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Articles and Other Writing

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More children left behind by No Child Left Behind (The Chronicle, March 22, 2007)

Congressional debate over the reauthorization of the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) has focused on the legislation’s myriad technical problems, many of which have seriously handcuffed local school district efforts to educate all children. Congress has not fulfilled its promise to fill the cavernous funding disparities that plague an education system funded primarily by local property taxes. Progress towards academic proficiency for all students by 2014, the goal around which NCLB is structured, is measured by comparing snapshots from year to year, rather than by mapping individual students’ progress as they move up in grades. And since schools are targeted for sanctions when progress lags for even one demographic subgroup in one subject—say, fifth grade Latino students in math—diverse schools with more identifiable subgroups are by definition more likely to be labeled as failing.

Addressing these, and many other, technical problems with NCLB would be a giant step in the right direction, but such fixes would stop well short of reversing the anti-government, pro-privatization agenda that has propelled NCLB since its inception. While most of NCLB’s supporters are sincerely motivated to improve education for chronically underserved students, a small group of others—namely those who first placed this landmark federal legislation on the public agenda—actively seeks to discredit and undermine public education.

The lofty rhetoric of high academic standards for all, while accepting no “excuses” for failure, was designed by the same right-wing think tanks—the Heritage Foundation, the Pioneer Institute, and others—that brought us the “death tax” and “partial birth abortion,” issues strategically framed to mask a fundamentalist, neoconservative vision of government. The bar of reaching 100% proficiency for every individual student by 2014, including those with limited English proficiency and severe disabilities, is a set-up of epic proportions, similarly audacious to requiring the Cambridge Police Department to eliminate all crime over, say, the next ten years in order to avoid private take-over.

School vouchers, which seek to redirect public education dollars for private school tuition, were originally the centerpiece of NCLB. While vouchers were ultimately left out of the law only when they threatened its bipartisan support, President Bush and current Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings have already declared their desire to have them written back into NCLB this year.

No Child Left Behind is changing American education in another important way: redistributing control over individual classrooms, schools, and districts away from teachers, administrators, and local governing bodies to state and federal legislators who rarely have meaningful connections to local needs and lack educational expertise. Fading away is the archetypal image of the one-room schoolhouse where lifelong teachers designed curricula relevant to the local community.

Classroom instruction is now marked by highly prescribed pacing guides derived from state and national curriculum frameworks that outline precisely what skills are to be imparted to kids at precisely what time of year. “Qualified” teaching is increasingly defined by a teacher’s knowledge of a particular content area rather than on actual teaching skills and one’s ability to respond to the divergent needs of children. Teachers are treated less like skilled professionals and more like employees to be managed. Schooling is becoming streamlined and sanitized.

Since NCLB’s accountability measures are so narrow, and because the repercussions for failing to meet annual benchmarks are so severe, individual schools have been forced to narrow the educational experience in order to strive for “adequate yearly progress.” Elementary school teachers lament the loss of instructional time for the arts, foreign languages, and physical education. Many schools have even abandoned regular instructional time for social studies and history, since these are not yet tested subjects under NCLB. Paradoxically, kids in poor urban schools, who benefit the most from a school experience that expands their horizons, have had their education most narrowed as a result of NCLB’s blunt accountability.

Relatively speaking, Cambridge schools are doing pretty well; elsewhere, many schools no longer offer instrumental music, some schools are now being built without playgrounds, and countless neighboring districts now charge user fees for extra-curricular activities. But we are not immune from outside pressures. Some CRLS students have been forced into taking MCAS prep courses as part of their regular course load and our after school and summer programs have begun to sacrifice broad educational enrichment for narrower stopgap measures for avoiding failure on standardized tests.

In Massachusetts we are in a unique position to resist this movement in public education. Senator Kennedy is NCLB’s most prominent Democratic supporter and Massachusetts regularly leads the nation in scores on standardized tests. Without sounding like sour grapes, we can lobby our senior senator to change his mind and begin to speak persuasively about the dirty underbelly of top-down standardized education. Cantabrigians know the value of a rich public education and we should be leading the movement to preserve local control over schools.

New contract keeps Fowler-Finn accountable (September 7, 2006)

June’s divisive Superintendent evaluation made it clear that the coming decision over Dr. Fowler-Finn’s contract renewal would be challenging. Indeed, it was a difficult summer for everyone involved, particularly for interested members of the public, who were unable to participate in, or even monitor, the process due to the legal nature of contract negotiations.

Entering the School Committee’s deliberations, I committed myself to keeping an open mind and working toward a final, unified decision. Boards that lead with a single voice chart the clearest direction for their institutions. Additionally, the group process of working through decisions often results in creative solutions that individuals alone would never have imagined.

Unfortunately, pursuing a shared vision became impossible when several committee members staked out public positions just as meaningful deliberations began: Joe Grassi and Fred Fantini ("Extend the Super's Contract to June 2008" July 13, 2006) declared that they would only vote for a one-year extension, and Patti Nolan responded tit-for-tat (“Nolan: Cambridge Needs New Leadership” July 27, 2006) making it clear that she would oppose any extension under any circumstances. Close observers also likely knew which way Mayor Reeves (against any extension) and Nancy Walser (for a one-year extension) would vote, but these members refrained from detailing their early positions in the newspaper.

A further complication was a June 8, 2006 e-mail sent to the Amigos School listserv by Paul Toner, then President of the Cambridge Teachers’ Association, pushing for an extension before Dr. Fowler-Finn’s evaluation had even concluded. A friend joked that Richard Harding and I should have gone off and deliberated on our own to determine the Superintendent’s fate since we were the only members whose votes were uncommitted.

Ultimately, I was faced with an agonizing individual vote, quite possibly the hardest decision I have ever had to make.

An enduring criticism of the Cambridge School Committee has been that it is a fractured body with seven members going off in seven different directions. But Dr. Fowler-Finn had contributed to this dynamic as well, insisting that the School Committee be only passively involved in policy making. He got everything he wanted from the previous School Committee when he negotiated his first contract, including provisions that greatly limited the School Committee’s ability to represent the public interest effectively. That contract forbid the School Committee from forming sub-committees for any task other than budget deliberations and contract negotiations, it forbid the Committee from consulting principals and administrators without the Superintendent’s permission, and it required that the district’s goals be negotiated in executive session, without the public’s input.

This time the School Committee bargained hard; each of these three provisions, all of which I found antithetical to transparent and reasoned public policy making, was successfully deleted from the new contract. We asserted ourselves in reclaiming these crucial legislative rights without giving away anything (i.e. a salary increase) in return.

Many people opposed an extension because they felt that standardized test scores had not increased enough under his watch. Even if you believe that test scores are a good measure of a school system, which I do not, three-years worth of data is simply not enough to make a sound judgment; you are better making decisions based on a hunch than on such limited data.

In the end I voted for a two-year extension under the newly negotiated contract, which seemed to me to be a reasonable and responsible compromise.

Despite serious misgivings about Dr. Fowler-Finn’s often unilateral and uninspiring leadership, I am committed to working with him over the years to come. One requires a very compelling reason to replace a leader and undertake the institutional changes that inevitably follow. I am hopeful that the Committee will now better hold the Superintendent accountable and keep its collective eyes on the prize: an exceptional district that educates all students for participation in society.

While the School Committee was very critical of Dr. Fowler-Finn during our negotiations, we were also self-reflective about the changes we wanted to make in our own capacity to guide and shape our schools. The relationship between the School Committee, our Superintendent, and the citizens of Cambridge should be a model for meaningful democratic deliberation. If we all participate more actively, more openly, and more candidly, we will be less dependent on the Superintendent’s expertise alone. Then maybe Tuesday’s decision will not have been quite as important as we thought.

I was delighted to give the commencement speech at both the King Open and Fletcher-Maynard Eighth Grade Graduations in June of 2006. Below is the text of my speech:

Congratulations to the graduating class of 2006. As a graduate of, and former teacher in, the Cambridge Public Schools, I am thrilled and honored to be speaking today.

Starting high school can be daunting, particularly one as large as CRLS. I will never forget the combination of excitement and anxiety I felt while walking to school with my friend Sean that first day of ninth grade. Since my time at CRLS was not all that long ago, I hope you will forgive me if I give you some advice for making the most of your time at high school.

My father is a teacher and academic advisor at MIT. A couple of years ago he was assigned an advisee who was a high achieving son of Vietnamese refugees. Like many immigrant families, they were determined to make most of their opportunity in the United States. At the beginning of this student’s first year, my father received a letter from the student’s father urging him to be tough on his son. He told my father that his son had only taken Advanced Placement and honors courses in high school and that he expected my father to continue pushing him in this vein, persuading his son to take the toughest courses offered at MIT and encouraging him to take 5 classes per semester instead of 4. My father was taken aback by the intensity of the letter and wrote back to the student’s father saying: “The advice I have given your son is: play volleyball.”

Thus, my first piece of advice for making the most of your time at CRLS is: Play volleyball.

Diversity, in all senses of the word, is Cambridge’s greatest strength, but it can be challenging to reach out and meet different friends in high school. The sports teams at CRLS are each a microcosm of what the larger school has to offer and each team provides a diverse group of students with a common mission through which you get to know each other quickly. Playing sports at the beginning of ninth grade gives you a ready-made social network, guaranteeing that you will see familiar faces as you roam the hallways at school and guaranteeing that you will meet and become friends with peers who are not just like you.

My second piece of advice is: Figure out who are the best, most demanding teachers and take their classes no matter what they teach.

The most inspirational teachers are often also the most difficult. High school is a time to develop your interests and to push yourself. Learning alongside a great teacher is the best way to sample different subject areas. The love of their work inspires you to excel. Even though my best teachers were also the toughest, I always found that I got better grades in their classes. Great teachers motivate you to do your best.

My third piece of advice is: Take something unexpected! CRLS has so much to offer that you could never possibly take a class in every area, but sadly too many students feel paralyzed by the range of options and simply stick with what is familiar.

I did not take a single art class during my first three years of high school. Fortunately, a friend persuaded me to fulfill my art requirement by taking photography my senior year. It turned out that CRLS had one of the strongest, best-resourced photography departments of any high school in the entire country. I also learned that while I was terrible at creating my own images through drawing, painting, or sculpting, I had a good eye for photography. Amazingly, I excelled in this class and went on to take photography in college as well. Looking back on this experience, I realize that by waiting until my senior year to sample an art class, I missed out on three years of honing my skills as a photographer.

My fourth piece of advice is: “Be outspoken.” Meaningful learning does not happen if you are not engaged and interested in what you are studying. Schools are a safe space for people to explore ideas and speak their minds. The more you speak openly and honestly, the more people around you will do the same. Hopefully we will all change our minds and develop our ideas as we go.

The first decision I had to make as a new School Committee member this January was whether or not to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance at the beginning of our meetings. There is tremendous pressure in the United States to participate in ceremonial acts of patriotism. What I find most offensive about the Pledge is that, from the beginning, it has been used almost exclusively in public schools as a tool for indoctrinating children. I made the difficult decision not to stand and I wrote an article for The Cambridge Chronicle explaining my reasoning.

In this article I explained that I am most troubled by people reciting the Pledge without thinking about its meaning and, therefore, I said I actually hoped that my controversial decision would spark a dialogue. Open, respectful debates are precisely what public schooling should be about. My decision to publicize my reasons for not standing resulted in a couple of nasty phone calls and even some hate mail, but it also resulted in many constructive conversations over the appropriate role of patriotism in our country and about the need for more meaningful, participatory civics education. I spent an hour on the phone with one person who had written to The Chronicle calling for my impeachment, someone I likely never would have talked to otherwise. Debating our positions did not change either of our minds, but it taught us both that we really had a lot in common. We spent a good portion of our conversation sharing ideas for ways to improve the quality of the histories taught in American high schools.

I hope that each and every one of you will challenge your teachers; I hope that you will organize with your peers to advocate for change at the high school; and I even hope you will complain to the School Committee when you feel that we have lost touch with what it is like to work day-to-day in our classrooms. Put yourself out there and participate critically in the community.

And one final piece of advice for making the most of your time at the high school: Eat cheese fries at Angelo’s . . . but not before volleyball practice.

Why I Sit Silently During the Pledge of Allegiance (The Chronicle, February 23, 2006)

One of the most important tasks of public schools is to promote civic engagement. Good citizenship is about thoughtful, committed civic participation, not blind acceptance. Schools do not promote good citizenship through loyalty oaths. To be true to that conviction, I have decided that I must sit silently during the Pledge of Allegiance. I hope that my personal decision will spark a spirited debate. Growing up in Cambridge, I was never expected to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. I was reared in a community that encouraged individuality and empowered young people to express their personal views. The Pledge of Allegiance and other displays of patriotism were not required. I learned that I could choose whether or not to participate in ceremonial acts of patriotism and that dissent was respected.

Still, my decision to sit silently during the School Committee’s recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance was difficult. Many pressing issues face our schools. I did not want my refusal to fuel a side debate that would divert the committee’s energy. After careful consideration, however, I realized that the act of debating a mandatory pledge is fundamentally related to the mission of our schools. I celebrate that Cantabrigians are opinionated and outspoken. On the School Committee I am working to ensure that such debates take place not only in the pages of The Chronicle but also in the classrooms of our schools. Students must be educated to think critically and debate ideas respectfully. In mandating the Pledge of Allegiance we risk promoting groupthink over such critical inquiry. If it were not for a recent state law that mandates a reading of the pledge in every classroom, every day, I would advocate for a referendum in our schools on requiring the pledge, allowing teachers and students to decide this policy for themselves.

Public debate over the pledge has focused, almost exclusively, on the constitutionality of the words “under God.” (These words were not always there: President Eisenhower persuaded Congress to insert them in 1954, mostly as a jab at the “godless communists.”) While I am uncomfortable with these religious overtones, my primary objection is more basic. I do not vow allegiance to the United States, and I object to requiring this of students and teachers, many of whom are citizens of other countries. While I am proud of many attributes of my country, especially the radical ideal of participatory democracy on which our country was founded, I am not as proud of others. I expect I would feel the same about any country in which I might live.

A brief Internet search found no other democratic nation that currently requires such a pledge. The only recent example of mandatory flag salutes appears to have been Nazi Germany. Indeed, in 1943 after the spread of Nazism, the American Supreme Court asserted the individual’s right to refuse to pledge.

One need not agree with me to see that the numbing daily rhythm of mechanically reciting the pledge serves to trivialize its laudable promise of “liberty and justice for all.” Ironically, Supreme Court Justice Brennan found the pledge’s “ceremonially deistic” language constitutional on the grounds that the phrase “under God” had become so secularized that it is devoid of religious meaning. Our schools should educate young people to expose language that strips the sacred of meaning, rather than require them to recite it.

Ultimately, we must distinguish between acts of patriotism that promote active participation in the democratic experiment and acts of patriotism that serve to discourage dissent and promote complacency. In research published in the March 1999 Journal of Political Psychology, Schatz, Staub, and Lavine demonstrate that blind patriotism is “positively associated with political disengagement,” whereas constructive patriotism is “positively associated with multiple indicators of political involvement” (emphases added). After struggling with these issues, I have come to the conclusion that the Pledge of Allegiance is a form of blind patriotism that actually discourages students from engaging in critical debates that are increasingly absent from our schools.

Let us not forget that we are on the heels of a municipal election that had the lowest voter turnout on record. The implication is inescapable: our schools must redouble their efforts to promote civic engagement. Reconsidering the meaning of a pledge of allegiance is a start.

Military funded at education’s expense (The Chronicle, July 21, 2005)

I never met a single military recruiter when I was a student at Cambridge Rindge and Latin (Pilot class of ’98). Since recruiters never came to campus, my classmates and I understood that joining the armed forces was just one of countless post-graduation possibilities. Guidance counselors never couched the option of military service in moral or patriotic terms. This was the way it should be. Unfortunately, things are changing.

Two troubling requirements buried deep inside the federal No Child Left Behind’s (NCLB) 1100 page text have greatly expanded recruiter access to public schools. One provision is having a particularly detrimental affect on Cambridge’s traditional separation of school and military; it requires that high schools grant a minimum of two recruitment visits per year to each branch of the armed forces.

While some city leaders have thankfully expressed opposition to the slow but steady movement towards regular military presence in the high school, others seem unconcerned that tacked on provisions to unrelated federal legislation such as NCLB (nothing on the NCLB homepage even mentions military recruitment) are dictating our city’s policies. I’m not suggesting that we ignore this legislation and risk losing federal money; our School Committee can still comply while finding creative ways to further restrict military presence in our schools. For example, we must find a legal means for requiring that a parent or guardian is present for all student meetings with military recruiters.

Brenda S. Engel hit the nail on the head when she noted in her June 30, 2005 guest commentary “A recruiter’s life is not a happy one” that high school students make up the population most vulnerable to military recruiters’ deceptions. High school students, particularly juniors and seniors, face daunting choices regarding what to do with their life upon graduation. The implementation of MCAS as a graduation requirement has created a new layer of anxiety for young people working to complete high school. Military recruiters take advantage of this vulnerability. Recruiters have quotas to fill and, therefore, act rationally by targeting potential recruits who are most desperate—high school students, primarily low-income students and students of color. As more and more wealthy Cambridge parents opt for private schools, our school district’s demographics are changing and CRLS is becoming an ever more attractive breeding ground for the military. There is little doubt that the recent Army Day celebration on the Cambridge Common was much more about glorifying the military for potential new recruits than it was about honoring our nations veterans.

The new recruitment push in Cambridge is coming as higher military enlistment demands go unmet. Low troop levels are problematic because the government cannot execute its offensive military plans without ever-increasing numbers of young bodies. But we can stop war planning where it begins—in public schools. Secondary schools nationwide are seeing an increased military presence in cafeterias, guidance counselors’ offices, and even in classrooms. Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC) programs in public schools, for example, create an alternate educational track where students periodically attend school in full uniform and the social studies curricula include skewed history texts that glorify military heroism. Some schools have even invited the National Guard to host gym classes. Cambridge schools must buck this trend.

Our massive military, with bases scattered worldwide, comes at the direct cost of public schools. Roughly 48% of the 2006 federal budget is slated for military expenditures while only 2.2% will go towards education. Adding insult to injury is NCLB’s threat to cut what little federal funding schools do receive if districts do not follow increased recruiter access requirements. The U.S. military, as it is currently structured, is the enemy of public schools. Our obscene military budget is more of a threat on the vitality of our nation’s public schools than charter schools and private voucher systems ever could be, and yet the issue is rarely discussed in these terms. Expanding military spending is threatening to bankrupt our nations social services. Educators and school policy makers on every level must resist war because schools lose out in a militarized society.

This website is designed and sponsored by the Friends of Luc Schuster. Copyright 2007. Banner Photo: Peter Bent.