A “Baker’s Dozen” Reforms for Teaching and Parenting
This year my second and youngest child heads to college. 2023 also marks two decades since I moved to Sacramento from New York City, a decision that precipitated, domino-like, a series of other choices that led me from a career focused on ideas and public policy to a career focused on care and development for youth, first as a stay-at-home father and eventually as a public school teacher.
I always wanted children—in fact I remember telling my wife when we were first dating that I wanted five (to her credit she didn’t run away in terror). But even with my big talk I never quite imagined that my personal and professional life would ever be quite so centered around the work of youth development. The work has been rewarding and I think I have done well by the children, both at home and to this day at school.
But the work has also been very difficult, so much so that I feel compelled to turn my training as a writer and policy analyst more frontally to issues around teaching and parenting. This month I will introduce the first in a “baker’s dozen” policy and cultural reforms/proposals. It’s going to be a heterodox list of ideas, some coded as liberal and others as conservative. I’ll let you know at the start that all 13 ideas derive from the moral perspective that all kids deserve devoted family support and a good education. Beyond that, you’ll have to wait to be either inspired or provoked.
“Baker’s Dozen” Reform One: Gender Shouldn’t Define Access to the Playgroup
I have the world’s best mom, and I hope you do too. My mother, now well into her eighties, is brilliant and beautiful and selfless and stable. Having such a wonderful personal mother has been a source of grace in my life, in the deep sense of freely given and undeserved favor.
Carl Jung, it may be worth noting, identified the mother as the most basic and encompassing of psychic archetypes. Here the famous 20th century psychologist describes the mother archetype as “solicitude and sympathy; the magic authority of the female; the wisdom and spiritual exaltation that transcend reason; any helpful instinct or impulse; all that is benign, all that cherishes and sustains, that fosters growth and fertility.” Importantly, he also goes on to say that the mother archetype comes with a dark side, including “anything that devours, seduces, and poisons.” I just saw Oppenheimer, so I immediately think here of Cillian Murphy injecting cyanide into a green apple with a syringe.
I bring all this up, even though I’m not sure I qualify as even an armchair expert on Jungian psychology, primarily because of Jung’s clause about the “magic authority of the female.” Having worked now for twenty years in female-typed spaces, acting as a stay-at-home parent and as a teacher, I will say that what Jung describes as “magic” is in fact extremely real. Mother authority, as mentioned above, can manifest in the world as a kind of grace, a grace perhaps so fundamental that in its absence society could not continue. But at the same time mother authority, like any other kind of power, can be used to exclude and to suffocate dissent.
I want to, gently and respectfully I hope, bring up a couple of local cases that highlight what I mean. One is a Facebook group known as “East Sac Moms.” This is a private group of around 1,300 members described as “A networking place for Moms of East Sac, McKinley Park, and River Park that focuses on community building.” For those of you who don’t live in Sacramento, “East Sac” is likely the wealthiest and certainly the whitest of the leafy older neighborhoods immediately surrounding downtown and the State Capitol. I’ve lived adjacent to East Sac for 20 years, and we’ve raised our children here.
Under group rules, the Facebook page states in bold that “The Group is for Sacramento Moms only.” It then goes on to state, perhaps just in case the reader was incapable of getting the message, that, “This group is a safe space for moms of Sacramento only. Are you a mom and live in Sacramento? This is the group for you. Not a mom and live outside of Sacramento? This is not your group.”
Since I’m not female, and since my gender apparently excludes me from a certain definition of “safe space,” I’ve never been on East Sac Moms. But I do know that this is a source for babysitting leads. I am told it’s a source for clothes, furniture, and other swag. Presumably the advertising is accurate, and the group is a place for “networking” and “community building”
Here you can no doubt already anticipate where I’m headed, so I am going to anticipate a couple of defensive arguments. Number one: this kind of stuff isn’t that important, right? We’re talking babysitting and yard sales and maybe play dates. Big deal. And number two: what about creating an East Sac Dads group?
To argument number one, I’d say simply that babysitting and play dates matter a ton if your primary role is to take care of children. Gender-based exclusions on such networks, while very likely legal (I am not a lawyer), amount morally to a restraint on trade.
To argument number two, I’d suggest you imagine an “East Sac Businessman’s Club” on Facebook with the following announcement. “This group is a safe space for businessmen of Sacramento only. Are you a businessman living in Sacramento? This is the group for you. Not a man, not in business, or live outside Sacramento? This is not your group.” Now imagine you’re a woman, or perhaps a transgender person, feeling on the outs, and someone told you, “You know, honey, why not just create your own East Sac Businesswomen’s group?”
Each reader would have their own reaction to such a statement, I suppose. But I’ll note parenthetically here that Sacramento’s venerable Sutter Club proudly announces on its club history page that such luminaries as Supreme Court Justices Anthony Kennedy and Earl Warren were once members. Not mentioned is the fact that Kennedy quit his membership in 1980 due to his concern about the exclusion of women as members at the time. Or see here for a much more recent 2017 WBUR Boston piece about Harvard social clubs finally opening their membership to women.
Personally, these are now old issues. It’s been a long time since I was a stay-at-home dad. And I want to say that the River Park Mothers’ Club, a separate and much older organization than the East Sac Moms Facebook group, was indirectly helpful to me when I was at home with two young boys. Shout out in particular to Karen and Kim and Lynette for the playgroup—it meant a lot back then to be included.
But the real point is that access to something as fundamental as a playgroup had to come indirectly through my wife. I suspect that Nina Warren, Earl Warren’s wife, was sometimes included at Sutter Club social gatherings back in the 1950s. But access to key social networks through one’s husband wasn’t enough then, and access through one’s wife isn’t enough now.
I’ll also point out that the Mothers’ Club logo in the photo is curious and revealing. We have a slim young woman in a dress, under a tree on her own with a single toddler. Maybe I am projecting the loneliness I sometimes felt at the same phase in my own life, but it’s a rather lonesome image. Perhaps the protective tree could be interpreted to represent a certain father archetype, though I doubt this is the intent. Certainly the actual father of the child in the picture is absent, either away at work 1950s style, as if the culture had not moved on at all from the time the club was founded, or perhaps is simply out of the labor force, as is increasingly, seemingly inexorably, and in most cases tragically the case for prime working age men. Curiously as well, the young woman in the logo isn’t surrounded by aunties or sisters or grandmothers either, much less childless/childfree girlfriends, much less, if you want to go there, people of nonbinary gender identity. She’s on her own, “You and Me Against the World” style, though presumed to be on the hunt for a narrow cohort of same age, same gender friends who want to “connect through motherhood.”
I don’t want to simply rag on groups like East Sac Moms or the River Park Mothers’ Club. The attacks on “Karens” in the culture have grown too omnipresent and too casually vicious as it is. But I do think women-only institutions and networks connected to parenting—and there are a lot of them out there if you look carefully—need to grow and change. Unless you really think the presence of men is somehow inconsistent with creating safe spaces around small children (and if you do, now we truly have issues), what is the downside to having a parents’ club as opposed to a mothers’ club?
On the other hand, I can certainly see good cultural reasons for single gender voluntary organizations. If that is what you want, moms, why not have a River Park Women’s Club, or perhaps an East Sac Women’s Facebook Group? That way all those aforementioned aunties and sisters and grandmas and girlfriends might get included.
I am very far from a position that’s culturally against parents’ organizations, or women’s organizations. But I think everyone might benefit if women were to ever so slightly loosen their grip on the unaccountable, unnecessarily gender-exclusive power that comes with that beautiful mother archetype I described earlier. This perspective also extends to the K-12 education space, but you will have to wait several posts, dear reader, before I touch on gender issues in the education workforce.
News Digest for July and Early August
Perhaps it goes without saying that the above discussion is clearly within the boundaries of this blog’s “urban prosperity” theme. Nothing is more important than issues around family and education for increasing the possibilities for people to live prosperous lives.
With that said, at the end of this post I want to include a handful of interesting links focused more explicitly on policy. The first three connect to a study on elite college admissions by Raj Chetty, David J. Deming, and John M. Friedman. If you truly want to geek out, here’s a bevy of slides and figures directly published with the study. For a short overview, here’s a link to David Leonhardt’s short article in The New York Times, which includes a chart that went viral labeled “Admissions rates at elite colleges among students with the same test scores.” The chart shows that the very wealthy are more than twice as likely to get into these colleges than their test scores would otherwise indicate. Meanwhile, students from families at between roughly the 70th and 95th percentiles of the income distribution are substantially less likely to gain admission.
Also on the same topic, here’s a link to a fascinating and uncharacteristically open dialogue between journalist Derek Thompson and study co-author Deming. I truly recommend this one, especially for the obvious agreement between both Deming and Thompson that standardized test scores, while imperfect, are in fact more fair as a criteria for admission than most other measures of selection. Thompson and Deming also seem to agree that elite colleges need to expand their enrollment. Amen to this! Personally I would say that the need to expand enrollment is even more acute, and more morally pressing, at high status public universities than at the private colleges covered in the study. I’m thinking of campuses like UCLA, UCB, UCSB, UCI, UCD, and UCSD here in California. Each of these schools, incidentally, is located in a community with a strong NIMBY coalition currently empowered to block needed expansion through the California Environmental Quality Act and other environmental/land use laws.
Drug policy has been a recent preoccupation on this blog. For a link to a compelling recent Washington Post opinion piece by Megan McArdle titled “The Best Answer to the Overdose Crisis Might Surprise You,” click here. I’m not sure if I agree with McArdle on everything she writes, but her article is interesting in that she talks us through an evolving personal perspective. This piece on drug policy in Portugal by Chris Bodenner in The Atlantic picks up on a similar theme, as does this closely related (and as a person who once lived in Oregon rather devastating) piece on drug legalization by Jim Hinsch. More locally, check out this interesting Vicki Gonzalez radio interview with Placer County District Attorney Morgan Gire, who has secured what the interview asserts is the first murder conviction in the state for dealing fentanyl (curiously and significantly, the conviction is for poisoning).
Several posts ago I raised the issue of human trafficking. See this Capitol Public Radio segment for coverage on how the Public Safety Committee in the California Assembly resisted imposing stronger penalties on traffickers, and how Governor Newsom was forced to act as the adult in the room and intervene to help make sure an important bill got passed.
Finally, I’m a big fan of journalist Jerusalem Demsas’ work on housing. See this great recent article, also in The Atlantic, on homelessness in California, and this episode of the Ezra Klein podcast, which features Demsas. (Spoiler alert: California does not have the biggest homeless problem in the nation because people are moving here for the weather!) For a direct link to the academic study on California homelessness through the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative at UC San Francisco that underlies this important reporting, click here.