Jonah Goldberg Still Dumb

Recently, Goldberg attempts to make sense of the relationship between Liberalism and the failure of American Education.  He claims that

[i]n 2008-2009, the  District of Columbia spent $1.3 billion dollars on 45,858 students. That is slightly less than the entire GDP of Belize. In 2007, 8 percent of DC eighth graders were able to do math at the eighth grade level. Clearly what’s needed is more money!

According to this

 the DC Public Schools gross budget for fiscal year 2008 as of October 1, 2007

was $949,087,062. Goldberg doesn't provide a link for his claim so  maybe there is another number out there, but he appears to have misplaced a decimal or so.

He continues

Yes, yes, the horrid state of American education is an American problem, and to that extent we’re all to blame in some abstract sort of way. But is there another major area of American public policy that is more screwed up and more completely the fault of one ideological side? 

 In 1980 Milwaukee began an experiment with charter schools, vouchers and all that right wing gobbledygook. The system created redundant schools, drained funding from the public schools, and more generally, sought to use market-based reforms to fix something that isn't a market.  The net result? Vouchers and the rest don't work.  How many school districts have had to deal with this kind of nonsense day after day? How much of the Conservative rage about education has funneled itself into this specific set of policy prescriptions? All of it.  The news that vouchers et alia didn't work led long timer supporter, Diane Ravich, of vouchers and similar reforms to conclude that these kinds of reforms don't work and are actually undermining successful reform efforts.

Ravich also argues that

Teachers feel, with justification, that they are being scapegoated and blamed whenever test scores don't go up. My book appeared at a time when there was only one narrative about school reform, which privileged the views of businessmen, lawyers, politicians, foundation executives, and government officials who are imposing their ideas without regard to the wisdom and experience of those who must implement them.

While Goldberg frets that 

[i]n the last few presidential elections I’ve heard more from Democrats — by far — complaining about leaky school roofs, cracking paint, and the need for more computers in the classroom than I’ve heard about the fact it’s easier to find and train a brontosaurus than it is to fire a horrible teacher.

It really is all the teachers fault and we need more market based solutions.

He then fumes that

I’m sure not that many people follow the DC education controversy, but in a nutshell: Mayor Adrian Fenty lost his reelection bid in large part because he tried, through Michelle Rhee the education chancellor, to fix the schools over the objections of the teachers’ unions. Fenty’s opponent and the liberal black establishment turned it into a racial issue (surprise!) and now education reform in DC is seriously in doubt. 

Rhee's favored solution was firing teachers.  The Teacher's Union, indeed any union, has as one of its main priorities protecting its members from being fired.  Goldberg seems not to have paid attention to the past 30 years of American history, during which the lessons of PATCO went unlearned by "centrists" while movement conservatives sought to destroy more unions, deregulate more industries, and, in the end, succeeded in screwing up the country.

He concludes with anguished cry over the unfairness of it all.  Because  if

you listen to these endless seminars and interviews on NBC and its various platforms, I never seem to hear Matt Lauer or David Gregory ask “Isn’t the education crisis a failure of liberalism?” After all, liberals insist all social problems can be reduced to root causes. Well, they’ve been in charge of the roots for generations and look at the mess they’ve made. Look at it.
Largely because of the Iraq war,  Katrina and Bush’s unpopularity,  a host of liberal intellectuals pronounced conservatism to be dead. The decrepit state of American education is a far more sweeping, profound and lasting indictment of the very heart of liberalism and yet the response from everyone is “Let’s give these guys another try!”

Actually, no. The problems we face today are  the result of the Neoliberal, Reaganite, Glibbertarian, and Thatcherite crap that has dominated policy making for the past 30 years. Starve the state of revenue, destroy unions, blame workers, traduce the state's ability to do what it has been doing successfully for since at least 1933, and deregulate.  What has this led to?  Look out your window.

In a sign of their seriousness about tackling education reform, when a recent study came out that showed that Head Start made little or no difference in academic achievement, Conservative demanded its immediate dismantlement and used as a stick to beat the stupid Liberals and the Liberal Liberalness.  Of course, they missed the fact that individuals who had the pleasure of Head Start did better by other measure, time in jail, etc, than their peers who did not benefit.


Can we all do better in the process of continuing to reform our educational system?  Yes we can.  Does this require jettisoning Neoliberal, Reaganite, Glibbertarian, and Thatcherite critiques of a by and large successful system?  Yes, it does.  We cannot afford to let these flying monkeys back into power. No, we can't

And as a bonus, remember that Yglesias wants the same market-based, Olive-Gardenesque reforms and thinks that firing teachers is the first step to nirvana.  It ain't.


UPDATE:
Goldberg's claim about 8% is in error.  In their self assessment DC schools have a 48% in "elementary math" on a nationally administered test they have, for 2008-09, 11%.  They did, it's true, have 8% on the nation test in 2007-08, but they improved their scores.

Remember "Good ideas do not need lots of lies told about them in order to gain public acceptance"

Tour Guides

You know why regulating tour guides is worth the effort?  Because the people who make use of their services are, generally speaking, from out of town and are not going to be in a position, more often than not, to wait around and file complaints and then come back to testify at the trials of those who have engaged in "abusive practices."  This means, it seems to me, that the abusive practices will be in play for much longer than they ought, if not forever.  If the regulators are underfunded, regulations rarely enforced or badly written this is an argument for funding, enforcement, and rewriting not for babies and bath waters.

Furthermore, it seems to me that if you want to make the argument that neither the state nor the tour guide industry has an interest in seeing to it that visitors to the seat of the Federal Government in these United States are not screwed, blued, and tattooed by incompetent tour guides, you might maybe want to consider the importance of visiting the seat of the Federal Government in these United States as it concerns continuing education in matters of some relevance, to say nothing of the blow to the Federal Government of these United States' reputation by those who were screwed, tattooed, and blued as well as those they related the tale of being screwed, tattooed, and blued.

You might also consider that, oddly enough despite their general failure to be like Olive Garden, our non-Olive-Garden institutions of higher education have been busy training individuals in public history for lo these many years, almost as if these institutions of higher learning were aware that there was a need for individuals trained in providing accurate, assessable, and interesting histories of the various sites of historical interest scattered hither and yon.

Granted, of course, that if the tour guide industry were to set about recruiting well-trained and well-educated tour guides their bottom lines might suffer, which is to say it might not be economically efficient to hire well-trained and well-educated tour guides, but, then again, having well-trained and well-educated tour guides might prove to be a boost for the tour guide industry. And, additionally, when did economic efficiency become the be all and end all of life on earth?  1976? 1980?

Attacks on regulatory regimes that rely on the "universal acid" arguments of Cato, AEI, etc, legitimate the universal acid of Cato, AEI, etc. The topic under consideration here is the need and ability of the state to intervene in the market to reduce abusive, incompetent, or dangerous practices and, in so doing, protect workers as workers and citizens as consumers. Should an industry capture the state, which oddly enough seems almost never to result in regulations that provide protection for either workers or citizens, then -- by golly -- let's rewrite the regulations.

Then again in a Ygelsian world retrospective prosecution is better than prophylactic regulation because the free market might work and if it doesn't other underfunded enforcement agencies might maybe prosecute. Unless, of course, they have been captured by the wealthy and the powerful, which -- of course -- won't happen.

And, relatedly, economic efficiency is not the proper measure of the rationality of having more than one, two or even three quality quarterbacks or nearly anything else of importance.  Consider, for example, the Pittsburgh  Steelers or poets. Indeed, it is possible to argue that focusing on economic efficiency when it is inapt, which it almost always is, is a Neoliberal, Reaganite, and (perhaps) Glibertarian attempt to convince folks that all issues are best debated and understood in terms of economic efficiency when, in fact, many, if not all, issues large and small have nothing whatsoever to do with economic efficiency. Consider the death penalty or whether your butt looks big in those jeans.

Sensible of the Dangers

The law as written, I suspect, is competent to deal with restaurants that follow unsafe food handling practices without the addition of some regulatory regime or another.  After all, it must be illegal to poison someone.  The purpose of the regulation of food handling is, of course, to limit the instances food borne illness as are the regulations that one or more employees are aware of the best practices in food handling.  It might even have been in the interests of already existing restaurants that these standards be rigidly enforced because they bolster  restaurants' reputation as healthy food providers.  Its true, as well, that forcing new entrants into the restaurant market to build safe and clean kitchens increases the cost of opening the business; consequently you could, if you squinted, make the regulations out to be designed by an association of already existing restaurants to limit competition and not protect consumers. But who, other than an ideologue, wants to squint that hard.

Let's say you read an article about fraud committed on consumers based on the use of fake addresses, inflated prices, and other skulduggery.  Would your first reaction be to call the practices "an innovative business model." Would you assert in the face of evidence to the contrary that the problem is limited to "simply lying" about where your shop is. Is that lie so simple?  Surely, the existence of a shop means all kinds of things to a consumer, local, a place were I can go to to complain, under the jurisdiction of my law enforcement agencies, etc.  Indeed, the lie is central to the business "innovative practice."  Surely, you would want to include the price gauging and other corrupt practices in your account.  If you didn't it might almost seem that you sought to minimize the damage done to the consumer because it conflicted with your ideologically driven conceptualization of the free market. And, relatedly, isn't the conclusion that

[i]t’s almost as if the locksmithing industry is trying to leverage some legitimate complaints into a tool they can use to stifle competition! 

Is only coherent if you leave out the point that the stifled competitors are the kind innovative businessmen and women whose practices more easily enable fraud?

Trade associations, regulatory regimes, and the state's criminal sanction of corrupt practices are different things and need to be thought about differently. So, for example, the fact that funeral homes have a lock on the coffin business strikes me as wrong and silly; however, regulating the construction of coffins strikes me as sensible and including in those regulations some minimum standard of woodworking competence and related requirements strikes me as equally sensible.  The independent creation of a United Association of Coffin Makers which disciplines its members, in terms of training and quality of output, is fine by me. The legitimacy, illegitimacy, or silliness of what happens next depends on what happens next.

 This 

 bit of counter-contrarianism to some of this blog’s recent content, let me say that one thing emerges when you meld the AFT’s massive expenditures on the DC mayor’s race with an awareness of the nefarious antics of the locksmith’s association, the tour guide guild, and the barber’s cartel is a realization that the standard center-left critique of teacher’s unions is almost 100 percent off-base.

requires some kind of discussion of the center-left critique of teacher's unions especially when what follows is a center-left defense of unions.

A Little Deregulation Never Hurt Anyone

Recently a pipeline blew up in California and it has come to light that from

a consumer advocacy group [that] has discovered that the company that operated the faulty pipeline, Pacific Gas & Energy (PG&E), had classified it as “high risk” and failed to utilize the funds it had collected from a rate hike to repair it. The Utility Reform Network (TURN) has obtained documents detailing the energy giant’s request to the California Public Utilities Commission (PUC) for a rate hike in 2007. PG&E asked the PUC for permission for a $5 million rate hike to “replace a section of the same pipeline that blew up in San Bruno.” The PUC approved PG&E’s request, allowing it to hike its rates so that it could repair the line in 2009.

Yet the energy giant failed to go through with its scheduled repairs. And in 2009, it once again requested a rate hike from the PUC, again for $5 million. In its request, PG&E warned that if “the replacement of this pipe does not occur, risks associated with this segment will not be reduced. Coupled with the consequences of failure of this section of pipeline, the likelihood of a failure makes the risk of a failure at this location unacceptably high.” Despite these admitted risks, the company could only promise to make its repairs by 2013.

There is considerably more skulduggery available at the link.  One might wonder why the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) didn't intervene and force the PG&E to fix the damn pipeline. It couldn't be because for the past 30 years or so all the cool kids having screaming like a bunch of flying monkeys that regulation of industry is unnecessary, stupid, and wasteful.  Could it?  It couldn't be because if you shout that kind of stuff loud enough and long enough regulators become ever laxer. Could it?

UPDATE:
More Neoliberal, Reaganite, and (possibly) glibertarian complaints about regulation

Coburn's office said Wednesday the senator will object to bringing up the bill if his concerns aren't addressed. His objections are a major blow to supporters' chances of passing the legislation this year.


The legislation would give the agency more power to recall tainted products, require more inspections of food processing facilities and require producers to follow stricter standards for keeping food safe. Currently, the FDA does not have the authority to order a recall and must negotiate recalls with the affected producers. The agency rarely inspects many food facilities and farms, visiting some every decade or so and others not at all.

As Tom Scocca, from whom I found out about this, puts it

This is just hostage-taking. Coburn's concern about the deficit is one-sided—he's not asking for taxes to go up to cover the cost of the bill, which is a scary-sounding $1.4 billion, or a considerably less scary $4.67 per American citizen. Taxes are bad. He is expressing the political opinion that removing disease-ridden feces from the food supply is a responsibility that the government should not take on. This is what Tom Coburn stands for: he believes that, on top of everything else, you can actually go eat shit.