In What Way Justice?

What does it mean to be an American the day after Georgia may have just murdered an innocent man?

Read the first words of the preamble to our Constitution: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice.”

Read the phrase engraved above the entrance to the U.S. Supreme Court: “Equal Justice Under Law.”

And read the reaction by the widow of the man Troy Davis was convicted of murdering 22 years ago: “We have laws in this land so that there is not chaos.”

In this year of global upheaval – from Egypt to Wisconsin – what is happening to our capacity to serve as the world’s beacon of freedom and equality? And when did our conception of justice shift so mightily – from securing equal treatment to avoiding chaos?

For those of us concerned with comprehensive school reform, the execution of Troy Davis is more than a temporary news item. Just twenty years old when he was arrested, Davis was also a high school dropout. And although his full reasons for doing so are unclear, what is clear is that of the ~1.2 million young people who leave school each year, more than half are from minority groups. Worse still, this pipeline of talent is running in the wrong direction, and sending disproportionate numbers of African-American men away from the workforce and higher education, and toward the dead end of the prison system.

The Advancement Project, a civil rights “action tank” committed to highlighting this issue, explains: “Across the country, school systems are shutting the doors of academic opportunity on students and funneling them into the juvenile and criminal justice systems. The combination of overly harsh school policies and an increased role of law enforcement in schools has created a “schoolhouse-to-jailhouse track,” in which punitive measures such as suspensions, expulsions, and school-based arrests are increasingly used to deal with student misbehavior, and huge numbers of youth are pushed out of school and into prisons and jails. In many communities, this transforms schools from places of learning to dangerous gateways into juvenile court. This is more than an education crisis; it is a racial justice crisis, because the students pushed out through harsh discipline are disproportionately students of color.”

The economic and opportunity costs of this exodus have been well documented. Yet today, in the wake of the United States Supreme Court’s cavalier reluctance to intervene in the state-sanctioned execution of a potentially innocent man, let’s be clear: the cost of this systemic societal dysfunction runs much deeper than lost wages. At stake is the legitimacy of our status as a nation committed to equal justice under law. At stake are the lives of potentially innocent men and women caught up in the gears of our legal system. And although our courts would seem to bear the sole weight of righting the ship, it is our public schools that are most responsible for giving young people the skills and self-confidence they need to not just stay out of trouble, but also become active, visible contributors to the common good. As the Greek philosopher Plato observed, more than 2,500 years ago, a civil society’s ultimate wellbeing rests primarily on its capacity to answer a single question: “But how, exactly,” he wrote, “will they be reared and educated by us? And does our considering this contribute anything to our goal of discerning that for the sake of which we are considering all these things – in what way justice and injustice come into being in a city?”

Mission Accomplished? What the U.S. Can Learn from China

I just returned from my first visit to China in 15 years, and I still can’t get over how aligned the Middle Kingdom remains around its core “mission statement” – and how misaligned we remain in the United States.

In China, the mission that directs the priorities of its private, public and social sectors is the one first laid out by former premier Deng Xiaoping back in 1984 – “building socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Deng’s vision was an unlikely pairing – on one hand, robust financial freedoms and a willingness to welcome foreign economic influences (like McDonald’s and Microsoft); on the other, sharply circumscribed social freedoms and a determination to forbid foreign cultural influences (like Facebook and Twitter).

Back in 1994, when I taught at a university in Beijing, this shared purpose was already well ingrained: the schools existed to instill a dialectical pair of aspirations in young people: the homogeneity of ideas, and the heterogeneity of the marketplace.

Regardless of how one feels about its mission, China’s ability to align the myriad aspects of its society around such a clearly defined goal is a major contributor to its current position as an ascendant power. And not surprisingly, this sort of clarity is characteristic of other global success stories. Take Finland – just thirty years ago a Soviet backwater, and now, after steadily following through on a thoughtful 20-year vision of reform, the unquestioned home of the world’s best schools.

When I look at countries like China and Finland, I see more starkly the misalignment between America’s historic vision as a nation and the current mission of its public schools. Ask anyone to describe the former, and you’ll hear slight variations on the same foundational theme: E Pluribus Unum – Out of many, one. Ask folks to describe the latter, and you’ll hear everything under the sun.

To some degree, mission misalignment is to be expected in a country of 50 states, 15,000 school districts, one overarching federal policy, and a chaotic, inchoate marketplace of reforms du jour. Yet if we take federal policy as our guide, the central mission of public education since 2000 has actually been quite clear: to eliminate the achievement gap between white students and students of color.

Will such a mission help America move closer to its larger vision of an equitable democratic society? In theory, definitely. And yet in a new article for National Affairs, education policy expert Rick Hess carefully chronicles how our decade-long obsession with the achievement gap, and our willingness to evaluate that gap based on a single metric – basic skills standardized test scores in reading and math – “has led to education policy that has shortchanged many children. It has narrowed the scope of schooling. It has hollowed out public support for school reform. It has stifled educational innovation. And it has distorted the way we approach educational choice, accountability, and reform.”

Unquestionably, these efforts have crippled our collective capacity to enact a shared mission for the public schools that is aligned with our shared vision for the public good. We all know we need schools that help children become more confident and creative – and yet we overvalue a small subset of academic skills to the detriment of all other forms of learning. We all know we need schools that nurture the needs of all children – and yet we pursue policies that prioritize the needs of some children more than others. And we know we need schools that pledge fidelity to the same overarching mission and fulfill that mission in myriad ways – and yet we impose stifling evaluative controls that hinder the ability of educators to make real-time decisions about how best to engage and inspire the children under their care.

The good news, I believe, is that we have reached the point in our history where the pendulum’s motion is about to swing back. A growing chorus of unlikely allies, from a wide range of perspectives, is saying ENOUGH – it’s time to restore our collective focus on the intellectual, emotional and vocational needs of children, and it’s time to align the overarching vision of our society with the shared mission of our public schools.

How do we get there? I propose a simple starting point: Since the main factor hindering our efforts is the ongoing exclusive emphasis on reading and math scores – and since the fecklessness of our elected officials suggests it may take a while before we see any serious revisions to federal education policy – let’s invite schools and communities across the country to do two things: opt out of the current system and its myopic metrics of success, and opt in to an open network of innovators that all pledge to find – and share – a better way of evaluating their capacity to equip young people to fulfill our shared vision as a nation? The goal would be twofold: to free schools from feeling like they can’t be innovative; and then, by doing so, to challenge ourselves to proactively chart a better way forward.

I say it’s time for the United States to align itself more proactively around the vision that has animated our history and inspired the world. So who’s in? And what simple structures would such a movement need in order to be effective, inspiring, and mission-driven?

The Many Faces of Thea

It wasn’t until the end of her tragically short life that Thea Leopoulos first discovered the depth of her talent as an artist.

A buoyant, beautiful girl with dark eyebrows and sharp brown eyes, Thea spent her childhood believing the experts who first told her, back in third grade, she was unworthy of acceptance to the local program for “gifted and talented” children. Since then, Thea had struggled in her coursework and felt uninspired by a stream of classes that focused too much on academics, and not enough on other forms of learning, like the arts.

Then, in her junior year of high school, she produced a finger-painted portrait of B.B. King and removed any doubt of whether or not she was talented. Soon after, her capacity to excel in every area of her life changed dramatically. She had discovered a new source of confidence and calm. She had found her path.

A few months later, she was killed by a drunk driver.

Along with 400 others last week, I learned about Thea’s story at a statewide conference of Oklahoma educators titled Faces of Learning: The Power and Impact of Engaging Curious Minds. On hand was Thea’s father, Paul, who shortly after his daughter’s death established the Thea Foundation and adopted the mission of carrying her legacy forward by advocating for the importance of art in the development of young people. “There are too many children today who, like Thea was, are either mislabeled or under-engaged by a system of schooling that pays insufficient attention to the whole child. It is equally true that every child, as Thea did, can discover their own inner sources of strength, passion, and purpose in school. But that won’t happen until we restore a balance to what we teach children, how we teach them, and how we go about evaluating our efforts.”

Jean Hendrickson, the conference’s chief architect and the executive director of a statewide network called A+ Oklahoma Schools, hopes that sort of change is afoot in Oklahoma. “I see this conference as the latest effort on our part to encourage each other to start to see our work differently,” she said. “Learning has lost its face – it has become an impersonal pursuit of metrics, not people. Yet we all know that the locus of learning begins and ends with the human being, and with the soul, spirit and mind. So my hope was to use the metaphor – faces – in a more intentional and multidimensional way: How are we thinking about this word when we describe our work as educators? Do we imagine it as a noun or a verb? And how can we help people grapple with this word and make their own work more grounded in the personal needs and aspirations of the children we serve?”

Hendrickson’s frame for the conference was a way for her to link Oklahoma’s efforts to a nascent national effort called Faces of Learning, in which local communities are encouraged to mobilize themselves by asking – and answering – four essential questions:

  1. How do people learn best?
  2. How do I learn best?
  3. What does the ideal learning environment look like?
  4. How can we create more of them?

“In Oklahoma,” Hendrickson explained, “the schools in our network adhere to a set of commitments that include daily arts instruction, experiential learning and enriched assessment. The schools collaborate around curriculum, mapping the instruction so that interdisciplinary concepts emerge that encourage cross-curricular integration, and the use of multiple intelligences to structure learning opportunities for students. And the infrastructure in A+ schools supports common planning time, shared vision, and faculty commitment to the goal of schools that work for everyone.”

Do you belong to a like-minded network of schools, or want to create one? Do you have a personal story to tell about your own most powerful learning experience? Are you ready to see America restore a balance to how, and what, we teach young people in our schools? Please join with Jean, and Paul, and many others across the country, and add your voice to the chorus of stories at facesoflearning.net.

Is School Renovation The Change We Seek?

OK, I realize I’m late to the game – I was in China last week when President Obama first outlined his jobs proposal to a joint session of Congress. But I’m back now, and I just read it, and as I look at it I’m wondering if anyone else has made a simple observation about his idea to renovate America’s crumbling public school buildings:

Is this really the change we seek?

Don’t get me wrong – scores of schools need renovating, and lots of people need jobs, so anything that tackles both of those issues must have some merit. And yet it’s odd that, at a time when we’re all in search of the best ways to transition from the Industrial-Age model of schooling to an as-yet unnamed future vision (the Democratic-Age model, anyone?), we would choose to double down on the use of buildings that were designed to accommodate the needs of a bygone era.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot since I’ll be spending the 2011-2012 school year observing three different schools — district, charter, and private — here in DC. The traditional neighborhood public school is housed in a traditional American school building – first constructed in 1924. By contrast, the brand new charter school is located in a brand new office building.

At first blush, you’d think the neighborhood school would have all the advantages when it comes to its use of physical space, and its capacity to think creatively about how to create the optimal learning environment for children. And, to be sure, the building – large, airy, and complete with playgrounds, art rooms and science labs – does afford certain privileges and conveniences (the children at the charter school, for example, must traverse a busy street in downtown DC just to reach an outside playground). But as I watched the staff of the new charter school use the final weeks of August to transform an otherwise nondescript office floor into an engaging and attractive learning space, I realized that the absence of a traditional building was also liberating, and, ironically, providing the space for people to think more innovatively about what a school actually needs to look like.

This point has been made before. As Rick Hess notes in The Same Thing Over and Over, “If the schools erected over centuries past were a road map for the system of schooling that we want, the strategy of walking the same path faster and more energetically would have much to commend it. But our schools do not provide that road map. They were never intended to take us where we desire to go. Our schools are not a solid foundation for twenty-first century schooling but a rickety structure that wobbles under the weight of each new addition.”

I agree with Mr. Obama when he asks rhetorically: “How can we expect our kids to do their best in places that are literally falling apart?  This is America.  Every child deserves a great school – and we can give it to them, if we act now. “ I also think it makes sense to make needed repairs. But as we do so, we would be wise to be more intentional in thinking about what the school buildings of tomorrow will need to look like – and not look like – and Mr. Obama would be wise to lead us in that process, else we move ahead blindly to renovate a sea of rickety structures that will do little more than provide cover for our ongoing efforts to succeed in a system that no longer serves our interests.

(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)

What Plato Would Think of School Choice

“But how, exactly, will they be reared and educated by us? And does our considering this contribute anything to our goal of discerning that for the sake of which we are considering all these things – in what way justice and injustice come into being in a city.”

— Plato, The Republic

Heard the bass ride out like an ancient mating call, I can’t take it y’all, I can feel the city breathin’, Chest heavin’, against the flesh of the evening, Sigh before we die like the last train leaving.

—Black Star, Respiration

What characterizes the ideal city – and the cities in which we live? How accurately does the health of a city reflect the quality of its plan for educating its youngest citizens? And does the push towards greater school choice get us closer to, or farther from, that ideal?

I’ve been thinking about those questions a lot since reading a column by George Will in last weekend’s Washington Post. In it he references two U.S. Supreme Court opinions in which the Court affirmed the constitutional right of parents “to direct the … education of children under their control.” As a student of the 14th Amendment, I sought the opinions out. What struck me had less to do with the legal arguments, however, and more to do with an excerpt in one of the opinions from Plato’s Republic, arguably the most famous political work of all time, and a work squarely concerned with the role a city – and, by extension, its education system – must play in helping all people develop their fullest potential.

The Republic is about decay as much as it is about rebirth. Socrates is visiting Athens during a period of decline (Plato, it’s worth noting, is not exactly a fan of democracy). While there, Socrates falls into conversation with a number of other men, who then co-construct a vision of the ideal city, and, by extension, the ideal state of humanity.

If you’ve never read The Republic (I hadn’t until this week), you may be surprised by how radical the vision really is. To wit, the section in which he explains the structure of schooling is the one Justice James McReynolds chose to cite in his 1923 opinion for Meyer v. Nebraska:

“That the wives of our guardians are to be common, and their children are to be common, and no parent is to know his own child, nor any child his parent. … The proper officers will take the offspring of the good parents to the pen or fold, and there they will deposit them with certain nurses who dwell in a separate quarter; but the offspring of the inferior, or of the better when they chance to be deformed, will be put away in some mysterious, unknown place, as they should be.”

“The desire of the Legislature to foster a homogeneous people with American ideals prepared readily to understand current discussions of civic matters is easy to appreciate,” McReynolds wrote, referencing a 1919 law that had outlawed the teaching of any subject to any person in any language other than English. “But the means adopted, we think, exceed the limitations upon the power of the state and conflict with [the] rights” of both teachers and parents.

Fair enough. After all, such a law seems to be a clear case of legislative overreach. But excepting its own forms of overreach (raise your hands, for example, if you’re willing to give up your children at birth so they can be raised in a common pen, or if you believe America should be recast as a communist country), in what ways can The Republic help illuminate the core opportunities – and pitfalls – of the greater push towards school choice?

On one level, The Republic seems to suggest that the very notion of choice is what ultimately undoes a community. “Have we any greater evil for a city,” says Socrates, “than what splits it and makes it many instead of one? Or a greater good than what binds it together and makes it one?” Seen in this light, the increasing balkanization of public education is merely the latest vehicle for pitting the motivations and self-interests of individuals and families against each other.  Socrates seems to confirm this notion later, when he suggests that “in founding the city we are not looking for the exceptional happiness of any one group among us but, as far as possible, that of the city as a whole.”

OK, so choice bad, no choice good. Right?

Not so fast. Although Plato would clearly take issue with the individualistic nature of our modern society, and perhaps too with our decision to make public education even more heterogeneous than it was before, he also believes that the highest calling of each person is to be “a seeker and student of that study by which he might be able to learn and find out who will give him the capacity and the knowledge to distinguish the good and the bad life, and so everywhere and always to choose the better from among those that are possible. . . From all this he will be able to draw a conclusion and choose – in looking off toward the nature of the soul – between the worse and the better life, calling worse the one that leads it toward becoming more unjust, and better the one that leads it to becoming juster. He will let everything else go. For we have seen that this is the most important choice for him in life and death.”

When I look at the current landscape of school choice in DC (a landscape I’ll be exploring in great detail this year as I follow the fortunes of three area schools – district, charter and private), I wonder how we can learn from Plato’s caution and heed his advice. Will greater school choice be a means toward helping more children and families “choose between the worse and the better life,” while also furthering our capacity as a city to live “free from faction”? Is this even possible? Or is our shared fidelity to the twin pillars of democracy and capitalism such that a vision of greater equity and spiritual fulfillment is merely illusory, and as misleading as the shadows of the puppets that dance on the wall of Plato’s allegorical cave?

In part, Plato’s allegory is a way for Socrates to make another key point: “education is not what the professions of certain men assert it to be. They presumably assert that they put into the soul knowledge that isn’t in it, as though they were putting sight into blind eyes.”

Plato’s larger point here is that we delude ourselves into thinking we understand the nature of things, when in fact all we are doing is constructing a false sense of the world and calling it real (as theoretical physicist David Bohm once said, “Thought makes the world and then says, ‘I didn’t do it.’”). For those of us trying to improve schools, I think the analogy is also an appropriate condemnation of the current system of schooling we have – a system that was designed to meet the needs of the Industrial Age that was, not the Democratic Age that will be.

So, now that the school choice genie has been released from the bottle, I ask you: In what ways can it engender more schools capable of giving more 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?