Wealthy county can't quite accept its success

I suppose I could get into teacher bashing almost every day in this blog, and there is some benefit in being consistently reminded about the low status that educators "enjoy" in America overall. I take some comfort in the fact that despite so many years of being undervalued and over-criticized, great people somehow still manage to enter the profession.

The latest bashing in these parts begins with -- and this will not shock anyone -- Republican radical politicians who have floated the idea on a local talk radio station of the Douglas County School Board publishing the names of all nearly 1,500 district employees who called out sick yesterday. 

Radio host and attorney Dan Caplis said this: "I think the names of every one of those teachers who abandon the kids tomorrow, they should be considered public record, and nobody should be threatened or abused or anything like that... None of that garbage. That's weak and silly and awful."

Beyond helping you decide to never hire his law firm in the future -- a decision unlikely to hurt the firm, which has plenty of rich people to service -- you might be wondering about the quality of his thinking and how that might seep into his law practice.

The inherent logical contradiction in his position is clear: He wants those names made public and he played the "teachers aren't in it for the money but for the children" card -- "they abandoned our little girl."

But he immediately tries to soften his call for public shaming and for the public to know exactly who they should criticize by saying that, really, nothing bad should come of that public shaming. No one should be threatened. Ha! 

Rabid politicians providing red meat to their most ardent followers often try to play this game of whipping up emotions with one hand while urging everyone to "keep it clean." Which hand gets the most attention?

I have heard a number of people talk about "elections do have consequences," claiming that the turnout for the November election was very small. That sounds right, doesn't it? After all, the common wisdom is that school board elections don't gather much interest since most voters don't have kids in the schools. Board elections are held during "off years," depressing voter turnout and (so goes the hope) reducing the impact of politics. Again, ha!

I looked up the stats. Roughly 119,000 people voted in the last board election out of a total number of registered voters of 282,334. That's 42 percent, which is disappointing but not unusually small. You can find all sorts of examples of board elections across the country drawing 10-15 percent of the potential voters.

So I would guess that it wasn't so much microscopic numbers of voters in the November election as much as the "cause and effect" relationship between modest turnout and increasing power for each individual vote. The power of getting extra voters to the polls and the fact that each "new" or changed vote carries power has led to some swings in board membership, and it would not be surprising to see another swing in the 2025 board election.

But a lot of bad (or good) can happen in four years. After all, for current freshmen that span covers their entire high school career.

School board elections are officially nonpartisan though that is true in much the same way as Supreme Court judge nominations are officially nonpartisan. 

Douglas County voters break down like this: approximately 100,000 registered Republicans, 54,000 registered Democrats, and 123,000 Undeclared. 

It's not easy to track down board members' voter registration status, but the four new members were quite open about their Republican Party affiliations, while the three holdovers include two Democrats and one Undeclared. So, the current political party splits seem to accurately mirror the county breakdown other than in the Undeclared category. 

The schools regularly score well by almost any measure, from standardized test results to college admission to graduation rates. At a glance, you might think that the board members must be child-centered, thoughtful policy makers, supportive of educators and parents... all striving to give every student and staff member a chance to excel.

As is often the case, the better things are, the worse they feel. Many Coloradans must shake their heads at the idea of all this strife in one of the nation's wealthiest counties with a long tradition of academic excellence.

Poor Douglas County.

Let's talk about cause and effect again

Our national tragedy of the moment may boil down to a simple refusal to acknowledge cause and effect.

Let's see. When did the great disruption begin? Ah, about the end of February, 2020, when the country and world started shutting down to slow the rise of Covid. 

That caused many businesses to cut back and certainly shifted consumer spending from services (like restaurants and travel) to "things" they could put in their homes (where they were suddenly spending much more time).

When the big industries cut back on buying from manufacturers, who could be surprised when restarting the entire supply chain ends up messy and spotty and frustrating?

A large number of people get a flu shot, but still get the flu. Their first thought is that the shot is to blame, despite the fact that the flu shot does not contain live cells. No matter. Many people settle for correlation and never go farther. The cliché among those who think about logic is "Correlation does not equal causation." 

Yet a majority of Americans appear to blame Joe Biden, of all people, for our ills. I get it. He is the president and his decisions have SOME effect on the economy (though not as much as some people think).

The federal government really did distribute trillions of dollars in aid to help everyone manage, and there is more to come. Yes, inflation is higher than it has been in three decades, though still far less than I recall from the mid-1970s, when we had an 18 percent mortgage rate for some years.

But here's the bottom line, and few seem to be willing to focus on this: If we can overcome the virus, many of our supply chain issues, our missing worker issues, and inflation itself will soon return to something approaching normal.

Here's my modest proposal: Everyone wear a mask indoors for four weeks, vaccinated or not. Cut the rate of transmission of the virus. Get those new Pfizer pills out in every doctor's office and hospital... the ones that cut hospitalization rates by 90 percent. 

I am well aware, however, that common sense and even a basic understanding of cause and effect is not happening in our "greatest nation on earth." Our myths and our tribalism have overwhelmed basic logic.

That is why I have come to believe that we are in for a decade's worth of pain and upset and changing mores and expectations. That, and gerrymandering, which warps our representation and which only happens every ten years. 

I am constantly surprised at how many times life comes down to accurately assessing cause and effect. 

I am hopeful that the new infrastructure money will make a difference for decades to come in our lives, and the Build Back Better bill may improve many lives in this country.

But everything balances on that root cause: the pandemic shut down the world and the world is having trouble restarting. I hate to oversimplify, but there it is.

Tamp down the virus. It is the most direct action that will improve lives.