Such was the dangerous state of affairs in Great Britain nearly two centuries ago, when that nation veered as close as it ever has come to outright revolution and a French-style overthrow of the government.

Reform-minded politicians knew they had to let some air into the system or the entire country would explode. So, the Parliament—through brinksmanship and arm-twisting, over the strenuous objection of aristocrats—passed the landmark Representation of the People Act of 1832.

The law’s primary purpose was redrawing the gerrymandered districts of Parliament, which still conformed to boundaries determined in the 12th century when the institution was in its infancy. Parliament had been born of arguments over taxes between rural strongmen and King Henry III that the reforms of the Magna Carta hadn’t been able to completely soothe. The balance of power between the crown and the nobles was evened out with a roving council that took its name from the Norman word parler—“to talk.”

King Edward I made this legislature more formal a century later by designating two knights and two citizens from every major population center to confer with him on matters of state. The biggest arguments, of course, concerned taxes and how much should be raised at any given time to support various wars against regional neighbors. The citizens’ group eventually won the right to elect members of its own, which became the beginnings of the House of Commons and the Western tradition of a bicameral legislature.

England changed in the centuries after the Parliament began, but the legislative districts did not. They conformed to the kingdom’s historic counties—Devon, Yorkshire, Cornwall, Essex and the like—without taking drastic population shifts into account. The lines remained static for six centuries even as demographic change rippled through the British Isles. Parliament entered the 19th century in a dangerously unrepresentative state.

The Industrial Revolution made this problem a crisis, as new cities like Manchester and Birmingham blew up with former countryside residents jammed into urban hovels without any representation or protection. The vote was restricted to property owners, defined as those who owned a home with a kitchen hearth. The saying went: If you could boil—or “wallop,” in British parlance—a pot of water in your own house, then you could cast a ballot. (The term “potwalloper” became another word for voter.) This restriction helped keep those on church relief—especially poor Irish Catholics—from voting.

One particularly galling act of an out-of-touch Parliament was the Corn Laws of 1815. This tariff on imported food was meant to protect the incomes of gentlemen farmers—often titled nobles—who sold their harvest to domestic markets at inflated prices. Riots quickly broke out over the rising price of bread; famine-like conditions among the poor accompanied bad harvests.

But Parliament was in the hands of the wealthy, especially a bloc called “The West India interest” who had investments in the sugar plantations of the Caribbean and were dedicated to the preservation of Black slavery. The high tariffs on wheat didn’t bother them, and many of those who owned estates in both hemispheres became even richer.

Though colonies like Jamaica and Barbados officially had no seats in Parliament, their local grandees were able to game their way in because of the ancient legislative maps. They also exploited an 1800 law that created a dual borough system of representation, which allowed for two members of Parliament from every borough, no matter how few people lived there. Abandoned medieval towns with almost no residents still could send two representatives to London. One was a hilltop cathedral that had collapsed in the 13^th century. Another was a ruined port city almost completely underwater.

Big money interests, especially West Indian slaveowners, elected puppet representatives from these hollowed-out areas. A whole class of political consultants called “borough jobbers” arose to steer merchants and earls—or their compliant allies—toward available seats.

This created profound inequality. A bare handful of people from rotten boroughs sent 112 dupes, puppets, and aristocrats to the House of Commons every year. Nobody could ever be sure who paid for a seat; it was the 19th century version of dark money. Abolitionists like William Wilberforce cursed the West Indian interest. As long as it remained intact, slavery would persist.

As a result, the English working classes began to sympathize with enslaved people in the Caribbean—victims of the same heavy hand that was pressing British industrial workers deeper into abject poverty. Radical speakers attracted crowds; at one such gathering at St. Peter’s Field in Manchester, a militia charged into the crowd to break it up, hacking at bystanders with sabers and killing 18 people. The carnage became a major scandal and raised the national temperature. It also called attention to the extreme unhappiness with Parliament among city dwellers.

Then, in the elections of 1830, the reformist Whigs gained a shaky majority, their overwhelming popularity slopping even over the high gunwales of gerrymandered district lines. When the House of Lords blocked three successive bills to add seats to Parliament, more rioters took to the streets and citizens’ committees started to talk of the most un-British of subjects: revolution. The Birmingham Political Union boasted of two million citizens ready “to recover the liberty, the happiness, and the prosperity of the country.”

The government—even the monarchy—seemed on the brink, unless a valve could be found to release the pressure. Historians have given this period the cinematic name “Days of May.” On May 10, 1832, the Whig prime minister Charles Grey, the 2nd Earl Grey, resigned after the failure of the third bill to expand Parliament and was replaced by Arthur Wellesley, the 1st Duke of Wellington, a famously tone-deaf politician. He reiterated his support for the status quo, and commoners erupted. Plans for street barricades similar to the Paris Commune were passed around; reform activists readied themselves for combat and office takeovers. The wife of King William IV told her friends that she hoped she would conduct herself like a lady when she was executed.

In a panic, the king reappointed Grey, who muscled a successful bill through both houses that redrew district lines and added Parliament seats. The radicals turned their energies toward petitions and electoral campaigns, demanding pledges of slavery abolition from candidates and formulating slates of those who seemed most likely to beat the borough-jobbers and their shills. In the next set of elections (with results clear by January 8, 1833), the Whigs captured 70 percent of seats and the West Indian interest was permanently hobbled.

That same year, a reformed and reinvigorated Parliament passed the Slave Emancipation Act, setting 800,000 people on a path to freedom. The legislature also approved the Factory Act, which banned the employment of children under the age of nine.

Britain’s path to a more representative government offers lessons to nations with sclerotic legislatures that have lost the confidence of their people. The best solutions in such circumstances are to crack open the locked box of ancient customs and minoritarian rule, to expand representation in the legislative branch, and to reduce the built-in influence of big money interests. Doing so saved British democracy from collapse in the 1830s, and steered its path to an expansion of liberty.

The post How Everyday Britons Forced Their Government to Save Itself appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

One afternoon in July 1985, President Ronald Reagan met with his domestic policy council in the White House cabinet room. The question: should he keep pushing legislation to offer amnesty to undocumented migrants?

Some Reagan aides wanted him to drop his support for amnesty, the term for granting legal status to people in the country illegally. Reagan’s pollsters had told him that the public opposed amnesty. And the president’s championing of amnesty had produced defeats. Reagan’s first bill to legalize immigrants failed in Congress in 1982. In 1984, Reagan had convinced the House and Senate to pass a bill, only to see the legislation fall apart in conference committee.

But amnesty had one stalwart supporter in the room: Reagan himself.

Recently, at Reagan’s presidential library in Simi Valley, I read through the records on the legislation that became the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act. Today, IRCA doesn’t get much respect; it’s long been dismissed across the political spectrum as “the failed amnesty law.” Its central idea, of broad forgiveness and quick legal status for undocumented immigrants, is completely out of political fashion today.

But while studying the records, I was struck by the difference between the reality of the 1986 amnesty and its 2018 reputation. The 1986 law was carefully conceived, realistic, and humane—reflecting the practical wisdom of a California president.

The records show that Reagan, despite his reputation for avoiding details, was personally engaged on immigration. When aides talked about the supposed peril to public safety of immigrants, Reagan shifted the conversation to specific stories of undocumented immigrants in California who suffered because of their lesser legal status. “The president cited past cases of exploitation of illegal aliens,” according to the minutes of that 1985 meeting.

Reagan ended the meeting by saying he wanted to talk more with the legislation’s co-sponsor, a Republican U.S. senator from Wyoming named Alan K. Simpson. In those conversations, Reagan and Simpson determined to go forward with the legislation, for two big reasons.

First, they saw legalization as essential to protecting and integrating immigrants. “The work to be done is to avoid seeing this nation populated with a furtive illegal subclass of human beings who are afraid to go to the cops, afraid to go to a hospital…or afraid to go to their employer,” Simpson wrote Reagan in a private note that began, “Dear Ron.”

Second, and more important, both men were old enough to have seen immigrants used as scapegoats; they urgently wanted legislation to preempt divisive politics. “If we do not choose to have immigration reform in the near future, the alternative will not just be the status quo,” said Simpson while reintroducing the legislation in 1986. “No, the alternative instead will be an increased public intolerance—a failure of compassion, if you will—toward all forms of immigration and types of entrants—legal and illegal; refugees, permanent resident aliens, family members and all others within our borders.”

The bill did pass, and it forestalled Simpson’s nightmare—but only for a while.

Immigration restrictionists blame the 1986 law for today’s bitter conflicts over immigration. But they have it backward. Today’s immigration problems result not from amnesty but from our collective failure to understand what made the 1986 law successful.

IRCA actually had two big pieces. One—the successful piece—was amnesty, which was limited, fatefully, to immigrants who had been continuously in the U.S. since January 1, 1982. But the bill’s other big piece drew more attention and was more influential in turning immigration into an American quagmire: a new enforcement regime that prohibited hiring and employing the undocumented.

Familiar figures from today’s politics show up in the records in ways rich with irony. President Trump’s National Security Advisor, John Bolton, Trump legal spokesman Rudolph Giuliani, and Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts—all then in Reagan’s employ—worked on amnesty’s behalf. The politics around this new enforcement were scrambled and did not break down along party lines. Many Democrats opposed the bill, with some arguing that hiring restrictions would lead to discrimination against all Latinos. Labor unions worried that the bill would be too lenient on employers, particularly in agriculture, while some Republicans opposed it because it might be too tough on businesses.

Compromises pulled the bill to passage. To reassure those worried about employment discrimination, an amendment prohibited, for the very first time, employment discrimination on the basis of national origin. And, crucially, California’s own U.S. Senator Pete Wilson—who as governor in the 1990s would embrace anti-immigrant politics—helped lead negotiations that led to the creation of a special legalization category for agricultural workers.

IRCA should have been celebrated as a tremendous legislative victory. But the bill’s passage was overshadowed by news of the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger. Reagan didn’t sign the bill until after the November 1986 election, in a small ceremony subdued by the fact that Republicans had lost control of the U.S. Senate. Reporters in attendance asked about the Iran-Contra scandal, not immigration.

But in his remarks that day, Reagan unabashedly emphasized the benefits of the bill for the undocumented. “The legalization provisions in this Act will go far to improve the lives of a class of individuals who now must hide in the shadows, without access to many of the benefits of a free and open society,” he said. “Very soon many of these men and women will be able to step into the sunlight and ultimately, if they choose, they may become Americans.”

Under the two-step amnesty process, more than 3 million people applied for temporary residency, which lasted 18 months, in the first phase. In the second phase, 2.7 million people received permanent residency as a result of the law. This was the largest legalization in the country’s history, but it should have been larger. An estimated 2 million people did not legalize their status.

Why not? The law was not generous enough. It excluded newer immigrants who had come between 1982 and the law’s 1987 implementation. Some undocumented immigrants feared making themselves known, while others didn’t know about the program, because publicity and outreach came late in the window for legalization. Some were discouraged by the federal government’s bureaucratic and time-consuming legalization process of security checks, document checks, and requirements for competency in English and American civics.

In retrospect, the process should have covered all undocumented immigrants and should have established a regular amnesty process every few years, since the demand for immigrant labor was certain to keep attracting people to the country. But in many ways, amnesty was a government success story—it gave millions of people the legal status they required to have a better life. It even turned a $100 million profit for the government through the $185 fees it charged applicants.

But amnesty’s successes didn’t stop immigration restrictionists from criticizing the law and scapegoating immigrants, especially after the economy went south in the early 1990s. The main attack on the law continues to this day: Amnesty encouraged more undocumented immigrants to come, critics say. In fact, the opposite is true. Studies show that amnesty produced a small decline in the number of illegal entries into the country.

Restrictionists also have persistently claimed that only tougher border security and immigration enforcement will reduce illegal immigration. The 1986 law’s hiring enforcement provisions, and the ensuing three decades of additional border security and tough-on-immigration laws have not worked to reduce illegal immigration. Instead, the endless deluge of new laws and restrictions have made it nearly impossible for undocumented persons to legalize their status or establish themselves in the country, thus adding to the numbers of people who stay in the shadows. Even migrants who arrive legally and apply for legal status can be effectively turned into lawbreakers by the immigration system. This is pure Kafka: In the name of stopping illegal immigration, we make all immigrants illegal.

President Trump represents not a new approach but rather a nasty extension of our longstanding obsession with criminalizing immigrants; his innovations are to reclassify refugees and children as immigrant terrorists, who need their own concentration camps. This is stupidity in service of stupidity, and hatred for hatred’s sake. Today’s immigration reformers aren’t much smarter. Their proposals combine more failed border security policies with legalization plans so full of bureaucratic obstacles and delays—some proposals require a 20-year wait to achieve legal status—that they are worthless.

Sadly, both advocates and opponents of immigration now follow the same failed script of increased spending on border security, increased illegalness, and offering a narrow path to legitimacy.

It’s time to flip that script. Make amnesty, not border security, the starting point on immigration. The stance should be: not one penny for enforcement or walls until we have amnesty for all our undocumented neighbors.

Amnesty is wise policy for reasons that go beyond immigration. The United States is not just anxious and polarized now: It’s downright unforgiving. In our public sphere, we never forgive a single sin of those who trespass against us.

The Bible says this is wrong: “Forgive as the Lord forgave you,” it advises. Our lack of forgiveness is also a sign of national decline. “The weak can’t forgive,” Gandhi said. “Only the strong can.”

Americans need amnesty not to forgive our immigrants. We need amnesty so that we might forgive ourselves.

The post Why Amnesty Remains America’s Best Immigration Policy appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

To understand how polarization harms parties, consider its most direct effects. As a party’s size and base shrink, so does the diversity of its membership. Consider the situation of the two major parties in the United States. Recent Gallup figures show that 43 percent of voters now identify as independent. Meanwhile, Pew surveys show that ideological entrenchment within each party is alienating moderate voters. In effect, the two parties are burning each other’s tents to the ground.

Some critics would celebrate the demise of parties, but revitalizing modern politics requires rejuvenating parties, which remain the best means for organizing voters with common interests. The question is, how can we rebuild parties in a way that ensures better elections and a better government?

Ironically, one potential solution to the party problem would be to combine two political reforms that are often championed as the surest ways to weaken parties: ranked choice voting and the top two election system.

Ranked choice made the news cycle this summer when Maine voters used it for their primary election, while passing a ballot measure to make this system permanent. Ranked choice lets voters rank their preferred candidates in order. Election officials tally voters’ top picks and then, as needed, eliminate the last-place candidates one by one, reallocating their supporters’ votes to their next-preferred choices until a winner is determined.

The other reform is a top two election—a popular version of what is often called an open primary. In this system, all the candidates for an office appear on the same primary ballot, regardless of party. The top two finishers advance to the general election.

Advocates of these reforms often portray top two and ranked choice as ways to weaken political parties that they view as insular, ideological, and ineffective. In response, party leaders have fought ferociously against these reforms. Parties already holding power prefer closed primaries in which only those belonging to the party choose its candidates.

This opposition has a clear logic. Ranked choice and top two give independent voters more voice and give all voters more choice. This makes it harder for party leaders to elect their favored candidates.

As both reforms have been put into place, however, each has produced peculiar results to which we should pay close attention. The top two system can produce undemocratic results when the most popular political party fields many candidates and a minority party runs only two. This has happened in California, for example, when Democratic candidates in strong Democratic districts divided up the primary vote such that only two Republican candidates advanced to the general election. Subsequent turnout in the general election can plummet because majority party members, along with supporters of smaller parties, have no candidate on the ballot.

Ranked choice can also cause problems, particularly when used in combination with an instant runoff. When the top candidate in this system doesn’t win a majority of first-place votes, a runoff process eliminates the lowest-ranked candidate and distributes his/her votes to whoever was listed in second place on their supporters’ ballots. This can produce worrisome results. In 2010, the winner of the Oakland mayoral race flipped in three of six successive tallies, as lower-ranked candidates were dropped. In fact, a 2015 Electoral Studies analysis showed that instant runoff winners routinely fail to win a majority of ballots.

Critics have pointed to these difficulties as reasons for repealing ranked choice and top two. Moreover, critics argue, neither reform has proven a reliable means of empowering political moderates or encouraging political compromise.

A more realistic approach recognizes that changing election rules always involves trial and error. Rather than rejecting these reforms outright, one can look for a way to build on their strengths and shore up their weaknesses. As it turns out, pairing top two with ranked choice might yield a powerful combination—one capable of moderating the excesses of the strongest political parties and broadening their bases of support.

Last month, this idea received the endorsement of two prominent civic organizations. The Independent Voter Project, which backed top two, and FairVote, which advocates broader reforms, announced plans to merge these reforms in California. They envision a “Top Four” primary in which the four highest vote-winners compete in a ranked choice general election.

Ranked choice could curb the defects of an open primary, especially one that selects only two winners. When voters must choose a single candidate, those with narrow support can sneak through to the runoff election over preferred opponents who split each other’s vote. Letting voters name second-, third- and fourth -choice candidates who have similar platforms will produce winners with broader support.

Meanwhile, a top two—or better, a top four—open primary could curb the excesses of ranked choice with instant runoff. Instead of electing people in one sitting, voters would get two rounds of election. That would allow for further consideration of the top candidates, instead of letting the initial rankings of a small primary electorate determine the winner.

The top four concept is particularly appealing. A FairVote analysis shows that top two systems exclude third party and independent candidates more than 90 percent of the time. In the vast majority of cases, the top two system simply advances one candidate from each major party. With four winners, major parties would almost always have a candidate advance—protecting them against lockouts—while minor party candidates would have a greater chance of advancing. This likelihood motivates voters in all parties to cast ballots—both in the primary and general election.

Admittedly, these reforms make voting a bit more complicated, particularly if they’re combined. There’s no denying that it takes more mental effort to rank a few candidates than to pick just one. Dealing with such complexity requires bringing into the mix two more reforms: ballot simplification and voter education.

To simplify the open primaries in this combined system, states and municipalities should leave off the ballot any contest that has four or fewer candidates. In such cases, all the candidates can advance automatically without cluttering voters’ ballots.

In the second round, or general election, every ballot needs to show voters each candidate’s party affiliation, if any, even in open primaries. Party affiliation is a powerful signal for many voters and including it aids voters who may not know or recognize individual candidates. For the same reason, each registered political party should have the right to display on the ballot its endorsements, so long as the candidate accepts. This will result in some candidates having multiple party endorsements, but more information aids voter decision making.

Simplifying life for voters helps, but a higher purpose is making elections more deliberative. The best elections are ones in which voters learn key pieces of information, weigh alternatives, and then make informed choices.

To help busy voters make informed choices, election officials should experiment with new forms of public education. In doing so, however, they face a dilemma. University of Arkansas communication scholar Robert Richards has found that conscientious election officials often struggle to tell voters what they need to know because they fear looking partisan.

Emerging online tools can help address the information deficit. Around the globe, tools such as Vote Compass ask voters to complete surveys, then show which parties (or candidates) best align with voters’ values. Social networking sites, in spite of their hazards, can also help voters get advice from like-minded friends who have taken the time to sort through crowded fields of candidates.

Other educational reforms may be less familiar but have the potential to be tremendously helpful. The state of Oregon, for example, aimed to improve voter education by launching the Citizens’ Initiative Review in 2010. This process convenes a panel of two dozen randomly selected citizens to hear from both sides of a ballot issue, talk with experts, then write a one-page analysis that goes into the state’s voter pamphlet. For example, the inaugural Review explained to voters that “an unintended consequence” of one proposed law “is that juveniles [would be] subject to twenty-five-year mandatory minimum sentences.”

I have long argued that such a citizen-based system could be used not only for ballot measures but for candidates as well. Randomly selected citizen panels could sift through materials provided by candidates to distill the most essential information to place in a voter pamphlet. The panel could ensure the fairness of its process by having equal parts Democrats, Republicans, and others. Final approval of each contest’s candidate summaries would require supermajority support within each of these subgroups.

Putting these reforms together, such a system could result in better candidate pools—but also better long-term results for the major parties. This system ensures that the parties have ample opportunity to remind voters of candidates’ party affiliations and endorsements. Thus, winning the final tally in a ranked choice top four election will usually require belonging to one of the two major political parties.

But, at the same time, successful candidates will need to court independents, or even moderates from the opposing party. Reaching across party lines wins a candidate what might prove to be decisive second-choice or third-choice preference rankings.

These countervailing forces permit the major parties to win elections and widen their bases, but only by recruiting and electing more moderate and capable candidates. Parties with broader bases of support are stronger.

With insufficient data at hand, these concepts remain nothing more than a hypothesis. But uncertainty is not an argument for inaction. If anything, it should inspire experimentation with different reforms—and packages of reforms—to give voters more choices and more information, while making sure winning parties are powerful enough to govern and diverse enough to remain broadly representative.

Ultimately, the goal is for political parties to seek better candidates who enter and win elections, then wear their party badges proudly while enacting good legislation or administrating effectively. In the end, this requires not just one election reform, but many.

The post Here Are Two Voting Reforms That Could Counter America’s Hyperpolarization appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

So let’s retire the old query, and turn it upside down to pose a new and urgent question: How can South Los Angeles save us?

South L.A. is no longer a place apart. Today, it sits in the center of the California story, embodying some of our greatest possibilities and our greatest struggles. And in a particularly nasty and anxious time in the United States, when pessimism and angry nonsense spread faster than Western wildfires, the South L.A. of 2016 offers a tough-minded but optimistic narrative that ought to remind us just how much can be achieved—beyond mere survival—through gritty determination and small, steady improvements.

South L.A. is both the closest thing we have to an urban success story, and the furthest thing from a fairy tale. In today’s South L.A., crime, despite recent upticks, is less than one-third of what it was a quarter century ago, access to health care is improving, there are more and better schools, housing prices and home ownership are up, transportation and arts and food options are multiplying. And major new developments are arriving—with all their promise and peril.

Of course, it is dangerous to generalize about a place so large and diverse. South L.A. consists of about 30 very different neighborhoods, from pristine suburban-style historic tract to industrial precincts to college-town enclave to narrow boulevard-based corridors. South Los Angeles is comparable in size to San Francisco, California’s fourth largest city. Both are nearly 50 square miles and have populations of 850,000.

But today’s South L.A. is more often described as Los Angeles’ version of Oakland. It’s a poorer place that is being changed, for better and for worse, both by the work of its residents and by proximity to the wealth and spillover housing demand of Los Angeles’ booming downtown and Westside.

South L.A. has not shed its older challenges, particularly around poverty and jobs, while its gains have created new challenges. In particular: How do South L.A.’s people and businesses make sure they don’t become exiles from their own success, driven away by a higher cost of living?

That poignant question resonates across the state. South Los Angeles is the largest working-class place left in coastal California. If it can figure out a way to remain such, it could provide a crucial model of success for a state with a dwindling middle and a widening divide between its affluent and America’s largest population of poor people.

Part of South L.A.’s importance lies in its relative openness to new approaches in addressing this conundrum. There’s less of the NIMBYism that’s epidemic elsewhere in the state. I recently heard community planners call South Los Angeles “L.A.’s L.A.” They meant that in two ways. First, in the sense meant by Tom Bradley, modern L.A.’s greatest mayor and a longtime South L.A. resident, who once said that people come to L.A. “looking for a place where they can be free, where they can do things they couldn’t do anywhere else.” And second, in the technical sense: while so much of L.A.’s planning and zoning has already been settled, with overlays and districts for different areas, South L.A.’s plans remain relatively free of such obstacles.

So how can South L.A.’s example save us? The region has become a popular proving place for new initiatives.

It’s already the site of some of L.A’s most significant cultural investments these days—in Exposition Park alone, the Coliseum is being renovated, a new soccer stadium is scheduled to be built, the Natural History Museum has been recently renovated, and the Space Shuttle Endeavour now resides at the California Science Center.

Many of South L.A.’s bigger developments come with “community benefits agreements” and local hiring promises that are all the rage among labor unions and local economic development wise men. But it remains to be seen whether such agreements lead to enduring improvements, or whether this one-deal-at-a-time approach undermines efforts at more thoughtful and comprehensive planning and development. USC’s The Village, which combines student housing with a new Target and South L.A.’s first Trader Joe’s, opens next year and is being closely watched because it comes with some of the strongest community benefits in the city’s history, including hiring for disadvantaged people, local business assistance, $15 to $20 million for a new affordable housing fund, and the creation of a legal clinic to assist local tenants. A proposed $1 billion expansion of the Washington Boulevard high-rise for creative firms and artists known as The Reef, to include new housing units, retail, and a hotel, faces skepticism about its feasibility and opposition from neighbors who fear it could further drive up rents in the area.

In an L.A. where it’s hard to build housing, South L.A. is a relative hotbed of new homes—often fashionably close to transit and retail—but it’s far from clear whether it is affordable enough to serve local residents. Recent efforts to improve access to health care are being closely watched, notably Martin Luther King Jr. Hospital, located south of the 105 Freeway, which recently reopened in conjunction with expanding local health clinics. The just-completed Expo Metro rail line (which connects South L.A. with downtown and Santa Monica) as well as the forthcoming Crenshaw line will make South L.A. a key test of whether highly touted transit investments can improve neighborhoods.

And South L.A. is home to dozens of charter schools, billions of dollars worth of new and improved school facilities, and various other educational innovations, including the Partnership schools, a district within a district. So far, some of these school experiments are showing strong results, while others lag.

South L.A. is a fertile ground for experimentation, from efforts to help local businesses embrace technology, to a new approach in sidewalk repair. The city’s new trash franchise is supposed to curb illegal dumping in South L.A. and establish recycling facilities in the area. Private and nonprofit efforts to provide healthy and locally grown food are targeting South L.A. And if high-profile efforts to boost voter registration and turnout are to succeed, they’ll have to gain traction in South L.A., where people vote less frequently than in other Southern California communities with similar population profiles.

Statewide efforts to increase park access in poorer communities are being tested in South L.A., which has seen the opening of many small parks but has struggled to establish the mid-sized community parks it desperately lacks. South L.A.’s long street corridors are ripe for the redesigns promised by the “Great Streets” movement, which aims to make streets friendlier for bicyclists, pedestrians, and community gatherings.

In all these initiatives, the stakes are high. If any of these ideas can show results in reputedly hardscrabble South L.A., they are likely to find a receptive audience in struggling urban areas around the country.

Of course, the two most profound changes South L.A. needs involve not physical, but human, capital.

First, South L.A. stands to benefit tremendously from statewide efforts to ease re-entry into communities for people who have served time, as well as from efforts to help people clean up their criminal records by expunging or reducing non-violent felony convictions. Nonprofit groups are collaborating to make it easier for people with records to get hired and become eligible for housing and student benefits.

Second, there may be no greater advertisement for long overdue immigration reform than to spend time in South L.A. And if the undocumented workers and entrepreneurs behind so many small or home-based businesses had the legal status to come out of the shadows, South L.A., as both an economy and a community, would be unstoppable.

South L.A.’s reputation, particularly in mainstream media, hasn’t yet caught up with its new, improved, and more complicated reality. Its success has come too slowly and steadily, without a sole catalyst, and so it’s not easily told.

But that may be about to change. Two high-profile political campaigns could bring media scrutiny to South L.A. Steve Barr, founder of a charter school network with many South L.A. campuses, is challenging the incumbent mayor of Los Angeles, Eric Garcetti, in 2017. And if former mayor Antonio Villaraigosa makes a strong run for governor in 2018, Californians should hear a lot about South L.A., the setting for the most significant policy initiatives of his eight years in office.

South L.A.’s people and institutions are understandably reluctant to tell their turnaround story, given the remaining challenges. And progress can have its costs. South L.A. was turned down at first for a federal Promise Zone designation, which brings all kinds of resources to the neediest neighborhoods, largely because it wasn’t poor enough to meet the program’s standards. But, in a demonstration of their collaboration and sophistication, South L.A.’s officials and nonprofits rallied, suggested changes to the program’s standards, and won the designation.

An updated narrative of South L.A. is vital to the region’s ability to protect itself and its people from developments and changes that might threaten its progress, or displace its people. Vast and diverse South L.A. is on the rise, and we shouldn’t let anything get in the way of the example being built there.

Because if South L.A. can make it, there’s hope for all of us.

The post South L.A. Doesn’t Need Saving appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

San Mateo looked pretty much the same. But I found I wasn’t recapturing the simpler days of my youth. When I started reconnecting with favorite spots like my old high school, I encountered complexities and advances I had not expected, particularly after the many headlines about California in decline.

The little house where I grew up on Voelker Drive still has no garbage disposal, no dishwasher, and no air-conditioning. But my brother Jim, the computer teacher at Baywood Elementary School, set up a Wi-Fi system and satellite TV. I felt up-to-date until I visited my alma mater, Hillsdale High School, a sprawling campus two blocks away on Alameda de las Pulgas.

I write about education for The Washington Post and its web site. High schools are my specialty. Suburban schools like Hillsdale rarely if ever change, except in their ethnic mix. Hillsdale was about 95 percent white when I graduated in 1963. Today the 1,343-member student body is 45 percent white, 30 percent Latino, 15 percent Asian, 4 percent Filipino, and 2 percent black. About 20 percent are low income, roughly what it was when I was there.

That is a typical demographic shift for a California suburban school, and not what makes it so startling to visit Hillsdale now. Through many twists and turns, while I wasn’t paying attention, it has become one of America’s first 21st century schools.

I often make fun of that label. Attempts to describe what 21st century schools look like often make them seem like 20th century schools with better equipment and fancier mission statements. Hillsdale, by contrast, has changed significantly the way students are taught, and raised the level of instruction for both kids going to college and kids not sure what they want to do.

Getting there wasn’t easy. A team of educators who were part of the transformation helped put together a manuscript, written by social studies teacher Greg Jouriles, that explains the process. The changes happened in the same unpredictable way that the computer and Internet revolution swept San Mateo and much of the rest of the Peninsula.

The term “Silicon Valley” did not exist when I graduated from Hillsdale. I still find it hard to believe that the ratty shops of El Camino Real and the nondescript warehouses along U.S. Highway 101 are backdrops for a now famous international center of commerce and innovation. That public schools, among our most change-resistant institutions, might be similarly altered is even more surprising.

At Hillsdale students are organized into small advisory groups that meet daily with a staff member trained to help them with any problems–a system pioneered by private schools. The ninth and tenth grades are divided into three houses that focus on interdisciplinary lessons and ambitious projects such as a recreation of a World War I battle and a trial of Lord of the Flies author William Golding. Students of all achievement levels are mixed in the same classes, sharing in discussions but doing different homework based on their needs and wishes. All seniors must define an essential question, write a thesis of at least eight pages, and defend it before a panel of graders including outside experts. More changes are planned. The idea is to do much more than prepare students for the annual state tests, but the changes have helped raise the school’s Academic Performance Index on California’s 1000-point scale from 662 in 2002 to 797 this year.

Mixing students of different achievement levels in the same classes and giving them different homework is extraordinarily rare in American public schools. Defending research work before a panel of experts is what happens in graduate school, not high school.

True, the football team is not doing as well as it did when it was led by my 25-year-old gym teacher, future Super Bowl coach Dick Vermeil. The Knights this year are 2-4. Like with everything else at the school, the faculty is looking for solutions, while enjoying the fact that the Friday night games, as in my day, have stands full of students and parents, a loud and boisterous band, and tasty hot dogs.

There is something else that connects the new era with the old. When I first moved into our San Mateo house in 1952 and enrolled in third grade, one of my classmates was a big kid named Don Leydig. He was kind, smart, and the best all-around athlete I had ever met. We became friendly rivals for good grades. He made places for me in baseball, basketball, and flag football games where I would not embarrass myself. At Hillsdale, he became the shining light of our 1961 championship football season, Vermeil’s best player as a halfback, and the league’s most valuable player.

Leydig played freshman football at Stanford under another future Super Bowl coach, Bill Walsh, but realized he wasn’t fast enough for the varsity and focused on his studies. He was in the Peace Corps in Libya, then returned to the Peninsula and built a splendid reputation as a high school history teacher, coach, and administrator. In 1989 he became Hillsdale’s principal.

Many coaches and teachers remembered him. They were happy to have as a boss one of the most talented and respectful kids they had ever taught. Don told me, “They would have done anything for me.”

He understood the importance of the American high school. It defines our national character as the last educational experience we share before some of us go to college and others to work. Leydig knew our high schools were in a slump. American 17-year-olds have shown no significant gains in reading and math achievement in the last three decades. Challenging courses are rare. Nationally, the average teenager does less than an hour of homework a night.

According to Jouriles’ written account of Hillsdale’s transformation, Leydig did not charge into the school waving a banner of reform and knocking down the opposition. Instead he renewed old relationships and got to know new people, using the modesty and thoughtfulness that made him so popular when we were students. He hired teachers with ideas for reform and let them make changes. He worked with the teacher’s union. He forged ties with the Stanford University education school, particularly its nationally renowned reform expert Linda Darling Hammond. He cut shop classes and secretarial slots to have more resources for the reforms. He let new ideas start small to iron out flaws. He got grants and finessed district budget rules. At crucial moments he forged consensus with surveys of teacher opinion that did not ask simply if they were for or against a change, but instead gave a range of choices. Were they for it with qualifications? Could they live with it? Were they against it but wouldn’t quit over it?

The change at Hillsdale came in spurts, with some backsliding. It was a team effort, like our class’s football wins. It was hard for everyone, including Leydig. Jouriles describes the afternoon an assistant principal and a teacher called faculty leaders to a secret meeting at a pub on 25th Avenue in hopes of getting the principal fired.

It didn’t work. Leydig’s recruiting helped produce a new generation of school leaders, including innovative teacher Jeff Gilbert who now leads the school. Leydig retired in 2005 and heads the Hillsdale Foundation, raising money to keep the changes alive. He often travels to coach administrators and advise on school redesign. There are a few other thriving California efforts to remake schools such as the New Tech Highs and High Tech Highs. But Hillsdale is the most advanced homegrown project I know of.

Leydig and I sometimes sit together at football games. Still trim, he avoids the hot dogs and cupcakes while I gorge myself. We enjoy the noisy, colorful stream of young people passing by. They seem like our classmates from 1963–from all levels of the income scale, happy to be together on a warm night. They no longer know the words to the fight song, but they have something better: lively, accessible teachers and a widening knowledge and appreciation of the challenge and excitement of the world outside.

Don and I loved the old Hillsdale. But if you ask us where we would like to send our grandchildren, the new Hillsdale gets our vote.

Jay Mathews, a Washington Post education columnist and the father of Zócalo’s California editor, is the author of eight books, including Work Hard, Be Nice: How Two Inspired Teachers Created the Most Promising Schools in America.

*Photos courtesy of Jay Mathews.

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