Having spent the better part of a quarter-century writing editorials and commentaries for a major metropolitan newspaper, I have wagged my finger with the best of them and spied more than my share of blood on the hands of shameless lawmakers. So I read New York Times columnist David Brooks routinely not only as a form of therapy but inspiration. His column on Tuesday, “Engaged or Detached,” is a wonderfully calibrated look at why the finger pointers teach us far too little.

“The detached writer wants to be a few steps away from the partisans,” Brooks writes. “She is progressive but not Democratic, conservative but not Republican. She fears the team mentality will blinker her views. She wants to remain mentally independent because she sees politics as a competition between partial truths, and she wants the liberty to find the proper balance between them, issue by issue. The detached writer believes that writing is more like teaching than activism. ... She sometimes gets passionate about her views, but she distrusts her passions. She takes notes with emotion, but aims to write with a regulated sobriety.”

There is a role for “engaged” writers who fire up the troops, but Brooks’ “detached” writer is the model that should motivate those of us who want to make a difference in the educational arena. Neither I nor this blog, redefinED, always measure up to that intellectual test. But it is something to which we aspire, and I can only hope that my former colleagues in journalism would as well.

I have spent more than 35 years working to help public education fulfill the promise of equal opportunity, but two recent New York Times articles illustrate how far we are from achieving that moral and societal imperative.

David Brooks, in a recent column entitled “The Opportunity Gap,” reviews the research on the gap between the haves and have-nots and concludes, “The children of the more affluent and less affluent are raised in starkly different ways and have different opportunities.” Brooks further reports this gap is growing: “Over the last 40 years upper-income parents have increased the amount they spend on their kids’ enrichment activities, like tutoring and extracurriculars, by $5,300 a year. The financially stressed lower classes have only been able to increase their investment by $480, adjusted for inflation.”

I see this opportunity gap daily in our racially and economically diverse neighborhood in south St. Petersburg. The affluent kids in my neighborhood are attending a variety of enrichment camps this summer. Meanwhile, the low-income kids are sleeping till noon and then wandering the streets in the afternoon trying to avoid boredom and arrest - and generally failing on both counts. Many of the low-income black teenagers I know are going to get picked up and questioned by the police this summer, and occasionally get arrested. Whether or not they’ve committed crime is irrelevant. They’ll all plead out, go into a diversion program that is a well-intentioned waste of time and money, and the whole cycle will start again.

In a second Times article, “Two Classes, Divided by ‘I Do,’” Jason DeParle chronicles how the differences between one- and two-parent families help explain this growing cultural dichotomy. DeParle writes that, “Changes in marriage patterns - as opposed to changes in individual earnings - may account for as much as 40 percent of the growth in certain measures of inequality … About 41 percent of births in the United States occur outside marriage, up sharply from 17 percent three decades ago … Less than 10 percent of the births to college-educated women occur outside marriage, while for women with high school degrees or less the figure is nearly 60 percent.” While many children raised by single parents do well as adults, DeParle concludes that overall, children raised by single parents are significantly disadvantaged:  “They are more likely than similar children with married parents to experience childhood poverty, act up in class, become teenage parents and drop out of school.”

None of this is news in my neighborhood. The vast majority of low-income children wandering our streets this summer are being raised by a single mom or grandmother. They have no fathers in their lives.

The traditional neighborhood district school has little or no chance of overcoming these obstacles, which is why new models of publicly-funded education are emerging. (more…)

David Brooks addresses a fictional foreign tourist in today's New York Times by presenting a guidemap to acceptable and unacceptable American inequality. "Dear visitor, we are a democratic, egalitarian people who spend our days desperately trying to climb over each other," Brooks writes, and I'm reminded of a passage in Harvard University professor Paul E. Peterson's book, "Saving Schools," which addressed the fiscal equity movement of the 1970s. Peterson tries to help the reader understand why the equity movement ultimately ran up against entrenched interests, highlighting specifically the challenges redefinED hosts John E. Coons and Stephen D. Sugarman faced when championing the Serrano case in California and the Rodriguez case in Texas. Coons, Sugarman and others had conceived a powerful idea, Peterson writes:

Equal protection before the law implies that all school districts within a state should have the same fiscal capacity. But that idea came up against the basic fact that those with more money want to spend more on their children's education, just as they want to spend more on housing, transportation, and all the other good things in life. To be told that their child's school shall have no more resources than any other school in the state runs counter to the desire of virtually all educated, prosperous parents to see their own children given every educational advantage. Fiscal equity was divisive.

The evidence that Coons and Sugarman had unearthed struck at the inequalities in spending between rich districts and poor districts, and it led the pair on a four-decade long mission to champion the cause of school choice. A commitment to family choice in education, Coons would later write, “would maximize, equalize and dignify as no other remedy imaginable.” Has the opposition to choice led to another form of acceptable American inequality?

From a must-read David Brooks column in the New York Times:

If your school teaches to the test, it’s not the test’s fault. It’s the leaders of your school.

David Brooks focuses again on health care in today’s New York Times, and his observations have huge implications for public education. Here are his key points:

Democrats tend to be skeptical that dispersed consumers can get enough information to make smart decisions … Democrats generally seek to concentrate decision-making and cost-control power in the hands of centralized experts … Republicans at their best are skeptical about top-down decision-making … Democrats have much greater faith in centralized expertise ... Republicans ... have much greater faith in the decentralized discovery process of the market … This basic debate will define the identities of the two parties for decades … In the age of the Internet and open-source technology, the Democrats are mad to define themselves as the party of top-down centralized planning.

I am a lifelong Democrat and the Florida coordinator for Democrats for Education Reform, but I agree with Brooks’ critique. Certainly in public education, continuing to centralize power in the hands of school boards and state legislatures is mad because doing so disempowers teachers and parents and ultimately undermines student achievement.

It's getting harder to find a nuanced conversation about the Midwestern struggle over collective bargaining, but a recent exchange between David Brooks and Gail Collins of The New York Times gets us closer to a more salient level of dialogue.

Brooks does his best to right-size his colleague, who admits she's wandered off "to the land of the insanely angry," but he offers a qualified defense to the Wisconsin governor who started the imbroglio.  "He’s right about the budget issues and the need to restrain pensions," Brooks said, "but he’s done it in such a way as to force everybody into polarized camps."

He then directs readers to the Atlantic's Clive Crook, who identifies a need to trim the supersized influence and power that public-sector unions have exercised over public affairs, but who's dismayed that the debate in Wisconsin has been cast only as a zero-sum game, a "winner-takes-all" affair:

The question for states and cities is not whether "collective bargaining" is a basic undeniable right, but how much union power in the public sector is too much. Progressives talk as though it can never be enough -- or at any rate, that no union privilege, once extended, should ever be withdrawn. Conservative supporters of Walker talk as though public-sector unions have no legitimate role at all. To me, the evidence says that the balance needs redressing.

Of course, our blog addressed perhaps a better way to provide a balance of power: by bringing more, not fewer, voices to the table, at least as it pertains to public education. Either way, Crook is right to address the balance in our discourse as well.