Catching up with the FITS, no. 3
The Washington Post wrote that “D.C. Teacher Evaluation System Has Academic Benefits, But Is Racially Biased, New Study Finds.”
Did the study actually find that? I don’t think that it did, and the ability of these findings to generate that conclusion is an instance I think of how pure gap-ism can lead to bad analysis and potentially bad policy.
You can guess what the “racial bias” is, but read Matt’s whole piece.
Richard Hanania is not impressed with the kibitzers criticizing the Afghanistan withdrawal.
People say it’s been handled poorly (see my thread here), but they do not know what the counterfactual is, and these arguments should be mostly seen as propaganda to either get the US back into the war or send a message to any future president who wants to defy the media and the generals that they’re going to make his life miserable.
The essay includes more stinging prose.
Emily Oster has a new book, The Family Firm. I never took any parenting advice when my daughters were growing up, and I don’t think I would take any now, much as I respect Ms. Oster. My line about being a parent was that if my daughters reached the age of 18 not on drugs and not having had a pregnancy, I would be happy with my parental achievements. Everyone to whom I said this was appalled by the low bar that I set. But my goal was reached, and now that I have grandchildren, my new line is “I feel like I’ve won at life.”
Speaking of parenting, Scott Alexander received some testimonials from folks who missed out on at least some public school and are not unhappy about it. Not a representative sample, of course, but with the public school system caught up in drama over Critical Race Theory, it’s comforting to think that one can do without it.
Yascha Mounk has a long interview with Eric Edelman, a never-Trump Republican. Edelman says,
But there are, unfortunately, all too many members in both the House and the Senate who will either maintain a judicious silence in the face of this vociferous element of the party, which I would say probably is in the vicinity of 40% of Republican voters. So it's not trivial.
I do think it will be a decade at least before the party can exorcise itself of these forces. In the first instance, what has to happen is that Republicans like [Representatives] Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger need to win their primaries and get reelected to office. That's not a given. Then I think the Republicans have to go through some cycles losing elections.
Here and elsewhere in the interview, Mounk lets Edelman make these sorts of pronouncements without asking the necessary Devil’s Advocate questions. Where does Edelman want the “vociferous element” of the Republican Party to go? Baseball teams have found a way to succeed by “tanking:” trading away core players for prospects, losing badly for a while, and then rebuilding as the younger players mature. But where are the “prospects” that the Republicans would get in the process of tanking?