Author: Sam

I write books and talk about stuff.

A Signature Shift?

Posted on | by Sam

(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)

Last week, I was asked by CNN to comment on the news that most states will soon phase out cursive writing in order to give students more time to hone their digital skills. Initially, I wondered why the issue was receiving national coverage – there are bigger fish to fry, after all – so I posed a Facebook query to that effect.  A torrent of comments followed, and I received several long emails from viewers who saw the segment and felt compelled to share their thoughts. Everyone, it seemed, had an opinion, and a strong one at that. Why were so many people so upset about this seemingly small development on the gigantic landscape of K-12 education reform?

This morning, as I watched my two-year old son make distinctive colorful swirls on his drawing paper, I realized what was going on: not only were we inching toward a new understanding about what each child must learn; we were also moving away from a deeply held belief about what makes each of us unique – the distinctive imprint of our handwritten signature.

The first issue is the one I tried to address last week – the powerful influence that memes have on our collective capacity to imagine new ways of addressing old problems or institutions. Ideas or memories that are shared among people in a given culture, memes are powerful obstacles to change – and they are ubiquitous in the American public school system. As Geoffrey and Renate Caine make clear in 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 elementary school — such as, say, phasing out cursive — 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, arguments for or against the educational benefits of cursive 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 handwriting, or the extent to which we fear the prospect of replacing something so familiar with something so unknown.

What do you think?  How important, in the end, is handwriting to our own sense of individuality and self-expression? As we shift to a world where script is slowly giving way to e-signatures, and where the artfully crafted letter is crowded out by the cursorily crafted email, are we losing something irreplaceable? Or is the significance we attach to handwriting merely a reflection of our humanness that will, in time, easily migrate with us to new forms of communication and technology?

WAMU Radio Learning Story Series: A Teacher Unlocks Hidden Talents

Posted on | by Sam

As part of the Faces of Learning campaign, WAMU 88.5FM is producing weekly radio stories in which different people recount their most powerful learning experiences.

This week’s story comes from Susan Oliver, who remembers the influence of Ms. Juanita Cooke, and the discovery of a hidden talent. Take a listen here.

The Three Most Important Questions in Education

Posted on | by Sam | 3 Comments on The Three Most Important Questions in Education

(This column also appeared in the Huffington Post.)

It’s graduation season again – yet nobody seems to be celebrating.

On college campuses, graduates are entering an economy in which the stable career paths of yesteryear are disappearing – and the specialized job opportunities of tomorrow have yet to appear. And in communities across the country, parents and young people are left wondering what exactly those past four years of high school were in service of – and how much, if any, truly transformational learning occurred.

Something’s gotta give. The Industrial-Age model of schooling, which benefited 20th-century generations by serving as a legitimate ticket to the middle class, has clearly run its course. In its place, we need a model for a new age – the Democratic Age. And we need strategies for ensuring that young people learn how to be successful in the 21st-century world of work, life, and our democratic society.

We can get there, but to do so we need to start asking – and answering – the three most essential questions in education reform:

1. How do people learn best?

Over the past several years, a slew of research from a range of fields has helped illuminate a much deeper understanding of what powerful learning actually looks like – and requires. We know the ideal learning environment is challenging, engaging, relevant, supportive, and experiential. And we know that learners of all ages are more motivated when they can apply what they are learning to do something that has an impact on others – especially their local community.

The bad news is that too many schools are still crafting environments in which learning – if you can even call it that – depends less on these attributes than on obedience, memorization, conformity, and a set of requirements first deemed important a century ago.

The good news is that we already have schools across the country lighting a different path. At High Tech High in San Diego, for example, all learning opportunities are hands-on, supportive, and personalized. As school founder Larry Rosenstock explains, “Students pursue personal interests through projects. Students with special needs receive all the individual attention they need. And facilities are tailored to individual and small-group learning, including project rooms for hands-on activities and exhibition spaces for individual work.”

Best of all, the High Tech High model isn’t so precious or rare that our only hope is to remake every other school in its image. Instead, the rest of us can create our own success stories by doing what Larry Rosenstock did – heeding what we now know about how people learn, and operationalizing those insights into an actual school.

It’s environmental standards for learning we need – not a standardization of content or teaching practices.

2. What are the essential skills of a free people?

Whether we intend them to or not, every school is structured to value a different type of citizen. In China, for example – the site of my first teaching experience – the needs of the community are valued more than the needs of any individual. As a result, in the school in which I taught, free expression was discouraged, conformity was encouraged – and China got the citizens it sought.

In the America of the Industrial Age, one could argue we experienced similar alignment. After all, the early 20th century was characterized by exponential growth in its general and school populations, and a stable set of jobs for young people to fill. Today, however, the forces of globalization and democratization have elevated a different set of challenges and opportunities – and, by design, a different set of skills. Yet schools have not caught up to the shift, which is why so many of our graduates are emerging unprepared for the challenges and opportunities of the modern world.

What would happen if every school in America scrapped its current set of graduation requirements, and started over by identifying what it believes to be the essential skills of a free people – in work and in life?

One school in New Hampshire, the Monadnock Community Connections School (or MC2 for short), is already doing this. At MC2, students must demonstrate mastery in seventeen habits of mind and work in order to fulfill the school’s mission statement – “empowering each individual with the knowledge and skills to use his or her unique voice, effectively and with integrity, in co-creating our common public world.” These habits – which apply to every imaginable learning experience, from internships to classes to personal learning that occurs outside school – all have concrete indicators that are delineated in levels ranging from Novice to Expert. And not surprisingly, the habits reflect the skills most essential for the challenges of the Democratic Age – from self-direction and creativity to critical thinking and collaboration. As school founder Kim Carter explains it, “In preparing a student for their chosen post-secondary path, be it college or work, it’s critical to know what skills and knowledge will help to shape the decisions that impact their life.”

Makes sense, right? So what are the rest of us waiting for?

3.     What does it mean to be free?

In the end, our ability to answer the first two questions is in the ultimate service of the third. And yet the reality is that too many of us still understand what it means to be free in terms of the style of jeans we choose to wear, not the quality of ideas we choose to express.

The Founders certainly understood it differently, and so must we if wish to recalibrate our schools for the modern era.  In such a world, what it means to be free would mean having the space to discover one’s full worth – and developing the capacity to unleash one’s full potential.  Our schools and colleges would be places where we proactively created healthy, high-functioning learning environments. And our graduates would know, embody, and be able to apply the essential skills of a free people.

The answers we seek for creating such a system of schools are all around us. We just need to start asking the right questions.

Let’s Scrap the High School Diploma

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Think globally. Act locally.

Do Great Conferences Have a “Special Sauce”?

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

What makes for a transformational meeting?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WorldBlu Live – What Would You Do If You Were Not Afraid?

Posted on | by Sam

In the early afternoon of the first day of WorldBlu live — a remarkable global gathering of people who share a commitment to organizational democracy — Menlo Innovations CEO Rich Sheridan shared the moment when he knew he was in trouble. “It was Take Your Daughter to Work Day,” he began, “and over dinner, I asked my daughter Sarah what she thought of the experience.

“You must be really important, Dad.”

“Why do you say that, Sarah?”

“Because no one can make a decision without you first giving the OK.”

For Sheridan, his daughter’s candor helped him realize two essential, uncomfortable truths: First, he had created a team that could only move as fast as he could. And second, although he was doing important work, he was also robbing his colleagues of something essential.

Sheridan’s (and Menlo’s) story since then is characteristic of the people and companies that make the annual trek to participate in WorldBlu Live. And at this year’s conference, which is being held at the posh St. Regis Hotel in San Francisco, a sold-out crowd of the most eclectic community you could imagine — from cable company executives to college administrators to online retailers to students and software developers — is actively plotting the biggest and most audacious of goals: seeding a global movement that results in one billion people working in freedom.

WorldBlu founder and CEO Traci Fenton explains: “The shift we are witnessing worldwide is a shift from the Industrial and Information Ages to the Democratic Age. To get there, we must put into practice a fundamental assumption of democracy — that each person has inherent worth and dignity. Currently, most people live and work in environments that are still bound to the command-and-control model, that still govern by fear, and that still deny us the space to be our most creative and fulfilled selves. But we who are here know something powerful: that when we, consciously and deliberately, choose to design our workplaces based on the design principles of freedom — and not fear — we help people and organizations develop the collective capacity to change the world.”

Imagine, then, a two-day program designed to equip people with the skills they need to bring about such shifts in their own communities and organizations. Imagine a mixture of storytelling, breakout sessions, and unstructured time for conversations. And imagine a ballroom filled with people who don’t just believe a vision like Traci’s is possible — but that it’s already underway.

There are many inspiring and illustrative examples worth sharing (and a number of others can be found via the conference Twitter feed — check the #worldblu hashtag). I want to share one with you here: the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, an internationally-renowned group of musicians that has been, for more than 40 years, making beautiful music — and doing it all without a conductor.

“Traditionally,” explains Executive Director Ayden Adler, “classical music has maintained a near militaristic attention to order and hierarchy. Back in 1972 Orpheus decided to accept the challenge of creating its order and beauty out of the multiplicity of voices and ideas that make up the group. We believe that process is directly responsible for the richness and the passion of our performances.”

See below to see for yourself. Stay tuned for further updates, Tweets, and blog posts about this remarkable group of people. And ask yourself, when thinking about your own profession or workspace, what would YOU do tomorrow if you were not afraid?

Is a Free Education a Fundamental Right?

Posted on | by Sam | 10 Comments on Is a Free Education a Fundamental Right?

(This article originally appeared on cnn.com.)

Should your zip code determine your access to the American dream? Or is the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee to provide “equal protection” a principle we have silently agreed to uphold in theory – but not in practice?

I’m starting to wonder after reading about Tanya McDowell, the Connecticut mother facing felony charges for lying on her five-year-old son’s registration forms so he could attend a better school. McDowell’s story is painfully reminiscent of Kelley Williams-Bolar, the Ohio mother who made a similar choice earlier this year – and is now a convicted felon.

These two stories of civil disobedience come against the backdrop of an ongoing national conversation about our public school system – and how it must be improved. They also provide an unsettling irony in lieu of tomorrow’s 57th anniversary of Thurgood Marshall’s historic victory in Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision that triumphantly reaffirmed a core American principle: “In the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place.”

If Marshall were alive today, he would urge us to stop celebrating our symbolic victory in Brown, and start accepting our actual responsibility for tolerating a public education system that is, clearly, still separate, and still unequal.

Marshall said so himself, in a lesser known 1973 Court opinion, San Antonio v. Rodriguez. But this time he was not the lead lawyer, arguing the case, but the Court’s first African-American justice, issuing a ruling. And this time, he was on the losing side.

The case began when a group of poor Texas parents claimed that their state’s tolerance of the wide disparity in school resources – much of which were determined by the value of local property taxes – violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. A state court agreed, but the U.S. Supreme Court, in a narrow 5-4 decision, reversed.

Gone from the Court’s 1973 ruling was its 1954 contention that “education is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments.” Gone, too, was its assertion that “it is doubtful any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education. Such an opportunity,” wrote a unanimous Court in Brown, “where the state has undertaken to provide it, is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms.”

Instead, the five-Justice majority in Rodriguez wrote simply that while the Texas school system “can fairly be described as chaotic and unjust . . . it does not follow that this system violates the Constitution.”

“Though education is one of the most important services performed by the state, it is not within the limited category of rights recognized by this Court as guaranteed by the Constitution.” If it were, the majority conceded, “virtually every State will not pass muster.”

For Justice Marshall, that was precisely the point. “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 understood that 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.”

So here we are, nearly thirty years after Rodriguez – and nearly sixty after Brown – and yet parents like Tanya McDowell and Kelley Williams-Bolar feel compelled to break the law to ensure that their children receive a fair shot at the American dream. Meanwhile, income inequality has reached unprecedented levels, the nation has simultaneously grown more racially and ethnically diverse, and massive spending disparities remain between schools.

In today’s America, when it comes to public education, have we allowed our five-digit zip codes to become the equivalent of a lottery ticket to a better future? Is this really who we wish to be?

After so many years and so little real change, something new – perhaps even something drastic – needs to be done.

What if we took away the legal ambiguity that resulted in a 5-4 Supreme Court decision? What if we made the guarantee of an equal opportunity to learn our nation’s 28th Constitutional Amendment?

What do YOU think? Is a Free Education a Fundamental Right?

a)    NO. A public education is extremely important. It’s also not listed as a fundamental right anywhere in the U.S. Constitution. It may be imperfect, but the Supreme Court got it right in the Rodriguez case.

b)   YES. The 14th Amendment’s guarantee of “equal protection” under the laws is sufficient grounds for recognizing the unique value of a quality education. It’s time to reinterpret the Rodriguez case!

c)    NOT YET. Reinterpreting Rodriguez is not enough. It’s time to make equal access to a quality education an undeniable right. It’s time for the 28th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution!

Democracy’s New Gatekeepers?

Posted on | by Sam | 2 Comments on Democracy’s New Gatekeepers?

For many of us, the Internet still holds the promise of becoming the Great Equalizer, the Great Connector, and the Great Amplifier for the modern era. From its utility as a resource for citizens protesting a corrupt governmental regime, to its capacity to connect people who would otherwise never have an opportunity to meet, the web is, we hope, our best chance at establishing a new form of public square, and a new medium for a fuller incarnation of the marketplace of ideas.

There are, however, increasing warning signs that this may not in fact be the case. And aside from the writings of Lawrence Lessig, I’ve yet to come across a better, more succinct summary of the problem than the recent TED talk from Moveon.org founder Eli Pariser.

See for yourself — and let me know what you think.