Literally, of course, it’s a sacred cow. And what strikes me is how everyone around it unconsciously adjusts what they do, to the point that the cow has become all but invisible to the chaos of a morning commute — and how ridiculous that is.
We have sacred cows here, too — but whereas in Nepal they literally block traffic, in America they block our ability to think in new ways. And I can think of no aspect of our shared public life with more sacred cows than America’s schools:
For that reason, 180 Studio and ATTN are partnering on a new series, Ask Why, that is designed to help us reflect on a fundamental question:
How should we continue to think about the structure and purpose of public education? Which rituals and habits from our collective past should we hold onto — and which should we let go of in order to reimagine teaching and learning for a rapidly changing world?
So stay tuned for the first few episodes in the series — and keep your eyes open for sacred cows. They’re everywhere.
Look — I love Sesame Street, and I especially love its new model of having famous singers adapt their songs for the show. A Katy Perry song about romantic mind games becomes a story about playing with Elmo. A Feist song is turned into an extended reflection on the awesomeness of the number 4. And so on.
But even the denizens of Sesame Street– and, apparently, singer/songwriter Ed Sheehan — are beholden to the unconscious assumptions we hold about school.
This notion — that school is the place to be passive, obedient, and receptive — is a central obstacle to our efforts to reimagine something better. And this video is just the latest reminder of how much work remains to be done before we can see school, and young people, as active (boisterous even) participants in their own learning.
Last night, I listened to David Remnick’s New Yorker podcast interview with James Comeyto hear what he had to say about our 45th President, but what disturbed me more was what he had to say (at ~13:30) about the phrase “mass incarceration.”
“It connotes an intentionality,” Comey explained, “but there’s nothing mass about it. Everybody was charged individually, represented individually, and everybody appeared in front of a judge. I think you can talk about those systemic problems without making it sound like there was an intentionality where law enforcement decided it was going to round up huge numbers of black men.”
Riiiiiiiiiiight. . .
Then, this morning, another white man on the radio made me cringe. This time, it was National Review editor Jonah Goldberg, who was on NPR to talk with Steve Inskeep about a new book, but who ended up talking (at ~3:30) about the recent incident at a Philadelphia Starbucks in which two Black men were arrested for, well, being Black at a Starbucks.
“If it’s bad to reduce two black guys in a Starbucks to members of a category I distrust — it’s also bad to say that I’m responsible for the stupid mistake of a Starbucks manager in Philadelphia,” Goldberg opined. “Identity politics reduces people’s lived identity to these thin abstractions.”
“And you don’t like being blamed for that as a White person?” Inskeep asked.
“I don’t like thinking of myself as a White person,” Goldberg countered.
Riiiiiiiiiiiiight . . .
Thank God, then, for the Washington Post’s Fred Hiatt (also White), who wrote a piece in today’s paper that underscores what both Comey and Goldberg — and millions of other White Americans across the country — are unwilling or unable to see.
Hiatt’s column was an informal review of the new Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama, which opens later this week, and which features a stirring, disturbing outdoor memorial to the thousands of African Americans who were lynched in American towns and cities (both North and South).
The museum and memorial, Hiatt suggests, offer “an alternative, and overwhelmingly coherent, arc of the history of white supremacy” — a history that runs from the advent of slavery right up to and through the arrest of those two men at Starbucks. Until we as a country can confront the full weight of that history, says the Museum’s founder, Bryan Stevenson, we will never be able to transcend it.
In fact, in Stevenson’s view, the modern legacy of white supremacy is best seen in the inequities of our criminal-justice system. “Blacks were — and are — more likely to be suspended from school, denied parole and when freed from prison denied benefits, kept out of public housing, blocked from employment or professional licenses and, once again, prevented from voting,” Hiatt writes.
Are you listening, Mr. Comey?
Plainly, the color of one’s skin is still an arrestable offense in America, as we saw in Philly last week. So while it’s nice that Jonah Goldberg doesn’t want to be thought of as White, the reality is that we all inhabit a world that was built on these foundations, and in which those “thin abstractions” are all too real for too many of us. As Henry Louis Gates famously said, “I know race is an abstraction, but I still can’t catch a cab in New York City.”
In short, there are forces at play that benefit white people (#whiteprivilege), and forces that place black people at risk, and there always have been. “There was this hope that this race stuff would just evaporate over time,” explains Stevenson, “but it doesn’t work like that. It is a serious disease, and if we don’t treat it, it doesn’t get better. It doesn’t go away.
“We’re not doomed by this history. We’re not even defined by it. But we do have to face it.”
Did you see that Betsy Devos interview on 60 Minutes this weekend? Did you see that President Trump appointed her to chair a yearlong commission on school safety? Are you ready to gouge your own eyes out in apoplexy?
Over a year ago, a group of parents and students from Detroit tried to warn the rest of us about just how unqualified she was to lead America’s public school system. Last January, in fact, they traveled to Washington to raise their concerns at her confirmation hearing, and speak truth to power.
What happened instead was that they were silenced— literally shut out of the room where it happened. But 180 Studio was there, and what we captured on film raises vital questions about the state of our democracy.
What this story shows is the delicate, dialectical relationship between being powerful and powerless. What it reveals are the different levels of gamesmanship that go into decisions like who will ascend to the highest levels of influence. And what it tracks is a distinctly American play within a play — a story about the halls of power that takes place in an actual hallway.
We can do better. We must do better. Please share this video if you agree.
Is it possible for people to change the story we tell ourselves (and one another) about public education?
I spend a lot of time thinking about this question. And some recent studies all suggest that if the answer is ever going to be “yes,” we have some serious work to do.
Consider the work of cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, whose book The Enigma of Reason demonstrates why facts don’t change our minds. In study after study, they have shown people overwhelming evidence to refute a deeply held belief, and then watch as those same people “fail to make appropriate revisions in those beliefs.”
How does this play out in modern life? In Science Speak it’s known as the “illusion of explanatory depth,” which basically means that we all believe we know way more than we actually do. And what is it that allows us to persist in this belief? Other people, so much so that on almost any issue of significance, we can hardly tell where our own understanding ends and others’ begins.
So what does any of this have to do with changing the story about public education?
At first blush, nothing.
But when you start to think of the extent to which our public school system has been shared by a group of animals that are evolutionarily wired to reinforce the same way of thinking and feeling about things, you start to appreciate just how powerfully the memes we have about teaching and learning continue to shape, and hinder, our collective capacity to imagine new ways of addressing old problems or institutions.
Memes get talked about a lot these days as catchy GIF files on Instagram, but before they were that, they were the ideas or memories that get shared among people in a given culture. And because they’re so widely experienced — and so ubiquitous in the American public school system — memes are powerful obstacles to change.
As Geoffrey and Renate Caine make clear in their book Natural Learning for a Connected World: “Traditional education is driven by a powerful meme that keeps replicating itself. One simply has to imagine several people gathering to talk about education to recognize how powerfully the meme is embedded. Individuals will visualize desks and books and a teacher in the front of the classroom. Grades, tests, discipline, and hard work will bind together the beliefs that everyone automatically subscribes to. These beliefs linger as foundational ideas that are rarely, if ever, questioned.”
Because we have such a strong shared sense of what schooling is (and isn’t), even small-scale changes to the way we think about public education will be likely to spark large-scale resistance. And yet rarely, if ever, do you hear a discussion of memes make its way into the national debate about school reform. It’s the equivalent of trying to help a garden grow by removing all the visible weeds — and ignoring all the invisible root structures.
In other words, well-reasoned arguments for or against the educational benefits of (fill in the blank) are not the way forward, because they only represent one part of the picture. Far more influential are the social and emotional memories we bring to the idea of elementary school itself, or the level of individuality we ascribe to our own memories of high school, or the extent to which we fear the prospect of replacing something familiar with something unknown.
Consequently, when it comes to changing the story about public education, there is only one conclusion to draw from the research: We have met the enemy. And it is us.
At its best, nothing is more unifying and vital to a community’s civic health than a high-quality neighborhood school. Why, then, do all notions of “school choice” end up being about either charter or private schools?
Enter Oakland SOL, a new dual-immersion middle school in the Flatlands section of Oakland, California — and the district’s first new school in more than a decade.
Created over three years of hard work and careful planning by a motivated group of local parents and educators, Oakland SOL paints a different picture of school choice — one that is squarely grounded in the aspirations of the families and children who will comprise its community core.
To some, it’s a murky picture. After all, Oakland’s school district already has more schools than it can afford; it faces up to a $30 million budget shortfall. Yet when you consider that after fifth grade, one of every four students in the district leaves the system, Superintendent Kyla Johnson-Trammel is making a different sort of bet — one that will require districts to become more responsive to local needs and demands.
“If we can provide programs that help them make the choice to stay in our district, I actually do think that’s fiscally responsible,” said Katherine Carter, SOL’s founding principal. “It shows the district cares about creating quality experiences for our kids and our families.”
“This was really rooted in parent demand,” added Gloria Lee, president and chief executive of a local nonprofit that supports new public school options. “I hope it is the first and not the only example of a way the district can continue to evolve and create new innovative programs that serve the really diverse families in Oakland more effectively.”
For more than a century, the physical layout of American schools has been as consistent as any feature in American public life. Although the world around us has been in a constant state of flux, we have always been able to depend on a familiar set of symbols in our schools: neat, orderly rows of student desks; teachers delivering lessons to an entire group of children; lockers in the hallways; bell schedules — the list could go on.
But what if those timeworn structures of schooling are actually preventing us from modernizing education for a changing world? What if, in fact, the physical environment is — after parents and peers — the “third teacher” of our sons and daughters?
The latest short film in our multimedia story series about the future of learning, 180: Thrive provides a window into one school’s efforts to directly tackle those questions, and do so in a way that results in a deeper alignment between what we know about how people learn — actively, collaboratively, differently — and how our schools are physically structured. It is intended to spark useful broader thinking about the relationship between a school’s physical environment and its students’ emotional readiness to learn.
Of our fifty states, I can think of no other whose local history — for better and for worse — captures the essence of the larger American story.
In a sense, we are all Mississippians.
To wit, our next 180 story provides a glimpse of the systemic and generational impacts of racism, and how vital investment in education is to all residents — and to the entire state’s economy. We see this all through the eyes of local organizer (and Mississippi native) Albert Sykes, his 11-year-old son Aidan, mothers in Jackson Public Schools, a mayor, a school board member, and other community advocates. Part history, part vignette, and full of humanity, our hope is that Mississippi Rising will begin to connect the dots of who needs to be engaged to identify, understand, and create a bright future for Mississippi that involves the entire community.
The release of this video is timely. On September 14th of this year, the Mississippi State Board of Education recommended a state takeover of Jackson Public Schools. Governor Phil Bryant is considering the recommendation, while many of Jackson’s students, families, faith, and business leaders — along with the Mayor of Jackson and several school board members — believe they should be the ones to determine the future of Jackson Public Schools. They are asking the Governor to support local governance. Commenting on the Governor’s decision, says Albert Sykes, the Executive Director of IDEA, “The Governor – and even the State Board – may have the right concern, but a takeover of JPS is clearly the wrong policy.”
The Breadcrumbs: Additional vignettes and calls-to-action (CTAs)
#myJPS is a video featuring the student voices naming the future they want for Jackson Public Schools.
#OurJPS is the group leading local organizing efforts on the ground.
Must read: State takeovers of low-performing schools – a 2016 report from the Center for Popular Democracy examines the record of state takeovers of districts in three other states.
Additional background on the takeover being considered in Jackson and a petition that was created to stop the takeover by JPS School Board Member Jed Oppenheim – who is shown in Mississippi Rising.
Implicit bias doesn’t just play out in classrooms. The schools, states, and districts where a “takeover” approach to school change has been deployed are disproportionately attended by students of color. Here’s a podcast from the Communities for Just Schools Fund on implicit bias.
One year, early in my teaching career, I got reprimanded for giving too many “A’s.”
“You can’t give everyone the same grade,” I was instructed. “Give a few A’s and F’s, and a lot of B’s and C’s. Otherwise, everyone will know that your class is either too easy or too hard.”
This was unremarkable advice; indeed, it was as close to the educational Gospel as you could find. It was human nature in action.
And, apparently, it was completely wrong.
“We have all come to believe that the average is a reliable index of normality,” writes Todd Rose, a professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education and the author of The End of Average: How We Succeed in a World That Values Sameness. “We have also come to believe that an individual’s rank on narrow metrics of achievement can be used to judge their talent. These two ideas serve as the organizing principles behind our current system of education.”
And yet, Rose suggests, “when it comes to understanding individuals, the average is most likely to give incorrect and misleading results.”
In fact, the origins of what Rose calls “averagarian thinking” had nothing to do with people; they were adaptations of a core method in astronomy — the Method of Averages, in which you aggregate different measurements of the speed of an object to better determine its true value — that first got applied to the study of people in the early 19th century.
Since then, however, this misguided use of statistics — by definition, the mathematics of “static” values — has reduced the whims and caprices of human behavior to predictable patterns in ways that have proven almost impossible to resist.
Consider the ways it shaped the advice I got as a teacher, which was to let the Bell Curve, not the uniqueness of my students, be my guide. Or consider the ways it has shaped the entire system of American public education in the Industrial Era — an influence best summed up by one of its chief architects, Frederick Winslow Taylor, whose applications of scientific management to the classroom gave birth to everything from bells to age-based cohorts to the industrial efficiency of the typical school lunchroom. “In the past,” Taylor said, “the man was first. In the future, the system must be first.”
Uh, yeah. No.
Of course, anyone who is paying attention knows that the end of the Taylorian line of thinking is upon us — and Rose’s book is but one of the many factors that will expedite its demise. “We are on the brink of a new way of seeing the world,” he predicts, and “a change driven by one big idea: individuality matters.”
In systems thinking, there’s a word for this approach: equifinality — or the idea that in any multidimensional system that involves changes over time, there are always multiple pathways to get from point A to point B. And the good news is that this revolution in thinking is already underway – it’s not just evenly distributed.
The bad news is that most of us have no idea that a revolution is occurring. Instead, we are stuck in the familiar notion that most American schools are failing, that the problems are too big to tackle, and that our slow and steady decline into, well, averagarianism, is inexorable.
I am here to tell you this is not true.
We know more than we think we do.
We are further along than we think we are.
And so, in the coming months – approximately every ten days for the foreseeable future – expect a new story that is about solutions, possibility, and the people and communities whose work is lighting that new path.
Of course, we know he won’t — but that doesn’t mean the rest of us shouldn’t brush up on the actual history of the Pledge, and the actual meaning of the flag. When we do, there can be no room for alternative facts — only a history that, based on how we define patriotism, either puts us on the side of some courageous young schoolchildren of a generation ago, or on the side of totalitarianism. . .
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Billy Gobitas knew that refusing to salute the flag in his fifth-grade classroom could result in expulsion from school, loss of friends, and even persecution in his hometown of Minersville, Pennsylvania. But on October 22, 1935, he did it anyway. “I do not salute the flag,” he later wrote to the school board, “because I have promised to do the will of God.” The next day, twelve-year-old Lillian Gobitas followed her brother’s lead and also refused to salute the flag. “This wasn’t something my parents forced on us,” she later explained. “I did a lot of reading and checking in the Bible and I really took my own stand.”
The Gobitas children were not alone. Other members of their church — Jehovah’s Witnesses — faced the same dilemma in school districts throughout the nation where saluting the flag was compulsory. As Billy explained in his letter, Witnesses believe that a flag salute is a form of idolatry, violating the biblical injunction not to “make unto thee any graven image, nor bow down to them.”
Two years earlier, in 1933, Adolf Hitler had banned the Witnesses in Nazi Germany for, among other things, refusing to give the Fascist salute in schools and at public events. Over the next decade, more than ten thousand Witnesses were imprisoned in concentration camps. These events in Nazi Germany led the leader of the American Witnesses, Joseph Rutherford, to denounce compulsory flag salutes in a speech delivered in 1935. Witnesses, he said, “do not ‘Heil Hitler’ nor any other creature.” Rutherford’s speech inspired the Gobitas family and other Witnesses to refuse to participate in the flag ceremony in the name of religious liberty.
The Witnesses’ objections to the flag salute failed to impress the members of the Minersville school board. In their view, the Pledge of Allegiance helped fulfill the public schools’ mission to instill “love of country.” They saw failure to salute the flag as insubordinate and unpatriotic. Most people in mostly Roman Catholic Minersville were equally unsympathetic with the unpopular Jehovah’s Witnesses. Consequently, Billy and Lillian Gobitas were expelled from school.
Eighteen months later, the children’s father, Walter Gobitas, filed suit. With the help of the Watch Tower Society of the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the American Civil Liberties Union, Gobitas argued that the Minersville school board had deprived Billy and Lillian of their right to freedom of religion and speech under the First Amendment. The Gobitas family won in the federal district court in Philadelphia and won again in the U.S. Court of Appeals. Both courts dismissed the school board’s contention that refusal by schoolchildren to salute the flag on religious grounds was a danger to the nation. On the contrary, the judges said, Lillian and William Gobitas were exercising the very “liberty of conscience” that was sought by many of our ancestors when they first came to the New World.
The Minersville school board appealed the case to the U.S. Supreme Court. Minersville v. Gobitis was decided on June 3, 1940. (Due to a printer’s error, the Gobitas family name is misspelled in legal records.) By an eight-to-one vote, the Court reversed the lower courts and ruled that the government had the authority to compel students to participate in the flag salute. Writing for the majority — and against the backdrop of an impending world war — Justice Felix Frankfurter pointed to the need for “a common feeling for the common country.” The flag, he argued, “is the symbol of our national unity, transcending all internal differences, however large, within the framework of the Constitution.” Justice Harlan Stone was the lone voice of dissent. The very essence of liberty, he wrote, “is the freedom of the individual from compulsion as to what he shall think and what he shall say, at least where the compulsion is to bear false witness to his religion.”
The Gobitis decision had an immediate and devastating impact on Jehovah’s Witnesses in the United States. Within weeks of the Court’s ruling, hundreds of attacks on Witnesses were reported to the Department of Justice. Mobs, sometimes assisted by police, attacked and humiliated Witnesses across the nation. “In the two years following the Gobitis decision,” federal officials wrote, “the files of the Department of Justice reflect an uninterrupted record of violence and persecution of the Witnesses. Almost without exception, the flag and the flag salute can be found as the percussion cap that sets off these acts.”
Disturbed by the violence, three justices began to rethink their vote in Gobitis. When told by Justice William O. Douglas that Justice Hugo Black had changed his mind, Frankfurter asked, “Has Hugo been re-reading the Constitution during the summer?” Douglas replied, “No, he has been reading the papers.”
In 1943, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear another flag-salute case, West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette — this time with three changed votes and two new justices. The case involved children of three Jehovah’s Witnesses in Charleston, West Virginia. Walter Barnette, Lucy McClure, and Paul Stull had been expelled from school for refusing to salute the flag.
This time, by a vote of six to three, the Court struck down the West Virginia flag-salute law, overruling the Gobitis decision. In one of the most eloquent and powerful decisions in Supreme Court history, Justice Robert Jackson cited examples from history of repressive government efforts to enforce national unity:
“The ultimate futility of such attempts to compel coherence is the lesson of every such effort from the Roman drive to stamp out Christianity as a disturber of pagan unity, the Inquisition, as a means to religious and dynastic unity, the Siberian exiles as a means to Russian unity, down to the fast failing efforts of our present totalitarian enemies. Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.”
The First Amendment, Jackson argued, was designed to avoid such tyranny by denying government the power over basic freedoms:
“The very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts. One’s right to life, liberty, and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly, and other fundamental rights may not be submitted to vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections.”
The American flag, Jackson reminded the nation, stands for freedom — including the freedom to dissent. And to deny people their inalienable rights is to deny the very meaning of the First Amendment:
“If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein. If there are any circumstances which permit an exception, they do not now occur to us.”
The U.S. Supreme Court announced its decision in Barnette on June 14, 1943 — Flag Day. Soon thereafter, attacks on Jehovah’s Witnesses ceased.
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Postscript: For an understanding of what today’s debate is really about, take 30 seconds to hear directly from San Francisco 49ers safety Eric Reid. This is what patriotism looks like — courageous, uncomfortable, informed, principled.
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