Sec. Spellings Gets My Praise

This week the head of the Department of Education announced a long-overdue change in statistics: standardizing the process by which the high school graduation rate is computed. I love it. The only way to discuss issues intelligently is if everyone is using the same words with the same meaning. Currently, states use different processes to compute a graduation rate. (If I remember correctly, my high school class had about 56 kids in 9th grade, by graduation we had 37 or so. The issue is the extent to which the rate accounts for dropouts. Because we don't have a system for tracking every child, that's difficult for the school bureaucracies--one system's dropout can be another system's in-transfer. I'll be interested to see how accurate the statistics can get.)

I have to say, this is a change that GW should have insisted on in the "No Child Left Behind" legislation. But then, his first Education secretary had played games with statistics in Houston, so Bush understandably didn't want to draw attention to statistics, particularly if they might undermine his major claim as Texas governor. (There--I had been too silent on GWB for a while--nice to get some criticism off my chest.)

But, progress is made in steps, and this is better late than never. Sec. Spellings should be commended.

Another Computer Project Bites the Dust

Via Government Executive, NextGov reports Commerce Department/Census Bureau is dropping a project to develop handheld computers for the 2010 census (for followups where the mail form was not returned).

'“I am here today because the Field Data Collection Automation project has experienced significant schedule, performance and cost issues,” according to Gutierrez's testimony. “A lack of effective communication with one of our key contractors has significantly contributed to the challenges.”

In his statement, Gutierrez calls the situation with the handhelds “unacceptable.”

He points to a dress rehearsal held in May 2007 as when “development and scoping problems emerged.” The bureau then identified “more than 400 new or clarified technical requirements,” he said, which were delivered to Harris on Jan. 16.

At a March 5 hearing of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Gutierrez said, "significant miscommunication concerning technical requirements between the Census Bureau and Harris" were a main reason for the failings.

In a statement sent to Nextgov, Harris officials said, "The handheld devices are one part of a larger, multifaceted process to move from a 'paper culture' to an 'automation' culture appropriate for the 21st century. We understand that such a significant cultural shift presents organizational challenges to any organization, and Harris is encouraged that automation is moving forward, even if in a more narrowly focused fashion.""

Communication and culture--the recurring nightmare for any change agent.

One wonders if they'd aimed lower at the start whether they mightn't have gotten something that would help.

Remembering 40 Years Ago

A lot of commemorations of the death of Martin Luther King. I had started work at USDA in Jan. 1968. I'd heard the news of his murder on the radio (didn't have a TV yet) in my efficiency apartment on 13th St NW. The next morning I went as usual to work--sometimes I'd walk through downtown DC and across the Mall to the Auditor's Building (right across 14th Street from the USDA South Building). Other times I'd go over to 14th St and catch the 50 or 52 bus. Don't know which I did that morning.

By 10 or so the rumors were flying. A bit later you could look north east across the Mall (it was a great location) and see smoke rising. Supposedly someone had set fire to Hecht's, one of the big department stores at that time located on 7th street (I think). I tried to ignore the commotion, finding security in keeping to my routine. (Or rather, since I'd spent 10 weeks circulating among the branches in the division, to understand the work and figure out where I should work, I was still getting used to the work in the Directives Management Branch, and to my co-workers. There were only a handful of blacks in visible posts in the Administrative Services Division, one clerk-typist who'd been hired 2 years before in my branch, a veteran who worked in printing (he later retired to Germany), and a couple others. There were others, not visible--a moving crew, mailroom staff, and file section.)

By 1 or so word came down that the government was closed and we were to go home. (That was my first experience of the government closing.) I knew the buses wouldn't be running on a rush hour schedule, assuming that they would run (at that time I seem to remember the drivers on the 50/52 routes were white). So I ended up walking up 14th street.

The first looting I saw was on Franklin square, between 13th and 14th--a D.J.Kaufmann's store was broken into and two or three people (young men) were moving in and out. I averted my gaze (if I didn't see them, they wouldn't see me) and walked on pretty quickly. I got to my apartment without incident, perhaps hitting the small grocery next door for food, and didn't leave for a couple days. The government resumed work only after the National Guard had been called in and was patrolling the streets.

The riot wasn't a particular surprise, or shouldn't have been. I'd been in Rochester in 1964 which suffered an early riot ("early" that is, in the sense of being early in the 1960's series of riots). Martin Luther King had to maneuver between the anger on the streets and the resistance and inertia of the society--something he managed to do for a while, something we like to mis-remember him as doing throughout his life.

What, Me Talk With Them? No Way

That's the effective reaction when bureaucrats are supposed to cross agency boundaries, as witness this report in Government Executive:

" Jay Cohen, the department's undersecretary for science and technology, said first responders were not always enthusiastic about sharing communications.

"We have some communities where the police chief only wants the police to talk to him ...," Cohen said. To a large extent, "technology is not the problem with interoperability ... it's the culture," he said. Cohen said that although the department was preparing to test a "phone-home" interoperable system for first responders, the jury was out on whether it would be widely accepted."

NYTimes and Pollan Disagree with Me

It shouldn't be a surprise that the NYTimes has an article suggesting that higher food prices will turn people away from bad food and onto good food (i.e., locally grown fruits and vegetables). An excerpt:

"Along with some other critics of the American way of eating, he [Michael Pollan] likes the idea that some kinds of food will cost more, and here’s one reason why: As the price of fossil fuels and commodities like grain climb, nutritionally questionable, high-profit ingredients like high-fructose corn syrup will, too. As a result, Cokes are likely to get smaller and cost more. Then, the argument goes, fewer people will drink them.

And if American staples like soda, fast-food hamburgers and frozen dinners don’t seem like such a bargain anymore, the American eating public might turn its attention to ingredients like local fruits and vegetables, and milk and meat from animals that eat grass. It turns out that those foods, already favorites of the critics of industrial food, have also dodged recent price increases."

They may be right, but I doubt it. (The same issue contains a story on how a big tomato grower in PA isn't growing this year for lack of immigrants to pick the crop.)

I suspect the biggest question is how people think (always a good cliche). Do they have a food budget, so that if Coke becomes more costly they will switch to apples? Do they have a standard of living budget, so if meals at restaurants become more costly they switch from Ruby Tuesday to Wendy's? Or maybe eat one big meal at Mcdonalds instead of two meals at home?

The cheapest calories are still going to be the ones the foodies don't like, so if a consumer feels a squeeze on the overall budget, the logic should drive them to the cheaper stuff.

Semper En Obscurus

The Times has an interesting article on a guy who's collected badges from various super-secret agencies/projects. One I particularly like has this motto and the image of a mushroom on the badge (means: "always in the dark"). We used to joke that the big shots treated us career bureaucrats as mushrooms.

(It wasn't merely that we wanted to know what was going on, and resented our second-rate status as embodied by the lack of information; we had the excuse that good implementation of programs required being in on the ground floor of a program.)

New Deal Was More Than Emergency Programs

The Washington Post runs an article today, by Cindy Skrzycki, on grapes and grocers. While many think the New Deal is long gone and long dead, it actually lives on in unexpected places, such as the marketing of grapes. And others think that our food has gone to hell in a market basket, as the influence of big industrial ag takes over the food stores. And others, particularly conservatives, used to like to compare the federal regulations for [a commodity, like cabbage, or whatever] to something like the Gettysburg Address, as in: "It takes USDA 20,000 words to define a cabbage and Lincoln only took....

This quote from the story is for all those people:

"For the past three years, California growers and produce wholesalers have been feuding over whether the standard for U.S. Grade No. 1 should be changed. Buyers say permitting more loose grapes will lower the quality and make the fresh produce harder to sell.

Now Department of Agriculture officials, who set quality standards for 240 food products, are proposing to increase the number of loose grapes without considering them defective. The debate is over image and the bottom line in the $2 billion fresh table-grape market, which has grown as Americans each eat 7 to 8 pounds of grapes a year, up from 2 pounds a person in 1970."

The legislation for marketing orders, which stabilize and standardize and regulate and render less competitive the markets for fruit and vegetables dates back to the New Deal (and before, actually). The increase in volume has resulted, presumably, from the use of plastic bags to pre-package grapes and the creation of standards for the contents. It certainly makes grocery shopping easier--you can grab a bag of grapes with minimal attention to the contents, being sure that the contents are, in our phrase, "good enough for government work".

Consider the Date...

When you read this post on Greg Mankiw's blog and maybe this post on Government Executive? (The latter is entitled: "IBM suspended from new federal contracts".)

A Locavore I Can Trust

Found this neat blog of a ranch/farm wife in Montana. She seems to be a "locavore", if only by necessity. (Taking 4 kids to the grocery store is not fun, and when it's an hour away you only go a couple times a month.) It's neat (a term from my childhood) because she writes with humor and style. Bill McKibben and Barbara Kingsolver have style, and occasionally humor, but they don't have Erin's wit. And they're trying to sell me something--the virtues of local food--while Erin is simply telling it as it is.

Lest I Forget

Stumbled across this following links (I'm not sure from where, perhaps starting with hnn.net). It's a reminder to an old geezer about being somewhat cautious about his memories. (Always liked Monty Python--this is the routine called "Four Yorkshiremen".)