Year: 2014

MORE THAN THREE NEW WORDS IN TURKISH*

Start your day with these two minutes.  It’s all Greek to me (well, Turkish) but I guarantee you’ll enjoy it.

SERIOUSLY: TWO MINUTES OF GREAT ADVICE

And now, in English.  You so totally don’t want to miss this.

BOREALIS

I continue to consider it the best lottery ticket I’ve ever seen — although there is presumably some way we could fail to win.  If only because we die of boredom first, waiting.  Here is the schedule of last week’s IATA Airline Cost Conference.  The first presentation, by IATA’s chief economist (IATA is the International Air Transport Association) shows what a dreadful business the airlines are in.  That’s why savings from WheelTug, which require no capital investment by the airline, could give early adopters a profitable edge.  (Eventually, once all the airlines were WheelTug-enabled, those savings would get passed through to passengers via price competition.)  Here are the slides from Mitsubishi’s presentation, “Impact of Technology on Fuel Efficiency: An Aircraft Manufacturer’s Perspective.”   And here are the slides from WheelTug’s presentation, pointing out that the savings go far beyond fuel.

I offer all this simply to remind you that, yes, these are serious people being taken ever more seriously.  E-taxi would seem to be coming.  (Maybe not, but why wouldn’t it???)  And so far, the WheelTug solution — which has been proven to work — has 20 or so airlines representing 985 airplanes signed up to install it once it’s FAA certified and goes into service (which is at least a couple of years off) . . . versus zero airlines signed up with anyone else.  So I’d say we we have a shot.  Current market cap of the grandparent, Borealis: $50 million.  Value someday if it can ever pull this off (and then all the other uses for its technologies): potentially, billions.  I know; I know.  But I like our odds.  If you bought BOREF with money you can truly afford to lose, hold on.  If you’re thinking of buying some now, remember to use a “limit order.”  Even a 1,000-share “market” order can move the price by 10% or more.

*For those who don’t get the reference, this is side five.  Follow in your books and repeat after me as we learn three new words in Turkish.  Iconic — but best reserved for an evening when your medicine has kicked in.

Last month, I re-posted an idealistic entrepreneur’s remarkable letter defending his decision to sell his company to Monsanto, per the New Yorker‘s Michael Specter.  A couple of weeks later, I posted Specter’s profile — some might say “takedown” — of renowned Indian environmentalist Vandana Shiva.

Needless to say, she was not pleased with that profile and neither were some of you.  But before I get to that, let me add one more voice to the conversation.

Astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson is concerned not just that right-wingers deny science . . . the earth is 9,000 years old, etc . . .  come back Friday for his Bill Moyers interview . . . he is concerned, also, about science denial on the left.  Read this interview with Dan Arel.  Watch this two-minute video on the need for the critics of genetically modified food to “chill out.”

Shiva’s impassioned response to Michael Specter’s New Yorker profile begins:

I am glad that the future of food is being discussed, and thought about, on farms, in homes, on TV, online and in magazines, especially of the New Yorker’s caliber. The New Yorker has held its content and readership in high regard for so long. The challenge of feeding a growing population with the added obstacle of climate change is an important issue. Specter’s piece, however, is poor journalism. I wonder why a journalist who has been Bureau Chief in Moscow for the New York Times and Bureau Chief in New York for the Washington Post, and clearly is an experienced reporter, would submit such a misleading piece. Or why the New Yorker would allow it to be published as honest reporting, with so many fraudulent assertions and deliberate attempts to skew reality. ‘Seeds of Doubt’ contains many lies and inaccuracies that range from the mundane (we never met in a café but in the lobby of my hotel where I had just arrived from India to attend a High Level Round Table for the post 2015 SDGs of the UN) to grave fallacies that affect people’s lives. The piece has now become fodder for the social media supporting the Biotech Industry. Could it be that rather than serious journalism, the article was intended as a means to strengthen the biotechnology industry’s push to ‘engage consumers’? Although creative license is part of the art of writing, Michael Specter cleverly takes it to another level, by assuming a very clear position without spelling it out. . . .

I invite you to read the whole thing.  I will admit to not having been entirely persuaded.

My very smart pal Chris Brown adds his own worthy perspective:

Chris Brown:  “This takedown of Vandana Shiva saddens me. I do not agree with much of what she says about GMO foods. But step back for a moment and what you have more broadly in Vandana Shiva is a woman not afraid to say, ‘privatizing all of the gain and making public all of the loss is an abomination.’  The incentives of corporations are not the same as the incentives of society, and when  we have a legal and regulatory regime that largely ignores that, the effect is great disparity and great crisis. And when someone speaks out against unlimited corporate power, there is, of course, a predictable backlash from the powerful protecting themselves.  Giving the water rights away to a select few for bribes or political favors is a problem. Vast tracts of genetically-identical monoculture, highly dependent on environmentally harmful materials, are a problem. Current factory farming methods in America, including along the Maumee river, are precisely why we couldn’t drink the water in Toledo a few weeks ago. To attack someone who has devoted her life to striving for fairness and a better life for the common people just strikes me as wrong. Martin Luther King, Jr. was almost certainly a plagiarist, but was certainly a great man. He died at the hands of those whose power he threatened.   One area in which I strongly agree with Shiva and Arundhati Roy (and Karl Marx for that matter) is that people are happy when they have control over their own lives, and a chance for meaningful work. There is an expression for small-cap stocks, ‘niches make riches.’ The same is true in human life. If you have meaningful work, meaningful loves, and a place in your community, life is better. The medical data support connectedness to other humans as perhaps the most powerful variable determining human longevity. So in that spirit, I recommend this classic book for your readers, one Vandana Shiva would wholeheartedly agree with, E.F. Schumaker’s Small is Beautiful.”

☞  An excellent recommendation.

Tomorrow: Mozart and the Best Advice EVER

It’s not e=mc², but certainly lends color to the concept of  relativity.

May we all have jobs — including jobs in retirement, like doting on the grandkids and spreading wisdom through letters to the editor — and may they be jobs doing something we love.

In that regard I always love to quote the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.: ““If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as a Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, ‘Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.”

And I offer this video, wherein Arthur Woods explains the progression from JOB to CAREER to CALLING . . . and suggests that if you frame your work right . . . he gives the example of a hospital janitor instead of a street sweeper . . . it can be a calling that gives extra meaning to your life.

UNIONS

You may have seen this Upworthy post on the Ludlow Massacre.  I’m one of those who thinks union power grew too great in the 1950’s, but that the pendulum has swung back too far.  Try to imagine yourself in 1913 watching this unfold on CNN — if there had been a CNN.  Would you have been on the side of the Rockefellers?  (The Kochs?)  We’ve come a long way, with far more enlightened regulation and corporate management.  But I think the forces trying to keep the minimum wage as low as possible, and unions as weak as possible, are diminishing the middle class that is so fundamental to our economic engine — and, ironically, the wealth of the very people trying to keep our least advantaged fellow citizens from voting, organizing, and receiving higher pay.

Wednesday: Shiva Responds and More Than Three New Words in Turkish

It’s not e=mc², but certainly lends color to the concept of  relativity.

May we all have jobs — including jobs in retirement, like doting on the grandkids and spreading wisdom through letters to the editor — and may they be jobs doing something we love.

In that regard I always love to quote the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.: ““If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as a Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, ‘Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.”

And I offer this video, wherein Arthur Woods explains the progression from JOB to CAREER to CALLING . . . and suggests that if you frame your work right . . . he gives the example of a hospital janitor instead of a street sweeper . . . it can be a calling that gives extra meaning to your life.

UNIONS

You may have seen this Upworthy post on the Ludlow Massacre.  I’m one of those who thinks union power grew too great in the 1950’s, but that the pendulum has swung back too far.  Try to imagine yourself in 1913 watching this unfold on CNN — if there had been a CNN.  Would you have been on the side of the Rockefellers?  (The Kochs?)  We’ve come a long way, with far more enlightened regulation and corporate management.  But I think the forces trying to keep the minimum wage as low as possible, and unions as weak as possible, are diminishing the middle class that is so fundamental to our economic engine — and, ironically, the wealth of the very people trying to keep our least advantaged fellow citizens from voting, organizing, and receiving higher pay.

Wednesday: Shiva Responds and More Than Three New Words in Turkish

100 MOVIE QUOTES

Here, in 10 minutes, 100 iconic moments in film.  Naturally, five of them are from “Casablanca.”  Inexplicably, the “true love” clip from “The Princess Bride” is not included, nor any of the others.  And for my money, they took the wrong clip from “Moonstruck.”  Where was, “Old man, you give those dogs another piece of my food and I’m gonna kick you til you’re dead”?  Where was, [Ronny Cammareri, anguished:] “I’m heeee-ya!” [Loretta Castorini, not missing a beat:] “Yo late!“?

I have actually met people who’ve not seen “Casablanca,” “Moonstruck,” or “The Princess Bride.”  (No: really!)

Well, that’s why God invented Netflix.

Buttercup: I fear I will never see you again.
Westley: Of course you will.
Buttercup: But what if something happens to you?
Westley: Hear this now: I will always come for you.
Buttercup: But how can you be sure?
Westley: This is True Love. You think this happens every day?

And yes, they got in “Dr. Strangelove,” another of my top ten — President Muffley: “This is the War Room!  You can’t fight in the War Room!”  But where was, “Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost, if you keep it a SECRET. Why didn’t you tell the world?  EH?!”

And for that matter, where was “Dr. Zhivago?”  (“Oh, look, Uri — Verikino!”) (Or, simply, as pen begins to scratch at the top of the blank page with near-frozen fingers . . . “Lara!”)

Engineer: If they were to give me two more excavators, I’d be a year ahead of the plan by now.
Gen. Yevgraf Zhivago: You’re an impatient generation.
Engineer: Weren’t you?
Gen. Yevgraf Zhivago: Yes, we were, very. Oh, don’t be so impatient, Comrade Engineer. We’ve come very far, very fast.
Engineer: Yes, I know that, Comrade General.
Gen. Yevgraf Zhivago: Yes, but do you know what it cost? There were children in those days who lived off human flesh. Did you know that?

Well, did you?  I say again: Netflix.  Have a great (very) long weekend.

MONSANTO – Part 2

Earlier this month I posted a remarkable letter by a young, idealistic entrepreneur defending his decision to sell his company, The Climate Corporation, to Monsanto.  

Here, in the New Yorker, Michael Specter continues the theme, profiling a renowned Indian environmentalist.

. . . Shiva, along with a growing army of supporters, argues that the prevailing model of industrial agriculture, heavily reliant on chemical fertilizers, pesticides, fossil fuels, and a seemingly limitless supply of cheap water, places an unacceptable burden on the Earth’s resources. She promotes, as most knowledgeable farmers do, more diversity in crops, greater care for the soil, and more support for people who work the land every day. Shiva has particular contempt for farmers who plant monocultures—vast fields of a single crop. “They are ruining the planet,” she told me. “They are destroying this beautiful world.” . . .

But guess what?  As you keep reading, you begin to realize that she may not be the Mother Teresa of agriculture.

. . . Hundreds of millions of people, in twenty-eight countries, eat transgenic products every day, and if any of Shiva’s assertions were true the implications would be catastrophic. But no relationship between glyphosate and the diseases that Shiva mentioned has been discovered. Her claims were based on a single research paper, released last year, in a journal called Entropy, which charges scientists to publish their findings. The paper contains no new research. Shiva had committed a common, but dangerous, fallacy: confusing a correlation with causation. (It turns out, for example, that the growth in sales of organic produce in the past decade matches the rise of autism, almost exactly. For that matter, so does the rise in sales of high-definition televisions, as well as the number of Americans who commute to work every day by bicycle.)

Shiva refers to her scientific credentials in almost every appearance, yet she often dispenses with the conventions of scientific inquiry. She is usually described in interviews and on television as a nuclear physicist, a quantum physicist, or a world-renowned physicist. Most of her book jackets include the following biographical note: “Before becoming an activist, Vandana Shiva was one of India’s leading physicists.” When I asked if she had ever worked as a physicist, she suggested that I search for the answer on Google. I found nothing, and she doesn’t list any such position in her biography. . . .

Not at all.

“It is absolutely remarkable to me how Vandana Shiva is able to get away with saying whatever people want to hear,” Gordon Conway told me recently. Conway is the former president of the Rockefeller Foundation and a professor at London’s Imperial College. His book “One Billion Hungry: Can We Feed the World?” has become an essential text for those who study poverty, agriculture, and development.

“Shiva is lionized, particularly in the West, because she presents the romantic view of the farm,” Conway said. “Truth be damned. People in the rich world love to dabble in a past they were lucky enough to avoid—you know, a couple of chickens running around with the children in the back yard. But farming is bloody tough, as anyone who does it knows. It is like those people who romanticize villages in the developing world. Nobody who ever lived in one would do that.”

Indeed . . .

“She is very canny about how she uses her power,” Lynas said. “But on a fundamental level she is a demagogue who opposes the universal values of the Enlightenment.”

It may be that the current Monsanto is mistakenly despised and that there is something to be said for genetically modified organisms.

The all-encompassing obsession with Monsanto has made rational discussion of the risks and benefits of genetically modified products difficult. Many academic scientists who don’t work for Monsanto or any other large corporation are struggling to develop crops that have added nutrients and others that will tolerate drought, floods, or salty soil—all traits needed desperately by the world’s poorest farmers. Golden Rice—enriched with vitamin A—is the best-known example. More than a hundred and ninety million children under the age of five suffer from vitamin-A deficiency. Every year, as many as half a million will go blind. Rice plants produce beta carotene, the precursor to vitamin A, in the leaves but not in the grain. To make Golden Rice, scientists insert genes in the edible part of the plant, too.

Golden Rice would never offer more than a partial solution to micronutrient deficiency, and the intellectual-property rights have long been controlled by the nonprofit International Rice Research Institute, which makes the rights available to researchers at no cost. Still, after more than a decade of opposition, the rice is prohibited everywhere. Two economists, one from Berkeley and the other from Munich, recently examined the impact of that ban. In their study “The Economic Power of the Golden Rice Opposition,” they calculated that the absence of Golden Rice in the past decade has caused the loss of at least 1,424,680 life years in India alone. (Earlier this year, vandals destroyed some of the world’s first test plots, in the Philippines.)

It’s a long article, but if you eat food, worth reading in full.

. . . In a recent speech, Shiva explained why she rejects studies suggesting that genetically engineered products like Pental’s mustard oil are safe. Monsanto, she said, had simply paid for false stories, and “now they control the entire scientific literature of the world.” Nature, Science, and Scientific American, three widely admired publications, “have just become extensions of their propaganda. There is no independent science left in the world.”

Monsanto is certainly rich, but it is simply not that powerful. Exxon Mobil is worth seven times as much as Monsanto, yet it has never been able to alter the scientific consensus that burning fossil fuels is the principal cause of climate change. Tobacco companies spend more money lobbying in Washington each year than Monsanto does, but it’s hard to find scientists who endorse smoking. The gulf between the truth about G.M.O.s and what people say about them keeps growing wider. The Internet brims with videos that purport to expose the lies about genetically modified products. Mike Adams, who runs a popular Web site called Natural News, recently compared journalists who are critical of anti-G.M.O. activists such as Shiva to Nazi collaborators.

The most persistent objection to agricultural biotechnology, and the most common, is that, by cutting DNA from one species and splicing it into another, we have crossed an invisible line and created forms of life unlike anything found in “nature.” That fear is unquestionably sincere. Yet, as a walk through any supermarket would demonstrate, nearly every food we eat has been modified, if not by genetic engineering then by more traditional cross-breeding, or by nature itself. Corn in its present form wouldn’t exist if humans hadn’t cultivated the crop. The plant doesn’t grow in the wild and would not survive if we suddenly stopped eating it.

When it comes to medicine, most Americans couldn’t care less about nature’s boundaries. Surgeons routinely suture pig valves into the hearts of humans; the operation has kept tens of thousands of people alive. Synthetic insulin, the first genetically modified product, is consumed each day by millions of diabetics. To make the drug, scientists insert human proteins into a common bacteria, which is then grown in giant industrial vats. Protesters don’t march to oppose those advances. In fact, consumers demand them, and it doesn’t seem to matter where the replacement parts come from.

When Shiva writes that “Golden Rice will make the malnutrition crisis worse” and that it will kill people, she reinforces the worst fears of her largely Western audience. Much of what she says resonates with the many people who feel that profit-seeking corporations hold too much power over the food they eat. Theirs is an argument well worth making. But her statements are rarely supported by data, and her positions often seem more like those of an end-of-days mystic than like those of a scientist. . . .

It’s just this stupid.   Four minutes.  You really have to watch.   (Stephen Colbert.)

Your thoughts, as always, welcome.

WHAT YOUR SKIN LOOKS LIKE UNDER ULTRA-VIOLET LIGHT

Yes, of course I should have posted this at the beginning of the summer not the end, but it’s too good to wait until next summer . . . and some of you lay poolside — or ski — even in the winter . . . so watch this.  Short, surprising, persuasive.  You may find yourself beginning to wear sunscreen much more consistently.  Which would be smart.

(But could you please not use the spray-on kind?   First off, I hate breathing it in — so please apply it downwind from me, wont you? — and it could even be bad for you.  But also, did you notice that most of it just shoots off into the air?  How wasteful is that?)

QCOR

John Leeds:  “It seems odd you never follow up about QCOR on your board.  Yes – I know you sold. But you usually update about any stocks that were tips. This one continued into a merger and closed up 80% or so from where you sold.  Why not tell your readers and keep them informed?”

☞ And while we’re at it, ITMN, that I gave up on three years ago, seems to be getting bought out at more than triple the price. It was up 20 points yesterday alone. Woulda, coulda, shoulda.

So what did YOU do on your summer vacation?  This Kiwi filmed the Forbidden City with a drone, then talked his way out of jail.  THAT story is perhaps even better than the four-minute video.  All here.  Enjoy.

(Thanks, Victor.)

SUCCESS!

Jim Batterson:  “Wow.  I am as impressed as you are at the wonderful results of Success Academy, and I understand that it is a model within the public school system entirely publicly funded.  But it is also perceived as a ‘private school,’ albeit within the public school system, and accentuates the problems of the rest of the public schools.  It reinforces the Republican argument for vouchers to allow all parents the freedom to get their children out of the public schools and into the (hereby demonstrably superior) private school model. . . . I know, I know, I know:  $4,000 a year tuition voucher will not let a poor family send its children to Lawrenceville or Foxcroft, it is more like a tax credit for rich parents who already send their children to private school.  Nevertheless, the argument will be made.”

☞ The argument may be made, but as you say, it’s a really poor one.  Charter schools are public schools.  Zero tuition — and in the case of the Success Academy schools, zero testing requirements to gain admission.  Enrollment is by lottery, and almost everyone in the neighborhood enters that lottery.

The more proven ideas and methods traditional public schools can borrow from successful charters, the better.  (Not all charters are successful, by any means.)  And the more successful charters are allowed to expand, the better as well.  Success Academy has gone from 1 school to 22 with 7 more coming on line this year, if memory serves.  If it keeps going like this, one day every lottery entrant might win.

BELGISTAN

John Carroll:  “The thing that governs all of your commenters [on Muslim rule in Belgium by 2030, as described in these 5 minutes], perhaps without their being aware of it, is the Sykes-Picot Agreement. In 1918 the Ottoman Empire was defeated. The whole region around what we now call Palestine-Syria-Iraq existed under the Ottoman Caliphate and Empire since 1453, and in 1920 the Sèvres treaty partitioned all that to satisfy the British and the French (and the Russians).  An example of an implication of this is to be found in a reference to ‘ISIS.’ The second ‘s’ in ‘ISIS’ is not ‘Syria,’ it is ‘al Sham.’ Usage of ‘Syria’ is European in origin. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is moving to redress what he perceives as the colonial arbitrariness of the borders of Syria, and establish ISIS as a caliphate. Mixing together Sharia and ISIS points to an awareness of some sort of movement, and I would suggest that across the Muslim Brotherhood, al Quaeda, and ISIS there  is a goal of reestablishing a Caliphate to succeed what was torn apart in 1920.

“The citation of Dr. Arieh Eldad in Monday’s post is an interesting one. Dr. Eldad was a representative in the Knesset, and established the Otzma LeYisrael party. When he states that ‘the war between Jews and Muslims in the Land of Israel is not a territorial conflict,’ his use of the term ‘Land of Israel’ negates that claim. In fact Dr. Eldad is quite vocal about dedicating his time to preventing the creation of a Palestinian state. He is also forgetting that many of the people whose land he is seeking to settle on are Christians. In 2006 Dr. Eldad complained that when he was injured in a confrontation with the Israeli police that he ‘was being treated like an Arab.’

“The main problem with the Dr. Eldad citation is that it plays directly into what is not solving the conflict, and it refers back to the Sykes-Picot Agreement. You have really got to wonder who did due diligence for the Zionists when they decided to make Palestine the national home for the Jewish people instead of Uganda. No matter how miserable one regards the the people living in Palestine as being, they had a frame of reference for five hundred years, and even if you possess the nod of the Abrahamic god, and merit compensation for suffering elsewhere, and dispossess people to create a superior civilization, it would seem reasonable to anticipate some ill will.  Demonstrating the inferiority of these non-Jewish inhabitants, their moral deficiencies, their dysfunction, is not going to make them compliant.”

AND NOW . . .

. . . try the pickles!

Have a great weekend.

So much of our country’s future is tied up in the education of its kids — especially those at-risk kids most likely to become unwed teen parents, perpetuate a cycle of poverty, and generally drain rather than enrich the social weal.

And so it’s worth trumpeting the latest test scores of the 22 Success Academy charter schools that I’ve been writing about here, here, here and here.

Whatever flaws there may be in testing, it’s handy in real life to be able to read and multiply.  What’s more, the discipline and commitment required to excel at whatever tests are set probably carry over to broader life skills.  (Success Academy schools have nothing to do with developing the tests.  They’re just subject to taking them like all the other schools.)

And so . . . behold the highlights of the 2014 New York State exam results.  Remember: their students come from the tough neighborhoods that usually bring up the rear in any ranking.

The Success Academy network ranks in the Top 1% of all 3,560 New York State schools in math.  If the network were a single school, it would rank 7th.
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Four of New York State’s top 10 schools in math—including the #1 and #2—are part of Success Academy.
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Success Academy ranks in the Top 3% of all New York State schools in English.
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In math, the network outperformed two of the city’s four gifted and talented programs that serve students from across the city — where admission depends on acing an entrance exam.
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At Success Academy Bed-Stuy 1, where 95% of scholars are African American or Latino, the math pass rate was 98%—with 80% receiving an advanced, Level 4 score. The ELA pass rate was 81%.
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At Success Academy Upper West— one of the city’s most diverse schools—100% of scholars passed the
math exam. The test takers are 32% white, 20% multi-racial, 18% African American, 14% Hispanic, and 5% Asian.
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96% of scholars at Success Academy Harlem Central — the school that lost its co-location last February — passed math and 63% passed ELA.
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At Success Academy Bronx 2, located in the nation’s poorest Congressional district, 99% of scholars are proficient in math. They rank second in the state.
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Success Academy eighth grade scholars — who were first graders when the network’s first school opened in 2006 — excelled on both exams: 97% passed math and 94% passed ELA — more than triple the citywide average for eighth graders (30%).
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93% of Success Academy scholars eligible for free or reduced-price lunch passed the math exam, compared to 35% of all students citywide.
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Success Academy (82% poverty rate among test takers) outperformed schools such as PS 6 on the Upper East Side (6% poverty), PS 87 on the Upper West Side (12% poverty), and PS 321 in Park Slope (11% poverty).
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62% of Success Academy scholars eligible for free or reduced-price lunch passed the ELA exam, compared to 29% of all students citywide.
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In ELA, Success Academy outperformed schools such as PS 3 in the West Village of Manhattan (17% poverty) and PS 8 in Brooklyn Heights (22% poverty).
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English Language Learners at Success Academy not only far exceeded their peers statewide, but also outperformed non-ELLs across New York
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English Language Learners at Success Academy were more than 8 times as likely to pass the math exam than ELLs statewide (91% vs. 11%).
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ELLs at Success were nearly 14 times as likely to pass the ELA exam than ELLs statewide (41% vs. 3%).
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ELLs at Success Academy outperformed the state’s students who have never been ELLs by 53.5 percentage points in math (91% vs. 38%) and 8 percentage points in ELA (41% vs. 33%).

Did I mention that 82% of these young Success Academy scholars qualify for free or reduced-price lunch (because they come from low-income households)? . . . that 11.4% are students with a disability? . . . that 10% either are or were learning English as a second language? . . . that 71% are African-American and 19% Hispanic? . . . that all are chosen at random from anyone who enters the admissions lottery? . . . and that in Harlem 90% do enter a charter school lottery (80%, the Success Academy lottery)?

Bad charters should be closed; mediocre ones, improved or closed.  But the ones that actually work — like these 22?  Full speed ahead!  This is public education at its best.  We don’t have a child to waste.