Facebook

I'm not really using Facebook, although I have an account on there. I feel that its design is fundamentally flawed because it doesn't reflect how I actually interact with my friends.

Facebook (and, to be fair, most of its peers and competitors) is designed to treat all the people you know as a single pool, an equivalence class of others; adding someone as a friend basically allows them to interact with you and all your other friends. When you make a "post" on your "wall", your friends, and maybe their friends, and maybe the world can see it; if you let friends "post" on your "wall", all of them can do so, and see each other's entries.

That doesn't mirror how I communicate with others in the real world; I don't interact in the same way with all my friends. My relationships with different sets of friends revolve around different activities, along orthogonal axes. For example, many of my friends are ones with which I share a particular hobby or interest; I don't particularly care what their political or religious views are, because they're not important in those contexts (business colleagues are a typical example). Then there are people with whom I specifically share values and ideals, and with whom I work to accomplish other shared goals or changes. Finally, I have family, with whom I have even different ties. To make it even more complex, the groups are not mutually exclusive; there are overlaps.

I'm just not convinced that there are that many things I want to communicate to all those people at the same time. For example, I might choose to express a political opinion, but I really don't want to discuss it with everyone. I also don't necessarily want my "wall" to be in the middle of a heated discussion between people I know, but who may not know each other, and who may never find common ground. And I think I'd like to have some space where I can discuss, plan, or do things with my friends or family which I would not necessarily want to disclose to my business colleagues.

The online facility which I think may be closest in spirit to what I think would be appropriate is Google Wave. I should be able to create one or more Wave(s) for each of my groups of friends, and collaborate with them inside. Individual "wavelets" can be open to all the people on the Wave, or to some subsets. In addition, the collaboration facilities will be much richer than any existing social media platform; for example, I've not been able to share documents with people on Facebook, so small groups of us use Google Documents together.

So that's a long explanation for why I might not "friend" you on Facebook. It's nothing personal; I'd just rather we keep in touch some other way.

HOWTO: Houston Flu

The City of Houston has a resource dedicated to information about the H1N1 and seasonal flu viruses, including a list of places where the vaccines (shot and spray) are available at no charge. Google has a map facility where you can put in your zip code and find commercial sites which have stocked, are stocking, and will stock the various vaccines. Houston ISD is opening campuses to provide vaccines this weekend; check back because they're likely to continue the program for a while.

And finally, Google Trends is predicting flu severity by tracking geographically-identified searches for flu related terms. Their methodology is interesting; they basically look for search terms whose temporal frequency matched historical outbreak data from the Center for Disease Control (CDC) for particular locations, and then use those terms to predict forward what CDC trends will be based on current searches. It's an interesting approach, especially since CDC data is only available after a lag of two weeks or so. It's just a correlation, and may be useful to provide earlier warning of outbreak. But it all depends on how well current and future search terms match ones used in the past, and depends on how representative Google searchers are of the population, etc. YMMV.

Stay healthy and safe this flu season!

This, I don't understand

The Houston Chronicle published a story about the Texas unemployment tax going up again next year. The logic behind such a move is perplexing. The fund, which is established by the Texas Labor Code, increases its impact on businesses (especially small businesses) during bad years, and reduces its impact on business during good years. This is because the tax rate goes up in bad years; the rate is calculated (roughly, and in part: see 204.062ff) by taking the unemployment claims to September 30 (in bad years, this goes up) and dividing this by taxable wages for the same period (in bad years, this goes down). The result is to essentially exacerbate the effect of recession by putting a higher burden on solvent businesses to support the unemployment fund in bad years.

The fund is organized as a reserve (see section 203.028(b)), so contributions should instead be increased during good years, to reduce the load on businesses during bad years. This would allow the state to assess businesses when they can best afford it, and save money for periods when businesses could use a break.

Disclaimer: I'm neither an economist nor an actuary. There may in fact be sound business reasons why the tax is structured the way it is, but I'm afraid they're too obscured by what seems like an obvious flaw in the reasoning behind the calculation. I'd appreciate any comments explaining why the current setup makes sense.

Privity of Estate

One of the concepts in our Property class which seems to confuse people is called privity of estate. Essentially, two parties have privity of estate when they can trace their land back to a common parcel. However, the analysis taught in our casebook and in the literature (I think even going back before Llewellyn) uses a two part process: first look for "vertical privity" on each side, back in time to a party who has "horizontal privity" with a common vendor.

Well, there's no reason why the terms "horizontal" and "vertical" make any sense in this context. Our casebook authors suggest that professors have, from time immemorial, drawn the analysis on a chalk board, and have put the original vendor and vendees in a horizontal line, and then drew subsequent conveyances in a vertical line (in some imperfect fashion representing time). I think people get confused because the adjectives "horizontal" and "vertical" have no other specialized meaning in this area of law.

As long as we're making terms up, I'd like to suggest some more descriptive phrases for what's occurring in these transactions. Perhaps the term "horizontal privity" would be better described as privity of estate following partition, privity of covenant (if there is an enforceable covenant), shortened to perhaps "partition privity" or "covenant privity" (a related concept is "contract privity"). A vendor who partitions their parcel and sells part of it to a vendee is in "covenant privity" (or "horizontal privity") with the buyer. Then you could have privity of estate in the whole or privity of assignment, which might contract to "transfer privity", "conveyance privity", "whole privity", "assignment privity", or something similar. This describes "vertical privity" in which the vendor conveys an entire parcel (without partition) to a vendee.

Any takers? Does these make more sense than "horizontal" and "vertical" privity?

Policy Governance (R)

There is a governance model, developed by John Carver and elaborated at http://www.carvergovernance.com/, which describes one way an organization can structure itself to best serve its mission and the needs of its internal and external constituents. I was first introduced to the concept as the "Carver Model", and I'll use that phrase here, since "Policy Governance" is a registered trademark of John and Mirriam Carver.

Let me start by saying that I think the principles behind the model are sound. I agree that a governing board or council should work toward a model in which it is responsible exclusively for high-level decisions; a board should certainly limit itself to discussing mission, goals, policies, and limits on executive authority. When a board is focused on minutiae (the day-to-day operations and interactions of staff, micromanagement of assets, etc.) then the life of the organization grinds to a halt because the board is a bottleneck. First UU Church Houston (First UU) has dealt with this in the past by delegation, but perhaps in a less than optimal way; perhaps the least appealing option exercised was an "executive committee" made up of the board president and some other leaders which met quietly each week and which made a lot of decisions, some of which were unpopular or challenged at later board meetings. The limits on the authority of the committee were not formalized and minutes were not typically kept, which made it difficult to argue that the church was being run in a transparent fashion.

The Carver Model thus describes an organizational structure in which an Executive reports to the Board, and the Board sets goals, policies, and limits on the Executive so the Executive can independently run the Church (see here). This is a good division of authority and responsibility; the Board has a focus on the forest, the Executive on the trees. The devil is in the detail of the composition of the Executive.

Although some congregations empower an Executive team, others place all the authority in the hands of the minister. A hybrid example is one where the Executive is a team but is dominated by ministers. I believe the last two models are inherently flawed because in the typical UU church, minsters are granted tenure. This privilege makes it difficult for the Board to effectively use any leverage to make sure the Executive continues to perform their duties consistently with the policies and limits set by the Board on behalf of the congregation at large. Ministers who for whatever reason begin to have a strained relationship with the whole or significant parts of the congregation are difficult to remove when their position becomes untenable, and a congregation can become severely fractured during the process. A model which vests complete authority (or a majority influence) over staff and spending in a tenured minister or ministers is in my opinion a dangerous mistake.

What would be a better model? There are benefits to having a single Executive (the CEO) who is empowered to make final decisions over operations. Such an person can be effective without calling meetings and can be held to account when they fail to execute their duties responsibly. When a decision needs to be made, an independent CEO (not a minister or a member of the Board) can make it with few concerns about a potential conflict of interest. To keep the CEO responsive to the Board and the congregation, this position should be filled by a lay person whose employment is controlled by the Board; they should be removed by a simple Board vote if they fail to perform their duties.

There are also benefits to having an Executive team but I think they may be inherently harder to realize. A team can perhaps be more available than a single person; in a situation which needs a quick decision it may be more likely to reach one of several people than one alone. The team can also take input from various areas of the church and balance them accordingly. It however seems harder to assign responsibility to a group when things go wrong; whom do you hold accountable in such a situation? Perhaps the team can be chosen by the congregation but members can be removed by the Board (triggering another selection process) if they are not performing their duties.

Let me close by saying I think a church can benefit from removing their governing council from daily operations and by having an independent Executive. I find the model which grants the Executive role to a tenured minister unappealing because it confuses having charismatic leadership in spiritual matters with the dangerous situation of having a charismatic leader of the bureaucracy. I suggest that First UU in particular consider having either an Executive team (on which the minister can sit, in minority) or a paid staff person identified as Manager or CEO.

Hamid Karzai

Hamid Karzai was sworn in today to serve a second term as leader of Afghanistan. I flashed back to an earlier article from the UK Telegraph.

I'm having trouble reconciling this:

The Abdullah camp said it would announce whether their candidate would pull out of the run-off at a 9.30am (5.00am GMT) Kabul rally on Sunday, but an official added: "We will not participate in an election which is not transparent and fraud-free."

Diplomats have told the Sunday Telegraph they estimate the chances of a second round proceeding to be less than half and falling.

with this:

Mrs Clinton said the withdrawal of a candidate would not be "unprecedented" and would not affect the legitimacy of the vote.

She said: "We see that happen in our own country where, for whatever combination of reasons, one of the candidates decides not to go forward.

"I don't think it has anything to do with the legitimacy of the election."

It just seems to me that it's rather easy to challenge the legitimacy of the result of an election which is neither transparent nor fraud-free. Kudos to the Telegraph for putting them next to each other in their article.

Geometry software

One of my children is taking Geometry this year, which is turning out to be a lot of fun. We have a nice compass and a good ruler, but even with these good tools construction can be a little tedious, especially for complicated problems. Geometry software is a good compromise because it can take some tedious compound operations and do them in one click; these are things you pick up early on (construct a perpendicular to a line, perpendicular bisector to a segment, parallel lines, reflection about a line, etc.) and do them later as a single step.

UPDATED to add:This article from Science Daily talks about how using Geometry software helps students play with construction concepts more readily than with paper and tools. It also suggests that the software is helpful to teachers, and that it's important to students to learn to use both the software and the physical tools.

I've heard that Geometer's Sketchpad is well regarded by math teachers. I love Key Curriculum Press textbooks; their materials and problem sets are compelling and fun. However, this piece of software doesn't work for our family for two reasons:

1. It won't run on Linux (only Mac OSX or MS Windows), and
2. it's not free software.

Luckily, there are good alternatives!

• C.a.R. and C.a.R.metal. C.a.R. stands for "Compass and Ruler"; it's a program which lets you perform all kinds of constructions using those tools. The array of available options is initially a bit daunting; it's very helpful to go through the tutorials first. You can set up a problem and have a second person solve it; the software will report if you get the right answer. The software will also allow graph a function for you; it's more intuitive in C.a.R. than in C.a.R.metal, but it's possible in both.
• Another interesting piece of software is Geometria. It's designed specifically around the presentation and solution of construction problems. To use it you must create a problem to be solved, then convey the problem to a student. As the student works on the problem, each step is recorded in a history log on the left side; this is useful for documenting a proof based on the construction steps. This program is not as free-form as the others, so I've not played with it much; still, I can see this being very useful for a teacher, who can create one problem and hand it out to the class. I also expect it won't be long before there's a collection of problems you can download for your class. You can try a demo online; I'd keep another tab with the documentation open while you're using it.
• Finally there's GeoGebra, a slick tool which does a good job of both geometry and algebra. It can be used on the web here if you want to try it out. It's got the best support for plotting functions and equations of the three; unfortunately, it's not entirely free software (the software/program is free, released under the GNU Public License, but the on-screen messages, which are translated into different languages, are not).

I like Key Curriculum Press; if you do too, want to support them financially, and have MS Windows or Mac OSX, go ahead and get a copy of Geometer's Sketchpad. Even so, you might want to play with the software packages above. They're all well written, and it's fun to play with a compass and ruler and see what you can construct.

Vote - Texas Constitutional Amendments

Early voting starts this week in Harris County for the ballot on Nov 3. Please vote for mayor and your council candidates. There are also 11 propositions on the ballot, some of which are described in the Houston Chronicle:

• Short descriptions of all the proposed constitutional amendments;
• Propositions 2, 3, 4, and 5;
• Propositions 1, 6, 7, and 8;
• Proposition 9 (Texas Beaches Open Access);
• Proposition 10 (Emergency Service Districts);
• Proposition 11 (constraints on eminent domain);

Full descriptions are propagated by the Texas Legislative Council in this document. Please look particularly at Prop 9 (Texas Beaches Open Access) and Prop 11 (constraints on eminent domain).

Candidate endorsements by the Chronicle are here:

• Houston Mayor
• Houston Controller
• At-large Council seats
• District Council seats

Death Panels

In 1999 Texas governor George W. Bush signed into law the Texas Futile Care Law, now part of Chapter 166 of the Texas Health and Safety Code, which "allows a health care facility to discontinue life-sustaining treatment against the wishes of the patient or guardian ten days after giving written notice if the continuation of life-sustaining treatment is considered medically inappropriate by the treating medical team." The law could be described as an improvement over the previous regime which allowed a hospital to "simply" receive a court injunction to withdraw treatment without notifying the family.

Contrast that to what's being described as "death panels" in the current health care reform proposals: a requirement for caregivers to discuss (and presumably memorialize in signed documents) the wishes of the patients themselves, so ordinary people can express their preferences ahead of time in case they are put in such a position of incapacitation. Could that not be considered an improvement over what currently exists in Texas, where the treating medical team can make that decision for the patient and the family?

More support for a single payer system

Here's an article from the Houston Chronicle, written by the inimitable Helen Thomas, exhorting President Obama and the Congress to extend Medicare coverage to all as the most effective way to reform health care in America.

Ireland rejects electronic voting

Clearing out old news articles: Ireland decides to end their electronic voting and counting project for financial and political reasons. Quote:

The Minister noted that “the public in broad terms appear to be satisfied with the present paper-based system and we must recognise this in deciding on the future steps to be taken with the electronic voting system.” The Minister also acknowledged that “the assurance of public confidence in the democratic system is of paramount importance and it is vital to bring clarity to the present situation”.

Maybe they've noticed our own declining confidence in electronic voting machines.

Intelligent Design

Today I attended a lunch time talk on Intelligent Design. It was billed as a discussion between two speakers, so I was looking forward to a debate. Instead, it was like the opposite of a hockey game; I went expecting a fight and a nuanced agreement broke out.

The first speaker described the theory of Intelligent Design (ID) in simple terms: it's like looking at phenomena (like Mt. Rushmore) and declaring "that was obviously designed". Because, of course, first impressions are important and determinative, like seeing the face of the Madonna on a cheese sandwich.

He then argued that ID was not science, and should not be described as an alternate to evolution; ID theory is a discussion about origins of biological complexity, which could be changed and optimized by natural selection over time. In fact, ID could be billed as an alternative to atheism, so it could be brought into school in a philosophy class.

For some reason, both speakers compared ID proponents (Discovery Institute) to Galileo - a bearer of revolutionary new ideas who is being prematurely vilified. Perhaps we should give ID its opportunity to mature, at which point it will be accepted as new scientific theory?

The problem with this comparison is that Galileo was proposing a new theory which better explained how the universe worked; ID can't provide any guidance on how to study new phenomena or move the state of engineering or production forward. You can't take the concept of intelligent design and use it as an axiom for any new hypotheses or theories. In addition, Galileo wasn't trying to use state power to sell his new theory to school children; he (and all the other scientific revolutionaries they like to compare to) had to convince adults of the correctness and utility of his ideas.

Finally, the first speaker suggested ID be brought into schools as an exercise to teach children how to think critically. If children are presented with ID and with evolution, perhaps they'll do research, discuss the relative strengths of the ideas, and make up their own minds. Except that anyone who's taught or even been around at least K-8 students realizes that they're just not equipped yet with the background and knowledge (never mind the desire or readiness) to think critically about science or math. They're in foundation-laying mode, where they need to learn tenets and facts which are commonly accepted and from which they can make more sophisticated conclusions. ID gives them no tools for that, and at that developmental stage, it's inappropriate.

This argument is also hardly convincing for bringing ID into high schools either. There are so many other classes (social studies, English, etc) in which critical thinking can be taught, using so many other interesting topics, historical or from current events. Students don't need the false controversy of ID vs Evolution to develop critical thinking skills.

The second speaker asserted that it's wrong to dismiss the idea of an intelligent designer because science, by its nature, is never complete; it has room for new theories. The rebuttal to that assertion is that the concept of an intelligent designer by its nature precludes further scientific inquiry (except, perhaps, into the nature and/or existence of the designer). If you decide there is an intelligent designer who is responsible for any "irreducible" complexity, you complete all your theoretical systems with the God closure.

Random thought: can you imagine ID applied to math? Let's see, that concept is irreducibly complex, so I guess an intelligent designer just gave it to us. Move along!

The second speaker also made a reference to the possibility that keeping ID out of school curricula is potentially censorship. That doesn't seem like a reasonable assertion; I don't think anyone is attempting to stop ID personnel from promulgating their ideas in public debate, or in private schools, or even as a topic of current events. What ID antagonists object to is making ID instruction mandatory in publicly funded schools, especially in the science classroom.

In all, I found no compelling argument for mandating ID instruction in public schools. The theory of "intelligent design" is not science; it's the opposite of science, and as such does not belong in that curriculum. And if it's just a debate topic or a current event, it doesn't need to be part of any state-sanctioned curriculum.

Thinking on my feet

Last night I was called on by one of my professors to explain a case which was assigned for that class. I'd read and analyzed the case and felt prepared for almost any question. I was poorly prepared for his first one: "So, was this a hard case?"

I'm embarrassed by my flat-footed answer: "Sort of". Clearly I need to get better at thinking on my feet. Luckily this wasn't an important point, and he moved on and got to the substance of what we were trying to learn from this reading. I was not sure I could articulate clearly nor defend the wishy washy answer - but I'd like to attempt that here.

I have had the experience of reading case law in two different modes. You can read a case as a law student and a future lawyer; from this perspective, it's my opinion you're trying to get the meaning of the case and how it modifies or adds to interpretations and doctrines. You're performing a forensic function, keeping some very important bits (those which were later codified or which influenced later cases), some pretty important bits (convincing reasoning which may show up in different contexts later), and the rest. It's sometimes hard to determine exactly what's important but (especially with guidance) it's ultimately pretty straightforward.

On the other hand, you could approach the case as a (future) judge. This to me is much harder, especially for the subtle cases where the court is trying to preserve a precedent while setting some new rule or tests. Why did the court think this was important? Why was the (then current) situation untenable, generally or for this case? Could you have made a convincing argument for a different outcome? Would you have come up with these reasons for this outcome?

To me, HANNA v PLUMER could have gone either way; clearly the court felt a particular outcome was warranted, and decided the case accordingly. With hindsight, the holding make sense, and feels right. Had I been presented with the same set of facts, would I have come to the same conclusion, or would I have reacted as the lower courts did and decided differently (this case overturned a lower court decision)? That's a much harder problem.

So was this a hard case? Sort of. Depends on whether you're looking at it as a future lawyer or a future judge. Should have come up with that last night.

Keep your eye on the ball

the public option is only a means to that end...

In his speech before a joint session of Congress, President Obama dismissively described the so-called "public option" of the proposed health care reforms as a "means to an end". I get that. It's hard to argue with such broad goals as "... provid[ing] more security and stability to those who have health insurance. ... provid[ing] insurance for those who don't. And ... slow[ing] the growth of health care costs for our families, our businesses and our government. ..." In a way, it's like saying "we're in Chicago right now, we want to get to Washington, DC, and there are more than one way to get there from here."

But as anyone who looks at a map can tell, some paths will get you there more quickly than others. A single payer plan such as HR 676 would be the fastest way; it clearly would provide stability and security to the insured, provide coverage to those who don't currently have it, and would control the growth of health care costs and decouple them from employment, reducing their burden on employers. A "public option" could work as well, if all health care providers are require to accept its payments (preserving your ability to choose a doctor) and if the plan has open enrollment (allowing everyone to access its benefits). The tepid "reform" proposals included in the President's speech, with no public low-cost competition for private carriers, are like walking from Chicago to California, then hoping you can hitchhike from there to DC. The byzantine regime of proposed regulations may be effective in controlling costs and keeping people healthy if they are coupled with aggressive enforcement and penalties for breach. Of course, this will inevitably add to the amount our country spends on "health care", without actually using that amount for providing care.

Let's also not lose focus on the main item insurance companies want to get from the current proposals: a mandate that everyone be required to purchase coverage in a "health plan". The insurance companies will benefit greatly by having 47 million new premiums paid (many or most subsidized by our tax dollars), and they will fight hard to make sure they can capture that revenue without onerous regulation or meaningful competition from each other or a public entity. If all we end up with is a "mandate" without a public plan to compete with private insurers, we will end up with a situation worse, not better, than what we have now.

Thank You

I have started classes at the University of Houston Law Center as a part-time/evening student. It will be a long haul, but 6 class days in I'm having a great time and am so far keeping my head above water. I'm really looking forward to each day.

I've tried my best so far to keep a balance between family, school, work, and rest. It's possible, but it's a schedule with very little slack during the week. I can juggle all the pins and keep them in the air, but if one wobbles - I need help.

When I pass the bar in a few years, it will be the result of a lot of hard work. But more importantly, it will not be possible without the moral and material support from my family and my friends. I can already see and feel everyone pitching in to make this happen, and I appreciate it greatly.

Thank you.

Keepin' it real at the Fed

As a follow up to my article about HR 1207, I offer a brief reference to a related bill, HR 3232, the PROFIT Act of 2009. A little background, perhaps, is in order.

The Great Big Bank Bailout Bill of 2008 (HR 1424 of the 110th Congress), passed with votes from Barack Obama and John McCain, was sold to the public as a necessary evil (to "stabilize the economy", right before the election) with a potential upside. Publicly, the Treasury would provide funding to banks in return for stock (in the case of at least AIG, a controlling interest), a requirement to pay what was effectively interest, and warrants, options to buy bank stock at a later time at the current (lower) price. This last provision was sold as an "upside" - the Government would enter the global casino with the hope that when the economy recovered, there would be additional money to be made to the profit of taxpayers, and we could hold our breath, cross our fingers, and hope to maybe even make a profit from all this investment. Never mind the fact that by tying the program's success to the requirement that these institutions have a future as independent entities made it much more difficult to consolidate or close them down as part of the solution.

Of course, the TARP has operated much differently from how it was sold. Because the Federal Reserve is now providing financing to banks and "banking institutions" (outside Congressional oversight; see HR 1207), funding recipients are now repaying the money they received under the public TARP. And, shockingly, the Treasury are redeeming the warrants at a fraction of their value, according to a report by the Congressional Oversight Panel. In other words, effectively providing the banks another subsidy. And this is public funding to institutions like these (from the Bloomberg article above):

[TARP special inspector general Neil] Barofsky said the TARP inspector general’s office has 35 ongoing criminal and civil investigations that include suspected accounting, securities and mortgage fraud; insider trading; and tax investigations related to the abuse of TARP programs.

We need to collectively admit the obvious: the people in charge of "fixing" or "managing" this financial crisis were either responsible for it in the first place, or were negligent in their oversight of those responsible. Starting with Reserve Chairman Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Geithner (and his predecessor Paulson) on down, these public servants need public supervision and guidance, without which they seem to pretty much be doing whatever they please with our money as long as it keeps some favored institutions in business (and profitable), and perhaps even forces competitors to fail.

Please contact your Congressional Representative and ask them to support HR 1207, HR 3232 (which requires the above-mentioned warrants to be sold in public at market prices, so we can realize those promised "profits"!), and related bills. This is the sort of oversight which should have been in the bailout to begin with; we should have kept up the pressure on our Representatives to block the bill until these safeguards were in place. Hopefully we'll do that next time.

Deeper in

I'm reading Karl Llewellyn's lectures collected in The Bramble Bush, the 2008 Oxford University Press edition, and thought I'd share another quote: this one is about assuming institutions are just so because that's the only way they could be arranged. This quote is preceded by a description of what courts and judges do, which I omit.

... I take time to say this because I deem it important that early, very early in this game you meet some counterweight against what I may call the unconscious snobbery of social institutions: against the touching faith that the current rationalizations of an institution, first, fit the facts, second, exhaust the subject, third, negate other, negate better possibilities. Nowhere more than in law do you need armor against that type of ethnocentric and chronocentric snobbery -- the smugness of your won tribe and your own time: We are the Greeks; all others are barbarians. ...

I offer the above quote to those who argue that a market based or private insurance solution to our health care crisis is important because the United States has a "tradition" of such things (a very recent one, to be sure). If that were not enough, Paul Krugman shares this report by Kenneth J. Arrow, excerpts of which are available from the World Health Organization web site; it's an economist's analysis of the factors which contribute to the observation that a market based approach does not provide optimal solutions to the pricing and provision of health care.

Question everything!

Entering the Bramble Bush

I've started reading Karl Llewellyn's lectures collected in The Bramble Bush, the 2008 Oxford University Press edition, and found these passages from Chapter 1. I may be republishing other interesting excerpts as I find them. Emphases are are in the original.

... We have discovered in our teaching of the law that general propositions are empty. We have discovered that students who come eager to learn the rules and who do lean them, and who learn nothing more, will take away the shell and not the substance. We have discovered that rules alone, mere forms of words, are worthless. We have learned that the concrete instance, the heaping up of concrete instances, the present vital memory of a multitude of concrete instances, is necessary in order to make any general proposition, be it rule of law or any other, mean anything at all. Without the concrete instance the general proposition is baggage, impedimenta, stuff about the feet. It not only does not help. It hinders. ...

... You may have missed in this discussion the common idea that the law is right, that rules of law are to be obeyed because they are right, that men have duties to uphold the law. Such ideas are not missing because they have been overlooked. They are left out because you may fairly be expected to be well aware of them already. They are left out, too, because they contain truth so partial, so faulty, as to cry out for revision in the light of some such analysis as I have been presenting. They are left out because at this stage of your approach to law your common sense is rather in the way than otherwise. Let me here say only this about rightness of the law. That if most people did not stand behind the officials, however passively, there would be little law to talk about. That if most people did not most of the time when they looked at a rule look to its purpose as well as to its exact and narrow form, and fit their conduct roughly to that purpose, then the officials would have been a burden on their hands they could not bear. And, finally, that if most people shaped their conduct really with reference to the law and to their legal rights, for any serious fraction of their time, rather than with reference to the patterns of action, the patterns of thought, the standards of judgment which they inhale as the social atmosphere they breathe, then life in our society would become unlivable. ...

I offer this in part as a response to those who look at the actions of those responsible for the current crisis in mortgage backed securities and who say "nevertheless, what they did was legal". This would also be applicable to those who excuse the actions of our government's agents toward those in its detention centers because of some technical justification by the Bush Administration's Office of Legal Counsel. Just because someone can twist the words of the law to justify reprehensible actions doesn't make those actions any less wrong.

Kudos to the Lanier Middle School Debate team

The Houston Chronicle has an article about the success of the debate team from Houston's Lanier Middle School, a public school in the Houston Independent School District. Because one of my children is on the team, I traveled with them to the 2009 National Junior Forensics League competition and was a volunteer judge for a number of events.

The experience was really enjoyable for a number of reasons. The competitors in all the different events were accomplished speakers; a number of schools stood out with impressive performances from their various team members, and it was a treat to observe them as a judge or in the audience. The Lanier group was of course one of the impressive groups, strong in both the speech/interp and debate tracks; this breadth of expertise served them well and ensured their 7th straight first-place national ranking, for although other schools were also very good in one or the other area, none were as good in both.

The other compelling reason to go again next year was the behavior of the team itself. They exhibited a welcome camaraderie with each other; for example, members would attend performances of their teammates when they were not competing themselves. As far as I saw, they were always respectful of the judges and other competitors and schools, thanking the judges after every round and congratulating the other competitors in the round when appropriate. When together, they played games or shared impressions and notes, and recognized the strengths of the other competitors. I think it was a good experience for my child to be part of such a large and supportive team.

As the team's coach Mr. Hill pointed out in the press conference, their success was due to their own hard work, but also in large part to the contributions of the alumni who returned to mentor and challenge the team, the parents who support the students, the school who value the team and treat them as champions (not just geeks!), and of course the coach, without whose guidance the students would not improve as much as they do over the years they're on the team.

Auditing the Federal Reserve

Representative Ron Paul of TX has introduced the Federal Reserve Transparency Act of 2009, a bill which essentially opens the workings of the Federal Reserve to Congressional audit but not control. It's a hugely popular bill on OpenCongress.

Proponents of shielding the Federal Reserve from meaningful disclosure and oversight justify their position by arguing that "the Fed" should be able to complete its work without political pressure, especially pressure to take short-term actions counter to particular long-term policies. There's some value to that, in the sense that in many cases the actions necessary to preserve economic stability and/or growth in the long term may be unpopular in the short term.

However, it's ultimately in the democratically-elected Congress where the nation can debate its long term goals, and when necessary, the tactics required to achieve them. As it stands, we can only trust the Reserve to take its actions without fear of audit; this is disturbing because we the people end up paying for loose or tight monetary policy and its "lending as a last resort". Because their actions spend or encumber our tax dollars (now or future), we taxpayers should have the power to determine (at least post facto) if the short-term tactical decisions make sense.

As Justice Brandeis once said, "Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants ...". The Federal Reserve is not a sausage factory; it in part implements policy by regulating its member banks. It's responsible to the Federal Government, and as such, should expect to be audited by elected officials.

Sarah Palin has a new job

When Sarah Palin recently announced her pending resignation as governor of Alaska part way through her first term, we wondered where we'd see her next. A clue came from an op-ed piece she recently wrote for the Washington Post (no link, look it up), where she argued vigorously against the current Waxman-Markley cap-and-trade proposal wending its way through Congress. Perhaps she's lining up a career as a pundit or lobbyist?

Painful as it is to say it, although I disagree with almost everything in her piece, I do concur with her overall conclusion the bill is a bad idea. Here are some of my observations about her writing:

1. Her first purpose seems to be to conflate energy with oil. It appears she'd even prefer to make that Alaskan crude but is forced to concede later down that coal and nuclear power are acceptable alternatives. She omits any mention of renewable sources of energy; apparently we can't power our economy with those.
2. She uses a provision of the bill, which offers funding to retrain displaced workers, to argue that the bill will have an overall negative effect on employment. However, retraining workers to land new jobs is a responsible response to a shift in energy production from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources. Is the better alternative to leave the displaced employees out in the cold? I guess she's not one of those compassionate conservatives.
3. If electricity prices do go up as a result of this bill, that implies the current bill is the wrong approach, not that cap-and-trade in general is a bad idea. As far as I can tell, one fatal flaw in the current bill is the giveaway of a huge amount of emissions credits to polluters - a provision offered to them precisely to avoid price hikes in the consumer sector. If producers are going to spike prices even with free emissions credits, then Congress should consider going back to candidate Obama's original proposal, which was to strictly auction off all the credits and use the auction proceeds as a per-capita refund. That's not a perfect solution either but at least it mitigates the claim that "with cap-and-trade your bills will go up".

4. Palin throws in a reference to outsourcing our energy decisions to China and Russia without apparently developing the idea further in that piece. I wonder if that meme has propagated enough yet for her to just mention it to make sense.

   What she's referring to is the very real effect the current bill may have on the domestic/import mix of oil. Basically, if energy refining is more expensive here (because of emissions controls and costs) then refiners will shut down plants and import more finished goods; according to Bloomberg, they're already making this threat. It seems from the Congressional testimony of Joost Pauwelyn (a good read, and thanks to Paul Krugman for the reference) that the WTO would be fine with Congress responding by imposing an equalizing tariff at the border on imports from countries which don't impose the same taxes we do on carbon processing; however, the Obama administration has ruled that out for some reason, leading to this perverse potential effect and leaving the bill's authors open to the assertion that we'd be end up more dependent on foreign oil (in the short term, we hope) not less.

Airport Searches and the TSA

An interesting case from UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE SOUTHERN DISTRICT OF OHIO, EASTERN DIVISION, USA v. FODE AMADOU FOFANA, decided 2 Jun 2009, which held that the defendant could suppress the presentation of the forged passports he was carrying through security because the search was only reasonable to find "weapons, explosives, or prohibited items". Contraband or other generally illegal items are not reasonable targets for a TSA search.

Fofana does not challenge his selection for secondary screening, but rather argues that the hand search of his luggage went beyond the permissible scope of an airport screening search because Agent Stroud had already determined that he was not carrying weapons or explosives when she decided to open the envelopes containing the passports. He further argues that his search exceeded the TSA's statutory mandate under 49 U.S.C. § 44902(a) and 49 C.F.R. 1540.111. He reasons that under 49 U.S.C. § 44902(a) and 49 C.F.R. 1540.111, [*13] the TSA is only permitted to search passengers and their belongings to detect dangerous weapons, explosives, or other destructive substances. He contends, therefore, that the TSA exceeded its statutory authority by opening the envelopes after his bags had been cleared of any suspicion that they contained weapons, explosives, or prohibited items.

For the reasons explained above, the Court GRANTS Defendant's Motion to Suppress. Any evidence that was seized or subsequently obtained as a result of Fofana's unlawful search, including the three passports, will be suppressed.

The key part of the reasoning seems to be that the forged passports were found in a search which commenced after Fofana had been cleared (by X-ray, wand, and explosives swabbing) of having any "weapons, explosives, or prohibited items". A subsequent search for further items is, according to Judge Marbley, an unlawful search on the part of the TSA.

Costs: Medicare vs. private insurers

I don't like to simply copy and paste from other peoples' articles, but I thought this meme was important enough to echo. From Paul Krugman's blog, a discussion of the assertion by the Heritage Foundation that the lower administrative costs of Medicare (less than 2% of expenditures) are actually higher than the administrative costs in private plans if measured on a per-capita basis. According to Heritage, the key is realizing that the expenditures in Medicare are higher per capita (they're a population which requires more care), so the percentage ends up being lower.

The key to rebutting this assertion comes from their own framing of the issue. If the two populations are not comparable (necessary to their argument) then it helps to find two populations which are. Luckily, we have the Medicare Advantage program, which serves a population comparable to Medicare, and which is run by private insurers. From Jacob Hacker:

These administrative spending numbers have been challenged on the grounds that they exclude some aspects of Medicare’s administrative costs, such as the expenses of collecting Medicare premiums and payroll taxes, and because Medicare’s larger average claims because of its older enrollees make its administrative costs look smaller relative to private plan costs than they really are. However, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has found that administrative costs under the public Medicare plan are less than 2 percent of expenditures, compared with approximately 11 percent of spending by private plans under Medicare Advantage. This is a near perfect “apples to apples” comparison of administrative costs, because the public Medicare plan and Medicare Advantage plans are operating under similar rules and treating the same population. (And even these numbers may unduly favor private plans: A recent General Accounting Office report found that in 2006 Medicare Advantage plans spent 83.3 percent of their revenue on medical expenses, with 10.1 percent going to non-medical expenses and 6.6 percent to profits—a 16.7 percent administrative share.)

The CBO study suggests that even in the context of basic insurance reforms, such as guaranteed issue and renewability, private plans’ administrative costs are higher than the administrative costs of public insurance. The experience of private plans within FEHBP carries the same conclusion. Under FEHBP, the administrative costs of Preferred Provider Organizations (PPOs) average 7 percent, not counting the costs of federal agencies to administer enrollment of employees. Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs) participating in FEHBP have administrative costs of 10 to 12 percent.

In international perspective, the United States spends nearly six times as much per capita on health care administration as the average for Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) nations. Nearly all of this discrepancy is due to the sales, marketing, and underwriting activities of our highly fragmented framework of private insurance, with its diverse billing and review practices.

As I've said before on health care, if you want your premiums to be applied to improving your health and not to inefficiencies then you should support H.R. 676. Even a fully functional, national public insurance option may be acceptable as a compromise, as long as its ultimate goal or effect is to gracefully, gradually, but inexorably drive the inefficient health insurance companies out of the market. This is especially important if a large public investment will be made in the plan; I want my tax dollars going toward improving public health, not padding the profits of private corporations. In the end, given the facts, it's really that simple.

Houston Opera Vista Festival Threatened

From Joe White:

HOUSTON – The organizers of the second annual Opera Vista Festival suspected one of their featured operas would draw controversy. But when an anonymous letter threatening the founders of the Nova Arts Project arrived at founding director Amy Hopper’s doorstep, she realized the show had potential to ignite a firestorm.

“We received this letter that was all about ignorance and hate, and that’s the whole point of this opera – to confront ignorance and hate. It makes it even more important to tell the story,” Hopper said.

The opera is “Edalat Square,” one of two works that won Opera Vista’s inaugural festival competition in 2007 (think “American Idol” for opera composers). Written by Atlanta‐based composer R. Timothy Brady, the opera recounts the true story of Mahmoud Asgari, 17, and Ayaz Marhoni, 16, who were hanged in Iran in 2005 for the crime of lavaat, or sex between two men. Brady was inspired by the story to craft a poetic work that offers an unblinking look at bigotry, but is also prayerful and mystical, said Viswa Subbaraman, artistic director and co‐founder of Opera Vista. “It’s an amazing appeal to the soul,” Subbaraman said. “It’s some of the most poignant music and lyrics in opera. I don’t know how you could watch it and not be moved.”

Because of its exploration of two hot‐button topics – radical Islam and homosexuality – performances of “Edalat Square” have faced opposition before. At its world premiere at Emory University, the university’s president contemplated canceling the show because of complaints. Some critics have said the show is persecuting the Islamic faith, which festival organizers say it doesn’t. Others object to the homosexual content.

On May 5, Amy Hopper found out the show was already pushing buttons here in Houston. She opened her mailbox to discover a hand‐stenciled, anonymous letter that said: “You are pigs to mix Islam with gays. You must stop! We will not let you do it.”

The festival’s organizers actually are glad the opera could spark debate or criticism. That’s part of the purpose of the performing arts – to provoke discussion and ignite the emotions, they said. “Great art should open a discussion, and I think that’s what this opera does,” Subbaraman said. “Art has never existed in a vacuum – it often has a political bent, and that’s as it should be.” “Edalat Square” will open the Opera Vista Festival at 8 p.m. Thursday, May 21, in the Wortham Theater Complex at the University of Houston. For more information and a schedule of operas being performed at the festival, visit www.operavista.org or www.novaartsproject.com/shows/ovf. Nova Arts Project is a Houston based, not‐forprofit performing arts organization that seeks to recreate classics and inspire new works in a fearlessly theatrical way.

Opera Vista is dedicated to continuing the growth of the operatic tradition by producing fully‐staged versions of new and contemporary operas, giving living composers a performance venue, and establishing and developing an audience for new opera. Opera Vista is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization.

The Houston Chronicle on Saving Newspapers

Yesterday, the Houston Chronicle editorial board weighed in with its suggestions on how to save themselves and their industry. As I outlined more broadly last week, these particular suggestions either make no sense or would be counter-productive. However, let's discuss each of the three Chronic proposals (cribbed, ironically, from the Dallas Morning News publisher):

1. Provide temporary tax relief by passing the Baucus-Snowe Act, which would allow newspapers (or any other businesses) to offset losses from 2008 and 2009 against the past five years’ earnings. This may be a bad suggestion from a tax point of view; currently businesses can take current losses and "roll them forward" to offset future tax burdens. This would allow businesses to make the offset today against past taxes, and get a big refund from the IRS. What this might do is encourage newspapers owners to take the refund up front, then declare bankruptcy and close. Hardly seems like a public good.

2. Give newspapers a limited antitrust exemption that would allow them to share ideas and investigate collaborative new business models. This is a very bad idea; collusion would potentially allow the small number of newspaper publishers nationwide an opportunity to distort the market to their own economic benefit, to the detriment of all their readers and customers. Funny that the newspapers, who have been such proponents of the "free market", argue against letting the market decide their fate, now that competition has dramatically reduced the amount of advertising revenue they can extract.

   Today less than 275 of the nation's 1,500 daily newspapers remain independently owned, and more than half of all U.S. markets are dominated by one paper. Why would we allow such an already small number of players in the market to collude on price-fixing? It makes no sense.

3. Allow newspapers to devise a way to ensure fair compensation from Internet outlets that use their content to generate their own advertising revenues. This is the one that confuses me the most, probably because I don't use any Internet outlets which use newspaper content to generate advertising revenues. I do occasionally visit Google News, which gives me headlines; when I click on a headline, it takes me to the publisher's site, where they can serve me all the ads they want; I can't read the content on the Google News site. What about using a search engine to discover articles? As it turns out, the search function on the Houston Chronicle's own web site is so poor that the best way to find articles on their site is to use an external search engine. So where is the free ride? It seems the Chronic should be paying Google for the visitors they bring to the site.

   The Chronicle should, in the interest of fairness and accuracy, let us know how many of the visitors to their site arrive from Google News, or various search engines; we would then know how much value those "parasites" are actually providing to this content provider. I'll go out on a limb and suggest that without the online aggregators and search portals, no one from outside Houston would have any reason to visit www.chron.com - nor would they know it existed unless they stumbled upon it at random..

I also don't get the idea of "Topic A: allowing newspapers to become nonprofit organizations." As I pointed out, newspapers already have the option to emulate The Texas Observer and Mother Jones Magazine, which are publications supported by non-profit foundations. Why would we need to make any other changes to the tax code just for newspapers, since that solution is already available to them?

I am sympathetic about the plight of the newspapers; I have good friends who either work at papers or who have family members there. I wish them all the best as they try to navigate the new economic conditions, and try to survive after playing in the free market and having their indirect compensation model undermined by new competition for advertising. But, much like the health insurance providers, the big record labels, and the merged banking and investment institutions, I won't miss them if they end up disappearing. I think there are enough indicators that the functions they serve either aren't necessary or can be handled by other market players.

Save journalism, not newspapers

I'm a big fan of David Simon, the creator of HBO's The Wire, Generation Kill, and The Corner. Yesterday he appeared before a panel of Senators from the Commerce committee, and participated in a discussion of the fate of newspapers in the US (reported in Dallas Morning News).

As usual, his analysis is spot-on; it should be, he's been trying to tell us of the problem for over a decade. Newspapers are losing readers because they're doing a worse and worse job of covering the news and their communities; in the fifth season of The Wire, the Baltimore Sun pretty much missed or buried all the actually big news events that took place. He identifies the root cause: driven by a desire to make larger and larger profits, corporate-owned newspapers have been trying to reduce costs (personnel, mostly) while increasing circulation (to be more valuable to advertisers). This has led to overworked editors and a decimated newsroom, with fewer tenured reporters. The net result has been a disaster for journalism, and as Simon warns, will eventually lead to an environment in which public officials no longer feel constrained by the watchful eye of the fourth estate.

Sadly, I disagree entirely with his two proposed solutions to the problem.

• Newspapers should charge readers for the content they create. Simon belittles the belief that "information should be free" on the Internet; it's this "freeloading" attitude toward newspaper content that is part of the problem, and the best solution is to figure out how newspapers can charge their readers for access to the content. After all, this content is costly to create; journalists, photographers, editors, managers must be paid, and their expenses covered while working on long running stories.

  While he's correct on the costs, he's coming to the wrong conclusion. Newspapers have never charged readers directly for the content therein; most of what you pay for covers the cost of raw materials and delivery. Newspapers have always paid for content indirectly by selling advertising, and there's no reason to expect that to change on the Internet. Yes, it's harder to make as much money - the newspaper is no longer the exclusive (or premier) advertising delivery vehicle for the community, so it can't charge a premium for the service. That's not the fault of the Internet readers; it's just a side effect of being in an economy where competition has sprung up for advertising dollars.

  If you make readers pay for content, fewer readers will come; that's a downward spiral, which seems only to lead to a small number of people paying large amounts of money for reporting, leaving the rest of us out in the cold. That's certainly not the model that speaks truth to power; only widely disseminated reporting can effect social change. In a strange sense, we've always had a small number of people paying for journalism - advertisers have often realized their power and attempted to use that to influence editorial decisions - but in the end, the need to deliver a large audience to advertisers has driven the delivery systems (newspapers, radio, television) to disseminate their product as widely as possible as cheaply as possible, to the benefit of society and to each of us individually.

  So how should newspapers recoup the cost of doing great journalism, if advertising dollars won't cover them? I don't know, but I do know that charging for content is likely to be a dead end. Instead, publishers should charge for some added value: access to archives, alerts for breaking news, or some other popular service. While we still have a multiplicity of news providers, we're likely to see experimentation in this area.

  One chilling suggestion Simon makes is that Congress consider relaxing anti-trust prohibitions so newspapers can collaborate on how best to charge for their content. The very last thing we need is a collusive attempt to establish a single business model, perhaps even the least efficient or effective one available. This would be analogous to relaxing anti-trust laws so software companies can collaborate on how best to eliminate their open-source competitors. It's a very bad idea.

• Change the tax code to make newspapers tax-exempt, as non-profit organizations. This is a heavy-weight non-solution to the problem, and it's a suggestion which gives an unfair competitive advantage to newspapers over other content producers such as television, radio, and of course Internet-only sources. It's also unnecessary; the Texas Observer and Mother Jones Magazine are two examples of publications run by non-profit foundations (full disclosure: I contribute to both). Therefore, a solution is already out there; in my opinion, we don't need to exempt newspapers especially from taxes in order to save journalism.

  On the other hand, I do support one of his suggestions, which was to give some sort of tax preference to a particular one-time event: the transfer of ownership of a newspaper from a for-profit corporation to some non-profit organization (such as an independent foundation, as above). This one-time benefit would help more quickly close the book on the disastrous experiment of having Wall Street own newspapers. I don't mind paying holding companies a bribe to divest themselves of the real assets, the personnel and the presses, as long as the transition is to an ownership structure which is more robust and responsive to its readers.

Another model for funding journalism is the curious system that is found in the United Kingdom: the British Broadcasting Company (BBC), funded by a tax on radios and televisions. It's a progressive approach to the problem; journalism (and to be fair, entertainment) is seen as a necessary public good, and so it's financed by a tax levied by the state. Interestingly, the result has not been an organization that shies away from attacking politicians - in effect, biting the hands that feed it. It's sadly a model which will never fly in the United States.

David Simon makes another good point: journalists require standing to be taken seriously by the people they're interviewing and/or reporting about. Traditional newsrooms have nurtured the careers of those journalists who are now household names, either nationally or in their community; elected officials tend to be more careful when challenged by these reporters because they know they have a constituency. The non-profit foundation model can hopefully also nurture the careers of "rock star" reporters, who can supplement their salaries or other compensation with speaking fees and book deals. Perhaps what we'll end up seeing are even more specialized journalists, who get to know a particular geographical area or topic really well, and become worldwide authorities on their subjects. I especially like his quote on page 7 (of 10) of his testimony; read the whole thing when you get a chance:

When I was in journalism school in the 1970s, the threat was television and its immediacy. My professors claimed that in order to survive, newspapers were going to have to cede the ambulance chasing and reactive coverage to TV and instead become more like great magazines. Specialization and beat reporting were the future. We were going to have to explain an increasingly complex world in ways that made us essential to an increasingly educated readership. The scope of coverage would have to go deeper, address more of the world, not less. Those were our ambitions. Those were my ambitions. ...

In summary, I think the problem is how do we save journalism, not "how do we save newspapers". Journalism is a system we know, and one whose contours aren't likely to change; you need to pay for good writers, good interrogators, and people who can pull the story together. That's what we need to make sure persists, not the particular delivery system.

HISD Random Search Statistics

I received this Open Records Request information via email yesterday. The response is interesting; I certainly remember a lot more news reports last year about teachers being found with drugs in their possession. I guess I have to assume those detections were from actual tips and not from the random searches. Which implies to me that the random searches were even more of a waste than I'd suspected. I wish I'd asked how much it had cost to implement those searches!

Bai B030909 Statistics on HISD random drug searches
From: "Kaiser, Pamela" 

Full report:

As of March 11, 2009 we completed 261 Random Sweeps of HISD facilities during the 2008 - 2009 
school year.  Only 3 employees have been arrested as the result of the Random K-9 Sweeps.  
These employees are:

December 15, 2008                  Harper Alternative                  Sharon Vean arrested for Possession of Marijuana

January 5, 2009                         Walnut Bend El.                      Perla Sanchez arrested for Possession of a Firearm

January 13, 2009                       Roberts Elementary               Melinda Herrick arrested for Possession of Controlled Substance (Xanax)


All three of these individuals were arrested and criminal charges were accepted by the Harris 
County District Attorney's Office.  The Harris County D.A.'s Office would be the ones to provide 
the disposition of the criminal charges.  Sharon Vean and Perla Sanchez are no longer employed 
with HISD. Ms. Herrick's appeals process has not been finalized.

Pamela Kaiser
Public Information Coordinator
Public Information Office


-----Original Message-----
Sent: Monday, March 09, 2009 9:23 AM
To: Kaiser, Pamela
Subject: OPEN RECORDS REQUEST: Statistics on HISD random drug searches

Hi Ms. Kaiser,

I'd like to submit an open records request for the following information. I'd like to know how 
many random drug searches HISD made since June 2008; if a campus was searched twice, that'd count 
as two. For only those random searches, I'd like to know how many employees were disciplined by 
HISD (any action - suspension, reassignment, termination, etc.), and how many of those cases were 
referred to the DA. If you can provide the names in the last case (I think those are public 
record?) then I can track the resolution of those cases via the courts.

Thanks;

Luigi Bai

Coda

We finally have closure on the charges against Roberts Elementary School art teacher Mindy Herrick: the District Attorney has dropped all charges against her. The Roberts community stepped up to raise funds and write character letters in her defense, which I'm sure only made it easier to look at the evidence and decide there's no credible case.

If we can count on the termination of the random search policy, then we'll have accomplished all we wanted with our efforts.

Progressive Forum Houston

I attended a presentation tonight by Lester Brown, sponsored by the Progressive Forum of Houston. They have an impressive list of past speakers, and are in the process of uploading audio and/or video from the various events. I'm glad we have such an active progressive institution in our otherwise very red state! According to the moderator (Forum President Randall Morton), they will have Speaker Nancy Pelosi on June 12.

A brief history of the Forum

The Progressive Forum premiered on June 13, 2005 with Robert F. Kennedy J. and Houston Mayor Bill White a the Hobby Center, Sarofim Hall, in a program called "Our Environmental Challenges". The year before in June, 2004, founder Randall Morton saw Robert Kennedy on Larry King Live and called one of Houston's fine speaker organizations and suggested they present Kennedy, but nothing came of it. Morton had created and hosted another speaker series in the oil industry, a client base for his advertising and public relations agency. Dismayed after the election of November 2004, he called Mr. Kennedy's representatives who were responsive to Kennedy appearing at a new event series. The great turnout and excitement at the Kennedy-White event showed the forum's unique model had viability long term. Six months later, the Forum opened its first spring season in 2006 with Jared Diamond, Seymour Hersh, and Molly Ivins. Al gore appeared June 7th in a sell-out event launching An Inconvenient Truth at The Progressive Forum, his first U.S. book event for that title. ...

Getting ahead in HISD

In general - if you feel your child can handle a curriculum more challenging than their current grade level, you should consider having them 'skip' a grade to have access to the advanced material. The problem is that it gets much harder the older your child is; I'd guess it's exponentially difficult after 4th grade, unless you're supplementing their school experience with material at home. The main issue would be skipping too much important material - a year of science, or of history, for example. But if your child is older by the time you think they can handle more challenge at school, you can still play to their strengths - see if you can get them access to one or more advanced classes, instead of skipping the entire grade.

One of my children was ready to take Algebra for her 7th grade math course, but her middle school didn't offer that option. We were pretty sure she'd mastered the curriculum being offered, but weren't sure how to go about demonstrating that and getting the advanced class. We did a lot of research, and consulted with various administrators within HISD, and after a few months over the summer, got what she needed.

Getting credit for content mastery

We were encouraged to find, in the HISD guidelines (the documents are under the "School Guidelines" menu option on the left, or see section XII), that there was no longer a provision restricting pre-AP Algebra to 8th grade students; what we'd need to do, then was to demonstrate that our child had mastered the pre-requisite materials. Fortunately, that was not difficult; the middle school math curriculum in Texas is basically a tight spiral around learning decimals, fractions, percents, area, and volume. We spent a few weeks testing our child with the previously released TAKS exams, available by statute from the Texas Education Agency (if that link stops working, you can visit their home page and search for TAKS). Her performance on those was encouraging, so we contacted our school and then HISD administrators to find out what to do next. At HISD, we spoke with the Manager of the Gifted and Talented Department who was extremely helpful, and who in turn discussed the issue with the Manager of the Mathmatics Secondary Curriculum, Instruction, & Assessment. Thanks to those administrators, we became aware of an option known as Credit By Exam.

Credit By Exam (CBE) is a statutory mandate from the Texas Legislature, embodied in the Texas Education Code which is available online. We were particularly interested in Title 19 (Education), Part 2 (Texas Education Agency), Chapter 74 (Curriculum Requirements), Subchapter C (Other provisions), Rule 74.24 (Credit By Exam). This provision reads (rather drily) as follows:

    (a) General provisions.
    
    (1) A school district must provide at least three days between January 1 and 
    June 30 and three days between July 1 and December 31 annually when 
    examinations for acceleration for each primary school grade level and for 
    credit for secondary school academic subjects required under Texas Education 
    Code, §28.023, shall be administered in Grades 1-12. The days do not need to 
    be consecutive but must be designed to meet the needs of all students. The 
    dates must be publicized in the community.
    
    (2) A school district shall not charge for an exam for acceleration for each 
    primary school grade level or for credit for secondary school academic 
    subjects. If a parent requests an alternative examination, the district may 
    administer and recognize results of a test purchased by the parent or student 
    from Texas Tech University or The University of Texas at Austin.
    
    (3) A school district must have the approval of the district board of 
    trustees to develop its own tests or to purchase examinations that thoroughly 
    test the essential knowledge and skills in the applicable grade level or 
    subject area.
    
    (4) A school district may allow a student to accelerate at a time other than 
    one required in paragraph (1) of this subsection by developing a cost-free 
    option approved by the district board of trustees that allows students to 
    demonstrate academic achievement or proficiency in a subject or grade level.
    
    
    (c) Assessment for course credit in Grades 6-12.
    
    (1) A student in any of Grades 6-12 must be given credit for an academic 
    subject in which he or she has had no prior instruction if the student scores 
    90% on a criterion-referenced test for the applicable course.
    
    (2) If a student is given credit in a subject on the basis of an 
    examination, the school district must enter the examination score on the 
    student's transcript.
    
    (3) In accordance with local school district policy, a student in any of 
    Grades 6-12 may be given credit for an academic subject in which he or she 
    had some prior instruction, if the student scores 70% on a 
    criterion-referenced test for the applicable course.

What this says is that if you've had prior instruction in a course, you are eligible to receive credit for that academic subject by taking a CBE exam and passing with a 70%. Crucial is the requirement that an administrator approve the application; all the CBE programs we saw had that as an application pre-requisite. Even better is the provision that you can receive credit, and a transcript grade, if you pass with 90% - even if you've not had any "prior instruction" in the subject. The latter is sometimes called "Exam for Acceleration". The middle school exams are available from Texas Tech and University of Texas at Austin; the 8th grade math is split into two semester tests, 8A and 8B. Students can also receive credit for High School courses through the HISD Virtual School (more on that later). We went with the Texas Tech program and were happy with it. They require a proctor, who was our middle school assistant principal; the materials are sent directly to the school, and the exam is given under normal conditions (each exam can take up to three hours). The completed work is sent back to Texas Tech, who typically takes about a week to respond with the grade.

Once that was done, our middle school had a last hurdle, which was to pass an assessment of our child's readiness for abstract concepts via the Iowa Algebra Aptitude Test. Once that was out of the way, she was ready to take the school's Algebra class in 7th grade.

Looking forward to High School

Texas, like any other state, has a set of required courses for each High School student to take. Among the requirements are two semester-long courses of life skills: Communication Applications (or, how to write a resumé and get a job!), and Health (more songs about sex and nutrition). Fortunately, these courses are offered online at the HISD Virtual School, and I'm strongly tempted to have my kids take them there so they can take other courses and/or electives during high school.

You might also consider having your HS student (or prospective student) attend courses at Rice University over the summer. The first alternative, Rice for HS students, is really quite expensive, but provides a "college experience". The second is a set of full day (8am - 3pm) classes for credit (or enrichment) at Rice Summer School.

If you're thinking of trying to help HISD tailor their curriculum to meet your student's needs, please let me know. Leave me a comment, and I'll follow up as best I'm able. Please also let me know about any errors or changes in the information above, if you're from HISD.

March 10: 4th National Call-In Day for Single Payer Health Insurance

Progressive Democrats of America are organizing a call in day in support of HR 676, the single payer health care plan. Please, call your representative on March 10, 2009.

Zero Tolerance for Zero Tolerance

Today, Roberts Elementary art teacher Mindy Herrick returned to the classroom. This is a wonderful event for both the school and for Ms. Herrick. The students, staff, and parents have learned that people, when organized, can bring about positive change; and Ms. Herrick has been shown decisively that the events of the past few months have not damaged her reputation at all. With all the staff, teachers, and a large number of parents watching, Ms. Herrick came to the outdoor stage from inside the school while the speakers played the theme from "Rocky". People were feeling happy, relieved, and triumphant.

The next step is to change the policy of performing random drug searches in teacher parking lots. Of course, none of us want to have teachers or staff whose performance at work is impacted by drug use, and we don't want anyone on campus distributing drugs on campus to anyone else. But random searches in general, and demonstrably so at HISD, are not affecting either population. It seems that adding random searches is not an improvement over searches involving probable cause.

The concept of the probable cause requirement for a search/seizure is rooted in the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution. The amendment requires the Executive (the police) in most cases to have more than a reasonable suspicion they'll find something before they can search a private area. As the link to reasonable suspicion points out, there are cases (such as a search for firearms) which have a lower threshold, but a drug search isn't one of them.

I'm not a lawyer, so this is all untrained speculation. It seems the Supreme Court has recognized that certain employers can institute random tests in Skinner v. Railway Labor Assn., 489 U.S. 602 (1989). Since then, it seems the number and types of employers instituting random searches has grown; I think that "safety-sensitive" has been more and more loosely construed, and more and more people are being searched by their employers. Clearly, HISD has decided they are comfortable their employees fit the definition.

I'm not sure that's reasonable. Of course, we want our kids to be safe; it's just not clear that random drug searches are preventing HISD employees from bringing drugs to school. (It may help prevent students from doing that though - they may not be as rational, nor do they have jobs to lose). Instead, in addition to paying our teachers poorly, and putting pressure on them to "teach to a test", the district is accusing them of being guilty until proven innocent of having drugs. Should they always work under that suspicion?

I have no sympathy for HISD employees selling or sharing drugs on campus. If there's reason to suspect that's happening, please, call in the dogs, and submit the evidence to the District Attorney. On the other hand, if you suspect someone of taking drugs they don't have a prescription for, maybe the right reaction is to figure out how to help them overcome the problem. If there is a problem (and the discovery was not a false positive) and they're an exemplary or even just an effective employee, especially if they've a long history of dedication to their job, maybe the first thing to do is treat them as a valuable person, and see if you can preserve the good in them by helping them overcome a weakness. If as an employer HISD were to find evidence of such a problem, I suggest it should first offer counseling before turning the issue over to the police.

The district should also determine if the drug use constitutes a potential danger to the students; that's a harder call, and of course it's just so much easier to automatically suspend or reassign anyone in such a situation. "Zero Tolerance" is a policy that potentially protects the district from lawsuits in the situation something unfortunate happens - but it's also potentially devastating to the employee, and that public vote of "no confidence" by their employer can make it difficult for them to return to their job. A friend of mine said Zero Tolerance means zero thinking, which can be an appealing approach if you want to implement what looks like an even-handed policy. But does a policy ultimately even protect the students, at such a cost? And what about all the other dangers adults pose to children?

Ultimately, it's my opinion that random drug searches, coupled with a "zero tolerance" policy, do not protect our children any better than a policy of vigilance and understanding. Vigilance will protect our kids from more than just danger from drugs; and understanding will be consistent with the concepts of rehabilitation and forgiveness found in most moral systems and religions.

The Obama administration and secrecy

I read an entry on Glenn Greenwald's blog discussing a filing made by the Obama Department of Justice in the case of Al-Haramain v. Obama et al. Greenwald's analysis is that this is an unfortunate turn of events - an opportunity the Obama DOJ had to reverse Bush-era policy, which they let slip by. But after reading the filing, I'm not so sure.

It seems to me the brief is arguing that Classified information is determined by the Executive to be sensitive; only the Executive can determine who has access to it; and that there are case law and statutory precedents supporting their assertions. After reading the references, I don't actually see anything wrong with their reasoning. I think both Congress and the courts have concurred - let the experts (the Executive) be the final arbiters of whether disclosure of a document may be harmful to national security.

I believe what's happening here is that the plaintiffs have advanced the wrong arguments. Instead of asking the Court to compel the Executive to disclose the document, and instead of arguing that the Court could choose to disclose the document itself, they probably should be attacking the classification. There, I think, is the problem. The Executive clearly should be able to keep certain information secret - but there should be limits on what can be classified, and I don't think that argument has been advanced. Certainly it should not be possible for the Executive to classify documents to cover up wrongdoing - which in fact appears to be the tactic in use in this case.

However because the plaintiffs haven't (yet?) advanced that particular argument, the DOJ was not required to address it or advance it for them. Let's see if counsel for Al-Haramain addresses the propriety of the classification of these documents, and how the Obama DOJ responds to that. Until they do so, I think the DOJ is right to protect the concept of keeping classified information secret. That's too large a privilege to give up, especially if it can have serious consequences for national security.

Mindy Herrick Returns

Roberts Elementary School teacher Mindy Herrick will be returning to work Monday morning at 7:30am. The staff at Roberts plan to have a big welcome back party at 8am. If you can, be there!

I don't think HISD has yet said why she's being allowed back. The Roberts parents were in touch with both Dr. Saavedra's office and Dr. Adriana Tamez (Central Region Superintendent), and didn't seem to get a detailed answer from either. We'll have to monitor the news to see why she's returning, and perhaps the status of other teachers caught in this drug sweep policy.

About the best you can say about HISD's policy regarding teachers and drugs is that it's confusing.

Paying your superintendent

In an article by the Houston Chronicle's Ericka Mellon, the issue of compensation for the HISD superintendent was discussed. I collected another 10 seconds on my cumulative fifteen minutes of fame, and wanted to clarify a few points.

• First, I said I'd be willing to "spot him the driver" in our 7th largest school district. Yes, I pay taxes too. But I grew up in NJ, and spent four years going to high school in Manhattan, which was only possible because of mass transit. I spent the travel time doing homework, reading, goofing with friends, or just chilling out. Dr. Saavedra probably travels a lot of miles in our huge sprawling city; any time he can prep for a meeting, work on a proposal or policy, etc. is bonus time to us, I think. Honestly, we should make Metro pay for the driver; it's really a shame we don't have a decent mass transit system in the fourth largest US city. I guess we can thank Tom DeLay for that.
• One of my biggest concerns is that the compensation package is almost strictly accretive. The next candidate isn't going to come in and say "I'll take less than my predecessor"; the trend is to ask for all that, and more. I think the Board should spend a little time discussing the package up front, then look for supers who are willing to work within those boundaries. If we need to shave back compensation or perks, we should take advantage of this opportunity to do so.
• I also said the Board should consider putting a cap on the compensated vacation/personal days. That's pretty normal for us plebes, who at best can carry a single year's worth of days over to next year. As an employer, you don't want your employees working for two years then taking a long vacation in the middle of your project the next year (though of course that'd be so nice). You also don't want to get socked with a big payout at termination, which is what we're seeing now with Dr. Saavedra. A cap just makes sense; use it or lose it.
• The salary part of the compensation doesn't faze me much. It's a big job, and a big district. Can we get equally qualified personnel to run it for less? I don't know. The bonus, on the other hand, is obscene; an $80,000 bonus is two average teacher salaries (I think). Wouldn't we be better served having the extra teacher(s)? Since it's tied (in large part?) to the performance on standardized tests, it aligns his compensation with what I consider to be a flawed metric. It also is of probably dubious value; at the end of the day it's the teachers and principals who are making that happen, not him.

In the end, as a taxpayer, I'd like to see us pay the super less if we can. As a citizen and parent of HISD students, I want a person in the job who can make sure the system works for our children. It's the Board's job to try to make those both happen, and I wish them luck.

This could be big

According to KHOU, HISD Superintendent Dr. Saavedra is planning to stop the random drug searches in campus parking lots. Of the 261 searches this year, only 12 were a result of a tip or request.

Even better is the suggestion that if Roberts Elementary Art Teacher Mindy Herrick is no-billed by her grand jury (for possession of drugs on a school campus) and tests "clean" (reportedly this is already the case), then she can return to the classroom.

I'd be thrilled to see both those happen.

Rally at Roberts Elementary for Mindy Herrick

By now, if you've read Lisa Gray's column in the Chronicle or Ericka Mellon's article, you've heard of Mindy Herrick, the Roberts art teacher who was put on administrative leave and is currently facing charges for "having possession" of two Xanax pills in a baggie in her car. There will be a rally in support of her as detailed below.

We hope to have radio, TV, and print media out in force. I'd like you to consider coming, if not for our particular teacher, to express disappointment and displeasure with HISD's "Zero Tolerance" drug policy.

Join us FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 20TH AT 5:00 at the Greenbriar entrance to Roberts Elementary as we RALLY IN SUPPORT OF MINDY HERRICK.   Bring your family, your friends and your neighbors to provide the biggest show of support we can for our beloved teacher and friend. Let's show everyone we want Ms Herrick back at Roberts, now!   We'll hear from Ms Herrick's attorney, Kent Schaffer as well as Roberts students who love Ms Herrick and miss her very much.   Posters and signs are welcomed.