We Don't Want Nobody that Nobody Sent

Just back from a memorial party held by one of our Far South Side community leaders to commemorate the 16th anniversary of her father's passing.  During a meeting Thursday to touch base about turnaround-school community engagement efforts, Jane invited a few of us from the Network office.  With a look that said, If you don't come, this community will not be engaging with you.

"You free five o'clock Saturday?"

"Absolutely."

***

As a white guy not from Chicago and not from an urban school system, working on community-engagement with an entirely African American turnaround school on the Far South Side ... well, my work is cut out for me.

As it should be.

I've been in this sort of situation before, and my approach to crossing borders is to cross them listening.  While I have my own knowledge and experience with community engagement, it's not my job to write a handbook in 10 weeks, pass it to the school and parents, and pat myself on the back.  Rather, I've tried to be democratic, inclusive, empowering: to take the ideas that the school and community have, and bring together the strands into a coherent whole.

After all, my thinking goes, community engagement will be an ongoing process throughout the school's five-year turnaround (and beyond).  Long after I am gone, parents, teachers, and community members will be holding the reins.  If they've had a hand in building community-engagement strategies, they'll be more likely to own them, and to implement them.

What's my approach been, concretely?

I've used one-on-one meetings--chit-chat over coffee, usually--to get to know the experiences and visions of teachers at Wallace Elementary, visions that can be tapped as the community-engagement work gets underway.  I've talked to all three leadership members of the staff--some of them more than once--as well as nine other staff members.  I've led off meetings with a few words about my background, how I became aware of my race and privilege, and the teaching and counseling that first got me interested in school-family partnerships.  I've listened to the stories of teachers, elicited their thoughts on engagement, and talked about the talents they bring to the process.

Feedback's been positive.  But it's been a harder go to connect to parents or community members.  Harder to get access, to get calls returned.  Harder to know who to contact.

I did, however, finally connected to two community members this week: Jane.  Community broker par excellence, parent to children who passed through Wallace, member of countless councils and boards.  Our meeting revealed one more thing that makes community connections harder than teacher connections: a reservoir of skepticism that may run very deep.

Wallace's teachers are all new, and the ones I've met with unvaryingly eager.  But as I quickly learned from Jane's questions, she's one of probably many community member who's seen attempts to change schools.  Seen people from the outside try to impose a vision.  Seen white people who know what's right.  Seen students extract an experience that becomes the basis for their thesis at a far-off university.

On Thursday, Jane voiced that skepticism to me; but also an optimism, and an invitation to her home tonight.

***

It was a rollicking good time: Jane's sisters and brothers and children and grandchildren, tin foil platters of rib tips and pasta primavera as far as the eye could see, and (I didn't quite expect ever to say this) a stirring a cappella rendition of Barry Manilow's "One Voice," sung by a middle-aged gentleman with a truly impressive range.


I stuck close to my supervisor--who knows Jane well--until I had a handle on the room's genealogy, ventured out to mix a little, had very much very good food.  As darkness came and conversation moved inside, it took a turn I'm becoming increasingly familiar with: clusters of folks separating off to discuss a new charter school opening, developments of a parent council, how a candidate in an old race approached the community.  Talk of redistricting, and how it will affect upcoming elections.

There's politics everywhere in this city.  It runs very local, it's very tied to schools.  Having never worked in another large urban district, perhaps this is par for the course.  But nevertheless, it's striking.  One moment I'd shaken the hand of a tall fellow by the sink--next he was telling me he's running for the board of a local, newly-opening charter school.

Perhaps the most important moment for my work came when Jane used her booming voice to command the stage with a few words.  After she thanked the crowd, she moved on to the three Network staff who were there.  She called me out--talking about how she was skeptical when she first saw me, but was coming around because now she witnessed passion and commitment.  She vowed to put some meat on my bones.

I felt good for a moment; but the listening, the awareness, the work, must go on.

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.  

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.

Engaging a Turnaround School: Dispatch #1

I've got my workplan, I've got my action steps.  Today the rubber met the road: I conducted my first "one-on-one" with a staff member of the turnaround elementary school in Chicago--let's call it Edwards Elementary--I'm working with this summer.  The topic is community engagement.

I've made the case to myself--and am trying to make it to my office team--that the best thing I can do is build and support relationships about community engagement, relationships that can far outlast my brief tenure as a summer consultant.  As a professor of mine said last semester, "People are more likely to support something they helped to build."  I'm trying to help them to build it.


I escaped from the 103-degree heat into a Starbucks on the far south side of the city to meet with the Edwards's newest clerk, Eileen.  I'd first connected with her at a school meet-and-greet the week before.  I asked her to tell me a bit about herself, and I learned that she grew up in the neighborhood of the school, still lives there, and went to the school herself some 15, 18 years ago.  That was all news to me.

Part of her story, then, was this: "I want Edwards to be the place it was, the place people came to for school from all over the city.  I want it to be the place, again."

Another part was the views on parent engagement she's developed in her previous job as the clerk at another turnaround school on the (somewhat less far) south side.  She was eager to open up about her experiences, and had some definite feelings about what works and doesn't work when it comes to connecting with families.  

If she could recommend only one or two key things to teachers at Edwards, what would they be?  Her eyes lit up: You've got to connect, she said, one way or another.  Email, text, phone calls.

At your old school, I asked her, what did staff do to reach out to families who didn't have a working phone or email?  Her face lit up: Oh--we'd get the security guard who'd lived in the neighborhood for 50 years, and he'd either find someone who could get to them, or he'd go knock on their door.

Just the first of many one-on-ones.  Should be an interesting summer.

Dispatches from the Frontier

All right, today marked my fifth day at my Education Pioneers summer fellowship, meaning a week is in the books.  I'm helping a network of schools within the Chicago Public system develop a community-engagement plan for an elementary school that is undergoing a "turnaround" process--year one of five commencing this fall.  It's cool work: different from what I've done, different enough to stretch me and give me new skills, but also not that distant.  Only 15 months ago I was working with parents--and my adult ESOL students--of Boston Public Schools students support their kids' learning.

Unlike some past pursuits, I feel prepared for this.  I've plunged into old jobs headfirst and thrashed; now I feel like I can not only swim, but swim well.  I worked with parents on parental involvement, did community outreach with the Latino and Hmong populations once upon a time in Milwaukee, and took a grad-school class that studied community engagement deeply.  I've got plenty of ideas and a binder full of more at my side.

A large part of today was spent mapping out the strategy behind the community-engagement strategy.  How do I do the work that I do?  My central question is this: if engaging a community (reaching out to parents, empowering them to have a voice, setting a common vision for the students based on both school and community desires) is a process, then most of the work will happen after my placement ends in August.  So how do I make sure my work empowers others to care about community engagement, and then do the engaging after I've likely left?

In other words, I can't just write a handbook, wipe off my hands in August, and take off.

This will be a challenge, and I'm looking forward to it.

***

Another challenge: building an effective team.

What makes an effective team?  Many things: trust, willingness to be critical, industriousness, focus on the work, commitment to the work.

And more ...

Today I was in a meeting of, say, eight people.  All adults.  During the two hours in which we managed to edit--nay, highlight several words for later editing--a single page of writing, the room was awash in distractions.  If it could be tapped, it was being tapped at: iPads, iPhones, other laptops.  A bowl of cherries seemed to present a fascinating byplay, over the course of more than five minutes, for two people.  All right: if the boss or the ops manager looks at the Blackberry occasionally, I get it.  It's 2012.  But virtually every single adult being consistently and blatantly distracted, while others are talking, in a small group meeting, often by not one but two devices?  Sheesh.

Respect is still respect (I hope).

Second City, First Impressions

Picked-up pieces from my first days in Chicago, aka the site of the summer fellowship:

After a day of kicking myself that I hadn't packed my basketball shoes (at least not for this trip), I borrowed my friend Anna's younger brother's sneaks to join a dozen future Derrick Roses honing their hoop game across the alley from my Anna's apartment.  Never seen a court that got nonstop play from 10:00 am to 10:00 pm.  But then, this is Chicago.

Since the last time I'd visited, I'd forgotten just how ... character the El has.  Taking the Blue Line into the city from O'Hare, when the train enters denser neighborhoods the tracks pass through a veritable canopy of apartment rooftops, so close you could reach out and touch them.  The platform at the station I got off at was wooden and clearly past its prime.  Such touches have their own kind of charm; then again, the accessibility is mediocre.

View from the kitchen table of my friend Anna's apartment, where I crashed till I could move into my own sublet: row of potted herbs on a windowsill, in front of power lines, in front of a grey rooftop with its ducts and vents, in front of a main drag of Mexican eateries, in front of ... the spectacular downtown skyline.  So much about urban living captured in a single vista.


Whoever Naty is, she's the Mayor of Anna's stretch of the Ukrainian Village.  Dona Naty's Tacos one block, Naty's Pizza the next.


I now know what a Pedal Pub is, and I'll leave it at that.

I remember the days when Megabus was just getting started in the Midwest, you could only take it to a few cities, and it seemed you could get a $5 ride even at the last minute.  How times change.

It's nice being back in a city served by The Onion's A.V. Club--for my money, still the most efficient, coherent, and informative entertainment listings available in the cities I've lived in.

Can anyone tell me where and when the good open-mic poetry slams are here?

Trying to find an affordable yet quality grocery store in Hyde Park has proven quite the challenge.

This is a city with a lot of good coffee.  And here I am, trying to transition back to tea.  Sigh.

Kudos to the UChicago Marketplace for connecting the lampless man with students giving away lamps.  I am awash in light!

I consider myself somewhat aesthetically challenged, but even I can appreciate how awful a color of pink my new room is painted.  And with all the new lamps, it's hard to avoid.

Glad to Be Done, and ...

I finished my graduate school work three weeks ago—closing the book, not with a bang but with a take-home stats exam—and though it’s taken some time for the feeling of completion to sink in, it finally has.  I first began to appreciate the month-long break I am on during those moments when, over a plate of dinner, a brief flash of anxiety would rise in me and then just as quickly recede.  No, I didn’t have to excuse myself to finish just one more class reading; there was no meeting to schedule, no unoutlined outline, no nothing. 

In the mood of reflection post-grad school, I’ve been most struck by two things: first, the ability to inure oneself to a ton of work, and second, the strong desire to do something truly imaginative.

First, I am struck by how accustomed one can get to a “new normal.”  In my case, it was the new normal of working all the time.  In August, based on advice extracted from friends who had crossed the grad-school bridge before me, I harbored fleeting and wildly optimistic plans to “treat grad school like a job.”  Get to the library at 8, work all day, and leave it all behind to get home by 6:30 or 7.  In my naïve imagining, it would a job with long hours, to be sure, but with relative boundaries.  The occasional evening and weekend would be sacrificed of course, but disciplined work ethic could make those exceptions, not the rule.  By the end of September, I was telling people, “I’m early to rise, and still working on the early-to-bed.”  I never did figure out the latter part.

Much of the time, the schedule represented a joyful immersion in pursuits of interest.  I distinctly recall, several times last fall, lifting my head up from a book and thinking, Wow, I’m being asked to spend all my time reading and thinking—what a privilege!  I felt the joys of the work most strongly in the spring, where I did most of work not alone but in groups, joining with classmates over bagels and coffee, our efforts laced with banter, good-natured needling, and inside jokes kindled in the long, loopy hours passed together at the ed school library. 

At other times, I was reminded of the darker sense of work that comes into English from the French travail, and the emotional something that is chipped away at by too much labor.  I will always be grateful for the privilege of spending a year focused entirely on school—and without having to balance it against a full-time job or full-time parenting, as others have to.  But when the hours were longest, schoolwork sometimes felt more like travail than joy.  Although being a student promised to be less emotionally demanding than previous work as a teacher, I abandoned much of the personal caretaking I’d once steadfastly maintained as a schoolteacher.  A personal rule of 6.5 hours of sleep per night slipped to 6, or less.  Weekly pick-up basketball remained an imperative, but a Thursday run became increasingly optional.  In the fall I’d stick to the calmer waters of tea, not coffee; by the spring I was intaking as much espresso as I needed to fire the engine.

Because grad school seemed to require less emotional strength than my prior work, I abandoned things to preserve me emotionally—and found my emotional strength taking a toll.  The costs were little but added up.  Having to leave dinner earlier than I’d like made me feel less present around other people, always the guy edging for the door.  Sending a personal email felt like a luxury compared to processing the dozens of missives about class, meetings, school events.  There was less time to linger over a conversation, or a beer.  Never before had I so appreciated how the long conversation, the personal email, the curling up with a movie or novel acts as a salve, healing and restoring us between bouts of work.  It makes the work easier to do.  It gives the work its sense of reward. 

At orientation, our faculty keynote speaker urged us students to surrender to grad school, and surrender I did—to the joy and to sacrifice of it all.  At the time, I could hardly appreciate how much I would end up surrendering, or how important it would feel to get back some of what I’d surrendered when it was all over.  Since being done I’ve experienced what feels like a gift: I am so much more appreciative of the little things than I was before.  Discovering an excellent pisco sour at the bar Eastern Standard; losing hours in a Michael Chabon novel; taking photos off a bluff overlooking La Crosse and the Mississippi River.  I am as happy to surrender to these things as I was to surrender to grad school.  Here’s to small things that feel like luxuries.

The second striking reflection of the last few weeks has been the primacy of reading to my vacation plans.  I got my fill of nonfiction and PDFs the last 10 months, but for my down time I mean novels.  It has become a sort of shorthand.  To the question, How do you want to spend your time off? comes the answer, Catch up on reading.  It’s always been that way; as a kid, I was constantly losing a whole afternoon to a book.  But now, the urge to crack open a book seems like a nonnegotiable part of the R-and-R.    

And in, finally, reading again, the most appealing part of literature has been how it allows one to escape into the unknown.  All of the things they say about literature—putting yourself in someone else’s shoes, imagination filling out characters—are so true, and I see that now all the more because of its contrast with my schoolwork.  It is like the contrast between the unknown and the known.  Literature brings us all to the happy precipice of the unknown, from where we take leaps that land in wonderful places.  How the mind’s eye will imagine a character is an open-ended endeavor.  Where the author will take the story may have been foreshadowed, but not telegraphed. 

The unknowns of fiction seem so unlike the decisiveness of the policy program.  Sure, as more than one ed-school commencement speaker mentioned, it’s important for us educators to “hit the ground listening” upon our graduation.  But I often found, in my policy and management program, that wondering about the unknown was far less emphasized than being decisive, assertive, straightforward.  You know it if you’ve seen; we students know it well: The executive summary outlining the three main points.  The imperative to define the problem—hammered into me by my most recent professor’s exhortation to “Have a clear problem definition,” or by my fall professor: “What’s the problem here?”  The unctuous elbowing-in of politics, with its necessary decisive steps and its cool disregard for second-guessing.  The PDF with the three bullet-pointed problems and accompanying three bullet-pointed solutions.  And as students, the policy memos we wrote more often than not hewed to the same dictum of the policy world: State the problem, suggest solutions.

What was lost in that decisiveness, especially given our location within what is (probably accurately) known as the most opinionated ZIP code in America, was, at times, a respect for the unknown.  A policy—anything in education, indeed most things in the world—can only be measured and assessed and understood so far.  There are things we don’t know, or can’t figure out, unless we wait a long time, ask just the right questions.  Maybe there are some things we can never know. 

It’s not just imagination that having a respect for the unknown demands of us, but patience, humility, the willingness to hold one’s guns, rather than fire them off in opinion.  In an essay on American education, as it happens, Christopher Hitchens wrote, “The measure of an education is that you acquire some idea of the extent of your ignorance.”  In that sense, my graduate program was a mixed blessing, opening up both countless avenues and on-ramps of curiosity while also disciplining a decisiveness about matters that carries danger.  We can debate the relative weight of either of these.  But no question, having time off has been a clear step in the direction of the unknown.