🎶 Hurrah, Hurrah, Pennsylvan-i-a 🎶
"Hurrah" for the Red and the Blue
The story under this Times headline sent me, appropriately enough, right to the bathroom.
I dug through the stack of magazines we keep on the back of the toilet in search of a specific copy of the University of Pennsylvania’s alumni magazine (as a household of roughly 1.6 Penn alums, we get two copies of the mag). I didn’t find it, but I did find a cover image, and a .pdf of the story, online:
It’s a long profile of Penn alum and then-Puerto Rico Secretary of Education Julia Keleher, a woman whose previous attachment to the island was a decade’s worth of consulting contracts.
It’s a mostly paint-by-numbers story of a high-powered pol who is always on the go, who “doesn’t sleep,” and sends 2 a.m. emails after “another insanely busy day of meetings.”
A breathless if not fawning portrait, it hand-waves at concerns about colonialism (“[Puerto Rico’s] singular history and its continued state of dependence—not to mention its lack of representation in Congress— has repercussions that are very much felt today.”) and then positions the hurricane-induced disarray and destruction of much of this U.S. territory as a stage set for the “education” of a woman from the Philadelphia suburbs.
But Keleher, clearly, wasn’t in Puerto Rico to learn: “I’m coming to transform this, because it doesn’t work, and it’s terrible, and you should have access to [something] better. … The point is raising awareness—empowering people to demand more and to know that that’s their right.”
But we’ve already seen, in the story’s opening vignette, Keleher’s raging at the day-long protest of her plans to close some 300 of the island’s 1,100 remaining schools.
“Keleher gets their frustration,” the writer tells us. “What galls her is that the organizers had not tried to contact her before taking it to the streets.”
She yells into her phone for 10 minutes or so, hangs up and the writer tells us
casts a sidelong glance in my direction. “That wasn’t as bad as it sounded,” she said.
Not bad at all, really. More like badass. [italics in original!] I’m starting to understand why a colleague in the Department of Education (DE) recently compared the experience of meeting her to “touching a bolt of lightning.”
A hard-charging hammerhead who might have to hurt some feelings to get shit done: that’s the figure we get from Samuel Hughes’ portrait.
In this not-very-interesting C-SPAN video from around the same time as the profile, Keleher addresses the Council of Chief State School officers and observes that the effects of the Category 5 hurricane on the island offer “new opportunities to rebuild a failing system.”
She also claims that “the system has failed people for at least two decades,” in Puerto Rico, and that “the human talent isn’t there,” for rebuilding — which necessitates bringing in more help from the mainland as she “decentralizes” the educational administration, but not before making the centralized decision to close those 300 schools. (Some “fun” photos of the resulting devastation here.)
The thing she glosses over awfully quickly in this speech is her budget number, and its comparison to other large districts. The Department of Education’s budget, she says, is $2.5 billion. She notes that this is half of the budget of the similarly-sized Miami-Dade district, and about the same budget as Montgomery County (PA?, MD? wasn’t specified), which serves half the number of students.
Me, an idiot: Seems like Puerto Rico doesn’t have enough money?
You, an administrative genius with a quarter-million in salary: No, we just have to fix the org chart and close a bunch of schools.
The idea, say, that the job of the top administrator — especially a politically-appointed administrator — might be to resist budget cuts or insist on more resources for the constituency she’s trying to serve seems not to have occurred to anyone involved with the magazine piece. But, then again, a good way to lock yourself out of future consulting gigs is to resign in protest, just as getting out your muckrake is a good way to get booted from your position at an alumni mag.
I’ve been thinking about this story not because Hughes, the writer, should have sniffed out Keleher’s kickbacks or other corruption, but because I’m still thinking about Janet Malcolm, as I have been for the past year. That idea, Malcolm’s operating principle of journalism as a mediation among competing narratives and (ideally) a mindfulness about how our assumptions frame our reception of those narratives is one I keep returning to.
I think Hughes was safe in assuming that most of the Pennsylvania Gazette’s readers would share Keleher’s perspective: more of them have probably been the well-paid consultant/manager rather than the on-the-ground teacher (average salary: $27,000).
At the end of the story, Keleher talks about wanting to create “a generation of critical thinkers, individuals who know how to seek out information, who can interpret the things that are said to them, and who come to their own conclusions … .” She wants them to “put on a different lens” and (unstated) see things her way.
As someone who is invested in education as a process, not a product, I can only say I’m glad that Keleher seems set to switch focus — after her 6-month prison stint — to (ahem) criminal justice reform:
“It only matters what this new system produces,” she adds. “It could be perfectly designed and operate perfectly and still not produce that kind of graduate. And then you’d have to ask yourself, ‘What good did you do?’”
These are really notes toward an argument, so I’d be interested in hearing what (most) any of you had to say!
another good one