Cleveland makes Baltimore look like Dubai in comparison.

Thanks for this. To be a bit pedantic, this would be income inequality, not wealth inequality (which would probably be worse).

Vietnam was under suzerainty of China for a long time, and Singapore is majority Chinese. In the rest of Southeast Asia, the Chinese are a minority -- they often been called the Jews of the area -- and Confucianism doesn't have much pull. (Most Malay Chinese are Hokkien, not Han, btw, but Han Chinese was a made up ethnicity anyway. Nonetheless, my point holds: there is no singular Asian culture.

And back to the original topic, it seems you are comparing Asian immigrants and their children's performance in school and our own city's largely Black student body. Even if it held as a counterpoint to what I originally wrote (which it doesn't), do you really think that's a fair comparison? Koreans are traditionally neck and neck with Greeks as being the most educated immigrants. The first wave of Vietnamese immigrants -- largely Catholic mandarins attached to the allied South Vietnamese government -- did much better academically than the second wave (the less affluent).

But, more importantly, with the exception of refugees (Vietnamese, Lao, Khmer), Asian immigrants have already gone through a self-selection equivalent to being admitted to a magnet school by the very act if immigrating and had the wealth to get here. (Note that the population of China is far less educated than our own.) Your comparing this filterd population with a broader population who was denied education of any sort and their labor stolen for 200 years, and then had another century of Apartheid, before being economically isolated in "freedom"?

Please. Let me know when you've found those poor, high-performing schools, btw.

How would slowing down make traffic better? If anything, it would make it worse. Same number and distance of trips + going slower = more time on the road = more traffic.

You're talking about East Asian cultures, not Asian cultures in general. Most aren't influenced by Confucianism all that much.

I also didn't realize that there was a singular Asian culture.

Similar to students in Baltimore City, which has about a 33% child poverty rate.

Great post. And thank you for your service to our kids.

Great. Do you have some counter examples of schools serving a poor student body (whatever their race) that do well on standardized tests?

I'm all ears.

Sure, the Nordics tax the rich at high levels. But the Nordics also tax everyone else at high levels, too. While the former may be politically doable, the second is not.

And while taxation is one of the reasons Nordic countries are middle class, it's also because until relatively recently they were quite homogenous. And their taxation and welfare systems enjoy broad approval. (In fact, right-wing parties don't even focus on them.) They also don't have the federated government we do.

So, your solution is about realistic as mine.

What's axiomatic in American public schools is poor areas make for poor school performance.

The answer is the same as it was 60 years ago: integration. If not racial, economic. Of course, this isn't politically feasible.

I should also add that the term "progressive" has a lot of baggage that modern progressives seem pretty unaware of.

A hundred years ago, progressives were indeed advocating for public health (which largely accounts for our doubled lifespan in that time), and more equal income distribution. But they were also generally eugenicists.

Better said than what I wrote above, and I agree wholeheartedly.

To me, while I share a lot of values with progressives, they seem to be most interested in gestures and who is gesturing. They also don't seem to have tons of interest in local governance and its prosaic details (fire department, police, trash clean up, etc.) or the role of local government vis-a-vis state and federal government. They are more interested in signaling on national issues. There's also an underlying tide of evangelicalism that I don't subscribe to.

I'm a liberal because I believe there's a huge role for government to help people get out of poverty and protect rights, including the rights of minorities. But, in most cases, that is role of higher levels of government, not the government of a poor shrinking city.

Here sure does love pictures of himself.

Between Zeke and Mosby, as a liberal anti-progressive, I'll write in Clark W. Griswold.

DiPasquale's

You can rate a screw on Amazon.

When thinking of screws, what would differentiate a five-star screw from a four-star screw? Whether your hair was pulled or not?

This was my worry along: a vibrant place filled mostly with poor and working-class Black customers turned into yet another wannabe yuppie enclave.

As James Baldwin said, "Urban renewal means negro removal."

Part of it is that there's a focus on sexy progressive initiatives rather than making basic services more efficient.

I'm a liberal, but believe redressing wealth inequality, etc. is the responsibility of the state and especially federal governments. Local governments can't do much about it. Their job is to address basic services and make an environment that's conducive to investors, including you and me.

I'm working my way up to a 5k.

Queen of Sheba in Highlandtown.

As of two years ago, they had ten people making six figures, and it's nearly all funded by hotel taxes.

I wonder what their metrics are to determine whether they are worth the outlay.

Not really. The Washington Post dominates the market for newspapers in there area. WBAL may be number one by a nose, but it doesn't have anywhere near the market share. That's why I was a little taken aback by the term.

Which people? I'd imagine that would be different stations for different people.