Cream-Based Politics

Trump has named Betsy DeVos to head the department of education.  She's a huge proponent of charters, vouchers, and choice; privatized education.  The selling idea is government institutions fail poor kids and "choice" provides a ticket out by allowing them some selectivity in schooling.

School "choice" is interesting because of what it reveals about the conservative perspective.  On the one hand, government provision of education is seen as to blame for "poor" schools; private, competitive charters would do a better job.  However, conservatism also blames the poor for their poverty, and looks to a breakdown in family and "culture of poverty" to explain the dysfunction we see in these communities.  This breakdown would clearly lead to "poor" schools, would it not?   However, maybe we are dealing with children, and so it is only fair to help them.  But shouldn't that be a job for the parents?  Why should the government be involved in rectifying the manifestation of social problems in children?

You can see how messy this gets.  "Choice" is kind of a fun way out.  It embraces free market principles.  In theory it promises a better education to all - even specifically the poor.  But it also performs a neat trick: government is no longer required to provide a proper education to all.  In effect, the burden is placed on the parent to send their child to a "quality" school.  This introduces an element of selectivity into the process.  Poor parents who want the best for their kids - and more important know how to get it, are now given an option to do so.  Previously, they would have been required to send their kids to their local school, whose demographic would have guaranteed the school to be failing.

This is great news for these parents.  And I don't doubt they deserve it.  I would want the same if I was in their position.  However, the issue is now the families who have been left behind.  The only reason the "choice" model works is because of its selectivity - poor kids (yet with motivated and accountable parents, who as any teacher will tell you are 80% of the battle) get to be with higher-capital kids (better income, education and motivated parents).  The only way you make butter is by removing the cream.

Now how are we going to make butter with the milk left over?  I don't have any answers.  But what I can do is raise questions about the fundamental issue involved.  My concern is that conservative ideology is very comfortable with what you might call cream-based-politics.  In theory, a robust social understanding of poor communities would involve grasping the functional relationships involved in barriers to success.  Yet because conservatism's ur-fear is government intrusion into the lives of the citizenry, these functional relationships frighten them to death.  Better to turn away and hand wave about "personal responsibility" or "market forces".  Choice bows to the latter and hides behind the former in doling out goodies to the selected poor while conveniently averting its gaze from those unable to "self-select".

Furthermore, the "starve the beast" tradition inevitably continue apace: poor schools housing the "unselected" will of course have even more difficulty in educating a student body composed of increasingly disadvantaged children.  Yet the schools' failure will not be seen as a function of this dynamic, but rather more evidence of government ineptitude.

And the graduates of such wretched institutions?  They will continue to stock our prisons and fill out our underclass, performing our menial labour and dutifully providing a reminder of how morally upstanding, intelligent and hard-working the rest of us are.

A Charter by Any Other Name

In the local paper today they presented what I thought was a telling example of our current and dangerous fascination with charter schools.

In theory, there's nothing wrong with experimentation and having schools try new things.  But aside from the more subversive and toxic tendency for charters to employ union-busting, a few high-profile examples have come to leave an impression in the public's mind that they are somehow better than traditional public schools.  What is often not well understood is that these special cases are not at all representative of what a charter school typically looks like.  Those somewhat storied charter schools that have shown remarkable results in decreasing the achievement gap between socioeconomic groups also tend to rely heavily on private donations or sacrifices from staff that are somewhat onerous.  The most notable of these schools is KIPP, or the Knowledge Is Power Program.

Most KIPP schools run from 7:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Monday through Friday and 8:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. on select Saturdays (usually twice a month), and middle school students also participate in a two- to three-week mandatory summer school, which includes extracurricular activities after school and on Saturdays. As a result, KIPP students spend approximately 60 percent more time in class than their peers.

This is not necessarily a bad model at all - if you can find the money and teachers to do it.  But the results you get from this type of environment should not be confused with what is possible from a more typical charter school, which is much more similar to the traditional model.

When the word charter becomes synonymous with some kind kind of magical reform, capable of turning around even the worst school, it can lead to some very unreasonable expectations.  The danger in this is that if people are taking false comfort from a supposed reform that has no real value, they are not taking action to support some other reform that might have real-world benefit.

A local school, Cielo Vista (one I have substitute taught at numerous times) has recently applied and been accepted to transfer to a charter model by the school board.  Apparently the staff and parents had been pushing very hard for the change, and for a while it appeared they weren't going to get it.  However, the application was approved, and everyone was ecstatic.  There are now 100 students on the waiting list.  Today's paper quoted a parent:

“When the charter came out, it was a win because we heard so many good things about Washington Charter — why couldn't Palm Springs do the same thing?” he said. “We wanted to get behind it.”

Now, what's interesting about this quote is that Cielo Vista and Washington Charter are two very different schools.  The "good things" the parent has heard most likely involve Washington Charter's API, or Academic Performance Index score, which is 915.  Cielo Vista's is 840.  That's actually quite good, and their score has been rising for a number of years. 

But what is also different about Washington Charter is the demographics.  The surrounding neighborhood from which it primarily draws students is upper middle class, and very white.  The state doesn't publish numbers on parent level of education or specific incomes, but around 80% of Cielo Vista students receive federally discounted lunches because of low-income, while only 30% Washington Charter students do.  Cielo Vista is 80% minority, Washington Charter is 30%.  60% of Cielo Vista students are Language Arts proficient, while 80% are at Washington Charter.

Yet despite these differences, Cielo Vista is doing quite well.  Both schools are actually ranked favorably against other schools with similar demographics.  If anything, based on indicators of how well each school should be doing considering the populations they serve, Cielo Vista is probably outperforming Washington Charter.

In the end, what this parent, and the larger public in general who see charters as somehow inherently superior to traditional schools, fail to grasp is that socio-economics - things like race, class, education and culture matter.  They matter more than any state test calculation could ever show.  Washington Charter is on one side of town, and Cielo Vista is on another.  The social capital is unevenly distributed.  In many ways, Cielo Vista will never be like Washington Charter.  The two neighborhoods will never be the same.  Maybe one day, with the right kind of investment, we will make sure that lack of social capital is no barrier to getting an equal education.  But simply calling a school a "charter" isn't enough.

Virtual Charters and the Kids Down the Road

The New York Times has a piece up documenting the continued growth of online charter schools - by definition paid for at taxpayer expense, and at the same level of individual student funding as brick-and-mortar schools.  This means that a virtual charter can expect to receive anywhere from $5-7k per student, or whatever the going rate is in that district.

From the article:

• There are no libraries, cafeterias, playgrounds, coaches, janitors, nurses, buses or bus drivers.
• Twenty percent of California’s 872 charter schools now conduct some or all of their classes online.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I taught for 3 years at a California charter school based around a similar model.  While a small number of its students, such as those I taught, were served in more traditional school houses, most of the nearly 3000 students were home-schooled.  These students received up to $800 for curriculum and supplies, and access to an "education specialist", a fully-compensated credentialed teacher who met with the family weekly or bi-weekly to oversee progress, and who usually had around 30 students on their roster.  So basically, the school paid a teacher around $60k, and took in 210k - all without the normal expenses associated with running a school building.

The homeschool parents were by and large thrilled with the service.  Mostly mid to upper-SES, they had the typical human and social capital to provide a quality education to their child.  What this typically meant was that the household had two parents, and enough income to support one parent (usually the mother) staying home to teach the children.  They had access to online resources that served as lesson guides, and the ability to meet their child's academic needs.  I don't have access to such specific demographic data, but my guess would be that most had a college education.

While there were a handful of schools in which students came in for instruction in a classroom setting - "acedemies" they were called, they represented only a small number of enrolled students.  Of the academies, only a few served primarily low-SES familes.  In fact, ours happened to be one of maybe two, located as we were in a small, poor town 2 hours from the corporate offices.  Our school had begun as a small K-12 staging area for the largely upper-SES, white, religious families in the community who sought homeschooling as a way to avoid the neighborhood schools, which were mostly poor and Hispanic.  Yet as a charter school, any local children were allowed to attend, and the original population was slowly replaced with one that reflected more clearly the demographic make-up of the surrounding area.

Currently, 35% of the school's students are eligible for free & reduced lunches, a standard means-tested measure of poverty in any given school.  At our academy, this would likely been at least 80% of the population.  Unfortunately, a range of administrative failures resulted in a profound denial of resources to these students.  Had they attended the local public school, they would have had access to a variety of services.  Yet the academy was seen by many parents as preferable; many considered it somewhat exclusive - almost "private schoolish".  This was certainly how the school wanted to present itself.  As most of the parents were unfamiliar with what a good school environment really looked like, few among them having gone to college or experienced much academic success in life, they were ignorant of what their children were missing out on.

Sadly, the main component of a "good school" is often simply students from higher-SES parents.  So such a large percentage of poor families in one school inevitably requires a whole range of special resources to compensate: better teachers, better administration, smaller classes, as well as a variety of extra services like meal programs, special education, etc.  In many ways our school did as well as any school could have hoped.  Our teachers and staff were dedicated and caring, we had high standards, and did our best to work with meager resources.  But we were in no position to offer what these students really needed.

Despite our students' eligibility for federal Title I resources - extra funding for poor students, we struggled to provide a bare minimum:

• We had no meal program (no breakfast or lunch).  Students often came to school hungry, without food, or with nothing but a soda and a bag of chips.
• We had no library, or librarian.
• We had no PE, Music, or Art teachers.  Foreign Languages were taught via software.
• There was no budget for field trips.  No school bus.
• We had one special education teacher, working on a pull-out basis.  No special day class.
• We had a skeleton crew for yard duty.  Teachers had no preparation periods.

In my time there, enrollment was in rapid decline.  Apparently many parents were realizing that their students were being under-served.  In my final year, the elementary grades had been divided into combination classes, where one teacher would be responsible for teaching two different grades.  I was stuck teaching Kindergarten and First.  With a low-SES population, this meant taking kids who were woefully unprepared and struggling to get them all to where they needed to be - x2.  In order to give direct instruction to each grade level, I was forced to rotate the students in groups of 4, 4 times a day.  This meant 16 separate activities in math and reading.  All without a prep.

I ended up being sent to teach high school science mid year, as the students there had already received a semester's instruction from a substitute.  There were only 3 high school teachers (English, Math, History) as it was.  The school hadn't been able to afford to pay for an assistant director - so she'd have to teach elementary.  As a young man, they thought I could do better with the rowdy highschoolers.  I began teaching Chemistry, Biology and Earth Science in February.  Fortunately I actually enjoyed it.  I went on that summer to get a credential in Geosciences.  That fall I taught Chemistry, Biology, Earth Science, Career Exploration, Visual Arts and Journalism.  But as more students left or dropped out, by November they couldn't afford me and I was laid off.  The science courses were split between the English, Math and History teachers.

Of course, there was no union.  Teachers were often fired the last week of school, and always for seemingly arbitrary reasons.  The principal wasn't really a principal - she was 2 hours away.  He was a site administrator.  This meant that the little input he had in site decisions (he didn't have a budget), always had to be passed through corporate offices.  Suffice it to say what teacher input there might have been was strangled.  We eventually gave up on leadership committees.  We were either too busy, felt our input was unwanted, or simply too scared to question the school's increasingly poor service of its students.

The school's principal had previously come under fire for financial corruption and misuse of funds.  The result was a split from a former organization and her establishing the present charter through the county district.  Her husband is the chief financial officer.  This may explain why the school was so comfortable with what may have been its most fraudulent activity.

When I was hired to teach Kindergarten, I learned that I was technically to be called an "Education Specialist", just like the homeschool advisers.  This was because, technically, the academies were simply meeting places for homeschool students, although the students all attended full-time.  This odd arrangement had a very lucrative benefit for the school: as long as the student could be accounted for having done a lesson at home, they could miss a day and still be claimed as having attended.  Teachers were required to fill out a sheet of paper every month on which they would check if a student had completed an educational activity for each eligible day of attendance.  In theory, the parent would arrange in advance for an absence, and the teacher would arrange for an activity to take place.  Of course, an activity might take no more than an hour, and in no way could be considered equal to a full day's attendance on-site.

What was more often the case however, was that the student would simply not show up to school, with no contact from the parent.  The teacher would mark the absence.  Yet teachers were routinely pressured to go back and have students do a "make-up" assignment so that a full attendance day could be claimed.  The justification for this was, wink-wink, more money from the state = more money for the school to provide better services.  Classes routinely had 100% attendance rates.  Yet, if any money was indeed "trickling down" to the site, we certainly saw no evidence of it.

As far as I know, the site is still surviving.  Although it remains to be seen how much longer they can continue attracting students.  The larger school, meanwhile, is flourishing.  As the story in the Times suggests, many parents have discovered quite a large loophole in the public school system that allows for what amounts to a de facto voucher for private education.  Our academy was seen as a sort of pro bono charity case, in which poor students who otherwise would not have had access to the homeschool model, and ultimately for whom public education was originally designed, were being thrown a bone.  But I doubt very many virtual and homeschool charters are even bothering with a pretense of generosity.

Philosophically, the problem with the voucher model - full funding for individual student expenses - is antithetical to the public school model, which is ultimately founded on the principal that society is responsible for providing a basic education to every child.  Public resources aren't divvied up according to head-counts.  Like an insurance model, they provide a baseline coverage and then allocate resources accordingly.  We don't demand "our fair share" of auto insurance when we don't have accidents.  We don't demand our fair share of health insurance when we don't get sick.  This is the general model for public services in general.  We don't demand our fair share of parks, roads, libraries, police or emergency services when we don't use them.  We believe that society at large should come together and share our collective wealth in order to provide what we believe are basic human rights.

When a high-SES student receives a maximum share of public education funds, they are taking money away from other children who do not possess the same level of human and social capital.  Those students are then further marginalized into schools whose demographic  make-up is increasingly similar to theirs, placing an ever higher burden on institutions that are designed to turn no child away, to "leave no child behind".  As it stands, one of the greatest barriers to reducing the socio-economic achievement gap is our unwillingness to adopt fundamentally means-tested education services.  My daughter, bless her heart, has two college educated parents who themselves came from parents of reasonable means.  When she enters Kindergarten next year, in a neighborhood composed largely of other higher-SES families that feeds an extremely high-achieving elementary school, she will be reading, writing and doing math at a roughly mid-1st grade level, not to mention having a generally well-enriched vocabulary and cognitive capabilities.  She will receive a very similar level of state resources very similar to the children from the poor communities a few miles down the road.

It isn't hard to see what this means for her future, as well as that of the kids in poor communities.  It isn't fair.  It isn't moral.  It isn't just.  It isn't what America stands for.  As long as we continue to think in such selfish and uncompassionate terms, we will continue to fail our future generations.

The Education Game

I'm relatively young in my teaching career.  I was recently laid off due to my K-12 Charter school's inability to maintain adequate student numbers.  When I left I was teaching Earth Science, Biology, Chemistry and a couple of electives to largely low-SES, ELL students who generally refused to do their work and were entirely contented to hold D-averages.  Parent involvement was nil.

No union to speak of, nor contracts, the staff was entirely at the mercy of an out-of-touch administration (literally, their offices were 2 hours away) with a very top-down attitude.  Basically, they told us to jump and we asked how high.  In the little time that we did have that was not taken up by largely useless, state mandated yet effectively punitive professional development seminars that offered little practical help in our day to day instruction, there was no organized effort to form leadership teams to address the ever growing list of the site's issues.  The administration opted instead for a management-by-memo approach, in which decrees were meted out to much head-shaking and solemnity.

One wonders whether the administrators of failing schools are ever forced by the state to attend management seminars.  Our board of directors, lead by the school's CEO, seemed to have nothing productive to say about the way things were being run.  And according to the state, the message was clearly that the teachers were doing something wrong.

But what were we being asked to do?  Most of the kids were at least 2-3 grade levels behind in reading and language.  Their test scores were terrible, but when I proctored them there was an absurd sense that the students saw them as little more than an awful lot of silly bubbles to fill in - not to mention another reminder of what failures they had become.  The enterprise on a daily basis felt as though we were all playing our roles in some twisted play that we knew wasn't going to end well.

And of course for many it didn't.  I remember clearly a young lady of about 17, with an 18 month old son at home being cared for by grandma.  Yet all the girl wanted to do in class was giggle with her friends or sneak into the bathroom to play with her make-up kit.  I had started out my career teaching Kindergarten, and I knew full well what her boy would look like when he entered his first day of school.  Hart & Risley documented quite well what kind of experiences children of her SES group would be receiving.  Lareau explained why.  My own daughter, who just turned five, is already reading well into a first grade level.  Both her parents are well educated and have raised her in an environment rich in vocabulary, cognitive processing and higher-thinking skills.  My poor little Kinders would come in barely speaking English, and not knowing what letters or numbers were - in any language.  However, I often joked that low-SES native speakers were likely to score lower on English language assessments than their non-native peers from higher SES-homes, simply due to higher language exposure in general.

And so here we were, a dysfunctional charter school, the parents who did attend only doing so out of sheer ignorance.  They likely thought they were getting something special because of the "charter" status.  We had no lunch program, although most of the students would have easily qualified.  There was no special ed day class - parents were simply sent to the "district" school.  School policy had been to send low-performers there also, until attendance began to plummet and we took anyone we could get.   The staff was bare-bones, the elementary teachers were all saddled with blends and the high school had 6 preps at a minimum.  No PE, gym, or music teacher.  No librarian.  No library.

At the end of the year we all sat around waiting to see who would "disappear".  They liked to wait until the second to last week of school, usually on a Friday, to fire staff.  From what we could gather this seemed to be quite arbitrary.  Good teachers were let go.  Bad ones remained (I'm not sure what that says about me - I certainly kept my head down).  Replacements didn't seem much better.

So what is all this?  It's an anecdote.  But I think it is also indicative of structural problems that aren't being addressed among the new education reformers.  According to the NY Times, the main points of the new Obama plans to overhaul NCLB are thus:

• replace NCLB's pass/fail school grading system, instead measuring individual students, attendance,  graduation rates and something called "school climate"
• more vigorous interventions in failing schools
• more incentives for performance

Yet simply taking that model and placing it on the school I describe would have had little impact.  We knew we were a failing school.  We had very high standards (although that means something entirely different when teaching Biology to kids who can barely read).  We certainly were accountable.

In fact, I could make the case that not only is this sort of thinking not offering real reform, it is a continuation, albeit slightly better, of policies that actually distract from a lot of good that teachers can simply do on their own without the "accountability", standardized testing, and school interventions.  But this seems of minor importance, and likely zero-sum.

I go back to the teen mother, whose child is mere years from repeating the cycle.  I go back to those young kids entering school for the first time and being so excited by it all.  The stories they were hearing!  The academic language and cool new discoveries to be made about the world.  Yet from day one they are so far behind that catching them up, in classrooms filled to capacity and one lone teacher doing his or her best to juggle them all, every single soul in the balance, takes a draconian level of mindless repetition and almost militaristic strictness.

Summerhill this is not.  I throw that out there not as an ode to that absurd and utopian philosophy, but as a reference point for how far we as a society have forced the pendulum to swing in the opposite direction because that is literally what it takes to take such underprivileged, underdeveloped kids and cram them into a system that is just fundamentally unequipped to deal with the task of correcting for, and then expanding upon what they haven't received from every other area of the social environment in their short lives.

These are the students that end up on drugs, in prison, with teen babies, broken homes, or at best working in some low-skill menial job, without health care, destined to live out their lives in a dirty apartment complex somewhere unremarkable.  This is the underclass.  This is what America stands against.  This is not freedom.  This is not equal opportunity.  This is social decay and it is wrong.

We as citizens have to decide whether or not we really want to leave no child behind.  Because that is what we are currently doing.  And that is what we are going to continue to do in the foreseeable future as long as we keep making excuses by blaming teachers for not being up to the task of correcting what we as a society have created.  What do we expect is going to happen when the poorest, most dysfunctional and disadvantaged among us are forced via the housing market into segregated, ghetto communities?  They all send their children to the local school, which is then by default comprised entirely of children from the most disadvantaged, dysfunctional members of society.

These aren't bad people.  Some of the Kindergarten mothers I met were some of the most warm and loving people I've ever known.  But they were maids, gardeners, cashiers, single parents, or uncles and aunts who babysat because mom or dad was high.  I had a 1st grader miss the first two months of school because a gang-banging uncle accidentally shot him in the stomach.  I had multiple students whose fathers were locked away.  They were doing the best they knew how to do.  Chances are, like the 17 year old girl in my class, they didn't have such a good start themselves.

Yet this population is expected to perform at the same level as my daughter, along with the other students in her lily-white neighborhood with higher income, college educated parents who read to them every night and take them camping and to tide pools.  And their teachers are expected to produce the same results.  Take a walk through a high school common area in a middle class neighborhood and then a poor neighborhood and compare the behavior and attitude towards learning of the respective populations of students.  One group is likely bored or nonplussed, but mildly chatty and for the most part aware of what kind of behavior society will reward them for.  The other lives in a battleground of anxiety and fear, or outright depression.  School for these students has meant failure and embarrassment.  For many what has saved them is finding ways to be proud despite their inability to perform how society expects them to.  They are proud to be fighters.  They are proud to disrespect authority.   Despite the shame that surrounds them, they manage to hold their head high, dress fashionably, and just make it one more day on their feet instead of their knees.

I became a teacher because I knew about social inequality.  I knew how unfair it was that just because you were born on the wrong side of town you were statistically destined to be scrubbing some wealthier man's dishes, or taking out his trash, or with the boss expecting you to smile and pretend that you don't scrape by month to month with no seeming way out.  I knew it would be hard.  But I wanted to be that cool teacher that made school interesting and fun.  I wanted to be the one that understood, or at least tried to, how hard life can be, and how oppressive the system can feel.

And I found those kids.  I was that teacher.  They used to come in to eat lunch in my classroom and feed the pet praying mantis bees they caught outside.  They wanted ask me questions about the world.  But I failed them.  Everyday, every class, I was lucky to bring them just a bit further than the allotted content.  But even that was a challenge, given that so many of them struggled so deeply with the material - and had no support at home.  And even then, their trajectory was lucky to get them to graduation, much less college.  So many of their friends had dropped out.  School was just a seat to fill, a place to be that wouldn't get them picked up by the police.

I had to remind myself everyday that in the end, it wasn't really me.  I wasn't Atlas, holding each of their lives in the balance.  If only.  I was just one man in a savage life that pulled at their young flesh, whispering in their ears that this wasn't the life for them.  Not only was it just a stupid game, but a game that was stacked against them, that they weren't going to win.  All I could do was my part, and if I was lucky maybe convince just a few more to hang in there just a bit longer, that they too could leave their neighborhood and attend college, to be the one that someone else washes dishes for, that gets their car washed, that they too could look further than a weekend into the future.

So what do these kids need?  There are a few schools that are able to do amazing work, but they aren't scalable.  They either rely on a large amount of outside funds or extraordinary teacher sacrifice.  Yet they offer fascinating glimpses at what kinds of things we might be able to do with some real social will behind meaningful reform.  Low SES kids need a lot more support than they are getting.  And it needs to start earlier, and it needs to extend beyond the walls of the schoolhouse.  Support services need to reach deeper into communities to connect with students and parents where they are at.  Neuman gives us some good road maps as to evidence-based programs that are doing this effectively.

I think NCLB has shown the public just how many of our schools are "failing".  But they seem stuck, at the moment, on seeing the problem as being based at the school, or teacher level.  But the research on communities that produce failing schools shows that our current model of school-based social reform is woefully unequipped to deal with the magnitude of the development task required.

We've thrown ever larger sums of money at the problem, with seemingly few results to show for it.  But throwing bad money at the problem not only isn't effective, it creates the impression that more money isn't the answer.  And money alone isn't.  Yet real reform will be costly - likely very much so, although much savings could be had in deconstructing our one-size fits all approach and opting instead to specifically target funds toward programs that are both necessary and effective.  It also never hurts to stress what the costs of social dysfunction are to a society.  Spending significantly early on will only save us exponentially more later on. 

In the end this is a moral issue.  And I think most Americans would agree that every child deserves a fair shot at success.  But that's a tall order.  It means nothing less than the eradication of generational poverty as we know it.  Much of our economy is not set up to operate without a considerable underclass of low-skilled workers.  We may effectively be tasked with the problem of what to do when every new year turns out an entirely well-educated and upwardly mobile graduating class.  But what a wonderful problem to have!  If nothing less, what this would mean for the electoral process is a radically transformative body of young voters.

This is the world I'd like my daughter to grow up in.  Where her fellow citizens are determined by more than what family they came from.  Where every child is taken as they are and guided in a loving, supportive environment that is neither punitive nor a quick-and-dirty band-aid over years of neglectful disadvantage.  Where public school is the welcoming hand society holds out to every new citizen, with the promise that when graduation comes they will truly be a life-long learner, inspired not by fear but by the natural joy that comes from exploring this fascinating world.  This is the American dream I have for her.  And for us all.

No One Knows

God... I've been having a terrible time at work. On Friday I was told, now definitively, that I would be spending the rest of the school year teaching a K/1 blend - which if you know anything about Kindergarten is a nightmare scenario. Basically, I will have to do interventionist teaching to bring two different grade levels of children to benchmark by the end of the year... with each of them receiving half the time - while one group is receiving my full attention, the other will be working independently. And expecting Kindergarteners to be able to do this is crazy.

But as I was given this news, I was also chastised for not having my management down well enough, despite the fact that I was having to have the kindergarten working independently from the second week of class.

I was also accused of not following the curriculum, and not having the students doing enough writing. This despite the fact that Kindergarteners do not even learn their first word until the 2nd month of school.

Oh yeah, and the reason we're in this mess (grade sizes are in the single digits across K-8), is that obviously recruitment hadn't worked. Yet apparently no real recruitment had even happened. Glossy fliers were ordered, yet still sitting in boxes as of the 2nd week of school. The school finally decided to spend thousands on advertising... in mid September.

OK, so that's why I haven't been sleeping. My wife is worrying about me again. But I'll be OK, honest. It's just going to be a ball-busting year.

And in the background... the economy is apparently collapsing into fire and brimstone. On the Sunday news shows, Congressional insiders wouldn't even mention the nightmare scenario Secretary Paulson painted for them if they didn't act quickly on a massive, trillion dollar bailout. They literally would not say. It was as if the economic future was Voldemort.

Yet they hinted at competing ideological rifts that may impede such an act from getting passed, even as they promised that the levity of the situation assured a minimum of friction. Then Kristol comes out saying it's all a big establishment power-play. Gingrich tells NPR that Bernanke & Paulson had been wrong before, so we couldn't trust them now. A scanning of the various blogs and columns reflects a frustrated clamoring for answers, explanations, solutions... seemingly in vain. Its almost as if the fabric of space-time is rupturing, and the public is being asked to digest, and give support to political positions on theoretical physics.

OK Newt, the function of time divided by the root of variable constants can't be exponential-dependent.

No One Knows. And everything depends on it. Reading David Brooks today, wily devil though he often is, seemed to paint a perfect portrait of the nebulousity of these times. Liberal + Conservative = "..........."