First with his book The Other Parent, and now
with a new grassroots organization, respected children's activist Jim Steyer '74 is working to make the modern media world a safer place for kids.

Putting TV
In Its Place

By Beth Brosnan

"Too often," says author and activist Jim Steyer '74, "parents feel blindsided by the media, surprised by what their kids have been exposed to and helpless to control the rate at which their children are pushed into the adult world."

Teaching is Jim Steyer's life. Not just his job-his life. Teaching is his day job, his night job, his awake-at-2-in-the-morning-worrying-about-his-students job. It's just his classroom that keeps changing.

During the past 28 years, those classrooms have ranged from Hell's Kitchen, Haaren High School, where, as a freshly minted Phillips Exeter grad, Steyer served as a teaching intern, to Stanford University, where he now teaches courses on children, education, civil rights and civil liberties.

But Steyer's true classroom is the entire country, and throughout his career he has labored mightily to educate, motivate and mobilize the American public as a whole and American politicians in particular about the plight of the country's children. In 1988, he founded Children Now, a national advocacy organization that focuses on such issues as childhood poverty, early education, children's health care and the impact of media on kids. Eight years later, he launched JP Kids (as in "just plain kids"), a children's and family media company that, Steyer says without a trace of irony, "was created to change the world for kids through quality educational media."

What he learned at the media circus has led Steyer directly to his latest educational crusade. Earlier this year, he published his first book, The Other Parent: The Inside Story of the Media's Effect on Our Children (Atria Books), with an afterword by Chelsea Clinton, a former student of Steyer's who worked as a research assistant on the book.

The Other Parent is a highly critical portrait of the vast modern-day "mediascape" that now stretches from the sprawl of cable television and increasingly explicit music and movies to computer and video games and the red-light districts of the Internet. This media onslaught, Steyer writes, "envelops and bombards [children] day and night . . . shaping their reality, setting their expectations, guiding their behavior, defining their self-image, and dictating their interests, choices, and values."

Like the prosecuting attorney he once was, Steyer indicts media conglomerates for taking a page from the tobacco industry's book, targeting kids and teenagers with questionable products. He lambastes the government for failing to better safeguard children against an industry in which "money rules all, not the best interests of kids or our broader society." And he warns parents, especially those of us who spent our own childhoods glued to the TV, that "the rules-and the risks-have changed radically, and many of us have been slow to grasp the difference."

Writing a book is, however, just the first chapter in Steyer's lesson plan. To help offset the influence of this other parent-and ultimately change that parent's behavior-he is starting a nonpartisan grassroots organization: Families Interested in Responsible Media, or FIRM for short. FIRM's goals, he explains, will be threefold: To inform and empower parents, to put pressure on the media industry and to influence public policy.

"We'd like to do for children's media what MADD did for drunk-driving reform," he says.

Learning to Teach

When Steyer describes his work, he talks about the "tug" he feels between working directly with kids and "doing big-picture social change work." To understand the sources of those two impulses, you need look no further than the Steyer family dinner table. Jim Steyer grew up in New York City, the second of three sons born to Roy Steyer, an attorney, and Marnie Fahr Steyer, a schoolteacher. Jim Steyer would later combine both his parents' professions, but the fundamental thing he learned from those dinnertime discussions was "a commitment to helping people who haven't had the same chances you've had. That was drilled into us, and I'm glad it was."

This was a lesson his mother (who died earlier this year, shortly after the publication of The Other Parent) also taught by example. Marnie Steyer spent three decades teaching reading in the New York public school system, working in schools in Hell's Kitchen, Harlem and the South Bronx. While Jim Steyer and his brothers were heading off to the Buckley School, a private school on the Upper East Side, their mother, dressed in her customary overalls, would hop on her bike and pedal up to 135th Street.

"People really respected her," Steyer recalls, something he observed firsthand during the six months he spent teaching alongside his mother at Haaren High School. But Marnie Steyer made sure that respect went both ways. "My mother taught me a long time ago that you have to treat everybody the same," he says. "You treat people with respect, and you hold them to the same standard. As a teacher, that's really important."

Jim Steyer entered Exeter as a prep in 1971, to be followed a year later by his younger brother, Tom, a member of the class of 1975. He describes his four years at the Academy as "a very mixed experience. The academics and athletics were unbelievably strong, something I probably appreciate even more in retrospect than I did at the time. But there was no question that [emotionally] you were sort of on your own." Steyer spent most of his lower year "trying to get kicked out, but when I failed, I gave up and decided to stick it out."

But if Steyer's Exeter "wasn't warm and fuzzy," it was, he adds, surprisingly diverse and well-integrated, a place where a kid from the Upper East Side could become best friends with a son of the rural South, as Steyer did with classmate Mike Oneal. It was also the place where Steyer began his first forays into community service: following a summer spent working as a Fresh Air Fund counselor, he set up a tutoring program in the Exeter public schools. And when he completed all of his course work halfway through his senior year, Exeter gave him the option to graduate early-an opportunity Steyer seized to return to New York and join his mother at Haaren High School in Hell's Kitchen.

It was, he says now, "like going from the best school in the United States to one of the worst," a large public high school with none of Exeter's resources and all of the problems that overcrowded, underfunded urban schools are heir to. Drug use was rampant enough to earn the school the nickname "Heroin High," and the average reading level was second grade. Nonetheless, the six months Steyer spent teaching remedial reading "cemented" his interest in education. "Teaching is a really rewarding thing," he says, "because you get the chance to help somebody learn. And you can see it, especially with students who've had so little care and attention-just the opposite of my own experience."

Since then, Steyer has found a way to stay in the classroom. As an undergraduate at Stanford-where he majored in political science and graduated Phi Beta Kappa-he started a reading program in neighboring East Palo Alto. (As a law student at Stanford, he co-founded a nonprofit law office in the same community.) And for much of his adult career, he has combined teaching courses on constitutional law and civil liberties at Stanford, where he is a lecturer in the university's School of Education and the department of political science, with volunteering at the E. Morris Cox Elementary School in East Oakland, where he has taught reading and math to second, third and fifth graders for more than 10 years.

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