Friday, August 30, 2013

Gated Communities, Charter Schools, and GROSS POINTE BLANK

Do you remember the scene in GROSS POINTE BLANK where John Cusack rides along with his one time high school buddy to a home in a gated community his buddy is trying to sell?  Half way through the sale another old high schooler drives up in his community patrol car, pistol strapped to his hip, lookin' for somebody to bust.  The rent-a-cop explains to Cusack how he took a two day course on law enforcement or something and then was sent out into the neighborhood to keep intruders away.

Gated communities!  I hate them; however, if I lived in one I'm sure I could find a nifty rationalization to explain my situation.  There are lots of great people who live in gated communities.  I would go so far as to say that the majority of the people in gated communities are well-intentioned and just want what is best for their families.

But that doesn't lessen the damage gated communities do.  Trayvon Martin would still be alive today if it weren't for gated communities, whether actual or metaphorical.  The creation of such communities is just another step in the stripping away of The Commons, the heart of what made our democracy work.  If you no longer share a Commons (again, actual or metaphorical, doesn't make much difference) you no longer have a community.  Instead, you have a bunch of different enclaves, all with different vested interests, all inherently distrusting of the enclave across the holler, the people who butter their bread on the wrong side, or who were insensitive enough to be born black.

I hate charter schools for the same reason.  They are nothing more than educational gated communities, all making love to whichever community interest will get them the most money, the most enrollment.  And just like gated communities, the folks who put their kids in charter schools are well-intentioned.  They want what's best for their kids.  No one has told them (or they don't want to admit) that what is good for their kids is not necessarily good for other kids.  Putting a kid in a school focusing on science or the arts or languages or whatever kills two birds with one stone.  It helps the kid get higher test scores and thus will help him get that acceptance to Harvard where he can launch his path to the Supreme Court, but studies show that while ability/interest grouping helps kids who are already motivated (actually, whose parents are already motivated) to succeed, achievement suffers for those kids who are stuck in the public schools who are getting less money as the charters take away some of their funding.  Their motivation suffers because all of the kids who were truly motivated are sitting in charter schools.  Their IQ scores actually go down.

But fuck 'em.  If they don't have what it takes to get into the charter, if their parents are too busy working four jobs to make a commitment to the school, if they don't have the transportation, well whose fault is that?  Meanwhile all those little parent driven over-achievers in charter schools continue to plow through curricula, continue to focus on the next test looming on the horizon.  They will grow up and become Ted Cruz, brilliant yes, but totally oblivious to the needs of anyone who isn't him.

There.  I just had to get that off my chest.

Sunday, August 11, 2013

Dougco Ramble

I have been thinking about the recent uproar at the Douglas County School Board meeting a week ago. The only thing I know about Dougco going in is what I hear from Katherine.  I try to avoid reading too much about the state of the profession.

As I understand it the Dougco board is all about school reform on steroids.  They don't just have charter schools; they have CHARTER SCHOOLS.  They don't have merit pay; they have MERIT PAY.  They are all about applying market principles (make that MARKET PRINCIPLES) on an institution that by definition is anathema to market principles.  They want to let 15% of the teaching force get weeded out of the pool by quantifying that which cannot be quantified.  To be fair--since Merit Pay is based on test scores--shouldn't they let teachers select and cull  their own classes by using the same market principles?  Somehow, I don't think that would fly.

Dougco actually pays certain grade level teachers more than others  because those grades (6th and 1st maybe) are more critical and thus more difficult to teach than others.  No teacher, no teacher who had actually spent time in a classroom, would suggest that there are different levels of difficulty to effective teaching.  It is damn difficult no matter who you're teaching or where you are.  In addition to all of this, Dougco teachers tell Katherine, they are not being valued.  They are not getting enough input on the decision making of the powers that be.  They are being denigrated in the press; blamed for whichever societal ill is in fashion; resented for their retirement plan that is, along with the horrible prospect that everyone might have health care, bankrupting the country.  And not only that, but according to Mike Rosen and others of that ilk, their job is easy.  Anyone could do it.

All of those complaints, of course, have been voiced by teachers since the days when kids did their ABC's on stone tablets.  That doesn't make them any less legitimate, only more frustrating.  But the school board sat back and listened to all this carping with incredulity.  Test scores were soaring, they claimed.  Fully 80% of teachers in a recent survey said they were happy with Dougco.  The percentage of teachers leaving the district wasn't higher than anywhere else.  So where's the beef?

If you've taught long enough in a big district those survey results in the face of all the public discontent make perfect sense.  The disconnect between what teachers as a group really think and feel and what they are willing to say to the "boss" was and obviously continues to be one of the most infuriating things about the profession.

The majority of teachers are like the majority of college educated people everywhere.  They're average. And just like everywhere, there are a bunch of remarkably talented folks in that group and there are a bunch of remarkably untalented folks and there are some who have no business on the streets let alone a classroom.  I can make the same statement about doctors, lawyers, engineers, POLITICIANS, etc.  But the thing that distinguishes teachers, I think, is that they themselves were teacher pleasers growing up.  They knew how to play the game.  They felt comfortable within the rules.  Most of all, they wanted people, particularly their teachers, to like them.  I know everyone wants to be liked, but being in schools and all the baggage that comes with it intensifies that need.

In other words, we teachers have a hard time with authority.  We don't like to be called into the principal's office.  And we learned early on that principals as a rule don't like to be contradicted.  When they ask you to say what you really think, you know what you really have to do is tell them what they want to hear.  Therefore, those same people who bitch and moan over a beer at FAC (as long as the bar is out of the community) about the rotten state of morale in Dougco or Jeffco or Anyotherco, will happily bubble in mostly positive marks on a survey that might make it to the desk of someone with power.

According to the survey (one of the county expectations, by the way, is an acquiescence to county goals and standards) everything is just peachy in Dougco.  According to the disgruntled Dougco teachers working out at the Y in the morning, the place sucks.  Go figure.