More interpersonal nastiness than usual

More interpersonal nastiness than usual, and the increased burden of expensive and time-consuming marketing tasks, are the human costs that school choice and competition have brought to real people in communities. This business-model practice helps to disintegrate intact, positive, community relationships which have been built up over time. I have yet to see how the milieu of increased competition between parents and schools is helping any children.

For families and their kids who have been in elementary school together and have established themselves as a community, the looming decision about middle school pits them against one another and breaks them up into factions. This happens in as early as the fourth and fifth grades, and again a few years later when middle-school families are under pressure to make their high school decision.

During the process, an unspoken-about tension builds up between parents and kids. People who once were collaborators on the same “team” increasingly find themselves judging each other. They repeatedly justify and emotionally defend their decisions, to both themselves and to each other. Parents and kids start to break their ties and actually become opponents who start sniffing each other out.

Carrying through with the harsh judging they’ve learned at home, students might even insult the schools their classmates have chosen. For instance, one day my 10-year-old daughter came home from school and worriedly reported to me that one of her classmates (who knew he would be going to a private middle school) had told her that she was "going to get beat up" at the public middle school we had chosen. The subtle and not-so-subtle judging of one another happens again in the seventh and eighth grade.

Another nasty side effect of school choice is that schools now have to "sell" themselves. School choice appeared in my district, but the already resource-poor traditional public schools weren't provided with any extra resources to meet the added demands of increased promotion and marketing. I'm talking about things like Web site management, brochures, newspaper ads, school tours, information nights and other events.

In the fall hunting season, prospective parents and kids visit the school for a tour during the school day. A set of teachers and administrators now have to take time away from their work to do "the sell." There is a heightened expectation for staff to work extra hours in the evening so they can pitch their school at parent meetings at feeder schools for multiple times. And the pressure is even on for school staff and parent representatives to make visits to potential smaller feeders during the school day.

All of this activity adds up to a lot of time and energy exclusively spent on the sell, sell, sell, sell, sell. Of course, this is the business model, where what is sold is less important that how much of it can be sold. And in order to survive, some public schools have essentially been forced into hiring marketing firms!

Schools do the best they can knowing that how they present themselves during this time means everything to the future well-being of the school. Some schools have parents who pick up the pieces with much of the marketing, only because they want to make their school attractive to other strong parents in the community. So the schools with the most skilled and hard-marketing parents are able to generate a greater amount of interest.

In the urban setting where there is a dearth of middle class parents, many of the schools want to acquire as many of the middle class and more-discriminating low income parents as possible. They know that the higher caliber parents usually produce children of a higher academic and behavioral caliber, so acquiring those families will affect the school in a positive way for many years.

And always present, when parents encounter other parents at the grocery store with whom they once had a relaxed relationship with in elementary school, is that silent sizing up of one another. "How's Bret Harte going for you?" "How does Johnny like Tech?" Both the questions and responses, verbal and non-verbal, are emotionally loaded.

People don't openly talk about the schadenfreude they feel when something negative about someone else's school has appeared in the news, or when they learn that some kid isn't doing so well at one of the competitor schools. People don’t openly talk about how their feelings of insecurity and envy get triggered when they hear something exceptionally positive going on at a school they hadn’t chosen. No one talks much about the grieving and sadness caused by all this competition-produced divisiveness.

You can bet that the people pushing this disruptive business model on families in fragile communities wouldn't permit their own families and kids to be subjected to it.

PS: Here's a sad article about two schools in the same building: Inside a Divided Upper East Side Public School: Whites in the front door, blacks in the back door, Steven Thrasher, The Village Voice (2/23/2010).

The Perry Preschool Project & Reflections on Play

My guess is that the vast majority of people who spout off about education have never spent a significant amount of time with children. For most people, spending nearly everyday dealing exclusively with kids (any number, or any age) is not an easy thing to do, even when the children are their own.

Because much of this work can be frustrating drudgery, I think many parents who could afford to stay home with their young children are happy to hand their kid over to a minimally-paid nanny or daycare provider, then preschool teacher, to do the bulk of actual early childrearing. It’s probably a relief to be able to drive away to the world of adults where there are no ongoing messes, no nasty temper tantrums or crying spells, and no unpleasant potty accidents to contend with, day after day, week after week, and year after year. It seems like most parents don’t mind leaving those challenges to someone else.

Spending time with children is exhausting, hard work, and this is why I give my utmost respect to people who take care of kids; they are performing a huge service for everyone else. And along with that, I absolutely do not understand why teachers are so vilified these days. Perhaps it is because so many people are detached from the experience of dealing directly with children themselves, for hours and days and weeks and months and years on end, and thus have never developed any sense of empathy for those who do. To them, the experience is all abstract.

For a time I had a turn at being a part-time preschool teacher. The opportunity presented itself when I joined a preschool which was a parent cooperative. This was when my younger daughter was just over two years old. Like most families who went there, we grew to love Peter Pan and I often reflect on that wonderful time.

If I had my way, I would make sure every single child had this type of experience when they were young. And as for young parents, there is no better introduction to reality-based childrearing than to spend a few years, supported by an experienced expert, helping a range of little kids learn to navigate as newcomers in this complex social world.

Peter Pan has been a play-based preschool in Oakland since 1947. As a cooperative, each parent is required to work at the school one morning per week, as well as to perform one other duty such as keeping an area tidy and clean, serving on the board, maintaining equipment, etc.

The main portion of our (comparatively inexpensive) tuition covered the salary of our Director. She was an experienced, early education specialist who would float from zone to zone handling the most difficult problems which came up, and modeling her patient, kind behavior for the rest of us.

During our work mornings, we oversaw and interacted with the kids who would wander into our assigned area. At the end of the school day the director always debriefed us as a group; we would we talk about the various things that had gone on that day, mostly re the kids and their behavior. As a parent, this was a fantastic learning experience.

The typical Peter Pan day looked like this.

The little kids (ranging from potty-trained two-year olds to young five-year olds) would arrive, deposit their jackets and lunchboxes in their cubbies, and then go off to play. The site was divided into different areas: a reading nook, an area with live animals (two guinea pigs, an aquarium, etc.), an arts and crafts table, a big room with building blocks, cars, dress-up, and animal toys, and an outside play area. The morning session consisted of a four phases: kids at liberty to roam from zone to zone, an on-the-rug story and music group session led by the Director, snack time, then mandatory outside play. Nothing is more perfect for a kid this age.

I heard a radio documentary about the Perry Preschool Study last weekend, and was brought back to those Peter Pan years. This page will give you access to hearing the broadcast or the transcript. Please take time to listen or read, all the way to the end where you will learn how the findings of the Perry Study tie in with test scores.

Some excerpts are below.

In the days we attended Peter Pan, it was primarily used by white, middle-class families, even though it was located in central East Oakland, an area of town with a more diverse population. The explanation for why so few non-white families were interested in the school, was, according to an African American neighbor, because “It’s not strict enough.” I wouldn’t be surprised if a study proved that being forced to attend one of the stricter, more academic, non-play-oriented preschools (which sometimes have graduation ceremonies complete with little caps and gowns), actually contributes to creating an early negative association with school.

As the research in the Perry Study will eventually demonstrate, play-oriented, rich environments are the ones which lead to the development of important non-cognitive skills needed for making future decisions which create a more successful life.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

From “Early Lessons” by Emily Hanford, an American RadioWorks documentary, October 2009

And by the time the study participants were 40 years old there were big differences between the two groups. The people who'd gone to preschool were doing much better - in life. They were more likely to be employed; they made more money. They were more likely to own homes, cars, to have savings accounts. The men who'd gone to preschool were more involved in raising their children. And the biggest difference of all had to do with crime. The people who had not gone to preschool were twice as likely to have been arrested by the age of 40…

But, here's something interesting about the people who went to the Perry Preschool. Even the ones who did not graduate from high school ended up doing better in life. They did not get more education - but they were still better off. Why was that?...

Jim Heckman is probably one of the world's most influential economists. He won a Nobel Prize. And he's really interested in the Perry Study because of what he sees as the fundamental paradox at its core. The people who went to the preschool were not smarter than their peers, but they did better in school. And they did not necessarily get more education, but they did better in life. And the assumption at the heart of a lot of economic theory is that intelligence and education level are the keys to everything.

… And here's what Heckman's learning.

Heckman: There are traits that seem to be somewhat different from just the raw ability to solve a problem.

Personality traits like...

Heckman: Perseverance, self-control, things like openness, agreeableness, extroversion ...

Heckman calls these non-cognitive skills. They're less a set of skills than a collection of traits and abilities that are not about how much you know or how fast you think. Heckman says we used to think of these traits as part of a person's character - sort of an old-fashioned notion that didn't get a lot of attention in economic theory. But a growing body of evidence from psychology suggests the development of cognitive ability itself is associated with personality traits, defined by psychologists as "patterns of thought, feelings and behavior."

Heckman: What we're coming to learn is that traits of young children like openness to experience, lack of shyness, some agreeableness even, will make the child much more ready to explore the environment. The act of exploration builds skills; it creates mental capacities, it gives you facts.

It's a dynamic process; the desire to learn, the drive, can't really be separated from learning itself, the process of becoming capable and intelligent. So if a child is discouraged from learning early in life, that can actually shut down the learning process. On the other hand, success in learning early on makes people want to learn more. The more they want to learn, the more they end up learning. Motivation is key.

Heckman: Now you're getting into something really deep. How is it that motivation is affected? What causes motivation? And that's something that I think we still don't really understand but I think what I do think we've found from these early interventions is they have affected the motivations of the children.

And here's the kicker. Motivation really matters when it comes to testing. The very tests that purport to measure how smart you are, or how much you know - these tests are time consuming, and hard. You need a reason to do well. Incentives make a difference...

...IQ remains a deeply divisive issue partly because people with high IQ scores typically do better in all kinds of ways. They get more education, they make more money. But what do IQ tests really measure? Heckman says one of the things they measure is motivation. How much effort are you willing to give? And so it raises the question: do people do well in life because they have high IQs? Or is the thing that helps you do well on an IQ test the same thing that helps you do well in life? Heckman thinks what matters more is motivation, perseverance, attitude; the "soft" stuff that he says schools tend to ignore these days because they're so focused on raising test scores.

Heckman: No Child Left Behind, the whole emphasis on cognitive skill testing is insane. I mean, it's really misdirected.

The School as a Staging Area

I offer you an example from “Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City” by Elijah Anderson (1999), Chapter 2 (Campaigning for Respect), pp. 93 to 98.

In my view, any discussion about reform in inner-city schools that does not overtly refer to an understanding of Anderson’s observations and conclusions will miss the target and be pointless. A full internalization of the message in the body of his work will be needed to comprehend the situation, before any reformer even attempts to develop a truly useful strategy.

THE SCHOOL AS A STAGING AREA

The inner-city school is an outpost of the traditions of the wider society. Racially segregated and situated in an impoverished inner-city community in which violence, drugs, and crime are rampant, it is characterized by the street/decent dynamic. During their early years, most of the children accept the legitimacy of the school, and then eagerly approach the task of learning. As time passes, however, in their relentless campaign for the respect that will be meaningful in their public environment, youth increasingly embrace the street code. By the fourth grade, enough children have opted for the code of the street that it begins to compete effectively with the culture of the school, and the code begins to dominate their public culture—in school as well as out—becoming a way of life for many and eventually conflating with the culture of the school itself. Such a school becomes a primary staging area for the campaign for respect.

In this social setting, decent kids learn to code switch, while street kids become more singularly committed to the street. Such a division, as previously stated, is largely a function of persistent poverty and local neighborhood effects, which include social isolation and alienation, but it is also strongly related to family background, available peers, and role models. For many alienated young black people, attending school and doing well becomes negatively associated with acting white. In what is essentially a racially black street-world, as shown in Tyree’s case, one develops a strong need to show others he can handle himself socially and physically on the ghetto streets, a powerful community value in and of itself. This “street knowledge” is esteemed, and the quest for it and the consideration for those who have it begin to predominate, ultimately competing with, if not undermining, the mission of the school.

With each passing year the school loses ground as more and more students adopt a street orientation, if only for self-defense in the neighborhood. But often what is out on the streets is brought into the classrooms. The most troublesome students are then encouraged by peers to act out, to get over on the teachers, to test authority by probing for weaknesses. Particularly during mild weather, many students in the upper grades attend school sporadically or stop coming altogether, because street activities effectively compete for their time. Even while in school, they walk the halls instead of attending class, and their encounters there often mirror those on the street, marked by tension and fights.

Some of the seriously street-oriented kids may have mental health issues; some have been abused by their parents; others are depressed. The most troubled may fight with teachers, bring guns and knives to school, and threaten people. The idea of deprivation and anger is important here. In this highly competitive setting, the most deprived youths, who can easily be made to feel bad, sometimes become jealous of peers. To avoid feeling bad, these kids may lift themselves up by putting others down. A common tactic is to “bust on” or “signify” at someone, verbally teasing the person, at times to the point of tears. Sometimes the prettiest girls can get beaten up out of jealousy. From so much envy and jealousy, beefs easily erupt, beginning with ritual “bumping” and ending in serious physical confrontations to settle things. Bumping rights are then negotiated, determining who is allowed to bump whom, to pick on whom, and in what circumstances. In essence, these young people are campaigning for place, esteem, and ultimately respect.

In this situation, the school becomes transformed in the most profound sense into a staging area for the streets, a place where people come to present themselves, to represent where they come from, and to stay even with or to dominate their peers. Violence is always a possibility, for the typically troubled school is surrounded by persistent poverty, where scarcity of valued things is the rule, thus lending a competitive edge to the social environment. However, the trophies to be won are not of academic kind, rather they are those of the street, particularly respect. In this campaign, young people must be prepared not only to fight, but also to take great care with their appearance. The right look means not wearing old or “bummy” clothes, or sneakers that are worn or dirty or out of style. Esteem is so precarious that it can be taken away with just a word, and kids are constantly challenge to defend what they have. Social life becomes a zero-sum scenario: “If you have something and exhibit it, it means I’m less. Who do you think you are by doing that?” The decent kids mimic the street ones, behaving in street ways that often confuse teachers (and also prospective employers and police who might be incapable of distinguishing the decent from the street). Some teachers are unable to differentiate between he two groups. Overwhelmed by clothes, the look, or the swagger, they cannot discern the shy kid underneath, which may be why teachers classify the majority of young people as “street.”

To be sure, much of the students’ behavior may be purely defensive, which requires significant expenditures of social energy. This situation intends to victimize the weakest players and certainly disrupts the business of the school. In time, when unattended, the street element (and those who would be “street”) dominates the school and its local terrain. In the most troubled schools, the street element becomes so powerful that beefs and scores can only be settled by death. Again, most of the young people in these settings are inclined toward decency, but when the street elements rule, they are encouraged to campaign for respect by adopting a street attitude, look, and presentation of self. In this context the decent kids often must struggle to maintain their credibility, like the fifteen-year-old boy I observed who typically changed his “square” clothes for a black leather jacket (thereby adopting a street look) after he got around the corner from his home and out of his mother’s view. In order to preserve his own self-respect and the respect of his peers, he would also hide his books under his jacket while walking to school, bidding to appear street.

In school as in the neighborhood, adolescents are concerned with developing a sense of who they are, what they are, and what they will be. They try on many different personal roles, and they experiment with many scripts. Some work, others don’t. How do the roles of decent and street play out in their search for an identity, and what parts do others play? What stages do the young people go through? What is the “career” of identity as this career takes shape?

Observing the interactions of adolescents in school and talking with them reveal how important school authority is to young people, but too often the authority figures are viewed as alien and unreceptive. The teachers and administrators are concerned that their own authority be taken seriously, and claims to authority are always up for grabs—if not subject to out-and-out challenge.

Young people, of course, do not go about developing their identities based solely on privileges and rewards granted by teachers, but this dynamic does exist to some degree. Often students perceive (more or less accurately) that the institution and its staff are utterly unreceptive to their street presentations. Mixed with their inability to distinguish the decent child from the street child, the teachers’ efforts to combat the street may cause them to lump the good students with the bad, generally viewing all who display street emblems as adversaries. Here, their concerns might be as much with teaching as with controlling their charges.

In response, the decent children place ever greater stock in their ability to code-switch, adopting one set of behaviors for inside the building and one for outside. But, as indicated above—particularly in the heat of the campaign for respect—the two roles often merge, and what is considered proper in either setting can become one and the same. When this confusion goes unchecked, discipline in the school situation becomes elusive, particularly for those children who seem “to get away with it.”

When students become convinced that they cannot receive their props from teachers and staff, they turn elsewhere, typically to the street, encouraging others to follow their lead, particularly when the unobtainable appears to be granted only on the basis of acting white. The sour grapes attitude notwithstanding, a powerful incentive for these young people then emerges, especially for those sitting on the cultural fence, to invest themselves in the so-called oppositional culture, which may be confused with their ”black identity.” Such a resolution allows these alienated students to campaign for respect on their own terms, in a world they control.

Impacted by profound social isolation, the children face the basic problem of alienation. Many students become smug in their lack of appreciation of what the business of the school is and how it is connected with the world outside. In addition, they seldom encounter successful black people who have gone through school and gone on to do well.

Education is thus undermined because the mission of the school cannot equal the mission of the kids. To accept the school would be to give in and act white, to give up the value of the street for some other thing. And the value of that other thing has not been sufficiently explained to the children to make them want to give up the ways of the street and take on the ideology of the school. So the outpost of mainstream society tries to deliver its message to kids in an environment that has little regard for that society. In fact, the code of the street, and by extension the oppositional culture, competes very effectively with traditional values. As the young people come to see the school and its agents are unreceptive to them, embracing the oppositional culture becomes more important as a way to salvage self-esteem. The mission of the school is called into question, if not undermined.

Alienated black students take on the oppositional role so effectively that they often become models for other disaffected students. They do it because they are profoundly at odds with the with culture and can see themselves as visibly different. But other alienated students may mimic them because they are such strong models.

The culture of the street doesn’t allow backing down. When the boys at the Youth Study Center (Philadelphia’s juvenile detention facility) saw a video on conflict resolution as an alternative to fighting, they just school their heads. They knew that you never back down. That is to set you up as a doormat. You have to be tough. If you show fear, others will exploit it. So you always have to give the impression that you are strong, that you are a “thorough dude.” Even a teacher who shows fear becomes vulnerable and can be emotionally undone by the kids. When that happens, the kids know they’ve won. So there is an adversarial relationship between the teachers and the students. The teachers’ role is to keep the kids in line. The students’ role is either to behave or to try to get over on the teacher.

The school is a microcosm of the community in a sense. Although police and disciplinarians are on patrol, kids are parading up and down the halls, socializing, even buying and selling drugs. The same things are going on inside the school as outside it. Yet it remains a haven, a place where one can go and expect relative order.

Valuable Skills for the Rising Generation

We constantly hear the regurgitated propaganda about "The Educational Crisis,” and how public school teachers are the primary cause of the US in decline, and why the corporate model of operating school systems is superior to all others. Today I offer you one very worthy alternative approach (yes, there are other choices we could make).

The current ed-reform movement is like foot-binding: restrictive and deforming. Those who want it imposed on children – and on those who care for them everyday – are titillated by the resultant hobbling, pain and stench. The final effect of this method for rearing children will be to shrivel the spirit of their humanity, and to stunt their collective growth.

“Patriotic” is the word that clearly emerged in my mind when I first read the following, and I am not a regularly flag-waving type. I realized that teaching these values to our nation's children just might be able to slow our descent and bring better health to our nation.

These are Diane Ravitch’s thoughts for “skills that we should cultivate assiduously among the rising generation, on the belief that doing so will lead to happier lives and a better world."

The Partnership for 19th Century Skills

I for one have heard quite enough about the 21st century skills that are sweeping the nation. Now, for the first time, children will be taught to think critically (never heard a word about that in the 20th century, did you?), to work in groups (I remember getting a grade on that very skill when I was in third grade a century ago), to solve problems (a brand new idea in education), and so on. Let me suggest that it is time to be done with this unnecessary conflict about 21st century skills. Let us agree that we need all those forenamed skills, plus lots others, in addition to a deep understanding of history, literature, the arts, geography, civics, the sciences, and foreign languages.

But allow me also to propose a new entity that will advance a different set of skills and understandings that are just as important as what are now called 21st century skills. I propose a Partnership for 19th Century Skills. This partnership will advocate for such skills, values, and understandings as:

• The love of learning
• The pursuit of knowledge
• The ability to think for oneself (individualism)
• The ability to work alone (initiative)
• The ability to stand alone against the crowd (courage)
• The ability to work persistently at a difficult task until it is finished (industriousness) (self-discipline)
• The ability to think through the consequences of one’s actions on others (respect for others)
• The ability to consider the consequences of one’s actions on one’s well-being (self-respect)
• The recognition of higher ends than self-interest (honor)
• The ability to comport oneself appropriately in all situations (dignity)
• The recognition that civilized society requires certain kinds of behavior by individuals and groups (good manners) (civility)
• The ability to believe in principles larger than one’s own self-interest (idealism)
• The willingness to ask questions when puzzled (curiosity)
• The readiness to dream about other worlds, other ways of doing things (imagination)
• The ability to believe that one can improve one’s life and the lives of others (optimism)
• The ability to speak well and write grammatically, using standard English (communication)

What if we altered our focus and began to emphasize these things in our schools?

Thanks to SF Education Examiner Caroline Grannan for tipping me off about Ravitch’s post.

Brilliance Emitted from the Roots of Grass

Arne Duncan, the members of the board of directors for Democrats for Education Reform, Eli Broad, Bill Gates, the Walton billionaires, and the others pushing for punitive measures and hours and hours of excruciating testing – supposedly their main solution for "inspiring" our nation's children to learn – are desperately in need of an epiphany before they drive us off a cliff with their faulty ideas for how kids should be treated in school.

If only they would take the time to read – and contemplate the message contained within – this chain of insights produced by a set of Oakland parents and teachers. Henry's summary should be read at least twice.

An exchange from the Oakland Public School Parents listserv:

Topic: Art is Education

Drawn animation from Ms. Rosario's 4th grade class at Peralta Elementary:

Take a look at the thank you scroll at the end. A heck of a lot of blood, sweat and tears go into funding the art education program at Peralta. This kind of classroom work should be funded as a matter of routine in California public schools. My kid will certainly remember this science lesson more than if he just read about Yosemite Valley's geological formation in a textbook.

Yo, yo, yo Yosemite.

Best,

J.

You got that right! I'll never forget the time I had my 2nd grade students make nutcrackers for the holidays (this after having seen a performance of the Nutcracker itself). The project was a rather elaborate one; felt, sequins, piping and googly eyes etc. My students were so focused, so happy and so into whole thing. I had several variations of the story in book form and the kids just devoured them. And they always wanted me to play the music thereafter (this admittedly got a bit old). But two things that I'll truly never forget is the time one of my students spontaneously held up his halfway done nutcracker and gleefully shouted, "Mr. Lopez, now I will never ever forget you!", and the time when many years after the project, a former student of mine told me that her mother continued to take out the now ratty nutcracker and put it on their mantel during the holiday season. Art is education, indeed!

M.

Oh, man, this cheered me right up! My almost-7th grader helped edit the math and science films in her 5th grade at Peralta. We all got copies on CD at the end of the year (not sure if it got to YouTube). I agree with M., this is what my kid remembers most from that whole year. Hands-on learning makes all the difference.

N.

You put your finger on the crux of the debate around education reform: hands-on education. The authentic education reform movement came out of the civil rights movement and culminated in the most important initiative in all of the 20th century: Head Start. Head Start has three primary components that make it work: (1) small adult-student ratios, (2) hands-on, developmentally appropriate learning, and (3) collegial relations between teachers and parents. Children who have attended Head Start have consistently performed better even on the inappropriate standardized tests than their non Head Start peers -- up through the third grade, when the gains taper off.

Head Start has been criticized for this tapering off when in fact the real problem is that the Head Start reforms need to be implemented to scale through the K-12 system. This is the reform movement that we need to rally around over the next few decades, the authentic response to No Child Left Behind.

Henry

Henry Hitz, Executive Director
Oakland Parents Together
440 Santa Clara Ave.
Oakland, CA 94610
(510) 325-8680
henry@parentstogether.org
www.parentstogether.org

This conversation is that bright light in the tunnel showing us what we need to do. It is called Truth.

Here’s hoping for a domino effect.

The Cliff

Charles Payne, a University of Chicago professor and author of “So Much Reform, So Little Change: The Persistence of Failure in Urban Schools,” recently participated in a panel discussion at a national seminar sponsored by the Education Writers Association where he said some very important things.

One observer wrote:

“Payne said in schools with low academic achievement, building high levels of trust makes academic improvement three times as likely than in schools with low levels of trust among educators and students. He cited a ten percent improvement in graduation rate in schools where students say they know and trust their teachers.”

Payne’s observations are correct, meaning the current mode of attacking schools, and the people who work in them, is exactly the wrong way to go. This is an anti-motivational strategy for human beings which can only produce a tremendous amount of discomfort, tension, and shame.

Q: So how will student/teacher trust be enhanced by Duncan’s upcoming five-year plan to close 5,000 struggling schools and fire thousands and thousands of teachers?

A: It won't.

Payne also had something to say about a similar approach Arne Duncan's used on Chicago Public Schools:

“The way schools are being closed in Chicago has eroded an enormous amount of social capital by not including parents in the process. These parents care about their kids and schools, and have been marginalized by people doing things for their children, without including them in the process.”

If you keep up-to-date about education issues, then you know it is rare to read or hear about the importance of maintaining and building that important feature called social capital. This entire concept is continually ignored by our U.S. Secretary of Education and his “reformer” friends, who strike me as education-fix-technicians trying to manipulate struggling urban school systems, and the people in them, without becoming too intimate. Lacking in their approach is a fundamental awareness of what the hearts of the families in these schools actually need – more long-term, healthy, and caring human connections.

The “worst” schools, often labeled as “dysfunctional,” are in very weak, fragmented communities and are attended by large numbers of kids from weak, fragmented families. No, they are not doing well in comparison to the schools in strong, cohesive communities which are attended by large numbers of kids from strong, cohesive families. But constant criticism coupled with a set of unrealistic expectations will never "turn them around."

Struggling school communities are in desperate need of a boost to their morale. If that could begin, barriers will be relaxed and the people in the schools could start to experience more positive feelings and pride, along with some hope for the future. At that point everyone will naturally feel more receptive to working together to implement new ideas.

In a chapter of his book, Payne wisely observes:

… So we continue forcing underdeveloped reforms on already over-burdened teachers and then blaming those teachers when reforms fail to produce the promised miracles. Just as teachers are too quick to conclude that nothing’s going to work with these children, reformers come to think that the reforms they advocate are right, they will work, just not here, not in this school, not with this particular group of hard-headed teachers and untalented administrators. Just as teachers are always saying they could teach if someone gave them better students, reformers are always thinking they could implement their programs if someone would just give them better people to work with. The reform community, partly because of its sheer arrogance, its ideological rigidity, its inability to enter into genuine partnerships with school people has squandered much of the moral capital, much of the strategic positioning, that it held at the beginning of the 1990s.

As a community victim of outsider-instigated “reform,” I have watched how my city’s public schools have been constantly labeled and threatened, and how this erodes away confidence and makes everyone feel on-edge and sad. Kids are both sick of being tested and then reminded of their failings. Teachers and administrators are worn out from the constant pressures and a too-often joyless experience at schools. Parents are frustrated by being stuck in an experimental reform-attacked school district which is sinking under the pressures of NCLB.

And still no gap is being closed.

From my vantage point, I can see that this current approach for educational reform is just not working, and it never will. Our society has big problems we refuse to address.

After feeling hope with Obama's presidency, it's depressing to realize that we are now going to be forced to follow a misguided plan which is intent on terminating thousands of neighborhood schools in communities which are unable to defend them. I am worried my daughters' schools will be among them.

In five years, when my kids come home to visit, will they be able to drive by, and look at, their former middle and high schools, or will those schools have been permanently shuttered? It's sad to think that, for me – as well as thousands and thousands of other local families – years of community history, school spirit and pride are in danger of being flushed down the toilet, all because of an unproven ed-reform strategy being pushed by Arne Duncan. Arne doesn't see it yet, but his grand plan has no chance of being the magic "fix."

We're on a path and heading toward a cliff.