Memorializing

I’ve been reading Nick Turse’s Kill Anything That Moves, a relentlessly honest history of the American War in Vietnam.

Producing a high body count was crucial for promotion in the officer corps. Many high-level officers established ‘production quotas’ for their units, and systems of ‘debit’ and ‘credit’ to calculate exactly how efficiently subordinate units and middle-management personnel performed. Different formulas were used, but the commitment to war as a rational production process was common to all.”

I have a brother who served with the 101st. Airborne in ’67 and ’68, walking point on search-and-destroy missions. Turse will tell you more than you want to know about search-and-destroy missions. I’d have wound up in the same kind of service if that brother, and another who flew radio ops over Vietnam out of Thailand in ’65 and ’66, hadn’t grabbed me by the neck in 1971 and told me to enlist in the fucking Err Farce. Instead of slogging through a jungle or shitting my pants on an RC-135, I got sent to DLI for Chinese studies and stationed in cushy Taiwan where I listened, on April 29, 1975,  to the live broadcast of the U.S. departure from the Saigon embassy.

I work with a young, much-loved  teacher colleague who was born in a Vietnamese refugee camp in Thailand in 1982. She is the only co-worker I presently have who knows, deep in her heart, how the data-driven, production-quota based insanity of our militaristic empire is infecting public education. She’s an extraordinary teacher. Maybe, through her service,  her students will extend the purpose of Memorial Day to honor all people, not just Americans, who have suffered and died as a result of our militarism.

“Carthago delenda est!”

Some crazy set of rules

Here’s James Fallows on Jerry Brown and the craziness of California:

The truth is that a reliance on rules and a mistrust of mere politicians have come close to ruining public life in California. “When given a choice between human judgments and formulas, we’ve always chosen the formulas,” Joe Mathews says. He is critical of Brown in many ways, and yet he says, “I would rather let the Jerry Browns of the world make decisions for me than some crazy set of rules someone thought would help.”

Let’s try an edit to that paragraph, thus:

The truth is that a reliance on rules and a mistrust of mere politicians teachers have come close to ruining public life education in California. “When given a choice between human judgments and formulas, we’ve always chosen the formulas,” Joe Mathews says. He is critical of Brown in many ways, and yet he says, “I would rather let the Jerry Browns teachers of the world make decisions for me students than some crazy set of rules someone thought would help.”

Another nail in the leaky coffin I leave behind

Word is out at a comprehensive high school near the bay that next year those lazy, disorganized, standard-less teachers (even the word-weak math and science types) must display a “daily language objective” (DLO?) on their blackboards, or green boards, or white boards, or websites, or weblogs, or projection screens, or interactive projection screens, or maybe just on their foreheads.

A daily Language Objective is important … Please consider how the four domains (listening,speaking, reading, writing) are integrated in [sic] your lesson. By articulating what language skills students are expected to use in this lesson, you will be able to break down the steps so more students will be able to access the content. In this example, asking students to compare and contrast is a common skill required by various content areas. By teaching students the words which signal comparison (similarly, in addition, moreover,…) or contrast (although, however, but,…), they will be able to identify these words and concepts while reading, and also use them when writing.

The new DLO requirement will appear in the bay-side school’s Prince_Of_Pals’ expectations for 2013-2014. Like all royal expectations, it may lead to some disappointment when the Prince and his court enter DLO-less classrooms within their four domains. What to do about disappointment? Ah-hah! The palace decree includes integration of the DLO requirement into (in?) the lazy, disorganized, standard-less teachers’ summative evaluations. The disorganized dismissed, disappointment will be assuaged.

Worth repeating this:

“When the [reformers] say that instruction must be ‘evidence-based,’ and ‘data-driven,’ they don’t mean that schools and teachers should be guided by statistical studies. When they say ‘data-driven,’ they mean breaking down jobs into tasks, breaking tasks into components, and then measuring and quantifying each component to develop target work norms. The norms are used to establish new conditions of work and workplace discipline. These are used to impose scripted learning, narrow ‘teach to the test’ curricula, canned software, and cyber-schools.” Jack Gerson, “The Neo Liberal Agenda and Teachers’ Unions,” in  The Assault on Public Education, p. 110.

CalSTRS as a “devious-cruising Rachel’

That last post deserves a (possibly final) update. The grievance, the request for information, the unfair labor practice filing, and the civil law case are all prepared. There’s little chance of winning, but “no battle is ever won,” right? I’ll lose  $4K+ a year by pensioning out six months earlier than planned. These days, that’s cheap for a satisfying taste of integrity. The fiercely pro-union, wisely secretive librarian I’d headhunted to replace me will keep his (or her) full-time employment elsewhere. The school’s 50 years+ run of full-time librarian staffing will end. Its management-favored non-classroom classified and certificated staffing will increase.  The Potemkin village of “democratic” site-based decision making bodies will continue to camouflage destructive staffing and budget policies.  And finally, teachers already so disposed will find new reason to close their classroom doors and “shelter in place.” A valid choice. If the bosses’ and their factotums’ repeated response to potential and real violations of the contract is, “Well, go ahead and file a grievance!”, what exactly are teachers supposed to do? What building representative has the damn time to identify, investigate, research, write, and file that number of grievances? And how the hell can the union stay effective when grievances just pile up with no resolutions?

Public education has been sailed dangerously off course and, sadly, most teachers don’t see themselves as shipmates. Some will mutiny against petty tyrants and their pandering and Starbuck-loyal first mates. Bravo!  But solo defiance won’t accomplish what fierce solidarity might. Ferocity frightens most teachers. (What have we come to if boo-ing a horribly ignorant and union-busting secretary of education is considered cause for apology? Who the fuck does Jennings think Duncan is? I boo opera singers, forchrissakes.) And fear leads even able-bodied union members to collude with the crazy captains of their school and district vessels. 

Advice to the number crunchers, and word smiths and data dancers among the enablers of the search for the white whale of “school reform” –  If Ahab surrounds himself with quisling officers, it’s probably best not to help any of them in any way. Better to spend time building a bouyant coffin to share.

Then again, maybe they didn’t make that offer

Well, I know I predicted they’d employ their shock doctrine tactics and resurrect a full time library job soon after my retirement docs were filed, but I didn’t think they’d pull that sleazy magic in just 3 working days. Check it out and note the time stamp in the top right corner:

Click to enlarge.

Anybody know a good labor lawyer? LOL.

They made me an offer I could ONLY refuse

Update.

I filed my retirement notice Monday, more reluctantly that I anticipated. I was already 95% decided until I discovered, a week ago, that buying back permissive time from sabbaticals and family leaves would require a wait of 240 days. 240 days??? That’s another whole school year. (Retirement-nearing teachers beware! It appears the retiree rush has swamped CalSTRS.) Considering the annual $7.5K+ bump that one more year would provide, I began rethinking my plans.

Then an administrator called me in for a meeting.

Seems the budget required cuts and only 60% of my librarian position remained. I’d heard rumors weeks before when a well-liked assistant principal had been dispatched to soften me up. I’d turned her away by demanding a union rep, a copy of the budget, and a copy of the meeting minutes where the budget was approved. Three weeks went by with no further contact and then, abruptly, I was offered three options for continued full-time employment. The possibility of combining the 60% librarian with some other part-time work was not on the table. Why not? Something about it being much more difficult to hire part-time Social Studies teachers (I have that credential, too.) than part-time librarians. Ha! Tell that one to the recently graduated history major barista you tip every morning. After 10 years at the school, I preferred working as a librarian. And for pension purposes, I preferred full-time employment. I asked some incendiary questions about the “real” causes of my reassignment. I saw the library job being restricted to 60% as a blatantly vindictive response to my union advocacy. Unnamed downtown powers had advised the local factotums against answering my queries. Still, I pressed for answers and waited a couple of days. Last Friday, I was informed that, based on site needs, I had been assigned to teach Social Studies for 2013-2014.

The rest was easy. I quoted Bartleby, “I would prefer not to,” and described my anticipation for grievances and unfair labor practices. I requested that, once my retirement was confirmed, all open positions at the school be promptly posted on the district job opportunities website. I sent out a farewell message to some of the staff, with a rah-rah union chant.

I’m not worried about the library. If books can’t defend themselves these days, who can do it for them? Web access via the library? Hell, computers live in pockets these days. The place might not be open at 7:30 AM or during lunch and during the useless department meeting times anymore, but there’ll be three days of class access. I even predict that, after my retirement paperwork clears, money will appear for full-time staffing, a predictable management “shock doctrine” maneuver.  Let no budget crisis go to waste, especially if it means pushing out an effective union advocate.

I’ll miss working with many teachers, paraprofessionals and students. On the plus side, though, I won’t have to deal with Common Core State Standards, Smarter Balanced Consortium testing, the CORE waiver’s Academic Growth Over Time evaluations, and the next delay in furlough day restoration.

And so it goes.

Following Bartleby’s lead

You’ve got to wonder what it means for teachers and students when one of SFUSD’s big data toys “achievement management systems” actually struts a positive reference from crazy Tom Friedman, the One True Wanker of the Decade (the vid is priceless):

On schoolLoop.com you can track your kid’s homework assignments and daily progress in every K-12 class. A most e-mailed list is coming to a job near you.

Such high praise from a Very Serious Person will probably inspire a SchoolLoop offshoot (pun intended), a body-count management system for deployment on drones.

Who else’s “data” will SchoolSnoop track? Not mine. Folllowing Melville’s scrivener, “I would prefer not to.” Retirement has its advantages.

“When the [reformers] say that instruction must be ‘evidence-based,’ and ‘data-driven,’ they don’t mean that schools and teachers should be guided by statistical studies. When they say ‘data-driven,’ they mean breaking down jobs into tasks, breaking tasks into components, and then measuring and quantifying each component to develop target work norms. The norms are used to establish new conditions of work and workplace discipline. These are used to impose scripted learning, narrow ‘teach to the test’ curricula, canned software, and cyber-schools.” Jack Gerson in “The Neo Liberal Agenda and Teachers’ Unions,” in  The Assault on Public Education, p. 110.