Harry

Here, via Laura, is Education Week’s take on the education policies of Bush and Kerry. Not exactly Tweedledum and Tweedledee. But not far off it.

I’m a fan of rules and regulations. But they should be designed so that, if there is a strong case for doing that they are basically designed to prevent, someone who pushes hard enough will succeed in doing it. Here are two stunning stories of people being prevented from working in the state (i.e. public) schools in the UK, because, although one of them has run a well-regarded private school, and the other has pursued a successful career as a professor of physics (a shortage subject), they are not properly qualified. I can see reasons for the regulation, and I do think it unfortunate that the Telegraph gave evidence in favour of Mr Jones-Parry that told us a great deal about the kinds of children whose parents can pay £15,204 a year on their schooling, and nothing at all about his abilities as a school leader. But this is hilarious:

bq. “The silly thing is that I have people from industry who are training to be teachers at Westminster. I have to sign them off to say that they are suitable. I suppose I could sign myself off.”

(Hat Tip: Michael Otsuka)

I realize that hardly anyone votes on education issues in Presidential campaigns, so this may be only of academic interest, but I’ve been looking at the Kerry campaign’s plan for education (k-12, I don’t know much about higher education policy issues), and thought I’d give my tentative take on them for what its worth. There’s some good and some bad and some obscure. Just to demonstrate my non-partisanship I’d say much the same of Bush’s promises and, believe it or not, of Bush’s record – in fact, my suspicion is that if you really cut through the detail of the two programs the most significant thing in both is the same thing – promises of a great deal more Federal funds – promises that I happen to believe in both cases, but which don’t really bring me deep joy.

Anyway, the first thing to note is the one thing that is not an issue here, despite Kerry’s promise in the NEA TODAY that ‘you will never see a voucher proposal coming from my office as President’, is vouchers and choice. (Sorry, the interview doesn’t seem to be online, but I assume that the quote doesn’t need verification!) Both campaigns mention choice, and Kerry is on board with the right kind of charter programs, but Bush downplays choice, understanding that his important constituencies don’t care much about it. Vouchers, in particular, are not going to win votes for the Republicans, because floating voters, and most existing Republican voters, have no interest in them, and because the people who are interested – urban Black voters – are not about to defect to the Republicans over the issue.

Kerry’s website was revamped after the convention, and the most peculiar, not to say ludicrous, promise – that the Feds would make sure every teacher has voicemail – was removed. This is to Kerry’s credit, but I admit that it still worries me a bit that anyone could have even thought it up, let alone thought that it was something to make public as a priority.

On to the main points.

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Compass is a new organisation that has emerged out of what could perhaps best be termed the thoughtful ex-Blairite left. It’s closely connected with the magazine Renewal. Its first national conference is coming up, with speakers like Polly Toynbee, Ruth Lister, Stuart White, Michael Meacher and Gordon Brown. Looks well worth going to, for those of you who don’t live thousands of miles from London.

Laura’s Family/Work blog conference is well underway, and I recommend going over there. The issues are difficult and fascinating. There’s a lot of food for thought in people’s stories about their own frustrations and joys — it is really interesting (to me, anyway) to see how other people work out the conflicts and tensions.

As Dave explains, I’ve spent part of the week getting embroiled in local affairs. Our school district devoted another in-service training to the Courageous Conversations program; every employee (except the many who took sick days) had to participate. Dave’s own experience reflects pretty accurately the experiences I’ve had related to me. It’s a kind of involuntary therapy session — the kind of thing that my friends who used to be in obscure Maoist organizations report having gone through regularly. The pretext is a concern with minority underachievement, which the District regards as being caused by institutional racism, on which the day’s conversation focused. You might expect that a focus on institutional racism would look at the racism in the criminal justice system and the labor market, which deeply affect the prospects of minority males and, presumably, therefore indirectly effect their aspirations and marriageability (with predictable consequences for family structure). But: no mention of these things. It is all about the racism inherent in the schools, and particularly in the attitudes of teachers.

Prompted by one very pissed off, but honest, left-wing, and good, teacher, I wrote an op-ed for the local paper, simply arguing that the focus is misplaced and suggesting some rather dull measures which, unlike involuntary and inconsistent therapy for school employees, have a good track record of slightly raising the achievement of low income and minority students. I have to admit I was nervous about doing it, both because the racist teacher theme is popular, and because lots of people don’t like open criticism of the District for wasting resources, because that creates an atmosphere in which voters are les likely to vote for tax raises. But I’m pissed off with the District for wasting resources, both because enough waste creates a perception of waste, and because I think the achievement of low-income and minority students should be the most urgent priority of our education system; and programs like this not only have no benefits, but give ammunition to those who don’t take it seriously as a priority.

In fact the response so far has been unremarkable: a nice note from a School Board member thanking me for writing it, and a series of emails from random people expressing their own feelings. I have, though, heard from a reliable source that the program was opposed internally by the main person responsible for equal opportunities and minority achievement. The Superintendent has not commented.

Laura promises that next week will be devoted to a really interesting-looking blog conference on Work/Family issues. She says

bq. Here’s the tentative schedule for the event:

bq. Monday — General Topics Related to Parents and Mothers and Work. What skills has you gained as a parent that will carry over into the world of work? Describe your typical day. Do you feel your work at home is undervalued by society and by the workplace? What obstacles have you faced in holding a job and having a family? What is your childcare situation? In an ideal world, what percentage of time would you spend with your kids and what percentage with work? Is parenthood too hard today?

bq. Tuesday — Parenthood and Academia. What obstacles have you faced as an academic trying to balance family and work? For the singles, are we a big bunch of whiners? What changes could be made?

bq. Wednesday — The Guys. What balance of housework/childcare have you arranged with your spouse? For the women, are the guys doing their share? What problems do stay at home dads face?

bq. Thursday — Feminism and Politics. What’s the big deal about having a career anyway? For younger women, were you disappointed that other women never told you how difficult it would be to have it all? Knowing what you know, what advice would give young people? What political and social changes would you like to see? Is Sweden a good model? Are women their own worst enemy?

bq. Friday — I’m not sure. Something fun, like telling the story of how your kid stuck breakfast cereal up his nose.

Go and enjoy yourselves there next week. For my part, I’m just glad that it wasn’t this week, in which work/family issues have kept me almost completely from thinking about work/family issues (if you see what I mean) or even from looking at Laura’s blog till now. I’ll fill you in on the bits that don’t have to do with the cat’s idiotic fight with next door’s dog (very expensive) later.

The posts on positional goods give me a lame excuse to link to a paper Adam Swift and I have recently posted on the Equality Exchange. The paper tries to think through the significance of positional goods for distributive principles. Here’s the abstract, in case you want to look any further. Comments welcome (though I don’t promise to respond on the thread, and if comments are really substantive you might want just to email me or Adam).

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I had a surreal day on Wednesday. I drove to Milwaukee for an appointment at the newly re-organised USCIS to get my green card renewed for another 10 years. I forgot my BBC7 tapes of London Particulars, so instead spent the whole drive there listening to my favourite 1970’s boxed set.

The appointment was odd enough — it lasted 10 minutes, and not only was everyone charming to me, but they were charming to the other 3 immigrants (who weren’t white, and didn’t have mock-posh English accents) too. A general reticence about these matters precludes me from publicising the interesting things that happened there. Anyway, that wasn’t the really surreal bit.

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If you are a Democrat living in Wisconsin I’d like to encourage you to vote, tomorrow, for Tim Michels in the US Senate primary, and, if you live in the Second District, for Ron Greer in the Congressional primary. The Democratic candidates in the general election are Russ Feingold and Tammy Baldwin respectively. At present Russ Darrow seems the Republican most likely to cause trouble for Feingold; Michels is not (quite) as wealthy, has worse name recognition, and is more immoderate: I think Feingold would find it easier to beat Michels, so I’d like to see him win the primary. Greer makes Alan Keyes look like a raving pinko (in both senses of pinko). His opponent, Dave Magnum, seems fine in many ways (‘fine’ here being a relative term, in a world in which pretty much everyone is pretty awful), and is much more likely to give Baldwin a real fight. If you care about Kerry winning, by the way, a Greer candidacy is more likely to trigger lefty voter turnout in this district than Tammy alone or than Kerry himself (unless he turns out to be the Manchurian candidate).

All registered voters are allowed to vote in the Republican primaries; it’s just that in doing so you disqualify yourself from voting in the Democratic primary. In several Wisconsin congressional districts nothing is at stake in the Dem primaries, so there is no opportunity cost.

Of course, in a better electoral system parties would not allow their opponents to participate in candidate selection. But between them the Republican and Democratic Parties and the State of Wisconsin have given you this power, so I am encouraging you to use it.

I’ve been researching an article about the morality of human cloning, prompted almost entirely by Brian’s article co-written with Sarah McGrath, which is a defense of the permissibility of cloning. Prior to reading McGrath and Weatherson’s paper (or more precisely, Brian’s multiple postings here when they were writing it) I had no real intuitions about the issue, but their defense prompted me to think about what might count as good reasons to prohibit cloning. I share their dismay at the weakness of the arguments most commonly presented.

But this post isn’t directly about why cloning might be prohibited.

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ABout 25 years ago I was innocently listening to my radio very late at night, and heard the first episode of a strange science fiction show. I was one of the few thousand people who listened to all the first series. It was not a success, but, being the BBC, they made another series anyway. A couple of years later it was transcribed as a book and became a huge publishing phenomenon, and the author wrote several more books added on to the series. I refrained from reading them, on the grounds that books are just second-rate radio shows, and if it wasn’t dramatised it probably wasn’t worth reading. It never occurred to me that, if I refrained from reading them, I might, eventually, be able to hear them dramatised on the radio as they should be, and not have any inkling of the plot. Fantastic.

As a fellow prohibitionist I decided to send an email to Mr Hastert asking him either to assure me that he has turned over the evidence he has of Mr. Soros’s wrongdoings to the relevant authorities or, if there is no evidence, to withdraw his accusations as prominently as possible. I got this very odd message after I send my email:

bq. Due to Congressional franking rules I cannot send a personal response to people outside the 14th District of Illinois. Your opinion is still important to me though and will be registered.

What on earth does this mean? The Speaker of the House is not allowed to correspond with people outside his district? Can this be right? I am not asking this frivolously, or to make a partisan point against the Speaker, since my experience of US electoral and campaigning laws is sufficient to know that it is labyinthine and bizarre in the extreme; incredible as it is I’m entirely willing to believe it. I ask so that some of the experts out there can explain what it means.

I was surprised in the discussion of Anne Alstott’s No Exit to find so much enthusiasm for means-tested benefits which, I suppose, reveals more about me and the company I keep than about anything else. I am not completely opposed to means-testing: in some areas of policy, for example funding higher education, I think it can be an effective tool for benefiting the less advantaged. And sometimes it is, given the political constraints, the best that you can do in lousy circumstances. But as a general matter universal benefits are better, and more egalitarian, than means-tested benefits. I was going to write up a lecturely account of why, after that discussion, but fortunately got distracted by summery things like making Bakewell Tarts and hanging out with my kids. And a good thing too, because Shlomi Segall has subsequently published a nice brief account of the general reasons why people like me prefer universal benefits. I’ll add one thing that Segall does not emphasize: the perverse incentives of means-testing. So, for example, the UK government’s decision to rely on the means-tested Income Guarantee Support as a top-up for the state pension introduces a disincentive to save for those nearing retirement age who think they might need it; and the old AFDC in the US reduced dollar-for-dollar as recipients earned income; recipients faced an effective marginal tax rate of 100% which even lefties like me can see might be a disincentive to work. But Segall makes the rest of the case briefly, and has thereby saved me a lot of work (which I was evidently too lazy to do anyway).