Debating Education: The Narrative is the Message

April 19, 2011Politics and Culture, Things that Piss Me off from The NY Timescharter schools, education, public schools, school reform, Waiting for SupermanMarion

Think back to the 2008 presidential campaigns. Between the candidates and their running mates, there were four compelling and uniquely American narratives to capture the public’s imagination:

John McCain, who as a callow young soldier learned the true meaning of courage during his imprisonment behind enemy lines.
Sarah Palin, the soccer-mom plucked from near obscurity with an uncanny ability to connect with small town voters.
Joe Biden, the senator whose destiny changed in an instant when a tragic accident took his wife and daughter and almost killed his son.
Barak Obama, the culmination of our hopes and dreams.

One of these narratives was of course stronger and more compelling than the others. It involved race, class, immigration, American dreamers who couldn’t be stopped by an ocean, and the idea that Americans could rise above and overcome the tragedy of history.

Back during that campaign, before the Citizens United decision, before the word “tea-party” became associated with elderly white people in comical hats demanding the government get it’s paws off Medicare, it wasn’t always clear what the ideological differences were between the parties. Many on the left and right would argue there wasn’t much difference. If you listened to the rhetoric of both sides, both would tell you the same things: they love their country, war is not a good thing, people need money to live, systems are broken, things used to better once upon a time . . .

We are now in the midst of a debate about the nature and future of public education in which the word “reform” is used by both sides. Both argue that they have only the best interests of children in mind and both want to wear the mantle of “progress.” But which side is the right side? Or for that matter the left?

In the popular film Waiting for Superman, we are told that “reformers” are people like Geoffrey Canada or Michelle Rhee who want to push past the entrenched and all powerful teacher’s unions that are acting out of their own self-interest and not the interests of children. Reformers are billionaires like Bill Gates and Mike Bloomberg, people who would never consider sending their own children to a public school. We are told that the problem with education is that bad teachers can’t be fired, and the only hope is a charter school system where schools aren’t tied to neighborhoods, but parents, even poor parents, can choose the best schools to send their kids to. Questions about the charter schools aren’t discussed; they aren’t even raised. The film is an uncritical love letter to those who bravely fight the power: teacher unions.

While the filmmakers did give one union leader a chance to speak, it didn’t allow her to directly answer the particular charges leveled against unions by the filmmakers. It didn’t talk about resources being taken away from good public schools in order to support the growth of these semi-private institutions, or about public education success stories, the advantages of building strong community-based schools and the way that innovative public schools are working in collaboration with neighborhood organizations to strengthen entire communities and engage young people.

Instead, by focusing on the lottery for spots at a few particular charters, and telling the story of a small group of kids going through the selection process, the film presents a simplistic, but compelling narrative. It builds a story around the idea that if these individual youngsters “win,” they will get into a charter school and have a positive future. If they “lose” and wind up in public school, they will not. We can’t help but get caught up in the story and the myth it creates, to the point where even an alert viewer doesn’t have much time to formulate the unasked questions: What are the attrition rates for these schools? What happens to kids who can’t make it in a charter? What about parental involvement and input? Are the teachers actually better trained? What’s teacher attrition like? What are the procedures and protections if a parent has a concern? How does allocating resources for these schools impact on local public schools in the districts in which they are located?

A new film is coming which does examine these issues. The Grassroots Education Movement a group of public school parents and teachers, has put together its own film which is still in its final editing stages, but has already been screened at some community gatherings, and is called, called, The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman. The film takes a clear stand in discussing “real” reform versus the corporate idea of reform (the privatization of the school system). It shows the ways in which resources have been taken from community public schools and given over to charters. The filmmakers hammer home their main points about what encompasses true reform and what has actually been shown to make a difference for kids. They point out that the two “reforms” consistently shown to increase student achievement are smaller class size and more experienced teachers. These are reforms that unions push for. They inform us that the states with the lowest public school achievement happen to be the ones that don’t allow collective bargaining for teachers. They point out that Finland, often lauded by the corporate reformers as an example of a working school system, is a unionized one.

Ideologically, the film is not simply “pro-union,” but pro-child, community and parent as well, defining true reform as an equitable system in which parents don’t need to arrange hour or longer commutes for their young children in order to secure a good education for them. It’s a short film, and one devoted to answering the attack on public schools, rather than showing examples of the best ones, or the many ways in which “community” schools not only educate children, but help revitalize communities. (For a decent article about the difficulties of trying to run a great school under the a regime that has been consistently working to undermine and politicize public education, see this article on a Bronx middle school.)

Both Waiting for Superman and The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman are polemics. The difference is that Waiting for Superman is a slick Hollywood production that manages downplay its bias, while The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman is an impassioned answer to some of the questions the first film doesn’t even raise. In Waiting the narrative is front and center, the ideology covert. It doesn’t seem like its attacking public school, but the only alternative it offers is a charter system. Truth is much less narrative driven. In answering the charges against teachers and unions, the tone can’t help being defensive. It’s pro-union, pro-grassroots rhetoric while stirring to its constituency, at times feels anachronistic, as though one is listening to a special on the Pacifica Radio network. Many people tune out when they hear the words “corporate interests” even if, in fact, the battle is about corporate versus public needs.

What Truth, which was not made by a Hollywood director, or even a professional one, fails to do is create the kind of narrative suspense of Waiting. I watched Waiting at home. My better-half got bored about half way through and went to sleep. The next morning he asked, “Who won the lottery?” He remembered the individual stories and how much seemed to be at stake. What’s needed is an answer to Superman, that doesn’t just lay out the case and the facts, but tells us a story equally as powerful. Sometimes the narrative is the message, and in this case, The Truth Behind Waiting for Superman, though valiant in its attempt, fails to capture the narrative.

Meat

April 17, 2011Politics and Culture, true storymeat, meat-eating, veganism, vegetarianismMarion

“A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy.” — Ingrid Newkirk, President, PETA

I’ve always had an ambivalent relationship with meat.

Where I’m at now is a belief that if one is not a vegan, one can at least be conscious of what meat is, not celebrate it, and try to limit the damage by both cutting down on consumption and seeking less cruel options when possible.

Back in ancient times before I’d graduated high school, I considered being a vegetarian. I graduated early, mid-year and needed to do something before college and so I volunteered on a kibbutz, because I was sixteen and a half and it was the only way I could figure out to leave home and go really far away without my parents reporting me as a runaway.

The volunteers were assigned different duties. There was stacking the dishes as they came off the dishwasher. I still remember the large cockroaches that sometimes came off with them. There was spritzing the orange trees with insecticide. I don’t think they could get the “migrant” workers from Gaza to do it, so they used us.

And there was of course gathering the chickens. They’d get a shipment of newly hatched chicks, raise them in a giant coup which was of course spacious when the chicks first arrived and then increasingly crowded as they grew. After a relatively short time, I think about eight weeks, the chickens would be ready to go to market, gathered and stuffed into a truck. Grabbing them required boots and thick gloves. There were certain instructions since an injured chicken would not be considered kosher.

At five a.m, a few of us would wade into the packed coup and scoop up chickens by their necks. They’d squawk and peck, doing their best to defend themselves. As I made my way through scooping up one or two at a time as others pecked at my boots amid the noise and the shit smell, I mentally referenced IB Singer’s famous line, “In their behavior toward creatures, all men are Nazis.”

I stopped eating meat after that for several years, though I really wasn’t a vegetarian. I never quit fish. I’d been fishing a couple of times. Somehow even seeing fish squirm when taken out of the water, I didn’t feel the consciousness was the same. A fish was not a dog to me or even a chicken.

In the years that followed there were different meat/non-meat variations. I briefly tried to be an honest vegetarian and give up fish. I dated meat-eaters and went along for the ride. At one point, after not having eaten chicken in years, I was staying in a Mexican beach town. There were a lot of chickens running around. Often these local birds would wind up being served at the restaurants that lined the beach. It didn’t seem like a terrible life for those chickens — they went around minding their own business, living their lives and every so often one or two of their number would get snatched up and …. Not much difference than for any of us, and the meat tasted damn fine.

At some point I wound up where I am now: I eat poultry on occasion, generally if there aren’t many alternatives though possibly at a restaurant if there’s some “free-range” available. Except for duckie. How I can watch the ducks in a pond and find their antics immensely soothing and then eat these birds as though they were a vegetable is beyond me. But there you go. Probably if I knew anything about life on the duck farm, I wouldn’t do it. But I remain woefully and willfully ignorant on that score.

I don’t as a rule eat mammals, which is not to say that I don’t ever eat them but we’re probably talking about under 5 times in ten or more years. I won’t eat pig though. Nothing to do with any religious inclinations or even the taste. To me a pig is a dog is a boy. The way they are farmed is extremely cruel and there is good evidence that they are as smart, if not smarter than dogs. Pigs in some fundamental way seem more like us than any non-primates. They are almost hairless, social, love to wallow in dirt, will eat anything, defend their young, and aren’t always that great about personal hygiene. Really, if you’re going to eat a pig where do you stop? Long pig was the Maori term for human meat, and even if you weren’t planning to go that far, explain to me exactly the difference between a pig and a dog?

But that’s the dilemma isn’t it? A vegan would argue that we all feel pain, and people love their pets even rabbits and yes, even chickens and ducks. The emotions we attribute to certain species and not others is not rational or even universal.

Which of course brings me to my menagerie — which I’m not planning to eat, ever, but do have to feed daily. I’ve got a dog and two cats. PETA offers information on going veg for your “animal companions.” While my dog could conceivable live on veggie diet, I can’t imagine she’d like it much, and as for the cats — clearly these little vermin catchers (or would be vermin catchers as they are stuck in a vermin free apartment) were not meant to be vegetarians. The big guy, a very vocal, Russian Blue, would probably make my life a living hell if I even tried.

Lately, because of several factors including the expense, ecological waste of cans and concerns about quality — I have started to cook meet for my animal companions. Specifically, boiled chicken, maybe with some beef liver or other cheap cut. The thing about it is, this puts me in touch with meat. Literally and viscerally.

There’s just no way I can look at a whole, headless chicken and NOT think of it as a dead body. As for the cow’s liver — you could replace it with a human one and I probably wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. Cooking meat, the smell of it in my home, picking the meat off the bones, the awareness of it’s constant decay, the need for care and cleanliness lest I containment my entire kitchen, the bloodiness of it, well kind of makes me think. I understand how and why we (humans) eat meat; I don’t quite get how we continue to be so blind to what it is. You don’t have to kill it to realize what it is, you just have to touch it, smell it, and see it.

So of course this has made me think more of the ethical compromises we all make. I wonder how pure even the vegans are. How many of them insist on going veg with their dogs and cats? But how can they justify not doing so, and choosing one species above others? And what about the bees? Vegans don’t eat honey, but how do they feel about the subjugation of bees used to pollinate crops? How many insist on not eating fruit or vegetables cultivated with the labor of captive hives? Why is it okay to have animal companions like dogs and cats but not egg-laying hens? Chickens developed as domestic animals and they lay eggs, so why is it not okay to “exploit” that if the chickens also get something (a nice roof over their heads) for their trouble? I do understand objections to milk and cheese. Good milkers need to give birth to calves, and all those excess calves especially the boy ones aren’t needed. Plus once a cow reaches a certain age, she’s no good as a milker anymore and retiring her to pasture is an expensive option.

Some might call me a hypocrite because of my half-assed stand on these issues and loads of inconsistencies. I’m waiting for when biotechnology can bring us real “cruelty free” meat. I imagine future meat farms that will be vast labs in which meat will be grown organ by organ, and its cultivation involve no pain to anyone. But that brave new world will no doubt face its own moral issues and questions. Meantime, I’ll continue to aim for simply paying attention and trying to do less harm.

Dora Stein, 1921-2011

March 27, 2011death and dying, true storyeulogies, how to write a eulogy, obituaries, tribute to a motherMarion

Dora Stein could be described in many ways — a devoted wife to Jack for almost sixty years. A mother of three. A proud grandmother. A “career woman.” A teacher. A volunteer. But mostly, and all of her life, my mother was a fighter.

It may sound silly to think of a tiny woman, who probably never had a physical altercation as a fighter, but she was.

When she was a little girl she almost died when her thyroid became overactive and she had to have a large chunk of it removed. It slowed her down enough to save her life, but not too much. She still managed to skip a grade or two and got into Hunter College of the City University of New York — the Vassar of CUNY. Her own mother didn’t see the point. Why did a girl need to go to college?

But my mother fought that attitude. And her whole life she was proud of being a “Hunter Girl.”

She majored in Math and it never to occured to her that “girls” weren’t supposed to be good in math.

When she met my father — no slouch in the intellect department either — she held her own. He proposed on the first date. She wisely neither said yes nor turned him down, but waited until she got to know him a little better. They married and she became, before it was a children’s show, Dora the explorer — following him as he was transferred in the army, working as an accountant at a time when “girls” weren’t supposed to be accountants — even going to one job as “D. Feldman”. When her ruse was discovered and she was told, “You’re not an accountant. You’re a girl.” My mother replied that she was a girl AND an accountant.

At a time when the movies and television offered the stereotypes of the perfect housewife or the lonely career woman, she chose to be a working mom, a phrase which didn’t even exist, settling eventually on teaching as a career. It didn’t occur to her to do otherwise. It was pragmatic — she wanted a good life for her family and she wanted to work. She didn’t need to wait until Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique to know there was more to life than ironing your husband’s shirts. You could get that done at the laundry.

It must hardly seem revolutionary to anyone under forty, to raise your daughters to believe that they could do anything and there were no limits imposed by gender — but at the time when she was raising her children — it was hardly a given. She raised her daughters to excel and always with the idea that they would someday go to college, and that having a career was as important for her girls as it was for her son.

Dora always fought for her family and for what she thought was right. In 1956, when a neighbor complained about my father’s having his business in their new house, Dora went to City Hall herself, to the office of Mayor Wagner, to get the certificate of occupancy changed, making it clear and legal that the home could be used for a business.

When the Vietnam War was raging, my fiercely patriotic mother joined in the protests, going with her teenaged daughter Anita to Washington and taking me — at age 10 to the Moratorium in New York City.

Dora never stopped fighting. She didn’t fight time in the way some do with plastic surgery or potions. She kept herself busy. My father complained that after she retired from teaching, she worked even longer hours as a volunteer for Hadassah, turning his old examination room into her office space, learning to use the computer to create newsletters and fliers.

She fought coronary artery disease for years.

She and Jack lost his fight with cancer, but even that didn’t defeat her. She wanted to be independent, but accepted she couldn’t stay alone in her home and moved into assisted living, where she kept active. She volunteered as a tutor with elementary school children. She met sister Hunter girls, and enjoyed Yiddish club and Boggle and discussions on current events.

The last few months were hard for her. She took a fall and fractured her pelvis, but she fought her way back in physical therapy even though it wasn’t easy for her. She was determined to remain independent. To stay out of a nursing home. Her only real fear was losing her mental agility, which she never did. She was still aware of the world around her, keeping up on current events. One of her hospital stays coincided with the President’s speech on health care, and we watched it together on the little set in her hospital room.

The last time I visited her in her apartment, she was showing Craig and me old photographs and the book about the Spatts — she was as proud to be a Spatt as she was to be a Feldman or a Stein, and still talked about working for her very successful uncle Sam Spatt what it meant to her that he believed in her brain.

Even, after her stroke — she was fighting. She made her wishes clear. Like Jack, her humor could be laced with irony. When Anita told her that it was ok to stop fighting, that the fight was over, Dora looked at her and asked, “Did I win?”

She came from a crowded railroad flat in depression-era Williamsburg and went to college, became an accountant, a teacher, a mother, a wife, a grandmother, and a volunteer. She traveled to Israel and Europe and even Alaska. She saw Paris and the Grand Canyon. She saw all of her children graduate college and go on to graduate degrees, one of her grandchildren become a lawyer and all of them get into good colleges. She sustained a marriage of almost sixty years. She had a good life and died with her family at her bedside. Yeah, Dora. I’d say you won.

Live Blogging — My Mother’s Death Bed

March 22, 2011death and dying, true story, writing/blogging/publishing relateddeath and dying, end of lifeMarion

It’s been many hours since she last spoke, but her breathing is steady, loud and labored. My sister and are sitting in a shit-smelly room in the Albany Medical Center, 5th floor, neurology unit. My sister is reading her kindle by the light of the patient’s bathroom. I am writing this backlit by my mac. The music is something Bach-like via Pandora. It’s not exactly a softly lit, pastel colored hospice room. There was no room at the hospice, but at least they got my mother out of the “stroke room” where an eager neurology resident made idiotic statements about an 89 year old woman with advanced CHF and coronary artery disease making “a full recovery” in 6-12 months.

When confronted with the information that she’d had a heart attack as well as a storke and cardiology had told us they couldn’t treat the blockages because of the stroke risk, Doc Bollywood didn’t blink. He just said, “Well, that was cardiology. I’m talking from a neurological standpoint.”
To which my brother-in-law replied, “Are you saying she can live without a heart? Who do you think she is, the Tinman?”

That actor had it wrong. Comedy is easy; dying is hard.

Physical therapy also stopped by earlier. We sat astounded. “I guess she’s tired. We’ll come back later.”

Yeah, tired. She’s just resting.

Not everyone who works in a hospital is crazy. Only the doctors and the physical therapists. The nurses get it. Comfort care when nothing else can be done.

My mother hasn’t said anything in the last six hours or so, and hasn’t said anything we could really understand since yesterday. — though there was a moment earlier today when I thought she understood me perfectly and I imagined I understood her grunted, garbled reply. I was telling her how great Jack — her husband, my father was and how much he loved her, how I still felt his presence, and the caring never dies.

She looked at me, and mumbled something, which I imagined was, ” He was a great husband and father.”

I agreed.

Now my sister and I just sit in a dark room and wait. My mother gasps for every breath. She was gripping our hands hours ago — holding on for dear life. Holding on to dear life. But that’s stopped. Her knees are bent up, the way we remember our father’s being.

On the phone to my friend, a nurse practioner in New York, my friend overheard the 9 PM announcement telling all visitors to leave.

“That doesn’t apply to you,” she said.

“I know,” I told her.

They finally gave her morphine. A tiny bit. My sister was worried. My mother once had a bad reaction to it. It was after a fall. She was in pain, but the drug made her paranoid, hostile. “I don’t want her to go out that way,” my sister said.

But finally my sister agreed it was time.

1 miligram to start. It’s already quieted the breathing.

We’re staying the night. Maybe in shifts. I used to work a night shift in a hospital. That was years ago, psyche, not medicine, but still it seems familiar to be here and odd, watching the woman who gave birth to me, contracting into herself, becoming smaller, smoother, more fetal.

Her strangely unwrinkled face. Dying has a beauty too. It is as elemental, fundamental as birth, but not celebrated. Still, there’s nothing tragic here. We are not meant to be too long lasting. None of us gets more much more than a century, and no one gets out alive.

The morphine is helping.