“I just stay in bed if no one calls me”
Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal had an uplift piece on using gee-whiz data analytics to improve Chicago’s public schools. I found it incredibly depressing. Here is how the article opens:
At 7:15 on a chilly May morning, Marshall Metro High School attendance clerk Karin Henry punched numbers into a telephone, her red nails clacking as she dialed.
“Good morning, Miss MeMe,” she said to Barbara “MeMe” Diamond, a 17-year-old junior with a habit of oversleeping. “This is Ms. Henry, your stalker.
The timing of the call was key. Earlier in the year, Ms. Henry and a co-worker were spending nearly two hours a day calling every student who hadn’t checked into school by 9:30 a.m. But weekly data tracked by their office found that only about 9% of those students ever arrived. So they changed tactics, zeroing in on habitual latecomers like MeMe, and delivering wake-up calls starting at 6:30. On that May morning, 19 of the 26 students called showed up.
“I just stay in bed if no one calls me,” MeMe said. “That 6:30 call be bugging me, but it gets me here.”
Here is how the article ends:
Sharief Raines, an 18-year-old senior with a toddler at home, took the challenge after missing every school day in December. In January, she showed up 12 of 19 days. Ms. Calhoun even watched the baby one afternoon while Sharief did homework. “I saw Dean Calhoun was trying to help me,” she said. “I didn’t want to let her down.”
Sharief graduated June 11.
The attendance clerk sounds like somebody getting into the office early to get her job done, and I assume that both MeMe Diamond and Sharief Raines have faced enormous obstacles in their lives. I say this without malice, but no school is going to solve the problems of many students like this. This school exists within a sea of dysfunction that it cannot fix.
The implicit frame of reference that is normally used for these kinds of stories is the history of the communities and families in question, or the “good” suburban schools around them. Mine is different.
Globalization has created trans-national labor pools through a mix of literal outsourcing, immigration and importing labor content via shipped manufactured goods. We move the people, the jobs or the merchandise; but either way, workers in Illinois must increasingly compete with workers who live in Eurasia or have immigrated here from Latin America and elsewhere. These are no longer poor people “out there somewhere” for whom we should feel pity and give foreign aid, but people with whom, one way or another, our hourly pay is being compared by those who will decide where new jobs go. Today there are probably hundreds of millions of people on one side of the relevant labor pool who have such a different orientation toward school that the worry is that they’re working too hard, and hundreds of millions of low-skill competitors on the other who are prepared to work for wages much lower than those of even very poor Americans.
Within less than one year, MeMe and Sharief will have to compete in that environment. There is no fixed lump of labor. By specializing in what we do best, and then trading with ever-larger numbers of others who can afford to buy our output, we can become wealthier. What will MeMe and Sharief specialize in? Who in an open market will pay enough for their time to create sufficient income to support them (and Sharief’s child) in a humane manner? (It’s easy to read this as scornful, but I really just feel sympathetic, in that if dealt the same hand of cards, I think I would be in pretty much the same place.)
By extension, where are large chunks of the American labor force are headed? How much dysfunction can the productive economy carry on its back as the level of global competition rises ever higher?
The answers to all of these questions are, in my opinion, very troubling.
I don’t have any great solutions, but then again, I don’t think anybody else does either. “The Answer” is probably not there to be found. I doubt there are any silver bullets, just lots and lots of scut work in many areas, each of which can make a small contribution.
“Data-driven schooling,” if done with this perspective in mind, can certainly make an incremental positive contribution. But it’s easy to do it in a way that actually makes things worse.. If focused on short-term carrots-and-sticks that ignore character effects; if divorced from the right incentives for the participants; and if not focused on careful evaluation of the actual success or failure of interventions against validated outputs, it’s likely to be a huge waste of scare time and money.
(Cross-posted to The Corner)
Great story. I’m equally convinced of the need to develop globally-competitive labor pools and productivity specialization to maintain long-term economic growth. But what about also teaching kids to be more self-sustainable? My assumptions here are that both food and energy are drastically undervalued/underpriced and the production of both will become much more localized over the next 50-100 years around the world. The U.S. is well positioned to profit from the proliferation of the technologies required for ‘localized modernization.’ I guess my question (maybe for a longer discussion) is how do you see the intersection between those two concepts (globalization/localized modernization)? Many people would see them polically at odds, but I see them as potentially very complementary.
— walker frost · Jun 28, 01:34 PM · #
What will MeMe and Sharief specialize in? Who in an open market will pay enough for their time to create sufficient income to support them (and Sharief’s child) in a humane manner?
It’s almost as if this system of resource distribution we cling to is a moral and practical atrocity, perpetuated by greed, dishonesty, propaganda, and the dirty tricks of the already enriched.
— Freddie · Jun 28, 01:49 PM · #
It’s almost as if this system of resource distribution we cling to is a moral and practical atrocity, perpetuated by greed, dishonesty, propaganda, and the dirty tricks of the already enriched.
One of the biggest problems is people who think of it as a problem of resource distribution. But I like to think I’m doing my small part by working to get Establishment Republicans and Leftwing Democrats removed from positions of public influence. It’s not a silver bullet, but it’s something.
— The Reticulator · Jun 28, 03:45 PM · #
Yes, because we all know how much better MeMe and Sharief will be in The Recticulator’s perfect society.
Mike
— MBunge · Jun 28, 06:22 PM · #
When you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is to stop digging: i.e., no more low-skilled immigrants.
MeMe and Sharief are, I’m assuming, our fellow American citizens whose ancestors were brought here by the slave trade. We owe them more than we owe foreigners, even if the foreigners will make higher profits for their employers.
— Steve Sailer · Jun 28, 11:21 PM · #
Yes, because we all know how much better MeMe and Sharief will be in The Recticulator’s perfect society.
Sorry, Mike, but conservatives don’t do utopia. That’s for socialists, libertarians, communists, and such like.
It won’t be utopia, but MeMe and Sharief will do better without the help of Establishment Republicans and Leftwing Democrats.
— The Reticulator · Jun 29, 12:58 AM · #
“MeMe and Sharief will do better without the help of Establishment Republicans and Leftwing Democrats.”
How? Why? In what way?
Here’s the thing. We actually have historical evidence of how people like MeMe and Sharief made out before Establishment Republicans and Leftwing Democrats took over and they didn’t do better than today. Often, they made out quite worse.
Folks like you are all about utopia. It’s the reason why Michelle Bachman is so committed to her “The Founding Fathers worked tireless to eliminate slavery” blather. Both you and her are obsessed with this mythological, rightwing society that supposedly existed at some undefined point in the past where taxes were low, government regulation non-existent and everyone lived in a state of perpetual bliss.
Or you could just be a sociopathic prick who doesn’t care about anyone else.
Mike
— MBunge · Jun 29, 02:39 PM · #
First, Thank You. Yes:
“if dealt the same hand of cards, I think I would be in pretty much the same place”
There but for the grace of god.
We’re on the “knowledge” end of a global economy, and the knowledge/skills/character bar is rising steadily. An increasing number of Americans simply don’t have the cognitive/character wherewithal to clear that bar. Hence the increasing split between rich and poor.
If we accept that our economy can’t thrive with that increasing split — that we need a thriving middle class (and their spending/allocation decisions) for rich and poor to thrive, and to avoid meltdowns — we need to figure out how to deliver lower middle-class incomes to people who won’t/can’t deliver what the split market is willing to reward at that level.
I think that the answer is a greatly expanded EITC. Even better, index it somehow to some measure of unemployment so it delivers the necessary countercyclical that discretionary fiscal policy never can. (Especially given our unusual system, compared to other countries, in which states are constitutionally required to engage in pro-cyclical policy.)
The moral argument? If people are willing to work, let’s ensure — for the good of everyone — that they can earn an okay middle-class living from that work. They’re no less deserving of a decent share of the pie just because they weren’t born with what I was lucky enough to be born with.
And c’mon: the incentives (financial and otherwise) for smart, capable people to succeed and do great work are astronomical. A little extra taxation ain’t gonna change that.
— Steve Roth · Jun 29, 04:53 PM · #
Mr. Manzi invokes competition in a global economy, which is certainly interesting and presents labor problems, but which seems bizarrely irrelevant to this problem and thus allows Freddie and Sailer to give irrevelant answers (and Walker to answer a different question).
Unless you think MeMe and Sharief, with their particular work habits (which may be a result of gruelingly difficult personal circumstances) are representative of the American workforce, then this isn’t globalization-related. MeMe would have had problems in a pre-globalized America (even ignoring say racial factors). Basically if you need prodding to get out of bed — again, acknowledging that some people become that way as a result of difficult social or medical circumstances — you’re going to have serious problems in any society except one which is so ridiculously wealthy and leisurely that there’s no incentive anywhere to find the most motivated workers.
This isn’t a capitalism problem, it’s not a globalization problem (not to deny that such exist). This is a, because of the world we live in some students need special educational solutions, problem, and the question is, is there a way there? Or are some existing problems so crippling that there’s not and ultimately we have to, over decades, fight the structural problems that make a MeMe (or, more probably, a bit of the first and a lot of the second)? But globalization’s got nothing to do with it.
I also suspect the real ``answer’‘ is in part that you need not one public educational system but several. What MeMe and Sharief need is a totally distinct system intended to work with different types of students. Problem is instituting that runs a risk of encouraging a horrible kind of part-racial, part-socioeconomic segregation and of locking in certain class barriers — but MeMe isn’t going to be served well by a school which serves my kids or Manzi’s well, and that’s a problem.
— Kieselguhr Kid · Jun 29, 05:51 PM · #
What we don’t need are importing millions more illegal immigrants whose children are, on average, not much more enthusiastic about going to school and studying hard than African-Americans.
— Steve Sailer · Jun 29, 09:30 PM · #
That’s shoehorning an irrelevant point, Sailer. Fortunately the vast majority of kids — children of illegal immigrants or otherwise — don’t need to be hectored to get the hell out of bed, so those illegal immigrants’ children don’t solve Manzi’s problem. Or if indeed I’m wrong and the illegal immigrants’ kids are less motivated that that, which is what you seem to be implying, then there’s not really a problem! MeMe has a problem no matter how you cut it.
You see that in Freddie, too — he doesn’t really have any thought about this problem, he just wants to shoehorn in, capitalism’s immoral. But that’s dumb! Because capitalism is MeMe’s only real hope right now. Me, I’m not such a big libertarian. I value monetary rewards much, much less than the hope that what I’m doing is putting my shoulder to the wheel, putting my sweat and effort to our common societal goals. And MeMe —and again, this could be deep-in-the-bone lazy (which happens!) but could as easily be terrible personal circumstances — isn’t on board with that program right now, so I find her a bit unemployable: I want workers around me, and around my employees, who really take pride in what they do and want to make a difference around them. Basically she needs to hope that on balance she can make an employer more profit than she costs and some employer is making that cold-hearted calculation. (Sharief, I grant, is in a different world: I like that her reason for getting with the program was the feeling that she owed her teacher something, and that does I guess align with my sense of what you want from an employee — she maybe just needs help getting care for her kid, so she costs more I imagine).
— Kieselguhr Kid · Jun 29, 11:14 PM · #
Folks like you are all about utopia. It’s the reason why Michelle Bachman is so committed to her “The Founding Fathers worked tireless to eliminate slavery” blather. Both you and her are obsessed with this mythological, rightwing society that supposedly existed at some undefined point in the past where taxes were low, government regulation non-existent and everyone lived in a state of perpetual bliss. Or you could just be a sociopathic prick who doesn’t care about anyone else.
Ooh. We have a slow learner on our hands, here. Remember, it wasn’t so long ago when your bigotry and prejudice was somehow an excuse for your inability to have an intelligent discussion. You got pretty beat up over that particular exercise of unintelligence and illogic, and now you’re back for more?
You better hope there is a mercy rule.
— The Reticulator · Jun 30, 12:16 AM · #
And c’mon: the incentives (financial and otherwise) for smart, capable people to succeed and do great work are astronomical. A little extra taxation ain’t gonna change that.
Oooh, an oldie but goodie — once you blow off the dust and put disinfectant on the mold!
I’ll bet you can’t see the terrible, unstated flaw in this line of thinking, either, even though you’ve probably had it explained to you.
— The Reticulator · Jun 30, 12:21 AM · #
And there ya go — Reticulator and MBunge are having a contest to see who can be goofier, because again — if we assume, as Manzi does, that these individuals are in the deep holes they’re in because of the paths they’ve come on (and I think that’s reasonable), then right now they’re in a place where neither the libertarian model nor a social justice one helps a whole lot. Some folks are just fucked. Jesus, Steve Roth is up there pushing the EITC — which I think is a great program — but you think, how do I get MeMe employed stably in the first place so she can take the EITC?
Look, if you want to push this as a case for capitalism or socialism or fascism or whatever then the best you can do is say, hey, the resulting society under my preferred scheme is so damn awesome that this situation isn’t ever going to happen, there won’t be terrible districts where a lot of poor and disadvantaged people live. And I realize that’s everyone’s argument about why their way is the way to go, but it’s, y’know, kind of a big discussion to try to push intelligently here. If Reticulator or Roth or anyone else thinks they have a model which does a whole hell of a lot for MeMe specifically, then the mutual contempt up there is funny ‘cause they’re all brain dead! What you can do for these individuals specifically is, well, some generous social safety net (which might create downstream problems or bad incentives for other people) and maybe some very fundamental rethinking of education and its goals (which might pay dividends for these individuals in a decade). That’s what’s getting Manzi down, and it sucks. But these are, thank God, atypically terrible if sadly not extremely rare cases and they don’t really make good exemplars for anybody’s social model. The best I can get out of Manzi’s cry here is, man, we gotta stop shit like this from happening to kids. Well, sure. Workin’ on it, babe.
— Kieselguhr Kid · Jun 30, 01:38 AM · #
The conventional wisdom in the U.S. is moving toward taking poor minority children away from their mothers for nearly every waking hour. The NYT Magazine runs a dozen or so stories per year on middle class professionals acting as surrogate parents for poor non-Asian minority children, such as in KIPP and in Michael Lewis’s “The Blind Side” (which was made into a hugely popular movie about rich white people who adopt a homeless huge black child. The NYT Mag ran a long article a couple of years ago on the public boarding school that pays $35,000 per student to live on campus five nights per week. (This institution was featured in the celebrated documentary Waiting for Superman as well.) The article’s main complaint was that the kids regress when they go home over the weekend, so the taxpayers really ought to spend even more to keep them on campus 168 hours per week.
Of course, progressive reformers in the first half of the 20th Century tried pretty much the same thing in America, Australia, and Canada with boarding schools for aboriginal or part-indigenous children. Endless apologies for the Stolen Generations ensued. A half century from now, we’ll probably be issuing apologies for the Borrowed Generations.
— Steve Sailer · Jun 30, 02:03 AM · #
If Reticulator or Roth or anyone else thinks they have a model
What slightest evidence do you have that I think I have a “model” that does a lot for MeMe? Keep in mind that MBunge is just making crap up about what I think, like he did last time around. He has shown us repeatedly that he’s a bigot. Probably he can’t help it. But why should anyone else give any credence to what he says?
A model. Good grief. Incidentally, I don’t think it’s so terrible that somebody from the school is giving MeMe a wakeup call, just like I don’t think midnight basketball is a bad idea. (Remember the stupid fuss that my hero, Rush Limbaugh, made over that in the days of early Clinton?) It’s when you turn these things into “programs,” and government programs, especially, that you set them up for failure. Models. Ugh.
BTW, I probably wouldn’t say any of this if I thought there was the slightest risk that MBunge would be able to read and understand what I’ve written. It’s like The Purloined Letter. The best way to hide an idea from him is to put it in writing where he can see it.
— The Reticulator · Jun 30, 03:15 AM · #
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— Office 2010 · Jun 30, 06:37 AM · #
MeMe and Sharief aren’t “doomed”. Anyhow public school won’t save them.
It’s like pushing a string.
They’ll simply find their way by their own. Education can’t be bought and sold, entrepreneurship can’t be taught.
I just see an example of social planning, and Ms. Henry is a almost like “willing servants” of the “just cause” of standard-schooling-at-any-cost. As she said, she’s a stalker.
— Silvano · Jun 30, 07:33 PM · #
KK asserts “But these are, thank God, atypically terrible if sadly not extremely rare cases …”
You must live a sheltered life …
— Steve Sailer · Jun 30, 09:51 PM · #
Those kids are just part of the typical teenage spectrum.For now their needs are taken care of and they suffer no deadly consequences of their inertia. The well meaning attention they are getting from their teacher is a poor substitute for what their parents and their community are supposed to provide.
— Dave · Jul 1, 11:20 PM · #
Would the school have “cared enough to call” if they didn’t get reimbursed based on attendance? I mean isn’t it easier for the school to let her sleep in…
the whole day.
— Chris · Jul 5, 07:15 PM · #
The idea of competing with smarter, younger, more energetic workers is daunting to me at times and I grew up with many advantages. It’s possible that the seeds planted by teachers and administrators who cared for these teens will bear fruit someday. These women are too young to write off but I agree it doesn’t look good for them.
— Joules · Jul 10, 08:13 AM · #