Economic Stimulus

I get the economic stimulus package Congress is debating. Consumer spending is a ridiculously large portion of the Gross Domestic Product, the number people like to throw around to indicate the relative economic health of countries. Over 70% of the dollars traded in the United States come from consumer spending. So you pump $146 BILLION dollars into people's pockets, suddenly there's a bunch of those 50" t.v.s leaving Best Buy, and the economic heartbeat of our country gets resuscitated. It makes sense. But to me it's a sick kind of sense. We're injecting adrenaline into a patient that needs brain surgery. I've got two problems with the discussion. 1. The House version of the stimulus package gives a check to households making up to $150,000 and the draft version being debated in the Senate is for households making twice that much. I don't know, that just sounds wrong. Personally, I'm going to use the money to pay down credit cards bills. That's consumption that's already taken place, not the new consumption needed to keep the boat afloat. I'd rather see the cap on household income at $50 or $60 thousand and for about twice as much per household than is reflected in the House version (around $1,600 for a family of four). Two or three grand in a household that make up to just past living wages would buy a lot of stuff. But still, those families carry a tremendous amount of debt and I'd have to advise that they use the windfall to pay that debt down. Which leads me to my second problem with the economic stimulus discussion. It seems to me that rabid consumerism may have something to do with the problem. We have established an expectation that we should all get all the stuff we can while we can, debt be damned, as if there is no consequence for the trillions of dollars that are being spent on credit. This is money that doesn't exist. It's no surprise that Congress is pushing a package that legitimizes our every desire when they've been spending trillions of imaginary dollars for years. Guess who the creditor for the U.S. is . . . China. No kidding. But I digress. Seems to me our government ought to be telling us to tighten our belts a little, drive our cars a little less, perhaps even get out of our houses and help out our neighbors when they're in need. I know I'm all over the place on this one but imagine what $146 billion dollars could buy if only we were thinking about an investment in the future rather than a quick fix. Heck, just $7 billion added to the Head Start allocation would fund Head Start for every eligible child in the country. We could put countless thousands through college, draw the best teachers to inner-city schools, create venture capital for a whole new breed of entrepreneurs, create birth funds that virtually guarantee that no child would need to live in poverty, or link even the most rural parts of our country with broadband internet access (the U.S. is like 33rd in overall broadband coverage) , creating commerce opportunities we can only dream of.
I could go on and on. There are lots of things better to invest in than just telling the public "everything is okay, just keep spending money." Like I said though, I really do get the concept. It just leaves me feeling a little queasy and shallow. Anyway, I think I'll go think of other ways to spend my money.

A moment for Martin Luther King Jr.

The last week or so my wife and I have been marveling over what our son Hayden is learning about Martin Luther King, Jr. as a kindergardner. He's basically gotten the whole story in a watered-down version that is palatable to the six year old brain. We reflected on the fact that when we were in elementary school thirty-some-odd-gasp years ago, none of this was part of the traditional curriculum. Heck, there in the mid-70's Martin Luther King Jr.'s words weren't even ten years old and the first decade after his death hadn't passed. As much as I tend to take for granted the lessons of the Civil Rights movement, it's hard to believe it was still simmering when I was born in 1970. We're still not far from it and certainly haven't finished our evolution on this subject. There are still people in Stacey's hometown that can't watch a black man dance with a white woman. Perhaps my son's generation in it's historical distance and relative starting point for thinking about race issues will move us that much closer to Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream. Hayden still doesn't get why we're talking about it. That's good on one hand but still a little naive on the other.

Race and poverty are still shamefully intertwined, educated friends who are black feel that it is condescending when told that they "speak well," and other friends point out the hopelessness and despair that frame their peers' reality. Things have definitely improved over the last forty years but the circumstances that surround the above realities reflect the prevalence of inequalities. Sometimes I worry that while our collective thinking about race is evolving, the relative silence on the subject masks the simmering cauldron that holds our fears, hopes, and prejudices. We're closer to King's dream but we still have a long way to go. I'd encourage everyone to make a point of studying Dr. King's words today. Even in the vastly different context of 2008, the dream is worth sharing.

Head Start paranoia evolves

A few years ago, in my last job as Director of the Missouri Head Start State Collaboration Office, I reveled in the conspiracy theories surrounding Head Start, even co-founding a quasi-subversive listserve with some of my snarkier peers around the country. With them, we laughed (to ward off crying) at the standardized testing of four-year olds, a corrupt Head Start official assigned to root out corruption, marriage proponent trainers that made gender jokes during presentations, and schemes to "block grant" Head Start to the states without any protections against being stripped of it significant social service and parent components. All of this was done in relative isolation as it seemed no one with any power could put a stop to this. Maybe we were just paranoid. In this month's Mother Jones, they showed that it's not paranoia if they really are out to get you, with a brief expose of all these issues. More than $100 million was spent over four years for standardized testing that was so ill-begotten that it's data was never used for anything. "Shay Gurry, an education coordinator for St. Jerome's Head Start in Baltimore, remembers a kid who was asked over and over to pick out a picture of a knight; finally she erupted, 'there's no moon, so there's no night!' Another, asked how many books would be left if you had three and gave one to a friend, explained, 'I don't have any friends.' (Excerpted from Mother Jones, January + February 2008 [sorry, there's no link to this article]). The Head Start official was corrupt, doling out thousands of dollars in contracts to her family members and "dubious" reimbursements to herself. It's been a dark time for Head Start these last eight years but I'm afraid they're not quite over. While our new Congress is still getting its sea legs, it passed a Head Start Reauthorization bill that, while vastly improved over previous drafts from as many as three years ago, still contains some disconcerting concepts. I might go over some of those concepts in a future post. In the meantime, I am very pleased to know that CMCA's program can weather just about anything that comes our way. Mernell King, Early Childhood Director, and her team are exemplary. In addition to the fact that they completed a nearly flawless peer review last summer, they left a great impression on our agency independent auditor (who wrapped up his scrutiny of our agency just today). He was blown away by our accountability systems and even pointed out that Melissa Chambers, Assistant Director, was the "best ChildPlus manager" he'd ever seen. Mernell often says that if you stay focused on what's best for kids, you're going to have a good program. Interestingly, that's not as touchy-feely as it might sound. To the CMCA Head Start team the best interest of the kids also happens to mean maintaining strict accountability of the government funds we receive, squeezing every drop of quality out of those dollars, and holding themselves to the highest standards in all areas of program implementation. I couldn't be prouder to work with a group of people. The Head Start landscape continues to evolve and we're preparing for the future.


Today I'm over my Head Start conspiracy theories . . . and wonder who's behind the dismantling of the rest of the social service, education, and health sectors . . .

Does ending poverty mean growing the middle class?

Is it okay to be poor if you're getting by? Should middle class values and expectations be imposed on those in the lower class? Is it offensive to talk about "classes" in polite company? Can't we all just get along? We touched on all of these concepts during a fascinating discussion with the Transformation Team this morning. We're involved in a massive, if not overbearing, process of creating a plan for our agency to evolve over the course of the next ten years. We're trying to organize our strategic plan in a way that we are addressing the vision, values, and mission of CMCA instead of taking what tidbits the government gives us and doing what they tell us to do. The whole of our parts, in other words, should mean people are getting out of poverty (or becoming self-reliant - as our mission states) instead of just having reports that show we have served a lot of people. So this morning we were focusing on reviewing the ten year outcomes staff from throughout the agency have put together over the last three months. We hit a snag on the second strategic commitment which states "Enhance community capacity to ensure all individuals have lifelong learning opportunities." We knew that we were talking about education and whether or not people were getting what they need from school or other training mechanisms to be successful. We were having a having a hard time however getting the concepts down in a way that make sense for our agency and our community. The team that worked on this gave us a framework and laid out the concepts. This morning we came up with a slightly different way to organize those thoughts. Basically we came up with the concept of having outcomes that focused on 1) traditional education, 2) "survival skills", and 3) enrichment opportunities. So far so good. Relatively quickly we agreed to a ten year outcome that says

“Comprehensive, accessible education ensures all students achieve success.”

(comprehensive means PK-K-12-votech-post secondary, accessible means eliminating barriers, whatever that means to people, parent support, ESL).

Next we wanted to work on "survival" skills. These are job skills, homeownership and care, budgeting, GED and remedial education to ensure understanding of critical concepts and reading, citizenship, lawfulness, parenting skills, etc (we had a list of about 20 ideas). With this idea in mind we started searching for the outcome that identified why these skills are important. One astute team member said "are we talking about being in the middle class here?" After some gasps and thoughtful silence, some of us said "yes, that's what we're talking about." Here's the outcome we drafted:

"Individuals have the skills necessary to participate in a society that is based on middle class norms."

This is where things fell apart. Half the room felt this was an offensive statement and the other half thought this was the holy grail of progressive anti-poverty thinking.

What does middle class mean to you? Does one need to know the rules of the middle class to be successful in our society? Are we perpetuating class stereotypes with this kind of statement? Or does this bring to one's attention the realities of our society? How does a society like ours - moving towards a global economy - maintain a middle class majority?