From: Ben Wildavsky
To: Diane Ravitch, Richard Rothstein, and Kevin Carey
Subject: Ravitch misunderstands the roles of charter schools, teacher professionalism, and bipartisanship in education reform.
This week, we've gathered some of top names in education policy to discuss the direction of school reform under No Child Left Behind and, now, the Obama administration.
From: Diane Ravitch
To: Kevin Carey
Subject: We don't yet have all the answers for fixing American education, but we know current reforms aren't working. So why keep supporting them?
On Monday, we kicked off a symposium about American education reform. Some of the brightest minds in education have come together to debate Diane Ravitch's new book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education, and its claims that the currentcraze for standardized testing and school choice are undermining student learning.
From: Kevin Carey
To: Diane Ravitch, Richard Rothstein, and Ben Wildavsky
Subject: Looking for answers to the problems plaguing education? Diane Ravitch doesn't offer them.
A few weeks ago, I noticed that conservatives, having celebrated the death of health care reform, were starting to wake up to the fact that reform wasn't actually dead. They remained overwhelmingly confident -- Yuval Levin: "It will almost certainly fail" -- but slight doubts were beginning to materialize.
Christian Wolmar’s recent New York Times piece advocating a major Amtrak Acela corridor upgrade and an AP file datelined Buena Park, California are illustrative when it comes to the hurdles facing the nation in building high speed rail.
In the Times, Wolmar argues that Acela should be made into a sort of demonstration project to truly achieve high speeds. That would involve straightening tracks, improving the catenary power supply, and eliminating grade crossings at substantial cost. As it stands, Acela competes with air travel in the Northeast corridor almost solely on an amenity basis—more comfort and less hassle in the post-9/11 security environment—and not on speed.
The outcome of such an investment, Wolmar contends, would be an example of true high speed train travel to hold out to the nation in an effort to develop new corridors, instead of the federal money spread across the nation last month.
John McCormack at the Weekly Standard has a splashy headline today: "Obama Now Selling Judgeships For Health Care Votes?" The story turns out to be that Obama is nominating Scott Matheson, Jr. to the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit.
Harold Pollack is a professor at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration and Special Correspondent for The Treatment.
At a low moment of the Second World War, a breathless young aide barged in on Winston Churchill to report some bad news. Showing the aplomb one fully achieves only within the pages of one’s own memoir, Churchill quotes himself responding: “I’ve heard worse.” That’s the resilience Democrats need.
Treatment readers already know that many health policy experts across the political spectrum support House passage of the Senate bill, with an accompanying fix of the bills various shortcomings through the reconciliation process. Like Paul Krugman, Jonathan Cohn, Ezra Klein, and Jacob Hacker, Tim Jost and I very much agree that this is the best approach.
Yesterday, Tim and I crafted a simple letter (shown below), which we emailed other health policy experts we know. Some are progressives who identify with a single-payer approach. Others are more politically moderate economists, sociologists, and political scientists. Still others identify with organized labor, medicine, or public health.
Within several hours, many outstanding scholars, activists, and practitioners signed on. Signers include Henry Aaron, David Cutler, Jon Gruber, Theda Skocpol, Paul Starr, and many others, including Anna Burger, Secretary-Treasurer of SEIU.
Some people we contacted could not sign on, but reported that they are seeking the same goal through more private means. Virtually no one we contacted disagreed with this letter on either political or policy grounds. Our letter represents a broad consensus of those supporting health care reform.
We are so close to enacting a historic reform. Now is the time for calm and resolute Congressional action. The Massachusetts election was a setback. Democrats still have large majorities in both the Senate and the House. We’ve heard worse. It’s time to act.
The closest thing Congress has to its own Tea Party takes place every Wednesday afternoon, in the Gold Room of the Rayburn House Office building. At 1:15, more than 100 congressmen and one aide each gather for the meeting of the Republican Study Committee, and for a little over an hour, the legislators chat about their latest projects to reduce the size of government--or, at least, to stop the latest Democrat effort to expand it.
At a Washington, D.C., restaurant, a child looking at a picture of Barack Obama turns to his mother and says: "Is he always going to be the president, mommy?"
"No," the mother replied. "Four years."
Maybe she's a Palin voter?
The latest edition of MetroMonitor--our ground-up view of the recession and recovery--is out today, looking at economic indicators through the third quarter of 2009. The bottom line: It’s still a big country. Some places had largely recovered by September, while others still hadn’t bottomed out yet. Check out the report for all the details, but here are a few amuse- bouches to whet your appetite:
The manufacturing belt surges… but it may be temporary. One of the big stories over the course of the recession has been the devastation wrought in “auto country,” particularly the upper Midwestern portion in metro areas like Detroit, Grand Rapids, Toledo, and Youngstown. But during the months of July through September, output grew, and job loss slowed, in these and other auto-focused metro areas. Signs point to the cash-for-clunkers program, which seemed to have a hand in boosting auto and auto parts production in these and many other regions across the country. Whether the trend continues into the current quarter, after the program expired, remains to be seen.
Education continues to be a mainstay… but government is slipping. Employment in educational services continued to grow in the third quarter, rising by 1.4 percent overall, and increasing in 77 of the 100 largest metro areas. And many centers of education--Austin, Madison, Syracuse, Washington, D.C.--continue to rank among the best-performing metropolitan areas over the course of the recession. However, government employment--a mainstay over the past two years—showed signs of slipping in a number of metro areas, particularly those including state capitals where budget crises loom. Honolulu, Nashville, Baltimore, Columbia (SC), and Albany saw government job growth in the second quarter turn into job loss in the third quarter.
For much of the United States, Detroit has become shorthand for failure--not just because of the dilapidation of the town’s iconic industry, but because the entire metropolis seems like a dystopian disaster. It is the second-most-segregated metropolitan area in the country; the city’s population is 82 percent African American. No other American city has shed more people since 1950--Detroit is only half its former size. Its city government fails at the most basic tasks. A call to 911 will bring a response, on average, in about 20 minutes.
The Iranian regime has never found itself more vulnerable. And, with this vulnerability, it has never leaned more heavily on its own narrative of history. This narrative, of course, has a central antagonist, a character conjured as the “Great Satan.” As this Koranic moniker implies, the Islamic Republic ascribes supernatural qualities to its adversary: From far away in Washington, D.C., the Great Satan has the power to send hordes of stooges to shout in the streets and the remarkable ability to manufacture every ill in Iranian society.
In the weeks ahead, Congress may finally provide American families with a seat at the financial regulatory table in Washington, D.C. If Congress passes the Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA) Act of 2009, on which the House Financial Services recently reported favorably, it will establish, for the first time, a federal agency whose sole mandate is to evaluate financial products through the lens of consumer fairness. By putting the tools to evaluate loans in the hands of borrowers, it would also give families the chance, as well as the responsibility, to protect themselves.
For years, the consumer credit market has been broken. Healthy markets depend on full information between parties to contracts, but lenders have systematically hidden the costs and risks of consumer credit products while burying a wide assortment of tricks and traps in the fine print. The result is that consumers can’t compare the costs of different products or distinguish safe lenders from risky lenders. Because the costs and risks are so well-hidden, the broken market undermines real consumer choice, inhibits consumer-oriented innovation, and leads many borrowers to over-consume credit, putting themselves--and our whole economy--at risk.
After four quarters of decline, GDP finally grew, and at a pace--3.5 percent annually--not seen since the summer of 2007. As my colleagues Alan Berube and Bill Galston point out, and as I argued last month, signs of economic growth don’t necessarily mean a rapid recovery, a sustained recovery, or even a recovery that feels meaningful to the vast majority of Americans. But that’s not the horse I want to ride today. Instead, I want to read the tea leaves (the details of the GDP numbers for the third quarter of this year) to see what they suggest about the geography of the recovery--which metro areas are likely to be recovering and which aren’t.
First, the obvious.
Now, the not-so-obvious.
It's too early to guarantee that health care reform passes. It's not too early to think about what should happen next.
What will it take to make the final reform plan work--to make sure that it really provides affordable coverage while realigining the health care system to produce higher quality, less costly care? And what can be done now, as the debate moves onto the House and Senate floors, in order to make success more likely?
Score another one for German engineering. Out on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., this week, the Energy Department has been hosting its fourth-ever Solar Decathlon—a competition among 20 designs for solar-powered houses from around the world.
For the handful of people in charge of saving the U.S. economy, it’s been a grueling season. The last eight months have featured endless back-and-forths, tense stalemates, and spirited confrontations. Larry Summers, the president’s chief economic adviser, has drawn blood with his lacerating quips. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has dropped expletives to signal his frustration. Even their aides have gotten in on the action.
And, in those rare instances when the wonks get a break, they step outside their conference rooms, loosen their ties, and do the same thing all over again. On a tennis court. For years, Summers, Geithner, and a variety of deputies have stared each other down from opposite sides of a three-foot-high net. These tennis relationships have played out on courts from Jackson Hole, Wyoming, to Davos, Switzerland, and on pretty much every flat surface in Washington, D.C. It turns out that tennis is the unofficial sport of the Obama financial team. And, if you want to understand the way its members go at it behind closed doors, it’s worth watching them go at it with tightly strung rackets.
Strong advocates of our new G20 process are convinced that it will bring legitimacy to international economic policy discussions, rule-making, and crisis interventions. Certainly, it’s better than the G7/G8 pretending to run things--after all, who elected them?
But who elected the G20? The answer is: No one. And, in case you were wondering, there is no application form to join the G20 (although you can crash the party if you have the right friends, e.g., Spain). The G20 has appointed themselves as the world’s “economic governing council” (to quote Gordon Brown).
Is this a good idea?
The conservative echo chamber continues to play "telephone" with its estimates of the crowds at the 9/12 protest. Follow along:
1) On his radio show yesterday, Glenn Beck claimed that the London Telegraph "quote[d] a source from the Park Service, the National Park Service, saying that it is the largest march on Washington ever."
The chances of global-warming legislation passing through the Senate before the end of the year are looking increasingly bleak. Onlookers had been expecting Barbara Boxer and John Kerry to introduce a comprehensive climate and energy bill on September 8, shortly after Congress returned from recess. But on Monday, the two pushed the deadline back indefinitely, saying that they expected to unveil the bill "in later September" and chalking up the delay, in part, to Kerry's hip surgery and preoccupation with health reform.
Sources on the Hill say they're now certain the Senate won't take up climate change until after the health care debate is resolved—which, realistically, won't happen until around Thanksgiving. And even if Kerry and Boxer can get their bill out by late September, the other committees that want a piece of the bill won't be able to work on it right away. For instance, Max Baucus, who chairs the Finance Committee, has said he wants to oversee the formula for allocating carbon permits under the cap-and-trade program—but he's currently busy with health reform. To date, his committee has only held one hearing on cap-and-trade, which Baucus couldn't attend because he was working on health care.
So, although Harry Reid's office still insists that the Senate will "have ample time to consider this comprehensive clean energy and climate legislation before the end of the year," there's a good chance a bill won't get finished in the Senate before the Copenhagen climate talks start on December 7. If that's the case, is there anything Congress or the White House could do to make sure the Obama administration doesn't show up at the talks empty-handed? (True, Obama could point to fact that the House has passed a climate bill, but it's unlikely that other world leaders will accept that as a down payment on Senate action.)
"It's a rough patch I'm going through," says Chris Dodd. How rough? Not long ago, Dodd entertained dreams of ascending to the White House. He moved his family to Iowa in 2007 and enrolled his daughter in a Des Moines public school, all in the hope of winning the state's caucus. He gave solid (if never spectacular) performances in debates while fund-raising prodigiously. And, though he didn't vault into the top tier of candidates, he managed to end his bid for the presidency with his long-standing reputation as a serious player in Democratic politics basically intact.
The 
