Half Changed World

In response to Monday’s post about the federal appropriations process, in which I vented a bit about cuts to the education budget, Jen asked me whether I’m still considering sending my kids to public school.

I do expect to send my kids to public school.  I’ve been very impressed by the new principal at my local elementary school, and I’ve heard enough positive experiences from parents that I think I’m willing to give it a try.  If that doesn’t work out, we’d probably try an out-of-boundaries public school (allowable both because the local school is a magnet or "focus’ school, and because of its low test scores under No Child Left Behind) and then consider moving to another school district, before turning to private school. 

With two kids, it’s hard to imagine coming up with the private school tuition for 13 years of K-12 education for each of them, certainly not without both my husband and I working for pay.  I earn enough that we’d be unlikely to qualify for much financial aid; plus, even if we could scrape the tuition together, I worry about the consumption expectations set by more affluent classmates.  (By contrast, at the local elementary school, we’d be among the wealthier families, which I realize has a set of issues of its own.) 

There’s always homeschooling, but I don’t think either my husband or I is really cut out for it.  And it’s hard to imagine my highly gregarious older son thriving in that environment.  I could may be see us "unschooling" in high school for kids with enough self-motivation, but that’s a long ways off.  (I went to grad school with the publisher of New Moon magazine, and her unschooled daughters were among the most impressively thoughtful and poised teenagers I’ve met in my life, far ahead of where I was at that stage.)

In thinking of my kids — rather than all kids across the country — I’m not especially worried about the budget cuts.  Most education spending is still from local dollars; federal budget cuts don’t make much difference in affluent communities like mine.  Rather, the impact will be felt in places where local taxes can’t make up the difference.  I’m more worried about No Child Left Behind (at the federal level) and the Standards of Learning (SOLs, in Virginia) forcing teachers to teach to the test to the exclusion of all else; I don’t know a single teacher who  doesn’t think that the overriding emphasis on standardized testing is a disaster.  But I assume the pendulum will swing back somewhat in the other direction in the next few years.

I’m a reluctant convert to school choice, meaning both charter schools within the public school system and even vouchers.  I don’t think it’s a panacea to everything that’s wrong with the American educational system, but I do think it provides a life raft to some kids who would otherwise go down with the sinking ship of disastrous urban schools.  The liberal argument against school choice has traditionally been that by giving some kids an escape route, it undermines support for and funding of public schools. I’ve come to the conclusion that this argument is essentially hostage taking, and I’m no longer willing to take kids hostage.

Plus, it doesn’t work.  People like me already have escape routes even without "school choice" — whether moving to suburbia or sending our kids to private school.  The only kids being held hostage are those whose parents have the ambition to take advantage of a school choice program, but not the money to escape otherwise.  And that’s not enough of a base to change public policy.  We’re never going to improve inner-city public schools until we make a convincing case that it’s in all of our interest to do so, not just the interest of those whose kids attend them.

Yesterday, I wrote about Barry Schwartz’s book The Paradox of Choice.  In looking for further discussion of this book on the internet, I found a PSB Newshour interview with Schwartz from last year, in which discusses some of the political implications of his argument.

The interviewer explains "Now, politically Barry Schwartz is a liberal who finds himself running against what seems to be the tide these days, more choice for every citizen: The private Social Security accounts that President George W. Bush has pushed, for example, where we would decide how to invest our own money."  In fact, the Bush Administration supports increased consumer choice as the solution to everything from health insurance to primary education, to social security, to job training (they’ve proposed giving unemployed workers vouchers that could be used for job training — or taken as cash if they get jobs quickly).

And then Schwartz says:

"People don’t have the resources, the intellectual resources, the time to learn enough in all of these different areas of life to make wise decisions. The point of public policy, seems to me, is to improve welfare.

"But who decides what’s in someone’s best interest? And the answer that we have collectively embraced, driven, I think, largely by economists is maximizing choice is the way to promote public welfare."

I have very mixed reactions to this statement.  When I think about health insurance, and social security, I tend to agree with Schwartz.  I think about how much trouble I have figuring out what is the best health insurance option for my family — as a person with access to all sorts of information, and the time to sort it out, and a graduate degree in public policy — and I find it hard to believe that there are a lot of people who are going to find it much easier, while I’m quite sure that there are people who will find it much harder. 

But I’m also vehemently pro-choice.  And, as my father asked (rhetorically, of course) this evening, how come Democrats are only pro-choice when it comes to abortion and not when it comes to anything else?  And he’s right, there’s something fundamentally inconsistent about saying that we trust women — all women — to make the best decisions for themselves and their families regarding abortion, but not regarding where to send their kids to school.  Or how to save for their retirement.

(Note that rejecting Schwartz’ argument doesn’t mean that you have to support these proposals; there’s a separate problem that most of these proposals deliberately eliminate the risk pooling that is inherent in the current systems.)

I got sent a link to one more set of maps today, showing the land mass distorted in order to reflect the population.  I find them harder to interpret than some of the others, but fascinating — a rorschach test of sorts.

***

I’ve been hearing a lot from people claiming election fraud.  One of my basic principles for dealing with the world is not to assume sophisticated conspiracies when human error and incompetence work equally well as explanations.  But even if it didn’t affect the final results (and I don’t think it did), it’s still worth investigating and figuring out exactly what did or didn’t happen — in order to prevent the same errors next time and in order to restore confidence in the system.  And Republicans ought to be demanding these investigations as loudly as — if not more loudly than — Democrats.

The organization that seems to be the focus of these efforts is http://www.blackboxvoting.org/  (NOT .com) As of 9.30 tonight, this site isn’t responding — maybe it’s just a random outage, or maybe it’s been the subject of some sort of denial of service attack.  Given that www.electoral-vote.com was continually under attack during the campaign, it doesn’t seem implausible.

****

We’re fighting hard in Fallujah.  I’m praying for the safety of our soldiers, and also for the innocent bystanders who will inevitably suffer.  I wish it weren’t so obvious that the Administration was just waiting until after the election to go in.

I’m afraid this isn’t going to be one of my most eloquent posts. I’m tired and I’m depressed.

After refusing for months to get my hopes up, I got caught up in the excitement yesterday and I really thought Kerry was going to win. Alexandria is a very blue area in an overall red state, so it felt like Kerry supporters were everywhere. It was awfully exciting to go to the school at 8 am and see a line of voters wrapping halfway around the block. And when we heard the Zogby poll saying that Virginia was too close to call, we were on the moon. But that’s not how it turned out in the only poll that matters…

I’m in awe of the people who waited on lines for 4 or 5 or 9 hours in order to vote. They’re my heroes today. I don’t understand why there were so few voting machines — was this an attempt to surpress the vote, or were they just being cheap? I think that the attempts to squelch the minority vote backfired, by reminding people not to take their rights for granted. If the level of engagement that we saw yesterday can be sustained — if people don’t get bitter and give up — this election may be regarded as a turning point in history.

I think Kerry made the right choice to concede this afternoon. It’s wishful thinking that the provisional ballots were going to change anything, and this way he looks classy instead of like a sore loser.

It’s looking like the Republicans will have 55 seats in the Senate. That should be enough that they take a two-seat advantage in all the committees, up from one in the current Senate. That’s significant, because in the current Senate, moderate Republicans like Snowe and Chafee as well as mavericks like McCain were able to essentially veto legislation in the Senate. (For example, Snowe wouldn’t let the welfare bill pass the Senate Finance Committee until she got a promise from the leadership to let her bring up her amendment to add $6 billion of child care spending on the floor.) That won’t be the case this year.

On the other hand, 55 seats isn’t enough to invoke cloture, so the Senate Democrats will still be able to put the brakes on a lot of Republican proposals. The talking heads on CNN this afternoon were predicting that there would be a brief "honeymoon," when the Democrats would be more inclined to compromise, but I find that highly unlikely. The atmosphere in the Senate has been totally poisonous the past couple of years, and I don’t see anything in the election results that will change that.

It’s worth noting that essentially all of the Republican gains in the House are due to the Texas’ legislature’s highly partisan off-year redistricting, masterminded by DeLay. If a genie granted me a wish of a single electoral reform to implement, I’d let the electoral college stand and go for non-partisan redistricting. The way it’s currently done, the vast majority of House seats are totally noncompetitive, making voting for them a pro-forma exercise.

Yikes. I just almost deleted everything I’ve written tonight by hitting the wrong button. I’m going to call it a night and get some rest.

Surfing on BlogExplosion, I ran across this post on the Progressive Blog Alliance, asking everyone to post their reasons for supporting John Kerry. Here are my top 3 reasons for opposing George Bush:

1) Ramming through the massive tax cuts at the cost of everything else in the federal budget — education, health care, job training, veteran’s beneits, you name it. The deficit he’s created won’t evaporate when the economy picks up — it’s structural and will cripple the government for years to come, as well as burdening my kids and theirs.

2) Rushing into war with Iraq, driven by pre-existing ideology rather than evidence, and alienating all of our allies in the process.

3) Using all of its power to tilt the regulatory framework in favor of business, with total disregard for the environmental consequences. If you missed this Washington Post story about the proposed regulation they’ve issued on dams, which would let dam owners cut private deals with the Department of the Interior, cutting out the states, tribes and environmental groups, please read it. And then send a comment to oppose the proposed rule (deadline November 8).

Kerry won’t do any of these things, he’s smart, and his voting record in the Senate is consistently progressive.

***

I spent most of yesterday morning going door-to-door for the local Democratic party, putting notices on people’s doorknobs reminding them to vote tomorrow. I’m not sure if it really gets anyone to vote who wasn’t going to, but it keeps me sane to know that I’ve done everything I could. I sort of feel the same way about it as I do about prayer — I don’t believe in a God who changes people’s fates based on the presence or absence of prayer, but I think it’s a valuable thing to do nonetheless.

I’m taking tomorrow off from work. In the morning I’m selling donuts at the elementary school, which is my polling place, raising money for the PTA. We’ve ordered 50 dozen donuts from Krispy Kreme. Then I’ll be doing whatever is needed — probably going door to door again, reminding people to vote and offering rides. And then I’m working the polls until they close. I probably won’t get a chance to blog.

***

I got an email forwarded today that’s from someone volunteering in Florida. He or she wrote:

"My job is to get people to the polls and, more importantly, to keep them there. Because they’re crazily jammed. Crazily. No one expected this turnout. For me, it’s been a deeply humbling, deeply gratifying experience. At today’s early vote in the College Hill district of East Tampa — a heavily democratic, 90% African American community — we had 879 voters wait an average of five hours to cast their vote. People were there until four hours after they closed (as long as they’re in line by 5, they can vote). "Here’s what was so moving: We hardly lost anyone. People stood outside for an hour, in the blazing sun, then inside for another four hours as the line snaked around the library, slowly inching forward. It made Disneyland look like speed-walking. Some waited 6 hours. To cast one vote. And EVERYBODY felt that it was crucial, that their vote was important, and that they were important. "

I’m also moved that people are willing to wait that long — I keep thinking of the photos of the people waiting to vote in South Africa that first year — but am concerned that it’s necessary. I’d love to hear reports tomorrow about how long people wait in different areas; if you’re reading this, why not post a comment?

***

After reading all the polls, I have no idea who is going to win the election. I’m guessing that we won’t know the winner by Wednesday morning; I’m hoping that it’s because they’re still counting absentee and provisional ballots, rather than because it’s going to be decided in the courts. If it goes to the courts, I think a lot of people are going to doubt the legitimacy of the election, whatever the results. And I think that’s bad for the country.

Also on the Progressive Blog Alliance is a call for mass action to protest in the case of "another stolen election." This worries me deeply — particularly since the coalition calling for protests doesn’t define what constitutes "systematic violations."

As Matt Bai wrote in the New York Times Magazine this weekend,

"Before 2000, most American voters generally viewed the political process in much the same way that avid fans view baseball. Yes, the umpire will blow a call now and then, and the manager will kick some dirt around, and he may even lodge a formal protest that has exactly zero chance of succeeding. But baseball fans come to see most of these incidents as isolated quirks. There is an underlying faith that the umpire is an honest broker and that his inability to gauge fractions of a difference (the milliseconds, say, between the time a ball hits a glove and a foot hits a base) is entirely human. Without this faith — if the umpire, say, wore a Yankee cap in Fenway Park — the game would devolve into pandemonium over every close strike. This is very much like what’s happening in states across the country as Democratic partisans vow to prevent a repeat of the last election. The voting process, once presumed to be a reliable, if fallible, arbiter of the public will, is increasingly seen, even by many more sophisticated voters, as a tainted instrument of partisan conspiracy."

I think this is truly bad for the country. I want Kerry to win, but I think I’d rather see Bush win with 300 electoral votes than see the election disputed in the courts, leaving 40+ percent of the country feeling cheated.

I conclude by pointing out a posting by Robert of Let’s Try Freedom, a conservative blog I found through BlogExplosion. He writes:

"If John Kerry wins, reasonably fair, reasonably square, then he will become my President and I will support him. That doesn’t mean I won’t fight him like the devil on all the many, many things he will do that are wrong and bad; I will. That doesn’t mean I won’t criticize him ferociously and with a partisan growl; I will.

But I won’t declare that he is an illegitimate leader.

I won’t undermine him in front of the national leaders that he has to relate to in order to do his job.

I won’t call him President-Select Kerry if the Supreme Court has to intervene, again, to keep the electoral machinery moving.

I won’t print up bumper stickers in 2008 saying Re-Unelect Kerry.

I won’t, in short, do any of the things that the nauseating anti-Bush left has done in the last four years. I did that stuff with Clinton, and now that I’ve grown up a little bit, and now that I’ve seen what it looks like when the other side does it to my guy, and now that they’ve held up a mirror, it’s a little bit sickening, and I’m more than a little bit ashamed."

I’ll sign onto the converse of that.

No long post tonight, as I’ve been watching the presidential debate. It’s more substantive than I had expected, given the way the campaign has been going.

If you’re not registered to vote, please do so. The deadline is this weekend in many states. You can download the forms for most states here. It’s less than 100 years since women got the right to vote in this country — don’t take it for granted.

I love this cartoon on women’s suffrage I found at the Library of Congress.

It shows a man in a suit and apron, holding two screaming infants, and looking with a desperate expression at a woman wearing a dress, jacket, tie, and monocle. There’s a sign in the back saying "Votes for Women" and the caption is "Election Day." I assume the implication is if you let women vote, the next thing you know, they’ll be going out to work and the men will be taking care of children.

More later, but the official 2003 poverty data are out.

The child poverty rate in 2003 was 17.6 percent, up from 16.7 percent the year before (although, as my bosses are going to repeat endlessly today, lower than the 20.5 percent it was in 1996). The overall poverty rates are also up, but it’s all driven by the increase in child poverty — adult poverty was unchanged. Census says that the increase in child poverty is all driven by an increase in poverty among single-parent households — the poverty rate among married-couple households is unchanged.

Sigh.

Ok, it’s later. This data isn’t terribly surprising — the poverty rate typically goes up for a while after a recesssion, and everyone knows that this has been a particularly anemic recovery, especially on the job front. You can’t really blame it on welfare reform, as welfare never gave people enough money to get out of poverty. But it’s still depressing.

Here’s the graph that I like to show people when I talk about poverty and public policy.

[The image fit onto the blog on my computer, but I’ve heard that it’s being cut off on some — the link is http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/img/incpov03/fig10.jpg if it’s not showing up properly for you.]

What this tells me is that government really can make a difference — the huge improvements of the 1960s are driven by the War on Povery, including the expansion of Social Security to cover a much larger fraction of the elderly population. But there hasn’t been the willpower to fight child poverty in the same way.

Which leads me to the most important news story that you won’t read in your paper — The Incredible Shrinking Budget, by Gene Steuerle at the Urban Institute. It’s about the structural imbalance between Social Security and Medicare, which automatically grow to meet the need, and programs that serve kids, which have to compete for funding with everything else in the budget. And it’s about how those programs are going to get squeezed in the coming years between the Bush tax cuts (whose costs are back-loaded) and the needs of the retiring baby boomers. It’s only 8 pages, and everyone who cares about children should read it.