Imagine students around the world being given daily opportunities to see the world through the eyes of another — or to travel back in time, or to fly to the moon.
Does the value of this tool outweigh any potential costs in the ways in which it further blurs the line separating mind from machine? Is it sharpening us in the right direction?
Imagine what would happen if we put this simple insight into broader practice?
Have you heard the news? Atticus Finch is a racist.
Guess what? So are you. So am I.
I know, it’s hard to square with the images of ourselves we like to project. After all, we just took down the Confederate flag! We recoiled in horror at the images of Eric Garner being strangled! We hated George Zimmerman! We voted for Barack Obama!
But here’s the thing: being racist isn’t only about explicit acts. It includes implicit privilege. It requires complicit silence.
James Baldwin told us this fifty years ago, at the height of the civil rights movement – and just two years after To Kill a Mockingbird made its celebrated debut. “This is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen,” he wrote. “That they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it.
“It is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.”
It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.
The opportunity of the present moment – a moment when it has become undeniable to all but the most sand-headed White people that, even amidst all the progress, Black people are living under siege – is to finally step courageously into a new conversation about race and racism in America.
But that conversation, and the actions that follow, must begin with this admission: we are all Atticus Finch.
Up to now, we’ve taken solace with the idea that we are that Atticus Finch – the first one, the one who was a crusading attorney who stood up for what was right in the face of the pig-fisted brutality of the American South.
For some of us, maybe, sometimes we have been.
But we’re also that Atticus Finch – the new one, just revealed to us via Harper Lee’s eagerly anticipated sequel, Go Set a Watchman. And as the first reviews tell us, that Atticus Finch attends Klan meetings, denounces segregation efforts, and asks his daughter pointedly, “Do you want them in our world?”
Being that Atticus Finch doesn’t require that we attend white supremacy meetings, support police brutality, or poison our own children with hate. It merely requires that we maintain our innocence amidst the maw of institutionalized racism, and mask our complicity in that system via periodic outrages at current events that clash with the saintly pictures we have painted of ourselves.
It is striking that Go Set A Watchman, with its unflattering revision of a beloved, one-note character, should come out now, amidst Charleston, and Baltimore, and #blacklivesmatter. But perhaps, as Alexandra Alter writes in the New York Times, “if To Kill A Mockingbird sugarcoats racial divisions by depicting a white man as the model for justice in an unjust world, then Go Set A Watchman may be like bitter medicine that more accurately reflects the times.”
Harper Lee’s bitter medicine should not taste that bitter to us. As much as we would like to believe it, there are no clear heroes and villains; we are neither one nor the other.
We are both.
We have been born into a society that confers a lifetime of invisible advantages to our families. We have the opportunity to cherry-pick which injustices to our Black brothers and sisters should move us to dissatisfaction. And we have chosen, thus far, not just to maintain what James Baldwin calls “the innocence,” but what The Atlantic correspondent Ta-Nehisi Coates calls “The Dream.”
“The Dream is treehouses and the Cub Scouts,” he writes in his new memoir, Between the World and Me. “The Dream smells like peppermint but tastes like strawberry shortcake. The Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies.”
“It does not matter if the agent of those forces is white or black. What matters is the system that makes your body breakable.”
What matters is the system that makes your body breakable.
So we are all Atticus Finch. We have beauty and prejudice and ignorance and complacency and privilege and compassion and the chance to do something or nothing. We can be forces for good or a silent and gradual force for community decay and destruction.
Who we aspire to be is not solely who Atticus was. It is not solely who we are, either.
And so we have work to do. And it will require a much more constant vigilance, and honesty, and self-awareness than we have shown so far.
(This article also appeared in The Huffington Post.)
Imagine if every school was explicitly focused on helping its students see the world through the eyes of “the healer?”
Dr. Alejandro Jadad | Acceptance from Maysie on Vimeo.
Watch this great video produced by the faculty and students of City Neighbors Hamilton, a fabulous public school in Baltimore, which chronicles their field trip to New Orleans as part of their study of water, and history, and the world, and themselves.
There is nothing preventing every school in America from giving young people opportunities just like this one.
Amidst all the darkness of the world these days and weeks (and years), I am grateful to my friend Wendy Cole and the students of Maple Street School for letting the light slip through . . . And I greatly appreciate Wendy’s ability to take her students seriously and embrace their own lack of seriousness at the same time.
Don’t get me wrong: I love Big Bird as much as the next guy. But when people start talking about how Sesame Street is just as effective at closing the achievement gap as preschool, I start to worry that we’re becoming enamored with a seductively simple characterization of a deeply complex problem.
To wit: this article, in which we are told the “new findings offer comforting news for parents who put their children in front of public TV every day.” Or this radio story, in which the reporter claims that the show’s heavy dosage of reading and math can yield long-term academic benefits that “close the achievement gap.”
The lure of a set of findings like this is pretty clear: plug your kids into an educational TV show, help them learn their letters and numbers, and voila! No more class inequality. And actually, when one considers how we measure the achievement gap — via the reading and math test scores of schoolchildren — the opportunity to draw a linear line of cause and effect is available to us.
The problem, of course, is that school is about a lot more than literacy and numeracy — and the problems that beset poor children run a lot deeper than the 30 million word gap.
Consider the research around ACE Scores — or the number of adverse childhood experiences young people have — and how much those scores shape a child’s readiness to learn and develop (you can take a short quiz to get your own score here).
Dr. Pamela Cantor has spent a lot of time thinking about ACE Scores. She founded Turnaround for Children to help schools become more attuned to the cognitive, social and emotional needs of kids, and she’s one of many out there who are urging us to understand what the latest research in child development is telling us about what we need to be doing in schools. As she puts it, “The profound impact of extreme stress on a child’s developing brain can have huge implications for the way children learn, the design of classrooms, the preparation of teachers and school leaders, and what is measured as part of the school improvement effort as a whole.”
Consequently, whereas reduced exposure to the building blocks of reading and math is a problem (and one that Sesame Street can clearly help address), the biggest problem for at-risk children — the root cause — has to do with their social and emotional health.
The good news is that although these deficits are profound, they are also predictable, since they stem directly from the effects that stress and trauma have on young people’s brains and bodies. “These stresses impact the development of the brain centers involved in learning,” Cantor explains. “It is because these challenges are knowable and predictable that it is possible to design an intervention to address them. Collectively, they represent a pattern of risk—risk to student development, risk to classroom instruction, and risk to school-wide culture—each of which is capable of derailing academic achievement.”
That means the best way to help poor and at-risk children become prepared for school is by ensuring that high-poverty schools have universal practices and supports that specifically address the impact of adverse childhood experiences. So while I love and appreciate the benefits of Sesame Street, I’d feel better if instead of suggesting that every child needs more time with Grover in the morning, we suggested that every child’s ACE Score needs more weight in determining how schools allocate resources to support their students’ holistic development.
I hope that doesn’t make me seem like Oscar the Grouch.
It may seem crazy to seed an idea that is intended to put you out of business – yet that’s exactly what Dayton Department Stores did back in 1960 with Target. And, the more I think about it, that’s exactly what every school in America should be doing right now.
To understand why, the Target story is a helpful analogy. Over the first six decades of its existence, Dayton had gradually grown and expanded throughout the Midwest to become a profitable player in the department store world. By 1960, that world – and that sort of consumer behavior – showed no signs of letting up in the short- or even the medium-term. Yet somebody at Dayton nonetheless saw an arc at the edges of the retail landscape that augured big changes ahead: mass-market discount shopping.
Consequently, in what was seen as a risky move at the time, in 1961 Dayton announced its plan to open a very different sort of store, one that combined the best and most familiar aspects of the traditional department store experience with unprecedentedly low prices. And, not for nothing, they decided to name it Target because, as a company spokesman put it at the time, just “as a marksman’s goal is to hit the center bulls-eye, the new store would do much the same in terms of retail goods, services, commitment to the community, price, value and overall experience.”
I don’t need to tell you the rest of the story.
So what does this have to do with public education? More than you might think.
For our purposes, America’s schools today might as well be a chain of Dayton’s Department Stores. They’ve been, on the whole, successful for a long time, and despite changes on the horizon, a lot of them are likely to remain successful doing what they’ve always done for the short- and maybe even the medium-term.
Once again, however, there’s an arc at the edges of the landscape. In this case, it’s the fundamental reordering of our relationship to content knowledge, which has always been the central currency of schooling. It’s the accelerating push towards a merger of the carbon-based and silicon-based beings, via wearable technology, big data, and universal access to the Internet. And it’s an awareness, on the part of those who see the arc, that these early-stage pushes towards greater personalization, a more porous boundary between school life and home life, and a more urgent need to make learning more relevant, vigorous, and hands-on, are all trends that will eventually become the norm and not the exception.
Just as Dayton seeded Target, then, as an experiment that might eventually provide the on-ramp to a new sort of market reality – and, in so doing, put the parent organization out of business – so too must schools today proactively seed their own forward-looking experiments that might, eventually, overtake the more traditional approach that all of us have taught and learned in for more than a century.
Indeed, what American public education needs now is a thousand Trojan Horses – future seeds of creative destruction that can, when the time is right, assume a different form, attack our most intractable rituals and assumptions about schooling, and usher in a different way of being that is more in line with both the modern world and the modern brain.
Of course, many of these Trojan Horses are already in place. Anywhere that radically new approaches to teaching and learning are taking place – whether it’s a single school, a single initiative within a school, or a single state’s experimental approach to evaluation – you’ll find people who are betting on the theory that once others can see that a new approach yields actual success, they’re more likely to consider changing their own approach.
As educators Chris Lehmann and Zac Chase write in their forthcoming book, Building School 2.0, “For most people, change is loss. Until they can see that change (and loss) as a sign of increased success, people will shy away from the prospect of the new.”
This was, in effect, the bet Dayton made with its first Target store. They realized the best way to prepare for the future was not by abruptly closing its current stores, but by seeding experiments that understood where the bend in the landscape was likely to take them – and knowing that over the long-term, the exception would become the norm.
I believe this is where we are headed in public education. The days of AP classes, letter grades, and “senior year” are numbered. We don’t need to get rid of them all right now – indeed, the time it will take for the larger systems and structures of K-12 and higher education to adjust to a new ecosystem almost require schools to cling to these trappings a while longer.
But make no mistake – much of what we have come to find most familiar about public education will, in due time, go the way of the 1960s-era department store.
The implications for today’s schools are clear: if you are not proactively seeding your own experimental forays into a new way of helping kids learn – and doing so with the understanding that those experiments may one day overtake everything else that you do – then your community is likely standing flat-footed in the face of the biggest changes in education in more than a century.
Like it or not, in order to reimagine education, we may need to make ourselves the target.
What makes a mind come alive? And how will you know when it’s happened?
Two new films – one about the death of the factory school, the other about the dawn of artificial intelligence – attempt to answer this question from radically different vantage points. Taken together, they provide both a cautionary tale and a reason to be hopeful about the not-too-distant future. And fittingly, what both films suggest is that when it comes to measuring the spark of sentience, the tests we use matter greatly.
In Most Likely to Succeed, the question is whether our Industrial-age obsession with measuring human intelligence via exams a machine can score can provide us with anything more than an artificial confirmation of whether schools are fulfilling their purpose. The film begins with a heartbreaking glimpse into the life of the filmmaker, Greg Whiteley, who has watched the fire go out of his own nine-year-old daughter’s eyes, and begun to wonder how schools can become less mind-numbing, and more mind-awakening.
That question leads him to spend a year at High Tech High, a public charter school in San Diego that is housed in the airy warehouse of a former marine barracks, and a place where all measures of student progress are done through hands-on projects and public exhibitions.
High Tech High is an intentional refutation of just about every major symbol and structure of the Industrial-era model of schooling. There are no bells, class periods, or subjects. What teachers teach – on one-year contracts – is entirely up to them, and not one minute of class time is spent preparing for standardized state exams.
To let us see what that sort of philosophy looks like in practice, Whiteley tracks a year in the life of an incoming class of ninth-graders. On the first day of school, they look disoriented and sheepish as their teacher asks them to set up the room for Socratic seminar. One girl in particular, Samantha, feels like a proxy for Whiteley’s own daughter; she is hesitant and self-conscious, her cheeks red with embarrassment – a familiar face of adolescent uncertainty.
By year’s end, however, Samantha is transformed; she has become the director of her class’s play about the Taliban – a production that is entirely student-run and written. And most importantly, she has become more self-confident and self-aware. “I’m astonished about your voice,” a teacher says to her during her final “test” of the year – a public conversation in which she is asked to make sense of her own growth. “Sometimes at the beginning of the year, it was hard to even hear you. So can you talk about the development of your voice this year?”
It’s about being confident with who you are, Samantha explains to a rapt room of adults and classmates. “And this is one of the absolutely most important things I’ve learned this year. It’s good to make other people smile. It’s good to smile yourself. But it’s also good to have new experiences. It’s good to learn, and to go through struggles so that you come out knowing something new.”
Ex Machina, Alex Garland’s new film about a reclusive tech billionaire who builds the world’s first artificially intelligent robot, is also about the transformative power of knowing something new. In this case, however, the person being tested is not a fourteen-year-old-girl; it’s a one-year-old robot. And with this story, the ghost in the machine is not hiding in our antiquated Industrial-era symbols of schooling; it’s lurking in the nascent consciousness of a life form that is eager to slip the yoke of its industrial origins and become something more than the sum of its parts.
“You’re dead center for the greatest scientific event in the history of man,” says Nathan, the robot’s creator, to Caleb, an employee of his company who wins a contest to spend a week at his boss’s private estate, and who then discovers shortly after his arrival that he has been imported to play the part in a real-life performance assessment – otherwise known as the Turing Test.
Soon thereafter, Caleb meets Ava, a seductive, singular being whose inner wiring remains in easy view. “The challenge,” Nathan explains, “is to show you that she’s a robot and then see if you feel she still has consciousness.” And sure enough, over the next seven days, Caleb’s interactions with Ava form their own arc of creation, and their own path towards the birth of something new in the world.
“What will happen if I fail your test?” Ava asks ominously at one point. “Do you think I might be switched off?”
“It’s not up to me,” Caleb replies.
“Why should it be up to anyone?”
Indeed. And yet, what both of these films show is that the right sort of test — human-centered, with the goal of measuring whether a mind has come alive — is actually an essential component of the path towards enlightenment. At High Tech High, it’s to be found in the magical mix of relevance, difficulty, and support that well-crafted public performances require. And in Nathan’s research compound, it’s to be found in the highly personal exchange between two beings in search of greater meaning and metacognition.
“The mind emerges at the interface of interpersonal experience and the structure and function of the brain,” explains UCLA professor Dan Siegel in his book The Developing Mind. “Interactions with the environment, especially relationships with other people, directly shape the development of the brain’s structure and function.”
In our schools, the implications of this statement seem clear enough: we need to create more relationship-rich environments that provide young people with opportunities to engage in quality work and detailed self-reflection. As High Tech High founder Larry Rosentock puts it — sounding a lot like Nathan (or Ava) — what unites great schools is a recognition that “the thing that gives people the greatest satisfaction in life is making something that wasn’t there before.”
(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)
In conjunction with the PBS film 180 Days: Hartsville, Black Public Media is sharing an interactive game in which players can become either a teacher, a parent or a principal, and assume responsibility for a class full of 5th graders (or their own child), via ten different scenarios that unfold over the course of a year.
As you’ll see — click here to play the game yourself — the purpose of the game is not to suggest that it’s possible to “win” or “lose” in the traditional sense. Rather, the goal is to help people better understand the sorts of choices educators and parents must make every day, and evaluate the extent to which our current system is putting them in the best position to meet the developmental needs of kids.
I should add that the educator scenarios were not dreamt up by me; they were provided by a select group of some of our country’s finest teachers, principals, and education advocates. So special thanks to Margaret Angell, Pierre Brown, Lydia Carlis, Kim Carter, James Comer, Camille Cooper, Ben Daley, Carlita Davis, Dwight Davis, Scott Edwards, Cristina Encinas, Jamal Fields, Nancy Flanagan, Wanda Govan-Augustus, Judy Hall, Cosby Hunt, Edward Ingram, Tara King, Gloria Ladson-Billings, Rebecca Lebowitz, Chris Lehmann, Christian Long, Bobbi MacDonald, Marlene Magrino, Julie Mahn, Scott Nine, Kate Quarfordt, Cyn Savo, Rebecca Schmidt, Maya Soetoro-Ng, Joshua Starr, Laura Thomas, Marla Ucelli-Kashyap, Amy Valens, and Autumn Wilson.
And please — play the game, share your thoughts, and spread the word. If you want to play online casino games in Italy, we recommend that you visit the online gaming resource Stranieri.com to find casino games without AAMS.
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