A gathering spot for warriors fighting for their special-needs children

If you're one of the many who have come to the realization that your public school system is out to get away with doing the absolute minimum for your special-needs child and is not actually interested in helping or educating your child, join the crowd. Bring some passion and some factual evidence and step into the fray.

Thursday, November 3, 2011

Law of Unintended Consequences: Affirmative Action Edition



During the last years of the Bill Campbell jobs-for-cronies program we jokingly referred to as "Atlanta city government," I had the odious task of going down to City Hall East to try to fix a car registration issue. The line at the desultory, fly-specked city office was quite short, but glacially slow. I suffered through a long wait, gradually came to the head of the line, and there I discovered exactly how the black "it's our turn now" leadership in Atlanta was on its way to destroying this city.

There was one very attractive young female clerk, with impossibly long, lustrous hair ("extensions," whispered the black lady next to me in line), who was typing our information into a terminal. Only "typing" isn't exactly the word for it. She was really pecking with two fingers, because she didn't know how to five-finger type. Only "pecking" isn't really the word for what she was doing, either, because her fake fingernails were so long--extending more than an inch past her fingertips--that she was unable to really "peck" the keys at all, but instead had to carefully place the edge of her fingernails on top of a key, one at a time, and gently push.

If you could see now how comically slow this process was, you would not believe it could actually happen in a professional office--even a government-run office. You'd think she was a parody of an office worker, playing for laughs. But to me it seemed an obscenity, a deliberate "fuck you" to the taxpayers of Atlanta, and without knowing a single thing about this young woman it was nevertheless possible to infer everything about the runaway city government under Bill Campbell, who infamously once proclaimed (after a U.S. Supreme Court setback for Affirmative Action), "I don't care what (the government) says, we'll always have Affirmative Action in Atlanta."

Campbell was imprisoned for his most visible acts of corruption, but what really hurt the city--and continues to hurt the city---was his race-and-resentment based politics. It was an attitude that said, "we are running things now, and we are going to extract as many good-paying jobs as possible out of this system, squeezing it until it cracks wide open if need be, and we're not going to be too concerned about whether the actual work of governing gets done or not, and we're certainly not going to do it at the pace y'all might expect."

This explains why, as late as 2011, it still took six months for the poor bastard who opened Killer Burgers on Piedmont Ave. to get his final few operating permits, a matter that would have taken a competent bureaucracy a matter of hours. "It was the worst six months of my life," he told the AJC.

But let's get back to the pretty young clerk with the long fingernails and the paucity of job skills. Undoubtedly she was the product of the Atlanta Public School system, which would have (then, as now) utterly failed to help her gain any marketable knowledge or skills. She nevertheless managed to get a nice-paying City of Atlanta job on the basis of a curvy figure and despite the fact that any man wanting to get close to her would have had to really watch out for those--well, you'd really want to protect your shrubbery from those Edward Scissorhands nails, you know what I mean?

So she gets the job, and this is where the whole thing--the whole concept--the whole idea of black-run, now-it's-our-turn, we'll-run-this-city-like-a-jobs-program-if-we-want-to construct goes bad:

See, that young woman...she can't ever move up. She lacks every skill necessary to get a better job out in the real world. So she's stuck working the only place she can ever work, which is for a black-run bureaucracy that will forgive her for being useless as an employee.

This means the slot she occupies can never be freed up for another person (black or any other color) to come in and take that job. So one city job parceled out to one underserving daughter-of-a-crony jams up the system for perhaps 40 years, whereas if you'd hired a deserving person for the job, someone with ambition and skill, they would quickly want to move up and out (probably to the private sector), thus freeing up that job for the next skilled, deserving person. By keeping ambitious people in the pipeline, you turn that job over many times over forty years, providing livelihoods to many people instead of just one bored chick with fake nails.

I hope it's starting to dawn on you that I'm not really against fuck-you politics. These are city jobs, and they're not the best jobs in the world (although they're the best jobs many APS-educated young people may ever get), and somebody has to fill those seats. I'm all for a black-run city government running its own informal Affirmative Action program. But when you put dreadfully underskilled people into these jobs, not only do you create an incompetent government, which hurts growth and provokes taxpayer outrage, you also fail at the task you are surreptitiously undertaking: to provide as many relatively good-paying jobs as possible to as many black people as possible.

If you're going to do a shadow Affirmative Action program, do it right. Hire better people and give them a short time to develop and get better, and heavily incentivize them to move to the private sector (you can do this by reducing city-paid benefits, or keeping city salaries slightly below market level).

Then: don't hire people who will take a lower salary because they've historically been bad employees and have few options. Hire young people on the way up who don't have much experience but show a lot of potential. Put the action in Affirmative Action.

Make it your goal to circulate many people through clerical jobs and low-level jobs each decade. There are few jobs in city government where retention is important. The Q.E.D. for this is obvious to anyone who's ever actually had to deal with city inspectors and clerks. These folks are so catastrophically bad -- and so incredibly unmotivated-- that it is impossible for anyone to make the case they have skills and/or experience worth retaining.

The place where this phenomenon--which I'll call the Atlanta Constipation--is most destructive is in the Atlanta Public Schools. I'll write about that next.