The High Cost of Partisan Discource in Education
“Moments in time when the world is changing bring out the best and the worst in people.”
― Tan Twan Eng
Forgive me if I am a little groggy today. We are in the midst of our first varsity baseball season. Which means 4 games a week and long rides home in the late evening.
Some of you, who don't know better, might question my descriptive us of "our" in describing the season. "You are not not out on the field playing, so why are you saying, our?" They might challenge, "That's like saying we are pregnant when it's actually your wife who is the pregnsnt one."
Ah...but trust me when I say, "Parents are playing. Just on a different field."
Just like the ball players, parents are expected to contribute and support. The concession stand, the gate, and the grill are all manned by parents. I don't know how your local team does it, but for us, the sign-up genious goes out for about a week prior to the season and then it's automatic fill in.
Expectations are that you'll cover your shift, and you don't really want to question what will happen if it goes uncovered. Nobody wants to be that guy, or gal, especially when this will be your peer group for 4 times a week for 2 months. It's easier to just grab a spatula and take a shift.
Games last around two hours, but players are there an hour early and responsibilities don't end once the final out is recorded.
After receiving the coach's post game benediction, players begin the ritual of caring for the field. Base paths, the pitchers mound, and the batting area all need raking. A tarp is pulled over the mound and the plate area, weighted down with heavy sand bags. Everybody pitches in from seniors to freshmen.
Afterwards, it may be late, but sustinance must be found. We often find ourselves at Waffle House, rehashing the night's contest over a stack of waffles and eggs.
He's a freshman, grateful for opportunity to play but starving for more. He understand the pecking order but doesn't fully accept it. Fortunately, he's blessed with coaches, who understand both the talent and drive. Who will nurture and develop those qualities.
A drive that sends him, despite the late nights, to the batting cages at 6 AM through out the week, for some pre-school hitting practice.
Something else I've learned, washing a baseball uniform is it's own ritual - one I'm not going to share in fear of missing a step or two. Suffice it to say, it takes scrubbing soaking, and supplemental cleaner. Grass, dirt, and blood, tend to cling to a uniform a bit longer then regular clothes. At least that's how it feels.
I've learned that it is a cardinal sin to throw a uniform in the drier. Do so and you run the risk of Pete Rose, Billy Martin, or Micky Rivers showing up your door to escort you to purgatory. Where is my mother's back yard laundry line when I need. Instead numerous jerseys are strewn around the house to air dry.
None of this is unique to us.
All across the country similar rountines are playing out.
Fathers and sons.
Mothers and sons.
Fathers and daughters.
Mothers and daughters.
All sharing a common bond.
In the midst of it, it all seems overwhelming and it's easy to get lost in the here and now - forgetting how fleeting it all is. In a blink of an eye freshman are suddenly seniors and the final days re in sight.
Some of the best advice I ever got was a from a father at my bar one late night. He was a former athletes who'd raised three college atheletes,
As we are want to do, talk turned to youth sports. After about 20 minutes of rehasing our offsprings atheletic feats, he got serious.
"I'm oing to tell you something and I don't want you to ever forget it." He said looking me squarely in the eye, "This is the most important thing - it ends."
"No matter how talent you are, whether it's in middle school or after a Hall of Fame career, it all ends. All of us are given a finate number of games and when that number is exhausted - its done. And you'll never recover those times."
Those words echo through my head everytime I struggle through traffic to make it to a cross town game. They echo as I stand in 40 degree weather watching an early March game, freezing while we get run ruled by a local private school.
Those words run through me when the team comes from behind in the ninth to snatch a game from a cross town rival or when his fellow freshman, and nearly life long friend, smashes a hit - showing that he's ready for the challenge of varsity ball.
None of it, not the good nor the bad, will last forever.
That's why, come 4 o'clock most days in the coming weeks, you'll find me at the ball park.
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Winding it's way through the Tennessee General Assembly is a bill that would peermit schools collect immigration data from students. The proposed law would allow public schools to check students’ immigration status and charge tuition to students who cannot provide proof that they are in the country legally. Needless to say, the legislation has raised pasionate responses.
Unfortunately the current conversation conflates legal immigration and unregulated immigration. They are not the same, and you can support one and not the other without being anti-immigrant. To suggest otherwise is disingenuos at best.
As the son of a first generation immigrant, I have mixed emotions over the bill. From a logistics stand point, schools just don't have the capacity to absorb another responsibility. They are struggling with all the mandates already heaped on their plates.
We claim that schools exist to educate students, yet are quick to turn teachers into social workers, psychologists, nutrition experts, and now supposedly border agents. Then we scratch our head in wonderment when we don't get desired results.
On the flip side, despite a lack of discourse, the reality is that the demand for required English learner services and teachers has nearly doubled in the last several years. A demand that smaller districts, let alone the larger ones, are struggling to meet.
Patrick Basnett with Professional Educators of Tennessee says schools are trying to hire more ESL teachers, but they face obstacles with communication gaps, inadequate interpreter services, and a scarcity of educational materials available in the student's native languages.
“It was determined that there were over 120 languages being spoken in our schools,” Basnett said.
Many of these non-English speaking students come to Tennessee classrooms with little formal education. It is not uncommon to find third graders entering schools reading on a kindergarten level. Addressing these challenges requires more teachers, more materials and more cost.
The solution can't be to just increase funding. Despite an altrusic desire, Tennessee tax payers can not be expected to foot the bill for specialized needs of the world's children.
Financial resources are not infinite. Fund one thing, and you have to lower funding for another. Should lawmakers put undocumented students ahead of those who are citizens. Spreading the money potentially means an inadequate services for everyone. Is that what we want?
Bill sponser William Lamberth (R-Portland) doesn't think so.
“It is not fair to the rest of the families in that community that all do pay for that entire educational structure and that system to bear the brunt of those additional expenses,” Lamberth said.
Others disagree.
“We should not put our children — the least of us, those that cannot do for themselves — in the middle of an adult battle,” Democratic Rep. Sam McKenzie of Knoxville said. “This is a bully bill.”
I would ask, who are "our" children? It's a hard question to ask and an even harder one to answer.
Some argue that undocumented immigrants are already contributing financially through sales taxes. Undocumented immigrants in Tennessee contribute $314.2 million in federal, state, and local taxes, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.
Proponents would argue these undocumented immigrants contribute to American's quality of life by taking many of the jobs that would go unfilled without them. Perhaps true as well.
But let ask, if I broke into your house and robbed it, but mowed the lawn and washed the dishes before departing, would you still press charges?
Sadly immigration regulation is a neccesary evil. For security and health reasons alone, it's imparative that we know who is entering the country and who is here. Not having some kind of regulation leaves open to attack from foreign enemies and outbreaks from disease.
Now, do we need immigration reform? I think we need to have a serious conversation. One that isn't rife with hyperbole.
Some would portray illegal immigrants as sainted individuals in search of a better life for themselves and their family. Hard working, honorable, exemplary mebers of society.
Others paint a picture of lazy criminals looking to suck off the teat of America.
Both work to rob these individuals of their humanity. Illegal immigrants are not carrictures constructed to further a political agenda. Rather they are people. simpl
Some good, some bad, but most a mixture of the two. Driven by various ambitions. No different than the rest of us. They deserve to be portrayed as such.
I don't have answers here, but I do wish that both sides would reduce the rhetoric and look for solutions. That solution likely lies in both increasing funding and limiting some access.
Still, I have little hope for the political theater to diminish.
On Wednesday, as Rep. Lamberth gave closing remarks ahead of the vote in the House Education committee, he was interrupted by opponents of the bill seated in the hearing room, who began singing, “Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world.” Amidst the singing, a young child walked up to lawmakers and began shouting, “You’re attacking my friends!”
We often preceive choice as being between good and bad, but often choice means choosing between two bad propositions. That's likely the case here.
- - -
Peter Greene has a new piece out this week that attempts to justify the existence of the US Department of Education. It's an interesting piece but ultimately, in my not so humble opinion, fails to make a convincing argument.
No piece of this nature would be worth its salt, if didn't begin by establishing the inherihent evil of President Trump. I'd argue that any defense of a department's existence should be put forth sans an antagonist. The central question should always be, why does the department exist regardless of who sits in the Oval Office. Including Trump in the defense makes it a partisan defense, and that's where my issue lies, but I'll get to that in a minute.
Greene writes;
A major part of that involves some lies and misdirection. The Trumpian line that we spend more than anyone and get the worst results in the world is a lie. But it is also a misdirection, a misstatement about the department's actual purpose.
Likewise, it's a misstatement when the American Federation of Children characterizes the "failed public policy" of "the centralization of American education." But the Department wasn't meant--or built--to centralize US education.
The department's job is not to make sure that American education is great. It is expressly forbidden to exert control over the what and how of education on the state and local level.
It's interesting that in these types of arguments, critics are often dismissed as not understanding or misidefining the concept. I've talked often bout the use of specialized language as a tool to mitigate debate. It's been successfully deployed in arguements over critical race theory and DEI. Yes often term opponents arguments evoke terms that don't truly define their concerns.
DEI, if employed as advertised is a fantastic thing. Critical Race Theory is not being taught in schools. That's not to say that there are elements of both that are causing issues, and deserve to be addressed.
Parents and others are not well versed in the specialized language, and so they look for the closest terms that seem to define their concerns. Often time that usage is fuel by disingenuous actors who wish to employ those concerned as political tools. In the end, no one benefits.
In theory, the USDOE is a wonderful beautiful idea, Unfortunately things have played out a little different.
Something that Greene acknowledges in his next paragraph.
The Trump administration is certainly not the first to ignore any of that. One of the legacies of No Child Left Behind is the idea that feds can grab the levers of power to attempt control of education in the states. Common Core was the ultimate pretzel-- "Don't call it a curriculum because we know that would be illegal, but we are going to do our damnedest to standardize the curriculum across every school in every state." For twenty-some years, various reformsters have tried to use the levers of power in DC to reconfigure US education as a centrally planned and coordinated operation (despite the fact that there is nowhere on the globe to point to that model as a successful one). And even supporters of the department are speaking as if the department is an essential hub for the mighty wheel of US education.
Trump is just working with the tools left lying around by the bipartisan supporters of modern education reform.
This would have been a prime opportunity to mention President Obama's Race to the Top legislation.
In my eyes, RTTT opened the Pandora's box to the majority of issues we face today - excessive testing, centralized standards, national teacher prep programs, and the rise in the influnce of outside private interests in eduacation policy.
To say that there are not entities committed to creating a national education system, and willing to use the USDOE as a tool in that goal, is just not true.
If you don't think that Race to the Top has contributed to nationalizaion of k-12 education, you are either ignorant or disingenuous, and Peter Greene is neither.
He does evoke an intersting view, when the portrays the role of the Department of Education as being rooted in the Civil Rights movement.
I'd argue that the roots of the department are not the Carter administration, but the civil rights movement of the sixties and the recognition that some states and communities, left to their own devices, would try to cheat some children out of the promise of public education. Derek Black's new book Dangerous Learning traces generations of attempts to keep Black children away from education. It was (roughly) the 1960s when the country started to grapple more effectively with the need for federal power to oppose those who would stand between children and their rights.
The programs that now rest with the department came before the department itself, programs meant to level the playing field so that the poor (Title I) and the students with special needs (IDEA) would get full access. The creation of the department stepped up that effort and, importantly, added an education-specific Civil Rights office to the effort.
That's a legitimate point. But remember those challenges and threats came with both parties in power. This is an argument that can stand sans the Trumpian demogougry, focusing on Trump only serves to weaken the argument and open a door for a counteer argument from Trump supporters,
It becomes the unspoken argument that without the Department of Education, when Democrats are not in power, Republicans will throw their children to the wolves. Again that is just not true. Both parties regularly promote policies that better serve adults instead of kids.
Greene closes with the following paragraph:
That's what the loss of the department means-- a loss of a department that, however imperfectly, is supposed to protect the rights of students to an education, regardless of race, creed, zip code, special needs, or the disinterest and prejudice of a state or community. Has the department itself lost sight of that mission from time to time? Sure has. Have they always done a great job of pursuing that mission? Not at all. But if nobody at all is supposed to be pursuing that goal, what will that get us?
His closing argument seems to boil down to. "Yea they kinda sucked, and were often manipulated by politicians, but without them, whos's going to protect students?"
That's not a strong argument. The statement, "protect the rights of students to an education, regardless of race, creed, zip code, special needs, or the disinterest and prejudice of a state or community" sounds great on a t-shirt, but what does it really mean?
Some would argue that means lowering the bar, so that all can reach it. But does that serve all students including those more gifted and perhaps having more resources? In the coming weeks I'll be talking high school calculous and the inherant inequity baked into the pathways. All students are not adequately served.
As a parent there are few things more disheartening then the realization that despite their inate abilities there are resources that your child will never have access to, It's a reality for most parents and unfortunately one that is acerbated by the good intentions of government officials.
Life is filled with inequities, and no goverment entity is capable of erasing those. It constantly amazes me that the equity fight goes on with a large swath of the population opting of battle. Parents with means send their kids to private school or magnate school, while those left behind argue over equitable resources while in an unequitable situation. Even if public school were capable of becoming equitable, there is still a growing population that has access to far greater resources, thus upon graduation have a pronounced advantage.
The question should be how do we decrease that advantage.
My argument against the USDOE remains that the USDOE is charged with a mission that they have limited tools to serve. As such it remains a mission that comes with more loses then wins.
Furthermore, despite its title, it remains a Department populated by people who are not educators. Not a lot of former teachers employed by the department. I doubt that your principal left their position to assume a role of leadership at the USDOE.
That's an issue for me.
That said, I encourage you to read Peter Greene. Agree or disagree, you'll always be better for it.
I know I am
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