Five minute passing periods and American teaching

            I  have just returned from a convention for international teacher visitors on the Fulbright exchange. My role, as an alumnus of the program, was to share insights and experiences about the cultural and professional exchange, to help troubleshoot and soften the landing into American teaching expectations, and suss out and communicate any problems that might be emerging behind the scenes. I was especially excited to see Franky and explore Denver and get pampered by the State Department again. But what happened additionally was unexpected and potentially nutritive, potentially destructive: questions I’ve been asking since my return (questions—when they’re not muttered discontent and grief) have found their resonance and choral echo.

            It’s one thing to place one’s self in entirely new contexts and from there observe the ways of the world. In Hungary I was always aware that I was picking up on larger cultural truths but not understanding them fully or defining them well, though my heightened awareness of American systems and beliefs, by contrast, gained clarity; this was why, when U.S. teachers got together in Hungary, we urgently compared notes, sizing up the emerging generalizations about our new home. Are you finding teenagers openly groping each other in public areas and buses? I am too! What’s that about? Are you finding people jumping in front of you in lines or totally pushing you out of the way? Not really: that’s happened to me in cities, but mostly the men I’ve seen hold doors and wait for you to pass; do you get that? Generalizations get a much bigger sample when you place many people—in this case, from different regions of the United Kingdom, the Czech Republic and Hungary—in one room and ask for their cultural comparisons and insights.

            When we Americans used to gather last year, we marveled at how much more time we had to live our lives in the school day, at how tightly bound the community of teachers into which we’d each entered, and how many more opportunities there were to know students outside the classroom—traveling together, cooking, celebrating, walking, in some cases even drinking. We were aware that our status as visitors perhaps gave relationships an extra glow, and that our workloads reflected the language barrier that kept us out of meetings, paperwork and supervisory duties. We were aware too, though not as keenly aware as our hosts, that our American paychecks kept us out of the second jobs and private tutoring that took up the afternoons. Nevertheless, we moved and lived in a community where families spent more time, communities celebrated more, teachers played together and had time daily to talk and be human beings in the world with each other, and students could sit on benches with each other and do nothing.

            I came back to my job and it slammed me. I returned wanting to write entries in this blog but was too worn.

            My first two weeks I arrived every day at 6:30 a.m. and left every day between 5:30 and 6:30. I shared lunch in our 35-minute periods with colleagues because I knew it was important but I also felt the strain of losing those minutes. My day has shortened to ten hours since that time, by sheer force of will, cutting larger and larger swathes of the corners teachers cut, and still—and I apologize for this—I still reward a stack of work by peeing, an act relegated to its own efficiencies and hurry.

            This is my sixteenth year teaching. Two of the three courses that I’m teaching this term, I’ve taught before and have extensively planned. And yet.

            At our convention, we had four Hungarian teachers, two Czech, and a little less than twenty Scots and Brits. One teacher after another observed how busy students were during the day, and then after the day, in all the sports and activities of the afternoons and weekends; they observed repeatedly how tightly scheduled the day and week; and individually, they related the same thing over and over, thinking every time that her American school was just a sad exception: the staff doesn’t really know each other at my school, they never spend any time with each other, there’s not really a community of teachers at my school, teachers don’t know who I am or even that my partner is gone. In observations related both by cause and effect, and I’ll explain in a moment, international teachers laughed or marveled at how little American schools trusted their students with their own interests or time.

            The pace of our schools is relentless. I remember teaching at a sprawling, teeming Rindge and Latin School in Cambridge, Massachusetts whose passing periods were three minutes—not in spite of the crowds and length of hallways, but because of them. Kids might be a little late if they’re traveling from another building. But they won’t be loitering. It’s the same engineering concept used in Nazi death camps: keep them running and they won’t rebel, won’t break ranks, won’t ask. What I have already expressed to colleagues at Roosevelt is how efficient our days are. We have worked hard to teach bell to bell, to push students to print papers and confer with us between classes and meet us after school, to move students towards those sports and clubs that will make them feel connected while we make the most of our own professional developments and adult meetings. Despite what people out there seem to believe and maybe in contrast to some of the schools out there (but not to any of the schools described or observed this weekend), our schools are incredibly efficient, with every minute accounted for and necessary. There is at least real pressure for this to be so. And within the school periods, we have become better and better at identifying, developing and assessing specific skills and organizing the hour to achieve them. If we finish our planned lesson three minutes early, we know students can usefully spend time reflecting on what they have learned. But this productive schooling doesn’t stop. Students, as the British teachers observed, live at the schools; and social community among teachers is not the common experience that it seems to be in other countries.

            We visited Franky’s school. The visiting American teachers (mentors and administrators of European Fulbright instructors) were especially interested in the free hour both students and teachers have within the 7-period day. Teachers have five classes, one planning period, and one period devoted to tutorials, conferencing and clubs, while students have six classes, with one period unplanned unless they’re ninth graders or have fallen behind and need help. Because this countered what international teachers observed—the relentless pace, the constant supervision of children—we very interested in how it worked. Students drove off campus. Sometimes they came back late. Students hung out outside and in halls as well as the library or lunchroom. Sometimes kids were directed somewhere but didn’t make it. But, the principal said, it was all worth it. Students received interventions and one-on-one relationships and tutoring and downtime; teachers got to know students in more personal ways and more time to breathe and put their arms around the school. Of course, many American visitors said this would never work in my community, and I'm sure they were probably right: this was a largely homogenous, comfortable student body going to school in a big grassy field.

            But I also thought about a moment Roosevelt, with not such a dissimilar population, tried to implement an activity period—an hour once every couple of weeks in which students could gather in clubs during the school day: we shut it down because some kids wandered off campus. I thought about the Denver principal saying, But it’s worth it. I thought about how much we do because we don’t trust kids—the short passing periods, the gradual eclipsing of the one student day we’d had at Roosevelt, the tiny half hour lunch. If we just had recesses in high school, I had been thinking the last month or so; and now I think it loudly: a real lunch hour, or ten minute passing periods, or a week or even two weeks in winter devoted to fun projects designed by teachers or students, or a tutorial hour or even half hour—something to give us all time to conference one-on-one or to play—to play!—to break open the day and slow it down, to give my job its humanity back.

            I met with all the Fulbright alumni now back in their American jobs. We were all relieved and alarmed to discover that each of us was having a hard return. For each of us, the day is too tightly packed and we are too tightly wound. The job feels all wrong. Now that we have worked in schools where teachers and students are trusted and have time and space to relate to each other in other ways than one, the hours and pressures are oppressive.

            Franky and I both sought out the teacher exchange partly because we sought the attitude adjustment: we were driving ourselves in unsustainable ways. What I realized when I was in Hungary and falling in love with my wife again and getting to know my daughters and performing with colleaguges in plays and choruses and dances and sitting on benches with students during passing periods—and I wrote this in an earlier blog—was that my job in Seattle WAS really that big. My job is just very, very big. And when I returned I found this to be true.

            We do a lot to serve our students here in America. We can be proud of this, and proud of our earnest and deliberate efforts to improve what we do. But Oh my God it’s airless.

            I love my students. I sometimes do a great job too. But maximizing productivity and accountability is no way to run a laboratory for democracy and quality life.

            Listening to the international teachers, listening to we who’ve returned to the driving pulse of our American positions, I know our schools and our jobs don’t have to be this way. I know I don’t have to live this way. And knowing it, I can change it—if not one thing, then the other.

Why I support Occupy Wall Street

There is an overriding belief among decision makers—overriding in that even those who don’t believe it are afraid to refute it—that Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand of capitalism will guide business and corporate entities to make decisions that are in the best interests of consumers, that a free market will draw many profit-seeking peoples to the best ideas and will then compete against one another to deliver these best ideas and, through such competition, provide consumers with both choice and lower prices and an active laboratory whereby ideas are further refined until the best, most vigorous ideas emerge, and consumers and businesses are rewarded both. One can find examples in recent and past history to demonstrate that the invisible hand has rewarded not only financiers and business-owners and consumers, but workers as well: Henry Ford knew that his workers were consumers and so paid them enough so they could afford his cars; lately, King County has greatly reduced health care costs to its employees by supporting the healthier choices they make in their insurance structure (1); at the start of the Great Depression, W.K. Kellogg found he could run a profitable business by moving to six hour days at the Kellogg cereal plants—because workers with more time for “family, community, church, and individual freedom” were more productive (2). Though free market arguments go largely unchallenged in our state and federal houses of congress, however, the invisible hand has shown again and again that it has not been good for most citizens of our country. We allow our businesses to make decisions not only primarily but purely to maximize profits and please investors. Corporate responsibility shows up as a single lecture in Ethics classes on the way to earning the most popular Bachelors and Masters degree in our country, Business Administration (3). The profit motive, however, has proven harmful. It’s proven bad for workers, bad for voters, bad for consumers, bad for health, and bad for our planet. While Jim DeMint (Senator from South Carolina) told a room that they might have to “take to the streets to stop America’s slide into socialism,” (4) the historical record has shown that our policy makers have backed off corporate regulation and accountability repeatedly, in the face of numerous abuses, disasters and calls for change; it appears now that the only way to shift the conversation away from the unquestioned faith in the invisible hand is to do exactly as Jim DeMint has demanded. Take to the streets.

This would not be the approach if democracy and capitalism were as synonymous as idea-crafters often make them out to be. I say this even given an important caveat that we are not a pure democracy, but a democratic republic in which we are represented under different rules under different interpretations in different institutions and states, such as between the Senate, in which representation by population does not count, and the House of Representatives, where it does; or in the Electoral College, with its winner-take-all states, whereby a majority win takes all a state’s electors, as in Washington State, or with its alternative, whereby electors are chosen by local districts, as in Maine. Furthermore, we are note purely a democracy because we have built constitutional protections to curtail the will of the majority if the popular will becomes totalitarian in impulse. This is called the Bill of Rights. Perhaps the more important caveat is that we are not a purely free market: we have a social safety net, a socialized military, state-run roads and police and schools and parks and more; and we additionally create massive incentives and disincentives for certain corporate and civic behaviors through the use of targeted taxes, fees and direct regulations.

Nevertheless, it is helpful to talk about democracy and capitalism, because their essential ideas justify so much of what we do: in our democracy, every enfranchised citizen has a voice. The idea that personal interests will end up pushing forward the ideas that will best suit us together as a community is stated by Alexis de Tocqueville this way: “The citizen looks upon the fortune of the public as his own, and he labors for the good of the state, not merely from a sense of pride or duty, but from what I venture to term cupidity.” (5) This idea is very similar to capitalism: the law of supply and demand suggests that desires and needs will get fulfilled, as long as all are free to buy and sell what they want. Both of these ideas, democracy and capitalism, rely closely on ideas of individuality and freedom, in ways that, from this level of abstraction, seem almost identical. But they are not. Seen from the concrete lens of history (and I’m perfectly aware this is the tack that Marx takes) and what actually happens, capitalism does not require everyone to win or benefit. Exploitation, slavery, extortion and other nakedly dehumanizing and wrong behaviors from our recent past and today are not behaviors theoretically out of bounds of the laws of supply and demand. Taking hostages creates demand: the fact that this is against the law is besides the point. Laws are a modification of pure capitalism. And while we have such laws and modifications, the biggest idea remains: profit and wealth are the ends, and getting others to pay as much as they can while outlaying as little cost as possible are the means. In a society where everyone is born to the same advantages and temperaments, perhaps capitalism and democracy could be similar ideas. But when capitalism flies on advantages and exploits disadvantages, by definition, not everyone has an equal voice, as they are supposed to in democracy. Democracy and capitalism are different.

When we equate the two, we privilege the ideas of individuality and freedom, and indeed, these are the concepts we shout during speeches; but beneath this equation are the increasingly unequal voices in our democracy: those rewarded for their advantages in capitalism are gaining disproportional influence on those we elect to represent our concerns. While most everyone is equally free to speak and to vote, because of laws of supply and demand, more people depend on those who run corporations, and so, representing more needs, we confer on them a special status, as demonstrated in the phrase “job creators,” a term that lays bare such dependencies.

Yet one of the deep ways that the profit motive has proved harmful has been on our democracy itself. Corporate lobbying and the proximity of K Street to the U.S. Congress has been well documented. Meanwhile, the correlation between the amount of money raised by political candidates and their chances of success is not perfect, but it is consistent. Money determines viability, and often enough, the advertising and marketing blitzes it provides put a candidate over the edge. The Supreme Court ruling favoring Citizens United—unlimited, undisclosed funds—opened the floodgates to corporate influence and demolished practical campaign finance rules (6) in a way that cements the absolute necessity for politicians to go to the rich for help forevermore.

Rick Perry provides a useful case in point. First, he became a millionaire only after he was elected into office: records show his biggest real estate sales were made to political allies and friends while governor (7). Second, the unlimited fund-raising Super-PAC “Make Us Great Again” is officially independent of Rick Perry, as required by what now stands in for campaign finance regulation, but the governor’s picture and record are all over it, and it is run by the man who was once Perry’s chief of staff, a man who co-owns a New Hampshire island with Perry’s campaign strategist (8). Third, while Perry shrugged off Michelle Bachmann’s accusation that he mandated the Gardasil vaccine as quid pro quo for Merck’s campaign donation, declaring, “If you’re saying that I can be bought for $5,000, I’m offended,” a very quick investigation suggests that, in fact, Merck had to buy him for quite a bit more—$30,000 for him and $380,000 for the Republican Governors Association which he came to chair (9). The larger point is that money not only influences whom Americans choose to vote for, it skews the way we are represented, favoring in a craven and obvious way corporate and individual wealth. Rick Perry is only the latest example of corporate interests rewarding politicians and politicians rewarding corporate interests.

The sheen of corruption here suggests the vulnerability of our democratic system. And if we can’t trust our democracy, if our elected officials have stopped listening to the drumbeat of frustration, if our elected officials aren’t aware that these sickly bargains they’ve been making to retain office are beyond the pale, then we take to the streets to remind them.

The profit motive has an inappropriate primacy in American institutions, beliefs and society. Look at what’s happened to our workforce. To maximize profits, many corporations have outsourced or relocated to other countries or free trade zones; and then they apply pressure to state legislatures to relax taxes and regulation so they can compete with companies overseas where capital and labor costs are so much less. Either way, the downward pressure on wages and the health and safety conditions of workplaces has not been counteracted by tariffs or trade restrictions on the part of our government; it has instead opened further free trade zones and competed, state to state, to provide the most business friendly environment, as when Boeing left Washington state for South Carolina’s no-union state (10). Wal-mart, when its workers threaten to unionize, simply closes shop and leaves rather than concede to demands for reasonable benefits (11). The political attempt to villanize unions is a step towards exposing Americans still further to the downward pressure on wages and conditions, and taking away the one lever workers have to tilt the law of supply and demand such that it accounts for their value. Workers’ rights need protection; instead government has been working in both direct and indirect ways to award businesses the freedom and power to exploit them.

The profit motive has been bad for the environment. After the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the hue and cry for change was persistent and loud. No one outwardly defended the shoddy oversight that led to the largest oil spill in natural history. It was the kind of event that might remind our government of its custodial relationship to land and water and remind it to demand effective mechanisms to prevent (if not entirely avoid) such disasters. What government did do was place a six month moratorium on offshore oil drilling. After that, the only policy change in the regulation of oil drilling was that Florida Governor Charlie Crist called for a special session to ban offshore drilling in state waters. The legislature rejected it (12). In other words, despite the fact that no one openly defended the poorly regulated conditions that led to such a disaster, and despite the fact that voters were furious, aggrieved or paupered depending on their locale, nothing changed. Not only does offshore drilling continue, but oversight was in no practical way improved. The profit motive quietly but steadily urged companies to make money, with as little cost as possible, off the supply of oil so in demand.

The profit motive has destabilized money itself. After the Glass-Steagall Act was repealed in 1987, banks were given free reign to take enormous risks with other people’s money, reaping the rewards of such risks without incurring the costs, which would be absorbed by Federal Deposit Insurance (FDIC). As the riskiest investments can realize greatest returns, banks turned to ever-riskier financial innovations, now a hitlist of stupidity: mortgage-backed securities, sub-prime loans, collateralized debt obligations, structured investment vehicles. Despite the housing collapse that resulted, deepening the recession and causing an entire market to compete with foreclosure prices, the only return to banking regulations and protections such as we once knew is a weak Volcker rule coming out this week, which seems to allow the conflict of interest between lending and investing to continue (13). Why isn’t the government pushing harder on something that continues to wreak havoc on our economy? The answer, of course, is It’s complicated, as all the strange terms in this paragraph indicate, an answer that provides great cover to keep the regulatory checks loose.

Health care is perhaps the most obvious example of a profit motive where it doesn’t belong. If an insurance carrier is to make a profit, it does so by taking in more than it gives out. In practice, it does so by shutting out the sickest patients and denying coverage whenever possible. It does so by raising premiums when people get sick, or by canceling a policy altogether when it’s needed most (14). This is theoretically the best way to make a profit in the industry, and the best way to provide stockholders, who expect growth every quarter, a good return on investments; and in practice it happens all too often. One can imagine the kind of urgency that life or death situations have on the law of supply and demand, and health insurance and drug companies take advantage. While medical problems account for more than sixty percent of American bankruptcies (15), health insurance companies are “into a third year of record profits.” (16) Yet attempted adjustments have been decried as assaults on liberty: Senator Ron Johnson, for example, called “ObamaCare” “the greatest single assault on our freedom in my lifetime.” (17) But capitalism is not democracy, and it needs its curbs. If insurers could make a small profit while ensuring needed access to otherwise out-of-reach medical treatments, then perhaps our nation’s citizens could stand idly by; but that’s not what’s happening.

Corporations are under incredible pressure to turn profit and the wealthy are lauded for cultivating the profits they earn. But profits should not be the keystone to our society. While profits do indeed do many of the things we want them to—rewarding innovation and hard work, filling needs and fulfilling desires—the profit motive should not go unchecked. On its own, it has proven harmful to our citizens and our country in so many ways. The solution is the invisible hand must not be a free hand, but one guided by conscious, collective interests. The government must provide regulation, targeted taxes, tariffs and, at times, laws to provide this guidance. Otherwise, the invisible hand too readily becomes a claw, snatching what it can.

Right now our government is too tightly in the thrall and grasp of this hand. I support Occupy Wall Street because I want our government, finally, to recognize that profits are not people, and that it’s the people who deserve the government’s protection and aid.

ENDNOTES:

(1) Gilmore, Susan. “County expects to save millions on health-care.” The Seattle Times. 21 September, 2011.

(2) Hunnicutt, Benjamin Kline. Kellogg's Six-Hour Day. Temple University Press, Philadelphia: 1996. Back cover. Print.

(3) "Fast Facts." National Center for Education Statistics. U.S. Department of Education, 2011. Web. 16 Oct 2011. http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=37.

(4) Hamby, Peter. "Senator Calls Obama World’s Best Salesman of Socialism." CNN Politics. CNN, 27/02/2009. Web. 16 Oct 2011. http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2009/02/27/senator-calls-obama-world’s-best-salesman-of-socialism/.

(5) Tocqueville, Alexis de, and Thomas Bender. Democracy In America. McGraw-Hill Humanities/Social Sciences/Languages, 1981. Print. 136.

(6) "Editorial: Beware the super PAC." Washington Post. 2 September 2011. Web. 16 Oct. 2011. http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/beware-the-super-pac/2011/08/31/gIQAdGB5wJ_story.html.

(7) Fitzgerald, Alison. "Perry Made More Than a Million on Real Estate While in Office." Bloomberg. 18 August 2011. Web. 16 Oct. 2011. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-19/perry-made-more-than-a-million-on-real-estate-while-in-office.html.

(8) Isikoff, Michael. “’Independent’? Maybe, but Super PAC Heavily Backs Perry.” MSNBC.com. 17 August 2011. Web. 16 Oct. 2011.

(9) Eggen, Dan. "Rick Perry and HPV vaccine-maker have deep financial ties." Washington Post. 13 September 2011. Web. 16 Oct. 2011. http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/perry-has-deep-financial-ties-to-maker-of-hpv-vaccine/2011/09/13/gIQAVKKqPK_story.html.

(10) Radil, Susan. "Union 'Hostage Situation' Prompted Boeing's Move To South Carolina." KUOW. 26 September 2011. Radio transcript. 16 Oct. 2011. http://www.kuow.org/program.php?id=24664.

(11) UFCW. "Wal-Mart Closes Store to Avoid Union." Political Affairs. 12 February 2005. Web. 16 Oct 2011. http://www.politicalaffairs.net/wal-mart-closes-store-to-avoid-union/.
Olsson, Karen. "Up Against Wal-mart." Mother Jones. March/April 2003. Web. 16 Oct. 2011. http://motherjones.com/politics/2003/03/against-wal-mart.

(12) Walsh, Bryan. "The BP Oil Spill, One Year On: Forgetting the Lessons of Drilling in the Gulf." Time Magazine. 20 April 2010. Web. 16 Oct. 2011. http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2066233,00.html.

(13) Farrell, Maureen. "Volcker rule raises more questions." CNN Money. 11 October 2011. Web. 16 Oct. 2011. http://money.cnn.com/2011/10/11/markets/volcker_rule_banks/index.htm.

(14) Vick, Karl. "As 'Rescissions' Spawn Outrage, Health Insurers Cite Fraud Control." Washington Post. 8 September 2009. Web. 16 Oct. 2011. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/07/AR2009090702455.html.

(15) Tamkins, Theresa. "Medical bills prompt more than 60 percent of U.S. bankruptcies." CNN Health. 5 June 2009: n. page. Web. 16 Oct. 2011. http://articles.cnn.com/2009-06-05/health/bankruptcy.medical.bills_1_medical-bills-bankruptcies-health-insurance?_s=PM:HEALTH.

(16) Abelson, Reed. "Health Insurers Making Record Profits as Many Postpone Care." The New York Times. 13 May 2011. Web. 16 Oct. 2011. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/14/business/14health.html.

(17) Johnson, Ron. "ObamaCare and Carey’s Heart." Wall Street Journal. 23 March 2011. Web. 16 Oct. 2011. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704662604576202203050970010.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop.