Category democracy

Progress on water (and two ways to celebrate)

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This next week I will be participating in two events that celebrate progress on water for all children in Jersey City’s schools: a book launch on Tuesday (the book is about populism, but from my perspective it’s about water), and our Jersey City Together water action on Friday, October 28.

Thanks to the advocacy of Jersey City Together as well as the work of public servants such as Superintendent Norma Fernandez, as school started this fall more kids have access to working drinking fountains than has been the case for more than a decade. Almost half of Jersey City Public School children are in schools where water remediation has already happened; one quarter of students are in schools where water remediation is in progress. For one quarter of the students, plans for remediation are not clear. For more details, see this summary. This wonderful graphic is by graphic designer Greg Nelson. Brigid D’Souza has also written an update over at Civic Parent.

To get to this point has taken several years of work by a strong team of families and community members, pushing public officials to work together to fix the water systems and install new water fountains. It was one of the first things we heard when we started listening to families: why don’t the water fountains have potable water? We first asked for this publicly at our action back in March of 2019, and then Superintendent Franklin Walker promised to, and did, start this work.

Thanks to my Rutgers colleagues Arlene Stein and Sarah Tobias, I had the opportunity to talk about my work with Jersey City Together on a panel with two amazing organizers: Heather Booth and Scot Nakagawa. This was in February 2020, and was one of the last public events I attended before the pandemic. It was also right after we had gotten the first tangible movement on water, with installation of water fountains at PS15.

The conversation was really amazing and fun, and it has now been published as a chapter in a volume edited Professors Stein and Tobias, The Perils of Populism, which will have an official virtual launch event on Tuesday October 25 at noon. Should be fun, so come if you can. I’m just an ordinary, local leader in an organization, so it was really fun to talk with these veteran organizers about the work.

Now, more than two years later, we have more progress on water, with still more to do. For me, this is why we need broad based power organizations that are in it for the long term. It is not glamorous work, learning all of the details of the process that is followed by various public agencies, finding the places where pressure can be exerted, while building and maintaining the organized people who can exert that pressure. But it is necessary.

Every fall I teach a class on community organizing, and for the past two years we have read Reveille for a New Generation, with many essays written by leaders and organizers of local IAF organizations. One piece some students have found puzzling is an essay by organizer Alisa Glassman titled “Don’t Win Too Quickly”. Her point is that the work of getting to victory is also the work of organizing, of building the network of organized people to not just win but keep on winning, because there is always more work to do. The progress on water is great; there is a little more work to do.

We’re in it for the long haul.

The work that “taxpayer” does

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This country has a “we” problem. There is so much talk of me and mine, of you and yours, of each of us as an individual and our individual interests, that we find it hard to talk about we and us, about who we are together, about being members of a society, let alone of a polity.

This is true at the national level but it is also very evident in local politics. It shows up a lot in discussions over education and schools. I see it in a focus on the “taxpayer” when we talk about public schools. The purposes of public schools are about “we”: schools exist to serve children and to fulfill our obligations as members of a society to each other and to the present and future well-being of young people. Too often, “taxpayer” is invoked to argue against public schools, and against the “we” of our community.

It matters how we talk about our collective life, and it also matters how we structure the institutions and policies that make up our public life. Part of the “we” problem with public schools is in how we pay for schools in the U.S. If you wanted to invent a way to pay for public schools that would ensure that the funding would be as unequal as possible, you couldn’t do better than to base it on local property taxes. This is especially true in a country with so much wealth inequality. The problem of this method of funding education is well known among those who study school funding: our system of funding schools is designed to produce and reproduce unequal funding.

One of the problems with trying to change policies, even ones that are irrational, is that change is difficult, and existing policies were created by, and in turn create, entrenched interests among those who benefit from the policy. So moving away from the system of local property taxes to fund local schools, a policy that originated in the mid-nineteenth century in the U.S., has been difficult. The state of Hawaii funds its local schools from state tax revenues; no other state has managed to move to state level funding without also using local funds, primarily property taxes. New Jersey did not even provide state funding for schools until the state was successfully sued, in the 1970s, for failing to provide the constitutionally required “thorough and efficient” education to students in Jersey City’s schools. (See Deborah Yaffe’s excellent book, Other People’s Children, for the details.)

All of us are taxpayers. Anyone who has ever bought a basic commodity in New Jersey has paid taxes in New Jersey. Students who buy snacks at businesses near their schools are taxpayers. But of course this is not what people mean when they talk about taxpayers and public schools. They mean the school tax portion of local property taxes. So only people who own real estate in a local community are taxpayers. And there is a longstanding idea in the U.S. that property taxpayers are somehow more important than everyone else.

Many people are likely familiar with the way that white people who supported segregation, in the North and the South, engaged in massive resistance after the Brown v Board of Education decision in 1954, closing public schools–schools that all taxpayers in the community had paid for–rather than desegregating them. In her book Racial Taxation (2018), Camille Walsh tells a longer story about the role of what she calls ‘taxpayer citizenship’ in shaping educational policy, including school funding, segregation, and the continuing inequality of our education system. She traces litigation over taxation and the right to public education from the Reconstruction period (right after the Civil War) through the 1970s. Part of her argument is that the litigation on education and taxpayer citizenship in the 19th century laid some of the groundwork for white “taxpayer revolts” of the post-Brown period.

To trace the story of taxpayer citizenship, she studied the arguments made by litigants in cases involving taxation and education, including court documents and correspondence, as well as newspaper coverage of the cases. The cases include claimants who were seeking to maintain educational inequality, and claimants who were seeking to create greater equality in education. The identity of ‘taxpayer citizenship’ was used for both types of purposes (p. 8). For example, in pursuit of equal access to education, African American plaintiffs made claims as taxpayers over double taxation in the post-Reconstruction period and through the first half of the twentieth century. In some cases state law designated unequal expenditures for (then) legally segregated schools; in other cases actual systems of double taxation were in place, forcing African American property owners to pay for schools that their children could not attend. Among the cases Walsh traces are many brought by the NAACP in the first half of the twentieth century (see chapter three). As Walsh summarizes this era of double taxation litigation, “…black taxpayers spent decades consistently overpaying just for the opportunity for their children to attend poorly funded schools.” (p. 68)

Yet the myth in the post-Brown era was that white taxpayers were overpaying for schools that black children attended. The book traces these developments, and has an excellent discussion of the 1973 Rodriguez decision, a decision that found that there is no federal constitutional right to education while pointedly avoiding any discussion of structural racial inequalities in school funding. Here is how Walsh summarizes the role of the “taxpayer” identity that she is discussing:

“…I suggest that the deployment and popularity of the ‘taxpayer’ identity category has helped co-constitute whiteness through its symbolic exercise in defense of exclusionary ideas. This identity has been tightly linked to the racialized entitlements to educational access and resources from the late nineteenth century onward and has helped to entrench a school finance system with differential levels of citizenship and rights.” (Walsh, p. 3)

We need public schools. We need them to work well, to be effective both at their fundamental educational mission as well as in providing children a space to learn how to be together, to share space and create a “we”. In a multiracial place like Jersey City, public schools can be truly remarkable “public things”, providing a common space for those who are different to come together and build a common society and polity. Taxes are the way that we fund public things such as schools.

When I first got involved in advocating in support of public schools, I was really confused by this focus on “taxpayers” in public conversations about schools, because it was usually evoked in opposition to providing children an adequate education. At the time, our school system was underfunded by over $100 million per year according to the state funding formula. Children were not getting what the state said was the minimum amount of funding for the “thorough and efficient” education required by the New Jersey state constitution. So “taxpayer citizenship” was being invoked in opposition to equity and fairness for children.

Some of us who spoke publicly in support of increased local funding for our school system noted that in addition to being parents of public school students, we were also property owners and therefore “taxpayer citizens” in the sense that Walsh uses the term. We invoked this (reluctantly in some cases) to argue for equity and for fully funded schools. Perhaps it was an artifact of decades of antigovernment rhetoric, but the fact that we advocated for increased taxation to support our schools meant we were often dismissed as not really taxpayers, or certainly as not representative of taxpayers. It was hard to imagine that “taxpayers” were arguing for increased taxes to support the public good of public schools.

Public schools are public goods. They are public things that require our support, our advocacy, our attention. We need to fund them. And we need to work together to hold them accountable for doing the work that we need them to do for our children, for our community, and for our future. That’s all about “we”.

Public universities and democracy

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In my recent article in New Political Science, “Higher Education and Democratic Public Life,” I argue that the common way of thinking about colleges and universities in the contemporary U.S., as a kind of consumer good, is wrong. And not just wrong, but damaging to democracy. I argue that when we think about higher education and especially about public colleges and universities and community colleges, we should think first of democratic public life and of the role of public institutions in serving the whole public. And we need to push and redesign public institutions to do a better job of being part of and of serving the whole public, as well as serving their local communities. This thinking comes in part out of the work that Rutgers University-Newark, led by Chancellor Cantor, has done in the past few years, to build a university that is “in Newark and of Newark”.

This economics-first way of thinking has been especially evident in the flawed public conversation about how universities will fulfill their mission of education and research this fall. Contrary to the idea that universities have “closed”, staff and faculty at my institution have worked harder than ever in the past four months, to convert classes to online instruction, to set up systems to ensure that we touched base with all students once we moved to remote instruction, to ensure that students scheduled to graduate in May were able to do so albeit without an in person ceremony, to continue to provide on campus housing and services for students who had no place else to go, and the list could continue just regarding the teaching aspect of our mission. This list does not even include all of the planning that took place to manage the university’s research mission, including shutting down labs where necessary, pivoting to COVID related research as appropriate, shifting research projects to virtual where possible.

So when we think about what universities should do, this fall and in the future, we need to think of public good not in the economic sense, but in the political sense. We need to place educational institutions at the center of democratic public life, and provide both public support and demands for accountability that our public institutions of higher education serve democratic public purposes.

 

Grief

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“…democratic politics is a response to the grief generated by the distance between the world as it is and the world as it should be.” Luke Bretherton, Resurrecting Democracy

When I first read that passage, I thought, how is democracy about grief? Anger at injustice yes, but grief?

As we find ourselves in a world that most of us could not have imagined just a few weeks ago, it is hard to know what to feel, let alone what to do. There are many ways to respond, but here I want to talk about two responses: grief, and collective action.

We are in the midst of overwhelming grief: many people are dying, sooner and more painfully than they should. People’s lives are being completely upended. And many more people will suffer, and will die in the U.S. and elsewhere, because of the failure to plan, and a deep and ongoing failure to place our collective capacities at the service of the common good. And this common good is so basic: life and death. As with any “crisis” in the U.S., this is a product of decades of systemic failures and disinvestment as well as immediate lack of leadership and coordination.

Americans have a terrible time understanding the complex system of our own individual grief. David Kessler (co–author with Elizabeth Kübler-Ross) notes the common misunderstanding of his work with Kübler-Ross that the stages of grief are linear, a point he discusses more deeply in this lovely conversation with Brené Brown. People in the U.S. often express that misunderstanding as “moving on” from grief, with the very strange notion that one passes through these stages in a linear way and then no longer feels anything about the loss of those close to our hearts. As Kessler says clearly in both interviews, denying the existence of grief is a way to contain our feelings. It is also a turning away from what it means to be human, separating ourselves from the pain and sorrow of the truth that all of us die, and all of us will lose those most dear to us.

Grief is painful, and there is no way to avoid that. But our individualism often turns us away from each other, into ourselves, whether our grief is for an individual, or for the damage that our broken political system is inflicting. The grief of losing a loved one can leave us feeling shattered, like our world has been broken apart and will never be reassembled. This is true: losing someone close to your heart requires you to remake your world, slowly assembling what sometimes feels like a parallel universe, complete with black holes and antimatter. For me the grief of this present moment feels similar.

In my communities, everyone is exhausted: trying to work, required to work and feeling unsafe, or recently out of work and not sure what comes next, trying to finish their studies in ways very differently than planned,  trying to hold institutions together through newly virtual spaces or old-fashioned telephone calls, while also caring for children and keeping them in touch with their teachers, or trying to just survive, in a world where nothing is what it was. People we know are dying, are sick at home and unable to get tested, have lost parents or friends or coworkers. Grief and exhaustion are all mixed together, and yet we can’t be physically together in our grief, and that too is painful.

We are also exhausted because we are grieving for a world that will not be the same again. We want to get back what used to be normal, even if there were parts of normal that weren’t so great. And we are only just beginning to realize that that normal world is gone, and what we will have once we emerge from this present will be utterly different. Maybe that world will be  better, maybe it will be much worse. Pushing the new world we are entering closer to the world as it should be will require that we work together, and think beyond our individual lives and in terms of the complex social and political worlds that are crumbling and that need reshaping. We will need to look up beyond our exhaustion and see each other with empathy, and rebuild our communities.

Because we need each other. Physical separation–and the way that so many people have so much difficulty practicing it–makes this so clear. Humans need each other.

Some of the best parts of the past few weeks have been meetings organized in our new spaces where we just check in and listen to each other. Listening to each other: it is such a gift. In our physical distance, it is good just to hear familiar voices, to virtually see familiar faces, even when those voices sound weary or afraid. And this is why our existing institutions and organizations are so important especially now.

Living in a society and a political system that works against us because of racism, economic inequality, mass incarceration, misogyny, homophobia, we feel anger, rage, fear, and also grief. There are ways that this crisis feels all too familiar for the ways it is already making existing injustices worse. But I also need to feel hopeful about this moment. This really colossal failure to choose life over death through our collective institutions might make us see some injustices more clearly, and make it possible to change some of our complex social systems so that they work for a better common good. Maybe it could work to bring us together in new ways. I hope so.

The tension and grief between what is and what should be is a common teaching in IAF community organizing. Organizers argue that the only way to bring those worlds closer together is to have enough power to push the world a little bit closer to where it should be. Change doesn’t happen because something is right; it happens when you have enough collective power to make it happen. If health care workers and first responders and even governors had enough collective power, we wouldn’t be worried about the lack of enough medical equipment right now.

Frequently what we do with our political grief is to become accustomed to the world as it is, to feel cynical and powerless, to deny the possibility that anything that we might do might make a difference. We are afraid to hope for new possibilities that might push us towards a world closer to the world that we want to see. Grieving is exhausting, and political grief also wears us down, makes us feel dull and tired. When we are just trying to survive in this crisis, it is easy to retreat to cynicism.

For example, what I have been experiencing regarding the lack of enough personal protective equipment (PPE) for health care workers is blinding rage. I have family members who are being put at risk because of this absolutely criminal situation. The federal government should have ensured, in advance, that the equipment that hospitals and health care workers need is readily available in sufficient quantity to ensure everyone’s safety. That is what government is for. People are dying because of this failure. That is not hyperbole. It is fact.

But my rage is not going to bring about a change in this situation. Here is where our existing organizations and institutions can also make a difference, and maybe push the world more towards what it should be. Metro IAF has tried to step in and function essentially where government has failed. And recognizing state failure, we are asking for better corporate responsibility. We shouldn’t have to. But here we are.

Kessler points out that grief requires movement. “There is something powerful about naming this as grief….When you name it, you feel it and it moves through you. Emotions need motion.” Such a wise way to think about emotions, and this is key to understanding grief from the point of community organizing: we have to be able to imagine change, movement, the world as it should be, to understand our feelings about what is happening.

Establishing and reestablishing democratically responsive decision making also requires a lot of people working together. This is where Kessler has added another way to think about grief, both personal and political: the idea of meaning-making.

Kessler is very clear that we make meaning, not from the loss itself, but from how we respond to the loss. You aren’t grateful for the death of your mother. You might be grateful for the meaning that you were able to make in your own way of acting, responding, to the grief. Probably only after many years of feeling many other things.

We could respond to this crisis by saying, we are all in this together. We could have empathy for each other, across all of our divisions, and try to build our communities as we help each other survive. This will be a marathon, not a sprint. We will continue to lose, even as we also make some progress in some places. Maybe I’m bargaining right now. Maybe I need to hope that what we do right now can make the world just a bit better. Maybe that is true.

There are many ways this situation might change us; many for the worse, perhaps some for the better. Maybe we can engage, already, in some meaning making while we are in the process of experiencing this situation. We already see and will continue to see, in ongoing, horrific detail, the effects of the failings of a government that does not seek to actually solve social and political problems. Maybe at least some of us can work together to push the world a bit, so that our collective decision-making bodies–civil society organizations and governments at all levels–actually work for the common good.

Discipline is action

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“Intelligent action, even public confrontation, is at bottom an attempt to engage and relate.” Michael Gecan, Going Public

I have been thinking over the past day about a story that Michael Gecan tells in his book Going Public about an action that East Brooklyn Congregations (EBC) did in the early stages of their organizing. They were trying to get the city to repair a neighborhood pool that had been closed for several years. Funds for the repairs had been allocated, but the repairs were not happening, and children in the neighborhood–children of leaders in EBC–did not have a place to swim in the summer.

The action was a meeting with the public official whose department was supposed to be doing the repairs. EBC had done their research: they knew that most of the money allocated for the repairs had been spent, but very little repairing had occurred.

The plan for this action was simple: keep the focus on the agenda, to get an answer to the question, when will the pool be repaired? The leaders expected the public official and his staff to talk about everything except this. And so they had planned carefully, to keep their focus on their agenda, to be persistent and disciplined in asking for an answer.

After rounds the leaders presented the results of their research, and then persistently asked their key question: when will the repairs on the pool be completed? In response to every effort by the public official to distract from this question, EBC leaders returned to their question.

You should read the chapter–Gecan tells the story very effectively. By the end of the meeting the public official has begun screaming, and EBC leaders quietly gather their things and leave his office. And within a few days, work has begun on the repairs. Within a few months, the pool is renovated and EBC attends a grand opening celebration and thanks the public official.

Why was this so effective? They had done their research. They knew what they wanted, and it was very specific. They had prepared carefully for the meeting, including practicing how to respond to unexpected scenarios. As Gecan notes, “The discipline, as the director unraveled and became more and more volatile, was superb.” And they kept their focus on what they wanted. They kept asking for it. And when they didn’t get the commitment they sought in that meeting, they left. And within a few months, they got the reaction they were seeking, and the public resource that their children needed.

We don’t always win. Sometimes it takes time to win. And it certainly takes organizing. It takes building power. It takes doing your research, knowing what is possible and what is not. It takes making a clear request for something specific. You have to know the reaction that you want. And it takes focus and discipline.

As Emily Farris says, local politics is the best politics. You can often actually get things done–get a park renamed, get a public pool repaired. Maybe you can even get your children’s public schools to be fully funded. But to do that takes organizing, and it takes discipline. And sometimes, the discipline is the action.

 

 

Public schools are public goods

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Parent leaders in Jersey City Together are consistently saying this in our public conversations: public schools are a public good. This essay is inspired both by their consistent leadership in making this point, and our shared frustration that we must keep making this point; that is, that it is not already a common public understanding that public schools are a public good in democratic public life:

Almost never is there an expressed concern about the public realm; there is silence about renewing the common world and about what that common world should be. What is it that lies in between, that holds us together, that we can cherish and try to keep alive? Where, when we ponder it, are we to turn? Questions like these move me to explore the role that might be played by public education in bringing into being an authentic public space, one that might give rise to a significant common world. Maxine Greene, 1982.

I recently came across the address given by the late Maxine Greene in 1982 when she served as president of the American Educational Research Association. The title is “Public Education and the Public Space,” and she speaks of the possibilities that are part of the purpose of education: “…we are educators, and education has to do with new beginnings and with reaching toward what is not yet.”

Greene speaks of what is missing in the conversation about public education in the 1980s, and it is equally true today. Discussions of funding formulas and graduation rates are important, but frequently these conversations divert our attention from any focus on the public purposes of public schools. Greene is speaking to educators, but she is also speaking at a time when the movement for our current regime of testing as accountability was on the rise. Just before the passage quoted above, she says, “literacy is talked about as though it were part of the gross national product.” What about the intrinsic joy of reading? What about the democratic civic purposes of an educated public?

We have become accustomed to speaking of schools in terms of achievements on tests, graduation and drop out rates, per pupil spending. Even Dennis Shirley, in his (very useful) discussion of the Alliance Schools program in Texas, speaks of test scores as one measure of the success of this community school program. All of these are important. But they are not all of what public schools are or can be.

Public schools serve public purposes for democracies. This is a simple, straightforward, necessary idea. This is not a new or original idea. But it is crucial.

 

 

In an article on the growing number of teacher strikes last year, Sarah Jones argued that one of the reasons for these strikes and for the conflicts over public schools more generally is that public schools “are some of the last public squares in this country”. Discussing the requirements in U.S. state constitutions for public education, she notes that three common words that describe public education are “Free, common, and efficient. These words tell us that public schools should be accessible and ubiquitous, and that they should function. ”

Yes. Public schools should function. They should help children to develop their human potential. They should provide appropriate, supportive environments for all students to learn. They should have space to play, to create, to imagine. These things are happening every day in Jersey City Public Schools. But there are many, many challenges as well.

In order for public schools to function, school facilities need to function. Public schools should not have classrooms that are dangerously hot or cold, that are infested with cockroaches, that are falling apart. They should have potable drinking water. They should have functioning bathrooms. That we are fighting for these very basic, functional facilities in Jersey City is shameful.

The story of why this is so is long and complicated, of course, implicating state as well as local officials and the failure to fully fund the School Development Authority despite the Abbott court’s order. Some beautiful schools have been built in Jersey  City.  But funds for repairing our ageing schools have not been appropriated. And the lesson of who is valued, and who is not, is starkly clear to young people in Jersey City. We have beautiful, new high rises, and crumbling high school facilities.

Greene goes on to cite Dewey, and his notion of the “eclipse of the public” articulated in The Public and its Problems (originally published in 1927). The persistence of this concern tells us that we should resist the temptation to refer to some nonexistent golden age; attention to the public realm and to public things is one of the key ongoing problems of democratic public life. Civic life requires us to be engaged in the ongoing project of renewing the democratic public realm. We have to organize.

At the end of Deborah Yaffe’s book Other People’s Children, about the long effort by the state of New Jersey to refuse to provide a thorough and efficient education to all of the children in the state, despite decades of court orders to do so, she notes that she is often asked “did it work”? People mean different things by that question, and one of the problems with answering it is that in some arenas, the state never did really comply with the court orders. But at the very end of the book, she makes reference to the public purposes of public schools, quoting one of the named litigants in the Abbott cases, Hector Figueroa. “‘You’re not guaranteed a home life, but you should be guaranteed a school life.'” And Yaffe says, “Public institutions matter, even if they are not the only things that do.”

Public schools matter. We must create more possibilities for schools to be the kinds of public spaces that are so vital to democracy. We have to dare to try.