Tough love.

How many people have ever been in the situation where they've invested time and effort into a relationship only to be rewarded by blundering idiocy on the part of their significant other? But you keep at it, hoping they'll change, hoping they'll see the light and stop acting like goddamn morons...

That, my friends, describes the relationship most parents have with DCPS. You see, it's important to get involved with your school and in DC, thanks to an utterly corrupt and useless facilities maintenance division, you have to get involved to make sure basic needs are met. You know, things like working toilets and fresh paint and clean hallways. Things that in almost any other organization you could take for granted, especially with a huge facilities budget, but that in DCPS don't seem to get addressed until parents complain loudly enough to make someone with decision power uncomfortable.

OK. This could turn into a really really long post* about how dysfunctional DCPS is, from head to feet, but there's no need to bore you with the details. Let's start with a few groundrules:

1. I believe in public education and it pains me greatly to see the body in charge of that function behave so badly.
2. While individual charter schools may be decent and run by decent people, the movement as a whole is a right-wing trojan horse for dismantling public education -- even if the schools are called "public charter schools."
3. DCPS is an urban school district. It isn't fair to compare its per-pupil spending with anything but other urban districts. Recently, the Post compared DCPS to Boston. That's a fair comparison. In most cases, comparing it to Montgomery County is not.

That being said, today's Post had an excellent opinion column by David Nicholson explaining one facet of DCPS's moronic approach to student achievement:

D.C.'s Master Education Plan pays lip service to the importance of libraries, calling for elementary schools to have librarians who work at least half time and for middle schools to have "a fully functioning library." But it says nothing about libraries in high schools.

And lip service it is, indeed. My son's elementary school has been functioning without a paid librarian for three years now. The column, which tells the story of formerly full-time Coolidge High librarian Lynn Kauffman's struggle to take a decrepit library and not only turn it around but also create an outreach program to the students to make the library -- or at least the importance of reading -- central to their education. Her reward for getting 60 students to join a reading circle, pledging to read at least one book a month? She was fired, or "excessed," as they like to say in DCPS-speak. Kauffman has testified before the DC Council Education Committee and the School Board that more than half of DC's schools have no librarian.

Friends, I don't know about you, but that is a pathetic comment on education in the District.

Oh yeah. And Janey is making the equally counterproductive decision to close schools. While there's general agreement that the shrinking system doesn't need the space it once needed -- especially since it refuses to maintain even the space it does use -- Janey's methods seem arbitrary and ill-suited to the situation. For instance, Janey has repeatedly emphasized the "minimum number of students" a school should have to be "viable." In other words, he's looking primarily at small schools as a problem and as targets therefore for closure. Why? Because in the number crunching world, a small school equals more overhead: fewer students served by the facility and the administrative and support personnel.

It's further evidence that he equates good education with keeping costs down. Guess what...education isn't a business and it shouldn't be run like a business. Small schools work in part because the support staff aren't spread across so many students. In our school, the principal knows every one of her students, and more importantly, the students know that. They know they aren't forgotten in the belly of the beast. Additionally, because "services" like libraries aren't "revenue producers" doesn't mean you should shut them down. The business model, whose bottom line is to generate profit for a company, is utterly inappropriate for education, whose bottom line is to generate critical thinking, independent young adults.**

Janey, who has claimed to be looking at Boston's turnaround -- and indeed has imported much of Boston's curriculum standards to DCPS --, might do well to note that Boston's turnaround has included the division of larger, impersonal schools into separate units -- in other words, the opposite of Janey's plans for consolidation:

With Gates Foundation grants, Boston has divided four large high schools into 13 smaller schools. Hyde Park, once an underperforming high school, was this year broken into three thematic schools decided with community input: engineering, social justice, and science and health. "The staff is more engaged, and I'm more engaged," said Linda Cabral, who was the headmaster of the larger school and now leads the smaller Community Academy of Science and Health, which resides on the top floor. "Students are less likely to slip through the cracks."

Students are worth the extra cost (Boston spends $1000 more per pupil than DC) to keep them from falling through the cracks. I can't wait to see what schools are on Janey's list. It should provoke some real nasty fights.


*Oops. It sort of did turn into a long one anyway. Just remember, it could have been really really really long.

**The "purpose of education" is an entirely different debate: is it to create well-rounded individuals, productive individuals, socially responsible individuals, critical thinkers, etc. Studies have variously shown that education tends to reinforce dominant belief patterns, recreate class/race divisions, etc., and that therefore the development of schools is a constant process, but let's leave all that jawing for another day.