The Dialogue Venture

Posts Tagged ‘education’

Dialogue, especially on social and political issues, benefits greatly from a clear (and agreed-upon) grasp of the facts. But ferreting out honest-to-goodness facts can be wickedly tricky. Allow me, in the spirit of making a point, to look at what may be an absurd example.

Our subject is an innocent-looking sentence in “School aid reductions won’t harm students,” a recent op-ed from New York’s lieutenant governor, Robert Duffy. Discussing a state school system that he calls “large, expensive and underperforming,” Duffy writes:

It is the most expensive system in the country and the 34^th in the percentage of adults with high school diplomas, according to the Census Bureau.

Usually I read sentences like that without blinking an eye. Why did this one set my truth antennae to tingling?

Let’s unpack the sentence a bit. A strict reading doesn’t make sense, if you think about it. No school system contains adults with high school diplomas—not as students, anyway. Students in high schools are teenagers, generally, and they don’t have high school diplomas because they’re there to earn high school diplomas.

Now that’s clearly not what Duffy means. But what exactly does he mean? Perhaps he’s referring to graduation or dropout rates, in which case his statement makes sense as legitimate evidence. But maybe he meant that New York State itself—not the school system—ranks 34^th in the percentage of adults with high school diplomas. Now we’re on shaky ground, because all kinds of factors might influence that statistic. Does New York’s large population of immigrants skew the ranking? Do the data count immigrants’ diplomas, if earned in another country, as “high school diplomas”?  The answers to these questions might help us understand whether the “34” statistic really proves Duffy’s point.

OK, maybe I’m tilting at windmills here. But the point stands. People who debate an issue (as in op-ed pieces) naturally use statistics to bolster their case. There’s nothing wrong with that when it’s done in good faith, as Duffy (I believe) is doing here. Dialogue, however, is not debate. The spirit of dialogue, with its commitment to ferreting out the truth above making a case, demands that we weigh such statistics carefully, consider who is using them, and evaluate their relevance to the issue at hand.

This is extraordinarily hard work in today’s world, with reams of information cascading toward us every minute.  Our 24/7 information cycle requires us to have finely tuned truth antennae, so we can pick out strange fact usage quickly. Try this exercise: Next time you read an article, watch a video, or scan a blog, and you run across something cited as fact, take five seconds to weigh it. Does it make sense? Is it self-evident? Or is something just a little bit off—something that sets off your truth antennae?

Have you already run across things that fit into that “something off” category? Feel free to share them here.

Bertie Simmons opened her remarks by saying, “If we can’t imagine what civility looks like, we can’t do civility.”

She then showed us what it looks like.

Simmons was a panelist at last week’s Citizens’ Civility Symposium 2010, sponsored by the Institute for Civility in Government. (Check out my last post for a broad overview.) Compelling and drop-dead funny, she spun the remarkable tale of her tenure as principal of Furr High School in Houston—and how she used civility to transform the culture.

That culture was tough, to say the least. The school had no fewer than 15 gangs. On her first day, one student threw another through a plate glass window. Another day brought a near riot to the hallways.

Simmons wondered whether she was cut out for the job—especially because 75% of the students were Latino, 25% were black, and she was (in her words) “white and old.” How could she possibly lead such a school, let alone make a lasting impact?

She got an early boost from a cultural phenomenon she hadn’t known about. Many Latino and black children learn from day one to hold their grandmothers in high esteem. As it turned out for Simmons, being “old” translated into being a grandmother. So she had an in.

And she leveraged it with a bold reach across divides. After the near riot, Simmons convened 42 leaders from the 15 gangs in one room—and asked them what it would take to make peace. What she heard amazed her: the depth of mistrust and disillusionment that these young people felt toward the system, the pervasive sense that they had been left behind.

How big was the divide? The gang leaders stunned Simmons with their belief that 9/11 never happened. They’d all seen things like that in movies; why couldn’t the government produce the same sort of “movie” and just make the whole thing up?

So Simmons took it upon herself to prove 9/11—by arranging a field trip to Ground Zero.

It took a great deal of planning and fundraising, but the trip took place, and the gang leaders got to see the devastation for themselves. In the process, Simmons built trust and got a penetrating look into the mindsets that drive many of her students.

That is what civility—and dialogue—look like. That is one way they bear fruit.

Simmons closed her remarks with the quote from Oscar Wilde that I mentioned last week. It, too, is a model for us as pursue dialogue: “Run your fingers through my soul. For once, just once, feel exactly what I feel, believe what I believe, perceive as I perceive, look, experience, examine, and for once, just once, understand.”