Baltimore Diary

Parting Shots

Goober Pyle: You know that's not as stupid as it looks, readin' a day-old paper. I do it myself sometimes - kinda gives you a sense of power, don't it? I mean knowing how everything's gonna come out.

—The Andy Griffith Show, "Goober Goes to an Auto Show" (2/5/68)

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A couple of days ago an article appeared in the Baltimore Sun about the impending retirement of Harry Fogle.

Fogle is the leader of a team of state managers who were hired (at BCPSS expense, of course) to oversee special education in Baltimore City. Frankly, they were so far removed from the trenches that I'd be amazed if they had any idea what was actually going on in the schools themselves, "Learning Walks" notwithstanding.

There are two quotes in the article that struck me as a little odd. Here's the first (emphasis is mine):

Still, Fogle has some concerns about the implementation of Alonso's plan to decentralize school management and give more power to principals. He said the system has given principals high-quality training in their new responsibilities, but he's concerned about the amount of information they had to take in. "You can't put a gallon and a half in a gallon jug," he said.

Excuse me? Did he just say that the principals in Baltimore City are stupid? I think he did.

The other quote comes from Dr. Alonso, who notes that when he comes to special education, "We need to change how we do business in this area perhaps more than in any other, because the children are most vulnerable and some of the outcomes most recalcitrant."

Recalcitrant? Really? I'm not sure that word means what he thinks it does, since applying that word to outcomes rather anthropomorphizes them. In the end, though, I don't think it's appropriate to cite work problems as being resistant to authority.

There's also a dreadful metaphor about the Statue of Liberty, but i'll let it slide for now.

Unfortunate Events

Sideshow Bob: [Bob is calling into a radio show] I am presently incarcerated, imprisoned for a crime I did not even commit. "Attempted murder," now honestly, did they ever give anyone a Nobel prize for "attempted chemistry?"

—The Simpsons, "Sideshow Bob Roberts" (10/9/94)

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By now almost everyone's heard about the latest in a series of stories involving violence in Baltimore City schools. This past Sunday, a pair of 13-year-old boys broke into Calverton Elementary/Middle School, ransacked several rooms and tried to sexually assault one of the assistant principals.

There's not a lot to say about this, really. The public response from the school, Central Office, the Union and the Mayor's Office has run anywhere between tepid and the usual hand-wringing, but in the end I doubt that much is going to happen.

Union President Marietta English has advised teachers not to put themselves in a position to leave the building after dark. Nice advice, Mari. Did you see the part of the story where this took place at 3:30 PM?

Mayor Dixon's representative was quoted in the Sun as saying that there are limitations to what the city can do: "We can't say, 'Here's the new policy.' We can't say, 'Here is the new deployment policy for police in the schools.' ... What we can do is work with the school system and offer any assistance that they are asking for." I hope that's not the same sort of assistance you're giving the Arabbers, and way to screw THEM over, by the way, Ms. Mayor.

The thing that disturbs me is that the teachers knew there was a break-in—and really, how could they not, given the state of the rooms and offices that were affected?—but until Tuesday afternoon, nobody among school staff knew that a staff member had been assaulted. Until it broke on the news, practically no parents were aware that anything had happened.

For the most part, Calverton Elementary/Middle School has been the "innocent bystander" in this neighborhood. It basically marks the line between the Bloods and the Crips, and consequently is the heart of a turf war. When the lockdowns took place there a few weeks ago, it was because of activity OUTSIDE the school that didn't necessarily involve students. Now the violence is starting to move inside.

The school called a staff meeting at the end of the day today, and people were advised to keep the rumors to a minimum. Marjorie Miles, the principal, advised people to leave the school in groups. I guess if you're in the middle of a group, you're only one of several potential targets. I'm not sure what the logic entails there. But the fact is that nobody in the building feels safe anymore, and they don't feel as though anyone really wants to help. You can still see broken glass on the floor inside the office where the students broke in, and there's still fingerprint dust all over the room, because the custodians haven't bothered to clean any of it up. This despite several requests by the person who occupies the office.

Something I don't get is the rather poor response on the part of the parents. Why aren't more of them angry? Why aren't more of them banging on the doors at North Avenue, demanding answers or, at the very least, transfers? Their children's lives are in danger! Here's a quick idea: why not get the preschool programs and the elementary-level kids OFF THE FIRST FLOOR OF THE BUILDING?

And why aren't more teachers furious about the situation they've been thrust into? Their lives are hanging in the balance! Why are they taking it like sheep?

There was a time, in the days of the Roman Empire, when a citizen could walk throughout the known world without fear of being accosted simply because they carried the designation: Civis Romanus; "I am a Roman Citizen". It was universally understood that retribution would be swift and certain. Why haven't the police moved into this neighborhood like the Wrath of God Himself and rendered it untenable for these gangs? Doesn't discouraging this sort of activity do anything toward making the neighborhood a better place?

I honest to god don't get it anymore.

Warning: Trite Memorial Ahead

Dr. McCoy: For a child entering puberty on this planet, it means a death sentence.

—Star Trek, "Miri" (10/27/66)

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I don't get a lot of comments, but I've gotten a lot of face-to-face conversations this week which involve some form of the phrase "HEY! When are you gonna post something new?" Freeloaders. Post a comment, ya slackers.

The fact is, I've not been feeling well since last week. My allergies are the worst they've ever been, and that is saying something. But, I'm back to being reasonably functional, so no more excuses.

I saw Daughter online a few nights ago. There was something on her IM profile that said it was a sad day, so being nosy as a concerned parent I asked her what was up. 

Now, here's the part where I expect to hear that her cat died, or perhaps her stepfather's ferret, or I don't know, something innocuous anyway. Instead she tells me that two kids in her school died that day. Then she tells the whole story: "There were three of them. They were driving at like 65 on Nassau Blvd. To get past these two cars, they sped up to 85, and crashed into a dumpster then wrapped around a pole. One died and another died on the way to the hospital in the helicopter." The school had an Open Campus policy, which meant that students could leave the school on their lunch breaks. There's a McDonald's nearby and I imagine it's a popular lunch spot for the students of that school. 

I'll give the school's rumor mill some credit; most of what she told turned out to be correct. The fact was, only one student had died at that point; the other survived until the next day. The driver was the only one who lived. As I write this he's still in the pediatric Intensive Care Unit at the hospital.

One of the reasons Daughter was pissed off was because she felt that the school administrators were dissembling as they made announcements over the PA during the day. Basically, the principal was putting it along the lines of "we don't know that it was students from our school yet" and such, but the fact is that this crash was just about within sight of the school and more than a few people saw it and recognized the car. As an educator I can kinda-sorta understand the princpal's position but this was way out of his control long before he keyed the mike. From what I've heard, he didn't really control the situation very well. But who knows how we'd react in the same place? So, no throwing stones on my part, anyway.

These guys weren't in Daughter's class specifically (she's a Junior and they were Seniors), but she did know two of them, if not especially well, and this sort of thing certainly sucks the fun out of the last three months of school. But what bothers me about this whole thing is that this horrifically unfortunate event won't necessarily become an object lesson for these kids. They're sad and morose and thank goodness it happened late in the year because at least there's a chance that there won't be a completely maudlin yearbook for these students.

But they're young, and they're resilient, and it doesn't matter because you know how it is: at one time we were young, too, and we were stupid and in the long run it didn't matter if some other kid got killed or whatever. That wasn't us. That won't happen to us, we're feeling our youth and our sense of immortality is with us and we have our whole lives ahead of us and that which doesn't kill us will make us stronger. And nothing will kill us.

I had a pretty big graduating class when I was in high school; almost 500 students, I think. None of them got killed. One was in an accident and had been in a coma for a couple of years come graduation, but nobody died. That didn't happen until the summer following graduation, when a friend of mine was in a bar (18 was the drinking age in NY then, children) after work and a disgruntled customer who'd gotten kicked out several hours earlier pumped a few bullets into the front window. So we didn't really get a chance to do the mass grief routine.

So the kids on Long Island will do the candlelight vigils (check) and the pile of notes and stuffed animals at the light pole (check)—can't leave them on the dumpster; that's been removed—and they'll attend funerals (check, check), and maybe there'll be, I don't know, a Memorial Ballfield or a Memorial Art Classroom, but then it's back to business as usual because that's the way things work.

That's the way they have to work, I think.

Sucked In

Doctor Harrison Steele: [Nick holds an M-16 on the bad guys] Have you handled a machine gun before?
Nick Deezy: Sure, lots of times, in high school. I was the captain of the machine gun team.

—Vibes (1988)

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Over on the Baltimore Sun's website, there's some debate in the InsideEd blog going on about a recent story. The short version is, a 7 year old boy was found in a Randallstown school with two loaded guns in his possession. Somehow I got sucked into the debate, but since that's not my forum, I decided to take my version of it here.

What I was originally going for was that, under "zero tolerance" rules, this kid was probably going to be automatically expelled from his school for this infraction. My concern was that this doesn't really solve the underlying problem.

(An aside: most people think of "expelled" and assume it means getting kicked out of school altogether. It doesn't; but it means that you're kicked out of the building you're currently attending for at least a quarter.)

A student who is as young as the seven-year-old in Randallstown, or the eight-year-old in Grove Park last year, is still a little too young to realize all the implications of what they've done. Sure, a third grader knows what a gun is, and they've seen them used on TV all the time, but they don't necessarily know that a gun's only reason for being is to put a hole in another person's body. And they may only be coming around to the idea that "dead" is a forever thing. You don't get to hit the "reset" button and start over. You don't even get to say "oh well, I've got two more lives before Game Over". So simply expelling a student, which is so often the only thing that happens (it wasn't, in Grove Park, but I can't say more), doesn't necessarily get across to the kid the seriousness of their action.

The other thing that happens when an incident like this takes place is that people start hollering for the metal detectors all over again. There's a lot of time and expense that goes into doing something like that. First, you have to find some way of covering EVERY entrance to a building, not just the front door. Next, you have to have somebody staffing the main entrance. Let's assume that everyone can only enter a building through a single door.  So for that one door you have a walk-through detector, which is about $5000. Plus you have to put someone on the door for the better part of the day. That's at least, say, $16,000 (for a really cheap, uneducated, untrained person), plus benefits as a BCPSS employee, so you're talking about $20,000 per year just to staff it, plus the cost of electricity, plus whatever time is involved making adjustments to the school schedule to accommodate the fact that there's a bottleneck at the front door. Oh, and you'll probably have to give the security person a uniform (or uniform allowance) and a hand-held wand for the people who flunk the walkthrough. So there's another thousand dollars or so.

This is the actual dollars-and-cents cost of reacting to a relatively isolated incident. According to a sidebar in the Sun, about 13 incidents involving guns have taken place in the schools since 2002. Three of them involved elementary-level students. Two of them were in BCPSS and one of those involved an unloaded, inoperable weapon.  Of the other ten incidents, two of them took place in Baltimore City. We're talking over 180 schools in BCPSS and a six-year period. That's an awful lot of money spent on a relatively remote possibility. I think I'd rather spend it on more books, school supplies, field trips, in-school programs...anything that's going to get our kids to view school as a place they're motivated to come to rather than another fortress that needs to be stormed.

That's enough, I think, to get the debate ball rolling.

My Vote Isn't Wasted Because I Don't Get One

C.J. Cregg: Twenty-five years ago half of all 18 to 24 year olds voted. Today it's 25%. 18 to 24 year olds represent 33% of the population but only account for 7% of the voters. Think government isn't about you? How many of you have student loans to pay? How many have credit card debt? How many want clean air and clean water and civil liberties? How many want jobs? How many want kids? How many want their kids to go to good schools and walk on safe streets? Decisions are made by those who show up. You gotta rock the vote!

—The West Wing, "College Kids" (10/2/02)

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The only wasted votes, as they say, are the ones that aren't cast.

I'm disenfranchised for the day, since I'm neither Democrat nor Republican. But if you're affiliated with either party, it's important to get out there. I don't care if you vote for McClinton or Huckabama or my dog Keiko, for that matter. It doesn't matter to me. Just get out there and vote.

How often is Maryland considered to be "in play" in the primaries? Get out there and vote, dammit!

Why are you still here? Get your ass out and vote, already! Hurry, before it snows!

One Hand Doesn't Wash The Other

Senator Pat Geary: I despise the way you pose yourself. You and your whole fucking family.
Michael Corleone: We're both part of the same hypocrisy, Senator, but never think it applies to my family.

—The Godfather, Part II (1974)

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Baltimore Sun: Dixon endorses Barack Obama

WBAL-TV: Dixon to Support Obama

Examiner: Dixon Will Endorse Obama

Have you seen any of these articles?

Want to know the curious part? I remember attending a political rally on August 4th, during which a letter was read to the assembled crowd. That letter was from Senator Hillary Clinton, endorsing (among others) Sheila Dixon for Mayor of Baltimore City.

Well...Integrity isn't everything. On the other hand, if you don't have integrity, you don't have much else.   

Best. Metaphor. Ever.

Pete: Man, this job sucks.
Linc: Beats jail.
Julie: A deal's a deal.

—The Mod Squad (1999)

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From The New Yorker (1/7/08 issue), "Talk of the Town" section:

Meanwhile, those groovy Democrats are reprising "The Mod Squad," with the white guy, the black guy, and the blonde scrambling to see who gets to make the collar.

The fact that Hilary Clinton won in New Hampshire shouldn't be a surprise, I don't think. That's always been pretty much Clinton Country. What should give people pause is that she won by a relatively small margin. We're talking in the neighborhood of 200,000 votes cast (compare that to fewer than 2000 in Iowa), with only a few thousand between them. This is still an uphill climb, and it's still anybody's game. Super Tuesday, called that because it's my birthday (I presume), is NOT in fact the next primary. Michigan comes next, although there wasn't much talk of that, and then comes South Carolina (which Huckabee pointedly mentioned) and Maine. THEN comes Super Tuesday, when we'll see twenty-two primaries (including a couple of caucuses). At that point someone should have the nomination just about sewn up.

But be forewarned: Reagan and Dubya were both slow starters in the primaries, so there are no foregone conclusions here.

Lead in the Water = Job Security for Me

Homer: Kids, kids. I'm not going to die. That only happens to bad people.
Bart: What about Abraham Lincoln?
Homer: Uh, he sold poison milk to school children.

--The Simpsons, "Homer's Triple Bypass" (12/17/92)

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OK, I admit it. That was a pretty dark headline.

You may have seen the news that Baltimore City Schools is finally bailing out (heh) on abating the lead in the water fountains. This is a pretty good idea, considering that in many cases the lead wasn't coming from anywhere within the school itself.

For instance, I worked at Cecil Elementary a few years back. During the 2001-2 school year, that building was under comprehensive renovation. I mean, they gutted the place down to a shell and started over. New everything, everywhere. I loved working in that building. And James Drummond, the principal at the time, has been promoted into the Area Office, so I'm working for him again, which is a pretty cool deal. (He's not my direct boss, but still.) But the point is that, except for the exterior brick, we're talking about a brand-new school.

And yet, when they did the comprehensive testing a year or so later, the fountains failed the tests. As near as anyone could figure, it's because the pipes OUTSIDE the building were contaminated. (And thank goodness they're replacing all the water mains in that neighborhood.) The custodians went through a few strategies to make things better, most of which involved flushing all the fixtures in the building for about five minutes each day. This apparently does the trick. The building then became one of the schools to pass the subsequent tests.

However, as an article in today's Baltimore Sun notes,the total costs of these strategies, which includes the cycle of testing and lab fees and staff to oversee the testing (but doesn't count things like the man-hours needed to run all the fixtures in every building for five minutes, or the cost of the water that's simply running down the drain during this process) was comparable to the cost of just putting water coolers in all the buildings. So it was a smart decision on Dr. Alonso's part.

What's amusing to me, as someone who works for BCPSS, is that the press release that went out on this yesterday was at least the third draft. Many of these things go out to the BCPSS system as a whole via email, separately from whenever the press gets ahold of it. For those of you who don't know, when Microsoft Outlook (which is what BCPSS uses for mail handling) is connected to a central mail server, there's a function called "recall" which allows you to cancel the sending of an email. However, it doesn't really prevent the person at the other end from reading an email if they happen to have Outlook open at the time the bad email is sent. So I was able to see that the message went out twice, and was recalled twice, before it finally went out for good. Here's an idea: proofread, THEN hit the "Send" button. 

Another note to BCPSS spies reading this: If you're going to circulate a message like this, you should probably send it as a PDF rather than a Word document, because now everyone in the city has a scanned copy of Dr. Alonso's signature that they can separate from the press release. An unscupulous person could conceivably write any kind of memo now, and put Dr. Alonso's signature on it.

Um...in theory.

Not Making Fans

Eric Kluster: It was a time consideration, Mike...
Mike Wallace: Time? Bullshit! You corporate lackey! Who told you your incompetent little fingers had the requisite skills to edit me?

--The Insider (1999)

Exeter: Now place your hands above the rail
[hands suddenly attach to the rail]
Exeter: ... they're magnetized.
Crow T. Robot: And if your hands were metal, that would mean something.

--Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie (1996)

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The Baltimore Sun has several blogs in its online edition. I contribute comments to a few of them, including InsideEd (the new name for Classroom Connections), and Reality Check (about Reality TV programs). I also lurk on You Don't Say, which is about word usage.

I've also spent some time with Random Rodricks, which is the blog run by Dan Rodricks (surprise!). Rodricks' blog is a smattering of things that didn't quite make his column, or which may supplement his column in the dead tree edition.

Back on August 22, Rodricks did a short post about that infamous Orioles game, the one which they lost 30-3.  A day or two later I submitted a comment which quoted a joke that David Letterman had used the next night. Now, comments on the Sun's website are moderated, so it doesn't post until it's been OK'd by someone. A short while later I got an email back from Rodricks saying that he hadn't seen the Letterman show in question and thanking me for my submission. However, my comment didn't appear.

On the 27th, Rodricks posted:

Missed this last week -- David Letterman on the Orioles' 30-3 drubbing by the Rangers.

"The Orioles were actually ahead 3-to-nothing earlier in the game. Then they made the mistake of putting up a 'Mission Accomplished' banner."

Basically, he didn't credit me for giving him the quotation. I shrugged it off and moved on.

This past Sunday, his column ended with the following:

Don Imus will be going back to morning radio -- and I'll be going back to not listening.

This would be meaningful if Don Imus had a Baltimore outlet prior to his getting canned. Saying something like this is kind of like my promising never to watch another new episode of Weeds. I don't get Showtime, so it's not a tough promise to keep, get it? So I went to his blog and commented on his most recent item, then made my observation about his not listening to Imus.

A while later I got an email from Rodricks. The first paragraph was what I'd written in my comment:

Today's (Sunday) column mentioned that Don Imus is returning to radio and
you're going to continue not listening to him. That's not so tough,
considering that he hasn't had a radio outlet in Baltimore for a long time
prior to his dismissal...

Rodricks reply:

"Well, duh . . . ."

In addition, he'd excised the above passage from the comment before posting it. I'm not sure what I'm more irritated about, the fact that he'd lopped off my comment, or his rather condescending email response. But this, on top of his prior failure to credit me, is of some concern in my head. I'm still not quite clear on what irritates me about all this in the aggregate, but I'll say this: None of my comments to other Sun blogs are tampered with like this, and I'm going to have to think hard before submitting to this particular one again.

Won't You Take Me to Flunkytown

[Vizzini has just cut the rope the Dread Pirate Roberts is climbing up]
Vizzini: He didn't fall? Inconceivable!
Inigo Montoya: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

—The Princess Bride (1987)

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A couple of posts ago I commented on a few observations I had about the final vote totals in the primary on the 11th. One of the things I wrote was:

The problem for me is that I don't think he'll [Ed Reisinger] get that message. I know his flunkies won't.

This morning I got an email from a resident of Morrell Park with whom I correspond a couple of times a month. I'm going to call him Jim, although his real name is Herschel Krustofsky of 1609 Harman Avenue. His views don't always coincide with mine but our contacts, whether through email or face-to-face, have always been cordial and there are a few times where we've had to agree to disagree. This gentleman is an occasional reader of this blog, although his comments have always come to me via email rather than in the Comments area.

Apparently Jim was chatting with someone in the neighborhood who'd seen that post and asked him, "How does it feel, being referred to as a 'Flunky'?" Jim hadn't seen it yet and didn't know what that meant. So this guy told Jim that I'd used the term to refer to people who help Ed Reisinger. With his mind thus loaded, Jim checked out the post and decided that his friend was right.

So I'm going to make myself clear as publicly as I apparently made myself misunderstood. Not everyone who supports, works with or votes for Ed Reisinger is a "flunky." Flunkies are stooges. Flunkies are yes-men. Ed's flunkies are the ones who make me feel like I need to take a shower moments after speaking to them. Jim is most certainly NOT a flunky, nor is his wife. Jim is absolutely NOT the sort of person who will take the "We won, you can go suck it" trash-talking attitude I spoke of, and this is probably the distinction for me.

Jim sent me the email and he copied it to several other people. At least one of them I would put in the "flunky" category. Another couple, I don't know who they are. One of them has an email address that would likely be offensive in Great Britain. (I don't know who that one connects to, either, but if you're curious, Jim, ask me about it.) I'm not sure why he did that, but OK. I aired my view in public (i.e., here), so he gets the same deal.

In addition, I've taken a lot of heat from people about remaining active in Morrell Park even though I no longer live there. GF and I looked in the area for months before we moved to the other end of town; we genuinely disliked leaving Morrell Park but none of the many places we looked at, unfortunately, met our needs. Well, one place did but it had a fatal structural flaw. I do still own property in Morrell Park, so I've literally remained invested in the neighborhood and I do care about it. GF spent a quarter of her life there, so she's definitely missing the area. I tell you what: if I were so disgusted with the neighborhood that I didn't care anymore, I could sell the place in a heartbeat and make an obscene amount of money compared to what I paid for it.

In the end, I hope that I can work with Mr. Reisinger, and more importantly that he is willing to work with me. A "loyal opposition" is a necessary thing in the United States. Teddy Roosevelt once said:

To announce that there must be no criticism of the President or that we are to stand by the President right or wrong is not only unpatriotic and servile but it is morally treasonable to the American public.

This is an attitude that must—MUST—make its way all the way down to the lowest governmental level. I've said a million times that the best kind leader is the kind who surrounds himself with smart people who are willing to disagree with him. Our leaders don't need flunkies. They need to hear the debate. They need to be willing to listen to the debate, and they need to be able to participate in the debate. That there are two associations in the neigborhood is now part of the debate. When Reisinger aligns himself with one of them and ignores the other, as he's done for many months now, he's looking for the flunkies to offer him some form of validation. And in that, there is a wrongness.