Meet the new Boss?

Today's news of the departure of Joel Klein from his position as New York City Schools Chancellor has sparked a lot of discussion, much of it expressing the sentiment "good riddance."  News that the his replacement Cathleen Black is even more of a charter-school ideologue than Klein and even less of an educator is already stirring concern.  As a new parent in the system, I don't really have enough direct experience to judge Klein, but I do find the subject quite interesting.  Now that I have a substantial stake in Black's success, I plan on keeping a close eye on her.

Klein has been an odd mix of controversial and disliked among people with a lot of direct contact with the system (teachers, parents, students) and lionized by the movers and shakers around town.  I think it's very tough to say what his net impact was.

His obsession with testing has demoralized teachers, student's and parents alike, and has proven to be a fraud both in concept and execution.  School choice has created opportunities, and made many parents happy, but has also sucked energy and money away from the core mission of making plain old public schools better, and injected a very counterproductive level of complexity into the process of figuring out where to send your kid to school.  His relationship with teachers is basically completely poisoned, and he is as hated among teachers and principals as any of his predecessors.

At the same time, though, I think the system is actually better (even if not measurably so) than it was before in some important ways.  There's more middle class buy-in, a much stronger sense that this is our school system and we're going to do what it takes to make it work for our kids.  It's in better physical shape than in many many years.  The sense that public schools are dangerous places you wouldn't dare send your kids is pretty much gone.  It may be very complicated to navigate the system, but there is a general sense that you'll be able to find a place for your kid.  Despite the demoralizing nature of being forced to teach to the test, there seem to be a lot of dedicated, capable teachers and principals.  This is all quite different from a decade ago.

Trying to figure out how much credit to give Klein for this reminds me of the debates over how much of a difference Giuliani really made in the resurgence of New York.  To people who worked in government, Giuliani was an unqualified disaster -- incompetent, surrounded by sycophants, thieves, and psychos, the source of an endless stream of bad ideas that only failed to cripple New York because city workers did their best to ignore them.  Yet people believed he turned the city around in the same way that so many people believe Klein did.  This belief has a bit of the character of a self fulfilling prophecy.

People believe he's good and support him. This support leads to some good things happening (maybe even despite his incompetence and wrongheadedness).  Maybe as a matter of cause, or maybe by coincidence, the middle class trickles back into the system from the burbs and the private schools, and we reach a tipping point.  It's now OK to send your kid to the plain old public school, or there's a G&T program, or a "school of choice" that works for you.  Then schools are more widely perceived as being good because they now have more good kids in them.  After all, more than teachers, or facilities, or curricula, or even funding, what makes a school perform is having students who come from backgrounds that prepare them to perform.  

So while some people express pessimism (or optimism) about the fate of the system because a particular leader is coming/going/staying, I tend to view the system as more dependent on grass roots.  In the end, the schools have gotten "better" because we have decided to stick with them, in a way many or our parents didn't, in much the same way the  City as a whole got better.  Based on what I've read of Cathleen Black, I think it highly unlikely that she has any gifts that will make a real positive difference in managing the schools.  It then becomes a matter of whether she can do no harm, and hold onto the middle class loyalty that has been building over the last decade or so.

It takes two to tangle up the schools

The current New York Review of Books has a polemic by Diane Ravitch that provides an interesting counterpoint to the "Waiting for Superman" craze.  I have no great love for any particular variant of schools, but I find the arguments Ravitch makes here about the flaws of charter schools, the virtues of regular public schools, and the importance of investing in traditional public education pretty compelling.  


Ravitch lays out convincing evidence and arguments against the trope of poverty not being the reason kids fail and money not being the reason schools fail. The single data point I can draw on (my son's local public school) seems to support Ravitch's contentions.  It's a pretty good place.  The parents are involved, the principal runs a tight ship, the teachers teach, and the kids learn.  There are no major discipline problems, the building is in pretty good shape, and the parents raise a fair amount of money to support the school.  The basic reason it's a good school is that it is in a school zone that (by luck) is coterminous with a stable middle class neighborhood (that is in the process of turning into an upper middle class neighborhood).


The only thing stopping this school from becoming every bit as impressive as a wealthy suburban school or a fancy Manhattan private school is lack of money.  If the school had (I'm guessing), 30% more money, we'd have enriched curricula, activities, supplies, recess.  Instead, we get the basics, reasonably capably presented, a bit of sadness about how spartan our kids' school experience is, and relentless parental fundraising.

I also agree with what Ravitch has to say about the demonization of teachers and their unions.  I've been on both sides of  the union/management divide (and oddly enough am currently in a management union that is a subsidiary of the teachers' union), and have no particular love of unions.  They suck up a big piece of my paycheck in exchange for a pretty low rate of return in benefits and raises.  But: 1) every contract has two sides; you can't blame unions for the terms of contracts that management signs. 2) Unions may sometimes impede firing, but they don't hire, grant tenure, or stop management from giving merit raises. 3) It's a myth that "union work rules" stifle public sector productivity; civil service rules and crappy management are much more to blame for the shoddiness of the public sector business culture.


This not to say the unions have no role in any of this, but see point 1).  Politicians negotiate and sign public sector labor agreements and appoint the people who manage public sector agencies.  If you want better public sector workers (including teachers), you need politicians who look out for something other than their own electoral and personal interests, actually know something about the operations they ostensibly manage, and stop accepting political support from unions (as well as other special interests, but that's another rant).  In  New York there are  the added complications of the City's limited home rule and subordinate status to the State on labor and civil service matters.  This creates opportunities for our corrupt state legislators to accept campaign donations from public sector unions in exchange for writing counterproductive employment terms and conditions into State laws.  You can blame the unions for pushing these agendas, but as with politicians caving in to corporate special interests against the public interest, the bulk of the blame falls squarely on the politicians.


They way I see it, "saving our schools" is a matter of money, managerial/educational  competence, and politics.  To get this, we need an involved citizenry with a stake in the game.  In New York City, we have had the twin problems of the middle and upper classes opting out in favor of private schools and the lower classes either being too dysfunctional to contribute, or opting out in favor of parochial or charter schools.  If there's a silver lining, it's that private schools have become absurdly expensive, parochial schools are disappearing, and so many of us have dropped out of the classes that could afford these options in the past, that there is now a growing cohort of involved and informed parents militating for improvements in the core public schools system.  Bloomberg and Klein have probably lost the confidence of this cohort because of the testing fiascoes, which leaves a huge opportunity for the next generation of politicians.  I don't know who  (if anybody) will fill that void, but I'm interested in seeing who does.  And for now, sending my kid to a plain old public school.

Open letter to the President on enforcement of Marijuana laws

I just submitted the letter below to President Obama at the White House's website.  I encourage others to do something similar


Dear President Obama,

Let me start this letter just by saying hello.  You and I were contemporaries at Columbia (I'm '84), and I have discovered that we were once next door neighbors on West 109th St.  Someday, perhaps we will swap stories about how we coped with the experience of cold-water slum living.

I'm disappointed to read that your administration intends to enforce marijuana prohibitions in California.  Given your personal background as someone who experimented with drugs, and came through the experience unharmed, I can't help but think that you are doing this for cynical political reasons rather than because you truly believe there is a clear moral basis for imprisoning people for marijuana posession.  Perhaps I'm wrong, though, and that you really believe in the merits of this course of action.  In order to clear this up for me, I'd appreciate your answer to these questions:

When you were in college experimenting with marijuana and cocaine, do you think you should have been arrested?

If there were no statute of limitations, and you were still potentially in legal jeopardy for these actions, do you think you should be arrested now?

To be fair, I'll give you some relevant personal history and answer the same questions.  I was a regular pot smoker roughly between the ages of 16 and 20.  I also experimented occasionally with cocaine and psychedelics.  I stopped on my own when I found I no longer enjoyed the effects.  I suffered no ill effects from any of this.  As to the questions, no I do not think that you or I should have been arrested for this, now or ever.  Nor do I think anyone else should be.
 ....

FYI: The contact form at the white house seems buggy, and I'm not sure if this all got through, so I will probably re-submit.  If anyone else submits something, watch out for this.

Origin of the species

The Setting: Downtown A train this morning
The Players: Myself, Charlotte (a friend/parent from the neighborhood), Charlotte's two daughters (aged 3 1/2 and 4 1/2), who are occasional playmates of my son (5).

Charlotte distributes pretzels to the cast.  Daughter1 looks at the pretzel and asks if this is how small she was when she was in her mommy's stomach.  A discussion ensues involving breaking the pretzel into ever smaller pieces and comparing the pieces to foetus/embryo/blastocyst/egg-sized daughters in mommy's tummy.  Charlotte then asks me whether I have had similar conversations with my son.  I say that I have. Indeed, he has gone so far as to ask not only where he came from, but where the first people came from.  Charlotte laughs, and daughter 2 then asks where the first people came from.  Charlotte, thinking she's got me on the ropes, suggests that I answer.  So, to the curious, this is where the first people came from (with help from the class).

The first people were fish.
No they weren't!
Yes they were.
No they weren't! You're kidding aren't you?
No, really the first people were fish. Some of the fish got tired of being fish, so they crawled out of the water and became alligators.
No they didn't!  Mommy, is he telling the truth?
Well, um, kind of
Yes, I'm telling the truth, the first people were fish who got tired of being fish, so they crawled out of the water and became alligators.  But some of the alligators got tired of being alligators so they decided to become dinosaurs.
NO THEY DIDN'T!!
Yes, really they did.  And then some of them got tired of being dinosaurs, so they became squirrels.
They did not!! Mom, did the dinosaurs become squirrels?
Um, well in a way ...
OK, so then the some of the squirrels got tired of being squirrels, so they decided to become monkeys, which are a lot like people.
They did not.  Monkeys aren't like people.
Monkeys look kind of like people don't they?
Um ... yeah ...
Well, they have hands like people don't they?  And two eyes in the fronts of their faces don't they?
Yeah.  But they have feet for hands, and hands for feet, so they're not people.
I know.  They also have tails.  Some of the monkeys decided they didn't want tails anymore so they got rid of their tails and became chimpanzees.
NO THEY DIDN'T!  Mom, did they really do that?  Did the monkeys become chimpanzees?
Um, sort of ...
Chimpanzees look a lot like people, don't they?
Yeah, they do (at this point, the daughters have stopped objecting and are looking at me like this is starting to make some sense)
OK, the chimpanzees got tired of being chimpanzees, so they decided to become people, and that's where the first people came from.
Really?  Did all of them do that?
No, not all of them.  Some of the chimpanzees decided to become people, but some of them decided to still be chimpanzees.  We call those Republicans.

Oh, here's my stop.  Gotta go.

This is Kindergarten. This is Big.

My son started kindergarten a month ago, which is big, much bigger than I ever could have imagined.  I went to kindergarten, and I don't really recall it being particularly important or rigorous.  In my day, there was a lot of smearing of colors and mushing of stuff.  There were many, many choruses of John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt, a bit of duck duck goose, and if I recall correctly, passing mention of the alphabet.  Times have changed, though.  In New York City, kindergarten is the new first grade.  Kids are now expected to learn to read, do homework, and say the Pledge of Allegiance.  In the first month.

They are also expected to be good citizens of the educational community.  I know this, because the New York City Department of Education just told me, via a fascinating document called "Citywide Standards of Intervention and Discipline Measures: The Discipline Code and Bill of Student Rights and Responsibilities, K-12" that just arrived via my son's backpack.  It is 28 pages of small-font, landscape-printed gobbledygook that is supposed to tell parents what kids are and are not supposed to do in school, and what will happen to them if they run afoul of the rules.

Or at least that is what I think it is. I have tried three times to get all the way through this thing, and I am so frustrated by its turgid, ungrammatical, passive-voiced bureaucratic incomprehensibility, that I cannot be sure.  For, example the section entitled  "Promoting Positive Student Behavior" begins with:

"Each School is expected to promote a positive school climate and culture that provides students with a supportive environment in which to grow both academically and socially."  Okay, a little stilted, but I have no problem with the sentiment. Schools should be pleasant places that help children learn and grow up.

Next comes "Schools are expected to take a proactive role in nurturing students' pro-social behavior by providing them with a range of positive behavioral supports as well as meaningful opportunities of social emotional learning."

Huh?

I have spent the last 22 years working in government and higher education bureaucracies.  Before that, I spent three years in the educational publishing business.  That is not the worst sentence I have ever seen.  For instance, it's nowhere near as bad as this one:

"Effective social emotional learning helps students develop fundamental skills for life effectiveness, including: recognizing and managing emotions; developing caring and concern for others; establishing positive relationships; making responsible decisions; and handling challenging situations constructively and ethically."

We're still on page two.  There are five more pages to go before we get to the actual code of conduct that our kids are supposed to follow.  Five more pages like this.  Jargon, wordiness, too many ideas running together -- everything your freshman composition teacher told you not to do occurs in every sentence of every paragraph of this document.

I suppose I could google "pro-social behavior," swallow my distaste for "proactive," break that sentence up into more manageable chunks, and figure out what it's about.  I could do that with the rest of the sentences in that paragraph.  I could do that for the whole 28 pages of this thing, and after a couple of hours boil it down to the 10 things I need to know about discipline in kindergarten.  After all, I do that sort of thing all the time with laws, regulations, directives, proposals, contracts, and all the other artifacts of my trade.  But could an uneducated immigrant parent struggling to find his way and hoping that his child's first month in kindergarten will be the beginning of a better life?

Well, you say, what do you expect?  The schools are run by a bunch of bureaucrats with no connection to kids or the classroom.  They sling this kind of drivel around at each other all the time.  What does it matter?  But this isn't some intra-office policy exercise.  This is a document that was printed up and distributed to every parent of every public school child in New York, sent home in the kids' backpacks so that the parents will read it and understand it.  I know this because it says so right on page one:  "All members of the school community -- students staff and parents -- must know and understand the standards of behavior which all students are expected to live up to and the consequences if these standards are not met."

This is also a classic CYA warning -- some day, we're gonna boot your kid out of school, and you'll have no excuse for not knowing that could happen because we told you so in black and white in your kid's backpack.

It should not be done this way.  This stuff is important.  Both the substance and the form. We should be told what is expected of us and our kids, and what can happen if we don't live up to the those expectations.  But we should be told in a way that all of us can understand, in the language of the parents, not the administrators.  The great irony of this is that the DOE has got thousands of people trained in exactly how to construct a clear readable document that can be easily understood by parents and children.  They're called teachers, and every school is full of them.

For many years, I have followed the story of Mayor Bloomberg wrestling control of the schools away from the monstrosity that was the old board of education.  I have paid particular attention to the dialectic between Chancellor Joel Klein and the teachers. Klein has been portrayed by some as a lone voice for integrity and merit, and by others (especially teachers) as someone who knows nothing about education.  As someone who worked in the Bloomberg administration for eight years and saw first hand how much of a real reformer he is, I have tended to take Klein's side in this debate.  Now I'm not so sure. Now, it's my kid, my kid's backpack, and my job to read what's in it.

This is kindergarten.  This is big.

Follow the money?

Today, Paul Krugman wrote an article destroying the arithmetic and logic of the Republicans' latest propaganda piece.  He focused mainly on the impossibility of the GOP's budget proposal and drew the connection between this exercise in wishful thinking and the longtime GOP strategy of deception.

"The answer isn’t a secret. The late Irving Kristol, one of the intellectual godfathers of modern conservatism, once wrote frankly about why he threw his support behind tax cuts that would worsen the budget deficit: his task, as he saw it, was to create a Republican majority, “so political effectiveness was the priority, not the accounting deficiencies of government.” In short, say whatever it takes to gain power. That’s a philosophy that now, more than ever, holds sway in the movement Kristol helped shape. "

OK, so Republicans will say anything (no matter how improbable) in order to gain and maintain power.     The logical inference, therefore, is that Republicans want power for reasons almost entirely other than those they state*.  So the question is, why do they want power?

Krugman walks a little way down this path.  He notes that the logical and arithmetic implication of the GOP pledge to balance the budget while cutting taxes by 2020 is that we would have to eliminate the entire Federal government aside from Medicare, social security and the military (including Congress) and privatize Medicare and Social Security in the bargain.  But then he steps back from the implication of this (that Republicans want to hand over as much dough as possible to the capitalists and leave the rest of us to fend for ourselves) by noting that this agenda doesn't stand a chance, even among the Republicans themselves.  Instead, what is going to happen is that we'll get the tax cuts and little if any in the way of spending cuts (or more likely, increases in spending in ways that won't do much good), and we will drive the government even deeper into debt and dysfunction.

Krugman's analysis boils down to calling them a bunch of idiots who won't get what they really want and will destroy us all in the process.  But there's a contradiction at the heart of this.  They're smart enough to understand that their numbers don't add up.  They're smart enough to craft propaganda that gets people to join in their wish-fulfillment fantasies.  They can't be so so dumb that they've miscalculated the political impossibility of what they're proposing.  OK, so I will admit that my motto in life is "don't assume conspiracy when incompetence suffices to explain."  I am predisposed to accepting exactly this assessment of the Republicans.  However, I don't really buy that they are pushing us toward banana republic status out of sheer ineptitude.  There's something else going on.

I have a partial explanation.  First, it mostly boils down to the fact the Republican party is controlled by the most nakedly ruthless forces within capitalism.  These forces want to grab as much of our society's wealth for themselves as possible.  Increasing public debt (especially debt spent in their interest) is a great way to do this, since they wind up holding most of that debt, and can tax the rest of us to pay it off.  At the same time, they recognize the limitations of this worldview (default on that debt would be a bad thing for them).  They realize that if they manipulate things just right, they can make Democrats take much of the blame, and be forced to do the heavy lifting of trying to clean up public finances (as Carter and Clinton had to do).  This is a crude analysis, no doubt full of gaps, but I think it fits the facts better than sheer incompetence.

There's also the deeper question of why people seek power in the service of this kind of agenda. While many politicians are part of the uber-wealthy class pulling the strings, many aren't.  What's the payoff for them?  Some are actually true believers in the cause and think they are doing society some good.  But given that the "cause" makes no objective sense in this instance, it seems unlikely that greed and stupidity alone are sufficient to explain the behavior of all Republican politicians.  The missing element would seem to be the desire for itself.  This is the part that I will admit I simply do not grasp.  I have exercised small amounts of power in my day (in the workplace, at home, over an audience), and have mostly been left cold by it.  Though I have certainly witnessed it over and over again, I have never come to any understanding of why some people seek power and use it in ways that harm others without necessarily serving their own material welfare.

To me this should be one of the central questions of the social sciences, yet it seems not to hold such a place.  Perhaps Krugman could turn his Nobel-wattage abilities to dissecting this

*In all fairness, Democrats (who may be better but aren't saints) will also of substantial improbability in order to gain and maintain power, also for reasons left unsaid, but I generally find these to be less frequent and less astonishing.  But that's a subject for another day

Next time, Danielle Steele ...

This summer vacation's selection for light reading has been Bob Woodward's "State of Denial," a pastiche of insider accounts of the war in Iraq, from its pre 9/11 stirrings through 2006. I realize I'm way too late to this party (given the age of the book), but better than late than never I suppose when it comes to recognizing ugly truths.

This is just about the most depressing thing I have ever read. A consistent thread through the book is people with doubts about the validity (or certainty about the invalidity) of the case for the war and management of post-Saddam Iraq keeping silent about their reservations. As Woodward describes things, it's as if no one who knew anything about the subjects of WMD, Saddam, al Qaeda, 9/11, Iraq, or the Mideast thought that any of Cheney's, Bush's, or Rumsfeld's utterances on these subjects had any basis in fact or evidence. Rumsfeld (in his own words and in descriptions by others) comes off as a truly pathological figure. Cheney comes off as, well, Cheney. And Bush comes off as even more of a disengaged idiot frat boy than we all thought he was. The "brains" behind the whole thing, Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz are ivory tower hallucinators.

But the worst thing about all this is that Woodward makes it seem as if there were possibilities to do things differently. He presents a series of episodes where people who knew that facts were not as Rumsfeld presented them, that the post-war plans were insane, that the premises underlying transformation to a unified democratic Iraq were utter fiction, had an opportunity to speak the truth to Bush and failed to do so. Tenet, Rice, Powell, Garner, Bremer, myriad generals, even David Kay (the great debunker of the WMD myth) all had opportunities to be alone with Bush, and none of them spoke his or her mind. None of them told him that there were no WMD, that there was no al Qaeda-Saddam links, that transforming Iraq into a west-loving democracy couldn't happen. The best that could be expected in a "free" Iraq was more social, religious and political chaos than under Saddam, at a lower standard of living. And this was only possible with two or three times as many U.S. troops as Rumsfeld said were needed, staying in Iraq for years longer than anyone could stomach.

They all knew this, and they all said it to each other. But no one said it to Bush. Even worse, none of these figures said it in public. They stayed on through the 2004 elections protecting Bush's political butt by keeping their mouths shut. Then they resigned and moved on to their think tanks and consultancies, and still kept their mouths shut. Or even worse, like Tenet, accepted medals for keeping their mouths shut.

Perhaps the worst thing about the book, though, is that Woodward himself was privy to all of these doubts from the very beginning. He references conversations he had with all of these figures going back to the very beginning of Bush's first term. While he was busy embedding himself in the Bush administration writing two other books that told tales of the resolve and political smarts of the Bush team, he was listening to the same warning bells and doing the same thing that Powell, Tenet and Rice did. He kept his mouth shut. This is the man who toppled Nixon and exposed Iran-contra in mid-scandal. He is perhaps the one journalist who could have said "this is a house of cards" and on reputation alone forced doubts into the open and allowed dissent to be treated as something other than treason.

But he didn't. Alas. I can't say that any of these revelations changed my views about the invasion and occupation of Iraq. I was opposed from the beginning. I saw the case for war as transparently implausible, and saw further that even if the worst of Bush's accusations were true it was a terrible idea that could only lead to decades of military involvement and make the world less safe for all of us. But after a while, I gave up thinking about it and talking about it. Perhaps it's time to reconsider this strategy. The only positive I can draw from this is that I now plan to make a conscious effort to pay a little more attention to Iraq and Afghanistan news and talk about it a little more. Maybe even in public.

Other voices, other shoes

Hmmm. It seem I haven't written anything in quite a while. Must be because nothing has happened anywhere in the world in the last, oh 12 or 13 months, that is worthy of comment. Either that, or I have no comments worthy of ... Well you get the picture. So, I am now into week two of the first real vacation I have had in something like five years.

By "real vacation" I do not mean "time off from work characterized by no basic change in level of obligation, anxiety, or lack of pleasing diversion." This time around, the adults number the child by 4 to 1 (using the conventional, age-derived definitions, of course, not the behavioral ones) which seems to be sufficient. The weather is nice. I brought a guitar (and a battery powered amp), plenty to read, and my thoughts are pleasingly free from of the leaden nostalgia of past beach forays. I even got the wax flushed out of my ears, so I'm ready to jump back in the ocean. Or, sit here in a shaded, breezy room, with 6 more days of vacation to go.

Things could be worse.

It's a dirty job ...

... But somebody's gotta do it, so let me be the jaded native New Yorker who shrugs and says "good riddance" to Tavern on the Parking Lot. It was shoved into the park by Robert Moses to spite a bunch of sheep, and that was more or less its high point. Real New Yorkers only went there for someone else's bar mitzvah. The one time I went there on purpose, I was a little disappointed that the food was actually somewhat north of ptomaine, but at least it was overpriced and the service stank.

News of the demise of Tavern on the Green (and the auctioning off of its gaudy fixtures) has spawned a wave of cyber garment rending, but really, it was just one of those things spoken of as quintessentially New York that was almost completely divorced from the reality of New York, even for New Yorkers who like to splurge on kitsch. It was no more than a confection for tourists, like carriage rides (or nowadays pedicab rides) in the park. Which is not to say that there aren't touristy things in New York that aren't really great, and which the natives enjoy without embarrassment, but this wasn't one of 'em. Bring back the sheep I say.