Charter, Charter, Magna Carta

When one finds himself squarely in the center of the political spectrum, decisions that elected officials make are often maddening.

Take nothing more than the recent example of Senator Obama saying that he acknowledged that his economic plan may hurt the economy. Or when he proposed that an increase to the capital tax (for those who own stocks) and was told that in every instance of doing so, it has lead to a weakening of the economy; his response was “well it may.” The answer is not “it may”, its “it does.”

So when officials cross the aisle I couldn’t be more excited…except when they cross the aisle to pick up another parties failure. The Globe reported that Governor Patrick was set to unfurl his ten year education plan later this month. In short, he’s opted for Charter Schools*. I think I might write him a letter.

In every instance I have seen this described to me, and in everything I’ve ever read, I can’t help thinking the same thing: New American Class System.

In my earlier collegiate days, I used to openly mock Harvard as politically corrupted with an education that focused more on cultural diversity than actually education. The reason for both of these is because they have a 50% legacy acceptance rate. If your parents went here, and you’ve got the money, its likely that you’re getting in. Then I found out what Oxford’s acceptance rate for legacies were and I lost all faith in Europe. Because of their educational structure, a staggering 90% of those accepted to Oxford have parents who’ve gone there as well.

Charter schools bring us about 3 steps away from that, and by steps I mean generations.

In Massachusetts, you’re required to pass an exam in order to be qualified to teach. Roughly 2 months ago, they proposed a waiver for those who’d failed the test three times to be able to teach regardless. “If that passes”, as one prominent political talk show host proposed, “tell me where you think these people will teach? Weston? Newton? Its just another shovel load of dirt on the casket”

Now imagine if they allow morons to teach, and the kids with potential are to be taken to schools where only those with a doctorate are allowed to teach.

With luck you’re child would make it in, he’d build his own rockets and he’d have to tie his best friend’s shoes for him. We’d widen the gap between the success rate on the MCAS exam between anyone who could afford it, and those who can’t.

The Charter school is not rewarding children who do well in schools, its rewarding parents who have enough money. It punishes adults who were disinterested as children, or who had parents who valued education only when report cards came out.

A child does not have the discipline of an adult in second grade, why should we punish them for 12 years with poor education, and then tell them they have no skill set when they attempt to find a job?

Similarly, why should it be the policy of the education department or its secretary to tell parents who are working multiple jobs to afford their child a future that they need to double their combined income in order to ever have the opportunity to achieve because they need to start paying for a good education now.

The premise behind Charters to begin with is that they will be pushed into the business section of life and held to the populist standards of businesses. Therefore schools would have to bend to the will of their “customer” to stay in business. I agree with this 100% because this usually whittles things down to “better product, for less money.” But there aren’t enough schools to warrant a capitalist exchange of ideas. What we’ve been given with these schools is a monopoly. When only one school is going to offer better education, a better chance to get into great colleges and therefore a great future, who’d care to address what’s taught or how?

And this new Patrick system is based on a lottery in an attempt to make it more “fair” which I can understand, but the gap still exists, and the cost doesn’t go anywhere so for the lucky few who are poor and get in, good luck, you’re a Front Page human interest story 18 years down the road. I’m sure the Metro can’t wait to have you. But if you’re one of the countless kids whose parents are regular blue collar people, there’s no hope in sight, and as it appears, both the left and the right have decided they’ve done their good deed for the year.

And they say voting third party is throwing your vote away. I might throw mine up.

Meghan amongst the leaves

I was in the heart of Penn Station when I got the text message from Meghan. “Tim Russert is Dead. Your thoughts?”

I always appreciated that my opinion mattered to people. Meghan and I had, since graduation, drifted apart as I tend to do with most people. I can’t keep pace on short notice, I don’t have it in me.

But the other day she sent me an e-mail with an article from The Onion with some satirical article about one of the video games I play. She had this to say…

“Vermont is awesome. I can't find a good job though. I'm ok, i miss the boston bars.

Meghan always had a succinct way of phrasing something. As much as I don’t care for him, she has a Salinger way about her writing, you get a whole emotional picture from one line of text.

But I have to say that it depressed the crap out of me. Not that shes gone or that she can’t find a job, but that sometimes we move on for reasons that aren’t the best. Or we’ve told ourselves that to not move on is to somehow stunt ourselves and we end up having this self-hating complex building up.

I tend to write about the still frozen image, as if at some point as a child I’d seen an old photo from the 70’s with a guy who looked like the life of the party, and then I was told that he was dead. This isn’t to suppose I find Meghan dead, but gone in the same fashion and that 40 years on I might look back and wonder whatever happened to her. She was a force unto herself, she was well educated but she didn’t give a damn for school and I respected that about her. The academic world is self-serving and some bite the bullet and get through, and some of us couldn’t be bothered by the fickle fascinations of some egotistical professor.

I can see her in those paisley tights she wore to Ambers wedding, and the jazz hands she’d use whenever she was mocking some terrible idea is that vaudevillian raspy voice. Now I see those things in front of the back drop of some green covered spring ski mountain, lying dormant waiting for winter to give it life again. Vermont to me has always been a lace for people to vacation and you didn’t move there unless you’re some transcendental hippie. To say you miss the boston bars, suggests to me that the metropolitan kitsch is decidedly vacant from the pubs up there.

And maybe its how I see Vermont that’s the problem, a heterogeneous mixture of like-minded individuals that by virtue of what Boston is, simply cannot exist here. I’ve met more interesting people on the bus here than I likely could in Vermont. To see a personality like hers, one that no doubt gave way to interesting dialogue and had to inspire its share of young minds in such a fertile place is a shame to me, and certainly a loss to the city.

For one reason or another, I get the impression that people go off to these places and die, or more accurately, become someone else. And maybe that’s what I fear the most. But in being realistic I know Boston wasn’t always a kind environment for her. I imagine I’ll tell my children stories about a lot of the people I’ve met, and how their from all over, and all the places I’d met them. But in the back of my mind I hope that don’t finish like so many of my fathers d…“yeah yeah…he’s dead now…cancer.”

I can’t honestly write about everyone I know or all those who’ve made an impact on my life but I can say that when I write about these people, I hope you see some of yourself in here (if you’re out there reading), the the sentiments I hold about one is applicable to the other, and if somewhere along the way we’ve lost touch or don’t communicate like we ought to that I think about lost friends more than I would care to think about. Maybe this is just an apology. I’m unintentionally elusive, and I drive myself toward goals that don’t allow me to pull others along, and for this I’m sorry, but your value is not diminished in my mind, and I forget very little of our friendship back then.

Santoro's Roast Beef Sub, with Mayo and Salt

[Santoro’s is a dumpy sub shop that abuts a gas station and somehow ended up in the same parking lot. For all intents and purposes, it’s a hole in the wall that is unmentionable in every instance of the word. It also had the grave misfortune of being in Carver, Massachusetts which has been put on the map by a renaissance fare and exactly nothing else.]

Back in my Councilor days, when we’d cart children around the state in giant yellow busses, we’d frequent the recreation facility that was a lot over from Santoro’s. It was standard fare; potato sack slide, go karts, bumper boats, arcade games, all plopped out here in the middle of Carver like some runaway carnival that went off to join Thoreau.

Being the kind of charming young lad that I am, I’d managed to make strong ties to one of the men who oversaw this particular camp, and as such when he’d break off from these field trips, he drag me along with him. It was here, that I would come to encounter the dump known as Santoro’s.

I remember when we pulled up on it his exclamation of excitement “yeah brow….San-Toro’s” with the end of that broken abbreviation hitting a higher than needed falsetto. I took from that I might be in for some remarkable cuisine here in this growth on the side of a Mobil station. I wasn’t.

Santoro’s was just another dive pizza joint, only as Massachusetts can. A Greek family masquerading around as some Italian family, making pizzas for blue-collar Americans that don’t know the difference and wouldn’t care anyway. (You mean the Greeks don’t eat pizza?) And thinking back on it, I couldn’t possibly imagine why the hell anyone would get excited for such a dump in the first place, and as any writer does, I had to come again to the conclusion that things that I see are just observations, and that my opinions are irrelevant. If you’ve been given perception beyond the tangible, you ought to use it.

Santoro’s could have been Jim’s Tire Store, or Guadalupe’s, the place really wasn’t relevant. Its more like a pragmatic American Dream. That we’d all risen high enough to fuck off at our job, and occasionally leave a ton of children in the charge of another group of people who’s judgment was questionable and, given that we were at an amusement park, whose attention spans might be lowered to lethal levels. We were out, we were free, and we were on the clock. It didn’t matter if we’d gone to buy stamps, I’m sure we’d have found an air conditioner to stand in front of and rationalize that in fact, this was the life.

I have been working myself toward an Old Money dream, one in which I shirk the low class mentality of the farm land I grew up on, one in which people conduct themselves with a degree of cosmopolitan air regardless of what their doing. To me being high class should come with being American. To live, as Bobby Kennedy suggest, for the people, not off the people. But whether they lack the money, refinement, or perpetual optimism to carry themselves in such a manner, there are those who don’t have such a high brow view of how things ought to be. Education was never a big point for them, neither to was propriety, and who says it ought to be. But I spend too much time lamenting this reality and not enough realizing that these are people who are lost in a dream, where the closest pizza joint can be the break from a bleak and doldrums-filled existence. Where the air conditioner at the post office, or the grade C meat at some dive pub can be all the difference in the world.

Sometimes when I look back I can see a scrap-book collage of still-framed images fading there over time, where you can see the joy in the face of a man who had lines from the hard life he lived and for logical or illogical reasons, the rough path he choose. I am, for all my graces, still no different than they are. We all look down upon one another for varying reasons, and to another man we may be equally as flawed. But though I’d never choose to descend to that level, or conduct myself in that fashion, I can still see the beautiful paintings that are created from their own emotional crescendo, and in those images, I might find myself something to write, a literary sea chantey I can’t stop whistling, even if its about some junk box sub shop, fading in the sun of old memories.