Category: Democracy

The Protest That Made Occupy DC Possible

Posted on | by Sam

As the protesters in McPherson Square enter their seventh week inhabiting a “city within the city,” what was the first national effort to Occupy DC – and how did it change the ways Americans saw their nation’s capital city?

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On a windy Easter morning in 1894, an unusual parade moved down the main street of Massillon, Ohio. The idea of an eccentric local businessman named Jacob S. Coxey, the parade featured an African American flag bearer, a hundred unemployed white men, and an infant named Legal Tender.

At the time of the parade, the United States was in the second year of a major economic depression and millions of Americans were unemployed; Coxey believed he had the answer to the nation’s economic woes. He proposed that the federal government issue $500 million in treasury bonds, that it apply those funds to initiate a massive program to build up the nation’s roads, and that it hire an army of workers, all of who would be guaranteed eight-hour days and daily wages of $1.50.

Convinced his plan would be ignored unless he presented it in person, Coxey intended to lead his peaceful parade of unemployed citizens all the way to Washington, D.C., where they would present a “petition in boots” to Congress on May 1 – International Labor Day. By the time they arrived, he promised reporters at a press conference on January 27, “We’ll have 100,000 men. We’ll not take a dollar with us, and instead of muskets every man will carry a white flag with the words, ‘Peace on Earth, Good Will toward Men, but Death to Interest-Bearing Bonds.’”

What Coxey did not know was that a law forbade him – without the official permission of the Vice President and the Speaker of the House – from presenting his petition in the way he envisioned. The Act to Regulate the Use of the Capitol Grounds, originally passed in 1882 to “subserve the quiet and dignity of the Capitol of the United States,” prohibited “any harangue or oration” and outlawed the display of “any flag, banner or devices designed or adapted to bring into public notice any party, organization, or movement” on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol.

Prior to Coxey’s arrival, the act had almost never been enforced. Yet it reflected the sentiment of the time, which held that Washington was a place for official business, not active protest.

Jacob Coxey was willing to challenge that sentiment on behalf of millions of unemployed Americans, even though he was not one of them. A successful businessman, he owned a sandstone quarry, bred racehorses, and amassed a personal fortune. Despite his own success, the wealthy Ohioan was disillusioned with the major political parties. Gradually, he became influenced by the growing Populist movement in America, which strove to offer an alternative to the dominant political parties by suggesting, among other issues, that the federal government take a more active role in solving the country’s economic problems and not defer to the states. [Founded in February 1892, the Populists garnered over one million votes in the presidential election that same year, and elected governors in both Kansas and Colorado.]

Three years before the Ohio parade, Coxey first lobbied for a Good Roads Bill to help shock the nation out of its economic stupor. It required the issuance of $500 million in legal tender – a.k.a. U.S. currency and, later, the inspiration for his youngest son’s name – and a massive construction project. Coxey was unconcerned that the proposal would have increased the federal government’s total expenditures by nearly 75 percent. But federal officials thought differently, and Coxey’s proposal was ignored.

Then, in the summer of 1893, Coxey met a man named Carl Browne at a national conference on monetary policy. Browne was even more eccentric than Coxey – born on July 4 in a log cabin, Browne spoke with a deep baritone voice and dressed daily in a sombrero and leather jacket – but he was equally passionate about economic reform. He was also a natural salesman. In fact, when Browne convinced the American Federation of Labor to support Coxey’s Good Roads Bill, the experience emboldened Browne to think bigger.

What emerged was the idea of sponsoring a massive rally of the unemployed, all of who would walk to Washington and present their demands en masse.  Coxey was skeptical at first – an event like that had never occurred in America. Indeed, as a reporter for the Washington Post later wrote, “One must go back to the impoverished peasantry of France marching upon Paris to find a parallel, for there is none in our own history.” But Browne had tremendous powers of persuasion; he even got Coxey to convert to Theosophy, a mystical belief in reincarnation that Browne first adopted when, after his wife died, he felt her soul enter his body.

In time, the two came to believe their march was sanctioned by God, and that each of them was a partial reincarnation of Christ. (Coxey also believed he was a partial reincarnation of former President Andrew Jackson, prompting a Washington Post reporter to quip: “Coxey has only to show that the soul of Andrew Jackson is residing upon his person, and he may be assured of a cordial, if not an enthusiastic welcome” in Washington.)

They also believed that their cause was protected by the First Amendment. As Browne told a reporter from the Chicago Daily Tribune, “Having faith in the rectitude of our intentions and believing that we are acting from inspiration from on high, we believe that the liberty-loving people comprising this indivisible and undividable American Union will respond in such numbers . . . assembling under the aegis of the Constitution upon the steps of the Nation’s Capitol to assert their prerogative, shielded as they would be by right and justice, and guided by him in the interest of good and higher government.”

In reality, the traveling band that Coxey and Browne called the “Commonweal of Christ” – and that the press jokingly labeled “Coxey’s Army” – struggled to attract a large number of marchers. As one Daily Tribune reporter put it, “like windmills waiting for wind, Coxey is waiting for men.” Another remarked that newsmen covering the event outnumbered the marchers. But because “Coxey’s Army” received so much press, and because nothing like this had ever occurred before, D.C. and federal officials spent the weeks before May 1 wondering what legal tools existed to help them respond to the marchers’ arrival.

On March 24, the day before the march was scheduled to begin, Washington police superintendent William G. Moore announced publicly that Coxey would not be able to present his petition on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol. Referring to the 1882 Act to Regulate the Use of the Capitol Grounds, Moore said: “This act is very stringent. It will serve to prevent the meeting on the steps of the Capitol and its provisions are ample in allowing the police force to deal with loiterers in the Capitol grounds.”

Newspapers across the country editorialized in favor of the 1882 law. “Upon the whole,” wrote the editors of the New York Times, “our institutions do not totter before the ‘armies’ of tramps.” By contrast, Populist politicians rallied on Coxey’s behalf. On April 19, William Peffer, a U.S. senator from Kansas, introduced a resolution calling for the appointment of a committee of senators to personally receive Coxey’s petition. Peffer was joined by Senator William Allen of Nebraska, who urged his colleagues to agree that “citizens of the United States, regardless of their rank and station in life, have an undoubted and unquestionable right to peaceably assemble and petition the government for a redress of grievances.” The third part of Peffer’s resolution directly addressed the 1882 act. All citizens, it read, “have a right to enter upon the Capitol grounds and into the Capitol building itself as fully and to as great an extent as other citizens or persons.” Any threats of violence or arrests against such persons “would be a clear violation of their constitutional and inalienable right.”

Peffer and Allen were in the minority, and their resolution failed. Meanwhile, on April 23, district officials – under orders from President Grover Cleveland – issued a proclamation condemning the proposed assembly. “The National Capitol is chiefly devoted to public business and it is the center of federal legislation,” they announced. “The Constitutional right of petition does not justify methods dangerous to peace and good order, which threaten the quiet of the National Capitol, which are contrary to law and opposed to the ordinary means of obtaining legislative relief under our system of government.”

Coxey was undeterred. “I have learned that there is a statute preventing parades of any kinds on Capitol grounds,” he told a United Press reporter, who then asked if he was planning to violate the law. “No,” Coxey responded.  “The Constitution gives us the right to do that, and Congress has no power to pass laws in violation of the Constitution. There is no legal authority on the part of anybody to prevent my making a speech on the steps of the Capitol, and that I propose to do.”

At 10:15am on May 1, Carl Browne summoned the five hundred men gathered just outside Washington to begin the final leg of their journey. It was a far cry from the 100,000 marchers Coxey and Browne had initially predicted, yet their small numbers were more than offset by the thousands of faces that lined the streets of Washington to see them. Some observers guessed that the total number was more than had even been seen at past Presidential inaugurations.

As they had done back in Ohio, the marchers provided an unusual spectacle. Coxey’s teenage daughter Mamie dressed in white to embody the spirit of peace and rode a white horse. Seven footsore musicians played “See, the Conquering Hero Comes!” on their drums, trombones, and cornets.  The men themselves, described by a Times reporter as “spruced up a bit for the great parade [but still] a sorry-looking lot,” marched in twos.

The marchers passed without major incident down Pennsylvania Avenue until the group approached the Capitol. The crowd that had gathered at that point was so densely packed that Coxey got out of his open carriage and Browne got off his horse. Amid the chaos, the two leaders pushed into the crowd and toward the Capitol. After reaching the low stone parapet that frames the grounds, Coxey and Browne slid over the top and made their dash for the Capitol steps. Browne was quickly surrounded and arrested; Coxey, meanwhile, made it all the way to the eastern steps. He pulled out his speech and prepared to deliver his remarks, but policemen stopped him before he could say anything of substance. He and his army had marched more than five hundred miles, only to be stopped just short of their ultimate goal.

On May 5, in a packed courtroom, Jacob Coxey and Carl Browne were charged with violating the Capitol Grounds Act. Arguing on their behalf in court as a witness, Senator Allen declared that the arrest of the defendants was an affront to the First Amendment rights of petition and peaceful assembly. The judge disagreed, sentencing each man to spend twenty days in jail and pay a $5.00 fine.

Coxey and Browne served their sentences and paid their fines. Most of the marchers left for home. (Those who did not were later put out by force.) And newspapers such as the New York Times approved of the decision. “The right to assemble and petition for a redress of grievances is not a right to assemble in any place where lawful business, public or private, will be disturbed by the assembly.” The Chicago Daily Tribune put it another way. “Thus ends,” the paper editorialized, the first national march on Washington and “the greatest march of the nineteenth century.”

Except it had not ended. Coxey returned to the Capitol, first in 1914 and then again in 1933, to renew his requests of the government. And then, on May 1, 1944, a ninety-year-old Jacob S. Coxey ascended the eastern steps of the U.S. Capitol to deliver the final incarnation of a speech he had first tried to deliver fifty years earlier. Addressing the crowd of two hundred or so reporters, servicemen, and curious passersby, Coxey – wearing an old-fashioned stand-up collar, a black string tie, and a faded blue suit – lambasted the federal government’s financial policies one last time.

The afternoon must have felt bittersweet. Coxey’s speech was permitted only because he had received official permission from the Speaker of the House and the Vice President; the Capitol Grounds Act was still law, after all. (Incredibly, it was not overturned until 1972.) But the nonagenarian must have felt secure by 1944 that his “army’s” march across the country had at least helped transformed the nation’s understanding of the Capitol. Indeed, as a Washington Post reporter wrote in 1937, “Coxey’s appearance signalized the birth of thousands of marchers” who, taken together, have “established Washington as the most marched-upon place in the world.”

(NOTE: This story first appeared in First Freedoms: A Documentary History of First Amendment Rights in America.)

Occupy Third Grade?

Posted on | by Sam | 5 Comments on Occupy Third Grade?

On a crisp fall morning in the nation’s capital, 3rd grade teacher Rebecca Lebowitz gathered her 29 public school students on their familiar giant multicolored carpet, and reminded them how to make sense of the characters whose worlds they would soon enter during independent reading time.

“What are the four things we want to look for when we meet a new character?” Ms. Lebowitz asked from her chair at the foot of the rug. Several hands shot up before nine-year-old Monica spoke confidently over the steady hum of the classroom’s antiquated radiator. “We want to pay attention to what they do, what they say, how they feel, and what their body language tells us.” “That’s right,” her teacher said cheerily. “When we look for those four things, we have a much better sense of who a person really is.”

As the calendar shifts to the eleventh month of 2011 – a year of near-constant revolution and upheaval, from the Arab Spring to the Wisconsin statehouse to the global effort to Occupy Wall Street – what might the rest of us learn from students like Monica? If, in short, we were as smart as a third-grader, what would we observe about the character of this year’s global protests, and what might we decide to do next?

1. It is not about “democracy” – As much as we glorify and value the principles and practices of our democratic system of government, it’s not democracy per se that is at the root of this unleashed global yearning. As New York Times columnist Tom Friedman recently pointed out, what motivated the protesters in Tahrir Square – and what most animates those who continue to brave the wintry weather in public squares around the world – is a deeper quest for what lies at the root of a genuinely democratic society: justice.

The people protesting around the world are not just looking to be seen; they’re demanding to be heard. And what they’re saying is that from Egypt to the United States, essential social contracts have been broken – contracts that require at least a modicum of fairness and balance. If anything, therefore, these movements are about highlighting an uncomfortable truth: merely having a democracy does not guarantee a just society, and the tendencies of democracy and capitalism, left untended, tend to flow in different directions.

2. It is about unsustainable social orders – Across the Middle East, citizens have been risking their lives for months to protest the injustice of their daily lives. And yet the absence of social justice is a cancer that has already spread well beyond the borders of the Arab world. According to a recent analysis of the 31 countries that make up the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), nearly 11% of all people in OECD countries live in poverty. Worse still, 22% of American children are affected by poverty, yet the United States spends only 0.33% of its GDP on pre-primary education.

When these data are combined with other indicators like income inequality, access to health care, and the percentage of elderly citizens living in poverty, the United States gets a social justice rating that trails all but four of the OECD’s 31 countries. Add to that the now-well-known fact that the top 1% of Americans now control 40% of the total wealth, and you have an unsustainable social system, plain and simple. Clearly, people are angry, and they’re not going to take it anymore.

3. It does require a reboot of public education – History has shown us that to sustain a movement for transformational social change, anger is both necessary and insufficient. To sustain our energy, we are best fueled by an empathetic regard for the needs of others, not just our own. As Gandhi put it, “I discovered in the earliest stages that pursuit of truth did not admit of violence being inflicted on one’s opponent but that he must be weaned from error by patience and compassion.”

If what we seek, then, is a more sustainable and just social order, how should we recalibrate our public schools – the institutions most responsible for equipping children with the skills and self-confidence they need to become effective and justice-oriented change agents as adults?

We might start by evaluating each other the same way Ms. Lebowitz’s students evaluate new characters in a book. To fulfill the egalitarian vision of 2011, children must grow up in learning environments that are sensitive not just to what they do and say, but also to how they feel and what their body language tells us about the larger world they inhabit. This, too, is a central insight of those who study systemic change. “We need to learn to attend to both dimensions simultaneously,” says M.I.T management professor Otto Scharmer. “What we say, see, and do (our visible realm), and the inner place from which we operate (the invisible realm, in which our sources of attention reside and from which they operate).”

Recent events have underscored just how essential it is to acknowledge our global interdependence; after all, it was the financial subterfuge of the few that affected the personal wellbeing of the many. That’s why a healthy democracy is more than just policies and practices – and a healthy school is more than just test scores and teacher policies. That’s why the American activists of tomorrow need more than just the occasional lesson about Gandhi or King; they need consistent opportunities to actively apply their own developing compassion for others in the service of creating a better world. And that’s why students like Monica need to grow up in a society willing to heed the rising voices of the protesters and recommit to our nation’s founding promise:  “We the people, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice.”

(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)

Justice in the City

Posted on | by Sam

A few shots of what it looks like when eight-year-olds come face to face with our nation’s monuments to justice — and briefly contemplate what it means to carry on the tradition.

In What Way Justice?

Posted on | by Sam

What does it mean to be an American the day after Georgia may have just murdered an innocent man?

Read the first words of the preamble to our Constitution: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice.”

Read the phrase engraved above the entrance to the U.S. Supreme Court: “Equal Justice Under Law.”

And read the reaction by the widow of the man Troy Davis was convicted of murdering 22 years ago: “We have laws in this land so that there is not chaos.”

In this year of global upheaval – from Egypt to Wisconsin – what is happening to our capacity to serve as the world’s beacon of freedom and equality? And when did our conception of justice shift so mightily – from securing equal treatment to avoiding chaos?

For those of us concerned with comprehensive school reform, the execution of Troy Davis is more than a temporary news item. Just twenty years old when he was arrested, Davis was also a high school dropout. And although his full reasons for doing so are unclear, what is clear is that of the ~1.2 million young people who leave school each year, more than half are from minority groups. Worse still, this pipeline of talent is running in the wrong direction, and sending disproportionate numbers of African-American men away from the workforce and higher education, and toward the dead end of the prison system.

The Advancement Project, a civil rights “action tank” committed to highlighting this issue, explains: “Across the country, school systems are shutting the doors of academic opportunity on students and funneling them into the juvenile and criminal justice systems. The combination of overly harsh school policies and an increased role of law enforcement in schools has created a “schoolhouse-to-jailhouse track,” in which punitive measures such as suspensions, expulsions, and school-based arrests are increasingly used to deal with student misbehavior, and huge numbers of youth are pushed out of school and into prisons and jails. In many communities, this transforms schools from places of learning to dangerous gateways into juvenile court. This is more than an education crisis; it is a racial justice crisis, because the students pushed out through harsh discipline are disproportionately students of color.”

The economic and opportunity costs of this exodus have been well documented. Yet today, in the wake of the United States Supreme Court’s cavalier reluctance to intervene in the state-sanctioned execution of a potentially innocent man, let’s be clear: the cost of this systemic societal dysfunction runs much deeper than lost wages. At stake is the legitimacy of our status as a nation committed to equal justice under law. At stake are the lives of potentially innocent men and women caught up in the gears of our legal system. And although our courts would seem to bear the sole weight of righting the ship, it is our public schools that are most responsible for giving young people the skills and self-confidence they need to not just stay out of trouble, but also become active, visible contributors to the common good. As the Greek philosopher Plato observed, more than 2,500 years ago, a civil society’s ultimate wellbeing rests primarily on its capacity to answer a single question: “But how, exactly,” he wrote, “will they be reared and educated by us? And does our considering this contribute anything to our goal of discerning that for the sake of which we are considering all these things – in what way justice and injustice come into being in a city?”

Mission Accomplished? What the U.S. Can Learn from China

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on Mission Accomplished? What the U.S. Can Learn from China

I just returned from my first visit to China in 15 years, and I still can’t get over how aligned the Middle Kingdom remains around its core “mission statement” – and how misaligned we remain in the United States.

In China, the mission that directs the priorities of its private, public and social sectors is the one first laid out by former premier Deng Xiaoping back in 1984 – “building socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Deng’s vision was an unlikely pairing – on one hand, robust financial freedoms and a willingness to welcome foreign economic influences (like McDonald’s and Microsoft); on the other, sharply circumscribed social freedoms and a determination to forbid foreign cultural influences (like Facebook and Twitter).

Back in 1994, when I taught at a university in Beijing, this shared purpose was already well ingrained: the schools existed to instill a dialectical pair of aspirations in young people: the homogeneity of ideas, and the heterogeneity of the marketplace.

Regardless of how one feels about its mission, China’s ability to align the myriad aspects of its society around such a clearly defined goal is a major contributor to its current position as an ascendant power. And not surprisingly, this sort of clarity is characteristic of other global success stories. Take Finland – just thirty years ago a Soviet backwater, and now, after steadily following through on a thoughtful 20-year vision of reform, the unquestioned home of the world’s best schools.

When I look at countries like China and Finland, I see more starkly the misalignment between America’s historic vision as a nation and the current mission of its public schools. Ask anyone to describe the former, and you’ll hear slight variations on the same foundational theme: E Pluribus Unum – Out of many, one. Ask folks to describe the latter, and you’ll hear everything under the sun.

To some degree, mission misalignment is to be expected in a country of 50 states, 15,000 school districts, one overarching federal policy, and a chaotic, inchoate marketplace of reforms du jour. Yet if we take federal policy as our guide, the central mission of public education since 2000 has actually been quite clear: to eliminate the achievement gap between white students and students of color.

Will such a mission help America move closer to its larger vision of an equitable democratic society? In theory, definitely. And yet in a new article for National Affairs, education policy expert Rick Hess carefully chronicles how our decade-long obsession with the achievement gap, and our willingness to evaluate that gap based on a single metric – basic skills standardized test scores in reading and math – “has led to education policy that has shortchanged many children. It has narrowed the scope of schooling. It has hollowed out public support for school reform. It has stifled educational innovation. And it has distorted the way we approach educational choice, accountability, and reform.”

Unquestionably, these efforts have crippled our collective capacity to enact a shared mission for the public schools that is aligned with our shared vision for the public good. We all know we need schools that help children become more confident and creative – and yet we overvalue a small subset of academic skills to the detriment of all other forms of learning. We all know we need schools that nurture the needs of all children – and yet we pursue policies that prioritize the needs of some children more than others. And we know we need schools that pledge fidelity to the same overarching mission and fulfill that mission in myriad ways – and yet we impose stifling evaluative controls that hinder the ability of educators to make real-time decisions about how best to engage and inspire the children under their care.

The good news, I believe, is that we have reached the point in our history where the pendulum’s motion is about to swing back. A growing chorus of unlikely allies, from a wide range of perspectives, is saying ENOUGH – it’s time to restore our collective focus on the intellectual, emotional and vocational needs of children, and it’s time to align the overarching vision of our society with the shared mission of our public schools.

How do we get there? I propose a simple starting point: Since the main factor hindering our efforts is the ongoing exclusive emphasis on reading and math scores – and since the fecklessness of our elected officials suggests it may take a while before we see any serious revisions to federal education policy – let’s invite schools and communities across the country to do two things: opt out of the current system and its myopic metrics of success, and opt in to an open network of innovators that all pledge to find – and share – a better way of evaluating their capacity to equip young people to fulfill our shared vision as a nation? The goal would be twofold: to free schools from feeling like they can’t be innovative; and then, by doing so, to challenge ourselves to proactively chart a better way forward.

I say it’s time for the United States to align itself more proactively around the vision that has animated our history and inspired the world. So who’s in? And what simple structures would such a movement need in order to be effective, inspiring, and mission-driven?

What Plato Would Think of School Choice

Posted on | by Sam | 3 Comments on What Plato Would Think of School Choice

“But how, exactly, will they be reared and educated by us? And does our considering this contribute anything to our goal of discerning that for the sake of which we are considering all these things – in what way justice and injustice come into being in a city.”

— Plato, The Republic

Heard the bass ride out like an ancient mating call, I can’t take it y’all, I can feel the city breathin’, Chest heavin’, against the flesh of the evening, Sigh before we die like the last train leaving.

—Black Star, Respiration

What characterizes the ideal city – and the cities in which we live? How accurately does the health of a city reflect the quality of its plan for educating its youngest citizens? And does the push towards greater school choice get us closer to, or farther from, that ideal?

I’ve been thinking about those questions a lot since reading a column by George Will in last weekend’s Washington Post. In it he references two U.S. Supreme Court opinions in which the Court affirmed the constitutional right of parents “to direct the … education of children under their control.” As a student of the 14th Amendment, I sought the opinions out. What struck me had less to do with the legal arguments, however, and more to do with an excerpt in one of the opinions from Plato’s Republic, arguably the most famous political work of all time, and a work squarely concerned with the role a city – and, by extension, its education system – must play in helping all people develop their fullest potential.

The Republic is about decay as much as it is about rebirth. Socrates is visiting Athens during a period of decline (Plato, it’s worth noting, is not exactly a fan of democracy). While there, Socrates falls into conversation with a number of other men, who then co-construct a vision of the ideal city, and, by extension, the ideal state of humanity.

If you’ve never read The Republic (I hadn’t until this week), you may be surprised by how radical the vision really is. To wit, the section in which he explains the structure of schooling is the one Justice James McReynolds chose to cite in his 1923 opinion for Meyer v. Nebraska:

“That the wives of our guardians are to be common, and their children are to be common, and no parent is to know his own child, nor any child his parent. … The proper officers will take the offspring of the good parents to the pen or fold, and there they will deposit them with certain nurses who dwell in a separate quarter; but the offspring of the inferior, or of the better when they chance to be deformed, will be put away in some mysterious, unknown place, as they should be.”

“The desire of the Legislature to foster a homogeneous people with American ideals prepared readily to understand current discussions of civic matters is easy to appreciate,” McReynolds wrote, referencing a 1919 law that had outlawed the teaching of any subject to any person in any language other than English. “But the means adopted, we think, exceed the limitations upon the power of the state and conflict with [the] rights” of both teachers and parents.

Fair enough. After all, such a law seems to be a clear case of legislative overreach. But excepting its own forms of overreach (raise your hands, for example, if you’re willing to give up your children at birth so they can be raised in a common pen, or if you believe America should be recast as a communist country), in what ways can The Republic help illuminate the core opportunities – and pitfalls – of the greater push towards school choice?

On one level, The Republic seems to suggest that the very notion of choice is what ultimately undoes a community. “Have we any greater evil for a city,” says Socrates, “than what splits it and makes it many instead of one? Or a greater good than what binds it together and makes it one?” Seen in this light, the increasing balkanization of public education is merely the latest vehicle for pitting the motivations and self-interests of individuals and families against each other.  Socrates seems to confirm this notion later, when he suggests that “in founding the city we are not looking for the exceptional happiness of any one group among us but, as far as possible, that of the city as a whole.”

OK, so choice bad, no choice good. Right?

Not so fast. Although Plato would clearly take issue with the individualistic nature of our modern society, and perhaps too with our decision to make public education even more heterogeneous than it was before, he also believes that the highest calling of each person is to be “a seeker and student of that study by which he might be able to learn and find out who will give him the capacity and the knowledge to distinguish the good and the bad life, and so everywhere and always to choose the better from among those that are possible. . . From all this he will be able to draw a conclusion and choose – in looking off toward the nature of the soul – between the worse and the better life, calling worse the one that leads it toward becoming more unjust, and better the one that leads it to becoming juster. He will let everything else go. For we have seen that this is the most important choice for him in life and death.”

When I look at the current landscape of school choice in DC (a landscape I’ll be exploring in great detail this year as I follow the fortunes of three area schools – district, charter and private), I wonder how we can learn from Plato’s caution and heed his advice. Will greater school choice be a means toward helping more children and families “choose between the worse and the better life,” while also furthering our capacity as a city to live “free from faction”? Is this even possible? Or is our shared fidelity to the twin pillars of democracy and capitalism such that a vision of greater equity and spiritual fulfillment is merely illusory, and as misleading as the shadows of the puppets that dance on the wall of Plato’s allegorical cave?

In part, Plato’s allegory is a way for Socrates to make another key point: “education is not what the professions of certain men assert it to be. They presumably assert that they put into the soul knowledge that isn’t in it, as though they were putting sight into blind eyes.”

Plato’s larger point here is that we delude ourselves into thinking we understand the nature of things, when in fact all we are doing is constructing a false sense of the world and calling it real (as theoretical physicist David Bohm once said, “Thought makes the world and then says, ‘I didn’t do it.’”). For those of us trying to improve schools, I think the analogy is also an appropriate condemnation of the current system of schooling we have – a system that was designed to meet the needs of the Industrial Age that was, not the Democratic Age that will be.

So, now that the school choice genie has been released from the bottle, I ask you: In what ways can it engender more schools capable of giving more people the skills and self-confidence they need to become active, visible contributors to the public good – a public good that, amidst the din of the ongoing battle between our intermixed democratic and capitalistic ideals, still seeks to fulfill our founding spirit of E Pluribus Unum – out of many, one?

The First Day

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on The First Day

This morning, I witnessed the start of a new school year at two very different buildings – a neighborhood public school that first opened its doors in 1924, and a public charter school that was opening its doors for the very first time.

I still get back-to-school butterflies each time a new year begins.  There’s just something uniquely beautiful, and precarious, about the first day a group of children come together under one roof. The promise of what lies ahead feels like an almost unbearable ache – the weight of the work to be done being so great, and so unsteady.

By 7:00am this morning, there were still no children under the charter school’s roof  — the school day didn’t begin until 8:30am – but the mere presence of the roof itself was cause for celebration. Just two days earlier, the hallways of the school, which will be housed for its first year on the fourth floor of a new office building in downtown DC, were buzzing with last-minute preparations. Workmen installed new windows in every room – a task the school’s founding executive director had been begging the building’s owner to complete for weeks. One volunteer steadily made her way up and down the hallways, using a green marker and a stencil to affix room numbers. The father of the school’s board chair installed wire hanging rods on the walls. In one classroom, two women spoke Spanish as they finalized nametags, while another made colorful signs out of construction paper.

By the time the first student arrived – a five-year-old boy named Henry, clutching a batman action figure and bearing the eager grin of someone ready for a new adventure – any signs of the recent chaos were long gone. The classrooms – large, sunny and airy – were immaculate and inviting. Each adult wore colorful t-shirts bearing the name and logo of the school. As the school’s operations manager struggled to get the printer in working order before the inaugural group of 120 children arrived, she took a deep breath and said, to no one in particular, “It will all be OK.”

A short bike ride across town, a different set of children and families made their way along the long, sunny sidewalk that leads up to the neighborhood school’s front doors. Originally built to accommodate the children of European refugees from World War I, the school’s enrollment now tops 450, and reflects the modern diversity of the surrounding streets. This morning alone, I heard English, Spanish, Vietnamese, and Amharic in the hallways. Children as young as three and as old as eleven filled the school’s gymnasium to meet their classroom teachers and get escorted to their homerooms. Parents received last-minute registration and information forms, and interpreters worked busily to make sure everyone understood what was required. During one such exchange, a teacher kinetically approached a particularly sullen young boy. “How you doing, Enrique?” she said, smiling and putting an arm around his shoulder. “Did you have a great summer?” Enrique shrugged, his head still down. Nearby, two girls playfully interacted with each other – new friends perhaps? – each clasping securely to the leg of her father, each performing her own unique pirouette.

This year, I hope to watch how the school calendar unfolds for these two communities – along with a private secondary school – and learn more about the particular obstacles and opportunities that give shape to the daily workings of a modern American school.

Although I live and work in DC, my interest in choosing three schools from the area went beyond mere convenience. Roughly 40% of the students in DC attend charter schools; less than 3% do nationwide. Similarly, less than 10% of the nation’s students attend private schools, yet many of the country’s finest are housed here, reflecting an uncomfortable – yet accurate – cultural divide that typifies the nation’s capital. And although the overwhelming majority of children in America still attend their neighborhood public school, fewer and fewer families in DC are doing so, opting instead to enter the growing, chaotic and nascent marketplace of school choice.

As this market grows and more families across the country are faced with similar decisions, what can the experiences of the educators, parents and students from these three school communities teach us about how to identify – and support – a great learning environment? Will our nation’s public, public charter and private schools openly and freely share their most valuable insights and observations with each other in order to benefit children and communities nationwide? Or will the high stakes of the marketplace lead a new generation of educators and innovators to guard their best practices, undermine their colleagues, and further privatize this most public of institutions?

Time will tell how these particular schools choose to answer those questions. But today was a good first day.

Just 179 to go.

Let’s Scrap the High School Diploma

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on Let’s Scrap the High School Diploma

This month, schools across the country are hard at work preparing auditoriums, printing programs, checking commencement speeches, and readying for the arrival of one of our society’s most cherished rites of passage – the high school graduation ceremony.

Perhaps by this time next year, we can do our students an even greater service and scrap the high school diploma altogether.

OK, maybe not next year, but soon. After all, almost every component of today’s traditional diploma reflects yesterday’s traditional thinking – if by yesterday we mean the 19th century.

It was 1893, to be precise. That’s when the first blue-ribbon commission was assembled to study the nation’s schools, which, at that point, were still largely decentralized. Among its findings, the ten-person committee recommended that “every subject which is taught at all in a secondary school should be taught in the same way and to the same extent to every pupil.” Not long thereafter, the College Entrance Examination Board was established in order to create a common assessment and set uniform standards for each academic subject. Couple those developments with the rise of the Industrial Era, the exponential growth of immigration, and the need to move an unprecedented number of students through the system, and you have the seeds that slowly gave shape to the public schools we have today.

Although these developments were clearly pivotal in fueling American growth in the 20th century, it’s equally clear that same system is ill-suited for the particular challenges and opportunities of the 21st. Which brings us back to the high school diploma – a document that still depends, in most places, on the same set of required courses, the same set amount of “seat time,” and the same set of curricular content that students have been studying since the end of the second World War.  No wonder that more than half our students have been classified as chronically disengaged – and that figure doesn’t even include absentees and dropouts!

We can do better. But first we need to shake free from the comforting familiarity of the pomp and circumstance of high school as we have come to know it.

The good news is that several schools across the country are already taking this courageous step. One such place is the Monadnock Community Connections School, or MC² for short (mc2school.org). A public school of choice in New Hampshire, MC² was founded to fulfill a distinctly 21st century mission: “Empowering each individual with the knowledge and skills to use his or her unique voice, effectively and with integrity, in co-creating our common public world.” As school founder Kim Carter explains, “Learning at MC² is personalized – so it can be tailored to each student’s learning needs; experiential – because students learn best by doing; negotiated – so that students can participate in decisions about what they will learn; and community-based – because learning takes place through a variety of community interactions.”

As you might expect, MC²’s goals and mission force it to look quite different from the typical high school. Instead of annually promoting kids from one grade to the next, students at MC² cannot progress until they have demonstrated mastery in a set of core competencies. Students spend as much time learning out of the school building as they do in it. Every student must write a 100-page autobiography in which they reflect on the people and events that have shaped the person they have become. And no one receives a diploma until they have successfully made a public presentation of their own personal growth and preparedness for adult life. (You can view a few of those presentations here).

In schools like this, the old adage is turned on its head: children are to be seen and heard. In schools like this, academic learning is balanced by an equal emphasis on emotional and vocational growth. And in schools like this, teachers and administrators have stopped relying on Industrial-Age benchmarks, and started identifying which Democratic-Age habits of mind and being will be most essential to their students’ future success as global citizens.

To create places like this for every child, we don’t need to sacrifice our desire for greater rigor, equity or accountability – but we do need to scrap many of our most time-tested symbols of schools, and of schooling. Redefining the requirements of a high school diploma is a great place to start.

Is Teach for America Becoming “Too Big to Fail”?

Posted on | by Sam | 2 Comments on Is Teach for America Becoming “Too Big to Fail”?

(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)

When it comes to reforming America’s schools, is bigger always better?

I’ve been wondering about that question since watching a recent episode of Treme, the HBO series set in post-Katrina New Orleans that chronicles the struggles of a diverse group of residents on the slow path toward rebuilding their beloved city.

In the episode, an aspiring local musician named Davis McAlary raps about changes in the school system:

Four years at Radcliffe, that’s all you know
A desire to do good and a four point oh
You’re here to save us from our plight
You got the answer ’cause you’re rich and white
On a two-year sojourn here to stay
Teach for America all the way
Got no idea what you’re facin’
No clue just who you’re displacin’
Old lady taught fathers, old lady taught sons
Old lady bought books for the little ones
Old lady put in 30 years
Sweat and toil, time and tears
Was that really your sad intention?
Help the state of Louisiana deny her pension?

It’s worth noting that Davis is rich and white himself, and that a friend of his quickly questions Davis’s logic. And yet when one considers the omnipresent discussion these days of “taking ideas to scale,” the core critique deserves some consideration.

The target in this example, Teach for America (TFA), must be used to the controversy by now.  Since emerging from Wendy Kopp’s undergraduate thesis at Princeton in the early 1990s, TFA has grown to a network of more than 28,000 individuals. Its alumni fill high-profile educational leadership positions across the country. And it was one of just four organizations to receive $50 million in “scale-up” funding from the U.S. Department of Education’s Investing in Innovation, or i3, fund.

When you experience that sort of success, you’re bound to attract your share of scrutiny. And TFA has become one of the most polarizing entities in modern education reform. Some hail it as the solution to our need for highly qualified teachers in every classroom. Others define it as a stopgap measure based on a model so transitory to make it dangerous at best, and racist at worst.

Which is it? How important is it that change efforts be led by people who have deep roots in the communities they wish to change? And to what extent should “scaling up” be a goal in modern education reform anyway?

For Kopp, the answers are clear: placing increasing numbers of corps members in communities of need, and growing to scale, are TFA’s top priorities. “We feel an imperative to grow given the enormity of the problem we’re addressing,” she explains. “Every additional recruit is another corps member who has the potential to have a life-changing impact in the lives of children growing up today and another alumna/us who can be a lifelong leader for fundamental change.”

It’s a powerful vision, and it’s impossible to deny the enormity, and the urgency, of the problem programs like TFA are built to address. Equally clear is that the strategic decision to scale up comes with certain trade-offs and sacrifices – chief among them the reduced capacity to be deeply rooted in the communities in which you work.

In the book Small Giants, Inc. Magazine editor Bo Burlingham profiles fourteen companies that chose to buck the conventional wisdom and stay small. “The companies I was looking at all operated on what you might call human scale, that is, a size at which it’s still possible for an individual to be acquainted with everyone else . . . and in order to create a sense of community and common purpose between the companies, their suppliers, and their customers – the kind of intimacy that is difficult for large companies to achieve, if only because of their size.”

Burlingham’s point is not simply that big is bad: sometimes, growing to scale does make sense. What matters, he contends, is having a clear understanding of the implications for doing so.

This makes me wonder: How does Teach for America interpret the costs and benefits of its own reform and growth strategy? Does Wendy Kopp agree that deep and lasting change in a community is impossible without the support and engagement of a diverse constituency of its members? Or does she believe, given the choices available, that bigger is better; that the meaning of “community” is fungible; and that the people who make up a school system need not develop deep and lasting roots to ensure its long-term success?

When you’re talking about operating at a human scale, says Ari Weinzweig, a successful food retailer in Ann Arbor, Michigan, “You’re talking about something like what the French call terroir.  It has to do with the way that the soil and climate in a given region contribute to the flavor of the food. That’s because the soil’s mineral content, the amount of sun and rain it gets, the local vegetation, and so on – all that is different in each region. It’s the same with some businesses. Every community has its own character, which is sort of a spiritual terroir. If you’re really rooted in that community, it’s going to have a big impact on the way you are.”

That lack of terroir is precisely what Davis McAlary raps about in Treme. It’s precisely what TFA’s chief critics – both fairly and unfairly – use to justify their attacks. And it’s what makes me wonder if, in the end, more non-profits should heed another piece of business advice when it comes to school improvement:

Think globally. Act locally.

Do Great Conferences Have a “Special Sauce”?

Posted on | by Sam | 5 Comments on Do Great Conferences Have a “Special Sauce”?

What makes for a transformational meeting?

I’m asking myself this question because I just attended the best conference of my life. I’m asking it because most conferences, well, suck. And I’m asking it because the people I just spent three days with were continually asking it of each other in order to identify the “special sauce” for themselves – and give us all a better chance of recreating it for more and more people.

The conference in question was WorldBlu live, an annual gathering that is “designed for individuals, for-profit and non-profit organizations who recognize the power of freedom and democracy as a tool for building thriving businesses, promoting innovation, attracting top talent and inspiring full engagement.”

I’ve already written about some of the specific highlights of the conference. Now I want to share the foundations of the WorldBlu “special sauce” that made it such a success – and that any conference planner can replicate, no matter what industry you represent.

1. The People (aka, Widen the Gene Pool) – WorldBlu Live is as heterogeneous a gathering of people as you’re likely to find.  It is, most broadly defined, a business conference, and, true to type, there were many CEOs in attendance, in industries ranging from telecommunications to healthcare to online retail. But there were also human resource professionals. And programmers. And higher education administrators. And musicians. And students. And the people themselves were coming from all across the United States. And Canada. And Denmark. And New Zealand.

This olio of professions, places and perspectives made for conference exchanges where no one could ever safely rely on their own linguistic industry shorthand, or even on an assumption about what one’s training did (or did not) include.  As a result, the conversations formed a powerful double helix of ideas and questions – quite the contrast from the more typical industry-specific meeting, in which the capacity to exchange new ideas – the genetic building blocks that lead to new ways of seeing both the world and our work – is so inward-focused it produces the equivalent of an inbreeding reproductive loop. In short, WorldBlu starts with the assumption that our capacity for innovation grows exponentially when we inquire into core questions with people inside and outside of our chosen fields. And any other conference would be wise to do the same.

2. The Purpose (aka, Start with the “Why”) – As Simon Sinek makes clear in his must-watch TED talk, successful businesses and individuals don’t get better solely by perfecting what they do and how they do it; they get better by understanding why they do what they do, and where that source of intrinsic motivation originates.

The same is true of WorldBlu live. Despite being such an eclectic group, each of us was clearly and powerfully united by the most unlikely of common denominators – a shared commitment to organizational democracy, and, by extension, to create spaces where people could bring their full selves to life and work. It was, put another way, a conference that was designed to reconnect the Me (individual capacity) with the We (collective capacity). And as a result, it was infused with great personal and professional relevance for every attendee.

By contrast, most conferences myopically focus not just on the professional, but also the “what” of what we do. This is what leaves us feeling half-filled, as, indeed, we are. It also prevents us from inquiring deeper into our own sources of passion, strength, and joy – a feeling anyone who attended WorldBlu live will tell you was at the heart of the experience.

3. The Pace (aka, Balance Passive & Active Learning) – Unlike many conferences, in which the majority of people have but one role to play – passive consumer of someone else’s learning experience – WorldBlu Live was designed to strike a dynamic balance between absorbing and co-creating solutions and ideas. Each morning, different people gave short, TED-talk style speeches to the entire conference – and each in response to one of WorldBlu’s ten design principles of an organizational democracy. Afterwards, someone else, from an entirely different organization or industry, spoke briefly about a tool they had used to apply that principle in their work. Then the group transitioned into long unstructured coffee breaks, then box lunches, and then short 45-minute breakout sessions.

I have never seen a shorter time for breakout sessions at a conference, and initially I assumed they would be too brief to yield anything meaningful. What I experienced was the opposite – the brevity encouraged folks to jump right in, and the design assumption was that breakouts were merely a way to help people identify affinity groups, and enable a more useful sorting of the participants so people could have the conversations they were most eager to have with the other people most eager to have them. Consequently, I witnessed something I rarely see in a conference: the complete absence of “drive-by speakers” – the folks who simply show up to dispense their wisdom and then leave as soon as they’re done. As one person put it, “At WorldBlu Live, the speakers were the conference, and the conference was the speakers.”

Imagine if more of our professional conference experiences were characterized by these design principles of people, purpose and pace? Imagine if we started to expect actual learning and fulfillment from these sorts of exchanges, instead of the reluctant knowledge that we will miss yet another opportunity to learn something valuable? And imagine if in the course of our own professional advancement, we made new connections that were equally valuable to our ongoing journeys of personal fulfillment?

It’s possible. I’ve seen it. So let’s stop accepting – and expecting – anything less.