Bar Results->4 Mile Benefit->Phish

Post bar exam the analogy seems apt...

Esq.

I found out today that I passed the Colorado Bar Exam. Thank you to all of my friends and family for your help and support. I do things in my own time, but when I do them - I do them right.

Performance Pay and Lazy Punditry, More from Jon Chait

I'm going to quote Jon Chait in full on performance pay, 

Recently, Vanderbilt studied the effect of teacher bonus pay in Tennessee. It found that awarding bonuses to teachers who produce high results did not improve performance. Opponents of performance pay have been crowing that this shows performance pay doesn't work -- teachers, they say, are already doing their best, so you can't wring better results out of them by dangling bonuses.

Of course, the point of performance pay isn't to wring better results out of the same teaching pool. It's to change the composition of the teaching pool. Teachers tend to come from the lower ranks of college graduates. That's natural, because the profession pays poorly compared with other jobs requiring college degree and does not offer financial rewards for success. The idea of merit pay is that you lure into the profession people who want to be treated like professionals -- they run the risk of being fired if they're incompetent, but they can also earn recognition and higher pay for exceptional performance. That's a long-term process. But it also shows some signs of immediate effect:

What was the immediate effect?

In fact, after D.C. public schools announced a new bonus system, which pays teachers for improvements in test scores, teaching applications soared 300 percent.

This is very typical analysis on education reform from Chait who, it seems, is always in search of some empirical silver bullet in defense of his positions. In the past he pointed to the distribution of Race to the Top funds of prima facie evidence of the effectiveness of school reform. No analysis of outcomes necessary, giving away money to the states is in and of itself demonstrative of the efficacy of the reforms Chait supports. He falls into the same trap today. The measure that Chait himself lays out is that we want the average teacher to come from a higher class ranking. But as evidence that pay for performance will achieve these ends Chait simply cites the fact that pay for performance increases the total number of applicants. It doesn't say a damn thing about the quality of the applicants and, in Chait's world, that doesn't matter.

This is so intellectually sloppy it reads like something Jonah Goldberg would write. Chait is smarter than this and so are his readers.

A Democratic Surge?

My latest at TFT.

Our Right-Wing Supreme Court

Orin Kerr at Volokh Conspiracy observes that the media has discovered that the Roberts' Court is staunchly right-wing but, he points out, the public thinks the Court is pretty liberal. What accounts for this disparity? Here is Kerr,

How to reconcile the press coverage with the poll results? To my mind, the most likely explanation is that there is a difference between the direction of the law on the left-right spectrum and its present location on that spectrum.

Sure. Or it could be that the vast majority of Americans have no idea how many members sit on the Court, much less what arcane issues they decide and where those decisions lie on some ideological spectrum, and so they react to decades worth of right-wing propoganda on the Court.

Or Kerr could be right and Americans could be making measured and learned decisions about the relative ideological space the Court holds. You know, just like their measured and learned decision that Obama is in fact a Muslim.

More on DeGette and Should We Care if She Wins

I recently asked if I was a bad Democrat for being indifferent to Congresswoman Diana DeGette's re-election. Andrew Oh-Willeke offers a substantive argument for why I should care in the comments,

DeGette votes the right way and has gained considerable clout in Congress from her seniority. The fact that she is a work horse rather than a show horse shouldn't detract from that record...

Individual Congressional seats do matter. The most important thing in the House is which party controls Congress, as opposed to individual member legislative action, and the more Democrats there are who are liberals, like DeGette, the less the House leadership has to compromise with Blue Dogs in a conservative direction.

DeGette has been a reliable vote on choice, and has personally taken the lead on consumer safety issues, which matter, even if they aren't necessarily the highest profile issues in Congress. 

Off the top let me say that I think these are all perfectly valid arguments, I'm just not personally persuaded by them. Starting at the top, I guess I am looking for a show horse. In my mind, if you represent a safe Democratic seat you have a responsibility to the caucus to lead on tough issues. There are other members of your caucus who don't have that luxury and if those in safe seats don't have enough fight in them to truly lead then that is a wasted seat in my opinion.

Individual Congressional seats do matter and I am a firm believer that the most important is the vote for Speaker of the House, because controlling the agenda means so much. But in a year where Dems are poised to lose the 45 or more seats and thus lose the majority by at least 8 seats then an individual seat matters less. I'm not advocating for a conservaive style war on moderates. You will never see me attack John Salazar or Betsy Markey. But when the opportunity arises to jettison dead weight and little to no cost to the caucus I have a hard time standing in the way.

About the best argument for DeGette's re-election is that she is a senior member of the House which means she can bring home the bacon. Hope and change it ain't.

Am I Bad Democrat for Not Caring About DeGette?

Lynn Bartels notes that Republican Mike Fallon may be putting a little scare into incumbent Congresswoman Diana DeGette. I can't seem to conjure up an iota of concern at the prospect of  DeGette losing her seat - does that make me a bad Democrat?

In the 8 years I have lived in Denver I can count on one hand how many times I have seen DeGette out in the community actually interacting with constituents. She strikes me as pretty uninterested in the day to day issues of the 1st Congressional District and despite having a safe (until now?) seat she's never led the charge on any truly controversial issues.

For all I know Mike Fallon is a raving right-wing lunatic and he certainly will not be receiving my vote but I can't help but think clearing out the deadwood would be healthy for the District. Let's have a competitive Democratic primary in 2012 and see what the younger set of local Democrats have to offer - like Paul Lopez or Terrance Carroll.

One seat isn't going to make a difference in the House in 2010, seems like it might be an opportune time to jettison our milquetoast Congresswoman.

"Who's Killing the Great Lawyers of Harvard"

Comedian Greg Giraldo died of an apparent over-dose this week. While I knew he was a lawyer, I had no idea that he was a Harvard Law School grad until today when I came across this Esquire article from 2000 about HLS grads who struggle to find happiness in the law and which prominently features Greg Giraldo,

KIDS WHO PULL STRAIGHT A'S in grade school don't often scare teachers. But for all his smarts, Greg Giraldo couldn't focus in fifth grade, and it disturbed those in charge. The kid from Queens daydreamed about funny people, guys who made other guys laugh. How thrilling to live at a time when John Belushi roamed the earth! How glorious to be Mad magazine artist Don Martin and to invent words like thwap and glork! Watch the face of a kid in love with laughter; it's not a face that soothes the schoolteacher's soul.
Mr. and Mrs. Giraldo were summoned to school and asked, Is something wrong at home? Is something troubling Greg? Nothing that we know of, the parents replied. And they returned home and asked Greg if there was something wrong. Not that I know of, he replied, and he returned to recording funny little thoughts in the journals he kept. Mom and Dad couldn't protest much; Greg was a perfect student, the kind who might fulfill an immigrant parent's dream that he become a doctor or a lawyer, or, better yet, an Ivy League doctor or lawyer. Or, best yet, a Harvard doctor or lawyer.

Go read the entire article.

When Will Colorado Start Paying the Price on Higher Ed?

Over at Pols a poster notes the fortcoming budgetary doom and gloom and looks at Higher Education funding in particular,

$4.4 billion has been cut from our state budget since the start of the Great Recession. When speaking on a funding allocation that the Colorado Commission on Higher Education would send to the legislature, Commissioner Greg Stevinson wanted to send a message, "that we just can't take any more cuts....We're cut to the bone."

For someone who pays close attention to our state budget, every year feels like "Groundhog Day". Our state, more than any other, significantly relied on federal stimulus dollars to back-fill our higher education budget. With the cessation of Stimulus dollars and a billion dollar shortfall, the 2011-12 fiscal year could eliminate all state support for higher education. This is a foregone conclusion if Amendments 60, 61 or Proposition 101 pass. Our state's constitutional funding mandates have made higher education the prime target for cuts. If the last decade set any precedence for what the legislature will do, students and families can expect the cost of higher education shift to them.

Colorado's support for higher education is already dismal. We are dead last in the nation in the funding of public four-year colleges. Since 1980, state support for higher education has decreased 70 percent. Per $1000 dollars of income, Coloradans pay $3.20 towards higher education, compared to a national average of $12.28. (View the HESP draft and background material for in-depth statistics) 

Colorado has largely avoided any consequences for the dismal state of it's higher education funding in part because we import so many of our residents. We have a highly educated workforce in this state, but they are educated elsewhere and move to Colorado for the quality of life. My hope is that as those young professionals grow into adults with families and children who need to go to college the seriousness of our state's fiscal morass, and the higher ed issue in particular, will become a bigger issue with the electorate. Because right now it doesn't feel like anyone cares if we become the only state in the nation with fully privatized higher ed.

TARP, 2 Years Later

Tim Fernholz at TAPPED looks at the numbers, 

It's the second anniversary of TARP, and people are still angry about it. The program's costs, however, continue to drop; right now, they amount to $66 billion -- out of $700 billion spent -- and that number could continue to decrease. That's even with loss-leaders like the HAMP program, AIG and the auto bailouts included.