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4,100 Students Prove ‘Small Is Better’ Rule Wrong
A decade ago, Brockton High School was a case study in failure. Teachers and administrators often voiced the unofficial school motto in hallway chitchat: students have a right to fail if they want. And many of them did — only a quarter of the students passed statewide exams. One in three dropped out.
Then Susan Szachowicz and a handful of fellow teachers decided to take action. They persuaded administrators to let them organize a schoolwide campaign that involved reading and writing lessons into every class in all subjects, including gym.
Their efforts paid off quickly. In 2001 testing, more students passed the state tests after failing the year before than at any other school in Massachusetts. The gains continued. This year and last, Brockton outperformed 90 percent of Massachusetts high schools. And its turnaround is getting new attention in a report, “How High Schools Become Exemplary,” published last month by Ronald F. Ferguson, an economist at Harvard who researches the minority achievement gap.
What makes Brockton High’s story surprising is that, with 4,100 students, it is an exception to what has become received wisdom in many educational circles — that small is almost always better.
That is why the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation spent hundreds of millions of dollars in the last decade breaking down big schools into small academies (it has since switched strategies, focusing more on instruction).
The small-is-better orthodoxy remains powerful. A new movie, “Waiting for Superman,” for example, portrays five charter schools in New York, Los Angeles and elsewhere — most with only a few hundred students — as the way forward for American schooling.
Brockton, by contrast, is the largest public school in Massachusetts, and one of the largest in the nation.
At education conferences, Dr. Szachowicz — who became Brockton’s principal in 2004 — still gets approached by small-school advocates who tell her they are skeptical that a 4,100-student school could offer a decent education.
“I tell them we’re a big school that works,“ said Dr. Szachowicz, whose booming voice makes her seem taller than 5-foot-6 as she walks the hallways, greeting students, walkie-talkie in hand.
She and other teachers took action in part because academic catastrophe seemed to be looming, Dr. Szachowicz and several of her colleagues said in interviews here. Massachusetts had instituted a new high school exit exam in 1993, and passing it would be required to graduate a decade later. Unless the school’s culture improved, some 750 seniors would be denied a diploma each year, starting in 2003.
Dr. Szachowicz and Paul Laurino, then the head of the English department — he has since retired — began meeting on Saturdays with any colleagues they could pull together to brainstorm strategies for improving the school.
Shame was an early motivator, especially after the release of the 1999 test scores.
“They were horrible,” Dr. Szachowicz recalled. She painted them in bold letters on poster paper in the group’s Saturday meeting room.
“Is this the best we can be?” she wrote underneath.
The group eventually became known as the school restructuring committee, and the administration did not stand in the way. The principal “just let it happen,” the Harvard report says.
The committee’s first big step was to go back to basics, and deem that reading, writing, speaking and reasoning were the most important skills to teach. They set out to recruit every educator in the building — not just English, but math, science, even guidance counselors — to teach those skills to students.
The committee put together a rubric to help teachers understand what good writing looks like, and began devoting faculty meetings to teaching department heads how to use it. The school’s 300 teachers were then trained in small groups.
Writing exercises took many forms, but encouraged students to think methodically. A science teacher, for example, had her students write out, step by step, how to make a sandwich, starting with opening the cupboard to fetch the peanut butter, through washing the knife once the sandwich was made. Other writing exercises, of course, were much more sophisticated.
Some teachers dragged their feet. Michael Thomas, now the district’s operations director but who led the school’s physical education department at the time, recalled that several of his teachers told him, “This is gym; we shouldn’t have to teach writing.” Mr. Thomas said he replied, “If you want to work at Brockton High, it’s your job.”
Fear held some teachers back — fear of wasting time on what could be just another faddish reform, fear of a heavier workload — and committee members tried to help them surmount it.
“Let me help you,” was a response committee members said they often offered to reluctant colleagues who argued that some requests were too difficult.
The first big boost came with the results of the spring 2001 tests. Although Brockton’s scores were still unacceptably low, they had risen sharply. The state education commissioner, David P. Driscoll, traveled to Brockton to congratulate the school’s cheering students and faculty.
“It had become dogma that smaller was better, but there was no evidence,” said Mr. Driscoll, who since 2007 has headed the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees federal testing. “In schools, no matter the size — and Brockton is one of the biggest — what matters is uniting people behind a common purpose, setting high expectations, and sticking with it.”
After that early triumph, remaining resistance among the faculty gave way, Dr. Szachowicz said. Overnight, the restructuring committee gained enormous credibility, and scores of once-reluctant teachers wanted to start attending its Saturday meetings, which continue today.
Brockton never fired large numbers of teachers, in contrast with current federal policy, which encourages failing schools to consider replacing at least half of all teachers to reinvigorate instruction.
But Dr. Szachowicz and her colleagues did make some teachers uncomfortable, and at least one teacher who refused to participate in the turnaround was eventually dismissed after due process hearings.
Teachers unions have resisted turnaround efforts at many schools. But at Brockton, the union never became a serious adversary, in part because most committee members were unionized teachers, and the committee scrupulously honored the union contract.
An example: the contract set aside two hours per month for teacher meetings, previously used to discuss mundane school business. The committee began dedicating those to teacher training, and made sure they never lasted a minute beyond the time allotted.
“Dr. Szachowicz takes the contract seriously, and we’ve worked together within its parameters,” said Tim Sullivan, who was president of the local teachers union through much of the last decade.
The committee changed many rules and policies.
The school had an elaborate tracking system, for instance, that channeled students into one of five academic paths. It was largely eliminated because the “basic” courses set low expectations for poor-performing students.
The committee worked to boost the aspirations of students, 69 percent of whom qualify for free lunches because of their families’ low incomes. Teachers were urged to make sure students heard the phrase, “When you go to college ...” in every class, every day.
When the school began receiving academic awards, they were made into banners and displayed prominently.
Athletics had traditionally been valued above academic success, and coaches had routinely pressured teachers to raise the grades of star players to maintain their eligibility. Dr. Szachowicz said she put an end to any exceptions.
But the school retained all varsity sports, as well as its several bands and choruses, extensive drama program and scores of student clubs.
Many students consider the school’s size — as big as many small colleges — and its diverse student body (mostly minority), to be points in its favor, rather than problems.
“You meet a new person every day,” said Johanne Alexandre, a senior whose mother is Haitian. “Somebody with a new story, a new culture. I have Pakistani friends, Brazilians, Haitians, Asians, Cape Verdeans. There are Africans, Guatemalans.”
“There’s a couple of Americans, too!” Tercia Mota, a senior born in Brazil, offered. “But there aren’t cliques. Take a look at the lunch table.”
“You can’t say, those are the jocks, those are the preppy cheerleaders, those are the geeks,” Ms. Mota said. “Everything is blended, everybody’s friends with everyone.”
Over the years, Brockton has refined its literacy curriculum. Bob Perkins, the math department chairman, used a writing lesson last week in his Introduction to Algebra II class. He wrote “3 + 72 - 6 x 3 - 11” on the board, then asked students to solve the problem in their workbooks and to explain their reasoning, step by step, in simple sentences.
“I did the exponents first and squared the 7,” wrote Sharon Peterson, a junior. “I multiplied 6 x 3. I added 3 + 49, and combined 18 and 11, because they were both negatives. I ended up with 52-29. The final answer was 23.”
Some students had more trouble, and the lesson seemed to drag a bit.
“This is taking longer than I expected, but it’s not wasted time,” Mr. Perkins said. “They’re learning math, but they’re also learning to write.”
Brockton’s performance is not as stellar in math as in English language arts, and the committee has hired an outside consultant to help develop strategies for improving math instruction, Mr. Perkins said.
Dr. Ferguson said Brockton High first “jumped out of the data” for him early last year. He was examining Massachusetts’ 2008 test scores in his office in Cambridge, and noticed that Brockton had done a better job than 90 percent of the state’s 350 high schools helping its students to improve their language arts scores.
Since then, he has visited Brockton intermittently and invited some of its faculty to the Harvard campus for interviews. The report he wrote with four other Harvard researchers includes an analysis of exemplary performance not only at Brockton, but also at 14 other schools in five states.
The report noted one characteristic shared by all: “Achievement rose when leadership teams focused thoughtfully and relentlessly on improving the quality of instruction.”
Brockton was by far the largest, but only five of the exemplary schools had fewer than 1,000 students, while six had more than 1,700 and two in Illinois had more than 3,000.
“I never bought into the dogma that a huge school can’t be great,” Dr. Ferguson said.
Elite Colleges, or Colleges for the Elite?
TODAY’S populist moment, with a growing anger directed at the elites who manipulate the system to their advantage, is an opportune time to examine higher education’s biggest affirmative action program — for the children of alumni.
At our top universities, so-called legacy preferences affect larger numbers of students than traditional affirmative action programs for minority students, yet they have received a small fraction of the attention. Unlike the issue of racial preferences, advantages for alumni children — who are overwhelmingly white and wealthy — have been the subject of little scholarship, no state voter initiatives and no Supreme Court decisions.
Among selective research universities, public and private, almost three-quarters employ legacy preferences, as do the vast majority of selective liberal arts colleges. Some admissions departments insist they are used only as tie-breakers among deserving applicants. But studies have shown that being the child of an alumnus adds the equivalent of 160 SAT points to one’s application (using the traditional 400-to-1600-point scale, and not factoring in the new writing section of the test) and increases one’s chances of admission by almost 20 percentage points.
At many selective schools, legacies make up 10 percent to 25 percent of the student population. By contrast, at the California Institute of Technology, which has no legacy preferences, only 1.5 percent of students are the children of alumni.
Legacy preferences are often justified as a way of building loyalty among alumni, sustaining tradition and increasing donations. But there is no hard evidence to prove this. A study by Winnemac Consulting for the Century Foundation found that from 1998 to 2007, at the nation’s top 100 national universities, if one controls for the wealth of alumni, “there is no statistically significant evidence of a causal relationship between legacy preference policies and total alumni giving.” Moreover, the study found that at the seven universities that dropped legacy preferences during the time of the study, alumni giving didn’t decline.
Legacy preferences are “virtually unknown in the rest of the world,” according to Daniel Golden, a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal. The paradox is that while they are an American contrivance, they are also un-American, standing in direct contradiction to Thomas Jefferson’s famous call to promote a “natural aristocracy” based on “virtue and talent.” The Old World nature of hereditary preferences may explain why, in a 2004 poll by The Chronicle of Higher Education, Americans opposed such preferences by 75 percent to 23 percent.
Legacy preferences may also be illegal. Although in 1976 a federal court ruled in a passing mention that legacy preferences are constitutional, the issue has never been properly litigated. Today, new legal arguments have been advanced questioning legacy preferences at both public and private universities.
Steve Shadowen and Sozi Tulante, two lawyers in private practice in Pennsylvania, have argued forcefully that preferences violate the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. While the amendment was primarily aimed at prohibiting discrimination against blacks, it also extends to what Justice Potter Stewart called “preferences based on lineage.” In the past, the Supreme Court has read the amendment to prohibit laws that judge individuals on their parents’ actions or behaviors, such as those that punish children born out of wedlock.
Legacy preferences at private institutions may also violate the 1866 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of “ancestry” as well as race.
Affirmative action policies are controversial because they pit two fundamental principles against each other — the anti-discrimination principle, which says we should not classify people by ancestry, and the anti-subordination principle, which says we must address a brutal history of discrimination. Legacy preferences, by contrast, advance neither principle — they simply classify individuals by bloodline.
Congress should outlaw alumni preferences at all universities and colleges receiving federal financing, just as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlaws racial discrimination at them. Or lawmakers could limit the tax deductibility of alumni donations at institutions that favor legacy children on the principle that tax-deductible donations are not supposed to enrich the giver. If legislators don’t act, it will fall to lawyers to bring suit to enforce the 14th Amendment and the 1866 Civil Rights Act and put an end to this form of discrimination in higher education.
The Angry Rich
Anger is sweeping America. True, this white-hot rage is a minority phenomenon, not something that characterizes most of our fellow citizens. But the angry minority is angry indeed, consisting of people who feel that things to which they are entitled are being taken away. And they’re out for revenge.
No, I’m not talking about the Tea Partiers. I’m talking about the rich.
These are terrible times for many people in this country. Poverty, especially acute poverty, has soared in the economic slump; millions of people have lost their homes. Young people can’t find jobs; laid-off 50-somethings fear that they’ll never work again.
Yet if you want to find real political rage — the kind of rage that makes people compare President Obama to Hitler, or accuse him of treason — you won’t find it among these suffering Americans. You’ll find it instead among the very privileged, people who don’t have to worry about losing their jobs, their homes, or their health insurance, but who are outraged, outraged, at the thought of paying modestly higher taxes.
The rage of the rich has been building ever since Mr. Obama took office. At first, however, it was largely confined to Wall Street. Thus when New York magazine published an article titled “The Wail Of the 1%,” it was talking about financial wheeler-dealers whose firms had been bailed out with taxpayer funds, but were furious at suggestions that the price of these bailouts should include temporary limits on bonuses. When the billionaire Stephen Schwarzman compared an Obama proposal to the Nazi invasion of Poland, the proposal in question would have closed a tax loophole that specifically benefits fund managers like him.
Now, however, as decision time looms for the fate of the Bush tax cuts — will top tax rates go back to Clinton-era levels? — the rage of the rich has broadened, and also in some ways changed its character.
For one thing, craziness has gone mainstream. It’s one thing when a billionaire rants at a dinner event. It’s another when Forbes magazine runs a cover story alleging that the president of the United States is deliberately trying to bring America down as part of his Kenyan, “anticolonialist” agenda, that “the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s.” When it comes to defending the interests of the rich, it seems, the normal rules of civilized (and rational) discourse no longer apply.
At the same time, self-pity among the privileged has become acceptable, even fashionable.
Tax-cut advocates used to pretend that they were mainly concerned about helping typical American families. Even tax breaks for the rich were justified in terms of trickle-down economics, the claim that lower taxes at the top would make the economy stronger for everyone.
These days, however, tax-cutters are hardly even trying to make the trickle-down case. Yes, Republicans are pushing the line that raising taxes at the top would hurt small businesses, but their hearts don’t really seem in it. Instead, it has become common to hear vehement denials that people making $400,000 or $500,000 a year are rich. I mean, look at the expenses of people in that income class — the property taxes they have to pay on their expensive houses, the cost of sending their kids to elite private schools, and so on. Why, they can barely make ends meet.
And among the undeniably rich, a belligerent sense of entitlement has taken hold: it’s their money, and they have the right to keep it. “Taxes are what we pay for civilized society,” said Oliver Wendell Holmes — but that was a long time ago.
The spectacle of high-income Americans, the world’s luckiest people, wallowing in self-pity and self-righteousness would be funny, except for one thing: they may well get their way. Never mind the $700 billion price tag for extending the high-end tax breaks: virtually all Republicans and some Democrats are rushing to the aid of the oppressed affluent.
You see, the rich are different from you and me: they have more influence. It’s partly a matter of campaign contributions, but it’s also a matter of social pressure, since politicians spend a lot of time hanging out with the wealthy. So when the rich face the prospect of paying an extra 3 or 4 percent of their income in taxes, politicians feel their pain — feel it much more acutely, it’s clear, than they feel the pain of families who are losing their jobs, their houses, and their hopes.
And when the tax fight is over, one way or another, you can be sure that the people currently defending the incomes of the elite will go back to demanding cuts in Social Security and aid to the unemployed. America must make hard choices, they’ll say; we all have to be willing to make sacrifices.
But when they say “we,” they mean “you.” Sacrifice is for the little people.
Water Drops for Migrants: Kindness, or Offense?
In this remote, semidesert landscape along the United States-Mexico border, water is a precious commodity — and a contentious one, too.
Two years ago, Daniel J. Millis was ticketed for littering after he was caught by a federal Fish and Wildlife officer placing gallon jugs of water for passing immigrants in the brush of this 118,000-acre preserve.
“I do extreme sports, and I know I couldn’t walk as far as they do,” said Mr. Millis, driving through the refuge recently. “It’s no surprise people are dying.”
Mr. Millis, 31, was not the only one to get a ticket. Fourteen other volunteers for Tucson-based organizations that provide aid to immigrants crossing from Mexico to the United States were similarly cited. Most of the cases were later dropped, but Mr. Millis and another volunteer for a religious group called No More Deaths were convicted of defacing the refuge with their water jug drops.
The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit weighed in on Mr. Millis’s appeal this month, ruling that it was “ambiguous as to whether purified water in a sealed bottle intended for human consumption meets the definition of ‘garbage.’ ” Voting 2-to-1, a three-judge panel overturned Mr. Millis’s conviction.
The issue remains far from settled, though. The court ruled that Mr. Millis probably could have been charged under a different statute, something other than littering. And the Fish and Wildlife Service continues to forbid anyone to leave gallon jugs of water in the refuge — a policy backed by this state’s immigration hardliners, who say comforting immigrants will only encourage them to cross.
From 2002 to 2009, 25 illegal immigrants died while passing through the refuge’s rolling hills, which are flanked by mountains and are home to pronghorns, coyotes, rattlesnakes and four different kinds of skunks. Throughout southern Arizona, the death toll totaled 1,715 from 2002 to 2009, with this year’s hot temperatures putting deaths at a record-breaking pace.
The Border Patrol has installed rescue beacons in remote areas along the border, including several in the Buenos Aires refuge, to allow immigrants in distress to call for help. Those who are injured and have been left behind by their guides are often so desperate they no longer fear deportation.
Still, the federal government has acknowledged that additional steps are needed to keep deaths down on its land. In 2001, it gave another aid group, Humane Borders, a permit to keep several large water drums on the refuge, each of them marked by a blue flag and featuring a spigot to allow immigrants to fill their water bottles for the long trek north.
Last year, the government considered but ultimately decided against allowing No More Deaths to tether gallon jugs to trees to allow immigrants in more remote areas to drink without taking the jugs on their way.
Right now, even after the court decision, there is what amounts to a standoff. This month, the federal government said it was willing to allow more 55-gallon drums on main pathways in the refuge. It said it would not permit any gallon jugs.
But the water jugs continue to appear.
Last week, Gene Lefebvre, a retired minister who co-founded No More Deaths, hiked along a path popular among immigrants until he reached a clearing where volunteers for his organization had recently left some jugs.
Each bottle had markings on it noting the date it was left and the exact location on the group’s GPS mapping software. There were also signs of encouragement for the immigrants: a heart and a cross on one bottle and the words, “Good luck, friends,” on another.
“We’d give water to anyone we found in the desert, even the Border Patrol,” Mr. Lefebvre said.
But opponents say the water drops are encouraging immigrants to continue to come across the border illegally. The critics say there ought to be Border Patrol agents stationed near the water stations to arrest those who are crossing illegally as soon as they finish drinking. So furious are some at the practice of aiding immigrants that they have slashed open the water jugs, crushed them with their vehicles or simply poured the water into the desert.
The Buenos Aires refuge is among the most troubled of the 551 refuge areas across the country, the federal government says. The reason is its location, adjacent to the border.
“Since its establishment in 1985, refuge staff have worked diligently to protect species such as the endangered masked bobwhite quail and pronghorn, as well as offer meaningful visitor recreational opportunities,” a recently released government report on the water controversy said. “However, over the past decade an increasing amount of refuge time and energy has been required to address the growing issue of illegal traffic entering the U.S. across refuge lands.”
In 2006 and 2007, an estimated 250,000 to 300,000 illegal immigrants crossed the refuge annually, along with Border Patrol agents pursing them, federal officials say. “As a result, refuge lands have been marred by illegal trails and roads, litter and degraded habitat,” said a government report on the problem.
The numbers have dropped in recent years, to 31,500 in 2008 and about 20,000 in 2009. “This still averages approximately 50 to 60 illegal immigrants traveling through the refuge daily,” the government report said.
Mr. Millis, a former high school Spanish teacher who now works for the Sierra Club, disputes the notion that leaving out water jugs is luring more immigrants. He said it was border enforcement efforts that had pushed those seeking to cross into dangerous desert areas.
As for spoiling the environment, he said he collected as many jugs as he left behind. He also recounts how he found the dead body of a 14-year-old Salvadoran girl near the refuge days before he was ticketed.
“People are part of the environment,” he said.
Told to Eat Its Vegetables, America Orders Fries
It’s been a busy week for vegetables.
The baby-carrot industry tried to reposition its product as junk food, starting a $25 million advertising campaign whose defining characteristics include heavy metal music, a phone app and a young man in a grocery cart dodging baby-carrot bullets fired by a woman in tight jeans.
On the East Side of Manhattan, crates of heirloom vegetables with names like Lady Godiva squash were auctioned for $1,000 each at Sotheby’s, where the wealthy are more accustomed to bidding on Warhols and Picassos than turnips and tomatoes.
Both efforts, high and low, are aimed at the same thing: getting America to eat its vegetables.
Good luck. Despite two decades of public health initiatives, stricter government dietary guidelines, record growth of farmers’ markets and the ease of products like salad in a bag, Americans still aren’t eating enough vegetables.
This month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a comprehensive nationwide behavioral study of fruit and vegetable consumption. Only 26 percent of the nation’s adults eat vegetables three or more times a day, it concluded. (And no, that does not include French fries.)
These results fell far short of health objectives set by the federal government a decade ago. The amount of vegetables Americans eat is less than half of what public health officials had hoped. Worse, it has barely budged since 2000.
“It is disappointing,” said Dr. Jennifer Foltz, a pediatrician who helped compile the report. She, like other public health officials dedicated to improving the American diet, concedes that perhaps simply telling people to eat more vegetables isn’t working.
“There is nothing you can say that will get people to eat more veggies,” said Harry Balzer, the chief industry analyst for the NPD Group, a market research company.
This week, the company released the 25th edition of its annual report, “Eating Patterns in America.” The news there wasn’t good, either. For example, only 23 percent of meals include a vegetable, Mr. Balzer said. (Again, fries don’t count, but lettuce on a hamburger does.) The number of dinners prepared at home that included a salad was 17 percent; in 1994, it was 22 percent.
At restaurants, salads ordered as a main course at either lunch or dinner dropped by half since 1989, to a mere 5 percent, he said.
The nation has long had a complicated relationship with vegetables. People know that vegetables can improve health. But they’re a lot of work. In refrigerators all over the country, produce often dies a slow, limp death because life becomes too busy.
“The moment you have something fresh you have to schedule your life around using it,” Mr. Balzer said.
In the wrong hands, vegetables can taste terrible. And compared with a lot of food at the supermarket, they’re a relatively expensive way to fill a belly.
“Before we want health, we want taste, we want convenience and we want low cost,” Mr. Balzer said.
Melissa MacBride, a busy Manhattan resident who works for a pharmaceuticals company, would eat more vegetables if they weren’t, in her words, “a pain.”
“An apple you can just grab,” she said. “But what am I going to do, put a piece of kale in my purse?”
No one really wants to admit that they don’t eat vegetables. A nurse who works at the Hospital for Special Surgery on the Upper East Side openly acknowledges that vegetables make her gag. Still, she begged to not be publicly identified because she is in the health care field and knows that she should set a better example.
David Bernstein, who lives in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, is sheepish about the lack of vegetables in his diet. He waits tables at the hip M. Wells restaurant in Long Island City, Queens, and knows his way around the Union Square Greenmarket. But his diet consists largely of bacon, yogurt and frozen stuffed chicken breasts.
“It’s just like any other bad habit,” he said. “Part of it is just that vegetables are a little intimidating. I’m not afraid of zucchinis, but I just don’t know how to cook them.”
The food industry has tried to make eating vegetables easier. Sales of convenience vegetables, like packages of cut broccoli designed to go right into the microwave, are growing. Washed, ready-to-eat bagged salads are a $3-billion-a-year business.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean people are eating more vegetables. It just means they are shifting their vegetable budget from one place to another, Mr. Balzer said. An organic cucumber might replace a conventionally grown one. A bag of lettuce replaces a head.
To be sure, vegetables are making strides in certain circles. Women, as well as people who are older and more educated and have higher incomes, tend to eat more vegetables, said Dr. Foltz, the pediatrician who worked on the C.D.C. report.
The vegetable, especially when grown from heirloom seeds on small farms, is held in such high esteem that knowing the farmer who grows the food is a form of valuable social currency. Vegetables are becoming high art. At Sotheby’s on Thursday night, the vegetable auction was part of a daylong event called “The Art of Farming,” raising nearly $250,000 to help hunger organizations, immigrant farmers and children without access to vegetables.
But vegetables are also becoming important on the other end of the economic equation. An increasing number of the nation’s 6,000 farmers’ markets allow shoppers to buy produce with food stamps. Urban gardens are springing up in vacant lots and on rooftops. Nearly every state now has programs that send fresh vegetables into poorer neighborhoods and school cafeterias.
The vegetable even has the first lady, Michelle Obama, on its side. She planted an organic garden on the White House lawn and talks up vegetables as part of her “Let’s Move” campaign against childhood obesity.
The government keeps trying, too, to get its message across. It now recommends four and a half cups of fruits and vegetables (that’s nine servings) for people who eat 2,000 calories a day. Some public health advocates have argued that when the guidelines are updated later this year, they should be made even clearer. One proposal is to make Americans think about it visually, filling half the plate or bowl with vegetables.
But clear guidance probably isn’t enough. Health officials now concede that convincing a nation that shuns vegetables means making vegetables more affordable and more available.
“We have to make the healthy choice the easy choice,” Dr. Foltz said. And the choices need to become ingrained.
For another study whose results were announced this week, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, spent three years examining the difference between children who participated in the Berkeley Unified School District’s “edible schoolyard” program, in which gardening and cooking are woven into the school day, and children who didn’t.
The students who gardened ate one and half servings more of fruits and vegetables a day than those who weren’t in the program.
For students who don’t have access to a school garden, perhaps the full-court press by the baby-carrot producers will have some effect. The iPhone application, for example, is a video game called Xtreme Xrunch Kart that starts when a player crunches a carrot (or makes a crunchlike sound) into the phone’s microphone.
But as in past attempts to revive the vegetable, none of this will necessarily be enough to change a clear aversion to eating vegetables.
“Eating vegetables is a lot less fun than eating flavor-blasted Doritos,” said Marcia Mogelonsly, a senior analyst for Mintel, a global marketing firm. “You will always have to fight that.”
Basic Religion Test Stumps Many Americans
Americans are by all measures a deeply religious people, but they are also deeply ignorant about religion.
Researchers from the independent Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life phoned more than 3,400 Americans and asked them 32 questions about the Bible, Christianity and other world religions, famous religious figures and the constitutional principles governing religion in public life.
On average, people who took the survey answered half the questions incorrectly, and many flubbed even questions about their own faith.
Those who scored the highest were atheists and agnostics, as well as two religious minorities: Jews and Mormons. The results were the same even after the researchers controlled for factors like age and racial differences.
“Even after all these other factors, including education, are taken into account, atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons still outperform all the other religious groups in our survey,” said Greg Smith, a senior researcher at Pew.
That finding might surprise some, but not Dave Silverman, president of American Atheists, an advocacy group for nonbelievers that was founded by Madalyn Murray O’Hair.
“I have heard many times that atheists know more about religion than religious people,” Mr. Silverman said. “Atheism is an effect of that knowledge, not a lack of knowledge. I gave a Bible to my daughter. That’s how you make atheists.”
Among the topics covered in the survey were: Where was Jesus born? What is Ramadan? Whose writings inspired the Protestant Reformation? Which Biblical figure led the exodus from Egypt? What religion is the Dalai Lama? Joseph Smith? Mother Teresa? In most cases, the format was multiple choice.
The researchers said that the questionnaire was designed to represent a breadth of knowledge about religion, but was not intended to be regarded as a list of the most essential facts about the subject. Most of the questions were easy, but a few were difficult enough to discern which respondents were highly knowledgeable.
On questions about the Bible and Christianity, the groups that answered the most right were Mormons and white evangelical Protestants.
On questions about world religions, like Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and Judaism, the groups that did the best were atheists, agnostics and Jews.
One finding that may grab the attention of policy makers is that most Americans wrongly believe that anything having to do with religion is prohibited in public schools.
An overwhelming 89 percent of respondents, asked whether public school teachers are permitted to lead a class in prayer, correctly answered no.
But fewer than one of four knew that a public school teacher is permitted “to read from the Bible as an example of literature.” And only about one third knew that a public school teacher is permitted to offer a class comparing the world’s religions.
The survey’s authors concluded that there was “widespread confusion” about “the line between teaching and preaching.”
Mr. Smith said the survey appeared to be the first comprehensive effort at assessing the basic religious knowledge of Americans, so it is impossible to tell whether they are more or less informed than in the past.
The phone interviews were conducted in English and Spanish in May and June. There were not enough Muslim, Buddhist or Hindu respondents to say how those groups ranked.
Clergy members who are concerned that their congregants know little about the essentials of their own faith will no doubt be appalled by some of these findings:
¶ Fifty-three percent of Protestants could not identify Martin Luther as the man who started the Protestant Reformation.
¶ Forty-five percent of Catholics did not know that their church teaches that the consecrated bread and wine in holy communion are not merely symbols, but actually become the body and blood of Christ.
¶ Forty-three percent of Jews did not know that Maimonides, one of the foremost rabbinical authorities and philosophers, was Jewish.
The question about Maimonides was the one that the fewest people answered correctly. But 51 percent knew that Joseph Smith was Mormon, and 82 percent knew that Mother Teresa was Roman Catholic.
You can take a version of the test here
At East Village Food Pantry, the Price Is a Sermon
The shopping carts are lined up hours early in Tompkins Square Park, not far from the dog run, where the East Village’s more genteel residents are unleashing retrievers and beagles and chatting animatedly. The poor or elderly waiting on benches to get the free food that comes with a dose of the Gospel seem more lost in their own thoughts, even though many meet every Tuesday.
A guard, Mike Luke, a powerhouse known as Big Mike who himself was a consumer at church pantries until he found religion and decided to work for “the man upstairs,” manages the crowd with crisp authority until the 11 a.m. service starts across the street at the Tompkins Square Gospel Fellowship. There is nervous tension because only the first 50 will get in, and suddenly two women are squabbling over a black cart.
“How do you know that’s your cart?” Big Mike firmly asks one, a fair question since the carts look alike. But the mystery is cleared up with the discovery of an orphaned gray cart.
Inside the worship hall, the 50 men and women sit in neat rows in front of a pulpit and a painting of a generic waterfall while a pianist softly plays hymns. Their carts are reassembled in neat rows as well.
The room has the shopworn air of Sergeant Sarah Brown’s Save-a-Soul Mission in “Guys and Dolls.” One almost expects Stubby Kaye to get up and sing “Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat.” But people don’t mind having to sit through a sermon as the price of admission, and few have jobs they need to run to. While they wait, volunteers fill each cart with a couple of bread loaves — redolent of a Gospel miracle, except these are ciabatta and 10-grain — a couple of bananas, a couple of less-than-freshly-picked ears of corn, a box of eggs, a box of blueberries, even an Asian pear.
The food is donated by Trader Joe’s, the gourmet and organic food purveyor, which has a store nearby. It usually feeds the kinds of professionals who use the dog run, but it provides the fellowship with a wealth of unsold baked goods, fruit and vegetables.
The fellowship was started 115 years ago as a mission to the immigrant Jews of the Lower East Side but now mostly serves the black, Latino and Asian poor. The East Village has several other pantries that dispense food without sermons; their food is government-financed and so must be religion-free. The fellowship started its giveaways in January and now feeds 250 people during three services on Tuesdays — one in Chinese — and a single evening service on Sundays and Wednesdays.
The mission is run by the Rev. Bill Jones, a lively ordained Baptist minister from the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina.
“People are not only hungry for food, but hungry for the word of God,” Mr. Jones said. “There’s not just a physical need but a spiritual need.”
Nevertheless, he is aware of the actual hunger. “If you wait for three hours to get $25 worth of groceries,” he said, “you have a need.”
He affirms that thought to the waiting crowd in a stentorian drawl.
“You all get blueberries today,” he announces. “Some of you get eggs. If you don’t get eggs, don’t be upset. You neighbor is getting eggs, so be grateful.”
The people who come include Rafael Mercado, 52, who lost his job as a mailroom clerk four years ago.
“I don’t have the kind of money now to go shopping,” he said, “so I go to many pantries.” Another is Asia Feliciano, 37, a single mother with a lush head of cornrow braids. She and her sons, Trevor, 5, and Jordan, 3, live in a nearby shelter, and they stumbled upon the mission in August while panhandling.
“It puts food on our plates every night,” she said.
Mr. Jones begins the service with a prayer — “Heavenly father, we are so grateful for the provisions you have brought us for another day.” He then offers a lesson from the Gospel of John, in which Jesus tells the disciples to love one another. With ardor that is not quite brimstone, Mr. Jones urges listeners to love one another as well, not give in to temptations and pray to remain faithful to God.
Many among the 50 sit stone-faced. But some clearly listen. Though she comes mostly for the food, Ms. Feliciano indicates that the worship has subversively taken hold.
“When I have to sit through the service, it opens my eyes,” she said. “So I started reading the Bible and I asked them for a Bible, and they gave me one.”
Anger as a Private Company Takes Over Libraries
A private company in Maryland has taken over public libraries in ailing cities in California, Oregon, Tennessee and Texas, growing into the country’s fifth-largest library system.
Now the company, Library Systems & Services, has been hired for the first time to run a system in a relatively healthy city, setting off an intense and often acrimonious debate about the role of outsourcing in a ravaged economy.
A $4 million deal to run the three libraries here is a chance for the company to demonstrate that a dose of private management can be good for communities, whatever their financial situation. But in an era when outsourcing is most often an act of budget desperation — with janitors, police forces and even entire city halls farmed out in one town or another — the contract in Santa Clarita has touched a deep nerve and begun a round of second-guessing.
Can a municipal service like a library hold so central a place that it should be entrusted to a profit-driven contractor only as a last resort — and maybe not even then?
“There’s this American flag, apple pie thing about libraries,” said Frank A. Pezzanite, the outsourcing company’s chief executive. He has pledged to save $1 million a year in Santa Clarita, mainly by cutting overhead and replacing unionized employees. “Somehow they have been put in the category of a sacred organization.”
The company, known as L.S.S.I., runs 14 library systems operating 63 locations. Its basic pitch to cities is that it fixes broken libraries — more often than not by cleaning house.
“A lot of libraries are atrocious,” Mr. Pezzanite said. “Their policies are all about job security. That’s why the profession is nervous about us. You can go to a library for 35 years and never have to do anything and then have your retirement. We’re not running our company that way. You come to us, you’re going to have to work.”
The members of the Santa Clarita City Council who voted to hire L.S.S.I. acknowledge there was no immediate threat to the libraries. The council members say they want to ensure the libraries’ long-term survival in a state with increasingly shaky finances.
Until now, the three branch locations have been part of the Los Angeles County library system. Under the new contract, the branches will be withdrawn from county control and all operations — including hiring staff and buying books — ceded to L.S.S.I.
“The libraries are still going to be public libraries,” said the mayor pro tem, Marsha McLean. “When people say we’re privatizing libraries, that is just not a true statement, period.”
Library employees are furious about the contract. But the reaction has been mostly led by patrons who say they cannot imagine Santa Clarita with libraries run for profit.
“A library is the heart of the community,” said one opponent, Jane Hanson. “I’m in favor of private enterprise, but I can’t feel comfortable with what the city is doing here.”
Mrs. Hanson and her husband, Tom, go to their local branch every week or two to pick up tapes for the car and books to read after dinner. Mrs. Hanson recently checked out Willa Cather’s classic “Death Comes for the Archbishop,” although she was only mildly in favor of its episodic style; she has higher hopes for her current choice, on the shadowy world of North Korea.
The suggestion that a library is different — and somehow off limits to the outsourcing fever — has been echoed wherever L.S.S.I. has gone. The head of the county library system, Margaret Donnellan Todd, says L.S.S.I. is viewed as an unwelcome outsider.
“There is no local connection,” she said. “People are receiving superb service in Santa Clarita. I challenge that L.S.S.I. will be able to do much better.”
As a recent afternoon shaded into evening, there were more than a hundred patrons at the main Santa Clarita library. Students were doing their homework. Old men paged through newspapers. Children gathered up arm’s loads of picture books. It was a portrait of civic harmony and engagement.
Mrs. Hanson, who is 81 and has been a library patron for nearly 50 years, was so bothered by the outsourcing contract that she became involved in local politics for the first time since 1969, when she worked for a recall movement related to the Vietnam War.
She drew up a petition warning that the L.S.S.I. contract would result in “greater cost, fewer books and less access,” with “no benefit to the citizens.” Using a card table in front of the main library branch, she gathered 1,200 signatures in three weekends.
L.S.S.I. says none of Mrs. Hanson’s fears are warranted, but the anti-outsourcing forces continue to air their suspicions at private meetings and public forums, even wondering whether a recall election is feasible.
“Public libraries invoke images of our freedom to learn, a cornerstone of our democracy,” Deanna Hanashiro, a retired teacher, said at the most recent city council meeting.
Frank Ferry, a Santa Clarita councilman, dismisses the criticism as the work of the Service Employees International Union, which has 87 members in the libraries. The union has been distributing red shirts defending the status quo. “Union members out in red shirts in defense of union jobs,” Mr. Ferry said.
Library employees are often the most resistant to his company, said Mr. Pezzanite, a co-founder of L.S.S.I. — and, he suggested, for reasons that only reinforce the need for a new approach.
“Pensions crushed General Motors, and it is crushing the governments in California,” he said. While the company says it rehires many of the municipal librarians, they must be content with a 401(k) retirement fund and no pension.
L.S.S.I. got its start 30 years ago developing software for government use, then expanded into running libraries for federal agencies. In the mid-1990s, it moved into the municipal library market, and now, when ranked by number of branches, it places immediately after Los Angeles County, New York City, Chicago and the City of Los Angeles.
The company is majority owned by Islington Capital Partners, a private equity firm in Boston, and has about $35 million in annual revenue and 800 employees. Officials would not discuss the company’s profitability.
Some L.S.S.I. customers have ended their contracts, while in other places, opposition has faded with time. In Redding, Calif., Jim Ceragioli, a board member of the Friends of Shasta County Library, said he initially counted himself among the skeptics.
But he has since changed his mind. “I can’t think of anything that’s been lost,” Mr. Ceragioli said.
The library in Redding has expanded its services and hours. And the volunteers are still showing up — even if their assistance is now aiding a private company. “We volunteer more than ever now,” Mr. Ceragioli said.
A decade ago, Brockton High School was a case study in failure. Teachers and administrators often voiced the unofficial school motto in hallway chitchat: students have a right to fail if they want. And many of them did — only a quarter of the students passed statewide exams. One in three dropped out.
Then Susan Szachowicz and a handful of fellow teachers decided to take action. They persuaded administrators to let them organize a schoolwide campaign that involved reading and writing lessons into every class in all subjects, including gym.
Their efforts paid off quickly. In 2001 testing, more students passed the state tests after failing the year before than at any other school in Massachusetts. The gains continued. This year and last, Brockton outperformed 90 percent of Massachusetts high schools. And its turnaround is getting new attention in a report, “How High Schools Become Exemplary,” published last month by Ronald F. Ferguson, an economist at Harvard who researches the minority achievement gap.
What makes Brockton High’s story surprising is that, with 4,100 students, it is an exception to what has become received wisdom in many educational circles — that small is almost always better.
That is why the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation spent hundreds of millions of dollars in the last decade breaking down big schools into small academies (it has since switched strategies, focusing more on instruction).
The small-is-better orthodoxy remains powerful. A new movie, “Waiting for Superman,” for example, portrays five charter schools in New York, Los Angeles and elsewhere — most with only a few hundred students — as the way forward for American schooling.
Brockton, by contrast, is the largest public school in Massachusetts, and one of the largest in the nation.
At education conferences, Dr. Szachowicz — who became Brockton’s principal in 2004 — still gets approached by small-school advocates who tell her they are skeptical that a 4,100-student school could offer a decent education.
“I tell them we’re a big school that works,“ said Dr. Szachowicz, whose booming voice makes her seem taller than 5-foot-6 as she walks the hallways, greeting students, walkie-talkie in hand.
She and other teachers took action in part because academic catastrophe seemed to be looming, Dr. Szachowicz and several of her colleagues said in interviews here. Massachusetts had instituted a new high school exit exam in 1993, and passing it would be required to graduate a decade later. Unless the school’s culture improved, some 750 seniors would be denied a diploma each year, starting in 2003.
Dr. Szachowicz and Paul Laurino, then the head of the English department — he has since retired — began meeting on Saturdays with any colleagues they could pull together to brainstorm strategies for improving the school.
Shame was an early motivator, especially after the release of the 1999 test scores.
“They were horrible,” Dr. Szachowicz recalled. She painted them in bold letters on poster paper in the group’s Saturday meeting room.
“Is this the best we can be?” she wrote underneath.
The group eventually became known as the school restructuring committee, and the administration did not stand in the way. The principal “just let it happen,” the Harvard report says.
The committee’s first big step was to go back to basics, and deem that reading, writing, speaking and reasoning were the most important skills to teach. They set out to recruit every educator in the building — not just English, but math, science, even guidance counselors — to teach those skills to students.
The committee put together a rubric to help teachers understand what good writing looks like, and began devoting faculty meetings to teaching department heads how to use it. The school’s 300 teachers were then trained in small groups.
Writing exercises took many forms, but encouraged students to think methodically. A science teacher, for example, had her students write out, step by step, how to make a sandwich, starting with opening the cupboard to fetch the peanut butter, through washing the knife once the sandwich was made. Other writing exercises, of course, were much more sophisticated.
Some teachers dragged their feet. Michael Thomas, now the district’s operations director but who led the school’s physical education department at the time, recalled that several of his teachers told him, “This is gym; we shouldn’t have to teach writing.” Mr. Thomas said he replied, “If you want to work at Brockton High, it’s your job.”
Fear held some teachers back — fear of wasting time on what could be just another faddish reform, fear of a heavier workload — and committee members tried to help them surmount it.
“Let me help you,” was a response committee members said they often offered to reluctant colleagues who argued that some requests were too difficult.
The first big boost came with the results of the spring 2001 tests. Although Brockton’s scores were still unacceptably low, they had risen sharply. The state education commissioner, David P. Driscoll, traveled to Brockton to congratulate the school’s cheering students and faculty.
“It had become dogma that smaller was better, but there was no evidence,” said Mr. Driscoll, who since 2007 has headed the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees federal testing. “In schools, no matter the size — and Brockton is one of the biggest — what matters is uniting people behind a common purpose, setting high expectations, and sticking with it.”
After that early triumph, remaining resistance among the faculty gave way, Dr. Szachowicz said. Overnight, the restructuring committee gained enormous credibility, and scores of once-reluctant teachers wanted to start attending its Saturday meetings, which continue today.
Brockton never fired large numbers of teachers, in contrast with current federal policy, which encourages failing schools to consider replacing at least half of all teachers to reinvigorate instruction.
But Dr. Szachowicz and her colleagues did make some teachers uncomfortable, and at least one teacher who refused to participate in the turnaround was eventually dismissed after due process hearings.
Teachers unions have resisted turnaround efforts at many schools. But at Brockton, the union never became a serious adversary, in part because most committee members were unionized teachers, and the committee scrupulously honored the union contract.
An example: the contract set aside two hours per month for teacher meetings, previously used to discuss mundane school business. The committee began dedicating those to teacher training, and made sure they never lasted a minute beyond the time allotted.
“Dr. Szachowicz takes the contract seriously, and we’ve worked together within its parameters,” said Tim Sullivan, who was president of the local teachers union through much of the last decade.
The committee changed many rules and policies.
The school had an elaborate tracking system, for instance, that channeled students into one of five academic paths. It was largely eliminated because the “basic” courses set low expectations for poor-performing students.
The committee worked to boost the aspirations of students, 69 percent of whom qualify for free lunches because of their families’ low incomes. Teachers were urged to make sure students heard the phrase, “When you go to college ...” in every class, every day.
When the school began receiving academic awards, they were made into banners and displayed prominently.
Athletics had traditionally been valued above academic success, and coaches had routinely pressured teachers to raise the grades of star players to maintain their eligibility. Dr. Szachowicz said she put an end to any exceptions.
But the school retained all varsity sports, as well as its several bands and choruses, extensive drama program and scores of student clubs.
Many students consider the school’s size — as big as many small colleges — and its diverse student body (mostly minority), to be points in its favor, rather than problems.
“You meet a new person every day,” said Johanne Alexandre, a senior whose mother is Haitian. “Somebody with a new story, a new culture. I have Pakistani friends, Brazilians, Haitians, Asians, Cape Verdeans. There are Africans, Guatemalans.”
“There’s a couple of Americans, too!” Tercia Mota, a senior born in Brazil, offered. “But there aren’t cliques. Take a look at the lunch table.”
“You can’t say, those are the jocks, those are the preppy cheerleaders, those are the geeks,” Ms. Mota said. “Everything is blended, everybody’s friends with everyone.”
Over the years, Brockton has refined its literacy curriculum. Bob Perkins, the math department chairman, used a writing lesson last week in his Introduction to Algebra II class. He wrote “3 + 72 - 6 x 3 - 11” on the board, then asked students to solve the problem in their workbooks and to explain their reasoning, step by step, in simple sentences.
“I did the exponents first and squared the 7,” wrote Sharon Peterson, a junior. “I multiplied 6 x 3. I added 3 + 49, and combined 18 and 11, because they were both negatives. I ended up with 52-29. The final answer was 23.”
Some students had more trouble, and the lesson seemed to drag a bit.
“This is taking longer than I expected, but it’s not wasted time,” Mr. Perkins said. “They’re learning math, but they’re also learning to write.”
Brockton’s performance is not as stellar in math as in English language arts, and the committee has hired an outside consultant to help develop strategies for improving math instruction, Mr. Perkins said.
Dr. Ferguson said Brockton High first “jumped out of the data” for him early last year. He was examining Massachusetts’ 2008 test scores in his office in Cambridge, and noticed that Brockton had done a better job than 90 percent of the state’s 350 high schools helping its students to improve their language arts scores.
Since then, he has visited Brockton intermittently and invited some of its faculty to the Harvard campus for interviews. The report he wrote with four other Harvard researchers includes an analysis of exemplary performance not only at Brockton, but also at 14 other schools in five states.
The report noted one characteristic shared by all: “Achievement rose when leadership teams focused thoughtfully and relentlessly on improving the quality of instruction.”
Brockton was by far the largest, but only five of the exemplary schools had fewer than 1,000 students, while six had more than 1,700 and two in Illinois had more than 3,000.
“I never bought into the dogma that a huge school can’t be great,” Dr. Ferguson said.
Elite Colleges, or Colleges for the Elite?
TODAY’S populist moment, with a growing anger directed at the elites who manipulate the system to their advantage, is an opportune time to examine higher education’s biggest affirmative action program — for the children of alumni.
At our top universities, so-called legacy preferences affect larger numbers of students than traditional affirmative action programs for minority students, yet they have received a small fraction of the attention. Unlike the issue of racial preferences, advantages for alumni children — who are overwhelmingly white and wealthy — have been the subject of little scholarship, no state voter initiatives and no Supreme Court decisions.
Among selective research universities, public and private, almost three-quarters employ legacy preferences, as do the vast majority of selective liberal arts colleges. Some admissions departments insist they are used only as tie-breakers among deserving applicants. But studies have shown that being the child of an alumnus adds the equivalent of 160 SAT points to one’s application (using the traditional 400-to-1600-point scale, and not factoring in the new writing section of the test) and increases one’s chances of admission by almost 20 percentage points.
At many selective schools, legacies make up 10 percent to 25 percent of the student population. By contrast, at the California Institute of Technology, which has no legacy preferences, only 1.5 percent of students are the children of alumni.
Legacy preferences are often justified as a way of building loyalty among alumni, sustaining tradition and increasing donations. But there is no hard evidence to prove this. A study by Winnemac Consulting for the Century Foundation found that from 1998 to 2007, at the nation’s top 100 national universities, if one controls for the wealth of alumni, “there is no statistically significant evidence of a causal relationship between legacy preference policies and total alumni giving.” Moreover, the study found that at the seven universities that dropped legacy preferences during the time of the study, alumni giving didn’t decline.
Legacy preferences are “virtually unknown in the rest of the world,” according to Daniel Golden, a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal. The paradox is that while they are an American contrivance, they are also un-American, standing in direct contradiction to Thomas Jefferson’s famous call to promote a “natural aristocracy” based on “virtue and talent.” The Old World nature of hereditary preferences may explain why, in a 2004 poll by The Chronicle of Higher Education, Americans opposed such preferences by 75 percent to 23 percent.
Legacy preferences may also be illegal. Although in 1976 a federal court ruled in a passing mention that legacy preferences are constitutional, the issue has never been properly litigated. Today, new legal arguments have been advanced questioning legacy preferences at both public and private universities.
Steve Shadowen and Sozi Tulante, two lawyers in private practice in Pennsylvania, have argued forcefully that preferences violate the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. While the amendment was primarily aimed at prohibiting discrimination against blacks, it also extends to what Justice Potter Stewart called “preferences based on lineage.” In the past, the Supreme Court has read the amendment to prohibit laws that judge individuals on their parents’ actions or behaviors, such as those that punish children born out of wedlock.
Legacy preferences at private institutions may also violate the 1866 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of “ancestry” as well as race.
Affirmative action policies are controversial because they pit two fundamental principles against each other — the anti-discrimination principle, which says we should not classify people by ancestry, and the anti-subordination principle, which says we must address a brutal history of discrimination. Legacy preferences, by contrast, advance neither principle — they simply classify individuals by bloodline.
Congress should outlaw alumni preferences at all universities and colleges receiving federal financing, just as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlaws racial discrimination at them. Or lawmakers could limit the tax deductibility of alumni donations at institutions that favor legacy children on the principle that tax-deductible donations are not supposed to enrich the giver. If legislators don’t act, it will fall to lawyers to bring suit to enforce the 14th Amendment and the 1866 Civil Rights Act and put an end to this form of discrimination in higher education.
The Angry Rich
Anger is sweeping America. True, this white-hot rage is a minority phenomenon, not something that characterizes most of our fellow citizens. But the angry minority is angry indeed, consisting of people who feel that things to which they are entitled are being taken away. And they’re out for revenge.
No, I’m not talking about the Tea Partiers. I’m talking about the rich.
These are terrible times for many people in this country. Poverty, especially acute poverty, has soared in the economic slump; millions of people have lost their homes. Young people can’t find jobs; laid-off 50-somethings fear that they’ll never work again.
Yet if you want to find real political rage — the kind of rage that makes people compare President Obama to Hitler, or accuse him of treason — you won’t find it among these suffering Americans. You’ll find it instead among the very privileged, people who don’t have to worry about losing their jobs, their homes, or their health insurance, but who are outraged, outraged, at the thought of paying modestly higher taxes.
The rage of the rich has been building ever since Mr. Obama took office. At first, however, it was largely confined to Wall Street. Thus when New York magazine published an article titled “The Wail Of the 1%,” it was talking about financial wheeler-dealers whose firms had been bailed out with taxpayer funds, but were furious at suggestions that the price of these bailouts should include temporary limits on bonuses. When the billionaire Stephen Schwarzman compared an Obama proposal to the Nazi invasion of Poland, the proposal in question would have closed a tax loophole that specifically benefits fund managers like him.
Now, however, as decision time looms for the fate of the Bush tax cuts — will top tax rates go back to Clinton-era levels? — the rage of the rich has broadened, and also in some ways changed its character.
For one thing, craziness has gone mainstream. It’s one thing when a billionaire rants at a dinner event. It’s another when Forbes magazine runs a cover story alleging that the president of the United States is deliberately trying to bring America down as part of his Kenyan, “anticolonialist” agenda, that “the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s.” When it comes to defending the interests of the rich, it seems, the normal rules of civilized (and rational) discourse no longer apply.
At the same time, self-pity among the privileged has become acceptable, even fashionable.
Tax-cut advocates used to pretend that they were mainly concerned about helping typical American families. Even tax breaks for the rich were justified in terms of trickle-down economics, the claim that lower taxes at the top would make the economy stronger for everyone.
These days, however, tax-cutters are hardly even trying to make the trickle-down case. Yes, Republicans are pushing the line that raising taxes at the top would hurt small businesses, but their hearts don’t really seem in it. Instead, it has become common to hear vehement denials that people making $400,000 or $500,000 a year are rich. I mean, look at the expenses of people in that income class — the property taxes they have to pay on their expensive houses, the cost of sending their kids to elite private schools, and so on. Why, they can barely make ends meet.
And among the undeniably rich, a belligerent sense of entitlement has taken hold: it’s their money, and they have the right to keep it. “Taxes are what we pay for civilized society,” said Oliver Wendell Holmes — but that was a long time ago.
The spectacle of high-income Americans, the world’s luckiest people, wallowing in self-pity and self-righteousness would be funny, except for one thing: they may well get their way. Never mind the $700 billion price tag for extending the high-end tax breaks: virtually all Republicans and some Democrats are rushing to the aid of the oppressed affluent.
You see, the rich are different from you and me: they have more influence. It’s partly a matter of campaign contributions, but it’s also a matter of social pressure, since politicians spend a lot of time hanging out with the wealthy. So when the rich face the prospect of paying an extra 3 or 4 percent of their income in taxes, politicians feel their pain — feel it much more acutely, it’s clear, than they feel the pain of families who are losing their jobs, their houses, and their hopes.
And when the tax fight is over, one way or another, you can be sure that the people currently defending the incomes of the elite will go back to demanding cuts in Social Security and aid to the unemployed. America must make hard choices, they’ll say; we all have to be willing to make sacrifices.
But when they say “we,” they mean “you.” Sacrifice is for the little people.
Water Drops for Migrants: Kindness, or Offense?
In this remote, semidesert landscape along the United States-Mexico border, water is a precious commodity — and a contentious one, too.
Two years ago, Daniel J. Millis was ticketed for littering after he was caught by a federal Fish and Wildlife officer placing gallon jugs of water for passing immigrants in the brush of this 118,000-acre preserve.
“I do extreme sports, and I know I couldn’t walk as far as they do,” said Mr. Millis, driving through the refuge recently. “It’s no surprise people are dying.”
Mr. Millis, 31, was not the only one to get a ticket. Fourteen other volunteers for Tucson-based organizations that provide aid to immigrants crossing from Mexico to the United States were similarly cited. Most of the cases were later dropped, but Mr. Millis and another volunteer for a religious group called No More Deaths were convicted of defacing the refuge with their water jug drops.
The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit weighed in on Mr. Millis’s appeal this month, ruling that it was “ambiguous as to whether purified water in a sealed bottle intended for human consumption meets the definition of ‘garbage.’ ” Voting 2-to-1, a three-judge panel overturned Mr. Millis’s conviction.
The issue remains far from settled, though. The court ruled that Mr. Millis probably could have been charged under a different statute, something other than littering. And the Fish and Wildlife Service continues to forbid anyone to leave gallon jugs of water in the refuge — a policy backed by this state’s immigration hardliners, who say comforting immigrants will only encourage them to cross.
From 2002 to 2009, 25 illegal immigrants died while passing through the refuge’s rolling hills, which are flanked by mountains and are home to pronghorns, coyotes, rattlesnakes and four different kinds of skunks. Throughout southern Arizona, the death toll totaled 1,715 from 2002 to 2009, with this year’s hot temperatures putting deaths at a record-breaking pace.
The Border Patrol has installed rescue beacons in remote areas along the border, including several in the Buenos Aires refuge, to allow immigrants in distress to call for help. Those who are injured and have been left behind by their guides are often so desperate they no longer fear deportation.
Still, the federal government has acknowledged that additional steps are needed to keep deaths down on its land. In 2001, it gave another aid group, Humane Borders, a permit to keep several large water drums on the refuge, each of them marked by a blue flag and featuring a spigot to allow immigrants to fill their water bottles for the long trek north.
Last year, the government considered but ultimately decided against allowing No More Deaths to tether gallon jugs to trees to allow immigrants in more remote areas to drink without taking the jugs on their way.
Right now, even after the court decision, there is what amounts to a standoff. This month, the federal government said it was willing to allow more 55-gallon drums on main pathways in the refuge. It said it would not permit any gallon jugs.
But the water jugs continue to appear.
Last week, Gene Lefebvre, a retired minister who co-founded No More Deaths, hiked along a path popular among immigrants until he reached a clearing where volunteers for his organization had recently left some jugs.
Each bottle had markings on it noting the date it was left and the exact location on the group’s GPS mapping software. There were also signs of encouragement for the immigrants: a heart and a cross on one bottle and the words, “Good luck, friends,” on another.
“We’d give water to anyone we found in the desert, even the Border Patrol,” Mr. Lefebvre said.
But opponents say the water drops are encouraging immigrants to continue to come across the border illegally. The critics say there ought to be Border Patrol agents stationed near the water stations to arrest those who are crossing illegally as soon as they finish drinking. So furious are some at the practice of aiding immigrants that they have slashed open the water jugs, crushed them with their vehicles or simply poured the water into the desert.
The Buenos Aires refuge is among the most troubled of the 551 refuge areas across the country, the federal government says. The reason is its location, adjacent to the border.
“Since its establishment in 1985, refuge staff have worked diligently to protect species such as the endangered masked bobwhite quail and pronghorn, as well as offer meaningful visitor recreational opportunities,” a recently released government report on the water controversy said. “However, over the past decade an increasing amount of refuge time and energy has been required to address the growing issue of illegal traffic entering the U.S. across refuge lands.”
In 2006 and 2007, an estimated 250,000 to 300,000 illegal immigrants crossed the refuge annually, along with Border Patrol agents pursing them, federal officials say. “As a result, refuge lands have been marred by illegal trails and roads, litter and degraded habitat,” said a government report on the problem.
The numbers have dropped in recent years, to 31,500 in 2008 and about 20,000 in 2009. “This still averages approximately 50 to 60 illegal immigrants traveling through the refuge daily,” the government report said.
Mr. Millis, a former high school Spanish teacher who now works for the Sierra Club, disputes the notion that leaving out water jugs is luring more immigrants. He said it was border enforcement efforts that had pushed those seeking to cross into dangerous desert areas.
As for spoiling the environment, he said he collected as many jugs as he left behind. He also recounts how he found the dead body of a 14-year-old Salvadoran girl near the refuge days before he was ticketed.
“People are part of the environment,” he said.
Told to Eat Its Vegetables, America Orders Fries
It’s been a busy week for vegetables.
The baby-carrot industry tried to reposition its product as junk food, starting a $25 million advertising campaign whose defining characteristics include heavy metal music, a phone app and a young man in a grocery cart dodging baby-carrot bullets fired by a woman in tight jeans.
On the East Side of Manhattan, crates of heirloom vegetables with names like Lady Godiva squash were auctioned for $1,000 each at Sotheby’s, where the wealthy are more accustomed to bidding on Warhols and Picassos than turnips and tomatoes.
Both efforts, high and low, are aimed at the same thing: getting America to eat its vegetables.
Good luck. Despite two decades of public health initiatives, stricter government dietary guidelines, record growth of farmers’ markets and the ease of products like salad in a bag, Americans still aren’t eating enough vegetables.
This month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a comprehensive nationwide behavioral study of fruit and vegetable consumption. Only 26 percent of the nation’s adults eat vegetables three or more times a day, it concluded. (And no, that does not include French fries.)
These results fell far short of health objectives set by the federal government a decade ago. The amount of vegetables Americans eat is less than half of what public health officials had hoped. Worse, it has barely budged since 2000.
“It is disappointing,” said Dr. Jennifer Foltz, a pediatrician who helped compile the report. She, like other public health officials dedicated to improving the American diet, concedes that perhaps simply telling people to eat more vegetables isn’t working.
“There is nothing you can say that will get people to eat more veggies,” said Harry Balzer, the chief industry analyst for the NPD Group, a market research company.
This week, the company released the 25th edition of its annual report, “Eating Patterns in America.” The news there wasn’t good, either. For example, only 23 percent of meals include a vegetable, Mr. Balzer said. (Again, fries don’t count, but lettuce on a hamburger does.) The number of dinners prepared at home that included a salad was 17 percent; in 1994, it was 22 percent.
At restaurants, salads ordered as a main course at either lunch or dinner dropped by half since 1989, to a mere 5 percent, he said.
The nation has long had a complicated relationship with vegetables. People know that vegetables can improve health. But they’re a lot of work. In refrigerators all over the country, produce often dies a slow, limp death because life becomes too busy.
“The moment you have something fresh you have to schedule your life around using it,” Mr. Balzer said.
In the wrong hands, vegetables can taste terrible. And compared with a lot of food at the supermarket, they’re a relatively expensive way to fill a belly.
“Before we want health, we want taste, we want convenience and we want low cost,” Mr. Balzer said.
Melissa MacBride, a busy Manhattan resident who works for a pharmaceuticals company, would eat more vegetables if they weren’t, in her words, “a pain.”
“An apple you can just grab,” she said. “But what am I going to do, put a piece of kale in my purse?”
No one really wants to admit that they don’t eat vegetables. A nurse who works at the Hospital for Special Surgery on the Upper East Side openly acknowledges that vegetables make her gag. Still, she begged to not be publicly identified because she is in the health care field and knows that she should set a better example.
David Bernstein, who lives in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, is sheepish about the lack of vegetables in his diet. He waits tables at the hip M. Wells restaurant in Long Island City, Queens, and knows his way around the Union Square Greenmarket. But his diet consists largely of bacon, yogurt and frozen stuffed chicken breasts.
“It’s just like any other bad habit,” he said. “Part of it is just that vegetables are a little intimidating. I’m not afraid of zucchinis, but I just don’t know how to cook them.”
The food industry has tried to make eating vegetables easier. Sales of convenience vegetables, like packages of cut broccoli designed to go right into the microwave, are growing. Washed, ready-to-eat bagged salads are a $3-billion-a-year business.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean people are eating more vegetables. It just means they are shifting their vegetable budget from one place to another, Mr. Balzer said. An organic cucumber might replace a conventionally grown one. A bag of lettuce replaces a head.
To be sure, vegetables are making strides in certain circles. Women, as well as people who are older and more educated and have higher incomes, tend to eat more vegetables, said Dr. Foltz, the pediatrician who worked on the C.D.C. report.
The vegetable, especially when grown from heirloom seeds on small farms, is held in such high esteem that knowing the farmer who grows the food is a form of valuable social currency. Vegetables are becoming high art. At Sotheby’s on Thursday night, the vegetable auction was part of a daylong event called “The Art of Farming,” raising nearly $250,000 to help hunger organizations, immigrant farmers and children without access to vegetables.
But vegetables are also becoming important on the other end of the economic equation. An increasing number of the nation’s 6,000 farmers’ markets allow shoppers to buy produce with food stamps. Urban gardens are springing up in vacant lots and on rooftops. Nearly every state now has programs that send fresh vegetables into poorer neighborhoods and school cafeterias.
The vegetable even has the first lady, Michelle Obama, on its side. She planted an organic garden on the White House lawn and talks up vegetables as part of her “Let’s Move” campaign against childhood obesity.
The government keeps trying, too, to get its message across. It now recommends four and a half cups of fruits and vegetables (that’s nine servings) for people who eat 2,000 calories a day. Some public health advocates have argued that when the guidelines are updated later this year, they should be made even clearer. One proposal is to make Americans think about it visually, filling half the plate or bowl with vegetables.
But clear guidance probably isn’t enough. Health officials now concede that convincing a nation that shuns vegetables means making vegetables more affordable and more available.
“We have to make the healthy choice the easy choice,” Dr. Foltz said. And the choices need to become ingrained.
For another study whose results were announced this week, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, spent three years examining the difference between children who participated in the Berkeley Unified School District’s “edible schoolyard” program, in which gardening and cooking are woven into the school day, and children who didn’t.
The students who gardened ate one and half servings more of fruits and vegetables a day than those who weren’t in the program.
For students who don’t have access to a school garden, perhaps the full-court press by the baby-carrot producers will have some effect. The iPhone application, for example, is a video game called Xtreme Xrunch Kart that starts when a player crunches a carrot (or makes a crunchlike sound) into the phone’s microphone.
But as in past attempts to revive the vegetable, none of this will necessarily be enough to change a clear aversion to eating vegetables.
“Eating vegetables is a lot less fun than eating flavor-blasted Doritos,” said Marcia Mogelonsly, a senior analyst for Mintel, a global marketing firm. “You will always have to fight that.”
Basic Religion Test Stumps Many Americans
Americans are by all measures a deeply religious people, but they are also deeply ignorant about religion.
Researchers from the independent Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life phoned more than 3,400 Americans and asked them 32 questions about the Bible, Christianity and other world religions, famous religious figures and the constitutional principles governing religion in public life.
On average, people who took the survey answered half the questions incorrectly, and many flubbed even questions about their own faith.
Those who scored the highest were atheists and agnostics, as well as two religious minorities: Jews and Mormons. The results were the same even after the researchers controlled for factors like age and racial differences.
“Even after all these other factors, including education, are taken into account, atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons still outperform all the other religious groups in our survey,” said Greg Smith, a senior researcher at Pew.
That finding might surprise some, but not Dave Silverman, president of American Atheists, an advocacy group for nonbelievers that was founded by Madalyn Murray O’Hair.
“I have heard many times that atheists know more about religion than religious people,” Mr. Silverman said. “Atheism is an effect of that knowledge, not a lack of knowledge. I gave a Bible to my daughter. That’s how you make atheists.”
Among the topics covered in the survey were: Where was Jesus born? What is Ramadan? Whose writings inspired the Protestant Reformation? Which Biblical figure led the exodus from Egypt? What religion is the Dalai Lama? Joseph Smith? Mother Teresa? In most cases, the format was multiple choice.
The researchers said that the questionnaire was designed to represent a breadth of knowledge about religion, but was not intended to be regarded as a list of the most essential facts about the subject. Most of the questions were easy, but a few were difficult enough to discern which respondents were highly knowledgeable.
On questions about the Bible and Christianity, the groups that answered the most right were Mormons and white evangelical Protestants.
On questions about world religions, like Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and Judaism, the groups that did the best were atheists, agnostics and Jews.
One finding that may grab the attention of policy makers is that most Americans wrongly believe that anything having to do with religion is prohibited in public schools.
An overwhelming 89 percent of respondents, asked whether public school teachers are permitted to lead a class in prayer, correctly answered no.
But fewer than one of four knew that a public school teacher is permitted “to read from the Bible as an example of literature.” And only about one third knew that a public school teacher is permitted to offer a class comparing the world’s religions.
The survey’s authors concluded that there was “widespread confusion” about “the line between teaching and preaching.”
Mr. Smith said the survey appeared to be the first comprehensive effort at assessing the basic religious knowledge of Americans, so it is impossible to tell whether they are more or less informed than in the past.
The phone interviews were conducted in English and Spanish in May and June. There were not enough Muslim, Buddhist or Hindu respondents to say how those groups ranked.
Clergy members who are concerned that their congregants know little about the essentials of their own faith will no doubt be appalled by some of these findings:
¶ Fifty-three percent of Protestants could not identify Martin Luther as the man who started the Protestant Reformation.
¶ Forty-five percent of Catholics did not know that their church teaches that the consecrated bread and wine in holy communion are not merely symbols, but actually become the body and blood of Christ.
¶ Forty-three percent of Jews did not know that Maimonides, one of the foremost rabbinical authorities and philosophers, was Jewish.
The question about Maimonides was the one that the fewest people answered correctly. But 51 percent knew that Joseph Smith was Mormon, and 82 percent knew that Mother Teresa was Roman Catholic.
You can take a version of the test here
At East Village Food Pantry, the Price Is a Sermon
The shopping carts are lined up hours early in Tompkins Square Park, not far from the dog run, where the East Village’s more genteel residents are unleashing retrievers and beagles and chatting animatedly. The poor or elderly waiting on benches to get the free food that comes with a dose of the Gospel seem more lost in their own thoughts, even though many meet every Tuesday.
A guard, Mike Luke, a powerhouse known as Big Mike who himself was a consumer at church pantries until he found religion and decided to work for “the man upstairs,” manages the crowd with crisp authority until the 11 a.m. service starts across the street at the Tompkins Square Gospel Fellowship. There is nervous tension because only the first 50 will get in, and suddenly two women are squabbling over a black cart.
“How do you know that’s your cart?” Big Mike firmly asks one, a fair question since the carts look alike. But the mystery is cleared up with the discovery of an orphaned gray cart.
Inside the worship hall, the 50 men and women sit in neat rows in front of a pulpit and a painting of a generic waterfall while a pianist softly plays hymns. Their carts are reassembled in neat rows as well.
The room has the shopworn air of Sergeant Sarah Brown’s Save-a-Soul Mission in “Guys and Dolls.” One almost expects Stubby Kaye to get up and sing “Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat.” But people don’t mind having to sit through a sermon as the price of admission, and few have jobs they need to run to. While they wait, volunteers fill each cart with a couple of bread loaves — redolent of a Gospel miracle, except these are ciabatta and 10-grain — a couple of bananas, a couple of less-than-freshly-picked ears of corn, a box of eggs, a box of blueberries, even an Asian pear.
The food is donated by Trader Joe’s, the gourmet and organic food purveyor, which has a store nearby. It usually feeds the kinds of professionals who use the dog run, but it provides the fellowship with a wealth of unsold baked goods, fruit and vegetables.
The fellowship was started 115 years ago as a mission to the immigrant Jews of the Lower East Side but now mostly serves the black, Latino and Asian poor. The East Village has several other pantries that dispense food without sermons; their food is government-financed and so must be religion-free. The fellowship started its giveaways in January and now feeds 250 people during three services on Tuesdays — one in Chinese — and a single evening service on Sundays and Wednesdays.
The mission is run by the Rev. Bill Jones, a lively ordained Baptist minister from the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina.
“People are not only hungry for food, but hungry for the word of God,” Mr. Jones said. “There’s not just a physical need but a spiritual need.”
Nevertheless, he is aware of the actual hunger. “If you wait for three hours to get $25 worth of groceries,” he said, “you have a need.”
He affirms that thought to the waiting crowd in a stentorian drawl.
“You all get blueberries today,” he announces. “Some of you get eggs. If you don’t get eggs, don’t be upset. You neighbor is getting eggs, so be grateful.”
The people who come include Rafael Mercado, 52, who lost his job as a mailroom clerk four years ago.
“I don’t have the kind of money now to go shopping,” he said, “so I go to many pantries.” Another is Asia Feliciano, 37, a single mother with a lush head of cornrow braids. She and her sons, Trevor, 5, and Jordan, 3, live in a nearby shelter, and they stumbled upon the mission in August while panhandling.
“It puts food on our plates every night,” she said.
Mr. Jones begins the service with a prayer — “Heavenly father, we are so grateful for the provisions you have brought us for another day.” He then offers a lesson from the Gospel of John, in which Jesus tells the disciples to love one another. With ardor that is not quite brimstone, Mr. Jones urges listeners to love one another as well, not give in to temptations and pray to remain faithful to God.
Many among the 50 sit stone-faced. But some clearly listen. Though she comes mostly for the food, Ms. Feliciano indicates that the worship has subversively taken hold.
“When I have to sit through the service, it opens my eyes,” she said. “So I started reading the Bible and I asked them for a Bible, and they gave me one.”
Anger as a Private Company Takes Over Libraries
A private company in Maryland has taken over public libraries in ailing cities in California, Oregon, Tennessee and Texas, growing into the country’s fifth-largest library system.
Now the company, Library Systems & Services, has been hired for the first time to run a system in a relatively healthy city, setting off an intense and often acrimonious debate about the role of outsourcing in a ravaged economy.
A $4 million deal to run the three libraries here is a chance for the company to demonstrate that a dose of private management can be good for communities, whatever their financial situation. But in an era when outsourcing is most often an act of budget desperation — with janitors, police forces and even entire city halls farmed out in one town or another — the contract in Santa Clarita has touched a deep nerve and begun a round of second-guessing.
Can a municipal service like a library hold so central a place that it should be entrusted to a profit-driven contractor only as a last resort — and maybe not even then?
“There’s this American flag, apple pie thing about libraries,” said Frank A. Pezzanite, the outsourcing company’s chief executive. He has pledged to save $1 million a year in Santa Clarita, mainly by cutting overhead and replacing unionized employees. “Somehow they have been put in the category of a sacred organization.”
The company, known as L.S.S.I., runs 14 library systems operating 63 locations. Its basic pitch to cities is that it fixes broken libraries — more often than not by cleaning house.
“A lot of libraries are atrocious,” Mr. Pezzanite said. “Their policies are all about job security. That’s why the profession is nervous about us. You can go to a library for 35 years and never have to do anything and then have your retirement. We’re not running our company that way. You come to us, you’re going to have to work.”
The members of the Santa Clarita City Council who voted to hire L.S.S.I. acknowledge there was no immediate threat to the libraries. The council members say they want to ensure the libraries’ long-term survival in a state with increasingly shaky finances.
Until now, the three branch locations have been part of the Los Angeles County library system. Under the new contract, the branches will be withdrawn from county control and all operations — including hiring staff and buying books — ceded to L.S.S.I.
“The libraries are still going to be public libraries,” said the mayor pro tem, Marsha McLean. “When people say we’re privatizing libraries, that is just not a true statement, period.”
Library employees are furious about the contract. But the reaction has been mostly led by patrons who say they cannot imagine Santa Clarita with libraries run for profit.
“A library is the heart of the community,” said one opponent, Jane Hanson. “I’m in favor of private enterprise, but I can’t feel comfortable with what the city is doing here.”
Mrs. Hanson and her husband, Tom, go to their local branch every week or two to pick up tapes for the car and books to read after dinner. Mrs. Hanson recently checked out Willa Cather’s classic “Death Comes for the Archbishop,” although she was only mildly in favor of its episodic style; she has higher hopes for her current choice, on the shadowy world of North Korea.
The suggestion that a library is different — and somehow off limits to the outsourcing fever — has been echoed wherever L.S.S.I. has gone. The head of the county library system, Margaret Donnellan Todd, says L.S.S.I. is viewed as an unwelcome outsider.
“There is no local connection,” she said. “People are receiving superb service in Santa Clarita. I challenge that L.S.S.I. will be able to do much better.”
As a recent afternoon shaded into evening, there were more than a hundred patrons at the main Santa Clarita library. Students were doing their homework. Old men paged through newspapers. Children gathered up arm’s loads of picture books. It was a portrait of civic harmony and engagement.
Mrs. Hanson, who is 81 and has been a library patron for nearly 50 years, was so bothered by the outsourcing contract that she became involved in local politics for the first time since 1969, when she worked for a recall movement related to the Vietnam War.
She drew up a petition warning that the L.S.S.I. contract would result in “greater cost, fewer books and less access,” with “no benefit to the citizens.” Using a card table in front of the main library branch, she gathered 1,200 signatures in three weekends.
L.S.S.I. says none of Mrs. Hanson’s fears are warranted, but the anti-outsourcing forces continue to air their suspicions at private meetings and public forums, even wondering whether a recall election is feasible.
“Public libraries invoke images of our freedom to learn, a cornerstone of our democracy,” Deanna Hanashiro, a retired teacher, said at the most recent city council meeting.
Frank Ferry, a Santa Clarita councilman, dismisses the criticism as the work of the Service Employees International Union, which has 87 members in the libraries. The union has been distributing red shirts defending the status quo. “Union members out in red shirts in defense of union jobs,” Mr. Ferry said.
Library employees are often the most resistant to his company, said Mr. Pezzanite, a co-founder of L.S.S.I. — and, he suggested, for reasons that only reinforce the need for a new approach.
“Pensions crushed General Motors, and it is crushing the governments in California,” he said. While the company says it rehires many of the municipal librarians, they must be content with a 401(k) retirement fund and no pension.
L.S.S.I. got its start 30 years ago developing software for government use, then expanded into running libraries for federal agencies. In the mid-1990s, it moved into the municipal library market, and now, when ranked by number of branches, it places immediately after Los Angeles County, New York City, Chicago and the City of Los Angeles.
The company is majority owned by Islington Capital Partners, a private equity firm in Boston, and has about $35 million in annual revenue and 800 employees. Officials would not discuss the company’s profitability.
Some L.S.S.I. customers have ended their contracts, while in other places, opposition has faded with time. In Redding, Calif., Jim Ceragioli, a board member of the Friends of Shasta County Library, said he initially counted himself among the skeptics.
But he has since changed his mind. “I can’t think of anything that’s been lost,” Mr. Ceragioli said.
The library in Redding has expanded its services and hours. And the volunteers are still showing up — even if their assistance is now aiding a private company. “We volunteer more than ever now,” Mr. Ceragioli said.
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Date: 2010-10-02 07:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-03 01:04 am (UTC)I just had to say that in light of Krugman's column and this chart, though of course by posting here I'm mearly preaching to the choir. :/
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Date: 2010-10-03 01:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-03 02:29 am (UTC)The first group can do with an income tax, the last four would have some form of government aid in any civilized nation. And what that aid would be would have to be different for each of them.
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Date: 2010-10-04 12:22 am (UTC)Because of their small percentage share of total wealth, both the "4th 20%" value (0.2%) and the "Bottom 20%" value (0.1%) are not visible on the "Actual" distribution.
In other words, the actual values are so disproportionate, the bottom two quintiles don't even register on the graph.
no subject
Date: 2010-10-04 02:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-04 12:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-02 05:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-02 10:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-03 03:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-03 11:57 am (UTC)I wonder whether the answer would have changed if they hadn't called him "Maimonides" but (also/instead) "the Rambam" - I get the impression that he's usually known as that in Jewish circles.
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Date: 2010-10-03 02:59 pm (UTC)That water article is great, but I *dread* the thought of anti-immigrant assholes deciding to put out their own jugs which contain something harmful. Here's hoping it doesn't happen.