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. 

Education: a Muse

Last week, I met with BoE member Deborah Quazzo about my pet project during one of her board office hours slots. The meeting was not productive on my end, but as we were walking out, Ms. Quazzo paid me what I consider to be a compliment when she asked me what subject I teach. 

I don't teach, and don't think I'd make a very good classroom teacher. As this TFA has-been writes, teaching is as much about classroom management as it is about teaching. Especially in many CPS classrooms. 

But I am a learner and consider myself an advocate for anyone else who follows a similar path. I am reminded of my days as a lycéenne; in French, the word for "teach" and "learn" is the same: apprendre. This is a conflation Americans could stand to make. 

I guess you could say that Education is in my DNA. It's only now that my kids are in school in a debt-ridden, politically questionable system once deemed "the worst public school system in America," that I've realized how deeply and widely the theme of education--both as a journey and as a destination--ran through my childhood. 

In my family, we talk about education a lot. My parents were each the first in their families to go to college and as their parents' only children of the Baby Boomer generation, embraced the culture of the time that held that formal education was critical to financial success. They were part of the 6 percent in 1970 that has now become the 70 percent of degree-earning bottom/top quartiles in 2011. 

But they were also part of the minority who were able to gain advantages despite their relative economic, political, and socially disadvantaged backgrounds when they landed in the college-bound HS track in NYC in the 1960s. My father was the youngest child of an orphaned, first-generation Hungarian Jew and a first-generation Roman Catholic Italian who learned to speak English only after she started school in Union City, NJ as a child. He graduated from Bronx High School of Science. 

Bronx Science is considered by many to be one of the first specialized magnet schools in the country, let alone NYC. Interestingly, the NYC BoE counts nine SEHSs (or Specialized High Schools) in its "portfolio." Compare that to Chicago's 10 SEHSs, despite a significantly smaller student population (400,000 ish to NYC's 1.1 million), and the popular demand for more SEHS seats becomes murky. Why create more tracking for the top XX percent (or as Sue Serra in this Reader article states, the top 10 percent)? Where is the equity in creating echelons of HS within the public system? 

But creating echelons in the public system is exactly what we're doing when the Chicago Board of Education allows Ald. Michele Smith to cede her public comment time to two Lincoln parents who happen to agree with her development plans without enforcing its own rules about such tactics. And it's exactly what it's doing when Estella Bertran rushes the anti-development side off the microphone in later public comment. It's exactly what we're doing when Todd Babbitz makes system-wide decisions—behind closed doors—about whether adding air conditioning or resolving overcrowding within CPS buildings are a better use of its $200M capital budget. It's exactly what we're doing when application-required charter schools claim they're "open enrollment" on the public record. It's exactly what we're doing when mostly Northside schools use parent fundraising to pad the CPS budget gap, leaving SpEd teachers like Jacqueline Casimir out of work.

And that's just (some of) the inequalities in CPS. State-wide, even nation-wide, the contrast between the haves and have-nots educationally is more striking. In Illinois, our property tax structure rewards rich districts and penalizes poor ones, and ISBE per-pupil foundational spending recommendations don't even come close to covering the extrinsic costs of educating Illinois's children.