30 (+7) for 30

What if I told you a documentary series could capture the attention of college-aged males across the country? You would probably think I’m nuts, or that it was about the Playboy Mansion or something like that. But what if I told you it was about the last thirty years of sport?

You would probably punch me in the face for asking all these rhetorical questions. But that’s what Bill Simmons and ESPN did during 2010-11. To celebrate ESPN’s thirtieth anniversary they made 30 documentaries exploring all kinds of sports stories from the last 30 years.

A Common Mistake

The Western Roman Empire fell in 476 AD. That is not a question, that is not a guess, it is a fact. Ms. Svoboda made damn sure each one of us knew that before we left her seventh grade social studies class.* Ask any one of my classmates today and there’s a pretty good chance they still have each one of those characters etched in their brains. 4-7-6-A-D. Well, nowadays turns out they’d be wrong.

Seeing Red Over Blue Chairs

Most people get excited when they see this picture and that’s totally understandable. It’s a clever business card, one hell of a catchy song, and I’m sure Greg Schneider can even notice the faint hint of a watermark. Most people, however, didn’t go to the University of Wisconsin.

Evaluating the Educational Impact of the National School Lunch Program

My absence from Eleanor Ave. for the last couple months can be explained in one word: thesis. Although, technically, it is a “professional paper,” calling it a thesis avoids lots of additional explanation.  No matter what you call it, they both involve lots of words and lots of time.

Because my EA postings ceased as a result of this large collection of words, I decided that I should post the final document. 

Brief summary:  The National School Lunch Program (commonly referred to as “free/reduced lunch") provides millions of meals to low income school children every day.   The students eligible for free and reduced lunches achieve at almost one standard deviation below their peers on math and reading test scores.  In this paper I ask: do low income children receive any cognitive benefits from receiving a free or low cost meal at school?    In previous research, the answer has been “no, not really, except for select demographics on certain tests.”  Many results even indicated that participation led to lower test scores.  What these researchers did not consider is if, without out the NSLP, eligible students would receive a meal anyway – from their parents, a sibling, a neighbor, or a food shelf.  For this reason, my paper looks at low income children who also have “low food security” – essentially an index of hunger.  For these children, participation in the NSLP free lunch program appears to lead to positive, statistically significant improvements in tests scores, but particularly reading scores.  However, there remain some null and negative results which are likely attributable to the nature of the survey questions.  Additionally, the paper provides recommendations for policymakers and future research on this topic.

For more details about these topics, the history of the program, and methods/models for evaluating the NSLP, check out the full paper.

Special thanks to my advisers, the Humphrey School, and the many others that helped with the editing, support, and encouragement that made this paper possible.

Aaron Craft: The Myth of Genius

Considering how easy it is, I’m fairly impressed at how few sportswriters have resorted to a play on his surname to describe Aaron Craft. The lack of “Craft-y” puns*, however, does not make up for journalists’ overreliance on the “coach’s son” narrative to describe the Ohio State sophomore. A cursory reading of the literature available on Craft would leave one with the impression of him as some sort of basketball genius – Archimedes in Adidas or Newton in Nikes.**

Reaction Paper 2*

*This essay was written for my PubPol 754 class (hence the lousy title). It has been slightly modified for posting on the blog (or at the Michigan Daily**, “the Blog”) The ideas – save for one grammatical correction – remain my own, but the message has become even more salient in light of the Regents’ decision earlier this week to file an amicus curie brief supporting the overturn of a recently passed Michigan law banning grad student unionization. Universities file court briefs occasionally, but near as I (or anyone I spoke with) can tell, the governing body of any university taking a such strong stance on a strictly partisan procedural issue is unprecedented.

**Ignoring AP style since 1890. Also, meta alert: footnote within a footnote!

The most recent chapter in the saga of unionization at Michigan began last May when UM regents, against the advice of top university officials, voted to give Graduate Student Research Assistants (GSRAs) the option to join the umbrella union for teaching assistants and other student employees. While this was a rare schism between the administration and BoR, it is a startling one. Not only did the board grossly overstep its authority, but vote tallies and quotes show that GSRA unionization was a strictly political question for the regents, with both sides toeing party lines and giving no indication that they had seriously considered how unionization would affect the university. As a partisan body (right now there are 6 Democrats and 2 Republicans), it makes sense for members act and vote in accordance with party dogma. The million dollar question is whether or not that makes sense for the university, its faculty, and its students.

Take me out to the ballpark

You can’t get much further apart than Miami and Minnesota. Lakes versus oceans, cabins versus night clubs, walleye versus dolphins, James, Wade, and Bosh versus this guy*. The Twins and the Marlins, however, have quite a bit more in common than you would think. Both clubs have two World Series championships. Both have spent the majority of the 2000’s as small market teams. And both have brand spanking new stadiums.