Category: Culture

Running in a Race to Nowhere

Posted on by Suki

The other night I joined a boisterous, energized crowd at the Rio Theater to see the second of two films about education making waves these days. (See my review of the first, Waiting for Superman. I’m going to attempt to avoid a compare/contrast of these two radically different films here; hopefully I’ll get to that soon.)

Race to Nowhere is tailor made for Santa Cruz. The audience loved it, alternately cheering and sighing (and sometimes a bit of crying) for kids suffering from the high stakes of our current educational system. You’d think that Race to Nowhere was just preaching to the choir in Santa Cruz, a city/county chock full of alternative educational opportunities. But the comment time afterwards made it clear that the film’s message is one we could pay a lot more attention to here.

Race to Nowherewas made by a mom, Vicki Abeles, whose daughter was hospitalized due to the stress of her middle school education. Abeles realized that her daughter’s experience was not only not unique, but that it was becoming more and more common. Faced with pressure to succeed from kindergarten or even before, kids are stressed out and anxious. But far from being stressed by an education that demands that they grow and learn, they are being stressed out by an education that constantly demands busy work with few real applications in their future lives.

The film is a low-budget affair, with bad lighting, inexpert camera work, and bare basics editing. But what it doesn’t have in fancy tricks is made up for by the overwhelming sincerity of the people who took part in this project. They didn’t just criticize our system, they poured their hearts out about their experiences in it.

Abeles develops her theme by first showing that our kids are stressed out, and that they don’t have to be. A generation ago, kids were taking home less homework, taking fewer tests, and worrying about college much later. In the last 20 years, our culture and our educational system have changed radically. Where homework once was used as a tool to help kids learn, now it’s used as a tool to punish kids and families by taking away their free time. Where kids once competed with each other for honors, kids now compete with a system designed to constantly cut them down. Where teachers once taught kids how to think, now they are forced to teach test-taking skills. Where kids once learned for life, now they learn for the test and nothing more.

Some of the most poignant aspects of the film for me:

A high school English teacher in East Oakland is shown being the brilliant teacher she clearly is. She inherits kids whose education has left them with few options. Instead of spending another year trying to get these kids to do better on tests, she spends that year inspiring them and teaching them to think for themselves. At the end of the film, she tearfully relates why she became a teacher… and why she is now quitting.

A mom whose teenage daughter committed suicide speaks, for the most part, calmly and with a challenging look at the camera. She knows that her daughter’s story is important. What we don’t know until the film advances is that her daughter’s story is also about how our culture has made getting good grades a life-and-death issue for some kids. This mom challenges us to reconsider our beliefs about teen suicide: her daughter didn’t show any warning signs. She didn’t have any obvious emotional problems. She didn’t run with a bad crowd. She was a normal, healthy girl who was driven to suicide by the pressure placed on her by school, college, and, her mother admits, her parents themselves. Late in the film, we see the mom interacting with her surviving son, and we hear her talking about how she has changed her parenting. She has learned a lesson in the way that none of us wants to have to learn.

The anecdote of a school where the principal read an anti-homework book and decided to try cutting out homework for a while. The parents and teachers liked it so much, they decided to cut out homework entirely. The result? Happier kids, families, and teachers, and no change in test scores. In fact, homework has no correlation with test scores.

I came into this film a member of the choir. In fact, many homeschoolers are part of the league of composers who have been composing for this choir for quite a while. For whatever reason, we took our kids out of school. And then we noticed some weird things:

Our kids were learning more.

Our families were happier and less stressed out.

Our kids (or the older homeschoolers we met) were doing just fine in college and in life, without tests and stress and piles and piles of homework!

But I thought that this film did an admirable job of presenting the facts clearly for those who have never even considered listening to this chorus of voices telling them that everything is being done backwards. In Santa Cruz, a hiss rose from the audience when George W. Bush was on the screen announcing what he hoped to achieve with No Child Left Behind. But we have to remember this: Most of the country, even liberals around this country, thought that NCLB would improve things. This was a bill co-authored by revered liberal politicians. The fact that the educational establishment largely predicted its ill effects on education aside, most people in this country applauded more testing, more focus, less fun.

If you’re one of those people, if you’re reading this and poo-poohing all I’m describing, you are the person who needs to see this film. Yes, it’s short on data. (Most films are.) Yes, it’s heavy on tear-jerking. But these tears are for real kids who suffered real abuse from our educational system. The overwhelming strength of this film is its emphasis on simple reality. No predictions are needed. Kids with less homework are happier kids. They learn just as well. Kids who go to OK colleges learn a lot and become productive members of society. We don’t all have to go to Harvard. If your kid fails algebra, it’s not the end of the world.

And if your kid gets a B in algebra, it shouldn’t be the end of her life.

The open comment time at the end showed just how much this film is needed even in alternative universes like Santa Cruz. The most powerful speakers were teens who got up and talked about the stress and competition at their schools. A graduate of Pacific Collegiate School (PCS) talked about how the teaching in this school that is regularly cited as “one of the best in the country” was geared to the test. He said that AP classes were shoved at students and it was just an exercise in memorizing information for tests. He talked about how many kids in his class dropped out due to the stress.

Ironically, this film was hosted by a number of local private schools, some of which are notable for their reputation for piling on huge amounts of homework. After the film, I heard a parent go up to one of the schools’ information tables and ask, with a twinkle in her eye, “So, you’re going to cut out homework at your school now, right?”

The mom manning the table simply rolled her eyes.

It’ll take more than a film to change our culture, but at least it’s a start.

Mandate, schmandate

Posted on by Suki

So we have a state budget and we perhaps think that all is good.

All is not good.

This economy is less like a roller coaster and more like a very slow sink into thick black mud. Who knows? Perhaps we’ll find a diamond down there in the mud, but for now, all we see is the muck.

I just noticed this comment in the Santa Cruz Sentinel about mental health funding for students:

“It’s a grave issue,” county Superintendent of Schools Michael Watkins said. “He took the funding, but it’s still a mandate, so the question is how can we get the money? With the legislature on recess and a new governor, trying to get something back in could be difficult.”

Also slashed with the stroke of a pen is state funding for childcare. Not my problem, you are probably thinking.

Problem is, it’s everyone’s problem. On the one hand, we want to do the right thing. We elect legislators who do things like create mandates for educating children. Poor children who need quality care. Any children with special needs. It sounds great! All children’s needs should be served.

The people to whom these mandates are given take them seriously. As I wrote in a previous post, our state-run preschools are a wonder. They do great things for families, for young parents, for education, for kids. We write a mandate, we send the money, amazing people like Teacher Debbie give their lives and invest their souls. Wonderful things happen.

Then with a stroke of the pen, it’s all gone.

I realize that this is a ridiculous economy. We can only see down. No one is seeing any diamonds sparkling above. We’re just hoping that there’s something to grab onto before we descend into the muck.

But as Watkins mentions in the Sentinel article, these investments save us money. Yep, a little spent, a lot gained. It’s like all the supposed furor being felt around the country for the health care bill. New taxes! New mandates! No matter that everyone who pushes a pencil around these ideas says that this will save us money. It is so much cheaper to catch diabetes early and provide medication and education, than to chop off someone’s legs then drop them a bill. Prevention works. Yes, rich people are more comfortable in countries with socialized medicine. Guess what? Rich people are already more comfortable here. The only thing that will change is that the poor might be able to keep their legs and continue to be productive members of society.

Right now we’re all supposed to be crying for those poor rich people who are going to feel a pinch in their extravagant lifestyles. Gimme a break while I go feed that woman begging outside of my window. She ran out of fois gras, poor thing.

Really, I just can’t believe that we can be so stupid, over and over. This is why old men are cynical, they say. But old women, according to the studies I’ve read, get energized and radicalized. I’m having trouble, right now, accessing that [very near] future of my radicalized old woman self. Instead, I read the paper and I wonder at the idiocy. No one has ever proven that higher taxes hurt the rich. Frankly, no one’s ever proven that the rich even notice.

(Hey, did you all notice that you took home more money last year? I read an article explaining that Obama changed Bush’s tax credit so that we got a small amount back each money by paying less in tax rather than getting a check at the end of the year. We all noticed that darn check, but we don’t notice Obama’s money. His is probably more useful in stimulating the economy, but no matter, we want our 600 bucks in paper form, darn it! Like the rich, we take home more money and we just don’t notice.)

There’s no guarantee that any particular government policy can stop this slow slide into the muck, but there is a guarantee that on a day sometime very soon, scores of low-income kids will be parked in front of a TV rather than watching an egg hatch in their classroom. They’ll be left with grandma (who lost her legs because there was no funding to teach her how to manage her diabetes) and grandma will know that she’s not doing the best for them, but what more can she do? The roof’s leaking, her grandson’s asthma medication is running out, and we’re all crying for the poor rich people.

Excuse me: she’s eaten her fois gras, and now she’s demanding I jumpstart her Jag. Rich people these days. I swear.

No time to wait for Superman

Posted on by Suki

I went today to a special showing of Waiting for Superman, the first of the two films about the sorry state of American education that are coming out this fall. It was sponsored by the Santa Cruz Education Foundation and had a panel discussion afterward by John Laird, Ellen Moir of the New Teacher Center, former teacher and union president George Martinez, and Mary Gaukel Forster, principal of Delta Charter School. They were introduced by Superintendent Michael Watkins.

Waiting for Superman
Waiting for Superman

When Watkins asked how many teachers were in the audience, a sea of hands went up. Though Forster and probably some number of the teachers represented charter schools, it was a panel and an audience heavily invested in “the system” that Waiting for Superman blames for all of our educational problems.

The film itself was moving — how could it not be? It followed a few months in the educational lives of five children who are at the mercy of the system. Four of them are urban, non-white kids. The fifth is a suburban white girl whose problems, the film argues, are not so different. She ended up being a bit of a distraction, but more on that later.

No one could argue that what the four inner-city kids are going through is in any way acceptable. One of them has a mother who will do anything to keep her daughter in the Catholic school across the street, but the limitations on the “anything” she can do are clear when she loses hours at work and can no longer pay tuition. The other children are in poor-performing schools, and their parents have found a charter school to place all their educational hopes on. Problem is, charter schools are few and far between, and the kids have to go through a lottery to get in.

The film makes some fine points, and I don’t think there’s any reason not to go see it if you care about the state of our public schools. But in my opinion and that of everyone else who had time to express an opinion at this showing, it suffers from a little too much Superman and not quite enough Clark Kent.

We learn about these fabulous charter schools that the children can get into: instead of 90% failure we get 90% success. Instead of teachers who won’t return repeated phone calls, we get teachers who work long hours and in one school, actually live there. We hear from teachers and administrators who are sure that all schools could be their schools. We hear from Michelle Rhee, who at the time of the filming was sure she was going to reform D.C. schools (and who has just resigned her job).

There are a few omissions in this film, however:

First, the acceptance of rather vague measures for what makes a good school. Are test scores the only measure? Rising test scores? Satisfaction of the students and parents? Surely, the schools they featured were good schools by many measures, but what makes a failing school? What do we want from our schools? What is the reality of what kinds of jobs are out there when the students graduate?

Second, the complete ignorance of all the other possible factors that make a poor student. The students at these charter schools are starting with the most important thing: an adult who wants them to get a good education. But if we turned all schools into charters like these, wouldn’t we have to educate the other kids? The ones who have drugged out parents, distant parents, no parents, too many parents fighting over them? And what about the nutrition these kids are getting? Again, we see these thoughtful, caring parents sending their kids to school with a full belly and a last slurp of orange juice. Their classmates are largely arriving on empty stomachs. And the home environment? There is not a single TV in this film except the nostalgic shots from past TV shows. There is only one scene with a kid playing a video game. Otherwise, this film would have us believe, if we turned all schools into charter schools, suddenly the distractions and commotions in every kid’s house would vanish. All the parents would assemble their kids around the dining room table to help them with homework. Hm.

Third, the lack of introspection about what a teacher’s job really should be. I absolutely applaud these teachers who are giving their lives to teaching, but most people aren’t going to do this. Read this EdWeek blog for a really great description of what an average teacher’s job really should be. What the film is proposing is literally impossible: hordes of energetic, young, well-trained teachers who don’t get burned out and magically don’t want job security or good working conditions. Teachers are real people with real lives, and our system needs to be set up with that in mind.

Finally, the reality of how things really have to get done: by working together. Nice idea to go off and start a charter school, but that’s going to serve the needs of 3% of the students. The other 97% are going to see things improved by the combined efforts of districts, principals, teachers, and yes, unions.

As Laird said in his remarks after the film, “Nothing is black and white. If things were easy, they would have been done a long time ago.”

As Moir said, “Charisma matters. Money matters. Focus matters. Teachers matter. Social services, mental health services…there are many pieces we need to think about.”

And Martinez, who has had a long career in education, drew a laugh and then lots of nods when he said, “What I’ve learned after decades of failed reform: To obtain an education requires hard work: by administrators, by teachers, by students, by parents, and with the support of your community.”

In other words, down here in the trenches we don’t have time to wait for Superman; we’re working too hard!

On to my aside above about the lone suburban girl in the film. I can only think that they threw her in as a nod to the demographic they knew they were going to draw, because they spent very little time on her after assuring us that her chances were pretty much the same as the other kids’. We all knew that this was nonsense, of course, and it’s clear that the dynamic in suburban schools, and in the rural/suburban mix we have here in Santa Cruz County, are very different than in urban schools.

In the short dash through her quest for a better school, the film assures us that the education she’s getting at her high school is bad because, simply, of tracking. The implication is that the kids at the top of the learning curve are doing great, and the kids who need remedial help in her school are doing just fine, but the students in the middle are suffering because they aren’t being challenged enough. This may be true, but that’s not because the needs of the students at the top and bottom are being served so well. In fact, it’s highly likely that the needs of the identified GATE kids aren’t being served at all, given the state of GATE funding in California.

This section of the film opened such a huge can of worms and then slammed it shut with a jump cut back to the inner city, rather than explore in any depth how the challenges of these schools compare to the others. And to say that it can all be solved by not serving the needs of different kids differently? That’s what “no tracking” really boils down to. This is an excellent piece about why ability grouping doesn’t have to be “tracking.”

So: heartwarming, yes. Scary, yes. Sad, yes. Inspiring, a bit.

But: overly simplistic, Hollywood-style slights of hand, and lack of real depiction of how a school works and how we can help, rather than blame, the teachers.

Beloved picture books

Posted on by Suki

According to the New York Times, parents are starting to push their kids away from picture books at unusually early ages. “Picture books are for babies,” seems to be the message:

The economic downturn is certainly a major factor, but many in the industry see an additional reason for the slump. Parents have begun pressing their kindergartners and first graders to leave the picture book behind and move on to more text-heavy chapter books. Publishers cite pressures from parents who are mindful of increasingly rigorous standardized testing in schools.

Geez, No Child Left Behind really is the gift that keeps on giving. No matter that picture books are written with age-appropriate stories, draw young readers in with vivid pictures and smaller amounts of text per page, and actually have more complex and advanced vocabulary than those horrid staples of first-grade reading, the chapter book. (OK, not all chapter book series are horrid, but they are in general simplistic, low on rich vocabulary, and narrow in their range of topics.)

One of our favorites!
One of our favorites!

My kids are both well ahead of the reading curve, as measured by standardized tests. They are the kids that these parents want, apparently. Their relationship with picture books, however, is still a fond one. My son, 11, will still pick up a picture book when his 7-year-old sister brings it home from the library.

My daughter, who can read an adult-level medical text out loud with very few mistakes (she was obsessed for a while with human body science), still loves picture books. She spent years after being a toddler still going to the board books section of the library. She’d sit down on the comfy pillows and read book after book.

Why did she do this?

Well, partly to irk her mother, I’m sure!

But mostly because picture books don’t work within the limitations of other books. In picture books, there is no dividing line between realism and fantasy. In picture books, there’s no assumption that “kids wouldn’t be interested in this.” Picture books can be about anything. Some of our favorites:

I Went Walking

A simple, repetitive story about a girl who goes out walking, and as she sheds various articles of clothing she mentions all the animals she sees. At the end, all the animals are following her. It’s really about… nothing? But it’s a great story, engaging and musical and lovely. (I saw a friend who has a preschooler holding this book the other day, and I had a brief twinge of jealousy. We’ve outgrown that book. Oh, no!)

Olivia

If you have a little girl with a Very Big Personality, you understand Olivia. She has a book of 20 Loud Songs. She wears ridiculous outfits. She makes a spectacle of herself at school. Oh, and she’s a pig with enormous ears, so she’s got that going for her, too.

Tyger Voyage

All in rhyme, I resisted reading this one for a long time after it was given to us. The illustrations are gorgeous. The story is puzzling and beautiful.

Dahlia

Love, love, love this little book about a girl who is given a gorgeous doll by her doll-like great-aunt, and then she and the doll have adventures.

Dr Seuss

You know about him.

The Bunny Planet books

Each child has a bad day, and then has a visit to the Bunny Planet, where everything is perfect.

This was just off the top of my head. I could get specific titles if I just walked downstairs to my daughter’s room. You see, last year after she finally started to read other books (though she’d been able to read since she was 4!), I decided to clean out her bookshelves so she could fit some books that were actually at her reading level. You know, important books. Real books. Serious books. I got rid of the crappy books we’d somehow ended up with over the years, and put our favorite picture books up in her closet.

One by one, two by two, large thumps came from her room in the next few months. She’d climb up in her closet and start throwing down books.

“You put away Hop on Pop????” I’d hear her yell. “I need to be able to reach Farkle McBride, Mommy!”

So much for room on bookshelves.

Let’s face it: until you get up into the really meaty novels, the early chapter books are really limited. They limit themselves to characters like an early-grade kid (Junie B., Captain Underpants). They limit themselves to 1st-2nd grade vocabulary. They forget all about onomatopoeia. They can’t take place in foreign lands. They can’t take wild flights of imagination.

My daughter doesn’t like small type, probably because she has inherited her mother’s weak eyes. So though she can read anything, what she chooses to read must have large-ish words. And that rules out Harry Potter. And rules in all the wonderful, wild, and weird picture books that she still loves.

I have actually been somewhat happy about this. Despite the fact that I know she can read more challenging books, we haven’t run into the problem we did with our son. When he started reading voraciously (going on 7 years old), he suddenly read through everything. He read every single Wizard of Oz. Zipped through Harry Potter. E.B.White? Done. Dick King-Smith? He was past that level in a month. Suddenly, we had to try to find appropriate reading material for a 7-year-old who’d read everything and wasn’t ready for scary young adult fare.

Picture books solve a lot of problems, and create none. I say, let your kids read and reread them as long as they want. There are worlds there for them to explore, beautiful illustrations for them to lose themselves in.

Everything they need to stimulate those high test scores. And those happy minds.

State subsidized preschools need support

Posted on by Suki

When my daughter was three, I was in big trouble. I’d found what I thought was the perfect school for my son, a parent participation charter school. But I had to take one morning out of my schedule to spend in my son’s classroom, and I didn’t know if I could do it.

As Teacher Debbie held out the egg, it hatched in her hand. Magic!
As Teacher Debbie held out the egg, it hatched in her hand. Magic!

My daughter was — as I’d heard another parent describe his daughter — a “force of nature.” She was as impressive as a hurricane, strong as a redwood tree, relentless as the waves that hit the beach. It was exhausting, and the thought of spending one of the three mornings she was in a private preschool not by myself was killing me. Her three mornings at preschool were my lifeline to something close to sanity.

But there was a light on the horizon, and that light was named Teacher Debbie.

My daughter had never had an easy time in preschool. When she entered at 18 months for two short mornings a week, she had a saintly teacher, Lisa, who took her in hand and ended up with a good respect of her. But then she was handed on to the next classroom up, and things were a total disaster. Her teacher really didn’t want to work that hard. (I found it hard to blame her; I didn’t want to work that hard, either.)

But then I found out that there was a State run preschool on the campus of my son’s new school, and in exchange for one morning of working in the preschool, I got a free morning to work in my son’s classroom as well.

Teacher Debbie is an amazing woman. I wouldn’t mention her background as a biker gal, except that it is so much part of her persona. The combination of being a loving, respectful preschool teacher and wearing a Harley t-shirt is just too great. Teacher Debbie knew nothing about my daughter when we started (frankly, I didn’t want to jeopardize my chances of having my daughter attend, and I knew that her behavior problems at her other school might give pause). So a few amazing weeks after we enrolled, I mentioned to Teacher Debbie as we stood watching the kids that my daughter had had no behavioral difficulties in her classroom.

“Why should she?” Teacher Debbie asked with a self-assured innocence. Why, indeed. This girl who had nearly brought one teacher to tears by getting her entire class to start chanting “poopie-head” for the better part of an hour was simply normal in Teacher Debbie’s classroom.

Teacher Debbie with kids -- we are all connected.
Teacher Debbie with kids -- we are all connected.

The preschool was special in many ways. Because it was actually an Adult School program, it was the parents who were the students. They were required to work in the classroom, where Debbie would mentor them in positive parenting techniques, bring snacks, so Debbie could help them give deep thought to what healthy food was, and go to evening meetings where they would hear talks by various child development experts. Many of the parents were very young. Most were not highly educated.

And they were a joy to be with. This program gave them a roadmap for positive growth as parents. It gave them such an amazing mentor (from biker gal to mom to preschool teacher). It gave them time to be with other parents and find out that their trials were our trials.

For me, it gave me a place where I, and my daughter, were normal. We were just parents. She was not a behavior problem with a legal document specifying how and why she would be kicked out of her school. I was not a mother who had a daughter who was shunned because, somehow, other parents seemed to fear that my daughter’s behavior might be communicative.

Why am I inspired to write about all this now when things are going so well for me and my daughter?

Because things aren’t going well for Teacher Debbie and the others of her ilk in Santa Cruz County and beyond. As you may have noticed, our State does not have a budget yet. The reason we don’t have a budget is that we need a 2/3 majority to pass a budget, and in these times of polarized political parties, there’s no such thing as a 2/3 majority, except if you’re voting on whether we should like apple pie.

Because we don’t have a budget, our state-run preschools are running out of money. As far as I know, none has closed yet, but closures are imminent. Read this story about the one in Live Oak School District. Our State-run preschools are having to borrow money to pay their teachers. I doubt they’re buying supplies anymore; that’s probably up to the parents, who are already largely low-income and stretched beyond their capacity.

Amongst all the horrible things that are happening because of our current economic and political climate, this is surely one with long-lasting effects. These children — and even more, these parents — need their preschools. It’s such a cheap investment in the good of our society. Recent studies have shown that if you want to reach children, reach out to their parents. For all the money that gets dumped into early childhood education, the little that gets funneled to educating the parents has such a greater effect.

I had read every parenting book I could get my hands on, in a desperate search for advice. So I wasn’t looking for education. But I was looking for support, and I got it. When I asked Teacher Debbie why she thought my daughter did so well in her classroom, she paused thoughtfully for a moment.

“She’s a strong girl,” Teacher Debbie said, “And I think the world needs more strong girls.”

Spoken like the truest biker gal turned preschool teacher. A woman who has changed lives.

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