Inequality in America: The Data Is Sobering
By EDUARDO PORTER
The good news is that President Obama appears to have decided to devote the rest of his presidency to trying to tackle the forces behind the yawning inequities that have hamstrung social and economic mobility, eroding the living standards of the middle class.
The bad news is that he may not be up to the task.
Consider the ideas he outlined during his speech at Knox College last week. Some are old. Some are new. Some are good, some less so. But the main problem with the set is that the politically feasible — those that he articulated with the most specificity — are the least likely to change the nation’s economic dynamics.
Connecting the nation’s schools to broadband is a good idea. So is tweaking the tax code to help ordinary Americans save for retirement.
Measured against what the president called “the forces that have conspired against the middle class for decades,” however, they are less than overwhelming.
The president’s most powerful proposals, by contrast — including investment in infrastructure, a higher minimum wage and universal preschool for 4-year-olds — remain as unlikely as ever to emerge from the nation’s partisan divide.
Many opponents simply reject Mr. Obama’s basic premise. Some researchers on the right of the political spectrum argue that inequality is not, in fact, gaping. Others contend that middle class stagnation is a myth concocted by the left to justify retro government activism à la 1970s.
After the president’s speech, the conservative blogger James Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute posted on Twitter: “I feel like I am in Middle-earth hearing about return of Sauron.”
The problem is that weaving modest policy proposals through the tiny spaces allowed by the nation’s partisan stalemate is unlikely to bear much fruit. A better strategy might be to articulate — forcefully — the nature of the problem and build a political consensus that would ultimately lead to long-delayed changes to American society.
It could go something like this:
The United States remains among the richest countries in the world. National income per person trails only that of Norway, Luxembourg, Singapore, Switzerland and Hong Kong. Yet despite its riches, in many areas the United States looks surprisingly, depressingly backward.
Infant and maternal mortality are the highest among advanced nations. So is the mortality rate of children under the age of 20. Life expectancy — at birth and at age 60 — is among the lowest.
Teenage pregnancy rates are not only higher than in other rich nations, they are higher than in Kazakhstan and Burundi. The United States has the highest rate of children living with a single parent among the industrialized nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Within the organization, only in Turkey, Mexico and Poland do more children live in poor homes.
These statistics may appear unrelated to the president’s vision of a society cleaved between a sliver of haves reaping ever-fatter rewards and hordes of have-nots who haven’t had a shot at a better life in at least a decade.
But they are intimately related not only to the problem but also to the nation’s willingness to solve it. They underscore how early underprivileged Americans fall behind.
America’s gaping inequality shows up everywhere, beyond the statistics for income. Rich families invest more in their children’s education. Educational opportunities are stacked against the poor and middle class: 60 percent of disadvantaged children go to disadvantaged schools with fewer and lower quality resources, according to a report on educational disparities.
Unsurprisingly, literacy is more lopsided than in most other industrial nations, according to international tests of 15-year-olds carried out by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
The gap between the top American scorers — at the 90th percentile of the distribution — and those in the middle is about as big as the gap between the average score in the United States and Azerbaijan.
In a globalized, high-tech world in which education has become a central determinant of economic success, it is hardly surprising that the prosperity of American children is more dependent on the prosperity of their parents than that of children in most other advanced countries.
How concerned is the American political system about these gaps? One way to look at it is by the effect of government actions on social outcomes. Take poverty. The United States has the 17th-highest poverty rate in the O.E.C.D., measured as the share of people who make do with less than half the median income, ranking around the middle of the pack.
If the same variable is measured after taking into account the effect of taxes and government spending programs, the American poverty rate jumps to fifth-worst.
And despite the president’s fiscal stimulus law, which lifted government spending in 2009 and 2010, the United States ranks among the bottom third of nations in the O.E.C.D. in terms of outlays on social programs — unemployment insurance, day care and the like — to help families deal with economic stress.
You would think Americans must be tiring of their lack of progress. The disposable income of families in the middle of the income distribution shrank by 4 percent between 2000 and 2010, according to data compiled by the O.E.C.D. In Australia, by contrast, it increased 40 percent. Middle-income Germans, Dutch, French, Danes, Norwegians and even Mexicans gained more ground.
And indeed Americans are tiring of it. Over half — 52 percent — say that the government should redistribute wealth by taxing the rich more, according to a Gallup poll in April, the highest share since Gallup first asked the question in 1998.
So there is reason to believe that a more forceful campaign against inequality than Mr. Obama has articulated so far would resonate. The United States is a rich country. Perhaps someday soon it will start behaving like one.
MORE IN ECONOMY (4 OF 17 ARTICLES)
Today's Economist: Consumer Spending and Economic Growth
A MUST READ..........and, for me, so timely, given Evan's question, "How big is the universe, Mr. Paull?"
A Word Gone Wrong
By LAWRENCE DOWNES
This Wednesday is the fifth annual “day of
awareness” in a national campaign to stop the use of the word “retarded” and
its variants. As a medical label for people with intellectual and developmental
disabilities, the R-word used to be neutral, clinical, incapable of giving
offense. But words are mere vessels for meaning, and this one has long since
been put to other uses.
“Retarded” and “retard” today are variations on a
slur. Young people especially like it: as a weapon of derision, it does the
job. It’s sharp, with an assaultive potency that words like “moron” and “idiot”
lost sometime in the days of black-and-white TV.
The campaign against it, called “Spread the Word
to End the Word,” is heartfelt and earnest in a way that makes it vulnerable to
ridicule. I know people who care about language who do not see themselves as
heartless and who do not see “retardation” as anything to get worked up about.
To them, banishing the R-word for another clinical-sounding term is like
linguistic Febreze: masking unpleasantries with cloying euphemisms.
In this, as in other cases of discrimination,
it’s probably best to let those affected speak for themselves.
Here is John Franklin Stephens, a man from
Virginia with Down syndrome who serves as a “global messenger” for the Special
Olympics. He has written op-ed articles giving lucid voice to thoughts you may
never have heard before:
“The hardest thing about having an intellectual
disability is the loneliness,” he once wrote in The Denver Post. “We are aware
when all the rest of you stop and just look at us. We are aware when you look
at us and just say, ‘unh huh,’ and then move on, talking to each other. You
mean no harm, but you have no idea how alone we feel even when we are with
you.”
“So, what’s wrong with ‘retard’?,” he asked. “I
can only tell you what it means to me and people like me when we hear it. It
means that the rest of you are excluding us from your group. We are something
that is not like you and something that none of you would ever want to be. We
are something outside the ‘in’ group. We are someone that is not your kind.”
Last year, after the right-wing personality Ann
Coulter sent a Twitter message about Mitt Romney and President Obama — “I
highly approve of Romney’s decision to be kind and gentle to the retard” — Mr.
Stephens wrote her a
letter. “No one overcomes more than we do and still loves life so
much,” he said, with such persuasive graciousness as to put other writers to
shame.
As Mr. Stephens makes clear, people can be
thoughtless and cruel, or well-meaning, and never know the damage their words
can do. The campaign is about inclusion. History is full of stories of people
from outside who fought their way in. To those with intellectual disabilities,
it sometimes seems the battle is just at the beginning, when little victories —
like an end to insults — are hugely important.
March 2, 2013
The Crime of His Childhood
By WENDELL JAMIESON
On an October afternoon 40 years ago, on a
beautiful block in Park Slope, Brooklyn, a crime occurred in a split second
that was as permanent as it was cruel. Grown-ups tried to make sense of it,
even use it as a cautionary tale for their children, but in the end, many just
put it out of their minds. How could they not? It was just too awful, its
lessons too hard to fathom.
The victim was named Josh Miele. He was 4. On
that day, Oct. 5, 1973, he was playing in the backyard of his family’s house on
President Street while his mother, Isabella, cooked in the kitchen. The
doorbell rang, and Josh sprinted to get it.
Standing on the other side of the heavy iron gate
beneath the stoop was Basilio Bousa, 24, who lived next door. Josh unlocked it.
Then he slipped his two feet into the gate’s lowest rung and grabbed hold with
his hands so his weight would pull it open. But Basilio just stood there. So
Josh stepped out, into the open.
And then, he couldn’t see. He didn’t know why. He
felt around with his hands, grasping for the walls. With great effort he forced
his eyes open and glimpsed the wood paneling in the vestibule. It was the last
thing he ever saw.
I was 7 years old and lived four blocks away, on
St. Johns Place. My mother came into the kitchen that day or the next, her
hands shaking. “Wendell,” she said, “Whenever you answer the door, never go out
to the gate until you know who is there. Always look through the window of the
inside door. Because you know what happened? This little boy on President
Street answered the door, and this crazy man poured acid on his head.”
She took me to our own front gate and made me
practice. I thought: why would anyone do that to a kid? The newspaper provided
no real clue, just a brief article: “Boy, 4, Is Hurt
by Acid Thrower.”
For me, it was like a particularly chilling
Grimms’ fairy tale, featuring at its heart the most terrifying of all villains,
The Acid Thrower. Until the day my mother sold the house, when I was nearly 40,
I followed her long-ago advice if I happened to be visiting: I hung back, just
a little, when I answered the bell.
It was the crime of my childhood, of another,
rougher Park Slope, and in the end it would destroy a family. We didn’t know
the Mieles, but I always wanted to know what happened, and what happened
afterward — how they had held it all together, or not. I wanted to know what
happened to the “crazy man,” and who he was. But most of all, I wanted to know
what had become of that little boy.
•
Jean Miele bought 851 President Street in 1965.
The house is narrow and quite distinctive, with pilasters and spandrel panels
and a keystone above the parlor floor window in the shape of a bearded man. The
brownstones looked much as they do today, though their facades were worn, and
many hid rooming houses within. The day the Mieles moved in, Mr. Miele first
unpacked a shotgun that he left sitting on the stoop for all to see. He and
Isabella had a son, also Jean, and a daughter, Julia. Josh was born in 1969.
Felipe and Clara Bousa moved into 849 President
Street with their son Basilio in 1955. The family had come from Cuba. “The
Bousas were lovely people,” Mr. Miele said when I spoke to him not too long ago
in his house on Carroll Street. The Mieles and the Bousas went out to dinner
together.
Carmen Bousa, their daughter, baby-sat. “When his
mother brought Josh home from the hospital,” she said when I reached her by
phone recently. “I thought he was the most beautiful baby I’d ever seen.”
But there were problems with Basilio. He “was a
space cadet,” said Ruben Torres, who used to hang out on the block. “We all
looked at him as someone who had done too much LSD. He was toasted.”
Carmen said her mother had detected something
amiss with Basilio when he was 1. She said they tried to get him help. He used
drugs heavily, was thrown out of Brooklyn College and started working at the
family bodega on Seventh Avenue. Then, for reasons clear to no one, he became
fixated on the Mieles. He broke a window, and later tossed a flaming bottle
into their backyard, prompting a call to the police and an arrest.
He was released. He joined the Army, but in
October 1973, was absent without leave. This is when he went to the bodega and
got ahold of a soda-acid fire extinguisher. He opened it up, poured the
sulfuric acid into a container, walked over to 851 President Street and rang
the bell.
•
Jean Miele had been on a business trip to
Washington; by the time he got back to Brooklyn, Josh was already at Methodist
Hospital. Mr. Miele was shocked at the sight of his son: “His face was a mask.”
Josh’s skin had turned brown, his features altered. “I remember thinking, ‘I
don’t know anything about what to do about this.’ ”
Doctors crowded around the boy, trying to save
his sight. Mr. Miele began to feel reassured until the next day, when an intern
came up and whispered to him that if they didn’t get Josh to a military
hospital, and soon, he was going to die. Only the military had the ability to
deal with that kind of injury. There was a pay phone in the waiting room. Mr.
Miele made it his.
He managed to get through to Park Slope’s
congressman, Hugh L. Carey. After some misplaced jocularity — “I’ve had 14 kids
and they’re always getting into trouble” — Mr. Carey got in touch with the
Surgeon General’s Office. There was a conversation with Josh’s doctors. Then a
call came to the pay phone from Col. Basil Pruitt, a doctor who was head of the
Brooke Army Medical Center
in San Antonio, the only military hospital at the time dedicated to treating
burn victims.
Colonel Pruitt said he was sending a medical team
and a C9 transport plane to McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey to get Josh.
All Mr. Miele had to do was get his son there. He worked that phone some more,
shoveling in dimes, talking to the duty officer and a helicopter pilot at
McGuire, and a desk sergeant in the 78th Precinct. He came up with a plan. They
all went along after he explained what had happened to Josh.
And so it was, later that night, that the
whoop-whoop-whoop of an Army chopper filled the air above Prospect Park, and
five police cars with their lights on formed a star pattern on the Sheep
Meadow, and the pilot saw it through the haze, and landed right in the middle,
and then lifted Josh, his mother and father into the sky.
•
Colonel Pruitt ran the Brooke Army Medical Center
from 1968 until 1995, and still practices today in Texas. He had thousands of
patients in those years but remembers Josh and his family quite vividly. “For
such a devastating injury, they were very realistic about what to expect,” he
said. Josh was burned over 17 percent of his body, with 11 percent third-degree
burns, mostly to his face. Colonel Pruitt said his chief goal was to save the
boy’s sight. But he knew right away that this was hopeless.
“He had these terrible injuries to his eyes,” he
said. “The globes had been irreparably injured. They were totally collapsed.”
Josh underwent endless operations. Skin was taken
from his leg and grafted to his face. Dead tissue was cut away, a hugely
painful process, again and again.
Isabella Miele, then and now an artist, would
explore San Antonio when she had a few moments away from the hospital. She
walked along the river that crosses the city, and found a food market on a
dusty plaza. But it was hard to escape what brought her there: “I’m looking at
the sky and here are these clouds, and I’m crying in the middle of the street,
thinking, Josh is never going to see clouds.”
When Josh’s brother, Jean, saw him for the first
time, back in New York about six weeks after he’d been burned, he worried his
legs would go out. Josh sounded the same, had the voice of the same little boy
who missed his big brother, but his appearance had been so radically altered,
and the injuries were so fresh. Many of his features were gone, and what was
left was roughly scarred. Julia was shy around Josh. He’d barely been out of
toddlerhood, had yet to come into focus for her as an individual, and now he
looked different from anyone she’d ever seen before. “My parents were quite
normal about it, but in my own memory I was timid,” she said.
Josh learned to use a cane and situated himself
at the Industrial Home for the Blind
in Brooklyn Heights. His father built a bunk bed that was part jungle gym, with
all kinds of bars and levels, so Josh could climb and stretch his scarred
underarms.
His mother had her own approach. “There were many
times where I put him in less-than-acceptable situations,” she said. “I would
let him touch things in museums. I would let him climb on things that people
don’t ordinarily climb on. He would say, ‘Mom, is this really all right?’ and
I’d say: ‘It’s O.K. Do it.’ ”
•
Jean and Isabella Miele separated. There are
differing opinions about whether the attack made the break come sooner or
later, but everyone in the family believes that a divorce would have been on
the way even if Basilio Bousa had never rung that doorbell.
Julia and Josh found themselves alone a lot. They
listened to talking books for hours on that jungle-gym bunk bed. They fought
and argued as any siblings. They played outside with friends from across the
street.
She makes it sound like a fun time. But it wasn’t
always. The two of them would range around Park Slope, two little children, 9
and 5, running errands, shopping — and more often than not someone would
comment loudly on Josh’s appearance. Or ask Julia, within his earshot, what had
happened to him. Or a child would scream: “Mommy, mommy! A monster! A monster!”
Julia grew angry. Once, after Josh had an
operation to restore his upper lip, he had to wear a gauze bandage for weeks,
and his mother drew a mustache on it. The next time someone on Seventh Avenue
asked what had happened to Josh, Julia snapped, “He had a mustache transplant.”
Josh’s brother, Jean, had a different way of
dealing with the looks and questions: he got into fistfight after fistfight.
Josh was mainstreamed at Public School 102 in Bay
Ridge, where he learned to read Braille. And then his mother moved with a new
companion to Rockland County, taking him and Julia with her. The operations
continued, including a failed cornea transplant, but when Josh was either 11 or
12, a big one loomed: there was a plan to stitch his arm to his burned nose,
with the hope that the live tissue in his arm would cause blood vessels and
tissue in the nose to restore themselves.
Josh put a stop to it. He had had enough. He told
his family he was always going to look different — why go through all this pain
just to look a little less different? This is how it was, and it was
time to start accepting his blindness and his face, and for him to start living
his life.
•
Josh Miele lives today in Berkeley, Calif., on a
beautiful block of 1920s cottages, with his wife, Liz, and their children,
Benjamin, 10, and Vivien, 7. Josh was deeply ambivalent about participating in
this article. We sent e-mails back and forth, and met for coffee in the fall
while he was staying with his dad. I was a little nervous: I wondered how I
would react to his appearance. But I found it less off-putting than
fascinating, his intelligence and sense of humor blazing through, and he
quickly put me at ease. By the time I went to his house for dinner, the
children running around, I had ceased being conscious of any difference between
us.
Josh has a degree in physics and a Ph.D. in
psychoacoustics from the University of California at Berkeley. He took several
breaks, years long, while getting his undergraduate degree, and worked full
time for the technology company Berkeley Systems on software to help blind
people navigate graphics-based computer programs.
He worked for NASA on software for the Mars Observer.
He is the president of the board of directors of the San Francisco LightHouse
for the Blind. He plays bass in a band. And he works as an associate scientist
at the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute,
a nonprofit research center. “It’s not that I don’t want to be written about,”
he said. “I’d like to be as famous as the next person would, but I want to be
famous for the right reasons, for the work
I’ve done, and not for some stupid thing that happened to me 40
years ago.”
He has helped develop tactile-Braille maps of
every station of the Bay Area Rapid Transit system, exquisite things with
raised lines of plastic and Braille labels. They elegantly lay out information
that can be heard by using an audio smart pen.
His enthusiasm for the Braille maps is
infectious, but it’s nothing like the way his voice goes up when he describes
his latest project, a cloud-based software program, the Descriptive
Video Exchange, that in theory will let anyone narrate any video or
movie to describe what they see for those who can’t. It’s a kind of
crowd-sourced service that would allow, for example, a Trekkie to describe a
“Star Trek” episode in a way that other devotees would appreciate. The first
version, out this month, will work for any video on YouTube.
Josh remembers the day he was burned with precise
detail — the little ride on the gate, that last glimpse of wood paneling, his
mother crying and saying, “My baby, my baby” as they raced to the hospital. He
remembers the ride in the helicopter — “It was so loud and jiggly” — and making
the nurses at McGuire laugh with elephant jokes. (“How can you tell there’s an
elephant in the closet with you? You can smell the peanuts on his breath.”)
He remembers his time at Brooke as a horror show:
he never knew when a new soldier would be moved into the cot next to him
because the last one had died. And he remembers those days when it was just he
and Julia ranging around Park Slope, a little amazed, as she was, that they had
so much freedom.
His perception of himself as being blind shifted
over the years, from not identifying with those who had no sight to becoming
aggressively proud of his blindness. He tried to bring his family on this
journey, with mixed success. “In those early days of being overly cool with
being blind, I said to my father: ‘Dad, c’mon, when are you going to get over
it? I am who I am.’ He was surprised, and he said, ‘You know, I’m never going
to get over it.’ ”
It was only when he had his own children that he
realized what this experience must have been like for his parents. He better
appreciates his father’s never-wavering optimism, his sister and brother’s
protectiveness, and how his mother told him again and again how he could do
anything a sighted person could, even some things that they couldn’t, like touching
priceless art in museums.
“I never doubted that it was all going to work
out,” he said. “It was a foregone conclusion that it was going to be O.K.”
•
That’s not how it was for the Bousas.
Basilio was arrested and charged with
first-degree assault. He said that he heard voices, that people were following
him and that, somehow, the Mieles were bothering him. He was given a diagnosis
of paranoid schizophrenia. At one point, out on bail, he returned home,
prompting fierce protests from the Mieles and a court hearing.
He was treated at a psychiatric hospital until he
was deemed ready to stand trial. Josh, then 7, testified. But in the end,
Basilio was found not guilty by reason of insanity, and ordered to undergo more
treatment. Eventually, the Bousas moved to Florida. The bodega closed. Basilio
died in 1992, after getting emphysema. His sister, Carmen, said he smoked
continually and obsessively in his last years, and in moments of lucidity was
horrified by what he had done. His parents died around the same time.
“Nothing was ever the same after that day,” she
said. “This thing destroyed my family. We were so sorry.”
•
When we first met for coffee, Josh — or, to give
his full name, Joshua A. Miele, or Dr. Miele — was in New York to lead a panel
discussion at the Metropolitan Museum of Art about improving the museum
experience for blind people. His dad still lives in Park Slope, as do Julia —
now Julia Miele Rodas and a professor at Bronx Community College who teaches
and writes about disability in
literature — and his brother, Jean.
He worried that Carmen Bousa still suffers so,
and wondered about calling her. He said he had tried to visit 851 President
Street, but whoever lived there now had not responded to notes he left; maybe
they know what had happened inside that gate, maybe not. And he was surprised
when I told him about my mother’s lecture.
But he said hers were wasted words.
“That’s so fascinating,” he said, “but you know,
it wouldn’t have made a difference. I was a cautious kid. I knew who was
outside the gate. I knew Bassy. You would have opened it, too.”
The Learning Virtues
By DAVID BROOKS
Jin Li grew up in China during the Cultural Revolution. When the madness was over, the Chinese awoke to discover that far from overleaping the West, they were “economically destitute and culturally barren.” This inspired an arduous catch-up campaign. Students were recruited to learn what the West had to offer.
Li was one of the students. In university, she abandoned Confucian values, which were then blamed for Chinese backwardness, and embraced German culture. In her book, “Cultural Foundations of Learning: East and West,” she writes that Chinese students at that time were aflame — excited by the sudden openness and the desire to catch up.
Li wound up marrying an American, moved to the States and became a teacher. She was stunned. American high school students had great facilities but didn’t seem much interested in learning. They giggled in class and goofed around.
This contrast between the Chinese superstudent and the American slacker could be described with the usual tired stereotypes. The Chinese are robots who unimaginatively memorize facts to score well on tests. The Americans are spoiled brats who love TV but don’t know how to work. But Li wasn’t satisfied with those clichés. She has spent her career, first at Harvard and now at Brown, trying to understand how Asians and Westerners think about learning.
The simplest way to summarize her findings is that Westerners tend to define learning cognitively while Asians tend to define it morally. Westerners tend to see learning as something people do in order to understand and master the external world. Asians tend to see learning as an arduous process they undertake in order to cultivate virtues inside the self.
You can look at the slogans on university crests to get a glimpse of the difference. Western mottos emphasize knowledge acquisition. Harvard’s motto is “Truth.” Yale’s is “Light and truth.” The University of Chicago’s is “Let knowledge grow from more to more; and so be human life enriched.”
Chinese universities usually take Confucian sayings that emphasize personal elevation. Tsinghua’s motto is “Strengthen self ceaselessly and cultivate virtue to nurture the world.” Nanjing’s motto is “Be sincere and hold high aspirations, learn diligently and practice earnestly.”
When Li asked Americans to randomly talk about learning they used words like: thinking, school, brain, discovery, understand and information. Chinese, on the other hand, tended to use phrases common in their culture: learn assiduously, study as if thirsting or hungering, be diligent in one’s learning.
In the Western understanding, students come to school with levels of innate intelligence and curiosity. Teachers try to further arouse that curiosity in specific subjects. There’s a lot of active learning — going on field trips, building things. There’s great emphasis on questioning authority, critical inquiry and sharing ideas in classroom discussion.
In the Chinese understanding, there’s less emphasis on innate curiosity or even on specific subject matter. Instead, the learning process itself is the crucial thing. The idea is to perfect the learning virtues in order to become, ultimately, a sage, which is equally a moral and intellectual state. These virtues include: sincerity (an authentic commitment to the task) as well as diligence, perseverance, concentration and respect for teachers.
In Chinese culture, the heroic scholar may possess less innate intelligence but triumphs over hardship. Li cites the story of the scholar who tied his hair to a ceiling beam so he could study through the night. Every time his head dropped from fatigue, the yank of his hair kept him awake.
Li argues that Westerners emphasize the Aha moment of sudden insight, while Chinese are more likely to emphasize the arduous accumulation of understanding. American high school students tease nerds, while there is no such concept in the Chinese vocabulary. Western schools want students to be proud of their achievements, while the Chinese emphasize that humility enables self-examination. Western students often work harder after you praise them, while Asian students sometimes work harder after you criticize them.
These cultures are surprisingly enduring, Li notes, even with all the cross-pollination that goes on in the world today. Each has its advantages. I’m mostly struck by the way the intellectual and moral impulses are fused in the Chinese culture and separated in the West.
It’s easy to see historically why this came about. Hellenic culture emphasized skeptical scientific inquiry. With us, religion and science have often been at odds. We’re a diverse society, so it’s easier to teach our common academic standards in the classroom and relegate our diverse moralities to the privacy of the home.
I’d just note that cultures that do fuse the academic and the moral, like Confucianism or Jewish Torah study, produce these awesome motivation explosions. It might be possible to champion other moral/academic codes to boost motivation in places where it is absent.
The State of the 4-Year-Olds
By GAIL COLLINS
One of the big moments of the State of the Union
address was President Obama’s call for “high-quality preschool” for
4-year-olds.
Earl Wilson/The New
York Times
Nobody was happier at the idea than Walter
Mondale, the former vice president. “This is going to be wonderful,” he said in
a phone conversation. His delight was sort of inspiring. If I had been down the
road Mondale has traveled, my mood would have been a little darker.
In 1971, when he was a senator, Mondale led the
Congressional drive to make quality preschool education available to every
family in the United States that wanted it. Everybody. The federal
government would set standards and provide backup services like meals and
medical and dental checkups. Tuition would depend on the family’s ability to
pay.
And it passed! Then Richard Nixon vetoed it,
claiming Congress was proposing “communal approaches to child rearing.” Now, 42
years later, working parents of every economic level scramble madly to find
quality programs for their preschoolers, while the waiting lines for poor
families looking for subsidized programs stretch on into infinity.
And President Obama is trying, against great
odds, to do something for 4-year-olds.
People, think about this for a minute. We have no
bigger crisis as a nation than the class barrier. We’re near the bottom of the
industrialized world when it comes to upward mobility. A child born to poor
parents has a pathetic chance of growing up to be anything but poor. This isn’t
the way things were supposed to be in the United States. But here we are.
Would it be different if all the children born
over the last 40 years had been given access to top-quality early education —
programs that not only kept them safe while their parents worked, but gave them
the language and reasoning skills that wealthy families pass on as a matter of
course?
We’ll never know.
Mondale’s Comprehensive Child Development Act was
a bipartisan bill, which passed 63 to 17 in the Senate. It was an entitlement,
and, if it had become law, it would have been one entitlement for little
children in a world where most of the money goes to the elderly.
“We came up with a lot of proposals, but the one
we were most excited about was early childhood education. Everything we learned
firmed up the view this really works,” said Mondale.
The destruction of his bill was one of the
earliest victories of the new right. “The federal government should not be in
the business of raising America’s children. It was a political and ideological
ideal of great importance,” Pat Buchanan once told me. He was working at the
White House when the bill reached Nixon’s desk, and he helped write the veto
message. He spoke about this achievement with great pride.
The saga of the demise of the Comprehensive Child
Development Act is an excellent explanation of why President Obama was prepared
to go through so much political trauma to pass health care reform, even when
many of his own party members were begging him to drop back, do something less
earth-shaking and wait for a better moment.
The better moment might never come.
After Gerald Ford became president, the early
childhood education bill’s supporters tried to resurrect the plan. They had
hardly done anything besides agree that they probably ought to wait until after
the 1976 election, when they were hit with a political tsunami. Members of
Congress started getting hundreds and hundreds — sometimes thousands and
thousands — of hysterical letters accusing them of plotting to destroy the
American family.
This was before constituent e-mail, when that
kind of outpouring was shocking, particularly since a number of the writers
seemed to believe that Congress was plotting to allow children to organize
labor unions and sue their parents for making them do chores.
“That was really the beginning of the Tea Party.
The right wing started to turn on this thing viciously,” said Mondale. “They
said it was a socialist scheme. They were really pounding the members of
Congress and a lot of people got cold feet.”
Nobody really knew where it was all coming from.
A reporter for The Houston Chronicle traced the hysteria back to a man in
Kansas who had written the leaflet, based on information he’d received from a
revival in Missouri, which he told the reporter he had since learned was almost
all completely wrong.
But that was it. Later, people would begin
proposing modest preschool programs, particularly for the offspring of poor
women who were required to work after the repeal of welfare entitlements in the
Clinton years. But there would never again be a serious attempt to guarantee
all American families access to quality early education and after-school
programs.
The president proposes doing something for
4-year-olds. This is a great idea. Mondale is certainly enthusiastic. But
still.
February 15th
When Families Fail
By DAVID BROOKS
Today millions of American children grow up in homes where they don’t learn the skills they need to succeed in life. Their vocabularies are tiny. They can’t regulate their emotions. When they get to kindergarten they’ve never been read a book, so they don’t know the difference between the front cover and the back cover.
But, starting a few decades ago, we learned that preschool intervention programs could help. The efforts were small and expensive, but early childhood programs like the Perry and Abecedarian projects made big differences in kids’ lives. The success of these programs set off a lot of rhapsodic writing, including by me, about the importance of early childhood education. If government could step in and provide quality preschool, then we could reduce poverty and increase social mobility.
But this problem, like most social problems, is hard. The big federal early childhood program, Head Start, has been chugging along since 1965, and the outcomes are dismal. Russ Whitehurst of the Brookings Institution summarizes the findings of the most rigorous research: “There is no measurable advantage to children in elementary school of having participated in Head Start. Further, children attending Head Start remain far behind academically once they are in elementary school. Head Start does not improve the school readiness of children from low-income families.”
Fortunately, that is not the end of the story. Over the past several years, there’s been a flurry of activity, as states and private groups put together better early childhood programs. In these programs, the teachers are better trained. There are more rigorous performance standards. The curriculum is better matched to the one the children will find when they enter kindergarten.
These state programs, in places like Oklahoma, Georgia and New Jersey, have not been studied as rigorously as Head Start. There are huge quality differences between different facilities in the same state or the same town. The best experts avoid sweeping conclusions. Nonetheless, there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that these state programs can make at least an incremental difference in preparing children for school and in getting parents to be more engaged in their kids’ education.
These programs do not perform miracles, but incremental improvements add up year by year and produce significantly better lives.
Enter President Obama. This week he announced the most ambitious early childhood education expansion in decades. Early Thursday morning, early education advocates were sending each other ecstatic e-mails. They were stunned by the scope of what Obama is proposing.
But, on this subject, it’s best to be hardheaded. So I spent Wednesday and Thursday talking with experts and administration officials, trying to be skeptical. Does the president’s plan merely expand the failing federal effort or does it focus on quality and reform? Is the president trying to organize a bloated centralized program or is he trying to be a catalyst for local experimentation?
So far the news is very good. Obama is trying to significantly increase the number of kids with access to early education. The White House will come up with a dedicated revenue stream that will fund early education projects without adding to the deficit. These federal dollars will be used to match state spending, giving states, many of whom want to move aggressively, further incentive to expand and create programs.
But Washington’s main role will be to measure outcomes, not determine the way states design their operations. Washington will insist that states establish good assessment tools. They will insist that pre-K efforts align with the K-12 system. But beyond that, states will have a lot of latitude.
Should early education centers be integrated with K-12 school buildings or not? Should the early childhood teachers be unionized or certified? Obama officials say they want to leave those sorts of questions up to state experimentation. “I’m just about building quality,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan told me. The goal is to make the federal oversight as simple as possible.
That’s crucial. There’s still a lot we don’t know about how to educate children that young. The essential thing is to build systems that can measure progress, learn and adapt to local circumstances. Over time, many children will migrate from Head Start into state programs.
This is rude to say, but here’s what this is about: Millions of parents don’t have the means, the skill or, in some cases, the interest in building their children’s future. Early childhood education is about building structures so both parents and children learn practical life skills. It’s about getting kids from disorganized homes into rooms with kids from organized homes so good habits will rub off. It’s about instilling achievement values where they are absent.
President Obama has taken on a big challenge in a realistic and ambitious way. If Republicans really believe in opportunity and local control, they will get on board.
By NICHOLAS D.
KRISTOF NYT 31st january 2013
You see America and its education system in all their glorious,
exhilarating, crushing, infuriating contradictions in our national high school
chess champion team.
Chess tends to be the domain of privileged schools whose star players
have had their own personal chess coaches since elementary school. Yet the
national champion team comes from a high-poverty, inner-city school, and
four-fifths of its members are black or Hispanic.
More astounding, these aren’t even high school kids yet. In April, New
York’s Intermediate
School 318 in Brooklyn, where 70 percent of students qualify for
free or reduced-price lunches, became the first middle school team ever to
defeat kids about four years older and win the national high school
championship.
The champs are kids like Carlos Tapia, a Mexican-American in the
eighth grade, whose dad is a house painter and mom a maid. The parents can’t
play chess and can’t afford to give Carlos his own room, but they proudly make
space for his 18 chess trophies.
“Chess teaches me self-control” that spills over into other
schoolwork, Carlos said in the I.S. 318 chess room, as a rainbow of students
hunched over their boards, brows furrowed.
This will be my last column for a number of months, as I’m taking a
leave to work on a new book with my wife. So I asked my Twitter
followers what they’d like me to write about in this column, and one suggested
I address: How do you do your job without getting incredibly depressed?
I promise, I’m not the Eeyore of journalists. The truth is that
covering inequality, injustice and poverty can actually be inspiring and
uplifting because of kids like Carlos. Just sprinkle opportunity around, and
dazzling talents turn up.
This isn’t about chess. It’s about investing in kids in ways that
transform their trajectories forever. The returns on capital would make Wall
Street jealous.
Take Rochelle Ballantyne, who was raised by a single mom from Trinidad
and soared on the I.S. 318 chess team. Rochelle, now 17 and aiming to become
the first African-American woman to become a chess master, has won a full
scholarship to Stanford University. She’s planning to attend even though she
has never visited the campus.
“We were meant to break stereotypes,” Rochelle told me. “Chess isn’t
something people are good at because of the color of their skin. We just really
work very hard at it.”
That seems to be the secret. A part-time chess tutor named Elizabeth
Spiegel arrived at I.S. 318 in 1999 and parlayed a tiny budget into a team that
drills tirelessly. A dynamic, passionate teacher who volunteered much of her
time, she nurtured a team that since 2000 has won more middle school
championships than any other in the country.
One way of assessing what she has accomplished: Based on estimated
chess ratings, Albert Einstein would rank third on the I.S. 318 team.
I wish the column could end on this triumphant note. But if these
extraordinary kids are a reminder of what can happen when we invest in creating
opportunity, they are also a reminder that budget cuts fall disproportionately
on the needy.
“Funding for extracurricular activities has dried up,” said John
Galvin, an assistant principal who oversees the 95-member chess team. The kids
run bake sales, candy sales and walkathons to raise the $50,000 needed to
attend tournaments each year, but on trips they sometimes survive on peanut
butter.
Galvin has tried approaching corporations and hedge funds for
donations but has had little luck. Budget cuts have already trimmed the after-school
chess club to three days a week from five.
A moving documentary about the team, “Brooklyn
Castle,” is scheduled to air on PBS later this year, and that may
help with fund-raising.
But similar cutbacks are playing out all across America. In 35 states, inflation-adjusted school financing is below 2008 levels, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. As of July, school districts have slashed 328,000 jobs since 2008, and budget cuts have devastated early childhood education that lays the foundation for children’s lives.
Affluent kids continue to enjoy nursery school and chess tutors, even as programs for poor kids are eliminated. Education is the best escalator out of poverty, but for too many kids it’s creaking to a standstill.
As we make historic fiscal decisions in the coming months, let’s not
balance budgets by slashing investments in our future. That would be like
economizing on heating bills by feeding the front door into the fire.
While on leave, I’ll be rooting for kids like Carlos to soar to
another national championship — and far beyond. Given the returns, the question
isn’t whether we can afford to invest in opportunities for kids but how we can
possibly afford not to.
No comments:
Post a Comment