I have an essay up at Mamaphonic!

This is one of the first essays I wrote when I started writing seriously again. It was for a non-fiction writing workshop. It has been through many revisions (more than I'm sure were worth it) and has been rejected by many publications. But I finally found a home for it. Thank you Mamphonic!

Check it out:
How I Found My Writing Mojo

I agree with Diane Ravitch!

Wait a minute, did I just say I agreed with Diane Ravitch? When I was in Ed school ten plus years ago, I seem to recall associating her with Reagan education policy initiatives which I associate with eliminating the Department of Education which I associate with a slew of illogical conservative ideas. But maybe this is all getting mixed up together in a ed school associated readings-writings-research blur. The important thing is that I agree with so much of what Diane Ravitch is saying NOW about the current state of public education policy, particularly in this interview with John Merrow.

Obama's education policy ideas continue to disappoint me.

A follow-up to my most recent post

One of the elements of Obama's education policy that I took issue with in my most recent blog post was tying teacher pay to student performance on standardized tests. I still think this is a bad idea! In that post, I cited University of Virginia cognitive psychologist Dan Willingham's video about the teaching of reading skills at the expense of content area-studies. Well, just recently Dan released a video about the unfairness of tying teacher pay to student test scores. It's worth a look: it's only three minutes and is much more concise than the arguments people like me go on and on making.


Enjoy!

A prose poem of mine got published!

Here is a link to a satirical piece I got published in Defenestration, an on-line literary magazine dedicated to humor. Be forewarned that it's quite different from the work I normally post here:

http://www.defenestrationmag.net/

What's Wrong with Obama's Approach to Education

In President Obama’s recent education speech, he proposed the creation of national standards, more accountability and merit-based pay for teachers, a longer school day, increased funding for special programs, and expansion of charter schools. He showed that he recognizes the vital role that education plays in a vibrant society and that he is serious about funding our schools. However, his ideas don’t reflect an understanding of the teaching and learning process at its best, or of how to build public institutions that would offer high-quality education.

Merit-based pay as well as the method for designating schools as failing or passing would most likely be based, as it has been since the enactment of No Child Left Behind (N.C.L.B.), on standardized tests. Obama’s policies as stated in his recent speech would continue the misuse of standardized tests that is already under way and reinforced by education “reformers” like Arne Duncan, our current Secretary of Education, and high-profile school chancellors (And, what, by the way, is up with this change in title? What happened to good old “superintendent”? Are we trying to emulate the British university system and its reinforcement of classism?) such as Joel Klein of the New York City Public Schools and Michelle Rhee of the D.C. Public Schools. Jeremy Miller’s account in the September 2008 edition of Harper’s Magazine of his year as a Kaplan coach in New York Public Schools paints a depressing picture of how, under Klein's watch, millions of dollars each year are taken away from New York City Public School classrooms to line the pockets of test-prep companies like Kaplan (not to mention the time taken away from teachers to teach content) while students’ education suffers. Miller's story also caused me to wonder if there might be a connection between Joel Klein’s cultivation and close mentorship of Rhee and The Washington Post’s (which owns Kaplan) incessantly glowing reports of Rhee and decision to remove from their beat Metro desk education reporters too critical of her tenure. Might there be a lucrative contract in the future for Kaplan at D.C.P.S.? Perhaps not, but at the very best, the Post is guilty of lazy and sycophantic journalism, and of the same short-sighted thinking Obama is.

Standardized tests do serve some purposes: with other tools, they should be used to help diagnose a student’s current academic abilities, strengths, and weaknesses; to help inform teachers’ teaching of their students; and, yes, to help measure student progress. Standardized tests are a fact of life—for better or worse, they are not going away any time soon. Normally, those who score well on them are those who come from backgrounds of education, power, and affluence. To fail to prepare the children who do not come from similar backgrounds to take and score well on such tests would be doing them a disservice. That being said, the test itself should be one of many measures of a student’s progress, of a school’s quality, and of a teacher’s impact and effectiveness; the tests and their results should be a means to a quality education, and not the end. I do not want a doctor who was trained to score high on his medical board exams but who lacks hands-on medical experience or knowledge of how to work with patients; likewise, I do not want our nation’s children to finish school knowing how to take and score well on a test but without being practiced and versed in critical reading, thinking, and analysis; scientific research; creative composition and interpretation of art, music, and writing; mathematical problem solving; knowledge of geography and history and their patterns; active civic engagement, and making healthy choices. Very few standardized tests currently measure the type of knowledge I just described.

If Obama wants to treat teachers as the professionals they are, he should start with not simply dividing them into “good” and “bad.” Surely, an intellectual like President Obama can be more thoughtful. Teachers have areas of expertise and interests; they have strengths and weaknesses. Why not talk about a system that builds on teachers’ strengths and strives to resolve their weaknesses and that finds the best ways to put their interests and areas of expertise to use? Sure, there are some teachers we could call “good” and some we could call “bad” but such descriptors are not productive, nor do they do justice to the complexity of what leads a teacher to be successful or not. Moreover, most teachers didn’t start out being effective or ineffective; they started out being passionate but inexperienced. I wish Obama and his reformers would first conduct an examination of how public education systems work effectively and how they work deficiently and dysfunctionally, how they turn inspired teachers into “bad” and ineffective ones. How do under-performing systems make those teachers that way and how do more successful systems work to produce more effective teachers? Until we can answer those questions, we'll just fire “bad” teachers and replace them with those doomed to become the same.

Obama called for nationalizing standards and benchmarks. With input from educators across the country, this could be a good idea. Currently, standards across the country differ such that some states’ school systems make the grade where others don’t. Common standards might also keep each state from having to reinvent that wheel every few years, and increase mobility between states for teachers and students, including into out-of-state colleges and universities. Some decisions, though, about funding priorities or curricular content, for example, should be made locally; each state, county, and municipality comprises different cultures and serves different populations.

A longer school day could have a positive effect, but only if it includes enriching academic activities, outdoor education, the arts, sports, and some choice for students, and a isn’t longer simply to accommodate more dreary test-based math and reading drills, short-changing other forms of knowledge. According to University of Virginia cognitive psychologist Dan Willingham, time for reading skills is already taking over time for content-area studies and as he puts it in this short video, teaching content is teaching reading. Also, a longer day may be difficult for the youngest students for whom even six or seven hours of structured activities is already too long.

Talk of more funding for programs such as Head Start is encouraging; however, the spending need not stop with primary schools. Programs like Title I Reading, for example, are phased out by high school. Even students who score well on reading tests need help with how to read a biology textbook. Speaking of secondary schools, the high drop-out rate, which Obama is concerned about, increased when N.C.L.B. and its emphasis on high-stakes testing came to town, particularly among Latinos (whom he singled out by the venue of this speech) and English Language Learners, who struggle to pass the English-language-centered standardized tests needed to qualify for a high school diploma. A return to using those tests to diagnose and inform teaching, rather than to inform the curriculum and unfairly stigmatize, might encourage those in danger of dropping out to stay in.

Charter schools are desirable on a limited scale, but we need to strengthen and re-invest in our neighborhood schools first. As the number of charter schools increases, they begin to displace neighborhood schools, undermining the communities those schools help to facilitate. Obama commends charter schools for being labs of experimentation and progressive thinking. Why can’t we experiment and be progressive in neighborhood schools? In the Oakland Unified School District, where my two sons attend school, neighborhood schools must use the Open Court Reading Program even if educators at those schools haven’t found the program to be successful or effective. High-scoring schools, such as that of my sons, are allowed some space to be creative with such programs; they can use programs like Open Court as they should be used: as a tool to see where their readers are and to teach reading skills. When it comes to having a rich experience with literature, they are free to use more complex and complete reading materials, which Open Court does not offer. Schools with lower test scores, however, are forced to use Open Court in a rigidly scripted way and are not allowed to supplement with other more interesting books and authors. Charter schools, on the other hand, don’t have to use Open Court at all--they can choose the materials, pedagogical approaches, and curricula that they feel most suit the students they serve and most fit the mission of the school. Why not give neighborhood schools this same latitude?

Tying teacher pay to students’ performance, especially to standardized test scores, only sets up perverse incentives that don’t encourage teaching or learning. A study highlighted in the book Freakonomics by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt showed that bonuses tied to test scores resulted in high rates of cheating. How does Obama define “progress” and “failure” anyway? What is due to teacher’s failure and what is due to the circumstances of students’ lives and communities? Didn’t a focus on short-term incentives recently lead an entire sector of our economy to ignore long-term realities? Current standardized tests scores tell us mostly about the educational background and socio-economic status of students who are taking the tests; they tell us very little about how they’re being taught. Looking at the scores of students at Bell Multicultural High School in Washington, D.C. (where I taught), one would conclude that it was full of “bad” and lazy teachers. Not true. Never have I worked with such talented and hard-working teachers and we saw some amazing progress. For example, it wasn’t uncommon a ninth grader to arrive reading on a first-grade level and then finish the school year on a third-or fourth-grade level, but to be seen as making progress, the student had to score as proficient for an average ninth-grader. Merit-based pay will reward teachers whose students would score proficiently on the tests regardless of their teaching, and force those who don’t teach such students who focus relentlessly on test-prep at the expense of richer content. In 2008, the chancellor of the D.C. Public Schools, in a desperate attempt to raise test scores, called for the elimination of foreign language instruction for all ninth graders due to low language arts test scores. Why should under-performing students sacrifice foreign language education, the enrichment it brings, and skills they’ll need to survive in our global economy for further test prep? If their test scores did go up slightly at the expense of the quality of their education, who does that serve? Chancellors and politicians; certainly, not the students.

There are ways beyond merit-based pay to both support and reward quality teaching. Many education programs include only a few months of student teaching and pay next to nothing to cooperating teachers. Why not require a full year or two of student teaching, paying those student teachers a modest salary, like medical residencies do, while compensating their master teachers adequately? Next, why not improve working conditions? I heard once that teachers have one of the highest incidences of bladder infections because of insufficient bathroom breaks. This NEA article describes the particular health hazards teachers face. Reducing class sizes and teaching loads and increasing planning time would also make all teachers more effective and students more successful without needlessly resorting to a competition. Increasing staffing at schools of arts and physical education educators, reading and content-area specialists, school psychologists, social workers, counselors, and nutritionists would provide support for teachers and essential services for students. Finally, let’s simply raise salaries for ALL educators.

Obama seems to be listening to only one recent brand of education reformer. What happened to Linda Darling-Hammond, the Stanford professor who was the architect of Obama's education platform during the campaign, and her ideas? Education academic and former teacher Mike Rose describes in his blog how and why Darling-Hammond was passed over. Why doesn’t Obama examine the work of innovators John Dewey, the founder of the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools where his daughters attended, or examine the practices of the illustrious Sidwell Friends School, where his daughter are currently enrolled? Surely, the educational philosophy at those schools is not based around the contents and results of high-stakes tests. Why, then, should the education of nation’s public school children be so based?

The problems of our educations system are not as simple as parents, teachers, or schools failing their children and students. Of course, everyone who is a part of our education system should be held accountable, and of course, standardized tests play a role in that process, but we need policies that acknowledge the complexity of the teaching and learning process and that bring out the best in our teachers, students, and learning communities. Abandoning the neighborhood school, sacrificing rich and challenging curricula and education for higher test scores, and throwing merit-based pay at uninspired teachers will not achieve this; and, neither will reducing our teachers to “good” and “bad.”


(photo by flickr user edlabdesigner)

Dark Stew of Bedtime Reading

It was late at night, past midnight. For a fiction workshop I’m taking, I read several pages of This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen by Tadeusz Borowski. Earlier this day I also read an article from spiked, an on-line publication, by Frank Furedi, “After Gaza: What’s Behind 21st-century Anti-Semitism?” about contemporary European reactions to and public conversations about the Holocaust, and also about the forms that anti-semitism seems to be taking in Europe. Just before reading the Borowski pieces, I read an article in The New Yorker about doomersphere and dystopian writers called “The Dystopians: Bad times are boom times for some.” We are most certainly in or headed for bad times, although perhaps not entirely if the occurrence of some bad things will provide the catalyst for more reasonable and rational things to happen.

So, here I had this dark stew of bedtime reading comprising the Holocaust story (what happened to Jews and other Third Reich-deemed misfits in bad times in Europe), the prophecies of these dystopian academics, and the evident presence in Europe (and elsewhere in the world) of anti-semitism that according to Mr. Furedi in part seems to be working on holding the Jewish people responsible for what happened to them during the mid-twentieth century genocide because of actions Israel is taking today. My response: I wanted to crawl into bed with each of my children and hold them close to me and feel fortunate that this is all in the past or far, far away from us. Only, we are in potentially dystopian times and I am Jewish enough to have qualified to be a passenger on one of the transports Borowski describes, and for reasons explained brilliantly in the spiked article, many people in the world may not feel too fondly towards my kind right now, so perhaps something like this could happen again?

I am an anxious person to start with, but every time I read Holocaust literature, I start to picture me or someone in my family getting carted off. When I was little, it was my father and mother. Now, it’s me and my children and my husband. Why am I so worried? Why am I so paranoid? No one in my family that I know of was even in the Holocaust, I don’t live in Europe or Germany, and nothing bad has happened to me in the States because I’m Jewish except for the occasional derogatory remark, ethnic slur, or misguided ignorance and unfair stereotyping here and there. Yet, I can’t help but take what happened somewhat personally. If their reaction is it all similar to mine after reading about Holocaust, how must African-Americans, for example, feel when they read literature from times of slavery or watch footage from the 1960’s of civil rights violations? Or even today, watching on YouTube a defenseless Oscar Grant get shot and killed? How do they not feel frightened and distrustful all of the time of white people, of their government, of law enforcement officers, all of the time?

So, yes, I want to go and feel my children safe and sound next to me. To hold each one of them against me and kiss their soft, delicious cheeks, stroke their still baby fine-hair, to hear and feel them breathing calmly because who knows, they could conceivably find themselves trampled to death on a transport, or if they survive the transport, they could be separated from their dad and me once we arrive. How terrified they would be. How utterly terrified. How brutal. Perhaps I should give up my religion, and any religion. Is any religion worth dying like that for? I do not and would not deny who I am, but sometimes I question belonging to something that may target me for a most unnatural and agonizing death. That same something, though, makes me stand by this part of my identity; to ever reject it or attempt to hide it would feel like self-hatred and cowardice.

I also wonder why I am so lucky. Why me? Why my family? Why my children? (Although for now I will not burden them with the angst of their extreme good luck and fortune.) I want to go forth and enjoy each day, hour, minute and second of my life, of them, of literature, of food, of films, of art, of recreation, of my lovely home, of family, of friends, of any beautiful place. I resolve to do this, to not take my children for granted, to not take those things enumerated just one sentence ago for granted. And for the time I take to breathe in and hold my peacefully slumbering children, I will not, just as I have so many other times, ignore the preciousness of life, of my life, that has been so starkly laid out before me this night.

But, really, when has such starkness changed anyone for longer than a relative moment? For how long do the roses smell sweet after one has resolved to stop to smell them? When does one lapse into not stopping to smell them at all? How long do I give myself before my son’s humming gets annoying, before I start wishing that my other son would stop flopping his body with a thud onto the floor, before I lose my patience with my daughter’s insistence on both choosing her shoes and not wearing any at all. I feel this feeling of fortune, of luck, and I try to live my life according to that, but I always lose that sense and then I gradually return to complaining again on a cold night about how poorly the heating works in my house or to feeling sorry for myself because an essay I wrote got rejected from some publication or another. What do those rejections matter when that transport could be me? When that transport is someone else right this minute as I have the leisure to write this? When it’s millions of people? And then, there’s the fact of this person’s suffering that is supposed to make me a better person, or rather, I am supposed to make myself a better person because of someone else’s suffering. And perhaps, I am a better person than I was or would have been had I not considered the suffering of some unfortunate Zimbabwean relative to my own suffering, which is, really, none at all.

How can we just go about our everyday lives when there is so much suffering that is going on? How can we be certain that we are not next? I am not using this is an excuse to do nothing. To say, well, all of that is insurmountable so I might just as well get my reality tv on and be blind to it all. I suppose we just need to live our lives as ethically, tolerantly, and charitably as we can and remember not to ever take our extreme privilege for granted. But, is that enough?


(photo, entitled Cottonteil Muromachi's Dystopia, by flickr user rocket surgery)

Sprinkling on the Parade

This is my attempt at a much more traditionally bloggish piece (is that an oxymoron?), a departure from the first two posts.

During the primary season, while most people of my ethnic, socio-economic, and age demographic (I’m white, educated, thirty-five, and a liberal) were busy listening to the music of Barack Obama’s awe-inspiring speeches filled with complex and smart ideas, I was busy deciding that I would vote for Hillary Clinton. I left the “Presidential Preference” section blank on my mail-in ballot for days, but diligently researched the options of and filled in every other section. Finally, one day, I grabbed the ballot, hastily checked the box next to Hillary’s name, and sealed it as quickly as I could before my husband, or anyone else, could see it. I have not told many people about this decision, especially not my father, who while not part of my age demographic, has never cared for Hillary Clinton. The man who stormed out of a cruise ship movie theater during a screening of American Beauty, yell-whispering accusingly to the daughter who had brought him there, “This movie won the Oscar for best picture! This movie!” will not be pleased.

At the time, I just wanted a known quantity. I felt at least that I knew her, flaws and cardboard political persona and all. The people who voted for Bush in the 2000 and 2004 elections thought they knew what they were getting from him and look what we got there: compassionate conservative, my ass. Hillary’s laundry and flaws had been aired out already, I reasoned. I was also concerned by what I saw among my peers as the pedestalization and idealization of Obama.

I’m known to be skeptical, critical, and wary of the latest trend. I hated the movie Titanic (why should I have paid good money to spend an hour watching people screaming and falling to their drowning deaths and the rest of the time being hit over the head with the formulaic “so evil, so good” character dichotomy); the girlfriends I watched it with wished they had left me at home. When I started questioning the literary quality of the Harry Potter series to my super fan family-in-law, they came close to shunning me. A friend from my husband’s graduate school days, himself no pollyanna, once lamented, “Great, Rachel, you’ve ruined another restaurant for us.” I have a way of raining on the parade, but during the primary, I kept my mouth shut about my doubts about an Obama presidency.

It’s not that I was in any way anti-Obama or that I had any particular problem with his voting record or policies. I liked what he had to say and how he said it. I was not disappointed when he attained the Democratic party’s nomination. In fact, once the racist undertones started in earnest in Hillary’s campaign, once she and Bill alienated the African-American community that had been so loyal to them, and her true turncoat colors began to show, I deeply regretted voting for her. The last straws were the proof offered that her campaign altered Obama’s image to make his skin tone darker and nose broader as well as comments like, “He’s a Christian, as far as I know.” It was too easy for her to sell out the black community for the working-class white males (who vehemently hated her just recently, but the irony of Hillary bashers becoming Hillary lovers is another story) and to try to profit politically from hate and ignorance. Around late February, I started rooting for Obama in the primaries. Once he won the Democratic nomination, I started praying for his victory in the general election.

Once he defeated John McCain, I myself was not immune to Obama fever. Election night was a joyous night, although that elation promptly deflated with the passage of Proposition 8. Inauguration Day was also a glorious and emotional day. I cheered and jumped up and down that morning, singing, “Ding dong the Bush is gone, the Bush is gone, the Bush is gone. Ding, dong the wicked Bush is gone!” I teared up and flat out cried several times that day watching the inauguration coverage on my living room television. To have a president who is educated, eloquent, smart, open-minded, curious, intellectual, from a non-traditional family, a person of color, and with an elegant, stately, and well, presidential wife and children is thrilling. It is refreshing to have Barack Obama be the person of the hour who so many of us, especially young people, are looking up to. Like so many, I felt proud to be an American that day.

That night and the next morning, however, the euphoria began to fade; I started to feel anxious and the misgivings I had during the primary season resurfaced. The excitement of the inaugural consummation started to turn into an inaugural hangover for me, and I started to worry that we might eventually do a walk of shame after the initial fervor surrounding Obama’s historic rise to the presidency. The pictures I saw on-line and that friends had posted were informative and documentary, but the prevalence of iconographic paraphernalia and images of idolatry disturbed me. During election season, the Obama campaign needed all of the free advertising and fundraising resources it could get. I understood the cultivation of a cult of personality for the sake of strategy and marketing. Likewise, Inauguration Day should be marked with all of the fanfare and souvenirs it was (especially if that means money is going into the pockets of disenfranchised and underfunded D.C. residents. Disclaimer: I am a prickly native of the District of Columbia). It was his day, D.C.’s day, African-American’s day, and America’s day.

But now I’m hoping that we can move on from the cult of personality and fan club mentality. I fear Obama has become the new Che, the person who people proudly sport on a t-shirt but of whom they have little idea for what he stands. Obama is not a savior. He is not the Messiah or the Buddha reincarnated or the second coming of Che. He’s a politician. He’s a family man. He’s a human being. Will Obama be like the movie that everyone raves about but which ultimately turns out to be a disappointment once we really watch it? Has he become the politician to love much like Bush became the politician to hate, even for things that he shouldn’t have been hated for (like watching a movie with his family in October of 2001)? Would he become merely the celebrity of the moment to worship, like Angelina Jolie is the one so many of my mommy peers seem to despise because she’s rich, beautiful and has eight nannies? Furthermore, have we built him up so much that he’s destined to fail?

There is a lot Obama does not know. Let’s take education, one of my pet topics (I was a public school teacher for seven years). The author of his education platform during the campaign was, refreshingly, Linda Darling-Hammond, but his choice was the pro-high-stakes testing “reformer” Arne Duncan. In his blog, Mike Rose, a veteran teacher and currently on the faculty of the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, does a good job of explaining the conflicts behind his appointment and why Darling-Hammond was a better choice. Parents United for Responsible Education (PURE) has produced some reports on problematic “reform” efforts that took place in the Chicago Public Schools under Duncan. In the last debate with John McCain, Obama praised Michelle Rhee, the current Chancellor of the D.C. Public Schools, as "wonderful." (If she's so wonderful, why isn't he entrusting the education of his own children with her schools. Cheap shot, I know.) Rhee is another pro-standardized-testing-based curriculum “reformer,” who also happens to be a darling of the national media but not of current D.C.P.S. educators or of those who have toiled to improve D.C.P.S. in recent decades. Even Colbert I. King, the Washington Post columnist who was a Rhee supporter, is starting to see through the buzz surrounding her. In an especially paternalistic piece in the New Republic, Joel I. Klein and Al Sharpton, of all people, add to the grand media fawn . An idea of hers that should give Obama pause is her plan to remove many D.C.P.S. career teachers (who are mostly over forty, middle class, and African-American Washingtonians) and replace them with Teach for America-esque recruits (who are mostly white, affluent, and from out-of-town).

Let’s hope that Obama won’t be blinded by the buzz surrounding individuals like Rhee and Duncan, and neglect to gain real knowledge about quality teaching, public schools, and education. Obama does surround himself with smart, knowledgeable people who have differing opinions, and he seems to listen to those people and to be a lightning-quick study. I just hope he listens to all of the experts in education (and other fields) and not just the policy wonks and people who get the media’s attention with gimmicky slogans but no substance. I hope he is able to convert what he doesn’t know to positive, progressive, and logical solutions. His administration's stated agenda for education so far includes a sound and reasonable approach and philosophy that does seem to include making teachers and educators part of the reform effort, and I like how they want to change No Child Left Behind (N.C.L.B.). But still, the statements are full of vague language such as, “demanding more reform and accountability” and neglect to lay out many details or the how of getting their goals accomplished. We need to recognize how much Obama doesn’t know and need to give him a chance and time to learn.

In the meantime, we need to do what we can do and fulfill our responsibilities as citizens and help him to fulfill his promise of change. The Obama team does offer a forum for ordinary citizens to express themselves on various topics. If we have detailed, expert knowledge, let’s speak up and make ourselves heard and remind him of his promises. Using education as an example again, we can make changes at the local level by at least considering enrolling our kids in public schools--if there are things we don’t like or would like to see change, we can engage the school leadership in a respectful conversation about it and join the P.T.A. We can ask actual educators their opinion about policies such as N.C.L.B., rather than rely on politicians three steps removed from the system. We can volunteer to work with young people at schools or elsewhere. We can pledge to withhold contributions to elite institutions of higher education until they vow to get out of the U.S. News and World Report ratings game, reform their S.A.T.- and A.P.-dependent admissions policies, and decide to reward students who are great and promising students, and not punish those poorer students whose parents could not afford S.A.T. prep classes and whose schools are unable to offer plentiful, or any, A.P. courses. (For more on this and to understand why loan-free grants to low-income students are not enough, consider reading Peter Sacks’ somewhat preachy but very well-researched Tearing Down the Gates: Confronting the Class Divide in American Education.) While we’re at it, let’s ask them to spend the ten dollars we are able to afford to give on the students and not on those useless pamphlets showcasing new computer labs or whatever. Finally, let’s not assume that just because we’ve studied a subject that we know how to teach it, or that because we’ve attended school that we know how the education system should work. I’ve been a city bus passenger numerous times and I have a driver’s license, but I don’t know the first thing about what it takes to actually drive a bus, unruly passengers and all, and I certainly don’t know how to show someone else how to do so.

Obama is not perfect. He is going to make mistakes. He is going to make compromises. He is going to make decisions that will be unpopular with certain groups of people. To butcher Abraham Lincoln’s famous quote, you can please some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot please all of the people all of the time. He may have a lapse in judgment at some point, either personal or professional. None of this bothers me or makes me think he should not be president or even stops me from believing that he may be the best president we’ve had. I’m not simply happy to see him in office because he isn’t George W. Bush. I did not agree with all of the Nader supporters in 2000 who said, “How much damage could one man do in four years?” No, I’m concerned that we’ve come to expect such perfection that if he makes one unpopular decision, makes one mistake, or has one momentary crisis or collapse of his moral and ethical code, that he won’t be forgiven and that the people who were engaged in the process for the first time in this past election because of Obama will disengage from the political process altogether. I’m afraid that the thin line between cynicism and unabashed optimism will blur and that all of those people will disengage and not vote again. We need to understand that Obama will make mistakes and the he will do some damage.

So, here’s what I’m inspired to say. Let’s not do that walk of shame. Let’s not be minions of the man and his image; let’s be minions of his message and values. Let’s not end up like my sophomore year economics textbook, full of highlighting for the first chapter but nothing beyond that. Let’s not pat ourselves smugly on the back after our one day of service and ballot casting. Just because we slap a bumper sticker on our car and buy a t-shirt does not make us part of something, except a no-longer-necessary branding. Let’s disavow greed, invest in public education (and be distressed that even the guy who wants to reinvent America's relationship to government did not see fit to send his own kids to America’s public schools), be active members of our communities, become civically engaged, demand affordable and universal healthcare, address the shame of having a class of people called the working poor, demand that equal rights be granted to all Americans, and address the ineffectiveness of incarcerating so many for so long.

There, I’ve said it. I’ll lie in wait for all three people who read this blog to say,"Come on, Rachel, do you have to ruin everything for us? Let me alone to enjoy my feelings of hope and relief." I realize that I am not the first to express these concerns and sentiments. For a much more wonkishly nuanced version of the sentiments in this piece, but regarding the economy, read this. In another wait-and-see piece, Juan Williams asks us to refrain from judging Obama based on the group he represents, although I rather feel that Juan Williams is not giving African-Americans enough credit. As a social studies teacher during the 2000 election, I took part in the Supreme Court Historical Society’s course for D.C. Social Studies teachers. After commiserating about the outcome of Gore v. Bush and bashing Bush, bashing Clarence Thomas was next for the majority African-American class. He got no free pass for being the second African-American on the Court. My favorite response so far to Obama’s Inauguration is from Jay Smooth’s blog, ill Doctrine, where Jay tells his readers to be pleased with the outcome of the election, but not to stop working to make ourselves and our society better.

I have a great deal of confidence in Obama, but I am concerned that the fan club mentality that seems to have swept over some of my demographic peers will cause them to make only superficial changes in the way they think, live, act, and spend. I’m concerned that Obama will fall hard and fast from that pedestal and that no one among us will question his choices or hold him accountable while he’s up there. Here is my commitment: I will endeavor to be a steward of his message and of the promises he made, I won’t be surprised or disappointed when that mistake, that failing, or that compromise comes, and when it does, I’ll still be loyal to Obama and, more importantly, to his message.


(photo by flickr user Lanterna)