Day: July 21, 2010

Parents ‘Trigger’ a Revolution at State Ed Board

In a huge victory for parents in Los Angeles and throughout California, the
California State Board of Education approved emergency regulations
for the Parent Trigger. These regulations, which lay out clear and common
sense rules and guidelines for how parents can go about using the Parent
Trigger, were critical for empowering parents to actually use this new law.
The parent trigger is an historic new law that allows parents to transform
their failing neighborhood school simply through community organizing.

Specifically, if half the parents sign a petition, they can trigger radical
changes, including bringing in new leadership and staff, or converting their
school into a charter school.

For the first time in the history of america, parents now have the power to
transform schools that have been failing neighborhoods and communities for
generations — and in doing so give their children the education they need
and the future they deserve.

Great Expectations

During a recent
public discussion about expected investment returns, the Chief
Investment Officer of a California public pension fund was quoted as
saying that "I would argue, and I have, with people who said it’s going
to be 6 percent or lower that they are basically saying the United
States is going to go in the drain in the next 100 years. I’m not
willing to go there."

By all accounts this CIO is a very smart fellow.  However, in making
that statement he’s up against some tough math because, for the 100
years of the 20th century – not exactly "in the drain" for the USA – an
investor with assets allocated like the typical pension fund would have
earned (you guessed it) around 6 percent.  

Somehow a perfectly good return in the 20th century has become a poor
expected return for the 21st century. How did that happen? As Warren
Buffett explained in a remarkably prescient article
in 1999, sometimes people extrapolate from statistically insignificant
periods to draw invalid inferences about future long-term performance.
For example, many people today came of age during the 17-year
investment boom from 1982 – 1999, but as Buffett pointed out, "The
increase in equity values [from 1982 to 1999] beats anything you can
find in history."

Paging Professor Wagstaff

In the 1932 movie, Horse Feathers, Groucho Marx plays Professor Adams Wagstaff, the new president of Huxley College. Professor Wagstaff decides to recruit  two older students, who he mistakenly believes to be professional football players, to enroll in Huxley and help Huxley defeat its rival Darwin. Chico (Baravelli, the iceman) and Harpo (Pinky, the dogcatcher) enroll at Darwin, where they, with Groucho, Zeppo and Connie Bailey, the "college widow",  predictably create chaos at the college.