There’s this little place all the way west in America.  It’s got heavy brown, bright green canyons; blue, foamy white waters; foggy mornings that burn away in pockets.  You can walk its width ten times over and still not have walked as much, had you stayed along its coast.

*

There’s this tall woman, 22 years old, at the front of a classroom in a Michigan village in the late 19th century.  She’s reviewing fractions with the children.  She doesn’t hear it yet, but the numbers lip and lap into the air, where they linger and call back:  You will not be here for long.  Six twenty-fourths.  You’ll trade this chalk for a pistol.  Three twelves.  You’ll own a railroad company and lay tracks that, by design, lead nowhere.  One-fourth.  You’ll dig for oil.  Twenty-Five percent.  You’ll settle for clay.

*

I visited the west coast for the first time at 45 years old to attend an education conference in San Diego. I didn’t want to come, despite what I’d heard about Southern California.  I didn’t travel growing up – my family stayed within a 20 mile radius of our Cleveland bungalow.  The first time I flew on a plane I was 17 – my basketball team was playing in a tournament.  The first time I bought a passport I was 24 – my husband’s family took us on a cruise to the Bahamas; it was the first time I’d seen an ocean.  But I’d spent years in the education reform space and needed to keep pace with innovation, so despite my vestigial proclivities to stay put and my current cynicism about the landscape of public education, I bought the damn ticket and now here I was, not in San Diego anymore but, instead, driving the Pacific Coast Highway into Malibu, where I’d spend the next week alone.

The Pacific Coast Highway is a 14,000 mile ribbon that traces the west coast.  It clawed its way into Malibu in the late 1920s shortly after the Supreme Court ruled in Ridge Co. versus County of Los Angeles that the government had a right to build a public road on someone’s private land:  “these roads, especially the main road, through its connection with the public road coming along the shore from Santa Monica, will afford a highway for persons desiring to travel along the shore to the county line, with a view of the ocean on one side, and of the mountain range on the other, constituting, as stated by the trial judge, a scenic highway of great beauty.”  

It really was beautiful.  The Pacific to my left and mountains to my right – salty, mild air all over – I knew pretty clearly why the rich and famous set up lives here:  because they can.

The new highway carried them here.  Silent screen star Anna Q. Nilsson was the first to sign a lease on a mile-long stretch of beach soon to be called the Malibu Movie Colony.  Clara Bow, Gloria Swanson, and Barbara Stanwyck soon followed.  One hundred years later and screen stars still live on that stretch of beach.

But I would learn all of this later.   Right now, I was in traffic.  Unlike the NYC traffic I was used to, this pause felt kind.  

The San Diego conference combined educators with EdTech players to answer the question:  how can we leverage AI to democratize education?  The question implies that it can be done.  I was no longer so sure.  The speed with which I dashed through the exhibitor’s hall – VR headsets, bot tutors, ChatGPT curriculum – was balanced only by the paralysis of presentations about fusing humans with A.I., designing future-ready schools, and redesigning higher education for a digital world. 

What am I doing here?

This country’s been trying to get public education right for hundreds of years, and like those trucks that dump beautiful black tar onto winter-worn roads, our actions trick us into thinking we’re actually doing something.  We’ve filled the holes.  We’ve evened the road.  Look at those perfectly straight, beautifully symmetrical yellow lines. 

*

It’s 1905.  She goes down to the beach, where a worker named Darlington waves.  Her pistol hits her hip as she descends the cliffs, and its shift recalls two memories:  the mockingbird who imitated her husband’s whistle, and much before that, her response to his description of a future family farm by the ocean, beneath mountains, among wild Eucalyptus.  That response: “You ask too much.”

But now there she was.

“What do you need,” she asks him.  Darlington points.  The tracks beneath his feet have once again been dislodged by a storm, and he sees no logical reason to rebuild, given the location.  Who lays railroad tracks on a beach?  “Dig it up and start again,” she tells him.

*

By the time I reached my Airbnb high (very high) up Corral Canyon, I was hooked on Malibu, and I wanted to learn more.  A quick Google search told me that in 1905 Rhonda May Knight Rindge (May) owned all 22 miles of it, plus a railroad company whose existence was predicated upon keeping it that way.  I downloaded the only book about May I could find – The King and Queen of Malibu – and read it in two sittings.

She purchased the railroad company because the law disallowed the laying of tracks side by side from competing companies.  So long as she was laying tracks along the Pacific, no one else could.  And if no one else could, no one else could come. 

The six or seven homesteaders who lived just outside May’s property couldn’t care less about her tracks.  They wanted roads.  And they’d continue to want roads for a dozen years.  It was hard enough living so deep in the Santa Monica mountains, let alone without a path to guide your way.  They were sick and tired of having to brave unpredictable canyons just to pass around this huge piece of private land.  So knowing that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, they started building their own.  No matter, this is private property.  No matter, its owner is a widow raising three young children.  No matter, she told you and anyone who would listen that she’d not back down.  No matter.  Build them anyway.  Just know that she’ll use her pistol, guards, dynamite even, to keep you from adulterating her land.  You’ll keep at it though.  You’ll rebuild the road inside the grooves of the dynamite blast, knowing she’ll likely be back with a shovel.  And you’ll watch her kick dirt into the dips of this new road before she completely buries it.

You’ll play this dance with her for a dozen years, and when the courts finally rule that what you’re doing is illegal – this is her private property – you’ll get mad.  And you’ll try to kill her.

*

Corral Canyon is breathtaking.  Drive a few seconds up and pull over, turn around to see what looks like a pair of skies, one on top of the other, framed by green-brown mountains.  The view scared me.  My brain recalibrated like it’d done a few days ago at the conference when presented with EdTech company names:  AdaptEd, ConnectEd, EngagEd.  I’m sorry, what?  Then they affix acronyms to missions:  GROWE (growing revolution of women educators), LABS (leveraging AI to build schools), ASK (accelerate student knowledge).  I wish half the creativity applied to names and acronyms were redirected to the public school system.  

The first tax-funded public schools were created in 1644 in Massachusetts, but not until Horace Mann’s concept of the “common school” in the 1850s did they begin to adopt a more intentional design, one that at least attempted to standardize education for everyday life.  What’s really peculiar is that those first public schools – the ones in 1644 – were created almost a decade after the founding of America’s first college, Harvard.  In fact, some of their graduates would go on to become Ivy League presidents, having successfully managed to reach the ivory tower of education despite the fact that their country hadn’t yet taken the time to build a robust school system for its common citizens.  Harvard’s exclusivity executed education in both senses of the word:  it began it, and it ended it.

By the turn of the 20th century, cities tripled in size as Americans fled their rural homes and one-room school houses.  These families should have reaped the benefits of Mann’s “common schools,” but design does not live in a vacuum, and the reality was, cities were not only getting larger but they were getting more diverse; local school boards were not only getting created but they were becoming politicized; curriculum was not only getting clarified but it was getting complicated.  In other words, inequity thrived, and by the 1920s when high school graduation rates finally started to soar in response to America’s economic boom, the country’s leaders knew they had a problem to solve:  how can we ensure that public schools are educating the population in a way that allows them to meet the demands of our new marketplace?  The answer they landed on:  we can’t.  We can’t properly educate our citizens if we only have a dozen years to do it, so let’s grab four more.  Nevermind that our colleges are not publicly funded.  We’ll fix that with the GI Bill.  Never mind that only white men could reap the benefits.  We’ll fix that with the Higher Education Act.  Never mind that not enough investors care to buy student loans.  We’ll fix that with the Student Loan Marketing Association, and just to emphasize our seriousness about opening up access to education, we’ll assign it a nickname.  We’ll call it Sallie Mae. 

*

It’s 1923, and the Supreme Court has just adjudicated eminent domain on her land.  They mailed her a check for it.  She’s looking at it now.  

The Black Walnut trees in her yard provide shade.  She walks towards them.  It’s for one million dollars, and she needs the money desperately.  Constant court battles to save her land have all but depleted her bank account.  She breathes deeply, and kicks around the few fallen walnuts.  She remembers overhearing her husband tell their two sons that California walnuts have a sweeter, richer, more oily meat than their English counterparts.  She remembers her daughter’s comment as she buzzed by in her red dress:  “Then we should gather them up and sell them.”  In response, he smiled at the child and turned towards the boys to say that these walnuts are harder to open, and Americans aren’t interested in taking the extra time.   

May kicks a walnut towards the fountain in their yard.  She folds the check and slides it into her dress pocket.  She will never cash it.  Instead, she will drill for oil.

*

I checked out the Malibu Movie Colony on Google Earth.  I walked around Billionaires Row on Carbon Beach.  At Paradise Cove, I zoomed in on a cliffside mansion and imagined how my non-college educated parents – smart, driven, hard-working – might live in a place like that.  The largest house I’d ever visited belonged to my college friend’s parents, and when I stepped inside, complex thoughts triggered simple words: “Mel, you’re rich.”  She was uncomfortably stunned and immediately countered that she was not rich.  Looking back, I know we’re both right, and as I continue to zoom in and zoom out, I try to imagine what a country needs to do for its citizens to believe they may be welcomed in to a cliffside mansion and I know:  it can’t.  This country can’t do anything because this mansion, like education itself, was built to keep people out.

Only 87% of the kids who start high school in America will finish it, and 62% of them will immediately enroll in college.  62% of that 62% (roughly, 34% of all high school starters) will earn a college degree of any kind within six years and will carry nearly $40,000 in student loan debt as they try to find careers in an unstable economy.  That’s bleak, but imagine having borrowed tens of thousands of dollars and having no degree to show for it.  For the last ten years I’ve worked proactively behind the scenes to move these numbers in the right direction.  Summer Bridge Programs.  Texting campaigns.  Emergency grants.  But the only time we saw movement was during the pandemic, and it was movement in the wrong direction.  

It takes either incredible wealth, comparable privilege, or a bloody miracle for a person to pass through that mess of a system and come out in one piece.

22% of black men over the age of 25 have a college degree.

Dig it up and start again.  

I climb back onto the rented Trek road bike – a compound machine that retails for thousands of dollars.  I know enough about bikes to know that this impeccable, intentional design guarantees that value, and the people who’ve got the money to purchase something like that don’t consider the hands that contributed to its construction.  I’m being cynical.  Millionaires.  Celebrities.  It’s their money inside this economy that keeps our machine running, after all.  Isn’t that what I learned in AP Government?  

I’m gliding down towards the Pacific Coast Highway now.  My Airbnb host warned me about riding alongside it, but what choice do I have?  It’s not like there are other routes along the coastline – routes amenable to bike riding, for example, or walking – so what choice do I have, other than to brave the 60 mile an hour traffic a few feet to my left?  I know I’ll pass Pepperdine University soon – land donated by May’s daughter, who’d inherited it after she died in 1941 with $785 to her name.  May’s efforts to dig for oil in the 1920s were in vain, and while she made due for a while with the clay she did find, it was not nearly enough to sustain her in the years that followed, especially after a fire ravaged her Malibu Potteries and all its gorgeous tile in 1931.

I continue to ride and think about where I’m going from here.  I’ve got a few hours of daylight left, and I consider riding to the only brewery I’ve passed these last few days.  I don’t have a bike lock, but that will hardly matter in a town like this – a town that oozes money.  I imagine sitting next to a celebrity at the bar (I hear they’re everywhere here), and after some loose conversation (I’m no good with small talk), making a tight argumentative move:  spend your money on education initiatives, not climate change.  If you want to slow climate change, invest in education, not clean energy, I say.  Without an educated public, what does any of it matter?

“My foundation mostly funds medical research and voting rights.”

“I’m just using climate change as an example.”  I can tell that if I don’t play this right, she may take offense.  But I can also tell that she’s interested.  There’s an empty chair between us.  It’s got these symmetrical rose-colored, clay tiles embedded in its seat, and I put my hand on one of them.  “Did you know that one woman owned all of Malibu over a hundred years ago?”

She actually smiles.  “I didn’t.”

And then I tell her about May Rindge.  About how she inherited the land after her husband died young.  About how the six or seven people who lived in the canyons nearby tried to kill her multiple times so they could build their own roads in peace, without the threat of female ownership hanging over them.  I tell her that for May’s 13th birthday her mother asked her if she wanted books or a new dress and she chose books because she saw in them a future as a teacher, and that she did become a teacher but only for a little while because her future husband wanted to take her west.  And truth be told, she wanted to go west and it wasn’t hard for her to leave teaching.  I ask, “Did you know she built the Malibu Pier?”  No.  “Do you know anyone who lives in the Malibu Movie Colony?”  Yes.  “Have you been there?”  Yes.  “She built that too,” I say.  I order another beer and say she built both because she refused to cash the million dollar check the government had given her in exchange for their highway.  I say, “She purchased a railroad company just so she could lay tracks that led nowhere.”  I’ll need to explain that, especially since chronologically this came before the highway.  And soon, I’ll awkwardly blurt out that it’s a metaphor for our education system.  And if she lets me go on, I’ll explain how we’ve been trying to get public education right for centuries, but we still keep digging up the tracks and laying them back down, right where they always were, headed for nowhere.  I hope she’ll hear me when I say, “25%.”  Not 25% of Black men have a degree, I’ll say.  I’ll do my best to explain why this matters, and when she starts drifting, I’ll pull her back in by surrendering, “Maybe we ask too much.”  Maybe everyone can’t live by the ocean, beneath mountains, among wild Eucalyptus.

But as I ride the Pacific Coast Highway, I’m educated enough to know that she won’t be there.  And that even if she were, she’d point out that these Eucalyptus, though, aren’t wild at all.  Their seeds were brought to Malibu during the Gold Rush because people didn’t have time to wait for Black Walnuts to grow.  A Eucalyptus can reach 60 feet in just six years, she’d say, and people needed to build houses and there was no time to consider other options.  I’d smile back at her, knowing we were in it now.  Now, we were settling into the metaphor because I knew something else:  Eucalyptus are far too weak for building.  Eucalyptus are too weak for building, I’ll say.  And she’ll quip back, And too prone to fires.

*

I returned to Malibu two months later, this time with my husband, son, and daughter.  It was important to me that they see it.  My son was a rising high school senior, and even though we were targeting colleges within three hours of our New York City home, I wanted him – I wanted all of us – to visit Pepperdine.

The fact that he would be attending college was a given, just as mine was not.  My degree required that my parents leave their immigrant neighborhood when I turned five so that I could attend a better school.  It required my mother accepting the death of her father when she was 17 and knowing that despite her perfect grades and razor sharp mind,  she could not keep going.  It required her to refine the skill acceptable to grow at the time and to forget the buried talents that with cultivation, would have developed into something magnificent.  It required her to spend her days typing briefs, when what she really should have been doing was practicing law.

And given that her parents didn’t even finish high school, she was supposed to be happy with that outcome.

Pepperdine was fine.  There were at least a dozen other families there, and I listened to them as they waited for the tour guide to show up.  One girl was talking about rushing sororities – a friend of hers had told her stories.  Another was listening to her father rave about the school’s D1 sports and commitment to service.  It was fine in the way all colleges are fine.  The point of any of them is that you attend, persist, and graduate.

I’m a nervous person so I walked around the bright room while we waited for the tour guide to appear.  A few people were standing around a table at an opened book, and once they left, I leaned into it and saw that it was about the history of Pepperdine.  I thumbed my way towards the beginning and saw grainy, black and white photos of a construction crew on a hill, gathering tools and equipment to build this new site the college would soon call home.  I don’t know why, but I was surprised that there was no mention of May or her daughter in the half-sentence of text that indicated this land we’re standing on had been donated by the Adamson family.  I don’t know why I was surprised by this oversight, but I want to think that it was intentional.  I want to think that these authors decided to leave out May Rindge.  They were so angry at her audacity, so annoyed with her persistence.  They were so mad at those tracks to nowhere and so frustrated at her settlement for clay.  She should have seen that the future was coming, whether she liked it or not.  In the simplest math problem she could have ever faced, she should have added her energy to her wealth and gotten a business that embraced and then ameliorated this future.  But she didn’t.  She held on.  And like our first attempts at calculus, she watched as the numbers and symbols slipped through her careless fingers. I know now that like a country building a college before properly educating its citizens, May Rindge headed full tilt towards her own version of the future, without first considering whether or not she should.

May’s absence in this book, though, was not intentional.  The writers had probably never uttered her name.  Her absence, like so many other things, just sort of happened.

I’ve been working in education in some capacity since I graduated college. It was not a conscious choice.  The career trajectory fell into my lap and I just went with it.  I taught writing and literature, supported students from low-income homes, built programs to compensate for flawed education designs.  And like most people who do this kind of work, the more intentional I got with my career decisions, the more angry I became.  How could anyone look at this situation and not see a simple math problem?  But the more I age into it, the more I start to see calculus.  

I don’t know why this country hedges its bets against our education system any more than I know why May channeled her talents in the ways that she did.  But I do know that we will continue to get nowhere fast, unless we start empathizing with failure and commending our attempts.  Should May have cashed that check and used it for good?  Yeah, probably.  But is her decision also admirable?  It may be.  Should Harvard’s founder have surveyed the education landscape before building his college?  Yeah, probably. But is higher education also inspiring? 

My family and I left the Pepperdine tour early.  On our way out, I recognized one Eucalyptus.  Did I call out its fraud?  You bet I did.  But what I also said to my kids was this:  the people who planted these trees to construct their community of homes learned that Eucalyptus are far too weak for building.  Then, they learned that they are much too prone to fire.  But soon, with time and acceptance, they also learned that when you grow them close together, on these majestic Malibu cliffs beside the Pacific ocean, they provide an evergreen, albeit imperfect windbreak.