"An immense laboratory of trial an error, failure and success..."

Education, specifically public education, is an institution with which most all Americans are intimately familiar. Ranging from deeply embedded memories of the classroom to inflamed opinions about how public money should (or should not) be spent on education, the subject of education is inherently political. On a sunny afternoon a few weeks ago, a well-meaning question about what I do for a living (I am a teacher) morphed into a soapbox-type musings on teacher's unions, bi-lingual education, and the state of today's youth. It was in listening and crafting polite but honest responses that I thought for the first time: the outcomes of education in America are personally important and significant for everyone - no wonder everyone is so concerned!

Titled as a tribute to Jane Jacobs the great observer of cities and economies, Diane Ravitch captures the spirit of Jacobs in her insistence that in terms of education reform, there is "no silver bullet, not magic feather, no panacea that will miraculously improve student achievement." (p. 229) Instead of a prescription, Ravitch methodically discusses her observations from working in education both as a historian and an federal-level reformer. Her suggestions are more simple and common sense than visionary. Neighborhood schools, rigorous and engaging content, and standards based instruction, and maintaining a democratic style of school governance, are the foundation for Ravitch's.

Divided into chapters that lead the reader chronologically through education reforms starting from the publication of A Nation at Risk in 1983 and the beginning of the standards movement, Ravitch then trods the well-worn path of criticism of NCLB / high stakes testing as well as challenging the touted flagship "successes" of school districts that, upon closer or more discriminating evaluation, reveal anomalies instead of sound pedagogical or institutional advances. This argument against using a single example to demonstrate success is also applied to the ever-growing charter school movement. Ravitch spends an entire chapter discussing the origins of the charter school and how the movement as we know it today, (new schools providing a supposedly sustainable alternative to traditional schools) is contrary to the very ideals that necessitated the creation of charter schools (the schools would be created to test new methods and the successful methods would then be taken back to the mainstream schools for wider implementation).

With regard to the current state of the education debate in our country, I found Ravitch's analysis of how foundations are influencing the education agenda to be most relevant. Ravitch looks at seemingly benevolent institutions such as "The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation" with a healthy dose of realism and skepticism. At a time when districts are strapped for cash and forced to layoff school staff without regard for the needs of the students, most superintendents or principals are looking for money wherever they can find it. Most recently in Connecticut, it was revealed that, in an attempt to infuse the perennially cash-strapped Bridgeport Public School system with private money, a Greenwich billionaire and his assistant attempted to have the democratically elected school board reconstituted under mayoral control. (See this article in the Connecticut Post for details.) It is anti-democratic methods such as those described above, that are perhaps most alarming in the current debate on education reform.


Ravitch reminds the reader that if private money is introduced into the public sector under the guise of carefully written grants,  fiscal necessity cedes control of education policy to the donor or foundation. While this may not look like a problem on the surface, Ravitch states "when the wealthiest of these foundation are joined in common purpose, they represent an unusually powerful force that is beyond the reach of democratic institutions." (p. 200) As an educator, the prospect of having to answer to donors instead of democratically elected community members, is quite alarming.


Because there is no "silver bullet" to education reform, perhaps Ravitch's message is most succinctly stated in Jacob's conclusion to "The Death an Life of Great American Cities." Jacobs final sentence reads "Lively, diverse, intense cities contain the seeds of their own regeneration, with energy enough to carry over for problems and needs outside themselves." Applied to education, perhaps what Ravitch desires her readers to understand is that one sweeping reform or idea is not a realistic method of reform. Because education is intertwined with the health of our society, all those who are interested should not only join the conversation, join the fight.

You can't lose something you never had

My approach to David Ulin's book The Lost Art of Reading: Why books matter in a distracted time came from a hopeful place. Personally, it wasn't until somewhere late in high school or the beginning of my time in college that I began to value reading for intrinsic reasons. Prior to that, reading was a forced and joyless endeavor.

Looking back on my relationship with reading up this point, perhaps I did not value reading because I did not value what Ulin concludes, is one of of the essential ends of reading - silence. Silence had no place in my life as a kid; this was a time in which my brain waves resembled a Looney Tunes show. A series of ever changing, chaotic, scenes that make little sense when viewed objectively - but funny as hell.

What Ulin seeks to uncover in this approximately 150 page book (which reads more like a pamphlet) is not a laundry list of nostalgic reasons to lament how the art of reading continues to lose traction among all segments of the global population as much as it is an inquiry into what importance the art of sustained reading still holds.

The most satisfying conclusion that Ulin reaches is a paradox of sorts. Despite the increasing interconnectedness of our global society, Ulin posits that it is the act of reading, not tweeting or making / checking status updates, which offers "the blurring of boundaries that divide us."

Ulin's assertion that reading's importance lies in being able to engage with and immerse oneself in lives, cultures, and social situations different from our own. It was this experience with Alice Sebold's work Lucky that ignited my own intrinsic desire to read.

Some may contend that the act of engaging with other individuals, cultures, and time periods is precisely what the age of Web 2.0 offers in a manner far outpacing what any printed book can offer. And if this is true, then maybe people like Ulin and those who agree with his stance as stated in The Lost Art of Reading will only know whether or not this is true if they engage in modern media with the same vigor and interest put towards print.

gally (v)

The vernacular employed by Melville throughout Moby Dick never ceases to confound me. Whether it is the time-specificity of the vocabulary or a conscious effort on Melville's part to challenge readers, a word italicized and footnoted by the author seemed to give me the permission to be utterly confused...

Here is the italicized subject in context:

"...when a general pausing commotion among the whales gave animating tokens that they were not at last under the influence of that strange perplexity of inert irresolution, which, when the fishermen perceive it in the whale, they say he is gallied.*"
Taken from: Moby Dick, pg. 344


Melville's footnote states that the word is to "frighten excessively, - to confound with fright." Not found in my Revices Tenth Edition of the OED - perhaps we need to take Melville's word that gally relates to "gallow" as found in Shakespeare - but was "plebianised" upon being brought onto the "New-England" rocks. One can only assume that the root for the verb 'to gally' is somehow related to the antiquated structures of corporal punishment.