I will rephrase my remarks:

I wholeheartedly object to bully tactics from the President on state matters!

In the Iron Curtain days I was on a train from East Berlin to Prague … in a compartment with a Communist Party oficial who also ran a textile plant … he asked me what was a major problem in American schools, I told him student behavior/lack of interest and lack of parental involvement. He told me it was not a problem in East Germany … the principal simply called the Communist Party offcial at the parent’s work site …

It’s a quick read, and quite relevant to the above comments (not to mention the charter debate). Key paras:

“The DoDEA’s success is not an isolated event. The system serves over 84,000 students in 12 foreign countries, seven states, Guam, and Puerto Rico. According to a 2007 Education World article DoDEA schools share many characteristics of typically found in low-performing public schools. Forty percent of students are minorities, 50 percent of the students eligible for free lunches, and a 35 percent annual mobility rate. “Yet, the schools have a 97 percent high school graduation rate, and the majority of students go on to higher education,” Education World finds. DoDEA’s success is attributed to factors inside and outside of the classroom.

Within the school, DoDEA has high academic expectations of students and regularly assess students’ progress. All schools use the same curriculum and have standardized classroom procedures to make students’ transition process less stressful. External factors might play an even more important role. Behavioral problems are not an issue due to the values students are taught at home. This in turn allow teachers to spend more time on teaching.

Militarizing all public schools is not a practical approach to school reform. This view might be one of the reasons there has been a lack of collaboration between military and civilian schools. However, this is changing. The latest round of base realignments and closures in 2005 has forced some military personnel to send their children to civilian schools. These changes prompted the Defense Department to create an Education Partnership Directorate in 2007 to work with local school districts to adopt aspects of DoDEA’s curriculum to ease students’ transition from military to public schools.”

Again: “Behavioral problems are not an issue due to the values students are taught at home. This in turn allow teachers to spend more time on teaching.” I’d be interested in the average class size, and the cost per student.

I hear Reggie saying, in so many words, “Student outcomes are not completely within teachers’ and schools’ control.” I agree.

And I hear Peter saying, loosely, “Some teachers and schools more than others make a huge difference.” Again, I agree.

But I did NOT hear Reggie saying “schools cannot succeed.” I heard, “Get parents more involved.” And what’s wrong with that?

Last night, Obama said, “No excuses.” He did NOT say “Only the teachers and schools should be on the hook.”

Apologies if I was unsuccessful at finding common ground.

Some schools in poor communities do much better than others … why? (See the Ed Trust website for actual schools) … Some combinations of school leaders and teachers have figured it out, and many haven’t … spending 12-14 hours a day is laudatory … but is the time well spent? No matter how hard teachers work, if they are not successful, should there be negative consequences? If other teachers, working with the same kids are successful, should there be positive consequnces? Ending poverty, reducing unemployment, improving housing and health care, reducing crime are all extremely important … but throwing up one’s hands and espouse that schools cannot succeed is unacceptable …

Yes, from the beginning. It was the founders who chartered the first national bank, so you’d have a lot trouble supporting your claim that they were — as a group — against it. Considering that TJ was responsible for the Louisiana Purchase (though he didn’t intend its magnitude), you’d have a lot of trouble supporting a claim that he was originalist textual literalist. You simply cannot win your argument by claiming “the founders” agree with you.

Again, you are allowed to prefer a different reading of the Constitution and constitutional law — which really needs to be understood in the context of a much longer history of common law. But the fact that your preferred reading was clearly inoperable as early as 1791 means that that reading is not the American reading and really never was.

And so, this strong arming (“blood money”? Really? You want to call it “blood money”?) might be problematic — to me because it violates the constitutionally established checks and balances (an idea that is not stated explicitly anywhere in the document). We certainly don’t like it when pushes states to do things that we don’t like. Some don’t like it because they don’t want the feds to have any role at all in education. But the tactic itself has long since been ruled Constitutional by those far more qualified to make such judgments than you or I, those who were given the power to make such judgments by the very Constitution itself.

I flail around quite a bit, especially verbally. I cannot tell the number of brick walls that I have damaged myself on.

As for the net exchange of funds with DC, I don’t defend the formulas, just the principle.

But I acknowledge that it is hard to figure out how to do this stuff. A geographically large state with a small population might need a great deal of federal funds, even if it is high in income per capita. At time, per capita funding makes sense, but at other times perhaps we should consider per square mile. Do we really want to begrudge MT more highway $/capita?

As for VA and HI, you clearly are including military spending. How do we want to factor that in? This is money that gets paid locally, but quite a bit of it gets paid to people who were added and thereby have directly increased many local costs. Spending might be accounted for as going to those states, but how is it handled if those bases spend money with contractors in other states?

The Army Core of Engineers is in VA. How is its spending accounted? If they travel and do work in another state, how are their expenses applied to this geographic accounting? What about spending on fleet maintenance in Norfolk?

I would also question VA’s ranking as a high income state. It’s income has increased dramatically in the last 20 years, and there’s a lot of issues outside of Northern VA. Certainly, it takes the feds time to update their formulas, too.

Generally, I agree with you that funding is not dispersed well. Low population states have disproportionate representation in our government, creating a structural barrier to addressing this issue. But there are other aspects of the problem that ought to be addressable. However, these kinds of tables that you mention — and I’ve been looking at then since the 1980′s — are too gross a view to provide a meaningful picture.

I appreciate that you would like to live in a country whose Constitution has quite a different meaning than ours does. I understand that you wish that the leaders of our government, including members of the supreme court, and including original framers/founding fathers, had interpreted out Constitution differently.

However, you do not and they did not. I wish I lived in a world where I was able to develop the coordination and concentration necessary for reliable jumper. But I don’t and never did. (Alas…one of the ongoing tragedies of my life.)

It simply is not correct to say that the National Bank or any number of other aspects of our government are unconstitutional. You can say that you wish they were, and you think that that would be a valid reading of the constitution. However, the courts have made clear that — even if that reading might be a valid one — it is not the reading of our country. Remember, our countries earliest leaders and justices were involved in the discussion that came before and during the constitutions’ writing — and the Bill of Rights’. I would suggest that they were in better position to figure out what the Framers intended, and the Originalists of our day should acknowledge that even the those who were “in the room” 220 years ago believed that federal powers could be implied by the constitution.

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Actually, I did not say that states rely on federal dollars to fund education. Rather, I said that state DOEs rely on federal dollars for their budgets. The feds cover 7-10% of education spending, and the bulk has been split more or less evenly between localities and states — with variance across the states.

The state DOE funding I mentioned was about Albany offices and personnel, not NYC, Westchester, Troy, Newburgh or any school district. What we get from Albany and other state DOEs is a perfectly valid question. But it is not at all like the feds pay for but the smallest share of education.

Obviously, there are any number of other federal programs whose funding you or I might divert to education. But that’s a different issue.

As for the rich paying more than the poor, I still think that that is incontrovertible. The questions we debate are about how much much (e.g. how progressive a tax structure should be). Remember, even a flat tax takes more from the rich, as the have more money in the first place. (That doesn’t mean that I endorse a flat tax. We’ve lost a lot of the progressivism in our tax code, with top rates simple at the 250kish level. Millionaire and billionaire taxes don’t seem at all crazy to me.)

As to your first few paras, did you even check out the link?

The system is not as altruistic or rational as you — or I (gimme some credit, puleeze) — would like it to be. Which was part of Moynihan’s point once he started digging into it on a national level, not just from a NYS-booster point of view. It ain’t rational. Ferrexample, in the 1999 “Fisc” (the last year before it was discontinued, there were three states in the top ten of net recipients who were also amongst the top ten in per capita income*, albeit from 2004-2006, best I could do with one foot out the door. To whit: VA, AK, HI. Rich states getting richer.

Well, at least I wasn’t accused of “flailing.” I guess we’re making progress.

* http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/income06/statemhi3.html