Bricks And Mortar, And The Underfunding Of Public Education

Jejak PandaTerima Kasih Sudah Kunjungin Blog Ini
ceme online terbaikI ran a professional development workshop at a new magnet school in New Haven earlier this week.  The building is a beautiful structure in a very impoverished part of town.  The library alone was gorgeous.  Wooden bookshelves, vaulted ceiling, lots of muted sunlight from high windows.  The carpeting gave off that new smell.  The tables were also made of wood, as were the chairs, each of which had animal designs cut into the backrests—frogs, turtles, butterflies, and lizards.  It was, in a word, immaculate.

Because a month and a half into the school year, no child had ever entered the room.

The school has no librarian. 

There’s also a merk new Mac lab that has never been used because there’s no tech person.

I experienced something similar a couple years ago when I did a site visit to the Sports and Medical Sciences Academy in Hartford.  Architecturally gorgeous new building, and the teacher I observed was new and eager.  She told me that she hoped to teach a journalism class in the television studio.  But when I asked about the studio, she shared with me that it had never been used.  No one on staff was qualified to use it, and so it remained locked up.

The building I teach in at UConn was just renamed following some construction upgrades.  The building across the quad is getting a facelift, a new roof, central heating and air, and wireless internet.  The building behind mine just opened an addition.  All over campus there are projects that involve building new offices and classrooms, or renovating outdated buildings.  These projects were mostly funded by the UConn 2000 and 2010 bills.  At the same time, we have just approved a four-year plan for tuition increases that will fund dramatic expansion in the hiring of faculty, which will bring our student to teacher ratio down to about 15-1.  No building projects or funding plans are without controversy, but on the whole I am pleased about the construction on campus, and I am glad it is being accompanied by a hiring plan, lest we find ourselves with nice new facilities but no instructors to teach in them.

But my examples expose some serious problems in the funding of education, and some serious discrepancies between K-12 and higher education.  Much of the new construction and renovation of schools throughout Connecticut (and the country) has been funded by the US Recovery Act or by various corporate grants.  But this bill and these grants only provide for bricks and mortar.  Not that I begrudge the funding.  On the contrary, I’m happy that at least some students in New Haven and Hartford are in these wonderful, clean, up to date buildings.  But there’s something wrong when federal and corporate funds are helping to erect structures at the same time that depreciating property values in this recession are lowering municipal property tax revenue and resulting in reductions in the teaching force, or, at best, hiring freezes.

The university can address this perkara by implementing tuition increases and transferring the cost of faculty hiring to the incoming students (and, indirectly, to the federal government and private lending agencies who provide students loans).  The K-12 system can’t do this even if they want to—unless they raise taxes, and raise them dramatically.  But that is unlikely to happen.  Just look for example to what happened in Region 8 not too long ago (and prior to the recession, I should add).

Voters in Hebron, Andover, and Marlborough approved a significant new building project and then followed this with a reduced education budget that took 12 votes to pass (at no small cost for each new referendum) and ultimately resulted in a four teacher reduction in force.  Voters effectively RIFed two reading teachers, a music teacher, and an art teacher.   

But I don’t really blame the voters. The real perkara lies with the ineffective ways we fund education.

I’d also add, however, that these examples expose larger problems with our cultural values.  Education just isn’t the cultural treasure we’d like it to be, and even within education, liberal arts and the humanities are disrespected and underfunded.

Just to demonstrate my point:  This summer the CWP was awarded two Title II grants of $20,000 apiece to fund Teacher Leadership and Professional Development in a High-Need School.  Then, early this semester, the university announced three major awards:  a $9.3 million grant from the NIH for human genome research, a $7.5 million grant from GE for electrical distribution research, and a $24 million commitment to build a new basketball practice facility, the bulk of which comes from a private donor who heads an investment firm.  Again, I have no objections to these donations, but the size and the discrepancy highlight this divergence in values.  Science and sports simply trump public education.  Let’s face it—my two grants combined will equal the doughnuts and coffee budget for those genome and electricity grants.  No exaggeration.

We really need to find a better way to fund—and value—public education.

Saturdays With Sam Clemens

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bandar ceme terpercayaWhen my alarm went off at 6 AM on Saturday morning, I gave serious thought to my sanity.  Or my judgment.  I was ripping myself from blissful weekend slumber to go meet a bunch of freshman and sophomore students from my interdepartmental course for students interested in teaching high school English.  We clambered into a university van provided by the First Year Experience (FYE) program, scarfed down black coffee and donut munchkins, and settled back for a trip to the Mark Twain House and Museum in Hartford.

As part of the Fellowship I received last year from Teachers for a New Era, I designed a non-residential Learning Community and a 1-credit course called Pre-Teaching Secondary English, open to freshmen and sophomores who think they want to be high school English teachers and who likely will apply to the Neag School of Education during their sophomore year.  The INTD course is complemented by a section of Freshman English themed around Education.  A couple students are in both classes.  The FE course is taught by an English graduate student named Heather who happens to be a certified high school English teacher in New York state.  I also have a sophomore student leader named Sarah who is assigned to my INTD course by the FYE program.  She serves as a mentor to the enrolled students and functions for me much as a grad student might.  This means that I get to come up with ideas for the course and the learning community but Sarah does most of the work to make it happen.  She gets academic credit for this, and the experience enhances her candidacy for the school of education.

All of this is new to us, and Sarah and Heather have been tremendously helpful to me in conceptualizing the course and planning readings, assignments, classroom activities, and extra activities like this field trip.

We had a beautiful fall day for our trip, and as the majority of us waited in the parking lot for a couple of students who drove directly themselves, we listened to the Park River as it rushed beneath us.  You can actually hear it through a prominent storm drain near the stairs to the main entrance.  Jeff Mainville met us in the lot and walked the nine of us along the north side of the house, bypassing the reception desk in the lobby of the visitors center.  As we walked, Jeff provided some historical background about the area and the house.  Once inside, we had the luxury of having the house to ourselves.  I have taken the tour many times in the past.  It’s a great tour, but typically there is a tour group just in front of you and another just behind, and you have to keep moving.  On this day, we were alone, and the tour took a leisurely hour.  Jeff’s focus was on curatorial aspects, like the architecture or the furniture.  He could tell us the make and model of each chair, as well as when it was acquired by the museum.  Knowing these were future teachers he had on his hands, and that I could practically give the tour myself, Jeff encouraged the students to ask questions that might be more relevant, and invited me to chime in.  We even got a tour of the servants’ quarters, which is usually a separate tour.

Afterwards, the students and I were treated to a 90 minute lecture and discussion by Craig Hotchkiss on Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that placed the novel in its proper historical context.  Craig was a social studies teacher at South Windsor High for 33 years, and has evolved into a expert on Huck Finn.  Like Jeff, knowing that he had future teachers for his audience, Craig customized his talk to accommodate pedagogical concerns, and opened the talk to a more meta discussion of the teaching of the novel.  We discussed challenges to the book, notably the still recent one in Manchester, and looked closely at historical events surrounding the writing and publication of the novel.  We also looked at Twain’s life and his support for African-American scholars and artists in order to put Twain’s attitude and intentions in a better and more accurate context. 

Most of the students took copious notes and asked great questions, even though we had gone well into lunch time and we all were becoming distracted by hunger.  We ate in the Japanese restaurant there in the visitors center and had great conversation over food.  Our driver still had time before he had to return the van, so this left the students time to explore the galleries downstairs and to peruse the bookstore and gift shop.  I walked away glad that I had sacrificed a little weekend rest to give these ambitious future teachers such a worthwhile experience.

The Annual Hurricane Issue

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situs bandar ceme

It is eleven o’clock on Thursday night, and I still have no power.  We live only a mile and a half from campus, but we are on a dirt road in the woods, surrounded by nature preserve.  I can’t complain because it is an idyllic setting.  But it’s not so good during storms.  There are too many trees.  In fact, most days I can’t get good cell phone service.

This morning I hoped we might get power back because there was a Northeast Utilities car parked along our road, but when we returned from seeing Pilobolus at Jorgensen tonight, that same guy was still waiting for a repair crew to show up.  Maybe tomorrow we’ll get lucky.

Meanwhile, we have tried to make the best of it.  We had power Sunday till around 6:30 in the evening.  That night, after dark, we read Halloween stories to the kids by candlelight.  The following morning, no one had school, of course, and we were fortunate to have sustained little damage.  One large limb came down in our back yard.  A neighbor had a large tree take out a fence and almost hit the garage.  But when we ventured out into the road to walk up the hill, we encountered two very large, old trees down.  One completely took out a set of power lines, and both tree and lines lay across the road.  Another had fallen against lines and was pressing hard, just waiting to fall.  There was no way to drive up that hill and out.  In the other direction, our road crosses the Fenton River.  Only kasus is that the bridge has been under repair for ages.  You can walk or ride a bike across it, but there’s no way to drive a car across.  The workmen have heavy machinery blocking the way even if you wanted to try.  So we were effectively trapped in.

About ten in the morning, Cormac and I decided to head out to campus.  We didn’t want to cross the downed lines, so we hiked toward the river and picked up the Nipmuck Trail, which follows the Fenton.  We hiked about a mile to where it crosses Gurleyville Road, and then walked up Gurleyville to Bundy to Dog Lane and then to campus.  If you know the area at all, that part of Gurleyville is just one long hill.  Not too bad for me but quite a challenge for a nine year old boy.  It took us an hour to get to the community center.  I carried a shoulder bag with towels, toiletries, and a change of clothes.  Cormac and I were able to gather information, take showers, grab coffee, juice, an apple and a pastry, and head home.  Another hour.  For all the inconvenience, it was pretty nice father-son time.

Eventually, tree removal guys came and cleared the trees.  We know you’re not supposed to drive over downed lines, but there was clearly no power, and so we and all the neighbors proceeded to drive out over the lines to get to town.  Not that there was much to do.  Most stores weren’t open till Tuesday or Wednesday, and no one had school.  I slept a lot.  I have a perpetual sleep deficit that I will probably never make up till death finds me, but I made up a few hours over the past several days.  And in the daylight hours, we all did a lot of reading and a fair amount of walking around the area. 

I rarely get to do much pleasure reading these days, so it was delightful to read Smithsonian front to back, and then devour Paul Auster’s The Invention of Solitude, which I have been wanting to read for years.  It’s sad but beautiful.  The book is the compilation of two long essays written around 1979, during which time Auster’s father died suddenly and then his grandfather died in a prolonged way, his marriage failed, and his young son came close to dying from pneumonia.  The book is a meditation upon memory, family relations (especially fathers and sons), and identity.  I was even inspired to write a short essay, though I doubt I will share it with any but a few select people at this point.

So I am very ready for the power to come back, but I am thankful for the time to sleep, read, and spend time with my kids.  Tomorrow I leave for a conference and get to stay in a hotel for two days. 

Women In Politics And Education

Jejak PandaSelamat Datang Kembali Di Blog Kesayangan Anda
bandar cemeLast night, Amy, our on-loan daughter Maria, and I watched Mona Lisa Smile, with Julia Roberts.  Roberts plays the part of a progressive-minded art history professor who challenges all the really bright but socially confined young women at Wellesley College in 1953 to question the expectations and limitations placed on them by the college, their families, and society in general.

It was fitting, then, this morning that I read a great article by Washington Tribune writer Kim Geiger on diversity in Washington, DC.  I knew Tuesday night as I stayed up late—waiting for Romney to concede and avert a succession controversy—that voters had elected women to the US senate in a few key states like Massachusetts and Wisconsin, but not till I read this article did I realize that voters had elected four new women Senators, bringing the total to an historic 20, or one-fifth of the Senate itself.

There was only one—Barbara Mikulski of Maryland—as recently as 1986.  I know I’m getting older, but really, that was not very long ago.  It was my ingusan year of high school.

Most of these senators are Democrats.  Sixteen of them, in fact.  Two of these, Mazie Hirono of Hawaii and Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin—are the first Asian-American woman and first openly homosexual senator.  (I find it interesting that even though Romney chose Wisconsin’s Paul Ryan as his running mate, Wisconsin voted for Obama, elected a lesbian Democrat to the Senate, and elected a gay Democrat—Mark Pocan—to replace her in the House.  Wisconsin Republicans must be stewing over that set of circumstances).

Equally impressive is the example of New Hampshire, whose governor, Maggie Hassan, both US Senators, Jeanne Shaheen and Kelly Ayotte (a Republican), and both US Representatives, Carol Shea-Porter and Ann McLane, are women.  It is the first time in the history of the United States that all of one state’s highest elected offices are held by women.

As a man who was raised by successful women and as someone who now works in professional fields dominated by women, I find this really cool. 

My maternal grandmother, a first generation Italian, was in the fifth graduating class of St. Joseph College in Hartford.  She became a registered dietician and worked at Saint Raphael’s Hospital for 52 years, from the time she was 19 till she was 71.  Yes, she had graduated from college by 18.  Later, she became head dietician and then took graduate courses at UConn in health management in order to become head of food services.  Her older sister was equally successful and also finished college at a remarkably young age. 

My grandmother used to tell me stories of her mother preparing her for school in the morning by reciting a mantra—“My name is Jane and I am seven years old.”  This was because she was five and the youngest in the family.  Everyone called her baby, and my great-grandmother had to familiarize her with her own name when she sent her to first grade two years early and lied about her age.

I have been at UConn in one capacity or another since 1987, when I began as an undergraduate.  I recall successful women professors from the previous generation, like Barbara Rosen or Joan Hall, who was the first woman offered a tenure line in the English Department.  And I recall many new, young women professors who are now esteemed veterans, like Gina Barreca.  But this year is the first time we have had a woman department head—Margaret Breen—who is acting chair during the current head’s sabbatical.  Prior to Margaret, Kate Smith had served as acting associate department head.  If I am not mistaken, these are the first two women to serve in those positions, and it only happened in the past five years.  And of course we now have the first female president of the university in Susan Herbst.

In my areas of work, women are equally prominent, whether it be Wendy Glenn, who heads Secondary English and served as director of Teacher Education, or Marijke Kehrhahn and Manuela Wagner, who head Teachers for a New Era, or Lisa Blansett, Lynn Bloom, Sarah Winter, Kathleen Tonry, Penelope Pelizzon, and Ellen Litman, all of whom hold or have held administrative positions in the department’s various writing programs.  Not to mention all the women on the CWP’s Leadership Council who are also building and department administrators at their respective schools—like Denise Abercrombie, Monica Giglio, and Michelle Vigue, just to name a few.

While women like my grandmother or Joan Hall or Lynn Bloom were true trailblazers, we’ve really come far since 1953.  Heck, look how far we’ve come just since 1986.