"Down with the struggle" (a rambly education post)

It is my considered opinion that most of the so-called school reform agenda is based on falsehoods and designed to maximize profits for its corporate engineers by privatizing education. To do that, they have had to create a narrative that schools are failing, which is also largely false.

But there still is an achievement gap, and there are major problems in the public schools. I don't live in a bubble, and I am not myself a liar, so I won't deny that. I just don't think the corporate reform agenda is the way to fix anything.

Many of my students are several grade levels behind in reading, and their writing is atrocious. Not just the students in special ed., but many others as well.

My grandma asked me the other day what the problem was, and I answered simply: poverty.

She looked at me quizzically, probably thinking of the years she spent summers sleeping on a fruit crate outdoors while her parents picked fruit.

"Imagine," I started.

There is one book in a household per 300 children living in poverty.

Imagine working full time and figuring out how to get your kid to 3 hour a day preschool. Daycare is an easier option, so many kids in poverty start school with little literacy awareness at all.

Now that they're in school, though, what happens if they're sick? If they don't have insurance, they likely don't get treatment unless it's an emergency, so they either miss school or attend sick. Same thing if they have a toothache. Can you concentrate when you have a toothache? Imagine how much they are learning under those circumstances. Imagine not being able to afford your asthma medicine or allergy medicine.

Imagine that the two free meals we feed them at school are the only regular, nutritious food they can count on. And imagine they're five minutes late and miss breakfast. Can you concentrate when you're hungry?

How loud is your house? Your neighborhood? In my years of teaching, my kids report hearing arguments, sirens, gunfire... One kid slept in a room with his colicky infant brother, and was awake almost all night every night. Can you learn when you're tired?

And imagine how hard it is just to get to school! If your neighborhood school is across a freeway overpass, a busy thoroughfare, or a rough neighborhood, your parents may not allow you to walk, even if it's within a mile or so (and with the school closings happening so rampantly, it will often be more than a mile). So what if your parents didn't have money for gas? What if the car needs repair? What if the family has one car and Dad needed it to go to work?

Imagine that your dad lost his job, so you need to stay with someone for a while, but it's in a different district. You wear out your welcome there, so you stay with friends in another city. Your parents always enroll you in school, but it's in a different textbook, a different teaching style, and it takes the schools a while to transfer your records, so you don't get the services you need. Imagine trying to learn when by eleventh grade, you'd already attended four high schools.

Imagine that your little brother is sick, but Mom will lose her job if she takes even one more day off, so she asks you to stay home with him.

Imagine your mom doesn't speak English, so she needs you to translate at the welfare office, the doctor, the utility company, your little brother's school, most of which have to be scheduled during your school hours.

I don't even think that's an exhaustive list, but it'll do for now. And I know what some people will say: they shouldn't have all those kids, then. They should learn to speak English. They should get a job.

Whatever. You know what? I've been damn lucky, and I didn't have more kids than I could afford, I have a job, and I was born speaking the language. Some of those things I worked hard for, and others I didn't. Some of them were choices and some weren't.

If you think those are the right choices, though, you have to help people make them. Endorse sex education. Make birth control affordable and available. Keep abortion legal and accessible.

End corporate tax loopholes, end the Bush tax cuts, make it harder for companies to profit at the expense of U.S. citizens by making huge profits but using strategies to make it look like their money was made offshore. Incentivize small business, incentivize factories on American soil, support unions, buy products made in America, stimulate job growth, forgive student loan debt... Find ways to get jobs for those who want them. Raise the minimum wage so that it actually supports a minimum standard of living.

And for the love of God, stop cutting education funds. If you want people to learn English, which for the parents of some of my students is a third or fourth language, then don't kill adult education programs!

In the meantime, while public schools aren't perfect, and society isn't perfect, there is much being done that is an attempt to mitigate the effects of poverty. The free lunches and breakfasts we serve on campus help. The Affordable Care Act is going to help.

And there are things that hurt. Closing neighborhood schools hurts.

And the worst news is, Even if you don't give two shits about the poor, even if you see them as crack-headed derelicts sucking at the welfare teat, this will affect you. These kids will grow up and either they will get jobs, or they will commit crimes. They will contribute to their communities and society at large, or they won't. And if they don't-- if all of them get left behind-- what kind of world will this ultimately be? Of course there will always be the rich kids with their SAT tutors. Presumably there will be no shortage of doctors and lawyers and investment bankers. And middle class kids like mine will probably be fine. And then there will be the bootstraps kids, many of them my students, who will succeed regardless of their circumstances. But if we don't lend a hand to the ones who need the hand, we will have, at best, a generations of kids who are well-suited to work at Wal-Mart (incidentally, one of the corporate moneybags behind Ed reform). They will be low-skilled workers, and Wal-Mart will pay them minimum wage, and as many as 80% of Wal-Mart employees use food stamps. So if you're not into subsidizing people's lives via your taxes, you may at least want to make a decision as to on which end of their lives it is better spent.

By the way, Wal-Mart made $15 billion in pure profit last year. You think they could handle a minimum wage hike?


I think back to Grandma again. I know that as a married couple with five kids, she and my grandpa didn't have a lot of money. My dad tells, me, I think without exaggeration, of having debt collectors at the front door, the back door, and on the phone. But there were differences as well from the kind of poverty my students experience: my grandpa had a union job. My grandma worked. They were homeowners. Their neighborhood was solidly middle class, although it has slid somewhat downhill since. Their kids walked to school, but not through the ghetto. It's hard to consider yourself to have been poor, then to hear that other people's kids can't succeed because of poverty, when your own kids did succeed. They are literate, they have jobs, they own homes.

My students invented a new game the other day. It's called "You don't know about the struggle." They begin with that phrase, then add, "I'm so down with the struggle," and make a hyperbolic statement about suffering from poverty. "I'm so down with the struggle," one said, "we had to eat sandwiches that were just two pieces of bread with ice cubes in the middle." "You don't know about the struggle," the other replied." "I'm so down with the struggle, I didn't even have the bread!" A third kid chimed in, "I'm so down with the struggle, my whole apartment has cockroaches." We all laughed, because he didn't get it. The game isn't about telling the truth about the struggle. The truth is too sad.

Happy fifth birthday, Azadeh Finn!

Feels like the first time: on seeing Star Wars for the first time in three decades*

One of the most interesting things about Star Wars is the completeness of its place in the culture. If you proclaim yourself a movie buff but admit you haven't seen Goodfellas, people will be shocked. But Star Wars is different: you don't have to be a movie lover. People will be shocked to learn you haven't seen it if you are within three or four generations of age, grew up in a first-world country, and don't have some significant disability. It is referenced in songs, tv shows, other movies... I haven't been keeping track, but I'd be surprised to learn that a month of my life has gone by without hearing one of the following: "I am your father," "these are not the droids you are looking for," "use the force," "the force is strong in this one," "I find your lack of faith disturbing," and a few choice others.

I recognize popular costumes, debates, and almost all the characters. What I could not have done, before re-watching it, was tell you the plot. Honestly, I had no idea what the thing was about. And it was a revelation! There were many things I was pleased and surprised to discover.

First, and perhaps best of all the surprises, was Princess Leia. I assumed she was some damsel in distress they managed to run into and she tagged along. Quite the contrary! She was working for the rebel alliance while Luke was still a whiny teenager stuck at home with his uncle. She takes the lead several times, dismissing the macho rogue Han Solo as useless, and she actually endures some form of torture when pressed to give up the location of the rebel base. She's a badass, not a damsel in distress at all.

Obi-Wan Kenobi and Ben Kenobi are the same person. I did not know that.

Darth Vader is not the big boss man in that film. It's Grand Moff Tarking. (I enjoyed irritating my husband by pretending to think his name was Grandma Pftarkington.) Of course, by the end, Grandma is dead, so things will change for the next film.

Alec Guiness as Obi-wan is not the scene-chewer the Star Wars nerds would have you believe. I can't tell you how many times someone has quoted the Jedi Mind Trick scene ("these are not the droids you are looking for") and done a deep stare, a hypnotist-at-the-fair voice, and a big hand gesture. In the actual scene, it's very subtle. He looks relaxed and calm -- is even smiling a bit -- and says it very casually. It's much more effective, actually, as a scene, than people who over-act it when quoting.

[Side rant: now that I think about it, that's frequently true. Think of how people quote Bogart in Casablanca. They have to do this over-the-top Bogey impression, when most of those famous lines ("Here's looking at you, kid") are actually relatively understated.

Luke is a whiny kid when the movie starts. It makes sense, because the story is a total hero's journey (I'm actually been teaching that this week, so it's fresh in my mind), and it fits the profile of the reluctant hero, but you never see that bit in pop culture. You always see him flying some spaceship or having a light saber fight. In the beginning, though, he's all, "aw, man, I don't wanna do my chores! Gee whiz, uncle."

Darth Vader does stuff. Again, the few things you see of him in pop culture are usually him standing, breathing, and giving orders. But at one point in this film, he's jumped into his own fighter jet thing and is chasing down the rebels, shooting at them. And when he's done with everybody else, he's chasing down Luke, which adds a good deal of dramatic irony and tension, as everyone now knows he's Luke's father.

[Note: this kid didn't know, and I love this video.]

Anyway, since all I remember of Return of the Jedi is Ewoks and some sort of really fast bicycle-things they fly through the trees, and all I remember of The Empire Strikes Back is stormtroopers marching, and all I can think of pop-culture-wise are Leia in the gold bikini from the cantina scene, the actual light saber fight, and Yoda, I'm quite looking forward to watching the next two movies! I will probably never re-watch episodes 1, 2, and 3 (I think I may have only seen 1 and 2 anyway), because that damned racist kangaroo got on my nerves.


*Three decades and change, actually. I spoke to my mom tonight, and she says we went to the theater to see The Empire Strikes Back when I was four, and we all enjoyed it so much we found a showing of A New Hope (back then, we just called it Star Wars) shortly thereafter. That was 1980, and that was the last time I saw those two movies. I saw Return of the Jedi when it came out in 1983.

Shady dealings in SCUSD

Okay, here's the Cliff's Notes version of what is going on in our school district, and a little history. It's still pretty long, but there's a lot to cover. For the record, although I'm a high school teacher, we're not really affected by this move. And although I'm a parent, my neighborhood schools are unaffected. I basically don't have a horse in this race. But I'm not objective: this pisses me right off.

Eli Broad is a bajillionaire who wants his hands in education, so he created "The Broad Academy," which trains non-education business guys to be school superintendents.


They have this guide that outlines their policies for privatizing education (i.e. turning public schools into charter schools).

Their sort of signature method is this:
1.  Create "churn" or chaos and disruption in the district.
2. Cite budget problems and declining enrollment as a reason to close schools.
3. Turn the closed sites into charters.

There's some subtly evil stuff like creating that "churn," then telling parents "Aren't you tired of the churn? At least a charter school will allow some stability."

And there's a marked propensity for hanging the school closures on a flimsy reason, then changing the reason at a moment's notice if it's questioned. The numbers they use are almost always pulled from thin air.

They generally affect poor and minority neighborhoods because the parents in the other kinds of neighborhoods are more likely to make a stink.

In the meantime, they write laws that say things like "if a school site is closed and a charter wants to open there, you have to say yes," or how if a small group of parents wants to "take over" a school (i.e. have it closed down and given to a charter operator), they can, and then give the laws to some politician to get them passed.

And they put money into school board campaigns to elect their candidates.

And on a larger scale, they make movies about how charter schools and "parent trigger" laws are the only way to save education, which is a nightmare (according to their carefully selected information, which ignores a lot of data and appeals to "gut feeling").

So what happened in Sacramento?

Our Broad-Academy-trained superintendent has created chaos for the last few years (several fights with the union over furloughs, calendar, massive over-estimating pink slip numbers, creating "priority schools" which moves teachers around, etc.).

The last school board member was appointed, not elected.

A "chief" of the superintendent's goes on maternity leave. They make a temporary hire of a guy who ran a charter school.

The school board announced that they were closing 11 schools, almost all in low-income neighborhoods, and that they would vote to close them all as a block, not negotiate over individual schools. There would be several public meetings over a few weeks, and the final vote would be in February (five weeks after the announcement). They cited declining enrollment as the reason, and said that many buildings were "underutilized." (No "stakeholders" like parents or teachers were consulted.)

People questioned the numbers, particularly given a few glaring inconsistencies. For example, one school they said was "underutilized" had plans to get portables in order to have enough room for the kids they had. Other schools had been scrutinized for upgrades and in the district's own report were sized differently than in the closure report.

Parents made a stink about a few of the schools, and two were taken out of the initial vote.

Parents made a stink about three more, and they were taken out of the vote, leaving seven schools to be voted on for closure.

4 members of the school board, including the appointed one, voted to close the seven schools.

As you might imagine, charter school operators are already eyeing the sites, and parents are being assured that there will still be a neighborhood school to attend.

Of course, closing all seven schools is only estimated to save the district about $2.5 million, and if 450 students dis-enroll from the public schools to attend charters, the district's funding will go down by $2.5 million. So any savings will be completely lost.

Among other shady things, the local newspaper, which has been falling all over itself to praise the district's action, has financial ties to the "reform" movement which includes privatization.

This is a losing situation for families, mostly. Many will lose a neighborhood school that they were able to walk to, or that served as a community hub.

It's a losing proposition for teachers, too: the schools that the kids will be moved to are all "priority" schools, which in this district means that the teachers there are "skipped" for pink-slipping purposes. If a larger number of teachers are at those sites, a larger percentage of teachers at other sites are likely to be laid off. Last year, it went all the way to teachers with nine years' service to the district. This year it could go further. A former student of mine remarked that maybe this wasn't the time to go into teaching. Maybe she's right.

It's also idiotic, in many ways, for the district as a whole (although not for the superintendent, who is working in the best interests of privatization, not of the schools): they spent money on things like smart boards at the sites that will be closed, and they have no intention of having them moved to the new sites. It's a very expensive gift to the future charters.

But perhaps the real kicker is this: the district is not really facing a financial crisis. Governor Brown's proposal (not yet passed) would increase funding to our district by $12.1 million next year and $18.7 the year after.

Long story short, education stands to be very profitable via contracts with testing companies, construction of new buildings, contracts with software companies, etc. And as long as all these goddamn unions are in the way, that big pot of state and federal money is hard to get at. So the "reform movement" people have to change laws, train a cadre of superintendents to destabilize education from the inside, buy the media so they can spin the story their way, and then open charters to get the kids enrolled. It seems like a lot of work, but apparently it's worth it, because they're doing it in Chicago, they're doing it in New York, they're doing it in LA, and they're doing it here.

Further reading:

Local journalist Cosmo Garvin does some good writing on the topic here and here.

This is Valerie Strauss of the Washington Post writing about why charters are good business.

This explains some things about how the exact same thing went down in Chicago.

Charter schools and "disaster capitalism."

This one explains how the Broad Academy got its hands on Chicago schools.

More on the Broad Foundation.