Engineering Failure, Preface Part A.
[Friends, sorry for my laziness about blogging. I've been working on a book. Here's a part of the Preface. If you get a chance to read any, let me know if it interests you]
Over the course of the past four years, more and more books are being produced concerning the public schools, which is not surprising, considering that they now consumer $745 billion# annually in taxpayer funds. A great many of these works are written by journalists or academics who issue opinions from an expansive distance and have little direct contact with the educational establishment and the students it services. There seems to be a dearth of insider accounts, and it is, as a means to address this shortage, that I decided to create the book that you now have before you.
Unlike other commentators, my views are the result of first person experiences in the public schools as an employee and card carrying member of the National Education Association. For a over a year now, in addition to my full-time job as an educator, I have been writing columns about various topics for several internet publications# but have found that pieces concerning education have most interested readers. I received countless emails expressing shock at the culture I inhabit and of the employees and ideas I encounter. My readers seem to have previously believed that the public schools differ little today from the ones they grew up in, but this is decidedly not the case. In the chapters that follow, I will depict the fall of one particular school and the way in which the inherent structure of our public schools made its decline possible.
The school in question is the one at which I have worked for the majority of my career. It is called the Northlands Center (NC) and lies in a suburb that is just slightly north of the city of Chicago. The Northlands Center is an alternative education facility that meets the needs of about 250 students who were referred to us by one of five general education high schools# that directly fund our operations. Around 200 of these students are eligible for special education services and the rest are regular education students who were expelled or transferred to our facility due to disciplinary violations. All of our students have one thing in common which is that they cannot reintegrate to their home schools without meeting general behavioral conditions and requirements. I first began working at Northlands in August of 1998 and resigned my position in July of 2004.
My official job title is “school psychologist” and its also the name embossed on the Specialist’s Degree I received from the University of Detroit-Mercy. The role of a school psychologist in a building confuses many outsiders (and some insiders as well). As a profession, there are at least 22,500# of us in the United States. Historically, have acted as the gatekeepers for special education. We have always tested students to determine whether or not they meet the eligibility requirements for special education through the use of formal hearings known in my region as Eligibility Conference reports and Individual Education Programs (IEPs)#.
With so many school psychologists, I am incapable of being a spokesperson for the field on the whole. Yet, it has been my observation that most of us are full-time or part-time bureaucrats who are generally responsible for a large amount of the forms that are intrinsic to special education. However, unlike teachers, we are not assigned classrooms so there is considerable variation among our daily activities. I do not doubt that there are some school psychologists who are not burdened in the least by the mechanics of special education procedures, but I can safely say that most of us have jobs requiring reams and reams of paper. The National Association of School Psychologists broadly defines our function as “consultation, assessment, intervention, prevention, education, research and planning, and health care provision.”#
Many times, due to our familiarity with the law and procedure, it is not uncommon to find school psychologists entrusted with a great many administrative# tasks that are outside of our normal day to day affairs. We often are placed in charge of financial decisions and represent the school at out of district placement staffings. Ours is a truly diverse life.
For me, assessments, the generation of reports, and sitting in endless meetings have always been among my chief responsibilities. I often use a corruption of an old Woody Allen joke to best describe my vocation. When occasionally asked if I am the school psychologist, I respond by holding my hand high in the air and exclaiming, “Of course I’m the school psychologist. Can’t you see my pen!” I imagine many of my peers would find humor in this quip. I would also include “putting out fires” as being another function I perform. At my first job, which was at a rural location ninety miles outside of Chicago, I regularly found myself trying to appease parents and maintain our school’s reputation. At the time, I was under the excellent leadership of Dr. James Boyle# so “fire prevention” was a remarkably easy and enjoyable thing in which to do. Being a school psychologist definitely turned out to be somewhat different than what I expected it to be when I was in graduate school, but I soon adapted to my role and reveled in it. The accomplishment of tasks and fulfilling of directives has always been a source of pleasure for me and I have to say that, until about a year ago, I was very satisfied with my career overall. In fact, I told all who would listen that I loved my job.

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