In today's lead editorial in the Minneapolis Star Tribune ("Key Twin Cities leaders are tone deaf") the editors address a second local controversy from the past week, the granting of $40,000 in moving expenses to the head of the St. Paul Public School District, Superintendent Valeria Silva. Superintendent Silva was promoted to the position from within the organization in 2009, so the moving expenses represent the cost of moving her from the St. Paul suburb of Woodbury, where she resides, to within the city limits.
As with the Minneapolis "bike coordinator" controversy, the editors are as worried with appearance as with substance, writing,
"Silva and the school board members should have realized it didn't make sense to pay thousands to move Silva 12 miles, even if former superintendents have had similar deals. That no one did so suggests disturbingly weak leadership in one of the state's biggest districts."
When she was promoted two years ago to become superintendent, the District faced numerous challenges, including a budget deficit, an achievement gap, and low test scores. So it is understandable that the Star Tribune and others believe that the $40,000 could be better used elsewhere and seem puzzled that local officials would defend the move.
Also last week, Lee McGrath, head of the local chapter of the Institute for Justice, had an opinion piece in the St. Paul Pioneer Press where he discusses what he sees as a lack of innovative thinking in education on the part of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor party (DFL, Minnesota's version of Democrats). He points out that a number of prominent DFL officials in Minneapolis chose to send their children to private schools.
None of this should surprise the close observer.
Forbes columnist Joel Kotkin, in his book The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050 (pages 56-57), quotes the late urban advocate Jane Jacobs on the role of cities in forming the middle class,
"A metropolitan economy, if it is working well, is constantly transforming many poor people into middle-class people, many illiterates into skilled people, many greenhorns into competent citizens....Cities don't lure the middle class. They create it."
Key words there: "working well." Unfortunately, as I discuss in Part 1, our urban political elite believe that they have developed a business plan that does not depend upon keeping this virtuous cycle going. From their view, the aspirational poor, the newly skilled, etc. are not reliable enough voters for an agenda centered on fashionable social policy and wealth redistribution. The elite believe that, should a middle class be needed, it can always be imported by marketing to the Creative Class, who are seen as the key to post-industrial society. In other words, the Creative Class is the kind of middle class that the urban political elite can live with.
Of course, this approach depends upon some other District creating the Creative Class. Aspirational middle-class shlubs like me are dependent upon public education to build the human capital needed for the next generation and for admission to the Creative Class, and we have been cleansed out of the core cities. As McGrath implied, members of the urban political elite have arranged their affairs so as to not be impacted by the results of their own policies, educational and otherwise. They are in a position to outsource to private providers the production of human capital, which McGrath points out, is an option they deny to their own constituents.
Which brings us back the $40,000 in moving expenses. By defending this indefensible expense, the political class of St. Paul are signalling that--regardless of overall budget cutting--they simply will not surrender a single perk of public office. The political class is just another one of the constituent groups of the urban, governing coalition and it too must be mollified. To back down on the moving expenses issue would send a troubling message to the group they even they are vulnerable to the new austerity.
Public education is perhaps the key area that must be reformed in order to restart Jacobs' engine of middle-class creation. But first, the urban political elite must decide that local production is in their best interest.
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