Andy Kessler

WSJ: A California Attempt to Repair the Crumbling Pillar of U.S. Education

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https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-crumbling-pillar-of-education-california-dave-welch-vergara-school-choice-charter-11638115242

Public-school education has gone from bad to worse. In the Chicago Public Schools, only 26% of 11th-graders were at grade level in reading and math in 2019. Remarkably, the school system had a record-high graduation rate of nearly 84% in 2021. Those students must have had strong senior years! This is why over half of first-year community-college students in the U.S. take at least one remedial course in reading or math. In the U.S., 43 million adults are illiterate. This is a disgrace.

In pre-pandemic California, only 32% of fourth-graders were at or above proficient for their grade in reading. Only 19% of eighth-grade Hispanics read at grade level, and only 10% of eighth-grade blacks did. Those who find disparate impact everywhere should be screaming from the rooftops that public education is racist. Instead, silence.

Despite these poor results, spending per student goes up each year. New York spent $25,139 per student in fiscal 2019. In California, it’s over $20,000. So why haven’t outcomes improved? Parents know why. Bad teachers don’t get fired. Because of tenure, even some capable teachers mail it in. Bad school districts don’t get fixed. Caps on charter schools, even those with proven records, limit their ability to put pressure on public schools. Teachers unions are all-powerful.

Silicon Valley entrepreneur Dave Welch is trying to improve California’s education system. He tells me we need “accountability of quality education.” You may recall the 2014 Vergara v. California decision, a suit Mr. Welch and others funded. Filed on behalf of nine public-school students, the ruling found that five California statutes related to teacher tenure, firing bad teachers and layoff policy violated the state’s Constitution. In his ruling, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Rolf M. Treu noted, “Evidence has been elicited in this trial of the specific effect of grossly ineffective teachers on students. The evidence is compelling. Indeed, it shocks the conscience.”

No matter. The California Court of Appeal reversed Vergara in 2016 stating: “With no proper showing of a constitutional violation, the court is without power to strike down the challenged statutes.” In the court’s view, the California Constitution guarantees merely a free public education.

So Mr. Welch was back where he started, with, he says, an “educational system that doesn’t prioritize its actions to educate the children to a degree necessary to function in our society.”

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WSJ: Politicians Have Earned Your Distrust

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https://www.wsj.com/articles/politicos-earned-distrust-biden-inflation-reconciliation-cuomo-covid-deaths-nursing-homes-11637504680

Each day government bombards Americans with reasons not to trust it. It has been only 616 days since the Trump administration’s “15 Days to Slow the Spread.” From the Fauci dance—no mask, one mask, double masks—to the airport mess known as the Transportation Security Administration. If it’s OK for travelers under 12 and over 75 to keep their shoes on through airport security, then surely it’s OK for everyone. Americans aren’t stupid. Each time we’re spun or deceived or outright lied to, trust in government melts away.

Case in point: President Biden’s speech at the Port of Baltimore about the recently enacted bipartisan infrastructure plan, in which he said “this bill is going to reduce the cost of goods to consumers.” Spend more, prices go down? Not likely. A few breaths later: “I’m going to create good-paying union jobs—union . . . not $12 an hour, not $15 an hour—$45 an hour and up with good benefits.” And that will somehow reduce the cost of goods to consumers? C’mon, man. Is Sen. Joe Manchin the only one who understands the wage-price spiral? Inflation is “transitory,” we’re told. Uh-huh. Meanwhile, some Californians are pumping $5 gas.

Mr. Biden also claims the $1.75 trillion social-climate-porkfest reconciliation bill—really more than $4 trillion without accounting gimmicks—“costs zero dollars.” The administration must be using that new “equity” math I keep hearing about. A third-grader could see the deception. Any wonder why Mr. Biden has a 41% approval rating?

White House press secretary Jen Psaki declared the chaotic Afghan withdrawal the “largest airlift in U.S. history . . . so no, I would not say that is anything but a success.” That’s like saying the Titanic was a success as the largest lifeboat deployment in history.

California government becomes less trustworthy by the minute. It lifted most Covid restrictions in June based on 70% of adult Californians receiving at least one vaccine dose, meaning you could go maskless in Trader Joe’s. By August, however, health officials, blaming the Delta variant, reimposed mask mandates in California’s big cities. Then in October, the same health officials said that restrictions will be lifted when 80% are vaccinated. No problem, 80% of adults had gotten jabbed. But wait, the new target is 80% of the entire population, including children under 12, who weren’t eligible for shots. Talk about moving the goal posts.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar and others are going after Facebook, claiming its products are addictive. Maybe they are.

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WSJ: The Chip That Changed the World

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https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-chip-that-changed-the-world-microprocessor-computing-transistor-breakthrough-intel-11636903999

The world changed on Nov. 15, 1971, and hardly anyone noticed. It is the 50th anniversary of the launch of the Intel 4004 microprocessor, a computer carved onto silicon, an element as plentiful on earth as sand on a beach. Microprocessors unchained computers from air-conditioned rooms and freed computing power to go wherever it is needed most. Life has improved exponentially since.

Back then, IBM mainframes were kept in sealed rooms and were so expensive companies used argon gas instead of water to put out computer-room fires. Workers were told to evacuate on short notice, before the gas would suffocate them. Feeding decks of punch cards into a reader and typing simple commands into clunky Teletype machines were the only ways to interact with the IBM computers. Digital Equipment Corp. sold PDP-8 minicomputers to labs and offices that weighed 250 pounds.

In 1969, Nippon Calculating Machine Corp. asked Intel to design 12 custom chips for a new printing calculator. Engineers Federico Faggin, Stanley Mazor and Ted Hoff were tired of designing different chips for various companies and suggested instead four chips, including one programmable chip they could use for many products. Using only 2,300 transistors, they created the 4004 microprocessor. Four bits of data could move around the chip at a time. The half-inch-long rectangular integrated circuit had a clock speed of 750 kilohertz and could do about 92,000 operations a second.

Intel introduced the 3,500-transistor, eight-bit 8008 in 1972; the 29,000-transistor, 16-bit 8086, capable of 710,000 operations a second, was introduced in 1978. IBM used the next iteration, the Intel 8088, for its first personal computer. By comparison, Apple’s new M1 Max processor has 57 billion transistors doing 10.4 trillion floating-point operations a second. That is at least a billionfold increase in computer power in 50 years. We’ve come a long way, baby.

When I met Mr. Hoff in the 1980s, he told me that he once took his broken television to a repairman, who noted a problem with the microprocessor. The repairman then asked why he was laughing.

Now that everyone has a computer in his pocket, one of my favorite movie scenes isn’t quite so funny.

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WSJ: A Long Time Since ‘Zeppelin IV’

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https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-long-time-since-zeppelin-iv-music-era-70s-1971-classic-rock-stairway-to-heaven-11636303100

“It’s been a long time since” . . . 1971. Fifty years ago on Nov. 8, the album “Led Zeppelin IV” was released, which included the eight-minute classic “Stairway to Heaven.” It was a year of transition from turmoil to modernity, a songwriter’s paradise. And yes, I’m a sucker for anniversaries.

Back in 1971 we listened to music on LP records—for the uninitiated, 20 or so minutes of music pressed into vinyl, spun at 33 1/3 rpm and amplified from a scratchy needle to giant speakers. Without TikTok, my generation wasted time poring over album-cover art in search of hidden meaning and reading the liner notes printed on the album sleeves.

More legacy-defining albums were released in 1971 than in any other year by my count. As proof, let’s play a game: I name the album, you name the artist, and no googling. “Sticky Fingers,” “Who’s Next,” “L.A. Woman,” “Aqualung,” “Tapestry,” “What’s Going On,” “Fragile,” “Imagine,” “At Fillmore East,” “Madman across the Water,” “Pearl,” “Anticipation,” “Shaft,” “The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys,” “The Concert for Bangladesh.” How many did you get? Now add the Grateful Dead’s first gold album, and of course “Led Zeppelin IV,” sometimes known as Zoso.

Nineteen seventy-one is still considered “the ’60s,” which started when JFK was assassinated and ended with Watergate. The antiwar Democratic Convention riots defined chaotic 1968. Woodstock embodied 1969. In 1970, the Beatles disbanded and Apollo 13 proved failure wasn’t an option. But what was it about 1971?

The sound of Vietnam protests and smell of tear gas still hung in the air, along with a hippy-dippy free-love ethos perfectly parodied by the TV show “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In,” which ran until 1973. Although Richard Nixon was in the White House, there were hints of modernity. U.S. astronauts landed on the moon six times between 1969 and 1972. Nineteen seventy-one was the perfect segue between past despair and future hope and dreams, which were sadly delayed by the inflation and smog-filled skies of the 1970s.

Led Zeppelin captured this transition. Singer Robert Plant’s lyrics had mystical musings and a Tolkien-esque feel—“bustle in your hedgerow.”

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WSJ: Nine Theories of Progressive Power

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https://www.wsj.com/articles/nine-theories-of-progressive-power-weath-distribution-tax-socialism-biden-aoc-11635705664

Go ahead, try to tax the unrealized stock gains of billionaires, a wealth tax of questionable constitutionality. Or wear a “Tax the Rich” dress with the same font as a Chick-fil-A takeout bag to a gala for millionaires and billionaires. Or expand the idea of “infrastructure” to include social giveaways—free stuff for all. But what do progressives get out of it?

They must know that massive wealth redistribution and public spending crush the economy if they have ever studied the failures of Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society or Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Progressives often invoke Europe as an economic model knowing full well that the U.S. outstrips almost all European countries in economic output per capita—15% higher than Germany’s, 43% higher than France’s.

Surely former law professor Elizabeth Warren has studied enough history—I mean, Harvard, right?—to understand the fallacy of her socialist leanings. Her government-controls-everything policies usually lead to Venezuela-style ruin. Why pursue these policies? What is the end game? Here are nine answers.

The obvious yet unsatisfying answer is to gain and then stay in power—to buy votes. That is understandable, but then why take it to the extreme, like they did with ObamaCare, which anyone with a revenue-vs.-expense spreadsheet knew would fail?

A better explanation is the shakedown theory. Even Honest Abe Lincoln’s administration was rife with patronage. The goal of single-payer healthcare recalls the opening scene from “The Godfather” when Don Corleone meets with a favor-currying constituent. Bonasera wants justice for an assault on his daughter. Now imagine he’s asking his senator for permission to have gallbladder surgery.

Then there is the “noblesse oblige” theory that the privileged should use government to improve the lives of the less privileged. Hooey, but everything sounds smart in French.

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