Pushy mom invades public school, triumphs

I just picked up one of my daughters from her public school and listened to four girls chatter in a spew of Spanglish and giggles. The girls included my white daughter, two girls who are Salvadoran, and a girl in a headscarf from somewhere in Africa. They moved from English to Spanish to who knows what in less than a minute.

So reading your comment, I could relate to both Sandra Tsing Lo and your colleague. I was reminded of a cab ride I took in DC with my Carribean cab driver with great dreadlocks who was listening to Pacifica radio. I asked him where he lived in DC, and I was surprised when he mentioned a very racially mixed neighborhood since DC is one of the most racially divided cities I've ever seen. When I asked why he lived there, he commented "I love living around white people. You all know how to complain and get stuff done better than any people I know. When you call the police, they show up. When you call the city council man, he shows up. When you call the principal, she shows up."

He's definitely onto something. White people--either through privilege or expectation--are great at getting stuff done. I think that's the key to the great schools in my neighborhood. The white people--who tend to lead all the committees even though white kids are in the minority--are good about complaining, but also good about complaining on behalf of our neighbors who don't speak English, who spend nights cleaning offices, who may be in the country illegally. While we advocate for our kids, we also advocate for Latino kids, African kids, Asians kids. We fight for more bi-lingual staff. We fight for understanding about Muslim holidays. We fight for soccer and wrestling, as well as crew and swimming.

The best school system I was in was a public one, from which 30 kids in my graduating class of ~500 went to Ivy League schools or the like. The story was that about 15 years earlier Jewish parents organized (their children being about 10% of the total in that otherwise quite average suburb); they went Type A on the town's school committee and donated a lot of money and efforts, in quite the manner Sandra Tsing Loh describes doing it. They succeeded- the town is widely known for its school quality and works hard to preserve it; that drives and sustains property values.

Every major urban area I've lived in, I've seen high Jewish population concentrations as strong correlate of some very good schools distinguishable from the correlation with wealth itself. Often public ones, in some places a combination of public and private ones, in some places just private ones.

Sandra Tsing Loh is a wonderful writer; she crops up a fair amount in one of my alum magazines, always with something interesting to say.

Boy, those newly assertive mums striking such high profile across the Great White Milfy Way of our suburban schools really do get their floured hands into many a pie - they're even waging war over digital-photo file formats - seems the go-along-to-get-along types are fine with the default of JPEG conversion; pushy moms, on the other hand, push GIF.

And for photo-sharia among those of Dreher humour, there's new Crunchy GIF...

Aaron:

"Well thank you, Flat Nose, that's what sustained me in my hour of need." - Butch Cassidy

Say, you aren't by any chance "Rod's Aaron", best known from that chapter of the Old Testament (i.e., hardcover) version of Crunchy Cons - where Rod threw you to the ground at a Pharoah Sanders concert, and you turned into a serpent? As the late Chris Farley would say, "that was awesome."

As you were...

mm - Good! That's what Crunchy-Con commenters are, mm: Good!

tvacres.com/admascots_campbells.htm

"Hitting the mackerel" - sig

That recalls the time the late Julia Child was a guest on David Letterman's original late-night show on NBC, where her staged cookery demo found her highlighting duck preparation. "Now, first," she said, clenching a tenderising mallet in her Francophilic fist, "you have to pound the duck - "

Upon which Dave, with sheepish smirk, could not help himself -

"'Pounding the duck,' eh?...'used to do quite a bit of *that* back in college..."

This here place is beginning to feel a bit like a certain sitcom Bostonian tavern - we'll call this one "Jeers" - where everybody knows your name, real, assumed, or blank in some cases...

In the LA area, if you want to be in a town with a decent (i.e. white-Asian dominated) public school system, you'd better be ready to spend $700K and up for a house. STL 'failed' probably because musician husband and freelance-writer wife didn't quite make enough. I like her approach though: why should schools in this gem of a city be given over to 3rdworld culture and dysfunction? If whites hadn't already surrendered in the culture war, we'd be moving into the public schools, taking control, and cleaning up the mess.

mm:

"Easy, Mungo!" - Michael Palin, The Restaurant Sketch

If I may be deadly serious for a change for one post: there's a lot of merit in the whole complaining-gets-results convictions advanced above: Which reminds me of an old joke, better told than read, I heard from the late Tom "Fire up the Colortinis" Snyder or someone like him:

You do the caller's voice below in your gruffest, most brutish, imagined deep voice of a lifelong male chainsmoker, in stage Brooklynese:

ANNOUNCER: Hello, and welcome back to the show...tonight we're taking calls on how you, the listener, were able to finally quit smoking. Caller, you're on the air!
CALLER [Basso maximo profundo]: Ah, yeah, well I'd have ta say it was my family what really did it - everybody complained about my smoking: my son complained, my dwatah complained - my *husband* complained...*

*I do admire, though, the fitness routine enacted among the sort of Sunbelted-radiant, bronzed, lizard-skinned, chainsmoking Jeri Atrix - men too! - crowding the slots at A Tribal Casino Near You: what with dragging around a heavy bucket of quarters with one hand, and another filled with sand and cigarette butts on the other, remedial strength training and osteoporosis would seem to be non-issues...

But would the pails of justice (ye sons of toil) at last pay off their tons of soil?

With all due respect for the able punning going on (that being hobnailed boots and the throwing of peanuts*), there is a serious comment to be made here, using the unsurnamed Michael's comment: ...why should schools in this gem of a city be given over to 3rdworld culture and dysfunction? If whites hadn't already surrendered in the culture war, we'd be moving into the public schools, taking control, and cleaning up the mess.

Michael, the context of your post leads me to a certain conclusion, so if you need to clarify I will be happy to relent; however: there is a clear and strong trend across the nation to blame the "3rd world" influx for the demise of public schools. That is pure horse pucky of the smelliest variety. The "giving over" is precisely the holdover from pre-Civil Rights days that remains true: given a school district with a large enough population of non-whites, there will ensue de facto segregation, a primary tactic of which will be the political decision to underfund schools that continue to have a majority white population, and subsequently blame their decline on the non-whites.

* Throwing peanuts: 88888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888, is the literarily- and time-honored method of applauding puns over at alt.callahans. Anyone not familiar with the Spider Robinson stories, and having the inclination to subject oneself to the very best(worst) of puns, should approach the science fiction section of your book store very carefully, and purchase the collected tales of Callahan's Saloon.

Thus do we refute the law of entropy. :-)

Throwing gobs and gobs of money at the problem has been tried:
http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-298.html

"Kansas City spent as much as $11,700 per pupil--more money per pupil, on a cost of living adjusted basis, than any other of the 280 largest districts in the country. The money bought higher teachers' salaries, 15 new schools, and such amenities as an Olympic-sized swimming pool with an underwater viewing room, television and animation studios, a robotics lab, a 25-acre wildlife sanctuary, a zoo, a model United Nations with simultaneous translation capability, and field trips to Mexico and Senegal. The student-teacher ratio was 12 or 13 to 1, the lowest of any major school district in the country.

The results were dismal. Test scores did not rise; the black-white gap did not diminish; and there was less, not greater, integration."

If you want to assure going to segregated schools (racially and classwise), move to New Jersey, with the most segregated schools in the entire country.

I was fortunate to go to a very diverse high school in the mid-1980s, which was unheard of at the time in N.J. (the increasing Asian population in New Jersey today, and affluent African-Americans moving to suburbia, are finally starting to make a few districts both more white-collar and more racially diverse). It was all thanks to a quirk in the district lines (which, while mostly white suburbia, also took in a few large apartment complexes, a military base, and a historic African-American neighborhood), which again is extraordinarily rare in New Jersey.

We didn't have "black lunch tables" or other such phenomena seen at so many schools; the main problem was not with the kids, but the adults, who tracked most of the African-American and Latino students into vocational classes, whether they deserved to be or not.

If only the solution were as simple as funding. As someone above points out, our inner city schools spend more per pupil than just about anywhere else and in most terrible school, teachers are paid a premium for being there. However, inner city school bureaucracies tend to be very corrupt and foolish with how they spend money. If I were made goddess of all things, one of the first things I would do is give principals control over staffing and at least 80% of how their funding is spent.

There are two inter-related problems with inner city schools which tend to lead to the sorts of problems. Many people in impoverished neighborhoods are undereducated themselves and feel that thy have no choice but to trust in the "experts" at the school district. Often they do not realize how badly the school officials are screwing things up and so do not protest when they ought to. They also tend, more than other Americans to believe the nonsense about lack of funding (there isn't a lack of funding - there's a lack of discretionary funding for principals to use to meet the unique needs of their schools). So when they do complain and are told, "there's not enough money", they are more likely than others to accept this situation and feel like there's just nothing they can do about it. It's almost a sort of learned helplessness that the school system engenders in people.

The other problem, which is grossly enabled by the problem outlined above is that many of our inner city school systems have become the experimental playgrounds of the ivory tower wack jobs. For example, the Chicago School system has a partnership with the University of Illinois Chicago education department, one of whose most prominent professors is a former domestic terrorist and Marxist. Because they are the experts, they get to press the school system into implementing all sorts of social justice programs, crayola curicculum, everyday math nonsense and democratic schools which don't work in practice all while neglecting basic reading, writing and math skills. In a middle class white suburban school, parents would see these sorts of things coming and mount an insurrection. However, in many inner city schools, parents assume that the experts know best and trust them to do the right things. However, many of the problems seen in our inner city schools, particularly the lack of discipline, can be traced back to the nonsense coming out of these ivory tower nutjobs.

Anyhow. I must admit that this woman has a lot more energy for the fight than I do. I had my son in the local public school for kindergarten. They were completely unresponsive to my concerns and my son's needs. The bizarre thing is that they acted like I was nuts and the only person to ever have a problem with anything they were doing. Yet the next year the implemented many changes which addressed precisely the problems I had raised concerns about, so obviously there was a problem and I wasn't the only one who saw it. I just knew that I wasn't willing to spend the next 12 years fighting with them. Especially if they would only make changes after my son had been screwed over. People think homeschooling is a lot of work, but to my mind it's much easier than fighting the school beast.

This is a blast from the past for me -- I met Sandra Tsing Loh when I lived in Los Angeles (back then, she was a performance artist) and it is great to see that she is still around. I really enjoyed this essay, and I think she is on to something in her description of "the middle class poor" and her proposed solutions to problems in the public schools.