Friday, March 21, 2014

Barker's Newsbites: Friday, March 21, 2014


Don't ya just LOVE that first sip of coffee in the morning...?
(*SIGH OF TOTAL CONTENTMENT*)

 And, now... onto newsbites!

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5 comments:

William R. Barker said...

http://washingtonexaminer.com/navy-database-tracks-civilians-parking-tickets-fender-benders-raising-fears-of-domestic-spying/article/2546038

A parking ticket, traffic citation or involvement in a minor fender-bender are enough to get a person's name and other personal information logged into a massive, obscure federal database run by the U.S. military.

The Law Enforcement Information Exchange, or LinX, has already amassed 506.3 million law enforcement records ranging from criminal histories and arrest reports to field information cards filled out by cops on the beat even when no crime has occurred.

LinX is a national information-sharing hub for federal, state and local law enforcement agencies. It is run by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, raising concerns among some military law experts that putting such detailed data about ordinary citizens in the hands of military officials crosses the line that generally prohibits the armed forces from conducting civilian law enforcement operations.

Eugene Fidell, who teaches military law at Yale Law School, called LinX “domestic spying.”

* NOTE GOOD, FOLKS... NOT GOOD...

March 21, 2014 at 10:34 AM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/20/us/politics/racing-to-deadline-white-house-plays-to-young-in-health-care-push.html?_r=1

From January until the end of March, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which runs the HealthCare.gov site and administers the Affordable Care Act, will have spent $52 million on paid media, officials said.

March 21, 2014 at 10:43 AM
William R. Barker said...

http://tampa.cbslocal.com/2014/03/20/woman-paid-for-2-health-care-plans-after-trouble-disenrolling-from-obamacare/

A Florida woman had to pay for two health care plans after she had trouble disenrolling from ObamaCare.

(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)

Melissa Battles tells WOFL-TV that she originally signed up through HealthCare.gov for insurance for herself and her autistic son. “I enrolled online and it is very convoluted and takes a very long time to enroll,” Battles explained.

After getting a full-time job with benefits, Battles went to disenroll from the ObamaCare insurance she purchased through HealthCare.gov. But trying to disenroll from Obamacare turned out to be a full-time job in itself. “The first person I spoke with after being on hold for 49 minutes couldn’t do anything and they had to refer me to a specialist, who still couldn’t do anything,” Battles said. “They had to refer me to an event resolution center. There was no email address, there’s no direct number to the event resolution center, only the main 800 number. And there’s no mailing address to file any type of grievance or complaint about how it’s handled.”

(*SMIRK*)

By the time it took her to finally disenroll from ObamaCare, she was already paying for both health plans. “I was blown away that they had not thought forward enough to realize that people are going to disenroll,” she told WOFL. “This is going to be a common practice.”

Health and Human Services officials said more than 442,000 Floridians have signed up for plans since October.

* AND HOW MANY HAVE ACTUALLY PAID...??? (NO... NOT A WISEASS QUESTION; GOOGLE IT!)

That’s not far from the Obama administration’s target goal of 477,000 for the end of March and surpasses the 381,600 goal for the end of February.

* WHAT'S FEBRUARY HAVE TO DO WITH ANYTHING...??? (SEE WHAT I MEAN ABOUT THE MSM, FOLKS?!) WANNA BET THE FEB NUMBERS DIDN'T MEET THE FEB GOALS?

(*ANOTHER SMIRK*)

A dozen other states, including California, are also on track.

* LAST TIME I CHECKED... 50 STARS ON THE FLAG... REPRESENTING 50 STATES... (AGAIN, FOLKS... SUBTLE ATTEMPT AT PRO-OBAMA SPIN... BUT PRO-OBAMA SPIN NEVERTHELESS.)

The administration refused to directly say whether they thought they’d reach their soft target of 6 million enrollees by March 31.

* "SOFT TARGET...?!?!" (WASN'T THE "REAL" TARGET OVER 7 MILLION...???) (AGAIN... FOLKS... NOTICE HOW THE REPORTER/EDITOR ATTEMPTS TO SPIN THE STORY...)

Instead, health officials said they expected a surge in enrollment with millions more Americans signing up in the next few weeks. The 6 million figure comes after the Congressional Budget Office scaled back its original target of 7 million because of ongoing problems with the federal website.

* OH... THEY... er... "SCALED BACK." THEREFORE IT DOESN'T COUNT...???

(*GUFFAW*)

Nationwide, 4.2 million signed up for private coverage under President Barack Obama’s health care law, according to data from federal health officials. But with open enrollment ending March 31, that means to meet the goal, another 1.8 million people would have to sign up by the end of the month, an average of about 60,000 a day.

* FOLKS... THE "GOAL" REMAINS WHAT WAS PROMISED - AND WHAT WAS PROMISED WAS OVER 7 MILLION SIGN-UPS. (FOLKS... UNDERSTAND... THE FINANCIAL VIABILITY TO THE LAW WAS PREDICATED UPON THE PHONY STATS THEY CAME UP WITH! THE WHOLE MARKETING CAMPAIGN FOR OBAMACARE WAS FRAUDULENT. PERIOD!)

March 21, 2014 at 11:01 AM
William R. Barker said...

* TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)

http://www.realclearpolicy.com/blog/2014/03/21/pre-k_not_so_empirically_validated_883.html

Today the unenviable task of opposing publicly funded schooling for the littlest Americans falls to me.

* THE "ME" HERE BEING: Neal McCluskey, associate director of the Cato Institute's Center for Educational Freedom.

As the Brookings Institution's Grover "Russ" Whitehurst has been working feverishly to communicate, we simply do not have a good base of top-flight research - studies in which children are randomly assigned to large preschool programs - on which to conclude that public pre-K works.

Most assertions about its effectiveness, such as President Obama's 2013 State of the Union claim that "every dollar we invest in high-quality early education can save more than seven dollars later on," are based primarily on two programs: Perry Preschool of the 1960s, and Abecedarian of the 1970s. Both treated fewer than 60 children, were very expensive, and were staffed by people highly motivated to prove their programs' worth.

Those programs did undergo random-assignment evaluations (though with some important randomization problems) and have shown lasting benefits, but taking such tiny efforts to a much greater scale would be highly treacherous. As California discovered when it tried - and failed - to replicate class-size reduction results from the relatively small Tennessee STAR program, scaling presents big challenges such as getting enough good teachers to staff all the new positions.

(*NOD*)

Or consider Head Start and Early Head Start, federal early childhood programs that have undergone random-assignment scrutiny. They have demonstrated very few lasting benefits, and some negative effects.

(To be fair, Salins argues that Head Start "was never designed to be a true preschool program," but is instead "a well-meaning daycare program.")

Preschool supporters argue that, unlike Head Start, undertakings such as the Abbott program in New Jersey, or Oklahoma's pre-K program, have demonstrated success. But in terms of methodology, research on these programs has often employed "regression discontinuity design" instead of random assignment.

* FOLKS... I KNOW YOUR EYES ARE GLAZING OVER... BUT THE DETAILS MATTER!

(RDD tries to control for differences among children by comparing test scores of similarly aged kids who just missed, and just made, the age cutoff for pre-K. There are several problems with this approach, including that a child who won't enter pre-K for another year will naturally be treated differently by his or her parents than a child in pre-K, and that it is hard to adjust for kids who dropped out of preschool.)

A recent study of Tennessee's pre-K program did use random assignment, and the program includes many "high-quality" hallmarks such as small adult-student ratios, a state approved curriculum, etc. What did the study find? No cognitive benefits by the end of first-grade, and fairly small non-cognitive benefits.

(*SHRUG*)

Perhaps because of its weak findings, Salins doesn't spend much time on the U.S. research, focusing more on the conclusion of Core Knowledge founder E.D. Hirsch that, as demonstrated by preschool in France, broad programs can work.

* THIS... ISN'T... FRANCE...!!! (AND BTW... HOW'S THAT FRENCH PRESCHOOL ED WORKING OUT FOR FRANCE'S MUSLIM POPULATION... FOR THEIR IMMIGRANT POPULATION... FOR THEIR POOR...???

* TO BE CONTINUED...

March 21, 2014 at 11:46 AM
William R. Barker said...

* CONCLUDING... (Part 2 of 2)

Salins does not provide a citation in his piece, but the relevant paragraphs from his book (83-84) are available online. He writes that "numerous evaluations" have verified the value of French preschool, but the only research directly cited is a 1992 survey by the French government - presumably this is the same study that Hirsch himself summarizes in English here. It's a non-random-assignment study that examined the effect of starting preschool at age two rather than three. If that is the main French support for pre-K, it is weak sauce.

Neither Salins nor Hirsch, however, seems to endorse pre-K in general; instead, they advocate pre-K with a particular curricular emphasis. As Salins makes clear, France's program is thought to be effective because, in addition to having "well-trained teachers" and "good facilities," it offers "rigorous cultural-literacy content."

* WHEREAS HERE IN AMERICA THE LIBERAL/PROGRESSIVE EDUCATIONAL ESTABLISHMENT WOULD WANT TO PURSUE THE EXACT OPPOSITE!

(And Hirsch himself has deemed the education establishment a "thoughtworld" that freezes out cultural literacy programs such as Core Knowledge.)

Which brings me to perhaps the primary reason preschool programs don't seem to deliver the goods: Government can't make providers furnish "high quality."

Unlike the accountability that comes when customers use their own money to pay for a service, government provision often ends up working for service providers, not supposed beneficiaries. It is the providers who get the most direct benefit - a livelihood - from pre-K programs, so they are the most involved in pre-K politics. And like anyone, their natural incentive is not to be held accountable for their performance.

This has been a serious problem in Head Start, which for years suffered poor oversight of centers that kept their grants come hell or high water. There are efforts underway to fix that, but as Salins himself points out, in education we have spent "billions of dollars on a broad array of hopeful sounding initiatives, but they have had little in the way of academic gains to show for it."

It is likely that the same impotence would be demonstrated in efforts along the lines that Salins proposes: school districts extending "their educational ladder by two years below kindergarten." While people can be too quick to blame schools for results that are largely a function of outside influences, it seems a triumph of hope over experience to think that districts that have shown no ability to help kids at the K-12 level will succeed with even younger children.

* BOTTOM LINE...

[W]hat we actually know about public, pre-K programs: There is little evidence they work.

March 21, 2014 at 11:46 AM

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