An Important History to Know

The idea of a “race riot” has deep roots in the historic violence against Black folks.  Before the mid-1960s, the term was used to describe the hundreds of instances of mob and often governmentally allowed violence against the Black community.  Thousands of Black people died in these attacks, and few people were ever prosecuted for those deaths.  They happened in the south, the north, the east and west of the nation.  They were common enough to have left an imprint among the vast Black diaspora.  Every current Black family still has stories of their progenitors being attacked during a race riot.  We know about them as a part of our history.  But these events weren’t just our history.  They are the history of the nation because they form a significant thread in the fabric of the nation’s race relations. When you ask, “How did we get here?” in response to what you’re seeing on the news, the history of race riots is one part of the answer.  

You should know about them, and here’s a place to start:

https://donotforgetourhistory.weebly.com/race-riots.html

My guess is that you’ll find an event from communities you know in that list.  Additionally, I looked up some reliable sources for a few of these.  Here’s a random, geographically diverse sampling of what you can find.  It’s a gruesome history that you now have no reason not to know.

Year	Event	Link
1863	New York City Draft Riots	https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/317749.html&title=The+New+York+City+Draft+Riots+of+1863&desc=
1866	Memphis Massacre	http://www.bu.edu/bulawreview/files/2019/01/DONALD.pdf
1900	New Orleans Robert Charles Riots	https://neworleanshistorical.org/items/show/1451
1904 and 1906	Springfield, Ohio Race Riots	http://www.filsonhistorical.org/archive/ovhpdfs/OVH_V6N1_Blocker.pdf
1906	Atlanta Race Riot	https://www.atlantastudies.org/2019/05/14/casey-p-cater-electrifying-race-relations-atlantas-streetcars-and-the-1906-race-riots/
1919	Red Summer	https://www.theworldwar.org/learn/red-summer
1921	Black Wall Street Massacre	https://www.theatlantic.com/sponsored/hbo-2019/the-massacre-of-black-wall-street/3217/
1943	Detroit Race Riot	https://detroithistorical.org/learn/encyclopedia-of-detroit/race-riot-1943

Building an Off-ramp – it takes more than money to retire

People ask me at least once a week about being retired.  “Do you enjoy it? Or “Do you find enough to do?” Or “Do you miss going to work every day?”  For the record, the answers are “Yes!” “Yes!” and “Are you kidding?”  People keep asking, though, because they hear about other folks who retired who struggle with it. 

Search the Internet with the phrase "advice for planning retirement" and you’ll find a list of articles about financial planning.  People think about preparing for the monetary part of retirement, and if they’re fortunate the finances come together.  But they often don’t think about what retirement will mean for their daily experience.  In my experience, how I prepared to use my time was as important as how I prepared financially.  

I was fortunate to have had a career that I enjoyed and that I found fulfilling.  Not every day (or sometimes month) was rainbows and daisies, but it was a good way to have spent a working life.  As an educator who spent a third of his career in as a junior high and high school teacher and the last two-thirds in community colleges and universities, I contributed to people’s lives and helped them dream and build their futures in small increments.  I even helped a few institutions move forward and think of the ways that they served or didn’t serve learners. 

I still continue to do that on a smaller scale, as I advise a few doctoral candidates as they complete their dissertations, consult with institutions on issues and programs, conduct studies that I find interesting, and write and edit articles that I believe are important for the profession.  So I haven’t disassociated from my professional life.  But what I have now is the flexibility to do the work that’s important to me without the demands of a job that requires me to be in certain places, doing certain tasks, and working at certain times.  In brief, I control my own life with few demands from external sources. 

Because I control my own life, I also decide how better to balance my professional life with my personal enjoyments.  When I’m not isolated from a pandemic, I can take time on a week night to meet a friend to play music without worrying about getting up early for work the next morning.  Or I can take a motorcycle trip along the Olympic Peninsula on a week day.  Or I can take the time to work on something I’m building, and if I don’t like my work, I can undo it and start over.  Or I can just relax at home, or have a standing, virtual cocktail party with friends from around the country – without worrying that some work demand will interfere.  After 46 years, three months, and 27 days of having a job that scheduled my life, now I’m scheduling my life.  That’s an incredible gift that I see as a privilege and a responsibility as I use my time.  If you haven’t yet deduced this, though, I’m really enjoying retirement.  So I write this in order to pass along some wise advice I received that helped me prepare. 

My already retired colleagues encouraged me, most importantly, to build what I think of as an off-ramp to retirement.  It’s important to think about retirement not being a finite point, but, rather, as a continuation, just like a freeway off-ramp isn’t a dead end.  That’s why I continue to have professional activities.  I’ve been consulting on the side for 25 years.  In the first year of retirement, my consulting practice had its busiest year ever, and its tapered a little from that in the last two years.  I don’t see that work continuing forever into the future.  But that helped me have an outlet for the professional energy that I maintained for a very long time during my career. 

Similarly, finishing out my doctoral candidates allows me to continue a teaching relationship with each of them – a relationship that I find incredibly satisfying.  Also, conducting a few studies, co-editing an issue of a professional journal, and co-writing some articles all allow me to make contributions to my profession, while I’m also mentoring the people who are working with me on these projects and helping them to gain publications that gain them status in our profession.  As I left my job and the part of identity it provided, these were the components of the off-ramp that allowed me to develop a new self-identity that’s not that much different than the one I’ve had for a long time. 

In my personal life, that off-ramp began about seven years ago as I built a music studio behind the house.  We have a small house, and there’s no space for the Hammond organ and other instruments I play with (note the phrase “play with” as opposed to “play”).  Four years ago, I replaced the older motorcycle I was riding with one that is better suited for touring because being on the open road helps me to meditate on life.  Then two years ago, we finally demolished our ramshackle garage and replaced it with a much larger one where I built a workbench with space for tools and working.     

The off-ramp also includes people – its most important component.  My wife and I’ve been fortunate to have made deep and lasting friendships over the years of married life.  Also, we both have family members who are important to us.  Although we only see some of those friends and family periodically, maintaining our connection to them grounds us in an understanding of the significance of human contact.  That’s part of the off-ramp that we started building a long time ago, and it’s one that we continue to build as we now have more time to nurture relationships.

Okay.  I understand that some of what I describe about building the off-ramp to retirement takes money.  In our case, it was the good fortune to have the resources to make choices a few years back.  As we had some extra dollars, we would invest in the off-ramp (e.g., building the studio or replacing the motorcycle with a newer one).  But that’s not any different than what we did in paying into our retirement accounts.  It was a conscious decision to understand that our lives were about to change and that we needed to prepare for that change.  In return for this opportunity, we try to live responsibly in the world around us because we understand how fortunate we have been to prepare for this time.

Like I said, I didn’t come up with this off-ramp idea.  I learned it by listening to and watching others.  None of the people who taught me did exactly what I’m doing because who they are and how they did it are all different.  The friend who retired and spent five years as a consultant with various companies providing his expertise.  The colleague who began a new research center after his retirement in his late 50s and then spent 30+ years managing that.  The neighbor who was a carpenter and now helps people with construction projects.  There are also people I know who have made their hobbies their life, or have completely reinvented themselves in retirement.  The key is that they had lives that extended from who they were to whom they became.  They built an off-ramp.

So in my third year, I’m still becoming.  It’s interesting that I had plans to do things that I haven’t yet done.  I’m okay with them never getting done.  Unlike my professional life, my goals now are now more fluid and less about an end product than they are about the experiences.  For now, I’m enjoying this latest episode of life, and I’m looking forward to seeing what it brings next as I transition through this off-ramp to whatever the fully retired me will be.  It seems to me that it’s never too late to start building that off-ramp.  Even if you’re retired already, you can start thinking of ways to bridge from where you are to where you could be.  My wife, for example, has taken up indoor gardening of late as a way to extend her enjoyment of seeing things grow without the demands of yard work.  The key, it seems to me, is to build forward to what’s next instead of looking back to see what isn’t.  After all, going to what’s next is what off-ramps provide us.

Let’s put on a show….

Those of us of a certain age will remember TV reruns of the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland musicals of the 1930s that got a lot of airtime in the 1960s as fillers for local TV stations looking for inexpensive content to air.  The plot always seemed to revolve around the need to show off the two young stars’ singing and dancing talents.  The heart of the movie revealed itself when Rooney flashed that mischievous smile he had and said something like, “My uncle has a barn we can use.  Let’s put on a show.”  The thin plot line then revolved around the rehearsals and performances that allowed Rooney and Garland to shine.

With all the talk of education moving to online formats in the current crisis, I’m reminded of those movies.  Get a barn, a group of kids, and then let them sing and dance their way into 90 minutes of entertaining frolic.  In this current circumstance, though, it’s, “We have online technology; let’s use it to teach.”  Well, just like a musical takes skills and an incredible amount of time and hard work to produce in the real world, just having a technology isn’t enough to replicate such a complex activity as learning and teaching.  In truth, it takes a lot of preparation and thought to move a course, at any level, into effective e-learning.  I worry that we’ve lost that truth in the demands to, “Let’s put on a show.”

In the past week, I’ve had a few discussions with teachers, and I’ve seen many more have discussions online, as people charged with educating children and adults are scrambling to figure out what to do as their institutions make a sudden move to online instruction.  That’s not to say that these teachers and institutions haven’t used e-learning in the past.  Most educators these days use a course management system to store content.  And many have used e-learning tools like video conferencing to connect their students to the wider world.  But it’s like putting on a musical.  We may have seen a barn, we may have seen a musical, and we may have some talent at signing and dancing.  But putting on a musical?  That requires mastering special skills that cover everything from stage design to directing to acting to marketing to a hundred other important tasks. 

K-12 schools and colleges that have been successful at moving into e-learning have hired good instructional designers to work with teachers.  Good instructional designers are amazing because they help educators rethink what they do to translate their intended impact into an electronic format.  They teach a way of thinking – they offer much more than the tools of e-learning.  That’s because teaching via e-learning is a learned skill that designers can help educators develop.  There are actually benefits to e-learning and there are ways that teachers can replicate the impacts they create in their face-to-face classrooms.  However, teachers generally don’t develop those skills innately.  They need support to develop the skills they need.

A school or college that expects that its teachers will succeed at translating what they do face to face into e-learning will quickly discover the importance of supporting that translation.  Unfortunately, there aren’t anywhere near the number of instructional designers available for the sudden change that schools and colleges are now undertaking.  So rather than looking like a polished MGM musical from the 30s, many of the current efforts, I fear, will look more like a local community talent show:  some highlights, but few stellar moments and even more frustrations for teachers and learners.

What to do?  For now, there’s not much to be done.  There are some schools and colleges that have a robust instructional design department, and they will provide the support that teachers need for the transition.  But this current crisis can be a wake up for educational leaders.  For the 25 years that I’ve been leading, teaching, researching, and developing e-learning, I’ve seen the “Let’s put on a show” model as dominant in discussions of educators outside of e-learning experts.  Educational leaders who hold the purse strings are satisfied to purchase the latest tools in the expectation that the tools are what’s required.  However, just like Judy and Mickey’s barn wouldn’t work in the real world, there needs to be a concurrent effort in the future to do more than just attempt a show.  Schools and colleges need to invest in a future that does more than puts a few assignments into an electronic format and expects learning to occur.  In addition to instructional designers, schools and colleges need to invest in ongoing, job-embedded, quality professional development and support for their teachers.  This moment, as emergencies often do, offers an opportunity to rethink how better to prepare for the future. 

Reflections on December 6, 1969

The link at the bottom of this posting takes you to yet another “death of the sixties” article on the 1969 concert at Altamont Speedway that featured the Rolling Stones and other bands.  Over the last 50 years, I can’t count how many of these articles and documentaries I’ve seen – the documentary, Gimme Shelter is the most well-known.  All of them focus on part of the story to make a point – which is often to juxtapose Altamont with Woodstock that had happened a few months prior.  The general theme seems to be that Woodstock was Aquarius rising, the coming together of a generation, the embodiment of the age of peace, etc., and that Altamont signaled the end.

My first reaction is that it really does stretch reality to claim the rise and death of any social movement in the short 110 days that separated these two concerts.  Rather, neither event is emblematic of social change.  In truth, both are separate snapshots of America at a time of social change.  The elements of the experiences of Woodstock and Altamont co-existed throughout the era, a complexity that is true of any moment.  After all, don’t forget that San Francisco’s 1967 “summer of love” two years before Altamont and Woodstock was also the summer of race riots in Buffalo, Newark, and Detroit.  In a truthful history, multiple experiences and perspectives exist simultaneously.  Seeing either Altamont or Woodstock as each or jointly definitive misses the complexity of that era in an attempt to neatly categorize the time and people.  It’s a mistake to see these events as providing any more meaning than the snapshot moments that they are. 

I was at Altamont.  I went with three other people, and we were in the upper bowl of the field that sloped down to the stage – close enough to hear the music and far enough away to miss the violence and chaos that surrounded the performers.  As we arrived, people around me passed around one-gallon jugs of Red Mountain wine and joints, a young couple next to us zipped themselves into a sleeping bag and had sex (which at least seemed preferable to the ones who were okay with sex in a rocking sani-can), and folks just sat around on the grass or danced energetically whenever music played.  So the event began as just another outdoor music experience like the many that preceded and followed it.  I arrived expecting something akin to the free concerts in Golden Gate Park that I hitchhiked to see before and afterward; or the free concerts that the collective I was part of organized on the other side of the bay from San Francisco.  Music, dancing, and people getting high in the open air. 

As all of the documentaries and articles I’ve read over the years have noted, though, there was something different at Altamont.  The event quickly felt noticeably dissimilar from all the others.  My experience there and all of the articles and documentaries point to a clear reason:  disorganization.  Nothing worked.  You can read how the Grateful Dead refused to play after Marty Balin of the Jefferson Airplane got knocked out twice by the Hells Angels who were supposed to be guarding the stage, or the other security issues, or the poorly designed stage, or the lack of food, or long lines at the toilets.  For someone who attended, that disorganization was palpable, and it generated uneasiness in the crowd.  Pauses in the music are part of an outdoor concert, as bands set up and transition.  But Altamont’s pauses highlighted the incompetence of a hastily mismanaged event.  Rumors about who was going to play next and who wasn’t coming circulated with each pause.  It was unclear whether there would be a next act whenever one band finished.  By the late afternoon, people in the area where I watched began leaving.  The harmony that pervaded all of the other outdoor concerts I’d attended was gone by then.  Not knowing whether the concert would continue, the person who had driven my group suggested we leave, and we did before sunset, the disastrous Stones set, and the mayhem and murder that followed at the stage. 

The disorder of Altamont was followed by other, less-publicized concerts that were managed with more care.  I attended and helped to organize many open-air concerts over the next year, and nothing changed.  People came, danced, listened to music.  The failure of Altamont didn’t carry forward into those other events.  That’s not to suggest that these events were trouble free.  At one concert our group organized that following summer, we had over 20 people overdose when someone passed around pills that were laced with PCP, a hallucinogen that caused both mental and physical convulsions.  Overall, though, the concert “vibe” didn’t change at any other events I attended in the year after Altamont.  And, truthfully, nothing changed as a result of Woodstock, either. 

What Woodstock and Altamont highlight for me is some of the diversity of my generation that gets lost in the attempts to make these two events emblems of anything.  The 58,220 American soldiers who were killed in Vietnam were mostly from that generation, as were the members of the Black Panther Party who fed hungry children and stood up to police violence against the Black community in Oakland.  The Hell’s Angels who were given the freedom to terrorize musicians and concert goers at Altamont were of that generation, as were the trust-fund-backed financiers who paid the bills at Woodstock.  I, a politically active, high school senior at the time, was there with a college-attending acquaintance and that friend’s brother, who worked in business.  Music brought us together for that moment, but the three of us were, and I imagine still are, very different people in our outlooks and perspectives.  People who attended Altamont with me were socially connected by the music, but radically different in the cultures that really defined us.  To say that that event signaled a cultural shift is to assume that we were all of the same culture, and that’s just not accurate.

I understand that it makes a good story to write about, or make a documentary about, how events are symbolic.  But the resulting images that comprise such a story are typically caricatures.  In order to highlight the story’s moral, it typically becomes a mixture of stock characters and readily accessible plot points organized to make a statement.  That’s what has happened with the Altamont story:  The evil Hells Angels destroyed peace-loving flower children and signaled the end of that era.  Such a simplified reduction of any story always misses what’s really happening.  On the surface, the “tribe” of my generation came together at Altamont and failed to have the experience it had before.  In reality, there wasn’t one “tribe,” and the event wasn’t anything more than the failure of promoters to organize – while ceding power and control to a group of bikers who didn’t have any interest in anything more than having a good time themselves.

Everybody’s heard a Hammond organ playing, even if they don’t know what they’re hearing.  A Hammond “tone wheel” organ is an amazing piece of technology that has driven the music of R&B, jazz, blues, and the sanctified church since the 1940s.  It’s not the organ you hear at high mass in a cathedral.  It’s the one you hear as you walk by a Pentecostal holiness church.  Or a blues club.  You’ve heard that sound.  It’s immediately recognizable for its pleading emotion.  If you play one, you know something about it that other people may not:  Each key on the keyboard can produce more than one note.  By pulling out any of nine drawbars, the player adds an additional note to the note being pressed.  If you ever have a chance to sit at a Hammond and hear this, you’ll be amazed.  Press any key (black or white) and then pull out one drawbar.  Pulling that drawbar while pressing the key will add a second note to the first.  Pull a second drawbar, and you’ll have the original note and two additional notes; and so on – up to nine, harmonious notes from one key on the keyboard.  A player develops a style where the drawbars are pulled in combinations to make the sounds that sing to heavenly angels or cry from the pain of mistreatment. 

The stories of the Altamont concert seem like a parallel to what most people hear when listening to a Hammond organ.  People hear a note, but they’re unaware that each single note can include up to nine notes, and each chord is made up of notes that use sophisticated combinations to produce a unique sound.  Similarly, a simplistic analysis of any one event like the Altamont concert cannot declaim the status of a generation of people, a movement, or a societal shift.  Besides, evidence that refutes “the death of the sixties” is overwhelming.  People of that era who tried to build harmony like people experienced at most outdoor music events went on to build social movements that spread across the country that range from Cooperative Homecare Associates in New York to Breitenbush Hot Springs in Oregon.  Those who were involved in political action, continued that action.  Those who fought against injustice continued their lives fighting injustice.  I know this because I’ve had the privilege to work in the trenches with people like this for over 50 years.  Their idealism didn’t die because of a poorly managed concert; it’s only deepened and become pragmatically stronger.  That idealism evolved into action which pervaded our social systems, our religious organizations, and even our businesses. 

What these documentaries and articles on the Altamont concert highlight to me is the folly of any simplification of the past which ignores the diversity of experiences that comprise any history.  Exploring complexities and the diversity of experiences are critical lenses to use in assessing the stories we tell about the past.  So let’s start by remembering:  Altamont was a poorly organized event that led to the deaths of four people.  No movement was born or died there.  And history is far too complex to be compartmentalized into a neat package.  Full stop. 

Link to article that prompted this.

The Experienced Voice: A note on the value of my generation in leadership transitions

As I enter the last third of my 60s, and as I read articles that suggest my generation should exit the stage quietly, I’ve been pondering my role and the roles of my generational peers.  That pondering is coupled with the current election.  Some of the contenders for the 2020 presidential election are people in their 70s.  It’s interesting that of the first five U.S. presidents only one was barely older than 60 when he took the office (John Quincy Adams was 61).  We waited 227 years to elect someone initially in his 70s.  Overall, we’ve only had 10 presidents out of 44 before the current president who began office in their 60s.  It’s not surprising, then, that the more recent candidacies of Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, and Elizabeth Warren have begun conversations about how old is too old. 

Does age correlate to skill or level of contribution?  Of course not.  As I write this, Warren Buffet still ably leads Berkshire Hathaway, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg sits on the Supreme Court.  Both are people in their 80s and by all accounts remain skilled at what they do.  Even if these two examples are anomalies, people live longer and the lifespan of the average person’s career is much longer than it was in 1776 or even 1976.  So it makes sense that someone would be longer in a leadership role, right?

In truth, there isn’t a magic age or age range at which a leader is ready to step aside.  And stepping aside because of age actually isn’t the question at all.  Change to the next generation is inevitable.  That’s the case whether the current leadership in an organization is on the verge of moving on, or whether the current leadership is decades away from turning over control.  The most important question, whether we’re discussing the role of leading the nation or a local club chapter, is about the plans to bring the next generation into leadership.     

As we explore that planning, those of us nearer the end of our participation than the beginning need to ask what our role should be in the transition.  That’s important because the transition won’t magically happen.  While the technical skills of leadership and management can be taught in seminars, workshops, and degree programs, there’s more to leadership than the technical skills of how to manage personnel, organize a project, or generate a budget.  Those of us who’ve taken leadership and management roles in our lives had to learn the complexity required in those roles through experiences.  It’s in consideration of what we’ve learned and how we developed our skills and knowledge that we must find a role for ourselves in the transition to the next generation of leaders.  While our less experienced colleagues can learn from seminars and classes and workshops, they must also benefit from what we’ve learned. 

It’s the idea of being the experienced voice.  That’s being able to share knowledge and the perspectives that take years to develop – not as rules that have to be followed, but as a source of wisdom, a word that often gets forgotten when we think of management and leadership.  If an experienced voice is part of the ongoing mixture of ideas and discussions, it can help contextualize and add perspective – it can offer wisdom.  When all people hear is that experienced voice of wisdom, the danger is that they’re only hearing the past; so it’s important that the experienced voice isn’t the only voice.  The experienced voice can’t be dominant; but it should be integrated as part of any conversation about an organization’s purpose or actions.

Of course, that means colleagues need to be willing to listen to us.   However, in my experience, that’s rarely the issue.  I have long ago tired of the “how to manage millennials” or the “unmotivated Generation X” babble that seems to be permeating current consultants’ spiels.  You know:  the ones who tell us that younger generations are self-defining and unable to take direction because they were raised on a diet of getting praised for every childhood act.  In my experiences in managing and leading people, I find that defining colleagues by the years they were born is about effective as relegating them to personality type by their astral birthdate.  Instead, I’ve found that most people of any age listen to advice and direction if it’s carefully explained and rationally justified from someone they’ve learned to trust.  Therefore, building those trusted relationships is critical to being an experienced voice. 

That means leaders need to be aware of who our colleagues are and remain committed to their success as much as the success of the organization.  In truth, those two successes are symbiotic, with one not possible without the other.  If I work with my colleagues from a position of mutual connectivity and respect, they’re more likely to see my perspectives as worth hearing about.  Will that work for every employee?  Not all of them, since some people (regardless of their generation) are self-absorbed and unwilling to listen to any other voice besides their own.  But it will work with the majority, and it’s the majority whom you need to build an organization.

Also, being an experienced voice means contributing to the future without restricting it.  We need to give control to others.  Whether the people we lead are administrative assistants or other managers, we need to be giving them opportunities to independently develop projects that they initiate and complete.  There need to be processes where people at all levels are encouraged to see their ideas merged into the strategic direction of the organization.  That means allowing administrative assistants, for example, to develop onboarding training for new employees.  Or it means allowing mid-level managers independently to reorganize their units in more effective ways.  

This is where a critical component of being the experienced voice has to happen:  Succession planning isn’t about who’ll be next at the top of the organization.  Effective succession planning requires a culture of leadership development where all people in the organization see themselves as leading.  Not in the sense that they all go in their own way, but in the sense that they control their efforts and see their efforts as moving the organization toward its aims.  People who have freedom to manage their work and make it more effective will innovate and create; and they’ll become leaders.  Their innovations will lead others and create a culture of innovation around the strategic aims of the organization.  Once all people see themselves as leaders, then finding the next executive who manages and leads the entire organization isn’t as daunting.  It becomes a natural next step in the organization’s work of self-renewal.  The experienced voice works toward that daily.

In traditional communities, we with years of experience would be named “elders” who are part of the community structure.  In those communities, we would be given the tasks of teaching and counseling, even after the time when we were done leading and managing.  That’s one place where many organizations miss an opportunity.  The current process for many organizations is to have someone retire and leave the organization to successors.  That happens for directors of non-profits as it does for corporate CEOs. While we sometimes bestow titles in that transition (in my profession, it’s “emeritus”), those titles carry little value in furthering the work of the organization.  In an era when we live longer with vibrant cognitive and physical agility, that system becomes actually a disincentive for us to leave our leadership roles.  When leaders do finally retire, they typically disconnect and the organization loses their wisdom and institutional knowledge. 

 Both as we approach the end of our formal leadership and afterward, our most important work is to develop our skills to be the experienced voice.  We need to cultivate the leadership of others in our organization as we consider what comes after our departure.  We need to find ways to become a teacher and counselor after we leave formal leadership – in ways that support the new vision that new leaders will bring.  After all, new leaders will mean a new direction that will differ from the past.  Success will mean understanding the past and building on it.  But it can’t mean replicating it.  Ask Packard automobiles or Wang or Tower Records what happened to them when they couldn’t evolve.  The important value in leadership change is that it offers the opportunity for new directions and new energy.  So those of us who are transitioning away from leadership and management need to understand and support those changes in this new role as elders providing the experienced voice.  And those who replace us need to be wise enough to understand that. 

A Budget Change You May not Otherwise See

If you’ve looked at the president’s proposed budget for education and the news accounts of it, you’ll see lots of disasters.  For example, he’s proposing to give $5 billion away in tax credits to wealthy donors who create “scholarships” to send children to private schools.  And it gets worse from there.

What you may miss is a proposed 24% reduction to adult basic education (ABE) state grants.  Not many people keep up with the federal ABE funding outside of the ABE world.  You may not even know what ABE provides.  But it’s an important component of the adult education world as programs provide everything from basic literacy to pre-employment training to GED preparation to high school completion for adults.  It’s part of the nation’s educational safety net, and the current funding already isn’t enough to serve the immigrants and refugees needing to learn English, people who left school before graduating and need to develop pathways to economic independence, parents who want to be able to read their children a bedtime story, and many more categories of adults needing basic skills.

This initial presidential budget will go to Congress and not look anything like its initial version when they’re through.  Both houses will make many adjustments in the final budget that is due in September.  As the largest funder of ABE in the nation, the U.S. Department of Education’s state grants have a major impact.  A 24% reduction to already lean funding will be disastrous.  And while the K-12 world has many supporters who will advocate against the changes proposed in the budget, the ABE funding could easily get overlooked as people focus on K-12 issues.  I encourage you to become an ally to the ABE world and offer your voice with those of us who work in this area.  A reduction in this budget is just not acceptable.

To that end, I’m including a link below to ProLiteracy’s legislative update on the president’s budget.  Please read that document and consider sending your representatives a note about this.  And please share this message widely in your networks.

http://go.proliteracy.org/webmail/288752/203525070/02eef5bfe7bed99efbb31c70870c3466c87e688e5290f8a144c4ab3409976061

President orders federal pay freeze

Isn’t it interesting that a president who claims to be for workers is willing to, during what he claims is a vibrant economy, freeze federal workers’ wages?  He touts that his policies are bringing prosperity to steelworkers and coal miners (despite evidence to the contrary).  But then the one group of workers for whom he has a direct control sees their wages stagnate. 

 

If you looked at the rhetoric of the right wing over the past 40 years, you’d think that the ranks of federal employees has become so large that it has choked our economy.  According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, federal workers comprise 1.79% of the nation’s workforce.  Despite claims of a growing and bloated federal workforce, it’s one of three employment sectors that BLS predicts will decline between 2016 and 2026.  The other two declining sectors are manufacturing and self-employed agriculture, two sectors of the economy for which the president reserves his most serious pandering.  In contrast, federal workers have been part of the right wing’s symbolism for decades.  They get pilloried along with “welfare moms” and liberals.  As is the case for all of these other generalizations, federal workers are a convenient target, and how they’re caricatured is far from reality. 

 

That’s how divisive politics works.  Reagan fired the air traffic controllers in 1981.  It was a symbolic act more than anything else as he showed his “strength” against unions.  It was politically expedient and a significant shift from his time as governor California in 1968 when he signed the nation’s first law giving public employees the right to bargain collectively.  After all, Reagan had been a union member of sorts, having served extensive terms as president of the Screen Actors’ Guild.  By 1981, though, he saw a chance to make political gains by attacking those air traffic controllers.  In the time since, right-wing politicians learned a valuable lesson as they discovered a convenient enemy that could be readily mocked, demonized, and easily blamed. 

 

It’s actually how bullies always operate:  Pick on someone whom you can defeat and call that a victory.  The belief is that then others will defer to your superiority.  Federal workers, because they are relatively few in numbers and have lost much of their collective bargaining power over the last three decades, are any easy target for a bully.

 

And that’s what’s really going on here.  Yes, the current administration gave away billions to the wealthy and now claims that there isn’t enough money to pay workers.  But that’s been the pattern for failed trickle-down Republican tax policy for decades.  This focus on federal workers is more than just that; it’s a symbolic statement.  It is intended to show that the president is powerful and in control.  It’s the fundamental lesson that any bully seeks to send.    

 

So let’s be clear here.  Federal workers have become a tool, here, for a dangerous message by a despotically leaning president who’s using them to show his superiority and willingness to push them.  The president doesn’t care that these folks have made career commitments to service.  When he was out night clubbing, bragging about assaulting women with impunity, and golfing, these folks were keeping the business of government operating and forming the steady foundation for our democracy.  It’s clear that the president doesn’t care about their cost in the overall federal budget.  As he does with most of his actions, he’s sending a message that he’s in control, and that no one other than him can lead this nation – that he, as a person of action, offers the answers.  There’s no thought to the people who will be affected or how this act diminishes their service and dedication.  It’s the same megalomaniacal beliefs that purportedly led Mussolini to declare:

 

“Democracy is talking itself to death. The people do not know what they want; they do not know what is the best for them. There is too much foolishness, too much lost motion. I have stopped the talk and the nonsense. I am a man of action. Democracy is beautiful in theory; in practice it is a fallacy. You in America will see that some day.” 

 

Although this quotation may be apocryphal, it rings true to Mussolini’s overall approach to governance as cited in many of his speeches and writings.  The echoes to comments from the current president demand that we pay attention.

 

Refusing cost-of-living raises to federal employees is about strongman optics.  That’s done in the corporate world all the time.  A CEO will “hold the line” on workers’ wages to earn favor with the board of directors and stockholders.  It may be tolerated there, but in a representative democracy, it’s a dangerous gamesmanship that defies the nation’s egalitarian ideals.  No group should be targeted for use in politically expedient lessons.  The idea of a strongman government where the leader can so easily target one group should be abhorrent to us.  Mussolini was wrong to cavalierly dismiss democratic systems in favor of his own judgment, and so is the president. 

Intolerable Inaction

My feelings of anger, sadness, and frustration at this nation for allowing violent acts to continue leaves me numbed by each new atrocity.  Numb enough to be once again pushed into a paroxysm of grief and anger.  But not numb enough to be silent. 

First, let’s get something clear:  The U.S. has never been a safe place for people of color or for people of different faiths.  From the witch trials of the north, to the klan night riders in the south, and to the abuse and mistreatment of first peoples from 1492 onward, the history is unambiguous.  So please don’t be shocked that there are people in this country who hate enough to harm others and to do that without provocation.  

It may be hard to acknowledge, but hate-fueled action has been a consistent feature of every era.  Just ask the Jews who were attacked by the mobs incited by Father Charles Coughlin in the New York of the 1930s.  Or the victims of “race riots” where White mobs attacked Black communities with impunity from the mid-1800s into the 1940s.  And it’s not just faith that people use to attack others.  Let’s not forget the killings of Matthew Shepherd or Harvey Milk.  Violence toward people who are different has been our history.  Let’s own that.  And let’s keep working to confront and eradicate it. 

What’s definitely gotten worse is the means by which people who hate can carry out their acts.  The evil attack at Charleston’s Emanuel AME and the one recently at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life were carried out by men who were able to transfer their hate into the trigger and magazine of an assault-style weapon.  Access to such weapons means that a lone actor can inflict significantly more damage than in past generations.  Through the 2008 Supreme Court Columbia v. Heller decision that overturned 200 years of precedent, the nation has accepted a revised understanding of the Second Amendment to mean something that the authors of the Second Amendment never intended.  And here we are again.

So maybe we can’t soon change the minds of people intent on hate – at least I’m convinced that we can’t do it quickly enough to prevent the next tragedy.  But we can, as other civilized nations have, limit access to a weapon of war that even military professionals can’t touch until they complete extensive training.  So as we’re countering the debased public ramblings and veiled hate speech from a president who should be leading us, let’s also stop putting weapons of war into the hands of people who hate enough to use them.  By all measures, when the nation banned assault weapons for a decade, the number and scope of mass assaults was reduced.  It’s time to demand that these weapons are once again banned.

The Bezos’ gift: Here we go again….

Jeff Bezos and his wife are promising to set up a foundation that will work on homelessness and providing preschool to low-income communities.  I can’t speak to what this new effort will or won’t do for homelessness.  That’s an issue where I have opinions, but no expertise.  But I fear what it will mean to have another deep-pocketed mega-donor step into education.  I’ve seen these efforts from afar and up close, and I’ve developed a preternatural concern that warns me that this won’t end well.  Maybe the Bezos family will be the exception, but in my experiences, having deep pockets involved in education generally isn’t good.

Where to start with the examples?  We could look at how the Annenburg Challenge put a half a billion dollars into schooling in the 90s.  Or perhaps a review of Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million gift to Newark, New Jersey’s schools.  Or maybe the Gates Foundation’s investment of at least $650 million into small schools; or its more recent $575 million on teacher reforms.  If you want to review the sad details of all of those, follow the links.  And if you want to see more examples, Diane Ravitch offered an excellent history and critique in her 2011 blog posting (including a prescient warning about the current federal Secretary of Education) at this link. 

What all of these have in common with the Bezos’ gift is that they come from well-intended wealthy people who have been exposed to some basic ideas about education.  Then they marshal their excess resources into well-meaning, yet ineffective actions.  What they all also have in common is that they fail. 

So what?  Somebody with a lot of money decides to throw their money away.  It’s not a significant loss to them.  They can still buy another estate in San Sebastian, or purchase another sports team, or whatever.  It is their money, after all, and what harm comes from sharing their wealth in a way that they feel benefits the world?  As things turn out, there’s actually lots of potential harm.

In the Ravitch posting I note above, she identifies some specific, politically motivated efforts that undermine public education.  She writes more extensively on that topic in her book, Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools.  These wealthy donors who are pushing agendas certainly pose a threat to the successes of an education system that has flaws, but isn’t failing in the ways that these wealthy “reformers” suggest.  It’s important to note, though, that Bezos, Gates, Annenburg, and others aren’t rabid reformers who preach an anti-public-school orthodoxy.  Yet their failed efforts have had and will have serious and significant negative impacts.

According to the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Educational Statistics, from the period of 2004 to 2014, the U.S. increased its K-12 expenditure per student by 3%.  The 2014 U.S. expenditures still place it fourth highest on the list of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries; however, that 3% increase is among the lowest increases among member organizations.  The average increase for other OECD countries during that period was 15%.  The U.S., during that decade, did not noticeably increase its investment in education, and that lack of investment came at a time when, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a dollar at the start of that period required $1.27 to obtain the same buying power at the end of it.

Like everything else, schooling runs on money.  An increased 3% investment didn’t help the nation’s education system keep up with costs – especially in poor urban and rural schools.  When schools can’t get their communities, their state, or their nation to provide resources, they chase dollars elsewhere.  And if mega-donors offer to give funding for schools that implement their idea, many schools will latch onto that idea and reach for the dollars that follow.  Look at the links to the initiatives I included above, and you’ll see what that looks like as schools re-formed themselves around donors’ initiatives.  Oftentimes, the changes meant that the structures that had been in place prior to the change were eliminated in favor of newer structures.  When the experiment failed, the school had neither the newly failed structure or its older processes to support it.  In The Emperor’s New Clothes, the only one harmed was the king.  However, these schools are left, after the funding is gone, with not only embarrassment, but without the systems they need to function fully.

You can see where my concerns come from with this latest announcement.  Does this mean that people with money should just stay away from funding education?

Before I answer, let me emphasize that the problem really lies in inadequate funding of our educational system, and especially insufficient funding for schools that serve students in poverty.  In my home state, that was the finding of our state supreme court’s decision in McCleary, et al. v. Washington State.  In 2012, the court found the state in gross dereliction of its responsibilities in funding schools equitably.  The court even got to the point where it found the legislature in contempt and fined it $100,000 a day from 2015 until 2018 because legislators failed to act even after the court’s ruling.  The $1 billion that the legislature added to its budget in 2018 takes a step toward addressing a long-standing failure to fund schools equitably.  The new funding in Washington state is a start toward addressing the need – a start.  When we adequately fund schools, then we won’t have a need for philanthropists’ involvement.

Given that full funding for schools isn’t likely an immediate outcome, the question remains:  With the failures and pitfalls, should philanthropists invest in education?  Despite my many concerns, I don’t see a binary “yes” or “no” answer to that. 

I have seen philanthropists who do have a positive impact in education.  And what they did is instructive to others.  First of all, they need to know what they don’t know (and it’s a lot).  At best, a philanthropist can only give small amounts of time to understanding the complex issues of education.  I expect that Jeff Bezos knows as much about education as I do about online retailing.  I understand how it works because I use it, but I wouldn’t be of any use if someone asked me to manage a division of an online retailer.  Anyone offering support, or advice, or certainly millions of dollars has to have more than a passing knowledge of how education functions and what communities actually need.  If it were as easy as funding preschools, then Head Start, which has been one of the most successful and researched federal programs of the past 50 years, would be where the Bezos family can put its money. 

One of the most impressive foundation missions I’ve seen was a regional foundation that sought to support an increase in the numbers of teachers of color.  The woman who started the foundation went to school to earn a master’s degree as she and her husband were starting the foundation so that she could be informed.  The result of her gained knowledge was a thoughtful engagement with colleges of education, with pre-service teachers, and the regional education community.  The foundation listened and learned and developed an excellent model of how to impact their intended focus.  The mission that began the organization evolved as they became more immersed in the needs of the communities they sought to impact, and as they learned how to work with those communities to serve the need.  What began as an effort to recruit teachers became a movement to support teachers because the funders learned and evolved.

Secondly, funding should be built on relationships.  The best foundation grants I’ve either received or evaluated are from funders who’ve taken the time to get to know whom they’re funding and to understand the work that they’re funding through the people being funded.  Whether it’s an award of $15,000 or $15 million, this relational aspect is critical.  Funding done well isn’t organization to organization; it’s person to person.  Of course, that can lead to cronyism that doesn’t ask questions and blindly doles out money.  But that doesn’t have to be the outcome.  Understanding the work means understanding who’s doing the work: their skills, their experiences, their goals.  It also means understanding the people who’ll be impacted by the funds.  By granting money, funders intend to impact lives.  It’s antithetical to do that in a vacuum where the funder neither knows the people being impacted or the people doing the work. 

I once evaluated an afterschool program that intended to serve a specific group of children.  The funders gave a significant amount of money to two organizations to implement a specific intervention.  The funders had chosen to fund this intervention because they had seen its impact on their own children’s learning.  Their children, of course, lived in privilege while the impacted children lived far from privilege.  It was a laudable aim.  These funders sought to provide a community with something that they believed was useful and impactful.  However, after four years of the project, the data that my evaluation team collected showed that the intervention was having no impact on the participating children.  The intervention was a poor fit to the children it intended to serve.  I recommended that the funder and the two organizations use the funding elsewhere, and they did. 

What went wrong?  The well-intentioned funders had no idea of the needs of the children they sought to impact.  The funders also didn’t know that the two organizations would need at least two years of working together to get the project fully operational.  The result was a lot of money that was spent ineffectively.  I’ve often thought that the localness of Head Start is one of the keys to its success.  The one study I completed involving Head Start certainly showed that.  Although it has federal mandates and benchmarks, it is implemented locally by directors and staff who are embedded in the communities they serve and each center tends to reflect local needs through adaptations that are suited to those needs.  That’s very different than an external funder coming with a solution that tries to fit the funder’s perception of needs.

In contrast, I worked with a funder who funded some projects that I generated as a college dean, and although I’m no longer seeking private funding for projects, I remain in touch with this funder because we developed a friendship.  This funder got to know me and through that knowledge provided support to important projects that helped to complement other funding.  Those funds allowed me to support not only my own unit, but the college as a whole as we sought to impact college instructional methods.  I still hear from people at that college that they’re using the skills they developed from that work.  The funder’s role was critical because as they got to know our work, they could see the arc of that work and its potential.  They also got to know the college and continued the relationship with the college well after I left.  Instead of seeing programs and operations, that funder sees people and relationships.  Through the relationships, they fund people and their projects.  I’ve seen that funder do that with many people in the region, and they have a resulting major impact in the region.  Instead of their philanthropy being about the funder’s ideas, they develop relationships that ensure that their funding supports communities’ ideas.

That’s what’s troubling about mega-donors’ efforts.  Their initiatives are never about building relationships and an understanding of impacts on people.  This new Bezos initiative has all the telltale signs:  a big plan where direction is already set.  It assumes that building Montessori-style preschools will make significant contributions to addressing the problems of an inequitable school system.  It’s a technical solution when a personal one is required.  As Arnold Pacey warned in his 1985 book, The Culture of Technology, we need to take caution before handing over social challenges to technicians with technical answers.  In announcing the new initiative, Bezos noted that, “I’m excited about that [building and operating a network of preschools] because it will give us the opportunity to learn, invent, and improve.  We’ll use the same set of principles that have driven Amazon.” 

This is the technician’s response.  Every problem is a matter of engineering a response that addresses the issue.  Social challenges, however, require relational responses.  Realistically, by the nature of mega-donors’ size and distance from the issues they wish to impact, it’s a getting-the-camel-through-the-eye-of-a-needle challenge for them to build the requisite relationships to support education.  When you’re spending billions of dollars, creating the kind of organization that knows the people you’re funding and their communities is difficult.  However, without that, we see the results in decades of misspent resources. 

While people (both in education and without) are excited that the Bezos family has become engaged in supporting the planet that gave so much to it, I’m cautiously pessimistic.  Good for them that they want to do something.  As the record shows, though, the history of these efforts is poor, and this one has all the marks of being as poor.  The Bezos family evidently decided on this venture when Jeff Bezos crowdsourced the issue of where to commit funding in 2017 through his Twitter feed.  That’s an innovative approach, but Twitter isn’t a good medium to develop relations or to gain the level of knowledge needed.  The family could save itself a lot of wasted resources and time if it replaced its technical response with a plan to develop the skills, knowledge, and relationships to succeed in supporting education.  Top-down solution solving may be sufficient to create an online retailer, but it definitely doesn’t work in education.  

On educating for action

I write this as someone who has considered himself as an activist since I was 16 – just over 50 years ago.  I could list all of the “actions” that I’ve been part of as my bona fides, but that seems tiresome to do.  You’ll have to accept my statement at face value – as a statement that at least I see as a fact that informs what I write here.

I like to see the young folks from around the country engaged in active response to the problems of gun violence.  They are passionate, focused, and gaining skills in how to make their message have impact.  At the moment, they are getting lots of attention, so their voices are being heard in places and by people who have ignored the problems generated by gun violence.  Good for them!

But I see all the markings of the end of this movement before the movement even gets underway.  Energy, passion, and current focus just aren’t enough to maintain the momentum that will lead to intended changes.  Activists need to develop the “legs” they need to carry their ideas on the long march to change.  What do I mean by “legs”?  Legs are the coalitions that bring together multiple constituencies for sustained action around a multi-pronged plan that includes legislative, social, and economic changes.  Legs are what it takes to merge ideas into a coherent statement of purpose.  Legs means that there are activists who will make this work their life’s mission and commit multiple years to creating change.  Legs mean that a movement has to work toward goals while effectively dealing with the inevitable and fatiguing infighting and divergence of opinion that mark the leaders of any action group.  If you look at any social movement that has long-term impact, it takes all of that. 

These barriers to success aren’t an outcome of right- or left-leaning politics.  Look at the alt-right movement that seemed to coalesce under the banner of the president in the last election.  It’s falling apart at every level because of these issues as national figures like Steve Bannon start jockeying for power.  Or smaller figures get wrapped up in the nexus of internecine wars and the demands of their personal lives.  It’s no different on the left of the political spectrum.  You don’t have to look too far back in the left’s history to recall the “Occupy” movement that was going to change the way that the nation looked at its economic structure.  After months of huddling in tents of the cold streets of New York and elsewhere, that effort seems to have dissolved into factions and slogans that can still be heard at rallies.

What will keep this current youth movement from gaining legs?  First, and most importantly, we can’t expect that high school students will give up their futures and fight for this cause for the time it will take to address all of the federal and state laws required to make changes.  The NRA and the legislators the NRA has bought know this.  These young people will graduate from high school and they will go out and get jobs, or enter training programs or attend college.  That’s what they should do.  They can be advocates in those roles, but being leaders in a movement that generates national change isn’t a part-time job.  They are fighting against one of the best financed machines in the history of the nation. 

And as much as I’d like to share the David-and-Goliath idealism that beliefs can conquer all, that’s just not how things work.  We got to this point in our history because gun manufacturers in the past 30 years have used the NRA as a tool to generate public opinion and policies that run contrary to what had been opinion and policy for almost 200 years prior.  The gun lobby/NRA’s machine has the legs that millions of dollars have bought so that it can create public campaigns and legislation, and shape public perception.  Beating that machine will take more time and energy than enthusiastic young people can provide in the short time they have to keep the nation’s attention.

I keep seeing these new activists being compared to the movements in the 1960s that brought about such change in that decade and the decades following.  The myth is that era’s change was brought about by youth marching in the streets and organizing for change.  Yes, that was at times the visible component.  But behind the peace movement was decades of organizing history and knowledge that groups like the American Friends Service Committee and the support of religious leaders like the Berigan brothers; and behind the civil rights marches were the Black churches and organizing structures like that of the NAACP and the Southern Christian Leadership Council.  These groups began well before the 1960s, and they had the staying power to hold the fight after marchers’ initial enthusiasms waned and during the moments when no spotlight was being held on their issues.  Today’s activists would do well to learn from those experiences instead of hearing the misguided mythology that they’ll be adequate in and of themselves.  For their efforts to impact their cause of gun violence, it seems they would benefit from connecting to the groups and organizations that are already engaged in the work. 

I’m actually heartened by seeing these young folks doing this work.  Good for them for caring about their world enough to demand that it change.  As they move on with their lives, my experiences tell me that their current activism will shape how they interact with the world, and that’s a good thing.  We need more actively engaged citizens who demand that our government and our society offer safety, justice, and opportunity to all.  So I believe that this movement will have lots of impact in the long term as we encourage more young people to be engaged in the society. 

But for now, let’s find ways to leverage their work into the efforts that have longstanding viability.  Let’s help them to see their work as part of a continuum of other work that precedes them and will last beyond them.  Let’s help them to see the ways in which they can channel their passion to work with other people and organizations that can help them learn and can help their work persist.