The Costs of Democratic Participation (Community Organizing and Urban Education)

[To read the entire series, go here.]

If we persist in our inquiry as to what is meant by a people’s program, raising a series of questions—“Who thought up the program?” “Where did it come from?” “Who worked in its creation?” and other similar queries—we rapidly discover that too often the program is not the people’s program at all but the product of one person, five persons, a church, a labor union, a business group, a social agency, or a political club—in short, a program can be traced to one or two persons but not to the people themselves. The phrase “people’s program” has become well worn with lip service, but whether such a program actually exists in practice is something else again.

--Saul Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals, p. 53 (1946)

There is a tendency among education scholars to genuflect before the idea of “democracy.” If we are going to participate in community or school change, the “progressive” position generally supports the idea that projects must emerge from “the people” as Alinsky argues here. And, in a general sense, it is difficult to challenge this desire. Of course it is important for those who are affected by a program to participate in its development.

But it is also important to understand that “participation” is not a costless activity. Furthermore, in complex areas where one needs extensive technical knowledge to make decisions about better or worse projects, effective decisionmaking by the “people” is inseparable from extensive educational activities. And then come difficult questions about how one is to ascertain what the “people” want or even who the “people” are. For example, as I have noted before, the organization I work with, MOVE, is made up of mostly middle-class church members. Figuring out what they want is not the same as figuring out what those who are most needy in our communities want.

I’m beginning to think that different levels of participation may be required for different kinds of interventions. With respect to some broad social service issues, it seems to me that it may be less important for the “people” to participate in deciding about which projects to pursue. For example, is it necessary to have long discussions about exactly what kind of dental service program we need for kids in school or about what kind of class size reduction plan we need, as long as we get one? Of course, it would be better to have these discussions. But lacking resources, doesn't it make sense to just “do it” when opportunities present themselves for fighting for new programs as opposed to stopping and engaging in long drawn-out community education and engagement efforts?

In general, it is usually less important to people exactly how new services are provided as long as they are provided. Kids need dental care and smaller class sizes. And parents don’t necessarily care whether we start with dental care or small class size--even if neither of these would be at the absolute top of their initial list if we did a survey of their desires for change.

For example, we have begun a process of developing an approach to providing dental care to students in the Milwaukee Public Schools. In focus groups, another organization found that many parents would rather take their kids to a private practitioner rather than have them treated in school. And this is fine. But we have almost one hundred thousand kids in MPS. 64% of them have significant tooth decay problems and less than 25% have even seen a dentist recently. The fact that some parents won’t want to use the service (or might use it even if they would prefer something else) won’t change what seems the undisputed fact that it would reach an enormous number of children who are not now served. I haven't heard anyone who actually opposes offering such services.

The fact is that this is the project that the most involved members of our organization think we can feasibly fight for—even if it isn’t the “perfect” program for everyone. The fact is that no one seems to know how to substantially increase private dental access directly for poor parents with state insurance. In part because there doesn’t seem to be any coherent alternative to a school-based plan, other groups have failed to put forward a comprehensive plan for student treatment at all (although they have recommended a patchwork of disparate changes that would be difficult to fight for as a collective). To some extent (from my distant and limited understanding) these other groups seem to have been paralyzed to one extent or another by a particular vision of democratic collaboration between institutions and local people.

It seems crucial to make sure that all programs include avenues for public participation so that they can be influenced by those they serve. But you can’t influence a program that doesn’t exist. You can’t fight for changes in service provision that doesn’t exist. It may be that the capability for local participation on an issue like this comes after the service is created and not before.

Other issues seem likely to require more extensive education and dialogue. For example, we are thinking about joining the fight of a couple of local school board members to reinstate arts programs and/or other extracurricular activities in MPS schools. An effort like this, which would involve shifting $$ from one area of the school budget to another (instead of providing new $$ like the dental plan would, above) seem problematic to pursue without extensive and broad input. There is deep disagreement out there about what schools should “do” or “be.” Should they limit their focus to the three Rs exclusively, or do they have a responsibility to provide more broad-based experiences to students? And do extracurricular activities really matter on an academic level? Are they simply add-ons that are fun, or do they, for example, keep students in school that might otherwise drop out? To me, it seems problematic for a few leaders to decide what the general population of their organization believes without engaging with them in some way.

There may be three different kinds of issues, here.

1. There may be issues like dental care or class size that don’t require as much intense democratic engagement or education. Anybody on the street can see why they are important and they don’t need to learn much to understand what needs to be done in a general sense.
   
2. Then there may be issues that require education and some democratic dialogue, but that revolve around issues that people generally will support unproblematically. People need to understand the complexities of these issues in order to participate effectively in the fight, but don’t need to have extended discussion about whether this particular fight is worthy.
3. And then there may be issues that require both education and more extensive democratic dialogue, like whether an organization should join an effort to bring extracurricular activities back given a limited pool of $ to do everything a school needs to do. They need to have discussions about whether this campaign is worth getting into in the first place. And they need to understand the structure of the budget—the specific details of where the funding will come from and the implications of this act for other programs—both to have the dialogue in the first place and to effectively fight for the change if they decide to pursue it.

To complicate this even more, as I noted above, it may be that democratic participation for different issues becomes important at different stages of a project. In some cases this may even happen after a particular campaign has been won so that there exist real opportunities to work on influencing a service that has not existed before.

Community Organizing and Urban Education XIII: Public vs. Private

[To read the entire series, go here. A one-page version of the entire series is here.]

Note: Much of this is elaborated from pp. 96-99 of Commonwealth by Harry Boyte.

Innumerable books have discussed different ways to conceptualize differences and similarities between “private” and “public” realms, mapping these across history, different cultural groups, and different conceptual frameworks. Here, I discuss the model developed in the context of community organizing.

According to one of Saul Alinsky’s lieutenants, Ed Chambers, one of Alinsky’s many shortsighted attitudes was about the private lives of organizers. “Indeed, Chambers spoke with visible pain of Alinsky’s cavalier, dismissive attitude toward his associates’ family life and retirement and security needs.” Chambers noted that “’He called me up long distance to order me to Rochester’” to work on a famous organizing campaign (Boyte, 96).

This refusal to respect people’s personal lives created numerous problems. Not the least was the tendency to burn people out. Many organizers speak of the revolving door through which many experienced organizers and leaders fled, never to return to the field. In this way, their hard-earned skills that could have supported future efforts were lost.

Post-Alinsky, many organizing groups realized that they needed to fundamentally change the way they supported organizers. Over time, to the extent possible, major organizations like the Gamaliel and Industrial Areas Foundations have tried to make organizing more humanly “doable,” something one could continue for a long-term career. At least in these flagship organizations, pay rates have increased, retirement and other benefits are more likely to be planned for, and thinking has gone into making jobs more family friendly.

One of the approaches developed in the wake of these issues was a new way of framing a distinction between “public” and “private” relationships. These new distinctions were designed to help them and the leaders they work with navigate the enormous emotional and time challenges inherent in any organizing effort. Like all concepts in organizing, these distinctions are meant as flexible guidelines. They are pragmatic tools for helping organizers and leaders make ethical and practical choices in a world that is always too complex to be captured by such binary frameworks. And it’s important to understand that these principles were actively constructed. They were not simply found lying around, but were developed and are still in the process of being developed in response to ongoing experience.

In trainings, organizers started by distinguishing between two columns of different kinds of relationships. On the private side they listed the more intimate relationships one has with one’s family and friends. On the public side they listed the more instrumental relationships one generally has with organizational colleagues, politicians, strangers, and others outside of one’s relatively narrow circle of intimacy. This is all summarized in the following table:

Roles Played in Private vs. Public Relationships

PRIVATE Relationships	PUBLIC Relationships
Family	Church Members
Friends	Students at School
Oneself	Political Actors
	Co-Workers
	People on the street

They also distinguished between what had emerged for them through their organizing experience as the key differences in the characteristics of relationships in these arenas.

In the private, people tend to encounter people who are mostly like themselves in the characteristics that are important to them. Private relationships are often given or inherited—few people, for example, can choose their families. They are relatively permanent. One might want to disown a sibling or a parent, for example, but we rarely do. Similarly, once we decide people are our “friends,” we become much more likely to tolerate their imperfections (and to expect imperfections to be tolerated in ourselves). In private, we have the right to expect to be relatively safe in a range of different ways; we can be honest about our feelings and fears and needs.

In the public, we encounter people that are often very different from us. If we conflict with them, we are much more likely to vote with our feet rather than try to work things out. If we are “stuck” with them (on the job or in politics, for example) our engagements with they are likely to be guarded, since public relationships are inherently less safe than private ones. Part of the reason for this lack of safety is that public relationships are much more likely to be instrumental. We engage with other people in public because we have something we need to accomplish or deal with. Partly as a result, these relationships are often quite fluid, with old acquaintances fading away while new ones emerge, often as a result of changes in our institutional or geographical location and not because we have necessarily chosen new people to engage with.

The table below summarizes these key characteristics of public and private relationships:

Characteristics of Private and Public Relationships

PRIVATE	PUBLIC
Sameness	Diversity
Commonality	Difference
Given/Permanent	Fluid/Temporary
Intimate	Guarded
Safe	Unsafe
Restricted to small number of intimates	Open to a large number of acquaintances

Finally, our expectations of what we can get out of public vs. private relationships are quite different. In the private, we expect to be accepted. We expect some level of loyalty, regardless of how problematic we may be at any moment and we often have a need to be liked or loved by our family and friends. Furthermore, in private we give without much expectation of getting anything in return.

In the public, as I have already noted, our relationships are much more pragmatic. We have relationships because there is some instrumental reason why we need them. Instead of wanting to be liked, in public, we expect respect (regardless of whether others like us or not). Instead of letting it “all hang out,” we must be much more guarded about what we say. In fact, in public, we generally take on a particular kind of dramatic “role.” This is common to teachers and politicians and bosses and workers. In these contexts, to one extent or another, all of us present a particular kind of “face” to the world. The point is not that one must necessarily be dishonest in public—in fact, persistent dishonesty can destroy public relationships even quicker than private ones. Instead we must be careful about how we frame what we think, what we reveal about ourselves, and the topics we discuss. While we can expect un-judgmental loyalty in private, in public we expect to be held accountable for what we say or do, and to hold others accountable in the same way. In general, then, what is most important to understand in public relationships are the self-interests of the different people involved. What motivates us and others to act? {In a future post, I’ll talk more about the broad way organizers frame self-interest.)

The table below summarizes the benefits and aims of public and private relationships:

Benefits and Aims of Private vs. Public Relationships

PRIVATE	PUBLIC
The need to be liked	The need to be respected
Expectation of loyalty	Expectation of accountability
Altruistic/self-giving	Quid pro quo/self-interest

Again, I want to emphasize that these distinctions are not definitions that can be followed strictly and unproblematically. Instead, they are flexible guidelines for “’appropriate behavior’ in [these] different realms” (Boyte, 96). Organizers, perhaps better than most people, understand that “’universals,’ principles that seem to apply across widely varying cultural and communal contexts, need always to be contextualized to have any real meaning. Thus, IAF teachers argue that nothing is ever completely ‘either-or.’” One organizer pointed out, for example, that “’public’ would have a qualitatively different meaning in most African societies . . . . And different settings partake of different ‘public’ and ‘personal’ or private qualities—a church . . . is far more personal than a convention or a political rally” (Boyte, 97).

I often use the example of my own “public” role as a teacher in my community organizing course. But at the same time as we talk about how I need to be held accountable and to hold my students accountable, we also talk about how there are private aspects of the teacher-student relationship as well. To some extent, it is important for me to be loyal to my students, and to balance accountability with a more personal kind of caring. No role is ever completely public or private (although teacher-student roles may be especially fraught with these kinds of tensions).

One way these conceptions of “private” and “public” are useful to organizers are in helping them distinguish between ways of treating people who are intimate relations and those who are public acquaintances. They allow one to draw relatively clear boundaries between people one should expect to be liked by and those from who one demands respect. They help limit one’s responsibilities to those who fall outside of one’s private arena and clarify the responsibilities, benefits, and burdens involved in admitting new people into one’s private circle. One organizer noted, for example, that he used to try to treat everyone like they were friends. He just ended up totally exhausting himself and actually damaging his relationships with people who really were his intimates—like his family. Learning to distinguish between “private” and “public” relationships helped him let go of relationships with people in his organization who weren’t living up to their responsibilities and concentrate on people who he could depend upon.

Despite limitations, it is in the realm of power, politics, inequality, and oppression that these distinctions between “private” and “public” come into their real power. In general, organizers argue that powerful people often try to control those who are less powerful by intentionally confusing private and public relationships.

A few examples:

On the east-west highway in my city right now there is a large billboard advertising a bank that says “it’s not business, it’s personal!” This is a perfect example of an effort to make people feel like a public relationship is really intimate. The fact is that the bank doesn’t care about individual clients. It understands quite clearly that its relationship with those it serves is not private but public. And if you don’t live up to your responsibilities to a bank you will find this out quite quickly, regardless of how nice the tellers and mortgage brokers may be.

Recently my wife and I went to buy a car. We had decided not to purchase a particular vehicle from a salesperson, and he started in on a passionate appeal to us, telling us that he needed another sale to get his bonus for the month. In other words, he was asking us to be loyal and altruistic towards him, even though he knew quite well that his relationship with us was entirely temporary and that any intimacy on his part was really an act that he performed with every customer who came onto his lot. Needless to say, we walked away from that deal.

Waitresses know quite well the power of fake private relationships. There is clear evidence that patrons who are touched lightly during a meal will give a larger tip than those who are not. Of course, in a sense at a restaurant one is paying for a kind of manufactured intimacy. But much of the impact of the strategies used by people like waitresses is quite invisible to patrons. They “feel” more personally connected, and this activates their “private” tendencies.

An organizer I know spoke of a campaign in which his organization was in conflict with a major bank in our city. The bank director used to call him up and the first thing the director would do was ask about the organizer’s family, his children, etc. The organizer said he would patiently wait out this “private” discussion, and then move directly to the “public” part of their discussion.

Frequently, politicians and others in power positions will say something like “I’m a nice person. Why are you doing this to me?” They’ll ask leaders and organizers to lunch or dinner in relatively intimate settings and try to create a personal relationship. But these relationships are not personal, they are public. They involve citizens putting on public faces and engaging with the powerful in their public role. And when social activists don’t understand this, they are open to being used.

One classic way to fight against absentee landlords in the central city who are letting their properties become blighted is to force what they want to be private into the public. A couple of years ago, the organization I work with went to the neighborhood in the suburbs where a notorious landlord lived. Leaders left leaflets with her suburban neighbors with pictures of her properties and a description of how her lack of upkeep was affecting her residents and their neighborhoods. This forced the landlord into a public relationship with her neighbors. This act essentially argued that people who do harm like this should not be able to hide in the private realm. Not surprisingly, if I remember correctly, this landlord very quickly made a deal with my organization.

These distinctions between “private” and “public” help social action organizations decide what kinds of actions are and are not ethical. An ethical action, these distinctions imply, will be one oriented towards the public roles played by an individual or an institution. It’s not legitimate, for example, to bring someone else’s family into the fight unless there is some specific reason why this has become fair game.

During a fight with the school board a couple of years ago, the board president, who was opposing us, declared that at a public meeting that anyone could come to his house any time they wanted. His door was always open for discussion. I thought that this opened him up to a very effective action where our organization might come in force to his house and present him with demands collectively. From my perspective, he had tried to use this as an example of how he was really a “personable” kind of guy as an effort to resist our efforts. This action never happened, however. He had younger kids and there was legitimate disagreement about whether this would overstep ethical bounds and exactly how to do something like this in an ethical way. I’m still not sure, myself, about this strategy.

Whether a relationship is public or private is a result of the role a person is playing at any particular time. For example, two US senators might be married. At home, they would have a “private” relationship under this rubric, but on the Senate floor, their relationship would be “public.” This is something that politicians and powerful people generally understand quite well. It’s why very conservative and very liberal Senators can say terrible things about each other’s views on the airwaves and then go play an amiable game of golf. And the fact is that a personal relationship with and between the powerful can be useful tools in a range of ways as long as the individuals engaged understand when they are playing different roles.

As Boyte notes, the distinction between public and private has

proved significant in teaching leaders the dynamics of effective political action, from the parish level to the life of communities. “We would never have been able to challenge the priest to stop acting like our ‘father’ without this sort of training [about public and private’ said Beatrice Cortez, a president of San Antonio COPS [a congregational organizing group] . . . . ‘You learn what is appropriate and inappropriate for politicians. They shouldn’t try to get us to love them, for instance.’

Cortez frequently tells a story about her daughter to illustrate how children can quickly pick up the point. During her tenure as president of the organization, Cortez had a COPS phone in her house. One day the mayor, Henry Cisneros—whom she had known for years—called up on the line. ‘My daughter answered and at first didn’t know who it was. ‘Who should I say is calling?’ she asked. Cisneros said, “Tell her it’s a special friend.’ ‘Then she recognized his voice,” Cortez said. “She said, ‘On this line, you’re not a friend, I know who you are. You’re the mayor!’ I told her, ‘You’ve got that right, honey!’ (Boyte, p. 98)

In general, Boyte argues that

The self-conscious recognition of the public realm in which IAF [and other community organizing] organizations functioned as significant actors thus began to make explicit and clear what had often been known intuitively but never quite identified: public life had its own distinctive dynamics, its own principles. . . .

But public life . . . also stands in a different relationship to private life than has been classically conceived. Indeed, the groups partially reverse the traditional attributes of public and private . . . The private . . . is the more self-sacrificial and idealistic realm, while the public is the world view of quid pro quo and self-interest. (Boyte, p. 98)

In a future discussion of the practice of “one-on-one” interviews developed by community organizers, I will discuss a range of other issues related to the rich conceptions of public and private that inform much contemporary organizing work.

[For discussions of “public” and “private” that influenced the development of the specifics of this distinction in community organizing, see Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, and Richard Sennett’s The Fall of Public Man.]

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 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.