I'd like to know what economic lessons Tim Harford would find behind Mark Zuckerberg, Cory Booker, and Chris Christie's attempt to transform the Newark school system; Zuckerberg donated 100 million dollars, Cory Booker-- a passionate proponent of charter schools-- raised sums to match this money, and Chris Christie saw this as an opportunity to attack the unions; Dale Russakoff explains all this and more in her book The Prize: Who's In Charge of America's Schools? and the morals of the story are complex, ugly, ambiguous, messy, and occasionally inspirational:
1) there is no magic bullet to fix education in an impoverished city;
2) top down directives, even if they use excellent jargon, don't change broken infrastructure;
3) you can't move kids around willy-nilly in a city like Newark to fill charter schools-- because the kids left behind have no where to learn, and the kids who get moved may have issues with with where they are moved-- gang turf, lack of busing, etcetera;
4) if you don't consult the community before implementing giant initiatives that involve their kids, they will feel angry and oppressed, especially if these directives are ordered by a white superintendent in a primarily black city;
5) you can be a rock-star or a mayor, but you can't be a rock-star mayor;
6) it's difficult to measure what parents and administrators find important in education, so the bureaucracy tends to find important what is easy to measure-- which is usually test scores-- and this can bite you in the ass;
7) consultants know how to bill hours and make a shitload of money from a situation like this (and it seems Zuckerberg has learned this lesson and is trying a different approach in the San Francisco bay area);
8) kids in a city like Newark need all kinds of additional support besides teaching, many of them have experienced horrible tragedy and violence, and they need counseling and psychological support as much as they need reading and math review;
9) Newark's billion dollar education budget is the "prize" sought after by politicians, unions, government and citizens . . . and there is going to be greed and corruption surrounding this much money;
10) there are superb teachers and students in the current system, and smart parents shepherd their kids through, but it's difficult to get rid of poor teachers because of union rules;
11) politicians and philanthropists will eventually lose interest and move on with their lives, but the parents and the kids and the community remains-- so change has to come from the bottom-up, and it needs to come from people that are going to stay in the community-- Booker went on to a senate position, Christie had to deal with Bridgegate and his presidential campaign, and Zuckerberg moved on to a new project-- meanwhile, the two hundred million dollar donation was a drop in the bucket, and got eaten up by consultants, contract negotiations with the union, and some charter schools-- but the main infrastructure in Newark is still ancient and crumbling, teachers still go to work in that environment, and students attempt to learn there . . . and the work needs to be done one student and one teacher and one classroom and one school building at a time, which is far more boring than radical, transformational top-down change;
12) if you want to understand some of the complexities of educational reform, read this book.
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query charter. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query charter. Sort by date Show all posts
Highland Park's Charter School Controversy Goes National
Wednesday, The New York Times printed an article called "The Promise and Costs of Charters," which focuses on the Hebrew language charter school debate happening in my town, and the article is very similar to the editorial I wrote on the same subject, both in tone and logic, so I am assuming that this Peter Applebome character got all his ideas from me, but I'm not going to force him to confess, because I got all my ideas from Banksy (actually, I got a lot of my ideas from Diane Ravitch, but it sounds cooler to say I got all my ideas from Banksy).
Charter Schools and Vouchers: The Math Doesn't Add Up
Once again, I have written an argument against charter schools and vouchers, but this might appeal to more conservative minds, as it deals with the financial consequences of Governor Christie's legislation; please read it, get involved, sign the petition, write letters to the newspaper and your political representatives, and I promise to return to my usual stupidity.
Required Reading (Especially for the NJDOE)
Cathy O'Neil's new book Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy is a must read for anyone living in our digital age; she's uniquely qualified to write this book, as she's an academic mathematician who earned her Ph.D from Harvard, worked for a hedge fund on Wall Street, analyzed big data for marketing start-ups and then became a political activist because she realized that a number of dangerous discriminatory algorithms are opaque, affect enormous numbers of people, and do unseen damage . . . she nicknames these WMDs . . . Weapons of Math Destruction, and she explains how these black box formulas evaluate creditworthiness, college rankings, our employability, our Facebook and Twitter feeds, and-- most significant to me-- teacher evaluations . . . and she spends a good portion of the book on just how irrational, absurd, and insanely unsound the models are that assess teacher performance-- the formulas might work if teachers taught ten thousand kids at a time, but for a class of 30 students, measuring how a kid did on a standardized test from one year to the next is essentially random (all the teachers know this, of course, even those of us who do not possess a math Phd. from Harvard, but it's nice to hear an expert explain the logic of why this is so) but apparently the NJDOE hasn't figured this out, and at the start of this school year, they increased the weight of standardized test scores in the evaluation model from 10% to 30% . . . so now, if a teacher works in a tested grade-- such as my wife-- one third of a teacher's numerical assessment is random . . . even if she teaches math and and can point out the many problems with the algorithm (a sociologist would cite Campbell's Law, of course, and also present a valid argument for why this change is absolutely inane) and I can't explain (without long strings of profanity) how incensed this makes me-- how utterly stupid the people at the NJDOE must all be, to enact this increase-- but I'm hoping that this book indicates a sea change in how we view these algorithms and formulas, and that people will learn enough math to understand how screwed up this is . . . and if the NJDOE changes the algorithm and writes a personal apology to me, confessing that they were totally ignorant of all math and logic, then I'm willing to forgive them, because even Bill Gates got it wrong with his charter school funding, he ignored the Law of Large Numbers and came to the conclusion that small schools were better than large schools, when the fact of the matter is that small schools have more statistical variance than large schools, because they have less students in them . . . so more of them will be better and more of them will be worse . . . but, of course, people may learn the truth and still not do anything about it-- we know that a later start time will improve test scores in high school, but the bus schedule prohibits this, and so kids show up at 7 AM, in a building without AC, ready to learn AP Physics . . . everyone knows this is not the best way to teach kids, but no one does anything about it, instead we purchase new software platforms so we can upload all the spurious data and crunch the numbers-- and there may be enough people in the NJDOE and other administrative capacities who love this idea so much, the idea that we're generating loads of numbers from standardized tests and evaluation algorithms, and they don't care that all the numbers are bullshit, because it's fun to have loads of "evidence" to evaluate and all this data perpetuates the idea that we need to pay people to look at it . . . anyway, I could go on and on, but read the book, it's revelatory . . . and if you don't feel like reading it, you can listen to her discussing it on Slate Money.
Can You Build a Teacher Bigger, Faster, Stronger?
Elizabeth Green's book Building a Better Teacher: How Teaching Works (and How to Teach It to Everyone) avoids most of the politics that Dana Goldstein covers in The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Most Embattled Profession and instead focuses on the quest to find out what good teaching is and what characteristics a good teacher possesses; along the way she dispels some myths-- one is that teachers are "natural born" . . . it would be convenient if this were so, because then it would be simply a matter of firing the worst ten percent of teachers (which is a LOT of people-- there are 3.7 million teachers in America . . . it is by far the largest number of white collar workers in any one profession, as a comparison, there are 180,000 architects and 1.3 million engineers) and replacing them with folks that are "born to teach" and then all our test scores would rise, but though there have been plenty of attempts, there are no particular characteristics or personality traits or intellectual capacities that make a good teacher-- as long as you are smart enough, it's something you learn . . . then there are the folks that just think if there were enough accountability and testing, we could figure out where the problems are-- but these sort of data collection set-ups don't actually help teachers improve and generally collpse under their own weight, and on the other side of the coin are the autonomy people, who believe that good teaching results from teachers being completely on their own, free of testing and data . . . but there's no indication that this is the case either; Green goes to Japan, a country that test far better than us in math, and she finds that they use a system very different than ours, where teachers have a lighter class load, but much more time to collaborate and observe colleagues, and then study and criticize their lessons in an intense fashion-- and, ironically, the Japanese learned this system from the United States-- we invented it, but we never implemented it (the book closely observes math teaching and an easy way to spot the difference is that American classes progress in an "I, We, You" fashion-- the teacher demonstrates, the kids work together, and then they try it alone, while Japan works in a "You, Y'all, We" manner, where the kids work on a single problem-- carefully crafted by a team of teachers-- and they work alone and struggle at first, then discuss possible methods with each other, and then have a teacher directed discussion on how they might go about solving the problem) and Green comes to the conclusion that though we've tried some noble experiments (the "zero tolerance" charter schools in impoverished areas and plenty of collaborative programs in certain schools) that we have no national infrastructure for this sort of thing, no shared curriculum and vocabulary in disciplines, and a general incoherence because of state, national, and district mandates (which may or may not conflict with each other) and that more observation (especially by people outside of one's discipline-- which is what is happening now in schools everywhere around the country) is not particularly helpful unless the teacher is a complete trainwreck-- and most teachers are not (in fact, teachers which are rated ineffective one year, have a very good chance of being rated effective the next, so there's a lot of subjectivity in these ratings) and so they need very specific feedback and lesson ideas for their subject area, not more administrative data, but-- as Michael Roth points out in this review of the book, American teachers clock far more hours in the classroom than teachers from other countries (especially successful countries) and so there is no time to collaborate or watch other teachers lessons or team plan, and -- because of the particular American obsession with business and productivity-- I can't imagine our course or student loads ever diminishing, so in a sense, we will remain islands unto ourselves (I am very lucky that a lot of collaboration goes on informally in my department, but it's pretty random and essentially determined by what English teachers you have lunch with . . . which is no way to improve national test scores in reading and math) but you never know, the book is worth reading just for the math ideas alone, which might help you to help your kid with his math homework.
Enough of That . . . Or Is It?
I finished Dana Goldstein's book The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Most Embattled Profession and while there's certainly fascinating stuff in there (the reason, in the1800's, politicians embraced females invading a traditionally male job was because they would work on the cheap) and the book lays out, in a comprehensive and unbiased manner, the history of teachers and unions, education and desegregation, the various attempts to use testing and teacher evaluation to improve schools, the political and moral panic that often resulted in teachers being persecuted for reasons other than incompetence, the charter school movement, Teach for America, the Race to the Top, No Child Left Behind, and all sorts of other things that I knew only passing information about, but for the layperson the interesting part of the book is the epilogue, where she makes some recommendations based on all her research, and these are logical and worth taking a look at; but for those of you who don't feel like it, which I totally understand (you could be reading a Don Winslow book) here is a short summary:
1) teacher pay matters and while teachers aren't paid poorly in America, they aren't paid nearly as much as in countries with very successful education systems, such as Finland, South Korea, and Japan-- if teaching jobs aren't coveted, and if teachers aren't as respected as doctors and engineers, then you won't be able to attract excellent candidates;
2) we need to focus on using good teachers as models and creating communities of excellent practice, rather than creating systems of evaluation purely to ferret out the bad teachers-- as these systems always fail because of the insane amounts of paperwork and data they create;
3) tests need to return to their rightful role as diagnostic tools, not as methods to achieve high stakes funding-- which resulted in teaching to the test, gaming the system, and all sorts of illustrations of Campbell's Law;
4) the principal matters as much as the teachers-- exceptional leadership improves the bottom third of teachers and the top third of teachers-- not excess evaluation paperwork;
5) star teachers were not necessarily the best students--so simply hiring people with higher math SAT scores isn't necessarily going to improve American education-- research shows you're better off hiring someone with excellent communication skills, who adeptly uses a large vocabulary, and can explain things well-- even if they once struggled to learn them in the past (and I agree with this, because I was a horrible and disorganized student, and so I know how to contend with this in class);
6) teachers benefit from watching each other work-- but there's usually no time for this (although since I started teaching Serial, a number of my colleagues have observed my class, and it's great-- they're not administrators filling out paperwork while I teach-- so there's no pressure-- and I can ask them for suggestions during the lesson or afterwards);
7) end outdated union protections-- there needs to be a faster way to fire incompetent veteran teachers, and a streamlined way for the teacher to appeal being fired (because teacher appointments and terminations have certainly succumbed to political whims in the past);
8) we are not as homogenous as Finland and there are limitations to our educational system, which is very decentralized, so it's near impossible to use top-down reform to improve our schools-- there's no federal body to check how schools are implementing federal standards, and federal funding is fairly minimal (compared to state and town funding) and we have schools in America with incredibly different study bodies and educational problems, so every school might need a slightly different plan to improve;
and finally, if you want to hear something more condensed on these issues, which features an interview with Dana Goldstein, then listen to this week's episode of Freakonomics: "Is America's Education Problem Really Just a Teacher Problem?"
1) teacher pay matters and while teachers aren't paid poorly in America, they aren't paid nearly as much as in countries with very successful education systems, such as Finland, South Korea, and Japan-- if teaching jobs aren't coveted, and if teachers aren't as respected as doctors and engineers, then you won't be able to attract excellent candidates;
2) we need to focus on using good teachers as models and creating communities of excellent practice, rather than creating systems of evaluation purely to ferret out the bad teachers-- as these systems always fail because of the insane amounts of paperwork and data they create;
3) tests need to return to their rightful role as diagnostic tools, not as methods to achieve high stakes funding-- which resulted in teaching to the test, gaming the system, and all sorts of illustrations of Campbell's Law;
4) the principal matters as much as the teachers-- exceptional leadership improves the bottom third of teachers and the top third of teachers-- not excess evaluation paperwork;
5) star teachers were not necessarily the best students--so simply hiring people with higher math SAT scores isn't necessarily going to improve American education-- research shows you're better off hiring someone with excellent communication skills, who adeptly uses a large vocabulary, and can explain things well-- even if they once struggled to learn them in the past (and I agree with this, because I was a horrible and disorganized student, and so I know how to contend with this in class);
6) teachers benefit from watching each other work-- but there's usually no time for this (although since I started teaching Serial, a number of my colleagues have observed my class, and it's great-- they're not administrators filling out paperwork while I teach-- so there's no pressure-- and I can ask them for suggestions during the lesson or afterwards);
7) end outdated union protections-- there needs to be a faster way to fire incompetent veteran teachers, and a streamlined way for the teacher to appeal being fired (because teacher appointments and terminations have certainly succumbed to political whims in the past);
8) we are not as homogenous as Finland and there are limitations to our educational system, which is very decentralized, so it's near impossible to use top-down reform to improve our schools-- there's no federal body to check how schools are implementing federal standards, and federal funding is fairly minimal (compared to state and town funding) and we have schools in America with incredibly different study bodies and educational problems, so every school might need a slightly different plan to improve;
and finally, if you want to hear something more condensed on these issues, which features an interview with Dana Goldstein, then listen to this week's episode of Freakonomics: "Is America's Education Problem Really Just a Teacher Problem?"
Stop the Country, I Want To Get Off!
In more news that sounds fake but isn't, Betsy DeVos-- the billionaire freelance Christian educational reformer who Trump has chosen for Secretary of Education-- has revealed that she would like to "help advance God's Kingdom" in the pedagogical realm . . . she's not content just donating money to Christian schools, instead she wants to "be in that Shephelah, and to confront the culture," which basically means she wants to fight the good fight against the Philistines-- of which I am one-- and she acknowledges that "the church-- which ought to be in our view more central to the life of the community-- has been displaced by the public school as the center for activity, the center for what goes on in the community" but she hopes with charter schools and tax credits and vouchers that the church can get more and more central and involved in the education of the youth . . . and I know she's not speaking to me, or my area of the country-- but still . . . HOLY SHIT . . . this is a wonderful, wild, weird admission of actual political/religious purpose-- in a way it's lovely because it's so clear and so crazy, an incredibly brazen violation of the separation of church and state, the admission of a deep-held desire for the government to fund religious affiliation-- Christian religious affiliation-- and a bizarre plan to unravel the most accessible democratic institution in American life-- the public school-- which is now a place where parents of any class, status, religion, and/or belief can have an immediate effect . . . a place where local people can run for school board or serve on the PTA or volunteer or coach or simply attend functions and have influence-- and so I love to see her ardent longing laid bare, her yen to turn this special place into a segregated religious institution . . . to place the secular setting where arts and music and sports and various clubs of all stripes and denominations happen under a religious purview, and more importantly, to taint the place where our critical thinking is taught with the tincture of Christian ideology-- hello Creationism!-- and I just love that she says it out loud, for everyone to hear . . . it's a great reminder of how ideologically different people are in this great country of ours; for a loosely connected reason why this is a weird and wild turn of events, listen to Sam Harris talk to Shady Hamid about his new book: Islamic Exceptionalism . . . Hamid explains that one of the major differences between the Islamic nations that often export terror and Western nations that do not, is that Islam is completely intertwined with politics, and there is no separation of church and state, nor is there even the idea that it's possible to separate religion and politics in places like Iran and Saudi Arabia . . . but there's no way that the Senate in the United States of America will approve her, right?
Bonus: I Write Something Serious . . . Blechh.
I spent yesterday venting my anger towards our Governor by writing this editorial about charter schools-- I'm sending it to our congressmen and the Home News, but I suppose it's just as easy to post it on the internet and see who stumbles on it; tomorrow I will return to my usual stupidity (and there is a petition to sign with the letter, if you want to get involved).
This Is the Reaction I Expect!
I received a voice-message at work on Tuesday, which is usually something bad-- and the computerized voice said that the message was "80 seconds long," which is a pretty long message, so I was expecting the worst . . . an irate parent or an administrator reminding me of something important I had forgotten, but from the first moment of the message I knew this was going to be different; it was a woman calling to express her rapturous adulation for my editorial opposing charter schools (which had just appeared in the local paper) and it was so impassioned that it made me blush, there were times when she seemed to be at a loss for words, nearly swooning with emotion toward my "cogency," and to confirm my suspicions about the tone, I let a few other people listen to the message (I've been known, on occasion, to misinterpret the female tone of voice) and they all agreed that I was correct in my inference . . . and I can't reproduce the commentary from the other teachers here because this is a family friendly blog, but you can imagine what went on (and I should point out that the woman-- who no longer has any students in the school-- left her phone number, though she said I didn't have to call her back) and, though it made me a bit uncomfortable, I think I'd like more of these messages, so if you read something wonderful that I've written, this is the reaction I will now expect of you.
Trump Sez the Chinese Curse is a Hoax
The Chinese Curse is devastatingly simple: may you live in interesting times, and-- unless the Chinese Curse is a Chinese Hoax-- there is no question that we have entered The American Era of the Chinese Curse . . . and I've exhausted myself thinking about the implications of this, and I've been trying to process and digest everything I've seen, read, heard, and thought before I posted on the election, but now that I've heard Trump's pick for Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, things have hit close enough to home and I need to vent about it all . . . and so here are some of my thoughts:
1) Betsy DeVos is a union-busting proponent of charter schools and vouchers, and she'd like nothing better than to privatize the most venerable community democratic institution in America, the public school . . . this causes me a great deal of anxiety, both for my job and the future of funding for the public school my children attend . . . and DeVos has ties to Amway . . . yuck;
2) I live in a wonderful liberal enclave where the kids walk to school, play in the streets (and occasionally get hit by cars) and enjoy a fairly safe, often wonderful, multi-cultural, friendly community . . . in my town, the vote tally was 3900 for Clinton and 1100 for Trump, and most of the Trump support seems to have come from the Orthodox Jewish population, who held a Trump rally at a synagogue, and who were probably voting for Trump for the reasons outlined in number one-- they pay Highland Park taxes, but they send their kids to private schools, and Trump would be their best bet on saving some money in this regard;
3) I was excited by Trump's infrastructure promises because I thought I might get air-conditioning in my classroom, but since Trump's infrastructure plan is to incentivize private companies to do infrastructure work and he'd like to appoint someone who wants to dismantle the public education system, I'm not going to hold my breath;
4) Clinton didn't get people out to vote the way Obama did-- perhaps because she was an establishment candidate in an anti-establishment campaign, and the Ohio and Pennsylvania counties that flipped are the ones plagued by heroin and opioid epidemics, so while I thought America was Pretty Great and Addressing Some Issues So It Might Get Greater, the people in these towns really think America Sucks-- they are uneducated, jobless, angry, and addicted to drugs or surrounded by people addicted to drugs, or working a crappy job, or working a decent job but surrounded by people working crappy jobs and addicted to drugs and watching their town go to shit-- and so while I liked some of the policy tweaks Clinton was proposing . . . maybe they would make college cheaper, or provide more pre-K and childcare, or help working mothers, maybe she would strengthen Dodd-Frank, etcetera-- and while she wasn't overtly proposing things I really care about-- she wasn't promoting unionization and radical environmental protection and carbon taxation, at least she wasn't completely opposed to them . . . but my life is generally great, and so while I fear massive change from the status quo, a bunch of people that I don't know or live near were really angry and wanted any kind of change, especially one that would make things worse for immigrants and minorities and terrorists and women, because if you can't find a way to improve your life, the best way to feel better about yourself, is to make someone else's life worse;
5) the best best case scenario of Trump's term (which will probably be eight years, unless he does something really really egregious, because he'll be able to create some short-term-- but very costly-- windfalls in the economy in order to get elected again) is that he fosters some diplomatic ties with Russia, remains a bit isolationist and doesn't get involved in some awful militaristic adventure, doesn't go too nuts with the wall and immigrant thing, and doesn't dismantle too much of the Clean Air and Water Act and other environmental regulations, figures out a way to revise Obamacare without making 22 million people lose healthcare, and basically doesn't get much done . . . but the more typical scenario is that moderate Republicans like John McCain reign him in a bit and we just have a typically terrible Republican term . . . so you can expect tax cuts that will drive up the national deficit, cuts in government programs, a stupid purposeless expensive adventure in the Middle East, a weakening of organized labor, a super-conservative Supreme Court, the return of torture, environmental deregulation and devastation, but a bit of a windfall from tearing all the coal from the mountains and fracking all the gas out of the earth and drilling for oil everywhere, financial deregulation followed by a financial bubble followed by a recession . . . for more on this, just read about the eight years under George W. Bush . . . yuck;
6) Myron Ebell, the climate change contrarian leading Trump's EPA transition team, is a scary motherfucker . . . while the education stuff hits close to home, nothing scares me more about Trump than his belief in conspiracy and hokum, and his lack of understanding of the scientific method . . . he's an anti-vaxxer, for Christ's sake;
7) if you're a guy like me, and just can't understand why anyone would vote for Trump, and would consider him a populist here, then you need to read this great post my friend John sent me . . . it's written by a guy who grew up in a white Jesus-fearing red community, and he says stop trying to understand the rural Christian voters because they don't understand themselves-- they are angry and brand loyal and would never let any "facts" or "critical thinking" or argument or logic sway them otherwise . . . Clinton is a socialist crooked politician and God is a white guy with a beard who controls the weather and the best news source is the post that makes you happiest on Facebook-- whether it's fake or alt-right propaganda and white people are superior and no elitist coastal bastard is going to tell you otherwise . . . and these people have been voting against their best interests for quite a while, Thomas Frank fully explains it in his masterpiece What's the Matter with Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America . . . it's a moral choice that's about brand loyalty, not critical thinking or policy, and if you're brand occasionally talks about grabbing women by the pussy, well, you can put up with that;
8) even if Trump said the things he said purely in order to win the election, the hate and vitriol he spewed against women, Mexicans, immigrants, and Hillary Clinton should never be forgotten and the pussy grabbing remark should be mentioned at every press conference . . . despite blind conservative brand loyalty, I'm surprised that any father with a daughter or any woman at all voted for this crass idiot, and I am ashamed for them . . . and I know that these people who voted for Trump hate me because I pity them for their ignorance and provincialism, it's an ugly dynamic;
9) worst case Trump scenarios are really scary: he's capable of bullying, intimidating, and coercing the press; he might really screw up banking regulations and trade deals; he might hurt the U.S. diplomatically for many years to come; he might start a nuclear war; he might intern all Muslims; the First and Second Amendment will be under attack; he might spend tons and tons of money building a wall; he's angry, petty, and he's been the butt of the joke for decades and now, in the ugliest and weirdest "underdog" victory ever, the butt of the joke-- the Ugliest American-- has become the most powerful man in the free world . . . it's best not to think about these situations and just concentrate on the stuff he will definitely fuck up, and scrutinize him constantly;
10) the press really dropped the ball-- they were vetting Clinton as if she won, and not doing story after story about Trump's crazy conspiracy theories, his lack of core principles, his corrupt business practices, his lack of tax information, his insane business conflicts, and the very real possibility that he might end up running an autocratic kleptocracy . . . he won't be doing political favors for people, he'll be directly enriching himself with his policy moves . . . this one is too depressing to continue;
11) I was trying to explain to my wife why we still have the electoral college, and I was really having trouble-- I know the Founding Fathers wanted to give rural states enough power to have some say and they wanted to promote a more stable two-party system, and the electoral votes make this possible, but it's gotten to the point where there are two Americas . . . and there are a lot more of us progressive city folk, who would like parks and good schools and clean air and water and green energy and multicultural tolerance and more Northern European style policy such as single payer healthcare and better family leave and help with college education and a progressive Supreme Court, and then there are these smaller states that are holding us hostage, and I'm not sure what they want-- and I don't think they know what they want either-- and I don't want to be stereotypical, so I'll refrain from speculating, but if there are any red state Trump supporters who read this blog (not a shot in hell) then please explain in the comments what policy you expected from Trump . . . anyway, we're getting to the point where we should be two separate economic entities, which would be nice, because the blue states are far less reliant on the federal government, and would do much better without the baggage of the red states-- who are incredibly thankless for the money we send to subsidize them;
12) some folks voted for Trump because he'd be tough on terrorism and ISIS, but I can't understand why people in rural America-- the least likely place for a terrorist attack-- are far more fearful of Muslims than the folks on the coasts, and some people voted for Trump because they see him as a bastion of law and order, a voice of reasonable justice wearing "the mantle of anger" amidst the gun violence, flood of immigrants, city riots and kowtowing to minority groups like Black Lives Matter . . . and while I don't agree with any of this, and think these people received their information from fake news on Facebook, at least it's a reason;
13) I'm not saying Trump is like Hitler . . . that would be hyperbolic, plus Hitler was organized, a compelling speaker, and Hitler actually had a plan of action-- joke stolen from David Cross-- but Hitler promised jobs, Hitler promised revenge for the deals that Germany had made with the world (The Treaty of Versailles) and Hitler was an intimidating bully who hated immigrants and promised to make Germany great again . . . those are just some interesting parallels, but I'm not comparing the two leaders because I don't want to get put on leave, like this teacher;
14) and so that's what it's come down to . . . the majority of the country, myself, included, can't believe what has happened, and many of us would have no problem leaving the red states to fend for themselves-- I would gladly vote to secede from the crap that's going to happen in the next 4-8 years . . . the red states can pollute themselves to hell, cut all the government services, privatize everything, dismantle the schools, ban gay marriage, make kids study Creationism, do lots of heroin, carry semi-automatic weapons everywhere, refuse to vaccinate, insult women and the disabled, deport immigrants, build walls and do whatever insane shit they want to do, with a spray-tanned game-show host as their beloved daddy-leader . . . just don't touch my America, because my America is Pretty Great . . . it could use improvements, but it's certainly never been better than this . . . so all I can hope for is that the political forces in my town and state can keep the political forces of Donald Trump and his ilk at bay, and maybe that's why we have the electoral college and why we are a loose federation of states . . . and readers who voted for Trump, perhaps you could explain yourselves in the comments, because you folks are an angry apocalyptic cipher to me . . . I still haven't gotten to have an actual conversation with a real Trump supporter, which makes me pretty sheltered-- I guess I live behind my own wall of elitist coastal intellectualism, which I've erected out of brain cells and books, but maybe someday soon some folks from Trump's America will make their way over my wall and explain things to me.
1) Betsy DeVos is a union-busting proponent of charter schools and vouchers, and she'd like nothing better than to privatize the most venerable community democratic institution in America, the public school . . . this causes me a great deal of anxiety, both for my job and the future of funding for the public school my children attend . . . and DeVos has ties to Amway . . . yuck;
2) I live in a wonderful liberal enclave where the kids walk to school, play in the streets (and occasionally get hit by cars) and enjoy a fairly safe, often wonderful, multi-cultural, friendly community . . . in my town, the vote tally was 3900 for Clinton and 1100 for Trump, and most of the Trump support seems to have come from the Orthodox Jewish population, who held a Trump rally at a synagogue, and who were probably voting for Trump for the reasons outlined in number one-- they pay Highland Park taxes, but they send their kids to private schools, and Trump would be their best bet on saving some money in this regard;
3) I was excited by Trump's infrastructure promises because I thought I might get air-conditioning in my classroom, but since Trump's infrastructure plan is to incentivize private companies to do infrastructure work and he'd like to appoint someone who wants to dismantle the public education system, I'm not going to hold my breath;
4) Clinton didn't get people out to vote the way Obama did-- perhaps because she was an establishment candidate in an anti-establishment campaign, and the Ohio and Pennsylvania counties that flipped are the ones plagued by heroin and opioid epidemics, so while I thought America was Pretty Great and Addressing Some Issues So It Might Get Greater, the people in these towns really think America Sucks-- they are uneducated, jobless, angry, and addicted to drugs or surrounded by people addicted to drugs, or working a crappy job, or working a decent job but surrounded by people working crappy jobs and addicted to drugs and watching their town go to shit-- and so while I liked some of the policy tweaks Clinton was proposing . . . maybe they would make college cheaper, or provide more pre-K and childcare, or help working mothers, maybe she would strengthen Dodd-Frank, etcetera-- and while she wasn't overtly proposing things I really care about-- she wasn't promoting unionization and radical environmental protection and carbon taxation, at least she wasn't completely opposed to them . . . but my life is generally great, and so while I fear massive change from the status quo, a bunch of people that I don't know or live near were really angry and wanted any kind of change, especially one that would make things worse for immigrants and minorities and terrorists and women, because if you can't find a way to improve your life, the best way to feel better about yourself, is to make someone else's life worse;
5) the best best case scenario of Trump's term (which will probably be eight years, unless he does something really really egregious, because he'll be able to create some short-term-- but very costly-- windfalls in the economy in order to get elected again) is that he fosters some diplomatic ties with Russia, remains a bit isolationist and doesn't get involved in some awful militaristic adventure, doesn't go too nuts with the wall and immigrant thing, and doesn't dismantle too much of the Clean Air and Water Act and other environmental regulations, figures out a way to revise Obamacare without making 22 million people lose healthcare, and basically doesn't get much done . . . but the more typical scenario is that moderate Republicans like John McCain reign him in a bit and we just have a typically terrible Republican term . . . so you can expect tax cuts that will drive up the national deficit, cuts in government programs, a stupid purposeless expensive adventure in the Middle East, a weakening of organized labor, a super-conservative Supreme Court, the return of torture, environmental deregulation and devastation, but a bit of a windfall from tearing all the coal from the mountains and fracking all the gas out of the earth and drilling for oil everywhere, financial deregulation followed by a financial bubble followed by a recession . . . for more on this, just read about the eight years under George W. Bush . . . yuck;
6) Myron Ebell, the climate change contrarian leading Trump's EPA transition team, is a scary motherfucker . . . while the education stuff hits close to home, nothing scares me more about Trump than his belief in conspiracy and hokum, and his lack of understanding of the scientific method . . . he's an anti-vaxxer, for Christ's sake;
7) if you're a guy like me, and just can't understand why anyone would vote for Trump, and would consider him a populist here, then you need to read this great post my friend John sent me . . . it's written by a guy who grew up in a white Jesus-fearing red community, and he says stop trying to understand the rural Christian voters because they don't understand themselves-- they are angry and brand loyal and would never let any "facts" or "critical thinking" or argument or logic sway them otherwise . . . Clinton is a socialist crooked politician and God is a white guy with a beard who controls the weather and the best news source is the post that makes you happiest on Facebook-- whether it's fake or alt-right propaganda and white people are superior and no elitist coastal bastard is going to tell you otherwise . . . and these people have been voting against their best interests for quite a while, Thomas Frank fully explains it in his masterpiece What's the Matter with Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America . . . it's a moral choice that's about brand loyalty, not critical thinking or policy, and if you're brand occasionally talks about grabbing women by the pussy, well, you can put up with that;
8) even if Trump said the things he said purely in order to win the election, the hate and vitriol he spewed against women, Mexicans, immigrants, and Hillary Clinton should never be forgotten and the pussy grabbing remark should be mentioned at every press conference . . . despite blind conservative brand loyalty, I'm surprised that any father with a daughter or any woman at all voted for this crass idiot, and I am ashamed for them . . . and I know that these people who voted for Trump hate me because I pity them for their ignorance and provincialism, it's an ugly dynamic;
9) worst case Trump scenarios are really scary: he's capable of bullying, intimidating, and coercing the press; he might really screw up banking regulations and trade deals; he might hurt the U.S. diplomatically for many years to come; he might start a nuclear war; he might intern all Muslims; the First and Second Amendment will be under attack; he might spend tons and tons of money building a wall; he's angry, petty, and he's been the butt of the joke for decades and now, in the ugliest and weirdest "underdog" victory ever, the butt of the joke-- the Ugliest American-- has become the most powerful man in the free world . . . it's best not to think about these situations and just concentrate on the stuff he will definitely fuck up, and scrutinize him constantly;
10) the press really dropped the ball-- they were vetting Clinton as if she won, and not doing story after story about Trump's crazy conspiracy theories, his lack of core principles, his corrupt business practices, his lack of tax information, his insane business conflicts, and the very real possibility that he might end up running an autocratic kleptocracy . . . he won't be doing political favors for people, he'll be directly enriching himself with his policy moves . . . this one is too depressing to continue;
11) I was trying to explain to my wife why we still have the electoral college, and I was really having trouble-- I know the Founding Fathers wanted to give rural states enough power to have some say and they wanted to promote a more stable two-party system, and the electoral votes make this possible, but it's gotten to the point where there are two Americas . . . and there are a lot more of us progressive city folk, who would like parks and good schools and clean air and water and green energy and multicultural tolerance and more Northern European style policy such as single payer healthcare and better family leave and help with college education and a progressive Supreme Court, and then there are these smaller states that are holding us hostage, and I'm not sure what they want-- and I don't think they know what they want either-- and I don't want to be stereotypical, so I'll refrain from speculating, but if there are any red state Trump supporters who read this blog (not a shot in hell) then please explain in the comments what policy you expected from Trump . . . anyway, we're getting to the point where we should be two separate economic entities, which would be nice, because the blue states are far less reliant on the federal government, and would do much better without the baggage of the red states-- who are incredibly thankless for the money we send to subsidize them;
12) some folks voted for Trump because he'd be tough on terrorism and ISIS, but I can't understand why people in rural America-- the least likely place for a terrorist attack-- are far more fearful of Muslims than the folks on the coasts, and some people voted for Trump because they see him as a bastion of law and order, a voice of reasonable justice wearing "the mantle of anger" amidst the gun violence, flood of immigrants, city riots and kowtowing to minority groups like Black Lives Matter . . . and while I don't agree with any of this, and think these people received their information from fake news on Facebook, at least it's a reason;
13) I'm not saying Trump is like Hitler . . . that would be hyperbolic, plus Hitler was organized, a compelling speaker, and Hitler actually had a plan of action-- joke stolen from David Cross-- but Hitler promised jobs, Hitler promised revenge for the deals that Germany had made with the world (The Treaty of Versailles) and Hitler was an intimidating bully who hated immigrants and promised to make Germany great again . . . those are just some interesting parallels, but I'm not comparing the two leaders because I don't want to get put on leave, like this teacher;
14) and so that's what it's come down to . . . the majority of the country, myself, included, can't believe what has happened, and many of us would have no problem leaving the red states to fend for themselves-- I would gladly vote to secede from the crap that's going to happen in the next 4-8 years . . . the red states can pollute themselves to hell, cut all the government services, privatize everything, dismantle the schools, ban gay marriage, make kids study Creationism, do lots of heroin, carry semi-automatic weapons everywhere, refuse to vaccinate, insult women and the disabled, deport immigrants, build walls and do whatever insane shit they want to do, with a spray-tanned game-show host as their beloved daddy-leader . . . just don't touch my America, because my America is Pretty Great . . . it could use improvements, but it's certainly never been better than this . . . so all I can hope for is that the political forces in my town and state can keep the political forces of Donald Trump and his ilk at bay, and maybe that's why we have the electoral college and why we are a loose federation of states . . . and readers who voted for Trump, perhaps you could explain yourselves in the comments, because you folks are an angry apocalyptic cipher to me . . . I still haven't gotten to have an actual conversation with a real Trump supporter, which makes me pretty sheltered-- I guess I live behind my own wall of elitist coastal intellectualism, which I've erected out of brain cells and books, but maybe someday soon some folks from Trump's America will make their way over my wall and explain things to me.
Will Success Go To My Head?
My editorial on charter schools was published in both the local paper (The Sentinel) and the regional paper (The Home News/Tribune) and some students told me their parents read it and agreed with my views . . . so the question is: will my successful foray into local activism go to my head? will I become a serious participant in local educational reform? will I start attending PTO and Board of Education meetings? will I continue to write editorials in an attempt to influence legislation? will I continue to fight the good fight? . . . or will I go back to recording psychedelic music with annoying monologues and make videos for them with stop-motion dry erase animation? . . . I would bet on the latter.
Campbell's Law and The Death and Life of the Great American School System
Diane Ravitch's book The Death and Life of the Great American School System asserts two ideas, and supports them with comprehensive detail: 1) a market system is fine if you want to create consumers, but it does not work for public schools-- as they are one of the last places where community, democracy, and local citizens can have an influence-- and 2) using testing as a measure of accountability for teachers and schools is illogical (she cites Campbell's law-- "the more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor") because it is essentially putting the cart before the horse; Ravitch speaks from a position of great perspective, she worked in the administrations of George Bush Sr., Clinton, and George W. and she is one of the most credible educational historians in America; book is something of a reflection on how she fell for some of these fads before she fully analyzed the evidence, and her change of heart is in notable opposition to President Obama's continuation of Bush's war on our education system . . . a must read if you have kids: ten charter schools out of a possible ten.
Bad Hair Night
Thursday night, minutes before I had to drive my kids to indoor soccer, I noticed some stray and unseemly gray hairs poking from the right side of my head, and I decided that I would trim them with my beard trimmer, but-- perhaps because I was in a rush-- I slipped . . . and cut a dent into my hair just above my right ear, and in my attempts to "even things out," I made the situation much, much worse, but then I felt obligated to make it equally as "even" on the other side of my head, so that at least my new style would be symmetrically bad . . . and in the end, I essentially gave myself a mullet (and a poor one, at that) and though I frantically tried to erase this by trimming randomly around the back of my head, I couldn't fix things and I had to take the kids to soccer and Catherine was at a meeting about charter schools, so I went to soccer looking like a lunatic, which the other parents found highly entertaining, and then when I got home, I was slated to go out for beers, and so I asked my wife if she would fix my hair first but she said, "No way, I'm exhausted, I'll do it tomorrow," and then she laughed at my misfortune and took a picture of the back of my head . . . but I was happy enough to be getting out on the town and so I said, "Who cares what I look like, it's not like I'm going out to pick-up girls," and she said, "Not that you could," and then, luckily (or unluckily for my students, who would have really enjoyed getting a look at my sorry head) we had a delayed opening due to snow and Catherine used a number 1 to shave away my remaining hair and make things look decent again.
Diane Ravitch Speaks About Education
REEP, KIPP and TFA Lecture Series from Jon Paul Estrada on Vimeo.
This Diane Ravitch lecture is rather long and dry (like Diane Ravitch's excellent and comprehensive book, The Life and Death of the Great American School System, which I summarize here) but she summarily refutes the claims of Governor Christie's favorite documentary, Waiting for Superman, and she exposes some of the myths behind data based teacher evaluations, charter schools, No Child Left Behind, unions, market driven school reform, and tenure . . . I highly recommend the book, but if you don't care enough about our nation's educational system to read an entire book-- which I completely understand, because it's almost Black Friday and you probably need to start reading the circulars-- then you can use this clip (she starts speaking ten minutes in) as a guide, albeit an ersatz one.
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