Up Close and Personal
During a school trip to Washington, a nonprofit program offers teachers their own intimate glimpse of how government works.

By Eugene L. Meyer
Sunday, April 15, 2007

THE DAY JOSHUA FUCHS LANDS IN TOWN, the young high school teacher wanders alone along the Mall and among the museums and monuments, gazing in awe and wonderment at the iconic symbols of the nation's capital.

On this, his first trip to Washington, he is an innocent at home.

"You see it in pictures. Suddenly, it's all in front of you, all the symbolism," he marvels at the end of the day. "I was sitting by the water in front of Capitol Hill, taking it all in. I sat first looking up at the Capitol for 10 or 15 minutes, just looking at it, thinking about the influence this small little area has over so much of the country and the world."

Fuchs, 29, tall and lanky, looking almost Lincolnesque with a wisp of a beard, is one of five teachers and 84 students who have come here from California's inner-city Oakland Technical High School.

The Oakland contingent is led by Maryann Wolfe, 60, the head of the social science department, who has been bringing groups here since 1983. The others are Marietta Joe, 48, an English lit teacher; Parker Merrill, 59, an engineering instructor; and Harry Pasternak, 60, who teaches government and economics.

The students are juniors and seniors in AP or honors classes. But this is not your typical spring class trip to Washington. This is the nation's capital "Close Up," a program that annually brings 20,000 students and 2,000 teachers here from 11,000 schools to get an inside look at how their government works.

The program is run by an entity far better known outside the Washington area. Yet, housed on the sixth floor of a waterfront building in Old Town Alexandria, the nonprofit Close Up Foundation has been putting together what for some is a life-changing week since 1971. It's a large operation, with 69 full-time and 50 seasonal employees, and a robust publishing arm that produces videos, teacher manuals and student guides. Close Up has an annual budget of $29 million, including $2.5 million in federal funds. Most of the rest comes in the form of tuition payments from students, schools and their sponsors. This week, 713 students and 93 teachers from 14 schools are here, housed at five motels. All are following in the footsteps of such illustrious Close Up alums as Oklahoma Gov. Brad Henry, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellman, and countless mayors and legislators. The brainchild of former State Department official Stephen A. Janger, who ran the foundation until his 2005 retirement, Close Up takes no positions on issues of the day. The goal is to educate, not advocate.

"It's beyond being nonpartisan," with a focus on getting participants to think critically about issues and become civically engaged, says the program's president and CEO, Timothy S. Davis, 53, a White House staffer during the Carter administration who attended Close Up as a high school student during its first year. While the students follow one schedule, the teachers follow another, their paths only occasionally crossing.

"This is a primary source for professional development for teachers," says Davis, sitting in his picture-window office overlooking the Potomac with the Capitol dome in the distance. "Just to register young people to vote without the opportunity to reflect is not enough. The schools have a real responsibility to step in, and we want to complement and support that."

For teachers, it's a chance to network and, many say, to return to their classrooms reenergized, often bringing new ideas and using the foundation's annually updated Current Issues book. Maryann Nielsen, an AP government teacher at a Pasadena, Calif., high school, says she has used the program to develop lessons on the Bill of Rights. Susan Howard, a Brighton, Mich., high school teacher, has developed an entire class around the Close Up program, an idea she got while talking to a teacher she met on one of her trips to Washington. Among other things, her students commit to visiting Washington as Close Up participants and organize a voter-registration drive at the school each spring. "It's become an institution," Howard says.

Teachers on Close Up trips can earn in-service or graduate credits after completing and submitting course assignments. Fuchs, who teaches physical education in Oakland and plans to go into school administration, hopes to use the week to gain credits to advance his career. Still, for him such considerations are secondary.

"More adults need to experience this and be a part of it," he says. But, he muses, not all schools can afford to send students and teachers. "It reemphasizes the fact that there is such a wide gap in our school systems." It cost about $1,700 for each of the Oakland participants to attend the program, with much of the money coming from fundraisers and donations.

ON MONDAY MORNING, the teachers file into a dining room at the National Press Club for breakfast and to listen to conservative speaker Ron Robinson, president of Young America's Foundation, criticize big government.

"Government's track record has not lived up to its promises," he says, cataloguing problems that persist despite government efforts -- from homelessness to the disappearing family farm to crime in the District of Columbia.

When Robinson asks for questions, government and economics teacher Pasternak raises his hand. "I understand your argument about government not living up to its promises," Pasternak says. "What do you do when the markets don't live up to their promises?"

Robinson responds that the financial markets succeed best "where they are unregulated by government."

"But my parents can't afford their health care," Pasternak counters.

Robinson understands, he says, that many teachers disagree with him, but they owe it to their students to also present conservative views. At week's end, Pasternak will say Robinson was the most effective speaker, because -- agree or not -- he presented his positions so well.

The teachers get a dose of liberal politics over lunch with Colman McCarthy, a former Washington Post columnist turned full-time "peace studies" educator and activist.

McCarthy, who teaches at Washington area high schools and colleges, describes himself to the group as "a pacifist and an anarchist."

"Like the lefties in Oakland, right, Mr. Pasternak?" he says, with a nod to the Oakland contingent's table.

McCarthy names three female pacifists whom most in the room have never heard of: Emily Balch and Jody Williams (Nobel Peace Prize winners) and Dorothy Day (a Catholic activist for social justice).

"Why do we know all the men who break the peace and not the women who make the peace?" he asks.

After taking questions, he signs his peace studies books. The Oakland teachers line up, but the supply runs out. Fuchs gets an e-mail address to order a book and expresses the hope that McCarthy will personally deliver his message to the students back in Oakland, which had 148 murders last year.

Late in the day, the teachers briefly stop at the Jefferson, Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt memorials for what is billed as the "Three Faces of Democracy Study Visit." Fuchs is taken with some of the

inscriptions, and, at the FDR memorial, shoots a photograph of one from the New Deal and World War II president: "We must scrupulously guard the civil rights and civil liberties of all citizens, whatever their background, and we must remember that any oppression, any injustice, any hatred is a wedge designed to attack our civilization."

Fuchs compares the injustice and oppression referenced in FDR's words to the disadvantages experienced by students in Oakland. "You have to have exceptional teachers to overcome those disadvantages, and we do, thankfully, have exceptional teachers," Fuchs says.

On Thursday, the teachers and students go as one group to the Hill to visit their congressional representatives. The Oakland group meets with Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer, but Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D) and Rep. Barbara Lee (D) send aides. The group also attends congressional hearings.

"It was fabulous to see Feinstein in action in the Judiciary Committee hearing, pounding her hand on the table, demanding that competent female U.S. attorneys not be fired," social science teacher Wolfe says. "This fit in so well with the classroom unit I do on women in Congress."

On the final, unscheduled day of the week, the teachers sign the students out before they turn them loose on the town. Then the teachers, too, go their separate ways. Merrill heads for the House of Representatives, but for him a midweek trip to Monticello has been the pedagogical highlight; he will use what he's learned about Jefferson's genius for architecture and engineering. Wolfe takes in the Portrait Gallery, where she buys books and posters for her classroom. Fuchs heads to the Holocaust Museum and Vietnam War Memorial and Pasternak to the American Indian Museum.

A week later, back in Oakland, Fuchs reflects on his Close Up experience: "Being there, it was kind of inspirational. It makes you remember your vote counts, that even in a country approaching 300 million, you can have an impact. The trip made me really believe in what the government stands for, what it was founded for."

Eugene L. Meyer, a former Washington Post reporter, last wrote for the Magazine about computer gaming education. He can be reached at meyergene@aol.com.