It’s Monday and I still have a bit of a high from Saturday’s passage of the historic health care reform bill. As someone said on Twitter, they’ve never seen so many people watching C-SPAN and tweeting on a Saturday night.
Speaking of health care reform – Josh Marshall is very optimistic:
There are many events in life that, while more or less predictable in themselves (House passage of the health care bill), turn out to have an impact and significance that is only truly apparent after they occur. The passage of the House health care reform bill last night strikes me as one of them.
The precise contours of the post-conference legislation remains uncertain in a number of key respects, especially in regards to the public option. But having watched the events leading up to the House vote and the politicking in the senate, I have little doubt that a broadly similar bill will pass the senate, be reconciled with the House bill in a conference report and bill that will be signed by the president in relatively short order.
The reason these sorts of events happen so infrequently is that they are like colossal ships or vast armies, very difficult to build or assemble and get on their way but also extremely difficult to stop or turn once they are under way.
Here’s hoping that he’s right. Joe Lieberman is making noises again about filibustering.
Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight has been all over the story of Strategic Vision pollsters, a Republican polling firm. They published a poll showing that students in Oklahoma did very poorly on the American citizenship test and the story was widely picked up by the media. I’ll let Nate tell the tale:
In detailing some of the evidence against Strategic Vision LLC, a pollster I am now almost certain is disreputable and fraudulent, I pointed in particular to a poll that they conducted on behalf of the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, an conservative-leaning educational thinktank. The poll purported to show that Oklahoma’s high school citizens were deficient in some of the most basic aspects of citizenship. Only 23 percent of them knew that George Washington was the first president, the poll claimed! Just 43 percent knew that the Democrats and Republicans are the two major political parties!
These conclusions seemed dubious to me on their face. Several years ago, at my old consulting job, I participated in a project for the State of Ohio’s public schools which involved sitting down in a third or fifth grade classroom for the better part of a day and seeing how the students were learning. Most of these observations took place in poor, post-industrial towns, which were still suffering the effects of the steel mill or the axle plant that had long ago left town. What struck me, most of all, was how smart the kids were, relative to my expectations. These kids might not have been the highest achievers — but I’m pretty sure that more than 90 percent of them would have known who George Washington was. And these were third and fifth graders.
There were other hints too, that Strategic Vision’s poll may have been fake. The scores that Strategic Vision claimed the kids had gotten, for instance, were strangely underdispersed. And they seemed to contradict results from Oklahoma’s own standardized testing, which asked much more difficult citizenship questions and found most of the students doing just fine.
The students and teachers of Oklahoma are owed an apology, a big one. Hopefully the news outlets that ran the fraudulent results will print a retraction as well.