Links to Consider from National Affairs
Eberstadt and Van Ness on the non-working population; Liddell on clumsy Presidential transitions; Good and Wallich on bad President/citizen relationship; Pondiscio on conservatives and school teachers
Nicholas Eberstadt and Peter Van Ness write,
For the bottom fifth of America's localities, the average overall LFPR [labor force participation rate for people of working age] in 2019 was lower than the national level for men and women with just a high-school education. For men alone, LFPRs in the bottom tenth of localities were only a couple of points above the national level for high-school dropouts. The situation is assuredly no better today.
They seem to be saying that when it comes to explaining differences in participation rates, geography explains much more than you would expect, and socioeconomic indicators explain much less. My guess is that they have not found the right socioeconomic indicators.
No president in the last 50 years has come into office with the experience of managing anything as complicated as the EOP [Executive Office of the President], let alone the enormous federal government. Presidential candidates were once chosen because of their skill in navigating internal political machinery — a good test of their ability to govern in a capital city that runs on relationships and bargaining. Now, the main criteria for selecting a president include media performance and rhetorical skill. These are important, but they are not sufficient for a successful presidency: The president must also be a deft organizational manager.
His suggestion is for a candidate to assemble a small team to plan the EOP transition a year ahead of time. So you would start in January of 2024 to prepare for a transition in January 2025.
But I don’t think that would solve the problem of Presidents not gaining control of the government. As Liddell points out, they are not experienced at managing large organizations. That is why I would prefer a COO.
Mikael Good and Philip Wallach write,
The rhetorical presidency and its successor, the emotive presidency, depend on our imagining a world where all political events and institutions revolve around a larger-than-life president, like planets around the sun. In the age of mass media and polarized national politics, the presidency holds an outsized place in our collective psyche. People tend to be hyperconscious of the president and all his doings at the cost of being ignorant or indifferent about their congressmen and state and local leaders.
We want the President to be someone to worship, not someone to manage the Executive Branch. And we get what we wish for.
a school is an inherently conservative institution. We build and maintain schools to expose children to our nation's history and culture, and to prepare them for a responsible adult life of informed, engaged citizenship. While teachers might not think of themselves as conservative, they staff institutions that have proved remarkably resistant to change.
Later,
Only 5% of teachers described themselves as "very liberal," while another 24% described themselves as "liberal." A plurality (43%) described themselves as "moderate." The remaining 27% identified either as "conservative" or "very conservative" (roughly the same number as those who identify as "liberal" or "very liberal"). This would make the teacher workforce only slightly less conservative, and somewhat more moderate, than Americans at large.
…Debates over education, however, tend to be driven by union leaders, political advocates, faculty at colleges of education, and philanthropic funders, all of whom are a deeper shade of blue than the teachers they represent or seek to influence.
Conservatives would do well to look past the rhetoric of these actors and focus instead on teachers themselves. If they do, they might be surprised to find allies among public-school teachers on any number of issues.
Amen. The problem with approaching education with a culture-war mindset is that for teachers the conservative activists represent another threat to their autonomy, and it appears to place parents and teachers in opposition.
Instead, conservatives ought to work with teachers to boot the bureaucrats out of the classroom. We should be opposed to “accountability.” because “accountability” in practice just takes authority away from school principals and gives it to far-off statisticians employing unreliable “metrics.” We should favor much smaller school districts, with fewer layers of administrators. We should favor more pay for classroom teachers and less union featherbedding of non-teaching staff positions. We should favor abolishing the Department of Education and instead let government money go to schools with no strings attached.
> Instead, conservatives ought to work with teachers to boot the bureaucrats out of the classroom. We should be opposed to “accountability
And indeed that's what conservatives have been doing in supporting vouchers and charter schools. And "accountability" is exactly the rhetorical tactic the left uses to try to knobble it.
As far as I can tell, conservatives are slowly winning that war.
The only way out on education is choice. The only real accountability is losing funding when nobody wants your service, like a regular business.
But that's the rub. Public school teachers know that any reduction in funding from vouchers threatens their salary, benefits, even jobs. While in theory they could get new jobs teaching at private schools, that's an unnecessary risk from their perspective and there is no way to know if it will turn out as good. For those with lots of seniority it will almost certainly not turn out as good.
The teachers unions ask very little of the teachers, which is smart. Shutting down the schools may have been terrible for the children, but it meant getting paid to phone it in for the teachers. Masks were an annoyance for many teachers I know, but the left leaning teachers probably thought they were a good thing.
I remember in 7th grade having a teachers called Mr. Tilli. Mr. Tilli was a fat dude that would come into class with a box of dunking donuts every day. He would start the class with about five minutes of some vague explanation of what we should do for the rest of the period and then he would just sit there eating the donuts and lounging about. I played paper football with the kid next to me for the entire period. Of course that dude hates vouchers, he could never get a job at a private school.
Teachers usually hate when the administrators ask them to do stuff, but they take it as the cost of doing business. The business is a sweet job with great benefits that asks very little of them. Some teachers give more then they have to, but its not a requirement.