Never Say What You Mean

Never say what you mean

Over the years, I have learned that politics is the art of reframing something so what you are doing to looks like just the opposite of what you are doing.

That is what is happening now in the Maryland State Legislature.  The piece of legislation called, “Protect Our Schools” should, if candor were a priority, be called “Feds, keep your hands off Maryland.”

Here is the background.   Trump and his newly minted Ed Secretary, DeVos, are clearly on the record in favor of charter schools and vouchers.  Maryland’s Governor is also a Republican and has made no secret of his favor for both of these ways to change public schools.  With a Republican in the White House and with DeVos as Secretary, there is a real chance these changes could come to Maryland.

The members of the Maryland Legislature are overwhelmingly Democrats.  They are also very much aligned with the Maryland State Teachers’ Union.  The teachers’ union sees charter schools and vouchers as taking money away from public schools where they do their work.  Protect our Schools is a bill that will not allow the State Board of Education to use either vouchers or the creation of charter schools as a solution for a failing school.  The legislation also makes it a bit more difficult for a school to be defined as failing by requiring that test scores only count as 65% of the metric rather than 75%.

The teams on either side of the issue are lining up.  The president of the State Board is opposed to the legislation because he says that education policy decisions should be independent and politics kept out.  But then he was recently appointed by Hogan so it is no surprise that he agrees with the Governor. No politics there.

Trump and DeVos advocate vouchers as a way to allow more low-income students to attend private schools.  Great idea!   Let’s give low-income folks $4,000 vouchers to attend $25,000 schools.  What vouchers wind up being is a discount coupon for the people who could already afford 20K for their kids to go to a private school.  If you can’t afford the purchase price, a roughly 5% off voucher is not going to open the door to the other 95% of the cost.

The center of the debate does not have all that much to do with who has the educational power to control public schools.  It is all about how well a Democratically controlled legislature can play defense against a Republican Governor supported by a Republican federal administration.

When looking at the sides in this fight, it is best to see who has which dogs in the hunt.  The legislature, the teachers’ union and to some extent the Superintendent’s organization all back the bill.  Governor Hogan and his Republican appointees are happy to find something they can agree with the federal administration on since if they go too far down that conservative road, they are not likely to be reelected in overwhelming blue Maryland. 

Republicans are telling us that families want to hold their children to high academic standards to carry out DeVos’ vision for education in our country. They also talk about jeopardizing federal funding.   Democrats tell us the legislature has the responsibility to step in on behalf of those same constituents who want to protect our public schools.

The language is very high and mighty but the fighting is down and dirty.  Hogan will veto and the legislature will probably override and no one will say what they really mean.

Let's get to work

Let’s Get to Work

The whole point of the Common Core curriculum is to prepare kids for college and careers.  At least that is what it says.  But the truth is, the things kids need to do to be prepared for any career whether or not it requires college are not addressed in the curriculum at all.  And parents and students will ignore these skills at their own peril.

First of all texting and emailing to the contrary, employees need to know how to talk to people.   My grandfather made that point to me very long before technology had taken over communication and it is as true today as it was so many years ago.  Almost every career requires verbal conversation with other humans.  Students need to learn how to express their opinions without being offensive to others.   They need to learn how to be active listeners so that the person to whom they are speaking feels heard.   Active listening doesn’t mean the listener needs to agree with the speaker but it does mean the speaker needs to feel that what has been said was absorbed.

Secondly, jobs require that people dress appropriately to the job.   While it is lovely to consider oneself fashion forward, the fact remains that some of that forward fashion is unfit for the workplace.   Even on a dress down day, jeans with strategic rips are going to be acceptable in very few workplaces.   Ditto sexually provocative and suggestive clothing.   A student can insist that his/her apparel is self-expression protected by constitutional rights.  Insist all you want.   The employer just won’t hire you.  And the other thing you should know is that employers can be quite creative in selecting a reason to terminate your employment.  Dress for success- corny but true.   Appearance makes it clear how important a person thinks the activity is.  We need to teach students to dress like what they do is important.

Personal social media is out there for all to see.   When students post sexually inappropriate topics, those topics will hang there for a future employer to check out.   Employees should not be using workplace email for personal messaging.   Everything that is posted on an employer’s email reflects on the brand of that employer.   Employers do not want to see their brand tarnished.

Sick day leave is not a right.   Sick day leave is a privilege by which a person gets paid even though he or she is at home trying to get well.   Employees should not feel the obligation to use up every sick day whether or not they are sick.  No matter how great a person is at his/her job, no job is getting done when the employee is absent.   Parents and teachers should model the behavior of staying home only as necessary.   Absenteeism at school is the forerunner of absenteeism at work.  Never a good thing.

Email is a more casual form of written communication than is a hard paper document.  Nevertheless, when it is being used for a business purpose grammar and sentence structure needs to be recognized.   Schools need to teach kids how to write a formal email that is part of a business communication and how to write a personal email that may have all manner of truncated sentences and abbreviations known only to the youngest generations of users.  Everything an employee does under the employer’s brand is a reflection of the employer.  Students need to be taught these work skills.  If we in schools are serious about preparation for college and careers then we need to teach the real job skills.  Trust me being brilliant in algebra II or biology 101 probably won’t get you to work and it sure won’t allow you to keep on working if you don’t have these job skills.

Neither Black nor White

Neither Black nor White

There is a big push now to try yet again to integrate schools.  Evidently integration in public schools has been on the decline since the late 1990’s.   School systems are once again trying to re-address the issue.

I am confused.

So, my African-American child gets to sit next to a white kid in school and somehow he gets smarter, learns better and my property values go up.  On the other hand, the otherwise high achieving white kid next to mine starts to fall behind in her learning and her family’s property values go down.  How does this happen?  And as an African-American parent, I am really annoyed that my kid needs to go to school with white kids to get smarter.

Yet research tells us that when schools are racially integrated black kids do better in school.  BUT, as any statistics 101 student will tell you correlation does not equal causation.

What are the independent and dependent variables in this equation?  In the research race has been the independent variable.   But the real question is what are the key factors in what makes a good school.   I refuse to believe that it is simply racial composition.   If that were true, all black schools would be bad and all white schools good and we know that is not true.

Good schools have some common components:

Safe and secure.   Children who go to schools that are safe, both physically and emotionally, are open to learning because they are not putting energy into self-protection.  The first human need is to be safe.  Along with that need goes the need for food. 

Clean and well stocked physical environment.  Good schools are clean.  Walls are free of graffiti, holes and visible patches.   Classrooms have paper, books, writing tools and appropriate technology for all the kids.

Experienced, skilled and caring teachers.  It is not enough for teachers to love the children.  If a person does not love kids, he or she should leave the profession.  Enough said on that point.  But love won’t get you a job or into college.   Teachers need multiple skills to teach kids with different learning styles to read, do math and engage in academic inquiry.  They need experience to get these skills and good in-service training.  Unfortunately, the way the unions have set up the system, once teachers get the experience they need to be good teachers, the union agreement allows folks with seniority to move to other “better” schools.  How are the weaker schools going to get better with only the weaker less experienced teachers.

Support services and Activities.  Counselors, art and music teachers and after school activities all make schools places that kids want to be and to help them find success whatever their interests.

And finally good schools have pushy parents.   The fact is that public schools are ultimately funded, or not, by politicians.  In a democracy politicians respond to getting re-elected.  Pushy parents make demands.  Politicians ignore those demands at their peril.

You will notice that none of the variables of what makes a good school is the race of the students.  What is true is that many schools with mostly minority students lack most, or all, of the above variables.  And perhaps, most importantly they lack pushy parents.   So what to do.

 If school officials really wanted to integrate schools, they would pour the first four ingredients into the mostly minority schools, even if there were no pushy parents.  If they had the stomach for it, they could work to make a level playing field so that with the exception of pushy parents, all schools had a similar level of the first four variables, including experienced teachers.  

I am betting that a well-kept school with good, experienced, caring teachers (and perhaps pushy teachers in the absence of pushy parents) would be every bit as attractive to the parents of minority kids as it is to the parents of currently majority white kids. 

I can tell you one thing.   If my kid, regardless of race, had a school with the traits described above, I wouldn’t care what color the other kids were.