204. Three
Holes In My Floor: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor
Gatto from archive.org
Chapter
Seventeen
The Politics of Schooling
Each year the child is coming to belong
more to the State and less and less to the parent — Ellwood P. Cubberley, Conceptions of Education
(1909)
It was natural businessmen should devote
themselves to something besides business; that they should seek to influence the enactment and
administration of laws, national and
international, and that they should try to control education. — Max Otto, Science and the Moral
Life (1949)
Most people don 't know who controls
American education because little attention has been given the question by either educators or the public.
Also because the question is not
easily or neatly answered —
James D. Koerner, Who Controls American Education (1968)
In October 1990, three round holes the size of silver
dollars appeared in the floor of my
classroom at Booker T. Washington Junior High between West 107th and
108th streets in Spanish Harlem,
about twelve blocks from Columbia Teachers College. My room was on the third floor and the holes went
through to the second floor room beneath. In unguarded moments, those holes proved an
irresistible lure to my students, who dropped spitballs, food, and ball bearings down on the
heads of helpless children below without warning. The screams of outrage were appalling. So pragmatically,
without thinking much about it, I
closed off the holes with a large flat of plywood and dutifully sent a note to
the school custodian asking for
professional assistance.
The next day when I
reported to work my makeshift closure was gone, the holes were open, and I found a warning against
"unauthorized repairs" in my mailbox. That day three different teachers used the room with
the holes. During each occupancy various objects plummeted through the floor to the consternation of
occupants in the space below. In one
particularly offensive assault, human waste was retrieved from the
toilet, fashioned into a missile,
and dropped on a shrieking victim. All the while, the attacking classroom exploded in cackles of laughter, I was
later told.
On the third day of these aerial assaults,
the building principal appeared at my door demanding the bombardment cease at once. I pointed out that
I had been forbidden to close off
the holes, that many other teachers used the room in my absence, that the
school provided no sanctions for
student aggressors, and that it was impossible to teach a class of thirty- five kids and still keep
close watch on three well-dispersed holes in the floor. I offered to repair the holes again at my
own expense, pointing out in a reasonable tone that this easy solution was still available and that, in my
opinion, there were traces of insanity in allowing any protocol, however
well meant, to delay solving the problem at once before another fecal bombardment was unleashed.
At that moment I had
no idea that I was challenging an invisible legion of salarymen it had taken a century to evolve. I only
wanted to spare myself those cries from below. My request was denied and I was reminded again not to take
matters into my own hands. Five
months later a repair was effected by a team of technicians. In the
meantime, however, my classroom
door lock had been broken and three panes of window glass facing Columbus Avenue shattered by vandals.
The repair crew turned a deaf ear to what I felt was a pretty sensible request to do all the work at once,
none of it complicated. The
technicians were on a particular mission I was told. Only it had been
duly authorized.
Commenting on the
whole genus of such school turf wars, the New York Observer's Terry Golway said, "Critical
decisions are made in a bureaucrat's office far from the site requiring repairs. One official's
decision can be countermanded by another's, and layer upon layer of officialdom prolongs the process. A physical
task that requires a couple of
minutes work can take weeks, if not months, to snake through the
bureaucracy. In the meantime the
condition may worsen, causing inconvenience to children and teachers. In the end, no one is accountable."
Thanks to Mr. Golway, I found out why the missile attack had been allowed to continue.
In my case, the problem lay in the
journey of my original note to the custodian, where it was translated into form P.O. 18. P.O.
18 set out on a road which would terminate in an eventual repair but not before eight other stops were made
along the way and 150 days had
passed. A study of these eight stops will provide a scalpel to expose some of
the gangrenous tissue of
institutional schooling. Although this is New York City, something similar is found everywhere else the
government school flag waves. I think we must finally grow up enough to realize that what follows is
unavoidable, endemic to large
systems.
Stop One: P.O. 18 was
signed by the principal, who gave a copy to his secretary to file, returning the original to the
custodian. This typically takes several days.
Stop Two: The
custodian gave a copy of the form to his secretary to file, then sent the request on to a District Plant Manager
(DPM), one of thirty-one in New York City.
Stop Three: In an office far removed
from my perforated floor, the DPM assigned the repair a Priority Code. Three or four weeks had now passed
from the minute a ball bearing
bounced off Paul Colon's head and a turd splattered in gooey fragments on
Rosie Santiago's desk.' A copy of
P.O. 18 was given to the DPM's secretary to file, and the form went to the Resource Planning
Manager (RPM), based in Long Island City.
Stop Four: The RPM
collects ALL the work orders in the city, sorting them according to priority codes and available resources,
and selects a Resource Planning Team (RPT). This team then enters the P.O. 18 in its own computer. A
repair sequence is arrested at
Stop Four for a period of weeks.
Stop Five: The P.O. 18 is relayed to the
Integrated Purchasing and Inventory System (IPIS), which spits out a Work Order and sends it to the
Supervising Supervisor. Three months
have passed, and used toilet paper is raining down into the airless cell
beneath John Gatto's English
class.
Stop Six: The
Supervising Supervisor has one responsibility, to supervise the Trade Supervisors and decide which one will
at some time not fix but supervise the fixing of my floor. Such a decision requires DUE TIME before an order is
issued.
Stop Seven: The Trade Supervisor has
responsibility for selecting service people of flesh and blood to actually do the work. Eventually the Trade
Supervisor does this, dispatching
a Work Crew to perform the repair. Time elapsed (in this case): five
months. Some repairs take ten
years. Some forever. I was lucky.
Stop Eight: Armed
with bags and utility belts, tradespeople enter the school to examine the problem. If it can be repaired with
the tools they carry, fine; if not they must fill out a P.O. 17 to requisition the needed
materials and a new and different sequence begins. It's all very logical. Each step is
justified. If you think this can be reformed you are indeed ignorant. Fire all these people and
unless you are willing to kill them, they will just have to be employed in some other fashion
equally useless.
At the heart of the durability of mass
schooling is a brilliantly designed power
fragmentation system which distributes decision-making so widely among
so many different warring
interests that large-scale change is impossible to those without a codebook. Even when a favorable chance
alteration occurs, it has a short life span, usually exactly as long as the originator of the happy
change has political protection.
When the first boom of enthusiasm wanes or protection erodes, the
innovation follows soon
after.
No visible level of the system, top,
middle, or bottom, is allowed to institute any significant change without permission from many other
layers. To secure this coalition of
forces puts the supplicant in such a compromised position (and takes so
long) that any possibility of very
extensive alteration is foreclosed.
Structurally, control
is divided among three categories of interdependent power: 1) government agencies, 2) the
self-proclaimed knowledge industry, 3) various special interests, some permanent, some
topical. Nominally children, teachers, and parents are included in this third group, but since
all are kept virtually powerless, with rare exceptions they are looked upon only as nuisances to be
gotten around. Parents are
considered the enemy everywhere in the school establishment. An
illustration of this awesome
reality comes out of the catastrophe of New Math imposed on public schools during the 1960s and 1970s. In the
training sessions, paid for by federal funds, school staff received explicit instructions to keep parents
away.
In schoolteacher training classes for
the New Math, prospective pedagogues were
instructed to keep their hands off classroom instruction as much as
possible. Student peer
groups were to be considered by the teachers more important than parents
in establishing motivation — more
important than teachers, too. Kids were to learn "peer group
control" of the operation by
trial and error.
Nobody who understood the culture of
kids in classrooms could have prescribed a more fatal medicine to law and order. But the experiment plunged
recklessly ahead, this time on a national
basis in the Vietnam-era United States. In the arithmetic of powerlessness that forced collectivism of this sort
imposes, students, parents, and teachers are at the very bottom of the pecking order, but school administrators
and local school boards are
reduced by such politics to inconsequential mechanical functions,
too.
1. The
actual names have been changed.
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