Welcome to the Big Time, Kid

I know a little bit about Chicago politics.  I've read about the pork and patronage.  Followed the Blagoyevich Senate-seat selling scandal.  The wards, the "mini-mayor" aldermen, the machine, the voter-turnout traded for jobs.  

When it comes to the school system, I've been slowly absorbing the lingo associated with the web of roles, rulers, and responsibilities in and around CPS.  At the local level, perhaps the most unique manifestation of politics and schools are the "LSCs," or Local School Councils.  Created during 1980s decentralization, with one for each of the 600-plus schools, they have survived recentralization--and maintain the power to hire and fire principals.  

In addition to the LSCs, the system's alphabet-soup includes CACs (Community Action Councils) and PACs (Parent Advisory Councils).  Powerful?  Evidently, yes.  Why?  I'm not sure yet.  

In the case of the south-side turnaround elementary school I'm working with on community-engagement, leaders from the LSC and CAC supported the turnaround.

Oh, and did I mention there's a PTA?  The PTA did not support the turnaround.

It's one thing to conceptually know the politics.  It's another to see it with all its brass-knuckles gleaming--as I did Thursday night during a community meet-and-greet for the school.

The meeting featured an invigorating opening speech by Principal Brennan, who recounted the teachers that first sparked her love of science, laid out her turnaround vision, and was generally a beacon of energy and optimism.  

It was an important speech.  But the real drama seemed to lie elsewhere.

Two community members were invited to speak.  One the head of the LSC, the other the head of the CAC. 

Community speaker #1 addresses the assembled parents: "You don't have to like me, and I don't have to like you.  Because it's about the kids."

Okay, glad we got that out of the way.

Now she addresses the principal: "Principal Brennan, people have been asking me, What do I think of you?"

An opportunity for a show of unity in the face of enormous challenges?

"And to be honest, Principal Brennan, I don't have an opinion about you.  Come back in December and ask me, and I will then."

How do you like them apples?  

Community speaker #2 was a little longer on the forward-looking and esprit-de-corps ...

... until I was introduced to her after the meeting.  As a non-Chicagoan white male in a suit, it often takes a little explaining to convey why I care about community-engagement and may have something to offer.  

Fair enough.  As it should be.

Well, let's just say: speaker #2 was and remains skeptical of my capacities in that regard, which she did not hesitate to directly tell me.  My status as an outsider, my choice of coffeeshop location, my taking of the bus ...     

I needed a glass of wine and a good 30 minutes of yoga after the meeting.  The school politics, the parent politics, the turnaround politics, the politics of race, of accountability, of community engagement.  This city breathes politics.  I've got a lot to learn.  

File This Under:

Wonky but Revealing: Cutting Class, a report from MassBudget on the problems--visible and hidden--with the public education funding formula here in the great state of Massachusetts.


The Executive Summary gets the main points, but there are many nuggets throughout the whole text.  Key takeaways: There are some structural and some situational issues with the "foundation budget" for school systems--what  schools spend on their system, minimum, which differs from district to district depending on number of low-income students, distribution of elementary vs. middle vs. high school students, and so forth.

Structural: the formula was set based on 1993 figures, which weren't adjusted once it was signed into law in 1994, thus always lowballing district needs.

Situational: health care costs and special-ed costs are higher than what you might expect.  Many reasons for both, mostly understandable.  The result: districts pull money that could be used for regular ed teachers and other services to fund their legal obligations to special-ed and employee benefits.

Circumlocutionary: By "the great state of Massachusetts," I actually mean, "the Bay State," "the citizens of the great state I governed," or "home," depending on which version you prefer from what Romney used in his victory parity speech tonight.  By my count he did mention the state's name twice, but it was listening to him get around having to say "great" and "Massachusetts" in the same sound-bite-bound sentence was almost as painful as, well, as listening to him speak in general.

By "home," he expanded by way of saying, "It's nice to be home for the first time in two months."  Hmmm.  Hasn't been in Massachusetts in a while?  As my mother might say, that's sort of how he governed.

Policy Takeaway for the Week: It's likely the only major legislation to get through the Massachusetts Statehouse before summer is the budget, and a bill to contain health-care costs.

First reaction: man, that's slow.  Why doesn't anything ever get accomplished in politics?

Second reaction: considering how much health care eats up the state budget, a health-care bill is an education bill, a transportation bill, a community-development bill.  In theory--the devil will be in the details, of course.

Limits

This week, a plunge into something new.  I'm interning at the Statehouse working on education policy. Firsts: first time working in a government building, first time walking through a metal detector to get to the office.  We all deal with policy--ramifications, fallouts--on a daily basis.  But--first time dealing with it from the inside-out.

My first day my supervisor handed me a three-inch-thick binder.  Instructions: learn everything you can about English Language Learners.  I put my head in the binder and emerged a few hours later swimming in Whereas this and Ch. that. 

The inherent limits of policy strike me right off the bat.  I'm not in an ELL classroom, and most of the briefs and reports I've read don't make me feel like I am.  I'd love to read some organized testimony of teachers: what's it like to do this work?  What do you think the law should say?  I'm sure it's out there for the finding.

Even if policy is informed by the grassroots, how much of current, or amended, policy can reach back to the classroom?  Should reach that deep?

**

It's an interesting way to learn.  Before Wednesday, I knew almost nothing about ELLs.  I know something more about language acquisition.  This is perhaps the most transactual learning I've ever done.  Learning for the purpose of tweaking a bill that has already been written.  Learning just enough, in compressed time, to suggest those tweaks.  Borrowing ideas already in use in other states.  Writing to the constraints of four-page policy memos.  Will it feel liberating, having so specific an outcome?  Will it feel limiting?

**

It was a hard decision to drop my fifth class.  I was already feeling overwhelmed by the workload.  I found myself stringing together 14-hour days, yet still not fully engaging with the work in some courses.  I pulled the plug on an extra quantitative class, in favor of being able to dive more deeply into projects I'm passionate about in other classes.  I think it's the right tradeoff.

The limit to the one-year program is always having to make these trade-offs. 

I already feel better.  I can follow through on having a discussion group for a class.  Talking through readings solidifies learning for me.  I'm excited all over again for this last semester.

**

An observation this year: I miss the grassroots.  I miss my students, my class.  I miss the crafting of lessons, the buzz of carrying them out, the lightbulbs when folks make connections.  The new recruits for the next course.  I loved--love--working with adults to help them overcome the limits of not speaking English.  I miss pushing the limits of practice.

I'm trying to heed the voices of my passions as I answer the $39,500 question: What Comes Next?  I came to grad school because I wanted to touch more than a dozen or two lives at a time.  I came because I saw my students confronting the realities of living poor in Boston and wanted to be part of a movement that could holistically address, upend, change those realities.

Should I go back to a classroom?  I don't think having a foot (heart, head) back in the grassroots need be seen as a limit.  I'd love to do good work on the ground and connect to good work at the 10, 20, 30,000 foot level.  Not sure how.  Still working on the roadmap.

Organizing Principles

If I am not for myself, who am I?
when I am only for myself, what am I?
And if not now, when?

--Rabbi Hillel

As I look back over the years, there are very few classes I took that transformed me, that I could say changed my life.  More transformative were moments I didn't see coming--a volunteer experience while studying abroad, a year volunteering with AmeriCorps after a planned job fell through.

I think I might be taking such a class this semester, though: "Organizing: People, Power, Change."

When I was an undergrad, my last two years on campus, every Wednesday, I attended the weekly meeting of a labor-rights group that advocated for (and alongside) the janitors, cooks, and groundskeepers who kept our campus humming.  Between meetings, I'd write op-eds, do outreach to students, plan events, and the such.  We started a Living Wage campaign--successful after I left campus. We walked picket lines in solidarity with a campus strike.  We didn't have a "leader": there were two coordinators, and everything was shared.  We rotated meeting facilitators, rotated note-takers, rotated op-ed writers.  Our group had people of all stripes: kids from backgrounds advantaged and challenged*, black and white and Latino, gay and straight, men and women.

Rarely in my life have I ever felt so alive as when I organized with them.  On the one hand, we were grappling with concepts of interracial understanding, capitalism, human rights; on the other, we were taking actions that, we hoped, would ultimately lead to direct benefits for the community we studied in.  Against the often theoretical background of being undergrads, we were doing stuff that felt real, that felt like it mattered not for tomorrow, not just to build our careers, but right now.  We had a extra-large dose of idealism, but we did genuinely good work.  We learned a lot--about communities, about ourselves, about commitment.  When I look back on my undergrad years, there are a few things I'd do differently if I could.  Being a student activist is never one of those.  I cherished those moments, and cherished them still.

One of the appeals of this class is that it's a more theoretical backing for organizing work.  Another is that it will let me test ideas of activism, even as I'm considering advocacy work upon graduation.  Another are the exercises: I will actually have to initiate an organizing campaign this semester.  Of all the classes I've signed up for, it feels scariest, hardest.  In the years since college, I've volunteered, I've canvassed for political campaigns.  But it's been many moons since I organized--and when I did, I did it in a group.  This feels like a step out into the wilderness.  I can't wait.

*Update.  This originally said "good backgrounds and bad" till a reader's comment made me take a second look at it and edit it.  Thanks for the input. 

I Used to Think ...

"We need a course where we can pull together what we're learning in our three other courses." --classmate Z.


That course wasn't there for me to take, but as much as often this semester I've tried to pull together what I've learned.  In September, facing readings flush with theory that felt far removed from the classrooms I'd taught in and the immigrant parents I'd worked with, I felt like I was being asked to predict weather patterns at 40,000 feet based on how I felt the wind blowing over my face.  As time went on, I sensed progress, most notably when I opened my mouth in class, started, "In another class I'm taking, we've been studying X ..." and could make the link back.  Taking a reading from class A to integrate into an essay in class B: another good sign.  I can't completely make the jump from ground to cruising altitude yet (I leave that for the basketball court; oh, wait).  But I'm gaining hops.

I learned a lot about a lot of stuff, from the mundane to the pointy-headed: parent-engagement techniques in districts and charters, Common Core, methods to improve child protective services, promotive and protective factors in child development, how foundations affect school reform, an eye-opening amount of management theory, an eye-crossing amount of stats.  On a personal front, I've worked on communication, from how to use hand gestures to voicing dissent in a way that informs new consensus.  I've learned how to manage time much better (and only been made fun of for my 15-minute increments ... 200 times plus/minus 100 times by T.).  On a professional front, I've had many conversations with folks in numerous fields, to the point that I got an email back confirming an informational interview a couple weeks ago and found myself staring at the subject line thinking: Catie who?  Works where? (It was in the email; all's well).

I'm one stats project (speaking of that), two final papers, and three class evaluations away from being done.  But taking a moment to glimpse the light ahead, some changes in my thinking.  Warning: these are (a) a Sample, (b) Broad, (c) General, and (d) Obvious in some cases.  The more nitty-gritty stuff ... well, I'll leave that for my posts on ESOL techniques.


I used to think ... in terms what I saw right in front of my eyes; now I think, not only that way, but also in frameworks, strategies, concepts.

I used to think that business practices were cold; now I think they can inform many types of management.


I used to think of cradle-to-career work in terms of starting programs, a la the Harlem Children's Zone; now I think collective impact might work better in many places.


I used to think of consulting as outside my interests; now I think that consulting assistance has helped spur great initiatives that I'm very much interested in (see here and here).


I used to think about poverty in terms of the experiences of the students in my class; now I most definitely still think about them, but also about funding issues, building support to sustain policy changes, strengths-based interventions, targeting vs. universal, and more.

I used to think that early parenting classes were mainly site-based, or classroom-based; now I think that home-visiting may be the key to making them productive.

I used to think that national foundations were too aggressive in promoting school reform; now I think they have a role in advancing knowledge in the field and, yes, putting their money out there to spur innovation (insert many caveats here).

I used to think a mission statement was crucial to keeping an organization focused on what matters; now I think that's still important, but should also be accompanied by strategic action steps, a theory of change, a theory of action, and criteria for ways to measure those actions.  

Oh god, the profs have gotten in my blood.  Back to that stats.

Politico Pith: Choice Thoughts from the State Secretary of Education

Not gonna say it was quite like seeing Lady Gaga walk into our library basement, but it was pretty cool.  Just a few (paraphrased) nuggets able to persist through my stats-addled brain-fog:

We hold school time constant and let learning vary.  We need to flip those: everybody to mastery, no matter how long it takes.

One of my big problems with NCLB was that it overidentified underperforming schools but didn't give states the money to help those schools.   

Teacher evaluation has to be based in part on student achievement.  It's a common sense connection parents know.  Last year she had a poor teacher and hated math.  This year she loves her teacher and math's her favorite subject.

If you want to guarantee great turnout at a school committee meeting out in the suburbs, don't propose revamping the reading curriculum--propose changing the school day by 20 minutes.

We just voted to do the first state takeover of a school system, in Lawrence.  I was at a school in a different city yesterday, and I was sitting there talking to those people, thinking, We should take over this district, too.

Border Remorse

There are good reasons to be concerned by undocumented immigration and hope for better policy, but I continue to be struck by how incoherent/sloppy/hostile states' responses are in the absence of federal action.  Piece from The Boston Globe today on "buyer's remorse" experienced by states that pass legislation:

In Alabama, meanwhile, business leaders and lawmakers are feeling the tinge of a new law written with such haste that no one actually can figure out what it means. According to the New York Times, the law states that an individual must provide proof of lawful immigration status for any interaction “between a person and the state or a political subdivision of the state.’’ Vast government resources are now being used to ensure that local pee-wee football leagues are not filled with undocumented Mexican children. 

I visited the border south of Tuscon and in El Paso a number of years ago on a trip exploring border issues.  Among many memories in those nine days spent under a larger sky than I'd ever seen, I recall getting a firsthand look at the water jugs placed by humane organizations for folks who would inevitably brave desert heat (and cold) to get to this country.  There are humans at the center of the debate, first and always.  I also learned how wall-building and border-enforcement had been rather a bipartisan undertaking, from Reagan through Clinton, and how it had mainly had the effect of shifting paperless migration to treacherous mountain regions rather than stemming it.

Despite my skepticism about federal action, though, this is one of those issues where I suspect federal reform would be much preferable to current makeshift state forays into immigration policy.  Federal reform historically has been very imperfect, and would be again, but I think there's a fighting chance national senators would be less influenced by the nativist winds blowing at the state level, because of the political realities of the burgeoning Latino vote, which of course matters more at the statewide level than within a single (possibly gerrymandered) district.  A state senator can still get re-elected with a hardline immigrant platform, the thinking goes, but I suspect it's decreasingly possible for a member of Congress to.  Obama's made some motions toward this; perhaps its something I can hope to give thanks for during a second administration.

NCLB Stew

Piece at the Times about Tom Harkin's NCLB re-write.  Still waiting for more analysis, but I was struck by this quotation from Grover Whitehurst:

“Harkin’s bill would return control to the state departments of education and the local school districts, and they’re the ones that got us into the mess that No Child was designed to fix,” said Grover J. Whitehurst, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who headed the Department of Education’s research wing under President Bush. “Districts and states have not been effective in delivering quality education to children from low socioeconomic backgrounds, so why should we think they’ll be effective this time around?”

Okay, okay, states and districts haven't always taken the lead in promoting achievement.  Or rarely.  We can debate that.  But it's not like NCLB had much to say about instruction and achievement, either, except to set pie-in-the-sky goals of universal proficiency by 2014 and impose punitive consequences (that were actually pretty easy to escape through the "other" option of school turnaround)  for those not on track. 

The idea that simply raising motivation to get improve achievement was sufficient to get the process going failed on two fronts.  First, it left states to fix, fiddle, and nip data to "show" proficiency.  Second, it's proposals for creating better options for kids were a) tutoring and b) transfer.  Leaving aside whether this is actually an effective way to raise all boats, only tiny, tiny numbers of kids took those up.  NCLB didn't deal much with capacity of teachers and schools, nor with good fallback plans.

Harkin's bill may not be stellar--I for one am interested to learn more--but it's slipshod to hold up NCLB as the original, responsible alternative.

NCLB Soup

If Law A guaranteed 100 percent student proficiency, but was only10 percent implementable, and Law Y shot for only 80 percent student proficiency but was 80 percent implementable, which would you prefer?

Interesting piece at The New Republic by Kevin Carey (Ed Sector) about the Obama Administration's tweaks to NCLB.  Basically, takes the moon-shot "everyone achieves by 2014" mandate away while empowering teachers and schools and states to do the things NCLB didn't properly address, like helping students meet stable standards, teacher quality, authentic school turnaround.

Meanwhile, Carey casts a plan among some Republicans to back away from NCLB as long-term retreat from federal spending obligations masking as nostalgia for the good old days when the Feds kept their hands out of the schools.

As far as Obama is concerned, while I never worshiped him as The Second Coming, I voted for him, would do it again, and will do it again (short of some major shift in the political landscape leading to a sudden embrace of Mitt Romney ... oh wait, yeah, I'm voting for Obama).  I share many reservations about his term, including some with the still-cohering Occupy Wall Street movement.

But he has initiated many "tweaks" that could have positive long-term impacts, like changing funding formulas for usually earmark-riddled energy and transportation sectors, this NCLB work, RTTT, and so on.  In that sense he has been more manager than leader--despite the oratory skills we all know.  Is it enough to be a President of "tweaks"?  No, and that may spell doom for him come next November.  But worth watching the long-term impacts.