Happy birthday!

Happy five-year anniversary, Education Sector!

Two summers ago, I was a Policy & Communications Research Assistant at Education Sector, a fantastic forward-thinking education policy think tank situated at the intersection of policy, research, and practice. My thinking about urban education policy developed a lot while working at Education Sector, and I'm grateful to the wonderful mentors I had there who helped me translate my policy research into my senior thesis at Northwestern and helped guide my decisions about what I should do post-college.

Although my recent work has shifted more towards asset-based community development and civic engagement at a larger level within city governance structures, my heart will always be in urban education policy. It was wonderful to reconnect with my former colleagues who are still driving the thought leadership on K-12 education, higher education, and the transition between the two institutions.

Thank you, and happy birthday!

Disconnected communities

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to meet Richard Murphy, the founding direct of the Rheedlen Center for Children and Families (that would go on to become Harlem's Children Zone) and the creator of iMapAmerica. iMapAmerica is an innovative project that channels some of the best aspects of asset-based community development, service-learning, and deliberative democracy. 

First, iMapAmerica uses a curriculum to train teenagers to map their communities to uncover the resources that are available and useful to them. Then, it sends out youth volunteers to map their communities, which leads to information that populates dynamic "ilivehere.info" websites. New Orleans, one of the pilot cities, has a great website.

The way that Murphy talks about his work is that children are only in school for 15% of life; outside of school accounts for 85% of life. That said, we can't expect schools to be the silver bullet. Focusing on community solutions and reconnecting and revitalizing communities is the missing link in school reform but also in community revitalization more generally. 

The New Orleans "I Live Here" website seems incredibly useful for youth
looking for resources, but also for youth-serving organizations to
connect more effectively with one another.

Murphy imagines the next evolution beyond mapping pilot cities as a Mapping America Week every two years where youth across the country would walk their neighborhoods and report back on what resources they have -- and, sometimes more importantly, what resources they lack. This information would help state and local governments as well as youth-serving organizations respond to real demand-driven community needs. 

City-based initiatives like Cities of Service are working to re-engage citizens to volunteer their talents and skills to serve their communities and meaningful and mutually beneficial ways. Paired with a broader launch of iMapAmerica and greater support for connecting across sectors within communities could yield incredible impact.

Civic engagement is taking root in more ways than just volunteerism. Perhaps we won't be bowling alone anymore after all. 

Do we spend too much time re-learning?

I spent most of the day at a conference on the elongation of the transition to adulthood hosted by the American Youth Policy Forum and the Future of Children. AYPF is focused on bridging the gaps among the spheres of research, policy, and practice -- an arena close to my heart given my past work relating to translating theory into practice on the subject of improving teaching quality in Chicago Public Schools through learning from what works in professional development and rethinking how teaching is conceived as a profession.

My boss was slated to speak at one of the panels of the conference from the perspective of federal policymaking and the coordination of federal agencies around policies for at-risk/disconnected/vulnerable youth (there seems to be no asset-based term to describe this population of 4-6 million young people who have been failed by societal institutions to the degree that they are both out of school and out of work -- any ideas?). The inter-agency working group on federal programs for youth connects 12 federal agencies to coordinate policies and build a strategic plan for children's policies -- their website maps resources and strategies in a pretty cool way -- and the White House Council aims to take work like this to the next level in terms of promoting public-private partnership networks and making recommendations on federal policy changes.

Each panel of the conference today had a researcher, a practitioner, and a policymaker, and the interplay among them made for some thought-provoking commentary. Some of my takeaways:

• We don't need to create new institutions. We need to move existing institutions to go out on a limb together to change the opportunity structure for young people since upward mobility and social inclusion are what's at stake.
• The silence was deafening in response to a question on the role of businesses and the private sector, which made me glad to know that one arm of the Council's work will be around building sustainable partnerships among businesses, education and credentialing institutions, and youth-serving organizations within communities. 
• Without a shared set of consistent outcomes and a plan for sustainability, we cannot expect collective impact to take shape. Collective responsibility must yield collective accountability for high impact.
• If the systems that punish have accepted that it takes years to change [e.g.: the length of prison sentences], why have the systems that help remain tied to an instant gratification timeline?
• National service is an incredible opportunity to empower youth from all backgrounds to develop the skills to improve their own lives through education and training, while engaging with and improving institutions and local communities.

Despite all of this wisdom and knowledge-sharing, I sensed a bit of frustration around the idea of praxis. One panelist commented that if we don't change the incentive structures that drive diverse sets of institutions that support youth, we'll just perpetuate the isolated "silo-ed" efforts and still be talking about the same issues of the need for collaboration, shared language, and collective impact decades from now.

The cynical part of me is reminded here of David Tyack and Larry Cuban's Tinkering Toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform, which reminds us that it's incredibly challenging to change institutions like school systems since even after a century of reform cycles, the basic structure of the school system has basically remained the same.

Yes, reform may be cyclical, but I wonder if some time is wasted trying to carve out a niche, trying to be unique, trying to create new organizations and enterprises rather than connecting what already exists. After all, creativity is about connecting things that already exist.

Do we spend a bit too much time relearning and repackaging existing knowledge instead of taking action on the understanding of what works? Obviously, it's not that simple, but it was a wake up call for thinking about where I envision my potential role -- spend a little less time thinking about creating new theories of change, flashy terminology, and new ways to delineate key elements for success and a little more time connecting potential change-makers and leveraging the existing knowledge and resources to take action.

The power of the printed word.

Source: Indexed

I didn't quite believe it when I heard in my Negotiation class in the Spring that the printed word is incredibly powerful, and that for some reason, people often assume legitimacy and finality when agendas are printed, figures are on a printed page, or anything is tabulated -- even though we live in an era where the majority of people have access to a printer.

That theory has been validated in the last few weeks of work. Once ideas take root, they are incredibly tough to destroy. Since the All-Council meeting that took place at the beginning of the month, I've been helping the Council focus on determining the collective next steps that could have the potential to:

1. yield high impact in connecting youth to education and careers 
2. catalyze needle-moving change

We took the initial step of synthesizing ideas for next steps that were brainstormed at the All-Council meeting. This was expected to be a jumping-off point for greater discussion and bolder idea generation. A few weeks later, apart from some wordsmithing and formatting, that laundry list of potential ideas (ranging widely in impact level, feasibility, and uniqueness) has stayed pretty much the same. When an idea is married to a name and appears on a printed list, it somehow psychologically seems to become real -- Pathways for Success, Youth Engagement Program, so on and so forth.

In his State of the Union address at the beginning of this year, President Obama reminded us:

We do big things. 

From the earliest days of our founding, America has been the story of ordinary people who dare to dream. That's how we win the future.

I trust that the members of the Council will look beyond the apparent "legitimacy" of the printed word, and aim instead to do big things.

Weekend adventures

Saturdays since I arrived in DC have been filled with odd combinations of ~12 hours of fun activities. Yesterday was no exception: a networking brunch, a museum, a gay pride amateur dog show, dinner, and a movie.

The Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE) works with low-income high school students to translate their "street smarts" into "business smarts" and "academic smarts" through experiential coursework, business case competitions, and more. NFTE provides high-impact opportunities to re-engage high school students who are veering onto dropout pathways and make school more relevant and engaging.   Their efforts are really aligned with the work that the Council is aiming to do, and one of my co-workers who serves as a NFTE ambassador invited me to the brunch, where I met a group of cool young DC-based entrepreneurs and heard from Garrett Graff, social media entrepreneur and the youngest editor of the Washingtonian magazine.

After brunch, I visited the National Building Museum (it's going to stop being free in a week, so see it soon if you're on an intern diet!). Visiting museums always makes me nostalgic about my training in American Studies, where one key aspect was always the fusion of culture, history, literature, policy, and every social science -ology with a special focus on the form and the content of objects. The NBM exhibition on Designing Tomorrow included a variety of artifacts from the World's Fairs in the US during the 1930s. World's fairs were all about imagining the future, which, in a way is what we who aspire to shape policy do every day -- hopefully beyond just the rhetoric of win the future.

And now for something completely different -- dogs!

Inevitable observations on gender and leadership

In one of the final sections of my "Strategy, Structure, and Leadership in Public Service Organizations" course with Andy Zelleke last fall, we opened with the following dire facts:

In the United States, women hold 15% of corporate directorships and constitute about 3% of Fortune 500 CEOs. In the public sector, women comprise 17% of the Senate, 17% of the House, 12% of Governor's mansions, and 25% of state legislator seats. Women make up more than two-thirds of the nonprofit labor force, but less than half of senior staff positions.

We read The Double-Bind Dilemma for Women in Leadership: Damned if You Do, Doomed if You Don't, a 2007 report by Catalyst, a research and advocacy organization working to expand opportunities for women in the workplace, and spent the session discussing some of our own personal and professional experiences relevant to women's underrepresentation in leadership positions. Many comments surfaced around women's competitiveness with other women, and it was saddening to hear that women in leadership positions are not always supportive and helpful to other women.

I feel incredibly lucky to have strong women mentors all around me, from the personal mentorship of my older sister who recently became a doctor, my mother, and my grandmother to friends in many different places. When I started this blog, I emailed the link to 25 mentors from my school years and my past internships. Of the 25, twelve are women. I feel incredibly lucky to have such strong mentors of both genders and from diverse backgrounds.

My summer workplace seems to have a larger proportion of women leaders than might be expected in a government agency. I primarily work with two women leaders -- the Executive Director and a Senior Advisor, and so far they have both taken their informal mentorship roles very seriously, which I really appreciate. The Chair of the Council is also a woman, as are our primary White House contacts at the Office of Social Innovation and the Domestic Policy Council. This kind of critical mass is just what we need in government and beyond.

Over the last school year, I participated in From Harvard Square to the Oval Office, a training program for women who might consider careers in politics (or at least in public service!). There, I learned from and with dozens of smart female Harvard graduate students with incredible potential to make our world better. One of them is now working on Off the Sidelines, a new initiative by Senator Gillibrand, one of the few women senators in the US. The site will be a platform for women to lead their communities and shape our country's future. Do check it out, and get involved.

The neighborhood

En la ciudad, un Pueblo. 


Mount Pleasant is a really cute community. In ways that make me nostalgic about Chicago, it's a really defined neighborhood. It has a history as an escape from the city, the part of the neighborhood where I live is in the vicinity of about four large churches (one of which plays organ music on Sundays that we can hear from inside the house!), a handful of a charter schools, and the long strip of shops that make up the commercial part of town. On Saturdays, there's a farmers' market!

I bought some delicious goat cheese and strawberries that will make up my lunch sandwich of next week. The people around were all really friendly. Even the inevitable people ready to accost you with a clipboard were talking about neighborhood concerns -- a petition to start a community wifi network and tips on weatherizing your home.

Welcome to the neighborhood!

Changing the Way We Do Business

Broader partnerships.

Bolder strategies.

Bigger goals.

Better data.

This morning began with a little field trip to the Hill, where I attended a Congressional Briefing on coordinating child and youth policies at the state and federal level. The Forum for Youth Investment -- an "action tank" -- and its Ready by 21 National Partnership hosted the event, which featured a panel of practitioners who have been working for sometimes more than a decade to align policies across agencies that affect children.

Remarkably, 29 states already have at least one coordinating body such as a P-20 Council or a Children's Cabinet (nearly 10% of states have three or more coordinating bodies, which might be a symptom of collaboration fatigue -- one of the panelists even mentioned how you need a coordinating mechanism for the coordinating bodies!).

The four Bs above are the building blocks for coordinating youth policies, according to the Forum. They're remarkably similar to the five steps for achieving large-scale cross-sector "collective impact":

Common Agenda
Shared Measurement System
Mutually Reinforcing Activities
Continuous Communication
Backbone Organization

Developing common language and complementary goals are key policy recommendations for any alignment effort. I wonder, though, whether progress is sometimes impeded by the tension between being unique/indispensable as an organization/entity and aligning efforts under a shared vision. For instance, "no excuses" charter schools have proliferated nationwide, but although they all share the same underlying values, they each find different acronyms and guiding principles to use. Is this because they are all vying for a perceived zero-sum pool of funding and all must therefore be unique?

Getting back to the event, I really buy into the Ready By 21 Theory of Change, which is very much in sync with the "all sectors, working together" model:

"Doing business differently" is one of those often-repeated truisms, and it's been popping up everywhere this week. Just yesterday at the National Conference on Volunteering and Service, Melody Barnes gave the White House Council for Community Solutions a shout-out. About the Council, the Social Innovation Fund, and other domestic policy efforts of the Obama Administration, she said:

"The Administration's emphasis on results has resonated among communities, philanthropies, and corporations across the country, spawning a new focus on innovation, evaluation, and the metrics for success. It's time for government to do business differently... and we are."

Yes. We. Can.

Learning to Learn

How do people learn best?

That's the question that Sam Chaltain, educator and democratic learning community advocate, spoke about at TEDxSinCity last month. In his book about the topic, Faces of Learning: 50 Powerful Stories of Defining Moments in Education, he interviewed ordinary and extraordinary Americans about their moments of learning. The five key conditions of learning, whether inside the classroom or outside of it, are environments that are challenging, engaging, relevant, supportive, and experiential.

How can students be expected to be engaged in school if they are not built to be optimal environments for learning?

This week's New Yorker includes a review of Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses and a few other books and articles in that realm of academic disengagement and the question of why we have college. Entitled "Live and Learn," the article considers the numerous theories that aim to explain why we have college -- for meritocracy, for democracy, and/or for credentialing for careers. Louis Menand writes, "The system appears to be drawing in large numbers of people who have no firm career goals but failing to help them acquire focus."

Guiding focus is not about cookie-cutter chutes and ladders, but about building learning environments where students are motivated and engaged. Student engagement is difficult to measure, but even before entering the maelstrom of higher education, it's an area of concern.

Although high school students drop out of school for reasons ranging from needing an income to needing to stay home with a child, 83 percent cite school-related reasons for dropping out such as feeling disengaged from the academic and social aspects of school.

 "Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire," wrote W.B. Yeats. The challenge for educators of toddlers to adults is to nurture environments that embody the five key conditions of learning, so that young adults don't end up academically adrift.  

The Moment We've All Been Waiting For...

In twelve hours, the Council will convene for its all-Council public meeting for the second time in its brief history. Just like in February, the public session will be live streaming on WhiteHouse.gov. The morning will be a few hours of serious discussion on the challenges facing young people aged 16-24 who are neither engaged in school nor in work and what organizations and communities can do to take collective action to support them more effectively.

The past two days of work have been a marathon of managing logistics and getting materials together, mostly the behind-the-scenes work of making sure all the PowerPoint presentations are accurate and all the hard-copy versions all match them and include the necessary extra information. Today even involved that oh-so-typical intern task of grabbing a cab and rushing hot-off-the-printer materials to the Chairwoman of the Council when she needed them ASAP.

I'll have much more to talk about next week when we're all detoxing from the meeting tomorrow and have had time to process all of the 26-person discussion (and when all of the materials are publicly available!). Also, I'll begin crafting my summer-long projects next week, so that'll definitely be exciting.