Month: March 2012

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The Insured and the Neighborly

The current debate about forcing citizens to buy health care reminds me that many citizens of this country pay for a service from which they receive no direct benefit– public education.  Consider how many tax-payers do not have children in the public schools: childless citizens, citizens who send their kids to private schools, citizens whose children left public schools a generation ago, citizens who home-school their children, citizens whose children are expelled from school. That’s quite a constituency paying for services they don’t receive.

Why do they put up with it?

I suppose their theory is that children in school are children who will not become public liabilities by delinquency, unemployment or requiring welfare benefits. Public schools are a kind of insurance against anti-social behavior and its consequences.  Does that mean tax-payers finance a program that protects them from the liabilities of those who might not otherwise participate in the program?  So it would appear.

We hear a lot of this analogical thinking in the current Supreme Court arguments, but most of it comes from the conservative justices who wonder if citizens can be compelled to buy broccoli (Justice Scalia).  Are we not already financing the unhealthy by being compelled to pay for Medicare and Medicaid? Are we not already financing the uneducated by paying for their schooling?

I have always preferred the arguments of the high road to social welfare, such as “Who is my neighbor?” In the Parable of the Good Samaritan Jesus makes a case for humanity toward those whose well-being does not affect us at all. The Samaritan in the parable helps an injured Jew, who has no kinship or tribal connection.  It is clear he will receive no compensation for his trouble. He does it out of compassion for a child of God.

That’s a very high standard to apply to citizenship in the United States, but it is a standard many of its citizens claim to live by. Why does it seem irrelevant to the cost of health care for the millions still uninsured?

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Evaluate Teachers Responsively

Reading the “Sunday Dialogue” about the evaluation of teachers in the March 18 New York Times, I have to agree with Joanne Yatvin that the best of the bunch came from a high school student, Nikhil Goyal, who said “Evaluation is not a spreadsheet. It is a conversation.” How profound!

“Responsive Evaluation” is actually a well-developed model of assessment, which assumes that both the evaluator and evaluated have something to say about the process (Robert E. Stake, 1975).   The doctor patient relationship, the work of the investigative reporter, the work of Congressional inquiry all turn on the notion of “responsive evaluation.”  The goal in each case is seek out evidence that will result in equitable and significant conclusions.

If the goal of teacher evaluation is to develop successful teachers, then responsive evaluation is the ideal process. If the goal is to merely weed out the most egregious cases of malpractice then an adversarial approach, such as that practiced by our legal system, is the solution. But we already have that in the tenure system, which most will agree is flawed.

The problems with responsive evaluation are that it is time-intensive and it does not invite definitive results. For those who are not being evaluated it appears to be a very equivocal system, one with conditions. If the teacher accomplishes certain goals in the future, the teacher will be qualified and perhaps even rewarded or promoted. If the teacher does not reach all of those goals then new goals are set.  Eventually definitive personnel decisions will be made, based on continuous and responsive evaluation.

For those who are not assessed or for those who teach under less problematic conditions, evaluation models that prolong personnel decisions  are unnecessary.  They appreciate the quick-and-dirty process of “evaluation-warning-dismissal.”  This more resembles the process of confining criminals or social misfits. And, of course, the intent is the same.

For those who teach under the most severe conditions, where students arrive in school from dysfunctional or less literate households, where adolescents may have heavy work or baby-sitting responsibilities, where school attendance is a basic challenge, the ability to teach always seems in question.  The abilities of such teachers are refracted even as the achievements of their students are.   Many are teaching exceptionally well with minimal results. Under those conditions responsive evaluation is the only equitable and productive model of assessment.

Or, as the wise Mr. Goyal said, “Evaluation is not a spreadsheet. It is a conversation.”

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War on Middle Class Mobility

If Rick Santorum or Mitt Romney become President, there would not be much hope for mobility in the middle class. Santorum disregards colleges as “indoctrination mills,” suggesting that college is not the key to success that the Obama administration considers it to be. Romney encouraged one student to find a low budget college, “And don’t expect government to forgive the debt you take on.”

This is very hard to hear from one candidate who has a Master’s degree and a J.D. and another candidate who attended an Ivy League school without the burden of student loans. There’s a hard subtext that says, “I’ve got mine, but you can’t assume you’ll get yours.” Or, as Paul Krugman concluded in his commentary on the two Republican candidates, “they believe that what you don’t know can’t hurt them” (New York Times, March 9).

The half-truths involved in these campaigns for the Republican nomination obscure  the brutal message of stunted class mobility from decreased access to higher education.  It is true that a university education is not the solution to an inadequate high school education.  Many students will climax their education in high school, if they have the staying power and the family income to sustain them.  High school graduation should prepare them for something, not merely college.

And it’s true that there are excellent moderate-priced universities for students to choose, although with persistent declines in state funding, “the tuition at public four-year colleges has risen 70% over the past decade,” according to Krugman. Graduates of such public institutions may not move directly into a six-figure income like Governor Romney, and many of them will have paid for their entire education with student loans that Romney will not forgive.

Even with such considerations, a college education remains the surest path to mobility within the middle and lower middle classes. Census data show that a college education will likely double the earned income compared to what a high school graduate will earn (2006).  The funds that allow so many college undergraduates to continue their education come from Pell Grants and other forms of federal student aid.  It is not the philanthropic funding from the private sector that keeps students from dropping out of college, it is the aid that pays their tuition while they work half-time or even full-time to pay their room and board.

How much of this do the sons of privilege understand?  How concerned are they for the first-generation college students whose every semester is a pitched battle between earning and learning?  How much do they care for the students who study their way out of poverty?

Perhaps this campaign does amount to class warfare, but the battle is not over who gets taxed. The battle front is the opportunity to learn and the possibility of social and economic advancement.  If they don’t understand the plight of students on the margins of higher education, then the Republican candidates are sadly misinformed. If they do understand the full implications of their policies toward higher education, then they are engaging in class warfare by despising or denying  these opportunities.

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Conviction and Passion

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity. (W.B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”)

When have these words from Yeats had more relevance than today?  With the retirement of Olympia Snow, the parade of moderates leaving the U.S. Senate has become a stampede.  The voices of moderation are sounding fainter and fainter.

Barry Goldwater said famously, “Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice. Tolerance in the face of tyranny is no virtue.” And Barry Goldwater has begun to look very amiable in this political climate.  Goldwater could always work across the aisle to draft legislation he believed in. He was a surprisingly tolerant Senator, when there was work to be done.

Today’s Congress operates as a “take-it-or-leave-it showdown,” said the New York Times today (March 1), paraphrasing Senator Snowe.  The “showdown” has become a  grinding halt.  The work of legislating has become the work of posturing, taking an inflexible political stance to demonstrate the will to get one’s own way. In some quarters this is characterized as standing on principle.  In others it is the collapse of good will.

For some reason the voting public is not impressed with “standing on principle,” as the approval rating of Congress has plummeted to the single digits.  There are principles and there are demands, even as in the international arena there is terrorism and there are sanctions.  Terrorism is taking extreme actions on the basis of beliefs, while sanctions are mounting and unified pressure to oppose repugnant policies.  Which of these best characterize the standoff we currently see in Congress?

It is certainly hyperbole to call the Congressional stalemate “terrorism,” but it falls far short of “sanctions,” because the pressure is coming from a minority of representatives and their resistance to productive legislation is losing its support. The “principled” right certainly found its limits with the passage of the payroll tax relief and unemployment extension in the last month.  Didn’t they actually cave in to the suffering of their middle class constituents? Didn’t they abandon their principles in the face of dire need? So no need to label these legislators as “terrorists,” because they were willing to compromise to save their collective necks, if not for the good of their constituents.

With eight months to go before the general election, the candidates at all levels should be choosing between “passionate intensity” and “conviction.”  And the voters should be discerning who has conviction and who has only passion. There is plenty of rhetorical passion in the media stream, but there is less conviction. Convictions have to go deeper than partisanship. They have to be grounded in serving “the greatest good for the greatest number” (John Stuart Mill).  There should be no unequivocal promises or tax covenants that would compromise this conviction. There should be no one-issue candidates. There should be candidates who will stand up to the bullies, the ones who press their case to bitter stalemate.

If the moderates are leaving, then God bless them for their service. Now we should replace them with men and women of good will, a working majority that will take seriously its responsibility to govern and not to willfully obstruct.