#i would rather every other student in this class cheat and have an 'unfair advantage' over me

[theygender]

I'm in an information systems class rn and we're starting out with Excel which I'm already really good at and use in my job daily and tbh it's so frustrating. I'm successfully completing the tasks my assignments want me to do but then I get marked wrong and when I go to check how the system wanted me to do it I'm like "Why would I do it that way?? That's so much less efficient"

[amphtaminedreams]

COVID-19, Negligent Manslaughter, and a Timeline of Tory Indifference

“I feel sorry for Boris Johnson. He is doing the best he can in the situation and I don’t think anybody else could have done a better job.”

[exhibit A: a gem somebody that I’m Facebook friends with reposted earlier]

It’s a sentiment that I cannot quite wrap my head around. I sit here hopeless and furious and trying to hold back tears because it’s been almost a year since England first went into lockdown and yet here we are, almost 100,000 dead, in an even worse position than we were before whilst other countries begin to slowly return to normality. It is clear to me who is to blame for this, however there are a large proportion of people who don’t want to “politicise” the actions of the PRIME MINISTER with regards to his approach towards handling a virus sweeping the country he GOVERNS. 

Typically, these kind of posts making the rounds on social media will be accompanied by some kind of photo of Boris Johnson looking somber as if to suggest that the way things have played out were beyond his control and that he is some kind of broken man beleaguered by the suffering he has, despite good intentions, inadvertently caused.

This one in particular of Johnson with his head in his hands is a staple. In reality, this is a photo taken back in 2018 whilst he was receiving flack from party members for comparing Theresa May to a suicide bomber (for her handling of Brexit, ironically) as well as from the papers due to his rumoured (now also proven, in a completely non-surprising turn of events, to be true) affair with his former aide, Carrie Symonds. 

So let’s shut this narrative-where we should feel for Boris because he’s doing his best, and apparently a better job than anybody else could’ve done in his situation- down right here. In a supposedly developed country with one of the world’s largest economies, if we’re talking by proportion, our COVID-19 death toll is up there with the worst of them. It seems that every other state figurehead (bar a small handful), and I mean almost every single one of them, is doing a better job. People love to throw figures out there about how densely populated we are to combat damning statistics as if we haven’t got just as many factors playing to our advantage, as if it’s unfair to compare our response to Germany’s or Japan’s or Singapore’s (both of which are far more densely populated) or New Zealand’s or Vietnam’s, but we are an ISLAND with world-leading technology and infrastructure and healthcare equipment and professionals and a relatively high standard of living. In what world is almost 70,000 dead in a country with abundant time and means to prepare a response reflective of said country’s leaders doing a good job?

Apparently we’re supposed to believe that Johnson feels some sense of moral responsibility for this astronomical failure. A man who refuses to acknowledge the multiple children he has fathered outside of his marriages and who has had repeatedly engaged in affairs and one-night stands throughout said marriages. A man who continued to cheat whilst his most recent wife was receiving treatment for cervical cancer, for fuck’s sake. Yep, a real stand-up guy. 

So where does this idea that Johnson must feel remorseful for this catastrophe come from? We haven’t seen a second of remorse or a hint of accountability for the lives lost from him nor any members of his cabinet. That much is really no surprise; I have this hypothesis, and it’s not a stretch, that these people do not have an ounce of empathy in their bodies. These ridiculously privileged, privately-educated individuals who have had everything handed to them their entire lives simply cannot put themselves in the shoes of the average working person and that is the problem. Unable to recognise that what distinguishes them from most others is little more than the luck of being born into wealth and the abundance of recourses and connections that has entailed throughout their lives, they see us as beneath them-as less intelligent, less driven, and thus less deserving of the status and respect they enjoy. They see us as a bunch of whining, unmotivated idiots who do not recognise the chokehold they have over our media nor the fact that everything they do is a desperate grab to keep money and power within the hands of a select group of people, an exclusive members club from which most of us are barred (just take a simple Google search and watch Jacob Rees-Mogg’s opinion of the Grenfell victims or the buried Johnson speech where he talks about how inequality is essential). They know that we will squabble amongst ourselves about who is to blame rather than wising up to the truth which is that every decision they make is fuelled by cronyism and the inability to make and follow through with difficult choices, the pandemic being no exception. The supposedly self-made elite see the life of the average working class person as having far less value than their own, and their parties actions over the last 10 years have made that very clear. 

It was in December 2019 that the first case of COVID-19 was declared to the World Health Organisation and on March the 11th that they announced they considered it as a pandemic. In Wuhan, people were dying of pneumonia in their clusters. And what was Boris Johnson doing in this time? Well for starters, here in the UK we didn’t even have a pandemic committee-Johnson had scrapped it six months before. If years of benefits cuts and defunding of the NHS in favour of funding nuclear weapon programs, keeping British troops on other people’s lands, and tax breaks for the mega corporations that donate to their party didn’t convince you that the Conservatives have little regard for human life, them getting rid of this committee-whilst a pandemic has been declared year after year as the greatest threat to mankind-should have been the first sign of trouble. As if that wasn’t enough, he also skipped five of the COBRA (meetings are made up of a cross-departmental committee put together to respond to national emergencies and PMs routinely attend those pertaining to crises on the scale of COVID-19) meetings addressing the situation. Whilst other countries were closing their borders and stocking up on PPE, Johnson and his ministers were selling PPE abroad and simply telling people to wash their hands to the length of the tune of happy birthday. Their only policy was one of “herd immunity”, which was in fact not a policy but just an abandonment of their party’s public duty disguised as one, intentionally obfuscated with pseudoscientific jargon.

Even thinking the absolute worst of politicians you would hope that when it came to the point where the UK’s non-response to COVID-19 was becoming an international disgrace, Johnson and his ministers would take proper protective measures if only to save face. But when they eventually seemed to do so, it became clear that the priority was not the safety of the ordinary people affected by the virus. Outsourcing their test and traces system to companies such as Serco, Sitel, Deloitte and G4S rather than public health services, Conservative ministers could not resist attempting to line the pockets of their friends and benefactors in the process. According to the Guardian, instead of reaching out to the experts or using publicly funded services to handle COVID containment measures, the Conservative party has awarded a disgusting £1.5 BILLION WORTH of contracts to businesses with explicit connections to its MPs and donors, the majority of which lack any relative experience of the tasks they’ve been trusted to carry out. Unsurprisingly, the National Audit office found that when awarding contracts relating to the production of COVID-19 protection measures and treatment needs, there was a “high-priority lane” for suppliers referred by senior politicians and officials; companies with a political referral were 10 times more likely to end up winning a government contract than those without. On top of this, it is not hard to draw a link between the late initiation of lockdown measures and preemptive openings of pubs and restaurants against scientific advice to the interests of frequent donors such as Wetherspoons owner Tim Martin. Even if one chooses to ignore the blatantly obvious correlation between the owners of the businesses whose profits were prioritised over safety concerns and the number of those owners who donate to the Conservatives, party officials at the very least were reluctant to follow the lead of many other countries in financing furlough schemes themselves and instead avoided this responsibility by using loose lockdown measures to leave it down to the discretion of small business owners, who couldn’t themselves afford to furlough staff, whether or not to stay open. 

Time and time again, as the government flounder and fuck about, favouring personal desires to keep their powerful, high-paying jobs and to satisfy the corporate allies who make this possible, blame has been shifted from the public to care homes to NHS workers and back again whilst we, the public, make the biggest sacrifices of all under the illusion that we were being guided out of this pandemic rather than lied to and thrown under the bus. Whilst the elite continue to pick and choose what rules apply to them, it’s students and the elderly and the vulnerable paying the fines and scrabbling to afford basic living costs and hoping that they don’t lose someone dear to them.

Don’t get me wrong, a large proportion of the public have contributed to the spread too with their selfishness and entitlement and the arrogance it takes to develop a sudden refusal to acknowledge basic science from experts who have studied in the field their whole lives so that they can justify their need to go to the pub (speaking of, it’s absolutely HILARIOUS how many “mental health advocates” are suddenly coming out of the woodworks on football avi Twitter after they’ve spent years calling people on mental health Twitter attention seekers). And don't get me wrong, there were inevitably going to be casualties of this pandemic. But it didn't have to spread to this many people, and there didn’t have to be so many deaths due to a lack of preparation, and this wouldn’t have been the case if it weren’t for the inherent apathy of the Conservative party towards the lives of people of lesser status than them, the reluctance to put those lives before party interests. I wish I felt like there was an end in sight, I wish there was some positive takeaway from all of this, but even now, we continue to see corners being cut with the vaccine lauded as our saving grace and anti-maskers gathering outside hospitals to chant about how “oppressive” it is to be urged to wear a bit of cloth over their faces for the short periods of time in which they leave their houses and all I can think of is the selfishness that runs like poison through our country. It makes me sick and leaves me to question desperately where we go from here. I don’t like unanswered questions, I don’t like feeling politically directionless, and I don’t like the growing fear I have about the state of the world which seems to intensify every single day. In the UK at least, it’s starting to feel like nothing will ever change-we’re told we live in a democracy and yet mainstream media is owned by the people whose interest is to keep their Conservative friends in power. The stronghold they have over print media in particular allows them to continually get away with smearing and defaming every person who comes along and seems to want to actually help ordinary people, without being challenged, to the point where the only kind of “opposition” we’re left with promises nothing but a big boss approved tactical reshuffling of the status quo (which they call “electability”); it doesn’t feel like democracy when the majority of the country are being fed misleading information and convinced against voting in their best interests. 

This is the result of that. The state we find ourselves in is the inevitable result of being manipulated into helping the elite build their protective wall whilst the rest of us scrabble to get in and step on each others heads along the way, the people inside shouting over that it’s those even more vulnerable than ourselves that are taking our places. Outside the wall, the earth is falling from beneath our feet, and instead of throwing over the ropes to help us out, the people inside are stockpiling them so they can secure their firm place above ground and then later flog the rest. How many more people have to die before we reach some kind of widespread realisation of that? Where do we go from here and what do we do? Well for one, we can stop spreading those god-fucking-awful textposts on Facebook and get our heads out of our arses. Wear our masks over and wear them over our fucking noses. Have some fucking consideration for others. Don’t wait til an issue affects you personally to give a fuck about it. AND START HOLDING THE FUCKING PRIME MINISTER AND HIS MINISTERS AND HIS ENTIRE PARTY AS WELL AS THE OPPOSITION MPS THAT HAVE SAT BY THE SIDELINES AND ALLOWED THIS TO GO ON WITHOUT PROTEST ACCOUNTABLE. That would be a good start. 

I’m so tired. Things didn’t need to be this way, and yet because of the selfishness of the few, thousands upon thousands are dead. It’s not about “throwing around blame”, it’s not about “throwing around” anything, it’s about expecting a leader to do his best to protect lives. If that is “throwing blame”, let’s get things clear, I have no issue with hurtling it torpedo style at those who handed out a death sentence to so many in this country rather than do anything that might compromise their own privilege. Honestly, pass me the shovel after and I’ll happily bury the wreckage in the ground. Who wants to join?:-)

[rebeccaseattle]

Stand and Deliver

I am, practically speaking a math teacher. Technically speaking, I am a mild/moderate special ed teacher, but I teach math, to special ed kids, mostly.   

Growing up, one movie I saw over, and over, and over again in school was Stand and Deliver. It was played almost every day we had a sub or the teacher didn’t have a plan, etc, etc etc. Then, my senior year my school theater program (of which I was highly involved) decided to do the play version. I essentially memorized that film. If you don’t know the movie, is carefully based off a true story of the famous math teacher, Jaime Escalante, an immigrant from Bolivia, whose teaches/coaches/mentors a handful of underserved high school students from a gang-ridden Garfield High School in LA into taking and passing the AP Calculus exam. These students success is so impressive, that they naturally are accused of cheating and the students have to retake a harder version of the test to indeed prove they do know math that well. 

Anyway, now that I am working math students, I asked myself, should I show the movie to my students? Somehow no one in my school seemed to know about the film. I’m sure things have changed in the 15 years since my own high school experience, and I’m in a different demographic. So I researched the movie carefully and how different educators felt about it. 

I ended up reading a lot about Jaime Escalante and the true story the film was based on. It was actually pretty close, a lot closer than your usual Hollywood films, it’s inaccuracies were few and not to dramatic. 

I found one fascinating blog post all about why teachers should not show this film to their students. One major point was, while Jaime Escalante was clearly an amazing educator who lead his kids to success, he was very controversial. Not only at Garfield high school as is portrayed in the film for pushing his kids so hard and setting high expectations for him, but also for later in life as he supported “English Only” movement in education. Many had the opinion that such an outlook is oppressive to students learning English as a second language. Most of the blog readers I read who said this, were like me, white, and native English speakers. I found this fascinating. I don’t necessarily agree with the English only movement, I don’t have an opinion and don’t think it’s my place to form one at this time. However, I think it’s possible to separate one person’s endeavor from another and appreciate one without the other. For example, I do in fact like Einstein’s general theory of relativity, however Albert was a huge jerk to his first wife, Meliva (whose name appears on one of the early drafts as its often said she helped with the math involved) and left her penniless with 3 children he refused to support for over a decade. Still Albert Einstein did do an amazing job of figuring out, testing, and working on this theory and that’s still amazing and inspiring. So I don’t think that was a valid reason to not watch it. 

Another educator wrote that Stand and Deliver was in the same spirit of “Dangerous Minds” which is definitely a movie about white saviorism. That movie, whose title alone offends me, also based on a true story, is about a white lady who comes to a gang-ridden high school and teaches English to underserved populations and like reduces gang violence or something (it’s been a while). That of course is a theme I need to avoid at all costs, savorism is a horrifying myth I seen projected onto my job, more on that later. For more fun we can watch the SNL skit “Pretty White Lady.”

However, Stand and Deliver is not the same as Dangerous Minds. The teacher is not a white person, but an immigrant himself who is technically classified as Latino. Okay, yes Bolivia is a very different country than say Mexico, or the other countries my students, or his, may come from. And I’m sure they don’t speak the same type of Spanish is Bolivia then say other countries, but still he’s an immigrant literally speaking the same language as his students. 

Also, the other factor I had to point out, is the math in Stand and Deliver, is actually very real math. In college I learned an excellent short cut to integration by parts, that my professors learned from the movie. Today things are a lot better, but in that era, the math in movies, was actually quite fake, and bad. The math that is done in SD, is actually quite accurate. It’s real calculus, algebra, and trig. I figured if nothing else I could show it to my kids purely for them to try to recognize the math happening in the movie. 

So I played the movie for my students and kept an open mind. I tried not to lecture or get to preachy toward them, I just wanted to be open to how they responded and then figure out if this was an advantageous movie for them to see. I did tell them to be aware of the various math tricks that happened in the movie. 

Also it was my first time watching the movie since I learned calculus and was very excited to revisit these scenes and examine the math. 

So here is the results:

1. My kids loved the movie. If for nothing else, they liked watching a movie in their math class. They would much rather watch movies then do math. It didn’t matter that the movie was nearly half a century old, still better than doing a worksheet or something. 

2. One thing that I noticed is that a number of my kids liked that the movie was about latina/latino students. A number of my students have a lot of pride in their ethnicity. While there are a number of white people in the movie, they show up in minor supporting roles. Much like the reverse of what we see in Hollywood today. The movie really is about Latin Americans and they seemed to appreciate that they were in the foreground. The minute it started, one of my students who had never spoke to me before then, told me about one of his favorite old movies, that was casted completely by latino actors. 

Furthermore, while Escalante is central, and he is portrayed as a hero, the real heroes of the movie are actually the high school students. It was very much a movie about kids in high school that delved into their family lives, dating issues, career decisions, conflicts with friends, etc. So it’s also a movie about high school kids. 

3. In addition, despite the movie being around 40 years old, there were a couple of cultural elements my students seem to relate to. For example, the way my students greet each other and their particular hand shake (which I can’t do, but am learning, growth mindset) was done in the movie by adults. In the scene when Guadalupe was putting her brothers and sisters to bed, one of my students, who identifies as Mexican, called out, “That’s a Mexican household there. That’s my cousins” My students commented on what food was being cooked in scenes and compared it to their friends and families’ cooking. In the conflict scene where Escalante confronts the college board representatives about the accusations, they were super engaged, predicting, accurately what Escalante would say next and how they would have handled it. They pointed out to me we have the same desks as the students in the movie (facepalm here). They even explained to me, the subtext of the gang violence around Angel in the movie. This is something I didn’t see or understand when I was a kid.  Of course this wasn’t the whole movie. A lot of the scenes culturally didn’t make sense to them, they were outdated, not relatable, or relevant. 

4. They liked that the movie talked openly about racism. Going back to that scene where Escalante confronts the school board, they were super engaged. They got very excited when Escalante confronts the college board representatives, and the fact that they were sent out because of their distinct ethnic backgrounds. They liked that the racism was being called out rather than everyone turning a blind eye and closed mouth. Most of my students, regardless of ethnicity were engaged in that part. 

Some of the kids though just spaced out, or were on their phones. I still have mixed feelings about the film, and would welcome other’s opinions about showing stand and deliver as a math teacher. It could be they were just grateful for a chill day. 

For me, I noticed a few things. 

1. The math is very accurate, and there are a couple of really cool math tricks happening in it. Namely integration by parts and the trick to multiply by nines using the fingers. 

2. I liked that Escalante pointed out the Mayans understood the concept of zero long before europeans did. I personally also like pointing out white people did not invent algebra, middle easterners did. I think the history of math is important, but is often whitewashed to be just about the Greeks and Romans. Often in history, only white history is told and the accomplishments of groups is silenced. 

3. The only math flaw I saw in the movie was when Escalante read ln(x-1) as the words L N. Any Calculus teacher worth their weight would of course read it as “The Natural Log of x minus 1. 

4. There are all sorts of subtext I understand now as an adult, that I didn’t as a kid. The fact the Ana leaves the test early so others won’t be accused of cheating off of her, or that Guadalupe doesn’t have a place or time to study when she’s at home. 

5. There is a honestly, the kids are clearly treated unfair by society and the movie points out this truth. The kids rise above by having to work extra hard to retake the test. I don’t know about the message of having the kids to work extra hard, I don’t want to get to preachy in my profession. But at least it acknowledges the unfair, racist elements the kids deal with, rather than be in denial or victim blaming I often see. It does have the message that the the kids are up to the challenge. They may have to work harder, but they are certainly underestimate by those in power over them. That makes an interesting point, but I’m not sure what it is yet. 

Anyway, I showed the movie this year, and I would love other’s thoughts about it. 

[djatoon]

Fantastic article. A must-Read for all parents and/or teachers.

“1. To be a parent is to be compromised. You pledge allegiance to justice for all, you swear that private attachments can rhyme with the public good, but when the choice comes down to your child or an abstraction—even the well-being of children you don’t know—you’ll betray your principles to the fierce unfairness of love. Then life takes revenge on the conceit that your child’s fate lies in your hands at all. The organized pathologies of adults, including yours—sometimes known as politics—find a way to infect the world of children. Only they can save themselves.

Our son underwent his first school interview soon after turning 2. He’d been using words for about a year. An admissions officer at a private school with brand-new, beautifully and sustainably constructed art and dance studios gave him a piece of paper and crayons. While she questioned my wife and me about our work, our son drew a yellow circle over a green squiggle.

Rather coolly, the admissions officer asked him what it was. “The moon,” he said. He had picked this moment to render his very first representational drawing, and our hopes rose. But her jaw was locked in an icy and inscrutable smile.

Later, at a crowded open house for prospective families, a hedge-fund manager from a former Soviet republic told me about a good public school in the area that accepted a high percentage of children with disabilities. As insurance against private school, he was planning to grab a spot at this public school by gaming the special-needs system—which, he added, wasn’t hard to do.

Wanting to distance myself from this scheme, I waved my hand at the roomful of parents desperate to cough up $30,000 for preschool and said, “It’s all a scam.” I meant the whole business of basing admissions on interviews with 2-year-olds. The hedge-fund manager pointed out that if he reported my words to the admissions officer, he’d have one less competitor to worry about.

When the rejection letter arrived, I took it hard as a comment on our son, until my wife informed me that the woman with the frozen smile had actually been interviewing us. We were the ones who’d been rejected. We consoled ourselves that the school wasn’t right for our family, or we for it. It was a school for amoral finance people.

At a second private school, my wife watched intently with other parents behind a one-way mirror as our son engaged in group play with other toddlers, their lives secured or ruined by every share or shove. He was put on the wait list.

Places at the preschool were awarded on a first-come, first-served basis. At the front of the line, parents were lying in sleeping bags. They had spent the night outside.

The system that dominates our waking hours, commands our unthinking devotion, and drives us, like orthodox followers of an exacting faith, to extraordinary, even absurd feats of exertion is not democracy, which often seems remote and fragile. It’s meritocracy—the system that claims to reward talent and effort with a top-notch education and a well-paid profession, its code of rigorous practice and generous blessings passed down from generation to generation. The pressure of meritocracy made us apply to private schools when our son was 2—not because we wanted him to attend private preschool, but because, in New York City, where we live, getting him into a good public kindergarten later on would be even harder, and if we failed, by that point most of the private-school slots would be filled. As friends who’d started months earlier warned us, we were already behind the curve by the time he drew his picture of the moon. We were maximizing options—hedging, like the finance guy, like many families we knew—already tracing the long line that would lead to the horizon of our son’s future.

I stood waiting in the cold with a strange mix of feelings. I hated the hypercompetitive parents who made everyone’s life more tense. I feared that I’d cheated our son of a slot by not rising until the selfish hour of 5:30. And I worried that we were all bound together in a mad, heroic project that we could neither escape nor understand, driven by supreme devotion to our own child’s future. All for a nursery school called Huggs.

New York’s distortions let you see the workings of meritocracy in vivid extremes. But the system itself—structured on the belief that, unlike in a collectivized society, individual achievement should be the basis for rewards, and that, unlike in an inherited aristocracy, those rewards must be earned again by each new generation—is all-American. True meritocracy came closest to realization with the rise of standardized tests in the 1950s, the civil-rights movement, and the opening of Ivy League universities to the best and brightest, including women and minorities. A great broadening of opportunity followed. But in recent decades, the system has hardened into a new class structure in which professionals pass on their money, connections, ambitions, and work ethic to their children, while less educated families fall further behind, with little chance of seeing their children move up.

In his new book, The Meritocracy Trap, the Yale Law professor Daniel Markovits argues that this system turns elite families into business enterprises, and children into overworked, inauthentic success machines, while producing an economy that favors the super-educated and blights the prospects of the middle class, which sinks toward the languishing poor. Markovits describes the immense investments in money and time that well-off couples make in their children. By kindergarten, the children of elite professionals are already a full two years ahead of middle-class children, and the achievement gap is almost unbridgeable.

On that freezing sidewalk, I felt a shudder of revulsion at the perversions of meritocracy. And yet there I was, cursing myself for being 30th in line.

2.

not long after he drew the picture of the moon, our son was interviewed at another private school, one of the most highly coveted in New York. It was the end of 2009, early in President Barack Obama’s first term, and the teachers were wearing brightly colored hope pendants that they had crafted with their preschoolers. I suppressed disapproval of the partisan display (what if the face hanging from the teachers’ necks were Sarah Palin’s?) and reassured myself that the school had artistic and progressive values. It recruited the children of writers and other “creatives.” And our son’s monitored group play was successful. He was accepted.

The school had delicious attributes. Two teachers in each class of 15 children; parents who were concert pianists or playwrights, not just investment bankers; the prospect later on of classes in Latin, poetry writing, puppetry, math theory, taught by passionate scholars. Once in, unless a kid seriously messed up, he faced little chance of ever having to leave, until, 15 years on, the school matched its graduates with top universities where it had close relations with admissions offices. Students wouldn’t have to endure the repeated trauma of applying to middle and high schools that New York forces on public-school children. Our son had a place near the very front of the line, shielded from the meritocracy at its most ruthless. There was only one competition, and he had already prevailed, in monitored group play.

Two years later we transferred him to a public kindergarten.

My wife and I are products of public schools. Whatever torments they inflicted on our younger selves, we believed in them.

We had just had our second child, a girl. The private school was about to start raising its fee steeply every year into the indefinite future. As tuition passed $50,000, the creatives would dwindle and give way to the financials. I calculated that the precollege educations of our two children would cost more than $1.5 million after taxes. This was the practical reason to leave.

But there was something else—another claim on us. The current phrase for it is social justice. I’d rather use the word democracy, because it conveys the idea of equality and the need for a common life among citizens. No institution has more power to form human beings according to this idea than the public school. That was the original purpose of the “common schools” established by Horace Mann in the mid-19th century: to instill in children the knowledge and morality necessary for the success of republican government, while “embracing children of all religious, social, and ethnic backgrounds.”

The claim of democracy doesn’t negate meritocracy, but they’re in tension. One values equality and openness, the other achievement and security. Neither can answer every need. To lose sight of either makes life poorer. The essential task is to bring meritocracy and democracy into a relation where they can coexist and even flourish.

My wife and I are products of public schools. Whatever torments they inflicted on our younger selves, we believed in them. We wanted our kids to learn in classrooms that resembled the city where we lived. We didn’t want them to grow up entirely inside our bubble—mostly white, highly and expensively educated—where 4-year-olds who hear 21,000 words a day acquire the unearned confidence of insular advantage and feel, even unconsciously, that they’re better than other people’s kids.

Public schools are a public good. Our city’s are among the most racially and economically segregated in America. The gaps in proficiency that separate white and Asian from black and Latino students in math and English are immense and growing. Some advocates argue that creating more integrated schools would reduce those gaps. Whether or not the data conclusively prove it, to be half-conscious in America is to know that schools of concentrated poverty are likely to doom the children who attend them. This knowledge is what made our decision both political and fraught.

From October 2017: Americans have given up on public schools. That’s a mistake.

Our “zoned” elementary school, two blocks from our house, was forever improving on a terrible reputation, but not fast enough. Friends had pulled their kids out after second or third grade, so when we took the tour we insisted, against the wishes of the school guide, on going upstairs from the kindergarten classrooms and seeing the upper grades, too. Students were wandering around the rooms without focus, the air was heavy with listlessness, there seemed to be little learning going on. Each year the school was becoming a few percentage points less poor and less black as the neighborhood gentrified, but most of the white kids were attending a “gifted and talented” school within the school, where more was expected and more was given. The school was integrating and segregating at the same time.

One day I was at a local playground with our son when I fell into conversation with an elderly black woman who had lived in the neighborhood a long time and understood all about our school dilemma, which was becoming the only subject that interested me. She scoffed at our “zoned” school—it had been badly run for so long that it would need years to become passable. I mentioned a second school, half a dozen blocks away, that was probably available if we applied. Her expression turned to alarm. “Don’t send him there,” she said. “That’s a failure school. That school will always be a failure school.” It was as if an eternal curse had been laid on it, beyond anyone’s agency or remedy. The school was mostly poor and black. We assumed it would fail our children, because we knew it was failing other children.

That year, when my son turned 5, attending daytime tours and evening open houses became a second job. We applied to eight or nine public schools. We applied to far-flung schools that we’d heard took a few kids from out of district, only to find that there was a baby boom on and the seats had already been claimed by zoned families. At one new school that had a promising reputation, the orientation talk was clotted with education jargon and the toilets in the boys’ bathroom with shit, but we would have taken a slot if one had been offered.

Among the schools where we went begging was one a couple of miles from our house that admitted children from several districts. This school was economically and racially mixed by design, with demographics that came close to matching the city’s population: 38 percent white, 29 percent black, 24 percent Latino, 7 percent Asian. That fact alone made the school a rarity in New York. Two-thirds of the students performed at or above grade level on standardized tests, which made the school one of the higher-achieving in the city (though we later learned that there were large gaps, as much as 50 percent, between the results for the wealthier, white students and the poorer, Latino and black students). And the school appeared to be a happy place. Its pedagogical model was progressive—“child centered”—based on learning through experience. Classes seemed loose, but real work was going on. Hallways were covered with well-written compositions. Part of the playground was devoted to a vegetable garden. This combination of diversity, achievement, and well-being was nearly unheard-of in New York public schools. This school squared the hardest circle. It was a liberal white family’s dream. The admission rate was less than 10 percent. We got wait-listed.

The summer before our son was to enter kindergarten, an administrator to whom I’d written a letter making the case that our family and the school were a perfect match called with the news that our son had gotten in off the wait list. She gave me five minutes to come up with an answer. I didn’t need four and a half of them.

I can see now that a strain of selfishness and vanity in me contaminated the decision. I lived in a cosseted New York of successful professionals. I had no authentic connection—not at work, in friendships, among neighbors—to the shared world of the city’s very different groups that our son was about to enter. I was ready to offer him as an emissary to that world, a token of my public-spiritedness. The same narcissistic pride that a parent takes in a child’s excellent report card, I now felt about sending him in a yellow school bus to an institution whose name began with P.S.

A few parents at the private school reacted as if we’d given away a winning lottery ticket, or even harmed our son—such was the brittle nature of meritocracy. And to be honest, in the coming years, when we heard that sixth graders at the private school were writing papers on The Odyssey, or when we watched our son and his friends sweat through competitive public-middle-school admissions, we wondered whether we’d committed an unforgivable sin and went back over all our reasons for changing schools until we felt better.

Before long our son took to saying, “I’m a public-school person.” When I asked him once what that meant, he said, “It means I’m not snooty.” He never looked back.

Illustration of a hand holding a pencil

Paul Spella

3.

the public school was housed in the lower floors of an old brick building, five stories high and a block long, next to an expressway. A middle and high school occupied the upper floors. The building had the usual grim features of any public institution in New York—steel mesh over the lower windows, a police officer at the check-in desk, scuffed yellow walls, fluorescent lights with toxic PCBs, caged stairwells, ancient boilers and no air conditioners—as if to dampen the expectations of anyone who turned to government for a basic service. The bamboo flooring and state-of-the-art science labs of private schools pandered to the desire for a special refuge from the city. Our son’s new school felt utterly porous to it.

I had barely encountered an American public school since leaving high school. That was in the late 1970s, in the Bay Area, the same year that the tax revolt began its long evisceration of California’s stellar education system. Back then, nothing was asked of parents except that they pay their taxes and send their children to school, and everyone I knew went to the local public schools. Now the local public schools—at least the one our son was about to attend—couldn’t function without parents. Donations at our school paid the salaries of the science teacher, the Spanish teacher, the substitute teachers. They even paid for furniture. Because many of the families were poor, our PTA had a hard time meeting its annual fundraising goal of $100,000, and some years the principal had to send out a message warning parents that science or art was about to be cut. Not many blocks away, elementary schools zoned for wealthy neighborhoods routinely raised $1 million—these schools were called “private publics.” Schools in poorer neighborhoods struggled to bring in $30,000. This enormous gap was just one way inequality pursued us into the public-school system.

We threw ourselves into the adventure of the new school. We sent in class snacks when it was our week, I chaperoned a field trip to study pigeons in a local park, and my wife cooked chili for an autumn fundraiser. The school’s sense of mission extended to a much larger community, and so there was an appeal for money when a fire drove a family from a different school out of its house, and a food drive after Hurricane Sandy ravaged the New York area, and a shoe drive for Syrian refugees in Jordan. We were ready to do just about anything to get involved. When my wife came in one day to help out in class, she was enlisted as a recess monitor and asked to change the underwear of a boy she didn’t know from another class who’d soiled himself. (Volunteerism had a limit, and that was it.)

The private school we’d left behind had let parents know they weren’t needed, except as thrilled audiences at performances. But our son’s kindergarten teacher—an eccentric man near retirement age, whose uniform was dreadlocks (he was white), a leather apron, shorts, and sandals with socks—sent out frequent and frankly needy SOS emails. When his class of 28 students was studying the New York shoreline, he enlisted me to help build a replica of an antique cargo ship like the one docked off Lower Manhattan—could I pick up a sheet of plywood, four by eight by 5/8 of an inch, cut in half, along with four appropriate hinges and two dozen plumbing pieces, if they weren’t too expensive? He would reimburse me.

That first winter, the city’s school-bus drivers called a strike that lasted many weeks. I took turns with a few other parents ferrying a group of kids to and from school. Everyone who needed a ride would gather at the bus stop at 7:30 each morning and we’d figure out which parent could drive that day. Navigating the strike required a flexible schedule and a car, and it put immense pressure on families. A girl in our son’s class who lived in a housing project a mile from the school suddenly stopped attending. Administrators seemed to devote as much effort to rallying families behind the bus drivers’ union as to making sure every child could get to school. That was an early sign of what would come later, of all that would eventually alienate me, and I might have been troubled by it if I hadn’t been so taken with my new role as a public-school father teaming up with other parents to get us through a crisis.

4.

parents have one layer of skin too few. They’ve lost an epidermis that could soften bruises and dull panic. In a divided city, in a stratified society, that missing skin—the intensity of every little worry and breakthrough—is the shortest and maybe the only way to intimacy between people who would otherwise never cross paths. Children become a great leveler. Parents have in common the one subject that never ceases to absorb them.

In kindergarten our son became friends with a boy in class I’ll call Marcus. He had mirthful eyes, a faint smile, and an air of imperturbable calm—he was at ease with everyone, never visibly agitated or angry. His parents were working-class immigrants from the Caribbean. His father drove a sanitation truck, and his mother was a nanny whose boss had been the one to suggest entering Marcus in the school’s lottery—parents with connections and resources knew about the school, while those without rarely did. Marcus’s mother was a quietly demanding advocate for her son, and Marcus was exactly the kind of kid for whom a good elementary school could mean the chance of a lifetime. His family and ours were separated by race, class, and the dozen city blocks that spell the difference between a neighborhood with tree-lined streets, regular garbage collection, and upscale cupcake shops, and a neighborhood with aboveground power lines and occasional shootings. If not for the school, we would never have known Marcus’s family.

The boys’ friendship would endure throughout elementary school and beyond. Once, when they were still in kindergarten, my wife was walking with them in a neighborhood of townhouses near the school, and Marcus suddenly exclaimed, “Can you imagine having a backyard?” We had a backyard. Our son kept quiet, whether out of embarrassment or an early intuition that human connections require certain omissions. Marcus’s father would drop him off at our house on weekends—often with the gift of a bottle of excellent rum from his home island—or I would pick Marcus up at their apartment building and drive the boys to a batting cage or the Bronx Zoo. They almost always played at our house, seldom at Marcus’s, which was much smaller. This arrangement was established from the start without ever being discussed. If someone had mentioned it, we would have had to confront the glaring inequality in the boys’ lives. I felt that the friendship flourished in a kind of benign avoidance of this crucial fact.

At school our son fell in with a group of boys who had no interest in joining the lunchtime soccer games. Their freewheeling playground scrums often led to good-natured insults, wrestling matches, outraged feelings, an occasional punch, then reconciliation, until the next day. And they were the image of diversity. Over the years, in addition to our son and Marcus, there was another black boy, another white boy, a Latino boy, a mixed-race boy, a boy whose Latino mother was a teacher’s aide at the school, and an African boy with white lesbian parents. A teacher at the private school had once called our son “anti-authoritarian,” and it was true: He pursued friends who were mildly rebellious, irritants to the teachers and lunch monitors they didn’t like, and he avoided kids who always had their hand up and displayed obvious signs of parental ambition. The anxious meritocrat in me hadn’t completely faded away, and I once tried to get our son to befriend a 9-year-old who was reading Animal Farm, but he brushed me off. He would do this his own way.

The school’s pedagogy emphasized learning through doing. Reading instruction didn’t start until the end of first grade; in math, kids were taught various strategies for multiplication and division, but the times tables were their parents’ problem. Instead of worksheets and tests, there were field trips to the shoreline and the Noguchi sculpture museum. “Project-based learning” had our son working for weeks on a clay model of a Chinese nobleman’s tomb tower during a unit on ancient China.

Even as we continued to volunteer, my wife and I never stopped wondering if we had cheated our son of a better education. We got antsy with the endless craft projects, the utter indifference to spelling. But our son learned well only when a subject interested him. “I want to learn facts, not skills,” he told his first-grade teacher. The school’s approach—the year-long second-grade unit on the geology and bridges of New York—caught his imagination, while the mix of races and classes gave him something even more precious: an unselfconscious belief that no one was better than anyone else, that he was everyone’s equal and everyone was his. In this way the school succeeded in its highest purpose.

And then things began to change.

5.

around 2014, a new mood germinated in America—at first in a few places, among limited numbers of people, but growing with amazing rapidity and force, as new things tend to do today. It rose up toward the end of the Obama years, in part out of disillusionment with the early promise of his presidency—out of expectations raised and frustrated, especially among people under 30, which is how most revolutionary surges begin. This new mood was progressive but not hopeful. A few short years after the teachers at the private preschool had crafted Obama pendants with their 4-year-olds, hope was gone.

At the heart of the new progressivism was indignation, sometimes rage, about ongoing injustice against groups of Americans who had always been relegated to the outskirts of power and dignity. An incident—a police shooting of an unarmed black man; news reports of predatory sexual behavior by a Hollywood mogul; a pro quarterback who took to kneeling during the national anthem—would light a fire that would spread overnight and keep on burning because it was fed by anger at injustices deeper and older than the inflaming incident. Over time the new mood took on the substance and hard edges of a radically egalitarian ideology.

At points where the ideology touched policy, it demanded, and in some cases achieved, important reforms: body cameras on cops, reduced prison sentences for nonviolent offenders, changes in the workplace. But its biggest influence came in realms more inchoate than policy: the private spaces where we think and imagine and talk and write, and the public spaces where institutions shape the contours of our culture and guard its perimeter.

Who was driving the new progressivism? Young people, influencers on social media, leaders of cultural organizations, artists, journalists, educators, and, more and more, elected Democrats. You could almost believe they spoke for a majority—but you would be wrong. An extensive survey of American political opinion published last year by a nonprofit called More in Common found that a large majority of every group, including black Americans, thought “political correctness” was a problem. The only exception was a group identified as “progressive activists”—just 8 percent of the population, and likely to be white, well educated, and wealthy. Other polls found that white progressives were readier to embrace diversity and immigration, and to blame racism for the problems of minority groups, than black Americans were. The new progressivism was a limited, mainly elite phenomenon.

Politics becomes most real not in the media but in your nervous system, where everything matters more and it’s harder to repress your true feelings because of guilt or social pressure. It was as a father, at our son’s school, that I first understood the meaning of the new progressivism, and what I disliked about it.

Every spring, starting in third grade, public-school students in New York State take two standardized tests geared to the national Common Core curriculum—one in math, one in English. In the winter of 2015–16, our son’s third-grade year, we began to receive a barrage of emails and flyers from the school about the upcoming tests. They all carried the message that the tests were not mandatory. “Inform Yourself!” an email urged us. “Whether or not your child will take the tests is YOUR decision.”

During the George W. Bush and Obama presidencies, statewide tests were used to improve low-performing schools by measuring students’ abilities, with rewards (“race to the top”) and penalties (“accountability”) doled out accordingly. These standardized tests could determine the fate of teachers and schools. Some schools began devoting months of class time to preparing students for the tests.

The excesses of “high-stakes testing” inevitably produced a backlash. In 2013, four families at our school, with the support of the administration, kept their kids from taking the tests. These parents had decided that the tests were so stressful for students and teachers alike, consumed so much of the school year with mindless preparation, and were so irrelevant to the purpose of education that they were actually harmful. But even after the city eased the consequences of the tests, the opt-out movement grew astronomically. In the spring of 2014, 250 children were kept from taking the tests.

The critique widened, too: Educators argued that the tests were structurally biased, even racist, because nonwhite students had the lowest scores. “I believe in assessment—I took tests my whole life and I’ve used assessments as an educator,” one black parent at our school, who graduated from a prestigious New York public high school, told me. “But now I see it all differently. Standardized tests are the gatekeepers to keep people out, and I know exactly who’s at the bottom. It is torturous for black, Latino, and low-income children, because they will never catch up, due to institutionalized racism.”

Our school became the citywide leader of the new movement; the principal was interviewed by the New York media. Opting out became a form of civil disobedience against a prime tool of meritocracy. It started as a spontaneous, grassroots protest against a wrongheaded state of affairs. Then, with breathtaking speed, it transcended the realm of politics and became a form of moral absolutism, with little tolerance for dissent.

We took the school at face value when it said that this decision was ours to make. My wife attended a meeting for parents, billed as an “education session.” But when she asked a question that showed we hadn’t made up our minds about the tests, another parent quickly tried to set her straight. The question was out of place—no one should want her child to take the tests. The purpose of the meeting wasn’t to provide neutral information. Opting out required an action—parents had to sign and return a letter—and the administration needed to educate new parents about the party line using other parents who had already accepted it, because school employees were forbidden to propagandize.

We weren’t sure what to do. Instead of giving grades, teachers at our school wrote long, detailed, often deeply knowledgeable reports on each student. But we wanted to know how well our son was learning against an external standard. If he took the tests, he would miss a couple of days of class, but he would also learn to perform a basic task that would be part of his education for years to come.

One day I asked another parent whether her son would take the tests. She hushed me—it wasn’t something to discuss at school.

Something else about the opt-out movement troubled me. Its advocates claimed that the tests penalized poor and minority kids. I began to think that the real penalty might come from not taking them. Opting out had become so pervasive at our school that the Department of Education no longer had enough data to publish the kind of information that prospective applicants had once used to assess the school. In the category of “Student Achievement” the department now gave our school “No Rating.” No outsider could judge how well the school was educating children, including poor, black, and Latino children. The school’s approach left gaps in areas like the times tables, long division, grammar, and spelling. Families with means filled these gaps, as did some families whose means were limited—Marcus’s parents enrolled him in after-school math tutoring. But when a girl at our bus stop fell behind because she didn’t attend school for weeks after the death of her grandmother, who had been the heart of the family, there was no objective measure to act as a flashing red light. In the name of equality, disadvantaged kids were likelier to falter and disappear behind a mist of togetherness and self-deception. Banishing tests seemed like a way to let everyone off the hook. This was the price of dismissing meritocracy.

I took a sounding of parents at our bus stop. Only a few were open to the tests, and they didn’t say this loudly. One parent was trying to find a way to have her daughter take the tests off school grounds. Everyone sensed that failing to opt out would be unpopular with the principal, the staff, and the parent leaders—the school’s power structure.

A careful silence fell over the whole subject. One day, while volunteering in our son’s classroom, I asked another parent whether her son would take the tests. She flashed a nervous smile and hushed me—it wasn’t something to discuss at school. One teacher disapproved of testing so intensely that, when my wife and I asked what our son would miss during test days, she answered indignantly, “Curriculum!” Students whose parents declined to opt out would get no preparation at all. It struck me that this would punish kids whom the movement was supposed to protect.

If orthodoxy reduced dissenters to whispering—if the entire weight of public opinion at the school was against the tests—then, I thought, our son should take them.

The week of the tests, one of the administrators approached me in the school hallway. “Have you decided?” I told her that our son would take the tests.

She was the person to whom I’d once written a letter about the ideal match between our values and the school’s, the letter that may have helped get our son off the wait list. Back then I hadn’t heard of the opt-out movement—it didn’t exist. Less than four years later, it was the only truth. I wondered if she felt that I’d betrayed her.

Later that afternoon we spent an hour on the phone. She described all the harm that could come to our son if he took the tests—the immense stress, the potential for demoralization. I replied with our reason for going ahead—we wanted him to learn this necessary skill. The conversation didn’t feel completely honest on either side: She also wanted to confirm the school’s position in the vanguard of the opt-out movement by reaching 100 percent compliance, and I wanted to refuse to go along. The tests had become secondary. This was a political argument.

Our son was among the 15 or so students who took the tests. A 95 percent opt-out rate was a resounding success. It rivaled election results in Turkmenistan. As for our son, he finished the tests feeling neither triumphant nor defeated. The issue that had roiled the grown-ups in his life seemed to have had no effect on him at all. He returned to class and continued working on his report about the mountain gorillas of Central Africa.

Illustration of the American flag with gold stars scattered on top

Paul Spella

6.

the battleground of the new progressivism is identity. That’s the historical source of exclusion and injustice that demands redress. In the past five years, identity has set off a burst of exploration and recrimination and creation in every domain, from television to cooking. “Identity is the topic at the absolute center of our conversations about music,” The New York Times Magazine declared in 2017, in the introduction to a special issue consisting of 25 essays on popular songs. “For better or worse, it’s all identity now.”

The school’s progressive pedagogy had fostered a wonderfully intimate sense of each child as a complex individual. But progressive politics meant thinking in groups. When our son was in third or fourth grade, students began to form groups that met to discuss issues based on identity—race, sexuality, disability. I understood the solidarity that could come from these meetings, but I also worried that they might entrench differences that the school, by its very nature, did so much to reduce. Other, less diverse schools in New York, including elite private ones, had taken to dividing their students by race into consciousness-raising “affinity groups.” I knew several mixed-race families that transferred their kids out of one such school because they were put off by the relentless focus on race. Our son and his friends, whose classroom study included slavery and civil rights, hardly ever discussed the subject of race with one another. The school already lived what it taught.

The bathroom crisis hit our school the same year our son took the standardized tests. A girl in second grade had switched to using male pronouns, adopted the initial Q as a first name, and begun dressing in boys’ clothes. Q also used the boys’ bathroom, which led to problems with other boys. Q’s mother spoke to the principal, who, with her staff, looked for an answer. They could have met the very real needs of students like Q by creating a single-stall bathroom—the one in the second-floor clinic would have served the purpose. Instead, the school decided to get rid of boys’ and girls’ bathrooms altogether. If, as the city’s Department of Education now instructed, schools had to allow students to use the bathroom of their self-identified gender, then getting rid of the labels would clear away all the confusion around the bathroom question. A practical problem was solved in conformity with a new idea about identity.

Within two years, almost every bathroom in the school, from kindergarten through fifth grade, had become gender-neutral. Where signs had once said boys and girls, they now said students. Kids would be conditioned to the new norm at such a young age that they would become the first cohort in history for whom gender had nothing to do with whether they sat or stood to pee. All that biology entailed—curiosity, fear, shame, aggression, pubescence, the thing between the legs—was erased or wished away.

The school didn’t inform parents of this sudden end to an age-old custom, as if there were nothing to discuss. Parents only heard about it when children started arriving home desperate to get to the bathroom after holding it in all day. Girls told their parents mortifying stories of having a boy kick open their stall door. Boys described being afraid to use the urinals. Our son reported that his classmates, without any collective decision, had simply gone back to the old system, regardless of the new signage: Boys were using the former boys’ rooms, girls the former girls’ rooms. This return to the familiar was what politicians call a “commonsense solution.” It was also kind of heartbreaking. As children, they didn’t think to challenge the new adult rules, the new adult ideas of justice. Instead, they found a way around this difficulty that the grown-ups had introduced into their lives. It was a quiet plea to be left alone.

When parents found out about the elimination of boys’ and girls’ bathrooms, they showed up en masse at a PTA meeting. The parents in one camp declared that the school had betrayed their trust, and a woman threatened to pull her daughter out of the school. The parents in the other camp argued that gender labels—and not just on the bathroom doors—led to bullying and that the real problem was the patriarchy. One called for the elimination of urinals. It was a minor drama of a major cultural upheaval. The principal, who seemed to care more about the testing opt-out movement than the bathroom issue, explained her financial constraints and urged the formation of a parent-teacher committee to resolve the matter. After six months of stalemate, the Department of Education intervened: One bathroom would be gender-neutral.

in politics, identity is an appeal to authority—the moral authority of the oppressed: I am what I am, which explains my view and makes it the truth. The politics of identity starts out with the universal principles of equality, dignity, and freedom, but in practice it becomes an end in itself—often a dead end, a trap from which there’s no easy escape and maybe no desire for escape. Instead of equality, it sets up a new hierarchy that inverts the old, discredited one—a new moral caste system that ranks people by the oppression of their group identity. It makes race, which is a dubious and sinister social construct, an essence that defines individuals regardless of agency or circumstance—as when Representative Ayanna Pressley said, “We don’t need any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice; we don’t need black faces that don’t want to be a black voice.”

At times the new progressivism, for all its up-to-the-minuteness, carries a whiff of the 17th century, with heresy hunts and denunciations of sin and displays of self-mortification. The atmosphere of mental constriction in progressive milieus, the self-censorship and fear of public shaming, the intolerance of dissent—these are qualities of an illiberal politics.

I asked myself if I was moving to the wrong side of a great moral cause because its tone was too loud, because it shook loose what I didn’t want to give up. It took me a long time to see that the new progressivism didn’t just carry my own politics further than I liked. It was actually hostile to principles without which I don’t believe democracy can survive. Liberals are always slow to realize that there can be friendly, idealistic people who have little use for liberal values.

7.

in 2016 two obsessions claimed our family—Hamilton and the presidential campaign. We listened and sang along to the Hamilton soundtrack every time we got in the car, until the kids had memorized most of its brilliant, crowded, irresistible libretto. Our son mastered Lafayette’s highest-velocity rap, and in our living room he and his sister acted out the climactic duel between Hamilton and Burr. The musical didn’t just teach them this latest version of the revolution and the early republic. It filled their world with the imagined past, and while the music was playing, history became more real than the present. Our daughter, who was about to start kindergarten at our son’s school, wholly identified with the character of Hamilton—she fought his battles, made his arguments, and denounced his enemies. Every time he died she wept.

Read: How Lin-Manuel Miranda’s ‘Hamilton’ shapes history

Hamilton and the campaign had a curious relation in our lives. The first acted as a disinfectant to the second, cleansing its most noxious effects, belying its most ominous portents. Donald Trump could sneer at Mexicans and rail against Muslims and kick dirt on everything decent and good, but the American promise still breathed whenever the Puerto Rican Hamilton and the black Jefferson got into a rap battle over the national bank. When our daughter saw pictures of the actual Founding Fathers, she was shocked and a little disappointed that they were white. The only president our kids had known was black. Their experience gave them no context for Trump’s vicious brand of identity politics, which was inflaming the other kinds. We wanted them to believe that America was better than Trump, and Hamilton kept that belief in the air despite the accumulating gravity of facts. Our son, who started fourth grade that fall, had dark premonitions about the election, but when the Access Hollywood video surfaced in October, he sang Jefferson’s gloating line about Hamilton’s sex scandal: “Never gonna be president now!”

The morning after the election, the kids cried. They cried for people close to us, Muslims and immigrants who might be in danger, and perhaps they also cried for the lost illusion that their parents could make things right. Our son lay on the couch and sobbed inconsolably until we made him go to the bus stop.

The next time we were in the car, we automatically put on Hamilton. When “Dear Theodosia” came on, and Burr and Hamilton sang to their newborn children, “If we lay a strong enough foundation, we’ll pass it on to you, we’ll give the world to you, and you’ll blow us all away,” it was too much for me and my wife. We could no longer feel the romance of the young republic. It was a long time before we listened to Hamilton again.

A few weeks after the election, our daughter asked if Trump could break our family apart. She must have gotten the idea from overhearing a conversation about threats to undocumented immigrants. We told her that we were lucky—we had rights as citizens that he couldn’t take away. I decided to sit down with the kids and read the Bill of Rights together. Not all of it made sense, but they got the basic idea—the president wasn’t King George III, the Constitution was stronger than Trump, certain principles had not been abolished—and they seemed reassured.

Since then it has become harder to retain faith in these truths.

Our daughter said that she hated being a child, because she felt helpless to do anything. The day after the inauguration, my wife took her to the Women’s March in Midtown Manhattan. She made a sign that said we have power too, and at the march she sang the one protest song she knew, “We Shall Overcome.” For days afterward she marched around the house shouting, “Show me what democracy looks like!”

Our son was less given to joining a cause and shaking his fist. Being older, he also understood the difficulty of the issues better, and they depressed him, because he knew that children really could do very little. He’d been painfully aware of climate change throughout elementary school—first grade was devoted to recycling and sustainability, and in third grade, during a unit on Africa, he learned that every wild animal he loved was facing extinction. “What are humans good for besides destroying the planet?” he asked. Our daughter wasn’t immune to the heavy mood—she came home from school one day and expressed a wish not to be white so that she wouldn’t have slavery on her conscience. It did not seem like a moral victory for our children to grow up hating their species and themselves.

We decided to cut down on the political talk around them. It wasn’t that we wanted to hide the truth or give false comfort—they wouldn’t have let us even if we’d tried. We just wanted them to have their childhood without bearing the entire weight of the world, including the new president we had allowed into office. We owed our children a thousand apologies. The future looked awful, and somehow we expected them to fix it. Did they really have to face this while they were still in elementary school?

I can imagine the retort—the rebuke to everything I’ve written here: Your privilege has spared them. There’s no answer to that—which is why it’s a potent weapon—except to say that identity alone should neither uphold nor invalidate an idea, or we’ve lost the Enlightenment to pure tribalism. Adults who draft young children into their cause might think they’re empowering them and shaping them into virtuous people (a friend calls the Instagram photos parents post of their woke kids “selflessies”). In reality the adults are making themselves feel more righteous, indulging another form of narcissistic pride, expiating their guilt, and shifting the load of their own anxious battles onto children who can’t carry the burden, because they lack the intellectual apparatus and political power. Our goal shouldn’t be to tell children what to think. The point is to teach them how to think so they can grow up to find their own answers.

I wished that our son’s school would teach him civics. By age 10 he had studied the civilizations of ancient China, Africa, the early Dutch in New Amsterdam, and the Mayans. He learned about the genocide of Native Americans and slavery. But he was never taught about the founding of the republic. He didn’t learn that conflicting values and practical compromises are the lifeblood of self-government. He was given no context for the meaning of freedom of expression, no knowledge of the democratic ideas that Trump was trashing or of the instruments with which citizens could hold those in power accountable. Our son knew about the worst betrayals of democracy, including the one darkening his childhood, but he wasn’t taught the principles that had been betrayed. He got his civics from Hamilton.

Read: Civics education helps create young voters and activists

The teaching of civics has dwindled since the 1960s—a casualty of political polarization, as the left and the right each accuse the other of using the subject for indoctrination—and with it the public’s basic knowledge about American government. In the past few years, civics has been making a comeback in certain states. As our son entered fifth grade, in the first year of the Trump presidency, no subject would have been more truly empowering.

“If you fail seventh grade you fail middle school, if you fail middle school you fail high school, if you fail high school you fail college, if you fail college you fail life.”

Every year, instead of taking tests, students at the school presented a “museum” of their subject of study, a combination of writing and craftwork on a particular topic. Parents came in, wandered through the classrooms, read, admired, and asked questions of students, who stood beside their projects. These days, called “shares,” were my very best experiences at the school. Some of the work was astoundingly good, all of it showed thought and effort, and the coming-together of parents and kids felt like the realization of everything the school aspired to be.

The fifth-grade share, our son’s last, was different. That year’s curriculum included the Holocaust, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow. The focus was on “upstanders”—individuals who had refused to be bystanders to evil and had raised their voices. It was an education in activism, and with no grounding in civics, activism just meant speaking out. At the year-end share, the fifth graders presented dioramas on all the hard issues of the moment—sexual harassment, LGBTQ rights, gun violence. Our son made a plastic-bag factory whose smokestack spouted endangered animals. Compared with previous years, the writing was minimal and the students, when questioned, had little to say. They hadn’t been encouraged to research their topics, make intellectual discoveries, answer potential counterarguments. The dioramas consisted of cardboard, clay, and slogans.

Illustration of a school desk with gold stars overlaid on top

Paul Spella

8.

students in new york city public schools have to apply to middle school. They rank schools in their district, six or eight or a dozen of them, in order of preference, and the middle schools rank the students based on academic work and behavior. Then a Nobel Prize–winning algorithm matches each student with a school, and that’s almost always where the student has to go. The city’s middle schools are notoriously weak; in our district, just three had a reputation for being “good.” An education expert near us made a decent living by offering counseling sessions to panic-stricken families. The whole process seemed designed to raise the anxiety of 10-year-olds to the breaking point.

“If you fail a math test you fail seventh grade,” our daughter said one night at dinner, looking years ahead. “If you fail seventh grade you fail middle school, if you fail middle school you fail high school, if you fail high school you fail college, if you fail college you fail life.”

We were back to the perversions of meritocracy. But the country’s politics had changed dramatically during our son’s six years of elementary school. Instead of hope pendants around the necks of teachers, in one middle-school hallway a picture was posted of a card that said, “Uh-oh! Your privilege is showing. You’ve received this card because your privilege just allowed you to make a comment that others cannot agree or relate to. Check your privilege.” The card had boxes to be marked, like a scorecard, next to “White,” “Christian,” “Heterosexual,” “Able-bodied,” “Citizen.” (Our son struck the school off his list.) This language is now not uncommon in the education world. A teacher in Saratoga Springs, New York, found a “privilege-reflection form” online with an elaborate method of scoring, and administered it to high-school students, unaware that the worksheet was evidently created by a right-wing internet troll—it awarded Jews 25 points of privilege and docked Muslims 50.

The middle-school scramble subjected 10- and 11-year-olds to the dictates of meritocracy and democracy at the same time: a furiously competitive contest and a heavy-handed ideology. The two systems don’t coexist so much as drive children simultaneously toward opposite extremes, realms that are equally inhospitable to the delicate, complex organism of a child’s mind. If there’s a relation between the systems, I came to think, it’s this: Wokeness prettifies the success race, making contestants feel better about the heartless world into which they’re pushing their children. Constantly checking your privilege is one way of not having to give it up.

On the day acceptance letters arrived at our school, some students wept. One of them was Marcus, who had been matched with a middle school that he didn’t want to attend. His mother went in to talk to an administrator about an appeal. The administrator asked her why Marcus didn’t instead go to the middle school that shared a building with our school, that followed the same progressive approach as ours, and that was one of the worst-rated in the state. Marcus’s mother left in fury and despair. She had no desire for him to go to the middle school upstairs.

Our son got into one of the “good” middle schools. Last September he came home from the first day of school and told us that something was wrong. His classmates didn’t look like the kids in his elementary school. We found a pie chart that broke his new school down by race, and it left him stunned. Two-thirds of the students were white or Asian; barely a quarter were black or Latino. Competitive admissions had created a segregated school.

His will be the last such class. Two years ago, Mayor Bill de Blasio declared a new initiative to integrate New York City’s schools. Our district, where there are enough white families for integration to be meaningful, was chosen as a test case. Last year a committee of teachers, parents, and activists in the district announced a proposal: Remove the meritocratic hurdle that stands in the way of equality. The proposal would get rid of competitive admissions for middle school—grades, tests, attendance, behavior—which largely accounted for the racial makeup at our son’s new school. In the new system, students would still rank their choices, but the algorithm would be adjusted to produce middle schools that reflect the demography of our district, giving disadvantaged students a priority for 52 percent of the seats. In this way, the district’s middle schools would be racially and economically integrated. De Blasio’s initiative was given the slogan “Equity and Excellence for All.” It tried to satisfy democracy and meritocracy in a single phrase.

I went back and forth and back again, and finally decided to support the new plan. My view was gratuitous, since the change came a year too late to affect our son. I would have been sorely tested if chance had put him in the first experimental class. Under the new system, a girl at his former bus stop got matched with her 12th choice, and her parents decided to send her to a charter school. No doubt many other families will leave the public-school system. But I had seen our son flourish by going to an elementary school that looked like the city. I had also seen meritocracy separate out and demoralize children based on their work in fourth grade. “If you fail middle school,” our daughter said, “you fail life.” It was too soon for children’s fates to be decided by an institution that was supposed to serve the public good.

Read: Poor kids who believe in meritocracy suffer

I wanted the plan to succeed, but I had serious doubts. It came festooned with all the authoritarian excess of the new progressivism. It called for the creation of a new diversity bureaucracy, and its relentless jargon squashed my hope that the authors knew how to achieve an excellent education for all. Instead of teaching civics that faced the complex truths of American democracy, “the curriculum will highlight the vast historical contributions of non-white groups & seek to dispel the many non-truths/lies related to American & World History.”

“Excellence” was barely an afterthought in the plan. Of its 64 action items, only one even mentioned what was likely to be the hardest problem: “Provide support for [district] educators in adopting best practices for academically, racially & socioeconomically mixed classrooms.” How to make sure that children of greatly different abilities would succeed, in schools that had long been academically tracked? How to do it without giving up on rigor altogether—without losing the fastest learners?

We had faced this problem with our daughter, who was reading far ahead of her grade in kindergarten and begged her teacher for math problems to solve. When the school declined to accommodate her, and our applications to other public schools were unsuccessful, we transferred her to a new, STEM-focused private school rather than risk years of boredom. We regretted leaving the public-school system, and we were still wary of the competitive excesses of meritocracy, but we weren’t willing to abandon it altogether.

The Department of Education didn’t seem to be thinking about meritocracy at all. Its entire focus was on achieving diversity, and on rooting out the racism that stood in the way of that.

Late in the summer of 2018, a public meeting was called in our district to discuss the integration plan. It was the height of vacation season, but several hundred parents, including me, showed up. Many had just heard about the new plan, which buried the results of an internal poll showing that a majority of parents wanted to keep the old system. We were presented with a slideshow that included a photo of white adults snarling at black schoolchildren in the South in the 1960s—as if only vicious racism could motivate parents to oppose eliminating an admissions system that met superior work with a more challenging placement. Even if the placement was the fruit of a large historical injustice, parents are compromised; a policy that tells them to set aside their children’s needs until that injustice has been remedied is asking for failure. Just in case the implication of racism wasn’t enough to intimidate dissenters, when the presentation ended, and dozens of hands shot up, one of the speakers, a progressive city-council member, announced that he would take no questions. He waved off the uproar that ensued. It was just like the opt-out “education session” my wife had attended: The deal was done. There was only one truth.

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De Blasio’s schools chancellor, Richard Carranza, has answered critics of the diversity initiative by calling them out for racism and refusing to let them “silence” him. As part of the initiative, Carranza has mandated anti-bias training for every employee of the school system, at a cost of $23 million. One training slide was titled “White Supremacy Culture.” It included “Perfectionism,” “Individualism,” “Objectivity,” and “Worship of the Written Word” among the white-supremacist values that need to be disrupted. In the name of exposing racial bias, the training created its own kind.

[alertreadingquotes]

Weapons of Math Destruction, Cathy O'Neil

What are WMDs?

“The first question: Even if the participant is aware of being modeled, or what the model is used for, is the model opaque, or even invisible?... A key component of this suffering is the pernicious feedback loop. As we’ve seen, sentencing models that profile a person by his or her circumstances help to create the environment that justifies their assumptions. This destructive loop goes round and round, and in the process the model becomes more and more unfair.The third question is whether a model has the capacity to grow exponentially. As a statistician would put it, can it scale? This might sound like the nerdy quibble of a mathematician. But scale is what turns WMDs from local nuisances into tsunami forces, ones that define and delimit our lives. As we’ll see, the developing WMDs in human resources, health, and banking, just to name a few, are quickly establishing broad norms that exert upon us something very close to the power of law....

So to sum up, these are the three elements of a WMD: Opacity, Scale, and Damage”

“Shell Shocked: My Journey of Disillusionment

...

My challenge was to design an algorithm that would distinguish window shoppers from buyers. There were a few obvious signals. Were they logged into the service? Had they bought there before? But I also scoured for other hints. What time of day was it, and what day of the year? Certain weeks are hot for buyers. The Memorial Day “bump,” for example, occurs in mid-spring, when large numbers of people make summer plans almost in unison. My algorithm would place a higher value on shoppers during these periods, since they were more likely to buy. The statistical work, as it turned out, was highly transferable from the hedge fund to e-commerce—the biggest difference was that, rather than the movement of markets, I was now predicting people’s clicks. In fact, I saw all kinds of parallels between finance and Big Data. Both industries gobble up the same pool of talent, much of it from elite universities like MIT, Princeton, or Stanford. These new hires are ravenous for success and have been focused on external metrics—like SAT scores and college admissions—their entire lives. Whether in finance or tech, the message they’ve received is that they will be rich, that they will run the world. Their productivity indicates that they’re on the right track, and it translates into dollars. This leads to the fallacious conclusion that whatever they’re doing to bring in more money is good. It “adds value.” Otherwise, why would the market reward it? In both cultures, wealth is no longer a means to get by. It becomes directly tied to personal worth. A young suburbanite with every advantage—the prep school education, the exhaustive coaching for college admissions tests, the overseas semester in Paris or Shanghai—still flatters himself that it is his skill, hard work, and prodigious problem-solving abilities that have lifted him into a world of privilege. Money vindicates all doubts. And the rest of his circle plays along, forming a mutual admiration society. They’re eager to convince us all that Darwinism is at work, when it looks very much to the outside like a combination of gaming a system and dumb luck. In both of these industries, the real world, with all of its messiness, sits apart. The inclination is to replace people with data trails, turning them into more effective shoppers, voters, or workers to optimize some objective. This is easy to do, and to justify, when success comes back as an anonymous score and when the people affected remain every bit as abstract as the numbers dancing across the screen. I was already blogging as I worked in data science, and I was also getting more involved with the Occupy movement. More and more, I worried about the separation between technical models and real people, and about the moral repercussions of that separation. In fact, I saw the same pattern emerging that I’d witnessed in finance: a false sense of security was leading to widespread use of imperfect models, self-serving definitions of success, and growing feedback loops. Those who objected were regarded as nostalgic Luddites. I wondered what the analogue to the credit crisis might be in Big Data. Instead of a bust, I saw a growing dystopia, with inequality rising. The algorithms would make sure that those deemed losers would remain that way. A lucky minority would gain ever more control over the data economy, raking in outrageous fortunes and convincing themselves all the while that they deserved it. After a couple of years working and learning in the Big Data space, my journey to disillusionment was more or less complete, and the misuse of mathematics was accelerating. In spite of blogging almost daily, I could barely keep up with all the ways I was hearing of people being manipulated, controlled, and intimidated by algorithms. It started with teachers I knew struggling under the yoke of the value-added model, but it didn’t end there. Truly alarmed, I quit my job to investigate the issue in earnest.”

On perverse incentives caused by WMDs.

“Students in the Chinese city of Zhongxiang had a reputation for acing the national standardized test, or gaokao, and winning places in China’s top universities. They did so well, in fact, that authorities began to suspect they were cheating. Suspicions grew in 2012, according to a report in Britain’s Telegraph, when provincial authorities found ninety-nine identical copies of a single test. The next year, as students in Zhongxiang arrived to take the exam, they were dismayed to be funneled through metal detectors and forced to relinquish their mobile phones. Some surrendered tiny transmitters disguised as pencil erasers. Once inside, the students found themselves accompanied by fifty-four investigators from different school districts. A few of these investigators crossed the street to a hotel, where they found groups positioned to communicate with the students through their transmitters. The response to this crackdown on cheating was volcanic. Some two thousand stone-throwing protesters gathered in the street outside the school. They chanted, “We want fairness. There is no fairness if you don’t let us cheat.” It sounds like a joke, but they were absolutely serious. The stakes for the students were sky high. As they saw it, they faced a chance either to pursue an elite education and a prosperous career or to stay stuck in their provincial city, a relative backwater. And whether or not it was the case, they had the perception that others were cheating. So preventing the students in Zhongxiang from cheating was unfair. In a system in which cheating is the norm, following the rules amounts to a handicap...

Each college’s admissions model is derived, at least in part, from the U.S. News model, and each one is a mini-WMD. These models lead students and their parents to run in frantic circles and spend obscene amounts of money. And they’re opaque. This leaves most of the participants (or victims) in the dark. But it creates a big business for consultants, like Steven Ma, who manage to learn their secrets, either by cultivating sources at the universities or by reverse-engineering their algorithms. The victims, of course, are the vast majority of Americans, the poor and middle-class families who don’t have thousands of dollars to spent on courses and consultants. They miss out on precious insider knowledge. The result is an education system that favors the privileged. It tilts against needy students, locking out the great majority of them—and pushing them down a path toward poverty. It deepens the social divide. But even those who claw their way into a top college lose out. If you think about it, the college admissions game, while lucrative for some, has virtually no educational value. The complex and fraught production simply re-sorts and reranks the very same pool of eighteen-year-old kids in newfangled ways. They don’t master important skills by jumping through many more hoops or writing meticulously targeted college essays under the watchful eye of professional tutors. Others scrounge online for cut-rate versions of those tutors. All of them, from the rich to the working class, are simply being trained to fit into an enormous machine—to satisfy a WMD. And at the end of the ordeal, many of them will be saddled with debt that will take decades to pay off. They’re pawns in an arms race, and it’s a particularly nasty one.”

On opaque ranking systems that boil universities down to ordinal rankings without explicitly describing the variables used to compare them.

“Perhaps it was just as well that the Obama administration failed to come up with a rejiggered ranking system. The pushback by college presidents was fierce. After all, they had spent decades optimizing themselves to satisfy the U.S. News WMD. A new formula based on graduation rates, class size, alumni employment and income, and other metrics could wreak havoc with their ranking and reputation. No doubt they also made good points about the vulnerabilities of any new model and the new feedback loops it would generate. So the government capitulated. And the result might be better. Instead of a ranking, the Education Department released loads of data on a website. The result is that students can ask their own questions about the things that matter to them—including class size, graduation rates, and the average debt held by graduating students. They don’t need to know anything about statistics or the weighting of variables. The software itself, much like an online travel site, creates individual models for each person. Think of it: transparent, controlled by the user, and personal. You might call it the opposite of a WMD.“

Biases in hiring WMDs

“Defenders of the tests note that they feature lots of questions and that no single answer can disqualify an applicant. Certain patterns of answers, however, can and do disqualify them. And we do not know what those patterns are. We’re not told what the tests are looking for. The process is entirely opaque. What’s worse, after the model is calibrated by technical experts, it receives precious little feedback. Again, sports provide a good contrast here. Most professional basketball teams employ data geeks, who run models that analyze players by a series of metrics, including foot speed, vertical leap, free-throw percentage, and a host of other variables. When the draft comes, the Los Angeles Lakers might pass on a hotshot point guard from Duke because his assist statistics are low. Point guards have to be good passers. Yet in the following season they’re dismayed to see that the rejected player goes on to win Rookie of the Year for the Utah Jazz and leads the league in assists. In such a case, the Lakers can return to their model to see what they got wrong. Maybe his college team was relying on him to score, which punished his assist numbers. Or perhaps he learned something important about passing in Utah. Whatever the case, they can work to improve their model. Now imagine that Kyle Behm, after getting red-lighted at Kroger, goes on to land a job at McDonald’s. He turns into a stellar employee. He’s managing the kitchen within four months and the entire franchise a year later. Will anyone at Kroger go back to the personality test and investigate how they could have gotten it so wrong? Not a chance, I’d say. The difference is this: Basketball teams are managing individuals, each one potentially worth millions of dollars. Their analytics engines are crucial to their competitive advantage, and they are hungry for data. Without constant feedback, their systems grow outdated and dumb. The companies hiring minimum-wage workers, by contrast, are managing herds. They slash expenses by replacing human resources professionals with machines, and those machines filter large populations into more manageable groups. Unless something goes haywire in the workforce—an outbreak of kleptomania, say, or plummeting productivity—the company has little reason to tweak the filtering model. It’s doing its job—even if it misses out on potential stars. The company may be satisfied with the status quo, but the victims of its automatic systems suffer. And as you might expect, I consider personality tests in hiring departments to be WMDs. They check all the boxes. First, they are in widespread use and have enormous impact. The Kronos exam, with all of its flaws, is scaled across much of the hiring economy. Under the previous status quo, employers no doubt had biases. But those biases varied from company to company, which might have cracked open a door somewhere for people like Kyle Behm. That’s increasingly untrue. And Kyle was, in some sense, lucky. Job candidates, especially those applying for minimum-wage work, get rejected all the time and rarely find out why. It was just chance that Kyle’s friend happened to hear about the reason for his rejection and told him about it. Even then, the case against the big Kronos users would likely have gone nowhere if Kyle’s father hadn’t been a lawyer, one with enough time and money to mount a broad legal challenge. This is rarely the case for low-level job applicants. * Finally, consider the feedback loop that the Kronos personality test engenders. Red-lighting people with certain mental health issues prevents them from having a normal job and leading a normal life, further isolating them. This is exactly what the Americans with Disabilities Act is supposed to prevent.

The majority of job applicants, thankfully, are not blackballed by automatic systems. But they still face the challenge of moving their application to the top of the pile and landing an interview...The hiring market, clearly, was still poisoned by prejudice...As you might expect, human resources departments rely on automatic systems to winnow down piles of résumés. In fact, some 72 percent of résumés are never seen by human eyes. Computer programs flip through them, pulling out the skills and experiences that the employer is looking for. Then they score each résumé as a match for the job opening. It’s up to the people in the human resources department to decide where the cutoff is, but the more candidates they can eliminate with this first screening, the fewer human-hours they’ll have to spend processing the top matches. So job applicants must craft their résumés with that automatic reader in mind. It’s important, for example, to sprinkle the résumé liberally with words the specific job opening is looking for. This could include positions (sales manager, chief financial officer, software architect), languages (Mandarin, Java), or honors (summa cum laude, Eagle Scout). Those with the latest information learn what machines appreciate and what tangles them up... The result of these programs, much as with college admissions, is that those with the money and resources to prepare their résumés come out on top. Those who don’t take these steps may never know that they’re sending their résumés into a black hole. It’s one more example in which the wealthy and informed get the edge and the poor are more likely to lose out.”

[duaneodavila]

Gaming The Game of College Admissions

That Aunt Becky was named in the complaint made it a lock that it would be front page news, but charges against 33 “affluent parents,” not to mention college coaches and others, put the lie to the cries that the only unfairness in college admissions was the dark hole of diversity. It’s a cesspool all around.

When it was time for my son to go to college, I did everything possible to “game” his admission, from prep courses to training with the best fencing coaches to enhance his interests as an athletic recruit. What I did not do is what Wilke Farr co-chair Gordon Caplan is alleged to have done, buy my kid’s admission.

I didn’t even know such a thing was possible, but to be honest, if I was ever inclined to bribe someone, it would be for the benefit my kids.

While much of the indictment reflects some obvious crimes, such as team coaches taking bribes to admit kids who never sailed in their life as sailing team recruits, and proctors giving answers for standardized tests, the alleged crimes of the parents emit a different odor.

The key distinction here is not just the amount of money, but the recipient. A donation is made to a college, while a bribe is paid to an employee who, in effect, is stealing an admissions slot, hawking it and pocketing the proceeds. (To comply with tax laws, donors also cannot engage in an explicit quid pro quo with a college. The well-rehearsed pas de deux of donations and admissions must be made to appear as a voluntary exchange of gifts, not a binding deal.)

From the perspective of the obsessed parent, does it really matter who gets the money? They’re paying it out one way or the other, and the only thing they want to know is whether the investment will pay off.* Parents inclined to do everything in their power to facilitate their child’s admission to college have a cottage industry available for them, from helping students to get better SAT or ACT scores to writing their college essays.

If it’s available, and parents believe it will help, some will do it. Some will pay a great deal of money to do it. And some will pay that money directly to a guy who guarantees admission, especially when they can write it off as a charitable deduction.

The allegations underscore the urgency many American parents feel about securing a place for their progeny at a selective college. In an era when most Americans are struggling to succeed economically, many of those who have prospered are terrified that their children will not get every opportunity to replicate that success.

Is it unfair that some parents have the financial ability to give their children benefits that others cannot? There’s a laundry list of “side doors” to college admissions, even if most people don’t have a firm understanding of how they work. Most of the “tricks” add points to the student’s potential admission score, rather than provide an assurance of admission. Even a legacy applicant isn’t getting into Harvard with an 800 SAT, unless daddy can build a really, really big library.

But from legacy to athletic recruits to diversity, it’s all unfair if some other kid has a leg up on your kid.

This is infuriating for parents and students who chose to play by the rules in seeking college admission — or had no choice but to do so. But no one should be under the illusion those rules are strictly meritocratic.

Merit is not easily defined. American colleges have long valued athletic ability, a quality rarely considered in college admissions elsewhere in the developed world. Schools similarly may value artistic talent, or other forms of merit not closely correlated with grades or standardized tests. And colleges have a legitimate interest in emphasizing various forms of diversity.

To a great extent, college admissions has brought this on itself. Had it been grades and standardized testing scores alone, we could compare apples to apples. But it’s a black hole for parents and students. How does one “play by the rules” when there aren’t any rules, when no one can say with certainty that they’ll be admitted to the college of their dreams? It’s that uncertainty that pushes parents who have the wherewithal to help their children to do more, pay more, if it gives their kid the edge.

Wealthy families often spend heavily to groom their children as candidates for admissions to selective colleges. Private school tuition, tutoring and test preparation classes, campus visits and coaches who help to write personal essays are all advantages largely unavailable to less affluent students, irrespective of innate talent. Paying for tutoring is different from paying someone to take a test for you — but students without money don’t have either option.

There is a substantive difference between doing everything possible to enhance a student’s likelihood to be admitted versus bribing the coach or cheating on the SATs. That the opportunity to do so is denied poor students is a dubious way to frame the problem. Would it be better if poor students had a way to bribe people as well? As grandpa always said, rich or poor, it’s good to have money. It’s one of the reasons people strive to achieve financial success, so that they have the resources that make life a little easier for themselves and their progeny. Nobody dreams of a future of poverty for their children.

Whether students are admitted because their parents paid for a boathouse, or because their parents bribed the sailing coach, it is still the case that merit alone is not deciding the issue.

This begs the question, is there such a thing as objective “merit”? Is merit one thing, or a thousand intangibles. While wealth isn’t merit, is skin color, or country of origin, or overcoming horrible obstacles? Is it unfair that kids from wealthy families can’t write essays about their experience of being homeless that bring tears to the admissions reader’s eyes?

A handful of parents tried to shortcut the system and got nailed for it. What they stole isn’t entirely clear, as it looks little different than what every other parent tries to game in their own way. But if it’s wrong, as it clearly appears to be, what of the rest of the black box of admissions that’s no more “fair” to anyone, despite every effort to game the game to the extent they possibly can?

*For about a year of a parent and student’s life, which college they go to becomes an obsession. Whether it should, or is a delusion, is another matter.

Gaming The Game of College Admissions republished via Simple Justice

[videoart4349]

Art 4349

ART 4349-VIDEO ART & NEW GENRES

Spring 2017

Instructor: Kyle Kondas

Office Hours: 162 Thursday 11:00 A.M. – 1:00 P.M.

Class: 166 Tuesday and Thursday 8:00 A.M. – 10:50 A.M.

E-mail: kyle.kondas@uta.edu

 Description: This class will approach film and video as a tool for the exploration of the conceptual and the creative use for film/video as an art form.  The student will continue to develop a unique and critical approach to video art, experimental film and new genres. Emphasis is on the experimental application of the electronic media and discussions of the history and aesthetics of film and video as an art form. Production of video art and personal projects that are a reflection of this tradition as well as the new directions of this genre will be produced. There will be directed reading, screenings of experiential film and video, and presentations by students focusing on one artist, and exercises to produce.

  Attendance: Attendance is required to all scheduled classes. However we do understand that there are occasions when an absence is necessary and excusable. In accordance with university policy religious holidays are excusable, as are an illness with a written note from a physician.  The student is responsible for notifying the professor ahead of class if the absence is unavoidable. Unexcused absences over two days, including any absence in which the professor and student do not communicate in writing about before the absence will result in the following grade reductions.  Third day absent will result in reduction of one letter for the final semester grade. Fourth day absent will result two letters off the final semester grade.  Fifth day absent will result in automatic failure of the class. 

 The student is responsible for any work missed during an absence, including any handouts given in class and any demonstrations.

 If a student misses demonstrations of equipment, they could loose use of said equipment until they can demonstrate to faculty the ability to fully control the equipment.

 Exercise #1 Part 1-Shoot a 30-45 second linear action sequence.  Example – You grab your backpack, walk to the door exit your apartment, lock your door and get into your car.  Be sure to think about all of your shots and cuts.

 Part 2 – Take your linear piece and think about how you might add to it to make it an experimental piece. Examples for this: Shoot more footage, multiply clips from the original piece, desaturate the footage, play with filters, etc.

 Exercise #2 – For a full month, using your smartphone, find something that you can shot 2-3 seconds of each day and then compile all the footage at the end of the month to see how the subject has changed through out the month. Examples: The view off your balcony, the view from your office window, a section of campus, a construction site, your reflection in the mirror.

 Exercise #3 – Ripping a minimum of 3 videos off of youtube, recut and remix a brand new piece using the existing footage and your artistic experience

 Exercise #4 – From scratch, create an abstract video painting using

After Effects

 Final Project – Create either a video art or experimental video of your own choice to possibly be shown at the end of the end of semester.

 10 -15 presentation of a video artist or experimental film-maker using either Key-note or Power-point.

 Art Gallery paper – You will visit at least two galleries and write a paper from two stand points: 1. How was the gallery set up and use the space wisely given the art it was showing and 2.  Could the space be used to showcase a vide artist/Experimental Film-maker, and if not, what would you change so that it could.

 Grading:

Exercise #1 -Part 1 and 2 – 20%

Exercise #2 - 10%

Exercise #3 - 10%

Exercise #4 - 10%

Artist Presentation – 10%

Gallery Paper – 10%

Final Project - 30%

 Class Schedule:

 1/17/17: Introduction to the class…

 1/19/17: Lecture and introduction to video artist; Exercise #1 part 1 assigned

 1/24/17: Lecture and introduction to video artist

 1/26/17: Lecture and work Day; Exercise #1 part 2 assigned

 1/31/17: Lecture and introduction to video artist

 2/2/17: Lecture and work Day, Critique on exercise #1 and exercise #2 assigned

 2/7/19: Lecture and introduction to video artist

 2/9/17: Lecture and work day

 2/14/17: Lecture and introduction to video artist

 2/16/17: Lecture and work day

 2/21/17: Lecture and introduction to video artist

 2/23/17: Lecture and work day

 2/28/17: Lecture and introduction to video artist

 3/2/17: Lecture and work Day, Critique on exercise #2; Exercise #3 assigned

 3/7/17: Lecture and introduction to video artist

 3/9/17: Lecture and work day; Critique on exercise #3

 3/14/17: Spring Break

 3/16/17: Spring Break

 3/21/17: Lecture and introduction to video artist   

 3/23/17: Lecture and work day

 3/28/17: Lecture and introduction to video artist

 3/30/17: Lecture and work day

 4/4/17: Lecture and introduction to video artist; Final Project assigned; Student Presentation #1

 4/6/17: Lecture and work Day; Student Presentation #2

 4/11/17: Lecture and introduction to video artist; Student Presentation #3

 4/13/17: Lecture and work Day; Critique on exercise #4; Student Presentation #4

 4/18/17: Lecture and introduction to video artist; Student Presentation #5

 4/20/17: Lecture and work day; Student Presentation #6

 4/25/17: Lecture and introduction to video artist; Student Presentation #7

 4/27/17: Lecture and work day; Student Presentation #8

 5/2/17: Lecture and introduction to video artist; Student Presentation #9

 5/4/17: Critique on Final Project; Gallery Visit papers due

  Americans with Disabilities Act

The University of Texas at Arlington is on record as being committed to both the spirit and letter of federal equal opportunity legislation; reference Public Law 93112—The Rehabilitation Act of 1973 as amended.  With the passage of new federal legislation entitled Americans with Disabilities Act- (ADA), pursuant to section 504 of The Rehabilitation Act, there is renewed focus on providing this population with the same opportunities enjoyed by all citizens.

As a faculty member, I am required by law to provide “reasonable accommodation” to students with disabilities, so as not to discriminate on the basis of that disability.  Student responsibility primarily rests with informing faculty at the beginning of the semester (within one week) and in providing authorized documentation through designated administrative channels.

 Academic Dishonesty

It is the philosophy of The University of Texas at Arlington that academic dishonesty is a completely unacceptable mode of conduct and will not be tolerated in any form.  All persons involved in academic dishonesty will be disciplined in accordance with University regulations and procedures.  Discipline may include suspension or expulsion from the University.

“Scholastic dishonesty includes but is not limited to cheating, plagiarism, collusion, the submission for credit of any work or materials that are attributable in whole or in part to another person, taking an examination for another person, any act designed to give unfair advantage to a student or the attempt to commit such acts.”  (Regents’ Rules and Regulations, part One, Chapter VI, Section 3, Subsection 3.2, Subdivision 3.22)

An exception to the definition of scholastic dishonesty is collaboration amongst students in the film/video classes.  On some assignments in this class you will be required to work with other students as a group.  On other assignments, assigned as individual projects, you may wish to enlist the help of someone in the class to assist with camerawork, lighting, audio, etc.  This is in no way considered cheating but rather collaborative effort to produce a polished, professional video project.  Collaboration is necessary to satisfactorily succeed in this class and it is encouraged that students assist others in this class and other film/video classes at UTA in order to advance their own expertise.  Please be aware however, that if you ask for assistance with something you are unfamiliar with you are required to gain and show expertise in that skill upon completion of the project.  Do NOT use classmates to do things you simply do not have the time or desire to do. 

Student Support Services

The University supports a wide variety of student success programs to help you connect with the University and achieve academic success. They include learning assistance developmental education, advising, and mentoring, admission, and transition, and federally funded programs. Students requiring assistance academically, personally, or socially should contact the office of Student Services Program at 817 2726107 for more information and appropriate referrals

Bomb Threats

If anyone is tempted to call in a bomb threat, be aware that UTA will attempt to trace the phone call and prosecute all responsible parties. Every effort will be made to avoid cancellation of presentations/tests caused by bomb threats. Unannounced alternate sites will be available for these classes. Your instructor will make you aware of alternate sites in the event that you classroom is not available.

Copyright Information

In this class you are not permitted to use copyrighted music without written permission from the musicians and publisher.  Create your own. Applications like Apple’s soundtrack make this possible; have a musician create a piece.

You are also not permitted to use copyrighted video images, (period end of story) unless you have written permission.

New there is now a web site that will let you use free archival footage

http://www.moviearchive.org/movie/index.html

Please remember: ultimately you are responsible for all of the material you use in your work.  Use your head, think about how things will affect others, and maintain your own ethical guidelines.  If you are considering the use of copyrighted material please pursue your own research in additional to reviewing the above information.  Links for starting Internet research are:

http://www.utsystem.edu/ogc/intellectualproperty/copypol2.htm

http://www.copyright.com/ http://www.ascap.com http://www.bmi.com/ http://www. LicenseMusic.com

 Additional Information For Video Students

 Please read and be certain you understand all of the lab policies.  You are responsible for understanding and adhering to all of these policies.  These policies are designed to facilitate the use of all of the equipment available to you and other students.

Attend demonstrations, take notes, and ask questions if you do not understand something.

Also understand that as a student you are responsible for adhering to the attendance and due dates in this syllabus and discussed in class.  If you do not understand a policy please ask me about it.

Read and remember these policies and your time in the film/video program will go smoothly. 

Throughout this class we will be viewing a wide variety of work from artists in all cultures, religions, languages and lifestyles.  This work has been carefully chosen to expose the students to different points of view and the artistic methods utilized to express those points of view.  Some of the work may contain material with which some students may not be comfortable.  If at any point in time a student becomes excessively uncomfortable with material being viewed they are welcome to exit the class for the remainder of that video piece and to return for the discussion of that piece.

Due to the technical nature of our video/computer/film facilities, certain systems or parts of systems may be unavailable as they are removed for maintenance or repair.  The faculty will make every effort to accurately inform students as to when equipment will be available again.  If you feel that technical issues will impact your ability to complete a project, you should discuss this with the professor in a timely manner BEFORE the project due date.  Please note that technical difficulties are a very standard occurrence in this field and successful professionals are often noted for their abilities to find creative solutions that allow them to complete their projects on time and with artistic excellence despite technical difficulties.

 The Fine Arts building is open 24 hours for your usage. If you are working

ate take caution to be safe and secure. Police is x3003  

Do not give out codes to anyone!!

  CLASS SCHEDULE (subject to chang