Attending School on Halloween

Malcolm attended the charter school in New Brunswick back in 2005, making him one of the kids who enrolled in the charter school the year after it finally had moved into its own building on the south side of the city. What happened to the kid is a damn shame.

Malcolm was a quiet and unassuming kid, all things considered. One of his teachers, who told me his story once we were at the school and I had joined the board, remembered Malcolm as someone who followed directions and did what was expected of him without complaining. Sometimes he was a little too compliant and didn't advocate for himself, but when push came to shove, you could count on him to find a solution to whatever problem he was faced with.

Malcolm was from North Brunswick, but transferred to the charter school when he was in second grade, thanks to the enrollment lottery. Nowadays that would be harder to do, because the school is established and its lottery fills up with students from its three home districts; but at the time the charter school was younger and never filled up its vacancies with local students. There were even a couple students from the Oranges who attended.

Anyway, back to Malcolm. Being as his family was new to the school and unfamiliar with its calendar, his mother (understandably) assumed that it was open the same days as the schools his older sisters and brother went to, and so that Halloween she packed him a lunch and dropped him off as usual since it was a Monday morning, and everyone had school on Mondays.

He got to school, and when he didn't see anyone running around outside, he just assumed he was late, so he went in. It wasn't quite what he was expecting. There were teachers there, and there were students; but none of them was anyone he knew. Feeling very confused and unsure what to do, he walked to his classroom and sat down.

Now when people think of schools that are closed, particularly on holidays like Halloween or Christmas, we usually think of them as empty. They're not. They're always filled with the ghosts of students who went there and the teachers who led the classrooms. Some of them died there, and others just had nowhere else to go, but they all come back. How could they not? When they were alive that was where they spent half their time. The school remembers, and it pulls them back.

So Malcolm sat there in class with a classroom full of 20 other students, all of whom were dead. The teacher? Also dead.

About halfway through show-and-tell, he realized he was the only one in the room who was breathing. This made him feel very awkward.

Not long after that they went to gym class, where the teacher had them play dodgeball. He felt he was at a disadvantage because the ball actually would hit him,whereas it went through the other students.

He had always loved music class but this new teacher played everything in a minor key and had them enter and leave the room to Chopin's funeral march.

When they returned to class and started their personal education packets, Malcolm started to feel that the other children were pointing at him and laughing. By the time it came for circle time and everyone gathered on the carpet, no one wanted to sit next to him and he was ready to cry.

The teacher noticed how sad and lonely he looked, so she encouraged him to sit next to her. She was pale and it was very cold next to her, but Malcolm didn't want to be disrespectful so he sat right next to her, criss-cross the way he had been taught.

"Now I know if you're here, you're probably still feeling upset about how you died and that's why you don't want to cross over," the teacher said. Her voice was calm and matter-of-fact, and it took a moment for Malcolm to realize what it was she just had said.

"Let's take a moment to talk about how we died, and share with each other how that makes us feel, and what we've been doing in all the time since," she said in her reasonable teacher voice. "Malcolm, why don't you go first?"

"But I'm not dead!" he protested. "I'm a live boy."

There are moments in every school when the entire classroom is focused on one student, and that student does something inappropriate. Maybe the student farts, or breaks the desk when they sit down, or just says something unrelated to the class activity. Whatever it is, it's something that turns the entire classroom on its head, wrests control from the teacher and leaves all the other students laughing.

That was what happened to Malcolm. The entire class burst into laughter and even the teacher had a hard time stifling back her giggles. His ears burning, Malcolm ran from the classroom while shouts of "Live boy! Live boy!" followed him.

He ducked into bathroom to escape the taunting, but in his hurry, he failed to realize it was the girls room. A girl ghost shrieked when she saw him, and her face melted away until he screamed and tried to run away, only to find that the door had closed behind already.

"Live boy! Live boy! Go away, live boy!" The taunts followed him out into the hall and all the way to the office. There he discovered that the door was locked, and the receptionist wouldn't let him out until school was over for the day. It was only 10 o'clock.

"Go back to class, live boy," she said.

Heartbroken, defeated and dreading the thought of eating lunch surrounded by a bunch of ghosts, Malcolm started shuffling back to class, when he found himself staring at the large trash bin the custodian was getting ready to take outside. Malcolm climbed inside and burrowed his way in until he was completely covered with paper towels and other trash. A moment later, the bin began to roll down the hallway, and ten minutes later he was free.

Alas, the story does not have a happy ending. When he made it home an hour later, pale and weak in the knees from his ordeal, his mother would have none of it.

"No son of mine is playing hookey," she said. "Your sisters are at school, and your brother is at school, and you are going back to school this minute. Ghost teachers and ghost classmates. The very idea!"

She took him back to the charter school and watched from the car as her son, defeated, walked back in.

On Tuesday, the education director came to school after a three-day weekend and found a disciplinary note on her desk with Malcolm's name on it that said he had been found truant and was being held after for punishment.

He has never been seen since.


Copyright © 2018 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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I'm a charter school parent. I oppose Betsy DeVos for Education

My daughter attends a charter school, the same charter school her older sisters attended, and the same charter school where I was on the board for 10 years. Obviously I support charter schools.

But let me provide a little context here. I live in a city where our school district is in a state of disarray. When we bought our house nearly 19 years ago, we heard disheartening statistics like "50 percent dropout rate." We heard things like "gang activity in the hallways" and "armed guards and metal detectors at the doors." This varies from school to school even within our district, obviously; but nothing in the past 19 years has altered significantly my impression of the overall look of public education in my city.

Our options for our children's education were to send them to a private school, let them attend the city schools, homeschool, or send them to an alternative publicly funded school. As fate and fortune had it, we had that option. Greater Brunswick Charter School had been approved in 1998, in the first wave of charter schools permitted under the state act authorizing charter schools. Charter schools were controversial even then. Highland Park sued successfully to delay the school's opening by a year over the funding issue.

Charter schools are publicly funded entities, created by a special charter granted its board of trustees by the state Department of Education. They are governed by the same regulations as other public schools, are not allowed to discriminate in their admissions process, and if they fail to meet state standards of education, they can be subject to closure.

The entire push behind charter schools is that they are committed to the education of their students without the constraints of the local board of education and its accustomed way of doing things. With that freedom, and with state oversight, they are free to re-invent the wheel, potentially to discover a better design, a more durable model, something that spins more easily and turns more readily. This new wheel, the thinking goes, can lead to be a better bicycle and make learning a better and easier experience for every student.

Think about your own experiences in public schooling. While we're all justly proud of the way our schools prepared us for our careers, and while we also remember particular teachers with great fondness, if we're honest we also can remember the frustration we felt with struggling to understand material that was too difficult for us. We remember the passions that we weren't allowed to indulge because they were too advanced for our classmates, and we remember the sheer agony of having to sit at a desk when we needed to move, to be quiet when we needed to talk and to be in one grade when our best friends were in another.

GBCS was founded by a group of parents in New Brunswick, Highland Park and Edison who dreamed of a school that was built around the interests, needs and learning styles of each student. When it opened its doors, the school had classrooms with students from multiple grade levels.

Instruction was designed to allow students to pursue each subject at their individual learning level so that a student who came to kindergarten already reading could partner with a first-grader who was struggling; and a math-savvy second-grader could tackle fractions if she already had mastered multiplication.

Learning not only was personalized, it was project-based, so that a girl who was passionate about pirates could make a pirate ship from a shoebox if she wanted, and present it alongside the boy who wanted to talk about dinosaurs. And in those lower grades especially, the floor plan was open. Children could do their math at a desk, or lying on the floor.

Over the decade that I was on the school's board of trustees, we've had to make some changes to how we do things because we found that they weren't working as well as we had hoped they would. Most classes are now mostly single-grade, with the chief exception being middle school and "specials" like art, music and gym classes.

But we also made some pretty bold innovations along the way. Because our school is located in New Brunswick, we've come demographically to resemble the city as well. We have a sizeale number of students who come to the charter school who speak Spanish at home and who know little if any English.

Five years ago, we instituted a dual language immersion program that now immerses everyone entering our school in kindergarten in a Spanish-speaking environment one week and in an English-speaking environment the next year. The result is that each student who attends GBCS is becoming more fluent and more literate not just in English but in Spanish as well.

That sort of innovation is the reason behind the first wave of charter schools in our state, and the things we have learned are things we have shared with other public schools -- another purpose of charter school education.

As a public charter school, GBCS has always made it a priority to educate each of our children in a financially responsible way. As a trustee of the board, I personally worked with our teachers union over three consecutive cycles of contract negotiations to reach a collective bargaining agreement that honored the commitment and service of our teachers without jeopardizing the fiscal health of our school.

With those staff members and with our administrators, we have kept our obligations under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, No Child Left Behind and other state and federal regulations and have never turned away a student who was eligible to receive a free public education in New Jersey

Somewhere along the line, as too often is the case with reform movements, enterprising individuals saw the opportunity to link charter schools with privatized education. Arguing that anything in the public sector would perform better if it were a private sector enterprise with a profit motive, they began pushing for-profit charter schools, and those schools in turn have found ways to cut costs in order to maximize profits for their shareholders.

That in turn has inflamed popular passions against charter schools as students have paid the price of these cost-saving measures, like fewer teachers, and the elimination of the arts in favor of the sciences.

The appointment of Betty DeVos, who favors privatized charter schools over public education, is something that truly worries me. During her testimony to the U.S. Senate, she betrayed a frightening lack of understanding of pedagogy and basic education law, including a school's obligations under IDEA.

Her ideas, which essentially amount to dismantling the public school system that 90 percent of Americans enjoy and have benefited from, would undo centuries of public policy in educating children and turn it over not to concerned parents working to provide healthier alternatives to schools that genuinely are struggling, but to corporate privateers with an eye on making money at the expense of those children.

As the record shows, I am a supporter of public charter schools. They're a proud and important part of America's public education legacy to the world.

But in confirming Ms. DeVos to lead the U.S. Department of Education, the Senate and Vice President Michael Pence have failed us all.



Copyright © 2017 by David Learn. Used with permission. Views expressed herein belong to the writer alone and should not be considered the views of any institution he is associated with.

Tragedy strikes in choice of font for school bake sale

Yesterday Middle Daughter made fliers for a Student Council-run bake sale. Using ComicSans.

I can't help but wonder where I went wrong. If I were a better father, this never would have happened.

broken hearts and lost love

My daughter's heart got broken yesterday.

I've been watching the past several weeks as she has fallen in love, and it really has been a sight to see. It started out as a mild curiosity that I unwittingly encouraged. I've known the object of her affection longer than she has, and when I've spoken of it, I have spoken only with the utmost regard and respect. That was enough. Her curiosity got the better of her before long, and she decided to check things out.

It was love at first sight.

Rachel is only 10, maybe a little young for a book the size and depth of "Les Misérables," but I've learned to trust my children's judgment on what they're capable of. Every morning for the past month, I have watched as she walks into school, the book tucked under one arm.

The sight of Rachel lugging an unabridged hardback copy of "Les Misérables" around the school quickly became iconic. Staff who never had her for a class asked me what book she was reading that was bigger than she was. They were amazed to hear not only that she would tackle a book so epic but also that she understood it.

And understand it she did. As she read, Rachel got caught up in the story. She groaned with good humor when she read Victor Hugo's 52-page essay on the Battle of Waterloo that is as fascinating as it is irrelevant to the story. (Just wait until you get to the chapter on the sewers, I told her.) She grieved for Fantine, hated the impassioned coldness of Javert, loathed the Thenardiers, and loved that brisk autumn evening when Valjean came to rescue Cosette.

Her experience with "Les Misérables" came to a cruel and premature end on Friday. When I arrived at the school to pick her up, I found Rachel distraught and almost in tears. "Les Misérables" was gone. She had left the book in its accustomed place during the school day, and now it was gone. She and the teacher had checked around the classroom and around the school, but they couldn't find it anywhere.

At first I thought she was upset because she had lost a book of mine, and I tried to console her. "It's all right," I told her, and I meant it. "I bought it 20 years ago at a used bookstore for seven bucks. It's not like it's your great-grandfather's second-edition copy of 'Moby Dick.' If it doesn't show up, we can find a new one."

Later, I realized how badly I had misread the situation. To me, "Les Misérables" was a book, a phenomenal book even; but to Rachel, reading it was a nearly religious experience. We could find another copy of the book, even the same edition, but it wouldn't be the same.

This wasn't just a book that Rachel had fallen in love with; it was a book that she had fallen into. The dust jacket was battered and worn, its edges frayed from being carted around every day for a month. For weeks she had taken every moment she could spare, and she had spent them all on reading that book. She had discovered the humanity of every character she had encountered, and established a connection with each one. Like the Velveteen rabbit, this book had become real.

And then it had disappeared. It was brutal. I had bought the book, but on Friday afternoon I realized that it wasn't mine anymore. Rachel had established a claim on the book and loved it right from under me. It's her book, through and through.

There is another possibility, though I prefer not to think about it. It's possible that one of the other students took it, out of spite. Every school has bullies, and Rachel has had problems with a few classmates over the past year.

But everyone in that school knows how much Ruth has been enjoying that book, and the thought that someone could be so deliberately cruel to another child is one I hate.



Copyright © 2013 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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The Great School Trip Musket Fight

I know I shouldn't, but sometimes it's just too much fun not to play with my kids' heads.

Middle Daughter today came home from a field trip to the state capital where she visited some Revolutionary War barracks and saw a demonstration of front-loading muskets, including how to load and discharge them, by an actor in period costume.

"Did you get to fire the musket?" I asked her.

"No," she said as if that were a silly question.

"Oh," I said, sounding disappointed on her behalf. "When I went there with Evangeline three years ago, we all got to take turns loading and firing the muskets."

Her eyes went wide. "Everybody?"

"Everyone," I assured her. "Even the adults."

Rachel turned this over for a moment, and decided that there just hadn't been enough muskets to go around this year. After all, her class had taken the tour with students from another school, while the tour I'd been on three years ago was just for the charter school. A moment later we joined Evangeline, and I told her that her sister hadn't been able to fire the musket this year.

"Did we get to?" Evangeline asked.

"Oh sure," I said casually. "Don't you remember? They split us up into two sides, one for the British and one for the Revolutionaries, and we shot muskets at one another."

"With real bullets?" There was no skepticism in Evangeline's voice, just idle curiosity.

"No, muskets didn't use bullets, they use those round musket balls, remember?" I said. "They said there was no danger of anyone getting hurt, since muskets have such a limited range and don't aim that well either."

There was silence while the girls pondered this. Their younger sister Alex ran around on the wood chips of the school playground, while the last lingering students either finally were picked up or were herded inside by their teachers.

"I guess someone must have got hurt by accident, and they had to stop letting kids do that,," Evangeline finally said. You could hear the disappointment in her voice, not only for her sister, but for all the other students whom the state would no longer allow the unfettered joys of firing front-loading muskets at their classmates during field trips to state parks. Government bureaucrats can be so joyless and petty.

We got into the car and drove away, and soon the afternoon was filled with other activities like homework, karate class, and play practice, but as I tucked Rachel into bed, I discovered how the day's disappointment still lingered below the surface.

"Dad," she said, after I had given her a goodnight kiss. "I bet they just bought better muskets than they used to have."

I gave one of those who-knows shrugs that fathers are famous for, to concede that she might be right. The state's always ruining perfectly good activities by upgrading their equipment. Why not get new muskets too?

"Could be," I said, and I turned off the lights.

I just wish I could be there tomorrow when her classmates hear about all the great activities they missed.



Copyright © 2011 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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Good night, moon

Today I liquefied my brain and removed it through a hole I had drilled in my skull, then filled the skull cavity with epoxy. Well, no, not really, but that's about what it felt like.

What actually happened is that I chaperoned a field trip with Rachel's class to the State Theater, where we saw a dramatic performance of "Runaway Bunny" and "Good Night Moon," both by Margaret Wise Brown. These are pretty basic bedtime stories, only 34 pages each, aimed at essentially preverbal preschoolers.

If you're thinking "What an incredible idea! I'll bet this was a really innovative reinterpretation of the books, bringing out the latent drama in a child who feels suffocated by his mother's all-consuming desire to thwart his independence, and his Gilgamesh-like desire to demonstrate his worthiness of immortality by resisting the beguiles of sleep," then you are thinking exactly what never occurred to me.

Alas, it also never occurred to the good folks at Mermaid Theatre, who turned two 34-page children's bedtime stories into two 34-minute children's plays with lullaby music and some clever puppeteering, in a very dark theater. No interpretive dance, no music numbers, no dialogue, no Avenue Q. Just puppet rabbits that hop, fly or sail, depending; a couple of cat puppets; and a mouse puppet that runs around. And a bunch of adults who quietly fade off to sleep while the kids watch the show.

Well, the kids enjoyed it, at least. But I remember thinking, as I drifted off, "I spent $27 so Rachel and I could watch this?"

But of course that's not why I spent that money. While we watched the show, I put my arm into Rachel's seat, and she let me wrap it around her waist. She moved closer to me, and I felt her warm little body snuggle against mine, and I thought, This is money well spent.


Copyright © 2009 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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alcohol and me

I got drunk, once. Not out-and-out drunk, but it was the most serious buzz I've ever had, and I'm sure it showed.

A group of us had taken a tour of a private school with LEEDS Platinum certification, to get a sense of what could be done to make the charter school greener. We went back to the house of the new principal to debrief and discuss our impressions, and he offered a variety of wines and beers. I picked a beer, and although I thought I went slowly, I also hadn't eaten anything all day.

Bad move. I realized about halfway down the bottle that my eyes were semi-glazed, and I was having trouble sitting up in the chair. I immediately slowed down on the drinking, said little, and waited for my head to clear. We finally left the house about 90 minutes later, so I had plenty of time to detox.

No one said anything, so I don't know if they even noticed. but I'm forever grateful that I had hitched a ride with another board member.



Copyright © 2008 by David Learn. Used with permission.

sermon on the mount

Matthew 5-6 comprises most of Matthew's account of the Sermon on the Mount. In Matthew's gospel, this is where Jesus teaches the Beatitudes, calls his followers the salt and the light of the world, and then begins teaching about his relationship with the Torah.

Jesus begins by saying that he has not come to abolish the Torah or the Prophets but to fulfill them. He's pretty firm on this point, going as far as saying that the least stroke of the Torah will not disappear until everything has been accomplished, and he warns not to teach others to disregard the Torah.

What's interesting is that right after this, Jesus begins setting up a contrast between what the Torah says and what he expects of people. In my Bible, Chapter 5 is broken into sections, with titles like “Murder,” “Adultery” and “Divorce.” Six of these in a row begin with Jesus saying, “You have heard that it was said” or something similar. In each of these cases, Jesus raises the bar from an external behavior proscribed by the Torah to an internal one that meets a higher moral standard, one that usually only the person involved can know.

We all know the drill. It's not enough not to murder someone; now you can't even hate them. It's not enough to keep from adultery; you're not allowed even to desire someone other than your spouse. It's not enough to desire only what the Law allows; you're supposed to forgive the lout who put out your eye and broke your tooth.

This is in sharp contrast with how the rabbis of Jesus' day had come to view the Torah. Over the centuries, rabbis and other teachers had added a second layer to the Torah, much of which is recorded in the Babylonian Talmud, an oral law that served as a fence around the sacred Torah.

The idea was that if you followed the oral traditions, you wouldn't inadvertantly break the requirements of the Torah. For instance, the Torah forbids boiling a kid in its mother's milk; thus, it is forbidden to mix meat and dairy, so that there is no risk of accidentally breaking the Torah proscription. The Torah forbids working on the Sabbath, so rabbis imposed a limit on how much walking a person could do – a Sabbath day's walk – so that no one accidentally would walk too far and break the commandment.

Jesus is also setting a fence around the Torah, but in the opposite direction. If someone wrongs you enough that you want to kill him, he says, clearly you must address your anger, rather than simply struggling for the self-control not to kill him. Otherwise the unsettled rage may one day still lead to murder, or to an otherwise cruel act of revenge.

Similarly, while some folks have gone to the extreme route of suppressing women, blaming them for every act of lust a man commits, even for rape or adultery; Jesus says it's the man's responsibility to control his attitudes toward women. (He also undercuts the contemporary practice of men issuing a get to divorce their wives over minor offenses,stipulating that the only reason a man may divorce his wife is if she in unfaithful.)

Thus, while we often erect barriers based on the idea of regulating our external behavior – don't associate with people whose lives are deemed immoral or in rebellion to God – Jesus wants the focus to be on us and how we view other people. That's where the revolution of God begins, not in how we act, but in how we think and feel in our hearts, because those inward attitudes are the well that brings either life or death to those who drink from it.

That's a challenge, because all we can know of other people, unless we know them well, is what they do, and it's on that basis that we usually judge them. Well, that and what's in our hearts and what motivates us. It's so easy to grow angry at another person because of what they do, without ever stopping to wonder why they do it.

I know of a mother, for instance, who this year pulled her son out of the charter school my daughter attends. It's a great school, and it was offering her special-needs son a lot of personal help and resources. He's now in the public school system, where he's less likely to get the individual attention a child in his situation needs. Is she a bad parent? Did she make a wrong choice? I want to say yes, but I really don't know.

That admittedly is a rather simple example, since I don't know the woman or her situation well. To be completely fair and honest, I'd have to look at the times in my own life right now where there are conflicts or grudges against other people, and see what baggage I'm carrying them.

Backing up a minute: Jesus says “You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden.” There have been a lot of politicians over the years who have used this phrase to describe America, inadvertantly or deliberately suggesting that our nation has some special place in the economy of God, or that we have a special contract with the Divine to work his will upon the earth.

That's patent nonsense, as nations are kingdoms of this world, and however much we spiritualize our nation's actions, we attribute them to our inherent godliness at our own peril. But the politicians are right about one thing: This saying of Jesus wasn't about individual believers. It's about the church as a gestalt; i.e., how a community of believers behaves.



Copyright © 2008 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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the legacy of Pete Seeger

For much of this afternoon, Evangeline has been singing an adjusted protest song from the 1960s:

If you love your Uncle Sam,
Support your troops in Iraq.
Bring 'em home --
Bring 'em home.

The song has its origins with Pete Seeger, who popularized it during the Vietnam War, but it came to us via Bruce Springsteen in "The Seeger Sessions." Evangeline is finding that she favors the music of the 1960s, so naturally she loves this song.

She also has decided that one of her goals this trimester -- students at the charter school get to individualize their course of study -- is to write and perform a song of her own composition.

I got ten bucks says it's a protest song about something at the school, in the footsteps of Arlo Guthrie, who wrote his first protest song in fifth grade, about a math test.

hell just froze over

Despite my earlier kvetching, I have beaten the system at its own game once again.

The cutoff date for first grade in our school district is Oct. 15. In order to begin first grade, you had to have been born at least six years ago by Oct. 15. If you were later than that, you need to wait until next year before you can enroll. Rachel was born Oct. 30, too late for this year.

Well, despite being born two weeks too late to enter first grade this year, Rachel has been approved for first grade this year, owing to her course of education at home the past year. This comes despite the many assurances I have received over the years that no one ever gets an exception from a school district's cutoff date, not never, not no how.

Teachers and administrators alike at the charter school are amazed that I pulled it off.

That fluttering sound you hear is pigs flying.

stinking bueraucrats

I'm the process of trying to get Rachel properly into first grade at school.

She misses the cutoff date in our district by two weeks, so ordinarily she would be starting kindergarten in a few weeks. Ordinarily, except I homeschooled her for kindergarten, and basically got her to the level where academically she's ready to start second grade.

I did this with Evangeline three years ago, explained everything nicely to the superintendent's office, and got a letter from them essentially saying, "Hey, no problem. We'll put her in our system as a first-grader." I gave that to the charter school, and bang! zoom! she was in. No problem, right?

Not this year. This year I sent a letter and got a phone call from the superintendent saying he needed more information about the course of study we used before he could approve such an exception. So I wrote him a detailed letter explaining what material I used to teach Rachel to read, how I taught her to tell time and count change, what math books I used, and made up a checklist showing her levels of progress and achievement for kindergarten throughout the year. I e-mailed it to him as requested, and waited.

And waited.

And waited.

Today I took a printout of the e-mail and its attachments to his office and gave them to his secretary. She was really nice; we chatted a bit, and it turns out she knows my name, and has seen the letter herself. She stamped the correspondence as received, and added a Post It note saying that I needed a response from him. (As I myself had indicated in each letter I have sent him.)

School starts in two weeks and I can't get a letter from this guy saying that Rachel is OK for first grade. Fortunately I've talked with the education directors at the charter school so they know that Rachel already is at or past a first-grade level in her subjects, so she can be educated accordingly. (At least we hope. I have fears that they won't know what to do with her, either. That was a problem Evangeline had three years ago.)

So what accounts for the foot-dragging this time around at the superintendent's office? Two things. For starters, relations between the charter school and the local district have soured somewhat over funding issues. Secondly, I'm beginning my third year on the charter school board of trustees. My name goes out on all the school's official correspondence, so the superintendent knows who I am, and he knows I'm not just a parent in the crowd.

I hope he surprises me and gives me that letter, but I have a sneaking suspicion he's going to drag his feet into the school year if he can.

second thoughts

Evangeline and I had a long talk this afternoon about school and how dissatisfied she's become with it.

A few weeks ago, Rachel had asked Evangeline whether she preferred being homeschooled, or attending the charter school. Since she had felt so isolated from other children while she was homeschooled and was so thrilled to attend a real school, I was floored when Evangeline answered, "There's some good and bad for each." Today when I picked her up from school, she asked a question or two about whether there would be an advantage in going back to homeschool, academically speaking.

So, once we were all home, the two of us went out for a walk around the university campus, and had a long, honest talk about our options for her education, and what the merits and pitfalls were of each.

Essentially, here's what she told me about the charter school: She likes seeing her friends at school, she enjoys recess, and she likes to eat lunch. She also likes her teacher, but she's bored by the reading and language arts part of her work plan, is not challenged by her math section, and remembers going over the latest science lesson (on the water cycle) with me when she was in kindergarten. The homework is more challenging, but that's because she's getting the homework for fourth- and fifth-graders, and even then, it's only the math that's more challenging, and she generally is mastering those concepts quickly. The biggest challenge she's having with it is getting it all done, because it's so voluminous.

What she misliked about homeschooling was that most of her time was with me and her younger sister. Play dates were hard to come by, because the co-op we hooked up with was based in Princeton, and none of the other kids was local for us. Otherwise, she remembers being interested, reading some good books, and learning all sorts of new things. (I was starting her on multiplcation when she began first grade.)

And even though she didn't use the word "voluminous," that still seems articulate for an 8-year-old.

We started weighing the pros and cons together, and I told her that if she were to transfer out of the charter school for fourth grade, that she still could see her friends -- but she wouldn't see them every day, and probably not even every week, although she would always be welcome to call them and initiate a playdate or sleepover if she wanted. And of course, there's no guarantee that she could transfer back in later on if she decided she regretted her decision, because spaces for the upper grades become available only if someone doesn't stay in, and you can't count on that.

On the flip side, there is a very active homeschooling group here in the Nova Bastille area that we have learned about. Rachel and I go to weekly co-op events with varying degrees of structure and activities, and there are other activities in the area besides that one, including a 4-H homeschooling group that we really haven't been involved with, because it conflicts with when we pick Evangeline up from school.

And we can always supplement the last music and P.E. with private lessons and musician studies of our own, along with sports participation, which we'd like her to do anyway.

I also mentioned the possbility of attending a private school, but cautioned her that attending one would depend on a scholarship and finding one that was good, since there's no guarantee we'd find one that we like or that will keep her challenged and interested. She was intrigued by the notion of a Catholic school, but I figure that's probably because she's never attended one. (I did, for a year.)

She decided she wants to keep her options right now -- combination of smarts, I think, and plain old reluctance to make a decision and commit to a course of action -- but we're going to explore our options and see what exactly is out there. I don't feel inclined to enroll her at the nearby Christian school in Piscataway because of the distance and because I have a pretty dim view of Christian schools in general, but I suppose I should check it out and see if they're using some abominable curriculum by A Beka or Bob Jones University before I rule it out completely.

In the meantime, as a board member at the charter school, I'm going to push really hard for the school to put more effort into retaining gifted, talented, and high-performing students. We do a good job of meeting the needs of kids who need basic skills instruction, who don't speak English at home, or who have special education needs, and we do all right with kids who fall squarely in the middle of the bell-curve distribution, but I'm not the only parent who has felt dissatisfied with the program where exceptionally bright children are concerned. If we're going to retain them through eighth grade, which I would think we would want, we're going to need to do more to make it worth their while to stay.

Sigh.

Gary Barker is a good charter school. It's one of the best in Iowa, to be honest. We use the Montessori model of education, so a lot of the learning is student-directed. Evangeline theoretically can go at her own pace, pick projects to work on that she's interested, and find the learning style that engages her the most. But she is so far out of the middle that the school doesn't really seem to know what to do with her.

It's frustrating, because if she doesn't feel engaged, she won't want to stick with it.

an early start on a career of crime

Evangeline has a promising career in burglary awaiting her.

I discovered this Friday afternoon when we were trying to leave the charter school. We had gone inside for Rachel to use the bathroom, and while I was waiting for the girls to finish up, I learned that the nurse had locked her keys in her office.

The lock is tempermental enough that the master keys wouldn't open the door, so a group of us adults stood around, trying to figure out ways to get in. The janitor fetched a stepladder, figuring on lifting the ceiling tiles, climbing through, and dropping down into her office. When he ruled that out as impractical, I took my expired driver's license and tried to open the lock like I've seen done on movies.

I must have tried for about 15 or 20 minutes, with no luck. The nurse had gone into the main office to see if she could contact someone to pick her up, and I was ready to give up myself, when Evangeline asked if she could try something. I handed her the card, and stood back to give her room.

She slid the card into the doorframe by the handle, turned the handle and pushed. The door swung open, the lock having been released by my little 8-year-old burglar.

Evangeline was a hit with the nurse, and with every other adult at the school who has heard the tale, but I'm keeping my old license under lock and key. Or I would, if I thought that would hold her off.


Copyright © 2008 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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wild child

Here's an essay by a college professor who wants more wild children -- students who are willing to break rules, try new things, and set aside social conventions in pursuit of their dreams.

I'm half-inclined to agree. Kids needs guidance and structure of rules, but kids who are willing to set aside rules and not be run by them are the risk-takers who will move and shake the world in days to come.

Evangeline has been butting her head up against a rule at school that is essentially unjust, and I've been trying to help her work her way through an appropriate response to it.

At lunchtime, students at the start of the year were allowed to sit with their friends from other classes if they wanted. About two weeks in, that privilege was unilaterally revoked because of the noise, and everyone was required to sit with their classmates.

Two things annoy the bejesus out of me about this. First is that the restriction has been imposed on everyone without regard for individual behavior. You don't hit an ant hill with a grenade, and you don't punish everyone because of some children's behavior. Second is that it's a punishment that fails to address the underlying problem; kids who are being rowdy and rambunctious will continue to be so even if they have to sit with other kids. And, sure enough, here we are in November and whenever I've been to the school and had lunch with Evangeline, the noise level has been ridiculous, and the kids still are being reprimanded for the volume.

Personally it's a pain in the tuchis, because Evangeline's friends are all in other classes from her this year, she doesn't get to see them the entire day except for recess, and she's miserable as a result. When they drew lots to see who would be friends at the start of the year, the quiet girl (shockingly) was the one who got the short straw -- again.

So what's Evangeline to do? Accept an unjust rule, or work to change it? And when the teachers continue to disregard her request because they're thinking about control instead of what a child needs, what does she do then? My fifth grade lunch was hell because I was stuck next to a bully by virtue of assigned seats and was not allowed to change seats for an entire semester, no matter how I asked.

Honestly, if Evangeline broke this rule and started sitting with her friends, and remained polite and respectful to the teaching assistants the entire time, and refused to move to an assigned table, I'd be thrilled. Some rules are just stupid and they need to be broken so everyone can see how wrong they were in the first place. That's a better lesson than blind obedience to authority.

school funding

A letter I sent to my governor and state legislators. I wrote it tonight, based on a newspaper column I ghost-wrote for a friend, based on a speech she gave to our state officials at a public budget hearing. For the op-ed piece, I was trying to keep her voice. Here, it's mine.

Dear Gov. Culver:

I am writing to you as my governor to ask that you seek a more appropriate level of funding for the state's charter schools. A resident of Nova Bastille, I have a daughter who is attending second grade at Gary Barker Charter School, and as both a parent and a trustee of the school, I am deeply concerned about the current funding inequities, which seriously dampen the school's ability to perform its mission.

As I'm sure you're aware, the Iowa Charter School Program Act of 1996 stipulates that charter schools are supposed to receive 90 percent of the per-pupil spending of the sending school district. Unfortunately, that's not what is happening. In 2005-06, Gary Barker spent $6,102 for each student, compared to the $12,203 that Nova Bastille spends. That's not even close to 90 percent. It's barely 50 percent, even though three-quarters of the students at Gary Barker come from the city. Apparently the state funding regulations do not consider Gary Barker to be an Abbott district, even though most of our students come from one and we're located in one.

The state's proposed budget promises to increase funding for non-Abbott districts with large numbers of poor students. Since we're not eligible to receive Abbott aid, but half our students do qualify for free or reduced lunch, you would think that this aid is perfect for us. Instead we've been told we are ineligible, because the school is located in an Abbott district.

I get a headache just trying to figure that one out. How on earth can we be both Abbott and non-Abbott and yet neither one, all at the same time?

The whole point of the funding arrangement created by the Charter School Program Act is for funding to follow the child. Why isn't that happening? Why are my daughter and her classmates being denied the money for their education that would be spent on them if they attended Nova Bastille's other public schools? I don't get it. Either Gary Barker qualifies as an Abbott school because of its location and should receive Abbott aid, or it's not an Abbott school and it's entitled to the new at-risk aid because its student population meets the criteria.

My wife and I have lived in Nova Bastille since shortly before our first daughter was born, in 1999. In no small part because of Gary Barker and the tremendous education program it offers, we have stayed in our "starter home" for nearly eight years now, long enough to have a second daughter who is now finishing preschool and gearing up for kindergarten. We've built relationships with other families in the school, and we've grown deep roots in the city. We've discovered for ourselves the cultural treasures Nova Bastille has to offer, and we have become involved in other organizations working to make the city an even better place to live. We love our city, and we love our school.

I'm asking you to help guarantee that Gary Barker gets the funding it needs and its students deserve, so that it can continue to be an asset to the community. As the Legislature finishes its work on the 2008 state fiscal budget, please remember to give all the students in New Jersey's public school system the best chance at success. Remember to provide qualifying charter schools with either Abbott aid or the newly allocated "at-risk" aid.

Thank you for your time.

David Learn

The rising cost young children pay for education in America

There's an article on Newsweek about the high-pressure nature of early elementary education:

Brian And Tiffany Aske of Oakland, Calif., desperately want their daughter, Ashlyn, to succeed in first grade. That's why they're moving—to Washington State. When they started Ashlyn in kindergarten last year, they had no reason to worry. A bright child with twinkling eyes, Ashlyn was eager to learn, and the neighborhood school had a great reputation.

But by November, Ashlyn, then 5, wasn't measuring up. No matter how many times she was tested, she couldn't read the 130-word list her teacher gave her: words like "our," "house" and "there." She became so exhausted and distraught over homework—including a weekly essay on "my favorite animal" or "my family vacation"—that she would put her head down on the dining-room table and sob. "She would tell me, 'I can't write a story, Mama. I just can't do it'," recalls Tiffany, a stay-at-home mom.

The teacher didn't seem to notice that Ashlyn was crumbling, but Tiffany became so concerned that she began to spend time in her daughter's classroom as a volunteer. There she was both disturbed and comforted to see that other kids were struggling, too. "I saw kids falling asleep at their desks at 11 a.m.," she says.

At the end of the year, Tiffany asked the teacher what Ashlyn could expect when she moved on to the first grade. The requirements the teacher described, more words and more math at an even faster pace, "were overwhelming. It was just bizarre."

Read the whole story

And we thought the charter school assigned too much homework.

Geez, what is it with people? I'm proud of how well our kids have done in school, and of their academic achievements. I like it that they're at the top of their class, but really, do we have to rob kids of the chance to be children in order to make them read, write and do math before they're ready? (Yeah, I know I've been guilty some times of putting too much pressure on our kids. The fault is mine as well.)

As a reporter I saw how much of an onus No Child Left Behind was placing on schools, and often in outrageous and unreasonable ways. There's a lot of ways American public schools are failing to educate our children -- though, to be honest, the fault doesn't lie entirely with the schools, as parents and TV have a lot to do with it too -- but overworking and overtesting kids hardly seems to be the way to go about fixing it.

I wonder how long it will be until No Child Left Behind gets scrapped.

A typical day in the life

Friday went like this:

7 a.m. Time to get up and to wake up Evangeline.

7-8 a.m. Get Evangeline her breakfast, pick out her clothes, make her lunch. Take Synthroid.

8 a.m. Take Evangeline to school.

8:30 a.m. Get home from dropping Evangeline off. Grab some breakfast.

8:45 a.m. Go with Rachel and Natasha to Rache's preschool.

10-11 a.m. Watch Rachel and her classmates perform a circus.

11:30 a.m. Return home. Prepare lunch for everyone.

Noon. Go outside, dig up goldenrod, chrysanthemums, Rose of Sharons, and possible forsythia to take to Evangeline's charter school for planned flower bed, saving school a small fortune on plants.

1:15 p.m. Pick up Evangeline at school. Work with her and Rachel to transplant aforementioned plants into pots with enough potting soil for them to survive until planting time in a few weeks. Also, water the seedlings in the greenhouse.

2:30 p.m. Parent-teacher-student conference with Evangeline's teachers.

3:10 p.m. Back home. Get the children a snack, then finish grocery list.

4 p.m. Go shopping.

6 p.m. Time for dinner. Wimp out and eat premade food.

7 p.m. Start load of laundry.

7:15 p.m. Fold previous load of clean laundry and put it away.

8 p.m. Begin cleaning dishes to put into dishwasher.

8:30 p.m. Bedtimes! Assist with bedtime rituals, including teeth brushing, stories, and goodnight kisses and prayers.

9 p.m. Put laundry into dryer.

9:15 p.m. Resume cleaning dishes.

9:40 p.m. Start dishwasher.

9:42 p.m. Oh boy! Time for myself!

I suspect this complaint is universal to housemoms and housedads everywhere.

scorched earth

Wondering about the long-term benefit of contemporary politicking? Check out this recent op-ed piece from the Dallas News.

The editorial is by Frank Schaeffer, a longtime Republican and the son of Francis Schaeffer, one of the best-known Christian intellectuals of the 20th century. In the editorial, Schaeffer describes an e-mail he recently received urging voters to re-elect Sen. George Allen, R-Va., on the grounds that his Democratic opponent, Jim Webb, writes "sleazy novels" that indicate he's probably a closet pedophile.

Got that? It's not because Allen has done a great job representing the state, not because he's spearheaded important policy or legislation, not because he's a man of impeccable integrity, but because his opponent wrote "Fields of Fire," which includes as characters two sexually active teens.

I'll be first to admit that I haven't read Webb's novel, so I have no idea what the purportedly salacious details really are. But for Schaeffer, the e-mail was the proverbial last straw. According to his column, he and his wife have decided to change their registration from Republican to independent, ending a longstanding affiliation that included personal correspondence with the Bushes and visits to the White House under Ford, Reagan and Bush the elder.

Politics has been getting progressively uglier the longer I've paid attention to it. Walter Mondale was chided in 1984 for classless remarks over Reagan's age. In the years since, which have included the thoroughly racist Willie Horton ads used against Michael Dukakis in 1988, Bush the Elder calling Clinton a bozo in 1992, the demonization of Hillary Rodham Clinton, the attacks on Bush's intelligence and the character assassination of John Kerry two years ago. Today Mondale's remarks wouldn't even register, except to note that he was being unusually polite.

New Jersey is in the midst of a senatorial campaign where the GOP challenger, Tom Kean Jr., essentially has done nothing but scream that his opponent is corrupt, without providing any evidence for that claim. In one of the more bizarre twists, Kean tried to link Sen. Robert Menendez to a corrupt party boss Menendez helped to put behind bars twenty years ago. ("And his principled stand then just shows what a conniving, unethical bastard Bob Menendez is today.")

Politicians today are doing little more than appealing to our baser emotions to win election. GWB cashes in on fear, telling everyone, "We're the ones who will keep you safe. If you elect the Democrats, you might as well crash airplanes into buildings yourself."

Others try to cash in on a sense of moral outrage, over the Foley scandal or a congressman's less sensational peccadilloes, or they make an issue of the access lobbyists and special interest groups have to one party (while conveniently ignoring identical practices on their own side of the partisan fence).

Compare that to some of the great leaders we had in the past, who inspired us to nobility and virtue. There was Franklin "We have nothing to fear but fear itself" Roosevelt, who gave people hope during the Great Depression, and who spoke with such confidence, directness and honesty during his radio broadcast fireside chats that people started putting their money back into banks. Or Lincoln, who pulled the nation through the bloodiest period in its history, and reunited it against all odds, hope or expectation. Or Kennedy, who inspired people to look for ways that they could contribute to America.

I ran for the school board recently, and it occurred to me while I was delivering my speech to the school membership that if I lost, it wouldn't bother me a bit. My attitude was that I wanted to serve the school, and if I lost, the board members who were elected would do an excellent job, and I could serve the school in other ways.

For most politicians I see today, even at the local level (and definitely higher up), serving isn't their goal. It's power. That's why campaigns get so brutal and nasty, and why everyone votes in lockstep with their party. The goal isn't to serve the public anymore, except in name only. It's to retain and expand power, no matter what.

Sadly, this holds true for much of the church in America today as well. Men like James Dobson and Jerry Falwell, who have amassed great influence because of their prominence in the evangelical fold, can light up the Washington switchboards by the power of their broadcasts. All they have to do is say that the family is under attack from homosexuals, invoke our fear for our children's safety at school, or stoke the "righteous anger" over threats to homeschooling or other popular causes, and millions are galvanized into action.

And, to cite the recently ended season, is it any surprise that evangelicals so often get in an uproar over Halloween, even though the fears of out-of-control Satanism, witchcraft and occultism are virtually all manufactured? Fear, as Ebenezer Scrooge will attest, can be a powerful motivator for change.

I'm tired of being told to hate, and I'm tired of being told whom I should be afraid of. I don't want a spirituality or a political philosophy that appeals to my baser nature, and I don't want leaders like that either.

Maybe it's time we stopped scorching the earth and started reaching for the heavens.



Copyright © 2006 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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Elected to the school board

I've been elected to the school board of trustees.

Now I get to get up to snuff on school financing, attend a host of training workshops and seminars, attend monthly meetings that run to the point of boredom, listen to other parents complain about the school.

It's already started as I'm helping on short notice to publicize a visit the school is having from educators from South Africa.

school board

The speech I gave last night at the Gary Barker Charter School membership meeting, on why I should be elected to the school board:

Buenas noches and good evening. [That opener got a huge appreciative chuckle from the membership, which is at least 50 percent Hispanic.] My name is David Learn, and I'm running for the school board because I'm a believer.

I'm a believer in education. I taught middle school in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and in Pennsylvania; and when my daughter missed the cutoff date for kindergarten in her district, I homeschooled her for a year rather than waste twelve months, when she was already eager to learn to read and to discover the world around her.

I'm a believer in charter schools. With their innovations in education, charter schools lead students to see the real-life value in their lessons, and they give children work that matches their ability levels, rather than leaving them frustrated or bored. Thanks to the pioneering efforts of charter schools like ours, our children are making education a lifetime journey through wonder and discovery, rather than the dreary ho-hum of one-size-fits-all schooling and the tedium of low expectations. Our public school system is better, our communities are stronger, and our state is richer, because of charter schools like this one.

And I'm a believer in Gary Barker. My older daughter is a second-grader here. I've been impressed by the commitment of her teachers to see her reach her potential, and I've been impressed by all that they've done to keep her work challenging and at her interest level. In the time that Evangeline has been a student here, I've been a regular volunteer at the school. I've helped to lead a Girl Scout troop, I've worked with students on their reading and math skills, and last year I read poetry by Edgar Allen Poe to the middle-schoolers. My daughter's teacher no longer asks me to volunteer for school activities; she takes it as a given that I'll be there.

Being on the school board of trustees simply would be the culmination of that volunteer effort. I'm under no illusions; I realize that if you elect me tonight, you'll be entrusting me to something a lot weightier than showing up this Saturday for a few hours to add a new flower bed to help improve the school grounds. It's a job that will require a hefty commitment of time and energy, and it carries with it the heavy responsibility of ensuring that all our children get the high standard of education we expect the school to provide.

I don’t have an agenda that I'm setting out to accomplish if I'm elected to the board, except for this: I want our school to be the best it can be, to deliver the best education it can, in the best environment possible. If you place your trust in me and elect me to the board, I'll pursue that agenda with everything I have.

Because I'm a believer.

I thought my speech was well received; the highest praise I got was from a student I passed on my way to the bathroom, who remarked, "Nice speech." My wife told me I was one of the few candidates who actually could be heard in the back, even with the microphone, and she figures that alone will garner me a number of votes.

I won't know the results until at least tomorrow, I think. There were six seats open, with a total eleven candidates running. On the other hand, I've been down at the school so often volunteering that people I don't recognize call me by name. I also learned from Evangeline's teacher that a number of the teachers were discussing my candidacy yesterday evening, in a generally positive way. Certainly a number of them wished me well. So I probably won, and I'm not sure whether that's a good thing or a bad one.

Evangeline told me a few times that she hopes I lost. I realized this morning that she's probably serious, so I'll have to find out why.