Danger, Super Vidoqo, Danger!

So, apparently Vidoqo is not so Super after all.  Well, that was kind of the point of the title*, right?  Who am I, lowly teacher with an undergraduate degree in Social Sciences and a Master's degree in Elementary Education from a state university, to think I could play with the big boys on issues as complex as race, class, philosophy and human development?  Well, in many ways I am not.  Yet in many ways I am.  I have a good deal of first hand experience with these issues, spending nearly two decades of my adult life among the disadvantaged, disabled, disenfranchised and generally dissed.  In many ways, my experience has given me insights that plenty of people with more prestigious academic credentials couldn't possibly obtain without direct experience of their own with the subjects on which they write, from behind the walls of an institution.

(*It occurs to me that I have never officially explained where the name Vidoqo comes from.  It's a pretty silly inside joke.  But it comes originally from a mispronunciation of the title (itself a mispronunciation) of a avante garde children's book I once created, titled "I am not Vidoco".  You can find the book, available for purchase here.)

And isn't this the beauty of blogging - that by simply having access to the internet and a linkable address, I can put my ideas out there for the world to see?  And I try to give you guys the good stuff.  I think a lot about these issues and when I write I do my best to bring thoughtfulness and clarity to my subjects.  But sometimes even the most thoughtful blogger makes mistakes.  Or, more generously, makes new discoveries about prior misunderstandings.  

So, why the long wind-up?  Well, one of the key areas of exploration and articulation on this blog is the concept of human and social capital.  That is why it has been somewhat unnerving for me to discover that my usage of the term social capital has been largely misapplied.  Apparently, the general consensus among sociologists and people who have spent years researching and writing papers on the subject, is that the term refers to the value of social relations.  I had been using the term, rather, to describe the value of one's external relations with society in general - a far larger and more generalized definition.

I think my original problem might have lain in trying to stretch the term out to transcend what I felt were its limitations, and thus provide a much more coherent and descriptive conceptualization, one powerful enough to functionally explain, alongside human capital, the total of human development and subsequent endeavor.  My interest was in developing a frame work for human agency, in terms of the process of input and output.  The social sciences have long found profound evidence that human agency is determined by genetic and societal forces.  Humans exist not in isolation, but rather as intimately wound players in the larger human drama.  Within this framework, there seems to be little room for determination that is neither rooted in genetics nor environment, certainly not in terms of explanatory power.

If one fears this framework to be overly reductionistic, I would caution that the explanatory claim is, like many powerful theories, not attempting to provide evidence for every human action, but merely laying the groundwork upon which any further causal mechanism might work.  For instance, we cannot possibly know with much resolution the precise causal mechanism for a vast range of human behaviors.  But we can, however, stipulate that any such behavior will have been rooted in genetic or environmental conditions.  It is then up to us to gather further evidence to increase the resolution of the causality.  An example of a similarly fundamental theory, would be evolution by natural selection.  While there are an almost infinite number of causal factors involved in the process - from the interaction of individual DNA base pair mutations up to the forces of nature such as weather patterns, and tectonic plate movements.  At the individual level, the process of evolution is quite low-resolution, yet in terms of broadly explanatory and predictive power, the theory is unmatched.

My interest in such a comprehensive narrative is largely a product not only of my readings in social science, but also in what I have witnessed in my life and career.  I suppose it should also be said that one of the imperatives of both adult civic, as well as interpersonal and self-reflective engagement, is to understand not merely what one believes but why one believes it.  At a most fundamental level, conscious life can be boiled down no further than the most basic and primary act of thought itself.  As Descrates famously wrote I think therefore I am, so too any claim we have as intelligent human actors must be derived from this basic premise: if I am what I think, then why do I think what I think?  In attempting this question, social science has been indispensable in providing evidence-based answers.

From this basic existential inquiry, arises all subsequent political, economic and cultural analysis.  No better example of this is in the frustratingly polarized political climate of our current era.  Almost every issue at which our countrymen find themselves at odds can be reduced down to fundamental questions of human development and human action.  Whether how to fairly tax the public, how to school our children, how to determine the morality of our laws, how to attack inequality and promote economic and social justice... all of these questions hinge upon the deeper question: why do men do what they do?

And here, I propose, social science has answers.  In terms of specifics, much less large-scale policy prescriptions, there is a vast amount we do not understand.  But all the evidence so far points to this very clear narrative: that human agency is a sum of Human Capital and capital that is derived from one's external resources, everything from a healthy uterus, the language spoken in a child's home, the condition of the neighborhood, the availability of health services or civic institutions, the adequacy education and social relationships that encourage emotional and cognitive development, the availability of employment opportunities, the quality of police and emergency services, and the quality and availability of government representation and journalistic inquiry. 

All of this, which I had wrongly been calling social capital previously, I will now refer to as Societal Capital. This term is, in my opinion, a much needed counterpart to the established term Human Capital.  Where the latter represents one's internal capacities, and therefore leverage and self-efficacy in society, the former represents the societal conditions which serve to either promote or inhibit those internal capacities. 

One of the main reasons the term Societal Capital is needed, is that neither term is static; neither is solely functional on its own.  One's Human Capital must often be understood in relation to one's corresponding Societal Capital, dependent as it often is both in its prior and future development.  Societal capital, likewise must often be understood in relation to corresponding Human Capital.  Without Human Capital, Societal Capital is often unclaimed, and thus unleveraged.  For instance, the ability to read is meaningless if there are no books available to read.  Likewise, the availability of books is meaningless if one is unable to read.

One of the powerful features of this framework is in its insight into the dynamic effects we see between Human and Societal Capital.  A lack in both will often produce a compounded effect that minimizes future capital acquisition, while an abundance of both will also compound, producing an increased future capital acquisition.  To return to the example of literacy, an absence of books and the capacity to read them will lead an individual to attend to other matters, and both forms of capital will likely remain dormant; no capacity to read stimulates no acquisition of books, no acquisition of books stimulates no capacity to read.  Yet capacity to read stimulates the acquisition of books, and visa-versa.

One can easily see how this dynamic, compounding effect has innumerable ripple effects throughout individual and community life.  This basic premise is a core feature of human culture and civilization, embedded in our societal relations at every level.  A defining feature of families, peer groups, communities, cities, states and countries is their implicit organization around the interaction between Human and Societal Capital.  We are a learning species.  We seek out friends and communities because of their utility in maximizing total Human and Societal Capital.  A friend calls on another friend for support in hard times, and both become stronger for it, their individual Human Capital is strengthened and Societal Capital is formed.  A government builds a system of mass transit that increases the individual Human Capital of nearby citizens, who then in turn vote to make the system better, increasing their Societal Capital.

There is of course the possibility of negative effects embedded in all of these interactions.  But the theory of Human and Societal Capital is only a general measurement designed to guide our analysis.  Some human interactions will have unintended negative consequences, and they will have to be accounted for in the design of our models.  Negative cognitive patterns of mind, for instance, are built that could be thought of as actively negative, in the sense that they actively contribute to a lowering of total individual or societal agency.  But I think it will be more practical, from a theoretical design perspective, to see these patterns in terms of being the result of a reduction in positive Human and Societal Capital.

In future posts, I look forward to continuing to hone this framework.  The term Social Capital, while certainly useful in a more narrow sense, I think fails to deal with what seems a glaring deficit of conceptualization in not taking on a role as an external counterpart to Human Capital's description of the internal mechanism of human agency.

Thinking about "The Help"

The movie The Help is out and stimulating discussions of issues of race and class.  Harold Pollack remembers a painful event from his childhood:

"....our family was close to our neighbors. Their children were cared for by a young black woman whose name I’m embarrassed to say I’ve forgotten. She slept in their basement. My dad did a lot of work around the house, and happened to have some extra moveable partitions. He gave one to her, so that she could have some extra privacy.

That night, the neighbors stormed over. They informed my parents that if they had wanted her to have a partition, they would have bought her one, and that my father had made an inexcusable intrusion into their home. There were some harsh words. Our families maintained polite but frosty relations from that moment forward."

 Things have certainly changed.  But in many ways, they have not.  Millions of people still work for poverty wages.  And taken broadly as a class of worker, there are distinct disadvantages they face that are not entirely dissimilar to what was so starkly a racial matter a few decades ago.  In fact, I wonder as I type this, whether the racial differences are still as stark.  We took a vacation up the California coast this summer and witnessed many fieldworkers who were all Hispanic, as far as I could tell, and likely undocumented.  We're used to the lowest forms of labor - in status, difficulty and pay - being done by minorities.

While we can I think agree that most overt racism has all but disappeared, at least as a primary factor in employment, structural problems remain in which large sectors of society are disenfranchised and almost destined from birth to lives of poverty and desperation.  And to the extent that any of us partake in the economy, certainly when we purchase services that directly require the labor of minimum-wage employees, we are exploiting their lack of empowerment.  The notion that they are all completely free individuals who could easily have decided to go to school and become lawyers or highly skilled workers is a convenient fantasy.

Exchanging Boughs

Anyone familiar with casino advertising knows the general theme: exuberant "regular" person jumping for joy, often waving handfuls of cash, along with an exclamation in bold print, "I won $50,000!!!"  Of course we realize this is false advertising, in the sense that odds are you will not be winning anything at all, but rather losing most of what you spend.  Yet nonetheless, it is an attractive concept.  Witness the $10 billion + market in the US alone. 

Yet would we go as far as devoting entire sections of our newspapers to covering the rare gamblers that find themselves beating the odds, and getting lucky enough to win big?  Or further still, would we publish stories about their lives that never mention the fact that their success was entirely due to luck, and celebrate instead their current status and accomplishments, with a brief mention of which casino they frequented.

This thought occurred to me as I turned to the Weddings/Celebrations section of the Sunday New York Times.  Wedged in-between coverage of some or another bourgeois cocktail party and a spread of the latest upscale fashions, there lie the dozens of marriage announcements.  Upon further inspection, these announcements (pronouncements?) nearly all detail what could easily be described as the lineage of wealth and privilege.  A modern day family tree of minor royalty. 

The wedded couples, almost always successful and well-bred, generally combine into astonishingly powerful arrangements:

 - A "management consultant in the Washington office of the Boston Consulting Group", marries an "adjunct law professor at the Georgetown Law Center and next month will begin working in the Washington office of the Council on Foreign Relations as the senior fellow for global health, economics and development".  He " graduated from Columbia and received a law degree from Stanford", she "received an M.B.A. from Georgetown University".

- A "a fourth-grade teacher" at a school in the 99th percentile, marries "the founder and chairman of Libertad Bank".  He "graduated from Princeton and received an M.B.A. from the University of Texas at Austin", she "graduated cum laude from Colgate and received a master’s in childhood education from Fordham."

And those were simply the first two couples. So, you might say, these are incredibly bright and high-achieving individuals.  Good for them.  We should all be so ambitious.

Well, we should all be winners at casinos as well.  Because the thing about wedding announcements, is that they always mention the parents.  And almost without fail, the parents too were incredibly bright, high achieving individuals.

- Of the first couple, her mother was an ER nurse and ethics consultant, her father a judge on the Vermont Superior Court.  His mother the "executive director of the North and South American chapter of the International Ozone Association, an educational and scientific organization,", his father "a chemical engineer, is an environmental engineering consultant in Stamford."

- Of the second couple, her mother taught English as a second language at a poor middle school, her father was "the executive editor of USA Today".  His father " the senior partner of J. C. Bradford & Company, a stock brokerage in Nashville" (founded by his grandfather in 1927).

The obvious take-away here is that, just like money doesn't grow on trees, neither does success.  Unless of course, you're talking about family trees, in which case it most certainly does.

So what are we celebrating in these young, successful and promising couples?  Surely we can be happy for them.  We can gaze upon them from afar, pondering what it must be like to live upon such gilded limbs.  Of course, all of our limbs are gilded to various degrees - some of ours more than others.  Yet let us not forget, as their magnificence, their "royalty" is offered to us from the pages of newspapers of record, that these vignettes are as rarefied and fortune-borne as anything glimmering down upon us from roadside billboards pointing the way to the nearest casino. 

Yet, instead of cash, the capital being teased is privilege, in many ways a jackpot more precious than gold.

Investing Wisely

When the issue of government programs, collectively known by the generally reductive and misleading label of "welfare state", is debated, an argument is often made that recipients of such government largess do not really "deserve" it.  There is on one level a principled case to be made for a distinction between the "deserving poor", and the undeserving poor.  Some people made all the right choices and yet were forced by circumstance into requiring help.  Other made very poor choices - often knowing the consequences, and find themselves at the mercy of a society that collectively mights as well be saying, "I told you so.

A problem thus arises in the necessity of having to try and sort out the supposedly deserving from the undeserving.  And it can be expensive.

But maybe this approach has it backwards?  Sure, there will always be the tendency to "mooch" as long as someone is holding out a hand.  But this can in large part be avoided at the start by policies that not only get at the root of what is driving people into the position of even having the option to "mooch" in the first place.  Without proper assessment of need - both at the individual and community level - "safety net" spending can be hugely wasteful.  Assessment-based, evidence-based policy allows use to not only make efficient use of our spending, but actually does something effective.  It does so by operating on what is the underlying driver of social dysfunction: Social Capital.

I've worked in a number of areas of social work and have always been surprised at how little various programs (by and large a patchwork of cobbled-together responses to various needs) work together.  For instance, right now I work with troubled teens at a continuation school.  As we are a public school, the biggest absurdity we face is trying to fit into the larger educational-reform agenda of accountability, standards, etc.  Making sure that Enrique is being taught Standard 2.d (what telescopes tell us about star cycles), takes priority over every other aspect of his life.  This, despite the fact that his dad is in prison, his mom is on meth, and he only goes to school because if he didn't his probation officer would throw him back into juvie.  Now, I would love nothing more than for Enrique to want to know about star cycles.  But there are *more pressing concerns* in his life.

A major need right now for us is to prioritize our responses to need.  We need to take a closer look at how we allocate resources to programs, with the goal in mind of finding out what forms of social capital will grant people the most leverage in their lives. It certainly isn't an easy question.  But it is one that will begin to pay off greatly in terms of social and economic dividends.  For instance, we know that the earlier we intervene in the lives of disadvantaged children, the more likely they will be to succeed as time goes on.  Cases like Enrique represent systemic failure, and a corrective response will likely be not only marginally effective, but a response that should not have had to happen. 

As it stands today, our school has only two counselors, for a population of around 300.  Mind you this is a continuation school and most of the students have severe emotional and/or behavioral problems.  The counselors spend most of their time on academic issues, with no time to realistically spend on the sort of counseling these children need, much less bringing their families into the picture, and attempting any larger corrective interventions.  With no ability to form much trust or bonding with students, the counselors must simply offer ad hoc support, and give parents the number of a local therapist.  They rarely hear back from parents in such cases, with certainly no communication between the mental health professionals and the counselors.

Which is where the teachers come in.  We are often times the only responsible, concerned parents in these children's lives.  We see them daily (well, when they decide to attend class), and form bonds that allow us to begin to have an impact in their lives.  Of course, we aren't trained counselors, nor do we generally have the time required to meet their needs.  A sad irony of our school is that because the student population is in such crisis, attendance is relatively quite low, which does allow us settings for interpersonal communication and guidance that would be unthinkable in a regular classroom.  At the regular high school, from where all of these students have come (after even less intervention), classes routinely reach 50 students.  I am fortunate in that, even though these are the "worst of the worst", I am able to work with them in groups that average 10-20.  Of course, as I say, this setting is far from ideal from the standpoint of intervention.  There is certainly no time for home visits, and no coordination of any other social service agencies that I am aware of.

So, starting early is best.  But as it stands, this rarely means much more than signing a kid up for head start, where the parent drops the kid off before heading to work.  Yet the levels of social capital in which the children are otherwise being raised are abysmally low.  Therefore, a system of intervention ought to be much more robust.  Parents ought to go through a much more intensive assessment process, with programmatic responses to their individual need (ideally starting at birth, with managed follow-ups).  This could be drug or alcohol counseling, job training, parenting classes, home-health visits, etc.  I think one of the most important things we could is literally send in "life coaches" to work with parents - to literally spend large amounts of time at the home, working with the parent to establish a more functional environment.  The amount of social capital we could be creating in the home could be extraordinary.  And in terms of cost, once you factor in the savings down the road, the initial expense would be quite reasonable.

This may sound radical, but in principal, it really isn't.  For the mentally ill or physically disabled, we spend large amounts of money on just this sort of thing.  What we are talking about with disadvantaged communities is not a physical disorder, but a social disorder.  We would be applying the same fundamental concept of intervention to social dysfunction as we do to physical dysfunction.  And the beautiful part is, while there are often no cures for physical disability, there is enormous potential in treating social dysfunction. 

Because in reality what we are doing is contributing to human development.  Social dysfunction is mostly due to a lack of appropriate development.  The process becomes all the more horrific when it is passed on generationally, becoming what we call (somewhat incorrectly) a culture of poverty.  Because, it isn't a "culture" so much as a lack of development in cognitive and emotional skills.  Of course people can't be successful when they lack the skills to leverage into what success means in the modern world.  This would be no different than if a blind person was never taught learned braille, or if an amputee was never given a wheelchair.  What we see over and over in poor communities is the result of this lack of social capital resulting in a lack of the development of human capital, and the subsequent tragic consequences.

Public schools are perhaps no better example of the ham-fisted approach society takes to this problem.  Already having been selected for relatively low levels of social capital by income and property values, poor schools are filled with disadvantaged children.  Yet the model we rely on for their success is fundamentally no different than at the wealthier school across town, where students were selected, again, for higher levels of social capital by income.  Yet the class-sizes are largely the same.  Aside from what title I money (federally mandated money for low-income students) pays for - mostly school lunches and maybe a remedial reading specialist or two, there is really not much of an intervention at all.  In fact, in terms of pure finances, wealthier schools have access to far greater fundraising capacity.  And this is largely due to the much greater levels of social capital in general.  Parents tend to be better educated, make more money, have fewer issues with drugs (at least that affect their life success), have more intact families, etc. This generally explains how they were able to afford to live in a better neighborhood and send their kids to "good" schools.  "Good" being a euphemism for a student population with higher levels of social capital.

The interesting nature of social capital is that it is exponential.  The greater the capital, the more it is leveraged into more total capital.  Inversely, the less the capital, the less it is leveraged, resulting in less total capital.  In this way, it is like other forms of capital, in which when invested (put to good use), they pay off in dividends.  When we expect people with low levels of social capital to see themselves rewarded with success, it is an absurd an expectation than as if we expected a small amount of money in the bank to pay out great dividends.  To extend the analogy to schools, a most schools' ability to pay dividends on its student population, in terms of student learning, is generally the same, as are two banks with similar declared interest rates.  Yet when we put more money in one bank, we don't put less money in another bank and expect it to perform as well.  "Garbage in, garbage out", as they say.  That's a terrible way to speak of children, but that's precisely how we are ultimately treating them when our policy interventions don't match the hubris of our rhetoric.

So if we truly care about intervening in these communities, we will approach them with an accurate accounting of their need.  Only then will be able to properly diagnose and respond to their needs in ways which are both cost effective and which produce overall increases in social capital.  Because the worst thing we can do is wait around for things to go bad, and then respond.  This sort of "emergency mentality" conflates the difference between treatment and preventative care.  Of course we must provide a safety net for those in need.  But we also need to respond to the issue of social capital disadvantage and its corrosive effects on communities and individuals.  What this will inevitably require is a more holistic approach, a sort of "social capital management", in which community needs are assessed and targeted for remediation.

Dining with the Rich, p.II - "Opportunity"

I think there are two related issues between the liberal and conservative perspectives on inequality and opportunity in America:

- the degree to which extant inequities in power structures tend to remain, if not solidify without intervention. In the extreme*, this might require revolutionary, literal redistribution of wealth. At the margins, it might simply means provision of quality libraries. The trouble is the massive squishy middle where there are a variety of interventions that can promote self-efficacy. Yet to be comprehensive and not tied to grab-bag charity work, a guarantee of equal access can be practicably made only by the government. The most obvious example of this is public education, which can then extend in terms of real efficacy to any variety of programmatic responses such as early childhood, parenting classes, childcare support, drug treatment, counseling, etc. (all of which of course must prove themselves but there is no reasons why they can't be completely effective in theory and there are indeed many such examples of effective programs).

*I'm thinking of countries where a kleptocracy has virtually impoverished everyone and must be removed by force.

- the degree to which opportunity is actually accessible to all. This is tied directly to the one I mentioned previously. We could tie ourselves in knots trying to determine how much self-efficacy any given adult individual has in America. But I think we can make some pretty assumptions based on a lot of very predictive data. The degree of efficacy results directly from an individual's human and social capital.

This however, would contradict your statement: "a middle class existence is within the grasp of everyone with a reasonable enough intelligence level." Clearly, the poor are not of below-average intelligence, at least to the degree to which their income is reflective of any marginal lower IQ.

The real problem lies not in IQ, but one's ability to realize their potential. To do this requires bringing all of the faculties to bear necessary to make the choices that will lead to success. For example, being in excellent shape is within most people's grasp. Yet why aren't they? It isn't that they are stupid. There are just too many competing factors involved in maintaining an excellent health regiment.

Returning to the larger issue of income, people are similarly confined by their capacity for self-realization. Yet this confinement is far more extensive and multi-faceted than mere habits of diet and exercise. For starters, there is a very close link between high school graduation rates and income. It isn't causal - it is certainly possible to be successful despite dropping out of school. But what the link does is point to the incredible power of other indicators that have already begun to act before citizens reach adulthood, and yet have effects that last their entire lives.

People simply do not magically invent their own capacity for habits of mind, etc. that allow them to succeed. These are skills that they have been able to develop over years, and upon adulthood can begin to leverage into success.

Now, it is all well and good to acknowledge this, and then seek ways of increasing agency in society, whether through cultural change, government intervention - whatever. But there are also systematic barriers - "channels" if you will - that provide sort of invisible scaffolding that allows some to reach higher, and leaves others more greatly marginalized and with fewer options.

So, these would basically fall into the realm of social capital. But, as opposed to structures like family or culture, which can be influenced by society at large, these would rather be more infrastructural, and within the larger designs of what kind of society we want to create.

One of the largest, most problematic of these structures is the unintended result of our system of property, specifically property values. What ends up happening is a clustering effect which ultimately has a profound impact not only on individual communities but society at large. When you have large degrees of inequality between neighborhood property values, you get communities with large disparities in human capital. In the rich neighborhoods you get selection for relatively well-adjusted*, motivated, educated, knowledgeable, intact families, etc. - basically high levels of social capital. Yet each point of social capital is not static. They build exponentially, leveraging one and another to to create a sum vastly more useful than its parts.

You can see where this goes with poor communities, where the same holds true, yet in reverse. There is a relative lack of social capital - education, worldly knowledge, motivation, psychodynamic integrity (mental illness, dysfunction,), etc., and each individual piece leverages against one another, building exponentially until the results become catastrophic. This snowballing of capital disadvantage has an overall effect of placing an active downward pressure on communities. Not only are there practical, day-to-day effects on activities, but stress levels increase, contributing to health and behavioral problems. If you think losing weight is difficult, try doing it with massive increases in stress hormones due to not being able to afford rent, getting laid off, your car breaking down, your kids fighting at school, your boyfriend running out on you, etc., etc. Any single lack in social capital advantage becomes extra burdensome in the presence of an overall lack. Whereas something like drug addiction or abuse in a wealthy community can be lessened in its destructive power by the presence of family cohesion, financial stability, in the absence of social supports, it can have much more dire consequences.

Of course, these are extremes. Most of us fall somewhere in between, possessing some mixture of the above. But this does not make any of the elements of social capital any less crucial to the understanding of how "opportunity" works.

The Uncollective

The school year is getting long in the tooth.  Students are weary.  Teachers are testy.  Here in the desert, the temperatures will soon reach a daily average of 100 degrees.  Testing will begin soon.  Our students will fail dramatically.

Today one of the teen mommies told me she and her boyfriend, with whom she lives, are breaking up.  She had been the only one - all of the others had been left long ago.  She's a spunky kid, tough and testy but always relatively positive.  Sixteen, her Dad ran out on the family years back.  Then her Mom "went crazy" and she was sent into foster care.  She then got out, moved in with a relative, and then her baby's daddy, who's 18.  Is it even legal for her to be living alone?  I imagine it is better than foster care.  Today she told me, "Life sucks."

Another young lady - so far unpregnant - was recounting the fight she had the other night, how it began after the partying got too loud for a parent with a heart condition, and then peaked after they spilled out into the street, her and another girl had drunken words, and ended up tussling on the pavement.  She showed me the girl's phone she had made off with.  The girl seemed sad, angry in the pictures.  There was a shot of some guy doing a line of something.

I asked her about her boyfriend, a sometime gang-banger with severe defiance and aggression issues.  At one point they were going to move away together, to live with her mother in another town, far away from the troubled local scene.  Yet that fell through after her mother broke up with her boyfriend, after finding "teen porn" among his things.  When mom asked how he could have such things around her teenage daughter, he replied that he only likes brunettes.  They moved out of his house, taking with them what they could fit in the car.  He refused to let them have the rest of their things.  He had been abusive.  My student rattled off a list - clothes, music, TV, shoes, etc. 

Sometime later her own boyfriend was expelled.  She said things went downhill from there.  He didn't treat her well.  He was jealous.  He tried to hit her but she hit back.  He flipped out when she said it was over.  He chased her for blocks, until she finally dove into a bush and watched him run past.

In the staff lounge, a couple of other teachers spoke of how sick of it they were - the teen pregnancies.   They said they resented their tax dollars being spent so that young girls could get free health care and welfare.  "Most of them do it for the government checks.  One girl has a friend who had 3 of them just for the money!"  This from the libertarian who says she wants universal healthcare, yet cracks at least one "execution" joke a day.  The Reagan Democrat piped in with a story of "some woman" who had nine kids - just for the welfare.  The libertarian complained that her son, making $15k a year, payed his taxes, yet made "too much" to qualify for medicaid, while illegal immigrants and unworking teen moms got all the care they needed.  She was convinced teen moms - or even the out-of-work - ought to have their kids put in orphanages.  The Reagan Democrat offered another woman, this time a friend of hers, who was raised in an orphanages - and liked it fine.  I suggested a few "helpful" remarks.  I referenced human and social capital, pointing out that the teen moms need not be blamed - they are disadvantaged.  "No excuse!" was the paraphrased refrain.

It's April.  The days aren't getting any easier.  The kids still won't work.  They never come to school.  When they do they're often high.  Their parents are often worse.

This evening I ran across a PhD thesis by a man by the name of Tom Healy, at the National University of Scotland, titled, In Each Other’s Shadow: What has been the impact of human and social capital onlife satisfaction in Ireland?  From a chapter describing the nature of social capital:

Social capital refers to resources inherent in self-organised human networks
based on reciprocal

• expectations and obligations (of support, engagement, delivery) [TRUST];
• communication of information, knowledge, informal norms, sanctions
and understandings [VALUES]; and
• belonging [IDENTITY]

that facilitate collective action.  (p.69)

Something rang true in those words in brackets: Trust, Values, Identity.  These students lack social capital, and thus have not been able to develop human capital.  And what is it that keeps them from acquiring it today, in my classroom, as I try and present to them the best social capital I know how?

They do not trust me.  They do not share my values.  They do not share my identity.  So how could I expect them to do their part in the reciprocal dance of education?  There is no collective between us: there is me vs. them.

I have been struggling all year to come to grips with how I might possibly teach these children.  What am I teaching them?  It surely isn't very academic, given the abysmal rate of participation (attendance and classwork).  I have found myself seeking to act more as a mentor or counselor.  I listen to their stories, ask them to reflect critically on their choices and assumptions.  I joke with them.  I try and throw them off their "game".  I try to humanize them.  I try not to get into power struggles, or to "react" in typical ways to their well-honed tactics of defiance.  For the most part it has been very successful.  Kids smile and talk to me in ways that would have been unimaginable months before.  I ask them daily to be better people.  They seem to listen.

But this is what I have been doing all along, without knowing it: I have been trying to build in them Trust, Values and Identity.  I have been trying to break down their defensive walls by showing them love, respect, honor, and thin, yet bottomless trust.  I will be there for them, empathizing and trying to see the world through their eyes.  I want them to see that they have eyes - that there are people in the world that want to see through their eyes, that they are part of a "collective", that there is something out there to "buy into".  I'm by no means making much of a difference.  These stories started long before I got there and they will continue long after.  But I try and think I'm at least "moving the goal posts" a little bit each day.

These are kids who have been torn away from the fundamental forces of social capital.  Opportunities exist for them that they cannot even dream of.  But they are blinded by a sense of isolation and disenfranchisement, confusion and nihilism.  For them to grow again, they must learn to reconnect with society, with their humanity.  And we, for out part, must be there to help guide them.

Obama's Marginal Plans for Education Reform

Obama's plan for education overhaul was announced today, the NY Times calling it "sweeping overhaul".

While it does seem to address some of the negative aspects of NCLB, it doesn't get us anywhere the real reform required to actually achieve the stated goal "that all students should graduate from high school prepared for college and a career."
Some highlights:

• replace NCLB's pass/fail school grading system, instead measuring individual students, attendance, graduation rates and something called "school climate"
• more vigorous interventions in failing schools
• more incentives for performance

Obviously, these are basically window dressing on the same failed approach we have always taken.  While NCLB is tightened up around the edges, there is no real accounting for the vast differences between demographic populations in terms of the role socio-economic status plays in educational achievement.

Instead, it's the same old model: take 30 students from every walk of life, give them one teacher, and with a heaping dose of accountability and incentives expect to attain the goal of a quality education as civil right for every child.  There is no emphasis on the vast differences in both human and social capital that are a fundamental part of creating a successful student.

No surprise then, that the teachers' unions aren't supportive.

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said of the proposal, “This doesn’t make sense.....From everything that we’ve seen, this blueprint places 100 percent of the responsibility on teachers and gives them zero percent of the authority."

Teachers in failing schools are being asked to a job that simply is not possible to do, but are then blamed when the result is failure.  No wonder then that their advocates are upset with a continuation of a plan that promotes them as scapegoats for society's failure to come to grips with its own socioeconomic structural dysfunction.