Monthly Archives: March 2011

What happens when even the schools in well-off sububs don’t meet the NCLB standards?

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With the increasing standards in the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), the Department of Education recently suggested that the number of schools that are not meeting standards is likely to dramatically increase:

The Department of Education estimates the percentage of schools not meeting yearly targets for their students’ proficiency in in math and reading could jump from 37 to 82 percent as states raise standards in attempts to satisfy the law’s mandates.

According to this “Fact Check,” schools are not labeled as “failing.” Rather, there is a process such schools would go through if they do not meet the NCLB increasing standards:

Obama’s terminology wasn’t quite right, though. There is no “failing” label in the No Child Left Behind Act. And schools that do not meet growth targets — aimed at getting 100 percent of students proficient in math, reading and science by 2014 — for one year are not subject to any intervention.

Those unable to do so for two or more consecutive years are considered “in need of improvement.” The consequences then become stiffer each year, starting with offering students an opportunity to attend another school, and escalating if the targets remain unmet.

As more schools are unable to meet these standards, what happens when suburban school districts in fairly well-off suburbs don’t meet the standards? Many of these communities use their well-performing schools as a selling point. Suburban home buyers and businesses are influenced by school performance and perceptions about school districts.

Having schools labeled as “not meeting standards” (or in possible public jargon, “failing”) would be a blow to the idyllic image and high status of a number of suburban communities. Beyond schools, suburbs are supposed to be places where Americans can be safe and at least their children can get ahead. Suburbs could try to give a more technical explanation for the NCLB data but this could prove tedious or difficult to understand.

One possible outcome  of all of this (suggested to me by a colleague outside my department) might be that this is when NCLB will truly be done: when monied suburbs realize that the legislation says their good schools are not making adequate progress.

Update on “baseball McMansions” in Arizona: White Sox also facing issues

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Yesterday, I wrote about a new spring training facility in Arizona that one writer dubbed a “baseball McMansion.” While this particular park may have issues, it is not the only one. The Chicago White Sox also recently moved to the same area. Because of the economic recession, the White Sox are having attendance issues and the mixed-use development that was supposed to surround their facility has not been built:

Small crowds on the west side of the Valley are an alarming trend as the White Sox and other neighboring teams try to rebound in the wake of a depressed area.

“The opening of the Rockies-Diamondbacks stadium (Talking Stick at Salt River Fields) is definitely pulling people away,” Sox chairman Jerry Reinsdorf said before 10,074 fans attended Wednesday’s game between the Sox and world champion Giants. “Now you have six teams in the east valley…”

But the Glendale area hasn’t developed into what the Sox thought when they decided to move from Tucson after the 2008 season.”One of the attractions to putting this ballpark here was the plan for what was going to be built around it,” Reinsdorf said. “By now, in our third year, we were supposed to be looking at restaurants and retail and a hotel and condominiums. And the guys who were going to do that went broke. So we’re sort of sitting out here by ourselves.

“All of the projections for the Phoenix area growth had Glendale in 10 years being the population center of the valley, a ton of people west of here. And that stopped. But at some point the economy will come back. This is too vibrant an area. And when it does come back, those projections will come true. So it’s just a delay.”

It may be some time before the White Sox and other teams see an uptick in attendance and building as Arizona has been hit hard by the economic recession, evidenced by foreclosures and a slowdown in development. Reinsdorf sounds quite optimistic about the future – perhaps he has to be if he has put a decent amount of money into this project.

it seems like now would be the time to look into why exactly the White Sox and other teams moved to this area. In their projections about Glendale, was their any allowance for a growth slowdown? Was the main draw the growing population in this area or were there certain financial incentives that made this move attractive? And what will happen to these spring training complexes if population growth in this area is limited for a significant amount of time?

Dumb NYTimes pricing

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The NYTimes is indeed erecting a paywall, as the rumors had it.

I won’t address the decision to charge users directly for content, but I will note that $15 every 4 weeks is annoying and ridiculous as a pricing methodology. That’s not $15/month; that’s $16.25/month.  (Already feels like a “gotcha”, doesn’t it?)

And then there’s this: assuming you’re being billed via recurring charges to a credit card with a monthly statement (a pretty safe assumption), one of your credit card bills per year is going to have 2 charges from the NYTimes on it.  (Yep, there’s “gotcha”, part 2).

Wherever NYTimes had decided to set its price, this is absolutely the wrong billing methodology.  It’s going to make for some terrible customer relations; just imagine all the the people who are going to look at their credit card bills at some point in the first year and go “wait…why did they bill me twice?”

Grant Hill, Jalen Rose, and race and class

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ESPN recently aired the documentary The Fab Five which earned the network its highest ratings for a documentary (though its unclear how this stacks up against their typical Sunday night programming). One part of the documentary that has drawn attention are the comments Jalen Rose made regarding Grant Hill, Duke, and race. Here is what Rose said in a short segment:

I hated Duke and I hated everything Duke stood for. Schools like Duke didn’t recruit players like me. I felt like they only recruited black players that were Uncle Toms … I was jealous of Grant Hill. He came from a great black family. Congratulations, your mom went to college and was roommates with Hillary Clinton. And your dad played in the NFL — a very well-spoken and successful man. I was upset and bitter my mom had to bust her hump for 20-plus years. I was bitter that I had a professional athlete that was my father that I didn’t know. I resented that more than I resented him. I looked at it as they are who the world accepts and we are who the world hates.

Hill responded to Rose’s comment on the New York Times website. Here are a few relevant points:

In his garbled but sweeping comment that Duke recruits only “black players that were ‘Uncle Toms,’ ” Jalen seems to change the usual meaning of those very vitriolic words into his own meaning, i.e., blacks from two-parent, middle-class families. He leaves us all guessing exactly what he believes today…

This is part of our great tradition as black Americans. We aspire for the best or better for our children and work hard to make that happen for them. Jalen’s mother is part of our great black tradition and made the same sacrifices for him…

To hint that those who grew up in a household with a mother and father are somehow less black than those who did not is beyond ridiculous. All of us are extremely proud of the current Duke team, especially Nolan Smith. He was raised by his mother, plays in memory of his late father and carries himself with the pride and confidence that they instilled in him…

I caution my fabulous five friends to avoid stereotyping me and others they do not know in much the same way so many people stereotyped them back then for their appearance and swagger. I wish for you the restoration of the bond that made you friends, brothers and icons.

While this appears to be a conversation about race, I wonder how much of this might be about social class. While Rose used terms that invoked race (particularly the reference to “Uncle Toms”), what also might have been describing differences in social class: Grant Hill grew up in more of an upper-class family where his dad was a known athlete and his mom had connections. Rose did not have the same opportunities that Hill’s family provided and felt bitter about Duke, a private school known for its wealth (according to the National Association of of College and University Business Officers, Duke is #15 in its 2010 endowment with over $4.8 billion).

In the long run, both men have done well for themselves: Hill is still playing in the NBA while Rose is an analyst for ESPN and also played 13 years in the NBA. But these discussions about opportunities and race and class are ongoing in sociology: is it race that is the primary issue or is it social class? A sociologist like William Julius Wilson has written about this, most recently here, invoking a lot of discussion over the last few decades. How this particular discussion ends up between  Rose and Hill remains to be seen but there will be plenty of ongoing talk about these larger issues.

What can 90% of Americans agree on?

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The answer: not much. Pew Research has an article about the small number of issues in which 90% of Americans agree:

Yet there are some opinions that 90% of the public, or close to it, shares — including a belief that citizens have a duty to vote, an admiration for those who get rich through hard work, a strong sense of patriotism and a belief that society should give everyone an equal opportunity to succeed. Pew Research’s political values surveys have shown that these attitudes have remained remarkably consistent over time.

The proportion saying they are very patriotic has varied by just four percentage points (between 87% to 91%) across 13 surveys conducted over 22 years. Similarly, in May 1987, 90% agreed with the statement: “Our society should do what is necessary to make sure everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed.” This percentage has remained at about 90% ever since (87% in the most recent political values survey).

Interestingly, these cited figures are about foundational values in American culture. Exactly what some of these things mean could be up for debate: how should one express their “very patriotic” feelings? What exactly should it look like so that “everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed”? But as values, voting, patriotism, and meritocracy are quite powerful. (And it would also be interesting to see who doesn’t agree with these values.)

We could also ask why exactly 90% is a cutoff we should care about. Here is an explanation:

[R]eaching the 90% threshold is a rare occurrence in public opinion surveys. In part, this reflects the tendency of polling organizations to focus on current issues about which there are often considerable differences of opinion. Nonetheless, even on issues where one would expect to find near-total agreement, the public’s views are far from unanimous.

This is why Pew highlights a recent finding: “fully 90% of the public said that they were hearing mostly bad news about gas prices.”

It would be interesting to see more data on this to know just how rare 90% agreement is. How often might we expect to see this out of all survey responses? How different is the 90% occurrence compared to 80% or even 70%? Is this lack of 90% agreement unusual only for the United States or does this apply to other nations as well?

IP enforcement, spying, and reasonableness

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Today’s posts have touched on who should enforce IP rights and what that that enforcement should look like.  Recent comments by Ed Black, President & CEO of the Computer & Communication Industry Association (CCIA — Wikipedia backgrounder), address both of these issues in the context of the White House’s Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator’s recent white paper:

The government has shown how its zeal leads to carelessness [previously covered here] in its unprecedented efforts to widely seize domain names for IP enforcement, which ICE undertook this year. Sites were wrongfully shut down based on allegations the user was engaged in criminal conduct deemed lawful by their courts. We are concerned the same low threshold will be used in making decisions to spy on U.S. citizens.

Some in Congress and the White House have apparently decided that no price is too high to pay to kowtow to Big Content’s every desire, including curtailing civil liberties by expanding wiretapping of electronic communications. Even the controversial USA PATRIOT Act exists because of extraordinary national security circumstances involving an attack on our country.  Does Hollywood deserve its own PATRIOT Act?

This new punitive IP agenda follows just weeks after dictators spying on citizens online was the lead story in every major newspaper.  Perhaps the obvious hypocrisy caused someone to decide to wait to announce the U.S. goal of expanding our government’s powers to spy online.   A screenwriter could almost market this plot as a comedy – if it weren’t so serious.

Maybe we should be grateful our government only wants to make streaming a song or movie a felony with potential prison time as punishment.  What’s next corporal punishment?

This is the latest indication of the extent to which the content industry has infiltrated this administration and managed to turn the Administration’s IP agenda into a policy which protects old business models at the expense of consumers, citizens’ rights and our most innovative job creating industries.

To be sure, Mr. Black speaks as the head of a trade group, advocating for his clients’ interests.  Nonetheless, we’ve covered advocates for the content industry and the broadband industry before.  I think it is important to remember (1) that both sides of the IP debate can make sweeping — sometime unprovable — assertions and (2) there are usually two sides to every story.

Broadly speaking, I have to agree with Mr. Black’s concern with the disconnect between official condemnations of “dictators spying on citizens online” and “the U.S. goal of expanding our government’s powers to spy online.”  As illustrated only a few months ago, the line between vigorous copyright enforcement and totalitarianism can be a thin one indeed.  As Harold Feld of Public Knowledge put it recently over on the LA Times:

In the virtual world, the real but mundane problem of shoplifting undergoes a Hollywood-esque transformation into “piracy,” causing the entertainment industry and folks in Washington to lose all perspective. Consider that Rep. Howard Berman (D-Valley Village) proposed a bill in 2002 to allow record companies to hack into your computer to search for illegal downloads. And how did Berman justify the equivalent of an electronic strip search? “There is no difference between pocketing a CD in a Tower Records and downloading copyrighted songs from Morpheus,” Berman told the crowd of aghast tech executives. “Theft is theft.” True, theft is theft. But I suspect Berman would have objected to an amendment allowing Tower Records to break into your home to recover a stolen CD.

Whatever you think of Mr. Black’s rhetoric — even hyperbole — I think most people would agree that truly draconian IP enforcement is not worth the terrible price it exacts.  Now we just need to reach a consensus on exactly how much is too much…

Describing a “baseball McMansion”

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The term McMansion is generally a pejorative word, typically referring to the size or the poor architecture of a home or the cookie-cutter nature of a suburban neighborhood. Occasionally, it gets applied to others structures, even baseball stadiums.  In a review of Scottsdale Stadium, the spring training home of the San Francisco Giants, a writer suggests that another spring training facility, Salt Water Fields, home of the Arizona Diamondbacks and Colorado Rockies, is more like a McMansion than a home:

Salt River Fields, someone said later, “isn’t spring training.” It’s a baseball McMansion. Scottsdale Stadium just feels like home.

Here is a little more of the description of the two ballparks. Scottsdale Stadium is described as, “intimate and evocative of its sport,” “the Cactus League’s quaintest stadium,” “The place blends into the landscape as if Frank Lloyd Wright had come back from the grave to assist the architects who replaced the old wooden park 20 years ago,” and “There is no such thing as a mediocre seat.” In contrast, here is how Salt River Fields is described: “The world up there seemed so different, the trip should have required a passport,” “Salt River Fields sits next to a Target and movie multiplex. Concrete rules the landscape, offset by some sprouting trees and cactus gardens,” “The parking lot and the walkways at the new stadium consume more space than the entire Giants facility,” and “Shade, like everything else, is more abundant than at the Giants’ park.” Overall, Salt River Fields is more suburban, bigger, less intimate, and features more space (particularly in the parking lots) while Scottsdale Stadium is more like Fenway Park and Wrigley Field.

It would be interesting to find out how fans respond to these two settings. Both offer certain amenities. Not everyone likes cozier, more intimate facilities like Wrigley Field. While Cubs fans tend to like the place, many others (including other teams) complain about the lack of space and outdated facilities (like the bathrooms). Additionally, we could ask whether Scottsdale Stadium really is authentic or simply borrows architectural and design features from other successful ballparks and tries to put them all together.
Ultimately, will baseball fans go in greater numbers to Scottsdale Stadium because of its design and atmosphere and avoid Salt Water Fields with its McMansion nature?

LA piracy debate

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The LATimes just posted the second round of its “piracy Dust-Up” (you can read the first round here), and I thought I’d pull two quotes.

The first is from Harold Feld, the “legal director of Public Knowledge, a Washington-based digital rights advocacy group”, who points to the hidden costs of copyright enforcement:

It’s easy to understand 9 million illegal downloads of “The Social Network,” and hard to understand how the new regulations Sony wants will raise the price of your broadband subscription and your iPod while keeping you from doing cool things on your iPhone.  As the crowning insult, there is no evidence that these new rules would actually make a dent in the illegal downloading problem, or that marginally reducing illegal downloads would translate into an increase in legal sales.

The second is from Andrew Keen, “the author of the upcoming Digital Vertigo: An Anti-Social Manifesto...[and] an advisor to Arts and Labs, a coalition of entertainment and technology companies”:

Rather than worrying about doing “cool things on our iPod,” shouldn’t we instead be trying to craft legislation guaranteeing that 21st century artists have the opportunity to make a living selling their books, their recorded music and their movies?

Here’s the thing that I don’t understand:  in 2006, Keen accused Larry Lessig of being “an intellectual property communist”.  Yet if I understand this debate correctly, it is Keen who wants to focus on ways of “guaranteeing that 21st century artists have the opportunity to make a living” and who is unconcerned whether or not people can do “cool things on [their] iPod[s]”.

Last time I checked, “guaranteeing” certain people paychecks is strongly associated with communism.  It is innovation of the sort that allows people to “do cool things on [their] iPod[s]” that smacks of the capitalism Keen so implicitly embraces.

Keen will no doubt object that I mis-characterize his view insofar as he “only” seeks opportunity, not outcome.  This objection is fair enough — so far as it goes.  But it’s a tricky objection to maintain credibly when it is your opponent (here, Feld) who is calling for balance and proportionality in infringement penalties and you (Keen) who is engaging in the take-no-prisoners logic that “we surrender to the online thieves by treating piracy as a ‘cost of doing business'”.

Mr. Keen, accepting business loses due to shoplifting (in the physical realm) or piracy (in the digital realm) is not “surrender”; it is a fundamental recognition of reality.  Failure to recognize this reality seriously undermines your argument — as does your claim that you only seek “opportunity” when you so clearly will be satisfied only by enactment of one particular outcome.

Who will enforce IP laws?

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Ars Technica and TorrentFreak are reporting that Australian ISP iiNet (Wikipedia backgrounder) recently released a policy report calling for changes in the way that IP laws are enforced:

The ‘Hollywood solution’ (in very simple terms) involves the employment of private detectives, hired by content owners, to trawl the public internet and gather information. The content owner uses this information to generate notices which are sent to internet service providers. The notices demand that the ISP should terminate the service of a customer subsequently determined by the ISP (not the content owner).

Naturally, ISPs find this approach unattractive and unsatisfactory, to say the least.

Rather than merely passively complaining about Hollywood’s solution, however:

iiNet has developed a model which it believes addresses ISP concerns and is likely to be far more effective. We believe it to be attractive to all participants and one which offers a sustainable strategy that includes an impartial referee, for resolution of disputes between the parties and the issue of penalties to offenders.

Here is iiNet’s proposal:

1.    A content owner will carry out their own detective work and identify an offending computer making unauthorised copies of their content available for sharing via (typically) bit-torrent software. This will provide them with an ‘IP Address’ that can be traced by the issuing ISP to a specific internet service.

2.    The independent body will determine whether the evidence meets a test of ‘cogent and unequivocal evidence’.

3.    IP addresses can be provided to an independent body who is able to identify the issuing ISP and ask that ISP for contact details for the service account holder. The ISP provides those matching contact details to the independent body.

4.    Using those contact details the independent body can issue notices to the account holder informing them that they had been detected making unauthorised copies available, provide educative information, advise the consequences that may follow continued behaviour and ask the account holder to ensure that the behaviour stops.

5.    The independent body keeps records of the notices and may modify the notice for a repeat infringer, or seek further sanctions. Some of those sanctions may include fines, court charges or changes to the internet service.

6.    Consumers who believe the allegations are incorrect will be able to appeal the notice to the independent body. These appeals and/or complaints would be dealt with by the independent body.

7.    Consumers who believe an insecure wireless access (or other technical issue) may be involved, will be referred, by the independent body, to their ISP for technical assistance.

As I read the proposal, it seems like iiNet is primarily trying to do two things:

  1. Remove itself as arbiter of IP-related disputes; and
  2. Lower the transaction costs involved in full-blown litigation by setting up a quicker (and cheaper?) arbiter of disputes.  (Perhaps they have something in mind like the Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy, which administratively resolves certain types of domain name disputes without having to go to court.)

With respect to #1, I agree with iiNet.  ISPs are ill-positioned to adjudicate IP disputes, especially since the cheapest solution (and thus a compelling business model) is simply to comply with any content owner’s request, no matter how tenuous the underlying legal cases.

With respect to #2, however, I have serious doubts.  iiNet’s proposal could be read as an ISP’s attempt to shift online infringement clearly from a malum in se crime (crimes that are inherently wrong, like murder) to a malum prohibitum crime (crimes that are wrong by statute, like minor speeding violations).  Acts that are malum prohibitum generally require less evidence for conviction (e.g., strict liability), but this is supposedly outweighed by lesser penalties and less social censure (e.g., fines for speeding are relatively small and do not carry the social opprobrium of murder).

Here’s the problem:  current copyright statutes don’t have the malum prohibitum “balance” built in.  While there may be lesser social censure for copyright infringement than for other crimes, it is hard to think of many non-violent crimes with higher penalties.  U.S. law assesses damages as high as $150,000 per infringing act, and there are never-ending proposals to increase penalties.  Even if such penalties seem grossly disproportionate to the underlying crimes and raise serious constitutional concerns regarding due process and punitive damages, they nonetheless are “the law” as it exists on the books.

Given the reality of enormous statutory penalties for infringement, streamlining copyright enforcement procedures could lead to disaster.  As a policy matter, it’s one thing to argue for streamlined procedures (i.e., fewer due process protections) in exchange for lower penalties.  Under certain circumstances, that can be a reasonable policy tradeoff.  But it’s a dangerous thing to argue that every content owner in the world should have a fast, easy way to sue individuals up for $150,000.  Copyright trolls like Righthaven exist even in a world with the due process protections of courts; it’s truly frightening to imagine how many new trolls will arise if the potential payoffs remain the (astronomical) same but the bar for suit is set even lower.

To be fair, iiNet appears to recognize this danger and suggests:

Infringements can be ranked as minor (say, single instances), major (say multiple instances of different files) or serious (at a commercial level). Each level having prescribed penalties….A scale of fines can be established, relative to the economic loss represented, and demerit points could also be awarded in line with the severity of the infringements.

Nonetheless, I fear that their report does not highlight just how pivotal such gradation and balancing would be to any implementation.

Contracting Youngstown

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With dwindling populations in Rust Belt cities (as an example, population loss in Chicago), some have suggested that urban contraction would be the best option. Youngstown, Ohio, which has dropped from a peak population of 170,002 in 1930 to 66,892 in 2010, has been demolishing empty houses and encouraging people to move to neighborhoods where more people live:

In 2006, the city abandoned all that. And Youngstown walked away from the most fundamental assumption of economic development and city planning: The idea that a city needs to grow…

But without the dream of growth, Youngstown just had a bunch of empty houses that no one was ever coming back to. So the city started demolishing thousands of empty houses…

The problem with shrinking cities is that they don’t shrink in a smart, organized way. It’s chaotic. Thousands of people will leave one neighborhood, and maybe a dozen people will stay behind.

So Youngstown has been offering financial help for those people left behind, offering to move them to a place with more neighbors.

The twist to this story is that a number of people were not interested in moving as they talked about how they had lived in their homes and neighborhoods for years. Due to this, the contraction plans have slowed down a bit. This is not too surprising: many people are attached to their homes and settings, even if presented with what outside observers would see as better options.

You can read more about this on Youngstown’s website. In their Youngstown 2010 plan, the first statement of the Vision talks about seeing the city as a smaller place:

1. Accepting that Youngstown is a smaller city.

The dramatic collapse of the steel industry led to the loss of tens of thousands of jobs and a precipitous decline in population. Having lost more than half its population and almost its entire industrial base in the last 30 years, the city is now left with an oversized urban structure. (It has been described as a size 40 man wearing a size 60 suit.) There are too many abandoned properties and too many underutilized sites. Many difficult choices will have to be made as Youngstown recreates itself as a sustainable mid-sized city. A strategic program is required to rationalize and consolidate the urban infrastructure in a socially responsible and financially sustainable manner.

If all goes well in Youngstown over the coming years and the city successfully transitions to a smaller city, they may just serve as a model for a number of other cities facing similar concerns.

It would be interesting to know how communities reach a point where they are able to truly realize that growth is not going to happen. Youngstown has been losing population for 50 years; what pushed them to the point of action in the mid 2000s? This is an important point to reach: cities and suburbs are supposed to grow over time. We have less clear ideas about communities that are on a slow decline – what do we do with the people there? Should we try to revive these communities? Can we admit that something went wrong? Is it acceptable or right to perceive places with massive population loss as “failures”?