image credit: jesse newman for TIME

Here’s another entry for my List of Reasons Why I’m Justifiably Pissed About the Lack Of Time Machines: the Blue Man Group started an elementary school. And if you know anything about elementary school, then you’ll be up on the pertinent info regarding age restrictions for enrolled students. I was eligible in, like, 1980 to attend the Blue School’s kindergarten. So you see why I need a damn time machine.

The school itself sounds amazing, and I really want a do-over so I can attend. But possibly more wonderful than the school is the reason for starting it up in the first place. The founding members of the Blue Man Group– Matt Goldman, Phil Stanton, Chris Wink—started their oddball performance group as “sort of a support group for people whose creativity had been all but squeezed out of them by education,” says Wink. “At one point, we asked, What if there was a school you didn’t have to recover from, that didn’t make you question the idea of being creative?”

image credit: NY Post

The Blue Man philosophy plus the Blue Man Group bank accounts added to the appearance of Blue Man Progeny equaled the formation of The Blue School. It’s a private school in Manhattan, so it’s not cheap. But it’s imaginative, has a good soul, AND it’s an accredited school. I’m happy and am thinking good thoughts for the kiddos who get to go. I hope they understand there will be nary a sympathetic ear should they ever bitch about their elementary education.

Further Reading and Viewing:

NY Post: Blue Man School
Time Magazine’s Video of The Blue School
The New Yorker: Cool for School

Posted by Alexa Harrington

While I understand the need every parent has—on a weird, biological level—to do as much for their child as is feasible in order that said kid’s life path can be as smooth and highly elevated as is everly possible, I have never been able to be anywhere near fine with the insane pressure and bizarre hoop-jumping some parents put their kids through.

Succeeding in life is super great, don’t get me wrong. Going to college for the sake of the education and the life experience is not something that can be duplicated. I’m pro-success and pro-college, absolutely. But I really (a whole damn lot) can’t fathom how working your ass off from preschool on through grad school to be in the top 5% of your cohort for any and all school and extra-curricular activities is either necessary or healthy. Plus, it can’t be all that fun.

Is it peculiar and freakish that I lump “success” and “happy” in the same pile? Perhaps. I love my kiddos, and I really do believe the high-pressure helicopter parents love their kiddos, too. We have different ways of showing it, however. I have some grandparental units who showed their love for me, for the first 25 years of my life, in ways similar to the hyper parents of today; they wished me every success, including unfounded dreams of sending me off to medical school because that’s what they had done and that’s where all of their friends’ grandkids were obediently marching off to (like cranky little lemmings, I might add).

My grandparents’ way was to coddle, protect, pressure and prepare me for the future until I was incapable of getting their lecturely tones out of my head. For the most part I’ve let it all go and have moved past the self-doubt and the second-guessing and the perfectionist tendencies I harbor. I put a lot less pressure on myself and I don’t intend ever to crush the souls of my own progeny, turning them into miserable beings, incapable of happiness or contentment. (It’s conceivable that I haven’t moved on entirely.)

My way is to support my kids and the choices they make, and to make sure they have a rich, well-rounded education, both in the classroom and at home. My main goal is to have happy kids. I honestly don’t care where or if they go to college, and whether they go right after high school or never. That sounds incredibly slackerly of me, I realize, but there it is.

The older I get (I just turned 35) the more I realize how hard it is to be a content and beatific adult. I’m happy, but only after letting go and unclenching a little. I’m fine with giving my kids an education (one where they are not expected to kick everyone else’s ass) and following their lead as to where they want to go in life. In this day and age, that’s a pretty revolutionary statement. I’m supposing people will respond with, “That crazy b**ch is going to let her kids do what they want with their lives!”

Anyway, this spew was brought on by Eduwonkette’s guest blogger, Hilary Levey. She’s a PhD candidate at Princeton, and wrote her dissertation on the whole high-pressure parent phenomenon, specifically the credentials those parents expect, want, and need their kids to acquire and achieve. The post is basically a summary of her dissertation, “Playing to Win: Childhood, Competition, and Credentials Bottlenecks.”

It’s a great article, and in it Levey does such an excellent job of explaining what the motivation is behind these insanely gung-ho parents, that I was able to open my mind up a smidgen more and maybe, a teensy bit, see the parents’ point. However, as much as I’d love to read the actual dissertation and all of her research (because her papers and her research sound fascinating), I think it would either enrage me or curl me into a ball that I wouldn’t want to come out of for a few days.

I realize it’s perhaps a little odd to be writing for an education blog and to be so cranky about uber-achieving parents and their offspring. I’m not against education in the slightest; I love education and I can’t get enough of learning in any form. Education is one of the greatest achievements of mankind, right up there with Ziploc bags, libraries, matches, wet wipes, cell phones and duct tape. But I’m just not on board with turning education (in all its forms) into a crazy competition where only the highest-scoring student has succeeded and everyone else has failed.

Everyone needs to unclench a little, step back, and see that their kids are amazing regardless of the credentials they may or may not hold. And to please realize that the winningest kid does not necessarily grow up to be the most successful or the happiest adult, and that the average kids don’t always turn out to be unsuccessful, miserable. low-income earning losers with no shot at kicking ass on the world because they screwed up that third-grade soccer championship.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Diane Ravitch at Education Week has written one of the most eloquent and succinct arguments I’ve read against the use of standardized testing as the only meter for accountability in schools.

By making test scores the sole gauge of progress, one can expect to see cheating and test prepping, and other quasi-legitimate and outright illegitimate ways of reaching the only goal that matters. When teachers, principals, and students are given rewards and punishments for only one measure, that measure may well rise, but at a cost.

What is the likely cost? What will be sacrificed—and is now being sacrificed—is an education of quality. Instead of educating students for post-secondary education, for a life of civic responsibility and for the modern workplace, we may instead send forth young people who have been cheated of an education. They were cheated because the only goal that counted was their score on a standardized test. They were cheated because the adults in charge of them were told that nothing else mattered—not their character, not their sense of civic duty, not their knowledge of history, geography, literature, or anything other than basic skills.

Interesting that Daniel Koretz (in his book “Measuring Up“) treats test-prepping as something that is just a step or two removed from cheating. Yet we know that many districts today spend a lot of time and money giving children “interim assessments” and preparing children for the all-important state tests. The question that remains unanswered is whether students would do just as well on tests for which they have not been “prepped.” The answer, I fear, is no, which means that whatever they learned through test prep was transient, did not transfer to other settings, and was to that extent fraudulent.

There has to be a better way to gauge how well the schools and teachers are educating the students, and how well the students are learning. After a few years of pondering and watching it in action, I’m still convinced that teaching to the test and narrowing curriculum and recess time to make room for said test-teaching (prepping, rote memorization, or whatever they’re calling it these days) isn’t the best plan.

I’ve been working on my own solution to this quandary; admittedly, it’s from way out in left field, but it just might be crazy enough to work. I’m wondering if perhaps increased funding in schools might be the catalyst that sets off a chain reaction of positives that in the end will result in better-educated students. A richer curriculum, better pay for teachers, art, music and computer programs, a return to normal recess times, decreased class size, etc. I realize my proposed solution is probably about as realistic as time travel and will in all likelihood discredit me utterly, but I figured I’d just put it out there.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

image credit: veer/james godman

I hate to say it, but Obama has already made a blunder. He is a politician, which means he’s supposed to piss off at least half the people most of the time, so I suppose I shouldn’t be so shocked. I really, really like him, but when it comes to fearless leaders, we can’t let ourselves be blinded by respect and adoration. He was bound to screw up at some point, I just can’t believe it was so quick and for something so easily side-stepped: Michelle and Barack will be sending their daughters to the private Sidwell Friends School in D.C., not a public school.

I get it that the girls attended private school in Chicago, and that attending a private school in D.C. will make security measures more feasible. Also, apparently Joe Biden’s grandkids attend the Sidwell Friends School, too, which may have been a scale-tipper. Friends, schmends; security, schmecurity! What’s so bad about public school?

Of course, one can always use the argument that I went to public school (and look how I turned out). But there’s also the point my father has always made, that the only way to improve public schools is for the parents with the interest, means, voice and impetus to effect change to enroll their kids in the public school system and to work to change public education from the inside out.

The Obamas did at least go through the motions of checking out some D.C. public schools. And as far as private schools go, Sidwell is a Quaker school; I have never found anything lacking with the Quaker education philosophy, nor have I ever been able to come up with anything negative to say about the Quakers (they had me at “underground railroad”).

Damn, my optimism levels were through the roof for a good few weeks after the election. I’ll just rein those back in.

Further Reading:

Quaker Accounts of the Underground Railroad
The Story of Quakers, Underground Railroad
Why Sasha and Malia Will Go to Sidwell Friends
Obamas Choose Sidwell Friends School For Daughters
Vanity School Fair
Obama Gets ‘H’ For Hypocrisy

Posted by Alexa Harrington

photo: Barry Halkin

There’s a huge pile of work awaiting the next Secretary of Education. There’s the No Child Left Behind act to be dealt with, charter school issues, under-performing teacher improvement, accountability, a universal pre-K system, etc.

It would be great if higher education were a priority on that to-do list, but historically, nearly all of the previous appointees have had strong backgrounds in primary or secondary education. Admittedly, it’s a short history; Carter was the first president to appoint a Secretary of Education, so Obama’s Education chief will only be the ninth in U.S. history. Of the eight we’ve already had, only Lauro F. Cavazos, Jr., who served from 1988-1990, has had a background in post-secondary education.

Waiting and trying to guess at who will be picked is like some weird combination of high school prom (Who’s gonna ask who?), March Madness (Who’ll win the office pool?) and the weather report (read Chaos by James Gleick to fully appreciate how impossible it is to accurately predict the weather).

The not-so-short list of Obama’s possible picks are:

David Boren: Current President of the Univ. of Oklahoma; former Governor (D) of Oklahoma (1975-1979) ; former U.S. Senator (1979-1994)

W. Gaston Caperton III: President of the College Board

Michael Cohen: President of Achieve, a group that works to help states raise elementary and secondary academic standards

Linda Darling-Hammond: Top Obama education advisor

Arne Duncan: CEO of Chicago Public Schools

Christopher Edley, Jr.: Dean of the law school at the University of California at Berkeley

James B. Hunt, Jr.: Former governor of North Carolina

Michael Johnston: Director of the Mapleton Expeditionary School of the Arts

Timothy M. Kaine: Governor of Virginia

Thomas Kean: Former Governor of New Jersey, served as the Chairman of the 9/11 Commission in 2002

Caroline Kennedy: Daughter of President John F. Kennedy

Joel I. Klein: New York City public schools chancellor

George Miller: U.S. Rep. (D-CA), chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee and author of the College Cost Reduction and Access Act

Janet Napolitano: Governor of Arizona

Hilary C. Pennington: Director of Special Initiatives of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

Colin Powell: Former Secretary of State in the first Bush Administration

Michelle Rhee: Washington, D.C. public school system chancellor

Sharon P. Robinson: President of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education

Andrew J. Rotherham: An Obama campaign advisor; co-founder of the education policy research group Education Sector

Jonathan Schnur: Chief executive of New Leaders for New Schools

Kathleen Sebelius: Governor of Kansas

Diane Shust: Director of government relations at the National Education Association

Paul G. Vallas: Superintendent of the Recovery School District of New Orleans

Robert E. Wise, Jr.: President of the Alliance for Excellent Education

Further Reading:

Who Will Obama Pick as Secretary of Education?
Early Transition Decisions to Shape Obama Presidency
Who Should Be the Nation’s Next Education Chief?
Obama’s Possible Candidates for Education Secretary
Who Will Be the Next U.S. Secretary of Education?

Posted by Alexa Harrington

I’m curious as to whether it’s the kids or the parents who need to be convinced to have elementary school students enroll at the “no-stress,” alternative Christa McAuliffe School in Cupertino, CA. The nearby Faria Elementary, a more traditional, all-standardized-tests-included school, has people lined up to enroll. But the no-pressure “research magnet school” where the students are engaged in their education every day and are all encouraged to think outside the box, be creative, and ask questions has seats available.

The cranky, cynical, hater-of-high-pressure-parents in me would be willing to bet large sums of cold, hard cash that it’s the parental units who are enrolling their offspring in the more traditional school, and if an objective third party (clearly not me) were to take the prospective students aside and ask them to choose between the two educational institutions, the kids would choose the happy engaging place.

For the record, kids from both schools go on to do well in high school and beyond. And the Christa McAuliffe School isn’t some new-fangled hippy-dippy place; it’s been around for 30 years and it used to have a waiting list. But now it’s one of the only low-key happy places in Silicon Valley, which pretty well solves the mystery as to why parents aren’t sending their kids there.

If someone’s looking for a research topic, I’d love to know at what point during parenthood do progeny-producing adults tie up their own self-worth so inextricably with the performance of their offspring that they can no longer just let them happily survive in a forward trajectory. When does it all become only about how much amazingness your kid can exhibit on paper?

My theory (which I’m totally pulling out of my posterior) is that the decades-long state of sleep-deprivation brought on by parenting tiny humans retards the logic and compassion functions in the parental brain. This is why there are so many hyper parents running loose in our society, demanding higher, better and faster hoop-jumping from their kiddos. And god knows we don’t want our kids growing up happy and calm; that would only lead to contented adulthood (a scourge we should all be striving to obliterate).

Posted by Alexa Harrington

image: shilo shiv suleman