October 24, 2012

A trillion dollars here, a trillion dollars there, pretty soon you're talking about down the Memory Hole

Today's announcement of the government suing Bank of America for a billion dollars over mortgage frauds committed by Countrywide Financial reminds me of how much one of the key events of the Housing Bubble/Bust remains ignored: namely, Countrywide's January 2005 press release boasting of its We House America initiative to lend One ... Trillion ... Dollars to minorities and lower-income borrowers. (This followed 23 months after Angelo Mozilo's Harvard speech in which he pledged Countrywide to lend $600 billion to minorities and lower-income borrowers.) 

I just did a Google search on 


and got a grand total of about 18 results back from Google. Here they all are. I realize these dozen and a half pages will be boring -- just PR releases, me, and a few random folks -- but that's the point.

About 18 results (0.30 seconds) 

Countrywide sets $1 trillion goal for real estate loan program | Inman ...
www.inman.com/.../countrywide-sets-1-trillion-goal-real-estate...
Jan 14, 2005 – Countrywide Home Loans today announced an expansion of its We House America initiative to fund $1 trillion in home loans to minorities and ...

Countrywide Expands Commitment to $1 Trillion in ... - PR Newswire
www.prnewswire.com/.../countrywide-expands-commitment-t...
Countrywide Expands Commitment to $1 Trillion in Home Loans to Minority and Lower-Income Borrowers. - We House America Challenge Leads the Industry in ...

Countrywide Bank Announces $770,000 in Financial Support to ...
www.prnewswire.com/.../countrywide-bank-announces-77000...
Among them is Countrywide's $1 Trillion We House America(R) Challenge, an aggressive goal to fund $1 trillion in home loans to minorities and lower-income ...

Countrywide Ups Minority Lending Goal to $1 Trillion
www.realtor.org/.../7a760e487a50da4886256fb30055957d?...
Countrywide Home Loans Inc. has extended its minority and low-income lending goal by $400 billion to $1 trillion over the next five years.

Steve Sailer: iSteve
isteve.blogspot.com/
5 minutes ago – Countrywide Home Loans today announced an expansion of its We House America initiative to fund $1 trillion in home loans to minorities and ...
You shared this

I am shocked, SHOCKED to learn that Countrywide ... - Steve Sailer
isteve.blogspot.com/.../i-am-shocked-shocked-to-learn-that.ht...
1 hour ago – Countrywide Home Loans today announced an expansion of its We House America initiative to fund $1 trillion in home loans to minorities and ...
You shared this

Steve Sailer: iSteve: Obama's Popguns of Singapore
isteve.blogspot.com/2011/.../obamas-popguns-of-singapore.ht...
Dec 21, 2011 – Countrywide also steered more than 10,000 minority borrowers into costly subprime ..... The dollar sum of student loans is ~1 trillion dollars.
You shared this

Countrywide Expands Commitment to $1 Trillion ... - The Free Library
www.thefreelibrary.com › ... › PR Newswire › January 14, 2005
Jan 14, 2005 – Free Online Library: Countrywide Expands Commitment to $1 Trillionin Home Loans to Minority and Lower-Income Borrowers; - We House ...

Michael Detwiler's Blog: Totally ridiculous!!
michaeldetwiler.blogspot.com/2012/01/totally-ridiculous.html
Jan 5, 2012 – Countrywide's Other Bill. When BofA bought Countrywide in 2008, it committed a record $1.5 trillion to minority lending and urban reinvestment.

BofA Must Pay Excess Settlement Funds To Acorn Clones ...
www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2829495/posts
Jan 4, 2012 – When BofA bought Countrywide in 2008, it committed a record $1.5trillion to minority lending and urban reinvestment. The 10-year accord ...

Your Lying Eyes: December 2011
lyingeyes.blogspot.com/2011_12_01_archive.html
Dec 21, 2011 – Given Countrywide's "$Trillion Pledge," some serious recruitment ofminority candidates was needed. To really ramp up minority lending, you ...

Countrywide sets $1 trillion target for home loans to poor, minorities ...
www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-127172336.html
Jan 17, 2005 – Byline: Gregory J. Wilcox Jan. 17--CALABASAS, Calif. -- CountrywideHome Loans Inc. on... | Article from Daily News (Los Angeles, CA) ...

Top Spot - Tags: COUNTRYWIDE Home Loans Inc. MINORITIES ...
connection.ebscohost.com/c/abstracts/14738782/top-spot
ABSTRACT. Reports the favorite mortgage provider of minority groups is Countrywide.... Countrywide's Mozilo Expects to See a Trillion Dollar Servicer by 2005.

DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE - Punta Gorda Tea Party
pgteaparty.org/22.html
When BOA bought Countrywide in 2008, it committed a record $1.5 trillion to minoritylending and urban reinvestment. The 10-year accord replaced the bank's ...

Countrywide's Angelo Mozilo: He Warned Us—But Washington Didn ...
www.vdare.com/.../countrywides-angelo-mozilo-he-warned-us...
Jun 22, 2009 – “Anti-Model Minority” Leftists Inventing An Anti-White Pan-Asian Identity.... The roots of Countrywide's catastrophic trillion dollar pledge go back ...

Discuss the ethical issues that caused the downfall of Countrywide
www.solutioninn.com › ... › Business EthicsShare
May 4, 2012 – In 1993, loan transactions reached the $1 trillion mark. Additionally, it was the number-one provider of home loans to minorities in the United ...

BofA Must Fund Acorn 'Clones' - Investors.com
news.investors.com/010412-596657-bofa-must-fund-acorn-cl...
Jan 4, 2012 – Countrywide's Other Bill. When BofA bought Countrywide in 2008, it committed a record $1.5 trillion to minority lending and urban reinvestment.

Battered Bank Syndrome - Investors.com
news.investors.com/.../010612-596992-bank-of-america-victi...
Jan 6, 2012 – Neither did the record $1.5 trillion minority lending and urban ... pledge it made to such groups in 2008, when it took over Countrywide.

Results for similar searches
$335 Million Settlement on Countrywide Lending Bias - NYTimes.com
www.nytimes.com/.../us-settlement-reported-on-coun...
More results for countrywide trillion minorities

Please note that the New York Times result at the bottom is for "More results for countrywide trillion minorities." (In other words, the NYT has never mentioned the word trillion in an article with Countrywide and minorities.)

If you do the search for 


you get 23 results instead of 18.

I dunno. I must be nuts. I personally think that a trillion dollars is a big deal, but what do I know? The implications of Countrywide's trillion dollar pledge don't favor one party over the other, they don't favor one ideology over another, and they don't favor the sacred fetish of Diversity, so who wants to know about it?

Nobody.

I am shocked, SHOCKED to learn that Countrywide Financial's loan practices were lax

Here's the top story in the Washington Post right now:
US suit cites ‘brazen’ mortgage fraud at Countrywide, even after Bank of America purchase 
By Associated Press, Updated: Wednesday, October 24, 2:15 PM 
NEW YORK — The latest federal lawsuit over alleged mortgage fraud paints an unflattering picture of a doomed lender: Executives at Countrywide Financial urged workers to churn out loans, accepted fudged applications and tried to hide ballooning defaults. 
The suit, filed Wednesday by the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, also underscored how Bank of America’s purchase of Countrywide in July 2008, just before the financial crisis, backfired severely. 
The prosecutor, Preet Bharara, said he was seeking more than $1 billion, but the suit could ultimately recover much more in damages. 
“This lawsuit should send another clear message that reckless lending practices will not be tolerated,” Bharara said in a statement. He described Countrywide’s practices as “spectacularly brazen in scope.” 
He also charged that Bank of America has resisted buying back soured mortgages from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which bought loans from Countrywide.

A relevant fact that has disappeared down the memory hole is that during the Housing Bubble, Angelo Mozilo, CEO of Countrywide, kept boasting that Countrywide was going hog wild in the name of increasing minority homeownership. For example, here's a press release from January 2005. (I suspect that this immediately followed a meeting between Mozilo and Daniel Mudd, head of Fannie Mae, in which Fannie agreed to buy more mortgages from Countrywide).
Countrywide sets $1 trillion goal for real estate loan program 
Funding aims to help minority, low-income borrowers 
BY INMAN NEWS, FRIDAY, JANUARY 14, 2005.

Countrywide Home Loans today announced an expansion of its We House America initiative to fund $1 trillion in home loans to minorities and lower-income borrowers and communities through 2010. 
"The $1 Trillion We House America Challenge, expanded from $600 billion announced in 2003, embodies Countrywide's long-standing commitment to lead the mortgage industry in closing the home-ownership gap for minority and lower-income families and communities," said Angelo Mozilo, Countrywide Financial Corp. chairman and CEO, who announced the initiative at the International Builders' Show in Orlando. 
"For several years now, Countrywide has been a leading lender to minorities and lower-income households," Mozilo said. "I am proud of our lending record and pleased to announce the expansion of our lending commitment to $1 trillion." The We House America program has already placed 2.4 million families into homes, Mozilo said that number should nearly triple by 2010. 
The company will continue to develop innovative programs emphasizing non-traditional lending criteria, according to the announcement, such as calling for improved underwriting systems that eliminate the over-reliance on traditional credit scores that can mask a borrower's true credit-worthiness. 
Countrywide last year launched Optimum Loan, a program that addresses obstacles for hard-to-qualify borrowers, such as allowing for non-occupant co-borrowers, other secondary income, and pooled funds for down payments. ...
"To ensure that this objective is achieved, we intend to expand upon our existing partnerships with specific community groups," Mozilo said.
Henry Cisneros, a Countrywide director and a former secretary of Housing and Urban Development, said, "This company is leading the industry in closing the homeownership gap through ambitious lending commitments, innovative programs, and a strong corporate culture that constantly looks for ways to improve." 
Countrywide formalized its commitment to affordable lending more than a decade ago by launching We House America, an initiative to provide increased homeownership opportunities for all Americans. The previous commitment covered the years of 2001-10 and has provided $341 billion of home loans as of Dec. 31, 2004. The company is now extending the goal to $1 trillion by 2010.

And back in February 2003, Mozilo had given a well-publicized Harvard address pledging $600 billion (with a B) in minority and low income mortgages in support of President Bush's October 15, 2002 call for closing the racial gap in homeownership by freeing up lenders from discriminatory regulations like insisting upon down payments.

And Mozillo had been demanding deregulation in the name of minorities from nine years before that, when Cisneros and the Clinton Administration threatened Countrywide with having the Community Reinvestment Act, with all its paperwork, extended to non-bank mortgage lenders like Countrywide if they don't start lending more to minorities:
Eased guidelines seen as key to boost in minority lending 
AUTHOR(S) Prakash, Snigdha
PUB. DATE October 1994
SOURCE American Banker; 10/13/1994, Vol. 159 Issue 198, p20 ... 
ABSTRACT Presents the guidelines outlines by Angelo Mozilo, chairman of Countrywide Funding Corp. regarding loans awarded to minority borrowers. Recommendation for the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) and Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corp.to loosen underwriting guidelines; Presentation of the guidelines during a speech delivered to the Mortgage Bankers Association.

The central thread in the Housing Bubble / Bust was excessive deregulation in the name of increasing minority lending. This all did a lot more for Angelo Mozilo's net worth than it did for minorities' net worth, but, there are simply no interest groups in America who want to hear what really happened. Everybody wants to promote their ideologically congenial fragment of the full story.

Sure, trillions evaporated and trillions may evaporate again in the future because nobody wants to learn this lesson of history, but I guess that's a small price to pay for keeping the embarrassing truth covered up.

"Argo"

Ben Affleck has made himself into a brand name over the last half decade for directing well-made suspense movies for intelligent grown-ups: Gone Baby Gone, The Town, and now Argo. They're not quite Drop Everything and Hire a Sitter movies, but more like When You Get a Chance, You and Your Spouse Will Enjoy This Movie movies. Thus, Argo didn't have a huge opening weekend, but it had an excellent second weekend, down only 15%, indicating fine word of mouth.

Argo is based on the once well-known 1980 "Canadian Caper" in which Canadian diplomats in Iran sheltered and help to extricate six American diplomats who had avoided being rounded up with the rest of the embassy hostages. The CIA side of the extrication was kept secret until 1997, and the movie focuses on the American machinations, somewhat unfairly to the Canadians.

And, most of the last half hour of exciting plot twists didn't actually occur, but they were all plausible enough that they well could have happened.

Also, unsurprisingly, Affleck strives to make the Democratic Administration of the time look as good as possible.

It's interesting to speculate how good Affleck-directed movies would be if he didn't make movies in order to cast himself or his brother Casey as the lead. For example, Affleck has himself play Tony Mendez, who was a CIA expert on disguises and forgery. Mendez called up an old friend, the Hollywood makeup artist who won an Oscar for Planet of the Apes, and they cooked up a fake sci-fi movie production to get Mendez into Iran as a Canadian movie producer scouting for exotic locations. 

Mendez entitled his memoirs Master of Disguise. Affleck is, by the standards of well-known actors, not very good at blending in. He's tall and he had a lot of work done to look like a TV movie of the week version of a Hollywood leading man the way Mitt Romney looks like somebody you'd cast to play the Republican candidate in a movie about the Secret Service trying to stop terrorists from blowing up a Presidential debate.

So, in Argo, Affleck dyes his hair black and grows a huge beard to cover most of his square-jawed, symmetrical face.

Apparently, the real Mendez has outstanding conman skills (he's an expert forger as well as make-up artist), which ought to make him an interesting character. But Affleck's chief trait as an actor is earnestness, so nothing much gets developed along those lines.

One amusing bit of history that was distorted in order to build tension was the secret six's reaction to Mendez arriving with elaborate cover stories about how each was a movie person scouting locations. In Argo, Affleck has to win them over to trust his crazy scheme enough to risk their lives on it. Tense arguments ensue. 

In reality, the six thought it was the most fun idea they'd ever heard. Without prompting from Mendez, they immediately started scrounging up more fashionable clothes and blowdrying their hair to look more Hollywood. When he returned the next day, they excitedly showed off their new looks.

A lot of crime and suspense movies these days are elaborate metaphors for movie-making: e.g., Inception, or The Town's ultra-competent bankrobbers are really a movie technical crew. (Real criminals tend to be screw-ups.) The Canadian Caper was an instance of this movie trope slopping over into real life, and, if anything, Argo underplays this.

Baseball: Is it too soon to go back in the fan pool?

With the World Series on, I'm reminded that baseball has some exciting young players like 20-year-old Mike Trout, who might win the A.L. MVP despite one of the various Cabreras winning the Triple Crown, and 19-year-old Bryce Harper. But are they too exciting? I mean, Harper has looked like he's 30 years old since he was 16. 

Last year, Ryan Braun won the MVP in the N.L., only to immediately get caught for performance enhancing drugs (although he managed to lawyer his way out of the 50 game suspension). This season, the San Francisco Cabrera was leading the N.L. in batting average when he got caught. 

Judging by the depressed overall offensive totals, the game is cleaner than it was a 10-15 years ago. But does that just mean that whoever is racking up standout statistics this year is probably just one of the smaller number of juicers?

A vast amount of analytical talent is devoted to thinking about baseball (statistical talent that might more usefully be deployed upon more significant statistical issues, such as, say, figuring out the long-run impact of immigration policies, but never mind for now). But, the sabermetricians, led by the sainted Bill James, tended to be unenthusiastic in the 1990s and early 2000s about thinking about why exactly all the most famous slugging records were suddenly being broken. 

Have they caught up? Are there websites that, say, explore how much confidence you can have that if you invest some loyalty in rooting for Player X based upon his impressive numbers, you won't suddenly find it's all been a fraud?

October 23, 2012

"How Children Succeed" by Paul Tough

From my book review in Taki's Magazine:
It’s a strange totem of the 21st century that if a brain scan can show us where something would happen inside the skull, we can therefore make it happen in ourselves; and also, hesto presto, we can fix African-American dysfunction by somehow making it happen in their brains. 
We don’t think this way about other organs, though. Consider the stomach. For a century or more, we’ve had a more than adequate knowledge of how the digestive system works. Yet on average we’re fatter than ever. Why? Not because the science of stomach scans hasn’t progressed enough, but because we like eating more than we like exercising.

Read the whole thing there.

Blackface in Berlin

It's always fun to keep up with the adventures of Bruce Norris, Angry White Playwright. He's the author of the best Chicago real estate play since Glengarry Glen Ross, Clybourne Park, which I reviewed for Taki's here. (And here's a real life version of just how far nice liberal white gentrifiers in Chicago will go to clear blacks from Lincoln Park.)

Clybourne Park isn't terribly politically correct, but only a few people have noticed so far.
Playwright Challenges Racial Casting Practices 
By ADAM W. KEPLER 
The Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Bruce Norris has called for a boycott in Germany of theater productions in which white actors are cast in roles explicitly written for black performers. In a letter addressed to fellow members of the Dramatists Guild, a trade association for writers, Mr. Norris condemned such casting, which he described as widespread in Germany. 
Mr. Norris wrote the letter after his experience with a production of his Tony Award-winning play, “Clybourne Park” at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, in which a white actress had been cast to play a black character.

Remember those two black German guys in Milli Vanilli? They're probably not busy. Bruce should give them a call, see if one of them will play Bruce's African-American lady in drag.
In the letter, which has been posted on the Dramatists Guild’s Web site, Mr. Norris said that it was his final correspondence with the management of the Deutsches Theater that caused him decide to withdraw the rights to the production.

It's worth noting how much power playwrights have relative to screenwriters. Can you imagine Chris Terrio, screenwriter of Argo, ordering Ben Affleck not to play CIA agent Tony Mendez in Argo because Ben's not Hispanic? It's close to unthinkable in Hollywood for a screenwriter to call off a production because he's unhappy with the casting of his script, but playwrights have had this legal right since 1919. Legally, American playwrights are Ayn Rand heroes who can blow up any production of their work they find displeasing.

Indeed, I have this wacky theory that when New York playwrights flooded out to Hollywood after the invention of the talkies, a reason that so many became Communists was because the movies turned out to be a collaborative enterprise where they didn't have all the power they had had back in New York. All we need, they reasoned, is to collectivize all property to restore me to my rightful property rights as sole arbiter of what happens to productions based on my writing.
“After much evasion, justification and rationalizing of their reasons,” he wrote, “they finally informed me that the color of the actress’s skin would ultimately be irrelevant, since they intended to ‘experiment with makeup.’ ”

"Colorblind casting" has been the approved norm in American theater for a long time. For example, I saw a production of Bertolt Brecht's Galileo at the Goodman Theater in Chicago around 1986 in which a black actor played a 17th Century Italian cardinal. But, it doesn't work the other way. White guys can't play Othello anymore. This isn't much of a burden, though, because there are more black actors than there are roles for blacks in all the plays in the repertory.

In regard to mounting Clybourne Park in Berlin in German, the whole enterprise seems pretty hopeless to me. I get what Clybourne Park is about because, just like Norris, I've stood on Clybourn with other white gentrifiers and tried to puzzle out just how fast The Powers That Be will get around to tearing down the Cabrini Green housing projects and sending the residents away to pester less privileged white people. Will we get rich before we get mugged? But, from reading reviews, I don't think that many other white Americans really get the play. I doubt if Berliners will have much of a clue at all, no matter who is cast.
... An online petition has also started at Avaaz.org to stop this practice in German theaters in reaction to a recent production of Herb Gardner’s “I’m Not Rappaport” at Schlosspark Theater in Berlin, where a white actor played Midge, a black character.

In other words, German theaters sometimes use blackface when putting on American or English plays with black characters. This was tolerated in the English-speaking world until not that long ago: Sir Laurence Olivier directed himself in blackface in his movie version of Othello as recently as 1965. 

On the other hand, Fred Armisen, who is 3/4th white and 1/4th Japanese, played Barack Obama in blackface on Saturday Night Live for several years. Of course, the blackface was a version of offering up a hostage, just to prove that SNL would never, ever make fun of Obama.

Tom Wolfe's "Back to Blood:" Buckle up, folks, it's going to be a bumpy ride

I just picked up my copy of Tom Wolfe's first new novel in eight years, Back to Blood (a story of 21st Century Miami), and opened it at random. Here's the first paragraph I read (on p. 181):
Now he looked directly at Ghislaine [a Miami girl with a French name, so I'm guessing she's Haitian]. He smiled ... to cover up the fact that he was trying ... objectively ... to assess her face. Her skin was whiter than most white people's. As soon as Ghislaine was old enough to understand words at all, Louisette had started telling her about sunny days. Direct sun wasn't good for your skin. The worst thing of all was to take a sunbath. Even walking in the sun was too much of a risk. She should wear big-brimmed straw hats. Better still, an umbrella. Little girls couldn't very well go around with parasols, however. But if they had to walk in the sun, they should at least have straw hats. She must always remember that she had very beautiful but very fair skin that would burn easily, and she should do anything to avoid sunburns. But Ghislaine figured it out very quickly. It had nothing to do with sunburns ... it had to do with sunbrowning. In the sun, skin like hers, her beautiful whiter-than-white skin, would darken just like that! In no time she could turn Neg ... just like that. 

And that's just the beginning of a racial inventory of her hair, lips, and nose.

Critic James Wood is extremely peeved in The New Yorker at Wolfe's book. Novelists aren't supposed to notice how people look! What kind of characters think about how other characters look? Vulgar characters, that's who!

Wood wants you to know that he much prefers Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, in which the characters sit around at a luxury health clinic thinking Deep Thoughts for 1,000 pages.

Here's my review of Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons.

Gopnik: America's historic prosperity = "white people with guns owning a giant chunk of well-irrigated, very well-harbored real estate"

Adam Gopnik has an eloquent review in The New Yorker called "Faces, Places, Spaces: The Renaissance of Geographic History" of a few books on the importance of geography, including Robert Kaplan's latest. 

This paragraph by Gopnik will seem less novel to iSteve readers than to most others:
The new space history has one great virtue. It forces upon historians, the amateurs we all are as well as the pros we read, a little more humility. American prosperity looks like a function of virtue and energy, but the geographic turn tells us that it’s mostly a function of white people with guns owning a giant chunk of well-irrigated, very well-harbored real estate off the edge of the World Island, bordering a hot land on one side and a cold one on the other. Really, you can’t miss. Our geographic truth enters our songs and sagas even if it evades our sermons: O beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain, for purple mountain majesties, above the fruited plain; this land is my land, from the redwood forest to the gulf-stream waters. The geographic truth beneath our prosperity is as naturally sung by our bards as the olive oils and wine-dark sea at the heart of Greek culture were sung by theirs.

This is basically Benjamin Franklin's argument from Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind that life in America is happier than in Europe because the population density is lower and thus land costs are lower and wages are higher, so it makes sense to limit immigration. Speculating freely, I'd guess the chain of influence goes to Adam Gopnik from his sister, cognitive scientist Alison Gopnik, from cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, from me, from Old Ben.

I'd have some specific criticisms of Gopnik's essay, but it's really much better than the average, so you owe it to yourself to read it. My impression is of an urban Ashkenazi intellectual groping in good faith to recover some knowledge and wisdom lost when people without much connection to land came to dominate highbrow discourse.

October 22, 2012

Presidential debate comment thread

Tell me about it.

Is it Baroque O'Blarney overwhelming the Underperformin' Mormon? Or Mathemagical Mitt exposing the Big Oh?

And how many more wars do we need to start?

Which one acted like he was in the lead in the election?

How to fix Barack Obama? The Obama Administration has a plan: more quotas and less discipline

Barack Obama Global Preparation Academy is a shiny new $79 million public middle school with 1,154 students in Los Angeles, complete with a school spirit song:
Barack Obama Global
Preparation Academy
Preparing us for the future
Our alma mater you'll always be
For your dedication
To our education
We'll always have and loyalty
For Barack Obama Global Preparation Academy (2x)
Soaring like an eagle
Above our beloved academy
Developing in our character
And in our integrity
If we believe it
We can achieve it
Our dreams become reality (reality)
Thanks to Barack Obama Global Preparation Academy
Thanks to Barack Obama
Global Preparation
Barack Obama
Global Preparation
Barack Obama
Global Preparation
Academy

Unfortunately, some people are lacking in school spirit. Here's the lone parent's review of Barack Obama on GreatSchools.net:
hi my dauther goes to this school i dont think that for the first year it went good at all the with staft and teachers they didn't had no control on the students i dont now what happen with our principal she was good when she was in forshay with our students on deciplem now the students get to schhool late and they close all the bathroom during classes so when they need to go they can find them open when they switch to another class so they arrive late to class the teachers close there doors and dont let them in even if they see the student running to class 

(By the way, this handy GreatSchools website also informs parents that the nearest comparable school to Barack Obama is: 
W.D.M Islamic Learning Center/S.C.M.S 
0.2 miles

As we saw with the Bush Administration's embarrassing 2003 failure to find any W.D.M.'s in Iraq, many Islamics haven't learned enough yet about how to make W.D.M.'s. So, it's good to see that somebody is working with the next generation to get them up to speed W.D.M.-wise, because I believe the children are our future.)

According to the architect of Barack Obama, the project cost for this 170,000 square foot school on 7 acres was $78,900,000. Capacity of the school is 1,400 students, although they seem to be having trouble getting that many to show up.

The Los Angeles Daily News reported on October 19:
Sharette Arnold simply wanted a safe place for her twin boys. 
Fearful of gangs trolling ["Cool story, bro"] her South L.A. neighborhood and dismayed at her sons' falling grades, Arnold took advantage of a less-publicized part of Choices. 
She pulled her sons out of the underperforming Barack Obama Global Prep Academy and enrolled them in Hale Charter Academy, a high-achieving campus in Woodland Hills where Cameron and Delion McDonald are thriving. 
"Our neighborhood school is new and named for Obama, but it's in a very bad area," Arnold said Friday. "My kids had to walk past prostitutes and gang members, and there were a lot of issues at the school that made it hard for them to concentrate. 
"My babies deserve better." 
Obama Academy is one of nearly 450 Los Angeles Unified campuses designated as Program Improvement Schools because they've fallen short of academic targets for two consecutive years.

Barack Obama has only been open for two years.

Fortunately, the Obama Administration has a plan to fix what's wrong with Barack Obama: namely, too much discipline. From the Center for Public Integrity:
Alexander Johnson arrived at Barack Obama Global Preparatory Academy to pick up his 12-year-old after school on May 19, 2011.

It's actually "Barack Obama Global Preparation Academy," which is probably wise. The word "preparatory" is practically impossible for anybody in America to pronounce reliably since the death of William F. Buckley Jr.

By the way, have you noticed how schools usually aren't called schools anymore? And the more words in the title of the school, the more doubtful the enterprise, kind of like the Democratic People's Republic of Korea? Practically the only school with a simple name to start up in Southern California in this century was Oaks Christian School in Westlake Village, which is where people like Wayne Gretzky, Will Smith, and Joe Montana send their kids. There may be a connection.
When his son, A.J. didn’t appear, Johnson went inside the Los Angeles middle school. What he found was devastating. 
A.J. and a friend had gotten into a physical altercation over a basketball game, and school staff had summoned not parents, but police officers. Neither boy was injured, and the school ended up suspending his son for only one day, Johnson said. But officers wrote up a court citation and decided, on the spot, to also handcuff and arrest A.J. as the alleged aggressor — after what Johnson believes was only a cursory look into what had happened. 
Despite Johnson’s pleas for another solution to what the citation said was a “mutual fight,” officers drove A.J. to a station, booked him, fingerprinted him and took a mug shot before releasing him. The family hired a lawyer, and school staff later apologized. But Johnson and his wife still can’t comprehend why school officials got police involved. And while school police say they have a duty to fight crime, the Johnsons can’t help but think that officers arrested their son because of snap judgments about African-American kids in South Central Los Angeles. 
“He’s got good grades and he’s never been in trouble,” Johnson said he kept telling police. “Tell it to the judge,” he said police replied.  
An anti-school discipline protest in L.A.
What happened to the Johnsons’ son is the type of incident — in Los Angeles and elsewhere — that has the Obama Administration’s Department of Education and a growing number of juvenile-court judges deeply concerned. In fact, the issue of police citations has been included in a federal review of discipline-reform plans that the Los Angeles Unified School District – under pressure to reduce high rates of suspensions of black students — was required to submit earlier this year to the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights. 
“Generally speaking, in all but the most serious cases we would hope that district officials review a range of options … before referring students to the court system,” the department’s assistant secretary for civil rights, Russlynn Ali, told the Center for Public Integrity in an interview that touched on both Los Angeles and national trends.   

Russlynn Ali, another member of the Obama Administration's West Indian coterie (Trinidadian subcon version?), is all very fine as a civil rights spokesmodel, but it's just not been the same since Xochitl Hinojosa left the Obama Administration for that campaign job in Nevada.
Months ago, the Los Angeles district failed to submit any records of police citations or arrests of students to Ali’s office so they could be included in the office’s most recent mandatory Civil Rights Data Collection. The collection of those 2009-2010 statistics from most U.S. schools was an unprecedented attempt by the Education Department to assess an apparent national upsurge in referrals of students to law enforcement.    
Los Angeles’ data and New York City’s, too, were conspicuously missing. But in April, the Center for Public Integrity and a Los Angeles civil rights group, the Labor-Community Strategy Center, obtained and analyzed a large portion of the L.A. data that Ali’s office had expected to get.    
The data — obtained through a public records act request — contained tens of thousands of citations to lower-level juvenile court issued by Los Angeles Unified’s own police force from 2009 through 2011. 
The data don’t include arrests, which are recorded separately, or separate citations that officers referred directly to a higher-level delinquency court, where Johnson’s son ended up. The data don’t include tickets written by city police either. 
But the citations do likely represent the bulk of police-student interactions, and reveal how pervasive the ticketing of students has become in this large metropolitan district, which is struggling with high dropout rates and budget cuts.   
The Center found that Los Angeles’ school officers, part of the largest school police force in the country, issued more than 33,500 tickets to students between 10 and 18 years old over three years. That worked out to about 30 citations a day, every day.   
More than 40 percent of these court citations were to kids 14 and younger, mostly for disturbing the peace, followed by daytime curfew violations, including tardiness, and scattered tickets for cigarettes, lighters, marijuana, vandalism or having graffiti “tools,” such as a Sharpie. Black students, about 10 percent of the district’s student body, received 15 to 20 percent of all tickets, depending on the year, and Latino students, 74 percent of enrollment, also received a disproportionate number.  

Can't be too disproportionate: the maximum arithmetically possible is that the 74 percent of students who are Latinos get 80 to 85 percent of the tickets.
Additional Center analysis also shows that these lower-level court citations were highly concentrated in low-income areas where children of immigrants and African-American families attend school.

You think?
Last year, there were more than 25 middle schools in such areas where at least 50 citations to lower-level court were given to students, many of them 11 and 12 years old.  At least a dozen of those schools showed 70 or more tickets issued to students, who were overwhelmingly black and Latino. 
After initial findings from the data were disclosed in media reports in late April, students and parents held protests in early May. The Labor-Community Strategy Center urged that the district cut tickets by 75 percent and adopt a moratorium on citations until more studies were done. District police officials declined to stop ticketing, but have engaged in community discussions about reforms.     
Ali said she couldn’t comment directly on “independently gathered” Los Angeles statistics. But, she said, “the data you cite reveal, and the recent Civil Rights Data Collection data show nationally, that students of color are disproportionately disciplined.” 
In March, Ali’s office revealed the results of what it had gleaned from districts nationwide that had complied and submitted their arrest and citation numbers for 2009-2010. The findings were stark: Black students, 18 percent of enrollment, represented 42 percent of school-based referrals to police. Latinos, 24 percent of enrollment, were 37 percent of school-related arrests. 
“While the magnitude of the problem is something those of us involved with civil rights enforcement have been keenly aware of, I would not be telling the truth if I did not say that I found the data surprising and disturbing on a personal level,” Ali said. 

Ms. Ali doesn't seem to know what the word "magnitude" means. It's not actually a synonym for "direction."
“Mind you,” she said, “racial disparities revealed by data alone don’t constitute a civil rights violation . . . But at minimum, they should certainly be cause for concern and lead to conversations about why the disparities exist and what can be done to ensure fair learning opportunities for all students.” 

A courageous conversation, as Eric Holder, another West Indian, might say.
Ali’s office has offered aid to help districts comply with another upcoming request that’s part of a new national collection of data. ... 
Civil rights groups fear that because of this concern for safety, ironically, black, Latino and low-income students are being subjected to unequal police scrutiny over minor matters and more searches than kids in affluent areas.    
Zoe Rawson, an attorney with the Labor-Community Strategy Center, who has defended students in court, said: “We are both policing students of color differently because they live in these areas and rely on the public education system, and we are using the police and the courts as a punitive tactic for school discipline despite evidence that it is ineffective, harmful and wasteful.” 
... The task force report cited an Arizona State University criminologist who found that a first-time court appearance in high school increases a student’s odds of dropping out by at least a factor of three. The impact was greater for a student who was only marginally delinquent.   

Correlation does not imply Caucasian.
Some of Los Angeles’ inner-city schools have struggled with dropout rates as high as 50 percent. The citations examined by the Center were concentrated at those schools, as well as at middle schools that feed students into those secondary schools. ... 
Christopher Ortiz, the district’s school operations chief, said in a more recent interview that school administrators are told that that the role of school police is clear: “School police do not do classroom management.” ... 

I've been trying to point out for years that public schools need a level of disciplinarians in between teachers and SWAT teams in body armor. If you want smart teachers who like thinking about how best to teach The Great Gatsby or the Quadratic Formula more than they like thinking about how to put punks in their places, you need to back teachers up with Assistant Deans of Discipline, guys with necks wider than their heads who live to put punks in their places.
Up to now, most kids in Los Angeles with lower-level citations have been summoned to an “informal” juvenile court. They must appear with a parent during court hours, which means students miss school and the parent misses work. Students can face hundreds of dollars in fines, and if they don’t show up to court – many are afraid to tell parents about a ticket – their infraction has a misdemeanor offense added on. ... 
Jerod Gunsberg, the Johnson boy’s attorney, said that it took six months to get that 12-year-old’s assault charges dismissed in delinquency court. Gunsberg said a probation officer told him she didn’t understand why A.J.'s case was in that court, but that he wasn’t the first student to be referred from his school. 
The court put A.J. into an informal diversion program of four sessions of anger-management counseling, asked him to write a book report and urged him to continue to get good grades. 
The district said no one at Barack Obama or the district could discuss the case because of confidentiality laws. Statistics show that at least 50 citations for lower-level juvenile court were issued at Barack Obama last year. 

A reader writes to explain what's going on: "Schools get a quota of how many black students they can suspend per year. By May 19, 2011 they were no doubt at their limit for the 2010-2011 school year. However, they can still call the school cops to cite or arrest troublemakers."
The Johnsons pulled A.J. out of Barack Obama for a while, but had to drive him a long distance to a more affluent school in Santa Monica. They noticed there were not a lot of police cars patrolling there. At Barack Obama, when his son got into his first fight, “it all went south when police got involved,” Alexander Johnson said. “They didn’t have anyone to handle discipline, and they told me everything goes straight to police.” 
The Johnsons put A.J. back in Barack Obama this year, and the school welcomed him back, his parents said, and assured them that a new staffer had been appointed to handle discipline. 
Gunsberg said that, unfortunately, even though charges were dismissed and A.J. was not required to formally admit to any wrongdoing, his mug shot and fingerprints remain on file with police until he can try to have them sealed in five years or when he turns 18. 
Center for Public Integrity data editor David Donald contributed to this report.
Meanwhile, Hans Bader of Open Market reports that the Obama Administration is even farther along than with Barack Obama in fixing up what's wrong with Oakland's public schools, which is, coincidentally enough, too much discipline:
Under pressure from the Education Department, which investigated it over “racial disparities” and “disparate impact,” the Oakland, California, school system has agreed to impose “targeted reductions in the overall use of student suspensions; suspensions for African American students, Latino students, and students receiving special education services; and African American students suspended for defiance.” ... These “targeted reductions” are racial quotas in all but name. (“Disparate impact” is when a process affects one racial group more than another, despite having no racist motive, such as when whites have higher average scores than minorities on a standardized test.)

By the way, I want to congratulate Hans Bader on really turning his life around since that unfortunate 1988 incident at the Nakatomi Plaza office tower. I guess one night of rehabilitation with Officer John McClane, NYPD, was all it took. Let that be a lesson to us all.

Villaraigosa in 2016!

From Politico:
The Los Angeles mayor gave a pretty obviously nonresponsive answer when Radio Iowa's O. Kay Henderson asked if he has any presidential ambitions for 2016: 
Villaraigosa spoke with Radio Iowa before his speech this evening. As for whether Villaraigosa might run for president in 2016, Villaraigosa said he plans to “reflect” when his term as mayor ends in the middle of next year before deciding what he’ll do next. “I want to figure out how we move America and, importantly, my state, toward what I call a radical middle,” he said.
He was in Iowa to headline the state Democratic Party's Jefferson-Jackson Dinner, which is of course what you do if you are simply interested in promoting policies of the "radical middle." 
Villaraigosa has talked about running for governor of California in the past, so it's no shock that he has ambitions beyond his city and perhaps state. That he (as well as other mayors like Cory Booker and Rahm Emanuel) are already being talked about as presidential prospects for next cycle reflects both the prominence of mayors in the Democratic Party, and the relatively thin collection of governors and senators the party might field in 2016 if Hillary Clinton doesn't run.

The Democrats actually still have a number of white male governors with executive experience and track records of appealing to state-wide electorates who sound far more plausibly Presidential than these guys. But the Democratic Party is evolving along with the demographics of America, so, yeah, sure, why not Tony Villaraigosa in 2016? 

Just repeat after me: "Correlation Does Not Imply Caucasian"

Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) wrote in his famous 1993 essay Defining Deviancy Down:
In a 1992 study entitled America's Smallest School: The Family, Paul Barton came up with the elegant and persuasive concept of the parent-pupil ratio as a measure of school quality. Barton, who was on the policy planning staff in the Department of Labor in 1965, noted the great increase in the proportion of children living in single-parent families since then. He further noted that the proportion "varies widely among the states" and is related to "variation in achievement" among them. The correlation between the percentage of eighth graders living in two-parent families and average mathematics proficiency is a solid .74. North Dakota, highest on the math test, is second highest on the family compositions scale - that is, it is second in the percentage of kids coming from two-parent homes. The District of Columbia, lowest on the family scale, is second lowest in the test score. 
A few months before Barton's study appeared, I published an article showing that the correlation between eighth-grade math scores and distance of state capitals from the Canadian border was .522, a respectable showing. By contrast, the correlation with per pupil expenditure was a derisory .203. I offered the policy proposal that states wishing to improve their schools should move closer to Canada. This would be difficult, of course, but so would it be to change the parent-pupil ratio.

This parent-student ratio concept is worth remembering.

As is commenter Rob S's revision of the now-cliched "Correlation does not imply causation" into the less euphemistic "Correlation does not imply Caucasian," because we definitely wouldn't want you to draw that lesson!

October 21, 2012

"Underperforming Barack Obama"

From the L.A. Daily News:
Most of the parents who sign up for LAUSD's Choices program hope to send their child to a specialty magnet - a performing arts program for an aspiring actor, perhaps, or a medical academy for a would-be doctor. 
Sharette Arnold simply wanted a safe place for her twin boys. 
Fearful of gangs trolling her South L.A. neighborhood and dismayed at her sons' falling grades, Arnold took advantage of a less-publicized part of Choices. She pulled her sons out of the underperforming Barack Obama Global Prep Academy and enrolled them in Hale Charter Academy, a high-achieving campus in Woodland Hills where Cameron and Delion McDonald are thriving.

However, if Romney messes up the final debate, I claim dibs on the term "The Underperformin' Mormon," a phrase that Google tells me has so far only been applied to 7'6" ex-BYU basketball center Shawn Bradley.

The phrase Underperformin' Norman was coined by John Derbyshire for Bush Administration Transportation secretary Norman Mineta, who refused to allow ethnic profiling in airport security after 9/11 to prevent Japanese from being interned, or something.

Big Gay Gallup Poll

Gallup included the question: "Do you, personally, identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender?" for 3 months of surveys, getting 121,000 responses

The always reliable Daily Mail headlines:
'White people are less likely to be gay': Poll reveals African-American community has highest percentage of 'LGBT' adults in U.S. 
Gallup survey, based on interviews with more than 121,000 people, showed that 3.4% of U.S. adults were lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (LGBT) 
Highest proportion in black community, at 4.6%, followed by Asians (4.3%), Hispanics (4%) and Caucasians (3.2%)  
Poll found 44% of LGBT adults were Democratic, and 13% Republican

I don't find the results too surprising, but I want to point out a couple of issues: 

There are several percent who don't say know either, just "Don't Know" or "Refuse to Answer."

We don't have any way of knowing what the plain dumb error rate is. (E.g., we can't separate out the male lesbian percentage.) One of the authors of the Gallup Poll, Gary Gates, has discovered in the past that it's not uncommon for a sizable percentage of unusual situations in data to be comprised of typos.
Our work indicates that over 40 percent of same-sex “unmarried partner” couples in the 2000 U.S. Decennial Census are likely misclassified different-sex couples.

There was a flurry of excitement and Brokeback Mountain fantasizing among the, uh, more Andrew Sullivan-like press, over reports after the 2000 Census that there were more gay domestic partnerships in places like Wyoming than in Washington D.C.. But it mostly turned out to be people filling in their Census forms carelessly.

In a study on the military, Gates estimated:
An estimated 2.9% of women on active duty are lesbian/bisexual compared to only 0.6% of men.

Wow, 0.6% of male active duty military personnel are gay / bisexual ...

John List on the virtual nonexistence of "stereotype threat"

The concept of "stereotype threat" is a vastly popular explanation for The Gap. In 2004, I argued that the most plausible explanation for studies finding that if you tell a Designated Victim Group that they are expected to score lower on a low-stakes test requiring mental effort in return for no reward, they will indeed score lower:
Of course, to me as a former marketing executive, there's an obvious alternative explanation of [Claude] Steele's findings: the students figured out what this prominent professor wanted to see, and, being nice kids, they delivered the results he longed for. This happens all the time in market research. After all, this was just a meaningless little test, unlike a real SAT where the students would all want to do as well as possible.

However, an even more cynical interpretation has been floating around on the fringes of public discourse for a number of years: publication bias. Studies that find stereotype threat get published, while studies that don't don't: the File Drawer Effect.

From an interview with John List, Homer J. Livingston professor of economics at the U. of Chicago:
RF:  Your paper with Roland Fryer and Steven Levitt came to a somewhat ambiguous conclusion about whether stereotype threat exists. But do you have a hunch regarding the answer to that question based on the results of your experiment? 
List: I believe in priming. Psychologists have shown us the power of priming, and stereotype threat is an interesting type of priming. Claude Steele, a psychologist at Stanford, popularized the term stereotype threat. He had people taking a math exam, for example, jot down whether they were male or female on top of their exams, and he found that when you wrote down that you were female, you performed less well than if you did not write down that you were female. They call this the stereotype threat. My first instinct was that effect probably does happen, but you could use incentives to make it go away. And what I mean by that is, if the test is important enough or if you overlaid monetary incentives on that test, then the stereotype threat would largely disappear, or become economically irrelevant.  
So we designed the experiment to test that, and we found that we could not even induce stereotype threat. We did everything we could to try to get it. We announced to them, “Women do not perform as well as men on this test and we want you now to put your gender on the top of the test.”  And other social scientists would say, that’s crazy — if you do that, you will get stereotype threat every time. But we still didn’t get it. What that led me to believe is that, while I think that priming works, I think that stereotype threat has a lot of important boundaries that severely limit its generalizability. I think what has happened is, a few people found this result early on and now there’s publication bias. But when you talk behind the scenes to people in the profession, they have a hard time finding it. So what do they do in that case? A lot of people just shelve that experiment; they say it must be wrong because there are 10 papers in the literature that find it. Well, if there have been 200 studies that try to find it, 10 should find it, right? 
This is a Type II error but people still believe in the theory of stereotype threat. I think that there are a lot of reasons why it does not occur. So while I believe in priming, I am not convinced that stereotype threat is important.