Monthly Archives: April 2015

job openings in civic renewal (9)

This is the ninth in a series of occasional posts with lists of open positions:

Executive Director, Opportunity Nation: “Opportunity Nation is a bipartisan, multi-sector national campaign comprised of more than 300 employers, educational institutions, faith-based and civic organizations, community groups and nonprofits working to expand economic mobility and close the opportunity gap in America. As it moves to execute on an ambitious two-year strategic plan, Opportunity Nation seeks a skilled leader, influencer, storyteller, and champion to usher in a new era of growth and collective impact as Executive Director.”

Program Manager, Healthy Democracy: “If you’re passionate about political reform and civic engagement, this position is a unique opportunity to advance your values while making a lasting and positive impact on democracy. Healthy Democracy is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization based in Portland Oregon. Our mission is to elevate the voice of citizens in our democracy in order to give voters information they can trust.  Our signature program, the Citizens Initiative Review (CIR), brings representative groups of citizens together to fairly and thoroughly evaluate high-profile ballot initiatives for the benefit of all voters. It’s a new and highly effective approach to democratic reform.”

Research Director, Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics (soon to be led by the excellent Danielle Allen): “Working closely with the Center’s Director, faculty, and fellows, the RD will develop and manage a portfolio of collaborative projects and dissemination projects that would yield a stream of work outputs of interest to broad audiences, and support the intellectual work of grant development to sustain this portfolio of activities. The RD will participate in thematic seminars and conferences, and will work with the Director on their development. … The RD will assist with the development of the newly launched Fellows-in-Residency program, including helping to plan and oversee a weekly seminar, and evaluating its progress. The RD will assist with short and long-range planning to meet objectives, policy development and implementation, and other projects such as writing the annual report and other communications.”

Budget and Fiscal Administrator at Tufts University’s Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service at Tufts (where I work!). See the Tufts Careers website, and enter requisition 15001129.

Program Administrator, Talloires Network (also based at Tufts). The Talloires Network is a coalition of universities — 340 institutions in 75 countries — that are moving beyond the ivory tower to tackle pressing societal problems. The Network is the primary global alliance committed to strengthening the civic roles and social responsibilities of higher education. It mobilizes its members to improve community conditions and, in the process, to educate students to be leaders for change. … The Program Administrator is responsible for organizing and managing conferences, workshops and other meetings; leading office management and systems; managing the annual MacJannet Prize Program; contributing to other core programs; and managing membership affairs. “

Joe Kahne on the citizenship test movement

Several states are requiring high school students to pass the US naturalization test in order to graduate. I credit the very well-intentioned sponsors of these bills with raising attention to civics and provoking a healthy discussion. I am against the actual legislation, for reasons I laid out in a Fox News piece: “Federal Citizenship Test: What Should a Good Citizen Really Know About America?” Mills College professor Joseph E. Kahne has an excellent article along similar lines in Ed Week today: “Why Are We Teaching Democracy Like a Game Show?” It’s behind a firewall, so I’ll just cite some highlights:

Suppose a legislature passed a law that made it a graduation requirement to know the name of the town in which Shakespeare was born. By passing that law, the members reasoned, teachers would teach this fact, students would learn it, and presto—the nation would benefit from improved literacy!

This hypothetical may sound odd, but legislators in more than a dozen states want to prepare young people for democracy by taking this approach. They have drafted bills to make passage of the naturalization test, the test given to those who want to become U.S. citizens, a graduation requirement. This law has already passed in Arizona and North Dakota.

To some, this graduation requirement may sound fair. If those who want to be American citizens must pass this test, why not require it for high school seniors?

Unfortunately, the test consists of a fixed set of 100 factual questions. For example, one test question asks for the name of the territory the United States purchased in 1803, and another asks respondents to “name one of the two longest rivers in the United States.” Memorizing the answers to such questions might prepare students for the game show “Jeopardy!,” but doing so won’t promote good citizenship any more than memorizing who wrote Moby Dick would promote good literacy skills.

Schools can prepare students to become leaders and problem-solvers for the 21st century. But to do so, policymakers need to reinforce the focus on substantive reform, not distract teachers and students with empty symbolic efforts. That way, teachers can concentrate on helping students understand the content of the Constitution, rather than on requiring that they memorize the answer to the test question, “When was the Constitution written?”

Democracy thrives when citizens think critically and deeply about civic and political issues, when they consider the needs and priorities of others, and when they engage in informed action—not when they memorize a few facts. Let’s make high-quality civic learning a priority. Let’s not take the easy way out and pass laws in more than a dozen states that turn civic education into a game of Trivial Pursuit.

signal

Eight with twenty-one zeros. That’s how many
Letters and numbers, dots, jots, tittles and clicks
Our chatty species sent around this year–
More than in a score of generations past.
Into that wind-whipped Sonoran, I cast
These sixty grains, these quiet sounds I hear,
In hopes their mood or sense or purpose sticks
In the swirl that obscures so much and so many.

pay-for-success in government

Let’s say you represent a program that would really save the government money as well as serving a social need. For instance, your program can cut the number of felonies, thereby saving $31,000 per person/per year in incarceration costs while reducing human suffering and injustice.

You’d like to ask the government for funds. You can’t get money from the executive branch at any level, because government budgets are committed to specific current activities, such as incarcerating a predicted number of inmates or fielding a certain number of police officers. Most agencies lack discretionary budgets for prevention, even if an investment would save them money later.

You could get funding from a legislative appropriation, but legislatures are not well set up to distinguish between truly effective preventive programs and those that just lobby well. In a crowded environment with tight budgets, your odds aren’t especially good.

You could offer the executive branch a contract that would commit the government to pay you from the savings that you actually achieve later on. They could measure the size of the savings using the most rigorous methods, such as random control groups. Then they could afford to pay you out of the savings in their planned budgets in future years.

But how can you operate your program until you deliver the savings and get paid? That apparent conundrum may have an answer: private third parties could invest in your program and get their money back–with a profit–once the government pays you for saving it money.

This is the pay-for-success model. Last week, we heard about it at a Tisch College panel with Jeffrey Liebman of the Harvard Kennedy School (the intellectual leader of this movement, who also provides technical support to governments); Molly Baldwin, Founder and CEO of Roca Inc., which has a pay-for-success contract to cut incarceration among highly at-risk young men in Massachusetts; Jeff Shumway of Social Finance, who sets up these deals; and Brian Bethune of the Tufts Economics Department and a Tisch College Faculty Fellow for 2015-16.

The evidence seemed compelling that Roca will save Massachusetts money while helping young men get on a better track. But I am a civic engagement/democratic participation guy, so I am supposed to ask, “Where are citizens in all of this?” I would say the following:

First, pay-for-success is value-neutral. It is an efficiency measure that could be used for a wide range of purposes. A dictatorship could use it to round up human rights protesters more effectively. Reducing incarceration in Massachusetts sounds much better than that, yet it could possibly legitimize the prison system. I don’t really agree with that critique, but I would acknowledge that any social intervention is a value choice. As such, it should be informed and reviewed by the public.

We already have the power to elect the high officials who preside over Massachusetts’ state government. But an election presents a binary choice (the Republican or the Democrat), which is a crude device for influencing subtle choices, such as whether to fund Roca, Inc. We can lobby and advocate on such matters, but there is an inevitable tendency for most advocates to be biased by self-interest or strong ideology. So we need more deliberative forms of civic engagement that get a wider range of people involved in making difficult value choices.

But increasing civic engagement seems fully compatible with using a pay-for-success model to get the government’s own job done. In fact, pay-for-success is wonderfully transparent. If citizens are asked to pay for 10,000 jail cells, we have no way of knowing how that will affect crime, safety, or fairness. But we can review the Roca, Inc. agreement and decide whether it offers what we want. And we don’t pay a dime unless it delivers.

A different question is how citizens should be involved in the programs themselves. I would hypothesize that in general, programs that produce good results have been designed and built through collaborations that involve the affected communities. Social policy is not like medicine, where chemical compounds that were invented in labs can cure (some) diseases in the real world. Social interventions operate in complex contexts with lots of conflicting values and interests, so they typically work only if they have been co-constructed. That is true, by the way, of Roca; Molly Baldwin emphasized that youth in the program have influenced its design.

Finally, if you want a robust democracy, one element has got to be a reasonably effective government that is capable of delivering what the people choose after due reflection. Eighty years after the New Deal, the US welfare state is not well designed for that purpose. It can’t, for example, make sensible investments in prevention. Even when it pays for activities that should have preventive effects (such as education), it doesn’t pay for success; it just funds the activities, some of which are ineffective. So I believe that pay-for-success is one step toward restoring confidence in government as the people’s instrument. Confidence is not an end in itself, but it is an important means to reengaging citizens in public life.

But see also: “qualms about a bond market for philanthropy”,can nonprofits solve big problems?” and “innovation and civic engagement.”

the Millennials’ political values in context

The General Social Survey asked a set of questions about political values or principles twice, in 2004 and 2014. The questions were phrased, “How important is it ….?” and the items included: always to obey the law, always to vote, never to try to evade taxes, and always to understand other people’s reasoning. Respondents were also asked how important it is for people to be able to participate in making decisions. It’s a nice mix of conventional civic obligations and deliberative and participatory values.

As is my wont, I have looked at the changes generationally. Graphs are helpful for visualizing these changes. For instance, the first graph below displays an interesting pattern in attitudes towards understanding other people’s reasons. Generation Xers have become substantially more committed to this value as they (or I could say “we”) have aged, although we still lag a bit behind our elders. Older Americans have lost their commitment somewhat, especially the group that was born between 1926 and 1945. Millennials enter the picture with the highest levels of support currently, although they rate listening as less important than their grandparents did a decade ago.

GSSothersreasons

I’ll display a second graph that shows quite a different pattern. The younger you are today, the less likely you are to believe that it’s very important for people to be able to participate in decisions. At least since 2004, the older cohorts have not changed their minds on that topic. Millennials continue the pattern of declining support by entering adulthood with the lowest levels of commitment to the value or principle of participation. This graph suggests that unless we do something to change the trends, generational replacement will gradually lessen our commitment to participation.

GSSparticipation

The pattern for always obeying the law looks like the second graph above, although the gaps are smaller. Millennials seem less committed than their predecessors, which could reflect an openness to civil disobedience.

All the older cohorts have grown to oppose tax evasion more as they have aged. Millennials enter the picture least committed to that ideal, but they are just where the Xers were a decade ago, and it’s possible that people’s focus on this topic naturally grows as they age.

Voting, finally, shows a pattern like participation in decisions (the second graph above). Commitment is lower for each generation, and much lower for Millennials. The older generations did not change their minds between 2004 and 2014, but the shrinking of the pre-War cohort and the growth of Xers and Millennials pushes down the average for the population as a whole. Voting is becoming less of a perceived obligation due to generational replacement. However, it’s important to note that this is a question about the obligation to vote. Actual voting rates have been flat over time. In other words, Millennials vote at similar rates to their predecessors; they are just less likely to conceive of that action as a duty.