Half Changed World

Via Whirled View, I found this post about schooling in England.  The author is moderately snide about the plight of the "London liberal lefty with a kid rising five."  What struck me the most is how much of it could have been written about the US:

"The young and liberal move into funky, down at heel areas, become parents, and then start looking round at the local schools. There’s no way their kids are going to contribute to the local, funky, down at heel ambience…"

Nick Cohen’s solution, in the Guardian, is to bring back grammar schools  — state funded, but selective schools.  (Or rather, he argues that these schools will help bright students whose parents can neither afford fee-based schools (what the English call puiblic, and Americans call private) nor houses in areas with good free schools.  It’s Blood and Treasure who says that argument is self-serving.)

The US doesn’t have "grammar schools" — but it does have "gifted and talented" programs in public schools, as well as a handful of selective public high schools, mostly with math and science focuses, such as Stuyvesant and Bronx Science in New York, Thomas Jefferson in Virginia, and Montgomery Blair in Maryland.  And I suspect the arguments about them are very similar to the arguments about grammar schools in the UK.

I have very mixed feelings about such programs.  I know that they are often a way for middle-class parents to get more resources — better teachers, smaller classes, enrichment activities — for their kids while sending them to public schools.  In Unequal Childhoods, Annette Lareau writes about the ways that middle-class parents is their skills to get their kids into such programs — advocating with principals, having children privately re-tested, etc.  At the same time, I attended one of those selective high schools, and after reading A Tribe Apart, I have no doubt that a significant chunk of my classmates would have dropped out and/or wound up institutionalized if they had attended a typical American high school.

The Washington Post magazine had a cover story this weekend about two young women who attended Montgomery Blair who were finalists in the Intel Talent Search.  They say that they didn’t care that girls were in the minority in their science classes.  But there’s a huge difference between being one of eight girls in a class and being the only one, or one of two.  One of the things that selective schools like that do is make it normal to like math, normal to work really hard, normal to get really good grades,

Jody pointed out that Typepad screwed up all the archives when they did the big upgrade last month.  If you use Typepad and haven’t republished lately, you probably want to do so.

I did republish, so if you notice anything not working in my archives, let me know and I’ll try to figure it out.

I also noticed that Typepad only lists 10 months of archives in my sidebar.  However, if you click on the word "Archives," the older months are still available.  (Anyone know how to make it show more than 10 entries?)

In our endless battle against clutter, we’ve been freecycling a bunch of stuff lately.  For those who don’t know, Freecycle is a loosely linked set of email lists, divided based on geography, where people post things that they’re giving away and other people email them to say that they want them.   I’ve given away things as big as our old washer/dryer and as small as baby food jars.  It’s one of the wonders of the internet age that for almost anything you can imagine giving away, not only is there someone who is thrilled to have it, but the odds are pretty good that you can find them.

Somewhat to my amusement, I’m more willing to get rid of things that we never use when I know they’re going to someone who wants them than when I know they’re going to the landfill.  If the only choice is to toss them, I feel compelled to hold on to them in case someday we want them.  But if they’ll make someone else happy, I remind myself that I can always beg, borrow or buy new ones if I suddenly need them.

I don’t freecycle everything we’re getting rid of.  A few things have enough value that I’ve ebayed them. Other things aren’t worth the effort of listing individually. I throw outgrown kid clothes into a bag in the closet, and when it gets full I bring it to work to give to a colleague whose wife works for NoVAM.  And whenever Value Village calls to say they’re picking up donations in my neighborhood, I wind up with a bag or two for them.

I still haven’t figured out what to do with things like handmade baby blankets.  It hurts to get rid of something that was given with so much love, but it seems silly to put them all in my parents’ attic to collect dust until my kids have children of their own.  Does anyone know of a place that collects blankets for kids in foster care or something like that? 

"Does the Sabbath exist independently from the preparation, from the tradition?  Can you meet your family for a pizza dinner on Friday, relax together for the first time all week, drive home after dark, snuggle up to a video tape, feel happy to be alive, and call it Shabbas?  Can you go to the beach with your family on Saturday, enjoying the creation on a beautiful day, and fulfill the observance?  The rabbis rather firmly say no.  A tired man and woman might prefer yes.

"Here’s a puzzle: If you race home from the office, snap off the cartoons, shake your roast chicken out of a box, and light the candles exactly by sundown; if you bound out of bed next day though you desperately need your sleep, and then head out to services in the rain on foot when driving would be more restful; if you stand and sit in the chapel, your concentration constantly interrupted by children, and then you return home in the rain: this might pass for Shabbas, and the rabbis would probably confer their blessing.

Possibly religion is not appropriate for parents of young children."

— Elizabeth Ehrlich, Miriam’s Kitchen.

I was struck by this post, from LAmom, in which she suggests that financial concerns are causing women to postpone (or forgo) parenting:

"If women who might be both physically and emotionally ready to have children routinely feel like they can’t because of finances, then our society is failing to meet the needs of women and families."

I think LAmom is fairly characterizing the discussion on Feministing that inspired her post, but I wondered how representative those experiences were.  I can’t think of anyone in my personal acquaintance who really wanted to have kids, but waited because of money.  (By contrast, I know a lot of women who wanted to have kids, but didn’t want to be single moms, and weren’t in a relationship that they wanted to bring kids into.)

More broadly, Dave Pollard claims that people worldwide are having fewer children than they want, due to economic constraints.  I’m skeptical about both halves of that statement.

The first part may be true in the sense that the Gallup organization does regular surveys of how big people think the ideal family is, and people in most countries do give higher numbers than the actual birthrate.  But I’m not sure how much thought people put into those answers, and whether they actually mean that many people have significant regrets about not having more kids.

The second part of the claim seems especially weak to me.  Pollard argues that the widespread correlation between women’s education and lower fertility is spurious and that the increased participation of women in the labor force is demand-driven.  In other words, women are working because they have to, and therefore can’t have as many kids as they want.  This seems totally offbase, for several reasons.

• People overwhelmingly have fewer kids in more affluent countries than in poorer countries.
• At least in the US, women’s labor force participation is unaffected by husband’s earnings, which makes it very hard for me to accept Pollard’s claim that it’s driven by "economic necessity."
• Pollard cites a statistic that "over 40% of Americans say they would have more children if they were wealthier."  In reality, however, in the US rich people have — on average — fewer kids than poor people. 

Tiny Coconut writes today about her tentative steps towards a spiritual practice that is compatible with her intellect and heart and sense of the world.  I posted a link that I thought she might like, and she wrote back asking if I had suggestions for books about progressive Judaism.

I always have suggestions of books, but as I told TC, I’m not sure that’s the right way to go about the quest.  For all the talk of Jews as "people of the book," Judaism really can’t be practiced in isolation — for one thing, many of the key prayers require a minyan, a congregation of 10 adults (traditionally, 10 men), in order to say them.   Orthodox Jews also don’t believe in driving on Shabbat, so they’re forced to live within walking distance of their shul.

More broadly, other than the central idea of monotheism, Judaism doesn’t care so much about what you believe, as what you do.  If you went to a rabbi and said, "Rabbi, I follow the commandments, I go to shul, I keep Shabbat, but I don’t know if I believe in God, can I still be a good Jew?" my sense is that most rabbis wouldn’t hesitate to say you can.

I also thought of something I read over on a blog called How to Save the World.  Dave Pollard writes (at the end of a long discussion of something called social network mapping):

"An application of all this that intrigues me is in assessing how we should (and can) change ourselves…. So do we start by a navel-gazing process that entails some personal, individual decisions and bold actions? Or, if our relationships and networks define us, do we start by first finding or redefining the circles, the communities to which we (and others) belong and then let those new and altered communities redefine and change us? For example, if we want to solve global warming or end world poverty do we first launch into personal study, self-improvement and individual activism, or do we first connect ourselves with those who can teach us and show us what needs to be done, and just get carried along with the collective wisdom of their activities?"

That made a lot of sense to me.  So I suggested to TC that she ask her local friends who are practicing Jews if she can go to shul (synagogue) with them, maybe wangle an invitation to Shabbat lunch.

I finished the Harry Potter book — I liked it better than #5, but not as much as the first four.  This is the first of the Harry Potter books that T and I haven’t read out loud to each other — after the disappointment of the last one, we weren’t ready to dedicate the amount of time involved in reading a thick book like this out loud.  (The boys are way too young for these books, so it would have come out of our very limited free time.)  I read it right away not so much because I was dying to find out what happened next, but because it’s fun to read books that your friends are reading so you can talk about them.

Right now I’m reading In the River Sweet, by Patricia Henley, which is the first book we’re discussing for Shannon’s Naptime Books group.  I’m enjoying it.  It cuts back and forth between modern Indiana and the same character 30 years earlier in Saigon — both versions of Ruth Anne are complex and believable.  The discussion hasn’t really taken off yet, though — I think we’re still trying to figure out how to make the online setting work.

I’ve just gotten out of the library The Life of Pi, which is the next pick for my real life book group.  I admit that I’ve been somewhat resistant to the book, mostly because it has a reputation as a "book group book."  Plus, it doesn’t really matter if I read the book, because the group tends to spend about 10 minutes discussing the book and the rest of the time chatting about everything else.  I don’t mind, because the group is made up of moms of kids from my son’s preschool class, and it’s a good chance to socialize with them. Since T does all the pickups and dropoffs, I don’t get to see much of the other parents, and the "book group" helps me stay in the loop.

So, just in time for the 50th anniversary of the merger of the AFL and the CIO, it looks like the American labor movement is splitting apart again.  Four unions have announced that they are not going to attend the annual AFL-CIO convention this week, and two of them — SEIU and the Teamsters — have formally withdrawn from the Federation. 

I don’t know whether this is a good thing, and don’t think we’ll know for years, if ever.  With hindsight, I think everyone agrees that the original breakoff of the CIO — the Congress of Industrial Organizations — from the AFL was a good thing, bringing new life to a morabund labor movement.  But it’s not clear whether any amount of fresh energy and organizing techniques can revitalize the labor movement today.  All the growth in the economy is in jobs that are painfully difficult to organize under the best of circumstances, and the laws are increasingly stacked against unions.  Opponents of the split fear that it will just make unions weaker when they need every advantage that they can get.

(I had some good friends from college who trained as organizers through the Organizing Institute, and I considered doing it.  I ultimately decided that I didn’t have what it takes to encourage people to become union leaders, knowing full well that the odds were high that they’d be fired as result.  Yes, it’s illegal, but companies do it all the time — the worst penalty they can wind up owing is back wages, which doesn’t amount to much for low-income workers anyway.)

My understanding is that the unions in Change to Win think that the AFL-CIO spends too much of its money and energy fighting for legislative changes and not enough organizing new members — and that the political efforts will always be wasted until there are more union members.  The AFL-CIO leadership thinks that it needs to fight in Washington for policies that make organizing efforts productive; it’s also made steps towards increasing the focus on organizing, and thinks that the leaders of Change to Win are more interested in self-aggrandizement than anything else.

This split could have huge implications for American workers, but you couldn’t tell that from scanning the blogosphere.  According to the Annotated New York Times, as many bloggers have commented on Brooks’ fluff piece on flying with children as on the lead article about the split.  The only interesting discussion I’ve found is in the "House of Labor" section at TPM Cafe, led by Nathan Newman, formerly of LaborBlog.

For the last couple of days, I’ve been playing around with Bloglines, which lets you go to a single web page to read almost any blog.  The big advantage of it is that it tells you which blogs have new posts, so you don’t waste time checking blogs that haven’t updated.  There are some disadvantages, too, however.

• You don’t get to see the design of the website as the creator intended it.  While I use an off-the-shelf Typepad template, some bloggers put a lot of creative effort into their designs.
• Similarly, you don’t get to see people’s blogrolls and other side-bar content.
• You don’t show up as hits on the bloggers’ site.  This is particularly an issue for bloggers who are trying to make money by selling ads (again not me), but I don’t know any bloggers who aren’t at least mildly obsessive about how many hits they’re getting.  On the other hand, you can see on Bloglines how many people have subscribed to your feeds.
• Not all of the blogs I read have feeds that Bloglines can read — it couldn’t find either Jo(e) or Suzanne’s blogs.  I’m afraid that if I get into the habit of reading via Bloglines, I’ll forget to check out what they’re up to.
• Perhaps most critically, Bloglines only shows main posts, not comments.  And in many of the blogs I read, the comments are at least half the fun.  It’s easy enough to click over to check them out, but my sense is that only a small fraction of bloglines readers do.  You’re missing out.

The Style section of the Washington Post today has a profile of Jane Sullivan Roberts, who turns out to be a rather accomplished person in her own right.  Hugo Schwyzer writes about how he’s encouraged by her involvement in Feminists for Life, which has fought against discrimination against teen mothers and the "family cap" under welfare.  (However, some of his commenters argue that FFL isn’t really a pro-feminist organization.)  More broadly, I generally think it’s a positive sign when men choose to marry women who are their intellectual and professional peers.

The Post also has an article by fashion columnist Robin Givhan taking potshots at the  pastel outfits worn by Mrs. Roberts and their two young children.  Jack’s outfit — a pale blue suit with short pants — is admittedly a bit over the top, but how the heck are you supposed to dress a four-year-old boy for a White House photo op?  In the extremely improbably event that I was suddenly summoned to such an event, I’d have to rush out to the very expensive kids’ store near me and beg for their help in finding something appropriate.

This photo suggests that the photo op exceeded Jack’s standing still limits.  I love the look on Josephine’s face too.