Monthly Archives: April 2015

Racial Violence and Police Brutality Have a Similar Genesis!

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The rioting taking place in Baltimore over the past couple of days is not the first nor will it be the last incidence of young blacks, mostly men, acting out in anger in central cities throughout the U.S. Unlike those who engage in thoughtful protest, violence is all many of these young people know.

They are part of a growing population of young people, a large percentage of which are black, who are disconnected from mainstream society. They have been chewed up a spit out by a flawed educational process, have access to minimal health care, feel targeted by the criminal justice system, and feel imprisoned in their own communities. Do these factors justify such behavior? Certainly not, but we are not seeking justification.

What we are seeking, what we must seek, is understanding. Until we understand the forces that drive such behavior we can only react to it and reaction only prompts a chain reaction. We need understanding if we are to have any hope of a meaningful resolution.

That being said, is the rioting in the streets in Baltimore any different than a group of cops losing control and beating a black suspect in the streets? History is full of examples in which seemingly peaceful groups of people can, when conditions are ripe, morph into a violent mob to which they seem compelled to relinquish their self-control.

That human beings have a propensity to surrender to the mob is a given and it is a powerful force of human nature. What concerns us are the factors that trigger such behavior.

In the case of white cops and young black men in urban America, the dynamics that trigger such violence are remarkably and ironically similar. In both instances, the triggering emotion is a heightened sense of frustration born of powerlessness in the face of forces that affect their daily lives. Let us remind ourselves that the overwhelming majority of African-Americans do not engage in senseless rioting in the streets of any neighborhood, let alone their own, and the overwhelming majority of police officers do not engage in the senseless beating of suspects of any demographic.

Young people living in poverty, hopelessness, and powerlessness are reacting to a world that does not seem to care about them and from which they see no escape. While this group includes people of all races, creeds, and ethnic heritage, African-Americans are disproportionately represented and possess a unique sensitivity to discrimination. This burgeoning population of Americans live in a world that is separate and apart from what is perceived to be mainstream society and the chasm that separates them is widening, relentlessly.

When these young people take to the streets, it is almost always begins as a reaction to what they believe to be police brutality or other forms of institutional racism.

The police officers who respond with violence are reacting to their own sense of frustration over their inability—their sense of powerlessness—to bring perpetrators of a virtual avalanche of criminal activity to justice in an environment in which they believe the courts to be ineffectual. Imagine how any of us would feel about a job in which the problems that keep us from doing our job are overwhelming and where our employer seems incapable of doing anything about it. None of this excuses this type of behavior but it does help us understand.

The reality that we face as members of a democratic form of government is that the world is changing faster than ever and the tools we have at our disposal are becoming obsolete. No matter how much some people might wish it, we cannot turn back the clock to a time when the white man ruled the roost and values were simpler and clearer. This is true whether you are viewing the scenario as a conservative or liberal, republican or democrat, tea-party member or socialist.

The combination of conservative and liberal policies employed by our leadership over the last 65 years are what brought us to this point in history. These policies did not work then and they have even less chance of working in a world in which the gaps that separate us as a people seem impassable; where the population is growing steadily more diverse; and, in which our elected legislators seem incapable of working together.

There are tens of millions of young people who feel disconnected from mainstream society and the number grows, daily. Somehow we must find a way to pull them into the mainstream, not shut them off from it. We need new ideas, new solutions; we need to think exponentially.

These new approaches must begin in our public schools where public school teachers are presently under attack by educational reformers who do not understand the challenges of public education; who think that simplistic, jingoistic solutions can solve complex problems; and, who are oblivious to the damage they do!

We must call upon professional educators to acknowledge that the way we have been teaching kids for decades no longer works. We need them to come together as a profession and seek new educational processes that are focused on the meeting the real needs each and every child and to create the necessary structure to support that effort.

To paraphrase Zig Ziglar, “if we keep doing what we’ve been doing, we’ll keep getting what we’ve been getting.”

The reader is invited to explore my book, Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge for Twenty-First Century America, where I offer a blueprint for action.

Relationship between teacher and student trumps everything!

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“I wish my teacher knew that I love her with all my heart!” was how one third grader in Colorado completed the assignment reported on ABC’s World News Tonight with David Muir.

If we want all American school children to get the quality education they deserve, and that our society so desperately needs them to achieve, we must give them what they need to be successful. We can identify four things that are not only essential but they trump everything else. What we need our political leaders to come to understand, whether here in Indiana or anywhere throughout the U.S. is that standardized testing is not one of these four things.

The first thing children need is to be treated as individuals on a dedicated learning path that is tailored to their unique starting point. As every professional educator will attest, the level of preparation and motivation children bring with them on their very first day of school is as diverse as the population of parents who gave birth to them. Beginning with such a focus not only puts a child on a path on which they can be successful, it sends a subtle but powerful message that they are special and that they are valued. Nothing gives the child the absolute best opportunity to be successful and nothing helps a child develop a healthy self-esteem more than being accepted for who they are; not how they stack up to their classmates.

The second most critical component of educational success is that each child is placed in an environment in which they can enjoy a nurturing, positive, life-affirming relationship with a teacher who will love them and care for them unconditionally. We want every child to experience the joy of the special relationship that most of us recall when we think back on our favorite teacher. While this component might be second on our list, it is second only because of chronology. Creating an environment that fosters such caring relationships between teacher and child is, overwhelmingly, the most important thing we can do to assure that the child receives the highest quality education of which they are capable. Yes, I understand that some children are easier to love than others but the universal truth is that “the child who is hardest to love is the one who needs it the most.”

The third thing the child needs is the assurance that they will get off to a good start and this requires that they begin learning how to be successful, from the very outset. This can be accomplished by creating a situation in which a child is not permitted to fail. Because we have placed them on a unique learning curve, it does not matter how a given child compares to other members of his or her class. We need to create an environment in which each and every child is given the time they need to learn each and every lesson, every step along the way. We simply must not permit them to fail. One of the things our current educational process does most successfully is to teach children how to fail. If we can, instead, begin teaching them that they can and will succeed it is amazing how success replicates itself every step along the way. It changes the equation to one in which the child’s success is a given.

The fourth essential component is that we need to engage parents as partners in the education of their sons and daughters. If we can pull the parents into the special relationship we strive to create between a child and his or her teacher we create an environment in which anything is possible and where every obstacle can be overcome. A warm, nurturing, and positive triumvirate between parents, children, and their teachers creates the most powerful motivational force in the world.

Many public school teachers will read this list and nod their head that these are important but will then go back to what they have been doing, whether or not it has been successful. The problem is that these four components are so far from the reality from most public school classrooms, particularly those in our most challenging schools and communities, that they are viewed as unreal; as abstractions.

What every professional educator must be challenged to believe at the very core of their being is that these components are not abstractions. They are real, and they can be created in each and every public school classroom in America, if only we step back and examine not only the way we do everything and why, but also the way we structure the process that supports and facilitates what we do. Each of these components is achievable and manageable; they are attainable solutions to a human engineering problem that requires only that we structure the educational process to support our most critical objectives.

In my book, Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge For Twenty-First Century America, I offer a blueprint for an educational process that relies on these components as a foundation for everything else it does.

I can imagine nothing that would validate a teacher’s existence more than hearing one their students say, “I wish my teacher knew that I love her with all my heart.”

We Need Fresh Ideas for a New Era of American History

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Both conservative republican and liberal democratic tenets of 20th Century America have gradually taken on the characteristics of dogma in that the underlying assumptions of their respective conventional wisdoms are rarely challenged or evaluated for their efficacy.

This is particularly concerning as we move into a new century where the problems we face as a nation, society, and world community are of an unprecedented breadth and scope. The unfortunate reality is that many of the challenges we face as members of an increasingly diverse people in an ever-more-complex new century are the consequence of the choices and policies of both republican and democratic leadership in the 20th Century. Those policies, choices, and ideologies will no longer take us where we need to go.

Most troubling is the emergence of the “tea party movement” that is striving to take us back to a time in America history that is perceived as better; a time when values seemed clearer. The problem, of course, is that the only people for whom that idyllic past was better were non- poor, white Americans. It was a time when white Americans represented the overwhelming majority and when they lived in a world in which they occupied a special place in society. This past is not recalled with the same reverence by black Americans and other minorities or by poor, white Americans.

Interestingly, this cherished past was a time in which blue-collar America, thanks to strong unions, enjoyed a level of economic success at least approaching that of “white collar” middle class Americans. The present day irony is that tea party and other conservative politicians and policy makers are doing their best to emasculate present-day unions as if they somehow pose a threat to the middle class. Why we would ever think that a strong working class able to earn levels of income to provide for their families, contribute to a vibrant economy, and pay their fair share of taxes is a bad thing is difficult to fathom.

The actions and policies of conservative politicians and policy makers seem to be driven by an equal resentment of the interests of African-Americans; other minorities; new immigrants, illegal or not; Muslim-Americans; gay and lesbians; and any other population of human beings who are perceived as different.

The unalterable fact is that African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, and other groups as defined by race, color, creed, faith, or sexual preferences represent one of the two fastest growing segments of our population and will soon replace white Americans as the majority. The needs of these growing segments of the American population, simply stated, cannot be ignored or otherwise abused without placing our entire society at risk.

What conservative Americans do not seem to comprehend is that the more the interests of these “other” Americans are left unattended, the more likely they will be to rise up and begin exercising their right to vote. Given that these groups, in the aggregate, will represent a statistical majority, such an eventuality will bring the conservative agenda to an abrupt but judicious end. We can only hope that the traditional liberal agenda will also be laid to rest.

We have not even addressed the issues involving the other fastest growing population of Americans made up of baby-boomers who are joining the ranks of the retired; a group whose political clout will also mushroom.

The best hope for preserving our liberty and providing a safe and affluent future for our children and grandchildren is through leadership that embraces our diversity and engages all Americans in the quest for new and innovative solutions to the challenges of the 21st Century. At present, we are not even seeking new and innovative solutions, much to our great disadvantage.

In my novel, Light and Transient Causes, I show what could happen if we relax our vigilance and abdicate our responsibilities as citizens of a participatory democracy.

Indiana’s Republican Governor and Republican-controlled General Assembly have Lost Their Way!

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How ironic is it that both conservative and moderate republicans who have spent their lifetimes marching to the tune of small government and individual liberty, have so quickly put special interests ahead of the interests of Hoosier voters.

Recently, I suggested that republicans, under the influence of the tea party movement, have abandoned the interests of Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” in favor of a strategy designed to pursue their own agendas. Clearly, the well-being of Romney’s “47 percent” no longer matters to those in office; men and women who were elected to represent the interests of all Americans, or in this case, all Hoosiers, not just a select few.

Governor Pence’s overt efforts to undermine the role of Indiana’s elected Superintendent of Public Instruction just because she would not kowtow to his policy initiatives is but one example. Whether through administrative polices, the formation of the Center for Education and Career Innovation (CECI), Indiana House Bill 1638, or other miscellaneous shenanigans the Governor and his supporters have waged war against public education, public schools, public school teachers, not to mention public school families, children and their communities.

When he finally dissolved the CECI, ostensibly to eliminate “the friction at the highest levels of government” and “fix what is broken in education in Indiana” the Governor expressed pride in the accomplishment of the CECI. That the most notable accomplishments of the CECI were the creation of “friction at the highest levels of government” and aggravation of “what is broken in education in Indiana” is the apex of irony.

Make no mistake, there are many problems with public education here in Indiana and in states throughout the nation but these are the very things the Superintendent of Public Education, the DOE, and Hoosier educators were working hard to address. Those efforts were sabotaged by the Governor in order to pave way for solutions that were conceived while being shielded from public scrutiny.

The whole principle of accountability of elected officials such as the Superintendent of Public Instruction, and also the Governor, is that the voters have the power to boot them out of office if their performance is unacceptable. The actions of the Governor have been dedicated to the process of removing the responsibility for accountability of selected elected officials from the hands of the voters and place it in the hands of policy-makers whom he has appointed and who are not held accountable by the voters.

A generation ago it would have been considered inconceivable that such actions would be the strategy of choice of conservative republicans.

Unfortunately, the power of Indiana’s current and recent Governors has also been directed at Indiana unions and their memberships through the ironically entitled ”right to work legislation”; and, more recently against the Common Construction Wage Law that guarantees that Hoosier workers in the various construction trades will be paid wages that enable them to provide for their families and pay their fair share of taxes.

Now, the republican leadership in Indiana has turned its attention to passing “religious freedom legislation” that has brought ridicule to our state and that places certain members of our diverse citizenry at risk of discrimination. Should not every citizen be entitled to protection both when they “have been substantially” subjected to discriminatory acts or consider themselves “likely to be substantially” subjected?

In response to public outcry, our governor and state legislators scrambled, this past week, to pass a fix that would placate the opposition. Let the reader understand that this fix does not alter the underlying motivation of Governor Pence and others and it was only passed because republicans were “caught with their hands in the cookie jar.”

Where will it end? Unless the voters of the State of Indiana rise up and hold their elected officials accountable for their self-serving legislation and policy making the ominous chasm that exists between the rich and poor, the fortunate and the unfortunate, and between white citizens and their minority counterparts can only expand.

The saddest truth about this widening trend toward the disenfranchisement of so many of our citizens is that the people who are adversely affected by these actions could boot our elected officials out of office if only they would band together and exercise their right to vote.

Hoosiers are like all other Americans and must be challenged to recognize that the solutions to the problems of 21st Century America cannot be realized through the application of 20th Century thinking, whether conservative or liberal. These new and more complicated social challenges will demand new patterns of thought, fresh insights into the dynamics of 21st Century American society, and a new commitment to American imagination and ingenuity. What we require is exponential thinking of the highest order.