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.