Civic Culture Watch: Education

From The Boston Globe:

Over 100 Boston parents, students, and community activists last night attended a community forum to comment on Superintendent Carol Johnson’s plan to turn around 14 academically struggling schools. One community-based group pushed for new leadership at Blackstone Elementary School in the South End, while the principal and some students at the Tobin K-8 School on Mission Hill defended their performance. It was not clear when the School Committee will vote on the superintendent’s plan.

This is why Boston’s move from an elected School Committee to an appointed body was a disaster for accountable education in the City.

Forget for the moment that “over 100” parents, students, and community activists ain’t a hell of a lot of people; forget the total incoherence of the audience.  The issue is this: the School Committee will make its decision secure in the fact that the needs of Boston’s children will remain secondary to the short-term political interests of the Mayor.

Debt Watch

From Andrew Sullivan:

Ethics Watch: Medicine

From the Columbia Journalism Review, we get a reminder that Doctors don’t always disclose conflicts of interest:

Kudos to the (Milwaukee) Journal Sentinel and reporter John Fauber for digging up the difference between fact and fiction when it comes to medical researchers at the University of Wisconsin medical school. At least nine doctors there told the medical journals which published their research findings that they had no conflicts of interest with companies that figured into their work. After digging into university records, the Journal Sentinel uncovered a different story.

In Boston, according to the New England Journal of Medicine, similar problems exist with disclosure of interest.

It would be absurd to consider this problem as limited to medicine.

Perhaps professionals of all sort should consider the implications of the corporate conquest of their fields…

The Paradox of Policy Progressives

The Massachusetts Democratic blog BlueMassGroup has a post today approvingly linking to criticism of Mayor Menino’s education policies.  The criticisms are accurate, but they miss the larger point.

In 1992 the Boston School Committee changed from an elected to an appointed body.  This was confirmed in a 1996 voter referendum.  During the referendum, the same people criticizing the very concept of an elected school board are the ones worrying today about the sorry state of today’s Boston schools.

At the core of most progressive thought is the belief that heaven awaits if “politics” is removed from the equation.  This ignores the fact that circular logic is not negated by advanced degrees.

What happened was that, in the absence of sustained public input, accountability was engineered out of Boston’s educational system.  The unfortunate fact is that quality education is not a major issue in Boston politics: most people who vote don’t have kids in the system, and most people with kids in the system don’t vote.

Great for incumbents.  Bad for students.

As messy as electoral politics can be, progressives should consider the possibility that they  have a place in forming policy.

The Great Realignment: the Prequel

A comparative look at the four graphs below makes me suspicious that the Obama Administration might be on the verge of engineering the biggest party realignment since the Republican shift of 1966 -1994.

The top chart breaks down Democratic Party members by ideology; the third chart does the same for Republicans.  The graph between them shows the relative percentages of liberals, conservatives, and moderates from 1992 to 2008.

The graph at the bottom displays polarization among Democrats, Republicans, and Independents respectively.

Compare the first two charts:

While weighted towards the liberal side of the spectrum, the ideological spread within the Democratic Party is not much out of balance with the country as a whole.

Now compare the relative composition of the ideology among Republicans in the chart below:

As the Right becomes more concentrated withinthe Republican Party, it tilts the GOP into an unstable position, relative to the electorate as a whole.  This is already accelerating within the GOP as its Leninist tendencies accelerate and infect downballot races.  The Republican will pick up both Congressional and Gubernatorial seats this cycle, but the damage is done.

While the United States is self-referentially a center-conservative country, it is not a Right nation.  (Indeed, I would argue that much of  the “conservatism” is actually populist anti-leftism, but that can wait for another post.)  What is occurring on the macro level is the beginning of an anti-Right realignment, based in civic conservatism.

It is not (David Broder note) based on split-the-difference centrism.

The Palin Collapse and GOP Leninism

Tom Shaller at 538.com has an insightful post stating why he doesn’t think a Palin Presidential campaign is in the offing.

Given the current dynamics within the GOP,  I’m somewhat underwhelmed given the remaining frontrunners:

I think that the GOP is going into a terminal Maoist phase, where anything approaching empiricism – or traditional conservatism, for that matter – is destroyed within the party by demagogic internal elites.

While the neocons are an easy target, they are more a symptom than the disease.  The modern Republican Party is a Leninist organization, with Neoconservatives serving as their propaganda arm.

“Leninist” is used so often as anti-Republican spin by liberals and the Left, that it might not have occurred to them that it might be literally true.

And Leninist systems are inherently auto-corrupting…

Thus we see Huckabee devolving from populist Christian conservatism to Religious Right heresy, and Romney becoming even more a flavor-of-the-day opportunist.  And the public face of the Republican Party is becoming totally detached from reality, having turned into a compendium of conspiracy theories.

This dynamic is too dangerous for Democrats to indulge themselves in gloating.

The Crisis of the Negro New York Pol

Ta-Nehisi Coates states:

There really is almost no black base for David Paterson, and Thompson is winning black voters by a mere 18 percent. For a black Democrat running for mayor in the biggest city in the country, against a white Democrat turned Republican turned Independent, that is incredible.

But not suprising.  There is a forty-year trend of auto-corruption in black politics.  For convenience sake, I date the incubation period from the 1967 New Politics Convention to the 1972  Black Political Convention.  From booing Martin Luther King off the podium to putting themselves up for bid, all within five years.  

In New York, the issue was complicated by inter-borough and inter-ethnic fights, further compounded by the defection of Latino voters from David Dinkins to Rudy Giuliani in the 1993 Mayoral election.   Giuliani was (and is) interesting  as a case-study in racial opportunism when, as was the case with his feud with the Police Commissioner, race baiting took precedence over public safety.

New York racial politics tend to be purely symbolic, as when Al Sharpton (for example) will mount a purely symbolic action as a means of community catharsis.  This makes Sharpton useful, because the catharsis comes at the expense of addressing tangible issues.  This dynamic goes far beyond racial politics in the City, because, organizationally speaking, there is no political culture beyond the neighborhood level.

The opportunity exists to fill the vacuum in City politics, but no black leaders or organizations deign to put in the sweat equity to accomplish it.

Politically, New York is a Gertrude Stein metaphor: there is no there, there.