It's no wonder that it's hard to improve our lot...

Today's Examiner is headlined "Williams: Police may need 5,100 officers." I didn't voice polite words when I saw this headline in the newspaper box...

In college I wanted to write a book titled "Prisoners of Progress." In part it used some of the arguments of Kirkpatrick Sale's Human Scale and even some of Walter Adams' ideas in The Bigness Complex.

The basic argument is that the U.S. became a great nation out of what I called an "extensive use" of resources--using more and more--rather than an "intensive use" or resources--using what you had better.

At that time, the Japanese economy was resurgent and the U.S. manufacturing base was (and continues) declining. But as much as I rail about car usage (I am a traitor to my Michigan heritage) the auto industry does fine and sells a lot of cars and trucks (well, until the recent rise in gasoline prices).

It's just that the U.S.-based companies, in particular Ford and GM, that aren't doing well (Chrysler goes back and forth). In large part, it's because the companies and their designs are stodgy. And in part it's because of legacy costs and a way of doing business (business model) that no longer works in a much more competitive economy.

Japan, which has to import most of the raw materials it uses--oil, iron ore, etc.--developed its business model around using resources more intensely and efficiently. It should be no surprise that in the 1950s, Japan business seized on the quality experts Deming and Juran decades before the profiles of these consultants rose in the U.S. This work led to the "continuous process improvement" business model developed by many companies in Japan, in particular Toyota, which soon will be the largest producer of automobiles in the world.

Japan ↑ - U.S. ↓

When resource costs increased significantly in the 1970s and 1980s, U.S. industry was, for the most part, unprepared. The new pricing regime favored an industry built around efficiency and intensive use of resources.

The extensive use of resources in the United States--natural resources and land--started early in the country's history, with the inexorable expansion west and the idea of "manifest destiny."

This idea--that the problem is lack of resources, often "money," pervades our political discourse, especially at the municipal level.

Even though times have changed. Budgets are not ever growing. The federal government is increasing unconcerned about center cities, and federal monies provided to urban issues and concerns continue to drop. People have concerns about ever-rising taxes, and as well are concerned about a seeming failure on the part of government to provide quality services with the monies received. (This is a different issue in cities like Detroit, which have high taxes because of their declining populations. The cities have an extant infrastructure that must be supported even though the population base has shrunk. Therefore, escalating taxes on fewer and fewer residents.)

What isn't being discussed in a nuanced and intricate fashion is how these resources are being used and applied.

One of the biggest misunderstandings of the "Broken Windows" theory of policing is the focus on what is called "zero tolerance policing." The real foundation of Broken Windows policing practice is a focus on how police resources are used and directed. Research from the 1970s and 1980s that found little impact on the number of police officers and crime didn't ask one basic question--what are the officers doing during their time while working? When the answer was driving around, responding to 311 and 911 calls, yes they didn't have much effect.

This is the difference between being proactive and reactive. Or using more resources vs. using your extant resources better.

As I said earlier today, most progressives are shocked at my attitude about policing, "disorder," nuisances, graffiti, public drunkenness, litter, etc. I am all for policing these and other offenses. I also favor school improvement, etc. But too often we aren't engaged in dealing with the real issues, the root of the problems.

I cannot see the justification for 1,600 more police officers in the city.

But I can see the justification for getting the entire community involved in dealing with the issue.

Courtland Milloy writes about this, sort of, in his column today, "What a curfew can't accomplish." I think he is more into parental blaming than thinking about how to re-engage people who are disconnected. Again, this is the issue of "middle class" vs. "street-culture" as discussed by Elijah Anderson in Streetwise and Code of the Street. Fred Siegel covers some of the relevant issues in The Future Once Happened Here (which is considered to be a conservative book). People are disengaged and this needs to change. Milloy writes:

But parental responsibility cannot be outsourced. A parent's got to parent. That's all there is to it. And although there is no guarantee that even responsible parents will succeed in raising a child into a responsible adult, the chances are almost nil that an irresponsible parent will succeed.

The fact is, loving, responsible parents are the solution to virtually all that ails our society. But we avoid that reality like the plague. If our children don't learn, we blame the schools. If too many of our children are being arrested, we blame the police. If there aren't enough recreation programs, we blame the mayor. If there are too many guns and drugs on the street, it's the president's fault.

No, it's our fault -- if only for expecting that the same government that fails us again and again will somehow change just because we complain, even if we do little else.

Understand this: Nobody takes irresponsible parents seriously -- not teachers, not elected officials, not even their own kids. Parents need to learn what it means to be responsible -- preferably before becoming parents. Then, maybe we wouldn't resort to having police officers chase our children through the night. And we wouldn't have children being arrested and paying the price of their parents' irresponsibility.

I am disappointed that none of my ideas even made it into the finals of the recent DC Appleseed contest. I am disappointed, it's no joke, because I don't think the winning ideas were very deep, or they were too convoluted (e.g., my similar idea for dealing with litter is far more realizable, more directed to structural change, and implementable compared to the $5,000 first place winner).

But the idea I put out there about "family learning contracts" and schooling gets at what Courtland Milloy is concerned about, although I like to think of it as re-engaging parents in the life of their children and their community.

I think it's the most important idea I have right now.

Here's the entry as submitted to DC Appleseed:

Build a community of learning centered around the schools through family learning contracts.

Until we have families and peer groups that support learning, we're not going to be able to improve outcomes. School systems can only do so much.

There is an interesting article about "positive deviance" in the May 2005 issue of the Harvard Business Review. It includes a case study about the schools in an impoverished state in Brazil where the teachers hadn't been paid in 6 months, and the test results for the entire province were about 50% worse than the national average.

Yet some schools were amongst the highest performers in the country.

It turned out this occurred because these schools engaged the entire family into the process of achieving academic success by creating family learning contracts. Parents were also motivated to do this because they were often illiterate, and literate children were able to help connect the family to government services by being able to read, write, and translate information about the programs.

This provided an additional sweetener, making the whole family committed to and engaged in the classroom success of their child(ren).

This idea of the family learning contract has a lot of relevance to urban school systems. Schools only have children for 6-8 hours/day. The rest of the time they are under the influence of peers, parents, and other members of the community. We can begin to right this process by getting the whole family committed to and participating in the learning life of their children.

It's not centered around "family learning contracts," but this blog entry, "More thoughts about connecting families to schooling," about schooling in the Toronto area shows how schools can help integrate-reintegrate parents into the lives of their children and the broader community.