The Rake Magazine

Tag: education

  • Readin', Writin', and Ninjutsu

    Like the stealthy shinobi, Secretary of
    Education Margaret Spellings slipped in and out of Saint Paul yesterday,
    accomplishing her mission with a minimum of bloodshed and outcry from those
    who would oppose her     in carrying out the quest laid upon her by her daimyo.
    Few recognized her shadowy presence, overshadowed as it was with news of racially-charged
    electoral rhetoric, newly appointed slutty
    governors    , and medical
    incompetence     of nigh-mythical proportions.

    Spellings’ quest is, of course, to stump for George W. Bush’s
    premier education program, No Child Left Behind
    (NCLB), which has been up for renewal since September 30. Her stop in St.
    Paul yesterday, complete with Pawlenty photo opp, concerned her decision to
    allow some states to make modifications in how schools are penalized for not
    making "adequate yearly progress". According to Spellings, the modifications
    are intended to allow states to differentiate between schools that are barely
    missing benchmarks and those that are dramatically underperforming on a
    year-to-year basis. Strangely, no mention was made of providing the money
    promised by Washington to fund the testing required by NCLB.

    Spellings’ speech emphasized that this new flexibility would
    not come at the price of accountability. Punctuated as it was by the secretary
    brandishing her gleaming ninja-to
    and threats to send her shadowy clan of kunoichi to "encourage"
    adequate yearly progress from the nonconforming and recalcitrant school
    districts not living up to the administration’s lofty standards, many in the
    Washington offered their confidence that these measures would make a monumental
    difference in closing the education gap.

    Oddly, Minnesota isn’t one of the states eligible to
    participate in the pilot program. Minnesota has yet to secure approval for the alternative
    exams developed for English language learners, so won’t be able to participate
    in the program. DFL lawmakers seized upon this opportunity to question why the
    secretary chose to come to Minnesota at all if the state wouldn’t be reaping
    the benefits of the Department of Education’s enlightened new policy –
    wondering if, in fact, this was all just a way to bring attention to Norm
    Coleman’s campaign for reelection. Given the nature of the news, this was
    unlikely at best. Regardless, Spellings quickly silenced these voices of
    dissent with a torrent
    of shuriken before vanishing into the quickly fading twilight, as ninjas are wont to do.

    Despite these modifications, which are intended to address
    one of the primary complaints about NCLB – namely that a school that doesn’t
    make adequate yearly progress gets bent over, sans lube, regardless of how
    close or far from the mark they hit – Congress and the Department of Education
    are unlikely to come to any significant agreement on renewing NCLB in the near
    future. The upcoming presidential election makes it even more likely Congress
    will sit on its collective arse expressing shock that baseball players would
    stoop so low as to take steroids, all the while informing the public on how
    hard it’s working to come to an agreement that "…will serve the best interests
    of the children. My god, won’t you think of the children?" Clearly our
    legislature has our best
    interests     at heart.

    Once we reach the end of the interminable two-year slog
    known as the modern election season, our elected representatives in Washington
    may stop wetting themselves every time a significant policy decision needs to
    be made long enough to create meaningful legislation. As a result, the act is very likely to be modified heavily, or even
    disappear altogether, after the election. Obama and McCain both want to modify
    the act heavily, and despite voting to put NCLB in place originally, Hillary
    Clinton is the only candidate who has stated she’ll put an end to the act,
    though she hasn’t yet provided a plan to replace the accountability measures
    many have agreed are good for several of the groups struggling with the
    achievement gap.

    And if that prognosis spawns an odd feeling in the pit
    of your stomach that feels remarkably like hope for the future, there no reason for concern. You can rest easy in the near certainty that the
    next administration, whoever may lead it, will almost certainly put an asinine,
    overpriced and ill-advised education policy in place that makes the reaming our
    schools have received under NCLB look like a threeway with Strawberry Shortcake
    and Rainbow Brite.
    Then again, Strawberry Shortcake turned out to be quite the tramp.

  • Suffer the Children

    The holiday spirit had barely dissipated last month when close to one-hundred-fifty people took to the streets to protest budget cuts for early childhood education. One protester was apparently so distressed by the lack of resources that she wailed and threw herself on her knees. Others tried to help her up, but she let her body go limp like an obstinate child. She was, in fact, four years old.

    All told, about two-thirds of the marchers had yet to see the inside of a kindergarten classroom. Clad in orange and sporting “Early Start” and “Strong Finish” signs on their chests and backs, respectively, the preschoolers, along with numerous chaperones, paraded down Nicollet Mall in downtown Minneapolis, the youngest riding in carts pulled by teachers, parents, and volunteers from the YWCA Children’s Center at 12th and Nicollet.

    Despite the goal that adults professed for the protest, the children seemed more concerned with peace. Many of them wore white satin headbands with that word spelled out in glitter and (except for the aforementioned activist) chanted, “We want peace. We want peace” as they skipped and jumped.

    “It’s really more about promoting civic engagement,” admitted Ellen Cleary, a YWCA development specialist, by way of explaining the confusion. When a reporter tried to get a straight answer from various marchers, they responded with the usual indignation, suspicion, and evasiveness, as if they had spied an infiltrator in their midst. One girl impudently thrust out her sign and contorted her sweet little face into a derisive “What—are you stupid?” expression. Another coyly smiled and looked down at her frosty feet, as if to suggest that she was marching for the right to winter boots. A three-year-old boy let out a shriek, buried his face in a nearby shoulder, and refused to answer. After the march, when questioned, four-year-old Nora ran and hid under a table.

    Protected by her gray laminate canopy, she was a little more forthcoming about what she was marching for. “Peace,” she said. And what is peace? Nora giggled and ran for cover again, this time into the arms of a YWCA volunteer. “Do you want to tell?” asked the volunteer. “No!” Nora insisted, and wriggled free of one more interrogator.

    The action on Nicollet Mall, organized by the YWCA of Minneapolis in honor of Early Childhood Education Awareness Month, was one of four protests (each near one of the nonprofit’s locations) to publicize five years’ worth of budget cuts for state childcare subsidies. According to the YWCA, with fewer low-income families qualifying for subsidies and facing higher co-payments, many low-income children are now deprived of early childhood education and some childcare centers have had to close.

    Becky Roloff, CEO of the YWCA of Minneapolis, attempted to kick off the downtown event with a brief statement. With several news cameras trained on her, she fought to be heard over the roar of restless children. “We are marching to tell everybody how important it is that all of you go to school and get an education like I got an education,” Roloff explained to her young audience. “We are doing this so that we can give you a good start, so that you can do well in school, and for the rest of your lives.”

    Without a microphone, however, Roloff’s message was no match for the din of a hundred youngsters ready to take it to the streets. The cameramen asked her to do another take—but not before Sarah Warren, an eager protest organizer with a drum, took a wrong cue. She began rallying the children to shout, “Early start, strong finish!”

    Though Roloff attempted to give the media what they wanted, revved-up children have a way of getting their way. There was nothing to do but lead the kiddie caravan out of the YWCA and into the cold.

    “What do we want? Peace! When do we want it? Now!” Thus began the mixed-message march as the group set off on its three-block trek down the Mall.

    Two blocks along, one mother, clearly accustomed to more aggressive demonstrations, spotted an approaching police car; she froze on the spot, as if bracing herself for the tear gas. The nearby nippers continued, oblivious to the threat.

    “We want peace. Hands are not for hitting,” they sang. Girls twirled. Boys jumped. Energy soared. And one lonely tear welled up in a reporter’s eye, while other passersby, in classic Minnesota fashion, seemed entirely oblivious to the spectacle.

  • Carpe Latinitatem

    I was walking around the office the other day and overheard one of the Rake’s ad reps telling two more reps that he’d just sold an ad contract. I opined, in passing, that his customer must be a very perspicacious sort. That, of course, brought the conversation to an abrupt halt.

    "What the hell does that mean?" he asked. So I told him wise or perceptive, and that it was from the Latin perspicio, which means to see through or to see thoroughly, and that perspicio, in turn came from per (through) and specio (to look) and that someone who could see through things tended to be wise, hence the connotation.

    "Perspective comes from the same roots, and you can change the inflective prefix and come up with introspective, inspect, respect, aspect, and so forth," I continued.

    Of course, by that time, the group had moaned, much like my children do when I go all Latin on them, and had gone back to their offices to sell more ads. At least I hope so.

    I thought of all this when I noted that on the NY Times today, the most emailed story was A Vote for Latin. The article is a good read, and makes a good argument for studying Latin. I am basically of the opinion that, if Thomas Jefferson thought is was worth knowing, it probably is. After all, as far as presidents go, he was the very summit of perspicacity.

  • The Death and Life of American Imagination

    In February 1953, a violent North Sea storm crashed through the Dutch levee system, killing 1,835 people and leaving a hundred thousand others homeless. In the aftermath, the country responded by building the Delta Works, the world’s most sophisticated system of flood defenses. According to John McQuaid, a reporter for Mother Jones on assignment in the Netherlands, the system is “engineered to a safety standard 100 times more stringent than the current goal (not yet achieved) for New Orleans’ most heavily populated areas. Even Dutch pasturelands have more protection than the Big Easy.” As one government engineer told McQuaid, conceiving and building the Delta Works “was like putting a man on the moon.”

    That was half a century ago. Why the disparity between what the Dutch could accomplish then, and what the U.S. (the country that did put a man on the moon) has conceived to protect New Orleans, one of its most historic and treasured cities, and the surrounding region? You can call it foresight, or innovation, but beyond that, what the Dutch response required—and where we appear to be failing in our response to the aftermath of Katrina—was tremendous imagination.

    Imagination is an intangible, unlimited, and free resource. It is not, at least for the purposes of this discussion, the same as fantasy, where universal laws cease to apply, where elephants might speak Latin or humans travel back in time. Nor is imagination reserved for artistic pursuits, though imagination is the core of creativity. Applying imagination to problem-solving requires the ability to come up with an idea, and to break that idea down into the steps that will bring it to fruition. It also requires an alchemical mix of will, vision, discipline, and action, not to mention stubborn perseverance in the face of frustration or opposition.

    A prime example of this use of imagination would be George Hotz, the seventeen-year-old who spent all summer cracking Apple’s iPhone; he broke the lock that tied the phone to AT&T’s wireless network and freed it for use on other carriers’ networks, even overseas ones. Hotz spent five hundred hours with four online collaborators, and was motivated by the challenge and by “fun.”

    Presently, imagination of this sort is very much in demand. One wake-up call to the erosion of imagination in American culture came in 2004, when “failure of imagination” was cited in the 9/11 commission report as the primary reason U.S. officials misjudged the threat of the 2001 terrorist attacks. Maybe government officials couldn’t imagine terrorists flying planes into the World Trade Center, but plenty of others could and did—and not just those who actually carried out the long-planned and highly complex attack. The ability to prevent terrorist attacks depends on leaders who are as imaginative as those who would carry them out.

    While imagination is one key to national security, it’s also crucial to economic security. In 2004, executives at leading technology companies like Dell, Cypress Semiconductor, and IBM spoke to Lee Todd, president of the University of Kentucky, about creating sustainable jobs for the U.S. in the years to come. All said the same thing, according to Todd: Imagination and creativity represent the future of the U.S. economy. On a broader level, the World Economic Forum chose “The Creative Imperative” as the theme for its 2006 conference in Davos, Switzerland. Writers like Daniel Pink, author of A Whole New Mind, point to the new “imagination economy” as a trend that’s just taking off. He sees it in quite simple terms: “People have to be able to do something that can’t be outsourced,” Pink told me. “Something that’s hard to automate and that delivers on the growing demand for nonmaterial things like stories and design. Typically these are things we associate with the right side of the brain, with artistic and empathetic and playful sorts of abilities.”

    Government leaders in education are joining the chorus, too. “American education’s single-minded focus on science, technology, engineering, and math (‘STEM’ subjects) is admirable but misguided,” wrote two former assistant U.S. secretaries of education in the August 12 issue of The Wall Street Journal Online. What makes America competitive in a shrinking global economy, they claimed, is “our people’s creativity, versatility, imagination, restlessness, energy, ambition, and problem-solving prowess.” As they summed it up, true success—economic, civic, cultural, domestic, military—depends on a broadly educated populace with “flowers and leaves as well as stems.”

  • Taming the Lunch Line

    Decreasing student enrollment in Minneapolis, and the subsequent shuttering of some nine of its public schools, has been big news in the last couple of years. Less known, perhaps, are the pressures that have resulted at remaining schools—especially in the cafeteria. 

    For example, Whittier International Elementary in South Minneapolis is a popular selection in the state’s school-choice lottery system and thus has seen enrollment go from 350 students in 2005 to nearly 500 in 2007. With this population surge, about a hundred kids are shuffling through the cafeteria every thirty minutes—for five consecutive lunch periods. Needless to say, things can get a little wild in what is already, by tradition, one of the more lawless realms at any K-12 institution. Seeking to impose some order, Whittier officials did a very au courant thing: They outsourced the problem to a consultant.


    Nancy Burns     is a certified classroom management trainer who has coached over ten-thousand teachers in her nine-year career. But in 2001, she began scrutinizing school lunchrooms. “I would do a classroom management conference and so many questions would come up about improving the cafeteria. Obviously, there was a need to make lunchtime work better,” she said. Since developing a training curriculum called “Cafeteria 101: Setting up for Success,” Burns has fully made over three school lunchrooms and consulted on several others. As far as she knows, this petite forty-year-old is the only person in Minnesota who specializes in this area.

    “Truly, I’m passionate about cafeterias,” said Burns, even as she admits how goofy that sounds. Her zeal stems from the idea that a relatively calm, well-run lunch period has benefits that reach beyond the cafeteria. “It affects the atmosphere of an entire school,” she pointed out. “Teachers can pick up kids and dive right into learning without wasting time recovering from a madhouse feeding frenzy.”

    How does Burns keep a busy cafeteria from devolving into a scene worthy of Animal House? She takes her cues from the biggest people-moving industry on earth. “A successful lunch program is like a well-run airport,” she said. “It has clear momentum and destinations, which are provided by signage, traffic flow, and zones.” She uses the typical flight experience as an example. “A plane is a place where you expect people—the flight attendant, maybe even the pilot—to be standing in a certain place wearing a uniform. Now the cafeteria staff and student helpers wear colorful aprons with handy pockets. They know exactly where to stand within their zones and children will always know where to find them.”

    Another strategy involves colored tape. “We literally marked out the line on the floor to help children and adults know where to queue up. It’s an enormous stress reducer when there are clear guideposts to the next transition,” said Burns. “Transitions, even small ones, are difficult for young children.”

    To adults, these “transitions” are merely a list of things one does in a cafeteria—get in line, pay for your food, grab some napkins, find a table, and so on. But to young children they can be sizable hurdles, especially when you factor in the stresses from hunger (the last lunch period at Whittier is at 1:40 p.m.) and the decibel levels in a typical elementary school lunchroom. According to Burns, the trickiest of these transitions involves condiments. Just try watching a hungry third-grader as she struggles to open a mustard packet—tears might not be common but frustration will be plentiful. Or worse: “Picture the kindergarten student who navigates the line and gets her hamburger,” Burns said. “But she doesn’t realize that it doesn’t have ketchup until she sits down. Now how do your procedures accommodate her?”

    To avoid students swimming upstream against the prevailing cafeteria current like ketchup-seeking salmon, Burns emphasizes prevention—a kind of “leave no condiment behind” approach. “The system that the lunch staff liked best involved foam-board signs,” said Burns. Emphasizing that the staff, who are there every day, have the last word, she made vertical signs that each pictured one of the day’s meals at the top, along with examples of recommended condiments. “I literally Velcroed ketchup and relish packets to the signs as a visual cue,” she says. And when that plan fails? “That’s when the colored aprons with their fabulous pockets come in.” All lunch room staff and helpers carry condiments with them.

    Establishing procedures is just one part of Burns’s job; she also trains lunchroom monitors on addressing throngs of young diners and managing the various tables: a peanut-free table for those with nut allergies and a “loss of privilege” table where students are consigned for poor behavior. And finally there is a “food sharing” table for unwanted items; if a kid wants something from this table, a helper brings it to her. It sounds odd, but this set-up was established to prevent bullying. “Food cannot travel from child to child because it can lead to intimidation,” explains Burns. “We don’t want ‘gimme your cookie or else’ to ever be confused with sharing; this is just another safeguard we’ve put in to make lunch better.”

  • The Mortarboard, the Sheepskin, and the Dixie Cup

    Nothing was normal on the morning of Wednesday, November 5, at Stratford High School in Goose Creek, South Carolina. For one thing, there were no drugs in the school. If there were, the fourteen police officers plus one drug-sniffing dog should have found them when they swept into the school, guns drawn, and sent students sprawling against their lockers and on the hallway floors. Some students were handcuffed, others covered with guns. A stocky officer dressed in blue jeans with a Kevlar vest over his T-shirt grabbed an African-American boy off the floor, spinning him in a 180-degree arc and slamming him back to the floor. The surveillance video that captured this scene, despite its jerky, stop-motion quality, shows a bit of swagger as the officer walks away. Stratford Principal George McCrackin had reported “an influx of drug activity,” though police found no drugs or weapons.

    The video clip, widely aired around the country last fall, got the attention of school administrators and parents but only, it seems, for a couple of weeks. Though it is destined to become classic footage from the war on drugs, it no longer truly shocks. On one hand, local communities have always used public schools as a crucible for social activism. On the other, the federal government tends to pursue policy goals in schools, in the name of its educational mandate, that have rarely been achieved in the extracurricular world. Between the two, the force of the law tends to land on schoolchildren with surprising regularity.

    In 1963, Alabama Governor George Wallace famously blocked an entrance to the University of Alabama with his own person to prevent the scourge of black scholarship. Six years before that, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus called on the National Guard to prevent the entry of nine black students into Little Rock’s Central High. The U.S. Army was then deployed to forcibly desegregate schools (though the GIs didn’t stick around to combat mortgage redlining and other forms of discrimination that persisted outside public schools for years afterward).

    Now, under the flag of drug prevention, dogs and feds are back at the schoolhouse door. And this time they brought specimen cups. Urine testing of students to detect drug use has now begun to march across the U.S., with new support from the Bush administration. The decision that opened the doors to testing without suspicion originated in Oklahoma. In 1999, a student named Lindsay Earls took umbrage when, in order to remain in her school choir, she was required to produce a urine sample under the supervision of school faculty. She was not suspected of drug use, but the school board had implemented a policy that required testing of students participating in all extracurricular activities. With counsel from the American Civil Liberties Union, Earls challenged the policy and scored a victory in the Tenth Circuit. But on June 27, 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court decided in favor of the school district. To many concerned about civil rights, this decision marked the sudden and complete expulsion of the Fourth Amendment from public schools.

    Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches have eroded gradually in public schools for about eighteen years. Back when Nancy Reagan was urging kids to Just Say No to drugs, the U.S. Supreme Court just said no to probable cause. In 1985, the justices decided against a New Jersey high school student who argued that getting caught smoking cigarettes did not constitute probable cause to search her purse. The court held that “The Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures applies to searches conducted by public school officials and is not limited to searches carried out by law enforcement officers. Nor are school officials exempt from the Amendment’s dictates by virtue of the special nature of their authority over schoolchildren.” While this upheld a portion of the Fourth Amendment, Justice Byron R. White went on to state that “school officials need not obtain a warrant before searching a student who is under their authority. Moreover, school officials need not be held subject to the requirement that searches be based on probable cause…” This deletion of warrant and probable cause left only the more subjective barrier of “reasonableness” between students and searches.

    A further erosion of the Fourth Amendment came in 1989. The Veronia school district in Oregon had decided it was reasonable to test the urine of athletes, regardless of individual suspicion. With probable cause no longer a concern, Justice Antonin Scalia found abundant justification for random drug testing because “in small town America, school sports play a prominent role in the town’s life, and student athletes are admired in their schools and in the community.” Apparently, admiration of these athletes declined when, in Justice Scalia’s words, “Students became increasingly rude during class; outbursts of profane language became common. Not only were student athletes included among the drug users, but as the District Court found, athletes were the leaders of the drug culture.”

    Justice Scalia agreed that the student body at large needed protection from the decadent-yet-admired athletes, and found it easy to dispense with the privacy expectations of the unruly jocks. He did this by reaching back past the Fourth Amendment to a legal source from eighteenth-century England, in which Sir William Blackstone wrote that a parent may “delegate part of his parental authority, during his life, to the tutor or schoolmaster of his child; who is then in loco parentis…” In this case, however, the parents of student James Acton had declined to delegate authority over his bladder to the school. Nevertheless, again citing “reasonableness,” the court decided in favor of the school.
    So by 2002, the reasonableness of testing urine without a basis in suspicion had been well established. That’s when the case from Oklahoma appeared to test the reasonableness of the Supreme Court itself, as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s fourteen-page dissent observed: “The particular testing program upheld today is not reasonable, it is capricious, even perverse…. If a student has a reasonable subjective expectation of privacy in the personal items she brings to school… surely she has a similar expectation regarding the chemical composition of her urine.”

    Writing for the majority, Justice Clarence Thomas reviewed the urine-collection procedure: “Under the policy, a faculty monitor waits outside the closed restroom stall for the student to produce a sample and must ‘listen for the normal sounds of urination in order to guard against tampered specimens and to insure an accurate chain of custody.’” While Justice Scalia seemed to prefer eighteenth-century British law to the U.S. Constitution, it’s hard not to speculate that Justice Thomas drew on personal experience in describing the process used in Oklahoma as “even less problematic” than the “negligible” intrusions in Veronia, Oregon. In the end, the court decided that if Lindsay Earls wanted to sing for the choir, she would first have to pee for the principal.