Books: Reform Lessons From "Four Fish"

What's a 2010 book about the future of fish have to do with education reform (or anti-reform, if that's your thing)?  A lot, if you ask me.  Tthe book describes the success of well-known campaigns like the Greenpeace effort to stop whale hunting, the campaign to "give swordfish a break," and also the limitions of efforts that relied on individual consumer behavior to generate large-scale change (sound familiar yet?).  The book reminds us that there is presently no environmental lobby in DC -- no Greenpeace for education, no NRDC, no World Wildlife Federation to counterbalance the industry (just the EdTrust doing it fulltime, really).  And it reminds us that luck and radical behavior are sometimes necessary to making change.  I'm not saying you should go fire up the old Zodiac, but the Monterey Bay Aquarium's "good fish, bad fish" cards haven't done the job and I'm guessing information and altruism alone won't be enough to get things changed for the better in education, either.  

Comments

[Marc]

As a former education reporter who's currently working on a book project related to salmon restoration, I've thought about these connections a lot. I think the plight of our education systems mirrors the plight of the salmon in many ways.

Many salmon species are on the verge of extinction primarily because of habitat destruction. Here in California, destructive gold mining desecrated a lot of spawning areas in the 19th century. Today, rivers are choked up by hydroelectric projects or strangled to a trickle by agri-business that uses the water to turn desert into arable land.

For these reasons, all the salmon struggle mightily to make their way from the ocean to their spawning grounds.

I see the habitat destruction of the salmon as a parallel to the destruction of low-income neighborhoods that occurred during the so-called period of Urban Renewal. I also think the destruction of safety nets, the lack of funding for social services and all these budget cuts that will affect low-income families could be seen as metaphors for "habitat destruction" for our young people.

With salmon, biologists are trying to avoid tearing down dams and restoring habitats by trapping and hauling baby salmon in large trucks. On one river here, snorkeling biologists are going to hand pick pea-sized salmon eggs and transport them to another, salmon bereft river.

It is highly unlikely these efforts will be successful because they don't get at the root of the problem.

I believe the same is true for education - small classrooms, Race to the Top, charter schools, none of these are long-term solutions.

We can improve education until we restore our communities and allow families of all income levels to feel safe and stable. We need to provide families the support they need.

Until we, from a salmon perspective, restore our children's habitats, there is only so much school reform can do.