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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