Little Children

We rented the movie "Little Children" last night--well, actually, we rented it three days ago and finally got around to it last night--and it was one of those movies that I enjoyed in the moment but resented later, upon reflection.

Damned reflection--always spoiling everything.

Not that it wasn't literate and well written, because it clearly was. And not that it wasn't stylishly shot and directed, because it certainly was that, too. And not that I didn't appreciate Kate Winslet's breasts and all, because, hey, I'm no philistine. It's just...

It's just that I'm so tired of movies in which ALL married couples are miserable, and EVERYTHING about suburbia is stultifying, and ALL men are immature knuckleheads, and ALL women are pinched and shrewish--except for Our Heroine, who is educated and elevated enough to: A)not shave her eyebrows, and B)find her neighbors small-minded and petty, and C)find her life--including her children--shallow and unrewarding, and D)read poetry--for pleasure! And use a dried rose as a bookmark! All of which, I realize, is obviously intended to make her as much of a knucklehead, in her own way, as the men in the movie--just in her own, educated and elevated way.

I know it's just a movie, and not intended to show the entire Broad Canvas of Life. But "American Beauty" was just the same. Suburbia = Spiritual Death. Marriage = Sexual and Emotional Death. Employment = Every Other Kind of Death. There's no real cause to any of this--nothing psychological or autobiographical or economic or political or religious or cultural. It's just Death.

And, as such, it's the attitude of an adolescent. Which is not surprising, given who makes our movies--a small group of people living in an amazingly rarified and isolated environment, with no real understanding of how anyone outside of that environment lives...except for their parents, who they probably resent and despise for being small-minded middle-Americans and thank GOD we escaped from that and made it to LA, right?

It's the same attitude I encountered in grad school, when I was in LA, twenty years ago. The style that everyone--EVERYONE--tried to emulate, in plays and films, was a kind of Less-Than-Zero-ish hip nihilism. And just as in "Less Than Zero," it was a nihilism practiced by people who knew nothing, who had been nowhere, who had experienced nothing. The coolest writers in the theatre department wanted to out-Beckett Beckett--but you know what? Beckett wrote "Waiting for Godot" in his fifties, after half a life of real engagement with the world. I mean, he worked for the French Resistance in World War II. So if he wanted to express a sense that underlying the Everything was Nothing, well, he had earned the right. Nineteen year olds whose only exhaustion was that they had run through all the recreational drugs available to them...not so much.

And they all grow up (more or less) and make movies for us. And in those movies, they tell us that they think we're all fools. And we pay ten dollars a ticket for the experience.

Quick--name a happily married couple portrayed in a movie or a TV series of the past decade. Can you? And I don't mean idyllic. Obviously drama requires conflict and all. I just mean happy, as in, this marriage is, on the whole, a pretty good thing. And our life together--here, in this house, with these people, in this community, is also a pretty good thing--worth working for, worth sacrificing for, worth holding together.

If you can think of one, let me know. I'm still working on it.

Reason #312 to Slow the F**K Down

Happy Children

Thing 1 and Thing 2 had a wonderful Christmas with their grandparents from here and from San Diego, and were, as usual, deluged with gifts. And they were wonderful, perfect gifts, too. Among the favorites were Plio, the robot dinosaur; Zoob construction toys; and a super-cool chemistry lab set from the Discovery Store.

But the best gift, by far, was having family here with us for days on end. Sounds cliched, but it's true. I'm very thankful that we were able to make the move out here one year ago, to be closer to the Wife's family here in Tucson, and my dad and his wife out in SoCal.

And it's not just me, saying this. As my dad was packing up the car to start the drive back home, he called to me to come get my son. I went outside and found Thing 2 sitting in their front seat, coat and backpack on, ready to leave. I said, "Oh, sweetie...you have to stay here, with us. But we'll see them again in one month, I promise." He burst into tears, launched himself at my father and stepmother, and refused to let go.

Can't wrap that. Can't return it. Can't replace it for any amount of money. Now that's a present.

Bill Moyers' Christmas Message To You

In our drugged state, we cheer the winners in the game of wealth, the billionaires who benefit from a skewed financial system -- the losers, we kick down the stairs. We open fire hoses of cash into our political system in the name of "free speech." Television stations that refuse to cover government make fortunes selling political bromides over public airwaves. Pornography passing as advertising assaults our senses, seduces our children, and pollutes our culture. Partisan propaganda gets pumped up as news. We feed on the flamboyance of celebrities. And we actually take seriously the Elmer Gantrys who use the Christian Gospel as a guidebook to an Iowa caucus or a battle plan for the Middle East. In the face of a scandalous health care system, failing schools, and a fraudulent endless war, we are as docile as tattered scarecrows in a field of rotten tomatoes.

And our collective response to the Grand Old Man of PBS would go something like this:

Dude, you're blocking the TV.

No Propaganda Left Behind

Author Jonathan Kozol met with Senator Ted Kennedy about the re-authorization of NCLB, advocating a major rehaul rather than any "tweaks" currently being proposed. I used to be a big fan of Kozol's, but his "partial hunger strike" in protest of the education law (partial hunger strike? What the hell is that?) annoys me.

So does some of the cant embodied in the letter he sent to Kennedy, which prompted and framed their discussion:

The law is racially discriminatory in its immediate effects. In affluent white districts, where small class-size and high spending are the norm and kids routinely do well on exams, NCLB is not permitted to degrade or narrow the curriculum. In embattled and low-funded urban schools, in contrast, principals are being forced by threat of federal sanctions to impose upon their teachers proto-military and test-driven methods of instruction which they tell me that they pedagogically abhor. Teachers in these schools are often being handed scripts to read and told they must hold timers in their hands, in order to be sure that not a single minute of the schoolday will be wasted by permitting children to indulge their curiosity, enjoy a moment of healthy playfulness or humor, pose a thoughtful question, or pursue a serious line of interest that will, however, have no pay-off on a standardized exam. (emphasis mine)

By placing inordinate pressure upon inner-city schools to limit their focus to that very narrow slice of subjects to be tested, NCLB is robbing minority children of the culturally expansive range of subject-matter given to white children, while also deadening the intellects of inner-city kids by robbing them of the critical-thinking skills needed to survive in higher education or to function as discerning citizens. In a decade when black children are more segregated than at any time since 1968, NCLB is compounding the damage of their racial isolation by deepening the cultural division between these children and the mainstream of society. (emphasis mine)

All right, let's break this down. No principal is forced to take instructionally idiotic steps by anything other than his own limited vision and short-sightedness. I taught in a school that forced "proto-military" test prep methods on me and the kids, long before NCLB. NCLB doesn't mandate them or even suggest them. If schools are canceling classes and imposing regimens of test prep, they're stupid schools run by stupid people. If schools are canceling science, social studies, and art classes because the kids are so far below grade level that only by intensifying core instruction in English and math can they hope to catch up, well...doesn't that say something about the school's instructional program, or the level of readiness with which kids enter the school?

That said, there are HUGE issues around equity of input, and I agree in principle with all of the arguments Kozol and others are making here. You can't demand equivalent outcomes without providing equivalent inputs. Blame the larger economy, lingering racism, and lack of access to pre-K, if you like. But this particular law is not creating economic inequity and educational foolishness.

Meanwhile, there is much he says that's good and important:

Instead of improving the quality of teachers, NCLB is driving out precisely those highspirited, well-educated, and creative new young teachers our urban schools try so hard to recruit, while rewarding the most mediocre and robotic teachers who don't object to rote-and-drill instruction that requires no real contribution of their own....

The standardized exams mandated by NCLB are useless to our teachers since, unlike diagnostic tests, they offer no specific information on a child's areas of weakness and because the scores are not returned to schools by testing corporations until mid-summer at the earliest....

High-stakes tests administered in third grade are wildly unfair to children who have had no preschool education. Middle-class and wealthy children typically receive at least two years, often three, of rich developmental pre-K. More than 2/3ds of our poorest inner-city children have usually had none.

Then there's this, which I kind of agree with and kind of object to:

NCLB has been unsuccessful in narrowing the gap between the races.

That's certainly true, government bloviations to the contrary notwithstanding. But to say this is not to say that the law has had no positive effect. I'm out there in school districts all the time--poor, urban, challenged school districts--and the leaders of those districts are thinking and worrying about their African-American students in ways they rarely did before. And their special ed students. And their disadvantaged students. By disaggregating test data and insisting on progress in all identified sub-groups, the law has had the positive effect of denying school districts the dark and shadowy corners where they hid their lowest-performing students, showing only the overall, total scores to the world. This is precisely why some of those schools and districts have done Supremely Dumb things like canceling science and social studies classes, or instituting test prep drill. They're panicked. Well, they should be panicked--they been underserving and undermining these kids for years. The fact that they've responded so foolishly shows that they don't really know what they're doing.

Given where I work, I obviously have trouble with this (even though he doesn't mention my firm by name):

NCLB's S.E.S. requirement, compelling a low-performing school to hire what is termed “an external provider” to do tutorials with students, has opened wide the gate for forprofit corporations -- a half-way step to vouchers. While the law does not require schools to hire profit-making corporations, the marketing skills of Princeton
Review, Sylvan Learning, and similar firms have been remarkably successful at carving out a huge piece of our public education budget in return for services explicitly directed at test-score inflation but devoid of pedagogic value.

At least here he admits that it's not the law's fault. But I find his knee-jerk objection to private sector involvement in education (he's been worse on this in other articles) very short-sighted and limited. If there's a need, and the school has trouble meeting it, and someone is willing to step forward and provide help...why should the school be denied the help, just because the help has a price tag? Teachers come with a price tag, too, you know--and a pretty nasty union fighting for their salary, benefits, and work rules. Contrary to Kozol's opinion, teachers are not, by structural definition, saints or martyrs. They work for a living, like everyone else. Obviously, the best of them also have a sense of mission. But guess what? So do the people I work with.

Of course, buying lousy test prep (or even good test prep) instead of real tutoring services is a problem. And NCLB is at the root of this problem. The emphasis on testing--and state-level, rather than national testing--creates an enormous financial burden for states, which leads, in many cases, to a slate of multiple-choice tests (cheaper to make, cheaper to score) which lend themselves to strategy courses and test prep approaches. If NCLB could find broader and more rigorous ways to judge student performance, the schools who need help would have to find broader and more rigorous methods of assistance, which would drive education companies to provide broader and more rigorous assistance.

I like that remedy much more than Kozol's, which is, "Congress should prohibit the diversion of resources by our public schools to hire private test-prep corporations to inflate the children's scores by artificial means." Because what's artificial? If it's a stupid test, the score on which can be inflated simply by learning some basic strategies, then the gain is the gain, and if it can be bought, people will (and should) buy it. Make better tests, or fold in outputs beyond testing. Trust me, the companies will follow. That's just business.

Ach, I'm exhausted. There's lots of other stuff--some good, some bad. Go here if you're interested in reading the original.