Here is an essay I
wrote reflecting on the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Possible
Lives: The Promise of Public Education in America. It appeared in Valerie Strauss’s Washington
Post column “The Answer Sheet” on August 8, 2015 [see it here]. As Ms. Strauss put it in her introduction to
the essay, we don’t find much of this kind of understanding of school as part
of community, a sense of place, in current education policy and reform.
***
More
than anything, it was the nihilistic policy and media language about schooling
that got me on the road in the early 1990s to document good public
school classrooms, and from those classrooms to draw a more comprehensive
language—a richer set of stories—about public education in our country. In the back of my mind was William Least
Heat-Moon’s wonderful book Blue Highways, a chronicle of his travels
across the back roads of the country, which were printed in blue on old highway
maps. Heat-Moon set out to discover
America and, in a way, himself. My goal
was different, but, I would later realize, not unrelated: I wanted to get us to
think about schools and school reform in a different way.
This
fall marks the 20th anniversary of the book that resulted from my
journey—Possible Lives: The Promise of Public Education in America—and
that fact got me to look through some of the notebooks I kept during my
travels. About mid-way through the
writing of the book, the opportunity came up to drive with a friend across the
U.S., and I saw the trip as a chance to view the country I had been seeing in
segments in one long arc.
I’ve
pulled two scenes from the cross-country notebook: one from Tucumcari, New Mexico,
the other from Rochester, New York. In
addition to the teachers and students who form the core of Possible Lives,
I met countless people in restaurants, markets, small shops—and just on the
street as I was finding my way around.
They were open to a stranger, and added to the richness of the
journey. I learned so much from these
conversations: about local history, about changes in the economy, about
regional speech and folkways, about the hopes and grievances attached to school,
and about the place of school in memory.
***
It
is mid-August, 1993, and I’m in the El Toro Restaurant in Tucumcari, New Mexico
talking with a local woman named Edda, whose parents homesteaded just outside
the current border of the city. She is
with her daughter, the “baby of the family”, who will soon be going off to
college in Texas, a hedge against the uncertain future in her hometown. Tucumcari borders Texas in east-central New
Mexico, and has a population of about five thousand people. Its economy, Edda explains, is built on
cotton and feed and livestock.
Tucumcari’s once vital downtown, Edda continues, suffered as corporate
retailers moved into larger neighboring cities, and the recession of the early
1990’s dealt a final blow. “There were
nice shops here,” she says. “Used to be
you could buy beautiful dresses right here.”
The city is tearing down two historical buildings.
Edda
directs me to an old building that houses the Tucumcari museum. It is not far away.
The
main floor is crammed with artifacts of Tucumcari’s livestock industry—over
one-hundred varieties of barbed wire—and with stone tools, pottery, and
arrowheads from local Native American tribes.
In the basement, the curators recreated a general store: A Victrola,
lamp shades, hardware, dry goods, and all kinds of remedies: Chill Tonic,
Hart’s Compound, and a laxative called Satanic, the devil’s arms opened wide
across the label.
By
the staircase, a sign: We do not discuss
politics, religion, or the Civil War.
Up
the stairs, then, to the second floor to find that about half of the space has
been fashioned into an early Twentieth Century classroom. Rows of small desks with ink wells. A mannequin dressed as a teacher—long, green
flowered dress, hair pulled back in a bun.
The alphabet. Pictures of the
presidents. A bookshelf with old books
stacked sideways: science, geography, the Spell-to-Write Spelling Book, a
Universal Composition Book. There is a
globe, lunch pails, and an eighth-grade diploma: “Admission to High
School.” It turns out that this building
was Tucumcari’s old schoolhouse.
***
“Crazy
Ronny” stands in front of a massive heap of metal, jagged sheets of aluminum,
severed steel beams, copper coil, burnt vats and tanks. Ronny supervises this recycling operation in
the defunct train yard in Rochester, New York, and he is electric with pride
and get-go. The recycling plant has been
running for two years, so Ronny has been with it as it’s grown. “We’re taking it in,” he says grinning,
“faster than we can get it out.”
The
railroad’s old roundhouse still stands—well, part of it…sections are sheered
off to accommodate the lot’s machinery and the movement of scrap. The pits where mechanics stood to service the
undercarriages of railroad cars are filled in, and the turning track in the
middle of the yard is gone, though the brick lining remains.
Ronny
is not a big man, but is wiry and powerful, with forearms that you get only
from years of turning a wrench or winch.
He is handsome in a rough-hewn way, and his face is bright with
confidence. He is quick and generous
with praise for his crew. He describes
the difficult task of stripping the 4” glass lining out of chemical processing
vats and says he doesn’t know how his guy does it so well. He praises his welders, their skill, their
tenacity. My guess, though, is that he’s
had tough times—in school, perhaps, maybe with the law. His tee-shirt announces Crazy Ronny, and he’s right at home in this metallic wasteland and
up to the task of taming it.
During
the time of my visit in 1993, Rochester had suffered the fate of so many
Eastern industrial cities: economic restructuring, empty factories, jobs
lost. Recycling plants exist in good
economic cycles and bad, but I couldn’t help but see this one as both outcome
and symbol of hard times.
The
remnants of closed shops are gathered together here, processed and crushed into
usable material for new industries, or old ones surviving in other forms or
locations. Creative destruction in a
pretty literal sense, but only a few jobs are being created out of tons of
thousands lost.
But
in the midst of this post-industrial churn, Ronny found meaningful work. In the 1990s there were some
government programs being floated to retrain former industrial workers for
(much lower paying) service jobs. I
couldn’t imagine a guy like Ronny sitting at a desk all day or helping people
process a claim or find a better appliance.
This
job mattered to Ronny. He supervised it
and watched it grow. He knew what he was
doing, had command of untold tons of twisted steel and iron, understood the
flow of work, what his crew could do, appreciated their know-how—the skills
involved in removing a four-inch layer of glass lining from a vat way taller
than a man. My Uncle Joe Meraglio once
said that the shop floor of General Motors was his schoolhouse. Ronny would understand exactly what he meant.
***