I have just returned from a multi-city trip to talk about my book and had a wonderful (though exhausting) time. On the flight from New York City to Denver, I wrote an opinion piece that appeared in the Los Angeles Times on October 2, the date of my first lecture there.
I started in Denver, where I spoke at North High School to about 600 people, mostly teachers. I also met the brave insurgent candidates who are running for the Denver school board as a slate, hoping to bring nine long years of corporate reform domination of the Denver public schools to an end. They are: Meg Schomp, Roger Kilgore, Mike Kiley, and Rosario c. DeBaca. They will be up against the same corporate funding machine that has elected previous boards. The odds against them are long, but I hope they win.
One night in Denver, then I flew the next morning to Seattle. There I had a meeting with the Garfield High School teachers who led the MAP test boycott, along with some of their parent supporters. I grabbed some Mexican food across from the hotel, then off to the University of Washington. There too were about 800 people, a very enthusiastic crowd. When I was signing books afterwards, the bookstore ran out of books, and people gave me other things to sign. At one point, I was asked to sign a weather-beaten copy of The Grapes of Wrath. I was hoping that John Steinbeck would not mind.
The next morning, I left for Sacramento. On the flight from Denver to Sacramento, I wrote an article for the New Republic blog about testing, challenging the claim that we need even more testing. That evening, I was preceded by a wonderful lineup of speakers, including Anthony Cody, Linda Darling-Hammond and State Superintendent Tom Torlakson. We spoke in the grand Memorial Hall–a historic building–to about 1,000 cheering people, mainly teachers. While I was signing books, a very handsome young man crouched alongside me and told me that I had inspired him to become a teacher. I asked him to explain. He said that he had served in the Marines, and when he left the Corps, someone gave him a copy of my previous book The Death and Life of the Great American School System, and now he is a teacher and he loves it.
Next day, a drive to San Francisco, where I stayed in the Intercontinental, near the Moscone Center. A hour or two of rest, and I was off to Berkeley, where I spoke in a large auditorium to what seemed to be nearly 1,000 people. I was introduced by my old friend Dr. Bernard Gifford, who was long ago the Deputy Chancellor of the New York City public schools and has lived and taught at Berkeley for many years.
Sunday, thankfully, was a day of rest, a chance to take a swim in the hotel pool, balm for my aching back. Then lunch with Anthony Cody and Adam Bessie.
Monday morning, I was on the Michael Krasny show on San Francisco NPR. He is one of the best-informed book interviewers I have ever met. Then off to Los Angeles. Each of two days was consumed with radio shows on NPR stations. One NPR station, KPFK, was near the end of a fund-raising drive. The announcer periodically interrupted the show to say that they were desperately trying to match a $10,000 grant, and they would lose the offer if they didn’t get enough new members. When they had only 25 left to go, I offered to join. When I concluded my segment, they had only one member needed and 45 seconds left to meet the goal, and I paid for one of my sons to join, so I left the station with the satisfaction of knowing that I had enabled them to raise $10,000 by joining twice!
My first appearance in Los Angeles was at Occidental College, a beautiful campus that is now 126 years old. Beforehand, there was a reception, where I met many education leaders from Los Angeles, Pasadena, and elsewhere. But the most moving moment of all was when a woman unknown to me threw her arms around me and thanked me profusely. I was baffled, and she was crying, but then I understood that her name was Irma Cobain. She was the principal of Weigand Avenue Elementary School who had been ousted because of the efforts of Parent Revolution. She was very grateful for the support I had given her when she was under so much pressure from the people who wanted her head on a platter. At that moment, I felt that all the blogging was making a difference. What she read had lifted her spirits. She was clearly a warm, kind, empathetic person.
That evening at Occidental, I was introduced by Steve Zimmer, an elected board member of the LA district. He told the story of how down-hearted his campaign was when he received an email from me, saying that he could beat the money assembled to crush him. Just keep saying that Los Angeles is not for sale, I wrote him. And in the question-and-answer period, a beautiful young girl came to the microphone, and I recognized her at once from her pictures: I shouted out, “Hannah,” and got an electric smile from this tiny young woman. She was the same Hannah Nguyen who had dared to ask an unscripted question of Rhee when she was on her “teacher town hall” tour.
Afterwards, there was quite a lot of picture-taking and hugging all around. What a nice campus.
The last night of my magical mystery tour, I went to the campus of California State University at Northridge. This is a major teacher training institution, which seems to have a strong program in special education. Almost everyone I met was either a professor of special education, a teacher of special education, or a graduate student planning to enter the field.
The big excitement was the arrival of Matt Damon and his mother, the wonderful Nancy Carlsson-Paige. Everyone was excited to meet Matt, and he is an incredibly regular guy. He was wearing glasses, and I thought if you passed him on the street, you wouldn’t recognize him as one of our super stars. In the green room, everyone took pictures of themselves with Matt and Nancy. He made a beautiful introduction, and I gave him my personal copy of the book. Speech over, sign books. There on the line was Monica Ratliff, the beautiful and spirited woman who beat the billionaires and won a seat on the LAUSD board. And there was a teacher who wanted me to have a large squash from his school’s organic garden. And there was every variety of American, of every imaginable ethnicity and hue. All of them shook my hand vigorously and said, simply, “Thank you.”
I came home Thursday night very tired. Friday night, I was on the Chris Hayes’ show. I will be honest. I much prefer radio to television. With radio, you know that people are thinking about what you say. With television, everything seems to be about appearances–your hair, your lipstick, your jacket, your expression– and the time flies past. And always, always, I feel this tremendous responsibility, this weight on my shoulders. I think to myself, I can’t let the teachers down. I can’t disappoint them. They are counting on me. I have to get this right.
I left on Saturday morning for a meeting of the National Superintendents Roundtable in Washington, D.C. I was preceded at the podium by the great Pasi Sahlberg. He is a wonderful speaker, with great graphics to demonstrate his points (sorry, I don’t do that). I took a few notes on what he said.
Pasi said that if we traded every teacher in Finland for every teacher in Indiana, the results would not be any different. Despite the highly competitive teacher selection program in Finland, despite the high esteem in which Finnish teachers are held, they would not be able to overcome the deep poverty of so many children in Indiana. On the other hand, the Indiana teachers would thrive because of the excellent conditions of teaching and learning in Finnish schools; there they would find autonomy, encouragement, and professionalism. And he also said, “Standardization is the enemy of creativity.” And another aphorism: “Accountability is what is left after all responsibility has been taken away.” The lesson of Finland, he said, was that “excellence comes with equity, not with choice.”
So, now, after a long train ride, I am home. I am not yet unpacked. My desk is a mess. The letters have piled up. Tomorrow I will see my two youngest grandsons. Tuesday night I will be at Congregation Beth Elohim in Park Slope, Brooklyn, in conversation with David Denby of the New Yorker. Thursday night I will be at Northern Michigan University in Marquette, Michigan.
Life goes on.
