We are ALL Center Street / Valleyview / Riverside / Greater Plains

Here is a comment that was posted on my previous post here at parenthropology:

I like the idea of rallying the other schools, parents, citizens, etc. together to protect them all. Unfortunately, some of the opinions of parents of the other schools is very disappointing. They are under the assumption that if a school closes it will be Center Street, therefore won't affect them. Closing of any school will be devastating to the whole community, but people aren't seeing it that way!

I think this shows that we need a little (or a lot) of good, old-fashioned organizing.

I have embraced social media, but I also think we just need to talk to each other as parents and neighbors, and do our best to keep each other informed.

In fact, based on what I have heard the superintendent and others working with the board of education say previously, my understanding is that it is not obvious that Center Street would be the school to be closed. That impression holds from a previous move to close the school during the 1980s. However, at least three of the four elementary schools (not just Center Street) have had their ups and downs in enrollment also.

So, none of us is necessarily “safe.”

There is, unfortunately, a growing body of research on the impact of school closures. A recent report from the Pew Charitable Trusts shows that closing a school does not on its own close a budget gap. There are both the immediate costs of busing students, and the long-term effects on the local economy if / when community members lose their jobs, families move from the area, homes stand vacant, and properties lose their value. Nor will it prevent further cuts in school programs, much less restore cuts that already have been made in the past.

(Please see the links to research on my previous post, and share them with others. Also, please forward additional sources to me, so I can include them here.)

I think it is more than fair to ask: What actually will we gain from closing a school?

This is why I think it is important for parents at all four schools in our district not to see treat this as "Center Street's problem" – or let it become a contest to see some other school that is not their own fall. I am a Center Street parent, but I want just as much not to see a closure at Valleyview or Riverside or Greater Plains.

Or in the Unatego school district, for that matter. Which brings me to this:



Please consider attending to stand up for our neighbors and for our own city's schools.

Occupy Our Schools

I am writing this for my friends and neighbors in our city's school district - and for friends and neighbors elsewhere who are facing the same kinds of challenges. (If you have experience or advice to share, please do!)

Tonight, I went to the PTO meeting at my daughter's elementary school and heard the tough news from our principal that the city school district, like so many others in the U.S. today, is facing a gap (about $2 million) and that there is talk now about possibly having to close one of the four elementary schools.

We live about four blocks from our elementary school. In fact, this is one of the reasons that we chose to make our home in the "Center City" area - and I know that a number of our neighbors and friends make the same choice for the same reason. My daughter has walked to / from school almost every day since the day she started kindergarten, and my son looks forward to that day coming this September when he will be walking along with her. Or so I hope.

We love our school. To be honest, the playgrounds are small, the parking is non-existent (or so I hear, as I have brought the car around only two or three times en route to a doctor's appointment...), and it is not the fanciest or most modern building. What can I say? The school is like our family. We accept the quirks. They are our quirks. My sense is that other parents and teachers feel like this about our school.

So, the prospect of our school closing is, of course, painful to consider. However, I find the prospect of any of the four schools closing to be painful. Because the schools each are more than buildings where teaching and learning happen. They are the centers of neighborhoods and communities.

Also, the more I think about it, I become less and less convinced that closing a school must be inevitable. (Or not properly resourcing a library or art and music programs or physical education, for that matter.) Just like poverty is not so much about a lack of wealth, but its inequitable distribution, so it is with the funding of public education.

When I arrived at home, I went upstairs and kissed both my children, then came straight back down and browsed the Web for reading on the impacts of school closures - economic, social and academic. Admittedly, this is just a quick perusal of what I found online, but I am underwhelmed by the "savings." (However, it seems that the academic performance of kids affected when a school is close is neither negatively nor positively impacted.)

The theme that emerged in my reading is that closing a school costs a lot.

Another theme is that closing a school takes a lot of planning in public for it to go at all well. Here is a summary of a report on Closing Public Schools in Philadelphia: Lessons from Six Urban Districts from the Pew Charitable Trusts. The link to the report itself is in the summary.

I am sharing the links I browsed below - in particular, I am finding esp. interesting the resources at National Clearinghouse for Educational Facilities, which is a non-profit, non-governmental agency that receives support from Congress, and the National Trust for Historic Preservation, whose resources on community-centered schools apply (I think) to all four schools in our city's school district:

Resource lists: School closure, consolidation, and co-location (National Clearinghouse for Educational Facilities)

The fiscal impacts of school consolidation: Research based conclusions (The Rural School and Community Trust, June 1, 2003)

National Trust for Historic Preservation – Resources for Advocates and Policy Makers


National Trust for Historic Preservation – Report: “Helping Johnny Walk to School: Sustaining Community through Smart Policy”

National Trust for Historic Preservation – Position on Community-Centered Schools

In addition, you can download PDFs of the following - just google the titles:

A Community Guide to Saving Older Schools by Kerri Rubman (National Trust for Historic Preservation)

“How to Save Your Historic School” by Rob Nieweg, Coordinator of the National Trust for Historic Preservation's Historic Neighborhood Schools Initiative.

Here are a couple of articles in local media elsewhere reporting on the impacts that school closures have had on communities:

The implications of closing Holly Elementary (The Rail, Holly, Michigan, February 8, 2011)

How school closure impacted a community (Atlanta Constitution-Journal, April 11, 2010)

A feminist's work is never done

I took a brief hiatus from blogging to start the spring semester and turn in my tenure file. Hooray, hooray.

However, I also have been on a bit of a FB rampage for the last few days b/c it seems like every time I check in, there is a post about yet another example of how a feminist's work is never done:

In case you had decided to drop off FB for a while, the matter currently raging is the decision made by the board of Susan Komen for the Cure - an organization that has done such praiseworthy work raising awareness and funds for breast cancer research - to withdraws its support of cancer screening and prevention activities from Planned Parenthood.

See this pie chart from the Washington Post, which illustrates what services Planned Parenthood actually provides.

I think it is important to note that abortion services account for only 3 percent of PP's activities. However, I personally do not think that is worth crowing over. There are any number of PP clinics that offer no abortion services, period. Which means that there are too many women who do not have abortion services accessible and available to them. I get that it is likely smart in today's political climate to spin PP as 97 percent not abortion, but I also feel like we who are taking a stand with Planned Parenthood need to get away from being oh so apologetic about abortion. Its accessibility and availability are concerns of dignity and justice.

Here is a petition being made to the Komen foundation, and here is one in support of Planned Parenthood.

In other news:

* The New York Times published an opinion piece, "Pregnant, and Pushed out of a Job,".

* Kate Clancy posted this story on sexual harassment in academia.

* The Huffington Post reposted this from Denene Milner over at My Brown Baby - a painful piece on "Birthing While Black."

What a week. So, we all should get some rest b/c we clearly have a lot to do.

Shit we say?

A friend just posted on FB a clip called "Shit Korean Girls Say," which made me laugh b/c I responded to it as more or less good natured fun. So much of it is familiar and recognizable, but more particularly, it is performed by a phenotypically white male with facial hair who pronounces his Korean so convincingly well!

Yet, I also had an uncomfortable moment wondering about what the point of the "fun" might be. B/c apparently, this is just one of the many iterations of the YouTube phenom that is "Shit Girls Say." I did not click on the other versions that popped up. I am afraid of what happens when you arm groups of young men with video production capabilities and then they produce something that they call "parody" concerning women.

However, what alerted me to the phenom in the first place was a video called "Shit White Girls Say to Black Girls". I have been thinking about this video, which illustrates what we can think about as the everyday-racism-not-recognized-as-racism - in other words, privilege.

Privilege is what allows white girls to say shit like that depicted in the video without themselves intending or meaning harm to black girls with whom they actually might be trying to make a connection. Case in point: The comment about being dark enough to be black ("Twinsies!")

More particularly, I have been thinking about the comment in the video about the best friend who used to be black. ("She is black... but we're not really friends anymore.")

For me, this is a reminder of how segregated our supposedly post-racial society remains - and why white and black (and Korean) girls remain such mysteries to each other. (The same might be said about women and men in this so-called post-feminist - I would say anti-feminist - society.) So that we mistake our superficial observations about the shit we say as some kind of insight.

State of The Nation

Just catching up on issues of The Nation that went neglected at the end of the semester, and this caught my eye - from a November 21, 2011 review of Melissa Benn's School Wars: The Battle for Britain's Education, which seems instructive for us on this side of the pond:

Benn quotes a commentator who observed that, for all the vehemence of disagreements on the matter, "everyone wants the same thing: a good, free, local school for all." But it may be, alas, that not everyone wants that; what many people want is for their children to have more educational advantages than others, and they are prepared to do anything legal to get that. One of the most striking features of middle-class norms of ethical propriety is that a degree of self-interest that would be condemned as unacceptably selfish if attached to one's own wants becomes irreproachably "normal," even altruistic, when attached to the education of one's children.

This leads to people reading Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers as a parenting manual.

Beanie's New Year

Last week, I checked Beanie's backpack and found this in her purple take-home folder.

At first, I marveled over it as evidence of her reflexivity and determination. I know math is not her favorite subject. So, I was impressed that she had expressed a wish to "get better" at math.

Yet, I also felt it was necessary to remind Beanie that in fact, she is already good at math. At school, she has been moving through her addition worksheets at a fine clip. At home, she and StraightMan have been exploring multiplication and division based on her own discovery of what it means to say "times two." Having suffered my own hang ups about math, I have tried hard to encourage Beanie to think about herself as good at math and to think about math as interesting, even enjoyable. I got her an electronic Minute Math game b/c she likes to have StraightMan set a timer when she does a math worksheet or flash cards (which again were her idea to get in the first place).

Then, walking home from school, she told me in her matter of fact manner that she was so happy that she had finished the W page / would start the X page of math even though she had been "shaking so badly" and her hands had "sweated so much that the paper stuck" during her math exercise at school.

I have been thinking about this b/c I saw on Facebook a link to this post on "The Trouble with Bright Girls" from last spring.

In particular, this observation made me think not only about why and how it is important for me to rethink how I might help Beanie, which psychologists Heidi Grant Halvorson and Carol Dweck would emphasize would be not through praise, but encouragement of her efforts:

[Dweck] found that Bright Girls, when given something to learn that was particularly foreign or complex, were quick to give up; the higher the girls' IQ, the more likely they were to throw in the towel. In fact, the straight-A girls showed the most helpless responses. Bright boys, on the other hand, saw the difficult material as a challenge, and found it energizing. They were more likely to redouble their efforts rather than give up.

Why does this happen? What makes smart girls more vulnerable and less confident when they should be the most confident kids in the room? At the 5th grade level, girls routinely outperform boys in every subject, including math and science. So there were no differences between these boys and girls in ability, nor in past history of success. The only difference was how bright boys and girls interpreted difficulty -- what it meant to them when material seemed hard to learn. Bright Girls were much quicker to doubt their ability, to lose confidence and to become less effective learners as a result.

The difference, the author suggests, is based on what Bright Girls internalize:

More often than not, Bright Girls believe that their abilities are innate and unchangeable, while bright boys believe that they can develop ability through effort and practice.

How do girls and boys develop these different views? Most likely, it has to do with the kinds of feedback we get from parents and teachers as young children. Girls, who develop self-control earlier and are better able to follow instructions, are often praised for their "goodness." When we do well in school, we are told that we are "so smart," "so clever, " or "such a good student." This kind of praise implies that traits like smartness, cleverness and goodness are qualities you either have or you don't.

This recalled to me a profile of Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg that was published in The New Yorker last year:

At her Phi Beta Kappa induction, there were separate ceremonies for men and women. At hers, a woman gave a speech called “Feeling Like a Fraud.” During the talk, Sandberg looked around the room and saw people nodding. “I thought it was the best speech I’d ever heard,” she recalls. “I felt like that my whole life.” At every stage of her time in school, Sandberg thought, I really fooled them. There was “zero chance,” she concluded, that the men in the other room felt the same.

Sandberg says she eventually realized that women, unlike men, encountered tradeoffs between success and likability. The women had internalized self-doubt as a form of self-defense: people don’t like women who boast about their achievements. The solution, she began to think, lay with the women. She blamed them more for their insecurities than she blamed men for their insensitivity or their sexism.

I remember feeling more than a bit irritated when I read this, and I am not the only reader who took umbrage with the emphasis on psychologies as opposed to the institutions and structures that keep women "in place." Then again, I think it is important and necessary to recognize that what the institutions and structures do is they create psychologies.

So, it matters a lot how parents talk to their daughters about math.

Driving home from piano lesson, I said as casually as I could: "Beanie, things like piano and math take a lot of practice, and I can tell from hearing you play and from your math worksheets that you practice a lot." To which Beanie replied: "I also practice a lot at reading."

To which I might respond that it takes a lot of practice to be a parent.

Threads

No year's end reflections or new year's resolutions here. Working on my tenure file, which I will be submitting in a few weeks. 'Nuff said.

***

Being an anthropologist who has published on fetal ultrasound imaging and having just uploaded about 20 photographs from Christmas, it seems fitting to ponder this, from Jana Prikryl's review of Errol Morris' new book, Believing Is Seeing: Observations in the Mysteries of Photography, published in the December 12th issue of The Nation:

On Facebook, intimate, life-altering information is often delivered in the form of a pictogram rather than a written "status update" - the ur-example being the dim, grainy sonogram news flash, which gestate as the mother's profile picture and then bursts forth into religious iconography with the posting of the Madonna-and-child snapshot. Births, bar mitzvahs, vacations, graduations, weddings and car accidents tend to be announced by way of their visual documentation. Compared with whatever we choose to write about ourselves, these snapshots seem to offer incontrovertible proof that how we wish to be seen is, in fact, precisely how we look.

***

StraightMan posted a tribute to archaeologist Elizabeth Brumfiel, who died on New Year's Day. I wanted to make mention of this here because without her willingness to take a chance on hiring an inexperienced instructor, it is likely that StraightMan would have quit academia. So, he and I both owe her something for both being working anthropologists today.

As a parenthropologist, who I particularly appreciate is that Professor Brumfiel's research as a specialist in Aztec archaeology turned attention to women and ordinary people. When she visited StraightMan's college to give an invited lecture in 2008, I became convinced that there could be almost nothing more fascinating to study than spindle whorls! I think that this is because she was interested in gaining insight into what life and work and family must have been like.

***

In college, a friend, observing the aggressive scribbles in the margins of my books, remarked that I needed to be a more "relaxed" reader.

I do not like to relax with books. I like books to make me change my mind.

YA author Walter Dean Myers speaks against a romanticized notion of reading in favor of a radical one:

“People still try to sell books that way — as ‘books can take you to foreign lands,’ ” Myers tells The New York Times in an interview published on January 3, 2012. “We’ve given children this idea that reading and books are a nice option, if you want that kind of thing. I hope we can get over that idea.”

“I think that what we need to do is say reading is going to really affect your life."

Word.