"Ask an impertinent question, and you're on your way to a pertinent answer." —Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man
As of October 2015, my goal for this blog is to ask 101 impertinent questions.

Monday, December 6, 2010

What is Mayor Bloomberg Thinking?

Mayor Michael Bloomberg's choice for the new chancellor of New York City schools is Cathie Black. A publication executive heralded as the "First Lady of American Magazines," Ms. Black is the author of "Basic Black: The Essential Guide for Getting Ahead at Work (and in Life). Interesting that life lessons is in parentheses.

Ms. Black has no experience in education and sent her own children to a private boarding school. But Mayor Bloomberg insists she is qualified by virtue of her cost-cutting skills and her experience in customer relations. The latter, he claims, will enable her to heal the rift between teachers and parents. What she brings to education is essentially a business model.

I haven't read Ms. Black's book. The pitch for the book portrays her as "a funny mentor who understands the challenges she faces." The pitch also tauts her as one of Forbes's "100 Most Powerful Women" and among Fortune’s "50 Most Powerful Women in Business." Her book would teach me how to handle interviews, which rules to break, and why I shouldn't hold grudges. It sounds like the power of now meets everything I need to learn I learned in kindergarten. But there's a history to education reform that has led to failure, and we need to address this, not with simplistic lessons but with serious reflection as a people on how it is that with all of our country's wealth and human resources, we allowed our education system to deteriorate into a national disgrace.

But let's assume that Ms. Black will be successful in creating a model for education reform. There's still the question as to whether what she will bring to education is what we want for our children. Since the National Defense Education Act of 1958, education has been a means to an end, much like the successful business model. Schools prepared students to win the space race, to beat the Soviets in the arms race, to outdo each other in sports and test scores, to make great strides in the sciences and technology, and to excel in business. In this competitive, goal oriented environment, the arts and humanities became expendable. And so did the commitment to giving all of our children the education they need and deserve. Perhaps student achievement has declined because children are not driven by nature to achieve the goals set by those who are ambitious for wealth and power.

The language of Education Secretary Arne Duncan's Race to the Top and the Common Core State Standards for curriculum tells us that our education goals should be to prepare children to compete in the global marketplace. This sounds high minded. But I learned as a teacher that when planning lessons, I needed to imagine what children would actually be doing in the classroom during that lesson. It seems to me that goals of achieving military and economic success are better suited to fulfilling the ambitions of politicians and corporate leaders than children. Most children don't naturally respond to such cold goals. Maybe declining achievement is rooted in the resistance of our children to goals that stifle rather than nurture their growth as individuals. Maybe the apathy and dropout rate are unexpressed desires for education that broader in scope and spirit than what our schools are offering.

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