Admitting You’re a Tool Doesn’t Make You Less of One
Matt (Dalton, Harvard) Yglesias, via Aaron Carroll’s note that he should move into another line of work), accidentally gives the Education game away:
the Dread Evil Neoliberal School Reformer Barack Obama And His Lackeys At The Center For American Progress
Yep, Matt has been doing great things for education.
As, of course, has CAP, in spades.
As for Barack “Also Never Attended a Public School, But I Know All About Them” Obama, all that needs to be said was said by Dean Baker on Saturday:
Emanuel’s predecessor as mayor, Richard Daley, also placed an emphasis on reforming Chicago’s schools. From 2001 to 2009 he installed Arne Duncan, currently President Obama’s Secretary of Education, as head of the Chicago school system. If Friedman and Emanuel’s complaints about the current state of Chicago’s schools are accurate, this would imply that Duncan must not have been very successful in his tenure even though he was widely acclaimed as a reformer at the time.
Improving from shit-awful to moderately-bad is still an improvement.
Is a self-aware tool a meta-tool?
So we were wrong that an angry black man would rise up and stop the Walmart aristocracy from exporting all the good paying jobs to the gulag and that the Harvard business school actually knew what the hell they were taliking about ?
Well, let’s all take another bite of the “cinnamon roll” and curse ourselves for thinking that it smells bad. You may, or may not, be an affiliate of the “fair and honest financial system” where the Supreme Court, the House of Representatives, the Senate, the Media, Academia, and the Presidency weren’t more dangerous than the guys with rags tied around their heads.
According to sociology professor Martín Sánchez Jankowsk who wrote Cracks in the Pavement: Social Change and Resilience in Poor Neighborhoods, ghetto schools perform poorly because the labor market has nothing waiting for these kids when they graduate so why kill themselves working at education. He spent 9 years on the ground in 5 disadvantaged neighborhoods in NYC and LA observing every place from the schools to the barbershops.
Around the time he was writing the book the minimum wage had dropped almost in half from LBJ’S $10.15/hr (adjusted) level — as per capita income doubled. IMO, the Crips and the Bloods could not survive a $15/hr minimum wage — and would not want to (only 3% direct inflation — see: http://ontodayspagelinks.blogspot.com/2008/08/3-cost-of-gdp-output-and-inflation.html )
http://www.amazon.com/Cracks-Pavement-Social-Resilience-Neighborhoods/dp/0520256751/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1319300196&sr=8-1