I’m back in good health, not 100% but close enough for government work. Last night I felt good enough to try eating and had breakfast for dinner, poached eggs, cheese, and ham on naan. I lived. This morning, technically afternoon I had breakfast for lunch, sausageeggandcheese on naan. I survived! There’s no discomfort. In the process of being sick I have expanded medical knowledge. I went almost exactly 72 hours without coffee. No lie! I know I wouldn’t believe it possible if I hadn’t seen I for myself. I didn’t have the shakes or hallucinations or anything. I might even be able to go longer but I don’t want to find out. My body might be able to take it but I’m not as sure about my psyche. If I wasn’t sleeping most of the time I would not have been coherent enough to blog. Now I have two cups of coffee in me; I feel like Underdog after a super-energy pill. And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is coffee. The only reason I’m not going to hell is that it doesn’t exist.
This little bout of Crohn’s has made me miss too much good music. It owes me big time. I have something down for tonight too but I’m having my cataract surgery tomorrow and I’m not taking any chances. I’m taking it easy today. Last night I missed Tomoko Omura Roots Quintet. I haven’t seen Tomoko since July and even longer for the Roots Quintet. I will never figure out how this works. Tomoko is on my never miss list yet I keep missing her. Tonight’s show is Nora Brown with Jerron Paxton. I don’t know Nora but love Jerron and don’t see him often enough. I suffer from FOMO.
I have plenty of music coming up, too much. I have so many conflicts. When are my musician friends going to get it together and check my calendar before scheduling gigs? Sometimes things work out. Oliver the Crow and Robby Hecht are playing the same night in New York. Good thing it’s a co-bill so I can see them both.
Now for something completely different, the College Admissions Scandal. I cannot look at a news site or my FB feed without seeing multiple references to it. Most but not all miss the most important thing. The particulars of the case that is drawing so much attention is in the scheme of things not very important. That 37 people got into elite colleges by bribery hardly effects anyone. It means 37 people that deserved it get in didn’t, out of the millions of people entering college that’s not even a rounding error. It involves celebrities albeit B-Listers so people care. It provides clear villains and people want to believe that everything bad that happens is because of bad people. It avoids all those unwanted greys.
What all that can highlight or hide, depending on how it’s treated, is the far broader inequalities in education, the systematic ones that effect millions. People often don’t want to face them as the people that are most politically engaged often benefit from them. What makes it hardest to deal with is that it’s about prioritizing what’s best for their own children, something which is not only true of most people but considered a virtue.
There’s a range of things that people do and what gets people most outraged are the things that are not available to themselves. I don’t know anyone that approves the very wealthy getting their kids into elite schools by making large gifts to the school. You endow a new building and your kid will get into Harvard. This goes on all time. Far more people get into elite schools via this route than bribery. It’s semi-legal. It would be illegal if done as an explicit quid pro quo, but it’s not. It’s just understood by everyone involved.
Far more common, the largest affirmative action program is the preferential acceptance of legacies. Colleges know there’s no better way of getting donations from their alumni than accepting their children. So the same families get preferential treatment generation after generation. The legacies not only get the benefits of a good education but more importantly for most, making the connections that will help them for a lifetime. People might object to this in the abstract but not in practice. How many parents are not going to make sure that Harvard doesn’t know that their daughter is the child of an alumnus? Who’s it going to hurt? Some unknown student that isn’t the child of an alumnus. You can’t point to a specific victim.
Perhaps your child is not going to apply to the school you went to. You want better for your child. What do you do? You give your child every advantage available to you. You send your students to Test Prep courses. You hire tutors. You pay for lessons in sports and arts that can help your kid get into college. You move to the area with the best school system or send your kid to private school. You send your kid to enrichment programs, when I was in high school I went to an NSF program at Western Michigan University and an astronomy course at the New York Hall of Science. This is what good parents do. It’s what you do. Perhaps more important than all these things, is the day to day enrichment you’ve given your child; you take them museums, plays, and concerts. You take your kid to the library. You’ve exposed your children to cultural enrichment at home. I grew up surrounded by classical music, opera, and art. My father would challenge me to figure out the composer of the work playing on radio or the artist that painted a work in a book. They didn’t do this to make it easier for me to get into college. They did these things because they wanted to share what they loved with the son, and they knew it delighted me.
But what of the students whose parents didn’t go to college, who don’t have the advantage of knowing these things themselves? What of the parents who work two jobs and don’t have time for these things? What of the children whose parents don’t value education? Do we want the sins of the father to fall on their children?
I have problems with school choice as that allows the children of parents with the means and disposition to go to the good schools and leave the bad schools to those who have the least advantageous home life. If you go to the school your zoned for it’s in the interests of parents to make all schools better, not just the one their child goes to.
The way we finance schools is criminal. They get financed by local property taxes, so wealthier students go to schools with more resources. That’s the opposite of how things should be. The children whose parents don’t take them to museums, who don’t read to them, who do not have a home filled with a love of learning, are the ones that need the most resources. But we can’t get that because the engaged parents are also the engaged voters, and they want what’s best for their children.
People don’t even want to think about these things as it creates a conflict between being a good parent and being a good citizen. Ideally I would like all public school to be national, so that a kid in rural Mississippi gets the same resources as one in Jericho, Long Island’s best school district. No, he should get more resources as the parents in Jericho will be providing a better home life. How do you get there? How do you get parents in Jericho to accept that their tax dollars are going to help kids they don’t know as much as their own? Either their taxes will have to go way up to bring everyone up to Jericho’s level or the wealthier school districts will have to make do with less.
It’s easier to mock the parents of the children who cheated to get their kids into college. It’s much more difficult to restructure our entire education system. Until we do equal opportunity cannot exist and we’ll have to try and counter it with affirmative action, giving a boost to those least advantaged.
Wise Madness 