Poverty Beats His Children

After coming across this great article which blows up some of the insidious lies that cripple our debate about our country's social safety-net, I remembered a piece I wrote back in June for my previous blog, and I thought it would be worth republishing here.  

Poverty Beats His Children

The other day, a friend of mine voiced the opinion on Facebook that America is the ultimate land of opportunity, and that people who are in poverty are at fault for blaming others for their plight. It was, he argued, a question of perspective. If people are poor, he argued, they should take more responsibility for their circumstances.

My friend isn’t a greedy or hurtful person. Though we haven’t seen each other in almost two decades, based on the pictures of his beautiful, happy family, he strikes me as somebody who has his priorities in order. But this statement got under my skin and has been itching. I’ve been scratching at this for a little over a week now, and I’m not quite sure how to express why this irritates me so much.

Should I begin on purely factual grounds? He states, without evidence, that the United States is one of the foremost countries which provides its people with the ability to raise themselves out of poverty.  “Unlike nearly any other country, you can start in poverty and move into the middle or upper income bracket within a few short years...definitely into a generation.” What he’s describing is something economists call "social mobility." It’s measurable. And he’s simply wrong.  At best, we rank 4^th. When other factors are included, like unemployment, inflation, and respondents’ satisfaction to standard-of-living and employment opportunities, the U.S. comes in 18th. Of the 195 countries our government recognizes, that means we’re not even in the top 5%. That hardly sounds like “unlike nearly any other country” to me.

Or should I challenge his notion that income inequality is irrelevant? He claims that we don’t have “haves” and “have nots”, but “has” and “has more.”  This sounds like merely bit of optimistic semantics. It’s all in one’s perspective, he claims. But that’s wrong, too. The distance between the “have nots” and the “has mores” produces real world consequences. According to economists, it impedes growth in a number of ways. It doesn’t take a lot of economics training to imagine why this would be. People who are far down the economic ladder can’t demand higher salaries. Beggars don’t haggle. When they have lower salaries, they can’t buy as many goods. The ultra-wealthy still live very well, thank you, but they store their money in accounts rather than investing in businesses which sell goods to people on the bottom of the income spectrum because that’s a better investment. If you reduce the buying power of the poor, you reduce the selling opportunities for the rich. This leads to less sales, less employment, less of what economists call “churning”: money growing because it’s changing hands in exchange for real goods and services. Widening income inequality makes some people much richer, and creates the illusion of economic growth when the total GDP is divided to become the Per Capita GDP, but in truth the standard of living of the vast majority of people decreases.

But this kind of sunny optimism is worse than just bad economics. In my friend’s defense of his position, he cites Christian scripture, pointing out that people have an obligation to use the talents they’ve been given to achieve success. He cites the parable in Matthew about the bags of gold entrusted to servants, Matthew 25:14-30. This is what an English teacher would call “bad reading.” The passage is clearly not about money, it’s about faith. The master says, quite clearly, “You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master’s happiness!” If the parable were about money, one would have to imagine that the “things” Jesus is teaching his disciples to take care of are quantities of money. This from a man who told people that they should take all they have and give it to the poor? This from a man who told people to give Caesar his coins back? This from a man who told people that wealth would make it more difficult to get into heaven? This from a man who told people not to store up their treasures on earth? This from a man who, at least according to scripture, was aware that his death was imminent and yet spent more time talking about concern for the poor than any other single topic during the limited time of his ministry? It’s certainly a convenient interpretation to use when one is trying to justify an investment strategy, but it cannot be justified by the text as a whole.

That’s not what bothers me, either, though. I’m not a Christian. If Christians want to pick apart their scripture to justify widening income inequality and callous disregard for the plight of the poor, that’s their business. They can write a new translation which actually includes the phrase “pull yourselves up by your bootstraps,” stick it into the Sermon on the Mount, and shove those words into Jesus’ mouth, and if that’s what they all decide they believe, who am I to argue? I could point out that it’s a very different interpretation of scripture than other Christians have had before, tantamount to a different religion, something earlier Christians would have called a heresy, but they could quite correctly retort that Christianity has changed a lot over the years. Some have learned to read around the misogyny. Most have learned to stop using scripture as a justification for racism and slavery. A growing number are even learning to get around the bigotry towards homosexuals that’s clearly in the text. So if they want to decide that all the commands to care for the poor, to suffer with those who suffer, and to recognize worldy wealth as a threat to their salvation are just cultural relics of a time gone by and scold the poor for having bad attitudes, it is absolutely within their 1^st amendment rights to do so, and they can take that up with their god when they get to the end of the road. That’s no longer my business.

Except…

Except I have to live with these people. And not just this particularly venal and callous kind of Christian, but with a greedy and self-defeating kind of American. This kind of attitude has real-world policy implications which harm my country, my community, my family.

No, that’s not it, either. I can abide people I disagree with, even when their beliefs harm me and mine. I can live with people who deny evolution even though their beliefs hurt our country’s international reputation and our scientific competitiveness. I can live with people who have regressive beliefs about immigration even though their selective notions of law enforcement will split up families, hurt our own economy, and ultimately fail to do anything but align them with racists. I can live with people who deny the reality of global climate change even though their intransigence will have dramatic and disastrous effects on the economic, political, and even physical health of their fellow citizens. I can live with people I find to be wrong. Why? Because I am sure I’m wrong about some things, too, and I’m sure the ways I’m wrong will injure others. Of course, I don’t know how I’m wrong. As Wittgenstien pointed out, “If there were a verb meaning ‘to believe falsely,’ it would not have any significant first person, present indicative.” If I’m wrong about something, I can’t know it at the time. But I can assume I am wrong because I know I’ve been wrong before, and because I know that being wrong about some things has always appeared to be an essential characteristic of every other human being with whom I’ve come into contact, including those people who are far smarter and far wiser than I am. I try to surround myself with the kind of people who can tell me how I am wrong, and I’ll bet this post may motivate a few of them.  I may not know what god to believe in, but I do believe in people, complete with all their absurdity and outright folly. Sartre said “Hell is other people,” but I think other people are the point of existence. Without them, including all their multifaceted wrong-ness, life would be meaningless. An un-observed tree falling in a forest may or may not make a sound, but a man in a crowd who doesn’t care about any of the people around him makes no difference.

And that, ultimately, is why my friend’s point bothers me so much. It’s the callous disregard for others that I cannot abide. I cannot claim to be an expert on poverty from personal experience. As the Everclear song says, I’ve “never had the joy of a welfare Christmas.” I wish I could explain poverty as eloquently as Sherman Alexie does early in his novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian. (If you haven't read it, do so forthwith.) I just don't have the skill.  But, in my experience, that kind of personal history doesn’t always give people a whole lot of insight into the nature of poverty anyway. I know too many people who raised themselves out of poverty, sometimes terrible, tragic poverty, and their response has been to look back over their shoulders with contempt and say, “I did it. Why can’t they?” I’m starting to recognize that I understand poverty better than some people who experienced it more acutely because, though I might be exactly as middle class as my parents (American social mobility, right?), like them, I’ve chosen to work for people who haven’t escaped poverty. That’s taught me about more than the path out. It’s taught me about the people who are stuck inside.

I came across a great illustration of this today. There's a powerful if unsurprising relationship between effects of dyslexia and the wealth of the dyslexic. Dyslexic children born to wealthy families are identified earlier and are able to get more interventions. As one would expect, they are far more likely to overcome their disability. Now, we could say to a dyslexic, as my friend does, “If you're working has[sic] hard as you can and not getting anywhere....change what you're working at. You need a new perspective or a new path.” But, in this case, we’d be saying, “If you are working hard to learn to read and it’s difficult, you really should have started working hard with a specialist when you were much younger, and in order to do that, you should have been born richer. Choose that path.”

I think my friend doesn’t understand poverty (and again, he is in the company of my middle class friends who climbed out of it themselves). Poverty is an abusive father who beats his children. He stands in the foyer of his house, punching them and kicking them, and they cower in the corner, curled up into tight little balls, trying to protect themselves. Every day his blows rain down on them, but while he beats them, he tells them to get out of his house. Behind him, the door is open. For some, it’s open wide. They are gifted with intelligence, athletic ability, good looks, resilience, perhaps an indomitable will. For others, the door is open just a tiny crack, smaller even than their little bodies. Maybe they are not exceptionally smart or brave or beautiful. Maybe they are afraid to leave the house that at least protects them from the weather. For whatever reason, some of these children remain cowering in the corner, while others make a break for it, scrambling for the door. Some of these escaping children run and don’t look back. “I made it out. Why can’t they? It’s their fault.” Others stay inside all their lives. But here’s the greatest atrocity: We are standing out on the sidewalk, and we can always see into the door, at least a little. We can see Poverty beating down the poor. And, to my amazement, many of us say, “It is their fault. Why don’t they take responsibility for their circumstances? Look at the way their choices keep them inside the house of Poverty?” But we stay out on the sidewalk. I want to ask my friend and anyone else talking about taking personal responsibility for poverty: "Who is supposed to take responsibility for where you stand while the poor suffer? Isn’t that up to you?"

All American Corporations Go to Heaven

Have you ever had the experience of telling a story to a friend and, only during the act of telling it, you fully realized what it meant or why it was relevant to the topic at hand? When I started writing The Sum of Our Gods, I was at the tail end of the process of losing my own Christian faith, and I was self-aware enough to realize that the story was part of that process. I didn’t fully realize what the story was really about until I revised it. Now, in the light of a news story that is just starting to get the attention it deserves, and after my book is in print and getting into people’s hands, I finally see just how relevant it is. In case you missed it, a private company called Hobby Lobby Stores Inc., has successfully worked its way through the lower courts and will have their case heard by the Supreme Court. Their contention is that, since the Citizens United case established that corporations have at least some of the rights of individual human beings, those rights should extend to allow companies to invoke their religious beliefs in order to get a religious exemption from the Affordable Care Act so that the owners don’t have to foot the bill for medical insurance that might be used by some of their employees who want to buy birth control. I’m not making this up. That’s really what they want.

And this case has just been accepted by the Supreme Court. The highest court in the land! This is not some tiny court with a wacky judge who hands out an absurd punishment that makes the local news, or even a state court that gives out a very large settlement in a civil suit which serves as anecdotal evidence for people who argue for tort reform (despite the fact that fear of civil suits and large settlements stands in for weak government regulation and makes almost every product we buy safer for consumers). No, this is the Supreme-fucking-Court! Either way, their ruling will have the force of law for the entire nation and will make precedent that will last until Congress acts (try not to laugh) or a future court overturns it. This is the real deal.

And yet, I’m not hearing any significant public outcry about this case. We live in a country where people complain if greeters at Target say “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas” (or vice versa), but this isn’t earning the same outrage? That’s madness! And now I see that it’s exactly the kind of absurdity I was trying to point out in my novel.

Luckily, I didn’t know about this case when I wrote the book. The novel is, by and large, light-hearted and fun. Had I known, it may have curdled into an angry diatribe. Why? Because this should piss just about everyone off if they would just stop and think about it for two seconds.

Now, you’re going to hear a lot about women’s rights to make their own decisions about their healthcare choices, and that’s a legitimate argument. You’ll also hear some talk about a slippery slope. Personally, I don’t go in for those as a rule. A slippery slope is a logical fallacy. A decision to move to position X does not necessarily mean a slide to position Y and then Z. People will point out that a company could use this same rationale to try to justify other forms of workplace discrimination. What if the owners of a company are opposed to same-sex relationships on religious grounds? Could they invoke the company’s religion to fire those employees? What if the company’s religion dictates that the planet should be preserved from ecological destruction? Could they fire employees who have gas-guzzling cars? Certainly we could imagine a thousand ways that this kind of proposition could be abused, but we don’t have to worry about positions Y and Z, because X is far enough, and I’m not just talking about the affront to the autonomy of female employees. The very foundation of this argument should have us (all of us, people of faith and those who live with them) howling with rage.

If a company has the rights of an individual, and those rights extend to a religious preference, then we are making a statement as a country that we believe companies can participate in religion as individuals. What does that entail? Does a company get baptized? Does it pray? Does it worship a deity? If so, does the deity recognize it as a single adherent? Ultimately, does the company have a soul that can be sanctified? Will Walmart go to heaven?

If this seems absurd to you, consider how much we allow beliefs like these to have sway over our society. This instance involves a relatively discrete set of circumstances; companies refusing to participate in the ACA. But we don’t have to go down the slippery slope into some dark dystopia to contemplate all the other absurdities that religious belief brings into our lives, whether we hold those beliefs or not. In a few short days I will have a tree inside my house. Why will I be bringing this bit of the outdoors inside? Because the people of one religion danced around a maypole in cold German winters to ask their gods for fertility, and the people of another religion decided to make that symbol their tradition, and my family took it on generations ago, and now it’s mine. It’s fun and beautiful and provides a meaningful connection to my childhood memories, but I’d be a fool if I didn’t acknowledge that it’s also fundamentally silly. So if that bit of ridiculousness can infiltrate so many of our homes every year, why should we think that the idea of companies recognized by the government as single spiritual entities will not become an equally acceptable part of our national dogma?

So here is where we find ourselves: Either a preponderance of Christians find this notion of corporate person-hood compatible with their beliefs about the relationship between God and human beings, or they don’t. I just don’t think there’s a lot of gray area in between. If they do, that has significant theological implications that should be acknowledged. God may sanctify your company. Or He may not. Do all the employees of a Christian company go to heaven? Did Jesus die on the cross to save Citibank and GE? If a company goes bankrupt, was it always predestined to go bankrupt? Should Christian companies obey Jesus’ edict to take all they have and give it to the poor? Perhaps Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., should address that question. My guess is that they would say that they are planning on divesting of every penny as soon as they figure out a way to make sure none of the poor will use that money for abortions.

Or companies are not individuals with religious rights, in which case we live in a country where Christians dominate our political landscape and, when faced with a proposition that would fundamentally undermine their concept of the soul and its relationship to the divine, they yawn. Or worse, they are willing to tolerate that insult to their faith if it gets them a win on a social issue or needles the President’s healthcare plan.

I went pretty easy on Christianity in my novel. Though I’m not a Christian any more, I love a lot of Christians, and I still hold a great deal of respect for them. I knew, going in, that many of these people would be pained even by my gentle ribbing of their faith. I know some of them pray for my soul. I sincerely appreciate their concern, and I’m sorry that my lack of faith hurts them. So I didn’t beat up on their religion.

But now I want to make something very clear to anyone who wants me to ever take their religion seriously: Figure this out first. Does your religion say that Walmart or Bank of America is on equal footing with real, live human beings in the eyes of your god? If so, (and you’ll have to pardon my language, but as a writer I’m bound to use the correct words) fuck that noise. If Saint Peter wants to write my name in his ledger underneath Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., I think I’ll find some other after-life abode, thank you very much. On the other hand, if your particular deity of choice doesn’t treat corporations as if they were people, did you stand idly by while the courts allowed that to be the legal interpretation of the country? Why? Because you couldn’t be bothered? Because preventing women from buying birth control was that important to you? Or did you just feel there was nothing you could do? Your god couldn’t or wouldn’t put a stop to it?

If this goes through, it will only shore up my fervent agnosticism which dictates that the universe is either run by no one in particular or by powers I cannot comprehend.  If Christians want to convince me that the universe is orderly and overseen by a deity who loves all individuals, they’d better decide if those individuals include Walmart.

BestsellerBound Recommends...

I was interviewed by the website BestsellerBound Recommends. They asked fun questions like: Favorite breakfast food? When I was a kid, my parents didn’t let us have sugary cereal, so I feel very adult when I get to have a bowl of Captain Crunchberries because I’m a grown-ass man and I can do what I want!  Most days I rush off to work and I’m lucky to grab a granola bar and a soda before my first class starts.

For more, click here.

If you have a site and would like to be a stop on the blog tour, click here.

Irresistible Reads Tours: A Book Tour Blog

Interviewed by Morgen Bailey

Here's my interview with UK book blogger Morgen Bailey. It also includes an excerpt from the book and a synopsis, so send it to a friend who is wondering if she/he will like the novel! http://morgenbailey.wordpress.com/2013/11/23/author-interview-no-694-with-multi-genre-writer-benjamin-gorman/

Skin That’s Thick and Thin: Some Advice for Writers

One cliché bit of advice doled out to writers (and actors, artists, politicians, and various other people who elect professions where they face a lot of criticism) is that they should grow a thick skin. Like rhinos, perhaps. Or crustaceans of some kind. The assumption is that this will make us more successful. That might be true. Perhaps due to our society’s conflation of financial success and happiness, there’s also an underlying implication that this thick skin will lead to happiness. Or to better art. I am unpersuaded.

This week, I hung out with a friend who had a particular verbal tick. In the midst of conversation, he'd say, "I don't care about that." This struck me as a harsh way to segue from one subject to another, or to make a point. This tick can be partly explained by the fact that English is his third language; a native speaker, learning English as a child with less strongly formed opinions, might have learned some gentler way to say, “I disagree,” or “Well, I’m not sure that’s relevant to the point at hand.” This friend simply and boldly asserted that he didn’t care. He even doubled-down, voicing his admiration for a particular writer who had achieved great success by promoting unpopular theories due to his complete disregard for the opinions of critics or academics who disagreed with him.

I shared my current dilemma. My novel comes out in a little over a month, and I can’t help but hope that readers enjoy it. I attributed this to a personality flaw. “I’m a people-pleaser,” I told my friend, as though making a confession to a habit of cannibalism or necrophilia. My confessor encouraged me to go and sin no more, to grow a thick skin, to not give a -well, he didn’t use the word “care” that time- let’s just say he advised me not to donate any carnal acts to critics.

On the surface, this seems like good advice. Why should a writer allow himself/herself to be cut to the core by the rantings of some Greenwich Village hipster he’ll never meet, the invective of a mommy-blogger who was too distracted by her children to read the book carefully, the ad hominem insults of a sixteen-year-old who likes to post nasty reviews on Amazon just to see if he can get a reaction?

Why? Because those three people are readers! The guy from the village walks down to Washington Square Park, finds an empty bench, and he reads! The stay-at-home mom carves out the few precious minutes when both her kids are napping, and she reads! The kid on Amazon… okay, he’s really a 35 year-old troll who lives in his mom’s basement, and he doesn’t really read novels, but his life is sad and he deserves some sympathy. Though the writer may never meet them, the guy in Washington Square Park and the woman sitting on her toilet next to the baby monitor… They are the reason he writes. Their opinions matter, not just because they are human beings with intrinsic worth, but because they read the book. If the writer doesn’t care about that, he should stick to journaling.

But this is an over-simplification as well. I never want to achieve “universal acclaim.” First of all, if everyone knows that a book is good, they file it away as a “classic,” a book everyone has heard of and no one is excited to read. Second, if the world of literary criticism ever becomes so homogeneous in its thinking that there are no contrarian voices, the whole pursuit becomes something I’d prefer to avoid. I hope for some bad reviews. By all the gods, I’d love to have a few high profile bad reviews. But only because they would drive more people to the book. I want the majority of readers to enjoy it. At least 51%. There. I’ve confessed. I want it to be (gasp) popular.

Having a thin skin may actually help in that department. Thin skin may be fragile, but it’s also sensitive. It feels effectively. Absorbing that information allows the writer to more accurately predict what might be pleasing to the reader. Consider, who would you rather curl up next to on a thick rug in front of a roaring fire, a beautiful woman/man with very sensitive skin, or the aforementioned rhinoceros? I would hypothesize that the human is more likely to be able to satisfy your sexual desires, but I don’t know what you’re into.

Still, despite Stephen King’s assertion, writing isn’t seduction. A desire to be sensitive  to reader’s tastes can lead to trend-chasing, a bad habit that has bred a thousand Twilight knock-offs which should have stayed hidden away in fan-fiction forums. Trend-chasers are about as seductive as the kid in middle school who asked every single girl to the dance and found out they were all planning on washing their hair that night. A writer has to have some small measure of self-respect.

After writing a handful of novels, I finally decided this was the one to publish not just because I’d honed my craft to a point I could be proud of, but because this book was my bravest one yet. I was able to put the disapproval of my grandmother out of my mind on some previous projects, but this time I was finally able to risk the disapproval of my parents, my dearest friends, even my wife, because I was nine-and-a-half months pregnant with a story that just had to come out. As I wrote it, I caught myself thinking, “Oh, that line is going to piss-off Christians,” and “Oooo, Muslims won’t like this chapter very much,” and “Some atheists won’t appreciate that crack,” and “Dammit. There go the Orthodox Jews.” I didn’t set off to offend religious people. Most of my favorite people are adherents of one religion or another. The book will only offend the kind of believers who lack a sense of humor. Luckily for me, they aren’t known for their habit of searching out opinions that disagree with their own. But they are the scariest kind of believers! Their bad reviews sometimes take the form of bullets. I was aware of that. I couldn’t let it stop me, though. I was processing the loss of my own faith, and I had to turn that pain into something positive, even fun, for myself. Then I discovered that the story I needed to tell myself was a good one, one that others might enjoy.

I couldn’t back down from the story, but I couldn’t ignore my audience either. If I was going to make it available for them, it had to be more than a story for my own benefit. I had to revise and edit. Those phases are the least popular among writers precisely because they exist to serve the reader’s needs, not the writer’s pleasure. I can’t overstate their importance, though. Not only did a willingness to revise, to truly “see again,” deepen my own experience of the story, it made the novel into something I’m far more proud of. And editing? Editing doesn’t build pride; it prevents shame. Now I’m neck deep in online writer’s groups where we share marketing ideas, and I am constantly amazed by the number of writers who post ungrammatical, misspelled, incorrectly punctuated comments online. Sure, these might be informal forums, but we’re writers, for Valhalla’s sake! Every typo is an offense to potential readers. I paid good money to hire an editor to save me from any of those mistakes in my book. You can bet I’m going to try to communicate that level of quality to potential readers in every online post.

So, if this novel is any kind of model, writing should have some measure of swagger. It should be hard at its core but soft on the outside. It should be confident but also sensitive. On second thought, I guess Stephen King was right about seduction.

In my life, my need to please others has led to my most embarrassing moments (made all the more excruciating by the fact that I’m so sensitive to embarrassment), my most ill-conceived blunders (desperate, impulsive attempts to win favor), and my most shameful acts (failed efforts to make people like me at the expense of others). However, the same impulse has led to my greatest successes. When I wanted the approval of the right people and went about acquiring it in the right way, I not only found my greatest joys but brought the most joy to others. Furthermore, my need to please demands that I look for the good in people, give them the benefit of the doubt at every turn, and though this has burned me quite a few times, it’s also proven to be a good bet; most people, it turns out, are worth pleasing.

My paper-thin skin may be sliced to ribbons shortly after the book hits shelves. I certainly won’t participate in a public melt down like some have. I plan to take the best advice I’ve heard about book reviews: Say Nothing. If it’s bad, Say Nothing. Maybe have a good cry or a stiff drink. If it’s good, Tweet it, Facebook it, send everyone to it, but on the page itself, Say Nothing. Here’s what I’d like to say to a reviewer, though: “Thank you for reading the book. If you didn’t like it, I’m sorry I failed you. Truly sorry. If you liked it, that makes the whole process of revision and editing and publishing worthwhile. But, either way, I care about you, and I’m grateful for you.”

So here’s my current advice for writer, such as it is: Don’t grow thicker skin. Instead, change your clothes.

1) First, put on your best suit of armor. Climb into an M-1 Abrams Tank. Drive it into a nuclear submarine. Write like you are invincible. (Warning: People in suits of armor in tanks in submarines are lonely. And cold.)

2) Change into your shortest skirt. Revise for the reader. But remember what you learned from the movie Pretty Woman: Don’t kiss on the mouth. Some things are off limits.

3) Put on a tuxedo. Adjust your cufflinks. Button the top button. Check your fly. Straighten your bow tie. Edit to protect yourself from shame.

4) Strip down to a swami’s loincloth and sit cross-legged under a tree for a while. Publish after a great deal of consideration.

5) Then, acknowledge that you’re basically naked. Run as fast as you can toward a garden of sweet, juicy blackberries and long thorns. Be willing to hurt.

That willingness to suffer shows more courage and more respect for the reader than any runway high-fashion name-brand rhino-skin apathy.

Happy Wednesday!

(Shhhh. I'm just going to quietly post this here on a Friday night, then share it on Wednesday. Don't tell anybody.)  

In case you don't get the joke or just want your Wednesday to be that much better:

Hump Day!

A Teacher in the Trenches Reports on Proficiency Grading

My friend Scott (who blogs here) sent me this question the other day: "I had an idea recently and I was wondering what your thoughts were. This is in regards to school reform, and I’m not a teacher; I’m guessing you’d have a very different perspective."

Okay, right away I'm hooked. Not only am I teacher, but I'm a teacher who loves to speak for all teachers. Other teachers might not appreciate that, but it's just how I roll. Also, I love to talk about school reform, partly because our schools do need to be reformed, but mostly because they do not need to be reformed for the reasons or in the ways that the professional school reformers want them to be reformed, and, as a teacher, I believe I have an obligation to speak out in defense of great public schools. So when Scott starts this way, I immediately start to gird my loins and prepare for a fight. But...

"I was recently listening to a book called The Generals, regarding the changes in command structure of the US army from WWI to Iraq II. One of the reforms he talks about having been introduced in the interim between Vietnam and Iraq I was that they ceased to have “X number of hours” requirements for training and replaced it with “demonstrated proficiency”-based training. That is, once you pass a test, you move on to the next point. This meant that officers were no longer forced to spend time in a mind-numbing course that they already comprehended, and those not learning had a greater incentive to learn."

Hold on! He's talking about the movement toward proficiency grading, a move I support!

"Now there have been a number of suggestions that schools actually pay students money to do things like show up and do homework and such. I’m guessing I’m not alone in thinking this is a terrible idea. There’s also the idea of incentive pay for teachers, which likewise is a terrible idea (it punishes or rewards teachers based in large part on the active role that the student’s parent plays, over which the teacher has no control, favoring the teachers with the easiest students). However, I think that incentives might be made better. Namely, students could be rewarded with time and autonomy for good behavior."

Paying students to learn is a bad idea: Agreed. Incentive pay for teachers is a bad idea: Agreed. Students can earn time and autonomy for good behavior: ...almost. A big part of proficiency grading is the recognition that behavior is not enough. Good behavior should lead to the acquisition of skills, and it's the acquisition of skills that should be rewarded. But I'm interrupting.

"I imagine something vaguely of this nature: students have to be at school from X:00 AM to X:00 PM, regardless of progress; this would not change. But let’s imagine that each school year were divided into quarters that last, say, 13 weeks (with the “4th quarter” being summer vacation, slightly shorter than the others due to vacations or holidays or staff development days, etc., during the course of the normal 3 quarter school year). The regular course of the semester would be to have instruction complete in 9 weeks with a final exam **or** final report/presentation/etc. (I don’t care about the specific metric; this is not about increasing the testing frenzy, but a student should be able to establish proficiency in whatever subject by a standard deemed appropriate by that instructor for the course at hand). If you pass that final exam, your next four weeks are given to you to do as you will with high flexibility and autonomy. If you like art, take art classes. Take extra time in shop, or in science lab, or just read or write in the library, should you choose. Enroll in some online college courses (audit or credit, it’s up to you). Enroll in local community college courses for free (this was actually available in San Diego for anyone with a free period, but I didn’t know it). Learn to program computers. Parents would also be free to take their kids out of school during those three weeks for vacations, should they be so inclined, without missing any important school work, provided the kids passed all of their classes prior to that.

"In addition to incentivizing the students to actually master the material at the end of 9 weeks, it would have the added (potential) that the teachers would be able to focus additional time for those students that most need it in those final 4 weeks. Students not passing at the end of the 13th week would need to use an elective period in the following quarter to meet the demands not met by the class not passed.

"My basic assumption is that *most* students have at least some subjects that they could meet proficiency in very rapidly if they had an incentive of (relatively) free time. This might serve to help align the goals of the students and the teachers. Yes, it would require more funding, but the truth is that Americans really aren’t that squeamish in general about spending money on education; in general, we spend way, way more than the rest of the developed world, and the few exceptions are small wealthy populations (like Norway and Luxembourg) which, though they compete with national averages favorably, still don’t spend as much as small subsections of the US like Boston or NYC. The problem is that administrators and bureaucrats take a large cut off the top (leaving less for teachers), and the results don’t track the increases in spending. Largely this is because parents today have bifurcated into two large camps of the over-involved and the under-involved, and the progress of a given student seems to reflect primarily their parental involvement. As such, motivating the students themselves seem imperative. What insights can you offer as a teacher?"

Oh, I have opinions galore. As to whether or not they are insightful, I'll let you judge, Scott.

We’re instituting something very much like this right now. It’s both daunting and exciting.

First, the exiting part (for a philosophy-major theory-head geek like me): The theory. The idea is that we’ve been grading all wrong, and the flawed grading has led to bad instruction. Grades should describe precisely what a student is capable of doing in relation to the goals of the course. Unfortunately, we’ve been messing that up in a number of ways. A student moves on to the next level of a course with a B, and the next teacher doesn’t know if that B means the student is capable of doing all the tasks required in the last class, or if she did a bunch of extra credit, or if she worked really hard and earned the teacher’s pity, or if she was super-capable but was punished for being lazy, or for cheating, or skipping school occasionally (because she was bored), or for a myriad of other reasons she might have that B. Instead, the grade should describe only her performance. Ideally, she shouldn’t even get a letter grade. She should get a list of specific tasks and simple scores on those (Meets, Exceeds, Does Not Meet, Did Not Attempt), so the next teacher knows precisely what she can and cannot do. If the grades were done this way, the instruction would be designed to lead up to these specific performance tasks. She could take a pre-assessment to determine if she already knows how to do whatever is about to be taught. If so, don’t waste her time teaching her that! If not, teach her how to do it. When she shows she can, move on. If she still can’t, don’t just pass her on to the next teacher. Take the time to focus on that skill she lacks. And don’t muck up her scores with anything but explicit descriptions of her academic ability: Bad behavior gets handled by administrators and her parents and is unrelated to her grade. Extra credit doesn’t exist. And effort only matters if it results in being able to perform the tasks; she’ll learn that it matters a whole lot, but not because she’s working for a letter.

That’s how it’s supposed to work. It can, too. Some people are doing this already and doing it well. It doesn’t even necessarily have to cost a lot more. Rural one-room schoolhouses with great teachers are perfect for this kind of thing. Really good home-schoolers can even pull it off (though too often home-school teachers can turn out to be un-schoolers or grossly unqualified to teach every subject at every level. I know I would be. Plus there’s the whole issue of socialization which requires a lot of work by home-school teachers who don’t want to produce students who can pass every test but are socially dysfunctional). Small class sizes are an important part of the mix here. No one can effectively keep track of 200 kids all going at their own pace, or at least no one I know, and I’ve worked with some of the best teachers in the country.

But it takes more than small class sizes to make this work. Teachers need lots of time and support to rewrite curriculum so that it targets specific tasks and measures them each effectively. There’s an understandable temptation to go out and buy a canned curriculum that will do all that work for teachers. That impulse must be avoided at all costs. For one thing, canned curricula tend to suck. Just because a huge corporation made something doesn’t mean it’s any better than something your local school teacher can produce, and it might mean it’s a whole lot worse. The corporations designing curricula have different motives than producing something that’s been tested and shown to be effective: They want to produce something that’s flashy and will make them lots of money. Sometimes the profit motive can lead to high quality products for reasonable prices (see: Toyota or Volvo)

and sometimes it leads to things that look a lot better than they really are (see: the early Miata)

or are priced to sell but not to last (see: the Ford Pinto).

Also, when teachers are given a canned curriculum they do not have the investment in its creation, so they are less likely to know the material inside and out and are more likely to resent the material (sometimes garbage) being handed down from on high. So, in order to do proficiency grading properly, teachers need the time and support to create dozens, sometimes hundreds, of pre-tests, connected lessons, and post-tests. And since our hypothetical student needs to have many opportunities to try again when she doesn’t master a skill the first time, more post-tests and more post-tests.

The other temptation is to plunk our poor girl down in front of a computer and make her take as much of her schooling as possible through computer-based classes. Now, teaching through the computer can work, but only if it’s done in a very specific way. Linguists learned a long time ago that programs on the radio, broadcast by Radio Free America, didn’t effectively teach people English. Why not? They could listen to them for hours upon hours, but they didn’t absorb the language. Was something wrong with them? Nope. It was the nature of the instruction. When people learn, they need to be able to demand feedback and receive unrequested correction. If you can’t ask a question and get an answer, you don’t learn well, and if you are doing something wrong and no one corrects you, you just keep on doing it wrong. Computer courses, too often, are designed to provide learners with an onslaught of information they are simply supposed to absorb before taking a test which provides them with very little feedback or correction. Someday we’ll design computer programs that can evaluate a student’s performance, provide them with the appropriate feedback needed to improve, and answer their questions (correctly and appropriately for their level) when they ask.  Then I will be out of a job. Luckily, we’re not there yet, and the people trying to sell computer-based learning are more concerned with saving schools money (and making their own) then providing students with the best instruction.  (But the day will come when students taught by computers do better than students taught by humans. I think that’s as inevitable as, say, universal healthcare. Yes, teachers should be as worried as the folks who file health insurance claims. We will have to learn to do something else.)

Another challenge for a true proficiency system, which you already alluded to, is what to do with the kids who are done too fast, and what to do with the kids who aren’t done fast enough. Our traditional model says that they should all go at the same rate, and we do it that way not because we believe it’s true, but because we can’t quite figure out what to do about the fact that we know it’s false. In small degrees, it’s bearable. If our hypothetical student finishes her math faster than her history, maybe we can provide a space where she can work on the history she needs to catch up on while the rest of her math class reviews something she already knows how to do. But what happens when she’s ahead of her class at everything? Free time to learn about things she’s interested in would be great, but according to a proficiency model, we should be moving her on to the next grade’s material. That poses a number of problems, though. Do we want a really bright 7^th grade girl hanging out in the same halls as our 16 year old guys? And what if she’s not a really bright girl? Do we warehouse her in a class of capable 7^th graders when she’s 16? What will that do to her, socially?

Oh, and remember how I mentioned that behavior problems will be taken care of by teachers and administrators and parents working together? That part is essential. And rare.

And those are just the obvious problems. What about the kid with a learning disability who is never going to be able to perform certain tasks? Do we say he’s a 10^th grader forever? And what about the kid who just moved to this country and doesn’t speak a lick of English? And what if he is also the kid with the learning disability? Our traditional model allowed that kid to stumble along with straight Ds, get a high school diploma that completely deceived employers about his ability level, and then he could get a low-level service sector job and maybe be okay. But those jobs no longer pay a living wage and the world wants high school diplomas to mean something specific.

Which brings us to another major issue: The world has not adjusted for the proficiency based model. Parents still want to know what the letter grade is because that’s how they were taught to evaluate their own performance when they were in school. Colleges are warming to proficiency grades because they will give them a better sense of who can succeed within their walls than the meaningless high school diploma did, but scholarship committees still want a GPA, so even a kid who wants to go to a progressive school that recognizes his list of skills instead of his GPA might not be able to pay for it. Businesses want to know that the kid will show up on time and obey his boss, something the list of tasks might not include. It’s going to take time for schools to be able to show that students focused on building skills still learn a work ethic without the fear of punishment through punitive grading, and in the meantime they may be punished for the system’s uneven, hodgepodge switch.

And then there’s the problem of the timeline. This wholesale reboot of both the grading and the delivery of instruction will take a while. We could just start with Kindergartners and roll it out over 13 years. That would allow folks to get more comfortable with it, but if we really know it’s better for kids, can we justify not doing it for the kids in high school right now? Conversely, is it fair to change course midstream for the high school seniors who are in line to be valedictorians and suddenly find that A) they have been earning those As through hard work and extra credit but can’t earn better than a B on skills alone, B) their colleges of choice still care about GPA more than skills, and C) the valedictorian award is suddenly getting the ax (which it should have received long ago)? All the theory might say proficiency is what is best for these kids, but it still feels unfair to me. And it will seem plenty unfair to their parents. Oh, and they would be right to point out that the teachers don’t even know how to do proficiency right yet.

And herein lies the biggest threat to proficiency-based teaching and learning: If the rollout is done poorly, despite all the research and theory behind it, we will abandon it like we have so many other education fads that were underfunded and hastily implemented. We’re already seeing that here in Oregon. The state produced a law that said, simply, that schools had to produce an annual letter to parents which described their child’s proficiency separate from that child’s behavior. Some schools dove in years ago, preparing for this, and they’re getting good at it. Others, like mine, are diving in at the last minute, but we’re going all-in, leading to massive stress levels and a very uneven implementation. Others are saying, “Let’s wait and see if the state will really enforce this law, because this sounds like a lot of work, and they’re not paying for it.” In the midst of this, parents start screaming (rightfully), and the politicians are running away from it, declaring that schools that are attempting to measure proficiency all year are going way beyond the law since they only required an annual report (as though anyone could produce an accurate report on the fly in April without keeping track all year), and that local districts get to define behavior. They went so far as to wash their hands of any definition of behavior, saying schools could include or exclude homework, missed work, cheating, absences, extra credit, you name it. Now, I’m all for local control when it makes sense, but if the state wants to pass a law that uses words, they can’t turn around and say each locality gets to individually decide what each word means. That’s not a law. That’s not even a meaningful suggestion. But this is what could undo your great idea, Scott. We either have to push through the resistance any new system will necessarily generate and provide the resources to allow that new system to produce results, or we will starve it of resources and buckle under the pressure to remain status quo.

And here’s what my experience as a teacher has really taught me: When people are pissed off about the crappy roll-out, they will blame the teachers. When the roll-out is starved of the necessary resources, they will blame the teachers. And if succeeds, the way public schools succeed right now in educating a broader swath of our population to achieve at higher levels than they ever have before, someone will point out that our kids are not doing as well as the kids in a country where kids are culturally homogeneous, all speak the same language, have a strong enough social safety net that all of them are fed and have healthcare, have vastly less income inequality, aren’t traumatized by our levels of crime, and go to school six days a week and throughout the summer, and they will blame the teachers.

And the people blaming the teachers will call themselves school reformers, make millions peddling the next fix, and send their own kids to private schools.

But I’m not at all bitter about that.

Admittedly, this took a bit of a dark turn at the end. Sorry about that. I try to stay positive because I really do love my job, but the further I get from theory, the more cynical I become. Now I have to go write a hundred new scoring rubrics while organizing my local union to strike because, in the middle of all this radical change, our school district, newly flush with state cash, thinks we should be paid less than we made last year.

An Idea for Addressing Income Inequality

Lately I've been more than a bit frustrated with the complete tone-deafness of America's political leaders when it comes to the issue of growing income inequality. Democrats, it seems, are so beholden to their big donors and/or so afraid of being called communists by right-wing talk radio that they only mention income inequality in hushed tones and don't dare to do anything substantive about it. Republicans, on the other hand, either want to use rising poverty rates as a club to beat up on the President, or they want to cut programs to assist the poor as a means to punish them into not being poor anymore. As John Oliver pointed out on this week's The Bugle, this attempt to address the problem of poverty is a bit like a doctor trying to awaken someone from a coma by repeatedly hitting the patient in the head with a wooden plank; it's unlikely to work, and if it does, the guy is going to be pretty pissed off when he wakes up.

I could rage about this for a few hours, but it's more constructive to try to think about solutions. Since the problem, as I see it, doesn't come from an inability to address the issue of poverty (we've done it before, quite successfully, with some of the very programs people are trying to cut now). It's caused by a lack of political will. So, tackling poverty should start with addressing Congress. Electric cattle prods might be a popular solution, but I'm pretty sure that's illegal, and if it's not, they have the power to make it so. Instead, here's an idea:

What if Congressional salaries were legally pegged to the median of U.S. incomes?

First of all, it shouldn't be the mean income ($55k), because Congress could skew that number upwards and enrich themselves by creating more policies that enrich a few people at the top. Instead, it should be the median. That's not an easy number to find, it turns out, but if I'm reading this correctly (click here, then, under the Table H-1. Income Limits for Each Fifth and Top 5 Percent, click on the "All Races" and note the top of the second quintile) it's probably right around $40k. Or, according to data from the Social Security Administration, the median per capita worker income is $26k. Like I said, it's not easy to find, but I'll bet it would get a lot more attention if the salaries of everyone in Congress were pegged to it. Oh, and the median would have to be calculated based on the income people actually pay tax on. In other words, if Congress continued to allow people to pay a different rate of tax on investment income, that income would not be included in the calculation of their own incomes. You can bet they would quite suddenly have a come-to-Jesus moment about investment income being taxable as income.

Anyway, that would have to be all these politicians were allowed to live on. Anything they owned previously would be put in a trust until after they were out of office. They would have to live in some pretty crummy neighborhoods in D.C., and that could open their eyes a bit. The President's salary should be exactly the same, but with the added perk of a really nice house. To make sure that all these politicians couldn't just live in near-poverty for a couple years and then cash in as consultants for the companies that were promising them lucrative future salaries in exchange for bad bills, the politicians would have to live with the mode for an additional ten years after leaving office, but with any difference between the current year's mode and the mode of the year they left office doubled. In other words, if the median went up by 1% the next year, they'd get a 2% raise. If it went up by 5%, they'd get a 10% raise. Conversely, if they padded the stats by creating economic bubbles while in office, and then those bubbles burst and the median went down by 2%, their income would go down by 4%. Consequently, they would be motivated to enact policies that would lead to longer term growth.

I think this idea would be a huge improvement. At the very least, it might prevent a few jerks in Congress from telling people without shoes to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. At best, it could lead to a very different way of regulating the economy. And it can't be accused of being communist, since flattening incomes towards the middle wouldn't change the median at all. This would make politicians try to raise the bottom and the top, but it would make them focus on the quantity of people at the bottom, not just the average per capita income.

What do folks think of this idea? Silver bullet or total dud? And if you think it's a dud just because the people in Congress would never vote for it, ask yourself why you would vote for anyone who wouldn't.

[Note: When I posted this originally, I kept writing "mode" instead of "median" and "median" instead of "mean." Luckily, I have friends who are smarter than I am who quickly pointed out the error. Fixed!]

Update: September 24th

My friend Scott, who blogs here and generally engages me in great debates because we come at problems from very different ideological angles, has a wonderful pair of ideas I want to share:

"[T]ax inheritance by the beneficiary rather than by the deceased; several small inheritances from one large estate should be taxed lower than the whole going to one or a few single individuals. The concern should be less about how much the deceased had acquired and more about how much any single recipient is getting; after some baseline (which should likely be pegged to a median home price, or should account a primary residence of the deceased as separate from normal liquid assets), the rest ought to be treated as regular income."

This is a great idea because it would encourage billionaires to give their inheritances to a broader number of people or put more of it in the public coffers. That's a winner.

Scott's second idea is more complicated, but I like it, too:

"[T]ax brackets should be pegged to median incomes. The executives with the highest salaries and thus highest tax brackets would be far better incentivized to raise wages and salaries beneath them and they have far more control over this. And it would need to be clear that this is the median of all filers, rather than just the employed.

"...an illustration.

"Let’s take the Ike tax brackets that are so widely discussed. He had a really high rate (something like 90%), but that marginal rate was only on incomes over $400,000 at a time when the median income was about $6,000. This is very different to today, where the highest bracket can hit a middle class person in a boom year that may not be representative of their overall wealth, opportunity costs, risks, future earnings, etc. So the idea would be something like this. Let’s take that ratio that Ike had and say that the top rates kick in at 50X and 100X the median salary. That is to say the top rate goes back down to 35% for whatever that bracket is today ($400,000, the same nominal value as in Ike’s time but drastically less in buying power). The next bracket jumps up to 70% on incomes over 50X the median, while incomes over 100X the median are taxed at 90%.

"Now let’s look at this in practice. The median household income in 2010 was $51,017, and it dropped to $50,054 in 2011. These numbers could not practicably be applied for anything but a two-year lag, so the rates generated would apply in 2012 and 2013, respectively (enough time to have the data compiled and have the rates known publicly by Jan 1st). In 2012, the rates would kick in at $2.551 million and $5.102 million, while in 2013 they’d drop to $2.507 million and $5.005 million, meaning that for any person making more than $5.2 million, $48,150 more would be exposed to 70% rather than 35% taxation, and $96,300 more would be exposed to 90% taxation rather than 70% taxation. Thus a person ends up paying a little more than an additional $36,000 in taxes because the median income dropped.

"That might seem somewhat small by comparison to the salaries, but let’s look at it in a different light. If the median income jumps $10,000 from $50,054 to $60,054 (assuming we’re talking several years, here) then the tax burden for that person making more than $5.2 million drops $375,000. That’s a huge incentive to business leaders to raise their employee’s salaries, and gives them a direct stake in raising wages and reducing inequality.

"This is a quick-and-dirty illustration to make the point, but theoretically the entire set of marginal rates could likewise be set. That $400,000 bracket could be changed to 8X the median. If the median increases, you lower your tax burden for a given nominal income.

"Currently, brackets rise with inflation. This means that as inflation goes up, tax burdens go down in order to account for the fact that $100k means a very different thing in 1990 vs. 2010. That makes some sense. To a degree, my plan accomplishes the same sort of thing, because inflation generally rises with average incomes. But the difference is that it only remains fixed to inflation alone when inequality remains constant. If inequality rises, however, the tax code becomes more progressive, and if inequality falls, the tax code becomes flatter.

"Ideally, a mechanism ought to be incorporated to look not only at the median, but some metric that assesses the 20th and 80th percentiles as well. The reason for this is that Wal-Mart raising wages across the board is unlikely to bump the 50th percentile directly, and the connection between wages/salaries and progressivity would be slightly less direct than is desirable. But I think it would be a good start."

See what I meant about having smart friends?

I made it into the local paper, but...

  ...it's for my work as the president of my teacher's union.

"Central School District classified staff settles, another side eyes deal" by Aaron Newton

One of my friends and colleagues said I should have put in a plug for the novel. I wish I could have figured out a way to do that. Maybe something like,

"Gorman, a novelist with a new book coming out in November, said that he is as hopeful for the success of the next bargaining session as he is for the sales of his book. However, in both cases, he is trying to maintain realistic expectations."

Yeah, that wouldn't have been at all weird.

Speaking of weird, the picture made me look like a goblin of some kind.

I have a sinking suspicion that's not Mr. Newton's fault.

Grumpy Cat, Meet Skeptical Hippo

My wife and I love Grumpy Cat.

If Grumpy Cat is my wife's spirit animal, I think I just found mine:

So, does my novel fall into the category "Religious Fiction"?

Yes. Religious Fiction, Skeptical Hippo-style.