school districts should start randomly assigning some of their students to teachers and gathering lots of information about them as a matter of course, on the theory that we very likely can’t predict what the most salient public policy issues will be at the future point when long-term impacts can be estimated. The few randomized control trials that exist continue to be enormously influential

The 14th Amendment, adopted after the Civil War, states: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.” It could not be clearer.

The Constitution apparently does not matter to these politicians. They also do not seem to care that Arizona is earning a national reputation for intolerance and racism

Dave Pries stands near a decades-old weather siren in his hometown of Minneiska, Minnesota, worrying about when the next tornado will hit. Along with the weather, the city clerk voices another big concern here: slow Internet connections.

"It's about as slow as sending it through the post office," he says. Minneiska, like many rural communities, cannot afford to install the infrastructure for broadband. Pries says not having it is more than just an inconvenience. He says if the town had it, it would be able to send weather alerts directly to people's homes. Without it, he says, the town relies on an aging siren in need of an upgrade.

"This equipment that we have here is dated back to the 1970s, 1980s, maybe early 1980s." He adds, "It's going to become obsolete at the end of the year."

Enter Gary Evans, the CEO of Hiawatha Broadband. Minneiska is among the communities Evans serves.

"That's really what broadband means to rural America," Evans says. "It means survival." When the government announced it was tapping $7.2 billion in stimulus money to bring broadband to rural communities, Evans thought he had a good case. His customers include the Prairie Island Indian Community.

In Lake City, Minnesota, apple orchard owner Dennis Courtier warns of small businesses like his becoming extinct. "Not having the kind of communication capacity in rural areas for rural businesses, it's going to be like not having electricity at the end of the Depression."

Congress should establish a simple registration requirement, not when something is created but in order to maintain the copyright. So let's say 14 years after you have published something, you need to register that. And if you don't register that, then you’re signaling to the world that you don't care about the copyright and the world can treat it as if you don't care about the copyright. But if you do register it, at least we have a clear understanding of who owns what.

The second change is we need to once again think about what the balance should be between free access to culture and metered access to culture, because both extremes are mistakes, either the extreme that says everything is free because then lots of people won't create because they can't cover their cost of creating, or the regime that says everything needs to be licensed, because in that world there’s a whole range of creativity – think of kids producing stuff on YouTube – that can't begin to happen because the cost of negotiating and clearing those rights is just so extreme.

At the turn of the millennium, the U.S. had some of the best broadband access in the world. It reached more homes, and at a lower price, than most every other industrial country. Ten years later the U.S. is a solid C-minus student, ranking slightly below average on nearly every metric.

Here's a different way to view the same data: http://blogs.ngm.com/blog_central/2010/01/the-other-health-care-debate-lines-vs-scatterplot.html

The U.S. Department of Education wants school officials to “eyeball” students who decline to state [their race] and check a box for them, reports McClatchy [News].  In order to identify racial/ethnic achievement gaps, “the agency is pressing schools to identify all students by race in 2010-11 or face penalties.

the Pantybomber wasn’t the big joke. The real laugh was the United States government. The global hyperpower spent the next week making itself a laughingstock to the entire planet. First, the bureaucrats at the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) swung into action with a whole new range of restrictions.

Against radical Yemen-trained Muslims wearing weaponized briefs? Of course not. That would be too obvious. So instead they imposed a slew of constraints against you.

Security is both a feeling and a reality. The propensity for security theater comes from the interplay between the public and its leaders.

When people are scared, they need something done that will make them feel safe, even if it doesn't truly make them safer. Politicians naturally want to do something in response to crisis, even if that something doesn't make any sense.

Often, this "something" is directly related to the details of a recent event. We confiscate liquids, screen shoes, and ban box cutters on airplanes. We tell people they can't use an airplane restroom in the last 90 minutes of an international flight. But it's not the target and tactics of the last attack that are important, but the next attack. These measures are only effective if we happen to guess what the next terrorists are planning.

If we spend billions defending our rail systems, and the terrorists bomb a shopping mall instead, we've wasted our money. If we concentrate airport security on screening shoes and confiscating liquids, and the terrorists hide explosives in their brassieres and use solids, we've wasted our money. Terrorists don't care what they blow up and it shouldn't be our goal merely to force the terrorists to make a minor change in their tactics or targets.

Our current response to terrorism is a form of "magical thinking." It relies on the idea that we can somehow make ourselves safer by protecting against what the terrorists happened to do last time.

The education-reform debate as we have known it for a generation is creaking to a halt. No new way of thinking has emerged to displace those that have preoccupied reformers for a quarter-­century — but the defining ideas of our current wave of reform (­standards, testing, and choice), and the conceptual framework built around them, are clearly outliving their usefulness.

The problem is not that these ideas are misguided. Rather, they are just not powerful enough to force the rusty infrastructure of American primary and secondary education to undergo meaningful change. They have failed at bringing about the reformers' most important goal: dramatically improved student achievement.

The next wave of education policy will therefore need to direct itself toward even more fundamental questions, challenging long-held ­assumptions about how education is managed, funded, designed, and overseen.

Found via http://www.edexcellence.net/flypaper/index.php/2009/12/the-end-of-the-education-debate

In a recent letter to Obama, 23 prominent economists identified four provisions that they said "can go a long way toward delivering better health care, and better value, to Americans." They are: ensuring that reform doesn't add to the federal deficit; creating an independent commission to bring Medicare costs under control; discouraging high-cost insurance plans by taxing them; and changing the incentives in medicine so that doctors and hospitals are paid not for how much treatment they give but for how well it works.

Many of these economists - as well as other health experts - are watching in dismay as the legislation's reforms and cost-saving measures are whittled away by powerful special interests. "It may be that the intersection between what economists consider good policy and [what Washington considers] good politics is very small," says Stanford University's Alan Garber, an organizer of the group who signed the letter to Obama.

Copyright should not be placed above citizens' fundamental rights to privacy, security, presumption of innocence, effective judicial protection and freedom of expression.

Found courtesy of George Siemens, www.elearnspace.org/blog/2009/12/04/why-we-need-to-pay-attention-to-copyright

The default position is that we ebook readers are always engaged in some form of wrongdoing.  We are charged more.  We don’t get the book at the same time.  We are constrained in how we use our books, on what devices we read them on, with whom we can share them.  We are not considered legitimate customers if we do not leave our house and buy a paper copy.

Sharing is a fundamental part of reading.  Sharing is a reader’s way of saying “try this, I think you’ll like it. There is no risk here.” It’s a way of building a relationship with another reader so that the next time you are reading a book, you can say, “get this” and that person will go and buy it, solely on your recommendation.  From one reader to another, there is no greater expression of trust than to buy on another reader’s recommendation.

Sharing is part of creating the reading community. Sharing seeds reading.  It creates and generates more interest in reading. Why is this important? Because the biggest threat to authors’ livelihood is not piracy.  It is not casual sharing.  It is a declining readership.  It is rising rates of illiteracy.  It is alternative forms of entertainment.

The world passed Washington by and Olympia didn't notice. The legislature is shocked that South Carolina will get some Boeing jobs and oblivious to the flat free-trade China-is-going-to-kick-our-ass education-is-everything global economy.

While it may not be optimal to have only one company selling digital copies of old books, it's "better than zero"

1. Accessing content. Consumers should not be limited in the content they choose to view online, as long as it's legal.

2. Using applications. Internet users should be able to run any application they want as long as they don't exceed service plan limitations or harm the provider's network.

3. Attaching personal devices. Consumers should be permitted to connect products they buy to their Internet connection, as long as the devices operate within the service plan and do not harm the network or enable theft of service.

4. Obtaining service plan information. Customers should be able to easily review their options when buying Internet service plans and learn about how those plans protect against spyware and other invasions of privacy.

5. New rule: Non-discrimination. Internet providers would be prohibited from selectively blocking or slowing Web content or applications.

6. New rule: Transparency. Providers would be required to make their network management practices clear and available to consumers.