208. It's
Not Your Money: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor
Gatto from archive.org
It's
Not Your Money
Though it was twenty years and more ago, I remember well that
day in 1979 when I loaded my old
Ford station wagon with broken tape recorders, broken movie projectors, broken record players, broken tripods,
broken typewriters, broken editing machines, etc., some nearly new and still under warranty, and without
notifying anyone trucked it all
over to the repair facility on Court Street in Brooklyn because the
Bureau of Audio- Visual
Instruction had failed to respond to three official requests for help from the
school.
This was an errand of mercy for a new
principal, a fine North Carolina lady serving her probationary period, a woman for whom I had high regard
because she broke rules to do the
things that mattered. 3 The executive on duty at BAVI had once been a
"Coordinator" at the
school I was coming from. Apart from his job title he was a likeable sort who reminded me of Arnold Stang on the old
Captain Video show.
But when he saw my
load of wreckage he exploded. "What are you trying to pull?" he said. "We don't have time to
repair these things!" Official ladders of referral did in fact assign the repair function to BAVI; if
not them, then who? Because I was there, the equipment was accepted, but shortly afterwards I heard on
the grapevine it had been thrown
out and my principal upbraided for her lack of decorum in trying to have
it repaired. Broken machinery is a
signal to buy new and may be reckoned among the lifeblood factors of school's partnership with the larger
economy.
As long as I'm reminiscing, I remember
also an earlier time when a different principal wanted to "make space" in the audio-visual vault.
Some years earlier a one-time
foundation windfall had been expended on thirty-nine overhead projectors
even though the school already had
ten, and nobody but administrators and gym teachers used them anyway because they bored the life out
of kids. "Could you help me out, John, and pitch those things somewhere after school when nobody is around to
see? I'll owe you one." The
reason I was asked, I think, besides the fact I always drove an old station
wagon and had no reluctance about
using it for school matters, was that I always insisted on talking as an equal to school people whatever
their title or status. I saw them as colleagues, engaged in the same joint enterprise I was enrolled in
myself.
This disrespect for
the chain of command sometimes bred a kind of easy familiarity with administrators, denied more
conventional teachers with an "us" and "them" outlook. In any case, I drove some of the junk to
the dumpster at the entrance to the trail to Lake Rutherford in High Point State Park, in New Jersey, the rest
to a dump near my farm in Norwich,
New York, where $10,000 or so in equipment was duly buried by the
bulldozer.
Incidentally, I recall being expressly forbidden to give these
projectors away, because they
might be "traced" back to Community School District 3.
Community School District 3, Manhattan,
is the source of most of my school memories, the spot where I spent much of my adult working life. I
remember a summer program there in
1971 where the administrator in charge ran frantically from room to room in
the last week of the term asking
that teachers "help him out" by spending some large amount of money ($30,000 is the figure that
comes to mind) that he had squirreled away on the books. When we protested the school term was over, he
explained he was fearful of being
evaluated poorly on money management and that might cost him a chance to
become a principal. Getting rid of
money at the end of the term so it didn't have to be returned was a major recurring theme during my years
in District 3.
Another District 3
story I'll not soon forget is the time the school board approved funds for the purchase of five thousand
Harbrace College Handbooks at $1 1 each after it had been brought to their attention by my wife that the
identical book was being remaindered
in job lots at Barnes & Noble 's main store on 1 7 th Street for $1
a copy. Not on the list of
approved vendors, I might have been told, though it's too long ago to
recall.
Why do these things happen? Any
reasonable person might ask that question. And the answer is at one and the same time easy and not so easy to
give. When we talk about politics
in schooling we draw together as one what in reality are two quite different matters. It will clarify the discussion
to divide school politics into a macro and a micro component. The macropolitics dictate that holes in floors
cannot be fixed, or machinery
repaired, or independent texts secured at the fair market rate. The macropolitics
of schooling are deadly serious.
They deal with policy issues unknown to the public, largely out of reach of elected representatives
— senators and presidents included — and are almost impervious to public outrage and public morality. Hence the
windfall for teachers and
administrators at public colleges over the past decade and a half.
On the other hand,
the micropolitics of schooling deal with the customary venality of little fish in their dealings with even
littler fish. I speak of the invisible market in petty favors that school administrators run
in virtually every public school in the land, a market that trades in after-school jobs, partial
teaching programs, desirable rooms, desirable classes, schedules that enable certain teachers, but not
others, to beat the Friday rush hour
traffic to Long Island, all the contemptible non-cash currency without
which the management of schooling
would become very difficult. The micro-politics of schooling are degrading, disgusting, and
demoralizing, but it pales in importance before macropolitical decisions about time, sequencing, curriculum,
personnel, ties of schooling to
the economy, and matters of that magnitude, for which the opinions of school
people are never significant.
What follows in this
chapter is mostly a consideration of the macro world, but if I had to sum up in one image how otherwise
decent people conspire through schooling against hardworking ordinary people to waste their money, I would
tell my auditors of the time I
tried energetically to save a Social Studies chairman a substantial
amount of money in
purchasing supplies even though I wasn't in his department. I happened
to know where he could buy what he
wanted at about 50 percent less than he was prepared to pay. After tolerating my presentation and
dismissing it, he became irritated when I pressed the case: "What are you getting so agitated
for, John? It's not your moneyl"
3. She
was denied tenure a few years later for failing to play ball with the district
office and the teachers who
mattered in the building. Although a New York Times editorial came to her
defense (!), the superintendent was unrelenting. A year later he was expelled for crossing the local
city councilwoman.
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