Common Core's Pustule Encrusted Underbelly

For the past two days I've written about high stakes standardized testing in our public schools. In Monday's post I discussed it within the context of current Congressional efforts to re-authorize the No Child Left Behind act which ushered in this current era of high stakes testing, suggesting that this is an opportunity for us to make a difference in the lives of children since the key players all seem to be backing away from the regime of high stakes tests. Yesterday, I riffed on the blatantly anti-democratic aspects of high stakes testing, evoking Noam Chomsky to support me. Today, I want to take a look at the pustule encrusted underbelly of the test-driven Common Core national public school curriculum that, even though it is clearly destined to fail dramatically, is threatening to rob a generation of children of a quality education.

Specifically, I want to write about the millions of dollars individuals and corporations have made so far off the labor of young children and the billions more over which they are greedily rubbing their greasy hands.

I'm going to begin with Pearson "Education." I use the quotation marks because what they do has very little to do with actual education other than to sell tests and pre-tests and test-compliant materials to schools and school districts, raking in billions in a process that includes breaking federal laws. They're involved with other education-ish stuff, I know, because a public school teacher once gave me a bunch of left-over pre-packaged "science kits" that included a few pennies worth of dried beans and plastic cups. My understanding was that these kits had cost the school district upwards of $20 each. I'm going to tell myself that they cost so much because Pearson pays a terrific living wage to the poor people hired to assemble them. (Ha, ha, ha! I hope I've done enough now to establish a vein of satire. Pearson is notoriously prickly and vindictive, so I want to protect myself.) Already sucking billions out of our nation's education budgets, Pearson stands to earn a minimum of $138 million off Common Core this year.

Another of the ways Pearson plans to accelerate their looting of our schools is that they've gone into business with Microsoft to develop more Common Core "products." Now neither of these companies roll out of bed for chump change, so I'm sure they see the market for these products to be quite massive. Last year, Bill Gates, Microsoft's founder, the world's wealthiest man, and the guy who privately funded much of the development of the Common Core, famously bristled when a Washington Post reporter suggested that he was involved in public education for monetary gain. He aggressively sputtered, "Are you suggesting I'm in this for the money!" and "This is philanthropy!" Maybe he actually has no idea about what Microsoft and Pearson are planning, an absentee leadership would explain why the company he founded has foundered for the past decade and more, but I find it hard to swallow that the world's leading venture philanthropist wouldn't know what's going on. In fact, it was in that same interview that he discussed "unleashing powerful market forces" on our children and compared the Common Core to standardizing electrical outlets so businesses could more easily plug their products into our schools.

I'm sorry, but the Common Core national curriculum, at it's core, is all about making money. It's not an accident Pearson and Gates are involved, just like it's not an accident that hedge fund managers and other Wall Street types are heavily invested in "education." They don't roll out of bed for chump change either.

And where you find bathtubs of money, you also find cronyism, conveniently hidden conflicts of interest and other kinds of dirt-baggery. 

Recently, NPR ran a piece on a man named Jason Zimba, a former professor who wrote the math portion of the Common Core. In the piece, he reveals that even though his own children attend a school that uses his work, he still tutors them at home. Why? Well, he blames professional educators for doing it wrong, which is sort of what everyone involved in the Common Core is now doing: pointing the finger at teachers for being bad at teaching the load of crap they've foisted on American children. Not only does Zimba come off as quite arrogant about his vastly superior intellect, but a little scratching beneath the surface reveals that he continues to make hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions, off Common Core, even as it is failing our nation's children.

My cap is off to Joy Pullman, managing editor at The Federalist, who last month published a excellent piece entitled "Ten Common Core Promoters Laughing All the Way to the Bank," with Zimba standing at the top of her list. He left his professorship to found a Common Core non-profit from which he earns over $330,000 in salary. On top of that he makes additional thousands by traveling the country teaching us idiot teachers how to do Common Core the Jason Zimba way. Pullman's list is limited to just 10 individuals who are sleazily and cynically gorging at the Common Core trough. Assuredly, there are thousands more who, like Bill Gates, are attempting to deny their vested interests, while making money off the make-work labor of our children.

Common Core is doomed to fail. Indeed, I would say it has already failed, but that hasn't dampened the greed that always lies at the heart of "powerful market forces." Even as Common Core crumbles, corporations and individuals continue to rake in the dough and they are doing it on the bent backs of our children.

If you're feeling a little sick right now, you can't say I didn't warn you that it is a pustule encrusted underbelly. Tomorrow I hope I can go back to writing about things happening in our preschool where we take a play-based, evidence-based, truly non-profit approach to education.

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"It's Turning Us Into Individuals That Devote Our Lives To Achieving A Rank"

When I write about the scourge of high stakes standardized testing in our public schools, I usually do so from the perspective of pedagogy, research, and the socio-emotional impact on the young children who are subjected to a testing regime. In yesterday's post, I also touched upon the impact corporate education "reforms" are having on our children as citizens in a democracy. I pointed out that our political leaders, of both parties, continue to promote the notion that the sole purpose of public education is job training, rather than, as is actually the case, to educate children so that they will be able to handle the rights and responsibilities of self-governance.

I've never heard a politician talk about public education without evoking those mythical "jobs of tomorrow." What incredible hubris. No one knows what those jobs will be five years from now, let alone two decades into the future when the young children we are teaching seek to take their place in the economy. They tell us "the Chinese are beating us," they say "we are falling behind," they crow, as the president did in his most recent Weekly Address that we are "competing against the world." It's as if they view education as a kind of competition, like a cock fight or something, in which we're tossing our kids to a winner-take-all arena that will turn them into lean mean economic machines.

This is emphatically not why we have public education in a democratic society. Certainly, it is important that citizens are able to contribute economically, but narrow economic self-interest cannot stand as the be-all end-all of citizenship. A good citizen contributes socially, artistically, politically, spiritually, as a neighbor, and as a member of a family. A good citizen is someone up to the challenge of self-governance, is someone who thinks critically, and who thinks for himself. A good citizen is someone who knows when and how to stand up for her own beliefs even when those around her disagree. A good citizen questions authority and is wary of those who insist upon obedience. A good citizen is someone who has a well-rounded education that includes not just literacy and numeracy, but also a working knowledge of science, the humanities, the arts, as well as the fundamental tenants of physical and emotional health. Not only that, but a good citizen is a life-long learner, someone who is motivated by the ongoing search for wisdom and truth.

I will point out that most of the traits that make for a good citizen will, if exercised in the workplace, get you fired. That's because the skills and habits of citizenship stand opposed to the dictatorship of the traditional corporate pyramid where those at the top do the thinking and everyone else obeys. When we turn our schools over the vocational training, we emphasize traits that are contrary to those necessary for a functioning democracy.

There are those who argue that this is the overt goal of corporate education "reformers," to prepare our children for compliance and obedience. I'm not sure it's intentional so much as that those with their hands on the levers power are, in their hubris, blind to anything else. Either way, the results are the same: schools designed to place our children at the service of the economy rather than the other way around.

Yesterday, a reader pointed me to this excellent video of the great Noam Chomsky discussing the impact of our high stakes standardized testing regime on our youngest citizens. "It's turning us into individuals that devote our lives to achieving a rank," which is, after all the highest good in a corporation, but the lowest in a democracy.

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It's Time To Stop The Crazy

In a very real sense, the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 was the beginning of our nation's cruel, misguided experiments in high stakes, high stress standardized testing of our children, a trend that has only become more vicious over the course of the past 15 years, under the relentless pressure from corporate education "reformers" to privatize public schools through the Trojan Horse of charters and the de-professionalization of teaching, the introduction of the so-called Race to the Top policies of the Obama administration, and now the Common Core national curriculum with it's emphasis on rote learning and it's own slew of high stakes tests.

Congress is currently attempting to re-authorize the No Child Left Behind law. My position is that it should be scraped entirely and I've communicated this to my representatives. In those emails and phone calls I quoted author and progressive education advocate Alfie Kohn who said, "(NCLB)'s main effect has been to sentence poor children to an endless regimen of test-preparation drills." I would only amend that by pointing out that it is not just poor children, but all children, who are having their love of learning destroyed by this relentless toil in these test score coal mines. 

In President Obama's most recent weekly address on the topic, he demonstrates an ignorance about public education that is apparently universal among the political class, only speaking of it in economic terms, asserting that the purpose of public schools is to prepare children for the "new economy" and for "competing against the world." It's as if he believes that our children are here to serve the economy rather than the other way around. There was, as usual, and this is true of politicians of both parties, no mention of citizenship, which is, after all, the central reason we the people take on the task of education in the first place. Without an educated population self-governance is impossible. 

But amidst all of the president's boilerplate ignorance, something jumped out at me:

This year, I want to work with both parties in Congress to replace No Child Left Behind with a smarter law that addresses the overuse of standardized tests, makes a real investment in preschool, and gives every kid a fair shot in the new economy.

You had to listen carefully, because seconds later he pivoted back to vocational training, but he actually said "address the overuse of standardized tests." Now, I don't know if he really means this: these corporate reform guys are brilliant at marketing and they've clearly identified standardized tests as one of the weak points in their messaging. It may just be in there to pacify parents and teachers who oppose corporate education "reform," but it is yet another sign that we are, if not winning, at least starting to have an effect. In recent months both the Gates Foundation (the leading private sector advocate for high stakes testing) and Education Secretary Arne Duncan (the leading public section advocate for high stakes testing) have both attempted to back themselves away from high stakes testing.

Maybe it's because many of our best teachers are walking away from the profession in droves, most citing these tests and Common Core on their way out the door.

(Award-winning teacher) Stacie Starr said Ohio's rigorous learning standards, the fast pace at which the curriculum is moving, and the assessments are forcing teachers to become presenters of material . . . "In doing so we've lost touch with the kids personally," she said. "There's a lot of them that have some emotional needs and I don't know that we're meeting all those social and emotional needs first."

Or as 25-year veteran teacher Dawn Neely Randall wrote last year in her resignation letter that was published in the Washington Post:  

I can no longer be a teacher who tries to build these 10-year-olds up on on hand, but then throws them to the testing wolves with the other.

Currently, about half of all teachers are leaving the profession within five years, a trend that is increasing over time. If any other profession was seeing that kind of attrition, we would consider it a national emergency. It's not just high stakes testing that's driving teachers out of the profession, but it has definitely accelerated things.

Maybe Obama, Gates, Duncan and the rest of the high stakes testing crowd are responding to parents who are increasingly choosing to opt their children out of these tests, with a few schools now reporting that over half of their students refusing the tests. Yes, these tests are "mandatory," but only in the sense that schools must administer them: they cannot force children to take them. School superintendents and principals, of course, are upset about this because the federal funding is attached to kids taking these tests. Some have even, hilariously, given up on arguing that these tests have anything to do with education, instead complaining that when children opt out, they gain an unfair advantage over their peers:

Some superintendents have argued that putting the (opt out) students in classrooms would give them more instruction hours and an unfair advantage . . . Let's analyze that Onion-worthy exercise in self-satire. More instruction time, the superintendents warn, would mean more education for the opt outers, which would give them an academic advantage over kids who wasted the opportunity to further their educations by taking the tests. In other words, a school year filled with pretesting, re-pretesting and the actual state testing deprives students of hours and hours of useful instruction. By saying the non-testers can get an "unfair advantage" from the "more instruction hours," the principals are making a forceful argument against our obsession with yearly, high stakes testing.

And maybe these standardized testing work bosses are starting to listen to actual statisticians and researchers who are telling them that these tests, created not by educators but by giant for-profit testing corporations like the evil empire of Pearson "Education" (I put that word in quotes because I simply can't, in good conscience, allow that lie to stand there unadorned), are complete bunk. They simply do not measure learning: at best these tests measure test taking ability and socio-economic status. We are "using a bathroom scale to measure a student's height."

On Valentine's Day, the Washington Post reported that over 500 researchers have signed an open letter to Congress urging them to stop test-focused reforms such as those included in No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and the Common Core. There is a photo at the top of the story of one of my own senators listening to testimony, so she can't say she doesn't know this. In the past two days, more than 300 more have signed on to the letter, which you can find right here.

We are researchers and professors in colleges, universities, and other research institutions throughout the United States with scholarly and practical expertise in public education, including education policy, school reform, teaching and learning, assessment, and educational equity. As Congress revises and reauthorizes the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, we strongly urge departing from test-focused reforms that not only have been discredited for high-stakes decisions, but also have shown to widen, not close, gaps and inequities. The current reauthorization provides an historic opportunity to leverage federal resources to address the deeper and more systemic problems with strategies that research has compellingly demonstrated to be far more effective in improving the educational opportunities and success of all students, particularly those in highest need. Specifically, we write to endorse the concerns, analyses, and recommendations in the recently released policy memo from the National Education Policy Center, "Reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act: Time to Move Beyond Test-focused Policies" . . .

From that policy memo:

Today's 21-year-olds were in third grade in 2002, when the No Child Left Behind Act became law. For them and their younger siblings and neighbors, test-driven accountability policies are all they've known. The federal government entrusted their education to an unproven but ambitious belief that if we test children and hold educators responsible for improving test scores, we would have almost everyone scoring as "proficient" by 2014. Thus, we would achieve "equality." This approach has not worked . . . (W)e argue that as a nation we must engage in a serious, responsible conversation about evidence-based approaches that have the potential to meaningfully improve student opportunities and school outcomes.

This is what we are asking for: evidence-based education policies. What we have now is based upon nothing more that conjecture and business jargon paid for by deep-pocket dilettantes. It's time to stop the crazy.

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Real Work

Anyone who has read here for any length of time knows that our cast iron water pump stands at the center of much of the outdoor play in our school. It sits at the top of our two level sand pit. The cistern is a 30 gallon Rubbermaid tub, which needs to be periodically refilled via a hose that we've more or less permanently installed along the fence. The water flows downhill, carrying with it sand from the upper to the lower level. 

This day-after-day erosion means we must occasionally, one way or another, replenish the sand at the top of the hill. Usually, we do this by adding new sand to the top, although every now and then we get a bee in our bonnet and transport some of the old sand back uphill.

So many children wanted to get involved that we ran out of shovels. Some of the kids resorted to scooping sand with planks of wood and buckets.

Earlier this week, one of us forgot to turn off the hose when we left the playground to go indoors and it ran for an hour. When we returned outdoors, a rushing river had carved out a path to the bottom of the lower level and beyond, leaving behind a sandy mudflats that piled sand several inches up the exterior walls of our playhouse.

Others just shifted their focus on sweeping out the playhouse, removing the thick layer of sand so the "little kids can play there."

You can't cry over spilled water any more than over spilled milk, so my main concern was that there are a few children, especially in our younger classes, who aren't particularly keen on sand, at least not everywhere, which is why we've tried to avoid getting too much sand in the playhouse. So as the children studied the results of our accidental experiment in the effects of erosion and flooding, I got out one of our adult-sized shovels and began to dig the playhouse out.

You'll recall that we're a cooperative school and one of the general community-wide characteristics of parents who chose to take part in this particular model of early childhood education is a willingness to pitch in. Within minutes someone had taken the shovel from my hands. We have a couple of other "real" shovels and a digging fork, all of which were soon being wielded by parents. And then the kids began to dig as well. Not just a few of them, but virtually all of them, inspired by the real work being done by the adults.

A team of kids followed me to the top of the sand pit after each load to watch me dump it. They were protective of the pile of sand we were creating. They told one another, "Don't wreck it!" and "We need to strengthen it," which they did by packing it down with the backs of their shovels, demonstrating an intimate understanding of how erosion works and how to slow it down. This is pure experiential learning -- no one had to tell them this.

We started by just piling the sand back into the lower level of the sandpit, but soon I had the idea of bringing the wheelbarrow onto the scene. If we were going to be doing all that digging, we might as well take the sand all the way back to the top of the hill.

As I wheeled the first load up to the top, I contemplated how I was going to get the load up into the upper level of the sandpit, which is bordered by rounds of cedar. But Gio, whose father is a professional landscaper, was one step ahead of me. He had already positioned a plank of wood as a ramp for me, saying, "This is how dad does it."

Much of our sand is mixed already mixed with the wood chips that pave the non-sandpit areas of our outdoor classroom. What's a little more as long as it remains dig-able?

By the time we were done, all of us working together, adults and children, not only had we dug out the playhouse inside and out, but we had transported a dozen or more loads of sand back to the top of the hill.

Young children are driven to connect to life through meaningful participation. Role modeling necessary or "real" work and making space for children to engage is a vital part of the role adults have in their educational lives.

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Cruel Systems

A few years ago a friend was diagnosed with breast cancer and made the hard decision to have a double mastectomy. My wife Jennifer was there as she regained consciousness after surgery. Predictably, she was in pain. The doctor had left instructions to start a morphine drip, the nurses stood ready to alleviate their patient's pain, yet no pain medication was administered for 45 minutes, a period during which our friend wept and moaned and suffered.

It seems someone has developed a system for Overlake Hospital in Bellevue, Washington, a presumedly state-of-the-art system, a system designed, as I understand it, to prevent the theft of controlled substances like morphine. Apparently, the hospital's pharmacist is the only one with the "key" to the morphine cabinet and that person, for reasons that were never explained, took 45 minutes to open it. The doctors wanted it opened, the nurses wanted it opened, the friends and family demanded it be opened, but the system was in charge. 

If there are any children in the room, cover their ears . . . That is one f**ked up system. Here is a woman in what is one of the worst physical and emotional moments of her life, and some bean counter's system, in a hospital, a place supposedly operating under the principles of "do no harm," viciously and cruelly put her through 45 minutes of entirely unnecessary agony. 

Systems: I have systems in my life, routines and processes that I've devised to make my life easier or more efficient or more effective. I always put my keys and wallet in the same place, for instance, so that I can find them. I have a system for brewing coffee in the morning, followed by another whole system that gets me set up for the day. I like my systems because they are an extension of me, of my personality, of my way of thinking, but what is most important about my systems is that when they stop serving me, I can tweak them, over-ride them, or just dump them altogether.

Systems like the ones at the hospital, systems imposed hierarchically, systems that cannot be over-ridden by doctors or nurses or patients in extreme pain are the worst kind of evil, because they force good people to take part in it. On a TV show, the hero doctor would have grabbed a tire iron from the trunk of his car and smashed his way into the morphine cabinet, damn the consequences, but this system is so incredibly cruel that it required someone not in any way involved in the human suffering to remotely activate that morphine dispenser. They've made it immune even to heros.

It's the kind of system that could have only been devised by a cost-control specialist or loss prevention manager or any one of the hundreds of other corporate operatives employed for the sole purpose of tending to the bottom line.  Of course, I don't know who it was who devised this system, but I'm confident in asserting that it wasn't my friend's doctors or nurses, the actual healthcare professionals responsible for her well-being. No, it was created by people whose only concern is not wasting even a drop morphine. It was created by people who don't trust doctors and nurses to, you know, make their own decisions about the practice of medicine.  It was created by people, in fact, who suspect that these professionals may be secretly plotting to steal or abuse this medicine because they are potentially nefarious, or lazy, or otherwise less perfect than their system.

This is a mentality that is pervasive within a certain segment of our society, this idea that amoral systems are, perhaps because of their amorality, superior to human beings. It's the kind of system corporate reformers are actively seeking to impose upon our public schools, with people who haven't been in a classroom since they themselves were in school, creating a standardized system of tests and curricula and schedules and assessments and procedures that are there to over-ride not only a professional teacher's best judgement, but everything research tells us about education. Children are in agony, education is suffering, but damn it, we aren't going to waste a moment of our teaching time, we will drill and kill them, and we won't have to rely on those nefarious, lazy, over-educated teachers who are less perfect than our amoral system.

I have no doubt that the people who devised Overlake Hospital's morphine system would have been mortified had they been forced to sit in the room with our friend as she unnecessarily suffered for 45 minutes on the worst day of her life. But that's how systems maintain their amorality: the human element is removed. The professionals, loved ones, and even patients are placed in service to the system, which has no interest in curing the patient, only in pinching another penny.

We live in a time in which those with their hands on the levers of power, those who sit atop hierarchical pyramids, don't have to witness the pain of patients or the suffering of children, where, in fact, news of this pain and suffering is just treated as further evidence of nefariousness and laziness. Rigid systems imposed upon the lesser humans, on the other hand, never complain. The best judgment of people, their knowledge, their experience, is immaterial within these systems. No one can even play hero as the system remains, as always, focused on the bottom-line. 

These systems are perfect in their cruelty.

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Love Literacy

As a boy I remember certain "art" processes that seemed like a kind of everyday magic. Fold-over paintings were one of those, as were cutting out snowflakes. At certain points in my childhood I put in significant hours experimenting with them, always slightly surprised at the results, even as I came to understand how the process worked. I guess it had to do with the mystery of not knowing exactly what you had created until unfolding the paper.

Cutting paper hearts is another of those and it's why we traditionally spend a session or two on it during the run-up to Valentine's Day. We start with the adult drawing lines to guide the kids' cutting, but typically they take that part over as well. Our younger children give it a go, but I've discovered that 4-5s seem to be the particular sweet spot, with many kids producing dozens in the spirit of my own childhood experiments.

As I've written repeatedly here, we don't engage in developmentally inappropriate literacy training, choosing to instead stick with what research and experience tells us, which is that formal literacy education should be saved for first grade and beyond, if it is ever needed, when reading and writing tend to naturally begin to emerge in most children. Of course, this isn't to say that it doesn't begin to emerge in many children at much younger ages, only that a play-based curriculum in a literacy rich environment with lots of dramatic play is the developmentally appropriate way to support children's earliest efforts.

At some point in the process of manufacturing these magic hearts, the subject of valentines always comes up with much of the discussion swirling around who is going to be the lucky recipient of their most personally satisfying creations. Children, when not bombarded with messages about receiving, almost always prefer giving. I usually finish the day with a nice stack of construction paper love, but many more are designated for moms, dads, brothers, sisters, and other relatives who are not present, which then leads to a need to mark them appropriately.

Some of the children are perfectly satisfied with allowing an adult to do the writing, perhaps saving their own name for their own hand, but those who are ready, those for whom writing is beginning to emerge, want the pens in their own hands, only needing an adult to coach them through the process of inscribing their hearts with personally meaningful words. And, of course, in every class there are one or two who have already moved on to invented spelling, foregoing adult support entirely.

This is how literacy looks in preschool. This is what giving looks like in preschool. This is what love looks like in preschool. We support them when asked, but otherwise, it's always best to allow children to explore mysteries as they see fit. That's how magic happens.

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We Love Our Children Too

I can imagine nothing more challenging for a parent than to learn her child has an illness or condition that threatens his life. I've been blessed to have not been confronted with this, but I've been close to many families who did. 

This weekend, KUOW.org, Seattle's National Public Radio affiliate, ran a story about one of my former students, a boy named Owen, who was diagnosed with leukemia as an eight year old. I wrote about him here on the blog as he set out on three years of chemotherapy and other treatments. The Weinert family has been quite public about their gut-wrenching journey, one that no parent should have to take with a child. They always hope they are out of the woods, but must live in fear that they aren't.

One of the side-effects of chemo treatments is a suppressed immune system, such that patients become susceptible to contracting diseases against which he has been immunized. People like Owen count on what's called "herd immunity" to protect them from contagious diseases like measles, the idea being that if (as in the case of measles) 92-94 percent of a population is immunized, then those who cannot be, or whose immunizations have been rendered ineffective by something like chemo treatments, are protected. According to the article only five of Seattle's 69 public elementary schools meet that threshold.

Also according to the article, most of those who have opted their children out of vaccinations have done so due to a "personal belief" about vaccinations. This is the tense dividing line in our national discussion about vaccinations.

My own child is vaccinated, although I did resist the chicken pox vaccination when my daughter was young. It wasn't so much a principled position as a memory of having contracted the disease in my own youth. This was the 1960's, just as vaccinations were becoming common place, but I recall that some of our neighbors urged mom to hold a "chicken pox party" so that all the neighborhood kids could contract it at once. She declined. Our pediatrician was not happy with me. He told me stories about horrific chicken pox deaths he had witnessed and urged me anew with each passing appointment. Like I said, it wasn't really a big issue for me, one that didn't even rise to the level of discussing it with my wife, so when she one day found herself in the pediatrician's office, she agreed to a vaccination without batting an eye.

A couple years later, as chicken pox spread through her elementary school, she contracted it nevertheless, albeit likely in a milder form than she would have otherwise experienced. I don't know the  statistics, of course, but given the population with which she goes to school, I reckon she wasn't the only chicken pox vaccinated kid to contract and spread the illness. I've read that many of those who contracted measles in the recent California outbreak were likewise vaccinated. At the time I was mostly irritated that the chicken pox vaccine "didn't work." Today, I'm grateful that a child with a compromised immune system, like Owen, wasn't exposed.

I'm not going to pretend that I can speak for those who either refuse to immunize their children with vaccinations other than to point out that this is a very emotional topic on both sides because it has to do with our children's health. I understand that a large minority of parents have become convinced, for a variety of reasons, that there is great risk in immunizing their children. I've read the articles, I've listened to the reasons, but I remain convinced that vaccinations, despite their flaws, have saved thousands of lives. I'm happy my own child has been immunized both for her sake as well as the sake of the herd. I've also come to the realization that there is really nothing I can say or do to change their minds, so I'm staying out of that part of the back-and-forth. 

What I will point out is that the anti-vax message has succeeded to the point that we are reaching a threshold, like the one that has been reached in Seattle's elementary schools regarding measles, at which once rare diseases have an opening for a resurgence. This is why parents like the Weinerts are now starting to rise up and push back: we love our children too. I have been silent on this for too long, not wanting to offend parents who, honestly, are just doing the best they can. I don't wish anything bad upon them, but I also know that my silence, the silence of the majority, has allowed matters to proceed to this point. It's time to get this moving back in the other direction: that's how democracy works.

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Stronger Than Death

"Death and love -- no, I cannot make a poem of them, they don't go together. Love stands opposed to death. It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death."  ~Thomas Mann (from The Magic Mountain)

I can't recall the last time I missed work due to illness. It's been at least a decade, but here I am sick at home. I wasn't able to pull myself from bed until about 4 p.m. yesterday and while I'm a little better today I'm probably not going to leave the house.

Most teachers who are at it for any length of time develop pretty hearty immune systems. I was sick for months on end during my first few years in the game, first as a parent of a preschooler in a cooperative when my child and I caught everything together, and then as a teacher. By now, after 17 years of plunging myself into what a friend once described as a "pit of pink eye" day after day, my body knows how to handle most of the crud that goes around. Irritatingly, this flu is one for which I was unprepared. Classroom attendance has been down for a month or more, not just at our school, but right across the system of cooperatives that operate under the auspices of North Seattle College. I was once again proudly pounding the chest of my immune system, when it got me.

Parents have rallied to hold classes in my absence, which is part of the beauty of the cooperative model, yet I still can't completely fight down these feelings of guilt and shame about not being where I'm supposed to be, doing what I'm supposed to do. I know these feelings are "wrong," but they are part of the reality I face whenever I'm not fulfilling my obligations.

I'm terrible at being sick. I tend to be mean to my loved ones, bridling at their solicitousness. I don't want to engage in conversations about symptoms. I don't want chicken soup. In fact, I just want everyone to leave me alone to wallow in my misery. What makes it worse is knowing that everyone who reaches out is doing so out of genuine concern yet I appear constitutionally incapable of acknowledging it. 

When I'm feeling healthy, I sometimes see the romance in the idea of a day in bed: reading, snoozing, and watching movies. One of the greatest novels ever written, The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg), by Thomas Mann, is set in a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps where patients spend large parts of their days bundled up in blankets with low grade fevers dangling thermometers from their lips while discussing art, philosophy, politics, and love, while snow falls outside. The idea is appealing in its cozy simplicity, but the reality is that my body and soul rebel at that sort of confinement. My joints begin to ache, my head to throb, and feelings of self loathing come to plague me.

The only thing that helps at all is to get out of bed, to drink some coffee, to take a shower, and to put on some clothes. Although I could barely breathe, I cleaned the kitchen and tidied the bedroom. That helped a little. But those feelings of guilt and shame still hound me. 

The guilt is the easier one to get my mind around: it never feels good to let someone down and even when they are sympathetic, not showing up to teach my classes is to let someone down. The shame is another matter. There ought not be shame in illness, but there it is nevertheless. I would rather that you not know. There is a part of me that lives outsides my consciousness that cringes, I guess, at the perception that this is a moment of my weakness. I don't like being weak: I like being strong. I'm forced to admit this even as I fancy myself a post-machismo male. I accept weakness in others, I think, or at least I try to, but not in myself. It's probably this groundless shame that makes me such hell on my loved ones.

I will return to health. I will be back at school on Monday. I will be strong again. I know this, like I know that the guilt and shame are "wrong" emotions, yet it's hard in the midst of illness to dwell on anything beyond illness except, perhaps, death.

One of the themes of Mann's masterpiece is that all higher health must have passed through illness and death. We know this is true of the human immune system: what does not kill us makes us stronger. The novel's protagonist startles himself with the speculation that "disease makes men more physical, it leaves them nothing but body," and I experienced that on Wednesday night as I literally moaned through my respiratory agony. I didn't wish for death, of course, but among the few fevered thoughts I recall from the long night included the notion that death would certainly put an end to my suffering, and in that thought I felt no aversion. If you had asked me to pick in that moment, life or death, I could have gone either way.

"Severed from life it (death) becomes a spectre, a distortion and worse. For death, as an independent power, is a lustful power, whose vicious attraction is strong indeed; to feel drawn to it, to feel sympathy with it, is without any doubt at all the most ghastly aberration to which the spirit of man is prone."

I know this sounds overly dramatic, and I was genuinely no where near death's door, but that's where I've been in my illness, wracked not just with fever, but the ghastly aberration of my spirit and "wrongness" of my feelings.

The fever has broken now. I'm reconnecting to life. I'm touched beyond measure by the email chain that tells the story of how our families rallied. There is a "get well" poster on the wall of the classroom awaiting my return. My wife, who knows what kind of sick person I am, has left me alone, yet taken care of me. My daughter as well. I feel loved. Without a doubt, it is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.

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"It Won't Break"

"I thought I was wrong once, but I was mistaken." ~a joke I learned from Dad.

"Teacher Tom, will you help me?" I'd observed this newly minted three-year-old boy wrestling with the plastic cover of an electric fan we dismantled several months ago. He was attempting to get it to the upper floor of the new playhouse, but it was simply too large to fit through the opening. I said, "Sure," and slid it through the railing.

He climbed the ladder, then positioned the fan cover over the opening, saying, "It's a door."

A friend following him up the ladder objected, "I can't get up!"

"It's a door. Open it."

"I can't."

"Use your head. It's a head door."

This struck them both as funny and they laughed as he moved the "door" out of his way with the top of his head. When they were both upstairs, they moved it back into place.

I said, "If you walk on it, it might break and you'll fall through the hole." I'm not really sure why I said it, neither boy is a daredevil. At least I didn't say, "Be careful. I guess it was one of those moments of catastrophic thinking that creep into our heads even when we know better. In my effort to warn them, I'd merely given them an idea.

They looked at their door for a moment, obviously thinking about standing on it. Finally, one of them said, "It won't break."

"You're pretty heavy." I envisioned him plunging through the hole and prepared myself for making a rescue.

"Watch," and with this he carefully stepped on the edge of the plastic mesh where it overlapped the floor, avoiding the part that covered the actual opening, keeping himself safe while proving me wrong all in one maneuver. His buddy, in turn, proved me wrong as well. They've only been at Woodland Park for a few months, but they've already learned to question my authority, not defiantly, but as a matter of course. Teacher Tom is too often wrong to take at face value. That's pretty cool.

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Teaching Her Father

Our daughter Josephine is a  now a high school senior, in the midst of a year of "lasts." She already knows where she will attend college and next fall she is moving away. I was recently digging in the deepest parts of the archives here on the blog and came across this one from 2010. I'm republishing it today because in everything but the specifics it all still holds true.

*****

Today was my daughter Josephine's Bat Mitzvah ceremony.

She stood before her congregation and taught them about dreams.

When a father looks at his daughter, he sees in her every age she has ever been. Yesterday, as she ran through her d'var Torah in her final rehearsal, the first time for me to hear it, when I saw before me what an accomplished, intelligent, poised, thoughtful, and beautiful young woman she's grown into, I felt as if I was offered a glimpse into every age she will ever be. I used to think that she was a girl upon whom a light always shined, but it has become clear that the light is her own, one that will make the world a brighter place as she now steps forward in the tradition of the Jews and accepts the full rights and responsibilities of life in her tribe.

Those who know me understand that I'm not temperamentally suited for sitting in churches, mosques, or synagogs no matter how much singing and dancing we do. Since I was a child, I spent my time in the pews with my eyes on the windows, imagining myself out there. I am a spiritual person in my way, but I've never been able to get my mind around the idea that some guy behind a lectern or some dogma can tell me anything more about the condition of my soul than I already know. I am a communal person in my way, but I've always found that spiritual connection with my fellow humans in other places, like amongst the families of our Woodland Park Cooperative Preschool. I'm a reflective person in my way, but I find being alone with the dogs in the woods to be the proper place for meditations.

That said, I've made a mistake in all of this. When Josephine first began talking about her Bat Mitzvah over a year ago, she did so with a certain amount of ambivalence. As she learned more about all the work it entailed, she confessed to me at least that she didn't want to do it at all, that she felt compelled, that she didn't have a choice. I take comfort in the knowledge that we're all stupid parents sometimes and with the pride of an idiot I took that to mean that she wanted me, her father, to save her. I had made my escape from organized religion, she was my daughter, of course she would want to join me on the other side of those windows.

With my help she was able to stand up and say, No, I will not do this. And it was only once she stood there before God, family, and the world having said No, I think, that she felt free to make this decision for herself.

Within a few days of having her No accepted, she turned around and committed herself fully. Maybe I thought that her occasional griping meant that she was going to change her mind again and she would need me to be waiting right where I had always been. But that was part of all the ages my daughter had ceased to be. The young woman she has become is one who makes commitments and sees them through no matter how hard the path or how easy it would be to give up. That was my mistake, seeing only my little girl and not this powerful woman, this daughter who teaches her father.

I'm excited for her and incredibly proud. She is the greatest gift in my life and I love her more than she will ever know.

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"Mom, Why Can't They Make School More Kid Friendly?"

A couple weeks ago, a former Woodland Park parent whose son is in kindergarten this year shared the following:

Waking this morning with a (thankfully rare now) hateful vehemence toward going to school . . . M dropped all kinds of 6 year old expletives. Later on the ride in to school he sighed, "Mom, why can't they make school more kid friendly? I hate it." Me: "Do you mean like let you play more?" Him: "Yah! Like we only get two short recesses and the rest is just work work work."

Up until a couple of years ago, every former student to whom I had spoken reported to me that kindergarten was "better" than preschool. In just a few short years, that sentiment has become quite rare. In fact, in just the past two weeks, three former students have told me they wished they could come back to preschool. It breaks my heart. Kindergarten is broken and it has been broken by the ignorant dilettantes who hold the reigns of education policy in America. Kindergarten has been broken by Common Core and a generation of our youngest citizens are suffering. I've said it before and I'll say it again, this is child abuse.

No where is the Common Core more abusive than in it's emphasis on early literacy, expecting kindergarteners to "read emergent-reaer texts with purpose and understanding," ignoring the fact that many, if not most children, are simply not developmentally capable of learning to read at such a young age. In fact, both researchers and professional educators agree that the window for reading is quite broad, many perfectly normal children not really picking up the basic skills until they are seven or older. Indeed, most experts conclude that if formal literacy education should happen at all, it shouldn't even begin until children are at least seven.

This isn't to say that some children can't read at an earlier age. I've known two-year-olds who were teaching themselves to read and many who were reading quite well by four, in the same way that children learn to walk and talk at different ages. But the majority are simply not ready to begin reading and won't be for several years. Yet, the dictates of Common Core are relentless, leaving no room for the kind of individual variation for which young children are notorious, and punishing schools and teachers who cannot succeed in forcing their students to "read."

From the introduction to a scathing joint report issued by the Alliance for Childhood and Defending the Early Years:

(T)he pressure of implementing the reading standard is leading many kindergarten teachers to resort to inappropriate drilling on specific skills and excessive testing. Teacher-led instruction in kindergartens has almost entirely replaced the active, play-based experiential learning that children need based on decades of research in cognitive and developmental psychology and neuroscience.

This is what has motivated the parents of Woodland Park to start it's own, developmentally appropriate kindergarten for the 2015-16 school year. Young children should love school. There is simply no excuse for the abuses of Common Core.

I urge everyone to take a look at the report. If you don't have a lot of time, this Washington Post piece sums it up quite well. I leave you with this short video:

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

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