This task is based on reading selection A, "The Community as Commodity" by Robert Reich, which you were given to read and study in advance and on Reading Selection B, "Engagement and Detachment: Getting Involved" by Philip Slater. The readings are printed below. Read "Engagement and Detachment" and review "The Community as Commodity" in light of the writing assignment, which is printed following Reading Selection B below.

Reading Selection A

(From The Future of Success by Robert Reich, copyright © 2000 by Robert B. Reich. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.)

UNCLE BILLY [emotionally, at breakingpoint]: Mary did it, George! Mary did it! She told a few people you were in trouble and they scattered all over town collecting money. They didn't ask any questions—just said: "If George is in trouble—count on me." You never saw anything like it.

-It's a Wonderful Life, screenplay, 1946

      THE FINAL CONSEQUENCE of the emerging economy for our personal lives concerns the communities we inhabit. Communities used to pick up where families left off. Home schooling gave way to the local public school; the very sick moved from home to the local hospital; libraries and playgrounds provided access to expensive facilities few families could afford on their own. Think of a "community," and you're likely to picture a place where people look after one another—a traditional neighborhood, church, voluntary association, New England town meeting, frontier barn-raising, quilting bee, volunteer fire department, charity supper. The last scene in Frank Capra's 1946 movie It's a Wonderful Life typifies the American ideal: just as George (Jimmy Stewart) is about to give up in despair, he finds he can count on his neighbors' generosity and goodness, as they have always counted on his. They're bound together in common cause and friendship.
      Contrast this imagery to a more recently heard lament: Americans lack community. We're no longer joiners. We don't know the people next door. We "bowl alone."¹ Since most of us are working harder and selling ourselves with ever-greater gusto, no one should be surprised if we have less energy to spend with our neighbors.
      But the view that we're no longer joining with others is not quite correct, and it fails to account for the most important aspect of what's happening. We're still joining together—for child care, elder care, schools, health care, insurance, health clubs, investment clubs, buying clubs, recreational facilities, private security guards, and everything else that's too expensive to purchase alone. But we're not joining as participants; we're joining as consumers. We're pooling our financial resources to get the best deal.
      The same advances in communication, transportation, and information technologies that are giving us wider choices of products and investments are giving us wider choices of whom to join and for what purpose. And as with other facets of our new lives, we can abandon the community we choose almost instantly and switch to another in pursuit of an even better deal. Like personal attention, communities are becoming marketable goods. We get what we pay for, and we pay not a penny more than necessary for what we get.

New Groups
      Through most of human history, community members didn't have much choice about whom they joined. They were born into their communities and usually died in the same ones. Some notably broke with theirs or were banished, but these partings were rare or traumatic. Even well into the industrial age, most people still congregated within extended families and clans that gave definition to city neighborhoods. Members of these communities stayed put for at least a generation or two.
      These communities provided their members some security and care. Yet they often did so at the price of boredom and stifled opportunity. One of history's crowning achievements has been to give people a choice of community. An unprecedented share of Americans (and citizens of other modern nations) now enjoy the freedom to escape the communities they were born into. They can choose whom they join with, and then switch to another group if they wish—another residential community, spa, health plan, child-care center. They can abandon their cyber-communities with a click. As choice replaces random fate, surely community life will be richer, more harmonious, and happier. How could it be otherwise?
      For one thing, membership in the older communities extended to many facets of a member's life. There were many different arrangements, of course, but mutual obligations and benefits tended to come in a big bundle: production, defense, care, nourishment, parenting, entertainment, and spirituality. As a participant, you contributed no less to the bundle than was expected of you, and extracted no more than you were expected to take. Clan members produced for the clan and took care of one another's children, sick, or elderly.
      By contrast, the new communities offer highly specific benefits. You pick a community for exactly what you want from it. As with other aspects of your new life, you shop for the best community you can afford. Because exit is so easy and the benefits are so targeted, these new communities don't require nearly as much commitment as the old did, nor do they offer the same security to members who might need to depend on one another in a pinch. Sure, you develop friends in a childcare group, but you don't have to reveal as much about yourself along the way, and you can end the friendship instantly, as can they.
      Here's the real catch. Given the range of choice and ease of switching, we're sorting ourselves into communities of people with roughly the same incomes, the same abilities, the same risks, and the same needs. Where we live has more to do with how much we earn than ever before. It's Vail and Greenwich versus the communities who attend to them—but on a much larger scale. People who are most buffeted by the new economy—whose incomes have eroded the most, whose earnings are the most precarious—are ending up together in the same poor communities.² Their schools are among the worst. They have less medical attention. Their insurance is more costly. Even when they pool what they can afford, the parents of toddlers still can't raise enough for good-quality day care. This sorting process started years ago, but it's become far more efficient, just when the people who are being sorted away into neglected communities need help the most.

The Sorting Mechanism
      To understand what is taking place, you have to understand the sorting mechanism. All other things being equal, someone who buys into a community wants the highest return on his or her investment—the best value, best service, most enjoyable and stimulating peers, largest amount of prestige their money will buy. Those already in likewise want the highest return on every new member—people who will contribute as much as if not more than they, and who make minimum demands on the common pool of resources. Unless your motive is charitable, there's no sense joining a community composed of a lot of people who are more costly and needy than you, because you'll end up subsidizing them. And it's irrational for a group to go out of its way to attract members who will be a drain on it, or to provide benefits that will likely attract such people.
      When a friend recently landed a job at the University of California at Los Angeles and his wife got a job in a financial firm in downtown Los Angeles, the two of them toured many different communities within a fifty-minute commute for both in order to find a good place to live. After they narrowed their pick of community, they examined a variety of condominiums and cooperatives. They finally settled on the best deal they could afford—within a condominium complex possessing its own security guards, maintenance crew, modest recreation facility, and even broadband Internet connection, in a neighborhood that was safe and attractive and contained a good elementary school for their daughter. In making their decision, they naturally considered the price of the condominium and the monthly fee that went along with it, as well as local taxes. They didn't consciously seek to live in a community containing few poor people whose children would need extra instruction in school and whose overall family needs would require more social services and hence higher local taxes to pay for them. And they didn't intentionally choose a condominium complex whose price would screen out poorer people with larger families that might use up more of the common amenities. They simply tried to find the best deal for their money. They had a lot of information and a wide array of choices (townships with different tax bases, private residential communities with different monthly fees).
      The wider the choice and the greater the ease of switching to something better, the more efficient the sorting mechanism becomes. Individuals try to get into groups offering them the best deals—not only the best cities or townships and the best private residential communities they can afford, but also the best universities, primary and secondary schools, child-care centers, nursing homes and elder-care centers, insurance pools, professional partnerships, and companies. And such groups compete to attract the most desirable members—those who can contribute the most and demand the least. As a result, the most desirable end up clustering together, sometimes nationwide, even worldwide. And with ever-greater efficiency, they exclude those who are less valuable or more needy. The next most desirable cluster together as well, and exclude those who are more costly than they. And so on, down the line.
      I've made it sound like a cold calculation--colder and more calculating than it usually is—in order to reveal a logic that's just under the surface of society, and likely to become ever more apparent as choices widen and information improves, and it becomes easier to switch to better deals. Few people employ the sorting mechanism consciously. It is, rather, the consequence of a large number of rational personal decisions.

Residential Sorting
      Begin with the decision my friend and his wife made about where to live. In a world of wider choices and easier switches, more people like them are making such decisions according to how much they can get for their money, and implicitly choosing not to subsidize people who are likely to contribute less to, or use up a lot more of, common resources. As residential communities have become commodities—marketed, evaluated, and purchased like any other—it's easier for buyers to get just what they want. And sellers have stronger incentives to offer just such deals.
      Local services in private residential communities—the fastest-growing part of the US housing market-are supported by membership dues. Such services in exclusive public townships, like Vail or Greenwich, are financed by local property taxes. But private or public, the sorting mechanism is essentially the same. Private residential communities exclude large families that need a lot of schools and social services, and whose children may be noisy or engage in petty crime, by charging hefty prices for homes and high membership fees and by strictly limiting the number of bedrooms in each unit. Upscale townships do it by requiring two- to four-acre plots for each home and prohibiting multifamily housing. Despite Vail's labor shortage, its residents don't want low-income housing that might threaten their property values. The only affordable housing that hasn't drawn complaints is situated in an old gravel quarry on a flood plain, forty-five miles away.³
      "Citizens' movements" against state and local taxes have been spearheaded by private homeowner associations whose members see no reason why they should pay to support families outside the gates when members are getting everything they need inside, through their dues. In 1990, the New Jersey legislature defused one such revolt by agreeing to reimburse residents of private communities the taxes paid for public trash collection, snow removal, street lighting, and other public amenities because those residents were already paying for them privately. In other words, homeowners would pay only for what they got and no longer subsidize other communities needing more.
      Depending on which is the more efficient means of sorting, private residential communities can morph into public townships, and vice versa. On March 24, 1999, the Leisure World retirement village in Orange County transformed itself from a gated community into one of California's newest municipalities: Laguna Woods, whose average citizen is seventy-seven years old. The change allows residents to keep more of their tax dollars for themselves, paying only for the swimming pools, tennis courts, riding stables, and lawn care within the new city's boundaries rather than spending money on schools and social services for children in the rest of the county.
      I once described this as the "secession of the successful," but in recent years the sorting mechanism has extended further down the economic ladder. As the proportion of married-with-children households continues to shrink and that of elders rises, more school districts contain larger concentrations of older people who vote for lower taxes and lousy schools rather than the opposite combination. Meanwhile, American cities are creating all manner of "special service" districts for middle-class residents and business owners willing to pay assessments for more trash collection, cleaning, and police—so long as the extra services are performed solely inside the district. Exclusive communities are even becoming exclusively wired. In the not-too-distant future, they'll link all their households, schools, retail stores, and offices to single giant high-speed networks—allowing teachers to communicate more easily with parents, businesses with their employees, and everyone with their town officials.⁴ Gated communities used to be just for the very rich, but now middle-income home buyers want in. In 1970, the nation had more public police officers than private security guards; now it hires three times as many private guards as public ones—in California, four times as many.⁵
      The secession of middle- and lower-middle-income families is also leading America back toward racially segregated neighborhoods. The probability that a black student will have white classmates dropped during the 1990s. You can spot the trend in most of the nation's large metropolitan areas. At the start of the nineties, about 10 percent of Chicago's neighborhoods could still be described as integrated (with black families constituting 10 to 50 percent); by the middle of the decade, less than 3 percent.⁶

School Sorting
      As the stakes in getting a good education continue to rise, parents more aggressively seek the best education they can afford for their children. And the best deals are where other students are at least as intelligent, ambitious, and intellectually stimulating—and less likely to use up the scarce attention of teachers by being troublesome or needing a lot of extra help.
      Peer effects among school-age children are significant—a fact that parents of teenagers will hardly find surprising. High-school students are more likely to go to college when more of their classmates are college-bound.⁷ And whatever their level of ability, students do better in groups more able than they, on average, and worse in groups less able, although the process isn't symmetrical. Students of less ability are helped more by being together in classrooms with students of greater ability than the more able are hurt by being combined with the less.⁸ New evidence strongly suggests that such childhood peer effects extend beyond schools to the communities surrounding them. After a random sample of poor inner-city families received housing vouchers that enabled them to move to higher-income suburbs, their children's behavior improved relative to children in families who wanted the vouchers but lost out in the lottery.⁹
      Here too, the sorting mechanism is becoming far more efficient. Wealthier and more ambitious parents are choosing highly regarded private schools or good public schools in tony suburban communities where other students are likely to exert a positive influence, troublemakers can be easily extruded, and slower learners are quietly isolated. ("Tuition" for a good public school in a wealthy neighborhood is, in effect, included in the purchase price of an upscale home there, and the corresponding property taxes.) Or they choose publicly funded "charter" schools with more leeway than public schools about whom to admit or expel. In most states, charters have little room explicitly to exclude or expel, but they can craft their offerings in such a way as to deter less desired students, for example by failing to offer services for children with learning disabilities or admitting children only from the surrounding upscale neighborhood. (A recent study of charter schools in Michigan found that most of them excluded students who were especially costly to educate, such as those requiring special-education services; charter schools in many of the most affluent school districts refused to accept applicants from outside the district boundaries.)¹⁰
      The same mechanism explains the upsurge of private "parents' foundations" in the wake of court decisions requiring richer school districts to subsidize poorer ones. Rather than pay extra taxes, parents are quietly shifting their support to these charitable enterprises, thereby keeping more of their money in the home district. Already about 12 percent of the more than 14,000 school districts across America are funded in part by such foundations,¹¹ paying for everything from a new school auditorium (Bowie, Maryland) to a high-tech weather station and language-arts program (Newton, Massachusetts).¹² "Parents' foundations," observed the Wall Street Journal, "are visible evidence of parents' efforts to reconnect their money to their kids."¹³ And not, it should have been noted, to kids who are needier and more costly.
      As a result of all this sorting, poorer children who require a lot of attention from good teachers are increasingly bunched together with other poorer children who also need a lot, within schools that have relatively few resources to begin with.¹⁴ It shouldn't be surprising that parents in poor communities tend to favor school vouchers, because vouchers at least give them a means of separating their children from troublemakers who use up even more of the scarce time and attention of teachers, and who exert the worst influence on their own kids. Schools in a voucher system are freer to expel children who are particularly unruly. Parochial schools have always had that option, which partly explains why poor kids who attend them do better on standardized tests than poor kids in the public schools. The aggressive use of "zero tolerance" codes of school behavior makes the extrusion of troublesome children all the more common. Where do all these children go? They're bunched together at the bottom of the entire educational system in schools that are essentially custodial institutions. If the children are too unruly even for these precincts, they may end up in juvenile detention centers. The sorting mechanism is complete.
      No one designed the educational system this way. Well-meaning parents think of their reliance on private schools, good public schools in upscale communities, charter schools, local foundations, or school vouchers as means of obtaining as good an education as they can afford for their kids—not as means of excluding children more costly to educate than their own. But in fact, these individual decisions add up to a large-scale sorting mechanism. And once under way, the mechanism has its own momentum—as is strikingly clear in California, which in the 1960s had been among the heaviest spenders on public education per pupil and had one of the best school systems, yet now spends among the least and has one of the worst. As residents segregated into richer and poorer communities, the poorer schools began to deteriorate. After Proposition 13 placed a cap on local property tax rates in 1978, and a court decision required rough parity in spending across districts, California moved to pool educational funds statewide—transferring tax dollars from rich towns to poor. This lessened the educational payoff to better-off parents of choosing a wealthier town in which to live, so they began sending their children to private schools and withdrawing their support from the public school system. As a result, overall public spending on education dropped, and almost all public schools began to deteriorate.
      In the emerging economy, success will depend most on talent, ingenuity, the ability to sell oneself, and connections. The quality of a child's early education and the character of the child's community are centrally important in these respects. Yet with ever-increasing efficiency, the sorting mechanism is separating children according to the communities and the schools their parents can best afford. Individual parents are acting rationally, but what's rational for individuals is not necessarily rational for society as a whole. Nor is it the outcome we might choose as citizens concerned for the future of the nation.

University Sorting
      Say you're a bright high-school senior, considering college. Twenty years ago your sights would have been on the best university in your state, perhaps your region. Now you've got far better comparative data about national colleges, starting with U.S. News's ratings and a flood of information over the Internet. Besides, your state university may no longer offer the cheapest deal. State support for higher education is no longer as generous as it used to be (we'll come to the reason later).
      This shift toward a national (and in many respects a global) market in higher education has put all colleges and universities into more direct competition with one another. In order to maintain or enhance their reputations, they've got to attract the smartest young people from around the nation, even the world. They, too, have more and better information about high-school stars. And as competition for these stars intensifies, colleges are offering them more lucrative scholarships.
      Parents of the stars are wising up and conducting bidding wars similar to those conducted by prized employees. Carnegie-Mellon University explicitly encourages star applicants to bring back offers from other colleges so that it can match or surpass them. We'll beat any price! Harvard makes the same offer more delicately, as is Harvard's wont: "We expect that some of our students will have particularly attractive offers from the institutions with new aid programs," it writes its new admits, "and those students should not assume that we will not respond."
      But as a result, there's less scholarship aid left over for needier students. "Need-blind admissions"—by which universities admitted applicants according to merit, and made sure that anyone who got through the door received enough financial help to stay—is fast disappearing. More of the scholarship aid is now going to the best and brightest. "It used to be, providing aid was a charitable operation," says Michael S. McPherson, president of Macalester College in St. Paul. "Now, it's an investment, like brand management."¹⁵
      This means that students who are especially talented, well organized, and motivated are clustering more than ever together in the same prestigious universities. Their chances of doing well in life are already high before entering college. The clustering further bolsters their prospects of success. Not only are their talents and ambitions mutually reinforcing, but their wealth of contacts and connections provide the whole group with access to even better job opportunities. And as they cluster together, the prestige of their university brand grows steadily higher. Young people who are somewhat less disciplined, motivated, or capable of doing well on standardized exams attend "second-tier" universities, and their experience reinforces those almost-but-not-quite-good-enough inclinations and connections. And so on down the line. (However, university rankings don't perfectly correlate with the talent found in any given institution of higher education. And some of the best small universities are establishing reputations for excellence in particular niches, to which world-class faculty and students are attracted.)
      The trend has been gathering momentum for several years. What's new is the efficiency of the sorting mechanism. Fiercer competition on both sides—prospective students seeking admission to the best universities, and the universities seeking out the best students—is resulting in an ever-greater concentration of talents and abilities. This helps explain why inequality of earnings is rising even among college graduates.¹⁶

Risk Sorting
      One traditional function of a community was to spread the risk of misfortune among its members. All contributed against the possibility that any single one might be in particular need. By the early decades of the twentieth century, it was assumed that nations as a whole should provide all their people with social insurance. Every American citizen would "receive old-age benefits direct from the insurance system to which he will belong all his life," said Franklin D. Roosevelt of the system he was signing into law. "If he is out of work, he gets a benefit. If he is sick or crippled, he gets a benefit."¹⁷
      But the sorting mechanism is eroding social insurance. To understand why, you need to understand two basic things about your incentive to insure yourself and your family: First, the reason you buy insurance—either privately, from an insurance company, or publicly, through tax payments to the government—is that you don't know whether or how much you'll be needing it. If you knew, it wouldn't be insurance; it would simply be the specific cost of whatever you anticipated needing, like a new car every five years. Second, the amount you actually pay to be insured—your premium or your tax payment to cover the cost of the insurance—corresponds to the average riskiness of everyone within the group to be insured. As long as every group reflects roughly the same mix of more or less risky individuals, or the group is a national risk pool like Medicare or Social Security, the cost to you is about the same. You can't get a better deal, so you have no incentive to shop for one. Inevitably, then, people on whom fortune smiles end up subsidizing the people on whom fortune scowls. To the extent that fate is random, this seems only fair.
      Absent strong social bonds, your incentive to contribute to an insurance pool will erode if you believe the likelihood that you'll need to draw from it is significantly less than the likelihood someone else will. "Welfare," as originally conceived in FDR's plan of social insurance, was for mothers whose income-producing husbands had died. As such it was popular, because the misfortune could happen to almost any family. But when welfare began to be seen as income support for unmarried mothers, a large portion of whom were black, the program no longer seemed like insurance. It looked more like a handout to the "undeserving" poor—who appeared even less deserving as more married mothers of young children had to get jobs. Political support for welfare dried up, and welfare shriveled.
      Broad-based social insurance programs remain popular with the elderly (witness the quadrennial political grandstanding about Medicare and Social Security), but the wealthier and healthier are having second thoughts. Many are beginning to see that they can get a better deal by joining together and leaving the poorer and sicker behind.
      Selfishness isn't the new force at work here. It's technology, which is revealing more about one's riskiness. For example, the genetic codes carried within your cells can reveal the odds that you'll develop any number of life- threatening diseases. Your family history—how long your parents and grandparents lived, and what they died of—reveals more information. And the way you live your life—the kind and amounts of food you ingest, how active you are, where you live, your income, your education, your personal habits and addictions—can be analyzed to provide still more specific information on the odds that you'll get sick, have an accident, or otherwise invite misfortune. In short, it's no longer the case that you and the community that insures you are in the dark about your chances of needing to be bailed out. The odds can be known with increasing precision.
      The sorting mechanism for insurance operates exactly as it does with social services and education: The best deal is one where your dollars don't subsidize anyone riskier than you. Americans spend tens of billions of dollars a year insuring their health and their lives in the private insurance market. Insurers who compete for this business have every incentive to "cherry pick," pursuing people with lower risks and charging them lower premiums. As more and better information becomes available, such people—who tend to eat better, get better medical treatment, have higher incomes and better educations—will be charged progressively less; people with higher risks—the converse in every respect—will pay more, and the gap in price will widen.
      The sorting mechanism is already slicing up private health insurance. Health maintenance organizations (HMOs) actively market themselves in wealthier suburbs and to high-paying companies whose employees are also less likely to need a lot of costly medical care. Employers, meanwhile, are narrowing or dropping coverage of their lower-paid and more risky employees even as they enhance coverage for their most valuable.

Reprise: The Sorted Community
      As a result of these maneuvers, the burden of paying for the things that the less fortunate members of every society most need is being shifted more squarely onto them. This is the ultimate consequence of the sorting mechanism.
      People with the greatest bargaining power—able to strike the best deals for schools, universities, child care, health care, insurance, taxes, returns on investments—are already the best off. They're likely to be well educated (or have well-educated parents), healthy, wealthy, and economically secure. Those with the least bargaining power--0n whom the burdens of economic change are falling the heaviest—must settle for the poorest schools, little or no access to universities, minimal or no child care, poor or no health care, and no insurance against the vagaries of the market. And as they become more socially isolated, they also lose connection to a wider economy that depends ever more on connections. The bargaining power of everyone between these extremes is also inversely related to their need.
      No one designed the system this way, nor intended this result. It's the product of a large number of separate decisions by individuals seeking to do the best for themselves and their loved ones. It doesn't suggest that people who are wealthier and more fortunate have become less charitable toward people who have less. The better off may sincerely want to help those who are falling behind. Many contribute to a host of worthy causes. They may in fact disapprove of the sorting that's occurring, to the extent they are aware of it. But the sorting itself may reduce their awareness of how others live who are less fortunate than they. And even if they are fully aware, the sorting mechanism has raised the stakes. For them to act on their own to join a poorer community would require them to sacrifice comfortable neighborhoods, good schools, access to excellent universities, high-quality health care and child care, valuable connections, and all the rest of the benefits that come from belonging to the more exclusive community. A decent society should not have to rely on saintliness.
      The sorting mechanism further increases the pressure to earn as high an income as is possible. High incomes buy you and your family memberships in excellent communities. Low incomes force you to reside in poor communities with inadequate schools, few parks or playgrounds, unsafe streets, and a host of social problems. As the sorting mechanism becomes more efficient, the benefits of membership in a desirable community and the costs of having to settle in an undesirable one diverge more sharply, further raising the stakes.
      This is not the end of our story. We are not slaves to present trends, nor captives of the sorting mechanism. We can, if we want, assert that our mutual obligations as citizens extend beyond our economic usefulness to one another, and reorganize ourselves accordingly. In this, as in other aspects of the new economy, we have choices.

Notes
¹ For evidence that Americans are joining up less, see Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone (New York: Simon & Shuster, 2000).
² For evidence that Americans are segregating more by income, see Paul Jargowsky, Poverty and Place: Ghettos, Barrios, and the American City (New York: Russell Sage, 1997).
³ James Brooke, "Cry of Wealthy in Vail: Not in Our Playground!" New York Times, November 5, 1998, p. A18.
⁴ For one example of this already occurring, see Laurie Flynn, "Georgia City Putting Entire Community Online," New York Times, March 17, 2000, p. C4.
⁵ "Policing for Profit: Welcome to the New World of Private Security," The Economist, April 19, 1997, pp. 21-4.
⁶ On the situation in Chicago, see Bill Dedman, "For Black Home Buyers, a Boomerang," New York Times, February 13, 1999, p. A15.
⁷ Xianglei Chen, "Students' Peer Groups in High School: The Pattern and Relationship to Education Outcomes," U .S. Department of Education, Office of Educational Research and Improvement, National Center for Educational Statistics, 1997, 1998. On economic mobility as it relates to education, see George I. Orjas, "Intellectual Capital and Intergenerational Mobility," Quarterly Journal of Economics (1992), vol. 1, p. 107.
⁸ D.J. Robertson and J.S.V. Symons, "Do Peer Groups Matter?" Centre for Economic Performance, London School of Economics, Discussion Paper, 1996.
⁹ L. Katz, J. King, and J. Liebman, "Moving Opportunity in Boston: Early Impacts of a Housing Mobility Program," Harvard University, September 1999.
¹⁰ Cited in Tamar Lewin, "In Michigan, School Choice Weeds Out Costlier Students," New York Times, October 26, 1999. p. A14.
¹¹ Data on school districts funded in part by private foundations are available from U.S. Department of Education, Office of Educational Research and Improvement, National Center for Educational Statistics.
¹² "Highlights," Newton Schools Foundation, vol.13, no. 1 (Fall 1999).
¹³ Editorial page, August 24, 1998, p. A12.
¹⁴ Despite efforts by many states to better equalize school funding, differences still exist. Public school expenditures per pupil (in 1996 constant dollars) in school year 1992-1993 (the most recent date for which such data are available) for districts in which median household income was less than $20,000 was $4,237; in districts where the median household income was $35,000 or more, it was $6,661; among the wealthiest school districts, expenditure per pupil ranges up to $9,500. See U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, "National Public Education Financial Survey," yearly issues. See also U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, The Condition of Education (1997).
¹⁵ Quoted in Michael Janofsky, "Financial Aid Bargaining Drives Admissions Frenzy," New York Times, April 5, 1999, p. A12.
¹⁶ Caroline Hoxby and B. Terry, "Explaining Rising Income and Wage Inequality Among the College-Educated" (Cambridge, Mass.: National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper Series, No. 6873, 1999).
¹⁷ Quoted in Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew (New York: Viking, 1946), pp. 282-3.

Reading Selection B

      People in the United States have a compulsive tendency to avoid confronting chronic social problems. This tendency often comes as a surprise to foreigners, who think of Americans as pragmatic and down-to-earth. But trying to solve a long-range social problem with a short-run solution—a down-to-earth result, surely--can hardly be considered practical when it aggravates the problem, as it almost always does. American pragmatism is deeply irrational in this respect, and in our hearts we've always known it. One of the favorite themes of American cartoonists is the man who paints himself into a comer, saws off the limb he's sitting on, or runs out of space on the sign he's printing. The scientist of horror films, whose experiments lead to disastrously unforeseen consequences, is a more nervous version of this same awareness that the most future-oriented nation in the world shows a deep incapacity to plan ahead. We are, as a people, perturbed by our inability to anticipate the consequences of our acts, but we still wait optimistically for some magic telegram, informing us that the tangled skein of misery and self—deception into which we have woven ourselves has vanished in the night. Each month popular magazines regale their readers with such telegrams: announcing that our transportation crisis will be solved by a bigger plane or a wider road, poverty with a law, urban violence with a new weapon, racism with a goodwill gesture. Foreigners are surprised when Americans exhibit this kind of naivete and/or cynicism about social problems—they don't realize that no matter what realism we may display in technical areas, our approach to social issues inevitably falls back on a cinematic tradition in which social problems are resolved by a gesture.
      When a social problem persists (as they always do), those who call attention to its continued presence are accused of "going too far" and "causing the pendulum to swing the other way." We can make war on poverty but shrink from the extensive changes required to end it. Once a law is passed, a top commission set up, a study made, a report written, the problem is expected to have been "wiped out" or "mopped up." The terminological similarity between military actions abroad and "crash programs" at home reveals a psychological one. Our approach to transportation problems has had the effect of making it easier and easier to travel to more and more places that have become less and less worth driving to. Asking us to consider the manifold consequences of chopping down a forest, draining a swamp, spraying a field with poison, making it easier to drive into an already crowded city, or selling deadly weapons to everyone who wants them arouses in us the same impatience as a chess problem would in a hyperactive six-year-old.
      The avoiding tendency lies at the very root of American character. This nation was settled and continually repopulated by people who were not personally successful in confronting the social conditions in their mother country, but fled in the hope of a better life. By a kind of natural selection, America was disproportionately populated with a certain kind of person.
      In the past we've always stressed the positive side of this selection, implying that America thereby found itself blessed with an unusual number of energetic, mobile, ambitious, daring, and optimistic persons. Now there's no reason to deny that there were differences between those who chose to come and those who chose to stay, nor that these differences must have reproduced themselves in social institutions. But very little attention has been paid to the negative side of the selection. If we gained the energetic and daring, we also gained the lion's share of the rootless, the unscrupulous, those who valued money over relationships, and those who put self-aggrandizement ahead of love and loyalty. And most of all, we gained an undue proportion of persons who, when faced with a difficult situation, tended to chuck the whole thing and flee to a new environment. Escaping, evading, and avoiding are responses which lie at the base of much that is peculiarly American—the suburb, the automobile, the self-service store, and so on.
      These responses also contribute to the appalling discrepancy between our wealth and our treatment of those who cannot adequately care for themselves. In a cooperative, stable society, aged, infirm, or psychotic persons can he absorbed by the local community, which knows and understands them. They present a familiar difficulty that can be confronted daily and directly. This situation cannot be reproduced in our society today—the same burden must be carried by a small, isolated, mobile family unit that is not really equipped for it.
      But if we are forced to incarcerate those who can't function independently in our society, we ought at least to know what we're doing when we do it. The institutions we provide for those who cannot care for themselves are human garbage heaps—they both result from and reinforce our tendency to avoid confronting social and interpersonal problems. They make life "easier" for the rest of society, just like the automobile. And just as we find ourselves devising ridiculous exercises to counteract the harmful effects of our dependence upon the automobile, so the "ease" of our social technology makes us bored, flabby, and insensitive, and our lives empty and mechanical.

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