Kindergarten Is Not The Place To Learn Everything

By Ed Raymond
Staff Writer

My favorite cartoon is a drawing of two huge hippos floating lazily in a sun-drenched African river at high noon, surrounded by the serenity of green swamp grass and big white birds roosting in tree branches. The quote balloon above one hippo expresses a doubt: “I can’t believe it’s only Wednesday.” For some reason, it tickles my funny bone. I suppose some part of my brain has something to do with it. In the future we may discover what part.

So far we have learned that the left side of the brain has various strengths. It is the rational side: logical, linear, and is good at sequencing, analysis, and processing. It is more objective, literal, time-sensitive, and loves accuracy. Our language program is based in the left side. It’s the storage place for grammar and the ability to be verbal.

The right side has different strengths. In all those mushy-looking folds dwells our imagination, intuitiveness, and most likely our whimsical side. It’s the place for ambiguity, metaphorical ability, the creation of pictures and gestures in a time-free environment. We use this side to think creatively, to make subjective judgments–and to dream a lot. I think the hippo cartoon is more right brain than left, but then again….we still have little knowledge of how the brain really functions.

The reason (Does this “reason” come from my left brain or right brain?) I bring this up is that the politicians are ripping the flesh from the dying education carcass again, complaining about poor schools, terrible teachers who should be fired, sinister teacher unions blocking innovation and privatization of charter schools, and dozens of other issues created to get votes. Actually improving education has very little to do with school reform. What we need is the reformation of our society so that the young have the innate ability, desire, family support, and wherewithal to perform well in school.

How Can We Have Universal Graduation Without Universal Health Care?

How do we educate a student who is constantly hungry? In a 2009 poll 63 percent of public school teachers bought food in for hungry students every month–in ‘the richest country in the world!” How many students at the poverty-level have access to a home computer? How many 18-year-old students from poverty-level homes have traveled more than 50 miles from home in their lifetime? How many students from poverty-level homes have access to newspapers, magazines, books,videos, and DVDs at home? How many four-year-olds in poverty have access to preschool and Head Start programs? We all know that low-income families attending low-income public schools will have their students struggle in high drop-out public schools. School “reform” doesn’t have much to do with these problems. Even that great advocate of capitalism Paul Harvey said: “You can’t get people out of the slums until you get the slums out of people.”

Look at the ink about the firing of all the teachers of Central Falls High School in a Providence, Rhode Island poverty-riddled slum. The school was not making “sufficient progress” in math and English scores under Leave No Child Behind, so the superintendent wanted some extra hours of tutoring per week from the teachers. The teachers expected the superintendent to negotiate extra money for the extra time. It’s the law. The district did not budge from their position so the teachers rejected the plan. Then came the firing. Over 40 percent of the students came from below-poverty homes. Another factor was not repeated very often.

Over 40 percent of the students came from homes where English was not spoken at all. Do you know how difficult it is to teach a young student English when it is not spoken at home? No wonder they did not meet the goals of Leave No Child Behind! But the politicians, even President Barack Obama and his Education Secretary Arne Duncan, blame the teachers! That is just plain stupid.As a former elementary and high school principal, I also feel for the teachers in New York City who have to cope with poor and illiterate students. New York has 150,000 new immigrant students who have to learn English before they can learn anything. New York also has 15,100 students up to 18 years-of-age who have never been in a classroom in their entire lives. They come from African and Asian countries speaking hundreds of different dialects.

The Rich Have Their Feudal Estates–So Why Worry About The Poor?

We are now in the greatest rich-poor gap in the U.S. since 1929, the days of the Rockefeller-Vanderbilt-Carnegie-Morgan exploitation and the Big Crash. (Have you ever seen any of their descendants in a soup line because of estate taxes?) But we have the no-new-tax crowd centered in a political party that has only two planks in its corporate platform: cut taxes and keep derivatives and credit default swaps legal. The Republicans in Phoenix have been cutting taxes for over ten years, through at least seven good years and two bad.

To put wealth in perspective, let’s go back to 1992 and the start of the good Clinton years. Even with the Internet and computer bubbles of the late 90’s the bottom 90 percent of Americans saw their incomes rise by only 13 percent in 2009 dollars. The top 400 highest earners raised their incomes 399 percent during the same time.

Internal Revenue Service data reveals that in 2007 America’s wealthiest households reported their highest incomes in history–while paying the lowest taxes in modern times. Just using the adjusted gross incomes of the 400 highest earners, the data revealed that their gross income from 2006 rose 31 percent in just one year, from a paltry $263 million to $345 million in 2007. In 1995 the top 400 were paying about 30 percent of their income in taxes. With Bush tax cuts in force their income tax rates had dropped to 16.6 percent, much lower than their pilots, limo drivers, maids, tax accountants, and butlers.

In 1992, when capital gains taxes were 28 percent, capital gains accounted for about a third of gross income. In 2007 the rich were making two-thirds of their gross from capital gains because the tax had been reduced to 15 percent. In 1992 salaries accounted for 26 percent of gross income for the top 400. In 2007 only 6.5 percent came from salaries and wages.

In 2007 the top 400 totaled $138 billion of adjusted gross incomes, or 1.6 percent of all national income. That’s three times the share they had in 1992.
We always hear from Republicans that the rich pay 40 percent of the taxes paid in this country. Actually for the amount of the national assets they control, they should pay a helluva lot more. The entire financial structure, including the tax code, has been rigged to fit the rich, whether it’s corporate welfare, federal regulation or the lack thereof, and the court system.

Not Much Money And No Job Security In Tchaikovsky

Dan Barry of the New York Times recently wrote an article about Tiffany Clay, a senior at Newark High School in Newark, Ohio. I’m going to use his framework in the article to show what’s wrong with current political ideas about school reform. Half of Tiffany’s classmates in Newark are poor enough to qualify for free lunch programs. Newark High School has one of the highest dropout rates in Ohio and a third do not graduate.It didn’t use to be that way. There were lots of manufacturing jobs in Newark until the late 90’s, paying good wages. A worker 20 years ago could cover a mortgage, buy a new car, go out to eat occasionally, and even take the family on a vacation trip. No more. The good jobs have gone overseas. Tiffany’s parents split when she was in elementary school.

She lived with her father until she was 16. He had been employed as a plant electrician, but now worked for half his previous wages. She left his house because she could no longer take his pessimistic approach to life. She now shares a $345-a-month small apartment with an unemployed boyfriend. Her long-range plans are to study nursing at a Newark technical college. Tiffany works a 35-hour week at a Sonic drive-in, making $7.35 an hour plus tips. She often is named employee of the month and gets a month of free meals.

According to her teachers Tiffany is a good student and is at the very top of her class. She should be going to a top university on scholarship, they say. She once thought of becoming a music teacher because she is a gifted musician. Her high school music teacher bought her a violin on e-Bay for $175. Tiffany loves to play Tchaikovsky. But the school district faces cuts every year. The orchestra in which Tiffany plays will probably be eliminated next year. Tiffany has to pay a $55 participation fee to play the school’s violin in the orchestra. Most of the instruments in the orchestra are actually hand-me-downs from closed schools in the area.

The Newark district music director likes to recall better days at a wealthy district where she directed orchestras. She remembers the time when a student smashed his $10,000 violin at graduation. It was his spare.

It seems funny that while unemployment hovers around ten percent and wages have basically stayed the same for ten years for the poor and the middle class, the rich households in this country are doing better than usual. Even during our financial crises of foreclosures and underwater mortgages the number of U.S. households with a net worth of at least $1 million (excluding their primary residence) went up 16 percent, totaling 7.8 million families.

Families with at least $5 million of net worth grew by 17 percent. Households with $500,000 or more went up 12 percent during these hard times and topped out at 12.7 million. We sure are short a lot of money. Our tax rates are fully 15 to 25 percent below every other industrialized country. When are we going to get our priorities straight? Do we really wonder why a teacher wrote an angry letter to the Arizona Republic newspaper, complaining about cuts in her district which assigns 43 students to her first grade class? Please tell me, school reformers, how you teach reading to 43 first graders—three who qualify for special services, two without any English background, and four who have not attended kindergarten?

The University of California recently had to cut $300 million from its various campuses. All theater arts and dance programs were cut. But all Sports Management majors and programs will continue to be funded. After all, how else can we keep all of those student-athletes in school? But what about the right side of the brain? Do we leave it empty?

Are We Really Saving Money By Cutting All Preschool And Kindergarten Programs?

This is what Arizona is doing to education–among many other things. At the same time of all this cutting they are talking about accepting the new national guidelines for reading and math recently promoted by Duncan’s Department of Education! How can the country accept new national guidelines in all subjects when we have such poorly financed school districts?

I suppose we could follow the warning of Republican Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer of South Carolina who recently said we should stop feeding the poor because that “allows them to continue to breed.” I guess Rush Limbaugh feels much the same way. He’s been complaining about the food stamp program lately and portraying the unemployed and the poor as smoking and drinking food junkies sitting on their ass watching flatscreen TVs.

I imagine Tiffany will make a great nurse. Even if she is handicapped by poverty, she has done a pretty good job of developing both the right-brain and the left-brain. But if given half a chance to really play Tchaikovsky, she might have brought joy to millions.

We just do not know how to match our programs of study to the development of both sides of the brain yet. Leave No Child Behind concentrates on the left side too much. It is so 19th century. Then we cut music, art, physical education, dance, theater, and debate so we can concentrate on math, reading, and science for the left side. That is not 21st century education. We are not educating to fill factories and run assembly lines anymore. Most great ideas come from the right side.

We are neglecting it. An Arizona columnist had it right: “Arizona’s economic future isn’t just copper, cattle, and cotton, but also computers, commerce, and creativity. Human capital is our ticket to turning our economy around.”

Questions and comments: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)