Life in Trump Nation

Taking time off from this blog, which has petered out slowly over the course of this over-blogged election season, to try a new blog about reactions to and results of the election itself. Visit it here: http://lifeintrumpnation.blogspot.com/

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Addressing the Extremes

Yesterday, from two politically astute pals, I received separate messages that, taken together, represent the extremes of my left-leaning friends. One, who manned the barricades in Paris in '68 and lost his job in publishing when he tried to unionize workers, wrote that he was very much enjoying canvassing in PA every weekend and was surprised and impressed by the organized passion of the 20-somethings leading the way. The other, who has maintained a daily FB post on presidential politics that has been intelligent, educational, and increasingly bleak, announced that he's leaving the Democratic Party and becoming a Green.

I have written amazingly little about the 2016 election, mostly because what the hell is there to say that isn't being said and spread, People's Mic-fashion, at lightning speed across the planet? I have been unsurprised at the fact that *gasp* there is racism in the world and that *gasp* Donald Trump is a con man. Even the appalling coverage by the media hasn't shocked me, because I've read On Bended Knee and Manufacturing Consent and haven't had much hope that things would get better with the addition of social media.

What's really astonished me has been the tendency of some on the left to spout Breitbartisms (and worse) unironically and to collude in the logical fallacy that equalizes evil on both sides. Some of the dumbass stuff I've read this week (friends of friends, and not people I know, thank God) includes that Trump and Clinton are longtime friends who conspired to have Trump win so that Clinton could easily take the presidency and that Bernie was bought out by friends of the Clintons.

Is Clinton the "establishment" candidate? Well, they both are, to be honest. I'm "establishment," too, despite having solar panels on my roof and working out of my home for 30 years. I know that for sure, because I know that if anything goes wrong with me, I can pick up the phone and call a doctor, a lawyer, my town supervisor, a manager at NYSEG, my assemblyperson, and so on up the line. I may not be in a position of power, but I am connected to and comfortable with those who are. And you know what? Based on your upbringing, schooling, and life choices, so are most of you. That's privilege.

I cannot tolerate people who are apologists for Trump rally racists, who lib-splain away those people's homophobic rants by suggesting that trade agreements broke them. No, they are racist homophobes. Yes, corporate America sold them down the river, their unions cravenly abandoned them, and people have lied to them for 30 years that their jobs are returning and not being handed over to robots. But they are still dangerously uninformed racist assholes. Sexist, too, whatever their gender.

Hillary Clinton wasn't my first choice; I voted for Bernie in the primary, as I always vote my heart in a primary. I don't like her foreign policy, and I don't like her stance on fracking. I don't like her careful parsing or her penchant for secrecy; the only concern at all that I have about her server is that it represents an end-run around FOIA. Bill Clinton was about my eighth choice in 1992. That's the way it goes. None of us loves incremental change, but with the exception of important Court cases, historically in the U.S., big changes have come about through power grabs by the executive, and I'm not sure that's something to be admired.

Our local Democratic Party signed up nearly 5,000 new voters this year; I know, because I had the letters to new voters printed up. Around half of those (I assume, based on their timing) were Blanks and Greens and Working Families voters signing up to vote for Bernie in the Democratic primary, but half happened post-primary. Without talking to each of them, I don't know why they made their choices—but it's interesting.

I am a woman of Jewish heritage who is raising a woman of Jewish heritage. In our family, meaning those who might join us for a holiday meal or funeral, we have Asian immigrants, Latinos, and African-Americans. Catholics, too. I have no problem with people's leaving the Democratic Party, which like all organizations of a certain size and age, is rusty, unwieldy, and as hard to turn as the Titanic. But in this year of Trump, I would posit that voting for a third-party candidate is the epitome of white [male] privilege.

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Reading List

"We are a country that imagines itself as democratic, and yet the majority has never cared much for equality."

So smart. Real history, but very readable. It upended many things I thought I knew, plus it could not be more relevant.

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Remember That Thing You Voted For?

We tend to think that once we vote on a resolution, and it passes, our job is done. I'm sure our legislators feel the same way. But in the world of NYS education, that's not always the case. Remember approving the Smart Schools Bond Act in 2014? It was going to put all kinds of new technology in our schools. And it would have, probably, if there were anyone left in State Ed to approve the purchases. Instead, it was a Big Idea for which many legislators and the governor will take all kinds of credit but that in reality had zero effect.

Well, back in 2015, the state legislature approved an exemption for BOCES capital expenses in the Tax Cap Formula. Before that point, regular school districts could bond and build a capital project without the debt service affecting their tax cap, but BOCES could not. The result was that since the districts pay for BOCES capital projects, any such project would likely put them over their limit, so no BOCES building projects could be approved. TST, in our region, hasn't added square footage to its campus in over 20 years. We have kids traveling 50+ miles because they can't fit into programs at TST, and we have kids with serious developmental and emotional needs parked on waiting lists due to lack of space.

So the legislature heard us, and they passed the new law, and they called upon the Office of Taxation and Finance to develop the language that would include debt service for capital projects at BOCES under the same capital exemption from the tax cap that regular school districts have. But the Office of Taxation and Finance, an executive office, chose to stick the request somewhere in their pile of "Big Ideas We Really Don't Give a Damn About Because They Might Affect Something We Do Care About" (the tax cap), and across the state, BOCES continue to wait.

So students in regular ed can learn and play in updated, safe facilities, but students with disabilities cannot. Students who are on a strictly academic track can have spanking new science labs, but students in career & tech programs must learn in facilities from the 1980s. If you sense that this is an equity issue, you sense correctly.

The sad part is that many (most?) of our legislators probably don't even know that this change to the Tax Cap Formula has stalled. Like the rest of us, they imagine that once they vote for something, that something actually happens.

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Speech for Opening Day at TST

U.S.A.

I’m not much of a nationalist. I tend to think that people do pretty awful things in the name of misguided patriotism. But in an Olympic year, it’s hard to get away from that rah-rah USA! USA! mentality.

Clearly, there are some things the USA does very, very well. We swim really fast. We tumble across mats brilliantly. I thought for our opening day today that I’d take a look at what it is that the good old USA does right when it comes to what we do here—the business of education.

If you’ve been in public education for any length of time, you know that it’s a fraught subject. We hear all year long about everything we do wrong. Our kids rank low in STEM scores. Our education is expensive but unproductive. Our students lack resilience—that quality that lets socioeconomically disadvantaged students perform better than predicted.

If you read the paper, listen to politicians, or look at test scores, you might think that the US educational system is a disaster. But you’d be missing out on the many things that we do right.

1. We are really, truly inclusive.

This wasn’t always the case. In the 1980s, my cousin took care of women in her home who had been released from the institution where they grew up—women with intellectual or developmental disabilities. They had been warehoused rather than educated from a very young age—and this wasn’t that long ago! And long before that, we didn’t educate girls at all, or children of color. But today, our national goal is to educate every child to the upper limit of his or her ability. Rich kids and poor kids. Boys and girls. Children with disabilities. Children whose first language is Spanish, or Vietnamese, or Yoruba. Gay, straight, transgender. Urban and rural. Pregnant kids. Kids with HIV. Even, since Plyler versus Doe, undocumented children of immigrants. They all have the right to a free public education as close as possible to the community where they live. And unlike many nations, we will pay to transport them, we won’t charge them for uniforms or books, and we’ll do it for 13 years or more.

Of course, all of this inclusivity contributes both to the expense of our schools and to our mediocre test scores when we compare ourselves to other nations. You give something up when you make a promise to educate everyone. I’m going to suggest that our promise is worth it.

2. We offer breadth and options.

Nearly all of the countries we competed against in the Olympics offer curricula that are more rigid and more limited than ours. Many countries weed out college-bound students early in their careers and offer no alternatives to the narrow tracks onto which they place their students at a young age.

We offer not only the traditional liberal arts education, but we also include physical education, music, fine arts, and health. We clear a path as much as possible for those students who want to attend college, but more and more, we offer other pathways for students with other goals. In cities with magnet schools, students can focus their high school careers on media technology, or on dramatic arts, and even here in Tompkins County, the New Visions Program offers options for students whose interests lie in medicine, life sciences, and soon, engineering.

And once students are into higher education, the US system really shines. Nowhere else on earth can students find programs in bioethics, robotics, culinary arts, psycholinguistics, aviation, agricultural engineering, and hospitality, all within a 50-mile radius.

3. We nurture as we educate.

One of the reasons our schools cost so much to run is that we try to mitigate social problems within the school setting. Other nations don’t necessarily feed their children at school. They rarely offer psychological or social services. In many nations whose students do well on standardized tests, children and adults are not expected to have a relationship beyond the formal student-teacher connection.

It’s different in the US. We all know teachers here who are mentors and life coaches in addition to being content instructors. We talk about educating the whole child, promoting physical and mental health, safety, and a personalized learning plan. We are not always successful in our efforts, but we try.

My husband thinks that only speed, goals, heights, and distances should count in Olympic sports. In other words, throwing the javelin is a sport, because the achievement may be measured. Diving, on the other hand, which requires a panel of judges ticking off subjective point values about style—diving isn’t a real sport.

When I look at Olympic teams, I think about percentages. Like if we have 320 million people to choose from to make up a team, is it really that impressive that we won 121 medals—or is it more impressive that Jamaica, with only 3 million people, won 11?

Compare that to the way we evaluate schools. We like to look at numbers, because numbers are easily compared and contrasted. So we look at how much Finland pays its teachers and how well Finnish students do on tests. Teacher pay, standardized test scores—those are measurable, they’re “real sports.” But Finland educates 1.5 percent of the number of kids we educate, kids who speak 1 percent of the number of languages our kids speak. So whose achievement is really more impressive?

And then there are those subjective values—the way we treat kids, the options we offer, the fact that we let anybody play….

When you’re feeling put upon by the media, or by parents, or by the state, when you are made to feel that we’re doing a lousy job, not keeping up, failing our kids—keep your head held high. You all deserve gold medals for the work you do, and your board appreciates you every day. Let’s make this a winning year. Thank you all.

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I Need a Trigger Warning for Conversations About Trigger Warnings

I know it's causing agita right this minute at my other alma mater. I know that most of my friends view this as an anti-PC move by cisgender white men. But I applaud it, because I think the worst thing we've done in the past 20 years is to make it possible for people, and especially young people, to listen only to their own truths. That's how we ended up with the Election of 2016! Time for a serious reboot.

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First, Do Your Job

We rail at the GOP Congress because they are dragging their feet on one of their most important tasks: Voting thumbs up or down on Supreme Court appointments. But we are silent when our own state executive branch fails to accomplish two of its main tasks: Releasing funds that have been allocated and filling key slots in state government.

The State Education Department organizational chart from December 2015 shows several key positions vacant. It's now August 2016, and those jobs remain vacant. This page shows job listings at State Ed, with asterisks indicating those jobs that require Budget Division approval to move forward. The most immediate problem, I believe, is at the School Operations & Management and the Facilities & Business Services levels, where capital project approval has stalled, and what once took four to six months now takes a year or more. This may ultimately affect everything from retrofitting lead fixtures to using Smart Schools monies. It's maddening.

The upshot is that the executive branch can require SED to do various things—monitor the spending of Smart Schools monies, fix crumbling buildings, create a task force to review Common Core—yet withhold the very funds that enable the department to do those tasks. This is a Democratic administration that absolutely fails to put its money where its mouth is. We taxpayers think we are funding our schools. Where's the money going? It's anyone's guess.

I'd encourage parents and others to write to Senate and Assembly leadership and to the Governor to ask: "Where's my money going? Why are the halls of SED echoing emptily when we are paying considerable sums to fund that department? Why isn't the Division of Budget doing its job?"

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