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.