THANKS FROM AN INDEBTED editor to the 196 misguided souls who cast their votes for me for a seat on the school board. Your checks are in the mail. And double thanks to the anonymous bed and breakfast proprietor who dropped off a bag of slightly used bars of soap at my house last week. Despite the soaps having been used on the wrong places of the wrong people, we will put each bar to appropriate use.
AS FOR THE ELECTION, I did a little better than I thought I would do. As usual, there was no real discussion of the issues or any apparent awareness of the actual condition of our schools, particularly the high school. The candidates gave no indication they had any knowledge of either our schools or public education generally As predicted, it was about like your standard 8th grade campaign for class president.
AS FOR THE REALITY, last year I made an appointment to see the high school principal, Jim Johnson. Johnson is now Superintendent. I took a stack of papers my children had come home with over a semester. Few of the papers were corrected. Of those that had been corrected, the corrections were incorrect. All had errors of fact. One was a book report on The Sun Also Rises. The kid had the politics of the novel completely backwards. This particular book report had been written several years before by my son. According to my daughter it had been recycled a number of times by a number of different students. Some students got A's on it, some got C's. On other papers, of nearly identical work, grades ranged from A to C without indication from the teacher what the difference was between A work and C work. Johnson said he would look into it. I guess he did, but this year's blizzard of uncorrected papers gives no indication that teachers now believe they must thoroughly correct student assignments. In any case, much of the homework is of the fill-in-the-blanks genre and entirely pointless from a pedagogical point of view.
WHAT HAS HAPPENED to our school and many like it throughout the country is sad bordering on evil. The name of the game is mediocre with schools being staffed by the least talented graduates of the state college system. You've got people who can't write teaching English. You've got people teaching literature who don't read books. People teach math who have trouble with second year algebra. People are shoved into classrooms to teach foreign languages who don't know the language they are supposed to be teaching. People teach social studies who cannot distinguish between fact and opinion. (Their classes sit mute and uncomprehending while the teachers recite a jumble of crackpot "conservative" interpretations of American and world history derived entirely from U.S. News and World Report.)
I'LL REMEMBER ALWAYS the day a black kid came home to my house and asked me, "Do you think slavery was good for black people?" I asked him who told him it was. "Miss so and so said if there hadn't been slavery we'd all still be living in mud huts in Africa." The same nut told an Indian kid that the "Indians had it coming" because they were the aggressors against the settlers who represented civilization and progress. These are not particularly extreme remarks coming from Anderson Valley High School. I've got a collection of them. Small wonder so many kids are brain dead by the time they re twelve.
WILL ANDERSON VALLEY High School get any better? It's hard to say. I would guess not because there isn't any real pressure from the community to see that it improves. The board of trustees is stronger than ever after ten years of domination by incompetents and loonies, dishonest loonies at that. The administrators, for the first time in years, are capable. Whether the trustees will require the administrators to clean house, is anybody's guess. At the moment we're paying nearly two million dollars per year for 150 days of 5 hour babysitting. Call it what you want, but don't call it education.
THE MOST ENCOURAGING development in a long time in local politics is the election of David Colfax to the Mendocino County School Board, for my money the most corrupt and cynical board in a County famous for cynical, do-nothing public bodies. The Mendocino County Schools should have been disbanded years ago. They do not offer one class, or one service that could not be offered or administered by local school districts. The County Schools has twice the number of program administrators they need. A good hunk of County Schools funding is derived from its operation of classes on grounds of some of the grimmest children's institutions in the state, the kind of places County School administrators and trustees wouldn't for a moment consider enrolling their own children. But as a source of funding for their jobs, these hell holes are simply swell. Colfax's presence amidst this collection of cowards and thieves is going to be very interesting.
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