Just making a connection here. School has been in session for 10 days now, and the pressure to work miracles on a daily basis has me fired up.

NY Times columnist David Brooks, and Kevin Drum of the Washington Monthly both recently noticed Andrew F. Krepinevich’s, How To Win in Iraq, published by Foreign Affairs. Krepinovich argues that the US counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq is flawed, and will require a new approach that brings security to Iraqi citizens. This approach, he argues, should replace the current strategy of hunting down insurgents. Nobody needs to tell me that our current policy is both a political and military disaster. I read the paper. I listen to the news, and I think about alternative courses of action that we might consider - reflective activity that does not seem to be occuring in the places where some new ideas might make a difference. But Krepinevich is making a case for this point of view in those places that matter - the White House. The Pentagon. The change of course Krepinevich advocates would provide an alternative to the positions argued for by those who have framed our choices as being either stay-the-course, or pull-out:

Instead, U.S. and Iraqi forces should adopt an “oil-spot strategy” in Iraq, which is essentially the opposite approach. Rather than focusing on killing insurgents, they should concentrate on providing security and opportunity to the Iraqi people, thereby denying insurgents the popular support they need. Since the U.S. and Iraqi armies cannot guarantee security to all of Iraq simultaneously, they should start by focusing on certain key areas and then, over time, broadening the effort — hence the image of an expanding oil spot. Such a strategy would have a good chance of success. But it would require a protracted commitment of U.S. resources, a willingness to risk more casualties in the short term, and an enduring U.S. presence in Iraq…

From the oil-spot-strategy proposed for Iraq, I began thinking that maybe we could use the oil-spot-strategy to improve schools. I don’t know what Krepinevich would make of what I have to say here, but at the moment I have the unique opportunity to watch what happens when working class and low income elementary school kids begin studying in a state-of-the-art new building. Everyone seems to be pretty jazzed to be there. I feel it, too. Compared to our old cinderblock bunker, the new school is a palace. We are surrounded by glass and color. It’s clean. Our lobby (We have a lobby!) is a three-story echo chamber of tile, glass and wooden celing panels. Huge Japanese fish kites hang from high overhead. There is a balcony at the top of a wide stairway, and from up there, everyone below looks very small - even the people that aren’t. The school population is not generally considered privileged in a socioeconomic sense, but I sense that almost everyone feels being part of this moment is a privilege. And I wonder how much that sense of privilege is going to carry over to academic gains for these kids. Is this what it might feel like to be in the center of one of Krepinevich’s oil spots? I think that all schools should be clean and comfortable, and should nurture feelings of safety and community while providing opportunities to creatively exercise the imagination. How much better would it be, I wonder next, if the oil spot was encouraged to spread and the whole neighborhood was renovated.

The idea of the spreading oil spot begins a cascade of associations that I can not resist. I imagine bulldozers and social workers converging on, not only schools, but abandoned buildings and run-down housing projects throughout the neighborhood, and eventually all over the country. I imagine community planners and architects and bankers having meetings to discuss current standards and guidelines. I imagine community meetings in which the residents are asked about their preferences for landscaping design and greenspace in the neighborhood. I imagine grocery stores and clinics springing up where weedy vacant lots once served as nothing but storage yards for dead vehicles. I think about how much better all our schools would be if the kids who came to us each morning felt safe and optimistic about the future.

The current educational reform effort is a seek and destroy mission. Test and sanction. We are assailed with propaganda about “best practices,” “ressearch based” programs, and standards, standards, standards. We have armies of aids and support staff who push paper and pull kids out of class for testing and tutoring. We have copy machines that spit out reams of worksheets and exercises. We have computers with microwave connections to the internet. We have leveled books and manipulatives. But is all of this going to make a difference for the kids who lock their bedroom doors at night because they are afraid of somebody who lives in their own house? Who come to school an hour early and wait outside the school for their free breakfast when the cafeteria opens? Who ask to see the school nurse every day because they have a stomach ache? Who don’t know where their mothers are?

The current educational reform effort is a passing thing, fueled by political whim. Ironically, unlike the oil-spot-strategy, there is no research or historical precendent to support NCLB. Come to think of it, are there standards for education reform? NCLB will be replaced by another big idea; it will die when its ideological baggage finally bogs it down and squeezes the enthusiasm out of the researchers and politicians who want us to believe that we can ultimately teacher-proof schools and make educational delivery the market-driven process they themselves would like to believe it is. It will be over when researchers and politicians are ready to admit their career paths will not be advanced by supporting this fiction as it’s unrealistic plot finally climaxes. The current reform strategy is as reactionary as hunting down insurgents. When we confront social problems item by item, we never defeat them. They each morph into a new form of virus which we don’t yet have an educational pill to cure. The problem with schools is not teachers. It’s not students. It’s not parents. It’s the messed up world that schools are a part of.

The kids in our classrooms come from down the block. They are not foreigners. We can’t isolate the school from the school community any more than Iraq can shoot it’s way to civil order. We need to address ALL of the needs of the community and develop an “oil-spot-strategy” that will eventually envelope the entire population if we expect to see any real progress in education reform. The US has to recognize that a constructive commitment to community and social justice will generate long term benefits for any population whose needs we target.