Warning: This endless winter has me cranky.

And I’m particularly cranky lately about the drumbeat of BS about education “reform.” And it is BS. Whether it’s Michelle Rhee and Students First, or what’s her name and Teach for America, charter schools  (which in Chicago is just another avenue for political corruption), vouchers, school choice, selective admissions, magnet schools, Race to the Top, No Child Left Behind,” or whatever the latest magic bullet gimmickry, it’s all BS. Now this BS definitely serves the interest of some folks (they get big salaries, start their own foundations and pay them selves handsomely), but none of the beneficiaries are in classrooms.

Mostly these hucksters blame teachers and/or their unions. And you’ll see numbers from these con artists, and from lazy or naïve reporters who regurgitate them. But they are BS. They always look shiny on first pass, and none of them hold up to scrutiny. None. You can look it up.

Lots of folks pay better attention to this stuff than the mainstream press. Here are some sources I like, and if you have some time by all means use comments to share.

• Alexander Russo’s This Week in Education
• The Beachwood Reporter (not strictly an education site, but good work on Chicago schools)
• The daily howler

Let me share the most recent Chicago Public Schools debacle. It goes like this: There is a mandate to administer a version of a standardized test that is known to be outdated and not valid. A group of teachers has said they will boycott administering the test, and the Chicago Schools chief – Barbara Byrd Bennett – has threatened to revoke those teachers’ licenses.

I’ll spare any more detail and just say that Byrd-Bennett is the typical hired gun administrator hack who comes in to do the dirty work of her boss (in this case, Rahm Emanuel). And she isn’t even a resident of Illinois, let alone Chicago. Chicago teachers must reside in the city, and the system spends a lot of time and resources policing that policy.

Oy.

Anyway, back to “reform.” I’m all for meaningful numbers being part of decision-making, but numbers are a product of human conceit—tests are flawed and biased, there’s widespread corruption in test rigging (when Rhee was head of D.C. schools, she presided over and ignored a cheating scandal, and Atlanta is the latest example)—but somehow we fool ourselves into thinking they are objective. They are not. Numbers should inform judgment, but they are not a substitute for judgment made by experienced educators.

By educators, I don’t mean the likes of Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who’s never spent a day running a classroom. There’s a whole class of these self-imagined masters of the universe who think you should run a school like a business. I got news for you: It’s not a business. It’s a lot HARDER than that, you bean counting MBA idiots.

That’s young Esther. She wouldn’t like any of this stuff, because she’d seen it before.

I know this, because I am the son of a badass elementary school teacher who taught her whole life, and succeeded in spite of lame administrators and  flavor-of-the-day fads. Let me tell you about Esther Knezovich (nee Latini). She did not work school day hours. At home she did mountains of bureaucratic paperwork, created materials for bulletin boards and special events, typed out mimeograph tests and handouts, and was on the phone constantly with kids’ parents.

I remember this vividly, because it left me feeling like, “What am I, chopped liver?” I felt the same way when we’d be at the local grocery store. A parent would corner her and I’d have to wait until they finished talking about that parent’s kid.

She didn’t always have summers off—sometimes it was summer school and others she took classes to maintain her credential.

She believed in the union and collective bargaining, but was not naïve enough to think all teachers were as committed. She tried to take young or foundering teachers under her wing. That was difficult, though, because the administrators by and large were a teacher’s nemesis, not his or her partner, and were often flunkies whose management style was to persecute particular teachers for one reason or another, and to do everything they could to pit teachers against each other.

And, from my own experience, I can tell you that I don’t remember principals or superintendents but I do remember every K-8 teacher I had, and most of my high school teachers. And you know what? Some were better than others, some were flaky; I really disliked some but somehow I made it. And not a one was incompetent. And not one of them kept me from learning if I wanted to.

That wanting to and being supported is a pretty big part of the equation; it’s obvious, yet we spend fortunes and too much time testing and testing to tell us this:

• Healthy neighborhoods and regions that are economically sound have solid schools.
• Poverty and crime riddled areas have poor schools.

Doh.

So what do we do? We play shell games with selective admissions and magnet schools, siphoning off the best students—who play a critical role in the culture of a school—writing off the neighborhood school, weakening it and the neighborhood.

Doh.

Here’s my non-data driven proposal for pretty much any school system, but especially for Chicago.

• Fire the top 2/3 of the administration. Arbitrary? Sure. What we’re doing isn’t working. Let’s take out top-heavy dead wood. We can always increase the ranks if needed, and probably, we’ll find we can get leaner still. (BTW, this absolutely has to be done in higher ed, where administrative bloat is largely responsible for ridiculous cost inflation.)
• Do one round of standardized tests early in the year, and one at the end. Or maybe just the end.
• You want to make teachers more accountable? Fine—but let’s give them back their classrooms. We want accountability from teachers on one hand, but we keep chipping away at their hegemony in their own classrooms. We dictate what they teach, how they teach it, how they test it. And then we change it. And we let parents treat teachers like they’re store clerks because flunky administrators want schools to be like businesses who serve customers. BS.
• If I were tsar-emperor, there would be no career administrators in policy-making positions. Classroom educators would be rotated in and out of those jobs (and no Ph.D.s necessary) for, say,  three-year terms. It’d give them a kind of sabbatical from the front lines, a view of what the bigger picture looks like, and when they were making the sausage, they’d be doing it knowing they’d be eating it one day when they go back to the classroom.
• Finally, there would be no magnet schools (at least at the K-8 level) or selective admissions, only neighborhood schools. (Here, like testing, selective enrollment is riddled with insider corruption. Bruce Rauner—Republican candidate for Illinois Governor who doesn’t even live in Chicago—clouted his kid into an elite Chicago public high school with a $250,000 donation to it. And that’s just the latest example of rigged admissions.) If a school underperforms, it would be (doh) an indicator of the health of the local neighborhood. That school wouldn’t be punished; instead it would get more resources (tutors, teachers, social workers, day care, after school programs) not fewer. Ideally it would become the hub of the delivery of a broad range of services that would help lift up the school and its neighborhood.

I feel like I’m a conservative on this issue. We don’t need gimmicks. We don’t need to undercut teachers. We need a simple commitment – in will and resources – to make public education work.

OK, thanks, I feel better. But it’s snowing again.

Whitney and I are back from the Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference in Seattle just in time to prepare for a presentation at a library in the Chicago suburbs tomorrow. A description in this week’s Lake Zurich Courier tells me not to plan on saying much!

GUIDING PRINCIPLES
Children and adults are invited to meet author Beth Finke’s guide dog Whitney, a Labrador/golden retriever mix, 2-3 p.m. Sunday, March 2 at Ela Area Public Library, 275 Mohawk Trail, Lake Zurich.

More on our successful trip to Seattle in a future blog post. Stay tuned!

Hello from Seattle! I flew out here with Whitney – our first solo trip since my emergency open-heart surgery last year. This was a major milestone, and I’m not ashamed to admit I was pretty anxious about it before we left. The flight was loooong, and already at takeoff Whitney decided she didn’t like her spot under the seat in front of us. Good thing the passengers next to us loved dogs –Whit was a bit of a sprawler. I was thrilled to hear our Seattle friend Greg calling out my name at baggage claim after we landed, and Whitney was happy to see him, too. She had to go, if you know what I mean.

I brought a Magic 8-Ball as a gift to thank Greg for picking us up, and I almost didn’t get it through security – to many ounces of fluid, doncha know. It got through on a technicality – they regarded it as a snowglobe, and snowglobes recently got approved by the TSA. In exchange for his Magic 8-Ball, Greg treated me to a couple of Seattle micro-brews (Mack & Jack’s lager  – yum!) at the hotel bar before Whit and I settled into our room.

I’m here to attend the annual conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) here in hopes of finding a publisher for my next book

All the snow and ice in Chicago this winter has had one (and probably, only one!) benefit: it provided a lot of time to stay inside and write. I made major progress on the book I’m writing about the memoir classes I lead for Chicago senior citizens, and Whitney and I will spend a lot of time at the AWP book fair going table to table to talk about my new project to anyone who will listen. (By the way, it’s in the 50s, sunny and I’m not wearing snow boots.)T

My author friend Audrey Petty encouraged me to do this, explaining that AWP is the perfect place to come with a writing project that isn’t quite finished. Publishers and other writers I meet might like my idea and give me guidance on how to shape it differently or rework it somehow before it’s entirely finished.

That’s Audrey with Alex Kotlowitz during a presentation last year. (Photo: Janet Smith)

You might remember Audrey from blog posts I’ve written about her before. She started thinking about doing an oral history of people who’d lived in high rise public housing back in 2008, and after McSweeney’s took notice, she spent most of the past three years under their guidance, tracking down former residents of Chicago’s housing projects and interviewing them for High Rise Stories: Voices From Chicago Public Housing, published by McSweeney’s Voice of Witness series late last year.

The conference doesn’t start until tomorrow, and I’ll meet up with Audrey then. She’s invited Whitney and me to come as her guests to the McSweeney’s cocktail party tomorrow night. Before then Whitney and I need to learn our way to the lobby from our room on the 26th floor of this absolutely huge hotel blocks away from the convention center. (Whitney is in front of our floor-to-ceiling windows enjoying the view as I type this blog post.) Once we tackle finding our way through the lobby, we’ll tackle making our way the four blocks to the convention center. I figure if I register before the conference starts they might let me in to figure out the lay of the land ahead of time. That way I’ll feel much more comfortable going table to table at the book fair tomorrow, asking each person there who they are and what they do, and then leaving my business card (it even has my name in Braille on it) to anyone who takes interest. Wish us luck!

This past weekend—a very full one—included a trip to Elmhurst College to root on the North Central College women’s basketball team (the Cardinals) against the evil Elmhurst College Blue Jays. OK, Elmhurst College isn’t evil. And really, we were there more specifically to root on Beth’s great niece, who, as a freshman, gets significant playing time on North Central’s team.

Anita follows through on a jump shot during Saturday’s game.

When we entered the gym I was ready with my $12 — $6.00 each for Beth and me, per the information online. The young woman at the ticket table said, “That’ll be $3.00 each.” I left the ticket table  feeling like we’d gotten lucky. Then Beth whispered, as we walked away, “I think she thought we were seniors.” As in senior citizens. Well now.

I guess I could’ve been miffed. But just walking into the court area reminded me that I have indeed been around for a good while. Because every time I go to one of Anita’s games, or a friend’s daughter’s soccer game, I am reminded that for the growing segment of the population that is younger than I am, these women’s games are no big deal. Commonplace.

But I still marvel at them. Because women competing athletically—hustling, clawing, grunting, and even fighting (did you see the USA-Canada women’s hockey game?)—wasn’t the norm,  wasn’t cool, and for most women wasn’t possible—when I was growing up. That’s all different now. That’s a wonderful thing, and it didn’t happen by accident.

Reasonable people can disagree about the role and the size of government—and that should always be at issue in our democracy. But I gotta say this: Title IX changed things for the better. Period.

By Title IX, I mean Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972 (there is also a Title IX of the 1964 Civil Rights Act). Birch Bayh, U.S. Senator from Indiana, co-authored and introduced the legislation that is summarized here:

No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance… 

The law was renamed in 2002. It’s formal name is now the Patsy Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act—Mink was the Congresswoman from Hawaii who co-authored the bill, and who introduced it to the House of Representatives.

The law was not focused on athletics—it was intended to ensure equal opportunity in employment and enrollment and educational opportunities at colleges and universities that received support from the federal government.  Here’s what Senator Bayh had to say about it back then:

“We are all familiar with the stereotype of women as pretty things who go to college to find a husband, go on to graduate school because they want a more interesting husband, and finally marry, have children, and never work again. The desire of many schools not to waste a ‘man’s place’ on a woman stems from such stereotyped notions. But the facts absolutely contradict these myths about the ‘weaker sex’ and it is time to change our operating assumptions.”

Title IX has made a huge difference overall, but its impact has been the most visible in athletics. When I was in high school lo these many decades ago, girls playing sports was broadly considered weird (at best, and characterizations of female athletes were often much less charitable than “weird”).

Not so anymore.  Saturday I sat in the bleachers with Beth, Anita’s family, Beth’s sister Cheryl, their mother Flo, and we cheered some really good players as they went at it hard in a very entertaining game. I heard the coaches get on the players, mothers and fathers yelling at the refs, and it was all…normal. I was pleased that it seemed so commonplace. But I will never cease to marvel at it, and I feel privileged to have witnessed this change in my lifetime.

Our friend Carli Karpeyev left a comment to that post I published here Thursday — you know, the one about the blind-dad TV sitcom. Carli doesn’t have a disability herself, yet she was disappointed that NBC didn’t hire a blind actor for the starring role.

I’ve heard this kind of concern before, why didn’t a wheelchair user play the lead in Born on the Fourth of July, why wasn’t a blind actor cast in Scent of a Woman and so on. It’s never been one of my big causes, though. I mean, gee whiz, isn’t that why they call it acting?

But then I watched a Ted Talk by female stand-up comic Maysoon Zayid that Carli had linked to in the comment she left to my post, and it got me thinking. Maysoon Zayid has cerebral palsy. She studied theater at Arizona State University but gave up her dream to become an actress after repeatedly being passed over for roles.

Even when ASU produced And They Dance Real Slow in Jackson, a play about a girl who has physical disabilities growing up in a small (and small-minded) town, Zayid didn’t get the lead. “This is a part I was literally born to play,” she says, lamenting that they cast an able-bodied theatre student instead. “They didn’t think I could do the stunts, but excuse me, if I can’t do the stunts, neither can the character!”

Zayid says she realized very, very quickly that Hollywood wouldn’t have a place for “fluffy ethnic disabled people” like her. The only female stars she could think of who made it to the top without conventional cover girl looks were comediennes. Whoopi Goldberg. Rosie O’Donnell. Roseanne Barr. So she turned to comedy.

Maysoon Zayid is a comedy success story now, but she still advocates for actors with disabilities, asserting in her Ted Talk that if Hollywood won’t hire actors with disabilities for everyday roles, than they ought to stop casting able-bodied actors into roles as people with disabilities. “If a wheelchair user can’t play Beyoncé, then Beyoncé can’t play a wheelchair user,” she shrugs.

That’s Teal Sherer.

A lot of disability advocates would agree with Maysoon Zayid. After Blair Underwood got the leading role in last year’s Ironside TV series, Sons of Anarchy star Kurt Yaeger (an actor who lost his left leg after a motorcycle accident) said that casting an actor who can walk for that part is “like being in the ’50s and having a white guy do blackface.”
Teal Sherer says Hollywood’s treatment of her and her fellow actors with disabilities is … lame. Her frustration with Hollywood motivated her to produce her own YouTube show called My Gimpy Life to illustrate the often absurd challenges actors with disabilities face in the entertainment industry. In an NPR interview, Sherer said she doesn’t want roles reserved for her because of her disability — but she does want to get a call to read for parts, including ones not specifically intended for actors with disabilities. “If we lose an opportunity to audition, then we lose an opportunity to move forward in our career,” she said.

A lot of food for thought, huh? And in case you were wondering, the dog playing the guide dog in tonight’s Growing Up Fisher debut is not a guide dog in real life, either. “I don’t want to take a guide dog away from a blind guy,” writer DJ Nash, who grew up with a dad who can’t see, said in an interview promoting the new show.“ It was more important to have a dog that could hit its marks and stop at a construction hole on cue, and not be phased by 167 crew members, than to have that verisimilitudinous touch.”