Category Archives: Education Policy

Failure Is Not an Option™ in 2018!

Closing Achievement Gaps, Courageous Leadership, Education Policy, Educational Leadership, Student Achievement,

When I asked 13-year-old Angie why she had recently joined the Latin Kings gang on Chicago’s South Side, she looked at me like I wasn’t too bright, but entertained the question anyway. ”Why wouldn’t I join?! My uncle is on the gang, my friends are in it and so is my boyfriend,” she said nodding toward another teenager watching our exchange from about 15 feet away. Shortly after I left with Rudy Espinosa, a Boys and Girls club Youth worker hired to quell gang violence and reclaim gang members, the rival Deuces gang drove by and took the life of Angie’s boyfriend.

This set off a series of reprisals back and forth between the gangs. My friend Rudy negotiated a truce allowing him to create a silver lining to this tragedy when he later saw Angie sobbing at the funeral. “Angie, I’m really sorry about your boyfriend; he was a friend of mine too. But this is what you’ve signed up for by being in the gang – and I can help you get out.” Soon after, Angie took Rudy’s advice and helping hand of support to leave the gang.

Crisis as Opportunity in 2018

After growing up in non-traditional settings (group homes, foster care, and with grandma); getting to college on an EOP Scholarship; founding and running Solution Tree and the HOPE Foundation; and authoring 18 books (the most recent being Excellence through Equity with Pedro Noguera), I can attest to the importance of seeing crisis as an opportunity. This is exemplified in how Rudy provided Angie both a mirror to see the reality of her situation, and a supportive, caring alternative for her to pursue.

If last year is any indicator, 2018 is sure to provide us all great deal of opportunity to work through crisis! This New Year’s message is about sorting through and making meaning of the cacophony of change underway, seeing what’s likely to come next, and developing the clarity and courage to move forward, or as Winston Churchill stated: “If you’re going through Hell, keep going!”

Demographics Don’t Lie…

The fact is that in 2015 America hit a watershed in its school population which has an impact every school leader, teacher, and school community in the Nation. For the first time in history, the majority of America’s students were poor and eligible for free and reduced lunch. (The majority of our students also were not classified as Caucasian.) Meanwhile, the wealthiest 80 people in the world held more financial assets then the bottom ½ of the entire world; that’s 3.5 billion people combined. Likewise in America, the top 1% of the population holds more wealth than the bottom 95% combined. The implications for educating our children and the way to achieve Excellence through Equity will be the topic of future postings.

…but Politicians Often Do Lie

The many challenges faced by those who are in most need of help will become even greater due to the combination of greed and callousness that has guided many of our elected officials to challenge the need for Medicaid, Medicare, CHIP, Citizenship for Dreamers, and much more. While USA rankings in international tests like the PISA continue to slip, our elected officials offer not support, as Rudy had to Angie, but a heavier load of tests, accountability, public humiliation and fallacies around the wonders of School Choice and Private Education vs. Public Education. Yet the one bastion of hope for our collective future is not a patchwork of unregulated and unreliably administered and untested private schools, but a strong commitment to every child receiving a high-quality public education.

What we have learned is that those who know the least about U.S. public education are often those who have the most authority over the policies that guide it. This is now codified by the ironic choice of our Secretary of Education who has never held a single job related to the enterprise of education over which she presides. Ms. Devos has instead declared the traditional education system “a dead end.” This is part of a false narrative around public schools that is setting the stage for the dismantling of them and the diversion of public school funding to private operators.
The narrative is that public schools are failing, and therefore need to be taken over by private and/or regulatory agencies. This story runs counter to the facts – e.g. Our schools have graduated a higher percent of students each year in the past decade than at any time in history; the number of low-income-family students taking the AP exams has gone up more than 500% from 2003-2016 as well. If your income grew at this rate, you’d take your boss to dinner! What we see instead is pundits challenging the validity of graduation rates, and an ESSA regulation that will increase the cost of taking the AP exams starting next year. Poor students will again bear the brunt of public policy.

Changing the Narrative

After helping to launch the PLC movement and running Solution Tree for 12 years, I asked a group of thought leaders from throughout the country for advise on next steps. Ed Zigler, Head Start Founder, suggested we have two challenges in education:

  1. We need to improve our performance;
  2. We aren’t as bad as the rhetoric indicates and need to improve our messaging.

I dedicated to #1 for the past 30 years and realize that it has been a heavier lift than necessary due to the second challenge: we don’t own our narrative about our profession. Therefore, we are swimming upstream. As support for our work often isn’t appreciated, teachers leave the profession (see Ed Week: Teachers Are Quitting Because They’re Dissatisfied. That’s a Crisis, Scholars Say), states like PA and IL are virtually defunding public schools, and others like NJ take over their urban districts and yet fail to improve these schools with impunity.

While educators often agree on the dynamics underway the larger public gets a different message. Educators don’t have a “Waiting for Superman” film, for example. Failing schools are usually an educational manifestation of inequities in our society: they do not exist in wealthy communities. Likewise, we find very few successful schools in economically deprived areas, and when we do we should learn from them. Instead, the exceptional poor but successful school is spuriously used as “exhibit A” in painting all other failing schools as being due to inept or uncaring professionals. We often treat the struggling and impoverished school by defunding it or threatened takeover, as though this will now motivate the mythical lazy and unwilling people who work within those schools. What these schools need instead is the same kind of helping hand Rudy extended to Angie, and that the VA DOE has extended to Petersburg Schools.

Courage to Act

As leaders and defenders of our nation’s children, we must move toward the danger, else it will move toward us and prevail. I’ve written a fair amount about Courage, recently with Pedro Noguera and in the Blogpost following Nelson Mandela’s passing. Over the coming weeks, we will share specific examples of professionals at all levels acting courageously to take collective responsibility for the success of all children!

Contact us for more information.

AASA on Courageous and Uplifting Leadership – Part One

Courageous Leadership, Education Policy, Educational Leadership, School Culture, ,

(the following is an excerpt from a forthcoming issue of The School Administrator.  See AASA.org)

It was Monday morning and the middle school had flooded over the weekend. Told it would take two weeks to reopen, the superintendent quickly moved this crisis to the top of his growing list that already included keeping lights on, making payroll, building teachers’ capacity to deliver engaging and rigorous instruction, and meeting state requirements for school improvement in a school district that ranked last in the state.

Yet Marcus Newsome, the new superintendent of the Petersburg, Va., City Public Schools, was smiling this morning during the city partnership meeting that convened top leaders from the state, city and school district. Toward the end of the meeting, Newsome shared, “I’m happy to report that the predicted two-week closing of our middle school didn’t happen. It opened on time this Monday morning! I’d shared with everyone at the school  that we needed ‘all hands on deck,’ and they made it happen.” Newsome publicly acknowledged the school’s janitor and other staff members who had taken the lead in ensuring the school opened on time. He also sent each a personal thank-you.

In the past, Petersburg staff would have responded differently to a crisis. This time there was a significant change. It began with a courageous leader — a leader who runs toward, not away from challenges.

A Time for Courage

Throughout history, leaders as diverse as Aristotle, Winston Churchill and Martin Luther King Jr. have pointed to courage — a word derived from the French root word “le Coeur” or “heart” — as the most important of all virtues. This brand of leadership is not based on self-promotion or ego, but on sacrificing for the greater good, which in public education includes promoting inclusiveness, and equity for all children.

Effective leaders use the five principles of courageous leadership to “face the facts and their fears” and address challenges head-on. When these principles guide the work, the efforts build trust and  are more likely sustainable district wide.

No. 1: Get to Your Core.

Friedrich Nietzche said, “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” With school board politics, resistance to meeting diverse students’ needs, and punitive financial and accountability measures serving as distractors from educating our children, we must be rooted in a personal connection to why we are advocating for children each day. The more personal the connection, the more steadfast will be our effort.

Every successful superintendent has a way to stay connected to this core. Aaron Spence, superintendent of the 67,000-student Virginia Beach City School system, reminds himself daily of his personal connection to helping all children and make sure they get the best education possible. He watches prospective principals walk through the building to see if they talk with students and teachers. Did they notice what was happening in the school? Did they connect directly with the students? He makes expectations clear, like the importance of knowing the names of the children who are struggling.

Amy Sichel, superintendent of the 8,000-student Abington School District in Philadelphia’s northern suburbs, celebrates schools’ successes with the students “to stay focused on the small wins vs. the big downs” that poor policy delivers. Sichel is personally energized by her ability to have influence beyond Abington by mentoring incoming professionals to leave a legacy and “keep public education alive.”

The daily routine of Dallas Dance, superintendent of Baltimore County Schools, includes praying, working out and staying connected to his own children and to his colleagues and the district’s 112,000 students. Letting go of the negative interactions and starting each day with a blank slate helps sustain positive energy. As Dance explains, “Most parent complaints are about the role I’m playing — not about me personally.”

When leaders have a core connection to the work, they are optimistic about meeting “insurmountable” challenges. Maintaining this attitude is essential to courageous leadership. As Newsome states, “Each one of us has the ability to set the temperature for the room. It’s important to come in daily with the brightest of views in the toughest of times: We are leaders; others feed off us, and if we aren’t optimistic, they don’t stand a chance.”

For the outline of all five courageous leadership principles and the complete article, see AASA.org

Copy Right © 2017 America Association School Administrators

Building Trust in Schools

Education Policy, Trust in Schools

The pioneering work around the importance of building trust in schools is more critical now than ever due to our current political climate, growing xenophobia, and the credibility of our media, judiciary branch and intelligence community being called into question regularly. In my first edition of Failure Is Not an Option ™ , I drew on the work of Bryk and Schneider 2002; 2010) and that of extraordinary practitioners throughout N. America who have acted on the fact that if there’s no relational trust between and among the adults in schools, there’s virtually no progress among students in those same schools in their math and literacy scores over a 5-year longitudinal study period.

Yet, there are many strategies that can be deployed – first by the leader and his or her lead team – to build a trusting culture to the benefit of the students. These strategies would be used  both in classroom settings, and in the development of the pillars of a high-performing culture in general, like the creation of common mission, vision, values and goals.

The strategies mentioned below are part of a series that will be shared over the coming months, most of which can be found in greater detail in Failure Is Not an Option (Corwin, 2013). It is my hope that we exert influence wherever we can on behalf of our children. There is no place in which this is more crucial than in our schools, and there is no better place to begin than in the area of building trusting relations.

The framework for building affinity and relational trust can be captured in part via the diagram below.

Each time we engage people in something positive, their communication, shared reality and affinity is enhanced. For example, Project Boost in New Yok, was designed to give impoverished 8th graders experience they would not otherwise have, as a means of expanding their horizons and ultimately moving them toward seeing college as a viable reality. As a result of a shared experience –like going to a museum or eating in a restaurant– the children, their attending families, and school personnel have a new shared reality, begin to communicate around that experience, and enhance their affinity for one another.

In the coming weeks, I’ll share a number of one-to-one strategies teachers and administrators can deploy to enhance relational trust in schools. If you have any questions prior, feel free to drop me an e-mail at:  ablankstein@hopefoundation.org

Where there’s hope,
Failure Is Not an Option ™

AASA on Courageous and Uplifting Leadership – Part Two

Courageous Leadership, Education Policy, Educational Leadership, ,

(the following is an excerpt from a forthcoming issue of The School Administrator.  See AASA.org)

Part 2: Face the facts and your fears.

Data reflecting poor performance, especially among subgroups, often become the catalyst to action. In Abington, Pa., the data showing gaps between the majority of the student body and minority and special education students compelled district leaders to ask whether being a good district was enough. In North Carolina’s Charlotte-Mecklenburg district, with its 147,000 students, Superintendent Ann Clark used data indicating wide gaps in reading proficiency to galvanize the schools and the community to change course.

Courageous leaders don’t use data as a weapon but rather as a tool for improvement. They don’t leverage fear to achieve greater results, but focus on how to collectively face the challenge and become mutually supportive and accountable for meeting the needs of students. The goal is improving the action, not punishing the actor.

Awash in data, courageous leaders focus on making data manageable, meaningful, and a catalyst for improvement. Sichel uses what she terms “getting results teams.” They are building-based, mixed groups that analyze student results, select focus areas of concern, develop a specific action plan and prepare progress reports for her toward continuous student achievement.

AASA on Courageous and Uplifting Leadership – Part Three

Courageous Leadership, Education Policy, Educational Equity, Educational Leadership,

(the following is an excerpt from a forthcoming issue of The School Administrator.  See AASA.org)

No. 3: Make organizational meaning.

The best school districts choose an overarching strategy for improvement rooted in their stakeholders’ core beliefs and vision, a clear-eyed analysis of the internal facts and external research, and a coherent way forward.

The strategy for the high-performing Abington district was to open Advanced Placement classes to all students while providing low-performing groups with the necessary supports to succeed. The plan for closing gaps between schools in Charlotte-Mecklenberg was strategic staffing in which high-performing principals and a select leadership team moved to the lowest-performing schools via a plan designed by those who were doing the actual work. It has since become a badge of honor to be chosen to lead a low-performing school in that district.

No. 4: Ensure constancy and consistency of focus.

The greatest challenges to success for every student in America are the issues surrounding policies that promote one child over another and punish educators for being ill-equipped to address the multiple and increasingly serious problems students bring to school.

Even in the toughest circumstances, someone in each district is succeeding with the same students that others are failing. Cyndee Blount, chief academic officer in the Petersburg schools, uses several strategies to build a process that enhances trust, communication and cohesion around instruction.

  • Principal partners. Recently retired principals from a high-performing neighboring district were recruited as partners and mentors for each Petersburg principal. The retirees, selected based on a history of success in schools with similar populations, demographics and/or instructional needs, work to build the instructional capacity of the leaders and teachers. They support the principal with everything, including developing the school improvement plan, providing professional development and joining the principal in teacher observations, followed by debriefing, reflection and collaborative decision making.
  • Instructional leadership. A shift in the perception of the building principal from manager to instructional leader was necessary to convey the urgency of improving daily instruction. Blount and instructional teams in Charlotte-Mecklenberg built professional development toolkits that included presentations, talking points, engaging activities and instructional look-fors to use in walkthroughs. Principals, along with building-level instructional leaders, received the training first, then delivered the presentations to teachers and over subsequent weeks provided increasingly intensive feedback using a common protocol during walkthroughs.
  • Central office as support for schools. Staff in the district office collaborate on and monitor each school improvement plan. Blount and a central-office team meet monthly with site leaders to enhance the “X Factor” – to expedite physical resources and expedite human resources. Real-time support boosts trust, morale and results.

Courageous leaders promote a culture that addresses the diversity of needs their students bring with them to school. They use student voices to inform their plans and the students themselves to help implement and evaluate them and to galvanize the community and influence key policymakers. Courageous leaders often act as buffers, taking on the external politics so their staff can concentrate on teaching and learning.

AASA on Courageous and Uplifting Leadership – Part Four

Courageous Leadership, Education Policy, Education Reform, Educational Equity, Educational Leadership

The greatest challenges to success for every student in America are the policies that promote one child over another and punish educators for being ill-equipped to address the multiple and increasingly serious issues students bring with them to school.

Even in the toughest circumstances, someone in each district is succeeding with the same students that others are failing. Cyndee Blount, chief academic officer in the Petersburg schools, uses several strategies to build a process that enhances trust, communication and cohesion around instruction.

Principal partners. Recently retired principals from a high-performing neighboring district were recruited as partners and mentors for each Petersburg principal. The retirees — selected based on a history of success in schools with similar populations, demographics and/or instructional needs — work to build the instructional capacity of leaders and teachers. They support the principal with everything, including developing the school improvement plan, providing professional development and joining the principal in teacher observations, debriefing, reflection and collaborative decision making.

Instructional leadership. A shift in the perception of the building principal from manager to instructional leader was necessary to convey the urgency of improving daily instruction. In Petersburg, Blount and instructional teams built professional development toolkits that included presentations, talking points, engaging activities and instructional look-fors to use in walkthroughs. Principals, along with building-level instructional leaders, received the training first, then delivered the presentations to teachers and over subsequent weeks provided increasingly intensive feedback using a common protocol during walkthroughs.

Central office as support for schools. Staff in the district office collaborate on and monitor each school improvement plan. Blount and a central-office team meet monthly with site leaders to expedite physical and human resources. Real-time support boosts trust, morale and results.

Courageous leaders promote a culture that addresses the diversity of needs their students bring with them to school. They use student voice to inform their plans and the students themselves to help implement and evaluate them. Students also can galvanize the community and influence key policymakers. To alleviate distractions, courageous leaders often act as buffers against external politics so their staff can concentrate on teaching and learning.

AASA on Courageous and Uplifting Leadership – Part Five

Courageous Leadership, Education Policy, Education Reform, Educational Equity, Educational Leadership

No. 5: Build sustainable relations.
The lifeblood of any organization is trusting relationships. Without trust among the adults in a school, there is almost no chance that students will excel in their academics. Building relationships with school boards, community members and parents makes it possible for district leaders to advance their core mission. Likewise, working authentically from their core and aligning with the other leadership principles, these leaders enhance trusting and sustainable relations.

When driven by mission rather than ego, leaders can listen more intently to the ideas and concerns of others. Newsome began his successful tenures at Newport News, Va., Chesterfield County, Va., and now Petersburg by asking questions and listening to all stakeholders, including adults who had no children in the schools. Responses to questions like “What do you believe is needed to ensure a quality education?” fueled the first student-led convocation in which the theme was “I Believe.” It brought together the best thinking of the community, as well as the state education department and the governor’s office, as they worked collaboratively to make Petersburg a model for other urban districts.

When leaders welcome various voices and state their values, yet allow others to shape a collective vision and appreciate individual roles in the success of every child, they build sustainable relationships toward a greater good.

Lessons from Opt Out: The Anti-test Movement

Education Policy, Educational Rights, Opt Out, Testing, ,

Lessons from Opt Out: The Anti-test Movement

While the number of families saying “no” to high stakes tests for their children are growing nationwide, New York State stands at the vanguard of this movement. Last month, the number of children opting out of tests rose by more than 300% since last year in New York. Last month, 165,000 students — or one of six eligible students– opted not to take standardized tests, representing a substantial increase over the 49,000 students opting out in 2014.

In New Jersey, 14.5% of 11th graders sat out the new tests. Weeks ago, Governor Hickenlooper of Colorado signed a law eliminating certain tests and requiring districts to allow parents to keep their children out of state tests. Given all that is at stake, it is helpful to have an analysis of the driving forces behind this movement, and some attending lessons outlined below:

How is even more important that what when it comes to implementation. Generally speaking, people will (and do) follow bad ideas that are presented in an engaging manner quicker than they will a good idea that comes to them via command, or fiat. I have asked thousands of educators during presentations in the past 2 years “Who is against the content of Common Core?” No one has yet raised their hand. I then ask “who is opposed to the way it is being implemented?” Virtually everyone raises a hand.

When I sat with 6 organizational leaders and two top DOE representatives at the NEA Headquarters for the Transformational Dialogues focused on Common Core in 2010, it became clear that there was not yet an implementation plan in place. The one used in NY State resulted in the resignation of Commissioner John King last year, and has led to a backlash in districts throughout the state.

Good people with good intentions often conceive of great advances for their constituents. Yet the implementation of these concepts is at least as important as the ideas themselves.

Failure isn’t an option for some parents. While poor children and their parents have been labeled failures for far too long, this is a unacceptable for middle class families at the heart of the current opt out movement in New York. Statewide only 31% of students were proficient in last year’s English test. While testing companies gaining billions of Common Core dollars, and politicians who are closely aligned with this industry make glib announcements about “adjustment periods,” parents don’t see failure for their children as insignificant collateral damage. They see their children suffering.

This opens up an opportunity to reevaluate failure as a viable option for any child. If a child’s life chance for happiness and economic independence is tied to success on a test, isn’t it our job as the adults in that child’s life to assure that he or she succeeds? As my coauthor Pedro Noguera and I point out in our recently released book, Excellence through Equity: Five Principles of Courageous Leadership to Guide Achievement for Every Student, the zero sum game is a tired and broken paradigm. All students perform better when schools focus on equity, even students who are already high-performing.

Relationships rule. While I respect many of Governor Cuomo’s qualities, and those of our new State Commissioner, and have great affinity for John King and his extraordinary intellect, my daughter’s 3rd grade teacher and her productive work with my child is more important. When parents start to see the tremendous burden and stress being placed on their local teachers and principals who also happen to be their neighbors and friends, who will these parents support? Will parents’ respect for the Governor trump the relationships with their children’s teachers? Not likely according to common sense, and every PDK/Gallup poll for the last half century.

Conclusion

The only political lever left to assure that parents opt back into tests for their children is the financial lever. That is a heavy handed approach that will gain compliance at best, but never commitment. What is needed is a strategy that truly engages all stakeholders in ways consistent with what motivates real people (see Daniel Pink’s book, Drive; or my own book, The Answer is in the Room). Using a hammer to fix a crack in the wall leads to a large hole in the wall. Instead, perhaps it’s time to deal with the real and legitimate concerns of the human beings affected by a policy-driven agenda that has left them out of the planning.

Baltimore on the Brink

Closing Achievement Gaps

A Tale of Too Many Cities

In the past two weeks I’ve traveled throughout the east coast, and had scores of conversations with black, white, and brown people – including those eager to share and those who seem to feel that by ignoring or minimizing this “last incident,” it may somehow disappear or at least not reach their own geographical or psychological domicile. Yet far from disappearing, Baltimore is yet another milestone in a road dotted with flashing lights warning of the deeper realities we must collectively face… or be faced with.

In many ways Baltimore is similar to Ferguson, New York, Cleveland, South Carolina and so many of our cities recently in the news. In each case we have seen the familiar pattern of police brutality against minorities, the poor, the homeless and/or mentally ill members of our citizenry. In each case the scenes are captured and the stories told by otherwise helpless passersby armed only with their cell phones.

What is happening in Baltimore is also significantly different. It’s true that the collective outrage and consciousness among those who have been targets of harassment by law enforcement for at least a century has grown to a boiling point. In this way, Freddie Gray begins to mirror Mohamed Bouazizi, the street vendor in Tunisia, who, after being roughed up by police while he was trying to sell fruit, set himself on fire, igniting uprisings throughout the Middle East known as the “Arab Spring.” In the case of Baltimore, it was those who survived Freddie Gray who set parts of the city ablaze. This did not lead to fires encompassing the east coast or cities throughout the nation, because the heat was turned down by unusual, swift and decisive actions of State Attorney, Marilyn Mosby. Yet the embers of human anger and frustration in Baltimore are smoldering, not extinguished; and the dynamics and lessons from this city should be widely understood and quickly acted upon by leaders throughout the country.

Living on the Edge of Hope

This past year we have seen numerous incidents of innocent victims dying at the hands of those hired to protect them. Yet the reaction on the streets of Baltimore was very different than what we witnessed in, say, New York after a grand jury cleared the officers involved in killing unarmed Eric Garner by strangulation. The statistics between the two cities tell much of the story.

Among racial and ethnic groups in New York, Hispanics recorded the highest poverty rate (26 percent), followed by Asians (25 percent), blacks (21.7 percent) and non-Hispanic whites (15.2 percent). Noncitizens had a higher rate (27.8 percent) than native-born (19.9 percent) and naturalized citizens (17.8 percent). Not only is there less diversity among the poor in Baltimore than in New York, but the overall poverty rate in Sandtown, the neighborhood in which Freddie Gray lived, is roughly double that of either Baltimore or New York. Moreover Sandtown and neighboring Harlem Park, experience about double the shootings, unemployment, and homicides than Baltimore City at large. These neighborhoods also have more residents in jails and prisons than any other neighborhood in the state of MD, with an annual cost of $17 million for incarceration alone, according to the New York Times. In short, as one young man in Baltimore shared, “It doesn’t matter what we do, there’s no hope for us here.”

Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War, that of the nine fighting grounds in which one might do battle, the most dangerous one was that in which the vanquished had no hope for escape, for their desperation would lead to unpredictable and incalculably deadly actions. Many of the residents of Baltimore in general, and Sandtown and Harlem Park in particular, feel hopeless and helpless in their situation. Pour a heavy and constant dose of injustice into the mix and the results are explosive.

One Man’s Gangster is Another Woman’s Youngster

It is difficult to find any black man in Baltimore who hasn’t been mistreated by local police. The abuse of Baltimore residents derives in part from the fear, anger and contempt by those outside of the neighborhoods who come to police the people within them. With less than 9% of the policing staff residing locally, many bring with them preconceived ideas about those they are hired to protect: They are often seen as the enemy, or at least unworthy of dignified treatment.

The unarmed and petite Baltimore mom, Toya Graham, demonstrated, by contrast, the extent to which a truly caring adult can intervene, even physically as she did with her own son, in a successful attempt to keep him out of trouble. While many question her approach of pushing and hitting her 16-year-old to keep him from participating in rioting, the point is that she was willing to do what it took to protect her child, and that even her use of force was understood to be out of concern for her son’s well-being. Had she not intervened, this easily swayed teenager would likely have been characterized by those who don’t know him as a hardened “thug” worthy of tasing and worse. Although the “Mother of the Year” title bestowed upon Toya by the New York Post might well be replaced with “Violent Father” had she been the boy’s dad, the larger point is that relationships rule.

Whether we look at research on managers who gain greater results with employees using concern for them vs. authority over them as motivator; how leaders in the army leverage loyalty more successfully than coercion in getting results; the outcomes lead us in the same direction. Decades of successful community policing, likewise, bear this point out for authorities as well: relationships are the key to getting desired outcomes with the least possible use of force and risk to all involved.

The Truck Stops Here

Morally-rooted, courageous and decisive action among leaders seems to be increasingly rare, as politicians in particular balance myriad interests and a constant focus on increasing their funding streams. Longing for the days of Harry Truman’s “The Buck Stops Here” motto in action, thousands turned their planned protests to joyous celebration upon hearing the unequivocal statement of criminal charges against 6 police officers by Maryland State Attorney, Marilyn Mosby only a day after receiving the results of an internal police investigation and the official autopsy report. Mosby minced no words in proclaiming that five stops of the vehicle in question left ample time and opportunity to tend to the needs of the man these officers had shackled and taken for “a ride.” As one young Baltimore man shared, “Just the fact that we have finally been heard and acknowledged was huge for me!”

While a mainly sympathetic white onlooker stated “The charges seem to be delivered very quickly,” and Gene Ryan, President of the Fraternal Order of Police, called it an “egregious rush to judgment,” the charges sent a clear message that regardless of race (three of the six officers charged are black including Ceasar Goodson, who faces the most serious charge of second degree murder), it’s a new day in Baltimore: justice will be served. One might also ask how long it would take to charge Freddie Gray, you, me, or any other potential suspect for a crime committed. For that matter what crime had Freddie Gray actually committed?

Ms. Mosby’s promise to the family that “no one is above the law,” and that “(She) would pursue justice on their behalf,” is heartening. Yet Mosby’s battle ahead is taking place within the “legal system” which is unfortunately not the same as the “justice system,” and the odds are stacked against her winning. Luckily Ms. Mosby has taken on such odds before and won, beating out her opponent, incumbent Gregg Bernstein, for this position only months ago, although he outspent her 3 to 1.

Horizons of Hope, or Despair and Destruction?

One might think that the lessons above would drive local and state leaders, the Fraternal Order of Police and vanquished political opponents to some common understandings that also governed a way forward for our new Attorney General, Loretta Lynch; President Obama, and business and civic leaders throughout the nation. Transparency and justice regardless of race, creed, color or economics is bad for dictators, but it’s good business for democracies; real and accessible economic and educational opportunities foster hope and collective well-being while their absence breeds despair and destruction; relationships trump force every day of the week and in almost any context; courageous leadership fosters confidence and positive action, and in tandem with the rest of these lessons, can turn riotous outbreaks into joyous celebrations in anticipation of a brighter future.

Yet things may have to get worse before they get better. If the Baltimore police officers are not convicted, it is likely the combustible forces of hopelessness, despair and rage will lead to outcomes that no one would like to see unfold and few of us would condone. Moreover, brush fires can become wild fires as we’ve seen throughout history and the world, including in the USA (think Boston Tea Party; Rosa Parks).

Under-girding the inequities and injustice we experience is a flawed zero-sum game paradigm that states someone has to lose while someone else wins at their expense. However, research of enlightened practice by my coauthor, Pedro Noguera and I has shown just the opposite is true. In the long-run, suspending the win-lose mental model allows for a more powerful understanding, that we can all win, and that being surrounded by a society filled with winners creates prosperity and quality of life for everyone. The words of Martin Luther King, “We are all inextricably bound to one another,” are actually accurate in very practical terms, which I’ll take up in another posting.

For now, let’s hope for an enlightened review of the fundamental lessons coming from Baltimore, and actions aligned with those lessons. If this is the outcome, America will experience an exciting new dawning.