My Big Five

Everybody gets to the point, I guess, where the job search becomes serious.  I spent months and months exploring jobs, calling up folks for informational interviews, and mulling.  Lots of mulling.  Now I need  a job in the next two months.  I've applied for things, but unfortunately HR offices don't calibrate their hiring processes to the end of my grad-school program!

Folks at Education Pioneers have nudged me to reach out transparently to people I know, with a single message: I'm on the job market.

I'm even getting sort-of headhunted.  By a pretty cool nonprofit for an intriguing job, but I will admit it's a bit ... weird.

A couple years ago, I was asked what are the five most important things I'd need in a job.  I made a list back then.  I've tweaked it since, but it hasn't changed much:

Mission: I've got to work for a place I can connect to.  For the most part, I always have--a blessing, but also a need.

Grassroots Connection: I struggled teaching high-schoolers, but loved teaching adults.  I loved being a student activist in college.  I love talking to people.  I don't know if I have to be on the front-most of the front-lines, but I feel a deep need to be close, at least.

Strategy: Okay, this one can be hard to square with the preceding one.  I like the opportunity to think strategically, make plans, deal with "big ideas" (even if they only seem big to me).  Some mix of grassroots and strategy would put me over the moon.

Sharp Colleagues: I want to work with people who push me.  "Push" can mean a lot of things--push me intellectually, emotionally, experientially.  But at the end of the day I want to be challenged not just by my supervisor, but my peers, too.

Support, Growth, Development: Though I am very self-motivated, I struggle when I feel "out in left field," with lack of clarity or lack of support.  I thrive when I can bounce an idea off someone.  When I taught adult ESOL, that person was not just my on-site supervisor, but also a mentor I connected with almost exclusively via email.  In other words, I'm flexible as to where I get the support, but I know I need it.

Those are my big five.  I'm trying to keep them in mind as I search for jobs: considering lots of options, trying to stay true to myself.

Reading between the Lines

Tonight, in my family engagement class, we heard from a Congressional policy advisor: Do you like reading legislation?  If you want to work in policy, you're going to have to read a lot of it--and you'll have to like it.

I've been up to my eyes in English Language Learners this semester in my statehouse internship, and thus far--I can't say I love legislation.  Department of Education regulations ... technical assistance for school districts; they may not be page-turners, but they're at least bereft of looping semicolons and "whereases" that dot the statutory language.  But the law itself?  Not only don't I love it.  It's not even a courtship.

I may not be enamored of legal language, but it's been a blast seeing policy from the inside-out.  The hearings, the advocacy, the urgency: this stuff matters.  And to contribute to the process has been quite gratifying.

But as someone used to writing a lesson plan on Friday to be rolled out next week, state legislation seems to move at an absolutely glacial pace.  And there's something else to adjust to.  Bills are filed, the public weighs in, committees file amendments, semicolons are added, "whereases" tweaked.  If you're lucky, a bill squeaks through committee, gets enough support on the voting floor, and goes to the Governor for a signature.  Sure, it's what we all learned in eighth-grade civics.  But the slowness of it is what stands out in person.

And the tortoise speed of legislative action is mirrored in the distance one might feel from the effect of law. The bill I'm working on right now carries a pearl of frustration precisely because it's not yet clear to me how changing the bill will actually change kids' lives.  It's not clear to me policy is the right arena in which to be fighting the battle.

Some legislation has an impact, maybe even immediate impact.  But much legislation edits around the margins, spawns unintended consequences, or at worst, as we all know this week, is immediately pilloried and targeted for repeal.

And that's something else our guest visitor spoke of today: How often do you need to see the results of your work?

What Matters to Me, and Why

Third in a series of speeches for Arts of Communication, at the Kennedy School of Government (the first here, the second here).  

Assignment: Speak about your values.

Over the past few weeks, a number of you have spoken about growing up white and privileged.  In the small town where I’m from, that was my experience, too.  My parents are loving, caring, and involved in the community.  But let’s face it: we were more likely to be in a food co-operative than a multiracial coalition.

A month after I graduated college, I moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin to volunteer with AmeriCorps.  In college, I’d been an ethnic studies major and student activist.  I was drawn to Milwaukee because it was diverse, affordable, and a bit gritty.  I was drawn to AmeriCorps because, before I became a schoolteacher, I wanted to immerse myself in the community.  I wanted to learn about the institutions around me, and about myself.  Little did I realize, living in a white neighborhood, and working in a black one, just how immersed I would be.

When I arrived, I had six weeks to kill before the program.  I went on brewery tours, I bought a bike, I learned about Milwaukee history.  And I settled into the room I’d rented in a two-bedroom apartment, one of six units in a yellow stone building in a neighborhood people had told me was good to rent in.

A month after I moved in, my roommate Helen and I were chatting one night.  She said, “if you ever need something fixed, talk to me.  The landlord, Gretchen, doesn’t like to deal with subletters.  And I’ll tell you something else Gretchen doesn’t like: blacks.”  Ellen went on: one time Gretchen found out she was considering subletting to a black couple.  She told her, “If you ever rent to people with hair like that, I’ll evict you.”

That night, I learned: it’s one thing to read about race, another to feel it pound, feel it sweat.  I went to my room in a daze, wrote down everything Ellen had told me on a yellow legal pad.  That night, and many more nights, my muscles would clench with questions: Should I move out?  Should I stay, and try to change minds?  I had black friends.  Could I invite them over?

I decided to stay.  I decided to take action.  Now, I didn’t end unfair housing.  But I gathered facts, secretly.  I called up a fair housing council, and gave them each piece of the story.  They opened a case—though I never found out how it got resolved.  But as they investigated the practices in my building, I had to interrogate the habits of my mind. 

For Milwaukee is a city with a lot of street crime.  And for many people, the face of that crime is young, black, and male.  That fall, as I’d leave my AmeriCorps job at the Red Cross to wait at a bus shelter on the corner of 27^th and Wisconsin, in a downbeat, black neighborhood, I’d like to say I felt no anxiety or prejudice.  But I’d be lying.

With time, I found my own way to be comfortable.  I talked to friends and colleagues about—my own racial feelings.  I walked around the neighborhood.  I engaged people at the bus stop.  I tried to make peace with my skeletons.  That fall, I learned: It’s one thing to feel open-minded, but another to open your mind and see how you really feel. 

More than that, in my year in AmeriCorps, I learned what structural racism, and personal racial prejudice, look like in living color.  What was the more important lesson?  To take steps to rectify institutional racism?  Or to take a step back and reflect on our own racial feelings?  Both.  And I learned that you can’t deal with one and not the other.  As long as our minds are segregated, our apartments, our streets, our neighborhoods, will be segregated.  I truly believe that, even if we can’t overcome inequality overnight, with time, we can—but it has to start with each of us.

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.

Which One Do You Want to Hear First?

The good news is, I got a summer job offer in Chicago.  It trains.  It pays.  It even pays as much as my former job!  And it starts a whole month after school ends, so there'll be some much-needed R&R.

The bad news is, I've got a dog of a cold.  And it's getting worse.

The hard news is, I need to give a speech on My Values in 9 days, and I'm struggling to get ideas on paper that feel deep enough to speak on, but not too detailed that they go for more than the allotted four minutes.  Time to suck on a zinc tablet and think it over.

Dirty Dishes and Public Transit: [Re]framing the Issue

Second in a series of speeches for Arts of Communication, at the Kennedy School of Government (the first here).  

Assigment: Choose an issue, and creatively employ framing techniques to persuade your audience to your position.  (Overused Metaphor Alert).

T alert.  Every day this week, the MBTA transit system will carry 1.1 million passengers. T alert.  Each of the last twelve months, on-time performance has been above 93 percent for the Red Line.  T alert.  In two short years, nearly the entire system has gotten real-time, GPS data so customers can track when buses and trains arrive.

How many of you have taken the T in the last week?  … Me, too.  How many of you have heard announcements like the ones I just made?  … Me, neither.  Instead, we’ve heard dire warnings from T officials about cutting services and raising the fares we pay.  We’ve heard frustration from riders, who see cuts and hikes as yet another attack on folks who already stand in the cold for buses.

This problem isn’t new.  If you’ve ever been in a relationship, you know what I’m talking about.  Have you ever woken up in the morning, come down to the kitchen, and been faced with a sinkful of dishes?  Your partner left them there.  You get upset, you roll your eyes, you start complaining.  Now imagine the dishes were there because your partner spent all last night making you a home-cooked meal: maybe a pork roast, mashed potatoes, butternut squash.  But here you find yourself, bickering about a few dirty plates.

That’s where we are with the T.  When I’m frustrated with my girlfriend, something I find useful is stopping and taking stock of all the good things we do for each other.  Let’s try that for the T.  When I was about eight, I visited my aunt in Quincy.  She took me on an adventure—to the old New England Sports Museum at the CambridgeSide Galleria: we rode the Red Line in, switched to the Green Line, and emerged above-ground, over the river.  It was my first time taking public transportation.  For years, I’ve been an avid transit user; and as a teacher, 60 bucks a month has always been softer on my wallet than gas and car insurance. Like any of us, I look for service that’s rapid, reliable, and can make renovations for the future.  Sure, I’ve had the occasional frustration.  But those are exceptions in what’s normally an exceptional system.  Most of the time, the meal’s good and the dishes get cleaned.

So let’s stop arguing.  Our dishes aren’t dirty because our partner is lazy, but because the dishwasher’s broken.  The T is 5 billion dollars in debt.  Just like a broken dishwasher, there are many reasons.  Two thirds of the debt was passed on to the system by the state.  And in 2000, lawmakers decided to fund the T with projected sales tax revenue … and then the economic bubble burst.  The result?  Every year, between 20 to 30 percent of the revenue the T takes in leaks right back out—to service that debt.  The projected deficit for next year is more than 150 million dollars.

But if the arguing continues, not only are we not going to do the dishes; our entire relationship will be on the rocks.  As in a relationship, both sides have a legitimate point.  Those dirty dishes probably should have been cleaned, and you probably should have appreciated that pork roast a little more.  It’s fair for T officials to consider cuts and fare hikes, especially given the system’s solid performance.  It’s fair for riders to be concerned about the personal impacts.  

Let’s stop arguing, and start talking straight.  If you need a new dishwasher, it’s time to set aside a little more money each month to buy the appliance.  It won’t be easy, but we should ask the same of the T.  Remember, it’s public transportation: it’s ours.  We must demand high quality—but be willing to chip in, too.  Let’s ask the T to find creative new revenue sources.  Let’s say no to service cuts. But let’s say yes to reasonable fare increases.  As in a relationship, it’s time to stop tearing each other down, and starting building for the future. 

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.