LEADERS: ANTIDOTE TO TOXIC LEADERSHIP

LEADERS: ANTIDOTE TO TOXIC LEADERSHIP

PRESIDENT ANDREW JACKSON

GEOFFREY CANADA, PRESIDENT & CEO, HARLEM CHILDREN ZONE

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© January 2008

“Who will lead me into the strong city; who will bring me into Edom?”

The Book of Common Prayer

Many of my books center around the idea of leaderless leadership in our time, and with reason. In the darkest of periods, however, there is always the promise of redemption. So, it has been throughout American history.

The only problem today is that we expect our leaders to be squeaky clean, as if sanitized by history to make our heroes bigger than life so that we can treat them as less than human. Nothing is more human than leadership; no one more human than a leader.

We want one-dimensional myths reified in three-dimensional leaders. We want heroes within the margin of perfection, not people like ourselves. We want them to be a little different but not too different; a little better but not too much better; a little smarter but not too smart. Otherwise, how could we identify with them?

Despite this ambivalence, a leader periodically steps out of the reservoir of our resilience to make a difference whatever we may think of them as individuals.

Nineteenth century Andrew Jackson and twenty-first century Geoffrey Canada appear to be such men. At a time when what poses as leadership is mainly destructive, when people want to be reassured not enlightened, when the culture is susceptible to passive followers, such leaders come forward.

Jackson was a slave owner, Canada descendant of slaves. Jackson created an age; Canada is attempting to create a viable society. Both are as American as we get. Both stepped away from the herd to be blinded by the light; and both were guided by that “god within” that recognizes no insurmountable barriers.

ANDREW JACKSON (1767 – 1845)

Last night PBS television had a special on the life of Andrew Jackson, eighth president of the United States.

Jackson was the litmus test of this fragile new nation in the early nineteenth century having risen from so little to accomplish so much.

The public television program captured his complex personality to some degree, not the way a book can, but I doubt many have read books on this president. If they had, they would discover he was a walking oxymoron. He was a powerful friend and a ferocious enemy. He never forgot a kindness given or the smallest of betrayals, ever. He was a democratic autocrat, an urbane savage and an atrocious saint.

Jackson embodied something of the American character that has always found room for dedication and duplicity, for caring and callousness, for prejudice and patronizing. He lifted the nation out of its false airs that mimicked gentrified Europe, and brought the quiet beast that rested beyond America’s doleful eyes.

Were he not to have risen in our midst in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, we would be a very different country if a country at all.

His mortal sins were as gigantic as were his mortal achievements. He won the Battle of New Orleans when the Army of the Potomac refused to fight in Washington, D.C., and the British burned the capitol to the ground.

Imagine how stunned the British were at New Orleans when Jackson’s ragtag army did not cut and run, but stayed, killing two thousand British soldiers and sailors, while losing only eight men, and saving the city, and the nation in one stroke.

His Irish heritage found it easier for him to ask forgiveness than permission. Ordered to patrol the southern territories, he instead invaded Florida conquering the Spanish without first receiving permission from president James Monroe. For his insubordination, Florida now part of the United States, president Monroe accepted his apology and then promoted him as head of the US Army.

Jackson embraced resistance, loved a fight, and once killed a man in a dual. The man first fired; Jackson then took aim and shot the man, dead. It wasn’t until after the dual that his second noticed blood coming out of his sleeve. Jackson had been shot inches from his heart. The bullet lodged in such a precarious place that he carried it in his body the rest of his life.

To public television’s credit, it also showed Jackson’s coarseness and racism. He had more than one hundred slaves and was not above having a slave whipped nearly to death for attempting to escape. He also drove Indian nations out of their native lands that were protected by United States Treaties. This two thousand mile trek across the continent into the Pacific Northwest became known as the “trail of tears.” Hundreds died on the way from disease, malnutrition and fatigue.

Jackson, a frontiersman with no formal education, upheld the laws he believed in, and ignored the laws that he didn’t. He was the strongest most ruthless and most Machiavellian president in our American history. He was also the necessary leader of this fragile republic when it was barely fifty years old, and surrounded by a world of piranha in the uniform of the French, Spanish and British waiting for our courage to falter and make us captive to their will.

He also founded the Democratic Party, created a strong executive branch of government, took all federal funds out of the Bank of the United States, thus destroying it, then reorganized American banking, and redirected the focus of capitalism from the privileged few of the East to disadvantaged many in the hinterland. Sound bytes from John Edwards echo Jackson's persona, but without the calloused hands and hickory in the sinews.

GEOFFREY CANADA

A very different leader is in our midst if what I saw on public television’s Charlie Rose show today is any indication.

Geoffrey Canada, president and CEO of Harlem Children’s Zone appeared in a business suite with a shaved head, lean athletic physique, passionate command of the American language, and a clear vision of his mission with a long twenty-year record of service to back it up.

The Harlem Children’s Zone is a 96-block area in Harlem serving the educational needs of 20,000 underprivileged students mainly of color and economically disadvantaged.

What is refreshing about this man and his message is that he sees the problem of educating the poor not a local but a national issue, not one of race but of reality, not one of tweaking this or that but of radically changing the system.

He sees the educational system not simply broke but anachronistic, the teaching profession not simply weak but atavistic, and the curriculum designed for an agrarian and early industrial society, not for the postmodern electronic age.

What does he propose? He proposes that the school day be longer and the school year correspondingly extended. Students had three months of summer vacation, he reminds us, when we were an agricultural society and school children were needed to help their fathers bring in the crops. Now, less than two percent of Americans are engaged in agriculture. Even traditional industrial and manufacturing jobs of the booming industrial period of the 1940s through the 1980s has essentially evaporated.

General Motors, Ford and Chrysler once represented hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs with tens of thousands of satellite jobs created by the “Big Three” in support of the automotive industry. Now, GM is near bankruptcy, Chrysler has essentially disappeared, and Toyota of Japan has replaced Ford as number two auto manufacturer in this country soon to be number one. Times are a changing. We have become a service and information society, which requires brains not brawn or a well-educated constituency to sustain the national economy.

Canada knows this, and recognizes that students in the classroom are bored and under whelmed by a curriculum designed for another time and a different student population. This is not a problem of color but culture and extends from the teaching of primary skills (reading, writing and arithmetic) to higher mathematics, science and the humanities. To have a civil society, Canada insists, is a civic responsibility with education at the forefront.

We are not only failing within our own society, he argues, but we are last or near last in test scores of our students against advanced nations about the globe. Bill Gates said a high school diploma is not enough, and he agrees, adding, we should be geared to create a society of college graduates with the social and professional skills needed to be competitive in this new world, otherwise we will continue to decline.

Canada is an enthusiastic optimist who doesn’t think optimism means being an apologist for our problems. Consider this, he says, in one state there were 40,000 college graduates and 40,000 young people incarcerated in the prison system. It cost about $18,500 per year to educate a student, $32,500 a year to house a convict. Nearly all these criminals, he adds, were high school dropouts.

Perhaps the bravest thing he said was that the educational system failed to improve or change because of the polarity of politics, chiefly displayed in teachers’ unions, which protect incompetent members from censure or dismissal.

It doesn’t stop there. Teacher unions not only protect incompetent teachers from being fired, but also prevent real change from taking place.

Nor can he find any justification for social promotion. If a student is in the third grade is not reading or writing or doing math at that level, he should be given special attention, but not promoted.

Teachers should not be allowed to continue to teach, however long in the system, when incompetence is demonstrated. They should be removed from the classroom and the system, in other words, fired. If removed from the classroom, they should not be paid comparable pay doing nothing to protect their jobs. Draconian? Canada would prefer the word “necessary,” showing hickory in his spine, too.

He sees merit in “No Child Left Behind,” but only in its spirit not in the letter of the law. Not enough funding has been dedicated to this purpose to make any impact on the problem.

It is Canada’s belief that education must start as soon as the child is born and be carried through the system and college. He sees this as a choice between the student becoming a leader and productive citizen or a burden to society, on the dole or a criminal. If this seems an exaggeration, he repeatedly emphasized the connection between education and civil responsibility, and its absence, and crime, welfare and chaos.

He claims we don’t have the right people in education because there is not incentive for the right people to come into the system. Too often we want a body in front of a classroom with little regard for what that person can do to educate the students.

He doesn’t recommend “teacher bonuses,” but does believe there is reason for merit pay when teachers are highly successful. Incentives are not a panacea. They will not bring people into teaching that would prefer the economic possibilities in the private sector, but they may bring people who prefer the teaching profession, but cannot afford the financial sacrifices demanded.

Canada is open to people of ideas outside the public school system, people from charter schools, private schools, and other approaches to education. He wants a dialogue created and plan developed to best utilize resources that eventually materializes into a national plan. He believes the tradition of local boards of control to public education is flawed, and can only be remedied by a national overseer system with real power to impose meaningful guidelines, or schools will continue to fail. This is a controversial stand but one, which is axiomatic to a leader.

Between 60 and 70 percent of the students in low-income areas in places such as New York City, Baltimore, Detroit, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and south central Los Angeles are not performing at grade level. These areas are also high crime areas, which further deplete economic resources to deal with the problem.

How about tests and measuring performance?

He is all for tests. One of the startling discoveries of these tests, he says, is that students of color in affluent schools perform just as poorly as students in mostly colored schools in poor neighborhoods.

He asks why? His answer: because students of color in these schools are not expected to perform at the same level; they are forgiven for poor performance. Fewer demands are made on them, he believes, fulfilling the self-fulfilling prophecy of failure. Incredible to his thinking, they are forgiven for reasons from dysfunctional home life to lack of academic support and access to academic aids such as computers. He shakes his head saying students improvise when they are encouraged to learn, and fail to try when they are not.

As I watched the program, and reflected, I wondered how many people had tuned out hearing this educator, who was essentially blasting the education system, but quietly and politely. Some might see him stepping on the toes of a lot of sacred cows, while others might see him echoing the radical sentiments of vested interests. I saw him as neither, but a sincere man convinced of the worthiness of his mission.

LEADERSHIP, THE DANGER OF BEING DIFFERENT

It is not easy to be a leader. It takes courage as well as vision and a capacity to serve. When the message of the leader is disturbing, often the message is not attacked directly but the messenger, the leader. It is why the leader needs an inner moral compass that intuitively steers him to his objective.

When a leader suggests change, possibly radical change, it always agitates those who have benefited most from the corrupt system as they see themselves threatened, their livelihood put in jeopardy, and the leader the cause. They fail to see the system and their participation in it driving them and it to inevitable ruin.

It is possibly for this reason that they behave so aggressively toward the leader, displacing their frustration as an unconscious defense mechanism where emotions and ideas are transferred from their own insecurity to the leader who would change things as they are. That is the group level.

At the individual level, displacement can combine with projection to blame the problem on all those who would support the leader or would see change in a positive light. They would thus become an abomination to that person, and the enemy. No longer would the enemy have the face of the leader, but now a broadband contempt for everyone.

We have seen this form of pathological paranoia of a crazed person repeatedly in recent years on high school and college campuses, most recently at Virginia Tech. A disturbed student gunned down thirty-two students and teachers, including a girlfriend. He projected his anxieties and displaced his hostilities by murdering indiscriminately in symbolized madness of college life. .

My reason for bringing this up in this piece is that in many ways the barbarism of the early frontier society of Andrew Jackson has held on tenaciously to our own. Geoffrey Canada faces a similar frontier barbarism in a failed system that persists. He has no less daunting task to save the American soul than Andrew Jackson had to save the American body.

We live in violent times where displacement and projection are fed by a pervasive paranoia. Geoffrey Canada is a breath of free air in the stale air of academic entropy. May his energies hold up and his vision manifest itself.

And what is that vision? To create an educated society that serves the civil needs of the American people and allows future Americans to be competitive and able to take their proper place in this new global world as leaders.

Dr. Fisher’s most recent book is A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (Authorhouse 2007).