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No Excuses on "The Wire"

January 14, 2008 7:17 AM | 2 Comments

Last week, A-Rus asked if "The Wire" is just "poverty porn." This week, Dave Bellel puts up a clip from last night's episode that hits the "no excuses" debate in less than 2 minutes. Is the Ed Trust or Richard Rothstein doing the ghost writing? You decide.

2 Comments

Posted by: John Thompson | January 14, 2008 3:28 PM

Obviously, Ed Burns has been ridiculing the Ed Trust approach and now Simon is going to present the Richard Rothstein approach. The only thing better in education writing is when Richard Price, author of the Clockers who actually lived in the Jersey projects, is the co-author. Remember Price's episode where the alt.ed. kids debated whether to beat down another and they agreed that you had to be hard because everyone's always watching you. Then they cut to police watching and entrapping the guy on the bicycle. Regardless of whether you are dealing with schools, the drug war, politicians, or the press, when you mandate top down data-driven accountability and try to remove professional judgement from teachers, judges, editors, whatever, then Campbell's Law holds true. True believers just make things worse when they deny the complexity of humanity.

Burns, Price, et. al. knew that the same human comedy that accompanied the war on drugs and that was made worse by the 1986 drug law would be repeated with NCLB. The police call it "juking the stats," educators call it Campbell's law, and in the best punch line of last year, the principal called it "curriculum alignment."

Burn's a former teacher has a perfect pitch in ridiculing the Ed Trust. His real-life asst. principal played a bit part two years ago when Bunny brought the street dealers back to the school gym but couldn't shut them up. The real life principal did. She and Burns battled over alternative education. Most teachers agree with Burns, and deride theorists who resist alt. ed. because they believe that High Expectations and professional development are enough. But he respected his real-life asst. principal. Being a realist, she compromised and they referred their "Corner Kids" to an alt. ed. program.

I'm assuming that the leader of the John Hopkins team is based on Robert Balfanz. The character sure resembled him. And they know that when dealing with the most troubled they are, "heading into uncharted terriotory."

I'm anticipating that the reporter will be a composite of the reporters who faked sources and an Ed Trust/Its Being Done advocate who will blame the schools for the sins of all of Baltimore.

Again, Burns and Simon are equally brilliant in lambasting the crass opportunists and the naive idealist, and indicate that they are equally destructive. Its sorta like the equal damage done by Bush and the Left in NCLB, because neither can see "shades of grey." In schools like the streets, if you can't revel in the complexity of human nature, you are heading for a fall.

John Thompson

Posted by: wonkery123 | January 15, 2008 12:40 AM

Well, let's see. According to UNESCO the United States has (1) the highest rates of childhood poverty in 28 OECD nations; (2) the lowest rates of family support through social services; and (3) is just about tied with England as the worst place in the advanced world to be a child, in terms of health care, family support, social services, and violence.

What else? In many large cities, the number of deaths from gunshots reaches 25-33% of the rate in Iraq since the war started. I think that probably means the gunshot death rate per 100,000 citizens in these cities is higher than it is in Iraq. Meanwhile in some rural counties in the South, nearly 50% of school-aged children live with neither parent. When Bill Clinton was President, a story actually ran in the Washington Post about a 12-year-old girl who wanted to pick out the dress she would be buried in, since she was sure she would die on Washington's mean streets. It's hard to pay much attention to AYP goals when student bystanders are ducking bullets on a near-daily basis in urban drug conflicts.

It's understandable that the powers-that-be would not want to make this thing too complex, as the video clip indicates. So the talking heads and blowhards have agreed that the problem is in the schools, a perfect holding bin where the problem and the solution can both be measured.

And they get a bonus. The bloviators get to bash teachers' unions and public employees generally -- a win-win situation for the fans of the fairy dust of markets in both parties.

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