Lectiones: Miscellaneous

Stuff you might think about reading:

Meme via Reclaim Reform.

Jersey Jazzman's fond farewell to Obama's worst cabinet appointment, the outgoing Secretary of Education, with a not very cheerful thought about his designated successor, New York State education commissioner John King, on whom I'd like to note the following statement from the New York State United Teachers:

“New York State United Teachers is disappointed in John King’s appointment as acting U.S. Secretary of Education. NYSUT has always considered John King an ideologue with whom we disagreed sharply on many issues during his tenure as the state’s Education Department commissioner. Just last year, our members delivered a vote of no confidence against him and called for his resignation. NYSUT urges its members to call the White House switchboard at 202-456-1414 — as well as a special White House telephone line dedicated to public comments at 202-456-1111 — to express their displeasure in John King’s appointment.”

And more below the fold!

And I'm docking you one letter grade for each day late, Mr. President

Image by XX for kidpub.

Thomas L. Friedman writes ("Obama's Homework Assignment"):

There's just no point in President Obama giving yet another State of the Union Address this year—boRING. Instead, he ought to give a State of the Union 800-Word Rant. Or, better, he should let Secretary of Education Arne Duncan give it for him, because Duncan's already written one, and it's a dazzler. But before I get around to telling you what's in Duncan's speech, or when and where he [jump]

Common to the Core

This (from NPR this morning) is the problem:

a southern California mom has created a new princess series with modern sensibilities. At the heart of her series, The Guardian Princess Alliance, is what animates any fairy tale: simple storytelling.

Publisher blurb:

Monitor wizards

Crocodile Monitor Lizard, San Diego Zoo.

Peter Cunningham, former apple-cheeked something or other in the Department of Education under Arne Duncan, writes on the subject of Diane Ravitch:

Over the years, her criticism of the administration became more and more strident. It was increasingly clear that she was not interested in a genuine conversation with us but rather was interested in driving her anti-administration message, even if it meant resorting to tactics that are beneath someone of her stature: ad hominem attacks on [jump]

Cabinet of curiosities

"I would dearly love to see Arne Duncan explain to Bibi Netanyahu that Israel's foreign aid is now cut off because they filled out the forms incorrectly". (Jersey Jazzman)

Madame Tussaud's spare heads. From nationalgeographicscans.tumblr.com.

The project of shuffling Obama's cabinet around just got a lot easier, now that Thomas P. Friedman, also known as Thomas L. Friedman, or by the Linnaean handle of Moustaccium intellectionis, has laid down the criteria for doing it well: you just have to pick people Friedman knows, not that he knows all the best people for all the jobs, though that is probably also true, but because only if he knows them can we be sure that they'll work out:

Kerry is an excellent choice for defense. I don’t know Rice at all, so I have no opinion on her fitness for the job, but I think the contrived flap over her Libya comments certainly shouldn’t disqualify her. That said, my own nominee for secretary of state would be the current education secretary, Arne Duncan.... because I think this is an important time to ask the question of not just who should be secretary of state, but what should the secretary of state be in the 21st century?

This is not the first time Friedman has proposed Arne Duncan as diplomat; my response is here. What I'd like to do now is look at some possibilities for filling out the rest of the cabinet by Friedmannian rules.

For instance, the Secretary of Energy should be Michael Mandelbaum, not just because of who he is (a political scientist and Friedman's co-author for That Used To Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back, 2011), but because of what he is, capable of duplicating Friedman's literary style to the comma:

“The biggest issue in the world today is growth, and the world is divided into two groups — those who get it and those who don’t,” said Michael Mandelbaum, the Johns Hopkins University foreign policy expert. “If you’re dealing with the Middle East, it might actually be helpful to have someone who can tell some of the parties why they are going in the wrong direction and how their problems are not what they think they are, nor are their solutions.”

As such, Mandelbaum would undoubtedly be able to convince Congress to increase the gas tax. The current incumbent, Steven Chu, certainly knows that the gas tax ought to be increased, but he carries baggage—notably that Nobel Prize—that makes him seem rabidly partisan. Whereas Mandelbaum can make it sound stupid enough to be non-threatening:

A gasoline tax “is not just win-win; it’s win, win, win, win, win,” says the Johns Hopkins author and foreign policy specialist Michael Mandelbaum. “A gasoline tax would do more for American prosperity and strength than any other measure Obama could propose.”

You can practically hear Eric Cantor leaping on that and agreeing to pass it right away.

Similarly, to replace Duncan at Education you could do worse than picking Bevil Hogg, South African CEO of EndoStim, a company making a kind of pacemaker for your esophagus, which is supposed to regulate acid reflux,

inspired by Cuban and Indian immigrants to America and funded by St. Louis venture capitalists. Its prototype is being manufactured in Uruguay, with the help of Israeli engineers and constant feedback from doctors in India and Chile.

Hogg may not know much about education specifically, but what he knows in general is what he needs to know, which is that everything from now on has to be cheaper, flatter, and run out of a Blackberry:

“In the aftermath of the banking crisis, access to public markets is off-limits to start-ups,” explained Hogg, so start-ups now have to be “much leaner, much more capital-efficient, much smarter in accessing worldwide talent and quicker to market in order to do more with less.” He added, “$20 million is the new $100 million.”

Finally, for secretary of the Treasury why not go for Friedman's multitasking Paris taxi driver of 2006?

After the car started to roll, I saw he had a movie playing on the screen in the dashboard -- on the flat panel that usually displays the G.P.S. road map. I noticed this because between his talking on the phone and the movie, I could barely concentrate. I, alas, was in the back seat trying to finish a column on my laptop. When I wrote all that I could, I got out my iPod and listened to a Stevie Nicks album, while he went on talking, driving and watching the movie.

No special reason, except that this is the only Friedman column I can find in which a taxi driver plays a prominent role, and he doesn't even say anything! As far as I can tell from the research (as David Brooks would call it) for this post, Friedman never talks to taxi drivers at all; we've been lying about him all this time. Who knew?

From Lianhe Wanbao, Singapore, via Sammy Boy.

The worst message

Mustache from The Shave Den.

Thomas P. Friedman (better known as Thomas L. Friedman, the Mustache of Postcolonial Maturity) reminds us that it's not just about us:

The worst message we can send right now to Middle Easterners is that their future is all bound up in what we do. It is not. The Arab-Muslim world has rarely been more complicated and more in need of radical new approaches by us — and them.... [Tom's italics]

And the best way we can help them to take responsibility for their own policies and their own lives, and to start pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps instead of ours, is to give them a very clear set of instructions and then punish them if they get it wrong and reward them if they get it right:

If it were up to me, I’d put Arne Duncan, the secretary of education, in charge of American policy in the Arab-Muslim world. Because we need to phase out of the cold war business of selling arms there to keep “strongmen” on our side and in power, and we need to get into the business of sponsoring a “Race to the Top” in the Arab-Muslim world that, instead, can help empower institutions and strong people, who would voluntarily want to be on our side.

So bold it almost hurts your eyes, huh?

Instead of that old business of distinct budgets for each country from the Pentagon and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, we'd have just one big kitty for everybody (excepting Israel, which is so adult we already gave them all our credit cards and car keys).

Then every year each country gets an annual performance review on the principles of results-based accountability: how far have they gotten on privatizing government business, how far they've come with computerizing, how much progress they've made in their multiple-choice test scores. And after the review we give out the prizes: Congratulations, Yemen, that's $4 billion! Sorry, Oman, but your critical thinking scores brought you down.

Because they won't voluntarily want to be on our side if we invite just anybody. And you can't expect people to think for themselves if you won't tell them what to think.

Animatronic Disney elephant. From Woonietest.

If the tsar only knew!

Updated 5/30/2012

While we're on the education subject, TPM invites us to note that President Obama has been making a campaign theme of the idea that Willard Mitt Romney wants to expand public school class sizes without apparently realizing that his own education secretary, Arne Duncan, takes a position that's hardly different from Romney's.

It isn't the first time he is attacking his own education policy, either. Remember what he had to say about high-stakes testing a little over a year ago at a Univision-sponsored town hall: [jump]

F for Effort

I saw Arne Duncan in the All-Stars celebrity match a couple of weeks ago, and I have to admit he looked spectacular. He could be the Bill Bradley of the 21st century--if he wasn't so damned dumb. And lacking in empathy.

Picture from Fox News Orlando, of all places.

Former "reformer" (i.e. privatizer and "accountability" hound) turned actual reformer (i.e., someone who wants to improve schools in the US) Diane Ravitch has prepared a report card for the secretary of education, in the New York Review. I think it's a little weird on her part to criticize Duncan for disrespecting the Tenth Amendment, the one that grants unmentioned rights to the states, on the grounds that he's pushing for a federal takeover of the system; in the first place he isn't, and in the second place I think we on the left would be wiser to let the Tenth Amendment alone.

It would be wiser to let the feds do what is needed under the General Welfare clause and stop doing what isn't needed. Some states need federal help; Texas needs help (and I mean tough love) in curriculum. No state needs help in figuring out how to let private industry suck more cash out of the education system, but I'd like to see them get some assistance in not doing it.

Other than that, it is a nicely packed summary of what our department of education has been up to in the last three years, and why it should stop. So click above and read it.