Brendan Nyhan

The New York Times reports that absurd numbers of college grads are applying to Teach for America — “12 percent of Yale’s graduates, 11 percent of Dartmouth’s and 8 percent of Harvard’s and Princeton’s” and “a record 17,350 recent college graduates” overall last year.

That sounds great, but the problem is that the program isn’t very good. Everyone I’ve ever known who has done it was thrown into a difficult urban classroom with little preparation and quickly became burnt out. As a result, they all left teaching at the end of their stint rather than getting the training they would need to be successful. End result: no new recruits for the nation’s teacher corps, no qualified teachers in failing urban schools.

Here’s the evidence on the effectiveness of the program reported by the Times:

It has also helped, on all campuses, that Teach for America now has a track record: An evaluation last year by Mathematica Policy Research found that Teach for America members produce slightly higher math achievement and no worse English results, than other teachers. And a June 2005 evaluation by Kane Parsons & Associates found that 63 percent of the principals in the schools where they work regarded Teach for America teachers as more effective than the overall faculty.

However, a study of Houston student achievement released this year by Linda Darling-Hammond of Stanford and others found that although Teach for America teachers performed as well as other uncertified teachers, their results did not match those of certified teachers. Teach for America officials contend that the study was flawed.

Let’s review: “slightly higher math” and “no worse English” results count as a positive finding? We’re spending all this money and human capital to barely nudge the bar? And the Darling-Hammond et al study supports the conclusions I present above — namely, unqualified teachers don’t perform well, period, no matter how smart or energetic.

That’s not to say that TFA isn’t well-intentioned or that the people in it aren’t trying their best. But couldn’t all that good will and money be put to better use? In addition, TFA falsely suggests that bad urban schools can be fixed on the cheap with low-paid, undertrained young teachers. The real problem, however, is far more deep-seated and difficult to solve. Let’s not fool ourselves.

Update 6/11/08 9:18 AM: A new Urban Institute report (PDF) finds that TFA grads are more effective teachers than previous studies have suggested. It’s an encouraging finding, but unlike the Mathematica evaluation cited above, it was not based on a randomized evaluation, so I have less confidence in the results.

Harriet Miers is a classic Bush nominee: the stealth loyalist. She’s probably better than, say, Janice Rogers Brown, but what she told David Frum is just ridiculous:

In the White House that hero worshipped the president, Miers was distinguished by the intensity of her zeal: She once told me that the president was the most brilliant man she had ever met. She served Bush well, but she is not the person to lead the court in new directions – or to stand up under the criticism that a conservative justice must expect.

I’m not one of those people who makes sweeping claims about how dumb Bush is — he’s actually quite savvy in a certain limited way — but the most brilliant man she ever met? To me, that suggests she’s a hero worshipper who’s far too deferential to power and authority, and that’s not the person I want to be a swing vote on the Supreme Court. Yikes.

(Frum quote via Matthew Yglesias by way of Josh Marshall)

I’m officially starting a countdown until Tom DeLay backs up the claim that the Democratic leadership is conspiring with Ronnie Earle (reported in the New York Times today), which he conveniently failed to substantiate under questioning from Wolf Blitzer yesterday:

DELAY: Ronnie Earle has been district attorney in Travis County since 1976. In 1976 there were no Republicans — certainly no Republicans other than governor, and he didn’t get elected until ’78. There were no Republicans. The fights were between conservative Democrats and liberal Democrats. Ronnie Earle does this to all his political enemies. He did it to conservative Democrats. He did it — and he does it to Republicans. And particularly in my case, he did it in conjunction and working with the Democrat leadership here in Washington, D.C.

BLITZER: Well, that’s an explosive charge you make, that there was some sort of collusion or conspiracy between Ronnie Earle and Nancy Pelosi and other Democratic leaders in the Congress. What evidence, if any, do you have to back that up?

DELAY: It’s very good evidence, that they announced this strategy publicly, they put it on their website and this strategy is in their fund-raising letters.

BLITZER: Who specifically — who announced this?

DELAY: The DCCC, the Democratic Campaign Committee, run by Chairman Rahm Emanuel.

BLITZER: They announced that they were working with Ronnie Earle to get you an indictment?

DELAY: No, they didn’t do that.

BLITZER: What evidence is there they consulted with Ronnie Earle, that they talked to him or they had any dealings with him whatsoever?

DELAY: That evidence is coming. But the point is, they announced the strategy, and it’s very funny that two weeks ago, when Ronnie Earle said publicly that I was not part of the investigation, that I hadn’t been investigated, and then turns around in two days — over the weekend — he now is going to indict me. It is quite obvious, because the Democrats announced this strategy. And we all know how this place works. I’m sure they worked closely with Ronnie Earle on this strategy.

BLITZER: When is the evidence going to be made available? You say it’s coming. When are you going to make that evidence available?

DELAY: When it’s timely.

BLITZER: What does that mean?

DELAY: When it’s timely.

BLITZER: All right. Well, we’ll have to wait and see for that evidence.

In other news, DeLay later asked Pelosi when she stopped beating her husband.

Update 9/30: Jon Chait does a great job of explaining what DeLay represents in his LA Times today (via Kevin Drum).

The Wall Street Journal editorial page breaks down the Roberts confirmation vote:

John Roberts was sworn in yesterday as the 17th Chief Justice of the United States. No surprises there. The confirmation vote was 78-22, with all 55 Republicans, 22 Democrats, and Independent Jim Jeffords voting “aye.” He’ll take up his gavel on Monday, when the Supreme Court begins its 2005-2006 term.

As a snapshot of the state of the Democratic Party, the vote is instructive. It was mostly a red-blue split. Thirteen Senators from states that went for President Bush in 2004 were pro-Roberts, including the five who are up for re-election next year. As they cast their votes, we expect that Jeff Bingaman (N.M.), Robert Byrd (W. Va.), Kent Conrad (N.D.), Bill Nelson (Fla.) and Ben Nelson (Neb.) had visions of Tom Daschle dancing in their heads. The former Majority Leader lost his seat last year in part because South Dakotans objected to his obstruction of Mr. Bush’s judicial picks.

A very different calculation was apparently on the minds of the party’s likely 2008 Presidential hopefuls. The “no” votes included John Kerry, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, none of whom wanted to alienate the party’s energized left-wing base. Even ostensible “moderate” Evan Bayh, of Judge Roberts’s home state of Indiana, couldn’t bring himself to vote for a native son.

The honorable exception here was Wisconsin’s Russ Feingold, a liberal in most matters, but perhaps one who understands that if he ever would become President, he’d prefer to have his nominees treated by Republicans with more than a party-dictated dismissal.

The full roll call is here. Make sure to also see the prediction and analysis of the Roberts vote at Keith Poole’s Voteview.com.

Harvard’s Barry Burden has posted an interesting graphic tracking presidential and Congressional approval during Bush’s time as president:

In analyzing the data, he finds that presidential approval influences Congressional approval, but not the reverse. This result is based on only 56 months of data from one presidency, but it’s an interesting finding. The most obvious implication, of course, is that the same fundamentals — the economy and major foreign policy events — seem to drive both presidential and Congressional approval, a result that’s consistent with the findings presented in Erickson, MacKuen and Stimson’s The Macro Polity.

David Brooks:

Sometimes in my dark moments, I think [George W. Bush] is “The Manchurian Candidate” designed to discredit all the ideas I believe in.

David Frum:

This has been a very bad month for the Bush presidency, maybe the worst to date: Hurricane Katrina, bad news from Iraq and grumbling from within the president’s own party over spending and immigration…. [M]uch of the trouble is the president’s own fault. He chose to appoint Michael Brown to head the Federal Emergency Management Agency. He chose to spend lavishly on highways and farmers and a new prescription drug benefit at the same time as he was fighting a global war on terror. And of course it is he who remains the final decision-maker on national security….

[A]s one who… still critically supports him, I find the sudden surge of public disenchantment with Mr Bush very difficult to understand. If you were looking for a diligent manager of the office of the presidency, a close student of public policy, a careful balancer of risks and benefits – George W. Bush would never be your man. But is this news?…

In a 2003 book about Mr Bush, I offered this assessment of his personality: Mr Bush is “a good man who is not a weak man. He is impatient, quick to anger; sometimes glib, even dogmatic, often uncurious, and as a result ill-informed… 

Bruce Bartlett:

I testify as someone who is very disenchanted with his party’s fiscal policy since 2001. Unlike the other witnesses, I am less concerned about the deficit per se or about the size of the tax cuts enacted over the last five years. Rather, what really bothers me is the increase in spending and expansion of government that my party has been responsible for.

…Therefore, it bothers me a great deal when Republicans initiate new entitlement programs, massively expand pork-barrel spending, and show the most callous disregard for fiscal integrity. Not too many years ago, Ronald Reagan vetoed a politically popular highway bill because it contained 157 pork-barrel projects. The latest bill contained at least 5,000. Yet President Bush signed this $295 billion bill into law, despite having promised repeatedly to veto a bill larger than $256 billion.

For the life of me, I cannot understand why President Bush seems so incapable of using his veto pen. His father knew how to veto bills. He vetoed 29 of them in his four years in office. But in his first four-plus years, this President Bush has vetoed nothing. He is the first president since John Quincy Adams to serve a full term without vetoing anything.

(via Brad DeLong and Andrew Sullivan)

Update 9/28: Via the Bull Moose, here’s National Review in an editorial:

President Bush is in a perilous political state. His slipping poll numbers are partly a result of softening support from his Republican base. If Bush doesn’t take decisive steps to try to offset the billions of new Katrina spending, the forecast will be: Danger, more softening ahead. Never in the Bush years has conservative discontent been so high, nor so justified. With a few false moves in the crucial weeks ahead, Bush could see even more of the life-blood squeezed from his presidency.

Jacob Weisberg has written an annoying piece about fighting povery in the aftermath of Katrina that is straight out of Slate’s “everything you know is wrong!” handbook. Rather than fighting attempts to turn the disaster zone into a conservative utopia of low taxes and weak regulations, Weisberg says that liberals should go along with Bush:

[A]ll of us have a stake in an experiment that tells us whether conservative anti-poverty ideas, uh, work. If the conservative war on poverty succeeds, even in partial fashion, we will all be better for its success. And if it fails, we will have learned something important about how not to fight poverty.

Unfortunately, Ezra Klein’s Tapped post responding to Weisberg is an ugly mix of invective and know-nothingism:

[Weisberg’s] argument, basically, is that liberals should let conservatives do whatever they wish to New Orleans because America needs to figure out whether Republican solutions to poverty will succeed — and if they don’t, it’s because they’re scared the conservative plans will work. The people of New Orleans, we can only assume, will not be told they’re participating in an economic version of the Tuskegee experiments; we’ll just let them get buffeted about out of sheer respect for the scientific method. Testing hypotheses is much more important than a few thousand black folk.

Weisberg, bizarrely, seems to think a liberal unwillingness to make New Orleans into a Grover Norquist fantasyland stems from a fear that it’ll work. Au contraire, it stems from a fear that it won’t work, and that scores of poor people who just had their lives demolished will now be further punished by a regionally restricted Gilded Age. Liberals do not think this because they are afraid, they think this because they are liberals. If they did not believe conservative solutions would fail, they would be conservatives. And if either group, liberals or conservatives, are so unsure of their policies that they believe antithetical programs should be applied for the experimental value of it, they should really exit the debate with all possible speed — these are real people we’re talking about, they shouldn’t be subdivided into control groups and experiment zones.

Klein is of course correct that liberals should not support policies that they believe will fail solely as an experiment. But the rest of his argument is horribly misguided.

First, the comparison to the notorious Tuskegee experiments, in which poor African American men with syphillis were left untreated for years, is absurd. Presumably, conservatives are proposing measures that they believe will help people in the Gulf, not withholding proven medical treatments from people with a disease.

In addition, Klein’s argument that “these are real people we’re talking about, they shouldn’t be subdivided into control groups and experiment zones” is wrong-headed. It’s precisely because there are real people involved that we should study what social programs work scientifically, and experiments are by far the best way to do so. For instance, voucher experiments have shown that the gains made by participants are marginal at best. Presumably Klein is glad that we’ve conducted such tests rather than simply enacting vouchers wholesale.

To be sure, we don’t want to conduct experiments that seem likely to make people in the Gulf worse off. But there’s no reason we can’t carefully test various anti-poverty interventions that seem likely to help, and assess which ones give us the biggest bang for our buck. That’s how we can help “real people” most effectively.

According to the Washington Post, President Bush is “suddenly finds himself struggling to reclaim his swagger”:

Most of all, White House aides want to reestablish Bush’s swagger — the projection of competence and confidence in the White House that has carried the administration through tough times since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Bush likes to say his job is to make tough decisions and leave the hand-wringing for historians and pundits. He almost never entertains public doubt, which is part of the White House design to build a more powerful presidency…

He projects this in nonverbal ways as well, the arms-swinging gait of his walk, the glint in his glare, the college boy grin that flashes even in sober moments. Some advisers consider this supreme self-confidence a secret to Bush’s success enacting his first-term agenda and winning reelection in a tough political climate. It reinforced Bush’s image as a decisive leader, which was an important attribute in an election colored by the threat of terrorism, and helped calm congressional Republicans who disagreed with some of the president’s ideas but were won over by the force of his style.

The confidence was contagious, with White House officials and Republicans in Congress as certain as the president himself in what Bush was doing. But over the course of six months, a growing number of Republicans inside and out of the White House have noticed an administration less sure-footed and slower to react to the political environment surrounding them.

I’ll tell you where the swagger went — out the window when Bush’s approval ratings hit the low 40s. As I wrote, “Many of the tactics that worked when Bush was at 60 or 70 in the polls are a flop at 38 or 41.” From late 2001 to early 2004, Bush could swagger around and everyone, including the media, would eventually fall into line due to his high approval ratings. But now he doesn’t scare anyone except Republicans who fear losing their seats in 2006 and 2008.

I believe that much of what happens in Washington is driven by the president’s approval ratings, which are — in turn — largely driven by the state of the economy or major foreign policy events like 9/11. But instead of looking at those factors, we tell stories about swagger and charisma and political strategies, just as we do when we study presidential races. It’s mostly nonsense. Bush could have done almost anything after 9/11 and still had high approval ratings (in fact, he did — remember the school in Florida?). Bill Clinton would have probably won in 1996 even if Dick Morris hadn’t run his famous 1995 outside-the-Beltway ads. Etc. But since the press and the strategists want to believe that they are all powerful, they ignore political scientists and listen to each other instead.

This quote from yesterday’s New York Times story on the Dover intelligent design case made me crazy:

For Mrs. Hied, a meter reader, and her husband, Michael, an office manager for a local bus and transport company, the Dover school board’s argument – that teaching intelligent design is a free-speech issue – has a strong appeal.

“I think we as Americans, regardless of our beliefs, should be able to freely access information, because people fought and died for our freedoms,” Mrs. Hied said over a family dinner last week at their home, where the front door is decorated with a small bell and a plaque proclaiming, “Let Freedom Ring.”

Teaching intelligent design in a public school science class is not a matter of “freedom”! You can freely access information all you want, but that doesn’t mean that a religious perspective should be taught as science by the government. Why are conservative pundits spreading this stupid argument?

The ubiquitous Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia (a political scientist) has
released a new article that his staff has incongruously titled “Protect Ya Neck: The 2006 Races for Senate and Governor” — who knew Sabato was down with the Wu-Tang?