Power to the People’s History

(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)

My wife likes to tell this one story from when she was in high school, and she asked her U.S. History teacher why the class wasn’t learning more about the Indians. “We don’t have time for the Indians,” he responded. “We have an AP curriculum to get through.”

Had I been as inquisitive as my wife when I was a teenager, I would have received the same answer. So, I suspect, would most of you; indeed, for too many of us, the study of American history ended up being little more than a linear, logical march through the years – filled with neat plot lines of cause and effect, victors and enemies, and a whole lot of triumphant white men.

Like so many others, I didn’t realize there was another way to imagine the chronicling of the American narrative, or the construction of history itself, until I first read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. Once I did, my understanding of the world was forever changed.

It was one year ago today – January 27, 2010 – that Zinn died at the age of 87. And it was nearly twenty years ago that I, as a twenty-something American History teacher in Brooklyn, first assigned excerpts of A People’s History to an unsuspecting class of 16- and 17-year-olds.

I can still recall the combination of pleasure and puzzlement when we dedicated precious class time to an extended conversation of the ways industrialization had impacted the lives of women, who, Zinn wrote, “were being pulled out of the house and into industrial life, while at the same time [feeling] pressured to stay home where they were more easily controlled.” There was the unit when we learned that the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution – originally passed to ensure that former slaves were forthwith defined as full “persons” under the law – had instead been overwhelmingly co-opted by clever lawyers intent on protecting the personal rights of corporations. And there was the time of the year when, echoing my wife’s long-ago request, we read the 1838 words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, urging then-president Martin Van Buren to abandon the efforts underway to forcibly remove all Cherokees to make way for American expansion:

The soul of man, the justice, the mercy that is the heart’s heart in all men, from Maine to Georgia, does abhor this business . . . a crime is projected that confounds our understandings by its magnitude, a crime that really deprives us as well as the Cherokees of a country for how could we call the conspiracy that should crush these poor Indians our government, or the land that was cursed by their parting and dying imprecations our country any more?

How indeed? And yet, here we were, being asked a different set of questions, and being forced to make sense for the first time of the many glories and hypocrisies of our national history. A People’s History was, in short, a radical, exasperating, inspiring, motivating vision of America, and of American history. And my students loved it. As one of them told me, years later, “Until I read Zinn, I viewed the world uncritically. But he taught me to mistrust the single viewpoint, to doubt, to verify, to ask more questions, and to always, always look for where the bones are buried.”

As in all things, of course, Zinn is best consumed in moderation; it is as foolish to exclusively teach his writings on American history as it is to solely teach the more sanitized stuff of textbooks. And yet all of us should be grateful for what Zinn helped bring about – a widening of the American narrative, a deepening of our understanding of what it means to be free, and an awakening in our cultural consciousness to forever remind us that, as with so much of life, all is not as it seems.

So on this anniversary of Howard Zinn’s death, I hope you’ll join me in honoring his memory. Visit the Zinn Education Project (http://zinnedproject.org/). Take a more open and honest look at the past. And help ensure that our schools equip students with the analytical tools they need to make sense of — and improve — the world today.

Rest in peace.

America’s Political (Dis)Harmony

I know it’s still January, but I’m already looking forward to March 26, when I’ll visit the National Constitution Center and participate in a program on Civility & Democracy. During that event, which will culminate in a public Town Hall discussion, we’ll have the chance to consider some essential questions of American identity and organization — questions that have been made even more timely in the wake of the public debate following the shootings in Tucson:

  • Is partisan rancor the exception or the rule in American politics?
  • What would the Founding Fathers think of today’s political climate?
  • What factors contribute to eras of extreme partisanship?
  • Is partisanship “bad,” or simply the way democracies work?

I had been reflecting on those questions all weekend — and then in yesterday’s Washington Post I read a new piece by George Will, who was himself reflecting on the history of America’s political disharmony. “What made the American Revolution a novel event,” Will writes, “was that Americans did not declare independence because their religion, ethnicity, language or culture made them incompatible with the British. Rather, it was a political act based on explicit principles. So in America more than in Europe, nationalism is . . .’intellectualized’: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident.’ Who holds them? Americans. Who are Americans? Those who hold those truths to be self-evident.”

Will suggests we are, at our core, a “disharmonic society” because the ideals of [our] creed are always imperfectly realized and always endangered. For Americans, government is necessary, but “the distinctive aspect of the American Creed is its anti-government character. Opposition to power and suspicion of government as the most dangerous embodiment of power are the central themes of American political thought.”

Agree or disagree?

P.S. Next month, a new book of mine (a narrative history of free speech in America) is coming out. The title, We Must Not Be Afraid to be Free, is a line from a Hugo Black opinion, and the book is largely a trip through his career, and his own evolving understanding of how to strike the right balance, both individually and as an open society, between honoring our freedoms and controlling our fears.

Justice Black — a FDR appointee and, as a younger man in his home state of Alabama, a former Klansman — is remembered as one of the Court’s most vigorous defenders of free-speech rights. And yet at the end of his long career, as he watched the social fabric of the country unravel during the 1960s, Black did an about-face — and began ruling against free-speech claims. His own journey therefore provides a useful window into the personal challenges associated with tolerating the exercise of freedoms when the very act of voicing those ideas runs the risk of tearing us asunder.

To Honor King, Embody Our Ideals

(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)

Today, Americans will pay tribute to the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. with school assemblies, community programs and — to the delight of students and adults alike — a national holiday. Yet few if any Americans, at this crucial time in our nation’s history, will directly connect King’s heroism and accomplishments to his faith in — and use of — our primary tools of democracy, the five freedoms of the First Amendment.

This is a missed opportunity. More so than any other part of our Constitution, our laws or our civic principles as a nation, the freedoms of the First Amendment — religion, speech, press, assembly and petition — embody what it means to be an American. Properly understood and applied, they allow us to expand the promise of freedom more fairly and fully to succeeding generations of Americans, and forge unity in the interest of our diversity, instead of at the expense of it.

Every January, the holiday honoring King provides an opportunity to remember both what the First Amendment demands of us as citizens, and also what is possible when we exercise those rights responsibly in the cause of justice and freedom for all.

Consider, for example, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the iconic 1963 rally that introduced King’s “I Have a Dream” speech to white America — he had delivered those lines in front of black audiences many times before — and produced the most poignant petition for redress of grievances in our nation’s history. Nearly every American is familiar with King’s speech that day. Many of us were asked to memorize it as students. But how many of us were also taught about that day — and the movement — in the specific context of our democratic principles as a nation?

Recall that the march occurred as Congress was wrestling with whether or not to pass President Kennedy’s civil rights program. Recall that young people across the country were being jailed for peacefully assembling to protest the South’s policies of institutional racism. And recall that the quality of our national conversation was still so rudimentary that in the days and weeks before the march, white journalists peppered black commentators with what today seems like a shockingly naïve question — “What is it that Negroes really want?

King and the other leaders of the movement understood that the best way to counter such naïveté and willful ignorance was by utilizing each of the First Amendment’s five freedoms to appeal to the nation’s conscience. So on that historic day, Aug. 28, they presented a program that celebrated the American belief in religious liberty, beginning with an invocation from the Archbishop of Washington and featuring remarks from the president of the American Jewish Congress; they relied on the press to broadcast images of the massive assembly — ABC and NBC even broke away from their regularly scheduled afternoon soap operas to join CBS and broadcast King’s speech in its entirety; and they petitioned for change with emotional appeals to, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, “the better angels of our nature.”

Nearly a decade of protest and activism reached its symbolic pinnacle when hundreds of thousands of Americans of all colors gathered in the shadow of Lincoln, in the centennial year of the Emancipation Proclamation, to petition the Congress to establish 1963, in the words of organizer Roy Wilkins, “as the year racial discrimination was ended.”

The rest is history, yet both the glory of that day and its unfulfilled promise provide powerful mandates for parents and teachers. As King said later, the night before he was struck down at the age of 39, the future of democracy is always only as secure as the commitment of its youngest citizens. “In 1960,” he preached, “when students all over the South started sitting-in at lunch counters … I knew that as they were sitting in, they were really standing up for the best in the American dream, and taking the whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the Founding Fathers in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.”

As much or more than anyone in recent American history, King had a profound understanding of the principles found in this nation’s “great wells of democracy.” And at the heart of his work was an appeal to all Americans to live up to our nation’s guiding principles and ideals.

Let’s remember that this holiday.

How to Really Teach Like a Champion

(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)

What does it mean to “teach like a champion”? Can great teachers be reduced to, and developed by, a discrete set of tools and techniques? Or is teaching ultimately an art form so individualized, so magical and elusive, that it can never be codified?

If I had to sum up the problem with our current efforts to improve teaching and learning in this country, it would be the illusion of this false choice, and the tendency of too many of us to feel we must pick one path. So before we get any deeper into 2011, I’d like to recommend we all read two books that, taken together, just might have the power to light a middle path between the extremes.

The first is Doug Lemov’s 2010 debut, Teach Like a Champion, a groundbreaking, controversial cataloguing of 49 techniques “that put students on the path to college.” Based primarily on thousands of hours of video and in-person observations of teachers who have helped their students dramatically raise scores on standardized tests (a metric Lemov calls “necessary but not sufficient”), the book is the most concrete, specific, and immediately actionable set of recommendations I’ve ever encountered as an educator. Those recommendations are also, often, shockingly simple and unglamorous – from standing still while giving students directions (Technique 28: “Entry Routine”) to ensuring that all students begin each class period with their materials out, ready to learn (Technique 33: “On Your Mark”).

As Lemov explains, the un-sexiness of his techniques is partly the point. “When I was a young teacher,” he writes, “people gave me lots of advice. I’d go to trainings and leave with lofty words ringing in my ears. They touched on everything that made me want to teach. ‘Have high expectations for your students.’ ‘Expect the most from your students every day.’ ‘Teach kids, not content.’ I’d be inspired, ready to improve – until I got to school the next day. I’d find myself asking, ‘Well, how do I do that? What’s the action I should take at 8:25am to demonstrate those raised expectations?’”

Teach Like a Champion is a major contribution to the field, and a window into the central motivations of today’s younger education “reformers” – precisely because it is so concerned with providing clear, simple, and practical advice for a profession that is so opaque, complex, and unpredictable. This sort of effort at making the overwhelming challenge of teaching more accessible and scalable needs to become more commonplace; I know a number of these techniques would have been extremely useful to me when I was still in the classroom. Lemov is right – lofty words are not enough, and there is great value in trying to chart some of education’s most uncharted terrain. And yet, his book also left me with an uneasy feeling, and not because some of the techniques rubbed me the wrong way (although they did). It was because once I put the book down, I was left with a sense that, in addition to some useful tools, the picture of my profession that had just been painted was still left significantly, even dangerously, incomplete.

Then I (finally) read Parker Palmer’s 1998 book The Courage to Teach, and I understood what was missing. In fact, although Lemov and Palmer wrote their books a decade apart, The Courage to Teach explicitly tackles what Teach Like a Champion implicitly fails to address – that although good techniques are useful, good teaching cannot be reduced to technique, because good teaching springs primarily from the identity and integrity of the teacher.

Palmer explains: “In every class I teach, my ability to connect with my students, and to connect them with the subject, depends less on the methods I use than on the degree to which I know and trust my selfhood – and am willing to make it available and vulnerable in the service of teaching. My evidence for this claim comes, in part, from years of asking students to tell me about their good teachers. Listening to those stories, it becomes impossible to claim that all good teachers use similar techniques: some lecture nonstop and others speak very little; some stay close to their material and others loose the imagination; some teach with the carrot and others with the stick. But in every story I have heard, good teachers share one trait: a strong sense of personal identity infuses their work.”

Palmer’s willingness to “enter, not evade, the tangles of teaching” is a reminder to all of us that the unavoidable first step toward creating better learning conditions for kids is ensuring that the adults in charge of them have a healthy sense of themselves – intellectually, spiritually, and emotionally. “Reduce teaching to intellect,” writes Palmer, “and it becomes a cold abstraction; reduce it to emotions, and it becomes narcissistic; reduce it to the spiritual, and it loses its anchor to the world. Intellect, emotion and spirit depend on one another for wholeness. They are interwoven in the human self and in education at its best.”

That’s why Lemov’s disproportionate focus on the “diligent mastery of the tools of the craft” is so dangerous; it misleads future teachers into overvaluing the power of technique, and undervaluing the need to better understand themselves and the highly relational, nonlinear components of what they have signed up to do.  I would argue this is the missing ingredient in much of today’s education reform programs and strategies, too many of which are built upon the highly seductive, highly misleading appeal of solving the unsolvable. It’s the culture of the technocratic answer.

Don’t get me wrong – education needs more actionable ideas, and more practical resources like the kind Doug Lemov has given us, and he’s right when he says “great art relies on the mastery and application of functional skills, learned individually through diligent study.” But Parker Palmer is right, too, when he reminds us of something else: that “technique is what teachers use until the real teacher arrives.”

Education Inception

(This article also appeared on the Huffington Post.)

I just watched Christopher Nolan’s remarkable new movie Inception, a futuristic film about a group of people who, through a variety of means, plant a thought so deeply in the mind of one man that it grows naturally and becomes seen as his own. In the opening scene of the movie, protagonist Peter Cobb rhetorically asks the audience: “What’s the most resilient parasite? A bacteria? A virus? An intestinal worm? No. An idea. Resilient, highly contagious. Once an idea’s taken hold in the brain it’s almost impossible to eradicate. A person can cover it up, or ignore it – but it stays there.”

Cobb’s movie-based challenge is not unlike the reality-based one being faced by today’s advocates for public education reform – how to seed an idea so simple and powerful that it can mobilize public opinion, inspire policymakers, and improve the overall learning conditions for children. And yet after reading Michelle Rhee’s two newest efforts to launch her own form of “inception” – an Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal and her organization’s inaugural policy agenda – I see further evidence of both her well-intentioned vision for massive educational reform, and her fundamental misunderstanding about the power of ideas.

Repeatedly, Ms. Rhee has shown she believes that the best way to mobilize people is through conflict, oppositional language and negative emotion. In the Journal, she speaks encouragingly about the fact that “public support is building for a frontal attack on the educational status quo.” And in the introductory paragraph of her policy agenda, she seems encouraged by the fact that her actions will “trigger controversy.” This sort of language extends the tenor of her brief tenure as DC Schools Chancellor, when Rhee made enough inflammatory statements to become the single most polarizing education figure in country. Love me or hate me, she seemed to be telling us – but pick one you must.

In some respects, Ms. Rhee’s approach to idea-generation, much like her approach to management, is deeply rooted in 20th-century paradigms of mobilization and leadership. Our culture has nurtured numerous shared archetypes of strong, authoritarian leaders – people who can make the tough decisions, go it alone, and refuse to give an inch. To compromise or collaborate is to be soft and exceedingly conciliatory, not to mention a weak-kneed guarantee that nothing will get done. Get with the program or get out. You’re either with us or against us. Don’t tread on me.

Of course, like all archetypes, these characterizations contain partial truths. To be all about compromise and not at all about principle is a poor model for leadership, and we do need leaders who have the fortitude to make tough decisions, hold people accountable, and speak simply and clearly. Similarly, we all should share Ms. Rhee’s sense of outrage. And in the end, several of her policies make good sense. But in terms of the overall effort at inception – at seeding the foundational idea – one thing seems equally clear: a national movement that is based primarily on negative emotion will not deliver us the long-term changes we need in public education.

Christopher Nolan certainly feels this way – it’s the core message of his movie. “How do you translate a strategy into an emotion?” Cobb wonders. A colleague suggests that an idea fueled by negative emotion will work best – something that would grow and fester in the mind of an individual, building both anger and discontent until it could be turned into action. But Cobb disagrees. “Positive emotion trumps negative emotion every time. We yearn for people to be reconciled, for catharsis. We need positive emotional logic.”

I agree, and I wish Michelle Rhee would, too. She has a national platform, a vital issue in need of being addressed, millions of dollars, and hundreds of thousands of followers. Now she just needs the right idea.

Robots in Classrooms?

You know you’re a little obsessed with an issue when a news story about artificial intelligence in the prisons of today gets you thinking about robots in the classrooms of tomorrow.

But there it was — a weekend piece in the New York Times about a training exercise at a penitentiary in West Virginia, at which artificial intelligence (AI) software was being used to recognize faces, gestures and patterns of group behavior. “When two groups of inmates moved toward each other,” we learn, “the experimental computer system sent an alert — a text message — to a corrections officer that warned of a potential incident and gave the location.” Then I read the lines that concerned me: “The computers cannot do anything more than officers who constantly watch surveillance monitors under ideal conditions. But in practice, officers are often distracted. When shifts change, an observation that is worth passing along may be forgotten. But machines do not blink or forget. They are tireless assistants. . . At work or school, the technology opens the door to a computerized supervisor that is always watching. Are you paying attention, goofing off or daydreaming?”

On one level, what’s not to like, right? Why not improve our efficiency if we can, and make sure we are even more safe and secure in our prisons? And why not extend this technology wherever it can be useful? Bring on the Society of Tomorrow!

On the other hand, I just finished Harvard professor Steven Pinker’s great 2009 book How the Mind Works, and his observations about the limits of AI — and how people learn — make me wonder if we’re making the same mistake in AI that we’re doing in education reform: getting carried away by an illusory short cut and ignoring one-half of the equation we need to solve.

More specifically, Pinker talks about why we don’t yet have those cool robot butlers from Sleeper — the human brain is (spoiler alert!) really, really complicated, and programming it to account for all we encounter on a daily basis is next to impossible. In short, we may not sweat the small stuff, but our efforts to make fancy robots derail because they can’t get past the small stuff.

For example, Pinker writes, “for a robot brain – or a human brain – to recognize objects and not bump into them, it must crunch these numbers and guess what kinds of objects in the world reflected the light that gave rise to them. The problem is humblingly difficult. . . But there’s nothing common about common sense. And an intelligent system cannot be stuffed with trillions of facts. It must be equipped with a smaller list of core truths and a set of rules to deduce their implications.”

Later, Pinker talks about how we do this by clarifying the distinction between intelligence (“the ability to attain goals in the faces of obstacles by means of decisions based on rational, truth-obeying, rules”) and consciousness (“the capacity for self-knowledge and sentience”). We can’t make Hollywood-worthy robots, he explains, because what makes us unique is that we possess both intelligence and consciousness. We can read people’s faces and interpret sounds and smells and colors and emotions and apply past experiences and decide what’s relevant information at that moment and connect it to our belief system and do it all seamlessly and instantaneously. Robots can do the intelligent number-crunching, but since we still don’t even understand sentience ourselves — except to say that it exists — how the hell could we hope to instill it in a machine?

This is not an insignificant point, and it doesn’t render AI worthless, but it does underscore the need for AI to serve in a complementary fashion, and to recognize that there are still some aspects of the human brain (and mind, which is, of course, what the brain does) that can’t be replaced. Use cameras to augment the work of your prison guards; don’t replace the guards altogether.

The problem, one can clearly see, is if the combination of budget cuts and a misunderstanding of what AI can and can’t do vis a vis human employees leads to 21st-century prisons being guarded by video cameras. I see a similar issue emerging in education, where our well-founded emphasis on improving the quality of teaching and learning is leading us to overvalue one side of the equation (intelligence, or, more specifically in a school context, technique) and ignore the other (consciousness, or, more specifically, the identity and integrity of the individual who is doing the teaching).

It is a technocratic illusion that all we need to improve American education is a set of useful techniques that can unlock the magic of the teaching craft. Technique is important, and many recent breakthroughs have made immeasurable contributions to the field. But when we embrace technique as the answer for our troubles, we deny the deeply relational aspect of teaching and learning. We also set ourselves up for believing, one day, that all we need are systems with the right set of pre-programmed techniques and, Voila! No achievement gap!

The scary thing is that that is not as ridiculous a statement as it should be. And yet if we say nothing in our public discourse or policy debates to suggest a recognition — let alone a valuing — of the teacher as person and relational conduit for learning, why not just get rid of them and run it on auto-pilot?

To really transform our schools, of course, we must do the opposite. As the great Parker Palmer says in his classic book The Courage to Teach, “We must enter, not evade, the tangle of teaching so we can understand them better and negotiate them with more grace, not only to guard our own spirits but to serve our students well. . . Good teaching requires self-knowledge: it is a secret hidden in plain sight.” In explaining how the mind works, Pinker makes a similar claim: “Our mental life is a noisy parliament of competing factions. In dealing with others, we assume they are as complicated as we are, and we guess what they are guessing we are guessing they are guessing.”

Parker’s and Pinker’s insights may lead to a messier equation, but it’s how the mind works, and it’s what good teaching requires. So why not make 2011 a year when we start to acknowledge both sides of this coin? When it comes to understanding the human brain, we must study both intelligence and consciousness. And when it comes to producing a world-class profession of teachers, we must help individuals acquire both top-flight technique and a deep understanding of the self that teaches.

Absent both, we are left with nothing more than science fiction.