"...an utterly corrupt new religion called environmentalism..."
If the history of this planet's climate over millions of years is any guide, we are about to enter a new ice age.
CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper indicated in a 1993 interview with the Minneapolis Star Tribune that he wants to see the United States become a Muslim country.
Escape From Gangsta Island: The Progressive Decline of an Alternative School, Part 1
By Bernard Chapin (10/05/04)
Over the course of the past four years, more and more books are being produced concerning the public schools, which is not surprising, considering that they now consumer $745 billion[1 ] annually in taxpayer funds. A great many of these works are written by journalists or academics who issue opinions from an expansive distance and have little direct contact with the educational establishment and the students it services. There seems to be a dearth of insider accounts, and it is, as a means to address this shortage, that I decided to create the book that you now have before you.
Unlike other commentators, my views are the result of first person experiences in the public schools as an employee and card carrying member of the National Education Association. For a over a year now, in addition to my full-time job as an educator, I have been writing columns about various topics for several internet publications[2] but have found that pieces concerning education have most interested readers. I received countless emails expressing shock at the culture I inhabit and of the employees and ideas I encounter. My readers seem to have previously believed that the public schools differ little today from the ones they grew up in, but this is decidedly not the case. In the chapters that follow, I will depict the fall of one particular school and the way in which the inherent structure of our public schools made its decline possible.
The school in question is the one at which I have worked for the majority of my career. It is called the Eastlands Center (EC) and lies in a suburb that is just slightly north of the city of Chicago. The Northlands Center is an alternative education facility that meets the needs of about 250 students who were referred to us by one of five general education high schools[a] that directly fund our operations. Around 200 of these students are eligible for special education services and the rest are regular education students who were expelled or transferred to our facility due to disciplinary violations. All of our students have one thing in common which is that they cannot reintegrate to their home schools without meeting general behavioral conditions and requirements. I first began working at Northlands in August of 1998 and resigned my position in July of 2004.
My official job title is “school psychologist” and its also the name embossed on the Specialist’s Degree I received from the University of Detroit-Mercy. The role of a school psychologist in a building confuses many outsiders (and some insiders as well). As a profession, there are at least 22,500[3] of us in the United States. Historically, have acted as the gatekeepers for special education. We have always tested students to determine whether or not they meet the eligibility requirements for special education through the use of formal hearings known in my region as Eligibility Conference reports and Individual Education Programs (IEPs)[4].
With so many school psychologists, I am incapable of being a spokesperson for the field on the whole. Yet, it has been my observation that most of us are full-time or part-time bureaucrats who are generally responsible for a large amount of the forms that are intrinsic to special education. However, unlike teachers, we are not assigned classrooms so there is considerable variation among our daily activities. I do not doubt that there are some school psychologists who are not burdened in the least by the mechanics of special education procedures, but I can safely say that most of us have jobs requiring reams and reams of paper. The National Association of School Psychologists broadly defines our function as “consultation, assessment, intervention, prevention, education, research and planning, and health care provision.”[5]
Many times, due to our familiarity with the law and procedure, it is not uncommon to find school psychologists entrusted with a great many administrative[b] tasks that are outside of our normal day to day affairs. We often are placed in charge of financial decisions and represent the school at out of district placement staffings. Ours is a truly diverse life.
For me, assessments, the generation of reports, and sitting in endless meetings have always been among my chief responsibilities. I often use a corruption of an old Woody Allen joke to best describe my vocation. When occasionally asked if I am the school psychologist, I respond by holding my hand high in the air and exclaiming, “Of course I’m the school psychologist. Can’t you see my pen!” I imagine many of my peers would find humor in this quip. I would also include “putting out fires” as being another function I perform. At my first job, which was at a rural location ninety miles outside of Chicago, I regularly found myself trying to appease parents and maintain our school’s reputation. At the time, I was under the excellent leadership of Dr. James Boyle[c] so “fire prevention” was a remarkably easy and enjoyable thing in which to do. Being a school psychologist definitely turned out to be somewhat different than what I expected it to be when I was in graduate school, but I soon adapted to my role and reveled in it. The accomplishment of tasks and fulfilling of directives has always been a source of pleasure for me and I have to say that, until about a year ago, I was very satisfied with my career overall. In fact, I told all who would listen that I loved my job.
There is a topic that should be scrutinized forthwith and it is the question of whether or not my work is a hasty generalization as it examines directly the happenings of only one school. We all know that one swallow does not make a summer so why would a book that analyzes a single facility tell us anything about our schools on the whole? This is an obvious and potent criticism of my work which is why I will refute it at once (before the story properly begins). First off, I admit that most schools are not alternative schools and that the physical layout of the most buildings differs from that of Northlands. I also Another factor supporting this story’s applicability is that the alternative school itself is becoming an ever more popular fixture within American education.[7] Alternative institutions got considerable press back in 1999 when Jesse Jackson[8] raised hell in Decatur, Illinois over students being expelled after a fight and thus being relegated to an alternative school for a year regardless of their behavioral and academic performance. The use of special behavioral wings or facilities are a logical extension of the therapeutic culture that now dominates American society. Regular education high schools sometimes look to alternative schools as a way in which to give their own discipline procedures credibility. In fact, I recall sitting next to a special education teacher from Douglas High School who informed me that his child management point card system “was directly ripped off from you guys.” With the help of lawyers and progressive ideologues, alternative methods of dealing with children are seeping gradually into the regular education environment, and will likely change the meaning of public school discipline in the years to come.
Since 2000, our own district discovered that a lethal combination of rampant spending and declining tax revenues has placed it firmly in the fiscal red to the tune of ten million dollars per annum. It’s solution, although it took them awhile, was to begin cutting programs and staff. We were targeted along with the general education buildings. Every time, the proposed budgetary reductions started out as being very severe, yet, every time, the cuts eventually were reduced to a miniscule amount. This was due to the fact that the high schools quickly found that they couldn’t live without us. Last year one teacher was laid off but come November, he suddenly reappeared in his classroom with a fresh group of students before him. Our regular education program is a frequent target for eradication as it doesn’t bring in reimbursement dollars from the state. In February of 2004 it was considered doomed but by May of 2004 it was restored. In this era of zero tolerance, school principals and deans simply cannot survive without the services offered by an alternative school. How often have I heard, “What would they do with these kids without us?” It is a crucial question as the home schools have little stomach for arsonists, thieves, batterers, and drug pushers congregating in their hallways. I firmly support the proposition that schools like ours are here to stay. Alternative schools are growing[9] and they’ll be in the news more and more in the decades to come.
Another challenge to Engineering Failure’s universality is the character of Principal Chin. I readily admit that it is extremely rare to have someone with a full-blown personality disorder working as a Principal in the public schools. She is comical, cruel, and unusual, but undeniably she is an aberration. I wish I could state that she is a figment of my imagination but any of ten employees she ran out of our building this year would avidly testify that she is not. In my nine year career I have worked under seven other Principals and they in no way were ever, even for a brief period, ever as dysfunctional as Mrs. Chin. Yet, while she stands in notable contrast with most of her administrative peers in the United States, the way in which she was protected by the bureaucrats above her is indicative of much that is wrong in contemporary education because so in countless situations around the country the educational elite polices itself which often means that there is no policing at all.
Read part 2 here
[1] http://www.heritage.org/Research/Education/wm478.cfm
[2] Enterstageright.com, mensnewsdaily.com, strike-the-root.com, pipelinenews.com, and gopnation.com.
[3] http://www.nasponline.org/about_nasp/whatisa.html
[4] Sometimes called “Individual Education Plans.”
[5] http://www.nasponline.org/about_nasp/whatisa.html
[6] http://www.principals.org/publications/connections/kowalski.cfm
[7] http://horizon.unc.edu/projects/HSJ/Knutson.asp
[8] http://www.cnn.com/US/9911/16/expelled.students.04/
[9] http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/frss/publications/2002004/
[a] Specifically, the names of the five high schools are as follows: Northlands, Southern, Lincoln, Douglas, and Douglas East.
[b] School psychologists are not always members of the teacher’s unions. At my first job I was a quasi-administrator on the administration’s pay school. In other districts, school psychologists, social workers and other personnel have formed their own unions apart from the teachers and administration.
[c] He’ll be mentioned in depth later on.
[d] I was also offered classes at various suburban locales which I did not accept.
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