Top National News Events, with Local Implications

What happened in our nation in 2010 that will undoubtedly have implications at our local level?

Merriam-Webster’s identified “austerity” as the word of the year. That single word may well encapsulate the major themes underlying my “top 7” list.

1. Health care reform: significant movement forward; a missed opportunity. On the positive side, the nation made progress on health care. An overhaul of the health care system did occur. New legislation makes care more affordable and eliminates restrictions based on pre-existing conditions, for example. This will help to reduce health disparities and promote greater effectiveness of care for everyone. However, failure to provide free, universal health coverage to all Americans puts us behind other first-world countries. In the U.K., where I lived for a year and visit frequently, everyone, from poorest to richest, goes to sleep at night secure in the feeling that they have health coverage. What a difference it would make if everyone in the U.S. had the same reassuring feeling. What if all of our children’s physical and mental health needs received attention, and did not detract from their ability to learn at school? I don’t care whether we adopt a Democrat plan or a Republican plan. My vote would go to a referendum to require Congress and their families to go without health insurance until all of their constituents have coverage. We could have free universal health care in a very short period of time!

2. National and state elections; the “shellacking” of the President. Voters delivered a message; the President, in his own words, said he was “shellacked”. With a House Republican majority (242 to 193) and a Senate Democrat majority (53 to 47), can we expect any bipartisan cooperation, or only endless, partisan stalemate? If the latter, we will have to do more on our own at the local level to promote education, jobs, and housing initiatives that will maintain our quality of life.

3. Economy perhaps gaining; jobs not. We seemed to begin to emerge during 2010 from a bad recession. However, job creation has not rebounded; unemployment remains high; the housing market has not recovered. (What little job growth we experienced in the first part of the year became insignificant in the face of cuts and a slowing of the job growth rate for much of the rest of the year.) Jobs are crucial; economic stability is vital for families. For many of the issues we encounter in education, for many of the problems that confront our communities – a healthy economy, including an adequate number of jobs, provides prevention and solutions. Efforts to improve our communities in 2011 will fare better if we can improve the economic infrastructure.

4. Arizona immigration controversy. Arizona’s law, the strictest in the nation, requiring people to carry their registration cards, drew intense attention to the topic of immigration. Heightened attention can have many benefits, if informed by facts. Our immigration research and public seminar this year, with the Minneapolis Foundation, convened people who understand that, in our globally interdependent modern world, we cannot simply put up fences, literally and figuratively. We must understand immigration within the larger context of our changing demographics, our desire to remain competitive in the world economy, and the necessity of forming positive relationships with countries throughout the world. The future of our nation and neighborhoods depends on it.

5. “Racing to the top” in education (but not yet winning the race). In 2010, our federal government committed billions of dollars to promote the “race to the top”. Nine states and the District of Columbia won grants to develop new standards to promote student success, to develop data systems to promote and measure progress, to recruit and retain effective principals and teachers, and to turn around their lowest performing schools. “Waiting for Superman” broadened the awareness of the general public regarding the quality of our nation’s schools. However, also in 2010, international data showed that we’re slipping. The United States ranks far from the top in Science, Reading, and Mathematics – well below places such as China, Korea, Japan, Canada, and Australia, on all measures. On some measures, the U.S. could not outperform much smaller countries like Iceland, Poland, Slovenia, Finland, and Estonia. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan commented: “The United States came in 23^rd or 24^th in most subjects. We can quibble, or we can face the brutal truth that we’re being out-educated.”

6. Tea Parties. Whether you participated or not, whether you love the partiers or despise them, you must acknowledge that the tea party movement constitutes a strong, clear manifestation of what it means to live in a democratic society. The movement emerged, and then drew energy from the grassroots. It profoundly influenced the 2010 elections; it will continue to influence policy. We who care about human services and community development must recognize that the movement offers another dimension to the broader, less strident, and less partisan concern among voters of many different political persuasions that we must show tangible results from the money we raise in taxes and spend on programs.

7. Poverty rates announced as highest since 1994. The Census Bureau issued this announcement in September of 2010, for 2009: an overall poverty rate of 14.3% (43.6 million people in poverty in 2009, up from 39.8 million in 2008 — the third consecutive annual increase). We had higher rates of poverty in this country in the 1960s, especially among older people. Nonetheless, this is a new peak for the past couple of decades. Meanwhile, the Census Bureau reported that the number of people without health insurance coverage rose from 46.3 million in 2008 to 50.7 million in 2009, while the percentage increased from 15.4 percent to 16.7 percent over the same period. Let’s hope that changes in a positive direction, as a result of the 2010 health care legislation.

Austerity. By the way, you might want to take a look at the Merriam-Webster web site, if you’re curious about 2010’s top words. I used “austerity” in a speech several weeks ago – perhaps contributing to propelling it into first place. As the lexicographers explained: Topping the list is austerity, defined as "enforced or extreme economy." Lookups for austerity peaked dramatically several times throughout the year, as people's attention was drawn to global economic conditions and the debt crises in Europe, but lookups also remained strong throughout the year, reflecting widespread use of the word in many contexts. "Austerity clearly resonates with many people," said Peter Sokolowski, Editor at Large at Merriam-Webster, who monitors online dictionary searches. "We often hear it used in the context of government measures, but we also apply it to our own personal finances and what is sometimes called the new normal."

Happy New Year! I wish you the best; and I look forward to working with you on these issues that face our communities.

Social Change Powered by Data

“You used to be a fun guy, talking about all the cute kids you were helping. Now, all you do is talk about data.” Geoffrey Canada jokingly referred to comments from friends, who noted the transformation in his behavior as he created an important new model for education: the Harlem Children’s Zone.

You might have seen Geoff in the American Express commercials on TV, or in the recently-released movie, Waiting for Superman. His approach to using information represents a new version of the old aphorism, “What gets measured, gets done.” Meaningful measurement can motivate, guide, and enable everyone who works on improving the lives of our children to understand what’s going right and what’s going wrong with the education of those children.

Harlem Children’s Zone has created what they call “a new paradigm for fighting poverty.” It has five core principles:

• · Serve an entire neighborhood comprehensively and at scale.
• · Create a pipeline of support. Provide support that starts with prenatal programs for parents and finishes when children graduate from college.
• · Build community among residents, institutions, and stakeholders, who help to create the environment necessary for children’s healthy development.
• · Evaluate program outcomes and create a feedback loop that cycles data back to management for use in improving and refining program offerings.
• · Cultivate a culture of success rooted in passion, accountability, leadership, and teamwork.

The emphasis on outcomes, data, and the use of information for continuous improvement reminds me of the visit I had with Dr. Beverly Hall, the superintendent of the Atlanta Public Schools. As she told the story, two ingredients for her successful reform of those schools are: (1) making sure that everyone – from the teacher’s aide and the cafeteria worker to the principal and associate superintendent – understands his or her role in educating the system’s children; and (2) using data at all levels to set goals, monitor performance, and continuously improve outcomes (by improving every step that everyone takes toward meeting those outcomes).

Our Saint Paul Promise Neighborhood includes a unique and powerful approach to promotion of children’s success through community organizing, which builds upon data. Neighborhood residents, both adults and youth, designed a community assessment, to understand the needs of the neighborhood’s children and their families. Powered by that information, six Solution Action Groups, totaling 120 or so residents and experts, will identify how this community can support children’s success in school and in life, “from cradle to career.”

Challenges exist in Saint Paul, some of which Geoffrey Canada faced in Harlem, some of which he did not. One challenge, for example: of the 8,500 children 18 and younger in the Saint Paul Promise Neighborhood, barely a few hundred attend schools in the neighborhood. So, the approach to improving their educational achievement is not as simple as creating something at an existing site and expecting that it can help most children in the neighborhood. We will look at solutions which can address all children, some of whom are too young yet to attend school. Another challenge: organizing resources. We will have to produce significant community change without expecting that financial resources will increase. In fact, they might decline. Our approach will build upon the ingenuity of an empowered neighborhood to identify how the formal systems of education, health, public safety, and human services can realign, along with the community systems of families, friends, and neighbors, to create a new environment that supports our children.

Data powers all this: the data from our community assessment; data on educational performance; other data on community conditions. Data will provide the raw material for helping us determine where we want to go, how we will get there, and whether we have arrived.

More on the Saint Paul Promise Neighborhood, as time goes by. For now, I hope I’ve made clear how sound, credible information, placed into the hands of community residents and others who care about the well-being of our children, can fuel a process of highly productive community organizing, to improve the success of the neighborhood’s children in school and in life.

Comments? Please let me know.

Interested in learning more about the Saint Paul Promise Neighborhood? Check the web site:

http://www.wilder.org/promiseneighborhood.0.html

Interested in joining a Solution Action Group? Take a look at the description and the application on the website.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Promise Neighborhood - A Promising Prospect

Why did the federal government give the Wilder Foundation a half million dollars for a Saint Paul Promise Neighborhood? Don’t Minnesotans already reside in the land of great promise? National publications often tout our state as one of the best places to live. Why do we deserve this grant?

On many indicators, of course, we do quite well. However, troubling signs exist. Students in some of our schools do very poorly in reading and math. (Actually, the students in very many of our schools do not do well in math.) In some of our neighborhoods, a third or more of all residents live below the poverty line; too many children live in poverty. The trend data show clearly that large proportions of our younger generation – the people who we hope will grow up and continue the success of this state, in work, in civic life, and in family life – lack the academic skills they should have.

The Promise Neighborhood model provides a cradle-to-career framework for developing a set of supports that will enable a neighborhood’s children to succeed in school and in life.

That’s why we applied for and received a Promise Neighborhood grant – to work with one community to organize its strengths and mobilize existing resources for the benefit of its children. Based on what we learn, hopefully all neighborhoods can become neighborhoods of great promise.

Where is the Saint Paul Promise Neighborhood? The Promise Neighborhood encompasses a 250-block area in the Summit-University and Frogtown neighborhoods in Saint Paul, which includes two public elementary schools, Jackson and Maxfield. Nearly 40 percent of the residents are younger than 18. Two-thirds of the residents live in poverty; eighty-two percent of students are eligible for free lunch.

What’s happening over the next 12 months? The Department of Education selected us as one of just 21 communities in the nation to carry out a “planning year.” The year includes a community assessment, lasting several months – shaped by neighborhood residents themselves – to understand all the characteristics of the neighborhood and the needs of the children and families. With the assessment in hand, we will bring neighborhood residents together in “Solution Action Groups” with educators, child development experts, and service providers to develop the best possible approach to supporting the neighborhood’s children. Finally, we will secure commitments from organizations to collaborate to provide cradle-to-career educational, family, and community resources and supports.

What happens after the planning year? If the planning year accomplishes its goals, then by summer of 2011, we will have constructed a network of organizations that will collaborate to provide services in the Saint Paul Promise Neighborhood. This, of course, will include the school district and the two public schools in the neighborhood.

How will we know if this all works? If successful, the first thing we should see – just a year or two from now, is that every child, even before birth, becomes a focus of community attention. Parents receive parent education. Infants and toddlers have access to health care and if they have health issues, these get addressed early, before those issues start to have negative effects on the child’s development and readiness for school. Preschoolers receive good care when their parents are working, possibly from child care providers, possibly from family, friends or neighbors. They develop in an environment in which they learn their numbers and abc’s, so that all of them, not just those with better incomes, can move ahead faster in kindergarten and elementary school.

In not too many years, we should see better school performance. While achievement tests do not measure everything, and we cannot focus solely on test scores to measure success, we should see reading and math scores rise, reflecting greater achievement among children living in this neighborhood.

Momentum has developed already. More than 30 adults who live in the community have completed the second of three meetings to shape the assessment. About 20 young people have had their own meetings for the same purpose. We’ve received calls from volunteers and from organizations who want to take part in the initiative. Our Project Director, Hamilton Bell, is actively reaching out to all who want to be involved.

I’ll have much more to say about this as the year progresses. I expect to learn a lot, and to have a lot of fun, managing this initiative. It has the potential to help us not just on 250 blocks, but throughout this region and our entire state. Stay tuned. If you have comments or suggestions, please let me know.

CSI is re-engineering how government works

A CSI role for the Executive Director of Wilder Research? That’s correct. Something more important, though, than a mere role in one of the most popular television dramas of all time. Rather, an opportunity to shape the future of our state.

The Commission on Service Innovation launched its efforts last month, to provide the Minnesota legislature with a plan to re-engineer how government does its work. Over the coming months, we will ask: What quality of life do we want to create for our state over the next 20 years or so? How can we best shape government to support the creation of this quality of life?

Responding to these questions has more challenges than immediately meet the eye. State and local governments operate mostly in ways that fit the 20^th century. Until recently, they have usually benefitted from reasonably adequate sources of revenue to do so.. The 21^st century presents a different landscape. National and international environments have changed. The state’s residents have a different social makeup; they hold different preferences and expectations.

Economic and demographic trends, at state, national, and world-wide levels, have created a situation unlike anything that Minnesota and its regions have experienced before. For instance, globalization has established a new playing field for business. Economic forces and competitive trends throughout the world have as much relevance as the trends and competition locally. (Competitors that Minneapolis business people need to watch don’t live in Saint Paul, or even in Wisconsin. They live in places far away.)

The aging of our population will present challenges and opportunities unlike anything ever seen anywhere in the world. For some counties and regions of the state, the “old-age dependency ratio” has begun an upward trend that will result in one person over 65 for every two persons “of working age.” What does the change in this ratio mean? It means that, for every person who is likely to be retired, we used to have four or five people in the labor force, receiving paychecks and paying taxes. Now, we will only have two or three. You can see very quickly how the burden on those workers will increase.

The state faces severe revenue shortfalls in the foreseeable future. Government must work smarter and more productively, as one of several steps to compensate for those shortfalls.

At the same time that these social and economic challenges have arisen, we have changed in other ways. Technology has created opportunities to organize work more creatively and efficiently than in the past. Communication with, and engagement of, the population can occur in new and powerful ways. Younger generations especially (but not exclusively) have come to rely on online access to resources, services, and information; for them, the use of social media has become second nature, whereas it might have seemed like science fiction even just 25 years ago. People of all ages expect 24/7 access for retail purchasing, banking, travel reservations, and other functions that previously could occur only in-person or by phone during much more limited times of day.

These changes in our circumstances and needs make it imperative to produce innovation in the ways that we serve ourselves through government. I look forward to creating a small but hopefully significant product that will help to shape the future of our state; and I look forward to doing so with colleagues on the Commission from business, from foundations, from employees’ unions, from education, from government, and elsewhere. It’s a rare opportunity to bring great collective expertise into the same group to move ahead boldly and creatively for the benefit of our state’s residents.

Immigration, the Need for Rational Discussion

Why have we witnessed the recent upsurge of commotion and concern about immigration?

A few facts deserve mention.

First, just about everyone on this earth is an immigrant or a descendent of immigrants. Virtually all land masses have received their human populations from elsewhere. It’s just a question of how long ago that occurred. I recently visited the Museum of Natural History in New York. If you’ve visited, you have probably seen the very impressive map which shows the flows of people, from continent to continent, beginning in Africa thousands of years ago. Even our American Indian people, the most native of any of us on this continent, descended from tribes who originated far away.

Second, a century ago in Minnesota, the proportion of our population comprised of immigrants far exceeded the current proportion. For example, the “non-native” residents of Minnesota made up 26% of the population in 1870; they made up 20% in 1920. Immigrants built Minnesota as we now know it – not just the urban Twin Cities, but the many cities, towns, and communities throughout our state, which contain streets, roads, and places often named in commemoration of distant homelands. During the 1980s and 1990s, the proportion of residents born in other countries reached its lowest point (about 2-3%). Today, immigrants make up about 8% of the state, and are a growing proportion of many areas of greater Minnesota.

Third, hostility toward immigrants is nothing new. Jews arriving in New York City from Europe in the late 1800s experienced frequent disdain from existing city residents. “Chinatowns”, which now attract tourists, served in many cities as protective enclaves from intense persecution of Chinese people. The Know Nothing movement of the mid-1800s spawned a national political party unsympathetic to immigrants. In Saint Paul, Swedes, Irish, and others initially faced much discrimination when they first arrived. Swede Hollow of the 19^th century exemplifies a situation of immigrants living in squalor due in large part to discrimination.

The Arizona law has prompted much of the most recent, visible controversy. In truth, I sympathize with anyone in Arizona who has suffered as a result of criminal activity perpetrated by illegal immigrants, or for that matter by citizens and legal immigrants who profit from the drug trade, for example. However, illegal activity should not define the debate. I don’t generate my opinions and recommendation for the health care system, based on the behavior of bad doctors; or for the legal system, based on the behavior of bad lawyers. We can’t let illegal behavior cloud our sight and damage our ability to understand trends and develop creative visions for the future.

In any case, the Arizona hullabaloo will pass. Underlying discomfort, often not outwardly expressed, plays a larger role. Why this discomfort? Why – especially if we all can point to our immigrant heritage – do we encounter a lot of tension in our communities related to immigration?

I’ll offer my interpretation; you may have your own. I would suggest that different members of our communities become uncomfortable for different reasons. Some people hold dear an “ideal” conception of life as it once existed. (In fact, such idyllic life probably never did exist, but that does not matter.) They witness different cultures, see institutions change, and wish for “the good old days.” Some have the concern that new arrivals will take their jobs and/or increase the demands on government service systems. Other people simply fear change and resist change; any change makes them uncomfortable. For other people, racism or xenophobia impedes their capacity to think and act. For others, a combination of these and other factors explains their reactions.

Rational discussion – based on current context, short-term perspective, and long-term perspective – must prevail. Trying to change or resist the patterns of migration, established over thousands of years, is equivalent to trying to change ocean currents or the tides. It can’t be accomplished in the long term. Indeed, it should not be accomplished. These patterns are neither good nor bad; they are simply reality. In the shorter term, we need to recognize that businesses need employees for production and consumers for consumption. Our communities need active, caring members; they need families with good parents. Individuals and families who arrive in Minnesota, whether from New York or New Delhi, offer today, in the 21^st century, opportunities for the state to thrive – just as offered by those many Minnesota immigrants of the 18^th, 19^th and 20^th centuries.

To promote rational discussion, we presented a webinar, which you can view – to hear about how immigration is changing the current Minnesota landscape. It contains information, along with commentary from three community leaders from throughout the state. More important, you can see the larger body of information about immigration, on which the webinar is based. Go to www.mncompass.org Click on the immigration tab.

As always, we welcome your questions, comments, and suggestions.