Wednesday, January 25th, 2012 at 9:30 am
Anytime you hear government officials mandating new behaviors to a broad swath of the population, that mandate is likely to run afoul of the First Amendment. And so it is with President Obama’s announcement last night that all states must “require that all students stay in high school until they graduate or turn 18.”
Although Mr. Obama made other pronouncements about education — see Dana Goldstein’s good summary analysis in The Nation — the stay-in-school mandate was the one that caught my ear, since enforcing it would run afoul of both the United States Supreme Court and our historic commitment to religious liberty.
Continue reading…
Sunday, January 22nd, 2012 at 2:07 pm
Last week, CNN reported on recent events in Garfield Heights, Ohio, where austerity measures have led local school officials to shorten the schoolday to five hours, get rid of subjects like art, music, and PE — and send kids home before lunch. What didn’t come out during the piece was that these drastic decisions were fueled in part by the community’s refusal, over a 20 year period, to pass a levy that would help support the schools. Like many places across the country, Garfield Heights’ residents were getting older, its younger people were moving away, and those that remained didn’t see sufficient value in a measure that would be used to support the education of other people’s children.
Continue reading…
Thursday, January 19th, 2012 at 1:21 pm
Like most parents of a young child, I’m trying to decide which environment will be the best for my son when he enters a public school for the first time next fall. At nearly every open house my wife and I attend, cheerful administrators and educators tout the advantage of being a “participatory” school, and of “giving children the opportunity to learn and work in groups.” Send your child here, they tell us, and he’ll acquire a core set of democratic skills – from working collaboratively to acting empathetically – that will help him successfully negotiate our increasingly interconnected global community.
Sounds great, I say – until I open my Sunday New York Times and read a cover story warning against the rise of a new type of groupthink. “Most of us now work in teams,” writes author Susan Cain, “in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in. But there’s a problem with this view. Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption.”
Whom should we trust? Have we overvalued democratic skills like collaboration and shared decision-making to our own detriment? And, in the end, should our schools be more or less democratic?
Continue reading…
Thursday, January 12th, 2012 at 2:54 pm
Here, in Léogâne, halfway between Port-au-Prince and the epicenter of the 2010 earthquake that unleashed Haiti’s latest round of devastation, death and hardship, Doug Taylor is building houses.
An Indiana native in his 25th year of working for Habitat for Humanity, Taylor is tanned, serious and unshaven, with sandy straight hair that hangs down as though it has been weighted with stones. On a sunny day in December 2011, Taylor greets a visitor before 155 brand-new homes, all arranged in orderly rows, all built to a uniform size and shape, and all painted bright colors of pink, blue or green – a Haitian Levittown.
Continue reading…
Tuesday, November 22nd, 2011 at 9:10 am
If you’re looking for the latest signs of America’s cultural descent into inanity, look no further than this weekend’s Sunday Styles section in the New York Times, and its review of Maria Abramovic’s performance piece at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art’s recent fundraising gala.
Continue reading…
Saturday, November 12th, 2011 at 3:47 pm
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.
Continue reading…
Categories:
Democracy,
First AmendmentTags: assembly, Bonus Army, Bonus March, DC, free-speech, Herbert Hoover, Occupy DC, OWS, petition, protest
Friday, November 11th, 2011 at 9:10 am
As the protesters in McPherson Square enter their seventh week inhabiting a “city within the city,” what was the first national effort to Occupy DC – and how did it change the ways Americans saw their nation’s capital city?
———–
On a windy Easter morning in 1894, an unusual parade moved down the main street of Massillon, Ohio. The idea of an eccentric local businessman named Jacob S. Coxey, the parade featured an African American flag bearer, a hundred unemployed white men, and an infant named Legal Tender.
At the time of the parade, the United States was in the second year of a major economic depression and millions of Americans were unemployed; Coxey believed he had the answer to the nation’s economic woes. He proposed that the federal government issue $500 million in treasury bonds, that it apply those funds to initiate a massive program to build up the nation’s roads, and that it hire an army of workers, all of who would be guaranteed eight-hour days and daily wages of $1.50.
Convinced his plan would be ignored unless he presented it in person, Coxey intended to lead his peaceful parade of unemployed citizens all the way to Washington, D.C., where they would present a “petition in boots” to Congress on May 1 – International Labor Day. By the time they arrived, he promised reporters at a press conference on January 27, “We’ll have 100,000 men. We’ll not take a dollar with us, and instead of muskets every man will carry a white flag with the words, ‘Peace on Earth, Good Will toward Men, but Death to Interest-Bearing Bonds.’”
Continue reading…
Monday, October 31st, 2011 at 12:38 pm
On a crisp fall morning in the nation’s capital, 3rd grade teacher Rebecca Lebowitz gathered her 29 public school students on their familiar giant multicolored carpet, and reminded them how to make sense of the characters whose worlds they would soon enter during independent reading time.
“What are the four things we want to look for when we meet a new character?” Ms. Lebowitz asked from her chair at the foot of the rug. Several hands shot up before nine-year-old Monica spoke confidently over the steady hum of the classroom’s antiquated radiator. “We want to pay attention to what they do, what they say, how they feel, and what their body language tells us.” “That’s right,” her teacher said cheerily. “When we look for those four things, we have a much better sense of who a person really is.”
As the calendar shifts to the eleventh month of 2011 – a year of near-constant revolution and upheaval, from the Arab Spring to the Wisconsin statehouse to the global effort to Occupy Wall Street – what might the rest of us learn from students like Monica? If, in short, we were as smart as a third-grader, what would we observe about the character of this year’s global protests, and what might we decide to do next?
Continue reading…
Categories:
Assessment,
Democracy,
Learning,
Organizational ChangeTags: 2011, Democracy, Empathy, Gandhi, Justice, Occupy Wall Street, OECD, Organizational Change, Otto Scharmer, OWS, Poverty, revolution, social justice, Tahrir Square
Monday, October 24th, 2011 at 3:20 pm
A few shots of what it looks like when eight-year-olds come face to face with our nation’s monuments to justice — and briefly contemplate what it means to carry on the tradition.
Continue reading…
Categories:
DemocracyTags: DCPS, Justice
Thursday, September 22nd, 2011 at 10:49 am
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 Jones 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?
Continue reading…
