Dance of the Lemons - Amuse Bouche #10

Hello, this is Amoose Bouche and I'm Bridget. Here you're getting a little bit of Bridget before our weekly release of Dinner Plus Drinks on Sunday. This week we're talking about the Dance of the Lemons. If you're confused, keep listening to hear what the heck I'm talking about. I'm gonna start this one by saying, I think we're going to have a two-parter on our hands here. I know that seems odd since Amose Bouche is essentially just a preview episode, like a little sneak peek, a little bit of Bridget, like I say in the intro, but this topic, like so many of the topics I've talked about, I could go on and on and on about. The reason I can't fit this all into a 10 to 15 minutes this week is because we're talking about public schools. I'm sharing some fascinating, okay, maybe only fascinating if you've been through it or are having children currently go through it like me. The fascinating public school system. I hadn't previously thought too much about it, but this week my son started kindergarten. Yes, I have a daughter as well, but she's in daycare not yet in the school system, but I have been a giant ball of anxiety. Um, I went to a private school. It was a religious grade school with 25 kids in my graduating class. Um, I went to that same school with the same kids, essentially, from kindergarten to eighth grade. I lived in a different state during preschool, so that one doesn't count. So my husband, he went to public school, the same school that my son is currently going to. Um, you see, our life didn't exactly go like we had planned when we had our son, um, which is pretty normal and that's okay. Um, but I'm a real type A planner. So we, Elliot was born in Milwaukee and we had no intentions of leaving Milwaukee. The plan was to send Elliot to a Montessori school just up the road from the condo we were living in, and it was part of the Milwaukee Public School System, which is fascinating because, in I would say, as a whole, Milwaukee Public School System is not a school system people are incredibly excited to send their kids to, but they do have a couple Montessori schools that are part of the public school system that are incredibly popular. Um, and now this Montessori school, we were on the, we would have been on the list, the top of the list to get in because they give preferential treatment to people that live within a mile of the school, which we did. So that was our our plan when our kid was only four months old. That was the thought of what we were going to do. Now, move forward here. We are in Lake Geneva and we have a couple options of um schools to send our kid to, and it wasn't really much of a thought for us. We said, you know what, our kid was going to be part of the Milwaukee public school system. Any school in Lake Geneva is probably fine, right? So I was having a discussion with my father-in-law, and he asked me if I had seen the documentary Waiting for Superman. Had I ever heard of it? What about the Dance of the Lemons? Have you heard of that? Well, I hadn't. So this discussion came after I was talking about how particularly stressed I was about a couple years down the road when Elliot moves on out of the current school he's in goes to second grade. So the next school he goes in is third, fourth, and fifth. And I'm already stressed out about that school, which is ridiculous, I understand, but I'm looking to his future. And um, when he moves on to that next bit of schooling, there is one particular faculty member that I am terrified to have teach my child. I don't think this person has any business teaching children. Um they've made themselves well known in our community and not in a way that I think is respectful, nor a way that I agree with. Um, I just don't think this person should be teaching children. So I'm I'm nervous about it already. Like, uh, do we need to switch his school? Because I don't want to pull him in formidable years. I want him to be able to make friendships and have some consistency. So, yes, three days into Elliot's first year of kindergarten, and I'm panicking all the way. So, with the discussion of this teacher, I think is the perfect time to introduce you to the Dance of the Lemons. This is what, you know, the title of the episode is. This is what was so intriguing to me, and this is why I immediately watched the documentary the day my father-in-law told me about it. Well, the Dance of the Lemons is basically schools swapping their worst-performing teachers at the end of the year on the bet that their lemon isn't as bad as another school's lemon. So all of the teachers, or I'm sorry, all of the principals get in one room at the end of the year and they get together and they do this dance of the lemons. They push around the lemons to various schools in hopes that they can take that lemon, that bad teacher, and make them a little bit better, and maybe hopefully the right mix of teachers and the right combination of bad teachers will be better than their bad teachers from the year before. This is fascinating. Um, the the documentary goes on to explore um teachers' unions and the amount of protection that they have. Uh, and this is not going to be a discussion about unions, but I will talk about uh what the documentary summarizes and how it has protected, unfortunately, these bad teachers. So one, and this statistic is a bit out of date at this point, but the general idea here uh will help you understand. One in 97 lawyers or so would lose their license. If they were terrible, they did something wrong. One in 2,500 teachers lose their license. So again, one in 97 lawyers, one in 2,500 teachers. That is backwards. Okay, so there it is proven that students with high-performing teachers, great teachers, amazing teachers that are invested in care, they progress three times as fast as those with low-performing teachers, but the cost is the same. So the cost to the school district is essentially the same. The the kind of way that it was put in real terms here was that a bad teacher would cover maybe 50% of the required curriculum. Maybe. Good teachers would cover more than 150%. And I can, you know, I can see it already. There are eight kindergarten classrooms in Elliott School, and I'm keenly aware of watching all of it and seeing what's going on. And I think we have a good teacher, you know, who knows? It's been three days. She seems great, she seems to care about the kids. You know, I don't know. Uh, the movie discusses that between grades five, fifth, and seventh is really when uh a lot of change happens, where standardized testing is starting, and kids start to see themselves failing and think that they're failing. And why should I try if I'm just gonna fail? And and standardized testing is a whole other thing that uh again is discussed in the in the documentary that we'll touch on briefly. But but I want to go back to this Dance of the Lemons. So the Dance of the Lemons actually was uh coined, that's that's what the Milwaukee Public School System calls it, is Dance of the Lemons. But other school systems call it past the trash, some call it turkey trot. And in New York, they have something that's called the rubber room. And the rubber room is the reassignment center. So in 2010, when the documentary was made, there were 600 teachers that would hang in the rubber room, and basically they are sitting in that room, reading, sleeping, playing cards, doing whatever they want to be doing while they are going through disciplinary hearings. So these teachers are collecting full salaries and benefits for sitting in this room during a disciplinary hearing. Now, those hearings are taking an average of three years. They take eight times longer than the average criminal case. So waiting on Superman is full of all kinds of horrifying facts that that I would love to think are updated, certainly. Um this notion has not changed. The cost to New York of these teachers in the rubber room is $100 million per year. So taking teachers that everyone has deemed as bad and protecting their jobs is costing New York $100 million per year. Now imagine if that school, if that money could be put back into the school system in a different way. Uh, how amazing would that be? So the Dance of the Lemons, not as fun as it sounds. Lemons, bright, fun, cheerful, we love that. Not in this context. So we, of course, everyone hopes to hopes to get that great teacher here. The thing that that scares me about the school system here is like I mentioned, I grew up with the same 25 kids. Um, those were my friends. That's who we had. Yes, I was better friends with, you know, these two girls, and and my twin sister in the same grade as me was better friends with these couple other people. But all in all, uh, those those were the same people I knew. We were all progressing at the same rate. We had a lot of one-on-one attention. When we were discussing whether to send Elliot to a private school or a public school, the notion was, you know, I actually, my transition from grade school to high school, which was much harder because I had only known really 25 people. Um, of course, I did extracurricular things that I got to know other people, but it was a huge change. We did not change classrooms, we didn't really have lockers, like we didn't have any of that stuff until high school. So that's a huge transition. We wanted Elliot to have um the experience of knowing a wide variety of people prior to. Now, of course, now that he's in that, I'm scared, but he'll do great. Um, there's eight kindergarten classrooms, like I mentioned. So he has, I think, somewhere around 15 students in his, and then they have shared recesses and things like that. So the benefit of being able to know a number of people as his years go on is ultimately what helped, you know, weigh our decision. And and at this point, the the preschool and kindergarten teachers, from what we know, are a great group of people. Um, so we felt comfortable with that. So back on to my favorite movie of the week, um, Waiting for Superman. It was interesting to me. Much of the movie is um an interview. Uh well, I mean, obviously it's a documentary, it's full of interviews, but uh there's someone in the interview that's absolutely fascinating. His name is Jeffrey Canada. He is an educational reformer, and man, I want to be his friend. He just is full, he just seems positive even when he's reporting horrifying statistics. Um, but he is the one that said, one of the saddest days of my life was when my mother told me Superman didn't exist. He grew up in um an area that wasn't very nice, and he had an educational system that was not positive, you know, it uh he saw the educational system uh growing up that was not positive and was like, well, we can change this, right? We can, this is this is fine. We'll do this. It was in the mid to late 70s. We can get this done before the turn of the decade, right? Before the 80s hit. Well, he said he ran into the biggest stumbling block of all. And what was that? School boards, which honestly I thought I thought was an interesting uh roadblock for him to have mentioned. I fully intended in my head, it was like we're I'm going into this documentary, and I did not expect school boards to be such a large topic of conversation, which maybe was naive of me, I didn't think about it much, but he said, the thing, basically the thing that was created to have to make our schools better have become the things that is preventing them from working. So there are four uh in 2010, there was 14,000 autonomous school boards, and and they're referred to on, you know, within school systems. I'd be curious if this is still how they're referred to today, I don't know, as the blob, um, which is hilarious. But um in the movie, they discuss school boards basically being like a tangled mess of conflicting regulations and mixed agendas, which holy cow, I couldn't agree more. Um, I spent time working with the city of Lake Geneva, and I wanted to bang my head against the wall every day. Uh, it's a challenging thing. And uh city government, county government, state government, up to the national level, the real change is happening on the city and county and state level. Um, the change that you can, in my opinion, that you can like where you can really affect change. So I thought. Thought I'm it I'm part of the small town, I can affect some change. Well, no, every two years the system changes and it completely gets uprooted. And um we're in a time right now in our community that like I just happen to completely agree with politically what's happening um in our city government. So I decided to turn my focus a little bit to the school boards because that is right now my children's future, and we're diving full on deep into that right now with kindergarten, and I'm just having this, you know, this panic and this moment of what the heck? I just assumed we were in good shape. So our school board, um, we have a Badger High School, so our local high school has a board, and then there's a Joint One School District Board. Up until um I just researched this to be sure I was accurate. Uh, I did a little stalking to make sure. Um, up until a couple years ago, when one additional member joined the school board, there was no one on the school board that even had a student in the school system. Sure, they had students in the school system 30 years ago, perhaps. They were my age, but now it seems that there is one person on the board that has students in the school system, so I'm really grateful for that. Um, and before anyone gets angry, of course I've been keeping my eye on openings for the school board, and I would gladly apply, but there's not currently an availability that fits um my location, you know, where I'm allowed to run. Uh so our school board is being run by people who don't exactly have the same vested interest that I do, which is the future of my child. So I strongly believe in starting them young is the easiest way to um gain success, right? If they if they think school is fun and an educational fun, like um uh if they think learning is fun at when they're five, they're gonna continue to want to be going to school and learn in future years instead of starting out with a negative experience. So I I firmly believe that we need to start young and have positive experiences from the beginning. Additionally, I I would think you want parents to have a positive experience with the school system in general. They're much more apt to volunteer, to donate, to be helpful, um, be more invested. And that's me. I am I am a joiner, I am happy to be involved and volunteer, but man, have I been frustrated so far. I I am type A, I'm a planner, I like good communication, and I just feel if there's one word to sum up my three days of kindergarten so far has just been chaos. It's a complete, and that is not the school system's fault entirely. Um, my first entrance into the school system with my oldest child was during coronavirus. So, you know what? I'll give everyone a pass. That was a tough year. But the only thing I knew about drop-off and pickup, for example, was based on a year of COVID. So we were not allowed in the building, we had very particular particular regulations. Now, this year, our school system, the superintendent of our schools, decided to send out a survey about students being masked. And those that responded responded overwhelmingly that the parents wanted it to be optional. So that is a topic for a different time, but that is what our school system did was mask optional and no virtual options unless you're part of the charter school. That's where we're at currently. So it to me, things went back to quote normal. Okay, it's normal kindergarten drop-off. Well, I don't know what normal kindergarten drop-off is because my kid only has gone to the school during a coronavirus time. So this year has been pretty, you know, we're back into kind of chaos of the new school year. So I I would love to, you know, think there's a perfect way to communicate to every parent. And I know there's not. You know, me, uh give me an email. That's great. Just write one concise email with some bullet points about like this is what you do on the first day of school. So everyone's learning, we're getting there. Um, I have so much more to say, surprisingly, I know, about this documentary in the public school system because really, um, I think it's important if you have kids coming up into the school system. Um, it does not have to be all doom and gloom. We are not those that are listening that are local, you know, we're we're in a pretty lucky situation here, uh, in that I do think our, you know, we have a pretty good school system. But there was some points that were made in the movie that if you don't have two hours to watch the documentary, you can listen to a couple, you know, 15-minute segments from me and hopefully get a few facts that might help um, I don't know, help you understand the school system and what parents that have kids in the school system are going through. Or maybe look back on the school system education, on your education as a child and and just reflect on it a little. It I can't, it's been really interesting to see. Um, and and it makes me want to be more involved. Uh, so if nothing else, maybe it makes you want to be more involved. So this is the end of the section one here of part one of a Moose Boosh Dance of the Lemons. And we will pick back up next week with a little bit more about our public school system, and then maybe we'll go back to more thrifting fun after that. Thanks so much for listening. Have a great weekend.