Book Preface, Part B.
[Sorry about all the #'s but those are due to footnotes/endnotes not being bloggable]
There is a topic that should be scrutinized forthwith and it is the question of whether or not my work is a hasty generalization as it examines directly the happenings of only one school. We all know that one swallow does not make a summer so why would a book that analyzes a single facility tell us anything about our schools on the whole? This is an obvious and potent criticism of my work which is why I will refute it at once (before the story properly begins). First off, I admit that most schools are not alternative schools and that the physical layout of the most buildings differs from that of Northlands. I also concede that the average student is far different in quality than the ones that we educated. However, despite the lack of similarity in structure and student makeup, I firmly believe that our school’s ideology and mission, along with the nature of its staff, is fairly comparable with what you’ll find in public schools today. I think that the correlation between my story and the thought processes and ideas of special educators is quite strong. Concerning regular education, I would judge that a correlation exists but that it is moderate in nature.
My school was jokingly referred to as “Gangsta Island” by its employees but we were no mere island. The individuals who staffed the building were the product of the same education schools that have produced teachers all over the land. They’re training differed little from the training of the staff at your local primary and secondary schools.# Our staff was exposed to the same contemporary fads and trends that that are now all the rage in facilities across the nation. They never received a segregated “alternative education.” Indeed, most of the characters I discuss never even specialized in special education. They are general educators who found themselves as special educators through the transfer or hiring process. Finding teachers with all the right credentials is no small trick and administrators often have to hire under-qualified personnel just to ensure that there are bodies in the classroom. It used to be that these general educators were allowed to take a few classes and receive “a letter” from the state which allowed them to teach disabled students. Nowadays, they are required to do much more in order for the school to be classified as possessing properly certified personnel.
The increasingly distinct requirements that the state mandated for special educators is exactly the reason that I suddenly found myself, in June of 2001, in the role of university instructor. Our district had decided to remedy their certification woes by paying to have satellite classes taught in our area under the auspices of a Chicago university. The classes would eventually provide the teachers with Masters degrees in special education. They were also free of charge assuming that the teachers remained with the board for at least five years time. After this first class finished, I was then called upon by the university to teach more quarterly classes at their downtown Chicago campus.# So far, I have taught nine courses and they’ve been exclusively to graduate level teachers. This has given me a unique “input/output” perspective on the field itself; meaning, I have witnessed teachers in both their larvae and maturation stages of development.
My work as a university instructor has given me substantial insight into the minds of educators and it is another reason why I decided to write this book. My experience also highlights the fluidity between special educators and regular educations as none of the six classes I taught on the Chicago campus included many students who were even remotely interested in special education. In every class I asked for a show of hands from those who wanted to teach special ed. and witnessed few arms raised. The fact that I was entrenched in an alterative school environment did not prevent the university from assigning me to these regular education sections as there are no hard barriers between those who serve the disabled and those who do not (this is particularly true with the near universal acceptance of inclusion among our educational elite).
Another factor supporting this story’s applicability is that the alternative school itself is becoming an ever more popular fixture within American education.# Alternative institutions got considerable press back in 1999 when Jesse Jackson# raised hell in Decatur, Illinois over students being expelled after a fight and thus being relegated to an alternative school for a year regardless of their behavioral and academic performance. The use of special behavioral wings or facilities are a logical extension of the therapeutic culture that now dominates American society. Regular education high schools sometimes look to alternative schools as a way in which to give their own discipline procedures credibility. In fact, I recall sitting next to a special education teacher from Douglas High School who informed me that his child management point card system “was directly ripped off from you guys.” With the help of lawyers and progressive ideologues, alternative methods of dealing with children are seeping gradually into the regular education environment, and will likely change the meaning of public school discipline in the years to come.
Since 2000, our own district discovered that a lethal combination of rampant spending and declining tax revenues has placed it firmly in the fiscal red to the tune of ten million dollars per annum. It’s solution, although it took them awhile, was to begin cutting programs and staff. We were targeted along with the general education buildings. Every time, the proposed budgetary reductions started out as being very severe, yet, every time, the cuts eventually were reduced to a miniscule amount. This was due to the fact that the high schools quickly found that they couldn’t live without us. Last year one teacher was laid off but come November, he suddenly reappeared in his classroom with a fresh group of students before him. Our regular education program is a frequent target for eradication as it doesn’t bring in reimbursement dollars from the state. In February of 2004 it was considered doomed but by May of 2004 it was restored. In this era of zero tolerance, school principals and deans simply cannot survive without the services offered by an alternative school. How often have I heard, “What would they do with these kids without us?” It is a crucial question as the home schools have little stomach for arsonists, thieves, batterers, and drug pushers congregating in their hallways. I firmly support the proposition that schools like ours are here to stay. Alternative schools are growing# and they’ll be in the news more and more in the decades to come.
Another challenge to Engineering Failure’s universality is the character of Principal Chin. I readily admit that it is extremely rare to have someone with a full-blown personality disorder working as a Principal in the public schools. She is comical, cruel, and unusual, but undeniably she is an aberration. I wish I could state that she is a figment of my imagination but any of ten employees she ran out of our building this year would avidly testify that she is not. In my nine year career I have worked under seven other Principals and they in no way were ever, even for a brief period, ever as dysfunctional as Mrs. Chin. Yet, while she stands in notable contrast with most of her administrative peers in the United States, the way in which she was protected by the bureaucrats above her is indicative of much that is wrong in contemporary education because so in countless situations around the country the educational elite polices itself which often means that there is no policing at all.
Several sources have thoroughly documented the deficiencies present in today’s teachers# and also in the teacher unions# which represent them, but few address the psychology of administrative nobility that oversees the entire empire. This book showcases a tandem of administrators whose sole goal is to protect their jobs regardless of the harm they inflict upon students or staff. While such a blatant refusal to act in the interests of others is undoubted abnormal, the fact is that, due to the lack of overseeing legal authority, there is practically no one to appeal to when administrators chose to do nothing about a disaster (which Mrs. Chin certainly would qualify as being). In the case of school, our operations were not subject to the purview of a local school boards# as our building was placed in the hands of superintendents who ran our feeder districts. It was highly unlikely that any of the parents on their boards at students at the Northlands Center so there was no reason to take an interest in the bizarre occurrences at our location. Yet, even in the case of school boards that represent non-alternative schools, it is sometimes difficult for them to know exactly what is going on behind closed doors. They rely on information that is relayed to them via the administrators who are seated before them during school board meetings, and if they wish to cover something up it is not that hard for them to do so.
In this story, what is transferable to the educational whole is the unaccountability of the managers and leaders. As admittedly absurd as the character of Chin is, what should appall the average reader is that no one above her would do a damn thing to censure or reprimand her. it would be folly to easily set aside the way in which her superiors made excuses for her at every opportunity and attempted to minimize the vendettas she directed towards her staff.
They didn’t even attempt to mitigate the damage she wrought. Nearly any common person would readily identify running a couple of motor vehicles in an enclosed environment with 250 children present and bringing assault rifles to school as gifts for other administrators as being behaviors that are “a lawsuit waiting to happen,” our magnates could not be bothered to supervise an individual who could enrich many an area lawyer. After all, it wasn’t there money and a lawsuit would be against the school as opposed to them directly. The district has the necessary legal protections in place where few individuals that I’ve met ever worry about being sued individually. I realize that this sounds unduly cynical but it is entirely in keeping with what I observed on the job.

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