Endless Rights and Endless Obligations

When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in late 2005, about 5,000 families lived in public housing. Following the storm, rather than replace housing developments that many argued had become concentrations of crime and chronic poverty, the officials of Housing and Urban Development announced that it would replace those developments with mixed-income housing.  Advocates of public housing staged angry protests, arguing that the government was using the hurricane as an excuse to get rid of the poorest residents. The protestors lost that campaign, though. Today, about two-thirds of those pre-Katrina families now live in public housing.  There are some reports that the lives of those who remain may be better than before. Violent crime, however, has not declined. Some New Orleans policemen have suggested to me that this may be because the displacement of violence-prone young men created turf wars.  We cannot know whether this situation would be even worse if the wards of the state had been moved around while renovating the old developments. But for the protestors, the issue was not whether the concerned agencies made the best decisions about what to do with a dependent population. It was about the putative rights of people to demand that they be given resources.

Loyola Law Professor Bill Quigley, a long-time activist, was one of the leading opponents of housing change. Quigley vociferously maintained that housing is a basic human right and that those who were losing their free and subsidized housing were being denied their rights. I thought this was a puzzling claim. As I look at the U.S. Constitution, I can see no guarantees of a right to shelter. We may want to try to provide homes for the homeless on humanitarian grounds.  We may want to pursue an economy that will give people the opportunity to purchase or rent decent lodgings. But to say that people have the right to housing, regardless of their ability to pay, is to say that someone else must give them housing. Those paying the bills cannot raise any questions about the kind of shelter or how many people will receive the benefits. The recipients have all the rights. The providers have only obligations.

Professor Quigley and his associates are now apparently unwilling to limit this extraordinary extension of rights to our local community or even to our country.  Haiti also suffered a major disaster in 2010. This week, a visiting activist will join with Quigley to demand that the U.S. government not only guarantee housing, as a basic right, to everyone in this country, but also send funding to the government of Haiti to supply this basic right in that sovereign nation.  This is not a call for American religious and charitable organizations to become more involved in helping our fellow humans in the Caribbean. It is an assertion that the right to receive U.S. tax-payer supplied resources extends to people beyond U.S. borders. If so, why stop at Haiti? Surely every person on the planet has the same basic rights. Don’t ask whether trying to guarantee adequate housing to everyone in the world would wreck the American economy.  Rights cannot be questioned.

After Iraq, Another Dangerous Tour of Duty

Previously, I wrote about the take-over of New Orleans schools by the state of Louisiana. While I strongly favor local control of schooling and other public concerns, I had to acknowledge that this take-over was a response to the fact that New Orleans had reached such a state of civic disorder that it was unable to effectively run its own schools. Now, State Representative Austen Baden, a Democrat from New Orleans, has said that he will ask Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal to send troops of the National Guard to patrol the city's streets.

The recent shooting death of a one-year old child apparently inspired Rep. Baden's request. This is far from the first child to die in America's murder capital.  The call for the National Guard is yet one more recognition of the descent into savagery of the city once known as the Queen of the South.

Perhaps the most astonishing part of the city's loss of order may be the critics of its supposed gentrification.  Open warfare prevails in many of the neighborhoods and advocates are concerned that the city might not have enough poor people.

The Meaning of Malls

Now that Christmas shopping is here, the roads of the Greater New Orleans area bear daily pilgrimages to the suburban shopping malls. Many of my friends and associates who live inside the city habitually look down their noses at the suburbs, but they too get in their cars and trek out to the malls for much of their buying. There are small, upscale shops in several city locations, such as the corridor of several blocks along Magazine Street uptown. But these trendy mini-mall spots take only small portions of the regional retail business.

The daily drives from the geographic centers to the peripheries are historically interesting because when I was a small child, growing up in suburban Jefferson Parish, we had to drive into town to do all of our shopping. There were few stores then out on the edges of the urban world.  Today, the margins have become the new center.

One of the messages New Orleans and other cities might do well to take from this switch is: gentrify or die. Those trendy little uptown stores are about the only competition the city can offer. For the higher prices and difficulty in parking, the urban strips have to compensate with the ambience of elegant old buildings.  If the inhabitants of cities want their communities to be anything other than decaying concentrations of poverty and crime, they will have to embrace their destiny as historical theme parks.

More speculatively, I wonder if the displacement of the cities by the suburbs is an example of a more general historical tendency toward growth, centralization, and decentralization through relocation of activity to the peripheries. Of course, suburbanization is the direct consequence of the automobile and roadways. But techniques for expanding transportation and communication are always a big part of spatial expansion.  

The movement of shopping to the American suburbs could be a localized version of grander trends. Complex civilizations grew in the eastern Mediterranean, eventually to see their social, political, and economic core shift to Rome. The Mediterranean world, under the leadership of Rome, expanded over a much wider geographic area. As it expanded, the Roman center became a hollowed out symbolic place, with more activity drained off into the vast suburbs of the empire.  After initial decentralization, these suburbs became the civilizations of Europe (Christendom) and Islam. Europe’s expansion gradually resulted in the move of the axis of activity to the peripheral area of North America.  The decline of the city and the rise of the suburb follow this same dynamic, inside of North America.

I believe I won’t go shopping today, either in the little city shops or the malls. I’d rather stay home and speculate.

Teach for America and The New Orleans Educational Experiment

Today’s (12/27/2011) New Orleans Times Picayune includes a front-page article on John White, recently appointed superintendant of the city’s Recovery School District (RSD) and a prospective head of the State Department of Education, and Kira Orange-Jones, head of the New Orleans Teach for America office and newly elected representative to the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE). Both are alumni of the Teach for America program, which is prominent in the New Orleans school reform effort.  The newspaper asks whether New Orleans and its state are entering the “era of Teach For America.”

Although I have previously expressed skepticism about the amount of improvement we can expect in New Orleans schools, rising test scores provide some tentative empirical evidence that the city’s abysmal schools have shown somewhat better results under the reform regime that has transformed a majority of the city’s schools into charter schools and brought Teach for America volunteers into heavy participation in the school system.  Somewhat reluctantly, I favor both charter schools and Teach for America. I favor the former because they do tend to offer a wider range of educational choices to families and freedom of action and flexibility to individual schools. I favor Teach for America, and programs like it, because I don’t believe that our current credentialization bureaucracy does a very good job of selecting and educating teachers, because I don’t think that certification has any necessary connection to good teaching, and because I see enthusiasm as generally more productive than years in the classroom, which can lead to burnout as often as knowhow.

I say that I reluctantly support these kinds of endeavors, though, because in their present form they are contrary to the ideal of local community control over education.  Although the organizations behind some of the charter schools are located in the city, the schools are often heavily dependent on outside reformers.  Teach For America is a kind of domestic Peace Corps, aimed at bringing volunteers into low-income districts to provide the quality of teaching those districts are presumably unable to supply themselves.  Mr. White and Ms. Orange-Jones, as products of Teach For America, exemplify the missionary spirit of this corps.  I have no doubt that they packed substantial quantities of idealism, intelligence, and dedication in their carpet bags, but neither resided in New Orleans before coming here to take up their reforming appointments.

The New Orleans experiment in public education, in fact, emerges from an external takeover of the school system. In 2003, the state legislature passed a bill mandating that the state take direction of consistently failing schools away from the locally elected school boards. The bill was clearly aimed at New Orleans, since most of the failing schools in the state were here and most of the schools in the city were failing.  This legal coup had good justification. The schools in New Orleans were some of the worst in the country, and the incompetence of the school board was exceeded only by the corruption that landed former Orleans Parish School Board President Ellenese Brooks-Simms in prison in 2007. Ms. Brooks-Simms was the twenty-third Orleans Parish school board official convicted for malfeasance in office since 2003.

I do not believe that the inept and sometimes criminal school board made New Orleans schools so awful, although it certainly did not help.  The relationship between a bad elected body and bad educational institutions was what statisticians call “spurious.”  The underlying cause behind both was a community that had become deeply dysfunctional.  As I argued in my 2002 book, A Troubled Dream: The Promise and Failure of School Desegregation in Louisiana, the problems of New Orleans were not simply due to poverty, but to a type of poverty that has become prevalent in other areas of the United States, especially in central cities.  This is an anomic poverty, characterized by the collapse of basic social institutions, most notably the family. Sky-rocketing murder rates give testimony to the city’s Hobbesian chaos. Over the past few decades, New Orleans has become a city that simply does not work.

The state takeover and the assumption of control by outside reformers were essentially acts of guardianship.  Guardians take over the affairs of those who are judged incompetent to run their own lives.  I think we need to recognize this fact as people debate the post-Hurricane future of the city. To attempt to re-create the New Orleans that existed on the eve of the storm would be to strive to return to civic failure.

Can outside direction bring a city to healthy independence? In fairness to the Recovery School District, its officials do generally say that they eventually intend to return the schools to a new and reformed Orleans Parish School Board. I am concerned that the tutelage will simply cultivate civic dependence, while continuing to undermine fundamental social institutions by maintaining a large part of the population as anomic wards of the state.  But given the current state of social decay, I do not see a good alternative.