Creating Schools We Can Trust

this is crossposted from dailykos - I think the content of what I wrote is relevant here, and I also want to encourage people to read the book. When I do review it I will probably also crosspost that review here as well. Peace.

This is really the litmus test for you, as president. Each and every time a policy decision comes before you, you must ask yourself: What impact will this particular policy have on the development of trustful relationships in every local community? Every single law or regulation that comes out of Washington helps or hurts such relationships; none is neutral.

Those words are from Deborah Meier, one of the most important thinkers and practitioners in education in recent decades (read her bio here). They appear in a book entitled Letters to the Next President: What We Can Do about the Real Crisis in Public Education edited by Carl Glickman. While I will soon be doing a review of the entire book, I wanted to focus on Debbie's section, which is entitled Creating Schools We Can Trust. Please keep reading.

I have often argued, here and elsewhere, that what happens with our schools in the canary in the coal mine of American society. I also advocate a view of schools in which their primary purpose is to prepare students to be full participants in an American society which is a representative liberal democracy (and here liberal is a technical political science term which has nothing to do with the political spectrum). I began with the quote from Meier that I did because while she is writing specifically about educational policy, her words are applicable to ALL governmental policy - and in the case of this administration, whether it is USA PATRIOT Act or NCLB, we have seen policies destructive of community, destructive of the maintenance of the kinds of trustful relationships important in real education and real community.

I mentioned that I will be reviewing the book. This is a new edition for the 2008 election. While I will write more when I do the formal review, which will first appear in a professional publication in the next week before I cross-post elsewhere (although what I post here is likely to be slightly modified with a link to the actual review), it is worth noting that the book contains pieces by teachers, educational scholars, students. There is a foreward by Bill Cosby, who has a doctorate in education from U of Massachusetts, and letters by such notables as Asa Hilliard, John Goodlad, Sen. Jim Jeffords, Lisa Delpit, James Popham, and Ted Sizer, among others. The 2004 edition was prophetic, warning about the impact of NCLB, with the writers warning that

unless the bill was drastically changed, we would see a further narrowing of curricula, students would e subject to more and more test-taking preparation for poorly conceived examinations, and that states and school districts would lower their passing levels and manipulate test score data and drop-out rates in an effort to scam the system. They foresaw that student engagement and interactive learning would be pushed aside and replaced by more didactic, "drill-and-kill" teaching. The letter writers also predicted that the mandated formulas the federal government would use for doling out rewards and sanctions to schools would be unworkable.
And it has come to pass. Tteachers have been left with a mess.

Those words by Carl Glickman help us understand that we need far more than merely tinkering around the edges as No Child Left Behind is reauthorized. I have written and will continue to write about this, but today, thanks to Deborah Meier, I want to focus on one part of what I believe is important if we are going to have schools we can trust, and that is the nature of relationship.

Parker Palmer, who wrote The Courage to Teach; Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher's Life, a book which greatly influenced my own teaching practice, argues that teaching is a series of overlapping relationships - between teacher and students, among students, all with the subject being studied. Perhaps that is why the first paragraph of the letter from Meier so grabbed my attention:

Every time you thin, "What can I do for education?," I hope you keep the following thought in mind" There is no way we can raise kids well in the company of adults we don't trust. At the heart of good schooling are relationships: relationships between trusted teachers and children, and between trusted teachers and families. No form of curriculum or teaching method can succeed where these do not hold up. No good ends can be bought at their expense. Where trust has never existed, we have never had good schools. Where it has eroded, we have lost ground. Where it endures is where the beswt education occurs.

And Meier warns us tthat

Rooted in distrust, the laws we hae now can only heop that distrust grow

.

Meier offers a list of 8 suggestions, which I will reproduce below. You may not agree with all of them, but there are the product of almost 4 decades as a thoughtful professional educator:

1. Get the Size Right: Small is Better.
2. Encourage Local Decision Making
3. Get Good Information
4. Provide Choice
5. Provide Resourcew for Improving Facilities and Supporting Professionalism
6. Provide Time
7. Use a Language of Respect
8. Close the Gaps

I want to focus briefly on the 7th, of using a language of respect. Let me briefly quote the beginning of Meier's remarks on that point:

Since kids cannot learn from teachers or schools that they neither trust nor respect, the way we publicly talk about teachers and schools matters. Disrespect comes in many forms, but it starts wiht our leadership. Our children learn by example: It's hard to be taught by people whom powerful people look down upon. Keep this in mind when you think about how little teachers are paid and what that pay differential says to kids. I hae seen too many parents act out the disrespect they read in their local newspapers and hear from their local and national politicians and then act surprised when their kids act up. Please, be careful how you speak of schools and teachers when you address the nation in press conferences and public speeches.

As a teacher I know that I must model what I expect from my students. If my words and my actions are in conflict, student will focus most on how I act. And I think it not unreasonable that those who desire to lead this nation demonstrate a recognition that their actions often speak far more loudly than their words. If they truly want to leave no children behind, then their approach to public education, to schools and teachers, should demonstrate a sense of respect rather than serving to undercut public trust in the institutions and people who are striving mightily to serve the needs of our children and our nation.

I am perhaps more fortunate than most teachers, something I readily recognize. I have the trust of my department, my school, even the system-wide administration, to exercise professional judgment in how best to serve my students. I rarely have problems with parents. Perhaps it is because I call all parents at the start of the year to touch base (although I must create the time to do so - it is on top of my other responsibilities, done on weekends and evenings). Perhaps it is because I provide ways parents can track what is going on in my class, with all assignments for the week up on a webpage. Perhaps it is because I am willing to converse - again usually on my time - via email or phone: my parents have my home and cell numbers. I trust that they will not abuse that access, and because trust is a two-way process they are perhaps somewhat more willing to trust me.

I can do these things because I am supported in a way many teachers are not. That provides the framework that allows me to build trusting relationships with most of my students. I have very rigorous standards, but if a student is really trying and yet still struggling, I will give her the benefit of the doubt and offer additional assistance. That enables me to reach many students who might otherwise be put off, or not be willing to try.

Let me be clear. I am far from perfect. There are students and parents with whom the relationships can be difficult, I make mistakes of judgment and of action. But I also accept responsibility, publicly apologizing when I am wrong. I thus model - for my students and their parents - that making a mistake is not the real problem, provided one is willing to accept responsibility and move to correct.

Our leaders should model what they wish us to achieve. That clearly applies to those of us in positions of responsibility within educational institutions. It also applies to our political leaders as well. And so I believe an appropriate conclusion to this posting will be to quote the final paragraph from Meier's letter to the next president:

ABOVE ALL ELSE, be the kind of person we brag about in school. As president, demonstrate the habits that you want us to value and engender in a good student. Our nation has had a long history of putting down "school smarts." We either need to change schools and what defines "school smarts" so that they match what we honor elsewhere, or we need to be sure that the leaders of our nation are in fact models of the kind of smarts we honor in schools. When you are elected, be sure the people making decisions about education on your behalf in Washington have recently spent time in schools and that their own children attend the schools about which they are making policy. Look for people you'd trust to take care of your kids.

Peace.

Creating Schools We Can Trust

this is crossposted from dailykos - I think the content of what I wrote is relevant here, and I also want to encourage people to read the book. When I do review it I will probably also crosspost that review here as well. Peace.

This is really the litmus test for you, as president. Each and every time a policy decision comes before you, you must ask yourself: What impact will this particular policy have on the development of trustful relationships in every local community? Every single law or regulation that comes out of Washington helps or hurts such relationships; none is neutral.

Those words are from Deborah Meier, one of the most important thinkers and practitioners in education in recent decades (read her bio here). They appear in a book entitled Letters to the Next President: What We Can Do about the Real Crisis in Public Education edited by Carl Glickman. While I will soon be doing a review of the entire book, I wanted to focus on Debbie's section, which is entitled Creating Schools We Can Trust. Please keep reading.

I have often argued, here and elsewhere, that what happens with our schools in the canary in the coal mine of American society. I also advocate a view of schools in which their primary purpose is to prepare students to be full participants in an American society which is a representative liberal democracy (and here liberal is a technical political science term which has nothing to do with the political spectrum). I began with the quote from Meier that I did because while she is writing specifically about educational policy, her words are applicable to ALL governmental policy - and in the case of this administration, whether it is USA PATRIOT Act or NCLB, we have seen policies destructive of community, destructive of the maintenance of the kinds of trustful relationships important in real education and real community.

I mentioned that I will be reviewing the book. This is a new edition for the 2008 election. While I will write more when I do the formal review, which will first appear in a professional publication in the next week before I cross-post elsewhere (although what I post here is likely to be slightly modified with a link to the actual review), it is worth noting that the book contains pieces by teachers, educational scholars, students. There is a foreward by Bill Cosby, who has a doctorate in education from U of Massachusetts, and letters by such notables as Asa Hilliard, John Goodlad, Sen. Jim Jeffords, Lisa Delpit, James Popham, and Ted Sizer, among others. The 2004 edition was prophetic, warning about the impact of NCLB, with the writers warning that

unless the bill was drastically changed, we would see a further narrowing of curricula, students would e subject to more and more test-taking preparation for poorly conceived examinations, and that states and school districts would lower their passing levels and manipulate test score data and drop-out rates in an effort to scam the system. They foresaw that student engagement and interactive learning would be pushed aside and replaced by more didactic, "drill-and-kill" teaching. The letter writers also predicted that the mandated formulas the federal government would use for doling out rewards and sanctions to schools would be unworkable.
And it has come to pass. Tteachers have been left with a mess.

Those words by Carl Glickman help us understand that we need far more than merely tinkering around the edges as No Child Left Behind is reauthorized. I have written and will continue to write about this, but today, thanks to Deborah Meier, I want to focus on one part of what I believe is important if we are going to have schools we can trust, and that is the nature of relationship.

Parker Palmer, who wrote The Courage to Teach; Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher's Life, a book which greatly influenced my own teaching practice, argues that teaching is a series of overlapping relationships - between teacher and students, among students, all with the subject being studied. Perhaps that is why the first paragraph of the letter from Meier so grabbed my attention:

Every time you thin, "What can I do for education?," I hope you keep the following thought in mind" There is no way we can raise kids well in the company of adults we don't trust. At the heart of good schooling are relationships: relationships between trusted teachers and children, and between trusted teachers and families. No form of curriculum or teaching method can succeed where these do not hold up. No good ends can be bought at their expense. Where trust has never existed, we have never had good schools. Where it has eroded, we have lost ground. Where it endures is where the beswt education occurs.

And Meier warns us tthat

Rooted in distrust, the laws we hae now can only heop that distrust grow

.

Meier offers a list of 8 suggestions, which I will reproduce below. You may not agree with all of them, but there are the product of almost 4 decades as a thoughtful professional educator:

1. Get the Size Right: Small is Better.
2. Encourage Local Decision Making
3. Get Good Information
4. Provide Choice
5. Provide Resourcew for Improving Facilities and Supporting Professionalism
6. Provide Time
7. Use a Language of Respect
8. Close the Gaps

I want to focus briefly on the 7th, of using a language of respect. Let me briefly quote the beginning of Meier's remarks on that point:

Since kids cannot learn from teachers or schools that they neither trust nor respect, the way we publicly talk about teachers and schools matters. Disrespect comes in many forms, but it starts wiht our leadership. Our children learn by example: It's hard to be taught by people whom powerful people look down upon. Keep this in mind when you think about how little teachers are paid and what that pay differential says to kids. I hae seen too many parents act out the disrespect they read in their local newspapers and hear from their local and national politicians and then act surprised when their kids act up. Please, be careful how you speak of schools and teachers when you address the nation in press conferences and public speeches.

As a teacher I know that I must model what I expect from my students. If my words and my actions are in conflict, student will focus most on how I act. And I think it not unreasonable that those who desire to lead this nation demonstrate a recognition that their actions often speak far more loudly than their words. If they truly want to leave no children behind, then their approach to public education, to schools and teachers, should demonstrate a sense of respect rather than serving to undercut public trust in the institutions and people who are striving mightily to serve the needs of our children and our nation.

I am perhaps more fortunate than most teachers, something I readily recognize. I have the trust of my department, my school, even the system-wide administration, to exercise professional judgment in how best to serve my students. I rarely have problems with parents. Perhaps it is because I call all parents at the start of the year to touch base (although I must create the time to do so - it is on top of my other responsibilities, done on weekends and evenings). Perhaps it is because I provide ways parents can track what is going on in my class, with all assignments for the week up on a webpage. Perhaps it is because I am willing to converse - again usually on my time - via email or phone: my parents have my home and cell numbers. I trust that they will not abuse that access, and because trust is a two-way process they are perhaps somewhat more willing to trust me.

I can do these things because I am supported in a way many teachers are not. That provides the framework that allows me to build trusting relationships with most of my students. I have very rigorous standards, but if a student is really trying and yet still struggling, I will give her the benefit of the doubt and offer additional assistance. That enables me to reach many students who might otherwise be put off, or not be willing to try.

Let me be clear. I am far from perfect. There are students and parents with whom the relationships can be difficult, I make mistakes of judgment and of action. But I also accept responsibility, publicly apologizing when I am wrong. I thus model - for my students and their parents - that making a mistake is not the real problem, provided one is willing to accept responsibility and move to correct.

Our leaders should model what they wish us to achieve. That clearly applies to those of us in positions of responsibility within educational institutions. It also applies to our political leaders as well. And so I believe an appropriate conclusion to this posting will be to quote the final paragraph from Meier's letter to the next president:

ABOVE ALL ELSE, be the kind of person we brag about in school. As president, demonstrate the habits that you want us to value and engender in a good student. Our nation has had a long history of putting down "school smarts." We either need to change schools and what defines "school smarts" so that they match what we honor elsewhere, or we need to be sure that the leaders of our nation are in fact models of the kind of smarts we honor in schools. When you are elected, be sure the people making decisions about education on your behalf in Washington have recently spent time in schools and that their own children attend the schools about which they are making policy. Look for people you'd trust to take care of your kids.

Peace.

The Week in Ed Science Links, Mostly

A Short Course in Thinking About Thinking

Danny Kahneman is a psychologist who is the co-creator of behavioral economics (with his late collaborator Amos Tversky), for which he won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002. Discussions with him inspired a 2-day "Master Class" given by Kahneman for a group of twenty leading American business/Internet/culture innovators—a microcosm of the recently dominant sector of American business—in Napa, California in July. They came to hear him lecture on his ideas and research in diverse fields such as human judgment, decision making and behavioral economics and well-being.

Mind Reading

Whether we know it or not, we're all street-corner psychics. Without the ability to divine others' thoughts and feelings, we couldn't handle the simplest social situations—or achieve true intimacy with others.

The Science Behind Personality

Why do some of us worry endlessly about our lives, while others sail through without a care?

More News from the Savannah

People seem to have “animal-monitoring modules” in their brains—which is bad news for road safety

Program Provides Blueprint For Recruiting Minorities To Science And Engineering

Strategies for recruiting under-represented minority students to science and engineering fields and supporting their successful completion of science degrees have been documented.

Music And Language Are Processed By The Same Brain Systems

Researchers have long debated whether or not language and music depend on common processes in the mind. Now, researchers have found evidence that the processing of music and language do indeed depend on some of the same brain systems.

Cockroaches Are Morons In The Morning, Geniuses In The Evening

In its ability to learn, the cockroach is a moron in the morning and a genius in the evening. Dramatic daily variations in the cockroach's learning ability are reported in a new study. The few studies that have been done with mammals suggest their ability to learn also varies with the time of day. For example, a recent experiment with humans found that people's ability to acquire new information is reduced when their biological clocks are disrupted, particularly at certain times of day.

Female Anxiety: Females More Likely To Believe Negative Past Events Predict Future

New research might help explain higher anxiety levels in women than in men. Women were found to be more likely to believe that negative past events would reoccur in the future. Two studies involving 3- to 6-year olds and adults examined emotions and behaviors in relation to past events. Using characters in stories, girls and women more frequently predicted that characters would be worried about harm from a person who was similar to past perpetrators.

'Deviancy Training' Among Friends May Lead To More Trouble

Friendships can be beneficial, but watch out when talk about deviant topics is the best way to get a laugh in an adolescent relationship, because such interaction may well lead to questionable behavior down the road, say University of Oregon researchers.

Aggression In Adolescents Is Influenced By Siblings

Sibling order and gender have effects on children's and adolescents' aggression. Having a brother or highly aggressive sibling of either gender was linked to greater increases in aggression over time. Older siblings with younger brothers had fairly stable aggression levels over time. In addition to age differences, the researchers considered parenting styles and family economics in their analysis. The research suggests that interventions related to aggression should include both siblings and parents.

Babies Raised In Bilingual Homes Learn New Words Differently Than Infants Learning One Language

Research on the learning process for acquiring two languages from birth found differences in how bilingual babies learned words compared to monolingual babies. The research suggests that bilingual babies follow a slightly different pattern when using detailed sound information to learn differences between words. Bilingual infants failed to notice a small change in the sound of an object's name until 20 months, while monolingual infants notices the change at 17 months.

Children Of Lesbian Couples Are Doing Well

A study of families in the Netherlands indicates that children raised by lesbian couples "do not differ in well being or child adjustment compared with their counterparts in heterosexual-parent families." Among the most interesting findings, lesbian biological mothers were significantly more satisfied with their partners as a co-parent than were heterosexual mothers.

When The Going Gets Tough, Maybe You Should Quit

Are there times when it is better to simply give up? It would seem that persistence would be tonic over the long haul; hanging tough should increase the odds that you’ll succeed, and personal success is closely linked to well-being. But what if the goal is extremely unlikely? When does an admirable trait like perseverance start to look more like beating your head against the wall? Psychologists studied two personality types to see how healthy and well adjusted they are. It turns out that those who persisted in the face of a great challenge were at higher risk for inflammation, which has been linked to diabetes and heart disease.

When Children Are Upset, Mothers And Fathers Make A Difference

When a young child experiences negative emotions -- anger, anxiety, or distress -- can his parents respond in a way that fosters the child's emotional development? A new study suggests that young children benefit when mothers and fathers differ in their reactions to their child's negative emotions.

Individuals With High Fear Of Crime Twice As Likely To Suffer From Depression

A new study has shown that people with a strong fear of crime are almost twice as likely to show symptoms of depression. The research also shows that fear of crime is associated with decreased physical functioning and lower quality of life.

Altruism Evolved From Maternal Behavior, Wasp Genetics Study Suggests

Researchers have used an innovative approach to reveal the molecular basis of altruistic behavior in wasps. Like honey bee workers, wasp workers give up their reproductive capabilities and focus entirely on nurturing their larval siblings, a practice that seems to defy the Darwinian prediction that a successful organism strives, above all else, to reproduce itself. Such behaviors are indicative of a eusocial society, in which some individuals lose, or sacrifice, their reproductive functions and instead work to benefit the larger group.

'Rusting' Also Describes How Methamphetamine Harms The Body

A pharmacology professor who left the lab bench to focus on science education has developed a tactic for keeping students hands in the air at the end of class. "What does get students' attention?" she and her co-authors asked in their new research article on fostering science literacy. "Sex, drugs and rock-n-roll, of course."

Why Few People Are Devoid Of Racial Bias

Why are some individuals not prejudiced? New research investigates how some individuals are able to avoid prejudicial biases despite the pervasive human tendency to favor one's own group.

Music Training Linked To Enhanced Verbal Skills

Music training, with its pervasive effects on the nervous system's ability to process sight and sound, may be more important for enhancing verbal communication skills than learning phonics, according to a new study. Musicians use all of their senses to practice and perform a musical piece. They watch other musicians, read lips, and feel, hear and perform music, thus, engaging multi-sensory skills. As it turns out, the brain's alteration from the multi-sensory process of music training enhances the same communication skills needed for speaking and reading, the study concludes.

Autism Symptoms Can Improve Into Adulthood, Study Shows

Hallmarks of autism are characteristic behaviors -- repetitive motions, problems interacting with others, impaired communication abilities -- that occur in widely different combinations and degrees of severity among those who have the condition. A new study shows that symptoms can improve with age.

Joint Attention Study Has Implications For Understanding Autism

A hallmark of human nature is the ability to share information and to comprehend the thoughts and intentions of others. Scientists refer to this skill as 'joint attention.' Even though it is a vital skill, scientists know surprisingly little about its development.

Children Of Immigrants Form Ethnic Identity At Early Age

Children of first-generation immigrants develop their ethnic identity at an earlier age than previous research has shown, according to a new longitudinal study. Additionally, a child's positive sense of ethnic identity is associated with the desire to socialize with children of various racial and ethnic backgrounds.

Victims Of Child Maltreatment More Likely To Perpetrate Youth Violence, Intimate Partner Violence

Some people are caught in a cycle of violence, perhaps beginning with their own abuse as a child and continuing into perpetration or victimization as an adult. To interrupt this cycle, it is important to understand how childhood experiences are related to behavior later in life. Researchers are examining how forms of child maltreatment victimization and youth violence and young adult intimate partner violence perpetration or victimization are interrelated.

The Week in Ed Science Links, Mostly

A Short Course in Thinking About Thinking

Danny Kahneman is a psychologist who is the co-creator of behavioral economics (with his late collaborator Amos Tversky), for which he won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002. Discussions with him inspired a 2-day "Master Class" given by Kahneman for a group of twenty leading American business/Internet/culture innovators—a microcosm of the recently dominant sector of American business—in Napa, California in July. They came to hear him lecture on his ideas and research in diverse fields such as human judgment, decision making and behavioral economics and well-being.

Mind Reading

Whether we know it or not, we're all street-corner psychics. Without the ability to divine others' thoughts and feelings, we couldn't handle the simplest social situations—or achieve true intimacy with others.

The Science Behind Personality

Why do some of us worry endlessly about our lives, while others sail through without a care?

More News from the Savannah

People seem to have “animal-monitoring modules” in their brains—which is bad news for road safety

Program Provides Blueprint For Recruiting Minorities To Science And Engineering

Strategies for recruiting under-represented minority students to science and engineering fields and supporting their successful completion of science degrees have been documented.

Music And Language Are Processed By The Same Brain Systems

Researchers have long debated whether or not language and music depend on common processes in the mind. Now, researchers have found evidence that the processing of music and language do indeed depend on some of the same brain systems.

Cockroaches Are Morons In The Morning, Geniuses In The Evening

In its ability to learn, the cockroach is a moron in the morning and a genius in the evening. Dramatic daily variations in the cockroach's learning ability are reported in a new study. The few studies that have been done with mammals suggest their ability to learn also varies with the time of day. For example, a recent experiment with humans found that people's ability to acquire new information is reduced when their biological clocks are disrupted, particularly at certain times of day.

Female Anxiety: Females More Likely To Believe Negative Past Events Predict Future

New research might help explain higher anxiety levels in women than in men. Women were found to be more likely to believe that negative past events would reoccur in the future. Two studies involving 3- to 6-year olds and adults examined emotions and behaviors in relation to past events. Using characters in stories, girls and women more frequently predicted that characters would be worried about harm from a person who was similar to past perpetrators.

'Deviancy Training' Among Friends May Lead To More Trouble

Friendships can be beneficial, but watch out when talk about deviant topics is the best way to get a laugh in an adolescent relationship, because such interaction may well lead to questionable behavior down the road, say University of Oregon researchers.

Aggression In Adolescents Is Influenced By Siblings

Sibling order and gender have effects on children's and adolescents' aggression. Having a brother or highly aggressive sibling of either gender was linked to greater increases in aggression over time. Older siblings with younger brothers had fairly stable aggression levels over time. In addition to age differences, the researchers considered parenting styles and family economics in their analysis. The research suggests that interventions related to aggression should include both siblings and parents.

Babies Raised In Bilingual Homes Learn New Words Differently Than Infants Learning One Language

Research on the learning process for acquiring two languages from birth found differences in how bilingual babies learned words compared to monolingual babies. The research suggests that bilingual babies follow a slightly different pattern when using detailed sound information to learn differences between words. Bilingual infants failed to notice a small change in the sound of an object's name until 20 months, while monolingual infants notices the change at 17 months.

Children Of Lesbian Couples Are Doing Well

A study of families in the Netherlands indicates that children raised by lesbian couples "do not differ in well being or child adjustment compared with their counterparts in heterosexual-parent families." Among the most interesting findings, lesbian biological mothers were significantly more satisfied with their partners as a co-parent than were heterosexual mothers.

When The Going Gets Tough, Maybe You Should Quit

Are there times when it is better to simply give up? It would seem that persistence would be tonic over the long haul; hanging tough should increase the odds that you’ll succeed, and personal success is closely linked to well-being. But what if the goal is extremely unlikely? When does an admirable trait like perseverance start to look more like beating your head against the wall? Psychologists studied two personality types to see how healthy and well adjusted they are. It turns out that those who persisted in the face of a great challenge were at higher risk for inflammation, which has been linked to diabetes and heart disease.

When Children Are Upset, Mothers And Fathers Make A Difference

When a young child experiences negative emotions -- anger, anxiety, or distress -- can his parents respond in a way that fosters the child's emotional development? A new study suggests that young children benefit when mothers and fathers differ in their reactions to their child's negative emotions.

Individuals With High Fear Of Crime Twice As Likely To Suffer From Depression

A new study has shown that people with a strong fear of crime are almost twice as likely to show symptoms of depression. The research also shows that fear of crime is associated with decreased physical functioning and lower quality of life.

Altruism Evolved From Maternal Behavior, Wasp Genetics Study Suggests

Researchers have used an innovative approach to reveal the molecular basis of altruistic behavior in wasps. Like honey bee workers, wasp workers give up their reproductive capabilities and focus entirely on nurturing their larval siblings, a practice that seems to defy the Darwinian prediction that a successful organism strives, above all else, to reproduce itself. Such behaviors are indicative of a eusocial society, in which some individuals lose, or sacrifice, their reproductive functions and instead work to benefit the larger group.

'Rusting' Also Describes How Methamphetamine Harms The Body

A pharmacology professor who left the lab bench to focus on science education has developed a tactic for keeping students hands in the air at the end of class. "What does get students' attention?" she and her co-authors asked in their new research article on fostering science literacy. "Sex, drugs and rock-n-roll, of course."

Why Few People Are Devoid Of Racial Bias

Why are some individuals not prejudiced? New research investigates how some individuals are able to avoid prejudicial biases despite the pervasive human tendency to favor one's own group.

Music Training Linked To Enhanced Verbal Skills

Music training, with its pervasive effects on the nervous system's ability to process sight and sound, may be more important for enhancing verbal communication skills than learning phonics, according to a new study. Musicians use all of their senses to practice and perform a musical piece. They watch other musicians, read lips, and feel, hear and perform music, thus, engaging multi-sensory skills. As it turns out, the brain's alteration from the multi-sensory process of music training enhances the same communication skills needed for speaking and reading, the study concludes.

Autism Symptoms Can Improve Into Adulthood, Study Shows

Hallmarks of autism are characteristic behaviors -- repetitive motions, problems interacting with others, impaired communication abilities -- that occur in widely different combinations and degrees of severity among those who have the condition. A new study shows that symptoms can improve with age.

Joint Attention Study Has Implications For Understanding Autism

A hallmark of human nature is the ability to share information and to comprehend the thoughts and intentions of others. Scientists refer to this skill as 'joint attention.' Even though it is a vital skill, scientists know surprisingly little about its development.

Children Of Immigrants Form Ethnic Identity At Early Age

Children of first-generation immigrants develop their ethnic identity at an earlier age than previous research has shown, according to a new longitudinal study. Additionally, a child's positive sense of ethnic identity is associated with the desire to socialize with children of various racial and ethnic backgrounds.

Victims Of Child Maltreatment More Likely To Perpetrate Youth Violence, Intimate Partner Violence

Some people are caught in a cycle of violence, perhaps beginning with their own abuse as a child and continuing into perpetration or victimization as an adult. To interrupt this cycle, it is important to understand how childhood experiences are related to behavior later in life. Researchers are examining how forms of child maltreatment victimization and youth violence and young adult intimate partner violence perpetration or victimization are interrelated.

True American Values

I don't agree with a lot of what Peggy Noonen (of the Wall Street Journal) says, but this time she gets it right: Americans should not fear talking--and listening--to those whose views we loathe.You don't want to judge Christ by Christians, someone once said. He is perfect, they are not.In a similar way you don't want to judge capitalism by capitalists, or the legitimacy of democracy by the

The Watcher's Council Has Spoken!

Each and every week, Watcher of Weasels sponsors a contest among posts from the Conservative side of the 'Sphere. The winning entries are determined by a jury of 12 writers (and The Watcher) known as "The Watchers Council."The Council has met and cast their ballots for last week's submitted posts. Council Member Entries: Bookworm Room took first place with Cosmic Ironies.Non-Council Entries:

Discipline.

I have a problem with it.

Happy

Ms. Frizzle is back!!

Left Behind

What IS Left Behind?

We have reached a critical crossroads in our educational and national history. As NCLB’s reauthorization or expiration takes center stage in Washington, American citizens who care about the future of our public schools and our democracy must be heard. Our shared future is not an abstract political possibility but, rather, one that breathes in every son or daughter, every niece or nephew, every grandson or granddaughter, every neighbor’s child, and every one of our own students who enters the schoolhouse door.

While Secretary Spellings and legislators from both parties stubbornly proclaim that NCLB is working—despite of all the empirical evidence indicating otherwise—and as politicians boast that no child is being left behind, let us pause to consider what has been jettisoned. Let us take a moment to think about what has been left behind, what has been dumped, what has been pushed out the door because there is no longer space or time for it in the school day.

Now if your school still has some of these things, I say congratulations. At the same time, however, I say beware. Beware, because the unattainable goal of 100% proficiency that is the bedrock of NCLB makes it most likely that over the next seven years, your school will join the 30% of schools today where these crucial elements of school have already been left behind.

As American citizens deeply concerned about the health of our democratic republic, we are, of course, concerned and horrified that the social studies have been left behind. In Florida and other states, social studies teachers, afraid of losing their jobs, are lobbying for social studies to be tested, so that their work will survive.

The emphasis on math and reading tests has meant less geography, civics, and government, which leaves children ignorant of how public decisions are made or where their community fits into state, national, and global contexts—or even that there is a context beyond their street and TV screens. Children are left, in effect, stranded on lonely islands of ignorance, without the impetus or skills to have their voices heard in ways that make the world listen.

History, too, has been left behind, making it assured that this next generation will grow up more likely to be swayed by the mistakes and misdeeds of the past to which they remain clueless. What is a democratic republic and where did it come from? Sorry, that’s not on the test, either.

And economics? While children in wealthy communities, the ones without AYP worries yet, play stock market games and learn about hedge funds, the economic education of children in schools under the testing gun consists of collecting “Scholar Dollars” that they trade in for bags of Skittles, a pittance of pay for a meaningless labor whose significance remains a mystery to them.

Health and physical education have been left behind, too, leaving children out of shape and subject to diseases associated with obesity and inactivity. At the same time, children are left in the dark about the importance of healthy foods, fresh fruits and vegetables, the kinds of foods that are scarce in the small stores of poor neighborhoods. And left behind, too, is information about the hazards of a never-ending diet of Taco Bell and McDonalds—because that's not on the test, either.

Art and music have been left behind, leaving in their crossing wakes an imagination gap, a creativity gap, and expression gap, an aesthetic gap, a souls gap. We can add these gaps to the achievement gap that parallels a widening economic gap – despite years and years of increased testing and accountability in those schools where the economic gaps are at their deepest points.

Diversity of thought has been left behind. What remains in failing schools and the ones teetering on the testing bubble are collections of remote and desiccated facts that represent not even a single culture, but rather, an anti-culture that has essentially eradicated cultural values as a discussable issue.

Science has been left behind, too, and thus the primary tool for understanding how the modern world is organized. Where science survives, it is where it is tested, and the kind of science that remains is the kind that can be fit into a multiple-choice format, not the kind that exercises children’s ability to think, solve problems, conduct experiments, and make good decisions.

Literature has been left behind, and with it the love of reading and books and the curiosity that is spawned and kept alive by the life of the imagination. Stories are now substituted by the measured mouthing of nonsense syllables and the framing of comprehension responses that the children who utter them do not understand.

Recess has been left behind in a third of all American elementary schools, and as the percentage of failing schools increases, we may expect that number to rise. Play, itself, then becomes left behind, and along with it one of the most useful skills of all—to think as if, what if, as in what if life were somehow different than, or what if there were a choice beyond a, b, c, or d?

Nap time has been left behind in kindergarten and even in pre-K, as teachers focus on replacing dream time with skill practice time for a future of testing.

Field trips, holidays, and assemblies have been left behind unless they can be used for test preparation, or unless they come after the test, those short precious weeks when smiles may be seen to return to teachers’ lips and to students’ eyes.

The love of the teacher for her craft has been left behind in so many schools, replaced by the burdensome regimen of the pacing guide and the production schedule and the script. And time for teacher-led discussion, exploration, reflection? There is only time for teachers to learn their lines, trying to become good actors in a very bad play where the audience is compelled to participate. And time to weigh the results of the practice tests in order to get ready for the real tests.

Left behind, too, are teacher autonomy and professional discretion. Now whole hallways of fourth grade classes are on the same page of the same scripted lesson at the same moment that any supervisor should walk by, supervisors who are identically trained to look for the same manifestations of sameness, from bulletin boards to hand signals to the distance that children are trained to maintain from one another as they march to lunch, with their arms holding together their imaginary straightjackets.

Most troubling, however, of all that has been left behind is the teacher’s nurturing care, the teacher whose advocacy for and sensitivity to every child’s fragile humanity has been a trademark of what it means to be the teacher of children.

With the current laser focus on avoiding test failure, even as expectations become higher with each passing year, the child who cannot do more than a child can do now becomes viewed as the stumbling block to a success that is increasingly elusive.

Instead, then, of being viewed as the reasons we have schools to begin with, the needful child who is, indeed, behind, becomes the obstacle to a proficiency that becomes further and further out of reach. When this occurs, as it surely does every time teachers and principals fall prey to the pressure, children become the burden that must be reluctantly borne, obstacles to a success that their own disability, poverty, or language issues complicate— and that even the best teacher can never compensate for.

Students, then, come to be seen as complicit in creating the failure that, in fact, no one, teacher or student, can remedy, because there is a monstrous system that has made child failure and, thus, school failure inevitable, a monstrous system that has traded and treated this generation of children as a means to attain a political end—a political end that, in fact, threatens our future as a free people who are able to think, to solve problems, to care, to imagine, to understand, to have empathy, to participate, to grow, to live.

So as you listen to the growing debate this fall in Washington, please do not leave your political responsibility behind and your good sense with it. Go online tonight and order the Linda Perlstein book, Tested. . .. Read it and, as you do so, keep in mind that the horror that she so ably describes occurred in a school that is considered a success, a “lighthouse school.” Think, then, of what it must be like in the thirty percent of American schools that are now labeled failures.

Recently, a quote by Cal State professor, Art Costa showed up on one of internet discussion groups, a quote that is horribly relevant today: "What was once educationally significant, but difficult to measure, has been replaced by what is insignificant and easy to measure. So now we test how well we have taught what we do not value."

Call and write and visit your school boards and your Congressional delegation. Remind them what you value and what you believe to be significant for now and for our future, and what you know that now and finally must to be left behind.

Jim Horn

A similar version of this commentary was delivered September 27 at Monmouth University. It will be posted on YouTube a few days hence.

Left Behind

What IS Left Behind?

We have reached a critical crossroads in our educational and national history. As NCLB’s reauthorization or expiration takes center stage in Washington, American citizens who care about the future of our public schools and our democracy must be heard. Our shared future is not an abstract political possibility but, rather, one that breathes in every son or daughter, every niece or nephew, every grandson or granddaughter, every neighbor’s child, and every one of our own students who enters the schoolhouse door.

While Secretary Spellings and legislators from both parties stubbornly proclaim that NCLB is working—despite of all the empirical evidence indicating otherwise—and as politicians boast that no child is being left behind, let us pause to consider what has been jettisoned. Let us take a moment to think about what has been left behind, what has been dumped, what has been pushed out the door because there is no longer space or time for it in the school day.

Now if your school still has some of these things, I say congratulations. At the same time, however, I say beware. Beware, because the unattainable goal of 100% proficiency that is the bedrock of NCLB makes it most likely that over the next seven years, your school will join the 30% of schools today where these crucial elements of school have already been left behind.

As American citizens deeply concerned about the health of our democratic republic, we are, of course, concerned and horrified that the social studies have been left behind. In Florida and other states, social studies teachers, afraid of losing their jobs, are lobbying for social studies to be tested, so that their work will survive.

The emphasis on math and reading tests has meant less geography, civics, and government, which leaves children ignorant of how public decisions are made or where their community fits into state, national, and global contexts—or even that there is a context beyond their street and TV screens. Children are left, in effect, stranded on lonely islands of ignorance, without the impetus or skills to have their voices heard in ways that make the world listen.

History, too, has been left behind, making it assured that this next generation will grow up more likely to be swayed by the mistakes and misdeeds of the past to which they remain clueless. What is a democratic republic and where did it come from? Sorry, that’s not on the test, either.

And economics? While children in wealthy communities, the ones without AYP worries yet, play stock market games and learn about hedge funds, the economic education of children in schools under the testing gun consists of collecting “Scholar Dollars” that they trade in for bags of Skittles, a pittance of pay for a meaningless labor whose significance remains a mystery to them.

Health and physical education have been left behind, too, leaving children out of shape and subject to diseases associated with obesity and inactivity. At the same time, children are left in the dark about the importance of healthy foods, fresh fruits and vegetables, the kinds of foods that are scarce in the small stores of poor neighborhoods. And left behind, too, is information about the hazards of a never-ending diet of Taco Bell and McDonalds—because that's not on the test, either.

Art and music have been left behind, leaving in their crossing wakes an imagination gap, a creativity gap, and expression gap, an aesthetic gap, a souls gap. We can add these gaps to the achievement gap that parallels a widening economic gap – despite years and years of increased testing and accountability in those schools where the economic gaps are at their deepest points.

Diversity of thought has been left behind. What remains in failing schools and the ones teetering on the testing bubble are collections of remote and desiccated facts that represent not even a single culture, but rather, an anti-culture that has essentially eradicated cultural values as a discussable issue.

Science has been left behind, too, and thus the primary tool for understanding how the modern world is organized. Where science survives, it is where it is tested, and the kind of science that remains is the kind that can be fit into a multiple-choice format, not the kind that exercises children’s ability to think, solve problems, conduct experiments, and make good decisions.

Literature has been left behind, and with it the love of reading and books and the curiosity that is spawned and kept alive by the life of the imagination. Stories are now substituted by the measured mouthing of nonsense syllables and the framing of comprehension responses that the children who utter them do not understand.

Recess has been left behind in a third of all American elementary schools, and as the percentage of failing schools increases, we may expect that number to rise. Play, itself, then becomes left behind, and along with it one of the most useful skills of all—to think as if, what if, as in what if life were somehow different than, or what if there were a choice beyond a, b, c, or d?

Nap time has been left behind in kindergarten and even in pre-K, as teachers focus on replacing dream time with skill practice time for a future of testing.

Field trips, holidays, and assemblies have been left behind unless they can be used for test preparation, or unless they come after the test, those short precious weeks when smiles may be seen to return to teachers’ lips and to students’ eyes.

The love of the teacher for her craft has been left behind in so many schools, replaced by the burdensome regimen of the pacing guide and the production schedule and the script. And time for teacher-led discussion, exploration, reflection? There is only time for teachers to learn their lines, trying to become good actors in a very bad play where the audience is compelled to participate. And time to weigh the results of the practice tests in order to get ready for the real tests.

Left behind, too, are teacher autonomy and professional discretion. Now whole hallways of fourth grade classes are on the same page of the same scripted lesson at the same moment that any supervisor should walk by, supervisors who are identically trained to look for the same manifestations of sameness, from bulletin boards to hand signals to the distance that children are trained to maintain from one another as they march to lunch, with their arms holding together their imaginary straightjackets.

Most troubling, however, of all that has been left behind is the teacher’s nurturing care, the teacher whose advocacy for and sensitivity to every child’s fragile humanity has been a trademark of what it means to be the teacher of children.

With the current laser focus on avoiding test failure, even as expectations become higher with each passing year, the child who cannot do more than a child can do now becomes viewed as the stumbling block to a success that is increasingly elusive.

Instead, then, of being viewed as the reasons we have schools to begin with, the needful child who is, indeed, behind, becomes the obstacle to a proficiency that becomes further and further out of reach. When this occurs, as it surely does every time teachers and principals fall prey to the pressure, children become the burden that must be reluctantly borne, obstacles to a success that their own disability, poverty, or language issues complicate— and that even the best teacher can never compensate for.

Students, then, come to be seen as complicit in creating the failure that, in fact, no one, teacher or student, can remedy, because there is a monstrous system that has made child failure and, thus, school failure inevitable, a monstrous system that has traded and treated this generation of children as a means to attain a political end—a political end that, in fact, threatens our future as a free people who are able to think, to solve problems, to care, to imagine, to understand, to have empathy, to participate, to grow, to live.

So as you listen to the growing debate this fall in Washington, please do not leave your political responsibility behind and your good sense with it. Go online tonight and order the Linda Perlstein book, Tested. . .. Read it and, as you do so, keep in mind that the horror that she so ably describes occurred in a school that is considered a success, a “lighthouse school.” Think, then, of what it must be like in the thirty percent of American schools that are now labeled failures.

Recently, a quote by Cal State professor, Art Costa showed up on one of internet discussion groups, a quote that is horribly relevant today: "What was once educationally significant, but difficult to measure, has been replaced by what is insignificant and easy to measure. So now we test how well we have taught what we do not value."

Call and write and visit your school boards and your Congressional delegation. Remind them what you value and what you believe to be significant for now and for our future, and what you know that now and finally must to be left behind.

Jim Horn

A similar version of this commentary was delivered September 27 at Monmouth University. It will be posted on YouTube a few days hence.

Fixing the Community Organizing Funding Disaster (Community Organizing and Urban Education)

To read the entire series, go here.

Community organizing groups spend an inordinate amount of time grubbing after money—often fairly small amounts of money when seen from the perspective of large foundations. And organizing groups often have to tweak what they do in order to fulfil the requirements of a funder. Even more problematically, many organizing groups are forced to get funding for purely service oriented activities in order to survive over the long term. While I think organizing groups need to think more carefully and complexly about how they might embrace more service work in order to reach out to more marginalized populations more effectively, the kind of service funding these groups usually receive is mostly a hodgepodge of what happens to be “hot” at any moment.

It seems obvious that we need to fundamentally change the funding model for community organizing. But how? Here I want to talk about what are called “permanent endowments.” Permanent endowments are large chunks of money that are placed permanently in a fund out of which only a portion of the interest is spent every year. Such endowments provide a guaranteed level of operating funding for those organizations that have them.

Who usually has endowments? Looking across the web, you find the usual suspects: universities, private schools, churches, and museums. But there are a range of other groups that can have foundations, including professional organizations, recreational and other natural areas. I found a ballet group, a music festival, home for pregnant teens, a counseling center, and more.

What brings all these groups together is a sense that their existence and functions are permanent.

This, of course, raises some difficult issues when one comes to organizing. How can one assume that one organizing group or method is going to be the most effective over time? How does one decide “which” organizing group to fund, and how does one prevent an endowment from actually destroying the kind of creativity, flexibility, and radical challenge that organizing may require in order to stay “healthy”.

To cite an old example, many have argued that the reason that Martin Luther King and other new organizing groups were able to emerge in the South during the civil rights movement was ironically because many Southern states had banned the NAACP. This seems to have opened up space for new thinking and new organizations, and removed the suppression of risky action that the NAACP seems to have been perpetuating to some extent. More contemporaneously, I think it is accurate to say that a certain level of uncritical dogmatism and self-congratulatory thinking among the neo-Alinsky organizing groups that currently dominate the organizing “scene” may be hurting the emergence of new approaches.

But one would not need to fund individual organizing groups in order to relieve them from some of the burdens of fundraising and the potentially destructive force of current “fads” and program mandates from distant funding organizations. Instead one could fund a local institution designed specificially to support organizing groups—old ones and new ones. By being based in a building that it owned, this group could provide basics like office space, copy machines, phones, technology and tech support. It could have a grants officer on staff to help organizations target their appeals and reduce the burden of fundraising. It could provide multi-year internships (with benefits) to allow individual organizing groups to bring community members in and train them in organizing. It could provide child care and meals and have a van and money to pay drivers to pick people up and get them to meetings. It could provide small reimbursements to participants to make it at least a “neutral” cost for them to go to a meeting. It could have a shared receptionist, and be open from early in the morning to late at night. It could have a board of directors drawn from a wide range of local progressive organizing groups and a carefully drawn mandate that ensured that it was able to “boot” dying organizations and bring in promising new ones. And it would have a constitution designed to ensure it remained true to a broad set of progressive commitments.

Such an endowed umbrella organization would ensure, just like with museums, universities, and beloved parks, that organizing is here to stay, especially in small cities like Milwaukee, where organizing has long been on “life support.” Through its board, it would force local organizing groups to work together to some extent, despite whatever disagreements they might have. If the building was big enough, it might allow the emergence of some more creative experimental relationships between organizing and service groups which I am increasingly convinced are crucial. In fact, simply because it would (I think of necessity) provide child care and meals and small reimbursements to participants, it would already be involved in a kind of “service” that would make participation as much a reality for people struggling on the margins as for professionals and other middle class folks like myself.

Where would the money come from? Well, of course, I don’t know. But if it had a building and an institutional name, it might be appealing to some funder that usually gives out program grants that do not leave any permanent legacy in the community. I could imagine some rich progressive person who would love to have their name permanently on a building or permanently on the name of an institution whose job was to stick a thumb in the eye of privileged oppressors permanently.

How much money would it require? Well, after glancing around the Internet, it seems like a round number like 4% is about what you can expect to spend every year from an endowment while still maintaining it over time given inflation. So let’s go with that as a rule of thumb (see this for those who are interested). And let’s assume you need, say, 2 million dollars for a building (including renovation) in a not necessarily high-priced part of town. So then if you have an operating budget of $250,000 (which isn’t a lot if you have a few employees), you need an endowment of around 6 or 7 million dollars. Or a total of 8-10 million dollars.

This may seem like a lot of money to most of you (or me) but there are plenty of folks out there in our increasingly income unequal society for whom this isn’t really that much.

Carnegie made his name forever by creating libraries across the United States (and beyond). What if some funder decided to stop trying to fund an endless series of cool sounding projects, and instead said, “I want to provide a permanent base for organizing in a collection of cities in America.”

[For those of you who think I've totally gone "off the rails" of education policy, here . . . . Well, look. If you are going to get interested in education organizing based in the community and not in schools then suddenly you've got to ask a whole new set of questions. We're used to talking about public schools which seem obviously to be a public, government funded function (regardless of how poorly they are funded). But now we're talking about an intervention in education that can't take government funding at all.]

Fixing the Community Organizing Funding Disaster (Community Organizing and Urban Education)

To read the entire series, go here.

Community organizing groups spend an inordinate amount of time grubbing after money—often fairly small amounts of money when seen from the perspective of large foundations. And organizing groups often have to tweak what they do in order to fulfil the requirements of a funder. Even more problematically, many organizing groups are forced to get funding for purely service oriented activities in order to survive over the long term. While I think organizing groups need to think more carefully and complexly about how they might embrace more service work in order to reach out to more marginalized populations more effectively, the kind of service funding these groups usually receive is mostly a hodgepodge of what happens to be “hot” at any moment.

It seems obvious that we need to fundamentally change the funding model for community organizing. But how? Here I want to talk about what are called “permanent endowments.” Permanent endowments are large chunks of money that are placed permanently in a fund out of which only a portion of the interest is spent every year. Such endowments provide a guaranteed level of operating funding for those organizations that have them.

Who usually has endowments? Looking across the web, you find the usual suspects: universities, private schools, churches, and museums. But there are a range of other groups that can have foundations, including professional organizations, recreational and other natural areas. I found a ballet group, a music festival, home for pregnant teens, a counseling center, and more.

What brings all these groups together is a sense that their existence and functions are permanent.

This, of course, raises some difficult issues when one comes to organizing. How can one assume that one organizing group or method is going to be the most effective over time? How does one decide “which” organizing group to fund, and how does one prevent an endowment from actually destroying the kind of creativity, flexibility, and radical challenge that organizing may require in order to stay “healthy”.

To cite an old example, many have argued that the reason that Martin Luther King and other new organizing groups were able to emerge in the South during the civil rights movement was ironically because many Southern states had banned the NAACP. This seems to have opened up space for new thinking and new organizations, and removed the suppression of risky action that the NAACP seems to have been perpetuating to some extent. More contemporaneously, I think it is accurate to say that a certain level of uncritical dogmatism and self-congratulatory thinking among the neo-Alinsky organizing groups that currently dominate the organizing “scene” may be hurting the emergence of new approaches.

But one would not need to fund individual organizing groups in order to relieve them from some of the burdens of fundraising and the potentially destructive force of current “fads” and program mandates from distant funding organizations. Instead one could fund a local institution designed specificially to support organizing groups—old ones and new ones. By being based in a building that it owned, this group could provide basics like office space, copy machines, phones, technology and tech support. It could have a grants officer on staff to help organizations target their appeals and reduce the burden of fundraising. It could provide multi-year internships (with benefits) to allow individual organizing groups to bring community members in and train them in organizing. It could provide child care and meals and have a van and money to pay drivers to pick people up and get them to meetings. It could provide small reimbursements to participants to make it at least a “neutral” cost for them to go to a meeting. It could have a shared receptionist, and be open from early in the morning to late at night. It could have a board of directors drawn from a wide range of local progressive organizing groups and a carefully drawn mandate that ensured that it was able to “boot” dying organizations and bring in promising new ones. And it would have a constitution designed to ensure it remained true to a broad set of progressive commitments.

Such an endowed umbrella organization would ensure, just like with museums, universities, and beloved parks, that organizing is here to stay, especially in small cities like Milwaukee, where organizing has long been on “life support.” Through its board, it would force local organizing groups to work together to some extent, despite whatever disagreements they might have. If the building was big enough, it might allow the emergence of some more creative experimental relationships between organizing and service groups which I am increasingly convinced are crucial. In fact, simply because it would (I think of necessity) provide child care and meals and small reimbursements to participants, it would already be involved in a kind of “service” that would make participation as much a reality for people struggling on the margins as for professionals and other middle class folks like myself.

Where would the money come from? Well, of course, I don’t know. But if it had a building and an institutional name, it might be appealing to some funder that usually gives out program grants that do not leave any permanent legacy in the community. I could imagine some rich progressive person who would love to have their name permanently on a building or permanently on the name of an institution whose job was to stick a thumb in the eye of privileged oppressors permanently.

How much money would it require? Well, after glancing around the Internet, it seems like a round number like 4% is about what you can expect to spend every year from an endowment while still maintaining it over time given inflation. So let’s go with that as a rule of thumb (see this for those who are interested). And let’s assume you need, say, 2 million dollars for a building (including renovation) in a not necessarily high-priced part of town. So then if you have an operating budget of $250,000 (which isn’t a lot if you have a few employees), you need an endowment of around 6 or 7 million dollars. Or a total of 8-10 million dollars.

This may seem like a lot of money to most of you (or me) but there are plenty of folks out there in our increasingly income unequal society for whom this isn’t really that much.

Carnegie made his name forever by creating libraries across the United States (and beyond). What if some funder decided to stop trying to fund an endless series of cool sounding projects, and instead said, “I want to provide a permanent base for organizing in a collection of cities in America.”

[For those of you who think I've totally gone "off the rails" of education policy, here . . . . Well, look. If you are going to get interested in education organizing based in the community and not in schools then suddenly you've got to ask a whole new set of questions. We're used to talking about public schools which seem obviously to be a public, government funded function (regardless of how poorly they are funded). But now we're talking about an intervention in education that can't take government funding at all.]