Paul Soglin: Waxing America

Kids, Schools, and Cities Part II

Education in Wisconsin.

In Kids, Schools, and Cities Part I on February 12, 2006 we looked at the environment in which many kids learn and introduced an approach that focused on two elements:

• building neighborhoods by focusing on their assets rather than welfare programs
• public employees are then treated as resources to the neighborhood; they are not to direct neighborhood activities

For those determined to slash government spending, creating Neighborhood Resource Teams (NRTs) and following through with 'asset building'  does not save money when compared to traditional programs.  Sorry, but it is just more effective creating safe neighborhoods and elevating academic performance.

If you are looking to cut government spending and public employment go elsewhere. If you are prepared to spend money to get great results, read on.

Scattered throughout the neighborhood are many city, county, and school agencies working in an uncoordinated manner. Two things brought to mind the need for NRTs.

On State Street, teenagers hung out in Peace Park.  Most were runaways or homeless.  Too many of them were involved with older chemically dependent drifters, and none of them trusted authority. One of our police officers built a rapport with the kids, and discovered one summer (1989) that over half dozen of the girls were pregnant.  We learned this from a police officer and not a public health nurse. Of course none of the girls was receiving adequate prenatal care.

At the same time another police officer, well trained in community policing, sent me a note that focused on two things.  While he knew what to do as a community police officer,

• he felt isolated working alone in the neighborhood,
• he was learning the needs of the neighborhood, but it was in areas outside policing.

These two occurrences lead to the creation of NRTs. They were composed of librarians, police officers, firefighters, building inspectors, traffic engineers, housing specialists, and planners.  Some teams met every week, others met once a month.  They exchanged information and worked to focus public and private resources into an area.  That included making recommendations for the city's next year's budget.

A lesson: one NRT worked in an area isolated from low price grocery shopping.  All they had was an expensive convenience store.  A building inspector started to help the community organize a ride sharing/baby sitting schedule so that parents could get the the supermarket, sans kids, and get the bulky stuff home.  But he didn't follow through.

He backed off and the parents took control and organized the schedule. Two benefits: the families got cheaper, better food, and the families learned they did not have to depend on outsiders to be in control but to use them as a resource.

Eventually Dane County made a major contribution to this effort.  The County, already focused on coordinating social workers with the public schools, integrated their efforts with our NRTs into something called Joining Forces For Families. As the months went by, NRT members who served on multiple teams reported back that the teams that had social workers were far more effective than the teams without social workers.

Recapping:

• This is not a cheap process; to properly support a neighborhood requires more from all agencies and it costs money.
• We really began to make progress when the schools, the city and county started working together.

Simultaneously, the police department was making extraordinary efforts to crack down on gang activity.  They were involved in a range of activities that included breaking up the trafficking of drugs from Chicago and Milwaukee, domestic abuse, and the extortion and intimidation of area residents. 

At the very beginning of these efforts, in Vera Court, two gangsters saw a neighborhood women talking to one of our community police officers.  The next day she was murdered. They were apprehended and convicted. This tragedy inspired others, and within a year the neighborhood turned around. 

The following year, I ran into a school teacher from the Vera Court neighborhood school. She said, "I want to thank you for what the city has done.  This is the first time in ages that I'm really excited about the start of the school year."

There was a downside to the intensive police activity.  For a while, as we busted the violent gangsters, they were simply replaced by others.  Eventually Madison led the nation in arresting a disproportionate number of black teens as compared to whites, given their proportion of the population. We spent as much effort as we could in developing the NRTs, working the neighborhoods and developing the two most important programs: summer recreation programs, and after school programs, but the mounting number of arrests of young black men continued.  In another post I will discuss efforts to deal with this issue.

I could go into more detail about the specifics of the NRTs and the city's efforts but I think the point is clear:

• kids learn best when there is a neighborhood compatible with education, as opposed to one overrun with drugs, extortionists, and where gangsters control the streets;
• this all costs money;
• these community based efforts encouraged parents to become more involved in their children's education.

In the next two weeks I will try to post on two additional areas: the role of the private sector in both housing and education, and the creation of a 24 hour a day learning environment.

In parting, let me share with you the findings of a Northwestern University professor, James Rosenbaum.* He studied poorly performing high school students, virtually all Black, from the Chicago Public Schools who moved into areas served by suburban schools.  His findings were that most of these failing students in Chicago were getting C's in the suburbs. A tougher school district and improved grades!

He wanted to see what changes occured in the lives of the families who reloceted to new communities as a result of the Gautreaux Decision.

The main point of his paper (for our purposes) was to challenge the commonly accepted conclusion that once a student was doing poorly academically, there was not much hope for turn around after the 6th or 7th grade.  His findings completely contradicted that conclusion.

I met with him and asked him "Why did these students improve so significantly?"  He said:

That was not part of my study; I only wanted to see how they did, I wasn't looking into the 'whys.'  But I believe what happened is that their peer group standards changed.  They met other low and middle income kids, other kids of color and connected with them.  They were in a learning environment where academic achievement was admired.

Before anyone of you rushes out and condemns the Chicago Public Schools, remember that these new suburban schools were also public. The difference was they had a lower proportion of low income students, smaller classrooms, and more money. And a peer group that wanted to learn.

*Rosenbaum studied the families who received portable Section 8 housing certificates and used them to find housing in Chicago's suburbs as a result of a court order in the Gautreaux Decision that made the certificates portable. 

Rosenbaum studied the effects on both the families and the students. From the abstract, How Do Places Matter? The Geography of Opportunity, Self-efficacy and a Look Inside the Black Box of Residential Mobility:

The culture of poverty model implies that low-income individuals who acquired a low sense of efficacy will retain it, while the geography of opportunity model implies that that they will change if their opportunities improve. The Gautreaux Program moves low-income black families to the city or suburbs in a quasi-random procedure. Participants who moved to higher SES neighbourhoods had higher efficacy and felt safer, which mediated the neighbourhood effects on efficacy. This paper examines which experiences participants identify as having an influence on their sense of efficacy, and the ways those experiences have these effects.

From  an article on the findings from the University of Chicago Magazine:

The Houses That Gautreaux Built

...Administered by the Leadership Council for Metropolitan Open Communities, the Gautreaux model not only gives families rent subsidies but also counseling and assistance in locating housing, with staff working to enlist landlords as program participants. And a seven-year study of Gautreaux families by Northwestern University education professor James Rosenbaum shows that these assisted moves to the suburbs have been beneficial to both parents and children.

"The program is distinctive because it creates both residential and school desegregation," Rosenbaum wrote recently in the North Carolina Law Review. "Children arrive in suburban schools as community residents, not as outsiders in a busing program, and they come to school in the same bus as their white neighbors." Studying some 400 families, Rosenbaum also found that the parents were more likely to find work in the suburbs and their children were far more likely to enroll in college or find full-time jobs than their city counterparts.

What part of this is difficult to understand? This was public education; it was public money; it was public success. It was breaking the stranglehold of dense levels of poverty.

Time to Confront the Right Wing Taxation Assumption

There is a growing sentiment among lefty bloggers that we should shift the debate on TABOR and its deviant relatives, and force the Neocons to defend their premise, that taxation is bad.

Here are just a couple of posts from the last three days:

In Effect: Conservative Expert Provides Less-Than-Expert Testimony

The Xoff Files: The $5-billion question on TABOR

Whats Left: Calling it like they see it (Who notes that the conservative Wisconsin State Journal  has had it with these clowns.)

These are just three examples of some of the most recent posts.  Then there were these comments to one of my  posts, Barry Paulson and the Unarticulated Premise:

...A better tactic for the opposition, IMO, is to demonstrate how gobsmacking insane it would be to run a household budget using the TABOR formula. I can picture the campaign commercial right now: John Gard trying to explain to a couple with three kids and a mortgage why their budget baseline should be the husband's salary as a grocery clerk in high school.

and

...Good points Sven.  I think it's long overdue for Democrats to step up and claim the title of fiscal responsibility. It seems like today's Democrats are scared of the old "Tax and Spend" label that Republicans used so effectively. ...On the local level, I'd love to see Democrats ask the R's exactly what would they cut? Police service? Fire service?

Shooting Victim Filled with Left Wing Guilt

Love the headline from Houston:

Injured Lawyer Apologizes to Cheney, Family

His face was marked with nicks and bruises and his voice was a little raspy.

But attorney Harry Whittington was all grace Friday as he described himself a lucky person and issued a sincere apology to the man who accidentally shot him — Vice President Dick Cheney.

What is this silliness of the victim apologizing to the man who shot him in the face?

Reschovsky on Wisconsin Tax Freeze

Professor Andrew Reschovsky of the University of Wisconsin wrote a paper on the Bride of TABOR, The Taxpayer Protection Amendment: A Preliminary Analysis. Unlike the stuff coming out of the legislative hearings, this is sound research-based discussion:

This analysis demonstrates that a proposed amendment to Wisconsin's constitution to limit the annual growth of government revenue would reduce public services and harm economic development. If it had been enacted in 1985 and not changed, Wisconsin would have experienced a 30 percent decrease in its revenue from taxes, bonds and fees.

One of the fundamental points missed by the right-wing nuts is that taxes, when properly spent, stimulate the economy.  A simple example is the nation's transportation system.  The recent snowstorms in the Middle West and the Northeast demonstrate how an economy collapses when there is no transportation.  Let the Neocons have their way and that is what the transportation system will be like on a permanent basis.

Dumbest Cheney Story Yet: Time Magazine and The Myth of the Hunt (and the Beer)

The dumbest story on the Cheney hit on Texas attorney Harry Whittington is the Time magazine article by Walter Kirn, The Myth of the Hunt: How the media has misfired on the Cheney accident:

...the greatest failure of the accident coverage has been its inability to convey, let alone fathom in the first place, just what goes on when people are chasing birds out in the middle of nowhere, in the brush, with dogs and other hunters on every side and adrenaline pumping through everybody's veins. It's a jittery, fluid situation. The coveys erupt without warning and they don't fly straight...

Yes, Walter, and that is why after they shot someone they wait almost a full day before reporting the shooting to law enforcement. And Walter, that's why the drinking cover-up is so critical.  As commentators have rightfully point out, a standard subterfuge after a drunk driving accident is to avoid law enforcement until the next day so that the alcohol has been metabolized out of the system and cannot be measured or proven.

Think about it.  If you were Dick Cheney and it was a straight-forward, clean accident with no cover-up, wouldn't you want to submit to the authorities immediately, so that like Caesar's wife, you were above suspicion?

Gay Activist Stars in Right-Wing Evangelical Film

Here is a tasty morsel for Wisconsin's  Ralph Ovadal , he of the Homo-Facsist Watch.  It seems that an openly activist gay actor, Chad Allen is starring in an evangelical film "End of the Spear." :

To blunt pointed criticisms, moviemakers turn to Larry Ross

How did a team of evangelical Christians end up casting a gay activist to star in "End of the Spear," their film about slain missionaries?

That has taken some explaining, especially to conservative Christians...

Albert Mohler Jr., president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., called that decision "very reckless." He said Allen, an outspoken advocate for gay rights, had hardly made a secret of his sexual orientation.

"Given the publicity of Chad Allen's activism and the intensity of his mission to normalize homosexuality ... it is hard, if not impossible, to suspend belief and see him as a missionary martyr for the Gospel..."

For more on Chad Allen, go to his website but first you may want to read more from the Reverend Albert Mohler Jr.   What Were They Thinking? The Controversy Over The End of the Spear.

Barry Paulson and the Unarticulated Premise

Barry Paulson is the University of Colorado economics professor pulled in to testify before a Wisconsin legislative committee to shill for the Bride of TABOR.  After wreaking havoc in Colorado, Paulson is not content to keep the carnage west of the Mississippi.

Paulson is the traveling carny barker with the unarticulated premise.  He starts with an assumption that taxes are too high and that government spending is off the charts.  He never gets to first base.  In all of his work, he never analyzes the impact of the cuts and the consequences of the cuts.  When he does pose alternatives (Solving Colorado's Educational Finance Problems), he glibly leaps to privatization, ignoring all of the modern-day skimming, bilking, overcharging, fraud, kickbacks, and graft associated with everything from garbage collection to Haliburton's war profiteering- costs that far exceed any government waste.

His premise, along with the rest of the Neocons, is a fraud: they never proved that spending was in excess. And when it comes to taxes, they play on the general populace as they shift the tax burden from the wealthiest to the poorest.

I decided to look into Paulson's research:

Learning to Live Within Colorado’s Tax & Spending Limits

A Collection of Papers from the Independence Institute

(The Independence Institute is yet another conservative "think tank" devoted to "non-partisan, non-profit public policy research," which just happens to support positions favored by Republicans.)

And then one paper from the Center on Budget Priorities: THE FLAWED “POPULATION PLUS INFLATION” FORMULA: Why TABOR’s Growth Formula Doesn’t Work.  This paper knocks the socks off of the twenty-some papers Paulson used to deforest Colorado's state and local governments.

Time for John Gard, R-Peshtigo, and Sen. Glenn Grothman, R-West Bend to step forward and be recognized for the frauds that they are.

I wish Paulson or one of these Republican Frankensteins who keep bringing TABOR back to life would once, just once, go through the exercise of deciding spending limits for one basic service, like the Fire Department in Milwaukee. Service levels are based on response time to every corner of the city, minimum staffing levels for on-duty firefighters, and a considerable number of related expenses, many of which are mandated by state government. Boys, don't forget those fire stations need heat and electricity!

• They will either have to lower the quality of the service below safe guidelines, or
• They will have to raise taxes above their beloved TABOR guidelines.

The right-wing controlled legislature is a sideshow carnival peddling a phony 'tax freeze' to the rubes, but it is a son-of-a-bitch when it comes to facing reality, which is what the voters of Colorado had to do after a couple of years of TABOR.

How about a fair discussion?  Take the Madison or Milwaukee Fire Departments and tell us what you will cut and the consequences. Then we get five minutes of rebuttal.

Instead, in the Republican-controlled legislature, we get the old carnival "knock down the weighted milk bottles" game, with the giant stuffed animal prize of lower taxes and more "efficient" government just out of reach.

Asbestos Stocks Tumble On Large Volume

Owens Corning one of the big benefactors of the proposed legislation to have the federal government subsidize the asbestos industry which is faced with billions of dollars in claims  took a tumble  after the Senate turned down the bailout.

The big question is did Republican insiders make or lose money on the news, Republican Insider Trading of Asbestos Stocks?

Badger Herald 1, WISC-TV 0

The University of Wisconsin  Badger Herald reprinted one of the infamous Danish cartoons on Monday. The student publication chose the cartoon which depicts Prophet Muhammad wearing a turban shaped like a bomb with a lit fuse.

As  WISC-TV, Channel 3   reported there was immediate criticism ranging from claims this isn't about "freedom of speech but rather freedom of dignity" to  "pure racism."

Some people will never get it. Free speech is there for the best and the worst of critics and commentators. Everything is fair game from religion to children, presidents to prophets. Dignity trumps free speech? Not today or tomorrow. If every comment someone considered undignified was to be banned and censored, there would be nothing left in the newspapers except the weather, baseball box scores, and the funny pages.

I regularly come across anti-Semitic rantings and cartoons some of which are recent publications and some of which predate Hitler.  I am in far greater danger from a society that would ban those publications to protect my "dignity" than I am from one that promotes free and open debate.

The University of Wisconsin Chancellor, John Wiley , issued a statement which said, in part:

This is not the first time that the swords of speech and controversy have clashed on this campus, and, most assuredly, it will not be the last. Most often, the disputes have involved charges of racial, ethnic or religious insensitivity, even hostility - not unlike the situation today. But any review of these disputes demonstrates a common finding: that the public controversies which ensued represent, together, a perfect embodiment of unrestricted speech in a free society, in which all views on a given subject were given equal weight and attention, aired so that every individual could form his or her own opinions. Then, as now, it should never be routine to recall that this university has for more than 100 years championed the cause of free and open debate, the "fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found," and that an increasingly complex world requires this standard more than ever.

Let's hear it for the Chancellor.  In the meantime:

• WISC-TV refused to show the cartoon, displaying a page of the Badger Herald with the offending drawing blanked out
• The Herald's, competitor, my college newspaper, the Daily Cardinal, disappointingly ran an article about the Chancellor's comments headed: Wiley Chastises Local Student Newspaper
• The Chancellor's statement was covered by the Duluth News Tribune, Chancellor Defends Campus Paper's Right to Reprint Cartoon

Doing A Heck of A Job, My Ass

I thought it would be interesting, in light of the Congressional hearings to go back and review George W.'s speech to the people in Mobile, Alabama on September 2, 2005 from the White House website:

(I cut out the bullshit)

President Arrives in Alabama, Briefed on Hurricane Katrina

10:35 A.M. CDT

THE PRESIDENT: Well, first I want to say a few things. I am incredibly proud of our Coast Guard. We have got courageous people risking their lives to save life. And I want to thank the commanders and I want to thank the troops over there for representing the best of America.

I want to congratulate the governors for being leaders. You didn't ask for this, when you swore in, but you're doing a heck of a job. And the federal government's job is big, and it's massive, and we're going to do it. Where it's not working right, we're going to make it right. Where it is working right, we're going to duplicate it elsewhere. We have a responsibility, at the federal level, to help save life, and that's the primary focus right now. Every life is precious, and so we're going to spend a lot of time saving lives, whether it be in New Orleans or on the coast of Mississippi.

We have a responsibility to help clean up this mess, and I want to thank the Congress for acting as quickly as you did. Step one is to appropriate $10.5 billion. But I've got to warn everybody, that's just the beginning. That's a small down payment for the cost of this effort. But to help the good folks here, we need to do it...

...And that's a primary mission, is to get food to people. And there's a lot of food moving. And now the -- it's one thing to get it moving to a station, it's the next thing to get it in the hands of the people, and that's where we're going to spend a lot of time focusing.

We've got a lot of rebuilding to do. First, we're going to save lives and stabilize the situation. And then we're going to help these communities rebuild. ...

...Out of New Orleans is going to come that great city again. That's what's going to happen. But now we're in the darkest days, and so we got a lot of work to do. And I'm down here to thank people. I'm down here to comfort people. I'm down here to let people know that we're going to work with the states and the local folks with a strategy to get this thing solved...

...My dad and Bill Clinton are going to raise money for governors' funds. The governors of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama will have monies available to them to help deal with the long-term consequences of this storm...

...Again, I want to thank you all for -- and, Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job. The FEMA Director is working 24 -- (applause) -- they're working 24 hours a day. ..

...Again, my attitude is, if it's not going exactly right, we're going to make it go exactly right. If there's problems, we're going to address the problems. ...