Can’t tell if Barack Obama believes what he just said about expanding access to college or if he’s just cynically feeding Americans what they want to hear.

His point was that education was one of four things he’s proposing that will leads to prosperity (“growth”) and that a High School diploma doesn’t get you a decent job anymore so let’s make sure we allow more people access to  Colleges. I’m all for “investing in our people” but helping the middle class cram more of its offspring into college doesn’t stop our skyrocketing inequality or increasing poverty rates. Nor does it guarantee the creation of more jobs.

If you as an individual want to move up then a college degree might help you but it doesn’t expand the actual number of good paying jobs available to Americans. That, however, is the job of the President – to provide leadership for the creation of public policy that enables more people to do better.

Not sure how propping up an economically unsustainable nuclear industry will help, either. Not to mention that thing they do to your genes when they blow up.

More people with college degrees doesn’t result in more excellent jobs and more excellent pay. It will just mean that in order to get those limited excellent jobs, you will now have to get more education and score more critical experience. So, Obama’s plan doesn’t expand the pie and help more Americans achieve the American dream, it just means that there will be diploma inflation, with more people going for their Masters degrees in order to separate themselves from the pack.

Granted, there are fields in which we need more entrants, and in a good old fashioned command economy it would be relatively easy to just send a certain number of youth to get training, but our glut of unemployed Americans with law degrees is a good indication that the free hand of the market is groping in the dark. Supply and demand is a tricky thing when it comes to the workforce, unless you are willing to wield the interventionist heavy hand of government.

So,  over time, Americans have been subjected to degree inflation. The more education is used as a sorting mechanism to allow access to the upper classes, the more there is a race for more better degrees (see figure 1).

But while more Americans have gone into debt to get more higher education, the economy hasn’t rewarded the bulk of us. Instead, just as Mr. Obama said, more of our family members are working and we’re working longer and harder (American productivity continues to increase and be at the top of the international charts) and we have more education debt, BUT our wage compensation is friggin stagnant (since 1973 the average hourly wage in the U.S. rose a whopping 1%).

If our President actually wanted to improve the economic security of Americans he’d raise the minimum wage to a family supporting level and take action to lower unemployment (worry less about inflation, worry more about incentives to entice folks out of the workforce like they’ve done in France- shorter workweeks and work lives).

Even better, a proposal that is picking up steam in England- establishes a maximum wage to minimum wage relationship (floor to ceiling). In the federal government there is roughly a 25-1 relationship between the highest paid employee and the lowest paid employee. In the private sector it is something like 400 to 1.

A floor to ceiling cap will ensure that as CEO’s look to fatten their offshore accounts, they’ll need to bring along their lowest paid workers as well (hmm… the President would have to do something about outsourcing in addition).

So, Obama has got to know all this stuff, he isn’t Bush and he isn’t surrounded by people who regard social science as heretical. Is he really that politically opportunistic and cynical?

Sigh.

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-Jon Greenbaum

The Rochester City School system is a mess and has made precious little progress over the past several years. It’s time to let Mayor Duffy step into a phone booth, put on a cape and get to work, right?

Not so fast.

There are two reasons why Rochester city schools should not be controlled by City Hall- 1) it’s wrong and 2) it doesn’t work.

This summer at a School Board candidate forum sponsored by Metro Justice, we asked candidates if they supported caps on classroom sizes and where they stood on cultural competency and racial justice. We then shared the candidates’ responses with voters. That’s democracy- residents organize to hold elected officials accountable on the issues. The Superintendent reports to the elected School Board members. The School Board also controls the budget.

But what happens when we don’t like the results? If the solution to dysfunctional legislative bodies is to throw up our hands in dismay and turn over the reins of power to one person then why bother with legislatures at all? Frustrated with the how health care reform got handled by Congress? Let’s just get rid of Congress and let President Obama take care of business. But what happens if the next president is Sarah Palin? Would you want David Paterson to call all the shots in Albany? Democracy might be a lousy system but the alternative is worse.

And red flags should go up when the movement to take power away from voters keeps building momentum when those voters are African American and Latino. Could you imagine the mayor of Pittsford telling residents he could do a better job in appointing the School Board?

OK, our Rochester city schools are in crises. Maybe we might be willing to hand over our voting rights for the sake of our children. Does mayoral control actually work? How has mayoral control worked in NYC?

Under Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel Klein teachers were fired (increasing classroom size), arts programs were slashed, yet the central administration staff was increased (the public relations department was quadrupled). The NYC comptroller called the city school district accounting a “shell game.”

Bloomberg has also been widely criticized for cooking the books on student performance. Here’s former Secretary of Education, Diane Ravitch calling out Bloomberg’s claims of improvement in a NY Times Op Ed, “On the federal National Assessment of Educational Progress — widely acknowledged as the gold standard of the testing industry — New York City showed almost no academic improvement between 2003, when the mayor’s reforms were introduced, and 2007.”

In her opinion piece Ravitch also exposes Bloomberg’s claims about increasing graduation rates, “(T)he city’s graduation rates have been pumped up with a variety of dubious means, like ‘credit recovery,’ in which students who fail a course can get full credit if they agree to take a three-day makeup program or turn in an independent project. In addition, the city counts as graduates the students who dropped out and obtained a graduate-equivalency degree. To further raise the graduation rate, the city does not include as dropouts any of the students who were ‘discharged’ during their high-school years.”

Mayor Bloomberg also wrapped mayoral control in the language of civil rights, telling parents, “We are enacting these reforms so we can make sure whatever your skin color, wherever you live, your kid will get the education he needs and deserves.” But, according to Columbia University sociologists Jennifer Jennings and Aaron Pallas, “[R]acial achievement gaps in New York City have remained stubbornly persistent between 2003 and 2008… in many cases, growing.”

How has mayoral control worked in the rest of the country?

There are different degrees of mayoral control (the Mayor of Cleveland can pick the school board but has to check with the board about firing the Superintendent, and then only after 30 months. The Mayors of NYC and Chicago have much more control.). Looking at all cities with various forms of mayoral control there are some indications that average NAEP scores have gone up a bit but the when you break out the results by race and ethnicity the results are alarming.

In The Bracey Report, Gerald Bracey of the University of Colorado, analyzes the data on race and ethnicity, “In 2003, Chicago eighth-grade math scores [NAEP] for white students showed 25% of them at or above the proficient level, a percentage that rose only to 35% in 2007. The vaunted improvements in test scores do not appear for Chicago’s black and Latino students. In 2003, only 4% of black eighth-graders were proficient or better in math; that figure rose to only 6% in 2007. Of the remaining nine cities in the NAEP trials, only Cleveland and the District of Columbia, both under mayoral control, showed less growth for black eighth-graders. For Latino eighth graders in Chicago, the 8% proficient or better in math in 2003 rose to 12% in 2007. Among the other nine cities studied, only Charlotte and New York showed less growth. Moreover, gaps in achievement between black and white students and between Latino and white students were large (25% of white eighth-graders scored at or above proficient, with 4% of black and 8% of Latino eighth-graders at those levels), and they grew between 2003 and 2007 for grades 4 and 8.”

Bracey also points out that, “Teacher stability has decreased, especially in low-income schools and predominantly black schools. Black, white and Latino teachers have all been moving out of those schools at increasing rates.”

Many people are pointing to a book entitled, The Education Mayor: Improving America’s Schools, as proof that mayoral control is a panacea. But Kenneth Wong and his co-authors clearly show that under mayoral control the achievement gap between the races has grown.

Mayor Duffy says he wants to ask the NY State Legislature to allow a change in RCSD governance. He has not been specific about how much control he would like to exert over the district but he has been clear about his motives.

Mayor Duffy has publicly lobbied against the “maintenance of effort” rule for large urban school districts like Rochester. Under the maintenance of effort rule, city taxes that are earmarked for schools can’t be diverted to be used by the city. The City School budget dwarfs the Rochester municipal budget. This clearly has bothered the Mayor and some City Council members.

Moreover, in explaining his support for a mayoral control system the mayor has said that it costs “$23,000” per pupil to teach a Rochester City School student. This would be a cause for concern because that figure is way above the statewide average and way out of line with the Syracuse and Buffalo expenditures.

But the figure is bogus. According to the reporting every district in the state is required to make to the state, RCSD is spending about $16,500 per pupil. That’s pretty much in the middle of the pack. And School Board members have tried to explain this to the folks in City Hall, showing how the City Hall folks are using the wrong denominator (funds are passed through the district, eg. to charter schools).

Is Duffy in the dark about RCSD costs, or is he playing politics with the numbers? Neither answer bodes well for our children.

Public schools in cities with high concentrations of poverty are having a hard time all over NY and the United States. Rochester, Syracuse and Buffalo are pretty much in the same boat. There is no magic bullet. Metro Justice/AQE and other parents and community members are approaching the challenge holistically, looking at a variety of issues. There are many things that can be done and many people are working hard to make it happen. But mayoral control is a move in the wrong direction. We won’t improve the school system by throwing up our hands in despair and handing the district over to the Mayor. We’re the people we’ve been looking for. The community needs to get more involved, not less involved.

And about the claim that Mussolini made the trains run on time- according to Snopes.com it is false.

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Chances are good that somewhere in the United State there is an American with schizophrenia claiming that alien worms have infiltrated our bloodstreams. The correct response is to support people with mental illness as they navigate their way through society. But it wouldn’t be correct to engage their assertion on the worm thing. It would be wrong to devote space in the Democrat and Chronicle Speaking Out page discussing the worms. It would be wrong for Rachel Barnhard to do a series on the worm theory. At some point we need to have some sort of intersubjective agreement about what gets discussed in civil discourse and what counts as reality.

Yes, you are entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts.

This point was driven home yesterday with the New York Times coverage of the Tea Party’s darling in Florida, Marc Rubio. According to Rubio, “This is the only society in history where your future is not determined by where you were born.”

OK, United State, land of opportunity, etc. In Rubio’s defense, this notion is quite widespread. But the Emperor, in this case, really is buck naked. The reality of naked Emperors should count for at least a flag down on the play.

Matt Yglesias points to the Center for American Progress data on the subject, “By international standards, the United States has an unusually low level of intergenerational mobility: our parents’ income is highly predictive of our incomes as adults. Intergenerational mobility in the United States is lower than in France, Germany, Sweden, Canada, Finland, Norway and Denmark. Among high-income countries for which comparable estimates are available, only the United Kingdom had a lower rate of mobility than the United States.”

So, Marc Rubio could be right, except for the fact that he is wrong. There’s just nothing true about what he said. Plenty of other societies have people move beyond where they were born and in fact our American economic system is comparatively mediocre at allowing people to move up. So instead of being the “the only society in history” etc, we’re more like a C+ behind a bunch of other folks doing it better.

So, the truthiness of the situation is that reality has a well know liberal bias. Except that the Tea Party folks aren’t laughing.

Let us not forget how these Tea Party folks came together. Last year, as the Obama administration was moving to confront the global economic meltdown unleashed by Wall Street’s binge on worthless housing derivatives and Bush and Greenspan’s complete and total denial of the housing bubble, just as Obama is coming in with a mop and pail to wipe it up with some federal stimulus, that’s when these folks showed up at the bridge on Main Street to dump tea in the Genesee River.

Their protest?

They were against the federal stimulus. And it wasn’t that they wanted Obama to do nothing. They came together to call for continued cutting of the estate tax and capital gains. They assembled to loudly call for more Reaganomics. More trickle down tax breaks for the wealthiest 1% of Americans. This was Why They Came Together and here, here, here and here. Next time a Tea Party person opens their mouth, please try to remember this fact.

Which brings me back to the alien worms. At some point along the continuum between the guy talking about the worms and nobel prize winning economists like Larry Summers, you need to pull up the drawbridge and say, “Yeah, no, we’re not going to spend a lot of time discussing that.” Somebody has to make sure we’re talking about what we agree on as Reality.

Tin foil hats really are tin foil hats.

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I was asking my coworker about his reaction to those new billboards in town “I’m gay and this is where I pray” and feeling around to see how the billboards are being perceived. I mean it seems like billboards should play a role in sending messages to move positive social messages. Anyway, the billboards might be effective, along with other messages, in the long term, but my coworker was pretty much set in his conservative ways citing the bible etc.

What was really interesting was that once he got rolling about gay marriage he went straight into a rap about how people can’t discipline their kids anymore because CPS will come and get them if they spank their kids (not true says my social worker wife but facts don’t really have anything to do with these views).

And from there he slid straight into a rant about how we can’t even say “Merry Christmas” anymore. I muttered something about retailers being smart about wanting to invite Jews and Muslims (and whoever else) into their stores to spend their holiday dollars as well but I might as well have been speaking Chinese.

But interestingly enough he really seemed to care about the Christmas subject. This is the fascinating thing. From my liberal Mr. Spock perspective these issues are just illogical. I can’t fathom how two gay humans getting hitched is any threat to me. And I can’t even begin to understand why it is wrong to try to be inclusive to non-christians. I mean it’s just the nice thing to do.

But that’s why it is so incredible. For all our basic underlying similarities, conservatives and liberals really process data differently. Our values are so profoundly different that we aren’t even speaking the same language. My coworker genuinely feels threatened by the changes in our society. It isn’t logical. But it is totally real for him. This stuff really freaks him out. He and I can talk abstractly about how things in the past weren’t so hot and how we need to change but that doesn’t address the core feeling in his being that these social changes to the existing social hierarchy are threatening. I think there is a fundamental anxiety about losing one’s place in the social order. It could be about being averse to change, but I think it has more to do with feeling like one has finally achieved one’s place within the social pyramid and possible disruptions to the social order can only mean one thing- loss of status.

From my bohemian perspective, this stuff doesn’t compute. I’ve spent the last few decades developing an identity outside of dominant social rules and mores, grappling with a different set of definitions of what constitutes “success”. I like to think that I’ve done some heavy existential lifting but probably I’ve plugged into a subculture that just doesn’t feel that attached to hierarchy. Or maybe it’s a different hierarchy. I really can’t tell. Meaning that I’m equally submerged in my own consciousness. Just as blind to my own being.

Anyway, all the Christian hand wringing about whether our society is going to acknowledge the supremacy of Christmas in the last two weeks of December, or whether the forces of liberal accommodation will relegate Christmas to Just Another Winter Holiday. To us liberal Mr. Spock types, Christmas has always been some kind of bizarre marriage between consumer capitalism, Christian colonialism and American folklore. I mean you’ve got the baby Jesus stuff, the grafted on Santa stuff (arbitrarily defined by Clement Moore and depression-era ad campaigns for Coco Cola) , the Christian cooptation of pagan yule/solstice ritual, and full bore marketing. In my mind it’s like those pineapple tacos in Los Angeles. Purity and tradition? You’re kidding, right? Seems like nothing but continual social evolution, adaptation and change to me.

The insanity seems summed up by this figurine, previously available from Church Supply Warehouse, but now, alas, sold out.

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Lemonade anybody?

OK- Bart Stupak is basically telling us taxes are an ala carte affair- we can pick and choose what we want our tax dollars to go to. Don’t like abortion? No problem- let’s just not fund it!

Cool. I like that principle.

I bet most Americans would agree that we should cut federal spending in Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama and Kentucky. I don’t want to continue sending buckets of cash to those states.

No? Well why not? Those are the leech states. In other words those are the states that get a lot more in federal spending then they kick in.

Here’s the list of Federal Spending Received Per Dollar of Taxes Paid by State. I’ve left off West Virginia and Virginia because I like Robert Byrd, Jay Rockefeller and Jim Webb. I’ve also left off New Mexico, Alaska and North and South Dakota because of the large concentrations of Native Americans in those states (I’m cool with flooding reservations with federal cash – and since this is all about personal preference in tax policy then, hey, that’s what I want).

Boy, I really don’t like Mississipp, Louisiana, Alabama and Kentucky. Their retrograde anti-union, anti-investing-in-their-people policies have left them crippled and sucking up our New Yorker dollars.

Screw them.

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