Blackhawk World

Michigan’s Public Schools Face Financial Ruin: A Boring Topic

Mike Klosner — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 10:58:18 GMT

That’s an alarming title –if you think about it, but no one seems to be thinking too much about the current state of ‘school finance’. Granted, it’s not a flashy topic. Not as flashy and controversial as, say, Rosey O’Donell. There is some passion where “taxes” are evoked and charged words like ‘accountability’ make it somewhat of a hot topic. But for the most part public schools, despite the 20 some years of scrutiny, attacks and changes, remain barely solvent, besides dull and except for the occasional championship team, very boring. Kids say that too often. Financially schools are at a perpetual, boring C-. Not enough money, or barely enough money is just too much of an old story.

Recently (this April) the State has warned of a $90-$100 per pupil reduction. (To put it into context, that’s about 3-4 teacher lay offs here at Fennville. -Fennville has already lost 13 teachers to early retirement, this year. That’s about 400 years of experience…to put it into context.) To think that this constant, reduction-type,-accountability has no effect upon our students is to bury our heads in the 20^th Century and hope Henry Ford’s assembly line will keep making cars to support our schools.

It’s easy to talk or complain about, but what do we REALLY do? It costs over $20,000 dollars a year (usually much more) to meet the needs of a special education student. A ‘regular ed. Student’ is supposed to be educated within the $7,600 and some change the state grants. The Feds kick in about 8%, then mandate expenditures of around 15% with No Child Left Behind and the rest comes from you and I. Some people offer simple solutions: close the schools. Lay off teachers and administrators. Just teach with a piece of chalk, etc. The simple suggestions sound easy –especially when you are angry and of course, are not feasible. Not yet anyway.

For almost a century Michigan received a big pay off for little public school investment. Workers could add parts to the assembly line and go to Friday night games for what amounted to chump change. Kids got a good assembly-line-style education. The Russians gave us a little scare with their Sputniks, but we don’t scare easy. We outspent them, buried THEM and went back to our comfortable lives of barely being aware of Kosovo or Baghdad, let alone what our kids were learning in school.

However, whatever they were learning did not seem to match what was happening in the world around us. If you haven’t noticed there has not been very many shift changes at the local factory. Medical technicians are reading our MRI’s (magnetic resonance images) in Australia. Software companies in India are writing programs to deal with unemployment in Indiana. Mortgage companies have their properties titles’ researched by people in front of computers in cities like Bangalor, India; places we cannot pronounce, let alone locate on a map. We buy fuel efficient cars from Japan and pay for expensive gasoline here. Walmart is the nation’s largest employer (!) and their product labels say, over and over, Made in China.

Yes, the times, as they say, are a changin’: It takes two minimum wage workers, adjusted for inflation, to earn what just one worker did in the 60’s. (Holly Slkar) And the news gets even grimmer. Since 2000 college-educated workers’ wages have fallen steadily. In 2005 Americans borrowed more money than they earned. (Parade Magazine) Business Week: “China’s competitive edge is shifting from low-cost workers to state-of-the-art-manufacturing. India is creating world-class innovation hubs, and its companies are far better performers than China’s.” In the U.S. we try to remain competitive by cutting wages and benefits. Our competitors gain the edge over us by moving ahead with investments in technology, innovation and an educated work force. Among the world’s 100 largest corporations in 2005, only 30 some were U.S. companies. Yet Americans work 200 more hours a year than our counterparts in European countries. (Holly Sklar) We work more for less and less. Both parents, too often, work more for less and less

And in the same article, A High-Road Economy: (http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/03/17/wanted_a_highroad_economy.php)

from a study done by the prestigious MIT of 500 international companies, "Contrary to the widely held belief of many managers, we conclude that solutions that depend on driving down costs by reducing wages and social benefits —are always dead ends. . . The activities that succeed over time are, in contrast, those that build on continuous learning and innovation."

We have students who have never intentionally opened the (paper) pages of an encyclopedia, but who can access the CIA fact book online. They can look at their home from a camera in orbit. MySpace, a social networking web site, has over a 100 million members. 61% are teenagers. They have messages, photos, chat rooms and yes, predators, stalking those cyber neighborhoods. We know of campus killings even before the victims know they are being literally murdered. No, this is not our fathers’ world. And shockingly, horribly, it might not be our children’s world anymore.

Our public schools, with what little monies they have, must prepare our kids for a future with all the above feature. It can be frightening or exciting depending on how good your community’s school really is. And it is more frightening if you don’t know this or don’t really care.

So is school finance a boring topic? Yes. Is it important? You, as a citizen, will have to determine that.

Public Schools, Gas stations, Iraq and the Super Highway

Mike Klosner — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 08:13:00 GMT

Public Schools, Gas stations, Iraq and the Super Highway

We may need to solve problems not by removing the cause but by designing the way forward even if the cause remains in place. -Edward de Bono

It’s a an old adage, that needs repeating, information does not necessarily equal knowledge or certainly wisdom. (We are using ‘knowledge’ here to mean having a sense of wisdom, of having the ability to make good, educated choices based on information.) We do have plenty of information, whether in print or available online (digitally) in its own many forms, images for example. In 1987 the New York Times published a newspaper that was 1,612 pages long! Not only was that a contemporary record for the Times, it was twice the information available to a person living in the 19^th Century! Twice. And that was in one newspaper.

Now we have the web, which is very, very wide, but very, very shallow. By this I mean the amount of information is staggering, some 11.5 billion web pages and growing each day ( 9 zeros after the 11). Yet how do we connect to this information? How is it organized? Google, Alta Vista and Ask Jeeves are common, but they do not search in the same way that you would go to the library and look for a book and only vaguely like you’d look up an encyclopedia article. They search using “hits”, how many times a page is visited. That’s shallow information. That means, using the old fashioned book technology, that you would look in a card catalog that only contained books that are popular and read a lot. This is why you say, how do kids find out this ‘stuff’! It’s a popularity contest. Is this the way to knowledge, to knowing? I don’t know. I don’t think so, but I don’t know, because information, or perhaps more accurately, accessibility to information is changing so quickly I don’t know if it is helping me gain knowledge or merely information of the popular variety. Knowledge, remember, is dependent on information.

If I know gasoline comes from the Fennville gas station, I have information. –I’m informed. I could tell you, or someone else, where it comes from and be correct. I could tell you the address, show you a photo or a map on Mapquest. I would be an informed person. Would I have ‘knowledge’ of gasoline. Absolutely not. Knowledge of gasoline is deeper, much deeper. (Pardon the pun.)

“Gasoline knowledge”, has geo-political and historical ramifications. Most oil comes from ‘other’ countries. They are countries within our “sphere of interest” and there in lies some major problems. Some are friendly, some are just greedy and some just downright hate us, but knowledge of gasoline, oil and energy is crucial to our world, even in Fennville.

We had information about Iraq, but we, especially in hindsight, had little knowledge of the country, the people, the geo-political ramifications of disrupting a region to impose our ideas.

But, this is not about Iraq. It is about information, knowledge and public schools. What do we do as educators to teach children about the nature of information? What processes, what curriculum vitae do we require, as teachers, as a community and as a nation to produce knowledgeable citizens? Citizens, by the way, who can protect their families, communities and their livelihoods. This is pretty serious stuff, because we (Americans) do not want to be out smarted by those who wish us ill or even those who just want our jobs. We need to teach new information, literacy skills that reflect the digital information forms –especially delivered on the internet. We need to teach how to transform information into knowledge. We teach kids to look both ways as they cross the street, yet we let them play on the Internet’s Super Highway without a thought to their educational safety, let alone as to who they are not becoming.

I fear this: not a super jet crashing into our skyscrapers, but a bright future, suddenly dimmed, rolling ominously down that super highway, towards us, towards our children who are playing indifferently on the road, plugged into their ipods, unaware of that huge, crushing machine coming at the speed of digital light towards them. And we with no way to warn them.

I fear all they will ever “know” is that gasoline comes from the gas station.

Public Schools and the multiplicity of American life

Mike Klosner — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 09:32:00 GMT

I like the word ‘multiplicity’ instead of ‘diversity’. Diversity is a code word for people who are either apologizing for being a true cross section of America, or are trying to attract people to participate in the American historical experience, which by the way, is one of constant immigration. Immigration started here in north America with those first Americans that migrated across the Bering Straits. It is never ending, in constant flux and not as idealistic as we like to portray it. Take for example our own state’s city of Dearborn, once the un-melting pot of Ford workers, now the home of more than 250,000 Iraqis, Lebanese and others suffering from the human propensity not to diversify. The Sunnis want Iraq for the Sunnis and the Shia want Iraq for the Shia. The Israelis want only Israelis around the Temple. It is an old, sad story. One wonders if those first Amerinds, crossing that incredibly hostile ice bridge, were fleeing rather than looking for the promised land. People tend to stay where they are until other people make them move for a variety of usually sad reasons.
Where does education come into the picture? Much to the chagrin of the political right wing, Public Education does something wonderful, it gives people the abilities to survive and thrive and at the same time keep their differences. Where else do history books talk about slavery and Dr. King in the same pages? If you are different (and we all are) because of where and whom you come from and yet you are a literate, functioning citizen, i.e., an educated citizen of this great country, then you are uniquely, successfully American. You have a multiplicity of skills learned in public school that minimalizes the disadvantages of coming from somewhere else. It is not diversity that public schools add to this nation and our American culture, it is the multiplicity of learning and ability to prosper. Again it is hard to imagine this in any other countries except modern Europe that learned some very hard lessons in the last century.
We see this all the time with amazement. We see people of diversity doing multiple jobs. They ring cash registers and they clean airports; they teach in universities and own business. We see, perhaps, their skin color or hear their accents or native languages, but we miss their multiple skills, the multiplicity of functioning in a place where they are relatively new. Fennville Public Schools is a fine example of diversity, but its best product is the multiplicity of its students. Fennville Schools has literally produced jet pilots, politicians, web designers, artists and automotive engineers, in short helped create the multiple lives of economically and socially successful Americans. How great is that?
Public schools teach multiplicity and enable all of us to be better Americans and probably more importantly, better humans in our travels through time and place.

Merry Christmas Public Schools!

Mike Klosner — Fri, 22 Dec 2006 12:03:00 GMT

Christmas, the New Year and Schools…

I had a wise teacher say to me, and I’ve repeated it many times, “You should realize that this is the last, best place where people care about your doing well or not…”

He was talking about school. I was pouting about something, or grumbling about something in school that we do so freely now days –and couldn’t do so freely in the “old days”.

He was pointing out that schools and the people in them, care about the kids doing well.

Of course it is not everyone, some might say, but it is in the high 90’s percentile. It is almost everyone that I know in the Fennville Schools. It is where people, not just teachers, but staff in general really care if kids are happy and doing well; that they are prospering; that they are growing to be what they should be, namely, happy citizens of this republic.

Later in life, as we go on to jobs, occupations and careers, we find that there are other concerns and reasons for our well being, namely if we are contributing to the organization; are we helping them make money. The concern is not if you are you happy, but that they are getting their money’s worth out of you. That, as they say, is life. It is how our society works.

But in Schools, for a brief time in our lives, it is near perfect, although we don’t of course realize it at the time. It is a world of genuine concern for our outcome. We leave it quickly. That time is indeed brief and fraught with many other concerns, but upon looking back it is the longest stretch of time where someone(s) cared about me, besides family. They cared about me, whether I deserved it or not (often didn’t) and they were forgiving of my mistakes and transgressions.

We living in the United States are lucky that public schools provide, not just an education, but a time where others care for our children with such devotedness and passion that they literally give their lives to do it.

It is a Christmas present from us to our children that keeps on giving every new year the school opens.

I’m grateful.

Education, Sports and Hospitality

Mike Klosner — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 09:15:00 GMT

You‘d think that ‘hospitality’, at first thought, belongs in the realm of travel or even in a philosophical or religious discussion. Certainly it is one of the moral imperatives that you give shelter and comfort to those in need. We are taught to welcome strangers. Hotel chains and the tourist industry take it as a standard of monetary necessity. Schools are learning, if they have not already learned, the hard lessons of being places of welcome.

It might not be odd then to think of hospitality in the context of education. We find ourselves, in many ways, like the travel business.

Hospitality is important because schools are constantly visiting and being visited in one way or another. Their sports teams visit other schools and their bands march on each others’ fields -or in Disney World if they are lucky. We look at the smiling faces of their graduates and we judge their kids by their behavior in their varsity jackets.

When you visit another school you are their guest. You are in their house. High school athletes probably know this feeling better than anyone. Every school has an attitude. Some are good. Some are welcoming. Some are a little aloof or worse.

If we are welcomed we can easily feel it, like you can feel a genuine smile. If we are given a place to sit and a comfortable, welcoming environment we feel it deeply. It touches that religious part of us.

At a recent basketball game, at another school, I saw a section of bleachers yellow taped off for the home team’s own use. It was a crowded event of great rivalry and bleacher real estate was at a premium. That is, of course, all well and fine. School functions are community functions. The home team need their fans to sit behind them. Some Fennville fans had unknowingly wandered into the section and sat down. They had not seen some other Fennville fans before them asked to move. They were quickly approached by a volunteer and asked to move. A discussion followed, which did not look overly friendly, but in the end they relented and all moved. You are always at a disadvantage on foreign soil. I saw several sets of Fennville fans asked to leave that section of bleachers.

In the end the reserved section mostly filled up. The game went on and we left the gym and basketball game to victorious memories, but I saw school hospitality differently after that. In my opinion it had been a breach of hospitality.

Hospitality is passive and kind. If hospitality is religious in nature one’s own seat would be offered to the stranger, like offering the naked one’s own clothes or shoes. If one’s hospitality is philosophical in nature, one would offer to share the seats. If the hospitality were commercial in nature, a deal would have been struck and money exchanged, but none of this happened. We were guests, but we were denied the hospitality due us.

It might be a sign of the times. We are sensitive of our ‘borders’, of what is ours and what is theirs. Sports, by nature, enforces this. But maybe we have become too sensitized to the dangers of strangers. Maybe we need to re-enforce our sense of hospitality, teach it in the same sense and way we teach sportsmanship. In a world gone crazy with ownership, perhaps we need to own our own humanity and offer it to others. Maybe that’s the best definition of ‘hospitality’, a sharing of one’s humanity.