Cities Made Differently: Try Imagining Another Urban Existence

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We know from history that there are many ways we can live together—let’s explore the idea.

By David Graeber and Nika Dubrovsky

In thousands of ways, we are taught to accept the world we live in as the only possible one, but thousands of other ways of organizing homes, cities, schools, societies, economies, and cosmologies have existed and could exist.

We started a project called Made Differently: designed to play with the possibility and to overcome the suspicion—instilled in us every day—that life is limited, miserable, and boring.

Our first focus is Cities Made Differently, exploring different ways of living together. Read and imagine four different kinds of cities taken from our book which are listed below, and continue your exploration, downloadable at a4kids.org, for drawing and dreaming.

City of Greed

What if you had to live in a city whose citizens must pay not only for housing and health care but also for the air they breathe?

The dystopian novel The Air Merchant takes place in a secret underground factory city. Mr. Bailey, the factory owner, condenses air from the atmosphere and sells it to his fellow citizens for a profit. Eventually, the Earth’s atmosphere thins, creating a catastrophic shortage of breathable air. With the price of air increasing, fewer and fewer humans can afford to keep breathing.

When people can’t pay for the air they breathe, the police throw them out of the city. Everyone lives in constant fear of suffocating, thinking only of how to earn enough money to spare their loved ones and themselves that terrible fate. The food company Nestlé is often criticized for its irresponsible use of water in India, Pakistan, and other developing countries. Captured in the documentary film We Feed the World (2005), former Nestlé chairman Peter Brabeck-Letmathe said:

“It’s a question of whether we should privatize the normal water supply for the population. And there are two different opinions on the matter… NGOs, who bang on about declaring water a public right… That’s an extreme solution. The other view says that water is a foodstuff like any other, and like any other foodstuff, it should have a market value. Personally, I believe it’s better to give a foodstuff a value so that we’re all aware it has its price…”

City as a Family

Imagine a city without any strangers, where everything is shared, and everyone looks after each other. There are no shops, no money, and no danger at all.

We think of the family as a group that practices “basic communism”: from each according to his ability to each according to his needs. Any family is thought to be protected by bonds of kinship from the cruel laws of the outside world. Unlike businesses, rarely will a family throw out a sick child or an elderly parent because they are no longer “revenue-generating assets.”

According to Roman law, which still underlies the value system of Western societies, a family was all those people living within the household of a paterfamilias or father whose authority over them was recognized as absolute. Under the protection of her father, a woman might be spared abuse from her husband, but their children, slaves, and other dependents were his to do with as he wanted.

According to early Roman law, a father was fully within his rights to whip, torture, or sell them. A father could even execute his children, provided that he found them to have committed capital crimes. With his slaves, he didn’t even need that excuse.

The patriarchal family is also the model for authoritarianism. In ancient Rome, the patriarch had the right to treat his household members as property rather than as equal human beings.

The Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau believed that humankind originally lived in small bands of hunter-gatherers composed of close friends and relatives until big cities and agriculture emerged, and with them wars, greed, and exploitation.

However, archaeology shows us numerous examples of how people in different times and across different parts of the Earth lived in large metropolitan areas while managing their collective affairs on a fairly egalitarian basis. At the same time, there have always been small communities where status inequality prevailed and a privileged minority at the top benefited by exploiting the rest.

We know from our personal experience that in almost every family there are elements of both authoritarianism and baseline communism. This contradiction never fully goes away but different cultures handle it differently.

A City оf Runners

The people who live in this city believe that real life is all about constant competition.

The people in a city of runners find it fascinating or even necessary to keep track of who among them is more important, who is richer, smarter, more beautiful, or more worthy. There are many ideas about how the city came to have habits like this.

One of the city’s revered philosophers, Thomas Hobbes, believed that the natural state of human beings is to seek violent domination over their neighbors, and that society without the authority of the sovereign would quickly turn into a battle of all against all. Constant competition between people is thus seen as an enjoyable game as compared to real war, which is always lurking around the corner.

Naturally, in cities like this, there must be some who are poor, ugly, and unhappy. Just as in some children’s games, there are winners and losers.

People living in the city of runners foster an admiration for winning in their kids, and an ambition to surpass their peers in all areas. Children in the city of runners have no interest in learning together, sharing, or mutual aid. Helping someone pass an exam is considered “cheating” and is strictly punished. All their lives, adults are engaged in constant competition over beauty, skill, and wealth.

Runners believe that people who live differently from them and who refuse to play their games simply choose to be losers. During the 1968 student unrest in Western countries, some disaffected young people abandoned the big cities for the “sleepy” provinces where they created autonomous settlements, many of which still exist today.

Underground City

Living in an underground city could be safe and convenient. Without weather, there’s no risk of storms. And no trees mean no forest fires.

Underground cities have been around practically forever. The city of Derinkuyu in the Turkish province of Cappadocia, for example, was built between 2000 and 1000 BCE. The landscape of volcanic tuff—a unique soft stone—could be hollowed out without requiring complex tools, making room to house 20,000 people. The underground city boasted a stable, corrals, churches, schools, canteens, bakeries, barns, wine cellars, and workshops. The intricate system of tunnels connecting it all together meant that intruders would not know their way around and quickly get lost.

Tunnels are found underneath many cities. Rome is famous for its catacombs, and at one time subterranean burial chambers were commonplace. These days, tunnels tend to be for underground trains called subways. In Beijing, the residents became so fearful of nuclear war that they built an entire bunker city, with 30 kilometers of tunnels connecting underground houses, schools, hospitals, shops, libraries, theaters, and factories. There’s even an underground roller skating rink!

Mexico City has not gone as far as to build an entire city underground, but architect Esteban Suarez is planning an underground apartment building. And what a building it will be! Piercing the center of the Mexican capital with its tip will be a 65-story pyramid—no wonder they call it the earthscraper. The glass-enclosed area above the surface will be for recreation and outdoor concerts.

Underground, the building will be heated and powered with geothermal energy, making the pyramid energy self-sufficient. It’s not easy building downward into the earth, but building underground won’t disrupt the historical landscape of the city. And it evades the city’s building codes restricting the height of structures to eight floors.

Mirny, a town in the Russian far north, has its eye on an abandoned diamond mine as the site for an underground city. There are no more diamonds to be found, but its abandonment threatens neighboring villages with cave-ins and landslides. Moscow architect Nikolai Lyutomsky has proposed a solution: building a strong concrete skeleton inside the quarry to strengthen its walls while covering its top with a transparent dome, resulting in an underground eco-city fit for 10,000 people.

Located in the Yakutia Republic, the town has a harsh arctic climate with temperatures reaching as low as -60 degrees Celsius in the winter. But underground, the temperature never falls below zero. The quarry would thus be good for both people and plants. Its architects have allocated most of the city’s inner space to vertical farms. Farms for food production, technical laboratories, factories, and research centers are located underground and, aboveground, there will be play centers and schools. Moving between the underground and the surface is quick and easy.

Going underground to avoid possible misfortunes—might seem like a good idea, but there’s a catch: if you don’t like the rules of your community it’s tough to get out. How important is it to be able to easily leave one community, whose rules no longer suit you, and join a different one?

This excerpt is adapted from Nika Dubrovsky and David Graeber’s Cities Made Differently (MIT Press, 2024, all rights reserved) and is distributed in partnership with Human Bridges.

David Graeber was an anthropologist and activist and is a bestselling author.

Nika Dubrovsky is an artist, writer, and founder of the David Graeber Institute and the Museum of Care.

Click here to read the article on the Observatory.

Photo Credit: Chainwit. via Wikimedia Commons

The Sustainability Scam: How Self-Interest Ruins Good Ideas

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We must ensure ecocentric standards to reverse environmental and social injustices.

By Esther Afolaranmi, Carter Dillard, Beatrix Homler and Mwesigye Robert

We have laws to ensure children are born into a safe, sustainable, and unpolluted environment. These laws are also meant to empower future generations and guarantee birth equity. But far from ensuring that these rights are upheld, we disfranchise children at birth because they do not have a legal say in the actions of adults that impact their future.

Our ill-advised desire to prioritize economic growth over children’s futures has led to the climate crisis. It has also led to children being born into unequal conditions where they do not have equal access to welfare resources. This has resulted in the impacts of environmental degradation being felt unequally among different socioeconomic groups. Poor people, Indigenous groups, and people of color are, by and large, impacted more by the degraded environment than the wealthy and white segment of the population. This is the tragic legacy of environmental racism, which has been referred to as “the new Jim Crow.”

Those most affected by these injustices often have little or no say in shaping policies and laws, and their children eventually inherit this unequal system. In a capitalist, profit-driven economy, it is unsurprising that the corporate sector, driven by financial concerns above all else, is the biggest culprit in perpetuating these wrongs—particularly the extractive industries and industrial agriculture.

The Misinformed Power Grab

Most leaders—and the biggest beneficiaries of an unequal society—never came close to protecting children from the harm caused by the development model favored by the rich world. Instead, poor children grow up in a world to face the repercussions of a power grab by wealthy, primarily white, families.

The first misstep of dissociating the connection between human rights and environmental sustainability was taken in 1948 when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was signed, establishing fundamental rights for all people.

Twenty years later, in 1968, the United Nations held a conference in Tehran where some groups raised concerns about the impact of population growth (and, by extension, economic growth) on human rights. Despite these efforts, the concerns were never resolved, and the relevant changes were never incorporated into the UDHR.

Fixing the Problem: Laws, Norms, and Reparations

The UN’s ill-informed, misguided policy decision has led to a socioeconomic system built on the disenfranchisement of children at the time of their birth. There is an urgent requirement to rectify this situation and secure their welfare.

Firstly, reparations are needed. The wealth made through this process of disenfranchisement must be used to secure the future of newborn children who are entering the world. Those wealthy individuals and corporations that have benefited most from this disenfranchisement (and may have promoted ignorance by glossing over the actual impacts of economic growth) should be held especially responsible.

Secondly, we must establish laws and norms that ensure that the rights and welfare of unborn children are accounted for in the democratic process and that human beings are not merely seen as a means to sustain and grow economies. We must shape a future where children are not born simply to become consumers or workers but as fully participatory citizens with agency over their lives, with the ability to choose and thrive instead of merely surviving.

While Effective Altruism and other movements based on financial investments are often viewed by many nonprofits as effective ways to resolve these issues, reparations are the most effective and immediate way to fix problems facing us today if we want to restore the natural balance. If we skip this crucial step, it would be the equivalent of building a house with no foundation.

The Sustainability Scam

Sustainability has become a buzzword among environmentalists, CEOs, and politicians. Leaders often present themselves as guardians of a better future, bragging about eco-friendly projects and sustainable methods. However, a closer look exposes a darker aspect to these assertions. The rhetoric and reality frequently diverge significantly, with racial disparities, self-interest, and uneven growth undermining various projects’ ostensible benefits.

Nonprofits working toward social, economic, and environmental changes must also include family planning in their goals. They must first help ensure the shared, inclusive equity of children born into the world. That means giving all newly born human beings an equal capacity to self-determine the social and ecological influences that others have over them.

In his 2018 book Winners Take All, The Elite Charade of Changing the World, Anand Giridharadas examines how the global elite’s efforts to “change the world” are only an attempt to retain the status quo. He argues that their actions to try and resolve problems are a bid to hide their role in creating the problems in the first place. Publishers Weekly called the book a “damning portrait of contemporary American philanthropy.”

But Giridharadas—and publications like the New York Times—have missed the biggest charade—the one mainly driving the suffering and death unfolding as temperatures increase. This “sustainability scam” has at least two standards for activist campaigns that claim to be sustainable, green, humane, democratic, eco-friendly, etc. There is one standard for wealthy investors (and their children), who often fund organizations that promote these terms, hoping that their work might have an impact in furthering them, and a different standard based on birth equity.

These standards are artificial, arbitrary, and designed to allow a particular form of economic growth that benefits some—mainly the white population—at a deadly cost to others. This first standard—anthropocentric and adopted in 1968 by the UN agencies bowing to wealthy families—does not require birth equity. It functions on unsustainable welfare as the primary currency or value.

This first standard allows significant deviation from the ecosocial baselines and ecocentric standards that would have prevented the climate crisis. These real standards can be measured along at least eight metrics like restorative levels of greenhouse gas emissions and inclusive representative ratios that ensure a healthy, functional democracy. Deviation from these standards—based on self-determination or freedom and equitable share in democracy—has led to the climate crisis that is killing millions.

Funders in the polluter nations facing significant climate liability fund various institutions—media, nonprofits, universities, agencies, think tanks, and celebrities—to spread disinformation to support the first standard. This allows wealthy families to treat inherited wealth and other privileges as something outside the realm of the democratic process, which they use to strengthen their positionality and growth to systematically disenfranchise the average voter. We are now at a place where they can use the wealth they made through the scam to attack the democratic process and try to step outside of it.

An effort is underway at the United Nations that requires assessments of climate damages. This includes the need to 1) ensure that ecocentric standards are adopted to account for the actual harm being done by the crisis and 2) to treat these standards and the recovery of climate reparations as the first and overriding human rights, a right that preempts the government’s authority to assign wealth contrary to it, and allows citizens to engage in preemptive acts of self-defense to protect themselves and their children.

Inequitable Growth Policies

As a fundamental right, people who are made vulnerable by the actions of others—like fenceline communities put in harm’s way by petrochemical plants being built in their backyards—are owed compensation. As millions die in a climate crisis resulting from inequitable growth policies undoing most mitigation efforts, questions arise about how that happened and who should be held accountable.

We can see the imbalance in how the climate crisis disproportionately impacts those who are least responsible for causing it. In 2022, Seth Borenstein and Drew Costley of the Associated Press reported that “the data shows that the top carbon emitter over time, the United States, has caused more than $1.9 trillion in climate damage to other countries from 1990 to 2014, including $310 billion in damage to Brazil, $257 billion in damage to India, $124 billion to Indonesia, $104 billion to Venezuela and $74 billion to Nigeria. But at the same time, the United States’ carbon pollution has benefited the U.S. by more than $183 billion, while Canada, Germany, and Russia have profited even more from American emissions.”

This problem can no longer be ignored if we want to secure our children’s future. We must work toward resolving the social and economic disparities, increasing access to welfare measures, and ensuring better resources for pregnant women and families.

Ensuring Child Rights

There is a minimum threshold of well-being for birthing a child, which is necessary for self-determination. We must take drastic measures to ensure all children have the resources to become self-determining individuals. This could involve seizing resources from well-defended enclaves of wealth. By doing so, potential mothers might be incentivized to plan for their children’s future, knowing these resources would be available.

Some will argue that reduced economic growth, for example, is too high a cost to pay for ensuring birth equity and access to the same welfare opportunities for all children, especially those from BIPOC communities. However, these minimum thresholds are essential in forming a just and equitable society. People who argue against these basic standards threaten who we aspire to be as a society. They are more interested in exploiting humans and the environment for their gains, rather than investing in a better future. They threaten our freedom.

It’s physically impossible to have a legally obligating “we” that precedes all legitimate national constitutions without measurable birth equity. As the work done by the United Nations shows, no one gets to use authority and state violence to benefit at a cost to others without incurring significant risk. It is important to see beyond the lies perpetuated between 1948 and 1968 to make us think that national sovereignty is magically inherent. It has to be derived from the measurable sovereignty or self-determination of its subjects.

The only way to ensure share equity is to entitle would-be parents to bring children into the world only after a certain threshold of planned conditions, measurable on the eight metrics, have been achieved. The wealth accumulated by exploiting nature, which led to the climate crisis, must be used to ensure these conditions.

The United States prides itself on being a free nation but uses the concept of freedom that starts by exploiting the most vulnerable. There is no minimum threshold of well-being for future children and animals, as they are seen as a means to growing economies rather than individuals with rights who form integral parts of society.

Converting democracies into unsustainable growth economies that enrich a few by diluting everyone else’s equal and influential equity shares in our political system is a subtle form of oppression. It leads to millions dying as the growth triggers catastrophic heat waves. This eventually results in justified resistance movements to protest against the scam, where those at the top of the economic pyramid benefitted from a society that promised an inclusive democracy, which is instead based on shared inequity.

“While there is no ‘optimal’ human population, the evidence suggests that a sustainable global population of 3 billion is an optimistic number given that we long ago entered a continuously intensifying state of ecological overshoot, accumulating ever more massive amounts of ecological debt that must be paid down if we are to avoid the ongoing (and ever-worsening) climate catastrophe, ecological destruction, and the resulting human misery,” Dr. Christopher K. Tucker, chairman of the American Geographical Society, said in an October 2024 email.

“Adding 80 million additional people to the planet each year—the equivalent of 10 New York Cities or an additional Germany each year—is not a recipe for addressing this polycrisis,” he said. “Fortunately, simply investing (heavily) in empowering strategies focused on women and girls worldwide can hasten the already inevitable demographic transition that would relieve the unrelenting pressure we have foisted on our planet—and help us meet our commitments to the next generation under the UN’s 1959 Declaration of the Rights of the Child.”

The wealthy need to pay the cost of creating an unequal system that benefits them instead of ensuring equal and inclusive participation by all citizens in that system. They profit from treating children as part of a labor force to build and grow economies, instead of securing their rights as part of human rights and the democratic process.

Many involved in prioritizing birth equity have seen a pattern in how they react to it: they do not offer counterarguments to the idea that restoring nature through ecosocial birth equity must be the first and overriding human right but resort to tactics to evade the issue.

These people share a common trait: They attempt to evade being held responsible for the deadly costs and lush benefits of their birth, developmental, and emancipatory positionality. Their phrasing varies from “I’m just trying to save these specific animals” to “I’m just trying to focus on this specific area of research.” That kind of siloed myopia ultimately destroys biodiversity and causes irreversible environmental damage.

True Sustainability Means Having Children in a Very Different Way

These deceptive tactics undermine the promise of sustainability, allowing leaders to project a false image of environmental stewardship while continuing harmful practices. To achieve genuine sustainability, we must demand transparency, hold organizations accountable, and ensure that the benefits of sustainable development are distributed equitably. Addressing these systemic issues is the only way toward a sustainable and just future.

Many willing to benefit at a deadly cost to others want to treat the birth of children as unrelated to their lives. It is not. It is the basis of all things: a commitment to our most fundamental aspirations. Do we care about each other or exploit each other? While economics has dominated the social sciences because humans predictably try to maximize their welfare, it is also clear that many people choose criteria for truth and value that reaffirm their birth and developmental positionality.

That’s a dangerous form of self-deception, but understanding its existence allows us to move beyond economics, beyond capitalism versus socialism, and toward unifying constitutionality. We can’t change lives for the better if disproportionately influential people have the power to define what good is. Recognizing this fact is essential to hold those who evade our obligations to birth equity accountable—so that we all can work together to know what’s right and work toward taking remedial steps to prevent further environmental damage.

How could you know how much welfare you deserve if you are not involved in making the rules determining welfare? We can’t create economic demand by violating neonatal rights. We can’t ensure economic growth by preventing all citizens from being born and raised in town halls and participating in the democratic process. Using specific ecosocial thresholds to reform birth and development rights ensures an equal and influential role in rulemaking, thus limiting the influence others have over you to live in relative self-determination. Given the exponential difference between the wealth of Black and white children, massive reforms are necessary to achieve equity.

Countries cannot legitimately undercut the sovereignty of their subjects by ignoring children’s birth and development entitlements, using those children instead as economic inputs to create ecologically deadly growth. Nations and many powerful interests within them have, while responding to the “baby bust” of falling fertility rates, openly admitted to doing this. Part of creating deadly growth is to offer tax cuts to women for having children.

In the book Walden by Henry David Thoreau, we learn that a basket weaver could not expect to succeed in the “free” markets created by those colonizing his lands. But even Thoreau missed the fundamental value of nature in constituting the creation of power relations toward equity and freedom. Laws that protect the beneficiaries of any political system only derive their legitimacy by including and empowering future generations—in a measurable way—rather than exploiting them.

This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life.

Esther Afolaranmi is an attorney, humanitarian, researcher, and writer. She is co-executive director of the Fair Start Movement and founder and executive of Golden Love and Hands of Hope Foundation, a registered NGO in Nigeria that targets the needs of the vulnerable and underprivileged. She is a contributor to the Observatory.

Carter Dillard is the policy adviser for the Fair Start Movement. He previously served as an Honors Program attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice and with a national security law agency before developing a comprehensive account of reforming family planning for the Yale Human Rights and Development Law Journal. He is a contributor to the Observatory.

Beatrix Homler is an animal and human rights activist based in New York. She is the head of communications at the Fair Start Movement, a consultant at Rejoice Africa Foundation, and a board member at the Education for African Animal Welfare Foundation. She is a contributor to the Observatory.

Mwesigye Robert is the founder of Rejoice Africa Foundation. He is focused on human and nonhuman climate mitigation and adaptation strategies and is passionate about investing in women and children to save future generations from the climate crisis. He is a contributor to the Observatory.

Click here to read the article on the Observatory.

Photo Credit: Fibonacci Blue (Minnesota, USA) via Wikimedia Commons

COP16: It’s Wild-West Capitalism Versus Life on Earth

The stakes for our collective future could not be higher, yet many decision-makers are doubling down on destructive policies.

By Laurel Sutherlin

All eyes should be on the salsa dancing capital of the world, Cali, Colombia, where representatives of 190 nations are joined by a broad swath of global civil society and international Indigenous delegations to participate in the United Nations Biodiversity Summit (aka COP16).

I’ve been struck that many people (even among those who generally track the larger annual climate COP process) are not familiar with the biannual biodiversity COP (conference of parties). This is a shame because the stakes for our collective future could not be higher: The Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) is the most crucial official treaty among the world’s nations to halt the extinction crisis. Its implementation—COP16’s primary goal—is critical to striking a sustainable balance between human civilization and the natural world.

We know by now that we are in serious trouble: More than one million species face imminent extinction, entire ecosystems are unraveling, and the very fabric of Earth’s life support systems that we all depend on—for literally everything—is convulsing on the brink of collapse under an onslaught of reckless resource exploitation, toxic pollution, and corporate greed. We also know that decision-makers at the highest levels of government and business not only have their heads in the sand but are doubling down on the kinds of short-sighted, profit-at-all-costs Wild West capitalism that got us in this mess in the first place.

This is why it was such a big deal when, in 2022, at the conclusion of COP15 in Montreal, 196 nations adopted the historic GBF, an ambitious pact to halt the extinction crisis and begin to reverse the destruction of nature by 2030. Of course, the GBF is imperfect and insufficient. However, given the current state of world affairs, it firmly qualifies as better than nothing and even a good start—mainly because it is the best we’ve got going. Now, countries are meant to present their detailed plans in Cali to implement and pay for this noble commitment.

The theme of this year’s biodiversity COP is ‘Peace with Nature,’ and Colombia has embraced its role as host to the world with gusto. The streets of Cali have been painted an exuberant rainbow of colorful birds, prowling jaguars, and other myriad representations of the richness of life. The president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, gave a fiery opening speech starkly outlining the predicament we face, holding no punches about the role of the rich world in creating this escalating catastrophe and the responsibility wealthy countries bear in supporting the developing world in solving it. The atmosphere surrounding COP16 presents a microcosm of our moment in history, with a chaotic chorus of international voices gathered to negotiate, cajole, and sometimes battle it out over how far and how fast we can agree to push the envelope on change.

Besides the heads of state shuttling around in black SUV motorcades, thousands of other stakeholders are flooding the city this week as well, both inside the formal UN Blue Zone on the outskirts of the city, where you need a delegate badge to enter, and outside, in the publicly accessible Green Zone along Cali’s main downtown riverfront. Alongside my organization, Rainforest Action Network (RAN), are hundreds of our non-governmental organizations from around the world, as well as dozens of Indigenous delegations and lots of unaffiliated activists of all stripes. There is hope and solidarity in the air, and it is undeniably exciting and inspiring to stand shoulder to shoulder with so many passionate advocates gathered to speak truth to power to achieve a better outcome for future generations.

And, ominously, there are the legions of businesspeople in suits and ties. Two years ago in Montreal, everyone in the environmental and human rights realm was commenting on the unprecedented abundance of bankers and corporate lobbyists, and it appears that this year, that trend has continued its sharp trajectory upward. On the one hand, the masters of finance seem to have realized that the real solutions we are seeking must necessarily involve structural changes to business as usual that would undoubtedly impact their bottom line and, on the other hand, that there may be great profit opportunities in some of the corporate-driven ‘solutions’ being proposed.

The thing is, we largely know what must be done to avoid the most catastrophic outcomes on the horizon. It’s just that nobody with real power sees any short-term gain from doing these things. Governments must pass finance regulations to stop the funneling of hundreds of billions of dollars into expanding nature-destroying sectors like soy, beef, and palm oil ever deeper into primary tropical forests. Wealthy nations must act to relieve the unsustainable debt and trade agreements that limit conservation options for so many developing countries.

We must shift the foundational dialogue from viewing nature through a transactional lens to embracing a holistic understanding of biodiversity. This includes listening to and incorporating the knowledge of traditional and Indigenous communities into our policies and economic models. We must transform the current landscape of corporate impunity into one where accountability prevails.

Sadly, there are already those dubbing this the ‘COP of false solutions’ as industry twists itself in knots to contrive increasingly Orwellian schemes that sound good on the surface but deftly avoid real change to the lucrative system from which they have grown fat. Along with an alphabet soup of innocuous sounding, corporate-driven initiatives like the TNFD (Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosure) is the newly ubiquitous concept of biodiversity credits, a dark mutation of the carbon credits debacle, which is every bit as ludicrous as it sounds. 

Left to their own devices, the financial sector’s solution to the crisis resulting from the commodification of nature is to find new ways to commodify nature. This is why a big part of our mission here is to call BS, push back against these hare-brained schemes before they take root, and leverage whatever influence we have to bring frontline demands to the table.

Longtime observers of this decades-deep process know better than to expect an immediate, transformative breakthrough here in Cali. But the fact is, change is coming, and on some level, everyone knows it. History is full of flipped scripts, unexpected shifts, and dramatic realignments of power. There is simply no way the current economic system can persist indefinitely on a finite planet. And when the big shifts inevitably do come, we, and life on earth, will be far better off if we have built the infrastructure of a new direction forward.

The crippling grip of our current dominant economic model can feel pretty disempowering and limit our imaginations of what is possible. So it’s our job to keep our eyes on the prize, dream big, and demand the real solutions that science and morality dictate, not just the ones corporations and politicians will tolerate.

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Laurel Sutherlin is the senior communications strategist for Rainforest Action Network and a contributor to the Observatory. He is a lifelong environmental and human rights campaigner, naturalist, and outdoor educator passionate about birds and wild places. Follow him on Twitter @laurelsutherlin.

This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Top image: Colombian President Gustavo Petro announces the city of Cali as the host for UN Biodiversity COP16 on February 20, 2024. (Photo credit: República de Colombia/Wikimedia Commons)

How a Struggling Boston School Found Success in the Roots of its Haitian American Community

The following is an excerpt of an article that was originally published on the Progressive.

Click to read the full article online.

The school’s success is a counterpoint to Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant campaign and a testament to the resiliency of public schools when they embrace their local communities.

In 2016, Boston’s Mattahunt Elementary was a school on the brink. A letter from the Massachusetts state education commissioner sent to Boston superintendent Tommy Chang threatened to use “state receivership”—essentially, a takeover of the school—unless the district could present “an effective plan” to “move the [school] out of underperforming status.” 

As WBUR, Boston’s public radio station, reported that year, Mattahunt had scored in the bottom 1 percent of public schools in Massachusetts for at least three years in a row. And since 2012, Mattahunt had been classified as a “turnaround school,” a designation given to schools and districts that have to be monitored by the state because of chronic underperformance.

Flash forward to 2024, and Mattahunt is one of only three finalists for a School on the Move prize, an annual award given by local nonprofit Edvestors that “spotlights the most notable school-wide improvement efforts happening across Boston Public Schools.”

Being considered for the prize, which includes a $100,000 cash award, is “like the Super Bowl of Boston Public Schools,” Alphonso Campbell tells The Progressive. Campbell is Mattahunt’s community hub school coordinator, a position he has held for the past three years after previously working as a paraprofessional in the school. Mattahunt is no longer designated as a turnaround school, he says.

How did Mattahunt go from being a school on the verge of a state takeover to being considered a district champion?

Although a number of factors have contributed to Mattahunt’s improvement, one overriding variable has been the school’s determination to search for solutions within the surrounding community—the largely Haitian American neighborhoods in Boston’s Mattapan district—rather than bring in an outside management firm or adopt a reform model drawn up by a policy think tank.

At a time when Haitian Americans are being targeted by an anti-immigrant campaign, driven largely by presidential candidate Donald Trump and his running mate, J.D. Vance, Mattahunt’s success story is a positive counterpoint and a testament to the remarkable resiliency of public schools when they embrace the local communities they serve. 

[…]

Read the rest of this article on the Progressive.

Jeff Bryant is a writing fellow and chief correspondent for Our Schools. He is a communications consultant, freelance writer, advocacy journalist, and director of the Education Opportunity Network, a strategy and messaging center for progressive education policy. His award-winning commentary and reporting routinely appear in prominent online news outlets, and he speaks frequently at national events about public education policy. Follow him on Twitter @jeffbcdm.

Photo courtesy of City of Boston Mayor’s Office (by John Wilcox)

Chicago Teachers Want to Transform Their City into a ‘System of Care’—Will Dems Go Along?

Charles Edward Miller from Chicago, United States, CC BY-SA 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Click here to read the article on LA Progressive.

Headbutting and friction continue in the battle of big ideas vs. entrenched leadership.

There was an ironic moment in former President Barack Obama’s speech at the 2024 Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Chicago when he brought up the passing of his wife Michelle’s mother Marian Robinson who, he noted, was raised in the South Side of Chicago and attended Englewood High School.

He likely brought up the details of Robinson’s upbringing as bona fides of her roots in a big city Black community. But the irony was that Englewood High School was closed in 2005 by Obama’s basketball friend—who later served as his secretary of education—Arne Duncan when he was the CEO of Chicago Public Schools from 2001 to 2008. That moment, as obscure as it was, came across as yet another signal—not lost to other astute observers—of how the Democratic Party is struggling to turn from its love affair with neoliberal policy to embrace a new politics of progressive populism that claims to care about families and workers.

That struggle is especially tricky in the education policy arena where Democrats have a lengthy history of imposing neoliberal policy ideas such as charter schools, vouchers, and standardized testing that led to labeling public schools as failures, closing them down, and ramping up charter school industry corruption.

Nowhere has that neoliberal agenda been more controversial than in Chicago, where Democratic political leaders such as Duncan and the city’s former Democratic mayors, including Richard Daley and Rahm Emanuel, imposed deeply unpopular policies largely driven by budget austerity, business narrowmindedness, complicated financial deals with Wall Street banks, and the privatization of public assets.

In the city’s newest political flare-up, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) and leaders of Chicago Public Schools (CPS) are engaged in a contentious contract negotiation in which the union has called for a progressive agenda that not only includes pay increases for teachers and school staff but also steps to mitigate climate change, end the gender pay gap for CPS employees, eliminate homelessness for families of CPS students, provide paid parental leave for CPS employees, and aid new immigrant families.

So far, negotiations over pay have drawn the most media attention. The union has asked “for a 9 percent pay increase,” Chalkbeat reported in August 2024. The CPS CEO Pedro Martinez appeared poised to offer raises of “between 4 percent and 5 percent,” according to WBEZ. However, CTU stated in its September 9 contract negotiations update that CPS has yet to address about 50 percent of the union’s proposals.

CPS’s resistance is especially frustrating to progressive advocates in Chicago who’ve been advocating for strengthening the public schools system since at least the 1990s. Despite their success, the hurdles these advocates continue to face have left them frustrated.

Over the decades of their activism, CTU and public school advocates fought for and won previous contracts that resulted in reduced class sizes, salary increases for teachers and school staff, funding for more social workers, nurses and librarians in schools, and a commitment from the district to fund and pilot the community schools approach.

CTU and its supporters doggedly opposed and finally toppled adversarial mayors to elect one of their own in Mayor Brandon Johnson, a former school teacher and CTU organizer. They advocated and pushed through progressive policies such as enacting a moratorium on new charter schools, transitioning school governance from mayoral control to an elected school board, and “ending student-based budgeting” that formed the basis of the city’s school choice agenda.

While Chicago teachers were successfully making progressive change in Chicago, Democrats took control of the Illinois state legislature, and with the election of J.B. Pritzker in 2018, elected one of the nation’s most progressive governors, although he has rejected calls for the state to help make up the budget shortfall for CPS.

Despite these wins, Chicago teachers and public school advocates find themselves in the same position they’ve long been in—butting heads with an entrenched leadership status quo, created largely by Democrats.

What’s at stake is enormous for Chicago but also important to the Democratic Party nationally as it attempts to remake itself into the party that now claims to care the most about workers and families.

‘Good Enough’ Schools

What’s stymieing negotiations between CTU and the district, according to Chalkbeat and other media outlets, is that the union’s “demands come as the district and city face budget deficits, with no clear path to securing extra funding for schools.”

Martinez has claimed that CTU’s contract proposals would “result in a deficit of at least $2.9 billion for the 2025-26 school year,” WBEZ reported, leading to “a hole more than five times the current projection and growing as large as $4 billion by 2028.”

And although the state increased funding for CPS in 2024 by $25.8 million, Chalkbeat reported, that’s still “$1 billion short of what the state’s formula considers adequate funding.”

Yet not everyone agrees that money is the issue.

According to CTU President Stacy Davis Gates, who Our Schools interviewed, “The push and pull you’re seeing in CTU’s negotiations with the district is mostly indicative of a years-long struggle to remake the district into a system of care.”

“It’s about challenging an education system that, from the beginning, was designed to be just good enough,” she said. “‘Good enough’ meant [providing] workers for the business elites who wanted the district to operate as a system to train future workers for their factories and stockyards. But ‘good enough’ doesn’t really work for [today’s] families.”

Remaking schools into better systems of care was not on the agenda when Chicago leaders closed Englewood and scores of other Chicago schools. Those schools were closed due to “underperformance” (although displaced students often fared even worse in their new schools) and financial inefficiency (which was also not alleviated by school closures).

Davis Gates conceded that what her union is asking for will cost the city and the state a lot more money. But she expressed frustration with how any political regime that claims to care about the well-being of families and children’s academic success could not come up with money to address the adverse conditions that Chicago families often face.

“My experience teaching social studies… clarified that the work I did in the classroom as a teacher was only a percentage of what was needed for students to have a full opportunity to access high-quality education,” she told Our Schools. “For instance, we have 20,000 students in our district who are unhoused. This creates many challenges for how we educate them when they spent the night in a car, a shelter, or couch surfing with relatives or friends. Being unhoused also creates social and emotional challenges for students.”

When questioned about the need to spend more money on innovations like community schools, she pointed to Cameron Magnet School of the Arts, an elementary school in the Humboldt Park neighborhood. When an influx of about 100 migrant students suddenly enrolled in the school, Cameron could respond more effectively because it was reorganized and funded to operate as a community school.

In a system of care, Davis Gates said, “You have a restorative justice coordinator in every school. You have librarians, nurses, and social workers in every school.”

‘They Fired All of Us, Even the Lunch Ladies’

Davis Gates began her teaching career in 2004 at Englewood High School and was in her second year when Duncan announced the school would be shut down and replaced by smaller schools, a neoliberal policy fad that many big-city school districts fell for at the time.

Jackson Potter, current vice president of CTU, started teaching at Englewood in 2002 and told Our Schools what it was like to have Englewood shut down.

“It was extraordinarily traumatic for our families,” he recalled. “Duncan called our school a ‘cultural failure,’ which was deeply felt as an insult by the entire community. Yes, Englewood was a school with problems. But Duncan inflicted deep trauma on teachers and students.”

“The mantra at the time was all about low test scores and graduation rates. As a new teacher it struck me as absurd,” he said. “So you’re saying I caused this, and you’re blaming these veteran Black teachers? And these were incredible teachers with deep roots in the community who knew our families and knew just what to do when one of our students was in a crisis.”

“The years of disinvestment our school had endured, the economic dislocation of our community, and the racial disparities of the city, all of that was discounted,” he said. “So they fired all of us, even the lunch ladies.”

Like Davis Gates, Potter said that in the current union contract negotiations, “Money is a piece of the puzzle but not the whole issue.” He brought up examples where CTU has collaborated with the district to acquire additional funding from federal and state sources, including a federal grant of $20 million for electric buses. “But we always have to push for it,” he said.

Potter told of how CTU proposed, as a cost-saving measure, for the district to change its teacher evaluation cycle from every two to three years. Due to its limited staff, the district already fails to evaluate some 2,000 teachers each year, Potter explained, so why not stretch the limited number of evaluators over a longer period? “But they won’t agree to that,” he added.

He also questioned why CPS has never applied for grants given out by the state’s Illinois Shines program for retrofitting public school buildings with solar panels.

“It’s not just lack of funds. It’s obstinance,” he said.

Potter agrees that more recently there’s been a turning away from some of the past school reform ideas that drove CPS policymaking. But he questions why staff positions created during the reform era are still there, such as an Office of Portfolio Management, a reference to a neoliberal approach in which school leaders run school districts as if they were Wall Street managers overseeing a portfolio of investments.

“A lot of resistance has hardened over decades, and we’re trying to create a new pathway forward. But that’s going to mean the city has to take on local power brokers, big banks, and powerful opponents in state government,” he said.

Both Sides Are Right

Which side is right in this back-and-forth on funding between CTU and the district? “Both,” said Ralph Martire in an interview with Our Schools.

Martire is executive director of the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability, a Chicago-based think tank that analyzes public policy through a social and economic justice lens. He also served on the legislatively established Professional Review Panel that was charged with monitoring the implementation of Illinois’s evidence-based funding (EBF) formula for the state’s K-12 public schools.

“In 2017, Illinois went from the worst to the best in education funding by enacting EBF,” he said.

According to Martire, EBF identifies a funding adequacy target for every school based on 27 research-based targets that include factors like the presence of students from low-income households, the percentage of students who are English language speakers, and school staffing levels.

“The priorities CPS is pushing for in its contract negotiation are all good,” he said. “In fact, many are the very things that EBF prioritizes in its funding formula. And there’s no doubt that the state’s funding of CPS is not adequate even as defined by the EBF model.”

“But under current circumstances, it would be really tough for CPS to come up with the necessary funding to support [all of the union’s priorities]” he said. “Unless the state makes a big jump in funding, it’s hard to see how the district gets out of this situation.”

What’s preventing that “big jump,” according to Martire, is that both the city of Chicago and the state of Illinois don’t have a graduated income tax. Every tax and fee that governments have available, he explained, are regressive except for two: a graduated income tax and an inheritance tax. But when Illinois voters had the chance to change the state’s income tax from a flat rate to a graduated tax in 2020, they rejected it.

“Illinois taxation is still mostly overreliant on local property wealth,” Martire said. Consequently, “growth in funding is not keeping pace with public needs.”

Cassie Creswell, executive director and president of Illinois Families for Public Schools, generally agrees with Martire’s assessment.

“[CPS’s] fundamental fiscal situation, created by decades of privatization on top of under-resourcing its schools, isn’t truly in the CPS board or CTU’s hands,” she wrote in an email to Our Schools. “Illinois’s structural deficit means we are underfunding all of our social and human services, and until we have the ability to levy a graduated income tax at the state level, I’m not optimistic about [CPS’s] finances, and, as a result, [the district’s] ability to make the resources available that CPS students need and deserve.”

Yet, despite the fiscal difficulty of paying for the schools “CPS students need and deserve,” to use Creswell’s words, there are other political dynamics at play as well.

Paul Zavitkovsky former CPS principal and retired EdD program leadership coach for the Center for Urban Education Leadership told Our Schools it’s not clear to him why CTU isn’t finding common ground with the current CPS board.

Since 2019, there have been new CPS board appointees and central office staff hires who would embrace greater collaboration with teachers, according to Zavitkovsky. “They are working hard to redress problems of assessments that weren’t working. They’ve recognized that sanctions alone aren’t helpful.”

He doesn’t disagree that what the teachers are asking for would make positive contributions to student achievements and create much greater academic gains than seen during the neoliberal reform agenda.

But he wonders if CTU isn’t trying to push a political advantage.

“CTU has had lots of good reasons to be adversarial,” he said. “Perhaps they believe they’ve been beaten up for so long that it’s time to make the best of what advantage they have.”

‘A Philosophical Problem’

Arne Duncan once bragged about what he did to Englewood High School.

In 2011, New York City math teacher and blogger Gary Rubinstein caught Duncan at a national conference of Teach for America—a private, nonprofit that flourished, in part, because of policies Duncan enacted as secretary of education—saying that one of the charter schools that had replaced Englewood had produced better results with the “same children.” As Rubinstein explained, that wasn’t really true because the charter, Urban Prep, cleverly manipulated its student enrollment and graduation statistics to make itself look better.

Since 2022, at least, CPS has been trying to shut down two campuses of Urban Prep due to “allegations” that the school had “mismanaged finances and failed to comply with special education laws, as well as accusations that the school’s founder, Tim King, sexually abused a now-former student,” Chalkbeat reported in 2023. Another article by Chalkbeat in 2024 said that a state appellate court allowed the closure to proceed.

Another school that replaced Englewood, TEAM Englewood, was shut down by the district in 2018 after years of losing students and funding.

It’s not at all clear that the current acrimony between CPS and the union resembles a political grudge match, as Zavitkovsky suggested. But what’s obvious is that Democratic lawmakers, both nationally and in Chicago, who claim the party is pivoting to a policy agenda driven by care rather than political calculation will need to prove that the party’s past isn’t a prologue.

Martire, for one, expressed deep frustration with the situation Democratic leaders have put themselves into, calling it “a philosophical problem.”

“Chicago has a fiscal crisis that conservatives had the brilliance to create,” he said. They understood, according to him, that once government institutions have inadequate capacity to pay for things, they will have inadequate outcomes. But paying for improvements is always a problem because tax increases are unpopular.

So they steadfastly fought any tax increases, realizing that eventually cutting off money would rob government systems of the capacity to produce desirable outcomes, make institutions like public schools dysfunctional, and help convince people that pouring more money into them was wasteful.

Conservatives played the long game Martire described so well that even Democrats, like Duncan, started calling public schools “cultural failures.”

“So now,” Martire said, “neither Illinois nor CPS currently has the financial capacity to do the job of educating students.”

This isn’t to say that campaigning to raise everyone’s taxes would be a winning political strategy.

But should Democrats want to make good on their new promise to be a champion for families and working people, patching up the party’s tattered relationship with organized teachers seems like a good idea, and Chicago is a great place to start.

Click here to read the article on LA Progressive.

Jeff Bryant is a writing fellow and chief correspondent for Our Schools. He is a communications consultant, freelance writer, advocacy journalist, and director of the Education Opportunity Network, a strategy and messaging center for progressive education policy. His award-winning commentary and reporting routinely appear in prominent online news outlets, and he speaks frequently at national events about public education policy. Follow him on Twitter @jeffbcdm.

Photo Credit: Charles Edward Miller / Wikimedia Commons

Political Collapse: Lessons From Fallen Empires

Click here to read the article on Popular Archaeology.

By Richard E. Blanton, Gary M. Feinman, Stephen A. Kowalewski, and Lane F. Fargher-Navarro

Our investigation of the disastrous society-wide collapses of four premodern polities, China’s Ming Dynasty, the South Asian Mughal Empire, the High Roman Empire, and Renaissance Venice led to the discovery of an unexpected historical pattern. This revelation was not evident before these sudden collapses as all four polities had demonstrated forms of governance that persisted for centuries, had been among the wealthiest and best-governed polities of their eras, and had embraced policies fostering inclusiveness and egalitarianism that engendered strong support from the majority of their citizens.

We could not identify any exogenous causal factors for the collapses—such as drought, epidemic, or conquest by a more powerful foe (three of the four eventually were conquered, but only after their governments were considerably weakened)—adding to our confusion about what led to these major political transformations.

To understand the reasons for the political breakdowns, we decided to revisit an earlier article in which we had posited an answer to this question when it became increasingly clear to us that the conflictive political culture of the contemporary U.S. presents striking parallels with what we had discovered. We aim to reexamine our article to bring a comparative perspective on historically well-known episodes of collapse, their causes, and negative outcomes, and to alert U.S. citizens of the potential dangers we face, so we can highlight the need to take urgent corrective actions. We begin by referring to recent works by political scientists and anthropologists that provided theoretical context for our arguments.

Collective Action Theory Expands Our Understanding of Governance

In all four instances, collapse followed quickly after the leaders of these polities inexplicably and suddenly abandoned principles and practices that had successfully underpinned state-building and social stability. Their actions initiated a cascading series of events that brought a rapid decline in many aspects of society, which extended beyond the government. But why would the actions of just a few people have such severe consequences for otherwise endurable and well-organized polities?

We identified a plausible answer to this question when we considered collapse from the vantage of recently developed theories of human cooperation developed by political economists Margaret Levi and Elinor Ostrom, along with several others. The cooperation ideas intrigued us because they potentially laid down a pathway to evaluate traditional claims that state-building did not result from cooperation in premodern times, but from the actions of the autocratic elite who coercively gained dominion over subservient and easily mystified subaltern subjects. A reliance on coercion was foundational for the traditional Western understanding that the rise of democracy in Classical Athens 2,600 years ago was an exceptional event that set Western (“Occidental”) political history on a separate and democratic track, sharply different from the “Oriental” autocracies. But is this entrenched presumption correct?

Humans as ‘Contingent Cooperators’

The most salient feature of collective action theory separating it from the Orientalist tradition is that it does not presume mystified subaltern subjects nor coercive leadership. The theory hypothesizes that both ruling authorities and subjects are thoughtful social actors (“contingent cooperators”) who will agree to limit their selfish actions when they perceive that the actions of others are consistent with mutual benefit (“contingent mutuality”).

Our recent work in this regard has supported the hypothesis as applied to state formation. What we have found is that subjects are more likely to gain confidence in governing authorities and the policies and practices of a government based on the degree to which the leadership willingly provides elements of what is called “good government” (or “good governance”).

Good governance includes the degree to which leadership will accept limits on its power, is willing to develop the governing capacity to identify and punish official corruption, is willing to provide citizens access to an impartial judiciary, and is prepared to implement equitable taxation, to open up access to positions of governing authority without favoritism, and to provide public goods beneficial to all households.

A key aspect of good governance is that if its benefits foster citizen confidence and compliance with obligations, its practices and principles must be judiciously adhered to, and good governance benefits must be made available across the realm without favoritism. We discovered that in instances where mutual benefit and good governance are key, state-builders and citizens recognized that impartiality was threatened when a leader’s power, or the state itself, was religiously sacralized. The same threat was felt when the state gained legitimacy and fiscal benefit by associating or controlling a particular religious institution (analogous to the contemporary concept of separation of church and state).

The population of Renaissance Venice, for example, was largely Catholic, yet featured considerable cultural diversity while also depending on trade relations with merchants who belonged to diverse cultures and religions. Correspondingly, strict rules prohibited affiliations of the leadership and their immediate family members with any religious institution. In South Asia, the Mughal Emperor Akbar instituted a strong program for governing in a diverse region that mandated religious neutrality of the state and encouraged reasoned dialogues between religious and political leaders. The Roman and Ming leaderships certified their legitimacy to govern, not as religiously sanctified beings, but as leaders whose actions were expected to benefit society. The policy of the Ming Dynasty also emphasized the need for neutrality in its dealings with the three main religions of its time.

A Cross-Cultural Study of Premodern States

We coded the good governance attributes across a worldwide sample of 30 premodern polities, and subsequent archaeological work by us and others has provided additional pertinent data. We also considered other variables that we hypothesized might enrich our understanding of the causes and consequences of mutual benefit and good governance; for example, we coded for demographic trends, which are population growth/loss, material standard of living of households, and the frequency of political struggles and organized opposition to state policies and practices. We also coded the relative severity of social, demographic, and agricultural changes after the collapse of the four polities.

Was Western Political History Really Unique?

Armed with a new theory, good governance measures to evaluate it, and a vast array of descriptive studies available from ethnographic, historical, and archaeological sources, we dwelled on the question: Was Western political history really unique? We know that coercive and autocratic states did exist in the past, as they still do today, but were there also experiments in state-building, outside of Western history, which were based on contingent mutual benefit and good governance, and were they similar to democracy? The coding of good governance variables yielded a surprising answer to this question as we were able to identify such experiments.

Although there is considerable variation in the details of governance across these cases, we identified forms of governing outside of Western history in which the central force guiding political change was contingent on the bond of obligation between governing authorities and subjects rather than on coercion. Further, in such cases, we also found that mutual benefit and good governance brought numerous advantageous downstream consequences for their respective populations.

For example, compared with the more autocratic and coercive states, the collectively organized polities were more politically stable, in part because public safety was greatly enhanced, there were far fewer episodes of anti-state movements (although disgruntled elites often would militate against the more egalitarian and inclusive policies), and there was a reduction in the frequency of internal conflicts between ethnic groups or religious groups.

As a result of these outcomes, resulting in part from the fact that states organized based on mutual benefit and good governance, citizens were provided with opportunities to engage in cooperative social interactions and alignments that could bridge social, cultural, and economic cleavages. Good governance, for one, was a fertile ground for commercial growth in the form of marketplace economies that provided new opportunities and increased living standards for buyers and sellers irrespective of wealth, patrimony, or rural-urban setting. Marketplace economies grew alongside other institutional outcomes, including open recruitment to positions of governing authority, which provided entirely new pathways to social mobility for the public. Well-organized and more livable cities, which were easy to navigate, also enhanced possibilities for commingling, cooperative interactions, and bridged social alignments weakening the likelihood of antagonism between different groups.

The collective action theory is an action-oriented framework that focuses on the idea that diverse webs of cooperative action in society are engendered by the palpable social actions of persons who want to realize collective benefits. In relation to leadership, this requires a display of commitment to carrying out the necessary and often challenging work of good governance.

Patterns of Stability and Collapse: Three Counterintuitive Discoveries

To confirm that premodern governments could, in some respects, display features that we associate with contemporary democracy was itself a surprise, but we discovered other unanticipated aspects of premodern governance:

Endurability: Despite the obvious advantages in cases where we see a focus on mutual benefit and good governance, their focal periods (the period when a particular set of policies and principles remained stable) were only slightly longer, at 166 years on average, compared to the more autocratic polities with focal periods of 152 years, a difference that is not statistically significant. In addition, polities built more strongly around mutual benefit occurred relatively infrequently (only 27 percent of our sample had consistently high scores for good governance). This shows that despite the advantages of mutual benefit and good governance, they have been difficult to build and sustain in the long run.

Collapse Patterns: Further, while providing many more benefits to their citizens compared to autocratic polities, states that organized to achieve good governance also had more of a collapse pattern than polities that scored lower on good governance. That pattern includes the emergence of damaging factional struggles for power, the loss of fiscal viability of the state, and even food shortages and demographic decline.

Collapse in the case of autocracies brought less serious consequences because, lacking much in the way of governance, groups such as neighborhoods, ethnic groups, and rural communities were already organized at the local level to respond to hazards. Yet, this fragmented form of adaptation was itself problematic, precluding coordinated responses to, for example, urban fires, lawlessness, or the actions of wealthy entrepreneurs who, lacking any opposition from a well-organized authority, were in a position to distort fair marketplace pricing.

Initiating Collapse: Earlier we mentioned the separation of religion and state because, although violating its premise was not the only misstep exhibited by the respective leaderships, it was among the most damaging. In Ming China, collapse followed the actions of leaders of the mid-16th century, including the Chia-ching Emperor, who became so obsessed with Daoist ceremonies and alchemy that he neglected his duties; his successor, the Wanli Emperor, turned his attention to gaining personal wealth, a violation of long-standing prohibitions. In the case of the Mughals, the fourth emperor, convinced by Muslim leaders, abandoned religious neutrality, even taxing Hindus more than Muslims and permitting the destruction of new temples. The Roman Emperor Commodus lacked interest in governing and became an avid performer as a gladiator. He identified himself with the god Hercules. Following his failed reign, the empire devolved into a chaotic and corrupt system in which, as the historian Ramsay MacMullen concluded, “relationships involving anything other than the wish for material possession had no chance to develop.”

The case of Venice is particularly troubling in light of what has transpired in recent years in the U.S. Although the Venetian government possessed the institutional capacity to impeach leaders, when Doge Giovanni Cornaro and his family broke the religious neutrality and other rules, for example, as a result of his son accepting the position of Bishop of Bergamo, the governing council refused to impeach him. This action, regarded by many inside and outside of the government as a violation of long-standing rules, was not corrected, and the governing council’s response to criticism was to double down on its authority. These moves, according to the historian John Norwich made the council ever more unpopular both with the citizens and other organs of government and precipitated a rapid unwinding of the societal threads that had, for centuries, underpinned inclusive forms of cooperation and devotion to a governing system that aimed to realize the common good.

It is important to note that these polities had developed the governing capacity to productively address various expressions of social malfeasance, including administrative corruption and shirking and free riding among citizens that could challenge the confidence of people in each other and the government. Yet, when it was the leadership that turned away from meeting expectations—including diligence in sustaining a system of governance and maintaining its religious neutrality—all the governments in question illustrated a key vulnerability: they lacked the institutional capacity to punish leadership displaying self-serving acts contrary to the pursuit of societal benefit.

Moral Collapse and Its Relevance to Contemporary U.S. Politics

Like the societies we have discussed, the original charters of the U.S. government featured mutual moral obligations between governing authorities and citizens at their core and specified key governing precepts, including the rule of law, the peaceful transfer of power, inclusion, checks and balances on the concentration of power, and the separation of church and state. Over more than two centuries, these principles, although sometimes opposed, have largely been followed. But now they face serious challenges from the presumptive leadership of the Republican Party and influential governing bodies including the Supreme Court.

These challengers reject the notions of inclusiveness and lawfulness embedded in the original charters in a way that does not align with what the majority of American citizens believe and would like to preserve. In particular, challengers deviate from broad sensibilities both when they show strong support for the idea that white nationalist ideologies and religious fundamentalism should serve as the religious foundation for our governing practices and principles, and when they assert their belief that violence is an acceptable means to achieve political goals in the face of opposition.

We hope that our discussion of historical cases is a reminder that mutual benefit and good governance succeed or fail based on the choices of contingently cooperative citizens. Contingency implies that, as in Venice and the other cases we pointed out, the loss of citizen confidence in the leadership can trigger an unexpected unwinding of the societal threads that underpin inclusive forms of cooperation and devotion to a governing system designed to realize common good.

This article was produced by Human Bridges.

Richard E. Blanton is professor emeritus of anthropology at Purdue University.

Gary M. Feinman is a MacArthur Curator of Anthropology at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, Illinois.

Stephen A. Kowalewski is professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Georgia.

Lane F. Fargher-Navarro is the director of research at the Past Foundation, Ohio State University.

Click here to read the article on Popular Archaeology.

Photo Credit: Thomas Cole / Wikimedia Commons

How Sustainable Next-Gen Materials Can Create a More Ethical Consumer Market

Click here to read the article on the Observatory.

The nascent industry of next-gen materials is set to dethrone unsustainable animal-based materials.

By Elaine Siu

Next-generation (“next-gen”) materials are innovative alternatives to traditional petrochemical and animal-based materials like leather, silk, down, fur, wool, and exotic skins. They aim to replace animal-based materials and significantly reduce environmental impacts and animal welfare concerns.

Next-gen materials replicate the performance of their animal-based counterparts by using biomimicry approaches while being more sustainable.

The Six Main Input Categories of Next-Gen Materials

The rise of innovation companies has led to several types of next-gen material being available in the market. These high-performance materials tend to vary from one another. For instance, mushroom leather produced by one company will differ from others; each innovator follows their own specialized approach.

To simplify the diverse landscape of formulation and processing approaches for next-gen materials, MII categorizes next-gen innovation into six “main input” categories:

  1. Plant-derived: Next-gen materials derived from plant matter, including fungi (fruiting body) and algae inputs.
  2. Mycelium: Materials utilizing the root-like structure of fungal species called mycelium. It is distinguished from the plant-derived category by its rich activity in next-gen innovation.
  3. Cultivated animal cells: Materials grown from animal cell constructs in laboratory tissue engineering approaches.
  4. Microbe-derived: Materials produced through cellular engineering approaches like cell culture or fermentation processes to create proteins and biopolymers.
  5. Recycled material: Materials utilizing recycled plastic or textile feedstock as the primary input.
  6. Blend: Materials made by combining components not well captured by any of the above categories.

State of the Industry

The fourth State of the Industry report by the Material Innovation Initiative (MII), where I serve as an adviser, highlights the importance of next-gen materials in transitioning away from unsustainable practices in material production.

The report provides insights into the progress made by the next-gen industry in 2023. It further details the key stakeholders and the challenges posed by the industry while spotlighting the “rising stars.”

Companies in the Next-Gen Materials Industry

As of the start of 2024, there are 144 “innovators,” or companies developing next-gen materials. The majority (92 companies) worked on biomimicry of animal leather and exotic skins. Twenty-four worked on biomimicry of silk, 16 on wool, 14 on down, and eight on fur.

Some companies work on more than one material. The U.S. had the most innovators at 44; other countries had between one and 13, according to the MII report. The vast majority of innovators’ main focus is next-gen materials. Also, some larger corporations have a next-gen material product as part of their diverse offerings. For example, Volvo has developed its next-gen leather, Nordico (with a blend input). The company aims to use this material in 25 percent of its new cars by 2025, comprising “recycled and bio-based content.”

More than half of all innovators used a plant-derived source as their primary input for their material, according to the MII report. The remaining half was divided between microbe-derived, mycelium, recycled materials, and blends, with cultivated animal cells forming the smallest input category at around 4 percent.

The feedstock, inputs, and technologies used to create a material affect not only the look, feel, and properties of the finished product but also—crucially in this industry of innovation—the time and cost it will take to reach commercial manufacturing scale.

Many innovators chose to stay in stealth mode until they were ready to launch. No new companies were created in 2023, but 29 that existed previously in stealth mode publicly disclosed their activities.

Due to their high market value, silk, fur, and exotic skins may appeal to early-stage innovators. Unlike commodity markets, these high-value product targets could lead to faster price parity. For instance, while polyester yarn costs around $1/kg, raw silk averages around $55/kg. These underserved product categories lack competition, making them attractive to innovators and investors seeking entry into the next-gen materials industry.

Investment in Next-Gen Materials

Investors play an essential role in the next-generation materials industry by funding research, development, and growth.

In 2021, there was an unprecedented spike in capital invested in next-gen materials companies, followed by a sharp decrease in 2022. An upward momentum returned in 2023, with just more than $500 million raised in 36 publicly disclosed deals.

Despite a global decline in venture capital funding and deal count in 2023, funding for next-gen materials companies increased. The industry experienced a 10 percent rise in investment funding, indicating higher investments than the general market. This is a positive sign for such a nascent industry.

The total investment figure of more than $500 million excludes significant investments made internally by companies in developing next-gen materials. Such internal investments are important as they reflect the expertise and resources of the companies. Gucciʼs capital investment in their Demetra next-gen leather exemplifies this trend, leveraging the companyʼs reputation, expertise in high-quality leather, and available resources to drive innovation in the next-gen materials industry.

Industry Brands’ Involvement in the Next-Gen Materials Market

Industry brands are established companies in fashion, automotive, and home goods that are the biggest buyers and users of materials. Although consumer preference has driven brands in these industries toward more sustainable practices over the years, material innovators seldom have a direct relationship with consumers. The success of transitioning from animal-based materials to next-gen materials largely depends on the ability of innovators and industry brands to work together.

Industry brands can play vital roles in the next-gen material innovation ecosystem, including funding internal and external initiatives, switching to next-gen materials as their raw materials, and collaborating with startups to create new products. These actions help accelerate commercialization and scale-up production of next-gen materials to replace conventional products.

Top-tier industry brands like Nike, IKEA, and Volvo are driving demand for next-gen materials due to pressure from consumers and regulations to improve sustainability and reduce the environmental impact of their products. Regulations such as the EUʼs corporate sustainability due diligence directive, Franceʼs AGEC law, and the New York Fashion Act replace voluntary supervisory systems with mandatory targets and consequences for non-compliance. This regulatory landscape and consumer sentiment are driving the shift toward next-gen materials in various industries.

Next-Gen Materials and the ‘Hype Cycle’ of Innovation

The Gartner Hype Cycle is a graphical representation of the stages in the life cycle of a technology. It depicts the typical progression of innovation from “overenthusiasm” toward a period of “disillusionment” and then to “eventual productivity.”

High expectations and low maturity lead to the “Trough of Disillusionment,” where interest wanes as experiments and implementations fail to deliver. However, investments may continue if the product is improved to satisfy early adopters.

The Hype Cycle consists of five key phases that describe the life cycle of new technologies and the challenges and opportunities they may encounter along the way:

  1. Innovation Trigger: Potential technological breakthroughs that spark initial interest but often have no usable products and unproven commercial viability.
  2. Peak of Inflated Expectations: This is characterized by early success stories, which generate hype, but failures also occur.
  3. Trough of Disillusionment: This period is characterized by declining interest as experiments fail, leading to shakeouts or failures among technology producers.
  4. Slope of Enlightenment: This occurs when there is an understanding of the technology’s increasing benefits, with second- and third-generation products emerging.
  5. Plateau of Productivity: This is a function of mainstream adoption, which begins with clearly defined criteria for assessing provider viability and broader market applicability.

The innovation trigger for next-gen materials began in 2018 when many startups received their first round of venture capital funding. The peak of inflated expectations began around 2020, with next-gen materials becoming a trend in business, industry, and fashion publications. Companies capitalized on this by using buzzwords like “next-gen materials” and “apple/cactus/mushroom leather.” Investment spiked in 2021, reaching $980 million, a significant increase from previous years.

After 2022, the industry has undoubtedly been in the trough of disillusionment signaled by a sharp decline in investment, exacerbated by the pandemic’s unprecedented disruption of various facets of business, from supply chains to funding availability. Early success stories were repeated, and the market soon became impatient with the lack of scaled production and availability of innovative materials. There was negative press as a result, and the innovation was discredited for not living up to the early, overinflated expectations of being the “perfectly sustainable” solution to the grand challenges faced by the fashion industry.

However, despite these challenges, innovation has continued, with companies working to improve products based on feedback, addressing scaling challenges, and exploring new markets.

The length of the trough of disillusionment is one of the most variable parts of the hype cycle. And yet, the industry’s progress to the next phase may be closer than expected. At the end of 2023, there was an upward trend in investments in the next-gen materials industry. This reflects progress with the hope that next-gen materials continue to be more widely adopted by leading brands to ensure a more sustainable future.

This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute. Claudia Erixon, communications and development assistant at Material Innovation Initiative, provided research.

Elaine Siu is an adviser at Material Innovation Initiative (MII), where she previously served as the chief innovation officer. She has also served as the managing director of Good Food Institute APAC and is the author of the book Your Next 40,000 Hours. Siu advises startups, corporations, and investors on strategies and industry insights, particularly on harnessing the power of technology and market forces to shift the world away from industrial animal agriculture. She is a contributor to the Observatory.

Click here to read the article on the Observatory.

Photo Credit: Elke Wetzig / Wikimedia Commons

Can Vice-Presidential Pick Tim Walz Make Democrats the Education Party Again?

Click here to read the article on LA Progressive.

Harris’s decision to choose a teacher as her running mate creates an opportunity to remake the Democratic Party’s image for public schools.

In choosing Minnesota Governor Tim Walz to be her running mate, Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris has not only picked a progressive governor and a Midwestern populist to lead the party’s national ticket but she also may have signaled that the Democratic Party is ready to take back its reputation as the education party.

Walz, a former public school teacher and football coach in Mankato, Minnesota, draws on his experience as an educator to inform his political persona and policy beliefs, saying in a 2007 interview with Education Week—after he was elected to Congress—that teachers are “more grounded in what people really care about.”

As governor of Minnesota, he acted on that philosophy of caring by pushing for and signing into law a $72 billion state budget in May 2023 that significantly increased funding for the state’s public schools, provided for a new $1,750-per-child tax credit, free college tuition for families earning less than $80,000 per year, funding for free school meals for K-12 students statewide, and paid sick leave for workers, as well as a paid family and medical leave.

The “historic” education spending Walz approved included a $5.5 billion increase over the next four years, a substantial raise to the state’s per-pupil funding formula, and an increase in funding for full-service community schools consisting of $7.5 million for two years and then $5 million per year in the future. Community schools practice a holistic education approach that entails attending to the non-academic needs of students and families, including access to technology, social services, physical and mental health care, adult education, and after-school and summer programs.

It’s also telling that in picking Walz to be her running mate Harris rejected Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, who prominent centrist Democrats claimed was Harris’s “best chance” of wooing political moderates in an election that is expected to be a close race to the finish.

But Shapiro had set off alarms among public school advocates. In a letter sent in July 2024 to the Harris campaign, which was picked up by numerous media outlets, more than two dozen grassroots education groups warned against selecting Shapiro because of his support for taxpayer-funded private school vouchers.

The letter stated that Shapiro “has supported education policies mirroring Project 2025,” the right-wing manifesto from the Heritage Foundation that is expected to provide a blueprint for a new Trump administration and “includes measures to funnel federal education funds directly to families through education savings accounts,” stated WITF.

“Through Project 2025,” the letter further read, “[conservatives] have made it abundantly clear the end goal of gutting public education and privatizing what is left via irresponsible voucher systems like those in Florida and Arizona.”

“Walz has pretty much been the best governor on education in Minnesota in decades,” wrote Sarah Lahm in an email to Our Schools. Lahm is a veteran education journalist based in the state and an Our Schools contributing writer. Choosing Walz to be the nominee “is good news,” she said, “especially compared to Shapiro and his school choice record.”

No doubt, in selecting a running mate, the Harris team weighed numerous issues, but the fact that opposition to school vouchers came to the fore is unusual in Democratic political circles where education is often not considered to be an important national issue.

When Democrats Were the Education Party

The last time the Democratic Party had a former K-12 school teacher running for vice president was in 1960, and the candidate was Lyndon Johnson. Although most experts insist that vice presidents have little influence on federal policies, Johnson ultimately became president and was instrumental in pushing through the landmark Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) in 1965 that is still, in its current version called Every Student Succeeds Act, and is the blueprint for federal education policy today.

The Democratic Party burnished its reputation as the education party in 1979 when then-Democratic President Jimmy Carter approved legislation to create the U.S. Department of Education as a Cabinet-level entity.

In 2004, Frederick Hess and Andrew Kelly of the right-wing American Enterprise Institute wrote, “Historically, Democrats have enjoyed a substantial advantage over the Republicans on education due to their support for education spending and their decades-old alliance with unions and public employees.”

But that advantage began to erode in the late 1980s, Hess and Kelly contended, due to “Reaganite critiques of liberalism and expensive social programs.” Democrats responded to those attacks by “seek[ing] a more moderate course on domestic policies, including education,” they noted, and by late 2002, when Congress passed the bipartisan No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law, popular opinion on which party was best on education was nearly split.

Nevertheless, Democrats seemed to have regained the advantage by 2012 when polling by Pew Research Center found, “By about two-to-one (53 percent to 27 percent), more [voters] say Democrats can do a better job improving the education system in the country.”

But the Democrats’ resurgence as the favored party for education didn’t last, and when Pew surveyed voters again in 2014, the party had only a 4 percent advantage over Republicans in handling education.

“Taken as a whole, the data suggest that Democrats are struggling more on education than at any other time in the past two decades,” Hess wrote in 2022 when he again examined which party had the best education cred.

The Democratic party’s declining reputation for supporting public schools did not mean Republicans were gaining much favorability, Hess found, but “Democrats have been losing voters’ confidence for a half-decade, and that decline has become noticeably steeper over the past two years,” he wrote, noting that nearly one in five voters didn’t trust either party.

Also in 2022, a poll of voters in key battleground states conducted by Hart Research for the American Federation of Teachers found 39 percent of voters trusted Republicans compared to 38 percent who showed confidence in the Democrats on education issues. Another poll conducted the same year by Democrats for Education Reform, an organization that advocates for privatizing schools with charters and vouchers, found a more lopsided Republican advantage, with 47 percent saying they trusted Republicans “to handle education” and 43 percent saying they trusted Democrats.

What Happened?

Republicans would have you believe that the source for the shift in popular approval on education policy away from Democrats was due to mask mandates that Democratic government officials supported during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Another narrative that right-wing operatives like to spin is that when the pandemic forced students to shift to remote learning, parents saw firsthand that their children were being instructed in so-called leftist ideology and “Democratic indoctrination.”

Although many media outlets have reported these narratives as factual, they really aren’t.

First, surveys of parents during the pandemic years found that they were mostly supportive of how schools responded to the situation, and when schools went back to face-to-face learning, parents remained satisfied with the schools.

Also, as the above survey data from Pew in 2014 show, voters started to sour on the Democratic Party’s education politics before the COVID-19 outbreak.

Without a doubt, the Democratic Party’s declining popularity related to education has something to do with the policies the party supported or failed to support. During the years that Pew was tracking the party’s declining reputation on education issues, the Obama presidential administration’s education agenda and his ham-handed Secretary of Education Arne Duncan were so disastrous that Congress was spurred to rewrite ESEA to rein in some of the federal government’s powers to shape local education policies.

Further, during President Trump’s administration, while Republicans coalesced around so-called school choice policies that give parents taxpayer funds to pull their kids out of public schools, the Democratic Party countered with, well, basically nothing.

It bears noting that when Joe Biden ran for president, he did not continue with the education policies of the Obama administration, and his administration, likely at the urging of the strong public school advocacy of First Lady Jill Biden, returned to a relatively safe narrative of education as an essential “investment.” But he never really gave the Democrats a programmatic education brand the party could hang its hat on.

Having Tim Walz on the Democratic Party’s presidential campaign is an opportunity to change that.

‘Sitting on the Edge of Our Seats’

Based on his accomplishments in Minnesota, Walz has demonstrated his inclination to back education policies that matter most. He also eschews policy gimmicks that have been favored by both parties.

In his 2007 interview with Education Week, Walz criticized NCLB as a “bureaucratic nightmare” and said “the application of it [had] very little impact on real student achievement.”

As governor, he has “stood firmly against school voucher programs,” according to the Baltimore Sun, and opposed Minnesota’s Republican-controlled Senate that wanted to create education savings accounts that give parents taxpayer money to pull their children out of public schools and use other education options.

With Walz now elevated to a vice-presidential nominee, public education advocates and policy experts are “sitting on the edge of our seats to see the policy implications of a teacher as the vice president of the United States of America,” wrote education professor Phelton Moss in an August 2024 op-ed for Education Week. “A Harris-Walz administration could be a historic next phase in education policy,” he wrote.

Of course, it’s still early in the long presidential campaign season to say whether or not education becomes a prominent issue. A Harris-Walz victory is far from being assured, and vice presidents often have little influence over policy directions in a presidential administration.

But Harris’s decision to choose Walz as her running mate creates an opportunity to overhaul the outdated education policies of the Democratic Party establishment and remake the party’s image of being a genuine hero for public schools and children.

Click here to read the article on LA Progressive.

Jeff Bryant is a writing fellow and chief correspondent for Our Schools. He is a communications consultant, freelance writer, advocacy journalist, and director of the Education Opportunity Network, a strategy and messaging center for progressive education policy. His award-winning commentary and reporting routinely appear in prominent online news outlets, and he speaks frequently at national events about public education policy. Follow him on Twitter @jeffbcdm.

Photo Credit: Office of Governor Walz & Lt. Governor Flanagan / Flickr

Take the New Grand Tour in Costa Rica

Irina Matuzava of the Human Bridges project has assembled the Costa Rica map and information portal for our New Grand Tour project, published on the Observatory. It’s our prototype for an accessible global data set for visitors and global audiences to learn more, and find ways to travel and connect with guides who visit human prehistory and ecology sites. Soon you’ll see the map expand to South Africa, France, Peru and Indonesia.

The New Grand Tour is an initiative of the Human Bridges project. We aim to increase awareness and circulation of discoveries in the social sciences, human origins, archaeology, and related disciplines. 

Currently, we are developing an exciting new project to encourage travelers to visit prehistoric sites, museums, and ecological hotspots around the world. The New Grand Tour is an initiative of the Human Bridges project. We are working to expand global public consciousness of new research and discovery in the field of human origins, archaeology, and related disciplines. 

You can read a general overview of the New Grand Tour, or watch Peter Coyote’s narrated documentary here, on the Observatory.

Observatory Special Report on How Investors Are Exploiting Public Education

Click here to read the article on the Observatory.

For-profit operators and their investors use complex business arrangements and networks of related companies to enrich themselves and do little to improve education.

Ever since charter schools were created in the 1990s, there’s been a persistent question1 of whether or not the schools introduce an element of profit-making into the public education sector. In statutory law, legislatures have generally ruled that charter schools must be operated as nonprofits. In fact, only one state,2 Arizona, technically allows for-profit organizations to be licensed to run charter schools. Yet, the charter school industry has proven to be an innovator in developing business arrangements in which third-party and related organizations profit handsomely off a nonprofit charter.

One such entryway for profit-making enterprises to exploit charter schools, according to an in-depth examination conducted by Our Schools in 2021, occurs when for-profit charter school operators partner with private investors intent on turning quick profits from public dollars meant for educating children.

Our Schools examined the relationship between Pansophic Learning, owner of the Accel Schools chain of for-profit charter schools, and Safanad Limited, a private equity firm, originating in the Middle East, with extensive investment holdings in K–12 education, senior living, and other public sector-related enterprises.

What Our Schools found was that for-profit businesses like Pansophic Learning are providing entryways for wealthy investors from abroad to flood the U.S. with money to buy up struggling taxpayer-funded enterprises and put into place elaborate business schemes and networks of interrelated companies that hide their profiteering while doing little to improve the quality of services to the public.

A request for comment regarding Pansophic’s relationship with Safanad and the partnership’s potential for conflicts of interest that was left as a press inquiry at the Pansophic website did not receive a reply.

The combination of for-profit operators backed by private equity has become prevalent in other publicly funded sectors that have traditionally been operated by federal and/or state governments or nonprofit organizations. And the results have not been beneficial to the public or the individuals the publicly funded system was intended to serve.

For example, in the government-funded prison system, “The involvement of private equity firms, which manage large investment portfolios, presents a conflict between the financial and social goals of some investors,” reported Prison Legal News in 2019, citing two studies—one from the nonprofit Worth Rises, which advocates for “dismantling the prison industry,” and the other from the American Federation of Teachers, a national teachers’ union.

Another analysis, by the ACLU, found that for-profit prison operators backed by private investors are more apt to create profit for their investors by maintaining high rates of incarceration, which results in significantly higher social and fiscal costs to the public.

Our Schools found that this combination of for-profit entrepreneurs backed by private investors is having a similarly corrosive impact in the charter school industry.

Ron Packard and K12 Inc.

The genesis of Accel Schools goes back to 2014, when Education Week reported that Ron Packard, the former CEO of K12 Inc., had formed a new education enterprise called Pansophic Learning. K12 Inc., which changed its name to Stride Inc. in 2020, was then, and as of this writing still is, the largest for-profit charter school operator in the U.S.

Packard, a former Goldman Sachs executive who specialized in mergers and acquisitions, departed K12 Inc., which he founded, at a time when the company was besieged with negative publicity.

In 2011, K12 Inc. was the subject of a scathing story in the New York Times revealing that “only a third” of the students enrolled in its online charter schools “achieved adequate yearly progress, the measurement mandated by federal No Child Left Behind legislation,” while the company employed multiple ways to “squeeze profits from public school dollars by raising enrollment, increasing teacher workload, and lowering standards.”

The withering critique, which ran on the newspaper’s front page, “caused” the publicly traded company’s stock price “to drop precipitously,” Education Week reported in 2012, and prompted a shareholder to file a federal lawsuit accusing K12 Inc. executives, including Packard, of “misleading investors with false student-performance claims.”

More negative publicity came in 2013 when Politico reported K12 Inc. was one among many online charter schools that “posts dismal scores on math, writing, and science tests and mediocre scores on reading.” Another blow came that year when influential hedge fund manager and charter school proponent Whitney Tilson announced he was shorting K12 Inc. stock, betting the company would fail.

In 2014, K12 Inc. became the target of yet another lawsuit accusing the company of “misleading investors by putting forward overly positive public statements… only later to reveal that it had missed key operational and financial targets,” Education Week reported. The lawsuit also charged Packard, whose relationship to the company had become unclear, of selling off his own stock before revealing the negative financials, and, thus, earning a windfall of $6.4 million before the stock price plunged.

But as Packard disengaged from one troubled education enterprise, he started another with a financial partner that would provide the capital to quickly scale up.

As Education Week reported in 2014, Packard’s new company, Pansophic Learning, included a partnership with a holding company, Safanad Education, a subsidiary of Safanad Limited, a New York- and Dubai-based real estate and investment firm. Packard and Safanad spent an unknown sum to purchase part of K12 Inc.’s assets, mostly in higher education, and acquire an international brick-and-mortar private school. The two entrepreneurs were “on the hunt for acquisitions,” according to Education Week.

A Charter School Shopping Spree

Initially, Packard and Pansophic Learning kept a low profile until, in 2016, a visit by then-Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump drew attention to a Cleveland, Ohio, brick-and-mortar charter school “that usually escapes notice,” reported the Plain Dealer, a Cleveland newspaper.

According to the Plain Dealer, the school, the Cleveland Arts and Social Sciences Academy, was one of 27 schools in Colorado, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, and Ohio that had been recently acquired by Accel Schools, a new for-profit network of charter schools owned and operated by Pansophic Learning.

Packard is listed as the CEO of both Pansophic Learning and Accel Schools. Two other C-suite executives of both Pansophic Learning and Accel Schools are COO Maria Szalay and CTO Eric Waller. Pansophic Learning and Accel Schools also have street addresses within 5 minutes’ walking distance of each other in McLean, Virginia.

Prior to the news about Trump visiting its school, Accel Schools had been “amassing an education empire” in Ohio, the Akron Beacon Journal reported.

Among its acquisitions were, in 2014, the “troubled K-8 schools” of White Hat Management, which had previously been, according to the Akron Beacon Journal, Ohio’s largest charter school chain. In 2018, Accel Schools purchased White Hat’s last remaining online charter school as well.

In 2015, Accel Schools also acquired the assets of another financially struggling charter management firm, Mosaica Education, and bought Cleveland-based I Can Schools, which, Packard told the Plain Dealer, were also “struggling financially.”

The charter school shopping spree Accel Schools went on undoubtedly benefited from the financial support of Safanad.

“We are fortunate to partner with Safanad,” Packard is quoted saying in Safanad’s official announcement of its partnership with Pansophic Learning in 2014. “Safanad’s extensive resources will allow us to pursue opportunities of all sizes,” he said.

The Bahamdan Connection

According to the firm’s website, Safanad’s founder and CEO is Kamal Bahamdan, a Saudi national. Kamal Bahamdan “was the CEO of the Bahamdan [investment Group],” according to his profile.

Kamal Bahamdan’s current relationship with the Bahamdan Investment Group is unclear, but the Bahamdan firm maintains a controlling interest in Safanad. According to its SEC filings brochure, Safanad is “controlled by Bahamdan Investment Group and KB Group Holdings Ltd.” KB Group Holdings Ltd., according to Safanad’s SEC filing form, is owned by the Bahamdan Investment Group.

The Bahamdan Investment Group is a Saudi-based investment firm founded by Salem Bahamdan, Kamal Bahamdan’s father, according to ZoomInfo. Kamal Bahamdan is the grandson of Abdullah Bahamdan, according to Wikipedia.

In numerous online profiles, Abdullah Salem Bahamdan (also Abdullah S. Bahamdan, Abdullah Salim Bahamdan, and Abdullah Bahamdan) is described as a “seasoned banker” and one of “the Middle East’s most prominent and influential financiers.”

Abdullah Bahamdan also spent more than 50 years as the chairman of “Saudi Arabia’s National Commercial Bank, the largest lender in the Arab world,” according to Institutional Investor. National Commercial Bank (NCB), which merged with Samba Financial Group in 2021 to form Saudi National Bank (SNB), was established in 1953 by royal decree, according to the SNB website, with the Saudi government as its major shareholder.

Despite its close relationship to the Saudi government, NCB was one among 16 financial institutions that were fined by the Saudi Monetary Authority in 2019 “for violating principles of responsible finance,” according to Reuters. “[T]he violations were related to exceeding debt burdens imposed on people in proportion to their monthly income.”

In 2020, the U.S. Treasury Department settled a lawsuit with NCB accusing the bank of violating U.S. sanctions against Syria and Sudan between November 2011 to August 2014.

The bank and Abdullah Bahamdan have been the subjects of at least two lawsuits accusing them of financing terrorist groups, which may have been part of what prompted the Saudi government to, in 2017, “crack down on corruption” in its banking industry, Reuters reported.

Perhaps as a result of the crackdown, SNB, as of 2019, claimed on its website that it “developed a Bank-wide Anti-Money Laundering and Combating Terrorist Financing Policy.”

Mixing Charter School Investments With Subpar Senior Care

Aside from its investments in Pansophic Learning, Safanad has made some of its biggest commercial real estate deals in the health care sector, principally in senior care facilities, including assisted living, independent living, memory care, and nursing homes, frequently called skilled nursing facilities.

Senior Housing News reported that Safanad teamed up with investment firm Formation Capital, an Atlanta-based health-care-focused private investment company, to purchase 36 senior care facilities in 2011, and, in 2012, the partners spent $750 million to acquire 68 more nursing homes located in East Coast states. The acquisitions made the two investment firms “one of the United States’ largest standalone skilled nursing portfolios,” according to Senior Housing News, with “more than $1 billion worth of senior care assets in the U.S.”

In 2013, the same two investment firms purchased a “36-property senior housing portfolio for approximately $400 million,” reported Senior Housing News, and in 2014, the two firms struck another deal to buy “14 skilled nursing facilities in the mid-Atlantic for about $150 million,” according to Senior Housing News.

The deals Safanad and Formation Capital struck to acquire senior care facilities are strikingly similar to the business transactions Safanad conducted with Pansophic Learning in the charter school sector, principally, buying up financially struggling service businesses that receive large amounts of public funding—in the case of the senior care sector, from Medicare and Medicaid—and that also happen to include significant holdings of real estate.

The nursing home and senior living facilities industry was struggling financially before the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a report by the Pew Charitable Trust. Facilities had been cutting corners for years, skating by with too few staff, due to stagnating wages, and sometimes hiring unskilled workers instead of highly trained personnel.

COVID-19 simply revealed an industry that was already “broken,” reported NBC News, citing “low pay, high turnover, and tough working conditions” as chronic problems in the senior care facilities industry.

Yet the growing presence of private equity investors in the senior care industry has done little to help the industry and appears to have done mostly harm.

A 2020 study3 found that private equity ownership of nursing homes and other kinds of senior living facilities increased costs to the public by 19 percent while shortening the lifespans of patients.

Patients in facilities with substantial private equity backing tended to have less access to nurses, declining mobility, and greater use of antipsychotic medications, the study found. Consequently, “private equity ownership increases short-term mortality by 10 percent,” the authors claimed, “which implies about 21,000 lives lost due to private equity ownership over our sample period.”

As with the for-profit prison industry, many of the problems posed by private investment firms in the senior care industry, according to the study, can be sourced to “high-powered for-profit incentives… [being] misaligned with the social goals of quality care at a reasonable cost.”

The study distinguished private equity for-profit ownership from “generic” for-profit ownership because “private equity ownership confers distinct incentives to quickly and substantially increase the value of their portfolio firms.” It is this form of intense, high-powered profit-maximizing incentives, the authors asserted, “that characterize[s] private equity… [and could lead to] detrimental implications for consumer welfare.”

Investor-driven senior care facilities were especially hard hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, a 2020 article in the New York Times reported.

“Decades of ownership by private equity and other private investment firms left many nursing homes with staggering bills and razor-thin margins,” according to the article.

“The toll of putting profits first started to show when the outbreak began,” the article continued. “[S]ome for-profit homes were particularly ill equipped and understaffed, which undercut their ability to contain the spread of the coronavirus.”

Among the for-profit operators that appear to have fared poorly in the pandemic is Consulate Health Care, one of the providers that were snapped up by Safanad and Formation Capital in 2014, according to Senior Housing News. In a 2020 report, the Private Equity Stakeholder Project listed Formation Capital as the owner of Consulate Health Care.

Nursing homes operated by Consulate Health Care and Formation Capital have been hotspots for COVID-19 outbreaks, according to numerous news reports from Florida and Virginia. The high incidence of outbreaks prompted, in part, a U.S. House committee to launch an investigation into the country’s five largest for-profit nursing home companies, including Consulate Health Care, Politico reported in 2020.

‘Creative Ways to Wring Profits’

As the New York Times reported in 2020, while senior care facilities often struggle financially, their private equity-backed owners have “found creative ways to wring profits out of them.”

Some of these creative ways include charging their operators “hefty management and consulting fees”; buying the real estate from the operators and then leasing the buildings back to the operators, while upping the rents; and pushing their operators to buy products and services from companies that are controlled by the investors.4

The real estate plays these firms pull off are particularly lucrative, the New York Times noted, because the buildings are often “more valuable than the businesses themselves.”

A 2018 article in the Naples Daily News described how these arrangements work in Consulate Health Care facilities owned by Formation Capital, the state’s largest provider.

Consulate Health Care and Formation Capital both operate a network of other related businesses—including “real estate, management, rehabilitation and other companies”—that they use as subcontractors for the nursing homes they own.

So when “[t]axpayer money flows to Consulate nursing homes,” the article explained, some of the money also goes to subcontractors that are related to the owners, Consulate Health Care and its controlling company, Formation Capital. “[A]nd profits earned go to the chain’s owner, the Atlanta-based private equity firm Formation Capital,” the article stated.

One of the Consulate Health Care nursing homes highlighted in the article pays its owner and management fees to two Consulate companies and also pays its lease payments and rehabilitation service fees to providers that are both related to Formation Capital.

“In each case,” the article said, “the money flows back to Formation Capital and its wealthy investors,” which include Safanad.

Pansophic Learning and Accel Schools operate similar business arrangements that help their organizations maximize their profits, according to a 2021 report by the Network for Public Education (NPE).[2]

Much in the same way Consulate Health Care facilities and Formation Capital push their nursing homes into contracts with their other related businesses, Accel and Pansophic use “a complex web of corporations,” according to NPE, to “control the operations of the school and in doing so, steer business to their related services.”

The report highlighted Accel-managed Broadway Academy, in Cleveland, a charter school previously owned by White Hat Management, according to the Accel Schools contract with the school.

Under the “fees” section in the terms of that contract—originally with for-profit management company Chippewa Community School, LLC, which is now a subsidiary of Accel Schools Ohio LLC—the school, referred to in the contract as the corporation, pays the operator (Accel, by way of its subsidiary Chippewa Community School, LLC) 96 percent of the school’s monthly qualified gross revenue, which is the per-pupil revenue the school receives from the state. In return, Accel is the sole source to provide the school with school staffing and professional development, school management and consulting, textbooks, equipment, technology, student recruitment, building payments, maintenance, custodial service, security, and capital improvements.

In other words, there’s nothing that stops Accel or Pansophic from creating yet more subsidiaries and other related companies that can do business with Broadway Academy. According to the contract, Accel can subcontract services “without the [Broadway Academy] Board’s approval,” and property purchased by Accel “shall remain… [Accel’s] sole property.”

According to NPE, these kinds of contracts, known as “sweeps,” are commonplace in the for-profit charter school industry.

“Sweeps contracts give for-profits the authority to run all school services in exchange for all or nearly all of the school’s revenue,” said the NPE report.

Taxpayer funding for the Broadway Academy that isn’t swept up by Accel’s continuing fee must be deposited into a “Student Enrichment Fund” for “educational services in the areas of student cultural activities[,] … supplemental tutoring services[,] and other programs.” Accel has sole authority to “propose uses for such funds,” and 85 percent “of all Student Enrichment Funds not spent during the fiscal year in which they are received shall be paid over to [Accel].”

While Accel’s contract with Broadway Academy doesn’t include real estate, the authors of the NPE report searched the database of Ohio charter school contracts, called “community schools documents,” and found that “Global School Properties Ohio, LLC holds the leases for many Accel charter schools. The… [landlord] is at the same 1650 Tysons Blvd. address in McLean, Virginia, as Pansophic [Learning].”

Profiting From D- and F-Rated Schools

School choice and charter school advocates are often quick to defend for-profit charter companies and their private investors, arguing that they are “sector agnostic”5 about who owns and operates a school and care only about the school’s “results.”

But what constitutes good results in education is a much-debated topic,6 and studies about the results of for-profit charter schools have found mixed results at best.

A 2017 report from Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) found that students who attend for-profit charter schools have weaker growth in math than they would have in a district public school and similar growth in reading.7 Students in nonprofit charter schools experienced stronger academic growth in both subjects than their peers enrolled in for-profit charters. The differences were “significant,” according to the study.

Also in 2017, Chalkbeat reported, “studies comparing for-profit schools to nonprofits and traditional public schools in the same area don’t find consistent differences in performance, as measured by test scores.”

None of these studies examined the performance of Accel Schools or the impact of private equity in the for-profit charter industry.

Nevertheless, an ongoing investigation by Our Schools has revealed charter schools operated by for-profit operators like Accel Schools cycle struggling charter schools through a series of private entities that, in turn, strip the schools of resources, run them at bare-bones costs, and reap whatever assets that remain before handing the schools off to the next private operator, or shutting them down completely. The result is charter operators and their investors may achieve the results they want, while the children caught up in this investor-driven enterprise often have their education significantly disrupted, or even permanently impaired, perhaps with lifelong impact.

References

  1. Network for Public Education, “Do Charter Schools Profit From Educating Students?” (April 2021).
  2. Network for Public Education, “Chartered for Profit: The Hidden World of Charter Schools Operated for Financial Gain” (July 2021).
  3. Atul Gupta, Sabrina T. Howell, Constantine Yannelis, and Abhinav Gupta; NYU Stern School of Business; “Does Private Equity Investment in Healthcare Benefit Patients? Evidence from Nursing Homes”​​ (2020).
  4. Matthew Goldstein, Jessica Silver-Greenberg, and Robert Gebeloff; New York Times; “Push for Profits Left Nursing Homes Struggling to Provide Care” (May 7, 2020).
  5. Nicole Stelle Garnet, Notre Dame Law School, “Sector Agnosticism and the Coming Transformation of Education Law” (April 2017).
  6. W. James Popham, ASCD, “Why Standardized Tests Don’t Measure Educational Quality” (1999).
  7. James L. Woodworth et al, Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO), “Charter Management Organizations” (2017).

Jeff Bryant is a writing fellow and chief correspondent for Our Schools. He is a communications consultant, freelance writer, advocacy journalist, and director of the Education Opportunity Network, a strategy and messaging center for progressive education policy. His award-winning commentary and reporting routinely appear in prominent online news outlets, and he speaks frequently at national events about public education policy. Follow him on Twitter @jeffbcdm.

Photo Credit: jonathan mcintosh / Flickr