Category: Democracy

Donald Trump, Westworld, & the Future of American Democracy

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on Donald Trump, Westworld, & the Future of American Democracy

Is the 2016 presidential election the beginning, or the end, of American civic life?

I say it’s both.

Pessimistically, one can say we are witnessing the end of civility, honesty, and empathy, and the beginning of the end of our two-centuries-long experiment in a quasi-functional representative democracy. Yet I believe what this election must provide, no matter who wins on Tuesday, is a wakeup call from our collective somnambulism, and a willingness to confront the Brave New World we have already begun to enter – a world in which we can disappear into virtual realities of our own imagining, and therefore one in which our ability to be more conscious (of ourselves, our surroundings, and the invisible systems that hold us prisoner) must become the lingua franca of a renewed civic order.

Fittingly, the stakes are laid bare in HBO’s latest blockbuster series, Westworld, a story in which future citizens spend up to $40,000 a day exercising their most base impulses – sexual violence and murder chief among them – in a vast adventure theme park filled with blissfully unaware android “hosts.” These hosts are pre-programmed with narrative storylines. Their memories are then wiped clean after each new day of rape and pillage, resulting in an endless loop of unconscious servitude.

As the show’s co-creator Jonathan Nolan puts it, Westworld is an effort to explore issues surrounding artificial intelligence and “the idea that humans are getting ever better at immersing themselves in their narrative fictions.” Consequently, it’s a story that poses timely and provocative questions about the depths to which we humans will sink when the line between fiction and reality becomes almost impossibly blurred. As one of the hosts says, foreshadowing her own conscious awakening from the nightmare she inhabits (and quoting Shakespeare as she does so), “These violent delights have violent ends.”

On one level, the election results on November 8 will reveal how violent the end to our most recent binge of primal theater will be. On another level, though, we have been asleep at the wheel for a long, long time.

Indeed, Trump’s rise recalls the warnings in Erich Fromm’s 1941 classic Escape from Freedom, a book that was written in the shadow of Hitler’s ascent to power, and in which Fromm tries to articulate our dialectical relationship with freedom itself, and what that relationship tells us about ourselves and the societies in which we live.

Fromm’s thesis was that before we can understand the dynamics of any society’s social processes, we must first explore the dynamics of the psychological processes operating within the individual. Central to all modern societies and individuals, Fromm wrote, was man’s relationship with freedom itself, which he defined as “the fundamental condition for any growth.” Since the structure of modern society and the personality of modern man first began taking shape – beginning with the end of the rigid social structures and limitations found in the Middle Ages, and accelerating after World War One – we have become freer to develop and express our own individual selves and ideas. At the same time, however, we have become freer from a world that gave us, precisely because it was proscribed, more security and reassurance. “The process of individuation is one of growing strength and integration of the individual personality,” Fromm wrote. “But it is at the same time a process in which the original identity with others is lost and in which modern man becomes more separate from them.”

The dilemma of modern society and how it impacts us is the same: it has given us more space to develop as individuals – and it has made us more helpless. “It increased freedom,” says Fromm, “and it created dependencies of a new kind. The understanding of the whole problem of freedom depends on the very ability to see both sides of the process and not to lose track of one side while following the other.”

The danger, Fromm cautioned, is if we forget that “aloneness, fear and bewilderment remain; people cannot stand it forever. They cannot go on bearing the burden of ‘freedom from’; they must try to escape from freedom altogether unless they can progress from negative to positive freedom. The principal social avenues of escape in our time are submission to a leader, as has happened in fascist countries, and the compulsive conforming as is prevalent in our own society.”

Sound familiar?

Because of this anxiety – and this willingness to submit to someone who will do the thinking for us – Fromm believed that our capacity to think critically had dangerously dulled over time (and that was in 1941!). Ironically, however, this gradual numbing of our critical capacities doesn’t mean we feel more uninformed. On the contrary, the constant barrage of messaging so indicative of modern society tends to be designed in such a way as to “flatter the individual by making him appear important, and by pretending that they appeal to his critical judgment, to his sense of discrimination. But these pretenses are essentially a method to dull the individual’s suspicions and to help him fool himself as to the individual character of his decision.”

How will Fromm’s observations play out in a Trump presidency, where the ersatz becomes the law of the land? How will they play out in a Clinton presidency, where the fog of secrecy becomes the daily forecast? And how will they play out in either case, as the virtual world increasingly becomes part of the daily menu of possibilities?

British filmmaker Adam Curtis has an idea, and it isn’t encouraging. As author Jonathan Lethem wrote in a recent must-read profile of Curtis, “One of his central subjects, running through all his work, is the possibility that we’re listening to the wrong voices in public life, and in our own heads; that the ideas we find authoritative and persuasive about our politics and culture are in fact a tenuous construction, one at the mercy of bias, invisible ideological sway and unprocessed, untethered emotions (principally, fear).”

“This is the whole thing about ‘good and evil’,” Curtis explains. “It’s a naïve view of the world. The problem is bigger, it’s a system. But how do you illustrate something invisible?”

For Curtis, the problem is that the central ideology of our age is the lionization of the self – the philosophy of ‘freedom to,’ run amok. “That the self, being expressive, is the good thing. Expressing yourself through consumerism is central. So, the dilemma for artists is that however radical in content their paintings, their performance art, their video works, the mode in which they’re doing it — self-expression — feeds the strength of the very thing they’re trying to overthrow, which is modern consumer capitalism.”

That’s deep. It’s also terrifying. So how do we separate ourselves? How do we develop the capacity to live lives of positive freedom amidst the filtered bubble of our own devising? How do we become more socially conscious at the very moment our ability to disappear into all-encompassing virtual worlds becomes commonplace?

How do we wake up?

In this sense, we are more like the android hosts of Westworld than we may want to admit. As Curtis put it, “On a social-media network, it’s very much like being in a heroin bubble. The utopia they hold out is a world where machines make everything for you and you have endless leisure time, you become creative and everyone’s happy. And the only thing is, actually, everyone’s incredibly unhappy because they haven’t got anything to do. What we call our jobs today are actually fake jobs. We sit in our offices in front of our screens in order to get the money to go out and buy stuff. Our job is really to go shopping. And the rest of the time, we sit in our offices doing complicated managerial things, and when we’re not, we’re actually watching the internet. The internet is there to keep you happy during your fake job.

“You have to recognize that you’re part of the thing,” Curtis argues. “But the point about journalism is to try to portray the thing you are part of. I think that’s the best you can do.”

So cast your vote on November 8. Recognize that you are part of the thing. And let the real work begin.

What is education for?

Posted on | by Sam

Always a good question to ask (and ask again), and I like the way environmental educator David Orr answers it for the 1990 graduating class of Arkansas College. See for yourself, and then ask yourself, how might we reimagine our own modern educational systems to engender this sort of awareness in every subsequent generation of young people? 

If today is a typical day on planet Earth, we will lose 116 square miles of rainforest, or about an acre a second. We will lose another 72 square miles to encroaching deserts, as a result of human mismanagement and overpopulation. We will lose 40 to 100 species, and no one knows whether the number is 40 or 100. Today the human population will increase by 250,000. And today we will add 2,700 tons of chlorofluorocarbons to the atmosphere and 15 million tons of carbon. Tonight the Earth will be a little hotter, its waters more acidic, and the fabric of life more threadbare.

The truth is that many things on which your future health and prosperity depend are in dire jeopardy: climate stability, the resilience and productivity of natural systems, the beauty of the natural world, and biological diversity.

It is worth noting that this is not the work of ignorant people. It is, rather, largely the result of work by people with BAs, BSs, LLBs, MBAs, and PhDs. Elie Wiesel made a similar point to the Global Forum in Moscow last winter when he said that the designers and perpetrators of the Holocaust were the heirs of Kant and Goethe. In most respects the Germans were the best educated people on Earth, but their education did not serve as an adequate barrier to barbarity. What was wrong with their education? In Wiesel’s words: “It emphasized theories instead of values, concepts rather than human beings, abstraction rather than consciousness, answers instead of questions, ideology and efficiency rather than conscience.”

The same could be said of the way our education has prepared us to think about the natural world. It is a matter of no small consequence that the only people who have lived sustainably on the planet for any length of time could not read, or, like the Amish, do not make a fetish of reading. My point is simply that education is no guarantee of decency, prudence, or wisdom. More of the same kind of education will only compound our problems. This is not an argument for ignorance, but rather a statement that the worth of education must now be measured against the standards of decency and human survival – the issues now looming so large before us in the decade of the 1990s and beyond. It is not education that will save us, but education of a certain kind.

SANE MEANS, MAD ENDS

What went wrong with contemporary culture and with education? There is some insight in literature: Christopher Marlowe’s Faust, who trades his soul for knowledge and power; Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein, who refuses to take responsibility for his creation; Herman Melville’s Captain Ahab, who says “All my means are sane, my motive and object mad.” In these characters we encounter the essence of the modern drive to dominate nature.

Historically, Francis Bacon’s proposed union between knowledge and power foreshadows the contemporary alliance between government, business, and knowledge that has wrought so much mischief. Galileo’s separation of the intellect foreshadows the dominance of the analytical mind over that part given to creativity, humor, and wholeness. And in Descartes’ epistemology, one finds the roots of the radical separation of self and object. Together these three laid the foundations for modern education, foundations now enshrined in myths we have come to accept without question. Let me suggest six.

First, there is the myth that ignorance is a solvable problem. Ignorance is not a solvable problem, but rather an inescapable part of the human condition. The advance of knowledge always carries with it the advance of some form of ignorance. In 1930, after Thomas Midgely Jr. discovered CFCs, what had previously been a piece of trivial ignorance became a critical, life-threatening gap in the human understanding of the biosphere. No one thought to ask “what does this substance do to what?” until the early 1970s, and by 1990 CFCs had created a general thinning of the ozone layer worldwide. With the discovery of CFCs knowledge increased; but like the circumference of an expanding circle, ignorance grew as well.

A second myth is that with enough knowledge and technology we can manage planet Earth.. “Managing the planet” has a nice a ring to it. It appeals to our fascination with digital readouts, computers, buttons and dials. But the complexity of Earth and its life systems can never be safely managed. The ecology of the top inch of topsoil is still largely unknown, as is its relationship to the larger systems of the biosphere.

What might be managed is us: human desires, economies, politics, and communities. But our attention is caught by those things that avoid the hard choices implied by politics, morality, ethics, and common sense. It makes far better sense to reshape ourselves to fit a finite planet than to attempt to reshape the planet to fit our infinite wants.

A third myth is that knowledge is increasing and by implication human goodness. There is an information explosion going on, by which I mean a rapid increase of data, words, and paper. But this explosion should not be taken for an increase in knowledge and wisdom, which cannot so easily by measured. What can be said truthfully is that some knowledge is increasing while other kinds of knowledge are being lost. David Ehrenfeld has pointed out that biology departments no longer hire faculty in such areas as systematics, taxonomy, or ornithology. In other words, important knowledge is being lost because of the recent overemphasis on molecular biology and genetic engineering, which are more lucrative, but not more important, areas of inquiry. We still lack the the science of land health that Aldo Leopold called for half a century ago.

It is not just knowledge in certain areas that we’re losing, but vernacular knowledge as well, by which I mean the knowledge that people have of their places. In the words of Barry Lopez:

“[I am] forced to the realization that something strange, if not dangerous, is afoot. Year by year the number of people with firsthand experience in the land dwindles. Rural populations continue to shift to the cities…. In the wake of this loss of personal and local knowledge, the knowledge from which a real geography is derived, the knowledge on which a country must ultimately stand, has come something hard to define but I think sinister and unsettling.”

In the confusion of data with knowledge is a deeper mistake that learning will make us better people. But learning, as Loren Eiseley once said, is endless and “In itself it will never make us ethical [people].” Ultimately, it may be the knowledge of the good that is most threatened by all of our other advances. All things considered, it is possible that we are becoming more ignorant of the things we must know to live well and sustainably on the Earth.

A fourth myth of higher education is that we can adequately restore that which we have dismantled. In the modern curriculum we have fragmented the world into bits and pieces called disciplines and subdisciplines. As a result, after 12 or 16 or 20 years of education, most students graduate without any broad integrated sense of the unity of things. The consequences for their personhood and for the planet are large. For example, we routinely produce economists who lack the most rudimentary knowledge of ecology. This explains why our national accounting systems do not subtract the costs of biotic impoverishment, soil erosion, poisons in the air or water, and resource depletion from gross national product. We add the price of the sale of a bushel of wheat to GNP while forgetting to subtract the three bushels of topsoil lost in its production. As a result of incomplete education, we’ve fooled ourselves into thinking that we are much richer than we are.

Fifth, there is a myth that the purpose of education is that of giving you the means for upward mobility and success. Thomas Merton once identified this as the “mass production of people literally unfit for anything except to take part in an elaborate and completely artificial charade.” When asked to write about his own success, Merton responded by saying that “if it so happened that I had once written a best seller, this was a pure accident, due to inattention and naiveté, and I would take very good care never to do the same again.” His advice to students was to “be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success.”

The plain fact is that the planet does not need more “successful” people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every shape and form. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these needs have little to do with success as our culture has defined it.

Finally, there is a myth that our culture represents the pinnacle of human achievement: we alone are modern, technological, and developed. This, of course, represents cultural arrogance of the worst sort, and a gross misreading of history and anthropology. Recently this view has taken the form that we won the cold war and that the triumph of capitalism over communism is complete. Communism failed because it produced too little at too high a cost. But capitalism has also failed because it produces too much, shares too little, also at too high a cost to our children and grandchildren. Communism failed as an ascetic morality. Capitalism failed because it destroys morality altogether. This is not the happy world that any number of feckless advertisers and politicians describe. We have built a world of sybaritic wealth for a few and Calcuttan poverty for a growing underclass. At its worst it is a world of crack on the streets, insensate violence, anomie, and the most desperate kind of poverty. The fact is that we live in a disintegrating culture. In the words of Ron Miller, editor of Holistic Review:

“Our culture does not nourish that which is best or noblest in the human spirit. It does not cultivate vision, imagination, or aesthetic or spiritual sensitivity. It does not encourage gentleness, generosity, caring, or compassion. Increasingly in the late 20th Century, the economic-technocratic-statist worldview has become a monstrous destroyer of what is loving and life-affirming in the human soul.”

WHAT EDUCATION MUST BE FOR

Measured against the agenda of human survival, how might we rethink education? Let me suggest six principles.

First, all education is environmental education. By what is included or excluded we teach students that they are part of or apart from the natural world. To teach economics, for example, without reference to the laws of thermodynamics or those of ecology is to teach a fundamentally important ecological lesson: that physics and ecology have nothing to do with the economy. That just happens to be dead wrong. The same is true throughout all of the curriculum.

A second principle comes from the Greek concept of paideia. The goal of education is not mastery of subject matter, but of one’s person. Subject matter is simply the tool. Much as one would use a hammer and chisel to carve a block of marble, one uses ideas and knowledge to forge one’s own personhood. For the most part we labor under a confusion of ends and means, thinking that the goal of education is to stuff all kinds of facts, techniques, methods, and information into the student’s mind, regardless of how and with what effect it will be used. The Greeks knew better.

Third, I would like to propose that knowledge carries with it the responsibility to see that it is well used in the world. The results of a great deal of contemporary research bear resemblance to those foreshadowed by Mary Shelley: monsters of technology and its byproducts for which no one takes responsibility or is even expected to take responsibility. Whose responsibility is Love Canal? Chernobyl? Ozone depletion? The Valdez oil spill? Each of these tragedies were possible because of knowledge created for which no one was ultimately responsible. This may finally come to be seen for what I think it is: a problem of scale. Knowledge of how to do vast and risky things has far outrun our ability to use it responsibly. Some of it cannot be used responsibly, which is to say safely and to consistently good purposes.

Fourth, we cannot say that we know something until we understand the effects of this knowledge on real people and their communities. I grew up near Youngstown, Ohio, which was largely destroyed by corporate decisions to “disinvest” in the economy of the region. In this case MBAs, educated in the tools of leveraged buyouts, tax breaks, and capital mobility have done what no invading army could do: they destroyed an American city with total impunity on behalf of something called the “bottom line.” But the bottom line for society includes other costs, those of unemployment, crime, higher divorce rates, alcoholism, child abuse, lost savings, and wrecked lives. In this instance what was taught in the business schools and economics departments did not include the value of good communities or the human costs of a narrow destructive economic rationality that valued efficiency and economic abstractions above people and community.

My fifth principle follows and is drawn from William Blake. It has to do with the importance of “minute particulars” and the power of examples over words. Students hear about global responsibility while being educated in institutions that often invest their financial weight in the most irresponsible things. The lessons being taught are those of hypocrisy and ultimately despair. Students learn, without anyone ever saying it, that they are helpless to overcome the frightening gap between ideals and reality. What is desperately needed are faculty and administrators who provide role models of integrity, care, thoughtfulness, and institutions that are capable of embodying ideals wholly and completely in all of their operations.

Finally, I would like to propose that the way learning occurs is as important as the content of particular courses. Process is important for learning. Courses taught as lecture courses tend to induce passivity. Indoor classes create the illusion that learning only occurs inside four walls isolated from what students call without apparent irony the “real world.” Dissecting frogs in biology classes teaches lessons about nature that no one would verbally profess. Campus architecture is crystallized pedagogy that often reinforces passivity, monologue, domination, and artificiality. My point is simply that students are being taught in various and subtle ways beyond the content of courses.

AN ASSIGNMENT FOR THE CAMPUS

If education is to be measured against the standard of sustainability, what can be done? I would like to make four propsals. First, I would like to propose that you engage in a campus-wide dialogue about the way you conduct your business as educators. Does four years here make your graduates better planetary citizens or does it make them, in Wendell Berry’s words, “itinerant professional vandals”? Does this college contribute to the development of a sustainable regional economy or, in the name of efficiency, to the processes of destruction?

My second suggestion is to examine resource flows on this campus: food, energy, water, materials, and waste. Faculty and students should together study the wells, mines, farms, feedlots, and forests that supply the campus as well as the dumps where you send your waste. Collectively, begin a process of finding ways to shift the buying power of this institution to support better alternatives that do less environmental damage, lower carbon dioxide emissions, reduce use of toxic substances, promote energy efficiency and the use of solar energy, help to build a sustainable regional economy, cut long-term costs, and provide an example to other institutions. The results of these studies should be woven into the curriculum as interdisplinary courses, seminars, lectures, and research. No student should graduate without understanding how to analyze resource flows and without the opportunity to participate in the creation of real solutions to real problems.

Third, reexamaine how your endowment works. Is it invested according to the Valdez principles? Is it invested in companies doing responsible things that the world needs? Can some part of it be invested locally to help leverage energy efficiency and the evolution of a sustainable economy throughout the region?

Finally, I propose that you set a goal of ecological literacy for all of your students. No student should graduate from this or any other educational institution without a basic comprehension of:

  • the laws of thermodynamics
  • the basic principles of ecology
  • carrying capacity
  • energetics
  • least-cost, end-use analysis
  • how to live well in a place
  • limits of technology
  • appropriate scale
  • sustainable agriculture and forestry
  • steady-state economics
  • environmental ethics

Do graduates of this college, in Aldo Leopold’s words, know that “they are only cogs in an ecological mechanism such that, if they will work with that mechanism, their mental wealth and material wealth can expand indefinitely (and) if they refuse to work with it, it will ultimately grind them to dust.” Leopold asked: “If education does not teach us these things, then what is education for?”

The Beautiful Struggle

Posted on | by Sam | 6 Comments on The Beautiful Struggle

I’ve yet to meet a grown-up who, at some point, hasn’t felt a bit like a hamster in the wheel – spinning mindlessly towards some opaque goal, and for some abstract, poorly understood reason.

Life can feel that way sometimes.

So you can imagine my surprise when, while visiting a small public high school in the Excelsior neighborhood of San Francisco, I encountered a group of boys working on an indeterminate project out of plywood and a handsaw.

“What are you guys doing?” I asked.

“We’re building a human-sized hamster wheel,” they replied.

Of course they were.

That’s because they were students at the June Jordan School for Equity (JJSE), where the goal of every adult is to help every young person see the world for what it is – and what it needs to become.

To do that work well, say co-directors Matt Alexander and Jessica Huang, a school must help children make sense of the world they inhabit. “This school was explicitly founded to be a force for social justice,” Huang explained, “and to do so for the kids in our city with the greatest need for it. We’re a college prep school, but our primary concern is not getting kids into college; it’s putting them in a position to have good options, and helping them see the both the oppressive aspects of our society, and the ways to make it better.

“The only way to get off the wheel,” she added, “is to realize you’re on it.”

Since its founding by a group of local parents and families in 2004, JJSE has resided in the same single-story building at the Southern edge of San Francisco, in a neighborhood that doesn’t even make it on to the tourist map.

For Excelsior’s longtime residents, the anonymity has been a good thing. Since its inception in the mid-19th century, Excelsior (which means “ever upward” in Latin) has been a refuge for working class families. Yet as median home prices continue to soar in San Francisco – and space remains finite – Excelsior is starting to gentrify, a development I heard about repeatedly during my time at the school.

“We’ve lost several of our strongest teachers in the past few years because they just couldn’t afford to stay in the city,” said Giulio Sorro, himself a longtime teacher at the school, and, like his colleagues, someone who embodies the best of the profession. “With more middle-class white parents moving in, we’re starting to hear new voices that see our black and brown kids not as assets but as deficits to their own kids. That’s going to change things. It’s already changing things.”

It may seem like the gentrification of a San Francisco neighborhood is a storyline that runs parallel to the lifeblood of a school that is trying to help its students become the first in their families to go to college, but at June Jordan, those sorts of incongruities are in fact the river running through the center of the school’s entire approach to learning.

The first hint of this occurs the moment you arrive, as I did on a recent sunny morning. The school, which shares space with a larger charter school, is surrounded by a ring of trees and greenspaces. Hillsides littered with houses, like favelas, poke up in the distance.

You must enter through a parking lot in the back, which is lined by a procession of graffiti. A particularly striking one near the school’s front doors, in colorful purple and a highly stylized script, quotes Martin Luther King to reinforce the spirit of the place:

Peace is not the absence of conflict, but the presence of justice.


IMG_7911

At first blush, the inside of the school feels familiar: wide hallways lined with lockers, low ceilings, and hastily-tacked up posters for next week’s afterschool meeting or upcoming dance. Yet one thing, for a high school at least – let alone a high school serving young people whose lives have been disproportionately clouded by trauma and adversity – feels decidedly unfamiliar: the ubiquity of laughter and levity.

I asked Sorro about that, just before the start of his 9th grade Health class. “We have to redefine education,” he said while his students filed in around us. “What are we here for? Is it to compete with China and India? Is it to get into college? I don’t think it should be about those things.

“I believe good teaching is good teaching anywhere, but there’s a whole other mind-state here. Young people of color, coming from oppressed communities in America, it is set up for these kids not to make it – you can see it.”

In response, June Jordan’s diverse team of founders crafted a mission for the school that was designed to help young people of color “make it” in three key ways: as Community Members who live with respect, integrity, courage and humility; as Social Justice Warriors who stand against oppression and work to create positive change in themselves and their communities; and as Independent Thinkers who possess the intellectual skills they need to succeed.

There are other essential design principles. June Jordan is a small school – just 250 students. Students are assessed not by taking standardized tests, but by presenting detailed portfolios of their work. Teachers teach subjects, but their most important job is to integrate the school’s six habits of mind (perspective, relevance, original research, precision, evidence, and logical reasoning) into the curriculum. Every student has a personal advisor for all four years. And every member of the community – from students to parents to staff – has a meaningful, accountable voice that shapes the overall health and wellbeing of the school.

“Too often,” explained Mr. Alexander, who, like Ms. Huang, was a teacher at the school before becoming its co-director, “everyone in schools is driven by the spirit of compliance, or the idea that there is someone external to the school who needs to come in and turn it around. It’s the mindset of your job being to fix something, or to do something to people instead of building capacity or doing the work with people.

“But if you really believe in democracy,” he continued, “and you really believe that everyone has equal dignity and worth, then you have to build everyone’s capacity and let everyone be their best selves. The accountability has to go that way, too – our primary accountability is to one another, not to the state or to test scores. Our main job is to build that capacity and to recognize that everyone comes with strengths and abilities. But you have to create the space for people to develop that – and it’s really hard.”

I asked Alexander and Huang how the school went about doing that.

They talked about schema theory.

“We know from the research,” Huang began, “that your brain builds schemas, or organized patterns of thinking, in order to understand your environment. We’re hard-wired to look for patterns; it’s what kept us alive thousands of years ago. So everyone is doing this, all the time, and when it comes to education, we have an eerily consistent set of schemas we have all called on for generations. So the bulk of what we do is construct a new counter-narrative that helps kids see the invisible layer of schema that has held us all unnaturally in place for so long – from institutionalized racism, to inherited feelings about what a math class can and cannot be, to internalized notions of inferiority. This helps them start to figure out how to disrupt those patterns, and imagine a different set of possibilities.”

To make this more actionable, the school has developed a pedagogy that encodes what teachers like Sorro are setting out to do. Indeed, over years of work retreats, trial and error, and sustained, challenging, collegial revisions, June Jordan’s faculty and staff have articulated an approach that is, in their words, “expressly designed to help our students understand the forces of marginalization they have experienced growing up, and begin the process of freeing themselves from oppression, especially the internalized oppression which we see preventing so many students from meeting their potential.”

The physical manifestations of this are ubiquitous at the school – from a clear set of preferred teacher behaviors to the classrooms themselves, which feel like bursts of color and texture and collage, and in which probing academic and personal work is always in some vital stage of unfolding.

In one class, for example, students were using the facts from a real case to play out a scenario about sexual harassment and the creation of a hostile work environment. In another, a group was strategizing how best to show their support for students at another school that had recently experienced a widely publicized racist incident. And in Sorro’s classroom, each person was asked to briefly share one thing they did over Spring Break that had benefitted their health – and one thing that hadn’t.

“I went to Pismo Beach to drive ATVs,” said one young man, innocently enough.

“And why was that good for your health?” Sorro asked.

The answer he received was a reminder that part of the reason the school culture feels so light is because the burdens their students carry feel so heavy. “I have a lot of anxiety,” he explained, “and I have a real rage in me; sometimes going really fast is the only thing that can make me feel better.”

Later, after several other intense and highly personal recollections from the previous week, Sorro asked the group, “Is it always good spending time with family?”

“Family can be poison sometimes,” said one student. Sorro nodded calmly. Throughout the class, his demeanor stayed constant; he did not over-react to the highly charged stories, or under-react to the quotidian ones. “In my teaching I try to go to the depth and the heart of it all,” he explained. “You have to put it all out there. I believe in going to the pain – and to the love.”

That duality – the intellectual and the emotional, the pain and the love, the heavy and the light – is what makes June Jordan such a different place to go to school.

“We try to create space for real collegial accountability,” Huang explained towards the end of the day. “We have real honest conversations here about the things that matter to us. But that’s taken years to build – years to build.

“What it means now is that if you have an idea, you understand that it’s your land to work here. That’s an Emiliano Zapata line: ‘The land belongs to those who work it.’ No one is going to do it for you.”

I reflected on her words as I walked the hallways of the school, which were blanketed by quotes, murals, and personal reflections.

Written across an upraised fist above a doorway were the words of Shirley Chisholm: “You don’t make progress by standing on the sidelines, whimpering and complaining. You make progress by implementing ideas.”

Down another hallway, just past a mural honoring two former students who were shot to death, I saw a sign telling me: “Healing doesn’t mean the damage never existed. It means the damage no longer controls our lives.”

And then, just outside a classroom, I found the JJSE Secrets Wall, where all members of the community were invited to anonymously post a secret (no matter how silly or somber) – and, in so doing, perhaps feel less burdened by its weight.

I don’t like myself.

I smoke weed.

I tried to kill myself.

Depression rules my life.

I feel like my parents won’t be proud of me when I’m older.

I can’t live without my Playstation!

I grew up around drugs, police, and losing family.

It felt jarring to see such naked admissions posted so publicly, and in such an otherwise-traditional looking place. But that is precisely what makes the June Jordan School for Equity so special. Spend time here, and you will feel the dialectical pull of the world as it is, awash in both beauty and heartbreak; and the world as it ought to be – empathetic and equitable, devoid of the mindless churn of the human-sized hamster wheel, and reoriented around a different sort of body in motion: the wheel of democracy, which, though it grinds slowly, propels us steadily toward justice, and the society we seek.

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This is the end of education (& the future of learning)

Posted on | by Sam

Or, more specifically, this is a video about a conversation of those issues. It features yours truly, but also Jaime Casap, the head of education at Google, and a number of other great educators in both K-12 and higher ed. Check it out, and see what it ignites in your own thinking . . .

Why We Need To Kill Our Darlings

Posted on | by Sam

Every writer knows what it means to “kill your darlings.”

It’s a reminder that there will be times when you’ve written a beautiful sentence, or a paragraph — perhaps even a whole character or scene — and yet you may need to leave them on the cutting room floor, if it turns out they no longer fit into the larger picture of what you’re working on.

That’s what editing does — it forces you to make tough decisions in service of crafting a final piece in which everything finds its rightful place.

I see this same problem everywhere in modern school reform. Ours is a crowded landscape of sacred cows — filled with competing beliefs, priorities, and acronyms. But here’s the thing: if we’re serious about collaboration — and the good news is I see a greater willingness to think collaboratively right now than any other time in my career — then all of us, to some degree, are going to have to kill our darlings.

That doesn’t mean we sacrifice what defines us, it doesn’t mean we compromise on our values, and it doesn’t mean we keep nothing of what we’ve built up to this point. But it does mean that if you’re serious about building a diverse coalition, and you’ve reached a point of having a pretty fabulous five- (or four- or six-) point vision of the future, then you need to be willing to break down — and then rebuild — your core vision and strategy with others.

That won’t work if the people you want to collaborate with aren’t fundamentally interested in the same set of core questions to drive their work. And it won’t work if anyone falls too deeply in love with their own ideas or language.

It will work, however, if we believe strongly enough in the processes we went through to make those darlings in the first place. It will work if we are willing to answer anew the questions we feel are most important to reimagining education for a changing world. And it will work if we realize that what matters most is not our list or our language or our framing — but our willingness to re-engage in the work with a wider net of partners.

That’s how movements are born. The goal is not to show people your own most beautiful pictures; it’s to hold up a mirror together and each be prepared to describe what we see.

 

The Difference Between Hannah Graham and Relisha Rudd

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on The Difference Between Hannah Graham and Relisha Rudd

On March 1, eight-year-old D.C. resident Relisha Rudd disappeared. She was, according to news reports, homeless, hungry, and in the care of a man who likely killed her. The search for her body didn’t even begin until almost three weeks after she was last seen, and, after just one week and a dwindling number of tips, police effectively stopped looking.

On September 13, eighteen-year-old University of Virginia sophomore Hannah Graham disappeared. She was, according to Charlottesville police chief Timothy Longo, a “bright, intelligent, athletic, friendly, beautiful college student who’s been part of our community for the past two years.” Hours after she went missing, state emergency management officials launched a massive search effort that was fueled by more than 4,000 tips. A little more than a month later, her body was recovered.

What can possibly account for the dramatic differences in these two stories? Both girls were filled with promise and potential. Both girls’ disappearances attracted the helpful glare of media attention. And both girls’ families deserved the closure that only a retrieval of their bodies could provide. So while I am grateful that the Graham family can now give Hannah a proper burial, I am appalled that here in D.C. – in the midst of a mayoral election, no less – the disappearance of Relisha Rudd has faded from public conversation altogether. And while I would love to say that the different outcomes of these two searches have nothing to do with race, the reality is that these two stories underscore what has been true for the duration of our nation’s history: black girls like Relisha don’t matter as much as white girls like Hannah.

Consider, for example, that whereas Graham was a college sophomore on a campus designed by Thomas Jefferson to serve as a beacon for the value of public education, Relisha’s first elementary school, Ferebee-Hope, was closed in 2013. Consider that whereas Hannah’s parents regularly appeared together at press conferences to make emotional pleas for help in finding their daughter, Relisha’s mother, Shamika Young, was a single parent who never reported Relisha missing out of fear that authorities would take away her other three children and enter them into the foster care system – a system Young herself had been shuttled through as a child. And consider that whereas Hannah had been supported, nourished and challenged by her high school and college communities, Relisha hated the homeless shelter at which she lived so much so that she would sometimes fake asthma attacks at friend’s houses in the hope that she could stay, and adults from her old school recalled her often arriving with filthy clothes, dirty hair and an empty stomach.

These are not just the differences between two girls’ stories. They are the difference between the seeds our society has decided to tend, and the seeds it has decided to discard. As the Washington Post’s Petula Dvorak has written, “what the nation’s capital has sanctioned — a miniature, shameful city of about 800 displaced and homeless residents who live in squalid, depressing conditions next to the morgue and among the clients at a methadone clinic — is fertile ground for evil.” And what the rest of us have sanctioned by our relative silence is just as malevolent – a tale of two cities, two worlds, two paths, and two girls – only one of whom matters.

We can’t begin to undo the systemic inequities that led to Hannah’s and Relisha’s starkly contrasting lives until that contrast becomes the central topic of D.C.’s upcoming mayoral election – not to mention the midterm congressional elections nationwide. And even if/when it becomes the central topic, it will require generations of effort to undo generations of injustice. We are not a post-racial society, and we have a lot of work to do.

We can, however, do something that won’t take generations, or elections, or policies to remedy.

We can find the collective will and focus to move mountains, as Charlottesville did, and we can find Relisha Rudd.

In memory of Ted Sizer

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on In memory of Ted Sizer

Several years ago, as the director of the Forum for Education & Democracy, I was lucky enough to meet Ted Sizer. A lion in the field, Ted was warm, welcoming, and eager in both theory and practice to create space for a new person like me to join him in his life’s work.

Ted died five years ago today — too young, at 77. In 2011, I edited Faces of Learning: 50 Powerful Stories of Defining Moments in Education, to try and honor his work and the impact it had on my thinking. It was a book that stitched together 50 people’s stories of their most powerful learning experiences, and the final one to share was Ted’s.

On this anniversary of his death, I want to share that story here — and urge everyone reading to consider reflecting on, and sharing their own story, at facesoflearning.net.

We miss you, Ted. And we haven’t forgotten what you taught us.

Ted Sizer’s Most Powerful Learning Memory

My first real teaching was in the army, where, as a twenty-one-year-old lieutenant in the artillery, I needed to teach my charges—mostly Puerto Rican high school dropouts who were as old or older than I was—how to prepare howitzers to fire at objects that were miles away. It was an important and practical form of geometry, a subject at which I had not been very successful in school. By now I was good at it, but I feared that learning would be too difficult for them, and then we would all fail.

I learned then that most teachers need to learn before they can teach. They have to learn about their students—and especially about what is relevant to them. My students were determined not to hit the wrong target; they struggled with the guns’ sights’ calibrations until they got them right. They took care of the ammunition so that it wouldn’t grow too wet or too dry. They followed all the safety precautions as if they had written the manual themselves. Where they came from, the learning difficulties they had had in the past, the many differences between their childhoods and mine, even what language they spoke mattered less than the job we had to do together. They did their new work successfully and gave me something I have valued ever since: faith in the possibilities for learning if teachers and students align their incentives.

Ted Sizer

Has Oprah come to embody what’s wrong with modern American culture?

Posted on | by Sam

I’ve decided that if I were to pick one person who embodies the ersatz character of contemporary American cultural life, that person would be Oprah Winfrey.

Let me explain.

Over the course of her long career, Oprah has stood for much of the best of American public life.  In her daytime talk-show heyday, Oprah created space for people to reflect on their inner selves, to connect to big ideas, and to find a point of entry into a shared community of people who were committed to living better, fuller, more community-centered and empathetic lives. It’s for this reason that she has become so beloved, justly, by millions of Americans – and the scale of her success has felt all the more resonant because of the way she rose from humble origins to become a truly global phenomenon. She is Horatio Alger incarnate, or as close as we’ve ever come.

When I see Oprah these days, however, I see someone whose work increasingly reflects a dangerous conflation of America’s equally revered, slightly oppositional founding principles: capitalistic consumption; spiritual self-fulfillment; and democratic community-building. And the yield of that vacuous mixture is best embodied by her current “The Life You Want Weekend” tour.

As the New York Times reported this weekend, the vibe at these events is akin to a Great Awakening of the modern era – except whereas the previous Great Awakenings were purely religious revivals, Oprah’s events are more like what happens when you combine a deeply felt spiritual yearning with a deeply embedded profit motive. At the event in Auburn Hills, Michigan, reporter Jennifer Conlin chronicles a steady line of opportunities for people to pay at the altar of self-improvement – from a tiered $199 magazine/fan club subscription, to a $999 VIP upgrade, to a smaller set of items like t-shirts, hoodies, books and phone covers. By the end of the weekend, after Oprah’s appearance on stage triggered the audience’s wristbands to glow orange (like the sun), and attendees wrote vision statements for the future and took notes during self-help seminars, Oprah’s parting words seemed unintentionally revealing. “Thank you for your money,” she told everyone. “I know how hard you all work.”

Now, don’t get me wrong – events like these must cover costs, and there’s nothing wrong with ending up in the black. For lack of a better way to put it, doing ‘good’ and doing ‘well’ are equally valued aspirations of the American identity, and since our dual allegiance to capitalism and democracy isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, our ongoing challenge is to strike the happy medium between, in this case, profit motive and personal fulfillment.

The problem is when we assume that one’s conscience is heightened based on the products one consumes. That, in a word, is gibberish, and yet that is what Oprah has come to personify – whether it’s a giveaway of free cars, a magazine that highlights her favorite stuff (and only features her on the cover), or a highly monetized national tour of self-actualization. As one frustrated attendee put it, “I came here to be spiritual, not commercial.”

A capitalist economy depends on our insatiable desire for things. A spiritual life demands that we be free from the suffering of desire. And a democratic society demands that we unite in service to a shared society that allows our best selves to emerge.

How do we reconcile these three components of our aspirational civic order?

The first step is to start acknowledging the inherent tensions that exist between our democratic, our spiritual, and our capitalistic selves – and to stop trying to tend to them all at once. Oprah has become a larger-than-life guru because we asked her to be. I can’t imagine what it’s like to be at the nexus of the spiritual and the corporate worlds, as she is, and the ways in which that must distort one’s sense of reality. (Though this video paints a pretty vivid picture.) So to be clear, I’m not blaming her – I’m blaming us for what we’ve asked her to become, and what our neediness says about who we are, and who we think we aspire to be. It’s telling, for example, that the first words Oprah uttered at her Auburn Hills tour event were, “You came! You’re here! Why are you here?”

Why indeed. But here’s the thing – the path toward “turning up the volume in our lives” does not lead through a Toyota Prius dealership, a magazine subscription, or a suite of Oil of Olay bath products. The things Oprah once gave us – the sense of community, the relevant national conversations and lines of inquiry, and the iconic model of intelligent self-reflection – have been cheapened by her attempt to align them with things. We cheapen her legacy, and ourselves, by pretending that they can be. What we need is a room of one’s own, not merely something to OWN. And the reality is we can’t really have them both.

At some point, despite what Oprah is telling you, we all need to choose.

(This article originally appeared in the Huffington Post.)

A School is Not a Pet. And Yet . . .

Posted on | by Sam | 2 Comments on A School is Not a Pet. And Yet . . .

This weekend’s story in the New York Times about former NFL star Deion Sanders’ struggling charter school lays bare much of what’s wrong with the way Americans think about public education in general, and charter schools in particular.

The story begins with Sanders being approached with a “splendid business proposition,” “deep-pocketed backers,” and a state board of education that “fell over itself” to accommodate one of the greatest pro football players of all time.

Never mind the fact that being a great NFL cornerback has nothing to do with knowing how to build a great school. Unless, of course, the only goal for the school is to become an athletic powerhouse, in which case, hey, do your thing.

You can already guess how the rest of the story goes. A rapid rise in the national sports rankings. Televised games on ESPN. A steady infusion of uniforms and equipment. And a near-complete inattention to the things that actually determine a healthy school.

As one former member of Prime Prep’s board put it, parents were seduced by the promise that under Sanders’ tutelage, their children would get athletic scholarships to college and, eventually, pro contracts. “The parents wanted a 2.5 G.P.A. so the kids could play,” he said. “And it happened.”

It gets worse. In a recording obtained by The Dallas Observer, Sanders explains to a colleague how the school came to be. “Senators, political leaders that you hooked me up with, that you put me down with — that’s how we got the school. You’re talking about a nigger sitting up there that was an athlete who didn’t graduate, another nigger sitting up there saying he’s the president, that ain’t graduate nothing, and we got a school. Think about that, man.

“How in the world do you think we got a school?”

How indeed. And although the Texas Education Agency has vowed to revoke the school’s charter, the toxic mix that birthed it in the first place – our celebrity-worshipping culture, and our endemic disrespect for both the teaching profession and young black and brown children – has already spread far and wide.

Let me say that again: Deion Sanders is right. What allowed a school like Prime Prep to come into being at all was a particularly American combination of celebrity worship, disrespect for teachers, and racist indifference to the plight of minority boys and girls.

To be clear, the space for innovation that charter school laws have allowed has led to many outstanding schools, many of which I have written about and will continue to hold up as examples of what’s possible in American public education. But it has also laid bare a widespread myopic belief that starting a school is a lot like raising a pet: provide enough love (cash), food (connections) and water (shiny stuff), and the rest will take care of itself. And yet schools are not puppies; they are complex systems of human beings with incredibly nonlinear, complex tasks to complete: the holistic development and growth of every child in the building, over the course of several formative, complicated, emotionally loaded years. A school like Prime Prep, with its naïve belief that the other parts of a school could be faked in order to engender nationally ranked sports teams, underscores this point well.

A big part of what makes this possible is our historic, and growing, disrespect for the teaching profession, and for the (few) men and (many) women who make it their life’s work. Teacher/blogger Jose Vilson has made this point numerous times, most notably in response to one of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s repeated public excoriations of female teachers. “As Christie wags a finger at this woman,” Vilson writes, “the crowd cheers, signaling a societal acknowledgment that politicians can lay waste to any courtesy towards anyone, and that democracy is overrated. Surely, dissenters get jeers at any rally, but this particular type of jeer further solidified the idea that teachers’ rights are aligned with women’s rights.

“None of this othering happens without society’s consent,” he argues. “Aside from Christie’s ego, gender plays a huge role here, and if you can’t see that, then perhaps you’re part of the problem, too.”

Of course, this isn’t just about the devaluing of women in American life; it’s about the devaluing of minorities too, especially young black men. How else to explain the senseless murder this weekend of Michael Brown, a college-bound 18-year-old who was shot ten times by a local policeman – a killing that marks only the most recent example of such a tragedy, one that extends not just to Trayvon Martin, but all the way back to Emmett Till and beyond.

These cultural flash points and news reports should be electric jolts to the system, and to all of us who exist inside the bubble together, in order to underscore just how much work we have to do as a society to transcend the historical baggage we have accrued over the past two centuries.

There is a reason our society has coined the “Those that can” line about teachers, while other countries have afforded the profession their greatest levels of respect.

There is a reason the U.S. houses 25% of the world’s prisoners, despite representing just 5% of the world’s population.

There is a reason almost half of those prisoners, 150 years after the end of slavery, have black skin – and that reason is not because of an innate pathology or proclivity for violence.

And there is a reason that so many of the most celebrated new pedagogies for poor children have never been piloted in the schools of children of privilege.

Simply put, we are anchored by troublesome mindsets that are difficult to shake off: What is good for us would not work for them. What they do in the present has nothing to do with what we have done in the past. And what they do for a living proves that they are not capable of doing anything more.

These thoughts are not unrelated. They are a huge barrier to our ongoing dream of a society that can provide greater equity and social opportunity. And they are chains we will never break until we’re willing, collectively and courageously, to reckon publicly with the world that we have wrought, and the ideas about one another we continue to carry.

New Orleans is an all-charter city. Is that a good thing?

Posted on | by Sam

This week, the last five traditional neighborhood schools in New Orleans’ Recovery School district were closed – making it the country’s first district made up entirely of charter schools.

That’s a good thing, right?

If you look at some of the baseline data, it’s hard not to say yes. According to the Washington Post‘s Lyndsey Layton, prior to Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans’ high school graduation rate was just over 50 percent. In 2013, it was just shy of 80 percent. Similarly, student math and reading scores have risen over thirty points higher than they were before the storm. Indeed, as longtime PBS education reporter John Merrow shows in his documentary film, Rebirth, there’s a lot to like about what’s happening in the Crescent City.

Of course, Merrow’s balanced coverage also exposes some of the problems with the reform strategy in New Orleans – from reduced financial oversight to increased social stratification. And community activists like Karran Harper Royal have gone further, arguing that school closures in cities like hers disproportionately affect African American students and families. “This push to close schools  . . . is the new Jim Crow,” she explained, pointing out that New Orleans’ “new normal” means something very different to residents like her. In an all-charter city, she says, “You have a chance, not a choice.”

Which is it? Are charter schools the answer? Or are they the beginning of the end of public education in America?

I’ve been thinking about these questions a lot these days, after spending the month of May traveling around the country to talk about my new book, which is (surprise surprise) all about school choice. What I learned can be boiled down to these two observations: first, school choice feels (and is) very different depending on where you live; and second, the question we ask when we talk about school choice – are charter schools the solution or the problem? – is not the question we should be asking.

With regard to the first point, let’s begin with a city like Washington, D.C., where enrollment in both charters and district schools is rising, and where the district and charter community are collaborative enough to have held their first unified lottery this year. Contrast that with a state like Michigan, where four out of five charter schools are for-profit entities. Then look at a city like Chicago, where more than fifty neighborhood schools have already been closed, where more will undoubtedly be shuttered this fall, and where shiny new ones are opening all the time – and this amid a larger climate of declining enrollment overall (you do the math), and you begin to see that speaking broadly about “school choice” or “charter schools” is appealingly simple, and completely inappropriate.

How choice feels depends on where you live, and how high (or low) the levels of trust, transparency, and cross-sector collaboration are in those communities. Period.

To be clear, school choice should feel different in different places, because different driving forces are at the root of different parts of the movement. Is the goal to build space for more innovation as a way to not just increase the number of charter schools but also create a rising tide that lifts all boats and improves all schools (of all stripes) in a city? I would argue that’s what’s happening, mostly, in D.C. Or is the goal to create a zero-sum game that results in the disappearance of everything old in order to make way for anything new? That’s what it feels like, partly, in Chicago.

Too often, our infatuation with charter schools has led too many of us – from soccer moms to President Obama – to equate them with reform. More charter schools, the logic goes, equals more quality and a reimagined public school system. And, to be sure, I’ve seen a lot more good charter schools in my travels than bad ones. But you can’t improve American public education, systemically, one school at a time (and, to be clear, although cities like New Orleans and D.C. are inundated, less than 5% of children nationwide attend charters).

This is not surprising to anyone who knows anything about systems change. “From a very early age,” Peter Senge writes in his classic book, The Fifth Discipline, “we are taught to break apart problems, to fragment the world.” This reflex makes complex tasks seem more approachable. But the truth is we all pay a price for deluding ourselves into thinking that complex problems can be addressed with piecemeal, or, in this case, school-by-school, solutions.

In Solving Tough Problems, Adam Kahane postulates that one reason we do this is because we fail to recognize the interplay of three different types of complexity: dynamic, generative, and social. “A problem has low dynamic complexity,” Kahane writes, “if cause and effect are close together in space and time. In a car engine, for example, causes produce effects that are nearby, immediate, and obvious; and so, why an engine doesn’t run can be understood and solved be testing and fixing one piece at a time.” By contrast, a problem has high dynamic complexity if cause and effect are far apart in space and time. This characterizes just about any major challenge faced by American public education today. Kahane says such problems “can only be understood systemically, taking account of the interrelationship among the pieces and the functioning of the system as a whole.

“A problem has low generative complexity,” he continues, “if its future is familiar and predictable. In a traditional village, for example, the future simply replays the past, and so solutions and rules from the past will work in the future.” By contrast, a problem has high generative complexity if its future is unfamiliar and unpredictable. Think again of the challenges faced by schools, which must depart from the traditional Industrial-era model of schooling to match the needs of students who are entering a radically different world than the one their parents grew up in. “Solutions to problems with high generative complexity cannot be calculated in advance, on paper, based on what has worked in the past, but have to be worked out as the situation unfolds.

“A problem has low social complexity if the people who are part of the problem have common assumptions, values, rationales, and objectives.” This may have been true in the past, when one’s neighborhood school was more likely to attract families of similar faiths, economic levels, and ethnicities. But a problem has high social complexity if the people who must solve it together see the world in very different ways. “Problems of high social complexity,” Kahane says, “cannot be peacefully solved by authorities from on high; the people involved must participate in creating and implementing solutions.”

So how do we identify solutions for a field that is marked by high degrees of dynamic, generative, and social complexity? One step is merely by asking the question, as opposed to debating whether we need more or less charter schools. And another step, impossible to avoid when the opening question is a different one, is to start seeing public schools and the communities they serve as systems, not parallel tracks.

Too often, this interdependence between charters and traditional public schools (not to mention between charters themselves) is given short shrift. Yet our still-nascent experiment in school choice – national and/or local – won’t work until we do. And although New Orleans’ highly localized experiment as an all-charter city may ultimately succeed, its strategy, applied nationwide, is a fool’s errand. “The most profound strategy for changing a living network comes from biology,” Meg Wheatley explains in Leadership & The New Science. “If a system is in trouble, it can only be restored by connecting itself to more of itself.”

So what does this all mean?

To unleash the sort of generative feedback loop that can improve all schools, we must see reform as a both/and proposition. We need to raze and rebuild, and we need to preserve and improve. We need the ingenuity of single-school autonomy, and we need the scalability of whole-community structures. We need to incentivize schools to instill in young people the skills, habits and dispositions they’ll need to navigate this brave new world, and we need to stop rewarding schools that are merely perfecting our ability to succeed in a system that no longer serves our interests. And, finally, we need to realize that as appealing as it may be to assume otherwise, concepts like “choice” and “charter” are not monolithic terms; they are fluid, fulsome, and unfolding before our eyes.

In New Orleans, and everywhere else, we remain in the eye of the storm.

(This column originally appeared in Education Week.)