Sequestration, Shame and Children with Disabilities with a P.S.

Just so you know, I'm not an expert on any of this government business, and every time I see The Tan Man's face (that would be Speaker Boehner**), my insides curdle, so you could say I'm very biased, but this is what I understand will happen if the Congress doesn't figure out the budget, and sequestration occurs:

The impact of sequestration on education programs is an estimated $3.5 to $4 billion. That includes a $1.2 billion cut to Title 1 grants for disadvantaged students and an estimated $900 million to Special Education under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) for the 2013-2014 school year.

More specifically, the resulting $1.2 billion cut to Title 1 could mean denying funding to nearly 4,000 schools serving nearly 1.6 million disadvantaged students, and more than 16,000 teachers and aides could lose their jobs and more than 10,000 special education teachers, aides and other staff providing support to children with disabilities.

U.S. Department of Education Secretary Arne Duncan 

How proud are you as an American citizen to be living in a country that demands sacrifice and belt-tightening from children, the disadvantaged and the disabled?

I did a little, a very little, research and found out that one drone called a 10-MQ-9 Reaper (how hideous is that name for a piece of technology that kills?) costs

$12,548,710.60.

If you do the math, that comes to approximately how many drones that -- I might add -- have been implicated in killing children in distant lands --to balance out the coming cuts in education for the disadvantaged and the disabled?

How proud are you as an American citizen to be living in a country that spends more on high tech equipment that kills people than on the education of children who are disadvantaged and disabled?

I'm ashamed to be an American and I'm not ashamed to assert that.

P.S. And we haven't talked (or ranted) about the state of Georgia nearly killing a cognitively disabled man in prison for murder yesterday. Or the death penalty at all.


**Spell check suggests the word Boner when I type Boehner which perhaps provides the only bit of levity in this post.

I stumbled upon this quote from the wonderful site Brain Pickings, and I can't help but think it'd be the perfect answer to my son Oliver's unique intelligence and accompanying hatred of school.

Why not eliminate schooling between age 12-16? It’s biologically + psychologically too turbulent a time to be cooped up inside, made to sit all the time. During these years, kids would live communally – doing some work, anyway being physically active, in the countryside... Those four 'missing' years of school could be added on, at a much later age. At, say, age 50-54 everyone would have to go back to school. (One could get a deferment for a few years, in special cases, if one was in a special work or creative project that couldn’t be broken off.) In this 50-54 schooling, have strong pressure to learn a new job or profession – plus liberal arts stuff, general science (ecology, biology), and language skills.
This simple change in the age specificity of schooling would a) reduce adolescent discontent, anomie, boredom, neurosis; b) radically modify the almost inevitable process by which people at 50 are psychologically and intellectually ossified – have become increasingly conservative, politically – and retrograde in their tastes (Neil Simon plays, etc.)
There would no longer be one huge generation gap (war), between the young and the not young – but 5 or 6 generation gaps, each much less severe.
After all, since most people from now on are going to live to be 70, 75, 80, why should all their schooling be bunched together in the first 1/3 or 1/4 of their lives – so that it’s downhill all the way
 Early schooling – age 6-12 – would be intensive language skills, basic science, civics, the arts.
 Back to school at 16: liberal arts for two year
Age 18-21: job training through apprenticeship, not schooling

-- from Susan Sontag's recently released As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980

What I'm Reading

the way upward and the way downward is one and the same

Heraclitus

Heraclitus - Michelangelo

I.
School 'Reform': A Failing Grade by Diane Ravitch, The New York Review of Books:


...In these two books, we have two versions of school reform. One is devised by Wall Street financiers and politicians who believe in rigidly defined numerical goals and return on investment; they blame lazy teachers, and self-interested unions when test scores are low. The other draws on the deep experience of a compassionate teacher who finds fault not with teachers, unions or students, but with a society that refuses to take responsibility for the conditions in which its children live and learn -- and who has demonstrated through her own efforts how one dedicated teacher has improved the education of poor young people.


II.
from the 49th issue of the literary journal Tin House, the issue titled The Ecstatic, a feature by Elissa Schappell called How the Light Gets In -- a mind-blowing accounting of the author's experience of temporal lobe epilepsy:

...However, this is how I reconcile my belief in science with my belief in the divine. You can say it was a seizure that sparked my ecstatic experience, the same way it brings on an aura. I will argue that because of the epilepsy I was open, the scar in my brain the crack that let the light in.


III.
T.S. Eliot's (prompted by a recent New Yorker article about him) Burnt Norton in Four Quartets:


Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory


Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.


                                 But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.




I am grateful for this reading, for my ability to read, for the ease with which I read and for the unending curiosity I have -- I am grateful for these graces bestowed upon me.

Paradigm Shifts

Here's another look at education -- a video that's been circulating on Facebook and blogs. I find it intensely interesting -- what do you think?

Waiting for Superman

I was contacted recently by someone at K-12, the online educator for grades kindergarten through twelfth grade, who offered to send me, gratis, to the new documentary, Waiting for Superman. In return for the free tickets, they asked me to write a review of the movie and post it, here, on my blog. You can read more information at the bottom of this post** and trust that my review is objective and that I was NOT paid to write something positive or negative!

I went on Saturday night to see the movie with great anticipation. I had taped and watched Oprah's show a few weeks ago when she had the director of the movie, Davis Guggenheim, some of the kids from the movie and their mothers, as well as other American luminaries, including Bill Gates, Michelle Rhee (the recent superintendent of Washington, D.C. schools) and Geoffrey Canada, from the Harlem Children's Zone . Despite the Oprahfication, the conversation was fascinating, so I really looked forward to seeing the movie.

I wasn't disappointed, because the documentary was educational, heartbreaking and, above all, sobering. The portrait it painted of the American educational system -- its history, attempts at reform, champions, success and failures -- was illuminating and emblematic, I think, of American culture in general. I was especially struck by statistics comparing where the American educational system rates in a list of other industrialized western countries (at the bottom) and Americans' actual perceptions of where they rate (number one). It's why I raise my eyebrows at the chants of "greatest country on earth" or "best healthcare system in the world" and why I object to having my patriotism questioned when I voice real dislikes and suspicions about this nation of ours.

The movie is relentless in its coverage of all the players in the system but comes down particularly hard on teachers' unions, illustrating the original good intentions of those unions but underscoring how arcane regulations and bureaucratic obduracy have become an almost untenable burden on the system. The movie uses very clever and engaging graphics to illustrate statistics, and one of my favorites was The Lemon Dance, the secret code principals use to deal with bad teachers. You really have to see it to believe it.

The individual stories depicted in the movie were typical documentary-fare -- disadvantaged, often minority children in large urban areas with hard-working parents who are trying with all their minimal resources to find a better place for their children. But, as I followed these children through their abysmal schools and watched as they and their parents tried to work within the system to find better choices, I felt my head glued to the back of the chair, pinned and horrified, stunned by the gross inequities and seemingly insurmountable odds. I thought of my own children and their relative position of privilege. I thought of our local charter school that we have had the good fortune to become a part of -- and the fact that it works so incredibly hard to give opportunity to many children of different socioeconomic backgrounds. The movie doesn't even go into the plight of special education in our country, a glaring omission in my mind, but woven into the individual stories are many examples of people working to make improvements, those people like Geoffrey Canada who have made significant change in their communities and are almost saint-like in their mission and vision --

There are too many points to convey in a blog post, but I encourage everyone to see the movie, whether you have children or not, to become aware and, hopefully, to commit to helping to change the way the children of this country are educated. It's imperative.

**Like the parents in the film, Waiting for Superman, K12 believes that access to a quality education is one of the most important things we can give our children.   K12 is the leader in online education for grades K – 12, with tuition-free, public school programs in more than half the States and D.C., as well as a private online school – the K12 International Academy – serving students across America and in more than 40 countries. Students in K12 schools get the best of both worlds: engaging, online curriculum along with award-winning books and hands-on materials, plus one-to-one attention from highly qualified teachers. All students receive an individualized learning plan, creating an educational program that is tailored to their learning style, pace, and needs.

Learn more by visiting K12.com or connecting with our community of parents and teacher on K12’s Facebook, Twitter, and Blog. Discover more about K12’s California online public school option at CAVA.  

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