Fall for an elder is different than fall for schoolchildren. For schoolchildren it is another another annual cycle. Fall begins a new school year. If, after graduation, no longer for them, then soon enough for their children. For the elder, fall is a matter of counting and accounting. How many more summers? Four? Eight? And the accounts, have they been settled? Which ones still demand settling; will I have the courage, the stamina to settle? Which are on the “why bother” list and why?

“Starting school?people act as if there’s something inherently virtuous to it. Setting your shoulder to the wheel, your nose to the grindstone, putting away childish things. Knuckling down?they can’t wait to get you knuckling down, as if you become a real person only when you start doing things you don’t want to do. God forbid you should spend your life running around the park. What if everyone did that? Who would poison the rats? Who would sue the government?”  Paul Murray

Then too, of course, this is September.
The newts in the creek had gone, already.
I don’t know where, I can’t remember
Your face or anything you said. W.D. Snodgrass

“It is radical conditions which have changed, and only an equally radical change in education suffices.” J. Dewey

Martin suggests that schools must adapt and replace the care, concern and connections. The Schoolhouse must become the Schoolhome.

“What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all its children.”  J. Dewey

“You should do for your children what their parents fail to do for them.”  Pestalozzi

Martin describes some schoolhomes, from Montessori, the Charles River Creative Arts Program, to the Atrium School, which are meant to suggest a realm of possibilities. Her hope is that utopias will naturally replicate themselves. I too have seen school utopias, it’s good to know that they are indeed possibilities. Existence is one thing, replication another.

Mike Johnston joined Teach for America, applied for and got the job in Greenville, Mississippi.  He was the young, white, newbie English teacher in a decaying high school in a decaying neighborhood in a part of the deep South that has yet to experience any of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream. He describes this classroom scene in his book, “In the Deep Heart’s Core.”

“Larry was far more dangerous and enigmatic than Corelle. He had learned to live life physically. I had heard him tell stories about his father’s beatings with a mixture of pride and venom. When he was in one of his rages, nothing I could say made any difference to Larry. With a different student I might have put a hand on his shoulder and guided him to his seat, but Larry’s rage promised that he would not tolerate my coming anywhere near him.

The first incident occurred with a scrawny girl who sat in the middle of the room. Shakena was mercilessly ridiculed for being cross-eyed. As a result she had grown up with more than a sizable chip on her shoulder. She had learned that the only way to stop persecution, or to refute it, was to fight. I saw her pick fights with the three largest boys in my room before she was eventually removed from my class. She would begin with a glare, proceed to a slap or a scratch, and often end in a wild assault of flailing arms, fingernails and feet. Because Larry was always looking for some form of entertainment to make his idle time in my classroom pass more quickly, his attention often lighted on Shakena. In addition to her pugilistic eagerness, Shakena had also developed an ability to zero in on a student’s greatest insecurity and bare it for all to see. It was a well-tested method of self-defense. Early in the year she discovered Larry’s Achilles’ heel: his academic record. Larry had been held back two years in middle school. After spending a year in the alternative school for threatening to kill a teacher, he was promoted to ninth grade without ever passing the eighth.”

What indeed are the possibilities?

I had come to the habit of listening without judgment or much comment to folks older or younger than I. This, a successful strategy as a child, I found useful as a parent and as a teacher. Let them tell their story, an occasional “humph” or “I’ll be darned” served as acknowledgement and encouragement to continue.

Doc Farner, too, lived in our neighborhood. We adults knew little about her circumstances, but the kids, Jules included, knew it all. She had lost her license to practice medicine and lived with her daughter, Beth, and a teen aged son Eric, who shot-up junk and slept under the pool table in the basement. One night Jules said she had recently been to Doc Farner’s who had hooked up a warm saline IV directly into her femoral artery. “What a sex rush,” she said.

Thirty five years later she sent a note of condolence over Hunter’s death, ending with, “You have no idea what it meant, and still means now, that you thought I was a person worth listening to.”

This week, now forty years later, I got a long letter, She is poor, bipolar, living with her “wife,” and painting beautiful covers for the magazine “Lesbian Connection.” The handwriting is difficult to read, but closes with, “ I think you’re one of the 1st adult males who was safe. You helped by just being and created an enduring flame of peace, love and gratitude. P.S. Beth Farner and I have reconnected.”

Being a listener is not without its dilemmas and predicaments.  You won’t hear anything but polite banter unless they believe you won’t rat them out or go all righteous on them. And if you are safe you are going to hear things like what went on at Doc Farner’s. Part of the agreement is that I won’t tell anybody unless directed to. As a friend in what is now a fairly intimate relationship I am obliged to think through my moral responsibilities.

In this case I said, “That’s far out. Are you OK with it?” “Sure,” she said and I felt that I had done all that needed to be done at that time. And yet, even now, I look back on other options that I had and feel doubts. I’m still not comfortable with the ending; but then this listening business is simply more important than being comfortable.

He came at what he figured would be after dinner, not wanting to confuse his mission with a “Won’t you stay for dinner “ possibility. Mom is ironing, eating dry popcorn. The kids are on the couch in front of the ironing board, watching the TV and eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. He notes no dishes in the sink and deduces that he has indeed come at dinner time. As a good, though relatively new, teacher he knows how to listen, and soon he understands the family situation. There’s the dad, perhaps permanently confined to the psychiatric ward of the military hospital. She takes the children every month on her visit.

“He is their dad,” she declares, “and they are his children. It’s important.” These monthly visits are what terrify the fifth grader, that he will become his dad; crazy, yet unhospitalized, and expected, required, to care-take this family.

He makes a bargain to come by every so often, bring some take-out food, and do some schooling with all three of the kids. Many mornings, now, his hat is found right here, and the boy knows he will be having a good day.

This is my commandment, that ye love one another.   John 4:18

Not that long ago school accountability was all about inputs. Teacher degrees, licensure, professional development hours, seat time for students, textbook choices, and so on. I don’t remember when performance based or outcome based assessment began, but I first heard of it from Tony Alvarado. Tony had been superintendent of schools in NYC and was the one who, in 1974, invited Deborah Meier, a kindergarten teacher fresh from Chicago, to found Central Park East Elementary School. He said something like, “If we get the outcomes we want, what does it matter what are the inputs?” That makes sense too, does it pass a fairness test?

Performance based accountability became assessment based upon student achievement, and student achievement became scores on standardized tests, and the Bush NCLB law made it the way American public education did its business. One of the very few good outcomes of NCLB has been a wealth of student achievement data. The data clearly shows that student achievement is not affected by the traditional measures of inputs mentioned above. We can also say that measuring student achievement and the achievement gap between haves and have-nots did not inform us about how to raise the scores or reduce the gap. Assorted schools where scores were worse were identified and many subjected to extraordinary turnaround plans, none of which had any basis in measurements.

It is not that assessing inputs is not appropriate, it’s that the traditional measures mentioned above proved themselves less than useful. It’s as deep and subtle as the biblical moral injunction, “As ye sow, so shall ye reap.” If you want a cheese soufflé you need eggs, white sauce, cheese, and that soufflé pan; and yes some serious instruction and practice. The dictionary definition for Reciprocal , adj 3. Corresponding, matching, complementary, equivalent, includes the word complementary that always pricks up my quantum mechanical ears. In physics, if two properties a and b are complementary then the more precisely one measures property a, the less it is possible, by any means, to measure property b. This is the uncertainty principle, complementary properties cannot both be precisely measured. In physics we can understand the mechanical details of how a measure of one creates the forces etc. that make the measure of the complement uncertain. In human social properties, the precise mechanisms are vague and arguable. But, for example, if one measures test results in total detail, it leaves the teacher with the most options to “game” how those results come about.

Often, when properties are complementary one seeks a balance of information from both complements. What would it look like if we had balanced inputs and outcomes, balanced between quantitative and qualitative? It would look like a healthy classroom. Would it be easier to identify healthy classrooms than all this balancing of inputs and outcomes? I think the answer may be yes. For one thing, while inputs look at what the teacher brings to the classroom, and outcomes look at what students can do, looking at the whole classroom integrates teacher and students into one element of study. My own experience as a teacher is that it is an almost instantaneous read whether or not a classroom is “healthy.”

John Goodlad stated that, “Healthy nations have healthy schools, it’s not the other way around.” OK, true, and then true too that healthy schools have healthy classrooms. Health, possessing soundness and vigor, freedom from disease or ailment. What are the objective characteristics of a healthy classroom; what metrics? For an object as complex as a human being we can define health; height, weight, pulse rate, lung capacity, blood chemistry, etc. Possible for classrooms?

She trailed her fingers into the water: “Ah, the water is fine,” she thought, and carefully lowered herself into her old friend of the floating memories. The unbidden delight of her daughters’ and grandchildren’s beautiful, lively faces drifted into her mind. Behind them, was her Satoshi-san, holding out his arms. It had been so long, so long. A smiling Yumi closed her eyes and allowed the luxury of sunyata warmth to seep in to her body.

Each of the three generations built their own cabins to suit, and as the older generations passed on, their cabins remained empty testimonies.  As Stan and Cora are childless theirs is the smallest of the generational cabins. Stan would often have dreams where Granpa Luigi would talk to him; “You must plant oats next spring in the dryland pasture above the paradise ditch.” In the morning he would tell Cora of his dream, and she would say, “I too dreamed that Luigi said to plant oats there.”

One night Luigi spoke to Stan, “You are childless and leave me no heirs. You must do so and so and so,” instructions about the possibility of an heir. In the morning Cora said, “Luigi told me too to do and so and so and so.” As they looked under the bed covers there was evidence …

Your flutes at evening, your seed-awakening
Dances fill the night with growth; I hear
The sun’s sad chorus to your starlit songs.    Wole Soyinka

We discussed lifelong learning as, “I don’t really care if you read by third grade, I care that you read for the rest of your life.” Responsibility as, “If we tell you what and how to do it, we have stolen from you your responsibility to figure that out for yourself.” Community as, “We know each other and we care for each other. When I know that you each and all care about my learning I am inspired to learn.” Lunch hour came before we got much farther than, “Injustices are harmful, and we are committed to doing no harm.”

I was explaining these four “directions” to Cliff, a fine middle school principal, who immediately jumped on it, “What is this thing you call social justice?” I answered that we each have our individual sets of actions that we call injustices, and social justice is the set that includes none of these. I cannot defend this as being good enough to be useful as a practical matter. It seems to me now that it is not up some elders to define social justice. It’s what the school does, just as it produces lifelong learning, takes responsibility, builds community, it does justice. “Do justice, love mercy,” Micah 6:8

Claus Offe and Ulrich Preuss in Democratic  Education and Political Participation suggest that this requires “an open-ended and continuous learning process in which the roles of ‘teacher’ and ‘curriculum’ are missing. In other words what is to be learned is a matter we must settle in the process of learning itself.”

Democratic schools usually have a justice system that involves the whole school in a meeting. Those who perceive an injustice present their case to the meeting, which decides, by vote if necessary, how to redress the injustice, to erase the harm, hopefully forever. They learn what they do.

The 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy was administered by the U.S. Department of Education to more than 19,000 adults (ages 16 and older) in households or prisons. They examined prose literacy, document literacy, and quantitative literacy. Quantitative literacy is described as “the knowledge and skills needed to identify and perform computations using numbers that are embedded in printed materials.”  Literacy was measured “directly by tasks representing a range of literacy activities that adults are likely to face in their daily lives.”

Basic quantitative literacy in ascending difficulty:

1.Calculate the cost of a sandwich and a salad, using prices from a menu.

2.Locate two numbers in a bar graph and calculate the difference between them.

3.Calculate the weekly salary for a job, based on hourly wages listed in a job advertisement.

4.Perform a two-step calculation to find the cost of three baseball tickets, using an order form that gives        the price of one ticket and the postage and handling charge.

Intermediate quantitative literacy:

1.Determine what time a person can take a prescription medication, based on information on the                 prescription drug label that relates timing of medication to eating.

2.Calculate the total cost of ordering office supplies, using a page from an office supplies catalog and an order form.

3.Determine whether a car has enough gasoline to get to the next gas station, based on a graphic of the car’s fuel gauge, a sign stating the miles to the next gas station, and information given in the question about the car’s fuel use.

4.Calculate the cost of raising a child for a year in a family with a specified income, based on a newspaper article that provides the percentage of a typical family’s budget that goes towards raising children.

Proficient quantitative literacy:

1.Calculate the yearly cost of a specified amount of life insurance, using a table that gives cost per month for each $1,000 of coverage.

2.Determine the number of units of flooring required to cover the floor in a room, when the area of the room is not evenly divisible by the unit in which the flooring is sold.

3.Calculate an employee’s share of health insurance costs for a year, using a table that shows how the employee’s monthly cost varies with income and family size.

Whoa, don’t crowd me now, I’m about to give you the results for the American public school system that is now trying to add a second year of algebra to it’s graduation requirements.

Race/ethnicity percent proficient        percent below basic
White 17%                                13%
Black 2% 47%
Hispanic 4% 50%
Asian 12% 19%
Native American 10% 32%

Your honor, we rest our case.  Full report at nces.ed.gov/pubs2007/2007480.pdf