Tag: education

WHEN THE CORE SHRINKS: Senate Bill 37, the University of Houston, and the Contested Future of General Education

.Reading time 43 minutes.

A collaboration between Lewis McLain & AI

Executive Summary

In the fall of 2025 the University of Houston began dismantling and rebuilding the required course of study that every undergraduate must complete. Reporting by the Houston Chronicle and corroborating coverage describe a plan that could shrink UH’s state-mandated core curriculum by roughly 40 percent, a review conducted largely out of public view, and a faculty that says the administration’s reading of the new law is far broader than the law itself requires. The trigger is Texas Senate Bill 37, a 2025 overhaul of public higher-education governance that hands governing boards recurring authority to review what colleges teach and reduces faculty senates to an advisory role.

UH is not an outlier. It is one data point in a national movement in which state legislatures—overwhelmingly Republican-controlled—have taken direct control of the general education core: the 30–40 percent of a bachelor’s degree that sits outside the major. Florida, Ohio, Indiana, South Carolina, Arkansas and others have removed courses, mandated founding-documents and civics instruction, tied tenure to “intellectual diversity,” or shifted gen-ed authority to legislatively created civics centers.

This paper does three things. First, it reconstructs what the reporting actually says, leaning heavily on UH’s own words and on parallel coverage. Second, it maps the national trend. Third—its main purpose—it examines where this leads through the lens the reader cares about most: the cost of college, and the related question of whether students genuinely hear more than one side.

The cost findings are counterintuitive. Cutting the core does not by itself lower the price of a degree, because a bachelor’s still requires about 120 credit hours; trimming the core mostly reshuffles those hours rather than eliminating them. The real cost risks lie elsewhere: in transfer friction if Texas’s guaranteed 42-hour transfer block fragments, in longer time-to-degree if course supply tightens, and in the administrative overhead of continuous political review. On the viewpoint question, both sides claim the same goal—students exposed to competing ideas—but disagree sharply about whether the disease is one-sided faculty or the cure is a one-sided mandate that chills the very debate it claims to protect.

1. What the Reporting Describes

Note on sourcing. The specific Houston Chronicle article referenced here could not be retrieved directly for this analysis. Its central findings have therefore been reconstructed and corroborated from primary sources—the University of Houston president’s own campus communications—and from parallel reporting by the Texas Tribune, Inside Higher Ed, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Houston Public Media and the Associated Press. Where a figure or quotation appears below, it is drawn from those corroborating records.

The 40 percent and the “secret” review

The headline finding is scale. UH’s core curriculum consists of 42 semester credit hours—the standard Texas Core mandated for every public institution—and the university is reported to be preparing to cut roughly 40 percent of it. The reductions grow out of a working group the provost convened over the summer to sort core courses for compliance with SB 37. Faculty critics quoted in the coverage said the work was done largely in secret, raising “serious concerns” about violating shared-governance principles and about whether the university’s interpretation of the statute is “overly expansive.” The completed review was presented to the UH System Board of Regents at its March 12, 2026 meeting; the system must report its findings to the state by January 2027.

“Teach, not indoctrinate”: UH’s own framing

The tenor of the effort is set in President Renu Khator’s own November 21, 2025 message to faculty. She framed the review around exposure to competing ideas:

“Educating students is a serious responsibility, one that comes with our commitment to expose our students to different perspectives. Our responsibility is to give them the ability to form their own opinions, not to force a particular one on them. Our guiding principle is to teach them, not to indoctrinate them.”  — Renu Khator, UH President & Chancellor, Nov. 21, 2025

That message launched two parallel tracks. The first, required by SB 37, asked the Offices of the Provost and General Counsel to review every core course against four statutory conditions and sort each into one of three buckets: (A) meets the conditions, (B) does not, or (C) partially meets them. The second track “extended the spirit” of that review to all courses, asking every instructor to audit their own titles, syllabi and content, and asking deans and chairs to provide an “objective assessment.” In her January 27, 2026 update, Khator confirmed the SB 37 core review was complete and headed to the regents.

The checklist, the certifications, and the pushback

What turned a compliance exercise into a campus conflict was the machinery underneath it. A five-page checklist surfaced at a February 11 faculty-council curriculum-committee meeting, asking instructors to rate each course “yes,” “partially” or “no” on whether it requires students to adopt a political or ideological viewpoint, presents multiple perspectives, and avoids penalizing students for their beliefs. According to faculty present, the agenda had not mentioned the checklist and committee members said they had not drafted it; administrators said it was written by a faculty group but declined to name the participants.

Separately, several deans asked faculty to sign statements certifying they “teach, not indoctrinate.” In the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, Dean Daniel P. O’Connor wrote on February 3 that he had “no evidence” any instructor was violating the university’s commitment, but described the acknowledgement as necessary documentation. In the Honors College, Dean Heidi Appel wrote that full-time faculty who declined would be ineligible for merit salary increases, and part-time faculty could risk reappointment, with a February 9 deadline. Appel and Graduate College of Social Work Dean Yarneccia Dyson both cited language stating SB 37 requires courses “do not endorse specific policies, ideologies or legislation”—wording that had appeared in earlier drafts of the bill but was removed before the law passed.

Faculty resistance was pointed. Robert Zaretsky, who has taught at UH for 36 years, refused to sign:

“When I saw the word indoctrination, for me, that’s a red line. It was as if there was a good chance that we are indoctrinating our students.”  — Robert Zaretsky, UH professor

Zaretsky said his tenure let him refuse where adjuncts “who have bills to pay” could not, and he warned that the requirement to teach “multiple perspectives” on every controversial topic could overwhelm students and “sink the course.” Using language drafted by the campus AAUP chapter, faculty called the premise of widespread indoctrination a “straw man” and said signing could be read as “some admission of guilt.” On March 2, 174 UH professors urged the faculty council to formally vote on the checklist rather than let it advance by “silent approval.” The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) warned that compelling faculty to affirm they present certain viewpoints could violate First Amendment academic-freedom protections. UH’s chief legal officer, Dona Cornell, responded that the review simply aims to “publicly verify… that a UH education is built on the highest standards of excellence.”

Importantly, the review is already changing what is taught. Documents show that in the Graduate College of Social Work, revised “approved” syllabi for spring cut several readings focused on race, gender and sexuality and removed explicit references to those topics from course objectives.

A statewide pattern

UH’s episode sits inside a wider Texas wave that accelerated after SB 37 took effect in September 2025 and after a video of a Texas A&M professor discussing gender identity drew conservative backlash. As the Texas Tribune catalogued: Texas State University flagged hundreds of courses and told faculty to use an artificial-intelligence tool to rewrite titles and descriptions in “more neutral” language; Texas Tech’s chancellor required certain race- and gender-related instruction to be disclosed and sometimes pre-approved; Texas A&M regents restricted courses addressing “race or gender ideology” without written approval; and University of Texas regents adopted a rule that students must be able to graduate without studying “unnecessary controversial subjects,” taking a “broad and balanced” approach when such topics arise.

2. What Senate Bill 37 Actually Requires

Signed in 2025 and effective September 1, 2025, SB 37 rewires the governance of Texas public higher education. Three provisions matter most for curriculum and cost.

Recurring board review of the core. Governing boards must review the general-education curriculum at least once every five years. Each core course must be judged against four conditions: that it is (1) foundational and fundamental to a sound postsecondary curriculum; (2) necessary to prepare students for civic and professional life; (3) equips students for the workforce and the betterment of society; and (4) ensures a breadth of knowledge consistent with accreditation standards. The law also directs that curricula be free of content promoting racial, gender, ethnic or religious superiority. Notably, the statute does not prohibit teaching particular topics, and it does not require instructors to submit written assurances about their teaching—both features UH added in its implementation.

Faculty governance downgraded. SB 37 makes faculty senates “advisory only.” Boards—not professors—now establish any faculty council or senate, and university presidents may appoint members. This is the structural reason the UH checklist could move forward despite curriculum-committee members saying they had neither drafted nor approved it.

A new oversight layer. The law creates an Office of Excellence in Higher Education, with an ombudsman to field complaints and police compliance—an enforcement channel that did not previously exist. Supporters call this transparency to taxpayers; critics call it a standing mechanism for political pressure.

The Texas Core it acts upon. Since 2014 the Texas Core Curriculum has been a uniform 42-hour block across all public institutions, set in the Texas Education Code and overseen by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB). It spans eight components—communication; mathematics; life and physical sciences; language, philosophy and culture; creative arts; American history; government/political science; and social and behavioral sciences—plus a component-area option. Crucially, completing that 42-hour block at one Texas public institution obligates every other Texas public institution to accept it as a block, with no re-taking of core courses. A separate 2025 measure permits the THECB to approve a core of fewer than 42 hours where doing so accelerates “workforce-aligned credentials”—the statutory doorway through which a 40 percent reduction could pass.

3. Not Just Texas: A National Map

The through-line nationally is a transfer of authority over the core from faculty to legislators and politically appointed boards, paired with a substantive tilt toward Western-civilization and civics content and away from courses centered on diversity and social justice. Inside Higher Ed reported in June 2026 that “red state lawmakers” are reshaping “what students must learn before they can graduate,” and that a report counted 21 higher-education “censorship” bills enacted in 2025—every one of them in a state with a Republican-controlled legislature. The table below summarizes representative measures.

StateMeasureYearCore-curriculum thrust
TexasSB 372025Five-year board review of the core against four conditions; faculty senates advisory; new oversight office. Sparked 40% core cut at UH and course reviews system-wide.
FloridaSB 2662023Bars gen-ed courses teaching “identity politics” or systemic-racism theory. Board removed Principles of Sociology from the gen-ed menu (2024); FSU pulled 432 courses; FIU dropped 22.
OhioSB 12025Bans DEI programs; adds a required “American civic literacy” course; post-tenure review; bars full-time faculty strikes; mandates posted syllabi and rules for “controversial” topics.
IndianaSB 2022024Ties tenure and promotion to “intellectual diversity” as judged by boards of trustees; creates a student/employee complaint system; redefines “diversity.”
South CarolinaREACH Act2021Requires a course covering the Declaration, Constitution, Federalist Papers, Emancipation Proclamation and African American founding documents to graduate.
ArkansasStrengthening AR Education Act2025Part of the same wave narrowing curricular discretion and expanding state direction of required content.
CaliforniaCSU ethnic-studies mandate2020Counter-example: a Democratic legislature added a required ethnic-studies course across the nation’s largest four-year system—evidence that legislating the core is bipartisan in method, if not in aim.

Two structural escalations deserve emphasis. In several states, legislatively created civics centers—semi-autonomous units that lawmakers, not faculty, established—are being given power to choose or teach which courses satisfy gen-ed requirements, moving formerly siloed entities to the center of the curriculum. And at Auburn University, the board took “full curricular control” and dissolved the faculty senate outright. Because gen-ed inclusion drives enrollment and funding to departments, the authority to decide what “counts” is also the authority to decide which departments thrive or wither.

The intellectual architecture on each side

The reforms have an explicit rationale. The Manhattan Institute’s Correcting the Core argues that most anti-DEI laws left a loophole—“at least 12 states with DEI bans still allow public universities to mandate diversity-focused courses”—and that a “more strategic” fix is to tighten standards for what qualifies as gen ed and review courses periodically, which it frames as preserving academic freedom better than outright censorship a judge might strike down. The National Association of Scholars goes further, urging states to create “Schools of Intellectual Freedom” to control the humanities portion of gen ed. Ohio’s Senator Jerry Cirino put the motive plainly:

“It’s not just that I want more conservative stuff. I want balance. And these universities, in the past, have not been delivering balance.”  — Ohio State Sen. Jerry Cirino, author of SB 1

Critics answer that this is “intrusion” of a kind higher education has not seen. University of Kentucky emeritus professor John Thelin said he had “never seen such intrusion” into curriculum and was struck by how effective it has been. University of North Texas professor Barrett Taylor observed that “policymakers are casting higher education as a partisan good.” Yet even a sympathetic critic concedes a real underlying problem. Bard College’s Roosevelt Montás, a defender of liberal education, argues that much of what passes for a core is “general education in name only”:

“General education is a kind of backwater hodgepodge of things that happen to be in the catalog… no two students have the same general education… In a very real sense, universities have withdrawn from the task of general education. There is, in fact, fire from which the smoke is coming.”  — Roosevelt Montás, Bard College

4. The Cost-of-College Analysis

Because reducing the core is often sold as efficiency, it is natural to assume it makes a degree cheaper. The honest answer is: mostly not directly—and possibly the opposite. The cost story has five parts.

4.1 Cutting the core does not cut the bill

A Texas bachelor’s degree requires roughly 120 credit hours, of which the core is 42—about 35 percent. Nationally, general education runs 30–40 percent of a degree. The decisive point is that the 120-hour total does not fall when the core shrinks. If UH cuts its core by 40 percent—from 42 hours to roughly 25—students still need 120 hours to graduate. The freed ≈17 hours do not disappear from the bill; they migrate into the major, electives or new requirements. At UH’s 2024–25 resident rate of about $362 per credit hour (tuition only), those 17 hours represent roughly $6,200 of tuition that is relocated, not removed. A price cut only materializes if the total hours to a credential fall—which is precisely why the “workforce-aligned credential” acceleration pathway matters, and why watching whether total degree hours drop is more informative than watching the core shrink.

4.2 The transfer machine: the biggest hidden cost

Texas’s single most valuable cost-control device for students is the guaranteed 42-hour transfer block. Roughly half of Texas bachelor’s recipients pass through a community college, and the block is what lets them move without re-taking core courses or losing credit. Anything that lets institutions diverge in what counts as core—narrower lists, campus-specific substitutions, courses removed at one school but not another—introduces the risk that transferred credits no longer map cleanly. When credits do not transfer, students retake courses, pay twice, and graduate later.

The financial penalty is concrete because Texas and peer states already punish excess hours. Under excess-credit-hour surcharges, students who exceed roughly 110–130 percent of the credits their degree requires can pay double the per-credit tuition on the overage (Florida doubles tuition past 110 percent; Arizona charges 120 percent of the rate past 145 hours). Research finds these policies do little to speed completion and mostly deepen debt—especially for low- and middle-income students. A fragmenting core would push more transfer students across exactly these thresholds. And every added semester carries an opportunity cost of forgone earnings—commonly $30,000–$50,000 for a year out of the full-time workforce—that typically dwarfs the tuition itself.

4.3 Course supply and department contraction

Because gen-ed inclusion drives enrollment and dollars to departments, removing courses from the core can shrink the departments that offered them. Fewer faculty and fewer sections mean scheduling bottlenecks: required courses that fill up, waitlists, and students unable to get the classes they need on time. Bottlenecks are a well-documented driver of longer time-to-degree, which—again—raises both tuition paid and earnings forgone. A narrower core can thus raise the effective cost of a degree even as it advertises simplicity.

4.4 The overhead of permanent review

SB 37 institutionalizes continuous compliance: five-year board reviews, general-counsel involvement in curriculum, new oversight offices, complaint channels, and—at some institutions—AI tools to rewrite course descriptions and stipends to pay faculty reviewers. UH offered stipends to review spring courses; Texas State licensed an AI rewriting tool; states are standing up civics centers. These are real recurring expenditures. They rarely appear on a tuition bill as a line item, but administrative cost growth is ultimately financed by tuition and appropriations—the same two pockets students and taxpayers fill.

4.5 The value-and-trust backdrop

None of this is happening in a vacuum. Public confidence in higher education fell from 57 percent in 2015 to a record-low 36 percent in 2023, recovered to 42 percent in 2025, then slipped to about 38 percent in 2026. The share of Americans calling college “very important” collapsed from 75 percent in 2010 to 35 percent in 2025. Gallup and others attribute the erosion to three intertwined worries: cost and debt, perceived political bias or indoctrination, and doubts about job-market payoff. Khator herself opened her State of the University address by citing this collapse in trust and warning that “the attacks—justifiable or not—are constant.”

This cuts two ways, and honest analysis should hold both. For the reforms: if a tighter, cheaper-to-navigate, workforce-aligned and demonstrably “balanced” core restores public confidence, it protects the entire value proposition of a public degree and the appropriations that keep tuition down. Against the reforms: if politicized review degrades academic quality, chills teaching, and turns the credential into a contested political object, it can erode the very value and trust it claims to defend—while adding cost. The evidence to adjudicate this is not yet in; the mechanisms, however, are visible now.

Cost mechanisms at a glance.

MechanismDirectionWhy
Shrinking the core itself~NeutralDegree still 120 hours; core hours are reshuffled into major/electives, not deleted.
Fragmented transfer blockHigher ▲Lost/duplicated credits, excess-hour surcharges, extra semesters for transfer and community-college students.
Course-supply bottlenecksHigher ▲Department contraction reduces sections; waitlists lengthen time-to-degree.
Compliance & oversight overheadHigher ▲Recurring reviews, counsel, new offices, AI tools, civics centers—financed by tuition/appropriations.
Fewer total hours to a credentialLower ▼Only genuine price cut—requires the “workforce-aligned” sub-42 pathway to reduce the 120-hour total.
Restored public trust (if it occurs)Lower ▼Protects appropriations and degree value that hold down net price—contested and unproven.

5. Governance and Academic Freedom

Underneath the cost mechanics is a question of who decides. For a century, the core was mostly faculty territory. SB 37 and its analogues move that authority to governing boards and, through them, to the legislatures that appoint them. Supporters see overdue accountability: boards are the public’s representatives, and faculty had produced the incoherent “hodgepodge” Montás describes. Opponents see expertise displaced by politics and point to the concrete tools now in use—mandatory-sounding certifications, pre-approval of race- and gender-related instruction, complaint offices, and the reduction of faculty senates to advisory bodies presidents may appoint.

The academic-freedom objection is not merely a faculty grievance. FIRE—an organization that also defends conservative speech on campus—warned UH that compelling instructors to affirm they present particular viewpoints could violate the First Amendment. The chilling-effect concern is that instructors, unsure what will draw a complaint, will simply avoid contested material. If that happens, students hear fewer perspectives, not more—an outcome discussed directly in Section 8, because it bears on the reader’s central concern.

6. Workforce and Return on Investment

A core rationale of SB 37’s four conditions is workforce alignment. There is a defensible case: employers and students alike complain that degrees do not map to jobs, and a core weighted toward communication, quantitative reasoning, civics and clearly transferable skills can strengthen the payoff and the public’s sense that college “works.” If narrowing also accelerates workforce-aligned credentials under the sub-42 pathway, it could genuinely lower cost and raise ROI.

The counter-case is that the courses most often targeted—sociology, ethnic and gender studies, and other social-science offerings—also build skills employers say they want (analysis of data about people, cross-cultural communication, writing), and that labor-market value is not the only measure of a degree’s worth. The ROI argument, in other words, does not point cleanly in one direction; it depends on what replaces the trimmed courses and whether the replacement is rigorous or merely ideological. That is an empirical question worth tracking rather than asserting.

7. Access and Equity

The distributional effects fall hardest on the least-resourced students. Transfer and community-college students—disproportionately first-generation, working, and lower-income—depend most on the guaranteed transfer block and are most exposed to excess-hour surcharges and lost credits if the core fragments. Within the faculty, the pressure lands hardest on contingent instructors: UH’s Zaretsky could refuse to sign because he has tenure, while adjuncts on semester contracts—who teach a large share of introductory core courses—faced reappointment risk and merit-pay consequences. A policy that is a debate for the tenured can be a job threat for the contingent, and the people teaching the most cost-sensitive students are often the most vulnerable to it.

8. The Central Question: Is “One-Sidedness” the Disease or the Cure?

The concern animating this paper is not which topics appear in a catalog but the slant—the worry that a student hears essentially one side. That concern deserves to be taken seriously on its merits, and so does the strongest response to it. Both are laid out below; they are in genuine tension.

The case that the slant is real

The empirical starting point is not in dispute: faculty lean left, heavily in some fields. A 2022 study of more than 12,000 professors found Democrats outnumbering Republicans by about 8.5 to 1; a national survey put faculty at roughly 50 percent liberal, 30 percent moderate and 11 percent conservative, with the imbalance widest in the humanities and social sciences and narrowest in business and STEM. Surveys find that majorities of faculty themselves favor more political diversity on campus. When one “side” of the professoriate outnumbers the other by high single digits in the very departments that supply most core humanities and social-science courses, it is reasonable to worry that some students encounter a narrow band of views presented as settled. Cirino’s framing—“I want balance”—lands because the intuition behind it is grounded. And Montás’s concession that there is “fire from which the smoke is coming” comes from a defender of liberal education, not a critic of it.

The case that the cure carries its own slant

Three problems complicate the remedy. First, composition is not the same as indoctrination. That a professor votes one way does not establish that students are coerced; the UH faculty’s objection—that the checklist and certifications treat “widespread indoctrination” as an established fact when administrators conceded they had “no evidence” of violations—is a fair one. Second, the cure has a viewpoint too. Removing courses on race, gender and sexuality while mandating founding-documents and Western-civilization content is not a neutral act; it substitutes one set of emphases for another. A student who now reads only the Federalist Papers and never a critique of them has not been exposed to more sides—only to different ones. Replacing a perceived progressive monoculture with a legislated traditionalist one does not, by itself, increase the number of perspectives a student meets.

Third, and most corrosive to the stated goal, is the chilling effect. The surest way for an instructor to avoid a complaint under a vague “balance” mandate is to drop contested material entirely. Zaretsky’s worry—that requiring “multiple perspectives” on everything is unworkable and will make instructors retreat from controversy—points to an outcome in which students hear fewer competing arguments, not more. A rule intended to guarantee that students hear more than one side can, in practice, teach professors that the safest number of sides is zero.

The irony, and what would actually help

The deepest point is that both sides claim the same goal. Khator says the aim is to “expose students to different perspectives… not to force a particular one.” The AAUP says the same thing when it defends academic freedom. Cirino wants “balance.” FIRE wants open inquiry. The disagreement is not about whether students should hear multiple sides—everyone professes that—but about who is trusted to deliver it and whether top-down mandates produce real viewpoint diversity or merely a new orthodoxy plus self-censorship.

If the genuine objective is that students hear more than one side, the interventions most likely to achieve it are different from the ones most in evidence. Measures that add perspectives—requiring genuinely pluralistic reading lists, protecting instructors who assign opposing viewpoints, hiring for intellectual as well as demographic diversity, and teaching students to steelman positions they reject—tend to increase the number of sides in the room. Measures that subtract them—removing courses, compelling loyalty-style certifications, and pre-approving what may be taught—tend to shrink it, whatever their intent. A reader who worries most about one-sidedness has reason to scrutinize the method of a reform as closely as its stated motive, because a one-sided cure and a one-sided disease leave the student in the same place.

9. Where This Is Leading: Four Scenarios

The trajectory is not fixed; it depends on forthcoming THECB rules and on choices individual boards make. Four scenarios bound the range.

Scenario A — Streamlining. Boards trim genuine bloat, add coherent civics, and keep the transfer block intact. Cost is roughly neutral to slightly lower; quality arguably improves; the “general education in name only” problem eases. This is the reformers’ best case.

Scenario B — Fragmentation. Campuses diverge in what counts as core, the 42-hour block frays, and transfer and community-college students lose credits and time. Cost rises, borne by exactly the students least able to absorb it. This is the most direct cost-of-college risk.

Scenario C — Chill and contraction. Certifications, complaint offices and pre-approval push instructors to drop contested material; targeted departments shrink; course supply tightens and bottlenecks lengthen time-to-degree. Students hear fewer perspectives and pay more for the privilege—the outcome most at odds with the reforms’ own stated goal.

Scenario D — Oversight as permanent infrastructure. Review offices, civics centers and compliance apparatus become standing fixtures with recurring cost and ongoing authority over what “counts,” institutionalizing political review of curriculum regardless of which party holds the legislature. California’s ethnic-studies mandate is the reminder that the tool, once built, is available to every side.

The realistic path is a blend, varying by campus and leadership. The single most important variable for cost is whether the guaranteed transfer block survives the reshaping; the single most important variable for the reader’s viewpoint concern is whether the method chosen adds perspectives or removes them.

10. What to Watch

A short watchlist for tracking where UH—and the country—actually ends up:

  • Total degree hours, not just core hours. A price cut is real only if the 120-hour requirement falls; a smaller core alone is not savings.
  • The transfer block. Do THECB rules preserve the guaranteed 42-hour block, or let campuses diverge? This is the biggest single cost lever.
  • Excess-hour data. Watch whether transfer students increasingly cross surcharge thresholds or add semesters after core changes.
  • Course supply. Section counts and waitlists in affected departments—early indicators of bottleneck-driven delay.
  • Method of review. Certifications, pre-approvals and course removals (subtractive) versus pluralistic requirements and academic-freedom protections (additive).
  • Whether students hear more sides or fewer. The stated goal; measure it by what is actually assigned and debated, not by the politics of the reform.

11. Bottom Line

The UH story is a local instance of a national reallocation of power over the college core from faculty to the state. On cost, the popular intuition is largely wrong: shrinking the core does not shrink the bill unless total credits fall, and several plausible effects—transfer fragmentation, course bottlenecks, compliance overhead—push cost up, especially for the most vulnerable students. On the concern that students hear only one side, the worry is grounded in real data about faculty composition—but the remedies most in evidence risk answering a one-sided disease with a one-sided cure, and the chilling effect they create can reduce the number of perspectives a student encounters rather than increase it. Everyone in this debate says they want students to think for themselves. Whether these particular reforms deliver that—or simply change which single narrative dominates—will be settled by method and implementation, and is worth watching closely on both counts.

Sources

Primary sources (University of Houston)

•  Renu Khator, “Curriculum and SB 37,” UH President’s Office, Nov. 21, 2025 — https://www.uh.edu/president/communications/communicae/2025-11-21-curriculum-and-sb37/

•  Renu Khator, “Update: SB 37 and Other Issues,” UH President’s Office, Jan. 27, 2026 — https://www.uh.edu/president/communications/communicae/2026-01-27-sb37-update/

•  Texas Core Curriculum at UH (42-hour core, components) — https://www.uh.edu/nursing/academics/undergraduate-programs/texas-core-curriculum/

Reporting

•  Jessica Priest, “GOP-led fight over allegations of student indoctrination raises tensions at University of Houston,” Texas Tribune, Mar. 9, 2026 — https://www.texastribune.org/2026/03/09/texas-university-houston-indoctrination-fight/

•  Ryan Quinn, “How GOP State Lawmakers Are Reshaping General Education,” Inside Higher Ed, Jun. 16, 2026 — https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty/curriculum/2026/06/16/how-gop-state-lawmakers-are-reshaping-general-education

•  “U. of Houston Is Planning Big Cuts to Its Core Curriculum. Faculty Aren’t Happy,” Chronicle of Higher Education — https://www.chronicle.com/article/u-of-houston-is-planning-big-cuts-to-its-core-curriculum-faculty-arent-happy

•  “University of Houston asks professors to sign agreement ‘not to indoctrinate’ students,” Houston Public Media, Feb. 6, 2026 — https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/education/2026/02/06/542793/uh-professor-agreement-curriculum-texas-universities-sb-37/

•  “Florida institutions slash general education offerings,” Inside Higher Ed, Oct. 3, 2024 — https://www.insidehighered.com/news/governance/state-oversight/2024/10/03/florida-institutions-slash-general-education-offerings

•  “Report: State Lawmakers Enacted 21 Censorship Bills in 2025,” Inside Higher Ed, Jan. 15, 2026 — https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty/curriculum/2026/01/15/report-state-lawmakers-enacted-21-censorship-bills-2025

Law and policy

•  Texas SB 37, 89th Legislature (bill text) — https://legiscan.com/TX/text/SB37/id/3205486

•  Senate Research Center, S.B. 37 Bill Analysis (PDF) — https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/89R/analysis/pdf/SB00037F.pdf

•  Texas Education Code § 61.822, Transfer of Credits; Core Curriculum — https://texas.public.law/statutes/tex._educ._code_section_61.822

•  THECB, Texas Core Curriculum Application Guide — https://reportcenter.highered.texas.gov/agency-publication/miscellaneous/waar-faq-texas-core-curriculum/

•  Ohio Senate Bill 1 (2025), overview — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio_Senate_Bill_1_(2025)

•  Indiana Senate Bill 202 (2024), Inside Higher Ed — https://www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-takes/2024/03/04/bill-tying-tenure-intellectual-diversity-heads-governor

Data and context

•  Gallup, U.S. Public Trust in Higher Education (2025–26) — https://news.gallup.com/poll/692519/public-trust-higher-rises-recent-low.aspx

•  “A Closer Look at Faculty Political Diversity,” Inside Higher Ed, Feb. 26, 2026 — https://www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-takes/2026/02/26/closer-look-faculty-political-diversity

•  “Excess credit hour policies increase student debt,” Inside Higher Ed — https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/07/20/excess-credit-hour-policies-increase-student-debt

•  General education share of a bachelor’s degree (30–40%) — https://www.edvisorly.com/student-guides/gen-ed-requirements

Prepared as an independent analytical white paper. The referenced Houston Chronicle article was inaccessible at the time of writing; its findings were reconstructed and corroborated from the primary and secondary sources listed above. Figures are illustrative where noted. This paper is analysis, not legal or financial advice.

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A collaboration between Lewis McLain & AI

A Confession Up Front

I have been in and around Texas municipal finance since 1972. I have read more budgets, audits, and commissioners court agendas than any sane person should. I thought I had at least a passing familiarity with every category of local government program that exists — public safety, utilities, parks, health, courts, jails, economic development, and all the alphabet-soup grant programs that flow through them.

Then last week I read an article in the San Antonio Report about something called a “crisis nursery,” and I realized I had never heard of it. Not once. Not in a budget document, not in a bond program, not in a county commissioners agenda, not in fifty-plus years of paying attention.

That bothered me enough to do something about it. So I did what I now do when my ignorance gets exposed: I put my AI research assistant to work. What follows is the product of that research — a layperson’s education on a program model that turns out to be older than most of my clients’ comprehensive plans, rarer than it ought to be, and cheaper than the systems it is designed to keep families out of. As always, I have tried to verify the key figures against original sources, but I want to be honest with my readers: the foundation of this post is AI-assisted research prompted by one newspaper article and my own admitted ignorance of the subject. Take it in that spirit, and check my numbers if you are in a position to act on them.

What Caught My Eye in San Antonio

The San Antonio Report story (Diego Medel, July 13, 2026) reported two developments moving on parallel tracks. First, Bexar County commissioners directed staff to explore creating a county-supported crisis nursery, with staff due back in August with recommendations on procurement and potential providers. Second, a coalition of San Antonio nonprofits — operating as the Safety Nest Network — revealed it has already been quietly running a collaborative version of the model for eight or nine months while waiting on the City of San Antonio to release a feasibility study that has been sitting in draft form for more than a year and a half.

A crisis nursery, for those as uninformed as I was, is a voluntary, licensed program that provides short-term care for children while a parent or caregiver deals with an emergency — a hospitalization, a mental health crisis, domestic violence, homelessness, a surgery, a substance abuse treatment stay. The key distinctions from foster care are that it is voluntary, temporary, and custody never changes hands. The family asks for help before the crisis becomes a Child Protective Services case, the children stay in a safe licensed setting for a few days, the parent gets connected to services, and the children go home.

Bexar County Sheriff Javier Salazar described the alternative in terms any first responder would recognize: deputies taking up collections among themselves to buy formula and diapers for children riding in patrol cars for hours while officers hunt for a relative. Children sitting in hospital emergency departments with no medical need, or waiting in CPS offices for a placement, simply because there is nowhere else for them to go during a family emergency.

The county’s funding idea is what got my municipal finance attention: roughly $1,600,000 previously budgeted for CPS family-based safety services caseworkers — positions the state has since taken over — could be redirected toward keeping families out of the child welfare system in the first place. That is a redeployment question, not a new-money question, and those are always the most interesting ones.

How Widespread Is This Model? Less Than You Would Think

Here is where my research surprised me. I assumed that if I had never heard of crisis nurseries, it must be a new idea. It is not. It is a forty-year-old idea that America funded, built, and then largely let wither.

The model got its national start with federal legislation — the Temporary Child Care for Children with Disabilities and Crisis Nursery Act of 1986, amended and expanded in 1992. According to research summarized by the ARCH National Respite Network, 47 states used that funding to establish a total of 175 crisis nurseries and two respite centers. That is a genuine national infrastructure buildout.

Then the dedicated federal funding stream went away, and so did most of the nurseries. According to a 2024 survey cited by SchoolHouse Connection, only 48 crisis nurseries remain in operation across the entire United States today. Seven of those are in one state — Illinois — which is no accident, because Illinois is the state that maintained ongoing state funding through its Department of Human Services. Illinois DHS today funds nurseries in Des Plaines, Rockford, Peoria, Springfield, Bloomington, and Urbana, all providing 24-hour crisis care at no cost to families.

The rest of the map is thin. Missouri has the outstanding St. Louis operation I will describe below. Minnesota, Arizona, California, and a scattering of other states have one or two. West Virginia is only now, in 2026, trying to open its first. And Texas — a state with 254 counties and more than 31 million people — has essentially no true crisis nursery infrastructure at all. That is why the San Antonio coalition had to invent something.

So the answer to “how widespread” is: the idea is old and proven, the footprint is small and shrinking, and the survivors are concentrated where a government funding partner stayed at the table. That last clause is the whole ballgame, and it is exactly the question now in front of Bexar County commissioners.

What Does One Cost to Run?

This is where I put the research assistant to work pulling operating budgets, and the numbers turned out to be refreshingly modest by local government standards.

A single-site crisis nursery appears to run in the range of $1,000,000 to $2,000,000 per year. Three data points:

The Crisis Nursery of Champaign County, Illinois — a 12-bed facility serving children birth through age six, admitting an average of 9 to 15 children in a 24-hour day and supporting 401 children last year — reports a FY23 annual operating budget of $2,038,819, with 78 cents of every dollar going to direct program services. Its funding mix is instructive: state DCFS money for the 24/7 emergency childcare program, Illinois State Board of Education money for prevention, federal pass-through dollars, an annual fund, an endowment established in 1998, and special events that raise nearly 20 percent of the budget.

The Urbana, Illinois nursery shows annual revenue of approximately $1,335,726. The Greater Minneapolis Crisis Nursery, founded in 1983, shows annual revenue of approximately $1,614,516.

Run the arithmetic on Champaign County and you get roughly $170,000 per licensed bed per year, or about $5,000 per child served annually. For perspective, a single detention bed in most Texas county jails costs more per year than a crisis nursery bed, and the jail bed is housing the downstream consequence rather than preventing the upstream cause.

The Gold Standard: St. Louis

If you want to see what the model looks like at scale and maturity, look at the Saint Louis Crisis Nursery. Founded in 1986 out of a Junior League research committee on child abuse, it now operates five 24-hour nursery locations plus a network of Family Empowerment Centers across St. Louis City, St. Louis County, St. Charles County, Jefferson County, and southern Illinois. It serves almost 4,000 children a year, birth through age 12, and has cared for more than 132,000 children since opening.

Two outcome numbers from their program reporting deserve attention. Annually, 96 percent of families who use crisis care services meet the safety and stability goals set at intake by the time they discharge their children. And 99 percent of children who stay at the nursery return home to their families — avoiding foster care placement entirely.

Those are the kinds of numbers that should make a county budget officer sit up, because they convert directly into avoided cost, which brings me to the fiscal case.

The Fiscal Math: What a Foster Care Placement Costs the Taxpayer

Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago published a 2024 analysis of the economic burden of child maltreatment and child welfare involvement. Their per-child government investment figures for a foster care removal:

Best-case scenario — short time in care, good treatment, timely permanency: $32,711 per child, covering medical needs, court costs, foster care maintenance payments, and agency administrative costs of removal and placement.

Harder scenario — longer time in care, repeated placements, multiple caseworkers, aging out: $65,422 per child.

Now hold those numbers up against the Bexar County proposal. The county is contemplating redirecting roughly $1,600,000 of existing budget. The Safety Nest Network has separately raised more than $500,000 in philanthropic support and will operate 42 residential beds after its August 18 expansion.

At the Chapin Hall best-case figure, the county’s entire $1,600,000 is recovered if the network diverts just 49 children per year from foster care removal. At the harder-scenario figure, the breakeven is 25 children. A 42-bed network with short average stays of one to three days — the typical crisis nursery stay per the national Crisis Nursery Coalition — will touch hundreds of children a year. If St. Louis-style outcomes hold even approximately, the diversion math is not close. The program pays for itself several times over, and that is before counting the avoided costs that never show up in a child welfare ledger: deputy hours spent babysitting in patrol cars, emergency department hours consumed by children with no medical need, and the long-tail human costs that Chapin Hall and others document in adverse childhood experience research.

My standard caveat applies, and it is the same one I apply to every economic development incentive analysis I have ever reviewed: the savings are real only if the diversions are real and measured. A county funding this model should require the provider to track, family by family, whether a CPS investigation or removal was plausibly avoided — not merely assert it in an annual report. Bexar County staff would do well to build that measurement requirement into the procurement from day one.

The San Antonio Twist

One more feature of the Bexar story deserves comment, because it is genuinely different from the national model. Rebecca Helterbrand of Respite Care of San Antonio told the San Antonio Report that the idea of a crisis nursery has circulated in San Antonio for nearly 25 years and repeatedly died — and when the coalition studied why, they concluded the standard model was the problem. Most of the 48 surviving nurseries are single nonprofits sustained by major capital campaigns and deep ongoing philanthropy. San Antonio’s philanthropic base, she said candidly, is not built for that.

So instead of building one standalone institution, nine organizations — ChildSafe, AVANCE, the YMCA and YWCA, Family Service Association, St. Jude’s Ranch for Children, Belong Community-Based Care, UT Health San Antonio, and Respite Care of San Antonio — wired their existing services together into one coordinated intake network with tiered responses: intensive case management for some families, emergency drop-in child care for others, and temporary voluntary residential care for the hardest situations. Helterbrand calls it “Puro San Antonio.” A statewide funder is already backing it as a model that could be replicated in other Texas communities.

That replication question is the one I want to leave hanging in the air.

The Question for the Rest of Us

If a 42-bed collaborative network can operate in Bexar County on roughly $2,100,000 of combined public and philanthropic money, what is the excuse in the rest of urban Texas?

Dallas County is contemplating a criminal justice campus measured in billions of dollars. Collin County is one of the fastest-growing counties in America, full of young families and, statistically, full of family emergencies. Tarrant, Denton, Harris, Travis, Bexar — every one of them has deputies buying diapers out of pocket and children waiting in CPS lobbies. Every one of them has some pocket of budget, like Bexar’s $1,600,000 in stranded CPS caseworker funding, that could be redeployed upstream.

I do not know yet whether the crisis nursery model belongs in every county budget. I only learned the term existed a week ago, and I have told you honestly how I learned the rest. But I know a favorable cost-benefit profile when I see one, and I know that a 25-to-49-child breakeven against a 42-bed, hundreds-of-children-per-year operation is the kind of arithmetic that deserves a line item, not another feasibility study gathering dust in a city manager’s inbox.

Bexar County staff report back to commissioners court in August. I will be watching, and I suspect a few other Texas counties should be too.

Sources and Method

This post grew out of the San Antonio Report article of July 13, 2026, by Diego Medel, and AI-assisted research conducted against that article’s claims. Principal sources include the Illinois Department of Human Services crisis nursery program pages; the Crisis Nursery of Champaign County FY23 financial disclosures; the Saint Louis Crisis Nursery program reporting; SchoolHouse Connection’s 2024 survey of crisis nursery facilities; ARCH National Respite Network historical data on the 1986 and 1992 federal acts; and Chapin Hall’s 2024 analysis of the economic burden of child maltreatment. Where figures matter to the argument, I have stated them exactly as reported by the source. Errors of interpretation are mine — and given how this post began, I would welcome correction from anyone who knows this field better than a newly educated newcomer.

Where Were the Parents? The Teen Takeover Phenomenon and the Generations That Set the Stage

.Reading time 33 minutes.

A collaboration between Lewis McLain & AI

A 14-year-old shot in the chest. Hundreds of teens swarming downtown Detroit on a Sunday night. A mayor pleading for both compassion and curfews. The “teen takeover”phenomenon is everywhere — and the question no one wants to answer honestly is what the last two generations did to make it inevitable.

On the evening of May 17, 2026, a 14-year-old boy was shot in the chest on Library Street in downtown Detroit. He had been standing in a crowd of hundreds of teenagers — kids who had organized on TikTok and Instagram to converge on the same few blocks, the same way they had the weekend before, and the weekend before that. Two large groups collided near Grand River Avenue. A fight broke out. Somebody pulled a gun. The boy survived. A 16-year-old and a 17-year-old were taken into custody. Detroit Mayor Mary Sheffield, who had spent the previous month inviting the takeover organizers to her office and publicly praising their “leadership,” stood at a podium the next morning and said the city would not tolerate what it had just seen.

What the city had just seen was not new. It was not even new to Detroit. In April 1974, an estimated twenty to twenty-five thousand teenagers forced the shutdown of the Belle Isle bridge. In August 1976, members of a Detroit street gang stormed Cobo Hall during an Average White Band concert, beating concertgoers and rampaging through downtown afterward. Large, loosely organized teen gatherings going violently sideways is a recurring feature of American urban life. What is new is the speed and the scale — the fact that on any given Saturday in 2026, a TikTok post can summon a thousand kids to a public square in three hours, and that the same scene is playing out in Chicago, Atlanta, Indianapolis, Cincinnati, and a dozen other downtowns simultaneously.

The response from city halls has been almost uniformly bewildered. Mayors are oscillating between treating the takeovers as a youth-services failure (build more rec centers, hire more outreach workers, host structured events) and treating them as a law-enforcement failure (enforce curfews, ticket parents, increase police presence). Both responses are reasonable. Neither is sufficient. And neither one engages the deeper and more uncomfortable question that almost no public official will say out loud: what were the last two generations of adults doing while the structures that used to absorb adolescent energy quietly fell apart?

What a Takeover Actually Is

The mechanics are simple and well-documented. Someone — usually a teenager with a substantial social-media following — posts a time and a location. Other teens repost it. The post goes viral within a metro area over the course of a day or two. On the appointed evening, hundreds to thousands of young people converge on a downtown, a park, a mall, or a transit hub. They take photos. They post video. They mill around. They meet kids from other neighborhoods. Most of them go home.

A minority of them do not. Among the crowd are smaller groups looking for fights, for property to damage, for opportunities to rob someone, or — in a small but growing number of cases — to use a firearm. Once hundreds of bodies are packed into a few blocks, a single dispute escalates instantly. The crowd itself becomes cover. Police arrive in numbers insufficient to disperse the gathering without confrontation. Video of the chaos hits the internet within minutes and feeds the algorithm that produces next week’s larger event.

This is the essential mechanic, and it is worth pausing on. The teen takeover is not a riot. It is not a protest. It is not, for the overwhelming majority of participants, a criminal enterprise. It is a social gathering — closer in spirit to a flash mob, a pop-up festival, or the way teenagers in earlier eras would converge on a particular drive-in, mall food court, or strip of beach. The organizers themselves are not, by and large, hardened criminals. The two sixteen-year-olds whom Mayor Sheffield invited to her office in April were, by every account, articulate kids who wanted a public space where they felt welcome. One of them, Danasha’ Tidwell, told reporters after the violence that the vandalism and violence“was harmful and very unacceptable” and that “these actions put people at risk.” That is not the voice of a wrecking crew. That is the voice of a teenager who organized a party that got out of her hands.

The Convergence of Causes

No single factor produced this phenomenon. It is a convergence — a stack of independent failures that compound on one another. To understand it, and more importantly to do anything about it, we have to be willing to name all of them.

The technology layer is the most obvious and the least sufficient explanation. Yes, TikTok and Instagram are the organizing infrastructure. Yes, the algorithm rewards chaos with reach, and the reach guarantees the next gathering will be larger. But blaming social media is like blaming the highway for the car crash. Adolescents have always wanted to gather. The phone in their pocket is the medium, not the motive. If we removed every social network tomorrow, the underlying hunger — to be physically present with hundreds of other people their own age, on a Saturday night, in a place that feels like it matters — would still be there. The question is why that hunger has nowhere legitimate to go.

The “third place” has collapsed. The sociologist Ray Oldenburg coined the term in 1989 to describe the informal public spaces — neither home nor work — where community life used to happen. For teenagers, the third places were the mall, the bowling alley, the diner, the skating rink, the movie theater, the parking lot of the convenience store, the church youth group, the school dance, the public park with lights on after dark. Most of those are gone or radically restricted. Malls have either closed outright or banned unaccompanied minors. Movie theaters require a parent. Diners do not exist in most suburbs. Public parks close at dusk. Rec centers have had their hours cut. Church youth groups, where they still operate, reach a fraction of the kids they once did. The result is that a teenager with a free Saturday evening has, in many American cities, literally nowhere to go that is free, indoor, supervised, and welcoming.

The takeover organizers say this explicitly. They are not asking for diversion programs. They are asking forsomewhere to be. Mayor Sheffield has at least heard them clearly on this point. Her phrase — that the kids “want to be part of a city and a place downtown where they feel welcome” — is descriptively accurate. The harder question is why a city the size of Detroit has so few such places that hundreds of teenagers feel the only way to claim one is to swarm Library Street.

Post-pandemic adolescence is a real and underrated factor. The kids who are sixteen years old today were twelve in the spring of 2020. They lost a year of school, a year of after-school activity, a year of summer programs, a year of casual hanging out, a year of the slow accumulation of social norms that governs how teenagers behave in public. They came out of it with their thumbs in better shape than their feet. Their primary social muscle was developed online, in environments where the consequences of behavior are largely invisible. Now they are out in the world again, in large numbers, and the social technology they spent their formative years learning does not translate well to a crowd of a thousand people on a public street. Some of them — most of them — are simply trying to figure out how to be present with other humans. Some of them have never had to.

The enforcement and parental layer is the part everyone wants to argue about and the part that matters most.Detroit has a curfew on the books. It is 10 p.m. for kids fifteen and under, 11 p.m. for sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds. The May 17 shooting happened around 9:40 p.m., right at the curfew threshold. Most of the kids in the crowd were violating the spirit if not the letter of the ordinance simply by being downtown that late without an adult. The curfew is, by every account, sporadically enforced. Parental responsibility tickets exist but are rarely issued.

The Chicago Police Superintendent, Larry Snelling, put this with unusual clarity earlier this spring. He said that many young people “don’t necessarily fear the police” — but they would be “more concerned if they saw their parents or their teachers there, who could identify them and what they’re doing.” This is true. It has always been true. In the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago, the principal of the local high school, with police cooperation, organized parents and teachers to physically gather on the street where a teen takeover was planned. When the teens arrived, they were met not by riot gear but by a crowd of adults they knew by name. The takeover dissolved. Nobody was arrested. Nobody was shot.

This is not magic. It is the oldest social technology in the world: the unmistakable knowledge that the adults in your life know where you are and what you are doing. It worked in 1955. It worked in 1985. It works now, in the few places where it still happens. What has changed is not the technology. What has changed is the number of households in which there is a parent present, awake, paying attention, and willing to bear the social cost of going to look for their kid.

What the Last Two Generations Were Doing

Here is the part that does not make it into most newspaper articles, because it implicates everyone and exonerates no one.

The teenagers who are taking over downtown Detroit on Saturday nights have parents who are, on average, between thirty-five and fifty years old. Those parents grew up between roughly 1985 and 2010. They were themselves raised by parents who, on average, came of age between 1965 and 1990. Those are the two generations in question. And while it is unfair to generalize about any individual family, the aggregate pattern is not in serious dispute.

The family structure collapsed. In 1960, roughly 73 percent of American children lived with two married parents in their first marriage. By 2020 that figure was 46 percent. The share of children born to unmarried mothers rose from about 5 percent in 1960 to roughly 40 percent today. The decline has not been evenly distributed. In some American cities, including Detroit, the share of children in single-parent households exceeds 60 percent. This is not a moral indictment of any particular parent — single mothers and single fathers do heroic work every day — but it is a structural fact with predictable consequences. A household with one adult has, on average, half the supervisory capacity of a household with two. Multiply that across a generation and across a city, and you have a measurable decline in the number of teenagers whose evenings are accounted for.

Mediating institutions emptied out. Church attendance, which provided a parallel adult network watching over kids in nearly every American community as recently as the 1960s, has fallen by roughly half over two generations. Roughly 28 percent of Americans now identify as religiously unaffiliated, up from about 5 percent in the early 1970s. Civic organizations — the Rotary clubs, the Elks lodges, the Knights of Columbus, the volunteer fire companies, the neighborhood improvement associations — have lost members at comparable rates. Robert Putnam documented this in Bowling Alone a quarter century ago, and the trend has only accelerated. The point is not that everyone needs to be a member of the Rotary. The point is that every one of these institutions used to put a particular sixteen-year-old in regular, named contact with a dozen unrelated adults who knew his parents and knew where he lived. When those institutions empty out, that web of accountability empties with them.

Parenting itself was redefined as a service relationship.Somewhere between the 1980s and the early 2000s, a quiet shift happened in mainstream parenting culture. The earlier model — in which parents were the unambiguous authorities and children were expected to conform to family and community standards — was replaced, gradually, by a model in which parents were facilitators of their children’s self-actualization. Boundaries softened. Negotiation replaced instruction. The phrase “my child would never” became a reflexive defense rather than a statement of fact. There were real gains in this shift. Children were less often beaten. They were listened to more. Their emotional lives were taken seriously. But there were also real losses, and the loss most relevant to a Saturday night in downtown Detroit is the erosion of the simple expectation that a parent has the right and the duty to know where his child is at 9:40 p.m. and to physically retrieve him if necessary.

Screens replaced supervision. Beginning around 2007, with the introduction of the smartphone, and accelerating dramatically after 2012, the average American teenager began spending several additional hours per day on a personal device. The data on what this did to adolescent mental health is by now overwhelming, and Jonathan Haidt and others have written the definitive accounts. But there is a less-discussed second-order effect, which is what it did toparents. The same smartphone that pacified the child also occupied the adult. A generation of parents grew accustomed to the idea that their kid in his room with a phone was safe, contented, and accounted for. He was none of those things. But he was quiet. And the quiet was mistaken for parenting.

The economic squeeze is real and is part of the story too.Two-parent households in which both parents work full-time — which now describes the majority of American families with children — have measurably less time for the kind of hour-by-hour engagement that earlier generations took for granted. This is not anyone’s fault individually. It is the consequence of a housing market, a healthcare system, and a wage structure that no longer permit most American families to operate on a single income. But it does mean that the practical capacity for supervision has fallen even where the will to supervise remains.

Add these together. A single-parent household, in a neighborhood with few functioning mediating institutions, where the dominant cultural script is non-directive parenting, where both parents (if there are two) are working long hours, where the child has had a phone in his pocket since he was eleven, where the rec center closed in 2017 and the mall stopped letting unaccompanied minors in three years ago, where the church his grandmother attended is down to a few dozen members on Sunday — and you have a kid for whom no one is meaningfully positioned to ask, on a Saturday at 9 p.m., “where are you and who are you with?”

“Where are the parents? What is causing this to happen?”

— A Detroit resident, May 2026

The question is the right one. The answer, in aggregate, is that the parents are at work, or asleep, or scrolling, or absent, or doing the best they can but operating in a structure that two generations of social drift has hollowed out from underneath them. None of this is a moral indictment of any individual mother or father. All of it is a description of what we have collectively built — or, more accurately, what we have collectively allowed to corrode.

A Christian Reading

For those of us reading this as Christians, the framework offered by Scripture is neither sentimental about kids nor dismissive of them. It is direct. “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it”(Proverbs 22:6). “Fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord” (Ephesians 6:4). “He that spareth his rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes”(Proverbs 13:24). The biblical model is one of formation — patient, demanding, loving, and unmistakably authoritative.

It is also one of community responsibility. The Old Testament city gates, where the elders sat, were a literal architecture of supervision. The New Testament church was understood from its earliest days as a household of households, in which other people’s children were one’s own concern. “Bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ” (Galatians 6:2). When a thirteen-year-old wandered through Jerusalem alone for three days, the resulting search party included not only his mother and father but the whole extended family caravan (Luke 2:41–52). The presumption that a child is the private concern of his nuclear family alone — and that what he does on a Saturday night is between him and his phone — is not a Christian inheritance. It is a modern invention, and a recent one.

The teen takeover is, among other things, a vivid picture of what happens when that older architecture is removed and nothing is built to replace it. Hundreds of kids show up in a public square because the public square is the only place they can find each other. They have no church youth group meeting that night. They have no scout troop. They have no neighborhood ball field with adults present. They have no front porch on which to sit. They have, instead, an algorithm, a downtown, and each other. The honest Christian response is not to be scandalized that they are there. The honest Christian response is to ask what we have been doing for two generations that left them with no other option.

What the Policy Conversation Misses

Mayor Sheffield’s six-point summer strategy is, on its merits, a reasonable municipal response. The new Office of Youth Affairs, the Youth Advisory Board, extended rec center hours, school listening sessions, structured “teen activations” downtown — all of these are useful and none of them will hurt. The Chicago parent-mob model is better than any of them: it works precisely because it does not require a new city department. It requires adults willing to show up.

But the conversation in city halls is constrained, for understandable political reasons, to the levers that city government actually controls. Curfews can be tightened. Police can be deployed. Programs can be funded. Parental responsibility tickets can be issued. These are the tools. They are not nothing — Detroit’s curfew, fully enforced, would meaningfully reduce the size of the gatherings — but they are downstream of the real problem.

The real problem is not solvable by municipal ordinance. It is solvable, if at all, by the slow and unglamorous work of rebuilding the institutions and habits that two generations of Americans let fall into disrepair. Marriage. The intact family. The neighborhood church. The volunteer ball league. The Friday-night youth gathering at the school gym. The grandparent who lives close enough to watch the kids on Saturday. The neighbor who knows your son’s name and will call you if he sees him on the wrong corner. These are not the responsibility of the mayor’s office. They are the responsibility of everyone else.

What This Means for Cities Like Mine

I work with municipal governments across Texas. Most of the cities I serve — Plano, McKinney, Princeton, Stafford, Groves, Denton, Midland — are not Detroit. They have lower crime rates, more intact families, more functioning churches, more youth programming, and more involved parents on a per-capita basis. They have so far been spared the worst of the takeover phenomenon. But the underlying pressures are the same everywhere. The smartphone is the same in McKinney as it is in Detroit. The decline in two-parent households is slower in Texas than in Michigan but it is moving in the same direction. The retreat of the church from daily life is universal. The collapse of the third place is universal.

If I were advising a Texas city today on how to get ahead of this — and a few of them are starting to ask — I would say the following. First, do not wait for a takeover to happen before you map your existing youth infrastructure honestly. How many places are there in your city, right now, where an unaccompanied fourteen-year-old can spend three hours on a Saturday night for free, indoors, in the presence of adults who know his name? In most American suburbs, the answer is zero. That is the problem statement.

Second, enforce your curfew. Whatever the ordinance says, enforce it. If it says 11 p.m., it means 11 p.m., and the consequence for violation should be an actual phone call to an actual parent, not a warning. Curfew enforcement is the single most effective lever a city government has, and it is the lever almost nobody pulls because it is unglamorous and because pulling it generates complaints. Pull it anyway.

Third, work with — do not work around — the churches in your city. They are still the largest network of adult volunteers in most American communities. They are also the most chronically under-utilized resource in municipal youth strategy. A church gym open on Friday night, with two adult chaperones and a basketball, will outperform any program your city’s parks and recreation department can design. It costs almost nothing. It requires only that the city stop treating church partnership as politically awkward.

Fourth, talk honestly about parental responsibility. Not as a punitive matter — though parental responsibility tickets have their place — but as a cultural matter. The single most important question a city can help parents in their community to ask is this one: do I know where my child is right now? If the answer is no, no program will fix it. If the answer is yes, no program is needed.

The Boy on Library Street

The fourteen-year-old who was shot near Grand River Avenue is expected to recover. His football coach, a community mentor named Dejuan Ford, said he had been at practice earlier that week. He is described as a good kid. He probably is. He was, by the account of everyone who knows him, in the wrong place at the wrong time, in a crowd that should not have existed, on a street that should have been quiet at nine forty on a Sunday night.

He should not have been there. The hundreds of teenagers he was standing with should not have been there. And the deepest answer to why they were is not that Mayor Sheffield was insufficiently tough, or that Detroit’s curfew is inadequately written, or that TikTok is poorly regulated. The deepest answer is that the architecture of supervision that surrounded an American teenager in 1955, or 1975, or even 1995, has been quietly dismantled — by economic pressure, by cultural drift, by good intentions, by neglect — and the kids are now living in the rubble of what their parents and grandparents did not maintain.

The takeovers will not be solved by mayors. They will be solved, if they are solved, by the long and humbling work of rebuilding what was lost. That work begins at home. It continues at church. It runs through the school, the rec center, the ball field, and the front porch. It is the work of generations, and it cannot be delegated to a city government, however well-intentioned its press conferences.

In the meantime, the curfew is 10 p.m. for kids fifteen and under, and 11 p.m. for sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds. If you have a child or grandchild in either category, you already know what to do.

Lewis F. McLain Jr. is the principal of CityBaseLab, a Texas municipal finance consulting practice. He writes on policy, economics, and culture from a Christian conservative perspective.

The Editorial That Couldn’t Add: Dallas County’s 17-Year Life Expectancy Gap and the Other Problems Sitting Next to It

.Reading time 41 minutes.

A collaboration between Lewis McLain & AI

On reading single-issue advocacy in a world of stacked legitimate needs

The Editorial in Question

The Dallas Morning News editorial board ran a piece on May 8, 2026, titled “In Dallas County, 17 years of lifespan can be a matter of ZIP code.” It summarized the 2025 Community Health Needs Assessment from Dallas County Health and Human Services and Parkland Health, noted that life expectancy in ZIP code 75210 (South Dallas) is 67.8 years while 75205 (Highland Park) is 85.0 years, and concluded — as these editorials always do — that “it’s important to continue to invest in creative solutions” and that the report “can serve as a roadmap for where the county must focus its attention in the years ahead.”

The piece is factually accurate, morally serious, and analytically empty. It identifies a real problem. It commits to nothing. It quantifies nothing. It assigns responsibility to no one. It does not specify a single dollar figure, a single agency, a single accountability mechanism, or a single trade-off against the dozen other legitimate needs sitting on the same county budget.

This is not a criticism of the editorial board’s intent. It is a criticism of a genre. Single-issue advocacy editorials, written one at a time across a year, never confront the governmental reality that hundreds of legitimate needs compete for the same finite tax base. Every one of them reads as if it were the only thing that mattered. None of them ever sit in the same room and ask: if we did all of these, what would it cost, and who would pay?

This blog post tries to answer that question for the health disparities issue specifically, and then for the eleven other issues most likely to generate identical editorials over the next twenty-four months.

A Note on Framing: Why Daily and Decade, Not Monthly

Before getting into numbers, one disclosure about how the costs are presented here.

It is conventional in advocacy writing to translate annual costs into monthly equivalents. “Forty-six dollars a year” becomes “less than four dollars a month,” which becomes “less than a streaming subscription,” which becomes “less than a cup of coffee.” This framing is not neutral. It is a deliberate technique borrowed from subscription marketing — the same one used to sell gym memberships, cable packages, and software-as-a-service contracts.

It works because the human brain weighs small recurring numbers as if they were trivial, even when the cumulative cost over time is substantial. A four-dollar-per-month gym membership feels free. The $480 you have spent on it over ten years, having gone twice, does not.

Public budgets deserve more honesty than that. Property taxes are not a streaming subscription. They are a permanent claim on household income, paid every year for as long as you own the home, and the obligation does not end when the program does. A “creative solution” funded by a one-cent rate addition in 2026 is still being paid in 2036. The cumulative impact on the homeowner is the relevant number, not the monthly slice.

So this post uses two framings instead. Per day, which is granular enough to feel real without disguising the recurrence — a $46 annual cost is 12.6 cents a day; a $416 annual cost is $1.14 a day. These numbers do not flatter the proposal the way “less than four dollars a month” does, but they do not understate it either.

And cumulative ten-year cost, which is the relevant horizon for property tax decisions. Most rate additions are not one-time. They become part of the baseline. A homeowner buying a $300,000 home in 2026 will likely still own that home — or one similar — in 2036, and will have paid the full ten-year cost of every initiative funded by every rate addition along the way.

Both framings will be applied consistently below. The reader can decide whether the proposals are worth the actual price.

First, Fix the Comparison

The 17-year gap headline is rhetorically powerful and analytically misleading.

Highland Park (75205) is not a representative benchmark. It is one of the wealthiest enclaves in Texas — median household income above $250,000, highly educated, near-universal private insurance, low rates of obesity, smoking, and untreated chronic disease. A life expectancy of 85 years there is not a target a public health system can plausibly aim for in South Dallas, because the inputs that produce 85-year lifespans in 75205 are not primarily medical. They are wealth, education, occupation, marriage rates, neighborhood physical environment, and intergenerational compounding of all of the above. No health intervention in 75210 will replicate the conditions of 75205 within a generation.

The right benchmark is national life expectancy. U.S. life expectancy is approximately 77.5 years (CDC, post-COVID recovery). Texas runs slightly below at roughly 76.5 years. The Dallas County average is around 79 years.

Reframed against those benchmarks: 75210 at 67.8 years is 9.7 years below the national average, 8.7 years below the Texas average, and 11.2 years below the Dallas County average. 75205 at 85.0 years is 7.5 years above the national average — an outlier in the other direction. The policy-relevant gap is not 17 years. It is roughly 10 years between South Dallas and the country as a whole, and that gap is the one a public health system can actually attempt to close.

This matters for two reasons. First, “close the gap to national average” is a defensible, fundable, measurable goal. “Close the gap to Highland Park” is not — it implies that public investment can override the entire socioeconomic gradient, which it cannot. Second, the policy interventions that move a 67.8-year ZIP toward 77.5 are different from the ones that would (theoretically) move it toward 85.

The first set is largely about preventable premature mortality — cardiovascular disease, diabetes complications, infant mortality, homicide, drug overdose, untreated mental illness. The second set would require rebuilding the entire socioeconomic substrate of a neighborhood, which is not a health department’s job.

So the honest framing: South Dallas residents are dying roughly a decade earlier than the average American, and most of that gap is driven by causes that are well-understood, measurable, and at least partially addressable through known interventions. That is the problem worth costing out.

What Actually Drives the Gap

The temptation is to assume the gap is about healthcare access. It is not, primarily. The research consensus, replicated across decades and dozens of studies, is that clinical care explains roughly 10-20% of health outcomes. The remaining 80-90% is split among health behaviors (smoking, diet, exercise, substance use), socioeconomic factors (income, education, employment, social support), and physical environment (housing quality, air, water, neighborhood safety, food access).

This means that pouring more money into clinics in 75210 will produce diminishing returns unless paired with food, housing, transportation, behavioral health, and income-support interventions. It also means that the most cost-effective interventions are usually not the ones with “health” in the name.

The 2025 assessment’s own findings reinforce this. The report cites behavioral and mental wellness as the top priority, notes that 14% of residents reported poor mental health (up from 10%), and identifies transportation, housing, and food access as upstream drivers. The editorial board read the report and concluded that we need creative solutions – two of the most abstract words that can be found. The report itself essentially tells you what the solutions are. Someone just has to write down the cost.

The Concrete Interventions, With Cost Ranges

Here is what a serious, county-wide push targeting the eight to ten lowest-life-expectancy ZIP codes — roughly 350,000-450,000 residents — would actually involve. These are not speculative. Every one of them has an evidence base, an existing operator in Dallas County, and a known cost structure.

Place-based primary care expansion. Parkland already operates Community Oriented Primary Care clinics. Adding or expanding a COPC site in a high-need ZIP runs roughly $3-6 million in capital and $4-8 million annually to operate, serving 15,000-25,000 patients. Federal 330 grants and 340B drug pricing offset 40-60% of operating cost.

Mobile health and street medicine. A fully equipped mobile unit is $400,000-$750,000 capital and $600,000-$1.2 million annual operating cost. Reaches populations that won’t enter a clinic.

Food-as-medicine and produce prescription programs. $15-40 per participant per month, typically $1,500-$3,000 per patient per year including clinical integration. For 5,000 high-risk diabetic and hypertensive patients in target ZIPs, this is roughly $7.5-15 million per year.

Non-emergency medical transportation. $25-50 per round trip. Bundled with appointment reminders and same-day scheduling, missed appointment rates drop 30-50%. For 50,000 trips per year in target ZIPs, the cost is $1.25-2.5 million.

Community Health Workers (promotores). $45,000-$65,000 fully loaded per CHW, each managing 50-100 high-risk patients. To meaningfully cover 75210, 75215, 75216, 75217, and 75241 you would want 60-100 CHWs at a cost of $3-6.5 million per year. This is the highest-ROI intervention in the literature for the populations in question.

Behavioral health integration. Co-locating LCSWs and psychiatric nurse practitioners in primary care runs $180,000-$280,000 per provider fully loaded. Telepsychiatry expansion is $150-250 per encounter. For meaningful behavioral health capacity in southern Dallas, the incremental cost is $8-15 million per year.

Housing-linked health and medical respite. $50-75 per bed-day for medical respite versus $2,500 or more per day for inpatient stays. A 50-bed Parkland-linked respite program runs $1-1.5 million per year and typically pays for itself in avoided readmissions.

Total order of magnitude: $40-75 million per year incremental, with 30-50% potentially recoverable through Medicaid, 340B, federal grants, and avoided acute care. The midpoint is roughly $57 million gross, or about $30 million net after offsets.

What That Costs the Average Homeowner

Dallas County’s certified taxable value is approximately $370 billion. The current county tax rate is approximately $0.215 per $100 of valuation. The Dallas County average taxable home value, after homestead exemption, is roughly $300,000.

Gross scenario ($57 million midpoint): $0.0154 per $100 of valuation — 1.54 cents added to the tax rate, or about a 7.2% increase. On a $300,000 home: $46.20 per year, or 12.7 cents per day. Over ten years: $462.

Net scenario ($30 million after offsets): $0.0081 per $100 — 0.81 cents, or about a 3.8% increase. On a $300,000 home: $24.30 per year, or 6.7 cents per day. Over ten years: $243.

For perspective: addressing the largest documented health disparity in the county costs the median homeowner somewhere between seven and thirteen cents a day in the near term, and between $243 and $462 cumulatively over a decade. That is a real ask, but a defensible one for a measurable improvement in premature mortality.

So far, so good. If health disparities were the only legitimate need on the county’s plate, the math would be easy. But health disparities are not the only legitimate need.

The Stack: Twelve Editorials Waiting to Be Written

Every issue below will get its own Dallas Morning News editorial within the next twenty-four months. All figures are incremental gaps — the marginal investment needed beyond what is currently funded — not total need.

  1. Health disparities and life expectancy gap — $30-57M/yr • $24-46/yr per $300K home
  2. Affordable housing and homelessness — $50-100M/yr • $40-81/yr
  3. Mental health and substance use infrastructure — $40-80M/yr • $32-65/yr
  4. Pre-K and early childhood education — $60-120M/yr • $49-97/yr
  5. Workforce development and adult education — $25-50M/yr • $20-41/yr
  6. Criminal justice reform and reentry — $30-60M/yr • $24-49/yr
  7. Food insecurity — $15-35M/yr • $12-28/yr
  8. Transportation access and transit equity — $20-40M/yr • $16-32/yr
  9. Aging infrastructure — $30-60M/yr • $24-49/yr
  10. Child welfare and CPS-adjacent supports — $15-30M/yr • $12-24/yr
  11. Domestic violence and sexual assault services — $10-25M/yr • $8-20/yr
  12. Climate resilience and extreme weather preparedness — $15-30M/yr • $12-24/yr

The Stack as a Single Number

LowHigh
All twelve issues, total annual cost$340 million$687 million
Annual cost on a $300,000 home$276$557
Daily cost on a $300,000 home$0.76$1.53
Ten-year cumulative cost on a $300,000 home$2,760$5,570

Stated honestly: the twelve-issue stack costs the median homeowner between seventy-six cents and a dollar fifty-three a day, and between $2,760 and $5,570 over a decade.

The Twelve Are Only the Tip of the Iceberg

Before going further, one more correction is owed to the reader.

Twelve issues is not the full universe of legitimate needs. Twelve is the number of issues that generate Dallas Morning News editorials — the photogenic, narratively coherent, advocacy-organization-supported issues that produce headlines. The actual operating budgets of the five entities in the Dallas County tax stack contain hundreds of legitimate, ongoing, often invisible obligations that no editorial will ever be written about, because they do not lend themselves to a 600-word op-ed with a sympathetic photograph.

Just to make this concrete, here is a partial sample of items that are real, recurring budget commitments and will not appear in any editorial in 2026: medical examiner capacity and forensic pathology backlog; indigent defense and court-appointed counsel funding; jury management and witness protection; election administration, voting equipment replacement, and poll worker recruitment; district clerk and county clerk records modernization; tax assessor-collector office staffing; public health laboratory accreditation and equipment; mosquito and vector control; animal services capacity and rabies surveillance; weights and measures inspection; code compliance and nuisance abatement; library system materials, technology, and rural branch operations; park maintenance and urban forestry; aquatic center operations and pool safety; cemetery maintenance for indigent burials; veterans services office staffing; probate court capacity; constable office operations across five precincts; juvenile detention staffing and youth services; adult probation and community supervision; pretrial services and bond supervision; victims’ services and restitution administration; civil process and warrants service; IT modernization, cybersecurity, and ransomware preparedness; records retention, FOIA response, and open records compliance; pension obligations and retiree healthcare (OPEB); workers’ compensation and self-insurance reserves; building maintenance, deferred capital, and ADA compliance; fleet replacement and fuel; emergency management, EOC operations, and FEMA match obligations; radio system modernization and interoperability; 911 dispatch capacity and call center staffing; grand jury and visiting judge expenses; auditor and internal audit function; purchasing and procurement compliance; risk management and liability claims; bond counsel, financial advisory, and rating agency fees; HR systems, training, and civil service compliance; facilities security and courthouse screening.

That list is not exhaustive. It is a partial inventory of one county’s general government functions. The City of Dallas has its own list, several times longer, including police and fire personnel costs that consume well over half the general fund. Dallas ISD has its own list, dominated by teacher salaries, transportation, special education, and federal compliance. Parkland has its own list, dominated by clinical staffing, pharmaceuticals, and uncompensated care. Dallas College has its own list, dominated by instructional faculty, student services, and accreditation costs.

Every line item on every one of these lists has a constituency. Every one of them was added because something went wrong in the past — a child died, a court was sued, a pension was underfunded, a system failed an audit, a federal agency issued a finding. Every one of them is, in some sense, a legitimate need.

The twelve issues in the editorial-genre stack are real. They are also, in the larger budget picture, a small subset of the total claims on the tax base. When the editorial board writes that the county “must focus its attention” on health disparities, the implicit message is that health disparities should rise above the 200+ other items competing for the same dollar. That may even be the right call. But it cannot be argued without acknowledging the rest of the list, and the editorial genre as currently practiced never does.

This is why the local government finance officer — the assistant city manager, the budget director, the CFO — tends to look at advocacy editorials with a mixture of respect and exasperation. The advocate sees one issue and wants it funded. The finance officer sees the same issue and sees it sitting in a queue with dozens of others, all defensible, none fully fundable. The advocate writes the column. The finance officer balances the budget. The two activities are not the same, and pretending they are is a category error that has consequences for governance.

What the Stack Reveals

The county tax base cannot carry this alone. $340-687 million is 18-37% of Dallas County’s current $1.9 billion budget. SB 2’s 3.5% voter-approval cap means even spreading the increase over five years would require repeated tax ratification elections.

Most of these are already partially funded. The figures above are incremental gaps, not total need. The honest question is rarely “do nothing versus do everything.” It is “which marginal dollar moves which outcome.”

Jurisdictional fragmentation is the real killer. Health disparities span Parkland, Dallas County Health and Human Services, fifteen independent school districts, more than thirty cities, DART, the state, and federal programs. Every initiative requires herding cats across entities with different tax bases, boards, incentives, and voters.

Prioritization is unavoidable and political. If the county can only afford three of the twelve, which three? Editorial boards never answer this. They write the next editorial about the next issue, and the implicit message is that all twelve should be fully funded. They cannot all be fully funded — and the twelve are not even the full list. So the choice gets made by default — by inertia, by who has the better lobbyist, by which issue had the better photo opportunity, by which constituency turned out for the last election. That is not prioritization. It is the absence of prioritization, masquerading as governance.

The tax-rate framing gets weaponized in both directions. “Twelve cents a day to save lives” sounds cheap. “$2,760 to $5,570 of cumulative new property tax over the next decade, stacked on rising appraisals plus school M&O plus city tax plus hospital district plus community college plus DART sales tax” is what the homeowner actually feels when the bills arrive year after year. Both framings are true. Only the second one shows up in voter behavior, which is why TREs fail and bond elections get rejected even when each individual project is defensible.

The Stack That Already Exists

Everything above treats the twelve unmet needs as if they sat on a clean slate. They do not. Any conversation about new investment that ignores the existing stack is not a serious conversation. It is a fundraising pitch.

The Existing Tax Bill, Unstacked

Taxing Entity2025 Rate per $100Tax on $300,000Share of Bill
Dallas ISD$0.993835$2,981.5144.6%
City of Dallas$0.698940$2,096.8231.4%
Dallas County$0.215500$646.509.7%
Parkland Hospital District$0.212000$636.009.5%
Dallas College$0.106575$319.734.8%
Combined$2.226850$6,680.56100.0%

Six thousand, six hundred eighty dollars a year. Eighteen dollars and thirty cents a day. $66,800 over ten years, before any rate or appraisal change.

The new $140,000 school homestead exemption that took effect for tax year 2025 reduces the Dallas ISD line by about $1,391 per year, but the homeowner still pays roughly $5,289 in combined property tax annually, $14.50 per day, $52,890 over ten years, on a $300,000 home with the homestead applied.

This is the baseline against which every “creative solution” editorial is implicitly asking for an increase.

What the Stack of New Asks Looks Like Layered On

ScenarioExisting Annual (post-homestead)New Asks AnnualNew Annual Total10-Yr Cumulative
Low end of stack ($340M/yr)$5,289$276$5,565$55,650
Midpoint ($514M/yr)$5,289$416$5,705$57,050
High end ($687M/yr)$5,289$557$5,846$58,460

Over a ten-year horizon, the additional cost of funding the editorial-board stack is $2,760 to $5,570 on top of an already-significant $52,890 baseline.

The Pressure That Makes This Worse

The math above assumes rates hold steady while new investment is layered on top. That is not what is happening. Dallas County total property taxes paid rose 32.7% from 2019 to 2024, an average of roughly 6.5% per year. DCAD valuations rose more than 14% in a single year between 2023 and 2024. Over the same period, every entity in the stack made cuts to its rate: the City of Dallas reduced its rate for ten consecutive years; Dallas ISD cut its rate by two cents for tax year 2025; Parkland held flat at $0.212 in 2025 after several years of reductions; Dallas County held flat at $0.2155; Dallas College reduced marginally.

And yet bills went up. They went up because a 14% jump in appraised value swamps a one- or two-cent rate reduction every time. A homeowner whose property gained 14% in appraised value and whose combined rate dropped by 1% still saw a net bill increase of roughly 13%.

This puts every taxing entity in an impossible bind:

  • Raise rates to fund any of the twelve issues, and they are politically punished for raising rates in a rising appraisal environment.
  • Hold rates flat while appraisals climb, and they collect more revenue without a vote, which Texas SB 2 was designed specifically to constrain.
  • Cut rates, as most have been doing, and they generate good headlines and modest savings, but they also lose the capacity to fund any of the twelve unmet needs.
  • Cut rates while appraisals climb, the actual recent pattern, and the homeowner still sees bills rise, the entity still collects more revenue, and nobody is happy.

Suppose the homeowner’s $300,000 home is reappraised to $330,000 — a 10% increase, well within recent norms. At the existing combined rate of $2.226850, the bill rises from $6,680 to $7,348 — an increase of $668 in a single year, with no rate change at all. If the same homeowner is then asked to absorb the midpoint stack increase of $416, the bill goes to $7,764 — up $1,084 from the prior year, a 16.2% increase, even though every entity in the stack might claim it “held rates flat” or “cut rates.” Over a decade, with appraisal increases compounding even modestly, the cumulative additional burden runs into the tens of thousands of dollars beyond the already-substantial baseline.

This is the lived experience of the Dallas County homeowner. The official rate changes are real, the appraisal increases are real, and the gap between what the homeowner hears about rate cuts and what the homeowner experiences on the bill is the political problem that makes every new initiative substantially harder to fund than the unstacked math implies.

Why Every Entity in the Stack Is Already Squeezed

None of the five entities in the stack have spare capacity to take on a major new initiative without either reallocating existing spend or raising additional revenue. Dallas ISD is subject to recapture (Robin Hood), which sends a significant share of locally raised school taxes to the state. The City of Dallas has $1.25 billion in voter-approved bond debt rolling onto its books from the May 2024 bond, plus pension obligations, plus baseline service demands.

Dallas County has held its M&O rate roughly flat for years and absorbed unfunded state mandates. Parkland is absorbing rising charity care costs, an expanding uninsured population, and the operational burden of being the safety-net provider for the entire county. Dallas College has the smallest rate and the smallest base.

So when the editorial board writes that “the county must focus its attention” on health disparities, the implicit demand is that Dallas County — already the smallest-rate non-college entity in the stack, already carrying state-mandated obligations — should somehow find $30-57 million per year inside an existing $1.9 billion budget.

This is not an argument for doing nothing. It is an argument for being honest about what doing something actually requires: explicit reallocation, explicit new revenue, explicit prioritization across the twelve issues (and the hundreds of other line items behind them), and explicit coordination across entities that currently do not coordinate. None of which appears in the editorial that started this conversation.

A Note on Implementation: Why Programs That Get Funded Still Fail

Even if the money showed up tomorrow, most of these programs would underperform. Not because the interventions don’t work — the evidence base is solid for almost everything listed above — but because the delivery mechanisms are usually wrong.

Trust beats marketing. Programs run through churches, barbershops, and existing community institutions get three to five times the engagement of programs branded by the county or hospital. Faith-based partnerships in South Dallas are not nice-to-have — they are the only way many of these populations will be reached at all.

Default enrollment, not opt-in. When eligible Parkland patients are auto-enrolled with the option to decline, uptake runs 60-80%. Opt-in versions of the same program run 15-30%.

Eliminate the paperwork tax. Every form, every eligibility re-verification, every “bring three documents to this office between 9 and 4” cuts uptake meaningfully.

Pay for outcomes, not enrollment. Contract CHWs and community partners with 20-30% of payment tied to documented engagement, not headcount served.

Cash and gift cards. $25-50 incentives for completing a screening, attending a follow-up, or finishing a class. Cheap, evidence-based, and politically uncomfortable, which is exactly why most public health programs do not use them at the dose that actually works.

Measure the right thing. Life expectancy is a twenty-year lagging indicator. Track one-year proxies: HbA1c control rates by ZIP, hypertension control, prenatal care initiation by twelve weeks, ED visits for ambulatory-sensitive conditions, behavioral health follow-up within seven days of crisis. If those don’t move in eighteen to twenty-four months, the program isn’t working regardless of how good the brochure looks.

What an Editorial Board Could Actually Demand

The editorial genre is not going to disappear. But it could be improved with a small number of disciplines. The next time the Dallas Morning News editorial board writes about any of the twelve issues, the piece would be infinitely more useful if it included:

  1. A specific dollar figure, with a defensible methodology.
  2. A specific funding source — Parkland levy, county general fund, bond, state appropriation, federal grant, philanthropy, or some combination — with the trade-offs of each named.
  3. A specific accountable executive at a specific entity, by name and title.
  4. Specific outcome targets with twenty-four-month deadlines, expressed as one-year proxies rather than twenty-year lagging indicators.
  5. An explicit statement of what gets cut or deferred to make room, since the stack does not allow for everything to be funded simultaneously, and the broader budget contains hundreds of additional items competing for the same dollar.
  6. A reference to the rest of the stack and the rest of the budget, with at least an honest acknowledgment that prioritization is required.
  7. An honest cost framing, expressed annually and over a reasonable multi-year horizon, not disguised in subscription-style monthly equivalents that make permanent obligations look like impulse purchases.

This is harder to write than “we must do better.” It is also the only kind of editorial that has any chance of producing the outcome the editorial claims to want.

The Real Question

The editorial concluded that the community health needs assessment “can serve as a roadmap for where the county must focus its attention in the years ahead.” It cannot. A 200-page document that nobody is held to is not a roadmap. It is a record of intentions.

The 2028 assessment will almost certainly show similar gaps unless someone decides, in public, with a dollar figure and a deadline attached: which of the twelve items get funded, which get deferred, which of the hundreds of other budget items gets reduced to make room, who pays, who is accountable, what the proxy outcomes are, and what happens if those outcomes are not met.

That decision is hard. It is politically uncomfortable. It will produce winners and losers. It will require the editorial board, the county commissioners, the Parkland board, the city councils of all thirty-plus cities in the county, and the legislative delegation to all sit in roughly the same room and agree on roughly the same priorities. None of that is easy.

But it is the actual work of governance, as opposed to the performance of it. The current editorial genre — a single issue at a time, no numbers, no trade-offs, no names, no deadlines, costs disguised in monthly slices — is the performance.

The 17-year life expectancy gap is real. The 10-year gap to the national average is the policy-relevant version of it, and it is also real. Both can be partially closed with $30-57 million a year of well-targeted investment, which on a $300,000 home works out to between seven and thirteen cents a day in the near term, or $243 to $462 cumulatively over ten years. That is true.

It is also true that affordable housing, mental health, pre-K, workforce, criminal justice, food insecurity, transportation, infrastructure, child welfare, domestic violence, and climate resilience all have their own legitimate cases and their own dollar figures, and the combined ask on the same homeowner is between seventy-six cents and a dollar fifty-three a day, or $2,760 to $5,570 over ten years.

It is also true that those twelve issues are only the visible portion of the budget. Behind them sit hundreds of additional line items — medical examiner capacity, indigent defense, election administration, library operations, pension obligations, IT modernization, courthouse security, animal services, vector control, and dozens more — every one of which is a legitimate need with its own constituency, its own legal mandate, or its own past failure that produced its current funding.

And it is true that the same homeowner is already paying $5,289 a year, post-homestead, on a $300,000 home — $14.50 a day, $52,890 over a decade — split across five separate taxing entities, none of which have spare capacity, all of which are watching their constituents’ bills rise faster than their rates fall. Adding $2,760 to $5,570 over ten years to fund the stack of new asks lands not on a blank slate but on top of a baseline that has already grown 32.7% in five years, against the political backdrop of a homeowner who is told every September that rates are being cut while their bill keeps going up.

You cannot do all of it. You can do some of it, well, with discipline and accountability, and the rest will have to wait or be done by someone else or not be done at all. That is the choice. Pretending the choice doesn’t exist is what the current genre of advocacy editorial is for.

But somebody has to do the math. Otherwise the 2028 report will read exactly like the 2025 one, the 2031 report will read exactly like the 2028 one, and the residents of 75210 will continue to die a decade earlier than the average American while editorial boards continue to call for creative solutions.

That is not a roadmap. That is a recurring obituary, written in advance, for people who do not have to die that early.

A closing thought: Ironically, the most impactful budget balancing approach available to governing officials is this – don’t start new programs or expand existing programs. Nobody asks, “knowing what we know now, would we fund this program if it was newly presented to us today?”

Credit is not handed out for a tough “no” in reality. For counties, most programs are mandated by the state. For other entities, it is collectively the taxpayers themselves requesting the elected officials to provide new or expanded services to meet a real or perceived need. Cities and ISDs are focused on quality of life demands. Counties, when you really drill down, are arms of the state dealing with the “ugly” services that someone must do!

Lewis F. McLain Jr. operates CityBaseLab, providing sales tax analytics, municipal finance modeling, and dashboard development for Texas local governments.

Charter Growth, Fixed Infrastructure, and the Second Wave of Closures in Texas

.Reading time 10 minutes.

A collaboration between Lewis McLain & AI

Charter schools are not new to Texas. They have existed for more than three decades. Many of us have written about them before — including in earlier citybaseblog.net discussions — when they were smaller, experimental, and assumed to be complementary. The original expectation was that charters would remain modest in scale and exert limited fiscal pressure on traditional school districts.

What has changed is not their existence but their speed of growth and their concentration in major metropolitan areas. Charter enrollment is no longer marginal. In some cities, it has crossed thresholds where incremental growth produces structural consequences. The alarm is not ideological. It is mathematical.

Texas now operates two parallel public education systems at meaningful scale. That reality has produced a second wave of school closures across the state, financial strain in districts already optimized once before, and increasing anguish for locally elected school boards who must make decisions that feel like betrayals to the communities they serve.

Not New — But Now at Critical Mass

Charter schools began as alternatives designed to foster innovation and provide parental choice. Early debate assumed charters would remain small relative to the district system. That assumption no longer holds.

In San Antonio, charter enrollment has grown from roughly 3 percent of public school students a decade ago to approximately 13 percent today. The number of charter campuses in the city’s largest districts has nearly doubled since before the pandemic. Tens of thousands of students have shifted systems over time.

This is not drift. It is redistribution at scale.

When charter share moves from low single digits into double digits, the effects are nonlinear. Small changes can be absorbed. Structural shifts cannot.

Enrollment Loss and the Reality of Stranded Costs

Texas funds schools largely on an attendance basis. When a student enrolls in a charter school, state funding follows that student. That mechanism appears neutral: public dollars remain within public education.

But the system was not designed for rapid enrollment fragmentation.

What Actually Declines (Variable Costs)

Some costs fall when enrollment drops:

  • Instructional materials
  • Certain hourly staffing
  • Some food service expenses
  • A small portion of utilities

These are real savings. But they represent a minority of total expenditures.

What Does Not Decline (Fixed and Semi-Fixed Costs)

Most district costs are fixed or slow-moving:

Facilities Built for Original Capacity

Campuses were designed for peak enrollment projections. When enrollment falls:

  • Gyms remain full size.
  • Football stadiums remain full size.
  • Auditoriums remain full size.
  • Cafeterias remain full size.
  • HVAC systems condition entire buildings.
  • Roofs must be maintained across full square footage.
  • Security systems operate across entire campuses.

A high school built for 2,500 students does not become a 1,800-student cost structure simply because seats are empty.

You cannot operate 60 percent of a stadium.
You cannot heat only part of a hallway.
You cannot shrink a roof.

Utilities do not scale linearly with headcount. Insurance, maintenance, and capital upkeep do not scale linearly with headcount.

Bonded Debt Service

Facilities were financed through voter-approved bonds. Debt service is fixed. Enrollment decline does not reduce bond payments. In fact, debt per pupil increases as enrollment declines.

That affects financial ratios, credit perception, and long-range planning.

Transportation Networks

Bus routes are geographic. Students leaving for charters are not clustered neatly for route elimination. A district may still need to run a bus for 28 students instead of 40.

Transportation cost per student rises even as enrollment falls.

Staffing Thresholds

Operational minimums exist:

  • A campus requires a principal.
  • A campus requires counseling services.
  • A campus requires a nurse.
  • A campus requires special education coordination.

You cannot operate at fractional leadership levels. Staffing reductions often require full campus closures rather than marginal trimming.

Extracurricular Infrastructure

Texas districts maintain significant extracurricular infrastructure:

  • Stadiums
  • Athletic fields
  • Band halls
  • Fine arts facilities
  • Career and technical labs

These programs do not downsize proportionally. They are either maintained or eliminated. And elimination carries cultural consequences.

The Second Wave of Closures

The first wave of school closures in Texas was largely demographic. Neighborhoods aged. Birth rates declined. Suburban migration shifted enrollment patterns.

The second wave is different.

This wave is occurring in areas where population remains substantial, but enrollment has redistributed across systems. More than 45 traditional campuses have closed in the San Antonio metro area since 2014–15. Charter campuses have expanded during the same period.

Districts that already consolidated once now face additional optimization. That is far more destabilizing.

After the first closure cycle:

  • The easiest consolidations are already done.
  • Community tolerance declines sharply.
  • Remaining schools often serve as identity anchors.

The next closure is rarely peripheral. It cuts deeper.

The Anguish of the School Board

This section cannot be treated clinically.

School board members are not corporate executives managing market share. They are locally elected volunteers or modestly compensated public servants who often ran for office because they love children, believe in public education, and want to serve their communities.

When enrollment decline forces discussion of closure, they sit at a dais facing:

  • Parents who are frightened.
  • Teachers who are grieving.
  • Alumni who remember Friday nights under stadium lights.
  • Neighborhood residents who see the school as their community’s heart.

The suggestion of closing a child’s school is not heard as fiscal necessity. It is heard as abandonment.

Board members absorb:

  • Accusations of incompetence.
  • Claims of political bias.
  • Personal attacks.
  • Public anger that feels brutal and relentless.

Many of these board members send their own children to those schools. Many taught in those buildings. Many worship in those neighborhoods.

Yet the spreadsheet remains unmoved by anguish.

Enrollment charts do not pause because meetings are painful. Bond schedules do not bend because testimony is heartbreaking.

This emotional burden is part of the structural story. The system demands decisions that feel morally injurious even when fiscally unavoidable.

Additional Structural Pressures

Labor Market Fragmentation

Charter expansion creates parallel labor markets. Teacher mobility increases. Recruitment competition intensifies. Salary pressure rises even as district revenue declines.

Marketing Costs

Districts historically relied on geographic assignment. In a competitive landscape, districts must market programs, brand campuses, and actively recruit students — a new layer of expenditure.

Planning Volatility

Ten-year enrollment projections become less reliable. Capital planning becomes more uncertain. Bond timing becomes riskier.

Equity of Infrastructure Burden

Communities have invested heavily in comprehensive district infrastructure. When enrollment fragments, the per-pupil cost of maintaining that infrastructure rises for remaining students.

Governance Differences

Traditional ISDs are governed by elected boards accountable directly to voters. Charter schools are authorized by the state and governed by appointed boards.

Accountability exists in both systems, but its locus differs.

When a district closes a school, the decision is public, political, and deeply personal. When a charter closes, families often return to districts unexpectedly, creating additional planning stress.

The asymmetry matters in governance conversations.

Acknowledging Counterarguments

Charters serve families who seek alternatives. Some demonstrate strong academic outcomes. Some research suggests competitive pressure can improve district performance.

Charters also generally lack access to local bond funding streams, creating facility financing challenges for them.

These arguments are real. They deserve recognition.

But structural fiscal pressure on districts remains real as well. Two truths can coexist:

  • Charter schools provide choice.
  • Charter growth at scale creates systemic strain for districts built on different assumptions.

The Central Alarm

This is not an argument that charters should not exist.

It is an acknowledgment that Texas public education was not originally structured for rapid enrollment fragmentation across two parallel systems.

When charter enrollment moves from marginal to critical mass, the impact is not incremental. It becomes systemic.

Public school districts are not infinitely elastic.

They are built of:

  • Concrete and steel
  • Stadiums and auditoriums
  • Cafeterias and bus routes
  • Bond schedules and staffing thresholds
  • Deep community attachment

These do not shrink at the speed of enrollment charts.

And school boards — there for the love of children — are left to make decisions that feel like choosing between arithmetic and heartbreak.

That is the reality now facing districts across Texas.

The Sound of Alarm: Why Some Words Agitate Us Before We Understand Them

.Reading time 5 minutes.

A collaboration between Lewis McLain & AI

Just as some words calm us before we know what they mean, others provoke tension before their message is fully received. A sentence may be reasonable, even benign, yet something in it lands hard. The jaw tightens. The pulse quickens. Attention narrows. Often the listener cannot explain why—only that the words felt sharp.

This reaction is not a failure of emotional control. It is the nervous system doing exactly what it evolved to do.

Language carries sound as well as sense, and the body listens to sound first. Before meaning is parsed, tone is assessed. Long before humans debated ideas, they survived by detecting threat in noise: abrupt impacts, sharp breaks, rapid bursts, rising intensity. Those acoustic patterns still trigger alertness today, even when they arrive disguised as ordinary speech.

Harsh-sounding words tend to share certain features. They rely on hard plosive consonants—k, t, p, d, g—which require sudden closures and releases of air. They often include short, clipped vowels that speed speech rather than slow it. They may stack consonants tightly together, creating friction and force. When spoken, these words strike rather than flow.

Consider words like crack, snap, blast, cut, shock. Their meanings are forceful, but their sounds are doing much of the work. The mouth closes abruptly and releases air explosively. The body interprets this as impact. Even abstract words such as strict, hardline, or confront carry this phonetic tension. The listener’s nervous system reacts before the intellect weighs the argument.

This is why language intended to persuade can backfire when it leans too heavily on harsh sound. The speaker may be making a careful point, but the body of the listener hears urgency, pressure, or threat. Attention narrows. Defensiveness rises. Reason becomes harder to access, not because the listener is irrational, but because the physiology of alert has been activated.

Harsh words also tend to compress time. They move quickly. They discourage pauses. They resist breath. This is useful in moments that require action—warnings, commands, emergencies—but corrosive when overused. A steady diet of clipped, percussive language keeps the nervous system in a low-grade state of readiness. Over time, this can feel like anxiety, irritability, or exhaustion without a clear cause.

Modern life amplifies this effect. Headlines, alerts, slogans, and arguments often favor impact over resonance. Short words. Sharp sounds. Rapid delivery. Language becomes a series of acoustic jolts. Even when the content is informational, the soundscape keeps the body on edge.

This helps explain why people sometimes withdraw from conversations they intellectually agree with. The words feel aggressive even when the ideas are sound. It also explains why harsh self-talk—short, punishing phrases repeated internally—can erode calm just as effectively as external stressors. The body does not distinguish much between words spoken aloud and words spoken inwardly.

None of this means harsh language is inherently bad. Alarm has its place. Sharp sounds cut through danger. They focus attention. They mobilize action. The problem arises when alarm becomes the default register, when urgency is applied where reflection is needed, or when force is mistaken for clarity.

Understanding the sound of harsh words gives us the same gift as understanding the sound of calm ones: choice. We can still speak plainly, firmly, even critically—without constantly striking the nervous system like a match. We can reserve sharp sounds for moments that truly require them, and allow softer language to do its quiet work elsewhere.

Language is not only a vehicle for ideas. It is an environment the body inhabits. When words are consistently sharp, the environment feels hostile. When they are chosen with care, even disagreement can remain spacious.

To listen for harshness in language is not to demand gentleness everywhere. It is to recognize when sound is doing more than meaning intends. And it is to remember that how something is said often determines whether it will be heard at all.

The Sound of Calm: Why Some Words Soothe Us Before We Understand Them

.Reading time 7 minutes.

A collaboration between Lewis McLain & AI

Most people can recall a word that feels calming the moment it is heard—before its meaning registers, before the sentence is complete. The response is quiet but physical: shoulders loosen, breathing slows, the mind softens its focus. That reaction often sparks curiosity because it seems to bypass reason. Why should a single word, stripped of context, have any effect at all?

The answer lies in the fact that language does not operate solely at the level of meaning. It also works at the level of sound, rhythm, and bodily response. Long before words were written or analyzed, they were spoken, heard, and felt. The human nervous system evolved to listen for safety or threat in tone rather than vocabulary, and that ancient listening still runs beneath modern speech.

Certain sounds reliably signal calm. Liquid consonants such as l, m, and r require relaxed mouth positions and smooth airflow. Soft fricatives like s and h resemble breath and ambient noise. Open vowels—ah, oh, oo—create space in the mouth and naturally slow speech. Words built from these elements arrive gently, without the sharp acoustic edges the brain associates with urgency or danger.

Take lullaby. Its meaning is gentle enough, but its effect is largely phonetic. The repeated l sounds sway the tongue back and forth, mirroring the physical act of soothing. Murmur works similarly. Its repetition of m and r produces a low, continuous hum reminiscent of distant voices or water—sounds the brain treats as stable and non-threatening. Mellow rounds the lips and avoids abrupt closure, reinforcing ease through the very act of pronunciation.

Some words calm by engaging the breath directly. Sigh is both a noun and a bodily instruction. Saying it almost forces a longer exhale, activating the parasympathetic nervous system responsible for rest and recovery. Hush closes softly rather than sharply, signaling quiet without alarm. Words filled with whispering s sounds—serene, silken, susurrus—imitate rain, wind, or leaves, environmental sounds that have accompanied human rest for tens of thousands of years.

Other words soothe through spaciousness. Halo and aura rely heavily on open vowels, requiring little muscular tension. They feel balanced, airy, and complete. Reverie and nocturne slow the pace of speech and thought, inviting inward attention. Even brief words like drift suggest motion without effort—movement that does not demand control.

What makes this phenomenon more than a linguistic curiosity is what it reveals about how humans experience language. Words are not neutral containers of meaning. They are physical events. The body hears them, feels them, and reacts—often before the conscious mind has time to interpret what is being said.

This explains why poets labor over sound, why prayers and mantras repeat soft syllables, and why certain names, places, or phrases feel peaceful even when their meanings are abstract. It also explains why clipped, percussive language can heighten anxiety even when the content itself is benign. The nervous system listens first; interpretation comes later.

To become curious about soothing words is to explore the boundary between language and the body. It is to recognize that calm can be invited rather than commanded, and that attention can be softened through sound alone. In a world crowded with sharp edges and constant noise, learning which words quiet us is not escapism. It is a form of literacy—understanding not just what words mean, but what they do.

Appendix A: Soothing Words — Definitions and Pronunciation

Lullaby (LULL-uh-bye) — A gentle song to induce sleep
Murmur (MUR-mer) — A low, continuous sound
Mellow (MEL-oh) — Soft, smooth, relaxed
Melody (MEL-uh-dee) — A pleasing sequence of notes
Serene (suh-REEN) — Calm and peaceful
Silken (SIL-ken) — Smooth and soft
Sigh (sye) — A long breath of release
Susurrus / Susurration (soo-SUR-us / soo-sur-RAY-shun) — Whispering sound
Hush (huhsh) — Silence or quiet
Halo (HAY-loh) — A circle of light
Aura (OR-uh) — A subtle surrounding presence
Reverie (REV-er-ee) — Dreamy contemplation
Nocturne (NOK-turn) — A musical piece inspired by night
Ripple (RIP-uhl) — A small spreading wave
Drift (drift) — To move slowly without force
Gossamer (GOSS-uh-mer) — Light and delicate
Halcyon (HAL-see-un) — Calm and peaceful

Appendix B: How Sound Is Used to Shape Calm (Deliberately)

Soothing words are not an accident of language. Writers, speakers, and traditions across cultures intentionally deploy sound to shape emotional response—often more carefully than meaning itself.

Poetry prioritizes sound as much as sense. Poets choose vowels and consonants that slow the reader or invite breath. This is why lines meant to console are heavy with liquids and open vowels, while lines meant to alarm rely on hard stops and sharp consonants.

Prayer and mantra traditions repeat soft syllables for a reason. Repetition of breath-friendly sounds reduces cognitive load and entrains breathing. Calm is not demanded; it emerges through rhythm.

Storytelling and oral teaching rely on sound to hold attention without tension. A skilled speaker instinctively shifts toward softer phonemes when signaling reflection or safety, and sharper ones when urgency is required.

Names and places often follow the same logic. Many names that “feel peaceful” share the same phonetic traits: flowing consonants, symmetry, and vowel openness. This is not superstition—it is acoustic psychology.

Modern applications appear in therapy, guided meditation, children’s literature, and even branding. Calm language reduces resistance. The body relaxes first; the mind follows.

Understanding this gives people a subtle but powerful tool. One can choose words not only for precision, but for effect. Calm can be invited into conversation, writing, or even inner speech simply by favoring sounds that signal safety.

Final Reflection

Words are among the smallest units of human experience, yet they carry enormous power. Some inform. Some persuade. And some, quietly, soothe. Learning to hear how words sound—not just what they say—is a way of listening more deeply to ourselves. Language does not merely describe calm. At its best, it becomes one of the ways calm arrives.

What Question Are We Actually Answering?

.Reading time 10 minutes.

A collaboration between Lewis McLain & AI

Why Good Analysis Begins Long Before Data — and Why Asking Better Questions Is a Skill That Must Be Practiced

I. The Invisible Starting Line

Every serious analysis begins with a question.
Almost every serious failure begins with the wrong one.

This is uncomfortable because it means that many errors are not technical. They are not caused by bad data, weak models, insufficient funding, or lack of expertise. They occur before any of that—at the moment a question is framed, accepted, and allowed to go unchallenged.

Questions are often inherited rather than chosen. They arrive embedded in headlines, legislation, grant applications, consulting scopes, software templates, or political urgency. By the time anyone pauses to ask whether the question itself is sound, the machinery is already moving.

Once that happens, better data does not fix the problem.
It accelerates it.

Precision is not clarity. A precisely answered wrong question produces results that feel authoritative while being fundamentally misleading. This is why analysis so often fails quietly and confidently.

II. The Four Types of Questions (And Why Only One Sustains Analysis)

Not all questions do the same kind of work. Most confusion in public debate and institutional decision-making comes from treating very different questions as if they were interchangeable.

1. Descriptive Questions

What is happening?

These establish facts, counts, and trends. They are necessary, but inert. Description alone does not explain change, causation, or constraint. Mistaking description for understanding is one of the most common analytical errors.

2. Attributional Questions

Who is responsible?

These arrive early and loudly. They satisfy emotional and political needs, but they tend to collapse complex systems into villains and heroes. Attribution feels like insight, but it usually precedes understanding.

3. Prescriptive Questions

What should we do?

These feel decisive and productive. They are also dangerous when asked prematurely. Prescriptions lock systems into action paths that may be impossible to reverse, even if the diagnosis was wrong.

4. Analytical Questions

What changed, relative to what, over what time horizon, and under which constraints?

These are the least intuitive and least rewarded questions, yet they are the only ones that scale. They slow the conversation down, resist moral shortcuts, and force structure onto complexity.

Most debates skip directly from description to prescription. Analysis happens, if at all, in the margins.

III. Time Horizons: The Quiet Distorter

Every question implies a time frame, whether stated or not. When it goes unstated, it is almost always too short.

Systems behave differently over one year than over five, and differently again over a generation. Short horizons hide maturation effects, suppress lagged consequences, and reward surface solutions. Long horizons expose tradeoffs, reveal inevitabilities, and demand humility.

When someone asks, “Why is this happening now?” without clarifying whether “now” means this quarter, this decade, or this lifecycle stage, the answer will be confident and wrong.

A reliable analytical rule is simple:
If the time horizon is unstated, it is probably distorting the conclusion.

IV. Baselines: The Question Nobody Wants to Ask

“Compared to what?” is the most expensive sentence in analysis.

Baselines are almost always chosen quietly and defended rarely. Yet they determine whether something appears as growth or stagnation, crisis or normal variation, success or failure.

Common baseline errors include:

  • Comparing growing systems to static ones
  • Comparing interventions to “doing nothing,” which never exists
  • Comparing today to yesterday instead of to trend or lifecycle stage

Without a baseline, change has no meaning. Without an agreed-upon baseline, debate becomes endless recalibration rather than understanding.

The refusal—or failure—to ask baseline questions is not a technical oversight. It is often a psychological one. Baselines make certain narratives harder to maintain.

V. The Substitution Problem

Systems do not eliminate pressure. They redirect it.

Every policy, reform, or intervention substitutes one cost, risk, or burden for another. The analytical failure is not unintended consequences; it is unacknowledged substitution.

When analysis celebrates a solution without tracing where pressure moved, it is incomplete by definition. The question “What problem did we solve?” must be followed immediately by “Where did the pressure go?”

Ignoring substitution allows success to be declared in one domain while strain accumulates invisibly in another.

VI. Metrics Are Mirrors, Not Truth

Metrics are indispensable—and dangerous.

They capture what is easy to measure, not necessarily what matters most. They reward visibility, not durability. They improve responsiveness but often degrade resilience.

Measurement should provoke questions, not end them. When metrics become substitutes for judgment, they stop illuminating reality and begin reflecting institutional incentives back at themselves.

What improves on paper may be decaying in practice. The analyst’s task is not to reject metrics, but to interrogate them relentlessly.

VII. The Discipline of the Second Question

Most people ask one good question. Then they stop.

The first question usually reveals curiosity. The second reveals discipline.

  • First question: What happened?
  • Second question: Relative to what expectation?
  • Third question: Why now and not earlier?
  • Fourth question: At whose expense did this improve?
  • Fifth question: What constraint was binding?

Most analytical errors occur between questions one and two. The pause required to ask the second question feels unproductive, even obstructive. In reality, it is where understanding begins.

VIII. Asking Good Questions Is a Skill — and It Must Be Practiced

The ability to ask good questions is not innate. It is trained.

It requires resisting the urge to sound smart quickly. It requires tolerating ambiguity longer than is comfortable. It requires being willing to appear slow, cautious, or even naïve in environments that reward speed and certainty.

Like any discipline, it improves through repetition:

  • Reviewing past analyses and identifying where the wrong question was asked
  • Practicing reframing problems in multiple ways before selecting one
  • Studying failures not for answers, but for misframed questions
  • Learning to sit with incomplete understanding without rushing to closure

Good questioners are not passive. They are rigorous. They know that the hardest work happens before the first chart, model, or recommendation.

IX. What Your Questions Reveal About You

Questions are diagnostic. They reveal far more about the questioner than about the subject being questioned.

They reveal:

  • Whether someone is seeking understanding or validation
  • Whether they tolerate uncertainty or rush to control
  • Whether they think in systems or in narratives
  • Whether they are curious about limits or allergic to them

A person who habitually asks attributional questions before analytical ones is revealing impatience with complexity. A person who never asks baseline or time-horizon questions is revealing comfort with surface explanations.

In this sense, questions are a form of moral autobiography. Over time, they expose whether a person is oriented toward truth, persuasion, blame, or reassurance.

X. Analysis as Responsibility

Analysis is not neutral. It shapes how resources are allocated, how authority is exercised, and how force—legal, financial, or moral—is applied.

Bad questions do not merely mislead; they coerce. They narrow the range of permissible answers and foreclose alternatives before they are considered.

The responsibility of the analyst is not certainty. It is honesty about limits, tradeoffs, and unknowns. Asking better questions is not intellectual vanity; it is an ethical act.

Conclusion

The most dangerous answers are not the wrong ones.
They are the ones that emerge from unexamined questions.

Before asking what the data says, before debating solutions, before declaring success or failure, the analyst owes one discipline above all others:

Stop.
Name the question.
Interrogate it.
And be willing to change it.

That pause—unrewarded, uncomfortable, and often invisible—is where real thinking begins.

What Every Student Should Learn From Civics and Government — The Education of a Citizen

.Reading time 8 minutes.

A collaboration between Lewis McLain & AI (4 of 4 in a Series)

If literature teaches us how to think,
and history teaches us where we came from,
and economics teaches us how choices shape the world,

then civics and government teach us how to live together in a free society.

When I was young, civics felt like a recitation of facts — three branches, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights. But I didn’t understand the deeper purpose or the tremendous responsibility that citizenship carries. I didn’t see that democracy is not self-sustaining. It requires informed people, disciplined judgment, and a shared understanding of how government actually works.

Years later, I came to realize that civics is not a list of facts to memorize — it is the operating manual for freedom.

This essay explores the essential civic knowledge students should learn, why it matters, and why it may be the single most endangered — and most important — subject today.

1. Understanding the Constitution — The Blueprint of American Government

Every student should know what the Constitution actually does.

At a minimum, students should understand:

  • Separation of powers
  • Checks and balances
  • Federalism (power divided between federal and state governments)
  • Individual rights
  • Limited government
  • Due process and equal protection

These aren’t abstract ideas. They’re the safeguards that prevent:

  • tyranny
  • abuse of power
  • unequal treatment
  • political retaliation
  • the erosion of liberty

Students should know why the Founders feared concentrated power. They should understand the debates between Hamilton and Jefferson, the compromises that made the system possible, and the principles that still hold it together.

A civically educated student knows what the government can do, what it cannot do, and what it should never be allowed to do.

2. How Laws Are Made — And Why It’s Supposed to Be Hard

A free people should know how laws move from idea to reality:

  • committee
  • debate
  • amendments
  • compromise
  • bicameral approval
  • executive signature
  • judicial review

Students should understand why the system has friction. The Founders designed lawmaking to be deliberate, slow, and thoughtful — not impulsive. This protects the nation from sudden swings of emotion, political fads, or the passions of the moment.

When students understand the process, they also understand:

  • why gridlock happens
  • why compromise is necessary
  • why no single branch can act alone
  • why courts exist as an independent check

This is how civics grounds expectations and tempers frustration.

3. Rights and Responsibilities — The Moral Core of Citizenship

Civics is not only about rights; it is also about responsibilities.

Students should understand:

  • free speech
  • free press
  • freedom of religion
  • right to vote
  • right to assemble
  • right to due process

But they should also learn:

  • the responsibility to vote
  • the responsibility to stay informed
  • the responsibility to obey just laws
  • the responsibility to serve on juries
  • the responsibility to hold leaders accountable
  • the responsibility to treat fellow citizens with dignity

A functioning democracy depends as much on personal virtue as it does on institutional design.

4. Local Government — The Level Students Understand the Least

Ironically, the level of government that affects daily life the most is the one students know the least about.

Students should understand:

  • cities, counties, school districts
  • zoning
  • local taxes
  • police and fire services
  • transportation systems
  • water and utility infrastructure
  • public debt and bond elections
  • local boards and commissions
  • how a city manager system works
  • how budgets are created and balanced

Local government is where the real work happens:

  • roads repaired
  • streets policed
  • water delivered
  • development approved
  • transit planned
  • emergency services coordinated
  • property taxes assessed

A civically educated adult understands where decisions are made — and how to influence them.

5. How Elections Work — Beyond the Headlines and Sound Bites

Every student should understand:

  • how voter registration works
  • how primaries differ from general elections
  • how the Electoral College works
  • how districts are drawn
  • what gerrymandering is
  • how campaign finance operates
  • the difference between federal, state, and local elections

They should learn how to evaluate:

  • candidates
  • platforms
  • ballot propositions
  • constitutional amendments
  • city bond proposals
  • school board decisions

Without civic education, elections become personality contests instead of informed deliberations.

6. The Balance Between Freedom and Order

Civics teaches students that government constantly manages tensions:

  • liberty vs. security
  • freedom vs. responsibility
  • majority rule vs. minority rights
  • government power vs. individual autonomy

These are not easy questions.
There are no perfect answers.
But a well-educated citizen understands the tradeoffs.

For example:

  • How far should free speech extend?
  • What powers should police have?
  • When should the state intervene in personal choices?
  • When does regulation protect people, and when does it stifle them?

Civics teaches students how to think through these issues, not what to believe.

7. Why Civics Matters Even More in the Age of AI

Artificial intelligence has changed the public square. It has amplified the need for civic understanding.

AI magnifies misinformation.

A civically uneducated population is easy to manipulate.

AI can imitate authority.

Only an informed citizen knows how to verify sources and test claims.

AI accelerates public emotion.

Civic education slows people down — it teaches them to evaluate before reacting.

AI makes propaganda more sophisticated.

Civics teaches how institutions work, which protects against deception.

Democracy cannot survive without an educated citizenry.

AI is powerful, but it is not responsible. Humans must be.

This is why civics — real civics — is urgently needed.

Conclusion: The Education of a Self-Governing People

History shows that democracies do not fall because enemies defeat them.
They fall because citizens forget how to govern themselves.

Civics teaches:

  • how power is structured
  • how laws are made
  • how rights are protected
  • how communities are built
  • how leaders should be chosen
  • how governments should behave
  • how citizens must participate

If literature strengthens the mind,
and history strengthens judgment,
and economics strengthens decision-making,

then civics strengthens the nation itself.

A free society is not sustained by wishes or by luck.
It is sustained by people who understand the system, value the responsibilities of citizenship, and guard the principles that keep liberty alive.

That is what civics is meant to teach —
and why it must remain at the heart of a complete education.

What Every Student Should Learn From Economics — The Missing Foundation for Adult Life

.Reading time 10 minutes.

A collaboration between Lewis McLain & AI (3 of 4 in a Series)

If I struggled with literature when I was young, and if I misunderstood the purpose of history, then economics was the third great gap in my early education. I went through high school without any real understanding of how money works, how governments raise and spend it, how markets respond to incentives, or how personal financial decisions compound over time. I did not grasp the forces shaping wages, prices, interest rates, trade, taxation, inflation, or debt. I did get a good dose in college.

Looking back, I can see clearly:
Economics is the core life subject that students most need — and most rarely receive in a meaningful way.

What educators should want every student to know from required economics courses is nothing less than the mental framework necessary to navigate adulthood, evaluate public policy, make financial decisions, and understand why nations prosper or struggle. Economics is not simply business; it is the study of how people, families, governments, and societies make choices. A few years ago, I attended a multi-day course for high school teachers hosted by the Dallas Federal Reserve. It was an outstanding experience. Resources are there today, thank goodness!

This essay explores the essential economic understanding every student deserves — and why it matters now more than ever.

1. Scarcity, Choice, and Opportunity Cost: The Law That Governs Everything

The first truth of economics is painfully simple:
We cannot have everything we want.

Every choice is a tradeoff. Students should walk away understanding that:

  • Choosing to spend money here means not spending it there.
  • Choosing one policy means giving up another.
  • Choosing time for one activity means sacrificing time for something else.

Economics calls this opportunity cost — the value of the next best alternative you give up.

Once a student grasps this, the world becomes clearer:

  • Why governments cannot fund unlimited programs.
  • Why cities must prioritize.
  • Why individuals must budget.
  • Why nations cannot tax, borrow, or spend without consequences.

This one idea alone can save people from poor decisions, unrealistic expectations, and political manipulation.

2. How Markets Work — And What Happens When They Don’t

Every student should understand the basics of markets:

  • Supply and demand
  • Prices as signals
  • Competition as a force for innovation
  • Incentives as drivers of behavior

These are not theories — they are observable realities.

Examples:

  • When the price of lumber rises, construction slows.
  • When wages rise in one industry, workers shift into it.
  • When a product becomes scarce, people value it more.

Students should also learn about market failures, when markets do not work well:

  • Externalities (pollution)
  • Monopolies (lack of competition)
  • Public goods (national defense)
  • Information asymmetry (the mechanic knows more than the customer)

A well-educated adult should understand why some things are best left to markets, and others require collective action.

3. Money, Inflation, and the Hidden Forces That Shape Daily Life

Economics teaches students what money actually is — a medium of exchange, a store of value, a unit of account. It teaches why inflation happens, how interest rates work, and why credit matters.

This is the knowledge people most need to avoid lifelong mistakes:

  • High-interest debt
  • Payday loans
  • Adjustable-rate surprises
  • Over-borrowing
  • Misunderstanding mortgages
  • Under-saving for retirement
  • Falling for financial scams

Inflation, especially, is a quiet teacher.
Students should know:

  • Why prices rise
  • How purchasing power erodes
  • Why governments sometimes overspend
  • How central banks attempt to stabilize the economy

Without this understanding, adults become vulnerable to false promises, political slogans, and emotional decisions disguised as economic policy.

4. Government, Taxes, Debt, and the Economics of Public Choices

Students should understand how governments fund themselves:

  • income taxes
  • sales taxes
  • property taxes
  • corporate taxes
  • tariffs
  • fees and permits

They should know the difference between:

  • deficits and debt
  • mandatory vs. discretionary spending
  • expansionary vs. contractionary policy

And they should understand the consequences of borrowing:

  • interest costs
  • crowding out
  • inflationary risks
  • intergenerational burdens

A citizen who understands these concepts is harder to fool with slogans like:

  • “Free college for everyone!”
  • “We can tax the rich for everything!”
  • “Deficits don’t matter!”
  • “We can cut taxes without cutting services!”

Economics teaches that every promise has a cost — and someone must pay it.

5. Personal Finance: The Economics of Everyday Life

If there is one area where economics should be utterly practical, it is here.
Every student needs to understand:

  • budgeting
  • saving
  • compound interest
  • emergency funds
  • insurance
  • investing basics
  • retirement accounts
  • debt management
  • risk vs. reward

Without this, students walk into adulthood with no map — and they learn lessons the hard way.

One simple example:
$200 saved per month from age 22 to 65 at 7% grows to roughly $500,000.
The same $200 saved starting at age 35 grows to only ~$200,000.

Time matters.
Compounding matters.
Knowing this early changes lives.

6. Global Economics: Trade, Jobs, and National Strength

Students should understand why countries trade:

  • comparative advantage
  • specialization
  • global supply chains
  • exchange rates

They should understand what drives:

  • tariffs
  • sanctions
  • trade deficits
  • manufacturing shifts
  • labor markets

This is the foundation for understanding why:

  • some industries move overseas
  • some cities decline while others rise
  • automation replaces certain jobs
  • immigration affects labor supply
  • global shocks (like pandemics or wars) reshape economies

A student with global economic literacy is less fearful and more informed — and can better adapt to economic change.

7. Economics and Human Behavior

Economics is not just numbers — it is a window into human nature.

Students should learn:

  • why incentives matter
  • why people respond predictably to policy changes
  • why scarcity shapes decisions
  • why risk and reward are universal
  • why unintended consequences are common

For example:

  • Overly generous unemployment benefits can reduce the incentive to return to work.
  • Rent control can reduce housing supply, raising prices long-term.
  • Strict zoning can artificially inflate housing costs.
  • Tax breaks can shift business decisions but may not produce promised jobs.

Economics helps students see beyond intentions to outcomes.

8. Why Economics Matters Even More in the Age of AI

AI has changed everything — except human nature and economic reality.

AI can process data, but it cannot interpret incentives.

Only a human mind can understand why people behave as they do.

AI can forecast trends, but it cannot grasp consequences.

Consequences require judgment shaped by real-world understanding.

AI can make decisions quickly, but it cannot weigh tradeoffs ethically.

Economics teaches students how those tradeoffs work.

AI makes bad decisions faster when guided by people who don’t understand economics.

A poorly trained human with a powerful tool is dangerous.
A well-trained human with the same tool is wise.

Economics is the steadying force that helps society use AI responsibly.

Conclusion: The Blueprint for a Competent Adult

What educators want students to gain from economics is not technical jargon or narrow theories. It is an understanding of how the world works.

Economics teaches:

  • how choices shape outcomes
  • how incentives drive behavior
  • how money, markets, and governments interact
  • why prosperity is fragile and must be understood
  • how individuals, families, and nations manage limited resources
  • how to avoid financial mistakes and public illusions

If literature strengthens the mind and imagination,
and history strengthens judgment and citizenship,
economics strengthens decision-making — the backbone of adult life.

Together, they form the education every young person deserves before entering the real world. And the most important thing I hope you take away from this essay and my experience: college in general and high school in particular is where you launch into a lifetime of learning (and re-learning). Anything you see in this series that you judge you missed, go back and learn! LFM