​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!

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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.