Showing papers in "Policy Review in 1997"

The Pursuit of Unhappiness

Abstract: Rip Van Winkle arose this spring from a slumber of two decades. He gazed in amazement at a world transformed. The Soviet empire, so menacing when he fell asleep in 1977, was now on the ash heap of history. Rising protectionism had given way to exploding commerce and tumbling trade barriers. Nixon-Carter stagflation had been replaced by Reagan-Gingrich prosperity. Business and profits were no longer dirty words. Now everyone wanted to be an entrepreneur. Prices for gasoline, airfare, and long-distance phone service had plummeted thanks to competition and deregulation. California had passed an initiative abolishing racial preferences. Federal farm and welfare programs dating to the New Deal had been abolished. Welfare caseloads in Wisconsin had fallen in half. A new emphasis on local accountability, truth-in-sentencing, and community policing was reducing crime in New York and other major cities. Congress was debating fundamental Medicare reform that would lower costs and give the elderly more choices. Leading liberals were pushing for legislation criminalizing late-term abor- tions. Congressional Black Caucus leaders were breaking with the teachers unions and the NAACP by endorsing school vouchers. Conservative Republicans now controlled both houses of Congress and a robust majority of governorships. Rip Van Winkle had fallen asleep listening to a harangue by Ralph Nader. He awakened to the music of Rush Limbaugh. But one thing hadn't changed since Rip closed his eyes. Conservatives were still depressed. They were still complaining about their leaders. And they were still failing to build institutions as powerful as their ideas. The American conservative is seemingly dedicated to three principles: life, liberty, and the pursuit of unhappiness. Something there is about the con- servative temperament that loves despair. Conservatives have been singing the blues for most of the 20 years this magazine has been published. This is not simply nostalgic yearning for a leader like Ronald Reagan. Conservatives were unhappy during most of his administration, too. In October 1983, Policy Review interviewed 12 conservative leaders to ask them what they thought of Ronald Reagan. Nine gave him low ratings. "If Reagan represents no more than a right-of-center vision of the welfare state, he doesn't represent change; he simply represents cheap government. Republicans cannot win in that framework," said a GOP backbencher now in the congressional leadership. "The radical surgery that was required in Washington was not performed. Ronald Reagan made a pledge not to touch entitlement programs, and that's one of the few pledges he has kept absolutely," said a top conservative activist. "This has been essentially another Ford administration. It has been business as usual, not much different from any other Republican administration in our lifetime," said a leading conservative intellectual and journalist. These quotations, from brilliant people I admire, betray an impatience, a set of unrealistic expectations that lead to dejection when they aren't satisfied, and a failure to create a culture of celebration for conservative achievement. In retrospect, we know that 1983 was a glorious year for conservatism. It was the first year of the Reagan boom. During 1983, as Grover Norquist wrote in these pages in the spring of 1984, "America in the throes of a supply-side recovery created more jobs in 1983 than Canada has created since 1965 . . . and as many jobs as Japan created in the entire decade of the 1970s." That year was also the turning point in the great titanic struggle against communism. As Elizabeth Spalding and Andrew Busch wrote in Policy Review in the fall of 1993, "a series of events in 1983 would come together to stop the seemingly inexorable advance of Soviet totalitarianism and to lay the ground- work for the eventual triumph of the West. …

Breakfast for Champions

Abstract: In cooperation with other conservative organizations, The Heritage Foundation holds monthly fundraisers for private civic groups that aid the needy more effectively than does the District of Columbia government. Our "Breakfast for Champions" series has so far raised more than $15,000 for six groups. Our first event was for the Washington Scholarship Fund, a privately financed school-voucher program that enables 300 low-income children to flee dead-end D.C. public schools for the religious or secular private school of their choice. The money we raised will fund three half-tuition scholarships. Breakfast for Champions financed five months of utilities for Hannah Hawkins's Children of Mine, an after-school program in the violent neighborhood of Anacostia that provides 65 children from troubled families a safe environment for homework, hot food, and Bible study. Hawkins has refused to take money from the government ever since she participated in a D.C. food program and was told she was not allowed to feed hungry children at 3 in the afternoon or give them leftovers as they headed home. Through other fundraisers, Breakfast for Champions has also financed: pregnancy testing and life-affirming literature for 600 women at the Capitol Hill Crisis Pregnancy Center; 22 walkie-talkies for the Metro Orange Coalition* the umbrella group for the brave men and women (mostly women) who are driving drug dealers out of their neighborhoods; pastoral care and a camp experience for the child of a D.C. prison inmate as part of the Prison Fellowship Ministries' Angel Tree program; and summer transportation for 60 participants in The Fishing School, a program run by ex-policeman Tom Lewis, a substitute father who teaches rocketry, dance, gardening, personal responsibility, and, yes, fishing to fatherless children. As this issue went to press, we were preparing a fundraiser for Clean and Sober Streets, a no-nonsense, "one-strike-and-you're-out" drug and alcohol rehabilitation program that turns around the lives of homeless addicts without taking a dime of government money. We are still accepting donations of $25 (or more) for any of these worthy organizations. Our goal in hosting these fundraisers is not only to raise money but also to generate publicity and future fundraising opportunities for effective civic groups that fight poverty through conservative principles. Here are some results of our efforts: * After we held an event for the Washington Scholarship Fund, House Majority Leader Dick Armey invited some of his top donors to a $1,100-per-head fundraiser of his own, where he raised more than $100,000 for the WSF. …

Don't Read, Don't Tell: Clinton's Phony War on Illiteracy.

Abstract: President Clinton is to be congratulated for calling attention to a national disaster: the inability of 40 percent of American eight-year-olds to read on their own. Reading is the gateway skill. It opens the door to all other learning. It is essential for participation in the knowledge-based economy of the next century. The president is right to insist that every American child learn this indispensable skill by the end of the third grade. But the president's answer for this disaster does not provide a real solution. Under his proposed "America Reads Challenge," the government would recruit a million volunteers, many of them minimally trained college students, to teach children to read under the direction of AmeriCorps workers. The program sounds wonderful--we're all for voluntarism. But it diverts accountability from the colossal failure of the public-education system to achieve perhaps its single most important mission. Think about it. Forty percent of third-graders cannot read. What a terrible indictment of our public-education system! What more important responsibility do schools have than to teach reading? Almost every child can learn to read by the end of first grade, if properly taught. But schools aren't achieving this by the third grade. For this failure, heads should roll. All teachers or principals or school superintendents who have failed to teach 40 percent of their third-graders to read should be looking for a new job. If 40 percent of third-graders cannot read and nothing has been done about it already, then teachers and principals obviously aren't being held to the right standards of performance. Even more important, current methods for teaching reading must be completely overhauled. There are now 825,000 teachers from kindergarten to third grade whose principal job is to teach the three Rs. A high percentage of these teachers have master's degrees; almost all have been specially trained to teach reading. Obviously their training isn't working. The federal government already spends $8.3 billion on 14 programs that concentrate on promoting literacy, including Title I funding for school districts with high proportions of low-income or poorly performing students. If 40 percent of third-graders can't read, then this money has not been wisely targeted and the teaching philosophy must be faulty. Federal, state, and local governments spend another $40 billion a year on special education, with about half targeted at children with "specific learning disabilities." According to J.W. Lerner, writing in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, "80 percent of children identified as having learning disabilities have their primary difficulties in learning to read." Special-education reading methods don't seem to be working very well, either. According to research by B.A. Shaywitz and S.E. Shaywitz, more than 40 percent of high-school students identified as "learning disabled" drop out of school prior to graduation; only 17 percent enroll in any postsecondary course, 6 percent participate in two-year higher-education programs, and 1.8 percent in four-year programs. The loss of human potential is staggering. The 1993 National Assessment of Education Progress reported that "70 percent of fourthgraders, 30 percent of eighth-graders, and 64 percent of 12th-graders did not . . . attain a proficient level of reading." These students have not attained the minimum level of skill in reading considered necessary to do the academic work at their grade level. The National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS), released in 1993, revealed that between 40 million and 44 million Americans are unable to read phone books, ballots, car manuals, nursery rhymes, the Declaration of Independence, the Bible, the Constitution, or the directions on a medicine bottle. Another 50 million Americans recognize so few printed words that they are limited to a fourth- or fifth-grade level of reading. …

See Dick Flunk

Abstract: The evidence is overwhelming that kids with reading problems need phonics-based instruction. Why arenAEt educators getting the message? Inside a National Institutes of Health (NIH) reading lab, 11-year-old Alexis stumbles to decipher a short story. Reading out loud, she inserts the word "girl" at the end of a sentence in which it does not appear. She skips the word "the" and says "grader" instead of "grade." Instead of "goes," Alexis reads "got"; instead of "her," Alexis guesses "the." Later in the sentence, she substitutes "broom" when the words read "a round iron handle." This is a sobering display: Alexis, an otherwise bright sixth-grader who scores above the 70th percentile in all other academic areas, cannot read a simple sentence without several mistakes and frequent guesswork. Unfortunately, she is not alone. Alexis is one of more than 10,000 participants in an ongoing 30-year, $200-million study of reading disabilities by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), a division of the NIH. Acting NICHD Chief Reid Lyon sadly notes that her case is typical of children who have not received proper instruction in how the sounds heard in speech are represented by the letter symbols used in print--the relationship known as phonics. Says Lyon, "There is no way to read if you are not very facile in the use of phonics." The problem is that few readers experiencing difficulties similar to AlexisAEs are ever given the explicit phonics training they so desperately need. Instead, teaching methods variously termed "look-and-say," "sight method," "whole word," and the latest incarnation, "whole language," have dominated the education landscape for almost seven decades. As a result, millions of kids are consigned to a lifetime of unnecessary reading troubles because most policymakers and educators have either willfully ignored the NIH-funded research or are unaware of its existence. This is clearly evident in the America Reads Challenge Act of 1997, President ClintonAEs five-year, $2.75-billion proposal to place volunteer reading tutors with minimal training in low-income schools. The program would hire reading specialists to give cram courses to these volunteers, but declines to incorporate the NICHDAEs findings into its recommendations. Its official literature tepidly states, "The U.S. Department of Education does not specify any particular reading instruction method." In addition, the federal government gives elementary schools $7 billion a year in aid to programs for special education, bilingual education, and low-income students without insisting that the instruction be research-based. If ClintonAEs remedy is misguided, at least his focus on reading is well placed. The 1994 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) found that more than 40 percent of fourth graders cannot read at the most basic level, indicating that they could not understand the "overall meaning of the text" or make simple inferences. The 1993 National Survey of Adult Literacy discovered that some 90 million Americans--nearly half the adult population--have severely limited literacy skills, and their ranks swell by millions each year. Bereft of the ability to use a bus schedule, write a short letter to address a credit problem, or calculate their savings on a sale price, they are much more likely to be unemployed, on welfare, or in jail than their fully literate peers. More worrisome is the fact that literacy skills among young adults and school-age children are declining. Among minorities, the statistics are even more tragic. On average, black and Hispanic children score four grade levels below their white peers on reading tests. And this gap does not narrow over time: The average black college graduate reads at the level of the average white high-school graduate. To be fair, American schoolchildren overall ranked second only to Finland on the last international assessment of reading ability, but that provides little consolation to disadvantaged children who scored well below the average score of our major trading partners. …

You've Come a Long Way, Daddy

Abstract: The greatest social tragedy of the last 30 years has been the collapse of fatherhood. Propelled by the twin engines of divorce and illegitimacy, the percentage of children growing up in a home without their father nearly tripled between 1960 and the early 1990s. By 1994, 24 million American children were living without their biological fathers. But not to worry, we were increasingly told, all family arrangements were equal and children could do just fine without their fathers. Put simply, the modern family might need a village, but it no longer needed a dad. Then something remarkable happened. Suddenly and unpredictably, fatherlessness began to be cited as the most disturbing and consequential social trend of our time. Soon, football stadiums were filling with Promise Keepers, busloads of African-American men were arriving in the nation's capital for a "Million Man March," and news stories began to highlight regularly the connection between absent fathers and such social ills as crime, educational failure, and welfare dependency. Some observers were even talking about the birth of a new social movement on behalf of fatherhood. Collapse of Fatherhood The retreat from fatherhood began in the 1960s, gained momentum in the 1970s, and hit full stride in the 1980s. Driving this collapse of fatherhood were three ideas about parenting, fathers, and children. Ideas do have con- sequences, and the cultural and social consequences of these ideas were profound. Moreover, these notions became so entrenched in American culture that, until recently, they obscured the obvious cause of so many social dis- orders: absentee fathers. The myth of the androgyny ideal. For much of the history of Western civiliza- tion, differences between men and women were widely recognized and even celebrated. As late as the 1950s, social scientists largely accepted that men and women had biological differences that produced behavioral differences. Men and women, it was thought, formed a natural complementarity wherein each sex supported and strengthened the other. This idea was so ingrained that, for much of this century, educators routinely reinforced male and female dis- tinctiveness and sex-role behavior. But beginning in the 1960s, our recognition of gender distinctiveness gave way to the ideal of androgyny. Out of a concern for greater social equity, androgyny advocates preached that men and women ought not only to be treated exactly the same, but to behave the same as well. Social psychologist Sandra Bem was particularly influential in spreading the gospel of androgyny, arguing that persons freed from traditional sex-role behavior would be better adjusted, more adaptive, and psychologically healthier. By 1980, according to a survey published in the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 72 percent of mental-health professionals described a "healthy, mature, socially competent" adult as androgynous. The ideal of androgyny found fertile soil in the field of parenting advice. Experts jettisoned the complementary model of childrearing and exhorted mothers and fathers each to parent in exactly the same way. According to many parenting gurus of the 1970s and 1980s, mothers and fathers should parent so that a child would neither know nor care whether it was mom or dad in the room. Androgyny became the basis of the New Nurturing Father ideal, in which a good father was defined as a man who shares equally in all childrearing activities from the moment of birth. The New Nurturing Father was expected not only to cry at movies, but to change precisely half the diapers and fix his baby's formula as adeptly as he could fix a flat tire. This view is now deeply ingrained in American culture--especially among social-service providers. At a recent workshop I conducted on restoring fatherhood, I was lectured by a social worker that it is not just incorrect, but dangerous, to use the word "father." The correct term is "parent. …

Mugged by Reality

Abstract: In the 30 years since Congress first established a federal agency for the study of crime, we have spent millions of dollars on criminological studies. That investment is finally bearing fruit. Aided by powerful new computers crunching reams of data, social scientists have learned a lot about criminal careers, how they develop, and how society can thwart them. The most serious offenders against people and property in this country generally hit their criminal peak between 16 and 18 years of age. The hard-core young thug-to-be starts stealing from mama's purse before he's 10. By the fourth and fifth grades, he is skipping school. As he enters his teens, he's gangbanging--and on the track to prison or an early violent death. Typically he is committing burglaries at about 15, armed robberies at 16, and often killing by 18--and sometimes much younger. After years of effort to con- tain the crime committed by these hoodlums, we know what works and what doesn't. At long last, we have all the knowledge we need to design an effec- tive strategy for the prevention of crime. Eight lessons we've learned abut the epidemic of crime-and what to do about it. 1. Most serious crime is committed by a violent minority of predatory recidivists. Criminologist Marvin Wolfgang compiled records of all of the 9,945 males born in 1945 and attending school in Philadelphia between the ages of 10 and 18. A mere 627--just under 7 percent--were chronic offenders, with five or more arrests by age 18. These so-called Dirty Seven Percenters committed more than half of all offenses and two-thirds of the violent crimes, including all the murders, that were committed by the entire cohort. Wolfgang followed his "Class of '45" through its 30th year in 1975. Shockingly few offenders were incarcerated. Even the 14 murderers among them spent an average of only four years behind bars for these crimes. Worse, these hard-core criminals admitted in interviews that, for each arrest, they typically got away with 8 to 11 other serious crimes. Wolfgang found that 70 percent of juveniles arrested three times committed a fourth offense; of those, 80 percent not only committed a fifth offense, but kept at it through 20 or more. If the city's judges had sent each Dirty Seven Percenter to prison for just a year after his third offense, Wolfgang calculated, Philadelphians would have suffered 7,200 fewer serious crimes while they off the streets. Wolfgang's findings electrified the law-enforcement world. At the request of U.S. Attorney General Edward Levi, Wolfgang repeated the study on the 13,160 Philadelphian males born in 1958. The proportion of chronic offenders was virtually the same: 982 young men (7.5 percent) collected five or more arrests before age 18. But the crimes committed by the "Class of '58" were bloodier and far more frequent. Compared with the Class of '45, these youths were twice as likely to commit rape and aggravated assault, three times more likely to murder, and five times more likely to commit robbery. They were, concluded Wolfgang, "a very violent criminal population of a small number of nasty, bru- tal offenders. They begin early in life and should be controlled equally early." Other studies with different methodologies corroborated Wolfgang's approximate finding of 7 percent in places as different as London; Copenhagen; Orange County, California; Racine, Wisconsin; Columbus, Ohio; Phoenix, Arizona; and Salt Lake City, Utah. 2. A minority of this minority is extraordinarily violent, persistent, or both. They are "Super Predators," far more dangerous than the rest. Researchers for Rand questioned 2,190 prisoners convicted of robbery in California, Texas, and Michigan. Nearly all admitted to many more crimes than those for which they were jailed. But a tiny fraction of these career criminals proved to be extraordinarily frequent offenders. The least active 50 percent of burglars averaged a little under six burglaries a year, while the most prolific 10 per- cent averaged more than 230. …

Wisconsin's Welfare Miracle

Abstract: Everyone wants--or or professes to want--to "end welfare as we know it." Despite such lofty proclamations, welfare is still thriving. Last year, federal and state governments spent $411 billion on means-tested welfare programs that provide cash, food, housing, medical care, and social services to poor and low-income Americans. This greatly exceeded the $324 billion spent in 1993, the first year of the Clinton presidency. At the core of America's vast, dysfunctional welfare system is Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). At present, nearly one out of seven children in the United States receives AFDC, residing with a mother married to a welfare check rather than a working husband. The typical family now on AFDC will spend nearly 13 years in the program. "Ending welfare" must begin with reform of AFDC. Congress enacted major new legislation last summer that will start this process. The new law promises three major changes. First, it eliminates the entitlement system of AFDC funding, under which states that increased their AFDC caseloads received automatic increases in federal funding, while states that reduced dependence faced a fiscal penalty. Second, the new law establishes performance standards that will require each state to reduce its AFDC caseload, or at least, if the caseload does not decline, require some recipients to work in return for their benefits. Third, the law sets a new goal of reducing illegitimacy and will reward states that reduce out-of-wedlock births without increasing the number of abortions. Although the new federal legislation sets the proper framework for reform among the states, the liberal welfare establishment and its allies in the media incessantly warn that reform will prove to be difficult, if not impossible. But one state has already proven the naysayers wrong: Wisconsin. Wisconsin's experience with welfare reform provides an unparalleled model for implementing reform that other states would be wise to follow. In the last 10 years, while AFDC caseloads in the rest of the nation were rising steeply, the caseload in Wisconsin has dropped by half. In inner-city Milwaukee, the caseload has fallen by 25 percent, but in the rest of the state, caseloads have fallen by nearly 70 percent. In 28 of Wisconsin's 77 counties, the welfare rolls have already dropped by 80 percent or more. And if all this weren't remarkable enough, the pace of Wisconsin's reduction in welfare dependency is accelerating. In Milwaukee, the AFDC caseload is now shrinking 2 percent per month; in the rest of the state, 5 percent. Wisconsin's achievements are utterly unprecedented in the history of AFDC. Liberal welfare experts used to insist that a successful work program might reduce welfare caseloads by 5 percent over five years; in much of Wisconsin, the number of people on welfare is steadily falling by that amount every 30 days. Wisconsin has thus won more than half the battle against AFDC dependence and is proceeding with the other half with breathtaking speed. This victory is crucial, since welfare dependency severely hampers the healthy development of children. In the long term, the greatest beneficiaries of Wisconsin's dramatic achievements in reforming welfare will be the children themselves. The Road Less Traveled This remarkable story begins in 1987, when a major congressional debate on welfare culminated in the Family Support Act (FSA). Touted as vet another "end of welfare," the FSA was a complete bust. The Act did, however, generate the expectation among voters that welfare recipients would be required to work. In the same year, a second unheralded event occurred with far greater significance for the future of welfare: Tommy Thompson took office as governor of Wisconsin. Following a gubernatorial campaign largely about welfare, Thompson entered office with a firm commitment to reform. …

Judaism's War on Poverty

Abstract: For Centuries, the Jewish tradition of self-help has been rescuing the poor from dependency. So why have Jewish liberals abandoned it to embrace the welfare state? American Jews have traditionally maintained a deep commitment to just and compassionate social policies. They rightly believe that their religious tradition obliges them to care for the disadvantaged. As social workers, social policy activists, public officials, intellectuals, and voters, Jewish liberals in particular have enthusiastically embraced public-assistance programs and welfare benefits as an appropriate expression of the principle of Tzedakah (charity) that is so central to Jewish religious tradition. Unfortunately, many of these Jewish liberals have profoundly misunderstood the biblical concept of Tzedakah. From biblical Israel to pre-New Deal America, the principles of individual self-help and communal self-sufficiency were the essence of both the Jewish view of charity and the evolving Jewish philanthropic tradition. In recent decades, however, many liberal Jewish defenders of government social programs have mistakenly equated Tzedakah with the principles and policies of the welfare state-policies that represent the very antithesis of the historic Jewish charitable tradition. Rather than extol increased government spending and social welfare programs, American Jews should reaffirm the traditional Jewish religious preference for charitable lending over almsgiving, and recognize that it provides an especially effective model of communal self-help that other communities throughout America might emulate. As alternatives to dependency on public assistance or government welfare, interest-free loans can provide individuals with the means to achieve self-sufficiency in small businesses of their own, to attend college or professional school, and to tide people over in times of unemployment or illness. Biblical Charity The word Tzedakah derives from the Hebrew root Zedek, which denotes "righteousness" and "justice." The biblical laws of Tzedakah translated these principles into concrete religious and legal duties. In the Book of Deuteronomy, God commands the Israelites "to open thy hand unto the poor and needy." For Jews, this aid is not a voluntary act of kindness-it is obligatory. According to the Book of Leviticus, farmers in biblical Israel were obligated to leave a corner of their fields for the poor to harvest themselves, and to leave the gleanings of their own harvest-the grain or fruits that had been left or forgotten-to the poor, the widowed, and the orphaned. The Hebrew Bible also mandates a special tithe, a sort of public tax on income, that pious Jews for centuries have scrupulously set aside for the poor. The requirements of Tzedakah were expanded in later centuries by Talmudic and medieval Jewish scholars. The Talmud, the classic compendium of Jewish religious law completed in the sixth century, preserves a multitude of rabbinic statements and maxims that emphasize the pivotal role of Tzedakah in Jewish religious and communal life. One of the best known is Rabbi Assi's dictum that charity is "the equivalent of all the other religious precepts together." By the time of the rabbinic sage Hillel, who lived in the first century, the "charity ethic" of rabbinic Judaism was so compelling that it was a "principal rule" that no pious Jew could live in a community that had no organization for public charity. This rule shaped Jewish life until the 20th century. The autonomous Jewish communities of medieval and modern Europe and the Jewish settlements of early America all expressed this religious principle of Tzedakah through synagogue-based charity and the creation of a network of independent charitable organizations. The Jewish Principles of Self-Help Although it has received surprisingly little scholarly attention, the principle of self-help has been one of the most influential concepts in the history of Jewish religious and political thought. …

Broken Ladder: Government Thwarts Affordable Housing

Abstract: From all appearances, federal policy on affordable housing is facing its most searching reassessment in decades As housing policy comes up for reauthoriza- tion in Congress, the decades-old approach of housing low-income tenants in massive housing projects has few defenders in Washington The Clinton administration seems to favor the demolition of some of the notorious projects, relocating some of their former tenants in newer, largely mixed-income units, and assisting others with vouchers to subsidize their rental of housing in the private market On the Republican side, Rick Lazio, the chairman of the housing and community opportunity subcommittee, has gone so far as to suggest repealing the National Housing Act of 1937, the basis for all current federal housing programs In addition, he has advocated potential time limits for public-housing tenants and tougher oversight of corrupt hous- ing authorities None of these proposals, however, have challenged the intellectual basis of current housing policy Both sides have essentially proposed marginal changes intended mainly to ameliorate the worst aspects of public and subsidized hous- ing Unfortunately, the changes rest on dubious assumptions -- chief among them that the problems with our housing policy have stemmed from its implementation rather than its very conception We are told that public hous- ing might work if only it did not take the form of high-rises and serve mainly the very poor, that low-income housing subsidies should certainly work if only they were provided in the form of vouchers that will open up the private hous- ing market to those in need But since these proposed reforms ignore the powerful social dynamics that shape neighborhoods, we are in danger of lurch- ing toward a new generation of policy mistakes There is another way out of our housing policy problems Throughout the coun- try, we see innovative models of housing that work and, in most instances, are neither politically divisive nor dependent on government subsidies This network of privately built and maintained neighborhoods suggests that massive government spending is not needed to help those of low and moderate income find good housing The key to understanding what works is a concept called the housing ladder: the idea that neighborhoods and the types of homes in them shape the way we organize our society and its social structure Public officials who understand the housing ladder can help citizens of any income secure good homes and neighborhoods If we understand its rules, its social dynamics, government can help extend housing opportunities through use of the market and,at most, limited subsidies In 1979, geographer Phillip Rees found that socioeconomic status is a universal sorting principle in American cities People of similar incomes and educational backgrounds overwhelmingly choose to live together The result: Most neighborhoods comprise relatively similar lots and types of housing Each type of neighborhood is linked roughly to an income group Each type of neigh- borhood represents a rung on the housing ladder But the housing ladder is not just a system of physical structures; it's also a social system Families strive to improve their economic position -- to climb to a higher rung A bigger and better house in a more affluent neighbor- hood is one of the rewards that market economies bestow upon individuals Unlike other consumer goods, the value of one's house is, in part, determined by the condition of one's neighborhood Keeping a neighborhood safe and property values high is a common enterprise that helps hold communities together Residents may, for example, work hard to forestall neighborhood deterioration and so avoid falling to a lower rung Residents fashion the civil society of their neighborhoods through myriad activities-organizing crime patrols, volunteering at a local school, or simply doing favors for neighbors -- that make an area a better place to live …

The New Mission for Philanthropy

Abstract: Shocking amounts of charitable giving are gravely misdirected and wholly ineffective A report from a commission chaired by Lamar Alexander points the way toward a reformation of American philanthropy "Giving Better, Giving Smarter," a report by the National Commission on Philanthropy and Civic Renewal, is the most significant work on the value of private charitable efforts since the report of the Filer Commission in 1975 Supported by the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the NCPCR aims to assess "how private giving in America can help revive our poorest communities and promote self-sufficiency and independence among our citizens" Its members include: Lamar Alexander (chairman), Reed Coleman (vice chairman), Elayne Bennett, Kenneth W Dam, the Rev Henry Delaney Jr, Kimberly O Dennis, Chester E Finn Jr, the Rev Jerry E Hill, Constance Horner, Sister Jennie Lechtenberg, William H Lock, Pastor Juan Rivera, and Sam A Williams Its Web site is wwwncpcrorg America is the richest, most generous nation on Earth In no other country do individuals, communities, foundations, corporations, and other private philanthropies give so many billions of dollars to such a wide variety of worthy causes and organizations Yet among all these commendable activities and missions, helping people in need has always played a special role For many Americans, it defines the essence of charity Today, however, far too much of the private largesse intended by its donors to improve the condition of the poor is misspent or misdirected This gap between the generosity and good intentions of Americans and the actual impact of their giving on those in need is the central concern of the National Commission on Philanthropy and Civic Renewal Since our founding last year, we have focused on private efforts to help the poor, by which we mean organized, nongovernmental attempts to aid the hungry, the homeless, the chronically unemployed, the addicted, the severely disabled, and anyone whose life has been made miserable by the effects of long-term poverty We chose this focus knowing full well that an immense world of private philanthropy also supports, to name just a few examples, hospitals, education, cultural institutions, and the environment We value these, too But we chose not to make them our concern There is good reason to believe that philanthropy for people in need demands more urgent attention today For many years, the United States has seen a vigorous public debate about the reformation of welfare policies It is in this area where government's role is now undergoing the greatest (and, we think, long-overdue) upheaval and where private giving and private institutions will be dramatically affected Hence we have made it the heart of our report We have concluded that much of the private philanthropy designed to help our poorest citizens and most distressed communities is gravely flawed; well-intended, to be sure, but often ineffective, inefficient, even misguided Our hope is that private charitable activity, if pursued in the right way, will play a greater role in reviving troubled neighborhoods and assisting individuals who cannot make it on their own It is our secret weapon Yet it would be an error to assume that today's philanthropy establishment is ready -- or even willing -- to shoulder that important role Far too much charitable giving is wasted on efforts that make scant difference in the lives of individuals or the well-being of communities True, the same criticism could be and has been made of countless government social programs But we believe private giving should be held to an even higher standard We have therefore come together not to assess what government has done or should do, but instead to recommend how private giving might renew itself We believe there is an urgent and singularly valuable role for such giving, distinct from government efforts to aid the poor and from the appeals of large, national charities …

Learning-Free Zones. Five Reasons Why School Reforms Disappear without a Trace.

Abstract: Nearly two decades have passed since the United States discovered that its primary and secondary public schools are mediocre. So why are the prospects for real improvement so dim? To be sure, the agenda for education reform brims with good, "conservative" -- I would call them "radical" -- ideas. More than 700 "charter" public schools are operating in the 28 states that permit them; upwards of three dozen communities have liberated poor youngsters from bad schools with privately funded low-income scholarships; other communities are experimenting with unlimited public-school choice, publicly funded vouchers, and privatized management of public schools. Yet the vast majority of U.S. schoolchildren still attend schools untouched by these ideas. President Clinton has set a target of 3,000 charter schools by century's end, but their benefits would be swamped by the remaining 80,000 noncharter public schools. Two dozen more communities may have adopted vouchers or scholarships by then, yet 99 percent of American youngsters won't have access to them. At the same time, however, American education is awash in faddish innovations that regularly sweep through the profession like tropical storms: "whole-language reading," "constructivist math," "mixed-ability grouping," "multi-age grouping," "multiculturalism," and so on. This faddishness gives the education system the appearance of ceaseless change. Yet few of these innovations improve academic performance. And nearly all of them are being undertaken within the organizational framework of a rigid, governmentalist monopoly centered on an archaic concept of schooling, a concept developed for a 19th-century agrarian society with little technology and scant awareness of how children learn. Advocates for the bold reforms America needs must confront an unpleasant truth: We have a pretty clear understanding of what would work better, yet old-fashioned bureaucratic monopolies continue to insulate most U.S. public schools from change. Of all the structural and political obstacles embedded in today's system, five are particularly deadly: 1. The education system does not reward risk-taking If we want educators to display the high-wire, high-intensity, round-the-clock dedication of securities traders, perhaps we should expect to pay Wall Street salaries. But compensation isn't the whole story. Security, predictability, and congenial relations with peers are more important to most educators than rigor, innovation, and entrepreneurship. Education colleges carefully nurture a "progressive" pedagogical philosophy that values self-esteem and respect for differences over intellectual distinction and competitiveness. Indeed, the surest way for an educator to get in trouble is to propose change. Teachers too easily run afoul of their principals, their school boards, their students' parents, even their own peers. Teachers who receive prizes for classroom excellence, or who go to the considerable trouble of earning "board certification," often find themselves scorned as "rate-busters" by their colleagues. The founders of a charter school in Massachusetts faced intimidation and harassment by public-school employees so severe that several of them left town. And the higher one's rank, the greater the risks of risk-taking. Public-school teachers typically earn job tenure after three years, but urban school superintendents, especially reformers, are lucky to last that long. One- and two-year contracts are becoming increasingly common. Although schools eagerly embrace new fads in classroom technique and curricula, authentic reforms are subject to far more stringent criteria than is the status quo. Would-be reformers are immediately challenged to prove that their proposal has been fully tested and evaluated, that it will have no undesirable side effects -- and that it will not deflect any resources from the "regular" system. In other words, nothing can be tried until it has been proven to work, but nothing can be proven until it has been tried. …

There's No Place like Home

Abstract: The state of Kansas has turned its child-welfare services over to private nonprofits with one mandate: Don't let kids languish in foster care More than 500,000 children will pass through America's foster-care system this year, double the number from a little over a decade ago Nearly 100,000 of these children will never return to their original home Some will be adopted, but even these lucky ones will spend an average of three to five years waiting for a permanent family The unlucky ones will spend the remainder of their childhood drifting through foster-care hell After "ageing out" of the system at 18 years of age, many of these foster-care "graduates" will end up on welfare, on the streets, in jail, or a combination of the three Last December, President Clinton issued a bold challenge to the states, which administer most of the country's child-welfare programs, to double the number of children moved each year from foster care to adoptive homes by the year 2002 "The public child-welfare system was created to provide a temporary haven for children," he said, "not to let them languish forever in foster care" Kansas may become a model for states trying to meet the Clinton challenge The Sunflower State recently became the first state in the nation to fully privatize its adoption, foster-care, and family-preservation services "Kansas has taken the national lead in foster-care and adoption reform," says Derek Herbert, the associate director of the Boston-based Institute for Children, which tracks developments in state child-welfare programs Kansas's Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services (SRS), previously the state's largest provider of adoption and foster-care services, now purchases these services from a network of private providers No longer does the state recruit foster-care or adoptive parents or send in social workers to assist families in crisis These responsibilities--along with administration, placement, counseling, and follow-up services--have all been turned over to private, nonprofit organizations The Kansas model offers vigorous competition between providers, a "capitated" funding system that pays contractors a flat, one-time, perchild rate regardless of actual costs, and stringent performance standards This emphasis on performance provides strong incentives for the private providers to move children rapidly out of foster care and into permanent homes Kansas's privatization effort is unprecedented in its ambitions The reform "addresses many of the hopes and dreams the child-welfare community has had for many years," says Bob Hartman, the executive director of Kansas Children's Service League (KCSL) "We just never fathomed the state would ever go to this extent" A System in Disarray Like most state child-welfare systems, Kansas's had been broken for years Case workers were overwhelmed, the computer equipment was antiquated, and the bureaucracy moved glacially Because they weren't mandated by state law, adoption services were neglected; over the past eight years, fewer than half of Kansas children legally free for adoption were placed in homes within a year Foster care was also a mess Children were shuffled from one foster home to another, and many passed through seven or eight homes during their childhood For 14-year-old Dale, a mere seven or eight would have been heavenly The teenager, an animal lover with an IQ of 130, has been in 130 foster homes since he entered Kansas's child welfare system at age three "Just when you unpack your stuff, it's time to move again," he says "I learned to turn off my feelings because if I thought about how bad I felt, I wouldn't be alive You learn to use your imagination a lot because it's so much better than what you're living" Finally, in 1990, the ACLU filed a class-action lawsuit against the state on behalf of children The judge listened to the state's defense--and promptly put the department under a consent decree …

"There You Go Again": Liberal Historians and the 'New York Times' Deny Ronald Reagan His Due

Abstract: On December 15, 1996, the New York Times Magazine published Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.'s recent survey of 32 historians and other "experts." He had asked them to rate every U.S. president as "great," "near great," "average," "below average," or "failure." Three presidents were ranked as "great": George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt. Six were rated "near great": Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, James K. Polk, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Harry Truman. The most astonishing part of Schlesinger's poll was the low assessment his panel gave Bill Clinton's most illustrious recent predecessor: Ronald Reagan placed in the bottom half of the "average" category. Sharing this designation were Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, William Howard Taft, Chester A. Arthur, and Benjamin Harrison. To be sure, Reagan generated anything but a consensus among the judges. Seven rated him "near great," eleven saw him as "average," nine considered him "below average," and four graded him a "failure." Still, something is amiss in Reagan's overall grade. A close inspection of Schlesinger's panel invites suspicion that participants were selected as much for the conclusions they were likely to reach as for their scholarly credentials. Eminent presidential biographers Merrill D. Peterson (Jefferson), Robert V. Remini (Jackson), Arthur S. Link (Wilson), and Robert H. Ferrell (Truman) deservedly made the list. Authors sympathetic to the New Deal and its legacy, such as James MacGregor Burns, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and Alan Brinkley, were represented in abundance. Also there were Lyndon Johnson enthusiast Robert Dallek and left-of-center historian Eric Foner. To top it off, the panel included two liberal Democratic politicians, former New York governor Mario Cuomo and former Illinois senator Paul Simon. Forrest McDonald was the only conservative scholar represented. Policy Review: The Journal of American Citizenship asked a number of leading authorities on the presidency whether they agreed with the Schlesinger panel's assessment of Reagan. Their answers follow. William F. Buckley Jr.: Reagan had the best intuitive sense of priorities of any president in the postwar period, when it became a constant struggle to know what to pay attention to. His designation of the Soviet Union as an "evil empire" froze the blood of international diplomacy, but agitated the moral imagination and did more to advance U.S. national objectives than a year's Pentagon spending. Speaking of which, Reagan was exactly correct in knowing that the resources of the U.S. could not be matched by those of the enemy. His willingness to install theater weapons in Europe, to explore anti-missile technology, and to commit great sums to defense effectively disarmed the potential aggressor. And then who, more resonantly than he, made the case against Big Government? Could he have known that a Democratic president, seven years after Reagan left office, would serve as an echo chamber on the matter of an end to Big Government? Reagan belongs on Mount Rushmore, and he'll be there, after the carpers die off. A.M. Rosenthal: There was a communist empire and it was evil. Ronald Reagan did as much as any leader in the world to help bring about the end of that empire. He also proved it false, as the Clinton administration now claims in the case of China, that struggling against a foreign dictatorship necessitates consigning to total isolation. President Reagan was able both to keep up the pressure on the Soviet Union militarily, economically, and politically and to maintain contact with its leaders because it was to their interest to do so. I think all this certainly raises Mr. Reagan to the status of above average. I think it is silly for contemporaries of a president to try to fit him into a permanent historical niche. I would expect that, as time went on, history, if not the historians, will judge him as near-great for his contribution to the downfall of the evil empire. …

The 7 Deadly Sins of Government Funding for Private Charities

Abstract: Welfare reform is once again forcing upon Americans an age-old debate: How should we, as a society, care for the neediest among us? Until about the 1960s, privately funded charities were the most vital and visible answer to that question -- putting the jobless to work, lifting single mothers out of poverty, keeping delinquent kids out of jail. But gradually, after waves of Great Society programs, government has come to dominate the care-giving industry. Today, federal and state agencies fund and regulate every conceiv- able social service. And, increasingly, they do so indirectly: Countless charities and other nonprofits are now heavily subsidized to deliver care; many of these "private" groups depend on public funds for well over half of their income. Even numerous religious agencies, typically the most wary of entanglement with the secular state, could hardly survive without government aid. With the lure of lucrative grants and contracts, government is quietly orchestrating one of the most profound -- and overlooked -- shifts in public policy in a generation. Massive, direct public funding for private nonprofits is quickly becoming the most important strategy for attacking social problems in America. But is it working? By increasing the pressure on the private sector to mobil- ize against poverty and other social ills, recent welfare reforms have raised two vital questions: First, have private charities become too dependent on government support? And second, what special risks accompany the taxpayer money that flows to religiously based charities? Defenders of the "public-private partnership" argue that government contracts make it easier for private agencies to sustain and expand their outreach. That may be true, but more true of those agencies with good lobbyists and political connections. Moreover, the subsidies to these groups carry serious liabilities. The following observations reveal the dangers -- the "seven deadly sins" -- of government's alliance with private social-service agencies. They are based on research in Massachusetts, mainly in the Boston area, which was chosen in part because of its heavily funded network of social services. Nearly all of the organizations cited depend on public money for at least 60 percent of their budgets. What follows, then, are not the criticisms of disenfranchised outsiders, but the insights and concerns of the system's benefactors -- or, put more precisely, its dependents. 1. Government regulations force providers to waste resources. With government grants and contracts come government standards -- reams of regulations intended to ensure accountability and guarantee quality care. What they guarantee instead is mindboggling waste. Jacquelin Triston, a Salvation Army captain in Framingham, oversaw a federal lunch program at an Army center that mandated every child be served an entire meal every day -- whether he wanted it or not. And if a child asked for a sec- ond helping of anything on the menu, he got an entire meal. "It was a crazy waste of food," Triston says. "It just ended up in the trash." The Key Program offers counseling and other support services to 700 youths daily, most of them in trouble with the law, at 40 sites throughout New England. Ninety-nine percent of the program's $15 million budget comes from state and federal sources. To continue to receive government funds, however, all Key centers must be fully accessible to the handicapped under the federal Americans with Disabilities Act. So exactly how many of its kids are physically handicapped? "Zip," says Bill Lyttle, a 20-year veteran of the agency. "Our programs are not designed to serve handicapped kids. We serve a lot of delinquent kids. There are not a lot of delinquent kids stealing cars in wheelchairs." Local regulations may be as clumsy and wasteful as federal rules. Private schools are prime targets of overzealous regulators, says Dick Barbieri, the executive director of the New England Association of Independent Schools: A small elementary school sets up a lunch table for students to make their own peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches. …

I Hear America Singing: The Arts Will Flower without the NEA

Abstract: The death knell is sounding for the National Endowment for the Arts. The agen- cy's federal appropriation last year fell by one-third, from about $150 mil- lion to about $100 million, and its appropriation may be cut again or even eliminated in the current session of Congress. The NEA is not only anathema to cultural conservatives, libertarians, evangelical Christians, and even a good number of artists. It is also likely to lose key political support as Presi- dent Clinton and other Democrats resolve to keep moving toward a balanced fed- eral budget without compromising Medicare, Medicaid, education, or the environment. But the end of the agency's federal funding need not prove cataclysmic for the arts in America. Artists, arts organizations, and their supporters have many strategies at their disposal for maintaining the vitality of the arts in a post-NEA era. And in any case, the importance of federal grantmaking to the arts has been greatly exaggerated. The NEA currently contributes to the arts in two ways: direct funding and less tangible, indirect services. Nowadays direct funding consists almost entirely of cash awards to arts organizations and event sponsors. (As of 1996, grants to individual artists were eliminated, except for creative writers, jazz greats, and masters of folk crafts.) NEA-financed music ensembles, dance festivals, museum exhibitions, and the like undoubtedly face a period of sacrifice and uncertainty, and there will be some casualties. But their prospects are far from hopeless. The NEA also renders indirect, noncash benefits and services through its peer-review panels. Their judgments can stimulate funding from other sources and identify certain artists and organizations as more deserving than others. In this realm of power-by-imprimatur, the judgment process would, in fact, probably work better if it were decentralized and used to spur greater involvement by funders. Making up the Shortfall To understand the reasons for optimism, it is necessary to assess the true nature of NEA spending priorities. The NEA's largesse regularly benefits the great established urban institutions and smaller local organizations of long-standing reputation. The NEA has also funded, less dependably, dozens of marginal artistic groups, some of which claim to depend on NEA funding for their survival. As a rule, the larger institutions will overcome the NEA's decline easily, but the smaller ones need not suffer if they heed certain examples set around the country. One might not know it from the political controversies that have attracted public attention, but the NEA has always favored the most venerable -- and richest -- cultural establishments over the esoteric, the shocking, and the avant-garde. A survey of funding patterns in 1985, 1990, and 1995 clearly reveals this preference. The Metropolitan Opera in New York City has been the single largest recipient of NEA funds, with annual grants between $800,000 and $900,000. Typical grants for other high-profile beneficiaries range from $200,000 to $350,000, awarded year after year and now incorporated into annual budgets. In theater, by far the biggest ongoing grants go to the major presenters and training centers, such as the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts ($305,000, on average, in 1985, 1990, and 1995), the Center Theater Group of Los Angeles ($251,000), the Guthrie Theater in Min- neapolis ($274,000), and the Yale Repertory Theatre ($167,000). In the museum world, the consistent winners are big-city institutions: Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco. In dance as well, the NEA has heavily favored the most established organizations. The Dance Theatre of Harlem, for example, averaged $303,000. Nearly all other troupes with six-figure grants bear the names of modern American legends: Alvin Ailey, Merce Cunningham, Martha Graham, Paul Taylor, Twyla Tharp. This preference for elite establishments should not be surprising, since it is usually the larger, wealthier institutions that have the staff and resources to put together winning grant proposals. …

The Moral Basis of a Free Society

Abstract: When the government of China tells people they can read state-run newspapers but not print and distribute Bibles, imprisoning and torturing dissenters; or have one child but not two, forcing women to have abortions; or watch state-run television but not listen to Radio Free Asia, jamming broadcast signals and threatening students--that is not freedom. But the absence of centralized state control is not necessarily freedom, either. The people of Beirut are not free. Neither are the people of Medellin and Cartagena, the drug capitals of Colombia. Freedom is not anarchy, chaos, and mayhem. The freedom to "let soulless forces operate," as the great classical liberal economist Ludwig von Mises termed it, is actually tyranny in another guise. So what is freedom? How can a widely pluralistic society sustain freedom without degenerating into chaos? What is the moral basis of a free society? Today the citizens and leaders of every nation are looking to America for answers to these questions. From Mexico City to Moscow, from Johannesburg to Jerusalem, from Bombay to Beijing, people have an eye on America as they struggle to make the exciting but difficult transition to free markets, free elections, free speech, and free worship. No nation, after all, has ever enjoyed the status that America does today. The greatest empires of history were but regional affairs. Today, America is truly the worldAEs only superpower. Yet our strength comes not just from the might of our economy or the brilliant capabilities of the men and women in our armed forces. It comes also from the example we set for the rest of the world of how a free people can adapt to and advance in changing times and circumstances. While others look to us, however, Americans themselves are seeking answers to some painful and bitter questions. Can a free society survive the collapse of the two-parent family, where one-third of children are born into homes without fathers? Can a free society long endure a culture in which newborn babies have been thrown into trash dumpsters and young people have doubled their rate of heroin use in a single year? As the 20th century comes to an end, the world is learning from America that the economic and political freedoms that come from capitalism and democracy are the most powerful and productive way to organize society. At the same time, we in America are discovering that capitalism and democracy alone are not enough to sustain a healthy, vibrant society. We are learning the hard way that a self-governing nation must consist of self-governing individuals. A breakdown in the moral fabric of society has dire consequences. An explosion of violence, crime, drug abuse, sexual promiscuity, and out-of-wedlock births undermines the blessings of liberty and prosperity. The stakes, therefore, are enormous. If America makes the economic, political, and moral changes necessary to move forward in the years ahead, then the rest of the world has a chance of getting it right. But if America drifts off course, then the rest of the world will be in trouble as well. A Free Society Americans have always defined true freedom as an environment in which one may resist evil and do what is right, noble, and good without fear of reprisal. It is the presence of justice tempered with mercy. It is a rule of law based on fundamental moral truths that are easily understood and fairly and effectively administered. It offers individuals and families equal opportunity to better their lives morally, spiritually, intellectually, and economically. Freedom, in other words, is neither a commodity for dictators to distribute and deny at will nor a moral, spiritual, or political vacuum in which anything goes. Freedom is a priceless treasure that the state is supposed to safeguard. Why? Because human beings have an intrinsic right to be free, a right that comes not from the state but from God. To the Founding Fathers, this was a "self-evident" truth. …

The Smart Samaritan

Abstract: Most private charities don't think very seriously about how to help the poor. Voluntary efforts will fail to improve on government welfare unless they learn from an earlier generation of poverty fighters. Government programs of social assistance are on the wane. They still enjoy enormous political and budgetary clout, but they are losing intellectual and moral support. Voters are clamoring for retrenchment, and policymakers are pondering ways--such as tax credits and government grants and contracts--to create a larger role for private organizations in the welfare system. President Clinton, announcing a national summit on volunteerism to be held in April, said, "Much of the work of America cannot be done by government. The solution must be the American people through voluntary service to others." The future of social assistance, it appears, will be in the hands of nonprofits, churches, and volunteer groups. This transformation will not, however, automatically create a better welfare system. The government system has failed because it has followed a defective approach to helping the poor. If the private sector maintains that approach--and it is in danger of doing so--we could end up with a welfare regime just as dysfunctional as the one we are struggling to replace. Before the country plunges into the brave new world of voluntary charity, we need to do some hard thinking about the right way and wrong way to give assistance to the needy. Here are some principles that charity leaders and volunteers ought to consider as they devise their own programs. 1. Unexamined giving leads to defective charity. Upon seeing a needy person, a benefactor's first impulse is a desire to fill the need. We see a beggar on the street who seems hungry, and we give him food. We see a person who is homeless, and we give him shelter. This is "sympathetic giving": giving according to the sympathy or pity one feels for the plight of the needy person. The problem is that such giving tends to "reward" the plight: Instead of lifting the recipient to self-sufficiency, sympathetic giving reinforces his bad habits and undercuts his motivation to reform himself. In this way, it leads to dependency and an ever-growing demand for more giving. Government programs are typically programs of sympathetic giving. Although they are sold to the public as a "hand up," they are--or almost invariably become--"handouts," that is, giveaways of goods and services based on the apparent need of the recipients. Hence, the programs inadvertently reinforce bad habits and wrong choices: losing a job because of drug or alcohol abuse, dropping out of school, not saving money, having children one cannot support, not striving to overcome a disability, and so on. Modern charity workers and donors need a comprehensive theory of giving to replace this flawed doctrine. Fortunately, we do not need to invent it. The 19th-century charity theorists covered this ground thoroughly, and they have left us a clear account of their conclusions. Earlier reformers insisted that sound policy requires more than pity toward the needy. It must also include tough-minded analysis. In 1876, American preacher and sociologist Charles Ames put it this way: "The open hand must be guided by the open eye. The impulse of pity, or compassion for suffering, belongs to every well-ordered mind; but like every other impulse, taken by itself alone, it is blind and idiotic. Unable to protect itself against imposition, unable also to discriminate and adapt its relief to the various conditions of actual helplessness, it flings its resources abroad at haphazard, and gushes itself to death." In many private charities around the country, this advice is disregarded. All too often, charity volunteers assume that if they are motivated by compassion, there is no reason to examine the long-term effect of their programs. In Sacramento, California, a group of reformers started a homeless shelter in 1983 called Loaves and Fishes. …

Miracle on I-35

Abstract: Think free trade is hollowing out the economy? Take a look at Kansas City, just one of the nationAEs newest export powerhouses Free trade and the international agreements that promote it have been very good for Americans In 1997, US unemployment dipped below 5 percent--its lowest level in decades Riding a wave of export growth, American manufacturers hired 14 million additional industrial workers between 1992 and 1996 In its first three years, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) slashed tariffs on US goods entering Mexico by 71 percent, and on Mexican goods entering the United States by 14 percent In spite of the peso devaluation that made US exports there more expensive, sales to Mexico have grown by 37 percent Total trade between the two nations increased by 61 percent, or nearly $50 billion AmericaAEs combined commerce with Canada and Mexico, its NAFTA partners, rose in that time by $127 billion annually This windfall from trade would be impressive even if it were confined only to dusty border towns and coastal cities But the real news is that there is a tremendous river of international commerce rushing right through AmericaAEs heartland In Kansas City, a metroplex of 17 million people that straddles the Kansas--Missouri border, unemployment dipped to 32 percent in July 1997 This has made NAFTA believers of residents of the region "NAFTAAEs early results surpassed our most optimistic expectations," says Doug Luciani, an economic-development expert with the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce Indeed, export figures from the two-state area dwarfed national trends Missouri sends transportation equipment, chemical products, industrial machinery, and electronics to Mexico In NAFTAAEs first three years, its Mexican exports rose from $540 million in 1993 to $109 billion in 1996--a 102 percent increase Kansas sells livestock, grains, and cars in the Mexican market; it increased exports from $187 million to $643 million in three years, an incredible 244 percent rise Many of these goods are shipped through Kansas City, an "intermodal" hub of air, barge, truck, and rail cargo Total merchandise exports from the Kansas City metropolitan area rose from $223 billion in 1993 to $399 billion in 1996--a $18 billion increase in two years Recovery in the Heartland "When I talk to people about Kansas City," says Agnes Otto, the ChamberAEs export-assistance representative, "I tell them about our new industries--our international engineering and telecommunications But I also tell them about our transportation and agriculture What amazes me is that the things that made us strong in the beginning are precisely whatAEs bringing us back" One leading trader is Farmland Industries, the largest farmer-owned cooperative in North America Headquartered in Kansas City, it serves 500,000 farmer--ranchers and 13,000 livestock producers It conducts business in all 50 states and in 70 foreign countries For its farmer members, Farmland processes and markets grain; for its livestock producers, it slaughters, processes, and markets pork and beef "The future economic well-being of American agriculture," says Farmland research analyst Bill Trickey, "is closely tied to our competitiveness in an expanding global market" He notes that US farm producers now earn 25 percent of their gross earnings from exports, and that this will likely increase to 35 percent by 2003 Trade agreements have been at the heart of this surge in foreign commerce, says Trickey "In the past six years, our international sales have grown from less than $200 million to over $41 billion In Mexico alone, we have seen our trade, since the passage of NAFTA, grow from less than $50 million in 1992 to $450 million in 1996 We believe that US policy must also be dedicated to the expansion of global markets" During the NAFTA debate of 1993, Ross Perot decried the "sucking sound" of American automotive jobs hurtling south of the border, lost to cheap Mexican labor …

The Commonwealth of Freedom

Abstract: Americans are estranged from their government; a lost tradition of community-building offers a way back. Government was once the instrument of a free citizenry. "We the People created government," Ronald Reagan was fond of saying, "not the other way around." As president, he regularly used the words of the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution to show that a just government is rooted in the citizenry. "Government of the people, by the people, and for the people," as Lincoln put it, was grounded in their communities and mindful of their common sense. The genius of American democracy was respect for the authority and energy of ordinary citizens. Today, by contrast, government strikes many Americans as some alien force, acting upon--or even against--the people. Since the 1960s, conservatives have criticized liberal public policy for reflecting the prejudices of a "new class" of elitist professionals, centered in and around government, that views ordinary citizens with condescension. By this account, the "new class" promotes the ideal of the state as a "Great Community" governed by experts, and it uses the language of policy analysis and social science to devalue face-to-face relationships. "Community is not a nation," Michael Joyce of the Bradley Foundation has written. "[I]t is not a class, a gender, or an occupation. It is a group you know, in a place you know." Conservatives like Joyce contend that the impersonal dynamics of bureaucracies and large organizations can never replace the human dignity and moral wisdom provided by family, church, neighborhood, and voluntary association. Their brand of conservatism offers an alternative vision of community and citizenship that balances freedom with individual responsibility. At the same time, the spread of market values and an aggressive consumer culture threatens to overwhelm the public goods, habits, and traditions that create the foundation for society. Robert Nisbet, the dean of modern conservative wisdom, argued that the marketplace celebrates an acquisitive individualism that erodes the authority of the church, the family, and the neighborhood. It corrupts civic character, public honor, accountability, and respect for others. Capitalism alone produces a "sand heap of disconnected particles of humanity," he said. Over a generation, the conservative critique has exposed the flaws of "Big Government." But it misses the rest of the Preamble to the Constitution--the idea that our government was created to undertake public tasks that benefit not only small groups or particular communities but the whole people. The work that citizens once performed toward these ends created a scaffolding, a "commonwealth," that tied everything together. In the commonwealth, citizenship was best understood as "public work" in government, community settings, or business that created things of lasting civic value. It was this public work that generated "E Pluribus Unum"--one from many, a civic consciousness beyond ethnic, parochial, or regional loyalties. As people created the commonwealth, they became the commonwealth. Through their work, ordinary citizens gained a sense of ownership in public things as well as private things. They developed civic character, public honor, and seriousness of purpose. The idea of a commonwealth constructed upon the work of citizens seems to have gone the way of "government of the people." But its revival will be vital to reinvigorating citizenship in the next century. The Commonwealth Tradition Formed from the old English words "common" and "weal," the word "commonwealth" originally meant "the common well-being." It traces its lineage to both political and social traditions. Commonwealth early became identified with the concept of the public, the whole body of the people or the state, and thus the classical republican tradition of politics, especially the idea of a government in which "the whole people" had voice and interest. …

While TV Moguls Dither, Parents' Guides Deliver

Abstract: For years, parents have worried about television exposing their children to violent, licentious, and vulgar images. If the TV industry won't stop broad- casting trashy shows, they have complained, at least it ought to provide families with advance warning about unsavory elements of its programming. The industry has finally responded, with a new rating system that professes to meet this parental request. But since the ratings are based on broad age categories, and omit specific information about the content of the shows, the industry's tepid solution is deeply flawed. TV networks have now begun rating their shows according to age-appropriateness, just as the movie industry does. There are six categories: two for children's shows (appropriate for all ages, or only for kids over seven) and four for shows aimed at general viewership. These categories echo the rating system for movies: "TV-G," "TV-PG," "TV-14" (analogous to "PG-13" movies), and "TV-M," for viewers who are ostensibly "mature." These ratings are now published in newspaper TV listings and dis- played briefly at the start of each program. The TV industry's age-based approach, unfortunately, is more of a diversion than a concession. It conceals what kind of objectionable content-sex, violence, or profanity-prompted a particular rating, offering parents the smiling salesman's assurance: "Trust me." But at any given age, some children are far more impressionable and immature than others; even children within the same family may cope with adolescence in radically different ways. Furthermore, the new system lumps together different kinds of so-called adult content, as if a child is equally sensitive to all varieties of such material. Worst of all, the new system leaves all judgments about the appropriateness of content to self-interested industry moguls -- who have long opposed content labeling for fear of losing advertisers. In a Washington Post interview, 12-year-old Jessica Musikar got it right: "I read that 'TV-PG' stands for 'Too Vague, Parents Give up.'" Movies, of course, have long been rated by age-appropriateness, but at least that system's flaws are mitigated by a raft of supplemental information published in newspapers, magazines, and on the Internet. Ordinarily, televi- sion programs are not preceded by advance "reviews" of their content. The TV listings in newspapers at best describe the plot in a sentence or two, leaving parents with only the industry's assurance that a specific show is good for every child of a certain age. The much-touted V-chip will only be as helpful as the industry's ratings -- that is, not terribly. The V-chip, to be installed in all television sets beginning next year, will screen TV programs only according to the industry's own rating system; until that system is improved, it will be incapable of sub- tler and more helpful judgments. Parents will be able to use V-chip technology to block individual programs or all shows with, say, a TV-M rating, but they will be no better equipped than they are now to evaluate specific show content and make viewing decisions adjusted to their children. Fortunately, parents don't have to wait for an industry-generated or govern- ment-imposed solution. Several existing publications already provide con- tent-based information about the offerings on television. Here are a few resources available to assist parents in regulating the tube: Parents Television Council Mark Honig, the executive director of the Parents Television Council, argues that the networks are not providing responsible programming. Exhibit A: the erosion of the networks' "family hour," the 8 to 9 p.m. time slot once set aside as a prime-time safety zone of programming for all ages. Age-appropriate labeling, he says, does nothing to clean up the content or restore that family-friendly time. It may even become a excuse not to. Indeed, Honig believes that age-based ratings will be nearly useless as guides. …

Tough Medicine for Welfare Moms

Abstract: Jay and his eight-months-pregnant wife, Connie, both former crack users, moved into a temporary apartment managed by the Interfaith Housing Coalition, an employment and housing program for homeless families in Dallas. Within a week, Jay had broken one of the conditions for entering and remaining in the program: He was caught using drugs. Jay got a stern warning from Ben Beltzer, Interfaith's founder, along with some help getting into a drug rehabilitation center. His wife and five-year-old son stayed in the apartment free of charge through the birth of the baby. Within two weeks of Jay's return, he was caught using drugs again. Now he comes to Beltzer with his daughter, thrusting the baby toward him and pleading, "You're not going to put her out on the streets, are you?" Beltzer looks at him clear-eyed. "No. You are." This may be one of the nation's toughest of tough-love approaches to helping the homeless. Participants are expected to complete educational training, get a job, find permanent housing, and save $1,200--all in three months. But for most of the 800 men and women who have graduated from the program, it was just tough enough. One independent study shows that two out of three graduates are still off the dole and off the streets two years later. Some residents get the message even if they don't graduate. Within two hours of Jay's second drug infraction, the whole family had to leave the program. Connie learned the tough-love lesson from getting kicked out of Interfaith. Today, although Jay is still using crack, she is now clean. She has a job, her own apartment, and full custody of both her children. Most of the residents at the Interfaith Housing Coalition, the majority of whom are welfare mothers, cannot turn their lives around without a great deal of help. They need more than job skills; they need basic life skills. Each Interfaith resident receives intensive individual attention from 10 people, who help lift them out of dependency. Two full-time staff members guide the daily job search, while two mentors coach each resident on employment skills. Two more mentors work with each resident on personal budgeting. Others teach family and parenting skills, nutrition, and comparative shopping. A case manager and child-care volunteers round out the team. The professional staff of 10 is augmented by 250 volunteers, who come from 28 Dallas congregations. Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Southern Baptists, and Catholics work side by side. With 10 people helping each resident, it's all but impossible to fall through the cracks. It's Not for Everybody A few hours after arriving at the Interfaith Housing Coalition with her two young daughters, a young woman--let's call her Maria--is sitting in the comfortable living room in the agency's main building. She has spent the past three weeks in a home for battered women after leaving a nine-year marriage of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse. Starting over alone doesn't look easy, but she believes it's better than living in a domestic war zone. Maria receives an introduction to Interfaith from Carter Holston, a longtime volunteer. "Interfaith is not for everybody," he tells her, explaining that the group requires a comprehensive interview, information about her family history, and a drug test. Applicants who test positive--as about 40 percent do--are referred to a drug-treatment program. They may not apply to Interfaith until they have kicked their drug habit. the program takes most of the remaining applicants if they show a flicker of willingness to be held accountable for their behavior. Maria shows that spark. Holston is one of 250 volunteers, called "co-partners," who work with the full-time staff of 10. "We're nearly all volunteers," he tells Maria. "Nobody is paying us to come and be here. We're here for the right reasons--because we care about you. We get a lot out of seeing you succeed. …

Mrs. Colehill Thanks God for Private Social Security

Abstract: Opponents of plans to privatize the Social Security system often exploit the fear of the unknown. Testifying before the House Ways and Means Committee in October 1994, for instance, union official Gerald Shea criticized such privatization plans as too risky. Over and over again, the employee-benefits director for the AFL-CIO said there is no evidence that privatization is better, no evidence that workers will save up more money, no evidence that workers will be protected if they become disabled, and no evidence that they could carry their savings from job to job. Conjuring up images of senior citizens standing in line at soup kitchens, he said that passing privatization reform would eventually force a future Congress to reintroduce Social Security. "No private insurance product," he said, "can offer such protection." Three weeks before Shea's testimony, in an equally passionate speech over the grave of her husband, Wendy Colehill offered just such evidence. A sanitation worker in Galveston, Texas, for 12 years, Bill Colehill had died in a car accident while driving Wendy and their three-year-old son home from the beach. He was 38. "I am normally a quiet person, but not at that cemetery I couldn't be," Wendy says. "I did what Bill would have wanted me to do. I thanked God that some wise men privatized Social Security here. If it wasn't for them, if I had regular Social Security, I'd be broke when he died-eating cat food or something." Within days of Bill's death, Wendy Colehill had received a death-benefit check for $126,000. With that money, she paid both for her husband's funeral and, since she could not raise Bill Jr. on a cashier's wages from Burger King, for her tuition at paralegal school. If Wendy Colehill had instead been relying on Social Security benefits, she would have received a check for a mere $255. A Lucky Loophole When Social Security was established in 1935, a loophole allowed states and municipalities to exempt their public employees from the federal retirement program. In a handful of states, governors and unions set up smaller versions of Social Security for teachers. They were virtually identical to the federal program. But in 1981, three counties in eastern Texas quietly withdrew from the Social Security system and set up their own privatized retirement program. Fearing a severe drop in Social Security tax revenues if others followed, Congress closed the loophole two years later. But the Texas experiment shows that Americans have nothing to fear from privatization. The Texas program makes more money. It offers greater benefits to the disabled. It follows the worker from job to job. And upon the death of the beneficiary, it functions as a generous life-insurance policy, paying the survivors a minimum of $50,000. "For years, critics have been able to argue with computer projections and models against privatization, but this is real life," explains Merrill Matthews Jr., an analyst at the National Center for Policy Analysis, in Dallas. "And real life shows us it works even better than anyone expected." In 1979, Bill Decker was serving an uneventful term as Galveston's county attorney. As the county official responsible for personnel administration, however, he started to become concerned about all the newspaper reports of Social Security's looming insolvency. So he asked a financial analyst to design a program that would protect the county's workers. Don Kebodeaux, the president of Houston's First Financial Capital Corp., proposed privatization. Under Kebodeaux's plan, the 5,000 public employees of Galveston, Brazoria, and Matagorda counties are still taxed 6.13 percent of their pay, just like employees everywhere, and the county kicks in an equal amount. But the money doesn't go to Washington. Instead the fund works like a private annuity. Every year, the counties ask large insurance companies to bid against each other for the right to manage their retirement funds for one year. …

The Gender Refs

Abstract: Federal Regulators want equal opportunity for female collegiate athletes. Do they care whether colleges have to cut menAEs teams to achieve it? When the menAEs varsity swimming and diving team at the University of California at Los Angeles performed in competition, they gave spectators more than a glimpse of athletic grace--they showed how disciplined greatness can emerge from eager but untrained youth. The team consistently finished among the nationAEs top 10. Over the years, it had secured 41 national titles in individual events and a National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) championship. Members of the squad have won an astonishing 22 Olympic medals. No more. The Olympic-size pools at UCLA are now closed to the male swimmers who set so many records there. In an apparent effort to achieve "gender equity" in collegiate athletics, university officials dropped the menAEs squad in 1993, making room for womenAEs teams in soccer and water polo. The UCLA team was one of 16 NCAA menAEs swimming squads eliminated since 1993. These programs join more than 200 menAEs athletics teams eliminated nationwide over the last several years. According to a survey by the NCAA, that amounts to a net loss of more than 17,000 opportunities for men in collegiate athletics. Many of these teams are victims of misguided egalitarianism. Colleges and universities are misapplying a federal anti-discrimination statute to artificially equalize the number of men and women participating in collegiate athletics. Thanks to pressure from the Clinton administration and the federal courts, schools are destroying menAEs athletics programs across the country. They are capping the sizes of teams, terminating long-standing programs, and driving thousands of male students off the playing fields. And they are doing so without regard to the level of interest in sports demonstrated by female students or to the resources of the schools they attend. The source of this mischief is a distorted interpretation of Title IX, enacted by Congress as part of the 1972 Education Amendments. Intended to ensure that schools do not discriminate in providing athletic opportunities for their students, it states that "no person shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, or denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any educational program or activity receiving federal aid." On the face of it, it was a benign anti-discrimination statute. In the hands of federal judges and officials at the U.S. Department of Education, however, the statute has become toxic for collegiate athletics. The departmentAEs Office of Civil Rights (OCR) has decided to judge compliance with the law not by whether colleges are practicing clear-cut discriminating but rather by they are failing to achieve "proportionality." In this case, proportionality means attaining a gender ratio among varsity athletes equal to that of the student body. If that sounds like a quota, it is. Though the OCRAEs interpretation of the law was first issued in 1979, its application remained uncertain due to a Supreme Court decision in the mid-1980s. The mass elimination of menAEs teams began in the 1990s. "ItAEs become really horrific since Clinton came into office," says Leo Kocher, a professor and wrestling coach at the University of Chicago. "The people in the OCR have really begun to interpret this as a quota law." Federal courts have been only too eager to go along, cementing proportionality into law. Consider Cohen v. Brown, the most prominent Title IX case so far, which the Supreme Court declined to review this spring. After Brown University eliminated two menAEs and two womenAEs teams for budgetary reasons, female athletes sued in 1992 seeking to reinstate the womenAEs teams. Federal district judge Raymond Pettine ruled, and the appeals court affirmed, that as long as the proportion of women athletes was lower than the proportion of women students, Brown could not eliminate viable womenAEs teams. …

The New Social Architects

Abstract: Millard Fuller Habitat for Humanity Here's a charity that scorns the concept of the handout in no uncertain terms. In fact, about the only thing they hand you at Habitat for Humanity is a ham- mer and a carpenter's belt. If you want a home for your family, they reason, you should help build it. Championed by former president Jimmy Carter, Habitat for Humanity has helped provide shelter for more than 250,000 low-income people, constructing about 40,000 homes. Its goal is to help the needy achieve and maintain permanent economic independence. Investing their own "sweat equity," families assisted by Habitat help to build their own homes and assume ownership. Thanks to cor- porate support and an army of volunteers, Habitat homes in the United States are built for an average cost of $35,000. The organization is the brainchild of Millard Fuller, a self-made millionaire who poured all of his money into founding the group in 1976. Based in Americus, Georgia, Habitat is now a global organization with nearly 1,500 active affiliates and building projects in more than 40 nations. Habitat has recently accepted AmeriCorps staffing and funding from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development. Fuller will accept government funds provided they come without conditions that might interfere with Habitat's Christian witness. Marvin Olasky World magazine As a Marxist atheist undergraduate at Yale, Marvin Olasky once conducted an art project in which he let a black cat out of a bag onto the floor. This was a metaphor, he explained, for how the Black Panthers were freeing themselves from the racial oppression of American society Today, Olasky says, he's a lot smarter about both religion and economics. A convert to evangelical Christianity, he has risen to national prominence through the promotion of "effective compassion"-material and spiritual help that upholds the dignity of the needy. His studies of 19th-century charities that lifted people out of poverty have propelled him to the forefront of the debate on welfare reform. After joining the University of Texas as a professor of journalism, Olasky and his wife started several "mustard-seed" groups, such as a crisis-pregnancy center in Austin. There, Olasky learned that "the great hope for our society lies with the millions of ordinary people who in quiet ways do heroic things every day." Olasky is the editor of World, the lively evangelical newsweekly magazine based in Asheville, N.C., with a circulation of 75,000. No author has been more widely read over the past few years as a source of wisdom on private alternatives to the welfare state. Among his 11 books, The Tragedy of American Compassion (1992) and Renewing American Compassion (1996) have been particularly influential. Effective charity, Olasky argues, must be personal, challenging, and spiritual. In his inaugural address as Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich urged all Americans to read Olasky's work. William Bratton New York City Police Department "We will fight for every house in the city, we will fight for every block. And we will win." So pledged William Bratton at his swearing in as the police com- missioner of New York City in 1994. And he kept his word. By the end of 1996, recorded incidents of seven major felonies had fallen by 33 percent and homicide by 50 percent. Bratton's approach was based on the "broken windows" theory-that smaller infractions lead to larger scale crime and civil disorder. From his days as chief of the Transit Authority Police Department, Bratton knew that one out of every seven people arrested for fare evasion were wanted on a warrant, and that one in 14 was arrested for packing illegal guns. Bratton's first step was to train his men in aggressive "order maintenance" to address the smallest of missteps, in an effort to alert citizens and would-be criminals that behavior degrading the quality of life in the city would not be tolerated. …

The Imperial Judiciary ... and What Congress Can Do about It

Abstract: Under the modern doctrine of judicial review, the federal judiciary can invalidate any state or federal law or policy it considers inconsistent with the U.S. Constitution. This doctrine gives unelected federal judges awesome power. Whenever these judges exceed their constitutional prerogative to inter- pret law and instead read their personal views and prejudices into the Constitution, the least democratic branch of government becomes its most powerful as well. America's Founding Fathers created a democratic republic in which elected representatives were to decide the important issues of the day. In their view, the role of the judiciary, although crucial, was to interpret and clarify the law--not to make law. The Framers recognized the necessity of judicial restraint and the dangers of judicial activism. James Madison wrote in The Federalist Papers that to combine judicial power with executive and legisla- tive authority was "the very definition of tyranny,"judiciary to interpret the Constitution would lead to judicial supremacy. "It is a very dangerous doc- trine to consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions,""It is one which would place us under the despotism of an oligar- chy." Unfortunately, the federal judiciary has strayed far beyond its proper func- tions, in many ways validating Jefferson's warnings about judicial power. In no other democracy in the world do unelected judges decide as many vital political issues as they do in America. We will never return the federal government to its proper role in our society until we return the federal judiciary to its proper role in our government. Supreme Court decisions based on the Constitution cannot be reversed or altered, except by a constitutional amendment. Such decisions are virtually immune from presidential vetoes or congressional legislation. Abraham Lincoln warned of this in his First Inaugural Address when he said: "[T]he candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the government, upon vital questions, affecting the whole people, is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court . . . the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having, to that extent, practically resigned their government into the hands of that eminent tribunal." When the most important social and moral issues are removed from the democratic process, citizens lose the political experience and moral education that come from resolving difficult issues and reaching a social consensus. President Reagan explained how judicial activism is incompatible with popular government: "The Founding Fathers were clear on this issue. For them, the question involved in judicial restraint was not--as it is not--will we have liberal courts or conservative courts? They knew that the courts, like the Constitu- tion itself, must not be liberal or conservative. The question was and is, will we have government by the people?" [Emphasis added.] Judicial Excesses When federal judges exceed their proper interpretive role, the result is not only infidelity to the Constitution, but very often poor public policy. Numerous cases illustrate the consequences of judicial activism and the harm it has caused our society. Activist court decisions have undermined nearly every aspect of public policy. Among the most egregious examples: Allowing racial preferences and quotas. In United Steelworkers of America v. Weber (1979),the statute: "It shall be an unlawful employment practice for any employer . . . to discriminate against any individual because of his race, color, religion, sex, or national origin."Weber differently, racial preferences would not exist in the private sector today. The Weber decision is a classic example of how unelected government regulators and federal judges have diverted our civil-rights laws from a color-blind ideal to a complex and unfair system of racial and ethnic preferences and quotas that perpetuate bias and discrimination. …

Spiritual Capital for the Capital City

Abstract: While President Clinton and House Speaker Newt Gingrich hold out the hope of federal aid for Washington, D.C., some local churches aren't waiting for government to rejuvenate the city's most depressed neighborhoods. The Hope Center, a church-based community development corporation, is seeking to buy and renovate the vacant Buchanan Elementary School in Southeast Washington. It's no mystery why Buchanan was shut down. The surrounding blocks are awash in unemployment, drug-dealing, broken families, and violence. Our goal is to establish a faith-guided community center offering urgently needed social services: crisis-pregnancy counseling, an AIDS hospice, a job-training and placement program, alcohol- and drug-rehabilitation services, and, eventually, a grade school. Our sister church, the Christian Fellowship Church Inner-City Congregation, which now meets in a nearby grade school, would form its spiritual hub. Our plan builds on existing relationships between suburban church members and urban neighborhoods. Since 1992, the largely white Christian Fellowship Church in Ashburn, Virginia, has reached out to mostly poor black families in Potomac Gardens and Arthur Capper, two public-housing projects in Southeast D.C. Volunteers provide regular worship services, a Kick Drugs Karate School, a mentoring program, and food and clothing to dozens of families -- nearly all on welfare. We have seen lives gradually turn around. When Patricia Hill attended our first worship service in the inner city, she was in poor health, on welfare, and addicted to crack cocaine. She soon became pregnant. Pat attended services sporadically. One day, at an open-air rally, she came forward, turned away from her sins, and put her faith in Jesus Christ as her savior. She later said she felt God was telling her she would be dead within a year if she didn't mend her ways. Today, Pat is drug-free and healthy and radiates optimism. She has found part-time work and also assists the elderly members of our congregation. Having ignored a counselor's advice to get an abortion, Pat is the proud mother of a one-year-old boy. She even volunteers in the same crisis-pregnancy center, encouraging other women to keep their babies. "My love for these people stems from the knowledge of where they are," says the Rev. Samuel Sierra, the director of the Hope Center and pastor of the Inner City Congregation. Sierra attributes his own recovery from drug addic- tion to his Christian conversion. It's time to expand our effort in Washington. …

Making Adversity the Mother of Invention

Abstract: In 1994, Ryan Jarvis had a tragic accident on the basketball court at his high school. While scrambling for the ball during a pick-up game, Ryan, 16, got elbowed in the face. The blow severed his optic nerve and blinded him in his right eye. Despite this injury, Ryan just wanted to go back to playing basketball and football. His father, Ed Jarvis, had his own decision to make: How should he respond to his son's accident? The contemporary American culture of victimhood offered him a range of options. He could have sued the high school, the basketball manufacturer, or the National Basketball Association for encouraging Ryan to play a dangerous sport despite the risks. He could have organized a grass-roots lobbying campaign to impose tougher safety standards on high-school sports and facilities. He could have gone on the talk-show circuit to decry athletic bellicosity, soliciting donations to start a charitable foundation to aid the victims of sports injuries. Jarvis did none of these things. In typically American fashion, he saw a business opportunity--and took it. Jarvis discovered that a major reason athletes still suffer so many eye injuries-more than 40,000 in 1995, according to a nonprofit group called Prevent Blindness America--is that the available protective gear is hard to wear and hard to use. Standard visors, he found, scratched easily, tended to. fog up on the court, and distorted the view that players had of their opponents and the ball. Kids, in particular, didn't want to wear them, because they were uncomfortable and interfered with performance. So Jarvis set out to design a better face guard. "It wasn't my intention to enter the optical or sporting-goods business," said Jarvis in an article in Business Week. "I just wanted to provide my son with the right equipment. But I've learned that to have a product, you need a sense of purpose." The protective visors then on the market were nothing more than pieces of plastic made to fit helmets or heads, so Jarvis, a former food-distribution executive from Lynn, Massachusetts, consulted experts in optics and ophthalmology. They told him that the products had no optical design in them at all. He then created a new company, One Xcel, to market a new product. The One Xcel visor that Jarvis designed is both coated to prevent fogging and scratches and curved to reduce distortion. It provides a broader side-to-side vision sweep than competitors' products. It is now the face shield of choice in the National Football League and is popular in the National Hockey League. "It's a superior product," says Jack Jeffers, the team ophthalmologist for the Philadelphia Eagles football team. Former New York Ranger Dave Maloney, who coaches youth ice hockey in Connecticut, predicts success for the improved headgear because in competitive sports "the slightest edge can make a great difference." Now Jarvis is working on special protective goggles for basketball players using the same optical and practical considerations. Pointing the Finger We're not used to seeing stories about personal tragedies, especially those involving children and recreation, end with a story of entrepreneurial success. The more familiar outcome is a lawsuit or a publicity campaign. In 1988, for example, one father virtually single-handedly got the federal government to regulate lawn darts after his seven-year-old daughter was accidentally killed by one. His crusade drew the spotlight of the national news and the talk shows, and directed tremendous public concern toward the Reagan administration's perceived "excesses" in regulatory reform. More recently, two Nevada parents mourning the death of their 13-year-old son brought attention to what the Consumer Product Safety Commission called the "serious problem" of in-line skating injuries. And the mother of a five-year-old girl who died after the string of her coat got caught on a slide at a school playground helped publicize the cause of replacing drawstrings in children's clothing with buttons, zippers, Velcro, and snaps. …

"No Child Is Unadoptable."(private Agencies Find Homes for Hard-to-Place Children)

Abstract: Liberalism, the self-styled defender of children's welfare, harbors a myth that dehumanizes and threatens countless children every day. It is a myth embodied in a bureacratic label: "unadoptable."is the assumption that, because some children are not wanted by their biological parents, they are wanted by no one. This myth fuels the tragedy of abortion. According to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, at least 13 percent of all women choosing abortion do so because they believe their unborn child suffers from some mental or physical dis- ability. So who would want them? This myth undermines an already troubled foster-care system, where thousands of children are officially classified "unadoptable" by their caseworkers. Children acquire this label for many reasons--because of emotional problems, physical handicaps, or the color of their skin. In part because of this tag, 15,000 kids turn 18 each year while still in foster care. While government bureaucrats give up on tough-to-place kids, private agencies are finding them permanent, loving homes. Across the country, however, there are countless men and women disproving the unadoptable label every day. "There is a home for every child who is out there,"of an organization called Adopt a Special Kid (AASK) Midwest. Eaton's organization, which uses the Internet to match foster children with willing families, is one of a growing number of private organizations finding permanent homes for so-called special-needs kids--older children, sibling groups, the severely disabled, the emotionally damaged, or those with life-threatening diseases. They are kids like Michael. He has the impish smile of an 11-year-old who does not like spinach. A profile of him available on the group's Internet Web site says that he was born with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, that he is a fifth-grader with attention-deficit disorder who doesn't read terribly well, and that he lives in foster care and a family "to provide him with the reassurance that he is loved and needed." Michael is followed by other faces and names--Joe, Elliot, Rachel, Sherita--all looking for a permanent home. Sherita, for example, loves to play dress-up and is wearing a party dress in her picture. Her little brother Antwan sports a bow tie. They clutch each other's hand tightly. Both were exposed prenatally to crack cocaine and then neglected after birth; Sherita was sexually abused. [*]Adopting the Net Working with county social-service agencies across the country, AASK Midwest gathers information on foster children for whom the public agency hasn't found a home and enters the data into its database. Michael, Sherita, and the others are just a few of the kids listed on AASK's Web site ([*] http://www.aask.org). Conducting the search nationwide increases the chance of finding a suitable family. AASK recruits families from all across the country to match with wait- ing children: It now has 973 children and 1,032 families in its database. It averages 100 assisted placements a year; since its founding 12 years ago, it has matched more than 1,200 families. The "Telemagic" software system AASK uses to match kids with families gives the group 21st-century tools, but its greatest strength is human, not tech- nological: Twenty-two families in 14 states across the country serve as volunteer recruiters. All the AASK field representatives have adopted special-needs children, and many have adopted more than 10; 95 percent of them have adopted transracially. This personal involvement accounts for the agency's success. Field representa- tives are passionate about adoption, and they know what it takes to adopt a special- needs child successfully. Working in the field with prospective adop- tive families, these volunteers provide both screening before the adoption and support afterwards. Such commitment permeates the organization. That's why AASK succeeds in find- ing homes for children when the public agencies fail, says Eaton. …

We Wuz Robbed! the Subsidized Stadium Scam

Abstract: Spring is upon us, and the thoughts of all right-thinking Americans turn to baseball. The crack of the bat and the sight of neatly mowed grass on a sunny day stir us in much the same way as they did our parents and grandparents, and hopefully will do for our children. Yet a shadow -- the shadow of big government -- looms over the great pastime. While the actual sport of baseball is an excellent metaphor for the free market (illustrating how individuals and teams work together and compete against one another), at the professional level nearly all the teams play in government-owned or government-subsidized ballparks. Boston's Fenway Park and Chicago's Wrigley Field are not only rare gems from the perspective of baseball's traditions, but also from the perspective of sound economics -- both were privately built and are privately owned. In baseball, as is the case with all professional sports today, socialism and corporate welfare have run amok. Taxpayer subsidies for multimillionaire owners and players anger even the most ardent baseball fans, not to mention millions of other taxpayers who care little about the national pastime. The only individuals undeterred by this unsavory arrangement are politicians and team owners. Indeed, state and local officials across the nation are frantically spending billions of dollars on new facilities for baseball, football, basketball, and hockey teams. Team owners pit city against city, and state against state, in the scramble for new sports venues with revenue-generating seat licenses and luxury suites. Seattle Officials here simply ignored the voters' opposition to paying for a new stadium for the Mariners. In September 1995, King County taxpayers voted against a hike in the sales tax to pay for a new ballpark as well as repairs to the Seattle Kingdome, present home of the city's baseball and football franchises. But just weeks later, the Mariners entered the American League playoffs for the first time and triumphed over the New York Yankees. This exciting per- formance stirred state and local officials to reject the vote of the people. In October of that year, the state legislature and the King County Council approved a $320-million plan for a new stadium. The Mariners offered to pitch in $45 million, while state taxpayers were on the hook for $105 million and county taxpayers for $170 million. Then-governor Mike Lowry, and then-county executive (and current governor) Gary Locke -- both Democrats -- led the charge. A year later, however, the estimated price tag jumped to $363.5 million, plus a parking garage costing $20.5 million. One member of the Public Facilities District board, which oversees the project, cavalierly noted that the project budget could be increased because the taxes designated to pay for the ballpark were generating more revenues than expected. Another board member claimed, "This isn't an overrun. This is just part of the design process." The team later grew irritated with project delays, and put the team up for sale. Proving that welfare for baseball was bipartisan, U.S. Senator Slade Gorton, a Republican, stepped in to help. The Mariners will stay in Seattle, having been promised a new ballpark by 1999 and more revenues than originally negotiated. Taxpayers got stuck with an additional bill of $50 million for the costs of extra borrowing, police details, clean-up, and litigation. The estimated price tag for the ballpark now totals $380 million, plus $26 million for the garage. Milwaukee In Wisconsin, not even a prominent conservative leader and leading welfare reformer could resist the siren song of corporate welfare for baseball. Republican governor Tommy Thompson lobbied hard for a boost in the sales tax to pay for a new stadium for the Milwaukee Brewers. Previously, in the spring of 1995, Wisconsin voters overwhelmingly rejected (by 64 percent to 36 per- cent) a sports lottery for a new ballpark. …

Promise Makers: The Founder of Promise Keepers Explains Why He's Calling for a Spiritual Assembly of Men in the Nation's Capital

Abstract: The founder of Promise Keepers explains why he's calling for a spiritual assembly of men in the nation's capital. America is suffering from a severe shortage of integrity, and men are behind some of its worst manifestations. Men are more likely than women to break their marriage vows through adultery, violence, or abandonment. Men are impregnating young women in record numbers and leaving them to deal with the consequences -- a stint on welfare, an education cut short, or a trip to an abortion clinic. Men are also more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol and then engage in a wide range of criminal behavior. Indeed, it is men, overwhelmingly, who commit most of the nation's violent crimes and dominate its prison system: At least 94 percent of all inmates are male. Social problems are moral problems, which ultimately have a spiritual cause. For those of us involved in Christian outreach programs, the connection is inescapable: The failure of large numbers of men to live up to their family and social obligations represents a failure of faith. More to the point, the growing irresponsibility of men points, in large part, to a failure in our Christian churches. Men are much less likely than women to set foot in a church, less likely to say they are absolutely committed to Jesus Christ, less likely to read the Bible during the week or strongly affirm the role of religious faith in their lives. Many -- perhaps most -- men see church mainly as a place for women and children. A similar separation of men from religious life is to be found in non-Christian communities as well. Uninspired by any religious vision for their lives, more and more men are becoming disconnected from any moral vision. All of this is taking a tremendous toll on our culture. The absence of responsible men from the home is now widely regarded as the most important cause of America's social decline. If America is truly in the throes of cultural breakdown, then the shallow faith of so many men, and the kind of behavior that follows from it, has contributed to this breakdown. The Need of the Hour But here is where many feminists and others who scorn traditional virtue have it wrong: If men are a principal cause of family meltdown, crime, and racial strife, then men also are central to the solutions to those problems. What America desperately needs today is men who take responsibility for their actions, who are faithful to their families, who keep their word, even when it's difficult or costly. America is crying out for a generation of "promise keepers." Five years ago, when I was still the head football coach at the University of Colorado, I realized that too many men were getting their priorities out of alignment. I'd seen too many men who called themselves Christians and attended church, but had little idea what it meant to live out a Christian ethic, either on the playing field or in their homes. To be honest, I watched my own family suffer as I poured myself into my career. I rationalized my workaholism, of course, but in reality I was letting go of my most basic responsibilities. Family members and friends finally helped me to see that, in essence, I had been directing my own life without reference to God. Because I failed so miserably, I've been able to see that many men today are doing exactly the same thing I did. I resigned my coaching position in order to help bring together men who were interested in succeeding in the most important areas of their lives: their personal relationships with Almighty God, their wives, and their children. Just over 4,000 men met in 1991 at the Coors Event Center in Boulder, Colorado, for the first conference of our new organization, Promise Keepers. It was not a gathering of angry white males or an exercise in chest-beating or in lifting male self-esteem. This was about men taking stock of their moral and spiritual inventory. We asked men to publicly proclaim their love and allegiance to Jesus Christ and their commitment to their families. …