As of late there has been a lot of chatter about how culturally Americans are dividing into basically two tribes, conservatives and liberals. There are smaller tribes, but even those tribes are slowly getting absorbed into the two larger tribes.

Look at the last couple of elections here in Nashville and you’ll see evidence of what I’m talking about. Whether it is the transportation plan, electing a new mayor or electing a new state senator, it seems that the same people divide into the same sides and the same battles ensue. I hear y’all starting to protest, and sure some of you remain outside the boundaries of the bigger tribes, but if you are honest you’ll admit the slide towards a tribe has already begun.

Sociologists have long noted the trend and last year economist and best-selling author Tyler Cowen released a new book called, The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream. In this book he notes how Americans are becoming more and more a part of a matching culture. “We’re moving residences less, marrying people more like ourselves and choosing our music and our mates based on algorithms that wall us off from anything that might be too new or too different. Match.com matches us in love. Spotify and Pandora match us in music. Facebook matches us to just about everything else.”

No where is this trend more evident than when it comes to education policy. It reminds me of the adventure clubs you could join when I was a kid. You signed up and in return you got a T-shirt, a window decal or bumper sticker, a list of beliefs, and the first news letter. You were always told that your adventure club was A number 1, and any others were just second-rate and not to be trusted.

That’s how it is now in education circles, except there are only two clubs, the reformers and the defenders. Each has a list of tenets that the joiner must subscribe to, as well as some that you ascribe to members of the other club. Each tenet comes with a catch slogan,

• Y’all just want to preserve the status quo.
• We believe all kids can learn.
• Charter schools promote segregation.
• Traditional schools fail kids.

You get the gist. I don’t need to list them all. The one thing these slogans all have in common is that they sound good as long as you don’t look too deep. For example, “Charter Schools promote segregation.” Sounds good if you just look at the Black and Hispanic families that chose to attend charter schools and don’t pay attention to your urban public schools. But, remember what I told you Friday?

Pearl Cohn HS has 17 white kids. Julia Green has 25 black kids in grades 3-5. Percy Priest has 12 black kids in grades 3-5. Glendale, the Spanish Immersion School, has 10 Hispanic kids in grades 3-5. Napier ES has 5 white kids. Carter-Lawrence ES has 25 white kids in grades 3-5.

Those numbers don’t exactly reek of integration. Now Charter schools don’t be getting all uppity. You’ve got plenty of misconceptions on your own side. Charter’s will talk about huge rates of teacher turnover in public schools, but if you look at Knowledge is Power Academies in Nashville. They’ve already hired 73 teachers/support staff/administrators to start 7/1/2018. That’s a lot of teachers starting so close to school and suggests some large turnover rates. The High School hired 20 more.

Sure, Valor Academy is doing some ground breaking work, but I’d argue Fall Hamilton is breaking some barriers itself.

I’m not putting any of this out there to try embarrass or shame anybody. Recent TNReady results after all show KA performing quite well. My point in all of this is that education policy is hard and you can’t reduce it to simple tribal tenets and then argue that the adoption of one set of tenets over another will solve the issues and always prove beneficial to kids.

Part of the problem is that so much of the real action takes place in that magical place called the classroom. Few of us try to access the classroom with any regularity so we are a little in the dark as to what actually happens in that nether world. We also don’t often feel comfortable talking to those who are regular visitors to the magical realm, i.e. teachers, so we miss out on additional information there as well. Since we don’t really know what goes on in the classroom, it’s easy to make suppositions. Those suppositions fuel the growth of the two tribes.

The cynic in me attributes money and ego as the fuel for the battle between the two tribes. At the top I see both tribes afflicted with the same malaise. The growth of the reform tribe began in earnest right around the time of No Child Left Behind but exploded with the adoption of Race to the Top. Tennessee alone received $500 million for their successful application. That’s a lot of cabbage around an industry that perpetually cries underfunded. It’s enough cabbage to fund a separate economy around school performance.

Between 2011 and 2015 the number of testing companies, curriculum developers, intervention specialists, educational software developers, principal trainers, teacher trainers, data specialists, grew disproportionately compared to previous years. The reformers saw gold in them dar hills and the defenders saw some one coming for their bounty, and thus war broke out. With war came the opportunity to be a savior. A bit of an over simplification but the more I think on it, the more I buy in to it.

Now, I’m not saying everybody involved in education over the past several years picked sides based on potential financial rewards or ego, just mainly the generals. Every general needs soldiers and few areas attract well-meaning and caring souls like education. The chiefs in both camps became very good at keeping their respective acolytes fired up. Continually convincing them that the other side was up to dastardly deeds at the expense of the nations children. Not too difficult a task when your soldiers have the best interests of kids as a primary motivation.

There is a lot of money out here in the world of education if you don’t waste it on kids. We all know about the high salaries of the leaders in the reform community, but how many of you realize that MNPS Director of Schools Shawn Joseph has a compensation package – salary, retirement, health plan, vacation days – that sits around half a million dollars annually. Not exactly missionary work is it? His salary is not an outlier.

In his aforementioned book, Cowan argues that this dividing into tribes is ultimately hurting us. Where once we were a restless culture, we have begun to substitute change for comfort. Being around like-minded individuals allows us to feel a higher level of comfort and as a result we are postponing change, due to our nearsightedness and extreme desire for comfort, but ultimately this will make change, when it comes, harder.

You can see evidence of this resistance to change over the events of the last month. Phil Williams at Channel 5 News has been continually for the last three weeks filing stories that point to deep corruption at MNPS.

• A principal at JFK Middle Schools engaged in egregious acts of sexual misconduct over a period of several years and covered up by human resources.
• Another principal resigns under alleged misconduct.
• An incomplete investigation done on another administrator who resigned back in November while under investigation for several accusations.
• The human resource executive director conducts an interview on HR practices that is the very definition of cringe worthy.
• The head of security retires while under investigation for allegations of misconduct.
• A coach who verbally abused a kid, yet by appearances, was protected from disciplinary actions by Dr. Joseph.

Collectively it’s a pretty damning portrait and one that I would think would inspire some calls for change. But instead it has resulted in a collective shrug. The school board raises no questions publicly. The mayor continues to publicly praise the Director of schools who feels no compulsion to answer inquiries by the media. In fact he feels safe to just avoid them at will. The human resources director feels so confident in the lack of public outcry that she just goes ahead and heads out on a three-week vacation, reportedly to Africa. Nobody feels any impetus to change.

What does dominate the news? Testing of course. Both sides have tenets that clearly address this subject. A letter gets sent and it is open season for discussion.  Everybody from the state commissioner of education, to equity groups, to individual school districts, gets to shout an opinion. Most of the opinions are of the “test is good” or the “test is bad” ilk.

Here’s one I’d like to see something someone shout about. In a test like TNReady, that is based on performance, the practice has always been rooted in a bell curve. 3 is considered your median. 1 and 5 are your outliers, under performing and over performing. 3’s and 4’s are each considered one index away from the norm. I think the expectation would be that the majority of your scores would fall into the middle categories right? Here’s approximately where they fell on this year’s TNReady,

• 493 ones
• 144 twos
• 320 threes
• 163 fours
• 574 fives

Hmmm…that’s quite the distribution isn’t it? How is that you have nearly double the number falling into the outlier categories as you do in the desired categories? Based on these results, you are either really kicking it or you are missing by a mile.

In other words, if Memphis is the destination, people are either going to Dallas or Miami, few are getting to Memphis. Lucy…you got some explaining to do. Yet, nobody feels any compulsion to actually explain how these results failed to comply with expected statistical results.

This is where I’d like to see less public out cry, but questioning behind closed doors, with Director’s of Schools attending meetings with the state and pointing these discrepancies out. I would think that these results would present a conundrum to both tribes and that they would both be equally vested in getting them right. The same as I believe both tribes would be equally vested in getting our school systems right when it comes to sexual misconduct.

I’ve said it before, and I imagine I’ll say it a 100 more times, we’ve got to go deeper in these conversations. “Charter school bad and traditional school good” or “Traditional schools just support the status quo” are comfortable slogans to chant, but they don’t begin to address the real needs our schools and our kids face. It is imperative that we avoid the trap of tribalism.

QUICK HITS

And that is a wrap. As always, you can contact me at norinrad10@yahoo.com. Make sure you check out the Dad Gone Wild Facebook page. have a great week!

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