I'm Still Not Hearting Diane Ravitch, Part III

I am going to keep this short because I've already used up my quotient of profanity for one day.  Came across this about Diane Well-I'll-Be-Goddamned Ravitch.  Like I said when I referenced her before here, here and here, I don't trust apostates.

What's the count now?  Three post-education reform books to tell the world what any person with sense already knew?  When schools like Choate, Dalton, Foote, Hopkins, St. Ann's, Sidwell Friends, Brooklyn Friends (you get my drift) start insisting on standardized tests and the curricula that love them, then I'll be convinced that No Child Left Behind is not the spawn of Satan.  In other words, in matters of education, I'll have whatever the elite is having.  Thankyouverymuch.

I'm Still Not Hearting Diane Ravitch, Part II

Although I was sober yesterday I wrote a convoluted paragraph about the way to teach children that mention private schools and public parks.  What I mean to say is that (as a generality) all children benefit from the same ways of teaching.  I don't believe that there's a way you teach kids who'd attend Choate that is profoundly different than the way you'd teach kids who'd attend any big city's public schools.  What had infuriated me with the Old Ravitch and others is that too often education is talked and written about as if there are some evolutionary differences between white and black kids.  Or, more to the point in Our America:  there are intractable differences between White and Asian (i.e., honorary white -- and if you don't believe me read some California history) and Black and Hispanic and Native American children.  The dirty little secret is that so many folks on all sides of the issue fear that it is innate and genetic.  (We are all evolutionary biologists now.)  Maybe, just maybe Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein were right after all.

I said it then and I'll say it now; I call bullshit on that.  My bona fides:  I'm black, which means that the percentage of African "blood" exceeds the percentage of European "blood" in me and my siblings.  And it means that by choice (and so as not to be classified as barkin' mad) I self-identify as such.  I'm middle class -- always have been, and sigh, unless the real estate market in NYC really goes crazy, always will be.  I grew up taking standardized tests such as the Iowa Test of Basic Skills and never met a standardized test I didn't like.  And I'm not unique.  So, can we stop with all lot of the racialized "black and brown" this and "black and brown" that and start looking at how class affects education?  Then let's talk.


These dispatches are about convincing myself to take Diane Ravitch seriously, since the positions she promulgated, defended and believed in were so obviously flawed.  I -- bet I'm not alone in this -- have trouble taking apostates seriously.  (And yes, Glen Loury and David Brock I'm talking about You!!)


To be continued.

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.

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.