​Last month, I stopped by the annual summer Yale Writing Workshop to hear my son Jotham interview Jill Lepore, a Harvard historian and a staff writer for The New Yorker. Jotham had introduced me to These Truths: A History of the United States, her latest book and a truly massive text centered around four major themes. For educational historians and critical theorists, the chief challenges facing our students—and, by extension, our schools—derive from social class, race, gender, sexual orientation, and disability. Lepore, interestingly, groups her study of America’s history, struggles, and development around the topics of race, gender, income inequality, and the role of the media. Notice any similarities?
 
Hanging above all of these themes, however, is an old unspoken maxim: History repeats itself. Lepore even acknowledges explicitly that “to study the past is to unpack the prison of the present.” When it comes to that initial theme of race and racial tension as a key element of American history, then, Lepore is really asking: Why is race such a recurring theme during every national election? Why is it the root cause of a daily struggle for so many Americans?
 
When it comes to the history American women and of their struggle for equal rights and equal pay, Lepore discusses one of the most overt symbols of past injustices coming back to haunt us: the impact of Phyllis Schlafly’s opposition to the ERA and her embracing of Donald Trump as a “true conservative,” as one who would fight for immigration and abortion reform. She died days after speaking at the Republican National Convention, a speech that helped the president to win 52% of the Catholic vote and 81% of the evangelical vote in 2016.
 
Regarding income inequality, Lepore traces the transition in the flow of income and profit from Southern farmers to Northern industrialists. She also tells the story of the modern technology sector, which rewards the few innovators and inventors—the new economic elite—for their brilliance while leaving the rest of the population at a comparative economic disadvantage. She demonstrates how, in the 1970s, the gulf between social classes began to emerge—at the same time that the middle class began to disappear.
 
Lepore’s fourth focus is on the ongoing role of the press—and its significance from the founding of our nation to this very day. Embedded in this theme is the role of political consultants and how they have used—and continue to use—divisive language in order to inspire fear and to distort fact. Indeed, Lepore’s analysis of the media throughout our nation’s history is a chilling commentary of the impact of partisan positions versus objective fact.
 
Ultimately, then, a brilliant potential reading assignment for American history students and a potent lesson on the cyclical nature of history in these troubled times, Lepore’s latest is, for educators, a new perspective on many of the same themes that have driven our work for decades. It gives voice to how the challenges facing our schools and students have changed over time—and where they come from.
 
And in times like ours, we can’t afford to be uninformed.  
 
To close, I lift a quote from Reinhold Niebuhr’s The Irony of American History, one of the many famous works highlighted and dissected in Lepore’s book:
 
"If we should perish, the ruthlessness of the foe would be only the secondary cause of the disaster. The primary cause would be that the strength of a giant nation was directed by eyes too blind to see all the hazards of the struggle; and the blindness would be induced not by accident of nature or history but by hatred and vainglory."  

As many of you know, the media has had a field day beating up educators and education—especially public education. David Brooks, our friend and influencer at The New York Times, writes about American journalism and the philosophy that drives it. “The world will get better,” he says, “when we show where things have gone wrong,” and what journalists do, he argues, is “expose error, cover problems, and identify conflict” —and, we would add, monitor public and private enterprises and their impact on community life. In short, they should prioritize the negative over the positive.
 
This type of coverage impacts consumers of the media in disempowering and depressing ways; Brooks asserts that these stories “sink [people] into this toxic vortex—alienated from people they don’t know” because they do not interact—or are totally insulated from—the Other. They fear the future. Indeed, at the same time that it exposes problems, the media should also be identifying solutions to those problems. And while some do not find news of thriving local and community life as immediately captivating as stories of disaster and terror, Brooks points out that this is wrong.
 
To that end, our focus has, as of late, been on identifying positive stories and uplifting news from the world of public education and administration. Over the years, we have found many enlightening stories of local and regional educational successes all across the country—in Maine, Colorado, Virginia, Illinois, Nevada, Indiana, New Mexico, Michigan, Mississippi, Ohio, California—and especially in Vermont, where Center Director Leonard Burrello came to know what truly personalized learning looks like during his time at the Williston School with Dr. Lynn Murray. Recently, however, we have turned our attention specifically to Warren Township in Indiana.
 
Center Social Media Manager and educational consultant Dena Cushenberry knows Warren well, having worked there for over nineteen years and inhabited nearly every role—from that of an assistant middle school principal all the way up to that of the district superintendent. In light of Dena’s recent retirement, Leonard, Dena, and their Mississippi-based colleague Robin Mills have been enmeshed in a study of how Warren transformed itself from a struggling district to a thriving one. The results of our study are being published in a forthcoming book entitled Vertigo, but in the meantime, we plan to bring you some excerpts—right here on our blog. Today, we want to frame this book for you and really let you know what’s coming. And so, with that being said, here’s an abstract (of sorts) for the forthcoming Vertigo!

​------
 
You can’t control what might impact—or befall—your district on a daily basis, but you can, as superintendent, control your response. And that is key.
 
We live in turbulent times, in an era characterized by division, tension, and anger. The world of public education—saddled with new financial burdens; increasingly diverse and complex student populations; ever-changing state and federal standards and mandates; teacher retention; and, perhaps most damaging of all, negative public perceptions—might best be described as being in a state of vertigo: unable to tell which way is up or down.
 
But how educators should respond in these turbulent and disruptive times can be found in the same place as always: in the creation of optimal conditions for student success at the local and district levels. Few administrators understand this better than those in Warren Township, Indiana: a district that, over the course of nearly twenty years, went from a struggling district to a thriving district. With insight and commentary from former Superintendent Dena Cushenberry and her cabinet members, we analyze ten issues that Warren Township school leaders were able to successfully navigate in their efforts to revolutionize their district—issues that any administrator of any district in any city or town in any state of America might well face. Dena and her team discuss lessons learned; offer advice for others to consider as they move their districts forward; and share the research they used to make their decisions, the templates they used in constructing district narratives, and the frameworks upon which they built their policies.
 
Above all else, though, what this book offers is a story of how a collaborative district leadership team came together to build a coherent message that connected students, staff, and the community in the common pursuit of transformative learning.

Market Economics 101:

• It is becoming increasingly clear that income inequality is a pervasive and growing issue across the nation.
• This issue, paired with ever-shrinking opportunities (the average college tuition rate is now $524 per credit), is keeping America's young people dependent upon their parents' support for longer and longer.  
• Legislative efforts to reduce the role of government in policing marketplace excesses began in the 1980s and continue today. Meanwhile, economic growth has slowed to a rate of 2% (or less!) per year.

 
According to noted economist and Columbia professor Joseph Stiglitz, standards of living increased from the 1800s onwards as a consequence of:

1. The advent of science and the subsequent expansion of our understanding of nature and how to increase productivity.
2. The development of social organizations that followed the established rule of law, thus allowing for the creation and evolution of democratic institutions with checks and balances.

 
The key to both science and democracy lies with a society’s ability to both assess and verify truth. In other words, success lies with the establishment of agreed-upon facts; as Daniel Moyihan points out, each of us is entitled to our own opinions, but we are not entitled to our own facts.

However, America is becoming increasingly fragmented, and that fragmentation is driven, at least partially, by the regularity with which Americans disagree about basic, previously set-in-stone facts. Moyihan argues that the secure establishment of fact derives from economic stability, from the state successfully managing to make markets serve society—rather than the other way around. The state needs to allow for competition without allowing for abuse and exploitation; it needs to align the goals and incentives of corporations with the workers they employ and the customers they serve. This, in turn, ensures the prosperity of the broader American populace, ensuring that society then benefits from any nation’s true source of wealth: the creativity and innovative designs and skillsets of its people.

As educators, then, our challenge is to teach students to inquire, to search for novel solutions to our nation’s problems. We need to prepare our youngest generations and all future generations for the future; we need to give them the skills and abilities they will need to complete their “new work.” For times change, and the work that society at large needs to accomplish to keep the nation afloat changes, too.

Our work begins with teaching our students to analyze, to reason, and to apply their skills and knowledge to whatever contexts and issues they might face in the classroom, at home, or in the community, nation, or world at large.  This process is largely a social one, one that requires our students to engage others in dialogue and debate. Debate then leads to synthesis, to a collaboratively designed solution to the given problem. To give our students the abilities necessary to think and analyze at such a high level, we need a curriculum founded on skepticism, critical thinking, and problematization.         

One of the best ways to craft such a curriculum is to center it around a project-based learning model, a model that requires students to think about real community and national issues instead of about abstractions. After all, in order to truly personalize learning, we must first find a way to motivate students to engage with the material—and with the world around them. For learning does not occur in a vacuum. Teachers need to bring challenging issues into the classroom because students can relate to those issues, can attach themselves to these real-life stakes and to the skillsets required to solve them.  

​We have some examples of these project-based learning models share. Vertigo, our forthcoming book, will also contain information on and strategies for building personalized learning models; stay tuned for updates on the book’s publication date. 

An excerpt from The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life, David Brooks’s newest book, was recently published in The New York Times. Titled “The Moral Peril of Meritocracy,” this essay offers a glimpse of Brook’s larger understanding of how we progress through life. His model is built around the idea that those who truly find joy usually begin by climbing what they believe to be the metaphorical mountain separating them from however they’ve defined success. 
 
Ultimately, however, Brooks uses this new book to argue that those who truly live joyous lives don’t stop after climbing this “first mountain.” Indeed, they learn that that first mountain wasn’t really what was separating them from joy after all. Thus, they must climb a “second mountain.” 
 
Below, we’ve distilled Brooks’s characterizations of these two mountains into a clear and easy-to-read chart. As you compare and contrast these two metaphorical models, consider which mountain you believe yourself to be currently scaling. Remember that, if your current climb is not satisfying your desire for a deeper purpose in life, then Brooks believes you might need to recommit yourself to a new and different climb. 

​Those of you who have been following our blog are already aware of our interest in appreciative inquiry, in finding our moral purposes and core values as educators and educational administrators. Ultimately, then, what we are most interested in is collecting what you perceive to be the purposes of public education—and the core values guiding your personal educational philosophies, the expectations your community has of its public school district, etcetera. 
 
While Brooks’s vision of the world, then, can be of immense value to us as individuals, it can be just as valuable to us as educators. It can help us to understand why we truly want to be teachers and administrators, why we want to live our lives helping children. If you’ve been an educator for years and haven’t yet felt personally fulfilled, then maybe you’re still climbing that first mountain—or maybe it was the wrong mountain to have climbed, and you’re either not in the right district or under the right administration with the right value system. Maybe you’ve become a teacher, but you’ve yet to climb that second mountain to an administrative position, one which would allow you to direct the district’s values, to correct a systemic wrong. 
 
As educational consultants, we here at The Center for Appreciative Organizing in Education want to help you to find joy and fulfillment in your educational career however we can. If you have anything you want to share with us—from stories of your climb/climbs to your personal beliefs in the purpose of public education to your district’s core purposes and values—email Center Executive Director Leonard Burrello at leonard@aoeducation.net, and we will offer some commentary on your messages to us in future blogs. (You can also contact us at that same address in order to discuss a consultation plan. Read about our consultants here.)

This week, we'd like to pay our deepest respects to the University of Texas at San Antonio's Bruce Barnett, a professor of educational leadership and policy studies and a leading scholar in our discipline. Recently, Bruce, who is also a Global Ed Leadership Distinguished Fellow, was profiled by Global Ed Leadership, and he shares a number of insights about his career and about how he has both mentored others and been mentored himself as he has strived to change public education for the better. 

Seeing as the overarching goal of this blog is to promote the sharing and discussing of ideas about educational policy, philosophy, and practice, it is only natural for us to sometimes bring in outside perspectives, particularly those of folks as experienced, versatile, and passionate as Bruce is. If you're looking for ways to affect real, substantive change in these troubles times, you need look no further for some great advice. 

Check out the first part of Global Ed Leadership's profile of Bruce Barnett here, and keep an eye out for the second part; we'll let you know when it drops. 

The other week, we talked about being the weavers—rather than the rippers—of our national social fabric. In keeping with that theme, we might find wisdom in the words of Ed Schultz, an old friend of Leonard’s from his time in grad school who has had a long career working with students suffering through severe emotional issues and illnesses. In his opinion, there are, at the very core, only two rules that schools really need to enforce:  

Rule #1: You cannot hurt yourself
Rule #2: You cannot hurt other people (or, of course, animals)
 
Echoing, in many ways, Ed’s sentiments, a 2017 piece in The New York Times offers a series of truths, so to speak, about children and about how they think and feel and are. We’ve reprinted this material below; take a look for yourself.
 
The truth is kids want to be part of the conversation.
The truth is kids are more curious than many adults.
The truth is kids know that lies are bad.
The truth is kids think cash is still cool.
The truth is kids don’t let differences divide them.
The truth is kids learn something new every day.
The truth is kids are smarter than you think.
The truth is kids can turn anyplace into a playground.
The truth is kids can make a difference right now.
The truth is kids feel things as deeply as adults do.
The truth is kids don’t need candy to feel better.
The truth is kids will inherit the earth.
The truth is kids have big dreams.
The truth is kids want to discover the world.
The truth is kids expect honesty.
The truth is kids think the simple stuff is funny.
The truth is kids bring people together.
The truth is kids appreciate a good story.
The truth is kids can handle the truth.
 
This brief piece might, in turn, help to form a foundation for educators’ attitudes towards children, their feelings, their developing values, and their senses of how to socialize with others—and some of these truths might thus function as rules in and of themselves. “The truth is kids know that lies are bad,” for example, could well be translated to the commonplace classroom rule that students are not to lie to one another—or to the teacher.
 
Really, though, what these truths do is reinforce Ed’s basic argument that, at heart, there are very few fundamental rules that need to be enforced in order to encourage children to be involved and ambitious and kind to one another.
 
But, as always, let’s converse in the comments below! Do you think that Ed is right about there being so few truly necessary school rules? Are we missing something here, and, if so, what is it? Do you get a different reading from the material from The New York Times?

Recently, David Brooks, our favorite New York Times columnist, wrote on our collective social fabric—as well as its “weavers” and “rippers.” “Every time you assault and stereotype a person,” he argues, “you’ve ripped the social fabric. Every time you see that person deeply and make her or him feel known, you’ve woven it.” He notes that our society has been living with sixty years of hyper-individualism, of an emphasis on “personal freedom, self-interest, self-expression, the idea that life is an individual journey toward personal fulfillment” (Brooks 2019). 
 
The whole concept of a “social fabric” is a very relevant one—both for us as people but also for us as educators. And it’s worth asking ourselves: How and to what extent do schools weave rather than rip the social fabrics of their local communities? And also: How do schools overcome the harmful effects of the premium our society places on hyper-individualism—particularly in light of heightened economic and social inequalities? 
 
This all connects to Neil Postman’s (1996) urging that we think of schools as an end—rather than as a means—to making a living. In other words, he suggests that schools and educators should pursue their profession as a way to actually make a life—rather than simply making a living. Such an enterprise, he is careful to warn us, is not, of course, a walk in the park—“since our politicians rarely speak of it, our technology is indifferent to it, and our commerce despises it. Nevertheless, it is the weightiest and most important thing to write about” (x). In Postman’s view, schooling needs to be about creating a transcendent and honorable purpose so that education itself “becomes the central institution through which the young may find reasons for continuing to educate themselves” (xi). 
 
But how do schools engage their communities to create a transcendent and honorable purpose for schooling? There is no short answer to that question—and certainly not one short enough to articulate in a single blog post—but it all starts with how we conceive of ourselves. With how we work to craft and define the purposes and values—the narratives—of our educational practices. 
 
In 2012, Dena proposed a community dialogue promoting and prioritizing a future-driven mindset and pedagogical and administrative philosophy, one which asks teachers to consider their plans for their students, school, and community as far ahead as 2025. Right away, this re-frames our thought processes because it makes us look beyond short-term problems, short-term solutions, and short-term consequences. It begs the metaphysical question: What will be our reasons for living—and therefore our reasons for schooling—so far into the future? As we work to reconcile with what might well be increasing inequality, climate change, and social discord, how will our communities change, and how will we change to address their changing needs? How does our narrative change to reflect a changing world, and how can we change the most problematic aspects of both our individual and our collective narratives to tell a better story with a happier ending for our students, ourselves, and our communities? 
 
For, as Postman (1996, 7) ultimately concludes: “[W]e are unceasing in creating histories and futures for ourselves through the medium of narrative. Without a narrative, life has no meaning. Without meaning, learning has no purpose. Without a purpose, schools are houses of detention, not attention.”
 
So what do you think? What’s the story you want to tell through your educational practices and policies? What does the story you’re telling right now look and sound like? What do you like and dislike about it? How do you want it to change? 
 
Let us know in the comments below, and let’s do our best—our absolute best—to be the weavers of our nation’s social fabric rather than its rippers. 
 
References:
 
Brooks, David. 2019. “A Nation of Weavers.” New York Times, February 18, 2019. 
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/18/opinion/culture-compassion.html.
 
Postman, Neil. 1996. The End of Education: Re-Defining the Value of School. New York: 
Vintage. 

​David Brooks of The New York Times is something of a fountain of knowledge for us educators—even when his work isn’t written with us specifically in mind. For his writing regularly encourages readers to consider a variety of topics from a stirring number of viewpoints, something that we should always strive to do when working on behalf of the nation’s youngest and most vulnerable citizens. This week, then, we’d like to highlight Mr. Brooks’s work, along with that of Oren Cass, as these two big thinkers are some of our most eloquent predictors of what’s to come: be it good or bad.
 
First: David Brooks. To give you a glimpse of his insights, here are some notes from an article he published just after the November 2018 election:

• 20% of working men are not working full-time jobs
• Only 37% of Americans think that their child will be better off financially than they have been themselves
• Financial insecurity is no longer a reality only for those near or below the poverty line

 
Oren Cass, meanwhile, is the author of The Once and Future Worker, a book replete with policy ideas educators might well consider. Cass, for example, supports what’s called academic tracking, a system by which students are grouped and taught according to their academic abilities as opposed to being thrown into a one-size-fits-all system designed to prepare everyone for college. In support of academic tracking, Cass offers the following data, ultimately concluding from it that too many schools currently treat all students as if they are all the same and have the same needs and aspirations instead of working to actually meet kids’ needs.   

• 20% of students do not graduate high school in four years
• 20% of students do not continue their education after high school
• 20% of students drop out of college
• 20% of students get a job unrelated to their college degree

 
And now, of course, it’s time for us to debate - just as all critical thinkers should. Debate. Analyze. Work out and through. So what do you think of this data? What do you think we should draw from it? Do you agree with Cass’s opinion of academic tracking?
 
Let us know. More to come soon. 

Last week, we kicked off the new year by discussing the ways in which we might look, in our increasingly globalized and interconnected society, to other American industries—such as healthcare—for ways to critique, better understand, and improve our current approaches to public education. This week, we’re going to expand briefly on one key component of our prior analysis, and that is the true and even shocking extent of geographical disparities in states’ investments in public education.  
 
Recall that, like healthcare, education is largely a state responsibility. Only naturally, then, it is the wealthier states which are best able to fund their students, leading, oftentimes, to better, brighter, and more financially stable futures for those students.
 
Yet while few sources actually track the disparities between just how much states across the U.S. invest in public education, the effects of those disparities—from graduation rates to college readiness to performances on standardized tests—are readily apparent. We recently followed Amazon’s national search for a site for a new corporate office and found, somewhat unexpectedly, an illustration of states’ investments in education—for in noting which areas a massively successful company like Amazon seriously considered, we found the mega-corporation itself tracking one of the greatest indicators of an educational system’s efficacy: local economic development. 
 
And Amazon, of course, is not the only company to evaluate potential business sites in this fashion. Also recently but much more quietly, Google also established new offices. And again, the chosen sites are hardly surprising: one in New York—and in close proximity to New Jersey and Connecticut—and another in Arlington, Virginia—and in close proximity to D.C. and Maryland.
 
For beyond the obvious wealth of these chosen business sites, Google made these moves because they are searching for talent, and there is a definitive connection between a region’s wealth, its access to talent, and the quality of its educational system. Talent is what it takes to sustain innovation and development, and education, in turn, sustains talent.
 
As we discussed last week, funding is not the only guarantor of educational efficacy—but it is an undeniably important one and one which is highly correlated to post-school success. For part of the reason that money begets talent and educational success is because money attracts the most effective teachers, the most talented educators. Money also buys technological advancement, thus enabling more advanced educational practices in our increasingly tech-driven world. Money buys experiences and opportunities, thus expanding a student's worldview.
 
Just something to think about as we continue to work to improve the modern state of American public education. Let us know what you think in the comments below, and for a particularly astute and in-depth analysis of economic disparities—with examples and precise figures—check out a recent study by USA Today​. 

“The purpose of public education is to create a public.”
—Neil Postman
 
As is probably the case for many of you, it feels, during the holidays, like every day is Saturday, a time for both fun and reflection. This year--after our energetic grandchildren had departed--that reflection centered on the midterm elections and the wave of diversity set to impact the House of Representatives. 
 
It was healthcare, of course, which was the number one issue to carry the day for most of these remarkable incoming officials. Fittingly, then, Senator Kamala Harris, an increasingly prominent figure of the Democratic Party, recently told the very personal story of her mother’s fight for her life against colon cancer. Her mother, who was a cancer researcher herself, knew the odds—and the inevitable. It’s a powerful story, one which has helped to inspire and inform Senator Harris’s forthcoming book, The Truths We Hold: An American Journey. 
 
And interestingly, it seems  we can draw a number of parallels—as well as several important contrasts—between healthcare and public education. In fact, it seems we might even use what we know about the healthcare system to illuminate and inform our discussions of the challenges educators are currently grappling with. 
 
For example, we know that the healthcare system grants coverage and care based upon where you live and, perhaps most importantly, how much money you make. At the same time, healthcare as a business and as policy is largely managed and determined by state governments and their relationships with public and large private healthcare companies within their jurisdictions. Everyone is guaranteed access to healthcare through hospital emergency rooms, but ER treatment is often cripplingly expensive and is hardly the preferred—or even the most effective—form of treatment. Wealth and location often thus differentiate the quality of care and the probability of better outcomes for American citizens, many of whom cannot afford the preventative medications and treatments which could keep them out of the ER.  
 
Similarly, education is largely a state responsibility. Only naturally, then, it is the wealthier states which are best able to fund their students, leading, oftentimes, to better, brighter, and more financially stable futures for those students.
 
Yet while both the healthcare system and the public education system service among the most vulnerable members of our population—sick people and children, respectively—medical practitioners are far more in control of their own financial destinies than are public educators. For in addition to the obvious inequities of an economic system which favors wealthier states and wealthier state governments, public school budgets are largely determined and can be further constrained by state assessments; in contrast, the privatized world of healthcare is able, albeit within certain boundaries, to self-police. In this sense, then, the obvious and oft-studied geographic and economic variables which can so negatively impact the healthcare system are actually only the tip of the iceberg for public educators, and it's an issue which needs to be discussed and further fleshed out in both contexts. 
 
It’s not all bad news, however, as we can learn as much about public education’s potential for growth as we can about its struggles by comparing it with the business of healthcare. Most significantly, it is by studying healthcare that we can see the power of technology and the value of technological investment. Indeed, the healthcare industry has embraced technological innovation and used it to enhance both the patient experience and to reduce costly hospital stays for sicker clients. Technology has also allowed for dramatically improved preventative and palliative measures which reduce long-term costs and improve patient outcomes.
 
In terms of public education, meanwhile, the technology to further improve educational practices and outcomes already exists. Implementing practices which emphasize truly personalized learning means diagnosing students’ learning preferences through their relationships with their peers, their teachers, and their parents and guardians. Curriculum is then built locally within a given school community as teachers and principals talk with parents and community members about desired learning priorities and projects that should guide students in their educational advancement from kindergarten on. As students age and grow within the system, they become increasingly self-directed and independent, and technology becomes ever more important in continuing to track students’ progress, intellectual development, and evolving learning preferences. Investment in technology, then, could well transform and improve the educational sphere just as it has improved the world of healthcare—but only if the money is allocated and provided for investment. 
 
Neil Postman’s famous quote at the beginning of this post thus bears repeating: “The purpose of public education is to create a public.” And as politicians like Senator Harris no doubt recognize, a “public” is made of a great many things beyond the world of public education—including things like healthcare. And in this time of globalization and as citizens of a nation which celebrates interaction, intersectionality, and cooperation, it makes sense to look to other industries in order to find sources of inspiration for our own work.
 
It’s something to think about—and to think about very carefully. How else might we learn about evolving educational practices from looking at the healthcare industry? What other industries might we learn from as we seek to better understand and improve public education? 
 
More to come. Let us know what you think.