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Author: Paul Deaton
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Feeding the Hungry – Iowa Style
The United Nations asserted that food production must double by 2050 to meet growing world-wide demand and to combat hunger which affects a billion people who are already here.
The 2009 report explained, “to achieve food security, investment in agricultural research, natural resources, financial services, local infrastructure, market links and safety nets are pivotal. Food prices, already high and volatile, could spike again as droughts, floods and other climate-related events affect harvests.”
In Iowa almost everyone has an opinion on how to feed the world, and there is no denying that the factors listed at the UN are important. There is also a role for increased productivity, measured in food produced per acre, in feeding the world.
To an investor—the kind that derives a living from Wall Street trading—opportunity presents itself. Synthetic biology writer Maxx Chatsko explained on The Motley Fool:
To boost yields and combat pests, farmers will need to increasingly rely on technology ranging from high-yield seeds to agricultural biotechnology to even the Internet of Things.
While progress is being made, consumers in many wealthy nations are demanding that their food be grown using organic farming principles. Some consumers rationalize their purchasing decisions by claiming the health benefits of organic food (which have been thoroughly debunked), the avoidance of health risks associated with genetically modified foods (with which the scientific consensus disagrees), or the more environmentally friendly and sustainable approach to agriculture that organic farming enables.
This chart from Tom Vilsack’s USDA, cited by Chatsko, is a bit misleading:
For anyone who has been in a popular grocery store, box store or warehouse club, the proliferation of organic products is no secret and people are buying them. Growth of this market segment may represent an investment opportunity, or as Chatsko indicated, “the trend in organic food sales hints that opportunity does indeed exist, even if it’s fueled in large part by outsize marketing budgets, a fundamental information gap, or, worst of all, misinformation.” What’s most misleading about the chart is that it is only a market segment, not the global picture. That’s what the UN report was describing.
Local food production doesn’t come up in the UN report or on the Motley Fool analysis, and some of us believe it represents an answer to eliminating hunger. So where is it?
Partly, we are enamored of a few rock star farmers like Joel Salatin. It is hard not to like the stories Salatin tells in books like “Folks, This Ain’t Normal: A Farmer’s Advice for Happier Hens, Healthier People, and a Better World.” If Salatin and his ilk are great promoters of eating “real food,” such punditry doesn’t get to solutions to real problems. Thoughtful nuggets like this one distract us,
The world is awash in food and 50 percent of human food goes to waste because of anything from pernickety consumers, or because a Red Cross truck can’t get through a border. If you and I could figure out how to double food production, there would still be people going hungry for a whole lot of socio-economic issues.
We like Salatin, and some of us are glad he is able to make a living by speaking, farming and writing, but a few rock stars will not feed the world.
The story of Cuba tells a different, and I believe more sustainable story. Cuban agricultural systems were disrupted the end of Soviet support, oil imports particularly, in 1989. Reacting to change in the agricultural system became a national necessity as Cubans literally lost weight due to lack of calories. Cuba went local and semi-organic. Christopher D. Cook is among the most recent to recount Cuba’s story in “Cuba’s Harvest of Surprises.”
Cuba’s farmers shifted to organic fertilizers, traditional crops and animal breeds, diversified farming with crop rotations, and non-toxic pest controls emphasizing the use of beneficial plants and insects. This blend of measures is part of a sustainable-agriculture approach known as agroecology. It’s often described as a promising innovation — which is a little ironic given that it draws on age-old peasant farming practices.
There is a case to be made for peasant agriculture as a way to feed the hungry in a sustainable way. In doing so, there are substantial world-wide obstacles, not the least of which is access to land. In the United States people perceive a return to peasant-style lives as unappealing when they already cannot find time in the day. If Cuba represents a possible solution, it needs an advocate, and I don’t mean U.S. normalization with the island nation or a rock star promoter of it’s semi-organic food system.
There is a growing local food movement in the U.S. and it has had successes and challenges. A lot of folks are entering the local food movement only to find that it is tough to make a living. To clarify, by local food movement I refer to producing consumer goods to support a Community Supported Agriculture project, restaurant, farmers market or other geographically local food sales.
How people access land is a key constraint to entering the local food business. Local food production also relies on cheap labor—barter agreements, volunteers and lowly paid professional staff. Like with so-called traditional farming, success has been elusive and often requires government subsidies or working off the farm to pay basic, year-round living expenses.
Jaclyn Moyer, a Slate writer who operates a 10-acre farm in California, asked some key questions of the often rosy picture painted of small scale, local food producers. “Do you make a living? Can you afford rent, healthcare? Can you pay your labor a living wage?” She answered her own questions, “if the reporter had asked me these questions, I would have said no.”
Global hunger is a real problem, to which “feeding the world,” especially from Iowa, is no solution. Increasing food production is, has been and will remain a key challenge to agriculture as long as the value of a day’s work is eroded by marketplace demands. There is nothing new about that, and the introduction of farm subsidies during the New Deal is rooted in this basic problem with farm life.
There is a lot we can do to alleviate hunger. For urban dwellers, there is a substantial opportunity in food recovery, about which I wrote for the newspaper. Donations of food, money and time to a food bank all produce positive results toward hunger elimination. The use of urban space has potential for local food production. Whether one grows herbs on a window ledge or plants some kale and tomatoes on a few square feet in the backyard, everything helps increase the amount of available food for people who need it. These are small things that can make an impact.
Growing world population is not a new issue, but the limits of our ecosystem to sustain people are becoming increasingly evident. While a row crop farmer may be able to carve out a living by increasing yield or reducing input costs, it isn’t a solution to world hunger. As the UN pointed out, it is about more than productivity. It is about climate change, political issues, finance and land as much as it is about growing food. Until those issues come to be recognized and closer to resolution we can do as many small scale things as we like and people will continue to go hungry.
That’s not to say we shouldn’t do what we can. We should. At the same time, if we don’t accept what the UN has said is the problem, then someone with standing, and less of an axe to grind, should get to work on the issue. Don’t look for a rock star to do it. Hope is the solution lies within each one of us working together.
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Foggy Kitchen Work
What the hell?
The intent was to prepare dinner for my spouse who worked later than me on Saturday. The dish would have onions and tomatoes in it. Those things I knew.
From there the culinary session went into chaos as either I couldn’t make a decision, or more likely, refused to cooperate as I struggled to enter the real world of counter top, sink, stove top and oven. There were knives and heat involved, so it is a miracle the preparation left me unscathed.
It began with an onion that was beginning to sprout.
Onions are a staple in our kitchen, and we can’t grow or barter for enough of them. Having used up the local harvest, we were on our second bag from the warehouse club. Unexpectedly, one sprouted.
Not a catastrophe, and my mind turned toward preparing dishes using onions to eat for dinner and store for later. It would be pizza, chili and/or pasta sauce. That “and/or” became problematic, but no problem with the pizza.
A long-time pizza-maker explained that dough makes the pizza. We like it as thin as possible and the recipe is simple: a cup of warm water, a teaspoon of yeast, a scant teaspoon of sugar, pinch of salt and flour enough to bring the dough together in a sticky, but not too sticky ball. Then into a greased bowl in a warm oven, covered by a dish towel for about an hour. It takes practice and over 40 years, I’ve gotten the knack. So far so good.
What did I do for an hour? Partly I prepared the toppings for the pizza, including caramelizing two large onions seasoned with basil, made eight ounces of sauce, drained sliced Manzanilla olives and opened the bag of shredded mozzarella cheese I bought on closeout from the local grocer on the way home from work. Caramelized onions on pizza was something we discussed, and Saturday was the night to try them.
Using ample bench flour, the risen dough was dumped on the counter, kneaded a second time, then rolled with a pin. For the first time I decided to use parchment paper under the pizza dough to make clean up easier. Initially I hoped to put the pizza-laden parchment directly on the oven rack. I rolled up the flattened dough on the pin and transferred it to the parchment paper, which I laid on a large wooden paddle. The paddle was from the part of the plan where I thought the pizza would go directly on the rack. To call it a plan is not accurate. I transferred the works to a baking sheet.
I docked the dough and spread on a thin coating of olive oil. Next the sauce (seasoned with oregano and the remains of a jar of “Italian seasoning” rescued from our daughter’s Colorado apartment), then olives, then onions, then cheese all spread as evenly as possible.
12-15 minutes at 450 degrees and pizza perfection. If I had left it there, everything would have been fine.
I got out my kitchen-weary Dutch oven to make the chili or pasta sauce, having reduced the plan from “and/or” to “or.” In my mind, I was making both. Making a rough dice of another onion, I covered the bottom of the pan with tomato juice drained from two quarts of diced tomatoes. The idea was to steam fry the onions. As the juice evaporated, I added more. This part went well and the onions softened, becoming translucent. I added two small cans of tomato paste. Whoever invented tomato paste was brilliant as it both thickens and adds a pronounced tomato flavor to any dish.
Here is where things went awry. To season the dish, I added a scant tablespoon of chili powder, some cumin and incorporated everything so I could proceed to the next step. Then I added a heaping teaspoon of basil, which violated some unwritten rule, making the dish neither chili nor pasta sauce. When I seasoned the caramelized onions with basil, while the jar was still in my hand, I unwittingly dumped the rest of it into the nascent chili-pasta sauce. It’s not a crime, but it’s not chili.
Once the deed was done, I had to recover. With the chili powder, it would never make good pasta sauce, so I fetched some cans of organic kidney beans from downstairs. I drained and washed them and added them in along with a bag of Morningstar® Recipe Crumbles and covered with more tomato juice. It made nine pints of so-called chili.
A fine dinner was and will be had by all as the results of this work are consumed over the next week or so.
What the cookbooks by celebrity chefs don’t explain is the foggy dynamic of what actually goes on in a kitchen. Having cooked many meals with my late maternal grandmother, I understand what happened last night is not unusual. The extemporaneous practice of cooking is more often like that than not.
Through the haze of a long day’s work we look at life’s deteriorating produce, and a spice shelf where seasonings are older than fresh, and say, “something can be made here.” Even when ideas don’t quite come together in the mist of life, we can sustain ourselves. That is a life worth living.
In Iowa, the Democratic Party organizes the nuts and bolts of statewide campaign operations around something called the “coordinated campaign.”
The coordinated campaign has been a blessing and a curse.
On the short list of preparations for 2016, one hopes the coordinated campaign is blown up and re-invented into something that can win against what has become a better organized Republican campaign operation. 2014 brought us Senator Joni Ernst, Governor Terry Branstad, and continues to re-elect incumbents each election cycle. Iowans deserve better than that.
As much as one believes that Democratic elected officials would provide better policy and governance for the vast majority of Iowans, the message is not getting out and Republicans are suppressing the wackiness found in extreme elements of their party enough to garner substantial, and winning support in the electorate. Most active Democrats I know are good people, willing to do the work of a political campaign. The problem has been with the way party leadership organizes each cycle’s effort, and what work is getting done.
What is the coordinated campaign, exactly?
It is a pooling of resources through the Iowa Democratic Party from campaigns up and down the ticket into a unified field effort.
Candidates pay to play, and the focus is usually on the big ticket races: president, governor and members of the U.S. Congress.
A manager and central staff have been hired to run the program and develop campaign options for approval by stakeholders in coordinated campaign.
The coordinated campaign organizes a field program with a paid canvass and targeted mail campaigns designed to help turn out Democratic voters and persuade targeted voters to vote for Democratic candidates.
In addition to statewide candidates, the coordinated campaign works on statehouse races in an effort to build a Democratic majority in the Iowa House and Senate.
Political insiders might nit pick with some of this, or add additional details, but this is the broad picture of what has been the coordinated campaign in the years since 2004 when I have engaged more actively in politics.
Why do I say the coordinated campaign should be blown up?
Democrats require some organizing mechanism, but continuing to repeat the past will produce the same results. Here are four reasons to blow up the coordinated campaign:
1. There is limited buy-in from local activists to what the coordinated campaign has planned. Campaign choices—locating resources like paid staff, offices, house parties and mailers—are made by others and local activists talk among themselves that some decisions don’t make sense. They have been asked to participate, but that participation has been framed as staffing a shift at an established phone bank or door-knocking event outside our precinct. It has been a clear disconnect from precinct politics that used to be a Democratic strength.
2. Republicans were stunned by the Democratic organization of the 2006 and 2008 campaigns, and they caught up. I used to laugh at Team Nussle’s efforts to organize phone banks and canvasses in 2006, but no more. The Republicans—partly due to the political leadership of Terry Branstad and Republican Party of Iowa chair Jeff Kaufmann— have caught up and surpassed Democrats, as evidenced in the results of the 2014 general election.
3. Democrats failed to articulate their message. Where Republicans made significant inroads is their effectiveness of identifying stakeholders in government and offering solutions. They framed solutions as bipartisan, but the core message that won elections is the sense of belonging their campaign helped create. Because the coordinated campaign focuses canvasses and get out the vote efforts on targeted voters, it left messaging to others, and a broad sector of the electorate on the table. Republicans have been Hoovering these voters up.
4. Democrats don’t get the role of third party resources. Because of its structure, the coordinated campaign made poor use of third party resources. As if when the check wasn’t deposited in the bank account, it didn’t exist. Tom Steyer’s NextGen Climate took a drubbing from liberal bloggers in the 2014 campaign, and some of the criticisms were rightly placed. However, liberal bloggers are not the coordinated campaign. In a time of the Citizens United ruling, Democratic leaders must figure out how to better balance outside resources to advance Democratic issues, while walking the legal tightrope of campaigns not coordinating with third parties. Some accuse Republicans of coordinating with outside groups illegally. Unless lawsuits are forthcoming and prevail, the role of third party resources in campaigns has been a Republican advantage. As annoying as it is that Senator Ernst wears an Americans for Prosperity pin at public events, Republicans have become masters of campaign finance laws, giving them an advantage the coordinated campaign can’t match.
Few others have taken the coordinated campaign to task in public. While there are no solutions offered here, I invoke the rule of 1,000 words. Ideas toward a better process will be the subject of a future post.
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On New York City Media
The twitterverse is in angst about yesterday’s passing of David Carr. I don’t recall reading his work until this morning. I may have missed something.
The most important news to come out of the peculiar stew of New York City journalism this week was not Carr’s death nor NBC News Anchor Brian Williams’ suspension for lying about the war in Iraq, nor Jon Stewart’s announcement he will be leaving The Daily Show.
It was the death of Bob Simon in an auto accident. An ignoble end to an engaged journalist who has been part of my life since the 1970s.
The 73-year-old CBS veteran, who won 27 Emmy Awards in a career spanning five decades, had to be cut from a mangled livery cab that rear-ended a Mercedes-Benz and slammed into a concrete median near W. 30th St. ~New York Daily News
The CBS obituary was less graphic, but for those of us who were fans, like Simon, we can take what the world dishes out.
My memory of Simon will be his assignments at 60 Minutes after being held hostage during the First Gulf War.
During the early days of the Persian Gulf War in 1991, Simon was imprisoned and tortured by the Iraqi army along with three CBS News colleagues. He later chronicled the experience in a book, “Forty Days.”
“…This was the most searing experience of my life,” Simon told the Los Angeles Times. “…I wrote about it because I needed to write about it.” ~ CBS News
My reaction to his first 60 Minutes segments after being released was that considering where he had been, they were puff pieces. That is not a criticism—he deserved a break.
On Simon’s death, Sir Howard Stringer, who led CBS while Simon was in prison, said, “Simon was every inch the network correspondent from the golden age.”
Responding to a question on CBSN about whether Simon was ever afraid in the field, Stringer recalled working with him in Northern Ireland in the ’70s during a confrontation between the British army and the Irish Republican Army.
“There was no sense of this being anything but another day in the life, and I don’t think he ever thought about it very much,” Stringer said. “I never was aware of him being afraid of anything. I mean, he volunteered for everything.”
Unique circumstances make figures in the national media possible. There are successes and failures—trials and twittering. There are a few that have been in difficult situations and fewer still that report from them on a national platform.
Bob Simon was one of them, and his presence will be missed.
We look up from the grindstone and notice everything has changed. When did that happen?
Most often it’s climate—torrential storms that ripped through the yard, knocking down trees and branches—but it is more than that.
It may the human condition: a long walk to our worldly end—replete with biological aging, physical ailments and the like. It’s not only that.
We have milled life’s bounty and used it, only to find that the wheat berries, oats and corn we like have all changed from abundance to scarcity. We make bread from the flour, but it no longer sustains us.
Bit by bit, we are confronted with changes we didn’t expect.
I don’t visit John’s Grocery much, but this story about Wally the Wine Guy is just one of several about the changes in that neighborhood where I briefly lived after graduate school. He moved to a new gig in the downtown grocery store after 26 years at John’s.
I like some of the changes in downtown Iowa City: the tall buildings in the pedmall with high-end apartments, the constant bustle of businesses opening then closing, the proliferation of student housing that can make landlords a tidy sum and keep downtown populated.
Other changes not so much, particularly the demise of Murphy-Brookfield Book Store, and what is now a struggling Riverside Theatre that gave up Shakespeare in the Park because for three of the last six years, they were flooded out in City Park, resulting in reduced attendance and a financial loss. Something’s changing and it’s not just that people are aging, although that’s part of it.
Wally went corporate is how I read the story. He might as well if the deal is sweeter and the opportunities to service a new clientel more profitable. Can’t blame him for that, and as I said, I don’t frequent John’s Grocery much. They already have plans for a replacement.
We must adapt to change as we can. We don’t have to like it, although we should look up from our work and notice— from time-to-time.
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Monday is My Friday
Deeply invested in an economy of multiple income sources, part time work, no benefits and flexible hours, discussions in the national media about job growth, the 30-hour work week, and changing job descriptions fall upon deaf ears.
I’m happy to sustain a life in a turbulent world, avoiding big jobs like the one left in 2009, and take my chances with what work circulates at the bottom of the rain barrel during a long drought. Most wouldn’t call that making a living, but the easy-money jobs are all gone, if they existed once upon a time. People, including me, do what they must to sustain life.
Things didn’t change this year, or in the last five years. This experience is the result of an intentional movement, one that saw its best days during the Reagan administration.
The truth is we all have to make a life. Even if suicide is painless, it is no option at all.
What matters more, what helps us go on, is the drive ever forward in our lives. Not toward some dark and pearly other world destiny, but with the exercise of free will and intent, toward making the commons a better place. Taking care of ourselves, while important, is not the endgame.
Without good health and economic security, it would be hard to do anything. Some of us are lucky to have a stable, if somewhat precarious platform built on years of hard work, good health and a safe upbringing and neighborhood. If we are one of the lucky ones, it is important to remember John Donne, “no man is an island,” and recognize that unlike the bard, we are of an age.
In my worklife, dating to the 1960s, there have been only rare times when I worked a Monday through Friday day shift job, most notably while at the University of Iowa in the early 1980s. Nonetheless, there is a cultural resonance to “the weekend,” even if I haven’t really had one since those government employment days. Whether with a high paying job or what I’m doing now, work always beckons, regardless of the day of the week.
The saving grace is the brief respite when a workday is followed by one more open. A chance to open a bottle of wine purchased from the discard cart at the grocer, or enjoy a snack from newly bought food from the warehouse club—chez nous.
Tonight, after a shift at a job, grocery shopping and a meeting in the county seat, only then will I succumb to escape, then sleep soundly.
It seems upside down, but Monday really is my Friday and the work goes on with nary a day off. I’m not complaining, just trying to understand life in this turbulent world so it can be sustained.
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Roasted Pepper Garlic Spread
The warehouse club sells packs of six 8-ounce bars of cream cheese. I bought one.
A basic use-it-up strategy is to make a spread for crackers and bread for after work snacking or luncheon. It’s easy.
Soften a bar of cream cheese on the counter until it reaches room temperature. Unwrap it into the bowl of a food processor.
On the bits and pieces shelf in the pantry locate some roasted bell peppers. Add about one whole pepper’s worth to the bowl. Roast your own if you have them, but in winter, who does?
Add one peeled clove of garlic and process until the texture is smooth.
The basic spread could be seasoned as you like it, although I found garlic is enough. Spread on crackers, toast or bread, Top it with pickled bits from the ice box: cucumbers, olives, beets or radishes and no finer winter snack can be found. If we lived in Russia a shot of vodka would be a mandatory accompaniment.
Much though I enjoy thinking and writing about cooking and processing food, it’s not why I blog. That is, the food’s not the story, the process is.
My first blog in 2007 was an effort to provide a place for our daughter to keep up with the home front. Not sure how much she reads it now, but she has been and remains a primary audience regardless of where I have gone with this writing. Luckily, I have grown a larger, supplemental audience.
Learning and writing about food preparation exemplifies a main process for understanding complex topics. There are few recipes simpler than the one above, but its simplicity belies complexity that led me to it. It is easy to collect recipes, more difficult to decide which batch of 25 will go into a seasonal repertory, and harder still to align a cuisine to seasonal, local food. Writing this blog helps with all of that behind the scenes, when all the reader sees is the end of the process in the form of a recipe.
So it is with the other main topics: sustainability, politics, the environment, worklife, climate change and local food. A constant trying-out of ideas and phrasing. Most of what I see in daily life is complex and simply recording what may have happened through a viewpoint not that interesting.
This blog is a process that leads hopefully to better living. I am thankful for anyone who follows along.
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Kale Canceled
Had to have known this was coming from my seed company:
Earlier this season you placed an order with us which included 365.11, Winterbor F1 PKT. Unfortunately, due to a supply problem we have canceled your order for the item listed.
The operator of the CSA where I worked last summer explained the kale seed problem in more detail:
For the past three years weather conditions around the world have impacted seed supplies. For the second year there is a shortage of kale seed. Turns out the big hybrid kale seed suppliers are in Europe and they were all affected by disease. Fortunately I had ordered and saved seed from my favorite varieties last year. So for those of you who were secretly happy there might be a shortage of kale it’s not going to happen.
The seed shortage is only half the problem. Demand for the leafy green vegetable has soared, with many people now including kale in smoothies, soups, casseroles, and salted snacks in the form of kale chips. Luckily I have two packets of kale seeds received as a gift last fall.
Kale was one of the most common green vegetables through the end of the Middle Ages. Because it grow and tastes better after the first frost, there has been plenty of it to go around.
Immediate plans are to look at garden stores to see if there are some packets of seeds available. However, I may have to make do.
There is a piece to be written about education and how it is supported in Iowa, although not the one that comes to mind.
It is a timely topic because the way our K-12 schools receive government funding includes what is called “State Supplemental Aid,” or as some slow to cultural adaptation legislators call it, “allowable growth.” The legislature is supposed to set the amount of SSA within 30 days of the presentation of the governor’s budget. They don’t always do that.
We know, with some certainty, that the bulk of a child’s education is not about school time. In fact, children do better in formal schools if they have a broader context of learning that includes family time, formal outside activities, and other social constructs to engage them. It’s not just me saying this.
“One in every five students drops out of high school and roughly 1.2 million students fail to graduate from high school each year,” reported the United Way in a 2012 issue brief titled, “Out-of-School Time.”
“Local United Ways and their partners must ensure that children and youth from birth through young adulthood have meaningful supports and opportunities across all settings (e.g., families, schools, communities).”
Education begins at home, and includes the society in which we live. The Iowa K-12 schools are a subset of that, and one doesn’t have to be a home schooler to appreciate it.
For some, it never gets far from there. Family life becomes an unending series of coaching, sharing, counseling, correction and stimulus moments injected, intentionally or not, into the arc of a child’s life. School becomes one more thing.
In our family, going to school was positive. Not only did we purchase special clothing and gear, and update our immunizations, the prospect of learning with other neighborhood children provided a broadening experience—one we couldn’t replicate at home.
There was some stress and uncertainty, and we didn’t agree with everything the schools taught, or the social environment they created, but the overall impact was positive. We learned how to get along in a diverse society, and that was and remains important. That applies to my own schooling and to my perceptions of our daughter’s time in K-12.
The other day I encountered a very young child in a stroller looking toward a conversation between the presumed mother and a store clerk. Silent and intent, the soon to be toddler took it all in. What unscripted learning took place? What observations did the child have and from what framework? The child focused on speech coming from the boisterous one. It was a look of wonder that is hard to forget.
Enter my Catholic upbringing and the concept of “free will.”
The question of free will ranks among the most important philosophical problems. The view adopted in response to it will determine a man’s position in regard to the most momentous issues that present themselves to the human mind.
On the one hand, does man possess genuine moral freedom, power of real choice, true ability to determine the course of his thoughts and volitions, to decide which motives shall prevail within his mind, to modify and mold his own character?
Or, on the other, are man’s thoughts and volitions, his character and external actions, all merely the inevitable outcome of his circumstances? Are they all inexorably predetermined in every detail along rigid lines by events of the past, over which he himself has had no sort of control? This is the real import of the free-will problem.
The progressive view is that life is not predetermined by circumstances of family or acculturation. Environmental factors may come into play, but every American can have the opportunity to share in the American dream, and the role of government is to give people a hand up in what often is a struggle toward an equitable and secure life in society. Public school funding is an important way governments do that.
This gets lost in the public debate on school funding. The Iowa House Republicans view setting SSA as a negotiation. They passed a bill—along party lines—to set the figure at 1.25 percent. This was a starting point, they said, intentionally set very low, and in line with the governor’s budget.
The Senate is expected to pass a bill setting the figure between four and six percent. One doesn’t have to be Jeane Dixon to see a settlement around three percent.
Interested parties will advocate for an SSA number and the process will be ugly. The schools will uniformly say it is not enough and cut budgets in response to the final amount. That will be ugly too.
School funding is one more reason elections matter and people should get involved in the political process. That they don’t is a problem our K-12 school system helped create. There is no bigger indictment than yesterday’s Des Moines Register headline, “only 23 percent of millennials can name their state’s senators.”
In our community, people remember attending the one-room schoolhouse Big Grove Township School #1, now called the Stone Academy. It closed recently, in 1953. Whenever there is talk at the legion or at public events about the school, an old timer or two will say, “I went there,” and recap who else did.
There is no going back to the one-room school house, and that’s a good thing. Living in Iowa, our schools have great facilities and well educated teachers and administrators. Yet something is missing.
As a society, we spend a lot on education. Details for Iowa can be found in the 2014 Annual Condition of Education Report. It’s not about the money, it’s about our priorities.
What is missing is a sense of connection. People may be connected to a local community the way a Stone Academy graduate is, but many won’t live here that long. They don’t want that type of connection.
It is not for me to say what people want, or how they get there, except to say I have hope that as a society we recognize we are not in the world alone. The interdependence of societies, cultures and resources on this blue-green sphere is becoming increasingly important. Education can and must play a role in bringing this outlook to the fore.
For the most part we tolerate diverse views. However, relativism has proven to be a false path toward resolving conflict and isolation. There is no right answer, just a notion that when we support education, it means a lot more than government budgets to support public schools. It means a type of engagement the creates hope for more than the success of an individual at the expense of community.
We are a long way from that type of sustainability, and it is unclear that education, in schools, at home and in society, is getting the job done.
That’s why I believe we should support education more than financially and more than we have.
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