This Is Not News

Chris Lehmann has a new post where he discusses the time demands of his job as principal of Science Leadership Academy, how he balances those with his family responsibilities, and the unrealistic expectations for self-sacrifice that are created by media portrayals of educators. Now, I follow Chris on Facebook and Twitter, and I have no idea when he switches his educator brain off to let it recharge. (Case in point - the blog post in question went up around midnight.) So if he’s saying there need to be limits, someone ought to listen.

I also think it’s worth it to zoom out from the school issue a little - is there any profession where the work doesn’t expand to fill all your available time plus, let’s say, 10%? There’s always that one-more-thing that we would like to do if we just had a little more time or a little more energy. We all have to find that line where we say “This is good enough.”

That said, I think there are two big factors at work making this the problem that Chris identifies in society at large and also within education.

1) We are, in many ways, a work-driven society. There’s very little pressure to be a successful person compared to the pressure to have a successful career. So instead of our professional standard of excellence being what you can accomplish in a 40 or 50 hour week, it’s what you can accomplish in a 60 or 70 hour week or more. So the people who meet that standard are the people who either don’t have families or personal lives to sacrifice, or who are willing to curtail the time they put into those areas. Once upon a time this was fodder for the Harry Chapin song “Cat’s in the Cradle,” now it lurks behind our discussions of gender equality in the workplace and a host of other issues regarding the balance between work, family, and personal life.

2) Society at large has so many problems, and so many of those problems have a direct impact on schools and students, that even if the most dedicated professionals like Chris found a way to double the time they spend working, it would not be enough. I think this makes it harder for teachers and educators to feel like they’ve reached the “good enough” point - especially when there are people who prefer to criticize the individuals who are already going above and beyond to try to fix the problem rather than criticize the society at large that has made the problem so daunting. Demanding that someone else fix this - without providing the tools to do so - somehow comes across as leadership. (And of course, there are educators and teachers who do the very same thing to their students or their colleagues, so I’m not saying any group is without fault there.)

This is the sort of story that drives me a little bit crazy, because my natural impulse to believe that people have reasonable explanations for their decisions runs headlong into my inability to imagine what those reasonable explanations are.

Philadelphia has been running a program for years where if a school has a large population of poor children, the district won’t require the families to fill out paperwork to apply for free breakfasts or lunches – they’ll just provide the free meals to the entire school. The thinking is, you save time and administrative costs, you avoid kids falling through the cracks, and you don’t place the responsibility for kids being in the program on the kids or their parents. The program began as a pilot program 17 years ago, and last year the Bush Administration suggested that it was going to wind down the program. In the last few weeks, an Obama Administration official has suggested that they plan to continue the phaseout – leading, incidentally, to some botched communication about when it’s ending.

Now, in fairness, there is some disagreement in the article about the documentation for the program, but it seems to me that the major objection people are bringing up is that 17 years is too long for a pilot program, and other districts want to know why Philadelphia’s special and doesn’t have to do all this paperwork. These actually strike me as legitimate concerns. Now, what is the reasonable way to handle them? Well, if it were me, I’d say that you should expand this successful program and take it out of the pilot stage so that other cities get to enjoy the benefits. But apparently that’s not the way the Department of Agriculture rolls.

Now, besides the fact that having students be well-fed is kind of critical to their success, this is important to me on a larger scale. If you believe, like I do, that human beings are capable of coming together, looking at the world around them, learning new ways to interact with that world, and then putting that knowledge to use, this story is a shovel to the face. Because we carried out an experiment here, we got the data, and we’re refusing to implement the good idea that came as a result.

That’s not a good change, and that’s not pragmatism. But that’s a post for later.

I have been trying to develop/find a good barbecue sauce for pulled pork and barbecued brisket for a while now - the thinker sauce that I use to glaze chicken can overwhelm the meat when I want a BBQ sandwich. Tradition appears to call for a vinegar sauce, but I am easily overpowered by the taste of vinegar. Today I mixed 1 cup of apple cider vinegar with 3/4 cup ketchup and about half a cup of Coke and got a pretty good base. I added some molasses (2 tablespoons) and some of my Alton-Brown-inspired barbecue rub (3-4 tablespoons), along with some steak sauce and Worcestershire sauce. I think the last two additions were a mistake - if I’m trying to balance out the strong vinegar, I shouldn’t be adding flavor liquids with a vinegar base. So I think next time out I’ll go with a cup straight of cider vinegar, Coke, and ketchup (or maybe tomato sauce), then add in the rub and the molasses.

I also cooked the sauce a little to thicken it up and let the flavors blend a little more. I’m sure that’s sauce heresy, but it works for me.

I haven’t just been AWOL from blogging for the last few months - I’ve been pretty quiet on the political activism front as well. I sort of took the opportunity of the election being over to say, “OK, I’ve done my hours of data entry - you go ahead and take the whole Oval Office thing and start fixing this mess.” Intellectually I know that this is inconsistent with my own beliefs about democracy and inconsistent with the bottom-up theme of the Obama campaign. However, if you combine the outrage deficit I’ve talked about before with the fact that instead of working to convince citizen voters, the activist task at hand is to convince elected officials with their own bases of power and their own agendas, I start doing a little cost/benefit analysis on the time/effort front and start to wonder what I can really do beyond my work as a teacher and writer.

However, that doesn’t mean I should be totally inactive, so I’m resolving to try to make good use of the summer to improve on both of those fronts. I may even take a crack at adapting my thesis to see what Deweyan reformers can learn from the election of 2008. Hard to believe it was just three years ago I was working quotes from some first-term senator’s memoir into that thing . . .

Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office:

http://www.phila.gov/districtattorney/

Brian Grady for DA:

http://www.votegrady2009.org/

Dan McCaffery for DA:

http://www.mccafferyforda.com/

Dan McElhatton for DA:

http://www.votemcelhatton.com/

Michael Turner for DA:

http://www.turner4da.com/

Michael Untermeyer for DA:

http://www.myspace.com/michael_untermeyer
(Inaccessible from School)

Seth Williams for DA:

http://www.votesethwilliams.com/

Coverage of Candidate Debate from Philadelphia newspapers:

Story 1: http://www.philly.com/philly/news/local/43021167.html
Story 2: http://www.philly.com/inquirer/local/pa/20090423_Lively_debate_for_DA_candidates.html

Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell proposed today that PA begin planning to consolidate school operations across the state, cutting the number of districts from 501 to somewhere near 100. The article’s well worth a read, since it also talks about school funding in the current economic climate. Obviously the devil will be in the details, but this sounds like it could be a very smart idea. I know “local control” is often touted as an absolutely essential component of education and other policies, but this is one case where I wish the “run it more like a business” advice would get followed - it’s a lot easier to make changes and get the most for the money when there’s not duplication of effort and numerous competing administrations creating inefficiencies. One thing I will want to see is how the target number was attained - too much consolidation could make districts a little too sprawling and hard to control. But here in the Northeast US, I definitely think we err too much on the side of numerous small municipalities and districts - I’ve read ridiculous stories from New Jersey, for example. So I’ll be interested in seeing if a governor with two years left in his term can get this done.

As the excitement about President Obama settles down, I’ll be interested in seeing whether any of the political lessons of the last two years can percolate down to the municipal level. Philadelphia will be having its first open Democratic primary for the office of District Attorney in - well, as long as I can remember, since retiring DA Lynne Abraham was first appointed to the job in the 80s. Young Philly Politics has already staked out territory supporting candidate Seth Williams, but I’m curious to see how the race unfolds over the next few months. Especially since I’m hopeful that I can use that primary as a teaching tool during my student teaching this semester. We shall see.

I have to say that it does not fill me with confidence that the new chairman of the board at Citigroup is gonna be a guy who thought it was a good idea to essentially sell Time Warner to America Online.

(One of my main images of the year 2000 is Pattie coming into the bedroom while she was getting ready for work and waking me up with some ridiculous piece of news that I was convinced had to be part of some hallucinatory dream I was having. “Time Warner’s merging with AOL!” “There’s a recount in Florida!” “Aliens have stolen our dining room chairs!” I think that last one did turn out to be a dream, at least.)

Always willing to be happily surprised, but that one strikes me as odd.

Pattie just told me that MSNBC got complaint emails when they cut away from Barack and Micelle Obama dancing. That - along with the not insignificant visual of two million people on the Mall in Washington - sums up the significance of today for me. People wanted this day, people worked for this day, and now people are happy together basking in this day. Tomorrow we get to work, but today - this is pretty awesome.

I am not a science guy. I wish I were, but my brain won’t wrap itself around numbers as easily as it wraps around words. I do have an interest in science, though, so from time to time I try to read geared-for-mass-audience science books. I’ve just started Michio Kaku’s Parallel Worlds, and a couple of chapters in I got struck by a question that I am not smart enough to see the obvious answer for:

If the light from various stars billions of years ago is just now visible because of the distance that the light has traveled, how did we get to this spot first?

My reading thus far has led me to the idea of cosmic inflation, which suggests that in the instants after the universe began there was a period of very rapid expansion, but A) I don’t know if I understand the theory yet and therefore B) I don’t know if it connects to the question I’m asking. So it looks like it’ll be back to the books on this one.