Half Changed World

Six months after I first wrote about the Virginia governor's race, six days before the election, and I still haven't quite figured out who I'm voting for.  I've been asking everyone I know who is politically active and lives in Virginia who they support, and I've been finding people who support all three of the gubernatorial candidates, and people who are still undecided.

I've been getting tons of mail from all the candidates.  McAulliffe had a mailer last week where the positions of each of the candidates were described and then you had to scratch off the silver boxes to see who went with each set of positions.  It was very clever, but sort of acknowledged that lots of people have a gut reaction against McAuliffe even if they agree with his positions.  The Post endorsement of Deeds clearly gave him a real boost, and I know some real progressives who are supporting him in spite of his not-so-progressive positions on abortion and gay rights because they think he's got the best chance of winning.  Moran has fewer negatives than either of the other candidates for me, but hasn't made a positive case that ties down my vote.

I'm also still undecided on the Lt. Governor's race.  Singer seems to be somewhat more progressive, and to bring some real grassroots energy.  But Wagner's been endorsed by lots of people I respect.  And I do care about having women in elected office.

I do know that I'll be voting for Kaye Kory for House of Delegates.

This week I'm looking at two of the recent series of books about parenting from a father's perspective.  If the female version of these are "momoirs," does that make these "dadiaries?"

Of the two, Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood, by Michael Lewis, is the more recent and the more hyped.  Lewis is the author of one of the better books I've ever read (Liar's Poker, about the excesses of Wall Street in the 1980s) and so I had high hopes for this book. And it has some really funny moments.  But basically, it reads like the slapped together collection of Slate columns that it is.  In it we learn that parenting can be absurd, exhausting and messy, but that "If you want to feel the way you're meant to feel about the new baby, you need to do the grunt work.  it's only in caring for a thing that you become attached it." 

I'd actually be interested in reading a book by Lewis in which he uses his journalistic talents to look at the contested territory of parenting in the 21st century, because he does nail some issues: "For now, there's an unsettling absence of universal, or even local, standards of behavior.  Within a few miles of my house I can find perfectly sane men and women who regard me as a Neanderthal who should do more to help my poor wife with the kids, and just shut up about it.  But I can also find other perfectly sane men and women who view me as a Truly Modern Man and marvel aloud at my ability to be both breadwinner and domestic dervish — doer of an approximately 31.5 percent of all parenting.  The absence of standards is the social equivalent of the absence of an acknowledged fair price for a good in a marketplace.  At best, it leads to haggling; at worst, to market failure."

Dinner with Dad: How I Found My Way Back to the Family Table by Cameron Stracher doesn't try to describe modern fatherhood in general.  Rather, it's the story of one man who decided to be home for dinner, 5 nights a week, for one school year, and how it changed his life.  And yes, it looks like it started out as a blog. 

In order to do this, Stracher started working from home a few days a week, and eventually wound up quitting one of his two jobs, and thus having more time to coach his kid's teams, and generally be part of their lives.  Stracher acknowledges that everything he does would be unremarkable almost anywhere but in the suburbs of New York City, but he also doesn't downplay the difficulty in changing patterns of behavior when he works a two-hour train ride from home, he's expected to travel regularly for work, and all of the kid-focused activities are scheduled for at-home-parents. 

The other major theme of the book is Stracher's desire to cook "real" (e.g. grown up) food for his family, and his frustration when his kids turn up their nose at it again and again.  He writes with passion about the pleasure of feeding people you love, and how easy it is to put undue weight on it.  (I know that one of the reasons I make waffles and muffins so often is they're pretty much the only things I can make that the kids will appreciate the effort.)  He's not the elegant writer that Lewis is, but I think I enjoyed this book more.

Becca at Not Quite Sure poses an interesting pair of questions:

I have no doubt that 40 years from now, when my hypothetical grandchildren learn about this period in history, the collapse of the US auto industry will feature prominently.  And my guess is that Dr. Tiller won't be mentioned, although the culture wars more broadly will.

That said, I'm not really upset about GM going into bankruptcy.  A bit sad, but not really upset.  Both because it's been coming for so long that it's not shocking, and because the good union jobs in the auto industry were going away whether or not GM managed to avoid bankruptcy.  And I'm going to blog about Tiller, not GM, because I don't have anything particularly original to say about GM.  (If you want to read about GM, go re-read Gladwell's article about why GM should be understood as a health insurance company that finances itself by selling cars.)

So, back to Tiller.  With Obama nominating Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, and presumably getting make at least one more and possibly several nominations, I think abortion is likely to remain legal for the foreseeable future.  But Tiller's murder drives home the degree to which the question of whether abortion is legal has become almost completely separate from the question of whether women who want an abortion can get one.  According to Planned Parenthood, more than 85 percent of counties in the US do not have a single abortion provider.  Tiller was one of only a few doctors in the whole country who do late-term abortions.

I can't blame doctors who decide that they're not up to facing the screaming protestors, the constant threats on their lives and their families.  And there's a selection issue — because so many doctors don't do abortions at all, it's easy for a doctor who is willing to serve women in this way to find that they're spending most of their time doing abortions.  But it's pretty hollow to have a legal right to an abortion if you can't actually find someone to do it.  Wealthy women will always be able to travel to providers (at least, if they don't need the abortion because of an immediate crisis) but poor women won't.

We had a really nice weekend camping.  We went with several other families, so there were a total of five kids, with ours the youngest at five and eight, and the oldest being twelve.  We went out to Wolf Gap, which is right on the border between Virginia and West Virginia.

I was impressed at how well the boys did hiking, since last year they were pretty whiny on a much shorter hike.  There was one section where you really needed to climb up some rocks, and both boys made it with only a few helping hands.  (They needed a bit more assistance on the downhill there.)  D whined a fair bit on the way up, but then raced down ahead of us trying to keep up on the way down.  N was a trooper for most of the time, but was clearly wiped by the end.

Other than the hike, the boys mostly spent the time obsessively poking the fire.  There were enough adults there that we were able to take turns supervising them, and no one got set on fire.  The kids all thought we should have a fire going at all times, so we told them they were responsible for collecting enough firewood to make that happen, and the older kids even each took a turn with the saw.  The adults were able to actually have some conversations, as well as reading, and staring into the fire.  We all ate far too many roasted marshmallows.

This was car camping [e.g. we could drive right to the campsite, but we slept in tents, not the car] so we were able to bring a ridiculous amount of supplies.  We had folding chairs and tables, a two burner stove, big tents, beer and soda, barbecued chicken, watermelon, coffee w/ cream, you name it.  This is the sort of camping that I did with my family when I was growing up, but as an adult I somewhere along the way decided that I only wanted to do backcountry camping, where you only have what you're willing to carry.  That's obviously not going to happen with the boys until they're old enough to carry their own gear, but this weekend made me realize that it's some sort of stupid snobbery to think that car camping isn't worth doing.

The two burner stove that my friends brought is pretty much identical to the one my parents bought at Sears 40 years ago, and a quick online search shows that Coleman still makes pretty much the identical model.  I remembered that when I was little we were able to buy the fuel for the stove at gas stations, which makes me think that car camping must have been far more popular then than it is now.* We hypothesized that it's been driven out by the combination of:

• Camping as a cheap way to travel has been driven out by cheap motels and low-fare air travel.
• Those who do travel and camp mostly use RVs.  (When did RVs get popular?)
• Now that air conditioning is so ubiquitous, not to mention television and the internet, not so many people are interested in sitting in the woods and getting eaten by mosquitoes.  (My boys did complain about our not letting them bring their DSs.)
• Those who do still camp are more likely to be the hard core folks who want to backpack and not car camp.

*I'm not entirely sure that's true — it looks like white gas was used for things other than just camping stoves and lanterns.

What do you think — has car camping declined?  Will it make a comeback in the recession?  Do you do it?  What's the one piece of gear that you couldn't live without?

Ok, I found some statistics from the outdoor industry foundation.  I think this is the trade group of the people who sell gear.  It's a little hard to read, but I think they're saying that 49 million Americans went car camping at least once in 2004, down 18 percent from 1998, and 13 million Americans went backpacking at least once in 2004, down 23 percent from 1998.  If anyone can find longer-term trends, I'd love to see them.

I've been reading Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing to N at bedtime.  I hadn't read it since I was in 2nd grade, and am pleased that it's almost as good as I remember (although the mother is pretty annoying).  But I had realized how much it would be a guide to the changes in parenting practice since it was written (1972).

• Peter (age 9) gets to go to Central Park without an adult, as long as he's with another kid. 
• But not because it's safer than today — Peter says his friend has been mugged three times, and he assumes he'll get mugged someday too.
• Three fourth graders are left alone in charge of a 2 1/2 year old.
• The reason Mrs. Hatcher goes back to the apartment is that she realizes that she forgot to turn the oven ON. 
• At Fudge's 3rd birthday party, the other kids are all dropped off and their parents leave — even though one kid is a known biter and another is terrified.

It looks like all of the Judy Blume books are still in print.  I remember reading a few years ago that she had updated Are You There God, It's Me, Margaret to update the references to sanitary napkins with belts (which were dated when I read it 30 years ago).  I don't know if she made changes to any of the other books.

What children's book of the past decade do you think our kids will be reading to their kids 37 years from now?  And what in them will seem most dated?

With Congress about to pass restrictions on some of the ways that credit card companies make life miserable for unwary users, the credit card companies are claiming that they're going to have to raise fees, curtail reward programs, and eliminate grace periods on those who pay off their cards every month.

This is obviously BS.  If the credit card companies were losing money on people who pay off their cards every month, they wouldn't be giving them credit.  They're making money now, even with the grace period and reward programs, because they charge merchants a cut every time someone uses their credit card.  And if they could make more money by eliminating the reward programs, etc., they would have done so already.  If they start charging fees, they'll just drive their customers away.

The NYTimes has an interesting discussion on the subject going, with lots of people saying that if credit card companies started charging annual fees, and/or eliminating the grace period, they'd just stop using credit cards.  I'm in this category — I use my credit card for convenience, and could switch to a debit card without too much hassle.  I'd need to keep more of my money in the checking account to ensure against overdrawing, but could presumably find an interest-bearing checking account to use.

That said, there will be losers (other than the credit card industry) as a result of this bill. There will be fewer card offers with low teaser rates, and the people who successfully juggled different accounts to always keep the interest low will be worse off.

The credit card industry may also try to squeeze more out of merchant fees.  I'm not quite clear on how the system of merchant fees isn't a violation of anti-trust law, but they've got a pretty good monopoly going on.  And merchants are afraid they'll lose huge chunks of their customer base, or that customers will spend less, if they don't take plastic.  I noticed last summer when gas prices were really high that some stations were offering discounts for cash — I hadn't seen that in a while.  (Visa and Mastercard don't allow stores to charge a transaction fee for using them, but they do allow discounts for cash.)  I'd assume that if they increase the fees enough, more stores will start offering discounts for cash.

Could you live without your credit card?  And how much of a discount for cash would it take to get you to switch over?

It doesn't take an economist to tell you that just one or two really disruptive kids in a class can absorb a disproportionate share of the teacher's time and make things harder for everyone.  But two economists, Scott Carrell and Mark Hoekstra, have studied the question of just how much effect does a disruptive kid have on the outcomes of the other students in a class.  Here's the paper, here's a less technical version of it, and here's a Freakonomics post about it.  (From last summer, although the paper is dated this month — I guess there was a pre-publication version circulating.) 

They were able to link school records with court records for domestic violence cases, and looked at both the children of the parents in the DV cases, and their classmates.  And they did find worse school outcomes — poorer grades and more disciplinary infractions — among the children who had classmates from these troubled families than among their peers in other classes and even than the same children in other years.

This is elegant research, but the findings shouldn't shock anyone.  Catholic schools pay their teachers worse than public school teachers (even when they're not nuns) and have bigger classes, but their not-so-secret advantage over the public schools is that they can kick the troublemakers out.  The Great Expectations School isn't great literature, but it's a brutally honest report by a rookie teacher of how the classroom management challenge just kicked his ass and made his teaching skills pretty much irrelevant.

This also once again makes me wonder how much of the success of places like KIPP is due to selection.  I don't think they can expel kids any more easily than the regular public schools, but making parents go through even modest hurdles to enroll their kids probably winnows out a lot of the most troubled kids.  And is that ok?  If the lifeboat is sinking and they can rescue some of the kids, but not all, isn't that better than letting them all drown?

But what are you going to do with those kids?  Carrell and Hoekstra's methodology reminds us that these "troublemaker" kids aren't bad seeds — they're kids with pretty messed up home lives, who are probably used to violence as a way to solve problems, even if they're not being hit themselves.  If anyone deserves help, they do.  But it's probably too much to ask of overwhelmed teachers that they be the ones to provide this help, while also trying to teach 25 other kids to read.

I finally got a chance to watch Milk on DVD, and thought it was terrific.  I knew that he was a gay politician and that he had been killed, and that was about it.  Having learned a little about him, I now want to know more — after watching the movie, I added The Times of Harvey Milk (which is a documentary about him) to my queue.

If the movie is portraying him fairly, Harvey Milk was a natural-born politician, able to talk to almost anyone, able to bring people together, able to make people have hope in spite of themselves.  Watching the scenes of him leading crowds, knowing what was coming, was almost unbearable.

One of my favorite professors in college used to talk about "Dante's influence on Virgil" meaning that after the Inferno, no one ever looked at the Aeneid the same way.  In the same way, Milk's story resonates differently today, in the age of Obama, with half a dozen states recognizing same-sex marriages, than it could possibly have resonated in 1984, when the documentary was made.

In the movie, Milk insists that all of his friends have to start coming out to their families and straight friends, because once your image of "the gays" is replaced by the face of someone you know, it's hard to hate.  It made me wonder how the equality movement would be different if AIDS hadn't hit the gay community so hard during the 1980s.  HIV/AIDS forced people out of the closet who would have stayed quiet otherwise.  And it's certainly hard to imagine that the right to marry would have become such a central focus of the gay and lesbian movement if the bathhouse culture of the 1970s had continued on.

I highly recommend the movie if you haven't seen it yet.

Last Friday, David Brooks had an op-ed in the New York Times with the headline The Harlem Miracle, discussing an evaluation of the schools run by the Harlem Children's Zone. While lots of people have been excited by the concept of the HCZ — it's the basis for the "Promise Neighborhoods" idea that Obama talked about in the campaign and included in his budget — there hasn't been any hard data about effectiveness until now.  Here's the underlying study* which really is quite exciting.

The main findings of the study are:

• For the middle school students, there were really enormous gains in math scores, although they took several years to kick in.  The gains in language arts scores were much more modest.  These findings are based on comparisons between those randomly selected for admission and those who applied but were randomly denied, so they're about as strong as you get.
• The elementary school impacts were stronger on language arts, somewhat smaller on math, but still impressive.  Because few students who applied for the elementary schools were denied admission, these findings are based on a different statistical approach (instrumental variables), which is somewhat less reliable.
• The authors did not find any significant effects on test scores for graduates of either Baby College or Harlem GEMS (the preschool program run by the HCZ).  They also note that the middle school impacts were as strong for kids who lived outside of the Zone as for those who were in it, suggesting that the full community package was not essential to the model.

So, what does this mean?  To start with, it refutes the claims of some that there's nothing you can do to help these kids do better in school and society. (The strong version of this claim is that IQ is genetic and can't be affected by anything you do, the weaker version is the claim that by the time the kids are in middle school it's too late.)

Brooks uses this finding to argue for "an emerging model for low-income students" where "schools create a disciplined,
orderly and demanding counterculture to inculcate middle-class values."  The thing to notice here is that Brooks is lumping HCZ and KIPP together.  Both models certainly share some features, including extended school days and years, and very high expectations.

However, if you read Whatever it Takes, one of the main themes is that Geoffrey Canada  (who runs HCZ) was constantly fighting his board, who thought they should just bring KIPP in to run these schools.  Canada felt that KIPP was too focused on rescuing a few students — and encouragin these students to define themselves in opposition to the neighborhood culture — whereas he wanted to change the neighborhood culture.  He also fought against explicitly teaching behaviors like making eye contact, arguing that no middle class school does that.  So, I don't know whether Canada gave in on these points, or if Brooks is distorting HCZ to fit his agenda.

But presumably, other people do have a good idea of what exactly is going on the HCZ schools.  Is this model then broadly replicable?  That depends on a bunch of questions:

• Are there enough good teachers out there who are willling to work in low-income neighborhoods, with the kind of hours required, and under intense pressure to achieve good test scores?  (HCZ had extremely high turnover of teachers.)  And are we, as a society, willing to pay enough to recruit teachers to do this?
• Are the kids willing to work as hard they have to to succeed in this model?  To give up afternoons and summers and weekends, and to work harder in school than they ever have before?
• How much of this success is dependent on Canada himself?  His personal charisma is clearly part of what made both teachers and students willing to work so hard.  And his personal story makes him a very convincing messenger for the idea that if you work hard you can succeed, even coming from poverty in Harlem.  No one is going to give up their weekends and summers unless they're convinced that it will make a difference.

* It drives me crazy that the Times never includes links to underlying sources.  But it cracked me up that Judith Warner's blog last week included a linked definition for "muffin top."

Others on this column:

• Laura at 11d.
• GothamSchools
• Thoughts on Education Policy