Words&Dirt

“The real dream was located in an imprecise zone, next to waking but without his really being awake; he would have had to make use of other references to speak about it, eliminate rotund terms like dreaming and awake that didn’t mean a thing, locate himself rather in that zone where once more his childhood house would be suggested, the living room and the garden in a clear present time, with the colors as they were seen at the age of ten, reds so red, blues of tinted glass shades, green of leaves, green of fragrance, smell and color, a single presence at the level of nose and eyes and mouth.  But in the dream, the room with its two windows that opened on the garden was at the same time La Maga’s room; the forgotten province of Buenos Aires town and the Rue du Sommerard were brought together without any clash, not juxtaposed or overlapped but merged, and in the effortless removal of contradiction there was the sensation of being where one should be, in the essential place, as when one is a child and has no doubts that the living room will be there for a whole lifetime: an inalienable belonging.”

––Hopscotch, by Julio Cortázar, pg. 490

“In 2008, New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg and his hard-charging schools chancellor, Joel Klein, shut down Ocean Hill-Brownsville’s JHS 271, citing persistently low test scores.  Physically, the building remains largely unchanged since the time when it was the UFT strike staging ground.  But today it houses the Eagle Academy for Young Men, a school that has proven very popular with Ocean Hill-Brownsville parents: In 2011, sixteen hundred students applied for eighty-six seats.  Why do thousands of families finally appear enthusiastic about a school in Ocean Hill-Brownsville?  As if in response to parents’ requests during the 1960s, the Eagle Academy, though a unionized school, emphasizes a longer school day and strict discipline, with required uniforms and even military-style routines.  As at many other ‘no excuses’ schools, teachers refer to Eagle Academy students as ‘scholars’ to emphasize high academic expectations.  The school is supported by a foundation whose board of directors is dominated by executives from companies like News Corp and Credit Suisse.  A separate advisory board includes two community members alongside a number of education professionals, from organizations like Teach for America and Scholastic, the publishing house.  Though the rhetoric of black separatist politics has all but disappeared, in many ways today’s ‘no excuses’ school reform movement has inherited the mantle of community control by aligning low-income parents with elite school reformers and philanthropists from outside their neighborhoods.

Yet for all that support, the Eagle Academy at Ocean Hill-Brownsville is not much more successful, in measurable ways, than JHS 271 once was.  The tide of gentrification and school improvement that has swept other Brooklyn neighborhoods has not reached Ocean Hill-Brownsville.  The Eagle Academy is deeply segregated (less than 2 percent white), a quarter of its students receive special-education services, and 76 percent live in poverty.  Only 13 percent of Eagle Academy middle school students are reading at grade level, and 6 percent are proficient in math.  Student achievement there remains an unsolved puzzle.”

––The Teacher Wars: A History of America’s Most Embattled Profession, by Dana Goldstein, pg. 158-9