My school district's stealth charter school

Recently, there’s been a lot of debate in New Jersey about whether charter schools produce better student results than similar public schools. Gov. Christie wants to see lots more charters, especially in poor, urban districts, because, he says, kids will get a better education in these smaller, less regulation-bound environments. But opponents question this assertion.

Critics claim that the student population of charters is not equivalent to nearby public schools, and therefore comparisons of student scores between them must be adjusted for factors like poverty, parental involvement, etc. Reports like the one produced by the Christie administration showing better results in charters aren’t valid, critics say, because the comparison isn’t fair; charter schools start out with a more advantaged population. 

But how would this happen? As charter school advocates loudly proclaim, charters are populated by lottery. Everyone has an equal opportunity to enter and win it, and therefore, they say, the student population it produces is similar to the populations found in nearby public schools.

 Opponents argue that a self-selection process occurs because, in order to get into a charter school, parents must take an extra action - they must enter their kids in the lottery. This presents an obstacle to parents who lack knowledge of the system, don’t speak English, or are simply uninvolved in their kids’ education. Number crunchers who have examined the data say that the differences are significant between charter and public school populations even in areas where the majority of the population is poor; the charter school students are, on the whole, less poor. (In addition to self-selection, there are other factors that may contribute, including attrition and lack of special education services in charters.)

I’m not a numbers cruncher, nor have I researched the situation statewide. But I wanted to share my own experience because, though it’s anecdotal, I think it sheds light on the reality of the situation.

I live in Morris Township, where kids attend the unified Morris School District along with Morristown residents. A little demographic information: My husband and I are white, American born, with post-graduate degrees. It’s a very long walk from our income level to the poverty line. My husband is a professional, and I left a career in online publishing to become a stay-at-home mom. By any measure, we are miles away from the demographic you would imagine might find it difficult to enter their kids in a charter school lottery. The only stumbling block we faced was that we’d moved to Morris Township just a year before our first kids (twins) were born. We didn’t know a lot of people here. We sent our kids to preschool in a nearby town, so most of their classmates were heading for kindergarten in a different school district.

When my oldest kids approached school age (around 2001), I began doing my homework. I read everything on the district’s website. I talked to the few parents I knew in the neighborhood about our local schools. Having learned that there’s a magnet school in our district with multi-age classrooms, I toured it a full year before my kids were to register for kindergarten. When the time came, I entered them in the lottery for the magnet school. (They didn’t get in, which, as it turned out, was just as well. But that’s another story.) I attended a district parents’ orientation meeting at some point. I brought the twins to be tested for kindergarten readiness and to register on the appointed day.

In other words, I did absolutely everything I could to get every scrap of information about the schools, the available options, the procedure. I honestly don’t know what else I could have done.

So imagine my surprise a couple of years later when, in a discussion with another parent, I learned there was another school my kids might have attended. She knew that it was somehow focused on teaching about the environment. She wasn’t sure  what the deal was; it was a very small school that kids got into by lottery. “Like Normandy Park?” I asked. (That’s the magnet school.) “Yeah, kind of like that, only no one knows about it.” I don’t know how much more time passed before I learned that there was a charter school in our school district - Unity Charter School. Since then, I have met many other parents in the district who have never heard of it. 

As of this writing, the Unity website is down, so I can’t tell you whether there is information about their lottery on their website. But then again, if you didn’t even know Unity existed, you wouldn’t seek out their website. Meanwhile, the Morris School District website contains no mention of Unity that I can find. (Please feel free to correct me if you find one.) On the District Information Page, here’s what you’ll learn about MSD schools:


"Within the District there is one preschool, three primary schools (K-2), three intermediate schools (3-5), one multiage magnet school (K-5), one middle school (6-8), and one high school. In addition to our pre-K-12 program, the Morris School District operates an innovative Community School that offers an extensive adult school curriculum for lifelong learners."

There’s a listing of every district school. None of those schools is Unity. Unity is invisible.

If you go on the NJ Dept. of Education website and click your way down to the charter schools section, then search for charter schools in Morris County, you will find Unity.  But if you’re a parent of a kid approaching kindergarten, why would you think to do that? Wouldn’t you assume that all options open to you are listed on your school district’s website? A quick Google search finds that, in the past couple of years, Unity has held open houses for prospective parents that were publicized in a couple of local papers. I have no idea if they’ve always had the open houses, but I’m certain that, with three kids in the public schools, I never heard about them through district channels or any other way.

Oh, and not surprisingly, Unity has a history of controversy with regard to its unrepresentative student population. 

I don’t know if the situation here is similar to other NJ districts currently hosting charter schools. But clearly, under existing regulations, this is how it can be. Our school district is socioeconomically diverse, with a significant number of Spanish-speaking families. I’m guessing that, if I failed completely to learn about our charter school, most of them did, too. (Anyone who has the time and know-how to seek out a comparison between the student demographics at Unity and the rest of the Morris School District, I’d sure be interested in reading what you find.)

So, is there a self-selection process created by the charter school admission system? If the situation in the Morris School District reflects the general situation even a tiny bit - you bet there is.

Can we please stop arguing beans with bean counters?

The idea that education is a business just like any other, and that we can be “successful” by running it like a business, is just plain wrong. The current generation of reformers thinks that, if they stay focused and never take their eye off the bottom line, other problems will magically melt away. Ask them which is worse for a kid’s education, living amid urban decay or attending a school where teachers have collective bargaining rights, and they answer the latter. Problems like poverty, violence, racism - more charter schools ought to fix those in a jiffy. So what if a kid has no resources at all, material, spiritual or emotional? Just get rid of tenure. That should do the trick.

It’s madness to treat education like other businesses because, unlike other businesses, education must serve everyone equally, even at great expense. A business, faced with the reality that there is no cost-effective way to get poor inner-city youth to buy lots of widgets, can simply choose to forego selling widgets to poor inner-city youth. Educators, faced with the reality that there is no cost-effective way to get poor inner-city youth through high school, must nevertheless accept the responsibility of trying to do so.

For some education-bottom-line worshippers, the business model is actually literal. They’re in it for profit. There’s a buck to be made in privatizing education with charter schools and vouchers, and where there’s a buck to be made, there will be hungry hyenas sniffing around for ways to make it. I find it difficult to understand how someone could not feel guilty about treating as a commodity something so fundamental to the development of the minds and hearts of fellow human beings, but there you go.

So, okay, I know who the robber barons are. I know who stands to benefit from reducing education to an imaginary bottom line. I know whose side I’m not on.

But here’s what’s really bothering me: We’ve allowed their side to frame the issue in their terms, and we distort our own argument to fit. They’re obsessed, first and foremost, with the narrative of failure. Some public schools serve students really badly; therefore, public education is in crisis. The entire system must be changed - even though only a fraction of the system accounts for the lion’s share of the problem. Conveniently, they ignore the nearly universal correlation among bad schools, poverty, race and ethnicity. And before we know it, we’re all talking about education in crisis - not children in poverty, not urban decay, but education in crisis.

The self-styled education reformers are also obsessed with creating “success,” ignoring such educational intangibles as creativity and critical thinking in favor of high scores on standardized tests. They want to use that metric to decide everything from how much teachers get paid to which schools are closed down, and, if it means doing anything necessary to raise those test scores - including dropping programs in art, languages, music; ignoring the  needs of higher achieving students; even dumbing down the tests - then so be it.

I agree with those who lament this over-emphasis on standardized testing, because it confuses test prep with actual learning and allows one diagnostic tool to become the central pillar of the entire system. And yet I find myself unwittingly buying into the whole test-scores-prove-something world view. When it was revealed that the Christie administration had lied about testing data in order to claim that charter schools had outperformed public schools - that in fact, when equivalent schools were compared, public schools outperformed charters - I did the happy dance.  Hooray! Gotcha, Christie! Hoist with his own petard!

The trouble is, that “petard” - standardized test results - still sucks as a definition of success. Yeah, the story reveals Christie for the lying opportunist he is, but it doesn’t prove anything about effective education.  A report indicating public schools in urban New Jersey districts outperformed charter schools sure as hell doesn’t prove that those public schools deserve any awards, any more than the opposite would have proven that public schools should be burned to the ground. There is much more to a school than its test results, just as there is much more to education than filling in bubbles. By reducing education from the grand character-building foundation of our citizenry to an exercise in data-bean-counting, we are cheapening the educational process and its value to society.

We’ve got to have the courage to stand up to the bean-counters and tell them that our obligation to support public education, provided equally to all and paid for with public funds, does not arise from a set of data points on a graph showing standardized test results. It arises from our recognition that students are not widget consumers; that every child deserves to be treated with dignity and educated rigorously; that ignoring poverty and race in the discussion of education is misguided and morally wrong; and that government must be held accountable for its failures. We cannot just walk away from the social contract that binds us together in communal pursuit of the common good, give up on our shared responsibilities, and hand the whole enterprise over to whoever happens to be in the education business at the moment.

We have to have the courage to make the moral argument: Our nation owes its citizens a good education, and an obligation of that magnitude cannot be met through privatization and profiteering - the haphazard hit-or-miss of the free market. If there is systemic failure, then systemic solutions are called for, and that includes addressing underlying issues of poverty and race. It’s time to stop arguing beans with the bean counters.

It's time for parents to stand up - before public schools are reformed to death

I never intended this blog to be all about New Jersey education, but lately I can’t seem to help myself. Understandable, I guess, what with having three kids in a Jersey public school.

What really gets me going is the way Governor Chris Christie has decided to stir the education pot. No, not stir it - dump out the contents, stomp on the dregs, and refill it with the swill being peddled by wealthy, powerful, union-hating privatization conspiracists and embraced by big-government-is-out-to-eat-our-souls tea party nut jobs. Along the way, he’s vilified teachers, botched applications for federal funding, scrapped a sensible agreement with the union, fired his education commissioner, politicized the court in an attempt to influence its decisions on education funding, bullied people in public meetings, and, of course, slashed the living hell out of school spending.

I’m not going to waste my time and psychic energy here rehashing the ways in which Christie’s brand of so-called education reform (backed as it is by the philanthropic machinery of Bill Gates and, god help us, the ghost of Milton Friedman) serves the agenda of the political right and the interests of hedge fund managers.  Charter schools, vouchers, merit pay, ending tenure - from the faulty research on which these policies are based to the blatant disregard for the underlying social problems that they can’t fix, the whole thing is a steaming pile of propaganda, wrapped in false hope, sprinkled with alarmist lies, and seasoned heavily with crocodile tears. Or, in plain English, people who stand to gain, both politically and financially, from the dismantling of public education are busily perpetrating the Big Lie.

And they are so good at it. They’ve got it down to a science. They think of everything. For example: What is the one group guaranteed to raise its voice against this all-out attack on public education? The teachers unions, of course. But by the time the unions get their bureaucratic asses in gear, the public has already been served up such an unrelenting diet of anti-union rhetoric that, no matter what the union says, it will never get a fair hearing. "Unions exist to protect bad teachers." "Unions don’t care if they bankrupt the state." "Unions couldn’t give a damn about kids." And sadly, the teachers who belong to those unions are tainted in the public’s mind by what they have been convinced is the nasty, socialist union evil.

The sad truth is, there’s a kernel of truth in that insane lie. The NJEA is not the Jersey Devil, but neither is it an impartial player. Unions DO represent the interests of teachers. That’s exactly what they’re supposed to do. While that doesn’t mean that everything they say is unreliable, or that they don’t represent the interests of children as well, it does mean that they are not the most effective power in our society to combat the business-driven free-market worshippers who would like nothing better than to chop off government’s head, put it on a stake, plant it in the town square, erect monuments to Ayn Rand, and let the underclasses fend for themselves.

If we allow the future of public education in New Jersey - and the rest of the country - to rest with the teachers unions, we may as well just rename the local secondary school Halliburton High and have done with. (Credit where credit is due: I swiped that line from Jersey Jazzman.)

So who else is there?

Us. Parents. People who have (or at least, should have) the strongest possible interest in the quality of our children’s education, and who cannot be accused of greed beyond the greed of wanting a better future for our children.

But in order to be effective, we have to start being honest. There’s a dirty little secret that many New Jersey parents have to face: our own complacency. We know that the doomsday narrative of failing schools does not describe most schools in our state, and that for the most part, we’ve been perfectly happy to let Christie construct any narrative he likes - just so long as he leaves our comfortable, more affluent school districts alone. People who can afford to live in an excellent school district are roused to anger only when someone mandates that their tax dollars go to fund schools in Newark or Camden - schools so segregated and poverty-blighted that those tax dollars can’t mend the damage, anyway.  More recently, rich folks got up in arms when the governor’s heavy budget-cutting hand fell on the salaries of the administrators who keep so many New Jersey schools in the top five for academic achievement in the nation.

Enough with the selfishness. By settling for an inexcusably inequitable educational system, we’ve opened the door to the propagandists who would use the lowest-performing schools as proof that our entire system is in crisis, and who would like to dismantle it wholesale in the name of efficiency and smaller government. We parents - here in New Jersey and around the country - have settled for a public education system more racially and economically segregated than the one that existed when Martin Luther King decried segregation half a century ago.  If we’re not willing to question the justice of the proposition that good schools are only for (mostly white) people who can afford to live in rich towns, then maybe we’re just getting what we deserve - Halliburton High.

I really hope we’re better than that. I hope that, as we see the effect of budget cuts on all our schools - larger class sizes, fired teachers, loss of art and music programs, pay-for-play extracurriculars - that we also see the big picture. Yes, we’re in the middle of a major budget crunch - but we can’t allow the immediate fiscal crisis to be used as an excuse to dismantle the public education system that has been the backbone of our society; that has made possible the social and financial mobility from which generations have benefited; that is a service provided equally to all and is therefore the appropriate function of a democratically elected government.

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For day-to-day updates on New Jersey education news, please check out my Facebook page, NJ Parents Against Gov Christie’s School Budget Cuts.

What's with the weird blog name?

A few months ago, I renamed this blog, “Smoking Toward New Jersey.” When I was a teenager in Manhattan, "Smoke toward New Jersey" was what I said when someone blew smoke in my face. It was the late ‘70s. Kids smoked a lot. 


Back then, New York was an incredibly exciting place to be young, what with the heady rebelliousness of the punk scene, the downtown clubs that never carded, and the freedom of movement provided by a 24/7 mass transit system.  Jersey, on the other hand? Bridge-and-tunnel New Yorker wannabes whose mommies and daddies had to drive them to the station, and who didn’t know the difference between Sid Vicious and Adam Ant.

“Smoke toward New Jersey” pretty much summed up my attitude toward the Garden State at the time: a filthy, polluted, industrialized waste of a place where people were either too stupid or too uncivilized to do the only sensible thing - move to New York.

Now I live in New Jersey. Call it Karma.

I’ve discovered that, like most things in life, the truth about New Jersey is far more complicated than I’d once thought. I was wrong about a lot of things - and right about others - and ignorant of a whole lot more. 

So it turns out the whole state does not consist of foul-smelling refineries along the Turnpike. In fact, it’s quite a mixed bag. Some parts, like where I live, are actually quite pretty, with lots of open space and quaint old towns. Farms, even. But much of New Jersey is suburban sprawl - towns with no beginning, middle, or end, just a patchwork of housing developments and strip malls that can’t even really be called towns. The only way you know you’ve left one is when you pass a sign welcoming you to the next one. There are cities, too. Turns out Newark is not just an airport. What it is, I’m not altogether certain. I’m not proud to say I’ve never been. Well, except for that one Miley Cyrus concert at that big nameless arena, where every cop was on duty to protect the suburban families as they ran for their cars.

Which reminds me - the car culture for which I had such disdain in my youth? I’m 100 percent a part of it now. I’ve fallen into that cesspool of fossil-fuel consumption, and I can’t get up.  I’m not proud of it, but I’m sadly unmotivated to do anything else. Every once in a while I tell myself I’ll start riding my bike to run errands or get to work. “This time I mean it,” I tell myself. I am such a liar.

Other things I treated with contempt in my youth I have discovered to be pretty wonderful. Backyards, for instance. As I type, I’m looking out the kitchen window at the bird feeders; I see a downy woodpecker, a cardinal, a titmouse, and and a nuthatch. I know this because I keep the Peterson Field Guide of Eastern Birds on a shelf right by the window. This is a far more entertaining, educational, and calming activity than watching pigeons in the air shaft outside my New York apartment window. Or listening to the breaking glass of the looters in the street. Well, that was only during blackouts.

So what about the people? That’s where age and experience really kicked my ass and taught me a thing or two. Somehow, at 16, self-delusion was way easier. I put on a leather jacket, spiked up my hair, smoked hand-rolled cigarettes, and convinced myself that I was part of a radical counterculture scene despite my affluent Upper East Side private religious school, Ivy League college plans, and - oh yeah - living with my parents. So much for nostalgia.

To tell the truth, Jersey people ARE more or less what I expected. Most stick to the narrow world they know, looking very little beyond popular trends in fashion, music, politics - everything. My area is pretty affluent, and with that comes the usual bourgeois lifestyle of conspicuous consumption combined with circle-the-wagons-cuz-the-socialists-are-a-comin’ politics. But of course that doesn’t describe everyone, and even those whom it does describe sometimes have a lot more to say for themselves if you bother to scratch the surface. Sometimes. Not always.

Then again, when I go into the city these days, it’s the same there. A 50-story glass-and-steel high rise filled with 2 million-dollar apartments is just the urban version of the McMansions I see right here, across the street, built the year after we moved to what is now the "poor" side of the street. Manhattan streets are lined with Gaps and Starbucks and Victoria’s Secrets and Barnes & Nobles, without even the comfort of climate-controlled corridors in between. Yeah, I admit it. If I’m gonna buy the same cookie-cutter crap you can get in a mall, I prefer to stay warm and dry doing it.

I’d like to think that some of the gritty liveliness, the rebellious excitement of the New York of my youth wasn’t imaginary. But even if it wasn’t, it’s mostly gone now, anyway. Jersey, meanwhile, turns out to be not so bad. No worse than the rest of the country, anyway.

But that’s not saying much.

One parent's story of one school district not having a crisis. Yawn.

Yesterday was a national Day of Blogging for Real Education Reform. Yesterday was also Start Cooking for Thanksgiving Day. Hence, this entry, a day late.

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There’s this story going around. It goes like this:

American public schools are in crisis. They are filled with stupid, lazy, greedy, teachers whose agenda is to protect their jobs at all costs while ignoring the needs of children as much as possible. Buildings are crumbling, gang wars erupt in the hallways, and no actual education occurs. Kids graduate without being able to read or do math - if they graduate at all. All of this goes on because powerful teachers’ unions are holding politicians by the short and curlies. And the taxpayers are getting screwed.

That’s the narrative you get from the media as well as from the latest crop of education “reformers” who are pushing ideas like school privatization, mayoral control, education vouchers, etc. Here in New Jersey, that’s the narrative we get from our right-wing Republican governor, who has slashed school funding and wants to create more charter schools, institute standardized-test-based merit pay for teachers, abolish tenure, and hand out vouchers for private schools. On another day, I might go into a 1,000-word rant on why wealthy philanthropists, hedge fund managers, politicians, and the media keep telling that story and proposing this particular set of “solutions.”

But not today. Today I’m getting personal and I’m changing the narrative. I’m talking about what’s worked well for my three public school kids. I know there are deeply troubled school districts that resemble the doomsday scenario much more closely than ours does - but I wonder whether, even there, the situation is as totally irredeemable as it’s made out to be. I’m asking people, before we bring out the wrecking balls and the bulldozers: First, look at what you’re being urged to destroy.

I know my list of Things That Work is narrow and leaves out a lot of important stuff, because it’s based on the experiences of just one family. I hope others in my district and others around the state and the nation will come forward and share what works for them - as well as what doesn’t - so that we can build a more realistic picture of public education in America, and a more reality-based plan to improve it.

THINGS THAT WORK IN THE MORRIS SCHOOL DISTRICT

Diversity: If our school district is anything to go by, diversity isn’t just a PC watchword - it’s effective education policy. Our student body represents the nation’s population pretty closely. The census data is pretty old at this point, but in 2000 we had 8,354 people under 18 in the district: 1,435 Latino; 1,049 African-American; 321 Asian; 6,273 white. Socioeconomically, we range from rich to poor: Our state District Factor Grouping (an index of socioeconomic status) is GH on a scale of A (really poor) to J (rolling in dough).

And here’s the thing: Everyone benefits. It’s not just about less-advantaged kids reaping the benefits of going to school with more-advantaged kids, though there is that. My white, Jewish kids have learned firsthand about our multicultural society; that achievement isn’t measured in dollars; that authority figures don’t all look like them;  that everyone has something to contribute; that everyone matters.

Research shows that poor kids concentrated together is an almost certain predictor of poor outcome.  The Morris School District offers evidence that the opposite is true as well: Diversity works. Diversity creates good schools for everyone, schools where those who need extra help can actually get it, and where those with high ability can truly excel.

Teachers: Yes, there have been a few we could have done without. But there have been so many wonderful teachers - caring, thoughtful, hard-working individuals whose efforts on behalf of my kids went far above and beyond the call of duty. There was the first grade teacher who recognized that my son’s love of dinosaurs went way beyond the usual childhood infatuation, and brought in books from her personal library she thought would engage him; the fourth grade teacher who, unasked, saved my daughter's work and compiled a comprehensive portfolio in support of her application to the gifted and talented program; the seventh grade algebra teacher who poses math questions that blow his students’ minds; the band teacher who pushes hard and makes kids feel the pride one gets from being better than one has any right to be; the teacher who built a gifted and talented curriculum from scratch because no one - not the state and not the district - provided her with even a rough outline. The list goes on and on.

Administrators: Hard to believe these folks are on the list, but yes, there are some good ones. When my daughter started kindergarten, she was already reading very well. I approached the principal to find out if she could be grouped with other kids reading at a similar level. Much to my surprise, the principal arranged for her to be evaluated by the reading specialist for a week, after which we were offered the opportunity to move her into first grade, which we did. No battles, no appeals, no threats. And then there was the administrator who dealt with the school bus bully who had targeted my kids. The fact that the bully didn’t fit the usual stereotype made no difference; he was disciplined swiftly and surely, and the teasing stopped. These are administrators who care about influencing kids, not just pushing pencils.

Music: This was a huge shocker for me. I attended an exclusive, small private school that didn’t even have an instrumental music program. I had no idea what I was missing. Now, having watched my kids pick up instruments in fourth grade and make music an important part of their lives, I realize not only that music is vital, but that, no matter what’s on my resume, I am an undereducated musical illiterate.

As part of their public school education, my kids have all learned to read music well and to play one or more instruments each. And they’ve gotten what private lessons alone could never have given them: the opportunity to play in a large orchestra or band. For those who want to reach for even higher goals, there are groups like concert strings and jazz band, where the kids are really challenged.  I am inexpressibly grateful to each and every music teacher who has given my kids this incredible gift. These opportunities are open to every kid - I know of kids who couldn't afford instrument rental, who were provided instruments free of charge, and who have excelled in the music program. 

Gifted education: New Jersey mandates it. No funding is provided. No curriculum is specified. No standard of identification is offered. And yet, through the district’s reasonably robust Quest program and a few dedicated teachers, my kids have researched, debated, created, explored, and designed, in fields ranging from business to architecture to ancient history to literature. In the current environment of standardized testing and shrinking budgets, in which the needs of gifted students who usually test well are often ignored, we’ve got staff and budget dedicated to the needs of high-achieving students. I consider this a small miracle.

Community: Being part of a neighborhood school connects us with our community in a fundamental, concrete way. It reminds us that, no matter who we are, where we come from, and whom we voted for, the shared needs of our children transcend those differences. It makes us - parents and kids - realize that all of us have to stand behind the ideal of a quality education for each and every child, and that our community is weakened when the needs of some are not met. So many parents pitch in with time, money, whatever they can, to make the schools better. Our kids see that and learn an important civics lesson about participation and volunteerism that will inform their choices for the rest of their lives.

Tolerance: Okay, I have a little confession to make. You know those painfully long, dull, out-of-tune holiday concerts we all sit through every year when our kids are in elementary school? They choke me up - every single year. Despite the fact that I don’t believe anyone should be singing even remotely religious songs in public school. Despite the fact that the Hanukah songs are way more lame than the Christmas songs. Despite the controversial origins of Kwanzaa. Despite the fact that, by 5th grade, the kids think the whole thing is pretty dumb. So do I. And yet, my innate cynicism is no match for my emotional response to that display of respect for cultures not one’s own. When those public school kids participate in an event that explicitly refuses to presume the universal Christianity of their community and their country, I choke up. I just do. So there.

 The 3 R’s: Yes, even those. Basic education. It happens.

I want to emphasize: I’m talking about suburban schools which, though not homogeneous, serve a more affluent and stable community than many schools in poor and urban areas. I am not deluding myself into believing that the status quo is acceptable everywhere, or for that matter, anywhere. But I do believe that the media, encouraged by right-wing think tanks and high-profile reform advocates, has created a grossly exaggerated view of the widespread decay of public education in America. Parents who know better, who have personal experience of a very different reality, need to stand up and tell their stories. We need to let our elected representatives know what our schools do and do not need - and we need to listen to parents in other districts whose needs may be very different.

Public education has been a good thing for our family. Will it continue to be? I have my doubts. So many changes could chip away at the things that work: over-emphasis on standardized testing; budget cuts; devaluing teachers; de-emphasizing the arts; de-secularization of the curriculum. That's why I scour the news every day to find out what legislation is being proposed; who's defunding what; which reform faction is ascendant at the moment. Lately, the news hasn't been good. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that calm heads prevail and we don't throw the baby out with the bath water.


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Click here to read more blog posts written for the Day of Blogging for Real Education Reform.

How to Fix Our Military - A Parody

Let’s face it - our military is a mess.

The war in Iraq hasn’t gone very well. Sure, we ousted Saddam Hussein, but ever since then, the Iraq effort has been in decline. People keep dying, and what do we have to show for it? The streets are unsafe, the people have not learned what we came to teach them, and we can’t claim victory despite repeatedly lowering our standards. And now, despite the fact that the Iraq War is officially over, we’re still paying soldiers to work there! Those are tax dollars coming straight out of your pocket!

And Afghanistan? Even worse! We keep throwing more and more money at the problem, but nothing ever changes. It’s still all about warlords and opium, while our important lessons of freedom and democracy go entirely unheeded.

So who’s to blame? The answer is obvious. Who’s over there, drawing their salaries on the taxpayers’ dime, getting outrageous benefits like free health care, free meals, free housing, money for college, paid vacations, and even the use of government-owned vehicles? 

The soldiers, that’s who. Clearly, the failures of our military are the fault of bad soldiers. And did you know that, as long as a soldier keeps showing up at the war and following orders, he or she never gets fired, even if we’re not winning? (Unless they’re gay, of course.) It’s like having job security for life! People in the real world don’t get that. So why do soldiers get such a sweet deal? Because they’re protected by an entrenched leadership committed to supporting its members and shielding them from outside interference. Can you imagine?

So - what can we do to reform our military? Here are a few easy, intuitively correct answers:

1. Cut military funding. Hey, these are tough times. Why continue to spend all this money if we don’t get clear-cut victories? Sure, soldiers might have to make do with fewer perks like reliable weapons, decent food, and body armor, but hey, it’s all about shared sacrifices. Lots of us have given up our SUVs and our timeshares in Boca. Besides, if they really need all that stuff, they can spend their own money on it.

2. Create charter armies. The military has been a government monopoly for far too long. You can’t expect excellent results with no free-market competition. We need to create  a market-driven military with multiple, privately owned and operated armies that are liberated from the burdens of government regulation and public oversight. Only then will we see some real military innovation! There are hedge fund managers champing at the bit to get a piece of this action. We must not let the willing philanthropy of such selfless patriots go to waste. Yup, charter armies will be the salvation of our nation’s military.

3. Merit pay for soldiers. It’s easy to judge who is an effective soldier: Who kills the most enemies? Sure, there are different jobs  in the army, and some of them do a lot less killing than others, but really, we all know what the bottom line is when it comes to war. So imagine how much more effective our soldiers will become when we pay them based on a rating that relies heavily on standardized kill results. And let’s go one better: Publish the ratings in newspapers, so that everyone knows which soldiers are doing the best job. Hey, these guys work for us - we have a right to know!

4. End guaranteed job security. If a commanding officer is dissatisfied with a soldier’s performance, why shouldn’t that soldier be let go? Just imagine how much more efficient our  military will be when every crying mama’s boy, every redneck maggot, every whiny little puke, every lowest form of life on Earth, and every pathetic jug-f*&%er gets fired! No doubt they’ll be quickly replaced with MIT graduates willing to work for nothing but sheer patriotic pride, daily verbal abuse, and a pair of boots.

By following these clear, simple steps, our military will once again make us the most powerful, feared nation on Earth, and we will quickly mop up little problems like Iraq and Afghanistan despite centuries of religious and tribal conflict.

Oh, and feel free to use this little manifesto to get the national dialogue going. Oprah, are you listening?

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Inspired by How to fix our schools: A manifesto by Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee and other education leaders.

What's in a name?

When my twin sons reached fifth grade, they started telling me about something that was new in their lives: the way kids tease each other at school. Their peers had started going through that phase where kids try to enhance their own status by humiliating others.

That came as no surprise. But what struck me as really weird were the two insults my kids told me their peers used most often: “racist” and “gay.”

Think about that a minute. When you use “racist” as an epithet, you’re putting someone down for showing intolerance toward people who are different.  When you use “gay” as an epithet, you’re putting someone down for actually being different. They are, in a sense, opposites. How could those two insults coexist in the same schoolyard among the same group of kids? Was it that the kids could believe two contradictory things at once, or did the words simply have no meaning to them at all?

The answer, I think, is a little of each.

There is a constant tension between the outward forms we use - the language and symbols we employ to represent things - and the core beliefs we have actually internalized. The white kid who uses “racist” as an epithet is not necessarily free of racism himself, but he’s internalized the taboo against appearing racist - he’s been raised in a culture of political correctness where he’s been carefully socialized to believe that the outward signs of racism - like using the “n” word - is to be avoided at all costs.  This, despite the fact that, if his lunch money disappears, he may suspect a black classmate first.

Meanwhile, the kid who uses “gay” as an epithet does not necessarily think about the morality of same-sex relationships - in fact, in fifth grade he may have only the haziest idea of what homosexuality is - but he’s internalized the taboo against behaviors culturally associated with homosexuality or, more generally, a lack of masculinity. 

In other words, the kids don’t fully understand the epithets, but they have a very clear idea about the words’ social implications. 

So what does that translate to in fifth-grade culture? For one thing, anyone who shows any awareness of the existence of race - for example, identifying someone as a “black kid” or a “white kid,” or for that matter using the words “black” or “white” in any context whatsoever (no, I’m not exaggerating) is liable to be called “racist.” And any kid who sets a toe outside the tight boundaries established for masculinity - the boy who is studious, artistic, or simply uninterested in sports - is liable to be called “gay.” 

For an epithet to be effective, it doesn’t have to be true or even probable. It just has to do one thing successfully: push the shame button and humiliate the victim. Successful insults rely on shared cultural cues about what is shameful. TV, movies, peers - they’re all important sources of those cues, but most important are parents.  That doesn’t necessarily mean parents are tossing these words around at the dinner table; it means that they’re sending cues which kids, like the intelligent, imitative primates they are, learn to interpret at a very young age. And kids have exquisitely finely tuned sensors for what embarrasses their parents. Pointing out someone’s skin color in a public place? Embarrassing. Seeing junior dress up in tutu and tiara? Cringeworthy.

Flash forward a few years, when the child reaches the stage where he believes that humiliating others enhances his own status, and “racist” and “gay” make perfect sense in the same schoolyard, among the same kids, because they both have the same effect - they call up a visceral shame.

For a while, anyway. Over time, one of those epithets seems to fade away, while the other becomes more common, and more cruel.

When puberty hits and the entire topic of sexuality becomes an intense, hot-button issue strewn with all kinds of personal and social land mines, a kid’s social life begins to revolve around one urgent need: to avoid embarrassment by seeming normal, with normal very clearly defined as heterosexual. And voila, “gay” becomes the epithet of choice,  because it becomes the word with the most power to do harm.

My boys are in seventh grade now. I never hear anymore about people being called “racist,” but “gay” is bigger than ever. And now, there’s a dawning understanding among their friends of what the word means beyond a general lack of masculinity. Seventh graders have, to varying degrees, begun to learn what sex is, and they’ve begun to be interested in it themselves. It’s that age when sex is simultaneously the most fascinating topic in the world and also the most excruciatingly embarrassing; the need to fit neatly inside the boundaries of what your peers see as normal is intense.

All of a sudden, the epithet “gay,” which was bad enough before, is now brutally distressing, whether or not it’s accurate. Just knowing that your sexuality is being disparaged can be devastating. Sadly, recent media coverage of teen suicides has been a shocking reminder of just how devastating.

So if parental and social cues serve to teach kids how to embarrass each other,  you have to wonder exactly what cues all those kids are getting on homosexuality. Many, no doubt, hear explicitly anti-gay statements at home. But even among those who don't, the message comes through loud and clear. At best, they may sense some grudging tolerance - a kind of awkward, bare-bones acknowledgment that gay people exist - they're out there, but we don't like thinking about it. To the average 12- or 13-year-old boy, the translation is: "Don't act like one, don’t hang around them, and for God’s sake, don’t EVER become one."

As long as people, especially parents continue to cringe at what they perceive as homosexual or unmasculine behavior, kids will continue to use “gay” as a weapon to wound. Schools can and should adopt anti-bullying policies; they can and should discipline kids who harass others in any way. But does anyone really believe that schools can make this problem go away on their own?

Every time a kid loses his life to the unbearable humiliation of being called “gay,” every parent should ask  him or herself, “What have I done to give that word its power to wound - and what can I do to take it away?”