Kim Reynolds Declares War

I live in Iowa, which is the happiest, most fiscally sound, and best-governed state in the universe, and also the one with the most economic opportunity. In what our recently reelected governor, Kim Reynolds, calls "a world increasingly marked by chaos," it is comforting to live in a place that is so normal and right-thinking and non-threatening.

There are Iowans, and there are extra-special Iowans like our law enforcement heroes and "parents" (i.e. parents who agree with the governor), and then there are... well, I don't know what to call them, but they're everywhere, aren't they? Even in Iowa. About the only surprise one gets in Iowa is that not everyone appreciates living in this paradise. While recounting her administration's accomplishments in her annual Condition of the State address, Governor Reynolds took time to point out that these accomplishments happened despite the direst predictions of our opponents ("as expected"--just like them!), members of the media (booooo!), and "so-called experts." In the face of our excellence, that bunch characteristically resorted to "hysteria," saving their "angriest attacks" for requiring schools to be in-person during the coronavirus pandemic. When those haters goes on about overcrowded hospitals and Iowa at one point having the highest death rate in the country, we know they're just hating for the sake of their own bilious hatred. Unlike us, they don't want what's best for our children!

We plan to shift money from under-funded public schools to private schools because we want to give "every child a chance to succeed." We could address concerns like those of Darwin Lehmann, superintendent of the Central Springs and Forest City school districts, who told the Cedar Rapids Gazette--an acknowledged media outlet, I regret to say--he worried about the proposal's impacts on public schools (McCullough 2023). But we don't see concerns, only "hysteria," and we "ignore the hysteria," don't we?

Of course, this can't go without mentioning a public school teacher who sent one of her children to private school, and some of her colleagues turned their backs on her! Haters, is what they are, haters and meanyheads! "It's about our children," haters! And we can't talk about our plan to ban all abortion without mentioning Sara in the audience, whose partner left her when she changed her mind about getting an abortion. That's the sort of moral sewer our enemies live in, folks, not only wrong all the time about policy but wrong all the time about life. And children!

(By the way, Sara now counsels other women who face the same decision she did. Until we pass the law and there won't need to be decisions any more.)

The Governor announced a public awareness campaign on the dangers of the opioid fentanyl, as well as increased penalties for manufacturing and distributing fentanyl. Fentanyl comes from immigration, which comes from Mexico through "the holes in the border," which come from the Biden administration. Truly I say to you, it is what enters Iowa that defiles it. (For the record, two days before the speech, President Biden had been in El Paso, Texas, to announce new measures on immigration policy (see Ignatius 2023)).

So let us get angry, stay angry, and all will stay well in the State of Iowa. I know this, you know this, and that's all we need to know, which is why we don't need to have any interviews with pesky reporters. And whoever wrote the headline atop this post? Probably hates children. And if someone would like to know about job creation, or the pandemic, or groundwater pollution, or police oversight, or climate change that brings tornadoes in January... well, they probably hate children, too.

(swiped from http://taccle2.eu/wp/core-skills/how-do-you-feel)

SEE ALSO:

"Is Iowa Becoming Even More Republican?" 3 December 2022

"Why Should I Vote For..." 23 October 2022

"Condition of the State 2022," 11 January 2023

Condition of the State 2022

St. Luke's Hospital emergency entrance

[UPDATE: The day after the governor's address, Iowa Department of Public Health announced that 182 Iowans had died of COVID in the previous week; COVID-related hospitalizations rose to 923 from 792, the highest in over a year; and the 14-day positivity rate rose to 21.2 percent.]

The Iowa legislature begins its 2022 session this week, and if early remarks by Republican leaders are any indication, it looks to be another year of fabricating problems to solve while ignoring the actual problems. Iowa's 188 percent increase in deaths from COVID during the previous week make it 5th in the nation, while its vaccination rate of 59 percent is falling farther behind the nation as a whole (63 percent). Hospitals and caregivers across the state suffer from overwork and stretched capacity (Parker 2022). But as far as the Governor and the legislature are concerned, the pandemic is beyond over. It was not mentioned at all in the Condition of the State address, except in connection with her demand that "Schools. Stay. Open." At least that's more than climate change or systemic racism or economic inequality got.

What climate? My backyard, August 2020. A rare December derecho followed in 2021

 

We in Iowa like things cheap. We're also into nostalgia, and self-congratulation (and taking credit for federal government spending). After introducing a couple who moved to Iowa, where people are nice, from California, where people are not nice, Governor Reynolds presented her "bold" vision for the "state of opportunity:" cutting income taxes to a flat rate of 4 percent, with no tax on retirement income no matter how wealthy you are; cutting "onerous" regulations on child care providers and training teachers; banning "explicit" books from school libraries; and using state education funds for private schools.  Also, there were plenty of swats at the federal government, bureaucrats, employable people supposedly making a living off unemployment benefits, and people in other states who refuse to teach and want to ban police. In Iowa, we like our rhetorical meat like we like our politics: very, very red. 

"Explicit" book banned in Ankeny

Senate leader Jack Whitver, R-Ankeny, told Iowa Public Radio's "River to River" yesterday that Iowa is looking to its western neighbor South Dakota as a role model, while rejecting that of its eastern neighbor Illinois. Illinois certainly has its share of problems, but it has way outpaced Iowa and South Dakota in job creation: Illinois increased employment by 4.1 percent between November 2020 and November 2021, while Iowa was less than half of that, at 2.0 percent, lower than any of its neighbors except... South Dakota (1.8 percent). South Dakota leads Iowa in deaths per 100,000 people from COVID, 286-254, and it is 10th in the nation in occupied ICU beds per capita. And as an added bonus, its porous tax system has made it a haven for foreign money laundering (Cenziper, Fitzgibbon and Georges 2021)!

South Dakota and Iowa are low-tax, low-service states, competing with each other on the basis of cheapness. That's a policy choice, and seemingly one that majorities in both states are happy with. But it is a choice, one that reflects a worldview that the cheapest product is the best. People in a marketplace don't always choose the cheapest product, though. Some prefer amenities, a social experience, or ethical values. We in Iowa are choosing the cheapest life. Our policies will attract those who share our values of cheapness and nostalgia, like those people Senator Whitver referenced who work in Iowa but live across the border in South Dakota because the taxes are lower. The 21st century may have other ideas.

SEE ALSO: "Iowa: It's Unreal," 13 January 2021 

Iowa: It's Unreal!

 Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds to state Republicans' latest round of electoral victories in November by saying "they validated the direction we are taking the state" (Pearce 2020). She doubled down on that Tuesday night during the Condition of the State address, praising the state's response to COVID and the August derecho, as well as its budget surplus. She did not mention the state being 7th per capita in COVID cases (17th in deaths), nor its reliance on federal grants for economic relief. Dislocations to businesses and students by the prolonged pandemic were attributed to overzealous precautions, to which she is determined to put a stop.

It has become an article of faith for a considerable chunk of Iowans that the pandemic is relatively benign, and requiring precautions such as facemasks are a blatant attack on our individual liberties. "Our liberties we prize and our rights we will maintain," goes our state motto, possibly written by someone who had a sense of responsibility to his fellow humans, but also possibly an early form of "You're not the boss of me!" Which would be an okay motto as well. The chamber seemed somewhat empty, as some members were (wisely) attending remotely. About half the members shown when the camera cut away from Reynolds were wearing face masks. The front page of Tuesday's Cedar Rapids Gazette showed a crowd of anti-mask protestors at the Capitol. The legislative leadership has said they will not require masks for committee meetings or floor proceedings. Representative Art Staed (D-Cedar Rapids) reported unmasked colleagues at each of the three committee hearings he attended Tuesday.

So Reynolds's call for public schools to open in-person rings hollow. Of course, students should be in school. Besides what must be an accumulating pile of research on the issue, I can testify from my experiences in 2020 going between in-person and online instruction that the very best students do well either way, but the farther you get away from that standard the more trouble students have with online instruction. So let's get students back to the classroom! 

Washington High School, Cedar Rapids, was closed for repairs until this month
(Google Screenshot)

But what has Governor Reynolds, or anyone in Iowa government, done to make that possible? Besides demanding it, I mean. She's resisted shutdowns and mask mandates, and overruled districts that have tried to do pandemic measures on their own. Tuesday night she called for a bill "that gives parents the choice to send their child back to school full-time." She also wants to expand open enrollment [to Des Moines and Waterloo, IPTV commentator O. Kay Henderson explained afterwards] and charter schools, as well as "education savings accounts for students who are trapped in a failing school." There will be no spending increase, though, because she wants to cut taxes again. She was full of flattery for teachers who went to extraordinary lengths for their students this year, but is proposing nothing to make their jobs less difficult or more safe. Minority leader Todd Pritchard (D-Charles City) called this part of the speech "a little bit of warfare with out public schools."

We want to do what other countries have been able to do during pandemic, without any personal inconvenience or going to the efforts they did.

From education Rerynolds pivoted to red meat about BLM protests. Reynolds did wear a facemask on her way out of the chamber... and hugged a whole bunch of people.

Iowans are brave and good and tough, and if you come to our state, you had better be, too!

The complete text of the governor's speech is here.

SEE ALSO:

"Condition of the State 2020," 15 January 2020

"Condition of the State 2019," 14 January 2019

Post No. 350: Back to school

A highlight from my summer trip to Seattle

Round-number posts mean time to reflect, coinciding with the start of another school year. Six and a half years into this blog project, what keeps me writing? After 32 years of full-time teaching, what--besides the need for money to convert into food and shelter--keeps me in the classroom?

When I was a student forty or so years ago, the changes we're dealing with were already underway, but it was difficult to see at the time. One day my political science professor announced, "Well, the world gained an empire last night!" (The tiny Central African Republic had rebranded itself, temporarily as it turned out.) None of us students knew this, until our professor told us. A few years later, in my own classroom, I found a note on my desk relating to our class discussions about American covert involvement in Nicaragua: "Could you please explain who or what are the contras?"

Today, anyone curious about the contras, or the latest news from the Central African Republic, could become more knowledgeable than me with a quick Internet search:

The academic model of discrete bodies of knowledge, possessed and dispensed by experts, and memorized by students to some degree or other, measured quantitatively and then rated on an ABCDF scale, has been overtaken by technology... if indeed it was ever very useful. There's some comfort on both sides in continuing to play the game, though, particularly for those of us who are (or were) very good at memorizing and articulating. Everyone knows their role (expert/grader, good student, poor student), the numbers give us an appearance of objectivity, and real life keeps going outside the classroom.

Did I really think, all those years ago, that all I had to do was make through college, then flash my diploma and my GPA, and lifetime employment would be mine? Did I really think, once I began teaching, that my role as objective explainer would be easy to define? Did we really think, all those years ago, that cars would always cheaply get us anywhere we needed to go?

"Who Made This City?" (1:00)

My hope this fall for my first-year students is that they set about owning their college education from day one, and they use this opportunity to cultivate the qualities that will enable them to live a good life: creativity, imagination, initiative, resourcefulness, and open-mindedness. I hope I can help them learn to perceive and reflect on, say, the places where they find themselves--the built environment, the political culture, the problems.

Source: Youtube

I hope I can help them learn these habits without having to be neutral about everything. The big questions of our time center on how to manage change: economic change, social change, environmental change. Without presuming to have all or any of the answers, does objectivity really require me to be neutral about presidential race-baiting? Then what about suburban sprawl? The preponderance of evidence on climate change?

Source: Pixabay via Journalists Resource

James Morone, in The Devils We Know (Kansas University Press, 2014), the fine collection of his essays from which I'm teaching this semester, portrays American political culture as an ongoing negotiation among individuals, institutions, and traditions. That seems a good way to approach anything as complex as a political culture, or a town, or an individual life. No one person or group can contain the entirety of a complex truth--which makes the "sage on the stage" model of academia even more obviously absurd.

Even so, there must be ways to distinguish among the claims for our support, and make some judgments, however tentative, about their validity. Empirical evidence will get you some ways down the road, but I'm finding myself increasingly drawn to moral arguments. Is it some life-cycle thing with me personally, or has some social consensus broken down that requires sides be taken?

(Good urban design, bad urban design)

One can't teach a seminar like mine on A Sense of Place without taking note of the impact of intracity highway construction on American life: the growth of the suburbs, the marginalization of the "inner city" and its nonwhite inhabitants, the types of businesses (mainly franchises) that were viable, the ways of getting around (any way but cars) that were not viable, the stress on government budgets once the maintenance bills started coming due. I grew up at a time when all this was taken for granted; it was "the way things are." If I thought about it at all, I assumed this is how supply, demand and available technology were naturally working things out. Of course suburban sprawl stemmed from policy decisions. And a lot of those policy decisions were motivated by racial segregation, highways drawn through black neighborhoods and to maintain "the boundary between the white and Negro communities," in the words of former Atlanta mayor Bill Hartsfield (Kruse 2019). Policies that work to the advantage of whites at the expense of nonwhites are not good, right?

To shape the future, the very future that my students will inhabit far longer than I will, we need to come to grips with what ails the present. And that means finding some other way to respond than  racism, greed or fear, while praising responses like that of Ottumwa Main Street that are both imaginative and incremental.

Ottumwa Better Block video (3:30)

I write, and I teach, as my way of contributing to a collective conversation-negotiation about our common future. Written and oral presentation helps me sort out the blizzard of information that is out there, not to mention my own responses to that information. Readers of this blog, known to me or not, like my students, help keep my sorting out accountable to something bigger than myself. If you've read this far, I am really grateful to you.

Downtown farmers' market, Butte MT:

Objectively preferable to a strip mall on a high-speed stroad?

Of the previous 349 posts, the most popular are from summer-fall 2016 (hereafter "Peak Holy Mountain" or perhaps "Holy Mountain Peak"):

1. A Silent But Needful Protest, 1 November 2016 [Coe College responds to the defacing of Multicultural Fusion posters]
2. Crime and Our Common Life, 1 August 2016 [The mysterious rise and fall and possibly now rise of violent crime rates in America]
3. Snout Houses? In Oakhill-Jackson??, 16 October 2016 [Suburban style development in a historic Cedar Rapids neighborhood]
4. Let's Hear It for Cedar Rapids, 5 September 2016 [The Mayors Bike Ride and everything else going on Labor Day weekend]
5. Gentrification: What Do We Know? 26 July 2016 [literature review analyzing a complex and controversial phenomenon]

The least popular list has some new entries, joining some long-time un-favorites from the early years:

1. Where are the Suburbs? 24 June 2019 [three definitions of the urban-suburban divide, applied to Cedar Rapids... a tangle of a post crying out for some graphic accompaniments]
2. Halloween 2013, 1 November 2013 [Halloween as civic holiday] 
3. Downtown Construction Continues, 23 September 2014 [early stages of the CRST building]
4. Nothing Says Community Like..., 13 January 2014 [Take your Christmas tree to this parking lot and it will be made into trails]
5. Book Review: Cities for People, 18 July 2018 [Danish planner Jan Gehl looks at city design from the perspective of human nature]

CRCSD plan

Public input forum at Washington High School, 11/9/2017

The Cedar Rapids Community School District is floating a bold plan to remake our city's elementary schools by 2034. Nearly all (18 of 21) existing schools would be closed under the plan, which is to be officially presented to the school board in December and voted on in January. New, larger schools would be built on ten existing school sites, the three remaining schools (Grant, Hiawatha and Viola Gibson) would be renovated, and the other eight schools would be closed and re-purposed, sold, or something.

The district's rationale mixes necessity and pragmatism. They cite the need for a total of $241 million dollars of building updates in our current elementaries, while the new schools could be built for pretty much the same amount ($260 million) and could save money on staffing and operating costs. The Physical Plant and Equipment Levy Fund (PPEL) is inadequate to fund needed repairs, and by 2024 the cumulative efforts to patch aging facilities will have exhausted the fund's reserves. Because SAVE money will be available from the State of Iowa beginning in 2020 to supplement the PPEL funds, the district can execute this plan without either a tax increase or a bond issue. Given the district's previous experience closing Polk School, there's also probably something to be said for getting all the pain out of the way at once.

District chart showing PPEL fund's inability to keep up with maintenance needs

I confess to difficulty analyzing the plan, the audacity of which is breathtaking. It is immediately redolent of the "orderly but dumb" top-down comprehensive planning that Strong Towns is always criticizing. In part we are responding to a situation that is created by decades of suburban development with a comprehensive reaction that will probably reinforce that pattern. Five years ago, there were five elementary schools located in the city's core neighborhoods (two in Mound View); after this process is through there will remain two (none in Mound View).

But react we must, probably. I'm going with the district's numbers on this, because I don't have my own. From 35 years in colleges and universities, I can tell you it's impossible to win an argument with an administration who says financial necessity requires us to do something unpleasant. Where opposing perspectives and alternative plans would emerge is during election campaigns, but remarkably, we've just this fall had elections for the school board and city council in which this city-altering proposal was not discussed.

So we're left trusting (or not) that school officials are acting in good faith and with good judgment. Long-term planning is inevitably risky, because they're based on forecasts that by definition amount to guesswork with varying degrees of certainty. Among the arguable assumptions of the plan or its advocates:

• Building new facilities (the "learning environment") is the most effective use of available money to improve student learning.
• The improved facilities and professional staffing (like full-time librarians) that come with newer schools cannot be achieved in any other way.
• Maintenance needs of schools at the back end of the plan (due for reconstruction or destruction in 2030-2034) will not in the meantime affect the overall cost calculus
• State funding will not appreciably increase anytime soon--OK, that's not really arguable--but we can rely on them maintaining current programs and funding levels.
• The population of Cedar Rapids will continue to sprawl. While young professionals or empty-nesters might be attracted to residences in the city center, we won't see similar shifts among school-age children.
• The assessment of infrastructure needs is accurate, and represents needs that must be immediately addressed. These figures are in no way inflated a la the American Society of Civil Engineers' annual report that the U.S. must spend trillions of dollars to bring its roads and bridges into shape (see Marohn 2011).
• Construction of the new facilities will be of high quality that will last... like some of our oldest schools that have lasted more than 100 years, and not like some of the shoddier stuff that was thrown up in the 1950s and 60s.
• Transportation costs to the district under the plan can be managed, because not many more students will require busing--many parents are already driving their children to school--and energy costs will remain relatively low.
• Less than 25 percent of students currently walk to school, so the impact of larger attendance areas will be small. There is no hope of increasing the percentage of students walking anyway.
• Of the 1200+ students currently choosing to home school or attend out of district, many will be lured back by new facilities with up-to-date features. "People have said to me they chose not to move to Cedar Rapids because they drove up and looked at our schools," Superintendent Brad Buck told the Gazette (Duffy, cited below). [By way of contrast, today's Gazette includes a quote from Coolidge School parent Janelle Lund who argues parents aren't fleeing bad schools, they're fleeing bad test scores: It has nothing to do with how (the schools) look bad on the outside. It's because the proficiency levels are too low. Of course, test scores are driven neither by buildings nor by the quality of the instruction, they're driven by the socio-economic status of the student body. So basically they're fleeing poor people, and they're not the first to do that.]
• Impacts on neighborhood property values are unavoidable if not negligible. Overall impact on assessed value in the city will be negligible.
• Something positive will occur on the sites of the closed schools. Certainly, said one person Thursday night, "we don't want [the properties] to become derelict." We should be encouraged that previously-closed Monroe School, on a block with a large number of cheap apartments in poor condition far from existing schools or employment opportunities, is going to become even more affordable housing.

The Facilities Master Plan may need to be comprehensive, but implementation should be considered incremental. In other words, as we learn more about how these closings and consolidations are affecting students as well as the city at large, we should modify or scrap the remaining part. We can only hope that neither the contracts nor the officials themselves are so rigid as to stick to the script when adverse consequences emerge.

A word to the wise: The district's information circulated at the public input discussions noted that future investments in middle and high schools will require going to the voters (p. 27). How the matter of the elementary schools is handled will have a significant impact on the public's receptivity to the future middle-high referendum.

SEE ALSO:
Molly Duffy, "C.R. Makes Bold Pitch for Schools to Parents," Cedar Rapids Gazette, 13 November 2017, 17A, 20A
"Public Deserves More Time to Weigh C.R. Schools' Facilities Plan," Cedar Rapids Gazette, 5 November 2013
"Starting a Conversation about Education," Holy Mountain, 16 August 2015

Welcome to college!

Source: Flickr

Without really meaning to, I've found I write an education piece about this time every year, which seems appropriate as America heads back to school. Since I wrote on K-12 policy earlier this summer, let's talk about the kind of school where I teach: college.

So you're going to college? Good for you! Having taught full-time at the college level for thirty years, it seems like a natural environment for me, but in the contexts of most people's lives it is a rather weird interlude, not to mention an expensive one. What I would like is for it to be a worthwhile experience.

From my perspective "on the inside," there are many misconceptions about college which can diminish your experience. A cranky column in Sunday's Cedar Rapids Gazette by northeast Iowa writer Sandra Reicks contains a bunch. From the column:

College campuses are heavily tilted toward liberalism. That's why most parents sending a child with conservative leanings off the college have had "the talk" with them. Know who has the power--professors. Know the likely political leaning of these professors--liberal. Know what could happen if you challenge their belief system--the "A" paper could become a "B" paper. Better to keep your head down, get through college, and let your conservatism shine after you have the degree in hand.

The column's argument contains some unstated premises: (1) College is important mainly because a degree provides a credential essential to most careers. How you get there is less important than that you get there. (2) The gatekeepers deciding who gets a degree and who doesn't are the professors. Achieving a degree is basically a matter of keeping the professors happy. If you do that, you can attend all the parties and play all the games you want. You could, I guess, do some assignments for classes, if you're into that sort of thing. (3) Today's society is essentially a battle between people who are Right and people who are Wrong. The Wrong are everywhere. There's nothing we can do about them, other than to avoid them to the extent possible.

If the first one was ever true, it certainly is no longer valid. There is a market for professionals, but it's a highly competitive one in which you will be with a lot of other people who are talented and had GPAs. What differentiates you from the rest will be critical: your ability to communicate, both written and spoken; your ability to think analytically and critically; the experiences you've had along the way; and whatever else you bring to the table that will pay for the cost of hiring you.

And your college wants you to succeed. Colleges have historically not been for-profit businesses, but that doesn't mean they don't operate in a highly competitive marketplace, or are insensitive to the bottom line. Colleges with satisfied, prosperous alumni have successful fund-raising campaigns and can use their reputation to attract the best new students. Colleges with unhappy, struggling alumni do badly financially and reputationally. Donald Trump didn't last long in the college business.

Without denyng the existence of ultimate truths, I argue that very few if any people are always Wrong, and no one is always right. Social phenomena are complex, and nobody has a complete handle on the truth. So the best, not to mention the wisest, way to a common life is through conversations in which the broadest possible set of perspectives is articulated and accounted for.

So, to the stated premise and conclusions: (4) Many college professors are ideologically biased to the extreme left, as well as being petty and vindictive. Therefore, conservative students should humor their professors, keep their own heads down, and figure out whatever they have to do to achieve a diploma.

This is tragically bad advice. It encourages the student to waste four valuable years by hunkering down and avoiding experiences, instead of accumulating experiences to prepare for the job market. It encourages the student to keep at a distance people who could serve as mentors. It encourages the student to close themselves off from others whose perspectives are different from theirs, when in fact they're going to be spending the next several decades of their lives dealing with them. It encourages the student to prepare for life as an "organization man," when that model of business has been absent for decades. It discourages the student from examining their beliefs, allowing those to become what John Stuart Mill (On Liberty, 1869, chapter 2) called "a dead dogma, not a living truth." Most tragically, it encourages the student to avoid opportunities to learn to disagree respectfully, which is a key life skill in the 21st century. Questions, challenges and contrary facts are NOT disrespectful; they show respect for the person and engagement with the argument. (And if we're only providing this for our conservative students and not our liberal ones, it's the liberals we're cheating.) Really, if students are getting and taking Reicks's advice, no wonder only 36 percent of Republicans think colleges and universities have a positive effect on America.

As a professor in the Internet age, I know I'm not the fount of knowledge, even in my field of study. I know less information than any student with a Smart phone. A classroom in which no one is the acknowledged authority is actually an exciting place where all can learn. What I can do is model the analysis of information from a number of perspectives, and moderate productive conversations. Any student who contributes to those conversations is welcome, and I value any perspective I can learn from. Maybe I'm unusual, but in this regard I don't think I am.

Of course, there need to be rules. An conversation that strives to be inclusive is going to make arguments for exclusion difficult-to-impossible. We need to respect data, however much our interpretations may differ. We need to respect each other, which means arguing in good faith, listening and responding to others, not being cynical, and not retreating into "Well, that's just me." Resist the temptation, which any exposure to social media will show is strong, to caricature and ridicule. Remember the goal is not "winning" some imaginary ideological contest, but to create a common life in which all can thrive.

I'm not saying this can be easily achieved or even easily described. (See my 2013 effort on deliberation.) The national political environment, and that of many states, has not for a long time provided much help by way of example. As David Koyzis points out, the ideal of inclusion exists awkwardly alongside revealed religions like Christianity which make absolute truth claims. (This reality leads me to wonder if a Christian, or a particular type of Christian, can be an urbanist, or an urbanist can be a Christian? I would say yes, and point to Eric O. Jacobsen as a prime example, but it requires a certain flexibility.) But if the way were easy, or straightforward, it would have been paved by now.

At some level, isn't this about negative assumptions about what people will think if I say I own a gun, or oppose abortion, or voted for Trump? (On the other hand, the personal is also political--how vocal should your opposition to homosexuality be in a conversation that inevitably includes gays and lesbians?) Such assumptions ahead of the fact amount to "verdict first, trial later" (if at all). Remember that in the Great Commission (Matthew 28:19-20) Jesus sends his disciples to "all nations," not to enclaves where they are to complain about the media and political correctness. Remember, too, the prayer of St. Francis of Assisi, wherein this:

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love.

You've got this.

SOURCE: Sandra Reicks, "Colleges Promote Diversity--Sometimes," Cedar Rapids Gazette, 8 August 2017, 3D

SEE ALSO: "A Silent but Needful Protest," 1 November 2016

Education update

Taylor School, rehabbed after the 2008 flood,
1.5 miles from New Bohemia

President Trump's appointment of a prominent advocate of private schools, Betsy DeVos, as U.S. Secretary of Education, has brought new attention to long-standing questions surrounding education. There have been public schools in America for nearly four hundred years, but they are not exempt from those who argue that the market could do it better. It's my impression that this question gets raised a lot more often these days than it did when I was attending school decades ago in my middle-class hometown, from which nearly all of my classmates went off to attend college. President Trump has called school choice "the civil rights issue for our time" and promised $20 million in funding during his 2016 campaign; DeVos told an audience at the Brookings Institution in March that she supports school choice because

1. Parents know what is best for their kids and no parent should be denied the opportunity to send their son or daughter to a school where they feel confident he or she is going to learn in a safe and learning and growing environment.
2. Good teachers know what's best for students in their classrooms.
3. State and local leaders are best equipped to address the challenges they face, not the federal government.

These principles are intended to be self-evident, although I'd say each is at least arguable.

The fiscal 2018 budget contains a 13.5 percent cut ($9 billion) in federal spending on education, while including a new line of $1.4 billion to "support new investments in public and private school choice." This would occur through Title I (of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965), which goes to districts with high poverty populations, will include bonuses for districts that "allow Federal, State and local funds to follow students to the public school of their choice." More research money would be specifically directed to the topic of school choice as well (Mann, Ujifusa).

In previous passes at education policy (see links below) I've noted that spending on education by all levels of government has held steady at about 4 percent of GDP since the late 1960s, yet concerns about the adequacy of funding have increased. In 2014 it was exactly 4.0 percent, which on the one hand was the lowest since 1988, but on the other hand spending never exceeded 4.5 percent during this period. Surely one factor in the financial squeeze is transportation: Each decade school districts transport a greater number of students, and spend more on transporting them. [See this article by Krista Johnson of Iowa Watch detailing how financial pressures on Iowa school districts are exacerbated by Iowa's school aid formula.]

Valid measures of vitally important education outcomes are hard to get.

• Graduation from high school is a basic but rather crude measure of educational attainment; rates have been rising until recently, but more slowly in 2015 and 2016, and definitively accounting for either phenomenon is difficult. Great differences exist by state and race (Dynarksi). 
• On international tests, American students score slightly above average. On the 2015 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) American 4th graders finished 11th among 57 countries in mathematics and 8th in science; American 8th graders finished 9th among 33 countries in mathematics and 8th in science. [The Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), referenced in my post,last August, was given in 2016 and the results are not yet available. In the last test, in 2011, American 4th graders ranked 6th among 53 countries.] These overall measures, of course, mask great differences within the United States based on socio-economic status and place of residence. And it's not clear that the tests measure actual educational objectives. Few if any jobs involve a person taking a series of timed tests.

It seems clear, though, that in a world where career opportunities are getting ever more challenging, a lot of young adults are not prepared for the challenge. And it also seems, particularly in densely-populated urban areas, that there are opportunities to re-think education in ways that address diversities of learning styles, talents, aspirations and more. However, it won't do to make a fetish of freedom, or of budget savings, or to outsource the community's responsibility to educate every citizen. A recent article in The American Prospect showed how closing schools in Chicago, Newark, Philadelphia and Washington achieved neither budgetary savings nor improved educational outcomes, placed burdens on students most of whom are non-white, and in some cases left neighborhoods with large empty buildings (Cohen). Cedar Rapids Community School District is considering similar widespread closings.

We only have a common life when all are included and opportunities are substantially equal. That begins by recognizing that we're not there yet. State--and to a lesser extent, federal--funding has mostly equalized wide disparities among local school districts, but as Matthew M. Chingos and Kristin Blagg at the Urban Institute point out, that hardly covers the disadvantages with which poor students start. A stronger response to this situation will surely involve innovation and budgetary efficiencies, but not if that means trying out our pet theories on poor students, and certainly not if it leaves poor students worse off.

SOURCES
Matthew M. Chingos and Kristin Blagg, "School Funding: Do Poor Kids Get Their Fair Share?" (Urban Institute, 2017)
Rachel M. Cohen, "The Devastating Impact of School Closures on Students and Communities," The American Prospect, 22 April 2016
Mark Dynarski, "What We Don't  Know About High Schools Can Hurt Us," Brookings, 18 May 2017
Elizabeth Mann, "3 Observations on Trump's Education Budget," Brown Center Chalkboard, 7 June 2017
Grant Ujifusa, "Trump Budget Would Slash Education Dept. Spending, Boost School Choice," Politics K-12, 23 May 2017

OLDER POSTS
"Starting a Conversation about Education," 16 August 2015
"Is Our Children Learning?" 15 August 2016

Is our children learning?

Anxiety about the quality of American schools has since the 1980s been driven at least in part by American students' mediocre performance on international tests. In the 2012 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), American 15 year olds finished 17th among 34 OECD nations in reading, 20th in science and 27th in math, which a frustrated U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan called "a picture of educational stagnation" (Simon, cited below). Younger students did somewhat better in the 2011 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), with 4th graders finishing 11th among 57 countries in math and 7th in science, and 8th graders finishing 9th in math and 10th in science. In the same year, American 4th graders finished 6th among 53 countries in the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS). (Results from 2015 TIMSS and PIRLS will be available this November.) If maintaining America's favorable position in an increasingly competitive, global economy depends on how well-prepared young people are as they enter the work force, these are not good signs, though some might be taken as at least OK.

Johnson STEAM Academy, Cedar Rapids, IA
Lowest test scores in the metro area
82.2 percent of students eligible for free lunch
(photo by author)

Viewing American students as a homogeneous group with mediocre levels of achievement produces, however, a misleading picture of American education. (There are also serious questions about the validity of the test results as statistical indicators, which reservations I share but which I am for the sake of the present discussion going to ignore.) To take just one dimension of diversity, the socio-economic status of the student body, students from low-poverty schools had average PISA scores similar to the top countries in all three categories, while students from low-poverty schools averaged scores that would have put them near the bottom of the OECD (Simon 2013; see also Shultis 2012). Geography matters, too: Several states score consistently much higher than the U.S. national average across-the-board on National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores: Minnesota, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Jersey. Wisconsin, Indiana and Virginia are close behind them. Whatever's going on there is clearly different in a good way than in the states that score much lower than the national average: Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and New Mexico. How is it then useful to treat the "crisis" as uniform nationwide?

Westfield Elementary School, Robins IA
Highest test scores in the metro area
6.0 percent of students eligible for free lunch
(photo from school website)

In the Cedar Rapids metropolitan area test scores at the individual school level vary according to the poverty of the student body. Here are the global ratings from greatschools.org and the percentage of students at each public school whose family income qualifies them for free lunch:

	0-10 %	11-20 %	21-30 %	31-40 %	41-50 %	51-60 %	61-70 %	71-80 %	81-90 %
10	es
9	es	HS es es es
8		HS
7		es es	es
6		MS	HS MS MS IS es es es	HS es
5		HS	es es	MS es es es	es	es
4			IS es	es	es	es
3				MS	MS
2			Es		HS	Es es	es es es	es
1						MS	MS es		es

Of the 11 schools with 20 percent or less of their students qualifying for free lunch, all but two score at least 7. Of the seven schools with more than 60 percent qualifying, all score 1 or 2. (There are also some inter-district effects that are hard to explain without further investigation. And I can no longer find SES data for private schools in Iowa. About ten years ago, I did a similar examination of public and private elementary schools that showed (a) private elementary schools had very low rates of free-and-reduced lunch students, and (b) their tests scores were comparable to, not better than, public schools with very low rates of free-and-reduced lunch students. And now it seems this handy metric is going to be lost even for public school comparisions.)

To be sure, as reporter Stephanie Simon notes, "poverty alone does not explain the lagging results in the U.S. Vietnam is a poor nation, yet it outscored the U.S. significantly in math and science." The problem is the nature of poverty in America, a rich country with areas of concentrated poverty particularly in central cities that are isolated from the mainstream economy, cut off from avenues to economic opportunity (Chetty et al. 2014, 2016). In many places this reality is enforced by zoning restrictions that keep the poor out of and away from economically-successful areas, including the schools (Rothwell 2012). Being poor anywhere is difficult, but being poor in America presents a particular set of challenges that are reflected in educational performance.

It should be clear by now that efforts to improve American educational outcomes need to address the subgroups with distinctively low performance: children from poor families living in areas of concentrated poverty. Most analysts' approaches focus either on individuals or society.

The predominant individual approach is some form of school choice, which at least means the ability to choose among public schools within or across school districts. The ability to form charter schools, as well as government vouchers that can be applied to private school tuition, further increase the range of choices. The core assumption--that school performance is driven largely by the talent and effort of the staff, and that market-style competition would spur higher quality and more innovation--seems to me flawed. If the school staff were the causal variable, we'd see performance vary more randomly across the map rather than being so easily predictable by local SES.

Nevertheless there are some reasons to think seriously about school choice: Giving people choices might increase their feelings of personal efficacy as well as responsibility for outcomes; it reminds school staff, to the extent they need reminding, that they are accountable for student learning; it might be a short-term way to start getting the improved social mobility that Chetty et al. argue would come from physical mobility; and it would be a way to reassure new middle-class residents that they could seek the best education possible for their children (Duany et al. 2010: 172, though n.b. their preferred solution is a consolidated regional school district: "Only if city schools are able to share the resources of those in the wealthier suburbs can large numbers of parents be convinced to locate their families downtown").

Efforts to improve racial integration attack the performance problem at a more societal level. Gary Orfield and colleagues (2016) argue from numerous studies that racial as well as economic segregation continues to be linked to inferior economic opportunity, and question the lack of policy "initiatives to mitigate spreading and deepening segregation in our nation's schools." Other societal approaches include improving teacher recruitment and training, essentializing the curriculum ( like "Common Core") and increasing spending on education. (For a list of plausible education policy questions for presidential candidates, see Hansen 2016.) Each of these societal approaches, though, takes the distribution of resources and opportunities in American society as givens and tries to do the best they can with them.

I realize the potential for a mixed message here, and I would not for a moment suggest that either the staff of high-poverty schools or low-income parents should ever give up striving to be the best they can be. There is a lot that individuals and schools can do to make things better (Gran 2016). But as a community, as a country, we have to confront how much poverty, particularly concentrated poverty, affects academic performance. Nothing, really, short of a frontal assault on inequality of opportunity will do.

EARLIER POST: "Starting a Conversation about Education," 16 August 2015, http://brucefnesmith.blogspot.com/2015/08/starting-conversation-about-education.html

SOURCES
Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Jeff Speck, Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream (North Point Press, 10th anniversary ed., 2010)
Michael Hansen, "What We Need to Know from Candidates on Education Policy," Brookings, 9 August 2016
Gary Orfield, Jongyeon Ee, Erica Frankenberg and Genevieve Siegel-Hawley, "Brown at 62: School Segregation by Race, Poverty and State," The Civil Rights Project, 16 May 2016
"PISA 2012 Results," http://www.oecd.org/pisa/keyfindings/pisa-2012-results.htm
Jonathan Rothwell, "Housing Costs, Zoning, and Access to High-Scoring Schools," Brookings, 19 April 2012
Steven Shultis, "It's the Schools, Stupid (Part I)," Rational Urbanism, 22 September 2012
Stephanie Simon, "PISA Results: 'Educational Stagnation,'" Politico, 3 December 2013, http://www.politico.com/story/2013/12/education-international-test-results-100575
"TIMSS 2011 Results," http://nces.ed.gov/timss/results11.asp

SEE ALSO: Elizabeth Kneebone, "The Growth and Spread of Concentrated Poverty," Brookings, 31 July 2014, https://www.brookings.edu/interactives/the-growth-and-spread-of-concentrated-poverty-2000-to-2008-2012/#/M10420