Hinsdale 86 Board Eliminates Buffer Zone

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On Monday, June 18, this appeared on the agenda of the Hinsdale Township High School District 86 school board’s meeting as the second action item:

“Recommended Action:  Eliminate the Buffer Zone as an attendance area by using proximity to draw school attendance boundaries to bring each school closer to its target enrollment”

And after board members had voted, the attendance choices some residents of District 86 have been granted since 1991 were abolished, beginning with the 2019-20 school year.  As of then, all students will have their high school assigned by the district, and no individual family will be able to select between Hinsdale South and Hinsdale Central. The buffer zone, which has fostered controversy in District 86 since its creation, came to an end by a 5-2 vote; whether this settles the issue permanently remains to be seen.  The most likely next step will come when the administration, led by Superintendent Bruce Law, presents the board with proposals on blending the two criteria the board has designated for determining which students will attend Hinsdale South or Hinsdale Central: geographic proximity and target enrollment numbers for each school.

This has been an issue for a long time, especially in recent years as enrollment for each high school has shrunk or grown:  South down to 1507 and Central up to 2765 on the 2016-17 school report cards.  I’ve written many times about this issue, with this one from 2016 providing an overview of how this has played out.  In summary, Central is overcrowded, South is under-utilized (to give you an idea, its enrollment peaked at over 1900) and is projected to shrink even further, a referendum which would have added space at Central was crushed by a 3-1 margin in April of 2017, and many parents potentially impacted by a shift in high schools are adamantly opposed to sending their children to South.  Now, however, it appears that the school board has made the hard choice to retake and utilize the authority granted in Illinois school code to determine which school students attend.

To be as transparent as possible, I am an unaffected observer of this situation.  Although I do not live in District 86 and both my children are just about finished with public education in elementary CCSD 66 and high school District 99 (Downers South), I did work for twenty-five years at Hinsdale South as an English teacher, which gives me some insight into Hornet-land (I retired in 2012).  As far as District 86 goes, I was active in the teachers’ union (Hinsdale High School Teachers Association—HHSTA) and worked with teachers from Central, district as well as building administrators, and board members on many district-wide issues, especially those which impacted teachers.  I still know lots of teachers, but very few administrators with whom I worked are still there (the only ones left are all at South), and I don’t know any of the current board members, with the exception of Keith Chval whom I met in the late 1990s when I was HHSTA president and he was part (head?) of the community organization Caucus 86, which slated people to run for the District 86 school board.  (Caucus 86 consulted with school leaders, including union presidents, on what constituted good board members.  For what it’s worth, I found Keith to be genuinely interested in working to make District 86 as good as it could be, and I haven’t seen or read anything since then to dissuade me of that opinion.)  Regardless, my view of this current situation has to be weighed with all of this baggage in mind:  I’m not impacted by this decision, I’m very biased in favor of Hinsdale South as a quality high school, I’ve never liked the whole “Buffer Zone” concept, and I believe the school board’s recent action was the right first step.  What all the various parties affected by this decision choose to do next, however, will ultimately determine if buffer zone elimination leads the district away from its historic divisions.

To begin, then, those in the now-defunct Buffer Zone will be unhappy.  Any time you go from having the option of either high school one school year to having that determination now in the hands of the school board the next, you can be forgiven for being upset.  Nothing I can write will convince parents who chose to live in the buffer zone (at least in part) because it would allow their kids to go to Central that South will provide their children with the same superior educational opportunities Central does.  Central has higher standardized test scores which some equate with the overall quality of a high school, but I cannot emphasize enough that the educational heights any individual student can climb at South will get the most talented students into equally rarified air as similar students at Central would reach.  Central’s expedition up the academic Himalayas will be larger than South’s, but those in South’s plucky troop will climb just as high as anyone in the country. (Since the most significant predictors of academic success are parental education and income as well as student test scores, and Central’s entering freshmen have always averaged higher in all three of those measures; the progress students make during their four years in high school is the standard by which any school should be judged.  And that progress has been consistently roughly the same at both schools.)   I taught some amazing students in my time at South—who went on to stellar academic careers at colleges like Stanford, MIT, the Air Force Academy, and Harvard (to name a few), and the vast majority of them gave credit to South as a key reason they got off to such good starts.

I know, I know—I’m trying to do what I’ve already conceded is impossible, but it does gall South teachers (even retired ones) to be denigrated as providing an education inferior to Central’s so regularly and vociferously any time the idea of transferring students comes up.  After the school board passed the above motion on June 18, the possibility of being forced to go to South led some audience members to disrupt the meeting for several minutes, board members were forced to leave the stage, and reinforcements from the Darien Police Department were called in.  (You can watch it here; the vote begins at about 1:17 and the disruption goes on until about 1:27.)   Parents need to realize they are attacking the entire staff at South with this kind of nonsense, to say nothing of demonstrating unacceptable behavior.  The interviews with teary parents don’t elicit much empathy from those whose career work these people are flatly stating is inferior to that of other teachers in the same school district, even though these parents have not one iota of knowledge about what South teachers do or what the school is really like.  I also have little tolerance for any rhetoric about “differences” between the high schools tinged with racism and class snobbery—South has significantly more minority and low-income students than Central—is that your problem?  Sorry, if that’s the case, I certainly agree with the majority who argue those kinds of beliefs shouldn’t mean higher property taxes for everyone so Central can be needlessly enlarged.  To be as fair as possible, though, I can understand how most parents would be concerned when the high school their child had been scheduled to attend gets changed, especially when many community members (mistakenly and with no first-hand knowledge) view one high school as inferior to the other one.

However, just as some of the concerns and shows of consternation are somewhat understandable, one does have to concede that the high school choice provided to residents of the late Buffer Zone was unusual, unique to District 86.  Even the year-long gap between the zone’s elimination and any attendance changes stands out in contrast to the relatively common boundary revisions other school districts have felt compelled to make over the years—and enacted much more quickly.  In many places, students have to switch schools regularly and with much less notice.  Just in the last twelve months in the Chicago suburbs:  January 18, 2018—280 Plainfield District 202 students found out they would switch schools effective for the 2018-19 school year; March 2018—600 St. Charles students in Geneva District 303 learned they would have a different school for the next school year; and December 2017—the CCSD 89’s board of Glen Ellyn voted to begin phasing in attendance changes for the 2018-19 school year.  In short, this sort of thing happens often as communities and school districts grapple with shifting populations and unbalanced attendance in their districts.  District 86 has actually been an outlier in creating a buffer zone and continually adding on to make more room at one high school while there is space in the other.

Unfortunately, this special treatment has evolved into taken-for-granted expectations which prompted audience members at District 86’s June 18th meeting to feel justified in screaming, “Shame” at the board and threatening the superintendent’s job.  This sense of entitlement is also an affront to the District 86 residents who have never been allowed to select which high school their children attend.

The school board—or at least the five who voted in favor of the Buffer Zone’s elimination—deserve credit for facing this contradiction, imbalance, and unfairness and finally doing something besides forming a committee to study the problem, using taxpayer money to build additions that weren’t really necessary, or hiring a public relations firm to assess public sentiment on that about which public sentiment was perfectly clear.  (Oh wait, this board did do that last one.)  It’s also very easy to imagine that some of those impacted by this change—when the new boundaries between South and Central are created—will take to the courts to challenge this decision.  Some of the pressure on the board to eliminate the buffer zone comes from a group in the South attendance area (Burr Ridge) which has filed a lawsuit claiming the school board discriminates against South; the District 86 board president stated that the reason no discussion of the buffer zone’s elimination took place on June 18 was due to pending litigation.  So, there is no doubt this could get messy, and there will undoubtedly be more legal machinations from both sides in the coming months, if not years.  You can be sure this will be a prominent discussion item in the next school board election when three seats will be in contention, in April 2019, which could shift the balance of power to those more inclined to resist a boundary shift’s taking effect.  And I fear that my old high school’s name will be continually dragged through the mud by those who know very little about it.  The majority on the Hinsdale 86 school board deserve plaudits for the correct-but-tough decision they made on June 18, and I hope all players in this situation try to keep their emotions in check as it goes forward.  Hinsdale South and Hinsdale Central are both excellent schools, and the District 86 communities should be thrilled to have such superior schools for their children to attend.

If you would like to read more on this seismic District 86 event beyond watching the board meeting referenced above, an explanation from the school district would be a good start.  The school board will be discussing the next steps in the buffer zone elimination process at its July 9th meeting, Monday in Central’s auditorium (they must be anticipating a big crowd), beginning at 6:00 P.M. (The discussion will take place after a tour of the building, audience communication, and several other business items.  As one who used to attend District 86 school board meetings regularly—yes, that is as fun as it sounds—you probably could get there at eight and still be waiting for a while for this agenda item.  Audience communication is bound to be heated and lengthy.)  For the more sensational seeking, you can hear people yelling after the board’s vote here.  This CBS newscast makes it seem as if the driving force behind the boundary change is the Burr Ridge lawsuit, and its spokesman (an ex-student of mine) makes the case for inequity over the years. There’s also a buffer zone resident bringing up worries about property values going down as a consequence of the change (another one of those claims which will inspire the ire of any South backer).  This ABC newscast follows the same trajectory, but with the aggrieved parents more emotionally devastated about the prospect of having their children attend South.  In this article, the Burr Ridge lawsuit is seen as the key driving force, and its scope is more specifically explained.  The Trib focuses on the anger of parents affected by the decision; it is a bit much to read how the board didn’t properly listen to all the alternatives being articulated on June 18 which would solve the problem while keeping the buffer zone intact when this issue has been poked and prodded for a long time, especially over the last two years.  Perhaps these individuals had only recently learned of this, but it’s been a much-debated topic for over a quarter century.  The most factual account of what happened at the board meeting can be found in the Hinsdale Patch.  And if you’re more interested in one ex-teacher’s views on how public education can be improved overall, my top choice is always available.

There’s no reason to doubt that Hinsdale Central and especially Hinsdale South will continue their excellence in educating District 86’s teens.  The key irony in a situation which has generated so much expense, negative energy, and hard feelings?  When it comes to which high school District 86 kids attend, there is no bad option.

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Factory Farming and Moral Evolution

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Understanding the problem but managing to disassociate ourselves from even thinking about it, much less taking action to correct the situation, I believe factory farming is something future generations will accept as inhumane and wonder at our casual cruelty in tolerating it for so long.  The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA)  estimates that more than 99% of all animals used in food production each year in the U.S. are raised on factory farms under problematic conditions such as “cages and overcrowding; physical alterations (e.g.,teeth-clipping or tail-docking) performed without anesthetic; indoor confinement with poor air quality and unnatural light patterns; inability to engage in natural behaviors; breeding for fast growth or high yields of meat, milk and eggs that compromises animal welfare; neglect of sick and suffering animals, often due to high ratio of animals to workers; misuse of antibiotics to compensate for unsanitary conditions; and/or rough or abusive handling by workers.”  Many cringed at the 2014 story about how then New Jersey governor and Presidential candidate Chris Christie vetoed legislation which would have required pigs being raised for slaughter to be enclosed in crates at least big enough for them to turn around.  Despite few if any pig farms in New Jersey, Christie rejected the bill in order not to offend potential Iowa caucus Republican primary voters.  It hardly seems too much to ask that a living creature be given enough room to turn around before its unnatural (not to mention brief) life is abruptly ended so that I can have sausage with my scrambled eggs.

It’s not my intent to go off on an anti-factory farm rant or to encourage you to join the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), the extreme (some would argue) animal rights group, although factory farms are pretty terrible and you could probably do much worse with your charitable time or money than PETA.  No, what strikes me as I think about this, after my cheap chicken dinner purchased already roasted from Costco, is our how paradoxical our species is in understanding what’s wrong with our behavior at the same time we take forever to change it, especially if it is inconvenient or different from what we’re used to.

There are those who claim critics don’t fully understand what factory farms are becoming and even places where the most humanely raised products can be found (although the aforementioned PETA would argue that no meat is produced humanely, and they would have lots of graphic company), but the truth is most of us won’t do much about factory farming, despite our revulsion at some of the conditions under which our food is created.  One day, when the vast majority of Earth’s residents have done away with the consumption of any meat except wild animals which have died of natural causes—“Fire up the grill, Maw! I just saw a sickly-looking possum!”—we indifferent carnivores who acted as if hamburger were born in Jewel will justifiably be viewed as primitive and ignorant (at best, with more creative pejoratives regularly used in anonymous on-line comment sections).  But what happens when we discover that plants have a rich, ancient culture and have seen our farms as concentration camps where their children are poisoned and butchered, their bodies hacked up and used for human structures, their remains ground into flour, their unborn fetuses boiled in water or baked in ovens for human consumption?  Don’t get too smug, vegans!

Changing our ethical behavior requires an evolution of morality which seems to be just as important and vital to our humanity as that which helped us to develop our bodies and brains to the point where we dominate the planet so completely we seem destined to destroy it.  Perhaps moral evolution is the only hope we have in preventing that destruction.

Any examination of the human age can’t help but find atrocity after genocide after brutality, ad nauseum—we are responsible for vast numbers of them:  From ritualistic human sacrifice by the Incans to European/American buying, selling, and using Africans as farm machinery to Nazi experiments on and extermination of Jews to tribal slaughter in Rwanda to ethnic cleansing in old Yugoslavia to the Syrian military killing thousands of its own citizens (occasionally resorting to chemically induced murder)—oh, and don’t forget about the religious persecution of Myanmar.  And that historical listing just scratches the surface of the dozens other newsworthy things we are confronted with every day, many of which present us with other moral questions: How do we guarantee children’s safety in schools if we do nothing about the prevalence of guns in the hands of anybody who wants one?  How do we ferret out and punish males who use their dominant, powerful positions to subject woman to intimidation, sexual predation, and violence?  How do we deal with equality of rights, particularly as they are applied to sexual orientation and gender identity which conflict with religious leaders who condemn these people and won’t bake them cakes?  (And by the way, how do we still grant so much power to organizations which advocate discrimination against innocent people?)  What can we do about minority rights again, but this time in reference to blacks and the predilection of white Americans to feel threatened by anyone who happens to be black, leading to dire consequences, especially when the police are involved?  How do we allow the situation where any human’s ability to access medical care is contingent on whether or not that person has the money/insurance for it?   That’s a sampling of the issues which tempt us to ignore our responsibility to do that which is right in the name of convenience or personal biases; we could add dozens more.

For example, something which is closer to the aforementioned animal cruelty issue in that it affects everyone is the environment.  There is much each and every single person could take every day to make sure we are not wasting limited resources and are creating as little pollution as possible, but billions of us are still fooling ourselves that our small acts make no difference in the grand scale of things.  Regardless of our rationalizations, there’s plenty to do:  Ban single use plastics (or at least ban them from our own homes), always bring canvas bags when shopping, and limit both car trips and our Amazon orders for all the fuel consumed and garbage those entail.  We could buy organic produce, use push/reel lawnmowers (ones without gas-powered motors), stop using fertilizers and pesticides on our gardens or lawns, and create compost heaps to recycle all our food waste (which we should striving to limit) back into the ground.  And coming full circle on our opening point, we could cut animal food products out of our diets to conserve water and other natural resources, not to mention reducing pollution, as well as eliminating the problems of factory farming and the animal cruelty which ensues.

The path to progress often seems impossible, or at least absurdly slow, especially given the obvious benefits improving our behavior would lead to.  Yet, despite our selfish reluctance and stupidity, we keep taking small steps which do advance the cause.  We begin in ignorance and unintended harm—who the hell would have figured that a chemical in aerosol cans (deodorant, hairspray and the like) would lead to the destruction of the ozone layer?  (And yeah, most of us have to be schooled on what the ozone layer is, much less on why its existence matters.)  But we then move to rationalized evil for a time after we’ve learned of the damage we’re inflicting but don’t want the hassle of changing our behavior, thus denying anything’s wrong—and wind up with a hole in the ozone.  Once we can’t pretend we’re not engaging in negative actions, however, is when things get interesting, in both horrible and ennobling ways.  There are always a few outliers who understand what’s happening more clearly and quickly than others who sound the alarm.  Ridicule and ruin often follow for these poor visionaries: The things they have proved to be harmful seem indispensable to our way of life, so we attack them: “Hair spray, gas-powered cars, hot dogs, and smart phones cannot be lived without—we need them!  You must have it completely wrong—how dare you claim my precious convenience is hurting anything!”  (Now, of course, we’ve evolved our denials even more effectively in the way we use political affiliation, religion, race, and even gender to discredit anyone calling attention to a moral wrong in our society.  How much will this new “skill” delay necessary progress is anybody’s guess—the children being separated from their parents hope we can sort this out quickly.  Enhanced moral evolution would help, especially when you consider how technologies and cleverness  have increased the pace at which human actions impact our lives, which only exacerbates the need for our figuring out the right path fast.)

Eventually—but often not before those pioneers who tried to warn us have been attacked, black-balled, ignored, persecuted, bankrupted, and/or died—we do achieve forward movement, albeit in incremental, halting stages, with regular, significant backslides, until we reach a higher moral ground and clean up our acts.  Despite how impossible it seemed thirty years ago, we’ve now had a black President.  Nobody thought it could happen fifteen years ago, but gay marriage is currently the law of the land.  Women being believed and powerful men being held to account for their crimes and indiscretions didn’t seem likely five years ago, but seemingly invincible males are now losing jobs, social standing, and even going to jail.  Those minuscule advances do lead to eventual progression, taking us out of the darkness into the light—well, at least into a patch that is a little less murky.  That we can’t recognize how much development actually occurs or what the key turning points are as we agonizingly inch forward is due to the depressing regressions we’re prone to; but if we can force ourselves to look backwards far enough on some issues, we can recognize that we’ve come a long way, that movement forward is a remarkably consistent human trait.  Our history is littered with countless horrific mistakes as we’ve already referenced, but out of those low points, we seem able to recognize the evil we have perpetuated in order to make improvements.

It doesn’t happen quickly or easily, and it is damnably difficult to recognize that good is inexorably winning out; but take a look at any recent dark period in human history and you will see that we are doing better now, at least in relation to the specific circumstances of that particular conflagration.  Treatment of and rights for minorities and women have improved in most places; pollution has decreased somewhat (or the harm we are doing has slowed down a tad); and the general quality of life has gotten better for hundreds of millions.  Sadly, there is an eternal parade of evil things happening, and human corruption will apparently always be a significant part of the equation.  Recognizing progress can never come at the expense of uncovering our rottenness, but the positive deserves our attention too.

Maybe I’m just trying to talk myself out a general sense of doom based on the awful, awful regression the United States has taken since the 2016 Presidential election and the subsequent significant back-tracking Trump has instituted in racial issues, environmental protection, corruption, women’s rights, civility, empathy, rule of law, immigration, income distribution, health care, civil rights, democracy, international alliances, and just about any progress we’ve experienced in the past fifty years.  No matter what your political leanings, there can be no denying that any movement characterized by the slogan, “Make America Great Again,” is based on trying to revert to the way things were in the past, the antithesis of America’s (admittedly, not completely linear) movements over the course of its history.  You think differently?  Then contemplate the America of one hundred years ago:  Women were still fighting to gain the vote, to say nothing of being allowed to compete with men in the workforce.  Blacks were regularly being lynched in parts of the country and were severely restricted in voter participation, employment opportunities, and housing options.  Child labor laws were so permissive that 18% of American workers were under 16 years old.  Still nostalgic?  Then would you advocate refashioning present-day U.S. into what it was two hundred years ago in 1818?  If you’re hankering for a time when half the country permitted slavery, then I’d recommend you stop reading this blog immediately and never click on my essays again!  (I know—no big loss…) Through the prism of historical fact, we can see without a doubt that the wild liberals of their day—those advocating women’s rights, protection of minorities from oppression, reformation of labor laws (not to mention unionization), and abolitionists (one of the more radical groups you’ll find in America’s young life)—were 100% right in pushing this country towards what seemed like extreme positions at the time.

November will be a fascinating evaluation of Trump’s attempts to move the country in his direction (translated: backward many decades); but regardless of the outcome of this grotesque blip on humanity’s moral evolution, history suggests we will finally come to our senses, bit by bit, as we stumble our way to a brighter tomorrow.  It will be embarrassing to confess to our grandchildren that we were a party to this idiotic, repressive phase in our development, but just like those humiliating pictures from our early teenage years, we can at least be confident that it will get better.  We just don’t know how or when we’ll conquer this particular awkward stage, but if we keep slowly but surely acknowledging and fighting for that which is good, that which is just, and that which is right; even a country that was foolish enough to elect Trump will one day move forward again.  We can do better and we will.  It’s just that I—like billions and billions of factory farm animals every year—wish it wouldn’t take so long.  Who’s hungry?

Still in the Cave

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With billions of humans owning smart phones and/or personal computers linked to the internet, the Information Age has reached its zenith and there can be little doubt of its pervasive influence.  Exactly what that influence is and the myriad ways it has and will manifest itself cannot be precisely predicted (given our cleverness), but we are definitely seeing some clear trends.  In one of the more ironic and fascinating mutations humans have ever pulled off, we seem to be using all the information we can now access to discredit the very information we consume, leading to more ignorance and conflict than ever.

When there is more data available than is physically possible to consume, we have to sort through our options and determine that which we wish to accept.  So immediately, the definition of information becomes modified from its original intent into something more challenging to handle.  I’m over sixty years old, and I was reared to believe the terms “information” and “facts” were synonymous, identical basically.  You could use the word information more narrowly only when you were talking about social contacts, “I need the information on Martha’s party,” and even then, all that was contained therein would be the facts of when and where.  Otherwise, everybody I knew saw the two words as interchangeable.  That equation was reinforced by available information/fact sources that changed very slowly, evolving over long periods of time.  Virtually all of the information I could access had significant time lapses between event and description/explanation of event.  Most of the knowledge I gleaned growing up came from books and encyclopedias which had been written years (decades!) before I used them.  Given the expense of creating these tools, there were not all that many available—two different encyclopedias, a couple of books, and a Newsweek or Tribune article (on microfiche just to make it even more cumbersome) would be the sum total of your research paper on World War II or the solar system or Mark Twain.  We had the luxury of a certain stability in our information that allowed us to equate it with fact.

We did eventually become aware of the limitations, biases, and oversights that this slow, expensive method produced in the “information” we understood.  From the settlers/invaders brutal treatment of Native Americans, to the use of cheap labor through abusing humans (slavery), to child labor in the late nineteenth century, to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II to the sheer folly of American policy during the Viet Nam War; many topics in American history tended to be gleaned over or completely ignored under the old system.  And it wasn’t because the “main” stream information sources conspired to gloss over flaws in our institutions; there was essentially only one stream which reflected the biases of those in charge—wealthy, white, privileged men.  Without question, the old system under which I came of age was only as good as the white guy in charge at the time, so our information access was definitely limited and biased in many ways.  To be clear, I’m certainly not nostalgic for nor do I wish to return to the “good old days.”

But the contrast is severe compared to today when you only have to type a few words in your Google search engine to come up with massive options.  My entry  “information” brought in roughly 8,600,000,000 results in 0.68 seconds.  So, if I wanted to be exhaustive in my study of that term and was willing to spend 24 hours a day devoting thirty seconds to each of those 8.6 billion sites, it would take me only a little more than 200,000 years to finish my research.  Given human longevity, patience, and willingness to devote time to study; it’s not hard to understand that we have to make many judgements on which of those billions of sources will contain the best truth, or the most reasonable answers to any questions I might have about the nature of “information.” (And yes, it is also interesting that the first item on this massive list is a definition for information that begins with “facts provided.”)  It’s easy to see how different this endless supply of information is from that narrow trickle of my youth:  If I found ten sources on the Electoral College, I had a pretty exhaustive pile of facts; much more, and I would be finding all kinds of repetition that wouldn’t advance my research.  Today, just using Google, those ten sources would represent 0.00000184501% of the 5,420,000 I can access, instantly in most cases.  (Don’t get me started on trying to obtain books or articles your library didn’t have, but could get on loan from other libraries—some time next millennium!)  We have no choice but to sort through sources now because there are a ridiculous, impossible number of them at our fingertips.

So that puts the onus on us to determine which information we will use, that which we will trust and that which we will ignore.  Again, way different from our recent past where discerning key points from the few sources we could access was the key skill necessary for gaining knowledge on a particular topic.  Nowadays, no matter how acute our ability to understand what we find is, we can still remain completely misinformed should we select poorly or get misled by those who have hidden agendas in what and how they make their presentations.  To illustrate, I had no idea Holocaust deniers even existed when I was learning about World War II in the 1970s.  Now, there are 250,000 sites on which that topic is discussed.  Almost all of them (of the couple of pages I checked) describe those who deny the Holocaust as factually incorrect, bogus, and anti-Semitic, which is what I would hope all of them would, but you wouldn’t have to search too hard to find ones supporting this form of lunacy.  And that’s just one of hundreds of wrong, vicious, stupid, harmful kinds of issues which can be found in the deluge of “information” around us all the time.

And it doesn’t have to be that dramatically evil to impact our lives on a daily basis—the very nature of everyday conversations has radically changed due to all the information we can summon at the drop of a Thomas Eagleton, Flo_Hyman, Roxy_Music, or unsolved Chicago Tylenol_murders reference; you can have information to settle any disputes immediately (absolutely Roxy belongs in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame!)  But over and over again we have to make fundamental choices on which source of information to select.  If I’m a Time magazine, CNN, Washington Post kind of guy (I am), I will see things differently than you do with the National Review, Fox News, and Washington Examiner.  That’s the key change of today—we hear about the same events and come to polar opposite conclusions about what they mean.  I see Trump as a corrupt, ignorant boor who is a threat to our democratic tradition, ruining our country as he yearns to become Leader for Life.  You see a disrupter who uses direct communication and unusual methods to change a moribund, lifeless swamp of deep state red tape and regulation in order to protect our country from the threat of global terrorism and insecure borders.  We can both support our positions with significant data, expert validation, and scads of data in the form of polls, statistics, and charts.  We logically and systematically come to our irreconcilable positions using the same methodology and information tools.  Is it any wonder we have no trouble moving from disagreeing with each other to disliking (hating) anyone too stupid not to understand the truth we have so carefully cultivated through the pruning and weeding of our own personal information gardens?

The Platonic ideal to which western civilization has pledged allegiance for at least a couple of millennia is now at risk of becoming obsolete.  For those of you who slept through that portion of your Humanities curriculum, in ”The Allegory of the Cave,” Plato argued that no matter how much our sensory biases and mental inadequacies allowed us to distort and corrupt reality, reality was an absolute, independent of foolish human interventions.  A chair is a chair, a woman is a woman, and the truth is the truth—none of them subject to qualifications or exceptions in terms of their ultimate reality.  Our quest toward achieving reality/truth, then, is the never-ending task of trying to strip away all the distractions and perversions from that simple, beautiful reality which should be unvarying for all humans.  If we can’t agree on what is fact, it’s only because we haven’t been successful enough at eliminating all the human nonsense we’ve enshrouded that facts with.  We are, in Plato’s parable, like a man in a cave, chained so as to see only the shadows of objects as they are projected onto the cave’s wall.

Now, the numbers of shrouds concealing reality are billions of websites deep, and we are further away from understanding that which is true than even that poor guy who was chained in Plato’s cave ever was, like him able to view only shadows and never seeing anything’s true nature. What’s so mind-bendingly weird about how far we are from ultimate truth is that we’ve used information (which used to be synonymous with truth’s best friends, facts) to make the path to truth so full of obstacles, detours, and dead ends that reality itself no longer seems to be absolute even in theory, but a subjective idea at its very core.

And the only answer in our attempts to find the best truth we can under these circumstances is to become arbiters of what information is best, which source is most reliable, who will be most honest in determining which events are most important for us to know about.  And then we have to budget our resources and time to then figure out how to prioritize all that needs to be done.  What should come first?  Is it Flint’s still dirty water or Puerto Rica’s still unreliable electrical grid or Scott Pruitt’s allowing brain damaging chemicals to be dumped into our water?  Should we focus on the “witch hunt” our Justice Department is supposedly using to try to impede and impeach our President?  What about the so-called “unwarranted” attacks on the Executive branch of the government coming from the fourth estate?  Will you watch Fox or MSNBC?  Huffpost or Drudgereport?  It has never been harder for this country to reach any consensus; even those things on which we all agree—school shootings are bad, for one—result in divisions along political lines about gun control, background checks, mental illness, and arming teachers.

That’s why I would argue that the Information Age is no longer an apt label for the time in which we live.  I’d probably go with something more like the Bubble Era, the Choose Your Own Facts Time, or maybe the Theory of Relativity.  It’s just incredibly aggravating and sinister to me that we’ve managed to move from a time when our information was generally uniform according to the standards of the elite (clearly a bad thing) to our current state where we abuse the concept of information to support whatever biases and self-interests we possess, which ironically makes it almost impossible that anything will ever get done or we can ever agree (even worse).  It’s unfortunate that almost 2,500 years after Plato wrote about our misusing our senses to relegate ourselves to caves where we could only perceive shadows of reality, we find ourselves still cave bound, still in the dark, and now forging the links of our restraining chains through our own actions.  Sooner or later we will have to figure out a way to get out into the sun.

The Cleverness Conundrum

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There can be little question at this point in human history that cleverness is both our greatest gift and the worst thing that ever happened to any species.  From life-saving vaccines to nuclear weapons to symphonies to hate crimes to Doctors Without Borders to the Holocaust, we’ve been able to reach astronomic heights at the same time we’ve exposed ourselves as the “most pernicious Race of little odious Vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the Surface of the Earth” (Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels).  What makes us so infuriatingly complicated is that our ingenuity can twist just about any discovery into the opposite of that for which it was intended.  Will we ever evolve enough to be able to anticipate the negative applications of the things we want to unleash on ourselves before we suffer the consequences of something we really believed was going to help us out, to make our lives better?  Even more difficult yet necessary given our innate curiosity’s leading us ever onward in our new creations, can we figure out how to turn something we’ve dreamed up that’s harmful into something positive?  Will we ever learn?

It certainly seems unlikely at this point.  Using plants to manufacture drugs which helped alleviate pain was certainly a noble goal, but shouldn’t we have been astute enough to recognize that anything which relieved pain would be abused by those seeking escape life’s realities?  Creating an Internet platform which allows friends to share joys and pictures was a great opportunity for people to stay in touch regardless of how far apart they lived, but surely we could have reasoned that volunteering that much information about ourselves to the world would be exploited by those who only wanted to take advantage of that data for their own power and/or enrichment.  You could go on with any human creation over the years: Nothing is all good or all bad in the hands of unpredictable, wily, visionary, emotional, psychotic, logical, vengeful, peaceful, angry, loving animals like us.

Smart phones have radically changed our lives in the short time they’ve been available, and we’ve probably only scratched the surface of all the ways they will determine our futures.  And shouldn’t it frighten us how that clause—“they will determine our futures”—can be so casually dropped without many of us even noticing?  Think about that:  It won’t be up to you how your life is altered by some technological invention; to function as part of our society, you will be forced to change yourself to fit the technology, whether you like it or not.  I resisted as long as I could being beholden to my cell phone, but I lost that personal war and now readily admit that they are necessities for any person in modern society.  But I had functioned quite well, by my own standards at least, for some thirty-five years before the first smart phone (click on “IBM Simon” to read this article) happened in 1992, and was pushing forty before they were widely used in the late nineties (at the earliest), a scant twenty years ago.  That’s a quick turnaround for societal change, especially when you’re a middle-aged person before the revolution even starts.

The same happened even more quickly with social media, initially sold to us as a total positive:  You get to share with friends and family so easily and immediately that there’s no doubt Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat have all made hundreds of millions happy, at least occasionally.  But think what a short time span has elapsed from that idyllic concept (“Too idealistic” is how one of Facebook’s spokespeople has been trying to spin it) to recent lapses, which may have led to a government hostile to the U.S. manipulating our most recent Presidential election just enough to swing the vote to the disaster we now endure.  On a less consequential but even more widespread level, studies have been published about how addictive checking out feeds can be, but it turns out we are actually becoming more isolated and less happy.  Everybody has at least a couple horrific anecdotes about how harmful some inadvertent posts have been to people they know.  The longer we live with this “advancement,” the less we seem to like it.  But it’s become a social requirement, with the various age levels tending to inhabit similar, but different platforms (“Facebook has become so old, Dad!”); yet all generations feel pressured to respond in certain ways to specific cues—how much hidden resentment lurks in our responses for some meme when it’s prefaced with something like, “Only my true, real friends will comment and share this…”?  From issues of national security to creating unspoken yet deep rifts between friends, the pot of gold at the end of the social media rainbow has contained abundant radioactive material as well.

The future offers wonderful and horrifying things for us too since our cleverness onslaught will continue unabated for…forever—we’re never gonna stop, and we all know it!  Looming as both possible great leaps forward and traps we will rue ever dreaming up (Can you say, “atomic power”?) are things like artificial intelligence (AI) and genetic engineering (as it becomes more easily accomplished via CRISPR developments).  Both have huge benefits and downsides, depending on how we use them.  AI robots will do everything more uniformly, more rationally, more quickly, and more cheaply than humans can, dramatically improving productivity.  Yet, as any long-time reader/watcher of science fiction could tell you, we’ve already imagined dystopian futures where machines have become our masters.  Unless you’re Neo or John Connors, I would suggest, that scenario won’t work out very well for you.  Even if the machines never become sentient and declare war on humankind, remaining our humble servants could prove harmful as well when their increasing efficiency and skill coupled with their decreasing costs lead to massive unemployment and human displacement as we struggle to adapt to a standard we are incapable of meeting due to our biological limitations.

Or is our genetic destiny capable of being altered for the better? The amazing strides we could make in preventing many inherited disabilities or diseases will make it impossible to resist the CRISPR promise to help vulnerable people, but O Brave New World  that has turned such technology into a means to create more “stable” humans in order to keep us from harming ourselves.  It’s also even easier to imagine how rich people could make use of genetic manipulation to continue and further their advantage over the masses, leading to a worsening class divide, which has already become a huge issue in developed economies throughout the world. (Of course, Sci-Fi’s already been there, too, in  Gattaca, as well as the aforementioned Huxley work.  And is it fear-mongering to worry about biological experiments going awry and creating some form of superbug which causes a pandemic, killing millions before our cleverness (?) finds some defense?

So, yeah, it’s pretty easy to envision both gloriously sunny utopias and repressive, dark hellscapes in our near futures.  The pace of that change is ratcheting up as well, impossible as that sounds, which makes it even more difficult to make carefully reasoned choices on how any new by-product of human cleverness will alter the world.  (Solar power into a solar weapon?  Nanotechnology injecting millions of tiny machines into our bodies to attack tumors or instill mind control?  Opiate-based pain relief mutating into a crisis of drug addiction and overdose deaths?  Wait, that one’s already happened.)  And you know as well as I do that some hitherto unknown idea or technology or technique or guru will soon present us with something we never would have dreamed of before it was suddenly available, leading to its rapid transformation into something we are unable to imagine living without.  (I don’t know about you, but I don’t want anything to do with Siri or Alexa.  And I’m afraid to admit I know I’m doomed to be entrapped by some other disembodied voice sooner or later.  And, sure, they know why Alexa was randomly emitting an evil laugh; she was amazonized at how easy it was to take over our world, is my theory.)  And that pattern will repeat in ever-more-rapid cycles.  What’s to become of us?

I guess the good news is that we’ve made it this far.  We’re quite adaptable, after all, and it would appear that there is little humans cannot endure, even the things we mislead ourselves into believing are advances which turn out to be drains on our psyches.  Maybe one day all those promises and guarantees will hold up; we’ll reach a perfect blend of science and humanity, of spirit and logic, of imagination and fact…And then we’ll develop a resistance to all medications because we ate hormone-treated baloney when we were six, only to become infected with some human-manipulated germ gone horribly wrong which leads to a gruesome painful death unless sufferers consume the brains of a blood relative—Zombie family apocalypse!—or (probably more likely) some idiot President will start a nuclear war to cover his collusion with Russia because his ego was bruised and the pee tapes are about to be released.  Sorry for the pessimism, but our history has shown over and over that we can screw up just about any situation, find a solution for that screw up, adapt quickly, and then discover a significant negative outcome from the solution that nobody had ever contemplated or intended initially.  We’re just that smart.

But our cleverness implies the capacity to learn, to understand, to climb higher on the rubble of our failures. Ultimately and tragically, every day we greet a new opportunity to choose differently than we did the day before.  We’ve incorporated our collective belief in progress into almost every part of our lives: education, careers, families move upward and onward as reassurances to us that we are in control, that we do know what we’re doing, despite all evidence to contrary.

Theologians and philosophers tend to see humanity’s life approaches in one of three ways:  Some of us believe humans are innately evil or flawed, despite having been created by a perfect being/entity/god.  We accept teachings which have been told to us by alleged human representatives of those perfect beings; those teachings are generally ideals we probably can’t achieve.  We accept (often grudgingly) that these judgements of moral behavior might not be the same across the various faiths humans follow, but we are certain our version is the right one; we gamble our eternal after-lives on that presumption since we believe there’s a place where those who have performed appropriately on Earth reside forever after their deaths.  But since following those teachings is very hard and maintaining a belief that our souls will live eternally is reassuring, we tend to embrace a goodly amount of daily hypocrisy so we can ignore anything we find difficult or inconvenient in the teachings, especially in wealthy countries like the U.S.  This tends to explain why so many of the most outwardly “godly” people tend to be concealing the most significant sinful behavior.  Some also prescribe a post-life place of eternal punishment for those who fail to follow or accept those teachings—and we’d like to believe the really bad hypocrites among us will go there too, but not those who were only a little bit disingenuous:  You know, people like us.

Then there are those who reject the concept of a supreme being/creator, instead following the teachings of the natural world.  Things which can be observed, tested, and replicated repeatedly become the basis of learning more about our physical surroundings and how things work.  As our depth of knowledge has grown, we have been able to find ways to manipulate, control, and exploit our world to the point where we now see ourselves as complete masters of this planet.  Unfortunately, all that knowledge and manipulation has had adverse effects on many humans as well as trillions of other creatures which share this space with us.  The faith this group has, then, is in human scientific skills to save us from the dangers many of our other scientific discoveries (Oil burns!) have wrought upon our world.  It’s hard to exaggerate the selfishness, ignorance, callousness, and greed which have led to the current state of our environment; yet, many of this philosophical clan still believe that humans are basically good and will ultimately figure out the right thing to do.  If nothing else, they have faith that the scientific method can lead us to ways out of our current challenges into better days.  (Bill Gates is one of the chief proponents of this, as only a multi-billionaire can afford to be.) Oddly enough, this non-deist approach is probably more optimistic than most religions.

Needless to say, the members of the third group see themselves as in both camps, at least some parts of each. (Which parts?  Why, the good, correct parts, of course. What a silly question!)

I’m not sure what all this says about our species nor do I have any better suggestions for how to proceed other than we should try to understand how our world is changing, even though it’s a hopeless task when things change so rapidly and in such complex ways.  We should exert as much rational thought possible on how changes in our world might impact us, both good and bad, despite the impossibility of knowing what those changes could lead to ten years from now.  We should show good judgement on how we use our time in ways that grow our souls and improve our thought, even though every other generation besides our own will consider the things we choose as pointless, stupid, and harmful.  (We, of course, will react to their choices precisely the same way.)  We should recognize a higher calling, even though we’ll never agree on exactly what god, religion, philosophy, or rules for life represent the true way.

Ultimately, then, anyone can make a strong case that the human race is doomed, that the radical changes our cleverness endlessly produces will one day inevitably lead to our destruction.  (Most religions foretell this, and even atomic scientists keep a Doomsday Clock, currently set at two minutes to midnight—midnight being when we destroy Earth.  That ain’t much time, friends.)  Until our last second, however, we can at least accept responsibility in our own lives for being moral in our actions, especially as family members and friends, toward each other.  That’s got nothing to do, by the way, with your political, religious, ethnic, or socio-economic group; I think Bowling for Soup sums up what I mean very clearly in their song, “Don’t Be a Dick.”  It’s difficult to behave in just, fair, loving ways when we are bombarded with examples of the opposite so often in the news, on the street, or in any comments section online.  It’s infuriating how poorly so many of us behave since we should be clever enough to know the difference between that which is reasonable and good as opposed to that which is irrational and abasing.  Fortunately, at least, we do regularly witness the human capacity to shift from the petty and spiteful to our better selves when devastating crises occur.  From pitching in during hurricanes, to fighting deadly contagious diseases, to saving rabbits from fires, it’s amazing how many laudable acts humans perform.  I’d like to hope that we don’t need disasters destroying our neighborhoods before we act decently, and I guardedly assume that maybe our kindness often goes unnoticed in the land of Trump and Circumstance.  I have no idea how our cosmic ledger of good deeds versus heinous crimes currently stands; it certainly wouldn’t surprise me if the next mean, thoughtless, stupid, hurtful, or grasping human act would cause a higher power to shrug in disgust before wiping us out in order to try again.

But every day, some of us odious vermin work at food pantries, give blood, and donate our efforts in Pads programs.  We clearly can’t control if or when our cleverness will cause our destruction, so we can assume we’re in for quite a few bumpy nights; however, there’s no reason why we can’t individually focus on other human traits like empathy, compassion, and generosity.  Cleverness might get most of the attention, but our world does a lot better when we don’t think too much.

Trump Is the Total Package

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It’s hard to conceive that America could ever choose someone to be our President who would be worse than Donald J. Trump.  Before you go off on your “libtard” rant about people like me, you need to understand that what makes him the worst commander in chief this country has ever had the misfortune to elect is not about the policy changes and initiatives he has pushed, or even the lasting stain his appointments will leave on our judiciary branch.  No, we’ve weathered horrible policy Presidents before, and we’ll probably have to do so again; plus, it’s too early to make evaluations on his legislative legacy after only a little over a year. Trump is superlatively egregious because of what a horrible person he is, not because of his misguided ideas.  In every aspect of what it takes to be awful, he sinks to the bottom.  Donald J. Trump fails as a human being, and that’s why it’s so vile that he has now become an American historical figure.

Before we can really get started, I’m afraid I need to explain my personal categories of character.  To me, flaws are demonstrated when someone does anything rude, offensive, and/or mean.  And those three adjectives sum up the main three groupings I have come to assign immoral people in ascending order.  Therefore, meanness is the worst trait a person can have, with offensiveness next, which leaves rudeness as the least terrible of the three.  Since all those traits are abhorrent, connotatively I need really insulting terms to use when I describe them.  So, rather than using “rude, offensive and mean,” when discussing those who commit these faux pas, I refer to them as “assholes, dicks, and bastards.”  We all have our own special terms which help us to cope with our chaotic world, and I apologize that mine are offensive to some of you (which I readily concede places me in the dick level of my own scale).  To elaborate:

An asshole is that obnoxious guy in the movie theater who keeps talking as he loudly consumes his endless popcorn/pop/candy.  He’s that fool who has to tailgate you or won’t hold the elevator door (or any door for that matter).  Most rude behavior is simply someone being inconsiderate and self-absorbed, so everybody acts like an asshole once in a while: You don’t answer the phone when you see it’s your talkative neighbor, you take the last of the leftovers even though you know somebody else was looking forward to them, or you don’t cover your mouth when you cough, even at the height of flu season.  One of the reasons that Rick Moranis was surrounded in this wonderful Spaceballs scene is that because assholes happen to all of us.

But while being an asshole is almost inevitable—at least some of the time–most of us feel bad when we realize we’ve acted that way and try to make up for it somehow.  Dicks typically don’t readily concede that they’ve done anything wrong; they seem to relish their inappropriate acts and don’t hesitate to double down despite the discomfort they cause others.  It’s one thing to slip and use a term or phrase that others might find distasteful; it’s another to rationalize away people’s difficulty as “their problem” or to dismiss their feelings with, “Sorry you don’t have a sense of humor, for God’s sake!” (Or, closer to home, claiming that you need to use sophomoric, vulgar language in order to write your essay about why Trump is so awful.) Dicks abuse their positions and cross the line into crass.  It’s not that they’re intentionally trying to anger people so much as they can’t accept that anyone else won’t cut them some slack since they rationalize their motives as “truthful humor,” or for the truly trite dick, “Just telling it like it is!”  Being dickish does seem to involve words more than anything, so a dick’s offenses might not seem worse than those of the asshole.  Intent is the key here, however, in that dicks have a pretty good idea that what they’re saying is going to piss somebody off.  That they say it anyway is why it seems worse to me than the me-centered acts of assholes, who are often unaware that anyone is upset over what they did.  There can be some intimidating tinges to how dicks interact with others, but you’ll find most of that kind of stuff in the third and worst type of person: the bastard.

Bastards really don’t care about anyone but themselves and will do whatever it takes to ensure they come out of all situations well.  The guilty conscience or trace of remorse you will find in assholes and dicks has no place in the bastard’s behavior; if he can take advantage of your weakness, he will.  These are the people who crowd the edge of anti-social behavior and woe to anyone who gets in their way.  They make heartless jokes and laugh loudly at them, they strive to make others feel bad about themselves, and they will stab even close friends in the back, given the slightest self-advancing excuse.  You can easily imagine them being cruel to pets, indifferent to elderly parents, and impatient with physically challenged.  They probably don’t have many friends, but there will always be a certain percentage of people who tolerate them out of fear.

To put all three into the same situation so you can see the differences, imagine you’ve gathered with hordes of others at some department store right before it opens on Black Friday, and everybody there has designs on the same hot item of which there is a limited supply.  Our three archetypes happen to be standing right behind a senior citizen in the crush of eager shoppers as the store opens.  The asshole would push through our hapless senior, oblivious to any damage or anger he causes; he would be truly surprised should the old person confront him for being knocked down in the initial stampede.  The dick wouldn’t do anything physically aggressive, but he would loudly make jokes to his companions about how he could easily outrun the senior, how he could toss her out of his way, or how he will out-muscle her should they both grab something at the same time, without much concern about who else heard him.  And the bastard would intentionally trip the senior in order to get past her, step on her as he went forward to ensure she couldn’t recover in time to compete with him, and then vehemently deny doing anything wrong when challenged about his actions, not completely hiding the smirk on his face as he held the coveted item.

One final note on these designations:  All three can be intensified with the addition of the modifier, “total.”  A total asshole is perpetually rude; even the sound of his voice will grate after a while.  A total dick is someone you count on to say something inappropriate in every situation, and he will cause hurt feelings regularly.  A total bastard, then, would be about the worst thing you could say about someone, and somebody to cut out of your life as much as possible.  (I also sometimes substitute “complete” for “total” to the same effect.)

All of which brings us to our conclusion:  Donald Trump (our President) is a bastard, as well as a dick and an asshole; and not surprisingly given the number of asshat, dickish, bastardly examples he accumulates almost daily, he deserves, without hesitation, the extra heft of “total” in all three categories as well.

A total asshole shoves a prime minister out of his way, yells at then hangs up on another, brags about not paying taxes, and doesn’t mind a shock-jock calling his daughter “a piece of ass.” 

As far as being a total dick, he would boast of sexual assault (of course, denying actually committing the act when his remarks come to light), insult Native Americans using, “Pocahontas,” as a pejorative, defend neo-Nazis as “very fine people,” and say/write so many racist things that the New York Times would feel the need to document all the times he denigrated blacks (to say nothing of his making “shithole” comments about Africa and Haiti.)

Actually, several of those incidents could easily be placed in the bastard category, but for sheer meanness, you only have to look at the belittling nicknames he has plastered on his enemies, his effectively calling a soldier’s widow a liar right after her husband had died, how he matter-of-factly tried to ban transgendered military personnel from service, and (it’s still hard to accept anyone could do this)  mocked a reporter’s disability in front of both television cameras and a large crowd.  (Oh, and as I was working on this, he fired his Secretary of State—who was no prize either—with a tweet.  Only a real bastard could make us feel sympathy for incompetent, nasty, and/or racist characters like Rex Tillerson, Tom Price, Scott Pruitt, and [amazingly enough] Jeff Sessions!)

As far as that “total” being added all three times, it’s a given, especially when you realize that the disturbing examples documented here are just a small sampling of the huge number of his offenses:  Even if you limit your time frame to when he announced his candidacy for the Presidency (by calling Mexicans rapists) to the latest storm over the $130,000 his lawyer paid to silence a porn star’s revelations of her sexual encounter with him at the time his wife was recovering from delivering his son, you’d still have more than enough examples to earn Trump a featured place in the Asshole/Dick/Bastard Hall of Shame.

We can debate his various policies, and I would be happy to discuss with anyone how I disagree with him on most issues you could name.  I can also recognize that my dislike for his ideas on how the country should be run would lead you to conclude that my evaluation of him as a human being is biased, but his constant repulsive acts make that charge easy to refute.  For one, I believe that Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were poor Presidents too, both of whom took the country in the wrong direction (way, way wrong in Reagan’s case especially) during each of their eight years in office. I would never, however, criticize their fundamental humanity or question that they were (more or less) moral, decent people.  I would be happy to meet either (Yes, I know Reagan is dead) and was not ashamed to have both represent me to other heads of state and the world.  I didn’t like them at all as Presidents, but they’re fine as humans.  (I still get misty listening to Reagan speaking about the Challenger astronauts who were killed, especially as edited into the Owl City song “Galaxies.”)

I can’t come close to that level of tolerance when it comes to Trump because there is nothing about the way he conducts himself that is appropriate or acceptable.  From his constant abuse of our mother tongue (I taught English for thirty-three years, so Trump’s vicious assaults on the conventions of our beautiful language and its grammar especially irk me), to his sleazy affairs with porn stars, to the way he ignored his wife as they came to the White House for his inauguration, to his boorish speech for the Boy Scouts, to his handshake games with other heads of state, to his lobbing paper towels at suffering Puerto Ricans, to his gloating about firing a government employee one day before the employee would have received his pension…well, I’ll stop there since you don’t have time for anything close to a comprehensive list—oh, don’t forget his childish feud with a Gold Star family. He has lied  more than any other politician in history—the only way he has made America #1 again—and never, ever apologizes or admits to mistakes.  Of course, there are many examples which can be pointed to of how other politicians have misled the public, but Trump lies about stupid, inconsequential things that serve no purpose other than to boost his ego, like crowd size at inaugurations.  Any other person in the world would have squirmed uncomfortably at the revolting sycophancy he engineered before a cabinet meeting began (I would have had to bolt from the room to save myself from dying of humiliation), but Trump seemed to revel in the false praise. I’ve never been able to watch that whole grotesque video; I probably should have put a nausea-inducing-warning label on the link—sorry about that.  Virtually every person who has gone to work for him during this administration has seen his/her own reputation sink to the depths—not only is Trump morally bankrupt, but contact with him taints and diminishes everyone else—Typhoid Trump.

I don’t need to belabor the point, but keep in mind that the chief character issues our previous President was accused of were charges of a phony birth certificate to cover up a Kenyan birth and that he was secretly a Muslim. So, two fantasy stories easily disproved were the main “scandals” of Obama’s eight years.  Petty personal feuds? Marital infidelity? Inappropriate ties to foreign governments? Publicly attacking his own Attorney General? Literally shoving people out of his way?  Notes to remind him to be empathic enough to tell grieving parents, “I hear you”?  Nope, and Obama didn’t praise a wife beater’s character, demand a military parade for his own ego, or regularly swear on TV, either.  (And don’t forget that Trump was the driving force behind the fake birth certificate nonsense, and in another dickish move, demanded copies of Obama’s college transcripts and passport.)

I know that just as I despised the policy directions the U.S. took under Bush the Second and Reagan, many of you felt the same pain based on the projects and initiatives which took place under Obama.  But if you can watch the Trump show now and somehow claim that he is as decent a human being as Barak, then you have a really warped view of what “decency” means.  I realize that I have sunk to dickish methods in characterizing this lump of orange flesh with disturbing hair, but there can be little debate on the reality that Donald Trump is a total asshole, a total dick, and worst of all, a total bastard.  Now, about his colluding with Russia, his obstructions of justice, his using his office to profit himself, his ignorance of climate change, his starting trade wars, his manipulation of the Dreamers, his shifting positions on gun control, his being accused of sexual assault and marital infidelity, his support for a candidate who stalked minors and was banned from a shopping mall, his false claims of voter fraud…Yeah, no doubt about it—he’s the worst.

Better Late Than Never?

capI’ve been blogging for a few years now, mostly about public education and teaching. But six years into my retirement, I’m not current enough on what’s happening at the classroom level to feel like my expertise on many education issues is as useful as it once was.  On the other hand, I still love to write and have had more time to work on, study, and experience other things more thoroughly than I did when I was teaching full time.  Because of that shift in focus, I’m changing the name of my blog from Snowflake Schools (the name of my e-book, which is still available should you wish to read it) to Better Late Than Never?  In our lightning-fast age with everyone’s attention quickly shifting from topic to topic, I’m definitely out of step in that my opinions generate slowly and getting them into a form I’m willing to share with others takes me longer than the pace at which current events flow these days, sometimes way, way longer—my most recent blog on “Guns” contains stuff I’ve been working on for over three years.

So, that explains the “Better Late Than Never” part of the blog’s new title: Its topics won’t necessarily be up-to-the-minute or reflect the most recent headlines.  I will opt for a more measured approach, even if it means that most have already moved on from whatever particular idea is being analyzed.  And the “?” simply acknowledges that anyone who reads the blog (to whom I’m exceedingly grateful) won’t necessarily agree that the views needed to have been expressed at all and could very well feel like “Never” would have been a better option.

This shift also means I won’t feel constrained as much as I did before about adult, potentially offensive topics and/or language in my essays.  Again, this might not suit some people, but one of the best parts of any blog entry is that you don’t have to read it unless you want to.  I’m very interested in what others think about my opinions and would like to engage in healthy confrontation with those who disagree with me.  I’m not in this for likes or empty praise; of course I enjoy positive feedback, but I do want to know when people don’t agree with my ideas.  No, I can’t guarantee I’ll change my approaches just because you don’t like them, but I do know that my analysis will not be as sharp as it could be unless honed through discussion.  I’m looking forward to pursuing my interests in fitness, music, politics, aging, and anything else which moves me, in addition to the education/teaching issues on which I still feel qualified and motivated to comment.

I will continue to make use of my snowflake-in-mortar-board logo I’ve been using for almost five years now.  I can easily justify the snowflake since I promise that each essay will be as one-of-a-kind as every frozen water particle is.  The mortar board is harder to explain—anything I might come up with would be really pretentious, self-congratulatory, and/or arrogant:  My readers are amazingly smart people?  Let’s just say that I helped to create this logo for my eBook, I own it, and I like it, so I’m gonna use it!  (How’s that for high-level analysis?) I really appreciate your taking the time to read something this convoluted about some unknown essayist’s rationale for changing his blog’s name.  Meatier stuff next time, I promise.

Guns

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“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”  Flannery O’Connor

At first, the tragedy in Parkland, Florida, seemed like just another in the series of horrific school shootings we’ve come to dread and expect in the U.S. “Hopes and prayers” would be profusely proffered with nothing changing until the next school joins the bloody ranks of this uniquely American epidemic.  But then articulate, camera-ready high school students gained access to our national media, and suddenly the possibility of some progress on this shameful legacy became possible.

As a high school/junior high teacher for thirty-three years (1979-2012), I was certainly aware of this issue, teaching for the bulk of my career in a high school similar in many ways to the two frame high schools of this era, Columbine (1999, 13 dead) and Parkland (2018, 17 dead) with Sandy Hook elementary school (2012, 26 dead) notably in between as well as way too many others.  I worked with kids very similar to those who attend Stoneman Douglas High School—upper-middle class, mostly white, with the majority going on to college and top 25% socio-economic status for their adult lives.  These are our future lawyers, doctors, and business leaders; they are the ones who take charge of our country, but typically not for twenty-plus years into the future, so it is fascinating that the country is paying so much attention to what they have to say right now.

Let me be very clear right up front: I strongly agree with their agenda—tougher gun laws, more comprehensive background checks, raising age limits, and assault-rifle bans (if anything, I don’t believe they go far enough)—but my support comes with a few qualifications as well.  Where was all this outrage and activism when other places were being shot up?    The fifty-nine dead in Las Vegas happened just months ago; did they take to social media after that too?  Who organized the marches to change laws in memoriam of these concert-goers’ and their hundreds of family members and friends? This self-absorption—where we humans seem capable of action only after we have been personally touched by an issue—has always frustrated my sense of right/wrong.  That our personal lives have to be impacted before we see an issue’s importance and are willing to support action is hardly a new phenomenon, though.  Gay rights progressed rapidly only after so many people had come out that virtually every straight person knew and liked at least one gay person.  Until we had Will and Grace, not to mention Ellen, we were quite capable of blithely saying and doing nothing about ludicrously unfair statutes which prohibited many rights to gays.  But once we realized that Jack McFarland and Sulu might die because they couldn’t get insurance coverage on their life partners’ policy, we recognized the inherent unfairness and compassionless nature of the bigoted system which had always been in place.

That certainly seems to be the case with these students. As Trevor Noah pointed out during off-camera comments on The Daily Show, they are using the privilege they have been afforded all their lives to question the status quo, at least once they have directly experienced how that quo functions.  So we who have long been appalled by the unfettered access our country has allowed to high-tech guns need to be patient with some of the eye-rolling inducing comments these kids make in their insistent demands that things change immediately now that they have an awareness of those things’ flaws.  (The most cringe-worthy moment I’ve seen so far was when a student being interviewed on CNN along with Dan Rather complained that on the day after the shooting, he had been rejected by one of his “safety schools,” Cal State Long Beach, even though he plans to go to Harvard or Northwestern (at about the seven minute mark of the interview).  I’m very familiar with that kind of student, having taught them for many years.  These Parkland students are extremely intelligent, articulate, and exceptional but they are not as unusual as they have been portrayed by the media—any high school teacher from similar districts throughout the country would recognize the earnest, idealistic, privileged, media-ready attitudes exhibited by these teens.

I guess the main thing I want to point out here is that there have been many individuals over the years who have been trying to accomplish the goals these kids are lobbying for and who offer an expertise and knowledge which would significantly supplement the raw emotion and idealism of those who have taken up the issue only after—and primarily because—they have been personally affected by gun violence.  Of course it’s imperative that those victimized by a problem participate in the formulation of a societal consensus on what the solutions should look like; it just seems unfortunate our attention and willingness to listen requires the emotional outpourings which follow tragedies.  It’s the same psychology which leads to horrific car wreck remains being displayed on the grounds of many high schools right before senior prom to deter drunk driving or the vicarious yet safe fear and dread spike which forces most to slow down to see as much carnage as possible after highway accidents.  I understand that impulse and recognize it will always be this way, but I wish we didn’t need such negative energy to be motivated to do what seems logical, humane, and obvious.

None of which blunts in the slightest the importance of our seizing upon this moment as an opportunity to make some progress on attacking the killing machines which so many Americans have determined to be their god-granted right, regardless of the potential harm they can so easily cause when in the hands of the wrong people.  For too long, we anti-gun folks have remained an impotent minority as our country has gotten more and more extreme about firearms.  Every once in a while (like right now or after Sandy Hook), an emotional wave spurs a few more to action and there are many anti-gun organizations headed up by bereaved parents or recovering victims, but the perpetual fervor and rabid attacks from the other side always manage to interfere with and ultimately defeat any actions that might change the dangerous lack of controls we have over who can get a gun, how many guns it’s acceptable to own, and/or the types of guns/accessories readily available all over the country.  Even liberal, reasonable people seem to have given up the fight, weakly pursuing only the most minor reforms in our lax gun laws.  But with the media megaphone provided by Parkland, anti-gun advocates might be heard more loudly and forcefully when they speak.  And I hope their goals are to limit the purchase of and to get rid of as many guns as possible, especially those in the hands of private citizens.

Yeah, I’ve heard and read all the reasons why this is a horrible violation of personal rights, not to mention the Constitution, but all those reasons are at worst completely invalid and at best hardly absolute when people look at the facts.  Let’s run through a few of the pro-gun arguments and see how well they stand up to logical analysis.

The right to bear arms is protected by the Constitution.  The second amendment was created during a time when the U.S. armed forces were a rag-tag collection of volunteers, and hostile Native Americans were prevalent on our continent.  We now have the best-armed, best-trained military in the world, and its ability to protect its citizens is without peer…anywhere.  The U.S. is bordered by friendly countries, and almost all of the threats to our sovereignty are overseas in places where our enemies spend more time fighting each other than trying to invade our shores.  No foreign country poses a military threat to the continental United States, and if one did, our armed forces could destroy it in a matter of days.  Ordinary citizens do not need guns to protect themselves from invading enemies, so the Constitutional need of 1789 no longer exists.  And let’s not even broach the topic of the infallibility of our founding fathers since that 1789 document also allowed for slavery.  Times change, and the Constitution needs some updating when it comes to guns even if you accept that the second amendment is intended as some sacred rite, rather than the need of another time when foes were closer and our federal armed forces were weak.  And we’ll also skip getting into all the other amendments—to say nothing of the Constitution’s basic tenets of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—which a heavily armed citizenry threatens as well.  The Constitutional argument for loose gun restrictions doesn’t hold up well at all.

We need guns to protect ourselves should non-democratic forces take over our government.  The NSA spying Edward Snowden revealed should give everyone pause about the increasing power of our federal government.  But does anyone seriously think that with drones, tanks, access to all our personal records, 1.3 million soldiers, and a military budget that dwarfs the next seven largest countries in the world combined; buying six shotguns would keep you safe should the government suddenly turn fascist?  It’s idiotic to believe that arming your ten-year-old with a .22 rifle would prevent our government from doing what it wants should it ever go rogue.  And that’s accepting that the kinds of coups which occur in places like Thailand and Egypt are even possible here.  Our system might lead to flawed leaders (Can you say Dick Cheney and Donald Trump?), but our tradition of peaceful dissent and the electoral process make militia paranoia absurd.  We don’t need guns to protect ourselves from our government, and even if we did, our government has way too much firepower for any community organization (and certainly any individual) no matter how well armed, to overcome.

If we ban guns, the bad guys would just use other weapons.  This one’s probably my favorite of the poor reasons gun advocates trot out.  Yes, we have had dozens and dozens of mass murders committed with knives and ball-peen hammers.  It’s just idiotic; killing people with a gun is light-years easier than anything else commonly available.  Perhaps one day evil criminal geniuses will come up with death rays or killer robots, but the only places you will find ANY examples of death on a large-scale that don’t involve guns are in the pages of science-fiction novels.  Oooo, look out—here comes that bad man with his clothes line!  He’s on a strangling rampage, and we’re helpless in the face of such deadly force!  C’mon; it’s just one of those debating points that has not a shred of evidence to support it, and we should just laugh when some gun-advocate tries to use that line of “reasoning.”

We need guns to protect ourselves from the bad guys.  This is probably the most effective argument (unlike the previous reason) that gun advocates use.  There have been cases where armed citizens have fought off or even killed evil ones who tried to rob or hurt them.  But there have also been cases where the armed citizen killed or injured innocent bystanders.  My preference is that guns only be in the hands of professionals—cops, soldiers, and criminals.  Yeah, you read that right:  The bulk of law-breakers do not want to hurt anyone, but just want money or drugs (or money to get drugs), and armed law-abiding citizens simply complicate what should be a simple robbery by brandishing a hand-gun, leading to somebody’s getting shot.  Certainly, sometimes the recipient of the bullet in these shootouts is a bad guy, but just as often a good guy with a gun is racked up.  You can go on-line to try to research how often guns have been successfully used to foil crimes (as I have), but both sides of the issue use various studies and statistics to prove completely opposite conclusions.  I don’t doubt that if we abolish guns there will be tragic events where unarmed people are hurt by evil idiots with guns.  But the evidence suggests that the numbers of innocents killed by guns will go down significantly once we get rid of the plague of guns currently awash in the U.S.

And we mustn’t forget that the bulk of gun-related deaths (roughly two-thirds) come in the form of self-harm:  Suicides are simply too easy with readily available guns and a federal government which is now trying to cut or eliminate funds for helping mentally ill people. The majority of those prone to violence due to mental illnesses direct that violence on themselves.  Again, yes, some of these poor people would find other ways to act out their pain with other tools, but guns are significantly faster and more lethal than anything else.

You can’t go by other countries since they aren’t like us.  Of course they aren’t like us!  But they aren’t like each other, either, and the one common factor in England, Canada, and Australia (three countries more like us than many in that they all share a language and heritage [or a heritage imported to the country from England]) is that they have significantly fewer gun deaths every year than we do.  Australia is especially interesting in that they only changed their gun laws after a horrific 1996 mass shooting in Tasmania.  A conservative president John Howard (who was an ardent backer of George W. Bush and thus obviously no bleeding heart) pushed through a significant reduction in guns by banning all automatic and semi-automatic weapons, coupled with a government buyback.  And Australia hasn’t had any mass gun killings since, not to mention that their gun-related suicide rate has plummeted without any increase in other types of suicides at all.  The firearm-related death rates for these four countries look like this per 100,000 population:  England: 0.25; Australia: 1.06; Canada: 2.38; and the United States: 9.42.  (See this for a list of all countries where you will see that only less developed countries in South/Central America and Africa have rates higher than the U.S.  Of the “modern, developed” (rich) countries, the U.S. is definitely the gun-death capitol of the world.)

So it’s great that these young people are joining those of us who have been against guns for a long time.  That they now agree with long-time opposers is heartening, and that they are drawing significant attention to this issue is wonderful.  Like the veterans, they should understand the important implications of their support, because they can have no illusions that this will be an easy task.  But as we’ll see below, there are some positive signs we could see progress this time.

First, understand the National Rifle Association (NRA) and its five million members wield significant sway with many politicians right now, both in terms of financial backing and the ability to deliver votes. On the money front, there are a couple of ways to fight back: In the short term, find candidates and politically active groups to support and donate money to them.  It does seem that the U.S. government is for sale, and politicians have to have large sums of money to wage campaigns and conduct public relations which will keep their constituencies happy.  So we anti-gun people will have to buy our own representation exactly the same way the NRA has.  Given the poll numbers which suggest the majority of Americans are ready for reform, it should be possible to compete with the millions gun groups (especially the NRA) donate to Senate and Congressional races.  We could even take some solace in that our bought politicians are at least being paid to save lives.

Hand in hand with that, you can use purchasing power to insist that your dollars don’t go toward the support of the gun industry or its mouth-piece, the NRA.  This is an extremely effective way to exert pressure on others who donate large sums to influence politicians.  And guess what?  Two airlines, six car rental companies, and at least one bank have all eliminated special discount programs open to those with NRA membership.  Now Wal-Mart has raised gun purchase age from 18 to 21, and Dick’s Sporting Goods has discontinued sale of assault rifles (expanding a partial ban which came after Sandy Hook).  And in perhaps the most interesting development, retailer REI has decided not to reorder from some of its suppliers because their parent company manufactures assault rifles. REI does not sell guns and it bought mostly clothing from these subsidiary manufacturers, but its executives have determined that contributing to the overall revenue of a corporation which sells these kinds of weapons is no longer acceptable business practice.  It’s understandable not to trust the words of politicians, especially those of Donald Trump, but once gun manufacturers and the NRA start to feel financial pain, who knows where this could lead?

But the long-term, more important battle is to get Citizens United  overturned.  (Citizens United is a Supreme Court ruling which more or less allowed unlimited money through super-PACs and the like to corrupt the political process to the point where single-issue groups or wealthy individuals have disproportionate influence in our government.)  If you saw NRA leader, Wayne LaPierre, at this year’s conservative summit, CPAC, you heard his unbridled disdain for our law enforcement officials, schools, and mass media, all areas which have little to do with a group supposedly interested in gun safety and hunting.  But NRA campaign donations totaling millions to politicians like Senators Mark Rubio and John McCain, as well as Speaker Paul Ryan, have allowed LaPierre and his followers to dictate policy on any issues they feel impact gun sales; thus the NRA’s main solution for making our schools safer revolves around an insane plan to arm teachers, but only the ones who are as good at shooting as Jose Abreu is at hitting home runs.  Trump has been all over the place on his proposals following the Parkland shootings, but the Republican leadership has been rock solid in its opposition to doing anything, except proposals like the latter, which the NRA likes because it would lead to more gun sales.  Of course we need better gun laws in the U.S., but cutting lobbyists off at the wallet would help us to get better laws for just about everything.

I’ve already seen Facebook memes suggesting that it’s hypocritical for voters to single out politicians who accept NRA donations as bad when the drug, insurance, and other industries also use cash to influence governmental policies to the detriment of us regular folks.  So, if we more tightly restrict and limit ALL cash contributions, that won’t be a problem.  Nobody’s pet cause should be adjudicated legislatively based on how much money its patrons can pony up.  There’s simply too much money in our political system.  Maybe those Parkland teenagers should be advocating another of my causes:  Political elections which are severely restricted in both time and money spent.  In England, for example, a typical general election lasts four weeks, and candidates are prohibited from buying broadcasting time.  Contrast that with the billions of dollars wasted on TV ads in the U.S. or the Presidential campaigns which begin at least two years before the actual election—one year into our current administration and potential candidates are already gearing up for their shot in 2020. And no, that’s not just Democrats as John Kasich and Jeff Fluke are clearly making plans to challenge for the Republican nomination.

But, ultimately, voting is crucial to making any of the Parkland teens’ wishes come true.  Already, the Florida legislature has backed away from any reforms, and you can be sure Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell will be loathe to allow any debate, much less bring any legislation to the floor of either the House or the Senate.  Trump has been erratic, but just as during recent immigration discussions on DACA, he doesn’t follow through on any of his controversial proposals unless his Republican cronies and special interest groups agree with him.  The only way we will change the gun culture of our society is to make our voices heard on Election Day.  So after all the protests and marches and town halls, those of us who want fewer guns in our society need to be sure to show that desire with our votes.  For me, it’s pretty simple—if a candidate is willing to accept donations from the NRA or has a high rating from the NRA, he/she will not get my vote.  And I don’t really see how any pro-gun people can criticize this approach—it’s the way they have come to control this issue despite overwhelming public sentiment in opposition.

If you’d like to make it even simpler, voting for Democrats or Independents is the easiest way to get gun laws changed.  Looking at the 2017 NRA ratings of Senators or the campaign contributions the NRA has made over the years (the top Democrat received $50,000 total for his career, compared with over eight Republicans who have been given over $1,000,000), it becomes crystal clear for whom we should vote if we want representatives who are not beholden to the NRA.  The key this year will be the suburbs of urban areas in places like Illinois, California, Texas, and New York which have traditionally supported Republican, “pro-business/anti-tax” candidates, who have fallen in line with the NRA over the years.  Congressional districts in rural Alabama or Montana are unlikely to support any changes to current gun laws, but these suburban areas—exactly the communities which have suffered the most school shootings—can make the difference in who controls the legislative branch of our government.  Coupled with a different President in 2020, reasonable changes in gun federal gun laws could be in place within three years.  No, that won’t be the weeks or months which the Parkland teenagers have demanded, but it would be a huge improvement.  It will take even more radical changes in our laws and gun culture to rid ourselves of this mass shooting epidemic completely than seem possible right now even with this optimistic schedule, but modest adjustments could go a long way to reducing their numbers.

It is depressing to contemplate that we are so divided we can’t come together on sensible procedures to prevent unstable people from easily obtaining guns, to agree that assault rifles don’t belong in homes, to ban over-sized magazines (which allow guns to fire significantly more bullets before reloading is necessary), to get rid of bump stocks (which alter guns to fire more rapidly), or to increase the age requirements for rifle purchase from 18 to 21 without significant Congressional and Senate turnover.  Let’s hope that the Parkland teenagers—and the rest of us who support their cause’s goals—recognize that no matter how logical anti-gun reasoning is or how brutally tragic future massacres are, given current political realities, nothing will change on the federal level until we have voted many of today’s leaders out of office.  And the potential for regression on a wide variety of issues will constantly be at risk as long as the Citizens United ruling is the law of the land.  We can make a difference and lower the risk our children take every time they get on the bus to head to school, but it will take a lot more than well-spoken distraught teenagers or a couple of marches.  We need to work together to make progress on this deadly scourge in our schools; the first step is to understand the importance of getting the money out of our political process and insisting that our elected representatives do what’s in our best interests, rather than what’s profitable for their biggest donors.

Autonomy Does Not Preclude Accountability

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One of the key dichotomies for teachers in public schools, especially when you speak of education reform, is autonomy versus accountability.  Many experts and politicians regularly attack the current system as providing too many protections which enable teachers to avoid being held accountable.  Those against teacher tenure, unions, and collective bargaining rights emphasize how those things shield teachers from being called to task for academic outcomes; when employees in business don’t deliver demonstrable results (increased sales, more profits, or work productivity), the reasoning goes, they are subject to being fired with little recourse: Produce or get out.  Teachers, on the other hand, (as claimed over and over by tenure foes) achieve job protection early in their careers and are never again under any pressure to do anything except show up and get a paycheck, regardless of lackluster results, typically as shown by standardized tests.

But people like me will counter that without commitment, dedication, and creativity in our teachers, our kids won’t get a quality education.  Teachers coerced, demeaned, and rated like brands of toothpaste will not be happy in their work, nor will the most talented individuals be attracted to a profession which is not valued in terms of either prestige or monetary reward.  I have always wanted my children to have motivated, energized, happy people teaching them; and the best teachers have always insisted on a certain amount of freedom to conduct their classrooms as they saw fit.  Although we’ll discuss how curricular decisions need to be determined collectively as well as updated frequently, individual teachers need to feel in charge when it comes to their classrooms which can only come through a sense of autonomy, the belief that what you are doing matters and that you have control over how you do your job.

And that’s one reason teacher unions have come to play an important role in getting teachers some freedom.  It would be quite disingenuous of me not to let you know that I was a union activist over my 33-year teaching career:  Not only did I teach junior high and high school English, but I also served in my teachers’ unions in several positions for the bulk of that time, as local president, contract negotiator, and grievance chair for example.  Obviously that experience does color my perceptions on this issue, so you’ll have to keep in mind I am decidedly pro-union when I analyze how public schools can improve.  It will come as no surprise, then, that I support tenure, collective bargaining laws, and independent teachers. I’ve explained all the reasons why many times before:  You can check out other essays on my blog  (or if you’d like even more detail, my book) to get those explanations more specifically.  But like that quick take above, unless teachers are enthusiastic and motivated (aka autonomous), your kids won’t learn as much as they could.  If you want your teachers to give their best and work their hardest, you’d better be sure they like what they do.  Treating them like interchangeable, faceless clerks who need to stock the shelves with material you have forced on them while insisting they handle that material in identical, proscribed ways—which is what some claim as necessary “reform”—will not create the environment or workplace morale which can enhance the education of our country’s children.

But if patronizing standardization isn’t the answer, leaving teachers wholly to their own devices isn’t either.  One persistent issue over the years has been how the quality of instruction varies from teacher to teacher and school to school.  Because teachers have been largely tossed into their classrooms without much day-to-day support, there is no question that some have floundered more than they should.  Don’t get me wrong:  I believe floundering is one of the best learning tools for anyone in a new job, and I heartily endorse a healthy amount.  Learning by doing is the fastest way to become competent, so trying lots of different things in order to figure out what works is one of the best ways for new teachers to grow.  (Be sure to catch my enlightening workshop: “Floundering—Going Down with Style” coming soon to your child’s desperate-to-fill-institute-time school district.  And no, I don’t really explain anything during the three-day workshop; good teachers will flounder around until they figure it out on their own!)  Really, I’m not sure I’d want to keep any teacher on staff who believed he had all the answers after teaching for one year; making mistakes, second-guessing lesson plans, and the Sunday-night “dreads” (becoming uncomfortable as the wonder of your school-free weekend fades into the reality of the approaching Monday morning) all help motivate young teachers to figure things out, to get better.  But like all “good” things, too much struggle can lead to habitual bad techniques, cutting corners, and out-of-control classes.  All of which leads us right back to the original American Enterprise Institute article which has stimulated my last three essays (Numbers one and two are still available if you haven’t read them.)

Those essays and that article review the ambitious goals two schools implemented with teachers providing students with challenging curriculums and pushing the highest standards, while being provided with quality resources in the form of up-to-date facilities and opportunities to collaborate.  But we also discovered that no matter what anyone tells you, no two schools will require exactly the same treatment: Many outside factors (parental support, community educational background, and available resources—to name a few) play a role in how ready students are for the material they are expected to handle.  Forcing all schools to follow the same path to achieving those high-level standards is not only a foolish goal, but logistically impossible.  Classrooms are always inhabited by unique sets of human beings who must cooperate and concentrate to complete purposeful actions in the hopes of attaining something useful (knowledge).  That’s a challenging, complex set of variables which will interact in a myriad of ways.  Results will never be constant because it’s impossible to control all the things which will impact the final outcome.  Not only will each individual and class react in one-of-a-kind ways based on their unique backgrounds, but you also have the wild-card factor of rapidly changing/growing young people.  There’s no question that you will see a large change in both students’ personalities and habits from kindergarteners through seniors in high school.   I certainly did as the school year progressed in the students who made up the bulk of my 33-year teaching career, ninth graders (fourteen going on fifteen)—a first-quarter freshman can be very different from that same human being in the fourth quarter.   Blend all those ingredients together and you can have a significant variance from year to year with a single teacher and the same curriculum.  That’s not speculation; that is a fact, as any teacher will tell you.

But good teachers will focus more on what they can do to “fix” whatever doesn’t work well, rather than fixating on all the other variables.  Understanding those things which impact readiness for and obstacles to learning is one thing; using them as an excuse to give less than maximum effort cannot be acceptable in a teaching staff.  And right there you have the rock and hard place of teaching: Teachers can never stop doing their utmost to provide students with the opportunity to learn, but they have to accept that there are many factors beyond their control which can impede progress.  The challenge for teachers is to ensure a baseline performance which meets the minimum standards which have been collectively worked out by the school’s community.  No, those should not be left entirely up to any one teacher; this is a key issue for accountability:  Teachers have to understand that simply because they disagree with or haven’t signed off on parts of the curriculum doesn’t mean they shouldn’t teach them or work just as hard to help students attain the goals which have been mutually worked out over the years. Because of those non-academic items which affect every child’s capabilities to achieve standards, teachers must recognize that the curriculum which has evolved for any one school is the product of many years’ experience and work from other teachers, administrators, school boards, and community members.  A school’s “culture,” therefore, is much too significant for any individual to ignore, and new teachers have to learn the larger gestalt in which they work. But equally important is that every teacher has a vital role to play in that culture’s progression.

Accountability, then, is based on the way a teacher fits into a school’s process.  All too often, teachers are given little education on the background of their school—what the community expects and how that has been changed over the course of decades.  Instead, they are assigned classes to teach, textbooks to use, and provided no help figuring out how they can use their unique talents to assist their students to achieve established standards.  And those standards might not be very clearly spelled out either; teachers have to learn those mostly on their own, too.  Finally, even less time is spent helping new teachers to understand how they are a crucial part of evaluating and modifying the curriculum from which the standards flow, that their opinion based on their own experiences will now contribute to how the school operates.  No matter how many decades more one teacher has been teaching than another, both the first-year rookie and the thirty-year veteran will have roughly the same number of students to teach; and thus equal responsibility for the school’s success or failure.

But because schools generally do not foster a sense of teacher community, instead leaving that mostly to chance, every school has developed extremely varied identities which will veer positively or negatively, way too dependent on the charisma or quirks of individual teachers, principals, superintendents, and school boards.  Teachers have to fight to be heard, and most never even understand how important they are to the school’s function.  Instead, they have shielded themselves from the capriciousness which regularly seems to flow from their bosses, politicians, and communities, accepting responsibility only for what happens in their classrooms and ignoring their rightful place as an important piece of the larger picture (often using the insulation provided by strong unions to stay out of the fray).

But as we noted last time, the trend in many schools is toward more time for teachers to plan and work together, which could help develop that unified purpose, that feeling of community which allows the sum to be much greater than that of the parts.  And you can rest assured that once a sense of teachers’ belonging, involvement, and being valued as important to the school has been instilled in a school, that school’s teachers will expect all members of their community be accountable for their efforts toward that end goal.  The widely criticized tenure process is supposed to be a trial period for new teachers, a time to evaluate if they have what it takes to join the rest of the teachers as shareholders in “ownership” of the school and its legacy.  Tenure is a significant achievement, not because it guarantees lifetime employment, but rather because it means a teacher is now a full-fledged, accepted member of the staff, a partner in the firm. When you work with kids, you have to feel like what you’re doing is significant, that it matters.  Which of course, teaching does.

Consider the memorable people with whom you have interacted over the years.  The odds are high you will list at least one teacher among the top two or three important non-family influences in helping you to become the person you are.  Granted, teachers do spend a great deal of time with the community’s children and are entrusted to make sure their students are provided with worthwhile learning opportunities.  But that quantity only emphasizes how important quality matters in teachers who are shaping our communities of the future.  I feel a personal disappointment/responsibility that with over 3,000 of my ex-students now eligible voters, Trump could ever come close to being elected President.  I do take some solace on Illinois’s overwhelming support for Hillary, but still… Regardless of my overblowing my own importance in Presidential elections, every person who attended public schools bears the impact of many teachers; they participate in the growth and development of all of us.  We tend to ignore their importance in how our society turns out, but after family, teachers are the most significant influence on our kids.

Accountability, then, can become institutionalized once teachers who actively participate in their schools’ curriculums and cultures work more closely with those new to the profession.  It’s already happened to some extent in virtually every excellent school in the country.  The challenge is figuring out the correct environment which allows that culture to develop so the process is not so haphazard.  The encouraging trends of permitting teachers more time to interact through more student late-arrival days and the increased numbers of teachers working together to team teach are definitely steps toward helping teachers to learn their schools’ cultures more thoroughly.  It will also lead to everyone’s becoming more familiar with each other’s methodology which can only lead to inexperienced teachers learning how to do better and skilled teachers to a clearer understanding which teachers need help or another career.  No, the veterans won’t try to create clones of themselves—that would take way too much time and work, given their normally busy schedules.  But as all teachers get more time to interact with their colleagues, they will instill a sense of mission in each other that accepts nothing less than hard work, dedication to common goals, and a ruthless devotion to finding even better techniques, materials, and/or technologies to increase their effectiveness.  Those who can’t or won’t commit to that level of performance should be obvious to everyone, certainly during the multi-year probationary period currently in place prior to achieving tenure, and politely but firmly shown the door.

And that’s without even getting into my challenge that if the current tenure process is used as it was designed to function (at least here in Illinois, one of the more “liberal” teacher union states), it will effectively police the teaching profession.  Accountability coupled with autonomy in schools already exists; you need only look to those which are successful and you will discover its proliferation.  The question is how to replicate that atmosphere more consistently and systematically: Setting up situations where teachers have the time to cooperate with each other is the single best way to ensure an accountable outcome and a more robust school culture filled with autonomous teachers.

Two More Public School Ambitions

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Last time, we took a look at an article—in the American Enterprise Institute’s What to Do: Policy Recommendations for 2017 series, included in the K-12 Education section—where AEI researchers summarized three key approaches used in two charter schools sponsored by the University of Chicago.  The first, “Provide an ambitious model of instruction,” led us to many digressions on how we determine what the model should look like:  Since that area includes what’s in the curriculum, what methods are used to impart that curriculum, and to what standards students are held as evidence of meeting those goals, it’s a gnarly topic—and it’s pretty much everything that matters most about education.  So naturally, the debate over how public schools can maintain excellence when that’s what they deliver, improve when it isn’t, and the ways we can tell the differences between the two has been anything but smooth or consensual.

Rather than review that contentious recent past (or rail against the present, given who is now leading our country on educational policy), we need to look at the second two “ambitious” principles good schools need to incorporate, according to the AEI. (I keep referencing this very conservative policy source because it’s relevant that two parties—the AEI and me—typically so far apart in our opinions on…well, almost everything else, can agree on these fundamental premises.)  Those other two ambitions would be as follows:  Schools should “organize teachers’ work to provide ambitious instruction, and (school systems need to) provide broad supports for ambitious instruction.”

Of course, we’re back to debatable abstractions, but there’s really no way to organize and support ambitious instruction without more time for teachers to interact with each other. There is much truth to the assertion in this article that as schools exist right now, teachers are left to their own devices too much.  The AEI sees current practices as teacher-centric, that teachers develop into divas, one-of-a-kind artists who free-lance and expect to be able to do whatever they want since they know everything, almost as though teachers went into education solely to flaunt their individual skills, prima donnas who never have their egos checked.  They also complain that teachers claim no one can question what they do since only teachers understand what is needed.  (Did I mention that AEI and I often diverge in our views?)  No, I wouldn’t phrase it that way, but in the spirit of trying to find educational foundations on which all can agree, I’m overlooking their slight negativity toward my ex-colleagues. (I could never have been accused of arrogance during my 33 years in the classroom—truly, I didn’t consider myself to be half as wonderful as I actually was.) Instead, I would point out that the workloads and schedules of teachers don’t allow for enough time to interact in any significant way on curricular/methodological/evaluative standards.  (That bit about nobody questioning their expertise will be addressed next time.)

Regardless of our disagreement over the evolution of teachers’ isolation in enacting crucial educational issues, we do agree that teachers need to work together to develop approaches to all those important pedagogical questions.

But they can’t be expected to generate methodologies, goals, or standards which are the same as any other school’s.  In the first part of our analysis of these ambitions, we pointed out how any single set of standards applied uniformly to every school will not succeed.  The needs, backgrounds, and abilities of American students simply won’t cooperate with such a limited view.  For proof of that just look to the failure of the Common Core’s evaluative arm, the PARCC tests. which some 63% of the 42 states who are still using the Core’s standards have stopped administering.  It’s especially easy to understand the folly of trying to administer any standards uniformly:  For example, we all agree with the goal that high school graduates should have high levels of critical reading skills.  But we’re likely to part company when it comes to how we measure progress toward that goal, what evaluation instrument we use to assess it, and the grading scale we use for different sets of students—and let’s not even get started in how we would define “critical reading skills!”  Each school has to consider its students’ previous educational experiences, natural ability, family support, economic status, and national/state/local financial investment before tailoring the educational curriculum, winding up with different approaches to that overall objective, different ways to evaluate progress towards it, and different levels of achievement deemed as acceptable.  It just isn’t realistic to demand the same results from wildly varying starting points.  (This is the issue Senator Al Franken tried to get then-nominee, now Secretary of Education DeVos to discuss when he asked for her stance on the proficiency vs. growth debate.  She had no clue what he was talking about, which is another significant problem we currently face.)

The only answer to this challenge, then, is to allow individual schools latitude in determining how to assess where students begin, where they finish, and which approaches work best to aid that growth.  And if we expect harried teachers to do all this in a directed, coordinated way, we’ll have to get them the time to work together and provide them with the resources they need to get the job done.

We’ll talk about accountability, which has become a huge public relations issue (aka: buzzword, smokescreen, distraction) in the future, but the real problem with these two ambitions will be that they cost money.  I worked in two school districts (Itasca Elementary #10 and Hinsdale High School #86) which did an excellent job in providing the resources I needed to do my job: supplies were abundant, technology was good if not cutting edge (I don’t believe you ever want state-of-the-art electronics since it means you’re paying double for something that still has major bugs in it, compared to the duller-but-significantly-more-reliable-and-cheaper versions down the road), and the facilities were well-maintained. (My chief complaint at my first school—which was having to compete with noise from O’Hare’s takeoffs and landings every few minutes on some days—got solved just a couple of years after I left with soundproofing and air-conditioning.  My big complaint at my second school—stifling classrooms for many days each school year—got taken care of the first year after I retired with air-conditioning for the entire building.  Clearly, I was the key obstacle to building improvements where I worked.)

The money problem is definitely tied to the way public education is funded:  Here in Illinois, property taxes dominate, meaning wealthy areas have great schools, including facilities.  Recent legislation has attempted to even out some of the disparities through larger state contributions to poorer districts, but we’re a long way from anything remotely resembling equity when it comes to public education funding.  (And even the modest steps made in Illinois were partially offset by a tax break for those who choose to send their children to parochial schools and the elimination of the crucial requirement that students have physical education every day.)  In other words, fair school financing is one of those huge issues that creates too-large an explanation/digression for my purposes here.  Rest assured, I do have suggestions for better ways to fund public education (see my e-Book for much more on this), but we’ll have to put off getting into that one again, at least for now.  It is an important key, absolutely.

But the time issue is more manageable since there are economical ways to address it that don’t require millions of dollars to be levied by a taxing body (local and/or state); they will, however, mean reassessing the traditional school day as well as how teachers interact.

More time for teachers to work together is clearly a trend in area schools:  My daughter’s Downers Grove High School District #99 has begun late arrival days, for example; most Mondays this school year will begin at 9:20 A.M.  Teachers will report at their usual 7:20, providing two hours each week for more collaboration.  Other school districts in the area have also begun working more staff time into their schedules.  Given how much teachers have to get done as it is, this time will have to be planned carefully to assure quality collaborative opportunities, lest busy teachers circumvent the program’s intent by using the time to do regular class work (grade papers, record scores, contact parents, fill out forms, and the like).  Despite the potential pitfalls, this type of teachers-working-with-teachers space is exactly what the goal of more “organizing teachers for ambitious instruction” is all about.

Another positive sign is that more peer coaches are becoming available.  Many school districts now regularly grant release time (typically one less teaching period) to free up classroom teachers to assist other teachers with tasks with which they might need help.  From using technology to reading techniques to mentoring younger teachers, it is always easier to ask a colleague a question, not to mention your colleague’s expertise is based on actual teaching experience.  You’d be surprised at how high a percentage of the scant time allowed for institutes during my thirty-three-year career was spent with outside experts who didn’t have any first-hand knowledge of my school and students; you’d be even more shocked that a significant percentage of those trying to instruct me didn’t even have any teaching experience or education background at all.  Giving teachers assignments where they can help other teachers is a much better way to spend institute money that is currently used on outside experts, who provide mixed results (and that’s being kind).

Finally and most significantly, more teachers are being allowed to work together.  Right now, this occurs mostly when special education teachers work in regular/average classrooms with the subject area teacher.  The special ed teacher is primarily there to service the students in the class with Individualized Education Plans (IEPs) who have had a learning or psychological issue documented.  These students might otherwise be in special education classes.  The unintended upside is that the more integrated the teachers become as they work together, the less any differences are perceived by everyone.  It’s just two teachers in the same class teaching everyone.  This can be beneficial for the non-IEP students in understanding that students with differences are just like them and don’t need segregation or being singled out for those differences; however, it can have an invigorating impact on the teachers as well.  They come to understand each other’s subject matter, learn state regulations/mandates, and help each other to utilize methodology they might not otherwise know about.

That last benefit is a key to helping schools get the most out of their teachers.  Most outside experts come into a school with “all” the answers: some program or approach they insist, if properly applied (which generally means a hefty investment in whatever they’re selling—usually consultation services, software, texts, workbooks, and/or courses), will dramatically improve any school…forever!  That we’re having this discussion at all shows you just how well those promises turn out.  But teachers—who spend their days doing the same things other teachers do AND who have the time to impart to others the special skills/insights they possess—are infinitely more helpful and useful to faculties.  Not only do they know the technology, technique, or methodology better than others, but  even more importantly for making that specialized skill beneficial, they understand what teachers in their buildings need and want.  As was pointed out earlier, teachers are used to going solo in the classroom and can be reluctant to confess weakness or ignorance to others.  But working with a colleague you’ve known for years makes it much easier to ask that awkward question and get an answer which might unleash some beneficial tactic for helping students.

Cooperative teams working together to improve worker productivity has been standard in most large corporations for quite some time now, but schools still tend to operate with dozens of independent entrepreneurs who don’t communicate with each other all that often.  But even more radical (translated: expensive) solutions are possible:  I’ve speculated about some in my eBook, and in another blog entry suggested a way for new teachers to be incorporated into a staff through a cooperative program where new teachers and veterans are assigned the same class for a year.  Assuming the benefits of this idea are as bountiful as I believe they would be, the concept could be expanded to having all teachers work cooperatively with another to teach classes on a regular schedule.  Coupled with the increased collaboration time we’ve already seen many school districts incorporating, we could see increasingly effective schools in no time.

And this cooperative teaching model wouldn’t be limited to teachers—every administrator should be required (although I would prefer the term “granted the privilege”) to teach at least one class every school year as well.  As was shown in the schools the AEI found to be successful, not to mention the countries where school systems have been highly rated for years, when educators have the opportunity to work together, they will find answers to the specific challenges their unique schools face much more effectively than when teachers are left in their current isolation with only outside experts pretending to know what is best.

This ambitious agenda definitely places more control with individual schools and teachers rather than a centralized bureaucracy (like county, state, or federal governments), which inevitably leads to concerns about accountability.  We’ll take on that issue next time.

Ambitious Education I

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The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) is not an organization with which I normally agree, as I have discussed before.  From the environment to taxation to consumer protections, we tend to diverge:  They prefer fewer controls and less government involvement in most things, while I believe the government must play a significant role in order for humans to progress, especially in areas where human greed and self-interest conflict with overall societal well-being .  AEI’s most influential donors, the Koch brother billionaires, rarely support candidates I vote for (although I think we agreed on not voting for Trump), and their push to eliminate regulations and restrictions on their energy projects (coal and natural gas) scares me.  But, this article, in AEI’s What to Do: Policy Recommendations for 2017 series, included in the K-12 Education section, is quite astute in its suggestions for how good schools should be run.  Amid the pro-DeVos (I’m not) and we-need-more-charter-schools (we don’t) articles, they tucked in this one, “To Reform Education, Be Ambitious,” by Nat Malkus (AEI Research Fellow) and Ian Lindquist (AEI’s Program Manager of Education Policy Studies).  Although “ambitious” might be a stretch, the process they outline is what many teachers have been advocating for a long time as really the only way to approach improving (where necessary) and maintaining (where already successful) public education.

Based on a book which analyzed steps taken in two University of Chicago charter schools, The Ambitious Elementary School  (authored by University of Chicago’s Stephen Raudenbush and Lisa Rosen, along with Elizabeth McGhee Hassrick of Drexel University), Malkus and Lindquist cull their AEI presentation into three fundamental approaches all schools should incorporate into the way they operate:  Provide an ambitious model of instruction, organize teachers’ work to provide ambitious instruction, and provide broad supports for ambitious instruction.  In essence, what this means is that teachers need to be provided with appropriate resources so they can collectively cooperate to hold students to mutually developed high standards.  That’s not particularly “ambitious,” especially to those of us familiar with how public education works in suburban areas with the financial means to provide good educational facilities. But it does at least get to the heart of what it takes to have a good school without going off on tangents which demean teachers or attack their unions (which tends to be more typical of the “conservative” approach to education).  In an era of polarization, that a group like the AEI can produce anything with which those in education can use as a basis for discussion, is pretty good, so this ex-union activist will do his level best to meet them halfway.  (I’m no longer a member of the education world, having retired after thirty-three years of teaching.)

Briefly delving into the first Principle of Ambition, providing an ambitious model of instruction simply means each and every student should be pushed, should break an intellectual sweat, should be expected to achieve.  That’s pretty basic, and I would expect it to be a given at any public school.  The challenge, though, is working out the best ways to do that, which is at the heart of a significant portion of the reform movement and its many controversies:  Is tracking (ability grouping) the best way to enhance student outcomes? Can you get the most out of special needs students in main-streamed or separate classes?  How do the answers to those first two issues combine to work in schools with diverse ranges of abilities?  How can we know that students are progressing at acceptable rates?  Does providing school choice enhance or detract from the overall educational outcomes?  Who determines what those outcomes should be?  An ambitious model of instruction has always been the clear mission for public education; our democracy depends upon clear-thinking citizens, and that will only happen if their education is rigorous.  But just what that should look like has been difficult to define or assess (plus, those previous questions are just a few of the dozens confronting public schools), which has led to countless school reform battles.

We need only look at one of the more recent attempts to sort that out to see the challenges:  The Common Core. No one can read the standards set forth in the Core and fault them as unworthy goals.  Problems, however, quickly arose on how best to apply them, how to measure progress towards them, and how well the grade-level objectives matched up with any school’s students.  As of this year, only three of forty-five states which adopted the Core’s standards have totally dropped out, but a whopping twenty-six will no longer use the recommended Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) tests to determine how students are progressing toward those standards.  And of all the testing being done, only twelve states require passing the required tests in order to graduate from high school.  In other words, standardized testing is still being done, but using a variety of different instruments with few consequences for those who do poorly.  Thus, we’re still seeking an answer to how we can find reliable ways to determine exactly how effective any public school might be.

Yet, there are many school districts in the country which are producing excellent results, if you consider how well their graduates function in society.  So, there must be some things which are working.  We need to look more closely into the reasons these schools succeed.  Clearly (in light of the Common Core’s white hot controversy during its brief existence), a single set of standards universally applied to all students will not be effective; each school has to work towards finding the correct balance of challenging its students at the appropriate levels without overwhelming them to the point where discouragement sets in.  Somewhere between getting an A for showing up and students’ failing despite intense effort is the sweet spot, but that huge range shows how difficult it will be to locate just where it is.  And as is pointed out by Malkus and Lindquist, an excellent way to get there is to have an individualized plan for each and every student, a tough benchmark to reach when teachers deal with 25 kids or more at a time (and for many, 150+ in a single day). That focus on rigorous objective standards, however, still needs to be of paramount importance since success can never be achieved unless everyone is clear on just what that success should look like. But at the same time we can’t forget that each unique student requires his/her own measure of success, that one-size-fits-all instruction can never be effective for all students.  And yet… You can see the challenges which public education will always present classroom teachers when on the one hand, unique students require unique approaches, but high school diplomas need to be based on similar standards.

Therefore, teachers need to focus on finished products (graduates) who meet a high level of achievement, but must adjust their techniques for reaching that standard constantly to match the unique skill set each student has.  And we have seen public education yanked back and forth between those two poles over and over again.  School choice proponents, for example, push toward more individualized needs:  The school to which my kid was assigned doesn’t meet her needs, so I’m going to shop around until I can find a school that does.  Accountability advocates, though, pull back in the other direction, arguing for standardized tests based on objective data which will rank students and schools according to a fixed scale, with little room for any qualifying comments or extenuating circumstances.

The hard thing, then, with any attempts to distill the desired ambitious model of instruction into practical applications is figuring out how to apply those disparate objectives in schools which differ so dramatically in their needs since students come with varying abilities and backgrounds.

My experience in junior high (eight years) and high school (twenty-five years) suggests this needs to be clearly and specifically analyzed much more often than is typical.  Schools are classic examples of institutions which tend not to see the forest for the trees:  The day-to-day tasks of planning for each class period, never-ending paperwork, administrative demands, and state/federal mandates (to name a few non-teaching issues) all too often leave little time for high level, more abstract discussions of what exactly the students need to be able to do, what activities will help them reach those skills, and what means teachers will use to determine how well those skills have been achieved.  Oh…and those discussions need to be supplemented with insights into different learning styles as well as finding myriads of methods to individualize instruction as much as possible given the one-of-a-kind abilities each student possesses.  During my teaching career in two middle-to-upper-middle-class schools, we rarely had the time for those discussions; even our institute time was largely devoted either to administrative “initiatives” typically designed to incorporate some state or federal mandate, or to outside “experts” who would come in and try to convince us that they knew better than we did how to teach our kids.

We won’t get an ambitious model of instruction unless our teachers can work together to resolve—at the building level—how to reconcile those competing goals of all students reaching challenging, important standards coupled with instruction which tailors a school’s curriculum to the idiosyncratic needs of each student.  You can hardly be expected to figure out a plan of action to achieve that during a couple of meetings of entire faculties for a few hours two days before school starts. (Most districts begin the school year with one or two teacher institute days, and those days are often up to 50% of the allotted teacher training time for the year.) And we must accept that how those key issues are resolved will vary from school to school (and even within the departments of specific schools).  Teacher A’s school has a history of academic excellence in an affluent area with students proceeding on to elite colleges as their parents closely monitor every test; Teacher B has many English-deficient, economically disadvantaged students who would be the first in their family to graduate from high school, with little parental participation due to crushing work schedules and single-parent households.  To expect the same ambitious method of instruction in those two schools is more than short-sighted—it is a waste of time and resources.  We need to be able to get to a place where those on site have the means to work through the knotty issues of achievement as contrasted with student needs.

And that’s where the AEI article offers some beneficial ideas on how schools can walk that tightrope.  Next time, we’ll take a look at the other two ambitious goals which, if applied appropriately, could lead to much better balance.