The Celebration Chronicles

by Andrew Ross, Ph. D.

  As an educator, I thought I had been around the block. But nothing had really prepared me for Celebration School. I learned my three Rs in austere Scottish schools, steeped in traditions of common education that date back before the eighteenth century. My secondary school enrolled everyone in my hometown. Latin conjugations were recited out loud in some classes, and corporal punishment for stray behavior was administered in all classes from a leather strap with long fingers called “The Tawse.” For most of the boys and the gutsier girls, peer pressure required that we take a good beating from that instrument with some regularity. (Not so long ago, the barbaric practice was outlawed by the European court of justice.) The British Empire had lately dissolved, but the maps on the wall still displayed its greedy dominions spanning the earth’s surface in pink swatches. In my last year, a teacher set an essay topic about “the Third World.” None of us appeared to know what the term meant. The teacher smiled wanly and proclaimed that “the Third World is whatever you want it to be.” In my final weeks, I discovered anthropology, the only curricular clue that had been offered to suggest that any societies outside of Europe mattered at all.

  For college, I went north to Aberdeen, one of the “ancient” Scottish universities, a stronghold even then of the moral philosophy that had guided the Scottish Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. In the age of late hippiedom, it was modish to live and study (by the spirit if not the letter of Rousseau’s Enlightenment) as far away from campus as possible, in communal farm cottages, where we grew our own vegetables and cannabis leaf in a noble rural setting. In the course of my graduate studies, I finally got to learn a few things for myself, first at a modern English “red brick” university—Kent—and then at a lavish American state “multiversity”—Berkeley. A peripheral casualty of Maggie Thatcher’s war on the British intelligentsia, I took my chances in the rough seas of American higher education and embarked on a career teaching the great works of American culture, high and low, that had drawn me across the Atlantic. Leaving a job in Kent instructing English as a second language to cosmopolitan European teenagers, I set off to teach corn-fed farmboys and urban homegirls at Indiana University and Illinois State, and moved on to instruct the elite student ranks at East Coast institutions like Princeton and Cornell. In 1993, I left Princeton, after a stint of eight years, to head up a graduate American Studies program at New York University.

  By the time I got to Celebration, I had been a college teacher for over fifteen years. These had been the years when higher education became a fierce battleground, ceaselessly targeted by conservatives who saw it as a vulnerable flank of the New Deal legacy they were so intent on putting to the sword. The contemporary form of a liberal arts education, partly focused on the teaching of multicultural justice, was a red flag to the monocultural New Right, and therefore had to be vandalized by their foot soldiers. Winning easy points with a compliant, scandal-seeking press, conservative detractors, from Reagan-Bush appointees like William Bennett, Chester Finn Jr., Diane Ravitch, and Lynn Cheney to reactionary professors like E. D. Hirsch and Allan Bloom and right-wing foundation hirelings like Dinesh D’Souza, ran a massive campaign of dirty tricks to discredit every socially relevant idea and program advanced in the nation’s colleges. As a progressive teacher, writer, and public lecturer, I found it impossible not to be drafted into the Culture Wars that battered and bruised higher education during that time. For myself and my colleagues to be cast as “tenured radicals” was one thing. To be judged a threat to national security for holding to our progressive beliefs was a bizarre and chastening experience.

  There is a sad lack of communication between those who work in the lower and higher sectors of education, and, with no children of my own, I had had no firsthand contact with schools. Embroiled in our own collegiate battles, it was easy to neglect the much greater trial by fire undergone by the public school system over that same period of time, much of it orchestrated by the same conservative forces, using the same tactics of disinformation and defamation. In particular, we did not have to deal with parents from the Christian Coalition on our school boards and in our classrooms, spreading fire and brimstone in our path. For all of our tribulations, higher education is still seen, even by its conservative detractors, as a great American success, attracting foreign students from far and wide. By contrast, the country’s public schools are branded an abject failure. As a result of the New Right’s campaign, by the mid-nineties virtually every ill in the nation was being laid at the door of public schoolteachers, and moves were under way in almost every state to privatize some element of the system.4

  In the absence of a national religion or shared cultural traditions, the public school has long been held up as the unique source of American national unity. It has ended up serving too many agendas as a result. Since its mid-nineteenth-century advent, the common school has been viewed as the repository of democratic virtue for the republic at large, the principal medium of Americanization for immigrants, the guarantor of economic prosperity, the salve of inequity and intolerance, the wellspring of efficient workforces, the arbiter of all civil strife, and the supposed solution to a staggering range of social maladies, from teen pregnancies to voter apathy. Some part of this hopelessly overburdened status was begot by progressive educational thinkers like John Dewey, who believed that schools could replace the family, church, and community as the primary means of socializing children into the responsibilities of a democratic citizenry. But I would attribute the lion’s share of these unreasonable expectations to the dearth of public criticism of an economic system that awards us with the grossest inequalities of any industrialized nation. In the absence of truly sustained critique of our market civilization, the public school system is an easy scapegoat for all the anxieties aroused by people’s thwarted hopes and ambitions.

  When public schools are invoked these days, there’s a good chance that the speaker is not really talking about education at all. Public schools have simply become the default for sounding off on every grievance, wrong, injury, or prejudice afoot in the republic. Not that these injustices have no impact on the shape of the public education system, which is as uneven and unequal in its access to resources as any other institution in American society. Indeed, a wholly privatized system of competition could barely have produced a more unequal result, given the vast disparities between the funding of predominantly white suburban schools and inner-city schools largely populated by minorities. The federal taxing system that allows each school district to levy taxes on homes and businesses to fund its schools has directly reinforced the high segregation that existed before Brown vs. Board of Education. Jonathan Kozol has diagnosed the outcome:

  According to our textbook rhetoric, Americans abhor the notion of a social order in which economic privilege and political power are determined by hereditary class. Officially, we have a more enlightened goal in sight: namely a society in which a family’s wealth has no relation to the probability of future educational attainment and the wealth and station it affords. By this standard, education offered to poor children should be at least as good as that which is provided to the children of the upper middle-class. If Americans had to discriminate directly against other people’s children, I believe most citizens would find this morally abhorrent. Denial, in an active sense, is however, rarely necessary in this nation. Inequality is mediated for us by a taxing system that most people do not understand and seldom scrutinize.5

  Under this local taxing formula, schools in wealthy suburban areas are allowed to enjoy funding levels that are often twice as high—up to $5,000 more per pupil—as those available to schools in low-income urban districts. Largely as a result of this formula, it remains the case that the color of your skin, the income of your family, and the location of your home will determine what you are likely to achieve in life.

  As it happens, Florida is relatively untouched by this plague of unequal funding. The school districts are countywide. As a result, any funding gaps between the urban, rur
al, and suburban schools that often coexist within these large districts (Osceola has an area of 1,506 square miles) are nominally slight. This is why Celebration School is barred from access to additional Disney and county funding, despite the high tax base of the town. So, too, the Florida Education Finance Program, passed in 1973, allows for little disparity in per-pupil expenditures from district to district, basing its funding formula on the number of students, local tax base, cost of living, and program costs. The state ends up providing about 50 percent, local property taxes about 43 percent, and the federal government 7 percent. Florida’s chronic problem is not unequal funding, but an overall funding famine resulting from the fierce anti-tax sentiments of its residents (many of them retirees) and its increasingly Republican legislature. With no state income tax, and with a legal cap on the percentage of property taxes that can be spent on education, the system faces a nigh impossible task in meeting the needs of its mercurial population growth unless there are some sweeping tax reforms. The equivalent of a 60,000-student school district is added each year, and, like the nation’s other most populous states—California, New York, and Texas—these include a disproportionate number of poor, immigrant children. One in four of Florida’s children lives in poverty. There is no greater disparity between a state’s wealth and its children’s well-being. While Florida ranked twentieth in the nation in per capita income in 1997, it finished above only Mississippi and Louisiana on the Casey Foundation’s annual assessment of children’s well-being.6 Classroom overcrowding is a serious problem in the majority of districts, and above all in the Central Florida counties, where runaway growth and development has far outstripped school capacity. Some schools in the region are already almost 300 percent over capacity and may have as many as 5–7,000 surplus students in the next few years.

  The relatively unpopulous Osceola (with an estimated 170,000 residents by 2000) still adds almost 3,000 students a year, will need twelve new schools by 2007, and is well on its way to becoming the portable classroom capital of the nation. Yet district voters routinely vote down penny or half-penny increases in sales tax to fund school construction, and housing developments are approved with no guarantee that the local school can enroll the new intake. Teachers’ salaries are severely deflated, starting at about $23,000 in a county where the average teacher’s salary is under $30,000. This makes it doubly difficult to recruit more talented educators to teach the county’s diverse base of new residents—more than 45 percent are minority—so different from the white, cattle-ranching community that predominated only a decade before. The bustling Osceola High School, home of the state champion Kowboys, which I visited just after the tornadoes, has students from twenty-two nationalities, speaking almost sixty languages, with an annual turnover rate of almost 40 percent owing to the transience of the new tourist workers.

  At Osceola High, Chuck Paradiso, whose principal’s office is adorned with steer horns, was developing a limited program based on the Celebration methods (“if it plays in Peoria …” he quipped) in a school already vocationally aimed at the area’s occupational niches like sports medicine and the hospitality industry. Popcorn was being sold outside to raise money for library books. Just down the road, at Thacker Avenue Elementary, 73 percent of the students qualified for free or reduced lunches in a county with a fifth of its children below the poverty line. Some of these students attend three different schools in one year as their families move around seeking marginally better paying jobs at area attractions. One school in Kissimmee, I was told, had a turnover rate approaching 90 percent. Pervaded by the smell of mold and sewage, decrepit, crumbling buildings with leaking roofs and rotting floors are not uncommon. What were once known as barefoot schools are scarcely less so today in a bedroom community district that faces daily challenges to its education system as formidable as anywhere in the nation with the exception of the most abjectly poor inner-city institutions.

  All the schools in the district I visited are designed on the factory model to host seven hours of consecutive, self-contained classes. The formulaic factory school was created to accommodate the shift from an agrarian to a manufacturing economy that required neat, punctual, and disciplined batches of line workers. Schooling methods were devised to facilitate the efficient transmission of knowledge, through chalk, text, and test, to passive, pre-factory trainees. How relevant is this nineteenth-century model to today’s more complex economic landscape? For over twenty years now, educators and policymakers have insisted that the postindustrial workforce requires skills that differ from the rote memory functions associated with drill sheets and standardized testing. Employers, we are told, are looking for self-motivation as well as self-discipline, teamwork as well as individual initiative, problem solving as well as functional reasoning, troubleshooting as well as maintaining technology, and attitudinal skills that rest on self-esteem, personal responsibility, and sociability. Of course, these are primarily for the higher-paying positions. The bulk of the new postindustrial jobs—in clerical, data-processing, hospitality, janitorial, and in-person service industries—are chronically low wage and carry no benefits or security. There is little incentive to seek or to retain such secondary labor positions—they lead nowhere because the rungs above are missing—and even less to learn the basic skills that entry-level positions require if it turns out that your employer and your workplace affords you no respect, let alone the prospect of advancement. Indeed, for a large percentage of these jobs, all that is required is a pleasant demeanor and a visible aspiration to please customers.

  PLATE SPINNERS

  First-time visitors to a neighborhood in Celebration School, especially those who associate classrooms with visible order and discipline, are usually baffled, and I was no exception. “It’s like a three-ring circus in there,” was a typical parent comment in this vein. On my first visit to Upper 3, I could see what they meant. If you were expecting the familiar, Hollywood tableau of schooling—a teacher in front of rows of desks—it was easy to conclude you had, instead, entered education’s equivalent of the Twilight Zone.

  Every conceivable kind of interaction and learning activity seemed to be going on at the same time, from seminar groups in high-energy discussion to individuals slumped on couches in a sullen, meditative torpor. A cluster were working on computers in the hearth, talking through a chat room to students in Scottsburg, Indiana, about a joint Web site the two schools are building to explore alternative scenarios in world history. A lively throng nearby were debating the male double standard in gender relations. They became too loud and had to relocate. Another small pack were working in the wet area on the soon-to-be defunct Lake Project, aimed at stocking the town’s lake with catfish. (Disney, I was told, was pulling out for fear of being sued by fishers attacked by alligators.) A scattering of students were practicing their hopeful Spanish in the conference room. Several individuals were stretched out on the banquettes, reading books. Two bad boys, one of them my own skatepunk neighbor, were sitting in silence, side by side, and were clearly being disciplined. Another group was gathered around the work-study tables, sketching a presentation board for their History Fair project on immigration. Individuals were surfing the Web for research on the Castles project. There was a constant movement of bodies across the hearth area, and every so often, pairs of students retreated to vacant corners of the neighborhood to exchange confidences. If you knew what everyone was doing, and if you were familiar with the day’s loose curricular schedule, then all of this made sense. If not, the place looked like a free-for-all.

  At the center of it all was Jackie Flanigan, in a blue denim shirt, white jeans, and Keds, with none of the Disney accessories she sometimes sports in an apparently irony-free way (but, with Jackie, a tail-end boomer who earnestly describes herself as an “idealistic throwback to her generation,” you could never be sure). Right now, she is “facilitating” several groups all at once. Teachers at this school are like the plate spinners on the Ed Sullivan Show, frenetically keeping things going
on several fronts. More like a mother in the home than a teacher in a classroom, she is responding to multiple requests and situations in various parts of the neighborhood while directing her own groups and talking to me. At some point in the day, she says, she has “to go lift weights or go psychotic.” Hailing from a family with classic Italian-American credentials—Mulberry Street, Providence, and Boston’s North End—Flanigan, who spent most of her life in the Midwest, is one of the few teachers who did not take a pay cut to join the staff. One of the town’s early stay-at-home moms, Flanigan decided to replace a teacher who left, and then stayed on staff to lead Upper 3’s second-year effort at establishing good communication with its anxious parents. To that end, it helped that she was also a mother who lived in Celebration, the only teacher in the school who fell into that category. In the regular information meetings with parents she often emphasized the continuity between the school’s standards of assessment and those used to manage a busy household. From month to month, I watched Flanigan, Nelson, and Gabel try to perfect the psychology of communication. Through e-mail, voice mail, Web home pages, live TV broadcasting, phone hot lines, newsletters, articles, and other print sources, Upper 3’s parents were bombarded with information about assignments, methods, and assessment rubrics. Gabel joked that it was all about “bringing the enemy into your own camp.” It almost worked.

  7

  THE SIEGE OF THE SCHOOL

  Mi Kid iz a Honner Studant at Sellibration Skool

  —Bumper sticker, Summer 1998

  Nothing could fully allay parents’ anxieties about the school, and it would take a palace revolt, or a bloodletting, for the enemy psychology on all sides to dissipate. The storm around the school had started early, claimed many casualties, and showed no signs of moving out to sea until it had inflicted more losses. Watching the toll rise from month to month was by far the most dispiriting experience of my stay in Celebration.