Half Changed World

This month’s Blogging for Book’s assignment is to "describe in 2,000 words or less why your life would make perfect sitcom."

Ok, here’s the pitch:  "It’s about a family — with two boys — a toddler and a preschooler — but the twist is that the DAD stays home with them, while the mom works.  And he drives a minivan!"

Are you doubled over with laughter yet?  No?  Oh, I’m not either.  Gee, I guess that unless you find the concept of a father changing a diaper inherently hysterical, my life probably won’t make a good sitcom.  Oh well.

So, I’ve been trying to figure out what sort of TV show my life is:

Blessedly, it’s not a soap opera.  No life-threatening illnesses, no affairs, no mistaken identities. Thank you, G-d; if possible, I’d like to keep it that way.

In spite of my sons’ best efforts, it’s not an opera.  While there’s lots of singing, and occasionally bursts of passion (otherwise known as tantrums), there’s no build-up to a dramatic peak with the tension resolved in the final act.

It is definitely not a decorating, or house repair show.  All our walls are off-white and when something leaks, we call a plumber.

My husband suggested that it’s an old-time serial adventure, with the hero getting into a scrape each week, but always pulling off a daring escape by the end of the episode.  And it’s true, our dialogue often sounds like a bad melodrama:

"You must go to sleep."

"But I can’t go to sleep."

"But you must go to sleep."

"But I can’t go to sleep"

"But you must go to sleep."

"I’ll go to sleep."

"My hero!"

However, I’ve decided that it’s really a science show, something that might run on the Discovery Channel late at night.  One day we learn what happens to milk that has been left at room temperature in a sippy cup for two week, the next day we discuss where pee-pee comes from.  We learn some biology, some physics (our youngest cast member is engaged in an extensive exploration of gravity and its effects on everything from his breakfast to Daddy’s keyboard), a little meteorology. The budget may be low, the effects cheesy, but we’re all learning together and having a good time.

Last week, Michelle Singletary, who writes a personal finance column for the Washington Post, had an article about the heavy burden of college loans.  She notes that the average student graduating from law or medical school owes a total of over $90,000, and argues that this debt load makes it hard for new lawyers to choose careers in public service (average starting salary $36,000) rather than private practice (average starting salary $90,000 — and the top students can get offers in the six digits).  She writes supportively of a proposal from Robert Reich to make student loans payable as a percentage of salary rather than as a fixed amount.

I have two issues with this argument.  First, some student loans can be repayed under an income-contingent payback plan.  But, more significantly, I think it’s terribly misleading to suggest that the main problem is the burden of student loans rather than the huge disparity between the pay in the public v. private sector. 

Let’s think about a lawyer fresh out of law school. She’s 26 or 27 and idealistic.  And let’s take financial aid out of the picture — say she was lucky enough to get almost all grants for financial aid, and got a great summer job that paid enough to cover the rest.  She’s so idealistic that she doesn’t care that her classmates are making almost three times what she is — she’s got more than enough to pay her rent and she’s happy.  (Hey, I made about $21,000 my first year out of college, and thought I was rich.)  And then 3 years go by, maybe 5, and she’s starting to think about having kids.  And it’s a lot harder to think about supporting 2 or 3 or 4 people on that salary than it is to support 1 on it.

And women are much more likely to take public interest jobs than men.   A student study at Harvard Law found that from 1998 to 2003, 10% of women graduates and 5% of men graduates took public sector jobs (including government, nonprofit, and legal services).  This is consistent with broader studies of both law students and other professsions.

What’s going on here? At least some of the women are looking for more family-friendly jobs (although public service jobs are not always family-friendly), but I doubt that’s the main driving force for most.  (In fact, if you’re not planning on having kids for several years, one could argue that the most family-friendly thing to do is to take a high-stress high-paying job and sock away as much money as possible, so you can afford to hire help, stop working, or go part-time when the kids come.)

I think gender roles play out in a more subtle way — that most young women don’t expect to be supporting a family on just their income, and so don’t feel compelled to maximize their earning potential. I’m not saying young men are thinking explicitly about supporting a family — but I think men get less societal support for picking altruistic but low-paying careers.  And it seems that earning lots of money is an unalloyed plus for men in the dating scene, while it’s a mixed blessing for women.

Singletary writes:

"If young people come out of school saying "Show me the money," who will teach in public schools? Who will work as social workers? Who will take lower-paying physician jobs in urban and rural hospitals? Who will legally represent the downtrodden?"

If these are tasks we value as a society, maybe we should figure out a way that people can do them without giving up on a middle class life (or marrying someone who will subsidize them). 

Just thought I’d let you know that the reason I haven’t posted in a few days is that I’m sick, and have been sleeping as much as possible with two active boys underfoot.

When I feel better, I’m planning on discussing the new Census report on family structure (in the meantime, you can read RebelDad and At Home Dad’s takes on it), how much nonprofit and public sector jobs pay (and should pay), how we deal with the whole Santa story, and starting a primer on tax reform and why liberals need to start reading the business section of the newspaper.  And maybe entering the new Blogging for Books contest, if I have any ideas when the topic is announced tomorrow.

Representative Henry Waxman issued a report today on the most popular curricula used by federally funded abstinence education programs.  He’s on the Government Reform committee, which gives him a nice bully pulpit for things like this. The findings were quite horrifying — 11 of the 13 curricula studied included blatantly false statements about things like the effectiveness of condoms at preventing STDs, the long-term health consequences of abortion, the means by which HIV can be transmitted.

One of my coworkers came into my office this morning holding the Washington Post article on the report and asking if I had seen it.  Her older son is in middle school, and she had just recently received the notice from the school informing her of her option to excuse her child from the abstinence component of the "family life" class they offer.  She’s now planning on asking the principal if she can see the curriculum that they’re using.

Rana commented on Pharyngula’s post about the report that maybe this is a subtle strategy to make liberals more open to homeschooling and vouchers.  I admit, my reaction to conservative moans about schools teaching "the wrong values" has always been to think that if you’re depending on schools to teach your child values, you’re already in trouble.  And it’s still true, while I’d be pissed off to learn that the local school was teaching this sort of bs, I’d hope that I’d have provided my children with enough real information that they wouldn’t be put at risk by this stupidity.  With the right sort of child (one who enjoys challenging authority and doesn’t mind sticking out a bit), I could imagine not exempting my kid from such a class, but arming him with real statistics, so he could keep raising his hand and being a pain in the butt.

I also want to point out that it was issues like this (on the other side) that lead to the creation of the Christian Coalition as an effective political force.  So, go find out if your local school district is using one of these awful curricula. If it is, write a letter of complaint to the principal and the school board.  And if they don’t do anything about it, find someone to run against them for the school board.  Or do it yourself.

Today is World AIDS Day.  I don’t really have anything to add to the raw horror of the simple estimates:  39.4 million people worldwide infected with HIV, of whom 25.4 million live in sub-Saharan Africa.  The vast majority of these do not have access to any treatment.

Two organizations that I give to address very different aspects of the AIDS epidemic.  amfAR, the American Foundation for AIDS Fesearch, supports research into both a vaccine and treatment, as well as into effective prevention efforts.  Food and Friends delivers groceries and prepared meals to people living with HIV/AIDS and other life-challenging illnesses in the Washington DC area. 

While I very much support efforts to bring treatment to Africa and Asia, I feel like any contribution that I could make is insignificant compared to the efforts of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.  (This foundation almost makes me feel good about buying Microsoft products.)

This week, I read Reading L.lita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, by Azar Nafisi.  It was an interesting read, although I’m not sure I can say that I liked it.  Much of the book is a discussion of the books her group of students read, and not having read most of them recently (and never having read any James), I felt quite at a loss.  And I still can’t remember who was who among Nafisi’s students.  But the description of her life as a westernized female intellectual in revolutionary Iran is absolutely fascinating.

Overall, it was a more pleasant life than I would have imagined.  External behavior, such as dress, was closely monitored, with penalties for such lapses as letting a bit of hair peak out from a veil.  But Nafisi never seems to have felt at risk for what she thought, said, or wrote.  While she talks about some of her students who were arrested, even killed, she never seems to have felt threatened herself.  It’s unclear whether this was due to bravado, wealth, connections, or just luck. 

Nafisi argues that reading and discussing these western novels was an act of resistance, not just because they were disapproved of by the authorities, but because the essence of a novelist’s work is to imagine the world through someone else’s perspective.  She suggests that the greatest sin of the fundamentalists in Iran was — like Nabakov’s Humbert — to deny others’ humanity by denying their points of view.  I’m not entirely convinced.  But I do believe that reading and thinking about literature were essential to Nafisi’s self-identity, and that she couldn’t have foregone them without doing fundamental damage to herself.

Last week, Elise asked me how I have time to read so much.  I’ve realized that reading is an important element of who I am, too.  So I make the time, at the price of less sleep and a messier house than I’d like.  It helps that I read fast and watch very little tv. 

(Updated 12/8: in looking at the google searches leading to my blog, I’ve decided to replace the Os in the word "L.lita" with dots to try to get rid of the folks looking for pix.)

Since I often post about bad news, I thought I’d share this encouraging piece of news that came across my desk today.  The CDC reported that births to very young teen mothers (ages 10-14) are down to 0.7 live births per 1,000 girls, half the rate they were in 1990, and the lowest rate since 1946.  This is good news on all levels — girls this age aren’t physically ready to give birth (it’s dangerous both to the mother and the baby) and they’re not emotionally ready to be parents. 

The interesting thing is that no one really knows why the birth rate has dropped in the last decade — either for this group of very young teens, or for teens in general (the birth rate for girls 15-19 is 41.7 per 1,000, down from 61.8 in 2000).  The story is a complicated one, involving both better birth control (especially long-term hormonal approaches like depo-provera and norplant) and reduced sexual activity.

Last week, following a reference in the NY Times magazine, I tracked down a remarkable study, the 40-year followup of the original Perry Preschool cohort.

The Perry Preschool study is famous among social policy researchers.  In the early 1960s, a sample of low-income African-American children who were assessed to be at high risk of school failure were randomly assigned to two groups, one of which received two years of high-quality preschool and one of which did not receive a preschool program.  The group that received preschool services scored higher on IQ and similar tests while in preschool and for a year or two afterward, but this achievement gap faded over time.  However, the group that received preschool services continued to score higher on school achievement tests and be more likely to complete school, more likely to be employed, and less likely to be arrested, even decades later.

The full report of the 40-year followup doesn’t seem to be available yet, but a summary report including Q and As is available on the web.  It’s a fascinating read, and makes some interesting points.

• Almost all of the impact on high school graduation is driven by the women.  84 percent of the women in the preschool group graduated from a regular high school compared to 32 percent of the non-program group.  (This is an impact so large as to be almost inconceivable — social service interventions typically move impacts by a few percentage points.)  The researchers suggest as a possible explanation that boys were more likely to be held back or assigned to special education because of behavioral issues, not just academic delays.
• Almost all of the cost savings, however, are driven by the reduction in arrest and incarceration, which is concentrated among the men.  The researchers estimate that each dollar invested in the Perry Preschool program returned over $17 — almost $13 for society as a whole, and $4 for the participants.  Of the return to society, 88% came from the reduction in crime.
• This study was one of the driving forces behind the creation of the Head Start program, and is still cited as one of the main pieces of evidence in support of the program.  However, the researchers note that most Head Start programs are not as good as the studied program — especially in regard to the educational background of the teachers.
• The researchers also caution against using this study to argue for universal preschool.  They say that this study shows that "educational productivity in early childhood settings has a large influence on young children’s subsequent lives."  The Perry Preschool was dramatically more "educationally productive" than the homes and neighborhoods in which these poor kids would have spend their days otherwise.  But the researchers argue that neither home nor preschool settings are inherently more educationally productive.  So, while these children benefited greatly, "young children from educationally productive homes who attend less educationally productive early childhood programs would suffer negative effects on their development."

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.

I have a new DotMoms post up today, about my loss of a few months of digital photos.  (For those who were concerned, I was able to get a bunch of them back by pulling the deleted images off of my memory card with PhotoRescue.  But some, including most of the first day of preschool this year, are gone for good.)  FYI, there was a story about DotMoms on some NBC stations earlier this week.

Thanks to The Zero Boss, I found this very interesting essay on writing about our experiences as mothers, by Andrea Buchanan, author of Mother Shock.  She starts by talking a bit about how the publishing industry consigns writing about the experience of mothering into either "mommy-lit" (which is not seen as real literature) or "momoirs" (which is less respectable than real memoirs).  She suggests that mothers have turned to blogs because the mainstream media portrays such a narrow and unreflective slice of our experience:

"So mothers who do not find themselves in what they read have begun to create their own narrative and to publish it in a place where anyone with access to a computer can find it: the internet."

And then she argues that mothering blogs are a powerful feminist tool because they provide unvarnished access to a range of experiences broader than any of us are likely to encounter in person.  By writing in her blog, she says,

"I write about such private things in a relatively public place because sharing my experience as a mother-in-process, as a mother continually learning and evaluating and questioning and contextualizing and theorizing and evolving, may touch someone. It may touch someone who is in a similar emotional place, or in similar circumstances, such as the readers who write me to tell me that what they read makes them feel less alone. Or it may touch someone like my mother-in-law, who is in a vastly different place, a mother with grown kids, a woman for whom feminism is a non-issue – in other words, a person with a completely different viewpoint."

I’d like to tie this back to a discussion that happened on Misbehaving.net about a month ago, about whether women are under-represented in the blogging world.  The thrust of the discussion was that while the pundit blogs that get most of the media attention and that get the most daily hits (especially during the election) are largely written by men (with the notable exception of Wonkette), if you go by sheer numbers, women are quite likely the writers of the majority of all blogs.  And many of the blogs written by women are mothering blogs, focused on "the real, gritty, funny, mundane, sometimes boring, sometimes riveting secret life of mothers." (Buchanan again)

So why aren’t parenting blogs getting more attention?  I think much of the media attention the pundit blogs got over the last year was driven by the presidential election, and will fade now that its done.  Some of the inbalance is mechanical — ratings in both the Truth Laid Bear ecosystem and the Technorati 100 are driven by links from other blogs, and while the political bloggers routinely link to several other blogs a day, many parenting bloggers never post links.

But some of the issue has to do with the very democracy of experience that Buchanan praises; while I enjoy spending a few minutes reading most of the parenting blogs I run across browsing on BlogExplosion or following the chain of blogrolls, unless a blog is especially well-written, I’m unlikely to bookmark it to return to again and again.  The ones that I’ve blogrolled here are all ones that I enjoy reading.