Contesting Progressivism: Discretion as Oppression

[This is a follow-up to this earlier forum post. I know many blog members, especially, are caught up with AERA prep, and it’s pretty long (and, dense, yes, okay) anyway. But what the heck.]

A core value of progressive visions of democracy is flexibility in response to the shifting realities of life in a complex society. True democracy, progressives believed, required capacities for constant and fluid adjustment to the unpredictable contingencies of life in modern society. Dewey and others argued, for example, that the U.S. Constitution should be revisited over time and freely, democratically adapted to new conditions that would emerge over time. The slowness of cultural change in response to the much faster shifts of a quickly industrializing society was a key problem for progressives.

In a truly democratic society, the progressives imagined, collections of unique individuals would be engaged in a constant collaborative effort to create a better society in response to the shifting sands of social change.

From the perspective of progressivism, then, permanence of any kind—especially social structures like rules and cultural practices—was a barrier to the emergence of a truly democratic society. In fact, combating this “lag” was a core motivation for Dewey’s vision of democratic education.

When everyone in democratic associations like the ones they imagined is equal, it may be reasonable to see this as a vision of real freedom for all. However, in reality no social contexts are ever totally equal and, more problematically, most contexts where people meet each other across cultural and economic gulfs are quite unequal.

In unequal contexts, this vision of flexibility becomes something different. It becomes what middle-class professionals have long fought for: discretion for an elite with the individual and collective right (through their associations) to make relatively independent decisions that effect the lives of others with less power. To a large extent, in fact, one can equate the need for “professions” in the first place with this need for “professional judgment” in situations that cannot be predefined ahead of time. To the extent that bureaucrats embedded within larger organizations maintain some level of discretion, they can (and would generally like to) see themselves as “professionals” as well.

It is equally helpful to see the reduction of the “discretion” of professionals as one of the core aims of working-class and impoverished social movements. For example, unions have long fought to establish the “work rules” that so often bedevil middle-class professionals and bureaucrats who see them as unreasonable constraints. In their contracts, unions frequently seek to reduce the discretion of management, creating restrictions on what workers can and cannot be told to do, and these restrictions usually restrict workers’ own decision-making at the same time.

Flexibility, those on the bottom have long known, is rarely a gift. Instead, it is often a burden, a tool for oppression wielded by those who have more power. In fact, what professionals generally want in an unequal world are rules that restrict the power of those below them but that leave them with maximum discretion to respond “intelligently” to contingency. What workers have frequently sought are rules that reduce this discretion, sometimes by transferring authority for decisions to them, but more frequently by writing decisions “into stone” at least until the next contract.

(Teachers, caught, as they are, uncomfortably between the positions of “workers” and “professionals”, often struggle to negotiate this in their own union contracts.)

If there are no set rules then the conditions of labor and life end up in the hands of those with the power to decide at any point what should happen. From this perspective, such rules are real accomplishments to be defended at high cost, even when they may seem to have become outdated. Throwing rules open for deliberation raises the possibility that these accomplishments may be lost. In this context, an imperfect constitution, an imperfect affirmative action system, an imperfect labor contract all can seem much safer than unpredictable deliberative contexts in which control can easily be lost and in which new rules may unpredictably alter the balance of power that had cost so much to achieve. (Critical race theorists have made this point as well).

A good example of the ways social movements of the less powerful can often be interpreted at least partly as struggles against professional “discretion,” can be found in the early struggles over welfare laws in America.

In the early days of public “welfare,” a great deal of discretionary power was put into the hands of middle-class social workers. And these social workers would often make culturally and racially discriminatory assumptions about the lives of their “clients,” using their discretion to try to mandate changes in the direction of more “standard” middle class values. These judgments were often perceived by clients as insulting and demeaning, but those unwilling to conform might quickly find their families out on the street without support.

The welfare rights movement successfully fought to change this system. They demanded strict rules that would define ahead of time who was and was not eligible for benefits, removing nearly all decision-making power from those who had previously judged them from on high.

Of course, these strict rules created their own set of challenges, which, in part, led to the dismantling of the system and to a range of pernicious consequences (although these were frequently exaggerated and misdescribed by conservatives). Despite these limitations, the welfare rules achieved by welfare rights activists did represent a great advance over the conditions recipients had experienced previously. To some extent, in fact, these limitations were integral to the benefits the new system brought.

(New visions of flexible work-groups that harvest the creativity of low-level workers in the same manner that these structures harvest the skills of professionals have been attempted in a range of different businesses. Most of the evidence indicates, however, that the modernist hierarchical model remains the norm even when lip-service is given to this model.)

The only way one could imagine flexibility could becoming beneficial to the relatively powerless would be if one could guarantee the existence of durable institutional structures that could constantly represent their interests. But while power is a collective achievement for those on the bottom, it is located more in individuals at higher levels. It is difficult to see how these collectives with limited “attention” could keep track of the myriad decisions being made by diffuse numbers of bureaucrats and professionals at all levels of any bureaucracy. The only way to level the playing field, it seems, is the creation of rules that limit the amount of “attention” necessary to enforce equality.

(To some extent, perhaps it is helpful to see these collectives—community organizing groups, for example—as “individuals” in the sense that Dewey meant this. In this analogy, the set “rules” equate somewhat to the established “habits” of individual persons necessary to free their limited attention of their leaders for aspects of their life where conscious attention and adjustment is most necessary. You want to fight for rules, and then monitor their implementation instead of fighting for a dialogic process that you constantly have to spend enormous energy supporting (and fighting within)).

Ironically as a result of the progressives’ inability to solve the problem of inequality, then, their cherished vision of a fluid, democratic “planning society” seems to contain within it, almost inevitably, the seeds of an oppressive “expert determined” society. Truly collaborative “democracy” slips too easily away into middle-class “discrection.” (This is especially true, as I noted earlier, when progressives took it upon themselves to delimit who does and does not count as adequately prepared for equal participation in citizenship.)

Visions of democratic classrooms where children learn to have the power to coordinate themselves and to respond collaboratively to change and complexity thus misdescribe the true contours of our society. In fact, even in the most ideal examples, outside classrooms where there are no teachers to artificially equalize power, such an attitude inevitably ends up empowering some while disempowering others.

(It is, of course, true that some discretion is required for any organization to function. Thus, there is a constant tension in many bureaucratic organizations between the fight for discretion at the top and middle, and against discretion at the bottom. And to further complicate this issue, it is also true that reality is always too complex to operate on simple rules. This is why a key labor strategy has always been “work to rule,” where the rules are actually followed to the letter and everything completely shuts down. So there is always an “underlife” of creativity functioning beneath the rules—in a sense productively “contesting” them—so that any organization can function at all. In a sense, the creativity that new models of collaborative work-groups were supposed to generate has always been there, except that it has usually manifested as an odd kind of “resistance” that is actually the only thing that allows the machine to run in the first place. In the extreme model of a Taylorist scientific management bureaucracy, the stupid “hands” that are not supposed to think and are not paid to think are actually creatively and intelligently adjusting themselves and their environment in “secret.” And there is, in fact, some evidence that working-class students learn skills for this kind of underlife creativity and system-maintaining rule breaking as a part of the “working-class” rote education most of them receive. I’ve explored some of this here.)

Coopted by Foundations? (Community Organizing and Urban Education)

[To read the entire series, go here.]

Foundations like Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Ford have a corrosive influence on a democratic society; they represent relatively unregulated and unaccountable concentrations of power and wealth which buy talent, promote causes, and, in effect, establish an agenda of what merits society's attention.

--Arnove, cited in Barker, "Do Capitalists Fund Revolutions?"

Community organizing groups often pride themselves by their refusal of any government money. The general agreement among organizers on this issue rests on very good reasons, grounded on a long history of co-optation of organizing by governmental institutions seeking to eliminate grassroots resistance. During the 1960s, for example, there was a small window of time within which the government actually tried to fund grassroots collective action. This quickly pissed off the powers that be (especially the local powers that be that were most affected by empowered citizens) and the funding was quickly cut or shifted into more service oriented work. (Fisher's Let the People Decide gives a nice overview of this history). Today, nearly all "community groups" funded by government sources focus almost exclusively on "service" projects. "Community organizing" in organizations like these looks little or nothing like the kind of power focused collective action and institution-building I've been discussing in this series. And in part because these organizations are mostly "professionalized" at the higher levels, they are generally run by people who have little connection to the communities they are located in.

This is especially true for schools, of course. With few exceptions, the only "community" people in inner city schools are support personnel and aides in extremely marginalized positions.

While this refusal of government funding is informed by long experience, it has meant that most local organizing groups depend on foundation funding for their existence. Yes, organizing groups, especially those based in coalitions of organizations like the congregational groups I am most familiar with, try to generate funding out of their members. But without significant foundation funding, as I understand it, most would limp along at best.

This brings us to Michael Barker's just published pair of essays, "Do Capitalists Fund Revolutions?" (see Part One and Part Two). Barker's intent is mostly to focus on the ways in which foundation funding prevents radical social change designed to transform capitalism. I'm not exactly opposed to such a transformation if it could be made pragmatically effective and workable, but I'm not holding my breath. However, his articles draw together a range of interesting writings about the ways foundations often try to soften and de-radicalize the efforts to community organizing and other social action groups.

To extend somewhat on Barker's argument, as I have argued elsewhere in this series, "progressive" activism is grounded in the emergence of what was essentially a middle-class professional movement at the turn of the 20th Century. Stromquist's book on social class and the progressive movement, Reinventing "The People", focuses extensively on how foundations funding social change were integrally part of this middle-class "progressivism." And the middle-class progressives (who were, it must be remembered, an alternative to the communists and the union movements) were focused on the idea that social change could occur through the kind of measured dialogue that they, themselves, were used to.

Even for those of us that aren't necessarily pushing for socialist revolution (not that Barker, for example, is this simplistic--he's clearly not) this gives an indication that there may be something fundamentally anti-power and anti-confrontation about the most important foundations of our time (which, in large part, were the most important foundations then as well).

I wonder if one of the key issues about foundations is their tendency on the left to fund "projects" instead of long-term institutional structure, like the foundations on the right are more likely to do. Barker cites Guilloud and Cordery who note that "funders determine funding trends and non-profits develop programs to bend to these requests rather than assess real needs and realistic goals."

What if foundations on the left instead were more willing to endow local organizing institutions so that they had the independence to do what they thought needed to be done? This, it seems to me, could fundamentally alter the way community organizing groups operate. Instead of constantly grubbing for money and changing their "'product' to bend to" foundation "requests", there might be opportunities for more independent action.

What might such local endowed organizations look like? Along with a friend of mine, I've begun to imagine something like the old settlement house movement:

• where multiple organizations could be housed, rent free;
• where transportation and reimbursement and child-care could be provided to poorer citizens who might then be able to actively participate;
• where a fundraising expert could be permanently sited to identify funds and help relieve organizers from spending so much time finding where there next buck would come from;
• where service providers might also be sited so they could work to support citizens on the margins, again, so that they might actually be able to participate effectively in social action (this aversion to service is another key problem for organizing groups, even though, again, they have good reasons for it);
• that might support interns from the local community on a rotating basis to bring local "expertise" into the building along with "professional" organizers.

Of course, this raises as many questions as it answers. But if someone gave an endowment of, say, 6 million dollars to a collaboration between multiple organizing groups in Milwaukee, only a portion of the interest of which could be spent every year, I wonder how it might change the depressingly limited status of social action and resistance in this community.

Thinking of education, specifically, it might allow the emergence of a permanent grassroots organization with the power to hold the school district accountable over the long term, instead of the kind of momentary and often not sustained engagements that have historically taken place.

(A good example of why this is a problem is the SAGE class-size reduction program that MOVE fought to bring to Milwaukee Public Schools. I have heard that a number of schools are starting to refuse this money because it isn't enough to actually make the program happen and the requirements that come with it saddles them with costs that they then can't really pay. We should be on this. We aren't. In part this is because we're caught up in other complex issues. Our group simply doesn't have the institutional resources to keep good track of what is going on in the moving target that is always the reality of an inner city school district.)

What do other people think?

Community Organizing and Urban Education XII: Locating a Target

[To read the entire series, go here.]

A key term in the neo-Alinsky community organizing toolbox is “target.” Fundamentally, in this model, if you don’t know what (or preferably who) your target is, then you can’t really act in a coherent way.

A target is “the institution or person who can make the change you want.”

Imagine, for example, that you are a leader in a local action group that wants to get sports re-funded in your district. The first thing you need to do is find out who makes that funding decision. And this involves not only figuring out how power works in your district, but also the different ways that sports teams might get funded within that system. For example, the superintendent might have the power to shift some funds to the sports teams. In other districts, the school board might need to decide. And the amount of money involved would be important, too. The smaller the amount of money, the lower on the totem pole the decision will probably be made. And generally you want to go for the weakest link, the target that it will be easiest to influence.

Figuring out the target is crucial, because once you figure out how the decision you want is made, you can start figuring out what might influence the person or institution that makes the decision. To act, you need to understand what motivates your target: its interests, fears, powers, etc.

Another example: About a year ago, a local conservative radio personality made a pretty repugnant statement about latinos in our city. So one or more groups decided to try to get this personality removed. They protested, and picketed in front of the radio station, and (as usual) basically had little or no impact. In this case, they knew in general terms who their target was (the radio station), but they don’t seem to have done much analysis of the internal power structure of the station, or even of its interests and concerns in more general institutional terms.

Around this time, a local organizer came to my class and used this case as an example. He asked the class what a radio station cared the most about, and after some prodding they gave him the answer he was looking for: money (although I thought some of their other answers were good, too). He then informed the class that the largest advertiser for this radio station was a local car dealership. He speculated: what if instead of doing yet another picket line, this group had targeted the car dealership? They could have first met with the owner of the dealership. If the dealership refused to pull its ads, they could have moved to the development of some creative actions. They could have sent fifty people a day to test-drive new cars, or to picket outside the dealership with signs declaring that it supported hate speech, until, hopefully, the owner caved.

In this specific case, this organizer was talking about what is sometimes called a “secondary target.” A secondary target is some powerful group or institution that can influence the target. The car dealership couldn’t make the decision to pull the personality, but had pretty impressive influence over the station’s management.

The point is not that this organizer was right or wrong. What’s important is that his process of analysis fits right within the neo-Alinsky tradition I’m talking about, here.

Another thing about a target is that, in most cases, it is helpful to pick a person rather than a group or institution. In this model, you want to generate some outrage about the actions the target has taken in its public role. And it’s easier to get pissed off at an actual person. It’s hard to get mad at the legislature as a group, for example. It’s too abstract. The speaker of the Assembly who is blocking your plan is easier to be upset at. But sometimes you are stuck attacking an abstraction rather than an actual individual. And sometimes it isn’t better to have an actual person. Every organizing campaign is unique.

The amount of power your group has will affect both the issue you choose to address (see this earlier post) and the target this issue requires you to influence. For example, as I have noted earlier, the organization I work most closely with is based in Milwaukee. We don’t have the power, alone, to really affect the legislature, especially since the key votes we need are Republican, and there aren’t a lot of Republicans we can directly affect. So this really limits our ability to work on school funding issues.

A couple more examples.

First let’s talk about the Iraq war for a moment. I was in Madison some months ago, and I drove by a group of three people waving signs against the Iraq war quite energetically on a streetcorner in the middle of campus. Now, I’m sure they felt much better about themselves after they did this. But I doubt that Madison is a hotbed of Iraq war support. And I doubt that a couple of signs are going to effect anyone that much anyway. Furthermore, the fact is that most of the nation doesn’t support the war anymore already.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have anything against sign waving or big marches etc. And I’m sure they have some effect, especially if you can get a lot of people out in them. And there are many different ways to approach any problem. But it may be helpful to look at the Iraq war problem (e.g., in my opinion, how we can get out of it) from a neo-Alinsky perspective.

There is actually at least one group taking this approach. The group Americans Against Escalation in Iraq is sponsoring an Iraq Summer, in their words, “targeting 31 members of Congress and 10 Senators to bring a safe end to the war in Iraq.” They have tried to figure out which lawmakers are most likely to change their minds about the war, and they have put their $$ into influencing these lawmakers by threatening their interests. They have figured out who can make the change they want, and they are focusing their resources on the individuals who can make it.

Second, let’s talk about NCATE’s decision to drop “social justice” from its list of “dispositions.” I have to admit, I’m not really up on the details of this controversy, but let’s look at it from a neo-Alinsky perspective anyway. To start with, who is the “target”? This isn’t clear to me, but it might be Arthur Wise, the president, or it might be the people (or key persons) on the task force that Jim Horn said was looking at this issue. Or it might be “NCATE” more generally.

You might say, well, it’s not really fair to target individuals on a task force or Arthur Wise. They’re just doing their jobs. And they may be your friends. From a neo-Alinsky perspective, however, this answer is part of the problem. In taking on particular roles, they have inserted themselves into the public space in a particular way and they should be held accountable for their public roles. Part of what organizing does is transform roles people would like to keep somewhat “private” into more public stances. And it’s not personal. Or, at least, it’s not supposed to be. Remember, “no permanent enemies, no permanent friends.” (I’ll speak in more detail about “public” and “private” from this perspective in a later post.)

Once you have chosen a target, you need to think about the specific interests and motivations and fears of the target as you have framed it. For example, one of NCATE’s key interests as an institution is to have universities that are interested in being accredited. What if a number of universities were willing to sign a letter refusing to re-accredit with NCATE unless the disposition were added back? What if a group of powerful professors at key institutions were willing to sign such a letter? Of course, what you can do depends on the particular resources your organization (or potential organization?) has.

You may discover that you just plain don’t have the right set of resources to effectively influence the person or institution you would most like to target. If this is the case, maybe it’s time to face reality. Maybe it’s time to switch your issue and pick another target.

In any case, if you are going to act, it is almost always helpful to figure out who the key targets are (or might be) and what motivates them, regardless of the set of strategies you will eventually end up using.

Community Organizing and Urban Education XI: Scholarly Participation in Organizing Campaigns: Research that Makes a Problem “Hit Home”

[To read the entire series, go here.]

[Note: post has been revised for more accuracy]

Given the enormous gulf between the realities of life in the academy—even in relatively marginal research institutions like mine—how might education scholars contribute to organizing campaigns?

First, I think it is important that scholars resist the urge to “help” by trying to turn organizers and leaders into scholarly researchers, into people like us. Organizers generally use research very differently than do scholars. In organizing, research done by participants is almost always deeply intertwined with the day-to-day activity of social action. As I noted in a review of a book by Oakes and Rogers, in social action groups

data collection is [usually] integrated into efforts to build relational power. Survey efforts, for example, become opportunities to engage with and recruit potential members. Leaders and organizers in Alinsky-based groups do not learn to be “scholars” or “researchers” separate from their identities as activists. In fact, in my experience “research” is sometimes pursued as a thinly veiled strategy for engaging people in an issue. And it isn’t unusual for these organizations to simply hire someone to get the data they need to act, allowing them to keep their limited resources focused on activities more directly related to organizing.

Community organizing groups need research to serve very particular purposes. (Exactly what skills a particular group or individual needs (or wants) at any particular time is always an emporical issue, of course.) In any case, at least three key uses of research come to mind: research that brings a problem into stark relief, research that helps define a particular solution, and research that contests assertions made by the opposition.

Here, I want to talk about the first use, making often vague social problems more concrete, making them “gut” issues around which one might recruit participation.

Of course, it would also be wonderful to have more scholars with a strong social action background. But given limited resources this may be more an issue of recruiting particular individuals than a strategy for supporting groups.

In the last few years, the education committee of the organizing group I work with, MOVE, has been focusing on health in schools as an area ripe for intervention. The reasons for this choice of issue are complicated and emerge to some extent from the specifics of our situation in Milwaukee. In the simplest sense, focusing on health allows us to seek out support for schools that is outside the usual funding streams and that, therefore, doesn’t “count” under the caps that currently limit funding in Wisconsin. Further, we believed that it would allow us to seek funding on a city instead of a state level, avoiding the need for power to move the state legislature that, as a city organization, we lacked.

To rally support from our own members and from other groups, we thought we needed some simple document that would lay out the challenges the health problems of poor children and their effects on learning in the starkest terms. We didn’t need a document that went through everything; we didn’t need a research study; we didn’t need a forty page review of the literature; and we didn’t need a document that would meet the requirements of a peer-reviewed journal publication. We needed a brochure.

The fact is that I knew little or nothing about health problems when I started working on the brochure. But I knew how to read through a mass of research documents and pull out key information, and I knew how to locate information that seemed to come from reputable sources.

So I pulled together the documents we’d been collecting through the preparatory interview research we had been doing, and searched on the Internet, and searched on the proprietary databases available at my university, and I searched through the archives of our local newspaper.

What I was looking for was data that would make readers stop in shock. What I needed was information that we could state publicly and not fear being attacked about for its accuracy.

The brochure that I completed, with the input of my committee is pasted in, above. You can see a more readable version here.

The first panel on the inside left is the most important. As I have noted before, it is crucial in organizing to find a “gut” issue that makes people want to stand up and act. An abstract crisis, a need for more “money” in general is not very motivating. But thousands of kids with their teeth rotting in their heads, thousands of kids that can’t see well enough to read easily, that’s motivating on a visceral level.

Importantly, I don’t waffle about the data. I make clear statements about the condition of child health. Only in the footnotes do I record where I got this information and possible limits of the data. For example, two large studies of poor inner-city children in different cities that both showed that 50% of the children had vision problems. In the full text of the brochure I simply state that 50% of poor kids have problems with vision, and then in the footnotes I note my extrapolation. In other cases, I have not bothered to put conditions on my knowledge, even though (as with most research) the data may not be as clear as the specificity of these numbers imply. For example, some of the data comes from statements by the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) superintendent. I think I know where he’s getting this data, and in one case I think it’s from a study that seems somewhat more limited in the population it covers than he indicates. The fact is, this is frequently true of data like this on a district level, often gathered for one purpose and used for other purposes. I don’t go into this in the brochure. It just isn’t important for the reader. The superintendent’s conclusion and the magnitude of his number is quite reasonable given the other research I’ve read, even if I’m not certain about the exact percentage he cites. There is no reason for us to complicate issues by constantly qualifying our statements because of small (possible) differences or uncertainties that, in the big picture, are pretty meaningless. These are the kinds of issues that matter to scholars, but not to policymakers, politicians, and people on the street. Statistics I could not defend in this way I did not include. In any case, the data is as accurate as I could make it, and readers know where to go to pursue it in more detail if they want. As far as I can tell, there is nothing in the brochure that could subject our organization to critiques from reputable research or professional groups (and I passed a draft by a key local stakeholder just to make sure).

Then, in the next panel, the brochure goes on to lay out the kinds of issues these health problems may raise for learning. And in the final panel I give some key quotes. Some of these are from Milwaukee, and some aren’t. And the picture isn’t of a Milwaukee kid, but it’s a good picture. None of this is really important to the reader.

On the outside of the brochure, I summarize the key limitations of MPS’s approach to solving these health problems. As a committee, we worked to lay these issues out without attacking the school district. And we tried to emphasize the district’s limited funding so that people wouldn’t misread us as saying the district should cut other programs to fund health instead.

Finally, in middle panel on the outside, we lay out our plan for fixing these problems. It may be surprising, but this is probably the least important part of the brochure. The reality of a campaign often necessitates changes in abstract plans stated ahead of time. But at least we make it clear that we’re not just complaining. We have plans to do something about the problems.

I don’t want to overstate my case, here. The brochure isn’t perfect. In retrospect there are some other things I wish I had done. But it's the first time I've tried to put something like this together, and I'm going to cut myself some slack. And I believe that it has been a useful organizing tool for us. It looks fairly professional and gives us credibility among health professionals, administrators, and politicians. It also gives readers the sense that there is organized, coherent, and well structured campaign. (This is true regardless of the "reality." As Alinsky said, what is key is not the power you actually have but the power others think you have.) Participation on our committee increased significantly after we passed it out to MOVE members. And instead of moaning about the fact that life is difficult, it lays out a path for some postitive change. It is empowering to some extent, just to have the brochure.

In fact, we have actually been successful at some important first steps in getting better health care for Milwaukee kids. I’m not going to talk about that right now, however. Our effort is still ongoing, and there are good reasons not to talk too much about it publicly until it is farther along.

Let me conclude this long post by contrasting this example of scholarly contributions to social action with that discussed by Oakes and Rogers in their book. They describe the development of a robust education policy round-table that they put together with a range of different organizations, providing them with research and facilitating dialogue.

Their's seems like a wonderful model. But it clearly requires dedicated funding and a significant commitment of other resources. I don’t have either of these available to me. Mostly it’s just me and my computer and my “enormously messy” office, as my daughter says.

This example shows how a relatively isolated scholar (like most of us, I bet) with access to the basic data available to all professors, some limited facility with Microsoft Word, and a week or so of time (spread over a couple of months) can put together a key “research” document to support what could end up being a major campaign. Perhaps my key skill, here, was in understanding just which data might be reliably leaned on without undermining the credibility of our effort.

It is crucial to emphasize, however, that I could only create this document because I am a long-term member of this organization. In our meetings, other members helped restructure the brochure and change the layout. In fact, it probably helps that I generally don’t emphasize the fact that I’m a scholar in my participation. I understood what this group needed because I’m a part of this group, and the group didn’t have any trouble working with me, or trusting me to put this together, because I’ve been there for a long time. Without this kind of embodied knowledge, I probably would have ended up creating yet another “lit review” that wouldn’t have really helped them that much.

Of course, the reverse could be true as well. This familiarity may have also made me less self-critical about what I was doing. Others may want to respond with their own opinion.

Community Organizing and Urban Education X: Is Progressive Democratic Education Undemocratic?

[To read the entire series, go here.]

Progressive reformers at the turn of the century undertook the project of reclaiming citizens from the “human junk” produced by industrialization . . . .

In the short run, as many historians have shown, Progressive reform of the political process narrowed rather than expanded the circle of citizenship. Dewey and most Progressives . . . failed to acknowledge this process of exclusion. . . .

The Progressive movement[‘s] . . . vision of the people, although universal in its claims, was in fact more limited and culturally bounded. New immigrants and African Americans were consigned to the margins, their capacity for assimilation dependent on their slow progress, their citizenship claims contingent.

--Stromquist, Re-Inventing “The People,” pp. 5, 7, & 10

Among progressive educators, today as in the past, the key contribution schools can make to social transformation is through education in practices of democracy. But is this effort to inculcate democracy itself anti-democratic?

Two key points are important to emphasize, here.

First, it is important to understand the intensity of the Deweyan model that nearly all progressive educators look to. In Democracy and Education, Dewey lays out an intensive process of transformation designed to develop individuals who think and interact with the world in a very specific manner. To become democratic, children must learn a complex model of intelligent inquiry. And they must develop a subtle set of social capacities that will allow each engage in a fluid collaboration with each other, drawing out and valuing the unique contributions of each participant.

What Dewey describes is an ongoing process of social development that reconstructs children’s perceptions of and actions into the world in fundamental ways. It involves a deep operation on the workings of their body/minds.

Second, as Stromquist and McGerr and others have argued, this progressive “democratic” individual is not simply a neutral model. Instead, it drew from the middle-class culture that was emerging at the same time at the turn of the 20^th century, and that was shared by nearly all prominent progressives. Dewey’s vision of democratic collaboration, for example, was deeply informed by a developing culture of professional dialogue and of educated middle-class families like his own.

It is important to acknowledge that progressives like Dewey were critical of the middle class as well. While their vision was rooted in the cultural practices they were most familiar with, they sought to build upon and improve what the thought was best about it. Thus, the middle-class children in Dewey’s Laboratory School still had much to learn if they were to fully embody the capacities of a democratic society.

Nonetheless, members of the professional middle class were (and remain today) closest to the Deweyan ideal. Members of the working class, and most members of oppressed cultures like those of African Americans and new immigrants had the farthest to go, the most to learn.

Thus, it is accurate in a limited sense to say that progressives sought a society in which everyone interacted more like they and their class interacted. Dewey developed an educational model designed, in part, then, to make people more like him.

Why is this discussion relevant to a series on community organizing?

I would argue that models of community organizing, like the ones I have been discussing in previous posts, embody a much less elaborate vision of democratic practice. In contrast with the kind of deep transformation that Dewey aimed at (and that schools have almost universally failed to achieve) community organizers have much more modest aims.

For purely pragmatic reasons of limited resources, among others, neo-Alinsky organizing groups take people largely as they are. Instead of trying to transform how participants conceptualize the world in deep ways, organizers provide people with a collection of fairly basic tools for making sense of inequality and for bringing disparate groups of marginalized and sympathetic actors together to fight for change.

Organizers also have developed a sophisticated conception of the difference between “public” and “private” perceptions of the world. Unlike Deweyan progressives, they leave the vast realm of people’s “private” understandings and practices alone, aiming only to give people skills for acting in and making sense of the “public” realm. Regardless of who you are in your private world, they argue, when you emerge in public you need to play a particular kind of role that can be learned in much less time.

And instead of asking every single participant to embody the sophisticated skills and understandings that these groups have developed over time, they accept a distribution of knowledge. Highly trained organizers work with less well-trained top leaders, who work with emerging leaders, who work with an only marginally involved mass of participants. They balance out the potentially undemocratic implications of this model by constantly working to stay in touch with the passions and desires of individual participants and by constantly seeking to find new leaders who can be brought up into the power structure.

I am grasping for a way to frame differences between the visions of democratic education embraced by Deweyan progressives and neo-Alinsky community organizers. Perhaps it is useful to distinguish between the educational “transformation” sought by Deweyan democratic educators and the more blunt, if often sophisticated “tools” of community organizers.

The Deweyan side focuses on an elaborate and subtle process of individual transformation. The goal is to change “who” people are in quite fundamental ways.

In contrast, the organizing side strips down what is needed for effective democratic engagement to the bare essentials required to contest unequal power.

In other words, it seems at least somewhat true that organizing sees people as more ready, as they are, for political participation in the democratic polity than do progressive educators who often sigh in despair at the incredible amount of work that needs to be done. And, as a result, organizing may, of necessity, be significantly more respectful of the cultural practices that different groups bring with them to the fight.

By teaching less the education involved in community organizing may, in fact, be more “democratic,” than that of progressives.

Community Organizing and Urban Education IX: Deliberation vs. Participation

[To read the entire series, go here.]

Progressive education scholars are, on the whole, the children of the Deweyan progressives of the turn of the century. I say Deweyan, but Dewey is central mostly to educators. A wide range of other key intellectuals, including Jane Addams, Richard Ely, Henry Lloyd, Walter Raushenbusch, and others in a broad assortment of religious, social, and political organizations held common cause with Dewey on many issues.

Recent scholarship on the progressives, especially Stromquist’s Reinventing ‘The People’ and McGerr’s A Fierce Discontent, have chronicled the ways in which the progressive movement was, in large part, a response to the class conflict that raged during the end of the 19th Century in America. Progressives, these and other works argue, developed a vision of a democratic society that, they hoped, would overcome these class divisions. They imagined and fought for a democratic nation in which everyone would work together for the common good.

With McGerr and Stromquist and others, I have argued that this is a vision that could make sense only to those with extensive privelige. One does not need to be a doctrinaire Marxist to understand that people without power cannot hope to have an equal dialogue with others who have more power unless they can find some way to be treated as equal. Unless they have some way of exerting their own forms of power, they are doomed in such circumstances.

Community organizers understand this fact of power. This is why community organizing is centrally, if not only, about finding ways to generate power for those who don’t currently have it.

The hope, visible in much of Dewey’s work, was that if people could just be induced to sit down together, they would find common cause. They would discover that they could accomplish more together than they would apart.

Recent work on discursive democracy has thrown cold water on this dream.

On a theoretical level, Mark E. Warren, in Democracy and Association, shows that there is a tension between dialogue across diversity and the ability to freely leave a particular association. He uses the classic distinction between “voice” and “exit.” What he shows is that where an option for exit is freely available, people will generally tend to leave an organization if it doesn’t fit with their current beliefs. It is only in those groups where exit carries a real cost, like unions, where people are likely to stick around to deal with the difficulties that come with real disagreement. In other words, Warren argues that by their very nature free associations are most likely to generate groups of like-minded individuals. A diverse democratic dialogue, in his vision, is unlikely to emerge “naturally” in an open civil society.

In Hearing the Other Side, Diana Mutz, to her surprise, found something similar to what Warren said would happen when she conducted empirical work on deliberation in organizations. In somewhat different terms than Warren, Mutz argues that deliberation and political participation are opposing forces in organizations. Organizations that can tolerate diversity, that can tolerate dialogue across difference are unlikely to be those that can also engage in political struggle. Conversely, those organizations with the capacity to engage in political struggle are likely to be those that are most lacking in internal diversity of opinion. She refers to this as the tension between “deliberative and participatory democracy.”

From a theoretical and an empirical standpoint, then, it seems unlikely that we will ever be able to create a society where we are all able to both talk and act together across difference. The point, of course, is not that dialogue across difference is not extremely valuable. I would point readers, for example, to the wonderful work done by the Study Circles Resource Center, which has developed a powerful strategy for encouraging such dialogic spaces. What Warren and Mutz show, however, is that while strategies like this may inform cross group understanding, real collaboration is likely to be accomplished on a practical level only when different groups come to the table as partisans for their points of view, backed by some kind of organizational power.

To some extent this maps onto visions of public and private developed by neo-Alinsky organizers. In “private” we can talk and get to know each other. The private is a space, in these terms, for dialogue between whole individuals. In “public” we take on our roles as partisans for particular causes. Whereas the private can be made a space of relative safety, the public is an unsafe space where the real interests of different groups come into conflict. And organizers argue that we cannot expect the public and the private to serve the same goals.

Like all simple distinctions, this one is too simple to describe the vast complexity of social and political life. But I believe it is illuminating, and that it fits what we are learning about how associations and political engagement actually work “on the ground.”

And it seems to indicate that the progressive dream of a world without class conflict (which could be expanded to include any conflict over inequalities of power) is simply unachievable. When we teach students that this world is possible, I think we mislead them about the realities of the world around them. We disempower them, by filling their heads with utopian visions that may seem quite comforting but that have little relationship to reality. As Dewey also argued, dreaming is wonderful, but dreams without concrete tools for making them into reality can be very destructive if indulged too long.

For a more detailed discussion of the relationships between social class and strategies of social action, see this paper.

Community Organizing and Urban Education: The Series

Aaron Schutz's webpage: http://educationaction.org

The series has been relocated to my webpage.

Community Organizing and Urban Education VIII: Fracturing Across Lines of Race and Class

[To read the entire series, go here.]

In my limited experience in Milwaukee with MOVE--a congregational organizing group that work with the Gamaliel Foundation which operates nationally and internationally—the larger institutionalized community organizing groups have significant issues with race and class that they don’t deal with effectively. (Later I’ll talk about how intermediary organizations like Gamaliel work with local groups). From what I have read elsewhere, this reluctance to focus specifically on race and class in favor of more pragmatic and general visions of “self interest” and coalition building is a problem with mainline community organizing groups more generally. This has apparently led to the development of new groups outside of the larger national groups that deal more directly with issues of racial identity, nationalism etc.

In its early days, MOVE was primarily made up of inner-city churches and the participants were mostly people of color. Shortly before I joined, the group decided that if they were going to have enough power to really make a difference, they were going to need to expand their membership to include churches outside the central city. Many mostly white middle-class churches joined.

What happened then is probably pretty predictable. As the whites came in, the people of color began voting with their feet.

One key problem is that middle-class, white professionals have a fundamentally different discursive style than lower-income people of color. While this issue seems to be one more of class than of race, it is important to understand that being middle-class and black on the edge of the central city places one in a much more financially and culturally marginal position than is common among middle-class professionals, as Patillo-McCoy, among others, has pointed out. So even though, as I noted earlier, it’s true that most members of congregational organizing groups come from middle-class mainline churches, what it means to be middle class, and how that links to particular discursive and cultural practices is much more complex than this observation might indicate.

A couple of stories.

For a while I attended the mostly white and mostly upper-middle-class (in culture if not in $$) Unitarian church in the city, and we mobilized a number of Unitarians to attend a talking session with some local school-board members. A number of black churches also sent members, and participants of color significantly outnumbered the number of whites. This larger groups broke up into smaller dialogue groups to come up with issue to present to the whole meeting. As I walked around, I noted that nearly all of the groups ended up having a Unitarian as their note-taker and facilitator. So when the groups presented back, most of the presenters were whites. Afterwards, predictably, the whites wondered aloud why the people of color didn’t participate as much as the whites, and the whites complained that they didn’t want to take over.

This is an incredibly common outcome when priveliged whites and less priveliged people of color come together in dialogue. As Eric H. F. Law puts it in a wonderful little book, people with privelige assume that their voice ought to count, and just naturally jump in to get heard. People with less power are less likely to make that assumption. Then the powerful wonder, “why don’t ‘those people’ talk?” And the less powerful don’t feel welcomed and they don’t come back.

There is surprisingly little in the literature about how to deal with the inevitable power differentials that emerge when priveliged whites and less priveliged people of color come together in dialogue. Many solutions involve highly trained facilitators or intensive training, but community organizing groups are much too fluid and resource limited to allow this to happen in most cases. Law came up with a process that seems to work for groups engaged in cross-cultural dialogue, but it seems to me and to other organizers I’ve talked with to be too cubersome to work in action oriented settings like community organizing meetings.

The point is not that nothing works. Instead, I am beginning to think (and others better informed about this issue may correct me) that it may simply be too dificult to find procedures that will allow equal dialogue in such settings without prohibitive amounts of educational and facilitational superstructure. The fact is that even though I know all of this, I often find myself butting in and interrupting as the white male that I am. I have real trouble even training myself out of this.

There is some evidence from classrooms and elsewhere, however, that people with less power tend to feel more empowered if they are representatives of external groups. (Of course, this idea fits quite well with more general organizing perspectives on collective power). In MOVE. I have recommended a number of times that we try to recreate spaces where there aren’t many priveliged whites, where inner-city folks can build their own sense of collective identity and then send representatives to meetings with the surrounding white churches. I have heard that there are other examples of organizations with a “black caucus” or “inner-city caucus”, but I haven’t had time to seek them out. For a range of reasons, this hasn’t happened in MOVE.

Although I haven’t been to many large MOVE events recently, I remember a couple of years ago going to training meetings and noticing that the number of participants of color was falling quickly. At one point, I heard a powerful black pastor trying explain to a group of mostly whites why “his people” weren’t coming, which also involved a lecture about the different ways his community was structured, but it didn’t seem like others really heard what he was trying to say (and I’m sure I didn’t totally get it either).

This brings us back to the Gamaliel Foundation’s reluctance to deal with these issues directly. They apparently don’t want to “get into it.” In classic Alinsky form (although there is evidence that Alinsky was more savvy than some of his followers) they try to overcome these issues simply by finding common areas of interest that will allow different groups to come together. I vividly remember a meeting where the head of the Gamaliel Foundation stood in front of a large group of members berating us for our inability to get as many people out as MOVE had done in its early days. At no point did he point out that most of his audience was white, in contrast to the early days when almost everyone would have been black.

Astonishing.

Community Organizing and Urban Education VII: In Youth Action, Power Precedes Engagement, Learning, and Understanding

[To read the entire series, go here.]

[To see our full presentation on our youth action project at AERA in messy MS Word Format on GoogleDocs go here.]

People don’t do anything unless they are motivated to action first. As Saul Alinsky stated,

If people feel they don’t have the power to change a bad situation, then they do not think about it. Why start figuring out how you are going to spend a million dollars if you do not have a million dollars, or are ever going to have a million dollars—unless you want to engage in fantasy? (p. 105)

Alinsky argued that it is only when people sense they have some power to make some changes in their world that “they begin to think and ask questions about how to make the changes.” “It is,” he noted, “the creation of the instrument or the circumstances of power that provides the reason and makes knowledge essential.”

This creates some real challenges when one tries to engage inner-city students in social action projects, as we are trying to do in a project in Milwaukee. You can run into a catch-22: they don’t want to do anything because they don’t think they can accomplish anything, and they don’t think they can accomplish anything because they haven’t done anything.

In Milwaukee, we are working with students who are required to partipate in a social action project in school. In contrast with most youth action efforts, then, these youth don’t necessarily arrive with any particular desire to act or with any sense of their own power.

We are beginning to learn that one of the answers to the catch-22 may be just to have students “do something” related to an issue they have expressed some interest in. If they are interested in the police, have them tour a police station, or have them visit a children’s court. Such visits allow them to ask questions and engage with people in power, it gives them some voice, however small. And this voice may become a small kernel of accomplishment that we may be able to hang some interest in action on.

This “just do it approach” is not one that we understood at the beginning of this year, but we are planning to make it a central aspect of our methodology next year.

At the same time, we have learned that we should start only with topics around which we can imagine students taking some coherent action. The point is not to force students to do what we want them to, but to give them a sense, from the beginning, that this topic is linked directly to action—even if they want to change what that action is.

For example, last year some groups expressed interest in antagonistic police relations with young people—something all of them had some experience in. These groups stumbled around for weeks, unable to find anything that seemed to engage them and that seemed realistically achievable. We spent a lot of time sitting in small rooms having dialogues that didn’t really go anywhere.

This year, we started police relations groups linked to a planned action—that they would develop a curriculum to teach younger kids how to engage with the police. And we believe that it is in part because these students had a sense of a goal from the beginning that they began much more quickly to start actually doing something (distributing a survey, for example) than had the groups the year before.

Both of these techniques—getting youth “out there” to engage with the realities of the situations they want to affect, and defining some achievable goal from the first place—relate to Alinsky’s principle of power and learning. Only when youth have a concrete sense that they can affect some aspect of their community that they dislike is there much chance that they will begin to take ownership of a project that is otherwise just another school requirement.

It’s not rocket science. In retrospect, it seems obvious. But engaging youth in social action projects in school—however limited—is not something we usually do. And learning how to do this successfully will demand that a willingness to face up to our own ignorance.

Community Organizing and Urban Education VI: Education is a Tough Nut to Crack

[To read the entire series, go here.]

"Although public education activism is hardly new in this country . . . , community organizing as a strategy for school improvement is barely a decade old."
--Kavitha Mediratta, NYU Institute for Education and Social Policy

“Organizing groups argue that education is more difficult to navigate than any other neighborhood issue because school systems are harder to penetrate and school leadership often is more insulated and unresponsive than the leadership of other public institutions.”
--Mediratta, et. al.

Since so much of the social action in the 1960s involved education, especially protests against segregation after Brown, it may seem like education is a common arena for social action. However, the fact is that community organizing groups around the United States in the last few decades have mostly stayed out of educational reform until quite recently. Why?

Organizing works best when groups’ demands are simple and clear. This is relatively easy to accomplish in areas like housing, or jobs, or health care, or wages, because one can define in fairly basic terms what it would mean to “win.” X number of houses, or X amount of loan $$ for a particular area, or a specific wage increase, or a new health center for a defined area. In education, the issues are often more complex.

Often in education, the problem is one of quality of instruction. But it is very difficult to define exactly what a “good” education looks like, and difficult (for specialists or everyday citizens) to monitor instruction from the outside. For example, even if you win something as seemingly simple as a “small schools” effort, how small is small enough? What counts as adequate support for these schools? Whose fault is it when some of them fail?

Monitoring is key for any organizing effort. Just because someone *says* they will do something doesn’t mean anything. Unless you can keep track of what they are doing over time, chances are they will find a way to weasel out of what they agreed to.

Questions about educational policy can get complicated and political very quickly. Think of the conflict around educational choice, for example. And, as noted in the quotes, above, public schools are especially difficult institutions to get access to.

Nonetheless, a range of organizing groups are increasingly engaging with the public schools. Often in collaboration with educational scholars (see Oakes & Rogers for an interesting example), they are developing tools like school “report cards” to help them keep schools accountable. They are developing strategies for collaborating with school staff, as in the Alliance Schools effort described by Dennis Shirley. And some groups, like ACORN, are even opening and/or supporting their own schools.

Other groups, like the one I work with in Milwaukee, are developing avenues for supporting school change that can be framed in relatively simple terms, as they always have, like class size, increasing the availability of school nurses, or guaranteeing nutritious school breakfasts.

I have only scraped the suface of the challenges specific to school reform organizing, here, and will return to these issues in later posts. A good source for information about these challenges is the Mediratta et. al. paper I quoted from above.

Community Organizing and Urban Education V: “Cutting an Issue” (Clarity and Passion)

[To read the entire series, go here.]

One of the most challenging tasks of a community organizing group is to come up with a specific issue to pursue. The world is full of what organizers call “problems,” aspects of the world we don’t like—e.g., world hunger, or educational achievement. Problems, however are too big and vague to grapple with in any coherent manner. In fact, just thinking about them can be disempowering.

So what organizers try to do is cut “issues” out of problems that can be concretely dealt with in a coherent and achievable manner. It turns out that this is an extremely difficult process, since many of the criteria for a good issue are usually in conflict with each other. Here I address two aspects of cutting an issue: “clarity” and “passion.”

Clarity in organizing is crucial. If one is going to bring a group of people who are not necessarily experts together around an issue, then that issue has to make sense without pages of explanation. MOVE, the community organizing group I participate in, worked to increase the number of SAGE schools in Milwaukee a few years ago. The SAGE program includes a number of different components, including reduced class sizes in lower elementary grades. So MOVE sold SAGE as a class size reduction program, instead of getting into the nitty-gritty of the details of how it worked.

Issues also have to have a “gut” sense of importance to the people you are trying to engage. And it is helpful to be able to tie specific stories and testimony to these issues. For example, arguing for more money for schools, in general, is not really a “gut” issue, although many people understand that, in an abstract sense, it is a problem. However, having forty kids in the same classroom, situations where parents have to quit work because a school doesn’t have a nurse to give insulin shots to their kids, stories about bathrooms covered in mold—these have a compelling emotional charge with them. If you can’t find a way to elicit this emotional charge, then you probably won’t be able to organize effectively around it, regardless of how important it may be to you. The right wing has really learned this lesson well.

Also, from an organizing standpoint, it doesn’t really matter whether you, as an organizer, care about a specific issue. What matters is that it is compelling for those you are trying to organize, that they have a “passion” for the issue.

An organizer I know once wanted to organize a housing complex in Milwaukee. The complex had a range of difficult problems, including drug dealers, plumbing and heat issues, and on and on. However, when she went around and talked to residents, what she found was that those issues weren’t the ones that were most compelling to them. What was? Cable television. They wanted to have cable access in their apartments. So that’s what this organizer brought them together around.

Another thing an issue needs to do is bring people together and provide an opportunity to grow the organization. This is actually related more to how you organize around an issue than to how you frame it, initially, but it’s difficult to separate these two aspects.

There are some problems that one can fix by drawing on a few experts. These aren’t good issues for organizing groups. From an organizing standpoint, you actually want an issue that will force the organization to do some collective work, to stretch and grow. In some cases, you may even force this work when it isn’t really even necessary.

The most famous example of an organizer creating the need for collective action out of whole cloth is when Saul Alinsky, the key conceptualizer of organizing’s general vision, went to a local city official in the 1930s and got him to agree to a change in policy. Then Alinsky got a large group of people together and they all marched down to the official’s office with signs, shouting their demand he change this policy. Somewhat bemused, I think, the official agreed. And then Alinsky trumpeted this victory to his group. “See,” he essentially said, “we do have power if we act collectively!”

Of course, lying to your constituents is not a good practice. But in the housing complex example the organizer did something similar. She knew that she could get cable TV for the residents pretty easily, but instead used this as an opportunity to engage them in the practice of organizing. They had meetings, planned actions, created materials, etc. And, not surprisingly, they convinced the landlord to give them cable TV.

Then the organizer turned to the group and said something like, “okay. What do you think about doing something about the drug dealing in this complex?” And they moved to a new issue.

The work of organizing, then, is an opportunity for educating leaders and other participants, it is an opportunity for identifying new leaders, it is an opportunity for expanding the number of people who see themselves as “members” of your organization, and the like. “Winning” in some ways is less important than the “power” that is built through the activity of struggling against oppression.

Sometimes you are “lucky” and a good issue just falls in your lap. A few years ago the school district decided that they would try to get students to go to their local “neighborhood” schools. As a part of this (and to save money) they wanted to eliminate parent’s right to bus their students to the schools of their choice in their bussing area. This created a great opportunity for MOVE to act collectively in resistance, since parents didn’t actually support this change. It even catalyzed the emergence of a new parent organization (even though this quickly dissolved).

In an odd kind of way, then, from an organizing standpoint it’s actually helpful when people in power do overtly nasty things. It’s much easier to respond to these than to more subtle, ongoing processes of oppression that are difficult to define or resist in any coherent way. So the example Dan has given of the state of Virginia eliminating foundations classes actually could be a “positive” rallying point for the field. But, of course, there is no institutional structure to rally people in any coherent way, so an opportunity for collective engagement and organizational power development is lost.

Community Organizing and Urban Education III: The Limits of Churches as Representatives of Impoverished Communities

[To read the entire series, go here.]

In the last installment of this series I explained why most of the largest community organizing groups in America are made up of coalitions of churches. Here I discuss why churches can be problematic representatives of communities, especially impoverished ones. Again, I think it is important for educators to understand the tensions involved in different approaches to community organizing because, despite their limits, they represent one of the most promising avenues for supporting struggling urban schools.

I want to emphasize that I am still very much a learner in the arena of religious sociology. I would welcome corrections from readers.

Much like schools, churches in America are extremely segregated by race and class. Unlike schools, however, church segregation is less a result of geographical boundaries than of the character of individual churches themselves. For our purposes, it is helpful to focus on two groups of churches: mostly middle-class, mid-sized mainline congregations and (especially among African Americans) usually smaller, mostly working-class Pentecostal/Holiness (often storefront) churches.

In general, congregational organizing groups are made up in large part of mainline churches. Why is this the case?

First, from a religious standpoint mainline churches are more likely to see broad, mundane social concerns as a part of their responsibility as (mostly) Christian people. In America, it is in these churches that a “liberation theology” focused on issues like educational reform makes the most coherent sense. In fact, the class and education level of the pastor and of the congregation is directly related to the likelihood that a congregation will participate in traditional social justice activities.

In the Pentecostal/Holiness, or “sanctified” tradition, the focus seems to be more on engaging directly with the holy spirit in one’s life. These churches are “in the world but not of it.” It is important to emphasize, as McRoberts and Sanders do, that the sanctified tradition is in many ways just as interested in social justice and in the creation of an egalitarian society as are mainline churches. But they seem more likely to focus on engaging individuals in religious transformation and on direct services more directly related to religious actualization as opposed to concrete action for systematic social change. It is also usually the case that these churches have fewer resources to expend on non-church functions.

Second, the dominance of a middle-class discourse is, to some extent, a self-perpetuating phenomenon. People who “belong” in the congregational organizing group I work with, MOVE, speak a certain way and, despite important differences, often worship in a particular way. While progressive whites may sometimes be uncomfortable with more expressive mainline African American and other traditions, these are not as alien as the practices of sanctified churches. In general, a poor person without much education is going to quickly feel out of place within a context dominated by those with at least the basics of familiarity with the dominant discourse. Even less privileged members of participating mainline congregations may feel uncomfortable in this setting.

As you can see, these differences are much more complex than simple distinctions between “conservative” and “liberal” can capture.

The class segregation of congregational organizing groups is often difficult for outsiders to detect. In part this is because churches are increasingly unlikely to draw from identifiable geographic areas. Many inner-city churches, for example, have mostly middle-class congregations that live nowhere near the actual church, and there are still white congregations (think of Catholics tied to historic churches) who worship in areas where the racial and class composition has shifted. Thus, the location of a church often says little or nothing about especially the class make-up of congregants.

Even insiders generally seem unaware of the extent to which an organization like MOVE represents a fairly narrow segment of the population. At a MOVE Education Committee meeting this week, for example, an African American reverend suggested that we survey members of our congregations to get a sense of the kind of changes parents face in the public schools. I had to tell him that we’d actually tried this a few years ago (with the same intention), and had discovered that almost none of the congregation members surveyed had children attending the most struggling schools in the city. Apparently, they have enough cultural and social capital to negotiate the intricacies of the schooling bureaucracy to get their kids in better schools.

In general, then, congregational groups represent a range of segments of the middle-class, including relatively few of those who are actually suffering the most from the effects of poverty and geographical segregation. You will not usually find a single mother working a second shift job for $7.00 an hour at a MOVE planning meeting (although she may come to a rally or a large public meeting). And even if you do, it is not likely that she will return next time. Interestingly, these class issues are rarely noted, in my experience, in writings about congregational organizing.

Of course, this raises important questions about how much even congregational organizing groups based mostly in the inner city actually “represent” these communities.

There is more to be said about the problematic ways class and race intersect in congregation-based community organizing. Here, I have focused on social class. In a later post I will examine how class issues can intersect with issues of race to produce destructive patterns of racial exclusion in congregational groups like MOVE.

Community Organizing and Urban Education, Part I: Introducing MOVE

[To read the entire series, go here.]

For the last six years or so, I have worked with a local community organizing group on their Education Committee. MOVE (a pseudonym) is now one of a number of allied organizations in Wisconsin, and operates under the umbrella of the Gamaliel Foundation,which has local chapters in many different states (the other large organizing groups in America are the IAF, PICO, and ACORN). MOVE currently has 37 different congregations as members with a wide range of Christian and even a few non-Christian groups. (image)

I didn’t know anything about community organizing when I came to Milwaukee. But I had been studying a range of different theories of agency and democratic social action, and I was increasingly unsatisfied with what I found. At the same time as I was visiting the Unitarian church, looking for a community to join, I heard about MOVE, and was one of the people that encouraged the Unitarians to join. Soon after, I attended Gamaliel’s week-long leader training, where we were taught some basic concepts and language relevant to organizing. (I was yelled at and managed to completely embarrass myself). And I was hooked. This seemed like a potential avenue for actually fighting for social change instead of just chatting about it, and it also seemed to provide an opportunity to reach across Milwaukee’s sharp racial and class divide.

While I have been part of MOVE we have worked to increase the number of low class-size schools supported by the state in Milwaukee (we were quite successful). We fought against efforts to eliminate parents’ rights to bus their children to non-neighborhood schools (almost single-handedly, MOVE forced the district to maintain these). And we worked on an effort to insure adequate funding for all schools (as I will describe later, this was a miserable—and predictable—failure). Currently we have shifted our focus a little and are working to improve health servMilwaukee Milwauk Public Schools (MPS). Just last week, we were instrumental in getting the state Department of Health and Family Services to put 27 new nurses in MPS schools (a three million dollar commitment), succeeding where a range of other groups have largely failed in their efforts over the last few years.

I plan to use this blog as an opportunity to write about my experience in MOVE: the good, the bad, and the ugly. I am writing as a researcher and as a participant, but it is important to emphasize that I have never made any effort to systematically conduct research on MOVE. These will be my personal reflections, drawing both on my experiences and on my broad reading about organizing.

In no particular order, topics I plan to discuss over the next few months include:

• Why churches? A different vision the church/state relationship
  
• How are organizing groups organized?
• Racial tensions (or, “white people can’t shut up”)
  
• Leadership training
  
• The language and key practices
  
• The ideal vs. the reality
  
• A different kind of democracy (or, “is this really democracy?”)
  
• What scholars can contribute
  
• Cutting an issue
  
• How to cut the wrong issue
  

For those who are interested, some key texts about organizing in general and organizing for educational change in specific include:

• Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals. (The classic work about organizing from the iconoclastic organizer. Nearly all major organizing groups in America have emerged out of the Alinsky tradition.)
  
• Warren, Dry Bones Rattling. (A nice overview of how organizing has developed from Alinsky’s day.)
  
• Shirley, Community Organizing for Urban School Reform. (Even after ten years, still the best book on school-focused organizing.)
  
• Chambers, Roots for Radicals. (A more contemplative book by one of Alinsky’s key apprentices, now head of the national organization Alinsky founded, the IAF [Industrial Areas Foundation].)
  
• Ginwright, Noguera, and Cammarota (Eds.), Beyond Resistance. (Just published, and the first significant book on youth organizing.)
  
• Anyon, Radical Possibilities. (An extended argument about the importance of community action and broader economic change for effective school reform.)