The Polish Wolf

Tomorrow is the last day of semester tests in Helena Public Schools, and it seems like an appropriate time to reflect on testing as a concept. There has been some indication that a teacher who is good at raising student’s test grades is likely to improve their life outcomes as well. However, it is important to note that the study took place in an environment where there were few incentives for teachers to focus on raising test grades. It is entirely possible (indeed likely) that rising test grades are a side effect of teaching habits that also tend to foster positive education outcomes for students. The same positive effects the study noted may be inhibited if the focus is shifted more heavily towards testing.

But the article that struck a stronger chord with me was this , which confirms what I’ve noticed as long as I’ve been working in the district. The students who are in the greatest need of excellent teachers are those are least likely to get them – low income students or those who belong to ethnic minorities. Craig and Pogie had some reminiscing a while back about great teachers. I for one had some great teachers, but I can’t say I feel like I needed them, not nearly as much as my students now need them. The question is, how do we secure great teachers for the students who really need them?

Even though I knew about the impeding wikipedia blackout over a day in advance, I am still annoyed by it. I’ve gone so far as to engage in a very difficult game of clicking links and then disabling my wireless internet in the brief second between loading the page I want and redirecting to the blackout page, more out of juvenile spite than anything.

But it does make me uneasy. I realize how much I depend on Wikipedia to answer questions that would otherwise annoy me, and my unease is not abated any by Google reminding me that they could do the same thing if they wanted. The internet has done impressive things to market forces – with no transportation or geographical considerations to create local markets, the market is biased towards conglomerations. Generally, this is good – I would hate to have to use Yahoo just because there wasn’t a Google store in Helena. However, it does lead to an extraordinary concentration of power in the hands of relatively few people.

Companies that go public have some additional checks and balances; nonetheless I feel like a large percentage of people would find the internet a cold and inhospitable place if Wikipedia, Google, and Facebook decided they would no longer grace it with their presence. Fortunately, I generally agree with the powers that be at Google and Wikipedia. Nonetheless, it does seem like someday, a full on digital strike could be extraordinarily effective and relatively easy to accomplish. If Wikipedia sees this black out as effective, anticipate more in the future. That prospect is enough for me, anyway, to consider broadening my own digital neighborhood so as not to be at the mercy of a few digital giants. Does it also justify a reconsideration of how we deal with monopolies on the internet, which seems uniquely likely to encourage them, or the extent to which we give allow web based organizations to concentrate traffic and, thus, influence?

Obviously there’s been a lot of discussion about the 99 percent, the 1 percent, and why there’s a gap. Some seem to think that the high unemployment rate is a result of these wealth inequalities; that’s possible, but not consistent with international data. But I think there are a few other percentages that are relevant in this discussion.

For example, there’s the 84% – the percent of Americans who have shopped at Wal-Mart in the last year.
Related to that, there’s the 60% of products at Wal-Mart that are imported.

The 90% of clothing in the US that is imported is also a big factor, because I’d say at least 99.9% of Americans have worn clothing in the last year.

And when 95% percent of American households own a car, and at least 99% of those cars use gasoline, it becomes important that 60% percent of our oil that is imported.

Now, the 1% undoubtedly had to do with the creation with the circumstances that made these other percentages possible. Nonetheless, it is important to remember that it is in fact the majority of 99% also make decisions daily that continue this state of affairs, and they can do more to contribute to the advancement of the American worker through changing some of these habits than they could through even the most earnest protesting.

The importance of voting carefully extends beyond the domestic realm and into an area that would ideally be almost completely non-partisan: foreign politics. Foreign policy oughtn’t be changed every four or eight years, because its objectives are longer-term than that. This has led some to believe that it doesn’t, that regardless of the party in power, there is some group controlling everything. A quick look over the last 11 years suggests otherwise.

Compare how George Bush and Barack Obama handled the use of America’s substantial military force. When the United States invaded Iraq, it pegged American credibility on the ability to improve the country, both in terms of liberty and in material conditions. In doing so, we gambled trillions of dollars and thousands of lives on a country we understood only poorly. Since Iraq in the years before we invaded was relatively stable, we set the bar pretty high – we had to destroy a country and rebuild it, better than it was, within the attention span of the global public. This opened an enormous opportunity to those elements wishing to discredit and reduce the power of the United States. They needed only to make Iraq unstable, to increase violence, to succeed. And since states like matter tend towards entropy unless there is a good reason for them not to, in the end the US was trapped in a hopelessly asymmetric conflict.

The fact that Obama authorized the United States to participate in the conflict in Libya said to some liberals that American foreign policy had not really changed. But even a cursory examination shows the difference in approaches. In Libya, the US waited until the proper time to act – when Libya was at its absolute worst, justifying intervention not with decades-old examples of violence, but with violence occurring at the time and with potential to occur in the future. And rather than going it alone or leading the charge, the US hung back and didn’t endorse intervention until the same had been proposed by numerous other relevant, regional powers. Adequate latitude was granted the armed forces to make the completion of the mission possible, but it was the Libyans themselves who dominated the operations and ultimately won victory, thus making the change in regime more palatable to Arab and Muslim sensibilities. End result? A hostile dictator is removed for a thousandth the cost of the war against Saddam, and much more importantly without the loss of American soldiers that characterized Bush-era foreign policy.

The conclusion? Well, we’d need more experiments to find out for sure, but it seems there are two hypotheses – something changed when we switched administrations, or else the secret committee that plots American foreign policy awoke in 2009 from a prolonged fit of nigh unbelievable stupidity.

I realize my blogging is increasingly being inspired by what goes on on the the comments section. I’m alright with that – there have been some though-through comments, and some of the ideas are worth looking at without having to scroll through dozens of comments.

One recurring theme – how do we know there is any difference between the two parties? How do we know that Democrats wouldn’t have made all the same idiotic decisions that were made under Bush?

In science, when we trying to determine something like this, we use the scientific method, we try to control one variable. That’s of course harder in politics than in a lab, but the last few years Obama et al. performed a nice little experiment. They proposed two infrastructure investment-heavy, Keynesian style stimulus packages. Both had a Democratic president, high unemployment in need of some stimulus, but in the face of a high deficit. The difference (or Independent Variable) is the House of Representatives. The first time, the stimulus passed, because there was a Democratic House. The second time, with a Republican House, no such luck.

So, elections make a difference for legislation. Is that legislation effective? Well, here I have a personal bias, because I was personally employed in some of those stimulus projects. But don’t just trust me, ask Mother Jones.

The only real conclusion? We need Democrats, we need the most liberal Democrats we can get and keep. And to get them, we need to vote.