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Posts by Paul Costello1

Strategies for Leveling the Educational Playing Field

Graduation caps being tossed

BY Elizabeth M. Ross

As an academic, David Deming says it is always tempting to think that we have to better understand major problems before we can solve them but, when it comes to the profound disparities in K–12 education in America, he is convinced that isn’t the case.

“We actually know what to do, we just lack the political will to do it,” he says.

The scale of the inequities is laid bare in new data recently analyzed by Deming, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and fellow economists Raj Chetty and John Friedman of Opportunity Insights. In their research, the team looked at the role that wealth plays in admission to elite colleges and, in doing so, scrutinized the test scores of more than 5 million students who took the SAT or ACT in 2011, 2013, and 2015 along with their parents’ incomes, by studying federal tax records.

The researchers found that more than 30% of students from the very wealthiest families had strong scores that were well above average: 1300 or higher on the SAT or 29 or higher on the ACT. Less than 5% of the students from middle-income families had such successful scores. In fact, at a time when it was widely required in higher education, only about one in three students from the bottom half of the family income distribution even took a college entrance exam. 

To help close the huge achievement gaps outlined in the study, Deming offers the following solutions:

1. Broaden access to high-quality early childhood education for everyone. 

Inequalities, including health outcomes, start early — even before birth — according to Deming, and disparities begin to set in before kids show up to kindergarten. “The difference between the home environment and the preschool environment is very, very large, especially for families who don’t have the resources to send their kids to private nursery schools,” he explains, and having 3-year-olds sitting at home, “is not helping them get a leg up.” Kids who attend good preschools arrive at kindergarten ready to learn because they have already begun to acquire important skills, such as how to get along with peers and self-regulate.

2. Spend more money on all public schools.

Because of the pandemic, schools around the country have received federal aid dollars through the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) Fund, but Deming says, “a one-time helicopter drop of money is way less effective than just sustaining higher levels of spending.” He proposes taxing citizens at a higher rate to fund schools since it is more expensive to educate students than it was in the past and because schools are “are important investments in the next generation.” 

3. Increase spending in schools in low-income communities.

Schools serving low-income families should, in Deming’s view, receive additional money in order to attract and retain qualified teachers, which can sometimes be challenging in poorer districts, and to also reduce class sizes. “That’s the kind of thing that can lead to sustained gains and achievement for everybody and closing of achievement gaps,” he explains.  

4. Add instruction time.

“We know how to teach people,” Deming says, we just need, “more seat time, more instructional time, more time on task,” and longer school days and school years, including teaching on Saturdays and over the summer, as well as supplemental tutoring for those who are struggling to catch up due to the pandemic or otherwise. 

He understands there may be resistance to some of his ideas, but fears that in a few years we will “see some examples of success, but also see a lot of lost opportunities,” when it comes to closing achievement gaps. “We just have to decide to make [education] a priority as a society, and I’m very concerned that we’re not,” Deming adds. 

The end of standardized testing? Not so fast….

As for those who might look at the vast differences in academic outcomes, tied to wealth, as a reason to scrap the SAT and ACT altogether, Deming thinks that would be a mistake. He considers the findings in his study to be “more a statement of the sum total of inequality in America,” and the disparities an indication that many students from lower-income families are less prepared for college “not because they’re not as smart, [but] because they haven’t been invested in, they haven’t had as much attention from teachers,” he explains.

While he has concerns about how the SAT is administered, that he would like to see addressed — such as allowing students to pay to take the test multiple times to get the highest score possible — Deming says, for highly selective colleges like Harvard (which is currently test-optional), the exam can be a helpful tool for finding students from less privileged backgrounds who have great academic potential. 

“If we didn’t have the SAT, we’d have no way to identify talent in unusual places and we need to preserve that,” he says. 

https://www.gse.harvard.edu/ideas/usable-knowledge/24/01/strategies-leveling-educational-playing-field

2023 In Eight Points: Meditating On Our Planetary Moment

Otto Sharmer

As the year draws to an end and we head into 2024, I feel the need to close the feedback loop between all the challenges of 2023 and my own sensemaking. Here are three tangible things that stand out in hindsight:

  • It has been the hottest year on record: Each month from June to November has broken previous ceilings.
  • It has been a year of escalating polarization and conflicts: Europe (Ukraine/Russia), the Middle East (Israel/Gaza), Africa (the Sahel region, Somalia, Ethiopia), and Asia (Armenia/Azerbaijan, Korean Peninsula, South China Sea).
  • It has been the year of AI: The arrival of generative AI is reshaping human experience and societal structures in ways that were unimaginable just a few years ago.

That’s what we perceive on the surface. But what are the deeper messages that these three phenomena are holding for us? What are these challenges telling us?

In this year-end contemplation, I try to decipher some of these deeper messages. If read in the spirit of a systems thinking-based reality meditation, you will come across the following themes:

  • We collectively create results that nobody wants.
  • We can’t do more of the same (even though we keep trying).
  • The challenges we face require us to look into the mirror of the whole system.
  • In that mirror we see ourselves and our potential to shift the inner place of operating by
  • . . . opening our minds to shift our thinking from a silo to a systems view,
  • . . . opening our hearts to shift our relationships from toxic to transformative,
  • . . . opening our wills to shift our actions from ego to eco.
  • Small islands of coherence have the capacity to lift an entire system.

1. We collectively create results that nobody wants.

Almost no one wants to inflict more violence and destruction on nature, on others, or on themselves. Yet that’s what we keep doing collectively by:

  • deepening the ecological divide: climate destabilization, biodiversity loss
  • deepening the social divide: polarization, inequality, war
  • deepening the spiritual divide: hopelessness, anxiety, and depression

These three divides constitute a giant abyss in front of our collective eyes.

2. We can’t do more of the same (even though we keep trying).

What does that abyss have to say to us? You cannot do more of the same.

  • In the case of the ecological divide that means: you cannot do more of the same while hoping for a future techno fix (like geoengineering, as currently proposed by the fossil fuel industry).
  • In the case of the social divide it means that no side can kill its way out of the current entanglement. We see this in Ukraine/Russia, a story of massive casualties on both sides for essentially no territorial gain for anyone; and we see this in Israel/Gaza, where neither Hamas nor Israel can get what they want by doing more of the same (heinous attacks and slaughtering of women and children by Hamas, bombings in Gaza that have killed more than 20,000 people, many of them women and children, by the IDF)
  • In the case of the spiritual divide it means that the pandemic of hopelessness and loneliness, largely amplified (if not created) by AI-enabled social media, cannot be fixed by even more technologies, e.g., medical treatments that address the symptoms but not the root issues: the violence and pain that we collectively inflict on our planet (pollution), on each other (war), and on ourselves (hopelessness).

The abyss says: you can’t do more of the same — look into the mirror. But thus far we’re not listening. We’re burning more fossil fuels; bombing and killing more people; and amplifying the pandemic of hopelessness by allowing Big Tech to turn human experience into profit-making machines led by organized irresponsibility, which just amplifies all the symptoms mentioned above.

As we keep doing the same, as the challenges keep piling up, and as the divides deepen, we get an even deeper look into the mirror of the collective abyss. What do we see? We are seeing ourselves.

3. The challenges we face require us to look into the mirror of the whole system.

We are doing all these things to ourselves. At this point, many of us feel drawn to jump to a habitual response (rejecting or reacting). But the trick at this stage, as my good friend Dayna Cunningham once told me, is this: keep the gaze steady.

Keeping the gaze steady means to see our own role in the making of the situation. It’s about seeing clearly the making of what has happened, of what keeps happening. It’s about linking it to our own sense of agency and accountability, which opens a shared body of understanding and possibility.

Keeping the gaze steady means we cannot address and close the three divides with the same thinking that created them:

  • We cannot solve the planetary emergency without profoundly reflecting on our role and relationship with our planet. Is our role to continue the current road of destruction or to transform and reshape our systems from extraction to regeneration and flourishing?
  • We cannot solve our escalating wars and tensions with the same foreign policy mindset and logic that created them. That mindset of othering denies our interdependency, our entanglement with the world around us.
  • We cannot solve the pandemic of loneliness, hopelessness, and depression by applying the same thinking that created them: tech fixes that focus on symptoms but not on the root issues.

Keeping the gaze steady means to face and acknowledge the profound sense of loss and hopelessness of our current moment. In fact, the hopelessness and pain that many younger people feel signals a deeper level of connectednessto the pain inflicted on the planet, on each other, and perhaps also on ourselves.

4. In that mirror we see ourselves and our potential to shift our source of operating.

When we stay with those difficult feelings, when we let go of preconceived notions, we can begin to notice a deeper place of source and resonance. As we deepen our gaze into the mirror, into seeing ourselves through the eyes of the whole, we notice that there is yet another presence available around, between, and within us that in the noise of our everyday lives we almost always miss and ignore. It’s a place and source of presence that is not judgmental, not cynical, and not afraid; it just is — and it is also a foreshadowing of what it is becoming.

In that deeper place of presence, the boundary — between me and you, between us and them, between me and it — is profoundly collapsing. What used to be in here is suddenly distributed all over. My own experience of self and space morphs into a panoramic sensing from the field. My chronological sense of time slows down to stillness. If I stay with and surrender to it, that slowly begins to shift everything around and within me, as the boundary between these two things begins to collapse.

5. By opening our minds we shift our thinking from silos to systems.

Shifting the source of our thinking from our existing bubbles and silos (ego) to the ecosystem around us (eco) may sound like a small thing. But it affects everything. Thinking creates the world. Real deep thinking — that is, creating something from nothing — is among the few things that machines (including generative AI) can’t do.

An example from the past year concerns how we conceive of and make sense of violence. On a surface level there is direct violence. One person is the victim, one is the perpetrator. News reports rarely go below this level.

One level deeper, there is structural violence. The perpetrators of violence are not people but structures (examples are systemic racism and other mechanisms that exclude particular groups from opportunity). In just about all conflicts around the world there is an interplay between direct and structural violence.

A third form of violence in many cases gives rise to the other two: attentional violence. Attentional violence means not to see the other in terms of who they really are. This form of violence is committed when one person or group doesn’t see others as “legitimate” (to use Maturana’s term).

A deepened understanding of the current conflicts around the world requires looking at them on all three levels. Over the past year, in our increasingly polarized world, I have found it very difficult to “hold the space for peace” (Harari, Yuval Noah: 2023) — that is, a space for the evolution of the whole that is beyond the hyperpolarized discourse that now paralyzes collective thought and action. As the holding of this space becomes more difficult in many places today, it also becomes even more important to do so, by building our capacity to hear and hold complex, divergent and conflicting perspectives.

For this first transformation to take hold — the inversion of our thinking from silos to systems, from ego to eco — a second transformation is required, one that concerns the inversion of our relationships.

6. By opening our hearts we shift our relationships from toxic to transformative.

The second transformation is about opening our hearts to shift our relationships. We do that by shifting the inner place from where our listening and our conversations originate. Shifting our listening means moving from downloading and factual to empathic and generative listening. Shifting our conversations means moving from downloading and debate to dialogue and collective creativity.

Not a single challenge contemplated above can be addressed with the old style of listening and conversing, which would only result in more of the same. The key to moving beyond our old patterns of actions lies in transforming our conversations from conforming and confronting to connecting and co-creating by shifting the inner place from where our conversation and listening originate: from inside the boundary of our own system to outside of it, that means stepping out of our preconceived ideas and listening from the perspective of others and from the social field as a whole.

This process of decentering — which sometimes can feel stressful because it comes with not knowing, with uncertainty, and with taking risk — is a capacity that can be trained and cultivated. Without it we will remain stuck in our old tracks.

For this second transformation to take hold — the inversion of our relationships from transactional (or toxic) to transformative — a third transformation is required: the inversion of our actions.

7. By opening our wills we shift our actions from ego to eco.

The third transformation entails shifting the origin of our actions from inside to beyond the collapsing boundary of our system. We see this happening in many places around the world, where, in moments of crisis, systemic breakdown, and existential need, people are rising to the occasion and helping each other. We see it in inspiring volunteer work that often is the secret sauce in creating resilience after hardship and loss (including in Ukraine, Israel, Gaza and other places of amazing community response). We see it also when traditional entities — companies, NGOs, or nation-states — collaborate in new ways across boundaries. In the language of Theory U we call this “awareness-based collective action” (ABC). We see it locally and across sectors. We even see it on a country level. It’s nothing short of amazing what we as humans can do if we choose to operate from an eco perspective rather than an ego perspective.

That said, we also know how painful it is to sit in partnership meetings in which an ecosystem-way of collaboration is disabled through a partner insisting to remain in unilateral control (which means, that there is no trust and the origin of action remains stuck inside that organization’s boundaries). For a more detailed view on the evolutionary patterns of institutional inversion and transformation see my recent blog on Philanthropy 4.0. The capacity for decentering our siloed actions towards co-creative patterns across institutional boundaries requires the opening of the mind, the heart and the will on the side of all key stakeholders.

8. Small islands of coherence have the capacity to lift an entire system.

“When a system is far from equilibrium,” says Nobel Prize-winning chemist Ilya Prigogine, “small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to lift the entire system to a higher order.” That our system is far from equilibrium became abundantly clear in 2023. Most people share that feeling. We also know that the “sea of chaos” is not in short supply.

But what about these “small islands of coherence” that have the capacity to tip our evolutionary trajectory in one direction or another? That’s where our role comes into focus — and by “our” I mean all of us, anyone contemplating the current moment with even the faintest open mind and heart.

When systems collapse, what are we left with? Each other. We are left with our relationships to the land, to ourselves, to one another. Small islands of coherence, as I understand it, are microcosms of the future that is trying to emerge.

Now is the time

Where is the smallest unit of an island of coherence? It’s in our heart. It’s in our relationships. It’s in our circles of deep listening and generative conversation. It’s in our efforts to transform difficult stakeholder relationships in our work and lives through generative listening and conversation.

I am inspired by Vaclav Havel’s distinction between optimism and hope. “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”

The year 2024 will present profound choices. Elections will take place in the US, India, Indonesia, South Africa, the EU, the UK, and other democracies. People’s choices will set the stage for the future of deep transformation work, one way or another. We don’t know the outcomes. But we do know that now is the moment to do what makes sense regardless of the outcomes.

A planetary action research community of change makers and leaders

So, what does it take for us as human beings to access that deeper level of our agency — the belief that something “makes sense regardless of how it turns out”? Accessing that deeper level requires us to access our deep humanity. Just as the regeneration of the soil in regenerative agriculture requires methods and tools of cultivation, the same is required for accessing our deeper levels of humanity to reconnect with what truly makes sense for us.

I am immensely thankful for the community of people in and around the Presencing Institute and the u-school ecosystem who continue to co-create, co-evolve, and refine all these methods and tools that serve the creation of islands of coherence. They are critical for bringing about the necessary shifts toward human and planetary flourishing in all our systems in ways that our current polycrisis is calling for.

The Presencing Institute and its global ecosystem of partners and core team members is an action research community of change makers and leaders who use the methods and tools of awareness-based systems change to facilitate processes of transforming our systems from extractive to regenerative, from ego to eco, and from degradation to flourishing.

What does it mean to be part of such an action research community? It means being a practitioner in creating small islands of coherence in our work one way or another — and then methodically reflecting on and sharing these experiences, methods and tools.

But we have learned that just supplying methods and tools for this work is not enough. What’s also necessary are places and spaces for experiencing them in a social context through applied practice fields. In addition we have learned that through the intentional use of technology it is possible to link these small islands of coherence with each other to form beginning ecosystems of coherence.

In 2023 we focused on living examples of these ecosystems in three domains:

  • Build Capacity & Activate Ecosystems: we launched our redesigned and updated u-lab that is available through MITx as well as our Ecosystem Leadership Program in Latin America (a three year capacity building and ecosystem activation program)
  • Create Innovation Labs: through systems labs that focus on Education for Human Flourishing (in partnership with the OECD), Ecosystem restoration and regenerative agriculture (various partners); SDG Leadership Labs (in collaboration with UN and Humanitarian Country Teams); UN 2.0 (in collaboration with multiple agencies); Business as a force for good (in collaboration with Eileen Fisher Foundation and other partners) as well as Transformative finance (in partnership with the GABV) and Philanthropy 4.0
  • Generate Knowledge, Methods, and Tools: Creating and evolving new social arts and related methods, tools, and practices (such as the 4D Mapping online tool), as well as sharing knowledge through our peer-reviewed Journal of Awareness-Based Systems Change, which just reached the remarkable threshold of 100,000 views and downloads in its first three years of publication.

We know that all this is just a small beginning. Even though we only operate with a very small core, many of these efforts involve hundreds or in some cases thousands of volunteering change makers across the globe. We’re really part of a massive movement of volunteers and change makers that keep clarifying and acting on ‘what makes sense regardless of how it turns out.’

That kind of unconditional commitment and action is grounded in a profound shift in awareness that, in this moment, perhaps is our most significant source of hope.

We know that the road ahead will not be easy. We know that many more disruptions are coming our way. But I also feel the presence of profound positive possibility that is palpable across so many places today. Even though 2023 was a difficult year for most of us most of the time, I am ending that year on a different note. More calm, connected, and also more confident that together we will be able to activate and realize the positive potential for change that most of us can feel right now.

I feel a deep gratitude for being alive in this moment. I feel gratitude for being connected to all of the initiatives mentioned (and many that were not), to all of you who co-created them as partners, team members, volunteers, and funders in dozens of projects and initiatives across the globe, and to being connected with those of you who are involved in different but likeminded initiatives in other places and contexts.

I feel that these are the years that I — and perhaps we — have been born for. These are the moments where we need to show up. Yes, it’s not easy, and that’s exactly why we chose to be here — to be here together. These days, months, and years are the moments to be fully present with what is emerging from our relationships with the land, with each other, and with the future that stands in need of us now.

If you want to support the Presencing Institute and its u-school for Transformation: we are funded through contributions from our community and appreciate any contribution you may consider.

If you want to check out further resources: Presencing Instituteottoscharmer.comu-school.orgJournal of Awareness-Based Systems Change

I thank Kelvy Bird for the image that she created for this contemplation! And I thank Antoinette Klatzky, Eva Pomeroy, Katrin Kaufer, Rachel Hentsch, and Patricia Bohl for their helpful feedback on the draft.

https://medium.com/presencing-institute-blog/2023-in-eight-points-meditating-on-our-planetary-moment-3081cf51ed5d

The Joy of Communal Girlhood, the Anguish of Teen Girls

Nail polish and pillow fights: What girlhood taught me about love | The  Daily Nexus

OPINION  JESSICA BENNETT New York Times December 31st 2023 

OK, I’ll admit it. When I learned of hot girl walks, I tried it: Go on a walk, think about how hot you are, do not talk (or think) about men.

I thought girl dinner was pretty funny, too. Adult woman dinner meant preparing dinner for others. But a girl dinner? It was just delicious — or at least edible — morsels tossed on a plate to please you and you alone. No prep, no cleanup, just me and my wedge of cheese and a handful of stale almonds, toppling the patriarchy with snacks.

But then, it seemed, there was suddenly a special girl version for everything: Weird girls were quirky fashionistas who refused to conform to sartorial blandness. Clean girls were subverting beauty standards — or something like that — with “no makeup” makeup and skin that looked like glazed doughnutsSnail girls prioritized self-care over ambition, while rat girls — perhaps the most clever of the girlie trends — scurried about town, not a care in the world, shirking society’s expectations that women cater to others by prioritizing only themselves.

I’ve followed these phenomena over the past year with some combination of bewilderment and delight. Decades after my mother’s generation tried to dissuade the use of “girl” to refer to grown women, that four-letter word, with all its connotations, still seemed to make things involving women more playful, less shrill, a little more fun. And who didn’t want to be fun? Surely there was nothing harmful about the idea, however silly, that a simple dinner could be a feminist act or that light physical exercise could be an exercise in self-confidence. Honestly, if only I could be as confident and unbothered — and simultaneously menacing — as a New York City rat.

And yet I still found myself mistrusting something about all of this: In 2023, it felt as though the world was glorifying girlhood, or an exaggerated version of it, more loudly than at any time I could remember (or at least since I was 16 and dressing as a Spice Girl for Halloween). Was it just coincidence that this embrace came at a time when girls themselves seemed so very miserable?

If the year in girl culture were to be charted, you might say it began with Beyoncé, who became the most decorated Grammy artist of all time, climaxed with Barbiemania, which broke studio records and led to a shortage of pink paint, and ended with Taylor Swift, whose Eras Tour became the highest-grossing music tour in history and who was just named Time’s person of the year. Girlhood literally boosted the economy.

But it wasn’t just the commercial aspects of girlhood that defined the year; it was the celebration of it — in mothers and daughters posting selfies as they belted the lyrics to “Fifteen,” in childhood girlfriends, now grown women, traversing the country to see Beyoncé perform onstage with her 11-year-old daughter and leaving a trail of silver in their wake. Girlhood was in the flash mobs that broke out early this year, as little girls mimicked the high school dance sequence in “Wednesday,” the Netflix smash hit about a teenage girl with a penchant for the macabre who seemed not to care about boys or rules.

In many ways, these displays of girly euphoria have been a delight to watch: pure, unfiltered, even un-self-conscious, in a time that is the opposite. They also felt like an antidote or maybe a carefully calculated distancing from the realities and difficulties of being women. “There’s not a lot of joy in adult womanhood in this time,” said the journalist and feminist critic Susan Faludi. She and I had been circling this point for months, ever since we saw the “Barbie” movie together, which she interpreted as a parable about abortion. “I sort of feel like, OK, you know, who wouldn’t want to be a girl?” she said. “I think we all feel so frightened and insecure and unsafe, maybe what we’re longing for is to be a particular kind of girl — one who is comforted and shielded from the world.”

Of course, that idea of girlhood is — and perhaps has always been — a fantasy. If there’s anything we’ve learned over the past year, it’s that girls, however strong, however able to endure, however good at pretending, are not OK. As study upon study over the past year has shown, girls face record sadness and hopelessness, double that of boys. They’re anxious. They are inundated with conflicting, and constant, messages about whom they should dress like, look like, act like, be, on platforms that have been shown to be toxic to them and where they also face frequent harassment. In the real world, even amid celebrations of so-called body positivity and endless reminders (usually in the form of product placement) that you are enough, girls face record rates of eating disorders and body dysmorphia; they’re wearing anti-aging products designed for middle age.

Girls, whose confidence often drops below that of boys during adolescence — and never catches up — describe feeling more alone than ever, even as their online networks surge.

I charted some of these contradictions this year, when I shadowed a group of 13-year-old girls throughout their eighth-grade year, as they navigated middle school, puberty and friendships amid constant access to a phone. In many ways, their experience was familiar to anyone who’s ever been a girl. But what stuck with me was how those devices seemed to ensure they could never get a mental break from the insecurities of adolescence. From the moment they woke up until they fell asleep, whether or not that phone was locked away or they had access to social media, there was an underlying anxiousness about the things happening on it — friend drama, rumors, grade alerts, DMs — in ways no study could really capture.

“I just feel like I need it, you know?” a girl from Michigan, Addi, told me of her relationship with her phone. “Like, it helps me get through the day.” In reality, of course, it often did the opposite: increased her anxiety, contributed to her self-consciousness, created drama with friends and family.

There has always been a difference between the performance of girlhood and the reality of it, between the selling of girl culture and the actual experience of being a girl. But something about today’s mélange — girls finding empowerment in a movie about a retrograde doll while the success of that movie makes the corporation behind the doll makers (even) richer, girl dinners touted as subversive on the same social media platforms making so many girls sick — feels particularly convoluted. No, not everything with “girl” in the title has to be indicative of something bigger. As Ms. Faludi put it: Let’s not mistake TikTok trends for political movements. But that doesn’t mean they’re devoid of political meaning.

“I think a lot of what girls are celebrating the loudest tend to be the things that we’re actually really struggling with,” said Freya India, a 24-year-old from London, whose newsletter, Girls, I had admired from afar. She wondered whether some of what we were seeing online was an effort by young women of her generation (but maybe also mine) to reclaim an innocent time that was lost: to social media, to the beauty industry, to world events that ask children to grow up too quickly, to the incessant cultural forces that have always plagued girls but are now on overdrive.

“What I think is tragic is there’s that kind of short window of time when you’re young, where you’re carefree and authentically yourself and you’re not insecure yet,” India said. “Now those anxieties are starting way earlier, and girls in particular aren’t getting time to just enjoy being a girl. Like, if you’re a girl on TikTok who’s categorizing herself and having a sad girl summer, that’s not a childhood to me. You are branding and marketing yourself before you’ve even had time to just not be self-conscious.”

I got to thinking about the work of Lauren Greenfield, whose 2002 photography book, “Girl Culture,” I read in college. It was groundbreaking at the time for its arresting, gritty portraits of American girls against the backdrop of the garish consumer culture of the early aughts: a girl scrunching her face in dismay at the sight of her breasts in a dressing room mirror, girls glammed up like women in beauty pageants, girls at quinceañeras, girl athletes, girls at an eating disorder clinic, girls at prom. In some ways, the portraits were a visual manifestation of a decade of work by scholars like Carol Gilligan and Lyn Mikel Brown, who first brought girls’ faltering sense of self into public view during the girl power era of the ’90s. But Ms. Greenfield’s portraits zeroed in on the juxtaposition of girls’ inner thoughts and their outward expressions — an “unhappy symbiosis,” as the book’s introduction put it, between their psychological needs “and the superficial, narcissistic content” they were consuming.

Two decades on, what is the state of that symbiosis? Girls’ psychological needs seem to have only grown more complicated, fueled by a far greater swell of content. But was it all superficial, narcissistic? I’m not so sure.

I did not see Taylor Swift or Beyoncé in concert this year, but I talked to some of the girls and women who did. Women who described the experiences as transcendent, magical, sacred and divine, a kind of “collective uplift,” as Stephanie Burt, the Harvard professor who is teaching a new class on Swiftology, put it. “I put it up there with my wedding night,” my friend Smita Reddy told me, of attending a Swift show with her daughter. A few minutes in, her 9-year-old turned to her and said, “Mom, I don’t feel like I’m alive.”

One of the differences between when Greenfield’s book came out and now is the extent to which women are the primary creative drivers behind much of the culture girls are consuming — which might be why it seems to be speaking to so many of their lives so powerfully. Peggy Orenstein, the author of “Girls and Sex,” who has been writing about girls for 30 years, likened these experiences to a “release valve.” “It’s such a complicated world, and girls and women feel such pressure,” she told me. “Maybe Barbie or Taylor offers a release from the pressures of mental health and gives you this moment where you can just live the fantasy or relax or be seen or feel like you don’t have to be seen or just watch the damned movie.”

I’d started out thinking of this year as a contradiction that needed untangling — the state of girlhood versus state of girls. But maybe there was never actually anything that contradictory about it; one serves as an outlet for the other.

I may not have gone to a girl concert this year, but I did go see the Eras movie with a couple of tweens, the daughters of one of my own girlfriends from middle school. It was a dingy, not very full theater in Seattle, with popcorn spilled between the seats. Not that anyone noticed. Girls with neon bracelets up to their elbows filled the aisles, hand in hand, singing, dancing, screaming every word to every song. None were on their phones.

I watched, a bit mesmerized, as my friend’s 9-year-old, who had made me a “Lavender Haze” friendship bracelet for the event, was mouthing every single word to every single song (she had studied the lyrics on her parents’ Spotify, with the subtitles on).

Looking at her was like peering into that perfect window of girlhood that the blogger Freya India had been talking about: when girls are old enough to know who they are but before the self-consciousness hits.

And maybe that’s part of this, at least for women: In all these girly spaces, in all these silly TikTok trends, there are cracks that let us step back into that time and remember what it feels like to think of nothing but ourselves, our friends and the lyrics to the song in front of us.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/22/opinion/girlhood-mental-health-taylor-swift.html

Moore promises no tax hikes, trims money for state programs in a ‘refocus’

By Erin Cox Washington Post January 18th 2024

After warning for months that Maryland needed to rein in its costs and boost its economy, Gov. Wes Moore (D) on Wednesday released a $63.1 billion budget proposal that aims to do that without raising taxes.F

His budget, the first one created exclusively by his administration, significantlytrims spending on transportation, private universities and community colleges, among many other smaller cuts, while plowing hundreds of millions of dollars into his other priorities.

Moore called the spending plan the first step in “rebasing” how the government invests in core priorities and lives within its means.

“I’m new to politics, but I’m not new to budgets,” Moore, a former investment banker, said. “If you are the CEO of a company and your business is not growing, then maybe it is time to rethink your business model. It will not be enough to simply rebuild the state government. We need to refocus.”

Moore said his administration went line by line through the state’s budget, looking for ways to align state spending with what works and looking for places pandemic aid inflated state spending.Among the examples his administration offered: cutting aid for private colleges such as Johns Hopkins University back to pre-pandemic levels.

Maryland faced budget gaps projected to widen from $761 million next fiscal year to $2.7 billion four years later. The cuts shrink those gaps but did not close them, and Moore said the state cannot pursue bigger ambitions unless Maryland’s economy grows to support them. At a time when other states’ economies grew by 7.5 percent on average over the past five years, he noted Maryland’s grew by merely 0.2 percent.

Among his spending priorities to boost the economy, Moore proposed another $100 million to build a new FBI headquarters, money to bolster a new technology hub in Baltimore and incentives to increase affordable housing.

“It’s not just about cuts. We’ve got to get this economy going,” Moore said during a Wednesday morning news conference in Annapolis where he set out four goals for the next year: to make Maryland safer, more economically competitive and more affordable, and to have a higher share of residents doing public service. To that last point, he included cash to expand his signature Service Year Option program, alongside the Maryland Corps program, to allow for 500 participants, up from the inaugural year’s 280.

He’s also proposed expanding a pilot program to rehabilitate juvenile offenders along with other investments into the Department of Juvenile Services, saying, “I believe in accountability and I believe in consequences for people that break the law. But if we put children into a system that makes them more likely to commit crime, we’re doing it wrong.”

Maryland launches nation’s first state-backed service year program

The budget proposal is subject to General Assembly approval and is 2 percent smaller than the current fiscal year, which was swollen by the last of federal pandemic aid.

The budget continues to pour billions into a growing public education plan meant to boost teacher pay, provide universal pre-K and flood high-poverty schools with resources, among many other goals. It also includes raises for state workers, which were negotiated in advance with the state’s unions.

He’s also proposed investments in job training and “cutting red tape” for certain industries, such as datacenters.

State lawmakers have considerable power in shaping the state’s spending plan and offered mixed initial reviews on Wednesday, with Republicans concerned about undisclosed fee increases hitting Maryland residents.Share this articleShare

“While it is a relief that the Governor’s budget spends less than last year and does not raise taxes, the number of fee increases proposed by his Administration through legislation and the regulatory process is concerning,” Senate Minority Leader Stephen S. Hershey Jr. (R-Queen Anne’s) said in a statement. “Taxes aren’t the only way to raise revenue, and state government should not be in the business of nickel and diming Maryland’s families and small businesses.”

One of those fee increases drew raised eyebrows from Democrats, who hold supermajorities in both chambers.Under his budget, a program that gives free child care to everyone that qualifies would instead implement a co-pay, asking families to pay up to 7 percent of their income toward the cost of care.

Moore emphasized record investment in a child-care subsidy program during his remarks. It has seen dramatic growth since a 2022 reform increased eligibility requirements from $40,000 to $90,000 for a family of four, and forbid the state from creating a waiting list for the program. Moore highlighted both the record amount going to the program and a recent report from the state comptroller that showed women dropping out of the workforce amid high child-care expenses.

“The cost of child care is too high. It changes the trajectory of our state’s fiscal health,” he said.

But his budget also saves $24 million by requiring new families to pay a co-pay, based on a sliding scale.

“That’s problematic,” said House Appropriations Chair Ben Barnes (D-Prince George’s) who described the budget overall as having “some good things.”

He said he was concerned about ways the governor moved around money to fund new programs without fully addressing the long-term shortfalls ahead. Within four years, the annual gap between revenue and expenses is expected to balloon to $2.7 billion within four years. “The current budget doesn’t reflect long-term solutions,” he said. “I’m confident by the end of the session we will find some.”

Maryland’s budget woes mirror states across the country. A Pew report earlier this month that found “roughly half of Americans live in states that report short-term budget gaps, potential long-term deficits, or both.”

Budget analysts were poring over the details Wednesday to understand the impacts of the governor’s plan.

Moore has been warning Maryland leaders about needing “discipline” ahead since August, and in December proposed $3.3 billion in transportation cuts over the next six years, eliminating projects across the state and curtailing transit service and litter pickup to deal with a lack of cash generated by the state’s gas tax. On Tuesday, he announced he could stave off $250 million worth of near-term cuts this year using some of the $2.5 billion in the state’s rainy day fund.

The move heads off what local and state leaders viewed as the worst of the $312 million in cuts expected to take effect this year.

Some Democrats have floated ideas to raise taxes to help close the budget gap, though there is no consensus on a plan.

Senate Budget and Taxation Chair Guy Guzzone (D-Howard) called Moore’s budget “a great foundation” and said he thought an important step is to “take the time to review very carefully all segments of the budget to make sure those are right-sized.” But he also said the legislature is looking closely at how to implement a long-term plan that pays for the education program, known as the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future, that is a primary driver of future budget shortfalls.

“This is an opportunity to do something very important for the future of our kids,” he said. “We want to live up to that commitment, so we will take that role very seriously.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/01/17/wes-moore-budget-maryland/

Robert Rosenthal, Who Linked Subtle Cues to Behavior, Dies at 90

A black-and-white formal portrait of Robert Rosenthal, sitting on a wooden chair, one arm resting over the back, wearing a dark jacket, sweater vest and tie, smiling.

Jan. 19, 2024 New York Times
By Clay Risen

Robert Rosenthal, a psychologist renowned as an expert in nonverbal communication, and in particular what he called the “self-fulfilling prophecies” in which subtle, often unconscious, gestures can influence behavior, died on Jan. 5 in Riverside, Calif. He was 90.

His daughter Ginny Rosenthal Mahasin said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was an aneurysm.

Widely considered one of the leading social psychologists of the 20th century, Dr. Rosenthal, who spent much of his career at Harvard, was best known for his work in the 1960s on what he called the Pygmalion effect — or, more technically, “interpersonal expectancy.”

In one famous experiment, he gave an aptitude test to students at a California elementary school, then told teachers that a group of the students was set to “blossom” in the next year, while another one wasn’t. In fact, the two groups were selected at random, though the teachers didn’t know that.

A year later, he retested the students and found that those in the “blossom” group had gained an average of 27 I.Q. points, regardless of how they scored initially, while the other group performed much worse.

Dr. Rosenthal concluded that the students’ performance had been affected by the different ways teachers had treated the two groups, encouraging the first with extra help, positive reinforcement and warmer body language. He called it the Pygmalion effect, after the Greek legend in which a sculptor falls in love with one of his works, bringing it to life.

“The bottom line is that if we expect certain behaviors from people, we treat them differently,” he told Discover magazine in 2015, “and that treatment is likely to affect their behavior.”

His book “Pygmalion in the Classroom” (1968), written with Lenore Jacobson, the principal of the California school in the study, caused an uproar. Some social psychologists faulted his data. Albert Shanker, the head of New York City’s largest teachers’ union, condemned it for blaming educators.

The cover of the book “Pygmalion in the Classroom.” Drawn on a chalkboard resting on an easel is the equation “2 + 2 = 5.”
The book “Pygmalion in the Classroom,” which argued that the way teachers view students affects their performance, caused an uproar in the world of education.

But over the next decade researchers accepted it as a model, and an inspiration. In 1978, Dr. Rosenthal and a Harvard colleague, the statistician Donald Rubin, analyzed 345 studies that drew on his original research, in settings as diverse as doctors’ offices, courtrooms and military training centers — and every one of them reaffirmed his findings.

“The same factors operate with bosses and their employees, therapists and their clients, or parents and children,” Dr. Rosenthal told The New York Times in 1986. “The more warmth and the more positive the expectations that are communicated, the better the person who receives those messages will do.”

In a related earlier experiment, he applied his work to himself. As part of his dissertation at the University of California, Los Angeles, he found that the way he posed certain questions and behaved toward certain subjects had a significant impact on the outcome of a study, an effect he called “experimenter bias.”

He was at times critical of how his research could be simplified and distorted, especially by reformers in fields like education and medicine. There was no single toolbox of gestures that a teacher or doctor could use to improve results, he said.

“It’s too simplistic to say that, for example, a physician is sending a message of rapport when he nods or tilts forward,” he told The Times. “When you freeze the moment and extract one part of what is going on from it, you lose the richness of the phenomenon.”

Robert Rosenthal was born on March 2, 1933, in Giessen, Germany, the son of Hermine (Kahn) and Julius Rosenthal, who sold clothing.

As the Nazis tightened their grip on Germany, the Rosenthals fled. They lived for a time in the British colony of Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, before arriving in the United States.

They settled in Queens, but in Robert’s senior year they moved to Los Angeles, where his father opened a department store. Robert studied psychology at U.C.L.A., receiving his bachelor’s degree in 1953 and his doctorate just three years later.

Dr. Rosenthal’s training and early career were in clinical psychology, with a special interest in schizophrenia. But without his intending it to, his work began to take on a social angle.

While teaching at the University of North Dakota in the late 1950s, he conducted an experiment in which a group of students was given two sets of rats. He told the students that one set was trained to be adept at running a maze, the other was not — even though both were identically trained. He then had the students run the rats through mazes.

As he expected, the “maze-bright” rats did significantly better. In a paper published in 1963, he concluded that the students had subconsciously favored the “maze-bright” rats in the way they handled them, giving them an advantage.

He married MaryLu Clayton in 1951. She died in 2010. Along with their daughter Ms. Mahasin, he is survived by another daughter, Roberta Rosenthal Hawkins; a son, David Clayton Rosenthal; and six grandchildren.

A candid photograph of Dr. Rosenthal, standing over a desk piled with papers, holding some papers in one hand. Behind him is a bookcase, also filled with stacks of papers.
Dr. Rosenthal in his office at Harvard in the 1960s. He was initially hired on a short-term basis to replace Timothy Leary, whose experimentations with LSD led to his dismissal.Credit…via John D Warren

In 1963, Harvard hired Dr. Rosenthal on a short-term, nontenured basis to help replace Timothy Leary, the clinical psychologist who had been fired over his experimentation with LSD and other drugs.

A year later, Dr. Rosenthal was offered a tenured job in a different field, social psychology, beating out a promising social psychologist named Stanley Milgram. Dr. Rosenthal suspected that he was chosen because Dr. Milgram had quickly been gaining notoriety for a series of now-famous experiments showing how easy it was to get one person to administer electric shocks to another, and that Harvard had been wary of promoting him.

In addition to his work on experimenter bias and interpersonal expectations, Dr. Rosenthal was a pioneer in meta-analysis, in which he developed a framework for combining multiple studies of the same phenomenon to reach better results.

He retired from Harvard in 1999, then moved to the University of California, Riverside, where he taught until 2018.

He retired from that job when his usually stellar evaluations by students began to decline, to just above average, he wrote in “Pillars of Social Psychology,” a 2022 book edited by Saul Kassin.

“Listening to the data,” Dr. Rosenthal added, “I went to the department chair that week and announced that I’m retiring.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/19/education/robert-rosenthal-dead.html?smid=url-share

Clay Risen is an obituaries reporter for The Times. Previously, he was a senior editor on the Politics desk and a deputy op-ed editor on the Opinion desk. He is the author, most recently, of “American Rye: A Guide to the Nation’s Original Spirit.” More about Clay RisenA version of this article appears in print on Jan. 21, 2024, Section A, Page 21 of the New York edition with the headline: Robert Rosenthal, 90, Psychologist Who Linked Subtle Cues to Behavior. O

Maryland’s economic woes predate pandemic, report finds

By Erin Cox. Washington Post Jan 4th 2024

Maryland’s economic woes predate the pandemic and “serve as flashing yellow lights for the state’s fiscal health,” according to a first-of-its-kind economic analysis released Wednesday by Comptroller Brooke E. Lierman’s office.

The report, written by state economists and policy researchers, delves into the seeming contradiction in Maryland’s economic indicators: The state has the nation’s lowest unemployment rate and highest median income, but it has barely grown since 2016 as the nation’s economy experienced a double-digit expansion.

The analysis found that Maryland lost lower- and middle-income workers to places with cheaper housing, and that a larger cohort of women left Maryland’s workforce compared with other states. The population growth sputtered a few years before economic and wage growth stalled in 2017, the study found.

“Private sector job growth has been stagnant. People are moving to Maryland from states with higher costs of living, but more Marylanders are moving away to states where cost of living is even lower,” Lierman (D) wrote in a letter accompanying the report.

The 110-page document doesn’t prescribe policy solutions but focuses attention on the state’s affordable housing problems and lack of access to child care at a time when Maryland leaders are scrutinizing weaknesses in the state economy.

Maryland’s state government faces budget gaps that are projected to widen from $761 million next fiscal year to $2.7 billion four years later. The Democrats who dominate the state government are looking for ways to raise hundreds of millions of dollars annually to pay for their priorities, particularly a sweeping education plan and transportation projects.

Maryland’s budget troubles revive debate about taxing the rich

Gov. Wes Moore (D) began publicly sounding alarms this past summer, as Lierman’s report was underway, saying that Maryland’s “economic engine does not support our ambitions.” His own economic council, created in June, is expected to release an analysis within the next few weeks.

Lierman’s analysis used publicly available economic data as well as interviews with residents and business owners to build what she called an audit of the state’s economic performance that also “illustrates the experience of Marylanders as they navigate an evolving economy.”Share this articleNo subscription required to readShare

Among the more striking observations: 100,000 women have dropped out of the workforce since the pandemic, most of them at a peak working age and at a rate at least twice as high as the national average.

Between 2019 and 2021, 2 percent of women ages 16-24 and 25-34 dropped out of the labor force in Maryland. Nationally, these figures were 1 percent for women under 25 and 0.4 percent for those 25-34. Part of the explanation, the report says, is that industries that disproportionately employ women were hardest hit by the pandemic. But at the same time, child-care costs rose dramatically in Maryland, complicating the math for mothers considering returning to the workforce, Lierman said.

Between 2019 and 2023, the average annual cost of child care increased by at least 14 percent and as much as 30 percent, the report found.

“If women do not return to the labor force, Maryland’s labor pool will remain shallow, making it difficult for employers to fill jobs and for the state’s economy to grow,” the report said. In an interview, Lierman added that “if businesses cannot hire the employees and the team members that they need, then it’s even more difficult for the private sector to grow.”

Among the other findings the report highlighted:

  • From the fourth quarter of 2016 to the first quarter of 2023, Maryland’s gross domestic product grew 1.6 percent. The U.S. GDP grew 13.9 percent during the same time. Neighboring Virginia’s grew at 11.2 percent and Pennsylvania’s at 6.6 percent during the period.
  • Nationwide there are 1.3 job openings for every job seeker; in Maryland there are 3.1 job openings.
  • Part of that mismatch is because fewer people ages 25 to 44 are seeking work. Disproportionately, those people are women. “While labor participation of both men and women has fallen in Maryland, the decline among women has been relatively larger compared to the nation, most census regions, and most neighboring states,” the report says.
  • Survey data gathered by researchers “indicate that household responsibilities such as childcare and health issues are contributing factors especially for women opting to leave the traditional labor force,” according to the report.
  • Opioid use has contributed to lower participation in the labor market.

Lierman said she launched the report in order to synthesize multiple government data sets and use the expertise of economists and policy workers in the comptroller’s office to help define the problems facing the state.

“I believe the information that we have in the agency is incredibly powerful and fascinating,” Lierman said. “But if we don’t bring it to the public in a way that is understandable and usable, then you know what? What good are we doing?”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/01/03/maryland-economy-lags-women-workforce/

How the battle for democracy will be fought — and won

By the Editorial Board.  Washington Post Dec 22nd 2023

In September last year, three days after widespread protests broke out across Iran over the death of a young woman detained for not fully covering her hair with a hijab, the authorities blocked the internet.

Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old from Iran’s Kurdistan province, had been visiting Tehran with her family when the morality police arrested her. Her family says she was beaten in jail, and she died in a hospital on Sept. 16. Around the country, people took to the streets, led by women demanding the right to dress as they chose.

The government cut off internet access in parts of Kurdistan, Tehran and elsewhere, according to NetBlocks, which tracks internet outages. Iran’s theocratic rulers apparently intended to keep demonstrators in the dark about protests spreading in neighboring towns and cities. Both WhatsApp and Instagram were shut down.

But a little-known channel helped millions of Iranians stay in the know. A nongovernmental organization in Los Angeles, NetFreedom Pioneers, had created a method to bypass the internet entirely and broadcast files — text, audio or video — from commercial satellites to anyone with a receiver dish. It is called Toosheh, or Knapsack. The group collected photos and news reports from social media platforms and elsewhere, uploaded them to a satellite and then down to homes in blacked-out Iran. The news was easily shareable on a flash drive.

Toosheh, founded by an Iranian émigré, brought fresh and uncensored information into a censored country, offering a ray of hope in the struggle between forces of dictatorship and democracy.

For more than a decade and a half, autocracy has been steadily advancing around the globe. Dictators routinely arrest their foes, including those demanding basic rights such as freedom of expression. But they have modernized their methods, taking control of the internet and using it to broadcast disinformation while censoring the truth. They have forced independent media to close and aimed surveillance at social media and the people who use it. They have created firewalls and imposed internet shutdowns. Freedom House found in its latest annual survey of political rights and civil liberties that democracy has been in decline for 17 years — and one of the biggest drivers has been attacks on freedom of expression.

But there are ways to confront the forces of authoritarianism, especially on the information battlefield, where the future of democracy may be decided for millions of people. The stakes are enormous: Will open societies thrive and grow, or will more of the globe fall under the sway of dictatorships such as the one in China, where information manipulation is the norm and surveillance technology watches over everyone, all the time?

Breaking through the firewalls



What makes Toosheh effective is its simplicity. It uses existing technology and current set-top boxes and commercial satellite receivers. Although Iran’s government has tried to prohibit ownership of satellite dishes, the ban is barely enforced, and they have proliferated. Evan Firoozi, executive director of NetFreedom Pioneers, estimated that Toosheh has reached 10 percent of the households in Iran, which has a population of about 90 million.


Every day, Toosheh recipients can download 1.2 gigabytes of data an hour for up to four hours. The files are scrambled but reassembled on arrival into their native formats, such as videos, photos or texts, transferrable directly to a flash drive. The system requires nothing new — the satellites are already in position, and NetFreedom Pioneers can be up and running in any part of the world in less than 24 hours. It is rapidly scalable. While Iran has tried periodically to jam the satellite signals in some places, it hasn’t been able to block the transmissions entirely or permanently.

“One of the main reasons for the protests to spread around the country is that people are hearing that other people are protesting,” Mr. Firoozi told us. “So they get the courage to go out and start protesting.” Toosheh delivers straight news so people can see what is happening elsewhere. The project could be used for closed societies outside Iran, such as Afghanistan under the Taliban, as well as for populations caught in wars or natural disasters.

Another promising approach is known as internet circumvention, allowing people online to pierce firewalls, evade censorship and gain free access to independent information from around the globe. Not long ago, circumvention techniques, such as virtual private networks (VPNs), which create a separate, protected tunnel through the internet, were a niche technology with an uneven record. Now they have improved, and the number of users has exploded.

From 2012 to 2019, Radio Free Asia nurtured an in-house pilot program, the Open Technology Fund, to find ways to evade censorship and surveillance for both its audiences and its journalists. In 2019, the effort was spun out into an independent nonprofit, with congressional funding of $40 million this year, working to bolster circumvention tools and protect the security and privacy of users. Previously, users looked to circumvention tools only when there was a crisis — there would be a spike, then usage would settle back down. “In the last two years, that has completely changed,” Laura Cunningham, the fund’s director, told us. The circumvention tools, apps such as Psiphon and Lantern, have become an everyday reality. As many as 1 in 4 adults in Iran are using them. Worldwide, the number of average monthly users of the circumvention tools supported by the Open Technology Fund has soared from 9 million to 40 million.

When Russia invaded Ukraine, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty saw demand for its coverage soar, about half of it from Russia and half from Ukraine. (The organization suspended operations inside Russia following years of pressure from the government, relocating staff to Prague and elsewhere.) To avoid censorship or interference from Moscow, the Open Technology Fund scrambled in a matter of months to build a system of mirror sites that would allow users in Russia to seamlessly access the RFE/RL news stories from social media without using a complex VPN. The sites are essentially reproductions, and users from within Russia can get to them unimpeded when they click on short URLs. They are now in place for 342 websites of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, assuring that such outlets as Voice of America and RFE/RL can continue to reach audiences in closed societies. The mirrors remove the burden from the user, making circumvention much easier for millions of readers and viewers.

Helping protesters see one another

In China’s authoritarian system, the knowledge of protests — what happened, where and when — is prohibited information. The government stopped publishing data about “mass incidents” more than a decade ago, and independent researchers who collected it have been arrested. China fears contagion: If people find out others are protesting, they might be inspired to follow. There are many protests in China, but the censors go to great effort to scrub them from news and social media, especially when they start to get shared.

All through the summer and early autumn last year, protests took place against China’s rigid “zero covid” policy, which imposed draconian lockdowns. Then, on Nov. 24, came a fire in Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang region in western China that is home to a persecuted minority, the ethnic Uyghurs. Around 8 p.m., a high-rise residential building erupted in flames. With the area locked down for covid, at least 10 people — and maybe as many as 44 — were killed, trapped in the building. The blaze deepened the anger in the country.

Two days later, students at a university in Nanjing began holding up blank sheets of paper, a protest tactic to evade censorship or arrest while also mocking it. The white-paper protests spread to other universities, and then demonstrations broke out in major cities. Freedom House’s China Dissent Monitor found 75 protest events that week. Social media posts, protest signs and other images spread online faster than China’s censors could scrub them; people learned about others’ grievances, protests and dissent.

A month earlier, a courageous dissident, Peng Lifa, had hung protest banners from the Sitong Bridge in Beijing just as the Communist Party was convening for its congress held every five years. He criticized zero-covid policies and demanded political reform, including the ouster of President Xi Jinping. After the Urumqi fire, in demonstrations in Beijing, Shanghai and Chengdu, protesters invoked language from Mr. Peng’s banner, including “We don’t want lockdowns, we want to eat.” The result was a decentralized movement — people were communicating indirectly through signs and slogans.

China’s security services rounded up students in the white-paper protests. But it was too late. The movement had rattled China’s leadership. On Dec. 7, Mr. Xi abruptly reversed the zero-covid policy.

A key takeaway: Seeing people actively protest inspires others who share their dissatisfaction. Making this happen is a goal of the China Dissent Monitor, a project that Freedom House started last year. Using artificial intelligence and other methods, it harvests and preserves information about dissent from multiple sources before Chinese censors erase it and charts the events in a database, creating an open record. While it is still difficult to get the information disseminated inside China, the group is trying different channels, including VPNs. The China Dissent Monitor has also built a gallery of photos and videos of demonstrations inside the country, a kind of Instagram of Chinese protest that is a powerful tool to show China’s people the breadth of activism — just what the government wants to hide.

During the white-paper protests, Li Ying, a Chinese artist in his 30s living in Italy, known as “Teacher Li,” had a huge impact. Out of reach of China’s censors, he collected protest information and images sent to him on Twitter, then broadcast them in a stream of reports in real time, becoming a singular point of contact for those who wanted to know what was happening. Through Mr. Li, the protesters were able to “see” one another. Although Twitter is blocked in China by the Great Firewall, people on the mainland can access it through VPNs. According to the Wall Street Journal, his posts from late November to mid-December last year had more than 1.3 billion views, a brilliant example of circumvention at work.

Mr. Li wrote an open letter to the Chinese authorities in the early days of the protests, saying he had received death threats and insisting they back off. “I’m not afraid of you anymore,” he wrote. “Don’t try to silence me.” He warned he would be replaced by others if anything happened to him.

Toward a new playbook

While these efforts are pushing back against autocracy, democracies need to do far more.

Russia and China, friends “without limits,” often assert that democracy has run its course, that it is incapable of governing, that authoritarian models work better. President Vladimir Putin of Russia told a conservative audience recently that the ideas of the United States have become “decrepit” and added, “We see it, and everyone sees it now. It is getting out of control and is simply dangerous for others.” Both Russia and China have launched fusillades of disinformation intended to confuse people, besmirch democracy and subvert it from within. For example, Facebook announced recently that it had removed 4,789 fake accounts based in China that were impersonating Americans and intended to create chaos in the lead-up to next year’s U.S. presidential election. The illiberal regimes are at war with the democracies on the battlefield of information and ideas. The democracies are taking a battering — and need to respond.

Sanctions are slow and don’t often result in change. For instance, the United States in August sanctioned 101 officials in Belarus for falsifying results of the 2020 election there, including visa bans on judges who sentenced people to prison for social media posts. But the Belarusian dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, went right on arresting people and imprisoning them.

The United States has a well-established set of programs to advance democracy, overseen by the U.S. Agency for International Development, the State Department and the National Endowment for Democracy. They provide training in independent media, draft laws, bolster civil society and encourage free elections around the world. There’s also important work in journalism from the outlets under the U.S. Agency for Global Media, such as Radio Free Asia, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Voice of America, which are designed to offer straight news and information and thus contribute to advancing democratic ideals. They are essential. But the existing U.S. government democracy effort, about $3 billion a year, less than four-tenths of a percent of the defense budget, is grossly under-resourced compared with the investments made by Russia and China.

It has long been true that the strongest argument for democracy around the world is the example of the United States. But the showcase is no longer enough. Powerful dictatorships that rely on deceit and manipulation are using new tools and technologies. Democracies need new thinking to respond.

One place to start is to build an uninhibited rebuttal of the narrative offered by dictatorships. A counternarrative must assert the basic values and ideals of democracy in a way that is credible and persuasive. The world’s democracies should create a system to fight back that can speak plainly and consistently about the inherent advantages of democratic systems, while admitting the imperfections, and use creative ways to illuminate the flaws and depredations of authoritarian regimes.

This will require hard work by the Biden administration, Congress and democratic allies around the world. It must go beyond summits and talking.Perhaps there is a model in the way that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation reimagined problem-solving in global public health. Or perhaps existing U.S. organizations — such as Freedom House, the National Endowment for Democracy, the Agency for Global Media — and similar groups here and abroad can, together, build a renewed campaign. It will require a major boost in resources. It must speak with absolute clarity; foreign audiences will be sensitive to spin and put off by clumsy sloganeering.

The mission is no less than explaining to the world why freedom matters to everyone, every day.

Authoritarian regimes often suffer brain drain. Open societies should leverage this for a renewed battle for democracy, taking advantage of talent spread around the world. Diasporas are rich with knowledge and should be brought into the effort.

Another idea is to focus more urgently on countries that are sliding backward but have not yet fallen entirely into dictatorship. It makes sense to catch them sooner rather than later. Remember the shining moment when Sudan’s population seemed headed for a democratic opening after the overthrow of dictator Omar Hassan al-Bashir? Could more have been done to save Sudan’s future for democracy before it fell into civil war? Often there is a fragile and rapidly closing window for action.

These are a few ideas, but the most important message is that autocracy is on the march in today’s world, and democracy must confront this profound threat.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/12/21/autocracy-democracy-internet-circumvention/

7 life lessons I’ll rely on this new year

By Steven Petrow.  Washington Post January 8th 2024

Before I slammed the door on 2023 — good riddance! — I took some time to reflect on it. Specifically, what useful lessons, insights and practices can I pack up and carry into the new year to help live with more balance, resilience, even joy?L

If there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s that next year will bring its own roadblocks and detours, turns and twists.

Here’s hoping some of the items in my baggage will help you navigate the 366 days of 2024. (Yep, it’s a leap year.)1

Connection is key

You know that saying, “It’s not the destination but the journey”? Over the summer, I heard a friend update it to, “It’s not the destination or the journey, but the companionship.”

I don’t think this friend knew the work of the early 20th-century French sociologist Émile Durkheim, who coined the term “collective effervescence,” believing that group activities excite and unify us. If Durkheim were alive today, I’m certain he’d point to a Taylor Swift or Beyoncé or Cher concert as the perfect example. Next best: Plan a dance party, or join a choral group or a sports team.2

Kindness is contagious

We take it as a given that bad behavior easily goes viral — just look at “copycat” crimes or mob mentality. Why can’t we make good behavior spread just as fast?

Katty Huertas/The PostStart 2024 with practical tips and smart solutions for your health, technology, travel, food, money, home and more. Easy wins, good habits, better living. Elevate your daily life with expertise from The Washington Post. Find it all here.End of carousel

According to Jamil Zaki, a professor of psychology at Stanford University, it’s certainly possible. “We find that people imitate not only the particulars of positive actions, but also the spirit underlying them,” he wrote in Scientific American several years ago.“This implies … that kindness itself is contagious, and that … it can cascade across people, taking on new forms along the way.”

For instance, he found that people made larger charitable gifts when they believed people around them were contributing generously than when they thought those others were stingy.Share this articleNo subscription required to readShare

Even when people cannot afford to donate, he learned “an individual’s kindness can nonetheless trigger people to spread positivity in other ways.” So consider paying for the next person’s coffee or meal in the drive-through, or offer to help a neighbor with snow shoveling or taking out the trash.3

Gratitude is powerful

While gratitude has become a well-worn buzzword these days, study after study shows how it improves our lives. Psychologist and author Robert Emmons wrote: “Gratitude gives us that connection. It gives us that sense of transcendence, the sense of celebration, but also the awareness of the finiteness of life.” Fortunately, Emmons’s approach doesn’t require a high bar, as he recommends keeping a gratitude journal — a simple notebook — to regularly record the things for which we’re grateful. At one point I feared I’d have nothing to be grateful for, given a year in which my parents died and I separated from my husband. But I did have things. And writing them down in a gratitude journal helped me, and may do the same for you, science says.4

Vulnerability is hard but worth it

Steven Overly, 35, experienced sudden hearing loss two years ago. At first the reporter and podcast host feared for his ability to work and socialize. But he found that talking about his disability and then writing about it had two surprising benefits. “I found … a sense of purpose in what I had done, that making myself vulnerable and sharing this experience has actually helped people in a very direct way.” In “Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead,” researcher and writer Brené Brown wrote: “Vulnerability is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy, and creativity. It is the source of hope, empathy, accountability, and authenticity.”5

Silence speaks volumes

Hush! You might actually hear someone. So many people have told me they don’t feel seen or heard — it’s a veritable “epidemic of invisibility.” I understand the pain caused by feeling unimportant or left out, leading to hurt and anger, because I’ve experienced it, too. So how do we begin to change these feelings of invisibility? Start listening, and I don’t mean pretending to listen. According to the U.S. Institute of Peace, “active listening is a way of listening and responding to another person that improves mutual understanding.” In practice, it starts with making eye contact and focusing on the other person; leaning in or nodding to let them know you’re paying attention; and allowing the other person to finish before you respond or, worse, interrupt.6

Doing nothing is challenging but rewarding

The practice of “doing nothing” has been popularized by several recent books, one of which is “Niksen: Embracing the Dutch Art of Doing Nothing” by Olga Mecking. The Dutch word “niksen” is “doing nothing on purpose, without a purpose.” It’s different from self-care activities like yoga, breadmaking or volunteering, all of which have an ostensible goal and require doing something. Mecking argues that doing nothing resists the pressure many of us feel to schedule our days for maximum productivity. In Canada, meditation teacher and author Jeff Warren leads a weekly online group called the Do Nothing Project, which brings together a couple hundred souls “doing not much together.” I thought doing nothing would make me nuts; after two years, it’s helped me find inner calm and equanimity. Try letting your mind wander. (If you want to do this at home, go to jeffwarren.org and scroll to the middle of the page.)7

Joy is everywhere

Last month I finished writing a book about my search for joy in stormy times. One of the biggest aha moments was the discovery of just how many different kinds of joy exist. It’s more than the ecstatic “bursting with joy” notion we tend to think of. There’s serene joy, sexual joy, even schadenfreude (the sneaky joy found in another person’s misfortune). Joy also goes by many names, including delight, exuberance, pleasure, peace, contentedness, amusement, wonder and relief. It surrounds us, and lives within us. Open your heart, and choose it when you see it.

So as I pack up that ragged duffel bag labeled “2023” and prepare to toss it into history, I’ll be plucking these few precious lessons out first to take with me in my shiny new spinner bag named “2024.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2024/01/08/life-lessons-gratitude-connection-joy/?utm_campaign=wp_the_optimist&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_optimist

Living with Our Pandemic Trade-Offs


A boy throwing away a face mask in a garbage can already cluttered with masks.

 Dhruv Khullar September 18, 2022 New Yorker

Isaiah Berlin, the twentieth-century philosopher, spent much of his life arguing that we can’t have it all. In any weighty societal matter, worthwhile values invariably clash: liberty and equality, justice and mercy, impartiality and love. Such collisions, Berlin wrote, are “an intrinsic, irremovable element in human life,” and realizing some ends “must inevitably involve the sacrifice of others.” But he also argued that we can soften the impact of this “value pluralism.” Our aim should be to “maintain a precarious equilibrium that will prevent the occurrence of desperate situations, of intolerable choices—that is the first requirement for a decent society.”

During the pandemic, few issues have crystallized the trade-offs we face as the disruptions to education have. This month, more than a million children returned to New York City’s public schools. They joined students around the country who, for the first time since 2019, started the school year without major covid restrictions: no universal mask mandates, physical-distancing protocols, compulsory quarantines, or remote learning. But they are among a cohort that has experienced historic losses in educational achievement. According to data from the Department of Education, reading scores for the nation’s nine-year-olds declined this year by the largest margin in three decades; their math scores dropped for the first time on record. These findings are especially troubling in light of research showing that third-grade competencies have a pivotal influence on life outcomes, such as the likelihood of graduating from high school, the risk of being incarcerated, and the ability to earn a living wage.

Some of this decline was unavoidable—the result of a once-in-a-century virus. But our choices mattered. In the spring of 2020, nearly all American schools switched to remote learning, in an attempt to mitigate the worst of desperate situations—overrun hospitals, rationed ventilators, mass death. Since then, however, there’s been wide variation in how long and how frequently schools shut their doors. The result is clear: the more time students spent remote, the more their education suffered. According to an analysis from Harvard, the American In­stitutes for Research, and NWEA, children in “high-­poverty schools” who spent most of 2021 learning remotely lost more than half a year’s worth of instruction. The effects were most devastating for Black and Hispanic children and for those who were already struggling academically.

This was a trade-off we chose—mortgaging the quality of education in an effort to protect parents, teachers, communities, and (to a lesser extent) children themselves from the coronavirus. Now the U.S. seems to have arrived at another judgment: the value of normalcy exceeds that of caution. “covid no longer controls our lives,” President Joe Biden said this month, and most Americans agree. In a recent poll exploring which of fifteen issues voters feel are most important ahead of the midterm elections, the coronavirus ranked fifteenth. Even among Americans who identify as “very liberal”—the most covid-cautious political demographic—worries about the coronavirus have plummeted. Last week, Governor Kathy Hochul allowed New York’s covid-19 state of emergency to expire. (Connecticut and Rhode Island are the only states in the Northeast with ongoing emergency declarations.)

Part of this shift reflects a genuine reduction in the virus’s toll. With vaccines, boosters, antivirals, monoclonal antibodies, and more than eighty per cent of Americans having been infected, covid’s case-fatality rate has fallen significantly, and I.C.U.s once overflowing with coronavirus patients now care for a pre-pandemic variety of illnesses. But much of it simply reflects the passage of time—a once novel threat fading into the background.

Owing to a lack of congressional funding and a desire to move past the “acute emergency phase,” the Biden Administration is taking a less central role in managing the pandemic. It recently paused a program that sent out free coronavirus tests, and soon it will stop paying for vaccines and treatments. Instead, these products will be purchased by insurers, who will pass the cost on to consumers through higher premiums; people without coverage will have to purchase the products on their own. covid will become just another of the many diseases that afflict Americans—a circumstance that says more about our social and political choices than about our medical reality. The U.S. continues to suffer more than two thousand covid deaths a week; it records more than sixty thousand new cases every day, and these represent a fraction of the true number of infections. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than half the country has high or moderate levels of viral spread, and many experts anticipate another covid surge this winter, possibly alongside a brutal influenza outbreak. (Australia, which often acts as a bellwether for the U.S., just had its worst flu season in five years.) Meanwhile, it’s increasingly evident that infections can have lasting health and economic effects: by one estimate, covid-related illnesses have reduced the U.S. labor force by half a million people. And many elderly and immunocompromised people remain at risk for serious illness, even after immunization.

Last month, the Food and Drug Administration authorized a redesign of covid vaccines. The new “bivalent” boosters target both the original strain and the hyper-contagious Omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA.5. The updated shots should, theoretically, offer better protection against the versions of the virus currently circulating, but because they were authorized on the basis of data in mice, instead of in humans—a decision prioritizing speed over certainty—it’s unclear how much benefit they will provide in the real world. The White House signalled that, going forward, Americans will probably need only an annual booster that takes aim at the variant du jour; that recommendation, though, seems based less on rigorous data than on a wish to assuage a weary public.

For much of the pandemic, covid discourse assumed a stark political polarity. Conservatives advanced arguments rooted in freedom and autonomy; liberals focussed on health equity and communal well-being. For better or worse, the two camps seem to have coalesced around a shared understanding: the coronavirus is here to stay, and it’s up to individuals to decide how to live with it. But, still, there are no universal truths. The value pluralism that Isaiah Berlin identified in societies is now roiling within individuals. On some days, at some events, for some people, the risks feel worth it. In other moments, they don’t. These internal tensions are inescapable—part and parcel of our own precarious equilibriums. ♦

Published in the print edition of the September 26, 2022, issue, with the headline “Pandemic Choices.”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/09/26/living-with-our-pandemic-trade-offs

Has School Become Optional?

A silhouette of a kid sitting on a desk revealing two people walking.

By Alec MacGillis January 8, 2024 The New Yorker

On a cold, clear weekday morning in early December, Shepria Johnson pulled up to a small house in Ecorse, Michigan, in an S.U.V. with a decal on the driver’s door which read “Student Wholeness Team.” She looked at an app on her phone. It was her third of ten visits that morning, and she was there to check on a girl and a boy, eleven and nine, who had missed enough days of school to put them on a list of “chronically absent” students at Grandport Academy, in Ecorse, an industrial suburb of Detroit.

In case there was no one home, Johnson wrote the students’ names on a form letter and addressed the envelope to “the parent of Jisaiah and King.” She wrote “parent,” avoiding the plural as she had seen schools do. “If it’s a one-parent household, that might get touchy.”

There was someone home. Kuanticka Prude opened the door; behind her were some of her eight children. Cats darted up and down the front steps, which were garlanded with Christmas decorations. Johnson introduced herself and said that she was concerned about Jisaiah’s and King’s attendance and wanted to see if there was anything the family needed to help them get to school.

“This is King,” Prude said, gesturing to a slender boy with wary eyes, “and this is Jisaiah”—a girl with her hair in thick side buns. Prude, a friendly thirty-two-year-old with multiple nose and lip studs, said she had woken the two up that morning, but they had gone back to bed, assuming she would be at her job, as a security guard at the Fillmore Detroit entertainment venue. By the time she discovered that they hadn’t left for school, it seemed too late to send them. She had set up a nanny cam to see what was going on at the house when she was away, she said, but the cats had chewed it up. She hadn’t been aware until recently how many days they had missed; she had noticed some attempted calls from their school but hadn’t realized what they were about.

“I tell them, ‘Y’all are going to get me in trouble for this,’ ” she told Johnson.

“This is not anything like truancy. We come from a place of support,” Johnson said, in her characteristically upbeat tone. “But, yes, it could lead to that, if they’re not in school, so we want to make sure they understand.”

Back in the S.U.V., Johnson’s composure briefly fell away. “Wow, they are too little to be skipping,” she said under her breath.

Johnson is part of an increasingly popular approach to combatting truancy: she makes home visits to learn why children are missing school and then works with families and schools to get them back on track. She oversees a team of six people in southeastern Michigan who are employed by a Baltimore company called Concentric Educational Solutions, which has contracts with seven small school districts in the Detroit area. Since 2021, she has been driving back and forth across the Downriver towns southwest of the city, a vast expanse of dollar stores, pot dispensaries, and manufacturing plants—some active, some abandoned. She passes the Marathon refinery, the Great Lakes Steel Works, and the giant Ford Rouge Complex, where this fall she could see the picket line of the United Auto Workers strike.

The strike ended. The crisis that Johnson was dealing with, on the other hand, seemed never-ending. Absenteeism has long been a problem in the Detroit area, as in other places with high poverty rates, but since the coronavirus pandemic it has worsened dramatically. Nationwide, the rate of chronic absenteeism—defined as missing at least ten per cent of school days, or eighteen in a year—nearly doubled between 2018-19 and 2021-22, to twenty-eight per cent of students, according to data compiled for the Associated Press by Thomas Dee, a professor of education at Stanford. Michigan’s rate was thirty-nine per cent, the third highest among states. States that have reported data for the most recent school year showed only minimal improvement; some cities have rates of more than forty per cent.

Absenteeism underlies much of what has beset young people in recent years, including falling school achievement, deteriorating mental health—exacerbated by social isolation—and elevated youth violence and car thefts, some occurring during school hours. But schools are using relatively little of the billions of dollars that they received in federal pandemic-recovery funds to address absenteeism. The issue has also attracted surprisingly little attention from leaders, elected or otherwise, and education coverage in the national media has focussed heavily on culture-war fights.

This void created an opportunity for a fledgling company like Concentric. Founded in 2010, by David Heiber, a former school administrator, the company grew slowly. It had only about twenty employees before covid ignited the business. Concentric now has more than a hundred employees, and it recently received a five-million-dollar investment from a social-venture-capital firm to fuel expansion.

“Right place, right time, right pandemic,” Heiber told me sardonically.

Kuanticka Prude had her first child when she was thirteen, so she finished her education at the city’s maternity academy. Before that, though, she’d liked going to school. “It was fun! Who wanted to be at home and listen to your mom complain all day?” she told me, when I spoke with her after Johnson’s visit. “But, then, we didn’t have covid and cities being shut down.”

During the pandemic, Detroit’s public schools, where her kids were enrolled at the time, remained closed to in-person instruction for nearly a year. “They did school online. I hated it,” she said. “They took it as a joke most of the time, playing in class, because they felt like they were at home and they could do that.” After the family moved to Ecorse, last summer, the mind-set lingered. “They got too comfortable at home,” she said.

This is a dynamic that Johnson has repeatedly encountered. When classes were virtual, students would log on some days, and some days they wouldn’t. The world did not end. For parents, it might seem easier that way. No dragging kids out of bed before daybreak. No wrestling them into proper clothes. No getting them to the bus stop as one’s own work waited. “You were able to just do the things you needed to do,” Johnson said. “Everybody was comfortable. It was, ‘I can go to my computer, my baby is in my room on the computer. We’re good.’ ”

After that hiatus, relearning old behaviors was hard. “If I were a child, and I could stay at home on my computer, in my room, and play with my little toys on the side, pick up the game for your break or lunchtime, how hard is it to sit in a school building for seven hours?” she said. “It takes us to help build those habits, and I don’t think just one person can do it alone.”

Some parents, unimpressed by what instruction consisted of during remote learning, didn’t see missing school as that consequential. Some simply liked having their kids around. “You’re dealing with a different generation here. This is a parent generation that plays video games with their children,” Steven McGhee, the superintendent of the Harper Woods district, another Concentric client near Detroit, said. “When we were kids, we were out of the house and at school. There was no option. This became optional.”

Even before covid, some students in the Detroit area had been able to choose online-only learning as an offering from public or charter schools. Since the pandemic, many schools have made it easier for students to try to catch up from missed days with online material.

The spectrum from in-person to virtual to nothing at all can get pretty fuzzy. One early afternoon, I saw an eight-year-old boy with headphones on standing outside a house in Ecorse, playing a video game on a tablet. His mother had died of a heroin overdose two years earlier, and his father said that he had enrolled his son in an online academy, because their housing situation was uncertain. Usually, there were three hours of instruction daily, he said, but the Wi-Fi hadn’t been working properly. “He’s done for the day,” his father said.

Families faced other hurdles as well. One student’s father had died a month earlier, and in the previous six months two of his grandparents had also died; his mother was suffering from heart disease that prevented her from working, and she could no longer afford school clothes. Johnson alerted the student’s principal, who had a special fund for such needs.

The mother of a middle-school girl had been in a car crash; when a Concentric employee visited, the mother had trouble even coming to the door, and she explained that she couldn’t get her daughter to school anymore. A high-school boy had moved in with his grandmother, but he was sleeping on the porch for lack of a bed; Concentric bought him one. A superintendent purchased a washer and dryer after hearing from Concentric that some students weren’t coming to school because they didn’t have any clean clothes. “Once you have these conversations, you know that there are real-life events that happen, there are real-life circumstances, where they’re just not able,” Johnson said.

Still, there were circumstances in which negligence did seem to be an issue. Johnson, who is thirty-four and has three kids, could feel her natural sympathy being tested: “I’ve had a parent tell me, ‘Well, hey, she wasn’t there because of my life problems.’ I get it, but you can’t just leave a student out of school because you have issues.”

Sometimes parents asked Johnson if she was a truant officer, and she would reply, “No, I’m a professional student advocate,” which was what Concentric called its outreach workers. “If you’re a truant officer, they’re defensive,” she told me. “They automatically assume you’re here to get them in trouble.”

Within the U.S., the concept of mandatory schooling can be traced to the seventeenth century, when the Puritans of Massachusetts positioned it as fundamental to Christian society, but this tenet was challenged by the Industrial Revolution, as children went to work in the mills. After Massachusetts instituted compulsory-schooling policies in the eighteen-forties and fifties, enforcement was spotty. But, in 1873, the state passed a law requiring attendance between the ages of eight and twelve, for at least twenty weeks a year. The law was enforced by agents of the school committee—truant officers—with fines of up to five dollars per week. Sixteen years later, the age range was expanded to fourteen, and a year after that the required term became thirty weeks a year. W. E. B. Du Bois, reflecting on his upbringing in western Massachusetts in the eighteen-seventies and eighties, emphasized his school routine. “I was brought up from earliest years with the idea of regular attendance at school,” he wrote. “This was partly because the schools of Great Barrington were near at hand, simple but good, well-taught, and truant laws were enforced.”

By the 1890-91 school year, more than two hundred of Massachusetts’s three hundred and fifty-one towns had an average daily attendance of ninety per cent, and only eleven were below eighty per cent. During the following decades, mandatory schooling spread nationwide. William Reese, a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, found that just six per cent of adolescents were in high school in 1890 but that by 1930 half of them were. By 1950, attendance was so universal that those who weren’t in school were called dropouts. “By the early twentieth century, the truth is that you’re supposed to be in school, and, in the long reach of history, that’s a remarkable fact,” Reese told me. “It became a universal norm. Other European nations sort of caught up eventually, but America was in the vanguard of this.”

Cities often employed truant officers, who roamed the streets searching for children to corral, and repeat offenders risked being brought to juvenile court. But in recent decades many areas have moved away from legal remedies, following a general shift toward less punitive juvenile justice. In addition, experts—citing psychology literature and evidence from states that still meted out consequences—argued that threats were unlikely to be effective. “Punitive rather than positive is not the best approach,” Michael Gottfried, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, said.

Enforcement of state truancy laws has grown rarer. In August, Missouri’s highest court affirmed the sentencing of two parents to at least a week in jail for their young children’s absences, but most of the movement has been in the other direction. In 2019, for instance, New Mexico removed the role of district attorneys in enforcing attendance. (The state, which had some of the longest school closures, saw its chronic absenteeism rates more than double after the pandemic, to forty per cent, the second-highest rate among states, after Alaska.)

The case of Kamala Harris is instructive. As the San Francisco district attorney in the mid-two-thousands, she made headlines for prosecuting parents of extremely truant students. “I believe that a child going without an education is tantamount to a crime,” Harris said, during her run for state attorney general, in 2010. “So, I decided I was going to start prosecuting parents for truancy.” During that campaign, she pushed for a statewide law that made it a misdemeanor for parents if their kids were chronically absent, punishable by a fine of up to two thousand dollars or a year in jail. In 2013, the state amended the law, giving school principals more leeway to excuse absences.

When Harris ran for the 2020 Democratic nomination for President, she received heavy criticism for her efforts. She expressed contrition, saying that she had hoped the law would simply prod districts to offer more resources to aid truant students. “My regret is that I have now heard stories where, in some jurisdictions, D.A.s have criminalized the parents,” she said. “And I regret that that has happened.”

In recent years, however, efforts to fight absenteeism have tended to involve nudges, not threats. In 2015, Todd Rogers, a behavioral scientist at Harvard, co-founded EveryDay Labs, which sent letters and text messages to families with reminders about the importance of school, and statistics about how their children’s attendance compared with classmates’. Parents could also respond to a chatbot about challenges that they were facing in getting their kids to school. The company was hired by some fifty school districts, but its approach was most effective with milder cases of absenteeism, less so with more severe ones.

David Heiber, Concentric’s founder, is an advocate of direct intervention, perhaps because he wishes he had received it when he was young. Heiber, who is forty-seven, was brought up in Delaware by his maternal grandparents. He had some contact with his mother, a white woman who suffered from alcoholism, but he did not know his father, who was Black, until he was an adult. His grandfather, whom he called Dad, was a truck driver, and he and Heiber’s grandmother—Mom—provided him with a stable middle-class upbringing. In high school, he was a track star who attracted scholarship offers.

In his senior year, his grandfather had a fatal heart attack while Christmas shopping. Heiber went back to school just two days later and, receiving no social-work support—although a gym teacher let him play Ping-Pong for hours on end—he “spun out of control,” he told me. He was expelled from school, convicted of burglary, and sentenced to some five years in prison. While he was incarcerated, his grandmother died of cancer. “I just decided, Something has to happen,” he said. “I got to do something.”

He earned his G.E.D. behind bars and a judge released him after twenty-seven months, on the condition that he enroll in college. He attended Lincoln University, a historically Black institution in Pennsylvania, and got a job teaching high school in Baltimore, which he did for a year before taking an administrative position at a different local high school. But, in 2006, he faced one set of misdemeanor charges related to a breakup, which were later dropped, and another set, he told me, for his role interceding in a fight between students at a high school in Washington, D.C., which he had been visiting as an observer. That case resulted in four years of probation. “It was a rough period,” Heiber said. “Very few people go in a straight trajectory.”

In 2007, he moved to Washington, D.C., to become the director of student services for a small group of charter schools. One day, Heiber and some colleagues were wondering what to do about truant students, and it occurred to him that one lived just across the street from the school. He suggested going to the student’s home. There, his grandmother said that he was attending a different school. For Heiber, it was an epiphany: to get the right information, you needed to go to students’ homes, both to show families that the system cared about them and to gain a better understanding of what was keeping the students away—unreliable transportation, depression, lack of clothes, or myriad other factors. “There was a list of maybe two hundred or so, and we just thought, Ask them questions,” he said.

Heiber came to realize that there was an art to conducting visits in ways that didn’t make families feel judged. In one home, a cockroach fell onto his shoulder, and he managed to keep himself from recoiling, “because it would have made the whole conversation go different,” he said.

In 2010, he was approached by the NewSchools Venture Fund, a philanthropy looking to invest in Black entrepreneurs. He received a hundred and fifty thousand dollars to help create Concentric, with the initial aim of advising districts on how to improve home visits by teachers. But it became apparent that many districts were having trouble getting teachers to do home visits at all and, instead, were interested in having Concentric do them.

Heiber embraced the new mission, becoming an evangelist for what he saw as an underappreciated aspect of the education system. Most school systems “pay the least amount of money for the most important job,” he said. “I’m not saying that teaching is not a very important job. But they got to be in school to be taught.”

His initial contracts were primarily in Detroit. He met several administrators in the school system there, mostly Black men roughly his own age, who then left to lead districts in the city’s working-class inner suburbs. They hired Concentric and recommended it to others in the region.

The frequent travel to Detroit was a strain on Heiber and his family, as was the scramble for new clients. He incurred bills for unpaid taxes and home improvements, leading to court proceedings in Prince George’s County, a Maryland suburb of Washington where he lived. Then came the post-pandemic boom, with new business in Maryland districts. Contracts ranged from fifty thousand dollars for home visits in a small district to several million dollars for home visits, plus mentoring and tutoring, in some large ones. In 2021 and 2022, Concentric hired dozens of employees, many of them young Black college graduates. It gave them two weeks of training, which included instruction as basic as how to knock on doors. “I tell everyone, ‘Knock a little harder, but don’t knock like the police,’ ” a Concentric manager said. The job mostly paid on an hourly basis, as much as thirty-five dollars per hour. The “professional student advocates” dressed well, in black polo shirts with the company logo or, sometimes, in suits. “I didn’t want people to go into a building and not know that they were our P.S.A.s,” Heiber said.

The company’s rapid expansion, with revenue reaching eight million dollars last academic year, brought growing pains. Some employees went weeks without getting paid, as income from new contracts arrived too late for payroll, and the company had to turn to lenders, several of whom later filed suit for nonpayment. (Most of the legal actions against Concentric and Heiber have been settled.)

Concentric’s growth only accelerated as the new school year began. For many districts, tracking down missing students was existential. Several million children had left public schools for private and parochial ones or for homeschooling; several hundred thousand were simply unaccounted for. With fewer students, some districts faced teacher layoffs and school closures.

To bring more order to the expansion, Heiber hired experienced managers. In early October came an announcement that a firm called New Markets Venture Partners was investing five million dollars in Concentric.

One of the firm’s partners, who was in charge of the investment, told Heiber that Concentric was worth fifteen million dollars. The federal pandemic funding that some districts were using to pay Concentric would fade in 2024, but many districts were using state money, which would continue. “He thinks we could be a hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar business in five to seven years,” Heiber said.

Every few weeks, Concentric received a fresh list of absent kids from each district, often about fifty names. Shepria Johnson’s list brought her to tiny bungalows, ramshackle apartments, and public-housing complexes. Sometimes she arrived at homes that appeared abandoned. “I pull up and am, like, No way, nobody lives here,” she said. “And I would knock on the door, and I see people peeking out, and I think, Oh, my God, someone does live here.”

She was able to stave off demoralization by feeling a purpose far greater than she’d had at her previous jobs—she’d worked as a manager at a shoe store and at a Verizon store, while making efforts to complete her college degree. “You don’t know what you’ll go and see, but if you’re not doing it then you can’t help,” she said. “It doesn’t make me sad anymore, it’s just, ‘How can I help?’ ”

She took pride in her ability to get parents to open up to her. “They go off of your energy. If you’re at the door, and you’re upset with me, I’m not going to get upset with you,” she said. “We should all consider the person on the other side of the door. We know what we’re trying to do—we’re trying to make a difference—but they don’t know that when we’re knocking at the door.”

The conversation was only the first half of the job; next was relaying what information she had learned to school officials or to Concentric employees stationed at schools. A mother in a mobile-home park said that her son, who was in high school, needed tutoring; another mother said that her son was always late to school because he hated algebra, his first period, and suggested changing his schedule. Even when Johnson found an address uninhabited, with nothing but a can of air freshener visible in the empty living room, she considered it useful, because it alerted the school that it needed updated contact information for a student.

These sorts of home visits are so new that there has been little chance to assess them. A Johns Hopkins University evaluation of Concentric in the Baltimore school district—its largest contract—during the 2021-22 school year reported that a majority of home visits found nobody there. The evaluators struggled to judge the impact even of the visits that did reach family members, because there was no attendance data from the pandemic year of 2020-21 to compare the new numbers with.

The Johns Hopkins study found, however, that school administrators praised the company’s efforts. Superintendents in Michigan echoed this praise. “The number of companies that pledge or promise to address inequities or deficits that are experienced in urban schools—it’s exhausting,” Derrick Coleman, the superintendent of Michigan’s River Rouge school district, told me. But Concentric, he said, is “able to go into places that many educators are reluctant to go into, for safety reasons, and make families feel comfortable. They create psychological safety to share whatever those challenges are. And that then gives us data and information to make adjustments.”

Connecticut, which has launched a home-visit initiative in fifteen districts, has taken a slightly different approach: outreach workers call ahead to schedule visits with families, which can last longer than an hour. A study found that the program—which is carried out by school employees or community members and which has cost twenty-four million dollars—resulted in an increase in attendance of fifteen to twenty per cent among middle and high schoolers nine months after the first visit.

But Johnson preferred arriving unscheduled, believing that it gave her a clearer picture of the household context. “When you’re on the spot, you have the pure parent,” she said. “If you schedule it, they’re prepared, they already know why you’re coming, they already know their story, but you’re not getting the raw reason.”

On a couple of occasions, visits by members of Michigan’s Concentric team uncovered situations so troubling that they prompted calls to child-protective services. More often, the team found a different recourse. Michigan is one of the few states that still enforce legal repercussions for truancy: a school police officer or administrator or a Concentric P.S.A. can send a JC 01 form to the prosecutor’s office for Wayne County, where most of the Concentric districts are.

If the prosecutor’s office finds sufficient evidence, it typically offers students who are ten or older a diversion program—the chance to improve attendance and have their records wiped clean. If that fails, students may be brought before a judge. (Cases of younger kids are referred to the adult division, and charges may be brought against their parents.)

Shepria Johnson photographed by Brittany Greeson.

Johnson, her colleagues, and the superintendents in the Concentric districts in Wayne County all said that the JC 01 forms have been a valuable tool in the most extreme cases—sometimes the court would even threaten to block parents’ welfare payments. “It was very powerful,” Josha Talison, the superintendent in Ecorse, said.

But during the pandemic, the superintendents said, the process broke down—it took much longer to hear from the prosecutor’s office about forms that had been filed. “When the pandemic started, they just stopped doing it,” Talison told me. Stiles Simmons, his counterpart in the Westwood district, which is nearby, told me the same. “The courthouse pretty much shut down,” he said. “And then there was a backlog.”

(Robert Heimbuch, the chief of the juvenile division at the prosecutor’s office, said that his team had continued to handle JC 01 forms, shifting meetings and hearings to Zoom, but that some steps in the process might have taken longer. He didn’t know if referrals for chronically absent students had fallen off, because JC 01s were filed for all manner of juvenile-delinquency cases, and his office did not keep a tally of how many were for truancy.)

After a morning of home visits with Johnson, I met with Sarah Lenhoff, a professor of education policy at Wayne State University, who started studying absenteeism in 2016. She joined a coalition to tackle the problem in Detroit and became convinced that the crisis is now so severe that it requires a greater response. “We’re thinking about school attendance all wrong,” she said. “It’s societal.”

Several of the Wayne County superintendents working with Concentric agreed. “The issue of chronic absenteeism is much broader than what the school and its partners can handle,” Simmons said. “There needs to be something else done.” It was a compelling argument: throughout the country, local and state government officials, school boards, and others had decided that it was in the public interest to close school buildings for a year or more, and now it was going to take a group effort to rebuild the norms. The issue couldn’t be left to individual schools or districts—or to a single company.

Society, as a whole, needed to reinforce—as it had in Massachusetts more than a century ago—the importance of school. It was where children awakened to the world’s opportunities, where they learned how to be productive citizens, and, for some, where they found a daily routine and regular meals.

Instead, as Lenhoff noted, families often got the opposite message. Inadequate infrastructure had led Detroit to cancel school for several days last year, because of excessive heat. Schools had also closed in the face of forecasts of snow which brought no actual snow. Districts get penalized by the state’s funding formula if attendance drops below seventy-five per cent on any day, and so they may close schools when they fear that too few kids will show up. “If you have that happen often enough, it does erode your feeling that the system is there for us, and not just when it’s convenient for them,” Lenhoff said.

One day, shortly after noon, I encountered several fifteen- and sixteen-year-old boys who had recently arrived from Latin America and were walking a dog in the quiet streets of River Rouge. But they weren’t playing hooky. School had been closed that day, owing to plumbing problems.

A short drive away, a middle-school girl was playing in a front yard, while her older sister and some of her friends, in their late teens and early twenties, were hanging out in a nearby car, one with a baby on her lap. The younger sister was also not missing school: it had been only a half day in her district, to allow for professional-development courses.

Asked why absenteeism had increased, the young women didn’t hesitate. “That’s what the corona did,” Serenity, who is twenty-one, told me. Now “they’re sending the kids back to school, and they don’t want to no more. They want to stay home and play on their computers.”

When December arrived, the weather became another obstacle: leaving home was even less appealing when it was dark and cold out. One mother told Johnson that her son had been missing school because she hadn’t been able to buy him a winter jacket.

Another mother told Johnson that she had just been crying on the toilet: her rent had doubled, so she wasn’t going to be able to afford Christmas presents for her kids. The rent increase had forced her to pick up a second job, at a fast-food restaurant, which had disrupted her school drop-off and pickup routines. Johnson alerted the children’s school and suggested that it put the family on its list for gift donations.

In Ecorse, Kuanticka Prude was worried about money, too. She had less coming in now than a year earlier, when she had been working a second job, at a Wendy’s. The reason her nanny cam wasn’t working, she told me, was not the cats, as she had said to Johnson, but because she couldn’t afford the monthly payments.

But she told me that she might quit her security job, too, to better monitor the schooling of her kids, who also included a girl in ninth grade, twin girls about to turn eight (who were in special-education programs), and a four-year-old girl in preschool. “I’m going to get it together,” she said. With Jisaiah and King, “it’s going to take me to sit them down and talk to them really good and let them know, to understand what they’re doing and causing. Because this is not a game or a joke. Not only can you get people in trouble but you need an education.”

The next morning, it was just getting light as Jisaiah and King were scheduled to bring their little sister two blocks away for her preschool bus. A cat pawed at the front door, as if to remind them. And then they emerged. They were a few minutes late, which meant that King needed to wave at the bus as Jisaiah hustled her sister down the sidewalk, a hand on her shoulder. Then Prude’s mother emerged to load the two of them and their older sister into her car. On this day, they were going to make it. ♦


https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/01/15/has-school-become-optional?_sp=e4da7158-16f1-4501-84eb-b83a6f37692d.1704829345282

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.Published in the print edition of the January 15, 2024, issue, with the headline “Showing Up.”

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Sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from The New Yorker.Alec MacGillis, a reporter for ProPublica, most recently published “Fulfillment: America in the Shadow of Amazon.”