You want fries with that?
While skiing with my step-daughter and son-in-law a couple of years ago, we stopped to take a rest and grab a beer. It was a warm, clear spring day, the sun on the snow was blinding and a temporary barbecue and drink area had been set up on the lodge’s sun deck. I grabbed a beer from an iced tub and stood in line at the cash register.
It was one of those registers like they have at a fast-food restaurant, with pictures of the various items on its keypad. (We don’t want the help to actually have to memorize the price of the items they’re selling.) It also had a digital LCD readout, which was impossible to read in the bright light.
I showed my beer to the college-age kid manning the register; he punched the correct picture on the keypad and then shaded the LCD display with his hand so he could read it.
“Three, seventy-five,” he announced, and I handed him a five.
The kid punched in five dollars and then shaded the display again with his hand so he could find out what the correct change was.
Welcome to the wonderful world of California public education.
*
At some point back in the Cretaceous Period, the California legislature hit upon the brilliant idea that education was an investment in the future. The better-educated are our children, so the folklore goes, the more able will be our workforce. The more able our workforce, the better will be California products, the higher will be our wages, the more taxes we can collect to pour back into education and round and round we go.
And for a while, California did prosper, at least through the dot-com boom, attracting a highly educated workforce and becoming an economic powerhouse because of it. Never mind that most of the intellects fueling the boom were products of elite private universities like Stanford or were imports from places like India and Japan.
It was a damned good idea and solid reasoning. But for all but the top highschool students from mostly the top high schools (almost by definition located in the state’s wealthier enclaves), it was largely lip service.
*
Long before (long, long before) Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and the California legislature began robbing the educational coffers to balance the state’s budget, the average California school district saw its secondary schools cut from six instruction periods per day to five, its core curriculum watered down and most elective courses, including music, speech, journalism, etc., axed.
In fact, as long as I can remember, California schools have been in a period of decline. When I was in elementary school in a military town in Oklahoma (granted, we were awash in federal funds), when a student transferred in from California, s/he was automatically put back one grade.
*
We live in a relatively good school district. The students’ annual test scores are well above the state-wide average, yet “relatively” is still the operative word. Its schools can only be considered “good” when compared with the over-all, poorly performing schools in the rest of the state, and particularly when compared to neighboring school districts such as Oakland and Hayward, both of which make a mockery of education.
When my step-daughter was in middle school, her mother and I realized that she needed to go to a private high school rather than stay in public school for the next four years. We investigated two of these nearby and finally settled on one. This school had a track record of sending 96% of its graduating seniors on to four-year colleges or universities. Castro Valley High School hovered around 18%.
We made the mistake of mentioning this to a school board member at a community function, and he immediately started blustering. “Now, just…just…just wait just a minute,” he stammered. “Why, only two or three years ago, we had a student admitted to an Ivy League college.”
Wow, and bada boom. One student, two or three years ago. That certainly makes all the difference. And I suppose the fact that Castro Valley High School’s own Rachel Maddow, who went to Stanford, became a Rhodes Scholar and now hosts her own commentary show on CNN makes up for the majority of her classmates who attended a year or two at a community college – at best – before dropping out to become hairdressers or advertising salesmen.
*
I was astonished when my wife confessed to me that she had never read a Shakespeare play. And no Dickens. No Emily Dickenson. No Walt Whitman. No Carl Sandburg. No T.S. Eliot. Maybe one Poe short story and maybe one or two of Robert Frost’s shorter and more familiar poems. And she was an A student.
In my Oklahoma high school (and I use Oklahoma for comparison not only because I am familiar with it, but also because it’s a benighted state, its citizens are suspicious of education and its legislature is perpetually at war with its major public university), we read a couple of Dickens’ works (even the C-level students read “Great Expectations”), “Julius Caesar,” “Romeo and Juliet” and “MacBeth,” and a broad selection of American prose and poetry. What we did not read was Shel Silverstein or Khalil Gibran’s dreadfully sappy “The Prophet.” How can you consider it an education if you’ve never read a single one of Shakespeare’s works? If you don’t know Balaam’s ass from J. Alfred Prufrock?
*
Maybe that’s why California’s public universities have to offer remedial English classes, taken by huge numbers of freshmen – mostly California-educated freshmen – who must take the course without college credit. “Bonehead English,” as it is commonly known, teaches college-age kids what they should have learned in high school: how to write a coherent sentence, a little bit about the great literature of the western world and, all too often, how to spell.
*
When my step-daughter was in the fifth grade, her principal was applying for some sort of state grant and wrote a grant proposal, which he sent home with the members of the Student Council to study. She, of course, didn’t understand it and asked me to look it over. I found it incredibly poorly written, full of grammatical errors, hackneyed phrases and misspellings.
I marked it up with a red pencil, gave it a big C-minus and sent it back to school with her.
Shortly afterward, her mid-term grades came out. She was down in almost every subject and the grade for “effort” had slipped in every single subject. We asked for a conference with her teacher, who told us that she was spending too much time out of the classroom on Student Council activities and that hardly a day went by when she did not miss at least one lesson due to absences from class. She said Kristi was using Student Council as an excuse and that she had been late for class on several occasions with the excuse that “Mr. Lyen (the principal) wanted to see me,” when that was not true.
We asked for a meeting, during which the teacher, the assistant principal, Marianne and I all agreed that there was plenty of time for Student Council activities before and after school, at lunch and at recess, and that Kristi would remain in class at all other times. Principal Taylor Lyen had been invited to this meeting, but declined to come.
A few days later, we attended a school open house, where we ran into Lyen. Marianne asked if he had spoken to the assistant principal about the meeting. He hadn’t. When she tried to explain to him the consensus that had been reached, he interrupted her with, “I don’t agree. You’ll kill her spirit.”
He then went into a long diatribe, contending that a child conniving her way out of the classroom was of more educational value than anything she could learn in the classroom.
“We’re teaching life skills, here,” he spewed before he stomped away. “Long division is an archaic concept and spelling counts for nothing!”
*
Archaic concept. Well. I know that even the most disadvantaged kids have calculators today, but I’ve often found myself without one handy when I had a problem to be solved. More importantly, however, long division teaches logic and reasoning. And spelling “counts for nothing?” If you want to be a plumber or a hairdresser, maybe. But don’t get me started.
I thought the situation had pretty much hit bottom, but we had a long ways to go yet before our minor triumph.
*
Lyen called Kristi’s father and arranged a meeting, telling him that we were “murdering her soul.”
Father, when he picked up Kristi for his visitation the next weekend, told Marianne that “I’ve heard about all the terrible things you’re doing to Kristi. You’re murdering her soul.”
Father contacted his attorney, claiming that what I was doing to Kristi was “intellectual abuse.” Whatever that is. Father’s attorney wrote to Marianne’s attorney saying that he was “shocked” to read the letters that had recently gone back and forth between myself and Lyen and adding that “Mr. Dimick needs to understand that he is not the father of this child and he needs to maintain a role consistent with the fact that he is the stepfather and not the natural father.”
I replied that I was sure that when he was given copies of these letters, “you were not given the letter of apology which Taylor wrote to us on the orders of the superintendent.”
*
Lyen was called on the carpet by the school superintendent for first, voicing his out-of-line sentiments about education in such a manner to the parents of one of his students and, second, for deliberately attempting to stir up trouble between a student’s parents because of a personal vendetta.
Although a letter of reprimand was placed in his personnel file, Taylor (“Long division is an archaic concept,” “Spelling counts for nothing,” “She’ll learn more by conning her way out of class than by staying in it”) Lyen is still teaching in the Castro Valley School District. The kids under his tutelage are still absorbing his strange ideas. Castro Valley High School graduates still can’t make change in their heads nor, for the most part, spell “Castro Valley” correctly two times out of three.
Kristi, fortunately, learned to spell, to write in complete sentences and to think critically. In high school, she actually read some Shakespeare and several other worthwhile books and plays. Since graduating from UC Santa Cruz, she has risen rapidly in the corporate world and, at age 29, is making a hell of a lot more money than I was at her age – even adjusted for inflation.
*
When Kristi was a junior or senior in high school, she attended a Chamber of Commerce function with me, where we spotted Taylor Lyen across the room. She went up to him and announced proudly, “My soul is doing just fine, thank you.”