The elephant in the room

There are at least three very good reasons for refusing to even consider busing your kids out of this neighborhood. Two are obvious: first, that you worked hard to make SPARK (or Lin) what they are today, and don't want to start over. Second, you bought a house here for the schools here, not to be on a bus route to Hope-Hill Elementary.

The third reason is one I haven't heard anybody else articulate, and that's because it's a really prickly subject: the role of black urban culture in bad test scores and bad behavior in second-tier APS schools.

It is the elephant in the room, so let's stop ignoring it.

APS truly, madly, deeply wants to solve some of its test-score problems by infusing second-tier schools with a creamy white solution of high-performing students. And right now they actually think they're going to pull it off. APS's $65 million deficit, they reason, is the perfect political cover for some large-scale social engineering camouflaged as cost-cutting.

And if there's one thing I learned while threatening to sue (and then suing) APS, it's that it's almost impossible to stop the people in the Trinity building from doing something stupid when they put their minds to it.

The bureaucrats who stonewalled us and got the district sued have a particular blend of arrogance and sense-of-entitlement that is oh so very North Korea, only blacker. So you're in for a big disappointment if you expect redistricting to be handled professionally and sanely.

Errol Davis is a righteous dude, but our Board of Ed is a formidable opponent to anyone wishing to do good in this school district. Our BOE reps are really just Costco-sized versions of APS bureaucrats--Now! Even MORE arrogance! And with EXTRA BONUS senses of entitlement! (Because, after all, they rationalize, they were elected by their (now deeply regretful) constituents).

The District is going to use numbers it creates (or finesses) to persuade you that there is NO OTHER CHOICE than to bus your kids away from schools that YOU have made into good schools----

----and INTO schools that can NEVER be made into good schools because there is a critical mass of parents and children in those neighborhoods who cannot and will not allow excellence to occur.

The neighborhoods APS wants to send your kids to have been infected by a self-loathing urban "culture" which considers assimilation and achievement via hard work to be "lame."

This culture accepts as a norm the one-parent household; accepts as a norm the casual use of vicious and sexually-charged language (the vernacular of its "musicians" and "entertainers") by children, and simultaneously blames its hardships on, and expects to feed from, the hands of others. What passes for a "value system" in these neighborhoods is something you wouldn't want to get on your shoe, which is why you live here and not there.

Houses can be renovated, streets can be spruced up. But neither APS nor anyone else can fix the adults in many Atlanta neighborhoods; people whose children come to school not to learn but to disrupt learning.

APS makes a serious effort to help the children--as serious as its limited capabilities will allow-- but it is a clumsy, hapless whale swimming against the tide.

But--notice the whale segue!--here comes the legacy of the disgraced and departed Bev Hall.

Yes, just in time for the holidays, say hello to the Ghost of Scandals Past!

Hall discovered that if she manipulated test cohorts, she could achieve illusory gains on the supposedly "fair" NAEP tests that she could then trumpet as her the legitimate fruit of her own hard work.

Hall's proteges at APS now realize they have the same opportunity. "Why, if we move a bunch of kids from SPARK to Hope-Hill," they reason, "we will have amazing jumps in test scores, and the children will be much easier to police.

"We can make ourselves look like geniuses simply by manipulating who takes tests, and where. It has worked before, and will work again!"

You've got to admit it--they're right. If SPARK children were bused to Hope-Hill, the school's test scores would rise, and the percentage of little-thugs-from-thug-parents would be diluted, perhaps even to a level where teaching and learning could occur.

So, you--the parents at SPARK--now have an opportunity to do what APS could never in a million years do, and that is dilute the percentage of low-achieving and bad-behaving kids in APS's second-tier schools. Isn't that why you had children in the first place? So your offpsring could sacrifice their futures in order to buoy the children of low-achieving, deeply resentful parents and buoy the fortunes of low-achieving, deeply resentful APS bureaucrats?

What? No? You didn't have that in mind? Where's your civic-mindedness? How could you be so callous? What about the concept that you must do what Brenda Muhammed says is "in the best interest of ALL the children of Atlanta?"

One's heart breaks for the children of no-account parents. Good people everywhere want to help those kids, even as we deplore the disastrous decision-making that leads to poverty-stricken one-parent households with absent, deadbeat dads.

But you didn't cause the cancer that is inner-city black culture and you are not responsible for fixing it. You want to help? Help with time and money. Not by handing your kids over to amateur--and amateurish--social engineers masquerading as school officials.

Your children are not some currency you've been given to gamble with. You have a job to do, and that is to provide them the best possible start. Period. So get going on that, and don't let yourself flinch when the arrows and epithets start flying.

The Case for a Bailout

It took awhile, and you have to unwrap multiple tissue-paper layers of courteous language to find it, but parents throughout out neighborhood are finally saying this to APS:

Forget about ANY plans involving busing our kids out of their current school zone. Not ever gonna happen. Slow down, start over, and by the way, we'll be bringing our own demographers to this next round of talks. (Okay, parents haven't said that yet--but they will).

Let's fast-forward through the next part of the dialogue, the part that is about to happen:

APS: We have to find $65M in savings somewhere, and we have to relieve overcrowding, and the fair way--the obvious way--is to move kids from crowded schools to schools where there's space.

PARENTS: We understand the problem, but you must take busing off the table. We won't do it.

APS: The schools are safe, the transportation can be managed, and the performance of the schools will improve once your kids are there.

PARENTS: We are not going to bus our kids away from the schools we've worked hard to build into schools that we don't think can ever be made to meet our standards for academic achievement and especially student comportment.

APS: If you don't agree to busing, our only recourse will be to cut staff, damaging schools.

PARENTS: Cut the bloat in central office, not teachers and staff at schools.

APS: This "bloat" you imagine we have--we don't really have it. We can't cut enough central office staff to erase the deficit. We will have to cut teachers, janitors, nurses and school staff. You'll have more kids in dirty classrooms with no nurses, no specials, no extras. Or you can have clean classrooms, extras and specials--but you'll be riding the bus.

PARENTS: We will not tolerate any further degradation of the school experience. No cuts in teachers or crucial staff; no elimination of specials, honors classes, AP, or anything like that.

APS: We can't raise property taxes, because families unaffected by all of this would never go along with that. They would just call you a bunch of spoiled, privileged white folk who won't compromise.

PARENTS: Agreed. No property tax hike.

APS: We're sorry, but you've given us no workable option.

(A frosty silence ensues).

Well, here's a workable option:

Pursue a bailout.

If GM can get one; if some banks are "too big to fail," then certainly in the world of intown Atlanta, APS is too big to fail.

So: who's going to bail us out, and why should we feel justified in asking?

Let's tackle that second question first.

There's a deficit because of Bev Hall's mismanagement (with the BOE complicit; it failed to watchdog Hall, with disastrous results; how did a projected $65 million budget deficit not pop onto anybody's radar screen until Hall had already snatched her last bonus check and fled to Kauai? How did the BOE not know about this MUCH sooner?)--

--AND because APS is paying a fortune to teachers it fired and must put through the due-process mechanism. (If you add up the AJC's numbers, the HR cost of the cheating scandal will exceed $10 million).

There are other reasons, such as APS having to overpay for wireless and other technology (the "e-Rate" scandal) and the horrible inefficiency of the special ed program, a swamp Errol Davis is just now beginning to drain....and of course the cost of providing too many non-educators with cushy jobs at the Trinity building.

But who here wants to argue with me that the taxpayers of APS were defrauded by the Beverly Hall regime on a massive scale. Anyone?

If it had just been sloppiness and bad record-keeping, we'd have no moral right to ask for outside help. But we were literally cheated.

That doesn't mean anyone has to help us, but it sure means we don't have to feel bad about asking.

What would happen if we went to the state lawmakers representing this area and insisted they at least draft legislation that would cover the part of the deficit resulting from the cheating scandal--all the HR and legal costs, basically. We could certainly see that a bill was introduced.

What if we then went to every foundation, every donor, every federal muckety-muck, and said, please help us this once, and we'll pledge never to let ourselves get caught in the perfect storm of a person like Hall and a BOE like...well, like our current BOE.

There is no guarantee anyone would help us, but I think we can make a convincing case that a one-time bailout is appropriate.

You know who won't help us with this effort? APS. They want to use this opportunity to social-engineer quality in some of their 2nd-tier schools by moving around good students and involved parents. It must be irresistably tempting to them to think that they can upgrade a school like Hope-Hill, for example, without having to do any hard work, but just by fiat.

Then they can observe the resulting success, success they had no real hand in creating and which may in fact be illusory (because while current Hope-Hill kids would benefit, how much would it hurt the high-achieving kids who were formerly at SPARK or Lin? How do you measure that?) and then trumpet their own expertise. In other words, THEY CAN PRECISELY FOLLOW THE BEVERLY HALL TEMPLATE.

Why did many Americans support bailouts of firms like GM? Because we understood that those companies (and indeed the whole economy) had been victimized by a relatively small number of unethical, vicious, greedy people.

How is this situation not EXACTLY like that one?

APS is soon going to say to us, unless you have some other idea about how to find 65 million dollars, we are going to have to get those buses warmed up.

At that point, it might behoove us to have something more to say than "no."

So, how about: "Then I guess we'd better all get busy looking for some money."

C is for Con Job

What Cecily Harsch-Kinnane and other progressive do-gooders want to sell you is the idea that diversity, by itself, is always a virtue, and that you cannot possibly get too much of it.

What you are actually buying is an agreement to allow children from bad neighborhoods to come into your neighborhood and use the public school you paid for (and have tirelessly supported) until it is overcrowded and/or underachieving.

Artificially introducing diversity in Atlanta is like living in an orange grove and taking vitamin C supplements. You get enough already; you don't need to buy more from the pill salesman. I have 20 interactions in Atlanta a day with people not like me. There's a hugely diverse population here, and it is most decidely NOT self-segregating. You see people of color at Kroger. At the ball game. At Atlantic Station. Every place you go. I get about 3,000 percent of the minimum daily requirement of diversity every day. I don't need any supplements.

If our neighborhood schools had 2X the capacity they have, would I be in favor of allowing more students from unfortunate household situations largely brought about by the selfishness of adults and terribly destructive govenrment entitlement programs --

--(I'm sorry, I meant to say, would I allow more "diverse" students)--

--to enroll here, and thereby flee their own underachieving neighborhood schools?

Absolutely.

But that is not the question in front of us.

The task we have right now is summoning the will to say no to holier-than-thou progressives who want to use guilt and race to bait us into taking a bad deal on redistricting. And if you don't see that deal coalescing in front of you right now (all the official statements to the contrary notwithstanding) then you'd better start paying attention. A bad deal is coming, and diversity is the Trojan horse they're going to use to wheel it into Midtown.

Now, nobody wants to turn their back on the many Atlanta children unfortunate enough to be born to parents who can't or won't get involved in their kids' schools.

Is this our problem? Technically, no. We can't fix those parents. But should we take on part of the job of fighting for those kids in an organized way, anyway? Is it a moral imperative? I think it is.

Can we help those kids while simultaneously excluding them from enrollment in our overcrowded neighborhood schools? Sure we can. Is it hypocritical to do so? No, it is highly moral to do so.

So how do we do that?

We should volunteer to adopt a school in another part of Atlanta and help improve its facilities and raise money for it.

We should also put heavy pressure on underachieving parents and underachieving politicians to do more for their own neighborhoods. There are ways to do that. Is it meddling? Yes, let's call it meddling. I'm pro-meddling. We should fight for those kids --kids who are mostly the victims of their own no-account parents. We should fight for them because their own parents won't.

I'm all for doing that. But I am not going to be forced to drive our daughter to a school in Buckhead or up to NAHS someday because somebody sold my kid out on the basis of their feel-good idea of "diversity."

No way, no how.

Honey Badger Don't Care

I love the "What I've Learned" feature in Esquire. You get the benefit of the accumulated wisdom of some very smart people like Regis Philbin and some people who have figured a few things out via some hard knocks (like Tim Allen).

Or the "Ask Jimmy the Bartender" feature in Mens Health--same thing. Great advice!

Recently, David Brooks of the New York Times did a series of columns on life lessons from folks who have lived a good long while. Excellent reading!

The point is, it's always less painful to learn something from somebody else's mistakes if you can.

So here, for your benefit, is what we have learned from our mistakes with APS:

1. Put on your headphones and listen to your iPod.

When you go to a meeting with APS people, you're going to be told over and over again what a great job they are doing and how they are using data-driven best practices and how they are on the upswing and how things are continuously improving. Put on your headphones and ignore this crap, because it's just a spiel Bevvy Hall told everyone to tell to parents.

Hall believed in the old football adage that the best defense is a great offense. So by always going on the offensive--always telling parents things were great and getting better all the time! --Bev was able to prevent APS from undergoing any real scrutiny for nearly all of her tenure. Until, of course, she left office utterly disgraced...

2. Don't worry about asking nicely, because it doesn't matter.

There are a great many people I know who really believe that if you ask a municipal employee to do their job better in a really nice tone and with your practiced empathy on full display you'll be able to persuade them not to hate your privileged ass and actually do the job they were hired to do in a halfway-competent manner.

I probably believed that at one point. But I now know it's a sucker bet, and it never works.

3. If you really want something done, there's only one way to do it, and that's to get a lawyer.

APS is condescending-to-openly-hostile to parents--you're the paper and APS is the scissors. But lawyers are the rock. So bring the rock with you. Trust me on that.

My prediction is that this whole redistricting thing will end up a bonanza for lawyers, and the communities with the best lawyers will win. I hope I'm wrong. But just in case, I want to find the Crazy Nastyass Honey Badger of lawyers.

What the F?

My first thought when I heard there would have to be a major redistricting plan to accommodate the mini-baby-boom in Midtown was this:

Oh, fuck.

We’re going to have to let our BOE make a big decision, and as sure as the sun comes up in the East, they’re going to screw it up.

Our BOE: individually, they're about the least talented group you’ll come across, but cumulatively—that’s where they really work their magic. Because cumulatively, they can’t agree on how to turn on a light switch. Cumulatively, they make the Supercommittee (you know, the one that never had a chance of reaching a deal on the U.S. budget) look like a model of cooperation and compromise.

We didn’t need (or pay much attention to the thought of electing) a smart, talented BOE last election day because we had Bevvy Hall, and she looked to the world (and to Atlantans) like the real deal. By that same token, the BOE members we have today probably thought getting a slot on the BOE would be an easy gig; nothing much to do but stand back and bask in the shared glory of Bevvy’s accomplishments.

But then, of course, it all turned to shit, and our BOE panicked, blew the investigation into the cheating scandal, disintegrated into Board of Ed Fight Club, got into a lawsuit, nearly got tossed out of office by Gov. Deal, and now...here we are. A BOE you wouldn’t trust to grade a second-period spelling test (I’m not sure all of them can spell) and we have to let them make the biggest decision in Midtown in the last 15 years.

Again: oh, fuck.

But as you play out the various scenarios that are likely to occur (and all the scenarios I can imagine have the BOE making a series of stupid decisions, resulting in more catastrophic damage to our system and neighborhood), it is comforting to remember this one thing:

You can get a divorce.

You can secede from this union. (You have to be careful saying that around here, because if you’re not, pretty soon you’re ringed by tattooed young men in pickup trucks shouting some sort of rebel yell, but yes, you can secede).

You can tell APS to go eff itself. (See illustration. Now, work into a sentence).

You can start a charter school or start a movement to force-convert existing schools into charter schools.

Now, if you do that, APS is going to FREAK OUT.

They are going to pull out all the stops to block you.

They realize that if you win, it’s the beginning of a process that ends with them dead or irrelevant in a few years.

And like any bureaucracy, they’ll fight with all their might to avoid that.

But who is going to say to us (and our lawyers): no, you cannot have a great school in your own neighborhood. You must continue to use subpar schools wherever APS tells you to go, because the greater collective good is better served if you and your children suffer and are shortchanged.

I can’t believe that would really happen. Not in post-racial Obamamerica. But even if it does happen, we can appeal.

Remember the scene in Fried Green Tomatoes where the Kathy Bates character doesn't mind smashing up her own car because "I'm older, and I have better insurance."

Well, we're more affluent and we can afford better lawyers. We'll win in the end.

.

Law of Unintended Consequences: Affirmative Action Edition

During the last years of the Bill Campbell jobs-for-cronies program we jokingly referred to as "Atlanta city government," I had the odious task of going down to City Hall East to try to fix a car registration issue. The line at the desultory, fly-specked city office was quite short, but glacially slow. I suffered through a long wait, gradually came to the head of the line, and there I discovered exactly how the black "it's our turn now" leadership in Atlanta was on its way to destroying this city.

There was one very attractive young female clerk, with impossibly long, lustrous hair ("extensions," whispered the black lady next to me in line), who was typing our information into a terminal. Only "typing" isn't exactly the word for it. She was really pecking with two fingers, because she didn't know how to five-finger type. Only "pecking" isn't really the word for what she was doing, either, because her fake fingernails were so long--extending more than an inch past her fingertips--that she was unable to really "peck" the keys at all, but instead had to carefully place the edge of her fingernails on top of a key, one at a time, and gently push.

If you could see now how comically slow this process was, you would not believe it could actually happen in a professional office--even a government-run office. You'd think she was a parody of an office worker, playing for laughs. But to me it seemed an obscenity, a deliberate "fuck you" to the taxpayers of Atlanta, and without knowing a single thing about this young woman it was nevertheless possible to infer everything about the runaway city government under Bill Campbell, who infamously once proclaimed (after a U.S. Supreme Court setback for Affirmative Action), "I don't care what (the government) says, we'll always have Affirmative Action in Atlanta."

Campbell was imprisoned for his most visible acts of corruption, but what really hurt the city--and continues to hurt the city---was his race-and-resentment based politics. It was an attitude that said, "we are running things now, and we are going to extract as many good-paying jobs as possible out of this system, squeezing it until it cracks wide open if need be, and we're not going to be too concerned about whether the actual work of governing gets done or not, and we're certainly not going to do it at the pace y'all might expect."

This explains why, as late as 2011, it still took six months for the poor bastard who opened Killer Burgers on Piedmont Ave. to get his final few operating permits, a matter that would have taken a competent bureaucracy a matter of hours. "It was the worst six months of my life," he told the AJC.

But let's get back to the pretty young clerk with the long fingernails and the paucity of job skills. Undoubtedly she was the product of the Atlanta Public School system, which would have (then, as now) utterly failed to help her gain any marketable knowledge or skills. She nevertheless managed to get a nice-paying City of Atlanta job on the basis of a curvy figure and despite the fact that any man wanting to get close to her would have had to really watch out for those--well, you'd really want to protect your shrubbery from those Edward Scissorhands nails, you know what I mean?

So she gets the job, and this is where the whole thing--the whole concept--the whole idea of black-run, now-it's-our-turn, we'll-run-this-city-like-a-jobs-program-if-we-want-to construct goes bad:

See, that young woman...she can't ever move up. She lacks every skill necessary to get a better job out in the real world. So she's stuck working the only place she can ever work, which is for a black-run bureaucracy that will forgive her for being useless as an employee.

This means the slot she occupies can never be freed up for another person (black or any other color) to come in and take that job. So one city job parceled out to one underserving daughter-of-a-crony jams up the system for perhaps 40 years, whereas if you'd hired a deserving person for the job, someone with ambition and skill, they would quickly want to move up and out (probably to the private sector), thus freeing up that job for the next skilled, deserving person. By keeping ambitious people in the pipeline, you turn that job over many times over forty years, providing livelihoods to many people instead of just one bored chick with fake nails.

I hope it's starting to dawn on you that I'm not really against fuck-you politics. These are city jobs, and they're not the best jobs in the world (although they're the best jobs many APS-educated young people may ever get), and somebody has to fill those seats. I'm all for a black-run city government running its own informal Affirmative Action program. But when you put dreadfully underskilled people into these jobs, not only do you create an incompetent government, which hurts growth and provokes taxpayer outrage, you also fail at the task you are surreptitiously undertaking: to provide as many relatively good-paying jobs as possible to as many black people as possible.

If you're going to do a shadow Affirmative Action program, do it right. Hire better people and give them a short time to develop and get better, and heavily incentivize them to move to the private sector (you can do this by reducing city-paid benefits, or keeping city salaries slightly below market level).

Then: don't hire people who will take a lower salary because they've historically been bad employees and have few options. Hire young people on the way up who don't have much experience but show a lot of potential. Put the action in Affirmative Action.

Make it your goal to circulate many people through clerical jobs and low-level jobs each decade. There are few jobs in city government where retention is important. The Q.E.D. for this is obvious to anyone who's ever actually had to deal with city inspectors and clerks. These folks are so catastrophically bad -- and so incredibly unmotivated-- that it is impossible for anyone to make the case they have skills and/or experience worth retaining.

The place where this phenomenon--which I'll call the Atlanta Constipation--is most destructive is in the Atlanta Public Schools. I'll write about that next.

Why you should care about APS special ed...even if your child isn't in the program.

To my fellow intown parents:

How many new teachers could SPARK or MES hire with the $1 million-plus APS just spent on legal fees to defend itself in the beating and abuse of an autistic child?

(See front page article in today's AJC: http://www.ajc.com/news/atlanta/an-expensive-fight-over-1188082.html )

That $1M figure doesn't count the estimated $600,000 settlement paid to the family--a family we know well--to educate their child, Stefan, privately until he is an adult.

Here's what those of you who DON'T have children in the APS special-ed program need to know. (And I speak to you now as a parent of such a child, and as a parent who also decided to sue APS):

Special-ed kids routinely disrupt "mainstream" classrooms. In our case, we discovered (to our horror) that our child was disrupting his 2nd-grade class at SPARK every single day, making it impossible for the two truly heroic teachers who had that classroom (Melissa St. Joy and Jenny Lockwood) to do their jobs properly. (The parapro assigned to our child routinely "took his breaks" during these mainstreaming sessions, at the time when his presence was needed the most).

Did you know that your child's teacher faces significant administrative pressure NOT to talk to you about any disruptions caused by special-ed kids, even if you ask point-blank about it? Do you even know right now if your child's classroom has any IEP (Individual Education Program--AKA "special ed") kids in it?

If you don't know, find out. Don't talk to the teacher, go directly to Becky Pruitt or Yolonda Brown. Insist she confirm the number of IEP children participating at any point in time during the school day in your classroom (many children, like ours, only visited the mainstream classroom for a small portion of the day). You may be told there are no IEP children present in the classroom on a permanent basis. This is sleight-of-hand; they just don't want you to know about the 2, 3 or 4 periods a day when IEP children "drop in" for their mainstreaming sessions. You may be told that it's "confidential information" that cannot be shared with you.

Tell them you don't need to know the child's name or sex, but you have a right to know what, if any, IEP services are being provided during your child's classroom-day. Stick to your guns.

Many parents like us desperately want their children to be mainstreamed as much as possible. We want our child to be around "neurotypical" kids--it's good for him. But when he is, he consumes 100% of the teacher's attention. And that is not fair to the other kids. Even though it benefited our kid to be mainstreamed, we could not, in good conscience, continue to see all of the other kids denied the teacher's attention and skill.

So we stopped. But it's likely many other parents of IEP kids either don't know or won't care if their kids are causing a disruption. (And not all IEP children cause disruptions, but I stand firm in the belief that all IEP kids demand a disproportionate share of the teacher's attention, and when this happens, it is a disservice to the other kids, who are already in a classroom that is more crowded than it should be).

Here are the points I want to leave you with:

1. The APS special-ed program is a disaster of epic proportions. If you want to know more, read about it in detail elsewhere on this blog, where you will also find our lawsuit (the actual lawsuit) as well as the recent outside audit of the PEC (dense, heavy reading but quite damning).

If you thought the cheating scandal was the worst problem APS has, well, let me just say the meltdown of APS Spec Ed could well turn out to be the costliest, and the one that directly affects your family the most.

2. The people working special-ed for APS have neither the skill nor the will to mainstream special-ed kids into your kids' regular-ed classroom in a way that does not adversely impact your child's education. (Oh, they will tell you they do--in fact, they will SHOUT OUT LOUD that they do, but they don't).

3. (And this is the most important thing you should take away from today): Throw your support behind private special-ed schools. (Full disclosure: our son now attends a wonderful private special-ed school, the Orion School over on Ponce by the IHOP). Schools like Orion not only help these vulnerable children in a way APS never has (and never will), they also remove spec-ed children from your child's mainstream classroom and allow your child's teachers to do a better job.

If you don't believe me, ask any teacher you know (and who will talk to you off the record) how much better they could do every day if they didn't have to contend with the unfair demands placed on them by special-ed rules and requirements.

Two questions every intown parent must ask themselves in August 2011

You're seeing APS stripped naked now in stark fluorescent lighting. Pretty scary, isn't it? The budget mess, the OIT debacle, the running-aground of the SpEd program....oh, and the lying, cheating, lawbreaking administrators.

So why would it be your default position--your unexamined yet deeply held premise--that APS ought to be allowed to continue to own and run schools like SPARK and even MES?

There is no reason to continue to allow thoroughly mediocre (on their best days) municipal employees to drag down schools in neighborhoods where parents expect--and can afford--excellence. The underlying assumption parents make is that we can't expect our public schools to be too good, because that would somehow be unfair to neighborhoods where the parents aren't as engaged or affluent.

It's not a zero-sum game. If you force your local school to get better, that doesn't mean its improvements must come at the cost of some other school somewhere else. And if you work hard to give your local school every advantage, and that creates a huge performance gap between it and the less successful schools, you are not the bad guy. The parents who allow their children to attend the underperforming schools are the bad guys. Every community has enough parent talent to run a school. Just not the will.

What does it take to run a school? Obviously it's work than parents want to add to their already overflowing plates (or they'd be taking it on in greater numbers than they are), and yet less than you'd think. You have to manage a budget, hire a great headmaster (a combination of principal and executive manager), find the fine line between oversight of the process and micromanaging day-to-day decisions (and stay on the proper side of it); rigorously and continuously evaluate teachers, and report all business transparently to the parent group. That's pretty much it.

Let your headmaster hire a staff and worry about things like the cleaning service and the tree pruning service. Let the parents worry about funding, HR snafus and a developing a fair but exhaustively thorough method of grading teachers. (This is the magic potion: find a way to make your school a paradise for gifted teachers and pure hell for substandard ones).

It's not rocket science. It can't be that difficult, because a thoroughly mediocre and demonstrably corruptible bunch of municipal employees to do it for us now--so how tough can it be?

The bullies are confronted

From GA investigators: APS has "engaged in a pattern and practice of intimidating, threatening, and retaliating against teachers and other personnel who report cheating or who question the propriety of principals' and test coordinators' conduct in administering the CRCT."

And:

APS protects "those in its ranks who engage in intimidation of potential witnesses to cheating."

Read the AJC story here (and be sure to click the link to see the Cease And Desist Order from state investigators, or download it here.)

APS adminstration is absolute, 100% trash. Throw it out and start over.

Answering the Tiger Mom Dilemma

So much is being said lately about the "Tiger Mom" approach and whether we could learn something from pushy parents who set exorbitantly high expectations and cajole their kids to reach them.

I bet more than a few of us have had this internal debate: yeah, sure, I would love for my kids to get straight A's and virtuoso violin, but there's no way I'm going to continuously hound them and deny them the simple pleasures of Wii Super Mario Galaxy, not to mention Super Mario Galaxy 2.

But the answer is ridiculously easy, and I'm surprised that I have to be the one to point out something so obvious:

Team sports.

You want your kid to learn discipline? Mental toughness? How to stick it out through adversity? How to handle both success and failure?

Put that child on a team sport with a good old-school, hard-nosed coach and tell the coach you've got his or her back all the way.

Coaches make excellent Tiger Moms. They can yell at you, make you run stadium steps and do push-ups, and even (when I was in middle and high school) paddle you for wrongdoing. (I received this punishment from my 8th-grade basketball coach and never acted out again).

Coaches can be the bad cop to your good cop. The best part is, your kids will be better off for having played a team sport. If, like me, you're way too soft to put your kid in a position where they're really in distress and really have to plumb the depths of their own being to find a way out, just let the local coach have at it. Everything important I know about working hard and being mentally tough came from team sports. A playing field is an excellent classroom.

Failing Schools: Our Own "127 Hours"

Schools fail in areas where parents aren't involved. Throwing more resources at those schools won't make the parents more involved, and since social engineering is frowned upon (see Naziism, et al), we're trapped.

"Progressives" won't acknowledge this; they're stuck in their own vicious cycle of complaining about inadequate funding while earnestly pushing for some new idea--like Beverly Hall's now-infamous "data-driven best practices."

But we are well and truly trapped, and we ought to own up to it like James Franco's character in "127 Hours," and face the inevitable. In this case, the limb we'll have to sever is the idea that public schools will always be there for you, free and undemanding, and all you have to do to get your kid in the door is fill out the enrollment form.

When we don't ask anything of do-nothing parents, they do nothing. This may be because they're dirt poor or they work too many jobs or they grew up in a household where education was never prized, or because they don't want to assimilate (Hispanic parents who refuse to learn English). It's not our responsibility to fix these people, and I don't care about them. I do care about their kids, because I'm soft that way.

If you're going to squeeze any young person through a rigorous, 15-year-or-more program of drills and tests, you're going to need a vise. Schools and teachers comprise only one jaw in that vise, and vises need two jaws to work. The other jaw is parents.

To be effective, a parent must persuade or compel a child to work hard and do well (some parents lean more toward persuasion; I'm fine with a little Dragon-Momming now and again too).

You don't have to attend a single PTO or PTA meeting or bake fundraising brownies to do your part well. But you do have to set up your kid for success (purchase supplies, make sure the kid is properly rested and ready to go each morning, etc.) and you do have to set expectations for their performance in school and hold fast to those expectations.

Many parents don't do these things and never will. Our system demands nothing from these parents, and nothing is what we get.

So if you want to reform the system, start by making the parents sign a contract stipulating that students who miss homework, flunk tests, get into discipline troubles at school or otherwise screw up will be held back and parents will be liable for the cost of remedial education. (In other words, education is free until you screw up. After that, you pay for it). Parents who withdraw their children from school must use their public funding for homeschooling or private school and provide documentation. Homeschooling parents would have to be licensed and monitored.

This will create all kinds of new headaches, but it will also create many new kinds of schools: charters, co-ops, technical academies, etc. Some will fail to produce strong graduates. In that way, they will be exactly like the expensive failing schools we keep trying to resuscitate now. Parents will eventually figure out that their best and cheapest option is to hew to the rules for our new, sign-the-contract-or-you-don't-get-in public schools.

You can't make schools better until do-nothing parents are forced to put some skin into the game. Until they have incentives to participate (or, rather, strong disincentives for non-participation), they won't change. When they change, the schools will change. But trying to change the schools without addressing the parents is a fool's game.

If he had kept trying to pull his hand out from behind that boulder, Aron Ralston (the guy whose true story is the basis of 127 Hours) would be dead now, instead of a worldwide celebrity.

You need guts to cut off your arm with a dull multi-tool, I guess, but what you mostly need is desperation. Well, we certainly have that here.

The Big Hypothetical

What if we just told APS to get lost and took over responsibility for our own community school. What if we decided conversion charters are NOT just for failing schools in dismal neighborhoods, but that we could use the same process to get the elementary school our kids deserve?

PROS:

No more APS scandals, excuses, delays, con-jobs, bureaucratese, "data-driven best practices," low-character superintendents, rampant nepotism, etc., etc.

Hire teachers and administrators who are directly accountable to the parent board

No obstacles to purchasing and implementing whatever technology is appropriate (see "How We Flunked the iPad Test," below).

Add electives we want (keyboarding class for all third graders & up!); sports, art, music, and all the other things APS keeps trying to cut.

Fire bad teachers sooner. Establish incentives to persuade great teachers to come here and stick around.

(Feel free to add your own items in comments).

CONS:

Have to manage every little detail (from lights to custodial to tech support to HR). Even if you hire someone good to manage the process (a real world-class principal, say, instead of a scandal-dogged Beverly Hall protege), you're going to have headaches aplenty.

Fighting APS for control of the curriculum (because they'll always be desperate to appear relevant).

Lingering guilt over abandoning the public education system (some of our more "progressive" parents seem to be unable to conquer this obstacle, which I think is silly. But we could compromise and agree to adopt a "sister school" in the public system and offer assistance).

(Again, if you can think of any CONS to add here, use the comments).

Doomsday at APS

I want you to remember one thing before you read this post: remember the date you saw it. Right now, it's early 2011, and there's still time to stop this catastrophe from happening. When it does happen, all sorts of people (including our BOE, and our new superintendent) will wail about the suddenness of it, the unfairness of it, the tragedy of it.

But because none of the people in power at APS are doing anything about it now, the outcome predicted here is (in my mind) an inevitability. So I don't want to hear any of those gutless, infighting, scandal-plagued poseurs whine about it when that day comes.

One last thing: in the microscopically improbable chance that I'm wrong about this, I will not only publicly apologize on this blog, I will write personal emails to all the people I am about to embarrass here, apologizing to them personally. I might just as well pledge to send them each a check for $1,000, made out to their favorite charity. I'm that confident.

Here's what's going to happen.

The Atlanta Public Schools special-ed program known as the Program for Exceptional Children (full disclosure: our family has sued the PEC and had what we consider to be a wholly successful outcome) is about to lose its eligibility for federal funding. The district doesn't disclose how much special-ed funding it receives from the feds, but it is in the many millions of dollars per year--enough to fund arts classes, music programs, field trips....remember that, as you read on.

The PEC has either this year or this year plus one more year (this audit of the program fails to specify whether it's the former or the latter, but concedes it is at most a two-year period ending in 2012) to get its act together. (If you are not aware of the disastrously poor performance of the PEC, read down on this blog and you'll get the drift).

So, fine. We have time to fix things. That's what most people would conclude.

But here's the problem: the only way to fix the program is to fire some people, and the guy in charge won't fire them.

The PEC is made up of people. The only way to make the program better is to either change the personnel and get better people, or convince the current people that they should do their jobs better. (I hate to oversimplify the issue this way, because there are some very nice and competent people in the PEC, but they are overwhelmingly outnumbered by the incompetent, racist fools on the staff).

You cannot reform this program and comply with federal law by writing some memos, implementing new rules and expecting your current shoddy workforce to suddenly wake up and decide they want to do things right. If it were possible to effect change via lawsuit, then extremely costly lawsuits like ours would have already done that. But APS has a curious business model for the PEC which is based, as far as our family could tell, on nothing more tangible than hope: the hope that more families won't sue like we did.

Hope is a fine quality; heck, we elected a president on it. But it is not a very good business model.

No, to reform the PEC you will have to change out the people who have failed the special-needs families of the Atlanta Public School system for oh-so-long. And the job of doing that falls to former middle-school principal Aaron Fernander, who spent time as a special-ed teacher before becoming a principal, but who never in his life expected to have to reform a deeply dysfunctional, legally complex system like APS special-ed. With all due respect to Fernander, who's actually a pretty nice guy, he's got no shot. Zero.

The reason? The last time he tried to fire a female employee, he screwed it up and got himself and the district sued. The Board of Education approved a $97,000 settlement to make the lawsuit go away.

Now, first of all, who pays $97,000 to avoid the cost of litigation? You can damn well litigate a case for under $100,000 if you didn't screw up.

But if you did screw up, and you got your ass sued, and the district had to pay nearly six figures to bail you out, how the hell do you get yourself promoted, the very next year, to a position of critical importance in APS, and where you will routinely have to make tough calls on personnel?

And yet, that is the legacy Beverly Hall is leaving us: not just the worst cheating scandal in the history of standardized testing, but a school-district hierarchy riddled with questionable hires.

So now we must ask ourselves a pretty obvious question: can we expect a guy who got himself sued last time he bungled an HR issue with a female employee to actually fire the middle-aged (and older) female employees who run the PEC? (Because they are all--and I mean all--middle-aged and older females).

Of course he's not going to fire them. He's going to stay as far away from employee terminations as he can for the remainder of his career.

So the APS will make rearrange the deck chairs on this Titanic, and when it goes down, as it inevitably will, the district will have to take millions of dollars from mainstream programs and divert it to special ed (because APS will still have to follow federal special-ed laws no matter what).

And when that day comes, Aaron Fernander (if he has any spine at all) and our new superintendent of schools will stand in front of the microphones and look really sorry about how all of this has played out, and announce dramatic cutbacks in mainstream programs.

If you are standing in a tunnel and a freight train is barreling at you at 100mph, it is not going out on a limb for you to predict that you're about to get squashed. The laws of inertia are not going to suddenly disappear because you really really want them to and you pledge to try harder and be smarter next time.

So it will be this time. There's no cavalry coming for the PEC, nobody to stop the program from going right over the cliff. The problem is, when the PEC crashes, we all go with it.

Remember the day you read this.

An open letter to my fellow SPARK parents

Dear Fellow SPARK parents:

Let's take a moment to hear from you parents who still believe that the only appropriate way to participate in your childrens' elementary-school education is to tirelessly and patiently collaborate with the municipal employees of the scandal-plagued Atlanta Public School System.

(Sound of crickets chirping).

Now, let's talk about your other options.

1. Stop believing people who tell you the Alpo they're serving you is really filet mignon. Be a forceful advocate for your child. (My mantra about this is: be as polite as possible, but as confrontational as necessary).

Or, if that doesn't work:

2. Take over the process and eliminate APS from any meaningful role in your child's daily life.

I've tried #1, but I think only #2 is likely to work.

Here's the argument for converting SPARK to a charter school:

SPARK will never be the high-achieving, best-of-class school we imagined so long as it is run by APS bureaucrats who have no interest in nor any background in managing a high-performing elementary school.

Look at the way the school is run today. We have a principal, Yolonda Brown, who was sold to us by Bev Hall on the basis of Brown's remarkable (and, as it would turn out, fraudulent) CRCT record at the traditionally low-performing (and now closed) CW Hill elementary school.

Even if Yolonda Brown had raised CW Hill's CRCT test scores honestly (I do not believe Ms. Brown cheated on any tests, but that doesn't change the fact that we can no longer believe the gains she supposedly achieved at Hill were valid), what does that have to do with running a school like SPARK?

We don't care about the CRCT (Platinum, schmatinum). Our kids should be able to pass the subminimal CRCT exam on the first day of school. But Yolonda Brown cares about the CRCT--that, in fact, is what she cares about most, because it has been her meal ticket thus far. When Yolonda Brown took this year's new kindergarten parents into the school cafeteria this year and showed them a PowerPoint focusing on--you guessed it--SPARK's exemplary CRCT scores, well, that told you everything you ever needed to know about Yolonda Brown.

She just doesn't get it. SPARK cannot be about CRCT scores. It should be a school with a very high ceiling.

This is why the CRCT cheating scandal matters. Because of the cheating that was going on, Beverly Hall was able to spread the myth that she was some sort of educational messiah. Because so many people on the initial SPARK principal selection committee bought into this myth, they accepted Hall's recommendation to hire Brown to be our principal.

If there hadn't been any cheating, Yolonda Brown's improbable CRCT test-score achievements at Hill would not have existed. Also without the cheating, Beverly Hall would not have had the messianic clout she had to push her protege Yolonda Brown onto the SPARK parent committee.

Now, we have Yolonda Brown as our principal. Let's take a look at how she's doing. To do that, let's examine the key duties of any principal:

1. Hiring and retaining only the best teachers and staffers. How's Yolonda Brown doing in that regard? Well, she hired a "technology specialist" who has not been able or willing to exploit even a fraction of SPARK's high-tech resources. She hired a friend's son to an important special-ed position, only to get the district sued. She administratively-transferred (AKA fired) one of SPARK's very best teachers, Julia Zahra, because Julia dared stand up to her. SPARK still has some great teachers. You know why? Because great teachers wanted to come to our beautiful new school and work with our actively involved parents and our high-achieving children. They didn't come because of Yolonda Brown.

2. Handling important construction projects. Anyone want to talk about the gym project this year? The parking lot project last year?

3. Special Ed: This is something our family is well-positioned to know about. There are many ways to mishandle special ed, and some of them get you sued. (We filed suit against APS this past summer, and the district quickly settled with us over their mistakes, one of the most serious of which was the hiring by Yolonda Brown of a friend's son with no relevant experience or credentials to work directly with our little boy).

But there are other ways special-ed can affect mainstream classrooms. Many parents of special-ed kids, including us, want their children "mainstreamed" as much as possible. But if this isn't done carefully and thoughtfully, it can be (and, in our case, was) devastatingly disruptive to mainstream classrooms. I am very sorry to say that our child was the cause of many such disruptions in his mainstream classroom, a fact that left us, his parents, positively mortified when we learned about it. None of that had to happen. But when we needed leadership from Ms. Brown on anything having to do with special ed, all we got was excuses.

4. Technology. Nothing galls me more than SPARK's underutilization of its comparative wealth of high-tech resources. We literally have more tech in our school than any other elementary school in the system (including MES), and yet we don't exploit it as we should. Where are the keyboarding classes? (Keyboarding is offered as a standard part of the curriculum at Woodward Academy starting in the 3rd grade). Where are the classroom blogs? Where are the videos shot by our students and edited in iMovie in our fantastic Mac lab? Where are the original music creations our kids could have done using GarageBand? Where are the digital photo slideshows? Why do we have a "technology specialist" who actually has no capacity to teach the software we went to such great lengths to obtain and install at SPARK?

In every key test of leadership: managing construction projects to completion; professionally managing personnel; tackling special ed; using technology to create a "high ceiling" for our high-performing student population, what grade would you give Ms. Brown right now?

This job--the job of SPARK principal--is too important a position for us to allow it to be occupied by an employee who's not up to it. Employees can be changed. And changing one employee, in this particular case, would lead to a cascade of other changes: better teachers. No more nepotism. Creative leadership on the technology front. Better management of special-ed issues.

It's an employee issue, folks. It's not personal. It's not racial. It's about the fact that SPARK needs and deserves a world-class principal who comes from a school where expectations were through the roof---not a school like CW Hill where the teachers were just doing anything they could to keep kids from failing the subminimal CRCT exam.

These are your children, and they deserve an experienced, standout principal with valid, verified credentials. Yolonda Brown can and should do fine things at schools like CW Hill. Maybe someday she'll learn how to professionally manage people and will become a principal worthy of a school like SPARK. I hope so.

Remember this: SPARK does not necessarily belong in perpetuity to APS and you do not have to let them run it any way they feel like. This school can be yours to run if you have the tenacity and the desire to do the job right.

The iPad test, and how we flunked it.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out that equipping our SPARK kids with a few dozen iPads would be lead to some very interesting possibilities. I know, because I thought of it in late 2009, even before iPads debuted, and I presented it to the SPARK technology committee shortly thereafter (I'll tell you how that went over in a minute).

Suddenly it's a year and a half later, and that same totally obvious idea is rapidly catching on elsewhere, as reported in the New York Times and elsewhere this week: New York City schools have ordered thousands of iPads; meanwhile, there's a whoops-the-reporter-totally-missed-the-whole-point article in the Times on the usefulness of giving every student an iPad instead of making them all tote around a bunch of textbooks.

In my mind, the whole point of giving kids at least some regular access to iPads was never about replacing textbooks or using them as a teaching aid. The point of an iPad in the hands of an elementary school student is to give them a way to create and communicate, not just another way to ingest the stuff we want to cram into their little heads.

Elementary school education can't be all about ingesting facts and spitting them back out onto test sheets, and yet at SPARK and other APS schools, that is indeed what it is about, because teachers are teaching to a test. In the (all too many) bad APS schools, teachers are threatened with all kinds of dire consequences if they don't get badly-parented and underprepared children up to the level where those kids can pass the ridiculously easy CRCT test. So the culture at APS is that you teach to the test and you follow the rote curriculum and if you have any time left over you let the kids make something out of paper and glue.

But it's 2011, people. Our children should be encouraged to create digital works of music and art and photography and video; they should publish blogs and make slideshows and do all sorts of other tasks in the digital environment where they will live and make a living their entire adult lives. If I have to persuade you that providing children with creative outlets is part of your job as a parent, you are definitely reading the wrong blog right now.

The iPad isn't necessarily the best vehicle for creative expression--I would much rather do all of that stuff I just mentioned on my Macbook. But kids think it is cool; many creative iPad apps are cool, and it is not up to us to tell children what means of creative expression they prefer, it is our job to listen to them and figure out what they'd like to do and then provide them with those tools if at all possible.

Part of this discussion must be about SPARK's curriculum. We emphatically do NOT have a good curriculum for SPARK. It may or may not be a good curriculum for the underserved, poorly parented children of typical APS schools, but even that point is arguable. It is inarguable that any curriculum for high-ceiling children must have room for teacher inspiration and teacher improvisation (and ours does not); it is inarguable that any curriculum for high-ceiling children may not use as its goal proficiency on the subminimal CRCT test, and our curriculum does.

But let's get back to the creative stuff. We all want our children to explore their creativity. We live in a digital world and on the Web. That's just the way things are now. Therefore, it falls to us as parents to make sure our kids have access to great digital tools and to those parts of the Web that are useful and safe.

That's where the iPad comes back into the equation.

When I brought up the idea of supplying our kids with, say, an iPad cart (which could be checked out by teachers and travel from room to room), I was under the assumption that our iBook cart and our iPad Touch cart--won from the tight-fisted and unimaginative APS bureaucrats only after a mighty struggle--were already in daily use around the school. But that turned out to be more than a little naive on my part.

When I asked the SPARK "technology specialist" (and I'm always going to put quotes around that phrase when I talk about her) exactly how many times the iBook cart had been checked out and used by teachers, I was told the answer was exactly zero.

Zero times. In four months of school.

Why isn't it being checked out? She couldn't give me an answer. But when I put a little blurb in the school newsletter asking for parent volunteers to help us figure out a way to get those iBooks used more often, she took it as a direct personal attack and asked her bosses to call me to retract the article.

Why do you want me to retract it? I asked. I was only relaying what you told me, and it wasn't like I was accusing you of being the reason we don't utilize the resource, I was just trying to ask parents how they would suggest we create more demand for the cart.

No, she said, you are blaming me and I want the article withdrawn.

But your name isn't in the article, and I never even mention you by title. How can you feel this is personal? Still, in the interest of maintaining a good relationship, I changed the article to be more "positive." (Looking back, this was a mistake on my part; our "technology specialist" is in fact a great hindrance to SPARK and to our children and I should never have considered trying to spare her the embarrassment she would diligently continue to earn).

Once again I will ask you to follow me back to this now-tortuous narrative about the iPad: after we'd had our little discussion about the iBook, I could not manage to get any of my fellow committee members, including the laptop-toting but totally useless "data specialists" from APS HQ to reply in any meaningful way about planning for the impact of iPads on our culture. It was as if I had suggested we all start training our children to breathe methane instead of air. They thought I was crazy.

This is exactly my point about the way SPARK is being managed. Of COURSE our school should have been among the first to try out iPads. We have some wonderfully tech-savvy parents and we have plenty of fundraising muscle. There is no chance we would have failed to raise the $20,000 or so it would have cost to do a pilot program, and there is no chance we would have failed to find creative ways to use iPads to enrich the classroom experience.

We could have blazed the trail for many other schools while giving our kids a fantastic new toolkit.

But there is such a failure of imagination among APS employees assigned to our school that the idea was never seriously considered.

It's the circle of life. Many of these APS employees went to dismal public schools and diploma-mill colleges and then were recruited by APS where they would come learn the Data-Driven Gospel According to Beverly Hall, and as a result any imagination they might have once had has vanished.

This is what will happen to your kids if they are not encouraged to create but are instead asked to absorb a bunch of stuff that's going to appear on a test. That's not learning; it's preparation for a life of mediocrity and drudgery.

There is a direct connection between the empty closet at SPARK where our iPad cart should now sit, and the quality of education your kids are now receiving. It may seem like not having iPads is a small thing. But it's not about having them or not having them; it's about failing to see the possibilities. The people to whom you are delegating the job of educating your children--your second-most important responsibility as a parent (after feeding and clothing them and keeping your children safe)--lack imagination.

They are the low ceiling over your child's future.

When you are ready for something better; when you are ready to go to work, let me know and we'll do better.