Mr. Barton Goes to Washington
by Fred Barton, Michigan State University, East Lansing
Editor, SLATE Update; Chair, NCTE/SLATE Steering Committee

April 2008 SLATE Update

I watched the Potomac glide silently underneath the plane as it made its final approach into National Airport, I couldn’t help thinking about what the person this city is named for had said about political parties. In his farewell address, the first president of the United States warned about the “baleful effects of the spirit of the party.” Particularly for a young democracy, “it is seen in its greatest rankness and is truly their [governments’] worst enemy.”

I don’t remember when I learned that the founding fathers did not intend that parties would dominate the political process. Perhaps they were naive, or just didn’t understand the forces they had set loose when they embarked on the experiment called America. Whatever the reason, their dream of a government free from “petty intrigues” didn’t even last past the tenure of the first president.

And now here I was descending into the very heart of “rankness” to meet with my state’s top party apparatchiks. Well, not exactly. I had already been informed that I wasn’t important enough to meet with my senators. In fact, I wasn’t even important enough to merit a response from Senator Levin’s office, but I was told I would meet with Senator Stabenow’s administrative aides, and my Congressman, Mike Rogers, was going to give me a half hour.

First, though, NCTE had arranged for some training. We met in the Ways and Means Hearing Room in the Rayburn House Office Building (it’s smaller than it looks on TV). There NCTE Executive Director Kent Williamson, Chair of the Educational Policy and Governmental Relations Committee Susi Long, and NCTE Lobbyist Ellin Nolan gave us some background on the history of Advocacy Day, its goals and current initiatives by NCTE.

Next, we met with key legislative staff from the House and Senate Education Committees. Alice Cain from House Committee Chair George Miller’s (D-CA) office, Roberto Rodriguez for Senator Ted Kennedy’s (D-MA) office, and Lindsay Hunsicker from ranking Republican Senator Mike Enzi’s (R-WY) office all filled us in on the status of NCLB (probably dead until after the election); the Striving Readers and Success in the Middle bills (moving, but slowly), as well as some other issues.

Sometimes the obvious is so obvious it’s overlooked. I have never been a friend of NCLB, calling it legalized child abuse, accusing it of robbing our children of their childhoods, and turning our schools into grim, soulless fact ories where children are no more than inventory and teaching was done by “Educational Technicians.”

But I also knew that to be successful, advocacy must build from what the two sides have in common rather than center solely on their differences. This is the only way to move from talking at one another to talking to one another. As I listened to the presentations, the term “unintended side effects” kept popping up. It finally hit me that this was the phrase they were using to allow the Democrats and Republicans to talk about everything that had gone wrong with the law without the rancor and blame.

It was a phrase I’m sure George Orwell would have been proud of, and, at first, I recoiled from so antiseptic a description for the damage I knew was being done to children, teachers, and schools. But as I listened to the speakers, particularly the Republican speaker, I sensed there was a real desire to fix this; an acceptance, grudging perhaps, of the fact of what NCLB had wrought in our schools. Well, OK, I thought, in the spirit of compromise I’m willing to accept your term if you’re willing to deal with the travesty you, and by "you" I mean Republicans and Democrats, have unleashed on our children.

Next we heard from Steve Robinson, a Legislative Assistant in Senator Obama’s office. He was all practicality and efficiency and from him I learned the phrase “What’s the ask?” This simply meant that when talking to a politician it was very important that he or she be able to walk away from the conversation with a very clear idea of what I wanted him or her to do. He also explained for us the importance of the thank you card after the meeting was over.

So, armed with the lingua franca, I was off to my first stop, Representative Mike Rogers (R-MI) representing Michigan’s Eighth Congressional District. Congressman Rogers’ office was in the Cannon House Office Building which was just a block from Rayburn, so I arrived a little early and was ushered to a couch in an incredibly small waiting area between two receptionist’s desks. His office was actually a warren of little cubicles and spaces where an unrelentingly young staff worked to keep the congressman informed and on schedule.

Then I met Andrew Hawkins, Rogers’ Legislative Assistant for Education and Health. He apologized profusely, but announced that the congressman had been called away for a vote and would not be able to meet with me. This was both disappointing and relieving at the same time. Rogers and I had seldom been on the same side of issues over the years, and I was a little concerned that my newfound ability to dispassionately discuss things I cared passionately about might dissolve if I had to sit in the same room with him for any length of time.

Andrew led me into Rogers’ office which was all dark paneling and leather and volunteered to substitute for his boss. I found him to be knowledgeable on the issues, friendly, and ready with good questions. He also looked to be about 12 years old. Actually though, he had graduated from Michigan State University in 2004 and had come to work for the congressman after college. Taking a cue from the advice of Mr. Robinson, I focused my “ask” around two issues: NCLB reauthorization and the Striving Readers Act. We had been told at our training that getting support for the Success in the Middle Bill would be problematic because it had been introduced by Senator Obama, and legislators were wary of an endorsement of his bill appearing to be an endorsement of his candidacy.

I centered my remarks about NCLB around the “unintended side effects” high stakes testing had on students, and AYP had on teachers. As I told my stories Andrew appeared to listen attentively, pausing occasionally to write a note, or ask me a question. I closed my remarks by saying one of the most destructive “unintended side effects” of the law had been that it gave teachers all the responsibility for educating children, but none of the authority to do so. At this Andrew perked up even more. He seemed to have discovered something he’d been looking for and asked me if he could pass that phrase on to Rogers. Sound bites, I thought. Still if it helps. . . OK.

We went on to talk about the congressman becoming a cosponsor of the Striving Readers Act. Of course Andrew couldn’t speak for Rogers, but he asked several questions, made some agreeable comments on the bill as I explained it to him, and promised to pass the information I left on to his boss. We concluded our conversation with a little small talk and then I was out and on my way to Senator Stabenow’s office.

The Senate Offices are on the other side of the capitol from the House Offices, about a 15-minute walk. It was a beautiful day, clear skies, about 75 degrees. The cherry trees had exploded into pink brilliance, tulips waved in the breeze, a riot of colors, like a rainbow fallen to earth. Advocacy Day was during the Pope’s visit so the streets were full of tourists carrying plastic bags with the Vatican Coat of Arms emblazoned on the side. I paused in front of the Capitol Building (always bigger than I remember) and watched the crowds, listened to the polyglot of languages flowing around me, drank in the scent of newly mowed grass, lilacs, and, oddly, popcorn and forgot for a while that 81% of my fellow citizens think America is going down the wrong path.

Senator Stabenow’s office is in the Hart Office Building where once again I was greeted by two receptionists. The waiting area there was a little more formal with furniture arranged around a television turned, naturally, to CSPAN. Senator Kennedy was on the screen rattling off statistics about pay rates and wage increases while an aide behind him frantically tried to keep up with charts and graphs which had been made into large posters. I wondered why no one had told the senator about PowerPoint.

I didn’t have time to wonder very long because Kristy Pagan and Colleen Briggs suddenly appeared from the back and introduced themselves as aides to the senator. My first thought was they looked like students in my 11th grade Techniques of Composition class, but like Andrew, they were bona fide adults, if rather newly minted ones.

They took me back to a conference room and I launched once again into my spiel. I noticed that in addition to taking notes, they also recorded the conversation. I hoped it was to play selected bits for the senator, and not to have a few laughs with their friends after work at a bar, but said nothing.

They listened, asked the occasional question, and laughed at my jokes. They were articulate and knowledgeable about the issues and aware of the “unintended side effects” of NCLB. Again no commitment on Striving Readers, but they promised to discuss it with the senator.

Maybe it’s because I’m an English teacher and can’t avoid a story, or maybe I was just tired, but as we were wrapping up the interview I told them that over the last seven years of NCLB my first-year university students remained strong in the basics of reading and writing, but the range of reading and writing skills they developed in school had narrowed. Then I told them the story of my dog Frodo. Frodo could do one trick, he could roll over. He was quite good at it. He could roll over to the left or the right and he sometimes did this little hesitation thing on his back to make you guess which way he was going to go. Trouble was, if you asked Frodo to sit up, he would roll over. If you asked him to play dead, he would roll over. It was his only trick.

I told them that my students were like that. NCLB had taught them one trick and they had learned it very well, but the university and the larger world required more than one trick and we were doing a disservice to our students by not preparing them for what awaited them.

Twenty four hours later I was on a plane again, watching the Capitol Building slip under the wing as we banked for the journey north. Had I done any good? No way to tell, but meeting Andrew, Kristy, and Colleen had certainly helped me. See, democracies are all about the future. The greatest asset a democracy has is its young people because they are that future. For me to meet those three young, committed, intelligent people reminded me that away from the glare of the klieg lights, away from the TV cameras and the political posturing, people like this young man and these young women are quietly working to make this country better. These three were probably in high school at best when the current administration came to town and my feeling is they’ll just be hitting their stride when the next administration rolls in. I thought again about the 81% of Americans who think this country is going the wrong way and I wished they had been able to meet Andrew, Kristy, and Colleen. I think it would have given them hope. I know it did for me.