Or: How I happened to disagree with our good friend Meteor Blades
Sometimes I wonder why so many people step up to defend such a horribly broken system.
Reading that diary started me thinking about what public school means to me. In two words: BAD things. Reading MB and Jim Cummins stirred up some personal reflections on American public schools which I've chosen to express here, by way of making a larger point...
If you can handle having some conventional thinking about education challenged, follow me below the fold.
First, let me get one thing out of the way: I agree wholeheartedly with Jim Cummins about the ideological and pedagogical underpinnings of No Child Left Behind. However, much of what he has to say bears a certain amount of unintended irony:
"We have choices," Cummins asserted. "A lot of folks at higher levels in the hierarchy don’t want you to know that you have choices because the dominant model of school improvement that is being inflicted in many states as part of the No Child Left Behind reading-first approach is to impose what is viewed as a scientifically supported approach to instruction and to wipe out teacher choice, to make it as teacher-proof as possible."
In spite of an array of ideological and bureaucratic efforts to undermine teachers, he said, "we always have choices. Even when we’re not conscious we have choices, even when we’re teaching in constrained conditions, where our principals, our superintendents, our administrators, our coaches, are ensuring that we use choice in as limited way as possible, we’re always making choices." To make a positive difference under these circumstances, he said, "We need to make the choice to reclaim our identities as educators ...
Jim, I hate to tell you this, but in my painful experience, you'd have to do a lot more with the American educational system than get rid of NCLB before ANYTHING useful could be done to reform the system.
Jim Cummins seems to think that public school teachers are secular saints. I take a somewhat different view based on painful personal experience.
And while I have anything to say about it, the little girl in the picture below is not going to go through the idiocy I had to endure through large periods of my childhood:
I submit that the American educational system was broken long before George W. Bush ever got within sniffing distance of elective office.
But first, Cummins offers a solution:
Cummins offered an alternative to the NCLB approach – under which more and more inner-city schools are failing every day. That alternative is school-based language planning which instructs along the lines of what the research has shown. Boiled down to its essentials, Cummins said, literacy attainment is directly related to literacy engagement. Such engagement requires participation, and effective participation requires that student identity is affirmed, which means first language learning should not be discouraged because "new understandings are constructed on a foundation of existing understandings and experiences."
There is another ideology involved in this dicussion beyond the right-wing NCLB. It's the ossified public school ideology. Anytime anyone dares criticize the methods by which our children get taught, dares criticize the content of the books that are provided to children, dares question why we should consign our kid to a second-class life because some of her teachers can't be bothered to do their freakin' jobs while they run out the clock on their pension, is immediately tarred as a bible-thumping right-wingnut zealot who wants to turn our country into a Protestant theocracy.
Frankly, I've had it. It's not a black-or-white situation.
Like it or not, NCLB was a response to an already bad situation in American schools. It's not as though we DIDN'T have bad test scores and gross inequality. The Repugs (and, it must be said, Ted Kennedy, who co-sponsored the legislation as you know very well) are pretty much rearranging the rubble of an already bombed-out system by inflicting NCLB on it.
What was so freaking great about our system?
Before NCLB came along, we already had lost drama classes, music instruction, art instruction and physical education through huge swaths of the American educational system. Our kids are fatter, ruder, less creative and mentally further behind than ever. Despite the welcome Harry Potter, kids are reading less than ever. In unprecedented cases, mass murder events have been happening in our schools.
More and more parents, in our competitive, dog-eat-dog, materialistic world are forced into two-income mode, thereby turning our schools into de facto day cares, removing one of the crucial safety nets children need to make it through public education: parental involvement. (Feminism is not the culprit - I think the situation goes much deeper, down to the very values of our culture and what we consider important. Women in work and leadership are an unalloyed good, as are freer gender roles. Blaming feminism is a familiar argument from the Right that I vehemently disagree with.)
It goes way beyond NCLB. It goes to the heart of how our public schools system functions. (I wish I had deeper research into this very topic at my fingertips - but I want to finish this discussion sooner rather than later. Perhaps someone can step up with more in the comments... but this is primarily a personal narrative.)
Finally, let us consider this from John D. Rockefeller:
"In our dreams, people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present education conventions of intellectual and character education fade from their minds and unhampered by tradition we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into men of learning or philosophers, or men of science. We have not to raise up from them authors, educators, poets or men of letters, great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, statesmen, politicians, creatures of whom we have ample supply . The task is simple. We will organize children and teach them in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way."
This is basically what we have today. Strangely enough, I think Rockefeller would be very pleased with what he saw now if he were alive. After all, he called out all the classes of people who might have the temerity to OPPOSE him. In fact, the system as it now stands, with or without NCLB, approaches the Rockefeller ideal. Perfect or not, it's doing exactly what he wanted it to.
However, this was also the case before the first word of NCLB was ever written.
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Here are my personal reflections. I went to school 40 years ago, a time when public education was in a Golden Age of availability and resources. The system already had serious pathologies. A child's fate for an entire year rested on whether or not they received the right teacher. If the parents were somewhat disengaged or unable for whatever reason to make sure their child's school got them into the right classes, that child could easily go from A's and B's to C's and D's almost overnight. This is precisely what happened to me in elementary school, in all particulars I've just outlined.
After getting straight A's in 3rd grade, I had an incompetent 4th grade teacher who just about destroyed me, and her class was full of bullies. It was not until halfway through 5th grade that the administrators put me into a class with a competent teacher, when lo and behold, I shot straight up to the top 10% of my class again, staying there until the beginning of junior high school. Certainly, my parents failed me. They saw the same report cards that I did. So why didn't they fight my school to get me into a better class as soon as they saw my grades going into a tailspin? Well, they were fighting constantly and basically did not have the time, as both were working parents. That was reality. This was not as common then as it is now.
Ultimately, the school administrators bear a major share of blame. Basic analysis should have shown that something was wrong. I did not go from brilliant kid to stupid kid in the course of one summer. Yet, nothing was done and I had to endure a passive, ignorant, bully-enabling teacher for an entire year, and missed by a whisker being held back. I still remember that scumbucket's name: Miss Ailie. May she rot in Hell.
The same thing happened in Junior High - I got shoved into a factory and got hammered. Before 7th-grade ended, someone (I will never know who) saw that this was wrong and had me transferred to an AP-style K-8 school elsewhere in the district, where my grades shot up again.
But then I still had to go to high school.
My high school of 30+ years ago was considered excellent but was still a horrible factory of conformism and even physically resembled a prison. There was a moat around the goddamn place! Most of my (overmatched) high school teachers couldn't instruct their way out of a paper bag. Almost all my classes were a 35-1 ratio, and/or overrun by bullies. It was a small miracle I stuck with it, because for me, high school was Hell on several levels. Until I got into AP classes in my junior year, I had a very hard time and pulled C's. After starting AP? Straight A's. By that time it was pretty much too late for me to compete for a place in a high-caliber school, even though I was among those who received the highest academic honors towards the end. My cumulative GPA just wasn't there. My SAT's were not good enough to compensate.
Without replicating myself a hundred thousand times across the country to verify this (which, thank you, I think I'll pass on), I am convinced that this situation manifestly prevails today, in schools across the country and even in the school across town from where I live. A bad teacher can wreck your kid's life. A gaggle of bullies can turn your kid's life into a living Hell.
After my experiences, do you think I'm ever going to listen to anyone who thinks I should keep my daughter in public school if ANYTHING of this sort starts to happen? And do you think I'm not going to be watching the people who are teaching my daughter with a gimlet eye?
No. I intend to be completely ruthless.
I will NOT allow my daughter to be victimized for a useless ideal that utterly failed me at a time when American public education basically was still in a halcyon era.
I'm sorry, but idealizing the public education system as this unassailble sacred cow is naive and simplistic. In my direct experience, whatever success I have as a human being is IN SPITE OF the American public school system, not BECAUSE of it.
And now it's worse than ever. I feel sorry for kids like me (like me back then, that is) who have to go to school now. At least I had creative arts as a refuge.
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We were until recently raising our little daughter in Berkeley. Berkeley has a lottery system, through which every kid has a chance to go to one of three schools nearby. So you do NOT automatically get to put your kid in your neighborhood school. (This situation prevails pretty much everywhere in the Bay Area that I'm aware of.) In our case, it was between Thousand Oaks (a good-ish school, but with weak parent involvement), Jefferson, the closest, which had good teachers and involved parents, and Rosa Parks, which had both the worst test scores and a highly fractious faculty. Then there was the gaping maw of Berkeley High to contend with later.
I was willing to at least give the system a chance. After all, this was BERKELEY. A citadel of political dissent and bearing a powerful reputation for public education.
I went and looked at all the schools. Note that Rosa Parks is located in one of the more dangerous and heavily-trafficked sections of South Berkeley. Local papers were writing stories about the feuds in the Rosa Parks faculty and staff. A friend of ours was assaulted near Rosa Parks not long after I checked the place out.
We discovered that inter-district transfers could never happen, because every noteworthy good school was chronically full. Once our daughter was placed in a school, that was pretty much IT. Getting our little girl into a decent school was strictly a matter of blind luck. A gamble.
A good friend of mine is an economist and professor at UC Berkeley. He is among the intelligentsia in Berkeley, a committed Democrat, and one of the smartest men I've ever met. (He frightens me.) He pays 20K a year to send his little boy to a private Jewish school, and would never dream of allowing him to go a bad public school in Berkeley, which was the result of his lottery. I was facing the prospect of paying taxes AND a third of my take-home income to see that our daughter got a decent education.
So given all of these factors, we reluctantly decided to vote with our feet. Given the choice between (a) investing our child's life in a system that appears to expect you to hold the collective over the individual to a toxic degree; or (b) making sure our daughter had a chance in life, choice (b) will win 100 times out of 100.
So, now that we are fortunate enough to live in a rural area where the schools are much smaller (but that is also 120 miles from my strongest job base), we'll give public schooling a chance, since we're paying for it anyway and since we know who the "good" and "bad" teachers are in our school, and have other parents who give us intelligence on this vital matter. These are not things I take for granted. If we have to, we will home-school our children. We hope we do not have to do that. However, unlike Berkeley, our current rural home has an excellent inter-district transfer entitlement along with excellent home-schooling infrastructure.
I am also fortunate enough to have a spouse who stays at home and can pay attention to this stuff. A key fact that many people never consider: there is a significant cost in two-earner families. No school can provide a complete substitute for sustained parent involvement. Unfortunately, particularly in the Bay Area, far too many people in the present day cannot do this whether they are homeowners or renters. The pressure is far too great. It's why we moved.
Unfortunately, for so many people who do not have the option to "vote with their feet" (like many people in the communities in Berkeley and Oakland that we thoroughly explored before making our ultimate choice), or simply cannot afford to have a parent remain at home most of the time, what the devil are they supposed to do?
Public schools fail millions of people in this situation. Even in Silicon Valley, where I work, in which quasi-urban cities like Mountain View and Sunnyvale boast average selling prices of $900K for crummy 3-BR ranch homes, the test scores for all the schools are lamentably low. (Except in the wealthiest communities, that is.)
These communities have basically been abandoned. Both parties bear a big share of blame.
Here is my inexpert solution:
(1) Implement Cummins's langauge-based education theories across the country.
(2) Reform the teacher's unions to improve salaries and workloads (particularly for new teachers), with fair but strong forms of accountability in return. Also institute subsidized housing policies so that teachers are able to live in or near the communities they serve.
(3) Restructure the tax code in all 50 states to have a flatter, more transparent tax system dedicated solely to education. Increase taxes if necessary, while ensuring that all districts and all parents know what is happening with their money. Quarterly financial statements, for example.
(4) Reduce the terrifying pension burden on communities from teachers' retirements through tax relief.
(5) Reform textbook writing to restore priority of place to Western ideas and literature, while giving fair treatment to all other key creeds and religions. Expand school libraries and mandate that all schools offer extra credit to students who make consistent use of them.
(6) Institute a nationwide education policy, with funding and proper tools, that persistently enabling or allowing bullying in class will result in the expulsion of the teacher from their profession. Institute a generation-long effort to discredit and end bullying in the schools.
(7) Critically, flatten the heirarchical public school management structure to prevent ossified decision-making and allowing kids to slip between the cracks as I did. Dispense with all levels of management between teachers and the principal, and split the principal's task between three people to manage the workload. One of these three should be tasked as a troubleshooter.
(8) For school communities that are irretrievably broken, offer a program of sustained intensive remedial instruction combined with sustained Cummins-type reforms in the local schools. Sustained remediation is critical so that private schools are not unduly burdened with students that are so far behind that the rest of the student body suffers.
(9) Restore arts in the public schools.
Finally, for communities whose childrens' and parents' backs are against the wall, I think vouchers also might need to be part of a bigger solution. I see nothing wrong with providing school vouchers to embattled parents in dysfunctional school communities. I do not consider it a good idea to use them as a middle-class entitlement.
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This is a challenge to dialog without emotional investment in a bureaucracy or an agenda. Flame attacks will get absolutely no response from me, because I do not believe in flame wars or personal attacks on people, or responding to same. This is not a troll diary. I really want to see what people think.
The state of American education constitutes a national emergency. Day by day, generations of American children (particularly minority children) are being consigned to never achieving their potential, to never knowing how rich the world is or how rich their lives can be; to never truly appreciating what it means to be alive.
This is an issue that transcends ideology.