Book Review: Hold the Dark by William Giraldi

     Reading Hold the Dark is like taking a trip back through your seventh-grade literature class, when you first discovered the mechanics of fiction.  We have the gripping first line: "The wolves came down from the hills and took the children of Keelut."  We have the heavy symbolism of wolves for all the evil inside us:

          "They have the spirits of the damned."
          "They're hungry wolves, hungry animals.  Nothing more."
          "I don't mean wolves."
          "I'll go now," he said.
          "Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly
     they are ravening wolves."
          "That's the Gospel of Matthew."

And so on.  Also, Giraldi treats us to the classic Man vs. Nature theme which, in the spirit of Jack London, that seminal lover of the cold and stark setting, morphs into a Man vs. Man which in turn transfigures into that most human of conflicts, Man vs. Himself.
     That brutal landscape (again, in the fashion of classic literature) expands into a character, a presence, a mysterious god whose force unleashes the primal violence and desire seated deep in our seemingly-civilized souls.  The village itself is unbelievably named for a terrifying mythical demon dog.  Besides the three children taken by wolves in the first paragraph, we have the story of a "girl mashed inside the digestive tract" of a wolf, the revenge killing of a wolf, and this surprisingly cheery, poetic description of wartime violence all within the first few pages:

     When the .50-caliber rounds hit them they tore off limbs or else left dark blue holes the size of plums.  He fired into those on the fuel-damp sand and those still crammed inside the truck's flattened cab.  Their blood burst in the wind as wisps of orange and red.  Curious how orange, how radiant blood looks beneath a desert non, in the dull even tinge of its light.

And the body count and blood flow does not abate through the succeeding chapters.  Giraldi appears to want to position himself as the Cormac McCarthy of the tundra, another sparse landscape and lawless terrain where the distinction between man and beast blurs in a stain of blood and brilliant sunsets.
     The book turns on two unexpected plot twists, one regarding the supposedly wolf-taken boy from the first line, and a second involving the nature of the relationship between the boy's parents.  That first twist is beautifully gruesome and breathtaking, but the second, coming in the final pages of the novel, is disappointingly corny and needless.  It was a shame for Giraldi to end the story with a plot twist straight out of soap operas, after successfully painting such a lovely, stark image of love, evil, revenge, and desire.  It would be as if "To Build a Fire" ended with the writer revealing that the main character had dreamed the entire story, or if 1984 had ended with Orwell explaining that Winston and Big Brother were actually brothers (a lá the ridiculous familial revelations in Star Wars).
     However, Hold the Dark redeems itself in the person of Vernon Slone, a man's man who simultaneously attracts and repels us.  Upon encountering one of his army buddies in the middle of raping an Afghan girl, Slone saves the girl.  Such a hero, eh?  Ah, but he does so by stabbing the soldier through the ear, a grisly salvation Giraldi depicts with his characteristic staid horror:

     He stabbed this soldier through the right ear.  A centimeter of the knife's tip poked through his left temple and Slone felt the body go limp on the blade.  He held the man's drooped form upright with the knife so he would not topple on the girl.  He then thrust him quickly back and yanked free the blade in the same even motion.  The serrated side of the knife was crammed now with bone and brain.

Yikes.  The book, and Slone, rolls on in this manner, with stretches of snowy tension punctuated by storms of extreme violence.  I found myself in the end, however, wanting to love this story as much as I loved those gems of seventh-grade literature - "The Necklace," "The Call of the Wild," "The Gift of the Magi" - but sadly, could not.  I just wish some editor had talked Giraldi into polishing up the ending.  Then his book, too, might have become assigned reading in schools, though likely not for seventh-graders.

Book Review: The Teacher Wars by Dana Goldstein

     I’ll be honest: now is not the best of times to be a teacher.  When I see the inane dictates foisted upon the profession from the local, state, and federal level, or hear the vitriolic blame-gaming that passes for educational discourse in this country, it’s as if I’m underwater, holding my breath until a long storm above passes and it’s safe to surface.

In a strange way, then, Dana Goldstein’s book The Teacher Wars offers some comfort, cold though it may be.  The book reassures us that insanity and inanity have long served as the guiding forces in American education.

     Take one of my favorite policies to hate: merit-based pay.  A mere thirty years ago, within memory of today’s policymakers yet oddly forgotten, the seminal A Nation at Risk report created a sense of panic which spawned some idiotic and fortunately short-lived educational reforms, including merit-based pay.  And here we are - in the galvanized 21st Century - seeing this corpse of failure resuscitated.  Goldstein notes that, back in the 80s:

Twenty-four states claimed to have implemented some sort of “career ladder” rewarding teachers with merit pay, but by the end of the decade, almost all of those ladders had collapsed, weighed down by low budgets and lack of teacher buy-in (174).

Our own school district this year rolled out a merit-pay plan that offered an impressive-sounding (yet truly paltry) million dollars to be paid not to all teachers who hit a pre-defined educational target, but rather just to the top couple hundred (based on evaluations and test scores).  So teachers can have near-perfect evaluations and lead all their students in passing the state test … and get nothing.  Haven’t we learned?  Back in the 80’s, this type of system undermined morale more than it raised test scores.

There were several merit pay plans that were popular with teachers, and they had one major feature in common: Bonuses were available to every high-performing teacher in a school district, regardless of the grade level or subject they taught … [whereas] just 15 percent of teachers in Tennessee under Governor Lamar Alexander’s widely celebrated plan, and 10 percent of teachers in Florida [received bonuses] (176).

Assuming for a moment what is not true - that bonus money can buy you test scores - why on earth would you only buy a random percentage of teachers off instead of every one who could make the grade?  Well, I guess because money is expensive.

     Always in such things, when you have politicians (some of the deservedly least popular people in the country) determining what happens in classrooms, the law of unintended consequences kicks in and makes a mess of things.  And this cause and effect, Goldstein has found, rules the currents of American educational history and reform.  In the 1830s, reformers brought more women into the profession to, eh, save money, because, eh, women work for less than men.  We male teachers (and our sisters-in-arms) are just beginning to peel off the hair shirt of this legacy.  As Goldstein recounts the influence:

Yet during an era of deep bias against women’s intellectual and professional capabilities, the feminization of teaching of teaching wrought by the common schoolers carried an enormous cost: Teaching became understood less as a career than as a philanthropic vocation or romantic calling (31).

Even efforts we all support, such as integration, can wreak havoc for those meant to benefit from it.

Half the southern states passed laws revoking the teaching license of anyone who joined an organization that supported school integration, including the NAACP. …  Then, during the frustrated decade after Brown, desegregation was the law, but not the reality (112-113).

At least with desegregation, there was a cause worth suffering for.  But how about the race effects in recent and today’s reforms, where corporatizing efforts in the 1980s are being repeated today, with the same ill results?

This painful episode in American education history has generally gone unacknowledged by today’s accountability reformers, as they pursue policies, such as neighborhood school closings and school “reconstituitions” as charter or magnet schools, that lead disproportionately to the loss of teaching jobs held by African Americans. … When the [Chicago school] district reconstituted ten schools in 2012, 51 percent of the teachers dismissed were black, although black teachers make up only 28 percent of teachers citywide (122).

No Child Left Behind (NCLB) could easily be crowned King of unintended consequences.  The law meant to remove any opportunity for making excuses for failing students, but ended up harming exactly those it most intended to assist.

Teachers showered attention on so-called “bubble kids,” those right beneath the proficiency threshold, while ignoring the needs of high-ability students who would pass the tests no matter what, or low-ability ones who had little chance of rising to the proficiency bar (187).

And it wasn’t only teachers gaming the system during the troubled reign of NCLB.  States and school districts, too, played the numbers game like Fast Eddie Felson:

As a result [of a lack of the means to manage underperforming schools], many states followed the letter but not the spirit of the law and made their new tests absurdly easy for kids to pass.  In Texas a student who scored 13 percent was declared proficient (186).

One more example.  The biggest buzzword in the corporatizing of education today is “value-added,” which basically posits that a good teacher can be identified by measuring the value added to her students.  What it comes down to is using standardized test scores to evaluate the worth of teachers.  And how’s that working out?  Goldstein tells us.

When value-added is calculated for a teacher using just a single year’s worth of test score data, the error rate is 35 percent - meaning more than one in three teachers who are average will be misclassified as excellent or ineffective, and one in three teachers who excel or are terrible will be called average.  Even with three years of data, one in four teachers will be misclassified.  It is difficult, if not impossible, to compute an accurate value-added score for teachers who work in teams within a single classroom … or for the two-thirds of teachers who teach grades or classes not subject to standardized tests (206-207).

Goldstein is the first I’ve read to point out something I have long griped about - what if we fired all the low-scoring teachers?  Who is lining up to take their places?  “Good” teachers?

Even if test scores were a flawless reflection of student learning and teacher quality, there is no evidence that the new teachers who replace the bad teachers will be any better … (230).

The upshot is teachers, students, parents, and administrators with whiplash as reform after reform fails, and the new thing is ushered in as the, well, as the new thing (better than the old thing).  Meanwhile, generations of students pass through schools without any attention to what actually could be done to better their educations and life chances.

     So what is the ever-elusive fix?  Goldstein finds that, too, buried in the past, in the words of an unheeded social scientist of the 60s.

[Sociologist James] Coleman’s message was that although family income might be the biggest factor in student achievement, teachers and schools also mattered, especially for poor kids (121).

This whole-child approach echoes those espoused by Diane Ravitch and other independent reformers of today, who have no theory or party or politics in the game but only, genuinely, want to see America’s children receive the best possible education.  We have to fix poverty, health care, and … um … everything, kind of.  Yet even this realization is nothing new.  Witness Goldstein’s account of Johnson’s war on poverty as applied to schools in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act:

[President Johnson] signed ESEA in his hometown of Johnson City, Texas, with his own elementary school teacher at his side.  “By passing this bill, we bridge the gap between helplessness and hope for more than 5 million educationally deprived children,” he said.  “And we rekindle the revolution - the revolution of the spirit against the tyranny of ignorance (114).

The path to real and effective and lasting reform may be tricky and even treacherous, but the way is mapped out for us.  Teacher preparation programs, for instance, have historically been more a part of the problem than the solution.

Today only half of teacher candidates undergo supervised student teaching in a real classroom, and most teacher education programs have no mechanism for making sure mentor teachers are themselves successful or trained in how to coach an adult peer (248).

And what is the plan to better prepare teachers for the realities of the classroom?  Apparently, plenty of “blah, blah, blah,” but nothing significant.  And the wheel of history goes round and round.

     That repeating chorus of failure throughout the history of American education sounds at the heart of Goldstein’s book.  She maintains a professorial tone, but the occasional cracks in her journalistic veneer let shine through a witty light well worth waiting for.

The hope that collecting more test scores will raise student achievement is like the hope that buying a scale while result in losing weight (232).

Ultimately, Goldstein holds out hope that we can get our act together and see American education live up to its promise.  And, fortunately, she does see who will lead the way:

Effective teachers can narrow, but not close, achievement and employment gaps that reflect broader income, wealth, and racial inequalities in American society (208).

She also has gleaned, as in this quote from Larry Cuban of the Cardozo Project, how exactly teachers can turn the ship.

Simply stated, effective teaching is intimately related to how well a teacher knows who his charges are and the nature of their surroundings.  If he doesn’t, his perceptions will continue to be shaped by TV, newspaper, social science formulas, and fear - not by first-hand experience (128).

The book does - wisely - stop short of prescribing any cure-alls.  After all, Goldstein is a writer, not an educational expert.  (Though such lack of credentials fails to stop Bill Gates and even dabblers like M. Night Shyamalan from diagnosing and meddling in reform as far as their riches allow, which for Gates is pretty darn far.)  Reading this reform-minded history of American education, however, will inform your mind for the educational debate sure to accompany the next presidential race.  God help us.