Monday Open Thread
Welcome to your Monday open thread. So, the week starts anew. Lather, rinse repeat. What’s on the agenda this week?
I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry about this column from Fareed Zakaria. He’s apparently just now noticing that Republican policies are ideology-based and not reality-based.
Watching this election campaign, one wonders what has happened to that tradition. Conservatives now espouse ideas drawn from abstract principles with little regard to the realities of America’s present or past. This is a tragedy, because conservatism has an important role to play in modernizing the U.S.
Consider the debates over the economy. The Republican prescription is to cut taxes and slash government spending — then things will bounce back. Now, I would like to see lower rates in the context of tax simplification and reform, but what is the evidence that tax cuts are the best path to revive the U.S. economy? Taxes — federal and state combined — as a percentage of GDP are at their lowest level since 1950. The U.S. is among the lowest taxed of the big industrial economies. So the case that America is grinding to a halt because of high taxation is not based on facts but is simply a theoretical assertion. The rich countries that are in the best shape right now, with strong growth and low unemployment, are ones like Germany and Denmark, neither one characterized by low taxes.
Hey, it’s better late than never. Maybe having a pundit other than Paul Krugman saying it will make it stick.
If you haven’t read it yet, I highly recommend this piece by the New York Times on Clarence Thomas and his ongoing ethics problems. The latest revelations are about a very wealthy friend of Thomas who is doing favors for Thomas. Of course, cases of interest to the donor, Harlan Crow, have come before Thomas in the Supreme Court with no recusals by Thomas.
The two men met in the mid-1990s, a few years after Justice Thomas joined the court. Since then, Mr. Crow has done many favors for the justice and his wife, Virginia, helping finance a Savannah library project dedicated to Justice Thomas, presenting him with a Bible that belonged to Frederick Douglass and reportedly providing $500,000 for Ms. Thomas to start a Tea Party-related group. They have also spent time together at gatherings of prominent Republicans and businesspeople at Mr. Crow’s Adirondacks estate and his camp in East Texas.
In several instances, news reports of Mr. Crow’s largess provoked controversy and questions, adding fuel to a rising debate about Supreme Court ethics. But Mr. Crow’s financing of the museum, his largest such act of generosity, previously unreported, raises the sharpest questions yet — both about Justice Thomas’s extrajudicial activities and about the extent to which the justices should remain exempt from the code of conduct for federal judges.
Imagine that, the Supreme Court has decided it’s exempt from the ethics rules that bind other judges. Think Progress points out that other judges have had to resign for similar conflcts, most notably Abe Fortas. Time will only tell if the increased scrutiny will stick to Thomas, but he has proven to be pretty resilient in the past.
Tags: Open Thread
RTTT Technology Update
While everyone was busy talking about charter schools, a team from the US Department of Education quietly slipped in and out of town for a routine visit to evaluate Delaware’s RTTT progress. Their report is due in the fall.
Which is an interesting subject (for some of us anyway). You may recall a few months ago I posted about two technology RFPs for Delaware’s new RTTT data systems (Education Insight Project). It turns out those RFPs which were supposed to have been awarded in March have still not been awarded (or at least the winning vendors have not been announced). This is a problem, for reasons I will describe below. If you are a project management geek, or just interested in RTTT, you might want to take a look at these projects and deadlines.
One of those RFPS (Longitudinal Data Warehouse) is to design and build the underlying technology for Delaware’s new data-driven approach to education reform. The Data Warehouse is due to be completed this August, according to the March 15 amendment filed with US Ed. With the vendor presumably not yet engaged, any project manager would feel his or her Spidey-sense tingling at this timeline. It’s not just about hacking together a system – the RFP specifies the vendor will perform or participate in requirements and design work before setting out to build the system.
In fact, I’ll go out on a limb and say that if the project isn’t started, it is now too late, without another amendment. I did contact DDOE to ask about this, but have not heard back. If they really are in negotiations with vendors, there’s not much they are allowed to say anyway.
After August the deadlines keep coming. The vendor for the second RFP (for “Dashboards”) has also not been announced. But the first Dashboard is due in March 2012, and work depends on the Data Warehouse being complete (although some design work can likely begin sooner).
All that in itself is not so bad. Major technology projects are rarely finished without slippage, and it is normal to make midstream adjustments and rescheduling.
But meanwhile, the Wireless Generation data coaches are already out in the field, according to the March 15 amendment. So are a handful of Development Coaches (that job was won for $3 million by the University of Delaware).
So if the new systems aren’t built yet, what exactly are they coaching on? RTTT funds the data coaches for three years, and the clock has started ticking. But the bulk of the new data systems are scheduled to be deployed midway through that three years.
In other words, we are already burning through the coaching engagements before we have even identified or implemented the new metrics they are supposed to be coaching on.
So perhaps they are coaching on current data systems and metrics. Delaware’s current school data systems are pretty good, very good actually, but they are not “longitudinal.” Longitudinal basically means that students and other system-wide data is tracked over years and can be meaningfully analyzed for trends and indicators. Also new metrics are supposed to be introduced in the new system.
So once the new systems and metrics are delivered, will we start coaching all over again? Will anybody go uncoached? How much funding will be left to coach on the new metrics and systems?
The Dashboards RFP describes an expert roundtable where the underlying educational metrics for the new system will be developed. That RFP also has not been awarded, so presumably that roundtable has not yet taken place. So what metrics will be used for the system due in August?
Another possibility of course is that in order to meet deadlines, a lot of the consultation with stakeholders specified in the RFPs will simply be discarded, and an off-the-shelf design will be fast-tracked (Texas, anybody?). I am personally still enthusiastic about the technology and the new access to data it will provide – as long as we follow the process described in the RFPs, and don’t take shortcuts on stakeholder input.
Update: As of today, an amendment dated May 24 was in fact released on the US Ed website, but it does not address the technology project deadlines.
Being a Republican, all he has to do is not quit.
I love the HuffPo headline: “Bristol Palin Lost Virginity While Drunk”
Yeah, and? I’m guessing a large portion of the American population did the same.