Wait a minute, Billy Beane is a Republican?!

I was sure that Billy was getting the short end of the stick

Politics in baseball are awfully contradictory, anyway. For a game run by rich old white Republicans, they sure act like a bunch of socialists when it suits them.

My crackpot idea has always been to make private schools illegal. I bet the quality of public education would become suddenly very important...(I don't actually advocate doing this.)

If schools had to compete for students, or the administrators and teachers would lose their jobs, they'd get better in a hurry.

I'm probably going to bow out of this thread now and I apologize if I've kick-started a 1000 post throw down.

Billy Bean and Billy Beane were briefly teammates for the 1988 Tigers. (Actually, they both played for the '88 Tigers but I'm not sure if they were teammates as they each just had a cup of coffee.)

No "e" Bean was one of the trinity of young players (along with Scott Lusader and Jim Walewander) from that era that Sparky praised far beyond any rational assessment of his abilities.

It was more than a trinity, unless Torey Lovullo and Chris Pittaro are from different eras.

A voucher program would allow parents to get their kids out of disfunctional schools into ones that maintain order. Why should the 80% of students who want to learn be dragged down by the incorrigibles?

I notice on his shelf a copy of Fortune magazine, with Meredith Whitney on the cover. And as he talked about the bankrupting of Vallejo, I realized that I had heard this story before, or a private-sector version of it. The people who had power in the society, and were charged with saving it from itself, had instead bled the society to death. The problem with police officers and firefighters isn’t a public-sector problem; it isn’t a problem with government; it’s a problem with the entire society. It’s what happened on Wall Street in the run-up to the subprime crisis. It’s a problem of people taking what they can, just because they can, without regard to the larger social consequences. It’s not just a coincidence that the debts of cities and states spun out of control at the same time as the debts of individual Americans. Alone in a dark room with a pile of money, Americans knew exactly what they wanted to do, from the top of the society to the bottom. They’d been conditioned to grab as much as they could, without thinking about the long-term consequences. Afterward, the people on Wall Street would privately bemoan the low morals of the American people who walked away from their subprime loans, and the American people would express outrage at the Wall Street people who paid themselves a fortune to design the bad loans

In November 2005 he (ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER) called a special election that sought votes on four reforms: limiting state spending, putting an end to the gerrymandering of legislative districts, limiting public-employee-union spending on elections, and lengthening the time it took for public-school teachers to get tenure. All four propositions addressed, directly or indirectly, the state’s large and growing financial mess. All four were defeated; the votes weren’t even close. From then until the end of his time in office he was effectively gelded: the legislators now knew that the people who had elected them to behave exactly the way they were already behaving were not going to undermine them when appealed to directly. The people of California might be irresponsible, but at least they were consistent.
....

But when you look below the surface, he adds, the system is actually very good at giving Californians what they want. “What all the polls show,” says Paul (MARK PAUL, A JOURNALIST AND NON-PARTISAN THINK-THANKER WHO CO-AUTHORED A BOOK NAMED "CALIFORNIA CRACKUP"), “is that people want services and not to pay for them. And that’s exactly what they have now got.” As much as they claimed to despise their government, the citizens of California shared its defining trait: a need for debt. The average Californian, in 2011, had debts of $78,000 against an income of $43,000. The behavior was unsustainable, but, in its way, for the people, it works brilliantly. For their leaders, even in the short term, it works less well. They ride into office on great false hopes and quickly discover they can do nothing to justify those hopes

I can see a connection between sabermetrics and right-wing politics. The desire to rationally explain events on the baseball field and the libertarian view of the world that is rationally derived from the absolute premise of individual liberty could in some cases have a similar source.

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." ... "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do." -Karl Rove, quoted anonymously by Ron Suskind

The left has conditioned the people to expect an all-powerful government capable of anything; the right has conditioned them to blame government for everything.

“What all the polls show,” says Paul (MARK PAUL, A JOURNALIST AND NON-PARTISAN THINK-THANKER WHO CO-AUTHORED A BOOK NAMED "CALIFORNIA CRACKUP"), “is that people want services and not to pay for them. And that’s exactly what they have now got.”

I'd let the parents decide.

Even kids that believed all that, but know how to read and write, do math, etc. at a HS level, would have a much better shot in this world than the products of most of our inner-city schools.

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." ... "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do." -Karl Rove, quoted anonymously by Ron Suskind

OK, but what kind of shot would the world have with that kind of ignorance even more rampant than it is today?

The reason education should be public and not private is because it is the social duty of everyone to educate everyone ELSES children. No matter how f'd up their parents are, where they live, how much money they have.

I actually sometimes think PRIVATE schools should be banned - and if you don't like your kids' school options you need to get involved personally and fix the damn school.

You do realize that a lot of journalists quietly believe that Ron Suskind fabricated that quote, right?

In any event, it most certainly did not come from Karl Rove. You're just making that up out of whole cloth.

Don't you think the parents that would want to send their kids to a school that taught the world is only 6000 years old are probably already teaching their kids that on Sundays?

“Going the Other Way: Lesson’s From a Life in and out of Major League Baseball” came out in the summer of 2003.

Who's talking about parents developing curriculum? The principals and teachers would.

So as it is, we kind of figure that we're going to have to move to Iowa or northern Vermont in a few years...

Not sure about state lines. I mean, why stop there? Shouldn't we - as people - want to educate the poor and downtrodden of Mexico (and Canada, eh) as well.