February 16, 2006
From the desk of Jane Galt:And now, a word from the negativity police
It is the base axiom of journalism: "If it bleeds, it leads". We are all worriers by nature, and more likely to watch the news if it tells us all the things we ought to fret about, rather than the many things that are going right in the world. I mean, I was asked by a friend to blog about the State of the Union--not the address, but the actual state of the union, and I thought, "You know what? Once you're living in a Western democracy, it's all frigging quibbling." By the standards of history, the homeless guy sleeping on the church steps next to my building is rich beyond dreams of avarice1. Whether we get a few more bucks for Medicare, or HSA's, just doesn't . . . well . . . matter very much. Yet to go by the picture you get from the media, the four horsemen are ever saddled up and ready to ride.
So here's a nice change . . . one of those rare stories that tell you how something's going right . . . and not only going right, but going right in a way that could go right in many other places that desperately need things to go right. From New York magazine, no less.
At the time of Greenblatt’s visit, P.S. 65Q was staring down the loss of an important grant. Under Iris Nelson, the principal who had started at the school a year after it had opened, P.S. 65Q had secured government funds for a reading program called Success for All. The program had led to some promising gains in reading scores, but the grant was expiring at the end of the year. Greenblatt, who had developed an interest in public education only a few years earlier, had become a fan of Success for All and was looking for a school where he could introduce or broaden the program to boost overall achievement. The Success for All Foundation’s director, Bob Slavin, arranged a meeting between Greenblatt and Nelson to try and make a match.. . .
Today, thanks to Joel Greenblatt’s friendly takeover, P.S. 65Q is a turnaround story worthy of a Harvard B-school case study. Perhaps no school in New York City has ever bounded so swiftly from abject failure to unqualified success. From 2001 to 2005, the proportion of fourth-graders passing the state’s standardized reading test doubled, rising from 36 to 71 percent of the class—and since then, the students’ performance has only gotten better. Nearly every child who has been at the school for three years or more now reads and does math at their proper level or beyond—even the special-ed kids. Last spring, the school was one of fourteen statewide to win the public-school version of the Nobel Prize: a Pathfinder Award for improved performance. The city schools that usually win are in rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods like the Lower East Side or Fort Greene—what one P.S. 65Q administrator calls “God’s country.”
The reading program it describes, Success for All, has been used by a friend of mine who is a teacher in a low-income school. This friend is a) impeccably credentialled b) fairly conservative and c) devoted . . . even desperate . . . to the cause of teaching poor kids to read. She gives it two thumbs up. The world, my little chickadees, is not only a pretty good place; it's actually getting better almost all the time.
1 Not to say that he's happy, mind you. Being mentally ill and addicted to drugs or alchohol is not much of a recipe for happiness. But he lives in a society that allows him to eat more than adequately, and gives him blankets to keep himself warm and a stoop out of the wind, even though he is self-medicating with alchohol instead of the stuff the doctors give him. Some might argue that it would be even nicer if we forced him into an institution, where he would get good medical care, psych meds to control his schizophrenia, and no alchohol or heroin. But compared to, say, your average African farmer, that homeless guy is a zillionaire--even before you consider the fact that no roving bands of bandits or government thugs are going to ride through and steal his blankets.
Posted by Jane Galt at February 16, 2006 2:39 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound linksHeartily agree with your statement that "Once you're living in a Western democracy, it's all frigging quibbling." --- That's a great way to put it, & I'll have to remember that quoue for future use! :)
But, what is the cause of all those funny characters in the quoted material? They seem to appear wherever an apostrophe belongs...
Jane, I adore you, really I do, but if you don't stop using the phrase "my little chickadees" I'm going to take you out of my RSS aggregator for a month.
JohnW: those little characters are multibyte-encoded Unicode (UTF-8). For some reason or other, Moveable Type here is configured to iso-8859-1 whereas the text is really in UTF-8... Switch to UTF-8 manually in your browser.
Ditto Matt. IIRC, the chickadees are pretty recent, but regardless they need to go. Like Marvin K. Mooney I don't care how they go if they will please go now!
Re: My little chickadees
How 'bout "my possums" a la Dame Edna.
MB
Our society used to institutionalize many of those who are now "urban outdoorspeople". Then a judge decided that institutionalization was unfair; and, that they were better off out on the street, sleeping against buildings and panhandling. Therefore, these folks are just where the judicial system wants them. Most cities, including the "Big Apple", have shelters available for these folks, but many of them prefer to sleep on the streets. Far be it from me to restrict their freedom.
Yes, but just think before about 1980 homelessness was so unusual in the US that the Bowery in New York was actually a tourist attraction.
It must be great to believe that going from esentially no homelessness in the US to a position where you brag about how well the homeless have it is progress.
Ed Reid it was not a judge that turned people out of institutions it was the Reagan administration.
Spencer, you're wrong. For starters, mental health policy is not a federal responsibility (and was even less so in the seventies when mental-patient deinstitutionalisation came in). It was court cases, and cost-cutting by the states, that put mental patients on the street. But mostly, it was that mental patients now cannot be committed against their will, or forced to take medication, unless they are a clear and present danger to others. Nor is there any good evidence that homelessness significantly increased under Reagan; that was a PR thing by liberal homelessness groups. Homelessness is very highly correlated with two things--zoning laws that eradicated flophouses, and deinstitutionalization--that AFAIK, had almost nothing to do with Reagan.
Is America a better, or worse, place because of deinstitutionalisation? I'm not sure there's a clear answer. I believe pretty strongly in personal autonomy--but I'm not sure what "autonomy" means if you think you hear voices telling you to squat in a train tunnel. Probably I'd side with reinstitutionalisation--but those institutions were, and are, pretty damn grim, so I'm not sure.
America is certainly a less pretty place for those of us who are not mentally ill; but I don't think the visual pollution of homeless people would justify locking them up so I can't see their suffering. Sleeping on a church step is a crappy life--but so is sleeping on a chair you've been tied to because the high-dose halperidol makes it hard to sit upright.
Just a brief quibble: a homeless person in NYC just is not better off than your average African farmer (given that your average African farmer is not caught up in a civil war - a lot of African farmers are, but far from the majority). He's better fed, but in worse physical shape, and utterly lacking in social status. The most correct comparison is probably to a crazy man living in an African farming community. Most crazy people in such communities are fed (sparingly) by their family, and spend their days hanging out with people who make fun of them, but also accept them. They're often malnourished, but they aren't marginalized and, if they aren't so retarded that they cannot do manual labor, their families will arrange marriages for them and they will raise families. So: life for a crazy person in an African farming community sucks, but has more dignity, and a fuller amount of human sustenance, than that of a crazy homeless person in NYC.
Jane -
Reagan gets to take some of the blame for deinstitutionalization in California, as he was governor here when that got started.
Deinstitutionalization was supposed to be combined with "community care" (or some such) where the mentally ill would check in with social workers on a regular basis to check their conditions and restock their meds. Liberals liked it because it meant more personal autonomy for the mentally ill, conservatives liked it because it cost less than institutionalization.
Unfortunately, it didn't work. The drugs available in the 60s had some pretty nasty side-effects, and many mentally ill folks went off them and stopped checking in with their social workers. There was no mechanism which could keep the mentally ill in the system.
Anthony,
You are overlooking one big thing: the courts decided that it violated a mentally ill person's constitutional rights to be locked up against their will. The implementation in California might have come on Reagen's watch, but he does not rate any credit or blame for the underlying policy.
There weren't any homeless in the '70s, but there were "bums" and "winos."
Ah Jane, you tease! When I saw the "rich beyond the dreams of avarice" line with a footnote, I was sure you were going to tell me you got that from "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan". But, no! You had have an intelligent footnote.
What a let-down :)
I also read the article, and thought you might want to read about some of the research that the program Greenblatt spent his money on. It is actually one of the better researched educational programs out there, and have seen it in action in several school that I have worked at.
http://schoolpsychology.blogspot.com/2006/02/how-millionaire-spends-1000-per.html
I also read the article, and thought you might want to read about some of the research that the program Greenblatt spent his money on. It is actually one of the better researched educational programs out there, and have seen it in action in several school that I have worked at.
http://schoolpsychology.blogspot.com/2006/02/how-millionaire-spends-1000-per.html
No Jane -- you are wrong. The Reagan administration cut federal funding for such programs and claimed the state government would take up the slack. So when the state governments did not take up the slack the Reagan people could say it was not our fault, it was the fault of the states.
You have bought into the cover story.
But, to get away from the blame game.
What does it say about the progres we have made as a society that we now accept homelessness as something we can not do anything about before the Reagan revolution we had essentially eliminated the problem.
Is this one measure of the progress we have made?
At least I am glad to see that you do not disagree with my position that it was essentially nonexistent prior to 1980.
Spencer: I suggest you research the words "hobo" and "tramp". Or spend a dollar on a DVD of old Red Skelton shows and watch a Freddie the Freeloader skit, from long, long before Reagan was even governor.
Three things did happen between 1965 and 1980: psychiatrists became uncomfortable with using coercion to apply treatments that rarely worked well to non-dangerous patients, court decisions restricted locking up the apparently crazy but harmless unless they committed themselves, and other court decisions eliminated "vagrancy" and most "loitering" charges and generally ended the police practice of keeping "tramps" moving along. I suspect it was the last that increased the "homeless" population in the cities the most.
And urban renewal bulldozed the cheap flop houses.
I once thought that Krugman had some secret agenda when he made the claim that electricity markets were being manipulated in California when everybody else was saying that California's problem was its ieadequate approach to electric deregulation. It turned out that the electricity markets were being manipulated and all those saying Krugman was unhinged were wrong.
The 2-1=3 formula that Krugman pointed to happened during the Bush/Gore debates. Bush, while accusing Gore of "fuzzy math" described how we could balance the budget, pay down the debt, increase funding in education, and pass a bunch of tax cuts. Krugman showed how Bush wrong on the numbers. I admit that Krugman might be wrong about Bush lieing about this. One always has to allow that he might be brick-stupid. If he is brick-stupid he's invariably is in ways that are convenient politically. If you reread Krugman's articles carefully you'll see that he is right once more. You don't really have to do that - just check out the current deficits and the increasing debt. Krugman's frustration at that time was less with Bush, who was trying to win an election afterall, and more with the people who promoted the notion that Gore was the lier and Bush was the straight shooter, both notions demonstrably false.
Krugman was the first columnist who brought up the notion of transition cost in the ill-fated plunge towards privatizing Social Security. He spelled it out easy enough for even an objectivist to understand.
The man is a national treasure. You don't have to like him or agree with him but describing him as an unhinged Bush-hater doesn't really come to grips with his arguments, does it?
So, in major cities where homeless people are, they may be better off than an 'african' farmer, but their environs probably has been polluted with human waste, bodily and from intoxicants/narcotics.
And, as the budget problems that bush's tax cut caused trickle down to the state and local level, there will be even more problems of not being able to pick up people's waste, there will be more homeless/crime because of cuts to social safety net, there will be more public health problems, and it will be easier for bad actors to cause major disruptions. (that is, because of societal pressures, it will be harder to police actual terrorism threats in large cities. You may not like San Franciscan voters, but the Golden Gate bridge brings a lot of foreign tourists. If someone blew it up, it would trickle down to affect others. Likewise, you may not like to pay for homeless health care, but does that matter if there's an outbreak of the plague and you die?)
Also, there's a growing meth problem that Bush's policies may not have created, but are not doing anything to alleviate.
While I don't agree with all of Krugman's statements, and we haven't yet begun to really feel these effects, we will. And I hate Bush for it, too.
And there have been plenty of homeless beaten and stabbed. Just google "homeless beaten death." Perhaps we wouldn't call them bandits, but the effects are the same. Or perhaps worse than blankets being stolen.
Cassandra out.
It is interesting that the "TERROR THREAT LEVEL" has not bounced around since the election. This site might dismiss that as coincidence but to anyone who is a little bit of a skeptic, it might appear that Republicans know how to use "fear" as well.
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