Investing in Education

Van with a Plan

by Lory Hough

Ann, Peter, Liz, Andy, Maggie, and Hugh celebrating Ann and Hugh's 50th Anniversary in Tuscany It all started with the family van. At least that’s how Ann Calkins remembers it. The year was 1965 and her husband, Hugh, was running for the school board in Cleveland, Ohio, a city struggling with slumping industries, racial unrest, and negative publicity.

“We bought an old van that the boyfriend of one of our sitters painted all kinds of colors,” she says. “We put the campaign posters in the back, the kids would pile in, and we’d go to the nationality picnics. There were so many in Cleveland. This was good campaign territory.”

It was also a good way for her children, all young at the time, to see, as Hugh says, that “education could be enjoyed.” Although none of the children, now grown with their own children and spread across the eastern half of the country, took to politics, all took to education — some professionally, all personally.

“I certainly remember those days on the campaign trail, riding in the striped van or on the back of a flatbed truck with a microphone in my hand,” says Peter, the oldest, an architect. “I don’t know that this experience really had a direct impact on how, as a fifthgrader, I thought about Educationwith- a-capital-E, except insofar as it contributed to the core idea that furthering the cause of education was always at the forefront of what my father, and then more broadly our family as a whole, simply does.”

After his first run, Hugh, an attorney, won the election and moved the family from Shaker Heights, a tree-lined suburb known for excellent schools, to Cleveland, a city with a struggling school system. He had just finished working on President Eisenhower’s Commission on National Goals and had started, in response to the struggling schools, a local citizens’ group focused on the city’s dwindling tax base, a nondiverse teaching staff, and an overall lack of community support for education. Hugh would eventually go on to become a Harvard Corporation fellow and key spokesperson during the university’s tumultuous 1960s. He even landed on Nixon’s master list of political opponents.

Maggie, now head of a research institute that focuses on Alzheimer’s and other forms of cognitive decline, was seven when the van rolled through the city. She learned from the experience, she says, especially after the kids were enrolled in public schools. “My parents made a conscious decision to put us in Cleveland public schools when he got on the school board, and at that time they had a great program called Major Work,” she says. “I know with absolute certainly that many of the skills I use in my career now I learned then, and that’s want Dad wanted for every child — to learn skills that would make for successful adults. To be a poster child for that, both on the campaign trail and in school, felt rewarding on some level.”

Andy, the second oldest, chose to work professionally in education, as did Liz, who was in nursery school when the family moved to Cleveland. A former editor at Scholastic magazine and director of Recruiting New Teachers, Inc., Andy is now executive director of MassInsight Education, a nonprofit focused on improving public schools in Massachusetts. He says Hugh’s “devotion” to education clearly “tilted me in the direction I’ve taken.” Liz has taught, thanks in part to advice given to her by former Ed School Dean Ted Sizer, M.A.T.’57, who told her that if she wanted to reform education, she should first start by being a teacher. (Hugh later took the same advice; after he retired from law, he spent five years teaching.) Liz is now principal of the Horace Mann Elementary School in Washington, D.C., where she and her husband, Steve Whisnant, Ed.M.’81, live.

Hugh says the family’s interest in education started well before the family van, of course. Both he and Ann, who helped get more libraries into the Cleveland public schools, grew up in learning-focused households.

“At the dinner table, my father would come up with a topic for discussion and go around the table asking what each of us thought. He was a practitioner of the art of symposium,” he says. “Ann’s father was the same way. There was a lot of intellectual activity. It was natural for Ann and me to create symposiums for our children, too.”

About the Article

A version of this article originally appeared in the Fall 2007 issue of Ed., the magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

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