Monthly Archives: June 2011

Five Strategies to Revive Civic Communication

(Chicago) I am here to release my white paper, “Civic Engagement and Community Information: Five Strategies to Revive Civic Communication,” at an Aspen Institute round-table.

In brief, the recommendations of the report are:

  • Take advantage of the large and growing infrastructure of national and community service programs by requiring all service participants to learn civic communications skills and by creating a new Civic Information Corps—mainly young people who will use digital media to create and disseminate knowledge and information and connect people and associations.
  • Take advantage of the nation’s vast higher education sector by changing policies and incentives so that colleges and universities create forums for public deliberation and produce information that is relevant, coherent, and accessible to their local communities.
  • Take advantage of the growing practice of community-wide deliberative summits to strengthen democracy at the municipal level by offering training, physical spaces, and neutral conveners and by passing local laws that require public officials to pay attention to the results of these summits.
  • Take advantage of new tools for mapping networks and relationships to make transparent the structures of our communities and to allow everyone to have the kind of relational knowledge traditionally monopolized by professional organizers.
  • Take advantage of the diverse organizations concerned with civic communications to build an advocacy network that debates and defends public information and knowledge.

(cross posted on Huffington/Post Chicago)

potentially revolutionary strategies that honor people’s wisdom and power

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Yesterday, I attended a meeting with the Positive Deviance Institute, which happens to be a center (like mine) at Tufts University. Their approach is to work with partners in a community to identify the individuals, institutions, or families who avoid the problems that everyone else is suffering from. For example (see PDF), in a poor Vietnamese community, child nutrition was rampant, but some children from extremely poor families were well nourished. The Positive Deviance people used their community-based research strategy to help residents find out why. It turned out:

In every instance where a poor family had a well-nourished child, the mother or father was collecting tiny shrimps or crabs or snails (the size of one joint of one finger) from the rice paddies and adding these to the child’s diet along with the greens from sweet potato tops. Although readily available and free for the taking, the conventional wisdom held these foods to be inappropriate, or even dangerous, for young children.

[Also:] most families fed their young children only twice a day, before parents headed to the rice fields early in the morning and late afternoon after returning from a working day. Because these children under three years of age had small stomachs, they could only eat a small percent of the available rice at each sitting. The PD families, however, instructed the home babysitter (an older sibling, a grandparent or a neighbor) to feed the child regularly.

The intervention dramatically cut malnutrition.

PD reminds me, in some very general ways, of the work of our friends at The Right Question project, who have achieved remarkable results by training service-recipients to ask a few key, critical questions about the decisions that affect them.

And it reminds me of “social accountability” measures, which reduce corruption and improve services by giving citizens detailed information about public spending.

And it reminds me of John Gaventa’s Power Cube analysis, a simple but potentially transformative tool for analyzing and challenging power relations.

And it reminds me of asset-mapping, which was developed by John McKnight and John Kretzmann and used in many communities to create a strong foundation before outside aid is used.

These techniques have important common features:

  • They show a high respect for poor people’s knowledge and ability
  • They require training, but dramatically less training than it takes to become, say, a school teacher or a physician. The Positive Deviance Institute’s main training program takes 12 days.
  • They are equally appropriate for many types of setting–schools, villages, hospitals–and for a variety of purposes.
  • They run counter to the norms, assumptions, and incentives in most big institutions and professions.
  • They have a different theory of how to go to (large) scale than is implicit in randomized experiments.

I think we need to understand which ones work, when, why, how well, for whom, for what purposes, and in what combinations. And then we need strategies for expanding them.

why the president should ignore the debt limit

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Here are two legalistic reasons that the president should simply ignore the debt limit if Congress fails to raise it by August 2 (or whenever the federal government surpasses the limit and faces default).

First, after Congress passed the most recent increase in the debt limit, it passed a budget that would necessarily cause the debt limit to be exceeded. The budget supersedes the debt limit law. It is impossible to follow both laws, so the president is free to choose to follow the budget.

Second, the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution, section 4, states, “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.” The current debt of the US was authorized by the laws that required the various expenditures made in the current fiscal year, and so it “shall not be questioned.”

I would be the first to admit that these are legal judgment calls, and there are other plausible readings of the law and constitution. But if Congress fails to raise the debt limit and the government defaults, the results will be disastrous. On the other hand, if the president openly exceeds the debt limit, what happens?

  1. Congress sues him, but the Supreme Court will, if it follows its own precedents, dismiss the suit.
  2. The House impeaches him. That is not an outcome that any president should welcome; at a minimum, it brings discredit on the House. But impeachment is better for our  constitutional system than defaulting on the debt would be. And it would probably pay off very well for this particular president, as Members of the House from swing districts would be forced to vote on the articles of impeachment, and then the Senate would refuse to convict. Two Democratic presidents in a row would emerge stronger after being impeached.

There is, of course, a third option: the president could agree to enough of the Republicans’ demands for structural changes in the federal budget and the role of government in America that they would raise the debt limit. But that presents three problems: deep cuts in vital programs during a near-recession, complete abdication of this president’s and all his successors’ power, and severely diminished odds of being reelected.

To be clear, I think the Congressional Republicans have a right to negotiate for the budgetary and policy outcomes that they want. That is what the regular budget process is for–the Congress must pass and the president must sign a set of tax and appropriations bills. They negotiate until they agree, and if they miss the deadline, the government goes into temporary shutdown. The collateral damage to the rest of us is limited. In contrast, missing the debt limit deadline by even five minutes means default. Therefore, using the debt limit vote as a lever for policy change is unacceptable.

horse-race coverage at its worst

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(In DC briefly for a Kettering Board meeting) This is how Katharine Q. Seelye begins her introductory profile of presidential candidate Rick Santorum in the New York Times:

Exasperation crept into Rick Santorum’s voice when he was asked the other day how he planned to win the Republican nomination for president in 2012 after having lost his last election as senator from Pennsylvania by more than 17 points in 2006.

Rather than discuss his strategy, he critiqued the question.

We readers are potential voters. If the Times chooses to write about Sen. Santorum at all, it should tell us what he has done, what he proposes, and what he believes, so that we can consider voting for or against him. Instead, the entire Times profile is about Sen. Santorum’s low chances of winning the nomination, and his “exasperation” at being asked whether he realizes that he will inevitably lose.

This kind of story can be a self-fulfilling prophesy, depriving voters of a choice. At a minimum, the Times misses a chance to inform the public and support a discussion of the candidates and issues. To be clear: I wouldn’t vote for Rick Santorum in a million years. But that is because I think I know what he believes, and I disagree with it. I could be wrong, which is why I read the newspaper. The job of reporters is to help us form and check our views.

This kind of profile, by the way, is a quadrennial ritual in the Times and other newspapers. I remember a very similar treatment of Sen. Lamar Alexander, who managed to interject that he wanted to run on the ideal of “civil society,” in the midst of an article about how he could never raise enough money to be competitive. We never found out what he meant by “civil society” or whether it was a good idea.

the movement to badges in education, and what it means for democracy

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The idea of giving badges to people who can demonstrate specific skills is taking off rapidly.  A “badge” is shorthand for a portable credential, rather like the merit badges traditionally used in Scouting. (See the Boy Scouts’ badge for backpacking as an example.) In the modern, adult world we could have badges for being able to schedule meetings of more than four people, being able to write an effective op-ed piece, or being able to set up a social network.

Mozilla (which builds Firefox and other prominent software tools), the MacArthur Foundation, and Peer 2 Peer University have launched an explicit “badges” project. Meanwhile, the US. Commerce Department is leading a federal effort to promote digital literacy that may, I am told, soon generate recognized credentials that are similar to badges.

As the old song says, “This could be the start of something big.” We are used to credentials that come only with the completion of whole courses of study. For instance, a high school diploma signifies that you have successfully completed four years of high-school-level courses (or the equivalent). That system creates dilemmas:

  • You can obtain the credential without necessarily knowing anything relevant or useful: it can just measure years spent in the institution. Or …
  • Its value can be more “objectively” measured by means of some kind of high-stakes test, such as an exam that is required for graduation. But heavy use of tests encourages test-prep instead of real education. Also …
  • If we want to know whether a prospective employee or student can do something specific (such as participate effectively in a meeting), the available standardized test scores may be of no use.
  • Many people fail to obtain general credentials. About a third of our young people reach age 19 without a high school diploma. A substantial majority reach age 25 without a bachelors degree. Yet many possess particular skills that would have market value if they were recognizable.
  • You can develop valuable concrete skills in school or on the job and (if the institution works well) can be recognized for your skills while there. But no one in a different school or job will know what skills you have: they aren’t portable. Recommendation letters are devices for transmitting information about skills, but they are highly imperfect.

Hence the idea of defining specific skills and providing portable credentials to people who can demonstrate them. The main advantages are solutions to the dilemmas noted above, i.e., better measurement, better incentives for learning, more portability, and less waste of skills that people already have.

But there’s also a practical opening here for anyone who thinks we haven’t been teaching the right things. I, for example, believe that we haven’t been teaching the skills and arts of association–of group-membership and collective action–that de Tocqueville saw as the foundation of democracy in America. We can advocate for those skills to be included in our curriculum requirements or standardized tests, but all the above-mentioned dilemmas stand in the way. Instead, I am tempted to jump on the “badges” bandwagon and advocate for civic badges (at all levels).

This is a supply-side strategy: trying to increase the number of people who have civic skills by providing relevant credentials. We could also pursue a demand-side strategy: persuading admissions offices and employers to seek individuals who possess specific badges. For example, the federal government will need to find 91,000 new employees each year for jobs defined as “mission-critical.” Imagine if they sought employees who had civic badges, like interviewing fellow citizen to determine their values and needs; or moderating public meetings. Advertising a need for those badges would have a powerful effect on curriculum.

By the way, I am very far from believing that the only objective of education is a set of concrete skills to which we can award badges. A liberal education is supposed to result in a coherent mentality that encompasses a sensitive appreciation of a wide variety of perspectives, moral grounding, aesthetic appreciation, and analytical rigor. But that is the outcome that a diploma ought to signify. By reserving badges for more concrete attainments, perhaps we can restore the appropriate meaning to degrees.