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 New Orleans I admit a hot headline on the front page of the New York Times about paying kindergarten teachers $320,000 per year absolutely caught my eye!
The back story was straightforward. A huge study under Project Star in Tennessee tracked 12,000 children in that state. The study was trying to determine whether or not class size effected a series of educational and life outcomes. A bunch of Harvard economists analyzed the results and came up with some unexpected conclusions. The main determining factor in significantly improving adult prospects for citizen wealth was whether or not the child had a good kindergarten experience. If they did: cha-ching! By 27 years old they would be making another $100 per month, $1200 a year, and so forth.
The “money shot” in the article is below:
“Mr. Chetty and his colleagues — one of whom, Emmanuel Saez, recently won the prize for the top research economist under the age of 40 — estimate that a standout kindergarten teacher is worth about $320,000 a year. That’s the present value of the additional money that a full class of students can expect to earn over their careers. This estimate doesn’t take into account social gains, like better health and less crime.”
Since I’m obsessed (as we all should be!) with what it takes to create citizen wealth for lower income families, my first thought was simple. If we now know what a kindergarten teacher might be worth, then what is a Head Start teacher worth for lower income families?!?
Admittedly, we have lots of horses in this race since Local 100 United Labor Unions represents Head Start teachers with several companies in Houston, Shreveport, and Little Rock, but if kindergarten teachers make that big a difference, logically it seems that early childhood education in programs like Head Start may be more powerful than we had imagined.
Study that, professors, and let’s see if we can’t make a difference for low-and-moderate income families!
And their beleaguered and underpaid teachers!!
 New Orleans Meeting with three visitors and friends from Korea, Yungik Jeong, Young Mi Choi, and Hwang Inhul, who work with PSAU, an organization of the unemployed and irregular workers, as informal and unprotected workers are now known there, the conversation quickly came to plight of home health care workers or domestic workers as they are sometimes called in Korea. Similar to the US, this has become a fast growing occupation which they estimated already involves 400,000 workers, yet these workers are not allowed the usual protections and social security of other Korean workers and from what they indicated are actually banned from membership in labor unions.
It was painful for me to report that in the US after many years of employment increases and rising protections brought by unionization in many states, these same critical, yet low status health care workers, are facing a crisis in state after state. Announcement curtailments of workers has already expanded waiting lists in many states, and California where there may be close to as a many workers as exist in Korea faces drastic budget proposals by the governor. If all the proposals being discussed were realized my guess is that 200,000 home health care workers could see their jobs disappear with cutbacks in state subsidies. The loss of 200,000 union dues payers would also be critical for SEIU, AFSCME, and other unions representing home health workers.
The IMF crisis a little more than a decade ago in Korea finds its lingering wake in the severe cutback of labor protections. The Great Recession in the US may end up leaving a similar tsunami for many public – and private – employees as well.
Bob Hebert in the New York Times woefully reminded today that many are averaging a 25% cutback in income in the recession and that it may take 6 to 10 years to make up the ground to move back from income insecurity to any semblance of citizen wealth.
Discussions with my Korean friends was a painful reminder of the long tail of economic crises with no end in sight.
 New Orleans Tomorrow in Phoenix Advocates & Actions will release a report called “Modification Mysteries: Playing Foreclosure Roulette with the Banks.” The report will not only document the huge ineptness of the Treasury Department and the banks in handling foreclosure modifications (as I discussed last week less than $250 million has been spent of the $50 billion TARP money set aside to prevent foreclosures according to testimony by the TARP inspector general to Congress!), but also the total indifference, program misunderstanding, and frankly incompetence of the way the banks have handled homeowners desperate for relief to prevent foreclosures.
The report details a number of cases where families have allowed Advocates & Actions to use their information. A typical horror tale is found in the situation of Jorge and Maria Carillo who are trying to save their Phoenix area home from Bank of America and its ineptness.
The contemporaneous notes speak for themselves. Read and weep with them!
Continue Reading Modifications Lost in Incompetence
 New Orleans The rush to judgment, public lynching of Shirley Sherrod speaks less to me about the stark avoidance of race, though absolutely that retreat is correctly the headline, than what it further exposes about the cowardice of conviction in the mindless process of media call-and-response where seeking face time and sound bites seems to be the pursuit rather than stranding for anything whatsoever. This sidebar is becoming the overarching theme.
I take no comfort in commentators mentioning that this is similar to the public implosion of ACORN in the video gotcha, look-at-me tactics of Andrew Breitbart and his camera thugs. Maureen Dowd is right in wondering if the White House is the “new” China where they don’t have Google access there to be able to first do the simplest form of new diligence and even check on who Shirley Sherrod might be before pushing her in front of the bus. Van Jones is right in trying to get some space and understanding for the way he was hounded out of the White House as well.
Our “mouths” have become the new bloody shirt of politics in the cultural and ideological wars replacing whether or not we served in Vietnam or ever inhaled, but for some reason there is no support for connecting our minds to our mouths and being able to be heard.
A tweet passed by quickly noting that Newt Gingrich and Howard Dean on a panel in Vegas agreed that “the White House is afraid of Fox News.” I think it’s worse than that. I think the White House is afraid to stand for its convictions. And, even worse than that, I think there is a full scale retreat from principled positions with even a slightly progressive slant.
An HBO documentary film maker approached me for help recently about what I refer to as his “ACORN Google Search” film. In the ACORN death watch his notion was “what was ACORN?” when a Google search revealed very little but what one of our ACORN Canada leaders called the “wall of hate” on one side and the liberals and left deserted the organization on the other side in the neo-McCarthy moment that had them running with their tails between their legs pretending they had never known, funded, or depended on the organization. He may not have a film there, but he certainly had a point.
I thought in the Age of Obama we might have gotten past that. Here was a guy who was simply too young for Vietnam and who didn’t pretend to have never inhaled. He wrote books that pretty much put a lot of it out there including his half-hug as a community organizer, yet he transcended all of what many might call “baggage” and became President. Oh, and he was black for godsakes! Yet, rather than encouraging or at least tolerating diversity, they have become fearful that any dissonance is off-message, disloyal, and helping the Republicans in this politically charged and polarized moment.
The right is speaking their mind, and frankly it’s scary. The left needs to at least saddle up with some courage to go with their convictions rather than cowering in fear that people will really hear their message clearly. With a little conviction they might be surprised at how much support they have in America, but until then we seem destined to even see great organizations like the NAACP join the lemmings in their rush to the sea.
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