Book Review-Crazy Like a Fox
A good friend once told me that a man with an experience is never at the mercy of a man with an idea. Or, more simply and contemporaneously put, you can’t argue with results. Dr. Ben Chavis of the American Indian Model of Education gets results. A little out of the orthodoxy of his industry, to be sure. But he’s proud of that.
First, the 900lb. gorilla riding the elephant in the room. Ben Chavis has recently been arrested and charged by the feds. They have a 97% successful conviction rate, so it’s very likely that he will be spending significant time in federal prison. That’s no joke. I’ve said many times that a transgression, poor judgment, or character flaw in one compartment of your life doesn’t completely discredit the good you’ve achieved in another compartment. During his time running the American Indian Public Charter School, it seems he used district money to pay his own real estate company for the use of a building he owned. If this was done in good faith, it still smacks of a conflict of interests. If he actually laundered money through his company, then he definitely violated the public trust. Either way, it’s certainly a bad look. But he had built a successful school before that happened, so I’d like to focus on that, as what he did there wasn’t facilitated by an alleged money laundering scheme.
Ben Chavis likes to go against the grain. Despising, eschewing, and throwing out current educational orthodoxy with the Tuesday trash would be putting it lightly. He goes so far in his book to state that he prefers to hire teachers who aren’t yet credited and certified so they aren’t ruined by modern educational ideas before they start working as a teacher. This is bold.
He is a registered Democrat but doesn’t subscribe to the kick-every-dog-but-his-own mentality. Indeed, the overwhelming majority of the criticism he has is aimed squarely at Democrats. He says their feel-good, self-esteem bolstering, victim mentality for non-white students preaching has ruined inner city schools. He believes Democrats are too socialist in nature and need to teach kids free-market capitalism. Being a wealthy man before he was a principal, he donated his meager $25,000/year salary back to the school in the form of payments to students for perfect attendance, good grades, and timely homework completion, along with bonuses and taking on part of the health insurance premiums for his already highly paid staff. Operating like this in a liberal state like California is even bolder.
Indeed, the only criticism he has for Republicans is glancing at best. He believes that in the 60’s, when prayer was taken out of schools, they are only to blame for giving total ownership of schools and their operation to Democrats. So at the worst, they can be accused of apathy toward a jungle gym that the kids on the other side of the playground are busy tearing down.
He calls his black, Latino, fellow American Indian, and Asian students “darkies”. He cusses throughout the book, around his students, and to his difficult parents. He calls his kids names like “fool” and worse. He’s engaged in a fistfight right off school grounds with an older brother of a student who refused to follow the rules. He makes misbehaving students clean up the schools, when the whole student body isn’t busy doing it at the end of every day anyway. He praises standards-based curriculum, standardized tests, and the No Child Left Behind Act, stating they all provide much needed accountability for a failing system. These are all even bolder in hypersensitive, politically correct times in which most educators can be counted on to gripe about George W. Bush’s landmark legislation and standardized testing at least once a day.
Boldness, having never met the man, is the first adjective I’d apply to him. Brazen, even. Strident, actually. He’s clearly got a personality the size of California, despite his humble sharecropping roots in the back country of North Carolina. I’d love to meet him, even if I have to do so during visiting hours. I’ve got a lot of ideas of how to fix education, starting with the fact that too much emphasis is placed on feel-good nonsense that wastes an immeasurable amount of time. Without the cussing and maybe a little less fussing, I’d like to run a school like his. I’m working on a book with ideas of how to fix this system. I thought some of my ideas for education were original. Turns out he’s been doing them for years.
If you’re looking for a polished book with good mechanics, a natural flow, and no redundancies, throw this book away as soon as it’s arrived. It’s poorly written. Seems as if he and his co-author recorded his tiresomely loquacious stream of consciousness. He goes back and forth constantly, recounts events from his childhood over and over again, and doesn’t put things at all efficiently or eloquently. But it’s fine. The outstanding message of the book shines through its linguistic shortcomings. I’m an English teacher. I must accept that not everyone has pristine language skills or cares for the language as highly as I do.
He does what he does, and has reasons for all of it. I respect folks who do what they do because it works, not because a highfalutin theory they learned in college says so. His school gets out every Friday at noon. That’s to give staff and students time for grading and homework, respectively. The students clean the school so he doesn’t have to employ full-time janitorial staff. He doesn’t waste money on expensive contractors, experts with self-important titles, and professional development so he can give his staff better salaries, benefits, bonuses, and work-related retreats in pleasant locales. He won’t let politicians, parents, celebrities, or the news touch his teachers during instructional time or otherwise. I’ve often stated that as a teacher, I don’t like hearing administrators say they are here for the kids. I’d like to be an administrator (I’m working on my master’s right now) who is there for the teachers and insulates them from bad parents and micro-managing boards/superintendents/state officials. The teachers are there for the kids. A principal doesn’t interact with the kids as deeply as they should interact and advocate for teachers. He has kids in self-contained classrooms which teach all subjects to cut down on the number of students each teacher sees and is accountable for, cut down on unnecessary transitions and the time it takes to settle students down immediately following transition (it’s daunting, believe me), and won’t allow the 90 minutes of English and Math in the morning to be invaded by school events and assemblies, recognizing that if kids can’t read and do math, they can’t do 45 minutes of history and science in the afternoon.
Read this book if you want to learn some of the dirty little secrets the public education system is hiding from you, what is wrong with the public education system, and witness the success of someone who goes so powerfully against the grain he makes a new grain altogether.
