Category Archives: Education / Youth

Family Values

What are “family values?”

To hear Republicans describe them, family values are a traditional, a backward-facing insistence on sexual “purity” (for women) and heterosexuality: mom in the home watching the children (no pre-school or day care), gays in the closet, no access to abortion. Occasionally, there will be a nod to the importance of dad’s fidelity, but that gets awkward these days, given GOP allegiance to a male sexual predator.

Democratic policies illustrate a very different approach to valuing families.

For one thing, Democrats emphasize job creation, so that families can adequately care for the children they may–or may not–choose to have. (On that score, the GOP’s performance has been dismal: during the DNC, Bill Clinton noted that, since 1989, America has created about 51 million new jobs. Fifty million were created during Democratic administrations, one million under Republicans. This jaw-dropping statistic turned out to be true, albeit slightly misleading.)

Even if you discount the importance of a robust economy to the health of the American family, a glance at the policies pursued by the parties confirms that Democrats are far more family-friendly. Nicholas Kristof recently made that case. Calling Republican efforts to paint themselves as the “pro-family” party “chutzpah,” Kristof wrote

Children are more likely to be poor, to die young and to drop out of high school in red states than in blue states. The states with the highest divorce rates are mostly Republican, and with some exceptions like Utah, it’s in red states that babies are more likely to be born to unmarried mothers (partly because of lack of access to reliable contraception).

One of President Biden’s greatest achievements was to cut the child poverty rate by almost half, largely with the refundable child tax credit. Then Republicans killed the program, sending child poverty soaring again.

Can anything be more anti-child?

Well, maybe our firearms policy is. Guns are the leading cause of death for American children and teenagers, largely because of Republican intransigence and refusal to pass meaningful gun safety laws.

It’s because of the G.O.P. that the United States is one of only a few countries in the world without guaranteed paid maternity leave. Republicans fought universal health care and resisted the expansion of Medicaid; that’s one reason a child in the United States is three times as likely to die by the age of 5 as a child in, say, Slovenia or Estonia.

Kristof also noted several of the anti-child policies advanced in Project 2025, including ending Head Start–which has been a lifeline for low-income children– and dismantling the Department of Education.

Banning abortion and requiring women to give birth whether or not they can afford to feed and clothe a child is hardly “pro family”– even ignoring the fact that when women with dangerous pregnancies cannot access adequate care, they often die, leaving existing children motherless. And Republican extremism on abortion and birth control has led to obstacles to in vitro fertilization–for some families, the only avenue to producing those children Republicans want women to keep turning out.

Kristof also recognized the importance of the economy in supporting families. If marriage rates are important–and he agrees that they are–the evidence of economic influence is compelling.

Union membership among men raises their marriage rates, for example, apparently because they then earn more money and become more stable and appealing as partners. But Republicans have worked for decades to undermine unions.

And while marriage is important, so is access to divorce. Before easy access to divorce, large numbers of women were trapped in violent marriages that terrorized them and their children. (JD Vance is on record counseling women to remain in such marriages.) As Kristof notes,

One careful study by the economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers found that the introduction of no-fault divorce in America was associated with about a 20 percent reduction in female suicides, at least a 25 percent reduction in wife-beating and an apparent decline in husbands murdering wives.

Which raises the question: can an anti-women party be pro family values?

In this policy arena–as in so many others–the fundamental difference between today’s GOP and the Democratic Party really does get back to dramatic differences in values. That’s why calls to “bridge our differences” and “achieve compromise” ring so hollow. If the debate is about the best way to achieve result X–say, feeding hungry children–then we can absolutely come to some sort of mutual agreement. But when one party wants to feed children and the other party doesn’t, compromise isn’t likely. 

Americans aren’t divided over policy; we are divided over values–and not just family values.

 
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Why Red States Are In the Red

A recent column by Michael Hicks in the Capitol Chronicle focused on a data-point that is far too often overlooked. It seems that calling Republican-led states “Red” is entirely appropriate, because most of them are in the red.

(Before going into the details of the column, I want to note that the Chronicle is part of an encouraging trend here in my city–a trend that is also showing up elsewhere. As I have repeatedly noted, the dearth of local reporting has had a very negative effect on democracy and the sense of community. In city after city, local newspapers have either disappeared or–as in Indianapolis–turned into “ghost papers” that no longer cover the sorts of things citizens need to know about their local institutions. Recently, however, we’ve seen several new media entrants that propose to fill the gap–including Axios Indianapolis, The Mirror, State Affairs, and the Chronicle.) 

But back to Hicks. He begins this particular column by noting that from the end of World War II up until about 1980, economic differences among the states bore little relationship to the partisanship of those states.

In fact, if you picked just one variable that best measured prosperity — per capita income — the was no correlation with political party. There were rich states led by Republican and Democratic governors and poor states led by both as well.

Over the past 40 years, that changed. Today, 19 of the 20 richest states are solidly Democratic, while 19 of the 20 poorest states are solidly Republican. It is clear that the GOP has become the party of poor states, while the Democrats have become the party of prosperous states.

The question, as usual, is “why?”

One big culprit is that political parties changed, erasing regional differences. Up until the late 90’s, there were conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans. That is no longer the case, so as states began to align with national politics platforms.

This trend more extreme today. Even races for local government tend to be highly nationalized. State and local issues are often ignored in primary or general elections. This homogeneity of national politics naturally tends to cause parties to have success in places that are more similar – polarizing states between parties.

A second trend is the sorting by politics increasingly effects household location choice. Though much sorting happens at the local level, the nationalization of politics means that state borders now effect household location choice.

The nationalization of politics means that each party has been staking out positions that appeal to majorities in key states. In this way, politicians are choosing their voters. The sorting of households reflects voters choosing political landscapes they prefer, on economic, fiscal and cultural issues. This trend appears to be accelerating.

That last paragraph reminded me of the demographic observations in Bill Bishop’s 2009 book The Big Sort.

Hicks acknowledges that there is never one simple reason for economic performance, but he also hones in on what appears to be the largest cause of the disparity between Red and Blue states: public education.

The cause of the economic divergence is because human capital — education, innovation and invention — replaced manufacturing and movement of goods as the primary source of prosperity. This means that places that grow will necessarily need to develop and attract more human capital. But the educational policies pursued by both parties are vastly different, with very different outcomes.

The GOP has largely tried to adopt broad school choice, and cut funding to both K-12 and higher education. The Democrats have largely eschewed school choice, but amply funded both K-12 and higher education. Seventeen of the 20 best funded states are Democratically controlled and 17 out of the 20 lowest funded states are GOP strongholds. Educational outcomes between these states are stark.

Educational attainment differences alone explain about three quarters of the difference in per capita income between states….

Voucher programs haven’t just failed to generate superior test scores. They’ve impoverished our critically important public school systems –and kept Red states like Indiana poor. As Hicks concludes,

Economists have been saying this for three decades, without any effect in poor states. The prognosis is simply that poor states — like Indiana — are going to get poorer for decades to come. While rich states will grow richer.

Not that Indiana’s terrible legislature will take note….

I recently discussed the abysmal effects of voucher programs on the podcast co-hosted by Morton Marcus and John Guy: Who Gets What? 

If you have some time, tune in.

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Project 2025, Public Education And The Public Good

Today’s post is a bit longer than usual, so consider yourself forewarned.

As we’ve learned more about the various elements of “Plan 2025,” it looks increasingly like an all-out attack on the America most of us believe in. There’s the assault on women (the effort to take us back to what those nice White “Christian” men consider our proper role as breeders and housemaids); the fight to remove any and all elements of a social safety net (who needs health insurance or Social Security?); the multiple provisions favoring the wealthy over the middle-class; and a full-scale attack on public education.

Time Magazine, among others, has reported on the education portion of the White Nationalists’ plan.

Project 2025, the policy agenda for Former President Trump’s potential first year back in the White House published by the far right conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, has been making waves recently. Some of the many destructive proposals within the agenda include the elimination of the U.S. Department of Education—along with federal education funding and any civil rights protections—and the diversion of public money to private school voucher programs instead.

Make no mistake: The goal is to end public education. 

As the article goes on to detail, the measures in Project 2025 are a continuation of the same efforts we’ve seen the past several decades– efforts to turn education into a consumer good available to those who can afford such luxuries. 

We are on the brink of a new wave of public school closures, another step in the decades-long project to divest and dismantle the institution of public school. Disguised as “school choice,” federal, state, local, and private actors have prioritized paying for  private and charter schools, hoarding educational resources for the haves and depleting resources for the have-nots.

The policies that Project 2025 plans to prioritize—government payments to families sending their children to private school and creation of new charter schools that are run like businesses—have expanded in the last few years, starving public school districts that serve all students of already insufficient resources. In the 2023-24 school year, at least 70 school districts, including in San Antonio, Texas, Jackson, Mississippi, and Wichita, Kansas, announced permanent closures of public schools, impacting millions of students. These districts are resorting to the harmful, discriminatory, and ineffective so-called ‘solution’ of closing schools in Black and Latine communities, stripping those communities of their local public schools.

The schools already being closed are (not so coincidentally) those in the poorer areas of cities–the schools that serve low-income and minority students, and that have historically been underfunded– depriving the communities around them of “community resources like adult education, polling locations, a place to hold community meetings, and access to democratic community control through school board elections.”

Despite the original rhetoric about opening access to “better” schools for underprivileged kids, voucher programs now primarily benefit upper-middle class parents, many of whom were previously paying to send their children to private and parochial schools.

What is ironic about this effort to deny educational opportunities to those with the fewest resources is how costly it is.

Pro Publica reports that the voucher program in Arizona has “blown a hole” in that state’s budget.

Arizona, the model for voucher programs across the country, has spent so much money paying private schoolers’ tuition that it’s now facing hundreds of millions in budget cuts to critical state programs and projects.

Two years ago, Arizona passed the largest school voucher program in the history of education. The program was generous: “any parent in the state, no matter how affluent, could get a taxpayer-funded voucher worth up to tens of thousands of dollars to spend on private school tuition, extracurricular programs or homeschooling supplies.”

In just the past two years, nearly a dozen states have enacted sweeping voucher programs similar to Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Account system, with many using it as a model.

Indiana was one of those states.

Yet in a lesson for these other states, Arizona’s voucher experiment has since precipitated a budget meltdown. The state this year faced a $1.4 billion budget shortfall, much of which was a result of the new voucher spending, according to the Grand Canyon Institute, a local nonpartisan fiscal and economic policy think tank. Last fiscal year alone, the price tag of universal vouchers in Arizona skyrocketed from an original official estimate of just under $65 million to roughly $332 million.

As a result, Arizona has cut $333 million out of water infrastructure projects (as the article pointed out, this in a state where water scarcity is a huge issue). It cut tens of millions of dollars for highway repairs, and $54 million from Arizona’s community colleges, among other cuts.

In Indiana, voucher program costs have ballooned to $439 million, some 40 percent higher than in 2022–2023.

Despite the enormous costs– vouchers haven’t improved educational outcomes. 

In the Public Interest recently noted that the assault on public education is part of a larger attack on the very notion of a “public good.”

We define public goods as the things we all need to survive and thrive–the big things: public health, mobility, knowledge, democracy, shelter, clean air and water, the ability to communicate with each other (including, lately, broadband access). Public goods include things we need everyone to have. Those are things that we can only do if we do them together. It is part of our responsibility to each other, and it forms the basis of our society. And for a very long time in the United States, there was a consensus that we need every child, not just one’s own children, to get a high-quality education.

It seems beyond the imagination of many conservatives that people might—or should—care about and feel any responsibility regarding the plight of someone who is not within their own personal sphere or realm of identity. (It also seems of a piece with the way former Ohio Senator Rob Portman became receptive to gay rights only after his own son came out to him.)

Margaret Thatcher once said of society “There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families.”

Such a narrow and individual approach to public policy is at the root of the notion of “school choice,” a catchy name for programs like vouchers that essentially move public money from public schools to private schools. It holds that K-12 education is best offered as a function of the marketplace, something with which only school age children and their parents should be concerned. It doesn’t view education as the necessary component of a functioning democracy, nor does it value the social cohesion that universal public education can foster…

The reality of “school choice individualism” is that schools that receive public money that comes from all of us via vouchers want to be able to exclude some of us.  They don’t have to follow the rules of public schools—they can pick and choose students, and they can–and do–discriminate against anyone they choose: those with disabilities, families who are part of the LGBTQ community, and religious affiliations they deem unacceptable.

The article concluded with a dig at JD Vance’s oft-expressed disdain for public goods and “childless cat ladies.”

While many conservatives don’t seem to regard public education as a public good but rather as an expression of a shopping preference for families, the vast majority of Americans do see education as a public good. And that includes those who have school-age children, those with children who are now adults, those who have never had children, and even, we’re sure, quite a few cat ladies.

Meow…

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The Things We Know That Just Aren’t So…

Michael Hicks is an economist on the faculty of Ball State University. He recently published two columns in the Indianapolis Star that deserve widespread attention.

Hicks documents two inconvenient facts: more people move into high-tax areas than into low-tax precincts, and economic conditions in Blue cities and states are significantly better than conditions in Red parts of the country.

Hicks makes that first assertion in a column discussing the repeated mantra of candidates for Indiana’s legislature--elect me and I’ll cut property taxes! High property taxes are why Indiana keeps losing population! He points out that–despite the popularity of these proposals, property tax cuts would be highly unlikely to grow population, employment, GDP or household incomes. The data shows that population growth tends to cluster in high-tax places.

In Indiana, the 10 counties with the highest effective property tax rates alone accounted for 27,105 new residents since 2020, a whopping 61.3% of the state’s entire population growth. The 10 counties with the lowest effective property tax rates saw only 878 new residents, or less than 2% of the state’s growth.

I know many readers will recoil at this challenge to a long-held notion that lower taxes cause growth. However, it is a cold, hard fact that both population and employment growth is positively correlated with tax rates on income and property.

In Indiana, a 1% increase in the average tax rate leads to a 2% increase in population growth. That is simple mathematics.

Why would that be? As Hicks concedes, no one looks at tax rates and says “Let’s move to where taxes are higher.” What they do look at are indicators of quality of life–public services and amenities that will be available to them.

These are places where families judge themselves better off. If you live in a state where families are moving from low- to high-tax regions, your state is underinvesting in local amenities such as schools, parks, and public safety.

That reality–anathema as it is to those who view all taxation as evil–goes a long way toward explaining another phenomenon Hicks has discussed–the difference between the economic performance of Red and Blue areas of the country.

Nationwide, it is unambiguously clear that the U.S. economy is performing historically well. On every important measure — employment, wages, GDP, or wealth — the overall economy is not just performing at record levels, but also outperforming the rest of the world.

Robust national economic performance has benefits for every county and small town, but that does not mean every place shares equally in economic growth. There are plenty of places that continue to do poorly.

And the gap between them is growing. Rich places are, for the most part, getting richer and poor places poorer–in contrast to what has typically happened before. Moreover,

poor places are increasingly governed by Republicans and rich places by Democrats. The gap between rich and poor places might help explain the partisan differences in perceptions of the economy.

The regional differences are compelling across dimensions of rural and urban places, as well as between cities and rural areas.

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The MAGA Vendetta Against Arts And Education

Well, I see where Ron DeSantis has petulantly stripped thirty-two million dollars of art funding from the Florida budget.

Ron DeSantis stripped more than $32m in arts and culture funding from Florida’s state budget over his hatred of a popular fringe festival that he accused of being “a sexual event”, critics of the rightwing governor say.

DeSantis justified his unprecedented, wide-ranging veto of grants to almost 700 groups and organizations by saying it was “inappropriate” for $7,369 of state money to be allocated to Tampa fringe, a 10-day festival that took place earlier this month with a strong message of inclusivity, and its sister event in Orlando.

I talk a lot about culture war on this blog. Usually, that term connotes the growing willingness of MAGA Republicans to publicly indulge their bigotries against Blacks, women, LBGTQ+ citizens and non-fundamentalist Christians, but DeSantis’ recent fit of pique should remind us that the war against anything “woke” extends to important aspects of the actual culture: the arts, certainly, but also public education. (The GOP proclivity for “projection”–accusing others of their own behaviors–is obvious in their hysterical ranting about public education “indoctrination.”)

The most successful effort to replace American public education with religious indoctrination, of course, has come in the guise of “parental choice,” or vouchers, which allow public monies to be siphoned from the public schools and sent  disproportionately to religious schools. I have posted repeatedly about that effort, which has not only failed to improve test scores but has increased civic divisiveness and re-segregated the schools in several places.

I forget who first popularized the phrase “you ain’t seen nothin’ yet,” but if Trump should win in November, Project 2025 has outlined policies that would dramatically escalate the attack on public education.

Here are some of the elements of what I can only describe as an assault on steroids:

  • Title I, the $18 billion federal fund that supports low-income students, would disappear in a decade.
  • Federal special education funds would flow to school districts as block grants with no strings attached, or even to savings accounts for parents to use on private school or other education expenses.
  • The U.S. Department of Education would be eliminated.
  • The federal government’s ability to enforce civil rights laws in schools would be scaled back.

The proposals are contained in a comprehensive policy agenda that’s part of a Heritage Foundation-led initiative called Project 2025: Presidential Transition Project, which includes nearly 900 pages of detailed plans for virtually every corner of the federal government and a database of potential staffers for a conservative administration. It will also feature a playbook for the first 180 days of a new term.

Project 2025 was devised by several former Trump administration officials and allies, working with dozens of aligned advocacy organizations (misnamed “think tanks.”) including Moms for Liberty. You will recall that Moms for Liberty is the organization that fought school boards over COVID-19 safety protocols, advocates for censorship of books in school libraries, and endorses far-right school board candidates.

Trump has said that parents should elect school principals. He advocates the abolition of teacher tenure, has promised to cut federal funding to schools pushing “progressive” social ideas, and pledges to establish universal school choice.

Under the Project 2025 agenda, states would be able to opt out of federal education programs, whose “regulatory burden far exceeds the federal government’s less than 10 percent financing share of K–12 education,” the document asserts.

States would also have full authority to decide how to spend Title I funds, which currently go to schools with large populations of low-income students.

Under the Project 2025 plan, those funds would first flow to states as “no-strings-attached” block grants before they’re phased out in a decade. Parents of students attending Title I schools could even have access to the federal funds in “micro-education savings accounts” to pay for private education or supplemental services for their kids. The plan outlines similar ambitions for funds distributed under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, the nation’s special education law, though it doesn’t propose phasing them out.

The assault on public education has displayed the fundamental disconnect between the civic purposes of education and citizens who see education as just another private, consumer good–skills to be acquired (by those who can afford it) in order to enhance the ability of one’s children to succeed in the marketplace.

Access to the arts and a common base of educational knowledge both facilitate civic conversation and cohesion. Both enlarge our understanding of the world we inhabit–its complexity and, yes, its diversity. The arts and liberal education are the antithesis of rigid ideology and group-think.

I assume that’s why MAGA cannot tolerate either.

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