Blue Notes from a Red Zone

Government by the Unbelievers

A lot has been said about the strong ties between the religious faithful and the Republican Party. There has been a strong push to ground our laws and Constitution in the Biblical intrepretations espoused by a narrow slice of the Christian right. Inroads by the morally self-righteous are trending toward the creation of a government by the believers.

While James Dobson is welcome to disagree with me, I don't think this movement will result in a theocracy. Even the most conservative courts balk at the complete disintegration of the wall between church and state, and the public is getting tired of all the selective Bible-thumping. If we are to be Christian, surely providing a safety net to our most vulnerable citizens has to be in there somewhere. The majority of citizens are not lined up in support of programs that cut the supports for children in need and students trying to get a college education.

Unfortunately, we may come a lot closer to destroying social programs than even our Republican Congress, state legislature and court systems would take us. The power grab by the executive branches of both our nation and state has extended beyond warrantless surveillance programs and illegal camps for "detainees" both in Cuba and in Eastern Europe. Those placed in charge of domestic programs have been equally effective in sabotaging the will of the people as expressed in Congressional laws and budgets.

Bloggers and pundits have occasionally disected George Bush's appointments within such agencies as Homeland Security, Department of the Interior, Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration (and a long list of others). Such positions are invariably filled by people who have either relentlessly campaigned for the destruction of these departments, or whose incompetence ensures that these agencies will function poorly, if at all.

Those of us in the trenches of social services know that it goes much deeper than that. Both national and Florida Bush administrations have a deep antipathy toward helping anyone but multi-millionaires, and their appetite for eliminating assistance to the indigent and struggling members of society goes beyond what even the ultra-right wing Congressmen and legislators can bring themselves to accomplish.

So they use their administrative powers to override budget allocations and popular programs. Subsidized child care is one example. Most Americans believe it is in the best interest of the country to provide quality child care for parents who work in minimum-wage jobs. Done correctly, subsidized child care could expose children to ideas, vocabularies and concepts that they are not likely to witness in families hounded by financial and social stress. These programs could hold the answer to breaking generational cycles of poverty and despair.

However, they are not functioning in this manner. For one thing, neither Congress nor state legislators will allocate sufficient funds for child care workers to receive anything above minimum wage, or get benefits other than FICA. Thus, our child care workers are drawn from the same class of undereducated, stressed members of society as the children they serve. Turnover is horrendous, as staff workers leave as soon as they can get a better-paying job at the local fast-food burger emporium. Child care works when children are exposed to stable caregivers who choose their careers rather than land in them by default. We are a long way from that goal, and pulling further away by the day.

But this state of affairs is not eviscerating subsidized child care programs fast enough, so our state government has moved to speed the process. The Orwellian double speak by which this is being done rivals the brilliance of the Clean Air and Healthy Forest Acts. In our case, we have moved toward "local control" of subsidized child care programs by setting up an extra management layer (whose control of child care dollars and direction is tightly regimented), without increasing the funds necessary to pay for the additional overhead. Then we renamed the program, first as "school readiness" and then as "early learning," and embraced the rhetoric of demanding quality and accountability to ensure that our little ones were receiving the proper attention and care.

No one could ever possibly object to quality and accountability in programs serving small children. But the rhetoric and the administrative regulations are not really designed to improve quality and accountability. Instead, they are set up to do the following:

1) Set up programs for failure, by demanding outcomes impossible to achieve or measure. For instance, local coalitions must demonstrate that all dollars spent result in improved outcomes for children. That sounds terrific, but exactly how does one do this? Coalitions are mandated to provide training for child caregivers. It is not enough to prove that the caregivers know more about each subject area when they leave as they did when they came in; they have to prove they applied the knowledge learned and that this had a measurable effect on the individual children in their care. Major universities with enormous research grants have struggled with this issue. Local coalitions with no resources cannot possibly measure such intangibles.

2) Insist that all child caregivers assess enrolled children as to strengths and weaknesses in school readiness at least twice a year. These assessments cannot be checklists, but must be exhaustive and thorough. Again, this is a great idea, but the recommended assessments have proven difficult for providers in college settings to perform adequately. Not many child care centers are staffed with college graduates looking to make $6.50 an hour. Further, these assessments must be compiled and used to direct future child care iniatives. Naturally, there is no funding for this either.

3) Require that Coalitions spend 4% of their overall dollars on quality initiatives, while serving ever increasing numbers of children with the same total dollar amount as was appropriated five years ago. Thus, the pressure on wages is ever downward, and the ability to turn even a modest profit on child care is restricted even further. Quality depends less on the number of computers in a toddler classroom, and more on the nurturing and creative capacity of the caregiver.

As in the case of the No Child Left Behind Act, providers who cannot meet ever more stringent and unfunded mandates are penalized through even greater reductions in available resources.

The same basic premise underlies the administration of every social service program I touch. The national government pledges to reduce homelessness, and does so by redefining homelessness to discount the majority of those who are living on the streets (you would be surprised to know that homeless families are not homeless according to the federal definition, because they are accompanied). More people, and particularly children, are deemed ineligible for Medicaid every year. Targets for mental health programs are set at insanely (pun intended) high levels, while the funding for services is ever more constricted.

Thus, the movement to eliminate the social safety net goes on under the radar, but is relentless for all that. It is time to acknowledge what happens when government is administered by the very people who don't believe in it at all, but rather consider it an opportunity to plunder by the well-to-do and well-connected. We pass on deficits to future generations, while ensuring they lack the preparation and skills necessary to handle the debt load.

Government by religious believers is problematic. Government by unbelievers is devastating.

posted by Lenore Wilson @ 9:56 AM