Snow day mailbag

Sewer socialists, what MLK got wrong, and how to get kids to go to school

Snow days really hit different as a parent.

But to counter the January doldrums, here’s some good news! USAID is taking big steps on global lead pollution, office-to-residential conversions are on the way, the nation of Cape Verde is now free of malaria, 63 percent of Americans say their current financial situation is good, and batteries keep getting cheaper. Last but not least, the Bureau of Land Management is set to dramatically expand utility-scale solar projects on federal land.

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KN: Alec MacGillis wrote a good piece for The New Yorker recently on the chronic absenteeism crisis for schools. We all know that COVID measures made it worse - that’s not up for debate — but what are the potential solutions? MacGillis discusses some person-intensive approaches (e.g., organizations that send people door to door to homes with chronically absent students), and notes the movement away from the traditional punishment methods (truancy officers, hauling parents into court). What do you see as the al the best approach to dealing with this crisis?

This is the MacGillis piece, which was co-published with ProPublica.

There probably isn’t a simple “one weird trick” fix to this problem, because it’s co-occurring with a bunch of other problems.

But we have a broad problem in contemporary American life around enforcing rules, not enforcing rules, and information cascades surrounding the non-enforcement of rules. When I wrote about shoplifting, one thing I said is that to the best of my understanding, it has always been the case that getting away with shoplifting was pretty easy. The big change is that social media allowed for rapid dissemination of the fact that even if store personnel observe you stealing, they won’t stop you. By the same token, if very few people are jumping fare gates, it doesn’t make sense for transit agency personnel to risk violent confrontations with the occasional fare-jumper. It also doesn’t make sense to incur large policing bills in order to reduce a rare crime. But if people start to notice that transit agency personnel won’t confront fare-jumpers, then more people start jumping the fare gate. In DC, WMATA is now installing new gates that are harder to jump.

My concern is that now that people realize that nobody will stop you from climbing over the gate, so making it logistically harder to climb over doesn’t do much. Posting a security guard at the CVS is an effective deterrent — until people realize the guard won’t do anything. To squeeze the toothpaste back into the tube, you need to go for the high-cost option of deploying law enforcement personnel.

Truancy is the same. Nobody wants to see tons of parents hauled into court. But once the norm is broken, only hard enforcement measures can help to restore it. At the same time, you can’t pour more resources into everything simultaneously. We had a big increase in murders in 2020 and 2021, and that kept police departments busy. In 2023, homicide fell to below its 2019 level. Hopefully that means more resources are available to crack down on shoplifting and other problems. Kamala Harris had some good ideas about truancy interventions in lower grades that I think she should talk about and work with politically friendly state and local officials to promote.

But I also do think that political and cultural leaders should try harder to change the vibes and reset norms.

I’ve heard some upscale parents sing the praises of the new post-Covid norms around absenteeism because they make it easier to pull kids out of school to take family vacations. I’m sure those families know what they’re doing with regard to their own children’s educations. But I also think these are, by and large, the kind of people who’d be open to a message of shaming about how that kind of behavior helps normalize truancy, complicates school officials’ lives, and ultimately harms less-privileged children. You could imagine efforts to form bipartisan teams of elected officials to put out PSAs about the importance of sending your kids to school, and the importance of checking in with your fellow parents and urging them to do the same. You could try to get celebrities to do the same. We’re obviously not one Taylor Swift Instagram post from solving the problem, but I do think the solution is basically a mix of returning to enforcement on the toughest cases, plus a broad cultural push to nudge the milder cases in a better direction.

Tom Whittington: It’s fashionable on MLK day to talk about the reasons he would agree with whatever agenda one espouses, but are there things you think he (or his movement) could have been wiser/more engaged/simply different in their approach on? I’m happy to acclaim him as one of Americans Greatest Heroes (tm), but surely he did things wrong (and let’s avoid the obvious adultery stuff)