After They Stop Believing in Santa – It’s All Down Hill

PLEASE NOTE: The following thoughts on this subject are in no way complete.

Speaking with my friend Mike, my friend, neighbor and former educator about the sorry state of things, education specifically, got me to thinking about how we allow ourselves and our elected officials to charge forward with a half-baked solution to nearly every problem we don’t fully understand and worse, problems or situations we won’t take the time to understand. You know – just fix it for me! Before I slog onward – I’m not blaming charter schools.

This is my opinion based on observations and experiences in education and is painted with a very broad brush to hopefully stimulate discussion. It is in no way, my version of the next best thing. I am trying to understand broken schools from a marketing guy point of view. Somehow, schools have been in trouble since well, the Fifties. In 1955’s Blackboard Jungle starring Glenn Ford, Anne Francis, Louis Calhern and Sidney Poitier the ugliness of urban public schools were projected on the big screen.

Here we are fifty-six years later and although most of the boards are whiteboards, it’s still a jungle out there. Program after program has been launched to stem the tide of the deteriorating American school system as our students continue to slip in the world rankings for educational attainment. Everything from desegregation to No Child Left Behind and nearly everything has been of little or no lasting value. Just another “look what we did” photo opportunity for some with limited results for all.

In the meantime, we still base our school calendar on the agrarian calendar and the day-to-day operation on the old mill clock. These old-world mechanics can’t continue to be applied to current educational needs. Awhile back I did a post: Fix the village. Fix the child. If the neighborhoods where the child lives are sustained, the schools will be sustained and the child will learn. The more I think about this concept, the more I believe in it. Desegregation was long overdue. However, busing was a completely backwards attempt to inject the equal in equal education. Instead of bringing up the neighborhoods, they shuffled the kids in and out of neighborhoods.

The haves and the have nots were in too close proximity and clashing like the Titans and it was an all around ugly mix especially in what was one called junior high when students become more aware of cultural trappings and identification. Urban culture didn’t evolve because “those people” didn’t want to relate to “these people” or what was available to them but rather because they didn’t fit, weren’t accepted or both. All along the education higher ups, not those in the schools, start to throw out the next best thing from their safe, arm’s length, well paid positions. Yada, yada, yada and now we’re rallying around the next best thing or flavor of the day – the charter school.

Charter schools have ended up unintentionally siphoning students, teachers and resources from public schools and are now more a part of the problem rather than the hoped for solution. If you a conspiracy theory follower, checkout where the charter school concept came about. Separate but equal is a clue. Again, I’m not blaming charter schools. It wasn’t the axe it was (or not) Lizzie.

The old chestnut - if it ain’t busted (or, broke), don’t fix it. On one hand, it makes sense to identify what is “busted” and what isn’t “busted” when looking into this issue. So you’d think somebody would know the difference between something that’s busted and something that’s not. Wrong! If the public school system in your hometown is busted, the brilliant solution is to build a charter schools – huh? Yeah, so if your house is falling apart, don’t fix it up, build another house tight next to it. The people who are in charge of the people who are education our children thought of this!

Look, the schools aren’t broken. They’re just longer connected to anything. They no longer represent anything. They no longer function the way they were meant to. You can’t run a program like No Child Left Behind in this disconnected environment – it’s not one size fits all! I’ll say it again, Fix the village - fix the child. Education starts at home. The health of the home is the health of the neighborhood. Healthy homes create healthy neighborhoods. Neighborhoods form “villages” which give a city or town character. The village is the neighborhood school’s steam gauge. The neighborhood school is central to the survival of the neighborhood and reflects its identity or lack of it. The school produces educated youth to sustain the neighborhood’s vitality and economy.

Boston’s older Southie Irish neighbors understand this. Southie is school, church and culture. They call those who left the old neighborhood two toilet Irish meaning, those who left for the suburbs for the promise of a single dwelling with two toilets. They also know by bitter experience that bussing kids doesn’t teach diversity. What it teaches is that they have more than we have. It creates a separate them and us environment. Birds of a feather do flock together. At the end of the day, the kids from the poor neighborhoods go right back to where they came from.

Busing is very expensive and I’m not talking about the cost of fuel. Yes every town has two sides of the tracks. Why did families escape to suburbs to begin with – better schools! The schools were centralized and ripped out of neighborhoods to save money and, at this point in this posting, the tail has begun chasing the dog.

The simplest of all questions is: why? Sometimes all you need is that one word. Why do we question the cause or reason of an outcome that was either unacceptable or unexpected? It can only be answered with: because. Because defines the outcome’s existence as on account of what was not acceptable or was not anticipated. Why then, do our children begin to fail when they reach the middle-school years? This feeds the frenzy over our broken schools. Before I answer that, let me once again say that the hardest questions may usually have the simplest answers. And, for that reason, the answer or the solution it represents is rejected.

Our children begin to fail when they reach the middle-school years because, based on my friend Mike’s observations, it’s not just the disconnection of the school system, it’s a society that has forced them to grow up before their time to become childlike adults. They begin to fail when they reach the middle-school years specifically because they have stopped believing in childlike things. Or, worse yet, they have been taught or coerced to stop believing and that’s the sad truth of it. In what have they stopped believing? I know the answer will make you laugh or sit there in your own state of disbelief but, think about it. Middle school is the cultural bottle neck that’s choking the system.

Today, when children stop believing in Santa it’s not an awakening or a rite of passage. It is simply the revelation of life’s cold, hard reality. The casualty list of disbelief also includes the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny. It, unfortunately, includes the loss of an element of childhood that, for many, can never be replaced – a sense of wonder. And, too, one of the victims is their own self-worth. All too often, this loss of belief coincides with art and music being downplayed in their curriculum. They enter a new phase in their intellectual and emotional development. Of course, the often pointed out culprit is their physical development especially when hormones seem to overshadow everything.

Not only is their disbelief in all things equated with childhood a factor. Those old beliefs are now replaced with a new belief system they may not really be prepared for. Yet, while this crisis of belief swirls in their consciousness, they come to believe, through their newly emerging social development, that they have certain rights and privileges in regards to specific social behaviors but they’re, as the retail industry has labeled them, ‘tweens. They are in a nether zone and are neither child nor teen.

Moms work because of taxes and the cost of health care. Sure, there are those who want a career. That’s not a problem. But when you combine all of these factors you get the childcare industry. Are they really just professional parents? The culture is shaping society into an ugly homogeneous blob. Working parents feel guilty about not being there so they give their children “things” and “experiences” to make up for it.

Every public school should be autonomous as to the extent of defining the neighborhood character and serving the unique need of the neighborhood. Where do we start? By creating a future for our children in the place where they were born. Our greatest export is educated youth. Send your kid to college and they’ll never come back even if they wanted to. The “village” needs to assist our educated youth by encouraging them to start businesses or create employment opportunities. So yes, student/child centric advocates are a requirement.

And finally, neighborhood kids can walk to neighborhood schools eliminating cost and maintaining environmental sustainability. Yes, this is decentralization. And, no, it is more financially appropriate because the delivery system is direct, easier to maintain and offers more value to the neighborhood(s) that comprise the village(s) which define the city’s geography, character and quality of life.

Charter schools should be developed for specific needs such as middle school vocational schools, centers for encouragement and advancement of talented and gifted children (which, by the way, I feel are getting a raw deal because they’re smart so why do they need help?) and as experimental innovation centers that test new technology or methodology before it’s released to the system.