Is Segregation the Problem?

I just finished reading "The Shame of The Nation" by Jonathan Kozol. In it he documents the de facto segregation of public education in America, apartheid if you will. His statistics are numbing and depressing. And this unofficial segregation today is as bad as it ever was before Brown v Board of Education, 1954 and the Civil Rights Act, 1964.

That Blacks and Hispanics in America perform poorly in public schools will come as no surprise to anyone. Mr. Kozol implies that the underlying cause for this is first and foremost, segregation and second, unequal spending on students in these segregated schools. Additionally he believes that the emphasis of No Child Left Behind on strict education by specific protocol and accountability testing actually harms hoped for outcomes. Again, here his observations are persuasive.

When I finished the book however, I was plagued by a sense that something was missing.

The primary emphasis was that segregation in schools in poor neighborhoods produced inferior education for their students with dropout rates of as much as 40% for black students. According to Mr. Kozol the all white schools in affluent neighborhoods rob the poorer schools of critical funding, siphon off the best teachers resulting in superior outcomes with the vast majority of students in these schools graduating and going on to college.

But aren't these also segregated schools? Has segregation hurt them?

So should we segregate schools? Of course not. It is not only illegal, it is reprehensible and immoral. Conflating the education problem in America with segregation, however tempting, is an oversimplification. Requiring integration of schools will not improve student performance of primarily non-white schools in poor neighborhoods.

Another of Mr. Kozol's observations is that poor neighborhood schools are underfunded. This is undeniably true. The conditions in these schools are too often deplorable and must be rectified. Students can not learn without books, study materials, a safe environment, clean surroundings and a sense that people care about them. Teachers are being asked to do the impossible, teaching in the typical minority school with its faulty bathrooms, oversized classes, lack of study supplies, peeling paint and leaky windows. This is a disgrace and must be reversed, yesterday.

However, if anyone believes that sprucing up these facilities to match the more affluent schools will fix education for the disadvantaged, they are foolish. It may make lawmakers feel proud that they did something wonderful for their constituents, but did they? You can rent Boston Symphony Hall, hire the Boston Pops, put Keith Lockhart on the podium, dress me in an Armani tuxedo, sit me down in front of the most expensive Steinway in the world, and you will have thrown away a lot of money. I never learned to play the piano.

No, Mr. Kozols observations, while not exactly untrue, lead him to only partial solutions. We can never really fix the education problem doing only what he suggests since he skims over what I believe is the fundamental problem.

Until we come to grips with the fact that the children most at risk have already begun to lose the battle long before they ever get to school we are doomed to more of the same disappointment and failure. None of Mr. Kozol's suggestions include the parents and families of these kids.

Who are the children's earliest teachers? How frequently do the most disadvantaged children come from homes with no father, mothers on welfare and uneducated themselves, with little or no work ethic or work experience, with no tradition of independence and productivity?

It is my belief that when any child is perceived to have a problem in school, parents and family must be involved if this child is to have any chance at survival, any chance to realize his or her potential, any chance to escape a bleak, too often abbreviated future.

No laws, no amount of money, will work until the social and cultural deficits are acknowledged and addressed. We have to stop expecting our schools and teachers to be parents and, especially in the preschool years, we have to help parents learn how to be teachers.

So, do we have an education problem or do we have a family problem? Yes.

You Aint Seen Nuthin' Yet

Property tax increases are in the news once again. This time it's Barrington, RI where the citizens have finally said enough! The ire has been directed at Vision Appraisal who did the revaluation last year.

The fact is that even with perfect appraisals, the distribution of the tax burden will always be unfair to large groups of owners. And that's because individuals can get as much as a 100% tax increase while the law limits the total tax levy increase to 4.75% this year. And if you look at the data you will find that as most people get increases greater than 4.75%, thousands of people will pay lower taxes.

So the anger and outrage will continue.

But to quote Al Jolsen, "You aint seen nuthin yet".

Try to imagine what will happen after the next revaluation when people get lower assessments yet still see higher tax bills. And make no mistake, this will happen. Why? Because values don't change uniformly whether markets are on the way up or on the way down and there are always people who will get higher tax bills to make up for the ones who get lower tax bills.

Some neighborhoods will drop in value less than others and these owners will get the larger tax increases while the other owners will get smaller increases and thousands will even get decreases. If the multi million dollar home values fall more than the more modest homes, the owners of the more modest homes will be the ones to take up the burden with higher taxes. No one knows for sure which houses will go up or down the most. It's a crap shoot and it's the way we've been doing it for years. One thing is sure however, there will be wide variations in the changes, and the outrage will be even greater.

This is a system that continues to utilize the flawed model of taxing property values over time, that has taken our economy for a joy ride for decades, but the ride is over.

On our website you can see the impact of revaluations in Cranston, West Warwick, and North Kingstown after recent revaluations and compare those traditional taxes with the taxes produced by the RIGHT plan. The differences are striking.

We believe it is a much better way to pay for local government. Fair taxes for new owners, dependable revenue for towns, limits on increases for all existing owners. Visit http://righttax.org

Have Capitalists Killed Capitalism?

Capitalism: "An economic system in which the means of production and distribution are privately or corporately owned and development is proportionate to the accumulation and reinvestment of profits gained in a free market."

It might be said that the goal of any economic system is the production of goods and services which a population values and wants. If those products are priced fairly the consuming public will purchase them, the producers will make profits which can then be used to grow their businesses, hire more people and expand the economy, creating more wealth, and so on...

So what just happened?

Maybe we lost site of the goal: to produce products which have value for the consuming public. It seems the more ethically challenged of Wall Street and our financial markets thought they had achieved the alchemist's dream; they found a way to create something out of nothing, which they then sold at a profit. And this is how they did it.

They convinced gullible and/or naive buyers that the rising home prices will continue and that market values are no different than real money, just like money in a bank. These buyers then borrowed on that so called "market value", often more than they could afford to pay back, believing that if they got into financial trouble, they could always sell their homes at a higher price, and come away with a profit.

(NB. The only time the market value is real is when a willing buyer buys from a willing seller. That agreed upon price is generally considered "market value". )

The predators in the financial and banking industries then took these mortgages, bundled them together so that they were impossible to analyze and price fairly, then sold them as 'investments', taking their cut of course, thus creating wealth for themselves without actually producing anything of true value. They even gave them important sounding names like - Mortgage Backed Securities, Credit Default Swaps etc.

The goal was no longer the production of products or services to produce a profit; it now was only the creation of capital, money, for their own benefit. That nothing useful was produced in the process was of no importance. Gordon Gekko lives. For the cinematically challenged, Gordon Gecko, in the movie "Wall Street" pronounced "Greed is good!"

And worse still, it was based on an illusion, a Ponzi scheme - the idea that the market value of anything is no different than real money, instead of what it actually is; a best guess, a hope, a gamble. We have built our financial markets on illusions, a gamble and we are now suffering the consequences of that pipe dream. We've been "Madoffed". (The illusion, the market price of property, also serves as the basis for funding local government. Property taxes based on market prices are responsible for the incredibly unfair distribution of the property tax burden after every revaluation. )

I hope we can return to our original goals - making high quality things and providing high quality services that people want and can afford. The profits will follow.

The economy, what else?

It seems to me that the government is using an indirect approach to fix our ailing economy. If the infusions of cash to failing banks and lending institutions do make it possible for them to lend money, then to whom do they lend it? Businesses that have no business? Retailers who have no customers? If the consumer stops consuming, everything grinds to a halt, credit or no credit.

Maybe consumers could be given a percentage off of certain retail purchases for say, a year. They could submit sales receipts (automated at the register) to the federal government who would immediately reimburse consumers directly, instead of giving the trillions to the businesses who have been so badly run in the first place.

This direct action will have immediate effects, would quickly stimulate business activity and unstick the economy. For example, the total retail and food services expenditures (excluding autos and parts) in 2006 was $3.9 Trillion dollars. An instant 10% rebate would cost about $390 Billion. Sounds like a better option than giving $390 Billion to AIG, GM, Bank America.

Maybe its just me.

Cancer: Lemons to Lemonade

Cancer is the diagnosis no one wants to hear. For some, treatment is getting better and survival rates are rising; for others it can be a death sentence. Still others find themselves in a sort of limbo, receiving chemotherapy, not getting much better, not getting worse. For much of the time, between chemo treatments, it's poor sleep, nausea, joint pains, general malaise, extreme fatigue and worse. The rest of the time the severity of the symptoms can lessen but they're never really gone.

Do they have to continue this way forever? What if they stop the chemo? Can they reduce the frequency? Can they reduce the dose? What are their options? Not unreasonable questions, are they?

Patients would welcome some guidance, some help in making a choice. If they ask their doctor, "What do the statistics show?" The answer will most often be, "We don't know"!

I have contacted the American Cancer Society, the National Cancer Institute, The FDA, and the Department of Health and Human Services trying to get these answers. Essentially they all said the same thing, they don't use historical hospital data. Eli Lilly, the maker of one recent cancer drug, Alimta, said the same thing adding only that the "standard dose is to be delivered every 21 days". When asked if they follow up hospital records to assess benefits or effectiveness of long term use they replied, "We don't have that data". After 6 months can the dose be safely reduced? "We don't have that data".

Surely patients have already made such choices in the past. Where is the information about those choices?

The sad truth is that the data is there, in every hospital, in patient records. It simply is not coordinated and analyzed. I asked an oncologist at the Dana Farber Cancer Center, one of the worlds finest cancer hospitals, if they pull their past data together to help answer these questions; "We don't have such studies." Individual doctors of course can review their own cases and try to draw conclusions but doctors are very busy treating patients and don't have the time or expertise to consolidate this data in a way that is scientifically useful. How ironic.

Pharmaceutical companies spend millions doing prospective studies on the safety and effectiveness of new drugs but once the drugs are brought to market there apparently is no effort to evaluate effectiveness after prolonged use. There should be follow-up. These questions deserve answers.

What if certain cancer drugs become less effective over time? These are not innocuous chemicals. They are toxic, they kill good cells along with the bad cancer cells, they make patients feel awful, and they cost a fortune. And when asked if their effectiveness diminishes over time we're told, "We don't know".

The federal government has announced a push to standardize and computerize patient hospital records to reduce errors and cut costs. This is a good thing.

And we should build on this and make it possible for investigators to access this data to analyze continued effectiveness of various treatments for cancer as well as other diseases. If the records were designed with a standardized format to include all data necessary for a scientifically valid retrospective analysis it would provide an enormous amount of information for doctors and patients. We have an extraordinary opportunity here in Rhode Island to do this. The data is there, waiting, in our hospitals and across the country.

What if we found that some long term treatments can be significantly reduced without danger? Think of the savings, think of the benefits to patients. It be wonderful for the Rhode Island Department of Health to embark on such a mission - to standardize and digitize all patient records while respecting patient privacy.

Rhode Island currently does keep track of cancer and related diseases (see Hospital Association of Rhode Island), but the reporting is not exhaustive and does not systematically track individual changes to treatment and their effect on outcomes.

This initiative will require creation of a team drawn from the Rhode Island medical community, including hospital and medical school staff, whose task it will be to standardize medical records, gather, analyze and publish the results in journals and on-line. This effort could serve as a model in which Rhode Island's medical community leads the way and helps our doctors provide even better medical care for our citizens.

Are We Doomed to Self(ish) Service?

You're either with us or against us is the philosophy that has gotten us where we are and it's a lousy place to be.

But the evidence abounds that this "either/or" mentality rules and when it comes to union issues it seems most visible.

When members of a private sector union are asked to sacrifice benefits for a company, they know that those sacrifices will benefit stock holders, executives, the company bottom line and their lenders - not necessarily bad things, but not something that will appeal to a worker's altruism and better nature.

When a municipal union member is asked to sacrifice benefits, is it because the stockholders want more profits, the executives need more compensation than their already obscene pay, or the city isn't wealthy enough?

Of course not. It's because the city, with the available revenue, is having trouble providing the services expected by everyone. If it's not possible to reduce costs then reduced services will surely follow.

If we don't see a difference, then our unions are in danger of becoming no better than their original foes - the selfish business owners who didn't want to give an inch to their employees. Only now it's the unions who won't give an inch to their employers, the property tax payers. We have to do better.

Will We Ever Not Be Stupid?

Read the blogs, read the papers, listen to talk radio, watch TV. It's the same everywhere.

The [you choose: right, left, Republican, Democrats, unions, businesses, liberals, conservatives] are un-American and think only of themselves. They are clueless and if you listen to them they will destroy this country we all love (except them, of course)

Can it be that we're really so dumb as to believe that only one side has exclusive access to the right answers and all the others are wrong?

Will we ever be able to stop and actually listen to each other. When (if) we finally do, we will benefit from the combined wisdom of our people and be the America we once were.

Maybe President Obama will let it happen. We can hope.

Dick Cheney's Comments

Dick Cheney was quoted in an interview with Politico.com on his views on terrorism and the Obama administration;

"The choice, he alleged, reflects a naive mindset among the new team in Washington: “The United States needs to be not so much loved as it needs to be respected.”

Mr. Cheney is at least partly right but I don't believe he's using the words he really means. I think he has conflated respect with fear and really means we must be feared if we are to be safe from a terrorist attack. Fear results from displaying power and military strength, being ruthless and flexing muscle.

Mr. Cheney, respect has to be earned by our deeds and principles. When we have once again regained the respect that we once had we will indeed be safer than we are now. On the other hand, fear spawns mistrust and even hatred which is exactly what the last eight years have given us.

So, Mr. Cheney, you are right. We need to be respected. If only you understood the difference between respect and fear.

When is investing not investing?

Most everyone is affected by the recent financial meltdown in the stock market and the economy in general. Millions have seen their investments in their retirement plans lose a huge part of their value and they are justifiably worried.

Since you have no influence on stock prices once you purchase them, are they really investments or should it more accurately be called gambling?

Some definitions of gambling include:

1) anything involving risk or uncertainty

2) take a risk in the hope of a favorable outcome

This sounds much more like what we do when we "invest" in the stock market. In fact when we buy a house with the goal of making a profit when we sell it aren't we doing the same thing? Indeed, we are gambling.

On the other hand if one buys a house to live in while raising a family or to enjoy retirement, we are more like the business owner who invests in his business. We too, maintain value by keeping our home well cared for and updated. We even may increase its value and if and when we decide to sell the home it may even be at a profit. So much the better.

But if our home is worth a little more or even less when it comes time to sell, have we not enjoyed our 'investment' all the years we have owned it and lived in it? This is a true investment.

We need to rethink our notions of investments and gambling. When we buy stocks and lose money on them we need to understand that we have lost a gamble; we made a bet and lost. If the price goes up our bet has paid off. It's a gamble not an investment. Our so called investment is actually a crap shoot and the most we can expect is that the dice aren't loaded.

If our pension plans 'invest' in the market and lose value we can be disappointed but don't whine about it. We lost a bet. If you don't want risk, don't gamble.

It's an ugly truth that transparency, oversight and basic honesty have been in short supply, and those in charge on Wall Street and in Congress need to be taken behind the woodshed. Despicable, greedy, dishonest behavior needs to be stopped, and punished and soon.

But the bottom line is that our economy has been built on gambling, and as any good gambler knows, you have to "know when to hold 'em and know when to fold 'em".

And let's not be stupid - always keep some 'real' money in the bank for emergencies. (preferably a bank that isn't getting a bailout)

But maybe it's just me.

Did you see this?

Did you catch this in President Obama's inaugural on Tuesday?

"It is the. . . selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose a job that sees us through our darkest hours."

When I recently suggested in a letter to the editor that teachers' union concessions would help ordinary Rhode Islanders, not corporate executives and shareholders, to weather this financial storm, I was trounced by union members suggesting I was just anti-union.

Why aren't they criticizing President Obama?