A Modest Proposal for Improving American Public Education

Let's return to the days of of de facto or de jure sexual segregation in employment.  Let's close the doors to careers in medicine, law, science and engineering, business, elective office, finance and academia.  Preserve those fields for men and men only.  And where do you think all those ambitious, brilliant, passionate, innovative, driven, visionary women will go to make their mark?  The Post Office.  Nope.  Into public education.  Problem solved.

One of the hallmarks of my upbringing was that I was raised in a university town during a time when it was all too common for wives to put their husbands through school.  Many of those wives, after having obtained their bachelor's entered teaching, and we kids in the 1960's and 1970's were the beneficiaries of these smart, often brilliant, women supporting their families.  By the time I entered college that compact was eroding as more women opted for pursuit of advanced degrees in higher-status and more lucrative professions. 

I liken this change to the documented unintended consequences of racial desegregation for African-Americans -- given choices ambitious and affluent blacks left their communities leaving the poor and unemployable behind.  (And yes, I know I'm collapsing a complex phenomena, but allow me this concision.  My argument is also culturally-specific to the United States.  In Ireland, for instance, the expansion of opportunity probably meant that fewer gifted men and women trained for the religious vocations.)  In cities that led to what's described as a permanent underclass -- the very object of much of the anguish and frustration that accompanies school reform.

The success of post-WW II feminism (and increasing literacy) catalyzed analogous results.  Many (not all) gifted college-educated women, given opportunities to pursue other professions ignored elementary and secondary education.  In my grandmother's time teaching and teachers were respected and revered.  (The quartet of high-status occupations pre-segregation?  Doctor, lawyer, teacher, preacher.)  In our current time other professionals condescend to "those who teach" and too often, teachers, the training programs that produce them, and the school systems that hire teachers don't do themselves any favors.  Too many students attend and sustain Schools of Education where the admissions and competency standards are too low.  Too many unions have resisted squarely addressing some of the most troubling byproducts of guild protection such as job tenure for the incompetent.  And too few school systems have not created advancement pathways that reward teachers who want to stay in the classroom yet need more challenges.

So many ways to address this topic.  Maybe I'll do a post called"13 Ways to Look At American Public Education".  But for today I'm serious, what will it take to restore a universal sense of mission in American education?  And who should be leading the charge?


 

I Saw Michelle Obama and You Dinnit (Minny Minny BooBoo)

Way, way way back when I went to college (for the second time) at the University of Iowa (not my alma mater, but a holding pen while I had a slo-mo nervous breakdown) I had a great job, perhaps one of the best jobs of my life.  I was part of a group called the Commission for Alternative Programming (CAP), founded by a couple of visionary friends, Dave Olive and Jim Tade, who were multimedia artists long before the phrase had air quotes.  (I remember back in 1974 Olive asked me if I could rap [which I couldn't and still can't].  I looked at him for a beat and said, "I just delivered the Gettysburg Address."  Asked and answered.)

Anyway, CAP produced concerts at the University and within a couple of years I had helped present Keith Jarrett, Pharaoh Sanders, David Bromberg, McCoy Tyner and others.)  After a while what with all the sound checks, the missing luggage, the hotel accomodations and the groupies you're just too busy getting the show up to be in awe.  The gene of sangfroid in the presence of fame or greatness was seeded for me during those days; it got catalyzed in the 1990's when I was writing for opera and musical theatre.  (But that's a story for another day.)

A few days ago when Susie V. told me that she had an extra ticket to hear Michelle Obama speak at a fundraiser for Dick Blumenthal in Stamford my first thought was "Naaaah, do I really want to go?"  Then I have a vision of Husband No. 1 screaming in my ear like a drill sergeant who can't find his Preparation H:  You never go anywhere except to the bathroom!?"!+!$^@!  I'll show him, I huffed, and told Susie V. yes, even though it meant that it was going on 2 weeks where I had to be somewhere or be with somebodies instead of having an unscheduled and solitudinous (get used to that word because you are going to see it A Lot) day here at home.  I told Lilli that I was going to see Michelle Obama, and in that lovely way of children she asked, "Can I go, too?"  I told her I'd tell Michelle Obama hi for her and that was enough.

We arrive in Stamford on Monday morning.  I see a line snaking around the block, thinking, these folks are too well-heeled to be applying for food stamps.  (An overactive imagination makes you stupid.)  We park and join the line.  It slithers.  We get into the Palace Theater.  With a little VIP treatment we get seated.  We wait having been warned by someone who's "done this before" that the Secret Service observes the crowd for an hour.  Someone (god bless 'em) has programmed great music over the PA system.  I swear I'm listening to Charlie Parker.  Susie leaves to say hello to a few of the thousands of politicos she knows.  I lean over the balcony looking at, not for, people from New Haven.  I'm hoping "In a Sentimental Mood" is up next.

It's the usual set up:  the disembodied voice thanks us for our patience, the pre-introductions are done by campaign workers with circles under their eyes, the beneficiary speaks, and then the star appears.  We stand in unison and give her a standing ovation and sit down to be charmed.  After all, this is what we came for, right?


Michelle Obama is a pro who knows what her job is and does it.  She came to Connecticut to buck up the troops which she did with wit, panache and efficiency.  There is something in her voice which belies an attractive warmth that can seduce you into thinking she could easily be your BFF.  But her job that morning was to "carry water" for her husband, the administration, and Democratic candidates nationwide all under the guise of merely being the Mom-in-Chief and The Wife.  And I thought to myself:  I hope this isn't all there is (for her) because this woman is being wasted.  Wasted.

Overheard on the way to Grand Central

I'm riding the 7:35 Saturday morning on my way to Brooklyn.  Surrounded by a gaggle of girlfriends, nurses, I think, on their way to Manhattan to play.  Talking about work, life, sick parents.  One describes her father's last days in a hospice and how, after one visit, she greeted an acquaintance, another patient.  Have a nice weeked, she told him, or words to that effect.  And he says:

So little time.
So much pain.

Are There Third Acts in American Life?

Aaah, middle age.  You meet yourself coming and going.  I'd always heard that age begat wisdom, but what I wasn't prepared for was the notion that it also begats (pardon my conjugation) obsolescence.  By this time of life hopefully you know what you're good at and what you're very good at.  For instance, I am very good (if I may say so myself) at not cooking for my family.  Here's a typical dialogue that happens every year around a major feast:

Them:  So.  What'll we do for (insert your favorite holiday)?

Me:  Hey, I got an idea!  I'll cook.

Them:  Gaaaargh!!!(not an exact translation).  Oh no.  Oh HELL no!!!!!  And then the sound of feet big and small running upstairs to throw themselves out a window.

And that's that.  Each year I'm spared doing something I really don't want to do anyway.  But what of those things I do do well and want to do?  And what of the aforementioned set of things I do do well and want to do can I still be paid for?

That's where  the obsolescence comes in.  Those who know me well have heard me say that there are only two things I wanted to be in life -- a mother and a writer.  And I am.  But in my late 30's another calling emerged, one that is a tributary of mothering (at least for me), and that was teaching.  I became a teacher -- of writing primarily, but not exclusively.  I worked for many organizations, one of the best was Teachers & Writers Collaborative; it has a storied and sterling history in New York's public schools.  I taught (and played) with children and teachers all over the city (except Staten Island).  What an education that was.  A dispatch for another day when I get myself worked up over public education.  (I can feel it coming on.  Don't get me started on No Child Left Behind or Michael Bloomberg or, pause for steam to come out of my ears, Diane Ravitch, who has finally "seen the light".)  But, I digress ...

As I was saying, I taught for many years, some of them when Daughter No. 1 was in high school and I recall having a conversation with Bob Lubetsky, former principal of her alma mater, City-As-School High School.  I confessed that I'd been struggling with the need to remain a writer and the desire to teach mathematics.  I'm still struggling with it more than 15 years later.  (My experience with teaching is that it draws from the same well as writing.  The more I taught, the less I wrote.)

Over the years I've trained myself to accommodate my ambivalence, even ignore it and take the next step.  Today I'm headed over to Southern Connecticut State University for their Graduate School Open House.  I'll probably be mistaken for an adjunct faculty member but I'm going as a prospective student and I'll ask what it would take for someone who got her bachelor's degree in 1980 to get a master's in Mathematics.  I decided I want to teach math although I may be 60 years old before I'm fully qualified to do so.  From this distance it seems like folly if the point is to get a job.  It's not, though, is it?  The point is to answer yet another call.  That never gets old, even if I do.

On New Haven

Tim Holahan, a man with long roots in this city recently published a brilliant essay in The New Haven Independent about the city.  He views it through the prism of "The Wire".

Health Insurance or Russian Roulette for the Self-Employed

It's a beautiful Saturday morning and before I have my next attack of housekeeping I want to talk about getting old(er).  Here are a few things I don't understand and probably never will:

Lindsay Lohan.  Who is she and why should I care?  (I do get Paris Hilton.  I see her as this era's Edie Sedgwick, with better rehab options and without the Mayflower cred.)

Or Lady Gaga.  Ditto.

Or why Twitter matters.  (The Japanese invented haiku and any talkative 4 year old is an exemplar of non-consequential chatter, so why do I need Twitter?)

Or paying the equivalent of a house note for health insurance and still having a deductible so high that it's as if I weren't paying insurance at all.  (Every few months I get the equivalent of an F-bomb of a bill from some physician's practice, or some lab for work that was done long ago.  Sigh.)  When people are diagnosed with a life-threatening or terminal illness one of the questions that caroms through the mind is:  What did I do?  Could I have prevented this if only I did X or Y?  Will people add:  "What if I had affordable health insurance?  Maybe this wouldn't have happened."

As bad as it is to pay for health insurance out of pocket what's worse is not having it at all.  Years ago Husband No. 1 was doing a kitchen for a client on Long Island.  He didn't like the client, and he didn't like the kitchen.  One Saturday he drove there from Brooklyn, against his will or better judgment, to work on the job.  From what I've gathered he was both mad and bored.  Add distracted to the mix along with a running table saw and voila, he makes a nice 45 degree slice through the fingers of his left hand.  He and the carpenter he was working with pick up his fingers.  (Contractor's Rule No. 1:  clean up your job site when you are done for the day.)  Luckily, the next door neighbor was an EMT.  He wraps what was a hand up and Husband No. 1 is helicoptered to a Long Island Hospital.  The surgeons were thrilled to see him.  They get so many motorcyle accident middle-aged hot dogs that they're bored piecing those fools back together.  Here was something exciting!  Fingers to be reattached so that the patient can make a fist and hold a pencil.  Wooo-Hoo!!

After some very good surgery and weekly visits to a very good physical therapist HN1 regained almost full use of his hand.  (Funny gross out moment:  While tissue and bone are growing the fingers have to be kept straight.  To do this pins the diameter of paperclips are inserted in each finger.  One day buttoning his shirt cuff I accidentally caught one of the pins and pulled it out.  By the time you can pull a clean pin out the finger's close to healing, but still ...  I wished then he liked polo shirts half as much as he did button-downs.)

Re-attaching HN1's fingers qualifies as a success story you'd think.  A man can continue his work and he won't scare the little children, what could be better than that?  Except that this EMTing, and helicoptering and surgery and PT was done on a man who did not have a lick of health insurance.  So not only was he left with having to go back to Long Island to clean up all that blood in the client's kitchen (which the thought of still makes me laugh as in Annals in the History of Renovations From Hell) but we had our own metaphorical blood to clean up which was a $35,000 and counting bill.

Lesson learned.

There are so many things I'd love to be doing during my favorite season, and shopping around for health insurance is not one of them but given the choice between something we can afford (at least until 2014) and sounding like an old crank because I don't understand the aforementioned phenomena, well guess what I'll be doing?