Not So Sure About Woocher’s “New Approach”

[cross posted to TAPBB.]

Jonathan Woocher is chief ideas officer at JESNA (Jewish Educational Service of North America) and director of the Lippman Kanfer Institute. He once thought that religion would disappear in the North American Jewish community and that all would be left would be secular institutions.

He has said,

“From an educational standpoint, there is good reason to welcome a situation in which learners drive the agenda. The learning itself will be more powerful and more enduring when it responds to authentic questions, when the learner actively seeks out the answers to these questions, and when there is ample room for diverse learning styles and formats.”

When he wrote that a few years ago, that sort of thinking was a breath of fresh air, and it was especially poignant for day school educators. At the time, booming enrollments and adequate funding gave them the opportunity to do some innovative things in their classrooms, and Woocher’s notion of learner-directed education was very helpful.

With the recent economic downturn spurring reports that day school enrollment is down, Dr. Woocher is now thinking about supplemental schools. In an article published in the recent edition of The Jewish Week, Woocher wrote:

“At JESNA, we believe that every family that wants to send its children to a quality day school should be able to do so. And we want the same for those choosing supplementary education. It will take some creative thinking and a lot of collaboration. But it’s doable, and we’re working now with our partners in central agencies across North America to make that vision a reality.”

He gives the following example of this free choice in action.

“Take a day school family now seeking an intensive supplementary program, perhaps one that meets eight or 10 hours per week, rather than the typical four or five, and that emphasizes serious Hebrew literacy, either for purposes of conversation or text study in the original. Or, take a very different, but not uncommon family whose Jewishness is primarily cultural, not religious, or focused on social justice and activism. Perhaps the family has a child who is passionate and gifted in the arts and wants to approach her or his Jewish learning through this lens. Perhaps the family is an interfaith one, and seeks a Jewish educational program that is uniquely sensitive to their life issues.”

There are only a few problems with this thinking. First, it does no good in Shreveport, Louisiana and places like it, where there are fewer than thirty students in the combined religious school. Filling classes, finding teachers, and enabling success is the problem. Offering alternative school models is beyond fantasy. This is exactly the problem that the Institute for Southern Jewish Life is successfully focusing on, and they are doing it by going in the opposite direction. They are doing it by standardizing curriculum while training and inspiring teachers.

Second, this is not a moment in history to have great faith in market driven economies. My Rabbi and teacher, Shelly Dorph, used to worry about Gresham’s Law that states that “Bad money drives good money off the market.”

He was saying that given the decision making ability, families that want less will always control the level of Jewish education. That is how we moved from three days a week to two or one. Believing that there are a significant number of families who want ten to twelve hours a week of “Hebrew School” is one of the fastest ways of putting a school out of business.

The idea of involving families in making choices is a good idea. All the best of congregations are doing so in their visioning and executing of excellence. In Jack Wertheimer’s latest study he says, “Good schools regard families as allies and also clients.”

Dr. Woocher is right that we need to have our ears to the ground, that we need to offer options wherever possible, and the market place has room for entrepreneurs who want to find and serve niche markets.

Where he is wrong, however, just as he was wrong about civil religion, is that Jewish life begins and progresses as community. This is not the time to follow the rules of the market place, but of the extended family who knows how to meet the needs of each member.

Altneu Non-Shul — The Sunday School for Jewish Studies

[cross-posted to TAPBB]

Started around 1970 by some Harvard professors, just about the same time some other Harvard faculty started the Harvard Hillel Children’s School (that morphed into Congregation Eitz Chayim), The Sunday School for Jewish Studies is a non-synagogue, parent cooperative, not for profit, way of providing a Jewish education and accessing a bar/bat mitzvah experience.

The school was featured in a recent article in the Boston Globe. The article described it as (a) a non-Synagogue and (b) cheaper way of providing a bar/bat mitzvah. The article centers on the fact that this “non brick and mortar” (non) institution that charges as little as 1/4 the cost of belonging to (and sending your kids to school at) a “brick and mortar” synagogue.

Here are the things I know.

[1] Harvard Hillel Children’s School (that I do know about) was started as a chance to provide an innovative, better, experimental Jewish education for a number of positively identified but “syno-phobic” Jews. It did a lot of pioneering work with adult education, family education, alternative education and a lot of the other frontier (for its age) areas of Jewish Education. For a lot of years it was guided by Rabbi Cherie Kohler Fox and her husband Dr. Everett Fox. The hallmark of the school was not its cost, but its ability to innovate. Much of that innovation was its ability to create community among a population that was considered fringe. That community ultimately felt the need to evolve into a synagogue.

[2] I had never heard about The Sunday School for Jewish Studies until The Globe article appeared. The little I’ve been able to learn about it on the internet makes it sound little different from the Harvard Hillel Children’s school at its prime. It is devoted to serving its students and its families. It has a social action vision of Judaism. It is open to all kinds of definitions of Jewish family. All this is to be praised!

[3] It is The Globe article that bothers me, not my understanding of The Sunday School. I have nothing against Jews creating independent institutions that meet their own needs. I have nothing against people choosing and creating alternatives to the synagogue. I do wish Jewish life was cheaper. What bothers me is the smug sense that this is a better way of providing a Jewish education because it has less overhead. The article provides no other way of evaluating the quality of the education offered at this school.

The article ends by quoting the father of a Bar Mitzvah, “He read it perfectly. I’d put his training up against any synagogue training,” Note: the standard was “his training” not “his education.” The author has a pretty classic misunderstanding of Jewish education. The school’s job is to “train” students for b’nai mitzvah. If the kid reads well, the school must have succeeded. It’s an economics equation. The school provides a product (“training”) for less money, so it must be a great deal.

[4] The article actually comes as a warning. The congregational school, that long believed that it has a monopoly on non-day school Jewish education, now needs to look over its shoulder. While we thought the major threat would come from “tutoring,” there are other alternatives on the horizon. Simply put, we are not the only way to have a bar/bat mitzvah. God’s creation of this world does allow for the rental of tents, the borrowing of Sifrei Torah and the photocopying of service booklets. If the only thing our schools offer is bar mitzvah training, we have a big problem because (a) we know that this isn’t a sufficient Jewish education, and (b) as this article teaches us, families can get a do-it-yourself b’nai mitzvah somewhere else.

[5] So here’s my final synthesis:

The article teaches us that congregational schools are not the cheapest Jewish education option in many cities. But we need to be the best. The research of Dr. Jack Wertheimer (School that Work: What We Can Learn from Good Jewish Schools) puts creating a nurturing Jewish Community, engaging Judaism at a high level, providing opportunities for experiential education, and valuing themselves and their students on the list of elements of high-quality Jewish schools.

As my friend and teacher, Rabbi Phil Warmflash, likes to point out, “The success of the synagogue school has as much to do with the success of the synagogue as the success of the school.”

Self-Paced, Point & Click: The Jewish Problem with Programmed Instruction

[cross-posted to TAPBB]

Programmed Instruction

There is a growing fantasy in Jewish education that everything will be better if we only take the teacher out of the equation. This is manifesting itself in the claim that low level computer exercises can replace a day a week of Jewish learning. And it is leading to tools like self-checking folders that students work their way through at their own pace. What all of these hold in common is a reliance on an old education technique, programmed instruction, which was used mainly for industrial training and has mainly shown itself to be a failure in general education.

Programmed instruction grew out of the work of B.F. Skinner, the behaviorist who believed that learning was conditioning. In rewarding students who get the right answer, students become conditioned to repeat that answer. Programmed instruction sends students through a series of frames where they (a) receive information, (b) are asked about that information, and (c) are shown the correct answer. In more sophisticated forms, there is now a “branching” opportunity. If the student got the answer right, they move on to the next frame. If they get it wrong, they are put into a review loop.

The good news seems to be (a) the ability of each student to move at his/her own pace, (b) a high rate of retention (at least in the short term), and (c) the freeing of the class from the imposition of a teaching doing bad “frontal” education. But most of the advocates of programmed instruction, whether in software or folders, seem to forget three things:

1. Levels of Learning

Benjamin Bloom, one of my teachers, wrote a big book with J. Thomas Hastings and George F. Madaus called Handbook on Formative and Summative Evaluation of Student Learning. In it is a taxonomy of educational objectives that describes a series of “levels” of learning. In the cognitive domain there are six: Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation. The problem is simple. Jewish life and real Jewish learning is all about Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation, the higher levels. Programmed Instruction is best for Knowledge, Comprehension and Application, the lower three levels.

There is also a taxonomy of affective objectives: Receiving (or Awareness), Responding, Valuing, Organization, and Characterization by a value or value complex. These affective objectives (usually called “Krathwohl’s Taxonomy”) are all about a process called “internalization,” whereby a student’s affect towards something goes from being aware (that’s the “receiving” part) all the way to the point where their affect has been internalized and consistently guides or controls the person’s behavior. It’s the path between knowing that kavod is a Jewish value and going through life treating people with kavod. Programmed Instruction can get you to Awareness, but it is not great at getting to the rest of the domain. Jewish education should be all about valuing and the rest of that process.

The argument can be made that Programmed Instruction is mainly being used to teach Hebrew language. That Alef Bet is only Alef Bet is partially true. But Alef Bet leads to Ashrei and Ashrei is supposed to build a connection to God. While learning folders with self-checking and computer programs may have a role in mechanical learning, they are incapable of taking it any further. When do you feel close to God? What is the right thing to do in this case? What do you think of when you say the Shema? These are all moments of Jewish learning that are simply not part of a computer’s function.

2. Community

The purpose of Bar and Bat Mitzvah is to acknowledge that a child is now old enough to function as an adult in the ritual life of the Jewish people. Reading Torah is a symbol that a child can now function as a member of the community. A new adult can now be counted in a minyan. Most importantly, this means that a new adult is old enough to go to a shiva house and be counted among those whose responsibility it is to help heal the pain of death. If we are going to turn our schools into B’nai Mitzvah mills, we could do worse than if they included the skills of participating in Jewish communal life and learning compassion and empathy. Those are not things that come from the kind of computer programs we have and are likely to have in the foreseeable future. They are the inverse of things learned when each student is moving at his or her own pace.

Tolerance is one of the things that one learns from being part of a learning community. So is patience, leadership, and being a good listener. The best way to learn how to participate in community life is practice. It is not an accident that Jews pray in community and demand community for most Jewish events. Studying prayer at home on the computer is not the best way to learn about community. Working alone at your own folder, checking your own answers, doesn’t develop leadership skills.

3. Teachers

Finally, the Jewish tradition believes in teachers. It sees teachers as rich (not mechanical) enablers of individualization and personalization. Teachers allow lessons to go off on tangents, listen to student needs, and take advantage of the moment. Teachers can appreciate and celebrate, understand and empathize. A teacher-free classroom can maybe transmit Jewish information, but it is not a Jewish classroom. The modeling of the Jewish classroom as Jewish learning community, the enabling of the community by a person manifesting and applying Jewish values – this is our goal. I know of no one who can claim that their best learning moment took place when completing a self-guided booklet. Not every teacher is ideal, but teachers are our ideal.

Every teaching tool that is effective has its time and purpose. Programmed instruction and computer-assisted instruction are tools that have their time and place. But ironically, as we have less time to spend together with our students, now is precisely the time for more student-teacher interaction, not less. As we are trying to teach the skills of communal worship, now is precisely not the time to invite our students to learn Hebrew from computer screens. When we are trying to instruct our students to maximize their humanity and use it to change the world, now is precisely the time to make human interaction a foundational value of Jewish education. The elimination of the human in education is a step backwards.

Steps Forward

At Torah Aura Productions, we are dedicated to producing curricular materials that realize a depth of understanding rather than focusing only on facts and feelings. That means that we also must be active partners with teachers and educators to maximize the Jewish educational impact on their students.

Programmed instruction is perfectly useful if the goal is to develop students who can perform at a one-time event. We’re encouraging a different goal: students who are lifelong Jews. Our mission is to make materials that help teachers and educators to enable their students to become empowered Jewish adults.

We believe in doing what it takes to develop good teachers who can actualize impactful Jewish learning. That may be more difficult than asking teachers to facilitate programmed instruction in booklets or on computer screens, but it’s a worthwhile endeavor. Human interaction is the key to the Jewish future. And because we believe in humanity, we believe that Jewish schools can succeed at doing something bigger, better and worthwhile.

CAJE: Up from the Ashes

[cross posted to TAPBB]

On the poster that changed CAJE’s name from the Coalition for “Alternatives” in Jewish education to the Coalition for the “Advancement” of Jewish Education was this Midrashic quotation picked out by Stuart Kelman.

At the end of the great persecution our teachers met together at Usha… They sent to the elders of Galilee saying, ‘Whoever has learned, let him come and teach, and whoever has not learned, let him come and learn.’ They came together and studied and took all necessary steps.
[Song of Songs Rabbah 2:18]

It perfectly captured the dream. CAJE started out as a dream. There were a bunch of us sitting around on the sofas at Boston University Hillel talking about the teaching we were all doing in Hebrew Schools. (We hadn’t yet gotten to Supplemental Schools or Congregational Schools or the other “reconceptualizations” of the process). The insight came from Cherrie Koller-Fox. She said, “We all have something to teach each other.” We began to imagine a local teacher’s conference where each of us would teach stuff, and get to learn stuff from others. Nothing came of that particular conversation. I don’t know how many times it was repeated. Eventually it made it the Network of Jewish Students who decided to hold a first Conference on Alternatives in Jewish Education at Brown University, to a Continuations committee who held a second conference at the University of Rochester, and then an organization was birthed. A few of us on the West Coast (Wolfson, Kelman, and Grishaver) put together (with a single staff person, Jody Hirsh) a West Coast Conference on Alternatives in Jewish Education. That was the third. And from then on the national organization took root and created its annual conference. It was all very Woodstock.

The midrash from Song of Songs was speaking of the Hadrianic persecutions, the Roman reaction to the Bar Kokhba revolt. When CAJE was formed, we were speaking about a tyranny of formality and the chains formed by the status quo. Today we are suffering from famine. Dire famine as nourishment for Jewish education shrinks and fades. There is no Egypt, there is no Joseph to go to. We have only ourselves as a resource. No single foundation is going to save us. This puts the obligation on us. With CAJE not happening, our job is to gather (not this summer, but soon) to teach and learn. Our reaction to the floundering of CAJE can’t be sadness but motivation. What had been taken care of for us, we must now do for ourselves.

The international growth of Limmud and the success of the Hazon Food Conference show that the basic CAJE model (the model away from which CAJE has drifted) is still viable. To a large degree, CAJE’s shift away from this model was a big contributor to its present state of decline.

Here’s what I believe:

1. The North American Jewish Community needs an annual trans-ideological, pluralistic education conference.

2. It needs to be lead by 20-30 year olds, not late 50 and 60 year olds. We who founded CAJE have a role as mentors and elders.

3. I don’t know whether what follows will still be called CAJE or not, but I do know that it must travel light and lean, and return to an emphasis on volunteerism.

4. I know that it must be accessible and desirable to lay people as well as educational professionals and that means an emphasis on Tikkun Olam and Torah l’Shma needs to be more prevalent in the mix.

5. Whatever we restart will need to involve coalitions between the educational organization and other players in the Jewish community—including a lot of new organizations.

6. The words, “we’ve always done it this way” need to be banned.

7. The keys need to be a fusion of “big names” and a renewal of the chance for “new voices.” The notion of grassroots needs to be revived.

8. We need to speak to all of those “who outgrew CAJE” not with a few new elements, but with a fundamental reconsideration.

We sit in a moment where much of what we know is collapsing. We have no choice but to rebuild. We need another gathering at Usha.

Did God Create the Dinosaurs?

by Joel Lurie Grishaver
[cross-posted to TAPBB]

I was doing a workshop on “teaching God” to about sixty San Diego teachers. We get to the point in the conversation where I ask them to bring into our discussion questions about God that their students have asked them. And the winner was, a third grade teacher who had a student ask, “Did God Create the Dinosaurs?” Teachers frequently bring up this question when I do God workshops. They get asked it all the time (especially by precocious eight-year-olds), and they’re not sure that they know the right answer to give.

It is not as simple a question as it might seem. What it represents is a testing of two information sources. For an eight-year-old, dinosaurs are the heart of scientific reality. It is what they buy at science museums and read about in science books. Dinosaurs are a symbol of history that has been reconstructed from bones and fossils and clues. They are the end result of the scientific method, the C.S.I. of history. On the other hand, the Bible (Torah) is God’s truth. In the reality experienced by most eight-year-olds, the Torah is not yet a metaphor. It is literal. The distinction between it being a book of truth rather than a book of history (science) is not yet comprehensible.

Kashrut the Business, Kashrut the Ethical Aesthetic

About a week ago the New York Times ran this story:

An immigration raid at the nation’s largest kosher meatpacking plant has opened a wide rift among Jewish leaders over the company’s ethical conduct and led to new interest in a campaign to create wage and safety standards for workers producing kosher food.

It tells (1) of America’s largest glatt Kosher plant that was shut down by immigration for a series of labor violations including unpaid overtime, underage works, illegal immigrants, dangerous conditions, and the like. (2) It voices the opinion of Rabbi Morris J. Allen who is backing a project in the Conservative movement called Hekhsher Tzedek (that means “justice certification” in Hebrew), and it (3) shares the opinion of major Kashrut authorities that suggest that everything is well now that the problem is fixed.

My issue here is not to say that Morris Allen is right. Arguing that Kashurt requires ethics as well as dietary rules is his position. That’s too obvious for anyone who doesn’t object to evolution being taught in the public schools. But rather, what a great time we live in. Here is a moment when we can teach kashrut as meaningful. When we can talk about ethical kashrut and eco-kashrut. We can make the issue of Kashrut (being fit for Jewish use) a whole new moment. We can’t get the instant lessons out fast enough, but a word to the wise: jump on this moment and start teaching.

It is Good to Have a Jewish National Enquirer

Somehow I am on the list that receives a free newspaper called WJD, the World Jewish Digest, that is the tabloid journalism of Jewish life. Earlier this year they did a story on how Hebrew Schools can never work that featured an opening salvo about a ten year old who literally had to be dragged kicking and screaming from his car into the synagogue because the Hebrew School situation was so oppressive. It never asked the obvious questions, “Was he be bullied?” “Did something happen at home?” “Was their some dramatic event that had so embarrassed him that entering was traumatic?” It just never faced the truth that ten year olds are usually not so freaked out about a schooling event that they would resort to this kind of behavior. In short, no one ever asked why, they just left us with Hebrew Schools are so bad that some kids need to be dragged in kicking and screaming. Good journalism!

This week I got an issue with a cover story that asks, “Is Enviornmentalism a Jewish Issue?” They staged a debate on the “No” side is Edward Bernard Glick who manages to confirm our worst stereotypes of Orthodoxy today. He manages to say, “In this 21st century–when intermarriage is rife, when even Jews who marry other Jews have a negative birthrate, when United States Jewery is declining in numbers, percentages, prestige and power, when Islam seeks to subjugate all other faiths and the Koran preaches that “the unbelievers are your inveterate enemies”; when Iran threatens Israel with nuclear annihilation; when European Jews face levels of antisemitism not seen since the days of Adolf Hitler–American Jewry must remember and reorder its priorities constantly.

Global warming is not a greater threat to Jews than Islamic terror. Using longer-lasting light bulbs is not on a par wth putting a mezuzah on your doorpost…”

Forget the fact that this is bad Judaism and a bad path towards the very Judaism he is concerned with saving. When his spiritual home in Brooklyn is underwater, when Jerusalem is beach front property, his arguments will be academic. But, what bothers me most is that this gives Orthodoxy a bad name. We have for most Jews–and most Jews are his target–Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist, Renewal– the conclusion that Orthodox Jews are Crazy Fundamentalist, Racist Jewry. He speaks poorly for his argument–and by sharing this as a valid Jewish position, an equally valid choice, WJD reduces itself to the level of publications that report Alien sightings and babies with two heads. It saddens me, because the tradition has a lot to offer non-Orthodox Jews who can’t help, like me, be offended by this article. The anti-Moslem racism is unforgivable, the lack of clear understanding of ecological mitzvot shameful, and his dismissive nature towards all issues but the “saving of the Jewish people” will drive more Jews away. I am really sorry that seems to have become the ubiquitous Jewish publication in America. I rather read about the Satmayr Rebbe being secretly an alien from Pluto (even if it is no longer a planet).

Gris

There are Still Good Times Ahead: Welcome Limmud NY

Over Martin Luther King weekend, 650 Jews gathers in a hotel in upstate New York to learn Torah, celebrate Shabbat and build a sense of community.

Built on the model of British Limmud, an amazing celebration of Jewish learning that had CAJE as a point of origin, but that grew in completely different directions. British Limmud made a turn from teaching to learning, and then it began to grow. It is now a 2000 person intergenerational pluralistic gathering with real orthodox participation and with all ages participating actively, and with the leadership being for the most part in its late twenties.

Now, a group of lay people in New York, inspired by the British model, have added another event to the national Jewish calendar. For those of us connected to other learning events in North America a few small things were revolutionary. Cookies and Coffee (etc) were served all day. The food was pretty good. It had a bar as an adult hang out at night. Sessions were diverse, high quality and the central focus. There was no theme, no tracking, no programmatic organization, just good people teaching excited learners. The administration was supportive and did not blame participants. As a presenter, it was easy to solve problems and things were flexible.

What’s kind of amazing—what is worth talking about—is that at a time when Jewish education somehow feels smaller, somehow feels that we are on the losing side, a group of volunteers in New York have once again made magic, once again enriched us with a vision of the possible (and a great new conference to consider).

“Are We Arguing?”

I have this adult Talmud class that has been going for more than fifteen years and that has been more or less the same people for five years. We were studying a passage from Sanhedrin that discusses the end of time, specifically resurrection of the dead. My class hated the text. It kept confronting them with ideas that they did not like, with ideas that challenged their own belief system. It fell into this rhythm where they ganged up on the text, shooting it as fool of holes as possible. Essentially, even though they knew that I was not imposing the Talmud belief system, they were uncomfortable differing with it dramatically. Meanwhile, I began defending the text, explaining its thinking on its terms again each of their challenges. The discussion got a little heated. At one point as the voices on both sides began to be raised, and the tone got harsher, I asked, “Are we fighting?” It was a joke, thinking of my relationship with different people in my life, but on a certain level it was a serious comment. The class protested, “no we are actually learning more tonight than most nights.” I think there are a couple of big lessons that comes out of that moment.

First, when we teach text, we need to invite our students to really engage the text. That means not just learning what the text says, but using the text to learn what they believe. Here was a text that could seem obscure that made big difference to those in the room.

Second, there is a difference between speaking for the text and speaking for yourself. This does not mean that the teacher cannot share their own thoughts (if they are clearly stated as such) but a text teacher has a responsibility to speak for the text on its own terms. That is a big part of the process.

Three, the Jewish tradition celebrates arguing, not fighting. Inviting your students to get passionate about their beliefs—and fairly challenging those beliefs—is powerful teaching. When we act as Jewish teachers, we are never merely conveying information or simple understandings, instead, we are always inviting dialogue—and that dialogue when it is honest, sometimes involves arguments. Conflict can make for good teaching and good learning.

Election Reflection

It may surprise a few people that “Democracy” is not a Jewish value (but “freedom” is). That doesn’t make democracy anything less than a significant addition to the Jewish tradition—one of the gifts of America to the Jewish tradition. In this year of the 350th anniversary of Jewish in America, we get a chance to understand two things: (1) what Jews brought to America and (2) what America brought to Judaism.

Judaism gave America (1) the sense of the holiness of every individual, (2) the need of people to take care of each other, (3) the wrongness of prejudice and the like. We were the ones we contributed “proclaim liberty throughout the land.” America added the commentary, “one person, one vote.” Civil rights in many ways are an idea rooted in Judaism, elections aren’t. Traditional Jewish communities actually used “money” as a governing principle—calling the board of the synagogue or a community, the funders (those who made the biggest contributions). But Jewish values on taking care of the poor and those in need were very strong—selfishness less accepted.

So we are facing an election, and an election is a chance to teach Jewish values. Truth is a Jewish value and there is a sadness that after every debate the news media has to unpack the lies and distortions that were told. Each of the big issues here, defense, war, medical care, education, Israel, and the like have Jewish components and Jewish insights. Free of endorsing any candidate, elections give us a chance as citizens to clarify our values and to explore our priorities.

Here is a great opportunity for some Jewish learning. But, most of all, here in year 350, there is a chance to show something that Jews got because they came to America—democracy—something that forever shifted the face of the Jewish community. Voting is now the way that virtually all Jewish organizations and Jewish institutions run. Roberts Rules of Order have become almost a volume of the Mishnah and the Jewish people are richer because of it. As Jews, as Jewish teachers, we all have an obligation to vote —and to share with our students the way voting is an extension of our values, and all of that can be free from partisan choice.