gat

But I was fresh from western Pennsylvania and saw something different, a
small but significant fraction of the school’s enrollment was made up of
phantom kids in several categories: kids on the school register who had never
shown up but were carried as if they had; kids who were absent but who for
revenue purposes were entered as present; kids who were assigned to
out-of-school programs of various sorts, some term-long, but who continued
as phantoms to swell the apparent school rolls. Then there were the absentees,
about 10 percent a day, who were actually marked absent, and the curious fact
that after lunch attendance dipped precipitously sending that fraction soaring,
although there seemed to be a gentlemen’s agreement not to document the
fact.
So it was that when the press announced horrendous class sizes of 35 and 50,
in my school, at least, the real number was about 28—still too many, of course,
but manageable. Although everyone agreed there was absolutely no space
available anywhere, by greasing the custodian’s palm I was able to obtain a
master key and a priceless document known as the "empty-room schedule."
Would you believe there was never a time when multiple rooms in that building
weren’t empty? By training my kids in low-profile guerrilla tactics I was able to
spread about half my class into different cubbyholes around the building where
they worked happily and productively, in teams or alone.
Beginning in the 1980s this tactic became impossible because all the empty
spaces did fill up—even though the number of students District 3 was
managing fell sharply from 20,000 to 10,000, and with even more lax
procedures to account for them than when I was originally hired. This latter
development caused phantom children to multiply like rabbits. A simple act of
long division will explain in outline what had happened: by dividing the number
of students enrolled in my building by the number of teachers on the class
register, I was able to discover that average class sizes should have been 17
kids.
And yet actual class sizes were about 28. The mystery of the now unavailable
empty space vanishes in the ballooning numbers of "coordinators," "special
supervisors," "community programs officers," and various other titular masks
behind which deadwood was piling up. Each of these people required an
"office" whether that be the former Nurse’s Room, the dressing room behind
the stage, or a conveniently large storage closet. It had happened to the Army
and to IBM, why should schools be exempt?
John Taylor Gatto
New York, New York
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