An Evening with Bob Moses in the Mississippi Delta

 

During my travels around the United States visiting good public school classrooms—which I would document in Possible Lives—I was fortunate to spend time in Mississippi observing Civil Rights leader Bob Moses demonstrating and helping local teachers implement his innovative mathematics curriculum, The Algebra Project, a supplement to the traditional mathematics course of study in middle school.

         Moses envisions The Algebra Project as both a curriculum and a social movement. It attempts to prepare children, all children, at the sixth-grade level for algebra, the gateway to participation in high school mathematics and science, which, in turn, is necessary for college-level work. Moses draws parallels between mathematical literacy and the earlier political literacy fostered by the Civil Rights movement: both are necessary for a fuller, more equitable participation in society. And as with the Civil Rights movement, the curriculum assumes that all people are capable of participation, and, in this case, capable of grasping the conceptual basics of algebra—equivalence, displacement, and so on. The curriculum is built around a sequence of accessible activities: taking bus rides, measuring, rating, comparing objects and events, and playing a range of games. After engaging in one of these activities, children draw or somehow model it, talk and write about it, attempt to translate it into a more formal mathematical language, and develop, through consensus, symbols to represent it. The process aims at making children more adept at and more comfortable with symbolic operations and procedural routines—essential of they are to succeed at algebra when it shows up in the curriculum in grade eight or nine.

         Bob Moses was an early field secretary for The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and organizer of Freedom Summer, a voter-registration project in Mississippi that was met with violent white backlash. Approximately thirty years later, he would be launching the “Southern Initiative” of The Algebra Project, taking him back to Mississippi, an effort that, I’m sure, was laden with memory and symbolism for him.

         I’ve been thinking about my time in Mississippi for a number of reasons. It’s been roughly another thirty years since I had the privilege of watching Bob Moses present The Algebra Project to gatherings of Mississippi parents and work with teachers and students to make the Project come alive. I love the idea of seeing the school curriculum as a site for social change, not only by correcting and adding to its content but also by affirming that intellectual mastery of its knowledge and skill can itself be a source of liberation, particularly when the people involved have been denied the opportunity for that mastery in the past. I am also taken by the kind of thing you’ll read about shortly: involving the community surrounding the school in a social activity with intellectual content—and envisioning all this as a political act.

         And, of course, it’s impossible to read anything involving Bob Moses and not think about voter registration. The 2020 election displayed the results of tireless, on-the-ground, get-out-the-vote efforts on the part of countless local community organizers—the current generation of activists exhibiting the same determination that drove those involved in Freedom Summer. And we are now watching yet another backlash as Republican-controlled states are enacting wide-ranging voter suppression laws, relying on legislative chicanery rather than billy clubs and guns to control who can cast a ballot.

         As I reread the passage below in our time—which I have lightly edited—I’m struck by both the beauty and the latent power of the gathering.

 

***

 

         There were well over a hundred people in the gymnasium of West Tallahatchie High School located in Webb, Mississippi: teachers, middle and high school students, little kids, many parents, some civic leaders, including two newly elected county supervisors. It was about six in the evening. Outside, the sun had dipped below the horizon and was suffusing a pink-salmon light over sheds and bare trees and small houses off the road. We sat close to one another at round and rectangular tables clustered along one long wall. In front of us were two small chalkboards on rollers and an easel with a large pad. Webb is in a very poor community, Cass Pennington, the district superintendent, told me. One of the poorest in the South. I would hear from others that it was also one of the most economically and politically entrenched. It was not too long ago that the white county leadership kept discouraging desperately needed small industry because it might threaten the supply of cheap agricultural labor. The two supervisors—who were now being introduced—were the first Black supervisors to be elected in the history of the predominantly African American county. The school was virtually all African American. Many of the parents in this room went to schools that were segregated by law; now school was segregated by demographic fact…

         One of the local teachers, Shirley Conner, walked out to the center of the gym. “I imagine a lot of you already know Mr. Bob Moses,” Shirley said, extending her left hand behind her. Bob walked to the side of the easel… “Hi, everybody,” he said softly. “How are you?” People murmured in response and acknowledgement. “I want to start us off tonight with an activity.” He gestured to the floor of the gym, where he had laid out with masking tape one of the games of The Algebra Project. “But first, a question.” He walked closer to the tables, looking around, a slow gaze. “What is a prime number?” A boy to the far right raised his hand. Bob asked his name: Martin. “OK, Martin, what is a prime number?” “A prime number,” Martin replied, a little nervous but intent and well-spoken, “is a number that can only be multiplied by one and itself.” Bob thanked him. “Does anyone else have anything to add to what Martin just said?” Tyranda, on the other side of the room, raised her hand. “A prime number,” she offered, “is a number that can only be divided by one and itself.” Bob unfolded his arms, cradling his chin in his right hand: “Why don’t you both come up on here.” They did, the audience watched, shifting, scraping a few chairs to improve their line of sight.

         “Pick a prime number, Tyranda,” Bob instructed, and Tyranda wrote 11 on the pad. “Now show me how what you said holds true. But first, repeat what you said, nice and loud.” Tyranda did, then, marker in hand, wrote . “There’s no number that’ll go into 11,” she summarized, putting down the marker. Bob turned to Martin. “Martin?” “Yes sir.” “Demonstrate for me what you said.” Martin took the marker from Tyranda and talked as he wrote. “You can get 11 if you times it by 1, but there are no other numbers you can multiply to get it.” Bob turned to Tyranda. “What do you think of what Martin just said?” Bob’s voice, the whole time, remained at the same pitch and volume, steady, curious. It’s hard not to lead, not to give away a bias when you question, but Bob came awfully close to sounding neutral. “He’s talking about multiplying,” Tyranda observed, “but I’m saying you get prime numbers by dividing.” Though there were glitches in both Martin’s and Tyranda’s use of multiplication and division, they clearly knew how prime numbers worked. Bob saw that, didn’t want to shut things down, wanted to keep inviting talk.

         He turned to the audience, asking for questions and comments. One parent raised her hand. “Are all odd numbers prime numbers?” “Well,” Bob replied, “let’s see.” He asked her to pick an odd number. She picked 9. Bob wrote it on the board and asked her to guide him through a factor tree. As she watched the tree develop she said, “No, no it ain’t a prime number.” A woman sitting at our table thanked Bob and the lady, for, she said, she had always confused prime numbers and odd numbers, too. For some in this audience, math might have been a favorite subject, a pleasure to dust off and revisit, and for others, I suspect, math conjured little that is pleasant. But here they all were: The community was talking about mathematics.

         A man from the side of the room stood halfway up and called the group’s attention back to Martin and Tyranda. “Isn’t the important operation there?” he said, pointing to the work the children had done, “Isn’t it division more than multiplication?” Bob turned to Martin. “Martin, did you hear what he said? He didn’t like your multiplication idea too much. Can you say why?” Martin stated the man’s position but noted that multiplication might still work. Then a parent from the table next to ours, a pencil over his ear, suggested that Martin and company break another number into its prime factors. “It’s been a long time,” he noted apologetically as he sat down, and a lot of people laughed and assented.

         Bob asked the audience for a number. “Eighteen,” someone called out. He turned to Martin, and Martin proceeded to work out a factor tree.

Someone standing along the wall asked if there was another way to do it. Bob handed Tyranda a marker and asked if she saw another way. She thought a moment, then:

A woman sitting by the easel spoke up. “What’s the difference?” she asked. “You still get the same numbers. See what I’m sayin’? You still get two 3s and a 2.” A man sitting by her turned and said, “But what I see is that 18 have other factors other than 3 and 2.” “OK,” the first woman replied, “but you still come out with the same prime numbers…”

         There was further discussion; then Bob had each table choose three numbers and calculate factor trees. Then he turned and gestured to the floor. “I put a pathway on the floor up here, and we’re going to figure out what it’s got to do with prime numbers.” He would soon have some students come up and demonstrate.

         It was about eight when we broke up. The participants remained in clusters, talking: parents, teachers, students, the county supervisors…Bob, head down, listening, was conferring with Shirley Conner. I stood in the doorway, looking out into sweeping darkness, light from a farmhouse or two twinkling in the distance. People were shaking out coats, buttoning up, saying goodbye. “This was wonderful,” a woman said, coming up alongside me. “The parents learned something, too. Math is a scary thing, you know. But…” And here she turned, her eye catching something, suddenly quizzical. I followed her line of sight to a poster with a funny little cartoon cat peering out of a paper bag. “But now,” she said laughing, “the, the cat’s out of the bag! It’s something we all can do.”

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Classrooms and Hope

            At the beginning of 2019, the gifted political journalist Susan Glasser wrote a column titled “Is Optimism Dead in the Trump Era?” in which she mused on the “January Effect,” the “year-opening optimism” of the stock market and, more generally “the eternal hope for a fresh start” that typically characterizes many spheres of our personal and political lives. But, she continued, given the current occupant of the White House and the resulting ugly chaos, “Washington these days is hardly a town for optimists, even of the January variety.”

            Glasser’s column got me to reflecting on optimism and hope, not just in January, and particularly in these dark times. There is a passage in the writing of Czech playwright and statesman, Vaclav Havel that is relevant here:

Hope… is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather an ability to work for something because it is good.

Even when things seem at their bleakest, Havel continues, true hope impels us forward, “gives us the strength to live and to try new things.” Social movements are driven by this kind of hope.

            Another way to think about hope is to ask what in our lives acts as a counterforce to the dulling and blunting effects of evil, helps us see the good, hold to it, and work toward it? As I was reading Glasser, reading her and interiorly talking with her, I realized that for me a longstanding source of hope, of what might be, is the classroom, or, more exactly, all that the classroom represents at its best: a sanctioned space for growth, learning, discovery, thinking and thinking together. The classroom is the site of teaching, which in my late adolescence changed my life and subsequently has given my life great meaning —teaching, so beautifully described by education scholar Eve Ewing as “moments of intense focus and commitment where trying to help someone understand seems like the most important thing in the world.”

            My last post on counting and writing might be relevant here. In that post I encourage counting and describing the small particulars of daily life: “…everyday tallies and scribbles that can lift you momentarily out of the flow of events, help you take notice and give you a tool to think about what you perceive.” This attention to commonplace detail can have moral consequence. Detail grounds us in a time and place, is a hedge against stereotypes and easy labelling. Life is vibrant before us, in the case of the classroom, the vibrancy of learning and growing, which for me becomes a source of hope and commitment.

            I’m trying to think my way into something here, and apologize for the gaps in reasoning.  Let me offer some less hazy examples from past writing of what I’m reaching for. The first comes from the introduction to Possible Lives, an account of my visits to good public school classrooms across the United States.

I.                           I had been studying schools for much of my adult life, had been trying to understand how they enhanced the lives of students or diminished them. Most of that work was located in and around the LA Basin. For all its bewildering complication, Los Angeles was familiar territory, home. These trips to Calexico, to Baltimore, to Eastern Kentucky, to a nation within a nation in northern Arizona brought forth new cultural practices, new languages, new gestures. I was fortunate to have been escorted into so many classrooms, so many homes, to have been guided into the everyday events of the communities I visited, for the invitation eased the unfamiliarity and discomfort that could have been present on all sides. What I experienced was a kind of awe at our variety, yet an intimate regard, a handshake on the corner, a sense of shared humanity. The complex interplay of difference and commonality. What began as a search for a fresh language of educational critique and invention became, as well, a search for what is best in this country — realized infrequently, threatened at every turn — but there to be summoned, possible in the public domain, there to instruct a traveler settling into a seat in the corner of a classroom.

            It was, in many ways, an odd time to be on such a journey. The country was in the grip of a nasty reactive politics, a volatile mix of anger and anxiety. And people of all political persuasions were withdrawing from engagement with the public sphere. It was the time of economic and moral cocooning. The question for me — framed in terms of public schools, our pre-eminent public institution — was how to generate a hopeful vision in a time of bitterness and lost faith, and, further, how to do that in a way that holds simultaneously to what educational philosopher David Purpel calls “the interlocking and interdependent hinges” of criticism and creativity. How to sharpen awareness of injustice and incompetence, how to maintain the skeptic’s acuity, yet nurture the ability to imagine the possible and act from hope.

            The journey was odd for me in another way, considering my own teaching history. My work in the classroom has mostly been with people whom our schools, public and private, have failed: working-class and immigrant students, students from nonmainstream linguistic and cultural backgrounds, students of all backgrounds who didn't fit a curriculum or timetable or definition of achievement and were thereby categorized in some way as different or deficient. There are, as we have seen along this journey, long-standing social and cultural reasons for this failure of our schools, tangled, disturbing histories of discrimination, skewed perception, and protection of privilege.

            And yet there were these rooms. Vital, varied, they were providing a powerful education for the children in them, many of whom were members of the very groups defined as inferior in times past and, not infrequently, in our ungenerous present. What I began to see — and it took the accumulation of diverse classrooms to help me see it — was that these classrooms, in addition to whatever else we may understand about them, represented a dynamic, at times compromised and contested, strain in American educational history: a faith in the capacity of a people, a drive toward equality and opportunity, a belief in the intimate link between mass education and a free society. These rooms were embodiments of the democratic ideal. To be sure, this democratic impulse has been undercut and violated virtually since its first articulation. Thomas Jefferson’s proposal to the Virginia legislature for three years of free public schooling, for example, excluded the commonwealth’s significant number of enslaved Black children. But it has been advanced, realized in daily classroom life by a long history of educators working both within the mainstream and outside it, challenging it through workingmen’s organizations, women’s groups, Black schools, appropriating the ideal, often against political and economic resistance, to their own emancipatory ends.

            The teachers I visited were working within that rich tradition. They provided example after different example of people doing public intellectual work in institutional settings, using the power of the institution to realize democratic goals for the children in their charge, and finessing, negotiating, subverting institutional power when it blocked the realization of those goals. At a time of profound disillusionment with public institutional life, these people were, in their distinct ways, creating the conditions for children to develop lives of possibility.

-       From Possible Lives: The Promise of Public Education in America, 1995/2006, pp. 412-413

II.                         So much depends on what you look for and how you look for it. In the midst of the reform debates and culture wars that swirl around schools; the fractious, intractable school politics; the conservative assault on public institutions; and the testing, testing, testing— in the midst of all this, it is easy to lose sight of the broader purpose of the common public school. For me, that purpose is manifest in the everyday detail of classrooms, the words and gestures of a good teacher, the looks on the faces of students thinking their way through a problem.

            We have so little of such detail in our national discussion of teaching, learning, or the very notion of public education itself. It has all become a contentious abstraction. But detail gives us the sense of a place, something that can get lost in policy discussions about our schools—or, for that matter, in so much of our national discussion about ourselves. Too often, we deal in broad brushstrokes about regions, about politics and economics, about racial, linguistic, and other social characteristics. Witness the red state– blue state distinction, one that, yes, tells us something quick and consequential about averages, but misses so much about local social and political dynamics, the lived civic variability within.

            The details of classroom life convey, in a specific and physical way, the intellectual work being done day to day across the nation—the feel and clatter of teaching and learning. I’m thinking right now of a scene in a chemistry class in Pasadena, California, that I observed. The students had been conducting experiments to determine the polarity of various materials. Some were washing test tubes, holding them up to the windows for the glint of sunlight, checking for a bad rinse. Some were mixing salt and water to prepare one of their polar materials. Some were cautiously filling droppers with hydrochloric acid or carbon tetrachloride. And some were stirring solutions with glass rods, squinting to see the results. There was lots of chatter and lots of questions for the teacher, who walked from student to student, asking what they were doing and why, and what they were finding out.

            The students were learning about the important concept of polarity. They were also learning to be systematic and methodical. And moving through the room was the teacher, asking questions, responding, fostering a scientific cast of mind. This sort of classroom scene is not uncommon. And collectively, such moments give a palpable sense of what it means to have, distributed across a nation, available by law to all, a public educational system to provide the opportunity for such intellectual development.

-       From Why School?: Reclaiming Education for All of Us, 2009/2014, pp. 201-203

III.                       Classrooms are powerful places. They can be the sites of numbing boredom and degradation or of growth and connection.  …I have strong feelings about classrooms. I like them, feel at home in them. I like the banter, the crayons and pencils and scratching of pens, the smell of watercolors and acrylics, the quiet of concentration, the bustle of students thinking something through. The classroom is the place of my life’s work, the long haul, layered with emotion and memory. It doesn’t take much to call forth the wisps of childhood alienation and loneliness  ̶  the pages of a worn textbook, a kid’s slumping posture, the whiff of disinfectant ̶  or sometimes, in rapid shift, feelings of delicate hope and admiration for a teacher’s or student’s courage, quickness, humanity. Some of the most significant encounters of my late adolescence and young adulthood took place in classrooms, and it was in classrooms that I appropriated powerful bodies of knowledge and methods of inquiry. As I moved from student to teacher, I came of age in these rooms, realizing things about my own abilities and limits, my talent and fragility, the interplay of understanding and uncertainty that defines teaching, the sheer hard human work of it. I have been privy to remarkable moments, spent untold hours with people ̶  from elementary school children to adults in literacy programs ̶  as they acquired knowledge and new skill, played with ideas and struggled to understand, reached tentatively across divides, felt the grounded satisfaction of achievement, raged against history and moved toward clarity and resolve. A democracy, I believe, cannot leave the conditions for such experience to chance  ̶  or, for that matter, to the vagaries of political climate and market forces, for as Walter Lippmann observed, “the market is, humanly speaking, a ruthless sovereign.” A society that defines itself as free and open is obligated to create and sustain the public space for this kind of education to occur across the full, broad sweep of its citizenry.

-       From Possible Lives: The Promise of Public Education in America, 1995/2006, pp. 6-7

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“A Nation at Risk” at 35

At the end of April, 2018, National Public Radio education reporter Anya Kamenetz did a story on the 35^th anniversary of the highly influential government report “A Nation at Risk.” Issued by the Department of Education under President Ronald Reagan, the report had a huge impact and shaped the language of education policy to this day. Here are some of the explosive sentences from the opening two paragraphs. You will recognize them, or you will have heard echoes of them:

Our Nation is at risk. Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world.

[T]he educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and a people.

If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves.

We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament.

            The diction is urgent, even fevered. Our schools are mediocre and getting worse, and their sorry state is resulting in an erosion of our economic and technological preeminence. The opening sentences build momentum toward an existential threat, the equivalent of a military attack—brought on by ourselves, by our educational failures. It comes as no surprise that these passages were quoted and quoted again in countless political speeches, opinion pieces, and institutional position papers.

            Support for this catastrophic assessment comes a few pages later in the form of a list of thirteen “Indicators of the Risk.” These indicators included the numbers of college students or military personnel needing remedial instruction in mathematics or English, percentages of Americans who are functionally illiterate, and the like. Over half of the thirteen indicators concern declines in international or national standardized test scores, such as those for the SAT. The emphasis on decline is important here, for it supports a central claim of “A Nation at Risk” which is that we were once dominant but have lost our way. This notion of loss, of a fall from a golden age is a powerful trope in our nation’s social policy, beautifully articulated some time ago by David K. Cohen in the Harvard Educational Review.

            So there it is. 1983 and we are doomed if we don’t do something fast and decisively. Erosion. Decline. Loss of Power. Assault. An act of war—against ourselves. Interestingly, throughout the rest of the report, there is little of this apocalyptic language. While the authors continue to make some questionable claims and offer some debatable solutions, there are also calls to boost the teaching profession, to increase school funding, to promote “life-long learning,” and to assure “a solid high-school education” for all. But few people read the full report. What was picked up was the dire language of the opening and—this is hugely important—that language not only took on a life of its own, it also distorted the way many reform-minded folk implemented the recommendations of the report that had promise.

            From the beginning there was trenchant criticism of “A Nation at Risk,” analyzing the report’s hyperbolic language and gaps in the logic of its claims and, of key interest, the problems with the report’s evidence. One simple and obvious example: A decline in SAT test scores results from increasing numbers of people taking the test, people who, a generation earlier, would not have considered college. So, yes, the average score might dip a few points, but because a wider percentage of the population was aspiring toward higher education. (For an excellent early compilation of the criticism see the 1985 collection, The Great School Debate, edited by Beatrice and Ronald Gross.) It is noteworthy that there were several other government reports written after “A Nation at Risk” that offered a different assessment of American education, but they received much less attention and, in fact, one was initially suppressed. Maybe we weren’t teetering on the brink after all.

            OK back now to Anya Kamenetz’s story on the 35^th anniversary of “A Nation at Risk.” Either for this story or for an earlier project, Kamentz interviewed several of the authors of “A Nation at Risk” and found that they did not set out to conduct an objective investigation of the state of American education, but came to the task convinced that schools were in serious decline as global competition was heating up, and therefore their job was to sound the alarm and, as one author put it, get education “on the front page.” They succeeded, big time.

            Kamenetz quotes James Guthrie, a well-known educational researcher who more recently reanalyzed “A Nation at Risk” and concludes that the report’s authors “cooked the books,” presenting only data that supported their bleak vision of America’s schools. But Guthie adds that “seldom, maybe never, has a public report been so wrong and done so much good,” for the alarm bells focused the nation’s attention on education. Guthrie is alluding to the sad fact that it is very hard to get the attention of policy makers and the public—there are so many issues competing for airtime, and a host of factors, from bias to saturation, can keep a particular issue from registering. One tactic activists have is to frame their issue as a crisis—which is exactly what the authors of “A Nation at Risk” did. Educational researchers like David Berliner and Bruce Biddle have forcefully argued that the crisis was “manufactured,” but the authors of the report would argue in return—and James Guthrie agrees—that drastic measures were needed to put education on policy makers’ radar. Education analyst Marc Tucker picks up from Kamenetz’s NPR story to take issue with Guthrie’s end-justifies-the-means logic and to further argue that the reforms sparked by “A Nation at Risk” have had “a profoundly malign effect on American education,” not the positive effects Guthrie claims. (Tucker’s blog is behind a pay wall, but you can get a good summary of it in Diane Ravitch’s May 12, 2018 post.)

            I agree with Tucker and the other critics of “A Nation at Risk” and the policies it spawned. But isn’t it also true that there are big problems with American education. It is terribly unjust that so many poor children, children of color, and immigrant children receive a sub-par education. It is a serious personal liability for an adult to not be able to read and write beyond a rudimentary level, and if tens of millions of us have a good deal of trouble reading and writing, that has significant civic and economic ramifications. These and other problems with education in the United States should cause outrage and lead to action. But one hard lesson learned from “A Nation at Risk” is that the way problems are represented has major consequences. This issue of language and representation sometimes gets lost in debates about the benefits or harm resulting from specific education reforms, but I think it is centrally important. It was one of the concerns that drove Possible Lives, published twelve years downstream from “A Nation at Risk”:

Our national discussion about public schools is despairing and dismissive, and it is shutting down our civic imagination... We hear—daily, it seems—that our students don’t measure up, either to their predecessors in the United States or to their peers in other countries, and that, as a result, our position in the global economy is in danger. We are told, by politicians, by pundits, that our cultural values, indeed our very way of life is threatened…

We seem beguiled by a rhetoric of decline, this ready store of commonplaces about how awful our schools have become. “America’s schools are the least successful in the Western world,” declare the authors of a book on the global economy. “Face it, the public schools have failed,” a bureau chief for a national news magazine tells me, offhandedly. “The kids in the Los Angeles Unified School District are garbage,” a talk-radio host exclaims.

There are many dangers in the use of such language. It blinds us to the complex lives lived out in the classroom. It pre-empts careful analysis of one of the nation’s most significant democratic projects. And it engenders a mood of cynicism and retrenchment, preparing the public mind for extreme responses: increased layers of testing and control, denial of new resources—even the assertion that money doesn’t affect a school’s performance—and the curative effects of free market forces via vouchers and privatization. What has been seen historically as a grand republican venture is beginning to be characterized as a failed social experiment, noble in intention but moribund now, perhaps headed toward extinction. So, increasing numbers of people who can afford to don’t even consider public schools as an option for their children, and increasingly we speak, all of us, about the schools as being in decline. This is what is happening to our public discussion of education, to our collective vision of the schools…

If we try to organize schools and create curriculum based on an assumption of failure and decay, then we make school life a punitive experience. If we think about education largely in relation to economic competitiveness, then we lose sight of the fact that school has to be about more than economy. If we determine success primarily in terms of test scores, then we ignore the social, moral, and aesthetic dimensions of teaching and learning—and, as well, we’ll miss those considerable intellectual achievements which aren’t easily quantifiable. If we judge one school according to the success of another, we could well diminish the particular ways the first school serves its community. In fact, a despairing vision will keep us from fully understanding the tragedies in our schools, will reduce their complexity, their human intricacy. We will miss the courage that sometimes accompanies failure, the new directions that can emerge from burn-out, the desire that pulses in even the most depressed schools and communities.

            One of the big challenges we have in front of us is how to maintain momentum in addressing the inequities in our education system but to do so in a way that is analytically and linguistically precise. How can we, to the best of our ability, keep focus on the vulnerable and underserved and do so with a mix of urgency and accuracy. A legacy of “A Nation at Risk” is a way of seeing that obscures the careful vision we need when working to improve our schools.

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