Half Changed World

Our mental health "system"

Point of evidence #1: The Cho family speaks out.

Point of evidence #2: David writes about his brother.

Point of evidence #3: One in four children in Virginia's foster care system are there because it's the only way to for them to get mental health treatment.

bird songs

Tonight was the parent orientation at N's new preschool, and kids weren't invited, so a friend babysit for the boys.  She brought over a really cool book that I had never heard of, so I thought I'd share my enthusiasm.  It's a book of birds, but it includes digital recording of the sounds that the birds make.  It's like the noisy books that my kids love, but educational and not as annoying (and it has a volume control).

There's a new one coming out of birds from around the world but I think I'd rather figure out what's making the sounds in my own backyard.

Two years later

Two years ago today, like pretty much everyone else with access to a computer, I was blogging about Katrina.

Two years ago tomorrow, I was "sad and angry" about the f*cked up state of health care coverage in this country.  And the uninsurance figures have only gotten worse.  And, as I noted two years ago, having health insurance doesn't mean that you're not screwed anyway.  I got this video from the Edwards campaign in my inbox today -- if you listen carefully, you'll note that the woman asking the question says that she has health insurance, but still has had to borrow $50,000 to pay for her treatment.

Two years ago yesterday, I was blogging about the man who invented the word "genocide" and remembering the anniversary of the Beslan massacre.  At that time, I wrote "I suppose there's not a date on the calendar where there hasn't been pain and bloodshed, somewhere, somewhen."

This morning I was listening to NPR on the radio, and Cokie Roberts was talking about New Orleans.  She said that the areas that haven't been rebuilt are strangely beautiful, because the ground there is so fertile that marsh grasses have sprung up already where there used to be buildings.  It made me think of the Carl Sandburg poem, Grass.

 Grass

                                 

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work--
                            I am the grass; I cover all.

And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and the passengers ask the conductor:
                            What place is this?
                            Where are we now?

                            I am the grass.
                            Let me work

TBR: Opting Out?

This week's book is Opting Out?  Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home, by Pamela Stone.  Stone is a sociologist, and the book reports on her study of the experiences of 54 white, highly educated professional married mothers who left their well-paid careers to stay home.  The book is framed as a response to Lisa Belkin's famous Opt-Out Revolution article, although I think Stone had actually started her research before it was published.

Overall, Stone's thesis is that these women did not stop working because of a call to full-time motherhood, but because of the lack of flexibility in their high-powered jobs that made it impossible to both work at the level that they were accustomed to and have any semblance of family lives, especially given the expectations for intensive parenting in upper and middle class families.  Most of their husbands worked even more crazy hours, and something had to give.  Many of the women had requested part-time or flexible work situations -- and in several cases, had taken advantage of such situations for a while, but were denied to permission to continue them.  Stone concludes that for these women, it was easier to incorporate professional skills into at-home parenting (often through high level volunteering) than to be a parent while working in their intensive jobs.

While Stone's findings generally seemed plausible to me, I found it frustrating that she only talked to the women who had "opted-out."  I wanted to know what was different about those who had faced similar pressures and continued to work -- did they have husbands who were more involved in family life?  more supportive bosses?  a greater willingness to outsource family duties?  healthier kids?

Since I've read and thought a lot about this issue, I felt like a lot of the book was old news to me.  The only real new ideas were in some of the details, like the suggestion that corporate mergers and downsizing often led to less flexible work arrangements, because people suddenly found themselves working for new bosses who didn't have a history with them.  I also was struck by the ways that, once there was a parent at home, families' lives rearranged in ways that made it harder for the mothers to return to work -- fathers worked longer hours, the children started participating in extra-curricular activities that required them to be ferried all over town.

Ultimately, I'm not sure that Stone's understanding is as different from Belkin's as she thinks it is.  Belkin too had argued that her subjects were pushed from the work side as much as pulled from the family side.  Belkin focuses more on on- and off-ramps, while Stone is more interested in part-time and flexible arrangements.  My guess is that's more a difference between parents of younger versus older children than anything else.

School time

School doesn't start here until the day after Labor Day.  Both boys are starting new schools, so we're all a little twitchy waiting to see how everything works out.  D's noticed that he's shorter than kids who are younger than he is, and is a bit worried that kids will tease him about it.  I'm trying to tell him both that it's perfectly normal to be a little nervous about starting a new school, and that it will be fine, and for some reason he seems to think that there's a contradiction inherent in the idea that everyone's scared of it but there's nothing to worry about.

The most emailed article today on the NYTimes website is about teacher turnover, and how school districts are scrambling to fill their slots.  In case you thought this was limited to poor districts, go visit Jody, who's got some stories to tell about teacher and principal turnover.  Having lived through D having 3 teachers (plus literally more short-term subs than I could count) last year, I've got my fingers crossed for some stability this year.

The Washington Post on Sunday had an opinion piece by Patrick Welsh, a local HS English teacher, on the battles over gifted and talented classes in Alexandria.  Apparently they've cut down enormously on the number of kids classified as G&T, especially in the more affluent schools.*  The problem is that there are lots of kids who don't meet the new cutoffs, who are still bored/underchallenged in their regular classes, which (claims Welsh) are mostly focused on making sure that low-income minority kids are passing the SOLs.  He includes a quote from Superintendent Perry that's fairly horrifying if accurate:

"To allay parental anxieties [Welsh has to be tongue in cheek here], Superintendent Rebecca Perry has said that the students at the top of the regular classes -- i.e., the white kids who didn't get into TAG -- will help to 'challenge, mentor and coach' the students struggling with the SOL material."

Interestingly, today's Post has an article on how gifted and talented students are the ones being left behind under NCLB.  It's based on a research paper that actually argues that both the very advanced students and the very behind ones get less attention as a result of the NCLB requirements.  The paper argues, plausibly, that schools have huge incentives to devote their resources to the students who have a shot at passing the standardized exams, but aren't guaranteed to do so, rather than those who definitely are going to pass or those who are definitely going to fail.  It's the same argument for why campaigns focus on swing states, rather than New York or Utah.

Welsh cites the Carol Dweck work on Mindsets that I've written about here before to argue that the gifted and talented label is destructive both to the kids who get put in those classes and the ones who are excluded.   He concludes that the goal should be to challenge "all our kids, all the time."  I agree with him in theory, but think it's easier said than done.  And sometimes easier done with differentiated classrooms, rather than with one teacher trying to cover the full range of skills and learning styles.  Especially with all those novice teachers who are standing in front of classrooms.

*I don't know if it's a real contrast, but the complaints I'm hearing in Fairfax are in the opposite direction, about the "watering down" of gifted and talented classes.  Who knows?

Emily's List

Are any of you Emily's List members?  Did you used to be?

I keep getting letters and emails from Emily's List, asking me to rejoin.  I'm still very sympathetic to their overall mission, but am disinclined to sign up at the moment.

First, I feel like I no longer need a group like Emily's List in order to identify candidates in other states who are worthy of my support.  Since I've never lived in what could be called a swing state -- and rarely even lived in a district with a competitive Congressional race -- I liked the idea of being able to make a difference in a race that might matter.  I still like the idea, but am more likely to send money to a candidate who someone I trust blogs about than to one endorsed by Emily's List.

Second, I feel like they've so totally drunk the Hillary kool-aid as to lose credibility for me.  I'm not a Hillary-hater, and I'll vote for her with enthusiasm if she's the nominee, but she's not my first choice candidate.  And when they run a major feature on Myths about Hillary Clinton and say "Hillary has repeatedly said that if she had all the facts when she voted for the initial authorization for the war... she would not have voted in favor of the Iraq resolution," my response is to think that maybe if she had read the national intelligence
estimate, she would have had more of the facts.

I think I'm putting my money into the Women's Campaign Forum instead.

TBR: Stuart, a life backwards

This week's book is one of the ones that Nick Hornby writes about in Housekeeping vs. The Dirt. Stuart, a life backwards, by Alexander Masters, is the biography of Stuart Shorter.  Who is Stuart Shorter, you may ask.  He's a homeless man who lived in Cambridge, England.  A violent criminal.  A drug user.  Someone with borderline personality disorder.  The kind of person most people try hard not to make eye contact with, if they can't avoid entirely.  So, in many ways, the simple idea of writing a biography about Stuart is a political statement, an argument that his life is as worthy of study as the politicians, scientists, or writers who are more traditional subjects of biography.

But the book is far more than just a political statement.  The edition I have is covered with blurbs from impressive reviews, with "extraordinary" and "funny" being the most common words used.  Masters does an impressive job of portraying Stuart sympathetically without  whitewashing his crimes or excusing his truly awful choices.  He includes Stuart's comments on the draft manuscript (which he thought was boring) and credits him with the idea of telling his life backwards, unfolding from their first encounters (working together to protest the unjust arrest of two social workers for not preventing drug dealing at a homeless shelter) to his earliest childhood (when he was both physically and sexually abused).  When Masters calls Stuart his friend, I believe him.

In another blurb, Zadie Smith is quoted as saying "It's been years since I've been so delighted by a book."  Either she's off her rocker or she's got a different definition of "delighted" than I do.  The book is many things, but delightful is not one of them.  It's depressing as hell.  If Neil in 49-Up is a walking advertisement for the welfare state, Stuart's story is a parable about the limits of the welfare state.  Unlike his American counterparts, Stuart is provided a place to live and a living stipend, but neither is enough to give stability to his "chaotic" life.

At one point, Alexander is flabbergasted when Stuart refers to "posh" people who live on council estates -- what we'd call public housing.  He writes:

"The boy's a freak, surely.
"No.  He's not.  People like Stuart -- the lowest of the low on the streets, outcasts even among outcasts, the uneducated chaotic homeless, the real fuck-ups -- people who've had their school and social training lopped off at twelve: they simply don't understand the way the big world works.  They are isolated from us normal, housed people as we are from them.  If Stuart is a freak, then it is for opposite reasons: it is because he has had the superhuman strength not to be defeated by this isolation.  It is because he has had the almost unbelievable social adroitness to be able to fit in smoothly with an educated, soft-skinned person like myself and not make me frightened half to death."

Wegman's

I had started to hear good things about Wegman's even before they opened their two Northern Virginia stores, and last week I finally got a chance to go over and check one out.  Some reactions:

• Their prepared food looks beautiful, but I just can't justify the cost.
• If I ate more organic foods, or shopped at Whole Foods now, they'd seem cheap by comparison.  But I don't.
• I like the way all the fruit is labeled "ripe today" or "ripe in a few days."  T. has admitted that he hates it when I just put "fruit" on the shopping list, because he's not good at judging what looks good.  Wegman's might make it easy even for him.
• I did manage to bring home some sort of melon other than the honeydew I thought I had chosen.  It looked like a honeydew on the outside, but was orange like a cantaloupe on the inside, and the taste was also somewhere between the two.
• The fig "cake" with dark chocolate is really yummy.  It would be a heck of a Passover dessert if you don't require the hecksher.
• Their big advantage over Trader Joe's or Grand Mart is that they also carry a good range of "regular" supermarket items, so you wouldn't need to make another stop to get the 2 or 3 things on your list that they don't carry.
• The one thing I bought there that I can't seem to find elsewhere in the area is bagels that actually chew like bagels.

Will I go back?  Probably not unless I'm heading out that way for something else or am hosting a party.  (Although I suspect it's not as hard to get to if you know where you're going -- I succeeded in flummoxing the GPS system in the car I was borrowing, as the address wasn't in its database.)  But the preschool where N will be going is about half way between Wegmans and our house, so I might ask T to get me some bagels.

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On another note, via US Food Policy, I found these amazing pictures of families and their food.  I was struck by the ubiquity of Coca-Cola in all but the poorest countries.

CityCars

Sunday's Post had an article about how Fairfax county is looking into the possibility of CityCars -- little two seater electric cars that could be used for short hops, say between your house and a metro station (they only go 10 miles between charges).  They don't exist yet, but the concept is very neat -- they stack together like grocery carts, so you can fit six of them in the space that it takes to park one regular car.  (See the third picture from the left here.  Aren't they cute?)

The Post article mostly discusses the safety issues of mixing CityCars with either pedestrians or cars.  I think that a lot depends on how fast they go -- if their maximum speed is, say, 30 miles per hour, that's too slow to be safe on the roadways, too slow to be safe on the sidewalks.

But I'm more interested in the logistics of how they'd be rented  The idea is that individuals would not own CityCars but they'd be stored at metro stops and other central locations, essentially like car rental programs (e.g. ZipCar and FlexCar).   I think that's because the nested parking only makes sense if each person takes the frontmost car, rather than having to shuffle them all around to get at your personal car.

The Post article suggests that you could pick them up at the airport, then return them the next day.  But that doesn't make sense to me, since someone would have to follow you back to the airport to give you a ride home.  (Similarly, while I have a FlexCar membership, I can't use it to borrow a car to come home from the metro, since you have to return it to the same place where you picked it up.)

CityCars seem to make a lot more sense for daily commuters, assuming that it wasn't prohibitively expensive to keep them overnight.  I'd certainly be happy to take a CityCar to the metro, especially if there were guaranteed parking for them.  And given that the parking lots at metro stations fill up by 8 am or earlier, it seems like a lot of other people would be interested.  And they'd also work for people who work at surburban locations that are just a bit too far from public transportation to walk, which would help inner city residents who don't own cars.

But you'd have to have enough of them that everyone who wanted one could be confident of getting one, because it wouldn't take getting stranded a whole lot of times to make people give up on the program.   And the smaller the program, the higher the percentage of "excess" cars you'd need to ensure that you didn't run out.

Mothers labor force participation

Here's something that I pulled together at work, and then wound up cutting from the document I did it for.  So I thought I'd share it here. 

This chart (from the new Indicators of Welfare Dependence report, issued by my old friends at HHS) shows the trends in labor force participation of married vs. divorced/separated/widowed vs. never-married mothers over the past 30 years.

I think it's pretty remarkable how sharply the line for the never married mothers goes up in the 1990s.  So, what's going on here?

Before turning to the question of why never married mothers labor force participation (LFP) rose so much during the 1990s, it’s first necessary to consider why it didn’t rise before the 1990s.  Another way to think of this question is to ask why did the labor force participation of married mothers rise during this period, and why didn’t the same factors increase the labor force participation rates of never married mothers (at least until the 1990s).

• One reason that labor force participation rates increased for married women is that women now have greater potential wages, which make paid labor more attractive.  Women are both more educated and more experienced than they used to be, and blatant labor market discrimination is far less common, opening many lucrative career options to women.
• However, these economic explanations only go so far; a key part of the story is changing societal norms that have made continued employment by married mothers, regardless of economic need, far more common.  As Blank and Shierholz comment, the effect of marriage itself on women’s labor force participation “virtually disappeared over time.”

What about divorced mothers?

• Same arguments as for married mothers, plus:
• Lack of alternative resources makes for lower reservation wages.
• Among more skilled women, single parenting has a positive effect on labor supply – true in both 1979 and 2003 (Blank and Shierholz)

So why didn’t the LFP for never married mothers rise in the 1980s?

• On average, younger, less educated than divorced mothers, so potential wages are much lower – may not equal the cost of child care or other lost benefits.
• In addition, the “child penalty” on LFP rate is higher for younger mothers, and less educated mothers, even when children are the same age (Boushey)
• Welfare provided a meager alternative to low-wage work – not a great living standard, but possible to eek by.  Kathy Edin’s work showed that low-wage work often didn’t provide any more disposable income.
• Welfare policies provided large incentive to keep all earnings off the books.
• In 1979, but not 2003, less skilled single moms were less likely than comparable childless women to work (Blank and Shierholz) – may be capturing the effects of welfare policy

What happened in the 1990s?

• Strong economy led to employment expansions for most low-income workers – male and female, parents and non-parents.
  
• EITC expansion greatly increased the returns to work in the formal sector for low-income parents – studies have shown that the effect was concentrated on single mothers.
• Time limits and work requirements largely removed the alternative of choosing full-time parenting over low-wage work for welfare recipients, even for parents of young children. Just between 1996 and 1999, the employment rate for single mothers under 200 percent of poverty with a child under the age of 6 increased from 44.4 percent to 58.5 percent.  (TANF 7th annual report, page IV-33).
• Work supports reduced the cost of going to work – child care, SCHIP, expanded earnings disregards.
• Rate of increase in LFP did increase for divorced women, but not as sharply as never-married women.
• Some of the increase in employment among never married mothers is likely due to composition effects – with declining teen birth rates, increases of overall non-marital birth rates, never married mothers are more likely to be older, more educated.

And in the 2000s?

• Weaker economy reduced both employment and LFP for all types of workers
• But married women’s LFP peaked in 1997, when economy was still booming – suggests that recession isn’t the whole story .  May be due to substitution with husbands’ earnings (although women’s LFP has become far less affected by husband’s earnings over time.)  (Blau and Kahn)
• Divorced women’s LFP peaked in 2001; never-married women’s LFP in 2002; single mothers under 200 percent of poverty in 2000.

Negotiations

In general, when the boys are watching TV, T. lets them alternate choosing what to watch (from the menu of shows that we approve and have TiVo'd).  I sometimes follow that pattern, sometimes tell them that if they can't agree on something, there won't be any TV watching.

Lately, D has figured out that he can improve his bargaining position by offering side deals, or bribes.  So, tonight he offered N one of his water bottles for choosing Tom & Jerry over Max and Ruby.  N happily accepted.  Yesterday the price was a nickel.

I'm not sure why this bothers me.  Both boys were happy with the deal, and neither one gave up something irreplaceable.   (D has other water bottles; N will get another chance to pick a show in a day or so.)  And they're learning how to negotiate without our intervention, as suggested in Siblings without Rivalry.    But I still feel like something's wrong with this picture.

Little Children

A short post, since Logan airport was fogged in last night, and I wound up taking the overnight train home and not getting much sleep.

While I was sitting around Logan waiting to see if my flight was going to be canceled, I finally got to watch Little Children, which I had out from Netflix.  I'm not sure it quite came together as a movie, but some of the individual scenes -- the pool scene with the sex offender, the book club -- are so perfect that they were almost painful to watch.  (The sex scenes are also sufficiently graphic that I was more than a little uncomfortable watching them in the middle of a crowded airport.)

I read the book of Little Children shortly after it was released* and I spent much of the movie comparing it with the book.  Sarah and Brad are both more convincing characters in the book, and their relationship is far less about the sex.  (In the movie, they're struggling to keep their hands off of each other from the beginning; as I read the book, they're lonely souls looking for companionship, and are themselves surprised when it turns into something else.**)

I think that the narration in the movie, which I hated, is an attempt to include some of their internal monologues.  But the balance between the Sarah-Brad plot and the Larry-Ronnie plot works better in the movie.  Watching the movie made me want to re-read the book to figure out exactly what they moved around.

* I had to read the book -- a) one of the main characters is a SAHD, and b) I took a writing class with Tom Perrotta in college.

** I still hate the plot contrivance of having Brad always use a double stroller even though he only has the one kid.  No one would use a double jog stroller if he didn't have to.  They corner like a constipated elephant.

Walking

Someone on one of my email lists posted a link to WalkScore which is a google maps based site that attempts to measure how walkable a neighborhood is, mostly based on the proximity of various places you might want to go (stores, schools, parks, etc).

Our new house scores a 25 out of 100, right between not walkable and driving only.  I think that's probably fair, although my subjective rating is mostly based on the things that didn't make it into their scoring system.  There are a bunch of things we go to that are within a mile, and they seem to assume that people won't walk that far.  I'm happy to walk that far, but I'm not willing to cross Columbia Pike other than with a stoplight, even when there's a marked crosswalk.  D's elementary school is about 1/2 a mile away, but there's no sidewalks for part of it, so the county provides a bus.  Lots of things are in biking distance, although I'm not sure I'd be willing to bike the places I won't walk, and the hills are brutal.

Our old house scores an 83, which I think is about right, maybe a bit low.  The first time I entered the address in NYC where I grew up (a week or so ago), it gave me a 97 or 98, which seemed like proof that you couldn't get a 100 using their algorithm.  But I just tried again, and it spit back a score of 100, so I guess they fixed that glitch.

I'd love to see some analysis of the distribution of the population of the US across their index.  My guess is that no more than 5 to 10 percent of the US lives in places that score as very walkable (70 or higher), and that probably 1/3 of those who do live in New York City.

Selection and schools

I wanted to pick up on Dave S' last comment about the role of peer groups and selection in schools. There's no doubt in my mind that KIPP schools and their like have a real advantage over the local public schools in their areas, in that their students have parents who value education enough to send them to KIPP.  That doesn't mean that they're not providing value-added -- in most cases, the local schools were failing with those exact same students.  But it does mean that if you extended the school day at all high-poverty schools and otherwise copied the KIPP model, you probably wouldn't get the same results.

And our old school suffered from negative selection -- it's not just that the parents hadn't made a deliberate effort to send their kids there, but that any parent who didn't want their kid to attend it could opt out.  And this was true long before NCLB, since it was a "focus" school and Alexandria schools allow parents to opt out of any of the focus schools (as well as out of the schools with a year-round calendar). So there was a real shortage of involved parents.  For example, when the school finally acknowledged that D's class was having a new teacher in February, and invited us in to meet her, I was the only parent to come to the event.

Some of this is about class and race -- JHAA's student population is 80 percent low-income and 92 percent non-white, and that alone would scare off some white-middle class parents even if it were the best run school in the city (and it's not).  (See this paper for a discussion of how parents "may prefer poorly run schools with good peer groups over those
that are more effective but enroll worse students" and The Failures of Integration for data on how rare it is for whites to live in majority non-white areas.)

But from listening to people around the neighborhood, I think that highly involved black parents were even less willing to send their kids to the school than highly involved white parents.  With a few exceptions (including the PTA president), they were less confident that their kids would do fine academically regardless of the problems with the school, and so less willing to take chances. 

Alexandria's wealthy enough, and supportive enough of education, that the school had plenty of resources even without the support of an active group of parents -- it's not like DC, where PTA fundraising supports things like music teachers.  But I do think the lack of a core group of involved parents makes a difference, in things from the availability of volunteers to pull events together, to the amount of energy that teachers need to spend on maintaining order in the classroom.

I don't know what can be done to reverse this pattern -- just raising the test scores won't do it.  The district for the school is so spread out -- some say gerrymandered -- that very few people see it as their neighborhood school.

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On a related note, we just registered D for his new school.  As proof of address, they wouldn't take utility bills -- they want to see the deed to your house, your rental agreement, or a notarized letter from the owner or leaseholder that you live there.  I'd never heard of such a policy.