Three people are running for two “selectmen” seats in our rich suburb of Boston. They came to a neighborhood gathering to campaign and take questions.
The first hot-button issue was whether our town should officially designate itself a “sanctuary city.” (My perspective is that our town is already a sanctuary city in that we welcome any undocumented immigrant with at least $2 million to spend on a house; I refrained from sharing this. See also “Sanctimony Cities”) None of the people at the neighborhood gathering could remember inviting an actual immigrant, documented or undocumented, to a dinner party, but they tripped over themselves to express support for the idea of providing sanctuary. One of the more realistic folks noted that it would be primarily landscapers who were illegal and we should plan acts of resistance if ICE showed up to round up illegals in our sparsely settled village (two-acre zoning minimum).
To a question about school quality and whether or not we should strive to unseat Lexington and Newton in the minds of house-shopping parents, immediately people talked about how we can’t possible match those towns because (1) they spend more money than we do, and (2) we have dark-skinned children in our schools from the METCO program. A town school committee member pointed out that we actually spend more money per student than Lexington and Newton. This web page says “The [Newton] METCO Program is open to all children of African American, Latino, Asian and Native American descent who reside in the City of Boston and volunteer to participate.” This web page says that “It is a voluntary integration program that provides a suburban public school education for African-American, Hispanic and Asian students from Boston. The Lexington Public Schools have participated in the program since 1968.” (See this post about schools in Finland for how a school with an above-average number of poor dark-skinned children tested above average; a teacher is quoted as saying that he tries to remain ignorant of students’ family background and situation.)
Nobody wanted to ask “Well, if these other towns spend less money and also have METCO, might it simply be holding ourselves to a lower standard?” On the other hand, fears were expressed that if we did somehow manage to drag ourselves up to the Lexington/Newton standard, families with children would flock to our town and the schools would become overcrowded (so we provide sanctuary for undocumented immigrants but we hope that they don’t have any school-age kids?).
Traffic was damned. Our roads are narrow, which makes them unsafe for pedestrians and cyclists. But if we widen them cars will drive faster and it will become even more dangerous. Nobody asked “If we have two-acre zoning and almost everyone here is rich, why can’t we build dedicated and separated bike lanes and sidewalks like they retrofitted to Copenhagen?”
Are any of your neighbors slave owners?
Your stories are always amusing, but I think they’d be more amusing if you’d actually say the things you think. 🙂
You mean they don’t want to spend $200M on a High School like we did here in Newton? How ridiculously rational is that?
fyi.. New York Times comment from a neighbor.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/21/opinion/this-century-is-broken.html?_r=0
Comment: Lawrence Brown Newton Centre, MA
The United States that Brooks describes in this piece is completely foreign to me. I am fortunate to live in a part of the country that enjoys a robust economy and I know there are many similar areas in America that are like mine. What sets these communities apart from those described by Brooks?
If I knew the answer to this query I’d be on a short list for a Nobel prize, but my impression is that our values may differ in quality and degree from other sections of American. First, we invest more money in schools than most other American communities. While it is true that our average incomes are higher, we have also avoided the seductive trap of lowering taxes at the expense of school quality. It is an investment in the future which dramatically differs from the short term gain of having a few more dollars in one’s pocket that tax breaks offer.
I lived in Topeka, Kansas, in the mid-1970’s which was a lovely community with good schools, but now the education system has been ruined there by the lure of tax breaks.
We do not argue about the value of Science and our school committees do not bother with silly arguments about “intelligent design” because students are learning about evolution. Religion is a private matter and tends to be seen as metaphorical and stimulating reflection rather than offering immutable truths to be swallowed without question.
And lastly, gun ownership is tightly controlled so our communities are safe havens and places to learn and thrive.
I have never seen a useful attempt at urban bicycle infrastructure in America. Some eager beaver in the government will paint some lines or put up some plastic lane dividers (not sure what you call them). The result is a four foot lane filled with broken glass and joggers and taxi cabs and toddlers disembarking minivans. What’s worse, drivers develop the firm belief that you have no right to be anywhere but in the useless “bike lane.” It is *more* dangerous to ride in the lanes than not in the cities where I’ve seen this stuff.
I think in the American context the Dutch idea of totally separate bike lanes is doomed to failure and is not worth trying. Speed bumps all over the place and steadily acclimatizing American drivers to the concept of sharing the road is the best that can be done.
The Dutch or Danish style bike infrastructure only even works because people are making two mile journeys. It’s for everyone, in dense areas. That’s simply not how any American cities are laid out. Here it’s always going to be limited to relatively fit people doing distances considerably farther and faster than Amsterdam residents.
Lawrence Brown, MA and Topeka, Kansas, apparently missed out on the big Kansas experiment of unlimited educational spending. (It didn’t help.)
There is a simpler explanation for good educational outcomes: brain drain from Kansas to Massachusetts, among other states.
Also, I think the thriving comes less from prohibiting guns and more from living in a small, untroubled Jewish/Asian/European community. (“Roughly one third” Jewish, 2.5% African American, 4.1% Latinx, Wikipedia tells us.) These with a comfortable median household income of $112,000 and an average household income of roughly $167,000.
In the general case, and above a trivial floor, it has never been demonstrated that increased educational spending results in higher educational achievement. Isolated examples definitely exist.
A more plausible theory: higher income parents bear more school-adapted children, and flock to areas with similar people, who collectively choose to live their own lives (professional advancement ftw!) but pretend to be doing their parenting part by voting for more educational spending as a surrogate, with the convenient side effect of raising property values (and taxes) due to the illusion of “better schools”. Lather, rinse, repeat.
My little New England towne spends almost 80% of its budget on the school system, yet every year they need an increase to Continue to Better Prepare the Next Generation of Leaders for an Increasingly Complex World. Oh, and pensions.
I’ll give them one thing. The new buildings are fantastic. So much learning could happen there, it’s amazing.
Reading this posts reminds me of why so many true southerners always get a nice guffaw from witnessing the lunacy Phil describes.