Stalking the Tax Man: The Pervasive Influence of the Property Tax Revolt

"Assessment Excess"

To the Editor,
In January of this year my retirement annuity was increased 1.3 percent due to the increase in the cost of living. In April of this year the city of Norfolk reassessed my property, raising it 6.87 percent. This is more than five times the cost of living percentage and will unfairly and excessively increase my property taxes.

I understand some city officials in the area may consider the hike in tax revenues by this means as tax "windfalls" or "bonanzas." We all know better. Every penny comes from someone who must live within means not derived from windfall gains.

According to figures in a recent Virginian-Pilot article, Norfolk can trim its tax rate to prevent windfalls and still receive the revenue needed for the present tax year ("Property taxes: vital seldom understood." March 29) A rate of $1.19 per $100 assessed valuation would suffice in Norfolk vs. the $1.25 now in effect. Portsmouth's rate of $1.30 per $100 could have been reduced to $1.21, according to the figures.

I hope elected officials are concerned and competent enough to reduce rates and assessments to their proper levels before concerned citizens activate a larger, angrier Norfolk Tea Party for fair taxation.

J.A. Johnson

Norfolk, VA

Virginian Pilot Ledger, May 12, 1987

Over the past eighteen months or so, the constant baying and mobilization of the Tea Party Movement has captured the attention of the American public. Conservatives, liberals, and centrists must at the very least acknowledge the social movement’s presence in the wider public sphere. However, though most observers treat the Tea Party as a modern 21st century phenomenon, a little digging reveals that the Tea Party moniker has been used by numerous groups in numerous decades to pursue various goals.

J.A. Johnson’s letter in May of 1987 illustrates the longer historical trajectory that the Tea Party label embodies in the post 1970 era. In his letter to Virginia Pilot Ledger, Johnson invoked the name of the local Norfolk Tea Party, a title that today often drives fear into the hearts of moderate conservatives and terror in the minds of liberals.

According to an October 1981 Virginia Pilot article, the local Norfolk Tea Party had formed in 1978 as a response to property taxes. Evolving from a “coalition of civic league representatives” angry over the municipality’s real estate tax, the Norfolk Tea Party gathered over 21,000 signatures protesting the city’s property tax hike. (It had been set at $1.62 per $1000 valuation, the Tea Party wanted it lowered to $1.15 per $1000.)  Though the city initially rejected the petition, the party responded by collecting over 17,000 more signatures in an attempt to force a special election so that voters could decide the issue. Though the circuit court thwarted their effort, that newspaper noted “it is generally acknowledged that the group was largely responsible for the council’s lowering the tax rate to $1.30” (Virginia Pilot Ledger, October 12, 1981).  

From 1978 through 1981, the party continued its activities in local electoral politics. The originally non-partisan Tea Party turned partisan. It backed several local candidates for city council, the House of Delegates, and the then-mayor Vincent J. Thomas. The 1981 incarnation hoped to boost the electoral hopes of one George S. Hughes. Hughes, a former Norfolk city councilman, who received the endorsement of the Norfolk branch in his attempt to secure the city treasurer position. If Hughes “reluctantly” admitted that he had sought their endorsement, he also acknowledged he knew little of the party’s intent.  “I don’t know their plans," he said.  "If they feel that (endorsement) is the thing to do, I’m sure they’ll do it.” While the paper described the local Tea Party as conservative, the group seemed willing to support Democrats, like Howard Copeland, who the Virginia Pilot identified as a “a former Tea Party lawyer, [who won] in a 1979 primary battle that enabled him to secure membership in the Virginia House of Delegates.” Still, though today’s Tea Partiers seem exclusively associated with the Republican party, Copeland illustrates the greater ideological malleability of the Norfolk Tea Party.

Naturally, the next question that arises revolves around this early Tea Party incarnation and the tax revolt of the 1970s.  The 1978 Norfolk tax revolt, as represented by Tea Party efforts, emerged as part of a larger process. Robert Self notes as much when he points to the pervasive influence of California’s Prop 13 property tax referendum: “Immediately identified not as a tax revolt but the Tax Revolt, Proposition 13 … along with the anti-statist (and antipolitician) political groundswell that underwrote it, was quickly exported around the nation in a wave of imitative ballot measures and state legislation from Massachusetts to Oregon” (Self, Prelude to the Tax Revolt: The Politics of the “Tax Dollar” in Postwar California”).  Clearly, the Norfolk Tea Party petition serves as one example of the very process Self documents. For Self, the leaders of the 1978 Tax Revolt were motivated by the failure of the “grand compromise” suburbia had established with the federal government. The conflict between business elite support for the perpetual “growth machine” and residents’ desire to focus on quality of life and minimized costs had been dodged through the combination of “federal subsidy and local tax policy” (Self, 147).  However, by the 1960s and 1970s, this compromise no longer sufficed. Homeowners rejected the explanations of state and municipal politicians. As Self summarized, “the tax revolt was thus one manifestation of a return in Suburban California to a classic growth machine politics that postwar liberalism had temporarily displaced” (147).

Self’s insights remain salient, but UCSD Sociology Professor Isaac Martin has also waded into the debate with his 2008 work, The Permanent Tax Revolt: How Property Tax Transformed American Politics. Like Self, Martin sees the property tax revolt as a transformative process. While Martin notes that by the 1970s the tax revolt had shifted right, in its initial form it featured political views from the left and the right. Conservatives and liberals had begun to question taxes in 1950s and 1960s, but each had different reasons for their skepticism. Moreover, the UCSD professor builds on aspects of Self’s argument that Self notes but fails to pursue.

For Martin, the tax revolts of the 1960s and 1970s reshaped American politics. The idea of “tax limitations” became embedded in political discourse, placing tax cuts “permanently on the political agenda.” (13) The apparent success of property tax limitations convinced politicians like Ronald Reagan that tax cuts provided a useful electoral strategy. Republican leaders, lobbyists, and the burgeoning rank and file embraced the tax cut approach, forcing moderates and the party as a whole to “redefine the GOP as the party of tax cuts” (14).

Fundamentally, the early “tax rebels,” as Martin labels them, sought not to prevent the state from collecting taxes but rather to reinstate a tax privilege that had been removed in the early 1960s under the auspices of good government. Martin points out that what early tax rebels really wanted was the restoration of “fractional assessment.” Describing fractional assessment as an example of an informal tax privilege imposed and maintained through custom, Martin notes that even though many states had no provisions for its implementation, nearly all employed it. Thus, fractional assessment came to function as a “kind of hidden social policy” (7).  How significant was this social policy? According to Martin, studies illustrate that the electorate and their representatives view “tax subsidies for homeowners as substitute for direct social programs like Social Security (8).  By the 1960s, this meant fractional assessment provided more benefits than all other social policies save Medicare and Social Security. Moreover, as the government provided subsidies to suburban development through highway appropriations and the like, the values of homes rose, thus, theoretically raising property values and assessments. The standardization of assessments through modernization removed this tax privilege from numerous groups, but especially politically valuable ones.

How did fractional assessment work? Fundamentally, fractional assessment operated as a clear political process. Though divided between elected and appointed officials, assessors were hardly property experts. “They typically lacked training in appraisal methods, and even where they were capable of appraising property accurately, the political imperatives to avoid blame for tax increases trumped the constitutional imperative to assess property at its full market value,” notes Martin (27).  Predictably, assessors' “assessment ratio[s] varied widely from place to place” so that the system lacked uniformity. Additionally, fractional assessment spread its benefits asymmetrically and inequitably. Poorer homeowners and businesses endured higher rates of fractional assessment; as Martin suggests, “the system was unfair to any taxpayer who was not lucky or savvy enough to get a good assessment” (28).  As one can imagine, this system failed to provide the necessary revenue to growing municipalities. Not only did assessors purposely keep the “measured tax base small,” they under-assessed properties. Reflecting the model of Charles Tiebout, local municipal leaders competed with one another to draw new residents to their communities. Having lower assessments provided one means to attract new homeowners. As housing values rose, in part due to government expenditures, so too did housing prices. By the 1960s and 1970s, the tax privilege that fractional assessment provided had grown, not shrunk.

Efforts to reform or modernize the property tax system emerged in eras prior to the 1960s. Arguing that the nation missed a prime opportunity to reform the system during WWII, Martin traces the emergence of a reform movement to modernize this tax base in the post war period. Modernization entailed a “centralization, professionalization, and standardization of tax administration” (26).  Basically, this meant county assessors would now have to take a formalized test to illustrate competence and were now required to impose a “common preference standard. County assessors would henceforth appraise all taxable property uniformly at its market value and assess all property for tax purposes at 25 percent of that value with no exceptions” (26).  Early postwar attempts to reform the system in California failed. First, the modernization movement featured a wide array of city officials both supporting and opposing modernization. Officials who dispensed tax privileges as political benefits viewed modernization as a threat. In contrast, those who lacked the ability to level fractional assessments wanted to curb their influence since reforms would bring more revenue their way. Second, state officials feared raising taxes while modernization foes used assessments as a political resource.

The demographics of the “tax rebels” might serve as a source of surprise. Though historians and others frequently conflate the 1970s tax revolt with suburban populations, Martin illustrates that in its initial stages, the tax revolt movement consisted of rural, metropolitan and urban supporters. Even in the 1960s, the movement’s support crossed ideological boundaries. Politically, leftists like George Wiley, executive director of the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) embraced the property tax’s abolition as tightly as conservatives like Howard Jarvis. However, Martin explains that though homeowners on the left and right opposed property tax because each deemed it a threat, the meaning of the threat differed. “From the right some complained that it was a tax on property, and therefore punished those who worked hard and saved money," Martin says. Meanwhile the left "complained that [the tax] was regressive and that poor communities had to charge high tax rates to pay for the same public services that wealthy communities could get more cheaply” (75).

While tax revolts proliferated locally in the 1960s, they failed to coalesce into a social movement until modernization had been imposed. Like numerous other recent scholars, Martin views the 1970s as decisive in regard to the tax revolt’s emergence as national movement.  The Permanent Tax Revolt pinpoints three reasons for this: 1) the common target of modernization enabled the formation of coalitions across county boundaries (removing assessors from the equation led many to realize the state was the target of their collective ire); 2) modernization standardized assessments so that protesters now “confronted … the same threat at the same time” (58); 3) under modernization assessments now “meant more than a one time cut in your informal benefits.”  New regulations required assessors to constantly maintain current values. This meant taxes rose with housing markets. “Homeowners, in short, saw that their tax privileges might be permanently reduced or altogether revoked," Martin says.  "Homeowners mobilized in proportion to the threat they faced” (58).  Likewise, the early 1970s represented property tax opponents' greatest opportunity to do away with the tax permanently. The movement found allies among elites. Many elites believed the property tax “to be in crisis,” and facing upcoming elections, the focus on property taxes provided an easy political strategy. For example, Nixon’s 1972 re-election campaign depended on reaching suburban voters. In the face of rising housing values, few issues captured the passions of suburban homeowners more than property taxes. Still, though the 1970s represent a burgeoning movement about to go national, it did not reach its apex until 1978.

So if the abolition of the property tax enjoyed popular and elite support, why does the property tax persist? Martin states simply, “Federalism foiled the American tax rebels” (86). How so? One of the strengths of Martin’s work is the use of comparison. From introduction to conclusion, Martin harnesses examples from Europe and Britain (and of course numerous comparative examples from within the US). This use of comparison helps refute ideas about American exceptionalism. In most cases where modernization impinges on a tax privilege, revolt has followed. These examples illuminate many of the points he makes regarding American property tax controversies. Here, Martin notes the success of Scotland’s unitary government in abolishing property taxes. However, in America, the flexibility of federalism meant Nixon could not impose a property tax ban. Property taxes were the responsibility of the state. Thus, states acted on their responsibilities by enacting numerous tax relief reforms. Martin notes that three reforms dominated this process: circuit breaker laws (favored by the left), classification laws (favored by the right), and tax limitation laws (favored by the center). In sum, these reforms acted as new “tax privileges,” as “the 1970s saw a burst of innovative policy making to provide homeowners with security from rising taxes and rising prices” (95).  The Scottish government lacked the flexibility to enact such reforms.

Martin’s conclusions challenge recent studies on federalism and fiscal policy that argue federalism impedes innovation “by multiplying veto points.” In this way, Martin acknowledges the contributions of these studies, but encourages scholars and policymakers to consider federalism’s “second face.”  Federalism “also appears as a structure of access points that encourage policy proposals from political outsiders … [it] blocked [Nixon’s] plan to abolish the property tax – but it encouraged the proliferation of other property tax relief policies” (96).  In part, this also explains why England did not embrace property tax cut. As a result of federalism’s flexibility, states were able to put reforms into practice such that many tax innovations had been operating under the watchful eye of the public. When Ronald Reagan, influenced by Prop 13’s electoral success, began advocating for property tax cuts, he appealed to state policies then in existence. When Margaret Thatcher attempted a similar feat, she failed. Unlike Reagan, Thatcher had pinned her hopes on an untested and relatively unknown new policy that Martin describes as “catastrophically unpopular” (144).  Thus, American conservatives now view tax cuts as the veritable Holy Grail, while Britain’s Tories see only electoral disaster.

Undoubtedly, the acknowledged epicenter (or the example most often employed) of the property tax revolt remains California. Prop 13 plays a central role in Robert Self’s metropolitan history of postwar Oakland, American Babylon, and likewise, Martin pays homage to the Golden State’s devotion to tax limitation, positioning Prop 13 as a catalyst for other movements in Michigan, Massachusetts and New York. In Massachusetts, Prop 13 “inspired conservative groups to take interest in the property tax issue,” resulting in the coming together of three separate camps of Massachusetts conservatism, who collectively helped push through Proposition 2 ½ in the state legislature.  (Prop 2 ½ “established a 4 percent limit on the annual growth of local taxes, but exempted all school districts and any local governments that voted to override the cap” [115].)  In Michigan, moderates saw Prop 13 as the proverbial “writing on the wall.” Sitting Governor William G. Milliken, a moderate Republican opposed to property tax cuts, defeated a 1976 attempt to impose tax limitation, but in the wake of California’s decision did not think a second victory appeared imminent. Miliken agreed to a less severe 1978 tax limitation out of fear of more drastic legislation. Finally, New York’s political leadership settled on a hybrid combination of tax limitations and classification. For liberals in the Empire State, Prop 13 demonstrated the power of public support. Many liberals justified their support of tax limitation on the argument that tax limitations would help the middle class but also significant numbers of low income homeowners.

Why did Prop 13 reverberate so widely? Martin points to three reasons. First, the symbolic power of Prop 13 sparked a belief, among proponents of property tax limitations, that opposition to property taxes had the support of the broad public.  Second, California’s sheer size suggested that the nation’s largest state and future electoral kingmaker represented broader opinion. After all, Martin notes, a 1972 Washington state constitutional amendment that tightened the state’s “existing, statutory property tax limit” garnered very little attention six years earlier. Finally, because California liberalism was seen as the dominant political culture in the state, the victory of an economically conservative fiscal policy like Prop 13 drew greater media attention than otherwise might have been the case, thus, magnifying its importance. Moreover, politicians and protesters around the nation took note that property tax limitation appeared to be a “viable solution to the property tax crisis” (111).

The right’s appropriation of property tax cuts emerged in the wave of legislative and electoral victories the revolt inspired. Conservatives used property tax limits as a central part of a larger package of conservative ideas. In many ways, property tax limits helped conservatives paper over differences while also energizing their base. Supply side economics encouraged a larger dedication to tax cutting. Ronald Reagan and his heirs argued that by cutting taxes, more money flows into the economy thus expanding the tax base and “thereby actually [increasing] federal revenues” (130).  As Martin argues, tax cuts as political tradition is a fairly new development. Tax cuts came to dominate political discourse in direct relation to the property tax revolt. "Tax limitation policies, watered by the Reagan Revolution, and flowering in the heart of the Republican party,” incubated a burgeoning new language of politics, the lexicon of tax cuts (145).

Over the 33 years since its approval, the discourse that has grown around Prop 13 often obscures its larger effects. First, the doomsday scenario that many state officials, conservatives and liberals alike, feared never came to fruition. The budget shortfalls failed to impact local municipalities as severely in Prop 13’s early years, because budget surpluses were used to patch up fiscal holes. As the Economist explains in a recent survey on California, “the state had a budget surplus and decided to bail out local governments by passing to them roughly the amounts they had lost in property tax revenues” (Economist, “Prop 13: War by Initiative”, April 23, 2011).  Moreover, this paradoxically resulted in a “permanent financing mechanism” that meant all future property tax revenues had to flow through Sacramento. In this way, “cities, counties and school districts thus lost their funding independence. Instead of local governments setting their own taxes they became tentacles of the state octopus.” Not exactly what a freshly scrubbed Reaganite conservative dreamt.

If Martin focuses on how California paced the nation, the Economist notes the pervasive influence of Prop 13 on the state’s internal politics. Referendums became less regulated and more common. Prior to Prop 13, the initiative/referendum process was viewed as a “safety valve”; after, it became “an industry and a circus.” Large interests intervened and bankrolled the process (see the controversial Prop 8 from 2008). The qualification process changed as well. Gathering signatures no longer fell under the purview of individuals committed to a cause, as "signature gathering became an industry and access was determined by money."  Paid professionals now corral thousands of John Hancocks and then sell them to organizations and interests who need them for ballot qualification. The costs of sponsoring initiatives have soared. Prior to Prop 13, initiative spending amounted to about 9,000,000 per election.  Ten years later, the typical initiative campaign cost 127,000,000. As one observer noted, “any billionaire can change the state constitution. All he has to do is spend money and lie to people.”

Perhaps, the largest misconception regarding Prop 13 regards who the real beneficiaries are. Traditionally, supporters frame the debate as “the little guy versus the established powers” (Economist, “How voters decide: What do you know?”, April 29, 2011). However, few seem to realize that Prop 13’s tax reduction includes businesses such as large firms, trusts, and hedge funds which own commercial property.  Does this count as David and Goliath?

Martin points to the results of Prop 13 by pointing to school appropriations. By far, education spending ranks as California’s largest expenditure. As of 2010, spending on schools accounted for 34.5% of the state budget (Economist, “The People’s Will”, April 29, 2011).  Though it took time to take effect, Prop 13 did lead to education problems. Martin acknowledges that studies have illustrated that “property tax limits like Proposition 13 reduced spending per pupil, lowered teacher qualifications, increased class sizes, and – the acid test for skeptical economists – reduced test scores” (141).  Prop 13 proponents argued they only voted to cut taxes, not to diminish services that those taxes funded. The Economist pointed out that in response Californians simply passed more initiatives to restore the very funding they had cut. The British periodical reflected that this was an “irony [that] often eludes Californians” (Economist, “Education: A Lesson in Mediocrity”, April 29, 2011).  To be fair, the failure of public education in California cannot be pinned to one factor or reason alone, but Prop 13 did not do the state’s students any favors.

For some, Martin’s argument fails to address issues regarding distrust of government (Vietnam, Watergate, stagflation) or the kind of economic changes that unfolded in the 1970s that historians such as Bruce Schulman have suggested transformed America from a savings society to an investment economy. This transformation increased the importance of exchange value and increased the home’s role as site for capital accumulation. Matthew Lassiter, Kevin Kruse, and the aforementioned Self focus on how a white taxpayer/homeowner identity emerged to contest integration through the language of race-neutral middle class respectability. Without mentioning race, homeowners in Charlotte, Atlanta, Oakland, and Richmond promoted their middle class consumerist interests through this identity. Martin’s work thickens our understanding of this development. In The Permanent Tax Revolt, homeowners seek to reinstate their tax privilege, one earned by their taxpaying/homeowner status. Lizabeth Cohen points to similar developments, “during the last two decades, a new combined consumer/citizen/taxpayer/voter has gained influence in a Consumerized Republic, where self-interested citizens increasingly view government policies like other market transactions, judging them by how well served they feel personally” (Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic, 9).  As Reagan appropriated the language of the people against uncaring, ignorant government officials, deregulation emerged as a populist tool to engage voters. Cohen furthers this point, noting that the ensuing deregulation contributed to exaggerating these developments such that by the 1990s, “the market relationship became the template for the citizens’ connection to government …. [bringing] a consumer mentality to their relationship with the government, judging public services and tax assessments much like other purchased goods, by the personal benefits they derived from them” (397).  One can see how Martin’s interpretation complements this model. Still, as Cohen points out, this consumerism did not guarantee equality, as occupation and housing segregation greatly limited the access to resources for minority communities. Prop 13 illustrates this clearly, as Self notes that Oakland endured greater difficulties than the surrounding metropolitan communities.

In the end, the property tax revolts of the 1970s may have subsided but their influence persists. One of Martin’s larger points is that social movements have lasting consequences. The language of tax cuts and the institutionalization of property based tax relief remain bricks in metropolitan governance. Moreover, Prop 13 reshaped national and local politics, while enabling the right to unite disparate arms of its ideology through the talisman of property tax limitation. Accordingly, even if its origins prove more diverse, the last two decades of Republican dominance emerged in relation to the tax revolt movement. One wonders if today's Tea Party can hope to have the same kind of influence. God help us all.

Ryan Reft

Me and You and Everyone We Know: Newsweek’s Sex Problem

With Easter just behind us, it is a fine time to consider sex. The Christian holiday celebrates the fertility and renewal of the Spring season, with its symbols of flowers, eggs, and the internationally recognized go-to reference point for libido, the bunny rabbit.  But Easter also more explicitly embodies the sexual weirdness of the religion itself – the rebirth of God’s son, who was born to a chaste woman but grew up to enjoy the company of prostitutes. In this spirit, we take a look at a 2009 Newsweek piece, “Only You. And You. And You,” one of many awkward discussions of sexuality broached by the nation’s most august newsmagazines over the years.

This remarkable piece of work introduces the Peorians of middle America’s checkout lines to “polyamory,” the practice of sustaining emotional and sexual relationships among multiple different partners, with mutual consent. Writer Jessica Bennett suggests that polyamory descends from the free love movement of the 1960s and the swinging fad of the same era. The magazine’s photo editors underlined the point by pasting a photo of Elliot Gould’s chest hair in bed with co-stars Natalie Wood, Dyan Cannon, and Robert Culp at the top of the article, referencing an era when films like Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969) and I Am Curious (Yellow) (1967) shocked Americans by portraying unconventional sexuality. (As an indicator of how little progress we have really made, consider this: ABC actually had the chutzpah to adapt swinger film Bob & Carol into an incredibly ill-advised sitcom in 1973, whereas today we are forced to listen to debates about whether a show called S*** My Dad Says is too risqué for primetime; God forbid American children would be exposed to asterisks.) 

When the likes of Newsweek and Time report on sexuality, it is a bit like your parents commenting on photos of your drunken shenanigans on Facebook: everyone had a vague sense that these things were going on, but actually seeing the evidence prompts an uncomfortable dialogue. And like Facebook, these magazines thrive on exhibiting people’s personal lives for public consumption. The polyamory piece reminded me of numerous articles in the past that have attempted to inform Americans of the latest new thing in sex, such as a 1995 piece that announced the discovery of bisexuality. It tells the story of a young couple who met during freshman orientation at the University of Chicago; much to the relief of their parents, Steven and Lori triumphed over their past dabbling in same-sex relationships to become real married heterosexuals. Except for one thing – Steven’s appetites have shifted from men to women and back to men again. He defined himself as both gay and “a once and future bisexual.” The article provides other details to puzzle readers, such as the couple’s habit of discussing “condoms as matter-of-factly as the weather” and maintaining same-sex relationships outside of their marriage. 

The moment was July 1995 – mere months after the Republican Party seized Congress on a wave of revulsion with liberal deficits and decadence, and a year before Bill Clinton would opportunistically sign the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act. Citing R.E.M., Roseanne, and Melrose Place, the article described a “bisexual moment,” which it envisioned as a curious offshoot of multiculturalism, with bisexuals asserting their status as yet another identity group with its own politics and institutions. There were “bi cable shows, bi web sites, bi newsletters and magazines,” as well as “Bi Women of Color, Bi Adult Children of Alcoholics, Bi Star Trekkies.” You know when you’ve been damaged by alcoholism and science fiction, you’ve hit the mainstream.

Almost as clueless as Newsweek

Such news coverage serves up sexual minorities as a bit of exotic titillation while purporting to educate the general public and ease the subjects’ path to acceptance. Another bedroom curiosity to grace the pages of Newsweek in the Nineties, for instance, was the virgin. Eleven years before Steve Carell made chastity (kind of) cool, a 1994 article tapped into the religious conservative zeitgeist with a look at the latest act of youthful rebellion: refusing to fornicate. “A lot of kids are putting off sex, and not because they can't get a date,” the magazine declared. “They've decided to wait, and they're proud o sf their chastity, not embarrassed by it. Suddenly, virgin geek is giving way to virgin chic.” Virgin chic never hit the runways of Milan or the bocce courts of Brooklyn, but the magazine did accurately forecast the rise of a cottage industry that promoted chastity pledges and “True Love Waits” rings. (The Southern Baptists founded the TLW movement just a year before, in 1993 – a harbinger, perhaps, of the Moral Majority’s subsequent rise to power.) 

Of course, the mass media do not look to sexual rebels only for the sake of voyeurism or amusement. The shameful history of fearmongering about gays and lesbians in the American media is well documented, from the first mention of homosexuality in Newsweek (a 1947 article that warned of deranged, feminine men infiltrating the US military) to a 1969 piece in Time that asked “Are Homosexuals Sick?” The magazine answered its own question ten years later, with a snarky comment on the American Psychological Association’s “highly political” decision to stop classifying homosexuality as a mental illness. It was a “bit like dermatologists voting to ordain that acne is indeed a skin blemish, but only if the acne sufferer thinks it is.” Such pejorative treatment might be unsurprising for the 1940s or even the 1970s, but the continued vilification of gays and lesbians throughout the 1980s and 1990s is harder to understand. Part of the problem undoubtedly owed to media panic over the AIDS epidemic, which was initially termed Gay-Related Immune Deficiency (GRID), but an inert conservatism about sexual values, even on the part of the so-called “liberal media” is undoubtedly more to blame. How else to explain the rather prurient interest Newsweek seemed to take in Lori and Steven’s extramarital liaisons with members of their own genders in 1995, or the surprise the magazine expressed, forty years after Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice was released, that monogamy might not be everyone’s cup of tea? 

Public discussion of sex is often tinged with a kind of amateur futurism. (Is there any other kind?) Changes in sexual behavior are easily read as signs of things to come; young people are often the ones seen to be experimenting sexually, and sex is tied up with reproduction and the making of the next generation. Perhaps sex functions as a channel for people’s anxieties about the future, especially the shared fortunes of the collective. Last August Newsweek gave us “Are We Facing a Genderless Future?” a piece about transpeople that seems to treat sexuality like peak oil, as if traditional gender roles were a kind of scarce and diminishing national resource.  The essay takes for granted the conceit that underlies the convictions of religious traditionalists – that sexual norms have always been fixed in the way envisioned by the Moral Majority or the National Organization of Marriage, and any reconfiguration of those norms perverts a tradition of ancient vintage. In fact, no bygone era of conformity ever existed. Scholars such as Nan Boyd and Daniel Hurewitz have documented the many fluid ways that Americans expressed their gender and sexuality in the early twentieth century, from female impersonation in vaudeville to the “homophile” activism of the Mattachine Society. 

Talk of a “genderless future” suggests a world in which people are so unmoored from tradition that it is no longer possible to sustain any distinctive gender roles. The idea of gender itself collapses and loses meaning. The implication – that some people asking for respect and security in their own identities would somehow affect everyone else’s gender – reminds one of the supposed threat that state recognition of gay marriages would pose to the “institution” of heterosexual marriage. Like Anita Bryant, who stoked conservative fears that gay men were insatiable savages who could not resist the urge to molest everyone’s children in the 1970s, we still find it difficult to separate the sexual expression of others from our own sense of self and security. Perhaps these concerns are rooted in the very social nature of sex itself, or the public dimensions of gender as performance and marker of status. If this is so, then a future without gender is as hard to imagine as a future without sex – or a future where sexual anxiety does not work itself out in public. Given the state of its finances, though, Newsweek may not be around to carry on this proud tradition. Someone will.

Alex Cummings

Teaching to the Test: The Middle Class, Teachers and School Reform in the 21st Century

The reality in Washington D.C. is if you live in Tenleytown versus if you live in Anacostia, you get two wildly different educational experiences. It’s the biggest social injustice imaginable. What we are allowing to happen in this day and age, we are still allowing the color of a child’s skin and the zip code they live in to dictate their educational outcome, and therefore their life outcome. ... We are robbing them every single day of their futures. And everybody in this country should be infuriated by that.

-- Speech at a D.C. restaurant in May 2008

People tell me the unions are an inevitable part of this [school reform]. My thing is, what has that gotten us so far? All the collaboration and holding hands and singing ‘Kumbaya’?

-- 2008 round table at the Fordham Institute.

For the last two decades, urban school reform has taken a front seat in national affairs. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and former Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley wrestled control of their respective cities’ education systems. Each saw the school system as a means to improve the plight of lower income constituents but also as a way to draw the middle class back into the urban fold. Daley spoke so often about the latter that it practically became a fetish. Teacher’s unions confronted both mayors and in the case of each, educators received concessions like better pay, but also agreed to longer days and school years. Bloomberg repeatedly awarded New York educators with higher salaries while getting the UFT to give on other significant areas.

Reforming urban school systems requires more than mayoral dedication; reform demands an education czar to carry out orders and impose their own vision. In Chicago, current Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Paul Vallas (currently busy rebuilding New Orleans’s public schools) before him filled this position. In New York, the indefatigable Joel Klein served as Bloomberg’s muscle. So it should come as no surprise that for the past several years, Washington D.C. had been following a similar route. The recently ousted Michelle Rhee served the same role as that of Vallas, Duncan, and Klein under the recently deposed Mayor Adrian Fenty. Since her departure from the D.C. government, she has been a regular feature in the news. A recent New York Magazine feature described her as “a sort of wonky Che Guevara, lending celebrity, credibility, and covering fire to political leaders who endorse her vision of school reform. “ Having appeared on countless news programs, the indie documentary Waiting for Superman and undoubtedly most importantly Oprah, Rhee had established a tough-minded persona that promised bad teachers future unemployment. She closed underperforming schools, fired incompetent educators, and laid off administrative staff. She wrangled with the D.C. teachers union, offering significantly increased pay in exchange for ending tenure. As New York Magazine journalist Andrew Rice points out, Rhee’s whirling dervish energy and commitment made her a congenial figure to both people on the left and the right. Moreover, in many ways, Rhee’s approach resembles the Obama administration’s new emphasis on good teachers as the key to school reform. A demanding technocratic leader like Rhee seems pitch perfect for the times. If there is one group ripe for popular backlash, teachers are front and center.

Recent events in Wisconsin aside, union struggles to remain relevant have been widely documented. With shrinking membership and a population working in a private sector that promises far less in job security, many American workers find union complaints about benefits to be obnoxious. Unlike the Bloomberg/Klein or Daley/Vallas-Duncan combination, Fenty/Rhee aggressively attacked the union. To be fair, teacher’s unions have been guilty of retarding school reform in an effort to protect workers’ benefits and rights. From the authors’ collective experience, the UFT sometimes cared too much about protecting incompetent teachers or enforcing seniority rules than ensuring that excellent teachers filled the classrooms. Moreover, as with any large organizations, some union representatives were better than others. According the New York Magazine, over the past decade, the public’s esteem for teachers has slipped to the point that now Governors like New Jersey’s Chris Christie feel comfortable “attacking teachers as welfare queens.” If one were to believe that this was the first time teachers have been vilified one would be mistaken.

Diane Ravitch documented the conflict and gnashing of teeth that have occurred throughout the New York City school system’s existence in her 1974 classic The Great School Wars: A History of the New York City Schools. In its early stages of development, New York’s teachers were political appointees made by local bosses. Furthermore, many political leaders viewed this burgeoning public system as a font of patronage employment. By the 1960s, teaching had been professionalized. Moreover, the teacher’s union as led by Albert Shanker, represented a largely Jewish workforce. The city’s schools consisted of largely black and brown faces. In the heat of the late 1960s rights movements, a union made up of a religious minority clashed openly with the cities dominant racial minorities.

During the 1968 Ocean Hill-Brownsville school controversy, Puerto Rican and Black parents lodged numerous complaints against New York public school teachers ranging from what we today refer to as “the bigotry of low expectations” to outright racism. When the union demanded more control over the classroom via stronger disciplinary measures, civil rights organizations and Black militants reacted negatively. From their perspective the unions situated the strike that unfolded over the controversy as “striking for the right to put black and Puerto Rican children out of class more easily.” (Ravitch, 327) Yet, forty years after the Ocean Hill–Brownsville controversy, many of the same education issues remain on the table. The continuing decline of urban public schools, funding inequalities, and credentials of city teachers remained flashpoints of conflict. Just as Rhee’s reforms drew applause from segments of conservative and liberal America, the burgeoning charter school movement shared support from minority parents and conservatives.

Though many minority parents might recoil at other aspects of the conservative agenda, the plight of their children in failing public schools creates strange but powerful bedfellows. Whether or not conservatives really care about school reform or are using it as a cover for privatizing public educational systems continues to be a mystery. One could make a similar argument for liberals who continue to support the public education. Many middle and upper middle class liberals speak reverently about urban educational institutions but send their own children to private schools or well-funded suburban public high schools.

As already noted, the fetish for middle class support pervades much of educational reform discourse. Just as teacher vilification has historical precedent, so too does the privileging of middle class interests.

In a Republic I think it is the part of wise statesmanship to give the people that secondary or higher education, at the expense of the state or [city], which they themselves demand … Good schools both for primary and secondary education .. Would, with rapid transit, help to bring back to the city that great middle class which, during the last ten years, has been absolutely squeezed out … leaving here only the very rich and the very poor. (Ravitch, 104)

Does this sound familiar? Board of Education president William Wood uttered these words in 1878, thus, illustrating the dominant influence of the middle class on educational and municipal reform. Modern day tropes about meritocracy and the traditional middle class belief in education as a means to advance in a meritocratic system serve as the driving forces of this credo. From 1878 through the long twentieth century, the need to address middle income interests pervades discourse. In this way, educational reformers have long struggled to develop a rubric by which to identify good teachers from mediocre ones. Over the past twenty years, one means by which this has unfolded has been an undeniable emphasis on testing as the primary evaluation regarding teaching ability and student academic retention.

The pressure on principals and teachers to raise student test scores can lead educators to fudge numbers or cheat in order to ensure that student test scores are high enough so that students succeed and schools are thought to be successful. One noteworthy cheating incident on standardized tests occurred in Atlanta, where in 2010, 58 of 84 elementary and middle schools were accused of changing student answers on standardized tests. The findings were based on analysis of tests that found that the exams had many more erase marks than is statistically probable. The superintendent and other educators vehemently protested these findings and last August another analysis of tests found that the first study was wrong and the district was largely exonerated.

This accusation of cheating in Atlanta was partially based on the fact that schools in Atlanta had made dramatic gains on test scores in a short period. Districts are under immense pressure to make huge gains in a short period of time, but if a district does make these gains it may come under suspicion that it used improper or illegal methods to achieve widespread student improvement. There is a still a widely held perception that it is virtually impossible for large urban districts to achieve success, so success is met with suspicion.

Classroom cheating earned the attentions of economists Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. In their 2005 best seller, Freakonomics, the two economists uncovered cheating patterns in Chicago public school classrooms. While tests have always served as incentive to cheat, as Levitt and Dubner point out “high stakes testing has so radically changed the incentives for teachers that they too now have added reason to cheat.” (23) While this cheating occurred during the aforementioned Arne Duncan’s watch, the two economists exonerated him from blame. “When Duncan was a boy, his afterschool playmates were the underprivileged kids his mother cared for,” the authors wrote. “So when he took over the public schools, his allegiance lay more with schoolchildren and their families than with teachers and their union.” (33) Duncan’s pursuit of classroom cheaters netted only 12 dismissals but according to Levitt and Dubner, the psychological effect was enough to reduce cheating by nearly a 1/3 the following year.

More recently, no large urban district achieved success more quickly or famously than Washington D.C. Under Michelle Rhee schools were driven to make large gains in short periods of time, and principals and teachers would be fired if they did not make the gains that Rhee was looking for. A USA Today investigative report on cheating in D.C. public schools reported that Rhee fired “dozens of principals and at least 600 teachers”, and according to one former D.C. principal Rhee told principals that they had to increase scores on standardized tests by 10 percentage points every year. Some schools in Washington did make outstanding growth in a short time, and Rhee rewarded the principals and teachers with huge bonuses. Now that Rhee is no longer chancellor schools that made huge gains when she was chancellor have rapidly falling test scores. The USA Today investigation found that one school that Rhee repeatedly singled out as being outstanding is being investigated for erasing incorrect answers and marking correct answers after students had finished their tests.

While it is certainly understandable to target teacher cheating so fundamentally, this focus ignores other critical aspects of “cheating”. Is it cheating when the state board of regents waters down state exams? Any New York school teacher with enough experience knows that New York regents exams of the early and mid 1990s differed markedly in difficulty from current incarnations. How about the way tests are graded? In New York, United States and Global history and English exams are all graded in relation to a rubric. The exam score is not based on raw point totals. Instead, students accumulate so many multiple choice and short answer points that are then cross referenced with their essay scores. (Students are expected to complete a thematic essay and a document based essay for history. English exams are based far more on essay writing in that they have fewer multiple choice questions and require four essays.) Thus, if a student had a raw multiple choice score of 28 (which combines 50 multiple choice questions and 9-12 points based on short answers to documents) and a combined essay score of 5, they receive a “local” passing regents score of 55. Now consider the fact that out of a possible 10 essay points this student received only half and less than half of the multiple choice/short answer total. When George Bush talked about the “bigotry of low expectations”, he and others apparently did not consider this aspect as part of the discussion. The push by administrators to improve scores can reach fever pitch in this atmosphere, as educators are ordered to “scrub” for points when students fall just short of the 55 or 65 threshold.

Recently New York City announced that it would begin to more vigorously audit schools’ test scores after data was released that on the five Regents test students need to graduate from high school many more students scored the minimum passing score of 65 than scored 64 or any other score. This news would not come as a surprise to any New York City high school teacher who has sat in a room with other teachers grading their own students Regents exams and trying to find points for students who are just below the passing threshold. As New York has moved to an A-F grading system for schools and has made it easier to close schools, the pressure on teachers and administrators to find extra points for students becomes even more acute.

The pressure on schools to raise test scores does not only come from superintendents and mayors. The No Child Left Behind law that was passed in 2001 mandated that schools had to make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) or schools would suffer specific consequences. No Child Left is due to expire this year and Congress will likely reauthorize the law in the next year. There is bipartisan agreement that No Child Left Behind needs to be fixed, but Republicans and Democrats do not agree on what the fix should be. Recently President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan highlighted one problem with No Child Left Behind: if the law is not changed by 2013 80% of schools in the United States will not be making AYP and will be designated as failing.

The reason that 80% of schools would be failing in a couple of years in that NCLB mandates that by 2014 every student in the United States must be making AYP. This provision of the law has been compared to mandating that a police force in a large city completely end assault in 10 years, and nobody thinks that all students will be making AYP in three years. It is absurd to mandate that every student meet an arbitrary standard by an arbitrary year, but it would be instructive to explain what meeting AYP means and why it is so difficult for so many districts to meet this standard.

The first thing to know about Adequate Yearly Progress is that is does not actually measure progress. Improvement by schools does not factor into making AYP. Schools must meet a standard set by the state and if they do not meet this standard then they are designated as a “School in Improvement”. To parents and the media they are designated as a failing school. What makes it so difficult for schools to avoid being labeled as failing is that schools must meet AYP in both math and reading in every demographic group. So a school that is meeting state standards in 17 demographic groups will be designated as failing if one group is not meeting standard. The motivation for creating these rules was sound. The federal government wanted to ensure that schools were not meeting standards by ignoring historically difficult to educate groups such as special education students or African-American males. However, the practical effect of writing the law with AYP is that schools that are making progress still never meet AYP standards.

Once a school is designated as being in improvement students at that school have two options: they can either transfer to another school in the district that is making AYP or they can get free tutoring that is paid for by the district. Most students do not transfer to different schools and in some districts no school is making AYP so students have no place to transfer. The free tutoring that students from failing schools are eligible for is paid for by Title 1 money from the federal government and is provided by private tutoring companies. This free tutoring was a centerpiece of NCLB because it gave the private sector the opportunity to provide tutoring to students whose teachers were failing to provide them a good education. The reality is that there is practically no oversight of these tutoring companies other than to assure that they are not hiring criminals. Many of the people who provide tutoring have no education background and school districts have found that this private tutoring has no overall positive impact on students’ performance on standardized tests.

The different provisions of No Child Left Behind, mayoral control of school systems, challengers firing teachers and principals and the proliferation of charter schools are all recent attempts to close the massive gaps educational outcomes that plague the United States. Ending this inequality has been the goal of education reformers for at least the past 50 years and these new ideas and trends are the current manifestation of this goal. The increasing calls by elected officials and education reformers to make it easier to fire bad teachers is based on research that says that teacher quality is the most important factor in whether a student succeeds in school.

Over the past two decades, most urban school systems adopted increasingly stringent rules for attaining teacher certification. More and more states now require that public school educators earn Master’s degrees. Few people would dispute that generally this has been a positive development. However, as both authors’ can attest, MA programs in education spend too much time on the wrong things. Most classroom teaching skills must be honed on the job. Methodology and pedagogy courses remain useful in small doses, but no amount of graduate school classes can replace the value of actual classroom experience. Most education programs would benefit from a more intense focus on content. Often, new teachers struggle with mastering the core material of their course whether it be Global or U.S. History, Chemistry, or English. The state’s focus on less than useful pedagogy courses and teacher certification exams becomes more tax on educators than anything (ask any New York City teacher about their videotape evaluation in which teachers must tape themselves then sent it to Albany for approval, often one of the last steps in permanent certification. It costs the teacher $80 and the rumor has always been no on actually watches these tapes). Yes, unions play a troubling role in this matrix. The emphasis on seniority and certification devalues the energy and enthusiasm younger teachers bring to education. Both authors’ have witnessed decaying bitter older teachers occupying teaching spots that would be far more affective were a younger, fresher more dedicated face given the responsibility. This is not to say older teachers do not pull their weight, the vast majority do. In fact, truly invested and experienced teachers can serve as invaluable sources of inspiration and guidance for newly minted pedagogues.

While the union’s privileging of experienced teachers makes sense, it also can be counter productive. In recessionary times like today it can be virtually impossible for a young teacher to keep his job if a district lays off teachers based strictly on seniority. These young teachers either have to become substitute teachers, or if they are fortunate, they may be able to find a regular job at a different school. Since districts are unlikely to hire new teachers when it is laying off current teachers it can become difficult for a young teacher to gain the seniority needed to keep her job and the laying off process can repeat itself year after year. It is very difficult to become a better teacher when starting over at a new school every year and can have a negative effect on student learning.

One of the major goals of education reformers and politicians is to end the “first in first out” seniority rules that are employed by about half of the states. For example, in New York Mayor Bloomberg recently said that New York would half to lay off 4000 teachers if the New York state legislature did not modify the law regarding layoffs based on seniority. The legislature has not yet acted on the mayor’s request, but the calls for reform are also coming from Andrew Cuomo, New York’s new governor. The focus on seniority rules is part of a broader argument about the effect of teacher quality on student achievement. As was discussed earlier in this paper, arguments about education reform are nothing new. However, in the past education reformers discussed parental involvement, cultural factors, and class size, as well as teacher quality. Recent studies that have argued that teacher quality is the most significant factor in student achievement have led to a renewed emphasis on trying to find ways to work around or eliminate seniority rules in order to ensure that the best teachers will be in the classroom.

Frequently cited Stanford economist Eric Hanushek has produced research focusing on teacher quality. Hanushek found that students in a very bad teacher’s class will learn about half a year’s material in a year, whereas a student in a very good teacher’s class will learn about a year and half of material in year. Hanushek calculated that in terms of world education ranking the U.S. could move from below average into the cluster of highest performing countries simply by replacing the bottom 6% to 10% of teachers with average teachers. It is studies such as these that politicians to call for not only scrapping seniority based systems, but also for calling for more stringent evaluation of teachers and the ability to fire teachers. There is a case to be made for making it easier to get rid of poor teachers, but the primary problem with this argument is that nobody has yet created a system or metric that fairly and accurately evaluates teachers.

One of the primary criticisms of teacher evaluations is that in most school districts nearly all teachers get satisfactory ratings. A 2009 study by the New Teacher Project found that in districts that use “satisfactory” and “unsatisfactory” 99% of teachers are given satisfactory ratings. This same study found that districts only use teacher evaluations when they are deciding whether or not to dismiss a teacher. Evaluations were not used to help teachers improve their teacher or for any type of extra compensation for excellence. It is clear that when 99% of teachers are getting satisfactory ratings the ratings mean nothing. When the author was a new teacher he was only observed a couple of times a year by the school’s administration, far fewer than the six times a year than was required for new teacher. When the author was up for tenure after his third year of teaching he was given tenure based on about six evaluations over a three-year period. This is an extreme example as the author had an assistant principal who was close to retirement and no longer cared, but even diligent administrators have a difficult time observing new teachers the required number of times. One of the reasons for the high percentage of satisfactory ratings is that when an administrator only observes a teacher 2 or 3 times a year it is easier for him to give the teacher a satisfactory rating than having to deal with the grief that comes from an unsatisfactory rating.

The recognition that the teacher evaluation system is effectively broken has led to a push to make teacher evaluations more meaningful. The Gates Foundation is leading an initiative to put cameras in classrooms to film teachers and base evaluations at least partially on what is recorded. The Obama Administration’s Race to the Top requires that states create a system for evaluating teachers as a requirement for winning money from the federal government. Teacher unions generally agree with education reformers that there does need to be a better system for teacher evaluations. However, the most contentious issue regarding teacher evaluations is whether or not test scores should be included in evaluating teachers. For years unions have vehemently opposed to using test scores to evaluate teachers. Teachers argue that standardized tests do not accurately reflect what students learn in a class and that using tests to judge teachers is fundamentally unfair when a teacher has no control over how well a student was taught prior to entering her class. However, with the more and more politicians calling for an overhaul of teacher evaluations the nation’s largest teacher union, the American Federation of Teachers, recently proposed using student improvement on standardized tests as one criterion for evaluating teachers. Despite this proposal by the AFT there is still a great deal of contentiousness over what is the fairest way to evaluate teachers. As state budgets shrink and teacher pay continues to come under attack it seems likely that teacher unions are going to have to agree to a more robust form of evaluation as a means of taking some of political pressure off of teachers and their unions.

[Author's note: For the record, the authors have a combined teaching experience in the New York City Public High Schools of 18 years, which also happens to be the same aggregate length of their membership in the UFT.]

Shane Updike and Ryan Reft

Currently working for the Highline School District near Seattle doing data analysis and administering the district's Title 1 program, Mr. Updike completed eight years of distinguished teaching in the New York City High Schools and holds MA degrees in Social Studies Education (NYU) and Public Administration (University of Washington).

Mountain Goats and the Music of Survival

Sometimes we’re not prepared for adversity. When it happens, sometimes we’re caught short… Sometimes, we don’t know just what to do when adversity takes over. And I have advice for all of us, I got it from my pianist Joe Zawinul who wrote this song, and it sounds like what you’re supposed to say when you have that kind of problem. And it’s called “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy.”

- Cannonball Adderley

This line comes from the opening of one of my favorite records of all time, and it sums up one musical and philosophical response to suffering – to recognize one’s own insufficiency and turn to a greater power for some kind of relief. Whether Joe Zawinul was himself a religious man is unclear, although one of his other most notable songs, “Country Preacher” (1969), was recorded in a Chicago church with the help of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, to whom it was dedicated. Adderley certainly viewed the song, famed for its sultry groove, as a yearning for clemency of a divine sort. 

Pain is among the major themes addressed by popular music, right up there with love, lust, and hedonism. Often enough, these concerns are linked by cause and effect, with love lost causing pain, pain leading to “the need to blow it out on a Saturday night,” as a Drive by Truckers song says. How these themes are refracted through songwriting and performance is as much a matter of temperament as genre – a punk might take the same heartbreak that would otherwise prompt a weepy steel guitar riff and turn it into an anthem of exultant rage, while blues oscillates between tales of grinding endurance and an exuberant, body-oriented celebration of pain. 

Indeed, one of the most salient arguments against the idea that human beings are entirely molded by their environment lies in the ways that different people cope with trauma. One person sulks and writes a funereal dirge. The next moves on with flinty determination and, possibly, a lust for revenge. One sibling reacts to a dysfunctional home life with optimism of the most unwarranted kind, while another grows bitter, resentful, and suspicious with the passing years. 

 I thought of these differences upon seeing the Mountain Goats perform in Atlanta, as the band’s own recordings and concerts embody just this divergence of attitudes. When I first heard John Darnielle’s music early in the 2000s, it seemed like the kind of whiny, quasi-emo, lo-fi fiddling that would come and go as an indie fad. I did not want to hear about his awful experiences and what an impact they had had on him through a mopey guitar riff and a four-track tape recorder. 

Later on several songs endeared me to the band, such as “Palmcorder Yajna” and “Going to Queens” – songs that went beyond mere confession of pain to evoke a broader scene of characters, landscapes, and struggles, whether “the ghostly sing-song of children playing Double Dutch” in Jamaica or a flophouse full of tweakers in Portland. In Poughkeepsie I had the good fortune of buying a collection of bootleg recordings called Cast Offs and Put Downs that revealed a much looser, upbeat, and colorful artist than most of the Goats’ studio recordings would suggest. The album showed a wider range of moods, from the rollicking and innocent (“Comandante”) to the sardonic and defiant (“Letter from Belgium,” “Pigs that Ran”) and even the sweet and elegiac (a cover of “Two Headed Boy” by Neutral Milk Hotel). 

It was puzzling that an artist whose songwriting I generally appreciated could still appear in two such distinct guises: studio recordings that were often grating and flat, and live performances that were far more robust. Moreover, how is it that an artist could package themes of child abuse, drug addiction, and depression in a more affirmative package in some contexts, but not others? The concert in Atlanta definitely reinforced this perception, as songs that formerly seemed straitjacketed burst open in a joyous fashion that seemed incongruous with lyrics like “I hope you die. I hope we both die!” A good chunk of Darnielle’s catalog deals with the childhood abuse meted out by his stepfather; while one of my favorite Mountain Goats songs addresses the experience of hearing his mother suffer at the abuser’s hands in bitter detail (“laying close to my little record player on the floor, so this is what the volume knob’s for”), it is hard to deny that some of these compositions lean toward the maudlin. 

Yet his best songs react to this deeply traumatic experience with a roaring resistance, all driving acoustic rhythms and acidic lyrics. By the end of the show, watching this performer chronicle suffering in a vivacious tone of voice, I realized that the anger, resentment, and invective in the songs not only drives the performance but ameliorates the grief. For the artist, and perhaps for much of the audience, it is an affirmation of self in the face of suffering – a token of survival, like so much of R&B and the historical legacy of gospel, with its roots in the Biblical narratives of slavery and redemption as well as the continuing struggles of the poor and people of color. As one of the most rousing numbers declared, with a brio not present on the recorded version, “I’m gonna make it through this year if it kills me!” The paradox is an existential one, a commitment to persevere even if perseverance might not be possible. Generations of people who have encountered violence, oppression, and the foreclosing of opportunity would likely recognize this stubborn refusal. 

Music shows us how people cope, drawing on resources both spiritual and secular. I was reminded of a traditional song recorded by Belle and Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch for the 2009 Dark Was the Night compilation, “Another Saturday.” The song has deep Christian overtones, averring that “He [God] won’t ask us to shoulder a weight too much to carry.” On first listen, the song seems to deny the great misery of the world, where so many face unmanageable burdens. (One thinks of Tupac’s Brenda and her baby in the garbage.) The God of the lyrics has clearly let evil run amok in a world where belief in providence is a luxury of the fortunate. Yet on further reflection the song seems to lay the emphasis not on God but on the shoulders of the individual believer – whatever burden is asked, it won’t be too much to carry, due to the faith and inner strength of the person who bears it. It recalls the Qur'anic promise that “On no soul Allah places a burden greater than it can bear.” 

This is clearly a religious frame of mind, but it finds its complement in secular music that takes pride in survival. A critic once noted that many of Pearl Jam’s most successful songs dealt with survivor’s guilt, notably “Last Kiss” and “Alive.” The most memorable moment from the latter song may be the poignant question posed in a verse (“I’m still alive, but do I deserve to be?”), yet the takeaway remains the simpler assertion of the chorus: “I’m still alive!” Songwriters like John Darnielle, who evince no sympathy for theism, find joy in the simple fact of surviving and the possibilities that remain, rejecting an attitude of pure fatalism. Even in a song as dark as “Going to Georgia,” a sense of wonder can be found: 

the most remarkable thing about coming home to you
is the feeling of being in motion again
it's the most extraordinary thing in the world
i have two big hands and a heart pumping blood
and a 1967 colt .45 with a busted safety catch
the world shines as i cross the macon county line

Though the lyrics are menacing, even homicidal, in performance the emphasis seems to lie on the world shining. A certain community of spirit was never so clear as in the final encore of the show, when the Mountain Goats and openers Megafaun performed a svelte cover of “You Really Got a Hold on Me.” Here the tie between soul and angsty 21st century folk was most explicit. “I got joy, joy, joy in my soul,” Darnielle sang. “Although you treat me badly, I love you madly. You really got a hold on me…”

Darnielle captured the emotional thrust of the Mountain Goats well on a Colbert Show appearance not long ago. The host noted that many of the band’s songs juxtapose a driving, upbeat rhythm with lyrics that were dark, to put it mildly. Colbert also asked why he didn’t name the band after a cooler animal, like, say, mountain lions. Darnielle explained that mountain goats were actually the coolest animals, because of their ability to climb sheer, vertical surfaces with ease. They become so cocky, he said, that they think they can cross steep ravines between ridges safely, which results in the inadvertent deaths of many goats each year. So the Mountain Goats, as a band, celebrate the animals’ “suicidal pride?” Colbert quipped. Yes, the singer agreed. The music is all about taking “it all the way down to the bottom,” in order to say, “What can you do to me now?” – a sort of defiance, a faith in oneself, which declares “I made it, I survived this, I will persist in the face of anything and everything.” It is a kind of determination that one finds in both secular and spiritual music, although for a skeptic like Darnielle the source of strength lies squarely in the self.  It is also a fine symbol of the music's existential promise: the goats take a literal "leap of faith" that comes with no guarantee of success.  The band's music, Colbert suggested, was all about “cheerful desolation,” and rarely have two words so aptly captured a recording artist’s animating spirit.
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Alex Cummings

Revisiting Black Suburbanization

In its March 31, 2011 issue the Economist noted the acceleration of a process often associated with white suburbanites, "white flight". The article "Black Flight" reports that increasing numbers of urban black dwellers have been departing for suburban environs. "Black flight" has had consequences for both suburban and inner city communities. Too often, historians have ignored Black American suburbanization. In January of this year, T of M explored this very issue through the work of San Diego State University Professor Andrew Wiese. In his 2004 work, Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century, Wiese addresses this historical blind spot. For Wiese, Black suburbanization unfolded throughout the century, but the ideals, values, and concerns of these suburbanites have garnered far less attention than their white counterparts. Placing Wiese in dialogue with other scholars on the topic, most notably sociologist Mary Pattillo-McCoy, T of M's Getting to the Mountaintop: The Suburban Dreams of African Americans engages the discussion, exploring the dynamics of a process that is still occurring as we speak.

Economist

The Changing Colour of Cities

Black Flight

Now it is the turn of America’s blacks to leave for the suburbs

Mar 31st 2011 | SEATTLE |

IN THE 1990s black Americans began returning in significant numbers to the South. This marked a reversal of the Great Migration, in which their parents and grandparents fled Jim Crow racism in the 1920s and 1930s for jobs in the industrial cities of the north-east, Midwest and West. But since 2000 the destination of many inner-city blacks has shifted again, according to details from the latest census. From Oakland to Chicago to Washington, DC, blacks are surging from the central cities to the suburbs.

Analysis of 2010 census data by William Frey, chief demographer for the Brookings Institution, shows that more than half the cities with large concentrations of blacks have seen significant declines in their black populations. About half of black Americans now live in the suburbs, up from 43% in 2000.

This is proving a mixed blessing. Well-educated blacks are finding better jobs, bigger houses and newer schools, just as white-flight suburbanites did in previous generations. But many lower-income migrants from the inner cities are finding poverty, crime and poor social services when they arrive in their new homes. In the past decade, poverty has increased more than twice as fast in the suburbs as it has in the cities.

Although the black exodus is happening across the country, its consequences are especially vivid in Seattle and nearby Portland, two of America’s whitest big cities. In each of these cities, blacks were squeezed by restrictive property covenants and racial prejudice into a small but highly visible central district—black-majority islands in a white sea.

By 2010 the islands had largely gone. Seattle and Portland had become “smart cities”, magnets for hordes of young, highly educated and highly paid newcomers, most of them white and childless. Hungry for “diversity” and rushing into relatively rundown black neighbourhoods, they snapped up the only housing bargains left. White-owned banks were eager to make loans to yuppies. Tens of thousands of houses were gutted and rebuilt. As gentrification gathered pace, property prices exploded. Black homeowners cashed in, taking their windfalls to the suburbs. Black renters were squeezed out by higher rents.

“My clientele has all moved away,” says Charlene Williams, owner of De Charlene’s Beauty & Boutique in Seattle’s Central District. Her neighbourhood was 79% black when she set up shop in 1968. It was 58% black as recently as 1990. Now it is 21% black. Ms Williams once had 13 hairdressers on her payroll; now she employs none. The young Ray Charles once performed in black-owned nightclubs in the Central District. Those clubs are gone, as are the restaurants where Ms Williams used to buy pork-chop sandwiches and peach pie. Eateries now offer crepes, wood-fired artisan bagels and north-west fusion cuisine.

The total number of blacks in the greater Seattle area has grown in the past decade, but they are widely dispersed to suburbs such as Renton, a dozen miles away. A few thousand black Seattleites still get together on Sunday mornings. They drive in from the suburbs to downtown churches. “There’s a community,” says Ms Williams, “but no unity.”