The Politics of Public Education: Deconstructing “No Child Left Behind”

For a fleeting moment, “No Child Left Behind” — the current Bush Administration’s education-reform agenda — was the topic du jour of mass-mediated public discussion. Controversial, suggestive, deceptive and vague, the complex nature of the phrase — its emphatic statement of resolve; its unmistakable allusion to progress and development; its irresistible appeal to social-minded Americans in our midst — is a perfect metaphor for the elusive, vexingly adaptive political ideology, Compassionate Conservatism, that currently holds our government in thrall.

And this is only what lay on the surface.

As is usually the case in our times, the truth to be found beneath glittering, sound-bite rhetoric is far more nuanced than either political party would have you believe, but it’s also no less difficult to divine. Is the new initiative, as some argue, a long-overdue step towards shifting the responsibility of low-performing public schools onto the families, communities and cities that tolerate them? Or is it a veiled attempt on the part of a callous administration to abdicate its social responsibilities and implement a system of assessment and regulation that is predictably futile?

The answer, as with so much else in our postmodern epoch, is that there is no answer; it’s a subject that informed and reasonable individuals will continue to debate. The bracing truth is that the efficacy (or inefficacy) of the “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB) legislation cannot be fully determined until today’s disadvantaged youth become tomorrow’s young adults.

What follows below is a statement of the four pillars of the NCLB legislation as described by its architects. And in a point all but forgotten in our time, the extent to which these notions are in the best interests of our society is for each of us — citizens of a liberal democracy — to determine for ourselves.

Pillar One: Stronger Accountability

American public schools will be held to impart measurable basic proficiency in reading and math to their students. Progress in this regard is assessed and charted, with consequences suffered if standards are unmet.

Critics hold that this singular focus on reading and math aptitude will result in less comprehensive educational instruction in America’s public schools, consigning poorer students to acute under-education.

Pillar Two: Increased Freedom

NCLB enables state and local school districts to allocate resources in whatever manner education officials deem most sensible — funneling support into remedial math instruction or after-school programs, for instance — without obtaining separate approval from federal agencies.

Critics argue that the real problem lay in the systemic under-funding of public schools and the disintegrating educational infrastructure it perpetuates. The freedom to reallocate inadequate resources, they contend, results in a pedagogical house of cards.

Pillar Three: Government Support

NCLB commits government funding in support of those teaching methods that have proven popular and/or effective in demonstrably improving aptitude among students.

Critics hold that notions of scientifically tested or proven teaching methods are false and misleading. Educational theories, they posit, are notoriously fleeting in their popularity and questionable in their utility.

Pillar Four: Greater Parental Choice

NCLB empowers parents to transfer children from zone schools that have failed to meet performance standards for two consecutive years, into out-of-zone schools that have met or exceeded said standards. (In an almost comic twist, the failing school district(s) must provide for the transferring students’ transportation to the better school.) Additionally, low-income students of schools that have failed to meet established standards for three consecutive years become eligible for supplemental educational services — tutoring, after-school services, remedial summer school — and students in high-violence school environments can be transferred into safer schools.

Critics contend that transferring students doesn’t necessarily result in improved learning, and that the influx of under-performing students can have an adverse effect on high-performance schools. They also contend that as such high-performance schools are scarce, the transfer option often becomes impractical. Finally, there’s the fact that no direct correlation exists between high student-performance scores and a school’s ability to improve the learning of under-performing children — and this, supposedly, is the motive goal.

Based on these principles, NCLB strikes me as being a decent-sounding improvement strategy that apparently has considerable space for improvement.

And now that you have a thumbnail sketch of the basic points, what do you think?

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This editorial originally appeared in an NYU student publication.

Heaven Can Wait: Prayer and the Public Good

Since early May of this year, members of Clinton Hill’s Mount Zion Tabernacle have been exploring a new strategy of community improvement at intersections throughout central Brooklyn. On Tuesday evenings, led by church elder Sister Winifred Bellamy, 86, and the Reverend Guillermo Goode, 40, congregants of Mount Zion pitch prayer tents at various high-traffic walkways in Clinton Hill, Crown Heights and Bedford-Stuyvesant.

These street-corner revivals are simple affairs, comprised of little more than a megaphone, a sound permit, and a red cloth banner which reads “Prayer Station.” Their goals, however, are considerably more complex: participants believe that through outdoor sermonizing and public expressions of faith, they can positively improve a community’s quality of life.

“We recognize that many people don’t come to church,” says Rev. Goode, “so the church must go to the people.”

Officer T. Connor, a community-affairs spokesperson from Brooklyn’s 88^th Precinct, said that the station house supports the efforts.

“It’s a welcomed neighborhood influence,” Connor stated. “Organized community engagement on the part of residents helps us to do our jobs; it’s something that we strongly encourage. We hope it becomes a trend,” he added. Connor declined to comment on what effect, if any, the prayer station has had on area crime and disorder.

General community response to the station has been mixed. Noise complaints early on led the Zion team to shut down its original sound system. And according to Rev. Goode, business owners have occasionally criticized the station for dissuading prospective customers.

Neighborhood residents’ impressions of the prayer station were more pointedly dismissive. Many viewed it with indifference, and others saw it as one of many inescapable urban annoyances that were to be tolerated or, if possible, ignored.

Jana Auguste, 27, a Crown Heights resident, believes the concept is laughably quaint, and openly questioned its usefulness. “I doubt the bad eggs in the community will be swayed by prayer,” Auguste said.

Undaunted by such opinions, Rev. Goode theorizes that shame and embarrassment are what prevent greater numbers of people from seeking public ministration. “There are those in the community that would sooner be seen accepting the food and clothing we sometimes offer, than be seen accepting the gift of prayer,” he proclaimed.

One form of resistance that has proven more difficult for the Reverend to ignore are the skeptical passersby — Christian and non-Christian — who aggressively challenge the station’s religious literature, or dispute its interpretation of biblical scripture.

“We’ve trained our group to politely excuse themselves from these kinds of confrontations,” Rev. Goode says, “our goal isn’t persuasion or debate, but salvation.”

Goode said his team may better achieve its aims with time and with increased “witness” to Mt. Zion’s commitment to aid the distressed. “When people come to see the purity of our faith,” he said, “it will help them to accept our help.”

Individuals and communities alike must be reminded that “prayer changes things,” Sister Bellamy declared, “it can change lives; it can save the world.”

And how will they know when their work is done?

“We’ll never know,” Bellamy confessed, “only eternity will tell.”

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This article was originally published in the summer of 2005, in a now-defunct local Brooklyn newsletter.

Dr. Lenora Fulani, the Grand Dame of the Grassroots

If like many other progressive-minded Americans, you’ve viewed the present state of government as an indicator of our nation’s political future, then you know there’s little reason for optimism. The tyranny of the two-party system is virtually unbreakable; its hold on our electoral culture — on our political imagination — is so thoroughgoing as to make any attempts towards reform practically absurd.

The recent efforts and successes of “outsider” candidates to capture elected office and lay the foundation of an alternative political reality — Perot in ’92; Ventura in ’98; Nader in 2000; Dean in 2004 — ultimately crumbled for lack of popular substance, legitimacy and coalition-building clout.

In the language of American electoral politics, “Independent” has come to mean marginal. It describes a candidate with little or no chance of winning, and a movement with few meaningful platform issues or actionable policy recommendations.

Thankfully (or curiously, depending on your political persuasion) Dr. Lenora Fulani, grand dame of the grassroots, doesn’t speak Electorese.

With several political lifetimes condensed into her ageless 54 years, Dr. Fulani continues to fight the fight of what she deems “the average American”: that individual, consigned against his will, to align himself with a political party (usually Democrats) that doesn’t speak to his basic needs or interests — whether he is aware of them or not.

This is not as bizarre as it may seem at first glance: Making people aware of their real needs and interests, and exploiting their frailties, is what political organizations have been doing since the advent of the popular vote.

Where Dr. Fulani and her Independence Party (IPP) differ is their lack of interest in either electing party candidates to office, or its corollary — seizing political power. In the opinion of a great many, it is this difference that consigns the IPP to the margins of America’s political culture. Interestingly enough, this is precisely where Dr. Fulani believes her party’s hyper-populist notions of liberal democracy — democracy in its purest theoretical form — can be most effective.

Loosely stated, the goals of the IPP are to foster and implement institutional political reform in American politics. This is accomplished, in Dr. Fulani’s estimation, not through seizing power in a corrupted system, but through promoting and nurturing a more intelligent use of the franchise among working- and under-class voters. She believes that by educating voters on the interests that they hold in common with the great majority of Americans — housing, employment, education and safety — interests that the major parties use to bait prospective voters and then wedge them apart, she can create a new, revolutionary Politics of Inclusion.

It’s a noble agenda, and if rationality was the key driver of human behavior, it might even be an inspiring one. But it’s more often the case that passions dictate our voting choices. And it’s certainly the case that political advertising — a method far more effective than grassroots circulars and person-to-person appeals — elicits and exploits those passions.

Dr. Fulani concedes that emotion, by and large, is the coin of popular elections. If what she suggests is true, then it’s even moreso the case when the target electorate is the working and under-educated poor. There is also the fact a significant segment of America isn’t a part of that demographic, and thus may not only perceive the interests of that group as foreign, but as fundamentally antithetical to their own — be they real or wrongly perceived.

To the extent that politics is the forum of competing worldviews, the odds are stacked heavily against Dr. Fulani. Quite frankly, it’s a game that she can’t win. But she fights the good fight, and she hopes the good hope. American democracy is the better for it.

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This editorial originally appeared in an NYU student publication.

Art World Anarchist: Contemplating Basquiat

America consumes its celebrities. We gorge on their beauty, their wealth, their ubiquity and the magnified scope of their missteps. Every era of the twentieth century has provided our society with a body of new faces and figures upon which we, in our hunger for escape, can feast until exhaustion.

In the 1920s, the key celebrities of choice were literary: we dined on Fitzgerald and Hemingway — seeing in their alcohol-fueled genius some validation of our nation’s excesses. In the mid-century, our hunger turned to movies and music: The supernovas of the moment — Garland, Davis, Monroe; Joplin, Hendrix and Morrison — nourished the latent American narcissism that would carry us through the Cold War and into the cultural void of the 70s.

In the 1980s, the art world seized center stage: Warhol, Reed and Bowie became the triumvirate kings of our voyeurism; their brilliance helped illuminate the icons of the age. In hindsight, few of the anointed warranted the credence they were given: Niko was little more than a fleeting novelty; Ziggy persevered only in the realm of musical fantasy. Basquiat, however — Jean-Michel Basquiat — was something else entirely.

Basquiat’s fame exemplified America’s morbid fascination with the “Other.” His rise to prominence — meteoric, irresistible, bewildering — was an anthropology of racial fetishism cloaked in the guise of anti-bourgeois aesthetics. The fame and fortune he accumulated in those few short years stand as a testament to our unending fascination with the culture of the street, and our national need to romanticize the self-destructive tendencies of the creative “genius.” More locally, it spoke to New York’s voyeuristic awe of any and everything “Downtown” — the sex, the glamour, the excess, and perhaps most critically, the exclusivity.

Basquiat’s life as an artist both validated and deconstructed this paradigm of art-world triumphant. His conquest of its center was a victory for every unschooled artist toiling in the shadows of the downtown art scene. And for every artistically inclined black person exposed to his celebrity, his successes were beyond victorious — they were messianic.

Brooklyn-born and raised, half-Haitian and half-Puerto Rican, Basquiat entered the art-world’s consciousness through the cellar. Among the most inventive of an “elite” team of graffiti artists that claimed lower Manhattan’s most visible public spaces as its canvas, SAMO© (as in “same old shit”) — Basquait’s nom de plume — very quickly became a ubiquitous sight along the byways of the then-burgeoning Soho art scene. Bypassing the conventional self-naming that often characterizes urban graffiti, SAMO© offered scathing, provocative and often cryptic phrases to his audience — most of which were intended to disturb the complacency of cultured New Yorkers. (The very same individuals who were the gatekeepers of “official” cultural significance.)

In transforming those spaces shared by the ordinary and extraordinary into a canvas of cultural criticism and free expression (literally and figuratively), Basquiat demonstrated the capacity of those outside of power (he lived as a homeless person for much of his early adulthood), to quite literally move power — and in some respects even redefine it. The fact that he bore no physical resemblance to the art world’s chosen lights, or its “beautiful people,” only further emphasizes the point.

In time, the glare of Olympus proved too great a burden, and Basquiat — wealthy, famous and celebrated beyond reckoning — succumbed to the drug habits that had weakened his productivity and destroyed his gifts. And in the bitter irony that often attaches to those stars whose lights go dim too soon (Basquiat was 27 when he overdosed), his life become truly significant — his vision and his work were truly celebrated — only after his death.

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This editorial originally appeared in an NYU student publication.

The Mediated Mayoralty: Press Relations in City Hall

Municipal government in the modern age is government by expertise: the distinct, interlocking zones of importance — enforcement, finance, education, transportation —are bureaucracies peopled by specialists that have mastered the public-policy language that grounds their agendas, and lends the agents an air of authority that few outsiders can question.

Municipal politics, alternatively, are a politics of familiarity; they are dominated by provisional consortiums with pointed, occasionally non-competing agendas, who see in each other a means to coalition-building, policy implementation and institutional strength.

Political campaigns in municipalities are a synthesis of these two dynamics: teams of specialists surrounding an interior — often unseen — circle of agenda-driven supporters and contributors, which in turn surround the candidate and his closest advisors.

In the largest and most complex of American cities — Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, and of course, New York — the factor of media scrutiny pressurizes these fundamentals by at least an order of magnitude. Every choice or decision brings with it a corresponding degree of controversy. In these cities, controversy becomes an inescapable element of governance; it’s something to be preempted, and to the extent possible, controlled.

Stated differently, controversy is something that any high-profile public servant must be able to manage — and manage effectively. This is no peripheral matter. In fact, one could reasonably argue that the success of any administration — and the prospect of its multi-term continuity — ultimately turns on its ability to manage controversy, and thus its capacity to protect the public image of its leader. In our current New York, these responsibilities are borne most accountably by Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s press secretary, Edward Skyler, and his team of six deputies.

Jennifer Falk, a poised and confidently attractive brunette, is one of those deputies — the Deputy Press Secretary for Economic Development, Business Press, and Jewish Relations in the Bloomberg Administration. The latter responsibility, she confides, stems from her fluency in Yiddish and her own orthodox upbringing on New York’s Upper West Side; the former two come as a result of her having requested the assignment. Interestingly enough, the circumstances surrounding her professional appointments — a sense of duty linked to personal interest and ambition — are a textbook microcosm of the forces that have long motivated privileged Americans to enter public service. Judging purely from her disciplined appearance and effortless self-possession, this current role is preparation for grander plans.

Ms. Falk’s path to this position doesn’t seem to be at all conventional. How a religion major winds up handling press for the city’s Children’s Services Agency is either a comment on resourcefulness, connectedness, or sheer luck. And though the truths to which she was exposed finally become too much to bear — “that job just ultimately overwhelmed me,” she remembers — the nature of the work stimulated her to such a degree that she found herself accepting a similar position with the Bloomberg administration soon after leaving. Evidently a “baptism by fire,” as she describes her early time with the agency, can sometimes be followed by the balm of enlightenment.

As a press liaison for an elected official, she’s responsible for finding artful and persuasive ways of aligning the agenda of the administration with the best interests of the city at large — a job that is surely more challenging than it may sound. And though she says her efforts are aided by the fact that the mayor’s self-funded campaign spared him the obligations that typically come with fundraising, she does reveal (albeit implicitly, and perhaps unintentionally) that his exemption from politics-as-usual — Michael Bloomberg is the only mayor since the days of Tammany Hall that has never previously held an elected or appointed office — carries a heavy cost of its own.

“The press really drives what the mayor’s office does,” Ms. Falk offers with a candor that seems characteristic, “such is the nature of our society.” A sobering if somewhat overstated notion which, if true, reveals that this mayor has no real penchant for public leadership — and that cannot bode well for the city if we’re confronted with another crisis.

Having earned the trust of her supervisor, Ms. Falk — not unlike the other deputies, she admits — is granted a considerable measure of autonomy in crafting the office’s press releases to the city’s multitude of newspapers. And given the biting edginess of some of her past official statements, it’s a freedom that she relishes — which isn’t entirely surprisingly, seeing as freedom is a rare commodity in her life. What little leisure time she’s accorded is spent with her family or cycling long-distance on weekends. But these are sacrifices she seems perfectly happy to make. And with a job as meaningful as hers, it isn’t very difficult to appreciate why.

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This editorial originally appeared in an NYU student publication.