Because I'm obsessed with housing policy, I've increasingly seen this through a housing lens.
People who live one block west of me are zoned into Ross Elementary rather than Garrison Elementary. And Ross feeds to School Without Walls for middle school rather than Cardozo.
Ross and especially SWW are seen as "better" than Garrison or Cardozo.
And in DC elementary schools that feed into Wilson High School and especially the sub-set of them that feed into Deal Middle School are seen as particularly desirable.
This gives homeowners a lot of interest in upholding the city's "public" school system (where slots are allocated to the highest bidder via the real estate market) vs its "charter" school system (where slots are allocated by lottery).
But there's more!
In my neighborhood where we now have a good number of yuppies but where the middle school option has a bad reputation, what the yuppies want is not liberation from the zone system but for the city to build a new Shaw Middle School.
I don't really have a piece with a clear thesis in me on this, but I think those housing dynamics are a big deal alongside the union stuff and everything else.
Much demand for "good neighborhood schools" that are capitalized into the price of the property they own.
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This week’s free post — policymaking for a low trust world:
Rather than getting tied down in an endless cycle of process, targeting, and compliance checks you need simple, crude ideas that clearly do what they say they do.
The Bad Place is programs like PPP that work through complicated and indirect mechanisms, or “trust before streets” concepts that try to address trust deficits with new layers of process that only degrade performance.
Republicans have become a dangerously unhinged group with a rising Q Anon caucus and an ongoing effort to steal the election, but they’ve also surrendered on the major issue disputes of the recent past.
Democrats were disappointed by the election result because they want to govern; Republicans have dropped their ambitions and are happy to settle for gridlock.
This is a good example — a rising star in the GOP caucus is defined not by any noteworthy policy ideas, but by her embrace or conspiracy theories and trolling about her handgun.
The extent to which activists are, in effect, contract employees of grant-making institutions rather than representatives of grassroots constituencies is underrated and journalists tend to be too credulous about it.
I don't think anyone really covers the "foundation beat."
For example, if philanthropists choose to create Climate Justice groups who are skeptical of CCS technology on racial equity grounds they can (and in fact have) done that.
But they could have chosen to create CJ groups with the opposite view.
Basically the funders decide how they think issue positions should relate to one another (perhaps covertly influences by take-slingers, per @ProfHansNoel's work) and then they conjure up groups that reflect that alignment.
The checks are imperfect in various ways but as @MattBruenig has been saying they compare favorably to existing tax credit programs that aren’t so controversial.
They also point toward a better way of curing recessions in the future.