I was especially curious about the Committee on Capital Markets Regulation, which I’d never heard of. Going to its website, I discovered that it’s yet another of the dozens of trade groups and associations dedicated to protecting Wall Street’s interests in Washington. Others include the Financial Markets Association, the Financial Services Roundtable, the Global Financial Markets Association, the Institute for Financial Markets, the Private Equity Growth Capital Council, and the Securities Industry Finance Markets Association. All of these organizations have powerful boards, sizable budgets, and considerable influence, yet no one is watching them.
.. From the Times I learned that the fund-raisers Singer hosts in his apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side can net more than $1 million a session, and I read in The Wall Street Journal that he was instrumental in the selection of Paul Ryan as Mitt Romney’s running mate in 2012. In a detailed profile of Singer in Mother Jones, Peter Stone noted that Elliott Management has frequently been called a “‘vulture fund’ because a chunk of its profits comes from buying distressed companies’ or countries’ debt at a steep discount.” In 2012 a subsidiary of the firm, seeking to extract full payment from Argentina for some bonds on which it had defaulted, had an Argentine naval vessel impounded in a Ghanaian port. In 2004, Singer contributed $5,000 to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which attacked John Kerry’s war record, badly damaging his presidential bid.
.. From Paul Blumenthal at The Huffington Post I learned that four hawkish-on-Israel billionaires—Singer, Sheldon Adelson, Home Depot founder Bernard Marcus, and Seth Klarman, the head of the private investment house Baupost—gave a combined $11.5 million to anti-Iran groups from 2011 through 2013 (while also giving $115 million to Republican Party Super PACs in the 2012 and 2014 elections).
.. As secretary, Duncan filled many top positions with people with ties to both Broad and Gates.*
The policy implications of all this were nicely summed up in an interview I found on YouTube with Stanley Katz, a professor of public affairs at Princeton and a longtime student of nonprofits. These megafoundations, he said, “have been able to leverage their resources in such a way that their policies have been adopted by state boards of education, local boards of education, and the federal Department of Education.” The result is that “the K–12 policy of these megafoundations is pretty much the K–12 policy of the United States of America.” It’s an illustration, Katz said, of how in today’s America private money can buy public policy.
Researchers at the Harvard Graduate School of Education asked 10,000 middle and high school students if their parents cared more about their personal achievement or whether they were kind. Eighty percent said their parents cared more about achievement — individual over the group.
.. The students lead their own parent-teacher conferences. They stand up before their parents, a teacher and other observers and they give a presentation on their successes, failures and how they might improve.
.. Most of the time character is not an individual accomplishment. It emerges through joined hearts and souls, and in groups.
The end result is a group of students who have “succeeded” in high school calculus without really having the proper foundations, a tower built on sand. It is quite possible for students to learn the mechanics of many categories of calculus problems and to answer questions correctly on exams without really understanding the concepts. To quote the MAA’s report:
In some sense, the worst preparation a student heading toward a career in science or engineering could receive is one that rushes toward accumulation of problem-solving abilities in calculus while short-changing the broader preparation needed for success beyond calculus.
.. The college course covers the same material in a quarter of the time; students must therefore have solid skills in algebra and geometry along with good study and work habits to succeed.
.. The rush to AP Calculus has instructed students in the techniques for solving large classes of standard calculus problems rather than prepare them for success in higher mathematics.
.. But if we want to advance STEM education and continue to produce a high-quality technical workforce we must confront this issue. We need to stop the rush to calculus and focus instead on a thorough grounding in algebra, geometry and functions.
Calculus is one of the great intellectual achievements of the last 400 years; shortchanging it by reducing its beauty and utility to a list of problems to be checked off a rubric does a disservice to everyone.
While much fuss was made of the last major revision to the SAT in 2005—which added a mandatory essay to the traditional math and reading sections, thus raising the total possible score from 1600 points to 2400 points—this new redesign is much more fundamental. It represents a big shift away from the test’s roots as an assessment of an applicant’s aptitude to more of a straightforward knowledge exam, much like its main competitor, the ACT. While the new SAT will revert back to the 1600-point scale, with the essay section becoming optional, it shouldn’t be mistaken for backpedaling to the old test.