teaching malinche

I am so blissed out to be done with final exam grading – and off to Spanish language environmental science/inquiry/play/non-standardized test summer camp with five kids out on the beach tomorrow and a brilliant Colombian teacher!  Okay, I’m only partially excited about that – in reality, I am really looking forward to my massage at Kabuki Hot Springs on Wednesday. I love the children. I am sick of the children. And teacher mama needs a massage.

So on with my message (not massage)! This past semester I met some people with a Bay Area organization called Evolve, who are trying to build support to repeal aspects of Prop 13 and get corporations to pay more taxes to support public education.

They recently worked on saving San Francisco City College, and on Tuesday we are showing up at City Hall to support the supervisors vote on “Closing the Corporate Loophole.” Please let me know if you want to show up with me and others at 3:00pm Tuesday, June 3. We will be outside the Legislative Chamber – Room 250. Yes, I’m bringing my kid.

Here is the Evolve website so you can see what they (we) are about.

On another note, I know that we are all voting this Tuesday – and I am asking you all to think about the intense moneyed interests of what I like to call the “education deformers”.

Public education in California is not alone in suffering the onslaught of billionaires who want to shut down public schools and teacher tenure, get rid of publicly elected school boards (no, seriously, this is for real – get rid of publicly elected school boards and the semblance of democracy in all aspects of education – read this!), replace public schools with charter schools that take the “best” students out of the public education pool and skimp out on special education students, privatize education with vouchers, crappy computerized learning environments, and young inexperienced teachers with little training. Please, please, please vote to keep Tom Torlakson as our State Superintendent of Public Instruction. He is the reason that our kids didn’t have to spend more than a week or two on standardized testing this year – seriously, Arne Duncan, the U.S Secretary of Education, threatened to withhold federal money if California didn’t double test this year with both Common Core field tests and the huge battery of STAR tests that we teachers are grateful to get rid of. Thank you, Tom Torlakson, for fighting for the rights of students and teachers in this state to have more time to learn and teach!

Torlakson’s competition is a business guy who has run some Charter schools in L.A., has never been a teacher, and who supports the Vergara trial to strip teachers of their tenure rights. (He probably supports getting rid of publicly elected school boards too). For those of you that are interested in understanding more about the problems with charter schools, why teachers should have tenure rights, please write me back, I have many well-researched articles that I can share with you, and 12 years of teaching experience in CA public schools. There are no easy and cheap solutions to education. Period.

One particularly relevant article on the issue of billionaires trying to “fix” the schools is the story of what happened in Newark, New Jersey – an alliance between Democrat mayor Cory Booker, Republican Governor Chris Christie and millions of dollars donated by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and friends. This article appeared in the New Yorker a few weeks ago and is a fairly good example of how such “top-down” approaches fail to deliver (and can make the situation much worse). These guys favored un-democratic reform measures that closed neighborhood schools, opened charter schools, and refused to listen to the communities, parents and teachers  they worked for. The article also details all the money that went to side businesses outside the classroom that told schools what to do, yet did not actually deliver more money to the students and classrooms. “Schooled” – it’s a great read.

If I could only laugh at Mark Zuckerberg and his idealistic dream of reforming without knowing. But instead, he and others like him just churn my stomach. And, now, from personal experience, Facebook is way high on my list of egregious acts of billionaire self-aggrandizing at the expense of my kid’s education. Seeing an opportunity to “do good” in the community where Facebook employees live and drink beer, Facebook selflessly volunteered to paint part of my son’s school – the portable public school library that sits on the tiny public school playground. Thank you, Facebook! It is hard to whip up parent volunteers for every shocking need that a poorly funded urban California public school deals with. I should know since I have volunteered for years at two public elementary schools squeezing volunteer hours out of exhausted overworked parents and teachers. But Facebook came to save the day!  In all seriousness, Facebook came, but before their small crew of volunteers came, we were told that the school PTA had to go out and buy all the painting supplies (with a so-far unfulfilled promise to reimburse us later) and made us prep the portable building with a base coat. When they came, they ordered the underpaid gardening coordinator around, took their cheerful media photos, then painted the Facebook logo on the public elementary school portable building to help indoctrinate their future clients – the guileless 5th grade and under set. Yes, a Facebook ad on a public elementary school. (Okay, our gardening coordinator painted over it as soon as they left). I am shocked at the hubris of corporations that wave their community involvement flag. Why would we let public institutions be at the mercy of these businesses posing as “people”?

Ugh, I just get angry, over and over again.

Peace, please, just go vote!

Maestra Malinche

“American Education has a long history of infatuation with fads and ill-considered ideas. The current obsession with making our schools work like a business may be the worst of them, for it threatens to destroy public education. Who will Stand up to the tycoons and politicians and tell them so?”
― Diane Ravitch, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education