To the Weekday program at KUOW-FM:
Your guest’s romantic view of meat, as a lovingly nurtured part of an integrated farm and home culture, doesn’t jibe with the American agricultural-industrial complex, with its feedlots, manure lagoons, and antibiotic-enhanced meats. As a vegetarian for 14 years, my answer to the question “why don’t you eat meat” has been “I don’t like the way they make it.” Shoveling cereal grains into grass-eating ruminants in order to increases the quantity of meat doesn’t make a lot of sense, especially if your guest is as concerned as he claims about quality and authenticity.
If I were to travel in the central Vietnamese highlands, I would not imagine I could bring my attitudes about industrial food production to the dining experience I would be exposed to. To think otherwise is to be no less doctrinaire than the vegans and other activists your guest complains about.
To the Seattle Times:
Editor:
I read the guest editorial by David Marshak, claiming that the Seattle School District is pursuing a policy of institutional racism against children of color and low-income students. I disagree.
He uses phrases like “the children and families who would have their schools taken away from them” suggesting that the children will be without a school at all: ignoring that for now, the fact is that the schools these children are in are not serving them well. That’s why those schools were chosen for consolidation.
He sees the removal of Sacajawea from the list as a move on behalf of whites, without any analysis of what criteria were used. To put it simply, he sees black and white without any concern for quality. I look around my kids’ schoolyard and marvel at the variety of colors and features, without keeping score. Could Marshak do that? Which is racist, to base your decisions on the various racial and ethnic proportions of a student body or to see kids as individuals and try to serve them as the unique people they are?Marshak also claims that since the majority of students affected by the consolidation proposal are of low-income, the consolidation plan is discriminatory. How does it help kids and families to keep them in a failing school with low parental involvement and poor academic performance?
Marshak also claims that “children do better academically and socially in small schools and that children from low-income families are particularly helped by being in a small school.” I’m sure that’s accurate, if the schools are equally well-funded and the kids have adequate support at home and in school support services. The fact of the matter is that Seattle’s schools are not always able to provide those resources to smaller schools: a school can offer more services if there are more kids in a given building, based on the way school funds are distributed. A school with 100 kids is likely to have a lower concentration of kids needing support than one with 400: consolidating populations and getting those kids access to services seems like the right thing to do.Finally, Marshak asserts that stability is a good thing, that kids who stay in one school do better. They also like cookies, but that has nothing to do with the quality of the education they will receive. It would be wonderful if every child in the district attended a high quality school, close to their home, with all the benefits of a large urban district. It’s hard for me to see how incoherent gripes like Marshak’s get us any closer to that. If he has solutions, he should spell them out. But all I see are weak accusations of public servants and the usual wishful thinking I expect from educational theorists who demonstrate no familiarity with the inside of a public school.
I had to get it down to 200 words but they say they’ll run it.
Professor David Marshak claims that the Seattle School District’s consolidation plan exemplifies “institutional racism” against children of color and low-income students. I disagree.
He views removing Sacajawea, a North End school, from the list as benefiting whites. I looked it up: Caucasian students make up just 41% of the students at Sacajawea, not even a simple majority.
Marshak also claims that since the majority of students affected are low-income, the consolidation plan is discriminatory or “classist.” Discriminatory against underperforming schools, yes, but against kids who need and deserve the best education we can provide, no.
Marshak’s claim that children do better in small schools, especially low-income children, is accurate, or would be if all schools were properly funded, all kids had strong home support, and services in school. By consolidating students, kids who need it should get access to the services they need.
His assertion that stability is good, that kids who stay in one school do better, is unassailable. It would be wonderful if every child attended a high quality school, close to home, but it’s an incremental process. We have to start somewhere.
Labelling an open, transparent process conducted by citizen volunteers “racist” is counterproductive.