budget is spent measuring the effectiveness of the other 2/3).
I think we must hold teachers, administrators, and school districts accountable for their results. I find it sad that you think this is not possible and so we leave it to meander along unaccountable to anyone.
then why do you feel the need to resort to cheap rhetorical tricks to shore them up?
1) Calling an argument “convoluted” is not a counter-argument, and argument which traces the actual systemic dynamics involved rather than just declares itself to be correct is not convoluted, but rather carefully constructed.
2) Mangerial authority works in the aggregate in the private sector because the private sector is based on private risk and the acceptability of private failure. Businesses go under, their employees unemployeed, their products left on shelves and dumped in landfills. We don’t have the luxury of tossing kids into landfills because you believe in a risk-based model.
3) This is the first time you have coupled the prerequisite of creating a competitive environment with your argument for managerial autonomy, and only after I suggested it as a necessary component. Yet you failed, still, to recognize that the managerial autonomy can’t be implemented without first having in place the competitive environment; the former is nonsensical and dysfunctional without the latter.
4) Are measures of “poorest performers” have almost nothing to do with actual performance, and rather everything to do with the environmental conditions in which the school is found. The poorest performers are always inner-city schools in which the poor performance is far more a function of what is happening outside the school than of what is happening inside the school. Just as individuals can beat the odds, so can schools, but they are not competing on a level playing field with suburban schools, and the imposition of a competitive, survival of the fittest model will drive talent away from those tough challenges rather than draw talent to them. The rewards need to be tailored to the specific circumstances, rather than treated as fungible with far less difficult circumstances.
5) No one has ever disputed that we must hold teachers responsible. That’s your straw man, not my argument. My argument is that your application of a model that thrives in a completely different context, subordinate to completely different imperatives, is not a mere act of faith rather than the application of a comprehensive and well-reasoned analysis.
And, for exactly that reason, this debate is almost identical to the one I might have with the Jehovah’s Witness who knocks on my door.
1) “an argument which traces…”
2) “Our measures…”
according to me it is most definitely not too complicated to fix. That’s why in my previous responses to this suggestion of yours I provided an in-depth model of how to fix it, which you complained, simultanously, was too attached to the status quo and too much of a departure from the status quo!
David, you have many strengths. I assume that you’re a good manager. Your interviews are a great contribution to public discourse. But your policy analyses suck. In fact, they’re not analyses at all, just off-the-shelf assumptions and overgeneralizations. You willfully ignore the differences between public education and private enterprise, all of which are currently real and some of which are inherent and unalterable. You have some deep emotional commitment to the validity of this particular assumption of yours, and just keep disregarding the counterarguments, dismissing them with little platitudes that don’t respond to them at all.
Articles of faith are fine, as long as you don’t impose them on others. When it comes to public policy, faith should not be how we determine what works: Well-reasoned analyses informing well-designed innovations is.
Having been both a sociologist and a high school teacher, I recognize some things about public education that you don’t. The most important one is that teaching kids most effectively is not at the very top of the priority pyramid for school administrators; avoiding problems is. Implementing your suggestion, while that (very difficult to excise) structural defect remains in place, is not a recipe for removing the worst teachers, as you arbitrarily declare it to be, but rather a recipe for removing the teachers who cause the administrators the most problems. In some instances, those teachers are indeed the worst ones. In some instances, they are the ones who actually hold students responsible for their performance and their behavior, which causes far more problems for principals than teachers who don’t hold their students responsible for their performance and behavior. Unfortunately, in those last instances, it is the best teacher rather than the worst ones who are weeded out.
Furthermore, the other problems of supply-and-demand coupled with reward structures still exists: We have a shortage of teachers, and no current ability to pay them salaries that compete with most other professional salaries. While that remains true, any innovation that makes the profession less attractive to incoming teachers (such as decreased job security) will inevitably result in fewer of the most capable potential new teachers choosing to enter the profession. This is an economic and mathematical fact, that you have never once addressed or responded to.
If you want to argue your point, argue it. If you want to preach your faith, well, preach it. I’ll be here to point out the myriad reasons why it is faith and not reason, and why it is a bad idea and not a good one.
To be honest, I’m not going to read 2 pages of posts back from you. Neither of us is going to convince the other. I think we have a proven model in the private sphere (including private schools). You don’t.
but you will repeat your arbitrary certainties, which you have insulated from challenge by sticking your virtual fingers in your virtual ears and saying “I can’t hear you!”
I abstained months ago from commenting on what I thought of the long, convoluted, many times incomprehensible posts you make. Discussing things with you doesn’t make sense because you are convinced you are right, but that only you can see the immense complexity of the only true and correct solution.
For example you say:
Which I think translates to “it’s very difficult to measure effectiveness.”
My reply is yes it’s difficult, but it can be done and must be done. And that every other business on the planet, including private schools, manages to do so. I view that as a sufficient counter-argument. You don’t. That doesn’t mean I’m wrong or that my points are not good – it just means you do not accept them.
I hope you will not insult me again by telling me that it’s not worth your time to read my responses to your posts addressed to me.
First, I never made the request you claim I made. I only requested that you stop repeating that you considered my posts too long, since no new communicative content was being offered. I made no request other than that.
Second, I’m not at all convinced I’m right to the degree that you believe I am, nor to the degree that you yourself seem to be convinced that you are right. I make arguments, full of the knowledge that the world is indeed so complex that even good arguments are no guarantee of being right. I make those arguments precisely because I have no a priori certainty of being right, but recognize that we must get there by means of analysis, argument, and counter-argument.
That’s why I pay close attention to ocunterarguments. You’ve never made any in this recurring debate. You’ve never addressed any of the following facts that I’ve raised:
1) Education is not privided in a competitive market, which is a prerequisite for market discipline to reward managerial competence.
2) Whether that obstacle is surmounted or not, education will remain political, which means that the incentives created by such a market will remain distorted by political incentives incorporated into it.
3) Administrator are, and will to some extent remain, dominated by avoidance of problems, because of this political dimension.
4) Problems for administrators are not just, nor even primarily, caused by poor teachers, but also by teachers who hold students accountable for performance and behavior, and thus invite complaints from parents and superiors for failing to engage in the cosmetics of grade-inflation and teaching to the test.
5) There is a shortage of teachers, and a shortage of money with which to raise their salaries. Firing “bad” teachers, even if they were in fact bad teachers, would still require an increased flow of new teachers into the profession. But the only incentives that are changed by your proposal are a decrease in incentives for new teachers to enter the profession, since you have removed unusually high job security from the bundle of incentives offered, without replacing it with some other off-setting incentive. The potential new teachers most likely to choose another profession as a result of this change in incentives are those new teachers with better options, who are also those new teachers most likely to be the best new teachers. So, whether or not you succeed in weeding out bad teachers on the back end, you will have also succeeded in weeding out good teachers at the front end.
I’m sorry if this straight-forward microeconomic analysis is too convoluted for you. That, I guess, explains why you have addressed exactly NONE of these arguments which I have repeated in every round of this debate.
You say that my quote in the block reduces to “it’s difficult to measure effectiveness” (only one small component of the total argument, and not one on which the entire argument rests). Actually, it doesn’t. It also includes the observations that 1) it is one component of a larger argument that includes competitive labor pools and managerial authority, 2) you have never included that your proposal unless and until I have raised it, and 3) the nature of the difficulty has to do not only with the difficulty of quantification of outputs, but also with the incentives to create cosmetic rather than substantive improvements. You were able to reduce it to one line by eliminating the bulk of its content.
Your next point is that this problem can clearly be surmounted, because every successful business on the planet surmounts it, including private schools. This is not true. The problem that every successful business on the planet is that it succeeds in marketing what its selling to potential buyers. This is what private schools succeed in doing as well.
Private schools have the benefit of being able to charge for the service they are offering, and so can tailor the product to the demand without inherent budgetary constraints. So, parents wealthy enough to pay for the highest quality education can, and those parents who want the real thing rather than a cosmetic version of it will get it on the open market. In the public sector, we can not pay for each child’s public education as though each child were the child of a wealthy parent. Public schools do not have that luxury.
Nor do all private schools outperform public schools. It depends on the bundle of perceived outputs that the parents are in the market for, and how successfully the private school provides them.
The larger market for public education is a different one from the current market for private schools, because the latter is a self-selected, and usually differently endowed subpopulation, not representative of the population at large. Successful marketing to the larger population is not likely to involve an identical product as successful marketing to the subpopulation currently paying for private schools. The former market, experience has shown, places a higher demand on being placcated, and thus creates greater pressures for cosmetic rather than substantive improvements in product.
In other words (since you like the short version), tell most parents, who often themselves are not terribly well education, that their children are doing well, and they will be pleased. Tell them that their children aren’t doing well, and they will be displeased. This incentivizes schools to tell all parents that all children are doing well, which reduces rather than increases the effectiveness of the education received.
These are actual counterarguments, David, not an arbitrary opinion in response to an arbitrary opinion, as you prefer to portray it. If and when you ever respond to them, I will listen to your responses, and consider their merit. If they are good arguments, I will incorporate them into my own. If they are better than my own, I will abandon mine and adopt yours. That’s the way to keep getting closer to the truth.
And I do apologize for being so inferior to you in my mastery of logical argumentation. Please, show me how it’s done.
paragraph 4: “counterarguments”
paragraph 5 (#1) “provided”
paragraph 7 (#3): “Administrators are”
paragraph 11 (#2): “included that in your”
Also, I did not address your claim that “every other business has done it” is a counter argument. In a sense it is, and so I erred by stating that you made no counterarguments whatsoever.
I failed to reiterate that it’s not true for a reason other than the one I mentioned above (that success is defined by attracting buyers, not by ensuring quality of output); it’s also untrue because many businesses fail. What you really mean is that every business that survives does so by managing to attract enough customers to keep it afloat. The problem that this model poses for education are that those students who have the misfortune of attending “businesses” that fail will receive suboptimal educations, or at least perceived quality of services that parents did not value as highly as those provided elsewhere.
Knowing this, we have no basis for determining if the failure rate for schools will be in higher number or degree than the current one. Your assumption only looks at successful businesses in the private sector, not unsuccessful ones. To make that a fair comparison, you would have to look only at successful schools in the public sector, not unsuccessful ones.
You are employing circular logic: Since all businesses that succeed in the private sector do so due to managerial autonomy, then they are superior to all schools in the aggregate (including those that don’t succeed) in the public sphere, crippled by the lack of such managerial autonomy. Yes, of course, those schools that succeed in the private sector have more success than those schools that fail in the public sector. BUT, those schools that succeed in the public sector have more success than those would fail (as do businesses in every sector) in the private sector. That gets us nowhere.
Again (and I haven’t stated this clearly enough), I actually believe that you may be right and I may be wrong! I’ve considered that possibility every time this debate has come up, and have done so in earnest. (I believe that’s actually one of the differences between the way we think). But the only assessment that can be made to determine which one of us is right is by means of comparing the strength of the relative arguments, and by that assessment alone (which is all we really have), I don’t think that the probability of being right rests with you. Until you can effectively address the very real and substantial issues I’ve raised, you are merely stating an arbitrary opinion, not a well-considered one.
These posts eat up a lot of time – for you to write them and for me to reply. I think you would be better served by putting that time in to campaigning. I know I would be better served by spending this time getting version 9 out the door.
So I will reply this once, but then I’m going back to my policy of not reading your long posts because that cuts my time on Pols in half.
1) First off public education is in a somewhat competitive market between private schools and rules that will close a school and fire all teachers if it consistently fails. Also your stipulation that a competitive market is needed for a competent system is disproved by both the VA and SSA – they have no competition and are very efficiently run.
2) Education is political in that it is run by an elected body. But the voters are in agreement with 95% of what they want the schools to do – provide a good education for their kids. Fire & police departments are equally political, in the case of police there is a lot more politics in what they should enforce. Yet many police & fire departments manage to run effectively.
3) Administrators, even if there is no politics, tend to avoid problems. That’s why you need to make a badly run school a major problem – so that it’s safer to improve the school than let it coast.
4a) This is a problem with how the system is structured. At present being effective is not a major issue. If educating the kids was the major measurement, then this issue goes away.
4b) As to teaching to the test – what do you think the elite private schools do? They are totally focused on having the kids score high on the SAT tests. That is their main measure and that’s what they sell.
5) What I have always proposed is firing the bad teachers and bringing in merit pay so the good teachers are paid more.
Now your umpteen million subsequent points:
a) I have said all of the above many times before. I’m guessing you didn’t bother to read my response.
b) I have no idea what your 1… 2… 3… paragraph is saying
c) You seem to think success in the private sphere is solely marketing. Marketing is important but so is having a quality product that addresses a need. Marketing just gets people to consider you.
d) Private schools face tremendous budgetary constraints. Most of them live hand to mouth and have more fundraising efforts than public schools.
e) Bullshit that the market for public schools is different. Virtually every parent wants the same thing – a quality education for their kids. The main difference is can a family afford it and is the improvement worth the extra cost.
f1) I was on the MEAC board at BVSD for a couple of years which was mostly addressing the needs of poor Latino kids. They did not want to be told their kids were doing well, they wanted their kids educated well enough to get in to college. They see that as the way out for their children. What hurts them is they don’t know what to do in many cases to help their kids get to that point.
f2) On the well off side, one semester my daughter comes home from school the day after parent/teacher night and tells us virtually everyone she knows is grounded – for bad grades. The response of the parents was not to yell at the teachers, it was to apply the cattle prod to the kids. (With the caveat that there was the occasional teacher who’s grading appeared to be almost random – and then you would have all the parents complaining about that teacher.)
And on to the next endless post where you replied to your own comment:
1) Yes unsuccessful businesses fail. Unfortunately unsuccessful schools don’t. If a school is not getting the job done, you can leave it there for appearances sake while it continues to just babysit. Or you can close it and open a new one – that by definition can’t do worse and odds are will do better.
2) My point is not all businesses that succeed vs all schools including those that don’t succeed. My point is all private companies open for business vs all schools open for business. And that is a fair comparison (and one where the schools do horrible compared to the real world).
3) Arguments don’t count for crap. It’s results that matter. The present system is failing over 30% of our children. That fact alone is argument for substantive change.
Oh God, there’s yet one more reply:
a) I can’t think of a business that does not measure the quality of output. In the case of pet rocks it was probably is the box printed properly, formed correctly, does the rock fit and is it clean. In the case of say architects, the plans must be approved as meeting the building code and there are magazines, parade of homes, etc that measure the aesthetic result.
b) Are you nuts? Yes we want doctors measured by their outcomes. That measurement should include the level of difficulty but I want a surgeon that not only engages in best practices, but does so successfully.
c) What would be wrong with measuring outputs. Do the kids know their ABCs, can they deconstruct The Color Purple – these measures determine if a child can get in to college, graduate, and get a professional job.
d) You can make all the snide comments you want – that does not change the fact that I have laid out all of the above many times before. I just don’t do it in long, dense impenetrable prose.
Mostly what I see in your comments on this is excuses for the system as it is.
and you can choose how to spend yours. My point was that it’s insulting to write a response and then say, “but I didn’t read the post of your preceding this, nor will I read the one following it, but I will insist on speaking unilaterally while insisting that your participation will be ignored.” That’s just bullshit. You stop spending your time in an exchange by not responding, not by responding but insisting that you won’t read the other person’s responses.
You’re right, though, that I don’t have time to address all of your points (again), so I will pick just a few:
1) The competition you speak of does not create the incentives that you associate with it, since teachers will be reassigned under such circumstances.
2) It has never been my contention that a competitive market is required for a competent system (another straw man), but rather that a competitive market is required for managerial autonomy to yield the benefits that it yields in the private sector. Those are two distinct contentions.
3) The definition of what constitutes a good education is politically contested, and fought over in the courts. The definition of what constitutes good fire protection is not. The products are quite different, as well, in their immediacy, tangibility, and measurability. Whether police departments are run more or less efficiently than schools is a random guess; no measure by which to compare them has been devised.
3) If making a badly run school a problem for administrators is a lynch-pin in your proposal, than include it when describing your proposal. Instead, you argue in isolation that managerial authority, all other things being equal, will have palliative effects. Your argument would improve if you compiled the qualifications that you import into it in response to my criticisms, rather than just insist that it was always right, and will always be right, as originally formulated.
4) Yes, the problem is how the system is structured, but saying that the solution is A, if we structure the system so that A will work, is not a real proposal, but rather saying “if we structure the system so that it works better, it will work better.” Yeah.
5) When schools in general become mere technical skills training factories, we will be in even worse shape than we are now.
6) Where does the merit pay come from? Schools are cash-strapped, and 80% of their budget is salaries. To make teacher salaries competitive with other professions, you need to raise the revenue flow by an enormous factor, while political will is moving in the direction of shrinking it even further. You’re not operating in reality.
7) I have read all of the above before, and have noted the ways in which it does not address the points I raised before.
8) My paragraph 1)…2)…3) says that your insult was erroneous, and here’s why.
9) I never said that success in the private sector is due just to marketing. That’s yet another straw man. I said that success involves getting people to buy the product, something that does not inherently mean that the product is of high quality, and I gave a specific example of a successful product of no quality whatsoever to illustrate the point.
10)Every parent wants to believe that their child is receiving a quality education, but not every parent knows what that looks like. Have you ever heard of homeschooling? Have you seen the results of the vast majority of the children who are homeschooled? Do you think that the parents engaging in that option believe that they are giving their children an inferior education?
Okay, I could go on, David, but you’re right, it’s not worth my time to either read the rest or respond to it. You know all. No counter arguments rise to your level of perfect knowledge. Fine with me. But every time you try to sell your crap in the marketplace of ideas, I’ll be there to paste on the warning label and make sure that people read the ingredients carefully before buying it.
the inside of your own eyelids.
Here’s my proposal, which I included in my responses the first time, and second time, and third time that we “discussed” this topic. No excuses, no avoidance of the challenge, none of your little straw men that you keep setting up and knocking down. Rather, an informed, systemic suggestion of what kinds of things need to be addressed, and how to address them, in order to improve public education.
If you, in all your insipid wonder, wish to delegate responsibility to the Wizards of Oz to whom you will assign the challenge, completely ignoring the real economic analysis presented to you (by someone who has both worked professionally with economic analyses, and as a public school teacher), while pretending to be vindicated by a cardboard cut-out of economic reasoning, knock yourself out. I’ll keep looking for ways to address the problem that are more insightful than “Put someone in charge.”
For the bottom line, expressing once again, simply and clearly, the fundamental systemic defect in your proposal, a problem which you have never explained away, see the response to BlCora below, at the bottom of this thread.
you are also mistaken that “it must be done” (measuring the quality of outputs). Actually, that’s false for two reasons: 1) not all successful businesses depend on actual proof of quality (many depend on marketing, or on other forms of persuading people that what they are selling should be desired, such as in the successful marketing of “pet rocks,” the quality of which were complerely irrelevant), and 2) even when they do depend on proof of quality, that proof does not necessarily depend on quantifying outputs (often, for instance, it is accomplished by guaranteeing the quality of in-puts, through licensing of practitioners by professional organizations, for instance).
Of course, in educaton, we don’t want to copy the successful private sector business model of “pet rocks.” We do want to guarantee quality, which we so, as in medicine and law and other professions, by licensing practitioners and holding them accountable for engaging in “best practices”, not by quantifying outputs. That’s why we still have surgeons willing to perform the most difficult and dangerous surgeries, and teachers willing to teach in the most difficult schools. Their success is not measured by how few “failures” they have in comparison to those who have undertaken less daunting challenges.
As a practical matter, I do agree that some quantification of outputs is probably an indispensible component of a successfull public education model, though the danger of excessive reduction of education to a mechanical process with clear and discrete products is ever-present.
Again, if I only my analyses were as cogent and comprehensive as yours, I would gain your seal of approval, and not be dismissed off-hand as the inferior thinker that you assure me I am. Oh! That that day may come!
Prior to that comment, of the two of us, I was the only one who had acknowledged the possibility of being wrong (when I said that blind faith might be right this time, but reasonable people shouldn’t bet on it). Subsequent to your comment, I stated the point more emphatically, that it’s my knowledge that I might be wrong which drives me to give careful consideration to the issue, rather than just to declare my correctness and repeat the debunked reasons why I claim it.
You, on the other hand, have never, in any exchange on this topic, acknowledged any possibility of being wrong. You have dismissed counterarguments in a variety of manners, almost none of which ever involved responding to the actual content of the counterarguments (most often, you’ve created straw men to knock down).
I’m not trying to convince you. I’m just trying to make sure that no reasonable person is convinced by you. After all, that’s what public discourse is all about: Giving reason a better shot at prevailing.
Steve, in all seriousness, your ideas would be likely to get better reception if you had an editor. David did an ok job summarizing some, but perhaps not the rest.
You are onto something useful when you point out that the competitive business model is not quite right when compared to public institutions or to education.
There are lessons to be learned from competitive business models, but a complete emulation is not appropriate.
the bigger the mallet gets.
David summarized almost none of my points accurately; please do not take his summaries as proxies. They are almost all straw men.
The most important point is this one (the one I originally alluded to in response to David’s repetion of his article of faith): The demand for teachers is not going down, the pool of money with which to pay salaries is not on the verge of going dramatically up, and people respond to the incentives they are faced with.
When you put these facts together, David’s proposal results in a possible reduction of some bad teachers on the margins (though, as I’ve argued, a surprising number of exceptional teachers would probably get the ax as well), but also results in a much more significant reduction in the number of excellent new teachers entering the profession. This is a consequence of imposing a net reduction of incentives for people with the most options to choose to become teachers (something which will result in those most capable of pursuing other professions to do so in larger numbers).
David draws me into enumerating all of the systemic details and complexities surrounding and associated with this, but what I just wrote in the paragraph above is the crux of the defect with David’s proposal.
Should the standard be that no bad teachers are retained? Or only good teachers are retained?
It’s a different standard and results in a different method.
If “no poor teachers are retained” is the goal- some good ones will go. You’ve given some reasons why, there are others.
If the standard is “only good teachers are retained” soom poor teachers are likely to slip through.
If instead the standard is that no poor teachers are retained, and we attempt to recruit exceptional teachers and retain them if they aer good, the whole thing has to look really different.
DT is right- teachers should be accountable. You are also right – measuring performance is not as easy as some in the business world make it sound.
Who on Earth would make such an argument? As DT pointed out, we do hold doctors, and lawyers, and other professionals accountable as well. The issue is not whether to continue to hold teachers accountable; the issue is how to move from the status quo in a way which improves public education.
If we move in the direction of more managerial autonomy, then we give principals more power to fire teachers (hopefully bad ones, but that’s not automatically the case), but we also change the package of incentives being offered to incoming teachers, removing a benefit (unusually high job security) without off-setting it with another benefit of equal or greater value. The question is: All things considered, is that a good move?
Unlike you and DT, I am not starting in a hypothetical vacuum; I am starting with the knowledge that a system is in place, and our innovations will affect it either, on balance, for better or worse. To understand how any move from the status quo will affect the system, you have to consider the dynamics of the system, not some hypothetical disembodied value to “firing bad teachers”.
Part of the systemic reality is that the option “fire bad teachers” does not really exist. That is an ideal to be strived for rather than an option to be selected, separated from our snap of the fingers by the imperfectly malleable realities of the system through which it must be accomplished. The option that does exist is how to distribute and frame the decision-making process which determines which teachers are retained and which are not. And in selecting that option, we need to do a complete analysis of how it affects the system both at the front-end and back-end.
As I said at the very beginning of this thread, the error here is the attempt to assign linear solutions to a non-linear problem.
David’s proposal is not to fire bad teachers (as I said above, that’s not an implementable proposal, any more than “everyone should act in our long-term global interests rather than in our short-term local interests”), but rather to give increased autonomy to school administrators to fire teachers. And my objection is not to “firing bad teachers,” but rather to David’s specific proposal.
David’s right about many things. He’s right that the word “is” is spelled
i-s, for instance. The fact that David’s right about some things does not mean that he’s right about anything that has been a point of contention between us.
Sure it is.
Clearly it’s not this goal you object to , it’s his proposed method.
I’m with you- to do away with tenure and hope to retain and recruit good to great teachers, some other incentive should be offered.
Me neither.
Just pointing out that the inevitable tension between taxpayers and educators (teachers and administrators) cannot be ignored if we are to attempt to address the way teachers are recruited andretained.
I never said you didn’t value accountability – just that DT is right that it’s got be a bigger, better shineier part of the equation.
that the whole model has to be reformed. I linked above to my suggestion of where to start. By incorporating more community involvement in our schools, we accomplish a lot in a relatively easy first step:
1) We utilize a free and abundant resource (volunteers, particularly retired folks).
2) We increase accountability by increasing transparency: The community is there, seeing how teachers teach.
3) We do so without confronting many opposing vested interests, so it is very implementable.
4) And we strengthen communities in the process, which is a social development that we desperately need to make headway on.
From that foundation, we can build toward a model with ever-increasing accountability, and ever more functional incentive structures for all involved.
Here is what our CD3 State Board of Education member, from GJ, said.
David, are you a 1973 HS grad?
to put me over 1000. Any takers?
N/T
Inside the mind of CO Springs. From the Gazette:
at the 30-yard perimeter of the Ed Meyers Security Zone? Then he’ll really get his money’s worth out of the 110-lb Lab and his Smith & Wesson insurance policy. You don’t get that kind of all-night entertainment from a street light!
Maybe we can balance the state budget by firing all of the Colorado Highway Patrol and hiring that guy. I feel safer already.