Red Schoolhouse Research Articles

Science Storytelling beyond the Dramatic Arc: Narrativity and Little Red Schoolhouse Principles in Science Communication

Science Storytelling beyond the Dramatic Arc: Narrativity and Little Red Schoolhouse Principles in Science Communication

Riding to Learn, Learning to Ride: Early School-busing in Connecticut, 1900–1945

Riding to Learn, Learning to Ride: Early School-busing in Connecticut, 1900–1945

Jane Roland Martin, School Was Our Life: Remembering Progressive Education (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2018)

Reviewed by: School Was Our Life: Remembering Progressive Education by Jane Roland Martin Randall Everett Allsup Jane Roland Martin, School Was Our Life: Remembering Progressive Education (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2018) In School Was Our Life, Jane Roland Martin provides a moving account of her personal experiences in the early progressive education movement, later defined as constructivist, whole-child, or student-centered teaching/learning.1 As a young girl during the Great Depression, Martin attended the legendary Little Red Schoolhouse in New York City’s Greenwich Village, then a patchworked neighborhood made of working-class homes. In the early twentieth century, “Little Red” was one of several grand experiments in universal public schooling– like the Francis W. Parker School in Chicago, Carmelita Hinton’s Putney School in Vermont, or the Marietta Johnson Organic School of Education in Fairhope, Alabama–all aimed at democratizing education and teaching for citizenship. John Dewey coined the term “New Education” to describe the movement: If one attempts to formulate the philosophy of education implicit in the practices of the newer education, we may, I think, discover certain common principles . . . to external discipline is opposed free activity; to learning from texts and teachers, learning through experience; to acquisition of isolated skills and techniques by drill, is opposed acquisition of them as means of attaining errands which make direct vital appeal; to preparation for a more [End Page 230] or less remote future is opposed making the most of the opportunities of present life …2 Martin was witness to a unique moment in U.S. history where new theory met new practice. Now, this book is not about John Dewey or Francis W. Parker, though they hover politely in the background. Rather, Martin’s book concerns thirty alumni of the Little Red School House class of 1943, now in their mid-80’s, driven in their senior years to reunite, and to sing and talk about how one particular school seemed to shape who they became in life, and what they did with their life. In get-togethers, they marvel at their collective memories. In this way, School Was Our Life is a descriptive phenomenological account of something deeply felt more than a compendium of best practices in constructivism, or a history lesson about the progressive education era. Marveling at their collective marveling, Martin begins like all qualitative researchers by asking, why weren’t these stories told? What could we learn from hearing their voices? She intuits a gap in our knowledge. “For reasons that I have only come to understand in the course of writing this book, Little Red is scarcely mentioned in the standard histories of American education.”3 Armed with a Spencer Foundation award, Martin returns to these informal gatherings with a formal research question: “What, if any, do you believe to be the long-term effects of having attended Little Red?”4 The responses, washed by memory and time, range from the ineffable [“it is so much a part of the way that I have lived my life, I can’t imagine what my life would be like if I hadn’t … I think progressive education was the matrix for which all of my adult success in overcoming failures stems”]5 and the descriptive [“we also studied about transportation, that is, we talked about the boats that bring things in, the trains that bring things in, the trucks that bring things in. Transportation. We visited all these places: the train yards, oh and also the buses, bus stations, the boat piers where the boats were tied up”].6 Martin writes about a childhood spent wrapping mummies, conducting in 4/4 time (floor, door, window, ceiling), reenacting John Peter Zenger’s libel trial, and collectively researching the Black Plague. Most activities were rendered into magazines, plays, and musicals. The students at Little Red studied Native American cultures, built a two-story pueblo in their very classroom, and hiked recovered trails in modern Manhattan. According to Miss Stall’s diary, after my class goes on a walk through the Village along what once were Indian [sic] paths, she reads them a story about fishing which the Indians prayed to their net and thank the...

Books Received

Books Received John Hersey. The Algiers Motel Incident (Revised Edition). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019. Pp. 397. Paper: $34.95. First published in 1968, this work from Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Hersey (1914-1993) utilizes local police reports, witness interviews, contemporary media stories, and court transcriptions to paint a stark, startling image of 1967 Detroit. An experienced war correspondent, Hersey arrived in Detroit shortly after the 12th Street Rebellion. Through the use of interviews with native Detroiters, local police, and city officials, Hersey delves into the late-night murder of three black teenagers at the Algiers Motel by Detroit law enforcement and National Guardsmen on July 26, 1967. Though three police officers and a private security officer were tried, none were convicted. With a new foreword by award-winning author Danielle L. McGuire, The Algiers Motel Incident provides readers with a chilling, thought-provoking look at racism and the criminal justice system in Michigan. Dolores Wharton. A Multicultured Life. New York: Doeclif Publishing, 2019. Pp. 264. Appendix. Illustrations. Index. Cloth: $24.95. Born into a life as the daughter of an influential black businessman, Dolores Mae Duncan experienced a vivid childhood set within the bounds of dynamic, diverse New York City in the 1930s. Educated at the progressive Little Red School House in Greenwich Village, Wharton then spent her adolescent years in a mostly white, middle-class New England town. Upon marrying pioneering black economist and corporate executive Clifton R. Wharton Jr., Dolores was able to gain valuable firsthand experience observing the unequal treatment of women and minorities across the world and in nearly every type of setting. She was able to use her position to create multiple corporate programs designed to change the lives of those most in need. A Multicultured Life is the story of a woman determined to foster her love of learning, strengthen her family, and explore black culture and civic duty in America. Lindsay Elizabeth Doran Central Michigan University ...

LOCAL ROOTS, GLOBAL BRANCHES: ELEMENT OF SECONDARY HISTORY EDUCATION IN THE UNITED STATES

The history of American education is a history of local control. Symbolized by the image of the one-room “little red schoolhouse”, from our nation’s beginnings, schools have been under the direction of local communities. Teachers were hired by local school boards, who paid their salaries and often provided housing and food as well. Curriculum was also set locally, although often through the choice of textbooks, or primers, that were the published work of various education “experts” from other places. Importantly, teachers were also fired locally. As a result, American education has long been quite sensitively calibrated to local outlooks, concerns and politics.

America’s One-Room Schools: Sites of Regional Authority and Symbols of Local Autonomy, after 1850

Before the nineteenth - century’s mandatory education laws, churches and towns created schools according to local needs. The one-room school was a product of local community and autonomy. Educational reformers sought to standardize schooling through guidelines for schoolhouse and playground design and standards for curriculum and attendance. These external reform movements provided the impetus for communities to reform or resist such impositions. America’s social memory of the “little red schoolhouse” paints the picture of one-room schools as sites of conformity and innocence, but historical archaeology of specific schools reveals tensions encoded in these buildings, their documentary records, and associated artifact assemblages.

Writing Spaces as Island Formation: Intersections of Design, Multimodality, and Space in Writing Studies

Writing Spaces as Island Formation:Intersections of Design, Multimodality, and Space in Writing Studies Lauren Garskie (bio) Importance of Space Question #1: In looking at each of the images below, what kind of writing does this space invite? Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. Image of inside of 19th century Little Red Schoolhouse ("Little Red Schoolhouse"). [End Page 275] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 2. Image of Fall 2015 renovated classroom and configuration that can be found on wall of classroom. An accompanying sign states, "This room has been set for the semester. Please do not change the capacity or configuration." Question #2: Considering the space you are currently in, what kind of writing does it invite? Keller and Weisser state how "nearly all of the conversations in composition studies involve place, space, and location, in one way or another" (qtd. in Davis). However, it is not only recent conversations that are discussing space. Nineteenth-century writing instruction manuals that were given to teachers talked about the arrangement and use of the one-room school-house in relation to the blackboards that were newly hung in the front of the room. Discussions about space also are not limited to composition, as seen in fields like design. Tim Brown in his Change by Design discusses space as integral to the creative process and if the product is creativity then the environment should reflect and reinforce this. Yet, despite these continuing discussions about space, Douglas Walls and others argue, "Physical space is perhaps one of the most important, yet often overlooked, issues of interface that we negotiate as writers, researchers, and teachers" (273). [End Page 276] Core Questions Why consider design in conversation with composition, though? In doing research on design and design thinking for my first-year composition multimodal assignments, I found the humanities are only sometimes mentioned as part of the disciplines that engage in design but are not mentioned consistently; instead, it is engineering, architecture, and business that are discussed. In this limited research, I have yet to see rhetoric or writing explicitly mentioned, even though such discussions are focused on rhetoric or discussions of the design process sound very similar to ones that have happened in writing studies. Ultimately, we see there is an archipelago of fields that are part of design and rhetoric. In a focus only on research related to space, design along with rhetoric and writing can all be part of one archipelago. My investigation to understand this connection of space with rhetoric and writing conversations that see design as important involved several core questions: • In writing spaces, what do writers create, how do they create it, and how is design an integral part of that? • IHow do we as instructors and writers understand the spaces in which digital writing now occurs? • IHow has design and design thinking shaped writing studies discussions of spaces and the kinds of writing that exists in those spaces? • IHow are our writing spaces, virtual and physical, like transforming islands? In surveying the literature, I have found spaces considered are wide-ranging: the variety of digital spaces and physical spaces that exist along with specifically, makerspaces, scholarship in academics, the body, and even a summer camp. The term design is also invoked in a variety of ways. Some of the research refers to design as elements, such as layout, arrangement, and typography, while others consider design as part of design thinking, design philosophy, or a design mindset. Role of Technology Initially, I went into this research thinking technology and new media will have had a significant impact on what is created. This was sparked by the research I had conducted on 19th-century classroom spaces and technologies and specifically how a technology like the blackboard was credited with transforming writing instruction. And, technology has had an impact. In his What Can Design Thinking Offer Writing Studies? James Purdy identifies two potential goals for invoking the term design: to "conceptualize composing as multimodal and to account for digital multimedia texts" (620). These goals help push the field of writing studies to consider digital texts as well as to consider the affordances of the technological...

New Light on the History of Correspondence Schools

New Light on the History of Correspondence Schools Robert L. Hampel (bio) What we now call distance education began long before computers linked students and teachers. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, hundreds of private companies, public universities, and enterprising individuals sold instruction by mail. Nearly any subject could be pursued, but vocational training was the best seller. The company that dominated the field, enrolling nearly 100,000 new students annually in the early twentieth century, was in Scranton, Pennsylvania, where its massive headquarters was known as the Big Red Schoolhouse. By comparison, the largest proprietary school in Philadelphia, Peirce College, never enrolled more than 2,000 students until World War I.1 The International Correspondence Schools (ICS) found its historian in 1996, when James Watkinson published an article in this journal.2 He described the practical slant of the organization’s textbooks, analyzed its enticing ads, profiled students from two cities, and concluded that ICS was a reputable vendor of the technical know-how that could help such ambitious adults as Arthur Godfrey, Eddie Rickenbacker, Walter Chrysler, Dwight Eisenhower’s father, and the inventor of Scotch Tape get ahead. Watkinson’s valuable article said little about ICS after the 1920s; his paper traced the rise of a behemoth rather than its later life. In addition, he relied on published sources because the ICS archives were so meager—no correspondence to and from ICS staff, no annual reports to shareholders, no legal records, and no letters from students.3 The few primary sources Watkinson missed—ICS advertisements in the National Museum of American History, the autobiography of an ICS advertising manager, the notes of an Italian immigrant who took carpentry and masonry—reinforce what he found elsewhere.4 [End Page 373] Two boxes in the William Warren Scranton Papers at the Special Collections Library of Pennsylvania State University shed light on ICS from the early 1950s to the mid-1970s.5 William Scranton’s father was on the Board of Directors when thirty-two-year-old Scranton Jr. joined the company in 1949 as its vice president for legal affairs. Although the younger Scranton left in 1954, he rejoined the Board of Directors after his service in Congress, a term as governor of Pennsylvania, and an unsuccessful run for the Republican presidential nomination in 1964. Scranton’s papers illuminate the financial ups and downs of ICS and reveal the risks of rapid expansion. From the annual reports, correspondence with ICS officers, press releases, and handwritten notes, historians can trace the lures and the perils of becoming a conglomerate. In the 1940s and 1950s, ICS rebounded slowly but steadily from the sharp loss of students during the Depression. The GI Bill briefly pushed enrollments to 115,018 in 1947, but that was the only time when ICS equaled the peaks of 1900 to 1925. The company recruited around 70,000 new students each year in the 1950s; a profitable book publishing division grew more rapidly. By the early 1960s, the annual revenue of approximately twenty million was triple the comparable figure from the early 1940s, with the stock price doing much better: from a low of one dollar in 1942, it rose to ten dollars by the early 1950s and continued to climb throughout the decade. The annual profits grew faster than the annual sales in the 1950s, and in a strong market the shares did well. The Scranton files reveal that ICS went on an acquisition binge in the 1960s, when for-profit education and publishing firms entered what investors today call a bubble. The market for schooling in many different forms seemed limitless, and stock prices skyrocketed. The company had seven suitors in 1961, but it wanted to buy rather than sell. By the end of the decade, InText (as it renamed itself) owned three vocational schools, a book distributor, an audiovisual company, a training program for overseas corporations, and five niche publishers. Annual sales began to surge in 1963, and the $22,349,000 in that year soared to $52,255,000 ten years later. But profits peaked in 1967, declined for the next three years, and became losses in the early 1970s. Some of the acquisitions were...

#SayHerName Loudly: How Black Girls Are Leading #BlackLivesMatter

In the style of a black feminist roundtable, black girls at LREI (Little Red School House & Elisabeth Irwin High School), the famous progressive school from which Angela Davis was graduated in 1961, discuss the ways in which they are leading the #BlackLivesMatter movement by using an intersectional feminist lens to create poetry and film to resist systems of oppression and to #SayHerName as well as their own.

The Myth of the Little Red Schoolhouse: Challenges and Opportunities for Rural School Improvement

Approximately one-third of U.S. schools, which enroll nearly a quarter of the nation's students, are classified as rural. Globally, the proportion of rural students may be even higher because the U...

Interview with Orwell Scholar John Rodden

John Rodden has published ten books about Orwell and his legacy, including The Politics of Literary Reputation: The Making and Claiming of “St. George” Orwell (1989), Scenes from an Afterlife: The Legacy of George Orwell (2003), Every Intellectual’s Big Brother: George Orwell’s Literary Siblings (2007), The Cambridge Companion to George Orwell (2007), The Unexamined Orwell (2011), and with John Rossi, The Cambridge Introduction to George Orwell (2012). His work on Orwell also partly inspired him to take a deep interest in the history of Socialism, including the rise and fall of totalitarianism in Germany. He has written a quartet of books focused on cultural politics in Germany before and after reunification: Repainting the Little Red Schoolhouse: A History of East German Education, 1945-1995 and Textbook Reds: Schoolbooks, Ideology, and Eastern German Identity (2006), The Walls That Remain: Western and Eastern Germans Since Reunification (2008), and Dialectics, Dogmas, and Dissent: Stories from East German Victims of Human Rights Abuse (2010). He has, moreover, published books and numerous journal articles on the modern British novel, public intellectuals in the USA and Britain, and contemporary Latin American literature.

Review: The Chicago Schoolhouse: High School Architecture and Educational Reform, 1856–2006 by Dale Allen Gyure; Das Klassenzimmer vom Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts bis heute / The Classroom: From the Late 19th Century until the Present Day by Thomas Müller and Romana Schneider; Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory by Jonathan Zimmerman

Dale Allen Gyure The Chicago Schoolhouse: High School Architecture and Educational Reform, 1856–2006 Chicago: Center for American Places at Columbia College, Chicago, distributed by University of Chicago Press, 2011, 294 pp., 81 b/w illus. $40, ISBN 9781935195191 Thomas Muller and Romana Schneider Das Klassenzimmer vom Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts bis heute / The Classroom: From the Late 19th Century until the Present Day Tubingen, Germany: Ernst Wasmuth Verlag, 2011, 304 pp., 400 color and 400 b/w illus. $65, ISBN 9783803033482 Jonathan Zimmerman Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory Icons of America series, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009, 233 pp., 13 b/w illus. $26 (cloth), ISBN 9780300123265 All of a sudden, architectural historians are thinking about schools. I hope this is evidence of a new trend to document educational landscapes, because for too long, far too long, places made for children to learn (and live and play) have received short shrift from our scholarly community. The encouraging evidence of interest includes a new history of children’s spaces in Denmark, several of open-air schools in Europe, and one study of British schools.1 In the United States, architectural historians have started to consider spaces for children, including in this journal.2 But the absence of book-length works on school design in the U.S. is puzzling, because schooling is the central experience of modern children and schools the central site where modern childhood is lived. For many reasons, the social construction of childhood changed in the nineteenth century, prompting parents to treasure children for their emotional contribution to family life and child savers to insist kids deserved to learn and play, rather than work. The transition was not easy or smooth, but as education came to be the job of every child, communities built public schools and hired architects to design many of them. Imagine the extent of this public works project, as important as any other in shaping a modern nation. Architects, some well known, others less so, designed buildings that, coupled with compulsory education, fulfilled the state’s interest in teaching children to read, write, and calculate. In the nineteenth century, this significant claim on the public purse demanded construction of hundreds of thousands of buildings in the U.S., from one-room schools in the country to grammar and high schools in cities and suburbs, and the manufacture of huge quantities of equipment, including desks. Immediately, these and other artifacts showed the cultural landscape of public education to be …

Red Schoolhouse, Burning Cross: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and Educational Reform

On a hot afternoon in July 1923, former Dallas dentist and national Ku Klux Klan leader Hiram Evans took the podium at the first annual national meeting of the revived organization. By the time of this meeting, the Klan had again become infamous for its reputation of intolerance and vigilante violence. It had also become enormously popular among native-born white Protestants. In states such as Indiana and Colorado, the Klan briefly seized control of state and local politics. In spite of vigorous and scathing attacks from liberals and minority groups, between three and six million native-born Protestant white men rushed to join the secret order. At least another half-million women joined the Women of the Ku Klux Klan. Some even claimed that President Warren Harding took the membership oath in a secret White House ceremony. The appeal of the organization has been explained by historians as evidence of a variety of cultural trends, including worries over lax Prohibition enforcement, desires to enforce white racial dominance, fears caused by increasing immigration rates and labor unrest, and anxiety about changing cultural mores. While each of these issues was part of the revived Klan's allure, the shrewd “Imperial Wizard” chose another topic to electrify his audience. “The greatest duty of America today,” Evans thundered, “is to build up our educational system.”

Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory

Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory

Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory by Jonathan Zimmerman (review)

Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory by Jonathan Zimmerman (review)

Small wonder: the little red schoolhouse in history and memory

The little red schoolhouse has all but disappeared in the United States, but its importance in national memory remains unshakable. This engaging book examines the history of the one-room school and how successive generations of Americans have remembered--and just as often misremembered--this powerful national icon. Drawing on a rich range of sources, from firsthand accounts to poems, songs, and films, Jonathan Zimmerman traces the evolution of attitudes toward the little red schoolhouse from the late nineteenth century to the present day. At times it was celebrated as a symbol of lost rural virtues or America's democratic heritage; at others it was denounced as the epitome of inefficiency and substandard academics. And because the one-room school has been a useful emblem for liberal, conservative, and other agendas, the truth of its history has sometimes been stretched. Yet the idyllic image of the schoolhouse still unites Americans. For more than a century, it has embodied the nation's best aspirations and--especially--its continuing faith in education itself.

Laurence S. Moss as a Young Scholar

I first met Larry Moss in 1964, when we were both 19 years old and undergraduates at Queens College in New York City. Someone observing the circumstances of our meeting would not have been likely to predict that a 40-plus-year friendship would ensue. Having recently become entranced with the writings of Rand, I was searching for like-minded students when I saw a notice about an upcoming lecture on the topic, Ayn Rand's Theory of Sex, sponsored by a group calling themselves for a Free Society. I had never heard of the group but the topic was irresistible, so off I went at the prescribed time to find other fans of Miss Rand. The talk was given by a young man named David Glauberman, who it appeared to me had very little regard for either Rand or her theory of sex. After listening for about 10 minutes, I got up in a huff, turned on my heel, and marched out of the room so as not to give moral sanction to such a disrespectful discussion. I didn't get far, however, before I was stopped by the president of the group, one Laurence S. Moss, who attempted to prevail upon me to return. I shouldn't take the talk too seriously, he explained, because they just chose that topic to try to entice students to come and be exposed to ideas. After all, what undergraduate wouldn't want to hear someone talk about sex? I had never heard the word libertarian before, and though I thought their means of spreading their message was somewhat underhanded, I was intrigued enough to attend future meetings to learn more about this alien political philosophy. To understand just how improbable this incident was, one has to have an idea of what Queens College was like in the 1960s. The school was started in the 1930s by the City of New York as a tuition-free institution of higher learning to serve those academically talented young people who might not otherwise afford to go to college. Soon after opening, it was nicknamed the little red schoolhouse--and not because of the color of the brick buildings. In the 1930s it was suspected of being a hotbed of communist sympathizers; by the 1960s it was less politically extreme, but nevertheless still dominated by the political left, both on the faculty and in the student body. This was New York City, after all. In 1964, Students for a Democratic Society was just beginning to develop a campus presence, but conservative or ideas were almost unknown and, when recognized, routinely reviled. Yet here was Larry Moss, against huge odds, and with youthful optimism, starting a club to provide a counterweight to the dominant leftist ideology. This was a heroic undertaking. On a campus whose student body numbered in the thousands, leftist-radical speakers could fill the student union to overflow capacity with little or no effort, but the average attendance at an SFS meeting was in the single digits. Larry, however, was not daunted. He truly believed that if he could just engage the left in an honest dialogue, ideas would win out. Larry's willingness, even eagerness, to enter into debate with those with whom he disagreed was one of the most distinctive features of his character, even then. He was a tireless debater and would discuss ideas for hours on end with anyone who showed an interest. While in those days the student left was developing a strategy of marching and rallying and sometimes shouting down the opposition, all that seemed undignified, even childish, to Larry. Instead of marching and shouting slogans, he argued, one was far better off spending precious college years reading, studying, and debating, so one would be prepared to make a difference in the long run. My respect for Larry, the intellectual crusader willing to engage opponents in debate at the drop of a hat, did not blossom immediately. That first semester of my involvement generally found us on opposite sides of current issues. When I met Larry, I thought of myself as a student of objectivism and as a political conservative. …

Should the Little Red Schoolhouse Have Been Green?

Should the Little Red Schoolhouse Have Been Green?

Return to the little red schoolhouse: whose education is this anyway?

Return to the little red schoolhouse: whose education is this anyway?

On Kentucky Fried Children and the Educational-Industrial Complex

WHILE ON a business trip to Washington, D.C., not long ago, my son Huck was given a driving tour of city. Having suffered through several childhood D.C. vacation trips with his history-crazed mother, he found that monuments had lost their novelty. To surprise of his tour guide, his response to sights was rather jaded. That was, until car drove past a seemingly uninteresting building, U.S. Department of Education. Wait, wait! he shouted to driver. Pull over, got to get a picture of this! Puzzled, but following command, driver swerved across two lanes of traffic and pulled to curb. Huck jumped out, flipped open his camera phone, and snapped a photo he knew had to see. Moments later, he called me. I've got a surprise for you, Mom. Check your e-mail, he said in a mischievous tone. Moments later, clicked open a file, and there it was in all its glory--the massive, impersonal, 1970s-bomb-shelter-inspired U.S. Department of Education building. The sun glistened off its blastproof windows. I'd seen that before, but there was something new, something thought momentarily must have been Photoshopped. It was a little red schoolhouse complete with white picket fence. Scrawled across top of facade was No Child Left Behind. rubbed my eyes. Could this be real? Unfortunately, it was. The Department of Education (ED) somehow had idea that a little red schoolhouse facade was exactly what was needed to connect vast impersonal machinery that is department to on street. studied picture, and for some reason all could think of was fast food. Perhaps, thought, department is finally acknowledging that programs it all but franchises to schools around country do more to create Kentucky Fried Children than to turn out well-educated citizens. It is easy to imagine those programs being trucked in from vast storage warehouses, supplying chain-store schools in strip-mall communities. The good thing about fast-food chains is that, no matter where you are, food will be same. The bad thing is that the same is often inferior. And like fast food, those scripted programs may fill kids up, but they are unhealthy choices full of empty calories and unseen risks. Unlike fast food, they are not cheap. But was pretty sure that ED was not trying to evoke images of fast food and Kentucky Fried Children. So wondered what they were trying to convey--for what purpose did they construct facade? tried to find out, but that is easier said than done. couldn't locate anyone at ED who could answer my questions about purpose or process. So was on my own, and my mind began to try to make meaning out of an image that was somehow beyond my comprehension. imagined a gaggle of high-paid advertising consultants sitting around a mahogany conference table somewhere inside bowels of that monster building trying to come up with ways they might portray humanity in an institution that has little. How could department make citizens feel it is in touch with real people and real schools? they must have asked. I'll bet it was quite a scene--one pitch after another followed by hours and hours of debate punctuated with pages and pages of graphs, charts, and blueprints and fueled by gallons of coffee leading to a brilliant insight. I know! imagine a nearly deranged ad man finally shouting. A little red schoolhouse facade at entryway! What could better convey warm and friendly image of U.S. Department of Education? Now discussion couldn't have ended there. The idea would have had to be pitched to and approved by more bureaucrats further up food chain. Then funds would have had to be set aside to pay for its construction, bids would have had to go out, and a contract would have had to be awarded. It must have taken months and months to move from dreaming of little red schoolhouse to driving last nail into bright-red facade. …