The Chaos School

Personally, I think that if you are a paid op-ed columnist for a newspaper, one's columns should demonstrate at least a passing familiarity with stories published in that paper.

Apparently David Brooks disagrees, since this week he wrote a very silly column about the New American Academy.  He finds its plan - sixty students per class in an entirely open space, and teachers loop with students - incredibly novel and exciting.

So did his employer, The New York Times.  However, they found it the kind of novel excitement that a trainwreck offers.  What with the overwhelmed, under-experienced teachers, the lack of student work or progress, and the pithy quotes from students ("We don't know what we are supposed to be doing, but we are learning about math"), they seemed less positive that this model was anything but a way to make absolutely certain children learned nothing.

Well, maybe Brooks did skim the piece - he notes that the school's lack of structures "was a problem at first" and notes the principal stating that they had "better control" over the students now.  Brooks is impressed by the "subtle tricks" the school uses - lining students up at transitions, making them enter a new open classroom together, greeting the teacher.

David Brooks had better not be planning to visit any regular public school classes anytime soon, because the "subtle tricks" he finds there are likely to amaze him into cardiac arrest.  Seriously, this kind of stuff is Remedial Classroom Management!  If the New American Academy staff didn't have these procedures down on day one, they have no business working in elementary education.

Mr. Brooks is also impressed by the $120,000 annual salary provided to master teachers.  I'm not: each master teacher is ultimately responsible for sixty kids and training/deploying some number of under-teachers (who aren't paid so well).  Moreover, something tells me that if Brooks were offered a $120,000 annual salary, he would primly refuse such penurious compensation as offensive to a man of his talents.

Of course, Brooks and the New Academy gang share a tendency to casual racism; Brooks notes that the teachers demand "proper diction" (by which I assume he means codeswitching to Mainstream Academic English from AAL or similar).  The school's founder and principal refers to the first graders as coming to the school "in a state of nature...[with] no civilization".  Oh, and many of these kids apparently will have "familylike" relationships for the first time with their looping teachers.  It may come as a surprise to Mr. Brooks, but poor families - even poor families headed by single parents - do not exist in solitude.  There are other family relationships than marriage, and despite Ruby Payne's unresearched nonsense, poverty is not a Hobbesian state.

But mostly the column lauds something disturbing.  Brooks notes the founder was inspired by expensive boarding schools; I am quite certain Phillips Exeter does not have classes of sixty students.  He notes the school serves "poor minority kids"; he neglects to mention that the school took less than a quarter to remove three high needs first graders to "more structured environments" and lost at least seven more to withdrawal.  He admires the master teachers, but fails to mention the rest of the teachers are "novice early childhood teachers".  He's excited by the "interdisciplinary" approach, but that approach includes no art instruction.

The New American Academy is indeed an experiment, but it's one that is presently responsible for "educating" two hundred and forty children this year.  Brooks' "great experiment" is a gamble that sacrifices the education of those kids if (when) it fails.  So amazed is he by the school's "guerilla" leadership and its innovations that he ignores the real problems with the model.  So incapable of basic research is he that he can't even read his own paper before publishing such a PR piece.

In which I enjoy italics immensely.

Teach a primary school for a few years, and people begin to make certain conclusions about you:

• you own puff-painted clothing;
• all your shoes are sensible;
• you never, ever raise your voice;
• you are not too bright.

Seriously.  I once had a research fellowship, and the principal investigator - who had a kid in Kindergarten - told me he had assumed I "just a teacher" until he heard what high-faluting fancy University I attended.  And when he heard the esoteric field in which I earned a B.A. and M.A. together in four years?  Well, then he "realized [I] must be pretty intelligent".

Which your average teacher is, for the record - along with fast on their feet, able to sing, paint, sculpt, and jump rope credibly, and so on.

I wonder if this explains the miserable quality of research spouted at teachers all the time.  I'm not just talking the fact-free spin stories about charter schools (again, no more successful and sometimes far worse than real public schools) - I'm talking actual learned research.

Well, half-learned.  Ruby Payne's credentials are iffy at best, and her understanding of simple terms like peer review is limited.  That said, she sure makes a lot of money off school districts - although I was never more proud to be a teacher in my old district than when an audience of its teachers chased Payne's second off the stage.

But you also get bad research from actual university professors, which is presented to teachers with no critique to be swallowed whole.  I think now of Drs. Hart and Risely, who discovered in the 1990s that poor children have a "vocabulary gap" and that that gap lowers their IQ.

Hart and Risely never trained as linguists; I did, so upon simply hearing their conclusion about a million-word vocabulary gap I began beating my head against convenient hard objects.  When I later heard them explaining how their conclusions were not racial because they ignored all data about race, I waved my copy of the Lingustic Society of America's resolution about Ebonics in the air before resuming to bashing in my own skull.

I'm fairly well-spoken and I know the research around vocabulary gaps and deficit models in language study quite well.  I can tell you why Louisa Cook Moats doesn't actually understand language, and note that the research that might have cleared up this issue for her was completed in the 1950s.  So I generally make it my business to politely critique any professional development guru who starts yammering about Hart and Risely (I also thank the ones who sniff at the idea of the vocabulary gap).

Their shock is always magnificent.  "This is data from UNIVERSITY RESEARCH PROFESSORS," they huff.  "YOU are a KINDERGARTEN TEACHER.  I know that reading probably challenges you, but trust me: THEY DID RESEARCH."

So I really think it's best to provide my fellow educators with some links that will assist them in such situations.  "Well," they can say diffidently.  "It's true I'm just a lowly Kindergarten teacher, charged with teaching our future.  But I've read these papers by learned university professors who also challenge the deficit thinking Hart and Risely assume.  Have you?"

This little review essay sums up both the broader problem with deficit assumptions while taking on Ruby Payne and Hart and Risely.  It's a nice start; anyone looking for more of the same is welcome to comment - I've got citations from the 50s to the present day ready for my fellow educators of high-needs students who are tired of hearing about how the fabulous and brilliant children in their classrooms have been destroyed by their rotten upbringings.

Unsent Letters

Dear Mikey One Percent,

Frankly?  I doubt you attended Kindergarten with forty three of your peers.  And I know - I know, with absolute certainty - that when it comes to academic performance, that Kindergarten class didn't get the results that my students meet by the end of August.  (Things have changed since you went to Kindergarten, dude, and it's not just the terrible union teachers and their tiny little classes.  The standards are years higher, too.)

But as always, I have to tell you that if you intend to double my students and my pay, I want to see you do it first.  Mikey, it might sound like a generous offer, but compare it to your income, and think hard about this offer.  (It's worth remembering that while, say, $125,000 may sound like an awesome amount of money for a teacher, the people proposing it make more than ten times as much.  And their pensions, insurance and so on are better than teachers', too.)

Given my typical class load, the forty four students you'll have will present some serious classroom issues, Mike.  At least six will have IEPs upon Kindergarten entry.  Eighteen to twenty will be on the young side - late October and November birthdays.  Thirty will not speak English, so start planning those ELD lessons now.

Four children will be in foster care; at least six more will be in kinship placements.  Two will be homeless; almost all of the rest will live in decrepit, violent and under-resourced public housing.  Eighteen will have witnessed or been personally involved in serious violence.  Twelve will have chronic asthma or other major health problems.

Forty three of them will qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, and half will face food insecurity at home.  Twenty five will live in homes where no adult is able to find work.  Start stocking up on the snacks and school supplies, Mike: you'll need to use that excellent salary to supplement what your school and your families can't afford.

Based on your breezy comments, despite the challenges, you'll have no trouble ensuring all forty four read fluently by the end of the year.  They'll whip through their fifty sight words spelling test in five minutes before finishing twenty addition and subtraction problems.  Then they'll write a five sentence story before making a map of their neighborhood and creating a Venn diagram to compare insects and isopods.

And then you'll have the credibility you need to lecture me about school success, ineffective teachers and the good old days of fifty kids to a room.

Until then: shut up.

Not So Cordially,

E. Rat

Differentiation, School Selection, "Those Kids".

One of the justifications I hear for avoiding certain city schools for Kindergarten has nothing to do with bad teachers, bad buildings, low fundraising or behavior: it's the "giftedness" issue.

It scans something like this: a lot of the children at School Y don't know the alphabet when they start, so my child, who does, will be bored and unchallenged.

I am not terribly sympathetic to this argument.  In general, my students don't know the alphabet when they start.  Learning it takes around five to ten minutes of our school day for whole group instruction, doing activities that are fun for everyone and teach more skills than letter names (for instance, activities that hone eye-tracking or hand-eye coordination, or patterns, or teach cooperative skills, or teach classroom structures that we all need to know - since alphabet teaching doesn't last all year, and I need to teach these structures, it's an important and valid educational goal).  Everything else is in small group, targeted to the needs of the learners.  After all, it's not really "knows the alphabet" and "doesn't" - there are the kids who have sorted everything but b d p q, the kids who know the capitals but need work on lowercase, the kids who know eighteen letters, the kids who need to sort out the category "number" and "letter".

And again, I'm not doing this all year.  And not for a long time each day: I take teaching science and art seriously, we have other aspects of reading than alphabet recognition to cover, and so on.

My other problem with this argument is personal.  I was a very gifted (if also very hyper) student.  I was reading before I started Kindergarten and not just a little, either.  By the beginning of first grade I'd finished off the Ramona Quimby books and starting in on Joan Aiken.

In Kindergarten, I was absolved from penmanship practice and phonics workbooks (about fifteen minutes of the day) in favor of additional recess with a couple of other early readers.  In first grade, the reading teacher pulled a high group from the class, and I went for awhile, but I was too high for that group too, so I stayed with my class.

I was also high in math, and honestly?  I wasn't bored very much.  This may be thanks to the magic of ADHD, Saving Children from Boredom By Providing All Kinds of Bad Ideas.  It wasn't due to excellent differentiation in first grade, either: I did the same work as everyone else.  But the work we did didn't just teach reading: it also taught skills that kids need.  Some of these - like paperwork skills - I really wish we didn't need.  But we do.  They also included games, and games are fun even if they're easy.

Nor do I think I could have gone further faster had I been in a classroom of all high-performing children doing high level work: attention was an issue, for sure, but I am an intensely non-competitive person.  I have yet to see a model of gifted instruction that doesn't only pay lipservice to cooperation and multiple intelligences but actually believes in it.  I was the kind of kid who threw the county spelling bee once there were two kids left because I wanted it over and 2nd place was pretty good.  I am the kind of teenager who never shared her SAT score because all the tension around those numbers was scary.  I am the kind of adult who won't play Trivial Pursuit at the Albatross because people get so nutty about winning.

So the gifted classroom was likely to make me sit with a box on my head more than I did already (it's fun to make whoooing noises from under the box!  Like your own ghostly echo chamber!).  Besides, the stuff I learned and read and did I learned and read and did because I liked it.  I am one of those irritating nerds who learns stuff because it's neat.  I majored in a field notorious for its geektitude.  I went to a university that prides itself on being the place where fun goes to die.  Etc.

Also?  I don't know about the everyone-knows-the-alphabet Kindergarten, but in my classroom, which annually spans from fluent readers to no-name-writers (somehow people assume there are no high kids on the southeast side, and honestly?  Some of my kids are probably higher than the average child at Clarendon), everybody looks pretty gifted to me.  If Kindergartners were formally identified for GATE, I'd probably identify everybody, because every kid has some spike of awesome in some area that needs nurturing so they can apply that awesome broadly.

Bill Gates and His Laboratory.

Oakland Unified wants to close some schools.  It's planning to close thirteen schools, most of them small schools.  Small schools are very expensive to run - in particular, they increase administrative costs.

Bill Gates and his eponymous foundation were huge drivers of small schools - they sent a functionary to a staff meeting at the school were I was teaching to try to find teachers to support such an effort.  (They failed; we had seven hundred and fifty K-6 students and a mess of portables, sure, but things were good.)  I asked the functionary what would happen after the three years of Gates cash; he admitted that the costs would fall to districts - and that the costs existed.

Gates didn't spend any foundation cash on research, and ended up pulling small schools cash early when the schools ended up making no real difference (except for the added costs).

Gates now has a new solution for the districts he's burdened: cut pensions, raise class sizes and institute performance pay.  Apparently, the financial issue isn't the additional administrators on the payroll thanks to small schools, or the increased building costs small schools require, or the costs associated with school closings, or falling school budgets.  No, it's the teachers.

Needless to say, Gates has put as much research into this as he did small schools.  I'm sure the effects will be predictably similar, if not worse.

It's time to stop allowing big pocketbooks to experiment on our public institutions.  They aren't even willing to clean up after themselves, and they want to punish us all for their messes.

It's time to stop allowing Bill Gates opportunity after opportunity to destroy public education.  Yes, he made a lot of money by taking A prompt out of the public domain and selling it as his own program.  Yes, he has a great deal of interest in public education although not so much that his children attend public schools or anything.  Yes, we often learn from our mistakes.

But Gates shows no learning: he's still jumping in with both feet and a blindfold.  When it ends up he's landed on concrete, he demands public money for his hospital bills.  He's unwilling to research first: it's all urgent urgency, and it's better to fail a few years of children than look at any data beforehand.

OUSD should bill the Gates Foundation.  Once Bill's cleaned up after himself, it might be possible to start taking him seriously.

Where Are These Eager Replacements?

Gary Rubinstein, a far bigger person than I am, has been writing a series of posts that are a "debate" (by email) with Whitney Tilson.

Having ADHD, I lack the patience and impulse control to deal with such people.  I don't approve of Mr. Tilson's profession, which I believe is morally suspect and bad for public schools.  And I definitely don't like his attitude, his inability to take data seriously, or his utter lack of reflection.

This, though, BEGS a challenge:

My bottom line: deliver results in the classroom for kids, or go find another profession. There is no shortage of college-educated adults who would be grateful for that job, especially in this economy! 


Mr. Tilson.

Get over yourself.

I personally teach at what is, for the third year in a row, an offically-designated "Hard to Staff School".  That's right.  There's something about my school such that people - college-educated adults who are "delivering results in the classroom for kids"* - leave.  Indeed, they leave without the prospect of future job.  They leave even though they're not beholden to a now-ended two year commitment.

I suppose it could be the terrible, child-hating veterans like myself scaring away these eager young educators.  But ancedata suggest otherwise: my Resident Teacher just signed on, so I didn't drive her away.  She'll be joining my long-time classroom volunteer, who moved back to the Bay Area to take a job at our school.

I suspect that it's the annual pink slip, the lack of supply money, the ongoing march of ten-hour days and weekends at school, the endless need to write another grant, attend another IEP or make another home visit, the relentless drain of media and education reformers denigrating your work, and secondary trauma visited by hands-on work with seriously traumatized children, families and communities.

Or it could be the worker's compensation-covered allergic reaction from mold, asthma aggravated by vermin infestations, and the prospect of yet another 15% pay cut if state revenues don't meet projections.

Whatever the case, Mr. Tilson, there aren't a whole lot of eager-beaver unemployed persons - even unemployed teachers - lining up to take the jobs at my school.  The District even chucks a little extra money at us as an enticement to take the job and stay.  It doesn't seem to have had a big impact, since we haven't cleared that list of hard-to-staff schools.

But there sure is a shortage of adults clamoring for my job.  And you're certainly unwilling to take it, no?


*As opposed to delivering results in the classroom for America's DVD producers or something.  I think that at Ed Reform School, they teach you to tack a "for the children" sentiment to every sentence you piously pronounce.

Suuuuuuuuuuuure they did.

I've read half of Joel Klein's Save-Our-Schools proposal in The Atlantic.  So far, I understand that we will save schools by value-added teacher performance pay and, um, not complaining about poverty.

I can tell I will have a lot of things to say about this piece, but briefly:

1. Hey, Joel!  BOO! Based on my read of the article, Klein just had a heart attack because a scary teacher from the scary teachers' union just scared him.
2. Joel claims a whole mess of teachers have told him how they hate their jobs and don't do any work but are just hanging on for their pensions.  LIE.  Like any teacher in his or her right mind is going to tell their Chancellor - who spent years itching to cut teacher pensions - that.
3. Joel neglected to mention that teacher salaries are capped.  He suggests that some teachers are making hundreds of thousands of dollars.  They aren't.  He was, though!
4. Joel claims he has a proprietary secret NYPS study that shows teachers don't work very much.  He is citing a secret data source you can't see.  I'm going to call that another LIE.  If you have those data, prove it.
5. Joel doesn't really get state-level funding AT ALL, but the way he heard it I will be rolling around in my pile of state money as I always do come August.
6. Hey, Joel?  Even Bill Gates has had to publicly take back the teachers-more-important-than-anything-else claim.  That would be because it's WRONG.
7. Erik Hanushek is at the Hoover Institute, which is located at, but not actually part of Stanford University.  It is a notorious right-wing think tank, Joel, which frankly is pretty obvious from the name.  Of course, you cite several pundit party organizations without mentioning their bias.
8. There are some real acts of targeted bad statistics in the article, but I'll get into that when I finish the piece.

After being nauseated by the hateful, racist and disgusting online comments - some proud and explicit, others more hidden but no less evil - I was reminded of this Tim Wise essay.

I believe that it is truly wrong to allow such disgusting sentiments to be aired unchallenged.  Still, I'm going to exercise my own privilege and not challenge them (on the threads, at least).

It is depressing in the extreme to see the White Citizen's Councils of the Internet on local blogs.   I'm not unaware of local attitudes (although my own white privilege means I hear them less and their direct impact on me is minor).  But the acceptance of such attitudes as valid - that they are a reasonable, if extreme, argument to make - revolts and surprises me.  And I do believe that the caterwauling of extremists provides a nurturing environment for less hatefully stated, just as destructive racialist attitudes to grow.

Enrollment Rolls Along

Not Confidential to Australians searching for "Trouble Gum" rodents: the animals in "Trouble Gum" are pigs.  Adjust your search accordingly.

We had some people come by to register yesterday: always nice.  I figure the people registering on the Monday after letters go out will probably be sticking around for August.

We also had a number of people stop by to tour.  I presume these people did not list our school and received it as their closest school with space.  Our school is cute (new mosaic going up and everything) and has cute kids, so I think we show well.  Besides, I'm pretty proud of our Kindergarten program, even its lazy, no-egg snails, and I like people coming to see it.

Occasionally we get a visitor whose smile is so fixed and body is so tense that I'm not sure why they bothered coming by.  After all, school sites are not EPC.  Indeed, your average school site's staff's heads are appreciably dented from run-ins with EPC.  It's not really in a school's interest to enroll a lot of people who don't want to be there.  And it's a lot of energy to try to convince people otherwise - energy I'd rather invest in the families who are enrolled.

The whole "hidden gem" thing kind of freaks me out.  It seems to suggest riches courtesy the PTA, and when you've spent the weekend laughing ruefully over the $250 teacher tax deduction for materials vs. the $2500 you spent last year, riches sound good.  There's something wrong with the notion that a school necessarily needs to be "fixed", though - like that it was broken in the first place.

Me, I think it's value systems and society that are broken.  The strongest correlation to test scores is class, after all.  "Low-performing" schools are usually high-poverty.  The number of children living in poverty in the United States is revolting, and the impacts of that poverty - long-term malnutrition, poverty-related health problems, environmental poisoning, unstable neighborhoods, early death - will be with those children (and all of us) for years to come.

Let's be clear: schools are badly funded.  Even in California, we're not being defunded as much as same-olded, with extra vigor, as this School Finance 101 piece shows.

I'm really not feeling the canard that those high-poverty schools are rolling in money, either.  There's this new idea being sold locally that the existence of some SIG schools (which are exceptionally well-funded right now, courtesy the federal government) means all high-poverty schools are having Bring Your Own Bathing Suit to Scrooge McDuck's Vault parties.  People who believe that should really do my taxes.

High-needs schools are low-seniority, and low-seniority schools are losing money on the average teacher salary formula SFUSD uses.  They may also receive funding for certain needs - for a counselor or a nutrition program - that would benefit all schools but are absolutely necessary at poor ones.

I don't know.  I prefer desegregated, diverse schools.  I'd love to have a big cash base underwriting Kindergarten arts and sciences.  I don't think we can get those without a real discussion about what we want children to know and be able to do, why we tolerate massive poverty and school underfunding, and how race and class privilege affect both how we understand the issues and what we want for ourselves and our own children.

I wonder what the locus of "unacceptability" is.  I suppose it's variable; for this family it's test scores and for this one it's diversity (or lack thereof).  I think that it would be possible to pull out a definition, and once you have that, you can talk about conceptions, assumptions and beliefs.  I don't think we're very good at having hard conversations though.

Your White Privilege is Showing.

Ahem:

Prioritizing the desires of the most powerful stakeholders will never make for a progressive argument.

Repeat: never.

I am tired of hearing about FAMILIES FLEEING THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS and how we need to get them back.  Even if those WEALTHY WHITE FAMILIES FLEEING THE DIRTY PUBLIC SCHOOLS came back to those schools, they have no history of advocating for any group other than themselves.

Aaaaaaaaaand they do that enough already.

The progressive argument is for building strong and well-funded schools serving the families already there. The progressive argument does not fantasize about how meeting poor children will be good for rich ones.  The poor are not there for your edification.  The progressive argument agrees that diversity is an important social value for all, but doesn't put the onus on achieving it on the oppressed.

Oh, and the progressive argument definitely doesn't fail to notice the block-by-block segregation that characterizes our city.  The neighborhood school proposal ensures that those WEALTHY WHITE FAMILIES will attend school with their fellow pale moneyed.

In closing: if there is a progressive argument for neighborhood schools, BeyondChron didn't make it.  They do provide an excellent example of San Francisco progressive politics at their worst: willfully blind to privilege.

no tiger beat cinema for tiger mothers

If you do not let your children try out for and perform in the school play, they commit suicide.  This leads to mass, Walt Whitman-inspired rebellion and Robin Williams getting fired.

That is my sum total response to the whole Yale-professor-child-rearing-by-suppression-rarrhr-tiger meme.

Actually, I hate the whole Competitive American Parenting drama, not only because I don't think competition is such a nifty thing but also because it feeds Compulsive American Blaming.

Your parenting is unlike mine, so you are a bad parent.  You, lady, work/don't work outside the home, so you are a bad mother.  You live in subsidized housing, so by definition you shouldn't have had any children because you can't afford them.  Our schools would be perfect if only we could get rid of all these bad teachers.  The problem with education today is that some kids don't have any respect.  This is because their parents didn't teach them and their teachers are useless.


This is deficit thinking, and deficit thinking hasn't gotten us very far.  We're so focused on what we think is going wrong (other people being bad, whatever bad may be) that we can't see what's working.  When you can only think about the negative, you're not going to be able to do anything positive; you see problems and your solutions are punitive.  Moreover, you're a real drag to be around.

Deficit thinking is self-limiting.  It assumes the worst about everyone.  It makes you suspicious, and that becomes prophecy: eventually, you're so unlikeable that they really all are out to get you.  And when all you can do is judge, you're certainly steamrolling over new ideas, divergent perspectives and new learning.

I actually work hard to assume best intentions.  This is easier for me with some groups (parents, children, etc.) than with others (District administrators, blame-unions-first Rethuglicans and reformers).  But it's worthwhile, and part of what makes me a good teacher is that I know what good teaching looks like - and that it can look very different from what I do.

MAN, the way people complain about the terrible Robin Hood ways of SFUSD and its naughty naughty southeast side schools, you would think that teaching on the southeast side would be more appealing to veteran educators.  I mean, apparently it's all candy and awesome, what with the ample cash (ripped out of westside hands), extra supplies, twelve adults per ten students and whatnot we got going on.

WHATEVER.  It's not only factually inaccurate - the low-seniority schools on the southeast side directly subsidize their higher-seniority peers elsewhere in the District, because teacher salaries and benefits are averaged - it is also offensive.

Southeast side schools have students with more significant needs.  That's just the reality: poor communities are badly serviced generally.  Minor health problems don't get taken care of and they are exacerbated by environmental toxins...the kind one finds in low-income neighborhoods.  My particular school abuts the largest housing project in town; it is a substandard, rundown place with limited public space, serious gang problems and no services outside of local CBOs.  Kids who live there need more than a kid who lives in a single-family home in Noe Valley.  They get less.

That's right: THEY GET LESS.  We are not Robin Hooding anyone; we are Hans Brinkering against a rising tide.

It's convenient, of course, that the poor and their schools provide such an attractive target: nothing like a little infighting to keep everyone from banding together for better school funding (locally: fewer SmartBoards at Cabrillo, more functioning computers at school sites, and state and federally too of course). I presume this is the same audience that believes ACORN and the Community Reinvestment Act caused the recession.  It's the same kind of nonsense, at least.

White Liberal Social Darwinism.

Only in San Francisco, seriously*.

According to denizens of the Aggrieved Reverse Racism Brigade, San Francisco (the city?  the district?  each and every resident?) is attempting to ensure "equality of results" (er, the usual phrase is "equality of outcomes", but I think the intent was to dumb it down for dimwitted Kindergarten teachers).

There is only one way to respond to this:

No.  There is no equality in outcome or in opportunity being attempted here.


How could you even say that with a straight face?

Let's look at some of those conditions here.

1. How many white people live at Sunnydale, originally slated to be torn down in the 1950s?
2. Are you aware of the location of Superfund sites in San Francisco?
3. How about of the breast cancer spike?
4. The asthma spike?
5. Taken a look at school funding inequities within the District lately?
6. Seen any of the figures on educating high-needs children?

That's just a teeny scrape on the pyramid of institutional racism.  There are your starting conditions.

As far as attempting equality in outcomes, how you could create evidence that anyone in San Francisco is attempting that is beyond me.  Are many forces - including SFUSD - trying very hard to ensure a quality education and college readiness for all students?  Is San Francisco attempting to offer medical care - thereby increasing productivity, life expectancy and ability to care for oneself - to the city as a whole?  Arguably, there is some attempt to enable equality of outcomes.

The thing is: it's a massive failure, and no one is trying that hard.  Yammering about being Beyond the Talk and being Beyond the Talk are two different things; no action SFUSD has taken leads me to believe that we'll be going beyond talking about Beyond the Talk.  Demanding A-G requirements is as powerful as mandating CASHEE: sounds good, no proof it'll do anything but increase the dropout rate.

Ultimately, what these semi-educated claims tell me is that the huge simmering vat of ignored privilege and sunny colorblindness that characterizes San Francisco's white liberal community is nearing a fast boil.

This is why I do not particularly care if San Francisco ever desegregates its schools.  Honestly, my school has a better chance of succeeding in its mission without having disruptive, anti-change elements like these in our community.  The students at my school are not the people who need to knock some sense into the ambience.

It is necessary work, of course.  Like it or not, the only way to ensure eventual equality of opportunity is to get all the stakeholders on board, and that includes the families turning to private schools because the public schools are scary social engineering places.  (Hack.)  And I do believe that it is the responsibility of white allies to do this work.  But I need a break from it, because I'm about to bash my head against the monitor to put it out of its misery**.

In other more cheerful news, I got a winter jacket.  With my thrifted Haider Ackermann culottes I cut a very Novakian figure in it and am more pleased with myself than usual.

*Okay, not really.  This particular blend of happy talk left politics and racism you don't see everywhere, though.  It's like a Ron Paul convention with more hugs.

**Which speaks to my own privilege, but you know what?  I am going to need to cut myself some slack on this one and reflect later.

Oh, (my fellow) White People.

Pointing out that SFUSD has a long-standing access problem is offensive to some element among SFUSD stakeholders.

How depressing.

Fear of these people is one of the reasons why SFUSD will never do anything actually beyond talking when it comes to the radical changes needed to ensure school equity (HINT: it involves money).  I mean, I was just threatened for mildly stating that the school enrollment process has some access issues.  This is a well-known fact, and data on the issue are helpfully posted on SFUSD's own website.  Apparently this is a case of The More You Know, the More You Are Clearly a Proselytizing Socialist Liberal Communist Fascist or Whatever.

I so call BOO on that.  I don't post anonymously on forums and I'm not working terribly hard to hide my job location.  I take responsibility for what I say and do.  I go ahead and go beyond the talk every day, and I don't wait for SFUSD to catch up.

In other news, the latest SFUSD article in the Chronicle suggested layoffs are coming again.  I suspected that Garcia's (public) claim that the point of the contract concessions was to avoid layoffs next year would come to nothing.  It's a little irritating that we're still talking about the $113 million shortfall - couldn't they have waited until that figure was updated? - and the central office had a bit of a redesign that necessitated many more big dollar contracts and we're ALREADY on layoffs again.

But seriously, after last year the White Trolls of SFUSD really should get with it.  I go to Board meetings and after announcing my name and job location, I join with my colleagues in noting that going Beyond the Talk requires action, and if you're not willing to take it then you are nurturing institutional racism.  And at least once the majority of the Board and Cabinet wasn't texting so I know they heard what I said.

So, as I was saying: BOO.