Turns out tznius is just what it says on the tin

I remember being a self-styled feminist grappling with the whole issue of tznius, or modesty, when I was in high school in Ramaz, a Modern Orthodox Jewish day school. The dress code required us to wear tops that were not low-cut, with sleeves at least halfway to the elbow, and skirts to the knee. (For some mysterious reason, they allowed miniskirts in the 1960s, when I was in elementary school. I think during that period the emphasis was more on “modern,” less on “Orthodox.” But I digress. Sorta.)

When I wasn’t busy hating the dress code for keeping me out of jeans, I told myself that it was kind of cool, because it was more of an attack on the shallow vanity and materialism at the core of the Western feminine ideal than a means of oppressing women and making them culpable for male sexual appetites. We were not going to fall prey to the hypersexualized, Madison Avenue-promoted image of the perfect teenage girl. Nope. Our Jewish culture was above all that. We were too busy contemplating the nature of good and evil, or something. In fact, tznius was the most feminist thing ever.

Of course, in order to stick with that interpretation, I really had to close one eye and squint the other one. For one thing, tznius was only applied to girls. There was no equivalent concept for boys. The male dress code – button-down shirt and tie – had more to do with looking like other Upper East Side prep schools than with anything inherently Jewish, including tznius. Apparently, Judaism did not see fit to build in protections against fashion marketing for boys. And that extra eye-squint? That was to avoid noticing that plenty of Ramaz girls were serious clothes horses, which they managed quite comfortably without violating the dress code.

Which brings me to today, and this article from the desperate-to-be-relevant online Jewish publication, Tablet. It reminds me that, as one former Ramaz history teacher used to tell us, the more things change, the more they stay the same. The title really says it all: “This Fashion Week, Dress Modestly While Staying Stylish.” So much for resisting fashion hype. It turns out shallow vanity and materialism are actually okay, and we have the word of Hadar Magazine fashion editor Jessica Gugenheim on that.

But that’s not all. She also tells us: “I think modest dressing lends any woman an air of sophistication. I think modestly dressed women command more respect; they use their minds rather than sexuality to get things done.”

Yup. That’s your choice: cover up and be respected, or play the slut card.

If I hadn’t ditched the whole thing years ago, at this point I’d be shutting both eyes tight and sticking my fingers in my ears to make a go of it. That would make driving really hard.

The Orwellian Irony of Common Core

How many decades will it be before we can have a productive, reasonable conversation about national standards in education? I think many, and here’s why: The biggest, most successful push to date for national standards was co-opted by the data junkies of the current education reform movement, who married the idea of national standards to the misbegotten notion that data from standardized tests should be used to reward and punish teachers, kids and schools.

That’s incredibly unfortunate. National standards, done well, could solve certain problems that plague public education, like the influence of local and regional extremists on what happens in the classroom, or the elimination of important subjects to make room for the pedagogical flavor of the day, or the sacrifice of valuable traditional skills on the altar of new technology. When you read about a state school board modifying the social studies curriculum to include American exceptionalism, the insertion of intelligent design into the science curriculum, sex education programs that teach only abstinence, books banned from classrooms for content relating to sexual orientation or atheism, the replacement of foreign language instruction with computer programming, or the elimination of civics classes from public schools, you wonder why there isn’t a mechanism to protect kids from the stupidity of their elders. As with civil rights and the environment, national standards for education would be less easily manipulated and could be a powerful tool for progress.

I hear the objection now: What if the forces of stupid take control of the national discourse, and all those terrible things become part of the national standard to be imposed on every kid throughout the land?

Which is exactly why national standards are not a no-brainer and need to be discussed in a reasonable way. Personally, I’m not sure where I stand on the issue, though I tend to think that, as with civil rights, the tendency of the nation as a whole is more trustworthy than certain regional proclivities.

But as things stand now, we can’t even hope to have that discussion, because the education-industrial complex has gotten its mitts on the whole idea and hijacked it as a way to sell tests, testing technology and test-prep materials; to beat up the unions by predicating decisions on teacher tenure and merit pay on the results of those tests; and to privatize public education by touting magic silver-bullet charter schools that churn out better test scores through drill-and-kill practices. The name of their strategy? Common Core.

Meanwhile, parents are waking up to the data-driven nightmare their schools have become after years of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, federal programs that encouraged the ballooning of high-stakes standardized testing. They're waking up, and they are not happy. They've been watching their kids become nervous wrecks over tests; seen schools scrap art, music and other subjects that don't appear on the tests; heard from teachers who are being directed to teach to the tests; and seen good schools labeled as failures because of scores on the tests. Their ire is being directed at the Common Core and the new tests being introduced under it, even though the testing problem has been upon us for quite some time.

Also contributing to the growing public animosity is the fact that, in some part of the country, knee-jerk opposition to national standards in anything has become the norm, whether it has to do with education, public health, guns, or voters' rights. That's why the Tea Party mob is breaking out the pitchforks on Common Core. Note that, despite what Tea Partiers might think, Common Core is not a federal program, but a set of standards created in the hope that all states would adopt them, making them a de facto national standard. Also note the irony of Tea Party opposition; many of the same education-industry players who stand to make a mint out of Common Core, and therefore promoted the hell out of it, are also the people who fomented the Tea Party mentality. It's a wonder the Kochs and Waltons of America didn't see this coming.

So now, for a wide variety of often contradictory reasons, the people are starting to rise up against the Common Core. In the short term, that’s a good thing, because the whole project has become more about testing and related data-driven reform than about actual standards. The pushback from parents could slow the onrushing Common Core train, stanch the hemorrhaging of teachers from a system that imposes unreasonable demands on them, and generally throw a monkey wrench into the plans of those who would use data-driven reform to dismantle government-run public education. But the unfortunate collateral damage is that the underlying notion of national standards in education is now poison. A sensible endeavor by actual educators to formulate a workable standard that could promote academic excellence uniformly throughout the nation won’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell for quite some time.

Shaking Hands With Erma Bombeck

You know how in a nice restaurant, they serve you these beautifully arranged dishes of food that look like works of art? No misplaced glops of sauce near the edge of the plate, burnt bits scraped off the bottom of the pan, or stray bay leaves forgotten in the stew? Everything is absurdly neat and pretty – unlike anything you would dream of serving at home. Because these guys are professionals, right? Undoubtedly, a beautiful presentation makes dining out more fun, but what home cook is going to spend time and energy to create composed plates? We’re just happy when we manage to present delicious home-cooked meals served, as the restaurant critics like to call it, “family style.”

Similarly, when I go to a hotel, I expect everything to be immaculate: beds perfectly made, towels neatly folded, floors freshly vacuumed – basically, no sign anyone has ever lived in the room before me. But at home? Not so much. And then there’s hotel décor. Everything matches. The furniture is all from the same set. The rug matches the bedspread. The paintings even match the environment -- or suggest some other, more pleasant environment. (Beach hotel? Seashells! City hotel? Skyline! Ski chalet? Mountains! Middle-of-nowhere hotel by the side of the road? Paris!) But at home, I am content with a much smaller set of necessities: everything in basic working order, nothing so filthy or gross that I can’t look at it, comfortable places for my family to plunk our weary bones at the end of the day, and the stuff we’ve accumulated over the years that makes the house ours.

But unlike food presentation, the world seems to be full of people who value hotel-level perfection so much that they manage it at home, too. This is a complete mystery to me. Sure, it would be nice to live in that Good Housekeeping environment. But the amount of effort it would take? That, I can’t manage. In fact, I tried to come up with a fitting analogy – you know, something that would hold some appeal but would take way more effort that it’s worth. “Sure, a perfect home would be nice. So would ____________.” Trouble is, everything I came up with to fill in the blank seemed to beat perfect housekeeping hands down. Having a pony? Flying a hot-air balloon? Speaking Swahili? Becoming a champion watermelon seed spitter? Climbing Mount Everest? Growing wings and flying? All things I’d be way more willing to sink some serious time into.

So, without further ado, my list of ten things other people manage to have at home that I just…don’t.

1. Matching towels. I know, it wouldn’t be that hard to just go out and buy a stack of towels that are all the same. But then I’d have to figure out what to do with the closet full of towels I already have. Clear out more closet space? Too much effort. Throw away perfectly good towels? What a waste. Donate them to charity? I guess I could do that. But I could also just keep the towels I have and write a check so the charity can buy whatever they really need more than a stack of used towels.

2. Made beds. All of them, all at the same time, every single day. We all know the nightly problem with this one. The ultimate act of futility. What’s the point?

3. Empty kitchen counters. All that stuff people use multiple times a day, hidden away somewhere out of sight. No sign of salt, cooking oil or soy sauce, let alone balsamic vinegar or Sriracha. And then there are the appliances. Where do they put them all? If I wanted to put away my stand mixer, rice cooker, soda maker, blender, coffee grinder, etc., I’d have to build a new kitchen. Either that, or get rid of all the stuff that’s already in the cabinets. And how would I do that? I guess I could donate them…(see number 1 above).

4. Window treatments. I don’t mean shades or blinds that are useful for keeping out the sun or your neighbor’s curious gaze. We have those. (And we only lived in the house about a decade before getting them.) I mean those entirely decorative things. Big hunks of fabric that hang across the tops and sides of windows for the purpose of “tying a room together.” It’s a miracle my rooms don’t fly apart into a million pieces.

5. Closets that close completely. Y’know – without piles of crap getting in the way? Again, this is probably doable. All I’d have to do would be to clear out space in the basement and move some of the stuff down there. But to do that, I’d have to clear out space in the garage for the stuff that’s in the basement. And to do that, I’d have to…donate stuff from the garage? Hmmm.

6. Laundry that’s all done. I mean, at the same time. And folded. And put away. Days when the only dirty clothing in the house is what’s on my family’s backs. Nope, we don’t have those. Around here, laundry is one ongoing, never-ending process, with piles of stuff at every stage—dirty, washed but not folded, washed and folded but not put away, washed and folded and put away – coexisting peacefully. The U.N. could learn from us.

7. Filed papers. Like the laundry, filing is an ongoing process. The last time every piece of paper was in its appropriately labeled folder inside a filing cabinet was probably the day we got our very first apartment. So…late ‘80s sometime?

8. Stuff that makes the air smell good. Sure, we have that from time to time, in the form of good smells coming from the kitchen. But I mean all those little tricks people use to make their houses smell good all the time. Sprays, plug-ins, candles, potpourri. Once every blue moon I decide maybe we could have at least that much. How hard could it be? You just buy something and plug it in or shpritz it or light it. A year later, we have empty, discolored plastic things sticking out of the outlets, or empty cans sitting on the backs of all the toilets, or lumps of melted, cinnamon-scented paraffin on the end tables. And speaking of things that smell good…

9. Cut flowers. This is one I would love to get the hang of. I may not give a damn about window treatments, but I do love flowers. This, too, I have tried. And I have the vases full of withered stems and slimy water to prove it.

10. A bowl of candy that actually has candy in it. For more than ten minutes.

Of course, I could probably have made a good start on any one of the above in the time it took me to write this…

Come to think of it, there is one thing I could get rid of that would make me feel really good about my home. Guilt.

Warlord Christie

Can we take a minute to stop and think about what a terrible thing Christie’s top staffers (and possibly the governor himself) did to Fort Lee? Because there are some people still saying it wasn’t such a big deal. It was a lane closure. It was a traffic jam in a spot where everyone who lives in the tristate area has sat in miserable traffic at some point in their lives. A Tea Party darling, hard-right Assemblyman Michael Patrick Carroll, dismissed it as a prank gone wrong.

What these people are missing (or willfully ignoring, most likely) is the much deeper implication of Bridgegate. Yes, the people stuck in traffic were the direct victims, as were the people waiting for emergency responders who were late in coming. But the truth is, every New Jerseyan became a victim that day -- a victim of a direct assault on their democratic rights.

A functional democracy depends on one fundamental idea: that every citizen is free to vote for the candidate of his or her choice, and that once elected, every official must act for the benefit of all, no matter whom they voted for. It’s as simple as that.

There was a time – there still is, in many parts of the world – when citizens declared their allegiance to one king or another, one warlord or another, and then stuck by him, right or wrong, because if they didn’t, he wouldn’t protect them from the attacks of rival monarchs, bands of thieves, or any rampaging hoard that came along. Or worse, he’d send his own army to beat the crap out of them. He’d let them starve when their crops failed, levy impossible taxes, forcibly conscript their sons. But we’ve moved past all that. We are civilized now. We can vote our consciences and still expect equal protection under the law, equal access to services, fair treatment by our government.

Except in Chris Christie’s New Jersey. This is a place where the refusal of a local leader, Fort Lee Mayor Mark Sokolich, to endorse the governor -- or perhaps a conflict with a legislator, Sen. Loretta Weinberg, over judicial appointments -- can and did lead to direct retribution against the citizens themselves. And that is a direct assault on the fundamental principle of democracy.

Just a traffic jam? Hardly.

PS: Is anyone buying Christie's sad clown act?

If it looks like a duck...

When "owning your own sexuality"...

...looks exactly like the commercial exploitation of sexuality...

...what exactly is the point?

Perhaps you're not actually "owning your own sexuality" if you're not thinking outside that box?

I elaborated a while back, here.

School Reform or Reform School?

I’m old enough to remember the threat of reform school. Not that it was ever really used as a threat against me personally, but it was a thing I heard about. "If you don’t behave, we’ll send you to reform school." I didn’t know anyone who actually got sent to reform school. For that matter, I wasn’t entirely sure reform school actually existed. But one thing was certain: It was somewhere you didn’t want to go. It was supposed to be a terrible place where kids had to march in straight lines, no talking; where you had to memorize a lot of stuff and lessons were boring; where you never had the fun classes like music and art; where everyone was scared of being punished all the time.

Reading this open letter to students at a no-excuses charter school reminded me of the mythical reform schools of my youth -- the places you knew you never wanted to be in. No-excuses charters are for kids who have committed the crime of being poor and minority. No doubt there are significant differences between these real schools and the reform schools of my young imagination, but there are disturbing similarities as well. They're places for kids who can't be trusted with freedom and autonomy.

Where does the no-excuses charter movement come from? Who thought it was a good idea to go back to such a strict school environment? It seems to have started when people (mostly white people with power and money, I expect) noticed a problem -- or more accurately, bothered to notice it again: Kids living and attending school in racially segregated pockets of poverty have low test scores, low graduation rates, and low college-attendance rates.

One possible solution: Integrate those kids into schools where the kids aren’t all minorities living in poverty, and where lots of kids do well on tests, graduate, and go on to attend college. If you want to get really crazy, you could maybe even do non-school related things in order to break up the pockets of racially isolated poverty, like creating jobs, requiring towns to build affordable housing, and strengthening the safety net for people in need.

Of course, that would require all kinds of legislation unpopular with more affluent white voters, and it would involve using tax dollars to help people, and it might even lead to a (gasp) tax increase.

Hence, plan B: Send all those kids to reform school no-excuses charters. It doesn’t actually solve the problem, because a whole lot of kids who wouldn’t have done well in conventional urban public schools don’t do well in reform school no-excuses charters either; they just drop out and go back to conventional urban public schools, rejoining the kids from the very poorest, most uninformed and possibly dysfunctional families who, having never gotten (or having chosen to ignore) the memo about the new magic-bullet school in town, never jumped on the charter-lottery bandwagon in the first place. But for the kids who stick out reform school no-excuses charters despite the lack of enrichment, and despite all the soul-crushing test drilling and snapping and tracking, and despite the indignity of being presumptively treated as a bad kid, there might be college at the end of the tunnel. Then the powerful, affluent people who promoted the whole reform school no-excuses charter idea can pat themselves on the back and keep their taxes low.

Not that they would ever send their own kids to those schools, of course. But then, that’s the whole idea, isn’t it? To make sure their kids have art and music and enrichment and freedom and creativity -- and don’t go to school with those kids?

Another Open Letter to Arne Duncan

Dear Mr. Duncan,

By now, you’ve no doubt been inundated by a wide range of irate responses to your comment that opposition to the Common Core standards is all about "white suburban moms who -- all of a sudden -- (discovered that) their child isn't as bright as they thought they were, and their school isn't quite as good as they thought they were."

You’ve probably heard from non-white suburban moms, and non-white urban moms, and white urban moms, and maybe even a few dads and grandparents and aunts and uncles. The one thing they all have in common is resentment toward your dismissive, insulting characterization of opponents to the Common Core.

I’m just one more voice in the chorus. I don’t mean to imply that my story is typical, but I sure as hell do mean that you should consider it before making stupid generalizations -- just as you should consider all those other stories you’ve been hearing. You’re the secretary of education. The least you could do is refrain from simplistic, insulting, reductive, sweeping statements about the families you’re meant to serve.

I am a white suburban mom. I have three kids. They all attended public school from kindergarten through 8th grade. They’re all in high school now -- but not in public school.

My husband and I wanted our kids in public school because we believe that it is one of the most important institutions in creating a cohesive society and a functional democracy. We were lucky: The schools in our town were both diverse and high quality. We wanted our kids to understand and appreciate the different cultures and experiences of others in their community. We wanted them to view education as a shared value so they would come to see the social contract as a benefit, not a burden. We wanted them to make friends with their neighbors so that their town would be not just the place where they live, but the community where they belong. And of course, we wanted them to get a great education.

For a long while, that’s more or less what they got. We found in our local public schools many wonderful, dedicated teachers who helped our kids thrive and become top students. We found a program that offered them a reasonably wide curriculum. When they were old enough, all three became involved in the instrumental music program, which quickly became an important part of their lives, as did the gifted education program. Some of the teachers in those programs were the ones who had the greatest impact on them, motivating them to strive for excellence.

But even early on, there were signs of trouble. This was already the era of No Child Left Behind. My kids’ elementary school was designated a school “in need of improvement,” for the most part because the many LEP (limited English proficient) and special education students didn’t score as well on standardized tests as their native English-speaking and non-special ed counterparts -- despite the fact that they were making good progress. (Under NCLB, every individual subgroup must score well, not just the school as a whole. LEP and special ed students are subgroups.) Having volunteered as a “parent reader” in the special ed classroom, I had firsthand experience with those students and their teachers, and I knew that it was an excellent program where kids received a huge amount of personal attention. But as far as NCLB was concerned, nothing mattered but the test scores. We parents knew that the “in need of improvement” designation would have the opposite of the intended effect. Instead of helping those kids, it stigmatized and punished the whole school, while other neighborhood schools in the area that served more uniformly affluent, native-born populations essentially got a free pass. The tension level at the school about testing quickly ratcheted up, and the kids all sensed it. The amount of time dedicated to test prep went up and up.

Middle school was a mixed bag. We found more great teachers; a high-quality accelerated math program; more music opportunities. But at the same time, test prep was increasingly eating up time. More and more resources seemed to be devoted to teaching to the middle -- the effort to nudge as many borderline-proficient kids as possible above that arbitrary “proficient” mark on the NJASK, New Jersey’s standardized state test. When I volunteered to tutor kids at the school who needed extra help, I was saddened to learn that only students who were considered borderline proficient were eligible for the tutoring; they didn’t even bother with the lowest performers.

There were other problems, too. Writing was being taught in a mechanistic way, clearly aimed at producing acceptable NJASK essays. Literature was more often than not treated as an exercise in reading comprehension rather than as a window into great ideas. And despite all the lip service paid to the importance of STEM subjects, the science program was downright anemic. (Up until 2008, NCLB did not require any science testing, so schools deemphasized science. It’s called teaching to the test.) One of the last straws came when we learned that the middle school would be firing one of its three instrumental music teachers, despite the fact that more than half of all students participated in the program. (He was later rehired part-time in response to parental outcry.)

My husband and I were torn. We did not want to abandon public education. But each kid only gets one shot at being a kid. As much as we wanted our children to be part of the grand project of public education, our number one priority was to make education a rich and engaging experience for them.

By this time, I’d been following Common Core for a while. Like a lot of parents, the idea had appealed to me at first. All the talk of analytical skills and high academic standards sounded good, and I figured it might be a way to defang the efforts of the right-wing extremists on school boards around the country who periodically tried to put creationism in the biology classroom and American exceptionalism in the history textbooks.

But when it became apparent that Common Core was being commandeered by those who would profit from selling tests and aligned materials, my tune quickly changed. It was clear that Common Core would be more of the same: ever-increasing high-stakes testing, with the added disastrous component of state-mandated test-based teacher evaluation. Teaching to the test and narrowed curriculum were bound to be the results. This was not what we wanted for our kids. So my husband and I did what so many of the so-called education reformers themselves do: We found an excellent private school that gives no standardized tests, but offers small classes and a rich, varied curriculum, and we transferred our kids there. Not without some guilt, mind you. We knew that we were lucky to have the option, and that if top students leave public schools, the problem only gets worse. But we also knew it would be the best thing for our kids.

To be absolutely clear: Never once did we have the slightest concern that our kids would do badly on Common Core-aligned standardized tests. Never once did we worry that our kids wouldn’t do well in an academically rigorous environment. They are all high achievers, even in the most competitive of environments. And yet Common Core made us run for the hills -- not in fear of failure, but to escape the oncoming tsunami of standardized testing and all the deadly dullness it would bring. We were not afraid that Common Core would show us that our public school was bad. We knew that Common Core would make our good public schools worse.

Well, that’s my story, Mr. Duncan. My kids may not be in public school any more, but I am still a taxpayer, and I want my tax dollars to support robust public education that’s all about learning and not testing. The Common Core Standards you’re promoting, despite what you say, are all about testing. You want to convince us otherwise? Do away with the tests. Until you kick the for-profit testing companies to the curb, your credibility on this matter is severely lacking.

Sincerely,

A White Suburban Mom

(Here's more information on what Arne Duncan said about white suburban moms' fear of Common Core.)