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Confusion | John Mueller | Cato Institute: Commentary: "DHS has "struggled" to identify a clear example in which a fusion center provided intelligence that helped disrupt a terrorist plot. And, when investigators looked at the four "success stories" touted by DHS, they were "unable to confirm" that the fusion centers' contributions were "as significant as DHS portrayed them; were unique to the intelligence and analytical work expected of fusion centers; or would not have occurred absent a fusion center.""
Thursday, October 11, 2012
What the Critics of Won't Back Down Don't Understand | Andrew J. Coulson | Cato Institute: Commentary
What the Critics of Won't Back Down Don't Understand | Andrew J. Coulson | Cato Institute: Commentary: "do a brilliant job teaching kids to read at your local public school and … the system treats you pretty much the same way as it does your least motivated, least effective colleague. Consequently, many of our brightest educational stars burn out and others leave the profession. Some are even pushed out.
Jaime Escalante, the brilliant public school math teacher celebrated by the 1988 movie Stand and Deliver, fell victim to a union-backed putsch. His offense? He couldn't bear to turn away kids, so his classes grew to 55 students. But the union had negotiated a 35-student limit, and Escalante's astonishing success undermined their bargaining position. So the union successfully campaigned to take away his chairmanship of Garfield High's math department.
Demoted and besieged by union opposition, Escalante left Garfield. At the height of his tenure, one out of every four Mexican Americans who passed Advanced Placement calculus nationwide attended Garfield High. After he left, the math program declined and has never recovered.
It's not surprising that the union found enough votes to oust Escalante. He expected excellence, and rising to meet his standards meant extra work for his colleagues — work for which the system offered none of the recognition or compensation that would accompany it in any other field. As Won't Back Down faithfully recounts, virtually all teachers do care about their students, but they're also human beings, and incentives matter.
Any system that ignores the performance of its workers and denies freedom of choice to its consumers is doomed to fail."
Jaime Escalante, the brilliant public school math teacher celebrated by the 1988 movie Stand and Deliver, fell victim to a union-backed putsch. His offense? He couldn't bear to turn away kids, so his classes grew to 55 students. But the union had negotiated a 35-student limit, and Escalante's astonishing success undermined their bargaining position. So the union successfully campaigned to take away his chairmanship of Garfield High's math department.
Demoted and besieged by union opposition, Escalante left Garfield. At the height of his tenure, one out of every four Mexican Americans who passed Advanced Placement calculus nationwide attended Garfield High. After he left, the math program declined and has never recovered.
It's not surprising that the union found enough votes to oust Escalante. He expected excellence, and rising to meet his standards meant extra work for his colleagues — work for which the system offered none of the recognition or compensation that would accompany it in any other field. As Won't Back Down faithfully recounts, virtually all teachers do care about their students, but they're also human beings, and incentives matter.
Any system that ignores the performance of its workers and denies freedom of choice to its consumers is doomed to fail."
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