There has been much reflecting and revisiting tales of “where were you on 9/11″ and investigating how this infamous event impacted lives all across the nation. We’ve heard from those who lost people to this day, and while the airways have been justly saturated with stories, we at State of the Re:Union thought it might be interesting to hear how the “Aftermath Generation” of 9/11 has been formed by the day. Our SOTRU intern Brit McGinnis helps us with that insight.

Where were you when what it meant to be an American changed?

I was at school, in class. Elk Meadow Elementary School, Mrs. Krakow’s fifth grade class in Bend, Oregon. I remember all of us being told that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center in New York City and that people could be hurt.

The news didn’t compute at first. I didn’t understand why everyone was so upset— my little-kid sense of distance between the East Coast and the West Coast made the Twin Towers feel so far away. I wanted to ask, “Why is everyone so sad?” Other children were tense, as if waiting for some boogeyman terrorist to suddenly appear in the hallway. I excused myself to the bathroom, noticing that the halls seemed much more quiet than before. My footsteps echoed more loudly.

I watched the news all the time that week. I wanted to understand what this meant for my country. Before that day, I had only seen the scrolling bars showing updated news once on CNN, but now they were everywhere. For the first time, I was afraid. Not of terrorists attacking our country, but of how the country as a whole was going to react to what was happening. I suddenly became afraid of all the grownups around me becoming impetuous and doing something stupid.

We need to think, I kept thinking. We can’t just react. For the first time, I understood what it meant to feel helpless as a citizen.

I started reading the newspaper more and more, a reaction prompted by this event. I was young and I couldn’t yet vote. But I wanted to know what was going on, and I felt that I had to know as soon as possible. I read about the different countries, what the “big people in charge” were doing. I had to know, because I couldn’t be ignorant anymore.

I’ve found that this was a common reaction among my cohort. No matter if it was a lot or a little, people my age were awakened to the events of the world. We wanted to know what Al-Qaeda was. Where were Iraq and Iran? What did the president want to do now, and why? Opinions were suddenly spouting from everyone about the actions of the country. We kids learned to listen.

As my peers and I grew older, we became infatuated with the media. We wanted to make YouTube videos and Facebook pages — proof that we were still here, that we were still alive and kicking after all the tragedy that had occurred in our short lives. Programs like The Daily Show with Jon Stewart exploded in popularity, due to the fact that we still desperately wanted to know what was going on in our world.

This awakening of a generation, though it was an effect of a horrendous tragedy, has made this coming generation likely one of the most intellectually formidable generations in America’s history. We wanted to know everything that happened due to the tragedy we barely understood at the time. We were too young to understand, but not too young to learn.

The tragic events of 9/11 made community-minded citizens out of an entire generation of young people, because it made us want to learn about the workings of our country and the world. Who can truly, effectively terrorize a nation of knowledge-seeking people?

There are pivotal moments in our lives, be they big, small, tragic or ordinary, affecting changes in the way that we do things. Are you a participant and voice in the Aftermath Generation? If so, do you think 9/11 has forged the way you operate? Are its effects truly defining your generation? If so, what is the one thing that changed in your/your cohorts actions or thinking? Did it make you more curious about religion or culture, suspicious of strangers? Perhaps it made you more impetuous, callous, thoughtful or forgiving? Think about it, write it down and send it to us. We would love to learn more about the future of the men and women in our communities.

Many people responded to the 9/11 attacks by putting flag decals on their cars, singing God Bless America and other patriotic songs, donating to various charities, and wearing flag lapel pins. At the time, I warned against such gestures, as I feared they amounted to a kind of empty or false unity. But today is different: we desperately need people to take such action.

Our politics and public life can be toxic, so much so that to even hold the 10th anniversary commemorations this past weekend required a kind of cease fire among deeply divided politicians and their supporters. Endless acrimony has left a stain on the public square, and left many of us bemoaning the daily conduct of our leaders. One can only hope our leaders will enlighten themselves and find a better path. But don’t hold your breath.

Instead, it is everyday citizens – you, me, and others – who ultimately will place the nation on a better trajectory. The task before us is to “rebuild” the nation – but not solely by constructing new memorials and buildings at Ground Zero and elsewhere. For bricks and mortar are not the most important building blocks for this rebuilding.

The first and most fundamental need is to “signal” each other that we are ready to step forward and join together. To achieve this, we must embrace and spread small public acts and rituals that get people out of their homes and demonstrate a sense of connection and compassion for one another – acts such as helping a neighbor, painting a local school, singing public-spirited songs together, and displaying the flag, among others. I am not advocating make-work volunteer efforts, or superficial initiatives, but small acts grounded in a sense of common purpose and accomplishment for the greater good.

I realize these public acts will not solve our most pressing challenges. At this point my goal is more modest, yet no less important. We must get people engaged with one another at a time when people no longer trust their leaders, many of the organizations created to serve their communities, and often one another. People worry no one understands the reality of their lives, their concerns, or aspirations – and that no one will stand with them in tough times.

People’s desire for a new course is not rooted in the politics of ideology or partisanship, as some would have you believe, but in the basic human hope for connection and compassion. Thus this challenge is one of humanity and identity, not simply politics and policy.  People want to feel a part of an able and connected America; they want to be seen, heard and understood; they want to restore their faith and pride in themselves and the nation.

I want to underscore just how basic and vital this first step is.  I recognize that many of the challenges faced across the country require more than the small public acts I am recommending here – they demand nothing short of sustained and systemic action if there is to be real and lasting change. There is no other way to effectively address underlying issues involving public schools, income disparities, health care, energy independence, and the like. But make no mistake: we must lay the proper groundwork to bring about the trust and public will necessary to break current gridlock and create a genuine sense of possibility in the nation. This is our most urgent work now.

That’s why on this, the 10th anniversary of 9/11, it is many of the very gestures that emerged after 9/11, the very ones I felt back then did not go far enough, that fit the bill today. If we are to get anything of real magnitude done in the days and years ahead, then we must have the courage to take the small steps that will get us moving in the right direction and build from there.

It’s not too late. Let’s start to rebuild the nation, together, one small public act after another.

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A dynamic public speaker, Rich Harwood is a frequent keynote for foundations and national organizations. He is an expert contributor on national and syndicated media outlets including MSNBC, NPR, The Christian Science Monitor, CNN’s Inside Politics, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, Special Report with Brit Hume, C-SPAN, and many others. He is also the author of Hope Unraveled: The people\’92s retreat and our way back (2005), Make Hope Real: How we can accelerate change for the public good (2008) and numerous studies, articles and essays chronicling vital issues of our time. His most recent written work, Why We\’92re Here: The Powerful Impact of Public Broadcasters When They Turn Outward, is being published and distributed in Spring 2011. You can follow him on twitter @RichHarwood and facebook.com/richharwood.

You can read Rich’s posts every Tuesday on State of the Re:Union’s website.

Over the past few days, it has been hard to dodge reminders about the tragedy of 9/11 and the stories of lives, families and communities that were ripped apart. It has been hard for some to overcome the harrowing time of our nation’s struggle, but for many others, it has given inspiration in remembering just what family means and why it is so important to our existence as a community. State of the Re:Union turns to John McKnight of Abundant Community to bring the meaning of family back into focus.

One day, when my mother was in her 70’s, she told me a story about how things had changed in her small town since she was a girl. She said,

“When I was a girl, things were very different. When we were feeling ill, my grandmother knew what would cure almost anything and all of us turned to her for healing advice.

When there was a dispute or trouble between family members, we turned to Uncle Charlie who listened, understood, and counseled us. He would remind us that our family’s sticking together was the most important thing we had.

Most important things I learned were from our neighbors and family. School helped, but the way I really came to understand the world was from the folks around me.

Whenever the family gathered, each of the kids was expected to display some talent for the group – singing, reciting a poem, doing acrobatics, playing a musical instrument. We didn’t think of it as entertainment. It was the enjoyment of sharing our gifts.

Everyone had backyard gardens and we had wonderful get-togethers when we picked and canned the food that got us through the winter.

My dad and brother built our house.

Today, that seems to have all faded away. Now, people use only doctors when they are ill and grandmothers are ignored.

People go to lawyers and psychologists when there are problems and Uncle Charlie is ignored.

Now, people think schools raise a child so children ignore their neighbors and their family.

Now, people enjoy television and movies and they ignore the gifts and talents of the people around them.

Food comes from the supermarket and McDonald’s and the backyard is for grass. There are no wonderful canning parties anymore.

Houses are built by architects and contractors who never make a house that really fits a family like the one my dad and brother built.”

I think my mother was reminding me that her community was a productive place.

I think my mother was reminding me that her community was the producer of much of its health, problem solving, education, talent, food and housing. It was a productive place. Now, she observes a community made up of consumers who believe that health is in a hospital, problems are the domain of lawyers and therapists, education is produced by schools, enjoyment is produced by electronic media, food is provided by supermarkets and a home is built by professionals.

Hidden within my mother’s observations is the fact that she is describing the loss of basic functions belonging to families and neighborhoods. Most have become incompetent in terms of doing the work of families and neighborhoods. The cost of this incompetence is families and neighborhoods that have no real function.

No group persists when it has no reason to be together. Therefore, if families perform no functions we can predict that they will fall apart.

We delude ourselves if we think our high divorce rates are caused by interpersonal problems and disagreements. It’s not that people are not getting along, it is that they don’t need each other because they have no functions. They are just isolated, unproductive, dependent consumers who happen to live in the same house.

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John McKnight is an expert on communities. An Ohio native who currently lives near Chicago, he has spent decades organizing communities and researching them, primarily in the Windy City itself. In the course of his career, he mobilized neighborhoods during the civil rights movement, wrote several books about community development, created a center for urban affairs at Northwestern University, and even taught the current President a thing or two about advocacy. (Yes, it’s true: way back when, a young and eager Barack Obama interned at McKnight’s training program for community organizers in southeast Chicago). If that’s not enough, he recently co-authored a book called “The Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods.”

State of the Re:Union will be featuring pieces from John McKnight and Peter Block of Abundant Community every other Monday.

There’s been a lot of bad news coming out of Sacramento lately: homelessness, the foreclosure rate, unemployment, political gridlock in a state crippled by the recession.  Add to that a stubborn case of politics fatigue, and you’ve got a lot of reasons to write off this city.  But we trekked to California’s beleaguered state capital to peek behind the national headlines and find out who keeps this city running—day in, day out—despite all that’s going wrong.  And we left with the realization that people in Sacramento are remaking the American city, in surprising and deeply moving ways.

State of the Re:Union wants to hear from you! Use the comment section below to let us know what you think about our latest episode, All Hands on Deck.

 

This week, State of the Re:Union would like to entertain our School Spotlight series with a recently required concept in preschool. The subject matter, preschool, is a notion that has actually been around and in use for quite some time. However, it is the mandate of incorporating it into the public school system that is making an old hat seem like a new accessory to education.

Thanks to the award-winning documentary “Early Lessons” by Emily Hanford, the River Breeze Elementary school was brought to our attention. However, a little bit of background information will need to be laid out before getting to why we chose them for this week’s School Spotlight.

Hanford’s documentary explores one of the most noted education experiments of the last 50 years, the Perry Preschool Project. One particular question asked in the 1962 study was: “Can preschool boost the IQ scores of poor African-American children and prevent them from failing in school?” According to Hanford, “the surprising results are now challenging widely-held notions about what helps people succeed – in school, and in life.”

A brief background of the study: In the late 1950s, a Michigan school system administrator, David Weikart, realized how badly these children were doing and decided to do something about it. In lieu of holding them back a year, he decided to head off the situation and start a preschool dedicated to helping 3- and 4-year-olds become smarter. After successfully proving Weikart’s case, the notion of cognitive development in the form of hands-on preschool was born. (To read more on the Perry Preschool results, click here.)

Forward to our School Spotlight today – a preschool classroom at River Breeze Elementary in Palatka, Florida. Here, school administrators and preschool teachers embrace the practices that were founded by Weikart. They believe that through interacting with children in the same hands-on learning manner as Perry Preschool, they will achieve similar, if not the same, results. Like the Perry children, these kids are being targeted for special education coming into the River Breeze preschool program who are from poor families. Some of these little ones have lived at homes with absolutely no books, and don’t say much when starting the program. However, these preschoolers soon get over their lack of artful conversation. One mother was surprised when her “quiet” child began singing the ABCs all the time. She even asked her child’s preschool teacher what she did to help her learn to find and use her voice.

All members of the River Breeze preschool program are very interactive. There are seven different areas that the classroom is divided into, and these areas contain just a few children at a time. The teachers not only watch the children learn through “getting dirty” with the hands-on learning, but they get to partake in the fun, too. Through doing this, the teachers can learn how the children are learning and customize an educational experience that will specifically target each child. This interaction also instills a positive school experience for the children, helping develop both their cognitive and non-cognitive skills.

River Breeze preschool is modeled after the same approach used by the Perry Preschool.  Children involved in the hands-on approach not only learn the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic, but important life coping and social skills, including motivation and the ability to work with others. These are the skills that are critical in helping people do well at school, at work, and most importantly, in life.

The families, children and teachers at River Breeze Elementary are happily taking a few pages out of the Perry Preschool Project study. They truly believe that, for them, this hands-on approach is what works for their children deserving a chance in successfully obtaining an education. They are also encouraged by the results yielded by the Perry Preschool Project: The participants in the study who went to preschool were more likely to be employed, making money, staying out of legal trouble, owning homes and cars, having families and being involved with them. All of this success allowed little time for these men and women to get mixed up in crime. Ere go, preschool helped cut the crime rate in half.

So, I guess all of the posters touting that everything we need to know is learned in kindergarten might need to have an alternate version printed with Pre-K, instead. With all of the controversy on broken policy shrouding our educational school systems, maybe more people should follow suit after River Breeze Elementary preschool teachers and administrators. With any luck, history will repeat itself for these families as they look to the past to get to their future.

Is this a possible solution that is feasible for the whole country? Some people are of the mind that children need a childhood and that school is too stressful. Others believe that there can never be enough school, and it is never too early to begin. What wheelhouse do you belong in? Is there such a thing as too early or too much? Or do you think that might be part of the prescription that our nation needs to inoculate itself against F-Cats, falling educational scores, and the excessive dropout rate? We at SOTRU love stories that help us understand others’ points of view. If you have one, we’d love to hear it.

Like most people I’ve always thought of truancy or chronic absenteeism as a high school phenomenon, but according to experts the problem can affect student performance at an earlier age. In some school districts, in fact, the absentee rate in kindergarten is almost as high as it is for ninth graders. The National Center for Childhood Poverty says that one in 10 kindergarten and first-grade students is chronically absent, although the absentee rates very significantly from district to district.

Kids miss school for different reasons, but one thing is clear; too many missed school days, whether excused or unexcused, can have a huge impact on student performance, especially among low income kids.

In an article I’m preparing for the National Civic Review, authors Hedy N. Chang and Phyllis W. Jordan describe what three school districts—Baltimore, New York and Oakland, California—are doing to address chronic absenteeism. In Baltimore, for example, the mayor’s office, the Open Society Institute-Baltimore and the local school district teamed up to make attendance a top community priority, enlisting a number of local organizations in a community-wide effort to bring down rates of absenteeism. Students made videos on the importance of attendance. Church members contact the families of chronically absent children to find out what the problem is. OSI-Baltimore grants focused on homeless kids and foster-children, two groups of kids that typically have high rates of absenteeism.

Baltimore’s Franklin Square Elementary and Middle School used a carrot and stick approach to create a “culture of attendance.” The principal meets with the family of every new student and emphasizes the important of attendance. The school attendance monitor calls the home of every absent student. After three days the family gets a letter. If the problem persists, the principal calls the home.

But the staff also tries to make the school environment a place where kids want to be with engaging after school programs and extras like dental clinics and haircuts for students who want or need them. Despite a mostly low income student population and pretty crowded classrooms, Franklin has one of the highest attendance rates in the district.

It seems pretty clear that focusing laser-like on a problem like absenteeism can make a big difference. But according to the authors, not everyone is looking at the right data. “Many school districts are in the dark because they don’t look at the right numbers. They look at average, school-wide attendance data, and they look at truancy, not the full range of excused and unexcused absences. Thus, they don’t know how many students are missing 10 percent of the school year, or in other words, how many students are chronically absent. Even a school with 95 percent average daily attendance can have 15 to 20 percent of its students registering high levels of absenteeism.”

Apparently Baltimore was uniquely positioned to focus on this issue in part because the state of Maryland was keeping the right kind of statistics, looking at the number of students who were chronically absent. Also, researchers at Johns Hopkins were doing work in the area of chronic absenteeism.

“Chronic absence is a problem we can fix,” note the authors, “if we look at the right data and start early enough. Schools and communities are seeing attendance rates improve within months when they  monitor chronic absence data, identify barriers to attendance, and reach out to children and families help them overcome barriers to getting to school. People everywhere understand the value of school attendance, which makes it easy for city leaders to rally support for their campaigns.”

The 2012 All-America City Awards will recognize communities that have developed the most comprehensive, realistic and sustainable plans to increase grade-level reading proficiency by the end of third grade by focusing on three areas that have real potential to drive improvements in grade-level reading: school readiness, school attendance, and summer learning. To sign a letter of intent for your community to apply for the award, link here.

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Mike McGrath is senior editor and chief information officer for the National Civic League. A former newspaper reporter and magazine writer, he is editor of the quarterly National Civic Review, which will be beginning its centennial year of publishing this spring.

Mike’s posts will appear every Thursday on the State of the Re:Union website.