My day began with a nice breakfast at a fancy downtown hotel, talking<\/p>\n
to a foundation program officer about a project that he is planning. I<\/p>\n
camped out in the lobby to do some work, and then Metro’d to the Cesar<\/p>\n
Chavez Charter High School for Public Policy. It seems like fun to go<\/p>\n
there. Two hundred kids are tightly packed into improvised classrooms<\/p>\n
in a former office building. There’s a sense that they are helping to<\/p>\n
create something idiosyncratic and important. Students participate heavily<\/p>\n
in planning the service projects that are central to the curriculum, so<\/p>\n
their voice matters. At the same time, discipline is strict: if you arrive<\/p>\n
one second late, you go straight to detention. As we walked through the<\/p>\n
halls, the principal had something specific to say to practically every<\/p>\n
kid she met: "We set up SAT classes for you. Oh, you can’t do them<\/p>\n
because you’re in the Corcoran art program. OK, we’ll figure out an alternative."<\/p>\n
The neighborhood, near U Street, is full of charter schools—I suspect<\/p>\n
because the rent is fairly low and Metro connections are good. It’s a<\/p>\n
transitional neighborhood, traditionally African American and working<\/p>\n
class, but now with quite a few White yuppies. I was thinking about the<\/p>\n
problems and advantages of gentrification when I passed workers restoring<\/p>\n
a beautiful row house. Outside the next-door house, an African American<\/p>\n
woman stood and shouted at them: "White man already has everything!"<\/p>\n
As an illustration, it was too perfect.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My day began with a nice breakfast at a fancy downtown hotel, talking to a foundation program officer about a project that he is planning. I camped out in the lobby to do some work, and then Metro’d to the Cesar Chavez Charter High School for Public Policy. It seems like fun to go there. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4139","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-advocating-civic-education"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4139","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4139"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4139\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}