RK: You have obviously had the enormous satisfaction of seeing your ideas influence a revolution, both in the thinking of economists and in the premises of politics and the role of government. Does this make you any more optimistic about the ability of the political process to work, and of government to learn over time? […]
Education in America
Posted inEducation in America
Education as a Positional Good
This idea that education is a positional good (as in, school quality mostly matters as compared to other schools rather than on isolated quality markers) seems obviously right to me. Education, after all, is instrumental these days. The better your performance, the more prestigious and numerous your options. If you want to learn for the […]
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The Population Time Warp: An Exchange
Adam Werbach’s inaptly titled essay “The End of the Population Movement” might have been worth reading three decades ago. He struggles at length with the superfluous task of rejecting the long outmoded concept of “population control.” Werbach might just as well mount a campaign against disco music or urge the pullout of U.S. troops from […]
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TABOR Pains
Just at the moment the Republican coalition is showing strain over Katrina recovery and Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers, a Colorado ballot measure is threatening more harm. Though it’s a “purple” state with notable blue and red streaks, Colorado now has a chance to roll back a program long supported by the anti-government movement. In […]
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School Integration
Today’s LA Times rightly laments that LA Unified is home to quite a few teachers, supervisors, and program directors who’re totally incompetent at teaching math: For instance, middle school teachers are erroneously taught that fraction division is repeated subtraction. This makes sense only for special examples such as 3/4 divided by 1/4 . In this […]
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End Of Story
I’m not usually one for Times-bashing, but since Slate‘s Jack Shafer deftly kicked off a discussion of Louise Story’s mysteriously placed page-1 New York Times piece in which she discovered — shock! — that women often know in advance that they intend to reduce work hours or stop working temporarily while their babies are still […]
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Educational Inequality
Jonathan Kozol, in an interview with Campus Progress, touches on something I’ve been thinking a lot about: Some young people will tentatively say to me, “well maybe I oughtta get involved.” Well I say, “You don’t have any choice; you’re involved already. Even if you never do anything about this, you’ve benefited from an unjust […]
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Skills Setback
“The economists don’t know what they’re talking about.” Granted, this may seem like an odd opening for a piece by two economists, but the guy who said this — a member of a focus group probing Americans’ experiences in the current economy — has a point. Policy-makers are waxing ever more enthusiastic about how great […]
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Stopping Aid
This was supposed to be a milestone year in the fight against AIDS. In 2001, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced that it intended to intensify its prevention programs in order to cut new HIV infections in half by 2005. Instead, the number has held steady at 40,000 a year since 1998. […]
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A Liberal’s Education
Dear Senator Santorum, Until I picked up your bookIt Takes A Family, I had never really recognized what it means to be a liberal. It turns out I’ve been going about things all wrong. I hadn’t realized that I was supposed to be opposed to everything good, right, or true in America. I also hadn’t […]
