CT Progressive

This story at The Mirror has been kicking around my head for a few days now:

After the Sheff order, dozens of open enrollment magnet schools with themes such as science or the arts opened across the state with the aim of promoting voluntary integration. However, unlike magnet schools, charters did not have specific racial targets and were designed to test innovative approaches to curriculum and teaching. Several of the schools opened in the state’s poorest cities, aimed specifically at disadvantaged students, most of whom are members of minority groups.

In 11 of the state’s 18 charters, minority children account for more than 94 percent of the students.

“The charter school movement has been a major political success, but it has been a civil rights failure,” UCLA Professor Gary Orfield wrote in a foreword to the Civil Rights Project report. Orfield, one of the nation’s leading authorities on school desegregation, was a witness for the plaintiffs in the original Sheff trial.

[...]

“The biggest problem with the report is it ignores student achievement,” Toll said. “It prioritizes integration above everything else.” In too many of the nation’s schools, “many of our minority kids are not getting a quality education,” she said. “That’s the real civil rights issue.”

At schools such as Jumoke, closing the achievement gap is the overriding goal.

Located in a former Catholic school, an aging brick building in Hartford’s North End, Jumoke’s elementary school zeroes in on academics, scheduling lengthy blocks of time each day for reading, writing and mathematics.

The school provides daily enrichment classes for students who meet academic benchmarks and extra help for those who don’t. Children wear uniforms, and the school posts signs such as “Respect Others” and “No Bully Zone” along the walls, part of its effort to emphasize character development.

“We’re bringing in quality teachers … and setting expectations high,” says the school’s principal, Lynn Toper, a former State Department of Education consultant. “Our parents are thrilled to be here. How often do you hear that?”

Both sides of the argument are sympathetic, but after some time thinking about it, I think that what the charter issue really highlights are the limits of using public schools as engines for social change. Schools are one of the best tools we have, but they can’t reverse a slow trend towards “soft” segregation based in tax policy, zoning laws, real estate steering, legacy economic gaps, and social stigmatization of cities among wealthier classes. Integrating our schools can’t, by itself, integrate our society.

What struck me was the quote that “Our parents are thrilled to be here. How often do you hear that?” My concern is that charters, on top of not being as racially diverse as they could be, introduce a class-based division into a larger educational system that was already highly segregated by race. As opt-in institutions, charters will disproportionately attract children whose parents are highly motivated and with the resources (time, transportation) to pursue those opportunities for their kids. Likewise, high-performing students and those with high degrees of parental involvement are drained from public schools, diminishing the variety of experience and background shared with student peers — in both sets of institutions. I see it as potentially being a parent-driven form of tracking for students.

In any case, if the article piqued your interest, it’s worth checking out the entire report [PDF link] — it weighs in at 85 pages before the endnotes and appendices. I haven’t made it all the way through, but I will.

The debate over Connecticut’s film tax credits has been fascinating – and there’s a new post up at the WFP blog that tries to sort it all out by characterizing both sides of the argument.

On the one side, it’s a massive giveaway from the State of Connecticut to companies that don’t necessarily create jobs or spend money in our borders. That sucks. But, the massive giveaway creates good jobs in other places, and maybe someday those jobs will come here.

I’m trying to be briefer than usual without being rude, but that’s really the heart of it. And what it illustrates is the sorry state of, for lack of a better phrase, tax philosophy in our political system.

If you believe in the theory that the government can do counter-cyclical spending to boost the economy in a recession, then you’d come up with a range of different ideas to help boost the economy in appropriate ways. As Gary LeBeau says in a post linked from the WFP blog, film production has some excellent qualities:

* It is second only to aerospace as the top export of the United States.
* It is a clean industry that is high tech, high value added and highly skilled.
* It brings excitement to wherever it is located and a magnet to keep young people.

The film industry also, due to high levels of unionization, pays workers at all levels a fair wage that will generally re-circulate in the economy. Those bullet points might also apply to financial products, but dropping a billion dollars on the financial services industry won’t stimulate the economy in the way that putting cash in the hands of middle-class workers will.

So if you wanted to promote the film industry in Connecticut, why not give them in-state stuff credits — paying for the cost of their carpentry, for vehicle rental, subsidizing production staff, etc? Or, just offer grants for artists working in the state. Art is nice, and more utilitarian than the also-made-in-Connecticut F-22s. So why not spend money on films by Connecticut residents? And failing all of that, you could just have the state government buy movie tickets and send them to people, because theater employees will then spend their money on rent and groceries, and at the very least we’ll be able to enjoy some movies in the process. And that money would be partly recouped by the state as is circulates around. Spending money to subsidize work that is being done in California might be a legitimate public policy interest, but one that should be handled by the Federal government.

Similarly, there’s an idea that you tax things you want less of, and subsidize things you want more of – think sales taxes on junk food but not on produce – and was recently reflected in the state plastic bag bill which died on the calendar without a vote this year. The bill would charge a nickel for every plastic bag purchased, and spend that money to enhance local recycling facilities. Of course, since it went down, towns are introducing legislation on plastic bags, preferring outright bans to revenue-enhancing fee measures.

Anyway, this dovetails nicely with this tidbit from Ezra Klein’s interview with Bruce Bartlett, a not-insane conservative economist, who offers a theory about why our tax policy is so stupid:

I think the administration made a mistake approaching the funding of health-care reform how it did and I think Republicans made a mistake refusing to seriously debate the issue or its funding. [...]

I think there’s a couple of reasons for that. Both sides are pathologically afraid of advocating any kind of tax that would be paid by the average person. Republicans are opposed in particular to the VAT precisely because it’s such a good tax. They fear it would become a money machine and it would help the government grow. I agreed with that for a long time. But the problem now is that we need a money machine! We have all this spending in the pipeline. It’s not a question of whether we’ll create new programs. It’s whether we’ll fund the ones that are already there.

The biggest shame is that Republicans don’t negotiate in good faith to set up our tax system in a way that is logical and functional top to bottom. Having a VAT to fund healthcare is a decent idea, and consistent with a lot of best practices both here and abroad, but since the GOP has a monomaniacal opposition to taxes at every level, we’ll probably have to do it with an cap of the tax exemption for healthcare or an adjustment to the top rate. And since there’s no rational debate about the best way to do it, nominal health reform allies will wind up being split off because they won’t be able to deliver a pony plan for free.

Ezra Klein did an interview with the on-the-mend Henry Waxman on the subject of his recently-released book, and he promises that it will include a more sweeping description of how the sausage factory runs than is normally featured in this kind of work:

I wrote the book with the help of Joshua Green, a superb writer. It sets out many anecdotes and behind-the-scenes information that people don’t ordinarily hear about in books about how Congress works. They usually hear about a House subcommittee then a committee then the Senate then the Senate committee. They think about it in terms of little boxes. I try to portray the forces at play in dealing with legislation and how some things that were big battles at the time are now taken for granted.

It was a big battle to get food producers to put uniform labels advising people about calories and sodium and carbohydrates and other nutrients on food. But I think most people take it for granted that they can see those labels when they go into the store and use them to make their decisions. But the food producers said they were going to go bankrupt if they had to put these labels on, it would be such a burden, it would be excessive. Finally we got it passed. And I don’t think most people give it a second thought today. It’s just there. [...]

I also talk about the Clean Air Act, which is the most successful environmental law on the books today. There was a huge fight over a one–year period to get that legislation enacted. But now people in the Northeastern parts of the United States that were seeing acid rain don’t have that problem any more. And the cost turned out to be a tenth what they said it would be even though different industries argued that our economy would go to hell. Invariably they met their requirements, met them ahead of time, and met them at a fraction of the predicted costs. So we’ve had very successful laws. But very few people talk about government in those terms.

Funny, Connecticut’s Governor just vetoed a calorie-labeling bill for restaurants, using those very same scare tactics:

“Does it come as a surprise to anyone that a vegetable salad is healthier and more nutritious than a bacon cheeseburger?” the Governor said. “There has been a growing and troubling tendency by some to legislate nearly every aspect of our lives and society, including personal responsibility. Such legislation always comes at a cost to the taxpayer and to individual freedom.”

Governor Rell also noted the cost such a bill would impose on restaurateurs and on the Department of Public Health, adding, “This is hardly the economic climate in which to further burden our businesses and state agencies.”

I included that bit about the Clean Air Act from Waxman’s answer because it occurs to me that there’s a vast amount of what could charitably be described as lying going on in the organized opposition to progressive legislation, and somehow history manages to forget the names of those that tell tales of grossy inflated costs to industry and the supposedly market-destroying impact of pro-consumer and pro-health regulations. If the laws get passed, then advocates are putting their resources into the next fight; if the laws fail, then the lying goes unproven. But from watching the damage that can accrue to politicians that repeat these kinds of falsehoods, it seems like revisiting the claims of industry groups would have a strong public policy benefit, a potential that advocates haven’t yet tapped.

Meanwhile, we have turned into a public-relations society. Much of the news Americans get each day was created to serve just that purpose—to be the news of the day. Many of our headlines come from events created by public relations—press conferences, speeches, press releases, canned reports, and, worst of all, snappy comments by “spokesmen” or “experts.” To serve as a counterpoint, we need reporters with expertise.

— Walter Pincus, Newspaper Narcissism

Three cheers again for the Fairfield County Weekly, which has had a recent trend toward publishing political stories that are interesting but which I had no idea I was interested in before they published the piece. We all know from political friends in the state and long-running discussions on different policy issues which bills to follow in the legislature, which ambitious politicos are looking to move up, which perennial subjects will produce some news and some competing press releases, and so on.

In any case, check out this article about the introduction of roving traffic cameras — the way that they’re changing law enforcement practices, and the new privacy concerns that they’re raising. It involves genuine reporting from sources in no fewer than five different cities, and sets the table for a debate that very few people are interested in having just yet. News of the day week that’s not designed to be the news of the day.