Quote:
Originally Posted by strongbad635
LAW AND ORDER: Conservative mayors, when you control for poverty rates, race, and a host of other variables, don't have better records than liberal mayors on crime. Point in case: Baltimore has had nothing but liberal mayors for the past two decades as crime has dropped to less than half what it was in the 1980s. Indianapolis, a city that has had a mix of conservative and liberal mayors (mostly Republicans), has seen a crime increase since the 1980s. Additionally, is the drop in crime in cities experiencing an urban renaissance the result of said investments, or did lower crime LEAD to more investment? In most American cities, the investment and revitalization happened and THEN crime dropped as neighborhoods became less racially/economically segregated and poverty rates dropped.
URBAN SCHOOOLS: Milwaukee was one of the first cities in the country to enthusiastically implement charter schools in the early 1990s. Now here we are, almost a quarter century later, and their urban schools are performing WORSE than they were before charter schools. Study after study shows that charter schools don't outperform traditional public schools. Study after study shows that weakening teacher's unions, ending teacher tenure, and implementing stick-and-carrot incentives like merit pay that treat teachers like trained dogs don't lead to any improvement in student performance, either. There is only one factor that tracks students's academic performance when controlled for every single variable: the income of the child's parents. Lower poverty ALWAYS equals better-performing schools, in every county, in every state, and in every country. Everything else we're doing to our schools is cosmetic at best and harmful at worst. Regarding teacher tenure in particular, it exists for a reason. Teachers have a great responsibility on their shoulders and many, many decisions they must make that cannot possibly make everyone happy. Like a judge in the court system, they often have to choose what is right (or what is legal) over what is popular, and tenure is sometimes the only protection they have to make these decisions independently and without conflicts of interest. Not to mention the complete lack of evidence that ending teacher tenure has any positive effect whatsoever on students. It never ceases to amuse me how many of my conservative friends decry the lack of discipline in today's public schools while simultaneously support removing the one tool (teacher tenure) that protects the ability of teachers to ENFORCE such discipline in their classrooms.
CITY EMPLOYEES: Pension and compensation packages for city employees is a difficult issue, and many of these generous packages were negotiated and set in stone during a time when cities were expecting to continue to be able to annex outlying lands to broaden their tax base. They were also growing in population and did not anticipate white flight that would cause their fiscal resources to dry up. Probably the best solution to this problem is to consolidate many of these municipal jobs into regional positions covering multiple cities in any given area under one department. This has the double effect of both securing a more stable and predictable tax base to fund these positions and streamlining excess government jobs that are created when many small towns have duplicate positions only serving a small population. If conservatives actually cared about smaller government, this would be a no-brainer, but most of them don't; they care a lot more about facilitating segregation and ensuring the more fortunate members of society can wall themselves off from everybody else to hoard resources for themselves.
It wasn't mentioned in the above post, but we are neglecting to discuss the #1 cause of disinvestment in American cities: free trade and supply-side economics. This double whammy has done more to facilitate the loss of jobs from American urban centers than anything else possibly could. The fiscal woes of Detroit and Cleveland did not happen absent the federal policies we have embraced to allow gigantic corporations to consolidate into behemoths that stifle competition, trim millions of jobs, and ship many of the remaining ones overseas thanks to corporate-friendly trade policies that shaft America in order to help companies rake in record profits that never make it back into the hands of 99% of American citizens.
We've been "open-minded" to these conservative policies for decades, and with disastrous results. It's time to dump them in favor of what has been proven to work better in the past, along with a pragmatic approach to today's changing economic scene.
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First off, I want to applaud you for giving a thoughtful, respectful, and engaging response. I expected the worst, but thank you for not resorting to ad homier attacks.
First, there is no reasonable person who would disagree with you that increased investment and a focus on economic/social integration definitely reduce the social alienation that contributes to crime, but it is also true that proactive policing and a focus on enforcing quality of life issues in the public sphere help to reduce crime as well. Don't get me wrong, police abuses such as those seen in Ferguson, MO and NYC are completely unacceptable and most conservatives agree. However, we do need a proactive police department focused on enforcing QOL crimes and doing the needed patrolling to keep urban areas safe. I'm not saying your wrong, but we're both right.
Second, just like the above, you're absolutely right that poverty is a massive headwind to educational attainment and it does need to be remedied via early childhood education, smaller class sizes and more after school activities. However, we should consider the
judicious use of charter schools in cases where the mainstream public school system has failed to adjust to student needs. Nowhere did I say charter schools or vouchers are a full-stop solution to all that plagues urban school systems, but they can be *part* of the solution.
Third, this is the one issue where I do break sharply to the "right". Okay, no one is saying public employees should be paid minimum wage, and again, you are right that we do need to encourage more county and metropolitan wide governmental organizations, but I'm sorry, there's no excuse for some of the incessant whining and exorbitant compensation packages public employees make. Here in Philadelphia, the Philadelphia public school system is in a massive hole, and many things, not just employee compensation, has brought us here. However, upon the suggestion that employees should pay 5% of their healthcare costs, we are now declaring a "War on Teachers".
Let's be frank here, if you put everything else aside for a moment, I don't see the justification why the public sector should somehow play by a different economic playbook than the rest of us. Even many countries in Northern Europe have flexible unions that understand if organized labor is to have any future in industrialized societies it needs to work with management and understand that some things that might have worked in the past don't cut it anymore. Forget arguments about tax breaks and look at it this way: think of how much more money would be freed up for schools, public transit, healthcare etc....
Again, there are good ideas and perhaps not-so-good ideas that come from all points on the political spectrum. My main point is not to turn this thread into a back-and-fourth on individual policy points, but to say that there are conservatives out there who do want to see cities succeed and do have something to add to the conversation. Not to point fingers or create a firestorm, but SSP has a very bad habit of shutting down certain "viewpoints" or looking down on certain cities that don't conform to a certain ideal. It's unrealistic to expect the American public to somehow wake up one morning and embrace Paris-style urbanism wholesale and calling them a bunch of hicks or racists because we urbanizing slower than some would like doesn't help. I can't tell you how many times someone from say Atlanta or Dallas points out a positive (...if very incremental) move towards more urban and sustainable living only to be pooped on because they didn't bulldoze everything and turn Plano, TX into the next Greenwich Village. Patience is a virtue.
Oh, and to add...as far as free trade is concerned, it's not going away. If it wasn't that, it'd be technological advancement knocking out jobs. "Bringing back the Factories" is a scam because even if you did, you'd only need 10-20% of the people to pump out the same raw tonnage of products. I'm not going to render a verdict on wither this is right or wrong or dive deep into this subject. I just want to say this is a phenomenon cities cannot control. It's like Buffalo saying we'd only be more prosperous if we had the same weather as Miami. Oh well.
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