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Reviewed by Mansoor Ahmed for Readers' Favorite
Swimming Upstream: The Little Tennessee Valley Educational Cooperative by Jerry Morton is a candid and absorbing memoir about one man's decades-long effort to build something that had never existed before in rural East Tennessee. In 1973, Morton, a freshly minted doctoral school psychologist, was hired to create a shared special education service system across seven separate school districts in the Little Tennessee Valley. The cooperative had originally been conceived to serve a model city planned around the controversial Tellico Dam project, a dam that was itself stalled by a federal lawsuit over the snail darter fish. When the grand city never materialized, Morton found himself building an organization. The book traces his journey from those uncertain early days through integration battles, political attacks, funding crises, and the long, slow work of persuading teachers, principals, and school boards to change behaviors they had practised for decades. Morton draws on his earlier experiences as a school psychologist during the forced integration of Florida schools and as an instructor at the Army's Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, where he learned that the skills of a change agent and a psychological operations officer are surprisingly similar.
Jerry Morton writes with the measured, honest voice of someone who has had forty years to understand what he was actually doing and why it was so hard. The pace is unhurried, and the storytelling is personal and vivid, moving between institutional history and individual moments with real skill. I was particularly struck by his account of the black principal in St. Petersburg who initially refused to meet with him, and who later confided that he paddled children for minor offences to harden them for the cruelty of the white world outside. That single conversation contains more insight about systemic change than most leadership books manage in two hundred pages. Swimming Upstream is a rare, quietly important book about the unglamorous, essential work of changing institutions from the inside out.
