Carly Berwick

Does education reform actually mean less money for schools?

People keep talking about how great Arne Duncan is: he's tall, he's good at basketball, he went to Harvard, he stands up to unions, and he has a lot of money he needs to give to needy school districts, via the $5 billion Race to the Top fund. This may mean subjecting students and teachers to lots of standardized testing of unproven value, but never mind that. Duncan, Obama's secretary of education, is also excited about charter schools and is the good-looking face of the school reform movement. Other well-publicized proponents of bringing business-like rationality and competitiveness (via charters) to steering the minds of millions of schoolchildren include DC's school chancellor Michelle Rhee, New York's mayor Mike Bloomberg, Newark's mayor Cory Booker, and the outgoing New Jersey governor, Jon Corzine.

I wrote about the sometimes unpredictable effects of the new rationality in school funding on New Jersey's urban kids for Next American City. A new school funding formula, passed in 2008, allots money in a seemingly fair and rational manner, weighting areas of concentrated poverty so that they receive more state money per student. But New Jersey already had fought a decades-long court battle to ensure that poor urban kids received what was deemed a thorough and adequate education--i.e. safe, decent schools--and the new formula actually gives less money to several urban school districts, in part because those local urban tax coffers are so depleted to start with. (The recession is also a confounding factor, but detractors of the new funding formula argue that it underfunds even before Trenton cuts out more.)

The shortfall may just point to just how much needs be done to help kids who start off in poverty attain the advantages accrued to kids from middle-class families before they even set foot in school. These are so basic they can be hard to discern: familiarity with books, with letters, with numbers, with lots of words. 

Many studies show that a good preschool can help overcome some of the disadvantages of poverty, but after that it's still unclear what helps a middling or troubled student stick school out long enough to discover something she loves/can stand. So it's an open question how much the current push for reform is going to help the most needy students older than five, on a national scale. Is the idea to open charters with such speed that they replace all 100,000+ public schools in the United States? Or to throw enough ideas out there, via charters, that eventually some good ones stick? (It's not like education experts haven't been trying for years.) And charters themselves have received mixed grades. 

Reformers can talk themselves in circles if they start looking at fundamental questions. Because at bottom, tackling our country's education problems means tackling economic inequity and poverty, which is often concentrated in neighborhoods and therefore schools (previous efforts at getting around this have included busing, magnet schools, and the Hope VI mixed-income housing push). And talk about that too much and someone's bound to call you a socialist.

The paranormal ordinary

Sometimes I wonder why I write about art. There are so many other important subjects out there. But then you see a really great work, and the potential of art to make audiences aware of fifty forgotten things all at once becomes clear again. That happened last month when I caught Israeli-American artist Omer Fast's first live performance piece at Performa09, where he invited one guest and a half-dozen actors to play a game of telephone based on the guest's harrowing personal story. I had been aware of Omer's work since 2005, when I reviewed a show of his mordantly funny, perplexing videos at Postmasters. It is sometimes so nice to be surprised and confused (but confused with the sense that order is imminent, as if perpetually on page 200 of an Agatha Christie novel). This week I wrote for New York about his strange talent for disorienting viewers with sort-of normal stories, based on interviews with people just like you and me, who happen to be soldiers, morticians, EMT first-responders, historical impersonators, aging extras, or refugees.

And on a small island-nation in the North Sea, they even pay you to bear and feed children

Being a working parent of young children can be pretty tough, so it's nice to think that some place in the world has figured out how to do it right--a modern parent utopia like, say, Sweden or France, where there's just the right amount of parental leave, health care is abundant, child care is free and good, and the state throws golden coins at you with every new birth. Since our household is half-German, the German model has come under the most scrutiny. I posted about some of its failings before, while my friend Nathan, over at dadwagon, extolled some of its virtues. In Germany, you can take up to three years of maternity leave, and either parent caring for a child can receive two-thirds of his/her salary for up to a year. But day care spots in Germany are few and far between, despite a recent law that guarantees spots for at least 35 percent of the of-age kids.

German journalist Miriam Hollstein traveled here to note the differences herself and wrote them up in her report as a McCloy fellow. (I was a fellow too, back in 2006, and wrote about something much less useful.) Her findings: little government support for parents in the US, but much more flexibility and respect for working mothers. Hollstein notes that German women (particularly in the former west, since East German women were compelled to return to work) who go to work before their children are three are often derided as "rabenmutter."

Hollstein's report is particularly fascinating because it highlights the flaw in generous maternity leave as your principal 'mom-friendly' policy. Long-term maternity leave alone just reinforces the idea that a mother doesn't need/want to work in the early years. Hollstein notes that despite no federal maternity leave policy, American women can continue to work from home in many cases and work part-time without torpedoing their ambitions. Yes, we need laws to help working parents stateside, but at least we don't call working moms crows.

The trace of the hand

Handmade baby clothes are ridiculous. Babies grow fast and have a tendency to attract most bodily fluids to their clothes. Spending $50--or worse, your own time--on a knitted sweater for a three-month-old is quixotic at best, yuppie-hipster parenting at worst (guilty as charged). But a particularly pleasing kind of whimsy infects the best handmade baby gear. Somehow being of practical use for a short amount of time makes these tiny cardigans and belled butterflies a little tragic and so even more beautiful. Here are two craftsy people that make extraordinary kids' toys/clothes.

Baby-D, clothing and knitwear by a Jersey City neighbor, Diana Koka. I haven't actually met her but have been the happy recipient of a silky knit cap and blanket knit together by her very hands.

Zoe-Bebe, animals by Claudia Dierig, my husband's cousin

This stuff is so hard. I tried to knit a blanket for my first son, out of some extreme form of masochism masquerading as maternal instinct. I spent something like $70 on the silk-wool yarn and precious hours of my life doing a basic stitch to end up with a loose-knit, kind-of-warm throw big enough to cover his diaper. People like me need to just step away from the needles from the start and pay someone else good money to stitch together 'rock-n-roll pants' and corduroy purple elephants. 

Art of noises

I am hearing a lot of noise music lately. Sadly, it's not because I managed to make this year's No Fun Fest, nor was I able to witness Arto Lindsay's Times Square cell-phone symphony, at the opening of Performa. It's just that my three-year-old has four guitars, one drum, two plastic pianos, a bunch of maracas, and these weird shaky sticks they give out at kiddie music classes--and he likes to use them all, at once. When he gets in a groove, though, he does sort of sound like all the members of Destroy All Monsters, artist Mike Kelley's noise band, which Kelley started as a college student in Michigan before he was a world-famous artist and was just looking to hook into an Iggy Pop vibe (as for Iggy, three-year-olds really dig him too). 

I interviewed Kelley about his first-ever noise music festival, curated for Performa, the very excellent art-slash-collection of crazy stuff festival going on across New York this month. The interview, along with some beautiful pictures of Kelley's orchestrated chaos, is in this month's Art in America. 

Party like it's . . .

It feels like 1999 all over again. I received two emails yesterday announcing new web initiatives from art institutions. Dia has reignited their moribund web commission series, with Lisi Rakin's nuclear weapon control panel web site, launching Friday. The press release says "Visitors may enter an address, select a weapon, and then detonate it." Calls to mind visions of Homer Simpson falling asleep at the reactor. The Whitney is completely relaunching its home page tomorrow, not long after MoMA did the same. 

Back in the late 90s, commissioning artists' web projects and sticking fancy interactive widgets on a museum web site were thought to signal forward-mindedness and of-the-minute-ness. Today it's clear that having a decent site is simply average branding strategy, and cloaking updates as ambitious art projects is commissioning on the cheap. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.

Reunification pessimists

Today marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. In most of Western Europe and the United States, the fall has been hailed as evidence of the advance of democracy, a kind of natural and positive political entropy, and a milestone in human rights. But when I traveled throughout Germany in early 2006, I met with several young radicals who felt that reunification was a step backwards. (I wrote about marching against fascists in Dresden alongside these members of the radical left--so radical it seemed they'd come full circle and become neocons--in Slate.) 

These anti-reunification pessimists--they call themselves anti-Deutsch or anti-German--see a whole Germany as ideologically dangerous, a rapprochement with the country's fascist past. I found the politics of the anti-Deutsch fascinating but difficult to translate to Americans. Making sense of their arguments depends on understanding the gravity, to young, philosophically minded Germans, of the connection between nationalism and anti-Semitism. Here's what I wrote back in 2006:

The anti-Deutsch see German nationalism as founded on anti-Semitism. They see anti-Americanism today as the outgrowth of pervasive anti-Semitism, where Israel and America’s support for Israel is vilified. The anti-Deutsch, in short, are the most pro-American Europeans outside of the army bases.

The anti-Deutsch began to coalesce as a group and a way of thinking in the early 1990s. Initially, they were leftists and communists who thought reunification would be a disaster for Germany. For some of them, the East German experiment was not necessarily dead. For most others, a reunited Germany was a dangerous Germany. They thought the country was better off fractured.

If anyone's interested in reading more about them, the entire report is here: Download Antideutschfinal. 

The global state of housewifery

I profiled Iraq-born, US-based artist Hayv Kahraman in this month's ARTnews. I found her just plain gorgeous paintings at last year's Volta art fair; it's actually difficult to encounter something new at an art fair, where dealers usually bring the same steady sellers they've shown several times already, which is why the smaller fairs make for better exploring. Anyway, Kahraman is the Mediterranean Amy Cutler, painting dark, abstracted storybook fantasies of beautiful women in deceptively dire straits. Funny thing is, lately these women have been American in inspiration. She told me that the image of the subservient housewife was strikingly strong here, especially in contrast to the stereotype of docile wives shuttered up across the Middle East. 

September issues: taming the curator; fantasy cities

ARTnews focuses on curators this September, those often-reclusive, hyper-educated, multi-lingual, sleek beasts whose job it is to define taste. I profiled Yasmil Raymond, the mild-mannered and self-assured new curator for Dia, who has championed good artists such as Tino Sehgal and Tomas Saraceno.

Also on the purely ethereal side of esthetics is the BLDGBLOG book by Dwell editor Geoff Manaugh. Based on his blog of the same name, the book puts on paper descriptions and images of neo-psychedelic real-world structures, most of them seemingly out of a Bond film: underground tunnel cities, satellite roadways. I reviewed the book for Next American City.

Dangerous and venal, all in the same week

My sleepy city of Jersey City, a kayak ride away from Manhattan, has been in the news more than usual recently, first for violence, then for corruption. Neither is new to Jersey City or New Jersey, though the national news seems particularly gleeful to find both here, again, on our streets. I noted the media's--particularly the New York Times'--perverse insistence on identifying our neighborhood as gritty, for the Next American City.