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It’s more difficult than ever to talk about what’s right with America these days, both because we’re still languishing in a persistent economic downturn, and because the most visible movement in America today is a single screaming complaint against everything that America, as a nation-state, does. As Susan Greene discusses in her column in today’s Denver Post (http://www.denverpost.com/greene/ci_16418853), it is political fodder for both candidates and citizens to decry the alleged laziness and inefficiency of public servants, without acknowledging the hard work, low salaries, and deep commitment that is widespread among them.

Certainly, there are inefficiencies, there are the issues of “goal displacement” and “agency problems” that are inherent to large bureaucratic organizations. These are authentic institutional challenges posing a legitimate need to address them to the best of our ability. But that demand on our ingenuity should not be confused with condemnation for the essential work that is done, and must be done, through our public agencies.

The problem is that the many indispensable things that America does, and that American public servants do, are so fully incorporated into our lives, so much a part of our expectations of what is and what should be, that they have become invisible to most of us, taken for granted and unacknowledged unless and until they’re gone. And even then, the competing streams of often inaccurate information allows people to blame the decreased quality of their lives resulting from the lack to other forces altogether, perversely leading to an increased demand for the shrinkage of government that caused the material and palpable decreased quality of life in the first place.

Such is the dilemma we’re in now. A decades long Republican-driven agenda of deregulation led to underregulated financial markets, the consequences of which were well foreseen (and frequently trumpeted on shows such as 60 Minutes, as was the inevitability of a major large-scale terrorist attack in the United States and a clear identification of our vulnerabilities) at least as long ago as the 1990’s, resulting in 2008 in “the biggest economic crisis since The Great Depression,” driven by a financial-sector fabricated housing bubble collapse and subsequent crash in values of mortgage-based securities.

If, at the end of the Bush administration, a deal had been offered to the nation that we would be in the economic condition we’re in today less than two years later, with a weak but stabilized economy, with an end to net increases in job loss and less than 10% unemployment, with the fairly clear prospect of a gradual return to economic growth and prosperity, every sane human being would have wiped their brow in relief, and screamed, “God yes! I’ll take that deal!”

But instead, the disingenuous Right gets away with trumpeting that 3.3 million jobs have been lost during the Obama administration, and even stating that that loss is a direct result of stimulus spending, disregarding that the rate of job loss was accelerating right up until the passage of Obama’s first stimulus bill, and began decelerating right after (http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-jobs-lost-in-the-bush-and-obama-administration-2010-2), and that the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office has reported that the stimulus bill created between 1.3 and 3.4 million jobs that would not otherwise have existed (Organized Ignorance and the Amplified Echo-Chamber of Disinformation).

More importantly, those of us who have actually studied the legal, economic, and physical complexities of things like energy and financial markets, and recognize the role of information asymmetries in the ability of those in centrally located market positions to play markets to the advantage of a few at the sometimes extreme expense of the public (such as happened in the Enron-fabricated California Energy Crisis of 2000-01, and the financial sector collapse of 2008), are aware of the immensity of the task of creating regulatory regimes sophisticated enough, and well-enough funded, to keep up with and police the opportunities for socially disastrous mischief. (See, e.g., Monday Briefs: Labor Markets, Mandela, & High Frequency Trading, Regulation of Financial Markets)

Not only the large demand on the nation-state to provide, maintain, and grow an extensive enough and sophisticated enough regulatory architecture to keep up with technological and institutional advances in insiders’ ability to game the system at the public expense, and unsure the smooth and efficient operation of our markets, but also the large demand on necessary infrastructural maintenance and improvement to reduce transaction costs, attract investment capital, and, in general, grease the gears of the market economy in ways that no private investment capital can’t fully accomplish (due to long time-horizons of return-on-investment, for instance).

We have been underproducing these public goods essential to the smooth functioning of our markets, with Democrats fighting to better approach the optimal level, and Republicans fighting to reduce our investment even more, moving in the direction of increased dysfunctionality. Doing as much as we are doing (and, preferably, considerably more) on these dimensions is what’s right with America; the populist and corporatist pressure to do less is what’s wrong with America.

Beyond these demands on the government to provide the material and regulatory infrastructure necessary to the maintenance of a robust market economy, is a duel-natured demand to make a similar investment in our human capital. As I argued in The Real Deficit, there is both an economic and social imperative to do so: We need a well-educated work force capable of competing in the global economy both to be economically competitive as a nation, and to enable our citizens to occupy the high-skilled high-salaried jobs that contribute to individual prosperity and financial security.

What’s right with America is that, until recently, we have maintained a vibrant system of state universities and government subsidized student loans which have enabled most academically capable young people to take advantage of higher educational opportunities. What’s wrong with America is our diminishing commitment to continue these policies, the erosion of higher education opportunities for middle and lower class Americans.

Of course, those young people need to have not only access to affordable higher educational opportunities, but also the academic preparation necessary to utilize those opportunities successfully. American public education is the target of widespread and, in some ways, much deserved criticism. But the problems with American public education are much more a function of factors outside the schools than within the schools. What our schools themselves have been doing, to the extent that we have allowed them to do it, is very much what’s right with America, for we have gotten an enormous return on our investment in public education. We have, on average, a far higher-quality teacher pool than the salaries and benefits themselves alone would be able to purchase, because many people who simply love to teach and love children go into that profession because it’s what they were born to do.

Even so, there are many deep structural problems with American education, within the schools as well as without. The profession attracts not only the highly committed, but also those who are not competent but can pass the threshold of entry into education, because the demand is so high and the compensation so relatively low. We cannot improve the teacher pool simply by eliminating tenure and removing “bad teachers,” because unless we alter the supply-and-demand equation, all we would accomplish by doing so is to stack the deck just a little more against attracting the highest quality human capital in the first place (by reducing incentives to enter, without counterbalancing the change in incentives elsewhere).

But, despite this weakness in a generally strong teacher pool, and the overwhelmingly risk-averse, ossified, autocratic administration of large school districts (qualities which further undermine the efficacy of the elimination of teacher tenure, by ensuring that almost as many excellent teachers as poor ones are likely to be weeded out as a result), the biggest problems with American public education are, in combination, the deep and widespread cultural anti-intellectualism that continually undermines the educational mission in most out-of-school social contexts, and the general failure to create robust school-community partnerships and programs to better prepare and include parents in the educational mission.

What’s right with America is that we currently counterbalance the relatively low professional salary we provide to teachers with an attractive package of benefits, ample vacations, and unusually high job security. What’s wrong with America is educational reform that kicks responsibility for deep structural and cultural problems down the hierarchy, blaming and punishing those who are, by and large, the strongest component of American public education for defects over which they have virtually no control, and, by doing so, undermining that strong pillar without strengthening the weaker ones. What’s right with America is maintaining the revenue streams that schools require to address these challenges. What’s wrong with America is the zealous movement committed to continuing to reduce and eliminate those revenue streams. (For more on education and education reform, see, e.g., Real Education Reform, A Positive Vision For Colorado, Are We Civilized?, and Education Policy Ideas).

Beyond the regulatory architecture and material and human infrastructural investment that only government can provide, and our commitment to public education as the foundational institution in preparing our citizens to prosper individual and contribute to a robust state and national economy, there are a host of challenges that society faces, and commensurate demands on government, that can be met at considerable present cost in return for both far greater future savings, and a generally improved quality of life for a larger spectrum of the population. I have discussed these at length in essays such as The Most Vulnerable Americans,  The Vital Role of Child, Family, and Community Services, Community, Family, and Crime Prevention, and Sound Mind, Sound Body, Sound Society; Sound Good?.

What’s right with America is that we have, by and large, elected people to public office who are more often than not pretty well-qualified for the job, people who know some economics and some law, are aware of the devastating suffering of millions of children, recognize the magnitude of social challenges we face that can only be addressed through the agency of government, and, in general, have some understanding of the real demands of governance. What’s wrong with America today is the massive and massively misinformed populist movement, financed by corporate money eager to keep the candy store unlocked and unguarded, pushing to put people who reflect and embody their own lack of comprehension and misconceptualizations into office, and threatening to do so successfully, at great and enduring cost to all Americans.

An inner-city Chicago school implemented a fairly simple and highly successful program to address the out-of-control violence and low probability of success (or even, in some cases, survival) that its students faced: Identify those most at risk, and pair them up with community mentors (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032619/#39804320). As one mentor said, he believes his mentee is college bound, though he didn’t think that when he first met him.

This is a model I’ve been advocating here in Jefferson County, both when I was a teacher, and now as a father and resident. It’s an obvious direction to take, clearly a good investment and good for our kids. Unfortunately, Jeffco Schools Superintendent Cindy Stevenson is too much of an autocrat to risk any significant degree of community involvement. I’ve encountered nothing but obstructionism from her.

But our school districts ultimately belong to us, not to those we hire as our agents in their administration. We all need to start organizing a community-school partnership movement, in all of our school districts. it’s the next logical step in the evolution of public education, increasing again the amount and variety of human capital to which children are exposed and from which children can benefit, just as the original institutionalization of public education did.

One thing is certain: Show me a kid who has an adult taking an interest in him or her, and engaging in intellectually stimulating and optimistic-about-the-kid’s-future conversations and interactions, and I’ll show you a kid who’s going to succeed in school and beyond. The first most important step we can take in education reform is to make sure that every kid has such an adult in their life.

Buy my e-book A Conspiracy of Wizards

There is a major movement in our country based on isolating individual issues, considering them in a vacuum, eschewing the products of academic research and careful analysis as “elitist,” insisting that arbitrary certainties are far more responsible and deserving of respect, struggling to disintegrate our social bonds to our mutual detriment, and fueling adherents’ angry opposition to applying our minds and hearts to the challenges and opportunities we face as a a people with fabricated absurdities and oversimplistic platitudes. One of the false certainties of this movement is that public spending at levels at or near what they currently are, and taxation at almost anything above an impossibly low level, is an act of violence against future generations, by bequeathing to them a ballooning debt and a crippled economy. But deficits come in many forms, and economies are more certainly crippled by turning any one legitimate consideration into an idol at whose alter reason and knowledge are sacrificed.

First, it’s important to note that this popular conservative vision of how economies work is cartoonishly oversimplistic. Even conservative economists almost universally agree (I haven’t heard one contradict this yet) that the continuation of tax cuts to the very wealthy is fiscally and economically indefensible. Most economists, even conservative ones, recognize the need for a complex regulatory structure to address information asymmetries in our complex modern economy. And most economists recognize the importance of investing in our human and material infrastructure. We will not reduce our national debt, nor reinvigorate our national economy, by starving our human and material infrastructure of the funds necessary to make them functional and competitive.

America, not long ago, led the world in college graduates. We are now far behind many other countries. Our leadership as innovators and an economic powerhouse will deteriorate as a result of our deteriorating commitment to this foundational demand upon us as a people. Jobs and capital will continue to gush from this country like oil from a blown well, and our attempts to cap the leak will be just as desperate. Eventual success, even if such is achieved, will leave just as much irreparable devastation in its wake.

American college tuitions are skyrocketing (http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_16273813), in large measure due to the anti-tax, anti-spend mania of overzealous libertarians. In revenue-starved Colorado, the problem is far greater than it is in less ideologically fanatical states. As a result, not only will America become increasingly less attractive to foreign capital, and not only will American employers be increasingly forced to seek more and more of their high-salaried, highly educated employees from countries like India, where well-educated labor is available at bargain prices; but Colorado will become increasingly less attractive even in comparison to other regions of the country. Entrepreneurs looking for a beautiful place with a pleasant life-style to locate their information-intensive start-ups, will think twice about choosing Colorado (which would otherwise, under smarter policies, be a front-runner), knowing that the state will not be able to provide enough of the human capital necessary, can’t be counted on to maintain the material infrastructure necessary, and won’t provide their children with the kind of education necessary, to attract and hold them.

The most critical deficit we are facing as a country, and more dramatically as a state, is the deficit in our investment in the minds of our children and young adults (the most vital of all naturally resources, tragically squandered); in the state-of-the-art infrastructure that a robust, world-class economy requires; in our hopes and dreams; and in our future. And that’s the deficit that is most urgent for us to get under control.

Buy my e-book A Conspiracy of Wizards

Buy my e-book A Conspiracy of Wizards

Sometimes, the threads of your own narrative conspire to take you down unexpected avenues. Mental Health issues, both personally and as a matter of public policy, were never at the forefront of my concerns, though they should have been, on both fronts. And chance sprinkled bread crumbs along the path that led me to that realization.

First, as a (surprisingly recent) law school student more interested in public policy than litigation or transactional law, I sought out appropriate venues to do internships. During my 2L year (after having momentarily forgotten why I went to law school, and, while interviewing with big firms during the early fall “on-campus interview” process, remembering again), I heard about a small policy LLC called “Center for Systems Integration,” looking for one or two summer interns. I told the career counselor who mentioned it, “if they’re anything like their name, they’re perfect for me!” I interned with CSI that summer, researching legal and fiscal issues surrounding trying to implement mental health screening and services in and through the public schools. Almost instantly, I realized how logical that was, and how needed. After all, adolescence is a time when emotional and mental stability issues are heightened, and many, if not most, need far more assistance navigating those roiling currents than they currently receive. Like the shoulder strap on seat belts, back in the day when cars were equipped only with lap belts, the instant you hear the suggestion or independently think of the idea, you slap your forehead and say, “doh! Of course!” I’ve since done far more research on the subject.

This morning, a renewed reminder of the importance of mental health care appeared on the Today Show, as I was getting ready to leave for a legislative breakfast with Mental Health America of Colorado. The father of the girl with cerebral palsy who boarded her school bus to threaten the kids who had been bullying her was on, with his daughter, clearly a descent guy who loved his daughter and was just driven into a rage at what she was suffering. This story is laden with implications: The bullies, the father, and the daughter all needed their own mental health hygiene (what is sometimes called “behavioral health”) better attended to. And the failure to attend to it has a negative rippling effect throughout our social landscape, reinforcing the bad behaviors of the bullies, leaving the girl to suffer without learning how to cope, and letting the understandable frustration of the father percolate into rage. Unattended mental health issues are seeds of destruction and despair, germinating in the soil of our individual and shared existence, and forming the root of many of our individual and social systemic woes.

Mental health is implicated in virtually all aspects of our lives, in how well we do in school, in how well we address the normal challenges and tragedies of life, in how well we choose our course and pursue our ambitions, in how well we contribute to the production of material and immaterial wealth upon which we all depend, in how well we avoid being sucked into predatory and destructive behaviors. Mental health is the foundation of social health, of prosperity and domestic tranquility, of human happiness.

Public investment in the provision of extensive, universal mental health services is a cost-effective one, paying proactively to nip problems in the bud, problems that, unaddressed, fester into bigger problems, requiring less effective reactive “solutions”, imposing costs that are far, far greater, both materially and immaterially, than the relatively modest costs of addressing these issues early and affirmatively. Our failure to make mental health care more of a priority, a more normal aspect of our routine maintenance of our own well-being, results in poorer academic performance by more children, more juvenile delinquency and subsequent adult criminality, more people incarcerated (we have the largest absolute and per capita rate of incarceration of any nation on Earth, bar none, costing society while producing nothing in return, and screaming of a social failure that we insist on denying), more drug abuse and homelessness and domestic violence and child abuse and neglect, all creating ever-more fertile soil for ever-more profound and widespread mental health problems, escalating in a feedback loop of spiritually and materially costly dysfunctionality. Investing in mental health services, from birth to death, is just about the biggest bang for the buck we can get.

Personally, and not at all uniquely, I’ve always struggled with my own inner-demons, my own internal emotional turmoil (for which I unfortunately never sought help), manifested, as it often is, as character flaws. For a person who takes pride in his accomplishments, in his sincere commitment to our shared enterprise, these failings have always been a source of deep shame. But they shouldn’t be. They are not extraordinary failings, nor extraordinary character flaws, but they are gravel in the gears of both my own personal efforts in life, and the social interactions necessary to our collective efforts. And it is their very normalcy, their very commonness, which is so poignant, because they are not inevitable, they are not mere functions of the cards we are dealt over which we have no control. Nor do they have to be purely individual burdens, borne well or poorly but with only that informal assistance that those same cards we were dealt happen to bestow.

Not only do I as an individual have a responsibility, and the ability, to confront those challenges and address them, but so do we as a people. Because the successes and failures of each of us are the successes and failures of us all. The relative inability of numerous individuals to most effectively and cooperatively participate in our shared enterprise as a society is an integral aspect of the shared challenge we face, of how we collectively play the cards we are dealt, when we face the challenge of improving the quality of our lives by being responsible, rational, and compassionate members of a society. Just as the gods help those who help themselves, society should as well. We should be in a partnership, the individual doing his or her part, and the rest of us offering our support.

Instead of the anger and rejection we indulge in when we confront someone who has problems that manifest in unattractive ways, we should strive to offer a helping hand. What we perceive as character flaws in others are often, if not always, unaddressed mental health issues. That may sound like an exaggeration, or an excuse, but it is neither. What are character flaws but internal problems, imbalances, sometimes even biochemical in nature, that have not been diagnosed and addressed? To those who insist that some people are just “bad” and some are just “good”, why is it that the numbers vary from culture to culture, that some cultures have far less or far more violent crime, or far less or far more “friendliness,” or far less or far more “humility,” or far less or far more “arrogance”? And, even if conceptualizing character flaws as mental health problems is unpalatable to some, the realization that we can help one another to be better people should not be so hard to swallow.

Of course, we are still all each responsible for our own actions and choices, but that does not mean that our actions and choices have no causes, and can’t be collectively improved upon through better understanding and better intervention. And, of course, it is impossible for us to “cure” all such problems merely through improved mental health care services, but, like many such problems, we can do better at addressing and mitigating them, and can benefit enormously by doing so. 

Mental Health America of Colorado, along with many other organizations and agencies, has made enormous strides in improving our ability to provide mental health services to those who need them. Throughout the human services community, a movement called “systems of care” is increasing both efficiency and quality of services provided, by creating more integration among different agencies and organizations providing complementary, supplementary, and overlapping services, so that individuals receiving these various services, receive them in a coordinated way, that reduces costly redundancy, reduces the fracturing of interrelated services into mutually isolated compartments, and increases the synthesis of services into more effective packages designed to best meet the needs of those being served.

Research is improving our knowledge, such as the importance of using peers in mental health care regimens, and that those who have been sufferers of specific mental health problems are often the most useful counselors to others who are suffering them as well. Our knowledge of the unity of physical and mental health issues, each affecting the other, both being aspects of a single whole, improves our ability to address the systemic needs of individuals and society as a whole.

But the political challenge of working on how, rather than whether, to best address these very real needs, is just one more incarnation of the deeper political challenge in which we are embroiled: The dogmatic commitment to extreme individualism on the one hand, leaving each to fend for himself (which costs us all, because we are in fact interdependent whether we want to realize it or not); and, on the other, a commitment to working together as reasonable people of goodwill to do the best we can to address the challenges and opportunities of a complex and subtle world. It’s a no-brainer. But, unfortunately, sometimes even no-brainers are not no-brainers enough for reason to prevail. Not surprisingly, Colorado, the land of rugged individualism, has the 18th highest rate of depression in the country, the sixth highest rate of suicide, and the second highest rate of juvenile suicide. On the flip side, Denmark, one of the countries most committed to the collective welfare of its people, has the highest rating of self-reported happiness of any nation on Earth.

Some argue that such talk is an assault on individual liberty. But individual liberty is a function of being members of a society, based on the material, cultural, and spiritual wealth we create together. We are each free to think and say what we want, using a language and concepts that we have collectively produced over generations. We are each free to pursue our fortunes, within an economy in which we collectively participate, and relying on a material and immaterial infrastructure publicly provided. We are free to explore the wonders of the world, traveling on vehicles, reading books, engaging in entertainments, all produced through a collective enterprise, an enterprise which both requires and benefits from intelligently designed public policies. The question we face is not how much government we should have, but rather how best to use our government to provide the most opportunity to the most people to exercise and enjoy our individual liberty, to celebrate our freedom by living healthy and productive lives. We all benefit by addressing that challenge as wisely as possible. It’s time to stop shirking that challenge. Investing in the mental health care of our citizens is one important component of “getting it right.”

Buy my e-book A Conspiracy of Wizards

The conventional wisdom that education reform needs to involve some combination of merit pay, an end to teacher tenure, and increased accountability as determined by short-term quantitative measures, continues to be in vogue (http://www.economist.com/node/17148968). At a minimum the utility of such measures requires: 1) More qualitative measures of teacher and administrator quality that take into account a larger amount of relevant information; 2) Recognition of the relevance of varying contexts within which teachers and administrators find themselves, involving varying challenges with varying time horizons and varying requirements to be most effective; 3) Sufficient incentives for administrators to be more concerned with the quality of educational services than with the absence of “problems” or meeting checklists of superficial and often somewhat arbitrary quantitative measures, 4) sufficient increases in pay or other incentives offered to prospective new teachers to more than off-set the disincentive of decreased job-security, and 5) recognition that this remains a strategy which addresses a relatively superficial aspect of the failure of our educational system, without doing anything whatsoever to address the more fundamental problems where they reside.

All of these conditions are absent in Colorado. We are moving aggressively in the direction of strong reliance on quantitative measures that deal with short time-horizons, distort the educational process, create new and counterproductive stresses on teachers and administrators particularly in the worst performing schools (often leading to an anxious environment that is the precise opposite of what the students in those schools most need), and punish teachers and administrators for working in those most challenging environments (creating a new disincentive to do so). Given the superficiality of the quantitative measures to which teachers and administrators are held accountable, there is no sufficient set of administrator-incentives in play to create a context in which improved educational services would actually take priority over the petty politics of large school districts. Teachers are currently as likely to receive poor evaluations, or be dismissed for poor performance, for being exceptional as for being sub-par, because exceptional teachers tend to both have long time horizons in what they are trying to accomplish with their students (planting seeds that may germinate in the future rather than show up immediately on tests for which their students may be woefully ill-prepared in a way that can’t be immediately addressed) and to rock the boat in a variety of ways (e.g., b eing less willing to engage in an empty ritual that increases their performance score, or to pander to all stakeholders in ways which undermine educational effectiveness).

In anti-tax-crazy Colorado, at least, the funds to off-set the diminished incentives created by ending tenure simply do not exist. There is ample research showing that smaller class size (and a higher adult-to-student ratio) is correlated to better performance, so reducing the number of teachers is not a viable option for positive educational reform. Given the large demand for teachers to satisfy existing need and the non-competitive salary for attracting the most talented college graduates, diminishing the incentives facing prospective new teachers promises to deteriorate rather than improve the overall quality of the teacher pool.

The poor teachers that are in our schools now are there because of supply and demand, not because of teacher tenure: There is a huge demand for teachers, and a limited supply, which means that some of that demand will be met with teachers of lower quality. Firing poorly performing teachers and paying high-performing ones a little more would be a great strategy if the goal were to reduce the teacher pool to a compact corps of highly proficient professionals. But that’s not the goal: We have to continue to put a teacher in every classroom, which means we can’t reduce the number of teachers to those that are most talented. And if we offer incentives to in-coming teachers that are in aggregate less appealing than the ones offered now, not only will we have no greater number of the most skilled teachers to off-set the removal of the least skilled ones, we will in fact have fewer of the most skilled teachers.

Some might argue that merit pay would be the increased incentive to the most talented college graduates to go into teaching. But without increased revenues, and due to various structural reasons (e.g., existing contracts, and the need to retain enough teachers to have one in each classroom), significant reductions in some teachers’ pay to fund significant augmentations in others’ is not a viable solution. In Colorado, at least, significantly increased revenues for merit pay just isn’t going to happen.

While it would certainly be nice to remove the least skilled teachers and replace them with more skilled teachers, aside from the difficulties to this plan posed by such obstacles as supply and demand (it doesn’t address the need to recruit more highly skilled teachers to replace the removed less skilled ones) and the sheer expense involved in doing it effectively (in a country whose current most robust political movement is an ideologically extremist anti-tax movement), it does not really get to the heart of the educational failure in America.

The overall quality of the teacher pool is surprisingly good, in fact. The more salient problems are what children are exposed to outside of the school building and school hours: Parents who often have neither the skills nor time to devote to effectively supporting and augmenting their children’s academic growth; communities populated by people who barely know each other and feel no real connection; an anti-intellectual culture that increasingly markets to our youth the idea that hard work and academic success are neither cool nor necessary; and a plethora of mindless and ubuquitous electronic distractions that have the essentially the same effect on kids as drugs do.

If we’re really serious about improving educational success in America, we’re going to have to take the mission of the schools to the streets, to the homes, to the corporate boardrooms, and turn America itself into a classroom. We’re going to have to reform our communities so that they become foundations of personal growth, assist parents in offering intellectual stimulation to their children, address the full range of unmet needs of the lowest performing students (e.g., social emotional development and behavioral health issues), and reach down into what is at root a cultural problem.

This may sound like an overly ambitious agenda, but there are some very easy and viable first steps to take. Improving school-community partnerships is highly cost-effective, because there are many community members who could be persuaded to volunteer their time to tutor and mentor kids (both increasing the all-important adult-to-student ratio, and explosing kids to a broader range and higher quantity of adult human capital), and to help parents who need it to learn better academic-support skills as well. There are an array of state and federal programs that offer various kinds of assistance to children and families in need that can partner with the schools to ensure that those needs are met. Efforts are currently under way to coordinate the missions of schools and health agencies and juvenile justice agencies in order to better accomplish these ends.

The current emphasis on getting rid of bad teachers merely kicks responsibility for deep structural problems down the hierarchy, to those who are least able to address those problems, and does nothing to actually produce and attract the increased number of the most highly skilled teachers that would be required to make it work. Let’s focus more on creating fertile soil for education in America, so that increasingly better students and eventually better teachers will be two of the benefits reaped, rather than pretending that the solution can be imposed by a quick fix oblivious to the systemic realities that that fix will inevitably run into.

Jeffco Schools won a federal grant for 32.7 million dollars (and Colorado Springs for 15.1 million dollars), over five years, to reward teachers for improving achievement, teaching in tough schools, teaching tough subjects or to tough populations, and taking on leadership roles in their buildings, as well as to fund professional development and classroom support for individuated instruction, all in schools in with a large percentage of low income students (http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_16153823?source=bb).

That’s all fine and good, and it can only help, but it’s not an approach which goes to the heart of the problem. It concerns me to see continued and increasing focus on the same old mechanistic, reductionist approach to public education that has persistently and increasingly failed for generations now. Education is a challenge which involves what goes on in the home, what goes on in the community, and what goes on in the media, as well as what goes on in the schools. And it is an endeavor that requires great attention to the unmeasurable foundations of the human imagination, in order to build strong measurable edifices upon it.

I have no objection to this approach as one tool in the toolbox, but if we’re going to start giving school districts sudden boons of millions of dollars to get it right, let’s give it to them to teach parents how to better play their part, and to involve the community in a more holistic, day-and-week-and-year-and-life long shared enterprise. Let’s use it to address the problem where it resides, in our homes and communities, in our astoundingly rampant anti-intellectualism, in the soil in which we hope these little saplings of human consciousness will grow. Because it doesn’t matter how sophisticated the growing lights you turn their way; if their planted in bone dry and depleted Earth, they’re potential is limited at its very roots.

Buy my e-book A Conspiracy of Wizards

Many of the most pressing social problems we face are embedded in the loss of community, in dysfunctional families, in unaddressed behavioral and situational problems of children. Some consider these spheres of life to be beyond the purview of public policy, and too expensive to address even if government could or should be used to address them. I think this is mistaken on all counts, and more profoundly than immediately apparent.

First, the unaddressed (or under addressed) behavioral and mental health problems of children, and the unstable or unsafe family environments in which many find themselves, end up being extremely costly to society in the long run, both monetarily and socially. These under addressed problems are implicated in poor educational performance, delinquent and future criminal behavior, and a myriad of related problems that reduce individual productivity, increase economic and social burdens on society, and reproduce themselves generationally.

Second, our current programs tend to be piecemeal, reactive, and both fiscally inefficient and of more limited effectiveness than necessary. This is not a set of defects that we cannot substantially improve upon, and, in fact, there are many advances taking place right now which are doing just that. By placing ever-increasing emphasis on coordination among services and agencies that perform interrelated services for children and families in need, we reduce the costs of fractured and redundant services performed by seperate agencies with unconsolidated administrative costs. Those costs are far greater than providing oversight boards which help to coordinate and consolidate these overlapping services. By doing so, not only is the fiscal efficiency of providing services greatly increased, but also the outcome efficacy of these services, for when schools and juvenile justice agencies and mental health providers and child welfare counselors and others involved in addressing individual children’s needs are engaged in those efforts in better coordinated ways, all do their jobs more effectively, and contribute to a more effective regime of service provision.

Providing such proactive services more effectively, addressing the behavioral health challenges that so many of our youth face, helping to ensure that each child has a safe and nurturing permanent family environment in which to grow up in, and coordinating these efforts with both juvenile justice agencies and public schools, not only increases the present and future welfare of those children, but also reduces both the costs of reactive solutions to the problems thus avoided, and the costs to society of the problems themselves.

The costs of the relative failure of our educational system, for instance, are enormous, on many levels, costs that can be dramatically reduced through improvements in the effectiveness of our schools. And the enormnous costs of having the dubious distinction of being the nation, of all nations on Earth, with both the highest absolute number, and highest percentage of our population incarcerated, are perhaps directly tracable to our failure to address the childhood problems that lay the foundation for that unfortunate statistic.

Improving our proactive services to children and families is an up-front investment in our future, cultivating productive and well-adjusted members of society who contribute more to our collective welfare and less to our collective suffering. And even marginal gains on that dimension promise enormous future fiscal savings. It’s an investment we can’t afford not to make.

But the potential to improve the quality of our lives, and the prospects for our children, do not stop there. Increased community involvement provides one more pillar to the structure of improved support to children and families, increasing the vigilance with which problems are identified, the informal neighborly assistance and interventions with which they are avoided or mitigated, and the positive human capital with which child development is cultivated. Implementing robust community volunteer tutoring and mentoring programs is one easy step we can take to increase the strength of our communities, improve the quality of education our children receive, and provide our youth with a greater number of positive role models to emulate. In addition to such benefits are the benefits of increased informal mutual support in times of need, and just as an ordinary part of life, each of us helping one another out just a little bit more, because we have spent more time working together as members of a cohesive community.

There are no panaceas, and I do not mean to imply that the policy agenda I am outlining would solve all of our problems, would magically make all children well-behaved and studious, and all neighbors helpful. I am suggesting that, as always, we can do better or worse, we can improve on our current social institutional framework or not, and we can strive to increase the opportunities available to our children for their future success, and our improved shared quality of life.

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