Sociologic Outlook

Stephen K. Bannon.  Need I say more?  Probably not.  Nevertheless, I shall.  I doubt that any of us seriously considered the possibility of a crypto-fascist dictating social policy in the USofA, but now it's time to get serious.  I know I swore off making predictions, but some things are pretty obvious:

WOMEN
It's unlikely that Bannon himself could care less about the right of women to have control over their own bodies, but it's important to a major segment of the Tr*mp coalition: Evangelicals.  Women's reproductive rights will be in serious trouble with any Tr*mp appointment to the Supreme Court, unless one of the sitting conservative Justices is too conservative to approve overturning a decision that's been in place since 1973.  As for birth control, protection from sexual assault, equal pay for equal work, etc., the Magic 8-Ball says, "Uh-oh!"  Opposition is mounting, but will it be enough?

BLACKS & LATINOS
Clearly, disenfranchisement of black and Latino voters through voter suppression will continue, especially since it worked so well in the recent election.  "Law & Order" policies in Republican dominated states and localities will breathe new life, and the prosecution of killer cops will continue to be distressingly rare.  The only bright spot may be some degree of criminal justice reform, since prisons are just too expensive for the tax-cut zealots.  Lobbyists for private prisons, though, continue to spend freely, claiming "cost savings" that don't exist.

IMMIGRANTS
The "huddled masses" will keep right on "yearning to breathe free."  While the "wall" will remain a figment of xenophobic imagination, Bannon's Breitbart followers and the National Border Control Council (the pro-Tr*mp union that represents border control agents) will keep up the pressure to expand Obama's already onerous deportation policy.  The budget deficits this will entail will be significant, leading to devastating cuts in funding to more productive areas of government.

LGBT
The various permutations of gay and trans Americans can expect their rapid gains in civil rights to come to a screeching halt.  Although Tr*mp says that marriage equality is "a settled issue," presidential opinions don't count for much when a conservative Supreme Court issues its rulings.  Hopefully eighty-year-old Anthony Kennedy is in good health.  Meanwhile, the green light is lit and burning brightly as far as gay-bashings and attacks on the transgendered are concerned.

EDUCATION
Look for state funding of private and religious schools, defunding of public education at both the K-12 and university levels, new lawsuits challenging affirmative action in admissions, and all federal aid to education provided in the form of block grants with no strings attached.  States will accelerate takeovers of "failing" schools, ensuring that they continue to fail.

HEALTH
Tr*mp's ideas for maintaining the popular parts of Obamacare while eliminating the rest is obviously untenable.  Forget about reining in Big Pharma.  Drug rehabilitation programs will succumb to Evangelical moralism, despite the enormous impact of the heroin epidemic on rural America.  Bannon probably would like to end CHIP, since that would lead to more deaths among the "mud people," but it's probably safe because Tr*mp is too much of an approval whore to countenance killing children.  Congress will delight in defunding the NIH and the NIMH.  Don't get sick!

WELFARE
Did I hear somebody say "block grants?"  The Earned Income Tax Credit is safe, but no longer likely to be expanded to childless families.

CULTURE
Season one of "Political Apprentice" will continue to earn high ratings on cable news.  Intellectuals and artists, both left and right, will be on their own.

NATIONAL UNITY
What?  Are you kidding?

Income Inequality

Pundits and politicians are always going on about how improving education is the answer to income inequality.  They're wrong.

College graduates are significantly more likely to be employed than high school graduates  A lot of their jobs used to be performed perfectly well by high school graduates, but so what?  If you can get a slightly more intellectual waitperson to serve your yuppie clientele for the same price, you may as well do it.  Right?

Back in the old faculty room, it was pretty obvious to everybody that you can't make a silk purse out of sow's ear, nor a Rhodes Scholar out of a horse's ass.  Human aptitudes, sadly, tend to follow that old normal curve.  There are probable winners, possible winners,and certain losers.

This is not to say that we should not work very hard to improve education, especially to shove more of those nice kids in the middle of the normal curve towards the higher end of the "hump" — and certainly we have to lift a lot of poor kids out of the quicksand of poverty and failure, and give them all the opportunities that might help them.

None of that has anything to do with income inequality.

Nobody should work for poverty wages.  Every worker should earn a living wage.  Despite the insistence of Tea Party types, the real inequality problem is not a result of "government giveaways" to the poor (mostly children), but because people working full-time (albeit, at times, in several part-time jobs)  cannot make ends meet.

The answer is legislating a living wage — at this time, about fifteen bucks an hour — indexed for inflation.  Certain businesses will have to spend a lot more on labor.  Who will pay for those extra expenses?  Well, the rest of us, of course.  We won't be able to lay it all on the rich, as much as we might like to do so.  Just the same, we'd be spending a lot less to support programs like SNAP (aka food stamps) and Medicaid.

Also, when the people at the bottom get a boost, higher wages trickle up.  Okay, that will push prices up — but the people hurt most by inflation (apart from retirees like me) are the bankers.  You can be sure the bankers will find a way to deal with inflation, even if it means keeping a bit less of their wealth.

Nobody working full-time ever should have to depend on the social safety net for survival.

Trickle Up

No, it's not money trickling up.  Money is rushing up with an audible whoosh.

What's trickling up are jobs — crappy jobs.  All those asshole talking heads telling you how what young people need today is "more education" to qualify for "so many jobs" employers "can't fill" because they can't find "qualified" workers are, pretty much, full of shit.  These days, jobs that used to require a high school diploma — secretaries, sales reps, waiters and waitresses at upscale restaurants — are going to young people with four year college degrees.  Why?  Because they can't get anything better.

A 2-year degree might give you an edge up for a job at Hooters, provided your hooters make the grade, but you'll still be living on sub-minimum wage plus tips.  Unless your hooters are fantastic, don't expect the tips to be too great unless you can get those drooling bastards really drunk.

Then there are the famous "STEM" jobs — science, technology, engineering, and math.  Recently, I met a young man with a four-year degree in physics, but he couldn't even find a teaching job at a high school.  He had attended a well respected state university, and his grade point index was better than 3.5.  Yes, if he'd earned a 4.0 from an Ivy, he might have been recruited by Wall Street.  Too bad, kid.

As for all those "STEM" jobs, expect most of them go to immigrants with H-1B visas, who are accustomed to earning a lot less than native born "STEM" workers.  The main reason there is so much "bipartisan" enthusiasm for immigration reform is to keep wages low.

Will there be some young people who do well?  Of course, if their pedigree is sufficiently correct.  As Billie Holiday sang, "them that's got shall get..."

Romney on Education

I just read the Romney campaign's "white paper" on education.  Absolutely nothing in it surprised me.

Central to Mitt's K-12 "reform" are vouchers.  He praises George W. Bush's DC Opportunity Scholarship Program, which Barack Obama allowed to lapse.  It provided federal funds to allow poor DC children to attend "private" schools.  Needless to say, the only "private" schools poor families could afford, given the size of the scholarships, were religious schools — resulting in direct federal subsidies of religious education.

While the Romney model includes a lot of talk of poor children leaving poorly performing schools, reading slightly between the lines we imply that his idea is that every child should be able to take his or her share of public spending on education to the school of his or her parents' choice.  In some states, which offer "scholarship" programs for children to attend private schools at taxpayer expense, children are learning that Earth is 6000 years old, and that the fossil record reflects the aftermath of Noah's flood.  (I can't be entirely sure, but it looks like those stay-at-home moms "home schooling" their kids might also be able to suckle at the public teat.  It's certain, though, that those entrepreneurial types offering online "schooling" would qualify.)

Romney would provide block grants to states that eliminate teacher tenure and seniority rules.  He wants to remove teacher certification requirements, which might impede "talented" individuals from entering the field.  Needless to say, he is just as enamored of testing children to evaluate their teachers and schools as all the other clowns tumbling out of their clown cars into the political arena.  Of course the questions might be a little different.

Which of these is the approximate age of the Earth?
a. 4.5 billion years
b. a million years, give or take a million
c. 6000 years
d. a little older than grandma

As far as higher education is concerned, Romney's main concern is to re-privatize the college loan program.  Things were much better, after all, when the banks serviced loans made with federal money — with no bank funds at risk — and collecting all the fees and interest.  Romney's Wall Street buds clearly regretted losing that cash cow.

Finally, Romney calls for (you guessed it) deregulation of colleges.  The main thrust of that would be eliminating the Obama regulation that for-profit schools provide prospective students with data on what proportion of their graduates find gainful employment, in the field for which they trained, upon graduation.  Clearly, such regulation stifles entrepreneurs like those who created the "Draw Me" Matchbook School of Art and Late-Night Cable HVAC University.

Granted, I think Obama's basketball buddy Arne Duncan is a perfectly awful Secretary of Education.  On the other hand, things could get worse — much, much worse.

Dump Duncan

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is, in my opinion, incompetent. Yes, he plays basketball with Our President, and he was named CEO of the Chicago public schools by Little Rich Daley, but so what? His most noteworthy "qualification" seems to be that he hung out with some kids from the "hood" — including a few who "made it" — while he was still in high school. Did it have something to do with his mother's white liberal "outreach" to Chicago's poor blacks, or did it have everything to do with it?

(Did he ever spend so much as a semester in the classroom? Of course not! He's one of the elite, and they don't lower themselves to a point of actually teaching. I shit upon him — figuratively, of course, because I see no opportunity to do it literally.)

Gag me with a spoon. Duncan is just another elitist asshole with "free market" pretensions — pretty much the same as Our President. Firing every goddamned teacher and administrator in Rhode Island's Central Falls High School is just fine with fucking Arne — and with fucking Barack as well.

Okay, here's an idea: instead of firing all the teachers of Central Falls, how about swapping them with the "successful" teachers of East Greenwich? East Greenwich is even more Anglo than Central Falls is minority, and vastly more affluent. Let's see how well those "successful" East Greenwich teachers do when they're tossed into the hood.

(As to the reverse: it doesn't matter who teaches affluent kids — they still succeed.)

So how do we save American education? Personally, I like that idea of teacher exchange — which would demonstrate that "bad teachers" are not the problem. That won't happen, though, so here are some other impossible ideas:

• Fire all the kids who attend "failing" schools. Better kids, certainly, would improve those underperforming schools.
• Fire all the parents of kids who attend failing schools. If their parents weren't failing, the kids would be all right.
• Mix the kids from the "failing" schools and the "successful" schools together, applying massive, random transfers. The average success rate will not change, but the number of "failing" schools will decline.

Mostly, though, get rid of Arne Duncan — and everybody else who never worked a classroom but pretends to understand what is wrong with American education. Find ways to move America's underclass into, at least, the working class — and move the working class, via education, into the middle class. The problems with American education are problems of social class — and you can't fix American education without fixing America.

The right stimulus

It's time for another stimulus package, and this time, it looks like the Democrats, at least, have it right -- extended unemployment insurance, increased food stamps, and direct aid to the states. The states are in bad shape, particularly those required by their state constitutions to have balanced budgets. In New York, Governor Patterson called for $2 billion in cuts just for the current fiscal year, which ends April 1. Most of the money would come from hospital and school budgets, primarily in the form of lay-offs.

While it's true you can't solve American education's endemic problems by "throwing money" at them, budget cuts will make schools a lot worse. Cut staff and schools become genuinely intolerable. The puddle of vomit stays on the floor all day, the decibel level in the cafeteria goes into the danger zone, and the bullies rule the hallways. In overcrowded classrooms, teachers spend more time on discipline and less on instruction. In some classrooms, that means there's no instruction at all.

The only students who seem to be able to learn under these conditions are the children of recent Asian immigrants. Before you call me a racist, let me call your attention to two recent articles in the New York Times.

In the first of those articles, we learn that Asian students are the group most likely to qualify for New York City's elite high schools, "including the storied triumvirate of Stuyvesant, Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech." At Stuyvesant, 72% of those admitted, by competitive exam, are Asian. The second article is about the efforts of Long Island's well regarded Jericho school district to get the parents of Asian students to show up at school activities. They don't join PTA and don't attend concerts (even though the orchestra is 70% Asian.) Somehow their kids keep getting into top colleges even though they don't attend college nights.

Apparently, whatever Asian parents are doing to help their kids succeed is happening at home. If we really want to improve the results we get from American schools, we may have to replace some doctors of education with anthropologists.

Some say Asian parents put excessive emphasis on test scores (and violin?), but I don't see that as the reason their children tend to be so much more successful. I think the secret is that they care about accomplishment rather than "effort" -- that their kids never hear, "Don't worry, you tried your best." They trust teachers to do their jobs, but recognize that the student, not the teacher, is responsible for learning. It follows that Asian-American students actually find it necessary to work hard to gain parental approval. How innovative!

In his most recent column, Times contributor Nicholas D. Kristof calls on Barack Obama to make sure education isn't on the "back burner," and to make improvement of urban schools a primary concern. That, he says, is the "most effective anti-poverty program." Most would agree, but the difficult question is, how do we go about it? Nothing tried so far seems to have worked especially well.

Well, here's my idea. Let's replace all the administrators, guidance counsellors, and school psychologists with Asian immigrants. They know how to apply the right stimulus -- the one that gets results.