Wise Voices in CT About Education

I was teaching in NYC schools when No Child Left Behind avalanched into American education.  For those of us who treasure creativity, novelty, self-teaching by exploration and an eclectic education the principles behind NCLB were alarming.  Many teaching artists were both alarmed and wary of what it would mean for our work.  The law and the school system's policies that followed from it fundamentally changed how and what we taught.  And our revolutionary and transgressive roles in school were diminished.

It didn't take long before many of us turned our backs on the work.  We would have left anyway.  You can only work so long as an itinerant artist-educator.  At some point you long for focussed commitment -- either to your art or the teaching.  But even if I'd stayed longer, my analysis and critique of educational policy would have been disregarded.  I had no juice.  But the people I'm linking to do have juice.  One is the legendary Dr. James Comer, whose work I'd known of since the 1980's and the other is the Superintendent of East Lyme, CT Schools, Dr. James Lombardo, interviewed yesterday on WNPR-FM's Where We Live.  Lombardo wrote to Governor Malloy, Education Commissioner Pryor and others in state government enumerating just how wrong the "reform" initiatives the state is pursuing are and the false premises that led to them.

I hope these voices are part of a tide being turned.  It may be too late for much of public education, but perhaps that's the point.  I sometimes wonder if urban public education has become like early 20th settlement work.  Upper class women, prior to their coming out balls that signified their ascension into society would work with The Poor.  They performed charity work that by no means upended the systemic order of things.  The status remained quo.

Anyway, the links:

 New Haven Independent interview the Dr. Comer, and

WNPR.org story on Dr. Lombardo's letter to Malloy et al.

It's Hard to be Poor, Part II

My friend, B, who is probably reading this, told me this story.  It resonated because I've had a similar experience.  My takeaway was that if you haven't lived most of your life or your entire life poor, then the how and why of getting there is complex, often involving some debilitating mental or physical illness, drug or alcohol abuse, headbangingly bad decision-making, a narcissism and neediness which exponentially increases as your natural assets decrease (some money, a job, good looks or merely one's youth, a family member or friend who unconditionally loves you, etc.).

B is living in the south for now, inhabiting the home of her deceased mother.  Like a banquet where none of the guests show up, the house is way, way to big for one person to live in and to manage.  In a mixture of empathy and practicality she allowed a woman, I'll call her Q, to move in.  In exchange for housing Q was to serve as an assistant and keep an eye on the house when B was out of town.

It worked for a while, and then it didn't when Q started stealing money from B's wallet and B caught her red-handed.  Understandably, B issued an ultimatum:  Get out.  Q refused perhaps knowing that state law was on her side, perhaps not.  My observation is that people like Q don't know the law, they know survival.  And they will do anything, ignore anything, and pretend anything to hold on to whatever it is that staves off extinction.  And so Q decided she was going to stay.  And B, faced with the month's long legal proceeding before eviction is allowed, tried an approach akin to detoxification, i.e., talking Q into moving in with a family member.  After all, Q had a brother, a sister, a child living in the same neighborhood.  But Q refused that and any alternatives, and B, realizing that as dysfunctional as families can sometimes be, by the time you have alienated your siblings and offspring, you really have reached the end of the line.

So B drove Q to the local shelter, even paying the $25 administrative processing fee (god bless the State!) to get her in.  And Q told the shelter that she would only need the assistance for 2-3 weeks because as far as she was concerned, B would settle down and let her back in.  Which wasn't true, of course, but what she had to believe as she watched B's car leaving her behind.

It's Hard to be Poor, Part I

Lately there have been a few news stories about Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty now that it have reached its 50th milestone.  Until the moment I decided to write that sentence, it had never dawned on me that its advent coincides with Black History Month.  The convergence may be wholly accidental but it underscores something I've observed for a long time, that poverty and African-American-ness are used interchangeably as synonyms.

But, instead of exploring that today -- don't have the chops for a long, spit-hurling screed -- I'll tell two stories.  One involves me; the other, a friend:

I was in New York a few days ago.  As is true of my recent visits they are brief, specific and about business.  The day wasn't bitter cold but cold enough, so I was bundled up with my ersatz hunter's cap, mile-long scarf, big-collared winter jacket, and old Timberlands.  Perfect for the weather and normal for me.  As far as I was concerned, I didn't look any different that day than usual.  I should also mention that if it's not overcast I wear shades outdoors year-round; you can't see me seeing you.  That day, for whatever reason(s), people broke through my barriers -- the shades, the bundling -- and talked to me.  I was walking through the long station that is Courthouse Square.  Years ago you'd leave Grand Central on the 7 heading east, cross the East River, get a paper transfer, walk down a rickety steel and wood staircase, turn a corner and then present your transfer at the turnstiles for the G train.  It was a pain in the ass to execute and if you didn't do it often, you'd wind up wandering up and down the street looking for the subway entrance.  Some time (probably after I left the city) it all got connected and now you can transfer, under protection of a glass pavilion, between the 7 and the G which connect Manhattan, Queens and North Brooklyn.

I was heading back to Grand Central, glad that the meeting had gone well and was brief.  While marvelling (once again) about the ease of transfer, I was thinking that I could catch one of many trains before rush hour, so wasn't in any particular hurry.  Perhaps I was in a good mood, perhaps pleased with myself.  Either way I was free and heading home.  Next thing I know a skinny kid in a hoodie covered by a light jacket asks me if I can get him something to eat.

And I say, as I have in the past, would you like me to buy you a meal?  And he nods yes and I crook my head to indicate that I'll follow him and up the escalator, outside the station, around the corner, and across the street (underneath the BQE) we go.  Not a word.  We stop at the corner.  There's a bodega in front of us and a diner to our right.  He enters the bodega and goes through the store, returning to the counter with a can of iced tea.  I thought you wanted something to eat?  I didn't see where.  I'm struck by his candor and lack of greed.  This kid -- maybe 14 -- is hungry.  Hungry.  Grey from malnutrition and cold.  You don't hang out in a heatless pavilion in February begging for food if you don't have to.  We go outside.  I point to the diner.  There?  I point.  He's ambivalent.  He either can't see it because he needs glasses, or he doesn't want to go there because he has never in his life sat down and ordered from a menu, or he can't read.  Or all three.

The intersection before us gathers like Five Points.  We cross two streets to another bodega.  Almost every corner store worth its salt has a deli counter.  Why the first one we went into didn't is a mystery.  But this one does and he orders a Philly cheese steak.  I stand aside as he luxuriates in the power of having and exercising choice.  The clerk bags the sandwich and offers it to me because I'm the one with the wallet open.  I turn to the boy; for a moment the clerk is confused, but I wait for him to figure it out.  The boy steps up and the clerk gives him his food.  The boy thanks me and because of necessity and because when you're poor you learn to abdicate your dignity quickly and often he asks, in front of everyone, the important ask, the one for train fare to get home.  Oh.  Sure.  I say, handing him a few bills.  Then I leave.

Rumor Has It

... that it's Black History Month.  I forgot.  An easy thing to do when you're as untethered to any institution as I am right now (discounting the institution of marriage which knows no Black or White, or any Wrong or Right.)  You know I'm kiddin' about marriage, right?

Anyway, I finally copped on to the fact that it was time for our annual and peculiarly American malady, Racial Reaction Formation, when I started to read fascinating longform pieces that dealt with the history of 20th century American race relations in its many manifestations.  It's much on my mind as I prepare myself to enter what has become Ground Zero in American inequality, the nation's public schools.

Here's a link to Part I of Tanner Colby's multipart piece in Slate, The Massive Liberal Failure on Race, and yes, the title sounds like the clickbait it's supposed to be.  But, you know what?  I largely agree with what he's written.

A Gaggle of Geese, A Year of Elegies

Whatever I was determined to write about last night when I decided to write at all has passed through my mind faster than the V of geese on their way north.  (Perhaps to escape an unusually cold Atlanta?)  What remains is evidence of getting older, not the least of which is these bouts of forgetting.  In answer to someone who asked if I used to dance I started talking about salsa -- which I love and haven't danced since my first years here -- and it's cousin, mambo, and for the life of me I couldn't remember what to call it except that it started with an m.  This was mambo I was struggling to recall.  The passion for which caused me to get up at the crack 'o dawn each and every Saturday for years and take the 2 or 3 to Harlem, exiting at the 135th Street station and then around the corner to the legendary Y, exchange street shoes for dance shoes and dancing my ass off.  In studios, on gym floors.  In clubs.  And every once in a while on the street.  I needed mambo like peanut butter needs jelly.  And yet I couldn't recall the word.

Moving on.  It will be that way, for the immediate future and perhaps even for the future future.  (Other than in grammar there is no such thing as the future perfect.)  I have never been a fantasist (or at least don't consider myself one) but since I'm not going to remember things, might as well make them up, eh?  Or, at least try to remember the broad strokes of a life lived so long that I can point to a 40 year old crown in my mouth that now makes contact with a 24 hour crown, both of which better last me forever.

A year of elegies, I call this.  My friend, Fred, is dying.  He, who I had designated as the executor of my will 20 years ago, will not live long enough to do me the honor.  He's leaving before me, a result of Stage 3B colon cancer diagnosed 7 long years ago.  He, and any honest medical provider would tell you the same, should not be alive in 2014.  But he is and it has been grueling, magnificent, humbling, lonely, relentless, stupid, exhausting, infuriating, and tiring all at once.  Throughout most of the odyssey he kept a journal, the Cancer Diaries, which was published as a book by Skyhorse Publishing.  Not everyone, with or without cancer, can read it.  Much of it is too raw, too painful, too indicative of a fate from a disease that seems to say tag! you're it!  And we are superstitious creatures wondering if I read this will I get cancer, too?  But if you want to know some of what it's like to fight to live through searing pain and depression and hopelessness -- well, this may be the ticket.  Anyone who knows Fred knows he is one tough motherfucker and if you've been his friend or colleague for more than a minute, chances are you've been on the receiving end of his toughness.  But, he is also one of the most honorable and loving people I know.

As anyone who's gone through this with a friend or family member, there is dying and there is dying.    Fred's in the former stage, not the latter.  Which means that the, if not quite zest, but will to live is very strong.  Very strong.  He and many others will swim up from, literally, the depths of despair towards any and every kind of ameliorative treatment so that one more day -- even if it's flat on your back poised for the visitation of the roiling pain that tumors poaching your life force is -- of precious life.  So, we go on.  A drug here.  An definitive answer there.  A nap.  

There are two processes, excepting c-sections and suicide, that take their own damn time:  birth and death.  Make plans if you want to, but don't expect them to be followed according to your wishes.  The body will do what it wants to do.  We must make the most of time.