Just Checking In

By desire and habit I lead A Very Boring Life. I seldom want to go anywhere, particularly at times like these when it is about 300 degrees Fahrenheit with 1000% humidity and one leg is much larger than the other because it is swollen in all its plantar fasciitis glory. Extreme heat and humidity exacerbate it; as do long periods of sitting, such as on a train to Philly or New York.  So today, here I am with the throbbing log I call my leg and a picture to prove I left the house:

That is a shot of the the Amtrak station in Philly last Sunday morning on my way out of town after having gone to Scribe Video Center's premiere of The Great Migration, a documentary on what I learned is was the first wave (1916 - 1930) of the African-American migration northward.  Some of you may know that when I decided to leave Brooklyn my first choice was Philly, which inexplicably I've always loved.  For the first time since settling in New Haven I wished I had.  There is something about the people there I just like.  Challenged, but not passive or defeated.

Granted, love letters to a city you've only spent a night or two in can be naive, but having followed the outrage du jour here in New Haven I despair of the racial tribalism which so distorts our local politics.  Lately it has been the controversy over Corey Menafee's breaking of a stained-glass window in a Yale dining hall, then no doubt being strong-armed by Yale to resign or be fired, then becoming the darling of left-leaning activists who, again no doubt, pointed out Yale's hypocrisy alluding to years' long under-the-rug-sweeping of a scion's or a prominent WASP's behavior but scarcely admitting to Mr. Menafee's wrongdoing (even if he himself admits it) and then his plight becoming the latest proxy for the rolling race/class, union/administration, town/gown shitshow that always accompanies a power and resource struggle within a closed system.  I've ceased to see these conflicts -- Menafee's job, re-naming Calhoun College, what Master Christakis said  -- as efforts to overturn oppression and class privilege, and come to see them as dominance battles in an institution that needs reform (as all institutions do) and yet, if one remains affiliated with it by remaining a student there bestows -- by intention and design -- incredible advantage in the marketplace.

I grew up in a university town and the lives of people on a 2-year or 4-year clock is very different from those who are permanent residents.  What matters deeply to short-timers (and here I'm mostly talking about students; with those who are seeking tenure there is more to lose) is often obscure to city dwellers, and the long-term consequences of the fight over Yale's soul, whichever side "wins", become the city dwellers' to deal with. For better, and often enough, for worse. 

Regrets? I'd had a few.

Of all the times to resume writing this blog (encouraged by far away friends who use it the way others use Facebook) I did not want to resume in the middle of a national crisis, one that is played out in my own 1200 sf home.  But, this blog was born of national crisis -- the controversy over building a mosque in downtown Manhattan -- and as long as I'm alive, and as long as I can feel outrage, this blog will exist.

Where to begin.

In my day job I sometimes read papers published in peer-reviewed journals that go to great lengths to describe the physics of a bullet as it travels through human tissue.  The speed, the projectile's rotation, calculation of the frictional force, trajectory, and the thermodynamics of heat loss as a device made of brass and gunpowder tears, maims and often kill you.  Usually there are pictures, e.g., Figure 1, let's call it Mortal Wound to Torso, and if I look closely enough (which I never do) what seems at a distance to be the mouth of an angry volcano is more likely what a tunnel gored by a bullet does to someone's body.  (Imagine the violence required to blast through the mountains of western Pennsylvania so that Interstate 76 can take you from Philly to Pittsburgh; that's what a bullet can do.)  If a picture is worth a 1,000 words, one's imagination is worth a 1,000 pictures.  I don't have to see it; I live with it.

In a city that has been dying for half a century.  Where persistent unemployment of young men of color is the enduring norm, not an anomaly.  Where I, who has been through the sluice gates of corrosive institutional racism and should know better am daily conditioned to fear and distrust men who could be my own children.  I repeat:  fear and distrust men who could be my own children.  That's where I live.

And I live with someone who, the mornings after Alton Sterling and Philando Castile were killed, and 5 Dallas police officers were killed, rushed to tell me that Black Lives Matter is responsible for what happened in Dallas.  (Like most libertarians, he thinks he lives on Dispassionate Reason Street when he lives on Id Lane.)  All of it, all of it -- outside and inside my home -- reminds me of the bitter and very American joke:

Q:  What's scarier than a white man with a gun?
A:  A black man with a gun.

I am in a rage which makes it difficult to write.  As I write it congeals into a pounding headache.  But, the paradox is that if I don't write I will never ever get to the other side.  I used to make fun of crazy people who would offer me their tiny-margined, single-spaced, double-sided screeds, their manifesto detailing the malevolence of the universe and all its actors.  I won't any more.

to be continued ...

This Will Be Brief ...

... because -- you know -- I've got systems of linear equations to solve.

A snapshot of my life:

1.  This is my month off as a wife.  Cuthbert is visiting the family in Ireland.  This means several things -- I have to cook for myself, I'm the head Home Skooler for Lilli, the house stays, if not immaculate, at least tidy and clean, and I don't have to use my we're-in-the-middle-of-a-firefight voice.

2.  Three times a week I meet Lilli at the bus stop and we snack, read and learn.  She is doing a traffic study.  We go to the grassy knoll and she counts cars at rush hour.  Each expedition she chooses a different color -- first day red, next time gray, and so on.  She records the day, date and time and the number of cars of a certain color that passed by in 5 minutes.  When she is done with fieldwork we'll look at the data and construct a pie chart or a bar graph.

3.  This week the daily temperatures went from the low 90's to the 70's.  I suffer from summer PTSD.  The hotter it gets the more I hate life.

4.  I am cooking.  Easy stuff that I can do.  Today, having been brave and and thawed a packet of pollock.  (What a great title -- A Packet of Pollock, A Gaggle of Geese) I'm all in for cooking.  Even found an easy recipe.  So as not to repeat the fiasco of a September past I will stay in the kitchen and study while the fish broils.  I'm slow, but I do learn.  If it's good I'll ask L&L to come over for dinner.  If not, well those goddamn feral cats that use my backyard as a litter box will get their version of The French Laundry.  Anyway, what do I care?  There's always popcorn.

5.  As Cuthbert predicted, New Haven's mayoral primary was decided along tribal lines.  Tribes of race and class.  Reminds me that this is essentially a very conservative town.  What I wouldn't give to be a NYC voter right now!  Crazy Anthony Weiner?  Bill Blasé-Former-President-of-the-NYC-Board-of-Education-Warmed-Over-Placeholder Thompson?  Bill de Blasio who's got a son who looks like what Michael Jackson should have looked like at 16?  Christine-I-Woulda-Been-A-Better-Fireman Quinn?  What's not to love about that field?!?!?!

So it's study, class, gym, home, cook, clean, iron and sleep.  A quiet life.  Ciao, bella!

I Was Sposed to Keep My Mouth Shut

I still have rules.  Not many, particularly not many that I haven't broken exposing myself as a Liar and A Hypocrite (as well as a Gentleman and a Scholar), but some nevertheless.  For instance, I never drink alcohol before 11 am.  Kept that one.  So far.

As part of a promising initiative to change the way we live now, Long Wharf Theatre and the New Haven Public Library have launched Community Conversations to discuss race and gentrification in New Haven.  Using Bruce Norris' "Clybourne Park" they've held Conversations hosted by Colin Caplan, Tom Ficklin and Clifton Graves at  different branch libraries with each site's meeting having a particular tenor.

 I attended the first one at the Stetson branch (in Newhallville) and wound up not only quoted in the Independent but photographed, too.  After that I said, if you go to another Conversation, you are Not To Say One Word other than hello.  Because, y'know, nobody likes a yaktivist, (my new favorite portmanteau), a person who talks incessantly about injustice and social change but does very little in terms of action.

I decided to go to the Fair Haven discussion last Saturday.  While the Dixwell meeting felt like a reunion of many of Newhallville's African-American families, Fair Haven's was a more astringent gathering in part because of the fascinating mix of people who live there and because there were no small number of folks who knew a lot about the history of US residential segregation thanks to legislative and judicial policy hand-in-hand with the standing practices of the banking and real estate industries. 

When it comes to talking about Race in this country when we get together in these rooms we are Very Polite.  And trust me when I tell you that I was trying, I really was trying to follow the rules of the game not to mention my own which was to come to Listen not talk.  But somebody said something and before you know it I had opened my mouth on the way to losing my shit.  Bam!! All she said was that her own daughters now lived in Brooklyn (I'm guessing Bushwick or East New York) but that when she was a student in the 80's she, as a young white girl from Connecticut country, she wouldn't dream of living in those places ....

And I shot back (and I'm paraphrasing here) that this is what gets to me in these discussions, that the normative perspective is supposed to be how white people see things and that even though all of those places (Crown Heights, Bed-Stuy, East New York, Bushwick) are full of complex communities that talk of specific neighborhoods in New York being dangerous for "me" is so reductive generally because it's based on ignorance and to use a fashionable phrase, white privilege, that it makes me crazy.  Now, this woman doesn't know me and it would be easy to think that I'd just become the "Lena" from the play her employer had produced.  It would be too easy to think that yet another Angry Black Woman doing what we do.  (Her:  Sheesh, I just speak my mind and a black person bites my head off.)  She certainly doesn't know that if a black person had started talking about not going into Greenwich to shop because blah-de-blah-de-blah I would light into their asses, too.

When the Conversation was officially over both she and I made it a point to approach one another and shake hands.  She wanted to finish her point about being a small town white girl from Connecticut and not being safe in the city.  But, again, I cut her off.  Well, yeah, I said (and again I paraphrase) you'd have to have some street smarts but frankly a white girl is more safe in a black neighborhood in a way a black person wouldn't be in a white neighborhood.  A fact and I'm not even angry about it.

Or am I?

A Tragedy's Anniversary Without Press Coverage

On the 4th Tuesday of every month I attend the general meeting our our neighborhood's community association.  It's something we've done since arriving in New Haven and finding out about the group.  My ties to West River have grown and deepened, and the neighborhood's initiatives toward community building have done the same.  That particular night, my friend, Ellen, Lilli and I were walking home the block and a half from Barnard School and we were overtaken by a swarm of teenagers.  They quickly parted around us on foot and on bikes and we could see that they were heading towards my house.

Four houses down we met A, who had been at the meeting, too.  He is by temperament both cautious and suspicious.  Perhaps for good reason; and perhaps he is this way as only people who have given others reason in the past to be cautious and suspicious can be.  He was getting ready to call the police.  I told him wait, I saw my neighbor, Eric, in the crowd, talking to kids, keeping an eye on things.  We went down the street and a hunch I'd had since the first teenagers overtook us was confirmed.  It was a year ago that Marquell Banks was murdered in the house 2 doors down from ours. These kids, some who knew him, some who did not, collected to grieve, and to discharge an inchoate, unspecific anger towards the house's tenants.  I'm sure if Eric hadn't been there some kid would have tried to get inside the house.  (The tenants coming home saw the crowd forming and left to sleep elsewhere.)

It is that palpable anger that made A want to call the police immediately.  Even a wise cop can only ameliorates it briefly.  And wise cops are rare.  But, it's a year later now and these kids are still angry, still looking for the answer to the problem of one of their own killing another of their own.  Marquell's family is traumatized.  The tenants, who have young children of their own, are traumatized and stigmatized.  (This is not conjecture on my part.  This comes from conversation and witness.)  The teenagers who came to mourn are traumatized.

We, the adults of this street in particular, and this community in general, need to reclaim the obligation that we've assigned to the police.  We've demanded, in the name of public safety, that they also fix what's broken in the social fabric and by doing so wash our hands of responsibility to each other.  As a community we've made great strides in that direction when the issues address a material lack, we fall short when it involves matters that are made more difficult by a lack of trust and no belief in agape love.  When those events happen we resort to calling the cops and deluding ourselves that the problem's been solved.  It hasn't, and I expect to see some of those same kids back again next year.

On Lisa Molomot's "The Hill"

New Haven is my adopted home.  I wasn't born here, I didn't grow up here.  I have no clan who traveled from the south 3 generations ago and settled in Dixwell or Dwight to take advantage of wartime jobs.  I didn't attend Yale nor do I work there.  I no longer have any formal role in the the city's Democratic Party hierarchy.  I just live here.

Here, in a city that is situated downstream from the catastrophic economic changes of the last few decades.  A company town with an entrenched full-time mayor and his political machine, and a part-time legislative body.  A segregated town where a segment of the promising middle class cycles out after obtaining a degree and another segment goes house shopping in Hamden or Guilford when the first kid turns 4.

When we first arrived, we would drive around town.  Soon I was playing a game, "Where's PS Waldo?" as we would encounter one after another of the city's breathtakingly beautiful school buildings.  (And yes, there are some spectacular duds.)  What kind of city is this I wondered, having spent years doing education activism in New York, that builds such beautiful schools?

I found out, yes I did.  It's a city that believes in top-down, ham-fisted educational reform based on old liberal pieties.  Convention wisdom has it that the Board of Education is a known depository for the politically connected, the mediocre loyalist and the status-seeking small-town careerist of middling abilities.  It's a city that is re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic as its neighborhoods become more racially and economically segregated, and where job creation is thought of as an act of noblesse oblige or chum on political waters.

For those of you who haven't seen it, the documentary, "The Hill", tells the story of an eminent domain battle between New Haven and residents of an area called the Upper Hill.  Goaded by state dollars that paid more for new construction than renovation, hubris, political calculation and vanity, the city set out to build a school.  The Upper Hill was and is a low-income area of homeowners and tenants.  The city's rationale was that since 2 other schools nearby were in terrible condition, and another school, Mauro, near the contested land could not accommodate the influx of more students another building was required.  To build would require removal of many households.  Some people were glad to go.  Others not, so they suggested that the city build on unused city-owned land nearby.  Those who wanted to stay (and their allies) raised hell and fought the city all the way to federal court to be able to keep their homes.  On a fine legal point (the doctrine of laches) they lost their case, although their moral argument won the day.

The homes were razed, the neighbors dispersed often incurring significant debt to rent or buy elsewhere, and the school was built.  In what I can only imagine was a final gesture worthy of Marie Antoinette, the school was named after the city's sole African-American mayor as if losing one's home and community is a small price to pay to honor a black man who led the city for 4 years.

And the 2 schools that were in terrible shape?  They exist today, more than a decade after this battle, as 1) a charter school and 2) a medical offices building.  And Mauro?  It's closed.  Not enough students.  The vacant land?  Sold to Yale New Haven Hospital and converted into a parking lot.  And the neighborhood?  Go see for yourself.  

And, too:  I can't seem to upload the trailer, so click the link.

It's Been Hot, N'est-ce pas?

I have to admit that life's been pretty good to/for me.  My major worries these days are stepping on one of those infernal slugs on the path between my back door and my office door; or Husband No. 1 becoming a full-blown Libertarian as he's always threatening to do.  The slugs I worry about constantly; my husband's political evolution?  Not so much.  He cannot stay sufficiently interested in it all to follow politics -- local or presidential -- otherwise he'd care enough to try to convince me to consider the likes of Ron Paul.  (And god knows Libertarians -- the committed and the fellow travelers both -- do like to argue.  I think it's a defining trait in them.  Perhaps it comes from working alone by themselves too often.  And still having doubts about being The Smartest Guy In the Room.  I really don't know; I just find them all a bit off-kilter.)

It's no secret that I have no truck for Paul (or for Paulistas, not to be confused with Paulists, another group of troublesome fanatics).  He's a cold fish of a certain sort.  By the way, is it just me or do you, too, find obstretician/gynecologists some of the grimmest physicians working?  I'd had my share of doctors and while I don't chose doctors because I need to love them, while conceding that at this age it's a good idea to stick with your internist because you'll be seeing a lot more of him or her as time goes by, it's been my totally unscientific theory that the specialty of delivering babies and looking at ladyparts with a flashlight seems to attract it's fair share of people with an empathy deficit.  Don't know what it is but the closest I came to brawling with a doctor was the ob/gyn who "delivered" me 31+ years ago.  Yeah yeah, I didn't come to see her until I was 7 months gone.  Yeah yeah, I was placenta previa by then, which if the delivery had gone badly would have meant a messy malpractice suit on behalf of my heir and survivors.  Yeah yeah I didn't think she walked on water.  She and I just did not like one another.  As far as I was concerned I needed a "mechanic" to get this baby out of me in a couple of month's time so I could get on with my business.  Needless to say she got her revenge:  showed up for about a minute in a 9 hour and oh so painful delivery.  (Were it not for the delivery nurses, it would have been worse.)  BabyMama Doctor left me totally unprepared for the ravages of childbirth and beyond -- the hemorrhoids, the psychotic breaks with reality due to exhaustion and all the usual greatest post-partum hits.  But, I digress.

It's politics I'm thinking of, or mischief, when I tell my libertarianistically inclined spouse to run for mayor.  He isn't the slightest bit interested in governing.  (He wasn't even living in this country when Reagan and his ilk invented the "gov'mint is the Enemy of the People" mantra, but it speaks to his contrarian soul.  Yes it does.)  And I am not in the slightest bit interested in him becoming mayor, although there's a part of me that would love to don a Chanel suit, a string of pearls and a wig of blonde hair with highlights (or some variation of the above) and campaign on his behalf.  But, a spell needs to be broken here in New Haven.  And perhaps a jester with nothing to lose can help do that.  (Jeffrey Kereke's was a serious and honorable campaign.  Far different than what I'm proposing.)

The Age of DeStefano has lasted too long.  Both operational efficiency and dysfunction have consumed innovation and vision.  How many people who work for the city work for the city, as opposed to work to keep themselves clothed and fed and eligible for a pension?  What mechanisms exist to honestly and critically evaluate its major initiatives in health, in economic development, in school reform, in housing or crime prevention with enough accountability that if there is not reasonable progress heads roll?

I'm not unmindful of the city's challenges, and how some of them are due to factors beyond one municipality's control.  Nor am I unsympathetic to those who are responsible for day-to-day governance.  It isn't easy, and it's all too thankless.  Nevertheless, I've had the uneasy feeling for a while now that this is a feudal city with more supplicants than citizens.   The sooner that ends the better we will all be.
 

New Haven's Brookside: Been There, Seen That

I was the designated babysitter yesterday.  I had 2 kids and a truck.  So, we went to Edgewood Park where they climbed trees and delighted an audience of developmentally disabled adults out on an excursion.  From my I'm-not-moving vantage point (as in if you climb that tree, you better figure out a way to get down without breaking your neck because I'm not rescuing you, Little Kittens) I watched the black boys and men play basketball.  As Niece No. 1 so perceptively observed, there were 2 games going on -- the teenagers and the adults.  It broke my heart:  It was mid-day on a Friday.  Why weren't they at school or work?  (I, we, know why.)

A city park on a weekday is populated by the disabled  -- by the economy, by culture, by either physical or emotional disability, by illness, or illegal status, or the imperative of caring for very young children sans institutional childcare.  As it is in Edgewood, it is in Brooklyn's Prospect Park, except that in Brooklyn the comet's tail of bikers and joggers rushing past obscures that fact.

New Haven, Elm City, is a beautiful city, especially in the spring, and we left one park in search of another.  But, I wanted to see the newly redeveloped Brookside so I decided to detour before we got to the next set of swings.  Back in 2009 when I was a public health study surveyor my partner and I drove out to the city's west side to interview residents of public housing.  I was stunned.  I knew New Haven wasn't all Whitney Avenue or Morris Cove; it wasn't even just my modest neighborhood.  But the west side of town, where these projects were located took my breath away, and I wasn't kidding when I came back barking that they were Bantustans, and although I was under no illusions that New Haven was le plus ultra in progressive urban planning, locating housing so far away from any and every kind of commercial center and supplying the entire area of mono-income families with one school, well if that wasn't worse than red-lining, show me the hell what is.

Later I was told that those projects were to be demolished, and I was actually shown plans for the new development.  Pretty houses, I thought, wouldn't mind one of those myself.  But, I asked, where's the bus stop?  Where's the grocery?  Surely the developers and designers already know that pretty townhouses do not a community make?  I don't want to get all New Urbanism-y here, but for god's sake I spent 1 1/2 years in Columbia, MD, and during the years I lived there I learned all I need know about Good-looking Dead Space.  (I concede that it may be a better place to live now.)  And that experiment is over 30 years old; not at all hard to research what it has become.

The kids and I drove through the development -- the windy streets, the newly-planted trees, the beautifully rendered, differentiated homes.  As the Irish say:  very nice, very luvly.  And yet, once it's populated, what will the people living here do?  If you don't have a car, if you're not the driver, where can you go, what can you do?  All I could think of was bored 13 and 14 year olds with too much time on their hands.  Too much early sex.  Too much food consumed to assuage loneliness and boredom.  Too much trouble to make because you feel trapped.

What will destroy Brookside cannot be prevented by fresh paint and square corners.  As if yet another ersatz stage set of the American Dream truly addresses the socio-economic and racial divide we all pretend isn't as pernicious as it is.  Be ashamed New Haven, be very ashamed.

Saturday Poetry (on Sunday): Prospect Park II

Okay, I know it's Sunday but I have an excuse.  I was here in my office minding my own business yesterday evening coming to the conclusion that I couldn't blame the temperature for my Elderly-Italian-Widow-In-Support-Hose feet.  The weather's been lovely, n'est-ce pas?  No, it's drugs -- the usage of 2 new ones to control my ever spiralling blood pressure since I can't do it myself through my usual Ironclad Discipline (a joke that).  I went back and read the fine print, the "contraindications" (whatever the hell that means) and wouldn't you know that for some people these drugs cause a person's extremities to swell (check) and make the skin sensitive (check).

I'm middle-aged now so not as blithe about personal health as I once was.  Monday I will dutifully call to make an appointment with my internist.  He will tell me what I already know:  stop takin' em and go back to the other pill.  The one that costs 3 times as much.  And you know I will.

New Haven has been much in the news lately -- much of the coverage unflattering and some of it richly deserved.  But, statistics and news reporting can be "wrong" while being factually correct.  The coverage creates an impression that too many parties take a perverse pride in, i.e, that New Haven is this gun-saturated town, this 'hood that's getting off the hook.  And so you have 2 choices and 2 choices only  -- die young or move to the suburbs.  If we keep thinking this way we will keep holding "Stop the Violence" rallies that are temporarily cathartic but ultimately meaningless.  (See arguments against conducting a War on Terror.)  Gun violence is not a monolith and it's not a being.  It, in and of itself can't be stopped.  The economic, statutory, social and psychological conditions which foster this level of violence can be changed but that takes shrewd and courageous political alliance-building and cooperation, it takes targeted economic and development strategies, and it takes the tenacity of the Red Army during The Long March.

I'll end with poetry:

Prospect Park II

That afternoon trip to the Park

was an outing offered

because I berated my daughters

for being too young.

We walked through the meadow

happy to split in two.

Me to smoke and scowl in my Ray-Ban's,

They to prowl among the families,

looking for love, and complaining about

the one they hated all day.

As usual, the men were teamed for soccer.

Some young, some old,

one thin and vain with a severed arm.

He carried a comb in his only hand

and between plays ran it

through his hair which was thin,

like my cigarette.

And I asked myself was he dying, too,

or only full of regret?

When I joined my girls at the far end

they were ready to love.

We wandered until we could go no further

and chose a path that led into the trees

where my shades hastened me

an early dusk,

but not so much that I missed

the men staring at us.

We, a bitter woman and her spawn,

had trespassed their cruising ground.

The men's caroming eyes

begged us to leave.

Holding their hands

I led my daughters forward

into those woods, until winded,

I found a hole in the fence.

Safe on Flatbush I bought ice cream,

a bribe for forgetting, and talked of

all the pretty flowers in the Park,

and weren't we lucky to find

that hole in the fence

so close to the ice cream truck?

Where an incoming hunter started

when he met this chastened flock.

A ewe and her lambs escaping

as he entered to fuck.

I'm Still Not Hearting Diane Ravitch, Part I

Last night I attended a School Change Summit organized around Diane Ravitch's “The Death and Life Of The Great American School System”.  Disclaimer:  I have not read her book.  Yet.  So, my remarks are based on the panel's responses to her book, to her own responses during the forum and to my incomplete knowledge of her thinking and impact on American education.  The summit itself was a terrific idea.  Paul Bass, publisher of the New Haven Independent partnered with the Community Foundation and others to convene a panel of New Haven parents, educators, scholars and students to read the book and join Ravitch onstage.  Meanwhile (in the winds section) radio, print and net journalists (I don't know why I feel the need to make the distinctions), one of New Haven's state reps and the Mayor live blogged.  People could and did send in their comments while the Summit was live-streamed, and, the auditorium held a great and lively audience.

I like to "touch and smell the produce" so I actually attended.  Before I go off (I'm afraid I will) let me share my frame of reference because you know that people-of-a-certain age always look back.

I started teaching writing in New York City public schools in the mid-1990's.  That was during the years when Rudy Giuliani had school chancellors jumping the turnstiles faster than a broke pickpocket.  The work was great; I, and other writers and artists like me were on a mission, and there was a great deal of respect (tempered by many educators' skepticism and their own fear of writing) for teaching poetry, fiction and drama to city kids.  By the late 1990's the climate was changing as "standards" and "accountability" took up more of the educational airwaves.  All of us in the education biz fell down the rabbit hole of metrics and quantifying the work we did as if it were possible to slice thinner and thinner slivers of raw learning and still call it tuna.

Don't get me wrong.  I am all for standards and any child or adult who has survived one of my courses will tell you that if I get a whiff that you aren't challenging yourself to do better I will make your ears bleed.  But even back then I felt that whole school systems were heading off in the wrong direction where in the effort to quantify they would deracinate the joy of learning and erode what little autonomy public school teachers have.  I remember thinking at the time that if "they" wouldn't teach this way at Dalton or Brooklyn Friends or St. Ann's (to mention a few of the estimable private schools in New York) why would "they" think that teaching merely to pass standardized tests even for poor kids, kids with massive educational deficits, emotionally damaged kids is the right way to teach?  (Kind of reminds me of the welfare reform conundrum:  if you're a middle-class or upper middle-class mom we are all for you being a stay-at-home mother; but, if you're poor and we must supplement your living, raising children [which you are no damn good at anyway, or we wouldn't be having this education debate now, would we?] is second to cleaning the public parks.)

And back when I was on the Advisory Board of City-As-School High School I was part of a group of teachers, students and administrators who had a meeting at Tweed Hall with Joel Klein.  The meeting opened with us all introducing ourselves.  When the Chancellor, who by that time had been on the job close to a year said to all of us, "This is the first time I've met with students ...." I was stunned.  It was all I could do not to look around the table as if to say, did you hear what I heard?  Didn't this man think that his learning curve might have been accelerated by hearing how adolescents saw their own education?

Ohhh.  Kay, I said, don't make too much of one boneheaded executive oversight.  Change takes time.  I'll give Bloomberg 7 years.  Then we'll see how things work out.

 If I dwell on New York's reform experiment I will never, and I mean never, get to my thoughts about New Haven's.  So, let me say this.  If you asked any New York City public school supervisor, administrator or educator if they had to send their children to a New York City public school randomly assigned using some obscure algorithm would they be comfortable with that assignment, I bet their answer would be [expletive inserted] NO!  You can reform education all you want but I'll wager that there will never be an actualized urban public school system that adequately (and beyond) serves its children.  Public school education must be examined through the prisms of late-stage Western capitalism, the effects of race and class on urban demography, and the particular impact of the finance and real estate sectors on municipal development (to name just 3 factors).

I've gotten this far without actually talking about Ravitch.  (I haven't mentioned Sarah Palin either and that's something to be applauded.)  Last night's summit is the hanger on which I'm exploring my ideas about and relationship with public education.  That's why I'll call this posting Part I.  Part II (soon to a cinema near you!) will follow tomorrow.

Black Manhood is the Devil's Playground

It is now 3 days after the midterm elections and here in New Haven I did my small part to get Democrats elected.  I thought I'd be tired from the Election Day efforts, I just had no idea how tired I'd be and looked forward to having a quiet Thursday evening at home.  But, an e-mail landed yesterday morning advertising a community discussion that very night facilitated by Community Mediation with New Haven's Chief of Police, Frank Limon.  In a larger city I could have ignored it but on my way downtown I was picked up by Stacy (Are you coming?), had lunch with John (who sent the e-mail); and saw Kevin and ran into Blest (both of whom worked to bring a contingent of YBM to the meeting.)  This community dialogue had been planned way before the recent deaths of 2 young men, but the timing made it more urgent.  So, no way I couldn't be there.

The story of New Haven varies with the storyteller and the neighborhood.  It's one thing to live your life in the tony precincts of East Rock.  Another to live it in Newhallville or Hill South.  Last night was dominated by reportage from young men talking about life lived as perpetual suspects and perpetual targets in retaliatory "beefs".  They spoke of encounters with the police ranging from the annoying to the physically violent and emotionally humiliating to the likelihood of getting "violated" over some bullshit so that you're headed back to prison.  There were counternarratives offered, if not direct rebuttals to their lived experience.  Everyone in the room, even those who fear and despise the police, understand that their function is necessary and complex, and that not all cops are bad.  And yet, and yet.

It's national news that  intra-community murders and shootings plague New Haven.  It is a trope of inner city life that law enforcement is more to be feared than trusted.  So the dilemma is, if there is violent crime in your community you can 1) be a snitch, 2) settle it on your own or 3) mind your own goddamn business and hope it doesn't happen in your family.  Choice 1 will get you ostracized, maybe even killed.  Choice 2 means that you have vigilante "justice" in your community and when you do, at some point someone you know, and perhaps even love, is going to lose a fight with a bullet.  Which means that Choice 3 is no choice at all.

The police, the law-abiding, the formerly criminal, the safe and those at-risk know this state of affairs can't go on.  Last night we didn't hear much from the Chief about what the police see as solutions (although he did close with an anecdote illustrating disrespect towards him, his wife, and parents of some kids).  It wasn't the time or place; he came to listen, as did many of the rest of us.  In my understanding, for many YBM (and not-so-young BM), this problem with the police begins with respect.  They know that they are fundamentally held in suspicion and contempt by the NHPD.  That gets translated into police behavior that, ehem, if it is perpetuated on Yale students would make national news and invites lawsuits; but if done to YBM it is business as usual.

The young men talked about the boredom that comes from not having "anything to do" all day.  How they remembered the PAL Leagues and the recreational activities or community centers that were available to them when they were children.  And while I sympathize with them I was looking at young MEN not BOYS.  I can't speak for other adults in the room but as an older woman who has done more than her share of childcare (paid and unpaid), menial work, some of it under the watch of assholes with roving hands, and any kind of job in order to survive, I kept thinking that creating more recreational outlets is a palliative. Don't get me wrong, recreation has its place for all ages, but a 19 year old male should NOT be spending his day playing ball (unless, of course, he’s paid), he should be working.  I'm thinking, if legitimate pathways to respectable manhood weren’t so meager for these YBM we wouldn’t be sitting in a room with a dozen of them talking about disrespect.

The fraught relations between the police (in this city and any other) and YBM are a symptom of a greater, more insidious phenomena.  These young men and their predicament are the waste product of our post-industrial decline.  They were obsolete before they were born.  How are we going to address that?

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".