Author Archives: Peter Levine

vacation

This blog is going on vacation as my family and I head off to Europe

for ten days. I have some moral misgivings about vacationing abroad while

people are being killed in the Middle East. I also feel some jitters about

traveling with loved-ones while terror warnings are high and there are

protests against my government (but not against my views) in the very

places that we intend to visit. Basically, I am looking forward to the

trip. This blog, however, is going to have to lapse into silence until

I return, since I will have no Internet access.

talking about desegregation

Our high school students interviewed

a white graduate of largely African American public schools in Prince

George’s County (class of ’98). It was interesting to compare her experience

to that of the African Americans who first attended the County’s all-White

schools in the 50’s. In short, she fared much, much better. She professed

never to be uncomfortable because of race, although her friends were mostly

among the other white students.

We asked our students to frame possible answers to the question: "What

should have been done with the County’s segregrated schools in 1954?"

They come up with these options:

  • "leave it alone" (1 vote)
  • improve the County’s two Black schools and let White students in (7

    votes)

  • build more Black schools (in different parts of the County); also

    let Black students attend White schools (5)

  • integrate the teaching staffs first (5)
  • ignore schools and integrate housing patterns by pressuring realtors

    (4)

  • allow students to transfer on request, and advertise this opportunity

    (6)

  • send everyone to the nearest school (6)
  • bus to achieve an equal racial distribution in all schools(4)

(I list the students’ votes not because they necessarily represent the

views of any larger population, but only to give a sense of the class’s

opinion.)

There could have been two kinds of "diversity" in the schools

of 1954 when the County was about 11 percent African American. Some schools

could have been predominanly Black and others predominantly white (diversity

among schools); or all schools could have been 11 percent African

American (diversity within schools). Our students, who are all

kids of color, unanimously preferred the latter.

We also asked them about these value priorities:

  • choice in what school to attend (2)
  • having a racial mixture in all schools (3)
  • having a few excellent, minority-dominated schools (1)
  • convenience (4)
  • avoiding disruption and conflict (2)
  • quality of education*

*"quality of education" won hands down on the first ballot,

so everyone had to vote for another choice.

local government & online civil society

"Reduction

in Civics Classes Mirrors Decline in Youth Vote": this is a pretty

good article on youth civic engagement in yesterday’s Boston Globe.

I gave a paper today at the American

Society for Public Administration‘s Annual Conference, arguing that

local governments should support independent voluntary associations

in producing elaborate websites with databases, interactive maps,

searchable archives, researched and edited articles, structured deliberation

forums, and streaming videos. I believe that local governments can and

should help in some of these ways:

  • Providing modest grants and technical assistance. Even a total pool

    of grant money on the order of $100,000 in a county of (say) one million

    people would catalyze a lot of good work

  • Publicizing the availability of relevant information that can be put

    online in enhanced and creative forms—information such as GIS mapping

    data, historical records, and photographs.

  • Regulating local Internet service providers (ISP’s), especially cable

    companies, to ensure that they do not provide services that discriminate

    against nonprofits or against people who want to create their own websites.

    If an ISP were to block you from visiting a particular site, you would

    switch carriers (as long as there was a choice). But ISPs can discriminate

    more subtly by speeding up content from certain favored commercial sites

    and slowing down other sites, by making certain portals and search engines

    the defaults for their users, by making it artificially slow to transmit

    data, etc.

  • Creating state-of-the-art local information networks (especially wireless

    ones) that provide cheap access and do not discriminate on the basis

    of the type of content transmitted.

liquid reason

We met over lunch with the founder of Liquid

Reason, an interesting Website whose purpose is to teach young

people social marketing. I also answered quite a few press calls that

arose from yesterday’s press conference. Reporters are mainly interested

in what is actually a fairly peripheral topic: the size of the decline

in youth turnout since 1972. In the evening, I briefed students from

University of Maryland and other Maryland state campuses about the Rhodes

Scholarship. I tried to persuade them that the application process can

be valuable, even though the odds of success are very low, because writing

an application essay forces you to come up with a provisional plan of

life just at the point when you are finishing college and your future

is less planned than it has ever been before.

the value of deliberating historical narrative

In our high school class, we spent almost two hours editing the text

that accompanies the first seven pictures in this slideshow

on the history of school desegregation in Prince George’s County.

We had planned to cover much more ground, but I believe the editing exercise

was extremely useful.

First, I don’t think the students usually edit what they write, so

this was a valuable experience for them.

Second, there are profound political differences implied by small changes

in the way you describe events. It sounds very different to say, "African

American students were required to ride buses to predominantly White

schools," or "The NAACP forced the County to bus students

to promote integration." Both are true; but the political implications

are hugely different. Trying to write narrative text is a wonderful

way to learn skills of historical interpretation.

Third, I kept pressing the class to make sure we had evidence for our

claims. They wanted to say, for example, that busing led to White protests

in Prince George’s County. This turned out to be true, but at first

nobody could remember any evidence to support the claim. I tried to

persuade the class that we have an obligation to prove to ourselves

that our assertions about specific places and times are right.

The text that is currently on the Website does not yet reflect the students’

latest edits. They were eager not to focus too much on their own high

school (which used to exclude Blacks as a matter of law). Our students

themselves would all be excluded today, but they still don’t like the

negative focus on their school. They also want to avoid a simple Black/White

narrative, since the communities they know are more ethnically and racially

diverse. But it’s hard to figure out what to say about other races in

the 1950s. It appears from old yearbooks that some people who would today

be called Latinos attended all-"White" schools. We have no data

on Hispanics/Latinos, since the Census did not use that category until

the 1970s. As for Asians, there were only 283 in the County in 1950, according

to the Census, so we don’t know what happened to their kids.

I also had an interesting conference call with NACE

members and participated in an "audio press conference" sponsored

by Carnegie Corporation of New York.