Category: Democracy

A Part of Us is Dying in Chicago

Posted on | by Sam

I can’t reconcile the deep sense of community that filmmakers Amy and Tom Valens have captured in their 10-part video series about a year in the life of a public school in Boston, with the painful public clashes we’re witnessing in Chicago – where 54 of the city’s schools will soon be shuttered.

Indeed, although the nation’s attention is fixed on the historic fight for marriage equality in the U.S. Supreme Court, a part of us is dying in the Windy City – and no one in the mainstream media seems to care.

No one disputes the fact that Chicago, like so many American cities, has real problems to solve. Population is down. Money is tight. School choice is growing. Tough decisions must be made.

By the same token, can anyone dispute that we have reason to worry about the state of our civic discourse when Chicago’s mayor, Rahm Emanuel, allows the announcement of something as contentious as 54 school closings while he is on a ski trip in Utah? And can anyone blame local community leaders who wonder what to think of the Mayor’s plan to hold additional hearings on the issue? “If nobody is going to be heard at the hearings, what’s the use of having the hearings?” said Marshall Hatch, a local pastor. “If it’s a done deal, then stop wasting everybody’s time.”

A part of us is dying in Chicago because so many of us are so increasingly convinced that on the most important issues of the day, we are voiceless. We know changes need to be made – and we are increasingly abandoning, or giving little more than lip service to, our historic commitment to make those changes democratically, deliberately, and delicately. The issues in Chicago are complicated, from tax policies to population declines to legacies of race-based oppression, but the willingness of elected officials to confront those challenges in a spirit of co-construction with their constituents has become as laughable as, well, the Cubs winning the World Series.

Which takes me back to A Year at Mission Hill, and the ways in which this series is quietly and consistently demonstrating the generative power of a community in which everyone’s voice is valued and actively solicited. Mission Hill is a public school with charter-like autonomy. Its teachers are all unionized, and everything the district requires of its other schools, it requires of Mission Hill. Yet this is a school where, as teacher Jenerra Williams puts it, “We take the state test, we prepare for the state test, and we don’t get consumed by the state test.” This is a school where we see teachers repeatedly working together to diagnose, support, and engage kids. And this is a school where we see highly committed and skilled adults in an ongoing dialogue with each other about the only question that matters: “Of all the things we can do together, what must we do?”

Watching what’s happening in Chicago makes we worry about the extent to which we remain committed to the “we” in that question – We the people. What’s happening there is a national tragedy, and an example of what happens when powerful people recall the first half of the famous quote by Winston Churchill – “Democracy is the worst form of government” – and conveniently forget the second half – “except all the others that have been tried.”

As Mission Hill demonstrates, democracy is messy, it is inefficient, and it is slow. But as I watch its students practice calligraphy and study honeybees, as I listen to its teachers share strategies and struggle to improve – and as I ride my bike past the throngs of demonstrators for and against marriage equality outside the Supreme Court – I’m reminded that examples of our inextinguishable commitment to the spirit of individual liberty and equality are all around us.

Mayor Emanuel, are you watching?

(This article originally appeared in Education Week.)

How Do You Design a Healthy School?

Posted on | by Sam

(This article originally appeared in Education Week.)

What if every school used our founding principles as a nation as its design principles for learning? How would schools need to change? And what would we unleash as a result?

This is one of the riddles at the center of the 10-part video series, A Year at Mission Hill. And although we’re just two chapters in, I’m starting to see an early pattern – and a dialectical pair of design principles at the center of it all.

First, it’s clear that just as the United States sprang from a shared vision of liberty, schools like Mission Hill spring from a shared commitment to individual freedom and autonomy. As a “pilot school” nestled within the larger structure of Boston Public Schools, Mission Hill has the institutional freedom to chart its own course around key issues like governance, curriculum, staffing, hiring, and budget. Its teachers (who are unionized) have great individual latitude in how they plan their lessons and assess their students. Its students are constantly placed in positions to exercise self-regulation and self-control (no hall passes here). And its aspirational habits of mind (which the school believes characterize a well-educated person) are designed to help young people develop the skills and self-confidence required to ask tough questions, discover meaningful patterns, develop empathy and compassion, imagine useful alternatives, and set appropriate priorities – both in school and in life.

What might this design principle look like elsewhere? Site-based autonomy seems important. So does the school having a clear vision of its ideal graduate – and not just in terms of what that person knows how to do, but how that person habitually lives his or her life. Giving children opportunities to practice decision-making is a must. And finally, there is the straw that stirs the drink – assembling a staff of highly skilled, highly collaborative educators, whose heightened expertise can justify a heightened level of autonomy, and whose understanding of learning and growth runs much deeper than academics alone.

But there’s an equally pressing, seemingly contradictory design principle that’s also at work, one that relates to an equally pressing human desire – for structure, safety and a sense of order to the world.  

These two universal needs – for freedom on one hand, and structure on the other – are what we must balance in order to create healthy, high-functioning learning environments of the sort we see at Mission Hill. And it won’t work if we forget a basic truism about organizations: that simple structures lead to complex thoughts, whereas complex structures lead to simple thoughts.

At Mission Hill, the simple structures in place are precisely (and ironically) the ones that help people develop the fullest sense of individual autonomy: the habits of mind that provide a North Star for everything the school does; the clearly defined expectations among staff and students about how people are treated and what is expected of them; the explicit rules about how decisions get made, and who gets to make them, and when, and why; and the individual-classroom and whole-school rituals that keep bringing people together to, as Mission Hill’s mission statement puts it, spend time with each other “even when it might seem wasteful hearing each other out.”

In my years as an educator, I have witnessed scores of schools that choose, consciously or unconsciously, to value one of these needs at the expense of the other. But what schools like Mission Hill remind us is that we do not need to choose. It is possible – indeed, essential – to find the right organizational balance between individual freedom and group structure. The challenge comes in finding the right mix of ingredients. And the opportunity before us is to find a way to get many more chefs in the kitchen – teachers, organizations, communities – each in search of a recipe they can call their own.

A Different Story About Public Education

Posted on | by Sam

I know we’re already one month into 2013, but think back to last year for a second:

What were the most talked about education stories of 2012?

I’m guessing your list looks something like this – Common Core. The Chicago Teacher Strike. Newtown. And what worries me is that no matter what other stories you recalled – from Michelle Rhee to the Dropout Crisis to Race to the Top – they’re all likely to fit into one of the following categories: content, conflict, or catastrophe.

Continue reading . . .

“Standardization” is not a dirty word

Posted on | by Sam | 2 Comments on “Standardization” is not a dirty word

The reviews are in — in 2013, inequality is out, and equality is in.

“Each time we gather to inaugurate a president,” President Obama began on Monday morning, “we bear witness to the enduring strength of our Constitution. We affirm the promise of our democracy. We recall that what binds this nation together is not the colors of our skin or the tenets of our faith or the origins of our names.

“What makes us exceptional, what makes us America is our allegiance to an idea articulated in a declaration made more than two centuries ago. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. That they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, and among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Today we continue a never ending journey to bridge the meaning of those words with the realities of our time. For history tells us that while these truths may be self-evident, they’ve never been self-executing. That while freedom is a gift from God, it must be secured by his people here on earth.”

Those of us who work to improve American public education no doubt heard his words through a certain lens. Indeed, public education has always been — and remains — unequal, inequitable, and incomplete (as I have written here, here and here). Unless we start behaving differently, so it will remain.

If you want illuminating statistics about the extent of this inequality, check out this video from the National Civil Rights Museum. And if you want something to chew on, consider this: standardization, as a word, is not actually “dirty” in and of itself. Indeed, standardization is a useful way to ensure quality control across a system.

The problem is this: here in the United States, the thing we have chosen to make uniform in order to ensure quality control are content standards. (I’m not opposed to content standards per se, though it seems somewhat anachronistic at this particular point in human history.) By contrast, in Finland, they chose to standardize two other things: school funding, and teacher preparation.

What would happen if we followed suit? Might we put ourselves in a better position to fulfill the lofty aspirations of Obama’s second inaugural address?

OK, Obama Won. Now What?

Posted on | by Sam | 2 Comments on OK, Obama Won. Now What?

It’s official. Barack Hussein Obama has been re-elected.

Now what?

When it comes to public education, let’s start by recognizing that Race to the Top was well-intentioned — and ultimately out of step with a truly transformational vision of where American schooling needs to go. Yes, we need better ways to improve teacher quality and capacity; no, we can’t do it by doubling down on what we currently measure. Yes, we need to find a way to ensure equity across all schools; no, we can’t do it by ignoring the ways in which schools are inequitably funded and resourced. And yes, we need to ensure that every young person is prepared to be successful in life by the time they graduate; and no, we can’t do it by continuing to assume that the endgoal of schooling is a discrete set of content knowledge at the same time the new Industrial Revolution is removing all the barriers from knowledge acquisition — and accelerating the need for an essential set of lifeskills and habits.

The definition of leadership I offered in American Schools is the ability to balance a distant vision (“One day . . .”) and an up-close focus (“Every day . . .”). Great organizations, whether they’re schools or Fortune 100 companies, see, nurture, and respond to both mission and vision in everything they do. That’s the tension. That’s the art. And that’s the way to ensure that we’re not just solving the practical problems on our plate; we’re also working towards the aspirational goals that animate our efforts.

In Obama’s first term, we received a series of education policies that addressed the problems on our plate; and we were driven by a mission to perfect our ability to succeed in an Industrial-era system that no longer serves our interests.

What would a healthy tension between vision and mission look like in an ideal second term when it comes to public education? I’d suggest three things:

1. Vision (“One day, every teacher in America will be a special education teacher.”); Mission (“Every day, every school and teacher preparation program will work to deepen its capacity to prepare teachers for the 21st century classroom and its emphasis on greater personalization and customization.”)

Let’s begin by stating the obvious: every child has special needs, and every child deserves an Individualized Education Plan (IEP). Here’s something else that’s equally obvious: we are responsible for creating the “short-bus” stigma around special education, and we can change it.

Finland is instructive here. By investing deeply in the capacity of its teachers to diagnose and address the individual needs of children, Finland helped ensure that, in effect, every kid ended up in Special Ed. This removed the stigma, so much so that by the time they reach 16, almost every child in Finland will have received some sort of additional learning support. We could do the same. President Obama can’t require traditional and alternative teacher preparation programs from overhauling what they do, but he can certainly put public pressure on them to do so. And individual schools and districts can certainly shape their own professional development calendars with an eye toward that long-term vision, and a step toward the short-term goal of equipping teachers to become more fluent in the full range of student needs.

2. Vision (“One day, every child will be equipped to use his or her mind well and in the service of a more just and harmonious society.”); Mission (“Every day, every school and classroom will identify, and assess, the skills and habits it believes its graduates will need in order to use their minds well and in the service of a more just and harmonious society.”)

As I’ve said before, it’s time for teachers to stop defining themselves as passive victims of the policies of No Child Left Behind. It’s been a decade, and no one has stopped us from identifying — and then piloting — a better, more balanced way to assess student learning and growth.

Actually, that’s not true. The New York Performance Standards Consortium has been doing this for awhile now, and with great results. Individual schools like The Blue School in New York City or Mission Hill School in Boston have been doing it. And forward-thinking districts like Montgomery County in Maryland are exploring ways to do it more.

What are the rest of us waiting for?

The future of learning is one in which content knowledge stops being seen as the end, and starts being understood as the means by which we develop and master essential skills and habits — the real endgoal — that will help us navigate the challenges and opportunities of work, life and global citizenship. This future will require us to do more than merely give lip service to the skills we value; it will demand that we find ways to concretely track and support each child’s path to mastery, while maintaining our awareness and appreciation for the nonlinearity of learning and of human development. And the good news is the art and science of teaching and learning are not mutually exclusive. We can do this. In fact, many of us have already begun.

3. Vision (“One day, it will be universally agreed-upon that education in America is a public good, not a private commodity.”); Mission (“Every day, every policymaker and decision-maker will repeat this vow: whatever the most privileged parents want for their children must serve as a minimum standard for what we as a community want for all of our children.”)

In America, we hold two definitions of freedom in creative tension: the first is the capitalistic definition, in which freedom means choice and consumption; the second is the democratic definition, in which freedom means conscience and compassion.

This will never change; our challenge will always be to manage the tension between the two in ways that serve both. But it’s foolish to unleash choice and consumption in American public education and expect that it will deepen our capacity to exercise conscience and compassion. We can either see education as a private commodity or as a public good. And we must choose.

That doesn’t mean we need to get rid of charter schools or choice; in fact, I’d say it’s undeniable that almost every great school I’ve visited has become great in part because it had greater freedom to chart its own path. But it does mean any investments in school choice need to be proactively made in light of the original vision of charter schools, and that we stop pretending that schools with smaller class sizes, better-trained teachers, and richer learning options are only appealing or viable for the families of the wealthy or the well-located. Simply put, a great learning environmentis challenging, relevant, engaging, supportive, and experiential — no matter who the kids are, and no matter where the community is located.

If I were in charge, those would be my marching orders.

What do you think?

(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)

The World is Watching Chicago, Once Again

Posted on | by Sam

In 1968, student protesters stationed outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago broke into a spontaneous chant that quickly crystallized the tenor of the times: “The whole world is watching!”

It’s ironic, then, that one day after this year’s Democratic National Convention, rumors of a city-wide teacher strike in Chicago are reaching a similarly feverous pitch.

As they do, I want to borrow that famous line from 1968 and re-purpose it for 2012. The whole world should be watching, once again, because the issues at stake in Chicago are the same issues at stake in our ongoing efforts to improve American public education. In short, what’s happening in Chicago is extremely important, extremely rare, and not entirely discouraging.

It’s extremely important because you have a Democratic mayor pushing reforms that his city’s teachers — the majority of who are also Democrats — are pushing back against. The mayor wants merit pay and a longer school day. The teachers want a more balanced set of courses, including the arts, music and foreign languages. The mayor wants 50% of a teacher’s formal evaluation to be based on student reading and math scores. The teachers counter that if you enact a policy like that, the only thing your extended day will get you is more test prep and more concerted efforts to game the system. In that sense, the fight in Chicago isn’t purely about teacher contracts — it’s also about conflicting visions of how you create the optimal conditions for teaching and learning.

It’s extremely rare because it hasn’t happened in a quarter-century — and yet 90% of Chicago’s teachers, and 98% of the teachers that voted, indicated their support for a strike. That tells you just how strongly Windy City teachers feel. And regardless of what one thinks about teacher unions, surely we can all agree that having teachers more directly engaged in core questions about education reform is a good idea.

And finally, it’s not entirely discouraging. The most recent reports I’ve read suggest that a deal is close to being reached. If that’s true, I’d characterize the Chicago showdown of 2012 as our latest reminder of what democracy actually looks like when it works — messy, frustratingly slow, and contentious. And yet, at the same time, when we honor individual and collective processes for making our opinions felt and known, it’s also the best chance we’ve got to ensure that when decisions are made, they are done so with the fullest possible knowledge of what “we the people” wish to see.

Tune in if you can.

(This article also appeared on CNN’s education blog, Schools of Thought.)

Origins of a Dream

Posted on | by Sam

Every year, we pay tribute to the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. with school assemblies, community programs and – to the delight of students and teachers alike – a national holiday. Yet how many of us directly connect Dr. King’s heroism and accomplishments to his faith in – and use of – the five freedoms of the First Amendment?

Consider the August 28, 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the iconic rally that introduced King’s “I Have a Dream” speech to white America – he had delivered those lines to black audiences many times before – and produced the most memorable petition for a redress of grievances in the nation’s history. Nearly every American is familiar with King’s speech that day. Many of us were asked to memorize it as students. But few if any of us were also taught about that day – and the Civil Rights Movement – in the specific context of our founding principles as a nation.

At the time, Congress was wrestling with whether or not to pass President John F. Kennedy’s civil rights legislation, and young and old people across the country were being jailed for peacefully assembling to protest the South’s policies of institutional racism. And although African American leaders had talked for more than twenty years about staging a national march for civil rights in Washington, one that could harness all the energy and persuasive power of the movement thus far, the decision to have the march on August 28, 1963, was not finalized until July 2; that meant march officials had less than two months to coordinate, transport, organize, and prepare for the thousands – maybe even tens of thousands – of marchers they expected.

The organizers rushed to plan the march so it could occur while Congress was still debating the president’s civil rights program. They also wanted the march to coincide with the centennial celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation, the January 1, 1863 declaration by President Abraham Lincoln, in the midst of the nation’s third bloody year of civil war, “that all persons held as slaves” within the Southern states “are, and henceforward shall be free.”

Almost a hundred years since that war’s end, African Americans were still waiting for Lincoln’s words to be fulfilled. Indeed, although the formal institution of slavery had long since passed, laws discriminating against African Americans had immediately replaced it. In response, march spokesmen promised that the event would be a mass demonstration for freedom, and that the protesters would, peacefully, assemble at and around the Lincoln Memorial. The goal was to pressure Congress to pass Kennedy’s proposed civil rights legislation and to establish 1963 as the year racial discrimination in America ended for good.

Concerned about a backlash in Congress, Kennedy administration officials expressed reservations. Speaking to a Washington Post reporter, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy sympathized fully with the cause and supported the marchers’ right to petition the government, but wondered if the march would achieve its desired result. “I certainly think at the present time Congress should have the right to debate and discuss legislation without that kind of pressure,” he said. Meanwhile, President Kennedy met privately with the leaders of the march to express his concern that it might damage the chances for passage of the civil rights bill.

According to John Lewis, the Chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and, at 25, the youngest of the civil rights leaders , the President said: ‘We want success in Congress, not just a big show at the Capitol.’ Publicly, however, the President praised the planned march as a “peaceful assembly for the redress of grievances”–with strong emphasis on the word “peaceful.”

In the weeks leading up to the national march, newspapers ran small stories about violent clashes between civil rights protesters and local authorities in different parts of the country. While white officers wielded clubs and occasionally fired shots, black protesters were arrested by the hundreds – sometimes after demonstrating peacefully, sometimes after throwing bricks or breaking windows.

Meanwhile, the prospect of tens of thousands of black protesters in the nation’s capital–at a time in the nation’s history when racial stereotypes were deeply grounded in ignorance and fear–was enough to prompt some rather extraordinary measures. For the first time since the days of Prohibition, Washington, D.C., banned liquor sales. Fifteen thousand paratroopers in nearby North Carolina were placed on alert. And white journalists peppered black commentators with questions such as, “What is it that Negroes really want?” The African American psychologist Kenneth B. Clark did not shy away from the question. The black community, he told The New York Times three days before the march, wants to “give vitality to the democratic promise by using the machinery of democracy–the courts and the constitutional guarantees of freedom–to press relentlessly toward unqualified equality.”

Like Clark, the leaders of the march understood that the best way to counter the general population’s willful ignorance of racial injustice was by utilizing each of the First Amendment’s five freedoms to appeal to the nation’s conscience. They also realized the fight could not be seen as theirs alone; they had to demonstrate that all Americans had a stake in their success. Consequently, at a press conference in New York on August 18, Rabbi Joachim Prinz, the president of the American Jewish Congress, called on American Jews to join the march. In so doing, he urged, American Jews would also be protecting their own freedom, “for we have long known that no group is secure unless the rights of all are safeguarded.” On August 23, the Catholic Bishops of the United States urged in a joint pastoral letter that Catholics get involved as well, declaring that the conscience of the nation itself was on trial.

That spirit of brotherhood was reflected in the final program of speakers for the march, which began with an invocation from the Catholic archbishop of Washington and included remarks from the clerk of the United Presbyterian Church and the president of the Synagogue Council of America. “America must not become a nation of onlookers,” urged Rabbi Prinz, who was also on the program. “America must not remain silent. Not merely black America, but all of America. It must speak up and act, from the President down to the humblest of us, and not for the sake of the Negro, not for the sake of the black community but for the sake of the image, the idea and the aspiration of America itself.” Prinz’s words reached thousands of television viewers across the country, who tuned in to see images of white, brown, and black faces at the massive assembly. ABC and NBC even broke away from their regularly scheduled afternoon soap operas to join CBS and broadcast the program in its entirety.

The march neared its conclusion when the final speaker – thirty-four-year-old Martin Luther King Jr. – approached the podium. By 1963, King’s eloquence and charisma had led him to become the person most identified with the goals of the campaign for civil rights. By the time he rose to speak, police estimated that the crowd had grown to more than 200,000 people – far surpassing even the most optimistic estimates of the organizers.

Although he had spoken to countless black audiences over the years, most white Americans – including President Kennedy, who was watching the march on TV – had never heard King deliver a complete speech. Aware of the importance of the opportunity before him, King stayed up late into the night before the march, working on the language of his remarks. By the time he put down his pencil, however, he felt the speech was not his best work. Emotionally powerful in some places while politically subdued in others, King’s prepared remarks reflected his conscious decision, given the audience and occasion, to sacrifice some passion in order to achieve the march’s ultimate goal – the passage of Kennedy’s civil rights legislation.

King approached the podium on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, looked out at the sea of faces silently awaiting his words, and began – still with mixed feelings, one would imagine – to deliver his remarks. Initially, the young preacher followed his prepared speech word for word. But toward the end, the spectacle of the moment, the history of the location, and the historic promises of the man whose marble likeness towered behind him prompted King to wander off the script.

As he began searching for a different note on which to conclude, gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, sitting just behind King on the platform, asked for the refrain of a speech she knew he had given many times before. “Tell ‘em about the dream, Martin.”

So he did. “I say to you today, my friends, that in spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.’ I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a desert state, sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today.

The rest is history. Yet despite progress, including passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and other subsequent changes in the law, much of King’s vision for America remains unfulfilled today. Indeed, despite King’s plea to his fellow Americans to “lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood,” racism and prejudice continue to plague the United States. For an afternoon, however, the image of thousands of peaceful protesters stretched out before a solitary, passionate young preacher gave Americans a glimpse of what Lincoln – the Great Emancipator—once termed “the better angels of our nature.” The New York Times called it “the greatest assembly for redress of grievances in the capital’s history.” And President Kennedy, in a press statement following the march, spoke about the hope the march had embodied: “What is different today is the intensified and widespread public awareness of the need to move forward in achieving these objectives – objectives which are older than the Nation,” he said. “The cause of 20 million Negroes has been advanced by the program conducted so appropriately before the Nation’s shrine to the Great Emancipator, but even more significant is the contribution to all mankind.”

(This story originally appeared in the book First Freedoms: A Documentary History of First Amendment Rights in America.)

Murdering Innocent Sikhs Does Not Make You a Patriot

Posted on | by Sam

Reading the initial reports of the mass shooting in Wisconsin that claimed six Sikh worshipers, I’m reminded of a little-known event from more than a decade ago. Taken together, the two events say a lot about where we are, and who we aspire to be.

It was September 15, 2001. The terrorist attacks that took down the Twin Towers and damaged the Pentagon had just occurred, and everyone felt angry, frightened, and shell-shocked. For Frank Roque, however, mere anger or sadness was an insufficient response; he wanted blood for blood.

Roque, an aircraft mechanic from Mesa, Arizona, spoke ceaselessly in the days after the attacks about “killing some towel-heads” or “slitting some Iranian throats.” On September 15, he spent the afternoon getting drunk at a local bar and openly threatening to “kill Middle Eastern people.”

After getting kicked out of the bar, Roque drove to a local Chevron station owned by a Sikh-American named Balbir Singh Sodhi and fired five bullets from a .38 handgun through the open window of his truck, killing Singh instantly. Later, when police arrested him at his home, Roque offered a simple explanation for his actions: “I’m a damn American,” he said proudly.

Although detailed information about yesterday’s assailant in the Sikh temple has not been released, what has been confirmed is that the gunman was a 40-year-old white man. And I worry that if he hadn’t been killed at the scene, his rationale would have sounded eerily similar to the addled, ignorant patriotism of Frank Roque.

The notion that anyone could think murdering fellow citizens reflects American values tells us a lot about the ways we have failed as a nation to ensure that all people understand, at its core, what it means to uphold those values.

To be sure, extremists like Frank Roque are rare, and there are plenty among us who can distinguish not only between extraordinary terrorists and ordinary Muslims, but also between Islam and Sikhism. And yet it is also true that too many of us believe that some people are more American than others, allowing institutions like a Sikh Temple in Wisconsin to become emblematic of the false notion that there are enemies in our midst.

Since its founding, the United States has been known as the world’s first new nation because it is the only place in human history where one’s standing in the civic order is not determined by bloodlines or kinship, but by a fundamental allegiance to principles and ideals. Anyone can be an American, at anytime, and equally so. We can practice any religion, proselytize any worldview, and promote any cause. And in a way the only guidance we have to do so and not rip each other to threads in the process comes from the 45 words of the First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The Frank Roques among us threaten that social compact by their willingness to threaten the safety and security of their fellow citizens. But the rest of us also play a part when we refuse to heed the implicit instructions woven throughout the First Amendment’s five freedoms – not the right to say whatever we want, but the responsibility to guard the rights of others, especially those with whom we most deeply disagree.

In a better, more hopeful version of who we are, the first people to come to the defense of a brown Sikh minority in Wisconsin will be their white Christian neighbors. The first thing children will learn in school is how to balance individual rights and civic responsibilities.  And the last people to lay claim to being American will be ignorant, violent extremists like Frank Roque.

(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)