Rubio *did* sincerely want some water during that SotU response of his. (Seriously, I can't wrap my head around how his political career survived that fiasco.)
I was thinking more of his cowardice around comprehensive immigration reform and the way Chris Christie exposed his shallowness during the 2016 primary. I'd forgotten about the water thing.
yeah who among us hasn't looked weird drinking water
but not having the courage of your convictions to say "yeah I had that position on immigration because I believed I was right, I still believe I was right, and I'm right" would have been much better for him than looking like such a spineless wimp
the market inefficiency in electoral politics is not sounding like everything you said was fed to you by a consultant (which is why Trump and Yang did better than what people would have expected)
Between that and not being to able to answer the universal healthcare question and getting absolutely bodied on stage by fucking Tulsi Gabbard of all people, it's incredible to me that she has any fans left at all. She's absolutely the worst candidate I've ever seen.
At the time she seemed to see it as a moment of triumph (she got attention, in a ridiculously large field), but it was probably the beginning of the end for her campaign. Amazing how quickly she went from top fundraiser to broke.
My problem with Kamala is that she was the mistress of the Speaker of the California Assembly when he was 30 years older than her. Every inch of her body has bent in service of her political ambition, and I distrust ambition on that scale.
That relationship is pretty low on my list of problems with Kamala, but I had expected to hear about it it all the time during the campaign and it was basically crickets from all sides.
Don't underestimate the charm of Willie Brown. His "rizz" was truly legendary. Playgirl voted him in top 10 sexiest men. Whether she benefited or not from the relationship, the attraction would have been mutual.
I don't think there's evidence she's specifically attracted to older men. Her husband is only 1 week older than her. She had a specific attraction to one particularly charming older man with whom she shared similar interests.
Standard. You think all these very smart people in politics are doing it for the public good or a little bit of money? Or do you just object that she wasn't able to become prominent through above board work to get her foot in the door?
Allan has nailed it! My thoughts precisely. I hate to come across as mean-spirited, but VP Harris does NOT instill confidence in anyone...as far as I can tell. Simply, a struggling, ineffective politician. 🙄
Bail is pretty easily weaponized by the state. It's easy to set bail beyond the means of a defendant irrespective of his propensity to show up. This leaves him with the unfair choice of languish in jail at great cost until the system gets around to him, or take whatever deal the state offers because the penalty on offer is less than the penalty he will have already paid even if he were to win at trial.
It's annoying but neither that hard nor at all unfair for the state to have to work a little harder to get someone to court if they don't show up on time. It's incredibly wrong to coerce a confession. I'll always pick burden on the state over burden on the citizen.
Sounds like a violation of the first amendment to me. Would your law make it illegal to provide funds to bail a friend or relative out of jail? If not maybe you could call it the "People With Rich Friends Can Get Out of Jail but Poor People With Rich Liberal Friends Have to Stay in Jail Act of 2023"
Bail funds are a lot like bounty hunters in the sense that they outsource the role of ensuring that the defendant shows up to court. I assume when the bail fund posts bail, they send the defendant a letter or something that says "we're helping you out by posting bail, please return the favor by showing up to court", and they're incentivized to make sure that they actually do.
On truancy here's a banal observation based on personal reflection: The covid school closings made schools seem much less serious about attendance even after they reopened.
My kid is about to start public school this month, and as I'm reading the rules about excused absences I keep thinking "how seriously do I need to take this? If I pull her out to visit relatives for a few weeks are they really going to do something?" I don't know that I would have had that thought if they hadn't been keeping kids out of classrooms for so long just recently. Maybe that same idea in other parents' heads is part of why truancy has risen.
Then do it during the two months off in summer or two weeks off around new years. Pulling you kid out of school for a month during the school year is a terrible idea.
Also surprisingly, there are some cultures whose most important dates don't align with the American-Christian holiday schedule.
It's not inconceivable that a Thai-American family might want to spend at least one, single Songkran with the grandparents before they die.
An Indian-American family might want to spend at least a single Holi with the grandparents before they die.
And so on. Chinese New Year, Tết, Passover, Eid, ...
Not to mention all the other things that crop up like weddings, funerals, death anniversaries, and so on that have significant cultural importance outside of America.
I'm not arguing it should be an annual occurrence. But your initial post suggested there was literally no reason to ever do it, which is what I'm pushing back against. You didn't write "egregious unless there's a good reason".
If these events are so important, they should be accommodated without taking several weeks off school. Or you should just homeschool.
These issues are not unique to SE Asians, and large multicultural school districts simply cannot be expected to accommodate all the different sets of demands different cultural groups might have on their students’ time. A week off here or there probably is fine. Stacking an extra week on a spring break or winter vacation is fine. Pulling a kid out of classes for a month and then expecting the teacher to deal with the consequences their return (catching them up, figuring out what to do about group projects, etc.) a month later is unreasonable except under extreme circumstances out of the student’s family’s control.
This reads as someone who doesn't understand that while school is important, its not the only important or even the most important thing. School is there to serve kids and the community, not for the kids or the community to serve school.
Our local public university is becoming increasingly diverse. Traditionally, they gave many Christian and Jewish holidays off. About a decade ago, they added Muslim holidays. A couple of years ago they threw in the towel and removed all religious holidays off the calendar and instead provided a list of dates that students or staff had to be allowed an excused absence for if they request it at the beginning of the semester.
"If these events are so important, they should be accommodated without taking several weeks off school. Or you should just homeschool."
Or you could just homeschool for the two weeks around the holiday. And that plan sounds pretty similar to taking the kid out of school for two weeks, because they'll still need to keep up on the work they're missing while on vacation (e.g., "here's the 14 worksheets we plan to give the kids while you're gone. Make sure yours does one each day.").
We’re talking about school policy, not the criminal code. If a student works out a prolonged absence with the teachers in advance, of course that can be accommodated now and again. But a school shouldn’t have a blanket policy that a kid can take weeks off without notice and then clear it with a parent note.
Just to play DA... a lot of the families that might make this particular kind of trip are from countries in South and Southeast Asia. Which isn't exactly known to have a "fun" climate during the summer. The vibes I've gotten from most of my Indian and Indian-American friends have been, "Why the fuck would I go back there in July? I came here because I LIKED not sweating my balls off all day long."
I get that, but schools usually have two weeks off in the winter. And when you’re prioritizing the comfortable climate during your trip over a month of school, it isn’t about the ability to see family but an indication that school isn’t important that we’re talking about.
And here in Texas, this really shows. It’s very common for a huge percentage of students not to show up for the first few weeks of school as they make their way back from visiting family in South and Central America or from jobs. It throws the schools that serve these students into disarray as they have to rebalance classes for at least the first month. One result is that parents who prioritize school pull their kids out in favor of private schools, charters, or move to public schools with demographics that don’t have these issues.
My family came from the Middle East, which can be just as hot. We either went in the summer anyway (there's stuff to do there in the summer even though it's hot) or went over winter break.
First, I’m sorry your family is experiencing this. The loss of a loved one is an extremely significant event.
Second, I don’t believe most children need to miss several weeks of school, even for such an event, as hard as it might be, though certainly there are exceptions. Under those circumstances, I believe most families would figure out a way for the children to visit over a week long absence, using the two weekends as bookends to travel, giving you a week to be with family. Or would borrow a day from a random holiday on the calendar. I understand that for some, that might not feel like enough. And I’m certain that for some, some mix of different travel dates might require borrowing a day or two on one side of the trip or the other, making a student miss 6-7 days in total. But I don’t think it would generally justify a month-long absence. And obviously we’d be talking mostly about the privileged few whose parents could also travel internationally for a month away from work.
Really, I was just trying to float the idea that truancies were up b/c school closures made absences seem like less of a sincere or important concern. I was only bringing up my personal situation b/c it was a sincere feeling for a moment as I was trying to understand the rules of the school my kid is entering. Fwiw, we have no definitive trip even planned at this point and I was just a little surprised to find that 5 is the limit. I'm sure we'll figure it out talking with other parents / teachers.
I will say 5 excused seems low. I’d be very surprised if there are real consequences for going over that until you get to something around or over 10. But I’d try to make a trip work on only using 5-7, which with weekends gives to 9-11 days. Surely not as much time as you’d like under the circumstances, but enough time to at least settle in and spend time with people.
I remember when I was in still there was a procedure for if a student was going to say for an extended period (week or couple weeks), say to visit relatives abroad or something else. We got each teacher to sign and they would list the assignments to complete while gone. Don’t know if they still do this or if it is universal
That's good to know. It's probably not that big of a deal in my personal situation since my kid's only going to be in K. I was really just bringing it up to reflect on how the covid closings made me more cynical about excused / unexcused absences, but I guess I did it in a way that launched into a dozen other directions, lol.
Lots of schools haven’t helped by, frankly, enabling truancy. My school system used to have a rule that 9 (more than 9?) unexcused - as in no doctor’s note - absences was an automatic failure for the year and meant repeating the grade. Now schools will do almost anything to pass a student.
That's likely because whatever damage missing two weeks out of 30-some may do, repeating a whole year has even worse long term consequences, substantially increasing the chances of the student dropping out before graduating.
True. In our case, the district says 5 is the max excused absences, though, and as I wrote a couple of other places, we may travel to Asia to visit a relative that is unlikely to live until summer. A week is doable, but seems a little strict in light of the district keeping itself shutdown longer than any other in our area. But I see a lot of good arguments each way here
I’d ask. And the question probably is more “what are the consequences if we go over,” not “what do you allow.” You might find that the first few unexcused absences are free, such that no one will say you can use them, but that effectively you can use them.
And obviously trying to borrow a random day off or two, winter break, whatever you can is going to be the best solution if you can swing it.
I changed schools around 6th grade. IIRC, my family had already booked a trip that winter break, but the school winter breaks didn't align, so now the trip collided with a week of school. The school officially didn't allow a week of absences, but they were perfectly happy to let it go as long as (1) it wouldn't be repeated (as is your case) and (2) my parents agreed to take textbooks along and make me do some work each day, so that I could turn in all the missed homework problems when I returned.
Sounds reasonable. I feel pretty confident we'll work this out some reasonable, if the trip even happens (mom might just go solo, it's her side of the family). We haven't even gotten past the brainstorming / what are the options phase.
But yeah, I like the way you're thinking about this and I imagine if the school is halfway reasonable they'll be somewhat accommodating. And it's only K, so probably a nuthingburger.
I now feel bad about bringing up the topic. I really just wanted to make the point that my visceral reaction to "5 excused absences allowed" was "Really? You closed down for a whole year !?" lol. Apparently I did it in a way that triggered a lot of opinions. But thanks for the advice in all seriousness.
All I want to say is that this is a fascinating subthread, and while I have some takes formulating, they're far from set in stone, and it's been good to listen to different perspectives on this to see if they better shape what I might think.
Yeah lots of things to think about. All I wanted to do was an offer an explanation for the rise of truancy based on a thought that crossed my mind earlier this week as we're trying to decide when / if to visit my wife's dying grandma in Asia.
There have been times when I’ve pulled my kids out for important family events, but usually just a week. It wasn’t a big deal as I coordinated with the school, got assignments they could work on during the absence, etc.
It depends on the district. If you are in a "failing" school district or one on the edge of failing, it is usually taken very seriously because attendance is watched closely. Also, money from the feds and state is affected by attendance numbers. In my own district, parents have often been griping about the "scare tactics" used by administrators once their kids have missed a certain number of days. These kids with involved parents are usually missing days for legitimate reasons, like extended illness, and I don't think those parents understand how widespread chronic absence has become since the pandemic. The 17% number cited in this article will be helpful to me when I try to get parents to chill a little before going after the school district full force.
If you are in a highly-ranked district, taking a few days off for vacation probably isn't a big deal, even if it is technically an illegal absence. A few weeks is a very different story. If it is PreK or K, they probably won't do anything besides a reprimand because students are not required by law to attend those, but first grade and beyond can have consequences, including calling CPS.
The absences on top of the disruption caused by the pandemic are going to have repercussions for a long time. I was working with a couple of librarians who work at an elite college. They are trying to rework their library instruction because new students are coming in with so little knowledge since the pandemic. They have trouble discerning an article from a book/monograph when doing searches, and they don't know how to get a call number from the catalog and find the corresponding item on the shelf. We are figuring that librarians at colleges with higher acceptance rates are having even bigger issues, and we are trying to figure out how to address them.
Is there nothing in there about parents notifying the school that kids would be absent for particular length of time, and maybe getting some extra materials to take with you?
After all, kids with medical conditions may have to be out of school for weeks, does that mean they are permanently deprived of education?
The real problem with truancy is generally that kids aren’t in school and the parents don’t know (or in some instances, care) where they are.
Students with medical conditions with long absences get a remote educator assigned to them who makes sure they get what they need and often sets up tutoring at home.
I don't know, my kids entering K and I'm just starting to learn about.
Really though, I was just trying to comment on a reason truancy might have risen. Their excused absence policy seemed a little strict in relation to how long they shutdown in-person learning. that's all :)
Let me add another point to the conversation: we’re still quite strict about attendance in college. Automatic F on the x number of unexcused absences (eg 4 a semester) is very common practice. The definition of “excused absence” is quite strict too and would appear on the syllabus.
P.S.
And it’s also common to enforce automatic and significant reduction in letter grade for eg unexcused absences 2-3 (ie if you have two unexcused absences and merit an A for the class you get a B 3 unexcused it’s a C).
By contrast to grade inflation generally these rules are actually enforced and very acceptable. Covid didn’t affect this because a doctor-approved absence falls under “excused” so in practice people could be absent more but there is a measure of control over it
When I was an undergrad, early eighties, I don't remember very many attendance polices like that. I did have one professor who was annoyed that I was getting "A"s while not showing up often (I needed money, and if work would give me extra shifts I'd take them). It's not something I did regularly, but the course was in my major and I was just really good at the material.
MBA program worked about the same. Law school, some classes had some deductions for low attendance, but nothing that punitive, and the exams represented so high a percentage of a grade that the attendance/participation component was really marginal.
If my paper and exam grades are good, doesn't that demonstrate I know the material?
I understand the attendance requirements as being an incentive to come to class, and that class time is helpful, usually critical even for understanding. So it's almost certainly better for a student to show up than to not show up. But you either know calculus or you don't, why should someone who has mastered it get a C because they didn't come to class?
After a year of teaching in NY, my husband made an attendance rule, but his aim was really trying to address the students that would come and go in the middle of class, disrupting everyone else. He had previously taught in Wisconsin, where he said the students were just as much of slackers, but they were a lot more polite about it.
This is interesting to hear. At my law school (class 2010) if you missed 5 days for any reason it was an auto fail. My crim professor actually told a guy to leave the exam who had missed too many days. He was pretty public about it too, the whole class witnessed it.
Class of 2000. First year was pretty strict, but I don't think you could lose more than a letter grade. I'm hard pressed to remember it as being as strict 2L and 3L.
It certainly wasn't a good strategy, and the people who followed it were not at or near the top of the class. They were also the people who followed it for BAR/BRI review and were over represented in the people who didn't pass the bar on the first try.
This happened 1st semester, 1L so 'weed out' was absolutely in full force. No idea if more leniency would have been given later in the program but after seeing the rule enforced once I was never tempted to find out.
I should specify that this goes for those classes that have mandaotry attendance. Many classes have de jure no obliigatory attendance policies. Those tend to be big lecture type classes. I'm talking about attendance-mandatory classes. In my experience (working in a Humanities dept. )those are discussoin based classes where particiaption is a part of the grade, or language classes. Attendance policies work the same for both, and make sense due to the nature of the class.
It's the "make sense" that I'm not quite grasping, and I don't mean that as criticism. But if by whatever objective measures you have: exams, papers, even number of times you constructively contribute to a class, a person demonstrates knowledge of the material, why should your grade not reflect that? I think really the heart of my question is what I started with: what should a grade reflect?
Ok. I’d note this is a digression from my original point (which was descriptive not prescriptive), but it’s a fair and worthwhile question so I’m happy to engage as best I can!
I have experience in discussion classes and language classes. They are different imo so I’ll address them in order.
For discussion classes the rationale is easier to articulate. The point is to have discussion. Preferably with debate and different view points. You need people there for that so that’s an exogenous reason. But more directly in order to grade people fairly you need to compare apples to apples so to speak. When I grade people on participation it can’t be based on something anecdotal such “oh she made a really smart comment this one time so that’s an A for her”. Rather I try to minimize arbitrariness by grading each student for their participation *in each class* then I average it accoridng to some formula. To do this fairly you need all studnets to have participated in a similar number of classes. Finally the point of the class is in part for the student to benefit from the discussion, and this can’t happen if they’re not there.
Language classes are a difffent beast. For living languages a crucial component is immersion via class discussion and listening to the instructor so that alone suffices for attendance policy. For dead languages (which are the ones I teach) we don’t typically do that (unfortunately). However you’re often graded on daily or weekly quizzes, so you need to attend to sit those. The need for the quizzes is practical : 90% or more of student will fail without them and I need them to monitor their progress.
In the more advanced language classes there will be fewer quizzes but more discussion (as we will primarily be reading and discussing a text in the original language) so the rationale goes back to the points i made about those classes.
My wife, a physician, did Classical Greek as her undergrad, I'll have to check and see what her experience was.
She started teaching herself Latin a couple years ago with some success (she has some weird ideas about "things that are fun"). She got distracted, and was also starting to look for online classes to continue with. Maybe I'll remind her and see if she picks it up again.
When my husband was a professor, he did give an excused absence to a student who had tickets to a Yankees World Series game (we are in NY) and one whose ferret died and came in with a note from the vet. He was generally pretty lenient if you told him ahead of time, but come in at the end of the semester with your excuses of why you missed previously, and he had no mercy. Also, having email addresses like "barhopper" didn't help your case.
Big lectures might not, but every small class I taught - i.e. one where participation is a component of the grade, had mandatory attendance, be it for freshmen or seniors. In fact as I recall the same went for graduate level courses too!
I've never seen that, at any of the institutions I attended, ranging from large lectures to tiny seminars. At most, there might be participation marks for 10-20% in the seminars, but we were all trusted to make our own choices about attendance and live with the consequences for learning and assignments/exams, as long as you didn't enter or leave in the middle of the class.
We are, as usual, veering off topic, but I had an interesting discussion not long ago with a relative who teaches college, and we were comparing the format of classes that my kids have in undergrad today compared to when we were in undergrad.
For the most part my classes were graded with one or two mid-term exams, one semester research paper, and one final. There were variations, numbers heavy classes like calc and stats or accounting and finance, tended to require some turned in homework along the way which just kept you honest about practicing on problems. Humanities course maybe had an extra paper or subbed in a paper for one less exam. But generally there were 3-6 high stakes grades and that was it.
My kids today seem to have a format similar to high school where there is a series of more frequent smaller assignments throughout the semester where you accumulate points toward some large number like 1000 or 1500. My niece and I agreed that we both would not have liked that because we both tended towards taking in information in bursts like drinking from a fire hose, but were less disciplined about doing a steady amount of work day in and day out. My kids are the opposite, and probably are better served by today's pedagogy.
Yes, it’s a change in pedagogical fashion (in America at any rate. At Oxford your grade for the entire *degree* is still determined exclusively by several long written exams all taken within a week or so at the very end of the 3-4 years!)
Law school is or at least was, one exam each class, end of each semester. In truly old school classes, a la The Paper Chase, you had no idea what you were facing the first time around.
Maybe things have changed in the last couple of decades, but when I was in school the only cases that cared at all about attendance were the super easy social sciences classes.
Isn’t it likely that some of the increase in classroom absences is due to pandemic-borne sensitivity around sending symptomatic kids to school?
Covid was such a strange sociological phenomenon in so many ways. When schools and offices began to reopen in 2021 there were long complicated instructions and flowcharts on when it was and wasn’t ok to come in...which all boiled down to the simple axiom that we all actually already knew: if you’re sick stay home.
But maybe Covid has caused people to take it more seriously than they did before. And with so much more home officing than before, it’s a much easier call for a parent who will be home anyway (or who can now more easily wfh) to keep a marginal kid home from school...doesn’t require a vacation day or a big childcare hassle.
This is absolutely true in my anecdotal experience. I had to raise an absolute stink to get someone other than me to call a families missing 30-50 days of third grade last year who were on the cusp of failing. In the past these would have triggered automatic investigations at much lower thresholds than 1-2 months of class missed.
That's crazy and sad to hear and really the kind of thing I was trying to reflect on in my initial comment.
Fwiw the only trip we are considering is traveling to Asia to meet an elderly, dying relative. And my kid's only entering K and if she was on the cusp of failing that would make the trip much less likely. Just figured I'd mention my specific situation and say that I don't intend to be one of the people making your life more difficult since so many people seemed to react so strongly to my vaguely worded personal plans in my initial comment.
This wouldn't apply to newer students so much, but for ones who already had some experience of school and were there during the closures (well...not there, more accurately), perhaps getting an unexpected taste of freedom from Child Prison showed a possibility that was previously hard to imagine. One could just...not go, and no one would much care, or possibly even officially approve. Yes, remote learning sucked for many, but far from all...and even pre-covid, school was fraught for lots of kids. I think it's similar to the rise in crime and disorder - after seeing a lot of that during the pandemic, and a fairly anemic response, the threshold of acceptable behaviour shifted for the marginal deviantly-inclined. (Trying so, so hard to not use that tired phrase "Overton window".)
Wrt covid specifically, I can also attest that my own workplace has seen a huge uptick in callouts and general absenteeism. Some of this is a positive norm change - people are much more willing to actually stay home when sick, rather than work through it. But it's also been the perfect cover to smuggle non-illness absences through, and of course medical privacy laws mean the employer can't grill too hard about exactly what someone was "sick" with. Some of it is also just vibes - the aforementioned crime and disorder makes being in public spaces like grocery stores much less fun than it used to be. I'd imagine the dynamic is similar in schools.
I doubt that the kind of calculations you are making are common among the families of children with truancy problems, which are skewed to low er socioeconomic groups that can't manage extended time away.
Perhaps so. Visiting sick dying relatives in other countries might be an issue some SES face, but not sure how commonly.
The relevance to MY's post today was just that I saw it as one reason truancy might have increased. Given how long my SD stayed closed it's a little hard for me to mentally adjust to their stated rules about being very serious about absences.
Oh I meant truancy / excused absences. That seems to be the area that had people jumping in fiercely. Yep, we've covered covid lockdowns from some other angles ad nauseum.
I think you're very, very wrong about this. You can't compare children to adults, and their minds are wired and growing in ways that can't just be replicated. You're only 6 (or 7, or 12, or whatever) once and if they aren't laying the right groundwork at that time there is a good chance they never will. Major disruptions in the learning process and development aren't easily repaired.
Teaching doesn't work like the workplace, if a kid misses an important set of foundational lessons that are happening in a given week they could fall really far behind and the teachers shouldn't have to take extra time out of their day to catch every kid back up whose family feels entitled to just take vacations whenever instead of waiting until summer like normal people.
The strain on resources is another component. As if it is fair to the other students to have their teachers diverted and distracted to accommodate people that do this.
I learned more outside of school than in the classroom until high school, and the ratio didn’t really even start to get close before I was about 11 or so. I imagine that that’s not uncommon for smarter than average and intellectually curious kids with smart parents— elementary school is generally very low-bandwidth. For families in that situation, school is much more of a daycare than a place where important learning happens, and a somewhat cavalier attitude about attendance is rational.
I read a lot of Lee Kuan Yew's materials a few years ago, which changed my political views significantly. One of my strongest takeaways has been his point that there are a lot of things the socioeconomic top 5-10% can do and be fine, but the rest of society cannot handle as well.
An a la carte approach to school attendance certainly seems to fit.
I'm sorry I just can't agree. Maybe in the highest echelons of society that's true in the sense that children growing up that way are impervious to anything anyway by virtue of wealth. However the message being sent is that showing up and getting your sh*t done is optional instead of mandatory. No one benefits from that. Developing the exact opposite ethic may be the most important thing the education system can impart.
I did it with my kids. Took two weeks off in elementary school to attend the winter olympics in Vancouver. We worked ahead of time with the teachers, who were thrilled for my kids. We had their books and assignments with them and completed them during down time, evenings, etc. They experienced zero drop in their grades,
and test scores, and the had experiences, learned different things, and met different people that they never otherwise would have had.
Like any group endeavor, there's a lot of activity that's necessary to have a group move forward that isn't necessary for each and every individual for each and every moment in that group. It's not waste, it's certainly not bad for the individual, but it's easy to see it can be compacted for an individual, especially for a short period of time.
I wouldn't want to home school, and think the regular educational process is best for kids, but to think there's no slack that can be taken up, or that every minute in a classroom is a precious learning moment that can't be made up, or that the model that's currently in use is so perfected that you can't have an alternative to it for a short period makes no sense at all.
As a military family, disruptions are the norm and haven’t impacted my kids ability to keep up. It’s actually possible to plan and work around the disruption, but it does take active parental action and involvement.
My understanding was that the evidence is mixed as best. I remember reading a article from ACT discussing this and came away thinking that mild amounts are probably fine.
I'm not sure it makes a lot of sense to rely on something like that for parenting. Also not sure how education policy and operations can be set if the rule is anyone can check in and out at any time for any reason.
Parents making that decision are behaving irresponsibly. I have no idea what fancy private schools do or don't do but I know taking kids out of school for any length of time is bad for them. People shouldn't do it and at a certain point the state needs to intervene.
There is probably an extremely small subset of parents who could navigate pulling their kid out of school for several weeks and manage their education at the same time, but it's definitely not the majority.
When I was a kid in the mid-90s the district where I went to school was mostly Mexican immigrants, and some of my friends would leave for Mexico a week before Christmas vacation and come back two weeks after it ended...even taking into account the two weeks school is closed, that's missing three weeks of school. They were very often lost, educationally, when they came back.
Same here. I generally have no issue with a kid missing 3-4 weeks of school if they are a really good student. They’ll be fine. But unfortunately most of the kids who miss 3+ weeks are already not doing well.
That may be true at the point where school is teaching significant things but I really doubt that is true for the first several years of school. The fact that the first several years of school are treated as completely optional helps show this.
I guess we'd have to narrow down definitions. From my perspective the big transition is going from learning to read in K-early elementary school to reading to learn. If those learning to read years get messed up you've got a serious problem that complicates everything after and that's really hard to correct. I'd never have a by choice extended absence during that time and I kind of think people who do (which includes some relatives of mine) are crazy.
A big thing schools teach in early years is just socialization, how to be in school. Missing out on that could make the rest of education pretty challenging.
Do you have any evidence on the prevalence of the "we're pulling our kid of school for weeks at a time" parenting style of private school parents? As someone who attended both public and private schools growing up, I can say that I never noticed the classrooms in private schools being emptied out, or it being in any way normal for classmates to just disappear for weeks at a time. I don't see any evidence that the reason kids are missing school at higher rates in 2023 is because parents suddenly decided that week long family trips or educational global jaunts are somehow now necessary, and if that's not the case then what exactly is your point in this thread? It seems far more likely that kids are missing school nowadays just to miss school and goof off with friends or engage in non-constructive activities.
To the extent that's true about private schools, I think the takeaway from your comment is that they need to change their practices rather than the public schools needing to be more like them. In the workforce, you get a certain number of vacation days, true, but you also don't get 2-3 months off in the summer, a week off in the springtime, and an extended break around Christmas. Kids already have tons of time away from the classroom- if anything, we should be giving them fewer breaks (I'm open to the claim that schools shouldn't break for the summer), but we definitely don't want to be excusing extended absences away from the classroom during the 9 months that kids are supposed to be learning each year.
I believe private schools are dealing with a different dynamic. Most specifically, they need to keep parents happy as a matter of customer service. But they also have some other things going for the school to mitigate the harms of extended absences: 1) they are generally dealing with families that already prioritize education, meaning that you can ask for the family to exert effort to gap fill in themselves what students are missing; 2) parents are usually better educated themselves, meaning they have greater ability to educate their children on their own; 3) they can tell parents to make up for absences by requiring the family to dedicate extra resources (e.g. hire a tutor); and 4) they can simply remove students whose absences cause problems for other students or who fall behind as a result of absences. So private schools have different incentives, some of which actually do mitigate the harm for students who miss more school, and others that at least contain the harm to that particular student.
Public schools have much different problems to deal with, especially large public schools with diverse student populations. Their funding is put in jeopardy if students miss too much school, both at the federal and local levels. Having large populations of students absent causes significant disruption. My neighborhood middle school that is a majority Hispanic just told families not to expect final class schedules for more than a month despite classes starting on Monday because they won’t know until a month in how many kids to expect. Something like 20% of the students won’t arrive the first week. And the schools are often dealing with student populations that already have very low value assigned to education. They don’t make up missed work, etc. Frankly, if given the option, a lot of families would pull their kids out of school a month at a time just to put them to work if they could. I’m not sure the right answer for these kids-but at a minimum, mitigating the harm to the education offered to other students should be prioritized.
To the extent it matters, we’re in a public school, but know a lot of families that moved to private after trying public simply because the public schools have to dedicate so many resources to dealing with chaos that they didn’t feel there was much energy or attention left for education.
I agree with your points, but I mostly think that this is just a made-up conversation that Mike* conjured out of thin air as a red herring for reasons I can't comprehend. I attended public and private school growing up, and I have friends and family whose children are in private school now. I see no evidence of some sort of widespread absenteeism in private schools where parents are just plucking their kids out of school to go galloping across the globe. It's just not a thing. My family does a 2 week reunion every year, and we do it over the summer because my siblings would never consider pulling my nieces and nephews out of school for something like a vacation- literally the primary scheduling concern for when we get together is the kids' school. So pretending like private schools allow this and its no big deal is just a ludicrous statement from what I can tell- there's no data to support it and it's being used as a way to try and pretend like public school kids skipping school is no big deal. It's just a crazy claim from what I can tell.
EDIT: got OP's user name wrong. Corrected to Mike.
I tend to agree. The difference between private and public mostly is the side-eye from public schools if you pull your kid out for a week that doesn’t happen in private. But that week is still mostly consequence free in public schools as long as you don’t miss more than 9-10 days total, so it’s probably not even worth mentioning.
In one version of the workforce what you describe is true, but it's not universal, and it's not necessarily an optimal model, it just happens to be the prevailing one we have today. If say you're self employed you're not limited to x number of days off. If. for instance, you are a self employed attorney, or plumber, it's largely the case that if you don't work you don't get paid. But if you want seven weeks off a year you can as long as you're happy with the amount of money you make in 45 weeks rather than 49.
If benefits, especially health care, weren't so tied to employment I think we would see more work look like this than we do now.
This is the mystery of Kamala Harris in political terms. She is perfectly positioned to establish herself as the smart, tough prosecutor who pushes back against woke excesses, to put it crudely. It's just a huge political opening. Everyone else in the party who might wish to make this case is inhibited by concerns over race-trolling, TBH. She could easily establish herself as a formidable general election prospect nationally. She would take some heat from her left but the benefits would easily outweigh the costs and lots of Democrats would treat her with kid gloves. This is really teed up for her. So why doesn’t she have the wit to see this? That's the question.
>She is perfectly positioned to establish herself as the smart, tough prosecutor who pushes back against woke excesses, to put it crudely.
I don't ask this sarcastically -- have you ever met a Kamala Harris fan who isn't a big proponent of woke excesses (to put it crudely)? If you're Harris and all of your supporters and staffers are among the most social justice-oriented activists around, and you were chosen pretty explicitly because of your identitiy characteristics, how would you be able to then pivot to being a centrist who punches left?
It's a tough position for her to be in, undoubtedly.
Not all social justice issues are identical. I think she could punch left on crime specifically and get away with it with her base. Her rabid supporters are social justicey, but they also really dislike the Bernie people, who were the subset of leftists who were most likely to embrace "defund" or anarchist rhetoric. The stereotypical Harris stan is more likely to be animated by things like ethnic representation in Star Wars movie casts.
You have just described the perfect person/position to "punch Left." "Look at all these Woke staffers I have. Look at my first generation immigrant background. How can anyone accuse ME of not being a good Progressive?"
Might be the perfect person, but its very hard to go against your "team." These are the people who work for you day in and day out, feeling like a disappointment to them is an hard thing to do.
It's also just really far outside of her professional political experience. Before being VP she worked exclusively in CA Democratic politics, which is entirely about upward mobility within your own party (since the state GOP is largely a joke). Her entire career has been about cultivating the Democratic base and power centers; all of the relevant political groups are on the left.
Political nerds like us can take a more abstract view of her candidacy, but I suspect that there is an unappreciated risk to a politician like Harris trying to move to the center in the sense that she probably doesn't operationally know how to do that yet. As VP she's so visible that she can't blunder through a bunch of tone-deaf attempts at being a centrist before finding a groove that makes the pivot seem authentic to most voters. It could be that her team just sees that as too much of a risk to attempt a pivot like this.
I would guess that you are right about her bubble placing limits on her maneuverability. But she would trade in some current devotees for new ones, probably with a net gain, if she assumed the role of Rhetorical Excesses Cop. But politically let's go deeper. Identity politics is fully compatible with ideological moderation. Hillary Clinton started using racial justice rhetoric as a way to punch left in 2016 and Biden’s strength with the Black vote in 2020 was the key to his ability to disrupt the white-brown strength of Sanders. This despite his history as an anti-busing crusader, which Harris pointed out. I was for Sanders both cycles and frankly I loathe the use of what I consider cheap racial justice rhetoric to undermine formally race-neutral but effectively reparative social-democratic politics. That is not what I am suggesting Harris might do. Instead I think she's well positioned precisely to caution Democrats against rhetorically racializing all issues when that is sometimes counter-productive.
I used to be a Harris fan - back when she was “raise taxes on rich to cut taxes for middle class” along with the cop persona we’re talking about here. She lost me for obvious reasons. She could have a fanbase more like me if she wanted.
I think the boring answer is that she's only slightly below replacement value in her instincts as a Democratic politician. There are strong incentives for a national Democratic politician to not spend a lot of time criticizing activist groups in their party beyond the immediate pushback on Defund after 2020. A lot of older liberals are frankly engaging in cope and convincing themselves that Harris is uniquely awful at this, but the truth is the Democratic party as a coalition demands a bit of incoherence and dodging, because it is the coalition's aggregated policy demands and not merely rhetoric that produces frustration with the median voter.
Biden is successful at projecting this because he's a white guy born when FDR was in office. His senior moments and slip-ups are bad for a politician in general, but good for reassuring moderates that he's no radical. Once he's replaced by a younger politician, they will have a hell of a time squaring that circle. Democratic bigwigs might be upset in Politico that they put Kamala as the only no-drama primary option, but they only have themselves to blame for where the party is in terms of promises to lots of different groups and interests. Bashing Harris is a cope for them.
Yes, and, also, the median voter is characterized by a fair bit of incoherence and dodging too. The right approach for Harris is to craft a public persona so that when average voters -- the type that don't follow politics all that closely and can switch between voting for Obama and Trump without seeing any great contradiction -- see her on the screen, they get a good feeling about themselves, about her, and about America.
Basically, be more of a happy, joyful celebrity and less of anybody's attack dog (even though that may be a traditional role for a VP and something that comes naturally to a former prosecutor). And doing that seems to be well within her reach. I thought some of the best stuff she did in the 2020 primary was thing like where she went into someone's house and cooked with them. A nontraditional campaign tactic but very powerful if done right and your goal is make make people trust and like you. As is having positions on crime and law enforcement that seem normie and common sense.
I don't think this is unique to Dems for what it's worth. Republican bigwigs are now learning that Trump has been better at delegating than DeSantis is, and this is a classic example of where Trump's day-to-day lazy management is not abysmally below replacement rate for Republicans such that any other leader could obviously do a better job. DeSantis has a delegation issue, I suspect that's why it has taken him 8 months and falling thirty points in polls to finally grasp a campaign strategy against Trump.
I agree. I think it's about being a great leader, or not. Clinton and Obama, in different ways, knew where they wanted to go and brought people with them. Biden is a different leader than they were, but gets where he wants to go by pretty astutely managing his coalition.
Harris has had a great opportunity to stand out and lead, but she just doesn't seem to have it. As to staff, Congress members can get captured by their staff and not suffer much for it, executives should be inspiring their staffs to follow them, not the other way around.
I think it helps to understand how she "leveled up". Twitter played a huge role in her building her base of support for running as AG. She was one of the first generation of pols who managed to become a "Twitter darling", mostly by catering to the sorts of too-online lefties who were cheering her on.
This is what eventually became her chief liability. Even though she doesn't primarily rely on Twitter anymore, she relies on that fanbase to bolster her reputation of popularity. Those people are huge fans of hers and think she's to the left of where she actually is (or where she started out). She can't just throw them under the bus.
It feels like DeSantis is running on a similar track. It's easy to get adoration by saying nonsense on social media to your bubble, but once the normies IRL start hearing your ideas and experiencing your actual public persona, it's all downhill.
I think it’s more like Elise Stefanik or Josh Hawley’s current branding problems: Once you cater to a base that isn’t your actual ideology, you can’t abandon the kayfabe.
RDS is more of a true believer - even if he doesn’t believe half the stuff he says, we KNOW that he harbors a similar sort of resentment/grievance to his followers that Stefanik and Hawley simply don’t share.
Anyways, KH should be a cautionary tale to Stefanik and Hawley about what would ever happen if they succeeded enough to graduate to a higher office than that which their kayfabe-bought base can actually sustain. As we see, she’s stuck. She can’t accept a demotion and go build the grassroots support she never bothered to; she’d lose face to anyone who bought the original hype. She can’t win where she’s at because she doesn’t have enough support nor talent; so she loses face by standing pat. And she can’t make a run at the top for those same reasons; she’d lose face by failing. No matter what she does, she loses. She can only ever luck out by having Biden die on her and then managing to not fuck up actually being president.
It’s sad, really. The vice presidency would actually be an ideal office for offroading these sorts of politicians who “outkick their coverage”, if not for the absurd tradition that parties treat their former VPs like they’re automatically entitled to be presidential contenders.
Arguably the problem is that vice-presidents have been selected for a very, very long time to shore up tickets' geographic, demographic, and general political electoral appeal -- basically being along for the vibes, with little pretense otherwise -- but they also bear the essentially unrelated responsibility of becoming POTUS if the primary officeholder dies or is incapacitated. So we choose VP candidates based on a vibe-check and then as a weird side-effect this implicitly "vets" them as qualified to hold the highest office in the land as well as providing a natural Schelling point for a future primary coalition.
Conceptually it's arguably similar to having research professors teach classes: it's part of the job description and that ends up mattering in substance, but at the same time it's not actually why anyone gets hired into a tenure track position in the first place, and sometimes you predictably end up with people who end up doing this secondary job tacked on to their primary one despite kind of sucking at it.
Progressives believe in change and the possibility of making the world a better place. They specifically assign the state the primary role of changing society for the better. This is done primarily through devices funded by the public (taxes) and for the public. Using the power of the state to protect and consistently improve public safety , via a public service that’s free and available for all (the police) and whose presence is esp salient in public spaces for public use is therefore progressivism par excellence. The anti police fashion in contemporary left circles by contrast is an incoherent aberration more to do with (rather reactionary) classism than any coherent philosophy that’s meaningfully progressive.
There's always been a strain of anarchist-ish and revolutionary-ish element in Left politics. But, I would agree that it's separate from traditional Progressivism. And that what goes by that banner today on-line especially is an awkward lefty chimera.
The hardcore anarchists often have the types of personalities that start out on the extreme left and end up flipping in middle age to the extreme right. Many historical examples of this from David Horowitz to Mussolini.
people use monikers in a rather loosey goosey fashion but to my knowledge the whole point of anarchism is that literally nobody is in charge... You can accuse people of not really meaning it but that's another matter.
The idea that underlies this ‘incoherent aberration’ from your description of progressivism par excellence is the core idea of Critical Theory that social norms are based on arbitrary hierarchies. In practice, this imparts a certain illegitimacy to reinforcing social norms. And it leaves those at the top of the hierarchy with no justification other than class status, which they aren’t going to relinquish.
Progressivism is historically associated with positivism, rather than critical theory. (Marxism is also more associated with positivism than with critical theory.)
"The anti police fashion in contemporary left circles by contrast is an incoherent aberration more to do with (rather reactionary) classism than any coherent philosophy that’s meaningfully progressive."
I'd describe the current divide between leftists and liberals like this: Leftists regard the existing social order as fundamentally illegitimate (while liberals regard it as legitimate but in need of improvement). Hence the leftist ACAB attitude - cops are responsible for upholding and protecting the existing social order.
but aren't also judges, teachers, soldiers etc? you can oppose order period and being an anarchists. A dumb but logically consistent positioin. I still maintain that "leftist" anumus towards policing is class bias not coherent philosophy.
I think it's a reaction to the many graphic examples of police misconduct over the last few decades, almost all of which affect poor Democratic constituents. Rodney King, George Floyd, Rampart, the MOVE bombing, and on and on. There are a good number of crooked or otherwise bad cops out there.
Now overall this is definitely overshadowed by the public good of policing as a whole and the fact that most police are trying hard to do good things. Democratic constituents would benefit from more policing because they tend to be the victims of most crime. I think a lot of people on the left don't care to acknowledge the cost-benefit analysis because it doesn't support their position, or just because they have dumb, knee-jerk positions.
But I don't think it's fair to say that the anti-police case came out of nowhere, or class bias (not sure what that actually means in this case).
It makes no sense. It is the right's move to observe suboptimal function of the state and yell "Defund" through the rooftops. The left is generally more rational than that. There is both the "bad apples" point but more importantly, any true progressive will be *reform* oriented, i.e. how do we improve the police should be the discussion on the left. That is not at all the same as being anti police, quite the opposite.
I don't know, this seems to be verging into "no true Scotsman" territory. The left has its fair share of beliefs that aren't really supported by the evidence, although these days the right (in the US at least) is continuing to make heroic efforts to retain the title of the irrational side. I think defund is one of those bad ideas on the left, even though I have immense sympathy for the idea of reforming policing. Doing away with it turns out to be quite different than making it work better!
I don't think your second sentence is accurate. Progressives don't assign the state the primary role of changing society for the better. They do believe that the state can play an important role, but I don't think they/we see it as the primary player. We believe that both individuals and lots of other communal institutions like schools, NGOs, churches, social clubs, political orgs, AND the state AND probably still most importantly individuals can all work together to improve the lives of everyone.
Probably the most critical progressive idea is actually valuing the worth of each individual and believing that society in total can be harnessed to enhance and value that individual.
I’m sorry but i don’t think you’re describing progressivism at all. The idea of the importance of the individual is shared by the liberal right. In fact they stress it more while the left stresses the importance of circumstances (or nurture over nature if you will). The classic division between right and left is about the role of the state. In other words I view progressivism as basically a watered down version of democratic socialism or non revolutionary/reformist socialism.
Basic point that Matt leaves completely unaddressed: Cops should also be arrested and prosecuted for non-murder crimes, such as making false statements on official documents (like arrest reports). Any attempt to improve the quality of our law enforcement has to take this seriously.
"First, we need more intense, coordinated, and sophisticated law enforcement efforts to apprehend, prosecute, and disrupt the activities of gang members and leaders. Second, we need to figure out how to prevent the entry of young, vulnerable individuals into gangs and also enfranchise communities victimized by gangs in the larger cause of fighting them. Finally, we need to break the cycle of crime and focus more strategically on the re-entry of gang members from jail or prison back into their communities."
Was it ever explained what an 'intense', 'coordinated' and 'sophisticated' law enforcement effort to [destroy gangs] was? What does she mean by 'enfranchising' communities victimised by gangs in the larger cause of fighting them? How does one focus more 'strategically' on the re-entry of convicted gang members into a community?
But apart from that, why does the diametric opposite of these things seem to be happening in California recently?
The DC Crime subtack that Matt references has a great breakdown on targeted enforcement that worked wonders. You basically identify the couple hundred highest risk offenders and then swoop in an make it clear to them that the cops and feds are watching and will catch them, and then offer alternatives if they agree to discontinue violence. Super effective if you keep at it and actually prosecute offenders who break the rules, but it costs money and takes dedicate resources staying on the issue after your first few busts.
I was struck by how the "one stop shop" for efficient law enforcement and quick adjudication seemed like a very good and very concrete policy idea, for which it sounds like Harris clearly deserves kudos to the extent of her involvement, versus the more platitude-ridden character of those other passages. (Although to be fair I do think that more emphasis on re-entry programs actually has some content as an idea rather than being totally vapid, even without precisely outlining the details of every such programs. "Enfranchise communities" is more in the vein of "I would also like a pony" except less concrete.)
ED: Responding specifically to the question regarding "intense" "coordinated" and "sophisticated" law enforcement efforts -- a potential reification of this might be "focus on whatever tactics and strategies ground the mob under the bootheel of the state during the heyday of RICO prosecutions and see if that works for gangs." Although I know nothing about actual anti-gang prosecutorial work so I can't say whether that's a novel proposal or if it's been tried repeatedly and just hasn't worked for any of various reasons.
I'm confused about the statement about why Kamala Harris is in the Democratic party. Is the implication that a prosecutor who enforces the law is not welcome in the Democratic party? That seems prima facie ridiculous.
Didn’t say it was--it’s one of those things that progressives say that get quoted on Fox News and other right-wing outlets to show that Democrats are crazy.
After George Floyd, mainstream Democratic electeds almost uniformly disavowed the “defund” slogan and Democratic primary voters continued to cast most of their ballots for Joe Biden. (His closest competitor, Sanders, also didn’t adopt the “defund” idea.) Twitter isn’t real life.
I agree with you about mainstream Democrats. But the parent comment misquotes Matt, who actually wrote "Reading the book, you might occasionally ask yourself why the author is _on_the_left_ at all," not "why the author is in the Democratic party", much less whether her views are compatible with mainstream elected Democrats.
Worse, it's all so the commenter can pretend to be confused about why people might perceive tension between Harris' book and her role as one of the administration's most visible social justice advocates.
Fair about the quote, though he does go on to say she has mainstream Democratic Party positions, which seems to identify the Democratic party positions with the left. I do think what "the left" means here is very much open to interpretation on social vs economic positions. And I think it is poor analysis to define left and right purely on whether someone believes in social justice or social injustice/hierarchy.
I just browsed a study on recidivism from the US Sentencing Commission, the group that writes the federal sentencing guidelines. The basic takeaway is that increasing sentences from 38 to 79 months reduced recidivism by 18%. That doesn’t mean you subtract 0.18, it means you multiply by 0.82.
They used matching to control for age at release and offense type, very plausible methodology, and they have enough data for robust conclusions.
Anyway, that seems like a good estimate of the effect of incarceration. Double sentences, reduce recidivism by 18%. This is a good investment if you are deterring serious, violent crimes and a bad investment if you are deterring almost anything else.
I remembering reading once that age is a significant factor the probability that some one commits a crime, and I wonder to what extent longer sentences reduce recidivism because people are older when they get out of prison.
the u.s. sentencing commission adjusted for that through matching, but yes, age is a huge predictor of criminality and violent crimes by men over 50 are pretty rare
I think that might be more true of violent crime, but much less than you would expect for crime in general. Recidivism among older people is still remarkably high.
Seems like there’s a slip from reduction of recidivism to deterrence at the end. It seems to me that those are very different things. And the importance of an 18% drop in recidivism might be more meaningful if it is a drop from 44% chance to 36% chance than if it’s a drop from 11% chance to 9% chance.
The desire to prosecute the 1/6 rioters being about "coercion" - presumably not to do it again - is the most sympathetic possible reading. I don't think anyone seriously thinks that these same people are going to storm the capitol again.
It's about punishment, which is fine. They should be punished. But it can be unsettling to witness just how much thirst for blood the "defund the police/abolish prisoners" crew has when there are political enemies involved.
I agree with you that you don't need a deterrence case for punishing serious crimes, punishment itself can be worthwhile, but I think you're confusing general and specific deterrence--even if none of those specific people do anything unlawful again, tolerating it encourages others.
As someone who lives in DC, I was fairly appalled at all the normally progressive, criminal-justice-reform minded people here who had spent years decrying the state of the jails and how we treat prisoners who were suddenly completely uncaring and gleeful about complaints from 1/6 defendants over how awful their treatment was at the local jail. A) I think that's a monstrous double standard, but B) it was a huge missed opportunity. If you ACTUALLY care about how we treat people in prison then you suddenly had the perfect chance to build a coalition to make reforms that could have lasted for years/decades, dramatically improving the lives of thousands of people who are normally some of the most overlooked and forgotten members of society, but instead everyone was too busy mocking the prisoners and republicans in Congress for whining about the conditions.
While I agree that the “normally progressive” folks baying for blood was not a good look for them, all I remember about “awful treatment” was the Q-Anon Shaman complaining that he wasn’t getting his organic diet in jail, which I think was rightly mocked. Also a lot of the rioters seemed to think they weren’t doing anything illegal (because they thought the President had their back) and were shocked to be arrested and confined--which is unpleasant, but a necessary part of law enforcement. Hard to see how the treatment of people who threatened members of Congress and were subjected to the same conditions as ordinary defendants presents some sort of great opportunity for reform--even Republicans sympathetic to Trump cannot have been thrilled with the folks who drove them out of the chamber and forced them into hiding for hours.
Some of those same members of Congress were visiting the jail and holding press conferences about the conditions outside of it. I mean, have you not seen public comments from Republican members of Congress decrying how awful DC is for treating these people this way? The fact that you can only recall the complaint about the organic diet indicates to me that maybe you just haven't paid very much attention to this? Nothing wrong with that (it's a small issue with only limited coverage, especially in the MSM vs. right leaning news sources), but it honestly feels like you just haven't followed this discussion.
"Hard to see how the treatment of people who threatened members of Congress and were subjected to the same conditions as ordinary defendants presents some sort of great opportunity for reform"
- People who have been clamoring for reform to help out ordinary defendants have been stymied by others who think reform is unnecessary. Those same people that blocked reform are now incentivized to make changes because their constituents are upset about and impacted by the poor conditions. That creates an opportunity to open the door and engage in a dialogue with those people about a suddenly shared goal.
I really don't. When you read the life stories of the defendants, almost all of them are confused people whose minds were broken by internet conspiracy theories. I think the LARP ended when they made contact with the criminal justice system.
Also it's hard to imagine there being a chance again, it's not like the Capitol Police are going to try to hold the fort with a dozen officers in 2025.
My favorite sort of thing in this space are people who are loudly anti-death penalty complaining about lack of hate crime enhancements in cases where the defendant is already being sentenced to life in prison without parole under existing laws.
maybe we could flog them bi-weekly for the first x years of their sentence, x being increased if the victims were generational african americans and decreased for every ancestor the victim had on the mayflower or in any ivy+ graduating class
I certainly did greatly enjoy watching all the commenters on progressive sites who weep over the cruelty of self-confessed multiple murderers getting the death penalty shrieking about how literally every unauthorized person in the Capitol building should be summarily killed on the spot.
I don't have a super strong opinion about Harris, but I've noticed that her supporters are disproportionately in the "DEI manager in the Yemeni wedding liquidation division at Lockheed Martin" quadrant of the coalition. The guys who want to decolonize the claim denial department at the health insurance company they work for. As in, more concerned about the most basic optics (and talking about them constantly) than, you know, what's really going on out there.
I haven’t read the book, but MY’s take on it makes sense to me because of a 2019 (?) podcast interview of Harris I listened to. She sounded very pragmatic - much like a modern, moderate Democrat. But her campaign instincts are horrible, and now I’m afraid that she’ll be a drag on the already low-polling Biden.
KH's views on the appropriate use of incarceration would be more attractive if our jails and prisons were more constructive and less dangerous places. Here in NYC, sending someone to Rikers could literally be a death sentence, and certainly not rehabilitative.
No good explanation, nope. And...things are definitely getting worse, because of inadequate staffing. We read this in the NYT, but also my son's Zen Buddhist group, which used to provide Buddhist chaplains to Rikers (and elsewhere) on a volunteer basis, has finally been invited back in after Covid, but is seriously worrying about whether conditions are too dangerous, based on what they have been told by the official chaplain, about staffing inadequacy. "We'd really love to have you back, but we can't promise to keep you safe."
One thing I would like to know is who exactly are these key Harris staffers? What are their names? And why do they appear from afar to be so much worse than the average Democratic staffer? Are they a bunch of a Tiktok-addicted zoomers? What's going on? I see from five seconds of googling that her chief of staff is someone named Lorraine Voles, but she was only hired in 2022 and has a long resume working for lots of normal Democratic politicians, so I assume she isn't the worst of them.
Thanks for not answering any of my questions, and for so effectively countering an argument that I plainly didn't make. I get that you really dislike Harris and everyone else to your left - I'm not a huge fan of hers either - but at least try to stay on topic instead of preaching at people.
I'm late getting to this post and catching up on all the comments. One thing I get (other than how focused people are on pulling kids from school) is that people dislike Harris because they, well, dislike Harris. Mumble mumble failed 2020 campaign mumble mumble. Something about unnamed staff personnel? Her fans being progressives? (I didn't know she had any fans.) All very vague and confusing.
VPs are never popular. VPs are never never more popular than POTUS (current approval rating 40% compared to 39% for Harris). They always look weak and ineffectual. It's in the job description.
The dislike of Harris seems to be so much about "vibes" and not much else that part of me is starting to think maybe it has something to do with her gender? I don't know. "Just asking questions."
What on earth? I don't particularly dislike Harris, nor is she on my left on most issues! I read your series of questions as boiling down to "What's going on" (one of your explicit questions, btw), so I answer that to my mind if there is anything wrong with her staffers - which you very storngly imply, in my humble reading - then imho we should ask why she hired them. That's more interesting, to me, then all the rest. We can agree to disagree on that. I may have also misunderstood you. In either case I don't see any justification for devolving the discussioon into (misfired) personal attacks.
hiring normie dems would be a big improvement because it seemed a lot like tiktok addicts were pushing* her into dumb positions like the healthcare thing and she'd have to do damage control.
*she may have just been that bad at campaigning, idk
Today ended up being a fun Throwback Thursday: after Matt took us on this trip down memory lane, I reread Elizabeth Nolan Brown's critical piece on Harris [https://reason.com/2019/06/03/kamala-harris-is-a-cop-who-wants-to-be-president/], to which I remember Matt tweeting in reply at the time something like "Kamala is a cop but cops are popular.".
The problem with Kamala is I don't know if she believes what she wrote in 2010 or what she said in 2020 (and I'm not sure she knows either).
Sincerity is underrated in politics.
Marco Rubio nods.
Let's dispel this fiction that Marco Rubio doesn't know what he's doing.
Ron DeSantis wriggles his head around with an exasperated expression of confusion.
Rubio *did* sincerely want some water during that SotU response of his. (Seriously, I can't wrap my head around how his political career survived that fiasco.)
I was thinking more of his cowardice around comprehensive immigration reform and the way Chris Christie exposed his shallowness during the 2016 primary. I'd forgotten about the water thing.
yeah who among us hasn't looked weird drinking water
but not having the courage of your convictions to say "yeah I had that position on immigration because I believed I was right, I still believe I was right, and I'm right" would have been much better for him than looking like such a spineless wimp
I think you are not correctly remembering the water incident if you believe it's about "look[ing] weird": https://youtu.be/19ZxJVnM5Gs?t=19
the market inefficiency in electoral politics is not sounding like everything you said was fed to you by a consultant (which is why Trump and Yang did better than what people would have expected)
Does she believe that Joe Biden is an unreformed segregationist? Or not? Hard to tell.
Jow Biden sounds like a bounty hunter Star Wars character.
Oups. Fixed that.
Between that and not being to able to answer the universal healthcare question and getting absolutely bodied on stage by fucking Tulsi Gabbard of all people, it's incredible to me that she has any fans left at all. She's absolutely the worst candidate I've ever seen.
>She's absolutely the worst candidate I've ever seen<
Has she lost a single race other than the Democratic primary in 2020? Not really a bad record.
This is Rick Perry erasure.
His debate performance was genuinely one of the biggest unforced errors in the last 50 years of American politics.
Arguably, it was forced by his existential status of being Rick Perry.
At the time she seemed to see it as a moment of triumph (she got attention, in a ridiculously large field), but it was probably the beginning of the end for her campaign. Amazing how quickly she went from top fundraiser to broke.
Bring back smoke-filled rooms! Smoke optional.
Would they be vape-filled rooms now?
The initial coverage from both progressive and mainstream outlets was that she had dealt a stunning death blow to Biden's obviously doomed campaign!
>> and I'm not sure she knows either
Yes, precisely the problem with her !
Many people don’t believe lots of things they believed ten years ago.
My problem with Kamala is that she was the mistress of the Speaker of the California Assembly when he was 30 years older than her. Every inch of her body has bent in service of her political ambition, and I distrust ambition on that scale.
That relationship is pretty low on my list of problems with Kamala, but I had expected to hear about it it all the time during the campaign and it was basically crickets from all sides.
trump would have been bold to weaponize that
How would you know there wasn't genuine romantic interest on her part?
the age difference is suggestive. furthermore, if her natural preference is powerful men 30 years older than her, doesn’t that make my point?
Don't underestimate the charm of Willie Brown. His "rizz" was truly legendary. Playgirl voted him in top 10 sexiest men. Whether she benefited or not from the relationship, the attraction would have been mutual.
I don't think there's evidence she's specifically attracted to older men. Her husband is only 1 week older than her. She had a specific attraction to one particularly charming older man with whom she shared similar interests.
Standard. You think all these very smart people in politics are doing it for the public good or a little bit of money? Or do you just object that she wasn't able to become prominent through above board work to get her foot in the door?
i think bernie was pretty pure and obama was pure enough but slutty enough to stay in afghanistan to hedge political risk
Allan has nailed it! My thoughts precisely. I hate to come across as mean-spirited, but VP Harris does NOT instill confidence in anyone...as far as I can tell. Simply, a struggling, ineffective politician. 🙄
Bail is pretty easily weaponized by the state. It's easy to set bail beyond the means of a defendant irrespective of his propensity to show up. This leaves him with the unfair choice of languish in jail at great cost until the system gets around to him, or take whatever deal the state offers because the penalty on offer is less than the penalty he will have already paid even if he were to win at trial.
It's annoying but neither that hard nor at all unfair for the state to have to work a little harder to get someone to court if they don't show up on time. It's incredibly wrong to coerce a confession. I'll always pick burden on the state over burden on the citizen.
Sounds like a violation of the first amendment to me. Would your law make it illegal to provide funds to bail a friend or relative out of jail? If not maybe you could call it the "People With Rich Friends Can Get Out of Jail but Poor People With Rich Liberal Friends Have to Stay in Jail Act of 2023"
Bail funds are a lot like bounty hunters in the sense that they outsource the role of ensuring that the defendant shows up to court. I assume when the bail fund posts bail, they send the defendant a letter or something that says "we're helping you out by posting bail, please return the favor by showing up to court", and they're incentivized to make sure that they actually do.
How is it different from a zero interest bail bond?
On truancy here's a banal observation based on personal reflection: The covid school closings made schools seem much less serious about attendance even after they reopened.
My kid is about to start public school this month, and as I'm reading the rules about excused absences I keep thinking "how seriously do I need to take this? If I pull her out to visit relatives for a few weeks are they really going to do something?" I don't know that I would have had that thought if they hadn't been keeping kids out of classrooms for so long just recently. Maybe that same idea in other parents' heads is part of why truancy has risen.
A few weeks absence to visit family seems wildly excessive.
Hard to believe but some people have family in other countries.
How long would you make a trip to Vietnam to visit family there? It's a 24-36 hour flight. Most people stay 2-4 weeks pretty easily.
I think most people take those kind of long trips in the summer for exactly that reason; I know my family did.
Then do it during the two months off in summer or two weeks off around new years. Pulling you kid out of school for a month during the school year is a terrible idea.
Also surprisingly, there are some cultures whose most important dates don't align with the American-Christian holiday schedule.
It's not inconceivable that a Thai-American family might want to spend at least one, single Songkran with the grandparents before they die.
An Indian-American family might want to spend at least a single Holi with the grandparents before they die.
And so on. Chinese New Year, Tết, Passover, Eid, ...
Not to mention all the other things that crop up like weddings, funerals, death anniversaries, and so on that have significant cultural importance outside of America.
I'm not arguing it should be an annual occurrence. But your initial post suggested there was literally no reason to ever do it, which is what I'm pushing back against. You didn't write "egregious unless there's a good reason".
If these events are so important, they should be accommodated without taking several weeks off school. Or you should just homeschool.
These issues are not unique to SE Asians, and large multicultural school districts simply cannot be expected to accommodate all the different sets of demands different cultural groups might have on their students’ time. A week off here or there probably is fine. Stacking an extra week on a spring break or winter vacation is fine. Pulling a kid out of classes for a month and then expecting the teacher to deal with the consequences their return (catching them up, figuring out what to do about group projects, etc.) a month later is unreasonable except under extreme circumstances out of the student’s family’s control.
This reads as someone who doesn't understand that while school is important, its not the only important or even the most important thing. School is there to serve kids and the community, not for the kids or the community to serve school.
Our local public university is becoming increasingly diverse. Traditionally, they gave many Christian and Jewish holidays off. About a decade ago, they added Muslim holidays. A couple of years ago they threw in the towel and removed all religious holidays off the calendar and instead provided a list of dates that students or staff had to be allowed an excused absence for if they request it at the beginning of the semester.
“If Christmas is so important, it should be accommodated without canceling classes for everyone.”
That is exactly what your first paragraph said.
"If these events are so important, they should be accommodated without taking several weeks off school. Or you should just homeschool."
Or you could just homeschool for the two weeks around the holiday. And that plan sounds pretty similar to taking the kid out of school for two weeks, because they'll still need to keep up on the work they're missing while on vacation (e.g., "here's the 14 worksheets we plan to give the kids while you're gone. Make sure yours does one each day.").
We’re talking about school policy, not the criminal code. If a student works out a prolonged absence with the teachers in advance, of course that can be accommodated now and again. But a school shouldn’t have a blanket policy that a kid can take weeks off without notice and then clear it with a parent note.
"But a school shouldn’t have a blanket policy that a kid can take weeks off without notice and then clear it with a parent note."
I...don't think this was implied by the original (or even any subsequent) post?
Just to play DA... a lot of the families that might make this particular kind of trip are from countries in South and Southeast Asia. Which isn't exactly known to have a "fun" climate during the summer. The vibes I've gotten from most of my Indian and Indian-American friends have been, "Why the fuck would I go back there in July? I came here because I LIKED not sweating my balls off all day long."
I get that, but schools usually have two weeks off in the winter. And when you’re prioritizing the comfortable climate during your trip over a month of school, it isn’t about the ability to see family but an indication that school isn’t important that we’re talking about.
And here in Texas, this really shows. It’s very common for a huge percentage of students not to show up for the first few weeks of school as they make their way back from visiting family in South and Central America or from jobs. It throws the schools that serve these students into disarray as they have to rebalance classes for at least the first month. One result is that parents who prioritize school pull their kids out in favor of private schools, charters, or move to public schools with demographics that don’t have these issues.
I spent K-12 in Texas, and I really feel the schools there should just chop a couple weeks off summer vacation and add it to the Winter break.
My family came from the Middle East, which can be just as hot. We either went in the summer anyway (there's stuff to do there in the summer even though it's hot) or went over winter break.
Well, the relative we are trying to visit might not be alive in summer, so that particularly idea wouldn't work
First, I’m sorry your family is experiencing this. The loss of a loved one is an extremely significant event.
Second, I don’t believe most children need to miss several weeks of school, even for such an event, as hard as it might be, though certainly there are exceptions. Under those circumstances, I believe most families would figure out a way for the children to visit over a week long absence, using the two weekends as bookends to travel, giving you a week to be with family. Or would borrow a day from a random holiday on the calendar. I understand that for some, that might not feel like enough. And I’m certain that for some, some mix of different travel dates might require borrowing a day or two on one side of the trip or the other, making a student miss 6-7 days in total. But I don’t think it would generally justify a month-long absence. And obviously we’d be talking mostly about the privileged few whose parents could also travel internationally for a month away from work.
Really, I was just trying to float the idea that truancies were up b/c school closures made absences seem like less of a sincere or important concern. I was only bringing up my personal situation b/c it was a sincere feeling for a moment as I was trying to understand the rules of the school my kid is entering. Fwiw, we have no definitive trip even planned at this point and I was just a little surprised to find that 5 is the limit. I'm sure we'll figure it out talking with other parents / teachers.
This is very common. About 10% of my class at my previous school would be in Jalisco for most of December/January
Asia is pretty far. Max of 5 excused absences in the school year. Lots of things to think about here, but not wildly excessive
I will say 5 excused seems low. I’d be very surprised if there are real consequences for going over that until you get to something around or over 10. But I’d try to make a trip work on only using 5-7, which with weekends gives to 9-11 days. Surely not as much time as you’d like under the circumstances, but enough time to at least settle in and spend time with people.
I remember when I was in still there was a procedure for if a student was going to say for an extended period (week or couple weeks), say to visit relatives abroad or something else. We got each teacher to sign and they would list the assignments to complete while gone. Don’t know if they still do this or if it is universal
That's good to know. It's probably not that big of a deal in my personal situation since my kid's only going to be in K. I was really just bringing it up to reflect on how the covid closings made me more cynical about excused / unexcused absences, but I guess I did it in a way that launched into a dozen other directions, lol.
Lots of schools haven’t helped by, frankly, enabling truancy. My school system used to have a rule that 9 (more than 9?) unexcused - as in no doctor’s note - absences was an automatic failure for the year and meant repeating the grade. Now schools will do almost anything to pass a student.
That's likely because whatever damage missing two weeks out of 30-some may do, repeating a whole year has even worse long term consequences, substantially increasing the chances of the student dropping out before graduating.
Going to visit relatives ought to be a perfectly good reason for absence from school. Truancy is unexcused absence.
True. In our case, the district says 5 is the max excused absences, though, and as I wrote a couple of other places, we may travel to Asia to visit a relative that is unlikely to live until summer. A week is doable, but seems a little strict in light of the district keeping itself shutdown longer than any other in our area. But I see a lot of good arguments each way here
I’d ask. And the question probably is more “what are the consequences if we go over,” not “what do you allow.” You might find that the first few unexcused absences are free, such that no one will say you can use them, but that effectively you can use them.
And obviously trying to borrow a random day off or two, winter break, whatever you can is going to be the best solution if you can swing it.
Call your school administrators and ask.
I changed schools around 6th grade. IIRC, my family had already booked a trip that winter break, but the school winter breaks didn't align, so now the trip collided with a week of school. The school officially didn't allow a week of absences, but they were perfectly happy to let it go as long as (1) it wouldn't be repeated (as is your case) and (2) my parents agreed to take textbooks along and make me do some work each day, so that I could turn in all the missed homework problems when I returned.
Edit: Andy and ML scooped me on this one.
Sounds reasonable. I feel pretty confident we'll work this out some reasonable, if the trip even happens (mom might just go solo, it's her side of the family). We haven't even gotten past the brainstorming / what are the options phase.
But yeah, I like the way you're thinking about this and I imagine if the school is halfway reasonable they'll be somewhat accommodating. And it's only K, so probably a nuthingburger.
I now feel bad about bringing up the topic. I really just wanted to make the point that my visceral reaction to "5 excused absences allowed" was "Really? You closed down for a whole year !?" lol. Apparently I did it in a way that triggered a lot of opinions. But thanks for the advice in all seriousness.
All I want to say is that this is a fascinating subthread, and while I have some takes formulating, they're far from set in stone, and it's been good to listen to different perspectives on this to see if they better shape what I might think.
Yeah lots of things to think about. All I wanted to do was an offer an explanation for the rise of truancy based on a thought that crossed my mind earlier this week as we're trying to decide when / if to visit my wife's dying grandma in Asia.
There have been times when I’ve pulled my kids out for important family events, but usually just a week. It wasn’t a big deal as I coordinated with the school, got assignments they could work on during the absence, etc.
It depends on the district. If you are in a "failing" school district or one on the edge of failing, it is usually taken very seriously because attendance is watched closely. Also, money from the feds and state is affected by attendance numbers. In my own district, parents have often been griping about the "scare tactics" used by administrators once their kids have missed a certain number of days. These kids with involved parents are usually missing days for legitimate reasons, like extended illness, and I don't think those parents understand how widespread chronic absence has become since the pandemic. The 17% number cited in this article will be helpful to me when I try to get parents to chill a little before going after the school district full force.
If you are in a highly-ranked district, taking a few days off for vacation probably isn't a big deal, even if it is technically an illegal absence. A few weeks is a very different story. If it is PreK or K, they probably won't do anything besides a reprimand because students are not required by law to attend those, but first grade and beyond can have consequences, including calling CPS.
The absences on top of the disruption caused by the pandemic are going to have repercussions for a long time. I was working with a couple of librarians who work at an elite college. They are trying to rework their library instruction because new students are coming in with so little knowledge since the pandemic. They have trouble discerning an article from a book/monograph when doing searches, and they don't know how to get a call number from the catalog and find the corresponding item on the shelf. We are figuring that librarians at colleges with higher acceptance rates are having even bigger issues, and we are trying to figure out how to address them.
Is there nothing in there about parents notifying the school that kids would be absent for particular length of time, and maybe getting some extra materials to take with you?
After all, kids with medical conditions may have to be out of school for weeks, does that mean they are permanently deprived of education?
The real problem with truancy is generally that kids aren’t in school and the parents don’t know (or in some instances, care) where they are.
Students with medical conditions with long absences get a remote educator assigned to them who makes sure they get what they need and often sets up tutoring at home.
I don't know, my kids entering K and I'm just starting to learn about.
Really though, I was just trying to comment on a reason truancy might have risen. Their excused absence policy seemed a little strict in relation to how long they shutdown in-person learning. that's all :)
Let me add another point to the conversation: we’re still quite strict about attendance in college. Automatic F on the x number of unexcused absences (eg 4 a semester) is very common practice. The definition of “excused absence” is quite strict too and would appear on the syllabus.
P.S.
And it’s also common to enforce automatic and significant reduction in letter grade for eg unexcused absences 2-3 (ie if you have two unexcused absences and merit an A for the class you get a B 3 unexcused it’s a C).
By contrast to grade inflation generally these rules are actually enforced and very acceptable. Covid didn’t affect this because a doctor-approved absence falls under “excused” so in practice people could be absent more but there is a measure of control over it
??? Neither university I attended took attendance in any non-lab section.
did you attend small classes other than labs?
What's "small"? I had easily twenty classes under 40, and at least a handful that were under 20.
were you graded on participation?
Precise grading rubrics on classes I took ten or fifteen years ago is a level of pedantry that eludes my grasp.
Certainly you'll have a bad day if there's an in-class quiz and you decided to skip.
Why is that? What should a grade reflect?
When I was an undergrad, early eighties, I don't remember very many attendance polices like that. I did have one professor who was annoyed that I was getting "A"s while not showing up often (I needed money, and if work would give me extra shifts I'd take them). It's not something I did regularly, but the course was in my major and I was just really good at the material.
MBA program worked about the same. Law school, some classes had some deductions for low attendance, but nothing that punitive, and the exams represented so high a percentage of a grade that the attendance/participation component was really marginal.
If my paper and exam grades are good, doesn't that demonstrate I know the material?
I understand the attendance requirements as being an incentive to come to class, and that class time is helpful, usually critical even for understanding. So it's almost certainly better for a student to show up than to not show up. But you either know calculus or you don't, why should someone who has mastered it get a C because they didn't come to class?
After a year of teaching in NY, my husband made an attendance rule, but his aim was really trying to address the students that would come and go in the middle of class, disrupting everyone else. He had previously taught in Wisconsin, where he said the students were just as much of slackers, but they were a lot more polite about it.
This is interesting to hear. At my law school (class 2010) if you missed 5 days for any reason it was an auto fail. My crim professor actually told a guy to leave the exam who had missed too many days. He was pretty public about it too, the whole class witnessed it.
Class of 2000. First year was pretty strict, but I don't think you could lose more than a letter grade. I'm hard pressed to remember it as being as strict 2L and 3L.
It certainly wasn't a good strategy, and the people who followed it were not at or near the top of the class. They were also the people who followed it for BAR/BRI review and were over represented in the people who didn't pass the bar on the first try.
This happened 1st semester, 1L so 'weed out' was absolutely in full force. No idea if more leniency would have been given later in the program but after seeing the rule enforced once I was never tempted to find out.
I should specify that this goes for those classes that have mandaotry attendance. Many classes have de jure no obliigatory attendance policies. Those tend to be big lecture type classes. I'm talking about attendance-mandatory classes. In my experience (working in a Humanities dept. )those are discussoin based classes where particiaption is a part of the grade, or language classes. Attendance policies work the same for both, and make sense due to the nature of the class.
It's the "make sense" that I'm not quite grasping, and I don't mean that as criticism. But if by whatever objective measures you have: exams, papers, even number of times you constructively contribute to a class, a person demonstrates knowledge of the material, why should your grade not reflect that? I think really the heart of my question is what I started with: what should a grade reflect?
Ok. I’d note this is a digression from my original point (which was descriptive not prescriptive), but it’s a fair and worthwhile question so I’m happy to engage as best I can!
I have experience in discussion classes and language classes. They are different imo so I’ll address them in order.
For discussion classes the rationale is easier to articulate. The point is to have discussion. Preferably with debate and different view points. You need people there for that so that’s an exogenous reason. But more directly in order to grade people fairly you need to compare apples to apples so to speak. When I grade people on participation it can’t be based on something anecdotal such “oh she made a really smart comment this one time so that’s an A for her”. Rather I try to minimize arbitrariness by grading each student for their participation *in each class* then I average it accoridng to some formula. To do this fairly you need all studnets to have participated in a similar number of classes. Finally the point of the class is in part for the student to benefit from the discussion, and this can’t happen if they’re not there.
Language classes are a difffent beast. For living languages a crucial component is immersion via class discussion and listening to the instructor so that alone suffices for attendance policy. For dead languages (which are the ones I teach) we don’t typically do that (unfortunately). However you’re often graded on daily or weekly quizzes, so you need to attend to sit those. The need for the quizzes is practical : 90% or more of student will fail without them and I need them to monitor their progress.
In the more advanced language classes there will be fewer quizzes but more discussion (as we will primarily be reading and discussing a text in the original language) so the rationale goes back to the points i made about those classes.
My wife, a physician, did Classical Greek as her undergrad, I'll have to check and see what her experience was.
She started teaching herself Latin a couple years ago with some success (she has some weird ideas about "things that are fun"). She got distracted, and was also starting to look for online classes to continue with. Maybe I'll remind her and see if she picks it up again.
When my husband was a professor, he did give an excused absence to a student who had tickets to a Yankees World Series game (we are in NY) and one whose ferret died and came in with a note from the vet. He was generally pretty lenient if you told him ahead of time, but come in at the end of the semester with your excuses of why you missed previously, and he had no mercy. Also, having email addresses like "barhopper" didn't help your case.
I think you are describing the exception. In my experience, most university classes have zero formal requirements around attendance.
Big lectures might not, but every small class I taught - i.e. one where participation is a component of the grade, had mandatory attendance, be it for freshmen or seniors. In fact as I recall the same went for graduate level courses too!
I've never seen that, at any of the institutions I attended, ranging from large lectures to tiny seminars. At most, there might be participation marks for 10-20% in the seminars, but we were all trusted to make our own choices about attendance and live with the consequences for learning and assignments/exams, as long as you didn't enter or leave in the middle of the class.
We are, as usual, veering off topic, but I had an interesting discussion not long ago with a relative who teaches college, and we were comparing the format of classes that my kids have in undergrad today compared to when we were in undergrad.
For the most part my classes were graded with one or two mid-term exams, one semester research paper, and one final. There were variations, numbers heavy classes like calc and stats or accounting and finance, tended to require some turned in homework along the way which just kept you honest about practicing on problems. Humanities course maybe had an extra paper or subbed in a paper for one less exam. But generally there were 3-6 high stakes grades and that was it.
My kids today seem to have a format similar to high school where there is a series of more frequent smaller assignments throughout the semester where you accumulate points toward some large number like 1000 or 1500. My niece and I agreed that we both would not have liked that because we both tended towards taking in information in bursts like drinking from a fire hose, but were less disciplined about doing a steady amount of work day in and day out. My kids are the opposite, and probably are better served by today's pedagogy.
Yes, it’s a change in pedagogical fashion (in America at any rate. At Oxford your grade for the entire *degree* is still determined exclusively by several long written exams all taken within a week or so at the very end of the 3-4 years!)
Oxford results depend on both mods (after 1 year, in most cases) and finals (at the end of the degree), not exclusively on finals.
Wow, end of 3-4 years!
Law school is or at least was, one exam each class, end of each semester. In truly old school classes, a la The Paper Chase, you had no idea what you were facing the first time around.
Maybe things have changed in the last couple of decades, but when I was in school the only cases that cared at all about attendance were the super easy social sciences classes.
Isn’t it likely that some of the increase in classroom absences is due to pandemic-borne sensitivity around sending symptomatic kids to school?
Covid was such a strange sociological phenomenon in so many ways. When schools and offices began to reopen in 2021 there were long complicated instructions and flowcharts on when it was and wasn’t ok to come in...which all boiled down to the simple axiom that we all actually already knew: if you’re sick stay home.
But maybe Covid has caused people to take it more seriously than they did before. And with so much more home officing than before, it’s a much easier call for a parent who will be home anyway (or who can now more easily wfh) to keep a marginal kid home from school...doesn’t require a vacation day or a big childcare hassle.
This is absolutely true in my anecdotal experience. I had to raise an absolute stink to get someone other than me to call a families missing 30-50 days of third grade last year who were on the cusp of failing. In the past these would have triggered automatic investigations at much lower thresholds than 1-2 months of class missed.
That's crazy and sad to hear and really the kind of thing I was trying to reflect on in my initial comment.
Fwiw the only trip we are considering is traveling to Asia to meet an elderly, dying relative. And my kid's only entering K and if she was on the cusp of failing that would make the trip much less likely. Just figured I'd mention my specific situation and say that I don't intend to be one of the people making your life more difficult since so many people seemed to react so strongly to my vaguely worded personal plans in my initial comment.
This wouldn't apply to newer students so much, but for ones who already had some experience of school and were there during the closures (well...not there, more accurately), perhaps getting an unexpected taste of freedom from Child Prison showed a possibility that was previously hard to imagine. One could just...not go, and no one would much care, or possibly even officially approve. Yes, remote learning sucked for many, but far from all...and even pre-covid, school was fraught for lots of kids. I think it's similar to the rise in crime and disorder - after seeing a lot of that during the pandemic, and a fairly anemic response, the threshold of acceptable behaviour shifted for the marginal deviantly-inclined. (Trying so, so hard to not use that tired phrase "Overton window".)
Wrt covid specifically, I can also attest that my own workplace has seen a huge uptick in callouts and general absenteeism. Some of this is a positive norm change - people are much more willing to actually stay home when sick, rather than work through it. But it's also been the perfect cover to smuggle non-illness absences through, and of course medical privacy laws mean the employer can't grill too hard about exactly what someone was "sick" with. Some of it is also just vibes - the aforementioned crime and disorder makes being in public spaces like grocery stores much less fun than it used to be. I'd imagine the dynamic is similar in schools.
I doubt that the kind of calculations you are making are common among the families of children with truancy problems, which are skewed to low er socioeconomic groups that can't manage extended time away.
Perhaps so. Visiting sick dying relatives in other countries might be an issue some SES face, but not sure how commonly.
The relevance to MY's post today was just that I saw it as one reason truancy might have increased. Given how long my SD stayed closed it's a little hard for me to mentally adjust to their stated rules about being very serious about absences.
Oh no, not this again.
I know you're not TRYING to stir the pot... but dude.
I didn't even know this had been a thing
You've missed the dozens of overheated arguments here about school closures?
Oh I meant truancy / excused absences. That seems to be the area that had people jumping in fiercely. Yep, we've covered covid lockdowns from some other angles ad nauseum.
I think you're very, very wrong about this. You can't compare children to adults, and their minds are wired and growing in ways that can't just be replicated. You're only 6 (or 7, or 12, or whatever) once and if they aren't laying the right groundwork at that time there is a good chance they never will. Major disruptions in the learning process and development aren't easily repaired.
Teaching doesn't work like the workplace, if a kid misses an important set of foundational lessons that are happening in a given week they could fall really far behind and the teachers shouldn't have to take extra time out of their day to catch every kid back up whose family feels entitled to just take vacations whenever instead of waiting until summer like normal people.
The strain on resources is another component. As if it is fair to the other students to have their teachers diverted and distracted to accommodate people that do this.
I learned more outside of school than in the classroom until high school, and the ratio didn’t really even start to get close before I was about 11 or so. I imagine that that’s not uncommon for smarter than average and intellectually curious kids with smart parents— elementary school is generally very low-bandwidth. For families in that situation, school is much more of a daycare than a place where important learning happens, and a somewhat cavalier attitude about attendance is rational.
You're expressing what I think is called a luxury belief.
I read a lot of Lee Kuan Yew's materials a few years ago, which changed my political views significantly. One of my strongest takeaways has been his point that there are a lot of things the socioeconomic top 5-10% can do and be fine, but the rest of society cannot handle as well.
An a la carte approach to school attendance certainly seems to fit.
To be clear: I don’t think that most people or educational institutions should be cavalier about student absences.
But for institutions with well-resourced parents or selective admissions policies, flexibility about student absences really isn’t that harmful.
I'm sorry I just can't agree. Maybe in the highest echelons of society that's true in the sense that children growing up that way are impervious to anything anyway by virtue of wealth. However the message being sent is that showing up and getting your sh*t done is optional instead of mandatory. No one benefits from that. Developing the exact opposite ethic may be the most important thing the education system can impart.
I did it with my kids. Took two weeks off in elementary school to attend the winter olympics in Vancouver. We worked ahead of time with the teachers, who were thrilled for my kids. We had their books and assignments with them and completed them during down time, evenings, etc. They experienced zero drop in their grades,
and test scores, and the had experiences, learned different things, and met different people that they never otherwise would have had.
Like any group endeavor, there's a lot of activity that's necessary to have a group move forward that isn't necessary for each and every individual for each and every moment in that group. It's not waste, it's certainly not bad for the individual, but it's easy to see it can be compacted for an individual, especially for a short period of time.
I wouldn't want to home school, and think the regular educational process is best for kids, but to think there's no slack that can be taken up, or that every minute in a classroom is a precious learning moment that can't be made up, or that the model that's currently in use is so perfected that you can't have an alternative to it for a short period makes no sense at all.
As a military family, disruptions are the norm and haven’t impacted my kids ability to keep up. It’s actually possible to plan and work around the disruption, but it does take active parental action and involvement.
My understanding was that the evidence is mixed as best. I remember reading a article from ACT discussing this and came away thinking that mild amounts are probably fine.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/kids-can-recover-from-missing-even
I'm not sure it makes a lot of sense to rely on something like that for parenting. Also not sure how education policy and operations can be set if the rule is anyone can check in and out at any time for any reason.
Any rule has to have within it an allowance for reasonable exceptions made by reasonable people acting in good faith.
Sure, but I'm not arguing against sick days. I'm arguing against no consequences come and go as you please.
Parents making that decision are behaving irresponsibly. I have no idea what fancy private schools do or don't do but I know taking kids out of school for any length of time is bad for them. People shouldn't do it and at a certain point the state needs to intervene.
There is probably an extremely small subset of parents who could navigate pulling their kid out of school for several weeks and manage their education at the same time, but it's definitely not the majority.
When I was a kid in the mid-90s the district where I went to school was mostly Mexican immigrants, and some of my friends would leave for Mexico a week before Christmas vacation and come back two weeks after it ended...even taking into account the two weeks school is closed, that's missing three weeks of school. They were very often lost, educationally, when they came back.
Same here. I generally have no issue with a kid missing 3-4 weeks of school if they are a really good student. They’ll be fine. But unfortunately most of the kids who miss 3+ weeks are already not doing well.
I think "kids whose parents take them out of school to go to Mexico" is not the kind of truancy we should be worried about.
We're doing it for a few days in April for the eclipse because we think they'll be ok for a few days and the opportunity is not to be missed.
That may be true at the point where school is teaching significant things but I really doubt that is true for the first several years of school. The fact that the first several years of school are treated as completely optional helps show this.
I guess we'd have to narrow down definitions. From my perspective the big transition is going from learning to read in K-early elementary school to reading to learn. If those learning to read years get messed up you've got a serious problem that complicates everything after and that's really hard to correct. I'd never have a by choice extended absence during that time and I kind of think people who do (which includes some relatives of mine) are crazy.
A big thing schools teach in early years is just socialization, how to be in school. Missing out on that could make the rest of education pretty challenging.
The reason poor kids don’t succeed is they’re too slavish about rules? That doesn’t track.
Don’t you think that private school families are more able to make up for learning gaps than public school families are, on average?
Do you have any evidence on the prevalence of the "we're pulling our kid of school for weeks at a time" parenting style of private school parents? As someone who attended both public and private schools growing up, I can say that I never noticed the classrooms in private schools being emptied out, or it being in any way normal for classmates to just disappear for weeks at a time. I don't see any evidence that the reason kids are missing school at higher rates in 2023 is because parents suddenly decided that week long family trips or educational global jaunts are somehow now necessary, and if that's not the case then what exactly is your point in this thread? It seems far more likely that kids are missing school nowadays just to miss school and goof off with friends or engage in non-constructive activities.
Absences from work are regulated based on how they affect the employer; absences from school, on how they affect the child.
To the extent that's true about private schools, I think the takeaway from your comment is that they need to change their practices rather than the public schools needing to be more like them. In the workforce, you get a certain number of vacation days, true, but you also don't get 2-3 months off in the summer, a week off in the springtime, and an extended break around Christmas. Kids already have tons of time away from the classroom- if anything, we should be giving them fewer breaks (I'm open to the claim that schools shouldn't break for the summer), but we definitely don't want to be excusing extended absences away from the classroom during the 9 months that kids are supposed to be learning each year.
I believe private schools are dealing with a different dynamic. Most specifically, they need to keep parents happy as a matter of customer service. But they also have some other things going for the school to mitigate the harms of extended absences: 1) they are generally dealing with families that already prioritize education, meaning that you can ask for the family to exert effort to gap fill in themselves what students are missing; 2) parents are usually better educated themselves, meaning they have greater ability to educate their children on their own; 3) they can tell parents to make up for absences by requiring the family to dedicate extra resources (e.g. hire a tutor); and 4) they can simply remove students whose absences cause problems for other students or who fall behind as a result of absences. So private schools have different incentives, some of which actually do mitigate the harm for students who miss more school, and others that at least contain the harm to that particular student.
Public schools have much different problems to deal with, especially large public schools with diverse student populations. Their funding is put in jeopardy if students miss too much school, both at the federal and local levels. Having large populations of students absent causes significant disruption. My neighborhood middle school that is a majority Hispanic just told families not to expect final class schedules for more than a month despite classes starting on Monday because they won’t know until a month in how many kids to expect. Something like 20% of the students won’t arrive the first week. And the schools are often dealing with student populations that already have very low value assigned to education. They don’t make up missed work, etc. Frankly, if given the option, a lot of families would pull their kids out of school a month at a time just to put them to work if they could. I’m not sure the right answer for these kids-but at a minimum, mitigating the harm to the education offered to other students should be prioritized.
To the extent it matters, we’re in a public school, but know a lot of families that moved to private after trying public simply because the public schools have to dedicate so many resources to dealing with chaos that they didn’t feel there was much energy or attention left for education.
I agree with your points, but I mostly think that this is just a made-up conversation that Mike* conjured out of thin air as a red herring for reasons I can't comprehend. I attended public and private school growing up, and I have friends and family whose children are in private school now. I see no evidence of some sort of widespread absenteeism in private schools where parents are just plucking their kids out of school to go galloping across the globe. It's just not a thing. My family does a 2 week reunion every year, and we do it over the summer because my siblings would never consider pulling my nieces and nephews out of school for something like a vacation- literally the primary scheduling concern for when we get together is the kids' school. So pretending like private schools allow this and its no big deal is just a ludicrous statement from what I can tell- there's no data to support it and it's being used as a way to try and pretend like public school kids skipping school is no big deal. It's just a crazy claim from what I can tell.
EDIT: got OP's user name wrong. Corrected to Mike.
I tend to agree. The difference between private and public mostly is the side-eye from public schools if you pull your kid out for a week that doesn’t happen in private. But that week is still mostly consequence free in public schools as long as you don’t miss more than 9-10 days total, so it’s probably not even worth mentioning.
In one version of the workforce what you describe is true, but it's not universal, and it's not necessarily an optimal model, it just happens to be the prevailing one we have today. If say you're self employed you're not limited to x number of days off. If. for instance, you are a self employed attorney, or plumber, it's largely the case that if you don't work you don't get paid. But if you want seven weeks off a year you can as long as you're happy with the amount of money you make in 45 weeks rather than 49.
If benefits, especially health care, weren't so tied to employment I think we would see more work look like this than we do now.
This is the mystery of Kamala Harris in political terms. She is perfectly positioned to establish herself as the smart, tough prosecutor who pushes back against woke excesses, to put it crudely. It's just a huge political opening. Everyone else in the party who might wish to make this case is inhibited by concerns over race-trolling, TBH. She could easily establish herself as a formidable general election prospect nationally. She would take some heat from her left but the benefits would easily outweigh the costs and lots of Democrats would treat her with kid gloves. This is really teed up for her. So why doesn’t she have the wit to see this? That's the question.
>She is perfectly positioned to establish herself as the smart, tough prosecutor who pushes back against woke excesses, to put it crudely.
I don't ask this sarcastically -- have you ever met a Kamala Harris fan who isn't a big proponent of woke excesses (to put it crudely)? If you're Harris and all of your supporters and staffers are among the most social justice-oriented activists around, and you were chosen pretty explicitly because of your identitiy characteristics, how would you be able to then pivot to being a centrist who punches left?
It's a tough position for her to be in, undoubtedly.
Not all social justice issues are identical. I think she could punch left on crime specifically and get away with it with her base. Her rabid supporters are social justicey, but they also really dislike the Bernie people, who were the subset of leftists who were most likely to embrace "defund" or anarchist rhetoric. The stereotypical Harris stan is more likely to be animated by things like ethnic representation in Star Wars movie casts.
that's fair.
Sanders supporters are silly and naive but at least they have a coherent ideology. I'm not sure what the ideology of the K-Hive is exactly.
I mean, say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it's an ethos.
You have just described the perfect person/position to "punch Left." "Look at all these Woke staffers I have. Look at my first generation immigrant background. How can anyone accuse ME of not being a good Progressive?"
Might be the perfect person, but its very hard to go against your "team." These are the people who work for you day in and day out, feeling like a disappointment to them is an hard thing to do.
It's also just really far outside of her professional political experience. Before being VP she worked exclusively in CA Democratic politics, which is entirely about upward mobility within your own party (since the state GOP is largely a joke). Her entire career has been about cultivating the Democratic base and power centers; all of the relevant political groups are on the left.
Political nerds like us can take a more abstract view of her candidacy, but I suspect that there is an unappreciated risk to a politician like Harris trying to move to the center in the sense that she probably doesn't operationally know how to do that yet. As VP she's so visible that she can't blunder through a bunch of tone-deaf attempts at being a centrist before finding a groove that makes the pivot seem authentic to most voters. It could be that her team just sees that as too much of a risk to attempt a pivot like this.
I would guess that you are right about her bubble placing limits on her maneuverability. But she would trade in some current devotees for new ones, probably with a net gain, if she assumed the role of Rhetorical Excesses Cop. But politically let's go deeper. Identity politics is fully compatible with ideological moderation. Hillary Clinton started using racial justice rhetoric as a way to punch left in 2016 and Biden’s strength with the Black vote in 2020 was the key to his ability to disrupt the white-brown strength of Sanders. This despite his history as an anti-busing crusader, which Harris pointed out. I was for Sanders both cycles and frankly I loathe the use of what I consider cheap racial justice rhetoric to undermine formally race-neutral but effectively reparative social-democratic politics. That is not what I am suggesting Harris might do. Instead I think she's well positioned precisely to caution Democrats against rhetorically racializing all issues when that is sometimes counter-productive.
I used to be a Harris fan - back when she was “raise taxes on rich to cut taxes for middle class” along with the cop persona we’re talking about here. She lost me for obvious reasons. She could have a fanbase more like me if she wanted.
For what it's worth, before the Great Winnowing, Harris was probably my #2 after the Klob.
(ended up very happy with Biden, so it's fine)
I think the boring answer is that she's only slightly below replacement value in her instincts as a Democratic politician. There are strong incentives for a national Democratic politician to not spend a lot of time criticizing activist groups in their party beyond the immediate pushback on Defund after 2020. A lot of older liberals are frankly engaging in cope and convincing themselves that Harris is uniquely awful at this, but the truth is the Democratic party as a coalition demands a bit of incoherence and dodging, because it is the coalition's aggregated policy demands and not merely rhetoric that produces frustration with the median voter.
Biden is successful at projecting this because he's a white guy born when FDR was in office. His senior moments and slip-ups are bad for a politician in general, but good for reassuring moderates that he's no radical. Once he's replaced by a younger politician, they will have a hell of a time squaring that circle. Democratic bigwigs might be upset in Politico that they put Kamala as the only no-drama primary option, but they only have themselves to blame for where the party is in terms of promises to lots of different groups and interests. Bashing Harris is a cope for them.
Yes, and, also, the median voter is characterized by a fair bit of incoherence and dodging too. The right approach for Harris is to craft a public persona so that when average voters -- the type that don't follow politics all that closely and can switch between voting for Obama and Trump without seeing any great contradiction -- see her on the screen, they get a good feeling about themselves, about her, and about America.
Basically, be more of a happy, joyful celebrity and less of anybody's attack dog (even though that may be a traditional role for a VP and something that comes naturally to a former prosecutor). And doing that seems to be well within her reach. I thought some of the best stuff she did in the 2020 primary was thing like where she went into someone's house and cooked with them. A nontraditional campaign tactic but very powerful if done right and your goal is make make people trust and like you. As is having positions on crime and law enforcement that seem normie and common sense.
Oprah would have won!
I don't think this is unique to Dems for what it's worth. Republican bigwigs are now learning that Trump has been better at delegating than DeSantis is, and this is a classic example of where Trump's day-to-day lazy management is not abysmally below replacement rate for Republicans such that any other leader could obviously do a better job. DeSantis has a delegation issue, I suspect that's why it has taken him 8 months and falling thirty points in polls to finally grasp a campaign strategy against Trump.
I agree. I think it's about being a great leader, or not. Clinton and Obama, in different ways, knew where they wanted to go and brought people with them. Biden is a different leader than they were, but gets where he wants to go by pretty astutely managing his coalition.
Harris has had a great opportunity to stand out and lead, but she just doesn't seem to have it. As to staff, Congress members can get captured by their staff and not suffer much for it, executives should be inspiring their staffs to follow them, not the other way around.
I think it helps to understand how she "leveled up". Twitter played a huge role in her building her base of support for running as AG. She was one of the first generation of pols who managed to become a "Twitter darling", mostly by catering to the sorts of too-online lefties who were cheering her on.
This is what eventually became her chief liability. Even though she doesn't primarily rely on Twitter anymore, she relies on that fanbase to bolster her reputation of popularity. Those people are huge fans of hers and think she's to the left of where she actually is (or where she started out). She can't just throw them under the bus.
It feels like DeSantis is running on a similar track. It's easy to get adoration by saying nonsense on social media to your bubble, but once the normies IRL start hearing your ideas and experiencing your actual public persona, it's all downhill.
I think it’s more like Elise Stefanik or Josh Hawley’s current branding problems: Once you cater to a base that isn’t your actual ideology, you can’t abandon the kayfabe.
RDS is more of a true believer - even if he doesn’t believe half the stuff he says, we KNOW that he harbors a similar sort of resentment/grievance to his followers that Stefanik and Hawley simply don’t share.
Anyways, KH should be a cautionary tale to Stefanik and Hawley about what would ever happen if they succeeded enough to graduate to a higher office than that which their kayfabe-bought base can actually sustain. As we see, she’s stuck. She can’t accept a demotion and go build the grassroots support she never bothered to; she’d lose face to anyone who bought the original hype. She can’t win where she’s at because she doesn’t have enough support nor talent; so she loses face by standing pat. And she can’t make a run at the top for those same reasons; she’d lose face by failing. No matter what she does, she loses. She can only ever luck out by having Biden die on her and then managing to not fuck up actually being president.
It’s sad, really. The vice presidency would actually be an ideal office for offroading these sorts of politicians who “outkick their coverage”, if not for the absurd tradition that parties treat their former VPs like they’re automatically entitled to be presidential contenders.
Arguably the problem is that vice-presidents have been selected for a very, very long time to shore up tickets' geographic, demographic, and general political electoral appeal -- basically being along for the vibes, with little pretense otherwise -- but they also bear the essentially unrelated responsibility of becoming POTUS if the primary officeholder dies or is incapacitated. So we choose VP candidates based on a vibe-check and then as a weird side-effect this implicitly "vets" them as qualified to hold the highest office in the land as well as providing a natural Schelling point for a future primary coalition.
Conceptually it's arguably similar to having research professors teach classes: it's part of the job description and that ends up mattering in substance, but at the same time it's not actually why anyone gets hired into a tenure track position in the first place, and sometimes you predictably end up with people who end up doing this secondary job tacked on to their primary one despite kind of sucking at it.
You do understand that Harris has a better chance than 99.99999999% of Americans to become President.
Pretty good for being a "cautionary tale."
Especially since “I’ll prosecute Trump, metaphorically or literally” was right there!
Progressives believe in change and the possibility of making the world a better place. They specifically assign the state the primary role of changing society for the better. This is done primarily through devices funded by the public (taxes) and for the public. Using the power of the state to protect and consistently improve public safety , via a public service that’s free and available for all (the police) and whose presence is esp salient in public spaces for public use is therefore progressivism par excellence. The anti police fashion in contemporary left circles by contrast is an incoherent aberration more to do with (rather reactionary) classism than any coherent philosophy that’s meaningfully progressive.
There's always been a strain of anarchist-ish and revolutionary-ish element in Left politics. But, I would agree that it's separate from traditional Progressivism. And that what goes by that banner today on-line especially is an awkward lefty chimera.
The hardcore anarchists often have the types of personalities that start out on the extreme left and end up flipping in middle age to the extreme right. Many historical examples of this from David Horowitz to Mussolini.
Mussolini wasn’t an anarchist he was The Fascist !
He started early adult life working for a Communist newspaper.
Neither communism nor fascism are at all the same as anarchism.
people use monikers in a rather loosey goosey fashion but to my knowledge the whole point of anarchism is that literally nobody is in charge... You can accuse people of not really meaning it but that's another matter.
The idea that underlies this ‘incoherent aberration’ from your description of progressivism par excellence is the core idea of Critical Theory that social norms are based on arbitrary hierarchies. In practice, this imparts a certain illegitimacy to reinforcing social norms. And it leaves those at the top of the hierarchy with no justification other than class status, which they aren’t going to relinquish.
Progressivism is historically associated with positivism, rather than critical theory. (Marxism is also more associated with positivism than with critical theory.)
Which is why the current influence of critical theory on the political left isn't promoting particularly progressive outcomes.
"The anti police fashion in contemporary left circles by contrast is an incoherent aberration more to do with (rather reactionary) classism than any coherent philosophy that’s meaningfully progressive."
I'd describe the current divide between leftists and liberals like this: Leftists regard the existing social order as fundamentally illegitimate (while liberals regard it as legitimate but in need of improvement). Hence the leftist ACAB attitude - cops are responsible for upholding and protecting the existing social order.
but aren't also judges, teachers, soldiers etc? you can oppose order period and being an anarchists. A dumb but logically consistent positioin. I still maintain that "leftist" anumus towards policing is class bias not coherent philosophy.
I think it's a reaction to the many graphic examples of police misconduct over the last few decades, almost all of which affect poor Democratic constituents. Rodney King, George Floyd, Rampart, the MOVE bombing, and on and on. There are a good number of crooked or otherwise bad cops out there.
Now overall this is definitely overshadowed by the public good of policing as a whole and the fact that most police are trying hard to do good things. Democratic constituents would benefit from more policing because they tend to be the victims of most crime. I think a lot of people on the left don't care to acknowledge the cost-benefit analysis because it doesn't support their position, or just because they have dumb, knee-jerk positions.
But I don't think it's fair to say that the anti-police case came out of nowhere, or class bias (not sure what that actually means in this case).
It makes no sense. It is the right's move to observe suboptimal function of the state and yell "Defund" through the rooftops. The left is generally more rational than that. There is both the "bad apples" point but more importantly, any true progressive will be *reform* oriented, i.e. how do we improve the police should be the discussion on the left. That is not at all the same as being anti police, quite the opposite.
I don't know, this seems to be verging into "no true Scotsman" territory. The left has its fair share of beliefs that aren't really supported by the evidence, although these days the right (in the US at least) is continuing to make heroic efforts to retain the title of the irrational side. I think defund is one of those bad ideas on the left, even though I have immense sympathy for the idea of reforming policing. Doing away with it turns out to be quite different than making it work better!
I don't think your second sentence is accurate. Progressives don't assign the state the primary role of changing society for the better. They do believe that the state can play an important role, but I don't think they/we see it as the primary player. We believe that both individuals and lots of other communal institutions like schools, NGOs, churches, social clubs, political orgs, AND the state AND probably still most importantly individuals can all work together to improve the lives of everyone.
Probably the most critical progressive idea is actually valuing the worth of each individual and believing that society in total can be harnessed to enhance and value that individual.
I’m sorry but i don’t think you’re describing progressivism at all. The idea of the importance of the individual is shared by the liberal right. In fact they stress it more while the left stresses the importance of circumstances (or nurture over nature if you will). The classic division between right and left is about the role of the state. In other words I view progressivism as basically a watered down version of democratic socialism or non revolutionary/reformist socialism.
Basic point that Matt leaves completely unaddressed: Cops should also be arrested and prosecuted for non-murder crimes, such as making false statements on official documents (like arrest reports). Any attempt to improve the quality of our law enforcement has to take this seriously.
"First, we need more intense, coordinated, and sophisticated law enforcement efforts to apprehend, prosecute, and disrupt the activities of gang members and leaders. Second, we need to figure out how to prevent the entry of young, vulnerable individuals into gangs and also enfranchise communities victimized by gangs in the larger cause of fighting them. Finally, we need to break the cycle of crime and focus more strategically on the re-entry of gang members from jail or prison back into their communities."
Was it ever explained what an 'intense', 'coordinated' and 'sophisticated' law enforcement effort to [destroy gangs] was? What does she mean by 'enfranchising' communities victimised by gangs in the larger cause of fighting them? How does one focus more 'strategically' on the re-entry of convicted gang members into a community?
But apart from that, why does the diametric opposite of these things seem to be happening in California recently?
The DC Crime subtack that Matt references has a great breakdown on targeted enforcement that worked wonders. You basically identify the couple hundred highest risk offenders and then swoop in an make it clear to them that the cops and feds are watching and will catch them, and then offer alternatives if they agree to discontinue violence. Super effective if you keep at it and actually prosecute offenders who break the rules, but it costs money and takes dedicate resources staying on the issue after your first few busts.
That would have been pretty effective when I was dealing
I was struck by how the "one stop shop" for efficient law enforcement and quick adjudication seemed like a very good and very concrete policy idea, for which it sounds like Harris clearly deserves kudos to the extent of her involvement, versus the more platitude-ridden character of those other passages. (Although to be fair I do think that more emphasis on re-entry programs actually has some content as an idea rather than being totally vapid, even without precisely outlining the details of every such programs. "Enfranchise communities" is more in the vein of "I would also like a pony" except less concrete.)
ED: Responding specifically to the question regarding "intense" "coordinated" and "sophisticated" law enforcement efforts -- a potential reification of this might be "focus on whatever tactics and strategies ground the mob under the bootheel of the state during the heyday of RICO prosecutions and see if that works for gangs." Although I know nothing about actual anti-gang prosecutorial work so I can't say whether that's a novel proposal or if it's been tried repeatedly and just hasn't worked for any of various reasons.
I'm confused about the statement about why Kamala Harris is in the Democratic party. Is the implication that a prosecutor who enforces the law is not welcome in the Democratic party? That seems prima facie ridiculous.
I'd say it's not far removed from what the normie Democrats think, but its light years from what they allow Republicans to portray them as thinking.
You mean what progressives say that makes Fox News’ work easy? Like “defund the police” or “men can get pregnant”?
I don’t see what “trans men can get pregnant” has to do with policing.
Didn’t say it was--it’s one of those things that progressives say that get quoted on Fox News and other right-wing outlets to show that Democrats are crazy.
Ok, let's pretend the reaction to George Floyd never happened.
After George Floyd, mainstream Democratic electeds almost uniformly disavowed the “defund” slogan and Democratic primary voters continued to cast most of their ballots for Joe Biden. (His closest competitor, Sanders, also didn’t adopt the “defund” idea.) Twitter isn’t real life.
I agree with you about mainstream Democrats. But the parent comment misquotes Matt, who actually wrote "Reading the book, you might occasionally ask yourself why the author is _on_the_left_ at all," not "why the author is in the Democratic party", much less whether her views are compatible with mainstream elected Democrats.
Worse, it's all so the commenter can pretend to be confused about why people might perceive tension between Harris' book and her role as one of the administration's most visible social justice advocates.
Fair about the quote, though he does go on to say she has mainstream Democratic Party positions, which seems to identify the Democratic party positions with the left. I do think what "the left" means here is very much open to interpretation on social vs economic positions. And I think it is poor analysis to define left and right purely on whether someone believes in social justice or social injustice/hierarchy.
I just browsed a study on recidivism from the US Sentencing Commission, the group that writes the federal sentencing guidelines. The basic takeaway is that increasing sentences from 38 to 79 months reduced recidivism by 18%. That doesn’t mean you subtract 0.18, it means you multiply by 0.82.
They used matching to control for age at release and offense type, very plausible methodology, and they have enough data for robust conclusions.
Anyway, that seems like a good estimate of the effect of incarceration. Double sentences, reduce recidivism by 18%. This is a good investment if you are deterring serious, violent crimes and a bad investment if you are deterring almost anything else.
I remembering reading once that age is a significant factor the probability that some one commits a crime, and I wonder to what extent longer sentences reduce recidivism because people are older when they get out of prison.
the u.s. sentencing commission adjusted for that through matching, but yes, age is a huge predictor of criminality and violent crimes by men over 50 are pretty rare
All sentences being life sentences means no recidivism, but it’s a bad solution
I think that might be more true of violent crime, but much less than you would expect for crime in general. Recidivism among older people is still remarkably high.
Seems like there’s a slip from reduction of recidivism to deterrence at the end. It seems to me that those are very different things. And the importance of an 18% drop in recidivism might be more meaningful if it is a drop from 44% chance to 36% chance than if it’s a drop from 11% chance to 9% chance.
The desire to prosecute the 1/6 rioters being about "coercion" - presumably not to do it again - is the most sympathetic possible reading. I don't think anyone seriously thinks that these same people are going to storm the capitol again.
It's about punishment, which is fine. They should be punished. But it can be unsettling to witness just how much thirst for blood the "defund the police/abolish prisoners" crew has when there are political enemies involved.
i think governments that dont punish those who violently try to overthrow their elections are not long for this world
I agree with you that you don't need a deterrence case for punishing serious crimes, punishment itself can be worthwhile, but I think you're confusing general and specific deterrence--even if none of those specific people do anything unlawful again, tolerating it encourages others.
Fair, but I remain skeptical that's what this is really about.
It's about BOTH punishment and deterrence, as criminal justice ought to be in most cases.
"don't think anyone seriously thinks that these same people are going to storm the capitol again."
If there's zero consequences then yes I absolutely think they would do it again, why wouldn't they?
As someone who lives in DC, I was fairly appalled at all the normally progressive, criminal-justice-reform minded people here who had spent years decrying the state of the jails and how we treat prisoners who were suddenly completely uncaring and gleeful about complaints from 1/6 defendants over how awful their treatment was at the local jail. A) I think that's a monstrous double standard, but B) it was a huge missed opportunity. If you ACTUALLY care about how we treat people in prison then you suddenly had the perfect chance to build a coalition to make reforms that could have lasted for years/decades, dramatically improving the lives of thousands of people who are normally some of the most overlooked and forgotten members of society, but instead everyone was too busy mocking the prisoners and republicans in Congress for whining about the conditions.
While I agree that the “normally progressive” folks baying for blood was not a good look for them, all I remember about “awful treatment” was the Q-Anon Shaman complaining that he wasn’t getting his organic diet in jail, which I think was rightly mocked. Also a lot of the rioters seemed to think they weren’t doing anything illegal (because they thought the President had their back) and were shocked to be arrested and confined--which is unpleasant, but a necessary part of law enforcement. Hard to see how the treatment of people who threatened members of Congress and were subjected to the same conditions as ordinary defendants presents some sort of great opportunity for reform--even Republicans sympathetic to Trump cannot have been thrilled with the folks who drove them out of the chamber and forced them into hiding for hours.
Some of those same members of Congress were visiting the jail and holding press conferences about the conditions outside of it. I mean, have you not seen public comments from Republican members of Congress decrying how awful DC is for treating these people this way? The fact that you can only recall the complaint about the organic diet indicates to me that maybe you just haven't paid very much attention to this? Nothing wrong with that (it's a small issue with only limited coverage, especially in the MSM vs. right leaning news sources), but it honestly feels like you just haven't followed this discussion.
"Hard to see how the treatment of people who threatened members of Congress and were subjected to the same conditions as ordinary defendants presents some sort of great opportunity for reform"
- People who have been clamoring for reform to help out ordinary defendants have been stymied by others who think reform is unnecessary. Those same people that blocked reform are now incentivized to make changes because their constituents are upset about and impacted by the poor conditions. That creates an opportunity to open the door and engage in a dialogue with those people about a suddenly shared goal.
I think the people with the most serious charges would absolutely storm the capitol again if they had the chance
I really don't. When you read the life stories of the defendants, almost all of them are confused people whose minds were broken by internet conspiracy theories. I think the LARP ended when they made contact with the criminal justice system.
Also it's hard to imagine there being a chance again, it's not like the Capitol Police are going to try to hold the fort with a dozen officers in 2025.
Q shaman got screwed
Same with the supposedly anti-death penalty people who were gleeful when Dylan Roof was sentenced to death.
My favorite sort of thing in this space are people who are loudly anti-death penalty complaining about lack of hate crime enhancements in cases where the defendant is already being sentenced to life in prison without parole under existing laws.
maybe we could flog them bi-weekly for the first x years of their sentence, x being increased if the victims were generational african americans and decreased for every ancestor the victim had on the mayflower or in any ivy+ graduating class
I certainly did greatly enjoy watching all the commenters on progressive sites who weep over the cruelty of self-confessed multiple murderers getting the death penalty shrieking about how literally every unauthorized person in the Capitol building should be summarily killed on the spot.
I don't have a super strong opinion about Harris, but I've noticed that her supporters are disproportionately in the "DEI manager in the Yemeni wedding liquidation division at Lockheed Martin" quadrant of the coalition. The guys who want to decolonize the claim denial department at the health insurance company they work for. As in, more concerned about the most basic optics (and talking about them constantly) than, you know, what's really going on out there.
I haven’t read the book, but MY’s take on it makes sense to me because of a 2019 (?) podcast interview of Harris I listened to. She sounded very pragmatic - much like a modern, moderate Democrat. But her campaign instincts are horrible, and now I’m afraid that she’ll be a drag on the already low-polling Biden.
KH's views on the appropriate use of incarceration would be more attractive if our jails and prisons were more constructive and less dangerous places. Here in NYC, sending someone to Rikers could literally be a death sentence, and certainly not rehabilitative.
What's the timeline on replacing Rikers with five borough-separate prisons? Have you seen a good explainer why they haven't been built yet?
No good explanation, nope. And...things are definitely getting worse, because of inadequate staffing. We read this in the NYT, but also my son's Zen Buddhist group, which used to provide Buddhist chaplains to Rikers (and elsewhere) on a volunteer basis, has finally been invited back in after Covid, but is seriously worrying about whether conditions are too dangerous, based on what they have been told by the official chaplain, about staffing inadequacy. "We'd really love to have you back, but we can't promise to keep you safe."
One thing I would like to know is who exactly are these key Harris staffers? What are their names? And why do they appear from afar to be so much worse than the average Democratic staffer? Are they a bunch of a Tiktok-addicted zoomers? What's going on? I see from five seconds of googling that her chief of staff is someone named Lorraine Voles, but she was only hired in 2022 and has a long resume working for lots of normal Democratic politicians, so I assume she isn't the worst of them.
I have no knowledge but have heard that Maya Harris played an important role in how Kamala defined her stances in the 2020 campaign.
Her staffers are her choice so ultimately it reflects on her (esp. if they are worse than average,, it makes HER worse than average as a politician).
Thanks for not answering any of my questions, and for so effectively countering an argument that I plainly didn't make. I get that you really dislike Harris and everyone else to your left - I'm not a huge fan of hers either - but at least try to stay on topic instead of preaching at people.
I'm late getting to this post and catching up on all the comments. One thing I get (other than how focused people are on pulling kids from school) is that people dislike Harris because they, well, dislike Harris. Mumble mumble failed 2020 campaign mumble mumble. Something about unnamed staff personnel? Her fans being progressives? (I didn't know she had any fans.) All very vague and confusing.
VPs are never popular. VPs are never never more popular than POTUS (current approval rating 40% compared to 39% for Harris). They always look weak and ineffectual. It's in the job description.
The dislike of Harris seems to be so much about "vibes" and not much else that part of me is starting to think maybe it has something to do with her gender? I don't know. "Just asking questions."
What on earth? I don't particularly dislike Harris, nor is she on my left on most issues! I read your series of questions as boiling down to "What's going on" (one of your explicit questions, btw), so I answer that to my mind if there is anything wrong with her staffers - which you very storngly imply, in my humble reading - then imho we should ask why she hired them. That's more interesting, to me, then all the rest. We can agree to disagree on that. I may have also misunderstood you. In either case I don't see any justification for devolving the discussioon into (misfired) personal attacks.
hiring normie dems would be a big improvement because it seemed a lot like tiktok addicts were pushing* her into dumb positions like the healthcare thing and she'd have to do damage control.
*she may have just been that bad at campaigning, idk
https://reason.com/2023/08/09/why-kamala-harris-wont-be-asked-about-the-suicide-of-a-newspaper-man-she-persecuted/
Heh, I see I wasn't the only one peeking around Reason this morning, and I'm not surprised that you were one of them.
"Reading the book, you might occasionally ask yourself why the author is on the left at all."
I'd ask why is this not bread and butter Progressivism, anyway?
Today ended up being a fun Throwback Thursday: after Matt took us on this trip down memory lane, I reread Elizabeth Nolan Brown's critical piece on Harris [https://reason.com/2019/06/03/kamala-harris-is-a-cop-who-wants-to-be-president/], to which I remember Matt tweeting in reply at the time something like "Kamala is a cop but cops are popular.".
One weird trick for Democrats to start getting Dave Coffin's vote:
Stop nominating fucking prosecutors.
Huh? I’m struggling to think of other prominent Dems who are former prosecutors.