TFA 5.0: Charters for Children

We have discussed the evolution of Teach for America before. Its ever-changing business plan mission has been a work in progress through several iterations:

TFA 1.0: The Best and the Brightest will help solve the teacher shortage, kind of like the Peace Corps.

TFA 2.0: Take a year or two off before grad school to beef up your resume with some non-court-ordered community service.

TFA 3.0: Traditional public school teachers pretty much suck. We are smarter and better.

TFA 4.0: We are here to bring diversity to the teaching force.

Teach for America has been having trouble with recruiting, though in all fairness, the entire teaching profession has been having trouble recruiting. It's almost as if young folks had heard nothing but how rotten the profession is, or had grown up seeing teachers reduced to automatons. Go figure.

But here comes a new pitch, a video and slogan that might signal TFA 5.0. The slogan "One Day, All Children" is a throwback to TFA founder Wendy Kopp's book by the same name (published, believe it or not, way back in 2001). The pitch-- well, the pitch will sound familiar.

"America's educational system should provide all children with opportunity," the clip begins. "Opportunity to succeed, to thrive."  But the voice-over lady goes on to tell us that depending on where a child is born, these opportunities may not exist. Because of race and poverty, a child may be subject to the tyranny of a zip code. The dream falls through "the cracks in an unfair system. For too many children, their zip code becomes their destiny."

At this point we are watching a little animation child plummet through empty space-- but here comes the logo of Teach for America to rescue the child, to lift it up (as the music shifts into a more hopeful major key).

TFA has seen too much progress to believe that your education has to be determined by where you live. TFA mission (this month) is to make sure "that every child has access to the same opportunities and choices."

TFA recruits from a group of "diverse thinkers and leaders" (so, you know, none of those sucky regular teacher types) from all backgrounds (not in the script, but a graphic saying 50% of TFA recruits identify as people of color). TFA shows them how to teach and supports them (here three adult stick figures gather around the child-- first they fill up with color, then so does the child, and then the child grows up and puts on a cap and gown while the teachers stance proudly, though of course TFA temps would mostly never be around by the time a small child graduated from high school).

Now, here comes a cool new way to parse the temp part of TFA--

They understand that their schools are part of a larger system, "so after two years, our teachers have a choice." They can stay in education (cue weasel-statistic that counts every vaguely ed-related job as "staying in education") and "continue to have a profound impact," or they can move on to "another career path" and lead in ways that "help our kids and help our country." Those leady roles include "advocates, policymakers, innovators and entrepreneurs."

As their network grows (cue web all over the US), TFA builds a movement. New TFA factoid-- 84% of alumni are working full time in "roles impacting education or low-income communities" and boy, isn't "impacting" a nice, broad all-purpose word here. It doesn't even carry a value judgment; if you're busy chasing poor people out of a neighborhood as prelude to gentrification, you are totally impacting a low-income community. Hurray! As long as you're making a difference, right?

So back to the child (who I now see is disturbingly handless). "Good for kids. Good for everyone."

Final slogan as we shift to logo-- "Change and be changed. Teach for America."

Residual traces of old, beloved sales pitches are still visible, but we have upped our helping of For the Children and completely dropped public education from the pitch. With almost no tweaking, this could be an ad for a charter chain. It already includes many of the choice crowd's favorite pitches. Each child should have choices and opportunities (not a great community school). Each child should be freed from the tyranny of the zip code (and policymakers should be freed from the problem of trying to make that zip code less of a place one would want to escape). And, of course, this is not work you want to commit to for a lifetime; it's simply the first step in your larger career of creating a network of educationny stuff (because, you know, the US public school system is not already a network devoted to educating America's children).

TFA has never looked less like an organization interested in helping the public school system pursue its mission, and it has never pitched itself more clearly as an educational network/empire separate from US public education. And of course its central fallacy remains unaddressed-- that anybody can be a teacher, as long as she is the Right Sort of Person from the Right Sort of Background. It's unfortunate that well-meaning college grads continue to be sucked in by this snake oil. The clip is embedded below, just to keep me honest. Not sure you really need to watch it.

NY: Eval Overhaul In Scary Hands

The expert names for the New York teacher evaluation high speed overhaul panel are in, and it is, at best, a mixed bag.

* Thomas Kane, an economist from Harvard. Kane thinks that evaluation should be directly linked to the Common Core via high stakes testing; he likes to compare this to using a bathroom scale when dieting. He thinks too few NY teachers were evaluated as sucky last year, and he imagines that maybe video-based observation would be swell. And he was an expert witness for the Vergara trial (can you guess on which side?) He headed up the Gates Measures of Effective Teaching study, and he thinks Cuomo is pretty much on the right track.

* Catherine Brown, vice-president of the Center for American Progress, a thinky tank invariably billed as "left-leaning" despite their general on-boardedness with assaults on the teaching profession. CAP has issued any number of sloppy and ill-supported attempts to push Common Core and VAM.

* Sandi Jacobs, vice-president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, a group that has taken the position that US teachers are low-quality hacks. These are the guys who help US News and World rate college teacher programs (including programs that don't actually exist) and who cobbled together a report on the rigor of college teacher prep programs by sitting in their offices and looking through a stack of commencement programs.

* Leslie Guggenheim of TNTP (The New Teacher Project), a group that really wants to see more personnel decisions, including pay, based on test results. They'd kind of like to get rid of tenure, too. Their big claim to fame is a paper called "The Widget Effect," that argues that teachers are not interchangeable widgets, but are in fact interchangeable widgets of varying degrees of quality.

I will go out on a limb and predict right now, today, that these four will declare that Cuomo's evaluation plan is okee dokee. But in the interests of not-entirely-kangaroo courtage (and perhaps additional entertainment value), the group also includes:

* Jesse Rothstein is a professor at Berkeley who has spent some time shooting holes in the research of both Kane and Raj Chetty. Starting with the same data, he found far less to love about VAM.

* Stephen Caldas is a professor at Manhattanville College who tagged the NY evaluation system with the delightful term "psychometrically indefensible."

* Aaron Pallas of Teachers College. He's been busily pointing out the problems with VAMmy systems for a few years now.

Those of you who have scored proficient in counting will notice that the majority of the committee seats are occupied by fans of reformy nonsense. But wait-- there's more.

Cuomo's insanely accelerated timeline (why get things right when you can get them done quickly) means that the usual 45-day post-draft comment period on proposed regulations is being waived because, well, if you had it, people might comment. Hey, it's not like anything else about supposed ed reform has suffered from being rammed through too quickly.

So NYSUT (which you may or may not love-- honestly, you New Yorkers and your intra-union alliances and battles) is on point when they say that everybody had better start making comments and making them now. President Karen MaGee says that folks need to speak up.

"NYSUT is well aware of the unrealistic deadlines contained in the governor's convoluted and unworkable plan, and the pressure that puts on the Regents and SED to try and mitigate the worst of it. Still, those deadlines do not absolve them of their responsibility to listen carefully to parents and practitioners and make any necessary adjustments to the draft regulations they wind up writing," Magee said. "One month is plenty of time for SED and the Regents to hold public hearings and still meet their deadlines."

So if you're a New York teacher or parent, it's time (right now-- the committee meets May 7) to get word to a Regent or the State Education Department. Tell them you want hearings on the draft. Tell them what you want in the evaluation system. Tell them why the stuff the committee is about to okay is a bunch of hooey (I'd suggest a more professional word than "hooey")


You can find a guide to individual Board of Regents members right here, complete with email links. You can find some NYSED phone numbers here and a whole department index starting with the A's right here. The clock is ticking. Time to make some noise. You might want to let the non-junk-science portion of the group know you support them-- they may be feeling a bit lonely soon. Heck-- you can even send word to Andrew Cuomo himself. It looks like this whole mess isn't going to be pretty-- but it doesn't have to be ugly and quiet both.

Hidden Costs of Choice

I'm going to set aside my several issues with a charter school system (say, the pitting of student educational interests against the charter operator's business interests) and pretend that I have other beefs with charters so I can focus on just one concern-- the extra costs of a charter-choice system.

If you run a restaurant, offering a buffet can be tricky and costly. You have to be prepared to offer a full range of dishes, so that your Beloved Diner can have a full choice-- even though your beloved diner will leave some of those choices unused. Either you will have to absorb the cost of the extra food, or you will have to offer a buffet that doesn't really offer many choices.

A charter must have extra capacity built in. If I'm going to offer Chris a choice of three schools, each one of those schools must have a seat available for Chris-- and Chris will only occupy one of them. But every empty seat represents a cost to the system.

The plan will be that Happychoice Academy can offer fewer seats than would be needed to accommodate every single student who could conceivably choose to attend. Instead of three schools preparing three seats each for Chris, Pat and Taylor, each school will prepare just one seat and hope that Chris, Pat and Taylor distribute themselves evenly between the schools.

But that ideal is unlikely to happen, so charter-choice schools have to manage their excess capacity, which means taking control of how many of which students come to fill those seats. The only way to guarantee a full open free-choice system would be to have multiple schools which all have the capacity to handle all the students-- and that amount of excess capacity would be hugely expensive. The only way such a system can hope to be remotely economically viable is for choice to actually be limited. So, choice controlled by the schools.

Even if the schools become good at predicting the amount of capacity they need, or they use very tight controls, the no-backfill rule creates more unused capacity which creates more excess cost. Success Academies, the extreme example, jettison more than half of their students between 3rd and 8th grade which means either A) they plan to wash out that many students or B) somebody has to pay the overhead costs of all those empty seats. That sloughing off of students also means that somebody somewhere has to maintain the capacity that allows them to absorb the students who return from Happychoice Academy.

Of course, the part of the system that is obligated to maintain much of this excess capacity is the traditional public system, which must take every student that shows up at its doors.

Bottom line-- if we treat a charter-and-public school combo system as one school system, we arrive at one of two options.

A) A system that, for each 1,000 students, must maintain and finance a total 1,400 (ish-- I'm just spitballing here) seats. That is economic wastage of huge proportions.

B) A system that, for each 1,000 students, maintains say, 1,200 seats, with the full 1,000 in public school and the charter-choice capacity all tightly controlled and not really very choicey at all.

This is one of the mysteries of the conservative support of charter-choice systems for me-- the wastage is huge. A charter-choice-public hybrid system is like trying to operate four homes for the same amount of money you spent on having just one. It's wasteful and excessively costly, requiring you to pay for all sorts of capacity that you don't need. There's a reason that school districts strapped for cash are not saying, "Hey, let's save money by opening three more schools in the district."

Newark: Students Stand Up Again

Look at this. Just look at this.

I believe that WE WILL WIN!
LIKE Our Page Newark Students Union NJ Communities United!!!
Posted by NJ Communities United on Friday, May 1, 2015

Yesterday the students of Newark took to the streets to register their displeasure with the newest round of New Jersey turnaround plans (and had the savvy to do it in front of the reporters already gathered for Bridgegate).

The students of Newark are a phenomenal group. I met three of them last weekend, and they are strong and smart and show a confidence and command in speaking up that many folks two or three times their age can envy. And they are also exactly like every teenager you've ever met.

The Newark Students Union has been a strong and relentless voice in Newark, one of the school districts of New Jersey that has had all of its democratic process stripped away in the name of reform (once again, the kind of public-silencing reform that most often seems targeted at a public that is mostly black). When superintendent Cami Anderson wouldn't talk to them, the students followed her to an AEI event in DC. And just a few months ago, they occupied her offices (using the insurgent strategy known as "walking through the open door").

Adult support for student activism isn't always great. "They're just kids. They don't really understand the issues. They have wacky, unrealistic demands. They get all caught up in drama. They create chaos and disorder."

And I'm sure that those objections are true sometimes. So what? We've seen that "responsible adults" with power and access make stupid terrible fact-less decisions and cement them as policy.

This is a democracy. Citizens and stakeholders are supposed to have a voice, and if students aren't stakeholders in schools, I don't know who else could be. I wish my students were this passionate about their school, their community, their right to speak up whether they have official permission or not.

Democracy is not about saying, "We will fix your schools (even if you didn't ask us to), but in exchange you will give up your right to have a voice in the governance of your own community." But that model, that model of silencing entire communities while using their schools to create revenue streams for folks who have no stake in that community-- that model is spreading from Newark to Philly to Chicago to Holyoke to Little Rock.

And so the students of Newark are standing up not just for their schools, but for the democratic heart of our nation. And they are not just standing up in Newark, but on the front lines of an incursion aimed at our entire country (well, except of course the rich parts). All of us who care about public education in this country owe the students of Newark our support and our thanks.

Choice: Real Problems, Fake Answers

By following link to link, I ended up at this piece by Derrell Bradford, executive director of NYCAN and experienced in the reform game (if not the school biz), part of the 50CAN network of choice-pushing charter fans. But his essay "I am your black friend who grew up in Sandtown-Winchester" is as raw and powerful an argument as I've ever heard from the Friends of Choice. And it crystallizes once again where the big, fat hole in the choice argument lies.

Bradford, it turns out, grew up in the same area as Freddie Gray. It was an earlier time, but it was still ugly. Bradford's personal story, which has fueled his reformster career, is the story of escaping that neighborhood.


I never thought things were rough in my neighborhood when I was a kid. I thought they just “were.” But the older I got the more my life became a focused square of activity because of those rough streets. School, sports, home at night, dinner, then the blue chair in my grandma’s Baker Street living room where I fought to stay awake and master the quadratic formula. In retrospect, a lifetime of dinner conversations and events make the haze of memories crystal clear. My grandma talked about redlining, a lot. My friend Stuart, a big redhead black kid a few years older than me that lived on Calhoun Street, was shot and killed. Grandma got mugged while walking home from church one morning. I'd been beat up and had my bike taken from me. All the streets around us-- Stricker, Presstman, Gilmore, Gold-- loomed with their own sort of eerie malevolence. In a city of neighborhoods, mine was exactly one square block.

Say what you like about Bradford-- the man can write.

He creates a compelling pictures-- as compelling as any of the many word pictures being crafted in the face of the Baltimore riots-- of a school and neighborhood that is a toxic, terrible trap for the young men and women who live there.

His point is simple. He escaped. He wants others to be able to do the same. And this is where I lose the thread of his argument.

Bradford had the fortune to land at a tony top-notch prep school. The kind of school that gets way more in money and resources than the school to which zip code would have consigned him. That's what got him out of the old neighborhood.

This is what I don't get about reformsters like Bradford. Why are they not saying, "We demand a school for our neighborhood that is every bit as good as that big, shiny prep school."

The problem of underfunded, under-supported, under-resourced schools is real. The choice solution is not real at all. It proposes to rescue some students and make things worse for the rest. It proposes to further cripple the neighborhood school that should be an anchor of the community (look at a twenty-year study of social capital and education done in Baltimore).

You find a group of children trapped on a sinking ship, so you rescue some by tearing boards out of the hull of the sinking ship to reinforce your lifeboat. And then you leave most of the children on the now-sinking-more-rapidly ship.

You find a group of children starving in a home, so you take some of them with you to feed, but on your way out you take all the pots and pans so you can cook for the kids you're taking, leaving the remaining children to starve even faster.

I absolutely get the dire nature of the problem that Bradford and others are describing. But please tell me how school choice helps? It rips resources away from the already-struggling school, making it that much harder to "fix" it. It "rescues" only a small percentage of the students.

Why why why WHY is this a better solution than moving heaven and earth to get that "failing" school the resources it needs? Why is it a better solution to move a handful of students to a bright, shiny school instead of doing everything in your power to turn the community school into a bright, shiny school for every student and family in the community? If you know how to create a magically awesome alternative to the failing public school, why can't the awesome alternative model be applied directly to the public school itself.

Don't tell me the bullshit about how money doesn't matter. Bradford has made the argument that failing public schools spend too much money on bells and whistles, but until you show me a highly respected private school that markets itself by saying, "We promise to spend next to nothing on your kid," or "Never mind the full voucher. Just send us the student with $500 and that's all we need to educate her," I'm not buying the money-doesn't-matter argument. And truly, neither is anybody else. Nobody believes that. Nobody.

This is what I have always found baffling about voucher proponents. It's not that I don't believe in the problems they cite. It's that their solutions strike me just like somebody who says, "I've had a terrible cold lately, so I'm going to jab myself in the gut with a steak knife and soak my head in kerosene." The voucher solution is non-sequitor, a solution that seems to hold no reasonable promise of help (and at this late date, no empirical or anecdotal support, either).

So I'm saying to Derrell Bradford-- I find your writing moving, your story moving, your picture of the problem compelling (and I am not using my trademark irony here-- I mean it). But I can not for the life of me see how school choice brings us the slightest step closer to a solution, nor in all the reading about choice that I've ever done, have I seen a clear and sensible explanation of how this non-solution solution can hope to solve a thing. I'm still listening.

Edushyster: Peter Cunningham's Woes

I have now met Jennifer "Edushyster" Berkshire, and I totally get it. I don't believe there is a human being on the planet who, upon sitting down with her, would not want to answer every question just to prolong the conversation and once you're talking, well, lying to the woman would be like kicking a puppy.

So it makes perfect sense that just about anybody would be willing to talk to her, even if she is on the Pro-Public Education side of the fence.

She's just put up an interview with Peter Cunningham, the former Arne Duncan wordifier who now runs Education Post, a pro-reformster political war room style rapid response operation (I knew I'd moved up in the blogging world when they took the time to spank me personally).

I don't imagine there are people who read this blog who do not also read Edushyster, but I'm going to keep linking/exhorting you to head over and check out this interview while I note a few of my own responses here.

There are a couple of eyebrow-raisers in the interview that really underline the differences between the reformsters and the pro-public ed side of these debates. In particular, Cunningham notes that many reformsters feel isolated and under attack. When explaining how Broad approached him about starting EP, Cunningham says

There was a broad feeling that the anti-reform community was very effective at piling on and that no one was organizing that on our side. 

Organized?! Organized!!?? It is possible that Broad et al have simply misdiagnosed their problem. Because I'm pretty sure that the pro-public ed advocate world, at least the part of it that I've seen, is not organized at all. But we believe what we are writing, so much so that the vast majority of us do it for free in our spare time (I am eating a bag lunch at my desk as I type this), and we pass on the things we read that we agree with. 

In fact, it occurs to me that contrary to what one might expect, we are the people using the Free Market version of distributing ideas-- we create, we put it out there, we let it sink or swim in the marketplace of ideas. Meanwhile, the reformsters try to mount some sort of Central Planning approach, where they pay people to come up with ideas, pay people to promote those ideas, pay people to write about those ideas, and try to buy the marketplace so that their products can be prominently displayed. 

It is the exact same mistake that they have brought to education reform-- the inability to distinguish between the appearance of success and actual success. If students look like they are succeeding (i.e. scoring high on tests they've been carefully prepped for), then they must be learning. If it looks like everybody is talking about our ideas (i.e. we bought lots of website space and hired cool writers and graphics), then we must be winning hearts and minds.

But what is Cunningham to do to save these poor beleaguered millionaires in their cushy offices (who are probably not eating a bag lunch at their desks as I type this-- isolated and alone in my classroom, I might add)?


I’ve created the ability to swarm, because everyone felt like they were being swarmed. We now have people who will, when asked, lean in on the debate, when people feel like they’re just under siege.

"Lean in" is a great way to put it. I've been "leaned in" upon. It just feels kind of mean, and definitely not like an attempt to create a better conversation. Which is, well, odd , because I've actually had some certainly fine conversations with people on the other side of the edu-fence. It's really not impossible, or even difficult. 

Cunningham himself has proven capable of critiquing the reformster party line. But he's been hired to do a job, and he's doing it. Which is perhaps part of the problem.

Mind you, I'm not by any stretch of the imagination claiming that I am extra-noble or super-swell because I toil away in unfunded obscurity. There are people (Jennifer is one of them) who do this as their main gig and ought to be getting deservedly rich for it; the fact that I'm not doesn't make me a better person.

But it tells us something about the two sides of the fence that the separate pastures are fertilized with such different-- yeah, let's drop that analogy. It says something that if all the money evaporated from the pro-public ed movement, things wouldn't change much at all. But take away Gates money and Broad money and Walton money, and we wouldn't be having these conversations. Reform has consistently side-stepped both the democratic process and the marketplace of ideas, adopting instead the corporate boss model of, "I'm paying your salary. Do as I say." Since democracy and the market place of ideas started fighting back, reformsters have been trying to adapt. But it's hard. And lonely.

Cunningham notes that by 2012-2013, pro-public ed was "very effectively calling a lot of reform ideas into question." Well, not exactly. They were effectively pointing out that a lot of reform ideas were crap. Marketing and PR do not necessarily beat actual substance. But Cunningham is a man who's been given a giant pile of money to hire swarms and bloggers and a big, shiny website, so he's going to spend it. for at least two more years. Read the edushyster interview.

Prager, Valdary, Understanding, and the Classroom

If you have a conservative Facebook friend, you have probably seen it. An intense and serious young black woman looks into the camera and describes, in a slickly produced five-ish-minute video why anyone who doesn't condemn the Baltimore riots is a racist.

The video is from Prager University. Prager University is non-brick, non-credit, non-coursework-- well, Prager University is a extra-fancy name for a growing library of video clips. It makes me realize that I really missed the boat by not launching this website as Curmudgucation Academy. (One more lesson I should have learned from Edushyster.)

The "University" was founded by Dennis Prager, a conservative writer and syndicated radio guy. The woman in the video is Chloe Valdary, who is best known as a zionist and pro-Israeli activist (as of 2014, she was senior in International Studies at the University of New Orleans.

The Pitch

Valdary argues that dealing with racism is difficult because progressives think they have to treat black folks with kid gloves, which she calls demeaning and condescending. She moves from there to a recent experience in an anthropology class in which a professor (one Valdary very much likes) says that in the shooting of Michale Brown, "ultimately the facts don't matter." It was another example of racism in a racist society, and therefor the riots that followed the non-indictment were a legitimate reaction of people who couldn't take any more.

The words of that last sentence are Valdary's; she does not attribute them to the professor or a classmate. That's important because it's exactly at that point that Valdary either makes a logical leap or just plain creates a straw man.

"Rioting and looting are acceptable forms of behavior because they have no other options?" Valdary asks incredulously. "In free democratic America? Really?" (This while her graphic shows black stick figures cheering the burning of a liquor store.)  She continues that this excuse is applied only to blacks (not other minorities) by "we, the enlightened ones." Worse, if it's white cop killing black teen, the facts don't matter. Well, not in Valdary's world. In her world, facts always matter.

Anyone who excuses bad behavior among blacks just because they're black is a racist, viewing blacks as children who can't play by grown-up rules. Valdary sets white supremicists and condescenders side by side and give the KKK-uniformed racist credit for being open and honest instead of the condescenders who "nod knowingly and say 'They couldn't take it any more. Who can blame them?'"

Valdary wants to convince the condescenders that "as a black human being, I want to be-- I must be-- judged by the same standards as everybody else." Her proposal-- treat everybody equally, all the time.     

The Problem    

I bolded some words above because I think they speak directly to why Valdary is off the mark here.

I don't actually disagree with the root of her argument-- that blacks (and women and folks with disabilities and short people etc etc etc) should be treated equally and not patronized or infantilized. But Valdary (and the conservatives who are happily sharing her because, hey, she's black so that means her words are more equal than others) is missing a large chunk of the point.

First, finding the behavior of rioters in Ferguson or Baltimore (or any of the other flashpoints of the last forever) acceptable or legitimate is not the same as finding it understandable. There's a long list of things that I don't find okay that I still understand. Valdary leans heavily on words of judgment, but in highly charged situations I find understanding far more powerful than judgment.

This stuff is basic classroom 101. Don't think I'm about to infantilize African-Americans by analogy-- I teach high schools students and Step 1 for me is to recognize them as grown humans, not children. But there is a power differential in my classroom, and if I want to (or if I'm too foolish to know better) I can drive my students to acts of misbehavior that get them sent to the office. It's not about judging or standards; it's about my understanding of my students and how that informs my use of power in the classroom. It's about respect and recognizing fundamental humanity. And I'm pretty sure I'm onto something, because my classroom is almost never a chaotic mess, but it has been years since the last time I sent a student to the office.

Valdary (and her amplifiers) want us to agree to condemn the rioters. It is not clear to me what that gets us. A warm glow of moral superiority? A justification to come down on the rioters like a ton of bricks? A free pass to ignore all contributing factors that led people to think there was nothing left but taking to the streets to lash out? What does any of that get us?

Is she afraid that there's a whole bunch of pro-riot folks out there, a bunch of people saying, "Yes, what this country needs is more riots. I'm hoping to organize a riot in my neighborhood." Maybe I'm naive, but I don't think a neighborhood riot appears on anybody's list of Things To Do except at the bottom. I don't imagine anybody saying, "Well, I can think of several actions we could try, but how about we just have a riot, instead?"

I won't deny for a second that condescenders exist. They always have. But many of the expressions of empathy and understanding have been the exact opposite. They have been a recognition that any human beings of any race living for years in such a state of systemic oppression would react with something less than calm decorum when the situation was goosed up by one more unnecessary and unjustified death.

And I should note somewhere in this piece that most of us could just wait on making any sort of judgment until we have enough information to know what the hell we're talking about. How can we all be so aware that the media are so untrustworthy and yet go right back to taking their word for it?

But whenever possible, I still believe that understanding is our best choice. Understanding does not mean approving, justifying or applauding rioting and violence. But in the long strong of violent urban outbursts running back decades upon decades upon decades, what we see is that attempts to understand and respond are far more useful than attempts to blame and punish.

Any good classroom teacher already know this truth: treating people with respect and understanding is not treating them like children; it's treating them like human beings. That truth does not change in the moments when they're acting out with anger and violence.

People want to be heard. They will keep raising their voices until they feel heard, and they will keep raising their voices until they are screaming. It's a basic rule in a classroom, in a board room, in any community-- if you don't want people to start screaming, you have to listen to them.

Note: I don't really recommend watching this video, but I will embed it so that you can check my work.