Tag: Plato

In New York, A Tale of Two Cities (and Two Selves)

Posted on | by Sam | 9 Comments on In New York, A Tale of Two Cities (and Two Selves)

At the New Teacher Center conference a few years ago, I watched a master teacher model a great way to introduce students to new material. She projected a single image onto the screen in our conference room — it was Liberty Leading the People — and asked us a single question, over and over again: “What do you see?” Any observation (“I see a strong woman”) would prompt a second question from the instructor (“What’s your evidence?”). It was fun, and illuminating, and after ten minutes, based on nothing more than our own close observations, we were ready to study the French Revolution.

I was reminded of that workshop recently, when I saw someone on Twitter share the following picture:

Absent any context, what do you see? And what is your evidence?

Now let’s try another one, this time a 30-second video:

Or this one:

Again, what do you see? And what is your evidence?

If you’re someone who closely follows the news about school reform, you already know that the standing woman in the photograph is Eva Moskowitz, the founder of the Success Academy network of charter schools in New York City. You know that her salary — $475,000 a year — is twice that of the NYC Schools Chancellor. And you know that the video, and others like it, appeared shortly after Mayor Bill de Blasio announced he was canceling plans for three of her schools in New York City — and allowing virtually every other charter proposal to proceed.

It’s been disconcerting to watch this fight escalate — particularly because, as I’ve said repeatedly, issues of school choice are complicated. Nuance is required, and once again, nuance is nowhere to be found. But there’s another issue I see playing out in this fight, and that picture, and those videos, and it’s the one we really don’t want to talk about: the extent to which our current reform efforts are either redefining, or merely reinforcing, traditional notions of race, privilege, and power.

Indeed, the battle between the Matriarch and the Mayor isn’t really about co-locations, or charter schools, or the right of a parent to choose: it’s about the ongoing tension between our country’s delicate, dual allegiance to the core values of capitalism (consumption & competition) and the core values of democracy (conscience & consensus). It’s about a mayor’s clumsy attempt to swing the ideological pendulum back — perhaps too far — in the direction of democracy by making a political point. And it’s about whether it’s OK or a little shady that a white woman can make a personal fortune by dramatically raising the test scores of poor black and brown kids.

Personally, I think it’s a little shady. Not because schools like Success Academy are inherently wrong or misguided, but because it’s a vivid example of the ways in which our society in general, and public school reform in particular, has shifted its moral center to the capitalist side of the values continuum. In that world, competition is king, and to the victor goes the acres of diamonds.

This is an old tension, and an ongoing argument between two competing sides of ourselves. Plato first laid it out for us, in The Republic, when he said that liberty was democracy’s greatest good. What type of liberty will generate the greatest good, however, has been debated ever since, though philosophers have clarified the distinction. One vision, described as the liberty of the ancients, refers to the need for people to have a voice into the policies and politicians that govern their lives. The other, the liberty of the moderns, speaks to the right of each individual to pursue his or her own private interests free form state oversight or control.

I would suggest that the core of the current fight over school reform policies can be traced back to which side of the liberty equation speaks to you most. Consider the central rallying cry of the charter school movement: My child, My choice. Consider the rallying cry on the other side — less pithily stated, but the essence is, public schools are the foundation of a healthy democracy (gotta work on that messaging, guys). Or consider the words of Khari Shabazz, the principal of Success Academy’s fifth Harlem location, in an interview with a reporter from the New Yorker. “They are going to be competing for spaces in colleges and universities across the country,” he said of his students. “Coming from the socio-economic background that they’re coming from, it’s important to learn to be competitive. And none of us work for free.”

There’s nothing wrong with that statement; it’s simply a market-oriented approach to school change — a liberty of the moderns worldview, if you will — and it’s a view that’s very much in line with the larger sea change in American society. “Markets don’t just allocate goods,” says Harvard’s Michael Sandel. “They also express and promote certain attitudes towards the goods being exchanged. And what has occurred over the past thirty years is that without quite realizing it, we have shifted from having a market economy to being a market society. The difference is this: A market economy is a tool – a valuable and effective tool – for organizing productive activity. A market society is a way of life in which market values seep into every aspect of human endeavor. It’s a place where social relations are made over in the image of the market.”

For a society in which social relations are deeply rooted in a shared history of race-based inequality and oppression, will the application of market thinking to public schools result in the erosion, or the entrenchment, of those legacies? Indeed, the center of the fight in NYC seems to be about what will happen when the considerable wealth and influence of a capitalist economy begins to remake the institution that was founded to be the ultimate safeguard of our democratic society. It’s about what happens when educators start to make private-sector salaries by improving achievement in communities that have been left behind. And it’s about what happens when two increasingly entrenched groups of people debate the future of public education from perspectives that can sometimes feel mutually exclusive.

This is what makes modern school reform so complicated. It isn’t that one side is evil and out to ruin America, and the other is righteous and out to save it — though both sides have claimed exactly that; it’s that the values people are working from to solve our most intractable problems are, in many ways, diametrically opposed.

Which takes me back to that picture, which feels like a Rorshach test for the values you bring to this debate. Does the imagery make you uncomfortable, even angry? Or does it seem like much ado about nothing, or perhaps even a positive representation of precisely what you want to be fighting for?

Knowing where we stand on the values question doesn’t immediately lend itself to any clear-cut, system-wide solutions. But perhaps it can clarify what we’re actually fighting over, and why any effort to find the happy medium between our democratic and our capitalistic selves may prove as elusive as the search for Plato’s ideal republic — now 2,500 years long, and counting.

In What Way Justice?

Posted on | by Sam

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?”

What Plato Would Think of School Choice

Posted on | by Sam | 3 Comments on 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?