License to carry

"Please allow my daughter to carry her backpack during the school day. She needs it because she has to carry a lot of books."

That's the note I wrote for my kid to bring to school this morning. I wrote it because she was told by her home room teacher yesterday that she can't carry her backpack around her middle school unless she has a note from home. Carrying a backpack violates a rule. My daughter wasn't sure why the rule exists, but she figured it has something to do with drugs or weapons. After all, she explained, they're not allowed to have water bottles because some kid once brought vodka to school in a water bottle.

Here's what school should be: A place where kids feel safe and respected.

Here's what school shouldn't be: A place where kids feel that adults assume the worst of them and where they are unfairly punished for the infractions of others.

The intention behind such rules is no doubt good, but it's like burning down your house to deal with termites.

Homework, history, privilege, guilt. It's all so complicated.

So did you hear about the school in Georgia that, in an attempt to integrate the social studies and math curricula, wound up sending home a math assignment that asked questions like, "Each tree had 56 oranges. If 8 slaves pick them equally, then how much would each slave pick?” and, “If Frederick got two beatings per day, how many beatings did he get in 1 week?” Yeah, really. That happened.

So here’s a piece exhorting public schools to do a better job with racial sensitivity. It reminded me of another, related issue:  They also need to do a much better job with socioeconomic sensitivity. We all should.

I’m amazed how often my kids have come home from school with assignments like, “Bring in a photograph of your house,” or, “Write about your family vacation.” These are such enormous cans of worms to open. It’s got to be tough on the kid who lives in a cramped apartment in a run-down building or even a shelter, seeing his classmates’ houses and even McMansions; or the kid whose parents are working multiple jobs to support the family and have precious few hours at home, hearing her classmates’ stories of ski trips, summer camp and cruises.

And then there are the assignments that require kids to bring in materials. My kid comes home with a list of stuff he needs to complete a group project; rather than tell him to divvy up the list with the group, I purchase the lion’s share of the list for fear that the expense will be a burden to a kid who really shouldn’t have to bear it. Most of the time, these projects could be simplified to require fewer materials - so why aren’t they?

This is a very socioeconomically diverse school district; don’t teachers think about these things?

But then again, I often don’t, either. I got schooled, so to speak, when one of my kids came home with an assignment to write about an object of importance to his family. This rang no alarm bells with me - it’s an object, not a house or a trip. Every family has some object that matters to them, right?

The afternoon the kids read their essays to the class, my son came home and told me it was his most emotional day at school. One essay had brought most of the class to tears. This student wrote that he had no object about which to write, because he’d been in foster care for a long time and he owned nothing of importance to his family.

That stopped me cold. The word “family” is an alarm bell, too. One I’d forgotten all about.

As it turned out, the kid did an excellent job writing an essay that educated his classmates (and I suppose his teacher, too) about his situation. I will never know what it cost him to do that; whether it was a positive experience for him, or one he would rather have lived without. But I feel pretty damn certain that he should have had a choice; that if he’d wanted to, he could have worked his story into some other essay. He should never have been put on the spot like that.

I hope schools are starting to recognize these problems and give teachers guidance in avoiding these situations.  And I’m rethinking what I tell my kids, too. Because, let’s face it, you can’t expect a kid not to mention her summer vacation to her friends for fear they can’t all afford the same, but you have to teach kids to be aware of their privilege. How do you navigate these tricky waters? Or am I the hopelessly patronizing white liberal trying to pad the world for people whose problems I don't truly understand? I remain unsure.

Wherein I walk a thin line on tenure

As a parent of public school kids and a vocal opponent of what I like to call education reforminess (the corporate-style, data-driven, high-stakes-testing-loving brand of education reform being foisted on the nation by everyone from Bill Gates to Chris Christie to Arne Duncan), I have a confession to make: I feel deeply ambivalent about teacher tenure.

Tenure reform is one of the key planks in the reformy platform. I have no doubt that this is primarily an anti-union measure driven by big-business interests that hate all unions generally and want to privatize education in particular. The Waltons, Kochs, and Gateses of the world would have us believe that American schools are failing in large part because tenure is protecting the jobs of lousy teachers.

This is absurd. Where schools are troubled, kids and their communities are poor, and they’re not getting the support they need. More affluent schools are doing just fine, and the tenure rules are the same in the best-performing and worst-performing schools. To blame the underperformance of troubled schools on tenure is like blaming World War II on Romania. The Allies couldn’t win the war by defeating Romania, and you can’t improve troubled schools by reforming tenure.

But that doesn’t mean tenure isn’t problematic.

I fully appreciate that, as public employees tasked with a job that depends heavily on many outside factors and that is subject to political pressures, teachers need job protection. I also understand that the “tenure is a job for life” argument is a myth, because tenure allows for dismissal after due process. And I believe wholeheartedly that teacher assessment based on students’ standardized test scores is a stupid, stupid idea.

But there seems to be general agreement that the “due process” provided in New Jersey and elsewhere under tenure is burdensome in the extreme. If you can’t nudge a teacher out some other way (and more often than not, you can), and you have to go to the formal process, it’ll take way more time and money than most districts are able or willing to expend in most cases.

Why does this worry me? Because, like most parents of kids in the public school system, among the dozens of wonderful, caring, competent, hard-working teachers my kids have had, I’ve encountered a tenured teacher who was really not cut out for the job. REALLY not cut out for the job.

I know what a lot of people will say: As a parent, I don’t have the whole story. As a parent, I’m not objective. Job termination is not necessarily the right answer. Professional development and/or transfer to a more suitable position might be viable options.

All true. I could be wrong. But I could be right. If I’m not right about this individual, someone somewhere is right about another teacher - someone who isn’t doing the job well and isn’t fired because it’s simply easier and cheaper not to.

Again, let me emphasize - I don’t think this is a systemic problem that is destroying public education. I don’t even think it happens much at all. And I certainly don’t think, as Perth Amboy superintendent Janine Walker Caffery implied in a recently published column, that kids are endangered by druggies and abusers who remain in the classroom because of tenure. In no way do I want to contribute to that brand of “education in crisis” reformy hysteria.

So what to do? The NJEA has made a very sensible tenure reform proposal: Add a fourth year before tenure is earned, and streamline the process for removing a tenured teacher using an arbitration process.   It seems to me that this would address my concerns quite well. Unfortunately, in the current highly charged atmosphere in which teachers are under attack from politicians and the Billionaire Boys Club, it must feel to teachers like capitulation on the part of the union. I fully understand their resentment. The way things are these days, if it were me, I’d be the Fox Mulder of teachers and trust no one.

But I hope that, at some point, we can move beyond the grandstanding and mistrust and do the right thing. It won’t affect the big picture, but every once in a while, kids in a particular classroom might be spared a few hours a week with an unqualified teacher. That would be a good thing.

Parental responsibility and the blame game

Last weekend, the New York Times published a piece by Thomas Friedman called, “How About Better Parents?” In it, he argued that it was time to acknowledge that not just teachers, but parents play an enormous role in the educational success of their children. “Parents more focused on their children’s education can also make a huge difference in a student’s achievement.”

That should be an utterly non-controversial statement. In fact, it ought to be so obvious that it doesn’t even need to be said. And yet it fills me with dread. I have a sick sense where this is going.

Here’s my prediction - and god knows I hope I’m wrong. In the not-too-distant future we’re going to hear voices on the Republican right morph Friedman’s innocuous argument into something like this: “The reason poor, minority kids are failing in school is that their parents simply don’t care. They expect the nanny state to do everything for their kids while they keep on having out-of-wedlock children they can’t afford and they don’t care for. They treat public education like a taxpayer-funded babysitter so they don’t have to do an honest day’s work. It’s time to stop soaking the taxpayers for additional funding for programs for kids whose parents don’t give a damn. Only when we end those entitlements will these people be forced to take responsibility for their children. And maybe then all those illegals will stop coming over here expecting their kids to get a free ride in our schools.”

Read the comments on most online news articles dealing with education reform, and that’s what the yahoos are saying already. It’s only a matter of time before it perks up to the mainstream. And it won’t be long before that drumbeat becomes so steady that the whole conversation has shifted waaaay to the right, and Democrats, afraid of being called socialists for their support of equitable school funding, will start marching to that beat, too.

Remember welfare reform? The notion of a “culture of poverty” created by a cushy free ride on welfare became so entrenched in the national discussion that the social safety net wound up being dismantled, not under a Republican, but under a Democrat - Bill Clinton. Both sides agreed it was a fine thing, too, at least, as long as the economy was humming along and unemployment was low. But take a look around now; the picture looks quite different in a down economy.

Education reform is going to be just the same way. We’re going to start hearing about a “culture of failure” blamed on the laziness of parents who don’t love their kids enough to educate them properly. There will be strong undertones of racism playing on stereotypes of unmarried, inner-city, minority mothers churning out babies - despite the fact that schools in poor, white rural areas are struggling, too. The end result of all the self-righteous finger-pointing will be a defunding of programs designed to provide additional educational support to low-income students. It’ll probably take a while for the adverse effects to become severe enough to be widely acknowledged - educational change is generally incremental in either direction. But by then, lower levels of education funding for the poor will have become the new normal, and we’ll just throw up our hands because, oh dear, the poor are always with us.

So that’s my prediction. “Parents should do more to help their kids’ education” will become, “Parents are to blame for their kids’ educational failure ”  which will become, “It’s time to end education handouts for the kids of lazy, uncaring parents.” From a moderate, realistic, limited statement springs an extreme, ideologically driven polemic.

I sure hope I’m wrong. But I’m probably not.

EDITED TO ADD: Bonus prediction:  If "parental-responsibility" education reform becomes the next big thing, there will be an egregious double standard. In poor, minority areas, there will be programs to address parental neglect. But rich white parents who exercise no oversight while lavishing their kids with enough money and cars to get into all kinds of trouble will get a big, fat free pass.

EDITED AGAIN TO ADD: I swear, I did not see this piece before I wrote the above. Yup, it's already begun. It's by right-wing education analyst Mike Petrilli, who laments "the 'good parenting gap' between rich and poor families" and prescribes a "marriage renaissance, especially for poor and working class families."  Because of course the way to promote social stability is not to address poverty and racism directly, but to teach the underclass a little good old-fashioned Christian morality. *headdesk*

Put these chips between your lips! Or, sometimes what you learn isn't what they were teaching

Bullying is horrible. Adults have a responsibility to protect children from that type of damaging, cruel harassment.

Okay, now that we have that out of the way, let’s talk about middle school anti-bullying programs - the kind my kids have been coming home and telling me about lately.

In 1982, the summer after my sophomore year of college, I got a job selling Chipwich ice cream sandwiches on the streets of Philadelphia. (Yes, this is about anti-bullying programs. Bear with me.) Before I was set loose on an unsuspecting public, I had to attend a day of training. I was given a Vendor Training Manual. Fortunately, I had the foresight to keep it all these years. (I tend to lose most stuff, but this had such enormous entertainment value that it’s traveled around with me ever since.)

The first page congratulated me for being chosen as “our newest professional Chipwich vendor.” Yep, I was a professional. A professional in a fake pith helmet with a bright orange hatband, a khaki apron, and an orange bow tie. It told me I was now an “ambassador of goodwill, wholesomeness, enthusiasm, and courtesy,” and it promised me “fun while selling lots of Chipwich.”

(Getting to the bullying programs. Really.)

Some more pearls of wisdom from the manual:

-- The cart is your office!
-- SELL, SELL, SELL
-- Smile
-- Make eye contact
-- Load vanilla on one side of the cart, chocolate on the other.
-- A well-groomed vendor will sell more than one who is not.
-- Success leads to success.
-- Never bring your personal problems to work.

You get the idea. But the best part? The slogans I was instructed to memorize so that I could yell them at passers-by.

-- It’s chip rich!
-- This is it!
-- Are you religious? It’s divinely delicious!
-- Want one? It’s a beauty!
-- North, east, west or south, Put Chipwich in your mouth!

And my personal favorite:
-- Put these chips between your lips!

Yes, I had to stand there during the training with all the other new hires and practice chanting these slogans. In uniform. With feeling.

It was utterly dehumanizing.

Some 15 years later, I was a manager working for an online startup that was acquired by AT&T - just in time for AT&T to announce that it was laying off 40,000 employees worldwide. Off they sent me and all the other managers to “Force Management Training” - or, as we called it, “Firing school.”

(Bullying. I haven't forgotten.)

I know I kept the highly entertaining manual from that training as well, but sadly I can’t put my hands on it at the moment. Suffice it to say that I spent the day listening to professional AT&T trainers tell me what I can and cannot say while firing someone. The obvious goal was to cover their corporate ass from lawsuits. (Don’t tell them WHY they’re fired, and especially don’t mention their age, gender, race, disability, or ethnicity.)

This authentic purpose was wrapped in a paper-thin cover of concern for people’s emotional well-being, as represented by a training film we were shown about  the four types of emotional responses we could expect. Ironically, this part of the presentation was meant to be the most benevolent and enlightened, but it was in fact the most offensive. Clearly, AT&T thought they were being hip with the diverse cast. But here’s what they ended up with: The angry employee was the black guy; the sad employee was the white woman; the hysterical employee was the Hispanic woman; and the stoic employee was the white guy.

(For the record, the actual firing turned out to be pretty painless because our division was mostly unattached 20-somethings, and the severance package kicked ass. Later, several managers, including me, complained to the mother ship (as we called AT&T HQ in Basking Ridge) about that offensive training film.)

So what do we have here?

(Bullying....almost there....)

Chipwich was a young company, just gone national, that was looking to sell a lot of product. Clearly, they took the advice of some marketing professionals straight out of Wharton who had never stood on a street corner selling overpriced junk food for a single day, and they were utterly oblivious as to the impression this training made on the people who were about to do so for real.

AT&T was a corporate behemoth with one goal in mind: profits. Specifically, not having to pay out large judgments in discrimination suits. So a bunch of personnel professionals consulted with a legal team and came up with a training program that was staggeringly oblivious to the real human toll of a gigantic layoff, both on those losing their jobs and on the managers being asked to fire colleagues and friends.

In both cases, the people on the receiving end of the program were not just underwhelmed, but downright offended at the dehumanizing bullshit we were being made to sit through. We didn’t feel the powers that be had a clue about what our day-to-day experiences were like. Their motivation was, “We’re doing this because it’s in OUR best interest, and because someone even more powerful than us says we HAVE TO.” Then they try to frame their selfish goals as being of benefit to ME, as a way of making MY job easier, when the truth is they know NOTHING of me, my job, or my life.

Which brings me back to school anti-bullying programs. (TA-DA!)

Everything I just said? When you’re in middle school, it’s ALL THAT TIMES A MILLION. The assemblies and “rap sessions” and edutainment programs with well-intentioned adults lecturing kids about the dangers of bullying? They are coming off to our kids exactly the same way.

The real question is, can it be done any better? In truth, I doubt it. Once you create an institutionalized program for the masses, you’re done for. There's something inherently dehumanizing about it - something self-help-guru-ish. It's lecturing. It treats people like children. It offers common-sense platitudes as if they were revelations from God at Sinai. And it misses the messy, complicated, disturbing realities of the real lives of real kids.

The hard work of combating bullying needs to be a personal commitment on the part of every single adult in a child’s life - whichever side of bullying that child is on - to truly see the child, listen, get involved, and intercede. Our schools are filled with people who do this well, every day. They’re also filled with those who don’t. How can we change those who don’t into those who do?  I’m guessing a training program won’t work.

Life is complicated, and I sure as hell don't have all the answers.

RELATED MATTERS:
Why New Jersey schools are going all out with the anti-bullying programs: Bullying Law Puts New Jersey Schools on Spot

Yeah, Chipwich really made us wear that stuff.

AT&T's kinder, gentler way of firing 40,000 people.

The anti-bullying policy parents in our district were asked to read. Think anyone did?

Education reforminess drives me to ranting

I haven’t blogged in ages, but not for lack of material. In fact, more often than not I read a hundred education-reforminess things a day that piss me off, about which I have LOTS to say. But then I get kind of bogged down in, “Where do I start?” (and all the million-and-one other things I have to do in a day), and it just doesn’t get done.

So this morning I realized that it’s time to rant. Ranting is good and necessary when the bullshit is piled up so high you can’t see over it. Ranting knocks down bullshit. People are occupying Wall Street because they’re trying to knock down bullshit; the least I can do is take a few minutes to type angrily. And best of all, ranting doesn’t require a high degree of organization. In fact, a list will do just fine. Random paragraphs with numbers in front of them. Here goes.

1. The primary danger of charter schools and vouchers isn’t that they might not be any better than public schools. Some of them might be better, and if they are, why not go for it? The real danger is that THEY ARE NOT PUBLIC SCHOOLS. Reformy types can say “charter schools are public schools” until they’re blue in the face, but THAT DOESN’T MAKE IT SO. It’s a lie. Public schools are PUBLIC. It’s not just who pays for them, but who runs them, and whom those people answer to, and what students are in them, not to mention little matters like the separation of church and state. Michele Bachmann loves charters specifically because she hates the government for insisting on the separation of church and state, and she wants charters to do an end-run around that established principal. And vouchers - don’t even get me started. Charter schools are not public schools, and private schools paid for with taxpayers’ money certainly aren’t, and that’s reason enough to not want them.

2. Some charter school advocates are no doubt sincere, and we could have an honest debate about whether charters could solve problems related to educating poor inner city kids. But there’s really no point wasting our breath on that debate because their movement has been co-opted by people who are inarguably insincere and downright dangerous to the welfare of our society. Businesses that want to profit off the education “sector.” Right-wingers who want to shrink government at all costs, including the cost of educating all our children. Christian extremists who see public schools as the primary liberal secular institution threatening their vision of a Christian nation. Industrial tycoons who hate unions and want to take down the public-sector unions because they’re the last bastion of a strong labor movement. These are the people pouring millions of dollars into an anti-public education movement and propagandizing about bad teachers and whatnot. And they do NOT give a shit about poor minority kids. We have to stop them before it’s too late. To the small handful of sincere charter school proponents who have jumped on that bandwagon in a misguided effort to bring some kind of positive change to their sorely underserved communities, I am truly sorry. You’ve been used. We’re not fighting you. We’re fighting your puppet masters.

3. Poverty is not an excuse. It’s a gigantic, dangerous, destructive PROBLEM. All those people railing about how zip code shouldn’t be destiny (or whatever that stupid mantra is) are conveniently ignoring the fact that in our country there is a shameful level of poverty, especially affecting children, and there is a shameful lack of basic humane support for those who need it. Firing teachers fixes NOTHING. Anecdotal evidence about some kids who were inspired by great teachers and rose from poverty to become Supreme Court justices or Nobel Prize winners is a bullshit distraction from the millions of poor kids who DIDN’T because not everyone gets that chance, or has the talent and drive to overcome staggering odds, or has adults in their lives who can help even a little. Acknowledging that our economic system is completely stacked against allowing the poor to become middle class would be dangerous to corporate America and billionaires, so instead they offer up CHARTER SCHOOLS and claim they will beat the demon poverty. Charter schools are cake, as in, “Let them eat cake.”

4. Reforminess, with its charters and vouchers, has completely diverted the public’s attention away from a great unresolved civil rights issue: school integration - and not just racial, but socioeconomic as well. If zip code is destiny, it’s because zip codes are segregated. Affordable housing is a more valid way of reforming education than charter schools will ever be. I say this as a parent of three kids in a district that was unified by court order in the 1970s and has provided high quality education to all comers ever since.

5. We all need to tell the Christian right who would insert their agenda into public education to SHUT UP AND SIT DOWN. America is not a Christian nation; we’re not chosen by God to be special; kids should learn science in school, not superstition (and yes, that means evolution, not creationism). Speaking for my own tribe, history has taught us that handing power (in education or anything else) to Christians in the belief that they will always be kind and benevolent toward the rest of us is STUPID BEYOND THE POWER OF WORDS TO EXPRESS. I prefer my constitutional protections, thank you very much.

6. We all need minority interest groups who would insert their agendas into public education to SHUT UP AND SIT DOWN. Yes, I’m looking at you, my fellow Jews, with your immersion Hebrew charters. That way lies madness. How the hell do you plan to teach “Hebrew culture” without falling off the cliff of religion? And more to the point, how do you expect that this won’t open the door to other groups using tax  money to teach their religious values? Have you learned NOTHING from history? Everything that made America good for the Jews - the historically unprecedented freedoms we’ve enjoyed here - would be threatened by putting a chink in the wall between church and state. Please don’t be that stupid; leave religious education where it belongs - far, far away from public schools.

7. We need to teach our kids about the social contract - that it’s perfectly okay in a capitalist society/constitutional democracy to enter into compacts where the people trade absolute liberty for communal benefits. Libertarianism is an odd form of utopianism that has never even been tried, let alone shown to work. In plain English, public schools are not evil. They are good, or anyway, the concept is good, and if we’d all just work at it, they could actually be good. Even taxpayers who choose not to utilize the public schools get enormous benefit from their existence, because we live among a better-educated populace more capable of intelligently exercising the duties and obligations of a democratic society.

8. Teachers are some of the best people around. God knows, not all of them, but then again, compared to hedge fund managers and oil barons, maybe all of them. At least they’re trying to contribute something good to our society in a pretty selfless way. Again, if you doubt it, answer this: Who’s more selfless, hedge fund managers and oil barons or teachers? If you said hedge fund managers and oil barons, you’re either being super sarcastic or you’re a massive idiot. You know damn well that, given the choice between earning what a hedge fund manager or oil baron earns and what a teacher earns, it’s the people with values OTHER than greed who would choose teaching. And some teachers go so far above and beyond mere goodness, it’s staggering. Some day I will write about Gerry Cohen, my friend’s dad who taught English in the South Bronx for decades. When I asked him why, he said simply, “If I don’t, who will?” Not the Koch brothers, that’s for damn sure.

That’s all I have in me for today. It actually felt pretty good to get all that off my chest. I should do it more often.

The Teabaggers said, "I don't care!"

My take on the debt ceiling negotiations, with apologies to Maurice Sendak:


One day Obama said
When Tea Partiers climbed out of bed
-The debt ceiling must be raised, or we’ll default.
Teabaggers said, “I don’t care!”
On taxes we’ll compromise.
“I don’t care!”
Cut down what government buys.
“I don’t care!”
We’ll be glad to negotiate.
“I don’t care!”
Hurry before it’s too late!
“I don’t care!”
You are acting like a clown.
“I don’t care!”
The world’s watching with a frown.
“I don’t care!”
If we don’t act the market will crash.
“I don’t care!”
Our credit rating will be in the trash.
“I don’t care!”
So Obama caved and gave away the store.