The enabling legislation which created school boards clearly enshrined a conflict of responsibilities. If this was not intentional, it was a brilliant accident in that it forced boards forever into a state of creative compromise.
There are at least eight constituencies a board member must represent beyond his/her own interests and opinions. Although the enabling legislation did not attempt to rank them, I will here in order of my personal views, from most important to least. You will notice that the lower you go on the list, the bigger the club each constituency carries. That has a lot to do with my ranking: assuming the school board has a great responsibility to balance the playing field between the players. The players nearest the top need the most help in having their voices heard.
Bear in mind also that within each category, board members must balance the needs of their nearest neighbors with those of the most distant. While directors must give a voice to constituents from their own town, they must often act against those interests if the good of the whole district conflicts: a balancing act within a balancing act.
1. Far and away the most important group is the kids. This group has virtually no legal rights and precious little ability to speak for itself, but it is the one for which the board has ultimate moral responsibility. The group must often be protected from assaults by all the other groups. The board member must do much soul-searching about the rights and needs of children, since each other constituency loudly protests how children must be treated, but suggestions and laws put forth often reflect more benefit to other constituencies than to children themselves. It is very difficult to really listen to children or really see them, but that is the director's first responsibility.
2. Parents can speak loudly, but their legal rights are minimal. They have strong and wildly varying opinions about how their children should be raised. Each parent is informed by different values and convictions. Some are sensitive to their children and others are criminally insensitive, yet they have a huge moral presence since they are ultimately the only people intimately concerned with the welfare of their children, from birth to adulthood. They are there before and long after the schools are involved with their children, and must be offered a megaphone to make their views known. They must be protected from schools' incursions into family territory.
3. Teachers have a huge influence on children, yet no real long-term responsibilities. Their views toward raising children, in an ideal world, should be informed by knowledge of child development and education theory, but often are buffeted by personal baggage, political winds, and orders from administrators and bureaucrats who really have far less a clue what is actually happening in the classroom and in children's lives. Teachers have some voice within the school, but are too often silenced by perceived or real threats to their jobs. They are the first to admit that they stand up for children far less than they would in a perfect world.
4. Schools and their administrators might appear to be in the same constituency as teachers, but that is not the reality. There is a tremendous amount of power politics in a school building. In many respects, the professional teachers in a school become just another class of children in a teachers' meeting. There is a culture of power in schools where the same tactics used by teachers to control kids are used on teachers by those "above" them. While those who have never experienced this personally might find it hard to understand, teachers must be protected from the power of the district because they form the second line of defense (after parents) for the rights and needs of children.
5. Unfortunately, the majority of the board's time is occupied in a dance with the superintendent. Legally, the board supervises the superintendent, but the reality is too often the opposite. Since board members have limited hours to spend on school issues, they rely on the superintendent to act as their eyes, ears, and often brain. The superintendent explains requirements and laws, steers the board toward his/her objectives, and strengthens his/her authority through manipulation. In the best of worlds, this is not a struggle of power and personality but a collaboration for the best interest of other stakeholders on this list, but that is unfortunately rare. A superintendent recently admitted in public that he spends the bulk of his time "chasing around managing the school board." While he was admitting something which is more the norm than the exception, this stands the law on its head.
The board hires the superintendent to manage the schools. There is constant tension surrounding what this means. Clearly the board cannot overreach and step on the superintendent's toes. The top administrator must have freedom to manage day-to-day operations and supervise staff. That is not the business of the board beyond its option to fire the superintendent when these functions are not performed to its liking. The board is completely within its rights, however, to insist on defining goals, values, and general direction for the district. To do this effectively, the board must have an overview of district operations not filtered through the superintendents eyes, and therein lies the conflict between necessary delegation and potential micro-management. This is never clear territory.
The fashion recently is to run schools like private corporations. The expectation under that model is the CEO has near total dictatorial control--but schools are not businesses. The board cannot ever forget that it sets the agenda, it evaluates the superintendent every year within strict guidelines, and the superintendent is just one voice among many. If it becomes the superintendent's rubber stamp, it might as well stay home and admit it no longer serves its other constituents.
6. Towns like to think of themselves as the prime constituents of the directors they elect, but they are way down the list. Board members must listen seriously to towns' concerns since the town supports the school financially, provides a context for education, is the seat of values not only of families with children but also of the childless and grandparents....and the town elects and fires directors. Directors may not always make the towns happy, but their towns must trust they will do what they think best for the kids, and thus for the future of the town. The director's responsibility for making education the best it can be conflicts regularly with the need to be fiscally responsible, and this becomes a huge issue for the town since the school budget is its largest expense.
7. The State provides the legal framework for the existence of the board, and exacts in payment a promise that the board will uphold the interests of the State. This is frequently in conflict, though, with the rights and needs of the children and their families, so the directors must walk a fine line. On its side, the State wields laws as clubs, and offers money to those who cooperate and fines to those who don't. The local board can rejoice when the State's interests coincide with local needs, and resist when they don't. There will always be a tension here between the top of this list and the bottom, however, because State and corporate needs for a compliant population are at direct odds with an intelligent individual's right to make up his/her own mind and decide the best course for a happy, rewarding life.
(8. The feds are another level on top of the state, but really exert no direct influence on school boards....only through the states. Still, Washington makes its wishes known in myriad ways, and is a force to be reckoned with.)
17 April 2010
14 April 2010
Carl Rogers
Note: These excerpts are from two essays in a book titled "Freedom to Learn" published in 1969.
Personal Thoughts on Teaching and Learning (1952)
I wish to present some very brief remarks, in the hope that if they bring forth any reaction from you, I may get some new light on my own ideas.
a) My experience is that I cannot teach another person how to teach. To attempt it is for me, in the long run, futile.
b) It seems to me that anything that can be taught to another is relatively inconsequential and has little or no significant influence on behavior.
c) I realize increasingly that I am only interested in learnings which significantly influence behavior.
d) I have come to feel that the only learning which significantly influence behavior is self-discovered, self-appropriated learning.
e) Such self-discovered learning, truth that has been personally appropriated and assimilated in experience, cannot be directly communicated to another.
f) As a consequence of the above, I realize that I have lost interest in being a teacher.
g) When I try to teach, as I do sometimes, I am appalled by the results, which seems a little more than inconsequential, because sometimes the teaching appears to succeed. When this happens I find that the results are damaging. It seems to cause the individual to distrust his own experience, and to stifle significant learning. Hence, I have come to feel that the outcomes of teaching are either unimportant or hurtful.
h) When I look back at the results of my past teaching, the real results seem the same - either damage was done - or nothing significant occurred. This is frankly troubling.
i) As a consequence, I realize that I am only interested in being a learner, preferably learning things that matter, that have some significant influence on my own behavior.
j) I find it very rewarding to learn, in groups, in relationships with one person as in therapy, or by myself.
k) I find that one of the best, but most difficult, ways for me to learn is to drop my own defensiveness, at least temporarily, and to try to understand the way in which his experience seems and feels to the other person.
l) I find that another way of learning for me is to state my own uncertainties, to try to clarify my puzzlements, and thus get closer to the meaning that my experience actually seems to have.
m) This whole train of experiencing, and the meanings that I have thus far discovered in it, seem to have launched me on a process which is both fascinating and at times a little frightening. It seems to mean letting my experiences carry me on, in a direction which appears to be forward, toward goals that I can but dimly define, as I try to understand at least the current meaning of that experience. The sensation is that of floating with a complex stream of experience, with the fascinating possibility of trying to comprehend its ever-changing complexity.
I am almost afraid I may seem to have gotten away from any discussion of learning, as well as teaching. Let me again introduce a practical note by saying that by themselves these interpretations of my experience may sound queer and aberrant, but not particularly shocking. It is when I realize the implications that I shudder a bit at the distance I have come from the commonsense world that everyone knows is right. I can best illustrate this by saying that if the experiences of others had been the same as mine, and if 1 had discovered similar meanings in it, many consequences would be implied:
a.) Such experience would imply that we would do away with teaching. People would get together if they wished to learn.
b.) We would do away with examinations. They measure the inconsequential type of learning.
c.) We would do away with grades and credits for the same reason.
d.) We would do away with degrees as a measure of competence partly for the same reason. Another reason is that a degree marks an end or a conclusion of something, and a learner is only interested in the continuing process of learning.
e.) We would do away with the exposition of conclusions, for we would realize that no one learns significantly from conclusions.
I think I had better to stop here. I do not want to become too fantastic. I want to know primarily whether anything in my inward thinking, as I have tried to describe it, speaks to anything in your experience of the classroom as you have lived it, and if so, what the meanings are that exist for you in your experience.
************************************
Regarding Learning and Its Facilitation (1969)
How does a person learn? How can important learnings be facilitated? What basic theoretical assumptions are involved?
Here are a number of the principles which can, I believe, be abstracted from current experience and research related to this newer approach:
Learning
1) Human beings have a natural potentiality for learning.
2) Significant learning takes place when the subject matter is perceived by the student as having relevance for his own purposes.
3) Learning which involves a change in self organization - in the perception of oneself - is threatening and tends to be resisted.
4) Those learning which are threatening to the self are more easily perceived and assimilated when external threats are at a minimum.
5) When threats to the self is low, experience can be perceived in differentiated fashion and learning can proceed.
6) Much significant learning is acquired through doing.
7) Learning is facilitated when the student participates responsibly in the learning process.
8) Self-initiated learning which involves the whole person of the learner - feelings as well as intellect - is the most lasting and pervasive.
9) Independence, creativity, and self-reliance are all facilitated when self-criticism and self-evaluation are basic and evaluation by others is of secondary importance.
10) The most socially useful learning in the modern world is the learning of the process of learning, a continuing openness to experience and incorporation into oneself of the process of change.
Facilitation
1) The facilitator has much to do with setting the initial mood or climate of the group or class experience.
2) The facilitator helps to elicit and clarify the purposes of the individuals in the class as well as the more general purposes of the group.
3) He relies upon the desire of each student to implement those purposes which have meaning for him, as the motivational force behind significant learning.
4) He endeavours to organize and make easily available the widest possible range of resources for learning.
5) He regards himself as a flexible resource to be utilized by the group.
6) In responding to expressions in the classroom group, he accepts both the intellectual content and the emotionalized attitudes, endeavouring to give each aspect the approximate degree of emphasis which it has for the individual or the group.
7) As the acceptant classroom climate becomes established, the facilitator is able increasingly to become a participant learner, a member of the group, expressing his views as those of one individual only.
8) He takes the initiative in sharing himself with the group - his feelings as well as his thoughts - in ways which do not demand nor impose but represent simply a personal sharing which students may take or leave.
9) Throughout the classroom experience, he remains alert to the expression indicative of deep or strong feelings.
10) In his functioning as a facilitator of learning, the leader endeavours to recognize and accept his own limitations.
Personal Thoughts on Teaching and Learning (1952)
I wish to present some very brief remarks, in the hope that if they bring forth any reaction from you, I may get some new light on my own ideas.
a) My experience is that I cannot teach another person how to teach. To attempt it is for me, in the long run, futile.
b) It seems to me that anything that can be taught to another is relatively inconsequential and has little or no significant influence on behavior.
c) I realize increasingly that I am only interested in learnings which significantly influence behavior.
d) I have come to feel that the only learning which significantly influence behavior is self-discovered, self-appropriated learning.
e) Such self-discovered learning, truth that has been personally appropriated and assimilated in experience, cannot be directly communicated to another.
f) As a consequence of the above, I realize that I have lost interest in being a teacher.
g) When I try to teach, as I do sometimes, I am appalled by the results, which seems a little more than inconsequential, because sometimes the teaching appears to succeed. When this happens I find that the results are damaging. It seems to cause the individual to distrust his own experience, and to stifle significant learning. Hence, I have come to feel that the outcomes of teaching are either unimportant or hurtful.
h) When I look back at the results of my past teaching, the real results seem the same - either damage was done - or nothing significant occurred. This is frankly troubling.
i) As a consequence, I realize that I am only interested in being a learner, preferably learning things that matter, that have some significant influence on my own behavior.
j) I find it very rewarding to learn, in groups, in relationships with one person as in therapy, or by myself.
k) I find that one of the best, but most difficult, ways for me to learn is to drop my own defensiveness, at least temporarily, and to try to understand the way in which his experience seems and feels to the other person.
l) I find that another way of learning for me is to state my own uncertainties, to try to clarify my puzzlements, and thus get closer to the meaning that my experience actually seems to have.
m) This whole train of experiencing, and the meanings that I have thus far discovered in it, seem to have launched me on a process which is both fascinating and at times a little frightening. It seems to mean letting my experiences carry me on, in a direction which appears to be forward, toward goals that I can but dimly define, as I try to understand at least the current meaning of that experience. The sensation is that of floating with a complex stream of experience, with the fascinating possibility of trying to comprehend its ever-changing complexity.
I am almost afraid I may seem to have gotten away from any discussion of learning, as well as teaching. Let me again introduce a practical note by saying that by themselves these interpretations of my experience may sound queer and aberrant, but not particularly shocking. It is when I realize the implications that I shudder a bit at the distance I have come from the commonsense world that everyone knows is right. I can best illustrate this by saying that if the experiences of others had been the same as mine, and if 1 had discovered similar meanings in it, many consequences would be implied:
a.) Such experience would imply that we would do away with teaching. People would get together if they wished to learn.
b.) We would do away with examinations. They measure the inconsequential type of learning.
c.) We would do away with grades and credits for the same reason.
d.) We would do away with degrees as a measure of competence partly for the same reason. Another reason is that a degree marks an end or a conclusion of something, and a learner is only interested in the continuing process of learning.
e.) We would do away with the exposition of conclusions, for we would realize that no one learns significantly from conclusions.
I think I had better to stop here. I do not want to become too fantastic. I want to know primarily whether anything in my inward thinking, as I have tried to describe it, speaks to anything in your experience of the classroom as you have lived it, and if so, what the meanings are that exist for you in your experience.
************************************
Regarding Learning and Its Facilitation (1969)
How does a person learn? How can important learnings be facilitated? What basic theoretical assumptions are involved?
Here are a number of the principles which can, I believe, be abstracted from current experience and research related to this newer approach:
Learning
1) Human beings have a natural potentiality for learning.
2) Significant learning takes place when the subject matter is perceived by the student as having relevance for his own purposes.
3) Learning which involves a change in self organization - in the perception of oneself - is threatening and tends to be resisted.
4) Those learning which are threatening to the self are more easily perceived and assimilated when external threats are at a minimum.
5) When threats to the self is low, experience can be perceived in differentiated fashion and learning can proceed.
6) Much significant learning is acquired through doing.
7) Learning is facilitated when the student participates responsibly in the learning process.
8) Self-initiated learning which involves the whole person of the learner - feelings as well as intellect - is the most lasting and pervasive.
9) Independence, creativity, and self-reliance are all facilitated when self-criticism and self-evaluation are basic and evaluation by others is of secondary importance.
10) The most socially useful learning in the modern world is the learning of the process of learning, a continuing openness to experience and incorporation into oneself of the process of change.
Facilitation
1) The facilitator has much to do with setting the initial mood or climate of the group or class experience.
2) The facilitator helps to elicit and clarify the purposes of the individuals in the class as well as the more general purposes of the group.
3) He relies upon the desire of each student to implement those purposes which have meaning for him, as the motivational force behind significant learning.
4) He endeavours to organize and make easily available the widest possible range of resources for learning.
5) He regards himself as a flexible resource to be utilized by the group.
6) In responding to expressions in the classroom group, he accepts both the intellectual content and the emotionalized attitudes, endeavouring to give each aspect the approximate degree of emphasis which it has for the individual or the group.
7) As the acceptant classroom climate becomes established, the facilitator is able increasingly to become a participant learner, a member of the group, expressing his views as those of one individual only.
8) He takes the initiative in sharing himself with the group - his feelings as well as his thoughts - in ways which do not demand nor impose but represent simply a personal sharing which students may take or leave.
9) Throughout the classroom experience, he remains alert to the expression indicative of deep or strong feelings.
10) In his functioning as a facilitator of learning, the leader endeavours to recognize and accept his own limitations.
11 April 2010
Aki Kurose
Aki Kurose, Seattle, Washington...This was copied from an interview by Studs Terkel in 1995, when Kurose was 70 (printed in his book Coming of Age). Aki Kurose died in 1998, after a 17 year struggle with cancer, and soon thereafter was honored by having a Seattle middle school named after her.
She is a Nisei, born and raised in Seattle.
As a sixteen-year-old, shortly after World War II was declared, she and her family, among scores of thousands of Japanese Americans, were arrested and sent off to internment camps.
“Horse Stalls and pigpens were converted to shelters for many of us. Our family of six was assigned to one room. They gave us burlap bags. We were told to stuff straw in them and they would be our mattresses...There were machine-gun towers in the parking lot. The guns were aimed inside, at us. People would drive around in cars, calling us names. You'd feel like an animal in the zoo.
“Everything was so surreal. The assignment one teacher in camp gave us was: 'Write why you are proud to be and American.' [Laughs softly.] We had to salute the flag every day and sing the national anthem.”
Around 1965, I was a Head Start volunteer. I got turned on to working with young people, so after my children were raised, I went back to school. I got my master's degree in early childhood education when I was fifty-six years old.
I started teaching in the early '70s and have been doing so ever since. I teach six-year olds, first grade. I've taught kindergarten and preschool, as well. I teach mathematics, science, and peace.
How does one teach peace? Well, I immediately say to them, “If you're not at peace with yourself, with your neighbor, with your community, you can't really learn very much. We have to get rid of all this garbage, this angry, competitive feeling. Then we'll all get along.”
We'd go outside and do these exercises in the morning to invigorate ourselves. We pretend that we're taking all the anger out of our bodies, getting rid of our anxieties and throwing them all into outer space. We're not polluting the space, because what we're throwing out is just being disintegrated. So we talk about environment that way also.
I tell them: When you're in school, no one is going to be sent to the principal, and nobody's going to be turned bad. If something unpleasant happens, we're going to resolve our own conflicts. When trouble may start, I tell them to stop, rest awhile, let's talk things over, because we need a cooling-off period. What happens in our classroom has to be a win-win situation for everybody. We don't have a winner and a loser.
Under no circumstances will they be punished. I tell them that making a mistake is the most natural thing to do. Everybody makes mistakes. The thing to do is to learn from our mistakes. The more mistakes you make, the more you're learning, so don't worry about that.
At my school, they didn't quite know what to do about me. The principal called me and said we were to attend a community meeting. I said, “Fine. Are the other teachers coming, too?” He said, “No. You'll be meeting with parents and you must be prepared to tell them how you're going to teach their privileged children.”
When I walked in, there were forty parents already seated. They had met an hour before, getting all their questions organized. They immediately wanted to know where I had been educated. I told them I had been to the University of Washington and was just about to get my master's degree.
They wanted to know if their children would pick up my Japanese accent. I told the, “I'm sorry, but this is a Seattle public school accent. I was born in this city.” They were so very anxious and worried. “you've been teaching poor children all these years. How will you deal with our children, who have had lots of preschool and are very advanced? Can you meet the challenge of these children?” I said I could meet the challenge of any child. “It's the challenge of the parents that may be more difficult.” They were quite shocked. [Laughs softly.] Two parents monitored my classroom every day for a month.
Here is a very affluent neighborhood of ambitious parents who don't know quite what to do with this Asian woman who is so outspoken. After a month of monitoring, they decided that I could teach. Eventually, these parents became more supportive of me than the staff did. They were the ones who recommended me for the Teacher for Excellence Award. Some of their attitudes were at first condescending, but that changed and it was wonderful.
The staff had a very hard time of it when I first came there. Remember, I had displaced a white teacher, who was transferred to the central area. They were naturally feeling sorry for the other woman and said, in so many words, that it wasn't fair that I should get all the breaks because I was of the minority. They felt it was a real privilege for me to come here to teach white children. Referring to my old school, they'd say, “Oooh, how did you stand it?” I said I loved it down there. I said, “Actually, I feel it's an inconvenience for me to come here. At the old place, I could walk to school. Now I have to drive all the way out there.”
One teacher asked me, “Who are you?”
I'm Aki Kurose”
“Well, you know what I mean.”
“No, I'm not sure, though I suspect I know what you mean.”
“What are you?”
“Oh, I'm a teacher.”
Finally, she said, “Well, where do you come from?”
“Oh. I come from Madrona.” (That's the area where I live in Seattle.)
“Well, no---you know what I mean.”
“I think I do.”
“What kind of name in Kurose?”
“That's my husband's name.”
She was getting quite angry with me. Finally, I said, “Are you asking my ethnicity?”
She said, “Yes. Are you Chinese or Japanese?”
“I am Japanese and proud of it. Why is it so important to you?”
Then she said some of her friends got killed in World War II. I said, “I'm very sorry, but I don't think I'm responsible for it. I'm against war, so please don't regard me as your enemy.” For many years, on December 7, they'd bring up Pearl Harbor: “Your people...” They'd want to talk to the students about it. I'd argue with them that that kind of history isn't what it's about. I always tell my students that war is the enemy, so you can't name people as the enemy.
It's changed a lot in the nineteen years I've been there. Because our busing is no longer mandatory, it's starting to get sterile again. We've lost a lot of black students. Oh, it was a challenge and hard at the beginning. I think the problem had more to do with money than color. You send these kids to a neighborhood with Porsches, Volvos, Mercedes, and mothers who are constantly at school to see to the needs of their own children. The whole lifestyle is so different from these bused kids, usually of single parents or working ones who can't participate. The PTAs there are like pink teas in beautiful homes. What working parent can go to a PTA meeting at ten o'clock in the morning?
The kids in my class were wonderful and starting to get along with each other. I said, “We're not going to compete.” Many of the parents in these affluent neighborhoods are so anxious for their kids to be at the top of the class. I said, “I'm sorry, in my classroom there's nobody at the top of the class, nobody in the middle, and nobody at the bottom. We work cooperatively. No grades in my class.”
At first, the parents didn't like it. They love to have their Susie first in line, top in math or top reader. I said I don't give tests that way. I give them problem-solving activities where they work cooperatively. Nobody's answer is wrong. We try to justify the answer. If they say, “Four plus three equals eight,” I say, “Let's see if we can justify that statement.” So the children work in groups of four and think about it. Each may come up with a different answer. So they rethink it. This one little boy who had four beans and three beans had to justify the total of eight. He suddenly realized something. He then broke one bean in half and said, “Four plus two plus the two halves of the seventh bean equal eight.” He thought it through.
When I first began teaching, I thought I had to have lots of knowledge that I could share with my students, so they could memorize all these things. That's not what education is about. We need to teach them that the planet earth is here for us to cherish and share with everybody. We have to stop this possessive approach, especially with young children. I realize as they grow up, they may have to compete. But at the low-elementary level, they need to build up their self-esteem and self-worth and, above all, learn to think.
I remember a letter from a college student who'd been one of my kids. “You made me interested in math and science. They have been among my favorites ever since. I know that not only does 5+6=11. So does 6+5. But the foremost part of your curriculum was peace. It has made the big difference in my life.” Teaching them the skill of living on this earth in a peaceful manner is what education should be about.
It's so sad to hear teachers saying, “I can't wait to retire. I can't wait for the school year to be over. I can't wait until three-thirty when the kids will be out of my classroom.” If you've lost that spirit, I don't think you should be teaching.
Some of them are burnt out because the classes are so large or because they can't deal with the anger of the kids. When busing started, most of the black kids were out in the hallway or being sent to the principal's office. I protested: this gives the wrong message. The other kids, the whites, se them in the hallways or in the principal's office and think they're all bad kids.
I said we don't need to punish kids this way. So I've been working with communtiy people, trying to get a peace curriculum passed through the legislature, because if you can't get along with one another, what;s the use of having a Ph.D.?
I have four kids at each of six tables. Every morning, I have a bouquet of flowers on each table so the students may enjoy its beauty---and learn the botanical names. In this way, they learn to spell rhododendron, azalea, chrysanthemum. They put a flower picture book together. On the back, they write a poem about the flowers they've come to know. In learning botany, they learn math as well---how the leaves are attached, how they are spaced, they count the petals. When the petals fall, they don't throw them away, they study them. You'll see children treasuring the stems, with the petals gone. It is not learning how to memorize, but how to see them as beautiful parts of their lives.
We grow salmon in the classroom. I take the children to the fish hatchery at the University of Washington. We see the spawning salmon. They allow us to squeeze the eggs out, which we bring back to the classroom.. We have an aquarium with refrigeration. And we grow the salmon eggs. We raise salmon! [Laughs delightedly.] Part of our curriculum is the life cycle of a salmon. The children learn a song about these fish. We release the little fingerlings back into the fresh streams, where they can hide under the rocks and gradually finish their lives, going back into the sea. Then we all sing “Bon Voyage, Bon Voyage.”
Every morning, we go outside to exercise. My bused-in-children, especially, don't need to be thrown into a classroom immediately. They need to get some of that energy out. We make a big circle, we study the clouds, the motion of the sun. While they exercise, they count by fives, by tens, “higher, higher.” All this time they're learning multiplication.
As we observe the clouds, they come up with these fantastic things: “Mrs. Kurose, you're talking about these cirrus clouds, but why do we see the cumulus?” They use these words not by rote, but because they connect with them what they experience at that moment. It's so exciting! I realize I'm learning so much from my students.
I encourge them to write constantly. They keep a journal and they write their thoughts. I don't say, “Spell it right,” certainly not at the beginning. They do inventive spelling and their stories are so exciting. I'm pretty good now at deciphering their spelling. But they know from the beginning what they've written. They share it with the group. So the observing and the writing are relevant to their day.
They know all the phases of the moon. My students tell their parents about a waxing, gibbous moon. A number of mothers and fathers there have told me, “We didn't know what a gibbous moon was until our first graders came home and told us.. We're learning astronomy from your students.”
I was honored as Teacher of the Year for the Seattle area. My name was submitted by the parents. The following year, the National Science Center gave me the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science and Mathematics. There was one winner from each state.
Bush was president. It was very ironic because under him the teachers have been damned with fewer benefits, and the students with fewer services. At the Rose Garden, some of the teachers were so excited about Bush. One said, “I'm never going to wash my hands.” I said, “Ughh!”
Bush came up to me, smiling: “Hi, would you like to take a picture with me?” I just couldn't help myself and said, “No, you're not my favorite president.” He just looked. I don't think he was even listening. I said, “You're supposed to be our 'education president,' but you don't show it. You're allotting all this money to the military, when all these children need education.” I added, “One stealth bomber would pay for the salary of hundreds of teachers. Two stealth bombers would probably supply many good school districts. You need to change your priorities.”
He just stood there with his plastic smile and he said, “Okay,” as he put his arms around me and had this person take a picture of us. He didn't hear a word I said.
I was thrilled to be in Washington. I was thrilled to see the White House. But I was sad because things just didn't fit. I had borrowed a dress from my friend because I didn't have any formal gown to wear. I put “Peace” buttons all the way across. I wear these buttons every day, on every garment. When my grandchildren come over, the first thing they say is, “Okay, you have them on.” My students love it.
During our Curriculum Night, the parents are invited. We have to explain what we teach. I said, “I want you to know that peace is the most important part of my curriculum. I teach science and math, but if a child is not at peace with himself or herself, with the neighbors, with the community, true learning cannot take place.”
On this night, one man said, “That's none of your business. I want you to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic. That's why I'm sending my kid to school, to learn the three Rs. What's all this nonsense you're handing out about atomic bombs, Sadako, or whatever?” I said, “Yes, I do tell them about Sadako and the thousand cranes because I think it's a wonderful children's story.”
Sadako was a twelve-year-old girl who was an A-bomb victim and was dying of leukemia. There was a Japanese legend that if you fold a thousand paper cranes, you can have good luck and a long life. She made 650 cranes and then she died. I thought children could relate to this.
I siad to this man, “Please , take this book home and read it. It's not controversial, it's not subversive.” e took it but he wasn't very happy. I said, “If you have any problem, you can always call me at home. Or I'll stay after school. Or I can come to see you. I'm interested in the parents as well as the children. I work hard and I want you to know I will deal with any of your concerns.”
This was in September. That was the last I heard from him---until November. I got this call, “Mrs. Kurose, I'd like an appointment with you. Can I drop in after school?” I said, “Of course.” I was nervous, had no idea what he was going to say. He said, “I want to tell you a story.” I thought: Uh oh. “My son is reading so beautifully His math is wonderful, and he treats his younger brother so nicely. He's no a mean kid anymore. And he likes to talk things out. I offered him a set of G.i. Joes, but he said to me, 'Dad, Mrs. Kurose would be very upset. That's a war toy. I would rather have a microscope.'” He was delighted. He said, “Mrs. Kurose, if you have any tax problems or whatever, I'd be happy to do your taxes for free.” He was an accountant.
Another parent who came said, “Boy, were our faces red! My wife and I were yelling at each other, and our little daughter said, 'Stop, stop! You're supposed to cool off and talk things out.'” The child was in my class.
Is my teaching today better than when I was younger? Absolutely. My face gets red when I think of the first day I taught. “All right, children, let's pass out the workbook.” Ridiculous. Aside from the classes I take, the children are teaching me how to discover things. You can tell a child that mixing vinegar with baking soda is going to fizz, but it won't make an impression unless they do it themselves. We do little magic things, too. I take a boiled egg and put it on top of a bottle. It won't go in no matter how we push it. We put a match inside, burn out the carbon monoxide [sic], and pretty soon the egg plops in. I ask them why it did so. They have to think things out. How can we get it out? You try to shake it, you try to suck it, it won't come out. You blow into it and the egg pops up so dramatically. The kids go “Wow!” They see it.
Some of the teachers don't like my methods. They're very regimented and feel that my children are too free moving. One complained, “Why are you taking them outside for exercise? They get enough exercise on the bus.” I said, “I'm not only doing it for my bus children, I'm doing it for myself as well. I get inspired.”
I can understand some of these young teachers with families. It's a full-time job, so they lead a difficult double life. They spend so much time on paperwork, xeroxing, and dittoes. And these SATs are so meaningless. It's an insult to the intelligence of young people. You don't need paper and pencil. You can count beans, multiply them, grown them. All this is magic and so is learning.
I have a science club from kindergarten through the fifth grade. I have a cross-grade teaching: big kids work with little kids. They love it.
The most important thing I learned was to respect children. You hear lots of complaints about how young kids aren't respecting us anymore. Are we respecting them? Respect begets respect. Children are very perceptive. If you are not valuing them, they know it immediately.
I wonder if we don't really ruin kids in school, cause them to lose respect for themselves. I think the biggest crime is to have a kid sent down to the office. I see that all the time. I see them constantly getting expelled. Why would you expel a kid? Let's face the truth: somewhere along the line, we have failed in our teaching.
In our state, we just passed “Three Strikes and You're Out” legislation. Three crimes and you're incarcerated forever, or something. Won't we ever learn that punished children become punitive people? If you wallop them, that;s the only thing they're going to know, so the wallop others. Treat them as human beings and they'll act that way.
Edward was eight years old. His fourteen-year-old brother was shot in a playground, a gangland situation. The mother was homeless. “Can I take him home?” I asked her. She said, “It's up to you.” So I brought him home, bought him some clean clothes. I bought him three pairs of socks and three pairs of shorts. He was so proud. “Do I got to give these to my brother?” His brother was still in the hospital. I said, “No, these are for you.” He thought I'd given him gold bullion. His eyes were like big marbles. “I get to keep these?” I thought I was a do-gooder, but he did more for me than I did for him. I was impressed with his sudden pride.
I said, “Now we're going to eat.” He said, “We get to go to McDonald's?” I said, “No, we're going to buy a trout, with a head and tail and everything. You're going to cook it. We're going to practice science and have a great meal at the same time.” We brought it home. He examined it. We washed it. I let him look at the flesh, study it, salt and pepper it, put it in the oven, and watch it change. As he saw the flesh grow firmer, he shouted excitedly, It's changing!”
We put it on a platter. I said, “Okay, this is going to be your dinner. But let's de=bone it.” So we did it together, put the skeleton to the side and he examined the bones. He kept shouting, “Wow!” He got to take the skeleton to school the next day to his great delight. I put out the goblets with milk in one, juice in the other, and water in the third. At different levels, I said, “Take your spoon and hit those.” He hit the glasses and cried out, “I'm making music!”
I took him outside to look at the sky. I said, “There's Orion's belt and there's the Big Dipper and Cassiopeia.” I explained it to him. Now, he always talks about that night and his discovery of the sky.
Then I said it was time to go to bed. And when he saw the bed in a room of his own, he couldn't believe it. He had never slept in a bed by himself, let alone a room of his own. The next morning, he made his bed very carefully.
When I took him to school, during the creative writing time, he said, “I got a story.” He told it to me: “It's about stars that came down to Garfield to play football.” Garfield High is where his brother got shot. “When the stars realized they had no hands, no eyes and no legs, they went back up to the sky and made their own formations. The made Cassiopeia, the Big Dipper, and Orion.
At our school, he's been punished, suspended. This same kid. He's got the potential. He loves learning, but we're ruining him. The pity of it is the waste. Unless we stop this punitive mentality, we're going to lose a lot of kids. We've got to teach them how to deal with their anger, but we can't do it unless we learn how to deal with our own anger.
Every time he saw me, he'd say, “Peace, Mrs. Kurose.” He'd be at the playground fighting with other kids and when he saw me, he'd say, “Ooops, I forgot. Peace.” And he'd stop fighting.
After he left my class, I'd see him sitting in the principal's office. I'd say, “Send him to me. I know how to deal with him.” So many times, our minority kids would be sitting in that office all day. Its their punishment. I still have that story of his at school, all bound for him. But I'm afraid he's gone.
I'm not pessimistic. I have lots of hope. I think more people are finding out about cooperative learning. Science is exciting. Math is exciting. But it means little unless it is incorporated with peace. I feel that I need to be there to be part of making the change.
She is a Nisei, born and raised in Seattle.
As a sixteen-year-old, shortly after World War II was declared, she and her family, among scores of thousands of Japanese Americans, were arrested and sent off to internment camps.
“Horse Stalls and pigpens were converted to shelters for many of us. Our family of six was assigned to one room. They gave us burlap bags. We were told to stuff straw in them and they would be our mattresses...There were machine-gun towers in the parking lot. The guns were aimed inside, at us. People would drive around in cars, calling us names. You'd feel like an animal in the zoo.
“Everything was so surreal. The assignment one teacher in camp gave us was: 'Write why you are proud to be and American.' [Laughs softly.] We had to salute the flag every day and sing the national anthem.”
Around 1965, I was a Head Start volunteer. I got turned on to working with young people, so after my children were raised, I went back to school. I got my master's degree in early childhood education when I was fifty-six years old.
I started teaching in the early '70s and have been doing so ever since. I teach six-year olds, first grade. I've taught kindergarten and preschool, as well. I teach mathematics, science, and peace.
How does one teach peace? Well, I immediately say to them, “If you're not at peace with yourself, with your neighbor, with your community, you can't really learn very much. We have to get rid of all this garbage, this angry, competitive feeling. Then we'll all get along.”
We'd go outside and do these exercises in the morning to invigorate ourselves. We pretend that we're taking all the anger out of our bodies, getting rid of our anxieties and throwing them all into outer space. We're not polluting the space, because what we're throwing out is just being disintegrated. So we talk about environment that way also.
I tell them: When you're in school, no one is going to be sent to the principal, and nobody's going to be turned bad. If something unpleasant happens, we're going to resolve our own conflicts. When trouble may start, I tell them to stop, rest awhile, let's talk things over, because we need a cooling-off period. What happens in our classroom has to be a win-win situation for everybody. We don't have a winner and a loser.
Under no circumstances will they be punished. I tell them that making a mistake is the most natural thing to do. Everybody makes mistakes. The thing to do is to learn from our mistakes. The more mistakes you make, the more you're learning, so don't worry about that.
At my school, they didn't quite know what to do about me. The principal called me and said we were to attend a community meeting. I said, “Fine. Are the other teachers coming, too?” He said, “No. You'll be meeting with parents and you must be prepared to tell them how you're going to teach their privileged children.”
When I walked in, there were forty parents already seated. They had met an hour before, getting all their questions organized. They immediately wanted to know where I had been educated. I told them I had been to the University of Washington and was just about to get my master's degree.
They wanted to know if their children would pick up my Japanese accent. I told the, “I'm sorry, but this is a Seattle public school accent. I was born in this city.” They were so very anxious and worried. “you've been teaching poor children all these years. How will you deal with our children, who have had lots of preschool and are very advanced? Can you meet the challenge of these children?” I said I could meet the challenge of any child. “It's the challenge of the parents that may be more difficult.” They were quite shocked. [Laughs softly.] Two parents monitored my classroom every day for a month.
Here is a very affluent neighborhood of ambitious parents who don't know quite what to do with this Asian woman who is so outspoken. After a month of monitoring, they decided that I could teach. Eventually, these parents became more supportive of me than the staff did. They were the ones who recommended me for the Teacher for Excellence Award. Some of their attitudes were at first condescending, but that changed and it was wonderful.
The staff had a very hard time of it when I first came there. Remember, I had displaced a white teacher, who was transferred to the central area. They were naturally feeling sorry for the other woman and said, in so many words, that it wasn't fair that I should get all the breaks because I was of the minority. They felt it was a real privilege for me to come here to teach white children. Referring to my old school, they'd say, “Oooh, how did you stand it?” I said I loved it down there. I said, “Actually, I feel it's an inconvenience for me to come here. At the old place, I could walk to school. Now I have to drive all the way out there.”
One teacher asked me, “Who are you?”
I'm Aki Kurose”
“Well, you know what I mean.”
“No, I'm not sure, though I suspect I know what you mean.”
“What are you?”
“Oh, I'm a teacher.”
Finally, she said, “Well, where do you come from?”
“Oh. I come from Madrona.” (That's the area where I live in Seattle.)
“Well, no---you know what I mean.”
“I think I do.”
“What kind of name in Kurose?”
“That's my husband's name.”
She was getting quite angry with me. Finally, I said, “Are you asking my ethnicity?”
She said, “Yes. Are you Chinese or Japanese?”
“I am Japanese and proud of it. Why is it so important to you?”
Then she said some of her friends got killed in World War II. I said, “I'm very sorry, but I don't think I'm responsible for it. I'm against war, so please don't regard me as your enemy.” For many years, on December 7, they'd bring up Pearl Harbor: “Your people...” They'd want to talk to the students about it. I'd argue with them that that kind of history isn't what it's about. I always tell my students that war is the enemy, so you can't name people as the enemy.
It's changed a lot in the nineteen years I've been there. Because our busing is no longer mandatory, it's starting to get sterile again. We've lost a lot of black students. Oh, it was a challenge and hard at the beginning. I think the problem had more to do with money than color. You send these kids to a neighborhood with Porsches, Volvos, Mercedes, and mothers who are constantly at school to see to the needs of their own children. The whole lifestyle is so different from these bused kids, usually of single parents or working ones who can't participate. The PTAs there are like pink teas in beautiful homes. What working parent can go to a PTA meeting at ten o'clock in the morning?
The kids in my class were wonderful and starting to get along with each other. I said, “We're not going to compete.” Many of the parents in these affluent neighborhoods are so anxious for their kids to be at the top of the class. I said, “I'm sorry, in my classroom there's nobody at the top of the class, nobody in the middle, and nobody at the bottom. We work cooperatively. No grades in my class.”
At first, the parents didn't like it. They love to have their Susie first in line, top in math or top reader. I said I don't give tests that way. I give them problem-solving activities where they work cooperatively. Nobody's answer is wrong. We try to justify the answer. If they say, “Four plus three equals eight,” I say, “Let's see if we can justify that statement.” So the children work in groups of four and think about it. Each may come up with a different answer. So they rethink it. This one little boy who had four beans and three beans had to justify the total of eight. He suddenly realized something. He then broke one bean in half and said, “Four plus two plus the two halves of the seventh bean equal eight.” He thought it through.
When I first began teaching, I thought I had to have lots of knowledge that I could share with my students, so they could memorize all these things. That's not what education is about. We need to teach them that the planet earth is here for us to cherish and share with everybody. We have to stop this possessive approach, especially with young children. I realize as they grow up, they may have to compete. But at the low-elementary level, they need to build up their self-esteem and self-worth and, above all, learn to think.
I remember a letter from a college student who'd been one of my kids. “You made me interested in math and science. They have been among my favorites ever since. I know that not only does 5+6=11. So does 6+5. But the foremost part of your curriculum was peace. It has made the big difference in my life.” Teaching them the skill of living on this earth in a peaceful manner is what education should be about.
It's so sad to hear teachers saying, “I can't wait to retire. I can't wait for the school year to be over. I can't wait until three-thirty when the kids will be out of my classroom.” If you've lost that spirit, I don't think you should be teaching.
Some of them are burnt out because the classes are so large or because they can't deal with the anger of the kids. When busing started, most of the black kids were out in the hallway or being sent to the principal's office. I protested: this gives the wrong message. The other kids, the whites, se them in the hallways or in the principal's office and think they're all bad kids.
I said we don't need to punish kids this way. So I've been working with communtiy people, trying to get a peace curriculum passed through the legislature, because if you can't get along with one another, what;s the use of having a Ph.D.?
I have four kids at each of six tables. Every morning, I have a bouquet of flowers on each table so the students may enjoy its beauty---and learn the botanical names. In this way, they learn to spell rhododendron, azalea, chrysanthemum. They put a flower picture book together. On the back, they write a poem about the flowers they've come to know. In learning botany, they learn math as well---how the leaves are attached, how they are spaced, they count the petals. When the petals fall, they don't throw them away, they study them. You'll see children treasuring the stems, with the petals gone. It is not learning how to memorize, but how to see them as beautiful parts of their lives.
We grow salmon in the classroom. I take the children to the fish hatchery at the University of Washington. We see the spawning salmon. They allow us to squeeze the eggs out, which we bring back to the classroom.. We have an aquarium with refrigeration. And we grow the salmon eggs. We raise salmon! [Laughs delightedly.] Part of our curriculum is the life cycle of a salmon. The children learn a song about these fish. We release the little fingerlings back into the fresh streams, where they can hide under the rocks and gradually finish their lives, going back into the sea. Then we all sing “Bon Voyage, Bon Voyage.”
Every morning, we go outside to exercise. My bused-in-children, especially, don't need to be thrown into a classroom immediately. They need to get some of that energy out. We make a big circle, we study the clouds, the motion of the sun. While they exercise, they count by fives, by tens, “higher, higher.” All this time they're learning multiplication.
As we observe the clouds, they come up with these fantastic things: “Mrs. Kurose, you're talking about these cirrus clouds, but why do we see the cumulus?” They use these words not by rote, but because they connect with them what they experience at that moment. It's so exciting! I realize I'm learning so much from my students.
I encourge them to write constantly. They keep a journal and they write their thoughts. I don't say, “Spell it right,” certainly not at the beginning. They do inventive spelling and their stories are so exciting. I'm pretty good now at deciphering their spelling. But they know from the beginning what they've written. They share it with the group. So the observing and the writing are relevant to their day.
They know all the phases of the moon. My students tell their parents about a waxing, gibbous moon. A number of mothers and fathers there have told me, “We didn't know what a gibbous moon was until our first graders came home and told us.. We're learning astronomy from your students.”
I was honored as Teacher of the Year for the Seattle area. My name was submitted by the parents. The following year, the National Science Center gave me the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science and Mathematics. There was one winner from each state.
Bush was president. It was very ironic because under him the teachers have been damned with fewer benefits, and the students with fewer services. At the Rose Garden, some of the teachers were so excited about Bush. One said, “I'm never going to wash my hands.” I said, “Ughh!”
Bush came up to me, smiling: “Hi, would you like to take a picture with me?” I just couldn't help myself and said, “No, you're not my favorite president.” He just looked. I don't think he was even listening. I said, “You're supposed to be our 'education president,' but you don't show it. You're allotting all this money to the military, when all these children need education.” I added, “One stealth bomber would pay for the salary of hundreds of teachers. Two stealth bombers would probably supply many good school districts. You need to change your priorities.”
He just stood there with his plastic smile and he said, “Okay,” as he put his arms around me and had this person take a picture of us. He didn't hear a word I said.
I was thrilled to be in Washington. I was thrilled to see the White House. But I was sad because things just didn't fit. I had borrowed a dress from my friend because I didn't have any formal gown to wear. I put “Peace” buttons all the way across. I wear these buttons every day, on every garment. When my grandchildren come over, the first thing they say is, “Okay, you have them on.” My students love it.
During our Curriculum Night, the parents are invited. We have to explain what we teach. I said, “I want you to know that peace is the most important part of my curriculum. I teach science and math, but if a child is not at peace with himself or herself, with the neighbors, with the community, true learning cannot take place.”
On this night, one man said, “That's none of your business. I want you to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic. That's why I'm sending my kid to school, to learn the three Rs. What's all this nonsense you're handing out about atomic bombs, Sadako, or whatever?” I said, “Yes, I do tell them about Sadako and the thousand cranes because I think it's a wonderful children's story.”
Sadako was a twelve-year-old girl who was an A-bomb victim and was dying of leukemia. There was a Japanese legend that if you fold a thousand paper cranes, you can have good luck and a long life. She made 650 cranes and then she died. I thought children could relate to this.
I siad to this man, “Please , take this book home and read it. It's not controversial, it's not subversive.” e took it but he wasn't very happy. I said, “If you have any problem, you can always call me at home. Or I'll stay after school. Or I can come to see you. I'm interested in the parents as well as the children. I work hard and I want you to know I will deal with any of your concerns.”
This was in September. That was the last I heard from him---until November. I got this call, “Mrs. Kurose, I'd like an appointment with you. Can I drop in after school?” I said, “Of course.” I was nervous, had no idea what he was going to say. He said, “I want to tell you a story.” I thought: Uh oh. “My son is reading so beautifully His math is wonderful, and he treats his younger brother so nicely. He's no a mean kid anymore. And he likes to talk things out. I offered him a set of G.i. Joes, but he said to me, 'Dad, Mrs. Kurose would be very upset. That's a war toy. I would rather have a microscope.'” He was delighted. He said, “Mrs. Kurose, if you have any tax problems or whatever, I'd be happy to do your taxes for free.” He was an accountant.
Another parent who came said, “Boy, were our faces red! My wife and I were yelling at each other, and our little daughter said, 'Stop, stop! You're supposed to cool off and talk things out.'” The child was in my class.
Is my teaching today better than when I was younger? Absolutely. My face gets red when I think of the first day I taught. “All right, children, let's pass out the workbook.” Ridiculous. Aside from the classes I take, the children are teaching me how to discover things. You can tell a child that mixing vinegar with baking soda is going to fizz, but it won't make an impression unless they do it themselves. We do little magic things, too. I take a boiled egg and put it on top of a bottle. It won't go in no matter how we push it. We put a match inside, burn out the carbon monoxide [sic], and pretty soon the egg plops in. I ask them why it did so. They have to think things out. How can we get it out? You try to shake it, you try to suck it, it won't come out. You blow into it and the egg pops up so dramatically. The kids go “Wow!” They see it.
Some of the teachers don't like my methods. They're very regimented and feel that my children are too free moving. One complained, “Why are you taking them outside for exercise? They get enough exercise on the bus.” I said, “I'm not only doing it for my bus children, I'm doing it for myself as well. I get inspired.”
I can understand some of these young teachers with families. It's a full-time job, so they lead a difficult double life. They spend so much time on paperwork, xeroxing, and dittoes. And these SATs are so meaningless. It's an insult to the intelligence of young people. You don't need paper and pencil. You can count beans, multiply them, grown them. All this is magic and so is learning.
I have a science club from kindergarten through the fifth grade. I have a cross-grade teaching: big kids work with little kids. They love it.
The most important thing I learned was to respect children. You hear lots of complaints about how young kids aren't respecting us anymore. Are we respecting them? Respect begets respect. Children are very perceptive. If you are not valuing them, they know it immediately.
I wonder if we don't really ruin kids in school, cause them to lose respect for themselves. I think the biggest crime is to have a kid sent down to the office. I see that all the time. I see them constantly getting expelled. Why would you expel a kid? Let's face the truth: somewhere along the line, we have failed in our teaching.
In our state, we just passed “Three Strikes and You're Out” legislation. Three crimes and you're incarcerated forever, or something. Won't we ever learn that punished children become punitive people? If you wallop them, that;s the only thing they're going to know, so the wallop others. Treat them as human beings and they'll act that way.
Edward was eight years old. His fourteen-year-old brother was shot in a playground, a gangland situation. The mother was homeless. “Can I take him home?” I asked her. She said, “It's up to you.” So I brought him home, bought him some clean clothes. I bought him three pairs of socks and three pairs of shorts. He was so proud. “Do I got to give these to my brother?” His brother was still in the hospital. I said, “No, these are for you.” He thought I'd given him gold bullion. His eyes were like big marbles. “I get to keep these?” I thought I was a do-gooder, but he did more for me than I did for him. I was impressed with his sudden pride.
I said, “Now we're going to eat.” He said, “We get to go to McDonald's?” I said, “No, we're going to buy a trout, with a head and tail and everything. You're going to cook it. We're going to practice science and have a great meal at the same time.” We brought it home. He examined it. We washed it. I let him look at the flesh, study it, salt and pepper it, put it in the oven, and watch it change. As he saw the flesh grow firmer, he shouted excitedly, It's changing!”
We put it on a platter. I said, “Okay, this is going to be your dinner. But let's de=bone it.” So we did it together, put the skeleton to the side and he examined the bones. He kept shouting, “Wow!” He got to take the skeleton to school the next day to his great delight. I put out the goblets with milk in one, juice in the other, and water in the third. At different levels, I said, “Take your spoon and hit those.” He hit the glasses and cried out, “I'm making music!”
I took him outside to look at the sky. I said, “There's Orion's belt and there's the Big Dipper and Cassiopeia.” I explained it to him. Now, he always talks about that night and his discovery of the sky.
Then I said it was time to go to bed. And when he saw the bed in a room of his own, he couldn't believe it. He had never slept in a bed by himself, let alone a room of his own. The next morning, he made his bed very carefully.
When I took him to school, during the creative writing time, he said, “I got a story.” He told it to me: “It's about stars that came down to Garfield to play football.” Garfield High is where his brother got shot. “When the stars realized they had no hands, no eyes and no legs, they went back up to the sky and made their own formations. The made Cassiopeia, the Big Dipper, and Orion.
At our school, he's been punished, suspended. This same kid. He's got the potential. He loves learning, but we're ruining him. The pity of it is the waste. Unless we stop this punitive mentality, we're going to lose a lot of kids. We've got to teach them how to deal with their anger, but we can't do it unless we learn how to deal with our own anger.
Every time he saw me, he'd say, “Peace, Mrs. Kurose.” He'd be at the playground fighting with other kids and when he saw me, he'd say, “Ooops, I forgot. Peace.” And he'd stop fighting.
After he left my class, I'd see him sitting in the principal's office. I'd say, “Send him to me. I know how to deal with him.” So many times, our minority kids would be sitting in that office all day. Its their punishment. I still have that story of his at school, all bound for him. But I'm afraid he's gone.
I'm not pessimistic. I have lots of hope. I think more people are finding out about cooperative learning. Science is exciting. Math is exciting. But it means little unless it is incorporated with peace. I feel that I need to be there to be part of making the change.
30 March 2010
Expanding the discussion...
Teachers of eastern religions talk about expansive vs. limiting thinking. Expansive thoughts tend to broaden views, promote connection to others, reduce tensions, breed trust, and promote creativity. Limiting, or contractive, thinking tends to narrow perspectives, incite division and distrust, induce paranoia, and reduce thinking to stereotypes, platitudes, and dogma.
Leaders can promote expansive or contractive thinking by their actions. Do your leaders:
...encourage all staff, parents and other community members to talk with each other and among themselves, or separate individuals from each other by spreading stories and gossip, punishing those who talk, and initiating whispering campaigns?
...encourage thinking out of the box, or reward certain ideas with applause while discouraging others with mockery?
...work to create a consensus from multiple viewpoints, or work to create a voting majority that can crush dissent?
...dig for information to illuminate discussion, or cherry-pick information to support a viewpoint?
...do all their business in the open for all to observe, or maneuver behind closed doors?
...allow ample time for consideration, or rush to judgment?
...treat all equally, or play favorites?
...strive for diversity of thinking, or aim for uniformity?
...say the same things to all people, or tailor their speech to their audiences?
...match their actions to their words so all remains open and accountable, or say one thing and do another?
Are your leaders helping people work better together, or setting people against each other? No matter what they are doing, you can make the environment expansive rather than contractive by your own actions:
If you hear a story, check it out in person.
If you are bullied into silence, make a point of talking louder and encouraging those around you to open up. Bullying requires the consent of the bullied.
If your leaders humiliate people, including you, call them on it publicly.
If they narrow the discussion, open it again.
If someone's views are crushed, make a point of bringing those views forward again and standing in solidarity with the silenced, even if you do not support their viewpoint.
If you feel rushed, others probably do too, so pour cold molasses on the discussion.
If the door is closed, open it.
If someone whispers to you, respond at full volume.
If you are approached in private, draw another into the conversation. If that is not possible, make it clear that you will not keep what is said confidential. If the person talking with you is uncomfortable with that, you do not have to continue.
Refuse to listen to gossip. If you overhear it, don't pass it on. Ask the gossiper if he/she is speaking from first-hand knowledge or just repeating rumors. Stop stories in their tracks: the next one will be about you.
If things you hear make you uncomfortable about someone, march right up to that person and talk it out. Chances are your discomfort was groundless.
Contractive actions cannot shut people down as long as enough people consciously practice expansive behavior, any more than darkness can survive if you turn on the light.
Leaders can promote expansive or contractive thinking by their actions. Do your leaders:
...encourage all staff, parents and other community members to talk with each other and among themselves, or separate individuals from each other by spreading stories and gossip, punishing those who talk, and initiating whispering campaigns?
...encourage thinking out of the box, or reward certain ideas with applause while discouraging others with mockery?
...work to create a consensus from multiple viewpoints, or work to create a voting majority that can crush dissent?
...dig for information to illuminate discussion, or cherry-pick information to support a viewpoint?
...do all their business in the open for all to observe, or maneuver behind closed doors?
...allow ample time for consideration, or rush to judgment?
...treat all equally, or play favorites?
...strive for diversity of thinking, or aim for uniformity?
...say the same things to all people, or tailor their speech to their audiences?
...match their actions to their words so all remains open and accountable, or say one thing and do another?
Are your leaders helping people work better together, or setting people against each other? No matter what they are doing, you can make the environment expansive rather than contractive by your own actions:
If you hear a story, check it out in person.
If you are bullied into silence, make a point of talking louder and encouraging those around you to open up. Bullying requires the consent of the bullied.
If your leaders humiliate people, including you, call them on it publicly.
If they narrow the discussion, open it again.
If someone's views are crushed, make a point of bringing those views forward again and standing in solidarity with the silenced, even if you do not support their viewpoint.
If you feel rushed, others probably do too, so pour cold molasses on the discussion.
If the door is closed, open it.
If someone whispers to you, respond at full volume.
If you are approached in private, draw another into the conversation. If that is not possible, make it clear that you will not keep what is said confidential. If the person talking with you is uncomfortable with that, you do not have to continue.
Refuse to listen to gossip. If you overhear it, don't pass it on. Ask the gossiper if he/she is speaking from first-hand knowledge or just repeating rumors. Stop stories in their tracks: the next one will be about you.
If things you hear make you uncomfortable about someone, march right up to that person and talk it out. Chances are your discomfort was groundless.
Contractive actions cannot shut people down as long as enough people consciously practice expansive behavior, any more than darkness can survive if you turn on the light.
26 March 2010
A Reminder...
The School Board has 9 members. Each of them alone has no power, but together they set a course for the district. They elect a chair to create agendas and run meetings. That chair has no super-powers beyond those roles.
Board members can meet with individuals and groups between meetings of the full board, but their opinions carry NO weight except in the context of the larger group. Since the chair is no more than one of nine, he or she can serve as a center of communication between meetings, but no more.
The superintendent is an administrator, employed at the pleasure of the board and delegated to carry out the board's bidding. He or she carries no super powers beyond the direction set by the board. The superintendent is delegated to represent the board, not to pursue goals independent of the board's stated wishes.
The board stands between the communities, the state, and the schools, representing the interests of all three, yet is entrusted to stand against any of those interests if the welfare of the children is at stake. Its paramount duty is to stand as guardians of the welfare of ALL the children served by the district's schools. As such, members of the board must both represent and resist each of the above constituancies.
The strength of the board lies in it's diversity, not in it's unity of purpose, thus any attempt to bully or circumvent the board is a direct threat to the children of the district, and should be considered no less.
Board members can meet with individuals and groups between meetings of the full board, but their opinions carry NO weight except in the context of the larger group. Since the chair is no more than one of nine, he or she can serve as a center of communication between meetings, but no more.
The superintendent is an administrator, employed at the pleasure of the board and delegated to carry out the board's bidding. He or she carries no super powers beyond the direction set by the board. The superintendent is delegated to represent the board, not to pursue goals independent of the board's stated wishes.
The board stands between the communities, the state, and the schools, representing the interests of all three, yet is entrusted to stand against any of those interests if the welfare of the children is at stake. Its paramount duty is to stand as guardians of the welfare of ALL the children served by the district's schools. As such, members of the board must both represent and resist each of the above constituancies.
The strength of the board lies in it's diversity, not in it's unity of purpose, thus any attempt to bully or circumvent the board is a direct threat to the children of the district, and should be considered no less.
22 March 2010
The One-A-Month Club
Being just a rural dweeb, I only now realized the wicked-grand movement I started in early 2004---You're Welcome!---by sending a piece published in my local paper and then forgetting about it---never took off. Like walking back to the garden for the first time in August and not being able to locate the radishes.
In Nov 06, by my calculations, I should have had the entire population of earth on board, and be marching by now shoulder-to-...whatever...with all sentient beings in the known universe. No Bush 2nd term, war eliminated, energy independence, global warming reversed, single payer health care, shared wealth, the Stock Exchange converted to a community greenhouse, suits in exile. Guess a few other charter members forgot too.
Back to the original 2004 scheme, contents updated to vers. 2.010 ...a veritable progressive Ponzi...Mary Kay for the soul...a Bernie M. for social justice:
* * *
Some of us don't belong. We don't play well with others.
We aren't Democrats or Republicans. We aren't rich. We are not connected. We don't belong to any Sierra Club. We don't dress cool. We still bend for pennies on the pavement. We are not powerful or pretty. We snack while watching TV and don't work it off later. We leave early, get home late, and get bone-tired. Vacation means home from work a week. Travel means driving so far we have to buy gas. Eating out is sitting instead of taking it home in a bag. Nobody would mistake us for Wall Street.
But there are a lot of us, and when we're all together we're big and scary. (Shit, some are scary by themselves.) We don't come together often since we don't belong, but we're beginning to feel our oats. We have not quite figured out why we're so pissed, though, so sometimes we switch sides mid-sentence and mis-spell stuff on posters.
We know we've been had ... and not just the last 10 years, but ever since we can remember. This isn't about politics anymore, but about class, wealth and greed. We don't belong, but we're not stupid.
So what do we do? Get out and organize? Yeah, right. Got some corporate campaign donors for us?
There's one kind of organizing that has real appeal where we live, though, and that's the pyramid scheme. Come to think of it, even the rich and savvy know you never lose with this one. Remember that lady who sent a dollar each to the top 5 in that letter and got a million back the next month? Remember the pension funds that....Need I say more?
How about this: Find one person this month. Get that person to find one more next month. The letters and undies parties we did before were just for practice. You know how to do it...now let's go for a big prize, like the right to go on living in civilized society.
Introducing The One-a-Month Club! Ta Da! We talk, and we convince one person a month that she or he can make a difference. We ask our recruit to find one other person a month. That's just about it, except we agree to do one extra task each month to make the world a better place. It can be anything: call a senator's office with an opinion, write a letter to the paper, drive a shut-in friend to vote, stand up and spout off in a meeting, send twenty bucks to Haiti, call back old One-a-Month recruits to see if they're still members. One thing, that's all.
For those who were sneaking a peek at the TV or going for a snack, let's recap those membership rules: 1. Find one person a month to join; 2. Take one action a month to make a better world: nothing snarky, evil, dishonest, disingenuous, underhanded, stupid, or otherwise Foxy-Newsy Tea Palin-ish allowed. If you can do that, welcome to the One-a-Month Club.
You won't get a newsletter or freebies -- no membership bumper sticker, jacket, or pink Caddy -- but you don't have to send money and you'll get your country back.
Of course, we're too dumb to understand anything like exponential growth. We can't figure out that one-a-month reaches 16 million people in 2 years, then 2 billion by the 2012 election. (Whoa, 2 billion? That's more than vote in India, Dude!)
* * *
The fatal flaw? In the glare of hindsight, it's painfully clear. It was just too much to ask.
How about 1-by-2? Talk to someone within two months and do six good deeds a year. In 5 years we could have one billion members. I could post a printable membership card to pass out...make it green so it could go in your wallet with all the one dollar bills and blend.
Nah, sorry, still asking too much. Let's just feel righteous and complain while washing Tupperware in Amway soap.
In Nov 06, by my calculations, I should have had the entire population of earth on board, and be marching by now shoulder-to-...whatever...with all sentient beings in the known universe. No Bush 2nd term, war eliminated, energy independence, global warming reversed, single payer health care, shared wealth, the Stock Exchange converted to a community greenhouse, suits in exile. Guess a few other charter members forgot too.
Back to the original 2004 scheme, contents updated to vers. 2.010 ...a veritable progressive Ponzi...Mary Kay for the soul...a Bernie M. for social justice:
* * *
Some of us don't belong. We don't play well with others.
We aren't Democrats or Republicans. We aren't rich. We are not connected. We don't belong to any Sierra Club. We don't dress cool. We still bend for pennies on the pavement. We are not powerful or pretty. We snack while watching TV and don't work it off later. We leave early, get home late, and get bone-tired. Vacation means home from work a week. Travel means driving so far we have to buy gas. Eating out is sitting instead of taking it home in a bag. Nobody would mistake us for Wall Street.
But there are a lot of us, and when we're all together we're big and scary. (Shit, some are scary by themselves.) We don't come together often since we don't belong, but we're beginning to feel our oats. We have not quite figured out why we're so pissed, though, so sometimes we switch sides mid-sentence and mis-spell stuff on posters.
We know we've been had ... and not just the last 10 years, but ever since we can remember. This isn't about politics anymore, but about class, wealth and greed. We don't belong, but we're not stupid.
So what do we do? Get out and organize? Yeah, right. Got some corporate campaign donors for us?
There's one kind of organizing that has real appeal where we live, though, and that's the pyramid scheme. Come to think of it, even the rich and savvy know you never lose with this one. Remember that lady who sent a dollar each to the top 5 in that letter and got a million back the next month? Remember the pension funds that....Need I say more?
How about this: Find one person this month. Get that person to find one more next month. The letters and undies parties we did before were just for practice. You know how to do it...now let's go for a big prize, like the right to go on living in civilized society.
Introducing The One-a-Month Club! Ta Da! We talk, and we convince one person a month that she or he can make a difference. We ask our recruit to find one other person a month. That's just about it, except we agree to do one extra task each month to make the world a better place. It can be anything: call a senator's office with an opinion, write a letter to the paper, drive a shut-in friend to vote, stand up and spout off in a meeting, send twenty bucks to Haiti, call back old One-a-Month recruits to see if they're still members. One thing, that's all.
For those who were sneaking a peek at the TV or going for a snack, let's recap those membership rules: 1. Find one person a month to join; 2. Take one action a month to make a better world: nothing snarky, evil, dishonest, disingenuous, underhanded, stupid, or otherwise Foxy-Newsy Tea Palin-ish allowed. If you can do that, welcome to the One-a-Month Club.
You won't get a newsletter or freebies -- no membership bumper sticker, jacket, or pink Caddy -- but you don't have to send money and you'll get your country back.
Of course, we're too dumb to understand anything like exponential growth. We can't figure out that one-a-month reaches 16 million people in 2 years, then 2 billion by the 2012 election. (Whoa, 2 billion? That's more than vote in India, Dude!)
* * *
The fatal flaw? In the glare of hindsight, it's painfully clear. It was just too much to ask.
How about 1-by-2? Talk to someone within two months and do six good deeds a year. In 5 years we could have one billion members. I could post a printable membership card to pass out...make it green so it could go in your wallet with all the one dollar bills and blend.
Nah, sorry, still asking too much. Let's just feel righteous and complain while washing Tupperware in Amway soap.
The Logical Tragedy of Benson, Vermont, from Gatto's Underground History
In 1995, just about one hundred years after the inception of modern institutional schooling in America, the little town of Benson in western Vermont set a national record by voting down its proposed school budget for the twelfth time. Charlie Usher, assistant superintendent in Benson, declared his bewilderment at the town’s irresponsibility. Mr. Usher suggested the task was to get "at the root of why people would be willing to let their schools fall apart..." I think Mr. Usher is right, so let’s see what we can turn up by using common sense. But first, to show how united in outrage Benson school officials were, Education Week, the bible of the teaching business, quoted Theresa Mulholland, principal at the Benson school (more on this shortly) as saying nobody in town had a good explanation for what they were doing: "I think they just want to say ‘No,’ " she said, as if those townspeople were ornery kids or retarded children. Benson just didn’t get it. Schools need lots of money, or, as Usher suggested, they fall apart.
The Education Week piece in which I read these things covered every single inch of a two-page tabloid spread, yet nowhere could I find a single word indicating the problem might just be that its taxpayers and voters didn’t regard the Benson system as their own. Nor is there even a hint Benson may have abandoned its belief that what goes on in school is an essential enterprise worth a substantial part of its income to promote.
So I read this newspaper account of a little town in Vermont and its defiance of the state school institution pretty carefully because I sensed some important message buried there. On the third run-through I discovered what I was looking for. Let’s start with Assistant Superintendent Usher. His title implies that hidden somewhere out of sight there is a Superintendent somebody, too. If you don’t find that odd it’s because I haven’t told you that the entire school district of Benson has exactly one school with 137 kids in it. A brand-new school with a principal, too. Apparently you can’t have a principal without an assistant superintendent giving orders to that lowly functionary and a superintendent giving orders to the assistant superintendent. Three high-ranking pedagogues whose collective cost for services is about $250,000—nearly $2,000 a kid. That’s nice work if you can get it.
The new Benson school itself is worth a closer look. Its construction caused property taxes to go up 40 percent in one year, quite a shock to local homeowners just hanging on by their fingernails. This school would have been rejected outright by local taxpayers, who had (they thought) a perfectly good school already, but the state condemned the old school for not having wheelchair ramps and other features nobody ever considered an essential part of education before. Costs of reaching code compliance in the old structure were so close to the cost of a new school that taxpayers surrendered. The bond issue was finally voted. Even so, it passed only narrowly. What happened next will be no surprise. Benson School turned out to cost a lot more than voters expected. I am skeptical that it cost more than the State of Vermont expected, though.
I have some personal experience with Vermont’s condemnation of sound school structures from the little town of Walden, hardly more than a speck on the map northeast of Benson in the most beautiful hill country you can imagine. A few years ago, four pretty one-room schools dating from the nineteenth century, schools still serving 120 kids with just four teachers and no administrators, were condemned by the same crew from Montpelier that gave Benson its current tax headache. I was asked by a citizen group in Walden to drive up and speak at a rally to save these remarkable community schools, beloved by their clientele. If I tell you when I woke in the morning in Walden a moose was rooting vegetables from the garden of my hostess’ home you’ll be able to imagine them better.
The group I came to speak for, "The Road Rats" as it called itself, had already defeated school consolidation the previous year. Montpelier’s goal was to close the little schools and bus kids to a new central location miles from home. Now Montpelier took off the gloves. If persuasion and seduction wouldn’t work, coercion would. Let’s call what happened "The Benson Maneuver," passing building code provisions with no connection to normal reality. This accomplished, Vermont condemned the one-room schools for violation of these provisions. All official estimates to reach new code standards were very close to the price of consolidating the little schools into a big new one.
Road Rat resistance would be unlikely to mobilize a voting majority a second time; the publicists of mass-production economics have successfully altered public taste to believe it doesn’t make sense to repair something old when for the same price you can have something new. Our only hope lay in getting a construction bid low enough that voters could see they had been flim-flammed. It seemed worth a try. The Walden group had been unable to find a contractor willing to publicly oppose the will of Montpelier, but by a lucky accident I knew a Vermont master architect. I called his home in Montpelier. Two hours later he was in Walden touring the condemned buildings.
Vital to understanding why the state wanted these places closed so badly was that everything in such places worked against professionalization and standardization: parents were too close to the classroom to allow smooth "professional" governance to sneak by unnoticed. It wasn’t possible in such schools to float a scientifically prepared curriculum initiative without having it come under close and critical scrutiny. That was intolerable to Montpelier, or rather to the larger octopus the Montpelier tentacle wiggled for.
After inspection, my architect pronounced the official estimates to reach code compliance cynical and dishonest. They were three times higher than the work would cost allowing for a normal profit. My architect knew the principals in the politically well-connected construction firms which had submitted the inflated bids. He knew the game they were playing, too. "The purpose of this is to kill one-room schools," he said. "All these guys will be paid off one way or another with state work for forwarding the agenda whether they get this state job or not." I asked if he would give us a counter-estimate we might use to wake up voters. "No," he said. "If I did I wouldn’t get another building job in Vermont."
Let’s get back to Benson, a classic illustration how the political state and its licensed allies feed like parasites on working men and women. Where Education Week saw deep mystery over citizen disaffection, the facts put a different spin on things. In a jurisdiction serving only 137 children, a number which would have been handled in the old and successful Walden schools with four teachers—and no supervisors other than the town’s traditions and the willing oversight loving parents would provide because the students were, after all, their own kids—taxpayers were being forced to sustain the expense of:
A nonteaching superintendent
A nonteaching assistant superintendent
A nonteaching principal
A nonteaching assistant principal
A full time nurse
A full time guidance counselor
A full time librarian
Eleven full time schoolteachers
An unknown number of accessory personnel
Space, desks, supplies, technology for all of these
One hundred thirty-seven schoolchildren? Is there a soul who believes Benson’s kids are better served in their new school with this mercenary army than Walden’s 120 were in four rooms with four teachers? If so, the customary ways we measure educational success don’t reflect this superiority. What happened at Benson—the use of forced schooling to impose career ladders of unnecessary work on a poor community—has happened all over North America. School is a jobs project for a large class of people it would be difficult to find employment for otherwise in a frightening job market, one in which the majority of all employment in the nation is either temporary or part-time.
Forcible redistribution of the income of others to provide work for pedagogues and for a support staff larger than the actual teaching corps is a pyramid scheme run at the expense of children. The more "make-work" which has to be found for school employees, the worse for kids because their own enterprise is stifled by constant professional tinkering in order to justify this employment. Suppose we eliminated the first seven positions from the list of functionaries paid in Benson: the superintendent, assistant superintendent, principal, assistant principal, nurse, guidance counselor, and librarian, plus three of the eleven teachers and all those accessory personnel. We’d have the work those folks do absorbed by the remaining eight teachers and whatever community volunteer assistance we could recruit. This would still allow a class size of only seventeen kids per teacher, a ratio big-city teachers would kill to get, and hardly more than half the load one-room Walden teachers carried. Yet it would save this little community over half a million dollars yearly.
In our hypothetical example, we left Benson with eight teachers, twice the number Walden enjoyed in its two hundred-year experience with one-room schooling. Only a calculating machine could consider a large, consolidated school to which children must commute long distances as a real advance in human affairs. An advance in wasting time certainly. Consider this angle now: who in your judgment has a moral right to decide what size weight can be fastened on the backs of the working citizens of Benson? Whose decision should that be?
From a chart included in the Education Week article, I saw that Vermont school bureaucrats extracted $6,500 in 1995 for each student who sat in their spanking new schools. That computes at $162 a week per kid. Is it fair to ask how private schools provided satisfactory service for a national average of only $3,000 a kid, about $58 a week, the same year? Or how parochial schools did it for $2,300, $44 a week? Or homeschools for a mere $500 or $1,000, or about $10 or $20 a week? Do you believe public school kids were better served for the additional money spent?
Those other places could do it because they didn’t support an anthill of political jobs, political purchases, and political routines. These other types of schooling understood—some through tradition, some through analysis, some through trusting inner voices—that transferring educational responsibility from children, parents, and communities to certified agents of the state erodes the value base of human life which is forever grounded in local and personal sovereignty.
Footnote 5: Shortly after this twelfth defeat at the hands of local citizens, the state stepped in to override the judgment of the voters. In January 1996, the Vermont State Senate passed a bill to forcibly "lend" the Benson School District the full amount of its twelve-time citizen-rejected budget. Benson voters would now pay the full amount demanded by the school district plus interest!
The Education Week piece in which I read these things covered every single inch of a two-page tabloid spread, yet nowhere could I find a single word indicating the problem might just be that its taxpayers and voters didn’t regard the Benson system as their own. Nor is there even a hint Benson may have abandoned its belief that what goes on in school is an essential enterprise worth a substantial part of its income to promote.
So I read this newspaper account of a little town in Vermont and its defiance of the state school institution pretty carefully because I sensed some important message buried there. On the third run-through I discovered what I was looking for. Let’s start with Assistant Superintendent Usher. His title implies that hidden somewhere out of sight there is a Superintendent somebody, too. If you don’t find that odd it’s because I haven’t told you that the entire school district of Benson has exactly one school with 137 kids in it. A brand-new school with a principal, too. Apparently you can’t have a principal without an assistant superintendent giving orders to that lowly functionary and a superintendent giving orders to the assistant superintendent. Three high-ranking pedagogues whose collective cost for services is about $250,000—nearly $2,000 a kid. That’s nice work if you can get it.
The new Benson school itself is worth a closer look. Its construction caused property taxes to go up 40 percent in one year, quite a shock to local homeowners just hanging on by their fingernails. This school would have been rejected outright by local taxpayers, who had (they thought) a perfectly good school already, but the state condemned the old school for not having wheelchair ramps and other features nobody ever considered an essential part of education before. Costs of reaching code compliance in the old structure were so close to the cost of a new school that taxpayers surrendered. The bond issue was finally voted. Even so, it passed only narrowly. What happened next will be no surprise. Benson School turned out to cost a lot more than voters expected. I am skeptical that it cost more than the State of Vermont expected, though.
I have some personal experience with Vermont’s condemnation of sound school structures from the little town of Walden, hardly more than a speck on the map northeast of Benson in the most beautiful hill country you can imagine. A few years ago, four pretty one-room schools dating from the nineteenth century, schools still serving 120 kids with just four teachers and no administrators, were condemned by the same crew from Montpelier that gave Benson its current tax headache. I was asked by a citizen group in Walden to drive up and speak at a rally to save these remarkable community schools, beloved by their clientele. If I tell you when I woke in the morning in Walden a moose was rooting vegetables from the garden of my hostess’ home you’ll be able to imagine them better.
The group I came to speak for, "The Road Rats" as it called itself, had already defeated school consolidation the previous year. Montpelier’s goal was to close the little schools and bus kids to a new central location miles from home. Now Montpelier took off the gloves. If persuasion and seduction wouldn’t work, coercion would. Let’s call what happened "The Benson Maneuver," passing building code provisions with no connection to normal reality. This accomplished, Vermont condemned the one-room schools for violation of these provisions. All official estimates to reach new code standards were very close to the price of consolidating the little schools into a big new one.
Road Rat resistance would be unlikely to mobilize a voting majority a second time; the publicists of mass-production economics have successfully altered public taste to believe it doesn’t make sense to repair something old when for the same price you can have something new. Our only hope lay in getting a construction bid low enough that voters could see they had been flim-flammed. It seemed worth a try. The Walden group had been unable to find a contractor willing to publicly oppose the will of Montpelier, but by a lucky accident I knew a Vermont master architect. I called his home in Montpelier. Two hours later he was in Walden touring the condemned buildings.
Vital to understanding why the state wanted these places closed so badly was that everything in such places worked against professionalization and standardization: parents were too close to the classroom to allow smooth "professional" governance to sneak by unnoticed. It wasn’t possible in such schools to float a scientifically prepared curriculum initiative without having it come under close and critical scrutiny. That was intolerable to Montpelier, or rather to the larger octopus the Montpelier tentacle wiggled for.
After inspection, my architect pronounced the official estimates to reach code compliance cynical and dishonest. They were three times higher than the work would cost allowing for a normal profit. My architect knew the principals in the politically well-connected construction firms which had submitted the inflated bids. He knew the game they were playing, too. "The purpose of this is to kill one-room schools," he said. "All these guys will be paid off one way or another with state work for forwarding the agenda whether they get this state job or not." I asked if he would give us a counter-estimate we might use to wake up voters. "No," he said. "If I did I wouldn’t get another building job in Vermont."
Let’s get back to Benson, a classic illustration how the political state and its licensed allies feed like parasites on working men and women. Where Education Week saw deep mystery over citizen disaffection, the facts put a different spin on things. In a jurisdiction serving only 137 children, a number which would have been handled in the old and successful Walden schools with four teachers—and no supervisors other than the town’s traditions and the willing oversight loving parents would provide because the students were, after all, their own kids—taxpayers were being forced to sustain the expense of:
A nonteaching superintendent
A nonteaching assistant superintendent
A nonteaching principal
A nonteaching assistant principal
A full time nurse
A full time guidance counselor
A full time librarian
Eleven full time schoolteachers
An unknown number of accessory personnel
Space, desks, supplies, technology for all of these
One hundred thirty-seven schoolchildren? Is there a soul who believes Benson’s kids are better served in their new school with this mercenary army than Walden’s 120 were in four rooms with four teachers? If so, the customary ways we measure educational success don’t reflect this superiority. What happened at Benson—the use of forced schooling to impose career ladders of unnecessary work on a poor community—has happened all over North America. School is a jobs project for a large class of people it would be difficult to find employment for otherwise in a frightening job market, one in which the majority of all employment in the nation is either temporary or part-time.
Forcible redistribution of the income of others to provide work for pedagogues and for a support staff larger than the actual teaching corps is a pyramid scheme run at the expense of children. The more "make-work" which has to be found for school employees, the worse for kids because their own enterprise is stifled by constant professional tinkering in order to justify this employment. Suppose we eliminated the first seven positions from the list of functionaries paid in Benson: the superintendent, assistant superintendent, principal, assistant principal, nurse, guidance counselor, and librarian, plus three of the eleven teachers and all those accessory personnel. We’d have the work those folks do absorbed by the remaining eight teachers and whatever community volunteer assistance we could recruit. This would still allow a class size of only seventeen kids per teacher, a ratio big-city teachers would kill to get, and hardly more than half the load one-room Walden teachers carried. Yet it would save this little community over half a million dollars yearly.
In our hypothetical example, we left Benson with eight teachers, twice the number Walden enjoyed in its two hundred-year experience with one-room schooling. Only a calculating machine could consider a large, consolidated school to which children must commute long distances as a real advance in human affairs. An advance in wasting time certainly. Consider this angle now: who in your judgment has a moral right to decide what size weight can be fastened on the backs of the working citizens of Benson? Whose decision should that be?
From a chart included in the Education Week article, I saw that Vermont school bureaucrats extracted $6,500 in 1995 for each student who sat in their spanking new schools. That computes at $162 a week per kid. Is it fair to ask how private schools provided satisfactory service for a national average of only $3,000 a kid, about $58 a week, the same year? Or how parochial schools did it for $2,300, $44 a week? Or homeschools for a mere $500 or $1,000, or about $10 or $20 a week? Do you believe public school kids were better served for the additional money spent?
Those other places could do it because they didn’t support an anthill of political jobs, political purchases, and political routines. These other types of schooling understood—some through tradition, some through analysis, some through trusting inner voices—that transferring educational responsibility from children, parents, and communities to certified agents of the state erodes the value base of human life which is forever grounded in local and personal sovereignty.
Footnote 5: Shortly after this twelfth defeat at the hands of local citizens, the state stepped in to override the judgment of the voters. In January 1996, the Vermont State Senate passed a bill to forcibly "lend" the Benson School District the full amount of its twelve-time citizen-rejected budget. Benson voters would now pay the full amount demanded by the school district plus interest!
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