When Evidence Doesn’t Matter

A friend who lives in Wisconsin recently shared an article from the Madison newspaper, detailing the declining rank of the University of Wisconsin in the wake of Scott Walker’s savage cuts to that institution.

Now-retired UW-Madison Chancellor John Wiley would often say that it took well over 100 years for the people of Wisconsin to build a world-class university, but it won’t take but a few years to tear it all down.

We saw the first signs of how true Wiley’s observation is when late last week the National Science Foundation reported that the UW-Madison has fallen from the ranks of the top five research universities in the country, a position it had maintained for the past 40 years.

The news underscored how the university is being impacted by the draconian policies of the current crop of Republicans who are running state government. .The governor and several key legislators have consistently insisted that UW faculty are overpaid and coddled. Walker chided that budget cuts could be weathered if only professors taught one more course. Other legislators would go so far as threatening more budget cuts when they would hear of a class they didn’t like.

Not surprisingly, a number of professors have left for greener pastures, and have taken their research grants with them, exacerbating the University’s fiscal woes.

As the article points out, Walker’s dogged insistence that cutting taxes and spending are the cure for anything that ails state government isn’t just affecting the university.

Wisconsin’s once-proud K-12 public education system is being forced to go begging to property taxpayers with referendums just to keep school districts’ heads above water. The condition of our lakes and streams and even our groundwater has been deteriorating each year and the DNR, charged with protecting it all, is being starved to death under a secretary who won’t fight for it. Our job creation is far below the national average and Wisconsin workers, many no longer protected by unions, earn less.

Wisconsin’s experience isn’t unique. Kansas’ economy continues to decline under the similar ideology and even more draconian policies of Sam Brownback. Betsy DeVos, Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Education, has presided over the abysmal performance of Detroit’s schools, thanks to a radical privatization philosophy she and Trump want to employ nationally. Paul Ryan and other House Republicans have their guns trained on Medicare, ignoring the fact that the program is both popular and cost-effective.

In each of these cases–and many others I could cite–elected officials are pursuing their ideological commitments with a decidedly religious fervor. Reality be damned.

When evidence doesn’t matter and experience doesn’t inform, Dark Ages aren’t far off.

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Whatever Happened to Integrity?

I concluded yesterday’s post by saying “We have spoiled toddlers running state and federal offices, but at least adults run the cities.” Evidently, some of those adults are less  praiseworthy than I suggested.

Indianapolis recently held a referendum on transportation. It wasn’t easy convincing the General Assembly that residents of the city should be allowed to decide for ourselves whether to impose a modest tax increase dedicated to the expansion of the city’s painfully inadequate bus service. It took a couple of years, but we finally did.

The vote was advisory, meaning that it will inform members of the City-County Council, whose votes will be dispositive. I think it is fair to say that voters expect the Councilors’ votes to reflect the clear results of the popular will.

The referendum won handily. But some Councilors– in districts where constituents voted decisively for the transit expansion– are vacillating. According to several people who have talked to them, the reluctant Council members are ambitious politicians who plan to run for higher office; they have been telling transit proponents that they don’t want a future opponent to be able to accuse them of raising taxes.

Think about that for a minute. This isn’t about legitimate disagreement about the merits of the proposal; this is about personal political calculation– a conflict of interest between the public good and personal advantage.

These City-County Counselors were elected to serve the constituents in their districts. Those constituents have signaled their belief that improved transit is sufficiently important to them to justify the (relatively minor) tax increase required. Rather than considering the wishes of those constituents, rather than considering the needs of the disabled and elderly people who depend upon transit, or the needs of workers to get to their places of employment without changing buses and enduring lengthy commutes (when they can get there at all–see yesterday’s post), these Councilors are viewing their votes only from the perspective of their personal self-interest.

Why, they might have to defend voting for the public good in a future political campaign!

I can understand why someone representing a district that voted against the referendum would decide to ignore the interests and expressed preferences of the overall community, but when elected officials disregard the wishes and needs of both the overall community and their own constituents in order to protect themselves from potential criticism in a potential future campaign, I find that contemptible.

I think it was Maya Angelou who said “When someone tells you who they are, believe them.”

And remember them.

Because if those who are threatening to vote no simply to protect themselves from criticism in a future campaign actually follow through with that threat, and if and when they do run for higher office, those of us with a different understanding of “representation” and “integrity” need to make a very public issue of their self-serving behavior.

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Meanwhile, Back Home in Indiana….

It’s admittedly hard to take our eyes off the monumental train wreck in the nation’s capital, with each day bringing additional evidence that America as we have known it is being systematically dismantled– but things aren’t so reassuring on the home front, either.

The newly energized wing-nuts who populate our state legislature are proposing bills to criminalize abortion and allow unrestricted, unlicensed gun ownership. (“Step right up, ladies, gentlemen, psychopaths, domestic batterers… Here’s a lethal weapon for you, no questions asked…”)

Of course, Hoosiers are used to seeing our state lawmakers focus on social issues at the expense of humdrum things like infrastructure repair and job creation. In Indiana, it is at the municipal level, in the cities, where the genuine work of government must be done.

Case in point: The Indiana Business Journal recently reported on the extent of poverty that co-exists with the more visible prosperity in the City of Indianapolis.

  • From 2000 to 2014, the percentage of the population below the poverty level swelled 80 percent, from 11.9 percent to 21.4 percent.
  • From 1999 to 2014, inflation-adjusted household incomes fell at least 10 percent in 75 percent of the city’s census tracts. Inflation-adjusted incomes fell at least 30 percent in 48 percent of the tracts. In contrast, only 5.9 percent of tracts reported an increase in inflation-adjusted household incomes.

As the IBJ editorialized, addressing our pockets of poverty will take a concerted push and the involvement of many stakeholders in business, education, government and the not-for-profit community.

As the editorial also noted, that involvement–and that stakeholder collaboration–is underway. Mayor Hogsett’s initiative, EmployIndy, is focusing on assisting low- and mid-skilled workers with a mix of job training and career planning that should improve their employment prospects . The Central Indiana Community Partnership is increasing the reach of Ascend Indiana, an initiative that connects employers with skilled workers and helps with training to provide workers with those needed skills.

Then there’s the recently approved transit referendum—which clears the way for the City-County Council to impose an income tax to improve bus service. Right now, only 33 percent of Marion County jobs can be reached via transit in 90 minutes—a huge impediment to improving the job prospects of the unemployed and underemployed.

I don’t have a crystal ball, so I will refrain from predicting the success or failure of this coordinated effort, but I will state what should be obvious: this is the way issues are addressed in a rational society.

The nature and extent of a problem should be established by credible research. Research and analysis should identify barriers to solving the problem–in this case, inadequate education or skills, lack of transportation to job sites, and lack of access to information about jobs. Co-ordinated public and private efforts should then be directed at removing the identified barriers.

This approach relies upon a consensus that poverty negatively affects everyone in a community, not just those who are in need, and upon a recognition that there are no magic bullets or bumper-sticker solutions–that ameliorating poverty will take time, resources and hard work.

What a contrast to the approaches being promoted by the “lunatic caucuses” of both the U.S. Congress and Indiana Statehouse, and by the incoming Executive branch clown show. Both are populated by people who consider research “elitist” and knowledge unnecessary, who prefer privatizing/contracting out to the hard work required by partnerships with responsible private-sector organizations, and who consistently privilege ideology over evidence.

We have spoiled toddlers running state and federal offices, but at least adults run the cities.

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The Coming Assault on Education

I have noted previously that Trump’s choice for Education Secretary is Betsy DeVos, a dedicated proponent of school privatization. The depth of her commitment to vouchers is matched only by the shallowness of her educational experience and training (she’s never taught nor does she have a degree in education).

Politico looked into DeVos’ history and statements, and began a recent article as follows:

The billionaire philanthropist whom Donald Trump has tapped to lead the Education Department once compared her work in education reform to a biblical battleground where she wants to “advance God’s Kingdom.”

Trump’s pick, Betsy DeVos, a national leader of the school choice movement, has pursued that work in large part by spending millions to promote the use of taxpayer dollars on private and religious schools.

In an audio recording obtained by POLITICO, DeVos and her husband (an Amway billionaire) explained that their Christian faith drives their efforts to reform American education. They believe that school choice leads to “greater Kingdom gain”  and that public schools have “displaced” the Church as the center of communities. They’re convinced that school choice can reverse that trend.

Hoosier readers who see the fundamentalist hand of Mike Pence in the choice of DeVos can find confirmation of those suspicions in a Mother Jones article about Pence’s voucher program.

Pence’s voucher program ballooned into a $135 million annual bonanza almost exclusively benefiting private religious schools—ranging from those teaching the Koran to Christian schools teaching creationism and the Bible as literal truth—at the expense of regular and usually better-performing public schools. Indeed, one of the schools was a madrasa, an Islamic religious school, briefly attended by a young man arrested this summer for trying to join ISIS—just the kind of place Trump’s coalition would find abhorrent.

In Indiana, Pence created one of the largest publicly funded voucher programs in the country. Initially launched in 2011 under Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels, it was sold as a way to give poor, minority children trapped in bad public schools a way out.

Daniels program was relatively small, and focused on low-income families. Pence dramatically increased and redirected it.

By the 2015-16 school year, the number of students using state-funded vouchers had shot up to more than 32,000 in 316 private schools. But Pence’s school choice experiment demonstrates that vouchers can create a host of thorny political problems and potential church-and-state issues. Almost every single one of these voucher schools is religious. The state Department of Education can’t tell parents which or even whether any of the voucher schools are secular. (A state spokeswoman told me Indiana doesn’t collect data on the school’s religious affiliation.) Out of the list of more than 300 schools, I could find only four that weren’t overtly religious and, of those, one was solely for students with Asperger’s syndrome and other autism spectrum disorders, and the other is an alternative school for at-risk students….

Indiana’s choice law prohibits the state from regulating the curriculum of schools getting vouchers, so millions of dollars of the state education budget are subsidizing schools whose curricula teaches creationism and the stories and parables in the Bible as literal truth. Among the more popular textbooks are some from Bob Jones University that are known for teaching that humans and dinosaurs existed on the Earth at the same time and that dragons were real. BJU textbooks have also promoted a positive view of the KKK, writing in one book, “the Klan in some areas of the country tried to be a means of reform, fighting the decline in morality and using the symbol of the cross to target bootleggers, wife beaters and immoral movies.”

Not surprisingly, Indiana children in these voucher schools perform poorly on standardized tests.

The voucher schools can’t necessarily blame low test scores on poverty, either. According to data from the state, today more than 60 percent of the voucher students in Indiana are white, and more than half of them have never even attended any public school, much less a failing one. Some of the fastest growth in voucher use has occurred in some of the state’s most affluent suburbs. The Center for Tax and Budget Accountability, a Chicago-based think tank, recently concluded that because white children’s participation in the voucher program dwarfed the next largest racial group by 44 points, the vouchers were effectively helping to resegregate public schools.

So Indiana taxpayers are subsidizing religious indoctrination with monies that should be supporting the state’s under-resourced public schools. And that’s the model that Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos want to replicate nationwide.

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Sauce for the Goose

Evidently, sauce for the goose is not sauce for the gander.

We’ve become accustomed to the breast-beating and recriminations that accompany decisions by American businesses to manufacture goods in other countries, or to move existing operations overseas. In the latter case, the loss of jobs is a genuine “hit” and efforts to retain them are understandable–although, as we’ve seen with Trump’s Carrier deal, often costly and counterproductive.

We almost never hear about the other side of the equation, however. Indiana, in particular, has benefited mightily from outsourcing decisions made by foreign companies. According to the Indiana Business Research Center at Indiana University, in 2015, Indiana had 152,700 workers employed by foreign-owned firms. (Think of the Honda plant in Greensburg, the Isuzu plant in Lafayette, etc.) Of the jobs created by foreign companies located in Indiana, 97,900 were manufacturing jobs that accounted for 3.1 percent of the state’s private employment.

Similarly, automation–not trade– accounts for most of the job losses in the United States. Trade actually creates jobs (although often the jobs created are different from those that are lost, and that does make for winners and losers). According to a January 2010 report from the Business Roundtable, at that time, 761,500 jobs in Indiana depended on trade.

In 2008, 20.5 percent of jobs in Indiana depended on trade, up from 10.0 percent in 1992. Indiana’s trade-related employment grew more than five times faster than total employment from 2004 to 2008.

This is not to minimize the issues raised by job losses; the impact on workers who find themselves unemployed–and often, due to age or lack of other marketable skills, unemployable–is very real. The impact on communities when a major employer closes or downsizes are equally real, and challenging. But addressing the consequences requires an accurate understanding of the causes.

To use a medical analogy, prescribing the proper remedy requires a correct diagnosis of the disease being treated.

The globalization of the economy has proceeded too far to be undone, even if we wanted to mount a retreat. History teaches us–or should teach us–that erecting trade barriers, punishing companies with tariffs on their foreign operations, and the other measures Trump has threatened–simply invite retaliation that hurts everyone.

It’s comforting to have a target for our economic frustrations, a “bumper sticker” solution to a problem. Unfortunately, modern life is more complicated than such “solutions” recognize. Automation has multiple virtues, but it does cause troubling job losses. There are good trade agreements and bad ones. Losing jobs as a result of American outsourcing is painful; gaining jobs as a result of Japanese or Canadian or British outsourcing is gratifying.

The world is a complicated place.

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