school

What Happened To The Village?
They say that “It takes a village to raise a child.” The village for most children in this country, is nothing but a ghost town. It doesn’t matter where you fall on the economic spectrum – as a child, you are better off finding your own Lord of the Flies island and bringing the Crazy Glue for the conch shell. You’re either “Waiting For Superman” to put you on a glitzier conveyor belt to serfdom or you’re “Racing to Nowhere” because you are the progeny of the wealthy elite who tend to eat their young (after my education at Collegiate School, Princeton, and contact with board members from Boys and Girls Harbor, I AM The Spook Who Sat By The Door regarding my knowledge on this).

Those of us who care at all about the school system, can succumb to the bystander effect. A lot of people are looking at the problem, so someone is sure to step in with a solution.  Why won’t anyone let the kids in on the joke that is their future?

Why Can’t I Keep A Job?
I pride myself on not being a bystander. Some would say I’m no better than the Good Samaritan who administers mouth-to-mouth when a Heimlich is called for but what the hell… I’m a man of action if nothing else. This is one reason why I have moved into the area of “personal development” as part of my professional portfolio. I went through a period where I lost “friends” when I stopped practicing law to enter the field of education. I have now lost more “friends” after abandoning my prestigious leadership position at a dysfunctional nonprofit. In both instances, my initial reaction was that people were somehow embarrassed by my change in status. Now that I have more clarity, I see that the discomfort these people suffer is because of the choices they have made with their lives.

My reading choices are eclectic and range from nutrition and sports performance to economics and biography. My guilty pleasure is the action/adventure genre. I’m currently reading a novel from Lee Child’s Jack Reacher series. I’m about halfway through. Reacher is trying to get to the bottom of a suicide that he witnessed that has left him with questions. As a result of his inquiries, Reacher (a former military policeman and occasional government operative) has been apprehended by what appear to be agents from some Federal agency. He is shot with a tranquilizer gun and placed in a cell in an abandoned firehouse. When he wakes up, he sees two local police officers involved in the case, also locked up. Reacher is able to overpower his jailers and when he sets about freeing the other two, he is stopped by their concern that if they escape from these anonymous inquisitors, they might be confirming their “guilt.” Reacher points out to them that they are guilty of nothing and that relying on their jailer’s benevolence is a fool’s game.

I realize that many people are okay behind their prison walls as long as one of their kind does not attempt to escape. Reminding people of the possibility of freedom is provocative.

Personal Development
When I talk with young people – my own children or other people’s – I tell them about this personal development thing. There are a lot of other professionals who will instruct them on the transactional nature of their formal education. The stuff I talk about has to do with getting rid of limiting beliefs, how to create well-formed outcomes (aka “goal-setting), managing stress and their emotions, discovering their muse, discerning and establishing their values and acting in accord with them, developing habits of courage and action, and the importance of developing their moral imagination. Whether it’s an audience of a single teenager, or a group of veteran Baltimore police officers, I believe it is my job to convince them that these things are survival skills for this new time we find ourselves in.

The Power of One
What next? Learn more about:

• Growing Power
• Transition Communities
• Exuberant Animal
• Edmund Burke on Moral Imagination
• Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Frederick Douglass
• Essays by Wendell Berry
• Community by Peter Block
• our Personal Development workshop

It’s part of the Long Defeat.  Are you in?

Talking About Diversity
Some people have a very limited view of diversity. Most people avoid the topic completely in the absence of EEO, HR, and “progressive” mandates. I thought seriously about staying out of the fray but here I am!

Jumping Into The Pool
There are a few reasons that I have made the leap. I am one of the “And People.” My nature and nurture make me an embodiment of The Mosaic. My children have the same gift/curse. It is also not lost on me that many people have made a significant living out of the topic – some deservedly so. I regard myself as an equal opportunity critic when speaking truth to power. This means that it was important for me to enter the field in order to confront the Diversity Mafia. I have the most experience with this group at the independent school level. They are often the Talented Tenth who somehow got discovered and marched on to claim their elite education birthright. They know all the diversity buzzwords and jargon and control the red velvet rope against those who don’t. Their class fears are as strong as the those of the oligarchs whose “accomplishments” they worship.

Taking The Cheap Way Out
Albert Einstein stated, “The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them.” Yet the purveyors of the party pablum insist on fighting the battle of diversity on the fields of cultural and identity diversity. School administrators and diversity coordinators love to put on the cultural events that celebrate their efforts at open-mindedness. Like reform efforts in public school accountability, these events are cheap and easy to do and everyone feels that they have done their part to make the tent bigger.

Fairness
I have worked with too many children who will never get the chance to see their cuisine sampled, songs sung, or humanity dignified. The common denominator for these children is their poverty. We allow private schools, elite colleges, and Fortune 500 companies to conflate race and ethnicity with deprivation. The five year-old of any race, growing up in a poor household will never have the chance to be invited to the dance.

Most people in this country will profess and believe they are open-minded on issues of race, gender, ethnicity, etc. It’s generally not popular to be a bigot. Ask people to contribute to a system that ensures educational equity for all poor children and they avert their eyes while their fingers point to the nice wall displays for Black History Month.

As the author Walter Benn Michaels asserts, “celebrating diversity shouldn’t be an acceptable alternative to seeking economic equality.”

We should not allow discrimination. Stereotype rigidity and the “Stereotype Threat” (see the research by Claude Steele) are very real problems and have to be addressed. This should not prevent debates on ideas and ideologies.

Most people don’t have access to the elite education that will open the doors to the American Dream. No one should be let off the hook just because their school or business seems appropriately diverse – there’s still that tiny, nagging issue about equality.

Help Them Out Of Their Corner

Bullying
Bullying has captured the national attention. Some tragic incidents have caused a reexamination of how parents and schools can keep kids safe. The use of the Internet and social media sites have made it easier to attack victims and complicated the search for a solution.

Sources
Bullies are not a new phenomenon. Bullies are sometimes created out of their own fear and insecurity. Some are predators. Lt. Col. Dave Grossman talks about the world being divided into lambs, wolves, and sheepdogs. Most people are sheep. They are kind, gentle, and productive. Then there are the wolves who prey on the sheep without mercy. Sheepdogs live to protect the flock and to confront the wolf. If you have no capacity for violence, you are a sheep. If you have the capacity for violence in pursuit of your ends and engage in it with no remorse, you are a wolf. If you have the capacity for violence and combine it with a deep love for your fellow human beings, you are a sheepdog. While I think there are more gradations, I believe this is a helpful outline when examining the problem of bullying.

The Real Enemy
The normal prescription for victims is to get teachers and parents involved. it is important to bring the physical and emotional violence to light but this is usually not enough when a predator is involved or when the group mind has taken over. In talking about the human mind, Primo Levi said that: “Many people – many nations – can find themselves holding, more or less wittingly, that ‘every stranger is an enemy.’”
The stranger, the enemy is kind of complicated in the case of bullies. I believe that many bullies are created as a result of their estrangement from their essential natures. This is coupled with an estrangement from Nature. This mirrors a pervasive national numbness of spirit and somatic deadening.

My Theory
I also believe that we are sacred, individual creations of God. We descend into purgatory or worse when we lose contact with this sacred essence. Those who live in this wilderness of the spirit hate those who maintain its essence.  For bullies, the keepers of the sacred flame are the “strangers” and the “enemies” that Levi talks about. They are a mirror and reminder of what was lost. Our current existence does not provide them with guides on how to regain what was lost. The bullies among us default to anger and hatred. In a paraphrase of a quote on power, Rosabeth Moss Kanter pointed out that “absolute powerlessness corrupts absolutely.”

I like to think that I have the soul of poet. With this disposition, I was fortunate to go to a school where open bullying was frowned on. I have been in other situations where my “sensitive side” could have been a liability, except for one thing – early on, I learned that there were times you had to kick someone’s ass and be prepared to have your own kicked, in defense of protecting your spiritual core. I was raised to be a “sheepdog.” I was taught to protect myself and others.

Solutions
Communities and cultures need to be developed where bullies are not tolerated but the problem cannot be legislated away. Theodore Roosevelt said that his father taught him to be tough as well as kind. His father believed that if Teddy was tough enough, people would not long laugh at his being kind. Victims need to be given tools. This needs to start with what Timothy Gallwey called “The Inner Game.” The tools of sports psychology and things like Neurolinguistic Programming could help with building mental toughness – confidence, resilience, positive self-talk, relaxation, motivation, and creating well-formed outcomes. This would be combined with physical skills that would help the poets among us explore the intersections between physical and moral courage. Even Gandhi understood that violence could sometimes be morally required.  Learning basic skills of self defense – based in boxing and some form of grappling – would provide confidence and a sense of agency while the adults figure things out.

At the same time, the bullies who have not achieved predator status need to have chances to rediscover their sacred purpose. They need to be coached and guided to appreciate the miracle of nature and to recognize the sources of their actions. This is not possible with the current factory model of schooling.  Decisions will have to be made.

My children have inherited my poet’s soul. My job is now to teach them how to protect that soul and the gifts that God has given them. My prayer is that they will add the job of “sheepdog” to their resumes.

My adventure now includes a role as a volunteer high school football coach.  In fact, my posts haven’t been as regular as I’d like because of the “two-a-days” being conducted at the high school’s field in the Bronx.  This post is not going to be profound.  In writing it I get to be a little wistful, a little amazed, and a lot frustrated by the experience.

Each time I show up to the school, I enter into an unapologetic man’s world.  It’s one of sweat, profanity, chewing tobacco, childish humor, and talk of the glory days long past.  My own football glory days were limited as my high school had only enough personnel to field a team for two of my high school years.  With the recent revelations about the brain injuries that football can cause, I now believe that my truncated career was a blessing.  But I now get to engage in mature reflections about the game and at the same time improve my cognitive function by learning its intricacies.

I’m working as the strength coach and assistant running back coach at one of the largest high schools in New York City.  Their four-year graduation rate is under 30%.  Despite the challenges, a group of 45 young men show up in the summer for ten hours of daily character-building.  In between sprints, pushups, and blocking schemes they are directed to pull up their pants, eliminate the use of the “N word,” to support each other, and to “finish strong.”  These tough teenagers look you in the eyes, thank brand new coaches for their advice, and begin to figure out that they should have a cause bigger than themselves.

They don’t know, that despite this work ethic they are developing, that their life choices are being unfairly limited by people they have never met and by circumstances that they had no hand in creating.

This coming weekend is football camp in upstate New York.  I’m taking my 9 year-old son with with me but it still means time away from family, close living conditions with the other coaches who are not in touch with their feminine side in the same way that I am (and who also happen to be strong, engaging male figures for these boys), and time away from the marketing that is critical for my fledgling leadership coaching business.  However, there are men to build – 45 African-American, Dominican, West Indian, Puerto Rican, and Russian teens who deserve to get a little traction on the path to the people they deserve to become and who are fighting against incredible odds.  Stay tuned.

The recent New York Times story about a remarkable drop in  test scores (after being recalibrated by New York State), should give us immediate pause and force a reassessment of claims about what really works in public education.  Many people are  scrambling to explain away what happened.  Some are even complaining that “the goalposts were moved.”   Some of the shining lights of the charter school movement are at a loss and can only say: “we just have to try harder.”  Try harder at what?!  Teaching to the test?  Teaching even more skills to improve performance on standardized tests?  I would like to suggest the crazy notion that the ladder is against the wrong wall.  Unfortunately, for too many people, this will have a short news cycle and it will become business as usual.

Abdication of Responsibility

I’ve said it before:  the game is rigged.  The idea of a meritocracy in education is laughable.  We’ve seen during our recent series of financial woes that qualities like integrity, hard work and sound morals have no significant correlation to economic success at the very top.  IQ cannot be proven to directly influence economic outcomes.

The merit myth also applies to education.  One thing that may be “post -racial” about this country is the extent to which the lives of poor, working, and middle class – Black or White – are all dictated by the needs of an oligarchy determined to maintain its power and privilege.   This plays out starkly in the field of education.  I have too much experience with elite private schools to believe that it’s about hard work, good character, and intelligence. I’ve been in too many meetings with wealthy supporters of charter schools to believe that they would subject their own children to the same education model they believe in so strongly for poor children.

Taking It Back

Education is a gatekeeper but not the type that anyone interested in fairness or American ideals should allow.  Educational attainment is primarily a reflection of family income.  This has to change if this country is too have a significant, viable  future.  Here are a few things that those of us interested in fairness and the future of the Republic should do:

• Read anything by John Taylor Gatto.
• Do your own research on best practices in literacy.
• Learn more about the history of education models like Montessori and Reggio Emilia
• Skip the vacation to the Hamptons and attend an event sponsored by the Appleseed Project.
• Attend a meetup of the local homeschooling association.
• Join a charter school board.
• Help kids get involved in Junior Achievement, Civil Air Patrol, and 4-H Clubs.
• Teach your children to play and win the “Inner Game.”
• Don’t blindly accept “expert” definitions of “measurable success.”
• Teach your children that competition doesn’t always have to be a zero sum game – it can also be about cooperation where you and your opponent bring out the best in each other.
• Learn the difference between end goals (which we don’t have total control over) and process goals (which we can control).

Knowing the truth about inheritance, family income, and luck should give those at the top some pause, greater humility, and a desire to do better by those less fortunate.  In the meantime, we have to get tougher, smarter, and more strategic about doing it for ourselves.

Do you have any models of schools that work for everyone?