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PaperclipPerfector  20hr ago (text post)   3034 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 21, 2026

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Came by this rather remarkable clip from posted April 6, 2018:

A person who understands community and a person who understands that we cannot live in this world and only be concerned about ourselves. Our fate should be tied to each other, and our children's fate should be tied to each other, because this is actually why integration matters. If your kids are in that school, you damn sure make sure those schools get what they're supposed to get. But if you can just separate all the poor people and put them in these schools over there, you don't care what happens to those kids in that school. A New York Times reporter in a high-poverty school changes the school, right? Okay. There are certain things that just are not going to happen in that school. I can go to that school and say there's a problem, and it gets fixed immediately.

She posted this on X [Archive] on June 9, 2024.

Eight years ago today the @nytmag published my cover story on school segregation in the great “melting pot” of NYC and the way elite parents and politicians conspire with structural inequality to keep our schools separate and unequal. Eight years later, this sweet baby girl on the cover is getting ready to graduate 8th grade as a bright, empathetic, funny, honor roll student from @uaunison, a non-screened, neighborhood middle school. By test-score metrics many would label this school a failing school, but just as I write in the piece, we judge these schools AND their students without ever stepping foot inside. My daughter is not worth more than any other child. Eight years later, I still know we made the right choice.

That is a fascinating find. The transcript cuts off too soon. Continuing

the mums who live across the street in the housing project can go to that school and complain day in and day out and every-one writes them off and no-one cares and then we say "they just don't care about their kids' education, they just don't advocate for their kids --- its not true; we don't listen to them" This is about us sharing the advantage that we have with those that don't have it, so maybe my kid doesn't get every single advantage but she already has so many

NHJ is almost there - she just has to realize what the "advantage" is. But she fumbles it, following up with a non-sequitur.

I think what I'm asking people to do is if you can give your kid everything else do you have to take the public resources and an education as well from the poor black or brown child maybe a good public education is the only thing that their parent could give them, that's the argument I'm making

I can trace discussion of the "advantage" back to Hirschman's book Exit, Voice, and Loyalty published in 1970. The political impact of the book came from the idea of coerced loyalty. If the rich are unable to "exit", they will speak up, that is use "voice" and this will improve things for the poor as well as the rich.

This idea was applied to education in the United Kingdom. Here is an article from twenty years ago https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2005/may/02/election2005.publicservices

During the 70s and 80s, looked at through the prism of Hirschman, the left and the right in Britain were polarised. The left wanted to reduce the possibilities for exit and promote voice by, for instance, abolishing private schools. The right wanted to increase the possibilities for exit through privatisation and school vouchers. The centre brooded away, and has now come up with its own solution: choice.

My old analysis was that "voice" depends on both "talk" and on "listen". Failing to speak up (talk=0) results in voice=0. Complainers may also be ignored (listen=0) which also leads to voice=0. A minimal model is multiplicative voice = talk × listen. Reducing "exit" affects "voice" both by increasing "talk" (if you cannot walk away, you can always try complaining louder) and also by reducing "listen" (why bother listening to people who a trapped? They just have to take it.) And my guess at the effect sizes was that halving "exit" doubled "voice", and reduced "listen" to one quarter. 2×1/4=1/2. "talk" may have increased, but "voice" halves.

NHJ confirms my guess with her emphatic claim that "mums who live across the street in the housing project" exercise "talk" and this fails to constitute "voice" due to the absence of "listen". Then she stops short of noticing that her advantage is "exit". When she finds out that the school doesn't listen she can move her child to a school that does.

There is an ambiguity about "exit". What is the end game of strong exit rights? Does every-body move their children, the school shuts down, and the teachers lose their jobs? Do enough parents move their children to get the attention of the head master, who sacks teachers that don't listen, or who listen but fail to act, resulting in the school improving? Or does the system win? The rules that create a dysfunctional system are state level rules and nothing improves.

I'm unhappy about using fake numbers in my exposition. We may say that voice is a function of exit, writing v(e) and that voice depends on exit via both talk and listen, writing v(t(e),l(e)) before using the chain rule to obtain dv/de = ∂v/∂t dt/de + ∂v/∂l dl/de. Then I'm making claims about signs.

  • ∂v/∂t > 0 talking contributes to voice
  • ∂v/∂l > 0 listening contributes to voice
  • dt/de < 0 if you can leave, leave; if you cannot leave, complain.
  • dl/de > 0 people listen when their customers can walk out of the door taking their money with them

and finally

  • dv/de > 0 because dl/de is the big one, not dt/de

which says that removing peoples exit rights reduces their voice.

But if you can just separate all the poor people and put them in these schools over there, you don't care what happens to those kids in that school. A New York Times reporter in a high-poverty school changes the school, right? Okay. There are certain things that just are not going to happen in that school. I can go to that school and say there's a problem, and it gets fixed immediately.

This is reminding me of The Exile's piece on Dworkin

Everyone in her circle knows that you say the right things and then fuck off with your kids because you're not gonna overcome institutional inertia and the consequences of disparate impact thinking. she was the one who actually believed it was just "resources" and that she could bully an entire school into shape.

I'd compare it to voting third party on the logic that a third party could be viable if enough people were willing to vote third party. Whether it's true or not, you changing your stance doesn't make everyone else operate on that logic.

But it's not like she was ground down by the experience of trying to improve the education her daughter was receiving. Instead, she basically just assumed that her daughter was being taught, took the school's word for it that they were doing a good job, and... That's it. No actual effort to bully the school into shape. If she had, she could have changed course for her daughter much more quickly.

Even given her ideology, it doesn't make sense. She should have been working to improve the school for the collective, instead of whatever it is she did.

She did try to bully the school into shape, she wouldn't call it "bullying", but this is pretty much what I imagine bullying a school into shape to sound like:

After lunch, I headed straight to the principal’s office to meet with her. Afterward, I sent a lengthy email about what I had witnessed and demanded the unsafe lunchroom conditions be addressed. In what had become a pattern when we raised concerns, it took several days before the principal responded and several more weeks of emails and calls before she announced a plan to address the lunchtime issues.

We had to stay and fight for the students who did not have options, and so we started to become a thorn in the principal’s side.

The article is full of the assumption that all these poor kids needed is a NYT writer savior telling the principal that maybe they shouldn't let kids act rowdy. As if it never occured to them.

All this to avoid accepting that, let alone admitting anything regarding genetics, some kids' early years and family environment set them up to fail and drag down others with them and that the damage caused to others by trying to act like they can be given the same chances is not worth it.

That works as an argument for removing the freedom to choose schools for your kids. Not as an argument for individual parents to martyr their own children on the altar of ideology. Forcing all the rich people to mingle with the poors may make a difference. Forcing your own kid to do so while alternatives exist will only leave you isolated and powerless.

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