http://www.dmiblog.com/ All comments, ideas and thoughts on DMI Blog are property of their authors. Reasonable excerpts are permitted on other sites and blogs; otherwise reproduction without the author's permission is strictly prohibited. View our comment policy here. en Copyright 2010 Tue, 09 Mar 2010 15:26:56 -0500 http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/?v=3.2 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Karin Dryhurst New York Mag has already shown itself to be a magazine that cares about the big issues--health care, Mike Bloomberg, and urban education--along with all things glitzy and foodie. But this week a city and regional magazine association named finalists for its 2010 awards and seemed pretty psyched about the coverage of unemployment and the Mexican border. With urban reporters at the daily metros covering oh about 10 beats, it's easy to see where reporters at magazines like Texas Monthly and Los Angeles Magazine can step in even though their outlets often talk restaurants, shopping, and travel. The same has been said about community newspapers that occupy a niche left behind by metro reporters covering an entire county rather than one city. In this way, the breakdown of institutional journalism has resulted in a new diversity of voices in print media just as on the Internet. But just as media critics complain about the echo chambers of the Internet, niche audiences in local print media may mean echo chambers in urban communities. The magazine association, which represents 97 city and regional magazines, commissioned a study, no doubt to entice luxury advertisers, that found subscribers had a median income of more than $145,000 and 71 percent had a college degree. Metro dailies often fail to represent the diversity of the community, but niche media has failed to expose that diversity to different readers. And though niche media appears to be necessary to keep local coverage alive, but the worst echo chambers will be the ones separated by purchasing power. http://www.dmiblog.com/archives/2010/03/urban_echo_chambers.html http://www.dmiblog.com/archives/2010/03/urban_echo_chambers.html Media Tue, 09 Mar 2010 15:26:56 -0500 Cristina Jimenez According to Joe Strupp from Media Matters, there is significant evidence that Newsday, the largest daily newspaper on Long Island, reassigned two reporters because of complaints from Steve Levy, Suffolk's County Executive. Levy is widely known for his anti-immigrant views. Strupp cites Newsday's reassignment of immigration reporter Bart Jones to the religion beat, implying that pressure from Levy was the reason for the change. Levy has publicly admitted that he submitted complaints about Jones. Levy's efforts to control the press also "extend to others who are quoted or not quoted." Patrick Young, Long Island Wins blogger told Media Matters: We have heard he [Levy] tries to keep immigrant rights advocates from being quoted,...As soon as there is some negative story about him, he calls to try to set the record straight. Based on Levy's record, this is not a surprise. Read more of this story here http://www.dmiblog.com/archives/2010/03/is_newsdays_immigration_covera.html http://www.dmiblog.com/archives/2010/03/is_newsdays_immigration_covera.html Immigration Tue, 09 Mar 2010 14:43:29 -0500 Harry Moroz Below, Karin writes about the impact that cuts in state aid to city and local governments are having on budget deficits. The National League of Cities demonstrated this point in a recent report revealing that such cuts could total between $21 billion and $30 billion in fiscal years 2010-2012. These cuts are not only big, but could have lasting consequences for city budgets. In recent years, state governments have become the primary benefactors of city governments, making up for the federal government's diminishing support. As Brookings Bruce Wallin points out, federal aid decreased from 17.5 percent of city general revenue in 1977 to 5.4 percent in 2000. But he also points out that: Equally noteworthy was the increase in state aid over this time period, which in the aggregate substituted for the decline in federal aid, allowing the overall level of city intergovernmental aid to return in 2000 to 1977 levels in real dollars per capita. Gaping state budget deficits will lead more and more states to cut aid to city and local governments, placing more of the burden of revenue raising on local governments, which in many places are already limited in how they can do so. This creates an opportunity for the federal government to reestablish its financial relationship with city governments, one that could be based as much on revenue sharing as on a recognition of the important role cities play as economic engines. However, if the federal government does not step in to assist urban areas, fiscal austerity measures taken by cities in times of economic stress will persist in times of economic recovery. Finally, though direct aid for cities would be preferable, the Obama administration's extension of Medicaid assistance for states - which the Senate is considering this week - will assist cities by easing the fiscal pressure on state governments. Presumably, the lower the deficit at the state level, the less aid to cities state governments will cut. http://www.dmiblog.com/archives/2010/03/why_cuts_in_state_aid_to_citie.html http://www.dmiblog.com/archives/2010/03/why_cuts_in_state_aid_to_citie.html Cities Mon, 08 Mar 2010 17:15:52 -0500 Karin Dryhurst Philadelphia is not alone. The Philadelphia Inquirer painted a picture of cities sharing the pain last week--and pointed out that unlike New York, L.A., Phoenix and San Diego, Philly hasn't proposed handing pink slips to city workers. Mark Muro from Brookings says that Mayor Nutter will need to continue to come up with creative solutions for Philadelphia and that leaders might need to consider current service cuts the "new norm." But the Inquirer fails to mention that these crises aren't just in the hands of mayors and that some of them are passed on down from the state government. Take San Francisco, which had funding cuts handed to them from the Governator and now has announced 15,000 layoffs at the city level. The Inquirer names Chicago as one city that has avoided layoffs, but Gov. Quinn has threatened to slash funding for cities, claiming they need to "share the pain," by giving up $300 million in income taxes. http://www.dmiblog.com/archives/2010/03/do_cities_need_a_support_group.html http://www.dmiblog.com/archives/2010/03/do_cities_need_a_support_group.html Cities Mon, 08 Mar 2010 13:36:38 -0500 Dan Morris Elizabeth Green's New York Times Magazine cover story on improving teaching could be read as a slap in the face to education reformers who pray at the conjoined altars of financial incentives and data. The title of her piece, "Building a Better Teacher," refers to the shift from merit pay schemes and quantitative performance metrics that have produced limited results toward a less flashy approach capable of sustained progress: understanding and replicating what the best teachers in different schools already do well. She breathes new life and meaning into the mechanics of teaching--the subtle techniques, decisions, and "bite-size moves," as she calls them, that keep students engaged and focused. She examines in great detail the fact that "getting students to pay attention is not only crucial but also a skill as specialized, intricate and learnable as playing guitar." She reveals it's a skill the vast majority of teachers can acquire, even master. One academic expert tells her: "[W]e could ensure that the average classroom tomorrow was seeing the types of gains that the top quarter of our classrooms see today." http://www.dmiblog.com/archives/2010/03/the_difficult_misunderstood_wo.html http://www.dmiblog.com/archives/2010/03/the_difficult_misunderstood_wo.html Mon, 08 Mar 2010 12:34:03 -0500 Amy Traub "Laid-off professionals line up for part-time census jobs," reports the Washington Post. Out-of-work lawyers, business consultants and other professionals are lining up for positions to knock on doors and collect census data. It's not a surprising headline at a time of persistently high unemployment, but it should be a provocative one. Consider what's going on here: unemployed people get a much-needed paycheck; taxpayers pay for it, and benefit as a constitutionally-mandated public need is met. The American population will get counted, and unemployment will decrease as a result. As a public jobs program, it's far from ideal: the census jobs are temporary, they don't fully utilize the skills of many job seekers, and it's limited by nature - not many public functions, like the census, are mandated by the constitution. But its efficiency and effectiveness should make us think again about the opportunities to put people to work performing services the public needs. No massive federal bureaucracy would be necessary: provide funds to the nation's cities, where local officials are already steeped in the most immediate needs of their communities, and municipal governments will put local residents to work. http://www.dmiblog.com/archives/2010/03/the_census_in_a_time_of_unempl.html http://www.dmiblog.com/archives/2010/03/the_census_in_a_time_of_unempl.html Employment Mon, 08 Mar 2010 11:39:51 -0500 Dan Morris A big story in education right now is the Race to the Top, something Chadwick Matlin described as a grand experiment in behavioral economics: a big incentive (or cudgel, really) of millions in federal dollars to force states to enact the Obama administration's education reform agenda, which is driven almost entirely by market principles and values: entrepreneurship, innovation, deregulation, and the most punitive form of accountability. This is why conservatives like Michael Gerson, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush and now a Washington Post columnist, love this agenda. Gerson gives it an A+. The federal government is expanding the bounds of privatization at the local and state level, and school leaders must form coalitions of the willing, or else. Well, the first group of finalists for the Race to the Top has been announced. But as Matlin pointed out months ago, the Race to the Top is really a Slide to the Bottom. There's only $4 billion overall that will be awarded--a relatively small amount, when you remember that virtually all states are expected to compete and the winners are supposed to use the money to do very costly things like lengthen school days, increase standardized testing, and undertake more rigorous, data-driven performance assessments of teachers and school leaders (nevermind that data is hardly a panacea.) http://www.dmiblog.com/archives/2010/03/a_race_to_where.html http://www.dmiblog.com/archives/2010/03/a_race_to_where.html Education Fri, 05 Mar 2010 18:09:53 -0500 afton branche On Monday, President Obama met with members of his Domestic Policy Council to discuss how to move forward with a comprehensive reform of our federal immigration system. The LA Times reports that the White House may recruit Senators Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) to craft a "blueprint" that could be used for legislation. Ultimately, Obama will leave it up to Congress to overhaul our immigration laws. http://www.dmiblog.com/archives/2010/03/immigration_reform_in_2010_a_l.html http://www.dmiblog.com/archives/2010/03/immigration_reform_in_2010_a_l.html Immigration Fri, 05 Mar 2010 17:42:30 -0500 Harry Moroz Policy wonks on both sides of the aisle - from Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research to Kevin Hassett of the American Enterprise Institute - have proposed Germany's work-share program as an effective, cheap way to reduce unemployment in the United States. Work-share essentially induces private firms to reduce employee hours, rather than fire workers. The federal government and the firm pay a worker a portion of the wages lost due to the reduction in hours worked. The firm benefits because it is able to reduce wage costs without pushing the wage cut onto the worker and because it is able to retain experienced workers. Firing is, after all, a blunt response to a drop in demand (it's difficult to fire the irrelevant part of a worker and keep the relevant part). Resistance to the measure probably results from private firms who see the firm contribution to work-share as a new "tax" despite the benefits they would gain from the program. Although retaining experienced workers is cheaper than hiring and training new ones, these firms probably hope to make efficiency improvements that make rehiring unnecessary or hope to wait out the downturn until hiring and training do not seem so costly. For the currently unemployed, though, this status quo is unacceptable. Thus, a federal work-share program is probably unlikely because of resistance in the private sector. However, in a time of large state and local budget deficits, using a work-share program to funnel aid to states and cities would be more politically feasible than work-share in the private sector while avoiding accusations of federal "welfare" to sustain state and local spending. Aid to state and local governments would become a jobs program. Indeed, maintaining quality public services - which is impossible without sufficient staff - is particularly important now because demand for such services increases during an economic downturn, unlike aggregate demand in the private sector. http://www.dmiblog.com/archives/2010/03/sharing_is_caring.html http://www.dmiblog.com/archives/2010/03/sharing_is_caring.html Stimulus Fri, 05 Mar 2010 15:26:30 -0500 John Petro Over at New Geography, Aaron Renn argues for the "10% solution," in which cities set the goal of capturing ten percent of a metropolitan region's population growth. Beginning with the Census Bureau's estimate that the U.S. will gain 100 million peole by 2050, Renn writes that it would be physically impossible to direct a large percentage of that growth into our city cores. Even if all the old housing [in central cities] was rebuilt, declines in household sizes, particularly in urban areas, has reduced the effective carrying capacity of the old urban fabric even at historic densities... Most of the existing highly urbanized cities are already largely full of buildings. Even where land is available, zoning restricts what can be built there, and increasing densities is politically difficult. So, because capturing a greater percentage of a region's population growth would be difficult, cities should set the modest goal of attracting ten percent of growth. But when considering where the country's next 100 million people will live, we need to look more closely at the suburbs that ring our urban cores. We need to ensure that instead of metropolitan regions continuing to grow outwards, that we begin to develop our suburbs so that they may absorb population growth in a more sustainable manner. This means that many inner-ring suburbs will begin to look a lot more urban. Cities and metropolitan regions across the country are already beginning to undergo these types of transformations. Cities like Charlotte, North Carolina have built rapid transit lines and are developing moderate-density apartment buildings along these rail corridors. The same thing is happening in San Diego, Seattle, Salt Lake City, Denver, and Houston. The country's suburbs will continue to absorb the majority of the country's growth. The only difference is that those suburbs will begin to grow along rail lines rather than cul-de-sacs. http://www.dmiblog.com/archives/2010/03/suburbs_of_the_future_will_loo.html http://www.dmiblog.com/archives/2010/03/suburbs_of_the_future_will_loo.html Urban Affairs Thu, 04 Mar 2010 17:31:06 -0500 Dan Morris In a Washington Monthly review of Diane Ravitch's much ballyhooed book on the failures of education reform, Richard Kahlenberg couldn't help but quote this passage: "At the very time that the financial markets were collapsing, and as deregulation of the financial markets got a bad name, many of the leading voices of American education assured the public that the way to educational rejuvenation was through deregulation." I fell out of my chair, too. This is startling coming from Ravitch, the conservative education historian and wonk who served as assistant education secretary under George H. W. Bush. Of course, Ravitch is not yet to charter schools what Matt Taibbi is to Wall Street. But still, notice what she's saying: even though deregulation was supposedly discredited after the financial markets imploded, that failure did not prevent leaders from touting the very same ideology as the way to ensure success in other institutions--namely schools. This raises questions about how alive and well and kicking deregulation is. News reported last year in the Wall Street Journal all of a sudden sounds more ominous: "In Minnesota, concerns about improper financial ties between charter schools and their governing boards have led the state legislature to consider tougher restrictions. Pennsylvania charter schools recently adopted a tighter ethics code amid an investigation into alleged nepotism and financial improprieties involving several Philadelphia charters. In Ohio, where about two-thirds of charter high schools fail to graduate at least half of their seniors, the state auditor says the financial records of 17 charter schools are so bad as to be "unauditable." Unauditable! http://www.dmiblog.com/archives/2010/03/the_twisted_logic_of_deregulat.html http://www.dmiblog.com/archives/2010/03/the_twisted_logic_of_deregulat.html Education Thu, 04 Mar 2010 16:01:15 -0500 afton branche http://www.dmiblog.com/archives/2010/03/cometh_to_the_taxman.html http://www.dmiblog.com/archives/2010/03/cometh_to_the_taxman.html Immigration Thu, 04 Mar 2010 15:39:27 -0500 Amy Traub Want to pay your employees less than it takes to support a family, force Medicaid and hospital emergency rooms to pay for their health care, and break a few labor laws to push costs down further? You may be able to get away with it - but you can damn well do it without relying on taxpayer dollars to stay in business. That's the message of more than a hundred living wage laws passed by American cities and counties over the past fifteen years. These local ordinances have raised wages, improved benefits, and increased workplace productivity without harming employment or significantly impacting municipal budgets. Now it looks like their powerful example is resonating all the way to the White House, with reports that the Obama Administration is developing a federal procurement policy that would reward companies that provide solid pay and benefits while shunning firms that repeatedly violate workplace and environmental laws. The proposed federal policy will likely turn out to have weaker provisions than many municipal living wage laws - while cities often require companies with contracts above a certain level to pay living wages, the federal government would merely give living wage employers an advantage in bidding. But a less stringent policy could be more than outweighed by the potential scope: while most municipal living wage laws affect only a few hundred workers, an estimated 22 million employees work for federal contractors. As a result, a well-crafted federal contracting policy has the potential to boost many more low-income workers into the middle class. Opponents of a federal living wage policy have been quick to attack the proposal, but they're relying on the same stale arguments that have already been discredited by research on the impact of dozens of city policies. http://www.dmiblog.com/archives/2010/03/no_more_contracts_with_the_dev_1.html http://www.dmiblog.com/archives/2010/03/no_more_contracts_with_the_dev_1.html Labor Thu, 04 Mar 2010 08:27:42 -0500 Maureen Lane In her State of the City address, New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn highlighted the role of education in ensuring the city's long-term economic growth: "Creating more jobs isn't enough. We have to make sure that New Yorkers have the skills and education they need to get those jobs. We still have 1.6 million New Yorkers who are out of school and don't have a high school diploma - and they're more than twice likely to be unemployed as someone with a college degree." Workforce development, along with education for New Yorkers from childhood to adulthood, will keep New York competitive in the marketplace. The organization I work with, Welfare Rights Initiative (WRI), is a founding member of The Empire State Economic Security Campaign (ES2), a campaign that in part works toward better access to education. ES2 points out in its current policy position that in order to keep up with economic potential and harvest entrepreneurial energy we need to invest in a well trained and educated population. A recent study found that New York ranks 43rd in the nation in the number of adults with high school who attained college. Less than 4% of NYS adults with high school diplomas are in college. In the ten years between 1995 and 2005 enrollment dropped by 20%. Quinn's call to make sure New Yorkers have skills and education is exactly the right response. It shows leadership in envisioning policy for the future. The city could start with a recent suggestion from the New York Times to open G.E.D. programs to families receiving welfare. The city also routinely fails to count education, training, work study, and internships as meeting welfare requirements, something the Speaker could work to remedy. In addition, city, state and federal legislators must work together to expand access to financial aid. Coordination among leaders and constituents will allow more poor families move out of dire poverty through education and employment. http://www.dmiblog.com/archives/2010/03/working_hand_in_hand_creating.html http://www.dmiblog.com/archives/2010/03/working_hand_in_hand_creating.html Education Wed, 03 Mar 2010 15:01:50 -0500 Harry Moroz The generally positive reviews of Joel Kotkin's latest book have not improved the urban futurist's mood any. As has become his tendency in "analyzing" the missteps of the Obama administration, Kotkin's latest piece for Forbes (reprinted on his disorienting New Geography blog) warns that the iron grip of totalitarianism, the freedom-crushing mechanisms of central planning, and resurrected bureaucrats of the Soviet Union have seized control of the White House. The pod people are here and we don't even know it. Kotkin paints a grim picture: Obama's desire to centralize power in the federal government has made the United States into a European-style super-state underpinned by a belief in French dirigisme and controlled by apparats and mandarins. The American people, in contrast, prefer problems to be solved at the state and local level and have maintained an entrepreneurial spirit "under the radar of big business and government." Beyond his vivid comparison of the Obama administration to the worst of the autocratic worst - Europeans, Chinese, French, Chicagoans - Kotkin forgets to provide evidence that the administration is actually obsessed with centralizing authority. In fact, in important instances the Obama administration seems more interested in devolving authority to state and local governments than in concentrating power in the White House. http://www.dmiblog.com/archives/2010/03/mandarins_and_apparats.html http://www.dmiblog.com/archives/2010/03/mandarins_and_apparats.html Wed, 03 Mar 2010 13:25:23 -0500