2012 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

19,000 people fit into the new Barclays Center to see Jay-Z perform. This blog was viewed about 77,000 times in 2012. If it were a concert at the Barclays Center, it would take about 4 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

 

Silver Lining in a Black Cloud 2: Good Public Education Makes a Comeback?

Part of an arbitrarily continuing, i.e., when I feel like it, series on education….

One of my favorite books I read as a graduate student taking an economics class was 1970 title by the economist Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States. This is a very nicely written book that examines two possible responses of consumers (broadly defined) to a perceived decline in products consumed (again, broadly defined). In a nutshell, the logic of exit says “Let’s blow this popsicle stand” while the logic of voice decries the fact that the popsicle stand in question that it is “all f$%@ed up!” Both mechanisms have their virtues. Over the last few decades, market-driven exit has been much favored over the politics-driven voice in American life, but as Hirschman notes, exit at best tells an organization that there is a problem—assuming they’re looking, and all too often too late—while voice has the potential of providing information for a solution.

I already noted that the Panic of 2008 may (hopefully) lead to a rebalancing of priorities of smart people who were tempted by big dinero working on Wall Street. A cover story in The Atlantic a few months back discusses the effect on cities. (Yes, I read The Atlantic heavily, in case you hadn’t figured that out by now.)

Well this one is about the kiddies, or, more particularly, their parents. Aspiring parents have, over the last few decades, decided to exit the public schools, either by sending Junior to a private school or moving to a different town (which amounts to sending Junior to a private school, where tuition is known as “property tax”). This has left behind the parents least willing or able to say “all f$%@ed up!” and do something about it. In fact the school example is one in Hirschman’s book. Hirschman was a bright guy to have thought of all this forty years ago when exit, aka “white flight,” was at its peak and the consequences were not yet clear (as they would be ten years later in places like New York). Obviously proposals such as charter schools and vouchers are designed to make exit easier for all, not just those wealthy enough to afford to move to the district with, e.g., New Trier, where cities feeding the district have per capita incomes on par with pre-crash Manhattan(!). Like Hirschman, I muse whether more exit is really the right way to go, but I’ll leave that debate to some other rant.

Last year, before the scope of the Panic of 2008 had, the perspicacious and always a bit acerbic writer Sandra Tsing Loh, a fortysomething mom in Los Angeles, contributed this little piece to The Atlantic about how she stopped paying attention to Jonathan “Savage Inequalities” Kozol and got down to work, when she realized she couldn’t afford to live in LA and send her kids to private school. (I’m still bitter I was forced to read Kozol as an undergrad. Whatever the merits of his case, the writing is the non-fiction equivalent of a Lifetime made-for-TV movie.)

Well recently I noticed this about parents in Manhattan in the New York Times. Maybe, just maybe, the Panic of 2008 will lead to a regeneration of the public schools, when caring, reasonably affluent, and ever so obnoxious parents like Loh—the kind unwilling to take no for an answer when their kids have to use decrepit materials and facilities, taught by staff lorded over all too often by ossified bureaucracies—make a return, where they will rapidly realize that the problems now faced by Avery, Brock and Caleb are pretty much the same as those DeShawn, Esmerelda, and Frankie have been facing for quite some time now, and then start exercising some voice. Because, let’s face it, you don’t care so much about things in the abstract as you do when you’re being confronted by it on a day to day basis and have a personal stake in it….