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?

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.

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!

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.