Category: Education

Deja Vu

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Congress is looking at declaring pizza a vegetable:

The Obama administration’s push to limit the starchy vegetables and tomato paste served to millions of children at school each day was derailed by lawmakers this week, in effect enabling school cafeterias to continue offering pizza and french fries.

………

The proposal also would have nixed the favorable treatment granted to tomato paste. Currently, an eighth of a cup of tomato paste is credited with as much nutritional value as half a cup of vegetables and thus counts as one vegetable serving. That enables food makers to better market their pizzas to schools.

………

Ordinarily, these type of issues would be hashed out as the USDA gathers comments from the public while finalizing the proposal. But several lawmakers made an end run around the process. They added amendments to block the two changes, on starchy vegetables and tomato paste, to agriculture spending bills moving through the Senate and House.

Late Monday, Senate and House negotiators reconciled the differences between their two spending bills and unveiled the final version, which included language to halt the potato and tomato paste changes.

Just like Ronald Reagan declaring ketchup, but the tomato(e)* is a fruit.

I’m expecting to see a Mr. Fusion powered DeLorean back on the big screen.

*It’s an homage to J. Danforth Quayle, who has more brains and common sense than any of the current ‘Phant hopefuls.

Some Insights into the Greek Debt Crisis

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First, it appears that George Papandreou’s suggestion as to a referendum scared the hell out of the (Conservative New Democracy Party) to the degree that it has forced them to support the bailout, which they had maintained for political advantage.

So I’m beginning to wonder if this was a ploy to defuse the opposition’s well ……… opposition ……… to the debt deal.

The other thing that I find interesting is that both Greek PM George Papandreou and opposition leader Antonis Samaras were roommates in college, specifically at Amherst College, in Massachusetts.

They, like many other world leaders (Benazir Bhutto, Radcliffe ’73, and Mikheil Saakashvili, Columbia George Washington University, come to mind) are the sons and daughters of their countries elites and products of the American post-secondary education, where they hang with the future Wall Street banksters and multinational executives.

It comes as no surprise then that they support the neo-colonial policies that devastate their countries, because they have been thoroughly inculcated in the belief systems of their de facto colonizers, and so for a (small) slice of what is extracted from their countries, they mortgage their countrymen’s futures.

It’s not limited to US Colleges, we find similar things with other leaders and Oxbridge in the UK, particularly amongst former British possessions in Africa.  (See Mugabe, Robert)

So what these countries are left with are battles between two groups of willing participants in the raping of their countries who are just fighting for the spoils.

It’s no wonder that people are drawn to populists like Hugo Chavez, who are little more than punks.

I’m beginning to think that our current international norms for finance and economics are about as effective in making the world better as leeches and bleeding were for syphilis.

I Didn’t Know that Moose Went to UMass

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Because this story brings back some memories:

A man in western Sweden came home from work Tuesday night to find a drunken moose stuck in his neighbor’s tree.

The moose had apparently climbed part way up into the tree to reach an apple where it became stuck with only one hoof on the ground and the other three up in the tree, tangled in the limbs and branches of the tree.

When Per Johansson arrived home from work, he told reporters that he heard a bellowing noise coming from his neighbor’s yard.

I don’t think that I ever got that drunk at UMass, I was medically prohibited from drinking during my sojourn there, but I certainly dealt with people who were that drunk.

H/t Littledog at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

Michelle Rhee Gets Called Out By NY Times

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It seems that the Gray Lady has noticed Michelle Rhee is frantically avoiding any discussion of the cheating that occurred under her watch as Chancellor for the DC Schools:

Eager for Spotlight, but Not if It Is on a Testing Scandal
By MICHAEL WINERIP

WASHINGTON — Why won’t Michelle Rhee talk to USA Today?

Ms. Rhee, the chancellor of the Washington public schools from 2007 to 2010, is the national symbol of the data-driven, take-no-prisoners education reform movement.

It’s hard to find a media outlet, big or small, that she hasn’t talked to. She’s been interviewed by Katie Couric, Tom Brokaw and Oprah Winfrey. She’s been featured on a Time magazine cover holding a broom (to sweep away bad teachers). She was one of the stars of the documentary “Waiting for Superman.”

These days, as director of an advocacy group she founded, StudentsFirst, she crisscrosses the country pushing her education politics: she’s for vouchers and charter schools, against tenure, for teachers, but against their unions.

Always, she preens for the cameras. Early in her chancellorship, she was trailed for a story by the education correspondent of “PBS NewsHour,” John Merrow.

At one point, Ms. Rhee asked if his crew wanted to watch her fire a principal. “We were totally stunned,” Mr. Merrow said.

She let them set up the camera behind the principal and videotape the entire firing. “The principal seemed dazed,” said Mr. Merrow. “I’ve been reporting 35 years and never seen anything like it.”

And yet, as voracious as she is for the media spotlight, Ms. Rhee will not talk to USA Today.

So the press is beginning to notice that the publicity hound is avoiding them.

Perhaps they should look more closely at her stories, because even a cursory examination of her record reveals that she consciously juiced those numbers through her official actions:

This conclusion is premature. A review of the record shows that Michelle Rhee’s test score “legacy” is an open question.

There are three main points to consider:

  • First, (by Rhee’s own admission) two simple policy changes enacted in 2007 were made, in part, to generate artificial test score gains during her first year (when roughly 75 percent of the DC-CAS increases occurred).
  • Second, the district’s DC-CAS test was introduced in 2006, and a year or two after any new test is introduced – as students, teachers, and administrators become more familiar with it – it’s common to see an artificial inflation in scores. The beginning of Rhee’s tenure coincided with this period. 
  • Third, the students enrolled in DC public schools in 2010 were a significantly different group compared with the students of 2007, and this demographic shift may have driven some of the improvement in DC-CAS performance. A deeper look at the best evidence we have – from the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) – suggests that the increases in D.C.’s average NAEP scores between 2007 and 2009 (widely touted by Rhee and her supporters as confirmation of her effectiveness) could, in part, be a result of this demographic change. Math increases may be somewhat overstated, while reading scores may have been flat.

This is not particularly surprising.  The educational reform establishment (an bit of an Orwellian concept) is all about finding a way to turning the education system into a for-profit Education-Industrial Complex, and no one would stand for it if they heard the truth.

Let’s hope that the worm turns for Michelle Rhee and their corrupt ilk like it has for Alan “Bubbles” Greenspan.

The Mess that Michelle Rhee Left Behind

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The Washington Post has a fascinating profile of respected school principal Bill Kerlina, who quit to bake cupcakes (really):

Bill Kerlina won a plum assignment when he was hired away from Montgomery County in July 2009 to become a principal in Northwest Washington. Phoebe Hearst Elementary was a small, high-performing school, right across the street from Sidwell Friends.
He grew to love its students, teachers and — for the most part — its parents.
“If I could lift that school up and put it in a functional school system, it would be perfect,” he said.
Instead, he said, the dysfunction he encountered in D.C. public schools led him to quit this month, fed up and burned out.
Principals in the District and other cities leave all the time, for a range of reasons. At least 20 of the District’s 123 public schools will have new leaders when classes begin in late August.The churn is especially heavy at low-performing schools. A 2010 study showed that nearly two-thirds of Chicago’s struggling schools had three or more principals in the past decade.
But Kerlina, a baby-faced 39, is leaving Hearst, not a struggling school in a poor neighborhood. He’s also leaving education altogether after 17 years — to go into the gourmet cupcake business.

Usually, resignations and firings unfold in silence, with officials citing privacy laws and educators reluctant to burn bridges. But a series of interviews with Kerlina offers a rare view of D.C. reform from an insider talking out of school.

He said he is quitting a system that evaluates teachers but doesn’t support their growth, that knuckles under to unreasonable demands from parents, and that focuses excessively on recruiting neighborhood families to a school where most students come from outside the attendance zone.

Generally, people on the way out doen’t talk, but in his case, he’s leaving the biz, so describes the dysfunction in detail:

  • Teacher “accountability” with evaluations, but no meaningful training for teachers to be able to actually meet these standards.
  • Lack of support of principals when dealing with excessively demanding parents.  (Not so sympathetic on this one, as my wife and I are pretty demanding about getting our kids special ed needs addressed.)
  • That he was pressured to whiten his school.

Here is the money quote:

Kerlina signed on just as Rhee was rolling out the IMPACT evaluation system, which called for five classroom observations to assess criteria such as clarity of presentation, content knowledge and ability to teach children with varying skill levels. Some teachers would be held accountable for student growth on standardized tests. Those with poor evaluations were subject to dismissal.

It was a major change.Kerlina said he was surprised when he heard it would not be tried on a pilot basis, which was standard practice in Montgomery. He said he came to believe that the initiative offered virtually no provisions to help teachers improve.

“The reform, in my opinion, is getting rid of people,” he said.

It’s been very clear for a long time that Michelle Rhee was doing pump and dump on the DC Public Schools, she had no plan whatsoever on early childhood education, and her goal was to fire black administrators and teachers in the hope of bringing white students into the school, to create a bump in the test scores.

This is not education reform, this is private equity style asset stripping writ on the public schools.

This is the Legacy of Arne Duncan

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You know, the guy who ran the Chicago schools, and was chosen to run the Department of Education, where he has gone full in on bashing teachers supporting the for-profit educational industrial complex.

Well. I’m not sure if he set the tone in the Chicago School district, or was just a product of it, but the fact that the Chicago Public Schools froze teacher salaries while jacking up pay for senior executives:

Though they voted last week to rescind four percent pay raises for teachers and union school workers, the Chicago Board of Education today is expected to approve salaries for the newly installed Chicago Public Schools CEO Jean-Claude Brizard and four other top executives that, by and large, mark substantial increases over their predecessors’ pay.

As the Chicago Sun-Times reported Wednesday, Brizard’s base salary – $250,000 – tops former CPS head Ron Huberman’s salary by $20,000 – and is the highest pay rate for any city executive excluding the city’s new police chief, Garry McCarthy. It is also an annual salary nearly $40,000 higher than the head of New York City’s school system, though less than the public schools chiefs in Los Angeles and other cities.

Salaries for the other four executives are less dramatic, but still more than their Daley administration predecessors. New Chief Education Officer Noemi Donoso, who is slated to rake in $195,000, is making $2,150 more than the former education officer. New Chief of Staff Andrea Saenz, who will be paid $165,000 annually, is making $49,000 more than those who came before. CPS chief administrative officer Tim Cawley and communications officer Becky Carroll are slated to take in $35,833 and $34,617 base salary increases over their Daley counterparts, earning $215,000 and $165,000 salaries respectively.

So their goal is to make American schools more like the banks.

They sh%$ on the workers, and extract as much money as possible out of the enterprise to overpay the incompetent rat-f%$#s in charge.

Another Obama Cave

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And this time it’s the for profit colleges, who pretend to educate, or at least credential, people:

The Department of Education on Wednesday tightened its regulation of for-profit colleges and other vocational programs that get billions of dollars in federal aid but leave many students with crushing debt and credentials worth little on the job market.

Under the new rules, programs would lose their eligibility to dispense federal student aid — and as a practical matter, be shut down — if, over the next four years, their graduates fail to meet new benchmarks for loan repayment and ratio of debt to income. But amid intense lobbying by the for-profit college industry and pressure from Republican lawmakers, the department significantly eased the rules from an earlier draft: officials said, for example, that no program would lose eligibility until 2015.

“We believe that very few programs will be forcibly closed by our standards,” Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said. “We want to give people a chance to reform. As a country, we need this sector to succeed. This is not about ‘gotcha.’ ”

These rules, which try to define how such programs prepare students for “gainful employment,” have been the hardest-fought issue in the debate over exploitive and fraudulent practices in the industry. The colleges and their allies spent $12 million lobbying against the rules since the start of 2010, and this spring, the House passed a budget amendment that would have blocked the department’s work on them. The rules were supposed to be issued last summer, but were delayed after the Education Department received a record 90,000 comments on its draft proposal.

What does this mean? Let’s see what the market thinks:

For-profit colleges rallied as the U.S. Education Department gave the industry more time to comply with rules that will cut off federal aid to institutions whose students struggle the most to repay their government loans.

ITT Educational Services Inc. (ESI) soared 21 percent to $85.67. Career Education Corp. (CECO) rose 5.4 percent to $24.10. Strayer Education Inc. (STRA) gained 19 percent to $144.95. Apollo Group Inc. (APOL) advanced 11 percent to $46.90. DeVry Inc. (DV) rose 15 percent to $61.86.

Corinthian Colleges Inc. (COCO) jumped 27 percent to $5.06. Education Management Corp. (EDMC) increased 22 percent to $24.76. Grand Canyon Education Inc. (LOPE) advanced 9 percent to $13.97. Bridgepoint Education Inc. (BPI) rose 3.4 percent to $24.48. Capella Education Co. (CPLA) climbed 3.3 percent to $49.58.

Washington Post Co. (WPO) , owner of the Kaplan for- profit education business, advanced 5 percent to $426.42.

It’s pretty clear that they took meaningful rules, and gutted them, probably because they figure that a good way to get a bit closer to their $1 billion goal for campaign donations in 2012.

So real reform is replaced with phony reform.  How Hopey Changey.

Woo Hoo!!!!!

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Natalie just got into the Lansdowne High School magnet program!

She was #3 on the waiting list, and now she’s in. 


She’s going into Lansdowne’s “Academy of Arts & Communication,” which is a concentration in theater, vocal, and instrumental music.

Your Michelle Rhee Fraud Roundup

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I thought that Michelle Rhee was a fraud when I discovered that her “school reforms” in the DC school district appeared to be to focus on tests, and that she never had any sort of plan for early intervention and pre-school.

If you want to improve education in the future, you get the kids early, when you can give them the most, and longest lasting benefit.

If you intend to pump and dump, you ignore that, focus on tests, and find someone to demonize.

Michelle Rhee got her start in the Teach for America program, which, considering its alumni, is to education what Typhoid Mary is to beefsteak tartar.

In any case, on her resume Rhee claimed that her students at her first position, “That after two years 90 percent of her students had reached the 90th percentile in reading and math.”

The problem is that this is not true. In fact her performance as a teacher, particularly in her years, was an unmitigated disaster which would have gotten her fired by Michelle Rhee, the DC schools administrator.

Jay Matthews, the Washington Post‘s education blogger, takes exception to (first link) takes exception to G.F. Brandenburg’s characterization of Rhee’s work as “lies” (second link), but this is an illustration about how the press in general, and the Kaplan Test Prep company in particular, find calling out obvious lies to be distasteful.

Rhee put numbers on her resume that were well nigh miraculous, but they were false, so either she had access to the numbers, which makes it a lie, or she did not have access to the numbers, and she put the false numbers (she claims that her principal told her) which is also a lie.

But it gets even better, because Michelle Rhee just loves what Scott Walker is doing in Wisconsin, because, as I have said before, finding an enemy is easier that generating real results.

And now we know that her results were the result of massive systematic fraud:

In just two years, Crosby S. Noyes Education Campus went from a school deemed in need of improvement to a place that the District of Columbia Public Schools called one of its “shining stars.”

Standardized test scores improved dramatically. In 2006, only 10% of Noyes’ students scored “proficient” or “advanced” in math on the standardized tests required by the federal No Child Left Behind law. Two years later, 58% achieved that level. The school showed similar gains in reading.

Because of the remarkable turnaround, the U.S. Department of Education named the school in northeast Washington a National Blue Ribbon School. Noyes was one of 264 public schools nationwide given that award in 2009.

Michelle Rhee, then chancellor of D.C. schools, took a special interest in Noyes. She touted the school, which now serves preschoolers through eighth-graders, as an example of how the sweeping changes she championed could transform even the lowest-performing Washington schools. Twice in three years, she rewarded Noyes’ staff for boosting scores: In 2008 and again in 2010, each teacher won an $8,000 bonus, and the principal won $10,000.

………

A USA TODAY investigation, based on documents and data secured under D.C.’s Freedom of Information Act, found that for the past three school years most of Noyes’ classrooms had extraordinarily high numbers of erasures on standardized tests. The consistent pattern was that wrong answers were erased and changed to right ones.

rasures are detected by the same electronic scanners that CTB/McGraw-Hill, D.C.’s testing company, uses to score the tests. When test-takers change answers, they erase penciled-in bubble marks that leave behind a smudge; the machines tally the erasures as well as the new answers for each student.

In 2007-08, six classrooms out of the eight taking tests at Noyes were flagged by McGraw-Hill because of high wrong-to-right erasure rates. The pattern was repeated in the 2008-09 and 2009-10 school years, when 80% of Noyes classrooms were flagged by McGraw-Hill.

On the 2009 reading test, for example, seventh-graders in one Noyes classroom averaged 12.7 wrong-to-right erasures per student on answer sheets; the average for seventh-graders in all D.C. schools on that test was less than 1. The odds are better for winning the Powerball grand prize than having that many erasures by chance, according to statisticians consulted by USA TODAY.

………

In 2008, the office of the State Superintendent of Education recommended that the scores of many schools be investigated because of unusually high gains, but top D.C. public school officials balked and the recommendation was dropped.

McGraw-Hill’s practice is to flag only the most extreme examples of erasures. To be flagged, a classroom had to have so many wrong-to-right erasures that the average for each student was 4 standard deviations higher than the average for all D.C. students in that grade on that test. In layman’s terms, that means a classroom corrected its answers so much more often than the rest of the district that it could have occurred roughly one in 30,000 times by chance. D.C. classrooms corrected answers much more often.

Remember here, that 4 σ is just where the testing program begins to note irregularities, so we are probably somewhere well into the 6 figures against, and the fact that Rhee and Her Evil Minions™ strongly fought against a meaningful investigation indicates that they either knew, or they were willfully blind, which is the same thing.

But we will be seeing more of this, because Rhee has failed up, and is now running a non-profit that she hopes will raise a billion dollars, and Barack Obama and his Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, have repeatedly indicated that they would like to repeat her “success”.

Between for profit profiteers, and Ponzi educators like Rhee, the educational reform establishment is toxic.

David Brooks is the Victim of a Botched Brit Milah

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 I don’t mean that there is physical damage to his penis.  I mean that the Brit Milah, the first mitzvah that a Jewish boy experiences, is supposed to, you know, make you Jewish, and Brooks’ biography states that he is a Jew did not work.  This guy is about as Jewish as Ann Murray.

Somehow or other he manages to express dumbfounded amazement at his experience at having a discussion with a Jewish theologian where she makes points that are so mainstream in Judaism that you can’t hear a Rabbi’s sermon without hearing at least one of them twice:

In her classes and groups, she tries to create arduous countercultural communities. “We live in a relativistic culture,” she told me. Many people have no firm categories to organize their thinking. They find it hard to give a straight yes or no answer to tough moral questions. When they go in search of answers, they generally find people who offer them comfort and ways to ease their anxiety.

[Dr. Erica] Brown tries to do the opposite. Jewish learning, she says, isn’t about achieving tranquility. It’s about the struggle. “I try to make people uncomfortable.”

Shocking, here is a Jew who asks a question in response to a question.  What do you think of that?

Brown seems to poke people with concepts that sit uncomfortably with the modern mind-set — submission and sin. She writes about disorienting situations: vengeance, scandal, group shame. During our coffee, she criticized the way some observers bury moral teaching under legal casuistry and the way some moderns try to explain away the unfashionable things the Torah clearly says.

Sorry, but I’ve heard this from Reform Rabbis through black hat Orthodox.

I don’t mean to imply that she  is not a rigorous thinker, or that she might not be an engaging teacher.  What I am saying is that this is completely mainstream Jewish thought, and that any Jew who expresses surprise and wonderment at what is standard boiler plate for a B’nei Mitzvah speech given by a 13 year old.

I have seen such expressions of surprise from Christians that I’ve dealt with, I recall a Pentecostal woman in college who was stunned when I noted that the afterlife was simply not particularly important in Judaism, for example (It’s orthogonal to Tikkun Olam), which blew her mind.

It’s one of the reasons that I object to the term “Judeo Christian,” because there are real and deep differences in ethics and philosophy.  I would argue that existentialism, with its focus on personal responsibility, is actually closer to Judaism than many of the strands of Christian theology.

As Ioz observes, “This is like a Catholic expressing surprise at the trinity.”

I am not sure if he’s really stupid, or if his hanging out with right wingers, who either are evangelicals, or who find evangelicals “useful idiots,” but he really needs to spend some time listing to the rabbi’s sermons, as opposed to playing on his Blackberry.

H/t Brad Delong.

610 Grand, Not Enough

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The lawsuit against the Lower Merion school district for spying on children with webcams has been settled for $610,000:

The Lower Merion School District will pay $610,000 to settle lawsuits over its tracking of student laptop computers, ending an eight-month saga that thrust the elite district into a global spotlight and stirred questions about technology and privacy in schools.

School board members voted unanimously Monday night to pay $185,000 to the two students who claimed the district spied on them by secretly activating the webcams on their laptops.

Someone should have gone to jail over all of this.

The fact that there was not a serious criminal investigation of this, with dozens of school officials under scrutiny is a disgrace.

Good Riddance

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I was listening to a hagiography on Michelle Rhee, now former Chancellor of the DC public schools on NPR today, and I had to change the channel.

She got test scores up by focusing on nothing but, and the evidence is that, in one of the most disadvantaged school districts in the nation, she had no interest at all in early education, basically ignoring it in her 5 year plan.

As Matthew Yglesias noted 2 years ago, “A certain type of person isn’t interested in any education improvements that don’t involve picking fights with teacher’s unions, and this seems to me like perhaps an example of Rhee suffering from that affliction.”

Basically, she spent a lot of time being an asshole, because that’s what got her the good press, and teaching to the test, along with a headlong embrace of gentrification, were what caused the bump in her numbers.

This Episode of Sesame Street Was Brought To You By the Letter “T” and the Number 2

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As in 2 Tits are 2Much:

In circumstances George Stephanopoulos probably never imagined when he gave up a hands-on role in politics to become a broadcaster, two fuzzy, nonhuman members of the “Sesame Street” cast joined him Friday morning on “Good Morning America,” along with that PBS children’s show’s executive producer, Carol-Lynn Parente, to discuss the recent decision at “Sesame Street” to pull a music video featuring the pop singer Katy Perry.

On Thursday, Sesame Workshop, which produces “Sesame Street,” said it would not broadcast a segment planned for the show’s coming season in which Ms. Perry performs a version of her song “Hot ‘N Cold” with Elmo and is seen wearing a low-cut dress.

In her “Good Morning America” interview, Ms. Parente told Mr. Stephanopoulos she was surprised at the volume of disapproving responses the video had generated when it was posted on YouTube earlier in the week.

It appears that some parents are up in arms about Katy Perry’s breasts, because her dress shows a bit of cleavage.

It’s actually fine to my mind, but I’m thinking that if the parents are this freaked out over this, they are going to be raising some sexually repressed kids who will likely be very bad in bed.

Video follows, though the comments at Youtube are prize:

I Write Letters

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So, the New York Times has an article where they bemoan the fact that Wall Street financiers could not buy 3 New York State Senate elections for “educational reformers”:

They were the candidates of riches, flush with hundreds of thousands of dollars from Wall Street investors who believed in the promise of charter schools.

But when the election results came in on Tuesday, all three State Senate candidates supporting education reform — Basil Smikle, Lynn Nunes and Mark H. Pollard — lost by huge margins, with none cracking 30 percent of the total vote in primary contests against union-backed rivals.

The three New York races amounted to some of the country’s first proxy wars between labor groups and Wall Street financiers pushing for education reform, and in the end, the time-tested union machine prevailed.

You see the message here: something is wrong with America if a bunch of rich pukes from Wall Street cannot buy elections in order to privatize an essential public service, in this through for-profit charter schools, and generate taxpayer subsidized profits.

It’s worked so well for prisons, and for military contractors, that we must feed our children to feed the Wall Street beast yet again.

In any case, it pissed me off enough to write a letter to the editor on the subject, which is almost certainly not going to get published:

I found the article one sided. While it is clear that unions played a role in the elections, you make it sound as if this was somehow unfair, while relegating those who donated, “hundreds of thousands of dollars from Wall Street investors” to these candidates who lost as somehow simply being people of good will, “who believed in the promise of charter schools.”

The promise of charter schools that attracts ” Wall Street investors” is its creation of an educational-industrial complex and its associated revenue streams.

There have been numerous studies of charter schools over decades, and they do not meaningfully outperform public schools in properly constructed studies.

There are real problems in our schools, but neither the mindless focus on test scores nor bringing Wall Street profiteers into the equation are the solution.

A Depiction of the Levels of Hell?

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Your tax dollars at work

Or maybe just a description of development, procurement, and life cycle support costs of a weapons system for the Pentagon ……… but I repeat myself.

The problem here is that each one of these steps represents a place where some private contractor can sit astride the process and extract a toll.

This why it takes 25 years and billions of dollars to develop the next fighter aircraft, when the P-80 was delivered just 180 days after the go ahead was given.

If this is what the past 50 years of developments in systems engineering have given us, perhaps, just maybe, there are some deep flaws in the underlying assumptions of that profession.

The source for the link is the Defense Acquisition University, and yes Virginia, there is a Defense Acquisition University, and they have a handy, dandy interactive flash version available on site.

I Want to Vacation in Iceland

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I company called ECA Program is in talks to purchase 15 Su-27 Flankers from Belarus in order to set up a private air-to-air combat academy at Keflavik airport in Iceland.

The primary customer is dissimilar air combat training for NATO forces, but I would really like to get a ride on one of these aircraft, and my guess is that they will make this available to private individuals as well.

Of course, now I just need a few million dollars.

I would also note that there are some differences of opinion amongst the various players in the Icelandic government about the merit of this proposal.

Lifelong Peonage and Are the Main Feature

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Click for Ginormous Graphic

Barry Ritholtz has a useful infographic showing just how education loans have become the latest way that the banks keep us in debt slavery.

Note that the value of outstanding student loans is now larger than that of credit card debt, and its holders cannot discharge it through bankruptcy, ever.

This goes hand in hand with changes in the job market, where jobs that do not require a college to degree require a college degree to get, along with the explosion of for-profit schools that make false promises of a career in order to get you to overpay for trade school.

It really is remarkable just how predatory our society has become.