Happy Birthday To Me!

I'm 46. I'm a teacher. I'm a single dad. I'm blogging this right now. Buy some TFT swag please.

Saturday Bonus Cartoon Fun: Nationalize The Banks Edition

Saturday Cartoon Fun: Envy Edition

Teacher Evaluations: A Crock

Teacher evaluations are dubious for a couple reasons. The first is the fact that principals, in my district at least, evaluate based on 3 observations in the classroom. These observations do not really provide enough evidence of teaching or not-teaching, unless the principal is predisposed to evaluate you in a certain way--positively or negatively. In that case, they can point to just about anything they want, and leave out anything want, to make the evaluation appear any way they want.

The second problem, related to the first, is the fact that the principal does this alone. There is no other person there, observing the same thing, to compare notes with. Perception is not always reality, and 2 people looking at something may just see things very differently.

Because of the way teacher evaluations are performed, teachers, unless they are on good personal terms with the principal, must live in fear of the baseless negative evaluation for which there is no recourse because it is the principal's word over the teacher's. As we know, management tends to win these battles.

I have many, many letters of appreciation from parents of students, and have had master teachers and principals tell me I am a fantastic teacher. I have been asked--by my current principal!--to be math leader (I said no), disaster coordinator (I am currently), tech leader (was until we got a new teacher who used to be tech guy for his district--he knows way more than me!), and am in charge of whole-school outings. Yet, because I push back, my principal gives me negative evaluations. This year is the first year I have ever received a negative evaluation. My teaching has not changed; indeed I feel I have gotten better having been left in the same grade for 4 years in a row (something I have written about before).

I would like to see teacher evaluations done by fellow teachers in conjunction with principals, and I would like the written notes of all evaluators to be included, with equal weight, in any final evaluation. This would be more informative and much more fair than the way it is done now.

For all you "unions protect the bad teachers" folks out there, the union can do nothing about a principal hell bent on firing a teacher; we teachers don't have any mechanism to expose the nonsense; union negotiations see to that (we lose, always).

Fox Rips Fox: All Hail Shep Smith?

Shep Smith rips his colleague Glenn Beck for being a douchebag. It's hilarious!

Obama And Torture: Not what I Expected

This is supremely disappointing. I am getting less and less enthusiastic about Obama as the days go on. First not prosecuting torture, then jumping on the education reform bandwagon, and now back to defending torture. Speak up! Be loud, people!

Obama Justice Department Urges Dismissal of Another Torture Case
By Daphne Eviatar 3/12/09 6:46 PM

In another move that suggests the Obama Department of Justice is not making many big policy breaks with its predecessor when it comes to the legal rights of Guantanamo Bay detainees, the department filed a brief renewing the government’s motion to dismiss the case of Rasul v. Rumsfeld.

The case is very similar to the lawsuit filed by U.S. citizen and former enemy combatant Jose Padilla against former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo, which I’ve been following. The plaintiffs in Rasul v. Rumsfeld allege that former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other senior Bush officials are responsible for their torture; prolonged arbitrary detention; cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment; cruel and unusual punishment; denial of liberties without due process, and preventing the exercise and expression of their religious beliefs.

According to their legal complaint, Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal and Rhuhel Ahmed claim they traveled to Afghanistan in October 2001 to offer humanitarian relief to civilians. In late November, they were kidnapped by Rashid Dostum, the Uzbeki warlord and leader of the U.S.-supported Northern Alliance. He turned them over to U.S. custody – apparently for bounty money that American officials were paying for suspected terrorists. In December, without any independent evidence that the men had engaged in hostilities against the United States, U.S. officials sent them to Guantanamo Bay. Over the next two years, they claim — as does a fourth British man — that they were imprisoned in cages, tortured and humiliated, forced to shave their beards and watch their Korans desecrated, until they were returned to Britain in 2004. None were ever charged with a crime.

Dismissed at the urging of the Bush administration, the case was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. In December, the case was sent back to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington for reconsideration, because the Supreme Court had ruled in Boumediene v. Bush that Guantanamo detainees have the right to challenge their detentions. It wasn’t clear what effect that ruling might have on the Rasul case.

Although some civil rights lawyers had hoped the Obama administration would change the government’s position — or at least try to settle this case, which is at the very least an embarrassment to the United States – the former prisoners had no such luck. Today, the Justice Department filed a brief arguing, as it did in Padilla’s case against Yoo, that government officials are not liable for torture, abuse, denial of due process or religious rights, because the right of Guantanamo prisoners not to suffer those abuses at the hands of the U.S. government was not clearly established at the time.[emphasis mine]

That would seem to contradict previous statements by President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder that torture (including waterboarding) and other abuses are clearly illegal, now and always, and that the president can’t simply override that prohibition. It also may discourage those who are hoping the president will eventually support prosecutions of former Bush officials for exactly those crimes.

Reached today, the lead lawyer on the case, Eric Lewis, a partner at the Washington-based law firm, Baach Robinson & Lewis, said he was “disappointed” but “not surprised.”

However, as I’ve pointed out before in the context of the Yoo case, the defense does raise some serious questions about whether the Obama Justice Department really ought to be defending Donald Rumsfeld and his former colleagues in this case at all.

I’ll be writing more about this case and others like it, as well as their implications, in the coming week.

"Put The Fools In Charge"

Jim Horn is my newest hero. Read this and find out how teachers feel.

If-You-Are-Sick Day April 1: Put the Fools In Charge for a Day

I am hearing all sorts of hopelessness expressed from educators who so recently were full of hope. I believe with all my gut, heart, and head that it is time to stop rolling over and to get into full sick-of-it mode. If you’re sick, that is. We all know that educators who haven’t signed up to work for the corporate charter CEOs still have about a dozen sick days per year that can be accumulated. I think it is time to start using them to help allay the overwhelming nausea that sets in as we begin to see the outlines of the Obama-Duncan Plan, which is a steroidal version of the Bush-Spellings Plan. More testing, pay-per-score for teachers, bribing students, more corporate charters, urban chain gangs based on KIPP brainwashing camps, weakening of benefits and due process, national testing. So I have a suggestion for the millions of demonized teachers of America:

If you are sick of your leaders cutting deals with the Business Roundtable in order to advance their own careers at your expense, then use a sick day;

If you are sick of being blamed for the societal effects of poverty that none of the oligarchs or politicians will even acknowledge as the problem driving the achievement gap, then use a sick day;

If you are sick of being attacked by nasty, know-nothing editorial editors and writers of the Washington Post and the New York Times who have never been in a public school classroom, then use a sick day;

If you are sick of Presidents who talk about the failure of schools to disguise the governmental failures to provide economic protection, health protection, jobs protection, and retirement protections for the citizens who have been raped by the corporate thieves and the misanthropists like Gates and Broad and Dell who export our work, then use a sick day;

If you are sick of reporters who would rather parrot the lies and exaggerations of the Business Roundtable, rather than talk with teachers who are giving their whole hearts every day to their students, then use a sick day;

If you are sick of businessmen who would rather offer criticism and blame than money to help children to have the resources that our governments refuse to provide, then use a sick a sick day;

If you are sick of education policy that demonstrates that professional trust that has been replaced by policing and monitoring, then use a sick day;

If you are sick of working in a profession that pays thousand less than comparably prepared professionals in other fields, then use a sick day;

If you are sick of being pushed, shoved, derided, slammed, blamed, caricatured, castigated, and mocked by people who are totally ignorant of the jobs teachers do and the sacrifices they make, then use a sick day;

If you are sick of using your own money to buy resources for children that politicians will not provide, then use a sick day;

If you are sick of spending 60 hour a week on your work, only to be mocked for taking summer vacations that you are not even paid for, then use a sick day;

If you are sick of being the brunt of jokes and jabs by arrogant jackasses who would who never learned that there a form of understanding called empathy, then use a sick day;

If you are sick of being told how to do your job by fools and charlatans who need to create a problem in order to sell their snake-oil solution, the use a sick day;

If you are sick of a virulent institutional racism advanced by an uncaring education industry that expects you to abandon your professional ethics in order to impose a form intellectual rigor mortis based on meaningless tests, then use a sick day;

If you are sick of your school being turned into prison camp where children are to be treated as convict laborers, then use a sick day;

If you are sick of the knowledge and understanding you know that children need being replaced by corporate scripts that treat you like an idiot and your students like parrots, then use a sick day;

If you are sick of the anti-cultural curriculums sold by corporations, then use a sick day;

If you are sick of threats to your salary and health insurance and retirement plans and due process rights by greedy oligarchs who control the government and who want to reduce their corporate tax obligations through your sacrifice, then use a sick day.

If you are sick of working your guts out and giving every dollar you could to elect a President that you believed would respect and honor the work of teachers, only to have the George Bush education plan put into overdrive by that new President, then use a sick day.

These are just a few of the reasons to use a sick day, the first of many that will be used until the irresponsible and out-of-touch corporate interests in charge in Washington decide to respect the teachers who have given so much to the noblest profession that is the least appreciated by the fools who now plan to run the public schools into the ground. The worm has turned for the corporate perpetrators, but they don’t even know it yet.

So on April 1, won’t you please leave the fools in charge who are clamoring to control the schools, while you use a sick day to deal with some of the nausea. You have earned it by the most loyal, patient and abiding sense of trust that has been responded to with a kick in the teeth. Take a sick day and use to let your elected officials know that the prison schools are shutting down and that a new school is about to open.

More Nonsense From The Reformers Debunked

Sharpton and Klein's Imperfect Op-Ed

The Huffington Post has a piece today by Al Sharpton and Joel Klein entitled "Teacher Rx: The Perfect Storm for Reform." They make a lot of good points, but they also come up short on a number. Here are some of the parts where they slip up:

"the teaching profession does far too little to recruit promising teachers to high-poverty schools or retain them by providing merit pay"

I'm not sure "the teaching profession" really controls either of these things. I don't see "the medical profession" running recruiting campaigns or paying certain doctors more. I guess the closest thing to an action taken by the teacher profession would be an action taken by unions, but they don't exist to recruit or pay people. I think what they meant to say was that our education system does far too little.

"From the moment a prospective teacher enters a teachers college to the day of his or her retirement party, a teacher's ability to elevate student learning is poorly assessed (if at all), and virtually never linked to consequences--either positive, as in the case of awarding merit pay, or negative, like being dismissed for poor performance."

This is part of their discussion of merit pay, but is really only tangentially related. Teachers can both be rewarded and punished without the aid of tests or merit pay. If too few teachers are dismissed it's not just because the system doesn't punish bad teachers, it's also because principals aren't making a concerted effort to fire bad teachers.

But in the 21st century, teachers are long overdue to join the ranks of other white-collar professionals, whose remuneration is based chiefly on job performance. "It is astonishing to me that you could have a system that doesn't allow you to pay more for strong performance, or for teaching in a particular school," says Bill Gates. "That is almost like saying 'Teacher performance doesn't matter'--and that's basically saying 'Students don't matter'."

It's not that simple. Teacher performance can matter without being linked to pay. Students can matter without earning caretakers money. Parents aren't paid more if they take better care of their child, but an awful lot of them find the will to care anyway.

"credentials and certification are poor indicators of who will become an effective teacher"

As are test scores and college transcripts. But they might be preventing worse teachers from entering the classroom.

"In fact, promising alternative programs for recruiting and certifying teachers, like Teach for America and the New York City Teaching Fellows program, are every bit if not more effective than the traditional training provided at teachers colleges."

No, their teachers obtain about the same results on standardized tests. That may or may not indicate that they're good at training teachers. It might mean that they're better at recruiting/hiring people with more natural talent at teaching. It might mean that people in those programs simply work harder because they're more willing to burn out and move on. That fact in and of itself tells us very little about how well TFA or NYCTF train teachers.

"When disadvantaged students have a good teacher a number of years in a row, it can eliminate, or at least make a huge dent, in the achievement gap. One study of 9,400 math classrooms in Los Angeles in grades three through five projects that if low-income minority students could be assured of having teachers who fell in the top 25 percent of effective teachers four years in a row (in lieu of a sub-par instructor from the bottom quartile of teachers), students could close the achievement gap altogether"

Ugh. Really? People still haven't gotten the memo? This projection was based on pure, and inaccurate, speculation that has since been disproved. Stop citing this. There's plenty of evidence that teachers are important -- we don't need to resort to citing faulty evidence. Remember: overstating your case doesn't make it stronger. Read Aaron Pallas for more on this.

"To move toward a true performance-based compensation system for teachers, school districts would need to be able to track the effect that individual teachers have on student performance from year-to-year over a period of years . . . Unfortunately, only a handful of states and districts have developed data bases that would enable school officials to track the performance of individual teachers and students over a multi-year period.

We believe that the Obama administration should require states seeking money from the new $5 billion "Race to the Top" innovation fund to not only develop but implement longitudinal value-added systems for assessing teacher performance. For all its imperfections and methodological challenges, value added analysis is still a vast improvement on the existing system, which fails its elemental duty to judge whether teachers are advancing student learning."

Two thoughts: 1.) Value-Added systems are difficult and expensive to develop. Might it be better for the federal government to create one (especially if we end up with national standards) and allow states to either opt-in or create their own? 2.) If the current system "fails its elemental duty" then why are we pressing to use it to evaluate teachers and schools?

Other than those problems, it's a pretty good piece.

Periodic Table Of Typefaces

Robert Reich Channels Paul Volker

Paul Volcker to Barack Obama

Former Fed Chair Paul Volcker is briefing President Obama today on how well the stimulus package is doing. I have no inside knowledge of what he's saying, but if I were Volcker (and I'm not -- he's almost two feet taller than I am), I'd say the following:

Mr. President, it's way too early to know exactly what the stimulus is doing because the money is barely out the door, but I've got to tell you I'm worried as hell. Unemployment is at 8 percent, and underemployment is over 14 percent of the workforce. The economy is shrinking much faster than it was when you put the stimulus together. It will be more than a trillion dollars short of its full capacity this year, and I have every reason to believe the same next. State governments alone are hundreds of billions in the hole, creating a huge drag. So your $787 billion over two years, only two-thirds of which is direct spending, isn't going to get us nearly far enough. I'd strongly recommend you make ready a second stimulus, about the same size, and get it enacted as soon as possible, with the proviso that it will be implemented if and when unemplyment hits 8.5 percent or underemployment reaches 15 percent.

Oh, and by the way, Mr. President. You may not want to hear this, but your Treasury Secretary is making things worse. His dithering on what to do about Wall Street, and his incapacity to speak clearly to the Street and to the public about what needs to be done, is spooking everyone. Why doesn't he just put the irrevocably insolvent banks into receivership under the FDIC, sell off their assets, protect depositors, and reimburse taxpayers with whatever remains? Let the rest of the banks fend for themselves -- working out their bad loans with their creditors. As to AIG, well, that's a complete basketcase. Put it out of its suffering. Take it over, sell its assets, protect policy holders (you'll need to create a big co-insurance plan with every other major insurer in the world), then get out.

Want a cigar?

Daily Show vs Cramer (Updated)

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Jim Cramer Unedited Interview Pt. 1

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things w/ Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Jim Cramer

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Jim Cramer Unedited Interview Pt. 2

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things w/ Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Jim Cramer

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Jim Cramer Unedited Interview Pt. 3

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things w/ Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Jim Cramer

Update: CNBC are such wimps!

Rigged

by dday

I sincerely hope that nobody is surprised by the fact that MSNBC, which has hyped the Jon Stewart/Jim Cramer "battle royale" for over a week now, has coincidentally dropped coverage of it at precisely the moment when Stewart delivered the knockout punch and made minced meat out of Cramer, CNBC and the entire media-industrial complex:

TVNewser reports that “MSNBC producers were asked not to incorporate the Jim Cramer/Jon Stewart interview into their shows today.” By TVNewser’s count, Cramer’s Daily Show interview was only mentioned once on MSNBC today and that was during the White House press conference when a reporter asked for Obama’s reaction.

CNBC is part of a corporate entity (although, interestingly, they don't report to the news division). That corporate entity is not going to get rich by highlighting the deficiencies of certain parts of its business. As much as CNBC deserves scorn and Jim Cramer deserves a subpoena, it's not just them. It's the entire media complex. And this indictment of their business won't be prosecuted and turned into a conviction.

James Rainey is also interesting today about CNBC and the larger implications.

Daily Howler Chimes In On Obama's Education Nonsense

Here is the real scoop on most of the nonsense my President mentioned in his speech. People, please! Read this and learn. We do the teaching, you do the learning. Now for the Daily Howler!

DAY FOR NIGHT: Scott Wilson’s report of Obama’s speech appears on the Washington Post’s front page. With an unerring instinct for error, Wilson begins with Obama’s remarks about the decay and decline of our schools:

WILSON (3/11/09): President Obama sharply criticized the nation's public schools yesterday, calling for changes that would reward good teachers and replace bad ones, increase spending, and establish uniform academic achievement standards in American education.

In a speech to the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, Obama called on teachers unions, state officials and parents to end the "relative decline of American education," which he said "is untenable for our economy, unsustainable for our democracy and unacceptable for our children.”

When Big Pols gives speeches about public schools, does some unwritten law forbid them from telling the truth? Does some law restrict the press from noting their vast overstatements? So it sometimes seems. Obama’s statements about that “relative decline” are very hard to square with the facts. But they’re written from a Familiar Old Script, a script which continues to lead us.

Tomorrow, we’ll look at Obama’s (interesting) remarks about the need for higher standards. But is there some unwritten law requiring Big Pols to make misstatements? Obama turned day into night with his remarks about that “decline.” And the press corps has twiddled its thumbs today, staring off into air.

Wikipedia always says it best: “Day for night is the name of a cinematographic technique to simulate a night scene.... [O]utside scenes can instead be shot during the day, with special blue filters and under-exposed film to create the illusion of darkness.”

Ah yes, the “illusion of darkness!” We thought we saw some “day for night” at the start of yesterday’s speech!

Let’s look at what Obama said about that “relative decline.” This extremely gloomy passage came early in his speech:

OBAMA (3/10/09): Let there be no doubt: the future belongs to the nation that best educates its citizens...

And yet, despite resources that are unmatched anywhere in the world, we have let our grades slip, our schools crumble, our teacher quality fall short, and other nations outpace us. In eighth grade math, we’ve fallen to ninth place. Singapore’s middle-schoolers outperform ours three to one. Just a third of our thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds can read as well as they should. And year after year, a stubborn gap persists between how well white students are doing compared to their African American and Latino classmates. The relative decline of American education is untenable for our economy, unsustainable for our democracy, and unacceptable for our children—and we cannot afford to let it continue.

That came quite early in yesterday’s speech. In this passage, Obama makes a string of Standard Complaints about “the relative decline of American education.” Let’s consider two parts of his presentation. Was he constrained by an unwritten law which forbade him from telling the truth?

Educational decay: First, Obama painted a Gloomy Picture of educational decline and decay. “We have let our grades slip, our schools crumble, our teacher quality fall short, and other nations outpace us,” he gloomily said. “In eighth grade math, we’ve fallen to ninth place.”

Obama painted a gloomy picture. But were these claims accurate?

Consider the claim about eighth grade math, the most specific claim he made. Presumably, Obama refers to the Trends in International Math and Science Study (TIMSS), the widely-ballyhooed “gold standard” for such international comparisons. (An exceptionally useless White House “fact sheet” fails to explain this statement, and others.) The TIMSS was last conducted in 2007—and American eighth-graders did finish ninth in math, just as Obama said. (Among 36 nations. For the relevant table, click here.) The U.S. scored far behind five Asian tigers, marginally behind three other nations. On the other hand, the U. S. scored slightly ahead, even well ahead, of quite a few countries you’ve probably heard of. The U.S. outperformed countries like Australia, Sweden, Scotland, Italy and Norway by significant margins. And we massively kicked Kuwait’s *ss.

(How representative are various national samples? We can’t tell you. Journalists should.)

None of this contradicts what Obama said in yesterday’s speech. But have our eighth graders fallen to ninth place, as the gloomy chief executive told us? Sorry. Before 2007, the TIMSS was last given in 2003; U.S. eighth graders finished 15th that year (out of 45). In the previous testing (1999), the U.S. had finished 18th. Indeed, U.S, eighth graders have steadily gained against the rest of the world since at least the mid-1990s, at least if we are going to judge by the measure Obama selected.

Have U. S. eighth graders fallen to ninth, as the gloomy president said? This table shows the twenty countries which participated in eighth-grade math in the TIMSS in both 1995 and 2007. Of the nineteen other countries, only three showed more improvement in average scores than the U.S. did. Sorry! In eighth grade math, the U.S. has risen to its current ninth place. We may feel that rank isn’t good enough. But must we persistently trade day for night? Does some sort of unwritten law require these gloomy misstatements?

A stubborn achievement gap: According to the gloomy president, it isn’t just that American kids have “fallen to ninth place” in math. Obama also based a gloomy observation on a purely domestic measure. “[Y]ear after year, a stubborn gap persists between how well white students are doing compared to their African American and Latino classmates,” he said. But that claim doesn’t quite seem accurate either. Maybe it all depends on what the meaning of “stubborn” or “persists” is.

Again, we’ll refer you to the ballyhooed “gold standard” for such declarations, the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP). As we recently noted, long-term results in this federal program show those achievement gaps narrowing in reading and math, though significant gaps remain. For example, this chart shows reading results from 1971 through 2004 in the part of the NAEP called the Long-Term Trend Assessment. The gap between white and black scores has substantially narrowed in all age groups, though significant gaps still exist. And the same sort of narrowing between white and Hispanic scores can be seen in this table. “Year after year, a stubborn gap persists?” Gaps persist, but they seem to be somewhat less stubborn than Obama suggests.

No one’s a bigger grouch than we about educational topics. But we’re also prepared to defer to the record; Obama’s statements about that “relative decline” seem derived from Famous Old Scripts, not from real observations. Gerald Bracey has long been The Man when it comes to critiquing these Standard Old Claims. This morning, we see that Bracey has posted about Obama’s speech at The Huffington Post. Go read it; Bracey goes into more detail about Obama’s statements than we have. (Please note: Bracey has persistently claimed that the NAEP sets an unrealistically high standard for “proficiency.” This doesn’t undermine use of the NAEP as a measure of progress over time.)

Tomorrow, we’ll look at what Obama said about the need for higher standards. But first, a note about the political uses of Gloomy Scripts.

Why do politicians paint this Gloomy Portrait of American schools? In some cases, they may not know what they’re talking about; everyone has heard these Standard Claims, and people tend to believe them. But yes, there can be political uses for such gloomy misstatements. As Bracey has noted, gloomy claims have long been used by educational “conservatives” to undermine faith in the public schools; vouchers and charters are more appealing if you believe that the public schools are a wreck. On the other hand, a president can set himself up to be a star if he overstates the mess which predates him.

Then too, a president may not want to admit that progress occurred under those before him. That said, we of course have no idea why Obama said what he did.

But:

Obama’s statement about U.S. math score seems to be simply inaccurate. His statement about those achievement gaps would seem to be misleading. Is it true? “Despite resources that are unmatched anywhere in the world,” have we really “let our grades slip, our schools crumble, our teacher quality fall short?” Have we “let other nations outpace us?” And have we “fallen to ninth place” in math? That’s a very gloomy picture—a picture that’s largely inaccurate.

This morning, that picture appears on the Post’s front page. In some ways, Obama traded day for night. Wilson doesn’t notice.

Reich Explains Obama's Economic Policy: Revolutionary!

Bob Reich was nice enough to offer a free correspondence course on Obanomics yesterday. You should read it. You should read everything Dr. Reich writes!

Is Obamanomics Conservative or Revolutionary?

There are two ways to see Obamanomics.

The first, much preferred by the White House, is as a set of initiatives so modest as to hardly merit a raised eyebrow. Yes, steps must be taken to deal with the current economic crisis. But assuming the economy recovers next year, Obama's budget projects that government spending by the end of the decade will drop to around 22.5 percent of GDP, which is about where it was under Reagan.

What about those tax hikes on the wealthy? Obama merely restores the top two marginal income tax rates to what they were in the 1990s, the capital gains rate to its lowest level during that same prosperous decade, and the rate on dividends to a level even lower than it was in the 1990s. And even these modest reversions to the 1990s will affect only the wealthiest 3 percent of Americans, and not until 2011. Ninety-seven percent of small businesses won't pay a dime more. True, the very rich won't be able to deduct quite as much as they can now for their mortgage interest and charitable donations, but this is hardly revolutionary, either. In fact, it's another throwback -- to the limits in place under Ronald Reagan. All told, taxes are projected to total 19 percent of GDP by the end of the decade. That's even lower than it was in the late 1990s.

Modest as they are, these taxes will generate enough revenue to pay for half of what's needed for universal health care, and still reduce the deficit by about $750 billion over ten years -- to 3.1 percent of the GDP by the end of the decade.

But isn't universal health care itself a pretty radical step? Not according to this view. The other half of what's needed to pay for universal health care will come from health-care savings that are also necessary to keep the current big health-care entitlement programs -- Medicare and Medicaid -- affordable. It's just common sense: Allow government to use its bargaining leverage under Medicare and Medicaid to lower drug prices, strengthen Medicare pay-for-performance incentives, and institute better disease management, prevention, and health information technologies.

What about the environment? Isn't cap and trade a huge deal? Not at all. Instead of heavy-handed regulation it's a market solution to the problem of global warming. Government merely sets an overall cap on the amount of carbon dioxide to be allowed into the atmosphere, which drops annually, and then requires firms to bid for permits to pollute within that overall cap. Firms can buy and sell permits to each other; they can innovate to reduce pollution even further. Such a system will generate enough revenues to give 95 percent of Americans a yearly refundable tax credit of $400, and also finance research and development of renewable energy and a modernized electricity grid.

But isn't Obanomic's approach to educational reform expensive and intrusive? No. By this view, it's very mainstream and incremental -- and doesn't impose on the prerogatives of states and locales. It expands the tax credit for college tuition to $2,500 a year and increases Pell Grants to $5,500 yearly -- almost negligible increases, given how fast tuitions are rising. It cuts subsidies to banks participating in the student-loan program, which is exactly what Bill Clinton did, and it provides some funds for early childhood education.

So there we have it: Obamanomics as pragmatic, incremental, centrist, even conservative.

But there's another way to view Obamanomics -- as an economic philosophy exactly the opposite of the one that's dominated America for more than a quarter century.

The basic idea of Reaganomics was that the economy grows from the top down. Lower taxes on the wealthy make them work harder and invest more, and the benefits trickle down to everyone else. Rarely in economic history has a theory been more tested in the real world and proven so wrong. In point of fact, nothing trickled down. After the Reagan tax cuts, increases in the median wage slowed, adjusted for inflation. After George W. Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy, the median wage actually dropped. Meanwhile, most of the income went to the top. In 1980, just before the Reagan revolution, the richest 1 percent took home 9 percent of total national income. But by 2007, the richest 1 percent was taking home 22 percent.

Obamanomics, by contrast, holds that an economy grows best from the bottom up. Obama's program increases taxes on the top, and uses the proceeds to raise the living standards of average Americans by giving them lower taxes, better schools, and more affordable health insurance. That may not seem very radical, but compared to the last quarter century it's revolutionary.

Reaganomics didn't believe in public investment, except perhaps when it came to the military. Everything else was considered government spending, which was assumed to be wasteful. Hence, the cuts (adjusted for inflation) during Reagan, Bush I and Bush II in education, job training, infrastructure, and basic research and development. And the reluctance to expand health insurance except when it came to corporate welfare for the pharmaceutical industry.

But Obamanomics is a commited to these forms of public investment. And there's good reason: In a global economy, capital moves to wherever it can get the best deal around the globe. That means capital and jobs go to nations that can promise high returns either because labor is cheap and taxes and regulations low, or because labor is highly productive -- well educated, healthy, and supported by modern infrastructure.

Which do we want? For the better part of the last quarter century our implicit economic strategy has tended toward the first. But that's a recipe for lower wages and lower living standards for most Americans, along with widening inequality. The only resource that's uniquely rooted in a national economy is its people -- their skills, insights, capacities to collaborate, and the transportation and communication systems that link them together. Everything else -- including capital, technology, designs, even plant and equipment -- can move around the globe with increasing ease.

Bill Clinton talked a lot about the importance of public investment but he failed to do much about it because he came to office during an economic expansion, and the major worry was excessive government spending leading to inflation. Obama comes to office during the biggest downturn since the Great Depression, and although he doesn't talk much about public investment his plan represents the largest commitment to it in forty years.

Reaganomics' third principle was that deregulated markets function better. They do, in many respects, but not always. And when they don't, all hell can break loose. Energy markets were deregulated and we wound up with Enron. Carbon emissions weren't controlled, and now we face global warming. Financial markets were deregulated and we have a global meltdown. Obamanomics, by contrast, accepts that government has an important role in setting the rules of the capitalist game: Setting an overall cap on carbon emissions, ensuring that products and foods are safe, maintaining the solvency and security of financial companies.

Under Reaganomics, government was the problem. It can still be a problem. But Obamanomics recognizes there are even bigger problems out there that can't be solved without government. By building the economy from the bottom up, recognizing the central importance of public investment, and understanding that markets cannot function without regulation, Obamanomics finally reverses and repudiates the economic philosophy that has dominated America since 1981.

If you look only at the small print, Obamanomics looks conservative. If you look at the big picture, it's revolutionary.

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