The Florida Shooting and the Public Schools

With 17 victims killed and a similar number wounded, the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting was horrific, and all empathize with the victims.

Horrific events like these are salient; that is, they loom large in our minds. As with airline crashes, which have resulted in more death than mass shootings, we, along with the electronic and print media, dramatize the risks of and importance of salient events. Nevertheless, the empathy and sorrow we feel for the victims is neither a logical nor an empirically valid reason for policy changes.

In 1897, 121 years ago, Emile Durkheim wrote Suicide, a sociological study of the correlates of suicide. Durkheim's study suggested that sociological analysis might increasingly contribute to reasoned policy discussion. Unfortunately, that does not seem to have been the case. Much of the policy discussion about the recent uptick in mass shootings is impassioned and lacking in perspective.

Durkheim found that social norms and regulation contribute to suicide rates; similar factors are at play in mass shootings, which are often suicidal. Durkheim found that suicide can result from a sense of not belonging; he also found that it can result from being overwhelmed by social demands; he also found that anomie, an absence of moral coherence or a breakdown of social norms, can play a role. 

Durkheim found that education makes suicide more likely, but social cohesion and religion play a bigger role. Protestants were more likely to commit suicide than were Catholics or Jews, even though Jews were highly educated. As well, suicide rates were higher for unmarried people than for married people and for childless people than for people with children.

Where do school shootings occur? They occur almost universally in public schools. I went through a list provided by Ballotpedia https://ballotpedia.org/United_States_school_shootings,_199…, and I noticed that of the first 20 or 30, 100% occured in public school settings, mostly in mid-sized-to-large-sized cities, and in low-income school districts. They also have often been associated with sports events.

The number killed in all of the mass shooting incidents is much smaller than the number killed in airline crashes, which in turn is much smaller than the number killed in automobile crashes.  Salience does not determine importance. 

This CNN piece (https://www.cnn.com/…/20-deadliest-mass-shooting…/index.html )
identifies the worst mass shootings in modern history (related and unrelated to schools), and the total of all fatalities arising from them is under 500. In contrast, a single one of any number of airline crashes had roughly 50% of the total number of deaths from mass shootings since 1990. As well, about 40,000 Americans died in automobile crashes in 2016. More than one million have died in car accidents since 1990, compared to under 500 from mass shootings, a ratio of 2,000 to one.

That is not to say that it is not useful to think about ways to reduce or eliminate mass shootings. One point that jumps out is that all of the mass killings at schools have been at public schools. A large majority is not surprising since about 91% of students attend public schools. Nevertheless, given that there have been several hundred school shootings, we would expect about 10% to have been in Catholic and other private schools, but that has not been the case. 

That gets us back to the question of anomie, normlessness, and its opposite, excessive social control. Since 1990 there has been a increase in political correctness and a decline in religious belief (see http://www.pewresearch.org/…/qa-why-millennials-are-less-r…/ ). In other words, there has been increasing academic control, increasing peer pressure, and decreasing religious participation. As well, there has been declining participation in society, as Robert Putnam points out in Bowling Alone.

Perhaps the public education system needs to be taken to task; and perhaps the American media with its idolization of celebrity, narcissism, and new age morality should be as well.  As well, given that there are sociological reasons for mass shootings, we might conclude that different locales require different solutions.  

A generic, federal solution to a variegated problem is as useless as looking for a single solution to airline crashes. Different locales need to develop optimal policies based on their unique characteristics. 

How to Cut State Government

Gus Murphy of Brooklyn had written to our local newspaper, the Olive Press, asking how to cut government. Here is my response:

Dear Editor:

Gus Murphy asks for specifics as to how to cut government spending (May 6) and the Wicks Law is one of many.   

30-50% of New York State's budget is waste.  Medicaid and other health-related fraud amounts to billions.  A nurse at the Kingston/Rhinebeck Tea Party told me that in her opinion nearly half of Medicaid spending is for waste. Until this year New York's per capita spending on Medicaid was double that of California's. If she is even half right, the savings from Medicaid fraud and waste alone amount to ten percent of the state's budget.  

One national statistic is that the average public sector employee's pay is $39.22 per hour and the average private sector employee's pay is $27.42 per hour.   How about if public sector employees, starting with school teachers, earned parity with the equivalent work in the private sector using comparable worth (pay evaluation) methods?

Moreover, why can't school teachers be paid for productivity?  School vouchers would do this through competition.  Too many public schools have become ideological brainwashing centers and have failed to teach the three 'rs.  Diane Ravitch shows in her book Left Back: A Century of Battles over School Reform that "Progressive" education techniques have demonstrably failed, yet education schools, school districts and teachers insist on them.  Vouchers could cure this, and cure excessive administration and pay levels.

Procurement is a problem.  The balance of quality and low bid practices depends on management knowledge that government cannot develop because it depends on annual budgets rather than long term performance measures.  Leasing decisions are made that make this year's budget look good at the expense of next year's. Infrastructure repairs cost money this year but save money over the long term.  Bridges and roads become more expensive to repair as time passes. Vehicle fleets are allowed to fall apart, in part because public perception favors state employees driving older cars, but the older cars are more expensive because of repair bills. 

As of the early 1990s the state did not know and could not value its own land holdings. Land was being given away to various parties such as charities without knowing the land's value.  The Erie Canal was a major tract and the state had to do a major survey just to figure out what it owned before it could start re-development. 

Because public sector accounting remains obfuscatory, it is difficult to compare state operations across states, which is essential to good management. Rather than fighting for coherent budget and financial statement categories that can be compared across states, and for integrated accounting system within the state, the Governmental Accounting Standards Board was set up in the mid 1990s and created half-way measures.  Depreciation still is not charged against state buildings, for instance.  Programs cannot be compared to programs across states.   Budgets for construction are backcharged to agencies and made difficult to compare because they are co-mingled with other program costs.

The bottom line is that no one can look at the operation of a program, say a commission on banking, and compare its costs to a comparable commission in other states. That is no accident.  No media source has raised the desirability of having this. No media source has discussed the effects of annual budgeting on long term costs.  No media source has made an issue of accounting practices since the 1970s.  The attitude in New York is: if it's broken, don't fix it; and if money is wasted, so what? 

After decades of Democratic Party rule in this state, millions have fled, services are dismal, and the economy is in steep decline. Here we see the result of the ideologically driven school system, because the public cannot figure out that if you keep raising taxes and squandering the money, the state will become poorer and decline.  New Yorkers are going to need to learn for themselves what the Greeks are learning for themselves. And like the Greeks, given 12 years of brainwashing that they went through in school, New Yorkers will blame everyone else in the world and will call them "racists" but will not blame the true culprit: the voters and public of New York State that has voted for self-destructive policies and the Democratic Party. 

Sincerely,

 

Mitchell Langbert