Author Archives: Peter Levine

civic skills, workplace skills (take 2)

I received some interesting comments in response to my recent post on the relationship between democratic education and education for the 21st-century workforce. So here is a different take, influenced by some good points from friends:

1. Jobs in the “information economy” require skills that are also essential for citizenship. Achieve, a nonprofit research organization created by the National Governors Association, has conducted surveys to determine the skills that are most demanded by employers and by college admissions officers (who, in turn, are gatekeepers to most of the best jobs). Achieve finds that successful workers in a knowledge economy must be able to collaborate in teams with diverse partners, communicating clearly and with civility. They must also be able to evaluate news reports critically, distinguish between reliable and unreliable online information, make public presentations, and in many other ways demonstrate skills that are equally necessary in a democratic community.

2. Intentional civic education is a good means to prepare people for skilled employment in the 21st century. Modern civic education includes classes on government, social studies, and history (which may involve debates, research projects, and site visits); service-learning opportunities that often combine practical problem-solving in the community with research and writing; appropriate student participation in the governance of schools; and simulations of lawmaking, judicial processes, and diplomacy. All of these pedagogies–which combine direct, practical experience with reflection on perennial issues and concepts–stand to teach the very skills that colleges and employers increasingly demand.

Nevertheless …

3. Good education for the job market is not adequate preparation for citizenship. There are two major reasons for this. First, even though all good jobs now require relatively advanced skills, they do not all demand civic skills. For example, the Achieve study finds that two manufacturing occupations that are growing and that pay good wages require advanced mathematics and literacy skills, including the ability to write memoranda and other analytical documents collaboratively. These occupations do not, however, require the ability to make oral presentations or to interpret the news–essential democratic skills. Thus, even in the 21st-century, a person can be well prepared for work and yet lack certain skills that would enable him or her to participate effectively in a democratic community.

Second, democratic participation requires some habits, skills, bodies of knowledge, and attitudes that are unnecessary in almost all jobs. For example, Achieve finds that high school graduates should be able to “analyze foundational U.S. documents for their historical and literary significance (for example, The Declaration of Independence, the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution, Abraham Lincoln’s ‘Gettysburg Address,’ Martin Luther King’s ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’). Indeed, citizens must understand these texts, which teach us our rights and responsibilities and the purposes of our public institutions. Many colleges rightly expect students to have such understanding–but that is because good colleges care about democracy. There is no necessary connection between understanding the founding documents of the American Republic and being effective in the workplace–as shown by the success of firms and employees in many foreign countries.

4. Communities are more economically successful when their residents have civic commitments and abilities. Statistics reveal a strong correlation between sustained prosperity and “social capital” (i.e., trust for other people and membership in groups). This correlation probably arises because people who work together to address local problems can form economic networks more efficiently, can reduce crime and corruption without as much dependence on the government, can gather and share information about assets and opportunities, and can persuade educated young people to stay in their community. However, successful civic collaboration requires habits and skills that, as Elinor Ostrom has shown, are counter-intuitive and contrary to people’s immediate, narrow self-interest. Therefore, participation in communities must be taught; it will not develop automatically.

Put together, these four points support the need for collaboration among civic educators, the business community, and those who are primarily concerned about students’ preparation for work. Civic education is not the same as training for the workforce–not even in a knowledge economy. Nevertheless, there is an important overlap between civic skills and workforce skills that suggest the need for dialogue and collaboration.

four kinds of unions

It is hard to know whether the breakup of the AFL-CIO is a good move or not. Making a reasonable guess would require a lot of detailed information (which I lack) about the differences among the breakaway unions and the ones that remain. However, from a theoretical perspective, I think it’s useful to distinguish four types of unions. These are “ideal types” in Max Weber’s sense; in the real world, they overlap and merge.

1. A classic craft union. Members share a similar expertise or training. They do not work for the same firm or even in the same industry; they may be freelancers. They have an interest in limiting the number of workers (or machines) that compete with them. Therefore, they form an association that provides training and licensing as well as other services, from insurance to social activities. In addition, the union tells employers that its members will only work in shops or on projects that are reserved for members alone. A craft union raises its members’ wages, but sometimes at the expense of those outside; and it may discriminate in invidious ways.

2. A public employee union. Teachers, police officers, firefighters, and welfare careworkers, among many others, hold difficult jobs in public service for which they often receive lousy wages and poor treatment. Therefore, it seems appropriate for them to organize and use both lobbying and strikes (or the threat of strikes) to protect their own interests. However, given any level of funding for public services, there is always a tradeoff between the interests of public employees and those of their “clients” (problematic as that term may be). Therefore, while I support the right to unionize in the public sector, I do not automatically take the unions’ side in actual disputes. In the case of education, which I know best, it seems to me that unions are right to demand higher wages and to oppose arbitrary authority, but wrong to protect seniority systems that send the newest teachers into the “worst” schools.

3. A political lobby. This kind of union organizes as many workers as possible, collects dues in return for representing its members in collective-beargaining, but puts most of its energy and discretionary resources into politics. It sees legislation, rather than employment contracts, as the best means to advance labor’s interests. It uses campaign contributions and volunteer labor either to support one party or to bolster pro-labor candidates in both parties. I believe that unions have a right to represent themselves politically (a form of “petition” protected in the First Amendment), and I think that their power can be a useful counterbalance to corporate power. However, there are many problems with this political strategy. Organized labor has limited power in an economy like ours, where many people work in jobs that don’t easily unionize. Also, there may be a very loose fit between the opinions of the rank-and-file and the negotiating position of their lobbyists and leaders. Finally, unions enter politics with a fiduciary responsibility to maximize the welfare of their members; therefore, they cannot participate very easily in open-ended deliberations about public policy that might take into account other issues.

4. An industrial union. This kind of union tries to raise its members’ salaries, benefits, and security by organizing as many workers as possible within a single industry. Whereas a craft union seeks to limit access to union jobs, an industrial union tries to grow as big as possible. It then uses the threat to withhold labor to strengthen its hand in direct bargaining with employers. An industrial union can make a mistake by demanding more that an industry can genuinely afford. However, I suspect that those mistakes are relatively rare. And barring a strategic error on the part of union leadership, I think the more they win at the bargaining table, the better.

It’s probably clear that I prefer “ideal type #4” to the others, although I believe that they too have rights. It appears that SEIU, the main breakaway union, is trying the hardest to be like #4, an industrial union in the old CIO mold. Therefore, my only question is whether SEIU’s departure from the AFL-CIO will enhance industrial unionism in America or only hasten its decline.

youth-led research on obesity and immigration

There is a cool new movie on the Prince George’s Information Commons website that students created as part of a project that I directed. You can click here to view it, but first, some background ….

More than a year ago, we received a grant from the National Geographic Foundation to help high school students study the “geographical causes of obesity.” There is an obesity epidemic that’s costing lives and that’s especially concentrated among adolescents of color; and our students at Northwestern High School were concerned about it. Our idea was to look for causes in the local landscape–in addition to more familiar factors like corporate advertising. This focus seemed promising for two reasons. First, young people might be able to do something about local land-use (and learn political skills in the process), whereas fast-food advertising campaigns are fairly intractable. Second, the literature suggests that local factors do matter. Having connected and well-lit sidewalks encourages walking. Having affordable, convenient sources of fresh produce encourages healthier eating; and so on. We happen to work in an area that is consistently low- to moderate-income, but the development pattern differs dramatically from block to block. Some places are suburban subdivisions; others look like part of a traditional city. So we hoped to explain the variation in food consumption and exercise patterns as a function of street layouts and other land-use patterns. And we hoped to do that as youth-led research, with high school students in charge.

This was too hard. The students did collect some data, but it was very equivocal, incomplete, and imperfect. Therefore, after several changes of course, we focused on a different intersection between geography and nutrition. Northwestern High School has a very large immigrant population, along with African American students who have typically migrated to Maryland from the South via DC. We thought we would investigate the way that food and exercise changed as families moved here from far away.

After many months of work, our student team has created a flash movie to capture their main findings. (They left much information on the cutting-room floor, but culled some highlights for a short video.) Their product is exciting for me, because I was present when all the audio and other data were collected, but I had nothing to do with creating the movie itself. I see some mistakes that need to be corrected sooner or later, but overall, I like it a lot.

a quick way to say “re-send”

Here’s an easy way to reply when you receive an email without the promised document:

You are welcome to borrow this image by right-clicking and saving to your computer, or by pasting the following into the source code of your email:

<DIV><IMG alt="please re-send email with document attached"

hspace=0 src="http://www.peterlevine.ws/images/nonattachment.jpg" align=baseline border=0><DIV>

the civic renewal movement and partisanship

In three fairly recent posts, I described a “strong, coherent, interconnected movement for civic renewal” that exists in America despite our sense that official politics is harsh, coarse, and unproductive. (See the first, second, and third posts.) Today my theme is the relationship between this movement and the two main political parties.

I believe that the civic renewal movement should retain a non-partisan core, because one of its main virtues is its open-endness, its neutrality between liberal and conservative ideas, which allows productive deliberation. Nevertheless, I doubt that any political movement can make much progress unless at least one party gets behind it. Partisan support for civic renewal will be inconsistent and strategic, to be sure, but it is crucial.

There is a precedent for that kind of partnership. In the Progressive Era (and at later times, when people pushed for clean, transparent, professional government), independent reformers made important alliances with parties. Sometimes the basis of this alliance was very short-term and tactical: for example, a party might attack “graft” because it was out of power. But there were also deep ideological affinities in both parties. Democrats typically wanted clean government for reasons of equity and efficiency. They assumed that privileged people were most likely to benefit from corruption. When public money was stolen or wasted, needy people would suffer. Republicans typically had moral objections to waste and fraud. Even if most politicians in both parties turned a blind eye to corruption, reforms came periodically from both right and left.

The civic renewal movement is not an attack on corruption, nor a call for professionalism in government. (In fact, “professionalism”–as generally understood–can be part of the problem, if it means that narrowly trained experts displace ordinary citizens.) Nevertheless, the civic renewal movement is like a “good-government” crusade in its relationship to partisan politics. It can serve the narrow, tactical interests of parties, especially when they are out of power; and it can tap deep principles in each party. Yet it is fundamentally different from a partisan movement.

For Democrats, our argument should be that existing state-based programs for helping the poor and disadvantaged do not work terribly well, nor do they have deep popular support. This is because: (a) citizens aren’t given important roles to play in these programs–public schools are an excellent example; (b) many of the ideas and models used in the public sector are out-dated; and (c) citizens have so little contact with those unlike themselves that they lack mutual empathy or understanding. Thus we need more public deliberation and more opportunities to work together on concrete public problems. There is a good chance that the result will be more net spending on social programs over the long term, although that remains to be seen.

A Democratic supporter of civic renewal should be especially enthusiastic about:

public support for community development corporations, land trusts, and other wealth-generating companies that are accountable to local citizens; see Community-Wealth.org for examples.

service-learning, service programs such as YouthBuild and Americorps, and other initiatives that are likely to enhance the civic capacity and empathy of youth.

charter schools (and perhaps analogous programs in health and welfare), which give citizens the opportunity to be creative within the public sector.

easier certification of unions, because unions build civic skills and social capital.

media reform to make space for more voices, including low-powered radio stations and various non-commercial alternatives.

For Republicans, the argument should be that technocratic elites have amassed too much power in the state sector; and the market is amoral. If the American people deliberate and work together to solve common problems, they will safeguard traditional values better than either bureaucrats or corporations. A Republican supporter of civic renewal should be especially enthusiastic about:

public support for community development corporations, including those based in churches and religious movements.

charter schools (for the same reasons mentioned above–plus a belief that competition will help education).

service programs (not so much to promote equality of political voice and empathy as to enhance patriotism)

reform of the broadcast spectrum to allow more voices onto the airwaves (thus undermining Hollywood)

Neither party can be counted on to promote redistricting reform or a better campaign-finance system, although these are essential to enhancing democracy and improving public debates.

I have argued that John McCain is likely to pick up the mantle of civic renewal if he runs in 2008. We’ll see if anyone on the left develops a progressive alternative, because then we would have an extremely productive election.