Global Warming hits Wisconsin

Oh there are, Harry, just a little further north.

Simple explanation

You people are such conspiracy theorists.

Actually, Madison, WI does have palm trees. After the last election, the state officially changed its form of government to banana republican, and you have to have palm trees in the capitol of a banana republic. It’s somewhere in the specs.

Krugman has posted an update: “This was apparently taken at a “solidarity” protest in Sacramento; and since Fox never said explicitly that it was in Wisconsin, technically you could argue that it wasn’t a lie (and for what it’s worth, I didn’t say it was). But it was, of course, an attempt to mislead.”

Meanwhile, Iowahawk takes on Krugman’s educational statistics for Wisconsin vs. Texas with a different set of statistics.

I don’t think Krugman was lying. But winning a Nobel Prize doesn’t necessarily mean that you think deeply.

Fortunately for Krugman, he does, in fact, think deeply. And, ah yes, Iowahawk’s explanation is that it’s because the South is full of all of those stupid black people.

Read Iowahawk’s piece, again Walt. and think again. “Not only did white Texas students outperform white Wisconsin students, the gap between white students and minority students in Texas was much less than the gap between white and minority students in Wisconsin. In other words, students are better off in Texas schools than in Wisconsin schools – especially minority students.”

As Tigerhawk notes, “in Paul Krugman’s ideological circles an assertion like Krugman’s would ordinarily get one accused of racism, unless of course one is Paul Krugman.”

Almost all of Iowahawk’s comparisons are so close that it’s hard to believe they’re statistically significant (and he doesn’t say), and if they are, the effect size is so tiny as to have little practical significance. Too bad he’s not content to say “after you control for class/race (pretty much the same thing), the result is actually a tie”, which would prove only that Texas is *poor* and therefore does badly at education regardless of the quality of its educational system. That would be a fair defense of Texas’s educational system, as far as it goes.

Of course, the fact that nonunionization produces worse test scores *through poverty* (rather than by destroying the educational system directly) isn’t that great a talking point for nonunionization. But at least you could say that focusing on the unionization of teachers specifically was pointless — it’s the whole workforce and population that needs to be brought out of poverty in order to bring the total scores in Texas up.

Calling the incident in Sacramento “union” violence is a lie, because no unions were involved. The confrontation occurred between members of the Tea Party and Moveon.org. Excusing FOX means ignoring the exchange O’Reilly had during the b-roll, which was concerned with Wisconsin and what that reporter observed there.

Comparing this with Krugman’s post on test scores is more than a little desperate. Quibbling over sample size is very different from fabricating evidence. And, on the evidence, Wisconsin still outperforms the five slave states in question in the ACT, as polifact shows, where participation is more comparable.

That would be attack on the Tea Party.

should read “two hot heads who can’t even agree with [each other about] what happened.”

Am I supposed to ask you what spitting in people’s mouths has to do with opposing unions? No, that would be stupid.

You’re right about my not knowing the details of the incident in Sacramento, JM. But I am still not real wild about Moveon.org/public union solidarity.

I find your determination to “hang the Tucson shootings on today’s Republicans” because of Loughner’s “redemptionist and sovereign-citizen movement concerns” pretty weak. He began to obsess on Gabrielle Giffords starting in 2007 (with a special resentment of her inability to address his concerns about “grammar”). He was also reported to be obsessed with the rather unusual 2007 anarchist/new age film Zeitgeist, which won an award at a progressive film festival. The Zeitgeist movement does look forward to a utopian, currency-free future, but the movie also includes Bill O’Reilly, Fox News, Capitalism and Christianity as villains and suggests that the U.S. Government was complicit in 9/11. Doesn’t sound real “mainstream” Republican to me.

Dudes. Chill. Goebbels would be distinctly unimpressed.

There is no violence in the video. A shove or two, a finger pointed in anger, some shouting, cops milling around, clumps of people acting bored. You know, like what happened in Wisconsin. Nothing in the clip says anything about “violence” anyway. BOR is blabbing about logistics the whole time.

Since the video was from a protest in explicit support of the union, you could even argue it was a “union” protest. But that’s just a quibble; I’ll grant that the video was wrongly captioned. And it was misleading in the sense that the events in the video didn’t happen in Wisconsin, where viewers would probably assume the video came from.

But to the extent that it is misleading, it is utterly harmless. That’s why there are “no laws about this”. You can’t say with any confidence that it was an intentional smear. You can’t even say it’s a smear, period. Some overworked backroom hack was confused by a filename while he was looking for a few seconds of stock footage for BOR to drone over.

Call me when Fox burns something down and blames it on you.

And :David-Wynn: Miller. How could I forget about him?

Seriously, KT, if you don’t want to be associated with these people, stop courting these people.

Which arguments are “unacceptable to Americans”?

P.S. Harry: I agree that it’s embarrassing not to have a clue why you’re at a protest.

Read Iowahawk’s piece, again Walt. and think again. “Not only did white Texas students outperform white Wisconsin students, the gap between white students and minority students in Texas was much less than the gap between white and minority students in Wisconsin. In other words, students are better off in Texas schools than in Wisconsin schools – especially minority students.”

As Tigerhawk notes, “in Paul Krugman’s ideological circles an assertion like Krugman’s would ordinarily get one accused of racism, unless of course one is Paul Krugman.”

Are you really having this much of a problem parsing sentences? The claim (by WI Republicans) was that it was those evuul teachers unions who were keeping the chidren’s down.

So the “Krugman” stats aren’t about saying that teacher’s unions are the best thing since wonderbread for children. They merely refute – and quite successfully, of course – the claim that they are bad for children.

Speaking of which, the idea that Krugman is saying that the teacher’s unions are good for kids is something that has come almost entirely out of yours and Iowahawk’s heads. In fact, I don’t see those unions mentioned anywhere in the column Iowahawk linked to, merely some (accurate) assertions about poverty and children. I find this sort of misreading bizarre.

ScentOfViolets: Are you filled with disdain that I quoted Tigerhawk instead of coming up with my own comment about the accusation of racism against Iowahawk, or what?

Iowahawk’s data made sense to me. But I’m not a statistician. So maybe I’m missing something.

So the “Krugman” stats aren’t about saying that teacher’s unions are the best thing since wonderbread for children. They merely refute – and quite successfully, of course – the claim that they are bad for children.

Except maybe for little black children.

Seriously, why don’t you send an e-mail to Iowahawk with your observations and report back? Or if that’s too intimidating, join the discussion in the comment section of the Tigerhawk post. Unless it’s beneath you to communicate with such people.

Fox News didn’t lie, they just deliberately misled their viewers. Well, I’m glad we cleared *that* up.

The only palm trees that are native to California are the little wispy ones out in 29 Palms. So, while they may not be a “liberal plant,” they are somebody’s plant, most likely a 19th century idea about what ought to have been there.

I checked the link that joe koss@43 provided, and it says Milroy “struggled with policy before they took him to the ground”.

I’m not sure what WKOW is trying to imply, there. Maybe that Milroy is having personal doubts about the policies he supports? Or that he was actually attempting to legislate, even though he said he was only there to get his clothes? Whatever, it’s obviously a sinister and extraordinarily dangerous effort to undermine either Milroy personally or the Democrats in general. It’s brilliantly subtle, too: there is zero possibility it will make any real difference whatsoever. Which is exactly why it’s so important! Those pernicious fuckers!

And of course WKOW can always claim it was just a typo. Those underhanded, vicious, stop-at-nothing fiends! If we don’t get an entire news cycle dedicated to this egregious instance of deliberate mass deception, that will be positive proof of a nationwide conspiracy among all news organizations. In a sane universe, they would all commit ritual suicide immediately, for shame at their betrayal of the public trust.

We’re through the looking-glass, people. Keep your powder dry.

@40 Did you bother to read the link on “little black children?” Obviously not because if you had, you’d have seen that reading proficiency in black children in Connecticut rose, yes, under dreaded union teachers.

The issue is not the union but, according to the article, poverty.

Or were you simply aiming for a gotcha?

That connection between test scores, ethnicity and poverty was one of Iowahawk’s original points, rrp. So are you suggesting that Wisconsin’s small black population is mired deeper in poverty, on average, than the black population of any other state, including the “slave state” (per another commenter) of Texas? Why would that be, since Krugman suggested that high-tax states like Wisconsin take much better care of children?

This is what the article I linked actually says about poverty: ” Although the NAEP results did show that student poverty correlated with lower reading scores, a greater factor was whether a student was African-American. . . .”

Didn’t you misrepresent the article just a little? Also from the article:

“State Sen. Lena Taylor (D-Milwaukee) added that generations of hopelessness and low expectations among black families in Wisconsin – especially in Milwaukee – have resulted in an education crisis that Wisconsinites must band together to solve.”

But, black kids at Montessori schools in Milwaukee were doing better. Might School Choice make a difference?

Meanwhile, Iowahawk answers critics of the original piece he wrote:

Hey, it’s been a fun two days based on a simple 30-minute study of educational statistics. As regards the effect of teacher collective bargaining on student learning, I wouldn’t call what I did conclusive; just pointing out the fallacy of aggregate statistical comparisons.

If you don’t like his data, there is a more definitive study cited at the end, plus a video which, even if you think collective bargaining for public unions is the only way to save the country, may lead you to consider the details of union rules.

Are you talking about my response to rrp’s suggestion that poor test scores among young black students in Wisconsin are based solely on their poverty, Harry? I don’t see that position as being based on “fine grained data and controls”. I believe that the statement of State Sen. Lena Taylor (D-Milwaukee) that “generations of hopelessness and low expectations among black families in Wisconsin – especially in Milwaukee – have resulted in an education crisis that Wisconsinites must band together to solve” has a lot of validity even though it is hard to quantify.

The big question is what leads to such “hopelessness and low expectations”? Why have blacks been more successful at moving into that middle class in the South than in Madison?

The entire point of Iowahawk’s original piece was that Krugman had failed to take into consideration “fine grained data and controls”. Krugman was coming to some interesting conclusions about the future destruction being sown in Texas by low taxes without taking into account much in the way of “fine grained data and controls”.

Concerning rrp’s triumphal statistics on rising test scores in Connecticut where teachers are unionized, I think that there are a variety of educational models which can successfully educate students. There are many liberal programs which work well for a while — sometimes even for decades — before falling into decline. Non-liberal programs also have a tendency to decline. But I believe that the rigidity of union rules often makes the decline of programs more destructive than would otherwise be the case.

My husband is a veteran unionized public employee. I would have gone nuts trying to understand what he was going through as his institution fell deeper and deeper into corruption if I had not read Barbarians to Bureaucrats. It notes that unions are typically logical responses to real problems with management, but points out how union/management relationships tend to become rigid and destructive over time. (This book is dated now, and is better at illuminating problems than at suggesting solutions in my opinion, but it helped me understand a lot about how the world works even outside the corporation).

I have a friend who is the principal of an elementary school with a unionized work force. This school system went through some very destructive political upheavals in the recent past which caused achievement to plunge from “distinguished school” status to among the lowest scores in the state. Scores are on their way up again. I’ve never heard her complain about the union. I have heard her complain about the State forcing her district to pay high-priced consultants to present fabulous new programs for which those consultants are never held accountable in any way. I am a big fan of local flexibility and creativity in programs executed by good people.