No 'Grit' at Lab or Francis Parker

"What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all its children." -- John Dewey, founder of the Lab School

The latest curriculum for poor kids. 

I checked. No, there's no "Grit" curriculum being taught at the University of Chicago's Lab school or at chichi Francis Parker, the schools where Mayor Rahm Emanuel and schoools CEO Forrest Claypool send their children at upwards of $34,000 a kid.

Professor Duckworth didn't intend it for their kids. Fixing the poor is the burden of the rich, white and powerful.

According to a story in this morning's Tribune, both Rahm and Claypool were "prickly" (ah, that's the word I was looking for) when asked by a reporter about why they, who run CPS, send their children to expensive private schools.

"I've got to be honest, I don't think it's a fair question, and I'll say why," Emanuel said. "My kids go to the same school that President Obama sends his kids to school, and nobody said anything when President Obama was leading the fight for Race to the Top. I don't live in public housing, but I do fight for fairness in housing. I'm not homeless, but I do fight for resources for homelessness. So if it's only about whether I as a parent make a decision, that's not actually, it's not about my kids, it's about the kids of Chicago."

Claypool said the fact his kids attend the exclusive Francis W. Parker School in Lincoln Park is "a parental choice. It's appropriate, OK?"

I remember N.J. Gov. Christie practically chewing a parent's head off for asking the same question.

Point of fact, I and many others, blogged plenty about Obama/Duncan's so-called Race to the Top and its reproduction and reinforcement of our two-tier school system.

And what a strange analogy Rahm's making between public schools -- created for everyone-- and public housing and homeless shelters, specifically reserved for the poorest and neediest of us. It's clear that the mayor views public education as some sort of poverty agency rather than as the cornerstone of a democratic society. And therein lies his problem and ours.

Nobody I know is challenging the right of the rich and powerful to send their children to private schools. That's not the point. The point is that the corporate reformers now running public ed, including our autocratic mayor and his hand-picked CEO, don't want our kids in public schools to experience the best educational practices, now reserved for their own.

Not banned at Lab or Parker. 

Remember back in 2013 when Rahm's felonious schools chief Barbara Byrd-Bennett banned the book Persepolis from CPS libraries? I made a quick call to the Lab School librarian only to find out that Persepolis was part of the middle school curriculum and readily available to all middle school students in the Rowley Library. In fact, the middle school library has 7 different editions of Marjane Satrapi's book, both in English and in French.

In 2011, the mayor forced a longer school day and school year on resistant Chicago schools even though he had no plan for what to do with the added seat time or how to pay for it. Again, I checked with Lab only to find out that their day and year was shorter than Chicago's.

Common Core? Nothing common about Lab or Parker.

Over and improper use of standardized tests? You won't find it in Lab or Parker.

In conclusion -- the best way to learn grit is by standing up to the bullies and pretenders who think they know what's best for other people's children.

True 'grit'

The next of my fellow academics who mentions the word "grit" to me is going to feel the wrath of my electric sander on their behind. This latest in a long line ed clichés, has become the buzzword du jour of the no-excuses, corporate school reformers like University of Pennsylvania psychologist Angela Duckworth, who claim that grit is the critical ingredient to academic success. The notion was popularized in Paul Tough's book, How Children Succeed and has become the 2014 version of telling poor kids to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. 

Thanks to Pedro Noguera and Anindya Kundu for this gritty response the other day on MSNBC.

More often than not, we discuss disparities in student performance in isolation from other factors that contribute to them, such as inequity in per pupil spending. If instead of posing the problem as an “achievement gap” which reinforces the idea that individual effort is the key factor determining differences in outcomes, we acknowledged it as an “opportunity gap,” we might do much more to address the disparities that limit the ability of children to learn.

Social science research has consistently shown that public school students with higher-income parents are likelier to attain higher levels of education than their lower-income peers. The United States continues to have the highest income inequality among first-world nations, and all the grit in the world will not change that. -- "Why students need more than ‘grit’".

KIPP charter in New Orleans

If Duckworth's name sounds familiar to readers of this blog, it's because I mentioned her in a post last December which focused on her boss, Martin Seligman, director of Penn's Positive Psychology Center, and the guru behind KIPP Charter Schools. Seligman's positive-psychology experiments were also used by the Bush Administration to develop its so-called advanced interrogation techniques used at Guantanamo.

These behavior-modification theories, now being applied to the field of ed reform as well as GITMO's torture chambers, have little in common with the philosophy of  John Dewey and other progressives who often focused on encouraging intellectual freedom and fostering creative intelligence, self-discipline, and social ethic necessary for students to find a meaningful and productive place within both their local community and the world. It was largely these ideas which drove the early small-schools movement of the 1990s.

That's not what the new grit-ists have in mind.