Double Whammy

A friend from Wisconsin often shares news reported in that state’s media. Most recently, he sent me an article reporting on the troubling results of research into poverty and public health.

Malia Jones is an assistant scientist and social epidemiologist working in Wisconsin. As she notes, her conclusions about increases in poverty despite the economic recovery are consistent with those reached by other scholars.

We didn’t look at explanations for that but other people have, and I think what’s happening is that people at the low end of the economic spectrum are not benefiting from recovery. They’re really being left behind. So inequality is increasing in the face of an expanding economy.

Jones’ work is one more confirmation that, as she says, low-income Americans are being left behind. But her analysis didn’t stop there, and her discussion of both the immediate and long-term implications requires attention.

In short, poor children in America are getting a “double whammy.”

Jones notes that the number of children living in poverty has increased since the Great Recession, and that the existence of children living in poverty is not only a humanitarian issue, but also a critical public health issue. As she points out, exposure to the myriad problems that accompany an impoverished childhood can lead to a lifetime of disability.

It’s those kinds of stressors like housing insecurity, not being sure if there’s going to be food for dinner, living in a crummy neighborhood with violence, those stressors can impair normal brain development.

Impaired brain development often leads to behavioral outcomes; as anyone who has taught in a low-income area can attest, it affects school performance in a variety of ways. Children of poverty often lack the opportunity or means to develop the sorts of skill sets common among middle and higher income students. That, in turn, affects later access to jobs, trapping such children in a cycle of poverty.

Living in poverty also increases the likelihood of poor health. Living in poverty is a major risk factor for obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and even premature death.

It seems unconscionable that the United States would ignore the lifetime health effects of poverty on poor children who are already living in sub-optimal and stressful conditions.  Even the self-satisfied and clueless scolds who insist that poor people just need to work harder can’t hold children responsible for their impoverished situations.  Surely, even the adamant opponents of Obamacare, Medicaid and other efforts to make health care affordable can’t believe that it is either moral or economically reasonable to deprive children of adequate medical attention.

And surely, even self-described fiscal conservatives must realize that the long-term costs of neglecting the most basic needs of poor children are far higher than the costs of timely intervention.

Why is it that American public policy choices so often make me think of the adage: penny wise, pound foolish?

Comments

Dispatch from the Front

Testing….123 testing….

The Washington Post recently reprinted an article originally written for Academe, the journal of the American Association of University Professors. It was a warning from a recently retired high school government teacher to college professors who would soon face classrooms filled with the products of reform efforts focused on high-stakes testing.

The article, while lengthy, is worth reading in its entirety. The author–a highly regarded teacher and scholar of education–made a number of observations that should be taken seriously by legislators (most of whom have no background in teaching) intent upon “improving” public education. A few of the high (or low) points:

In many cases, students would arrive in our high school without having had meaningful social studies instruction, because even in states that tested social studies or science, the tests did not count for “adequate yearly progress” under No Child Left Behind. With test scores serving as the primary if not the sole measure of student performance and, increasingly, teacher evaluation, anything not being tested was given short shrift.

Further, most of the tests being used consist primarily or solely of multiple-choice items, which are cheaper to develop, administer, and score than are tests that include constructed responses such as essays. Even when a state has tests that include writing, the level of writing required for such tests often does not demand that higher-level thinking be demonstrated, nor does it require proper grammar, usage, syntax, and structure. Thus, students arriving in our high school lacked experience and knowledge about how to do the kinds of writing that are expected at higher levels of education….

The structure of testing has led to students arriving at our school without what previously would have been considered requisite background knowledge in social studies, but the problem is not limited to this field. Students often do not get exposure to art or music or other nontested subjects. In high-need schools, resources not directly related to testing are eliminated: at the time of the teachers’ strike last fall, 160 Chicago public schools had no libraries. Class sizes exceeded forty students—in elementary school.

I have posted many times about the deficits I see in civic literacy–especially knowledge of American government and history. At the Center for Civic Literacy, one of our first inquiries was into the reasons for that deficit; after all, most schools have government or civics courses, and most states have standards including such content. What we found was that the required tests did not include that material, and that teachers’ time and effort was devoted primarily to subjects that would be tested.

As for the written word…my undergraduate students are abysmal. That, I must admit, is nothing new, but neither is it improving. Grammar, syntax, punctuation, word choice, organization….often, my class is their first introduction to those terms and concepts. I was a high school English teacher in a former life, and one thing I know: the only way to teach written communication skills is to have students write. A lot.

It’s ironic that the people who focus on job training to the exclusion of education, who thus favor ignoring “frills” like English literature and the humanities, fail to recognize that the ability to communicate clearly is an essential job skill. (I would argue it is an essential life skill.)

When a student tells me “I know what I mean, I just can’t say it,” my immediate reaction is “Then you don’t know what you mean.” If you can’t express it, you don’t really know it. That is certainly the reaction students can expect from their eventual employers.

There is copious research supporting the value of art and music education–and not just for the sake of creating well-rounded human beings. Art and music instruction have been shown to increase student performance in STEM and similar subjects near and dear to job trainers’ hearts.

And don’t get me started on the numerous important characteristics that tests can’t measure.

Comments

Georgia On My Mind

Can we talk about Americans’ widespread confusion over religious liberty?

Georgia lawmakers recently approved a bill that says church officials can refuse to perform gay marriages. (Evidently, supporters of the so-called “Pastor Protection Act” do know that religious leaders already have that protection under the First Amendment, but they argue that passage of the measure will “reassure them.”)

The “Pastor Protection Act” was one of at least eight other bills pending in the Georgia legislature sponsored by opponents of same-sex marriages. They included Georgia’s very own RFRA, which is headed for passage over the vocal objections of state business leaders. Georgia’s RFRA already prompted 373k, a Decatur-based telecom startup, to announce it would relocate to Nevada; yesterday, it generated an editorial about state-level RFRAs in the New York Times:

These brazen measures, going beyond the Indiana law, would create blanket protection for discrimination. That these states would consider such legislation is all the more remarkable given the damage Indiana’s image and economy suffered in the national backlash to its law.

One of the most alarming bills comes out of Georgia, where state lawmakers have cobbled together a dangerous piece of legislation that would prohibit the government from punishing anyone or anything — individuals; businesses; and nonprofit groups, including those that receive taxpayer funds — for discrimination, so long as they claim it was based on their religious views of marriage.

 We’ve seen this movie before.

Decades of foot-dragging in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education was nothing short of scandalous; resistance to the 1964 Civil Rights Act continues to this day, and now, in the.wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, states like Georgia, West Virginia and Indiana—among others—are engaging in the same sorts of behaviors that followed those previous extensions of equal rights.

In fact, what we are seeing from “religious” folks today is strikingly similar to “religious” arguments against civil rights protections for African-Americans in 1964. Then, the argument was “my religion teaches that the races are to be kept separate, so requiring my bakery or shoe store to serve black customers would deny me religious freedom.”

So what is the First Amendment right to religious freedom? How extensive is it? What does it protect?

As I tell my students, religious freedom means you have the absolute right to believe anything you want. Jesus, Zeus, the Flying Spaghetti Monster or nothing at all—it’s entirely up to you. And your church or synagogue or coven can preach about those beliefs, reject participation in events offensive to those beliefs, and even hire and fire certain employees based upon religious doctrine.

When it comes to acting on the basis of your beliefs, however, the law erects some limits. You can sincerely, deeply believe that you should sacrifice your first-born, or that prayer, not medical intervention, will cure your child’s serious disease, but you are not allowed to act on those beliefs. (You can refuse medical care for yourself, but not for your minor child.) You can believe that your God wants you to rob that bank, or use drugs, or copulate in the middle of the street, but no matter how sincere your belief, government isn’t going to go along.

Except in very rare cases, religious belief does not exempt individuals from what the courts call “laws of general application.”

Here’s the deal: when you open a business, government provides the streets and sidewalks your customers use to access that business. Police and fire departments protect it from harm. When your toilets flush, government sewers remove the excrement.  In many areas, government picks up your trash and provides public transportation for your customers and employees. In return for these and other services, government expects you to do two things: pay your taxes and obey the laws.

Including civil rights laws. Even if you live in Georgia, or Indiana.

Comments

What’s at Stake

Yesterday, the media frenzy was all about Chris Christie’s endorsement of “The Donald.” Of course, there has been something every day–the latest tweet, the most egregious insult, the latest analysis of how someone so manifestly unqualified has managed to get this far…

All of this media attention focused upon Trump–attention that has allowed him to suck all the oxygen out of Republican rooms–has had a number of unfortunate consequences. One of the less remarked of those consequences is that the so-called “establishment” candidates look more reasonable by comparison.

Even Trump can’t make Cruz look sane, but as political observers have pointed out, Rubio and even Kasich are on record taking positions that would have been unthinkable even ten years ago. Paul Krugman recently noted aspects of Rubio’s extremism:

[W]hat I do know is that one shouldn’t treat establishment support as an indication that Mr. Rubio is moderate and sensible. On the contrary, not long ago someone holding his policy views would have been considered a fringe crank.

Let me leave aside Mr. Rubio’s terrifying statements on foreign policy and his evident willingness to make a bonfire of civil liberties, and focus on what I know best, economics.

You probably know that Mr. Rubio is proposing big tax cuts, and may know that among other things he proposes completely eliminating taxes on investment income — which would mean, for example, that Mitt Romney would end up owing precisely zero in federal taxes.

What you may not know is that Mr. Rubio’s tax cuts would be almost twice as big as George W. Bush’s as a percentage of gross domestic product — despite the fact that federal debt is much higher than it was 15 years ago, and Republicans have spent the Obama years warning incessantly that budget deficits will destroy America, any day now.

What Krugman failed to note were Rubio’s extreme social policy positions; for one thing, he proposes outlawing abortion even in the case of rape and incest.

Not to be outdone, the presumably more moderate John Kasich recently defunded Ohio’s Planned Parenthood.

These are the candidates whose hoped-for elevation to the highest office in the land is motivating Mitch McConnell and his Senate colleagues to ignore their constitutional duty to consider an Obama Supreme Court nominee. (“Strict construction,” anyone??)

If the Senate Republicans manage to keep Scalia’s position open, the next President is likely to choose three Supreme Court Justices. If those choices are made by any of these candidates, America will be a very different country in short order. And it won’t be a country that most of us will recognize.

Comments

Off the Rails

Excuse this rant, but I’ve had it.

According to my husband, his father hated FDR. But when some of the people watching newsreels in a theater booed the President, he was appalled, because “back in the day,” whatever your opinion of the person, Americans believed in showing respect for the office.

People serving in Congress in times past were undoubtedly just as political, just as self-dealing, as those who are there now, but for most of American history, it was understood that disagreements with the Commander-in-Chief stopped at the water’s edge.

What we are seeing during the Obama Presidency isn’t “loyal opposition.” We are seeing shameful, childish and above all, profoundly unAmerican behavior.

Various commenters have suggested that the disrespect and hostility shown to this president are little different than the partisan attacks on Clinton and Bush. That simply isn’t true: while both of those individuals aroused intense feelings (and often boorish behaviors), the animus pales in comparison to what Obama has faced. Furthermore, much of the opposition those Presidents faced was triggered by their own actions; in Clinton’s case, his inability to keep his pants zipped, and in Bush’s, his decision to engage in a costly war of choice.

Obama has faced implacable hatred from Day One.

Political Animal listed just a few of the ongoing, unprecedented expressions of disdain for this President:

* Shouting “You lie!” in a speech to a Joint Session of Congress,
* Refusing to accept the date for a speech about job creation to a Joint Session of Congress.
* Negotiating a speech to Congress from a foreign head of state behind the President’s back.
* Seeking to undermine U.S. negotiations with a foreign country by writing a letter to their head of state. (This, in my view, was close to treasonous.)
* Refusing to even hold a hearing on the President’s proposed budget.
* Tossing the President’s proposal to shut down Guantanamo Bay Prison in the trash (and videotaping the process).
* Refusing to hold hearings on a Supreme Court nominee before the President has even named one.

Yesterday, a couple of commenters suggested that the refusal to consider Obama’s Supreme Court nominee was no different from previous posturing by Democrats–just “politics as usual.” But verbal posturing by a couple of Senators who subsequently discharged their constitutional duty is significantly different from the united refusal of GOP Senators to uphold the Constitution and do their jobs.

At Political Animal, Nancy LeTourneau posted a sentiment with which I entirely agree:

As Josh Marshall says about the latest example of refusing to hold hearings on the President’s Supreme Court nominee, it is “a culmination of Republican efforts not simply to block Obama’s policies but to delegitimize, degrade and denigrate his presidency and the man himself.” That was essentially my reaction when I first heard of their plans.

Throughout Obama’s presidency, Congressional Republicans have adamantly refused to support programs that would have been uncontroversial during any other administration–including initiatives that they themselves originally developed–simply because this President proposed them.

David Brooks, a conservative columnist for the New York Times, represents the Republican party I once knew–a party that no longer exists. He recently wrote that despite disagreements with the President, he would miss him: 

Obama radiates an ethos of integrity, humanity, good manners and elegance that I’m beginning to miss, and that I suspect we will all miss a bit, regardless of who replaces him.

To that, I would add dignity and grace in the face of constant efforts to diminish and degrade him.

One final point before I conclude this rant: to those who deny that racism motivates much of this despicable treatment of the President, who insist it’s just partisan politics as usual, I suggest you open your eyes and ears. Obama has been demonized as “other” since he took office. Birthers have questioned his citizenship, and anti-Muslim Republicans still insist he’s Muslim.  The current crop of GOP Presidential candidates has channeled the racism and xenophobia, enthusiastically accepting endorsements from white supremacists and unapologetic racists. A recent New York Times Poll found that 20% of Trump supporters believe that Lincoln should never have freed the slaves.

The GOP is off the rails, and its behavior is inexcusable, racist and detrimental to America.

Comments