Nincompoopery

I do miss Molly Ivins and her tart pen. It’s hard to pick my favorite phrases/putdowns; she once characterized America’s religious extremists as “Shiite Baptists,” and in response to reports that the then-Governor of Texas was taking Spanish lessons, said “Oh good–now he can be bi-ignorant.”

Molly also noted that “Nincompoopery has never been a bar to high office in our nation,” and although she focused primarily on idiocy within the Great State of Texas–a state replete with it, then and now– current officeholders across America are competing to demonstrate how right she was.

Take Missouri. Please.

The New York Times reports, “the Republican-controlled Missouri legislature is expected to enact a statute next month nullifying all federal gun laws in the state and making it a crime for federal agents to enforce them.”

Richard G. Callahan, the United States attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri, is concerned. He cited a recent joint operation of federal, state and local law enforcement officials that led to 159 arrests and the seizing of 267 weapons, and noted that the measure “would have outlawed such operations, and would have made criminals out of the law enforcement officers.”

It isn’t  just criminals. As the Times explained, “A Missourian arrested under federal firearm statutes would even be able to sue the arresting officer.”

Of course, there’s a pesky little thing called the Supremacy Clause that makes this particular exercise as unconstitutional as it is stupid.

Molly would undoubtedly have a choice phrase or two for this nincompoopery, but all I can do is shake my head. Where do these people come from? And why are they holding elective office?

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Revenue Enhancement

A couple of days ago, a former partner of my husband copied me on a message he sent to his City-County Council representative. It began:

Today we were the recipients of an unannounced revenue enhancement effort “inspection” by a member of the Indianapolis Fire Department, acting under authority of General Ordinance #46, supposedly under the guise of State law.

The message went on to describe a Fire Department program in which individual tenants of commercial buildings were notified of an obligation to “self-inspect” their leased premises –and charged $25 each for that dubious privilege. Those failing to respond were assessed a $60 fine.

The owners of the building were not notified, despite the fact that they would seem to be the parties responsible for maintaining fire safety standards. And as the writer noted, tenant “self-inspections” are unlikely to generate confidence-producing results.

What particularly irked my correspondent–a registered architect who has to comply daily with fire safety regulations–was the fact that the building in which he has his offices is fully sprinklered, has a supervised alarm system, and is regularly inspected by the State Fire Marshall.

The purpose of these laughable “self-inspections” is rather obvious, and it isn’t fire safety. It is, as he asserted, “revenue enhancement.”

The City’s taxing authority has been constrained (unwisely, in my view, but that is a separate conversation), so it is trying to compensate by raising “fees.” The difference between a tax and a fee is that the former is levied on the population at large in order to provide services that benefit the entire citizenry; fees–at least in theory–are levied on the people benefitting from the service.

Fire safety is a good example of the elasticity of this theory. Many years ago–in colonial times, actually–fire protection was a consumer good. Fire departments (privately owned) would respond to fires at the homes of those who could afford the “insurance” they sold. That didn’t work very well, as you might imagine, and lawmakers recognized the benefits of providing “socialized” fire protection.

Thanks to America’s current hysteria over taxation, we seem to be moving back to the bad old days. Affluent neighborhoods are hiring their own “security” in the absence of adequate police protection. And now, we’re evidently going to use a “safety program” to charge commercial occupants for a portion of their fire protection.

This isn’t progress, folks.

Maybe its time for a community-wide discussion of what government is for.

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A Wobbly Leg on the Three-Legged Stool

Years ago, when many of us were working hard to revive a moribund downtown, I learned the lesson of the “three-legged stool”–housing, retail and business. All three are needed for a vibrant city center, and at the time, Indianapolis’ downtown had only one leg: business. Downtown meant banks and law firms and brokerages; very few people lived in the central city, and retail was virtually non-existent.

When my husband and I moved to then-still-iffy Lockerbie Square, there wasn’t even a grocery nearby. Downtown had few restaurants.

Change came slow and hard. First, an O’Malia’s (now a Marsh) was lured into the old Sears building. A couple of adventurous doctors joined the lonely downtown dentist to serve the small but growing residential population. The breakthrough, of course, was Circle Center–the culmination of a decade of planning, land acquisition and hope.

Circle Center was just one element of the municipal effort to bring people downtown: the canal, sports venues, City programs that supported residential development, the arts and districts like Massachusetts Avenue and Fountain Square. Our downtown’s renaissance was the result of decades of hard work and intentional policies.

Despite its thriving night life and restaurants, despite the number of residential projects underway, downtown still has a long way to go. We don’t have the amenities provided by suburban “big box” stores like Target and Bed, Bath and Beyond.  We still don’t have a competitive array of clothing stores, convenience stores and the kinds of retail choices that a growing residential population needs.

It was sad when Borders was replaced by a bank. I think allowing the Indianapolis Star to replace Nordstrom is a mistake we will all regret. But until yesterday, I didn’t realize what had happened to the rest of Circle Center.

I was early for a downtown meeting, so I decided to walk through Circle Center. I’ve been really busy at work, so it had been several months since I’d been there. It was sad. There were several new stores, but they were clearly aimed at teenaged buyers–cheap costume jewelry, trendy and inexpensive clothes for young girls, shops that seemed ill-at-ease with the relatively few remaining higher-end stores from headier, earlier days. Together with the dark space that used to be Nordstrom, the overall effect was depressing.

There weren’t many shoppers there, either.

The fate of Circle Center is important, because it remains the single largest retail destination for downtown residents and workers. There are plenty of storefronts available for the kinds of shops that have been moved into Circle Center, but there aren’t plenty of places that can offer downtown residents the same mix of goods available at the regional shopping malls.

Downtown has never achieved a critical mass of retail, but we were working toward it. The current sad state of Circle Center is a huge step back–and with large numbers of residential units coming online, the timing couldn’t be worse.

I’d like to believe the City and Simon are working on reversing this, but given the curiously passive approach of the administration to so many significant issues, I’m not holding my breath.

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Testing….1,2,3…Testing

I’ve been watching school reform efforts for several years now, and I’m depressed.

Most of the organizations that have formed to improve our public schools are populated by wonderful, well-meaning people, and most of the men and women who have chosen to teach in those schools are caring, dedicated professionals. So you’d think they would all be talking to each other and working together to identify and eliminate the barriers to better schools.

Instead, they seem to be at war with each other.

Now, I understand that focusing on common goals has been made more difficult by  the “take no prisoners” attitudes of ideologues like the departed-but-certainly-not-missed Tony Bennett, whose arrogance and autocratic tactics created a backlash of resentment among the teachers he regularly and unfairly bashed. (It shouldn’t surprise us when people who’ve been told they are overpaid and underperforming nitwits are unenthusiastic about collaborating with those who leveled the accusations.) But Bennett and his equally tone-deaf boss are gone, and the folks on the front lines–the teachers–need to help the real reformers understand what they need.

I haven’t been a high school teacher for nearly 50 years; neither do I have mastery of the reform literature. I’m just an interested observer who believes that public education is an immensely important public good, so you should take the following observations with the appropriate amount of salt.

Reformers are absolutely right to want teacher accountability. But teachers are absolutely right that high-stakes testing is not accountability.

Testing to figure out what kids know is a time-honored necessity; testing as a way to evaluate teacher performance is deeply problematic. For one thing, poor people move so frequently that turnover in many inner-city schools exceeds 100% during the school year, and the kids being tested at the end of the year aren’t the same kids who were tested at the beginning. Tests in such classrooms are meaningless.

Even in more stable environments, the current testing regime does significant damage–to students, who are being taught that there is always a “right” answer, and to teachers who are forced to focus their efforts on the subjects being tested and neglect other, equally important lessons. Furthermore, years of research demonstrate that more affluent kids test better for lots of reasons unrelated to the quality of classroom performance. If teachers are going to be evaluated and paid based upon test results, a lot of good teachers are going to leave the poorer schools that need them most and head for precincts where the students are better off and easier to teach.  (And yes, I know the theory is that we are testing for improvement, not absolute knowledge, but that theory is too often just that–theoretical.)

Here’s a heretical thought: before we engage in programs to assess accountability, let’s see if we can achieve agreement on what we mean by “education” and “quality instruction.” In other words, let’s be sure we know what instructors are supposed to be accountable for.

Too many of the self-styled “reformers” (not all, but too many) equate education with job training and quality instruction with (easy to test) rote learning.  For that matter, too many teachers agree with those definitions.

The people who genuinely want to improve public education–and there are a lot of them in both reform organizations and classrooms–  start by tackling the hard questions: what do kids really, really need to know in order to function in 21st Century America? What skills are essential? What are the barriers to imparting that information and those skills?  What additional resources do poorer kids need?  How much money does it take to provide a  good education, and how much does ignorance cost us?

Here’s how you can separate out the genuine education reformers from the ideologues and shills: real reformers understand the importance of public education’s civic mission. Because they understand the constitutive function of the public schools–because they understand that education is more than just another consumer good–they want to fix public education by working with teachers and parents and policymakers to make our public school systems work.

The genuine reformers aren’t the ones insisting that we  privatize or abandon those schools.

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Fifty Years Later

I’ve been mulling over the fifty-year anniversary of the March on Washington, and Martin Luther King’s “Dream” speech.

Unlike many–actually, most–of those providing commentary around this milestone, I didn’t read about the event in class or see television reports after the fact. I was twenty-one when the March occurred–the coverage I saw was contemporaneous, and a great deal of it was far from positive.

In Indiana, as elsewhere, a significant percentage of the population considered King an “agitator.” Even among people who genuinely wanted a more equal society, there were concerns that King’s approach was too “in your face,” and would end up making things even worse. Needless to say, there were plenty of people who were not just unconcerned with racial justice,  but who strongly believed that black people were inferior and needed to be kept “in their place,” and were outraged not just by the March on Washington, but by the entire civil rights movement.

So–fifty years later, where are we?

Are things better than they were when I was young? Absolutely. Are they where one might hope after fifty years? Not even close. Considerable racial animus persists, although its expression has (thankfully) changed.

Ironically, it was the election of an African-American President that brought long-buried racial resentments out from under the rocks that had obscured them. Perhaps progress is always like this: two steps forward, one back. Advance, then blowback. But Obama’s election unleashed a bitter undercurrent that surprised and disheartened many of us. The “birther” accusations, the racist emails, the hysterical opposition to everything the President does or says, the characterization of America’s Commander-in-Chief as a Muslim, a socialist, a Nazi….as “other.” I suppose it is a measure of progress that even the haters feel the need for euphemisms, and use these labels rather than the “n” word they so clearly mean.

I suppose it’s progress that they shrink from acknowledging even to themselves that their blind hatred is motivated by race.

Fifty years ago, in the midst of the social upheaval that we now simply call “the Sixties,” it would have been impossible to predict where social forces were taking the country. Despite the wrenching changes and excesses–and the enormous and often disproportionate reaction to those excesses–I would argue that the country emerged a fairer and more equal place. I  hope we can say the same thing about our current divisions fifty years from now.

Martin Luther King was certainly right about one thing: the arc of history does bend slowly.

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