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.
Getting Local
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.
Failing Upwards?
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.
Yes We Did
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.
Speed of Light Just Isn’t Fast Enough
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.
My Outrage Deficit and Patience as a Non-Virtue?
I’ve been relatively quiet on presidential transition matters, partially from being outright wiped out and partially because I feel a little disconnected. There are some Obama decisions I like, some I feel unqualified to comment on, and some that I think are flat-out bad ideas. But while plenty of commentators expressed their hurt and anger over things such as the invitation to Rick Warren, and I can see the case that they’re making, I can’t get myself to feel the same. Part of this might be a defense mechanism – after spending a lot of time, energy and money to help get Obama elected I don’t want to think that that was effort poorly spent. But I think I have a larger issue. I’m so resigned to disagreeing even with the public officials that I support that I can’t find the line past which disagreement turns to “Hell no!” If I were implementing my own society, it would probably resemble something from what gets called the Far Left of the American political spectrum. But I have so little confidence that such measures would find popular or electoral support that I have come to view political reform as a generational process, and so the best I’m hoping for in the present is a set of tactical moves that will pave the way for that better outcome. So I am constantly asking myself “Is this program that I disagree with on its substance acceptable as a tactical move that will make my substantial desire more likely in the long term?” And when you reduce politics and government to a tactical discussion it loses a lot of the passion and can make it hard to remember what you’re working for in the first place. So I’m gonna have to figure something out here – I’m just not sure what yet.
Roots of the Adversarial Education Culture?
Last night Chris Lehmann posted about the way that many figures in the education world view teachers more as adversaries than vital resources in the effort to educate our kids. I’ve been mulling over Chris’s post in my head since then, and while I am far from an expert I think there are a number of reasons for this viewpoint. That means there are a lot of things teachers (and others) have to do in order to correct the problem, but maybe a rough To Do list isn’t a bad place to start.
- Familiarity: I’ve noticed that writers in various creative endeavors often say that they get the brunt of criticism from people when something isn’t quite right. There’s a perception that writers have the easy job, that if they screw up it’s more egregious than if a director or an artist or what have you screws up. And they say that part of this is that even if the average person has never framed a shot or played a note, just about everyone has put words to paper. (Maybe not well, but that’s another story.) So there’s no mystery associated with the task. That mystery is a line of defense for other creators – we may know that we don’t like a song or a scene, but we don’t have a sense that we know why it’s wrong or a sense that we can do better. So we might not be as critical. What does this have to do with teachers? Well, we’ve all been students and many of us have been parents. We’ve been part of the classroom process and so we don’t feel like there’s any mystery – even if we’re not familiar with the behind the scenes work (prep, grading, lesson planning) that makes the classroom environment work. So we’re less forgiving of what we see as mistakes. Plus, since we’ve all been in classrooms, the odds are pretty good that we’ve had bad teachers at some point. I’d say I’ve had some bad teachers at every level since elementary school. I’ve had average teachers and excellent teachers too, but just like people will remember the one double play the second baseman screws up instead of the ten he turned successfully, those memories of bad teachers can become magnified and create an unease that teachers don’t know what they’re doing.
- Bad Word of Mouth: When I say that everyone knows a bad a teacher, I’m going to include teachers in that statement. I have had friends, family friends, acquaintances and associates who work in schools. Almost every one of them has had stories about teachers who aren’t up to the job. In fact, in the urban education course I took this past semester for my Master’s, I was assigned a book written by a former teacher at an urban school who warned prospective teachers not to let the bitterness and bad attitudes of experienced teachers get to them. Now, maybe that’s due to differences in styles, maybe it’s due to personal rivalries. But when people hear from people “on the inside� that there are bad teachers who don’t get called to account, that’s going to create a negative image of teachers and the organizations and officials that advocate teachers’ interests.
Continue reading “Roots of the Adversarial Education Culture?”
Screen Actors Guild and Gandhi: What’s the Cost of Cooperation?
I’ve been loosely following the goings-on in the Screen Actors Guild negotiations, and I admit that much of my info seems to come from the dueling statements by various factions which are reposted on Nikki Finke’s Deadline Hollywood site, but it strikes me that there’s a really interesting case study here of an idea I’ve seen expressed by Gandhi (and certainly elsewhere). In a nutshell, SAG has gotten nowhere in its negotiations with the main group of production companies, the AMPTP. In order to try to gain some leverage in the negotiations, the national board of SAG wants to hold a strike authorization vote. They don’t actually want to strike yet, they just want to make it clear that a strike is a possibility if a suitable deal isn’t worked out. Various factions within SAG, along with many unions and industry participants outside of SAG, make the argument that given the current economy, it’s a terrible time to strike and possibly put people out of work, and SAG should just hurry up and try to get the best contract it can now.
OK, so where’s the Gandhi come in? One of the major tenets of his strategy of non-cooperation was that no minority can exploit a larger group without that group’s permission and cooperation. If the larger group simply refuses to cooperate, then the smaller group can not accomplish any of the things it wants to accomplish and therefore can not benefit from the oppression. In the case of India, Britain could gain no advantage from its empire without the labor of the colonial subjects, the general acceptance of colonial rule, and the work of native administrators and officials. If every man, woman and child in India refused to do any work that would benefit the British Empire, the British in India would be at a loss and Britain itself would gain no raw materials or profitable market. The oppressed must go along with their oppression. Why would the oppressed willingly cooperate with their oppressors? Because the oppressors have the power to inflict suffering. They can take away what small amount of resources and freedom the oppressed have obtained for themselves. They can even take away the oppressed’s lives. And so, in order to preserve the small bit that they have, the oppressed cooperate and do not demand the much greater amount of resources and freedom to which they are entitled. You know the expression that no one is more dangerous than someone with nothing left to lose? Well, the flip side is that if you give someone just a tiny amount to lose, they become a whole lot less dangerous. Continue reading “Screen Actors Guild and Gandhi: What’s the Cost of Cooperation?”
The Problem with Paper Ballots
After the 2000 election, I was pretty strongly in favor of electronic voting. Of course, what I was in favor of was an idealized form of electronic voting, one that I would describe as “functional.” Instead we wound up with many instances of buggy, non-secure machines that sometimes failed to operate and often could not be verified. And I began to wonder what had ever possessed me to support the idea in the first place. The Minnesota Senate race has reminded me. For starters you have the problems with paper ballots and scanning machines where the machines don’t properly count some votes. Then you get the ambiguous ballots where you have to figure out voter intent from a bunch of markings that don’t quite follow the instructions. (And let me just say how much confidence these exercises give me in all the standardized tests I’ve had to take in my life.) And now on top of that we’re seeing the inevitable result of a process that depends on taking hundreds of thousands of pieces of paper and moving them around: stuff gets lost. If I’m following the story correctly, one Minnesota precinct has lost an envelope containing over a hundred ballots, so those ballots can not be recounted and Norm Coleman’s campaign wants to prevent Minnesota from using the original count.
Now, given all the problems we’ve discovered with the actual implemented version of electronic as opposed to my idealized version, maybe we need to accept these drawbacks. Or maybe we should be looking for a way to combine electronic voting with paper documentation and backups to ensure that when we have an election, we can actually figure out who wins.
(Then again, if I’m truly honest, this Minnesota election looks like it’s so close that any human error might change the result. This seems to me like the kind of situation that calls for a run-off election. It might be failsafe you only have to use once in a lifetime, but boy wouldn’t it come in handy once you do need it?)
I Was Young and Foolish Then
Another thought that’s been running through my head, in part based on the idea that I heard in last night’s presentations and elsewhere that these days twenty-somethings are more likely to spend some time after college in an extended period of gathering their thoughts and figuring out where they want to go – possibly returning home to live with parents or taking some time before beginning their careers. In an odd coincidence of timing, I had just been talking to one of my officemates at St. Joe’s about how many of my future options and choices were shaped by the decision I made to major in philosophy as an undergrad: a decision I made at the age of 18 in large part because as a college freshman I had a history class I hated and a philosophy class I loved, and I couldn’t drop the former without dropping the latter. I never took another history course as an undergrad. So when I decided to pursue a graduate degree, philosophy seemed the most logical course. And when I decided that I wanted to pursue a career in secondary education, all of a sudden I found myself in a graduate degree program that did not match up particularly well with my overall career goals. So now here I am finishing up a second graduate degree. How different might all of that have been if I had loved the history course and disliked the philosophy class?