The end of school

Education

Class dismissed 

The city plans to close lots of schools 

Mar 30th 2013 | CHICAGO |

From the print edition

THE news that parents had been dreading came on March 21st. As many as 54 of Chicago’s 681 schools have been earmarked for closure. Most of them are doing poorly, need costly repairs, or are undersubscribed: they are part of a system with more than 100,000 empty desks across the city. If the proposals are all approved by the Board of Education in May, the result will be one of the largest closures of schools ever seen in America. It will affect around 30,000 pupils.

 The municipal agency that runs the city’s schools faces a $1 billion deficit for each of the next three fiscal years. Although shutting schools is unpopular, it would help the agency, Chicago Public Schools (CPS), to save $43m a year. The policy, under discussion for some time, was the subject of negotiations during a teachers’ strike last year. [http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21574518-city-plans-close-lots-schools-class-dismissed]

Organising Americans

After the election of Barack Obama, it was something of an open mystery what his organisation would do with itself, and I was told in the immediate aftermath that it was far too early to say and that it was being figured out. We've seen the group Organising for Action emerge from the ashes and get involved in federal and state issues, it has expressed an interest in immigration and gun control.

Although it does not have at its fingertips the massed forces that it was able to draw together to fight the 2012 election it looks as though it is going to be ambitious. Its latest email to supporters, a few hours ago, stated: "No one has ever done what we're trying to do: restore the balance of power to ordinary people by countering the special-interest groups with the most powerful grassroots movement ever built."

One of Mr Obama's legacies may be, then, to create the world's largest community action group in history--which is basically what he started out doing. For a youngish politician who has peaked rather early in life, one has to wonder what he will do next. Wouldn't it be ironic if he ended up back where he started--inside a grass roots activist organisation?

Brothers Emanuel

I had only 500 words to review this charming little book, so quite a lot was left out. The first thing to say is that this is not a book about Rahm specifically, it is a family memoir by his older brother Ezekiel. It contains a series of lovely little anecdotes about their childhood, about their traumas and triumphs, their hopes and dreams. In so far as it is analytical it tries to answer the question of how the three of them grew up to be such high-performing, alpha males.

If you are looking for a penetrating book about Rahm Emanuel, this is not the book for you. But if you want to glean some interesting little details about this life, it is a fun read. You can see the roots of Rahm's politics which come from the activism and left-leaning nature of members of his family. His mother founded a chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality in her neighbourhood and held meetings at her home. She also took her boys along to the many civil rights protests she attended.

Like many Jews of the time who were part of a distrusted minority group in 1960s Chicago, she was attuned to the racial stigmitisation of the era and determined to do something about it. (Indeed Rahm's mother reminds me a little of my aunt June Finer who was a doctor in Chicago around the same time. She joined the Medical Committee for Human Rights, and travelled to the deep south in the 1960s to provide medical support to the civil rights movement there. The story of the doctors who did this (many Jewish) is recounted in the book The Good Doctors.)

But I digress. The point is that Rahm grew up in a politically articulate, and passionate, family. He was not one of those kids who trained to be a lawyer and then thought that it would be a good career move to get into politics. Politics was baked into him at an early age and he has carried this with him through life. And it was never inevitable that he would be a politician, he started out with a great love of ballet--inspired by the lessons that his mother took all three boys to as part of their cultural education.

I also get a sense from the book that Rahm did particularly well at politics because he was so adept at extracting money from donors. Reading an account of their dinner-table debates, with all the swearing and liveliness, one cannot help connect this to the man who freely expresses irritation with those who ask what he sees as silly or bad questions. In this context it is worth remembering that this is a man who comes from a family where a debate about the film "The Deerhunter" ended in a family brawl.

One interesting revelation is that Ezekiel says the brothers are culturally Jewish but do not believe in God. I was surprised by this but after talking about this over lunch with another Jewish relation she insisted this is actually perfectly normal--and that many highly educated Jews feel this way. She told me they adopt Jewish customs and heritage, observe shabbat and happily attend synagogue. But do they believe in a big guy in the sky? Absolutely not, she told me. 

There are no answers in the book to the question of how the son who railed against authority now copes with being in charge. As the memoir moves on to their older years it focuses far more on Ezekiel's journey through life. The politician who once protested with the civil rights movement will now face similar tactics as the unions in Chicago try to fight plans to close many of the under-occupied schools in Chicago. The tactics may be the same but the issues could not be more different. The problem that school closures are tackling is tied to the facts of demography rather than racism, parents have voted with their feet and moved their children from so many of Chicago's schools in the past few decades that too many are expensively half empty.  School closures happen all over the country. The reason so many are now needed in Chicago is that the job has been put off for so long. Rahm's greatest challenge as a politician will be to haul the city's schools from the rut they have been in here since he grew up.


Parenthood 

Brothers in arms 

Raising three remarkable children 

Mar 23rd 2013 |From the print edition

Rahmifications of childhood Brothers Emanuel: A Memoir of an American Family. By Ezekiel Emanuel. Random House; 274 pages; $27.

THE youth of the three brothers that is described in “Brothers Emanuel” is interesting because one of them is Rahm Emanuel, the mayor of Chicago, President Barack Obama’s former chief of staff and a leading figure in Democratic politics. Rahm is the middle sibling. The eldest is Ezekiel, a medical ethicist and vice-provost at the University of Pennsylvania, and the author of this memoir. The youngest is Ari, a Hollywood agent and the role model for the character Ari Gold in “Entourage”, an American television series.

They grew up in Chicago in the 1960s—before supervised playdates, constant communication and fears of abduction. They explored their neighbourhood and even spent entire days on the beach alone. The alternative was to allow them to conduct their raids, sneak attacks, skirmishes, mock battles and combat missions indoors. Close in age, their wild play resulted in some bloody wounds including the loss of four teeth and the removal (fortunately temporary) of four fingers from two different brothers. [More...]

A curious American row about early education

Nursery education 

Winning grades 

Americans argue about the need for early schooling 

Mar 23rd 2013 | CHICAGO AND NEW YORK |From the print edition

“WHAT part of the book is this?” asks the teacher, pointing to the binding. Twenty children of three and four answer: “The spine!” The instructor then asks, “Where is your spine?” and all the little pupils point to the right place. They arrived at eight this morning at Harlem Children’s Zone in New York, and were given breakfast. Later they will have lunch and take a nap. Although there is plenty of time to play, they spend much of their day learning letters, numbers, vocabulary and even manners. Marilyn Joseph, who heads the early-learning programme, says they want to make poor children as ready for school as those from better-off families. [More...]


A piece written and reported by Rosemarie Ward and myself.

North Dakota by the numbers

Energy 

Formation pressures

Booming North Dakota by the numbers 

 Mar 16th 2013 |From the print edition

IN 2012 North Dakota produced more crude oil than any other state except Texas. Between 2011 and 2012 production there increased by more than 250,000 barrels a day (b/d). By November last year almost 22m barrels of oil a month came out of the ground—outpacing the traditional petroleum-pots of Alaska, California and Oklahoma. About 33,000 wells will be drilled over the next 15-25 years, 5,000 of them in the next two years. [More...]

More eco-porn

Rockhopper penguins, G Harris

Seriously, what is not to love about two vast new marine protected areas in Patagonia, one of the most beautiful places on the planet? The Wildlife Conservation Society tells me that Isla Pingüino Coastal Marine Park and Makenke Coastal Marine Park have been established recently by the country's National Congress.

Red-legged Cormorant in Puerto Deseado Patagonia. G Harris

A pair of Imperial Cormorants in Punta Leon Patagonia. G Harris.

A matter of style

Journalists at The Economist have recently been issued with our new Style Book. It comprises 184 pages of rules, orders, guidelines, suggestions, warnings and worldly wisdom. I've been dipping into it every day and I was particularly struck by this passage describing the history of military euphemisms and how they have been introduced to neuter social outrage.


"Worse can be expected when politicians try to justify a war. “They make a wilderness and call it peace,” wrote Tacitus nearly 2,000 years ago, quoting Calgalus, a British chief whose people had been beaten up by the Romans. Orwell was equally acute in pointing out 60 years ago how terms like transfer of population and rectification of frontiers put names on things without evoking mental pictures of them. Friendly fire, body count, prisoner abuse, smart bombs, surgical strike, collateral damage have been coined more recently with the same ends in mind. Thus in Britain the War Office and the secretary of state for war became the Ministry of Defence and the defence minister. In due course nuclear weapons became nuclear deterrents – unless they were held by bad people. The Reagan administration spoke of its airborne invasion of Grenada in 1983 as a vertical insertion. The butchers of the Balkans produced ethnic cleansing, and the jihadists of al-Qaeda have offered sacred explosions in place of Islamically incorrect suicide bombs. The Bush administration, with its all-justifying war on terror (prosecuted with the help of the Patriot Act), provided more than its fair share of bland misnomers. Its practice of enhanced interrogation was torture, just as its practice of rendition was kidnapping, extraordinary rendition was probably torture contracted out to foreigners and its self-injurious behaviour incidents at Guantánamo Bay were attempted suicides. Some of those who now advocate a military attack on Iran refer to it as the kinetic option."