Thanks to the deep mid-1970s recession, and its effect on my father’s employment situation, I spent my last two years of high school in the Southwest, where oil was booming and jobs were plentiful. That sojourn gave me the opportunity to experience Red State America first hand, and to evaluate its differences from the Tri-State area. At the time the Southwest couldn’t match the tolerance and diversity of the New York, where people from all kinds of cultural backgrounds live together in proximity. On the other hand, class differences were much smaller there, with people with different levels of education and in different occupations sharing membership in the same church, following the same sports teams, and living in the same general area. The New York area, in fact the whole Northeast, is far more segregated by class than most of America, with people from different economic strata living, for the most part, in different worlds. And frankly, the attitude of many with college degrees toward those without, and those working in occupations that do not require them, is less than respectful, a disrespect that is often returned. This has consequences.
Tag: Education
School Choice and Stress
|The New York Times had an interesting article today on school choice within the public schools. “Under Mr. Klein, choice has increased exponentially,” the Times said. “Giving people choices is always empowering and almost always will lead to better outcomes for kids,” the Chancellor is quoted as saying. “Choices could indicate when an undesirable school should close.” Yet far from feeling empowered, parents are feeling frantic according to the newspaper. And less affluent, low income parents and their children will be left behind. Why? One sentence captures the problem. “While some parents say they are thrilled to have such a rich menu of options, others complain that it is the schools — not families — who do the choosing.” That’s the reality. The limited, though hopefully growing (some who post here say no) number of schools were a decent education is on offer are deciding which children they will deign to educate. Or it is being decided by chance, or other procedures. The other schools aren’t going to close. They are going to get the kids who aren’t accepted or who lose the lottery.
NYC Public School Spending: Way Up Compared With The U.S.
|In a prior post, I showed how far New York City lagged beyond the rest of New York State in public school spending in FY 2005, with a conservative cost of living adjustment applied to Downstate expenditures. Using data from the U.S. Census Bureau for Fiscal Years (FY) 1997 and 2004, however, we find that inflation-adjusted per-student current expenditures for the city’s schools increased 46.7% from the former year to the latter. And whereas the city’s per child current spending was 2.3% below the national average in FY1997, it was 19.2% above average in FY2004. The spreadsheet is attached, and I'd rather have you download that than read the rest of this post. Once you have, to compare your explanations to mine, my overview of the breakdown by type of spending follows.
The City That Doesn’t Work (Or Didn’t)
|I recently wrote a series of essays on what I consider to be phony or exaggerated economic issues in New York State. Now I’m going to write a series of essays on the real problems, as I see them. For New York City, perhaps the biggest problem is the low share of its adults who work, or look for work. The support of the non-working is a burden the working have to carry, and to the extent that burden is concentrated on those who live in their proximity, it is a particular burden in New York. But that liability is small compared with the impact of the absence of employment on the non-employed themselves. It is one of several ways New York’s poor are less well off now than in the 1950s – though, as we shall see, better off than in the mid-1990s.
NYC Demography: A Stunningly Rapid Change
|I’ll have to interrupt my series on Medicaid, which was delayed by a computer problem at home, to call your attention to recent data from the American Community Survey. The data on educational attainment, written up in today’s Times, is in fact shocking. I say that as someone who has looked at similar data over long periods of time. It’s not so much the direction of the change, which corresponds with what I see on the street, but its scope and speed.
The share of the city’s population that is high-school and college-educated is soaring; the share that has not completed high school is plunging. This cannot be the result of the educational attainment of those who comes through the city’s schools: the state’s policy of making the life-chances of the city’s children even worse that it would otherwise be has thus far succeeded. Rather, it is a function of who is moving in and who is moving out or dying off. The former are better off than the latter, and the population turnover appears to be rapid.