Mail-In Voting:

 

2022 has begun, and with it, the mid-term election processes.  Primaries will be held this spring, and the national Congressional elections in November.  Given the narrow margins between the two major parties in Congress and the increasingly major differences between them in philosophy and political tactics, it promises to be a very competitive election.  The competition promises also to be bitter.  We are already seeing signs of that in new state-level restrictions on voter access.  The challenges and false charges that Trump and his cohort continue to promote make it essential that we find a new consensus on how citizens can best exercise their rights—and responsibilities—as voters.  Citizens need confidence in their access to voting and confidence that their votes count.  It is an urgent public education need.

One key area for citizen education in the coming months is mail-in or absentee voting.  This is a relatively new feature for many voters, who are accustomed to showing up at the voting booth on election day.  However, that is increasingly a problem for many voters, partly because of the pandemic.  However, there are other factors--work schedules and other limits on travel, for instance—that have made mail-in balloting an important new way to ensure that most citizens have the practical ability to exercise their voting rights.  Meanwhile, opponents keep raising fraudulent concerns about the security of mail-in voting.  What we need is better public information about the dependability of mail-in balloting. 

Many will be surprised that all 50 states already provide mail-in voting as an option for citizens.  Ballotpedia reports that all 50 states offer a form of mail-in voting.  The Ballotpedia website notes that thirty-four states provide mail-in ballots to any voter who requests one (of these, seven automatically send a ballot to all voters).  The other sixteen states also support mail-in ballots, but require that voters first submit an application and, in some cases, meet eligibility criteria. In-person voting continues to dominate in both environments.

The Brennan Center for Justice, a nonprofit center at New York University’s School of Justice, has issued a primer on the security of mail-in voting.  It notes,

“Some critics, most notably President Trump, have claimed that mail ballot systems are unusually vulnerable to ‘voter fraud.’  But years of mail voting around the country show this is false and that there is little malfeasance.”

In short, mail-in voting is not an aberration on the fringe of the elections system.  It is increasingly mainstream means of providing better access for citizens to fulfill their civic responsibility. 

I have been concerned for years about the lack of effective civics education in our high schools.  This is an example of the lack of broad public education. What we need, in order to quell the partisan campaigns against this and other means of encouraging voter participation, is a voter education program to help people better understand mail-in voting as part of the Constitutional process of empowering citizens to vote, to feel confident about voting in spite of negative partisan publicity, and to promote best practices in individual states.  That education should be part of the high school curriculum.  Meanwhile, the Brennen Center primer suggests that there is already a wealth of information could be the basis for a public information campaign to help current voters better understand the system in their states.  A public education campaign along these lines would be a welcome project for groups like the League of Women Voters, the ACLU, etc. 

Simply stated, voters need to be confident that they understand this emerging environment and that they trust in its security.  This will help avoid the kind of fraudulent criticisms that arose in 2020 and the lies that led to the January 6 insurrection. 

"Silent Night" 1914

 

In 2001, historian Stanley Weintraub published Silent Night, the true story of a spontaneous, if very informal and temporary, front lines truce in December 1914 between German and English troops during the first months of World War I.  In Silent Night, Weintraub describes a time when soldiers on both sides of that war found the common truths of their lives and tried to grasp anew the meaning of Christmas. 

Weintraub had recently retired as Evan Pugh Professor Emeritus of Arts and Humanities at Penn State, after heading Penn State’s Center for the Arts and Humanistic Studies.  An internationally known expert on George Bernard Shaw, Weintraub wrote widely about the people and events of the twentieth century.  Silent Night was the first of several books in which Christmas was the focal point of historical events.  Others included:  General Washington’s Christmas Farewell: A Mount Vernon Homecoming, 1783 (published in 2003); Eleven Days in December: Christmas at the Bulge, 1944 (published in 2006); General Sherman’s Christmas: Savannah, 1864 (published in 2009); and Pearl Harbor Christmas: A World at War, December 1941 (published in 2011).

In Silent Night, we learn that the Christmas Eve truce of 1914 was not an isolated event, but a series local truces that extended into Christmas Day, bringing German and British troops out of the trenches in different spots along the front to share holiday treats, sing songs, and, in some cases, play soccer with each other. Before returning to what would become a world war. 

The song Christmas 1915 by Irish musician Cormac MacConnell, tells a similar story.  It resonates this year, when our sense of ourselves once more is under fire, but in a way far different from those sad holidays a century ago. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JG3l-OBdcPI&list=RDMMJG3l-OBdcPI&start_radio=1

Moving Toward a K-14 Educational System

 

One important aspect of the initial “infrastructure” debate in Washington was an Administration proposal to support the nation’s ability to fully embrace and lead the Information Revolution:  President Biden’s proposal to extend free public education beyond high school.

The Administration described the initiative as “free community college tuition.” According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, three quarters of new job hires are in occupations that require at least a baccalaureate degree.  However, two-thirds of American adults lack a degree.  The goal of offering free community college tuition was to greatly enhance the ability of young people to better prepare for jobs that require expertise beyond high school and, in the process, help to the economy—and society in general—adjust to rapid technological change.  

The stalemate on this issue is a symptom of the blindness among politicians and their backers to the nature of change that is underway in our society.  Extending access to schooling beyond high school is a critical need in our new society.  Just as the Industrial Revolution led to the creation of new public colleges and universities and the expectation that all citizens would have free access to high school, today’s transformation—whether you call it the Information Revolution or the Third Industrial Revolution—demands new skills of all of us, both in our role as workers and as citizens.

The idea of extending universal access to education beyond high school and into college has a precedent.  In the early 1900s, many adults did not attend high school.  They went through the eighth grade, but high school required them to pay tuition, so they dropped out and went to jobs in the new industrial economy.  As the impact of the Industrial Revolution increased, however, it became apparent that more education was needed to prepare students to compete for jobs—industrial and social—in the new environment.  As a result, communities began to fund access to high school, creating the K-12 model as we know it today.  Today, the majority of K-12 funding comes from States and local communities.  The federal government provides about 8 percent of the total K-12 funding in the form of grants that are then managed by the States.

The language that the Administration used to describe the proposed change was based on recent initiatives in New York and a few other states, where the State government allows in-state high school graduates to attend state-funded community colleges without paying tuition fees.  These experiments are a harbinger of change, but likely not an end in themselves. 

Long term, the solution is not simply free community college, but a fresh consideration of our society’s need for education in the new environment—a move from K-12 public education to a K-14 system.  Given that the proposed free tuition proposal was not accepted, here are some thoughts on how the Administration might act to set the stage for K-14 in the years ahead as part of a long-term vision for public education in the information society. 

A National Commission

President Biden should create a National Commission on K-14 Education to look at the need for universal K-14 schooling.  The Commission could begin by looking at the current experiments in free community college tuition and how a national initiative could build on those, but also consider related practical issues, such as how the innovation should be supported financially, how a K-14 education would relate to the rest of the undergraduate curriculum, and how a mature K-14 system might change both K-12 education and undergraduate collegiate education. 

Here are several implications that this National Commission might consider as it designs a national strategy for educational change:

Curriculum Integration There is a longstanding concern about duplication between high school and the first two years of college.  How many courses on American history are needed?  How many introductory algebra courses?  How many “Introduction to Physics” courses?  If a K-14 approach means that the percentage of high school students who go on to the general education curriculum at their local community college increases significantly, the Commission should look at how best to minimize unnecessary duplication.  At the same time, it should explore how best to fill classrooms that become available due to reducing duplication, perhaps by enhancing the array of career specialization courses. 

Dual Credit  One way that students have already begun to blend high school and college is by enrolling in college courses that allow students to earn college credit while also meeting high school graduation requirements.  It is one tool that schools can use to minimize duplication of instruction while also speeding up students’ progress to the associate degree (https://www.edglossary.org/dual-enrollment/).  What role should this play on the road to a K-14 system?

The Gap Year As we move toward an educational system in which most, if not all, young people spend a minimum of 14 years in education, we should also consider the value of a “gap year” for the long-term health of our youth and their ability to make good career choices.  One way to think about the gap year is to see it as a year of service, in which young people could work as volunteers in social service organizations or governmental agencies (national parks, for instance) or in social agencies that use the skills the students will gain.  A gap year might help students consider their personal and career goals.

Impact on Higher Education  How can K-14 best be structured in states where community colleges currently are not available in every county or regional educational unit?  Should other public institutions—state colleges and universities—be involved?   If high school graduates are encouraged to attend community college for their first two years of postsecondary education, this could have significant impact on four-year colleges and universities, which might conceivably lose significant numbers of students in their freshman and sophomore classes and, by extension, weaken the student pipeline to upper division courses that lead to baccalaureate degrees.

These are just a few of the issues that are sure to arise as a National Commission explores a pathway to a true K-14 educational environment.  This approach may be the more practical, less politically divisive way to explore the territory and build a new social contract to meet the needs of a mature post-industrial society.

            Thoughts?

“Mammals about to be born dream of the world to come.”

One of my favorite features of Harper’s magazine is “Findings,” a collection of briefly stated scientific facts strung together in a few paragraphs on the last page.  The October 2021 issue had this statement as the final “Finding” of the month:  “Mammals about to be born dream of the world to come.”

It is enticing to think: even before we are born, we are able to dream.  I had to learn more, so I did a web search.

It turns out that this finding is based on research done by Michael Crair, a professor and vice provost for research at Yale University.  He and his team studied images of the brains of mice shortly after birth but before their eyes opened.  They discovered that the mice’s retinal waves immediately after birth flowed in a pattern that mimics what would occur if the mouse was moving forward through the environment (Hathaway, para 6).  “These brain circuits are self-organized at birth and some of the early teaching is already done,” Crair said. “It’s like dreaming about what you are going to see before you even open your eyes.” (Hathaway, para. 12).

Crair and his team have given us a description of a pre-birth experience that benefits beings after they are born.  That said, on a philosophical level, when I read the “Finding” in Harper’s, the first thing I thought is what C.S. Lewis once said:  “We don't have a soul. We are a soul. We happen to have a body.”  

A Lesson from Ernest Hemingway

 

Here is a quick lesson on writing--or, more specifically, on what to do when NOT writing--from Ernest Hemingway.  Writing about his work room in Paris, he notes:

 

It was in that room too that I learned not to think about anything that I was writing about from the time I stopped writing until I started again the next day.  That way my subconscious would be working on it and at the same time I would be listening to other people and noticing everything, I hoped; learning, I hoped; and I would read so that I would not think about my work and make myself impotent to do it.  Going down the stairs when I had worked well, and that needed luck as well as discipline, was a wonderful feeling and I was free then to walk anywhere in Paris (A Moveable Feast, p. 13).

It is interesting advice that, I suspect, applies not just to writing.

Bob Ubell’s “Staying Online”

 

Many colleges and universities moved online over the past year in response to the COVID pandemic.  This year, many of those same institutions are considering the ongoing role of online learning in their overall teaching and learning environment as they seek to establish a new normal that better integrates virtual and face-to-face learning for the long run.

            Robert Ubell’s new book, Staying Online: How to Navigate Digital Higher Education is a powerful resource for administrators and faculty who are working to help their institutions make the most of an aspect of education that is moving quickly into the mainstream.  Many chapters in the book are adapted from essays that Ubell has published over the past few years, updated to best fit the new environment that online learning is helping to create today.  As he says in his introduction, “the aim of these extended essays is to explore which virtual practices are likely to be best for students, increasingly tossed unwittingly into unfamiliar digital academic environments. All have been updated and include more recent material to give shape and substance to earlier pieces requiring broader current perspectives.”  For readers, it provides the opportunity to have a veteran pioneer at your side as you plan your own innovations as we continue to respond to the emergency and, at the same time, build the basis for the post-pandemic environment.

            Ubell organized the chapters around four broad themes: (1) moving to online learning as an emergency resource during the pandemic, (2) theory and practice issues, (3) scaling up, and (4) problems and considerations facing institutions as they scale up.  A final chapter explores areas where has changed his mind about a topic since the essays were originally written.

            In many ways, Ubell suggests, the use of virtual education during the pandemic has provided a point of comparison with a properly designed online course.  “Most faculty had no time to prepare a virtual course that drew thoughtfully on valuable pedagogical methods, like active learning, project-based inquiry, and peer-to-peer instruction . . .Without planning faculty just take their face-to-face lectures and put them online.”  That experience has spurred new thinking about the design of online learning—the new normal that faculty and institutions are working to find while they manage the pandemic emergency.  The effect of the rapid pandemic-spurred conversion has been to give many faculty and their institutions a first experience with online learning at scale and an opportunity to consider what it takes to make the transition to this new environment.  The lesson he learned was that:

Teaching online demands that instructors find new ways of captivating students they often can neither see nor hear, a radical departure from centuries of conventional instruction. Virtual instruction does not depend on one’s expressive face, spirited movements, or an affecting speaking voice, but on altogether new pedagogies introduced in the last century and practiced by inventive early adopters in this century. To recover from the stumbling emergency semester, surely the first item on the higher ed agenda was to guide faculty in digital instruction best practices. 

In the “Theory and Practice” section, Ubell recounts his personal experience as a first-time online instructor, the obstacles he encountered, and the importance of instructional design and media development support in helping him find way in a new environment that encourages multiple kinds of engagement among faculty, students, and content.  He goes on to examine how innovation over the past quarter century has led to standards—endorsed by a variety of professional associations—that institutions can use to guide their own development and to address concerns about how ensure that the environment is truly serving the needs of an increasingly diverse student population.

A chapter on the “digital economy” explores the changing academic environment—the increase in adult learners, the decrease in traditional-aged students, the increasing need for continuing study as students move into the workplace, etc.—and changes in the faculty itself as higher education responds to sometimes dramatic economic and social changes—and how online learning itself is evolving as institutions use it to address the new environment.

            In the 1990s, when we were creating the World Campus, Penn State’s online campus, a friend and associate dean for outreach in one of Penn State’s colleges, gave me some very helpful advice.  “If you want to successfully lead innovation in a university,” she told me, “you have to become a scholar of that field.  You have to become the source of knowledge about the field you are leading.”  Staying Online helps today’s new leaders achieve that goal.  By sharing the experience and perspective of a successful elearning innovator, Staying Online allows innovators to better help their institutions scale up online learning in this rapidly evolving field. 

Thaddeus Stevens: Civil War Revolutionary, Fighter for Racial Justice

 

Just finished reading Thaddeus Stevens: Civil War Revolutionary, Fighter for Racial Justice by Bruce Levine.  As Pulitzer Prize winner Steven Halm noted in his review of the book,

“Often reviled and generally misunderstood, Thaddeus Stevens has been relegated to a dark corner of the American historical stage. The distinguished historian Bruce Levine not only brings Stevens back into the light but also reveals his significance to the revolutionary dynamic of the Civil War and Reconstruction.”

When many modern readers think of Thaddeus Stevens what may come to mind first is the curmudgeonly Congressman played by Tommy Lee Jones in Steven Spielberg’s great bio-pic, Lincoln.  While Jones apparently got the personality of Stevens right in the film, Stevens role in the nation’s struggle over slavery was much greater than most people understand.  In order to properly tell about Stevens’ contribution to American life, Levine gives us a detailed history of how issues of emancipation and racial equality evolved in the decades leading up to the American Civil War and during—and after—the war itself and of Stevens’ central role in shaping our concepts of racial equality that resulted.  It is a remarkable story—one not given much time in our high school history classes—of how American politics and culture dealt with the issues surrounding slavery while fighting what many now see as the Second American Revolution.

Stevens was born in Vermont in 1792 and suffered from a club foot all his life.  His father abandoned the family when Stevens was six, and he grew up in poverty.  However, his mother encouraged him to read and to get a good education.  Thanks to a New England culture that provided access to education for poor students, he was able to attend Dartmouth College and then taught school while he studied for his law degree.  In 1816, he moved to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where he established himself as a lawyer.  He was elected to the Pennsylvania House of Representatives in 1833, where he advocated for public school system, and served as a delegate to the Pennsylvania Constitutional Convention in 1836-37.  After losing re-election, he moved to Lancaster to build his law practice and was elected to the U.S. Congress. Over the next three decades, until his death in 1868, Stevens was an outspoken advocate for full emancipation of slaves and their acceptance as full citizens. 

What is intriguing about Levine’s book is the detail that he provides on how emancipation and related issues gradually developed in the years leading up to the Civil War and during the war itself.  Politicians were so concerned to attract the Confederates back into the Union that they were reluctant to make any demands on the slave-holding states, even to the point of being reluctant to allow escaped slaves to serve in the military.  The result is a fascinating look at this aspect of our history that few of us got in high school or college American history classes.  Given today’s climate, where we again as a nation are struggling to overcome the idea of racial distinctions, it is a powerful bit of historical narrative.

Stevens was in the midst of the debate over these issues and championed freedom throughout his career.  He wrote this epitaph for himself, which was carved into his monument in 1868 at the Shriner-Concord Cemetery, then the only racially integrated cemetery in Lancaster, Pa:

I repose in this quiet and secluded spot not from any natural preference for solitude.  But, finding other cemeteries limited as to race, by charter rules, I have chosen this that I might illustrate in my death the principles which I advocated through a long life: EQUALITY OF MAN BEFORE HIS CREATOR.

Thaddeus Stevens is a great read and a great lesson for our times.