Dispatches from the Field

 

Dear Brandeis community,

 

I write you this morning from the Omni Hotel in Atlanta, Georgia, site of the 2018 National Association of Independent Schools annual conference. The hotel sprawls into a conference center, and you can walk miles through halls and across bridges without ever stepping foot outside. I am struck, every time I come to such a place, by the architecture of disorientation they seem to exist within; by the odd angles and sightlines that one encounters. What, I wonder, am I supposed to make of this, the view from the hall outside my room—this bizarre cityscape entirely encased in glass?

 

 

This year the conference theme is leadership, and my itinerary today is full of it, with sessions on the public and private lives of school leaders, on leading organizational change, on leading wisely in a conscious society, and on using research to inform institutional strategy. Tomorrow, I’ll shift more toward pedagogy, with sessions on mastery-based assessment and the future of homework. I look forward to the learning, and what of it I can bring back to Brandeis.

 

Yesterday, I began my time here with a tour of Atlanta’s African-American and civil rights history. It was fascinating to learn of the many erased histories all around us—the black Baptist church built by slaves, for example, that was torn down to make room for the Falcons’ football stadium next door. We heard about the first African-American men and women to own property in Atlanta—about a woman who bought a home, and then sold it for a profit and used the funds to buy her husband’s freedom. We drove through what felt like innumerable unmarked and unnamed historical sites—where strikes and demonstrations took place, or where the interstate cuts through and rides over what had been a slave graveyard—and learned about the ongoing fights with state and local government to recognize these places and the histories they hold.

 

We ended the tour at the tomb of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., which sits in a bright blue pool, surrounded by the tenets of nonviolence which he practiced and espoused. A tiered fountain feeds the pool:

 

 

 

The quote on the walls reads:

 

Until Justice Rolls Down Like Water and Righteousness Like a Mighty Stream.

 

Reading that quote, in the wake of all those unacknowledged histories, I found myself thinking about the true power and responsibility of leadership. I found myself thinking about our recent and never-ending national debates about gun control—about our “prophetic tradition that teaches a moral responsibility to pursue justice,” as it states in the first sentence of the open letter from Jewish day school heads. I found myself thinking about the future leaders in our schools, whose country accepts the “appallingly routine” death of children via school shootings, as it says in the open letter from California heads of school, which will run in this Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle and Los Angeles Times. I found myself thinking about why I stepped into the complicated public and private life of school leadership: because the spirits of our kids and our country need shepherding, and repairing; because the work is long, and the day is short; and because, though I will not finish the work, neither am I free to desist from it.

 

Wishing you all weekends full of righteousness rolling like a mighty stream, my friends.

 

Warmly,

 

Dan