CREATIVITY IS THE NEW RIGOR, BUT HOW'S THAT WORKING FOR YOU?

Thought piece by Donn K. Harris, October 2018

CREATIVITY IS THE NEW RIGOR. . . . a much-expanded text based on my speech after receiving the 2018 California Lawyers for the Arts Artistic License Award. I was honored for my part as Chairman of the California Arts Council from 2015-2018 in restoring the Council’s funding to pre-millennial levels above $30 million from a 2014 low of $5 million. I touched on some of these ideas in that speech and decided to take it further with this thought experiment.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

First, thanks so much to the California Lawyers for the Arts for honoring me on cinco de mayo, one of my favorite holidays. It signals that summer is on the way and the ice is in the pitcher, so to speak. Thanks to my daughters and co-workers who are here, and to Anne Bown-Crawford, the California Arts Council Executive Director who came down from Sacramento to be my presenter. What I am able to do in my work takes a pueblo, and the pueblo has always stepped up. I am also thrilled to be in a program that includes Senator Loni Hancock, Senator Mark Leno, Senator Scott Wiener and Supervisor Aaron Peskin, champions of causes I believe in so deeply, all coming from a set of values that we share and that I – we – put into the operation of schools every day. Also, Alma Robinson of California Lawyers for the Arts, a local and national treasure and my very good friend, more than three decades of service and support, we will be honoring you soon, Alma, and I can’t wait. And her husband Toyin, who I just met and we immediately bonded over his 2-seater Mercedes and the finer things in life.

I really am happy just to be here, I enjoy this event immensely. Two years ago I presented the William James Association their award -- Laurie Brooks and Larry Brewster are here – for their groundbreaking work with the arts in prisons, which is internationally renowned.

These days I am honored to lead our school district’s effort to build an arts center and highlight an arts high school that will rock the world when we open in 2023. Our ArtsCenter is for all 56,000 students in SFUSD, and is a direct expression of the unbounded creativity, the struggle for equity, and the multigenerational worldview we hold that, to be honest, keeps me young and makes me scoff at the AARP notices in my mail. I recycle them as I reclaim youth on a daily basis. I am also glad Recology is being honored here, both for their unexpected artistic commitment and for their environmental stewardship. Those who know me are familiar with my stance on recycling. But those AARP notices, I mean they’re a great outfit, they do good work, but it’s hard for me to make peace with that age thing. Once I ordered one of those senior breakfasts at a reduced price, the smaller portions were fine but the egg whites I couldn’t do, whole eggs please I said, maybe I negated the whole thing.

One issue about schools that I keep coming back to: we have all gone to school. Educators ask, why are we getting so much advice? We don’t tell our brain surgeon how to operate. (Actually I think they put us under for brain surgery, so at least at the moment we can’t say much, and if we are speaking at that point I don’t think I’d trust the advice.) Anyway, if we’re honest we know the answer: educating youth is not a precise endeavor. It’s a sliver of their lives, they are at different developmental levels, the scholar is different than the poet/seeker (that was me), or the dyslexic who is a brilliant visual artist and a mechanical wizard – it really is an incredible range of developmental levels in one place and so many with skills and passions I found out only by accident. Or maybe coincidence is a better word, I really was intentional in my teaching, and my learning journey got a new topic when as a young Special Education teacher I gave an assignment to my class of dyslexic students to create their own alphabet. My thinking was that maybe they knew their visual landscapes much better than us and they would draw up alphabets that had certain features that would be helpful. The first time I got back mostly graffiti art, which I can’t read very well, so I was the dyslexic. “Mr. Harris is going to be in Special Ed in my school,’ one girl said, and then proudly: ”He’s not at grade level.” See how they listen?

Actually the problems I had with the graffiti language weren’t that different than many dyslexics report in their adult years: spatial blending, concentrating on wrong places in the word picture, using former shapes as a guide without flexibility to new forms . . . well, here, maybe we’re getting closer to brain surgery, so no advice people, please, while we dissect your children (figuratively, of course) and get all scientific.

So I was talking about kids with skills that we miss, and I was thinking about Alex, this one very very quiet language-deficient boy who was in trouble with his foster parent and was about to be rejected and sent back into the system. He was told his grades better improve, which his teachers were supposedly on top of since his verbal disabilities were so severe, but even the carefully trained teachers can fall back into “He’s not trying” or “I’m just adding up his test scores” -- and his grades look like any other bored kids’ grades. Except the consequences were dire for the kid: he wasn’t going to live with his family any longer.

But Alex wants to please his foster dad and he thinks something is possible with this assignment. He starts to work on it, more engaged than I’d ever seen him. On the wall we have the letters of the alphabet, a few graffiti word art posters, which look like beautiful bright abstracts to me, prototypes of design elements that I think an engineer would doodle in his or her spare time.

On Day Two Alex pulls out a cool set of colored pens, a Scandinavian brand I’d never seen before, but he is a master with them, a stroke here, a flourish there, and after an hour I look over his shoulder to see his prologue to the alphabet:

WHEN I HAVE THE CHANSS TO DO IT MAY WAY, I AM MUTCH BITTER AND CAN MAKE A BOOK ABOUT HOW TO FFIX THINKS LIKE BICIRCLS AND SMALL MASHEEENS. AND SPEL CHEK IS OK BUT SOMETIMES IT TELLS ME IM WRONG AND DOESN’T GIVE ME THE RITE GOOD SPELING. LIKE MASHEENS IS WRONG AND IT TELLS ME NOTHING FOUNT. I TRY TO LOOK IT UP BUT ALL I GET IS MASHING OR MA- SHEEN WICH IS A MOM TO A KID NAME SHEEN.

Fascinating coming from the mind of this 16 year-old, but even more was the alphabet he made to which the above was meant to be a preface. His letters often were approximations of our alphabet, but with many gaps, like the curve of “D” was there but the straight part was represented by two dashes in red, and the curve was light blue. He didn’t try for lower case or script at all, just shaking his head when asked about them, looking pained and even angry, like “Why would you do this to me? The other letters don’t even look like the capitals. It’s hard enough.” For some reason he had spokes in the “O” (found out later he was a world-class bicycle mechanic and in art class they were always drawing bicycles) and in the open parts of “B” and “R” (but not “Q”, which I never could figure out and he just shrugged when I asked). He made the lines in the “H” uneven and skipped “C” – I was later to learn from a reading specialist that he thought it was redundant as “K” could just be anything with a hard “C” and “S” would cover the soft “C” sounds. How did she find this out as Alex was so non-verbal? “He showed me a practice paper where had “KOW” and “RISEEVE” – the “E” and “I” short sounds were often switched – and we could see where he crossed out the “C” and tried to fit in his new replacements. He was simplifying it for himself, pretty sophisticated strategies. I do the same thing with IKEA instructions, I start crossing out excess visual info. I told him: ”This is profound, Alex, I’m impressed.” He didn’t seem to get it so I said, “It’s deep, really deep,” which caused him to smile and he went back to work. He worked on the book constantly for weeks, and when he was finished he was absent for a few days and came back to school frowning and morose wearing a light gray sweatshirt that read “A IS For ATTITUDE” with the “A” in his style, the tent part of the letter intact in burgundy dye but the horizontal line just a black dot. I gave him time and space to workout whatever was bothering him. It was a hot spring and we kept pushing toward the school year’s end.

So what’s my point?

In San Francisco our vision is to endow each student with a creative and inquisitive experience each day. The rote will be replaced by the reflective, the red pen of corrections and point reductions will be replaced by the probing question and the challenge to go deeper. Grades are on a continuum. ‘What if you tried a new direction? Give me more of……..’ If what a student first turned in got 50 points, they didn’t lose the other 50, those points were out there to be seized. It was a constant value-enriched, gains-to-be-grabbed environment, and if it got competitive, it was only over pace, not someone being smarter. Once we allowed the students to create, it ran in its own direction. The assignments grew increasingly esoteric, but more connected, for example – a 19 year-old Vietnamese boy who had a traumatic brain injury from a car accident at age 7 and was unable to process receptive language, either by ear or on paper, brought in a DMV book in Vietnamese from which he had been studying for his driving test – apparently he was a great driver behind the wheel, but couldn’t pass the written test, and was unable to read printed signs or street names. His sister brought in a whole booklet of Google Maps photos the boy had printed to be sure he knew where he was going, “SAFEWAY” the sign alone was like someone scratching their fingernails on a blackboard to him, but shopping carts, large paper bags, blown-up photos of mangoes advertising specials meant to Duong: FOOD. And that boy was the most efficient Safeway shopper I had ever seen, knowing where every item was, how to get the freshest of everything by ignoring how they put the older stuff in the front and reaching behind to get a week or so extra on shelf life. Duong also wore a smock when he went shopping, almost like one of the big-pocket aprons staff wore, so he was often queried about the location of ethnic food items and the ingredients to make them from scratch. He knew where to find collard greens and ham hocks and Cajun spices; lard for frijoles made from scratch and super-refined Japanese rice that still wasn‘t good enough for the purists. All the Vietnamese knew where the lemongrass was and they wouldn’t have asked another Vietnamese anyway, Duong told me with a scowl, and get this, Duong was this good in any Safeway, we’ve been to 5 or 6 together and we enter, he stops in the doorway, takes a few seconds to scope it out and goes charging off into his wilderness, soon tamed, and he intuitively knew when a particular Safeway had its cooked chickens down to $5 – about three days before the “Sell By” date which gives you a total of 10 days if the refrigeration is good and storage tops tight – somehow he knew they were going on sale and they were close to half price.

After high school this new service called Rabbit which privately matched up needs and skills got ahold of him and he was one of the highest paid personal shoppers anywhere, getting $90 an hour to get the rich their pate and cold-brewed Jamaican coffee and burnt paprika from the Basque market. You think I didn’t learn from these kids? He studied hard ahead of time if he knew stores were going to be requested, and he avoided words, looked for pictures and colors and mapped his in-store routes and he was fast and got sold-out items through connecting with various market managers, all in minimal words, a few gestures, a nod, Duong’s sour face if they were out of something . . . part of his learning curve was accepting a substitute product.

But that DMV book was a source of rage almost between Alex and Duong, fairly mild-mannered rage. You’ve seen the Vietnamese language written in the Anglicized manner? Actually French is the problem, you’ve got chapeaus and nine diacritics and the cedilla thing for fa?ade and gar?on, I mean why bother, just make the thing an “s” if you want it to sound like that, why put the letter with a hard sound there and then change it with yet another little squiggle which made Alex throw the book across the room one morning. I mean I said fa-KADE as a kid and I was a spelling champ. And the chapeau and the missing letter in forét, why take the letter out and then put the symbol back in? I understand why he took it personally. H?pital is said with no “S” so I’ll assume the others are similarly pronounced. Just let it go, it’s gone, the “s” had been dropped, it’s like they’re in mourning with that remnant hanging around. But with all the accents and the lower and the upper and the way the French decided that Vietnamese with its tonal qualities needed even more elaboration – just looking at it makes me almost angry – it’s hyper and frantic and I can’t imagine any soothing poetry will come out of it, not that the language is the problem, it’s the western packaging and overcontrolling mania. Some poor 2nd grader has to stand up in class and suffer through every syllable; it will NEVER flow for anyone with that many exceptions and adjustments. For Alex and Duong it was a declaration of war. The issue actually helped Duong pick up some tricks in English as he gave up on the mother tongue.

Then Rosalita showed up in that small class, a Latina with a temper that was described in her file as a TERREMOTO (earthquake). She also went by Rosario because of the actress in Rent, and the Springsteen song (Rosalita jump a little higher!) was her anthem, but Rosie worked fine for both so we settled on that most of the time. Rosie became an expert on South India which started with a unit in Social Studies on sub-continent culture where she loved the saris and the romantic songs from the Bollywood movies (which she got right away, saying after watching a song reach a kind of high point and the couple came within an inch of one another and then spun off into a dance move and disappeared into a low cloud: ‘ooooh, muy caliente, como no Aisha –’ nudging the blushing Pakistani girl who denied that her country would ever be so crass . . . . .’C’mon,’ Rosie chided her, ‘that dancing boy isn’t your type, huh, look at you.’ Aisha was still blushing but admitted, ’We wouldn’t MAKE those movies in Pakistan, but maybe I can watch them sometimes.’ ‘Said like a good Catholic girl,’ Rosita teased. ‘We got a hundred ways to tell you why we ain’t . .. . .,’ and she looked at the student teacher, young Bethany, who tried to keep a brave face on as Rosita took her into conversational places she never wanted to go, but Bethany froze, looked to me, where I could only shrug and say, ‘We have a wellness center, Rosie, talk about it there, not here,’ and Rosie, satisfied now that everyone was uncomfortable, said astutely: ‘These Bollywood romcom movies say it all. What is real, what we feel, what we hide and how we lied.’ Happy with herself for the witticism, she strutted off theatrically. Bethany said: ‘This is so much more fun than general ed,’ and after a pause mused, ‘if I can keep from getting fired.’ That’s what I said all the time my first few years. (The stuff they just blurt out!)

So that’s schools. At the State level I had the honor of chairing the California Arts Council until a few months ago when I rotated off after three years and watching our budget grow from $5 million to over $25 million in a 4-year period. I’m one of the few people who needs to use the word quintuple.

As in, 5 times.

As in, vision.

As in, our commitment to a millennial world of creativity, leadership, collaboration, empathy, all the things we believe the arts offer -- and the resources to support it.

Here’s what we get for our investment:

Programs for arts education, including targeted funds for youth in juvenile detention centers and other adjudicated settings; so that over time we prevent the need for the $6.8 million committed to serving incarcerated adults with a proven reduction in recidivism and prison violence; grants for the independent artist with an idea bursting forth that seemed untenable before, but now can be realized; large scale grants for cities and townships and imaginative collaborations that bring our communities closer together, promoting innovation as they honor tradition (no one does that dichotomy better than California); we honor our veterans and their families through a new grant program, as well as immigrants and their vital cultures, the art forms of indigenous peoples, both Native American and globally as they exist in California; we support County offices who can re-grant funds to support local initiatives; the list is unmatched in our history. This programming and geographic range has been our collective vision and we have to a great degree realized it, but the urgency still exists, will always exist. It is a social justice agenda driving an economic outlay, and that’s a good pairing. Funding should be about opportunity and visibility and the exponential growth that occurs when multiple factors push in the same direction. We got that – for now. This has been fun and meaningful and great CAC staff ran with it as they have to write up all the new programs and administer the grants from application through final report.

So for me it usually comes back to schools; up to 25% of our budget involves arts education.

Living in the 21st Century world of the San Francisco public school system has proven to be fairly complex. Things we believed would help us educate children and support their creativity have at times stunted the very things they hoped to promote. Economic changes in the city have not benefited everyone; creativity where it exists is often used to keep a roof over one’s head and procure decent food. With language differences causing schools to hunker down with basic skills, the creative spirit is often tough to come by. With the jolt of creativity one is told will come in diverse environments often stunted in schools, things are not headed in the direction we seek without resistance. But the educational system has always had a large amount of drag.

The unintended consequences of seemingly benign acts are hurting us, and not just here. The person who masters first finding and then preventing unintended consequences from dragging down complex systems will be at the influence vortex of the millennium. It will be an SFUSD student if what we are already achieving in spots accelerates even further. This is what the creative educational movement is about, but it doesn’t exist equally for everyone. We were teaching students to read road maps, and they were difficult and required lots of varied skills and we created tests to make sure we were teaching them correctly so they wouldn’t get lost. But then we found out they were lost, that our maps were too simplistic and the kids would come to a place that didn’t match the paper and they would freeze or impulsively jut off and get totally lost, with no skills to get back, no context or way to approach the dilemma – like, OK, I went uphill and was near the big mountain, and then went down, so now I should …????… …. . - they didn’t know – no improvisational skills at all, no creative abilities to let’s say draw a map, even if you started them out with that idea as a school assignment – in laying out a scenario like this I had one girl shouting at me: Don’t you start talkin’ that east-west mess to me, Harris, ain’t nobody care about that. And I remember the mother of one kid is yelling in my face that this is dangerous, locating all this stuff and giving people war skills to find places like a they in a video game, no sir, you keep my street and my co-ordinates to yourself . .. . got it Ms. Phillips, I didn’t see it that way. She said I should check certain things with her before I taught them. Ms. Phillips went to school through 10th grade and that experience was partially why she went off on me regularly. They told me to make a family tree and identify my people . . .some sort of pride thing, knowing where you came from. My father was so mad I thought he would explode. You tell those people, he said, that if I want you to know about your people I’m the one who’s gonna tell you.

It ain’t brain surgery, right, I’m not like you lawyers, I don’t have any specialized knowledge, if anything I’m over my head in most fields, too much of a generalist, even maps are too much, obsolete as they are. But maps were my metaphor, we’ve got to get beyond reading maps and get to making them, which all my teacher friends loved, producing the tool instead of using the tool. But how are we going to get from here to there?

I was with some visiting Russian and Ukranian teachers a few weeks back discussing this, and their best English speaker was saying: "The man who makes the tool makes more money, he’s the rich guy, so he hires me to drive. I got the GPS voice, it's like a robot, very creepy when it calls me Peter, but the guy likes it and makes me stay with that voice.... I like the British voice saying ‘Left, old boy, then 3.3 miles to the destination on the left...... you are no longer in a government-controlled area. Proceed at your own risk.’" We were in the rented car that came with their travel deal, a slightly dinged up steel grey Ford Taurus. 'This is a luxury car in Moscow,' Peter told me as I was about to ask what he meant by government-controlled area. We were on our way to someone's cousin's wedding in the Richmond District, but when we arrived at an empty field and the GPS insisted we were at the wedding chapel, I stayed silent. It was fascinating. Here we were in the real world with the map metaphor in front of us, live from San Francisco. The GPS voice kept insisting we were there. ‘Put the American chick back on,’ a Ukrainian said. ‘This is America, after all.’ The Ukrainians, music teachers from Kiev, talked only to each other. They seemed to think that the American woman would have a different interpretation of the location. I tried to tell them that the same data will be fed through the voice box and the sultry chick will tell them the same thing.

But I’m middle class by that time, the male drama teacher told me. And I’m protected. Something was lost in the exchange, I knew, but there was enough to be fascinated. Middle class by what time? As long as he would have to wait for the GPS to work? Years?

He repeated: And I'm protected.

From what and by what are you protected? I asked loudly, doing that thing you do when a foreigner isn't making sense, getting loud and intense (and people say I take on foreigners' accents when I speak with them, some kind of subconscious empathy) -- and he’s thinking hard, trying to answer me accurately about a complex topic in what to him is a strange language. It's similar to the questions we are asking all the time in schools when we deal with privilege and opportunity, and this teacher, probably by mistake, came up with a political angle that at least tried to explain why it worked for some people and not others. There was still some odd translation mishap going on but when he got to his limits on thought and speech in English the answer was chilling.

Others in middle class protect me, he said happily, adding proudly: We take care of our own. (Another Springsteen song, the Barack Obama 2012 campaign anthem that this group of Russians loved. Didn't Ronald Reagan misappropriate "Born in the USA" for Republican use as a patriotic statement when Springsteen's anti-hero, home from Viet Nam, actually set fire to his town's refinery, out by the shadow of the penitentiary? Sometimes you get it wrong even in your own language. But Springsteen was a staunch Democrat, a 150% supporter of Obama, and he wrote the song for the candidate, so we can take the lyrics at face value. It's a bit tribal, but that's where we are these days. ) No music for elections in Kiev, said a female music teacher, one of the Ukrainians. You think Pussy Riot, [the Russian girl punk band, recently incarcerated for lewdness] will write song for Poroshenko, or Yeltsin?

Here is another place where the unintended consequences of our relatively calm outpost came in: we wavered into the land of replicability and standardization, and whole cottage industries built up around testing – schools became test prep factories, even school culture was a package deal you could buy. We tightened up a bit and raised scores, and other data looked better, but the achievement gap persisted. That in itself was enough to have over 70% of California’s schools in Program Improvement, as each school had 17 different data points to make; fail one and you were in PI. Or if everyone gains but the top group gains more, the gap widens and you have a problem. There is a group of analysts quite incensed when it's suggested that this is only a statistical problem, the kind of weirdness that comes when we turn into data pimps and seem to root for some groups to lose ground. What happens, the line of logic goes, when these scores show up in similar ratios on SAT reports and colleges are making admissions decisions? Is that only a statistical problem? So we do root for some groups to fall back? is asked, but no one wants that, or at least they don't want to admit to it as a strategy, so we have a measured, carefully calibrated dreamscape where everyone gains, but the lower groups gain in greater proportion and reduce the gap, while the lead runners are more than happy to watch the successes of those underserved before but now picking up the pace ......... and the already established groups' gains are fine, they're not really losing ground, just allowing others to catch up in a spirit of collaboration and mutual investment in each group's prosperity. I'm sure George W. Bush was operating in that spirit when his charts of expected test score levels had ALL American public school students in grades 3-11 at 100% proficiency 4 years after he left office. President Obama, look at the gift I arranged for you. You are the one who will attain perfection. I left it for you. Please no, don't thank me. It's for the children. No, don't thank me, just be sure you don't fuck it up. That's a sweet-looking chart, all the colors, lines going up and up like the legs of a .......... well, you get my point. I paved the road to get us here, now you have to pave some more as you go.

Except it wasn't like that, not even close. Bush was behind his own set levels when he finished his term, modest as they were, and then the very next year the largest jump of the whole arrangement was expected, something just shy of 20 points. No wonder Arne Duncan was in a frenzy his whole term, acting like a data-chasing fool with his competitive Race to the Top grants, which were like compliance marathons, do exactly as I tell you, give me the data and more, promise us you'll do just what we say in terms of rigor, and testing, and punishment, you'll get rewarded when everyone's been appropriately chastised and we see the newspaper headlines, the taunting and the public shaming and the “Worst of – " lists predominate. Outside vendors and federal programs will surge in to craft boutique solutions and lay claim to gains and proof of superiority (although one such federal program, Turnaround Arts Schools, is intriguing) – proof immediately refuted by their detractors, in equally confident and seemingly logical tones. And the charter school pashas in thousand dollar suits whip their little hand-picked worlds into shape and produce the bottom line and strut off into the VIP dinners and the trophies pile up. Look, I loved my nine years in a charter school, so it's not that. We have regular district schools with some of that hunger for statistical showmanship. America was built on that, but we're not selling Cadillacs here. But call something Race-to-the-Top and you have the accelerators and the ones without the fire to compete. You set it up that way and it can only play out one way -- unless you have a Jerry Brown, who says: I don't play that way and I can expose your shell game. Hell, they already beat you with the NCLB stats under the wrong shell, places it's impossible to reach and you're still playing their game and you're threatening me. How's that work? Just race real hard and it's a blur, I guess, and if you're good you don't get called on it and the next guy has to try to keep it going. In some circles we call that a Ponzi scheme. If this were money you'd be a criminal. But it's only children. They'll recover, we were all traumatized by childhood and school anyway, it's a rite of passage. Like the measles.

The worst of this, the sad irony, is that the whole thing was a false front, a fa?ade (I can pronounce it correctly now, and even know where to find the [?] on a Mac keyboard) with nothing behind it. We were teaching outdated and useless skills and creating undue hardship for those who struggled with them. Our top kids got into UC Berkeley but they were not thinkers, they were bean counters and committee members who were skilled at data, consensus and non-offensive discourse. Many Board meetings I attended for arts agencies during that time repeated the same idea over and over, whether it be funding, or advocacy, or odd partnerships with groups like storefront psychics (what about astral arts?) and the Executive Directors were at the other end not of criticism or censure, but of not-so-subtle prodding to see things as Board members did, and to follow every arbitrary suggestion down some path that staff would despise, and so amidst the unanimous votes over watered down resolutions, and the monotone harmony, the battle lines were being drawn. It had a lot to do with the complete lack of resources, in many ways no one took anything seriously, it was like playing a video game. This was not what many people signed up for when they heard that a new creativity movement was afoot. The “agreement mentality” became a kind of tyranny; consensus would kill off all its rivals and could claim to be king, but of what? I’d rather argue my idea and lose than stuff the idea into an ill-fitting package and have people vote yes on the impostor. That never works out.

In 2015 Governor Brown told Education Secretary Arne Duncan that California would not be testing its K-12 students for any measurable result. We would pilot the test, check out the new technology, get familiar with it and its procedures, and we’d be back in 2017.

That hiatus, and the change in culture it should effect once we get over the PTSD from 15 years of frightened subservience and threats or worse under No Child Left Behind, can be entirely attributed to Governor Brown. The world has finally caught up to him – almost. He stayed just a step ahead but now we’re listening. Once decades ahead of his time, he now is within earshot. While I can’t say that my educational views are endorsed by him, we certainly dealt with the foundational underpinnings of America’s educational system many times, and he was amused when I refused to publicly acknowledge that his school was in Program Improvement for missing one of 17 data points in 2011. "You can’t deny that," he told me emphatically. "You have to do certain things . . . " he began, pointing at a list of actions in The Chronicle for PI schools. "It says right here." But I had worked for him for 6 or 7 years at that point and I took a page from the Jerry Brown Book of “You’d Better Be Smarter Than Me if You’re Playing a Con Game.” (referring to the con game of the California Department of Education labelling our school).

“Governor,” I said quietly. "I don't work for the Chron. They’re often inaccurate, as we see in election coverage. When I hear from the CDE or the feds, formally, then I’ll acknowledge the status.”

“Clever,” he said, smiling, but that disappeared quickly. “You haven’t heard from them? Another example of how ill-advised this all is.” He paused, then added, sternly:"In the meantime do all the things they say here. A maverick is fine, a violator of regulations not.”

“Already underway,” I told him.

I had been fortunate to work for and with Governor Brown for nine years as I led his Oakland arts school and the arts council in Sacramento. He always challenged me to dig deeper into the actions I took or the ideas I espoused. He created two schools who seemed diametrically different on the surface, and he challenged all of us to synthesize the existence of a military school and an arts school in the same time and place, and I paraphrase him here: Creativity without structure and rigor can be chaos and madness; rigor without creativity is paralysis, even rigor mortis.”

That’s Governor Brown, finding the place where opposites meet and create higher realities. I served in the Air Force for four years as a pacifist and these kinds of dichotomies live in me as well. So I have to keep prodding my own creative energies just to keep pace:

Governor Brown has been right before when no one believed him. Water has been a core issue for him for decades – so I got to thinking maybe the desalination plants are going to be big soon. The technology is way behind the massive amount of water needed and the process seems nearly impossible. But if the need is there, we have a track record of doing the seemingly impossible: cars, computers, planes, wireless technology, Ubers, open-heart surgery – those sure seemed impossible, still do to some of us. I mean, an Uber? Who would’ve thunk? Can’t we harness all of this information and wildly creative energy and figure out the future? I want the next generation to have ice cubes. Is that worth the human-powered invasiveness and violations of the environment necessary to create luxury water? But now I’ve veered off into nonsense and I’m confusing myself. Things have gotten so big and complex they're looping back on themselves absurdly: ideas and programs we discarded as logically unsound or obsolete return seemingly unchanged . . .... check the dates on any items like this, often it's just an old piece of email resurfacing. It's the ghost of whatever we discarded -- okay, but am I supposed to feel good about this?

We put it out there that this era will require creativity from everyone, yet generations of conformist-oriented societies have gone on to live on the backdrafts of a small creative and powerful elite who harnessed enough of the right energy to keep it all float. But on their terms. When we demand it on our terms, are we ready? Have we equipped this last generation of students to think and act creatively, and if not, where does that leave them? Chasing people like me down rabbit holes, who are creative my inclination or indulgence, the untrained creative enthusiast? A Masters in Theater Arts is some kind of creativity training, I suppose, but not many actors would look at the Program Improvement paradox and decide to ignore it. That's a different type of creativity, and it involves insight and deep comprehension and courage. Not yet for the latter, so I'm not extolling my own virtue -- we'll see who's back is that strong when the real test comes. Right now I'm the canary in the mine shaft. I smell gas and I'm not passing out yet, but it's close . . . . .

So who knows where this will all lead? Is this a cautionary tale about creativity? In a way, yes, because when we open that door, it’s going to be unpredictable. When we pushed rigor, did we know we’d get paralysis? Creativity is the new rigor, and how much madness will come along with it? It’s bound to be messy, as all great things are. We’ll see who can handle it.

One last thing, about the unfortunate finale to the Alex story from my Special Ed class. About a week after the completion of his alphabet assignment and the excitement of the joint projects with his classmates, he had regressed a bit, and the foster father noticed the fancy pens that Alex had bright to class and used in his writing. Turns out they were stolen from a nearby shop, were expensive, and a photo from the security camera of a barely recognizable Alex was pasted to the front door: WANTED SHOPLIFTER. GOES TO LOCAL HIGH SCHOOL. At first it looked like a job posting, as if they needed a shoplifter for some reason.

Alex couldn’t have applied anyway: The foster parent had returned him to the system. The school year ended. The local shop got their used pens back. Unintended Consequences –- as I said, the ones who can figure them out, theirs is the world and all that’s in it. I like to think I’m good, but I missed this one. And look at the abyss that opened for someone to fall into. You never know. But I still buy into creativity in the classroom.

And if we really want to be the creatives of the next wave, answer this:

What’s next after creativity? If we’re regretting all the time on standards and rigor, will creativity fall equally short? To what should we be aspiring?

It’s like investing in futures. The vintage of or 2023 or 2025? Weather, soil, affected by the years in between, public taste variability, dry rot, noble rot, fires, military action: I’ll take the French Semillon from ’23, the Napa Primitivo from ’25 and the long shot: a Lodi Dry Reisling from ’27. Could work out, rolling in dough with the wines of the century or I could be broke and all alone with cases of unheralded overpriced wine no one will drink, reminded of my losses daily.

The Myers-Briggs Personality Test told me I'm a risk-taker, but I already knew that. So I’ll put it out there – the concept beyond creativity will be something like synthesis, the ability to put together varied aspects of things, even contradictory things, to align wide-ranging energies, to rein in the excesses of people like me without losing what we creatives do well. Which is to set things and people up for the new and unexpected and try to leverage that discovery by combining it with something you learned the day before, two weeks back or two years back, rarely does anything stand alone these days, it usually fits best with some other idea or department or direction, and it’s surprising what things actually fit quite well together, and when you discover why they work, it’s usually something simple like: they’re both authentic, or they both do well in a crisis – we were looking at all these complicated parabolas of personality and missed the simple truth.

Look for synthesis going forward, and if it’s true, then creativity would have been a part of it all, so this time won’t be wasted. We will be building the future, one quality at a time.

Again, thank you so much for this recognition; I shall cherish it.

I mean, Lawyers for the Arts, one of those unexpected combinations that make you think for a moment. When I first heard it I thought it was a mistake – but then I thought, sure, it can work, why not? Sort of like arts education. Been around long enough, it’s probably here to stay.

 Donn K. Harris finished his third term as Chair of the California Arts Council in January 2018. He is currently the Executive Director for Creativity and the Arts for the San Francisco Unified School District, where he is charged with building out the District’s Civic Center property to become an Arts Center for students and the city. Harris was the principal of the Ruth Asawa School of the Arts from 2001-2008, from which his two daughters graduated, and the Executive and Artistic Director of Governor Brown's Oakland School for the Arts from 2007-2016. He has sent nearly 2000 young artists out into the world to wreak a little havoc and help build the future.