Links to Consider, 10/17
Roland Fryer talks with Russ Roberts; Eugene Volokh on Yale Law; Matt Shapiro on the vaccine approval steamroller; Snyder vs. Cummings on Ukraine;
In a podcast with Russ Roberts, Roland Fryer offers five characteristics of schools that make a difference. One of them:
putting kids in small groups. I guess it's okay to say 'tutoring,' now, because it's back in vogue. So, when schools that were effective put kids in groups of six or less, four or more days per year.
Now, this is a big important concept, because it has to be high-dosage tutoring. Tutoring for four hours a year is going to get you what you expect; not a lot, okay? It has to be high dosage. Tutoring is in vogue, but people don't want the high dosage part of it. You have to really spend the time to catch up.
Yale Law school sent a letter to alumni describing steps it is taking to promote freedom of speech. Eugene Volokh quotes from the letter, including this interesting item:
We welcomed a new Dean of Students who is focused on ensuring students learn to resolve disagreements among themselves whenever possible rather than reflexively looking to the institution to serve as a referee.
On an elementary school playground, the boys will run off and organize a game where they discuss and enforce the rules themselves. The girls will hang around close to a teacher so that they have an authority figure nearby.
Participants suggested that the CDC recommendation be altered to recommend this only for people over 50. They were told that the wording around age recommendations could not be changed without causing substantial legal problems related to the EUA.
The participants were a committee of doctors acting as advisers in the process. It seems that they were railroaded into approving a recommendation that they did not actually approve.
Timothy Snyder makes the case for siding with Ukraine.
we don't have to worry about the kinds of things we tend to worry about, like how Putin is feeling about the war, and whether Russians will be upset about losing. During an internal struggle for power in Russia, Putin and other Russians will have other things on their minds, and the war will give way to those more pressing concerns. Sometimes you change the subject, and sometimes the subject changes you.
He says that Putin has nothing to gain by using a nuke, and we have everything to lose by caving into nuclear blackmail. The more he loses the war, the more he will realize that he needs to withdraw troops in order to keep hold on power at home.
Tulsi Gabbard must think that Snyder is a Raytheon stooge.
On the other hand Dominic Cummings writes,
Hoping Putin leaves UKR and is replaced by an AOC-lookalike is no more a plan than the ‘pandemic plan’ published in March 2020 was an actual plan. Remember how that worked out for us? Faced with mass death we had to ditch it and get an ‘actual plan’ as we put it to Boris on Saturday 14 March.
Do you think that the stable deep state geniuses who gave us Iraq and the Afghan debacle last year are going to execute a brilliant plan for regime change in Russia?
"He says that Putin has nothing to gain by using a nuke, and we have everything to lose by caving into nuclear blackmail."
The situation is asymmetric- and always was. We, the West, have far more to lose than do the Russians, the Iranians, the North Koreans, etc. Play it out- Putin begins to lose in a rout and nukes Kiev, and promises to nuke Berlin, Warsaw, Paris, London, and Rome. What would we do in response? Would we really start a tit for tat nuclear exchange? What I find fascinating is this- people who whole-heartedly want to support Ukraine with weapons and air support are far more likely to describe Putin as a madman bent of reestablishing the USSR than not, but when critics of the present policy point out how all of this brings us closer to Armageddon, the war supporters suddenly revert to saying Putin isn't a madman at all and would never use a nuclear weapon- so, which is it, madman or not?
The two sides should have been brought to the table for a cease fire 6 months ago. That there have been no efforts to reach a cease fire is a moral indictment of our leadership in the West.
As for the public schools- there is no hope at improving them. Yes, intensive tutoring is the way to go, but it will never happen in the public school realm- they are beyond repair and reform. To institute it at the public school level, the schools would request vast increases in budget and employment (see Hutcheson below for the flavor), and then the money would be spent hiring another layer of incompetent teachers and admin with even higher salaries and benefits to only end up in exactly the same place.
The only way forward is for the parents to continue removing their children from these schools and placing them in private schools, or homeschooling them.