Robert David Sullivan

Libertarian group says Mass. doesn't have big government (but cut it anyway)

The libertarian Mercatus Center says that Massachusetts ranks 46th in "freedom," thanks to such oppressive measures as motorcycle helmet laws and high cigarette taxes, but it doesn't exactly buy into the "Taxachusetts" slur: "Tax rates remain about average, and the government payroll is remarkably small."

So what's so bad about the Bay State? "The biggest fiscal problem for Massachusetts is debt, which equals more than a quarter of personal income."

Hmm. If the state's debt is our biggest problem and our tax rates aren't unusually high, why not raise taxes (perhaps on gasoline) to help retire our debt? That's unthinkable for a libertarian, so Mercatus has an alternative solution: "Reduce state grants to local school districts to encourage better use of funds. Use savings to retire state debt."

Of course, state aid to local school districts is targeted to poorer cities that don't have much of a tax base, so Mercatus is essentially saying we should reduce the state debt by firing teachers in Lawrence and Springfield.

Why not say that any school district that depends on money from the state must lower its legal dropout age to 12? Think of all the savings — and freedom! — to be gained!

Illiterate, intolerant, homophobic? 5 statistically flawed raps against Boston and the Northeast

I'm not really a hometown booster, and I've bitched about Boston enough to be told "Then why don't you leave?" many times. But my parochial pride has been stirred several times in the past few days by one thing that drives me battier than the Hub's famous rudeness: Sloppy statistics.

Here are five examples of knocks (or faint praise) against Boston, Massachusetts, and the Northeast that don't stand up to scrutiny.

As reported in USA Today, Boston is only the 12th "most literate city" in America, behind St. Louis and Cincinnati.

The complete survey by Central Connecticut University is here. Note that Boston ranks 3rd, behind only New York and Washington, in the number of periodicals published here. We're 4th in newspaper circulation. (My hunch is that New York, Los Angeles, and many Western cities rank poorly in this category because of the large number of people who don't speak English as their primary language.) And we're 5th in "Internet resources."

So why aren't we in the Top 10 overall? Mostly because Boston ranks a terrible 61st in bookstores per 10,000 people; New York City is tied for 65th. I suspect that this has more to do with the high cost of real estate than with locals' reading habits. There aren't many places in Boston or Manhattan where you can pay for a storefront in a busy retail district by selling used books (as opposed to clothes, wine, jewelry, or other easily marked-up items). Second-place St. Louis has a mystery bookstore; we'd probably still have one on Newbury Street rather than just online if tourists stopped coming to that trendy address.

Also, bookstores in Boston and New York are probably bigger, if less numerous, befitting a geographically compact metropolis. And the survey is apparently limited to the city proper, which means it doesn't count bookstores in Cambridge -- where many Bostonians shop.

"Waiting for 'Superman'": The feel-bad-about-being-American movie of the year

Last night I saw Waiting for "Superman," the documentary about education reform that officially opens in Boston this Friday. Unlike most American films, it's not a chore to sit through and it's full of memorable images. A few impressions:

--Filmmaker Davis Guggenheim uses frequent close-ups of the colored balls in a lottery machine, and it's not just a metaphor. Most major school districts in the US have a handful of innovative schools that offer escape from the "dropout factories" that predominate in urban areas. They go by different names (charters, magnets, KIPP schools, and even boarding schools), but they all have many times more applicants than desks, so kids are usually selected at public lottery drawings. In Superman, we witness a few cheers and a lot of shell-shocked faces at these events. It's like watching the steerage passengers on the Titanic draw straws to see who gets one seat on a lifeboat. But I suppose this ritual is a good thing for state governments: It sends the message that the best way for families in poor families to turn their lives around is through sheer luck. So keep buying those scratch tickets! 

--The film has a great animated sequence on the annual "Dance of the Lemons" in one urban school districts. This refers to the end of the school year, when principals try to transfer their bad teachers to other schools -- the risk, of course, being that their replacements will be even worse, since they were the lemons that other principals were trying to get rid of. This is an argument against the practice of tenure, under which it's practically impossible to fire teachers in public schools who have logged a minimal amount of time on the job. Guggenheim does not show a lot of sympathy for teachers' unions, but people who don't have the benefit of tenure -- that is, practically anyone who's not an educator, a Supreme Court justice, or an occupant of rent-controlled housing -- are likely to share his prejudice.

Who will fight for the "sweet spot" of mid-sized school districts?

The Boston Globe's Peter Schworm writes about the state's efforts to nudge tiny school districts in Massachusetts into merging with their neighbors. There's some pushback from residents in small towns, which isn't surprising given New Englanders' obsession with local control. (Not to mention our class consciousness; some towns fear that if they merge with poorer communities, they'll end up paying more in taxes in order to educate "those" kids.) 

What struck me was this caveat to the idea that bigger is better:

A study last year from the state Education Department found that districts with fewer than 1,500 students spent about $1,000 more per student than districts with between 1,500 and 3,000 students, a range that educators call a sweet spot. Larger districts spend more per student, researchers found.

That sounds plausible. Bigger districts have are more likely to have students of every conceivable type, including those from troubled family backgrounds, those with special needs, etc. It can cost more to tailor programs to cover a wide variety of subgroups. Larger districts probably also have higher transportation costs.

But while I can imagine organized campaigns for "bigger" and "smaller" districts, I can't imagine any kind of push (either from government or from citizens) for districts that total between 1,500 and 3,000 students. There may be mountains of data to support the idea of a sweet spot in the middle, but it's awfully difficult to move our A vs. B political system over such a specific target.

Are there "sweet spot" solutions in other issues that seem to defy tug-of-war politics?