Hey, teachers: Is it really that bad?

Did you see William K. Richardson's rant about violence in the schools this Sunday in the CA's Viewpoints section? "Simply put, the Memphis City Schools has a thug problem," he says, before going on to detail some of the things he's been called by his students ("bald white motherf***er"); he teaches 10th grade English at Frayser High. He says Blue Ribbon, the much-heralded discipline plan MCS put into effect last year, is a joke, and he's not the first teacher we've quoted in the paper saying the same thing.

Reading this column yesterday, which ran right next to a heartbreaking picture of a child holding a picture of her daddy, shot to death in a drive-by shooting, made me wanna holler. Teachers: Is it really this bad? What is actually working for you, in the classroom and in the schools? Anything?

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idiviamemphis.com

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/07/weekinreview/07myer.html

GEORGE W. BUSH, embattled at home, tied down in Iraq and watching the clock run out on his presidency, has found a diplomatic crutch in an unlikely place: China.

Last week’s agreement by North Korea to disable its nuclear facilities — announced in Beijing, tellingly — showed just how much Mr. Bush’s foreign policy has come to rely, for better or worse, on the help of the Chinese. They might just be the administration’s best hope for peacefully resolving the next big crisis on the horizon, Iran’s refusal to give up the right to enrich uranium. Or so some in the administration are hoping.

Mr. Bush, who spent most of his presidency with a swaggering, go-it-alone style, has increasingly turned to China on problem after problem: from North Korea to Darfur to the repression of pro-democracy demonstrators in Myanmar.

“China has become the first stop for any American diplomacy,” said Christopher R. Hill, the American negotiator in the North Korea talks.

Could China bring Iran around in a similar way? The two confrontations are different in myriad ways, but there are some signs that the answers could be yes.

White House officials, for example, note that China, which had remained in the background at the United Nations when the United States pressed for more pressure on Iran, has now signed on to two rounds of (mild) sanctions. They say it could support a (tougher) third round if reports expected this fall suggest that Iran is breaking its commitments not to pursue nuclear weapons.

Experts also say China needs Iranian gas and oil for its economic growth — and while this has made it skittish about imposing tough sanctions, it also makes China eager to avert a war in the Persian Gulf that would disrupt energy supplies.

Still, it would be wishful thinking to call China an ally or even a partner, given its historical and political divisions with the United States. China has proved unwilling to go along with much of what the Bush administration has asked of it, especially when it comes to punishing authoritarian regimes. On that score, China’s one-party rulers have always been cautious, calling such measures interference in the internal affairs of others.

Given that history, there are reasons to think that Chinese cooperation on Iran could have its limits. The Korean Peninsula is on China’s border, as is Myanmar, and that alone could explain China’s interest in reducing tensions there. For the United States, fear of Iran’s nuclear capability is linked to fear of Iran’s ties to groups like Hezbollah and Hamas, and to its growing influence in Iraq; those are worries whose urgency the Chinese do not seem to share.

And experts who take a skeptical view of the deal with North Korea point out that for all the help China has given, this agreement is just another step on a long road toward the ultimate American goal, which is stripping that government of the nuclear bombs it has already built. Meanwhile, Americans have had three decades of trying to squeeze Iran economically, while China is counting on retaining Iran as an important economic partner.

“China can be constructive when its interests align with the United States,” Clifford Kupchan of the Eurasia Group, a consultancy in Washington, said. “In Iran, it seems to have a different agenda.”

Nevertheless, Steven Clemons of the New America Foundation, a bipartisan research organization in Washington, said that while some Americans express frustration at what they see as Chinese unwillingness to press Iran, China has already played an active role in trying to resolve tensions that could lead to another military conflict in the Persian Gulf.

He credited what he said were quiet Chinese efforts to win the release of four Iranian-Americans jailed by the authorities in Iran this summer.

With the North Koreans, China’s support proved more crucial than anything else. China, which for decades acted as North Korea’s protector, responded to the North Korean leader Kim Jong Il’s nuclear test last year by cutting off military aid and joining the Bush administration’s efforts to choke off the country’s bank accounts abroad.

A senior administration official said in an interview that China’s diplomatic push began even before the test, after Mr. Bush assured President Hu Jintao that he wanted a peaceful resolution with North Korea during an outwardly disastrous White House visit in April 2006 in which a protester infiltrated their joint news conference.

Mr. Hu dispatched State Councilor Tang Jiaxuan that week for unannounced talks in North Korea that, after some ups and downs, laid the foundation for last week’s deal, the official said. “What changed was not them,” the official said of the North Koreans, “but the Chinese attitude.”

China, by virtue of its permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, has always been an important diplomatic player. But its importance to the Bush administration has grown for two reasons: it has become more assertive around the globe and the administration has exhausted a lot of its options.

“I think we need China almost everywhere in the world because we’ve disengaged from the rest of the world,” Mr. Clemons said, criticizing the administration’s initial disdain for concerted international diplomacy and citing its preoccupation with Iraq.

Meanwhile, China has steadily expanded its diplomatic and economic ties far beyond Asia. Mr. Clemons suggested that that has caused a subtle tectonic shift in how nations view it and, conversely, the United States. “They see China as an ascending power,” Mr. Clemons added, “and they don’t see us that way any more.”

Such ties give China influence. And with influence comes leverage. In Sudan, the Chinese long resisted American-led efforts to stop the killing in Darfur but this summer lifted their objections to a United Nations and African Union peacekeeping force — perhaps in part because a Hollywood human-rights campaign threatened a boycott of the 2008 Olympic Games, to be held in Beijing, if China did not do more.

Supporters of the democracy movement in Myanmar — Burma to those supporters — also hope to use the threat of an Olympic boycott to force China to lean on the military government there.

Mr. Bush, who accepted an invitation to the games in Beijing next year, did not go so far, but he met in the Oval Office with China’s foreign minister, Yang Jeichi, to privately urge China to intervene with the generals.

Last week, Myanmar’s rulers relented and allowed a United Nations envoy to visit — a diplomatic accomplishment that the Chinese touted, but hardly a breakthrough given reports of continued arrests. “If China is claiming credit for this, they have to show results,” said Jeremy Woodrum of the U.S. Campaign for Burma.

Still, in the Iran negotiations as elsewhere, the United States seems to be betting that China’s interest in global stability will continue to rise, so that it coincides more often than not with American interests.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/weekinreview/30moore.html?ref=weekinreview&pagewanted=print

September 30, 2007

Ideas & Trends

Reporting While Black

By SOLOMON MOORE

THE police officer had not asked my name or my business before grabbing my wrists, jerking my hands high behind my back and slamming my head into the hood of his cruiser.

“You have no right to put your hands on me!” I shouted lamely.

“This is a high-crime area,” said the officer as he expertly handcuffed me. “You were loitering. We have ordinances against loitering.”

Last month, while talking to a group of young black men standing on a sidewalk in Salisbury, N.C., about harsh antigang law enforcement tactics some states are using, I had discovered the main challenge to such measures: the police have great difficulty determining who is, and who is not, a gangster.

My reporting, however, was going well. I had gone to Salisbury to find someone who had firsthand experience with North Carolina’s tough antigang stance, and I had found that someone: me.

Except that I didn’t quite fit the type of person I was seeking. I am African-American, like the subjects of my reporting, but I’m not really cut out for the thug life. At 37 years old, I’m beyond the street-tough years. I suppose I could be taken for an “O.G.,” or “original gangster,” except that I don’t roll like that — I drive a Volvo station wagon and have two young homeys enrolled in youth soccer leagues.

As Patrick L. McCrory, the mayor of Charlotte and an advocate of tougher antigang measures in the state, told me a couple of days before my Salisbury encounter: “This ganglike culture is tough to separate out. Whether that’s fair or not, that’s the truth.”

Tough indeed. Street gangs rarely keep banker’s hours, rent office space or have exclusive dress codes. A gang member might hang out on a particular corner, wearing a T-shirt and jeans, but one is just as likely to be standing on that corner because he lives nearby and his shirt might be blue, not because he’s a member of the Crips, but because he’s a Dodgers fan.

The problem is that when the police focus on gangs rather than the crimes they commit, they are apt to sweep up innocent bystanders, who may dress like a gang member, talk like a gang member and even live in a gang neighborhood, but are not gang members.

In Charlotte’s Hidden Valley neighborhood, a predominately African-American community that is home to some of the state’s most notorious gangs, Jamal Reid, 20, conceded that he associates with gangsters. Mr. Reid, who has tattoos and wears dreadlocks and the obligatory sports shirts and baggy jeans, said gangsters are, after all, his neighbors, and it’s better to be their friend than their enemy.

Sheriff’s records for Charlotte-Mecklenburg County show that Mr. Reid has been arrested several times since 2004 for misdemeanors including driving without a license, trespassing and marijuana possession. Despite his run-ins with the law, Mr. Reid said he had never been in a gang and complained that the police had sometimes harassed him without a good reason.

“A police officer stopped in front of my house and told me to come to his car,” he told me. “I said, no. They got out and ran me down. They did the usual face-in-the-dirt thing.”

Maj. Eddie Levins of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg police said that officers are allocated to different areas based on the number of service calls they receive, so high-crime areas are likely to get more police attention.

“Where there are more police, expect more police action,” Major Levins said. “Some people think ‘I can just hang out with this gang member as long as I don’t do any crime.’ Well, expect to be talked to. We can’t ignore them. In fact, we kind of want to figure out the relationship between all these gang members and their associates.”

Major Levins said that his fellow officers aren’t perfect and that he was aware of occasional complaints of harassment, but he said that most residents would like to see more police officers on the streets, not fewer.

Even Cairo Guest, a 26-year-old who complained he was handcuffed in his backyard, acknowledged that gang members in his neighborhood were “out of control.”

“There are a lot of guys out here doing stuff they shouldn’t have been doing,” Mr. Guest said.

Still, some civil rights advocates complain that the definition of a gang member is vague. Gang researchers find that most active members usually cycle out of their gangs within about a year. Even active participants might only be marginal members, drifting in and out of gangs, said Kevin Pranis, a co-author of “Gang Wars,” a recent report on antigang tactics written by the Justice Police Institute, a nonprofit research group.

Harsh penalties could actually reinforce gang membership by locking peripheral gangsters in jail with more hardened criminals, he said.

Suburban Salisbury, population 30,000, is about as far from the traditional ganglands of Los Angeles, Chicago or even Durham as you can get. But it has had an outsize voice in pushing for tougher antigang measures since a 13-year-old black girl was inadvertently killed there in a gang shootout after a dance party in March.

I arrived in Salisbury at midnight, figuring that gang members would be more visible after dark, and found a local hangout with the help of a cabdriver.

Striking up a conversation with young gang members in the middle of the night in an unfamiliar town is always a tricky proposition, but the one advantage I figured I had was that I am African-American. Brown skin can be a kind of camouflage in my profession, especially if you do a lot of reporting in minority neighborhoods, as I do. Blending in visually sometimes helps me observe without being observed.

But even when my appearance has been helpful, the benefits rarely survive the first words out of my mouth, which usually signal — by accent or content — that I’m not from around wherever I am.

“What’s The New York Times doing down here?” asked an incredulous black man. He and about a dozen other men were standing in front of a clapboard house in Salisbury. I observed several drug sales there within minutes of arriving.

“Man, you a cop,” said another. “Hey, this guy’s a cop!”

“You’ve got me wrong,” I said trying to sound casual as the men looked at me warily. I started to pull my press identification out of my wallet. “I’m a reporter. I’m just trying to talk to you about your neighborhood.”

In the distance I heard neighborhood lookouts calling: “Five-O! Five-O!” — a universal code in American ghettos for the approaching police. I thought they were talking about me, but thought again as three police cars skidded to a stop in front of us.

A tall white police officer got out of his car and ordered me toward him. Two other police officers, a white woman and a black man, stood outside of their cars nearby. I complied. Without so much as a question, the officer shoved my face down on the sheet metal and cuffed me so tightly that my fingertips tingled.

“They’re on too tight!” I protested.

“They’re not meant for comfort,” he replied.

While it is true that I, like many of today’s gang members, shave my head bald, in my case it’s less about urban style and more about letting nature take its course. Apart from my complexion, the only thing I had in common with the young men watching me smooch the hood of the black-and-white was that they too had been in that position — some of them, they would tell me later, with just as little provocation.

But here again I failed to live up to the “street cred” these forceful police officers had granted me. As the female officer delved into my back pocket for my wallet she found no cash from illicit corner sales, in fact no cash at all, though she did find evidence of my New York crew — my corporate identification card.

After a quick check for outstanding warrants, the handcuffs were unlocked and my wallet returned without apology or explanation beyond their implication that my approaching young black men on a public sidewalk was somehow flouting the law.

“This is a dangerous area,” the officer told me. “You can’t just stand out here. We have ordinances.”

“This is America,” I said angrily, in that moment supremely unconcerned about whether this was standard police procedure or a useful law enforcement tool or whatever anybody else wanted to call it. “I have a right to talk to anyone I like, wherever I like.”

The female officer trumped my naïve soliloquy, though: “Sir, this is the South. We have different laws down here.”

I tried to appeal to the African-American officer out of some sense of solidarity.

“This is bad area,” he told me. “We have to protect ourselves out here.”

As the police drove away, I turned again to my would-be interview subjects. Surely now they believed I was a reporter.

I found their skepticism had only deepened.

“Man, you know what would have happened to one of us if we talked to them that way?” said one disbelieving man as he walked away from me and my blank notebook. “We’d be in jail right now.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/weekinreview/30bruni.html?em&ex=1191384000&en=3b39f56b5393509b&ei=5087%0A

September 30, 2007

Curbside, We’ll Never Have Paris

By FRANK BRUNI

AMONG the many reasons to suspect that Europeans are more gifted than Americans at enjoying urban life is this: they eat outdoors because it’s pretty. We eat outdoors even though it’s not.

By we I mean New Yorkers, and I specifically mean the New Yorkers who, from the first rumor of spring to the dying gasps of an Indian summer, insist on restaurants with sidewalk cafes, apparently believing that nothing sauces roasted chicken like the exhaust from an M104 bus and there’s no music more relaxing than the eek-eek-eek of a delivery truck in reverse.

On the narrow and sometimes cobbled byways of Paris, Rome or Barcelona, a sidewalk cafe most likely has a view, a mood, a purpose beyond fresh air. (To be fair, it isn’t so fresh there, either.)

On Broadway, Columbus or Lexington, a sidewalk cafe has traffic — pedestrian and vehicular — so dense and close that a diner has to learn not to flinch. Wine helps. For me just three and a half glasses do the trick.

Of course I’m generalizing, and perhaps I’m exaggerating, but I’m nonetheless wondering: are the ranks of New Yorkers who like these seating arrangements really so large?

On the evidence of last week’s news, they are. And they’re growing.

And they’re a neat window into the peculiar character of this city’s denizens, although some open-air epicures are really just looking for a place to smoke. Thanks to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, they get a double dose of carbon monoxide — some from Marlboro, some from Mercedes — for the price of one entree of braised short ribs. The man knows how to cull the herd.

What happened last week was an announcement by city officials that restaurants with sidewalk cafes could henceforth install portable natural-gas heaters and thus extend the weeks or months when a diner might comfortably — in terms of temperature, that is — lunch or sup outside.

And part of what fueled that decision, apparently, is the increased popularity of sidewalk cafes in New York, the number of which has grown by 25 percent over the last four years, according to city officials. There are now 900 of them.

Some are really lovely.

I bet 875 aren’t.

I should be clear: I’m talking about cafes that are actually on sidewalks — that jut into public space — because exposed areas or patios that are set back from the sidewalk, and exist within the bounds of a restaurant, aren’t part of the aforementioned count. They’ve been using portable heaters for a while.

And I’m not talking about back gardens. Who doesn’t love a back garden? It’s often quieter than the rest of the restaurant — trees and clouds are effective mufflers — and sometimes it’s even surrounded by vine-covered brick walls or a painted wood fence.

What surrounds many a sidewalk cafe are waist-high metal dividers that recall crowd-control barricades as much as anything else. The tables are a pinkie’s width apart. I look at the diners gorging themselves in these pens and wonder if they’re actors rehearsing to play veal in the movie version of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma.”

They’re on awkward display, not so much people watching as people watched, letting all the world see whether they chew with closed mouths and what kind of crumb management they’ve mastered. It has to be nerve-racking.

So why go through it?

Theory 1: It lets them pretend they’re in Europe. While many Americans outside New York get excited about “freedom fries” and dismiss Europeans as too-thin scolds with too-small cars, New Yorkers envy their fuel efficiency, their monuments, their cheese, their eyewear.

And their cafes. Never mind that eating outside in Rome means a Bernini statue and a Baroque church while eating outside in uptown Manhattan means an unobstructed panorama of Bed, Bath & Beyond. New Yorkers are fantastic at make-believe, which leads me to ...

Theory 2: New Yorkers have a highly evolved, unrivaled knack for glossing over the limitations, absurdities and dubious habitability of an unforgiving metropolis.

They walk into a friend’s 545-square-foot two-bedroom (one bath, no tub) and stammer: “Just $4,965 a month for this?” They walk into the Spotted Pig at 5:55 p.m. on a Tuesday night and exult: “Only a 90-minute wait?”

And they sit in a sidewalk cafe — sirens blaring, vagrants swearing and jackhammers jittering all around them — and sigh: “It’s so relaxing to soak up the street life.”

Theory 3: If something is in limited supply, New Yorkers want it, period.

Most restaurants don’t have sidewalk cafes. If they do, there are fewer seats outdoors than indoors. So these seats take on an exclusive aura, and once all of them are occupied, they become more exclusive still. In New York, the only thing better than something there’s not enough of is something there’s absolutely none of.

At the restaurant L’Impero on a recent night, most of the precious few tables in front of the entrance were taken. Most of the dozens of tables inside weren’t. When I turned down the hostess’s offer of one of the remaining perches outside, she just about went pale with shock. I explained that while I was fond of fresh air, what I was really gaga about was air-conditioning.

On the Upper West Side, when scaffolding went up around the sidewalk cafe in front of the Ocean Grill this year, the restaurant’s owner, Stephen Hanson, wasn’t about to let the lure and luster of those seats be dimmed. He had chandeliers and potted plants hung from the top of the scaffolding and leafy vines wrapped around the poles.

Mr. Hanson operates a dozen restaurants in Manhattan. Seven have outdoor seating; four have actual sidewalk cafes. He was a big proponent of the new portable-heater rule. He said he thought it could extend sidewalk season from the first day of April to the last day of October.

I think it could be the death of sidewalk cafes.

If they’re around for only four or five months every year, they’re exceptions, digressions, reminders of warm weather that won’t last. As Mr. Hanson said when I asked him for his own theories about why New Yorkers embrace these enclosures: “It’s the seasonality of it. It’s something you can’t have all the time.”

But if sidewalk cafes start to operate for six or seven months, they’re standard, and eating in one isn’t a celebration of summer. It’s a celebration of man’s talent for climate control, even on the pavement in front of Circuit City.

New Yorkers, of course, might find some other, rosier way to see it. I’d ponder the possibilities, but I’m late for a picnic someone’s having in the Holland Tunnel.