Hang around a school long enough and you’ll get a feel for its mission. Curiously, you can’t fully comprehend a school’s ethos from its official documents.  Instead, you’ll get a feel for the place mostly by watching the school’s leaders—how they lead, internally and externally.

For instance, if you listen carefully to the head of school or division director—how they speak, how they write, and how they behave in a crisis—you will see themes and values at work.  I hesitate from calling these themes fully formed educational philosophies; rather, they’re more like carefully timed messages about who the school is and what the community stands for.

Good-to-great leaders in educational organizations often have good instincts about children and teaching. They also have a hard to describe competitive quality and more than a little confidence.  Let’s call it “edge.” Just about all leaders, whether they like it are not, will find themselves with a megaphone and the pressure to articulate a message.  People will be looking to them for direction. Story-telling may not make the leader, but very bright people have been undone by their inability to tell a good story.

School leaders don’t wing it or make it up as they go along. Instead, they work on their stories, test limbs, and practice their timing—micro level (literally, the words on the page or in their heads) and macro level (when the words should be delivered and why). School leaders who don’t venture far from their school’s mission statements in their speaking and writing endeavors are usually dull and ineffective leaders.

Here’s an anecdote about a head coach and a tale he told his players the night before the big game, which just happened to be the school’s first championship soccer game in half a century.  This story underscores the value of telling stories, the importance of remembering who your audience is, and the power of having a little “edge.”  All great schools are made up of leaders who know how to discharge a carefully timed message.

The kids are on the bleaches. It’s the end of practice, the last practice before the championship game, and the coach launches into another one of his stories.  The kids groan because they love to hate his stories.

“Last night I was watching this movie where this guy falls in love with the most beautiful girl in town.  You know the kind of girl I’m talking about.  She’s the type you sit behind in math class.  She keeps your mind off of class for the entire period.”  There are a few chuckles at this comment, but the coach shoots the whole team a sidelong glance, as if someone blew wind in church.

“So this guy falls in love with this beautiful girl, but she won’t go out with him until he promises to light a candle beneath her window each night for a 100 nights. Don’t ask me why she wants him to do this—she just does.”  The coach has a soccer ball at his feet.  He flicks it into the air and catches it in his hand.

“Anyway, the boy knows right where this girl lives.  So each night he appears beneath her window, lights a candle, and waits for her to appear.  Sometimes she appears, sometimes she doesn’t.  She’s a bit of a tease, if you know what I mean.”

“Ten nights go by, then 20, then 30, then 50.  Of course the boy gets tired but he keeps showing up and lighting those candles.  The girl’s worth it.   Eventually the 95th night rolls by.  Then 96, 97, 98, 99 . . . and on the 100th night, there’s the boy beneath the girl’s window again. But a moment before midnight, a split-second before his goal is attained, the boy blows out the candle and goes home.”

The coach appears to be finished with the story.  No one moves from the bleachers.  Finally someone builds up enough courage to ask What Happens, does the boy get the girl or what?

“No, he doesn’t get the girl,” the coach growls.  “He goes home and gets a good night’s sleep because he has a championship soccer game to win!”  And at that moment there is a collective burst of energy as the front row lunges up from the bleachers and tackles the coach in mock-anger.  The ball comes loose and rolls away.  Practice is over.  There won’t be another one—nor another story—for nine months.  The next day the team wins the championship, but years later it is the story that resonates deeply in memory.

This story has edge.  This coach has what educational literature calls “a teachable point-of-view.”  He often tells stories, so his charges have gotten into the habit of listening to him.  It also helps immensely that this coach knows the game; he’s wearing soccer cleats, he knows how to flick balls up into the air, he knows how to juggle.  He knows how to walk the walk and talk the talk.  I think this is an important message for any school leader.  Don’t tell—or re-tell—a story if it’s not your style, or true to your own “voice” as a leader-learner.

This story expresses values and is full of ideas, although the coach has cleverly disguised his message until the final moment.  What could be more valuable and important to a group of teenaged boys than winning the girl of their dreams? I suppose the coach could be accused of being a little sexist, but he is certainly aware of his audience and the context (practice field, getting dark, brink of championship).  The coach could have merely told his players how important it was to him to win the big game, but that “message” wouldn’t have been nearly as memorable or powerful as the story about the boy who tosses the girl of his dreams aside in order to go home and get a good night’s sleep.

Educational writer Stephen Denning speaks about “the sparking action type of story” but he ties it primarily to “getting people to change.”  But school leadership is not always about sparking action for change.  Often it’s about knowing your audience and getting everyone on the same page and excited about moving forward after little changes have accumulated, or after the big change has been made.  I call these “HOO-RAH!” stories (a reference to Al Pacino in The Scent of Woman). Stories only excite if they tap into a common well of experience, which is why knowing your audience and your subject is so important.

And finally, the story above is really an example of taking risks.  The coach is not afraid to be a little irreverent.  He’s not afraid to use a story to achieve an explicit teaching/coaching end.   He’s not afraid to be wrong.  He’s not afraid to insert a good story into any conversation or endeavor, whether it’s on the soccer field or in the classroom or in the meeting room.  This is his teachable point-of-view.  Every exemplary school leader I know is good at telling stories.

I don’t know who has committed the worst outrage in this strip-search case: the people in correction-officer uniforms, the people in orange jumpsuits, or the people in pin-striped suits.

[This oped appeared in the Philadelphia Daily News on Tuesday, November 17th, 2009. Click here for the newspaper clipping.

There is only one thing more humiliating than a strip search, and that’s a perfectly legal acquisition of public funds by lawyers shooting taxpayers the moon.

From 2003 to 2007, Philadelphia’s prisons universally followed a strip-search policy, which meant all prisoners were searched during intake, regardless of offense.

The purpose of this screencast is to help my students learn how to use in-text citations in the context of MLA-style. This is the first of several videos on this topic.  More can be found under “screencasts” in the header of this website.  Note:  To make the text bigger and clearer, do two things: (1) Turn the “HD” option on (upper-right); and (2) Go to full-screen view (click the arrow-box on the bottom-right).  Be patient.  This ain’t no Hollywood movie.

I created this 8-minute video to imitate filmmaker John August’s scriptcasts on his personal blog. I wanted to see if his scriptcast idea could work for more mundane writing tasks. For instance, could someone like me, with modest technological know-how, use the same software and create a lesson that might be useful for students in college or graduate school?

In the following video, I show my UPenn students how to use in-text quotations in the context of APA-style. There are several videos on YouTube that demonstrate the general format of APA-style, like how to compose a title page or a bibliography, but I couldn’t find any that explicitly addressed how to erect an idea out of the brick-and-mortar of another writer’s words, and still get the formatting right.

Eventually, we will have wildly popular writers like Stephen King and David McCullough “unpacking” their writing process in digital format, thereby puncturing a sizable hole in that elusive black box known as the writer’s craft. 

This new way of using technology to demonstrate the writing process¹ may not turn good writers into great writers. But lessons like these may help mediocre-to-good writers become very competent, even accomplished writers. All it takes is an Internet connection and a little determination.

[Note:  To make the text bigger and clearer, do two things: (1) Turn the "HD" option on (upper-right); and (2) Go to full-screen view (click the arrow-box on the bottom-right).  Be patient.  This ain't no Hollywood movie.]

¹  Albeit, screencasts like these are still approximations of how words emerge from the writer’s head and evolve to walk the page.  But it’s the closest thing yet to getting into the mind of the writer.

There is synergy at work here, and not just on the water, but in time, in the wonderful way that remarkable people come together to make opportunities real and attainable for others.

[This contracted piece appeared in the Fall '09 edition of Penn Charter Today, PC's alumni magazine. Click here for the magazine clipping; only for fast connections.]

For more than a quarter-century the waters of the Schuylkill River and the docks of Boathouse Row had been tantalizingly out of reach for Penn Charter students, a curious anomaly for a school so close to the water and one with a remarkable crew connection.

Over the past few decades, how many Penn Charter students, parents, and alumni have run, walked, or biked along the busy artery known as Kelly Drive, passing without stopping or much noticing the statue near the crew pavilion finish-line of John B. Kelly, Sr., “Jack” to most, the three-time Olympic gold medal champion in crew?  Forever he sits in his single scull, a few meters from the finish line, his face the calm strength of innumerable rivers rowed.

How many can recite the details of Jack’s humble beginnings in Philadelphia in the early 1900s, his rise to fame as a world-class athlete, arguably the greatest oarsman in history, and his meteoric rise as a respected businessman, “Kelly for Brickwork,” and the legacy of his four children, two with household names—Grace Kelly (yes, that Grace Kelly) and his son John B. Kelly, Jr., “Kel,” OPC ’45?

Under the guiding hand of Jack and his son Kel, a remarkable squad of rookie Penn Charter oarsmen cut the River in practice and competition, many continuing to row long after graduation, including Kel, who went on to win (twice) the prestigious Diamond Sculls at the Henley Royal Regatta and then his own Olympic medal.  For more than a quarter-century, the campus has remained strangely quiet about competition on the water, while crewcuts and J. Crew have plied the choppy hallways.  But the sculls have come back to Penn Charter.

This past year, Penn Charter fielded its first official crew team since the late seventies.  Instrumental in getting the boats back on the water was a serious interest on the part of a substantial group of students and parents, lead in part by J.B. Kelly III, father of Nick Kelly, currently a senior at Penn Charter, and grandson of Jack.  Mr. Kelly found a strong advocate in Head of School Dr. Darryl Ford.

Both men used their considerable influence to get the community in synch with a new crew team.  Dr. Ford expressed his desire firmly to the athletic department, and Mr. Kelly threw his weight into securing use and space at the Vesper Boat Club, the very club his grandfather rowed for at the start of his remarkable career, a hundred years ago.

While these conversations were brewing, the search for a crew coach was underway.  A few months prior to the summer of ’08, Hanne Gradinger was elevated from a substitute role and offered a full-time art teacher position at Penn Charter’s middle school.  The oars were finally in place.

In high school in Kansas City, Mo., Ms. Gradinger belonged to a crew club, then went on to the University of Colorado, where she was the stroke-seat rower in the Buffaloes’ lightweight eight.  Before taking the helm at Penn Charter, she coached the novice female rowers at the Shipley School.  Her assistant is former Ithaca College rower Emma Morrow.  Both women enjoy sharing their passion and knowledge about the sport to young people.

“I love coaching mostly because I love the sport of rowing,” offers Ms. Gradinger.  “I love watching my athletes embrace the fact that rowing is the ultimate team sport, and once they start to understand that, it creates a very strong bond within the team.  Rowing develops honesty, responsibility, and reliability in a person.  What better time to instill those qualities than in high school?”

Practices for the rookie team, initially granted junior-varsity status, began last March when the weather was still so cold that even runners on Kelly Drive were rare.  For the first few weeks, the coaches worked with Penn Charter students in the classroom and on the docks, a steep learning curve for many, that included first learning a new vocabulary—what is an erg, a gate, a rigger?—then learning proper etiquette and equipment care.

Getting the boats down from the racks and onto the water requires technique and teamwork, to say nothing about actual competitive rowing maneuvers on the water. Penn Charter students took to the program quickly, the coxwains’ eyes clearly focused on the finish line and on gaining varsity status as soon as possible, possibly this upcoming spring.

Practices for the inaugural season were held five-days-a-week, from 3:30—6pm on the River, and also two mornings a week in the weightroom, from 6:45 to 7:45 am.  Generally Sundays were reserved for competitions with storied names like the Manny Flick Regattas, the Dr. Robert White Regatta, and the Stotesbury Cup Regatta.  Penn Charter’s roster consisted of 23 rowers in 9th through 11th grades, 5 boys and 18 girls, and they usually competed in two doubles, one quad, and one eight (four rented boats in all). This spring Penn Charter hopes to own at least one boat and a set of oars.  Work is already underway on designing the school symbol and colors for the blades of the oars.

For a typical practice, training consists of a series of drills that work on different aspects of the stroke—how to apply pressure, when to apply pressure, and how and when to pause, the whole effort geared towards synchronizing body and blade movements.  The practices for the week build up in intensity and duration and then taper approaching race day.  Some practices involve the repetition of “steady state pieces,” continuous rowing, or aerobic exercises, where the workout is equivalent to a runner’s long-slow-distance workout.

Other practices are focused more on prep racing, like a runner’s training intervals, where students practice the starting race sequence as well as strategies for when and how to effectively “power through” a race.   Each rower, or team of rowers, yearns for the “swing,” that hard-to-define feeling when near-perfect synchronization of motion occurs in the boat, the feeling of cutting through the water and leaving friction, that enemy of racers in all sports, almost in the wake.

A typical practice on the water is an exercise in individual-boat coordination and whole-team coordination.  Synchronization is the best word to describe it, for on the water there is no place for the lone ranger.  “Everyone has to work together, which means that the boat is like a person,” offers Maggie Faigen, current 11th grader at Penn Charter.  “The entire boat has to think as one,” concurs Dylan Smith, 11th grader.  “Bow through coxswain, we all have to help each other, not work against each other.”  Once launched from the dock, rowers congregate on the west bank and “weigh enough” (stop) for all PC boats and coaches.

The River is marked by physical landmarks, such as the Girard Train Bridge, Girard Ave., Columbia Bridge, Strawberry Mansion Bridge, the Island, the Wire, and Gillin Boathouse.  With often more than 20 high-school crew teams on the water at once—and an occasional non-competitive dragonboat clipping the water with its small army of paddles—circumnavigating the Schuylkill is a remarkable exercise in inter-school group work.  Only rowers get a unique view of the city’s skyline.  The busy commute on all sides is strangely out of earshot, and there’s a stillness on the water that is almost palpable.

“I like how diverse and intricate crew is,” explains Susannah Bonn, current 10th grader.  “At times it seems like a team-oriented sport, staying together and pulling your weight.  But sometimes it’s all about you, your stroke rating, your 2K time, or your layback at the finish.  I also like the intensity of some practices.  I never ran four-plus miles on a Saturday. I don’t like ordinary sports, and crew was something that I’d never thought about.  It was a really rewarding experience.”

There is synergy at work here, and not just on the water, but in time, in the wonderful way that remarkable people come together to make opportunities real and attainable for others.  Crew at Penn Charter can be traced back almost a hundred years, with short-lived explosions of interest.

Almost 65 years ago, Penn Charter, organized its first complete rowing team, with local legend John B. Kelly, Sr. as the head coach and Kel, his son, as the captain. The rest of the 1945 athletes were completely inexperienced.  Many members of that magnificent team went on to respectable rowing careers in college, and many continued to row competitively and recreationally throughout their lives, passing the joy onto their children, and eventually to their children’s children.  The sculls have come back to Penn Charter.  For a new generation of student-athletes, the journey begins anew.

[Mark Franek served as an English teacher and dean of students at Penn Charter from 1999-2007.  He is the academic dean at the Rock School for Dance Education.]

NOTABLE STUDENT QUOTES:

“I enjoy going out on the water everyday with people I like being with.  I have grown to really like our team and how we work together.  Crew is more than a team sport.  There is no one person scoring a goal.  Unless the entire team has the same power and stroke, we won’t go anywhere.”

—Alixandre Azizi, 11^th grade

“I actually started crew a little later than everyone else.  The reason I joined was because I wanted to do a spring sport, and my sister, who was already on crew, told me they needed a coxswain.  I wasn’t sure what that was at first but when she told me it was a short person who gave orders, I decided that crew was the perfect sport for me.”

—Julia Binswanger, 10^th grade

“I wanted to try something different than I’ve never done.  I really like crew because it’s not only a team sport but a family sport.  My parents claim to watch me when I play soccer when in fact their heads rarely look up from their PDAs, but with crew they bond with the other parents and spend the whole day watching.  I also like getting shirts for each race.  It’s nice having a reminder of what I’ve done.  Also, you can never have too many shirts.”

—Liz Binswanger, 12^th grade

“I love the sport of rowing because it is a true team sport.  Rowing requires you to row in synchronized motion with the rest of your team.  If anyone is not rowing in tandem, the whole boat gets off balance.  Equally, dedication is essential.  If someone can’t make practice, nobody from their boat gets to row.  The boat requires 100% participation and will not move for less.”

—Billy Wagner, 12^th grade

“The reason I enjoy rowing is the ‘zone’ I feel  moving in unison with other people, the feeling as the boat is heaved forward by four people working together.  I love the feeling at the finish.  I am too tired to think but I can row.  Rowing is a part of me.”

—Alex Brown, 11^th grade

“The first time I was in a boat I was not happy. It was raining the whole time.  When I got off the water, I looked at how much I had improved from just that one practice, and I looked up and down the river knowing that we were one of the only teams to go out in the rain, and we rowed the whole course.  I felt a lot of gratification.  I also realized that I survived the cold rainy weather, knowing conditions couldn’t get much worse.  My first race was on a beautiful sunny 80 degree day.  There is nothing better than spending a day like that on the river.”

—Christy Chollak, 12^th grade

“The feeling of moving through water is almost a spiritual experience, especially the feeling of moving in unity in a quad or an eight.  Crew rewards hard work and determination on both an individual and group level.  Whether you’re a natural, or just average, if you put the time in to train properly, you will get better.  You will see the water going by faster.”

—Nick Kelly, 12^th grade

Mark and May Mon got married on June 6th, 2009, in their backyard.  The reception was at the Bellevue.  It rained 21 days in June, but not on this day.

Penn Charter and George School Students ’share’ a very old building.

[This contracted piece appeared in the Penn Charter Alumni magazine, Penn Charter Today, Spring 2009 edition.  The images are owned by Charles S. Hough, and used here by permission. Click here for the magazine clipping; only for fast connections.]

In the pre-rush hour dawn of July 10, 1972, a police escort and two flatbed trucks carrying eight magnificent hand-hewn wooden trusses from the Twelfth Street Meetinghouse inched north, throwing a shadow on Center City Philadelphia for the last time. The centuries-old roof trusses—measuring 20 feet high by 58 feet wide—wound their way north from Twelfth and Market streets, veering in and out of parked cars and beneath overhead cables, turned right on Spring Garden, then north on Delaware Avenue, the entire caravan seeking the breathing room of Interstate 95 and the final destination. The new home of the Meetinghouse would not be William Penn Charter School, whose students and faculty had used the Twelfth Street Meetinghouse for 50 years, from 1875 to 1925, prior to the school’s move to its present location. The Meetinghouse’s new home was destined to be George School in Bucks County, 35 miles up the Interstate. How the complex move occurred is a fascinating story. Why the building didn’t end up on School House Lane is a question often posed by members of the current Penn Charter community. The answer, like much of Penn Charter history, is recorded in a leather-bound volume of the Minute Book, the recorded minutes of meetings of the school’s Overseers.

Handling the Herculean move and reconstruction process was Charles S. Hough, a 1944 George School graduate and a founder of Hayes & Hough Architects. Hough later served as the principal architect for Penn Charter, from 1975 to 1995, and his son, Paul H. Hough OPC ’77, has also been an enthusiastic supporter of the school. Hough orchestrated every aspect of the de-construction and move as well as the reconstruction of the Twelfth Street Meetinghouse at George School. Workers began with the roof, peeling off one layer at a time. After the wooden “skeleton” of the roof was fully exposed, they dismantled the rafters and the horizontal timbers, leaving the trusses—the thick triangular vertebrae of the roof—visible from below. They reinforced the trusses and lowered them to the ground, wrapped the entire assembly in polyethylene and laid them on flatbed trucks. Brick by brick, workers dismantled the façade of the building, carefully chipping away the mortar and saving the bricks for future use.

The crew salvaged most of the building’s structure and historically significant artifacts and transported them to George School for reuse. The materials included the eight trusses, exterior doors and hardware, porches and marble steps, exterior trim, windows and shutters, stone paving bricks, about 50 percent of the exterior bricks, several foot-scrapers, wainscoting and stair railings, pine floorboards, many of the wooden benches and cushions, and the facing bench. Capping off a remarkable list of items was a floor joist, signed “1755 AC + IC” —initials for Abraham Carlisle, the master carpenter, and Isaac Coates, his apprentice. The carpenters’ initials were formed by handmade nails driven into the face of the beam, a pre “John Hancock” of sorts. (Some perspective: The Boston patriot John Hancock would not attach his prominent signature to the bottom of the Declaration of Independence at Independence Hall, a few blocks away, for another 21 years.)

Once relocated to George School, the smaller parts were stored in the school’s old cow barn, while the trusses were stored in a temporary, weatherproof shelter in the woods. Work began in the spring of 1973 and concluded the following year. The architects and George School officials emphasized a recycling and “greening” philosophy that was rare in its time. The builders relied heavily on meticulous architectural notes, diagrams and photographs of the Twelfth Street structure. The building was modernized, but Hough worked to retain the harmony and spirit of the original. Hough opened up the pitched part of the roof and exposed the bottom half of the trusses to the gathered meeting below. Honoring the value of honest work and the resiliency of good craft, Hough embedded Carlisle’s initialed joist in the wall directly above the facing bench.

On September 24, 1974, a little more than two years after that pre-dawn journey from Center City, the George School community rededicated the structure, providing future generations of friends, faculty and schoolchildren the opportunity to worship and assemble in one of America’s most notable meeting houses.

The Meetinghouse that now resides on a gentle hill amidst a cluster of trees on the George School campus can trace much of its material to the original 1812 structure at 20 South Twelfth Street. Some of its material—six of the eight trusses and some of the floor beams—dates even further back in time to The Great Meeting House. That predecessor, a smaller structure erected in 1755 at Second and Market, or High Street as Market was then called, was the principal place of Quaker worship during the Revolution and the presidency of George Washington. In fact, the Great Meeting House site was in use well before 1755, and older meeting houses on the plot can be traced back to 1695, predating the city’s Colonial courthouse, which was built nearby in 1707. Centuries later, the Twelfth Street Meetinghouse is now into its third decade in the care of George School—and the building has been magnificently restored and cared for and looks as if it has always existed in that zip code.

Henry Cadbury, a Quaker historian and birthright member of Twelfth Street Meeting—and also an 1899 graduate of Penn Charter—documented the centrality of the building to Penn Charter and the Friends community in a paper presented in 1962 at the Twelfth Street Meetinghouse in honor of its 150th anniversary. “The worship and ministry and the organized life of the meeting differed little from those of other meetings in the city or out of it,” Cadbury wrote. “The most distinctive features were perhaps what I might call extra-curricular—organizations loosely attached to it or located near. Two of these connections are particularly conspicuous, each lasting about a half century. One was the William Penn Charter School, whose staff and students attended midweek meeting in this house every Wednesday in term time. . . . The other major connection . . . is the American Friends Service Committee from 1917 to 1960.”

Since 1917, the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) has organized humanitarian and relief endeavors around the globe, fighting for social justice, human rights and peace in some of the world’s most violent and disadvantaged places. In 1947, AFSC received the Nobel Peace Prize, along with the British Friends Service Council, on behalf of Quakers worldwide, and Cadbury accepted the prize on behalf of AFSC. Not bad for an organization that migrated from the Friends Institute next door, to the lobby of the Twelfth Street Meetinghouse, to the dining room, and finally to small offices in the Meetinghouse’s attic, girded, literally, by those giant trusses. In the spring of 1975, AFSC moved into the Friends Center, a modern-looking structure adjacent to the Race Street Meeting House.

As Cadbury noted, Penn Charter students and teachers attended meeting “in this house” from 1875 when Penn Charter built a new schoolhouse at the corner of 12th and Market until 1925 when Penn Charter departed Center City for the green space of Germantown. School documents from the late 1800s explain the reason for the move: Headmaster Richard Mott Jones believed the school should offer students physical education and sports as part of the curriculum, but the Center City school did not have adequate space. Mott looked for short-term fixes—including trying to get permission from the Pennsylvania Railroad YMCA to use a playing field at its 52nd Street Station—and advocated for a long-term solution: 20 to 30 acres of land outside Center City. The school acquired acreage on School House Lane and, in the early part of the 20th century, began using the property for athletic fields. Mott Jones, who resigned in 1917 because of poor health, did not live to see the move to the new property in 1925.

In the ensuing decades, Penn Charter bought adjacent land, and by the 1970s owned almost 40 acres—enough to make room for the Twelfth Street Meetinghouse, which was in need of a new home. In 1956, two downtown meetings, the Philadelphia Monthly Meeting for the Western District, popularly known as the Twelfth Street Meeting, and the Philadelphia Meeting of Friends, called Race Street Meeting, merged to become the Central Philadelphia Monthly Meeting. In her book In the Shadow of William Penn, Margaret Hope Bacon gives a concise history of Central Philadelphia Meeting and she chronicles how, for nearly a decade and a half, the newly created meeting was challenged by complicated talks about how to deal with redundant property, including Twelfth Street and, on Race Street just above Fifteenth Street, the meeting house that survived and is still used today. In September 1969, Central Philadelphia Monthly Meeting entered into an agreement to sell the Twelfth Street Meetinghouse and land for $810,000 to the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society (PSFS) with the option of being able to move the building. PSFS had long since bought and razed (in 1929) the five-floor William Penn Charter School building, which resided on the southwest corner of Market and Twelfth Streets, and replaced it with a towering skyscraper. For nearly four decades, PSFS had been eyeing the Meetinghouse property, just to the south, as a site for further expansion.

Perhaps driven by negative publicity over the pending destruction of a structure with significant ties to Philadelphia and Quaker history, PSFS delayed razing the Meetinghouse and instead left it in the care of the seller, Central Philadelphia Monthly Meeting, which spent many meetings trying to find a proper home for the building. Penn Charter was interested, but so were many other organizations, including the Philadelphia Community College and a local synagogue. Some members of the Meeting objected to selling and moving the building at all. Others pondered the best use of the money once a deal was finalized. According to Bacon, the Meeting proceeded with the sale of the building to PSFS on October 10, 1971, with this justification noted in the minutes: “Since we are an urban meeting our main thrust should be toward the urban crisis and urban development.” During the 1960s, the problems associated with urban decay, inner-city poverty, and racism prompted many urban churches and community organizations to rethink how best to use resources and influence public policy.

Roger Hillas OPC ’45, currently a senior Overseer and then treasurer of the Penn Charter’s governing board, clearly recalls discussions four decades ago about moving the Twelfth Street Meetinghouse. “We were interested,” said Hillas, “but it was going to cost a fortune.”

Hillas’s recollection is supported by school records. Among the dozens of leather volumes on the bookcases in the office of Head of School Darryl J. Ford are four Minute Book binders (earlier volumes are stored in the school archive) recording the minutes of the “Overseers of the Public School Founded by Charter in the Town and County of Philadelphia in Pennsylvania.” Minutes for Dec. 15, 1970, signed by Clerk Barbara S. Sprogell, read: “Expression has been made by several Friends of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting that since the ground under the 12th Street Meetinghouse has been sold and the Centers Committee has no interest in moving the 12th Street Meetinghouse to 15th and Race Streets that one solution might be to give the meetinghouse to Penn Charter in Germantown. Overseers expressed their great willingness to have this Meetinghouse on their property if arrangements could be made to have it moved with funds not belonging to the School.”

Then, almost a year later, this entry for the meeting of Nov. 23, 1971: “Overseers again talked of the possible acquisition of the 12th Street Meeting House for Penn Charter, and arrived at the decision that while desiring it, they thought it unwise as well as impossible to consider spending four to five hundred thousand dollars on moving it to the School grounds. Nor was it deemed the best use of the school’s money to spend upwards of fifty thousand dollars to salvage the beams and woodwork of the Meeting House for their possible later use in a new Meeting House for the School.”

Forty years later, Hough said that it cost $60,000 to deconstruct the meeting house and transport it to George School and, although he did not have a cost on the reconstruction of the building, the figure of $400,000 to $500,000 “did not surprise me.”

The Minute Book not only confirms Hillas’s recollection, it puts his comment in perspective. Penn Charter’s entire budget for 1970-71 was $1,091,945 and the half-million dollar cost of the meeting house project was almost equal to the sum Penn Charter spent that year on teacher salaries: $523,500. (In 1970, teacher salaries ranged from $7,000 to $12,500.) The Minute Book also shows the school engaged in long-range planning for building projects, including renovations to the Main Building and, attached to the kindergarten building, construction of a new Lower School with classrooms for grades 1 through 5.

With the withdrawal of Penn Charter, the problem of what to do with the Meetinghouse still remained. But not for long. In December 1971, Eric Curtis, then head of George School, announced that an anonymous donor—later identified as the Spruance and Alden families— offered to pay to reconstruct the building on its campus if the Meeting paid to dismantle and transport the building. It appeared to be a win-win situation.

The Twelfth Street Meetinghouse, completed in September 1974, continues to throw beautiful shadows on the lives of those who assemble under its giant trusses in Bucks County. For those in the Penn Charter community who wish the historic building was on our current campus, the solace in this story may be the understanding that the building went not to a better home, but to an equally suitable one.

Mark Franek is the former dean of students at the William Penn Charter School. He is currently the academic dean at the Rock School for Dance Education.

Many of the images in this book would not surprise Quaker schoolchildren in a bygone era of modest schoolhouses and meeting rooms, of cobbled streets and dirt roads, nor would this book seem quaint or mysterious to current students. Friends schools have always had a distinct philosophy of education.

[I recently co-wrote and published a modest little book about Quaker education called, Philadelphia Friends Schools.  The book was a joint-project between the Friends Council on Education and Arcadia Press. The co-writer, Janet Chance, is the lower school director at the William Penn Charter School.  Gathering the photographs required the help of archivists from ten of Philadelphia's oldest Quaker schools.  Writing the captions and chapter introductions appeared to be a straightforward task, but the peculiar components of Quaker education did not lend themselves to easy explanation.  Below are two excerpts.]

Excerpt from the Introduction to Philadelphia Friends Schools:

This book contains a unique series of photographs from the archives of the Philadelphia-area Friends schools that were founded before the 20th century: Friends Select School and William Penn Charter School, both of which trace their roots to 1689; Abington Friends School, 1697; Plymouth Meeting Friends School, 1780; Westtown School, 1799; Frankford Friends School, 1833; Friends’ Central School, 1845; Germantown Friends School, 1855; Greene Street Friends School, 1855; and George School, 1893.

After a glimpse into the origins of each school (chapter one), this book focuses on the unique pedagogy of the Philadelphia-area Friends schools during the 20th century. The chapters highlight distinctive features of Quaker education: Meeting for Worship (chapter two), Inquiry and Innovation (chapter three), Community and Collaboration (chapter four), Experiential Learning (chapter five), and Peace and Social Justice (chapter six). An introduction explains the importance of the each chapter’s theme and its relevance to Quaker pedagogy. Concluding the collection is a chapter on the Friends Council on Education, the umbrella organization for Friends schools in the United States.

Curiously, many of the images and captions in this book would not surprise Quaker schoolchildren in a bygone era of modest schoolhouses and meeting rooms, of cobbled streets and dirt roads, nor would this book seem quaint or mysterious to current students. Friends schools have always had a distinct philosophy of education. Friends believe that each person has the capacity for goodness, and the school takes responsibility to nurture that goodness. Friends schools believe that education is preparation for the whole of life: the lively development of intellectual, physical, and social-emotional capacities, as well as the development of the spirit. Friends schools are spiritual communities based on the belief that there is that of God in everyone, yet Friends schools do not proselytize or seek to convert students or faculty.

Excerpt from Chapter Two, “Meeting for Worship,” of Philadelphia Friends Schools:

Simple in design, minimally comfortable and as broad as space allows, the Meeting bench has been a Friends school’s most important learning tool for more than 300 years.

—Robert Smith, Quaker educator

Meeting for worship—or simply, meeting—has played a central part in the curricula of all American Friends schools since their emergence in Philadelphia more than three centuries ago. Even though meeting does not appear anywhere on the transcript, it is the spiritual and educational center of the school. Not only do Friends schools discuss the importance of community, they also deliberately protect and nourish their community. In perhaps no other sustained educational activity is the interconnection and possibilities of the individual and the group publicly under construction each week. Quaker educators and philosophers have variously described meeting as a budding flower, a waiting stream, and a night sky. While no two meetings for worship are exactly the same, the general idea is that members of the community assemble in the meeting room, settle into silence, and remain in silent reflection unless someone—from a kindergartner to the head of school—is moved by the spirit or an inner voice to stand up and speak. The messages are surrounded by long periods of silence. Occasionally a story is shared that is so powerful and memorable that it illuminates the room like a northern star. Other messages come and go like fireflies. At still other times, the message emerges from the communal silence and washes up on shore of the individual mind, like a true unexpected treasure. Genuine reflection and the notion that all lives are hopeful and intertwined are difficult concepts to model and teach week after week, yet that is what Friends schools are doing. This chapter contains images of meeting for worship from the archives of Philadelphia-area Friends schools. The photographs are not ordered by date; instead, they show how the meeting unfolds from the perspective of schoolchildren, who arrive at Friends schools with a wide variety of religious beliefs and practices, including some with solely secular backgrounds.

[To buy the book, visit the FCE website: Philadelphia Friends Schools.]

[Mark Franek is the academic dean at the Rock School for Dance Education in Philadelphia, and Janet Chance is the lower school director at the William Penn Charter School, also in Philadelphia.]

The Presidency is an office of enormous but not unlimited power.

[This piece appeared in the Philadelphia Lawyer Magazine's spring 2009 edition.  Click here for the magazine clipping; only for fast connections.]

Andrew Patel is probably the only lawyer in the United States who has stood at Ground Zero moments before the Earth shook, and then, in the terrible wake of the tragedy, went on to vigorously defend suspected terrorists, just like he did before the towers fell. His clients have uncommon names like El Sayyid Nosair—a convicted murderer, suspected of masterminding the 1993 World Trade Center bombing from prison—and José Padilla—the so called “dirty bomber” and the man whose case is the basis of this story. No one would accuse Mr. Patel of having an easy job. His clients are often demonized by the media. His opponents often have unlimited resources.

The federal government arrested José Padilla, an American citizen, in Chicago on May 8, 2002, and detained him as a material witness until June 9, 2002, when President Bush designated him an “enemy combatant.” Mr. Padilla was subsequently transferred to a military prison in South Carolina where he was held, without trial and in extreme solitary confinement, for over three-and-a-half years on suspicion of plotting a radioactive “dirty bomb” attack inside the United States. For over two years he was denied counsel. After pressure from civil liberties groups and lawyers, including Mr. Patel, the Padilla case was eventually moved to a civilian court.

In a dramatic turn of events, the federal government’s November 2005 indictment did not mention the alleged crimes that had lead to Mr. Padilla’s “enemy combatant” status and his forty-three months of solitary confinement. No mention of a dirty bomb, no mention of planned attacks—or of “planning to plan” attacks—on U.S. soil, and no direct references to Al-Qaeda. Instead, the indictment accused Mr. Padilla of conspiring to murder, kidnap, and maim people overseas. Furthermore, the indictment was handed down several days before a pending Supreme Court hearing on the Padilla case, which would have lead to a showdown between the Court and the President, and likely to more clarity about the limits of the President’s power during war-time.

The change in strategy ultimately worked in favor of the government. After only three days of deliberation, on August 16, 2007, a federal jury in Miami, Florida, found Mr. Padilla guilty of charges that he conspired to kill people in an overseas jihad and to fund and support overseas terrorism. He was sentenced to seventeen years and four months in prison. In one of his first public statements after the conviction, Mr. Patel, in a radio interview, observed: “You have to excuse me. It’s hard to summarize what, to me, is a human tragedy in a sentence or two. We were very sad, very disappointed, and had been hoping for a different verdict. We had been hoping that José would be home with his family today.”

Recently, Mr. Patel spoke to Philadelphia Lawyer magazine editorial board member, May Mon Post, about the Padilla case. Ms. Post and writer Mark Franek took the transcript from the telephone interview and nixed the original questions. Where it seemed appropriate, boldface was added and Mr. Patel’s answers were reordered. The goal was to tell a story in the manner of Esquire magazine’s “What I’ve Learned” column.

I was in lower Manhattan. I will never forget. I was so close. We could not see the building fall. According to the New York Times, if you look at the photographs of the South Tower, which was the first one to fall, and there’s an amazing photograph of it just starting to collapse. And if you look at the bottom of the photograph, you’ll see this brown cloud. According to the The Times, that cloud was moving at 140 miles an hour. I can tell you that from where I was standing, which was two blocks away, when something’s coming at you at 140 miles an hour, you get two steps and then the lights go out. I actually put my hand in front of my face and could not see it. You couldn’t see, you couldn’t breathe. I had been standing shoulder to shoulder with two people from my office, and they just disappeared. I eventually—if you’ve seen people covered with white ash—looking like ghost people. I was one of those people. I had chemical burns in my eyes from the material. As I explained to a friend of mine, for some of us, 9/11 was not a television experience. When you say I will never forget it, that much is beyond the shadow of doubt.

The Padilla case is about Mr. Padilla and the Constitutional principles that came out of this case, but it wasn’t really about the Constitution [itself]. That sounds like a trite answer, but it’s really not. This case concerned, as the Supreme Court eventually put it, the authority of the most powerful office on the planet. Can the President order someone to be held by the military as a matter of executive whim? I don’t use the word “whim” lightly. But when you’re a judge, jury and sentencer, then whim becomes the appropriate word.

The notion that the law applies equally to one and all broke down in this case. Here we had the President himself say: “I order that this person be detained by the United States military,” and essentially argue that no court would have the authority to overrule, limit, or interfere with the President’s power to order someone’s detention. And that was really an extraordinary claim of authority by the President of the United States.

In the southern district of New York and in almost all of the federal courts, there is a panel of private attorneys who have sufficient experience in federal criminal investigations where the court will ask us to represent individuals who can’t afford to hire an attorney. I am a member of what is called the Criminal Justice Act Panel in Manhattan. It was Chief Judge McCavey who asked me to get involved with the Padilla case. There’s a very clear rule of federal litigation; when a judge asks you to do something, the answer is always “yes.” That’s how I got involved in this case and these cases.

The public basis for initially declaring Mr. Padilla to be “an enemy combatant” was a declaration by an employee of the Department of Defense—a lawyer—containing certain factual allegations of which that individual had no personal knowledge. In other words, it was entirely hearsay.

At that time there was no redefined definition of an enemy combatant. It basically comes out of a Supreme Court decision from World War II, and at that point what it really meant was an “enemy soldier.” But it’s been somewhat more defined as the litigation went along. But this is not a term that prior to this round of activity by the United States government was generally used in the discussions of the law of war. For example, if the term “negligence” is a legal term that lawyers and jurors understand, and the court can define, and has defined, there will be a dispute about whether a specific act is or is not negligent. The term “enemy combatant” has no such definition. If it sounds bizarre, that’s because it was.

The general allegations were that they had information—there was what was called the Mobbs Declaration, which was the basis for the President’s order, and there was an affidavit from an FBI agent that was the basis for the warrant for Mr. Padilla’s arrest. To answer your question, Michael H. Mobbs, Special Advisor to the Undersecretary Defense for Policy, declares that he is a government employee in the Department of Defense, government reports in records about Mr. Padilla, relevant to the President’s June 9th determination that he is an enemy combatant—I’m sort of paraphrasing this. The information is derived from multiple intelligence sources regarding Abu Zubaydah and Binyama Mohammed. The term “intelligence source” is a broad term. It can be anything from a newspaper report to anyone who talks to someone who then talks to an intelligence officer.  As to these two intelligence sources, the government has admitted that Zubaydah was water boarded. There has been a great deal of litigation and media coverage concerning Benyamin Mohammed. He experienced a rendition to Morroco where he was treated in a manner that would make water boarding seem like a day in the park.

It is distressing that the warrant [in Padilla’s case] was supported only by information obtained by torture. When the source of information is obtained by torture, and the person providing information has no personal knowledge of the source, then you have unreliable information being reported as hearsay. So you have unreliability on top of unreliability, and based on that unreliability, which the government has now to a certain extent admitted, wouldn’t stand up in court. You have someone being thrown into a military brig and held in complete isolation for over three years. In other words, just because someone wants to say something bad about somebody, doesn’t mean it’s true.

For example: If the government obtained an affidavit that said [a person named] Muhammad had met with you, and you had planned to perform a terrorist act in the United States, but there’s no statement from Muhammad, the person who gives the statement never met Muhammad. There’s no information about how the statement was obtained from Muhammad. And yet, you’re thrown in jail, not even a jail that a judge has sent you to, but a jail the President has sent you to. That’s essentially what happened to Mr. Padilla.

When you say “allowed to happen” you assume there must have been a rational basis for it. But this happened because the President said, “I have the authority to do this.” This is exactly what the Constitution was designed to prevent: that level of assertion of power by any branch of government.

The important thing was not what Mr. Padilla said [during interrogation that resulted in a “confession”], but the fact that he was held under military detention by order of the President, and not by order of a judge. He was taken outside the Constitutional system. So what he said is really irrelevant, and has never been and probably never will be used in a court of law.

A conspiracy is an agreement between two or more people to do something unlawful. That’s a classic definition of a criminal conspiracy. The question is, can you have an agreement to agree to commit some crime that hasn’t happened? And the crime that Mr. Padilla was charged with was a conspiracy to commit murder overseas. So it was a conspiracy on top of a conspiracy. And it really kind of stretches the very logic of conspiracy law.

There was no dirty bomb. And the government brought an entirely different set of accusations against Mr. Padilla [in Miami]. The dirty bomb rumors, to be polite, were irrelevant to the charges in Miami. He just was not charged with anything to do with the dirty bomb. Because there was none.

Well, it’s because the Attorney General of the United States went on television and said, “We stopped this guy from setting off a dirty bomb.”

This case was about some very fundamental basic issues. Does the President have the authority to hold someone on his own authority? Does a court have a right to say, “I’m sorry, Mr. President, you can’t do that.” And a number of courts did say, “Mr. President, you don’t have the right to do that.” You don’t have the authority. The Constitution does not give your office the power to do that. It is an office of enormous but not unlimited power.

You don’t have to wait for terrorists acts to be completed before you begin an investigation or a prosecution. That’s certainly true. Because, when guys are clearly involved in attempting to build a bomb [or planning a terrorist attack], that’s one thing. But you also have people who are involved in more advocacy kinds of things. And then the question becomes, Where do you draw the line?

I’m a solo practitioner, but there was a team of us working on the Padilla case. One of the things that really pleased me and made me very proud of our profession was the way lawyers from medium firms, big firms, and small firms rose to the occasion and didn’t say, “Oh, no, this is too controversial for me.” But wrote magnificent amicus briefs at every level. At the District Court level, at the Circuit Court level, and then the Supreme Court. They made themselves available to discuss some of the very arcane issues involved. So it was really the support that we got from the legal community. I think it’s something that all of us can be very proud of. I thought it was extraordinary. It was not, “what’s in it for us, or for our firm?” Instead, it was, “We think this is important. What can we do to help?”

                                                         #   #   #

[May Mon Post, an editorial board member, is the owner of the Post Law Firm and President of the Asian American Bar Association of Pennsylvania. Mark Franek is a freelance writer and a member of Cabrini College’s English department.]

People who are out of work tend to take things personally. It helps to rally around friends and family.

[This piece appeared in the Baltimore Sun on Thursday, April 2nd.  The original version appears below.]

My fiancée and I have six college and graduate school degrees between us. For nearly two decades, we’ve worked in non-finance-related, white-collar professions. Last winter she was laid off without warning and without a severance package. This spring I found out that my contract will not be renewed at the college where I teach due to cuts in the budget resulting from a significant downturn in tuition-paying students.¹

With no kids and good credentials, we are fairly advantaged members of the swelling ranks of the unemployed. The situation for us isn’t dire. Yet. But we are experiencing a variety of emotional and financial realities that our parents and our professors virtually promised us would never happen.

To quote the last line of a poem by Emily Dickinson called “After Great Pain”: “First—Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go.”

My fiancée, who has been jobless for about six months, is in the “letting go” stage. She has started her own business and is busy every day chasing potential clients, updating her Web site and organizing her home office. Her business is showing signs of life. Our friends have helped immensely by referring potential clients to her services via word of mouth, e-mail, Facebook and LinkedIn.

The social networking aspect of the Web has been a godsend. It doesn’t translate immediately to dollars, but it makes one feel a part of a wider community.

I, on the other hand, am still in the “stupor” stage, which for me is a state of mental numbness and bodily lethargy. But it’s fading.

Our wedding is going ahead, but not exactly as planned. We explained our circumstances to the folks at our contracted businesses, and several let us out of the deal without penalty. We are getting married in our backyard, and then heading to the city for an intimate meal with a much smaller cast.

We will go on our honeymoon when one of us gets a job with steady pay.

Meanwhile, if unemployment creates uncertainty for us, it is also terra incognita for our friends and family members who are fortunate to still have their jobs. There is very little advice out there for people who want to find appropriate ways to help friends or loved ones who recently received pink slips. Giving or loaning money is a sticky wicket, but there are other things friends and family can do that don’t require much effort but still make a big difference.

First, keep the lines of communication open and light-hearted. My father recently e-mailed me a picture of his labrador retriever, her nose brown from digging in the dirt, with this message in the subject line: “Even for the brown-nosers, times are Ruff!”

That made me smile.

It also helps to exercise empathy and patience. My friends and family—and to some degree, my fiancée—have all shown an amazing capacity to endure my rants, which are worse than usual, and part of my overall coping strategy.

For instance, last month, amid the AIG payout scandal, my credit card company informed me that my annual percentage rate had increased due to “adverse market conditions.” I suspect that tens of thousands of Americans received similar notifications. The irony was so thick, you could cut it with a derivative.

People who are out of work tend to take things personally.

Just listening, without judging—even if the rants omit facts or cast impossibly wide nets—is beneficial.

Small kindnesses go a long way. Recently, friends of ours invited us to dinner at their house. Mercifully, they didn’t use the fancy dinner plates, break out the good wine or expect us to talk about our situation.

Better times are on the horizon, somewhere. According to the pundits, it’s going to take collaboration at all levels of government and in board rooms all across America to get us out of this mess. We don’t believe that Americans—and American institutions—are inherently greedy and mean-spirited.

We will get through this. Friendship and support are the currency of compassion. They cost virtually nothing.

Mark Franek lives in Philadelphia. He is a co-author, most recently, of the book “Philadelphia Friends Schools.”

¹ A few weeks after this article appeared, I was offered a job at The Rock School, and May Mon settled her first case under her own shingle, The Post Law Firm.  A friend of mine called this article “a typical case of premature Franek elocution.”