I desire to disrupt two forces that limit the uptake of global citizenship education (GCE) in U.S. K-12 public schools: (a) weaknesses in global citizenship’s conceptual and measurement bases and (b) inequitable opportunities to learn essential interpersonal and intrapersonal domains (e.g., global citizenship). Given these pledges, I wade into scholarly debates that are rife with international importance. I do so because of my passion for education, global citizenship, and the connection between them. As someone who prefers the arduous path, my interest in GCE might emerge from a compulsion to contribute to a pursuit Davies and Pike (2009) call “necessary, highly significant, but extremely challenging” (p. 62). Relatedly, President Kennedy’s rhetorical cadence continues to capture my imagination, though I was born 15 years too late to hear any of his speeches without a recording. Especially this excerpt from his 1963 commencement address at American University—five months before his assassination— inspires me to understand and expand access to GCE: 

Although his words ring in my ears and chill my spine every time I read or hear them, I still needed nearly a decade in a small North Carolina town to find my professional commitment: ensuring every public school student completes Grade 12 with the knowledge, skills, behaviors, and dispositions to become global citizens. In that town (pop. 25,342)—where as recently as 2012 the local newspaper ran a front-page advertisement for a Ku Klux Klan crosslighting—I taught English and journalism to middle and high schoolers. Later, I implemented and directed five international studies programmes. My experiences serving rural, urban, and suburban areas, particularly juxtaposed to my first 27 years living in and around New York City, propelled me to help schools ready young people for the age of global interdependence.

Of course, insinuating that my interest in GCE stems simply from observing deficits in that domain while working in the American South would be incomplete. Early on, my life affixed some pretty powerful blinders to my eyes. My parents, both elementary school educators, settled our family on Long Island to avoid my brother and I attending New York City’s public schools. True to its well-advertised statistics, the school system they chose bred copious Ivy League acceptances and sent nearly all its students to four-year colleges. Our school produced two other interrelated crops: white privilege and limited understanding of cultural difference. Due to spending my formative years on Long Island, I was initially oblivious to those concepts. Including the college semester when I lived in Italy, my four undergraduate years at New York University might have reinforced my ignorance of cultural difference, not counteracted it.

Ironically, that small North Carolina town developing my worldview more than living in the planet’s most populous and diverse city did. If not for attending a community college lecture during my first year teaching in North Carolina, I probably would not have developed my commitment to GCE. The speaker exhorted K-12 educators to globalize curricula and pedagogy. He told us to read Thomas Friedman’s The world is flat: A brief history of the 21st-century instead of Harry and Rosemary Wong’s First days of school: How to be an effective teacher. I thought about the teachers I worked alongside, many of whom treated photocopied worksheets and student engagement as synonyms. Then, I realized similarities between the New York schools I attended and the North Carolina schools where I taught. Both focused inwardly, constructing cultural bubbles that impeded students from forming broad or inclusive worldviews. I felt compelled to learn how to penetrate those bubbles. In 2008, a solution materialized. My school district began preparations to implement International Baccalaureate programmes, which are designed, among other outcomes, to develop global citizens. En route to epiphany, the district chose me as the new programme’s first teacher. I received incomparable professional development. Within two years, the superintendent tapped me to implement and direct a three-school International Baccalaureate partnership to accommodate our overflowing wait list. Our programmes doubled in popularity in fewer than three years. Our students led the state in standardized test scores; our seniors led the county by orders of magnitude in every college acceptance and scholarship metric. In 2013, my boss credited our International Baccalaureate programmes as a major reason why he won the state’s superintendent of the year award.

Amid the excitement of families and local media celebrating our successes, I realized that we did not know what we were doing. We talked about creating global citizens, but none of us could define what that meant or measure progress toward that goal. We just assumed we were doing good things. We served a non-representative 7% of the county’s students, so I built a coalition of stakeholders who wanted full participation, not just students from our affluent suburbs. A rival faction, including some of the teachers who I had trained, wanted to restrict access for select students. As this debate intensified in frequency and contentiousness, I realized that I lacked the skills to win hearts and minds in order to move the programme forward. I needed to learn more about how to define, measure, and scale up GCE so it would not belong to a select few. My partner and I packed up our daughters (then ages 5 years and 10 months) to drive nearly 2,800 miles across so I could study at the University of Oregon.

I have maintained professional proximity to this construct for nearly a decade as an internationally focused secondary-school educator and administrator, plus now as a researcher. These experiences drive my singular contention: any school that does not prepare students to be global citizens is failing to serve its community adequately.