Op-Eds & Letters

Here are some op-eds and letters to the editor I have written:

Virginia Democrats Must Now Bolster Democracy (The Falls Church News-Press, November 2019)

After a decades-long struggle, Virginia Democrats have won back control of the statehouse. This is cause for celebration! But when we finish our victory lap, we face an important question: what are we going to do with our power? There are many long-overdue policies worth pursuing, from gun safety to housing justice to green energy. But on Day 1, it is important that we don’t lose this opportunity to ensure that our democracy itself is bolstered. Without an election system that ensures the active participation of the diverse many — rather than the entrenchment of the powerful few — any particular policy we pass this session is at risk of being rolled back in due time.

Therefore, I propose that Virginia Democrats prioritize the passage of a “democracy booster pack” on Day 1. To make it easier to vote, let’s (1) establish same-day voter registration and (2) make Election Day a state holiday. To allow more people to vote, let’s (3) lower the voting age to 16 and (4) like Maine and Vermont, allow prison voting. To give more candidates a chance, let’s (5) establish ranked-choice voting; and (6) end gerrymandering with nonpartisan redistricting. And to increase the voice of working people in the campaign finance system, let’s (7) pass a Seattle-style democracy voucher system and (8) repeal our anti-union “right to work” laws so that more workers can organize for power.

We’re called “Democrats” for a reason — let’s not lose this amazing opportunity to deepen our democracy!

Comment on Affordable Housing and Primaries (The Falls Church News-Press, January 3, 2019)

Pete Davis, F.C. native and recent Harvard Law School graduate now living back in the City: “Two things are on my mind as the Little City in the new year. First, with the arrival of HQ2 and Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax’s prioritization of anti-eviction policy, 2019 may be the year our region wakes up to our affordable housing crisis. If we do, 2019 could be a pivotal year for promoting much-needed economic diversity in Falls Church. Secondly, 2019 brings us an enriching state senate primary between Yasmine Taeb and Dick Saslaw. It will be a great opportunity for Falls Church voters to discuss campaign finance reform, clean energy, and diversity in the state house.

On Amazon and Startups (Falls Church News-Press, November 15, 2018)

“If the recent Amazon deal goes through as written, Virginia taxpayers will hand over $573 million to one company in exchange for 25,000 jobs. This comes out to Virginians paying over $20,000 in public funds per job. Here’s an alternative deal: why don’t we simply endow 25,000 Virginia entrepreneurs with $20,000 in startup capital to launch local businesses, startups, non-profits and worker cooperatives?

A state economy based in local entrepreneurship and community business is more resilient, flexible, and civic-minded than an economy reliant on the whims of an untrustworthy monopolist. Such a plan would cost the same amount as subsidizing Amazon, but would leave our communities much more vibrant, equitable, and empowered.”

The Ref Has Been Worked: Harvard Law’s Flake-Out (The Harvard Law Record, April 12, 2018)

There is an idea in sports called “working the ref.” You accuse the ref of being biased toward your opponent, and the ref starts being biased toward you to make up for it. It’s a clever tactic for bending an easily-rattled referee to your will.

In institutional politics, the right-wing establishment has honed working the ref into an art form. It’s a two-part dance. First, they take institutions that see themselves as “neutral referees” and accuse them of having a “left-wing bias.”  Then, they repeat themselves over and over and over again — no matter what the truth of the matter is — until the institution is so rattled by being called biased that it, in an attempt to affirm its neutrality, starts doing whatever the right-wing wants.

Dozens of institutions that see themselves as referees have been worked. PBS has long been accused of being left-wing, so it finally gave in this year and launched its own conservative talk show. The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Atlantic editorial boards got accused of being left-wing so much that they just went ona hiring spree for conservative columnists. The Obama administration so internalized the accusation of being left-wing that  it started implementing conservative agenda items, like cutting entitlements and deporting thousands of American families, to prove its neutral bona fides.

Resist the Cult of Smart, Embrace the Call of Citizenship (Harvard Law Record, August 30, 2017)

Many factors account for this transformation of public interest 1Ls into corporate interest graduates: a competitive culture that fails to spark public-spiritedness; a curricular system that pushes contextualized and experiential education — the types of courses that teach students about the real-world crises in the justice system — into second- and third-year electives; a career-building system that sets corporate interest law as the default career option for students; and a tuition debt structure that dissuades students from public interest work.  

Today, however, I would like to focus in on one factor fully within your control as first-year students: participation in our school’s “cult of smart.” See, from the very beginning of your time here, there will be a push to hold those with the sharpest and narrowest analytical skills in acclaim, regardless of their moral or civic orientation.

The introductory rites of this “cult of smart” occur in the first-year classroom, with student acclaim for smart professors. The first-year classroom, as Professor Lani Guinier points out, centers all attention on the professor, with “professors fishing for the ‘right’ answers, and students trying to catch the hook.” Professors frame the whole ‘game’: the questions that should be considered important, the eventual ‘correct’ answers to those questions, and the affirmative and negative reactions to students’ guesses. Since bringing in outside morality or ideology (or even facts from the real world) into the environment is discouraged, students evaluate the entire exercise on the cleverness of their professors’ analytical gymnastics. That is how, Guinier argues, being smart becomes “a value itself, detached from what people want to accomplish with their mastery.”

This cult of smart eventually expands out from students’ views of professors to students’ views of the judges they are reading. It is not uncommon to hear classroom comments like “I might disagree, but this argument is so clever and well-written,” or “Say what you want about what he advocated for, he was a genius.” This is reinforced by the physical school environment, which hangs pictures of academic faculty and ‘genius’ jurists — as opposed to clinicians and courageous reformers — most prominently on the walls.

And finally, this cult of smart eventually trickles down into student culture. The students who are best at the game of law school — those who might be the research assistants for the smartest professors or clerks on the Supreme Court — are often the object of peer fascination, with little regard given in the hallway chatter to their moral courage or to which legal interests they plan to serve after graduation.

This cult of smart is dangerous because it obsesses over means — one’s ability to complete legal tasks efficiently and cleverly — at the expense of discussing ends —  reflecting together on which legal tasks are worth our time. When we give too much acclaim to clever means and not enough to moral ends, we misallocate legal resources on a grand scale, leaving some of the most important legal projects of our era — building an economy and democracy that works for everybody, shrinking our monstrous prison system, mitigating climate disaster — underserved, while at the same time leaving perhaps the least important legal projects of our era — advancing the legal interests of the already wealthy and powerful — overserved.  

The Scharff Alternative (The Falls Church News-Press, April 28, 2017)

In the late 1950s, the social critic Paul Goodman tasked himself with figuring out why so many young people were failing to adjust to society and instead turning to lives of, as it was called back then, “juvenile delinquency.” Whereas many had already put forth their own culprits – rock and roll, Soviets, soft fathers, etc. – Goodman’s conclusion would stand out because he would be the first to argue, shockingly, that perhaps society was not worth adjusting to. Goodman titled his “report” Growing Up Absurd and made the case that the white picket fence lifestyle that kids were failing to prepare for was neither meaningful nor enlivening. Later on, Martin Luther King echoed Goodman, telling young people that they should be “proud to be maladjusted” to common evils like bigotry, poverty, and militarism.

Because of teachers like Goodman and King, a generation built an alternative to their parents’ suffocating Mad Men culture. But, as happens with the passage of time, when my generation reached high school, new absurdities had cropped up. To be a well-adjusted Millennial teen was to curate your individual identity at the shopping mall, praise the profiteers of the latest digital distractions, and study hard in school so as to “compete in the global economy.” When we resisted this path, most adults told us: there is no alternative.

However, if you were lucky enough to wander into the social studies wing at George Mason High School over the past 18 years, there was always an alternative waiting for you. There was someone there who would encourage you to listen to that voice whispering from your social conscience. There was a teacher there who saw education not as the pouring of the previous generation’s knowledge into the next generation’s empty heads, but rather as the sparking of our curiosity and moral imagination. His name is Jamie Scharff and he is retiring this year after 29 years of service.

Dear 1Ls: Consider the Clock (Harvard Law Record, August 27, 2016)

How did it come to this? We at Harvard Law School forgot about Time. We teach the law like it exists outside of Time. We do not discuss the history of how the law got made, the future of how the law could be different, or the present of how the law works in the real world today. In the coming years, Class of 2019, we need your help in again steeping this school in Time.
If we can do better at teaching the history of the law, we can cut the present order down to size, showing how it came to be and how that process was often less reasonable than one would expect. If we stop asking “Why do you think this law is set up this way?” and instead ask “How do you think this law wound up this way?”, we can better remember that the folks who made the present order were no better than we are.

If we can do better at teaching the future of the law, if we can discuss not just how to navigate the legal order, but also how to change it, then we will better prepare ourselves to join our ancestors in co-creating our social order. If we start remembering how much can happen in a generation’s lifetime — how many Constitutional amendments or political watersheds can come to pass in just a couple of decades — we will start valuing not just legal analysis, but also legal imagination.

And finally, if we can do better at teaching the present of the law, if we expanded our curriculum beyond case studies to include direct experience with the realities of the justice system, then we would learn not just how to think like attorneys — advocates for specific clients — but also how to think like lawyers — members and caretakers of the legal profession, tasked with serving the justice system and advancing its public interest mission. (Our only required field trip in my 1L year was to a corporate interest law firm. If you, as a class, can advocate to have yours be to a border detention center or a union hall or a prison, your class will be better equipped to, as we are instructed by Canon 8 of the American Bar Association’s Model Code of Professional Responsibility, “participate in proposing and supporting legislation and programs to improve the [legal] system.”)

An Open Letter to the Harvard Law Review: Break Open HLS’ Inner Ring (Harvard Law Record, April 30, 2016)

Here at Harvard Law School, we are especially susceptible to Inner Ringing. I think it is safe to assume that the desire for “being on the inside” was a major reason in why we all applied to come here. But this desire, as Lewis argued seventy years ago, is a danger. And this desire, in America — a nation built on the democratic faith in open institutions where all people, not just a select few, possess the constructive genius to co-create our shared world — is a vice. We should be working together to wean ourselves off this desire and become a community of sound craftsmen, devoted to our work — work, as our school’s mission statement impels, to advance justice and societal well-being — as an end in itself.  

Unfortunately, as it is currently structured, the Harvard Law Review, which selects about 8% of students to be welcomed into Gannett House each year and leaves hundreds of our community members outside, feeds this dangerous desire.  It is time to open up the Review — to break open Harvard Law School’s Inner Ring — and let any student who wants to participate to participate. This is assuredly workable: if the Review truly is the most impactful law journal in the country, it certainly has challenges, research opportunities, and areas of development and expansion to which more students could be of use.

Some may argue that exclusion is a fact of life. Indeed, Lewis draws a distinction between accidental or necessary exclusion versus Inner Rings that exist solely to exclude:

"In any wholesome group of people which holds together for a good purpose, the exclusions are in a sense accidental. Three or four people who are together for the sake of some piece of work exclude others because there is work only for so many or because the others can’t in fact do it. Your little musical group limits its numbers because the rooms they meet in are only so big. But your genuine Inner Ring exists for exclusion. There’d be no fun if there were no outsiders. The invisible line would have no meaning unless most people were on the wrong side of it. Exclusion is no accident; it is the essence."

We should ask ourselves whether the Review’s desire to exclude resembles the former or the latter: whether its policy of exclusion is necessary due to a lack of available tasks or whether its policy of exclusion is because “there’d be no fun if there were no outsiders.” If it is the former — if there are not a sufficient number of tasks to welcome all interested students on staff — I would challenge the Review to have a higher estimation of its own civic potential. There are major crises in the law — mass incarceration, unequal access to justice, a weakened tort system that leaves consumers unprotected, and the institutional failure of Congress, to name just a few — that a larger, more ambitious Review could better help tackle. It would be a shame to let these crises go unnoticed by the Review next year due to a lack of staffing precipitated solely by a desire to exclude.

“You are on a list of students…”: The Office of Career Services Tracks and Nudges Public Interest Students (Harvard Law Record, March 7, 2016)

Last November, in a letter to Dean Martha Minow, I attempted to account for why it is the case that for every Harvard Law School graduate in 2014 who pursued work designed – as our mission statement impels – to advance justice and societal well-being, five graduates joined corporate interest law firms. I argued that the school does not explicitly tell students to pursue corporate interest legal work, but rather nudges students into such work by making it appear that the “default option” for students is to go into such work. 

Examples of such nudges include the fact that: the hypotheticals in courses often presume you are working for a corporate client; the only required field trip for 1Ls is to a corporate interest law firm (at the end of the winter Problem Solving Workshop); the office primarily tasked with encouraging corporate interest careers is given a generic name (The Office of Career Services) while the office tasked with encouraging public interest careers is given a specific name (The Office of Public Interest Advising); and the structure of student loan forgiveness results in those pursuing corporate interest careers having not just an easier, but a simpler, time paying back their loans than those pursuing public interest careers.

Today, we can add “tracking and pursuing students not interested in corporate interest work” to the list of ways Harvard Law School nudges students into corporate interest work. This morning, every 1L who has not expressed interest in participating in the Early Interview Program — HLS’ program designed to lubricate the process of entering corporate interest work — received the following email from the Assistant Dean of the Office of Career Services:

Subject Line: Checking in about EIP Orientation
Hi there – I am writing because you are on a list of students who have not yet RSVP’d for the EIP Orientation and Market Mixer event which takes place this Wednesday, March 9, from 5:00 – 8:00 p.m.in Milstein. If you plan to participate in the Early Interview Program (EIP) in August, then I highly encourage you to attend this program which will address important information about preparing for EIP over the coming months. This will be the last program about EIP before August. Additionally, you will be able to meet a lot of employers from the specific markets in which you are interested. It’s actually a lot of fun and there will be tons of food.

I know that some students have classes that evening. However, even if that is the case, I’m encouraging you to attend after classes end. If you are going to be late, please just let us know.

To RSVP click HERE. If you are going to be late, in addition to RSVP’ing, please reply to this email letting us know that you will be there after your class ends.

I hope to see you on Wednesday.

This reminder email was not sent to every student: it was only sent to students who had not shown an interest in pursuing corporate interest legal work. It resembled an official administrative email aimed at everyone — similar to ones that remind you to register for courses or to sign up for on-campus housing — rather than one about career or extracurricular opportunities specific to certain groups of students. In saying that students uninterested in legal work serving corporate interests were on a “list of students” who had failed to complete a task the administration was tracking, the email embodies the exact “default option”-setting that I described in November: it implies — like with the in-class hypotheticals, the Problem Solving Workshop field trip, and the loan forgiveness structure — that corporate interest legal work is the presumptive career choice for Harvard Law School students.

Follow Professor King’s Lead: Without Experience with Legal Realities, 1Ls Left Unprepared to “Think Like A Lawyer” (Harvard Law Record, January 27, 2016)

It is often said that the purpose of Harvard Law School’s 1L curriculum is to prepare each student to “think like a lawyer.” It would be much more accurate to say that the present curriculum aims to prepare each student to think like an attorney. The distinction is rarely articulated to students: an attorney is a legal representative to a specific client, while a lawyeris a member and caretaker of the legal profession, tasked with serving the justice system and advancing its public interest mission. Solely understanding important cases involving the major areas of law (Contracts, Torts, etc.) may be sufficient to “think like an attorney,” but if Harvard Law is interested in also helping each student to “think like a lawyer,” we must expand our 1L curriculum beyond solely case studies to include direct experience with the realities of the justice system.
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Similarly, in the present arrangement, Harvard Law cannot ensure that its degree-holders have ever visited a prison, met an asylum-seeker, or saw what a public defender’s office looks like relative to that of a white collar defense firm. Voluntary elements of the Harvard Law experience are often sorted by what we were already predisposed to be interested in, resulting in the most important learning experiences — the future prison reformer hearing from a victims advocacy group, the future prosecutor learning from a formerly incarcerated person, the future corporate interest lawyer experiencing a union meeting or a visit with victims of corporate malfeasance, and the future government regulator meeting a startup entrepreneur — never happening. If we believe those experiences are necessary to “think like a lawyer” in 21st century America and if a Harvard Law degree is supposed to signify that its holders have been through the experiences necessary to “think like a lawyer,” then the curriculum of Harvard Law should incorporate those experiences. In short, we should put our mandatory 1L curriculum where our mouth is.

End OCS’ Complicity in D.C.’s Revolving Door Corruption (The Harvard Law Record, January 13, 2016)

The OCS-endorsed recommendation reads like a corrupted version of President Kennedy’s inaugural address. Instead of calling young people to work for the federal government by challenging them to “ask what you can do for your country,” the Office of Career Services at the law school of Kennedy’s university is directing students to statements that call students to work two-to-three years for the federal government by challenging them to ask what you can do to gain knowledge and skills for deep pocketed future clients. “The federal government,” Point 12 reads, “is a great place to gain practical experience and training.” Indeed, the school whose mission is “to educate leaders who contribute to the advancement of justice and well-being of society” frames government work no longer as service to our national community, but rather as experience to be strategically monetized.
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America does not need young law students working for our national government with the mindset that they will bring the intel they learn there back to serve powerful interests. If our nation’s oldest law school is going to recommend people to go into government work, it should only be in the context of entering such work as a public servant with our national community’s interest in mind while one works there.

A Mission in Winter (Harvard Law Record, January 7, 2016)

Dear Harvard Law School Class of 2018,

Harvard Law School’s stated mission is “to educate leaders who contribute to the advancement of justice and well being of society.” Every January, when the sun sets early and corporate interest law firms flock to campus to wine and dine us, that mission can fade to the background. It is important that we do not let the hustle and bustle of Big Law receptions crowd out the reason we are here: to launch not prestigious careers, but rather transformative vocations that serve to advance justice and societal well-being.

There exist great civic challenges of our time. One in four American children grow up in poverty. Our nation’s Congress has been corrupted by money. A warming globe threatens humanity’s most vulnerable. One in three of our black male neighbors will be locked in prison at some point in their life. These challenges need all hands on deck. These challenges need the Harvard Law School Class of 2018.

We came to law school to develop a skill with a proven track record of tackling great challenges such as these. In winter, though, as we are shuffled from corporate interest reception to corporate interest reception, doubting questions cloud our memory:

If most students are going into corporate interest law, it must be crazy to pursue a different path, right?

If legal work designed to serve those without money is — as one professor recently told our class — “the Lord’s work” and I am no martyr, am I not fit to pursue it?

If serving the interests of a wealthy and powerful few can provide stability to my life, but serving the interests of the public will require periods of uncertainty, would it be best for me to play it safe?

As these doubts grow bigger with each passing winter night, it becomes easy to ignore the civic challenges calling us and forget the reasons we came here in the first place. Left to its own devices, the creeping belief that there is no alternative but using our skills to serve wealthy interests will take hold of us. Our ambitions to build transformative vocations will be suppressed and delayed. Our dreams of living Big Lives will be shrunk to the consolations of Big Law: “…there will be some pro bono work, I guess…” “…wealthy folks need lawyers, too, you know…” and“…maybe later…”

We must remember, though, when we find a quiet moment during these snowy, winter nights and contemplate what we want to labor for during our brief and precious time here on this Earth, that there is always an alternative. It is an alternative that we are blessed to have had so many Harvard Law alumni take up: to trade the prestigious certainty of corporate advocacy for the transformative citizenship of contributing to the advancement of justice and well being of society. To name just few:

After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1992, Jennifer Gordon founded the Workplace Project, a non-profit worker center, which organizes immigrant workers and fights for stronger state labor protection laws. After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1970, Mark Green spent the Seventies publishing various books on reigning in corporate power, culminating in his founding of the New Democracy Project, a public policy institute.
After graduating from Harvard Law School in 2010, Gina Clayton founded the Essie Justice Group to support and empower women with incarcerated loved ones to help end mass incarceration.

Gordon, Green, and Clayton — as well as hundreds of their fellow citizens over the years who pursued a civic-minded vocation right out of Harvard Law School — faced the same winter of doubt that we face today. But they listened to that voice that drew them to law school in the first place: we have a mission to serve, we have great challenges to tackle, we have skills to deploy in service of our human community and we cannot let fear of uncertainty distract us.

Unfortunately, for every 2014 Harvard Law graduate who pursued work in organizations designed “to contribute to the advancement of justice and well being of society,” four graduates joined firms designed to serve wealthy clients’ interests. We, the Class of 2018, can take a different path. We can have a higher estimation of our own civic significance. We can survive this winter with our vocations intact.

Sincerely, 
Pete Davis

Hearts, Laws and Our 1L Orientation (The Harvard Law Record, September 13, 2015)

Throughout my 1L orientation, my mind kept returning to this overlooked moment in the 2016 Presidential campaign– a moment that teaches us much more about American politics than the entire telethon of Trump-focused punditry ever has nor ever will. In a backroom after a Hillary Clinton campaign event, Julius Jones, a Black Lives Matter activist, is face-to-face with the frontrunner herself, challenging her to explain how she would change “hearts and minds” to address racism in America. Clinton, in a rare candid moment, responds passionately: “I don’t believe you change hearts; I believe you change laws, you change allocation of resources, you change the way systems operate.”

What a great political tension! To address the great public problems of our time, should we be changing Hearts or changing Laws?  

Of course, Jones and Clinton are both right. Heart and Laws — and consequently, Heart-changers and Law-changers — are not opponents, but rather interlocutors in democracy’s great conversation.

The Imperative of Civic Education Revitalization (The Falls Church News-Press, September 4, 2014)

Last year marked the 30th anniversary of A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Education Reform, the bombshell Reagan administration report that helped define today’s conventional wisdom about American schools. Thanks to the report – which implied that America’s “preeminence in commerce, industry, science and technology” was “being overtaken by competitors” due to a “rising tide of mediocrity” abetted by public schools – one cannot talk about schools today without hearing that classes are not “rigorous” enough, that American children are “falling behind” Chinese, Indian and Korean children in “competitive skills,” and that the answer is evermore “tougher standards.”

Three decades later, educators are standing up to call “hogwash!” on the report’s themes. When you adjust for poverty, American scores are not ‘falling behind’: non-impoverished school districts lead the world on recent PISA tests. Even more, there is no connection between a nation’s economic productivity and its test scores: Americans have had low-ranking scores for decades and yet still lead the world in economic productivity. Factories have moved to other countries not because they have better-educated citizens, but because they have lower labor standards than Americans find just. In fact, the largest recent economic threat to America – the financial crisis – was caused by the reckless corporate policies of the well-educated. Indeed, we are not A Nation at Risk of falling behind economically and, if we are, don’t blame our public schools.

America’s outlook isn’t exactly rosy, though: We are failing to stem climate change, reign in the corporate crime wave in the financial industry, roll back mass incarceration, and stop the corruption of Congress by monied interests. But these are not failures in economic competitiveness. Rather, they are civic failures: failures by us citizens to address shared problems.

When Ben Franklin was asked what governmental system America was going to end up with, he responded: “a Republic, if you can keep it.” To keep our Republic – the system that places the power to govern in the hands of the People, ourselves – we need civic education: schooling in the democratic values, civic skills, and public-minded determination needed to address today’s civic failures. Perhaps it’s time for a report entitled A Republic at Risk: The Imperative of Civic Education Revitalization.

Falls Church schools should lead the way in revitalizing American civic education. Only providing vague encouragement of ‘service hours’ and a single course on formal Government is a disservice to our high schoolers: Packing kits for the homeless is not the same as pairing such service with responsive political action against the structures that create homelessness; reading about how a bill becomes a law is not the same as developing the hands-on experience that is needed for legislative change.

Let’s Create F.C. Hall of Fame in Cherry Hill Park (The Falls Church News-Press, December 5, 2013)

When Albert Einstein was asked by the New York State Education Department about what schools should emphasize, he responded: “in teaching history, there should be extensive discussion of personalities who benefited mankind through independence of character and judgment.” The genius was right: We need role models to look both back and up to. As citizens, we need civic heroes to remind us how much can be achieved when we embody our communal values in the way we live our lives.

I, for one, was greatly influenced by my exposure to the work of Annette Mills and Dave Eckert, Falls Church civic heroes of the 1990’s and early 2000’s. I remember as a kid hearing about and benefiting from their seminal help in so many tremendous Falls Church projects: the Tinner Hill Heritage Foundation, Watch Night, the Blues festival, the recycling program, their Tripps and Four Mile Run stream advocacy, the neighborhood tree program, Operation Earthwatch, and much more. Because I was exposed to their work, I was inspired to get more involved in Falls Church civic life in the hopes of being a tenth as civic as the couple who Tom Whipple once called, “F.C.’s Dynamic Duo.”

We cannot let the example of Falls Church civic heroes like Annette and Dave be lost to history. Our grandchildren should be exposed to the stories of citizens like Jessie Thackery, E.B. Henderson, Howard Herman and others. This is why I am calling upon our community to come together to create a permanent home for our Little City’s civic heroes: a Falls Church Hall of Fame. Just like how the mission of the Baseball Hall of Fame is to “preserve the sport’s history, honor excellence within the game and make a connection between the generations of people who enjoy baseball,” the Falls Church Hall of Fame’s mission will be to: “preserve the city’s history, honor excellence in civic action and character and make a connection between the generations of people who call Falls Church home.”

Civics Education Lacking in F.C. City Schools (Falls Church News-Press, June 30, 2010)

The current state of civic education in our schools falls short in two ways. First, our civic education needs to be broader. If knowing the tools of democratic participation is as important as knowing the tools of literary analysis, why is the latter taught for 13 grades and the former is taught for only two? Civic education should be present in every grade’s curriculum and the values of public activism should be engendered across subjects.

Second, our civic education needs to be deeper. Service learning and knowledge of the branches of government is not enough – Falls Church students need to know how to play active and effective roles in our community and democracy. If we can set standards that ensure that every Falls Church student can read, practice the scientific method and understand algebra by the end of senior year, surely we can set standards that ensure that every student can file a Freedom of Information Act request, hold a press conference, build a coalition group, utilize their civic imagination, and identify and actively take on community problems by graduation day.

Our schools should not only train students for their role in our economy – they should also help develop students’ public spirits and empower them for their role in our democracy. A good place to start the Falls Church civic education renaissance would be to ask the school board and Superintendent Berlin to initiate an official comprehensive review of the current state of civic education in Falls Church schools. If they were to do that, it would be a first step towards ensuring that all Falls Church students could play active roles in our democratic community. Now what’s more patriotic than that?