(2019-09-13) Packer When The Culture War Comes For The Kids

George Packer: When the Culture War Comes for the Kids. (Educating Kids in NYC) Our son underwent his first school interview soon after turning 2.

The system that dominates our waking hours, commands our unthinking devotion, and drives us, like orthodox followers of an exacting faith, to extraordinary, even absurd feats of exertion is not democracy, which often seems remote and fragile. It’s meritocracy—the system that claims to reward talent and effort with a top-notch education and a well-paid profession, its code of rigorous practice and generous blessings passed down from generation to generation.

The mood of meritocracy is anxiety—the low-grade panic when you show up a few minutes late and all the seats are taken.

New York’s distortions let you see the workings of meritocracy in vivid extremes.

True meritocracy came closest to realization with the rise of standardized tests in the 1950s, the civil-rights movement, and the opening of Ivy League universities to the best and brightest, including women and minorities. A great broadening of opportunity followed. But in recent decades, the system has hardened into a new class structure in which professionals pass on their money, connections, ambitions, and work ethic to their children, while less educated families fall further behind, with little chance of seeing their children move up.

When parents on the fortunate ledge of this chasm gaze down, vertigo stuns them. Far below they see a dim world of processed food, obesity, divorce, addiction, online-education scams, stagnant wages, outsourcing, rising morbidity rates—and they pledge to do whatever they can to keep their children from falling. (Two Cultures)

In his new book, The Meritocracy Trap, the Yale Law professor Daniel Markovits argues that this system turns elite families into business enterprises, and children into overworked, inauthentic success machines, while producing an economy that favors the super-educated and blights the prospects of the middle class, which sinks toward the languishing poor. See 2019-09-17-MarkovitsHowLifeBecameAnEndlessTerribleCompetition

Our son had a place near the very front of the line, shielded from the meritocracy at its most ruthless. There was only one competition, and he had already prevailed, in monitored group play. Two years later we transferred him to a public kindergarten. We had just had our second child, a girl. The private school was about to start raising its fee steeply every year into the indefinite future. As tuition passed $50,000, the creatives would dwindle and give way to the financials. I calculated that the precollege educations of our two children would cost more than $1.5 million after taxes. This was the practical reason to leave.

The essential task is to bring meritocracy and democracy into a relation where they can coexist and even flourish.

Our “zoned” elementary school, two blocks from our house, was forever improving on a terrible reputation, but not fast enough

most of the white kids were attending a “gifted and talented” (TAG) school within the school, where more was expected and more was given. The school was integrating and segregating at the same time.

That year, when my son turned 5, attending daytime tours and evening open houses became a second job. We applied to eight or nine public schools

Among the schools where we went begging was one a couple of miles from our house that admitted children from several districts.

Two-thirds of the students performed at or above grade level on standardized tests, which made the school one of the higher-achieving in the city (though we later learned that there were large gaps, as much as 50 percent, between the results for the wealthier, white students and the poorer, Latino and black students).

The building had the usual grim features of any public institution in New York—steel mesh over the lower windows, a police officer at the check-in desk, scuffed yellow walls

Now the local public schools—at least the one our son was about to attend—couldn’t function without parents. Donations at our school paid the salaries of the science teacher, the Spanish teacher, the substitute teachers. They even paid for furniture.

When my wife came in one day to help out in class, she was enlisted as a recess monitor and asked to change the underwear of a boy she didn’t know from another class who’d soiled himself. (Volunteerism had a limit, and that was it.)

That first winter, the city’s school-bus drivers called a strike that lasted many weeks.

Administrators seemed to devote as much effort to rallying families behind the bus drivers’ union as to making sure every child could get to school.

The school’s pedagogy emphasized learning through doing

“Project-based learning” had our son working for weeks on a clay model of a Chinese nobleman’s tomb tower during a unit on ancient China.

And then things began to change

Around 2014, a new mood germinated in America

This new mood was progressive but not hopeful.

At the heart of the new progressivism was indignation, sometimes rage, about ongoing injustice against groups of Americans who had always been relegated to the outskirts of power and dignity

Over time the new mood took on the substance and hard edges of a radically egalitarian ideology.

The new progressivism was a limited, mainly elite phenomenon.

It was as a father, at our son’s school, that I first understood the meaning of the new progressivism, and what I disliked about it.

Every spring, starting in third grade, public-school students in New York State take two standardized tests geared to the national Common Core curriculum

The excesses of “high-stakes testing” inevitably produced a backlash. In 2013, four families at our school, with the support of the administration, kept their kids from taking the tests.

In the spring of 2014, 250 children were kept from taking the tests.

The critique widened, too: Educators argued that the tests were structurally biased, even racist

Our school became the citywide leader of the new movement; the principal was interviewed by the New York media. Opting out became a form of civil disobedience against a prime tool of meritocracy.

when she asked a question that showed we hadn’t made up our minds about the tests, another parent quickly tried to set her straight. The question was out of place—no one should want her child to take the tests.

We weren’t sure what to do. Instead of giving grades, teachers at our school wrote long, detailed, often deeply knowledgeable reports on each student. But we wanted to know how well our son was learning against an external standard

Opting out had become so pervasive at our school that the Department of Education no longer had enough data to publish the kind of information that prospective applicants had once used to assess the school. In the category of “Student Achievement” the department now gave our school “No Rating.” No outsider could judge how well the school was educating children, including poor, black, and Latino children

Everyone sensed that failing to opt out would be unpopular with the principal, the staff, and the parent leaders—the school’s power structure.

The week of the tests, one of the administrators approached me in the school hallway. “Have you decided?”

Later that afternoon we spent an hour on the phone.

She also wanted to confirm the school’s position in the vanguard of the opt-out movement by reaching 100 percent compliance, and I wanted to refuse to go along. The tests had become secondary. This was a political argument.

95 percent opt-out rate

The battleground of the new progressivism is identity

The school’s progressive pedagogy had fostered a wonderfully intimate sense of each child as a complex individual. But progressive politics meant thinking in groups

The bathroom crisis hit our school the same year our son took the standardized tests.

Within two years, almost every bathroom in the school, from kindergarten through fifth grade, had become gender-neutral.

The school didn’t inform parents of this sudden end to an age-old custom, as if there were nothing to discuss. Parents only heard about it when children started arriving home desperate to get to the bathroom after holding it in all day. Girls told their parents mortifying stories of having a boy kick open their stall door. Boys described being afraid to use the urinals.

IN 2016 two obsessions claimed our family—Hamilton and the presidential campaign

Hamilton and the campaign had a curious relation in our lives. The first acted as a disinfectant to the second, cleansing its most noxious effects, belying its most ominous portents

Our son was less given to joining a cause and shaking his fist. Being older, he also understood the difficulty of the issues better, and they depressed him, because he knew that children really could do very little. He’d been painfully aware of climate change throughout elementary school—first grade was devoted to recycling and sustainability, and in third grade, during a unit on Africa, he learned that every wild animal he loved was facing extinction. “What are humans good for besides destroying the planet?” he asked.

We decided to cut down on the political talk around them. It wasn’t that we wanted to hide the truth or give false comfort—they wouldn’t have let us even if we’d tried.

Adults who draft young children into their cause might think they’re empowering them and shaping them into virtuous people (a friend calls the Instagram photos parents post of their woke kids “selflessies”). In reality the adults are making themselves feel more righteous, indulging another form of narcissistic pride, expiating their guilt, and shifting the load of their own anxious battles onto children who can’t carry the burden, because they lack the intellectual apparatus and political power.

I wished that our son’s school would teach him civics. By age 10 he had studied the civilizations of ancient China, Africa, the early Dutch in New Amsterdam, and the Mayans. He learned about the genocide of Native Americans and slavery. But he was never taught about the founding of the republic. He didn’t learn that conflicting values and practical compromises are the lifeblood of self-government

Every year, instead of taking tests, students at the school presented a “museum” of their subject of study, a combination of writing and craftwork on a particular topic. Parents came in, wandered through the classrooms, read, admired, and asked questions of students, who stood beside their projects. These days, called “shares,” were my very best experiences at the school.

The fifth-grade share, our son’s last, was different. That year’s curriculum included the Holocaust, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow. The focus was on “upstanders”—individuals who had refused to be bystanders to evil and had raised their voices. It was an education in activism, and with no grounding in civics, activism just meant speaking out

The dioramas consisted of cardboard, clay, and slogans.

Students in New York City public schools have to apply to middle school.

The city’s middle schools are notoriously weak; in our district, just three had a reputation for being “good.”

The middle-school scramble subjected 10- and 11-year-olds to the dictates of meritocracy and democracy at the same time: a furiously competitive contest and a heavy-handed ideology. The two systems don’t coexist so much as drive children simultaneously toward opposite extremes

Our son got into one of the “good” middle schools.

Competitive admissions had created a segregated school.

His will be the last such class. Two years ago, Mayor Bill de Blasio declared a new initiative to integrate New York City’s schools.

I went back and forth and back again, and finally decided to support the new plan. My view was gratuitous, since the change came a year too late to affect our son. I would have been sorely tested if chance had put him in the first experimental class.

I wanted the plan to succeed, but I had serious doubts. It came festooned with all the authoritarian excess of the new progressivism

“Excellence” was barely an afterthought in the plan. Of its 64 action items, only one even mentioned what was likely to be the hardest problem: “Provide support for [district] educators in adopting best practices for academically, racially & socioeconomically mixed classrooms.”

our daughter, who was reading far ahead of her grade in kindergarten and begged her teacher for math problems to solve. When the school declined to accommodate her, and our applications to other public schools were unsuccessful, we transferred her to a new, STEM-focused private school rather than risk years of boredom

majority of parents wanted to keep the old system.

Even if the placement was the fruit of a large historical injustice, parents are compromised; a policy that tells them to set aside their children’s needs until that injustice has been remedied is asking for failure

As part of the initiative, Richard Carranza has mandated anti-bias training for every employee of the school system, at a cost of $23 million. One training slide was titled “White Supremacy Culture.” It included “Perfectionism,” “Individualism,” “Objectivity,” and “Worship of the Written Word” among the white-supremacist values that need to be disrupted.

“Isn’t school for learning math and science and reading,” he (our son) asked us one day, “not for teachers to tell us what to think about society?”

Have the ‘culture wars’ come for NYC schools? What you should know about that contentious Atlantic essay

Written by George Packer, a longtime reporter for The New Yorker, the story focuses on his family’s experience at an unusually progressive elementary school in Brooklyn and has sparked fierce reaction.

some close observers of the city’s schools have struggled to recognize the school system Packer is describing.

Here are three pieces of context that are crucial to evaluating Packer’s argument:

The elementary school Packer describes is not like most city schools.

school that is unnamed, but which is clearly the Brooklyn New School

While coveted among progressive Brooklyn parents, the school is by no means typical in New York City — making it hard to generalize his experience into a broader argument about the city’s schools

New York City is seeing some local efforts to diversify its schools. Packer’s piece illustrates the uphill battle those plans may face.

Packer’s argument — that he is supportive of integration but not at the expense of “meritocracy” — has been a key objection to some of the city’s highest-profile integration efforts, including a fight to overhaul admission to the city’s elite but segregated specialized high schools.

The system was structured that way, in part, to entice more white and affluent parents to public schools — parents now invested in maintaining access to those schools.

‘Good’ schools and ‘bad’ schools are not always as they seem.

It’s rare that schools find ways to surmount all of the ways poverty can set students behind their more affluent peers. Sometimes, however, raw test scores or other performance measures can mask meaningful progress, even if students don’t fully catch up to their middle-class counterparts.

On the other hand, some schools with stellar reputations may be doing little more than taking credit for the performance of students who are already ahead.