Miss Washington, but love Chicago,

deplore the Donald and, oh, three cheers for Karen Lewis and the Chicago Teachers Union

Our recent move from Washington, DC to Chicago is still in its transitional phase. We left very good friends behind in DC and we'll miss them all. Our challenge in Chicago will include developing a network of close friends as diverse and sustaining as the group of friends we left behind.

But I am optimistic about the possibilities. Our friends in Washington were often quite accomplished people, and some of them were native to the DC area, but in Chicago even the transplants from elsewhere seem to grow very deep roots here. I don't know what to make of that difference just yet, but the potential for movement-building seems more real here than it is in Washington. Yes, Chicago is a very segregated city, but the demographic diversity is astounding. There simply is no racial majority. If you want to make change here, coalition is the only way to go.

It is reliably colder in Chicago than in Washington and that does take some getting used to, but the solution is layers, lots of them--and not hunkering down. One has to live outdoors with vigor here or settle for hiding from the weather.

Another noteworthy difference is how big the sky seems in Chicago and how far away the horizon appears to be. That's a good thing. A great thing, really. At the lakefront one's eyes simply bask in the glory of unobstructed views. Yes, Chicago is flat and that's not so good, but the payback in being able to see the skyline, to watch the lake rage in the cold wind, to scan open vistas, like the green midway running through the University of Chicago, is a nice tradeoff. The eyes can't help exulting.

I have to say that back in DC, the Washington Post used to piss me off more often than not. The frequent failures to call out official spokespeople for their meaningless drivel, to call the powerful out for their nonsense, could often drive me to rants that Marrianne must have found tiresome. But the Chicago Tribune seems at least an order of magnitude more hapless than the Post. The Trib has some stalwart opinion writers, like Eric Zorn, Rex Hupke, Mary Shmich and Clarence Page, who still favor evidence-based journalism, but they are book-ended by right-wingers who make Jennifer Rubin and George Will look like moderates.

Of course, here and everywhere Donald Trump's election victory seems to have upended reality. Steven Chapman, a regular columnist for the Trib, has always been too right-wing for my taste. I used to marvel at how predictably he would find fault with Bill Clinton and applaud George W. Bush. Admittedly, Clinton was a person with numerous faults, whose instinct to parse political positions, appease critics and develop compromises that pleased no one is, or should be, legendary. Chapman's inclination to distrust Clinton, to believe that he was a liberal wolf in a moderate sheep's skin, made sense, but his willingness to refrain from strong criticism of Bush while he launched ridiculously expensive wars and failed in fundamental leadership ways, like rebuilding New Orleans, seemed to be a perfect example of abandoning conservative principles in favor of rooting for the home team.

But here comes Trump, who has turned out to be so extreme that he has created opportunities for compromised conservative thinkers to get past partisanship and return to principle. Chapman's column in Wednesday's Trib ("Trump the Weakling and his latest surrender") thoroughly indicts Trump for numerous offenses, all of which fall under the category of buckling in the face of resistance. "Backing down is not a departure from [Trump's] usual style. It is his usual style. Trump is not a guy who can be counted on to stand his ground. Often, he crumbles under the slightest pressure."

Trump, Chapman noted, responded to a federal court order blocking his first travel ban with, "see you in court, the security of our nation is at stake." But instead of going to court in a presidential effort to protect the "security of our nation," Trump, seeking to avoid another judicial rebuke, modified the travel ban. We'll see how that goes.

But Chapman wasn't finished. He noted that Trump defiantly took a call from the president of Taiwan, ignoring the long-standing one-China policy that has guided U.S. policy for more than 40 years. But he backed down and reaffirmed the one-China policy when Chinese premier Xi Jinping refused to speak to Trump "until he agreed to eat his words."

Trump, Chapman added, didn't even bring up the idea that Mexico would pay for a border wall when he visited with Mexican president Pena Nieto, but "only when he was safely back across the Rio Grande did Trump dare to repeat that our neighbor will foot the bill."

There's more, and if one is looking for an enjoyable moment with a right-wing columnist who is essentially calling Trump out for cowardice, just follow the link above. In any case, I'm not saying that I suddenly have warm feelings about Steven Chapman, but I am encouraged to see that for some conservatives, partisanship really does not compromise every principle.

Nor do I think that Chapman is the first right-winger to find a way to resist the siren call of partisanship at any cost. The Post's Jennifer Rubin, for years an inveterate critic of Barack Obama and constant flatterer of Paul Ryan, has begun routinely denouncing Trump's behavior and policy nonsense for at least the last six months. Check out Jonah Goldberg in the National Review, also.

"By now you may have noticed the difficulty many conservatives have defending everything President Trump does and says. I’m not just referring to the big policy moves, most of which conservatives can support fairly easily (so far). I mean the whole whiplash-inducing spectacle: the unfiltered, impulsive tweeting, bizarre interview non sequiturs, glib insults and distractions.

"If you honestly have no idea what I’m talking about, you may need to be de-programmed from a personality cult," Goldberg wrote in a piece for USA Today ("The Right can't defend Trump's behavior"). Of course, one reflects, these things are entirely clear to virtually all of us--except that they are not. A recent Suffolk poll finds that Trump is unpopular with the majority of Americans, but still somehow more popular than Hillary Clinton, who actually hasn't done anything to offend any of us for months now. I will therefore take the piece by Goldberg, the editor of the National Review, and others he has written that are also deeply critical of Trump and Republicans who cannot seem to separate themselves from Trump politically, as a good sign.

After all, every democracy not suffering from complete gridlock needs conservatives and liberals who can hear each other think. I'm not saying a few columns prove anything one way or the other, but I am encouraged by conservatives who are writing "I'm not with him."

Anyway, back to good-bad things about Chicago. I am definitely going to go to more performances/art exhibits/concerts/slams/whatevers here than I ever went to in DC. Washington certainly had a vital grassroots culture of its own, but the high-end, high-culture stuff often seemed to dominate. But everybody and her cousin seems to have some street-slam culture thing going in Chicago and I aim to be close by when some of that stuff goes off. I will concede, though, that I've only briefly sampled thus far and am only talking (or writing) about good intentions. We shall see.

Not surprisingly, serious urban problems and an apparent inability to solve them are among the things Washington and Chicago share. They also both suffer under a federal government that shows no signs of a willingness or ability to help. Given its druthers, the Trump administration will do its best to further damage public education, an agenda that will harm black and brown America first, but ultimately take down white America, too.

Of course, Trump, himself, volunteered to intervene to make Chicago's gun violence problem worse than it already is. But given his obviously short attention span, it appears likely that the city will avoid being wounded by that particular stray bullet. Not that there aren't plenty of others around who can't help barking both fruitlessly and endlessly at the sound of gunfire.

"It is time for a radical response. Time to stop talking and start doing. Time to take steps to clear the air of gunshots so our lofty plans for more police and more jobs can seed and grow rather than wither from the spray of automatic weapon fire," wrote former prosecutor Donna Moore in a March 8 column in the Trib (Stop the indifference: Bring in the National Guard).

Arf. Arf. Arf.

"...the city should ask that [the National Guard] be deployed, along with local police, to the South and West sides, not to militarize them," Moore recommended, "but to restore public safety and save lives."

Moore's single argument that her plan will work rests on an example of "one blessed weekend in November 2016," when "Chicago police, Cook County sheriffs, state police and federal agents saturated the three most dangerous police districts in the city...The strategy worked. The killing ceased. That weekend there was exactly one shooting--one--in the area under patrol."

This is nonsense. Dare we ask what causes such high levels of violence in the first place? How does a show of force address the underlying causes of violence in Chicago (and elsewhere, for that matter)? Moore cites a weekend of intensive policing during which only one shooting occurred. Are we to believe that focussing on a specific-area did not have adverse effects outside those limited boundaries? What were the patterns and frequencies of violence and crime before and after the weekend under examination? How is it possible to patrol streets, alleyways and parks with uniformed, heavily armed personnel without militarizing the area? What would be the downside consequences to the communities under lockdown and to the city, in general?

Arf. Arf. Arf.

Because the Trib routinely favors harsher punishments and longer prison sentences for the perpetrators of violence, the paper's willingness to accommodate opinion pieces that advocate counter-productive tactics like increased armed occupations of poor and minority neighborhoods comes as no surprise. Nevertheless, more thoughtful perspective pieces do run in the paper from time to time. One such piece, written by Chicago Teachers Union president Karen Lewis ("Invest in schools, teachers to reduce violence"), ran in the paper on March 7.

Lewis's piece, a sustained and effective argument that advocates spending on social service interventions that reduce the traumatic effects of ongoing violence in neighborhoods, and in the process, addressing the causes of subsequent traumas, merits reprinting in its entirety here. But the link above will take interested readers to the full piece. In the meantime, here's an extended quote:

"While we are not typically thought of as first responders to violence, teachers and school staff are often the first responders to the trauma that violence brings, especially when it happens to the very students entrusted to our care," Lewis wrote.

"At Henderson Elementary School in West Englewood, teachers helped students write notes to Kanari [Gentry-Bowers], their classmate, before she died in the hospital. Since November, seven Henderson students or former students have been killed or injured by gun violence.

"Every shooting of a child brings confusion, sorrow and fear for their classmates. Left untreated, these emotions cast a dark cloud, affecting young people's ability to learn and focus — and, in the worst scenarios, leading them down the path to violence.

"That's why CTU members held out for crucial violence-prevention provisions in our most recent contract. Our new contract expands counseling and supports staffing community schools with clinicians, restorative justice practitioners and wraparound services to help break the cycle of violence.

"At the time, Mayor Emanuel claimed that there was no money to pay for these demands. And even after signing the contract, the mayor has continued to starve our schools, with help from [Illinois governor] Rauner. Carson Elementary School, down the street from Henderson, will lose more than $200,000 in the millions of cuts just announced.

"We live in one of the richest cities, in one of the richest states, in the richest nation in the world. Elected officials who line up to mourn the latest shooting while claiming that 'there is no money' to pay for prevention, or that the wealthy already 'pay too much,' are really saying that they care too little.

"Enough with the talk.

"CTU members were willing to strike to ensure that all Chicago's children get the resources that they deserve. We've forced the mayor to put our tax dollars toward young people, instead of into developer slush funds.

"But if Takuya [Holmes], Kanari and Lavontay [White Jr.] are to be more than just names on an endless list, then we will need to do much more.

"We must eradicate the conditions that create violence. That means policy change and resources: fully funded schools and thousands of new jobs that pay a fair wage.

"The members of the Chicago Teachers Union show up for our students when the cameras are off. We need our public officials to do the same."

Can I add Karen Lewis and the Chicago Teachers Union as two more of the really great things about Chicago?

The Courage All Around

Boston could mark a point on the path to building a national community that we would like to live in.

More or less the letter I wrote to the Washington Post the day after the bombings at the Boston Marathon:

Editor,

I've been struck by how many conversations I've heard (or overheard), both public and private, focusing on the suddenly imaginable possibility that we've entered a period in history when Americans face new threats from bombings aimed at civilians. This might indeed be so. Experts have predicted the possibility for years. So have novelists and screenwriters.

If it happens, it will be a different sort of mayhem than the kinds we have faced in the past as drivers, cyclists and pedestrians. It will require no more of us than has already been demonstrated by workers who work at dangerous jobs, or by victims of abuse and battering, or by children who grow up in dangerous places.

Each death from terrorism will be a tragedy. But it will also be a profile in courage of those who choose to continue living in public places. The individual suffering may be horrific, but collectively we will survive it and, even, transcend it. A test of shared courage, perhaps, but exactly what we ought to expect of ourselves.

Jeff Epton, Washington D.C

Have we finally arrived at our berserker future?

The Post edited it down a bit and headed it in a way that suggested the letter was responding to an article in their paper. But it was a response to an event, not to the relentless media coverage of the event. So be it. (See the Post's version, "Living in public after violence.")

When I heard the news about Boston, about runners and spectators, civilians randomly victimized in a terror attack, John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar came to mind, as it has many times since I first read it in the early '70s. The novel tells the story of a highly urbanized, overcrowded, dystopic world--one that in reality seems to have been creeping up on us for a very long time.

Of course, though Brunner's vision could not have been accurate in most details (after all, even tomorrow and the day after seem a little hazy from here, no matter that we are standing quite close), more than a few of us seem to be living within shouting distance of Zanzibar. In Brunner's world relative innocents, shopping and dining and purposefully walking in crowded places, sometimes fall victim to berserkers, hyperadrenalized maniacs exploding into suddenly murderous rages that usually don't end until the maniacs burn themselves out.

I couldn't help wondering if we'd finally arrived at our berserker future.

What the letter meant to say, maybe

If that's our future, then we will need to make more deliberate choices to live in public places. But we should not kid ourselves on either of two points.

One, we are not heading into combat here. Plenty of people--neighbors, friends, family--already live their lives courageously. We will be required to follow their lead. No more.

The corollary to that is we should also learn that the courage shown by soldiers or by first responders is not a different sort of courage, either. Their courage is human courage, we all have it in us. Skills and strength and a little training help, too, but we can teach each other what we need to learn (and maybe fix our public schools along the way).

The Courage All Around

When Marrianne and Brendan and I first got to Washington, I'd go a couple of times a year to Bus Boys and Poets open-mic night. It was always very exciting. Most of the poets who made it to the mic were rappers. They were driven by rhymes and rhythms and an apparent need to get up on the stage and say who they were and what they cared about.

And every once in a while I'd get up and try to rumble a few lines, injecting a little blank verse, substituting assonance or alliteration for rhyme and, quite obviously, an occasional longer word when a shorter one might have done. The audience was always patient, but usually hungry for the next rapper. 

In the upshot, I learned far more from them than they learned from me. And, watching the risks they took, I learned that I needed to take more risks, too, and put more heart into speaking my poems. I wrote "The Courage All Around" for them:

Late-night honest

with myself

My boy shames me

The courage he shows

drumming at the Metro

Spare change pours in

Folded bills drifting like

snow covering his lap

Ten years old, first

sharing a buck

with a woman who asks,

then shooing her away

when she won’t stop

asking for more

He goes about his business,

a lionheart tending his

pride of intentions,

while I flinch at the work

before me, at stepping up

before you, at speaking my piece

But where he’s heading,

where heart and skill

and the company of others,

the company of you,

colleagues with an instinct

to be movement and reach

we can believe in,

that place, that thought, swells

my heart The world you will build

beckons and beguiles

and because the heart is

a complicated thing

I feel no shame here

I feel the courage all around

The point, maybe, is still another thing.

There ought to be some emphasis on what we might get, if we learn to live together with more courage. We might learn to prefer human-scale humans and human-scale events over celebrity and spectacle. We might learn to get out of the way of little acts of creativity and sharing, and to see how much such things enrich our lives and strengthen our communities.

I could lengthen that list, but so could you. I could try to prove that I'm right, but I ain't got no data.

All I know is that right after Boston, following on the heels of my thoughts about the berserkers in our future, I was suddenly excited by the thought that we really could do much, much better.

Michelle Rhee's achievement

It says here: DC schools are not the very worst

Check out the most recent edition of Lapham's Quarterly. In his preamble,"Dancing with the Stars", Lapham sketches out the anatomy and history of celebrity, associating it with earlier manifestations like, "the vanity of princes" or the "wish for kings" or the "pretension to divinity " found in some leaders in all societies, including ours, especially "since John F. Kennedy was king in Camelot, and the collective effort [to manufacture fame]--nearly fifty years of dancing with the stars under the disco balls in Hollywood, Washington and Wall Street..."

There is always, always, a hot new thing, and always a new niche opening. For the moment, former DC public school chancellor Michelle Rhee occupies a celebrity niche in education; type Michelle into a search engine and Rhee will pop up before Obama.

But her moment is likely passing. Rhee has moved on to her own nonprofit organization, Students First, and to Sacramento where she will live. The Students First website promotes the organization as the agent of a national movement that will influence educational policies down to the state and local level. The website features glowing generalities about great teachers, informed parents and motivated students, but little about the Rhee's confrontational attitude toward teachers unions, the ultimate basis for her celebrity. Rhee and Students First, according to Washington Post writer Valerie Strauss, "are attempting to raise $1 billion for her new effort to take on the teachers unions." Rhee, it appears, still prizes confrontation with teachers unions above all else.

In her short turn as chancellor, a little over three calendar years on the job (but likely less than that in real time), Rhee crafted her own image as a teachers union nemesis. And the media responded. See, for example, Time magazine's 2008 take on Rhee, who posed on their cover holding a broom with which she would presumably sweep out the "bad" from America's schools as a way to get on the right track, or Fast Company's 2008 cover story, "The Iron Chancellor," which applauded Rhee's serve-the-children-damn-the-adults rhetoric, or the same magazine's 2010 follow-up on Rhee, which included her off-with-their-heads explanation for the firing of some 250 teachers, "I got rid of teachers who had hit children, who had had sex with children, who had missed 78 days of school," Rhee says. "Why wouldn't we take those things into consideration?"

Standardized test scores improved after Rhee's first year on the job, but the results from the next two years were mixed. Nevertheless, Rhee gets lots of credit for "fixing" a disastrously bad school system. "When Rhee took over in 2007, D.C. schools were tied with Los Angeles for worst-in-the-nation status," writes Richard Whitmire (author of The Bee-Eater: Michelle Rhee Takes on the Nation's Worst School District), in "Rhee's necessary toughness." Her achievement, Whitmire, observes, "boosted the District off the cellar floor." Such an improvement hardly seems worth celebrating, but Whitmire is pleased with it and pronounces his disappointment at being unable to "identify one state poised to make Rhee-style academic gains."

So in the wake of Rhee's scorched-earth march through DC, we are now looking for other leaders who will, at a minimum, literally decimate the teachers unions in various school districts, abandon her post in three years or so, and leave behind minimal gains on standardized tests that cannot be correlated with specific, sustainable reforms. Such are the gifts of celebrity.

A Flawed Call to Action

The ironically titled documentary, “Waiting for Superman,” deftly portrays the nation’s longing for a high-quality, universally accessible public school system and some of the obstacles to achieving substantial reform. Along the way, the film celebrates some reformers and mounts a counterproductive campaign to cast teachers and teachers’ unions as significant obstacles to change.

Early in the film, Geoffrey Canada, founder of Harlem Children’s Zone, describes the devastation he felt as a child living in a dangerous neighborhood after his mother told him that Superman was not a real person. The news pushed Canada to the shattering realization that no hero was coming to rescue him from the widespread poverty and violence that characterized the area he grew up in. Canada’s tale of his awakening provides the underlying metaphor driving the film; if we as a nation want an educational system that prepares all our children for the world they will inherit, we cannot wait for a hero, we must perform that rescue ourselves, and together.

Overall, this is an easy notion to sell. Our system of public education has been failing for more than 40 years. Test scores in both reading and math have flatlined since the 1960s. Mid-20th century schools were mostly adequate to the challenge of preparing 20 percent of their students to move on to college, and another 20 percent to begin working as bookkeepers, stenographers and in other semi-skilled positions, while the remaining young people headed for the kind of work that would teach them the necessary skills on the job, or became homemakers in households with one parent at work earning a family wage.

But work life and the global economy have changed dramatically since then. If young people are to find a job in the modern economy, most need a college degree, but with high school dropout rates of 30 percent or more in most public school systems and only a tiny percentage of graduates going on to college, many leave school with no viable alternatives.

Through the dramatic personal stories of children and their adult caretakers desperate to find alternatives to the manifold inadequacies of their neighborhood elementary and high schools, “Waiting for Superman” outlines the collapse of public education and some of the consequent injustices. In the process, the filmmakers follow the work of a number of innovative and creative school reformers, including Canada.

Michelle Rhee, the young chancellor of the Washington, DC, public schools, has several strong scenes in the film, which portrays her as a frank, even confrontational, take-no-prisoners sort of leader. Rhee has been the head of the 45,000-student DC school system since 2007. She has repeatedly characterized entrenched teachers and their unions as one of the most significant obstacles to school improvement. She has fired or forced out more than 600 of DC’s 3,800 teachers since she arrived and has created a series of controversies as she proceeded with the terminations and closed neighborhood schools.

Many of Rhee’s admirers (and they are numerous, both locally and nationally) argue that she could not have moved so effectively against bad teachers and in eliminating underutilized and deteriorating buildings without offending some of the school system’s stakeholders. But the arguments in Rhee’s favor fade when considered along with her provocative assault on the city’s teachers. Virtually all observers agree that some percentage of teachers are extremely ineffective and cannot be coached or retrained to effectiveness, but this consensus cannot justify a reform strategy that appears to rely on sustained combat with teachers. The argument against partnership with teachers’ unions comes almost exclusively from young zealots like Rhee and historically anti-union groups like the Heritage Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation. Unfortunately, the documentary pays little notice to the efforts of education reformers, including Steve Barr, the founder of the Green Dot charter school network based in Los Angeles, and the Gates Foundation, who work with teachers’ unions in pursuit of fundamental change.

Though “Waiting for Superman” portrays teachers’ unions as a, perhaps the, major obstacle to change, the Washington teacher union was not a major problem for Rhee while she fired, released or forced out some 600+ teachers and hired almost 1,000 new teachers. Rhee’s confrontational approach has even obscured other positive changes she has made, including a tenfold increase in the number of teaching coaches working for the system and the establishment of a master teacher program that uses demonstrably effective and experienced teachers to perform ongoing classroom evaluations.

“Waiting for Superman” makes the case that dramatic improvement in the schools will require significant changes in the way teachers are trained and educated. The documentary cites research that pinpoints substantial differences in the results obtained by teachers classified as highly effective or highly ineffective. Those teachers identified as top performers get through 150 percent of the standard curriculum during a school year, while the most ineffective teachers complete only 50 percent of the curriculum.

Ultimately, the film does a thorough job sounding the alarm about the sorry performance of public education in the United States and the dire implications for the country and for millions of children, But while it seems to be warning that we cannot “wait for superman,” its focus on Rhee seems problematic.

Just two days before the recent decent mayoral primary, in which the incumbent mayor, Adrian Fenty, who hired Rhee, was defeated, she appeared at a special invitation-only DC premier of “Waiting for Superman.” At the conclusion of a Q & A following the showing, Rhee made a final statement to the audience. There were still enemies of school reform out there, she said, and they would do whatever they could do undermine school reform and, presumably, force Rhee out. After overpowering the teachers’ union and terminating or otherwise eliminating more than 600 teachers in the last three years, Rhee’s continuing verbal assault is pure scorched earth.

If the claim is true that eliminating the six or seven percent of teachers who are the worst-performing in a district will lead to dramatic improvements in schools and significant increases in test scores, then some of the bloodiest steps toward school improvement have already taken place in Washington. Under the circumstances, it is time for peace with the remaining teachers. The worst are gone and the good efforts of the rest are key to any long-term improvements.

It is unfortunate for “Waiting for Superman” that Rhee turns out to have been such a flawed hero. The larger, more important point that the documentary highlights so well is that failure in school reform is no option; rarely have so many young people and their families required so much from the rest of us.

Tom Geoghegan's Which Side Are You On?

A book about labor and justice

I just finished reading Which Side Are You On?, published originally in 1991. Written by a labor lawyer in Chicago, Tom Geoghegan, a man who knows too much--about how badly the union movement has been screwed by government and bolixed up by its own leadership and left to die a lingering death by the rest of us--knows too much for his own moral comfort. But Geoghegan's honest and important book should earn him a break from his angst about failing the cause.

Who knows, it has been 20 years since the book came out, maybe he has let some of the guilt and pain go. But last I heard, he was still a labor lawyer in Chicago, still wishing and hoping for the legal case that would break the pattern of rulings against workers organizing to form a union, however improbable such a case would be.

It's hard to say exactly when Geoghegan himself came to the conclusion that such hopes were nowhere near realistic, but sometime during his career, after losing cases that he felt the courts were morally obligated to decide in favor of his clients, he came to the conclusion that labor's decline was directly traceable to the passage "in 1947, over the veto of Harry Truman" of Taft-Hartley, the law that "outlawed mass picketing, secondary strikes of neutral employers, sit-downs; in short, everything that [John L. Lewis and the Mineworkers] did in the 1930s."

Geoghegan writes that it was years before the damage from Taft-Hartley was obvious; the labor movement would grow quickly for ten more years, and even after the industrial unions began losing ground, rapidly growing public employee unions would hide the fact of decline. Geoghegan's not whining here, but he's not the only one to point out that the history of American labor would be a different history if not for Taft-Hartley.

"The CIO, in 1946, was planning a big organizing drive in the South...this drive, Operation Dixie, was pulled back at the last moment to avoid alienating Southern Democrats. and the Republicans, meanwhile [with majorities in both houses of Congress], went on to pass Taft-Hartley, to stop just this kind of mass organizing. If the CIO had organized the South, American history would have been different, because labor would have been a truly national force, and not a regional one, trapped in the Northeast and Midwest."

I'd like to quote so much from the book I'd end up reprinting most of it here, but Geoghegan is also a wonderful writer. Anyone who merely read my excerpted version would be missing the real thing, an intimate view of workers and their families struggling with and for their unions, and of their leaderships, the good, the bad and the ugly, from an informed observer who chose labor's side a long time ago, but knows himself to be an outsider.

I wrote a letter to the Washington Post a while ago, extolling charter schools and asserting that the best practices of charter schools and public school reform efforts needed to be regarded as complementary activities aimed at the shared goal of rebuilding quality public education. In response, a friend, another Chicago lawyer, wrote me arguing that the charter schools were actually part of a systematic attack on the union movement. We exchanged several e-mails on the subject, but she remained convinced that I was inadvertently stooging for a right-wing attack on labor and I came to the conclusion that she saw charter schools as a for-profit conspiracy to privatize education. Had we continued our discussion, I'm pretty sure that we would have found common ground, but I am more certain that our whole discussion would have been broadened substantially had we first read Which Side Are You On?.

Broadened theoretically, at least. After all, nothing in Which Side suggests a practical course of action, especially 20 years later and immediately after the sustained and tortured fight to pass health care reform. Perhaps not so ironically, it is the current day coalition of Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats, not unlike the coalition that passed Taft-Hartley over Truman's veto 60 years ago, that made prompt passage of a better health care bill impossible. Sixty years ago, before Taft-Hartley, unions organized by card check--getting the signatures of a minimum of 30 percent of workers at a plant in order to form a bargaining unit that the employer had to recognize. Today AFL-CIO and Change to Win unions have prioritized the Employee Free Choice Act, which would once again allow for card check, instead of the NLRB regulated elections that employers have learned how to win with regularity simply by firing leaders on the shop floor and intimidating workers.

Lots of questions arise. In many ways progressives are lost without a viable union movement. A few years ago, writing in In These Times and attempting to bridge a perceived gap between labor and other progressives, I wrote this: "Corporate America and the Republican Party have forged a partnership that ... decrees the contours of our economic and cultural life. If progressives ever want to counter this corporate hegemony, they must learn from the past and embrace the strength and potential of the union movement (from "Labor's Future Is Ours," In These Times, January 21, 2005).

It's difficult for me to say now that I still believe firmly in what I wrote in In These Times just five years ago. A better health care bill could have been passed and sooner, if labor leaders had not opposed a provision taxing "Cadillac" health care plans last summer. It would have been a better bill that would have taken a bigger step toward universal, single-payer health care. But after reading Geoghegan's book describing the deck stacked against the union movement for half a century, it seems silly to blame labor for something all of us, unions, the Democratic party, progressives, a vast coalition of non-profits, couldn't accomplish.

But what then are we to do if we can't blame labor or save it? The answers, of course, are complicated. We should certainly support the Employee Free Choice Act, even if it doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell. There is a long list of other things to tackle, including the demilitarization of our economy and foreign policy, underwater mortgages, financial regulatory reform, the restoration of urban public education, action on climate change, and more. All of this would help, were we able to accomplish it. But labor's decline has made progressives much weaker. Perhaps, we've lost clarity about what matters most. Tom Geoghegan's book, written 20 years ago, is still profoundly relevant.

"Lately, I've been writing this book. I've been writing it on weekends and in the mornings before I go to work, and now that I've reached the end of it, I hate to let it go. Because in writing it, I come closer to solidarity with ... well, not the workers, but other people ... than I do in the day-to-day living of my life.

"Here's a depressing thought. Maybe in a book, and only in a book, is solidarity 'forever.'

"But there's a great danger in writing a book. I can already see what's happening. I keep some steelworker waiting on a corner, walking up and down. What kind of solidarity is that?

"That's where the aesthetic view of politics leads. That's why it's dangerous.

"That's why when you shut the door and begin to write, someone should ask you, right then,

"Which side are you on?"

Securities Traders and Science Teachers

Letter to the Washington Post, #17

Editor,

Stories about bonuses for the "vital employees" capable of unravelling the tangled complex derivatives that have nearly crushed AIG, and about the need to give school districts the right to fire incompetent teachers lead the news in DC (and most of the rest of the country, for that matter). It makes sense that people are deeply concerned about how we preserve businesses that are "too big to fail" and improve public schools that fail too often, but we seem to be drinking a kind of kool-aid here.

Though our public schools and our economy need reform and large infusions of cash, a different perspective on the various problems is in order. The average securities trader at AIG probably makes five to 25 times the salary of the average public school teacher. The proposition that those same traders ought to make, say, an additional million dollars more for untangling the trades that their colleagues made because they are the only ones with the knowledge and skill to do it right is an invoice that I, as a taxpayer, am not willing to pay.

But, assuming that we must fix, and not simply rend, AIG, let's consider recruiting high school science and math teachers, who surely have the requisite smarts, to spend their summer vacations untangling derivatives. They could start the summer at boot camp, getting an immersion experience in complex financial trades, and then work another seven weeks or so getting the job done at AIG and other distressed enterprises that the government is bailing out.

We could pay a substantial premium to the teachers for their summer work and save millions in proposed bonus money for investment elsewhere, perhaps in the school districts where our "derivative disentanglement" teams work during the school year. It may be a stretch to suggest that the unemployed securities traders spend the summer in a reeducation project of their own, maybe in basic ethics or debt counseling, but I'm going to go ahead and suggest it anyhow.

Jeff Epton
Brookland

An Education Lesson from the University of the District of Columbia

Today's Washington Post carries word that "UDC Chief Wants to Cut Undergrad Major in Education." University of the District of Columbia President Allen Sessions said "hardly anyone graduates" from the program.

Post writer Susan Kinzie spoke to UDC professors in the education program who said that the problem arises from the low reading, writing and math skills of education majors. President Sessions proposes to address the issue by replacing the undergraduate program with a master's program in urban education.

I assume that Sessions came up with his solution in the middle of a long, sleepless night. The proposal bursts with ironic features. If the diagnosis is correct, UDC's education program graduates less than five percent of its enrollees because they are unable to pass a test that measures the skills their previous educational experience was supposed to teach them. So the school that purports to teach people to educate gives up on educating them.

Somehow, "the students who do graduate are excellent." The rest are so bad, UDC would rather not address the fundamental issues, but would rather close down the program. Heaping on the irony, they would like to establish a master's degree program that would address the further educational needs and aspirations of a tiny percentage of those who come to the school hoping to become teachers.

Marrianne McMullen (the person to whom I am married), who works on urban public education for the Service Employees International Union, suggests UDC go about addressing the program in an entirely different way. "Why not add to the front end of the college educational experience," she says. "Set up a program that addresses how these students were short-changed in K-12. In the process, learn more about how to help graduates of underperforming school systems. And give these graduates a personal experience they could bring to their own teaching."

We are a nation that has declined, for at least 40 years, to invest in urban public education, declined to invest in the institution that affects most deeply the lives of the majority of our children. Faced with one of the striking features of that relentless failure, the University of the District of Columbia is apparently willing to compound that failure, apparently unwilling to use its frontline position to mobilize for educational change we can believe in. We should expect more of UDC.

Statement on Public and Public Charter Schools

I testified today at a DC City Commission hearing on education. A couple of people thanked me for my remarks and nobody pointed at me and yelled, "drug test that man." Overall, I'd say the whole thing went pretty well.

Here's my statement:

February 29, 2008

My name is Jeff Epton and I live in Brookland. I’m a product of Chicago public schools and my two older children went to conventional public schools in Michigan. My youngest goes to E.L. Haynes Public Charter School here in the District. I have also taught (poetry) for the last three years on a part-time basis in both Chicago and DC. From the standpoint of a parent, an enthusiastic advocate of public education and a part-time teacher, I’d like to rave a little bit about E.L. Haynes.

In my judgment the teachers and staff at Haynes are highly qualified. More than that, they are enthusiastic, caring and creative and, I think, successful under challenging circumstances. The Haynes curriculum focuses both on skill development for all and on precise and targeted responsiveness to individual children. On that basis alone, Haynes offers Chancellor Rhee and DC public schools one more opportunity to observe and evaluate successful innovation.

There’s three quick points I’d like to make here:

1. We should avoid lengthy debates that focus on distinctions between public schools and public charter schools. Everyone wants to be accountable here. Everyone wants to see the schools strengthened by innovative practices. And we all want to recruit, develop and retain skilled and dedicated teachers and staff. Public schools were once the best tool we had to build democracy and still have the potential to help us build a truly human and enriched society. Charter schools are not the enemy in that, they are a simply a means to achieve some of the revitalization we seek.

2. At times in the past, organized labor may have been an obstacle to improving the schools. But unions have also been a way to insure that the interests and skills of working people are represented in efforts to make change. Unions should be partners in whatever we do to improve the public schools. And not just teachers, either. Students at the schools know the people who work in the schools, the custodial staff, food service staff and others. And those workers know the children and have something to offer this effort, too. Their unions should be a part of these discussions.

3. It may be that if a distinction develops between charters and other public schools that we can’t resolve, it is because these schools are competing for a piece of a pie that is not sufficient to meet their needs. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. The American public school system has suffered sustained neglect over the last 30 years. We must make our schools as efficient as we can and we must demand accountability.

But we must also demand—in concert with school systems and city councils from around the country—that our federal government increase its investment in our children by increasing its investment in public schools of every description.

Jeff Epton
807 Taylor St., NE
Washington, DC 20017
202 506-7470

Letter to the Washington Post, #4

In her Feb. 17 op-ed (“Call Me a Snob…”) Susan Jacoby asserts that we are living through a period characterized by “a virulent mixture of anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism and low expectations” and says we ought to begin a national discussion on “the low level of discourse in a country with a mind taught to aim at low objects.”

But Jacoby doesn’t get us to an adequate starting point. Dumbness, arrogance and a shrinking attention span characterize a rising number of Americans, she claims. Unfortunately, these are not precise analytical terms; they are mere insults.

Perhaps a 1500-word piece does not allow sufficient space to make Jacoby’s point, but surely it’s room enough to at least mention the sustained neglect the American public school system has suffered over the last 30 years. My guess is that single parents with low-wage jobs, two-parent households with both parents in the work force, lack of childcare, crumbling school buildings, lagging teacher salaries, a shift of infrastructure investment from cities to suburbs and from schools to prisons, the increasing cost of higher education and the diminishing availability of need-based college scholarships have much to do with our collective lack of time and preparedness for the discussion Jacoby desires.

Shifting focus to the failures of policy-makers since the Reagan administration to honor and sustain the past achievements and real potential of high-quality universal public education might be a better place to begin that conversation.