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Topics: Youth & Religion (cross-referenced)

Baltimore's Commonwealth of Schools, continued

Index

Story: Baltimore's Commonwealth of Schools
Case Study Plus: Repairing the Commons

Contents

Case Study Plus: Repairing the Commons

I. Schooling and Citizenship in American History
II. Baltimore's Citizens Respond to the Educational Crisis
III. Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development
IV. Revitalizing the Public Schools: the Baltimore Commonwealth
Notes

Case Study Plus: Repairing the Commons

This essay was first published as chapter 7 of Commonwealth: A Return to Citizen Politics (New York: Free Press, 1989). Harry Boyte is the coordinator of the American Civic Forum. He is also co-director of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship, Hubert Humphrey Institute, University of Minnesota.

Introduction

"We are of the humble opinion that we have the right to enjoy the privileges of free men, but that we do not will appear in many instances and we beg leave to mention one out of many," declared A Petition to the State Legislature of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, delivered by a group of African American leaders in 1787, the year of the nation's Constitutional Convention. The right in question was "the education of our children which receive no benefit from the free schools in the town of Boston." A "great grievance," they argued, that made them "fear for our rising offspring." If not remedied, their children would be consigned to "ignorance in a land of gospel light...for no other reason [than] they are black."0

The petition served well as testimony to the painful ironies of American democracy itself. Since the nation's beginning, the ideal of public education has been inextricably linked with America's very definition of a republican, or commonwealth government. And the distance between that ideal and the actual practices has proven the key to deciphering the unfulfilled promises of democracy. In few other cases has the contrast between myth and reality proven as stark as in the educational story of African Americans.

But the narrative is not one of unrelieved victimization. Blacks have often refashioned schools—or created their own—as instruments of community strength, cohesion, and the struggle for full citizenship, even in the face of considerable hardship. And today, Baltimoreans United for Leadership Development, or BUILD—the largest mainly black local organization in the country—has crafted what may well be the most ambitious plan for revitalizing public schools, called the Baltimore Commonwealth. The plan combines a remarkable incentive plan for high school graduates with a strategy for wide-ranging devolution of power and responsibility to teachers and the community. Moreover, it represents a potent redefinition of the very function of schools, reviving the old tradition which saw education as the instrument of democracy itself, teaching young people to be full, active participants in the life and decision-making processes of their communities.

The Baltimore Commonwealth of schools, furthermore, renews the old concept of commons as meeting ground. In Baltimore, collaborative work on schools by BUILD, the business community, city officials, unions and others created a mechanism for an ongoing conversation about the city and its future, after a period of extreme division and polarization.

BUILD's Commonwealth initiative has old antecedents. It stands as example of the prophetic role African Americans have regularly played in calling the country back to unrealized democratic promises. And the clout that BUILD assembled to press its plan constituted a reminder of the regenerative possibilities still to be realized in American politics.

I. Schooling and Citizenship in American History

For the more democratic activists in the American Revolution, widespread public schooling was seen as the indispensable bulwark against tyranny. "Where learning is confined to a few people, we always find monarchy, aristocracy and slavery," wrote Benjamin Rush, a founding figure in American education, in 1786. Thomas Jefferson rested much of his hope for avoiding the corruption and decay of the American republican spirit in the spread of schooling. "Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day."1

Such a faith in the democratic power of education had old antecedents on the continent. As early as 1664, reflecting in part the Puritans interest in teaching practical applications of the Bible, Massachusetts passed a compulsory education law, requiring all male European children in the Colony to receive formal schooling. Five years later, enabling legislation required each township to provide schools and schoolmasters. A hundred years later, similar legislation had been passed in the body of the New England and Middle Atlantic colonies. The original religious purposes of education had taken on secular, practical ends of the sort advocated by Benjamin Franklin, who argued that any man might have to do anything in a frontier society; the point of his model school, the Philadelphia Academy, was to train male children to deal with unanticipated situations. It was to be a school out of which boys "will come...fitted for learning any Business, Calling, or Profession."2

In fact, relatively few children—even among the white, male population—received more than a few years of public school education in the early republic. But in the first half of the nineteenth century, the public school ideal fueled a wide-ranging movement, called the Common School Movement, which picked up the language of commonwealth and civic commitment. In this view, public school education was both an instrument of democracy—the means for enlightening the general "citizenry"—and itself, increasingly, a new form of social property: the very possession of an "education" in schools was seen as a foundation for independence and civic virtue, allowing active participation in the public affairs of the community. But as educational and social historian Colin Greer has pointed out in his book, The Great School Legend, "public schools never really embraced the mass of the community."3

Whatever the rhetoric and intentions of reformers, common schools in the 19th century were meant not only to inform and increase access to citizenship. They were also seen by the powerful as instruments for sorting out virtuous citizens from others—females, blacks, the poor, immigrant workers—who were not to be included, and for training in the skills and attitudes seen as desirable. Thus schools became objects of sharp struggle over control. And urban elites most often emerged victorious from the fray. The result was that schools, in the main, sought to inculcate middle class values of discipline, control and deference to authority that would be useful in producing a tractable workforce and citizenry. 4

African Americans confronted educational obstacles even more daunting than white working class families. Reading and writing had been illegal for blacks under the slavery system of the Old South. But the illicit tools were taken up in secret nonetheless. In Richmond, Virginia, after the Civil War, a petition of "20,000 colored people" seeking repeal of a hated pass system circumscribing the movement of former slaves highlighted subterranean practice. "Three thousand of us can read," it maintained, "and at least 2,000 can read and write."

The black population immediately undertook a zealous crusade whose twin goals of education and land challenged America's racially restrictive commonwealth and demanded full inclusion. Land was tied to education. "It was a whole race trying to go to school," recalled Booker T. Washington about those years in his autobiography, Up from Slavery. "Few were too young, and none too old, to make the attempt to learn. As fast as any kind of teachers could be secured, not only were day-schools filled, but night-schools as well. The great ambition of the older people was to try to learn to read the Bible before they died." The Freedmen's Bureau in 1865 opened more than 4,000 schools across the South and, in the next five year, almost a quarter of a million people attended them. Throughout the south, those with education became leaders during the early years of Reconstruction. Thomas Allen, a former slave in Georgia who had no property, explained that his literacy made him a leader. "In my county the colored people came to me for instructions, and I gave them the best instructions I could. I took the New York Tribune and other papers, and in that way I found out a great deal, and I told them whatever I thought was right."

The drive for land, schooling, and full citizenship rights more broadly animated a vast political movement for several years. Black women shared in the new public world. Even though they could not vote for public officeholders or take office themselves, in the black political movement they voted on resolutions, organized mass meetings, and took part in rallies and parades, sometimes to the dismay of males. One Mississippi planter in 1873 observed, "Negroes all crazy on politics again." "It is the hardest thing in the world to keep a negro away from the polls," said another white in Alabama. "That is the one thing he will do, to vote."5

But the expansive sense of political possibilities engendered in the early years of Reconstruction soon eroded. The promise of land, a central program of the Freedmen's Bureau, was quickly rescinded. And the reality of African American education proved far more incomplete than Washington's generation had hoped for. By 1870, the Bureau itself was shut down and its schools mostly ended. Though Reconstruction legislatures in the south had been moved to establish public schooling for blacks, the subsequent decades locked the population into a rigidly segregated system where their schools received only a pittance. By the 1930s, the amount spent yearly for each pupil in black schools by 10 southern states amounted to $17.04, little over one third the amount, $49.30, spent for white children. In Mississippi and Georgia, school systems spent about $9 for each black child in school and five times more for whites.6

As industrialization reshaped the nation, schools came increasingly to be understood as the handmaiden of the emerging corporations. U.S. Commissioner of Education William Harris put it briskly at the turn of the century in his argument that graded schools represented the instrument for "training in the social habits...regularity, punctuality, orderly concerted action and self-restraint." Schools also were most often designed to teach more subtle forms of accommodation to dominant values: the effort to "Americanize" millions of immigrant children into a homogeneous white, Protestant and largely English culture, where differences of national background would be marginalized. Ruth Elson and Colin Greer's separate investigations of textbooks found that every minority cultural group except English, Scots, Germans and Scandinavians were depicted with similar stereotypes: Catholics, Jews, Italians, Chinese, Irish, Eastern Europeans as well as blacks were "mean, criminal, drunken, sly, lazy, and stupid in varying degrees."7

Finally, there was pressure for schools themselves increasingly to resemble factories in the emerging industrial, urban order. Teachers functioned as "line workers," whose work process was tightly regimented and divided into relatively narrow tasks. Students became the "product," stamped with the mark of homogenized and routinized learning of a given body of "facts," in ways that formed a stark contrast to the practical occupational flexibility envisioned by Benjamin Franklin and the education for citizenship foreseen by reformers like Jefferson and Mann, alike. Thus, through the 20th century, the trend has been toward larger and larger schools. Curricula have become increasingly fragmented, with students moving from room to room each hour. Teachers have less and less contact with individual students. And school administrations are progressively more concerned with questions of order, conflict management, and quantifiable measures of "output" like standardized testing. In such a setting, most students experience failure.

The evidence suggests that for most immigrant groups through the 20th century, economic mobility came largely as a result of access to entry level industrial jobs where individuals could advance through seniority systems over time, not through formal schooling. Indeed, functional illiteracy rates are highest in the nation's "rust belt" urban areas, where generations of immigrants left school long before graduation to enter the workforce, convinced of the school system's scant usefulness to their own lives. As New York school board member and education theorist Norman Fruchter has put it, "for the most part we produced a complex, interlocked system which produces failure for most kids. The debate is about who to blame." On top of the long-developing problems of urban schools, moreover, the migration of both black and white middle class residents to the suburbs in the 1970s left central city school districts in often desperate straits. Middle class taxpayers were increasingly unwilling to fund school improvements. Schools were wracked by problems of drugs, teenage pregnancy, even gang violence and physical assault against teachers. Dropout rates—after declining for two decades after World War II—began climbing once again. The spectre grew of school systems that were more like prisons, where poor and black populations were consigned to dramatically inferior education, locked into a culture of despair.8

II. Baltimore's Citizens Respond to the Educational Crisis

By the early eighties, such accumulating problems resulted in a widespread sense of crisis, captured in the 1983 report by the National Commission on Excellence in Education, A Nation At Risk. The report argued America's very future was being undermined by the nation's deteriorating school systems. But its solutions themselves became objects of controversy. A Nation at Risk reflected the biases of the Department of Education under Reagan appointee William Bennett. It did propose an upgrading of salary scales for teachers. But its main emphasis was toward a further centralization of power in school systems: new focus on discipline and strengthening of the hand of school administrators, sharply increased attention to central core curriculum and standardized testing. Its approach came to be known as the "Accountability Movement." Accountable schools, heralded by Ronald Reagan's Bennett, quickly became a kind of orthodoxy across the country.9

But its strategy was challenged by critics like the Carnegie Commission and leading educators such as Vito Perone, Deborah Meier and Theodore Sizer. They argued that the main thrust of these reforms could well end up making schools more like factories, where students were treated as unthinking, uncreative receptacles for a "given" body of information and teachers' possibilities for innovative pedagogy and mentoring of kids would all but disappear. On the surface, Accountable Schools might appear to introduce new elements of democracy to parents and children into education by requiring, for instance, that students pass standardized tests if they are to graduate. But in fact, the result would be a workforce and citizenry ill-equipped to respond creatively to complex problem- solving in the ways essential in future decades. For instance, to put the sort of intense emphasis on standardized testing called for in Accountable Schools meant, in practice, the gearing of curricula specifically to prepare students to pass narrowly focused tests—with little attention to the broader array of skills and critical capacities essential in a real world environment. Ben Franklin's old ideal of a flexible, creative, adaptable workforce has a renewed relevance for the years ahead.

In contrast to the Accountable School approach, an alternative began to emerge with a number of dimensions variously called "Essential Schools," "Local Site Control," and the "Professionalization of Teaching." Together, this ensemble of themes stressed increased autonomy for teachers and development of a view of teaching as a craft, involving high standards and multiple skills, and rewarding teachers, at the highest levels, with professional-level salaries, and decentralization of power and authority to the local school itself. To prove successful, the democratic school approach would require the breaking up of enormous schools into smaller units that would allow far more teacher and student interaction. Teachers would also have included, as part of their regular responsibilities, visitation with parents. Students would be required to meet rigorous standards, but the means of testing would be far more multidimensional than standardized testing allows. Sizer, for instance, proposed that students pass rigorous "exhibitions" in each core subject before graduation, combining written work, verbal presentations and questioning of peers and teachers. In a number of school systems, moreover, there were moves toward at least experiment with some of these elements.10

Thus a conflict began to emerge around the shape of America's education whose central issues involved questions of power and control. It was a complex and many sided controversy, with arguments and obstacles on both sides of the debate. Accountability advocates pointed to research by Ronald Edmundson and others that creative leadership by principals was the key factor in effective educational reform. Democratic school organizers agreed that principals' role was important, but they argued that schooling for America's future must involve a radically different, more collaborative sort of leadership than had traditionally been the case. But for democratic school approaches to work necessitated not only changes in the formal structure of education but also effective, skillful training and some clear public commitment to an alternative understanding of educational purposes themselves. Parents and community members, usually, were disadvantaged in any sort of school governance experiments. "I've had principals tell me they can always spot independent or troublesome parents in PTA meetings at the first of the year," recounted Norman Fruchter about his experiences on the school board. "They quickly move to isolate them."

In addition to traditional, hierarchical attitudes among school administrators and the lack of detailed knowledge about school functioning, minority and poor parents are discouraged from serious participation in school decision making processes by a series of other obstacles as well. Great differences in class and cultural background may separate parents from school professionals. Community residents, overworked and scrambling to meet ends meet, encounter difficulties in even attending meetings, often held far away. Finally, minority or poor parents frequently have painful memories of school to overcome. "There is an enormously powerful tendency for parents to simply say, 'they're the experts,' Fruchter summarized. "They just tend to stay away from any involvement." In sum, any serious effort aiming at substantive democratization of the school systems—especially programs that involve a greater degree of accountability and responsiveness to communities —faces considerable difficulties. 11

But there are also traditions of resistance to draw upon, as well. In Baltimore, Maryland—a town midway between North and South, shaped both a history which included sharply etched divisions of segregation and by the largest 19th century free black population of any city in the country—urban schools, like their counterparts across the country, had similarly suffered neglect and underfunding. But schools in the black community had also long stood as a symbol of black community pride, with a resilience forged by decades of battle against discrimination.

In the 1980s, after a period of decline, the schools once again became the centerpiece for a renewal of black community power in a fashion that held lessons for the nation as a whole. The program for change, the Baltimore Commonwealth, reflected a three fold combination: incentive plans for high school graduates of the sort sponsored by business groups around the country; the ideas of the Essential School Movement and other democratic school advocates; and the methods for a vast public "schooling in democracy" developed by the IAF.

Moses said to the Lord, 'Why hast thou dealt ill with thy servant?...Where am I to get meat to give to all this people?...I am not able to carry all this people alone, the burden is to heavy for me...

And the Lord said to Moses, 'Gather for me seventy men of the elders of Israel...and I will take some of the spirit which is upon you and put it upon them; and they shall bear the burden of the people with you, that you may not bear it yourself alone. - Numbers 11: 10 - 18

In 1981, the Black Caucus of the Industrial Areas Foundation network of organizations produced a new document, The Tent of the Presence, based on the passage from Numbers where Moses gathered a carefully selected group of elders at the "tent of meeting," the center of the Jewish community. There, Moses shared with them power and responsibility for leadership during the travels to the promised land.12

Tent of the Presence, rich with Biblical symbolism and exegesis, also included the newly accented IAF themes of democratic public life. The document argued that the black community in America—and the black church in particular—stood at a crossroads, facing a dangerous movement to the right in American politics. In such an environment sixties'-style "movement leaders," dependent on charismatic appeals and moral exhortation, were simply ineffective. For the black community to avoid an increasingly dangerous isolation and marginality, a new style of leadership would be needed, along with new organizational forms. Like Moses, the black clergy had to choose individuals with promising talents and abilities and "share some of the spirit" with them. A new form of collaborative leadership should emerge, spreading leadership, power and responsibility more widely. And new "broad-based" organizations were needed, owned by the members, funded with their own money, aimed at gathering durable power over time. Baltimore, Maryland, was an ideal test-case for the new approach.

Baltimore's African American community had a rich history to draw upon. The city had always had something of a mixed regional character, "caught midstream between the freedom of the North and the tradition of the South," as a Baltimore Urban Coalition report in 1934 put it. "The Negro rides the street cars in Baltimore as he does in New York, sitting where he finds a vacant sit. Yet...Negroes and whites attend separate schools and separate motion picture houses." Gerald Taylor, raised in Harlem and organizing in the New York area for years before he came to the city in 1984, immediately felt the contrast. "There's still respect for property—you don't see a lot of graffiti in Baltimore," he observed. "Because it was a segregated city, there were a limited number of places that blacks could go. But you also see a lot of overlaps, friendship networks, a density of community ties to build on."13

Through the 19th century, the city was famous as a center of cultural and political strength: Bethel AME church was a founder of the African Methodist Episcopal denomination. The city had been home of famous abolitionists like Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison. As early as 1890, African Americans gained representation on the city council. The black school tradition dated back to famous institutions like Sharp Street, established in the 18th century, African School, founded in 1812 by Daniel Coker and black girls schools like St. Francis' Academy, begun in 1828. In the decades of segregation, institutions like Frederick Douglass High School and Morgan State were seen as beacons of black education, turning out national leaders like Lillian Jackson of the NAACP, Clarence Mitchell, the lawyer, and Congressman Parren Mitchell."14

A long tradition of popular protest had emerged from the dense network of community institutions in black Baltimore as well. Abolitionists like Elisha Tyson had been prominent figures in Baltimore as early as the Revolutionary War. In the 1880s the State Supreme Court, prodded by the African American legal organization called Brotherhood of Liberty, admitted blacks before the bar. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, activist organizations like the Young People's Forum, the People's Unemployed League, the Fellowship of Reconciliation and the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom combined protests against economic hardship with challenge to segregated educational and employment patterns. Every Friday night in the early 1930s, the Young People's Forum drew hundreds of people to its forum on controversial public issues, held at Bethel AME church. It led a widespread boycott to demand the hiring of black clerks in downtown stores, and petitioned city and state for an upgrading of black schools in the city. During the civil rights movement of the 1960s, leading ministers like Vernon Dobson often consulted with Martin Luther King, Jr., and his staff, and helped spark a wide-ranging series of successful protests for desegregation of public facilities in Baltimore. 15

By the latter years of the 1970s, however, the civil rights movement had largely run out of steam. "I was becoming an old, disillusioned preacher," remembered Dobson. "The last demonstration we called, we had had a press conference where we announced we'd have 300 people. Ten came." For the Rev. Doug Miles, the memory of those years was more painful yet. Miles had led a group of ministers to meet with Alan Hoblitzel, president of Maryland National Bank, to protest the institution's plans for an increase in interest charges on credit cards. "Out of the ten who said they would come, four showed up. Hoblitzel escorted us to a classroom. Then he told us what he was not going to do—what we didn't have the power to make him do. I sat there and my blood boiled but I realized that was the truth. We didn't have enough clout." The credit card fees were instituted.16

Such defeats fed a gathering political discouragement in black Baltimore. "Reagan's message was becoming the message of America," Miles recalled. "Even the black community had adopted the philosophy of 'me, myself and I,' the idea that I've got mine and if you don't have yours that's tough." In religious terms, the trend was strongly toward privatism. "The black middle class was eating up the message that you could go in and get saved, feel good about yourself." Politically it was a time of retreat. "For the first time I heard black people talking about 'those people in the ghetto.' It was a mental dissociation from the pain that none of us are more than a step away from." Miles himself prepared to pull his congregation back from social commitments and cut back his involvement with groups like the Black Ministerial Alliance.17

But leaders like Dobson and Miles, discouraged as they were, understood the perils of public apathy. Indeed, the same period marked a growing perception throughout the city of "two Baltimores"—with a prosperous, middle class increasingly distanced from a growing, largely black underclass. The division took many forms. William Donald Schaefer, elected mayor in 1971, had led Baltimore to national prominence with a vigorous promotion of a downtown "renaissance" that took Norman Vincent Peale's philosophy of positive thinking to hithertofore unexplored terrain. Occasioned by large scale developments along the harbor, Harborplace, and a complex of office buildings, commercial spaces and recreational facilities called Charles Center, Schaefer sponsored flamboyant public events. On "Sunny Sundays" at the Harbor he led crowds in clapping for the sunshine. On "Pink Positive Days" he organized rallies to applaud the harbor. Schaefer's exuberance undeniably aided corporate development.

But he also fashioned a political machine built directly around his personality, brooking no opposition. "Schaefer didn't want anybody to challenge him at all, especially in a public way," said Michael Fletcher, who covered city politics for the Baltimore Sun after his arrival in 1981. When he encountered resistance, reaction was swift. "Schaefer could act like a vindictive bully," added Michael Ollove, another newspaper writer. According to critics, the mayor combined a quick temper with a marked tendency toward a politics of denial. "Anything that raised negatives about Baltimore, he just did not want to hear," said Miles. "He didn't even acknowledge that there were homeless in the city." 18

The consequences were mounting problems below the surface celebration. Housing for low income city residents became scarce. Seventy percent of the officially unemployed 20,000 Baltimoreans were African Americans—and the actual numbers of unemployed ran much higher. Eighty percent of the school system was black—and increasingly the system divided into a few special programs for gifted students in magnet schools and neighborhood schools, called "zone" or comprehensive schools, which were overcrowded and scandalously in short supplies of basic materials like textbooks. "For the first ten years I worked here, the system was excellent," remembered Irene Dandridge, president of the Baltimore Teachers Union, or BTU. The next ten years, the community lost its commitment to schools. It was very discouraging. Teachers began a mass exodus to the county and we couldn't recruit new teachers." Schaefer's own appointment as Superintendent of Schools, Alice Pinderhughes, echoed such diagnosis. "We had developed a few city wide schools with high achieving students," she described. "But the majority are not. White exodus started. Then middle class blacks began sending their children to private schools. The comprehensives lost their image of being community schools. There was a major morale problem there; they felt like second class citizens." 19

The erosion of city schools and, for many young people, decent job possibilities as well fed more subtle social decay. When Carl Stokes grew up in the fifties and sixties in a public housing project in the poorer black area of Baltimore, the East Side, it was a safe, intact community. "We had no drugs—we didn't know drugs. The project was safe. The project was a stepping stone for a lot of families who would move out when they could; it was public housing as it was supposed to be." But just as he was leaving the neighborhood went through marked changes. Drugs appeared on the scene. Shoot-outs between dealers and police would occur in the middle of the day. Desperate, unwed mothers and children populated the deteriorating apartments.

Perceptions about a growing crisis under the surface were shared by other parts of the community as well. Robert Keller, city and then metropolitan editor for the Evening Sun for 13 years, took a position as the executive director of the main business group, the Greater Baltimore Committee, in the early eighties out of the sense that the city had reached a crucial turning point. "The physical development of the community was under control, the harbor and further out" he recounted. "But there were major fundamental problems in jobs, education, the cultural infrastructure. I felt this was a community that was either going to be on the edge, on a new forefront of civic cooperation, or we were going to disappear into the bay." It was against this background that BUILD began shakily in the late 1970s, found its footing in the early 1980s, took on the problems of the public schools in 1984, and then crafted a wide-ranging alliance and strategy for school transformation and democratization, known as the Baltimore Commonwealth.20

III. Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development

The 10th Anniversary Convention of Baltimoreans United In Leadership Development—BUILD—convened at 2:30 pm on a Sunday afternoon, November 8, 1987, in the Baltimore Palladium with more than 2,000 present. By 1987 Build's membership, still mainly black, was also increasingly diverse: it was made up of 42 churches (and was in the process of negotiating Jewish membership as well), including several white congregations; three labor unions (the Baltimore Teachers Union, the Community College Teachers Union and 1199E of the Hospital Workers); the association of school principles; and the public housing tenants group, Murphy Homes Improvement Association.

The Palladium is a large public auditorium built in a style someone referred to as "Gothic Disneyland," with ramparts and towers, parapets, columns and hugh windows, a kind of hypermodern stained glass. Somehow the combination of old-fashioned design and hypermodern motifs fit the event—a testimony to the power BUILD accumulated in its first ten years through drawing on ancient religious and cultural roots of black Baltimore, and its future-oriented and entirely pragmatic view, that its real work was just beginning.

Around the walls of the Palladium were balloons, banners, signs of individual churches: "St. Andrews BUILD—the Holy Spirit Makes Us One"; "St. Celia: Rejoice in the Lord," with a large dove; "Bethel AME, commemorating 200 years, 1787 - 1987: A liberating people. The motto is rejoice in thy salvation, and in the name of God we will set up our banners," from Psalm 25. A huge banner in front proclaimed BUILD: for the 80's and 90's. A smaller sign nearby welcomed visiting delegations from I.A.F. affiliated groups around the country.

Promptly at 2:30 Carol Reckling, BUILD president, called the meeting to order: "This is going to be a good day," she said. "What better way to mark our 10th anniversary than in our own traditions? We will struggle and celebrate and recommit ourselves." An opening prayer followed. Then an "accountability" roll call had each church, union and civic group announce the numbers of its members in attendance—numbers that would later be compared to prior commitments. Greetings followed from various political figures—Paul Sarbanes, U.S. Senator from Maryland, a short statement from AME Bishop John Hurst Adams, a member of the I.A.F. National Board, remarks from various I.A.F. projects around the country. Vera Valdiviez "representing 220,000 families of I.A.F. organizations in Southern California" described their "all out war to create a moral minimum wage" in that state. "We are pleased to be here to help celebrate ten years of rebuilding public life," she said. "The public life promised by our forefathers and so long denied to our fathers and mothers. We are proud to be your sisters and brothers on the other coast."

The heart of the meeting was called "Empowering the BUILD Agenda," an exchange between BUILD leaders in the four key program areas—public housing, employment, education and neighborhood development—and public actors in the city. Their presence, more than anything said, made visible Build's power. Michael Middleton, Executive Vice President of the Maryland National Bank, spoke forcefully of the Greater Baltimore Committee's commitment to the school program, the Commonwealth. Leo Molinaro, Representative of the Rouse Company, one of the nation's largest builders, made a commitment to convene business executives to discuss with BUILD a new jobs program for unemployed adults.

Mary Pat Clarke, the President-Elect of the City Council, and the Mayor-Elect Kurt Schmoke, both agreed to meet regularly with BUILD and in the coming months take the Baltimore city council as a whole up to look at the Nehemiah Project in New York. Schmoke, the first elected black mayor in Baltimore's history, had beaten the incumbent appointee of William Schaefer, "Du" Burns, after Schaefer had gone on to become governor. And Schmoke's campaign had been waged largely around "BUILD Agenda" issues that BUILD had declared as "its candidate," garnering in the process 75,000 signatures in support. "I heard a reporter say the other day 'I don't know which one of these guys will win,'" Schmoke recounted. "'But the real winner is the BUILD agenda.'" In a stirring symbolic gesture, Rev. Douglas Miles responded to the responses. He called for the Clarke, Sarbanes, the Congressmen in attendance, business executives, the school superintendent, foundation heads and Schomke to clasp their hands overhead. Together they pledged a "new covenant" for the future of Baltimore.

Then, running somewhat late, the convention moved to a concluding "Prayer Service." Songs, scripture and prayers continued. And the Rev. Grady Yeargin brought the audience once again to its feet with an eloquent "message": "One day it will be said that in the city of Baltimore in the last quarter of the 20th century, strange and unusual things began to happen," he intoned. "Well-known somebodies with something from someplace began to meet with little known no-bodies from noplace. The upper crust began to meet with the middle crust and with those who have no crust at all. It was a peculiar people. A strange and unusual coalition that negotiated and fought and worked together.

"Then stranger things began to happen," he concluded. "Young men started putting down their guns and started picking up their shovels to rebuild the city. Young teenage women stopped going on welfare and started going to work.

"Somehow the Kingdom will come on this earth. BUILD, if you are a mighty people, if you are a noble people, if you are a Great people, there's forests out there. There's land to be filled. There's work to be done. Won't you be counted in the army of the Lord?" The meeting ended with cheers and applause, singing and hugs. The representative of the Rouse Company—who purportedly had never visited the black community in Baltimore before and had been worried about the trip—kept shaking his head, saying he had never seen anything as wonderful.

The event was undeniable testimony to Build's power. Particularly around the Commonwealth School agreement, centerpiece of BUILD organizing over the past several years, diverse elements of the city power structure made extensive commitments. By the next February, the Commonwealth—enthusiastically endorsed by Kurt Schmoke as the centerpiece of his own administration—had become the most wide-ranging school incentive plan for graduates in the country.21

But as the convention drew to a close, I.A.F. staff around the room from other areas of the country could be seen frowning. Cortes scowled. Chambers shook his head, in an odd counterpoint to the festive spirit. They were intimations of future arguments. Two days later, the BUILD Action Team, the group of leaders who had put together the event, Arnie Graf, I.A.F. supervisor for the region and Gerald Taylor, Build's executive director, met late into the night in a stormy evaluation session. Leaders raised questions about the explicitness of several public officials actual commitments. They challenged a number of congregations and unions for failing to meet their quotas of participants.

And, most problematic in their view, many pointed out that the meeting had gone a "completely unacceptable" 18 minutes late. The issue raised the question of why there had been a prayer session at the end—and that question, in turn, led to a prolonged debate about whether church leaders were too dominant in the organization, whether enough attention was given to Build's "public" and "political" dimensions, and what public life and politics were all about. More than the convention itself, the evaluation was a window into the organizing dynamics that produced Build's power in general and the Baltimore Commonwealth in particular: the BUILD organization treats every occasion primarily as an experience from which to learn new lessons and insights into particular issues, policy questions, power dynamics and the broader meaning of "public life" and politics. BUILD, like its sister organizations, sees itself as a "school for public life," and it mirrors such a theme in the projects it undertakes.22

BUILD had begun in 1977 with a sponsoring committee led by an ecumenical group of ministers, Vernon Dobson, Wendell Phillips and the late Msgr. Clare O'Dwyer of the Catholic church and nine founding members. For three years, it worked on local neighborhood issues like police protection, arson controls and rat eradication, while churches raised an initial funding base. But the early years were not easy. Some point to supposed mistakes by a purportedly abrasive I.A.F. organizer, no longer with the network. "The first organizer here really screwed some things up, alienated people and congregations who still haven't come back in," according to Rev. Joe Muth, priest at St. Ann's, an inner city congregation who sought for several years to get his congregation to join. The organization did not apparently begin to cohere into a promising project until Arnie Graf, lead organizer at San Antonio COPS after Cortes, came in the spring of 1980. By that time, the need for a new and powerful citizen organization in Baltimore's black community had become widely apparent. The question was whether it could succeed. 23

Arnie Graf, white, Jewish, soft-spoken, presents a considerably different figure than the image of the traditional, "tough-guy" organizer out of the Alinsky mold. But Graf also conveys a keen intuition into what motivates other people, and a kind of steely strength, under a gentle humor. When he came to Baltimore early in 1980, Graf also had had years of experience behind him: the sixties civil rights movement, two years in the Peace Corps in Sierre Leone, welfare rights organizing in Harlan County, West Virginia. In 1971, Graf had gone to work in an I.A.F. in Milwaukee, convinced that the network included the best citizen organizing around. In 1976, he followed Ernie Cortes as the executive director of COPS in San Antonio. Graf's own work to encourage community leaders' exploration of their Mexican and religious cultural traditions contributed considerably to the developing I.A.F. approach.

Graf found the organization deeply in debt and struggling with a small group of discouraged leaders. So, despite the emphasis in I.A.F. on slow, patient organization building without much publicity, he urged what he called a "movement approach," tied to recruitment and training of leaders. "We didn't really have time to do a slow process of parish renewal work," Graf recounted. "The only thing I could think to save it was to start a black movement with a lot of visibility, large issues, a great deal of action and momentum." To add to the sense of activity, Graf himself did ten or eleven meetings each day for months, probing people's interests, seeking to motivate them and engage them in the effort.24

IAF skills brought a thorough knowledge of targets, potential victories and appropriate strategies that had been missing in the failed efforts by black leaders in the late 1970s. In particular, Graf knew that Baltimore banks and savings and loan associations could be pressured to reveal where they were making loans under existing federal and state legislation, and disclosure of such information would give the organization tools to use in reaching agreements for more mortgage loans in black communities. BUILD members were taught to do the research on banks and legislation. They discovered that most banks lent only a small portion of their mortgage funds in inner city and mainly black areas. Provident bank, for instance, despite its self-description as a "community bank," lent $660,000 out of more than $50 million, less than one percent.25

In the spring of 1981, the organization launched a major campaign with a dramatic, colorful action. "Sixty or seventy of us went to Provident Bank and asked for a meeting with the vice president," remembered Gary Rodwell, a former Eagle Scout who had long waged his own private wars against discrimination he felt in Baltimore and through his college years at the Naval Academy. "We wanted to ask them to become a participating member of the Maryland Housing Investment Fund," a state program that insured mortgages in lower income areas without cost to the lender.26

The bank officer refused. So the group formed long lines at the windows and asked for change into pennies. Police came. Officials panicked. And the president of the bank asked to meet with a delegation. Several meetings later, Provident agreed to invest several million dollars in low-income neighborhoods.27

Rodwell, who became treasurer of BUILD in 1981, felt the action was the sort of effective effort he had been waiting for all his life. "I said to myself, 'this is it. I'm finally doing something that can have impact.'" Doug Miles, whom Arnie Graf had finally enticed to the demonstration after repeated rebuffs, was similarly deeply affected. "I hadn't been involved in anything where you could get sixty people there since the antiwar movement," said Miles. "It was a magnificent feeling of excitement." He soon joined the Strategy Team, the key group of leaders who make day to day organizational decisions in BUILD and saw a dramatic difference in its approach. "In the late '70s, we really never thought we would win," said Miles. "Winning was just being able to say you were on the right side; it was a moral victory. Nothing substantive came out of it."28

When he began going to BUILD meetings, he was struck by written agendas, meetings that began and ended on time, and most of all, the focus on actual accomplishment. "There was a constant teaching role about what leadership is, what power is—how power isn't a dirty word. The need for accountability. The difference between the world as it is and as it should be. The stuff was a mind-boggling change." 29

Involvement in BUILD and other IAF groups seems almost invariably to work considerable personal change, but it varies. Marian Dixon, president of the organization in 1982, had been a teacher for many decades. Dixon conveys, when one meets her, a calm indomitability, and the stories of her encounters with city officials and other members of the power structure form a major part of the folklore of the organization—she is well known, in particular, for insisting on respect and proper etiquette from elected politicians, not allowing them to call her by her first name in a public setting or allowing them to "get away" with evasive rhetoric. But Dixon credited assertiveness to her experiences in BUILD and in a 10 Day I.A.F. training session. "BUILD taught me to demand what was right," Dixon described. A devout church member and lay leader, Dixon thought certain facets of Christianity had previously taught her and others the wrong lessons. "You're not supposed to have self-interest. You're not supposed to want power. You're supposed to be meek and humble and be trampled on! But we learned." 29

In contrast, experience taught Doug Miles a certain humility—he realized he alone was not responsible for his church—and a willingness to bend and compromise where appropriate. "Back in the seventies, we didn't believe in compromise," he explained. "So when we couldn't get everything we wanted, we'd go off with a nice quiet whimper into the darkness of the night." 30

In John Gwaltney's insightful work Drylongso, a study of "core black culture," one of the key figures, Hannah Nelson, recounted the pervasive feeling of powerlessness felt by blacks in urban areas. "The most important thing about black people is that they don't think they can control anything except their own persons," she argued. "So everything is very personal." Dixon agreed that blacks historically felt considerable powerlessness, but she pointed to the public consequences. "Black people generally don't understand the power and self-interest of whites. It doesn't mean you're dumb. You've just never thought about it." When people feel completely powerless, she continued, there is a hopelessness which simply precludes attention to the other. "There's just no need to focus on it." IAF taught a theory of careful attention to others' self-interests. And BUILD began to accumulate the successes which made the lessons come to life. 31

IV. Revitalizing the Public Schools: the Baltimore Commonwealth

Such practical lessons and experiences formed the background for the campaign around revitalization of Baltimore public schools. By the early 1980s, IAF groups across the country had begun to take leading roles in policy initiation, especially around key questions of infrastructure. "The classic approach in the seventies was to pressure government for X, Y, or Z," said Mike Gecan, regional I.A.F. director in New York. "But now they can't or won't do it. Nehemiah never would have happened if we hadn't taken on responsibility." In New York, the infrastructure crisis had become acute. "Nobody else is taking on the big things like streets or corruption or bridges, whatever. There's a great vacuum. The political leaders don't really deal with these issues. They see themselves as captives of the bureaucracy. The whole productive side of government has begun to collapse."32

Gecan, like other IAF leaders and staff, saw pitfalls in assumption of responsibility for infrastructure programs—"if we take on the role of government, part of the danger is they'll just do less and less." IAF groups' goal is to revitalize the older understanding of government and elected officials as public "servants," neither saviors nor enemies. In the meantime, however, there were also benefits in taking on such questions: an education for members in the intricacies of policy issues; a sense of ownership and "stake" in key elements of community life; and perhaps more intangible but crucial to the organizations' self-defined mission of recreating "public life," the creation of important occasions to work with diverse elements of the larger community in a collaborative, ongoing way. 33

In Baltimore in 1983, BUILD began to investigate the shortages and disparities in school supplies, especially in the zone, or comprehensive schools. They discovered that such schools were short not only paper products—writing materials, toilet paper, paper towels—but also textbooks, film projectors, typewriters and an array of other basic resources. By that time, with victories in hand around bank loans, auto insurance, utility rates and other issues, the organization had accumulated a notable reputation in the city. Build's third convention in October the next year drew over 1500 delegates. Unlike the convention two years before where not one elected official appeared, the audience this time included a congressman, two candidates for governor, a half-dozen members of the General Assembly, the state's attorney and a number of city council members—though then-mayor Schaefer continued to boycott the group, after a confrontation with Dixon and others the year before. The question was what to do with such power.34

Graf, who had served as staff while the organization became a visible public presence in the city, saw continuing weaknesses in the organization. "We could turn people out. But I knew we were still not deep. A 'movement' style alone can feed on itself. You don't do house meetings. You don't train people carefully enough. But it can't last." Graf himself had been deeply affected by the civil rights movement and saw the same prophetic spirit in BUILD. But the civil rights movement had faded, with an incomplete legacy. The challenge for BUILD was how to sustain such transformative energy. "So we stopped for a while," Graf described. "We did a series of retreats about what our purposes were. We did house meetings. And we talked about what to do about the schools."35

The new superintendent of schools, Alice Pinderhughes, was vulnerable to pressure, they knew. A Schaefer appointee, Pinderhughes lacked a graduate education and, despite her race, was viewed with considerable skepticism in the black community. When they first approached her about supply shortages, she was doubtful about the accuracy of the charge. A simple confrontation might well have forced the issue into the open in a way that would would have won. But BUILD leaders, doing a careful analysis of Pinderhughes' "self-interests," concluded that whatever the precariousness of her position, she did indeed care about the schools. She needed some new and positive visibility. She could use allies. And a "public relationship" with Pinderhuges was important if they were to take on the broader crisis of the school system as a whole. So a delegation of BUILD leaders approached her, and together they broke the story about school shortages. It was the beginning of a new stage for BUILD. 36

BUILD used this method of "public relationship building" throughout its campaign around the schools over the next several years. In Build's analysis, locally owned and rooted businesses—from local industry to insurance, banks and other service providers—all had what they called "institutional self-interests" in seeing that the school system did not disintegrate. From the point of view of a few key business leaders, as well, schools provided a perfect "neutral issue" around which to repair a badly fractured city. "BUILD had first approached us on unemployment," remembered Alan Hoblitzel—ironically, the same chief executive whose curt dismissal of Miles in the 1970s had led to the minister's near retreat from public engagement altogether. Hoblitzel took on the presidency of the main business organization, GBC, in 1984. "I was initially skeptical. I had read about their adversarial nature, their confrontations, things like that. The question was whether you could sit down in a cooperative vein to deal with problems that are common."

Hoblitzel further knew he would have difficulty selling anything to other business leaders that smacked of "quotas, track programs, things that seemed to invade the way people ran their businesses." But he felt there had to be some other way to get businesses "to be aware of and sensitive to the needs of minority groups." Thus, when BUILD leaders told him about the Boston Compact, an incentive program begun by Boston businesses to help secure jobs for college graduates, he was interested. "I told them this may be something we can both rally around. This would help convince youth that something was out there for for them, that there would be a job. And it would assist the business community to be responsive to people's needs." 37

The unfolding series of discussions had moments of drama. Miles, Graf, Hoblitzel and Bob Keller all remember a crucial meeting in the fall, just before the BUILD convention, that was a turning point—though their accounts vary somewhat. Hoblitzel recalls it as the meeting he went to with an intention to reach a serious agreement. Miles has a different story. "We had had several meetings without reaching agreement," said Miles. Hoblitzel kept looking at his watch, saying 'I have to catch a plane. I really don't have time to pin anything down.' He said a final 'no.' Then I looked at him and said, 'Mr. Hoblitzel, you and I stand at a very unique position, a cross roads in the life of this community. We can take the leadership of building one community, or become perpetual enemies. Wouldn't the history of Baltimore read better if a black preacher and a white businessman helped save the city rather than further divide it?' He sat there a minute. He headed for the door, put his hand on the doorknob. Then he turned around and said, 'we can work this out. Put together some ideas. When I get back from this trip we'll get together more people and sit down and see what we can do." Miles said "it was nothing but the spirit of the Lord that saved that day." The power of BUILD likely also had a hand.38

Soon after the convention, Gerald Taylor replaced Graf as executive director of BUILD, when Graf became regional director of I.A.F. projects in the MidAtlantic area. Taylor himself had already acquired a remarkable reputation as an organizer: during the civil rights movement, as head of the New York Youth Division of the NAACP, he had been the brash challenger to the organization's old guard which had joined civil rights demonstrations only with reluctance. In the 1970s, Taylor acquired a national reputation in community organizing circles for successfully building a large community group in Williamsberg-Greenpoint, a white ethnic are of Brooklyn. Taylor had also worked for a time as a teacher in the famous Harlem Prep storefront schools, through which many black teenage dropouts acquired a high school education.

Taylor, like Ernie Cortes, combines organizing talents with an indefatigable interest in ideas. Taylor brought these distinctive talents to the negotiations. Despite opposition, for instance, he urged the BUILD organization sign an initial agreement for considerably less than they wanted—their original proposal had been a strong job guarantee for every high school graduate with good attendance; GBC's counter was job help for those with B averages—out of his understanding of the dynamics of public life. "I felt our first challenge was establishing a public relationship," said Taylor. "I knew if we did we'd have the clout over time to realize our program." Such an approach reflected a broader theory of public life. "I'm trying to create with the leaders a way to think about the city. Politics is really the discussion and action of creating community. And an understanding of the importance of time and patience at certain points is an indispensable part of that."

Taylor also suggested the word, "commonwealth," as the description of the new agreement. "I was intrigued by the word and the idea, commonwealth," said Taylor. "That's what we were about. About the wealth of the city that was created and produced by the people being commonly dealt with." Taylor had also been influenced by the economist Joan Robinson, who often used the term. Others saw the utility of the label. "I thought it was wonderful, but not for the reasons that I've come to understand," remembered Keller. "We thought, 'we've got to market this thing.' It was a way to describe the 'neutral' issues that a lot of people can rally around—education, community stability, good jobs."39

For the next four years, the Commonwealth Agreement, later the Baltimore Commonwealth, went on two tracks: the development of the program for high school graduates soon became a national model. Meanwhile, less visibly but with even more wide-ranging implications, BUILD sought to use the incentive plan as a scaffolding around which to change the schools themselves and to open discussions with GBC around a range of other issues, like adult unemployment and housing.

In the first instance, the incentive plan for high school graduates continually expanded. By June, 1989, city high school graduates with attendance records of 95 percent in their last two years were guaranteed three job interviews at one of the 150 members of GBC, and additional help in securing employment. If the interviews themselves did not produce a job, the city Office of Employment Training evaluated the young person and provided additional training. At the end of April, 1988, BUILD, GBC, Schmoke and a coalition of area colleges and universities announced a further element: a twenty-five million dollar fund guaranteed financial aid through college for any graduate from Baltimore schools with good attendance and a B average.

Even in the first couple of years, when the school aid packages were not as extensive, the program was not widely known, and patterns of juniors and seniors had been long since shaped by years of school experience, teachers and counselors in zone schools noted a considerable impact. "Traditionally we had two or three students go on from here to the University of Maryland," said Charlotte Brown, guidance Counselor at Patterson High School. "Last year, with the Commonwealth Agreement we had between 12 and 15, and two students went to Loyola." When Steve Johnson, a Patterson student, got word he was accepted to Johns Hopkins—the first student to go there from any of the zone schools, in anyone's memory—the news was broadcast over the public address system again and again, all day long.40

The second aspect of Build's school initiative has involved efforts to change the Baltimore school system itself, in line with approaches of the Coalition for Essential Schools approach and school site management advocates. In the attempt, the organization used hundreds of volunteer organizers—in the spring of 1986 and again in 1988, BUILD contacted thousands of high school student parents, and held dozens of meetings on the Commonwealth Agreement and other school issues. Parent and community workshops explored the changes in schools over the last decade, bringing to the surface people's anger and dismay at the demise of a once proud system. They compared schools as a "mediating institution," a form of association midway between family life and large scale macro institutions, with churches—and talked about strategies for democratizing and renewing such structures. They identified problems and complaints, reasons parents have felt hesitant to become involved in school projects, and developed strategies for intensive work with 12 schools, including two high schools—Douglass and Walbrook—and a number of feeder middle and elementary schools. Douglass, formerly the premier school of Baltimore's black educational system, had radically deteriorated in recent years and was without virtually any parent involvement—the PTA had three members before Build's organizing. Walbrook, a member of the national Coalition for Essential Schools, served as one model for what BUILD envisions in the future.

By the fall of 1988, a collaborative discussion involving community leaders, teachers, principles and business community had come up with a wide-ranging reform plan for the system, leading to local site management by teams that have power over the key issues of budget, curriculum and staff decisions and paralleling the Sizer-Meier ideas for small schools, considerable teacher-student interaction and simplified curriculum. As a complement to changes within the schools themselves, community boards called "trustees" are to be vested with authority for after-hours building use, allowing school facilities to once again become community resources for programs that might range from school clubs and service projects to adult education and community events. Each activity, in turn, is evaluated in terms of how it develops "public skills," ranging from political imagination and judgment to understanding of self-interests.41

In theory, central administration has agreed to such changes; but in practice across the country the encrusted nature of school system bureaucracies tend to thwart significant shifts in power and authority. BUILD, having proven an ability to enlist large numbers of community leaders, parents and educators in such efforts, is in a rare position, however. What marks the BUILD initiative as virtually unique in such experiments across the country is its combination of public pressure with extensive experience in training.42

In Baltimore, such a change seems at least imaginable. The possibilities for a program of school change with far ranging implications is further enhanced by Build's membership, which includes both the teachers union, the BTU, and the organization of principles, the Public School Administrators and Supervisors Association, or PSASA. This has meant opportunities for interaction among school staff, community leaders and parents. It has also allowed for school professionals a continuing opportunity for extensive discussion and training in what a different sort of school system might look like. In the spring of 1988, Taylor held workshops for building representatives from all the city schools. "We looked at how our schools are structured—like a factory. People felt like workers on the assembly line. controlled by the outside. It resonates strongly," he described. "Teachers feel they're not treated with respect. Twenty or thirty years ago, the teacher in the black community was a role model."

The workshops explored the reason for the difficulties facing teachers unions—a "failure of vision," Taylor argued. "We've stayed on dollars, benefits, grievances and lost the creative side, teaching as an art or a craft."

They then explored what teachers desired: "control over the workplace, materials, the idea of master teachers who were mentors, a school day broken up to allow visitation with parents and one on one interactions with students." Taylor drew on his own experiences with the freewheeling, experimental and effective storefront schools in Harlem in the seventies, to obviously good effect. "Teachers said this was the most exciting discussion they'd had in years. They asked, 'can we really do this?' I said, 'this is what we can do in the future. But it means you've got to want it. It means retraining, accountability, recognizing that not everybody should be teachers. Seeing teaching like a craft again."43

It is still too early in the process of their efforts to evaluate the prospects for Build's most ambitious hopes around schools. But already, the Baltimore Commonwealth has created a series of striking new precedents and begun to flesh out the "essential school" side of the emerging debate about America's educational future.

Moreover, like the old village greens in New England towns, the Commonwealth created a new forum, citywide and in the tangible, localized spaces of particular schools alike, through which diverse elements of Baltimore could meet, identify problems, disagree, find areas of agreement, plan, work on programs together. Gerald Taylor, Build's executive director, described the creation of such forums as the move from simple protest to governance: "the first struggle for the black community, coming out of a segregated history, is the fight to be recognized. When you've been out of power so long, there's a tendency to not want to be responsible or to be held accountable. But to participate in creating history, one must move into power," he said. "Moving into power," in Taylor's view, meant being prepared "to negotiate, compromise, understand others have power and ways of viewing the world other than your own." It involved agreement "to engage with others" that eliminated violence or alienated protest as a strategy. Perhaps most notably, it served as a declaration of independence by the black community that recalls Frances Harper's Reconstruction Era image of the "commonwealth of freedom." BUILD members took a leading role for Baltimore as a whole, signalling that they would no longer simply be "objects" of forces beyond their control. The Commonwealth Agreement—like the "Nehemiah Project" in New York and similar efforts elsewhere—was a language of human agency that taught the most important of lessons, that things like school systems are human artifacts.44

The Commonwealth Agreement, in sum, served as a community-wide arena that reknit and created relationships that were badly frayed in some cases, virtually nonexistent in others, but which were essential for effective action. "The Commonwealth created a vehicle by which we could continue to have a dialogue about the school system and other issues in way that I never would have expected," explained Alan Hoblitzel, chief executive of Maryland National Bank. "It's changed the thinking of a lot of businesses in the city. And it's been a way to learn about people. It's just not my normal experience to sit down with a black minister and talk about the issues we do." Kurt Schmoke, mayor of Baltimore, echoes the views of other political leaders like Henry Cisneros in San Antonio, whose contact with I.A.F. groups have given them a different view of the role and meaning of the citizenry. "As an elected official, I can't solve all the problems," explained Schmoke. "It's a gamble, in a sense, because if you have powerful organizations out there, when it comes to disagreements they have influence. They can battle you. But the benefits outweigh the risks.

"They show people what citizens can achieve without the government doing the whole project for them. They say, we have some power. We can influence policy. Let's show you how not in an abstract way, but by working together where we can around concrete issues like Commonwealth, or the Nehemiah plan." The Baltimore Commonwealth around schools subsequently led to a series of other initiatives around adult unemployment and other issues.45 In sum, the sort of collaboration pioneered by BUILD—paralleled, as it is, by a number of continuing struggles and confrontations with establishment interests in Baltimore simultaneously around other questions—furnishes a paradigmatic example of a particular understanding of "public life." For BUILD, public life is a contested, turbulent arena that mixes values, interests and differences with common purposes. It aims at an understanding of what democracy is and can become far different than conventional definitions, but which has old roots in the commonwealth tradition of citizen politics.

Notes

0 Petition quoted from Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Equality (New York: Vintage, 1977), p. 1.

1 Rush and Jefferson quoted from People's Bicentennial Commission, Voices of the American Revolution (New York: Bantam, 1974), pp. 175, 176.

2 Bernard Bailyn, Education in the Forming of American Society (New York: Vintage, 1960); Franklin's plan for the Philadelphia Academy in Colin Greer, The Great School Legend: A Revisionist Interpretation of American Public Education (New York: Basic, 1972), p. 15.

3 Colin Greer, The Great School Legend: A Revisionist Interpretation of American Public Education (New York: Basic, 1972), p. 15.

4 Ibid., p. 29, and chapter four, "Liberal Rhetoric for Conservative Goals."

Horace Mann, despite his democratic ideals, found himself faced with the political necessity to justify enlarged public schools to business groups through the argument that education functioned as a "balance wheel" protecting the existing order. "Finally, in regard to those who possess the largest shares in the stock of worldly goods," he wrote, "could there, in your opinion, be any police so vigilant and effective, for the protection of all rights of person, property and character, as such a sound and comprehensive education and training as our system of common schools could be made to impart?" quoted in Greer, School Legend, pp. 74-75.

Interestingly, conservative opponents of the public school movement were often the most penetrating critics, observing that the reformers chief goals—measures like centralized administration, graded schools, and formal teacher-training—represented a significant expansion of state power over the lives of individuals and over the values of communities.

5 Petition quoted in Peter J. Rachleff, Black Labor in the South: Richmond, Virginia, 1865-1890 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984), p. 14; Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution: 1863 - 1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), p. 290; Allen quoted in Ibid., p. 287; Washington quoted in Kluger, Justice, p. 51.

6 Kluger, Justice, p. 51; figures on expenditures from Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, Vol. 1 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1942), p. 339.

In the years immediately following the demise of the Freedmen's Bureau schools, most education for blacks was provided by northern philanthropy, but it brought with it distinctive burdens as well. The five thousand northern teachers flooding the south looked upon black culture with often unmitigated horror and contempt. "At one of their prayer-meetings, which we attended last night, we saw a painful exhibition of their barbarism," wrote Lucy Chase to her New England family about her early experiences in Craney Island, Virginia. Northern teachers saw their mission largely as reacculturating blacks into the dominant cultural idiom. As one teacher put it, "Our work is just as much a missionary work as if we were in India or China." Historian Lawrence Levine summarized the ethos by pointing to the regional difference between white southerns and northern educators: "Where southern whites generally were perfectly content to allow the blacks to stew in their own cultural juices, the northerners pined to wipe them clean and participate as midwives at a rebirth." Blacks sought to preserve and sustain their own culture and learn the tools of the white world by developing a dual language. "In the classroom we all learned past participles, but in the streets and in our homes the Blacks learned to drop s's from plurals and suffixes from past tense verbs," Maya Angelou described. "We learned to slide out of one language and into another without being conscious of the effort." Chase and missionary quoted in Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York: Oxford, 1977), p. 141; Levine, 143; Angelou, 154.

7 Greer, School Legend, p. 89; for a look at wellsprings of democratic educational approaches in America—including the kind of practical "citizenship education" programs found in labor, civil rights and other social movements—see Ruth Dropkin and Arthur Tobier, Eds., Roots of Open Education in America: Reminiscences and Reflections (New York: City College Workshop Center, 1976).

8 For a description of elite views, see Clarence J. Karier, "Elite Views on American Education," in James J. Shields, Jr. and Colin Greer, Eds., Foundations of Education: Dissenting Views (New York: John Wiley, 1975), pp. 44 - 53; on the consequences for working class children, essays by Peter Schrag, S.M. miller and Pamela Roby, and Brian Jackson and Denis Marsden in the same collection; also Norman Fruchter, "A History of Community Education Movements," presentation at Union Graduate School "Democratic Education" seminar, Shelter Island, New York, May 20, 1988. For a depiction of the patterns of a growing two track system of education, increasing violence, and impersonality, see also Arthur Powell, et. al, Shopping Mall High School (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1985).

9 The strategy flowing from the Nation at Risk approach is well detailed in Ann Bastien, et. al., Choosing Equality: The Case for Democratic Schooling (Philadelphia: Temple, 1986); also well sketched by Fruchter in his Shelter Island presentation; see also "Yes, Our Schools Can Be Saved," Newsweek Special Report, May 2, 1988, for a description of Effective School strategy.

10 Sizer, Meier and other educators formed an outspoken network called the Coalition for Essential Schools, including a number of high schools designed around such ideas, to press their case. For a description of core Essential School principles, see Horace, the publication of the Coalition, especially Vol. 4, No.4 (1988). Meanwhile, several of the nation's larger school districts moved toward elements of local site control. But as education specialist Ted Kolderie has pointed out, "site control" of schools—which in a serious way must involve a delegation of authority and power to local schools over such key issues as budget, hiring, curriculum and control of use of time—has become a rhetorical buzz word; very few efforts have actually been made toward its implementation. See for instance, Kolderie, "School-Site Management: Rhetoric and Reality," (Minneapolis: Humphrey Institute's Public Services Redesign Project, 1988).

For an overview of the democratic argument and the clashing educational visions, see Leon Botstein, "Education Reform in the Reagan Era," Social Policy Vol. 18, 4 (1988), pp. 3 - 11; for Sizer's view, see Theordore R. Sizer, Horace's Compromise: The dilemma of the American High School (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984); also Alice Digilio, "Theodore Sizer: Man with a Mission," Washington Post, April 15, 1987; In Rochester, New York, for instance, the 1987 "Career in Teaching" agreement between the School District and the Rochester Teachers Association, represented a significant devolution of authority to teachers and an upgrading of teacher responsibilities and remuneration, alike. Lead teachers were seen as mentors to others, in addition to their teaching responsibilities. Lead Teachers and other professionals would be assigned to areas where there was the most need—especially poorer districts—rather than the most affluent schools. Each secondary teacher assumed responsibility for regular interaction with up to 20 students, including conferences, advice, and contact with homes. In Miami's Dade Country, an experiment in "school site control" delegated authority in the critical areas of budget, curriculum and staffing decisions to local site committees involving administrative staff, teachers and parents—a plan that formally resembles the process envisioned for Baltimore. In Chicago under legislation passed by the state, inner city schools beginning in 1990 will be governed by school councils of eleven members, including six parents, two teachers, two community residents and a principal; councils will hire principal's for a three year term. See for instance, Will Astor, "Final Addition," Rochester City, September 3, 1987; Rochester agreement details taken from "Synopsis," Contract Settlement, July 1, 1987, through June 30, 1990; New York NEA hotly attacked the seniority provisions. Kolderie's "School-Site Management" analysis.

11 Fruchter, Shelter Island Presentation; for a depiction of the more authoritarian and more democratic sides of the education debate over a number of years, see James Wm. Noll, Ed., Taking Sides: Clashing Views on Controversial Educational Issues (Guilford, CT: Dushkin, 1983).

12 Interview with Ed Chambers, June 1, 1988.

13 Ira De Reid, The Negro Community of Baltimore: A Social Survey (Baltimore: Urban League, 1934), pp. 207-08; interview with Gerald Taylor, Baltimore, Nov. 11, 1987.

14 Reid, Negro Community; Suzanne E. Greene, Baltimore: An Illustrated History (Woodland Heights, CA: Windsor Publications, 1980); interview with Vernon Dobson, Baltimore, Nov. 13, 1987.

15 Reid, Negro Community, see especially pp. 191 - 205; Leroy Graham, Elisha

Tyson, Baltimore and the Negro (Baltimore: Morgan State, 1975).

16 Dobson, Nov. 13 interview; Miles, Nov. 14 interview.

17 Miles interview.

18 The story of the Inner Harbor and Center City is detailed in Greene, Baltimore; interview with Michael Fletcher, Baltimore, November 13, 1987; interview with Michael Ollove, Baltimore, Nov. 13, 1987; Miles interview.

19 Figures on schools and unemployment from DeWayne Wickham, Destiny 2000: The State of Black Baltimore (Baltimore: Baltimore Urban League, 1987); and also Frank Defilippo, "'Baltimore 2000' Revives the Notion of Two Baltimores," City Paper, Feb. 13, 1987; interview with Irene Dandridge, Baltimore, Nov. 16, 1987; interview with Alice Pinderhughes, Baltimore, Nov. 16, 1987.

20 Interview with Carl Stokes, Baltimore, Nov. 5, 1987; interview with Robert Keller, Baltimore, Nov. 16, 1987.

21 Accounts of the convention are based on first hand observation and taped recordings of speeches; on BUILD's power in the previous years, see for instance, "BUILD grows stronger as voice for voiceless," Baltimore Evening Sun, Dec. 3, 1984; "BUILD flexes its political muscle, "Baltimore News American, Nov. 4, 1985; BUILD to enter mayor's race," Evening Sun, Nov. 17, 1986; on the expansion of the Baltimore Commonwealth, "Baltimore Commonwealth," Lead editorial, The Sun, Feb. 29, 1988 and "Businesses to Help More Kids Get Jobs," Evening Sun, Feb. 25, 1988.

22 This kind of evaluation includes considerable praise for what worked well and for individuals who had accomplished their agreed upon tasks. But it is also tough and rigorous, involving not only criticism but detailed discussion about what should be done in similar situations in the future. The consensus of the evaluation was that other key members of the Action team besides Reckling, who was chairing the event, should have caucused with Taylor in the back of the auditorium as soon as it was apparent the convention was running late and made an on-the-spot decision about what should be dropped from the program. The whole exercise was a strong indication of the immense importance I.A.F. groups place on beginning and ending meetings on time, which they feel creates a culture of respect for people's commitments and an indispensable practice of accountability.

23 Interview with Father Joe Muth, Nov. 13, 1987, Baltimore; Graf acknowledged that when he arrived, the organization was deeply in debt and had a core of only six or eight leaders.

24 Interview with Arnie Graf, Baltimore, November 16, Nov. 6, 1987.

25 Baltimore Morning Sun, July 10, 1981.

26 Interview with Gary Rodwell, Baltimore, Nov. 13, 1987; the campaign was also described in the Afro American; see especially "BUILD Reaches Agreement with Baltimore Federal, Tuesday, June 30, 1981.

27 Sun, July 10, 1981.

28 Rodwell interview; Miles interview.

29 Miles interview.

30 Interview with Marian Dixon, Baltimore, March 31, 1988.

31 John Langston Gwaltney, Drylongso (New York: Vintage, 1981), p. 6; Dixon interview.

32Interview with Mike Gecan, Baltimore, Nov. 11, 1987.

33 Gecan interview.

34 "BUILD convention attracts politicians, gains credibility," The Sun, Oct. 22, 1984.

35 Graf interview, Baltimore, Nov. 16, 1987.

36 Graf interview, Nov. 16; also Pinderhughes interview, Nov. 16; information on school supplies from "Schools Need Paper," The Sun, March 7, 1984.

37 Interview with Alan Hoblitzel, Baltimore, April 18, 1988.

38 Miles interview; Hoblitzel interview; also interviews with Graf, Nov. 16, Keller.

39 Interviews with Gerald Taylor, Baltimore, Nov. 11, Nov. 12, 1987; Keller interview.

The initial Commonwealth Agreement was signed April 24, 1985. Its preamble read:

The Commonwealth Agreement evolved out of a series of meetings held between leaders of the Baltimore City Public Schools, the Greater Baltimore Committee and BUILD over the course of the past six months. It represents a partnership between these parties to take dramatic steps to improve public educational opportunities.

The largest segment of today's workforce is composed of high school graduates who will not attend college. Numerous national studies indicate that many of these graduates lack the basic skills necessary for the employment opportunities open to them. Other students do not graduate from high school, further restricting their opportunities for the future. Well-educated citizens are essential to the eocnomic well-being of our metropolitan area; our vitality is linked to our youth gaining appropriate job skills.

The Commonwealth Agreement commits the Baltimore City Public Schools, the Greater Baltimore Committee (GBC) and BUILD (Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development) to improve educational opportunities, to prepare students for careers, post secondary education and to improve access for jobs. The Commonwealth Agreement is about a common vision, a common focus, a common wealth—One Greater Baltimore.

Document in author's possession.

40 On the Baltimore Commonwealth, see Carol Steinback, "Investing Early: Education Report on Baltimore," National Journal, September 3, 1988, pp. 2192-95; interview with Charlotte Brown, Baltimore, Nov. 16, 1987.

41 Interview with Taylor, Baltimore, October 1, 1988; document on "A Public Understanding of Schools," developed by the collaborative committee for fundamental school reform, in author's possession. On difficulties, see Kolderie's memo.

42Interviews with Richard Hase, Baltimore, Nov. 16, 1987; June 1, 1988; with Carol Reckling, Baltimore, Nov. 15, 1987; with Marian Dixon; and with Ted Kolderie, Minneapolis, August 22, 1988.

43 Interview with Gerald Taylor, April 2, 1988.

44 Interview with Taylor, Baltimore, November 12, 1987.

45 Interview with Hoblitzel, Minneapolis - Baltimore, April 18, 1988; interview with Kurt Schmoke, Minneapolis - Baltimore, May 5, 1988.

For more information

Carol Reckling, BUILD community leader
Jonathan Lange, BUILD organizer
(410) 225-3882

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