The transformation of Gail Collins into a latter day, New York based Molly Ivins is somehow sad to watch. I think Gail Collins was doing such a nice job of being Gail Collins – a savvy, feminist New Yorker with just a hint of jaded cynicism – that it’s near painful to watch her try and replicate Molly Ivins, and her personally brilliant style of sugar tipped, poisonous sarcasm. The difference may seem nuanced, but Southerners, really, have cornered the market on seeming super nice while in fact being extra super bitchy.
In all of this, I blame Rachel Maddow: the more Collins becomes part of Maddow’s rotating cast of snarky columnists who share her darkly sarcastic take on the day’s events (It’s already ruined Chris Hayes and Gene Robinson, among others), the more her writing gets infected with trendy catchphrases (Maddow may well be the triumph of the Brooklyn Hipster on cable TV news), and the less Collins actually works to tether her otherwise trenchant commentary to deeper insights about the issues of the day.
There’s a string of recent NY Times columns to illustrate this, but let’s just take yesterday’s as the most recent. In it, Collins bemoans a generalized trend of increasingly turning over public education functions to private businesses – from for-profit colleges to charter school management firms, to teach certification enterprises – to make a case that this is proof that Republicans are terrible and education should be left to… well, Democrats. And I mention Ivins, because one of Collins key examples, and not isolated, is a long anecdote about for-profit teacher certification in Texas.
(This is probably as good a time as any to note that, since the New York Times has instituted that bizarre paywall scheme where you can only see a small number of articles for free in a month, I will no longer link to the Times. First, it’s a waste of my limited free article cache to look for article links; and second, clicking through without realizing it’s the Times wastes yours. If nothing else, I stand for the notion that newspaper articles should run free on the internet.)
Ivins, of course, was renowned for being an arch Texas liberal who made mincemeat of the failures and foibles of the Texas legislature, itself a spectacular, scandalous enterprise full of big characters and legendary outrageousness. And while that’s kind of similar to the amazingly dysfunctional mess-ups of the New York state legislature in Albany, it’s also very different. Collins has a finely honed sense of how to convey the mix of hopelessness and squalid decay of Albany and how it eats nearly every good thing and person put into it… but trying to pin her own snark onto Texas comes off – as it should – as condescending, a kind of northeastern class superiority that tends to undermine her sarcasm as she deploys it.
There’s a lot of attention on education at this moment – a symptom, I suspect, of the painful choices local governments have to make as our current economic realities dictate. Charter schools, teachers unions and pensions, vouchers for private schools… all of these issues stem, primarily from the reality that local governments can’t afford business as usual approaches to education spending. And along with for-profit colleges, the choices we are having to make, as parents, students, and members of our communities, are changing the nature of American education. It’s fair, I suppose, to bemoan the changes and note their negative impacts. But, reading between the lines of Collins’ dark cynicism, the alternatives are almost nonexistent. It’s basically “let’s not change anything, because the alternative are these terrible ideas that are terrible, in many ways, because conservatives like them.” It’s just not an answer.
I’m not trying to play devil’s advocate here and say that for-profit companies represent a potential positive development in education; my opposition is a combination of my Mom’s sense that things like people’s health and education should probably not be run for a profit… but also my own sense that, in fact, education is not a profitable enterprise, no matter how you try and provide it. The for-profit technical colleges may make money, but there’s a reason that the training they produce is held to a lower standard than that of not for profit schools. There’s also a reason that such options are proliferating, having everything to do with a fetishized notion that a “college degree” somehow makes a better, more employable person… and everything to do with an economic reality that training, say, to be a nurse or even a nurse’s aide, will at least get a job that pays the bills.
This new, Ivinized and Maddow-ish version of Gail Collins can, easily, unload her sarcastic venom on the various, crazy details of education policy in various localities… but the larger problem we have is the kind of thing I think a savvy New Yorker with vast experience and a jaded eye could inject some real insight: Charter schools and vouchers and all the rest are really details in an education debate about something very basic. Either we commit to a system of public education for children – and frankly, we don’t really have any serious alternative to it – and spend the money for it, or we don’t. Either way, there will no clear cost-benefit analysis that will prove we did the right thing. Either way… there isn’t really a joke to be told.
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