Solvation

California School Report

A report alleging the California public school FINANCIAL SYSTEM is broken is picked up far and wide, notably in the New York Times.

Some key points in the Summary Report I want to comment upon:

Voluntary contributions of money, and more importantly, time also add to variation in resources across districts.  While monetary contributions to schools get substantial attention and are large in a small number of schools, on average they account for less than two percent of funds to schools for operating expenditures (Loeb, Grissom and Strunk, 2007/GDTF).  Brunner and Imazeki (2004) find that monetary contributions averaged less than $40 per pupil in 2001. On the other hand, voluntary contributions of time appear to be substantial... Principals in higher income communities reported substantially more frequent use of volunteers to provide clerical work, adult supervision at morning arrival or playground duty, tutoring, and help running sports activities than did principals in poorer communities.  ...  Overall the difference in
volunteer time between low-income and high-income schools appears to be a greater source of resource disparity than are contributed dollars. (Emphasis theirs.)

Integrity In Science

I found a science watchdog site -- which tracks conflicts of interest in regulatory environments and is put out by the Center for Science in the Public Interest -- while investigating another: 

Evidently the FDA is set to approve a new, controversial, cow antibiotic, and there's evidently backchannel that people there are paralyzed by a Guidance note.

American Superconductor

I was called upon to make one professional investment recommendation last year.  It was for a fund that is buy-and-hold (long only); consequently they wanted an advanced material in the alternative energy space that had minimal downside risk and high upside potential, preferably where the upside is realized in the short term but the time horizon was "three years."

I recommended AMSC. Many reasons: well run, conservative company with extremely well defined market with which it had outstanding reputation; making a core technology with many different applications, and they were approaching that diversity in a very organized and thoughtful way; and of course, leading edge disruptive technology.

Anyway, it's up 50%. Not too shabby.

The Education Policy Research Unit and I agree.

The Think Tank Review Project (for Education Policy Research) gave a 2006 Bunkum Award to a paper I lambasted last August.  We both point out the model the Harvard paper chose was weaker than the one the NCES used. 

Yes, a "bunkum award" goes to Harvard.  That said, it was probably a great manipulative ploy, and it effectively discouraged NCES from doing further research in the topic -- whether private schools were actually more effective than public ones, when controlling for differences in the clientele.  Obviously this is a key area of investigation for those who are trying to improve public school efficacy.

Activist academics: people who push the results of inferior research over superior research to influence policy makers or curtail support of valid areas of inquiry.