Tag: DC

High Stakes Tests For 3-Year-Olds?

Posted on | by Sam | 5 Comments on High Stakes Tests For 3-Year-Olds?

If you’re a parent of a young charter school student in DC – or just someone who cares about early education – you need to know what’s happening here in the nation’s capital, and fast.

In less than a week, all charter schools that serve young children will start being held accountable to their students’ test scores on reading and math.

Just to clarify: we’re talking about three-, four-, and five-year-olds. Being Tested. In Reading and Math. With High Stakes attached for the schools that care for them.

First, some context: Like many other cities, DC is a place where daycare waiting lists can last for years, and where the costs of childcare can amount to a second mortgage. Unlike other cities, however, Washington ranks first in the nation for its percentage of 3- and 4-year-old children enrolled in preschool programs – 88% in all, and at an expense of nearly $15,000 per child. That’s a huge advantage for DC’s families, and a huge influence on the overall development and growth of the city’s youngest residents.

As DC inches closer to its goal of providing universal preschool by 2014, our civic leaders are rightfully asking themselves what else they should do to ensure that our deep investments in early childhood reap deep civic returns. And in their effort to provide an answer, DC’s sole authorizing and oversight body for charter schools – the Public Charter School Board – has proposed an accountability plan for the youngest children that would mimic the format that’s already in place for the oldest.

If the plan is approved – and it will be, barring significant community objections – all of the city’s Pre-K and lower elementary charter school programs will forthwith be ranked according to a weighted formula that assigns between 60 and 80% of a school’s overall performance to student reading and math scores. And although the proposal includes the possibility for schools to “opt-in” to adding an assessment that measures the social and emotional (SEL) growth of children, it would count for just 15% of the total for Preschool and PreK, and 10% for Kindergarten.

This sort of weighted formula squares neatly with the latest trends in education policy. It does not, however, align with the latest research on the brain.

“Everything that happens to us affects the way the brain develops,” says Dan Siegel, a clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA and the author of The Whole Brain Child. “The brain is a social organ, made to be in relationship. What happens between brains has a great deal to do with what happens within each individual brain . . . [And] the physical architecture of the brain changes according to where we direct our attention and what we practice doing.”

Where we direct our attention, then, matters greatly when it comes to determining what our children will practice doing, and how their brains will develop.  And what scholars like Siegel are saying is that the worst thing we can do is disproportionately weight one piece of the developmental puzzle. “We want to help our children become better integrated so they can use their whole brain in a coordinated way,” he explains. “We want them to be horizontally integrated, so that their left-brain logic can work well with their right-brain emotion. We also want them to be vertically integrated, so that the physically higher parts of the brain, which let them thoughtfully consider their actions, work well with the lower parts, which are more concerned with instinct, gut reactions, and survival.”

Siegel’s suggestions align with the recommendations of other leading researchers, all of who confirm that the foundation of learning is social, not academic. In fact, according to the Collaborative for Academic, Social & Emotional Learning (CASEL), an organization that works to advance the science and evidence-based practice of social and emotional learning, the best way for schools to provide the optimal foundation for learning is by helping students develop five core competencies: self-awareness, or the ability to accurately recognize one’s emotions and thoughts and their influence on behavior; self-management, or the ability to regulate one’s emotions, thoughts, and behaviors effectively in different situations; social awareness, or the ability to take the perspective of and empathize with others from diverse backgrounds and cultures; relationship skills, or the ability to establish and maintain healthy and rewarding relationships with diverse individuals and groups; and responsible decision-making, or the ability to make constructive and respectful choices about personal behavior and social interactions. CASEL has even published a compendium of the available assessment measures when it comes to measuring these sorts of skills in children.

In other words, the research is clear, the tools are out there, and the common sense is self-evident to anyone who is a parent to young children. So I ask you: will an accountability framework that places as much as 80% of its weight behind reading and math scores engender a generation of children with the skills CASEL identifies as the foundation of all learning, or lead to the sort of neurobiological integration scholars like Siegel are calling for?

If you think the answer is yes, sit tight. But if you think the answer is no, I urge you to call or email the PCSB’s executive director, Scott Pearson (spearson@dcpubliccharter.com, 202.328.2660) and insist that any accountability system assign equal weight to the different components of a healthy, high-functioning learning environment – including, and not limited to, social and emotional growth. (You can also sign this petition.)

The past twelve years of federal policy have taught us that when it comes to assessing the upper grades, reading and math are valuable – and overvalued. Let’s not make the same mistake twice.

What Happened in DC in 2008 – & Does it Still Matter in 2013?

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on What Happened in DC in 2008 – & Does it Still Matter in 2013?

If a prominent urban school leader told you he couldn’t recall being informed that half his city’s schools may have allowed the gross mistreatment of students to occur, would you believe him? And even if you did, would you still want him in charge of your children?

Now imagine that the leader in question is not just prominent locally, but nationally as well. Imagine that this individual has appeared on the cover of iconic news magazines and been interviewed on Oprah’s iconic couch. And imagine that this person has come to embody a singular approach to determining the effectiveness of schools and teachers – the rationale for which would be challenged if the allegations of mistreatment were ever proven to be true.

Would you want to know if any actual wrongdoing had occurred?

In fact this is not a hypothetical question, but an actual one we can apply to the nation’s capital, and to our nation’s most visible school reformer, Michelle Rhee. It is, therefore, a question fraught with potential implications for how we think about (and assess) modern American education reform. And it’s a question that has been given new life in the wake of PBS reporter John Merrow’s publication of a confidential memo in which an outside consultant suggested that as many as 191 teachers, scattered across nearly half the city’s public schools, may have erased and corrected their students’ answers on the city’s high-stakes standardized test, the DC-CAS, in 2008.

No one in a position of authority to inquire further is doing so – yet.  Both Mayor Vincent Gray and David Catania, the chairman of the D.C. Council’s education committee, say they do not plan to reinvestigate – even though all previous investigations forbade any sort of erasure analysis or an examination of the original answer sheets. Rhee herself, a self-described “data fiend,” stands by her original statement: “I don’t recall receiving a report  . . . regarding erasure data from the DC-CAS.”

The significance of a potentially uninvestigated cheating scandal in Washington extends beyond the personal reputation of Ms. Rhee. Other cities around the country have already suffered their own scandals, from El Paso to Atlanta. Increasing numbers of parents are opting their children out of standardized tests as a form of civil disobedience to what they see as the deleterious results of the high-stakes testing era. And anyone who spends serious time in schools knows how many educators are struggling to stay motivated in a policy climate that, albeit unintentionally, disincentivizes them from valuing anything other than literacy and numeracy.

If no subsequent investigation occurs, we will be witness in Washington D.C. to what happens when powerful people try to sweep uncomfortable subjects under the rug. Ironically, however, Atlanta has demonstrated what happens when the opposite occurs – and courageous public officials, combined with a watchful free press, commit to uncover the truth, whatever it may be. As Georgia Governor Nathan Deal (a Republican) put it: “When test results are falsified and students who have not mastered the necessary material are promoted, our students are harmed, parents lose sight of their child’s true progress, and taxpayers are cheated.”

Deal’s investigative team was equally forceful: “Superintendent Beverly Hall and her senior staff knew, or should have known, that cheating and other offenses were occurring,” they wrote in their 813-page report – a report based on interviews with more than 2,000 people and a review of more than 800,000 documents. “A culture of fear and conspiracy of silence infected (the) school system and kept many teachers from speaking freely about misconduct.” As a lead member of the Atlanta investigative team told Merrow earlier this year, “There’s not a shred of doubt in my mind that adults cheated in Washington. The big difference is that nobody in D.C. wanted to know the truth.”

Whether or not widespread cheating occurred in 2008 should matter greatly to all of us, even in 2013. What matters more is whether we are willing to find out. Because when we lose the courage and the curiosity to inquire deeply into our own practices – and the unintended consequences they may reap – we lose the capacity to reimagine education for a changing world.

(This article also appeared on the Smartblog on Education.)

The Wisdom of Crowds, Untapped

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on The Wisdom of Crowds, Untapped

The decision by DC Council Education Committee Chairman David Catania to hire an outside law firm to craft school reform legislation is an awful one, worthy of serious public rebuke – and for two interrelated reasons.

The first is that hiring a small team of lawyers is the least likely path towards achieving imaginative and effective policy. Despite public stereotypes of the profession, K-12 education is a complex web of cognitive, social, emotional, language, ethical and physical challenges and opportunities. Its systemic barriers to change are as myriad as our complicated shared memories of what schooling is (and is not). And it’s a field in the midst of a major paradigmatic shift – away from the traditional notion that a student’s job is to adjust to the school, and towards the radical notion that a school’s job is to adjust to the student.

So while it’s true that the final stages of policymaking involve a certain amount of legalese, Mr. Catania’s belief that this process should start with a team of lawyers – and not end with one – speaks to a fundamental missed opportunity, and the second reason it’s a bad idea: We are ignoring the wisdom of our own community, and the chance to imagine DC’s future education policy as a city-wide, regenerative civic event.

Of course, surfacing and applying the insights of our own community is not something we do often – perhaps because so many of us secretly agree with Thomas Carlyle, who famously said: “I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.”

The thing is, Carlyle was wrong. As New Yorker business columnist James Surowiecki writes in his 2004 bestseller The Wisdom of Crowds, “If you put together a big enough and diverse enough group of people and ask them to make decisions affecting matters of general interest, that group’s decision will, over time, be intellectually superior to the isolated individual.”

In other words, when our imperfect individual judgments are aggregated in the right way, our collective intelligence is often extremely helpful. That’s why Surowiecki suggests, “we should stop hunting and ask the crowd. Chances are, it knows.”

In fact, that’s exactly what Mr. Catania is doing – hunting. It’s an impulse so common sociologists have given it its own name: “Chasing the Expert,” which references our tendency when facing difficult decisions to search for that one person (or small group of people) who will have the answer.

What Surowiecki discovered was that the opposite was true, but only if the core conditions of making a good large-group decision were present: diversity, independence, and a particular form of decentralization. “Paradoxically,” he writes, “the best way for a group to be smart is for each person in it to think and act as independently as possible.”

Imagine if instead of seeking outside funds to hire a small team of lawyers, Catania had announced a citywide initiative in which the best wisdom around crowdsourcing would be utilized in order to help the entire community arrive at a thoughtful, informed collective decision around the future of education policy? After all, politics is about the impact of government on the everyday lives of citizens. Why do we think the way to do it well is by distancing ourselves from the voices of the citizens themselves?

Indeed, the most damning implication of Mr. Catania’s decision is his inattention to the mechanisms of democracy, to the wisdom of the community, and to the regenerative power of combining both in an effort to improve public education. As Surowiecki writes, democracy “is not a way of solving cognition problems or a mechanism for revealing the public interest. But it is a way of dealing with (if not solving once and for all) the most fundamental questions of cooperation and coordination: How do we live together? How can living together work to our mutual benefit?”

“The decisions that democracies make may not always demonstrate the wisdom of the crowd,” Surowiecki concedes. “But the decision to make them democratically does.”

(This article also appeared in the Washington Post.)

Sunday Morning Quarterback

Posted on | by Sam

Earlier this week the DC Public Charter School Board released its latest rankings of every charter school operating in the nation’s capital. Some schools earned higher or lower scores than last year — each school is rated either Tier 1, 2 or 3 — but the majority did not change. No surprise there: these things take time, not to mention the fact that our system for evaluating whether a school is high- or low-performing remains imperfect at best.

Still, the report worried me, mostly because of the language charter leaders used to frame their reactions to the rankings. “If your results aren’t good after a fair period of time, you need to lose your right to operate,” said Robert Cane, executive director of Friends of Choice in Urban Schools, or FOCUS. And Naomi DeVeaux, deputy director of the D.C. Public Charter School Board, said this: “You can’t tread water and stay a Tier 2 school. Each school has to continue to become better.”

On one level, my response is, “Well, of course.” No school should be allowed to continually provide a subpar learning environment, and every school should be proactively seeking ways to improve. Yet what I hear in the undercurrents of these comments is an expectation that schools achieve quick results, sustain a linear march to excellence, and operate under a no-excuses culture of expectations. And maybe it’s just coincidence because we’re in DC, but when I hear that kind of language from the top, I think of the Washington Redskins. And when I consider all we need to do to improve the city’s schools, I can’t think of a worse organizational model for systemic change and sustained success.

For those that don’t follow it closely, the Redskins are a storied NFL franchise with a long history of success — just not recently. In fact, since current owner Dan Snyder bought the team in 1999, the Redskins have become a perennial cellar dweller and experienced nearly constant change at the top — seven different head coaches over the past thirteen seasons, to be precise.

This is not exactly a recipe for success. Yet Snyder has spent goo gobs of money over that time, and he clearly, desperately, wants to win. So do the players. So why aren’t the Skins winning? And what does any of this have to do with the DC charter school community?

Simply put, what has plagued the Skins is the impatience of Dan Snyder, and the jittery culture he has established. He overpaid for free agents instead of building through the draft. He failed to consider the ways different pieces come together to form a team — that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. And by hiring and firing coaches whenever things didn’t turn around quickly enough, he ensured that his team would never have time to establish a sustainable, long-term road map for success.

By contrast, consider the approach of the Pittsburgh Steelers, one of the NFL’s oldest and most successful franchises. In my 42 years on earth, the Steelers have won six Super Bowls, and played in eight. Along the way, they’ve also had nine losing seasons.  And yet over that entire period, the Pittsburgh Steelers have maintained a consistent organizational identity. They’ve always built through the draft. And in 42 years, while the rest of the sports world lives and dies on each game, they’ve had just three head coaches: Chuck Noll, Bill Cowher and Mike Tomlin.

Which takes us back to the comments of Robert Cane and Naomi DeVaux, and some lessons from the gridiron we would be wise to apply to the classroom as well: Sometimes, successful organizations do tread water. And always, the mark of a great culture is the extent to which it is aligned around core values and principles, and the extent to which its leaders create a culture of security, not anxiety, by their words and actions.

What are the core values and principles that define the shared vision of the DC Public Charter School community? And when it comes to constructing a path for sustained excellence, how can charter leaders be more like the Steelers — and less like the Redskins? There’s no single answer to those questions, but this much seems clear: when it comes to making hiring or firing decisions based solely on a school’s rating (or a team’s record), I can guarantee what legendary Steelers owner Art Rooney would say: that dog just won’t hunt.

(This article also appeared in the Washington Post.)

A Different March Madness: The DCPS Lottery

Posted on | by Sam

Since last fall, I’ve been working on a new book about a year in the life of the DC public school system(s) — as seen primarily through two schools: one a brand-new charter school, the other a 90-year-old neighborhood school — so I was thrilled to hear that WAMU’s Kojo Nnamdi was dedicating a show to the DCPS lottery and various local parents’ reactions to it.

That show aired today. If you’re interested, you can listen here to my observations about the process as well as many other DC parents and representatives from DCPS.

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.

Is it time to redesign the report card?

Posted on | by Sam

This week, parents and guardians of schoolchildren across the country will receive their first report card of the 2011-2012 school year. For some, the occasion will provide welcome confirmation of a young person’s superior effort. Others will open their mail to find an uncomfortable wake up call. Yet for too many families, the report cards will offer little more than confusion – about how their child is actually behaving, what he or she has actually learned, and whether any meaningful progress has actually been made. “I have a masters degree in education,” said Devon Bartlett, a parent whose children are in first and fourth grade, “and even I can’t make sense of what my child’s report card is trying to tell me. Clearly, we can do better.”

Given how uninformed so many parents feel, and considering how differently the nation’s 100,000+ schools choose to track student growth, is it time to give the school report card an extreme makeover, and dress it up for the 21st century?

Continue reading . . .

Is this Occupy DC’s future?

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on Is this Occupy DC’s future?

It was a nightmarish image for any American President to consider – U.S. soldiers attacking U.S. veterans in the shadow of the U.S. Capitol. But on July 28, 1932, Herbert Hoover believed it had to be done. “For many weeks,” he announced in a press statement, the veterans gathered in Washington had “been given every opportunity of free assembly, free speech and free petition to the Congress.” Now, he said, “in order to put an end to this . . . defiance of civil authority, I have asked the Army to . . . restore order.”

It had all started peacefully, three months earlier, when the first groups of First World War veterans gathered in the nation’s capital to demand early payment of a bonus Congress had promised them. The payment was not scheduled until 1945, but the veterans could not wait that long. As a result of the Great Depression, many had lost their jobs and been stripped of their life savings, leaving them struggling to keep their families from starving. Believing protest was better than idleness, large groups of veterans – who became known as the Bonus Expeditionary Forces (B.E.F.) – set out for Washington, D.C., to peaceably demand that Congress give them their bonus.

Their cause quickly became front-page news across the country. Hitching rides and relying on the kindness of strangers, the veterans ingratiated themselves by heeding the gentlemanly instructions of their unofficial “commander,” Walter W. Waters, a former sergeant who had been unemployed for eighteen months. Waters insisted that the men agree not to panhandle, drink, or cause trouble, and rallied veterans along the way with the cry, “Let’s hit the road to Washington!”

The good feelings for the B.E.F. continued when the first forces, also called the Bonus Marchers, arrived in the nation’s capital. Police superintendent Pelham Glassford, a retired brigadier general, arranged for the marchers to camp in two abandoned federal buildings, and secured portable kitchens for them. Secretary of War Patrick Hurley ordered two thousand beds for the men, and several civic organizations provided two tons of straw for extra padding.

As more and more men arrived, however, Congress worried about how the veterans’ protest could peaceably be resolved. “If they come here and sit down and have three meals furnished free every day,” worried one congressman, “then God knows what will happen to us. There are more than 8,500,000 persons out of work in this country, most of them with families. If the government can feed those who are here, then we can expect an influx that will startle the entire country.”

To make matters worse, the veterans were demanding their bonus – between two and four billion dollars in total – at a time when the federal government was already in dire financial straits. But Waters was unmoved. “We mean to stay until the bonus is paid,” he said, “whether it is next year or 1945.”

To help their uphill cause, the B.E.F. had a key ally in the House, a freshman congressman from Texas named Wright Patman. Patman kept the marchers’ hopes alive by steadily presenting new bonus bills, and urging his fellow congressmen to put money in the hands of “the little fellows in every nook and corner of the nation” instead of “the big boys [in] New York.” None of the bills was passed, but Patman’s public support convinced thousands of discontented veterans that their protest in Washington was worth a protracted fight.

Then, on June 15, the House passed Patman’s latest bill. With the Senate set to vote on it two days later, the veterans migrated to the steps of the U.S. Capitol, eagerly awaiting good news and a return to their families. The Senate, however, voted against the marchers yet again. At that point, hundreds of veterans, convinced their cause was hopeless, headed home. But thousands more stayed. Encamped on the mud flats of the Anacostia River, their new rallying cry became “Stay ‘till 1945.”

Wives and children joined the men, swelling the camp’s ranks to between ten and fifteen thousand. With an increase in the camp’s population came a decrease in the quality of life. Rats and flies abounded; there was no running water, no electricity, and no toilets. By early July, the lack of food had gotten so bad that Superintendent Glassford spent a thousand dollars of his own money to provide temporary relief.

The conditions, made worse by the sweltering midsummer heat, prompted President Hoover to make a last-gasp effort at easing the tension. With the help of Congress, he secured funds to send willing veterans home. Many–approximately five thousand–accepted the offer. The rest remained in the camps.

As the summer droned on, as it got hotter, and as the conditions of the camp grew worse, many veterans grew irritable. Before long, the first minor clashes between marchers and police broke out. The situation worsened when Congress adjourned for the summer, and D.C. officials decided the marchers had worn out their welcome. They ordered Glassford to remove the veterans from the two federal buildings, which were awaiting demolition. Glassford refused to remove the marchers by force, warning that a bloodbath would follow if he did.

On the morning of July 28, when workmen arrived on Pennsylvania Avenue to begin the demolition, the trouble began. According to a New York Times report, “the clash with the police . . . was short and furious. The advancing police, met by a hail of brickbats, first used their nightsticks and then began to shoot.”

Later that day, the commissioners of the District of Columbia wrote President Herbert Hoover: “This morning, officials of the Treasury Department, seeking to clear certain areas  . . . in which there were numbers of these bonus marchers, met with resistance and a serious riot occurred . . . In view of the above . . . the Commissioners of the District of Columbia, therefore, request that they be given the assistance of Federal troops in maintaining law and order in the District of Columbia.”

Hoover granted the request. “There is no group,” he explained forcefully in a July 28, 1932 press statement, “no matter what its origins, that can be allowed either to violate the laws of this country or to intimidate the Government.”

A reporter for the Baltimore Evening-Sun wrote one version of what happened next:

The cavalry clattered down Pennsylvania Avenue with drawn sabers. The infantry came marching along with fixed bayonets. All Washington smelled a fight, and all Washington turned out to see it. Streets were jammed with automobiles. Sidewalks, windows, doorsteps were crowded with people trying to see what was happening . . . Veterans in the rear ranks of a mob that faced the infantry pushed forward. Those in front pushed back. The crowd stuck. An order went down the line of infantrymen. The soldiers stepped back, pulled tear-gas bombs from their belts, and hurled them into the midst of a mob. Some of the veterans grabbed the bombs and threw them back at the infantry. The exploding tins whizzed around the smooth asphalt like devil chasers, pfutt-pfutt. And a gentle southerly wind wafted the gas in the faces of the soldiers and the spectators across the street.

Gradually, the army pushed the marchers back across the Anacostia Bridge to their shantytowns along the river’s edge. Then, according to the New York Times, “the infantry and cavalry donned gas masks and moved systematically in a contracting circle, hurling tear gas bombs before them and giving the veterans an unwilling taste of old times, when they used similar methods on German strongholds in the World War.” Everyone was evicted.

Was the use of the U.S. military on the veteran marchers justified? Douglas MacArthur, head of the U.S. forces that day, believed it was. In MacArthur’s Report on the Battle of Anacostia Flats, he wrote: “Had the president not acted today . . . had he let it go on for another week, I believe that the institutions of our government would have been severely threatened.” And Attorney General William D. Mitchell, in his private report to the President, said “the prompt use of the military to outnumber and overawe the disturbers prevented a calamity . . . The right peaceably to petition Congress for redress of alleged grievances,” wrote Mitchell, “does not include assemblage of disorderly thousands at the seat of Government for purposes of coercion.”

The public disagreed. Americans across the country reacted to the images of soldiers attacking veterans. “What a pitiful spectacle is that of the great American Government,” wrote the editors of the Washington Times, “mightiest in the world, chasing unarmed men, women and children with Army tanks. If the Army must be called out to make war on unarmed citizens, this is no longer America.”

One bonus marcher, Henry Meisel, described it differently in his book, Bonus Expeditionary Forces: The True Facts: “America, you belong to your people! Herbie Hoover, we shall not rest until you and your favored few are out of office. You cannot run our country . . . We shall beat you and yours with the mighty American vote.”

Four months later, Herbert Hoover lost the Presidential election to the former governor of New York Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And in 1936, the veterans’ initial decision to exercise their First Amendment right to peaceably assemble and to petition their government paid off. They got their bonus, nine years early.

(NOTE: This story is part of the collection included in First Freedoms: A Documentary History of First Amendment Rights in America.)