Laura Noonan, MPA
Since the inception of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) in September, critics and commentators have questioned both the motives and tactics of the populist movement. Perhaps the most common objection is that OWS protestors have failed to focus on a single, unifying demand. To be sure, their concerns are broad, and even at times seemingly conflicting. Issues that have been voiced include protesting social and economic inequality, high unemployment, corporate greed and corruption, and the undue influence of corporations – especially financial services firms – on the political process.
The fact is, their demands are far from simple. While some are fairly tangible (e.g. more progressive tax policies), others (like reducing the influence of Wall Street and corporations on the political process) are much more complex, requiring the overall of deeply-embedded systems.
For that reason alone, it was ultimately beneficial for the OWS movement that protestors were recently forced out of Zuccotti Park in New York City and other locations across the country. While an aggressive tactic such as ”occupation” was perhaps necessary to draw initial attention to their cause, over time it was bound to became a war of attrition, one that would be nearly impossible for the protestors to win given the lack of clear solutions to the issues they are protesting.
Semi-permanent encampments also require intense dedication from protestors, tending to draw a higher proportion of the more extreme (less understood, more easily attacked) supporters, while potentially scaring more moderate compatriots away. I, for instance, care deeply about economic and social inequality, but chose for various reasons not to join the protests. To be ultimately successful, the movement of the 99% must gain more support from the 99% of Americans they claim to represent.
In addition, to make changes within our current political system, the movement would be wise to make the distinction that they are protesting against policies which serve to protect the rich at the expense of the rest of us, not the rich themselves. Warren Buffett, who has come out against regressive tax policies, should serve as an example that the wealthiest 1% of Americans are not always the enemy.
The OWS movement does seem to be moving towards more mainstream acceptance, and is now publicly supported by a coalition of more than 70 liberal organizations, including MoveOn.org, several large labor unions, and Planned Parenthood, as well as hundreds of prominent and influential individuals. This could help to provide additional resources, legitimize the movement, and ultimately force a prioritization of demands.
It remains to be seen, however, whether the Occupy Wall Street movement will be able to have the electoral impact needed to achieve many of their stated goals. The Tea Party, a similarly ambitious and unfocused movement, was able to successfully attract candidates to run on a platform representing the movement, and to shift mainstream Republicans’ campaigns in an effort to please Tea Party constituents.
While the long-term impact of the OWS movement is still unclear, it has in many ways already been successful, primarily by starting to reframe the public discourse on inequality.
The top 1% of the individuals in the American economy take home 25% of total income, and own 40% of the wealth. Research has shown that most Americans support a much more equal distribution of resources, but are also optimistically ignorant of the level of inequality that currently exists. But this may be changing as more and more attention is drawn to the issue. The term “income inequality” is appearing more and more frequently in the media, rising from 90 mentions in the week before the protests started to nearly 500 by mid-November.
And while most Americans still think of the United States as a land of opportunity, a 2006 report from the Center for American Progress showed that among high-income countries, only the United Kingdom has a lower rate of intergenerational economic mobility than the United States. For example, children from low-income families in the US have only a 1% chance of reaching the top 5% of the income distribution, versus children of the rich, who have about a 22% chance of doing so. Simply bringing awareness to the current reality has the power to subtly change public opinion that may be based on rosier assumptions.
Getting Americans to understand current social and economic inequalities of opportunity would be an important accomplishment. Whether policies ultimately change to prevent them, however, will depend on whether the country as a whole decides that they no longer find them acceptable.
Showing posts with label New York. Show all posts
Showing posts with label New York. Show all posts
Thursday, December 8, 2011
Friday, May 6, 2011
A return to normalcy: Reflecting on 9/11 in a post-Osama world
Jacob Hartog, MPA
Here’s how I know I’m the oldest MPA1: When 9/11 happened, I was already teaching. In fact, I was administering a beginning-of-the-year standardized test to my 6th grade homeroom when the aide who was handing out the bubble sheets to all the classrooms told me someone had crashed a plane into the World Trade Center, and that there were reports of a second plane as well. The kids overheard the aide’s words.
“Who crashed a plane, Mr. Hertawg?”
“Let’s have a moment of silence,” I said, pretty sure that was what I was supposed to do in these situations.
There were some uncomfortable giggles and a few restless seconds of silence, and then I kept handing out the bubble sheets.
From there, the day got more surreal. Parents began arriving around 10AM to pick up their kids, and the school—a huge and disorganized block of cement in the South Bronx, with 1,500 kids—became still more disorganized. Pretty soon, a long line of anxious parents snaked down the second-floor hallway, waiting to be told where their child was. When that situation began degenerating further, the main office began calling out name after name over the PA system, and the hallways began filling still more.
Finally, the teachers were told one by one to bring their classes down to the auditorium, where they marched past parents standing along the walls, who were supposed to point out their children like suspects in a lineup. When the last kids were dismissed at 3:20PM, rushing unafraid into a bright September day that had suddenly turned ominous for adults, I made my way home, walking from the Bronx to my apartment in Washington Heights. The subways and buses weren’t running, and the streets gradually filled with pedestrians walking in the middle of the road. As we crossed the bridge over the Harlem River into Manhattan, several people pointed at the sky, insisting they could see smoke in the distance of Downtown.
I was always surprised by the public reaction to 9/11, which seemed to be more bellicose the further one traveled from the attacks. Yes, in New York as anywhere else in the country there was anger as well as grief. But for those of us in New York, 9/11 represented a frightening answer to a question that anyone who lives in the City must inevitably pose: whether in living amid that buzzing and bustling confusion one sacrificed a crucial measure of control over life; whether the thin veneer of civility by which packed subway cars, crowded classrooms, and darkened streets become tolerable would one day vanish, revealing savagery and violence. My departure from normalcy was of course but the merest side-trip, compared to those of thousands of others, who returned that night to empty and grieving homes.
In the days after 9/11, perhaps inevitably, our leaders embraced the rhetoric of violence and revenge. But what was needed then was not cowboy swagger but civility, kindness, decorum: not just the kindness of the shopkeepers who had lined Broadway to pass out bottles of water to streets of weary and frightened commuters, nor just rightfully honoring the heroism of fallen rescue workers, nor just the admirable patriotism of thousands who volunteered for the armed forces in the following months; but also a belief in the power of laws, process, normalcy: that criminals can be brought to justice through the courts, that everyone can go back to school and work, and that the trains can run on time.
This is perhaps why the news of Osama bin Laden’s death fills me with ambivalence. It comes after a signal failure by President Obama—a man who believes as much as any in the power of laws and the limitations of violence—to close Guantanamo, to bring Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to trial in a civilian court, and to fully to end unlawful interrogation practices and infringements on civil liberties. Perhaps none of these goals would have much impressed Osama bin Laden, and that is just why we should have embraced them. Instead, we are happy to crow over an enemy’s bloody death, a reaction bin Laden would have very much understood.
Any sane answer to Osama’s legacy of bloodshed, now as on September 11th, 2001, must start with a commitment to the power of process and normalcy. This commitment to the boring things in life is, perhaps, why we’re in a policy program: a belief that the war, the election, the revolution is never as important as the society in which we wake up on the morning after. A cost of such realism is, perhaps, a limitation to our political passions and a regulation of our hatreds and adorations. Ironically, the same weekend that Osama bin Laden was successfully assassinated, an unsuccessful NATO attempt on the life of Moammar Gadhafi instead killed the Libyan leader’s son as well as his three young grandchildren. Whether we are speaking of Obama, bin Laden or Bush, it is not leaders that ruin or redeem the world but the patterns of action they leave behind.
Here’s how I know I’m the oldest MPA1: When 9/11 happened, I was already teaching. In fact, I was administering a beginning-of-the-year standardized test to my 6th grade homeroom when the aide who was handing out the bubble sheets to all the classrooms told me someone had crashed a plane into the World Trade Center, and that there were reports of a second plane as well. The kids overheard the aide’s words.
“Who crashed a plane, Mr. Hertawg?”
“Let’s have a moment of silence,” I said, pretty sure that was what I was supposed to do in these situations.
There were some uncomfortable giggles and a few restless seconds of silence, and then I kept handing out the bubble sheets.
From there, the day got more surreal. Parents began arriving around 10AM to pick up their kids, and the school—a huge and disorganized block of cement in the South Bronx, with 1,500 kids—became still more disorganized. Pretty soon, a long line of anxious parents snaked down the second-floor hallway, waiting to be told where their child was. When that situation began degenerating further, the main office began calling out name after name over the PA system, and the hallways began filling still more.
Finally, the teachers were told one by one to bring their classes down to the auditorium, where they marched past parents standing along the walls, who were supposed to point out their children like suspects in a lineup. When the last kids were dismissed at 3:20PM, rushing unafraid into a bright September day that had suddenly turned ominous for adults, I made my way home, walking from the Bronx to my apartment in Washington Heights. The subways and buses weren’t running, and the streets gradually filled with pedestrians walking in the middle of the road. As we crossed the bridge over the Harlem River into Manhattan, several people pointed at the sky, insisting they could see smoke in the distance of Downtown.
I was always surprised by the public reaction to 9/11, which seemed to be more bellicose the further one traveled from the attacks. Yes, in New York as anywhere else in the country there was anger as well as grief. But for those of us in New York, 9/11 represented a frightening answer to a question that anyone who lives in the City must inevitably pose: whether in living amid that buzzing and bustling confusion one sacrificed a crucial measure of control over life; whether the thin veneer of civility by which packed subway cars, crowded classrooms, and darkened streets become tolerable would one day vanish, revealing savagery and violence. My departure from normalcy was of course but the merest side-trip, compared to those of thousands of others, who returned that night to empty and grieving homes.
In the days after 9/11, perhaps inevitably, our leaders embraced the rhetoric of violence and revenge. But what was needed then was not cowboy swagger but civility, kindness, decorum: not just the kindness of the shopkeepers who had lined Broadway to pass out bottles of water to streets of weary and frightened commuters, nor just rightfully honoring the heroism of fallen rescue workers, nor just the admirable patriotism of thousands who volunteered for the armed forces in the following months; but also a belief in the power of laws, process, normalcy: that criminals can be brought to justice through the courts, that everyone can go back to school and work, and that the trains can run on time.
This is perhaps why the news of Osama bin Laden’s death fills me with ambivalence. It comes after a signal failure by President Obama—a man who believes as much as any in the power of laws and the limitations of violence—to close Guantanamo, to bring Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to trial in a civilian court, and to fully to end unlawful interrogation practices and infringements on civil liberties. Perhaps none of these goals would have much impressed Osama bin Laden, and that is just why we should have embraced them. Instead, we are happy to crow over an enemy’s bloody death, a reaction bin Laden would have very much understood.
Any sane answer to Osama’s legacy of bloodshed, now as on September 11th, 2001, must start with a commitment to the power of process and normalcy. This commitment to the boring things in life is, perhaps, why we’re in a policy program: a belief that the war, the election, the revolution is never as important as the society in which we wake up on the morning after. A cost of such realism is, perhaps, a limitation to our political passions and a regulation of our hatreds and adorations. Ironically, the same weekend that Osama bin Laden was successfully assassinated, an unsuccessful NATO attempt on the life of Moammar Gadhafi instead killed the Libyan leader’s son as well as his three young grandchildren. Whether we are speaking of Obama, bin Laden or Bush, it is not leaders that ruin or redeem the world but the patterns of action they leave behind.
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
Rediscovering discovery: Investing in public school science labs
Jacob Hartog, MPA
Here’s a Jeopardy clue for IBM's supercomputer, Watson:
“This educational institution has produced more Nobel Prize-winning graduates than Princeton, MIT, Caltech, Oxford, or Yale.”
The question, surprisingly, is “What is the New York City Public School system?”
From the 1930s through the 1970s, the New York schools (and not just that one high school in the Bronx) produced legions of future scientists and engineers, including many who later made pathbreaking discoveries: from superconducting materials to mating bacteria, from Arrow's Impossibility Theorem to the design of the atomic bomb.
Where should we assign the credit for this astonishing productivity? Some of it, undoubtedly, is due to the particular mix of immigrants whose children filled the schools. Some of it is also due to the culture of those times, which celebrated science and discovery, which knew you could free the world from Fascism, stave off Sputnik, and make it to the moon, if you just got the differential equations right.
But part of the credit must go to the science labs.
At the same time as it was teaching long division to future laureates like Richard Feynmann and Robert Solow, New York City built and rehabilitated thousands of schools. On each floor of every one of the intermediate and high schools, they put science labs—rows of lab benches with gas lines and sinks, rows of cabinets full of chemical supplies, and a huge demonstration bench across the front of the room with ring stands and clamps, for showing off what happens when you drop pure sodium into a beaker of water or mix hydrogen peroxide with liquid soap and then add potassium iodide. (Watson, take note: the former explodes, the latter turns to foam.)
I began my teaching career in such a room, in a school built in the South Bronx in 1960, in the immediate aftermath of Sputnik’s blinking passage across the sky. Of course, by the time I got there, the gas lines had long ago been permanently shut off. The faucets were hacked off at the base, leaving jagged pieces of metal coming out of the lab benches. The sinks were choked with debris and, in some cases, emptied not into plumbing but directly into the cabinet below, so that when young Jose and Arthur tried out their model volcano, a flood of baking soda-and-vinegar lava coursed across the floor. The chemical cabinets were empty, except for decades of old dittos and worksheets, several nests of mice, and one unstoppered bottle of concentrated hydrochloric acid, the fumes of which had gradually turned the locker that held it into an ocean of rust.
The South Bronx has had some troubled years, no doubt. But this scene of decay is not unique to poor, inner-city schools. A trip through a middle-class suburban school might also show you sinks that don’t work and gas lines that no one knows how to turn on, microscopes with broken lenses and chemical cabinets with nothing in them but some aged litmus paper that no longer changes color in acid and base. Science class in such rooms can feel less like a trip to the future than a sojourn at an archeological dig.
What happened, to make us disinvest so thoroughly in science education?
Competing priorities within education deserves some of the blame. Although teachers’ salaries in American schools are lower than average for developed countries, American schools employ many more people than they once did, especially in special education and among specialists employed outside the classroom. And increasing regulation (and unnecessary asbestos abatement) has made even modest overhauls of school buildings prohibitively expensive.
Computer technology, meanwhile, has become a tantalizing investment for principals and grant agencies, at the expense of science supplies and equipment. Even science teachers themselves, some of them uncomfortable with the risks and inconvenience of doing real experiments, are often all too willing to pass out the laptops or textbooks and give their students something to do that, unlike hands-on labs, is quiet and indisputably safe. But staring at a screen is not conducting an experiment, and no amount of individualized support can make up for a classroom experience that, regrettably, involves filling out worksheets instead of blowing things up.
The “Sputnik Moment” that President Obama asserted was upon us, in which our relative educational attainment in science and math seems to fall further every year, cannot be solved with any single government intervention. But one thing we can take away from the original Sputnik moment is the importance of investing in high quality science labs and equipment, so that along with lots of Oobleck, Green Slime, and Elephant Toothpaste, the next generation’s Nobel Prize winners can also be made in the public schools.
Here’s a Jeopardy clue for IBM's supercomputer, Watson:
“This educational institution has produced more Nobel Prize-winning graduates than Princeton, MIT, Caltech, Oxford, or Yale.”
The question, surprisingly, is “What is the New York City Public School system?”
From the 1930s through the 1970s, the New York schools (and not just that one high school in the Bronx) produced legions of future scientists and engineers, including many who later made pathbreaking discoveries: from superconducting materials to mating bacteria, from Arrow's Impossibility Theorem to the design of the atomic bomb.
Where should we assign the credit for this astonishing productivity? Some of it, undoubtedly, is due to the particular mix of immigrants whose children filled the schools. Some of it is also due to the culture of those times, which celebrated science and discovery, which knew you could free the world from Fascism, stave off Sputnik, and make it to the moon, if you just got the differential equations right.
But part of the credit must go to the science labs.
At the same time as it was teaching long division to future laureates like Richard Feynmann and Robert Solow, New York City built and rehabilitated thousands of schools. On each floor of every one of the intermediate and high schools, they put science labs—rows of lab benches with gas lines and sinks, rows of cabinets full of chemical supplies, and a huge demonstration bench across the front of the room with ring stands and clamps, for showing off what happens when you drop pure sodium into a beaker of water or mix hydrogen peroxide with liquid soap and then add potassium iodide. (Watson, take note: the former explodes, the latter turns to foam.)
I began my teaching career in such a room, in a school built in the South Bronx in 1960, in the immediate aftermath of Sputnik’s blinking passage across the sky. Of course, by the time I got there, the gas lines had long ago been permanently shut off. The faucets were hacked off at the base, leaving jagged pieces of metal coming out of the lab benches. The sinks were choked with debris and, in some cases, emptied not into plumbing but directly into the cabinet below, so that when young Jose and Arthur tried out their model volcano, a flood of baking soda-and-vinegar lava coursed across the floor. The chemical cabinets were empty, except for decades of old dittos and worksheets, several nests of mice, and one unstoppered bottle of concentrated hydrochloric acid, the fumes of which had gradually turned the locker that held it into an ocean of rust.
The South Bronx has had some troubled years, no doubt. But this scene of decay is not unique to poor, inner-city schools. A trip through a middle-class suburban school might also show you sinks that don’t work and gas lines that no one knows how to turn on, microscopes with broken lenses and chemical cabinets with nothing in them but some aged litmus paper that no longer changes color in acid and base. Science class in such rooms can feel less like a trip to the future than a sojourn at an archeological dig.
What happened, to make us disinvest so thoroughly in science education?
Competing priorities within education deserves some of the blame. Although teachers’ salaries in American schools are lower than average for developed countries, American schools employ many more people than they once did, especially in special education and among specialists employed outside the classroom. And increasing regulation (and unnecessary asbestos abatement) has made even modest overhauls of school buildings prohibitively expensive.
Computer technology, meanwhile, has become a tantalizing investment for principals and grant agencies, at the expense of science supplies and equipment. Even science teachers themselves, some of them uncomfortable with the risks and inconvenience of doing real experiments, are often all too willing to pass out the laptops or textbooks and give their students something to do that, unlike hands-on labs, is quiet and indisputably safe. But staring at a screen is not conducting an experiment, and no amount of individualized support can make up for a classroom experience that, regrettably, involves filling out worksheets instead of blowing things up.
The “Sputnik Moment” that President Obama asserted was upon us, in which our relative educational attainment in science and math seems to fall further every year, cannot be solved with any single government intervention. But one thing we can take away from the original Sputnik moment is the importance of investing in high quality science labs and equipment, so that along with lots of Oobleck, Green Slime, and Elephant Toothpaste, the next generation’s Nobel Prize winners can also be made in the public schools.
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