| Oct 31 | A Brief List of Things That Will Not Happen |
| Oct 27 | Expanding the Map |
| Oct 10 | More Cops in the Emerald City? |
| Oct 5 | School Days |
| Oct 3 | Glug Glug |
| Oct 2 | Postal Voting: Not Perfect |
| Oct 2 | More Wire Content (Because You Can Never Have Too Much Wire Content) |
Here's why. In a divided Senate, Joe can't afford to switch parties, or even become an independent. Democrats are almost guaranteed to defeat the weak sisters of the Senate class of 2002 (Norm Coleman, Wayne Allard, and perhaps others) and will therefore take control of the Senate. Lieberman would become persona non grata in his former party in that case. And he can't leave to become SecDef or EPA director and let Rell appoint a Republican, even if he wanted to. Here are my amendments to the Scenario.
Currently, Democrats are on track to gain at least 3 seats in the Senate, and 12 or 13 in the House, with most forecasters predicting gains of 20-25 seats in the House; enough for control of the Speaker's gavel, but still needing the votes of most Blue Dog Democrats to get anything done. I've got nothing against the Blue Dogs, but this means that any sort of deficit reduction in expansion of health care beyond obvious fixes to the Medicare prescription drug benefit will be difficult if not impossible to pass. So, there is strong incentive for Democrats to aim for a more solid majority by gaining 30+ seats.
Charlie Cook argues (and netroots folks like Jonathan Singer agree) that Dems should put $500,000 apiece towards an additional 20 races beyond their current targeted 30 seats. Good advice; at this point, spending another $500,000 on direct mail or TV advertising in saturated media markets won't make much of a difference, but inspiring people to vote for Scott Kleeb or Larry Grant in areas where voters haven't been exposed to huge amounts of advertising will have a much larger impact.
I think the GOP's spending in districts like Indiana 3 was really an attempt to goad Democrats into expanding the field too thin. Expanding the contest to 50 races means that .Dems will only need to win half the seats that they challenge (the GOP has conceded around 10 seats already). It was a win-win spending for Republicans; if Democrats spread themselves too thin, they might win with only a small margin; if they don't take the bait, then a little bit early spending helped solidify the Republican district before the final stretch.
Seattle City Councilman Peter Steinbruck recently suggested that the city add 250 more police officers to improve crime control. Based on the latest FBI crime survey, the city has very little violent crime, but more than its share of property crime—theft, burglary, and auto theft. So adding more cops is probably not a bad idea.
Steinbruck engages in a little slight of hand, though:
The hires would cost about $5 million a year, said Steinbrueck, who acknowledged he doesn't have a plan for raising taxes or cutting spending to cover that. But he thinks he can develop one.
One could interpret Steinbruck's statement to mean that he would have to find $5 million in tax increases and spending cuts to fund new cops. But the $5 million figure reflects the per year increase, meaning that Steinbruck will have to find $25 million to add the police force he wants, or roughly $55 per resident. That would represent a 13% increase in the department's workforce and a similar increase in its budget.
Perhaps that's a good idea. $25M is roughly 2.8% of the city's general fund revenues, so it's possible a reasonable package of small tax increases and spending shifts could fund the department. In addition, rather than strictly adding 250 cops, the city might figure out how to put more sworn officers out on the street rather than sitting behind desks. But either way we should be more upfront about the costs.
Timothy Burgess writes an insightful column on the demographic changes Seattle has endured over the last 20 years; namely, more and more parents leaving the city for the suburbs. He lists several reasons, but the most glaring one is the question of schools. Money quote:
Cities that don't proactively attract families with children find themselves in trouble. And this trouble has a cascading effect that touches us all. Schools suffer as fewer and fewer people are invested in ensuring quality and accountability.
Exactly. Now that the late '80s-early '90s crime wave is history, cities have become safe enough for young singles and empty-nesters to move back. But in most areas, urban centers have yet to tackle school quality with the same vigor that they once brought to the maintaining public safety. Parents are still choosing the suburbs, and not just because they want backyards and soccer practices; the school quality issue drives plenty of folks out of the city. Seattle City schools are decent, but there's certainly room for improvement, especially relative to suburban schools.
And this isn't just abstract wonk talk; school quality affects me personally. I'd like to keep living in the city, with the confidence that my kids will have good teachers, decent extracurricular opportunities, and a bit of college application guidance even if they don't end up at Garfield or Roosevelt. But these days, the school district is closing schools in the south end of the city, despite the fact that lots of the family-oriented redevelopment has occured along the Sound Transit line between the airport and downtown.
Now, what to do about the school system here is something I'll leave for another time.
Drinking Liberally tonight
And with something larger than an initiative to talk about:
Find us at the Montlake Ale House
[See Ezra's blog for more.]
It's pretty obvious that The Wire's creative leader, Baltimore Sun reporter and author David Simon, is not a big fan of "blaming the victim". He portrays the drug trade as something close to a rational response to conditions in urban Baltimore; the lack of quality schools, decent paying jobs, and a sense of family and community, all combine to make it hard for teenagers to see a prosperous future without either leaving the city or getting in The Game. We get a large dose of this "don't blame the victim; blame the system" critique in Episode 4, this time focusing on the Tighlman Middle School. The kids are happier at school than they are when they're back on the streets or in foster homes, according to Bunny Colvin's tour guide. But the bureaucracy clearly doesn't work. Many teachers aren't able to keep their students engaged; social promotion sends Bubbles' "nephew" Sherrod to eighth grade when he ought to be back in sixth grade; Bunny and his new college boy colleagues have a hard time convincing the school board to approve their proposals (and find her unwilling to admit that the system doesn't work); and the assistant principal bends funding rules to enlist Cutty as a truant officer, but only needs him to round up students for a few days in the fall to increase school funding.
Despite all these flaws, good things somehow still happen even in the most broken of broken schools. In Colvin's walking tour of the school, he sees several rooms where the teacher has lost control, but one where the kids are sitting quietly, eagerly raising their hands to answer questions, and paying attention to their lessons. The teacher has organized a quiz game that keeps most of her kids on task. Is this a plausible real-world experience, or an attempt to make the show a little less bleak? Believe it or not, successful teaching does happen even in low-performing schools. In his article "Hot for Teachers: John Kerry's quietly radical school reform plan", Washington Monthly contributor Jonathan Schoor tells the story of a charter-school advocate who plans on keeping her kids in a low-performing school, because their teacher is worth saying for. And the success of various turnaround programs and efforts to target a small number of at-risk children suggests that with a lot of effort, even the largest obstacles to learning can be overcome.
If teaching matters, how should we change the way we run schools to put good teachers in the places they'll do the most good? Kerry's plan offered teachers a straight-forward deal; more spending on teacher salaries must be accompanied with rigorous standards for teacher quality, the right for school districts to move teachers to low-performing schools, and the prerogative to fire low-performing teachers.
The problem is funding all of these initiatives. The Teaching Commission estimated the increase in teacher salaries, trainging, and other resources needed to give good teachers an incentive to move to the toughest schools at $30 billion/year—enough to give every teacher in the country roughly a $10,000 raise. Coupled with additional state resources, that would certainly help, but $30 billion is a lot of money. By itself that's enough money to increase domestic discretionary spending by 6%, and education spending by 60%; and this is after Bush already increased domestic spending by 60% in his first term. Obviously, spending more on education is a good idea, but it will take a lot of work For the time being, such a bold proposal will probably sit on the shelf until a state produces positive results with a similar plan.
Be sure to check out The Quick and the Ed for policy-based Wire reviews.
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updated by Nicholas Beaudrot on 06:51 01 November 2006