The United States is particularly good at looking a sprawling problem like systemic disinvestment in public education square in the face and thinking “I bet some very small individual purchases will fix this.”
I've been trying to think of a good phrase for this sort of behavior — like "hygiene theater" for unnecessary COVID cleaning, but for vocations we don't actually appreciation
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Have you seen a local story on 'businesses can't fill positions b/c low pay + COVID fears' (that may or may not blame unemployment benefits)? I'm collecting them
This nut allergy / kid coddling essay is so bizarre; do we not recall what became of the last over-coddled generation (answer: after being shamed for moving back into our parents' basements if those basements existed in the first place, we turned into work robots)
Also there's a great section in Barbara Ehrenreich's FEAR OF FALLING where she quotes a bunch of different conservative writers bemoaning the state of coddled and lazy boomers (in their 20s) in the 1970s
Midge Decter's LIBERAL PARENTS, RADICAL CHILDREN (1975): the boomer who "languishes now in a hospital where the therapists feel that in another few months he might attempt a few tasks & even...hold down a job"
also omg forgot to share that one of the Baylor influencer twins (currently finishing up their senior year) got engaged yesterday
reminds me of the Christian university where many of my friends went where one of the women's dorms had sweatshirts depicting the three thing residents should do before graduating and one of them was get an engagement ring?????
I am enduringly fascinated by the US vaccine rollout map because it resists any attempt at straightforward narrative/explanation
You can make some immediate extrapolations here looking at some of these clusters but then they fall apart
Montana, however, is a pretty straightforward narrative: tribal nations getting it done (Glacier County has fully vaccinated 99+% of the population 65 and older)
Childcare is incredibly expensive for parents — and yet the people doing the work are paid very little, w/15-25% below the poverty line nationwide. No one's getting rich.
It's a classic market failure — and has been for decades:
You know what we've historically done with other services, like K-12 education, road construction, sewage treatment, public park maintenance, that would also be massive market failures? We decide to fund them publicly!
This would've happened YEARS ago if not for regressive baggage about affordable care "incentivizing" women to work out of the home — and also the enduring expectation that women, and women of color in particular, should essentially do this work for free
I started out reporting this piece by focusing on the high cost of childcare & how to lessen the burden; turns out there's one weird fix, but I was thinking about the entire problem the wrong way
What if we think of childcare not as a personal responsibility, something to endure and forget about when you get through it, but a public good, deserving of public funding — and, like other public school jobs, treat it as a "good job" & pathway to the middle class?
The percentage of early childhood educators living below the poverty line is *astonishing.* So is the pay gap between ECE workers w/degrees and K-8 teachers. The turnover rate is so expensive — plus you're driving so many people who love the work out of the profession