Category Archives: culture

Government-Funded Pre-K Schooling

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Vanderbilt University has a longitudinal study of the effects of such a program on children’s academic success through the 6th grade.

Researchers at Vanderbilt University have been running a long-term study on Tennessee’s state pre-K program, following 2,990 low-income children. The program was oversubscribed, so researchers followed applicants who ended up in a program versus those who were turned away. This means all the children had parents motivated to sign them up for pre-K, which makes for a statistically appropriate control group.

The researchers found, in sum,

[C]hildren randomly assigned to attend pre-K had lower state achievement test scores in third through sixth grades than control children, with the strongest negative effects in sixth grade.
…
A negative effect was also found for disciplinary infractions, attendance, and receipt of special education services, with null effects on retention.

In a spate of academic integrity, the researchers also wrote,

…no distinctive characteristics of the Tennessee program have yet been identified that are a likely explanation for the disappointing findings.

The Wall Street Journal offered one possible explanation:

One theory worth a hearing is that these programs expose children to more rigid academic settings before it is developmentally appropriate.

I offer another possibility, one that is not at odds with the WSJ‘s. It may be that the parents of children who got into the Pre-K program, thinking their children’s future is secured, relaxed their close and constant oversight of their children’s schooling, performance, execution of homework, and so on relative to that of the parents whose children didn’t get in. That parental oversight and supervision also is a Critical Item in children’s academic performance, especially in those first years of school.

Either possibility, especially in combination with the study’s outcome, suggests that, particularly from the Federal level, government funding of grade school programs is at best a waste of taxpayer money.

The study itself can be found behind this paywall.

Investing in the PRC

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Some pundits are suggesting that the way in which the People’s Republic of China handles real estate company Evergrande’s default will say a lot about the utility of investing inside the PRC. The Wall Street Journal even is asking whether foreign investors are second class citizens “now.”

Last things first: foreign investors always have been second class citizens in the PRC. They’ve only recently been “allowed” to become equal partners or majority holders in established PRC companies being newly invested in or in enterprises being newly formed. It’s still the case, too, that as a condition of doing business inside the PRC, foreign companies must “share” intellectual and technology properties with their partners, and they must permit the PRC government to install back doors into those foreign partners’ primary software.

It’s also the relatively new case that, under the 2017 National Intelligence Law, companies must divulge any and all information that the PRC’s intelligence community requests.

Still, the Evergrande outcome will be informative.

Who is still standing when the dust clears will say a lot about the future of China as a place to invest more generally.

In particular, resolving this misconception will be informative:

Oaktree Capital has moved to seize a large chunk of Evergrande’s Hong Kong property, worth an estimated $1 billion, against a secured loan now in default—a property which could have potentially served an important role in Evergrande’s general offshore debt restructuring.

With the Xi Jinping government having, over the last couple of years, phagocyticly absorbed Hong Kong into the mainland body politic, that city no longer is offshore. Whether Oaktree will be permitted to seize that Hong Kong property is an open question, and a question subsequent to a permitted seizure will be the limits the PRC imposes on Oaktree’s disposition of that property.

I’m not sanguine.

ADL and Racism

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Luca Cacciatore has caught the before and after of the Anti-Defamation League’s attempted redefinition of racism. Here’s ADL’s original definition:

Here’s the ADL’s “revised” definition:

They’ve gone from a balanced definition that identifies the misbehavior in all races to one that makes it impossible for anyone other than a particular race to commit racism.

For a little bit of context, here’s the definition of racism according to The American Heritage dictionary:

1. The belief that race accounts for differences in human character or ability and that a particular race is superior to others.
2. Discrimination or prejudice based on race.

Far from fighting hate for good—that so Precious slogan at the bottom of their logo—the Anti-Defamation League’s personnel, with this Orwellian redefinition, shows how just good they are at hating and generating hate.

A Party’s Legacy

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David Marcus had a piece in Thursday’s Fox News regarding the Progressive-Democratic Party’s (Marcus still calls Party by its legacy name, Democratic Party) move as far Left as it has gone.  He posited two reasons for Party’s behavior.

The first is that by focusing their energy on the nation’s big cities, progressive Democrats can gain cultural power. While radical agendas on welfare, gender, and education, to name a few, may play better in New York and Los Angeles than in the heartland, it is reasonable to believe that controlling politics in urban centers will influence television, movies and news in ways that will eventually spread, especially to younger voters.

And

[A] second reason may be that the far left sees more benefit than harm in a shellacking for their party in the midterms. After all, the Democrats who will be swept out of office are not the progressives, but the moderates. By losing this election, the former can gain institutional power in the party, possibly for a generation.

There’s a third explanation, too, that’s corroborated by the Progressive-Democrats’ behavior with Obamacare. This third reason also dovetails nicely with Marcus’ second reason. Since the last election, Progressive-Democrats have had control of both houses of Congress and the White House. With that, even with the slimness of their control, they’ve decided to go for it all and get their far Left (relative to the American political spectrum but center Left relative to Party) transformational, fundamentally socialist agenda enacted. They know that if they can get it rammed through, their policies won’t be repealed, even if they’re badly whipped in the next election. Just as with Obamacare.

Inadequate

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Co-President Joe Biden-Kamala Harris are having trouble getting much of their political and (pseudo-)economic agenda passed. (Aside: failure isn’t a done deal; it would behoove the pundits on the right side of center to stop their crowing and predictions of landslide Republican elections in November.)

That’s not a failure of the agenda or of Biden-Harris or of Party managers in the House and Senate, though.

Not at all, insisted Paul Begala.

I think the problem for the Democrats right now is not that they have bad leaders. They have bad followers, okay?

And

In other words, those of us who want to say voting rights– we need to get to work. I do think Biden is putting everything behind this. But he needs– he needs better followers….

This is an example of the contempt Progressive-Democrats have had for us Americans all along. Here is Herb Croly, one of the founders of the modern Progressive movement that has evolved the Democratic Party into its current form as the Progressive-Democratic Party:

But the fault in that case lies with the democratic tradition; and the erroneous and misleading tradition must yield before the march of a constructive national democracy. The national advance will always be impeded by these misleading and erroneous ideas, and, what is more, it always should be impeded by them, because at bottom ideas of this kind are merely an expression of the fact that the average American individual is morally and intellectually inadequate to a serious and consistent conception of his responsibilities as a democrat.