Author: Sam

I write books and talk about stuff.

When it comes to the free-speech rights of teachers, the joke’s still on us

Posted on | by Sam

The good news is that Republican lawmakers in Arizona are now retreating from their recent proposal to require teachers to limit their speech to words that comply with FCC regulations on what can be said on TV or radio — a half-baked idea rightly characterized by one critic as the “most hilariously unconstitutional piece of legislation that I’ve seen in quite some time.”

The bad news is that, Arizona’s foolishness aside, when it comes to the free-speech rights of teachers, or any other public employee, the joke is on us.

The dark days began back in 2006, when a closely divided U.S. Supreme Court handed down a 5-4 ruling in the case Garcetti v. Ceballos. Up to that point, courts had always looked for two things when evaluating a public employee’s free-speech claims: first, whether the person was speaking out on a matter of public concern, and not just some personal grievance; and second, what the proper balance was between the individual’s right to free expression and the employer’s interest in ensuring an efficient, disruption-free workplace.
The legal precedent for this test stemmed from a 1968 Supreme Court case in which a public school teacher had been fired for writing a letter to his local paper in which he criticized budgetary decisions by the local school board. A lower court upheld the school’s decision to fire the teacher, but the highest court in the land reversed. Writing for the Court, Justice Thurgood Marshall was clear: “Absent proof of false statements knowingly or recklessly made by him, a teacher’s exercise of his right to speak on issues of public importance may not furnish the basis for his dismissal from public employment.”
Then came Garcetti in 2006, a case that began when an assistant district attorney from Los Angeles, Richard Ceballos, wrote a memorandum criticizing the failure of his office to dismiss a case that was marred by false testimony. Ceballos no doubt felt comfortable that his actions would be protected under the existing standard for public employee speech, and, sure enough, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld his right to blow the whistle on his superiors. But five Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court disagreed, resulting in not just a dramatic turn of events for Richard Ceballos, but a new categorical exclusion for official, job-related employee speech.
As First Amendment Center scholar David Hudson explains, “The Garcetti decision caused a sea change in public-employee First Amendment jurisprudence, as many employees who speak out on important issues or blow the whistle on corruption no longer have a constitutional claim.”
Sure enough, since 2006 it has become increasingly difficult for public employees to speak out on matters of public concern that relate to their official duties. As Hudson explains, “After Garcetti, the importance of the information is not relevant. Many employees have spoken out on matters of public concern – even rank corruption in the workplace – but if the speech can be classified as official, job-duty speech they have no First Amendment protection.” Hudson says this new climate has led to a new term lawyers use to describe their clients who still seek First Amendment protection. Instead of getting justice, they get “Garcettized.”
So let’s enjoy a short laugh at the foolishness and the poorly-constructed effort of Arizona’s lawmakers to muzzle their state’s public school teachers. And then let’s remember that a more carefully constructed bill may not be as outlandish, and unlikely, as we think.
(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)

Require kids to stay in school? Not so fast…

Posted on | by Sam | 4 Comments on Require kids to stay in school? Not so fast…

Anytime you hear government officials mandating new behaviors to a broad swath of the population, that mandate is likely to run afoul of the First Amendment. And so it is with President Obama’s announcement last night that all states must “require that all students stay in high school until they graduate or turn 18.”

Although Mr. Obama made other pronouncements about education — see Dana Goldstein’s good summary analysis in The Nation — the stay-in-school mandate was the one that caught my ear, since enforcing it would run afoul of both the United States Supreme Court and our historic commitment to religious liberty.

The case that established the precedent originated in Wisconsin, where a group of Amish families were convicted of violating the state’s school attendance law by withdrawing their children after they graduated from the eighth grade (the law required kids to stay in school until they turned 16). In the place of further formal schooling, the Amish children were expected to begin vocational apprenticeships in their communities that would better prepare them for the particulars of Amish life (and shield them from the vagaries of high school, which their parents felt would endanger their eventual salvation in the eyes of God).

The Wisconsin Supreme Court upheld the rights of the Amish families, a ruling the U.S. Supreme Court then affirmed. As Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote, “There is no doubt as to the power of a State, having a high responsibility for education of its citizens, to impose reasonable regulations for the control and duration of basic education. . . [But] however strong the State’s interest in universal compulsory education, it is by no means absolute to the exclusion or subordination of all other interests.”

I would imagine that Obama’s logic for the new mandate mirrors the logic that drove Wisconsin’s state officials, who advanced two arguments in support of their compulsory-education law. Referencing the writings of Thomas Jefferson, they pointed out how essential some degree of education is toward preparing citizens to “participate effectively and intelligently in our open political system if we are to preserve freedom and independence.” And they noted that education “prepares individuals to be self-reliant and self-sufficient participants in society.”

The Court accepted the merit of both assumptions — and saw a limit to the logic. “When Thomas Jefferson emphasized the need for education as a bulwark of a free people against tyranny,” Burger wrote, “there is nothing to indicate he had in mind compulsory education through any fixed age beyond a basic education. . . . The fundamental theory of liberty upon which all governments in this Union repose excludes any general power of the State to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only. The child is not the mere creature of the State; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations.”

Consequently, the likelihood that this idea goes beyond last night’s speech is almost nil.  But the bigger issue is our willingness to accept such a simplistic notion about how to solve our school’s dropout crisis. Although there are myriad reasons why young people drop out of school, many do so because they feel uninspired and unengaged. If we begin with that basic fact, the real crime is less that so many children are dropping out, and more that so many of our schools are failing to ignite their students’ passion for learning or adequately prepare them for the world they will enter as adults.

The president’s proposal is therefore merely the latest example of our tendency to craft policies that address the symptom, and ignore the root. And that’s not change I can believe in.

Other People’s Children

Posted on | by Sam | 3 Comments on Other People’s Children

Last week, CNN reported on recent events in Garfield Heights, Ohio, where austerity measures have led local school officials to shorten the schoolday to five hours, get rid of subjects like art, music, and PE — and send kids home before lunch.

What didn’t come out during the piece was that these drastic decisions were fueled in part by the community’s refusal, over a 20 year period, to pass a levy that would help support the schools. Like many places across the country, Garfield Heights’ residents were getting older, its younger people were moving away, and those that remained didn’t see sufficient value in a measure that would be used to support the education of other people’s children.

In this way, the events in Garfield Heights are a poignant window into a larger issue about what we value, and don’t value, in modern American society. And the reality is that despite our historic commitments to both liberty and equality, American education policy reflects our willingness to honor liberty at the expense of equality.

It wasn’t that long ago that four U.S. Supreme Court justices believed the way we finance public education in this country was unconstitutional. Five of their colleagues disagreed, however, leading Justice Thurgood Marshall to speak forcefully in dissent. “The majority’s holding,” he wrote, “can only be seen as a retreat from our historic commitment to equality of educational opportunity and as unsupportable acquiescence in a system which deprives children in their earliest years of the chance to reach their full potential as citizens.”

Marshall and his colleagues had been asked to rule on the funding policy of Texas, in which, like so many other places, the wealthier the community was, the more resources it had to provide for its schools. A group of poor Texas parents brought suit, claiming that the policy of relying on property taxes to fund schools was an unconstitutional violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. Speaking for the narrow majority, Justice Potter Stewart disagreed, despite conceding that the Texas school system “can fairly be described as chaotic and unjust. . . . [But] it does not follow,” Potter continued, “that this system violates the Constitution.”

Marshall was incredulous. “The Court concludes that public education is not constitutionally guaranteed,” he wrote, even though “no other state function is so uniformly recognized as an essential element of our society’s well being.”

Marshall’s central point was simple: without equal access to a high-quality public education, democracy doesn’t work. “Education directly affects the ability of a child to exercise his First Amendment rights,” he explained. “Education prepares individuals to be self-reliant and self-sufficient participants in society. Both facets of this observation are suggestive of the substantial relationship which education bears to guarantees of our Constitution.”

Indeed, public education is our surest form of “national security.” It provides the most likely path out of poverty, helps prepare young people to be successful workers and citizens, and reminds us all of who, on our best days, we aspire to be. And yet the reality is we continue to tolerate a system in which your zip code determines your access to the American Dream, and in which communities refuse to fund their schools because “their” children no longer go there.

We can do better. But first we need to correct the error the Court made in 1973. We need to admit that the way we fund public education in this country is unconstitutional, and we need to craft a new system that funds schools equitably.

Should Schools be More or Less Democratic?

Posted on | by Sam | 5 Comments on Should Schools be More or Less Democratic?

Like most parents of a young child, I’m trying to decide which environment will be the best for my son when he enters a public school for the first time next fall. At nearly every open house my wife and I attend, cheerful administrators and educators tout the advantage of being a “participatory” school, and of “giving children the opportunity to learn and work in groups.” Send your child here, they tell us, and he’ll acquire a core set of democratic skills – from working collaboratively to acting empathetically – that will help him successfully negotiate our increasingly interconnected global community.

Sounds great, I say – until I open my Sunday New York Times and read a cover story warning against the rise of a new type of groupthink. “Most of us now work in teams,” writes author Susan Cain, “in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in. But there’s a problem with this view. Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption.”

Whom should we trust? Have we overvalued democratic skills like collaboration and shared decision-making to our own detriment? And, in the end, should our schools be more or less democratic?

The answer, of course, depends on which values and behaviors we associate with that word – democratic. And the reality is that too often, too many of us – from local educators to federal policymakers – define it in a way that limits our collective capacity to understand what a healthy, high-functioning learning community really looks like, and requires.

In many schools, “democracy” is a subject students study in social studies, or via a special add-on program, or, if your school still has such a thing, in civics class. It’s something schools and districts seek separate grant money to support. And it’s something that, in the end, you learn about – whether it’s the three branches of government or the legislative process or the twenty-seven Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. Call it “Democracy via Content.”

In other schools, the word stands for something very different – a philosophy of human interaction that guides how adult decisions are made and how students interact with each other. In these places, what matters most is how the classroom itself is structured (or unstructured), and the messiness of the approach becomes the central message about what it all means. Call it “Democracy via Process.”

Problems arise whenever we overvalue either approach. In an environment where democracy is seen solely as a subject, children memorize their rights but never practice them. And in a classroom where democracy is seen primarily as a process, children sit in circles or work in teams – regardless of whether or not those methods are helping them learn more effectively.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan underscored this point at a recent White House forum. “The goals of traditional civic education – to increase civic knowledge, voter participation, and volunteerism– are all still fundamental,” he asserted. “But the new generation of civic learning puts students at the center. It includes both learning and practice — not just rote memorization of names, dates, and processes.” Harvard’s Tony Wagner agrees, noting that there is a “happy convergence between the skills most needed in the global knowledge economy and those most needed to keep our democracy safe and vibrant.”

In a healthy school, educators know which skills – from collaboration to self-direction – their students must develop to be successful as adults, and which combination of content and processes will get them there. Some days, that might mean working in groups; other days, it might mean listening to an old-fashioned lecture. And every day, it means school leaders are aware of the paradoxical human impulse at the center of any democratic society – a point Ms. Cain makes in her Times article. “Most humans have two contradictory impulses,” she writes. “We love and need one another, yet we crave privacy and autonomy.”

A democratic learning environment honors both needs. That’s why from now on, the first thing I’ll ask at the open house is if the school understands which specific skills it wants to cultivate in its students, and why. I’ll ask which processes the teachers will use to engage kids in their own learning, and why. And when I find a school with clear answers and a clear plan for developing both “choice and voice,” I’ll know where to send my son.

To praise or not to praise

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on To praise or not to praise

What’s the best way to support the overall learning and growth of children — via a healthy doze of generalized praise, or with a strict diet of precise, targeted feedback that helps children see their own work more objectively?

That’s the question posed in a recent article in the Washington Post, and based on the reaction it’s receiving — hundreds of emotionally-charged comments on either side of the debate — it’s clear that the issue of when, and how, to deliver feedback to children is a serious hot-button issue for parents and educators.

The question of feedback is vital, however, in ways that go beyond individual classrooms and students; indeed, some of the Obama administration’s primary proposals for K-12 education reform are based on the assumption that extrinsic motivators are a particularly valuable form of feedback — performance pay for teachers, for example.

Is this a viable strategy to pursue? What exactly is the debate between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation when it comes to individual performance, and how should those arguments be shaping the way we think about everything from drafting federal policies to finding the best school for our children?

To unpack that a bit, here are two previous pieces of writing about the subject — the first describes a live debate between educators on the subject; and the second summarizes the recent research and offers some suggested next steps. See what you think — and please share your thoughts and reactions publicly.

Epicenter

Posted on | by Sam

Here, in Léogâne, halfway between Port-au-Prince and the epicenter of the 2010 earthquake that unleashed Haiti’s latest round of devastation, death and hardship, Doug Taylor is building houses.

An Indiana native in his 25th year of working for Habitat for Humanity, Taylor is tanned, serious and unshaven, with sandy straight hair that hangs as though it has been weighted down with stones. On a sunny day in December 2011, Taylor greets a visitor before 155 brand-new homes, all arranged in orderly rows, all built to a uniform size and shape, and all painted bright colors of pink, blue or green – a Haitian Levittown.

By the end of 2012, Taylor and his colleagues – a mixture of fellow Habitat employees, local builders, and members of the families that will eventually be moving in – will have built 500 houses on a patch of land which, like much of the surrounding area, forms a flat basin ringed by rugged mountains.

Surveying the site, including one house bearing former president Jimmy Carter’s signature – just a month earlier, he and his wife Rosalynn were part of a volunteer force that erected more than 100 homes in a week – Taylor feels both satisfied and uncertain. “This project is unlike anything I’ve ever been a part of,” he explains. “Most of our work involves building single homes for families that are professionally employed – a way of anchoring those professions and communities. Here we’re building for families that live on less than 50 cents a day. And 500 homes is a small town. There are a lot of grand visions – a health clinic, a couple of schools, and supposedly Nike is committed to doing a recreational field. We’ve got parks space, green space, but at this point those are just suggestions from the community’s input. We don’t yet have the partners to do all of that. And anyway, the biggest problems in a project like this are the ones we don’t usually have to face – how will this community make decisions? How will safety be secured? Where will the jobs and the food and the transportation come from – and what will unite these families in common cause?”

As he speaks, a stout dark-skinned woman named Mari approaches from behind and envelops Taylor in a surprise hug.  He turns to greet her, and she smiles widely from underneath the brim of her large black bonnet. “THIS is my house,” she says, before asking that a visitor take her photograph. She poses for the camera, leaning against the broom she was using to clean sawdust off her small porch.

“Mari is the president of the local organization representing the families,” Taylor says. “She’s the one making sure all decisions unfold in a participatory style. It’s really inspiring – and the level of experience most Haitians have with making decisions democratically is a story most people simply aren’t aware of. At the same time, there are so many different pieces of building a healthy community that need to be thought through, and that all influence each other.

“Five years from now,” he confessed over the din of hammers and saws, “we’re going to visit this site and feel one of two things: it’s either going to be our greatest success, or our biggest failure.”

* * *

Even before the earthquake that struck on January 12, 2010, killing tens of thousands and leaving millions homeless, Haiti was one of the poorest, least functional states in the world.  Its unemployment rate tops 70%. The average income is between $600-$700 a year.  The judicial system is corrupt and inefficient; as many as 80% of the country’s prisoners have never been formally charged with a crime. And for the bulk of its history, Haiti’s national leaders have been autocratic, self-serving, and, in time, both violent and violently overthrown.

The nature of Haiti’s challenges is apparent to any first-time traveler to the country. On the plane out of Miami are a mixture of aid workers, missionaries, and returning nationals. Even the plane itself is in need of modernization; there are still ashtrays in the armrests, and as it lands, a giant piece of the overhead compartment comes off and crashes in the aisle, exposing someone’s happenstance effort to re-affix it prior to departure with glue and tape.

Outside the airport, which has all been rebuilt since the earthquake, the extent of the devastation becomes clear. Just beyond the windows lining the long immigration corridor leading to customs are the remnants of the former airport – now condemned, its sides marked in red spray paint for “demolio”, a faded Air France sign peeking out from behind a heaping pile of rubble, 10 million cubic meters of which were left in the quake’s aftermath, and only half of which have been removed.

At the bottom of an escalator near the final stage of customs, a band plays festive Kompa music. The musicians wear red Digicel t-shirts (“Roam with the bigger, better network”), and point to a CD they’d like visitors to buy. Amidst the clamor, no one notices the accident that follows an abrupt stop of one of the escalators. An elderly white couple is sent tumbling. A Haitian woman yells for the people in front to pay attention – but the music is too loud.

The shuttle weaves through piles of wreckage that have yet to be cleared, past corrugated tin-roofed storage shelters on the right and patchy grass on the left where a single helicopter and a rusting airplane are parked, and past a long queue of passengers waiting to board a battered plane marked World Atlantic Air.

Inside the customs tent are scores of ceiling fans, spinning slowly as all arrivals are gradually herded into lines. Signs on the wall in Creole trump the importance of clean drinking water, and of breastfeeding.

Just outside the terminal, a swarm of frantic faces fill up the arrival space to jockey for position, pleas for bread replaced by a request to carry someone’s bags. Piles of cinderblocks make unintentional obstacle courses on the airport exit road. Shells of the former airport line the right side of the road, and everywhere the earth is a petrified sea of stone, rubble and concrete.

At one point, the car’s driver stops to get some water and snacks. The convenience store’s shelves are thinly stocked, its fryer long empty. The bottled water and snack bar are both locally made – a sign of real progress. Just outside, a dusty pregnant woman sits expressionless on the ground, her legs apart. A cardboard box sits between them, on top of which is a stack of Ramen noodle packages for sale. Waves of uniformed schoolchildren pass by the woman, neither taking notice of the other. As the driver heads back to the tinted-window SUV, he passes a young boy begging for money, wiping car windows with a dirty cloth. The doors close and the car speeds off.

* * *

It was also here, in Haiti, that the only successful slave rebellion in history occurred, leading to the birth of a newly independent nation that promised a full embodiment of the Enlightenment vision of a more just, equitable society.  In this way Haiti’s story is not just its own, but also a story at the epicenter of all of Western civilization, still struggling to understand what it means to be free.

First, though, before there was ever a free nation of Haiti, there was the island of Hispaniola, a place that served as ground zero for European colonialism in the Americas. And fittingly, that era began with the arrival of Christopher Columbus, who, in 1492, left behind a small group of Spanish sailors and renamed the island La Española – the local Taino Indians had called it Ayiti, or land of mountains. Within twenty years, the island had become a highly lucrative source of sugarcane – and the indigenous population had been almost entirely wiped out by conquest, servitude and disease. By the mid-sixteenth century, any remnants of Taino culture had been permanently extinguished.

The Spaniards were soon distracted by bigger riches – the Aztec and Inca empires awaited – but in their stead other European powers laid their claims, and in 1697, the western portion of the island was officially ceded to France. Soon, the newly crowned colony of Saint-Domingue became France’s most profitable outpost – yielding sugarcane in the basins, and coffee in the mountains. Before long, it became the centerpiece of the Atlantic slave system, and before its slaves won their independence, Saint-Domingue received as many as one million of them from Africa – accounting for as much as 10% of the entire Atlantic slave trade.

As the eighteenth century neared its conclusion, revolution was in the air – from France to the nearby American colonies – and the spirit proved contagious. “People here are drunk with liberty,” wrote a deputy in Saint-Domingue at the time. “The peril is great; it is near.” Initially, that spirit of liberty was limited to free people of color on the island, but before long both free and enslaved inhabitants were referencing the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and its notion that “men are born and remain equal in rights.”

In August 1791, a series of nighttime meetings of slaves took place in the northern region of the colony. By month’s end, a makeshift army of 2,000 slaves traveled from plantation to plantation, killing the owners, burning the houses and cane fields, and spreading the promise of freedom. A few weeks after the uprising, an insurgent was captured by white soldiers. In his pocket was a pamphlet from France, filled with utopian visions of a more egalitarian future.

Two years later, France shocked the world by granting the slaves of their most profitable colony their freedom – and a charismatic ex-slave turned military leader named Touissant Louverture assumed the task of protecting, and defining, what this newly won liberty would look like.

It was a long, slow birth. Louverture felt the only way a new nation of former slaves could survive in the eighteenth-century global economy was by maintaining the plantation hierarchy that had proved so lucrative for France. He imposed martial order, demanding that people “blindly obey the laws.” And he kept a close watch abroad, where the egalitarian fervor of the French Revolution was subsiding, where exiled plantation owners were lobbying their government for a return to the previous order, and where an ambitious general named Napoleon eventually set his sights on recapturing his country’s Caribbean outpost.

Louverture’s response, in 1801, was to draft Haiti’s first Constitution, and decree both that Saint-Domingue was still a “part of the French empire,” and that it must also be governed by a set of “particular laws” – chief among them that “servitude is permanently abolished.”

Napoleon responded by sending fifty warships and 80,000 French soldiers. Over the next three years, the ex-slaves and their former masters fought a gruesome, vengeful war. Eventually, however, the will of the insurgents, coupled with the devastating effects of disease on the French soldiers, led France to formally surrender.

On January 1, 1804, the free nation of Haiti celebrated its formal birth by vowing to negate not just the era of French colonialism, but also the entire legacy of European aggression in the Americas. Louverture was not present for the celebration – he had died a year earlier in captivity – but his final words reflected the spirit of the new nation he had fought to secure. “In overthrowing me, you have cut down in Saint-Domingue only the trunk of the tree of liberty of the blacks,” he vowed. “It will grow back from the roots, because they are deep and numerous.” A Frenchwoman present during the years of war agreed. “We kill many of them,” she wrote to a family member back in France, “and they seem to reproduce themselves out of their ashes.”

* * *

On the aging French veranda of the Hotel Oloffson, a place where, as the British author Graham Greene once wrote, “you expected a witch to open the door to you or a maniac butler, with a bat dangling from the chandelier behind him,” Benaja Antoine wants to talk about public education in Haiti.

Antoine is fresh from the ferry that shuttles people between Port-au-Prince and La Gonâve, the island on which he grew up. A young father of twin girls, Antoine is working with members of the local community who are creating collaborative social businesses, the profits from which will fund their schools. “For many, this is the first time they’re going to try something like this,” he explained in a soft, confident voice. “People feel a lot of hesitation, so we’re going to work on that and do what we can to get them in a position where they feel more confident.”

To build this confidence, Antoine is working with the Grameen Creative Lab (GCL), an organization that was founded just a year before the earthquake. GCL is led in Haiti by Claudine Francois. “The difference between rich and poor here is not wealth but opportunity,” she suggested one day in Grameen’s conference room, a Spartan setup with a long rectangular table and chairs, a water cooler in the corner, and a single framed oil painting of pumpkins on the wall — each Independence Day, Haitians serve themselves pumpkin soup, a local delicacy they were formerly required to serve their French masters. “The poor are the world’s greatest entrepreneurs, but it’s a type of entrepreneurship that’s more concerned with survival than innovation. We need to change that by giving them resources, showing them how to leverage those resources, and getting out of the way. People talk a lot in this country of the old proverb, ‘Give a man a fish, he’ll eat for a day; teach a man to fish, and he’ll never be hungry.’ I’m sick of that saying here in Haiti. We have thousands of fish, and it’s still not enough. Now what?”

Francois returned to her native country from work in Africa because she believed GCL was committed to answering that question – and that the answer was social business. “We’ve all been taught to believe that any sort of economic growth will eventually trickle down to benefit the poor as well. We believe in economic growth, and we want to make it work for everyone by creating a different business model that is not just about private interest but also collective benefit. This type of social business is not supposed to replace traditional business, merely to coexist with it – and to expand our idea of what it can mean to ‘do business’.”

Francois knows of what she speaks. Tall, strong, and sharply dressed in a pink blouse and gold jewelry, Francois’s career began in the private sector, and her experiences are what led her back not just to development, but to a deeper understanding of what people need to become more effective. “When I was younger, I think I made the mistake of letting arrogance dictate my behavior; I was convinced I had all the answers, and so I didn’t listen well to what other people were saying. Our work at GCL and in communities like La Gonâve is the opposite – and what I’ve learned is that when you start a relationship by asking questions and listening – not fixing problems and talking – your business efforts improve. But this is not how things are generally done in Haiti. This country is a catalog of unfinished projects and failures. We need to start working together in a different way, and we need our main decision-makers to do the same.”

Antoine agrees. Like many Haitians, his own education was limited to high school – 90% of Haiti’s schools are privately run, a reflection of the country’s almost complete lack of infrastructure – but in the years since he’s developed a deep understanding of democratic decision-making practices, as well as strategies for how to help people experience them. Today, he works for Haiti Partners, a faith-based organization that helps schools and non-profits use democratic processes to create healthier learning environments. A former teacher himself, Antoine had spent several years working at a “really progressive school” on La Gonâve. “Every single decision at that school needed to have the approval of the staff,” he recalls proudly. “And so everyone had a voice to say what they think. I was happy, but four years ago that started to change, and our leaders started to make more decisions by themselves. That cut our feelings, and I left. Now I get to work with lots of teachers, and help them get things right. But there’s a lot of work to do, because there’s still a lot of corporal punishment in the system here, and a lot of memorization. If you don’t memorize something, you get beat.”

It’s fitting that Antoine would describe his challenges at the Hotel Oloffson, which has been at the center of so much of Haiti’s modern history, and which reflects the country’s particular mixture of local and foreign cultural influences. The main courtyard is filled with voodoo sculptures in which pieces of wood, metal and glass are mixed with personal items like eyeglasses and clothing to form a bizarre cadre of creatures, babies and monsters. The paint is slightly chipped on the walls and ceiling, and the floors provide a colorful checkerboard under the mixture of foreigners and well-to-do Haitians there for a leisurely midweek lunch.

The hotel was constructed in the late 19th century as a private home for a wealthy Haitian family. The father of that family, Tiresias Sam, was president from 1896 to 1902 – a time when U.S. economic and military interests in Haiti were intensifying. In 1915, Sam’s son followed in his footsteps, but it was a period of massive unrest, and after just five months on the job, the son was literally torn apart by an angry mob.

Haiti’s period of instability provided space for America’s period of opportunity, and on July 28, 1915, the USS Washington delivered the first U.S. Marines into the harbor of Port-au-Prince. The American soliders would stay for another twenty years, ostensibly to ensure order and usher in a more democratic era, but in reality the main objective was to make Haiti safe for corporate investment, and to establish it as a strategic military outpost.

For the duration of the occupation, the Oloffson was used as a U.S. military hospital, and Haitians were left to confront the realization of their biggest fear – that a foreign power would return and deny them their hard-fought prize of self-determination. As one Haitian politician put it at the time, “The white soldiers had come to defile our independence: where were the ancestors? Finally the ancestors were no more.”

In truth, Haiti was an easy target. Deeply saddled by an indemnity it agreed to pay France as recompense for the lost profits of exiled plantation owners, Haiti was paying as much as 80% of its total budget to its former colonial masters by the time the Americans arrived. For all of the nineteenth century, Haiti struggled through an ever-weakening cycle of civil wars and forceful usurpations of power. And within a few years of the U.S. occupation, young Haitian men found themselves back in shackles, working forcibly on the construction of new roads, enduring the scorn of racist American soldiers, and watching Haiti’s founding laws get revised to make the country more hospitable for foreign investment.

In the end, however, a trend that began during the days of Louverture proved equally resilient throughout the American occupation: a locally governed counter-plantation economy in which Haitians farmed small plots of land, pooled resources and responsibilities, and weathered the inefficiencies of the central state. As historian Laurent Dubois writes, this system of local governance “developed largely in the absence of – indeed, in opposition to – the Haitian government. Unable to transform the national political system, rural residents found another solution: they created an egalitarian system without a state.”

Today, more than seventy years after the last American soldiers left in 1935, Benaja Antoine’s work at Haiti Partners continues to build on this legacy of local decision-making. His organization’s newest project is a new school that will open in September 2012. “We want it to be a motor of development for the whole community,” he said. “The idea is to have the school serve as a residency for training, and a learning hub for other schools. I believe education is the absolute key – it’s the only way to change things over the long-term. And there’s great creative potential here – but it needs to start doing something other than figuring out how to survive. Most teachers here still don’t have any real formal training – many never finished high school themselves – and half our young people aren’t even attending school. So how do you take an underfunded system and end up having enough schools to meet the needs of the people?”

After lunch, Antoine hops into a car to visit the school’s construction site, a mile up the hill from the home of Haiti Partners’ co-founder, an American expat named John Engle.  The road leads slowly out of the city, past a giant intersection piled high with discarded wicker furniture, past gas stations and women with baskets on their heads filled with bananas, carrots and avocadoes, and past half-built cinderblock structures and piles of rubble alongside new buildings under construction. Rebar wires shoot up and out of the cinderblocks – a sign of what’s to come, like frozen fountains.

Gradually the car makes its way out of the central city and up into the hills, past tent cities and an iron bridge stretching across a barren river of trash and debris. “The UN presence here is still very controversial,” Antoine explained. “There are many people who feel that it feeds the previous dysfunctional system, and keeps Haiti stuck in the past. So many people are so desperate here. In the end, is the UN helping us address those issues and become more independent – or is it keeping us stuck in the wrong worldview?”

Along the way Antoine stops briefly at the Big Star Market, one of Haiti’s more upscale grocery stores. Inside, well-dressed women complete their daily grocery shopping amidst well-stacked shelves, cool air-conditioning and quiet. A man outside guards the parking lot with a shotgun slung over his shoulder. Antoine pushes a cart of beer and soda to the checkout aisle, past holiday displays of Ferrero Rocher chocolate, copies of L’Express magazine, and large bags of Pedigree dog food.

The last half-mile of the drive is extremely rough, like climbing a mountain of stones. As the car nears the top, the landscape of white and pink gravel – all generated by hand-swung pickaxes that made the roadway real – gives way to a denser tropical feel; tree roots stick out from the starkly-cut sides of the roadway, and lemon trees mix with large ferns. The temperature drops as well.

The car pulls past a large red gate and John hops into the car for the final drive to the school, where workmen are digging a trench around its main building. It’s a beautiful patch of land, overlooking all of downtown Port-au-Prince and the bay, and pointed west, toward Léogâne, and toward the quake’s epicenter.

John Engle first moved to Haiti in 1991, after making a two-year commitment to join the Evangelical Association for the Promotion of Education. He is clean-shaven with thin eyeglasses and a black Casio watch. Always neatly dressed, on the day of Antoine’s visit he wears blue jeans, sneakers, and a white short-sleeved shirt covered with hand-sewn patterns of local farmers. “I first heard the organization’s founder, Tony Campolo, speak when I was 19, and I immediately liked his philosophy,” John said. “It was a vision of evangelicalism that was about empowerment, that was about collaborative inquiry, and that was highly culturally sensitive. I grew up working for my dad, selling electric typewriters and other forms of office equipment. I had gotten married at 20 – and divorced at 25. So as I look back, I think what happened is that I quickly had a comfortable life, but it was hollow. Those years before I moved to Haiti and got divorced, I was increasingly ready to do something radically different.”

The end of Engle’s prior professional and personal life coincided. “I left my dad’s company to try my own entrepreneurial venture – importing low-tech products in Taiwan. I was struggling to get the business off the ground, I was mired in debt – and then I found out my wife was having another affair.”

Within months, Engle was living alone. He worked briefly as a district sales manager for Panasonic to pay off his debts. Two years later, debts paid, he boarded a plane to Haiti. That was 1991.

Engle remembers the day of the 2010 earthquake well. “We were packing to leave the country, and we had just added the second floor of our house, all of which was done in the traditional way – with lots of concrete. The first tremor lasted for 40 seconds, and I remember thinking I didn’t realize a concrete house could shake that badly.

When the first tremor stopped, John and his family were fine; the house had stood. They wondered how bad the devastation had been elsewhere. Then they looked down from their veranda, toward the city below. “All we could see was dust rising out of the valley. Then, wave upon wave of people rose out, too, covered in dust and blood, and we realized this was a nation-changing event.”

* * *

The next day, in a different part of the city, on the campus of the L’ecole Supérieure Infotronique D’Haiti – or ESIH – John Engle and Benaja Antoine join an eclectic mix of Haitians and foreigners for OpenHaiti, a meeting that had been billed as an open-source exploration of “things worth doing.”

Considered one of Haiti’s best universities, ESIH greets its visitors with a giant message hanging on the school’s dreamsicle-colored walls: “Embody the inconceivable is what makes the world change. WE, Haitians, can do it when WE start making hard choices.”

The meeting takes place in a computer lab on the top floor of a building that overlooks both the central Bay of Port-au-Prince and a labyrinth of neighboring shelters and homes that stretch all the way to the nearest mountain. The shelters and school are separated by a single ten-foot wall. On the other side, women hang drying laundry as children arrive home from school to help out.

The room is arranged to house two concentric circles of chairs. A screen is at the front, and a young Finnish man named Jaakko is working feverishly to secure a livestream of the event. Jaakko is a passionate believer in the “power of organizing out in the open, and of organizing without organizations. The open-source paradigm has already revolutionized software programming,” he explains to a new arrival, “yet it does not exist as widely in international development efforts. Why?” As he speaks, one of the event’s organizers, a graduate student in computer science named Alain, works on the final bits of technological troubleshooting as people start to find seats or stand a few more moments just outside the room on the narrow railway overlooking the city below.

One of the early arrivals is Steven Werlin, an American who has lived in Haiti off and on for more than a decade, and who currently serves as the regional manager of an extreme poverty program for an organization called Fonkoze. He has the body of a long-distance runner, and on this day he wears a tan shirt, pants and flip-flops. His eyes are intelligent, focused and calm, and he wears oval-shaped glasses. “The economy here looks entirely different from other places because the largest piece of it is entirely informal. Most of my days are spent seeing stunningly poor families working their way to near-poverty. We help them get to a space where they can manage their own path forward. What I’ve found is that people need assets, first and foremost, they need training in how to use those assets, and they need ongoing coaching as they learn to think of their lives in new, more promising ways.”

Seated nearby is another American, a young woman named Loralei. Until yesterday, Loralei was an employee of one of the many organizations doing relief work in Haiti since the earthquake. The day before was her last day, however; her job is now filled by a young Haitian man. “I think it’s really important when doing development work to be aware of your position,” she says. “My organization has been really careful to build in a process that will make it sustainable.”

A native of Vermont, Loralei has long wavy black hair, a silver nose ring, large cobalt blue eyes, and big silver earrings with a single turquoise stone. She hugs her teeth with her lips when she speaks, and her voice is both husky and soft. You must lean in to hear her, and you want to; intense and thoughtful, in the past eighteen months she has seen things most of us have not.

“I arrived shortly after the earthquake,” she began. “Before I’d been working for the Vermont Medical Response Team, and although I’d lived around the world growing up, I’d never experienced life in a post-emergency zone. There was rubble everywhere, and in the main camp I worked at, there were over 60,000 people, all living on a former golf course.”

Initially, Loralei joined the displaced by erecting her own tent; she lived in it for ten months before getting an apartment nearby. “I realized it was probably a good idea to get out of relief mode and more into development mode,” she explained. As part of her work, Loralei and others focused on camp management, education programs, and successfully relocating people back into their communities.  “Some of the education and training work is a challenge because there’s a mindset here that ‘free’ means there is no quality. Being accustomed to scarcity makes people feel things like these training programs – on issues like microcredit and small-business skills – are too good to be true. But now there are just 26,000 people living in that camp, and several of the public squares in Port-au-Prince that had been tent cities since the earthquake are now gone.

“I’ve learned that the best and worst feature of Haiti is that there is no “normal” here,” she continued. “There are so many deep-rooted injustices in Haitian society that it’s going to be a long haul. Now that we’re two years removed from the quake, it’s really interesting to see the new types of investments that are coming here – but at the same time, as money is being released, I keep wondering, ‘What is the model of investment going forward?’ Is it the right model, or merely the one that is available? So this moment in Haitian history is one of great opportunity – and great vulnerability.”

The meeting begins with an official welcome in French from Marlene Sam, ESIH’s director of external relationships, and herself a member of a same prominent family whose misfortunes sparked the start of the U.S. occupation. Engle follows by explaining the basic principles of open space technology, and invites people to propose discussion groups that relate to things worth doing in Haiti. People propose workshops in Creole and French, and volunteers provide real-time translations. Then the groups disperse to dive into issues as varied as addressing agricultural sustainability – Haiti has experienced an almost total level of deforestation – to identifying ways to take advantage of the fact that, despite such high unemployment, over 80% of the Haitian population owns a mobile phone.

After the meeting wraps up, Alain leans against the railway outside the meeting room; it’s now dusk, and the lights of the city are slowly coming on in specks underneath him, while below the railing fellow students mill about in the school’s central courtyard. “I believe this sort of gathering is what we need most in Haiti,” he says. “Everyone needs to come together to build something together – to build a better Haiti. And the first step is getting together.”

* * *

The next morning, Engle and Antoine are back on the hill where their school is being built, preparing to facilitate a community meeting; for all aspects of the school’s construction and development, local residents are directly involved. As Antoine assembles a circle of chairs in the shade of a nearby tree, Engle talks about the challenges – and the opportunities – of modern Haiti.

“There’s some cautious hope about the new government,” he begins, “and about the idea that Haiti may be entering a more stable period of its history. But our present is still in many ways a product of our past, and the types of things people have experienced here don’t get shaken off easily.”

In particular, Engle references the decades-long dictatorship of Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his son, “Baby Doc” – a reign of terror that resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of Haitians, that led to as many as a million more fleeing the country, and that didn’t end until 1986. A relative unknown when he first assumed power in 1957, Duvalier quickly proved himself to be an astute scholar of Haitian history – tapping into the historic tensions between lighter- and darker-skinned Haitians, and feeding a cult of personality that eschewed individual freedoms in favor of an all-knowing police state. “As President I have no enemies and can have none,” he announced. “There are only the enemies of the nation. And these the nation must judge.”

Before long, Duvalier had done away with everything from Haiti’s bicameral legislature and methods of dissent to the Lord’s Prayer itself. In its place, Haitians would spend their Sundays paying homage to “Our Doc, who art in the Palais National for life, hallowed be Thy name by present and future generations. Thy will be done, in Port-au-Prince as it is in the provinces. Give us this day our new Haiti and forgive not the trespasses of those antipatriots who daily spit upon our country; lead them into temptation and, poisoned by their own venom, deliver them from no evil.”

In addition to creating a climate of fear, Duvalier assured that Haiti would spend decades with little more than a shell of a national state – almost all taxes and foreign aid went directly into the bank accounts of his fortunate few, once again leaving Haitians to create their own forms of order and agency at the local level.

To an observer like Engle, this is Haiti’s double-edged sword – the destructive legacy of autocratic national rule and corruption, juxtaposed with the generative legacy of democratic local rule and equity. “A constant question here is when and where to push for excellence – no matter what it is – amidst a larger societal context in which people’s whole lives have been about survival for so long. Thanks to the legacy of its dysfunctional central governments, there are a lot of Creole phrases that carry the message, ‘If you try too hard, you’ll just get discouraged.’ To survive and not go crazy, people have become conditioned to take it, and to endure it. And yet it’s also true that since the days of Independence, there is this deep tradition of democratic decision-making at the local level. When do you push for deeper reflection and deeper performance, and when do you make sure you work within what people are most used to so you don’t push too far too fast? I’m still struggling with that.”

* * *

Under the late afternoon sun, twenty community members – old and young, male and female – fill the seats of Antoine’s circle to talk together about what their community’s new school should look like. The sounds of roosters and pigs float up from further down the hill, while construction work continues nearby – a constant reminder of how much remains to be done before opening day arrives.

Like most democratically led conversations, the topics veer in a number of directions, and towards the end of the meeting, it’s unclear what specific next steps have been identified.

Then, during closing comments, an elderly man speaks up for the first time. “I was born here,” he said. “I’ve grown up here. And I never thought I would see anything like this. I give thanks to God for keeping me here long enough to see it.”

Your Nominees for the World’s Most Transformational Learning Environments

Posted on | by Sam | 6 Comments on Your Nominees for the World’s Most Transformational Learning Environments

I know most of us have already checked out for the year, but I wanted to share the nominees I’ve received so far in my ongoing search for the world’s most transformational learning environments.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve received recommendations either via Twitter or posted comments on this blog and/or Huffington Post. I’ve done my best to capture every recommendation I’ve received. If I missed yours, or if you have a new one to add, just post your comment and I’ll add it to the master list.

Keep in mind that this list, which features 58 nominees overall, merely aggregates what people have recommended. Of the nominees, 47 are schools or programs here in the United States: 9 public charter schools, 4 public charter school networks, 3 general networks, 13 public schools, 13 private schools, and 5 “others.” For the 11 international nominees, 6 could only be classified as “other” — an interesting contrast, I thought. In any case, see what you think, check them out at your leisure (and keep in mind the QED Transformational Change Model as a way of judging how transformational they are), and let’s all keep adding to the list.

Nominees for World’s Most Transformational Learning Environments

The (Keynesian) Economics of School Choice

Posted on | by Sam | 2 Comments on The (Keynesian) Economics of School Choice

In the halls of Congress and on the presidential campaign trail, a debate is raging over which set of economic proposals to pursue in order to rebuild the national economy. At the same time, K-12 education reformers are engaged in their own frantic search for the right recipe(s) that can unlock the full power of teaching and learning. But rarely do we acknowledge that one individual stands, improbably, at the center of both debates – John Maynard Keynes.

Keynes’ influence on economic thinking is well established: ever since 1936, when he first argued the economy was driven not by prices but by “effective demand,” we’ve been in a continual debate over whether outside agencies (like, say, the government) are required to intervene during times of crisis. By contrast, Keynes’ influence on education thinking remains largely invisible – yet most urban school districts across America are being recast in the image of his core theories, particularly the notion that providing more choice in schooling will empower urban parents to drive demand in a new way and, in so doing, unleash a series of tailwinds that can transform public education.

Regardless of how one feels about the move toward greater school choice, it is almost surely here to stay. Consequently, as more and more parents encounter the inchoate marketplace of public school options for their children, we should stop asking ourselves whether school choice is “good” or “bad”, and start asking a different question instead: In what ways can urban parents’ newfound power as education consumers engender more schools capable of giving more young 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?

That’s a big question, and I think it’s possible for us to answer it – but only if we understand the extent to which urban parents can actually drive “effective demand” in ways that will ultimately serve their and the larger community’s interests.

I know of what I speak, because I’m the parent of a two-year-old in Washington, DC. Most of my closest friends are also DC residents, and also the parents of children about to enter formal schooling. All of us are spending a lot of time thinking about where to send our kids, and all of us are well-educated and motivated to make the right choices: in short, we are the low-hanging fruit in an idealized marketplace in which knowledgeable parents can drive demand.

But there’s a problem: most of the resources that exist today to edify my friends and neighbors are still reflective of the myopic notion that schools can be meaningfully ranked according to a single measure – test scores. To make matters worse, whereas in theory all families in DC have the same chance to get into the same set of schools, the reality is that most middle-class families will have more of a particularly precious resource than their lower-class compatriots: the time it will take to evaluate and assess which schools are the best fit for their child.

As an example, look at Great Schools, the wildly successful organization that accurately bills itself as “the country’s leading source of information on school performance.” Great Schools receives more than 37 million unique web visitors a year, and it supports parent outreach and education programs in three cities – including here in DC. In a world where parents are feeling overwhelmed and under-informed, Great Schools is the closest thing to a one-stop-shop out there.

The good news is that Great Schools is filled with great information that will be helpful to parents – from individual school data to concrete recommendations about ways to stay connected to their school; build new play structures; start a school library; or identify the attributes of a great principal. Ultimately, however, the main factor fueling Great Schools’ growth is its school ratings system, and the bad news is that each school’s 10-point score is still determined by a single measure – “its performance on state standardized tests.”

The appeal of such a simple recipe is clear; it’s equally clear that such a formula will never drive effective demand. Instead, this sort of rating system is feeding a different beast. Keynes had a name for that, too – he called it our “animal spirits,” and warned that, absent a holistic picture of any given situation, these spirits can lead us “to depend on nothing but a mathematical expectation.” When that happens, Keynes cautioned, “enterprise will fade and die,” and where “effective demand is deficient not only is the public scandal of wasted resources intolerable, but the individual enterpriser who seeks to bring these resources into action is operating with the odds loaded against him.”

In other words, parents and policymakers need to be guided by more than their animal urges for simple answers to complex problems, and schools need to be evaluated by more than one criterion. As Keynes first suggested, 75 years ago, “it may be possible by a right analysis of the problem to cure the disease whilst preserving efficiency and freedom.”

The same sort of recipe can apply to school choice – but only if we prevent ourselves from seeing choice itself as the panacea; it is freedom and efficiency that we need. And until our freedom to choose is matched by our efficiency to help parents better understand what powerful learning looks like – and requires – our future efforts to help parents drive demand are likely to remain as elusive as our current efforts to get many of those same parents back to work.

What (& Where) Are the World’s Most Transformational Schools?

Posted on | by Sam | 18 Comments on What (& Where) Are the World’s Most Transformational Schools?

OK, people, let’s get specific: Out of all the schools in the world, which ones are the most transformational when it comes to imagining a new way to think about teaching and learning in the 21st century?

There are a lot of inspiring schools out there, so I want to repeat: which are the most transformational – by which I mean schools that are demonstrating, by policy and practice, 10 or more of the 22 core categories from QED Foundation’s Transformational Change Model?

What I find so useful about the QED model (scroll down a bit on their home page to see it) is the way it identifies the central pillars of a high-quality education, and then demarcates what each pillar looks like in a traditional, transitional, and transformational setting. In a traditional school, for example, we tend to assume the student bears the primary responsibility for learning; in a transitional environment, that responsibility shifts to the teacher (see, e.g., just about every recently proposed accountability policy in the U.S.); but in a transformational context, the responsibility is shared via a learning team that includes, and extends beyond, teacher and student.

Of course, learning teams are just one part of a holistic system of environmental conditions. That’s why, taken together, the QED change model helps clarify what we need, and which stages our own evolution will need to pass through, in order to pull K-12 schooling out of the Industrial-era model and into a new, Democratic-era paradigm.

Because that sort of clarity is in short supply, too often we hold up models of school reform that are, at best, examples of transitional progress, not transformational change.

With that caveat in place, please help me find the best set of transformational schools the world has to offer – and please ground your recommendations in the QED change model.

I’ll start the bidding with two examples, and a sample of the ways in which the school is modeling transformational practices:

Science Leadership Academy (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) – SLA is an inquiry-driven high school that opened its doors in 2006. Students at SLA learn in a project-based environment where the core values of inquiry, research, collaboration, presentation and reflection are emphasized in all classes.

Selected Transformational Practices:

  • Philosophy: Traditional – Coverage; Transitional – Depth/Breadth; Transformational – Standards-based Inquiry
  • Goals: Traditional – Test Results Targets; Transitional – Curricular goals; Transformational – Learner Aspirations & Life Options
  • Assessment: Traditional – Of Learning; Transitional – For Learning; Transformational – As Learning
  • Educator Development: Traditional – Re-certification Hours; Transitional – Group Learning; Transformational – Collaborative Inquiry

Riverside School (Ahmedabad, India) — Riverside offers a curriculum and experiences of engagement with the city that enables children to better understand their skills, potential, and responsibilities as citizens. It is also developing social intervention initiatives in the city to provide a wide array of activities (cultural, instructional, and recreational) that can be synchronized with the regular school curriculum.

Selected transformational practices:

  • Model of Success is Based On: Traditional – The Willing and Able; Transitional – Inclusion; Transformational – Racial and Social Justice
  • Context for Learning: Traditional – Classroom; Transitional – School; Transformational – Learning Community
  • When/Where Learning Happens: Traditional – In School; Transitional – Coordination between in- and out-of-school; Transformational – Anywhere/Everywhere
  • Student Investment: Traditional – Requirements; Transitional – Engagement; Transformational – Passion

To be sure, Riverside and SLA are just two of the schools out there doing several things really well, and being very intentional about the way they do so. What other schools are demonstrating a transformational approach to teaching and learning? And in which specific ways are they doing so?

I look forward to your recommendations and ideas.

(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)