[Editor’s note: Peter Goodman blogs at Ed in the Apple, where this post originally appeared.]
Break on through to the other side
- The Doors
Election Day
7:30 am: My plan was to get to the poll at the opening, 6 am, and cast my ballot quickly. At 6:05 am the line was incredibly long … took me an hour and a half. A friendly line, we chatted, talked about the historic nature of the election, no one argued, the polling people were well-organized and I pulled down my mechanical handles and swung the lever to the left, a solid “clunk,” as the decades old machine registered my vote.
10:30 am: The line is longer!! The line usually abates as folks move on to work, not today…
1 pm: The line is still long… I wander into the polling place to talk with the election supervisor, a neighbor and retired Middle School principal.
“Real busy today… must really be hectic.”
“I ran lunch rooms for seventh graders for twenty years, this is a piece of cake.”
3 pm: The crowds have slowed. Many neighbors standing around outside the polling place… all hoping for an Obama victory… and nervous. Seniors, a few voted for FDR, many parents bringing their kids, first time voters, all on the “same side,” maybe we really can turn around the nation. All ages, all colors, genders, all on the same page… and looking carefully you can see all with their fingers crossed.
10:30 pm: By my calculation the only chance McCain has if he wins Alberta, Manitoba and British Columbia. With 207 EVs and California, Oregon, Washington and Hawaii coming at 11 pm… and Florida, North Carolina, Virginia still in play… I put the champagne in the fride to cool.
I pop the cork as MSNBC calls the election… champagne and roast pork egg foo young… a perfect victory meal!!
As the days move into weeks and the weeks to months the euphoria will fade as the governing begins. The first major sign will be the nomination of Secretary of Education. Will it come from the “technocratic elite,” someone like New Leaders for New Schools head John Schnur? or, from the Bolder, Broader Coalition, perhaps Linda Darling-Hammond, or Arne Duncun, the current Chicago Schools Superintendent who has signed both the educational agenda, and let’s not omit Barbara Bryd Bennett, former Superintendent of Cleveland, with roots in New York City and a well respected national educator.
No Child Left Behind (NCLB) will be reauthorized this spring, in spite the opposition primarily from the National Education Association, who would like to see it die. It will be fascinating to see how Randi Weingarten, the new AFT President steers through the swirling waters of Congress. In New York City Weingarten managed to fend off assaults on the teacher contract, negotiated 43% in salary increases over the last two contracts and a schoolwide bonus plan; she is a deft negotiator and agile politician. Can she work with Obama, Representative Miller and Senator Kennedy to create a federal role that is inclusive of teachers, parents and the wider community?
The Broader, Bolder Agenda, including Community Schools was close to the Obama education position, will the economy, Iraq and Afghanistan overwhelm an educational agenda?
Hopefully Jim Morrison was right and we are breaking on through to the other side.
Tagged: election '08, NCLB, Obama
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1 Comment:
1 Paul Schickler
· Nov 7, 2008 at 11:19 pm
Now I truly understand the figure of speech, “My heart is bursting.” The morning after Election Day I walked down the street with the nearly irresistible impulse to hug absolute strangers and congratulate them. But this is New York, and though there may be places in America where you would not be assaulted, arrested, or carted off in a straitjacket for that type of behavior, this is not one of them.
I had sat down at the TV the previous evening at 9 p.m., a bowl of pre-celebratory ice cream in my lap and a box of tissues by my side. The ice cream disappeared rapidly, the tissues, more slowly, but just as surely. One disappeared when the electoral vote total finally showed 270. One when I saw blacks and whites hugging each other in Times Square. One when I saw the rapt face of a young woman perhaps just old enough to vote staring up at a Jumbotron TV at what was surely the most historic event in her young life. (Was there a more historic one in mine?) One when I saw a closeup of Jesse Jackson standing in the crowd in Chicago’s Grant Park, tears coursing down his face. One in pinch-me awe when the president-elect appeared with the soon-to-be first lady, a first family of color for at least the next four years.
Yet another when Barack Obama appeared at the podium around midnight and finally let loose with the type of stirring oratory for which he first became well known. A few more while he spoke. Another when he brought out his cute-as-buttons daughters for a final wave. There were many more tissues, but my memory, like my eyesight last night, is a bit of a blur.
There were some causes for laughter, too. One was when Oprah Winfrey announced that this country was no longer red or blue, but the color purple.
Another was when cameras set up near a Kenyan town that was home to some of Barack Obama’s relatives showed a man wearing a bright orange cowboy hat. That hat captured the adventurous, can-do, exuberant spirit of America, as well as the doofy silliness and manic and unfettered yet devoted energy that elections can bring out in us. And from all I’ve heard and read, that hat also captured the wonder, the delight, and the excitement of the rest of the world in the prospect of an Obama presidency, their belief that in America, the shining lamp beside the golden door had dimmed but not gone out, that the promise of democracy was still in force, that hope was kept alive.
To now return to a classroom filled with the children of people of color and speak of equal opportunity not in the future tense but the present tense, is as unspeakably satisfying an experience as any I have had in my career. And now when I tell my students that history is not just something they study, but something they live, I know they will understand. Teachable moment indeed.
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