TAMPA — Meeting here in mid-June, the panel of judges for the 60th All America Cities awards–America’s premier civic recognition program–were in for a big surprise. Of 29 cities making presentations, a group of 25 teens and near-teens from Richmond, Ind., clearly stole the show.

The young people, a rainbow of races and sizes, not only made Richmond’s 10-minute case to be a winner, but arrested attention with their powerfully mature responses to questions.

The build-up had been Richmond’s effort to envision its future and prove its worth to be an All-America City. Adult civic leaders had been activist enough: reacting to a 2007 Johns Hopkins University report calling Richmond “a dropout factory,” they’d inaugurated a Third Grade Reading Academy for early intervention. Two-thirds of third graders reading below grade level had signed up, with scores shortly rising by 50 percent.

But as the process rolled out, the 12-to-18 crowd–some 100 of them–seemed to be the chief civic agitators. And proud of it: as 15-year old Sophie Ottoni-Wilhelm told the jury, “We’re the backbone and also the brains of this effort.” Richmond Mayor Sally Hutton was on hand to help make the city’s case, but she committed the rare political act of staying back in the shadows.

Derek Okubo, senior vice president of the National Civic League, which produces the All-America City event, confirmed the kids were in charge even in rehearsals for their presentation.

While supporting the Third Grade Academy, for example, the young people had gone upstream with their own solutions, tapping what they believed was pent-up motivation to be more involved in both school and community. They had persuaded hundreds of their friends and acquaintances to participate in performing arts events.

“What really got my attention,” said jury member Christine Benero, head of the Mile High United Way in Denver, “was the energy that went into KidFest” –a month-long celebration of the efforts the Richmond young people were making in their community. Adults from the mayor’s office, from the Wayne County Historical Museum, Earlham College and the Richmond State Hospital lent a hand, but seemed to respect the teenagers’ ability to take charge.

KidFest started with a 90-unit moonlight parade that attracted over 2,000 people–more than five percent of Richmond’s total population. Among the results of the entrepreneurial talent invested in the project: start-up of a new local magnet school oriented to entrepreneurship.

The All-America City award occasions invariably produce cheerful but fervent competition among finalist city delegations seeking one of the ten prized annual awards. The lobbies and corridors of the Tampa Marriott Waterside Hotel and Marinasaw swarms of delegates, adults and youth mixed, each group easily identified by brightly colored T-shirts that shouted their city’s claim as a truly great place.

Anyone wandering into that Grand Ballroom on awards night would have felt the energy as the suspense over the final winners grew. After three days of listening to each other’s stories, all 29 were convinced they were winners. The announcement of each winner drew yelps of praise and thunderous applause. Yet the miracle is: even those not leaving with one of the ten awards consistently said they got so much out of the experience that they also felt like winners.

The event itself was something of a cross between a high school pep rally and a political convention. Delegations sitting together. Signs and banners. Whoops and yells at every announcement. When called out, winning teams march in the aisles and up on to the stage.

Winning delegations were high-fiving and hugging–public officials and grassroots activists, people of all colors, prosperous people, poor people, united by what they’d done in common. It’s America as it might be: a people united by common purpose and deeply felt emotion. We’ve all seen a facsimile of this formula at a major sports event when the home team makes a dramatic comeback.

But sports do not spell the future of the country. Kids do. Just when you think the country might come apart, the All America Cities competition delivers a yearly, youthful jolt of civic hope. A 12-year old African American boy from that Richmond delegation, Jeffrey Caldwell, summed it up when he said “We’re not just the future, we’re the present too.”

Also among the 2009 All-America City winners: Big places like Phoenix, which took on its twin bogeymen of an underdeveloped downtown and loss of open spaces to sprawl; Wichita, Kansas, which staged a massive public engagement process involving thousands, with over 500 organizations then taking responsibility for an action agenda; and much smaller Inglewood, Calif., squeezed in by the massive LAX airport, which successfully persuaded the airport–using litigation as the last cudgel–to spend a quarter billion dollars insulating homes from LAX’ noise. Also in the winners’ circle: Fort Wayne, Ind.; Albany, N.Y.; Statesville, N.C.; Somerville, Mass.; Kinston, N.C.; and Caroline County, Va.

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The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law was much praised at the time of its passage in 2001, especially its ambitious goal to bring disadvantaged and minority school achievement into the mainstream. NCLB was seen as a rare example of bi-partisan federal policy making.

Yet now this famed law is stuck in a twilight zone. Politics permit neither its re-authorization nor its repeal. This is a good thing.

Good because NCLB, despite its laudable goals and its marginal gains, has actually done considerable damage to American education. It has resulted in a rush toward standardization–trying to make every school and every program the same–precisely when we need a rich variety of different schooling opportunities for today’s diverse youth.

First the politics. Everyone supports closing achievement gaps; and who’s not for standards? But the NCLB law has become a toxic brand. Rural Republicans hate the idea of the federal government meddling in local school affairs; and a slew of congressional Democrats elected in the last two cycles ran against NCLB. Civil rights groups are adamant about maintaining NCLB; teacher unions counter the standards are unrealistic. The president who pushed it will be gone. It is an opportunity to do something better. NCLB was, technically, the seventh re-authorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. An eighth ESEA might be crafted while a new secretary of education is left to modify NCLB through his waiver authority.

But politics aside, check the damaging if unintended consequences of this law:

• The standards came to mean standardization. Courses, classes, tests–as though all young people are wired identically. The law’s narrow focus on reading and math has re-aligned what high schools spend money and time on toward a standardized model.

• The virtue of expecting all young people to achieve has morphed into the expectation that they must all learn the same things–usually in the same place at the same pace. An almost delusional notion of achievement further contemplates that a standardized test is both a valid and sufficient means of assessing learning. “College ready” has become a mantra, despite the reality that most of the jobs for decades to come, while requiring some specialized preparation, do not require a baccalaureate degree.

• Worse yet is the law’s theory of action: that once we have standards–albeit 50 wildly varying sets, state by state–we can order achievement and when it fails to materialize, command its fulfillment with threats and sanctions. Students do not learn from standards; they learn from what they see, and hear, and do, in their interactions with each other and adults in a school situation. If they are motivated to learn, they will. If they are not, no one can force them. The traditional model of school, oriented around delivering instruction, fits some but hardly all students. Those who do not learn that way fall away. Some who fall away are running away, finding school boring, rigid, and totally disconnected from the real world and from the ways they learn.

• What some wrongly call a teacher shortage is a growing teacher-retention problem. Close to 40 percent of new teachers–especially the most promising–leave the profession within the first five years. Why? Because being a soldier in the NCLB army doesn’t lead to a very satisfying career. Unless we allow teaching to be a real profession, we should not expect this sad trend to change.

• NCLB’s obsession with testing has led to the almost silly assumption that we can judge a school by averaging all student test scores at a point-in-time. Imagine if the federal government ranked medical clinics by averaging the health status on a given day of all the people who regularly use that clinic?

• Finally, the law’s deadly drumbeat of repeated, standardized testing is steadily shrinking what high schoolers can study, as resources are concentrated on reading and math and other subjects are crowded out. So even science matters less. History matters less. Art and music–critical ways of learning for many young people–are out the window. Not to mention economics or foreign languages.

In stark contrast the nearly meteoric growth in on-line learning and next-generation education software reveals what happens when students get a chance to learn in different ways. For a peek at the potential for 21st century schooling, take a look at Hanging Out, Messing Around and Geeking Out, based on a recent report sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation. See what happens when schooling taps the motivation of students, starts with their interests and passions, when learning is designed for interaction, rather than one-way “instruction.” Getting every willing young person ready for the challenges of this century is neither impossible nor hopeless. NCLB, as it stands, is both.

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By Curtis Johnson

An historic $14 trillion of public and personal debt, a fourth of America’s bridges deficient, more than a fourth of adults obese, and nearly half of the nation’s youth not prepared for a 21^st century economy – what do these baleful effects have in common?

Each of these effects and more like them show what we got for a half-century of an easy-going, profligate, low-efficiency culture.  Though only five percent of the people in the world, we Americans got comfortable with burning 25 percent of the world’s resources. From corporate practices to personal lifestyles, we shoved the consequences of waste on to the backs of the less well off and future generations. We provided schools but didn’t worry if half the students didn’t succeed.

Now costs along with climate change compel Americans to use air and water and land more efficiently, to rethink how we can arrange our lives less tethered to our car keys, to get serious about creating schools that work for every willing child.

Ongoing wars aside, 2008′s been a rough ride. On top of collapsing confidence in the world’s financial institutions, we got a rude awakening from the run-up in prices of food and fuel.

We are an adaptive people, but emerging from a half century of seemingly effortless superiority, seeing our assumptions turned topsy-turvy has us in shift-shock.  For as long as most of us can remember, we could force our will through military might. Our universities – still the best in the world – prepared enough young people for the best jobs. We imagined an economy 70 percent dependent on consumerism was sustainable strategy. We thought cheap fuel and food would go on forever.

Faced with the possibility of permanently higher prices for energy and food, people all over the country are forced to rethink sources and the supply chain for food. Would locally grown food be both better and more affordable? Even Wal-Mart executives now seem to think this is possible. Utilities executives such as Jim Rogers of Duke Energy have plunged into the regulatory pits to argue that power companies should help customers optimize use and be rewarded for the savings.

We seem suddenly aware that hundreds of proposed new coal-fired energy plants might come at the price of the planet.  Though we struggle still with the notion of reducing consumption, interest seems up for cleaner fuels, especially renewable sources such as wind and solar.

Can we Americans really deep-six long held habits?  We prefer spending to saving. We’re hooked on the ease with which we borrow from China to pay our Middle East energy tab. We don’t like postponing gratification or using less energy or water that’s always seemed to be ours for the taking.

After a generation of eating too much and exercising too little, the nation’s looking at a cost for a medical system probably too high to pay, if we’re to have resources left for anything else. Can we get everyone in the system and also make lighter use of it?

Americans grew confident we could live on California cliffs or in fire-prone Florida forests or farm the Mississippi river floodplain. When disaster came, a sympathetic nation wrote subsidy checks so we could go back and do it again. With both resources and patience running thin, we are grudgingly reconnecting land use policy to environmental realities. It’s getting embarrassing to grab our bottled water, climb into our SUVs and head for a Sierra Club meeting.

A Minnesota bridge fell a year back, becoming the canary in the infrastructure mine. Now paying attention, we discover a big unpaid bill ahead for leaky pipes, a shaky energy grid, worn-out roads and rail tracks. Catching up will cost nearly $2 trillion. Just to keep up with the Europeans, we’d have to insist that Congress and the states invest two to three times more of our GDP every year on infrastructure improvement.

We’ve lived large – big houses, big cars, big meals – and over the past half century managed to consume about five times more land than we had population growth. It would take a generation for communities to restore historic patterns that enabled people to walk or use public transport for most trips. With housing values plunging in exurbs, rising in urban interiors, enthusiasm for sidewalks shooting upward, there certainly seems to be a real market for living closer together, for new commercial and retail developments where people can park once, or better yet, arrive by train or bus and then walk to many destinations. Bicycles are making a comeback.

With the climate change clock ticking and America’s long-playing success story on the line, we can mourn the passing of the easy era, or get busy on every front. Our states and regions should start tapping the new energy for change.

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Curtis Johnson’s e-mail is cjohnson@citistates.com

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