Top Quotes: “Dying of Whiteness: How The Politics of Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland” — Jonathan Metzl
Introduction
“I couldn’t help but think that Trevor’s deteriorating condition resulted also from the toxic effects of dogma. Dogma that told him that governmental assistance in any form was evil and not to be trusted, even when the assistance came in the form of federal contracts with private health insurance or pharma companies, or from expanded communal safety nets. Dogma that, as he made abundantly clear, aligned with beliefs about a racial hierarchy that overtly and implicitly aimed to keep white Americans hovering about Mexicans, welfare queens, and other nonwhite others. Dogma suggesting to Trevor that minority groups received lavish benefits from the state, even though he himself lived and died on a low-income budget with state assistance. Trevor voiced a literal willingness to die for his place in this hierarchy, rather than participate in a system that might put him on the same plane as immigrants or racial minorities.”
“White backlash politics gave certain white populations the sensation of winning, particularly by upending the gains of minorities and liberals; yet the victories came at a steep cost. When white backlash politics became laws, as in cutting away healthcare programs and infrastructure spending, blocking expansion of healthcare delivery systems, defunding opiate-addiction centers, spewing toxins into the air, or enabling guns in public spaces, the result was — and I say this with the support of stats — increasing rates of death.”
“I kept thinking that at some point, the drive for self-preservation might trump political ideology. Why would someone reject their own healthcare, or keep guns unlocked when their children were home? Yet because of the frames cast around these and other issues hued with historically charged assumptions about privilege, it became ever-more difficult for many people with whom I spoke to imagine alternate realities or to empathize with groups other than their own. Compromise, in many ways, coded as treason.”
“I quickly realized that the primary victims of gun mortality weren’t criminals or inner-city gang members, as the NRA and some politicians implied. Rather, as gun laws were liberalized, gun deaths spiked…among white people. This was because white Missourians dominated injuries and deaths via gun-related suicides, partner violence, and accidental shootings — and in ways that outpaced black gun deaths from homicides. Gun regulation is such a politically sensitive question in the US that there has long been a congressional ban on funding for research on the health impact of firearms. Through a back door into data on mortality, I detail how legislation that substantially deregulated gun purchases set MO on a path toward becoming a top state for gun suicide, even among other pro-gun states, and that the primary victims of these trends were white Missourians, particularly white men living in rural areas. Lax gun laws ultimately cost the state roughly $279 million in lost work between 2008 and 2015 and ultimately led to the loss of over 10,500 years of productive white male life.”
“Looking closely at the data on health outcomes between TN and neighboring Kentucky uncovers how, when averaged across the population, TN’s refusal to expand Medicaid cost every single white resident of the state 14 days of life.”
“The book’s final section takes us to KS, where citizens struggle with the aftermath of a Tea Party-funded economic ‘experiment’ led by controversial Gov. Sam Brownback, in which the largest income tax cut in state history turned the state budget surplus into a substantial deficit. Parents and school administrators describe how politicians often framed the resultant cuts to KS public schools as ways to punish ‘wasteful’ minority districts who supposedly splurged on ‘party buses’ instead of classrooms. And indeed, early budget cuts overwhelmingly impacted schools in low-income minority districts. But these initial cuts weren’t enough to fill the gaping holes in state budgets. Soon, as a thoughtful KS state legislator told me, ‘the fire that we set in the fields burned all the way up the home.’ Popular resistance began to form only when cuts began to affect suburban white schools, but then it was often too late. When the data began to roll in, it turned out that the white student populations saw flatlining test scores and rising high school dropout rates — trends that correlate directly with poor health later in life. As but one example, 688 additional white students dropped out of KS public high schools in the first 4 years of budget cuts than would’ve done so otherwise. On average, in the US, dropping out of high school correlates with 9 years of lost life expectancy. When calculated against average life expectancy, the cuts correlated by conservative estimates with 6,196 lost white life years.”
“Prior to the emergence of the Tea Party and other far-right movements, purple states also represented centrist examples where people with differing ideologies worked together to try to find common, if often unstable solutions to polarizing societal problems. MO claimed a long history of gun rights but also enforced some of the strictest handgun laws in the nation. Bipartisan groups of TN lawmakers aimed to create a Southern oasis of healthcare in which every citizen of the state had health insurance. KS boasted some of America’s best public schools. Then, polarization took over, and things changed.”
“Racism itself can have profoundly negative health consequences. Epidemiologist Yvette Cozier and her colleagues have uncovered associations between frequent experiences of racism — such as receiving poor service in restaurants and stores or feeling unfairly treated on the job or by the police — and higher risks of illness and obesity among black women. Sleep researcher Michael Grandner has found links between perceived racism and sleep disturbance. And public health scholar Mario Sims found that lifetime discrimination was associated with greater rates of hypertension among adult African Americans.
Increasingly, we now hear that people with racist attitudes fare poorly as well. Racist views make people ‘sick’ and ‘unhealthy,’ neuroscientists claim, because the psychological effort of discrimination can raise blood pressure or cortisol levels and heighten risk for heart attacks or strokes. ‘Harboring prejudice may be bad for your health,’ neuropsychologist Elizabeth Page-Gould writes, because racially prejudiced people experience such ‘biological reactions…even during benign social interactions with people of different races.’”
Guns in Missouri
“MO boasts a long history of gun use for hunting, warfare, and dueling. At the same time, through the early 90s, MO’s handgun laws were among the strictest in the nation, including a requirement that handgun buyers undergo background checks in person at sheriffs’ offices before obtaining permits.
However, in the past 20 years, an increasingly conservative and pro-gun legislature and citizenry had relaxed limitations governing practically every aspect of buying, owning, and carrying firearms in the state. In the 6 years prior to my 2016 visit to Cape Girardeau, the MO legislature ended prohibitions on the concealed and open carry of firearms in public spaces, lowered the legal age to carry a concealed gun from 21 to 19, and repealed many of the requirements for comprehensive background checks and purchase permits. In 2014, MO voters approved Amendment 5 to the state constitution, which established the ‘unalienable right of citizens to keep and bear arms, ammunition and accessories associated with the normal functioning of such arms, for the purpose of defense of one’s person, family, home, and property,’ and effectively negated the rights of cities or towns to enact practically any form of gun control.
And in 2016, MO lawmakers overrode their governor’s veto to enact Senate Bill 656, the so-called guns everywhere bill. Among other stipulations, SB 656 eliminated requirements for training, education, background checks, and permits needed to carry concealed weapons in MO. Bill 656 also annulled most city and regional gun restrictions, vastly expanded so-called Castle Doctrine coverage — the notion that ‘a man’s home is his castle and he has a right to defend it…free from legal prosecution for the consequences of the force used’ — and extended ‘stand-your-ground’ protections for people who took lethal action against perceived dangers outside the home as well.”
“At the same time, research suggested that gun injuries and deaths rose after it became easier for people to buy and carry firearms. For instance, a team of Johns Hopkins investigators analyzed crime data from MO and found that the state’s 2007 repeal of its permit-to-purchase handgun law ‘was associated with a 25% increase in firearm homicides rates.’ Between 2008 and 2014, the MO gun homicide rate rose to 47% higher than the national average. Rates of gun death by suicide, partner violence, and accidental shooting soared as well. In 2014, gun deaths topped deaths by motor vehicle accidents for the first time in the state. News outlets referred to MO as the ‘Shoot Me State.’”
“Research shifts the discourse about suicide from shame and blame to empathy and community. Suicide was long considered an offense toward God or a crime when approached through religion and the law. Christian dogma in 17th-century Europe promoted the notion that suicide was a sin. People actually dragged the bodies of suicide victims facedown through the streets before throwing them onto garbage heaps. In 19th-century England, the state deemed suicide victims criminals, buried them at night, and confiscated their estates and belongings. By 2015, however, surveys suggested that nearly 90% of Americans associated suicide with mental illness, and 94% of Americans believed that suicide was ‘at least sometimes preventable.’”
“Part of the initial impetus for the Dickey Amendment resulted from the outcry from the gun lobby about a 1992 study in the New England Journal of Medicine titled ‘Suicide in the Home in Relation to Gun Ownership,’ which tested the hypothesis that ‘limiting access to firearms could prevent many suicides.’ After an extensive analysis of nearly a thousand cases, the authors found evidence supporting the notion that ‘the ready availability of guns increases the risk of suicide in the home’ and advised that ‘people who own firearms should carefully weigh their reasons for keeping a gun in the home against the possibility that it may someday be used in a suicide.’
This seemingly straightforward suggestion raised the ire of pro-gun lobbyists and politicians and eventually led to the ongoing deep freeze on funding for research on all forms of gun violence prevention, including gun-suicide prevention. In the 15 years after the ban went into effect, federal funding for firearm injury prevention fell by 96%, and peer-reviewed academic publishing on firearm violence fell by over 60%.”
“Because of the ban and its downstream effects, researchers rarely study why a small number of gun owners chose to turn their guns on themselves while many others did not. They can’t determine the most effective points of intervention to prevent deaths among lawful gun owners or within particular social networks. They cannot compare various safe-storage methods in rural communities to find out whether gun lockers, trigger locks, or smart-gun techs work best in households with guns and children. They can’t even receive a grant to study the potential psychological benefits of owning a gun.
In other words, the federal ban on funding gun research and the polarization it produces makes it harder to create common knowledge about some of the issues that most affected the communities in which Missourians strive, work, and try to survive. These were the red-state, pro-gun communities whose 2nd Amendment rights were never in doubt, but who lived in armed petri dishes with the lights turned out when it came to identifying risk factors and promoting strategies for suicide prevention. They were the communities in which the most lethal means to a self-inflicted end often lay, armed and loaded, beneath people’s pillows or under their beds. Everyday people who most needed guidance even as they lived with, and often fell in line with, the politics and agendas that promoted the ban in the first place. In other words, the people who stood to benefit the most from the very research that their politics and politicians prohibited.”
“Resiliency is important because the vast majority of people who try suicide by means other than firearm survive their initial attempts. For instance, drug overdose, the most common method in US suicide attempts, is fatal in less than 3% of cases.
But gun suicide has its own temperament, its own pace, its own urgent, mercurial linearity. Turning a firearm on oneself (or a loved one in some cases of armed domestic murder-suicide) can fall into a category that experts call ‘impulsive’ — a spontaneous response to immediate stressors, such as a breakup, job loss, fight, or rejection. One landmark study of impuslive suicide attempts in TX found that 24% of young people spent less than 5 minutes between the decision to commit suicide and the actual attempt, that 70% took less than an hour, and that ‘male sex’ and a history of having been in a physical fight — but not depression — were found to be risk factors for these impulsive suicide victims.”
“From 2009 to 2015, white men accounted for nearly 80% of all gun suicides, despite representing less than 35% of the total population.”
“While white gun suicides skyrocketed between the late 90s and mid-2010s, this same period saw one of the more dramatic drops in firearm homicide rates in modern memory. Once again, from an extensive Pew report:
Compared with 1993, the peak of US gun homicides, the firearm homicide rate was 49% lower in 2010, and there were fewer deaths, even though the nation’s population grew. The victimization rate for other violent crimes with a firearm — assaults, robberies, and sex crimes — was 75% lower in 2011 than in 1993. Violent non-fatal crime victimization overall (with or without a firearm) also is down markedly (72%) over 2 decades.
According to the data, gun suicides rose even as rates of gun homicide and other forms of gun crime fell. By 2015, even Breitbart reported that gun suicides accounted for 2/3 of firearm deaths in the country. And because white Americans, and for the most part white men, comprised the majority of gun suicide victims, this meant that white men increasingly drove the overall data on US gun deaths.”
“As Adam Winkler describes, ‘few people realize it, but the KKK began as a gun control org’ that aimed to confiscate any guns that free blacks may’ve obtained during and after the Civil War and thereby ‘achieve complete black disarmament.’”
“On one side of the emerging gun divide, the modern gun control movement took shape after the high-profile assassinations of JFK, Robert Kennedy, and MLK Jr. An unlikely coalition of politicians and activists drove what in retrospect would be the crowning achievement of the movement, the Gun Control Act of 1968. Although Pres. Johnson saw the act as far from sufficient: ‘We must continue to work for the day when Americans can get the full protection that every American citizen is entitled to and deserves, the kind of protection that most civilized nations have long ago adopted,’ he said at the signing. But the law nonetheless brought new levels of federal oversight to the buying, selling, and tracking of guns, seemingly guaranteeing equity in the market.
Meanwhile, starting in the 70s and 80s, the corporate gun lobby began its steady climb to dominance by proclaiming that gun ownership was an unalienable constitutional right bestowed to all Americans (the same argument as Malcolm X). The NRA’s transformation from a sporting and rifleman’s org into a powerful corporate lobby rested on a then radical reinterpretation of the 2nd Amendment. The ‘new’ NRA took on long-standing assumptions that the amendment served as a guarantee of gun storage for well-regulated and disciplined militias for common defense, and it aggressively promoted the notion that the Constitution guaranteed the gun rights of individual citizens.
The gun lobby supported Reagan’s successful presidency run and funded the campaigns of senators such as Orrin Hatch, who in 1987 chaired the Subcommittee on the Constitution that produced a report titled The Right to Keep and Bear Arms, which claimed to uncover ‘clear — and long-lost — proof that the 2nd Amendment was intended as an individual right of the citizen to keep and carry arms in a peaceful manner, for protection of himself, his family, and his freedoms.’ This type of language also appeared in the so-called Firearm Owners’ Protection Act of 1986, which invoked ‘the rights of citizens…to keep and bear arms under the 2nd Amendment.’ Over the next 3 decades, 44 states would pass laws that allowed gun owners to carry concealed weapons in public.
The political emergence of the NRA went hand in hand with the exponential growth of the US gun industry and the number of guns it manufactured and sold. By some estimates, America’s privately owned gun stock increased by 70 million between 1994 and 2014. By 2015, American citizens owned 255 million guns, or more than one for every adult in the country — far and away the highest rate in the world. German Lopez explained, ‘Americans made up about 4% of the world’s population [in 2015] yet owned roughly 42% of the world’s privately held firearms.’”
“Perhaps the [white gun ownership] trends symbolized 300 years of history in which owning firearms and carrying them in public marked a privilege afforded primarily to white men.
Racial tensions surrounding gun ownership lurched into full view in the 2010s when MO and a number of other S, MW, and W states legalized what were previously considered extreme gun-rights positions, such as the right to openly carry firearms in public spaces. A number of these bills also ended gun-free zones in places like parks, airports, and hospitals and allowed people to purchase even high-capacity firearms without a permit or training.”
“Sociologist Scott Melzer exposes the role of white men with guns on the 19th-century frontier as a mythology not of the 1800s but of mid-20th century pop culture. Guns were ‘unquestionably part of white western expansion,’ Melzer writes, ‘but the role of firearms in expansion has been greatly exaggerated,’ and in reality, many settlers who traveled west found little use for firearms in their daily lives. Most settler communities valued cooperation and law and order and thus banned guns in public spaces unless a person was taking a gun for repair, hunting, or going to a military gathering.
Even Dodge City, despite its reputation as a town of shoot-outs and chaos, had a mere 5 killings in 1878 at its peak of violence ‘due to a lack of duels and six-shooter pistols.’ According to Melzer, white Protestant gunslinger heroes were largely invented by writers and 1950s-era movies. Gun makers, pulp magazines, dime novels, Western movies, and tourist towns ‘were important contributors to the romanticizing of the gunfighter myth,’ he writes, ‘and the producers of these goods benefited from its widespread acceptance.’”
“The loosening of MO’s gun laws equated to 413 additional white male suicide deaths over the years 2008–2015. Over these 8 years, this averages to an additional 52 white male deaths per year on top of MO’s already high gun suicide rates.
To put these additional white male deaths in perspective, 52 deaths in a year would exceed the reported gun deaths by defensive use, home invasion, or accidental shooting in MO in every year since 2012. The 413 deaths over 8 years equals the total number of reported gun deaths from mass shootings in the entire US in 2015.”
“The math shows that white men in MO were 2.6 times more likely to die by firearm suicide than white men in CT, and 2.4 times more likely to die by firearm suicide than nonwhite men in MO.
These kinds of odds place death by self-inflicted gunshot as a category whose relative risk functions within the same orbit as risk factors for more well-known causes of death. For instance, rates of white male death by gun suicide roughly equaled mortality rates for car accidents, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, influenza, and pneumonia. Much has been made about opioid addiction in rural America and its impact on white men. But the aggregate death rate for white males by unintentional drug poisoning in MO between 2008 and 2015 was 17.5 per 100k people, while the rate for self-inflicted gunshot was 17.8.”
“As this process plays out, the peril to white men comes not just from the instrument, the impulse, or even the legislation. Rather, privilege itself becomes a liability. White men themselves become the biggest threats to…themselves. Danger emerges from who they are and from what they wish to be. Over time, the data suggests, ‘being a white man who lives in MO’ then emerges as its own, high-risk category.”
Healthcare in Tennessee
“All-cause mortality declined by a whopping 6%, or 19.6 per 100k people, after expansion, including a 4.5% decline for white residents and an 11.4% decline for nonwhite residents. Sommers concluded that ‘2840 deaths [were] prevented per year in states with Medicaid expansions’ compared to similar states that rejected expansion.”
“If TN had expanded Medicaid, between 1,863 and 4,599 black lives might’ve been saved from 2011 to 2015. That staggering number is actually conservative: the figures didn’t account for the many more black citizens who grew sicker but didn’t actually die during the time frame.”
“Subtracting the values of the Sommers-based projections from the actual figures suggested that between 2011 and 2015, between 6,365 and 12,013 white lives might’ve been saved had TN expanded Medicaid.”
Education in Kansas
“To the casual observer, State Line looks like any other road in any other town. But kids who grew up nearby knew the difference. The MO side of the road felt always unkempt. The KS side was cleaner. If you got a new bike, you wanted to ride it on the KS side, since the roads were smoother and better maintained. If you planned a summer party, you wanted to hold it in a park on the KS side as well, where you could count on well-mowed grass and clean facilities and bathrooms.
Then there were the schools. If you lived on the MO side, you grew tired of watching your friends move to KS around the time they reached junior high. Everyone knew the reputation of KS public schools: excellent teachers, small class sizes, advanced curricula, and strong track records placing students into colleges. For these reasons, many parents felt a move to KS was worth the extra property and income taxes, which they viewed as an investment in their children.
The MO side suffered by comparison. MO public schools reeled under successive attempts to rectify deep racial inequities — the state had a larger black population.”
“KS became a frequent landing place for white flight. Its stronger tax base and significant state investments in education yielded significant results for student outcomes. Through the late 90s, KS consistently ranked in the top 10 states in the percentage of persons 25+ with high school diplomas, and in the top tier of MW states in percentages of persons with reading and writing proficiency, and with college degrees. Reading and math skills for KS 4th graders peaked in ’07 and ’08 at levels well above the national average. KS also boasted markedly low dropout rates.”
“Brownback’s KS experiment involved an epic defunding of state government. In 2012, he signed KS Senate Bill Substitute HB 2117 into law, enacting one of the largest income tax cuts in state history. The cuts particularly eased the tax burden on wealthy Kansans: the rate for the top bracket fell from 6.5% to 3.9%, and Brownback promised to eventually reduce it to 0. In real terms, HB 2117 reduced taxes on top brackets by 25%. The bill also eliminated income taxes for nearly 200k businesses and landowners.
The Brownback admin argued that HB 2117 would provide tax ‘relief’ — to the tune of $231 million after 1 year, and $934 million after 6 — as stimulus for flourishing. The admin frequently boasted that the ‘march to zero income taxes’ would catalyze entrepreneurship and job creation at the rate of ‘25k new jobs per year,’ while at the same time lowering unemployment and increasing construction and development.
Next, Brownback signed a controversial school finance bill, HB 2506, which created tax breaks for corporations that donated to private school scholarship funds, allowed public school districts to hire unlicensed teachers for science and math classes, cut support for at-risk students, and made it easier for schools to fire experienced teachers. HB 2506 further defunded government by supplementing these changes with significant cuts to property taxes.”
“It turned out that, contrary to hyperbolic reports of government waste, the state had frequently used tax revenue to pay for roads, bridges, traffic lights, aqueducts, conduits, and causeways — structures often supported by communal governance, and for which wealthy persons who receive tax breaks don’t often clamor to invest their surplus funds. Tax revenue also secured the fiscal reputation of the state, enabling the various lending and borrowing vital to a functioning economy.
Cuts to infrastructure became increasingly apparent. KS fell below national averages on a wide range of public services, including public transit, housing, and police and fire protection. The American Society of Civil Engineers gave KS an overall grade of C- on its 2013 infrastructure report card. The report further detailed that ‘bridges were awarded a D+, in part due to KS’s nearly 3k structurally deficient bridges. Only 5 states have more structurally deficient bridges than KS’ and that ‘dams earned the lowest score of a D-.
…With 6,087 dams, KS has the second most dams in the US next only to TX. Of the state’s dams, 230 are classified as high hazard, meaning failure would likely lead to loss of life and significant property damage.’ According to the report, these and other low grades resulted primarily from ‘funding gaps’ that delayed upkeep and repair.
Brownback raided Kansas Department of Transportation funding to shore up sagging budgets in the state general fund and other state agencies. In 2015, road repairs fell from 1,200 miles of road per year to a paltry 200 — meaning that only the most badly damaged stretches of highway saw attention and that the state hired fewer road workers.”
“Meanwhile, the state economy imploded. Tax cuts seemed to bring out the worst in people, often by placing individual wealth management ahead of common good. Growing numbers of people declared themselves ‘businesses’ in order to pay 0 income tax. Rates on the wealthiest citizens fell ever lower, and the wealthy in any case found new ways to game the system. Several small-business owners told me how large corporations bought up hundreds of ‘small businesses’ in order to lower their tax obligations.
Growing evidence suggested that these and other actions opened a staggering loss in revenue. KS lost $687 million, or nearly 11% of the state budget, in the first year after the cuts began. By June 2014, the KS treasury fell nearly $300 million short of its projected tax collections.”
“All the while, the benefits of austerity for middle- and lower-income Kansas grew ever-more difficult to discern. Some small-business owners decried the ways that Brownback’s tax cuts yielded no real relief because their untaxed profits simply reduced the deductions they were allowed to take, thus increasing the amounts they owed on federal returns. Many localities raised sales taxes to offset cuts in state funding. Critics claimed that the only tax cuts with real effect were those that relieved burdens on the wealthiest Kansans.
The promised hiring boom never materialized either. Brownback claimed in 2012 that the tax cuts would act as a ‘shot of adrenaline’ for the KS economy, spurring job growth in ways that allowed business owners to reinvest their shot of barbiturate. KS added only 29k ‘nonfarm’ jobs in the 2 years after the tax cuts took effect — by contrast, NE, an economically similar state with a much smaller labor force, saw a net increase of 35k jobs. KS began to actually lose jobs in mid-2015; in 2016, KS ranked 46th among all states in private sector job growth.”
“Education quickly became a target when Brownback took office. The first rounds of tax cuts eliminated about $200 million in education spending — the largest reduction in the state’s history. Brownback also changed the school financing formula at the expense of poorer, urban districts. The National Education Association produced a report showing how base state aid per pupil in KS dropped from $4,400 to $3,800, even as enrollment and the costs of health insurance increased for many districts. Further gutting followed subsequent cuts, which led to larger class sizes, rising fees for kindergarten, the elimination of arts programs, and layoffs in every corner of the education system. Procrustean reductions also hit state universities.
Brownback wasn’t done. In early 2015, he signed a new law that replaced the state’s education funding formula with 2 years of block grants — a strategy later championed by Betsy DeVos. A Guardian report detailed how budget shortfalls led Brownback to take the highly unusual step of cutting funding to education budgets midyear, thereby pushing KS schools to eliminate education programs and shorten school years.”
“Budget cuts forced school administrators to go beyond belt-tightening into dismantling education programming. ‘My district has been forced to cut $1 million a year,’ a S. Kansas superintendent told me. ‘$1 million. At first, we cut lunch options; but now we’re cutting teachers, after-school programs, even whole topics from our curriculum.’
By 2015, according to KASB reports, ‘KS grad rates have generally been rising at a slower pace than the national average and peer states,’ while 4th and 8th grade reading and math skills fell to the extent that ‘KS could expect further declines in national achievement rankings if corrective action isn’t taken.’
Then things got really bad.”
“We look at the cumulative impact of those 3 tax changes…chunks of tax changes. And the poorest 40% of Kansans saw an average net tax increase. The poorest 40%. They saw their taxes go up as a result of this.”
“The data showed that the 2012 tax cuts deceptively increased taxes on the bottom 40% of earners in KS, or those earning $42k / year or less, by hiking sales taxes and eliminating tax credits that benefited lower-income families. Such trends disproportionately affected minority communities, including 75% of black and 83% of Latino households in the state.”
“Prior to Brownback, KS funded K-12 public schools through formulas that combined payments based on the number of pupils in a district’s schools with what were called weightings, or extra monies sent to schools that taught immigrant, poor, and at-risk students. This system was set up to fulfill a mandate in the state constitution guaranteeing adequate education for all school-aged children.
The Brownback regime upended this emphasis on fair distribution through a block-grant system that froze funding levels and rewarded investment in private schools. Aid dropped by over $600 per pupil statewide, and the shift hit poorer school systems the hardest. Budget cuts further devastated programs that helped minority, immigrant, and low-income children catch up. ‘Because of the budget cuts, frozen budgets, we’ve had to eliminate almost all of our extended learning time,’ the Dodge City superintendent (from a district where the first language of a majority of students wasn’t English) told the NY Times. ‘Those kids aren’t able to get the time they need to learn the things that they need to learn to be successful.’
Educational disparities became so extreme that the KS Supreme Court intervened. 5 years into the tax-cut experiment, the court ruled that the state failed to adequately fund public schools by hundreds of millions of dollars per year and that the cuts and revised formulas disproportionately harmed minority, low-income, and immigrant children the most. ‘We conclude the state’s public financing system, through its structure and implementation, isn’t reasonably calculated to have all KS public education students meet or exceed the minimum constitutional standards of adequacy,’ the court opined. The ruling explicitly highlighted how the state system failed to prep 25%+ of students in basic reading and math skills and shortchanged half of the state’s black and 1/3 of its Latinx students.”
“Racial animus has a long history in KS politics. For instance, the Koch family, Brownback’s main benefactors, once supported the right-wing John Birch society during its active campaigns against the civil rights movement. Among myriad other actions, ‘Birchers’ attacked MLK Jr. and Rosa Parks (and countless others) as communists. In the 60s, the Birch Society sponsored billboards across KS calling for the impeachment of Earl Warren, the chief justice of the US Supreme Court, who’d ordered the desegregation of the public schools.”
“In 2015, Brownback issued an executive order preventing any state department or agency from assisting the relocation of refugees from other countries in KS. In support of the order, the governor alleged arrests of refugees with ties to terrorism, as well as alleged terror plots aimed at KS. But the 2015 order also conveniently provided a way to ease the spending burdens of the state, mainly by displacing the spending away from the most vulnerable populations.”
“Through the 1910s and 1920s, education journals highlighted innovations in KS schools and praised their efforts to diversify a workforce based largely on farming into one that supported robust multilevel skills and businesses. KS also pioneered junior high education, a new kind of school that changed what had been a direct path from elementary to high school.”
“‘If I have to go to another bake sale, I’m going to scream,’ a Prairie Village parent told me. ‘At first we sold brownies to raise some extra money for school supplies. But now, well, we’re being forced to hold a bake sale every month, and if we don’t raise the funds, they’re going to fire the Spanish and French teachers. Can you imagine? We have to bake brownies all the time so that they don’t cut classes!’
For an increasingly vocal cohort of KS, the downside of austerity hit home when it affected their children. Events on the ground began to upend the belief that the consequences of tax cuts were happening somewhere else, to someone else. ‘School cuts definitely started out as something that people thought were only geared toward inner-city, black, and Latinx schools and districts,’ one administrator explained. ‘That’s how they were sold at first.’
Over time, however, the radius extended. Annie McKay explained to me that, while some communities were better insulated at first, the fires were eventually getting to the edges of those communities as well, metaphorically speaking, and the sort of very radical extreme tax policy changes were destroying the way of life throughout the state.
By 2016, KS fell to 44th in the nation in per-pupil spending in public elementary and high schools.. Educational attainment results for students at all levels dropped as well, and for the first time, KS students fell into the lower 25% of all states on a number of key education benchmarks. KS students plunged to dead last in the US in student scores on some sections of national proficiency exams and into the bottom 5 in terms of the percentage of students who took the ACT exam. The state also fell into the bottom 10 states in the percentage of high school grads who pursued college education.”
“By early summer 2017, a coup was brewing in the state legislature. After 4 years of below-average growth, deepening budget deficits, and steep spending reductions, the GOP-dominated KS legislature repealed many of the tax cuts at the heart of the Brownback fiscal agenda. In a dramatic rebuke, KS legislators — including a number of Republicans — voted to override Brownback’s veto and reverse many of the tax cuts. The result, called KS Senate Bill 30, effectively raised the top income tax rate from 4.6% to 5.7% and eliminated certain exemptions for pass-through businesses. Metrics suggested that these actions would raise up to $1.2 billion in new revenue over 2 years, which would then go toward closing budget shortfalls and propping up the public school system.”
“‘We lose kids and the resources associated with those kids to untested charter schools. In fact, it’s interesting, in MS you have charter schools in St. Louis and Kansas City. Kansas City probably has 20+ charter schools. I think that you’re getting close to half the population of the city that’s in a charter school paid for with public funds. That’s had a devastating impact on the district, and that’s a district that serves mostly black and brown kids. There are things like that, that the legislature puts in place that disproportionately impacts certain communities, certain kids. You can track some of that by race.’”
“According to 1 study, college grads with only a BA were 26% more likely to die during a 5-year study follow-up period than those with a professional degree. Americans with less than a high school education were almost twice as likely to die in the next 5 years compared to those with a professional degree.
Among whites with less than 12 years of education, life expectancy at age 25 fell by more than 3 years for men and by more than 5 years for women between 1990 and 2008.”
“People in Salt Lake City saw steady improvements in body mass index after the city built new public transportation infrastructure and cardiovascular health improved in New Orleans after certain neighborhoods introduced bike lanes.”
“Rising dropout rates in the 4 years after the cuts meant that 802 more Latinx high school students dropped out than would’ve otherwise.”
“Meanwhile, 689 additional [white] dropouts over 4 years amounted to 6,196 additional lost white life years.”
“For the first time, a majority (58%) of Republicans felt that colleges had a negative overall effect on the country, compared to 36% saying they had a positive effect.
A national survey found that growing numbers of S and MW working-class whites (72%) said they preferred factory jobs over office jobs (28%).”
“Some of the downstream fissures started to show sooner than expected, if in subtle ways. In late 2017, KS and MO aggressively pitched a joint proposal to become the home of Amazon’s 2nd HQ. Kansas City mayor Sly James garnered attention by purchasing 1k items from Amazon and posting pro-Kansas City comments in the product review sections of the site. And the KS City Area Development Council promised numerous tax credits and abatements to sweeten the potential deal. Yet among the reasons why the Kansas City proposal came up short: the region had too few skilled workers in science and math.”
