Somalia, here we come!

The big buzz-word in American legislative circles these days is "deficit reduction." Let's reduce the size of government, reduce government interference in business, eliminate waste, and by doing all these things restore individual freedoms.
Like pretty much everyone, I favor eliminating government waste -- though we might have some difficulty in defining waste, once we get beyond a few glaring examples.
Let's look first at the society we might end up with if all the cost-cutters were to get their way. (I'll mention a number of proposals at both state and federal levels, because they will all -- from whichever level -- impact how we live, and because they are all expressions of the same mind-set.)
The two major categories of cuts may be in services and in regulation.
Services: States are vigorously cutting funds to education. In North Carolina, funding to universities, to community colleges, and to public schools is being cut. Admissions are being limited, tuitions are being raised (in spite of a North Carolina constitutional requirement that university tuition be essentially free), academic programs are being shrunk or eliminated, teachers are being laid off, class sizes are being increased. Cuts are being considered for many court programs that have been successful at keeping people out of prison (though experts point out that eliminating these programs will actually cost more). Various counseling programs and other programs to help young people stay in school or families stay together are being cut. Cuts are likely or are being considered in services to a wide variety of needy people -- the poor, the sick, the unemployed, the elderly. I could go on and on. Even if not all of these cuts become reality, we are looking at a future in which the well-to-do are surrounded with legions of needy, desperate people, people who cannot afford the medical treatment they need, cannot get trained for good jobs, cannot afford decent housing, and are left to their own devices in their ignorant interactions with the law. Sounds a bit like Somalia to me.
Regulations: Of course we oppose government regulation, particularly of struggling businesses. Or do we? I oppose petty bureaucratic regulation. But is that all there is? There have been innumerable newspaper accounts of tainted meat (because it was not properly produced or inspected), of farm workers harmed by pesticides (because no one was inspecting to be sure the employer did not have his workers use chemicals in a dangerous way), of imported sheet-rock that emitted formaldehyde or other noxious chemicals (again because no inspectors stopped the import or sale, of prescription drugs recalled when people began dying (because the government didn't have the manpower to check these drugs adequately before they were put on the market). The extreme example of lack of government regulation might, again, be Somalia.
So what is appropriate regulation? For me, it's this: I want to be sure that any product or food or medicine I buy is very unlikely to harm me if I use it according to directions. And I want to know that anything I buy is what it says it is -- that I can trust the label (and the advertising) to tell me the truth. And since the goal of any business is to make a profit, and since some businesses will do this by any means they can get away with, we need government regulation to ensure that all businesses play by the rules, selling safe and honest products.
Before we get too busy with our axes, let's give some thought to the kind of society we want to live in. I've given you an idea of the kind of society I want to live in. As I've said, I want a society with enough government regulation to ensure that products and foods and medicines are honest and safe.
And I want responsive government services sufficient to maintain a population that is healthy, well-educated, well-housed, employed. I want my neighbor's kids in good schools, I want any sick or injured person to get good medical care, I want both good roads and good public transit so I and my neighbors can travel where we need to go, safely, conveniently, and economically. I want services available so that abused or neglected kids get counseling or support or protection or whatever they need so that they have an opportunity to grow up to be happy, productive adults.
What kind of society do you want to live in? How much government will it take to provide that? If you want zero government, do you think you might be happier in Somalia?

Why Are You Struggling?

Long ago, on a Roman galley, the captain tried an experiment. He let everyone on board -- oarsmen and aristocratic passengers -- vote on whether to change to a democratic system, where everyone would take turns, alternately rowing and lounging in the luxurious passenger quarters. Of course the aristocrats voted to retain the existing system. But then, to his surprise, so too did the galley oarsmen.

There is a simple explanation for why you are having a hard time financially, why you are in danger of losing your job or your health or your home, why you don’t have access to the luxuries that more privileged members of society are enjoying.
Why haven’t you realized the truth? In case you are too dumb to figure it out, here it is: It’s because you deserve what you are getting. And because deep down inside, you know this. That’s why you keep making choices that maintain the status quo, that keep you down and struggling.
You don’t believe it? Consider this:
Our legislators obviously believe what I’ve just said. They maintain a tax structure and an economic structure that does what it should do -- it rewards the deserving and punishes the undeserving. In other words, some people get rich, the rich keep getting richer, and the rest struggle to stay where they are, and sometimes, no matter how hard they struggle, they slip downward into poverty.
Look at the statistics -- they’re all around you. You’ve seen them. The top 2% make as much money as the bottom 50%. CEOs get paid on average 400 times as much as their lowest-paid employees. When failing businesses are sold out, the top managers (who ran their companies into the ground) walk away with “golden parachutes” worth millions of dollars.
And at the other end of the scale, 10% of our workforce is unemployed. This country has some 40 million uninsured people. The middle class is getting smaller. More people are in poverty than ever. Millions go to bed hungry every night. Hundreds of thousands of homes are being foreclosed, leaving ever more people homeless.
And how are our governments, local, state, and federal, coping with all this? They are reducing services to those most in need. Thousands of state employees are being laid off, hurting not just them but also all those that they were providing services for. Universities are cutting faculty and course offerings; students must pay higher tuition for fewer and more crowded classes. Public schools are laying off teachers and aides and increasing class sizes. Mental health programs, already appallingly inadequate, are being cut further, leaving the mentally ill in crisis and unable to receive treatment that might save their lives.
Clearly the decision-makers who have brought all this about are acting out of a morality that says that the deserving will be rewarded and the undeserving punished.
And who chose these decision-makers? You did. You have chosen to elect representatives who will carry out your moral values, who will punish you for all your flaws and shortcomings. And as long as you coninue to believe that you deserve the worst, you will keep on electing representatives who will make sure you get it.

Sarah Tucker, a Remarkable Woman -- In Memoriam

Kay and I drove on Thursday from our home in Durham to a funeral in Charlotte, the funeral of an amazing woman I had known for forty-five years (though I didn't realize fully how amazing she was until I heard the testimonials at the funeral).

Here's how I got to know Sarah Tucker:

In the mid-sixties I spent four years as the program director for an ambitious project in a low-income school in Charlotte. The mandate of the program was to select the most promising seventh-graders in six successive classes, work with them in a variety of ways, and prepare them for college. (I've written in more detail about this elsewhere.)

Carlene was one of that first group, and I soon got to know her mother, Sarah. I learned that Sarah was young (just six years older than I) and had been widowed for several years. She had seven small children and no job skills, not even a high school diploma. She was working as a domestic. Realizing that she could not earn enough to provide adequately for her children, she completed her GED and took a secretarial course, which prepared her for a higher-paying job. Then, a couple of years later, having somehow discovered what she really wanted to do, she went back to school again for nursing training, and got into the field she worked in for the rest of her working career. And of course she had to get all this schooling evenings and whenever she wasn't out earning a living.

This was potentially a recipe for disaster for her children -- seven kids at home, no adult supervision, all kinds of attractive trouble outside the home.
But it didn't happen. In a community where half the kids dropped out of school and many got in trouble with the law, every one of her children graduated. Why? She was both loving and firm. She let her kids know that she loved them and had confidence in their worth and their ability. And she laid down the law: "You will go to school every day. You will do your best in school. And you will graduate from high school." I'm not sure if she ever spelled out what she would do if any of the kids broke any of these rules, but I'm sure none of them ever wanted to find out.

So all seven graduated. Most went to college. Two became ministers. One completed a doctorate and became a clinical psychologist. And in later years -- as I learned at the funeral -- when several grandchildren were in danger of getting themselves into serious trouble and ruining their futures, they at various times came to stay with Grandma for a number of months. And they responded to her mix of praise ande support and confidence-boosting, and they turned their lives around -- as they emphatically and emotionally told the two hundred mourners at the funeral.

Restore the Economy by Jobs and Education

All predictions say that even though the recession is technically over, unemployment will decline only slowly and over several years. Since -- as has been pointed out -- 10% of the population controls some 90% of the investment market, that 10% may be quite comfortable with the status quo, but for the other 90% of us the situation is at least worrisome and, for the 10% who are jobless, the outlook is just plain bleak.

It may be necessary to continue to pump money into Wall Street and big corporations and the like, but none of this has much immediate effect on the jobless.

There has been talk about job creation, but I have heard little emanating from Washington that sounds as though it will do much anytime soon, and what I've heard doesn't sound like a comprehensive coherent plan.

Here's my proposal:
First, some self-evident facts:
1) We are going to have to subsidize the unemployed for a long time.
2) The unemployed, for the most part, have lots of available time.
3) There is much work that needs doing in this country, including a) building/repairing/ upgrading facilities in national, state, and local parks and other public facilities; improving streets, highways, and bridges; building mass-transit (train, streetcar, and bus) roadbeds and rolling stock; c) upgrading the electric grid and transmission facilities; d) developing, manufacturing, and installing alternative power equipment -- solar panels, wind turbines, etc.
4) We are going to need more, and more highly trained, workers for a vast range of technologically advanced fields in the future: alternative power, medical technology, biotechnology, nanotechnology, and many others.

I would put all these indisputable facts together in this way:
Instead of just providing unemployment checks, let's offer most recipients two alternatives:
1) You can go back to school to learn some advanced skills. Government will put lots more money into paying stipends to those who want to improve their skills -- and perhaps the stipends will be bigger than the unemployment schecks. And while several million unemployed ate back in school, hundreds of thousands of teachers (who might be unemployed scientists and engineers) will also be given employment. And when the recession is truly over, and jobs are again plentiful, there will be a large workforce available of people with new high-tech skills.
2) Or you can move into any of a range of WPA or CCC type jobs: The government will pay wages for people who are available for relatively low-skill jobs improving the nation's infrastructure and public facilities. Many state and local governments have lists of "shovel-ready" jobs, some of which are already being done with stimulus finds. (Or if private companies need a boost to do many of the tasks suggested in (3) above, government might supplement wages, sort of like older OJT -- on-the-job-training -- programs.)

The advantages of this approach to the unemployment situation should be clear. Roughly the same amount of money would be spent, but this way it would produce improvements to the nation's infrastructure and facilities, and it would train a workforce for future jobs.

Bill O'Reilly -- Secrets of Success

I've just read most of a new book, "A Bold Fresh Piece of Humanity," by right-wing commentator Bill O'Reilly (I hope that's the right way to characterize him). The book was given to me by my very right-wing father-in-law, perhaps with the hope that it would help to straighten out my thinking.

Interestingly, I agreed with many of Bill's beliefs -- in justice and fair play, for instance.

But as I read on (and on and on), I realized what Bill's blind spot was. His implicit (and sometimes explicit) argument throughout this childhood-memoir-as-polemic is: "I didn't start out with any advantages, and I made it, so anyone can." He often compares himself with his classmates at various educational levels, classmates who came from wealthy and socially prominent families. He harps on the fact that he had none of their advantages going for him.

Ergo, he's saying, any kid from the slums, any kid from a broken family, any abused child of alcoholic or drug-using parents, has no excuse for not striving and becoming a success.

So where's the blind spot? Right here: Again and again, Bill tells of his somewhat cold and unsympathetic father, who, when Bill came crying to him about some mistreatment at the hands of other kids, would tell him, "Don't come crying to me. Get out there and fix it yourself." And he talks about the nuns at the parochial schools where he got his early education -- they were tough, and their educational and disciplinary techniques may have been questionable, but they set tough standards and demanded that kids live up to them.

(It's a little ironic that as Bill talks about his first teaching job in Florida, he criticizes most of his fellow teachers for failing to set up the sorts of expectations he sets up for his students; he feels that most of the faculty disliked him as much as he disliked them, because he was willing to be tough and they weren't. But he fails to recognize that the majority of students have missed out on something he had and which he as a teacher was trying to instill.)

So Bill, even if he lacked material advantages, had the indispensable advantages of self-reliance, self-confidence, discipline, and high standards. And, though he can claim credit for retaining and using these characteristics, he cannot claim to have invented or discovered them on his own. In his life were some powerful influences -- without which he would almost certainly have amounted to nothing.

The moral: It's not, as Bill accuses liberals of, to coddle criminals and bums because they didn't have the advantages. It's not to overlook criminality and laziness. No. But our moral obligation is to do everything in our power -- as individuals and and as a society -- to create learning environments (and to improve parenting) so that every young person acquires values -- and motivation -- similar to that which inspired Bill O'Reilly to strive, to compete, and to succeed in life.

We're eating our seed-corn!

We're far enough away from pioneer times that many now don't understand "eating your seed-corn." In that difficult era, you'd grow as much as you could, knowing that it had to do two things: feed you all winter, and seed the fields in the spring for the next year's crop. If the crop had been poor or the winter long, you might be very hungry when you'd eaten the feed-corn and all you had left was the seed you needed for next year. But if you ate that, there wouldn't be a crop next year. Farmers then knew that no matter how hard the winter was, you couldn't eat your seed corn.

The crop that should matter to all of us is our young people -- the next generation, those who will provide not just the brawn (not much of that is needed these days) but the brains to invent and develop and produce the ideas and technology a competitive society needs -- if it wants to stay competitive.

When I started in the job-training/manpower-development field in the late '60s, it was accepted government policy to expand training opportunities when unemployment rose. How better to be sure of a trained workforce when the economy started growing again? And it made lots of sense to pay people a stipend to go to school rather than just hand out unemployment checks or welfare money (though there might still be a need for some of that). Either way, you put money in the hands of people who need it, but this way you got something back by investing in a future skilled workforce.

With all this in mind, I have been shocked to read almost daily about the state and local governments and the universities cutting back on education, laying off teachers, dropping courses, raising tuition, and generally making it harder for young people (and older ones too) to improve themselves.

And, ironically, by using hard economic times as an excuse for cutting back on education, government has made hard times harder by increasing the amount of unemployment. Penny-wise and pound-foolish!

Should we educate illegal immigrants?

North Carolina recently adopted what I would consider a compromise resolution to the question of educating -- and providing other public services for -- illegal immigrants, by allowing them to attend community colleges, provided they graduated from North Carolina high schools, and provided they paid out-of-state tuition.
The arguments against providing education and other services to illegal immigrants are
1) that this is a financial burden on taxpayers,
2) that caring for illegals may deprive citizens of the services they deserve, and
3) that offering services encourages more illegals to come. There may be a degree of truth to all these arguments, though the evidence is not conclusive.
On the other side, I would offer one core moral principle: In this country, we should not have any second-class citizens. That was what the civil-rights struggle was all about. "Ah," some will say, "but these illegal immigrants are not citizens." True, technically. But morally and practically, not true. If there are people living among us, and they expect to remain her permanently, and we have no plans to deport them, then for practical purposes they are our fellow-citizens.
I see a black-and-white choice: We need to either 1) deport illegal aliens, or 2) treat them as citizens. I think it is both morally wrong and not healthy for our society to let them stay here, on the one hand, and to deny them full participation in our society and economy, on the other hand. As for how we handle the technicalities of bringing them into full citizenship, there are lots of proposals -- everything from a blanket amnesty to a gradual, perhaps decade-long, process of application and preparation. But I'd say that regardless of the process chosen, one way or the other, anyone we allow to remain here needs to be brought into full citizenship -- because I for one don't like the idea of living in a society with an inferior under-class -- and that's what we'll have if a significant part of our population is uneducated, underpaid, and sick. Such a situation hurts not only them -- but all of us.

Diversity--Not the only way to fix schools

Yesterday I wrote a response/comment to the Opinion Piece in the N&O by Christopher W. Marsch entitled “A System Trying to Hide Its Failures.” By the time I winnowed my already-brief response down to the requisite 1000 characters, it became pretty cryptic. Here’s a more useful response:

Marsch’s piece was one of a pair: His pointed out the fact that Wake Schools are failing large number of students. The companion piece was justifying school busing for the sake of diversity, and arguing that improved average test scores prove the value of this policy.

I come down on Marsch’s side. It doesn’t matter how good the averages are if significant numbers of students aren’t being helped. (Remember the statistician who was lying with his feet in a fire and his head on a block of ice? He said that, on the average, he was quite comfortable. Perhaps the Wake Schools are “quite comfortable.”)

What’s the point of diversity? At heart, it’s this: Children (like adults) are influenced by the culture around them. If a school is predominantly poor (by which we might mean, variously, economically disadvantaged, with poorly educated parents, in a run-down community, minority, etc. -- take your pick), then the dominant school culture may be (but doesn’t have to be) one that tells the kids, “Don’t go to school every day, don’t do your homework, don’t speak up in class -- it’s not cool.” Most kids in that environment (like most of us in ours) are looking for rewards. And where do they get them? Most likely, from their peers more than from the school. Doing well in school will seem to offer little pay-off, and will cost them the support and respect of their peers.

School busing tries to counteract this culture. The rule of thumb is that if this defeatist culture is promoted by no more than 30% of the students, then the other, the middle-class, culture and values will prevail. Maybe. But there are at least two problems: 1) Many of these kids now exposed to middle-class values may already be so far behind academically that catching up would require more effort than they think possible. And 2) at the end of the day, these kids return to their own neighborhoods, where they have plenty of incentives to return to the values they have been bussed out of. So diversity, in the form of busing, is not a magic cure-all. And if we look beyond the gross (“average”) statistics to the kinds of issues Marsch is talking about, it might turn out that busing-for-diversity is counterproductive

I think one argument for busing has been that no other policy can combat the failure-culture of schools in poor neighborhoods. But I’d like to suggest another approach, one that works at changing that failure-culture in place.

Many years ago in a disadvantaged school in Charlotte I conducted a program called Project Opportunity, funded by the Ford Foundation and operated in a total of eleven schools around the South. Its plan was to select the top 10% of 7th graders each year for six years, and work with each group until they graduated, doing everything possible (not defined at first) to prepare them for college. I urge you to read in detail about the program and its results on my website, www.csanford.com (click on “This I Believe,” then on Project Opportunity). In a nutshell, virtually no one dropped out, most participants attended college, those that didn’t went to community colleges, and -- significantly -- the school’s previous failure-culture changed.

The key reasons for these successes were, I think, not even intended but just happened: (1) The enrichment activities -- field trips, tours of factories, attending plays and concerts, book-discussion groups -- were considered fun. The kids (at first) weren’t there to learn things, but to go on trips, to have a good time. But the learning took place. And non-participants heard about the fun and wanted to get in too. (2) Non-participants who asked were told that if they did well in school,they could get in next year. Many did. Many more started doing their school work because they wanted to get into the Project.

These are simple ingredients. But they can change a school -- and the lives of kids.