Whitcomb: Patience, Please, on School Reform; Beach Brawl; Toward Population Implosion? Fragile Kids
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Whitcomb: Patience, Please, on School Reform; Beach Brawl; Toward Population Implosion? Fragile Kids
-- Elmer Davis (1890-1958) news reporter, author and director of the U.S. Office of War Information during World War II
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“Nets of waving sunlight
Falling through the trees;
Fields of gold-white daisies
Rippling in the breeze;’’
-- From “New England June,’’ by Carman Bliss (1861-1920), Canadian poet who spent much of his life in New England. He served as Canada’s poet laureate.
“The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.’’
-- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), German philosopher and cultural critic
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You need one person in this case -- the state education commissioner – to have clear responsibility and authority for school reform. An elected school board would weaken reform efforts by overly dispersing power.
And it could lead to excessively political and parochial decision-making, demagoguery, short-term thinking and perhaps district-wide or local corruption. The state now oversees Providence schools; previously a school board with members selected by the mayor oversaw the district. The state takeover, which came in 2019, followed years of failure to raise outcomes in most of the city’s schools. (It should be said that there are exceptions to bad performance – especially Classical High School.)
The failures are, in general, continuing. And the forced departure of Supt. Harrison Peters, who only came aboard in February 2020, has added some more chaos. Mr. Peters resigned in the controversy around his hiring of Olayinka Alege to be a Providence schools administrator despite past complaints of him “toe popping” five students when he worked in Florida and then of giving a teenage boy a non-consensual foot rub in a Warwick gym.
Bizarre enough for you?
The state, not the city, has the resources and authority to finally turn around this large, complex district – a takeover that will require much experimentation and patience. To do this, it needs to find the best national reform models and then, whatever the political heat, stick with the most promising ones.
Are there large school-system professionals in nearby Massachusetts, ranked as having the best public schools in the country, who could be enticed to lead the turnaround of the Providence system? Their proximity would give them a head start in understanding the district’s challenges.
Regarding the May 22 brawl at Narragansett Town Beach: I wonder if the Rhode Island State Police and municipal cops have enough officers to oversee the beaches in this summer of pent-up demand. This is not only a matter of public safety; it’s also an economic issue. Rhode Island’s beaches draw many visitors, and their money, from out of state. For the state’s beaches to develop a reputation for rowdiness, or worse, will scare many away.
I’ve always been surprised by the number of people who want to be at a beach with hundreds or thousands of other people, cheek by jowl, with at least a few stoned, drunk or both.
It seemed particularly strange that so many people showed up last weekend with the water still quite frigid. Then there’s the glare of the sun, that vaguely itchy feeling of salt on your face, sand in and on everything….
I don’t get the allure but I do hope that beach lovers will bring their wallets from out of state to the Ocean State’s many lovely beaches, nearby restaurants and places to stay. When they leave after Labor Day, I’ll walk on the beach.
Get Building and Retrofitting
To curtail the housing-cost surge, Rhode Island officials should make new efforts to encourage the building of multi-unit housing, be it brand new or by retrofitting more of the state’s still large stock of old but sturdy (and attractive in their antique way) mill buildings. How about converting parts of closed hospitals and stores into housing?
More happily, the housing-cost surge reflects the fact that, especially after COVID erupted, lots more people want to live in the Ocean State. But long-term sky-high prices could hurt the state’s economy by making it impossible for many workers to live and work in Rhode Island.
The identity thieves taking advantage of COVID chaos are still at it. If you receive a letter purporting to be from the Rhode Island Department of Labor and Training with the words “Pandemic Unemployment Assistance Monetary Determination,’’ along with your name and the last four digits of your Social Security number, you’re almost certainly a victim of some level of identity theft by crooks trying to steal public money.
Hit these links to file a report:
and:
Happily Falling Fertility
Some readers may have seen The New York Times’s long May 23 article on the world’s falling human fertility rates (Sub-Sahara Africa being an exception). This is leading demographers to project that the planet’s population may start to fall in the next few decades.
That’s generally very good news. A sharp slowing in population growth and then a population decline would help reverse mankind’s destruction of the natural world, make it easier to slow global warming, tend to raise wages for many and reduce the economic pressures on households. Consider that women having fewer babies means that households will have more money to pay for education and other services for the children they do have. Now if we could bring back the two-parent family….
But, of course. there will be new challenges: There will be far more old people and relatively fewer young people. We’ll need to encourage the healthy elderly to work later in life to continue to pay for Social Security, Medicare, and other social services. And we’ll have to address with more urgency the need to reduce the incidence of age-related illnesses, particularly dementias, to keep more people healthy and productive later in life.
New England, with high percentages of elderly people, and universities researching treatments and preventives for dementia (Brown University is doing famous work in this sector!), is well-placed to be on the cutting edge of eldercare.
We must extend not just longevity but the years in which older people are relatively healthy and engaged in society.
Meanwhile, prepare for big changes in American culture with the aging of the population. And how might the fertility falloff affect the relative strength of nations?
By the way, the last part of retired New York Times editor and foreign correspondent Craig Whitney’s autobiography Raveling Time is an honest and moving description of the assault, over years, of Alzheimer’s disease on his wife and the lessons he has learned as her main caregiver.
Two Mobsters on the Move
The criminal forced landing of a Ryanair jetliner and seizing (and apparent beating) of a young dissident at the orders of murderous Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko, with the cooperation of his boss, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, another killer, shows yet again the urgent need to weaken these gangster regimes as fast and as much as possible.
If democracies fail to take very tough action against the Belarusian regime, it and Putin’s Kremlin will be further emboldened for aggressive acts and brutal human-rights violations, including outside those countries. Financial sanctions must hit Lukashenko and the oligarchs around him hard. At the same time, America and our European allies should support independent Belarusian journalists in and out of the country who dare to report on the regime’s depravities.
The West has been far too easy on Putin and Lukashenko, even as they conduct relentless cyberwar against us while terrorizing pro-democracy dissidents at home and abroad.
‘Safely’ Stupid
There’s been a bit of a furor over an email sent by a Wellesley, Mass., middle school teacher who invited, as reported by The Boston Globe, staffers and students of color in grades 6 through 12 to an online healing space, adding: “*Note: This is a safe space for our Asian/Asian-American and Students of Color, not for students who identify only as White. If you identify as White, and need help to process recent events, please know I’m here for you as well as your guidance counselors.”
As it turned out, reports The Globe, a few White (or is it white?) students did attend, without incident. But in what’s supposed to be our multi-ethnic society, such exclusionary-sounding messages in a public institution leave a bad taste. And for God’s sake could they drop such saccharine phrases as “safe space,’’ as if all these kids are traumatized, and they “need help to process recent events.’’ Such flaccid language encourages emotional and psychological weakness. George Orwell, who wrote so well about political B.S., would have had fun with Wellesley.
Those speed bumps in Providence coming off the Henderson Bridge need to be adjusted. While trucks, SUV’s and other high-profile vehicles can be driven over them without damage, those driving low-slung vehicles – usually sedans -- hear the bumps scraping, and perhaps damaging, the bottom of their vehicles – mufflers, etc.
And cars are swerving to try to straddle the bumps. Too much excitement.
The Texas Way
As the bodies pile up in mass shootings around America, Texas is removing its last major gun restrictions – against the wishes of a majority of Texans, if polls are accurate. The far-right legislature has come up with a new law that will let people carry handguns without a license, background checks and training. The National Rifle Association, the gun-and-ammunition industry lobbying body, loves this.
So much for the need for a “well-regulated militia’’ cited in the Second Amendment. Instead, it’s an unregulated free-for-all.
Of course, military-style rifles are the favored tool of mass shooters. But the handgun law will lead to more individual murders in households, bars and other public places as well as robberies. (And suicides.) And it will encourage more people to travel to the Lone Star State to stock up. It’s all crazy, and we can’t do anything about it.
In last week’s San Jose mass killing of nine (followed by the suicide of the killer), the murderer had three semi-automatic handguns and a massive quantity of ammunition. Handguns aren’t nearly as efficient as rifles in mass murder, but still….
Some of those Texas guns will end up in New England.
What would be critical mass to get spineless legislators to enact real gun control? How about 200 people killed by one man with an assault rifle, which he had no trouble buying in a Red State, and using it at a QAnon rally.
Hamas Kills Gazans
As the international media continue to do sad, repetitive human-interest stories on the devastation in Gaza caused by the terrorist group Hamas’s war with Israel (whose destruction Hamas seeks), the implication all too often is that Israel killed the civilians. It would be more honest to say that Hamas killed them by sending off rockets into Israel from tightly packed Gaza, hoping not only to scare and kill a few Israelis but, especially, to draw Israeli fire. That, of course, kills Gazan civilians, which Hamas uses in its propaganda war.
Meanwhile, the Israelis help keep the temperature high by illegally taking some Palestinian properties in Jerusalem.
Early, Leisurely Reading
We’re heading into summer reading weeks. Some of my most pleasant boyhood memories are of enjoying first, say, stuff like the Dr. Doolittle books, then the likes of Kidnapped and Treasure Island, old editions of which I still have. They were brought over by my great-grandparents from Edinburgh, Scotland, which these classics’ author, Robert Louis Stevenson, came from. Then I took out from the library such historical novels as C.S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower series.
More modern stuff, such as Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby grabbed me later, along with long histories and biographies. I still remember having felt that I had joined Hemingway in that crazy, exhausting week in Pamplona and Fitzgerald through that summer in the early Twenties. And just before college, I even tackled a bit of reading in French – the very clear and simple French of Albert Camus’s novel The Stranger and a couple of the Belgian George Simenon’s Inspector Maigret’s books.
Then more onerous summer jobs and other distractions halted my long golden age of summer reading – books whose details I remember better than those I read in the crowded, hectic midst of adult life.
I wonder what with all the distractions of our Internet and cell-phone age how many young people lose themselves in summer books. I often think of these books when I look up into the summer sky and see contrails, which I gazed at from time to time as I read outside on a frayed lawn chair near a big oak many decades ago.
Contrails, evoking freedom and trips to far-away places, always seem to me romantic.
Newport Death March
Newport has a long history of exotic criminal cases – all part of the weird international romance of the place. Consider the late tobacco heiress Doris Duke’s killing, with a car, of aide and designer Eduardo Tirella in 1966; she was never charged in the death. Then, in 1982, there was the late Claus von Bulow’s alleged attempted murder via insulin (she died years later) of his rich wife, Martha (nicknamed “Sunny”). He was first convicted but a second sensational trial cleared him.
Perhaps it’s past time to offer summer tours of Newport high-society crime scenes, followed by oysters and locally produced wine at one of the City-by-Sea’s fine restaurants.