Confectionsof Apartheid

ContinueIn Our Schools

By Jonathan Kozol From Phi Delta Kappan

M:I ANY Americans I meet now, has been precisely the re-

who live far from our verse. Schools that were alreadymajor cities and who deeply segregated 25 or 30 years

have no firsthand knowledge of ago, like most of the schools Irealities in urban public schools visit in the Bronx, are no lessseem to have a rather vague and segregated now, while thou-general impression that the great sands of other schools that hadextremes of racial isolation they been integrated either voluntar-recall as matters of grave national ily or by the force of law havesignificance some 35 or 40 years since been rapidly resegregat-ago have gradually, but steadily, ing both in northern districtsdiminished in more recent years. and in broad expanses of the

The truth, unhappily, is that South,the trend, for well over a decade "At the beginning of the 21 st

Jonathan Kozol, author of Death at an Early Age, Savage Inequalities,and Amazing Grace, has been working with children in inner-city schoois forover 40 years. This article is adapted from The Shame of the Nation: TheRestoration of Apartheid Schooling in America, published by Crown Publish-ers and available now atwww.randomhouse.com. Condensed from Ph\ DeltaKappan, 87 (December 2005), 364-75.

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century," according to GaryOrfield and his colleagues at theCivil Rights Project at HarvardUniversity, "American publicschools are now 12 years intothe process of continuousresegregation. The desegrega-tion of black students, which in-creased continuously from the1950s to the late 1980s, has nowreceded to levels not seen inthree decades....

"During the 1990s, the pro-portion of black students in ma-jority white schools has de-creased ... to a level lower thanin any year since 1968.... Almostthree-fourths of black and Latinostudents attend schools that arepredominantly minority, [andmore than two million, includ-ing more than a quarter of blackstudents in the Northeast andMidwest,] attend schools whichwe call apartheid schools [inwhich 99% to 100% of studentsare nonwhite.]"

The Civil Rights Project citesthe four most segregated statesfor black students as New York,Michigan, Illinois, and Califor-nia. In California and New York,only one black student in sevengoes to a predominantly whiteschool.

As racial isolation deepensand the inequalities of educationfinance remain unabated and takeon new and more innovativeforms, the principals of manyinner-city schools are makingchoices that few principals inschools that serve suburban chil-

dren ever need to contemplate.Unable to foresee a time when

black and Hispanic students inlarge numbers will not go to seg-regated public schools and see-ing little likelihood that schoolslike these will ever have the in-frastructure and resources ofsuccessful white suburbanschools, many have been dedi-cating vast amounts of time andeffort to create an architectureof adaptive strategies that prom-ise incremental gains within thelimits inequality allows.

CastigationNew vocabularies of stento-

rian determination, new systemsof incentive, and new modes ofcastigation, which are termed"rewards and sanctions," haveemerged. Curriculum materialsthat are alleged to be alignedwith governmentally establishedgoals and standards and particu-larly suited to what are regardedas "the special needs and learn-ing styles" of low-income urbanchildren have been introduced.

Relentless emphasis on rais-ing test scores, rigid policies ofnonpromotion and nongradua-tion, a new empiricism and theimposition of unusually detailedlists of named and numbered"outcomes" for each isolated par-cel of instruction, an oftentimesfctnatical insistence upon unifor-mity in teachers' meinagement oftime, an openly conceded emula-tion of the rigorous approachesof the military, and a frequent

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use of terminology that comesout of the world of industry andcommerce—these are just a fewof the familiar aspects of thesenew adaptive strategies.

Although generically de-scribed as "school reform," mostof these practices and policiesare targeted primarily at poorchildren of color. And althoughmost educators speak of theseagendas in broad language thatsounds applicable to all, it isunderstood that they are valuedchiefly as responses to per-ceived catastrophe in deeplysegregated and unequal schools.

"If you do what I tell you to do,how I tell you to do it, when I tellyou to do it, you'll get it right,"says a South Bronx principal ob-served by a reporter from theNew York Times in laying out amemorizing rule for math to anassembly of her students. "If youdon't, you'll get it wrong."

Skinner's IdeasThis is the voice, this is the

tone, this is the rhythm and di-dactic certitude one hears to-day in inner-city schools thathave embraced a pedagogy ofdirect command and absolutecontrol. "Taking their inspirationfrom the ideas of B.F. Skinner,"says the Times, proponents ofscripted rote-and-drill curriculaarticulate their aim as the estab-lishment of "faultless communi-cation" between "the teacher,who is the stimulus," and "the,students, who respond."

The introduction of Skinne-rian approaches, which are com-monly employed in penal insti-tutions and drug-rehabilitationprograms, as a way of alteringthe attitudes and learning stylesof black and Hispanic children isprovocative, and it has stirredsome outcries from respectedscholars. To actually go into aschool in which you know someof the children very, very welland see the way these ap-proaches can affect their dailylives and thinking processes iseven more provocative.

On a chilly November day fouryears ago in the South Bronx, Ientered P.S. 65, the elementaryschool in which I met Pineapplefor the first time when she was inkindergarten. Her younger sis-ter Briana was now a studenthere, as were some 25 or 30 otherchildren I had known for severalyears. But I hadn't visited thebuilding since Pineapple gradu-ated, and there had been majorchanges since that year.

Silent lunches had been insti-tuted in the cafeteria, and, ondays when children misbehaved,silent recess had been intro-duced as well. On those days,the students were obliged to stayindoors and sit in rows and main-tain silence on the floor of a smallroom that had been designated"the gymnasium."

The school still had a highturnover of its teachers (Briana'sclassroom was in chaos the day Iwas there because her teacher

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had just walked out of the build-ing without warning and it wouldbe several weeks before anotherteacher could be found), but thecorridors were quiet, and I sawno children outside of their class-rooms.

The words "Success for All,"which Wcis the brand name of ascripted program used within theschool, were prominently postedat the top of the main stairwayand, as I would later find, in al-most every room. Also displayedthroughout the building were anumber of administrative memosthat were worded with unusualdirective absoluteness.

"Authentic Writing," said adocument called "Principles ofLearning" that was posted in thecorridor close to the office ofthe principal, "is driven by cur-riculum and instruction." I didn'tknow what this statement meantand later came back to examineit again before I left the school.

I entered the fourth grade ofMr. Endicott, a man in hismid-thirties who had cirrived herewithout training as a teacher, oneof about 15 teachers in the build-ing who were sent into this schoolafter a single summer ofshort-order preparation . As Ifound a place to sit in a far cornerof the room, the teacher and hisyoung assistant, who was in herfirst year as a teacher—Mr.Endicott was in his second—werebeginning a math lesson aboutbuilding airport runways.

"When we count the edges

around the runway," said aworksheet that was on thechildren's desks, "we find theperimeter. When we count thenumber of squares in a runway,we find the area.... Today we aregoing to conduct an inventory ofall the different perimeters."

Portfolio ProtocolsOn the wall behind the

teacher, written in large letters:"Portfolio Protocols: 1. You areresponsible for the selection of[your] workthat enters your port-folio. 2. As your skills becomemore sophisticated this year, youwill want to revise, amend,supplement, and possibly replaceitems In your portfolio to reflectyour intellectual growth." To theleft side of the room: "Perfor-mance Standards MathematicsCurriculum: M-5 Problem Solv-ing and Reasoning. M-6 Math-ematical Skills and Tools...."

My attention was distractedby some whispering among thechildren sitting to the right ofme. The teacher's response tothis distraction was immediate:His arm shot out and up in adiagonal in front of him, his handstraight up, his fingers flat. Theyoung co-teacher did this as well.When they saw their teachersdo this, all the children in theclassroom did it too.

"Zero noise," the teacher said,but this instruction proved tobe unneeded. The strange sa-lute the class and teachers gaveeach other, which turned out to

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be one of a number of such silentsignals teachers in the schoolwere trained to use and childrento obey, had done the job ofsilencing the class.

"Active listening!" said Mr.Endicott. "Heads up! Tractorbeams!"—the latter meaning "Ev-ery eye on me."

Wasted TimeOn the front wall of the class-

room in handwritten words thatmust have taken Mr. Endicottlong hours to transcribe therewas a list of terms that could beused to praise or criticize astudent's work in mathematics.At Level Four, the highest of fourlevels of success, a child's"problem-solving strategies"could be described, accordingto this list, as "systematic, com-plete, efficient, and possibly el-egant," while the student's abil-ity to draw conclusions from thework she had completed couldbe termed "insightful .... com-prehensive."

At Level Two, the child's abil-ity to draw conclusions was to bedescribed as "logically un-sound"—at Level One, "notpresent." Approximately 50 sepa-rate categories of proficiency, orlack of such, were detailed in thiswall-sized tabulation.

An assistant to the principalremained with me throughoutthe class and then accompaniedme wherever else I went withinthe school. Having an officialshadow me so closely Is a bit

unusual in visits that I make topublic schools.

Principals who feel relaxedand confident about their teach-ers typically invite me to sit inon classes without constant su-pervision and to visit classes thathave not been pre-selected. Alsounusual was that Mr. Endicott,whom 1 had met before, did notsay hello to me until nearly thefinal moments of the class anddidn't actually acknowledge thatI was there except by stoppingby my desk and handing me theworksheet on perimeters.

A well-educated man, he laterspoke to me about the form ofclassroom management he wasusing as an adaptation from amodel of industrial efficiency."It's a kind of 'Taylorism' in theclassroom," he explained, refer-ring to a set of theories aboutmanagement of factory employ-ees that was introduced byFrederick Taylor in the early1900s. "Primitive utilitarianism"is another term he used whenwe met some months later todiscuss these management tech-niques with other teachers fromthe school.

His reservations were, how-ever, not apparent in the class-room. Within the terms of whathe had been asked to do, he had,indeed, become a master of con-trol. It is one of the few class-rooms I had visited up to thattime in which almost nothingeven hinting at spontaneousemotion in the children or the

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teacher surfaced in the time Iwas there.

I had visited classes that re-sembled this in Cuba more than20 years before; but in the Cubanschools the students were al-lowed to question me auid did sowith much charm and curiosity,and teachers broke the pace oflesson plcuis from time to time tocomment on a child's questionor to interject a casual remarkthat might have been provokedby something funny that eruptedfrom a boy or girl who was react-ing to my presence in the class.What I saw in Cuban schools wascertainly indoctrinational in itsintent, but it could not rival Mr.Endicott's approach in its totali-tarian effectiveness.

Accountablo Talk?The teacher gave the "zero

noise" salute again when some-one whispered to another childat his table. "In two minutes youwill have a chance to talk andshare this with your partner."Communication between chil-dren in the class was not pi-ohib-ited but was afforded time slotsand was formalized in an expres-

- sion that I found included in amemo that was posted near thedoor: "An opportunity ... to en-gage in Accountable Talk."

Even the teacher's words ofpraise were framed in terms con-sistent with the lists posted onthe wall. "That's a Level Foursuggestion," said the teacherwhen a child made an observa-

tion other teachers might havepraised as simply "pretty good"or "interesting" or "mature."

There was, it seemed, a for-mal name for every cognitiveevent within this school: "Au-thentic Writing," "Active Listen-ing," "Accountable Talk." Theardor to assign all items of in-struction or behavior a specificname was starting to unsettleme.

It's understandable thatteachers need to do this in theirlesson plans and that terms likethese are often used in teachereducation and in programs ofprofessional development. Butin this class, in part because ofall the postings of these itemson the walls, it seemed the chil-dren too were being asked toview their own experience, eventhe act of sharing an idea, asnamable as well.

The adjectives had another. odd effect, a kind of hyping-up ofevery item of endeavor. "Authen-tic Writing" was, it seemed, amore importcmt act than whatthe children in a writing class inany ordinary school might try todo. "Accountable Talk" wassomething more self-consciousand significant than merely use-ful conversation.

These naming exercises andthe imposition of an all-inclu-sive system of control on everyform of intellectual activity con-sumed a vast amount of teach-ing time but seemed to be intrin-sic to the ethos here: a way of

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ordering cognition beyond anyeffort of this sort I'd seen in theUnited States before.

The teacher, moreover, didnot merely name and governevery intellectual event withpracticed specificity; he also is-sued his directions slowly, pac-ing words with a meticulous de-livery that brought to my mindthe way the staff attendantsspoke to the Alzheimer's pa-tients at my father's nursinghome.

Bizarro RitualsAs I sat there, somewhat mes-

merized by Mr. Endicott's articu-lation of his phrasing and hisstrict reliance on official words,the naming rituals began to strikeme as increasingly bizarre. Eventhe act of telling a brief story, forexample, had been given a newname.

To write a story, according toa "standards" listing posted onthe wall ("English Language ArtsNumber E-2," subtopic "D"), wasto "produce a narrative proce-dure." The object-noun, al-though it did not fit the verb,appeared to lend a semi-scien-tific aura to the utterly pedes-trian—"narrative procedure,"unlike "story," suggesting some-thing empirical and technical.

Meanwhile, the verb ("pro-duce") seemed to escort the actof writing out of any realm of theaesthetic into an industrial arena."Production" is inherently a dif-ferent matter than tale-telling.

I remember, too, another as-pect of my visit that distin-guished this class from almostany other I'd visited up to thistime. Except for one brief giggleof a child sitting close to me,which was effectively sup-pressed by Mr. Endicott, noth-ing even faintly frivolous tookplace while I was there. No onelaughed. No child made a funnyface to spmebody beside her.Neither Mr. Endicott nor his as-sistant laughed, as I recall.

This is certainly unusualwithin a class of 8-year-olds. Inmost classrooms, even those inwhich a high degree of disci-pline is maintained, there arealmost always certain momentswhen the natural hilarity of chil-dren temporarily erupts to clearthe air of "purpose" and relievethe monotone of the instructor.Even the teachers, strict as theymay try to be, cannot usuallyresist a smile or a bit of plaj^ulhumor in return.

Nothing like that happenedin the time I was in this class.When I'm taking notes during avisit to a school and children ina class divert themselves withtiny episodes of silliness, or briefepiphanies of tenderness to oneanother, or a whispered obser-vation about something they findamusing—like a goofy face madeby another child in the class—Iput a little round face with asmile on the margin of mynotepad so that I won't miss itlater on. In all the 15 pages that

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I wrote during my visit in thisclassroom in the Bronx, there isnot a single small round smilingface.

Later, looking at my notes, Ialso noticed that I couldn't finda single statement made by anychild that wasn't prompted bythe teacher's questions, otherthan one child's timid questionabout which "objective" shouldbe written on the first line of apage the class had been asked towrite. I found some notes on chil-dren moving from their tables totheir "centers" and on varioushand gestures they would makeas a response to the hand ges-tures of their teachers.

No PorsonalityBut I found no references to

any child's traits of personalityor even physical appearance. Dif-ferences between the childrensomehow ceased to matter muchduring the time I observed theclass. The uniform activities andteacher's words controlled myown experience perhaps asmuch as they controlled andmuted the expressiveness ofchildren.

Before I left the school, I stud-ied again the definition of "Au-thentic Writing" posted in thecorridor. Whatever it was, ac-cording to the poster, it was"driven by curriculum." That wasit, and nothing more. Its mean-ing or its value was establishedonly by cross-reference to an-other school-bound term to

which it had been attached by"drive" in passive form. Authen-ticity was what somebody out-side this building, more authori-tative than the children or theirteachers, said it should be.

Teachers working in a schoollike this have little chance todraw on their own inventivenessor normal conversational abili-ties. In the reading curriculum inuse in the school, for instance,teachers told me they had beenforewarned to steer away fromverbal deviations or impromptubits of conversation, since eachpassage of instruction neededto be timed (Mr. Endicott had awind-up timer in his room) andany digression from the printedplans could cause them prob-lems if a school official or cur-riculum director happened to bein the building at the time.

Supervisors from the organi-zation that designed and mar-keted the scripted reading pro-gram also came into the class-room to police the way it wasbeing used—"police" being theword the teachers used in speak-ing of these periodic visitations.

The pressure this imposesupon teachers to stick closely tothe script leaves many with un-comfortable feelings of theatri-cality. Teachers tell me they feelthey're reading "lines" from acommercial playbook, written byan unnamed author with no lit-erary talent other than a stolidgift for keeping to a continuity oftheme. •

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Sometimes it seems to do thejob of moving children throughtheir lessons almost automati-cally, and when it does, theteacher may be praised for whatI've heard described as "mana-gerial proficiency." But it's acurious proficiency, contrivedand glazed, as even school offi-cials who enforce these policieswill frequently concede.

Emphasis, reiteration, andassertiveness in pushing what isonly half-believed, or not be-lieved at all, too often take theplace of sending out authenticsignals of conviction that a childlistens for. Thus "authenticity,"no matter how much it's pro-moted to the children by theposters in the halls, is prettymuch denied to those who teach.

All teaching is theatrical tosome degree. Almost all teach-ers have the obligation at somepoint or other to present materi-als or lessons that don't terriblyexcite them, and they learn tosimulate enthusiasm they don'talways feel. However, in a rela-tively normal teaching situation,these are improvised theatrics,and the teachers are allowed tocome up with their own inven-tive ways of capturing the inter-est of their students.

And there are also many por-tions of the day in which theteacher teaches something thatshe actually selects and trulycares about, in which case thereneed be no theatricality at all.The difference in too many

schools like P.S. 65 is that nearlythe entire school day comes tobe a matter of unnatural theat-rics that cannot be improvisedto any real degree without therisk of teachers being criticizedby their superiors.

Not Spied OutWhen I later met and talked at

length with Mr. Endicott andother teachers at his school, theyspoke about this feeling of en-forced theatricality, but theyreminded me of the high state ofvigilance they must maintain inorder not to be spied out in de-viation from the school-widenorms. Anxiety-ridden days werecommon among teachers at theschool, they said, and children,not surprisingly, picked up someof the same anxiety as well. "Theschool, admittedly, is not a mel-low place," said Mr. Endicott.

Anxiety, for the children, wasintensified, according to afifth-grade teacher, by theever-present danger of humilia-tion when their reading levels ortheir scores on state examina-tions were announced. "Theremust be penalties for failure,"the architects and advocates ofprograms such as these increas-ingly demand, and penalties forchildren in this instance weredispensed not only individuallyand privately but also in the viewof others, for example in a fullassembly of the school.

"Level Fours, please raiseyour hands," the principal re-

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quested at one such assembly.In front of nearly all their school-mates, those very few who weredescribed as "Level Fours" liftedtheir arms and were accordeddutiful applause. "Level Threes,please raise your hands," theprincipal went on, and these stu-dents, too, were rewarded withapplause. "Level Twos," sheasked, and they were given someapplause as well.

What lesser applause, onehad to wonder, would be givenLevel Ones, the children readingat rock bottom? The Level Ones,as it turned out, got no applauseat all. "The principal didn't askthe Level Ones to raise theirhands," according to the teacherwho described this series ofevents to me. "It was like theLevel Ones weren't even there."

Shaming KidsMost grown-ups remember

moments in their, schoolingwhen a principal might draw at-tention to the children in a classwho had received good gradesand, for example, at a schoolassembly or a meeting of thePTA, might name the children ineach grade who made the honorroll because they got straightA's, or A's and B's, which wasthe cut-off point for the honorroll when I was a student.

Few principals, however,would have shamed the childrengetting only C's and D's—nor, inmy memory at least, did princi-pals address us by our letter

grades or numbers, as if thesedefined not only how well we didbut also who we were. You "got"a B. You "got" a D. But you didnot become that B or D. Callingchildren "Level Fours" or "LevelOnes" is rather new, and chil-dren so labeled soon begin touse these labels to refer to oneanother or themselves.

"Reginald is a Level One,"Pineapple's sister Briana said, alittle scornfully, I thought, whenshe was telling me about the chil-dren in her room that year. "Me-lissa and Shaneek are LevelThrees."

"How are you doing thistime?" I inquired. She wrinkledher nose and looked at me un-happily. "I'm just a Level Two."

Since that day at P.S. 65, Ihave visited nine other schoolsin six different cities where thesame Skinnerian curriculum isused. The signs on the walls, thesilent signals, the curious salute,the same insistent naming of allcognitive particulars, these be-came familiar as I went from oneschool to the next.

"Meaningful Sentences" be-gan one of the listings ofproficiencies expected of thechildren in the fourth grade ofan elementary school in Hart-ford, Connecticut (90% black,10% Hispanic) that I visited ashort time later. "NoteworthyQuestions," "Active Listening,"jmd other similar designationshad been posted elsewhere inthe room. •

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Here, too, the teacher gavethe kids her outstretched arm,with hand held up, to reestab-lish order when they grew a littlenoisy, but I noticed that she triedto soften the effect of this byopening her fingers and bendingher elbow slightly so it did notlook quite as forbidding as thegesture Mr. Endicott had used.

Over her desk, I read a "Mis-sion Statement," establishing theschool's priorities and values.Among its missions, accordingto the printed statement, alsoposted in some other classroomsof the school, was "to developproductive citizens" with theskills needed "for successful glo-bal competition," a message re-inforced by other posters in theroom. Over the heads of a groupof children at their desks was asign anointing them "Best Work-ers of 2002."

Another signal now was givenby the teacher, this one not forsilence but to achieve someother form of class behavior,which I could not quite identify.The students gave exactly thesame signal in response. Sud-denly, with a seeming surge ofrestlessness and irritation—^withherself, it appeared, and withher own effective use of all thetricks she had learned—sheturned to me and, in a burst offurtive anger, she said, "I can dothis with my dog."

I had had a thought like thatat P.S. 65 while watching Mr.Endicott. However, temporarily

at least, he seemed to take pridein how well he could do it, whilethis teacher seemed to feel al-most alarmed. She also spokewith sharp discernment of therace-specific emphasis of thecurriculum. "If we were not asegregated school," she said, "ifthere were middle-class whitechildren here, the parents wouldrebel at this curriculum, and theywould stop it cold—like that!"

Named and NumberedThere was no single wall-sized

chart of stipulated ways to praiseor criticize a child in this Hart-ford classroom, nothing like thelist that Mr. Endicott had copiedon his wall, although there weremany smaller lists and charts ofsubdivided competencies word-ed in official phrases and identi-fied by numbers on the walls ofthis and other classrooms in thebuilding.

Teachers forced to spend somjmy hours compiling these listsand charts and matching mini-skills with numbers for each les-son they teach have told me theysometimes feel reduced, as oneMassachusetts teacher wordedit, to "servile tabulation." Teach-ers also note that, as a conse-quence of the continuous cross-referencing between the learn-ings of the children and thestate-mandated skills and num-bers posted on the walls, thereis little sense that anything achild learns has inherent valueof its own.

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Its value is established only ifit is connected to a grievouslyextended skein of namable "ob-jectives" that have been deter-mined outside of the school andare aligned with items that willshow up later on a standardizedexam.

The teacher cannot simplysay, "I read an early lyrical poemof William Butler Yeats with mythird-graders and discoveredthat they loved it." Instead, shemust position what she didwithin a recognized compart-ment: "I used a poem of WilliamButler Yeats to deliver Elemen-tary Standard 37-A," or some-thing of that' sort, which she mustthen identify by naming the in-tended outcome for the readingof the poem, which might besomething as specific as "therecognition of analogies" or, de-pending on grade level, "under-standing meter in an unrhymedpoem."

Kiiiing DiscoveryThe listing of objectives in a

lesson plan is, of course, a nor-mal practice among teachers inmost public schools. If they didnot do this, utter randomnessand impulse would prevail. Itisn't the practice in itself, it's theremorselessness with which itis applied to almost every littlepossibility for natural discov-

. ery—and pleasure in discov-ery—that many teachers in theseschools make clear they dislike.By giving every particle of learn-

ing an official name, we strip it ofuniqueness.

By forcing it to fit into theright compartment of signifi-cance or meaning, we control itspower to establish its own mean-ings or to stir the children topursue a small exhilaration indirections that may lead them toa place the experts haven't yethad time to name. Fascinationand delight, no matter what lipservice we may pay to them,become irrelevant distractions.Finding "where it goes" cmd whatit "demonstrates" and how it canbe "utilized" become theteacher's desolate obsessions.

Teachers who come into el-ementary education with someliterary background tell me thatthey sometimes feel they are en-gaging in a complicated kind oftreachery when they are forcedrepeatedly to excavate a pieceof poetry or any other literarywork of charm or value to ex-tract examples of official skillsthat have some testable utility.Most administrators, even inthese highly regimented schools,pay tribute on occasion to theworth of art and aesthetics fortheir own sake.

But this notion does not holdup well within a setting in whicheven Eeyore's sorrowful pro-nouncements or the soft per-plexities of Pooh have to betreated as a kind of "quarry" fromwhich named and numberedcompetencies have to be hackedout and held up to the bright

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light of curricular illumination.There is an awful gravitation tothe commonplace in this.

Teachers also tell me thatthese numbering and namingrituals are forcing them to sacri-fice a huge proportion of theirtime to what are basically pro-motional, not educational, ac-tivities. Hours that might other-wise have been devoted to in-struction are consumed in rest-less efforts to position littlechunks of subdivided knowledgein acceptable containers.

And the ritual often contin-ues after children are dismissedand teachers are obliged to stayat school until late afternooncompiling inventories of the out-comes they have named and,once a year at least, participat-ing in meetings at which everyseparate inventory must be rec-onciled and unified into a singlestatement of collective purpose.

Some of these activities takeplace in suburban schools aswell, but their relentlessness isgreatly magnified in inner-cityschools that are, for instance,under state review because ofdisappointing scores. In suchschools, enormous documentsknown as "Improvement Plans,"which stipulate specific gains aschool must make in a specificperiod of years (and which bringto mind those famous five-yearplans for steel production in theSoviet era), and sometimes evenlonger documents that specify aschool's "strategic answers" to

these plans, create a massivepaper-clutter that takes on a kindof parallel reality with only anindistinct connection to the ac-tual experience of teaching.

The amount of time that thisconsumes is all the more frus-trating when one realizes thatmost of this is being done underthe business-driven banner of"efficient management of time."Nothing could be less efficientthan this misappropriation of ateacher's energy and hours.

Do a Number on Kids"There's something crystal

clear about a number," says TracyLocklin, a top advisor to the U.S.Senate committee with jurisdic-tion over public education, cmdthis point of view is reinforced instatements from the Office of theU.S. Secretary of Education andfrom the White House.

"I want to change the face ofreading instruction across theUnited States from an art to ascience," said a top assistant toRod Paige, the former educationsecretary, in the winter of 2002.

But the longing to turn artinto science doesn't stop withreading methodologies alone. Inmany schools, it now extends toalmost every aspect of the op-eration of the school and of thelives that children lead within it.In some schools, even such ordi-nary acts as filing to lunch or .recess in the hallways or thestairwells is subjected to thesame determined kind of em-

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phasis upon empirical precision."Rubrics for Filing" is the

printed heading of a lengthy listof numbered categories bywhich teachers are supposed tograde their students on the waythey march along the corridorsin another urban district 1 havevisited. Someone, in this in-stance, did a lot of work to fit thefiling proficiencies of childreninto no more and no less than 32specific slots.

"Line leader confidently leadsclass.... Line is straight.... Spac-ing is tight.... The class is step-ping together.... Everyone showspride, their shoulders high, noslumping," according to the strictcriteria for filing at Level Four.

"Line is straight, but one ortwo people are not quite in line,"according to the box for LevelThree. "Line leader leads class,"but not "with confidence" thistime, and "almost everyoneshows pride....

"Several are slumping.... Littlepride is showing," says the boxfor Level Two. "Spacing is un-

. even.... Some are talking andwhisperiiig."

"Line leader is paying no at-tention," says the box for LevelOne. "Heads are turning everyway.... Hands are touching.... Theline is not straight.... There is nopride."

The teacher who handed methis document believed at firstthat it was written as a joke bysomeone who had simply grownfed up with all the numbers and

accounting rituals that occupymuch of the day in manyover-regulated schools. It turnedout that it was no joke but hadbeen printed in a handbook ofinstructions for the teachers inthe city where she taught.

In some districts, even themost pleasant and old-fashionedclass activities of elementaryschools have now been over-taken by these ordering require-ments. A student teacher at anurban school in California, forexample, wanted to bring apumpkin to her class on Hallow-een but knew it had noascertainable connection to theCalifornia standards.

Only Exam StuffShe therefore had developed

what she called the 'MultimodalPumpkin Unit" to teach science(seeds), arithmetic (the size andshape of pumpkins, I believe—this detail wasn't clear), and cer-tain items she adapted out oflanguage arts, in order to posi-tion "pumpkins" in a frame ofstate proficiencies. Even with hermultimodal pumpkin, as her fac-ulty advisor told me, she wasstill afraid she would be criti-cized because she knew thepumpkin would not really helpher children to achieve expectedgoals on state exams.

Why, I asked a group of edu-cators at a seminar in Sacra-mento, was a teacher beingplaced in a position where she'dneed to do preposterous cur-

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ricular gymnastics to enjoy a bitof seasonal amusement with herclass on Halloween? How muchinjury to state-determined "pur-pose" would it do to let a groupof children have a pumpkin partyonce a year for no other reasonthan because it's something funthat other children get to do onautumn days in public schoolsacross most of America?

"Forcing an absurdity onteachers does teach something,"said an African American pro-fessor, "it teaches acquiescence.It breaks down the will to thumbyour nose at pointless proto-cols—to call absurdity 'absurd.'"Writing out the standards withthe proper numbers on the chalk-board, even though these num-bers have no possible meaningto the children, has a similareffect, he said.

Spitting it BacitAnd doing this is "terribly im-

portant" to the principals inmany of these schools. "Youhave to post the standards, andthe way you know your studentsknow the standards is by askingthem to state the standards. Andthey do it—and you want to bequite certain that they do it ifyou want to keep on working atthat school."

Then, on top of all the rest,there are the bulletin boards onemust put up not only in the class-room but throughout the schoolto be sure that state officialswho drop by from time to time

to supervise instruction will seeall their goals and standardsproperly displayed above what-ever bits and pieces of a child'swriting may be viewed as excel-lent enough to show to visitors.

These are nothing like the lov-ingly assembled postings of thework of children that mostgrownups who attended schoolin decades past are likely to re-call. They differ in at least twoways. First, the principals inmany of these schools refuse tolet the less-than-perfect work ofchildren who are struggling stillto live up to the standards bedisplayed at all.

If such less-than-perfect workshould be selected for some rea-son, teachers are pressured tocorrect mistakes. If the teachersclean up the mistakes, accord-ing to a teacher who insisted onanonymity in speaking to theNew York Times, when officialswalk by "with a clipboard" look-ing for the requisite "five ele-ments of a good bulletin board,"as the teacher puts it, "at leastthey won't take it down becauseof an eraser mark."

"The prevailing wisdom,"says the Times, is that theseinner-city schools with "long his-tories of failure and constantturnover of teachers" cannot af-ford to tolerate "misspellings orthe other errors that in wealthier,more successful schools" mightbe perceived as "normal andeven endearing."

This is the same message

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I received from teachers atPineapple's former school, P.S. 65,in which "display cind pretense,"as one teacher put it, took priorityover the substance of the workitself and where, she said, "thecover of the book" is more impor-tant than whatever is inside:

The teacher said her princi-pal had told her that these corri-dor displays were worth the timethey consumed because the chil-dren "would take pride" in see-ing their work exhibited for visi-tors. But the teacher said shedisagreed: "I don't think the kidstake pride in these displays," shesaid, "when they can see someof their words have been erased"and "rewritten in a teacher'shand."

I asked her, "Does that reallyhappen?" "Yes," she said, "itdoes." She told me that she, likethe teacher that the Times re-porter had interviewed, hadbeen assured that there werefive—"exactly five"—criteria bywhich a bulletin board would bejudged. When she refused todoctor writings by her students,she wcis warned that there wouldbe "a letter" in her file, a warningthat another teacher at theschool told me that he was given

• too. "I'm so torn up," she said."I'm thinking about law school."

Thereisasecond way in whichthese wall displays differ fromthe ones we still routinely find inmost suburban schools, as wellcis in many urban schools thatserve the children of the middle

class. Almost any piece of writ-ing by a child that is chosen to beposted on a classroom wall or ina school hallway tends to be lostbeneath a large heraldic state-ment of the "stjuidard" or "objec-tive" it is meant to illustrate.

Overshadowing Kids1 once stood for a long time in

a third-grade classroom in theBronx examining a mobile thatwas hanging from a string aboveachild's desk. Astate proficiencywas named on the mobile. It hadsomething to do with Englishlanguage arts, as I recall, andhad a number listed also. Almostimperceptible on the same pieceof cut-out paper were about 12words In child's writing that de-scribed a leaf. There was a draw-ing of the leaf as well.

The leaf and writing couldhave been displayed without thenumber and the designation thatovershadowed them. But the ob-ligation of the teacher to containspecifics in generics and to posi-tion even tiny particles ofchildren's artfulness within al-legedly "productive" patternsgoverns almost everything. Nolittle leaf, it seems, will go with-out its number.

Children pick up these num-bering and naming rituals, as didPineapple's sister, for example,speaking of the other children inher class as "Level Ones" or"Level Threes." The over-inflatedformal designations for theirclass activities seep into the

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children's vocabularies too. Of-ficial words supplant the use ofnatural or even logical expres-sions when the children try totell you what they're doing at agiven moment of the day—orwhy they're even doing it at all.

"Meaningful"?The words "Meaningful Sen-

tences," for instance, have beenposted on the walls in many ofthese schools. Wanting to knowhow children understand the im-plications of that big word(meaningful), I once asked agroup of fourth-graders to tellme what it means.

"It means you have to box theword you got in SFA [Success forAll] and underline it in your sen-tence," said one child. "You haveto put a starred word in the sen-tence," said another.

"I understand that part," I toldthe children, but I said that 1 wcisstill not clear on what this bigword actually means. The chil-dren I was talking to seemedflummoxed by the question, andthey looked at me, indeed, as if itwasn't a fair question. Then, in-stead of givingmecin cins wer, theyrepeated what they'd said about"starred words" and "boxing."

I asked about another term,"Word Mastery," a more familiarclassroom term that also hadbeen posted on the wall. "Ifyou're told to memorize some-thing and you memorize it right,"a child who had been identifiedto me as one of the best students

in the class replied, "you get100—and that's Mastery."

When I said I still did not quiteget the point of what this worditself was supposed to mean, aboy named Timothy explained itin this way: "Mastery means thenumber of words that you canmaster in five days," which was,I learned, the span of days thatwas assigned to each subunit ofthe scripted plan.

"But what does 'master'mean?" I asked Timothy. Helooked at me as if I were wayoutside of the loop of what mosteducated people are supposedto know. "It means you get 100,"he replied.

The circularity of Timothy'sresponse, I later thought, madeperfect sense within the contextof a very tightly closed contain-ment of ideas and referencepoints. The children gave me an-swers in the terms that they hadlearned in the curriculum.

Stating meanings for thesewords in terms that would makesense outside of the curriculum—or, in the case of "meaningful,"in any terms they understood atall—was not expected of them. Iwrote in my notes, "These chil-dren seemed 'locked-in.' What-ever the rationale for all of this,it opens up no doors to under-standing."

Although the principals andteachers in these schools areconstantly reminded to hold outhigh expectations for low-in-come children, I thought the ex-

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pectations here were very low. Ithought the intellects of childrenwere debased when they wereasked to parrot language thatthey did not understand andweren't invited to explore andfigure out.

The argument is sometimesmade that scripted lessons andthe other elements of order andcontrol that we have looked athere are essential strategies forschools in which the teachersfrequently are inexperiencedand where there is high turn-over of faculty members.

Worthless SamenessIf our urban districts cannot

give .these schools the continu-ity of staffing by experienced in-structors that is found in schoolsthat serve more middle-classcommunities, according to thisreasoning, they can at least pro-vide the artificial continuity af-forded by a set of scripted les-sons that leave little to thecompetence of teachers and canbe delivered by a person whohas never studied education andhas no familiarity with the de-velopmental needs of children.

The problem with this argu-ment, however, is that many ofthe teachers who have been re-cruited to these schools, whilethose who are most insecuremay be relieved at first to beprovided with what are de-scribed as "teacher-proof" ma-terials, ultimately reject themintellectually, as did many of the

teachers at Pineapple's school.Or, if they accept them as a

necessary recourse, as did Mr.Endicott, they do so with thedeepest reservations and with

. torn allegiances, as Mr. Endicottmade clear. "My main feeling,98% of my reaction to this meth-odology," he told me flatly, "isthat it's horrific for the teachersand boring for the children..., anintellectual straitjacket."

"I love my job because 1 lovemy students," said one of theyounger teachers at the school,"but I also hate my job because Iknow I'm buying into somethingthat I don't believe in."

Few of these new instructors,as a consequence, remain inthese schools very long. All ofthe beginning teachers 1 met atP.S. 65 in the time Mr. Endicottwas there—two of whom weregraduates of Harvard, anotherof Cornell—have since departedfrom the school.

So a curriculum that was im-posed, in part, to compensatefor staffing needs of schools thathad a hard time recruiting teach-ers ends up by driving out pre-cisely those well-educated menand women that school systemshave worked so hard to attractinto these neighborhoods.

In a letter in which he spokeabout the program in effect atP.S. 65, Mr. Endicott told me hetended to be sympathetic to theschool administrators, moresympathetic at least than theother teachers I had talked with

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seemed to be. He said he be-lieved his principal had littlechoice about the implementa-tion of this program, which hadbeen mandated for all elemen-tary schools in New York Citythat had had rock-bottom aca-demic records-over a long pe-riod of time.

"This puts me into a di-lemma," he went on, "because Ilove the kids at P.S. 65." Andeven while, he said, "I know thatmy teaching SFA is a charade...,if I don't do it, I won't be permit-ted to teach these children."

The Poor Get SFAMr. Endicott, like all but two

of the new recruits at P.S. 65,was a white person, as were theprincipal and most of the admin-istrators at the school. Most ofthese neophyte instructors had,as a result, had little or no priorcontact with the children of aninner-city neighborhood.

But, like the others whom Imet and despite the distancingbetween the children and theirteachers that resulted from thescripted method of instruction,he had developed close attach-ments to his students and didnot want to abandon them.

At the same time, theclass-and-race-specific imple-mentation of this program obvi-ously troubled him. "There's anexpression now," he said. "Therich get richer, and the poor getSFA.'" He said he was "still tryingto figure out my professional

ethics" on the problem thisposed for him.

White children made up "onlyabout 1 %" of students in the NewYork City schools in which suchscripted indoctrinational instruc-tion was imposed, according tothe New York Times: "The pre-packaged lessons" were intended"to ensure that cdl teachers—evennovices or the most inept—"would be able to teach reading.

As pragmatic and hard-headed as such arguments mayseem, these are desperation strat-egies that reason out of the ac-ceptance of inequity. If we didnot have a segregated system inwhich the more experienced in-structors teach the children ofthe privileged and the least expe-rienced are sent to teach the chil-dren of minorities, these prac-tices would not be needed andcould not be so convincingly de-fended.

These are confections ofapartheid, and, no matter bywhat arguments of urgency orpracticality they have been jus-tified, they cannot fail to furtherdeepen the divisions of society.

"It would be of great concernto me and most of the people Iknow," says Lucy Calkins, a lit-eracy specialist at Teachers Col-lege in New York, "if we had aneducational apartheid systemwith one method of instructionfor poor kids and another formiddle-class kids." But, to a verytroubling degree in many urbanareas today, we already do. €01

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