Math challenge. From a recent policy paper of the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless on the gross inadequacy of substance abuse treatment facilities: “Over the last 11 years 77% of federal drug control funding has been spent for law enforcement, leaving only 33% for treatment, prevention and research.”
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“Standard descriptions of Latino political identity go something like this,” writes Peter Beinart in the New Republic (August 11 & 18). “Latinos are an impoverished community of color who, like African Americans, are heavily invested in a large public sector, and share with them a strong mistrust of the police.” But in Chicago “black unemployment is close to double Latino unemployment. Blacks are three times more likely to be employed by the government. Twenty-three percent of Latino families with children are headed by single mothers, compared to 60 percent of black families. The African American rate of welfare dependency is two and a half times the Latino rate. Latinos not only broke with African Americans over Mayor Richard Daley, voting him into office in 1989 with 80 percent of their votes, compared to 5 percent for blacks, but they have also backed moderate Republican Governor Jim Edgar at more than double the rate of blacks.”
“In the worst of inner-city schools, the social infrastructure has been so damaged by mutual suspicion, low expectations, factionalization of staff, and general pessimism as to make most school reform efforts irrelevant,” writes sociologist Charles Payne in a new working paper published by Northwestern University (“Institute for Policy Research News,” Summer). After analyzing six years of data on 16 Chicago elementary schools, he found that in some schools teachers weren’t comfortable with the idea of sharing what they did in the classroom with other teachers and that actually visiting someone else’s classroom was commonly referred to as “spying.” Thus “the first two or three years of school reform typically involve clearing away social impediments to change rather than actually implementing any specific program. It may take some schools that long to create a social infrastructure that will give them a chance to start actual implementation.”
