Liberty Maven

Most rational people agree that in the face of the current economic meltdown, all levels of government- federal, state and local- should spend less money.  What no one agrees on is how to spend less.  One person’s pork is another person’s vital service, and we usually don’t have trusted third parties to figure out which is which.

A case in point is the school district where I teach, Los Angeles Unified, the second largest in the nation.  California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has been issuing increasingly dire assessments of the state economy, with increasingly dire implications for education.  His latest assessment of likely cuts to education could swell LAUSD’s current $375 million deficit to more than a half-billion within this school year.  There is no debate about spending less.  Everyone in the district has become a spend-less conservative.

The disagreement, of course, is on what to cut.  The teachers’ union wants to cut the bureaucracy (while demanding a raise).  The school board wants to cut teacher perks like health care (while offering no raise).

Here’s what I want: All district “literacy coaches” should be sent back to classroom positions, all publishing enterprises that duplicate the expense of state approved textbooks should be discontinued, and district “literacy cadres” should be disbanded.

And here’s the rub: you the reader, well informed though you may be, have no idea what I’m talking about.  It’s local, insider stuff.  One can’t rally the troops with calls of “Down with literacy coaches!” as one can with teacher accountability or pay raises.

Adding to the problem is that even a close explanation of the district’s meddling in curriculum does not necessarily lead anywhere.  Let’s try it out and see if I’m right.

One of LAUSD’s responses to its dismal reading scores has been the creation of a new job title: “literacy coach.”  The coach is usually a former classroom teacher who worked his or herself up into local administration circles, where entities called “literacy cadres” welcome them into an inner sanctum of jargon and intrigue.  The coaches, one per school, each represent an additional teacher’s salary, and the cadres are staffed by many administrative personnel who earn more than teachers.  Adding to the expense is the growing practice of publishing supplements to already purchased textbooks.  There are no public figures on the cost of the literacy enterprise, but it’s comfortably in the millions.

So what’s wrong with literacy coaches and cadres?  Don’t they do some good?  Scores have not gone up in the few years since the cadres and coaches appeared, but shouldn’t we give them a chance to work?

My only “proof” that we should dump the whole enterprise is the tale of the cadre/coach cabal’s latest foray into management of district English departments: this year’s attempt to revise the 11th grade curriculum. Juniors have traditionally taken American Literature, starting in the fall with William Bradford’s account of the Mayflower, hitting Mark Twain in the autumn, and finishing with maybe John Updike in the spring. Now, per the mavens at the California State University at Northridge School of Education and the district cadres, we are being told we need to revamp our fussy old approach. At the program roll out in October, 11th grade teachers listened as a CSUN professor told us that there is no real reason to teach literature, by which she meant fiction- novels and short stories- or poetry. Literature, per the pundit, was forced down our throats in the 1890’s by elitist professors at Yale and Harvard. Today the experts understand that literature is useless except for the few students who will be college English majors; it does nothing for the great unwashed. What we need instead is expository writing: how-to manuals, “you can do it” pep talks by celebrities and other light fare that won’t unduly tax our kids’ minds.

After the professor’s introduction we received copies of the student edition of the “11th Grade Contemporary Composition Course,” which, should we choose to obey, we will use in the spring semester. The presentation turned to what the presenters considered the showcase piece in the new book: “Virtual Selves,” an article by MIT “cyberanalyst” Sherry Turkel which explores “avatars,” artificial “selves” used to represent people while they play video games. We spent a good two hours studying the unit. By the end of the session, many teachers were shouting in fury and storming out. Let’s see what you think.

Terkel begins by claiming that computers are “not just changing our lives but changing our selves.” Specifically, we have relocated our fantasies from our heads to our computer screens, and this is making us “comfortable with new ways of thinking about relationships, sexuality, and identity.” We have become “decentered” into lots of “windows,” where real life (abbreviated RL) becomes just one more window. This is apparently a good thing, though in past times we might have called it schizophrenia.

Examples follow. Terkel describes how a 21 year old college student creates a rapist avatar and other violent characters, giving him “…the chance to explore multiple and unexplored aspects of the self.” Similarly, our 16 year-olds will be advised, we can have “virtual adulterers, or virtual gender-swappers.” Terkel explains the latter: “In the ‘fake-lesbian syndrome,’ men adopt online female personae in order to have netsex with women.” Likewise, women can “present” as men to have either heterosexual or homosexual net-sex.” Other possibilities include “group sexual encounters” and “animal” sexual encounters.

The unit ends with a suggestion that students break up into groups where teachers direct them to discuss “what your multiple personalities might be and/or who you’d like to be.”

So there it is.  I think the literacy coaches and cadres and their burgeoning publishing empire should be scrapped and the money saved.  But not all the teachers present at the 11th grade curriculum rollout agreed.  One man stood up and called the program “powerful,” and any number of other sycophants, excited over the prospect of promotion, fawned all over the presenters.  How do I overcome this? How, for starters, do I prove that poetry is valuable, that we should spend money teaching it?

You know what, I can’t prove it.

How, when you think about it, can anyone prove anything?  How can you prove, for instance, that a U.S. installed  “missile shield” in eastern Europe will be a colossal slice of pork that won’t work, that we could teach poetry to every child in the world for the price of one radar station?  Why bother to try to prove such a thing, when the interests that want the “shield” will just prove the opposite?  Generally speaking, every side of every contentious issue is “proven.”

As an English teacher, I’ve reached the challenging part of my essay.  After all, don’t I order my students to write “persuasive” essays in which they must take a stand and support it?  How hypocritical it would be for me now to end with, “We can’t prove what programs to cut.  There’s no such thing as knowledge.”  Ok, how’s this: I can’t prove that my school district should teach literature and poetry rather than fantasy sex, but I can make evident that many people agree with me on this matter, and that these people have had it up to here and are going to make so much noise that the district will have to restore common sense to our instructional ideas.

Alright then, everybody together: “LAUSD: Cut all spending on your misguided pandering to students who want to daydream about sex instead of cracking a textbook!”  Maybe a bumper sticker too?

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Doug Lasken teaches English and Debate for the Los Angeles Unified School District. Reach him at Dlasken514@aol.com