Go. Read. Share. This is a Must Read – it puts the breaking of our social contract all together beautifully.
One morning I opened The New York Times to read that tuition at Manhattan’s elite private schools had reached $26,000 a year, starting in kindergarten. On that same page was another story about a school in Mount Vernon, just across the city line from the Bronx, where 97 percent of the students are black and 90 percent of those are so impoverished they are eligible for free lunches. During Black History month, a six-grader researching Langston Hughes could not find a single book by Hughes in the library. This wasn’t an oversight: There were virtually no books relevant to black history in that library. Most of the books on the shelves date back to the l950s and l960s. A child’s primer on work begins with a youngster learning to be a telegraph delivery boy!
It has taken constant litigation to bring to light this chronic neglect of basic learning in poor communities. Just seven years ago, in 1999, the Department of Education said that $127 billion was needed to bring “the nation’s school facilities into good overall condition.” The National Education Association put the figure at $268 billion—that’s just to make sure our kids are physically safe, 28 or 30 or even 32 or more to a classroom. Now the New York State Court of Appeals has ruled that the New York City school system alone is due approximately $15 billion “to provide students with their constitutional right to the opportunity to receive a sound basic education.”
Surely this inexcusable underinvestment is one significant reason why, despite our national wealth and GDP which are higher than virtually all of Europe combined, American students as a whole fare so poorly compared to their counterparts in other advanced countries. In 2003, the United States ranked 24th out of 29 advanced countries in combined mathematical literacy, according to the Program for International Student Assessment. A better ranking in combined reading literacy—15th out of 27 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries in 2000—might be counted a success when compared to our abysmal math performance, but this can hardly be comforting if we consider that students are performing significantly better in countries without America’s vast wealth.
One Response
More thanks! Great Stuff.
As you say, the really really really big problem with America is that the social contract is broken. It shows in healthcare just as it does in education. America spends 16 percent of GNP on healthcare, but ranks 45th and 46th in infant mortality and longevity. Cuba ranks higher in the former measure.. And few counties spend so much as 12 percent of their relatively smaller GNP’s So healthcare is broken badly.
If you go to Wikipedia’s entry on the Gini index, you will find a mathematical explanation of why it is the most accurate measure of economic inequality in a nation. 0 is perfect equality, 1 is perfect inequality – one person owns everything. There is a link to a table showing all nations. Look at European nations and you will find Gini indices of .25 to ,35. America in 1980 was close to .38, not far off. Today it is close to .49. This puts it below every European nation, most Asian nations. Only Latin American nations and a handful of resource-rich African nations have significanlty higher Gini coefficients. America’s wealth is being distributed to its wealthiest one percent. And it is happening with frightening rapidity.
But I think the thing that bothers me even more than this is the thinking that underlay California’s Prop 13. Proposition 13 denies a rather fundamental idea of civil society – equal protection of the law. ( I know that the Supreme Court ruled otherwise in a rather narrow decision, but it it was more because the defenders of the law road a Trojan horse into the courtroom than it was for the legitimate merits of the program. They argued that it was formulated for the preservation of neighborhoods – not its primary motive, nor a very effective means of carrying out the purpose. It was only argued this way because there was precedent for rulings supporting such arguments. ) In any case, it assumes that people can be arbirrarily sorted into classes that are taxed at different rates. The people who arrive in California latest are taxed the most. This is a kind of exercise of raw power. People who have, taking from others, because they can. And this is the attitude that has pervaded lawmaking since Prop 13 passed in 1979. “I got mine. You’re SOL.”
If we are to mend America before it is irrevokably broken we need to imagine that there is a common good, and that the purpose of law is to promote that good, and that policy debate has the purpose of discovering and agreeing on that good. The purpose of law is not simply for people to band together for the purpose of extracting what they can from the guys who lose the elections. In games like that, most of us will lose. We should know that by now. And if we don’t I think we will soon learn. And learning is frequently painful.