Month: August 2021

Thanks to the pandemic, Washington DC has temporarily eliminated the achievement test normally required for admission to its most elite high school, School Without Walls. But it still didn't enroll any, um, diverse kids:

Data obtained through a public records request show that eliminating the test did not make the Walls freshman class any more socioeconomically or geographically diverse.

Five of the school system’s 15 neighborhood middle schools are located in Wards 7 and 8 — the wards with the highest concentrations of poverty and many of the city’s lowest performing schools based on standardized test scores. None of the 132 students in the incoming freshman class at School Without Walls attended one of those five middle schools.

....Walls administrators offered interviews to the 500 students with the highest grade-point average....Just three eighth graders at middle schools in Wards 7 and 8 — Hart, Johnson, Kelly Miller, Kramer and Sousa middle schools — made the cut of 500 students and accepted interviews, according to city data. Two of those students matched at other high schools and one is currently on the Walls wait list.

This piece was written by Perry Stein in the Washington Post, which means she's not allowed to simply tell you what's going on. But I can:

As we all know, we're not really talking about "geographic" or "socioeconomic" diversity. We're talking about Black kids. And as you can see, Black eighth graders in Washington DC's public schools score a stunning 61 points lower than white kids in the NAEP reading test.

This gap is so gigantic that I'm not even sure how to interpret it. Based on the standard deviation for this test (roughly 34 points) and a little bit of handwaving, my best guess is that the average Black eighth grader in a DC public school reads at about the fourth grade level. The number who read at an "advanced" level is close to zero.

I don't care what administrators do or how they decide who gets into this high school. With reading achievement this low, there's just no way that more than a tiny handful of Black kids from public schools will ever get in. The only source of Black students for an elite high school like School Without Walls is DC's charter schools.

If we're ever going to take this seriously, interventions need to start at kindergarten or earlier and need to be continuous all the way through high school. Is that expensive? It is. But it's the only thing that has the slightest chance of closing the Black-white achievement gap. Anything else is just performative play-acting.

Since August 14, the U.S. has evacuated and facilitated the evacuation of approximately 109,200 people. Since the end of July, we have re-located approximately 114,800 people.

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) August 27, 2021

Bagram-mania has taken over the Republican Party:

We have the capability to reestablish our presence at Bagram to continue to evacuate American citizens and our Afghan allies.

The biggest mistake in this debacle is abandoning Bagram.

— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) August 26, 2021

"Bagram" is the newest "stand down" or "lock her up" from conservatives: a plausible sounding attack line that's based on nothing.

The evacuation only needed one airport and the military made the decision that Kabul airport was the better choice. It's possible that this was the wrong choice, but there's certainly no conspiracy here nor any kind of incompetence on the part of the Air Force planners.

When there are two choices, and the first one turns out to be difficult and deadly, it's always tempting to convince yourself that the other choice would have been better. But Bagram is 40 miles away from Kabul, a 90-minute bus ride. If we had kept it open it would have been harder for people to get there and there's a good chance that we would have evacuated far fewer people. What's more, it probably would have been easy for ISIS-K to plant an IED somewhere that would blow up an entire bus of evacuees. If that had happened, conservatives would all be outraged about our stupidity for not using the more convenient and easily defended Kabul airport.

In any case, "Bagram" is now just a Republican totem. They can repeat it over and over, and to most people it sounds like a good question. Why did we shut down Bagram? But the only reason it sounds like a good question is because Fox News doesn't bother answering it.

Apparently my camera is irretrievably broken, and local repair is impossible because Sony doesn't sell replacement parts for it. So I'll have to send it in to their authorized service center at a (minimum) cost of $400 and God only knows how many weeks of waiting. In the meantime I guess I'll haul my old Lumix out of mothballs, but until I do that you'll have to be satisfied with archival pictures of the cats.

In this one, which isn't actually all that old, Hilbert is yawning so wide you could almost do dental work on the photo. He must have been quite the exhausted cat while I was taking these pictures.

The New York Times says inflation rose "sharply" last month using the Fed's preferred measure, and I suppose that's true. But as usual, context is everything:

Core PCE inflation peaked in April and has been dropping ever since. So while it's still high by historical standards, it's plummeted to half of what it was just a few months ago. This suggests that the momentum behind high inflation is starting to ease.

And we're still dealing with the crazy situation in used cars, which is artificially pushing the inflation rate up. Presumably this will resolve itself in the near future, and all by itself that will probably knock a percentage point or so off the inflation rate.

The progressive left is outraged at the Supreme Court based on two recent rulings:

• In 2019, President Trump put in place his "Remain in Mexico" policy, which required migrants seeking asylum to stay in Mexico while their cases were being adjudicated. On his first day in office, Joe Biden rescinded the policy. On Tuesday the Supreme Court ordered the policy to be reinstated pending a full hearing.
• Last month Biden was set to allow the CDC's eviction moratorium to lapse, but under pressure from progressives he ordered it to be continued. On Thursday the Supreme Court ruled that the moratorium had to end.

Strictly as a matter of law, are these two rulings really so outrageous? Regarding the first one, the Supreme Court has frequently said that a policy, once put in place according to the rules, can't be "arbitrarily and capriciously" ended. Since Biden killed the "Remain in Mexico" policy on his first day, it seems like you can make a pretty good case that it was arbitrary, can't you?

On the second one, the Court had clearly signaled months ago that it wouldn't approve an extension beyond July 30. Biden himself didn't expect to win a SCOTUS battle, and sure enough he didn't.

IANAL and I'm more than willing to hear from lawyers who know the law and have opinions about this. But tentatively, at least, it's not clear to me that there's anything to be all that outraged about.

POSTSCRIPT: Both of these rulings were per curiam, which means they weren't signed by individual justices. They were just released as opinions of the court. This has also generated some heat, but I have no special opinion on this aspect of the whole thing.

The New York Times tells the story today of the first turbochargers on American production cars, the 1962 Olds F-85 Jetfire and the Chevy Corvair Monza Spyder. They failed miserably, but eventually the technology was improved and turbos made a comeback:

In 1978, the Saab 99 had offered the first turbo on a production car since G.M.’s misfires....In 1982, Saab’s turbos added its breakthrough Automatic Performance Control, a microphone that listened to engine combustion and made adjustments on the fly. The engine became functional, reliable and economical. The word turbo became synonymous with Saab.

....With technical and image problems quashed, turbos crept back. By the mid-1980s they could be found on a Volvo wagon, the Porsche 944, the Ford Mustang SVO, the Datsun 280ZX, the Dodge Daytona Shelby Z and Chrysler’s LeBaron GTS.

Oh come on. Porsche turbocharged the 911 in 1975 and it's been putting blowers on anything that moved ever since. Granted, we're not talking about cars aimed at the broad middle class, but they are production vehicles, and they obviously weren't the product of Saab envy. Let's get our history right, folks.

The news out of Kabul has been dominated by the bombing deaths of more than a dozen US soldiers, but there's good news too:

Since August 14, the U.S. has evacuated and facilitated the evacuation of approximately 95,700 people. Since the end of July, we have re-located approximately 101,300 people.

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) August 26, 2021

Nearly a hundred thousand people! Nobody was guessing anything like that last Monday, when scenes of people falling off airplanes was all anyone could talk about.

If we end up evacuating 150,000 or more by August 31, will any of the skeptics revisit their initial reactions? Or will they remain obsessed with the American deaths, which had nothing to do with the competence of the airlift anyway? I'm guessing the latter.

This is a picture of a warbling Swinhoe's White-eye in our front garden. It is native to East Asia, which is why it was formerly known as the Japanese white-eye, but apparently several of them got loose from a nearby zoo in 1980 and found the climate favorable. They were fruitful and multiplied, and now they can be spotted all over the place in Southern California. Including our front garden now and again.

From Richard Engel:

It is deeply depressing to watch what could be among the final Afghans loaded up and flying out of their country. Afghans had hope. Now millions live in fear. A humiliating end for the US in Afghanistan. pic.twitter.com/cy126AQTwX

— Richard Engel (@RichardEngel) August 26, 2021

You might expect me to be annoyed by this, but not really. I'm pretty unhappy with the media's obsession over panic and chaos, which has prevented a more balanced treatment of the evacuation, but that's all. The fact is, it is deeply depressing to watch the Taliban take over again in Afghanistan and it is humiliating for the United States. And it's horrific to think of the fate of women and girls under Taliban rule. That doesn't change even though this denouement has been obvious for many years and probably inevitable from the start.