On schools and other things

The Detroit public school system recently announced that it is going to close another 50 schools in the next year or so. 23 are slated for closures this summer. 600 teachers will be laid off. An additional 30-40 will close next year. There are currently 194 schools in DPS. Over the last few years 70+ schools have closed.

A closed school represents a lot of money. Desks, Books, Chairs, etc etc. Unfortunately due to budgetary concerns most of that capital has been left in the schools to grow dust, acquire water damage, be vandalized etc. Why have so many schools been closed? there are many reasons. 1. population contraction. 2. charter school expansion (about a third of Detroit students are in charter schools)and the biggest reason:

3. money money money. The district just can't afford to keep the schools open. The state recently stepped in and appointed a new superintendent with all sorts of special powers and a special investigator to figure out the finances. Detroit has faced falling revenues for many years for two reasons; population contraction and the impoverishment of the city. Put simply: All the people who could afford to pulled up stakes and got the heck out of Dodge. Anyway, the investigator found an additional 100 million dollars in unpaid debt that the school district didn't know about. A whole stack of invoices stashed in a drawer somewhere.

So where does this leave the students? I guess there's not really any way to describe it...crowded classrooms, limited resources, violent hallways, violent classrooms, jaded teachers without resources or the incentive to actually teach. The dropout rate is over 50% in most high schools, literacy rates in Detroit are below third world levels.

Here are some snapshots:

On March 29, 2006, students at Mackenzie High in Detroit staged a walkout to protest the lack of textbooks and toilet paper. 32 were arrested, with 8 charged for disorderly conduct, and 1 for inciting to riot. Students complained that they had only one textbook per 3 students, an administrator had an expensive plasma television, amid allegations of a missing $3,000, and leaking roofs which damaged 45 new computers in storage.

On August 31, 2007, Detroit Public Schools announced that they have opened a Detroit Police mini-station in Henry Ford High School. Detroit Free Press article indicated that police mini-stations are planned for Cody, Cooley, Northwestern and Central high schools. [54] DPS maintains its own sworn and armed police officers.

So why am I saying all of this? I have a confession. I always assumed that it was possible for anyone to make it to the top in the United States. I always said, "yes there is inequality of outcome, but there's equality of opportunity. If someone born in a poor neighborhood wants to they can make it out." And it gave me a good feeling inside. It justified my lifestyle. It gave me a feeling of superiority. Somehow I was better for having chosen to be responsible with money and for having gotten a job and gone to college and pursued success. And it justified my not doing more to help people.

And so I guess my point is this: Equality of opportunity in this country is a myth. A kid who grows up with no education, with parents who weren't educated and don't know how to fight for him, with no prospect of a job, in a place that the rich have abandoned and left for dead, does not have the same opportunity to succeed that I did. I don't say that to condemn anyone, or to try to goad you to action. Most of the people who read this blog do more than I do to help people anyway. But I say it as a confession. I was wrong. And I am one of the rich who turn their backs on the poor.

Money Money Money

1.5 trillion dollars is a lot of money.

A penny weighs 3.1 g, so if you had that in pennies it would weigh 465,000,000,000 kg. So given a density of 8.96 g/ml that makes 5189732142 square meters. so if you had a stack of pennies one meter tall, and one mile wide it would be 3243582 miles long--that's enough to wrap around the earth 135 times, or alternatively, you could build thirteen, 1 mile wide towers of pennies to the moon. (

Being the president is kind of like being Robin Hood. You get to steal from the rich to give to the poor. Except it's also kind of like being the Sheriff of Nottingham because you get to pocket a lot of coin. Bill Clinton for example makes more that a 100,000 dollars an hour giving speeches-and it's all tax free. You also get the pleasure of taking money from the rich-then letting them pay lobbyists lots of money to get it back again.

You also get to feel like to banker in monopoly--oh what-we're out of 1,000,000,000,000 dollar bills, let me just go make some more out of construction paper and tape.

Then at the end of the day you get to feel like a successful shopper just back from the mall--sure the defecit is a couple trillion now, but we'll only be 500,000,000,000 dollars a year in the red--so I'm like totally saving tons of money.

There's a plank in my eye

zip, per capita, median houshold
48105: 34,534, 73,103
85621: 10,691, 22,801
85711: 16,901, 30,909
48201: 11,641, 16,921
49269: 18,905, 48,472

taxes

Two of my siblings have recently commented on politics on their blogs so I guess I can too.

I think it is hilarious that the Chairman of the House Ways and Means committee (yeah the one in charge of writing the tax code) was cheating on his taxes. I think it's even more funny that despite the fact that he has been on the committee since 1975, his excuse was "I didn't know I was supposed to report that..."

If a man who has spent the last 33 years writing the tax code can't figure it out...

Betrayed

Three or four weeks ago, the church we attend started a new series called Consumed. We were presented with a central question...what consumes you? Christ? Money? Something else?

The opening message centered on Galatians 5: Stand free and do not let yourselves be burdened again by the yoke of slavery...do not use your freedom to indulge the sinful nature, serve one another in love...the acts of the sinful nature are...the fruit of the spirit is...

For me the central question became how do you position yourself before God. How I position myself before God and other people communicates my feelings towards them. Everyone tries to present themselves in a certain way, both to other people and to God(even when we know we can't). And for very few (or none) of us is that image that we portray, the image that we see when we look in the mirror. All of this is, I think, usually unconscious. So it is good to reevaluate ourselves on a regular basis, in order to understand our relationship with God. Also it is healthy to try to realign our actions with our mental priorities.

I know that the last paragraph doesn't make perfect sense...you try to compress two weeks of thought into a paragraph.

Anyway...I found the first few weeks at least mildly stimulating...then last week the theme of the sermon was Debt is Bondage. Impressive title I know. But I had some issues with it. Don't get me wrong, I thin kdebt is bondage, and I try to avoid it. I would like to not owe any money on our condo. But the sermon focused on on Credit Card Debt, and ignored everything else. This was the safe choice. In a church as rich as the one we go to lots of people have debt, and most f it isn't credit card debt. Also I have a hunch that the decision was made because the church owes a lot of money. I'm not sure of that, but I would be surprised if it wasn't true.

So that was ok...a little disappointing...but not that bad.

This week the sermon was on Stepping into generosity. Which is a worthy goal...I am not nearly as generous as I wish I was.

But the focus was on giving money to the church...which is ok...but the proposed spending really got me
Special Spending Projects: around 30,000 for a variety of missions projects...and 300,000 for a remodeled sanctuary...in addition to normal costs.

When I realized what this is all about I have to admit I felt betrayed. I felt like I had been led into this series under false pretenses. Because it seems that ultimately the idea behind this series is to use people's guilt about their own spending and materialism to fund a spiffy new sanctuary, itself a manifestation of the very materialism that makes it possible.

So instead of helping people overcome their involvement in materialism...we fuel their addiction...nice

On sports

We went to the UM/OSU football game yesterday. It was to say the least, an interesting experience.

I have to admit, I don't really enjoy sporting events for the most part, or at least I'm beginning to think that I don't. Crowds aren't really my thing. But aside from that, being a spectator really isn't my thing.

I love playing sports. Pretty much any sport. Granted, I'm not very good at any of them, but I enjoy letting my competitive nature free for a while from time to time. But watching sports is the worst. It's like playing, in that if you're not careful you'll become invested in the outcome, but you don't have any control over the outcome. In the case of the game I went to ysterday, I could only sit and watch as Ohio State beat Michigan. Luckily, I'm not as invested in Michigan football as a lot of other people or it would have ruined my whole day.

Over the years I've been to a few professional baseball games, and a few college football games, and even a college basketball game. And they've all been fun, to a point. My best experiences were when I was a child sat in awe at the outsized nature of big time sports. As an adult the chief pleasure in going to a game has been derived from the company. Perhaps I've become inured to the grandiose after 26 years in the US.

Inevitably, at some point during the game I begin to ask myself...what's the point. Why am I here? What is so compelling that 110,000 people would gather in one place? A bunch of young men throwing a ball around? Is that really so gripping, so important that it draws more people than church, or than the symphony, or even than a rock concert?

Besides that I always feel a little a little guilty. For one thing there is an association between big time sports and alcohol. Walking through the rows of tailgaters at 10 in the morning the alcohol flowed freely. Even on the high-school campus every car had a table set up with rows of bottles.
Besides that, there's the money issue. It would be hard to justify the money that goes toward sports in this country if it went towards buying food for homeless people. But as it is it goes to television stations, agents, owners and guys with big guns.

So anyway,

money

For the first time since 1975 the Loony is worth as much as the Greenback. So much for cheap shopping.