Public Servitude

Before the September Board meeting, I ran into our school's contact in the Office of LSC Relations in the lobby of the Marquette Building. 

We spoke briefly about my ongoing request that the BoE include a teacher preference percentage into its admissions policies. Although he is a 20+-year veteran of CPS and his children went through the system under the previous policies, our contact told me that he doesn't support my request for several reasons, but chiefly because it is a requirement of public service that you don't give yourself perks. My changes, as proposed, would be "too much of keeping the best for ourselves."

We challenged each others' thinking for bit, exchanging ideas and beliefs about the issue, and then he went for coffee and I went up to attend the September BoE meeting. 

But the more I think about it, the more this particular stance ticks me off. As I said to our contact. if it were true that public servants should consider personal sacrifice as part of their job description, why is it only the rank and file teachers who must adhere to this mindset? 

Why does Tim Cawley get a residency pass to live in Winnetka? Why is there no outcry that the mayor sends his kids to Lab? On the current Board of Education, appointed by mayor Rahm Emmanuel in 2012 and 2013, there are are only a handful of members (Andrea Zopp, David Vitale, Mahalia Hines) who sent their children to CPS--and even then, only Hines's son attended a non-selective school (Luther High School South). 

On CPSObsessed this week, there is raging debate about how much access individual schools should give to individual parents. Inevitably, the discussion in comments turned to teacher perks. 

I don't get this us versus them mindset that seems to prevail whenever parents and teachers begin to bemoan the problems of a deeply imperfect and under-resourced system. I truly do not understand why we as a society cannot view the school environment as a school environment (even if it is a work environment for teachers/administration) and not as a corporate environment. As Dorothy Shipps chronicled in her book, School Reform, Corporate Style, business has been trying to modernize schooling to corporate ideals for over 90 years. Now the “free market capitalist” mindset toward public education has so infiltrated our collective psyche that the public is in on the cry for modernization as well. Even worse, we think it’s OK to compare every public service and agency to a private one. 

As I wrote last year, I believe in the teachers union. Even more important, I believe in the teachers themselves, and in the strength and integrity of their profession. I have been extremely fortunate that I have met only a handful of less-than-great teachers, and my children have been taught pretty much exclusively by good to great teachers. 

The mindset that teachers have it so easy--summers off, the laundry list of holidays, make more than the rest of us, automatic pay increases, work partial days, have funded pensions, to name a few things I've read about teachers lately--is farcical. It implies that there is only so much pain and suffering and general pain-in-the-assishness to go around, and that office workers have a lock on it. 

The teachers versus corporate workers comparison is reminiscent of conversations in the Great White Moose of an afternoon: does The Boy's loss of his favorite jacket trump The Girl having to be partners again with the boy next to her in line? Or does The Tot Who's Not trump them both because he's mortified that I told his uncle a story about The Tot and gummy bears?  

The fact is: if you're not a teacher, you have no idea how much the work day or work week can stink. (And if you've never worked a crummy corporate job, you've likely no idea how much the work day or work week can stink.)  That corporate America no longer gives the so-called white-collar knowledge worker a sense of purpose and control over his/her work environment is a great point of sociological discussion, but it has no bearing on what is happening systemically in public education or other public agencies. 

Nerds like me

On Sunday night, I attended the first CPSObsessed book club. It was a group of 8-10 heavy readers and/or commenters of the blog, plus CPSO herself. We came together ostensibly to discuss Diane Ravitch's book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System, but the discussion eventually became a CPS/education/social policy free-for-all.

I was in heaven.

One guy mistook my stated interest in reading social/public policy issues as credentials in the field, which I both corrected and find flattering. These in-person discussions make me feel like I'm back in college, arguing political theory until Espresso Royale kicked us out when they closed at midnight. I'm older, saggier, more worldly, and more dependent on coffee, but also just as recharged by the process now as I was 15 years ago.

A central theme in both Ravitch's book and our discussion was the difference between data-informed decision-making and data-driven decision-making. The former can be useful in public schools, whereas the latter is an oft-used buzzword for a concept that is best left to those who coined it: corporate America. As Ravitch said over and over again in her book, test scores are a measurement, not the goal:

• Scores matter, but they are an indicator, not the definition of a good education.
  
• No Child Left Behind had no vision other than improving test scores in reading and math. It produced mountains of data, not educated citizens.
  
• Testing is not a substitute for curriculum and instruction.
  

I have said before that I believe the standardized tests my children take are just one tool in the box available to their teachers. But the test scores themselves are not really the goal. The goals are students' ability to think critically, read fluently, and master other "executive-level functioning" skills.

With a former charter school administrator in the room and the reversal of opinion on charter schools expressed by Ravitch in the book, the dual concepts of charter schools and school choice was also a topic of discussion. The parents at the discussion were pretty much all beneficiaries of school choice (either through or in spite of NCLB), but opinion was split about whether school choice is desirable. As many pointed out, there are too many variables that aren't controlled in studies of academic achievement. Do successful schools succeed because the kids chose to go there, the parents chose to be involved, or because they fit the kind of demographic profile that has historically enjoyed success? Put another way, demographic changes in a school often drive change within the school population. In CPS, it explains the nascent popularity and/or acceptability of schools like Nettelhorst, Waters, Agassiz, Audubon, Coonley, Hamilton, and Belding when even a few years ago, those schools were on most well-educated, middle-class parents' no-way-hell list.

In contrast, the group reached consensus that (the expectation of) school choice is pretty much the only thing that NCLB achieved since its implementation in 2002. One guy even said that NCLB/charters' model of run-schools-like-businesses introduced the kind of organizational instability (heretofore known by corporate employees throughout the U.S.) to the public schools. We all agreed that NCLB is on the way out; that the Powers That Be will declare victory and move on.