Therapeutic Reading for the Highly Educated

Abstract

AH, SUMMERTIME and its supposedly leisurely take on life. Time to relax, maybe reflect on the school year past, eventually think about planning for the next, tune or tune out the political rhetoric, and catch up on reading. To aid the last effort, I want to continue a little tradition I started a couple of years ago and suggest some books that have been especially selected for their currency or pertinence to events or people the news. First on the list is a little volume, chosen from among many written the same vein by the iconoclastic Neil Postman, that I recommend for U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige. There is some evidence that he may already have read Teaching as a Subversive Activity, by Postman and Charles Weingartner, but if that's so, then re-reading this little classic ought to make him feel better about his labeling of the National Education Association as a terrorist organization. The next suggestion might help the Bush Administration and the many state legislatures that claim that current education funding is ample to cover the expenses of providing a high-quality education for every child. True, they are working with coffers that are far from full, but this repeated insistence that education gets enough money is a misconception that needs to be pierced. Perhaps Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By America, by Barbara Ehrenreich, can change some minds. Ehrenreich's personal experience trying to make do with minimum-wage jobs this country is a microcosm of the struggles of public education. The low status, the long days put by dedicated teachers, the disgusting facilities that many students and teachers live in during the day, and the lack of time to do things differently seem drawn from the same material that Ehrenreich writes about. In the end, she calls the working poor the major philanthropists of our society because they make it possible for the middle and upper classes to lead comfortable lives. Public education serves the society much the same way. Into the midst of our debate about the future direction for public education America came No Child Left Behind (NCLB). It exposes what schools have not been doing well, and its heart is the right place, though its strategies are far from adequate. The push and pull of NCLB over the past two years have exhausted educators, policy makers, advocates, researchers, and politicians. Perhaps they could all use a break. One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, sounds as if it would be a welcome read. But be forewarned. Only the title is comforting. Marquez describes the gradual erosion of a family's fortune as each successive generation eats away at the patriarch's vision and wealth. The mounting agenda of things to amend NCLB -- awaiting only the passing of the November election -- may usher a time when the goals of the law are forgotten, and public education eventually returns to its former landscape, as does the family the Marquez story. State and local assessment staffs, as well as researchers, have truly been challenged by test-based accountability measures. NCLB just piled more demands onto already overburdened systems. These poor souls need some helpful reading. And no one, it seems, needs it more than the folks Houston, where the public schools have become notorious for their strange machinations with data. When some high schools reported incredibly low numbers of dropouts -- or not any, one case -- it was obvious that someone, somewhere, some office had problems with statistics. …