Monthly Archives: October 2005

Justice O’Connor

At last week’s Steering Committee meeting of the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools, we were honored by a visit from Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. I don’t want to quote the Justice verbatim, because I’m not sure if what she said was meant to be on the record. However, she spoke eloquently about the importance of civic education and youth civic engagement.

Several members of the Steering Committee argued for an experiential approach to civics. They said that we should help young people to play significant roles in their communities right now, and not wait until they become adults. The Justice seemed very supportive and even recalled her own experience in high school. She said that she was afraid and alienated there until she became part of extracurricular organizations.

She stayed with us for more than 90 minutes and asked probing questions. She was much gentler than she might be in oral argument at the Supreme Court, but much tougher and more acute than one would expect from a mere courtesy visit. She wanted to know what was working and what chance we had of succeeding with our advocacy campaign if we employed various strategies. I think she’s completely serious about this topic and ready to add her very powerful voice to the movement for youth civic engagement.

a new map of civic renewal

Several times before, I have made “maps” of the civic renewal movement, using software to diagram the links among websites in the civic field. (See this effort and then this one.) Web links are not reliable evidence of collaboration. However, people create links because they consider another site interesting or important, and that means something. Network-mapping software starts with a short list of sites that you provide as examples of a field or movement. The software analyzes web links among those sites and clusters them together depending on how closely they are interlinked. It also finds other sites that have many links to the ones you started with, and adds them to the map. By examining the final product, you can draw some inferences about what organizations belong in a field, which ones are central or peripheral, and where gaps exist.

I previously used TouchGraph’s GoogleBrowser, which is cool and easy. This week, however, I tried again with IssueCrawler from the Govcom.org Foundation in Amsterdam. IssueCrawler is more sophisticated and flexible. After “crawling” hundreds of linked sites, it generated a cluster map of civic renewal and a circle map of civic renewal. The cluster map is best for showing which organizations are central. The circle map shows the density of links within the network: a very dense community would look like a ball of thread. (Note: You may need to install a browser plug-in to view these .svg files: you can get it here.)

Overall, the cluster map shows a set of youth engagement and volunteering organizations that are linked, on one side, to foundations (which fund them) and on the other to government agencies (because they link to official information and interact with the state). A few commercial news sites also appear.

Alas, I forgot to save a list of my initial nodes. However, I’m sure that I started with sites that represented deliberative democracy, community economic development, civic education, and voluntary service. Among the good sites that disappeared from the analysis were the Civic Practices Network and the Pew Partnership for Civic Change. This doesn’t show that these sites are unimportant; only that they don’t connect to the world of civic education and community service that the computer decided was central.

I’m not terribly impressed by the product of this particular IssueCrawler search, although it may show that the civic renewal field is less unified than I had previously thought. If the maps mean anything, they indicate that the world of youth civic education and service is unconnected to deliberative democracy and community development–and that would be bad news if true. In any case, the software is useful and powerful, and I want to learn to use it better.

network organizations

Today and yesterday, I’m participating in steering committee meetings ofthe Deliberative Democracy Consortium. Tomorrow, I’ll be chairing the steering committee of the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools. I also participate in three or four other organizations that have similar forms. They all have small paid staffs that are funded by grants from foundations. Individuals and ex officio representatives of nonprofit groups serve on their steering committees and do quite a lot of the work, on a voluntary basis.

I love this kind of organization and donate, I suppose, thousands of hours per year to them in the aggregate. They have great potential. They also face some characteristic challenges, including:

  • competition for limited funds between the staff of each network organization and its various members
  • unclear lines of authority, since the staff are accountable to the funders, but they are also expected to be “steered” by their steering committees
  • unequal and sometimes sporadic contributions of voluntary effort from steering committee members
  • a tradeoff between trying to create a “big tent” and pursuing a focused agenda

    • A combination of these challenges has made the National Alliance for Civic Education, which I helped to found, basically moribund. The groups I’m meeting with this week are in pretty good shape, as are Imagining America and the umbrella organizations in service-learning. All these organizations need to learn how to use new technologies to get more people involved in doing their work; and they all need to expand their revenue sources so as to diminish competition for funds. But it may be that the challenges that these groups face are perennial, and that’s why civil society is constantly “churning”–generating new networks while others fall apart.

    New Orleans: a youth-led rebuilding project

    At CIRCLE, we plan to fund some young New Orleanians who were displaced by Katrina to conduct research on the experience of the disaster. The youth we’re working with happen to have been homeless before the storm, so their perspective will be interesting. Meanwhile, I have received the following appeal by email. Knowing some of the people involved, I believe I can disseminate it in confidence:

    Amid all the confusion in New Orleans, inspiring grassroots projects are taking shape. One inspiring example is the work of students at Frederick Douglass High School who are rebuilding the social fabric of their community in the low-income 9th Ward. A group called Students at the Center, originally a creative writing program based at Frederick Douglass High, a predominately African American school, has dedicated itself to rebuilding their inner-city school and neighborhood.

    A core group of these Frederick Douglass students, teachers, artists, and parents currently displaced across the country has stayed in communication, and wants to meet face to face in New Orleans so they can assess the damage and plan their next steps to save their community. It is our goal to raise $10,000 to enable 15 to 20 of them to reconnect November 11-13.

    “The people of New Orleans will make the decision” of which schools to rebuild or abandon, according to Education Superintendent Cecil Picard (“New Orleans Public School Enrollment May Be Halved,” Times-Picayune, 10/13/05). If the families at Douglass High are to have a voice in these decisions, they need your support now. This is a poor neighborhoods without political clout or the resources to travel.

    Please contribute $25, $50, $1,000, whatever you can, either by check (see below) or by PayPal on the New Village Press website One hundred percent of your donation (we will pay for PayPal processing) will go directly to airfare, ground transportation, food and lodging for the 3-day gathering. Make checks payable to New Village and designate it for Rebuilding New Orleans Community. We’ll keep donors informed about the progress of this project.

    on overestimating the impact of the press

    Paul Krugman wrote in last Friday’s New York Times:

    Many people in the news media do claim, at least implicitly, to be experts at discerning character — and their judgments play a large, sometimes decisive role in our political life. The 2000 election would have ended in a chad-proof victory for Al Gore if many reporters hadn’t taken a dislike to Mr. Gore, while portraying Mr. Bush as an honest, likable guy. The 2004 election was largely decided by the image of Mr. Bush as a strong, effective leader. (Article now available by subscription only.)

    Many people on both the left and right agree with Krugman’s causal hypothesis. They assume that journalists have some choice about how to portray the characters of politicians, and their choices affect voting decisions. It is because people buy this theory that they expend enormous energy looking for bias in the major news media and trying to influence mainstream coverage. A belief in the power of journalists’ implicit judgments raises the temperature; it encourages people to be highly critical readers who focus on the “spin” in news stories.

    Of course there must be something to the theory. (And the 2000 election was so close that anything could have changed the outcome, including a rain storm or fewer earth tones in Al Gore’s wardrobe.) However, I believe the importance of journalists’ implicit character judgments is often overstated. Most surveys find that average voters are quite inattentive to the news, to start with. News coverage is always diverse, even when there seems to be an overall tilt like the one that Krugman detects in 2000. Moreover, the spirit of news coverage is not completely under the control of journalists. Al Gore, for example, had some potential influence on the way Al Gore was covered in 2000; this wasn’t simply a discretionary call by reporters.

    Finally, we can almost always explain a presidential election as a result of economic indicators, leaving news coverage aside. Larry Bartels has argued that 2000, like most US national elections, was determined by the change in disposable per capita personal income (dpi) over the twelve months prior to the election. It follows that Al Gore would have won in 2000 if the Clinton administration had decided to cut taxes, thereby raising people’s dpi. Instead, they decided to pay down the national debt, thereby increasing the odds that Bush would win. If anything, it is surprising that Gore got more popular votes than Bush.

    If I’m troubled by anything, it’s not anti-Gore (or pro-Bush) spin, but rather the way that our democratic system seems to reward borrowing and punish fiscal responsibility. By the way, Bush’s popularity until now may have a lot to do with the billions he has borrowed and spent.