Joan Vennochi’s column today is excellent, and adds some desperately-needed perspective to the narrative that unfortunately is starting to define the race for Mayor of Boston. I would quibble with a couple of things in it, but overall, she nails an important and badly under-discussed point.
This is the key:
Forget about new Boston versus old Boston. The real issue is rich Boston versus poor Boston and whether the next mayor cares enough to do something about it.
Yes, yes, yes (as I’ve already argued, I must add). Here’s more on that topic.
In the midst of an economic boom, 36,000 Boston children live in poverty, writes [Don] Gillis. The top 10 percent of Boston’s families earned as much income before taxes as the bottom 75 percent of Boston families combined. Meanwhile, families at the 95th percentile earned nearly 40 times the income of those at the 5th percentile. “With poverty at a 20-year high in Boston, the next mayor must concern himself with addressing inequality,” Gillis argues.
Both candidates promise they will, but both should be pressed on their biases and loyalties.
It’s important to stand up to labor when it comes to negotiating contracts. But it’s also important to stand up to developers when it comes to upgrading linkage formulas and deliver more affordable housing. And what about corporate tax breaks?
Yes. Someone, please ask Joan to moderate a debate.
Vennochi criticizes some of Marty Walsh’s more aggressive backers for trying to create a “phony class war” by focusing on John Connolly’s upbringing, labeling that “a losing strategy.” I absolutely agree. She also could have mentioned some of her colleagues’ *cough*Lehigh*cough* unfortunate obsession with unions, and their misguided apparent belief that if only we could crush the unions, all the city’s problems would be solved. She has alluded to that in a previous column; still, since she’s calling out people who are pushing the wrong issue, I’d have liked to have seen it mentioned here again.
But that’s a quibble. Overall: brava to Joan Vennochi for trying to get people to pay attention to what really should be driving this race. Here’s hoping that both candidates’ partisans – including Vennochi’s colleagues at the Globe – are listening.
This Working America couldn’t have tested that piece with undecided voters, or they’d know it would backfire. And they couldn’t have spent much time thinking about how well it would play into John Connolly’s message of “Walsh can’t contain his union thug buddies”. It was a dumb piece, and they have harmed Marty Walsh, who I am supporting.
They allowed the subject to change from ‘who is the person better equipped to manage the city, who is the person who’s values I trust, with a background that understands the struggles of working class families’ to ‘who can better control their supporters’.
It’s really disheartening to see this happen, and I agree there probably was nothing legally Marty could have done to stop it, and the piece surely hit the post office well before Marty could say much. I don’t blame his campaign. But it is doing damage.
To David’s larger point, I totally agree that there needs to be more of an effort to show this anti-union bias of the Globe’s (and others) is really awful for Boston.
I posted this comment to Vennochi’s column:
The WBUR poll out yesterday had Walsh leading in the $25k-$75k income bracket, Connolly leading in $75k-$150k.
The pollster in today’s Globe story said of Connolly, “If you are looking at the type of person he is attracting, it is more upper-income, more highly educated, and possibly more Republican.”
So while “class war” is hyperbole, there is a difference in who sees whom as an advocate. And if you look at their records, Walsh has been involved in fighting poverty on a number of fronts (jobs, housing, minimum wage, etc.) while Connolly seems to think education alone can solve the problem.
Look at these policy differences, if the differences in their life stories don’t move you.
Paul McMorrow:
w know where it came from. Like here.
No, not according to the article: “The source of these groups’ funding can often be opaque; while some file disclosure reports with campaign finance regulators, others accept funds funneled through nonprofits and shell corporations that are exempt from disclosure requirements.” I guess it’s okay when Walsh does it, but when it’s the Koch Brothers who do it, its anti-democratic? Pervasive outside, special interest money is a major problem in American politics. Citizens United is damaging to democracy. You can’t pick and choose based on who you’re supporting this time around. Boston voters should question why big labor is spending so lavishly, and secretively to elect Marty Walsh. What do they expect to get out of it?
as you put it, is the only thing that brought this nation out of 1890s-style income inequality. As “Big Labor” has declined in influence, we’ve gone right back to where we were before FDR: huge concentration of wealth at the top. It’s amazing that “Big Labor” has lost so much of its membership and clout, but none of its ability to spook even self-described “progressives” as a scary “special interest.”
I’d like nothing more than a decent system of campaign financing, but no thanks to me this is the world we live in. I’m much less concerned with all the hand-wringing about process and much more concerned about what’s going on in this country. In particular, I’m appalled by the demonization of organized labor — the only major component of the “progressive” coalition focused on the economic struggles of lower wage earners — by people who consider themselves liberal.
What do they expect to get out it? Maybe a mayor who doesn’t try to blame all the problems in our schools on underpaid teachers who work hard every day at a job he couldn’t hack. Maybe they’d like a mayor who doesn’t say, “You see, the private sector has eliminated decent wages and job and retirement security for its employees, so you public employees have to join them in penury.”
How much of a property tax increase can middle class voters who own homes in this city take to make sure that the unions get the contracts that they want? There has to be fiscal balance and I don’t think Walsh provides that balance. Your statements about Connolly, are false–he doesn’t blame “all the problems… on underpaid teachers.”
There certainly needs to be one. However, I think the challenge in trying strike that proper balance is more a problem of the means by which we fund our public services, education especially, than one of the unions asking for too much.
I agree with your first point. At this time, however, the reality is that the mechanism (property taxes, etc.) used to fund the city government is unlikely to change in the short term.
Yet I still feel that it’s imperative to talk about how unsustainable this system is. If we allow the discussion to only dwell on the realities of the short term, we’ll never see change in the medium to long term.
As it is, taking education as an example, we have a system that pits middle class property owners who want high quality education for their children yet (rightly) feel squeezed by raising property taxes against middle class teachers (who are also property owners and have children of their own), struggling to remain in the middle class. It’s the middle class fighting among themselves over what is becoming, due to increasing wealth inequality, an increasingly smaller piece of the pie. And what makes this even worse is the reality of who truly benefits from increased educational excellence. Sure the individual benefits, but the truth is that maintaining and growing a highly educated workforce is a cornerstone of our commonwealth’s economy. The more educated our citizens, the more competitive we are nationally and globally. And when our economy grows, who benefits the most? These days, increasingly, it’s a smaller and smaller fraction of the very wealthy. Yet funding schools largely through property taxes is a great way to ensure that the folks who reap the most from the benefits of educational excellence get to pay a disproportionately small percentage of their overall income to the support of our educational efforts.
To me, this is the discussion that we really need to be having.
How much of a property tax increase can middle class voters expect to pay because big developers and lawyers are funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars to Connolly? It’s different because they put their names on their checks? How different is the influence? Union power is aggregated through their organizations, not through huge individual donations, which most individual members can’t pony up.
on the outside money flowing into the race shows a dramatic imbalance. Honestly, I don’t understand your first question. There are lots of lawyers and developers supporting Marty Walsh too. The point is that the source of the money isn’t clear when it comes from these outside groups; they aren’t legally constrained by contribution limits; it’s unbalanced in favor of Walsh; and, the imbalance is due to labor money. And, yes, I do think that there’s a major difference when there are limits and you have to put your name and address on your check. I’m not sure what you mean by “huge” but individuals can give up to $500. The outside groups don’t have the contribution limits to individual candidates, and they can take in as much as they want from an individual, or another organization without reporting requirements (in some cases).
Has Boston ever passed a property tax override? Ever needed to? Ever even voted on one?
Get real.
Spending and taxes are legitimate issues but let’s not go overboard on the “how big a tax hike” thing.
The question for any community ought to be, How much money are we talking about, and what do we get for it?
Hand waving about tax “hikes” just obscures that conversation.
Nice one.
not so much.
It’s pretty clear why this has been an expensive election. Competitive elections for Mayor don’t happen all that often in Boston.
More importantly, it’s a reflection of the passion that exists on both sides.
I am not seeing the candidate who is going to distance themselves from this type of damaging leadership, insider politics and flawed priorities.
Casino Menino, Bobby “slots” DeLeo, Governor “all in” Patrick, Connolly…..Walsh…..etc., etc…etc.
that radically changing public schools is going to reduce inequality:
American students (Mass. students especially) are better educated now than in the 1970s. Yet inequality is much worse. There are some very well-educated people in our society, like adjunct professors and a lot of law school grads who are definitely stuck on the lower part of the ladder.
So Connolly’s ideas of school reform are not going to deliver on addressing inequality.
“American students (Mass. students especially) are better educated now than in the 1970s”?
Really? I’d like to see some data that supports that. My children attended public schools in an affluent north shore (Massachusetts) community that, between 2000 and 2012, had nowhere near the course selections available to me in my public high school between 1967 and 1970.
The schools my children attended could not offer AP Calculus and AP Physics in the same year because there was only one teacher for both. They could not offer Spanish or German classes in their middle school because there was no Spanish or German teacher in the middle school. The middle school theater program was dropped altogether.
I agree that schools in Massachusetts have much more elaborate athletic facilities. My children attended a suburban High School in a very beautiful new building. Such physical investments are not the same as providing them a good education.
Can be found here, using the “gold standard” of ed statistics, the NAEP.
http://nationsreportcard.gov/
I don’t doubt that Black and Hispanic students have made significant gains since the 1970s. That’s a marvelous thing. I don’t see, in those statistics, what proportion of the overall sample those subgroups represent. Similarly, I don’t doubt that the gender gap narrowed in comparison to 1973.
I am acutely aware that educational opportunities for minorities and women were far more restricted in the 1970s than they are today. Many of us have worked hard to accomplish that, and we all celebrate it.
At the same time, America — and especially Massachusetts — has been slashing taxes and attacking government for decades. Public education has been among the favorite targets. The impact of that thinly-veiled hostility towards education has been that educational opportunities for middle-class white suburban children are smaller today than they were in the 1970s.
I’ve helped make minorities and girls get a larger share of the education pie in the last forty years, and I celebrate the progress we’ve made. At the same time, that “education pie” is itself a smaller piece of the larger economic pie than it was then — and middle class white suburban children appear to be bearing a disproportionately large share of that reduction.
The fact remains that my children did not get the same opportunities in their public high school that I got in mine. For better or worse, I and my children are white and middle-class. My youngest daughter, a gifted student, could not take AP Physics and Calculus in her high school as I did in mine because those classes were not offered. With all due regard to statistical differences in the gender gap, my daughter suffered in comparison to the 17 year old female students whom I sat with in AP Physics and Calculus classes at Robert E. Peary High School in Rockville, MD in 1970.
Public education is broken in Massachusetts today. It is broken because we don’t invest nearly enough in it. It is broken because we don’t value our educators, and we don’t value the results of their efforts. It will remain broken until we raise taxes and raise teacher salaries. We don’t need batteries of standardized tests, we don’t need expensive “charter schools” or “vouchers” (both of which are thinly-veiled euphemisms for segregated schools), we don’t need to dismantle teacher’s unions, we don’t need more posturing about “efficiency”.
We need a culture that values public education and expresses that value by paying higher taxes to attain it. I remain convinced that when have better paid higher quality teachers, we will have better outcomes.
Public education is not “broken.”
That word is a great excuse for the righties to push things like vouchers, charter schools, etc.
“I remain convinced that when have better paid higher quality teachers, we will have better outcomes.”
Certainly part of the solution, Tom! As a Cambridge teacher who has been without a contract for 2 years, I hear you! Our salaries have gone nowhere the past 3 or 4 years while the Superintendent is going to see his salary rise from $266,000 to $275,000 next year. Having one rich guy at the top of the organization does not really show a culture that values public education.
But our system is not broken. Every day thousands of Bay State teachers go into the classrooms and teach our children with better training, curriculum, and textbooks than we had 30 years ago. And if you like, here is a link showing the statistically measured improvement in math by 17 year olds. Trend graph is at the bottom of the page, and might take 20 seconds to load. Note that since disadvantaged groups like Hispanic and Black children now make a bigger percentage of the population, a straight up average masks the measured progress.
This exchange started because I disagree with your statement that “American students (Mass. students especially) are better educated now than in the 1970s”.
I grant you that my characterization of today’s public education as “broken” is perhaps overwrought (I have been known to do that from time to time). On the other hand, finding enough common ground with the righties to at least agree on the need for significant change might be a good thing.
As a scientist and engineer, I understand and pay attention to statistical and objective arguments. As a parent, I care more about the actual first-hand experiences of my children (and presumably eventual grandchildren).
The public education that my children received in Massachusetts was worse than the public education I received in Montgomery County, MD in the 1960s. Perhaps “broken” is too strong — but when we are done with the statistics, that fact remains true and remains most important to my voting behavior about public education.
I want to see higher paid teachers. I want to see communities paying a significantly greater portion of their wealth in taxes, and I want to see a greater portion of those taxes be invested in public education. I want to see those public education increases be spent on academics and arts — specifically not athletics. Given a choice, I prefer higher-quality better-paid teachers with larger class sizes to larger numbers of lesser-paid teachers with smaller classes.
My wife is Austrian, her siblings live in Bavaria and Austria. Two of them are retired public school teachers. My wife and I are struck by the profound difference in respect shown her siblings in comparison to public teachers here. Her sisters were well-paid while active, and have comfortable retirement plans now. I believe (though I’m not certain) that they received generous housing stipends while they taught. They were and are revered and respected by the communities where they live and taught.
I want public education in Massachusetts to be more like Austria and less like Louisiana. We have, in my opinion, moved far too far towards Louisiana the forty years I’ve been here — driven that way by an increasingly greedy and self-centered electorate, and resisted by dedicated public education professionals.
Maybe it’s not “broken”, but I want the direction to change.
has been de-funded too much–and that needs to change. Health insurance premiums and excessive spending on sports facilities have taken money away that could be used to provide rich language, music and arts courses.
But, I advise you to read a little deeper about the NAEP–it was a no-stakes test begun as part of LBJ’s improved federal funding for education to measure progress, and nobody teaches to the test on that they way they do for SAT, ACT, MCAS, or (soon) PARCC.
Longtime liberal blogger Bob Somerby has a strong series of posts on how elite journalists ignore the tremendous measurable progress made by poor and African American students in America’s public schools. It’s worth your consideration.
The school system my children attended (they lived with their mom) is the public school system of an affluent north shore suburban town. It is certainly typical of the public schools systems of eastern MA.
I found the experience of Stoneham enlightening. When the town attempted to impose draconian cuts in the school budget, the response — for once — was that the schools proposed to cancel ALL high school athletics, and use the resulting savings to continue the threatened academics. Astonishingly, it turns out that town was able to find that money somewhere else.
CRLS was resource rich and for awhile teetered on the edge of losing its accreditation. But we had so many great programs. I suspect it was a town that either has better private schools or lost overrides. I know my dad felt that Salem has always had bad public schools when he went through in the 60s till today and its since nobody there wants to pay property taxes. Communitu inequity is not just an issue affecting inner city schools though-until we switch to drawing from a standard pool we will continue to see disparity.