Now, now, I don't recall Krugman warning about the evils of the shadow banking sector and off-balance sheet transactions anytime prior to the last few months.

Certainly not when Paul was consulting in the late 1990s for the Kings of Off Balance Sheet, those wonderfully innovative energy traders at that firm in Houston... what was their name again...

Krugman was advising Enron?  Wow, that's news to me.  Seems out of character based on his economics columns.

BTW tep, I know you don't think much of Daniel Gross, but he was warning about the impending crash of the sub--prime mortgage market and the housing bubble 2 years ago.  He was quite adamant that it was going to make the dot com crash seem like a picnic.

Bigger point here is the one that national scolds like Robert Samuelson, not Paul Krugman, have been directing at both parties: our economy has been sustained for at least 15 years now by moneyfiddling of one form or another, not by innovation and other sustainable advantage creation in the real economy. Serial asset bubbles manufactured by the Fed; financial engineering; massive leverage enabling financial investors to mint money off of yen carry trades and other forms of Bob Rubin's specialty, arbitrage; and heads-I-win, tails-you-lose taxation and compensation schemes  that reward excessive risk taking with other people's money.

The corollary to Krugman's (correct, necessary) denunciation of the moneyfiddling 2-and-20 scammers, the CEO hogs and their enablers is the Samuelson message: too many American workers are badly educated and lack skills needed to be competitive in a global economy, and for that, the fault lies not in our CEOs but in ourselves. Specifically the American sense of entitlement and aversion to those hard academic subjects like engineering, math and basic science that attract millions of Chinese, Koreans and Indians.

OK, maybe I need to take a closer look at Daniel Gross's stuff. What I've seen on Slate is snarky and seems aimed at people who fear and loathe financiers; I probably rejected it out of hand because of his tone.

The bigger problem though is cultural. For anyone who works closely with brilliant Asians, Israelis and East Europeans, and has children going to school with their children, the gap in attitudes toward education, skills, saving etc is mind-boggling. They shame us, remind us of the yankee ethos that fat dumb and spendthrift Americans have forgotten: thrift, industry, ingenuity, entrepreneurship, a tough-minded and realistic approach to education and opportunity. (Hint: learning math is _not_ fun. It's hard. It requires rote memorization, following Teacher's instructions and doing the drills.)

If memory serves, Krugman has been predicting the dire consequences of the popping of the housing bubble for several years now.

Tep's right in that Krugman was part of the squad (intellectually) behind Rubinomics (as was Greenspan) during the 90s.

To be fair though, Greenspan flip-flopped on deficits (by supporting massive Bush tax cuts) and encouraged bad lending, once that happened in the early 2000s, Krugman came down on him like a ton of bricks.

Krugman basically believes in 'proper' Rubinomics and the gains from trade being shared via stronger safety net.

Daniel Gross is actually pretty good, but I don't understand why everyone forgets about the Clinton/Greenspan axis and how HRC can't separate herself from this team (particularly Rubin and Summers), how she's an NY Senator (so she has to kow tow to Wall St. who likes her) and how she's been running on the 90s economic record this entire time.

It was embrace these guys (and look legitimate and loyal) or flip flop massively.

to be fair to Krugman, Clinton wanted no part of him when he was setting up the economic team during the '92 campaign.  

Oh, and down in the Bear Stearns lobby there's a protest going on as we speak.  "MAIN STREET NOT WALL STREET, MAIN STREET NOT WALL STREET."  I'm too close to the situation to express an opinion.

Well, we all thought it _worked_, and worked brilliantly. Again, the easy-money culture and its Lever it to the max, baby! academic underpinnings were supported by just about everyone, across the spectrum. The left was glad to see the Fed easing and making credit and mortgages available to low-income households; the right was glad to see asset prices soar. I don't recall anyone bashing Miller and Modigliani.

It's easy to scapegoat here, but it's more accurate to say the fault resides in US culture generally.

If Obama's version of Morning in America doesn't include-- focus on, really-- a call and a plan for restoring the Yankee Ethos, then all the finger-pointing won't do us any good.

Krugman used to bash the Clintonites over what he called their "pop internationalism", specifically, dumbed-down protectionist schemes. Under that title he published a scathing and very funny set of essays about the Clintonites' adventures in unfree trade during the 1990s.

I can see why Clinton was not amused. It's devastating.

I'm going to need a definition of "Yankee Ethos" Tep?

Folks may be interested in an article my wicked money man of a husband just sent me - it seems to be the sentiment with everyone he works with. It's about how ideologically based "free market" capitalism is done and good riddance:

www.nakedcapitalism.com/.../wolf-free-market-capitalism-just-passed.html

Arson - here goes. In 2008 America, my version of the Yankee Ethos entails

1) Thrift (renew this): increase our savings levels significantly. Focus on future needs more than present desires

2) Ingenuity (redirect this): apply our vaunted ingenuity to the real economy, not the financial one.

3) Universal Free Public Education (REFORM THIS): end the nonsense of student-centered classrooms and infantilizing curriculums and go back to the old teacher-centric classroom with rigorous standards and much more drilling and repetition, esp re math and foreign language instruction

4) Work (stop punishing this): change the tax code so as to stop punishing salary income and shift more of the burden onto capital gains.

5) Reality Principle (remind people of this): "nothing's got for nothing" - Emerson, "early to bed, early to rise etc" - Franklin,  "genius is 90% perspiration, 10% inspiration" - Edison.

Save more, consume less.

Innovate and build *real* products for the *real* ie nonfinancial economy.

Pay teachers a **LOT** more money, restore their authority, and force our kids to turn off the idiot devices and master a much more rigorous curriculum.

Reform the tax code.

Level with Americans about our bread-and-circus economy, and show them a more stringent and ultimately more availing alternative.

tep: Americans have, in general, always been anti-intellectual.  It runs through out our history.  I vividly remember being picked on as a kid for getting good grades in elementary school, being good at math and the sciences, etc.  It has gotten out of hand in the last 20 years though.  I swear is started getting really bad with the Reaganites.  The shrubies have taken to a bizarre art form, where being an expert in the subject is the worst thing in the world (witness global climate change).

In the 30s Einstein was treated as a celebrity; today he'd be some obscure nobody.  And look at how his name is used today: it's used way too often as an insult, not a compliment.

At $2 bucks/share blumenfeld the BSC deal wasn't a bailout for the BSC, but a bailout for 'the street.'

Although a bit nauseating, this was acceptable.

Now, at the proposed $10/share (which Morgan clearly wouldn't do unless it had a free line to the discount window) it IS starting to smack of a specific BSC bailout.

Sorry to interrupt the really interesting discussion with the triviality that will follow. (And tep, you can write the cultural/economics planks of my platform any day.)

But I wonder if the last week has provided Krugman with the justifications he will need to make the switch from Hillary to Obama when the time comes. Hillary's kowtow to Greenspan would be one justification, but even more would be Hillary's new line of attack on Obama for once supporting single-payer healthcare.

tnmats - ah but excellence in math/engineering and other supposedly practical subjects has always been viewed differently in America from excellence in arts and letters. From Whitney, Morse, Edison, Ford to  Dave 'n' Bill, Steve 'n' Steve, Larry 'n' Sergei.

Whether you grow up in Detroit or Silicon Valley, Arizona or Pennsylvania, NYC or Montana, there's still enormous respect across all educational levels for people who can apply science to making stuff work better.  The problem is that somewhere, somehow during the last 30 years Popular Mechanics got displaced by a kind of nerd version of Pimp My Ride, with the smart kids gravitating toward careers on Wall Street or in dotbombs.  

jblumenfeld, hope you're safe and well.

Tep - I cheer what you propose in your "ethos."  I particularly agree with the prevasive role our faltering educational system in this country plays in many of our problems.  I can attest specifically to the to the consequences of "student centered classrooms" and "infantilizing curriculums" at the level of baccalaureate and graduate/medical education.  My colleagues and I often lament the lack of fundamental skills in math, chemistry, physics and writing among our Ph.D. and M.D. students that could be taken for granted a mere 10-20 years ago.  These once basic skills, oviously essential for truly understanding disciplines in the biomedical sciences, are now more the exception than the rule.  Unfortnately, the reaction to this by administrators seems to be to reduce the rigor at the higher levels to compensate (to keep the failure rate to an "acceptable" level), or to remediate, rather than forcing the improvement of primary and secondary education to bring the training of the Amreican student base back to where is once was.  Our foreign born and trained students (China, India) have a demonstrable advantage in this regard.

And now time for the broken record.  I agree wholeheartedly with tep on the need for eductaion reform.  trouble is, your party is against it 100%.  Obama once spoke before the NEA convention (I think) and mentioned that he was for merit pay for teachers.  He was booed for his trouble.  Booed!

The fact is, our public education system is a mess generally, with pockets of excellence (e.g., Fairfax County, VA).  And it most ill serves the very poor/lower middle class kids that your party purports to care so very deeply about.  BS!

Neither of your candidates gives a fig about real education reform, which starts with getting the federal gov't out of the K-12 education business, where is has no business being, and does no good.  Further, let's start with a longer school day and a much longer school year.  And get rid of cell phones Ipods, etc.  Rigorous cirriculum?  Sure, and let teachers/principals discipline kids again.  Rein in the trial lawyers (oops, anothe Dem sacred cow).

In any case, when I read the laments on these boards about the lousy public education system in teh US, I chuckle, because your party are the people who mandated it be this way in the first place.

oh butchie, sanap!  You show up and whack us with no warning with our biggest weakness, the frigging TEACHERS unions.  Thank alot.

You win.

OK, butchie, I see your longer school day+schoolroom discipline, and raise you... classroom-earmarked tax increases at the national level to support across the board, nationwide teacher pay increases so that every school in this country devotes not less than 70% of school funds to classroom expenditure ie salaries + supplies.

Game?

Plenty o' blame to go around on this one, mon ami. My kid's kindergarten teacher, probably the best teacher in the entire district and has been for over 30 years, has been reduced to gently pleading for the parents to buy paper, crayons, hand sanitizer, etc. No $ in the school budget for it. Will Repubs and their greedy geezer constituents pony up the funds we need to attract excellent students into teaching careers.

No way on Yahweh's green earth that a talented big-city math graduate will consider a career in begg- er I mean teaching for $55k/year when he or she can earn 4x that, with bonus, figuring ways to spin financial derivatives out of cash flows real and imagined.

If we want to restore the yankee ethos, then we have to make it attractive for people to enter the unglamorous, currently underpaid professions which enabled yankee America to thrive: engineering and primary/secondary teaching. Tax the hedge hogs at the marginal income rate, and shift that money to teachers' salaries + loan forgiveness for engineering graduates.

Federal tax increases for education from a Republican administration?!

You've clearly never heard of the concept of freedom Teplukhin. Stop hating America.

It's easy, and cheap, to dump on intellectually lazy Americans, and how they are eclipsed by Indians and Chinese and others, but I think it is ultimately inaccurate in many ways.

First, I have met, and continue to meet, a hell of a lot of very smart, very innovative, and very hard working native-born Americans in the solid state physics, computer software and healthcare industries (I'd bet they are there in other sectors as well, but I don't run into them regularly because of the company I keep and journals I read).  A solid majority of  information technology and biomedical technology innovation takes place in American settings, and while there are plenty of expatriate Asians in those labs, there are also plenty of Americans.  Electronic is in the midst of a wholesale move, innovation-wise, to Asia, but it's hardly gone yet.

Which brings me to point two: It's trivially easy to conclude that Asians are harder working and smarter than native-born Americans, if you look at Asians in American - they are an a aggressively selt-selected group, and it would be a huge surprise if as a group, they were not smarter, more amibitious, and harder working than those that didn't make the cut to get into American undergraduate and graduate schools.  Nor is it a surprise that their first generation native-born American children pick up much of that ethos from their immigrant parents.

Which brings me a step further  we are as a culture arguably (becoming) fat and lazy, because we are inordinately rich as a middle class society, so the natural breeding ground for that ethos Tep pushes has been largely attenuated by the ease of getting by more than adequately well just by working middling hard and being middling smart.

The solution: here Tep is absolutely correct - unless we reward hard work, thrift and innovation, we won't breed it.  You almost have to start imagining a Sparta inspired child rearing and educational regime that denies the benefits of the wealth of society to people growing up, unless they earn it through hard work, smarts, and thrift, or, which is at least possible, a challenge (global warming, competition from China, some new sputnick moment) so inspiring, that people rise about the easy path.

The first ain't going to happen.  I'm moderately hopeful on the second.  I see a lot of energy and idealism in my children's (roughly age 17 -27) cohort.  With luck they'll push their self-indulgent parents and immediate preceeding cohorts aside, and start behaving like adults before their 50.

Сделанное добро. Посмотрите это!  Единый, могучий Tep!

no one buys the 'johnny can't code' crap, especially Tep. China and India combined have 1.5 billion people who live on 5 bucks a day and worship the great pumpkin, let's not even get in to their infrastructure and political problems.

Solving school shit is easy, everyone agrees:

1. Ability to fire teachers, administrators decide (sorry teachers, I love ya', my mother was one)

2. Way raise teacher pay/fund schools

3. Lengthen school days, serve 3 meals if kids want 'em, after school homework clubs, etc...

4. At age 16/after 10th grade, offer kids a choice: Take a test and leave (discouraged); enroll in a huge array of vocational schools (telecom, computers, medical technicians, auto repair, drafting) and hand them a voucher for voc of choice; and of course, the 3rd option, stay in high school and take college prep courses.

stick a fork in it, you're done.

How to get it done politically? No idea.

Was probably starting sooner thanks to some of the societal changes tep and other mention -- but the schools really hit the skids with affirmative action and quotas.

And it's past time to do away with No Child Left Behind (shoulda been called All Children Left Behind) and the overall absurd emphasis on tests. Headstart works -- probably the only educational reform that did...

Along with the testing nonsense, it's equally absurd to hold teachers accountable for the problems -- and failures -- in the home.

Amen, LISAH, on the absurd emphasis on standardized testing. I am a substitute teacher in my kids' elementary school and have been actively involved at the school in other ways. This is a solidly middle class school in the northwestern suburbs of Atlanta (home to the "Evolution is Just a Theory" textbook label  touted by the county school board; ultimately defeated, thank God!). Standardized test preparation, especially this time of year, when our state's high-stakes testing is just around the corner, eats up probably 70% (maybe more) of the school day. And the real irony is that the test is so damn easy that it's meaningless. Our school has passage rates for the statewide test in the high 90% range, but having spent a lot of time in the school at all levels (K - 5) I can tell you that 30% to 40% of these kids are not prepared to move on to the next grade level, to say nothing of achieving the kind of excellence that the high passage rate would suggest. This is a classic case of NLCB resulting in LESS excellence, not more.

Tep

So here's why I asked: The phrase seemed to exclude the pressing need to undue the damage post 9/11 immigration procedures have done to our ability  staff research universities and to attract and retain tech talent in general.

mmathog  

Two other things.

Get rid of the school boards. They control what's in the textbooks or rather what's not in the textbooks.

Expand Teach for America.

O' and 4 will never work unless you get universal HR industry buy in.  

amen back, chmclean -- your points really make the point... what you describe is so sad and so overwhelming...

and I forgot to mention: get the private sector out of the public schools...this kind of influence is destroying civic education.

tep, I'm happy to spend more on education, but keep the feds out.  They're toxic to the effort.  Do as MI has done - fund schools with a sales tax, not property taxes, and spend the same per-pupil across the state.  The rich districts can just write checks (Mommy and Daddy) for all the extras.  But spending in the poor districts will go up a lot.  And who's against that?

I also oppose NCLB, but from the other end.  I oppose it because the federal gov't needs to stay out of K-12 education to the maximum extent possible.

Yes, of course pay teachers more, but require more of them, too.  There was once a pol who was for that, let's see, oh, yeah, Clinton was his name.  Perhaps you've heard of him.  But you're right, you'll never compete with law and medicine, and besides, we've been increasing teacher pay in real terms for over a decade now.  The bureaucracy strangles everything.

I wish I had Cyrillic on hear.  Moguchee tep, indeed.  Samyi sil'ni!

tep, you're right about rewarding work over cap gains.  Even Reagan was correct on that in that his tax reforms didn't give preference of one over the other.  I find it absurd that the gains I make on dividends in passive stock investing is taxed at a lower rate than my labors designing ICs for export.  Which is better for the US economy?  Sure ain't the dividends.

As for education: like I said and I'll say again: the parents are mostly at fault.  You can blame the unions (no unions here in NC and most of the south, but let's blame them anyways), you can blame the kids, but the real problem lies with the parents dumbing down the system.  All of this "local control" has finally gotten the best of us.  I read now that some parents are hovering over their kids in COLLEGE.  That one stunned me; my parents didn't even know who they could bother even if they wanted when I was in college.  All they wanted to see what good grades at the end of the semester, and the prof wasn't afraid to fail you out of school (the attrition rate  in engineeing schools used to be around 70%).  Not so true anymore it seems.

Finally: if you want to attract more students into the sciences and engineering, make it profitable.  There aren't many people like me who are natural born tinkerers and would go into engineering even if it paid like a clerk at Walmart.  Just like teaching, you get what you pay for.  If the pay of engineers and scientists matched that of lawyers and MBAs, believe me you'd see more kids struggle with math and the sciences.  Right now, the only ones willing to do that are the ones (like me) who just have a natural affinity for it no matter what the pay.  And there aren't many kids like that.

mmathog, isn't your point #4 pretty much what the Germans have been doing for decades?  It sure works for them.  You get a highly skilled artisan/trade class.  That's one area we are definitely lacking in the US.  Then again, American industry can't wait to offshore skilled trades too fast enough since they want to shed manufacturing (the code phrase is "asset light", which is cheered on by our MBA/Wall Street class).

And jblumenfeld, who's protesting, B/S employees or someone else? If it's B/S employees, sorry, not much sympathy from me.  I've seen too many plant closings up close and personal due to Wall Street types demanding profit from a company by axing thousands of workers and sending it offshore.   It's high time Wall Street employees suffer the fate they cram down the throat of the rest of us.

I hear many on these boards bringing up the idea of improving science/mathematics education and having more go into those fields.  Show of proverbial hands: how many reading this blog actually did do those things him/herself?  I for one did (BS and MS in electrical engineering).

Tep nails it hands down, with good assists from tnmats and butchie.

Butchie, you're absolutely right, but keep in mind that many of us "democrats" hate that side of our party but are still affiliated with it because we distrust the core of the current Republican party even more. I don't even know what I consider myself any more, though as long as the Republicans are motivated primarily by social-engineering evangelicals and mega-corporate interests, they're not getting my vote.

One question, though: if you remove all Federal influence on education, how do you balance the likely backsliding in some states as modern science is neutered (i.e. Kansas)? How do you avoid creating an even larger disparity in American education among different states?

tnmats, I have a B.S. in geology and near-dual masters in geoscience education/interpretation. I got out of academia because I lost interest in the politics and echo chamber, and subsequently abandoned government science work because of the poverty wages and bureaucratic B.S. My wife is ready to quit her government science job out of disgust with the mismanagement, wasted money, and cross-purposes of bureacracy. I strongly considered going into classroom teaching but am disgusted by the current state of education, including overuse of federal standards, miniscule resources, no allowance for creativity, micromanaging parents and school boards (or ignorant/apathetic same), and so on. I'm a damn good teacher and want no part of the current system.

So now I run a small direct-market produce farm, expanding soon into livestock, poultry, and eggs. My life embodies tep's Yankee Ethos in a way that means most to me; I work hard, I produce products of real and direct value to my community and economy, I interact with the government as little as possible except for all the arbitrary restrictions that limit my business options, and I limit my participation in the "fake" economy as much as possible. I am directly active in my community, serving on the boards of two non-profits and managing their web sites. My farm represents the original kind of American enterpreneur, and I'm damned proud of that.

Not saying that my story is relevant to most people, but I'm exactly the person who left the worlds of education and science behind because of all the B.S., and will only go back if it becomes worthwhile again. I'd love to go back to teaching someday, I really enjoy working with kids, but not in the current social and governmental culture.

literatehobo, maybe you should have worked for da url bidness as they need geologists.  I hear they're doing sort of okay these days.  :-)

As for university academia, I hear ya.  I got a quite foul taste of the politics when in graduate school.  I vastly prefer working in industry.

Literate, I understand your point.  I'm a Rep only because I think my idiots are only slightly less idiotic than your idiots.  Neither party has a monopoly on wisdom or stupidity.

As for your concern about the states, all I can say is that K-12 education is and always has been a state responsibility.  Governors and state legislatures are responsible - besides, no federal law or rule banned Kansas from doing what you dislike.  But the voters of Kansas did when they threw out the offending BOE members.

I don't expect you to convert, but I'd note that McCain is certainly not in the thrall of the evangelicals (any more than Reagan was), and that BOTH parties low-tow to corporate interests.

And even though I live in the South, hooray for the Yankee Ethos.

sdemuth - "It's easy, and cheap, to dump on intellectually lazy Americans, and how they are eclipsed by Indians and Chinese and others, but I think it is ultimately inaccurate in many ways....

1. lots of very smart, very innovative, and very hard working native-born Americans in the solid state physics, computer software and healthcare industries and others"

No question, agreed.

"2. Asians in American are an a aggressively selt-selected group"

No question, agreed.

"3. [it's easy to do well here with little effort]"

Not any more. The asset bubbles have burst. Back to reality. cf Emerson's comment above.

"....a challenge (global warming, competition from China, some new sputnick moment) so inspiring, that people rise about the easy path."

Not up to the public-- the people didn't rise to the Sputnik challenge; it was the fed that imposed it, from the top down: FLAS scholarships, massive funding of basic scientific research etc. I'm totally elitist on this. Simply cannot trust the public to do the right thing. People seek the path of least resistance, always have always will.

Goodness gracious, if Son o South Butchie's for the Yankee Ethos, maybe this idea has legs. I think I'll contact a few publishers.

What do y'all think I should title the book? It has to have a gerund in the title, plus a colon following not more than three words max:

Restoring the Yankee: etc

Blessed Yankees: etc

??

tep - you might want to be real careful using "Yankees", unless you want everyone to think it's a baseball book. "Restoring the Yankees" sounds like a Joe Torre memoir. How about "The Future American Economy: Get back to work or learn Chinese (preferably both)"?

butchie - I don't expect to call myself a Republican any time soon, but you're absolutely right that I'm watching McCain far more closely than I would have any other R candidate. I respect Huckabee tremendously, but he didn't show me that he was able to move beyond his core constituency, whom I don't respect as much. I considered voting for McCain over a Dem on Super Tuesday, but decided that unless I was willing to call myself a Republican I wasn't going to cheat. I can't wait for the Dems to settle on someone so we can really start learning about policy proposals. I think there would be worse things than a strong Democratic congress with McCain as president to reign in the excesses.

Fair point on Kansas and state control of ed. It's my natural liberal side speaking, saying " but...but...we CAN'T let that happen!" as opposed to "well, let it happen and let them face the consequences". I think my concern remains that it's one thing to allow adults to make their own choices, it's another to let those choices screw up kids. What happens if a generation, or even a couple years, of kids are raised in a state school system with terrible standards? The rest of us end up paying for it in the long run because those kids, through no fault of their own, become a drag on society. But yeah, I'm sympathic to your point that federal control just isn't the solution to an intractable problem.

What hobo said re Kansas and federalism. How many home-schooled kids really get a decent education? I suspect that a very large number of them end up functionally illiterate.

We pioneered universal public education. I've nothing against vouchers-- hell, I support them-- but we need to make sure the public schools work. If the localities are doing a sh*tty job, then give control to whatever level we need to in order to toughen up the curriculum and get more $$$ to the classroom.

tep's right on the Sputnik analysis.  The feds are the ones who got spooked and dumped loads of money into public science and mathematics education.  The public would have sit on it's hands.  That's why we call them "leaders" as that's what they're supposed to do.  And my experience with home schooled children is you can spot them in about 30 seconds of dealing with them.  And in general it is not a pleasant picture.

As for federal control, I still contend that we need national standards.  That's the case in every other industrialized nation. US students usually rank near the bottom in most areas of science and mathematics so I don't see local control doing such a good job.  We've had 200+ years of local control.  I'm a firm believer in data pointing you to a conclusion and local control did not bring us the best educational system on the planet by any means.  A kid in Kansas isn't competing with a kid in Arizona, both are in the same boat competing with the kid in China or Japan or India or Germany.  That's why both kids have to have the same high standards and 50+ standards is not cutting it anymore.

And note I did not say federal control, I said national standards.  Big difference.

Well, one argument for federal control is fiscal: eliminating the overhead of a gazillion miniature local school districts, each with its own purchasing, admin, "consultants" (whatever it is they do), real estate etc, would probably free up a few grand per child in annual funds available to the classroom.

Why do we need local standards? Why should teaching math be different in North Carolina than in Seattle? For that matter, shouldn't the teaching of history and "social studies" be as standardized as possible? Isn't that a _conservative_ argument?

I'm mystified as to this supposed value created by the local school board. We compete in a global economy. Why the f--- should we have idiosyncratic, localized standards?

And if you want to raise standards, the easiest way to do so is through a federal mandate that... _raises standards_. For EVERYONE. To the benefit of everyone. Given the ideological agendas involved here-- the duelling PCs of the Politically and the Patriotically Correct brigades-- it seems likely that not having national standards means the curriculum will always tend toward the bland, the watered-down, the lowest possible bar.

More eiltism, please.