Bad News for Generic Democrats, and Probably Specific Democrats as Well

Today on NRO

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: For nations as for individuals, pretending self-interest doesn't exist is perilous. The War on Human Nature.

CHARLES C. W. COOKE: Holding popularity contests is not the wisest way to select the leader of the free world. The American Idol Electorate.

LUKE FRANS: Obama has squandered his biggest advantage among key voting groups. The President Who No Longer Feels Your Pain.

KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON: Obamacare and the New Age quacks. Qi Bono?

ANDREW JOHNSON: Newly elected Sawant sings from the old socialist playbook: Capitalism "is a dirty word." Socialist in Seattle.

SLIDESHOW: White House Turkeys.

Morning Jolt
. . . with Jim Geraghty

November 26, 2013

Bad News for Generic Democrats, and Probably Specific Democrats as Well

Get used to generic ballot results like this: "A new CNN/ORC International poll indicates a dramatic turnaround in the battle for control of Congress in next year's midterm elections. Democrats a month ago held a 50 percent to 42 percent advantage among registered voters in a generic ballot, which asked respondents to choose between a Democrat or Republican in their congressional district without identifying the candidates . . . The Democratic lead has disappeared. A new CNN/ORC poll indicates the GOP now holds a 49 percent to 47 percent edge."

Note that in the final generic ballot polls of 2010, Republicans had much bigger leads.

An Uncommon Contempt Displayed towards Those Objecting to Common Core

Our friend Ramesh on the Common Core debate:

Arne Duncan had to backtrack from [his statement that Common Core critics are mostly "white suburban moms who - all of a sudden - their child isn't as brilliant as they thought they were and their school isn't quite as good as they thought they were"] which also happens to be clearly false. Students aren't yet being tested to determine whether they meet the standards, so poor test results couldn't be generating a backlash. The contempt that the remark revealed is real enough, though. Proponents of the Common Core tend to view its critics as an ignorant mob. Support for it is, in certain circles, a sign of one's seriousness about education reform.

Yet the reform strategy it represents hasn't been thought through well, and it seems unlikely to work. The debate that surrounds it is an extended exercise in missing the point.

You can see why 'common core' would be a seductive idea in theory. Way too many American schools are failing the students who come in through their doors, and so there's a natural belief that if we could just get those worst-performing schools up to some minimum standard, and establish some sort of universal floor or threshold for quality, everyone's kids would be better off.

Why, you could use the slogan . . . "Leave no child behind!"

Of course, 'No Child Left Behind' is what we tried with a national system of standardized testing back in 2001, with decidedly mixed results. Of course, President Obama granted waivers to 26 states exempting them from the No Child Left Behind requirements, effectively nullifying the law.

Establishing that minimum standard is easier in theory than in practice, and parents have good reason to be wary of an effort to centralize control and authority of education matters. If I'm a concerned parent with a beef with how my local school is teaching my children, I can join the PTA or attend my local school-board meeting. Those school administrators should, at least theoretically, be more attentive and responsive to my concerns, as they'll see me at the school and around town. My state legislator will run into me much less frequently, and the evidence suggests Secretary of Education Arne Duncan seethes with contempt for parents who disagree with him and avoids interacting with "white suburban moms."

Local control isn't perfect, but it is, in theory, the most self-correcting. And if a school over in some other district wants to change their curriculum, say to emphasize more math, or more history, or more foreign languages, and the local parents are fine with it . . . why should I complain or weigh in? Even if my school finds a formula to improve student performance, it may not work over there and their ideas many not work over here. If there's anything that frustrating efforts at education reform have taught us, it's that way too many success stories can't be replicated elsewhere. Jaime Escalante proved to be an astonishingly successful calculus teacher, but after he and his successor retired, "a very successful program rapidly collapsed, leaving only fragments behind."

As Ramesh notes, trying to standardize education across the country amounts to strangling experimentation and innovation:

The case for having a "common core" in the first place is weak. High standards may be valuable, but why do they have to be common? It isn't as though different state standards are a major problem in U.S. education. There's more variation in achievement within states than between them. Common standards may make life a bit easier for students who move across state lines, but they also mean that we lose a chance for states to experiment.

Finally, which is most remarkable and surprising -- that Barack Obama is president of the United States, that Joe Biden is vice president, or that Arne Duncan has been secretary of education for five years and will remain in the job for the foreseeable future? It's not like Duncan could cite a record of remarkable improvement during his tenure in Chicago:

Soon after Arne Duncan left his job as schools chief here to become one of the most powerful U.S. education secretaries ever, his former students sat for federal achievement tests. This month, the mathematics report card was delivered: Chicago trailed several cities in performance and progress made over six years.

Miami, Houston and New York had higher scores than Chicago on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Boston, San Diego and Atlanta had bigger gains. Even fourth-graders in the much-maligned D.C. schools improved nearly twice as much since 2003.

The federal readout is just one measure of Duncan's record as chief executive of the nation's third-largest system. Others show advances on various fronts. But the new math scores signal that Chicago is nowhere near the head of the pack in urban school improvement, even though Duncan often cites the successes of his tenure as he crusades to fix public education. . . .

The Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago, which represents business, professional, education and cultural leaders, concluded in June that gains on state test scores were inflated when Illinois relaxed passing standards and that too many students still drop out of high school or graduate unprepared for college. The Consortium on Chicago School Research, a nonpartisan group at the University of Chicago, reported in October that Duncan's closure of low-performing schools often shuffled students into comparable schools, yielding little or no academic benefit.

Obama picked Duncan because he was "his" guy. Then again, it's not like President Obama trusted Arne Duncan enough to let his schools teach his daughters; while the Obamas lived in Chicago, their daughters went to the private University of Chicago Lab School, where the tuition is $25,000 to $28,000 per child per year.

Obamacare: Not Ready for the Next Deadline. Or the One after That. Or . . .

Oh, gee, who saw this coming? "Administration officials said Monday that some visitors to ObamaCare's federal enrollment site would experience outages, slow response times or messages to try again later during the month of December. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) delivered the message in the latest attempt to downplay expectations surrounding Nov. 30, the administration's self-imposed deadline for fixing HealthCare.gov."

Way back on October 23, the Washington Post's Sarah Kliff reported about the importance of the"834 EDI transmission."

Insurers sometimes call it, more simply, "an 834." It is a technical, back-end reporting tool that consumers never see. It is meant to be read by computers, not human beings. It's the form that tells the insurer's system who you are and what you need. And it might be the new health-care law's biggest problem.

Insurers report that, in some cases, 834s are coming in wrong. That's a much more serious problem than the online traffic bottlenecks that have dominated coverage of the health-care law's rollout.

One month later, the Washington Post reports . . . nope, still not fixed:

Even if it does work better for consumers, there are still problems — particularly the scrambled reports insurers are getting about people who have signed up for coverage through HealthCare.gov. Insurers say they are getting duplicate records and reports that misstate family relationships, such as listing a child as a spouse.

In some cases, enrollment reports are disappearing. With these "orphan records," insurers would have no way of knowing whether a person is signed up for coverage, unless a new customer happened to call the company with questions.

"The biggest concern is that there are going to be people showing up to get their care," said one person close to the insurance industry, who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive issues. "Then [the doctors or hospitals] call us and we have no record, and then the consumer is left frustrated and worried and scared."

Until such errors stop, "you can't open the floodgates" to large numbers of Americans using the Web site to sign up for coverage, said an insurance industry official who also asked not to be named to discuss private conversations with administration officials about how to improve the system.

The ripple effects of these flaws affect consumers, because the new coverage does not begin until customers make their first payments of monthly insurance premiums. And without accurate information about their new customers, health plans cannot send them correct bills.

Remember this, when you see Obama administration officials breaking out the party hats and confetti, celebrating on December 1 that the site isn't crashing for 80 percent of users and insisting that means the site is "fixed."

We're getting some more detail on the parts that still have to be built, and that are apparently going to be built in the next three weeks:

For instance, starting in mid-December, the government and each participating insurance company is supposed to perform a monthly "reconciliation," to make sure that each side has the same list of new customers, the benefits chosen by the consumers and the government subsidies for which they qualify. That feature of the online system, however, has not been built, according to people close to the industry and government officials.

Nor can the system handle another feature, scheduled to be ready when health plans take effect on Jan. 1, in which insurers are to be paid extra government money, through a method known as "risk corridors," if their new customers are old and require expensive medical care. "It's not built, let alone tested," the industry official said.

Notice this measuring stick of success: "For example, about half of the people at a Nov. 7 Miami-Dade Community College enrollment fair in Florida were able to create accounts and peruse their plan options, said Justin Nisly, a spokesman for the advocacy group Enroll America. By the second fair on Nov. 16, that proportion had risen to 2 out of 3 people."

Translation: One-third of users are still encountering difficulty in creating accounts, and perusing options.

The soft bigotry of low expectations.

ADDENDUM: Quinnipiac this morning: "Ohio Gov. John Kasich begins his reelection year with a 44 – 37 percent lead over a largely unknown possible Democratic challenger, Cuyahoga County Executive Ed FitzGerald, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released today. Ohio voters approve 52 – 33 percent of the job Kasich is doing as governor, close to his all-time high job approval of 54 – 32 percent June 25, and give him a 41 – 30 percent favorability rating."

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