180: Mississippi Rising

Of our fifty states, I can think of no other whose local history — for better and for worse — captures the essence of the larger American story.

In a sense, we are all Mississippians.

To wit, our next 180 story provides a glimpse of the systemic and generational impacts of racism, and how vital investment in education is to all residents —  and to the entire state’s economy. We see this all through the eyes of local organizer (and Mississippi native) Albert Sykes, his 11-year-old son Aidan, mothers in Jackson Public Schools, a mayor, a school board member, and other community advocates. Part history, part vignette, and full of humanity, our hope is that Mississippi Rising will begin to connect the dots of who needs to be engaged to identify, understand, and create a bright future for Mississippi that involves the entire community.

The release of this video is timely. On September 14th of this year, the Mississippi State Board of Education recommended a state takeover of Jackson Public Schools. Governor Phil Bryant is considering the recommendation, while many of Jackson’s students, families, faith, and business leaders — along with the Mayor of Jackson and several school board members — believe they should be the ones to determine the future of Jackson Public Schools. They are asking the Governor to support local governance. Commenting on the Governor’s decision, says Albert Sykes, the Executive Director of IDEA, “The Governor – and even the State Board – may have the right concern, but a takeover of JPS is clearly the wrong policy.”

The Breadcrumbs: Additional vignettes and calls-to-action (CTAs) 

Thank you for watching. And stay tuned! #thisis180

How to Design the Ideal Early Childhood Center

What would you do if you could design the ideal early childhood center?

At WONDER, we just got that opportunity — but we need your help.

Historically, the way people think about a problem like this is by taking the total number of square feet (30,000-40,000), and then dividing by the total number of kids (300) to figure out how many classrooms you need (15).

This is the wrong formula for any school — but it’s especially wrong for a school that intends to base its educational program on the Reggio model — a form of education that originated in Italy around the notion that the physical environment is the “third teacher” (after parents and peers), and that seeks a much fuller integration of all spaces (and senses) than the traditional primary school.

Consequently, we’re beginning the design process with this question: Knowing that all children learn best through play, collaboration, curiosity and wonder, how might we design this learning environment differently?

Better yet, what if we took those same 15 spaces and, instead of designing a really cool template and then and just repeating it 15 times, we created 15 amplified, thematic experiences that offered their own special source of exploration and wonder?

Imagine, for example . . .

The Puddle Room — A space where we play and learn about water.

Einstein’s Dream — A space where we play and learn about the nature of light.

The Echo Chamber — A place where we play and learn about the nature of sound.

There are so many possibilities! We have room for fifteen.

What would YOU want to see?

The Age of the Individual is Upon Us

One year, early in my teaching career, I got reprimanded for giving too many “A’s.”

“You can’t give everyone the same grade,” I was instructed. “Give a few A’s and F’s, and a lot of B’s and C’s. Otherwise, everyone will know that your class is either too easy or too hard.”

This was unremarkable advice; indeed, it was as close to the educational Gospel as you could find. It was human nature in action.

And, apparently, it was completely wrong.

“We have all come to believe that the average is a reliable index of normality,” writes Todd Rose, a professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education and the author of The End of Average: How We Succeed in a World That Values Sameness. “We have also come to believe that an individual’s rank on narrow metrics of achievement can be used to judge their talent. These two ideas serve as the organizing principles behind our current system of education.”

And yet, Rose suggests, “when it comes to understanding individuals, the average is most likely to give incorrect and misleading results.”

In fact, the origins of what Rose calls “averagarian thinking” had nothing to do with people; they were adaptations of a core method in astronomy — the Method of Averages, in which you aggregate different measurements of the speed of an object to better determine its true value — that first got applied to the study of people in the early 19th century.

Since then, however, this misguided use of statistics — by definition, the mathematics of “static” values — has reduced the whims and caprices of human behavior to predictable patterns in ways that have proven almost impossible to resist.

Consider the ways it shaped the advice I got as a teacher, which was to let the Bell Curve, not the uniqueness of my students, be my guide. Or consider the ways it has shaped the entire system of American public education in the Industrial Era — an influence best summed up by one of its chief architects, Frederick Winslow Taylor, whose applications of scientific management to the classroom gave birth to everything from bells to age-based cohorts to the industrial efficiency of the typical school lunchroom. “In the past,” Taylor said, “the man was first. In the future, the system must be first.”

Uh, yeah. No.

Of course, anyone who is paying attention knows that the end of the Taylorian line of thinking is upon us — and Rose’s book is but one of the many factors that will expedite its demise. “We are on the brink of a new way of seeing the world,” he predicts, and “a change driven by one big idea: individuality matters.”

In systems thinking, there’s a word for this approach: equifinality — or the idea that in any multidimensional system that involves changes over time, there are always multiple pathways to get from point A to point B. And the good news is that this revolution in thinking is already underway – it’s not just evenly distributed.

The bad news is that most of us have no idea that a revolution is occurring. Instead, we are stuck in the familiar notion that most American schools are failing, that the problems are too big to tackle, and that our slow and steady decline into, well, averagarianism, is inexorable.

I am here to tell you this is not true.

We know more than we think we do.

We are further along than we think we are.

And so, in the coming months – approximately every ten days for the foreseeable future – expect a new story that is about solutions, possibility, and the people and communities whose work is lighting that new path.

The Age of the Individual is upon us.

#thisis180

Before he says anything else about the Pledge of Allegiance, @RealDonaldTrump should read this . . .

Of course, we know he won’t — but that doesn’t mean the rest of us shouldn’t brush up on the actual history of the Pledge, and the actual meaning of the flag. When we do, there can be no room for alternative facts — only a history that, based on how we define patriotism, either puts us on the side of some courageous young schoolchildren of a generation ago, or on the side of totalitarianism. . .

—-

Billy Gobitas knew that refusing to salute the flag in his fifth-grade classroom could result in expulsion from school, loss of friends, and even persecution in his hometown of Minersville, Pennsylvania. But on October 22, 1935, he did it anyway. “I do not salute the flag,” he later wrote to the school board, “because I have promised to do the will of God.” The next day, twelve-year-old Lillian Gobitas followed her brother’s lead and also refused to salute the flag. “This wasn’t something my parents forced on us,” she later explained.  “I did a lot of reading and checking in the Bible and I really took my own stand.”

The Gobitas children were not alone. Other members of their church — Jehovah’s Witnesses — faced the same dilemma in school districts throughout the nation where saluting the flag was compulsory. As Billy explained in his letter, Witnesses believe that a flag salute is a form of idolatry, violating the biblical injunction not to “make unto thee any graven image, nor bow down to them.”

Two years earlier, in 1933, Adolf Hitler had banned the Witnesses in Nazi Germany for, among other things, refusing to give the Fascist salute in schools and at public events. Over the next decade, more than ten thousand Witnesses were imprisoned in concentration camps. These events in Nazi Germany led the leader of the American Witnesses, Joseph Rutherford, to denounce compulsory flag salutes in a speech delivered in 1935. Witnesses, he said, “do not ‘Heil Hitler’ nor any other creature.” Rutherford’s speech inspired the Gobitas family and other Witnesses to refuse to participate in the flag ceremony in the name of religious liberty.

The Witnesses’ objections to the flag salute failed to impress the members of the Minersville school board. In their view, the Pledge of Allegiance helped fulfill the public schools’ mission to instill “love of country.” They saw failure to salute the flag as insubordinate and unpatriotic. Most people in mostly Roman Catholic Minersville were equally unsympathetic with the unpopular Jehovah’s Witnesses. Consequently, Billy and Lillian Gobitas were expelled from school.

Eighteen months later, the children’s father, Walter Gobitas, filed suit. With the help of the Watch Tower Society of the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the American Civil Liberties Union, Gobitas argued that the Minersville school board had deprived Billy and Lillian of their right to freedom of religion and speech under the First Amendment. The Gobitas family won in the federal district court in Philadelphia and won again in the U.S. Court of Appeals. Both courts dismissed the school board’s contention that refusal by schoolchildren to salute the flag on religious grounds was a danger to the nation. On the contrary, the judges said, Lillian and William Gobitas were exercising the very “liberty of conscience” that was sought by many of our ancestors when they first came to the New World.

The Minersville school board appealed the case to the U.S. Supreme Court. Minersville v. Gobitis was decided on June 3, 1940. (Due to a printer’s error, the Gobitas family name is misspelled in legal records.)  By an eight-to-one vote, the Court reversed the lower courts and ruled that the government had the authority to compel students to participate in the flag salute. Writing for the majority — and against the backdrop of an impending world war — Justice Felix Frankfurter pointed to the need for “a common feeling for the common country.” The flag, he argued, “is the symbol of our national unity, transcending all internal differences, however large, within the framework of the Constitution.” Justice Harlan Stone was the lone voice of dissent. The very essence of liberty, he wrote, “is the freedom of the individual from compulsion as to what he shall think and what he shall say, at least where the compulsion is to bear false witness to his religion.”

The Gobitis decision had an immediate and devastating impact on Jehovah’s Witnesses in the United States. Within weeks of the Court’s ruling, hundreds of attacks on Witnesses were reported to the Department of Justice. Mobs, sometimes assisted by police, attacked and humiliated Witnesses across the nation. “In the two years following the Gobitis decision,” federal officials wrote, “the files of the Department of Justice reflect an uninterrupted record of violence and persecution of the Witnesses. Almost without exception, the flag and the flag salute can be found as the percussion cap that sets off these acts.”

Disturbed by the violence, three justices began to rethink their vote in Gobitis. When told by Justice William O. Douglas that Justice Hugo Black had changed his mind, Frankfurter asked, “Has Hugo been re-reading the Constitution during the summer?” Douglas replied, “No, he has been reading the papers.”

In 1943, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear another flag-salute case, West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette — this time with three changed votes and two new justices. The case involved children of three Jehovah’s Witnesses in Charleston, West Virginia. Walter Barnette, Lucy McClure, and Paul Stull had been expelled from school for refusing to salute the flag.

This time, by a vote of six to three, the Court struck down the West Virginia flag-salute law, overruling the Gobitis decision. In one of the most eloquent and powerful decisions in Supreme Court history, Justice Robert Jackson cited examples from history of repressive government efforts to enforce national unity:

“The ultimate futility of such attempts to compel coherence is the lesson of every such effort from the Roman drive to stamp out Christianity as a disturber of pagan unity, the Inquisition, as a means to religious and dynastic unity, the Siberian exiles as a means to Russian unity, down to the fast failing efforts of our present totalitarian enemies. Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.”

The First Amendment, Jackson argued, was designed to avoid such tyranny by denying government the power over basic freedoms:

“The very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts. One’s right to life, liberty, and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly, and other fundamental rights may not be submitted to vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections.”

The American flag, Jackson reminded the nation, stands for freedom — including the freedom to dissent. And to deny people their inalienable rights is to deny the very meaning of the First Amendment:

“If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein. If there are any circumstances which permit an exception, they do not now occur to us.”

The U.S. Supreme Court announced its decision in Barnette on June 14, 1943 — Flag Day. Soon thereafter, attacks on Jehovah’s Witnesses ceased.

Postscript: For an understanding of what today’s debate is really about, take 30 seconds to hear directly from San Francisco 49ers safety Eric Reid. This is what patriotism looks like — courageous, uncomfortable, informed, principled.

This is also who we are . . .