A woman walks into a bar

I like knowing what I want. Being decisive is a quality I find exciting in others, and thrilling in myself. The very fact of having choice is pretty amazing, and decisiveness is the best way I've found to revel in this luxury.  It is so easy to become overwhelmed by choices, and to allow the beautiful wonder of plenty and freewill become a burden. I see it in my students, frustrated that they cannot choose a library book, or a sticker, or a bookmark. I see it in adults, torturing themselves to make perfect choices. I see it in myself sometimes, when I have reduced myself to a puddle of angry inertia-tears. With children, taking most of the options out of sight usually decreases the amount of time they require to choose, and increases their pleasure with their choice. Harder to do this simple trick with adults, or oneself.

What I have found I can do is to practice. I create a game, called "What do you most want at this moment?" (WDYMWATM is a terrible title for a game. I guess in my head I don't refer to it by name much.) I play the game when I am sad also - its good for reminding oneself how awesome life actually is, by making plain how much agency one has. But the game is particularly good for building skills in decision-making. Maybe because when you know what you most want, you have, in effect, thrown out the vast array of choices, and can hone in on finding something similar to this one thing.

In any case, it makes me happy to not pick up menus and just ask for what I want. It is less fun in a retail environment - I've breezed by racks to find salesclerks and ask for particular items, but usually the item isn't available. Kitchens are different - magical places of transmogrification where things can be turned into other things and approximations become victories of creative power on a very different level than settling for a blue dress when you wanted an aqua one. But kitchens (my own or an eatery's) are ideal settings to play the game - the stakes are low, the occasions for practice numerous, and the end result is near immediate.

Decisiveness is not always successful. I decisively declare I don't want things before I have actually considered whether I want them or not. If I am startled by an offer or a sales pitch, my answer will always be no, just to eliminate the unwelcome intrusion into my space. Pretty frequently I find myself looking at the back of some boy who asked me to coffee after class or a vendor hawking the exact thing I was looking for, thinking, "Well, crap." Shooting from the hip means failure, sometimes.

But most of the time it makes me pretty happy. And sometimes it makes me ecstatic. It might make me a super annoying person to date, but in casual relationships nothing is more liberating than exiting situations that cease being fun. Oh, here's this environment turning to crap, it's going to be a big bummer, if I was in this relationship long term I'd have to stay and clean this up, but I'm not! So I can just leave and be with my awesome self. Ta-da! I have a vivid memory of driving away from a man's cottage one morning when I was bored and unhappy and he was ignoring me, until he turned around and I was waving goodbye, listening to Norah Jones for several hours on the sunshiney drive home. I felt guilty about it later and sent him flowers (which of course confused him because he'd already forgotten the whole thing), but that was a rock star moment for me, when it dawned on me that I was an adult and did not have to stay.

I'd rather meet people at a place within walking distance than do almost anything else, because it gives me the most agency (when I arrive and depart) with the least responsibility (how much I can drink, how simple it is to find my way home, what obligations I have to others). Other options have to be evaluated on a graph where providing my own transportation (increased agency) is weighed against joining others for transportation (less responsibility). This means I am on my own a lot, among strangers, which is not always ideal, since I also value friendships and intimacy. But I love being on foot. I love the freedom. I listen to old poems romanticizing the sea and its lures to sailors - that's me, on my feet in a metropolis.

I am in love with myself on foot. In love with my agency and decisiveness, even if I am blowing off things I want because I don't think before speaking. The offer will come back, or it won't. Whatever. The sun is shining, my feet are walking, and I'm hopping onto the stool, making eye contact with the barkeep, "What reposados do you have?...This one, in a margarita. Grand Marnier. Lime juice, no sour mix. Rocks, salt." In this one small area, I am queen. I am discriminating and difficult. "Is this okay?" the barkeep nervously hands me a glass. I am a bitch. Sorry. I am in love with myself and my decisiveness. The only thing sexier than watching a self-possessed man is hearing my own voice ringing with assurance as I ask for exactly what I want.

unscumbled

I watch Libby hold Naomi

Naomi is crying. The moment is private, painful.
I should help, I should leave.
But I watch

because the moment is also beautiful, this picture of what love is,
what it is at its most basic.
Intimacy
Someone to hold you
Someone to let you fall apart, be strong when you are vulnerable
Someone who sees the pain that makes others uncomfortable, drawing near anyway,
not to exploit - no solutions, no demands
just a witness beside you

And all my complicated thoughts fall away
my angst and tortured prevarications
my inability to articulate what the fuck I am looking for
This is it, I think. This is what I most want.
I want someone to love me like this.
I want to trust someone enough to be this weak

To stop protecting partners from my emotions
Like I can't really be me
Like I can't speak at full volume
Or share what I am really thinking
Being polite all the time
because the messiness displeases others

Take off the shade
Burn at full brightness
Be it exhausting, trouble, a tangle of yarn, this is my beauty
I scream fun
I sparkle
I hold on with both hands
not your problem
I know myself - just listen
These are my colors, unscumbled

Let me crackle
or let me radiate

no distaste
no retreat

Make the small talk I can't at the funeral, so the walls can melt over my face

Answer my left-out petulance simply, "Just dance with me." 

Hear someone throw the gauntlet, catch my eye, slip keys back in pocket
"You're missing her point," at my flank, with relish
No fear of me
my face out to the sun, yours a smile
You are this.

But you are also deliberate separateness, stinging silence, vague uncertainty
I am a place that you visit.
You leave and are fine, shaking it off, while I am wrung out, and empty
Looking for reassurance
So perceptive...but you don't see this

And Libby said the best thing in the world
She said,
"Do you know how long it took me to learn to do that?"

Maybe this is intimacy, too.
The learning
The falling down
The conversations on texts and voice mail and through eyes that aren't meeting that seem just as awful as these talks always have been
And yet aren't
A bit of patience
A bit of apology
Awareness
A breath
A glimmer
I'm not more trusting
I'm still me
I don't trust men, I won't, that won't change
Except I think that even though I don't trust you to come back because you're a man
I think you might
because you did before
I think I might be able to count again instead of spewing
protective venom shell around me
I think
maybe
no supernova this time
Maybe no gravel flying out from under my tires

And maybe this is intimacy
Not the kind I'm aiming for
Not the kind with smiles and laughter
Not the kind that makes me smug
But maybe the kind that I'd recognize from outside
If I wasn't crying
If you weren't learning how to hold me
If I weren't learning to respond to your, "Ouch."
I'm not receiving comfort now

But I might be ready, 

soon

A personal day

The city is waking up as you walk to the bagel shop for a sandwich and coffee on your way to the garage. Chipper 20something students in fresh eyeliner. Vigorous adults hustling to work, muttering about traffic and construction. Delivery trucks. Someone hums a tune. The barrier gate arm won't raise when you flash your remote, so you call the help desk and they radio the arm to let you out. Fill up the tank on your way to the repair shop, where either the desk staff or fellow customers can direct you, with gestures and precise distance measures, to the bus stop. Climb over the 3 foot crown of ice on the sidewalk and wait 3 minutes for the next bus, feeding your $5 into the vending machine as the driver politely explains and hands you a transfer card. Relocate your seat 2 minutes later as he chats up the next passenger and folds up the seats to make room for the wheelchair. Get off at the first stop downtown, and walk home in the sunshine, listening to the birds above. 

Cozy up near the window, blue skies at your shoulder as you skim over the news. A phone call from your mechanic, informing you that "it would be criminal" to replace the part the dealer said you needed, since apparently you do not. The only disappointment is your unspent bus fare.

Its easier to fill up with love when it isn't being siphoned out of you by the needs of others. I am a really happy person who sometimes gets sucked dry, but who also knows some magic. One of my most potent spells: "Take a Personal Day." Nothing makes me feel richer or more pampered. My own company is this pretty amazing thing. Some exercise, some creature comforts, a small challenge or two over which to feel mastery. I find new treasure rooms full of sparkles. I can offer you care and patience as a transmogrifier of the love that is poured into me, from my town, from the earth, from my self.

Valentine's Day, postponed

He takes a box out of his pocket and sets it on the table. A small box. A box for jewelry. I love jewelry, I love gifts, I love small surprises men carry home for you. I love looking in his face as he looks at me bouncing in my chair because there is a jewelry box in front of me. That perfect face only clouds over for a moment, when he considers my glee might arise from a belief that the box contains something rather more Significant than a mere piece of jewelry. It doesn't. This is just my "I have a jewelry box from the most handsome man in town" face. I love this moment so much I almost don't want to open the box, because then the box ceases to be important and becomes extraneous. But of course I do open it, because a jewelry box is irresistible. And inside is a bubbly lustrous pair of "I love yous" to frame my face. He thought they looked like me. He was right.
Thank you, Michael, for the smorgasbord of delight.

On believing victims

Endless stuff about Woody Allen recently. On and on. Every day some new update in my feed. And what the world needs less than anything is to know what I think about anything. So I move along, avoiding conversations, because getting involved in any of them is likely to do almost zero good and nearly guaranteed to piss me off.

But only a few weeks before I read this http://blogs.villagevoice.com/music/2013/12/read_the_stomac.php

And just a few days ago I read this http://gawker.com/who-wants-to-remember-bill-cosbys-multiple-sex-assaul-1515923178/@Jessica

And over the summer read this http://www.cnn.com/2013/07/01/showbiz/elmo-suits-dismissed/

And holy crap this, ugh http://www.addictinginfo.org/2013/07/16/the-party-of-rape-culture-40-republican-rape-quotes-everyone-should-remember/

Which is all horrible and sad and makes me feel bad about humans.

But it has me thinking, too. About what it takes for us to believe victims. About standards of proof that would move us from, "Well, that's just her story - what does he say?". About dragging these kinds of stories through months and years and decades of innuendo and scandal and nothing of substance actually happening that brings change or makes vulnerable people safer or holds powerful people to higher accountability.

We don't believe victims. We don't want to. It makes us feel icky and requires us to do things.

Is it ever possible that people not in power make false accusations? This is the wrong question. It is already setting us up to fail. To make it easier to shut the victims up.

A better question is: If the victim is telling the truth and we don't believe her, what do we lose? How does that loss compare to the alternative?

I think we lose much more as a society by creating a hostile culture for victims than we do by holding those in power to high expectations. If we make a culture that leans toward believing victims, we are demanding the powerful be above reproach, that they work hard toward avoiding even the appearance of wrongdoing. Is this such a bad thing? I think about what we demand of teachers, because an accusation by a student is taken deadly seriously. It should be. And teachers are wary, and they should be. But there are also very good expectations in place to keep everyone safe, expectations about how teachers and students can and cannot interact, not because there is anything wrong with the interaction per se, but because of how it might appear. And this is a GOOD thing. Yes it creates some annoying side effects occasionally. But we need to believe children. And so teachers have to do the work ahead of time, to prevent situations (being alone with a student, for instance) that could create an appearance of impropriety.

Sure, an accusation is not the same as truth. Absolutely, the accused deserve to have due process. But when we reduce everything to "she can't REALLY prove that this happened, so maybe it didn't" we are avoiding dealing with the real problem.

An even better question is: What would it take for us to believe her, absolutely and without question?

When I ask myself that question, I realize how far gone I am in this mess as well. I realize, well, there is no way I can believe her absolutely. There will always be a sneaky way my mind can create a scenario in which she is lying and this public figure is innocent - because I don't want to believe that people are wretched, that those in power abuse those without it, that people who make things I like can hurt and shame others and are part of the darkness. The darkness is scary and threatens to overwhelm. It is much safer to believe that this one (or so) woman (or teenage boy) is a liar, out for money or fame, which is disgusting but not a tidal wave of darkness.

The tidal wave of darkness is my own issue to overcome.  To learn that there is no tidal wave of darkness, there are only challenges and things that hurt and things that can be worked through.  There is no jumping off point, past which redemption or forgiveness or love or healing is impossible. There is just stuff. Stuff that sometimes looks like a mountain of straw that you will never be able spin, but reality has this funny way of shifting a little bit when the sun comes up or your hormones balance out or a friend walks in the room. But outside of myself and my own personal growth, what would I like to see in my world that would help this situation? I'd like to see us trying to believe victims. I'd like us to put the bulk of the work on the shoulders that are in power, to avoid the appearance of misconduct.

http://www.litigationandtrial.com/2012/11/articles/the-law/federal-claim-sexual-abuse-kevin-clash/

Plummy

I superglued my fingers together today. Rather badly. I think I wasn't really paying attention to the glue. It's hard to pay attention to much when he is in the same room. He smells like buttered honey. And his eyelashes. The little curled hairs on his jawline and his melted kiss eyes. So my fingers are glued together, and I'm crashing back into reality that they are not coming apart even under the faucet, and he is on his feet, going through the medicine cabinet looking for acetone, pouring it into a dish and reprimanding me when I try to use it gingerly so I don't muss my nailpolish. 

I dropped a glass a few years ago, and he was on his feet, not to clean the mess but to lift me bodily out and away from the shards.

He wakes up and the first thing he does, every single time, is start stroking me. For an hour, or till one of us falls asleep or gets up.

I've woken and found him on the sofa, sitting quietly in the dark, because he didn't want to wake me by tossing in bed.

We haven't seen each other in a while, and he shows up, looking down at me, and we both start grinning like goofballs. Just staring and smiling at each other. There is a look he gets on his face that grabs my cheeks and pushes them up, up, up.

I don't even know what we do for ten hours. Nothing, usually. I talk as fast as I can because I have so much to say, except I forget a lot of it when he is in the same room with me so sometimes I'm not saying anything but I am kicking myself for just staring and smiling when I will think of all the things I want to say when he leaves.

I sleep terribly when he's here. I sleep sporadically, jumping awake to make sure he's still here, reaching out for him and crawling over to smell him. I get weirdly hungry and think of ten thousand things I should cook for him and go sifting through the cupboards pulling out jars and pans.

I sleep crazy good when he's here. His skin is always always warm, tryptophan cozy, smooth under my hands like velvet coverlets that press down on your eyes. I swim up to the surface just barely, but everything is warm and easy and falling down again is nice.

We talk about traffic patterns and gender norms and politics and protests. We watch tv shows that came up in one of my stories, or one of his. He sewed his buttons on while I fixed my hooks and eyes. I try on dresses for him. He loses his glasses. 

When he leaves I am dazed, slow, happy and dumb. It's hard to do anything productive. I smile a lot and try to figure out what just happened. Where the hell did all that time go? What did I do all day? Why do I feel so fuzzy? His face. His breath. Why are his hands always warm and perfect? Maybe it is actually possible to tie myself in a knot around him. But I really like getting messages from him. And I can't think when he's close. Only when he pulls away a little, and I think, "Your face. Your face. I want to look at your face all day. I want to go away and think about looking at your face. I want to smile thinking about thinking about your face."

His face, and his words, when he doesn't think I'm listening. The messages he doesn't know I saved. This person I understand and don't understand and it doesn't matter if there was pain and endings and heartbreak because his hair is so soft on my cheek when he leans in to speak to me four months later and if my stomach is going to grab my heart because of the texture of his hair on my cheek, it doesn't really matter what we said or what anyone said. Or it does matter, because it has been done and said and now it isn't something to fear but something overcome. I will keep standing and feeling him lean close, and I will hang on to that feeling when nothing else makes sense - because words are tricky and changeable and hard. But rowed out far far into the dark hurt, he leans in with a kind face and soft hair and melted kiss eyes. It can be easier. I can let it be easier. 

I made it through "Reign of Error"

I avoid reading too much Diane Ravitch, or other school reform politics, because it makes me want to run screaming through the streets until I fall down. A combination of outrage, incredulity, impotence, WTF!!!!, sadness, despair.  Kind of like how I felt sitting in the Ross Business School multi-whoknowshowmuch$ auditorium on MARTIN LUTHER KING DAY and listening to Adrian Fenty (stunned disbelief fueled my footsteps to this presentation, that one of the proponents of closing schools serving black students was considered a worthy invitee to a symposium on social justice) discussing those darn uneducated black parents who didn't know what was good for them and their kids when they voted him out of office in D.C., and the room full of "I've-not-been-inside-an-actual-classroom-since-I-was-filling-out-dittoes-but-it-probably-is-still-the-same" rich Ross school alums who were shaking their heads and wringing their hands over oxen-headed-teachers, "How CAN we convince them to participate in professional development?? WHY are teachers so resistant to growing and learning?" I was holding a microphone, waiting to be called on, seething several different colors, but Mr. Fenty (wisely?) never acknowledged me.  I left with flames shooting out of the top of my head and texted about a zillion swear words to Michael about how the Democratic Party has calculated the pluses and minuses of throwing teachers and unions to the wolves in order to gain corporations and hedge fund managers, and decided us lunch-box-toters can all go fuck ourselves. The ten or so texts detailing my epiphany may not have been the best decision in terms of my relationship but kept my head from melting, so there's that.

So, Diane Ravitch. I appreciate that she is talking, and doing what I'd like to do except I am too emotional to stay on topic for that long.  I still have to get up in the morning with emotional energy to love my students, and teach, and not give up. I can't take much more than a few tweets of hers at a time and still walk into work with a sense of hope. This makes me feel a bit of a shirking ostrich, since I do point to her as someone who is saying something about education that I can get behind, something educated and reasonable, and I should actually be able to talk intelligently about what she says, right?  So I agreed, with some relief/anticipation to join an online group of my friends reading her newest book, Reign of Error. The camaraderie will keep me from despair, and the reading/discussion will make me smarter.

Within the first few minutes I knew I was in trouble.

Reading this is like reading the legislative news for my monthly union reports. It is like watching the brightest students in my school leave for race-segregated charter schools. Like listening to Adrian Fenty and a room full of season-ticket holding, non-Hyundai driving Ross alums tell me how I suck and am greedy for making $60k/yr. It is all of the worst parts of my job, except it is in my home and I am reading it before bed as I try to calm down or over my dinner I'm eating at 8 pm because that's when I got home from work. It makes me sad, and mad, and I don't know what to do about it.

I'm trying to keep some of David Kennedy's ideas in my head as I read, his insights from Don't shoot, where he is talking about how deeply the two sides of the urban crime debate misunderstand each other, and how if they can set aside their convictions that the other side is a soulless monster and just talk and listen to each other, for real, they find that they have much in common, differing only in procedure, and can find ways to come together to create real change. Not so much by compromise as by looking squarely at what each side is best at, and figuring out ways to use those strengths together instead of against each other.

I'm trying. Trying. It's the only thing getting me through, thinking that there must be some reformers who legitimately believe they are doing good, and not just smashing two hundred years of painstaking incremental work to make a quick profit.

If you can help me in this endeavor, please speak up :)

Some highlights from the book - things that caught my attention or I want to remember:

"In 1994, [Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers and one of the founding fathers of the charter school movement back when it was an innovation of the public school system instead of a competitor], learned that the first charter school in Michigan was Noah Webster Academy, which enrolled seven hundred students, mostly Christian homeschoolers, and that instruction was given mainly through computers. The students continued to stay at home but with a state-funded computer and a curriculum that taught creationism. Shanker was aghast. He was even more disturbed to realize that the academy's founder had discovered a tiny, impoverished school district with only twenty-three students that agreed to sponsor the academy and give it a ninety-nine year contract, in return for 'a kickback of about $40,000.' Meanwhile, the Noah Webster Academy would receive $4 million in state funding for its at-home pupils." From "Reign of Error" by Diane Ravitch, pp.157-8

"Charter schools are deregulated and free from most state laws other than those governing health and safety.  This freedom allows charter schools to establish their own disciplinary policies and their own admissions rules. Deregulation also frees charters from the financial oversight that traditional public schools receive. Some states exempt charters from the teacher evaluation schemes that are imposed on public schools. In Louisiana and some other states, charter school teachers do not need to be certified."

"The Community Renewal Tax Relief Act of 2000 included the New Markets Tax Credit, which allowed investors in charter school construction to collect a safe and reliable returns of 39 percent over seven years...Another federal program known as EB-5 enabled foreign investors to get immigration visas (green cards) by investing $500,000 or more to build charter schools."

"Bruce Baker of Rutgers University analyzed the question of whether charter schools are private, public, or some sort of hybrid. He noted that they are similar to voucher-supported private schools in several ways. They have limited public access in that they can cap enrollment and class size according to their individual preferences; they can admit students only in certain grades and at particular times of the year and are not required to admit students midyear or in any grade; they can adopt their own disciplinary procedures, which are sometimes harsher and more restrictive than those typical in public schools; and 'they can set academic, behavioral and cultural standards that promote exclusion of students via attrition.'"

"Even the lottery system, while seemingly fair, is a selection mechanism, since the least functional families seldom take the steps necessary to enter."

"The idea of vouchers has been on the fringes of education debates since 1955.  That was when the University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman proposed vouchers as a way to end the squabbling over Catholic schools...His essay appeared as the country was reacting to the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954...States that wanted to preserve racial segregation immediately turned to school choice as their first line of defense, and for many years school choice was widely understood by the courts and the public as a strategy to preserve school segregation."

Chicago's Democratically-led elementary schools far outperform Chicago's 'turnaround schools'

"Linda Darling-Hammond of Stanford University reminds us that we know full well how to improve schools:

'It's not as though we don't know what works. We could implement the policies that have reduced   the achievement gap and transformed learning outcomes for students in high-achieving nations where government policies largely prevent childhood poverty by guaranteeing housing, healthcare and basic income security. These same strategies were substantially successful in our own nation through the programs and policies of the war on poverty and the Great Society, which dramatically reduced poverty, increased employment, rebuilt depressed communities, invested in preschool and K-12 education in cities and poor rural areas, desegregated schools, funded financial aid for college and invested in teacher training programs that ended teacher shortages. In the 1970s teaching in urban communities was made desirable by the higher-than-average salaries, large scholarships and forgivable loans that subsidized teacher preparation, and by the exciting curriculum and program innovations that federal funding supported in many city school districts.'

These policies were hugely successful from the 1960s into the 1980s. Darling-Hammond points out that 'the black-white reading gap shrank by two-thirds for 17-year-olds, black high school and college graduation rates more than doubled, and, in 1975, rates of college attendance among whites, blacks and Latinos reached parity for the first and only time before or since.'"

How the High/Scope Perry preschool study has influenced public policy

"...when older people remember the supposedly 'good old days' of forty or more students in a class, they are evoking a different time in American history. They are recalling a time when most schools had classes of homogenous students. They are remembering a time before court decisions and federal legislation ended legal segregation. They are remembering a time before students with disabilities were included in public schools and before all but the most severely disabled were mainstreamed into regular classes. They are remembering a time before massive immigration from non-English speaking nations in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and elsewhere. Many of those who fondly remember the 'good old days' were in classrooms that included few, if any, students who did not speak English, had disabilities, or were of a race different from their own. Moreover, even in those supposedly good old days, the schools with many poor or immigrant children had low achievement (far lower than now) and high dropout rates (far higher than now), but this wasn't seen as consequential, because there were jobs available for those who did not graduate."

"The Institute of Education Sciences of the U.S. Department of Education has identified class size reduction as one of the few evidence-based reforms that has been proven effective."

"A survey of expulsion rates in the District of Columbia found that the charters -- which enroll nearly half the student population of the district -- expel large numbers of children; the charters' expulsion rate is seventy-two times the expulsion rate in the public schools."

Peer Assistance and Review - look at this!!!! I want this evaluation system! Talk about making all the players work together. This is awesome. And, totally butting heads with RttT.  This article
Helping Teachers Help Themselves makes the case about how absolutely ridiculous this is - that you have a system that works, increasing the skills of good teachers, improving or eliminating poor teachers, but it doesn't have high stakes testing in it so Obama and Duncan are like, nah, we'll go with the unproven high-stakes testing models, thanks.

There are about 14,000 school districts in the U.S. today, each with its own local school board. In 1940 there were about 117, 000 local school boards.

"The analysis of...(University of California at Berkeley economist) Rucker Johnson revealed that 'black youths who spent five years in desegregated schools have earned 25 percent more than those who never had that opportunity.  Now in their 30s and 40s, they're also healthier -- the equivalent of being seven years younger.' "

David L. Kirp "pointed out that after the federal courts retreated from enforcing desegregation in the 1990s and allowed districts to abandon their desegregation efforts, the black-white gap stalled and, by some measures, widened. He concluded that 'the failure of the No Child Left Behind regimen to narrow the achievement gap offers the sobering lesson that closing underperforming public schools, setting high expectations for students, getting tough with teachers and opening a raft of charter schools isn't the answer. If we're serious about improving educational opportunities, we need to revisit the abandoned policy of school integration.'"

Okay, I finished the book. It is depressing. It could have used a better editor -- got kind of rambly and repetitive. But basically good points. I am not sure how convincing some of her arguments are going to be to those who don't already agree, however - saying kids need stability and that choice and churn and changing schools constantly is chaotic and not good for them makes sense if you are around a lot of messed up kids on a regular basis, but probably sounds namby-pamby if you aren't.  I think the point about how high-stakes business competition is effective in some arenas but terrible for others is valid and very important but it needed a better editor or someone to help her think it through so she could deliver it in a way that might resonate with someone who is, say, libertarian.

A lot of the book is like that - I mean, I get what she is saying about prenatal care, but seriously. I can just hear the scorn. If she wants to make arguments like that I feel like she would have been better off making them strictly numerical and economical - this many dollars into prenatal care translates into this many dollars saved on speech therapy in elementary school. Or something. I don't know. Seeing a chapter on prenatal care in a book on school reform makes me want to run out of the room. It just makes the problem SO BIG. I totally want my country to spend more on prenatal care. Totally. But omg please don't bring this up if you are ever talking to a conservative because I will have a hard time coming to your defense.

And yes, I totally believe that every school should have a nurse or doctor and a real clinic where the kids can get regular checkups and screenings. And a psychologist and a social worker that can work with both kids and parents. Do you have any idea how many emotionally disturbed kids are in the public schools? How many kids are dealing with complete chaos in their lives, everyday? Hint: way more than you see at work among adults sifted out for competency. Think more along the lines of what you see on public transportation. Except these are kids who are told where to go & what to do, not adults who can seek out help. But I also do not believe I will ever see that in my lifetime. Because socialism. 

Things I did like:
-new ideas in teacher evaluations: unions and administration working together to help struggling teachers get better or move on
-enough already with the frickin' testing. diagnostic only. or teacher-designed, for use in that classroom, non-standardized assessments.
-charter schools playing by the same rules as public schools for the most part, if they want public money (i.e., accountable and transparent, similar student populations, oversight, and no profit-making from taxpayer money).
-aggressive preschool programs, ones that actually do what research has shown is effective (trained teachers, appropriate curriculum, tiny classes)
-all schools should look like what rich schools look like, in terms of curriculum, staffing and class size
-quit lowering standards for teachers and administrators and insist on educational certification and training
-democratic control!!
-desegregation
-return to federalism, thank you very much

I don't know that anyone will actually hear or read anything in this book, but maybe. maybe. maybe its nearing time for the pendulum shift? i really hope so.