Democracy in Schools 2: A Conversation with Helen Beattie

Conversations on Participatory Democracy

Innovative democratic professionals are encouraging greater participation in some of our most fundamental institutions, yet what they are doing is rarely the focus of political theory, social science research, or what politicians talk about when they are talking about renewing American democracy. The conversations in this series aim to shed light on new democratic practices taking shape and to find out more about the dynamic people involved.

Helen Beattie is the founder of YATST (Youth and Adults Transforming Schools Together), a set of ideas and tools she and her colleagues have developed with schools all across Vermont to increase and deepen student engagement through collaborative action-research teams.  YATST teams, made up of students, teachers, and administrators, have conducted and analyzed dozens of surveys on school practices and facilitated school-wide conversations on their results; sparked changes in student government structure; created pedagogical videos; helped reform student assessment processes; piloted a classroom assistant program giving students a role in instruction; and altered the ways many teachers consult students for guidance on technique and course themes.  We talked recently about how she got involved in the work of transforming institutions and about why it is important that youth and adults are working together as partners to change their schools.

Albert Dzur: You began your career in health care, not education, but you noticed early on certain debilitating problems shared by these domains.  In health care organizations, you experienced how disempowering the organizational structure could be, how people were sometimes treated as objects rather than human beings with independent voices.  When you subsequently went into school psychology, you discovered that educational structures sometimes blocked rather than enabled development.  Can you tell me more about these early institutional experiences?  What did they mean to you?  Why did they prompt you to try to change organizational practices?

Helen Beattie: I worked for the American Cancer Society, an independent nonprofit, in two capacities.  My entry job was program director, but then I became director of service and rehabilitation for the state.   It was all patient and family related programming.  My next job was coordinator of the Cancer Information Service, a toll free hot-line.  All day I listened to phone calls from patients and family members about their experiences with their healthcare institutions.  I wasn’t based in one hospital or clinic; in fact, I was hearing from patients and family members throughout Massachusetts, about what was happening for them.  So a lot of my understanding and my deepening concern about the loss of empowerment and voice of people in the healthcare system came from those professional positions.

What made my going to the cancer society so meaningful was that my dad had just died of cancer.  I had had some very powerful experiences both with extraordinary providers and a couple of horrifying instances when he was utterly stripped of his dignity in situations where professional power and personal ego played big roles.  So I guess if you really peel this all the way back, my passion and my intolerance comes from that as much as anything.  I’ve just followed that thread throughout my life.

AD: One way of handling a disappointing experience with a professional institution is to chalk it up to some bad apples, but you took a more organizational viewpoint and held institutional structures responsible.

HB: Right.  So I had this deeply personal experience and then I started to understand it and explore it very much at an institutional level as I listened to patients and family members.  I developed programs for them to help them feel as if they could be more valued and integral to decision-making in their health and I started to work with providers to help them see the importance of that.

AD: Were there things that institutions were doing that shut down patient voice?

HB: The system of medicine in general offered very few opportunities at that time for patients to raise their questions and concerns, or to be partners in decisions about their health. They were basically passive recipients of their care delivered by well-intended practitioners—who really do have this extraordinary field of knowledge to do their work.  And so much like the parallel in education, there was the power structure.  Though inadvertent, often in both situations the outcome is learned passivity, helplessness, hopelessness, and the devaluing of one’s voice.  Individuals start to believe quiet compliance is the only way they can survive in the system.

To me it quickly became an institutional issue: not one of fixing the bad apples but rather fixing a way of providing healthcare that did not highlight or even take into consideration the healing power that comes with giving people, who are subject to that system in such a vulnerable place, their dignity and voice.  I immediately began to see on an institutional level that you could choose to attack the bad apples but that’s really going to go nowhere.  Firing the bad doctors or teachers would be ineffectual.  Instead, we need to change the paradigm under which they are working to elevate the role of the recipients and really see them.  In both situations the desired outcome of healing and learning happens better when you ignite the capacity within individuals to be players in it.  We know that patients do better when they feel like they have some control over their healing process and have hope.  They do better than patients who just feel utterly powerless in the face of their disease. It’s the same thing with learning.

I felt as if my impact would be far greater if we really looked at root causes and the deepest one is the cultural shift around the fundamental relationship between the provider and the recipient whether it’s physician-patient or teacher-student.

AD: This same kind of issue came up when you became a school psychologist.

HB: It did.  It also came up in between, when I did my doctorate in education.  In fact, that doctorate involved helping cancer patients and family members understand how to deal with going through radiation or chemotherapy from the position of the patient.  I created two teaching videos from information provided by patients. Instead of a nurse saying, “This is what’s going to happen to you and this is what you should do,” the videos had patients in a focus group sharing what they’d experienced, what they came to know, and what strategies had worked for them.  The videos affirmed, “You’re not alone in your questions; you’re very capable of finding these answers; other people who have been in your situation can help you do that; and there’s a provider in the room who’s ready to listen to you and coach you and be there at your side.”

That was an interim part of my story about trying to make tools.  Then I became director of primary care with five health centers up in Vermont and they were pretty community-oriented.  Much of what I saw as the needed paradigm shift existed in the way these people practiced in that primary care setting.  That was really wonderful to see a model that was patient-centered.

AD: So you saw that things could be different in practice.

HB: Right. Certainly on a primary care level.  I think it gets much tougher when you get into acute care settings with their level of sophistication and knowledge. The knowledge base is big everywhere, but it’s packed when you get into acute and tertiary care facilities.  But, anyway, that’s the story about my institutional experience in health care.  So then, lo and behold, I leave that job and go into education and I see very quickly the exact same thing happening.  Through doing evaluations with students, I notice that those who are struggling most are also feeling voiceless and often hopeless, and they see no way that they can influence the system for their or others’ betterment.

AD: You see the exact same thing happening with students that you had noticed with patients.  Can you help me understand that a bit more concretely?

HB: Right.  As a school psychologist, my referrals were children who had cognitive struggles with reading, for example, or with content areas because of disabilities or social and emotional issues.  And often what I saw was that they felt that they were the problem.  It wasn’t just that the system wasn’t addressing their needs, which it wasn’t, it was that they saw themselves as the problem.  And when they lived with the weight of being named in this way, they often progressively withdrew.  They felt as if they had no venue to influence what was going on—they essentially lost their voice.

Most heartbreaking was when they just started to feel hopeless: “It’s me,” “I’m deficient,” “They’re right,” and “There’s no way I can fix it.”  They couldn’t advocate for themselves because they believed what the system was implicitly telling them.  These insidious messages—which are really loud when you’re the one who’s the recipient—say it was their inability to be a “good” student that put them in that place.

That was equally as intolerable as when patients felt as if they had to be good, with “good” meaning “being silent and taking it as it was provided without question.”  So that was the parallel that was pretty pronounced to me.

AD: Instead of seeing the student who’s in your office as the problem, you’re seeing the institutional environment as a contributing factor.

HB: Huge contributing factor.

AD: The institution is labeling them and, in a sense, encouraging them not to succeed.

HB: Right. It was not the intention, but it was too often the outcome. By stripping them of their ability for self-advocacy.  By not acknowledging a primary responsibility to listen and respond rather than tell and instruct.

AD: Just to get more clear on what might be happening at a typical school that would serve as a barrier, can you say something about a specific student who comes to mind when you’re talking about this? You don’t have to use a name.

HB: One student comes to mind who exemplifies a number of system issues.  When I took her family history, she had been in 18 foster homes within 6 years.  She was extremely withdrawn: her bangs were hanging over her face and I could barely even make eye contact with her.  And she engaged in the whole evaluation process with me.  She wasn’t resistant to participating, but she just seemed so hurt and so hopeless about being understood, being met. The system had no idea what to do with her.  That’s an extreme case of withdrawal and in her case, too, mixed with anger and acting out.  And that’s really hard for schools to deal with. They don’t know what to do with that.  Those who become quiet and disengaged just fade away.

AD: So you’re saying that there was nothing especially problematic about the school, it just wasn’t reaching out to her.  Teachers weren’t able to get through to her.

HB: Right.  They were overwhelmed and unable to reach her—to create a relationship so that they could sort through, from her perspective, what she needed both as a learner and in the much more complex social and emotional realm.  She had been “the problem” for so long, in so many settings.  Some were judgmental of her, given her difficult behaviors, perpetuating the message that she was a “bad” person rather than a person who was struggling.  Most cared, but felt unable to help.

AD: What the school was seeing was a package of deficits.  And at least partly because of this standpoint, it was not able to form a relationship with a young person struggling to get through some problems.

HB: Right. There were some really good people in that school who were trying to do that.  But in general, if you look at intake systems for schools they’re generally deficit-based systems.  We create a problem list and then we pick away at that problem list.  Rarely does a school say, “Okay, let’s name and look at your coping strategies and the strengths that are reflected in your resilience in this situation and then let’s construct a problem list. We’re going to look at that problem list but we’re always going to be cross-checking with those things we know already are strengths of yours to be able to shrink that problem by building on those strengths.”

Affirming strengths has not been the approach of schools.  Their deficit approach goes along with the punitive behavior management systems, which are often in place.  Thankfully, schools are starting to go more to the positive psychology side now, but for years and years we would punish bad behavior and relate it to bad students.  That line needed to be broken.  I did a ton of work in Vermont using the resiliency model, which gives very pragmatic ways for people to say, “I should be looking at strengths first.  I could look at this person as oppositional or I can look at their strong will as a potential strength and try to work with them to try to have it work more on their behalf.” It’s that half full or half empty adage: it’s so simple, but that’s not the frame that education institutions tend to use.

AD: It’s what you would do if you had a friend or relative who was having these troubles. You would seek to understand the whole person.

HB: Right, and particularly help them see what strengths and anchors they already have as they grapple with an issue because so often a person feels totally overwhelmed and inadequate.  So first help surface those pieces of resilience for them—and for you—to create balance in a perspective of the situation.  Those pieces of resilience can be evident for an outsider but may not be to the person experiencing difficulty.  And also listen to the deep concerns or problems and really unravel them in balance rather than in isolation.  Psychology has driven us to a deficit approach and our institutional practices have been designed using that, too, but we now know that we don’t have to do it that way.  When we do it this other more balanced way it better serves the child.  The whole field of resiliency helped take certain kinds of judgments away from the practitioners.  We needed a different set of tools that can help us have this new lens.  That’s been the approach in medicine, too.  The bottom line for me is to assume best intentions: nobody’s been doing this because they wanted to hurt a child or hurt a patient.  It’s the way the system has been, and now we know better, we can do better with some pretty simple strategies that reshape our thinking.  That’s also what YATST or Youth and Adults Transforming Schools Together, is doing.  This is the initiative we developed for schools to promote youth-adult partnership.

AD: Another thing that is interesting is that instead of simply saying standard practice—well-intentioned as it may be—is not helping students with certain learning problems, you have made a larger claim: the struggles students bring into your school psychologist office are a window into problems all students are having.

HB: Right.  Absolutely.  Everybody does better when they feel valued, they feel hopeful, and they’re engaged in meaningful work in a meaningful way.

AD: Help me understand that.  You refuse to see this as a just a problem with poorly performing students.  What are you seeing in well-functioning students that makes you think that they need a different program?

HB: There are lots of students who are just playing the game, getting their A’s and B’s, building their portfolios for college.  They’re never questioning the teaching or what is happening instructionally in the classroom, which may actually be very poorly designed for learning.  Those students are learning the skills to play life’s games but they’re not learning the skills to be active advocates for something better, something that has integrity. And if there’s a life skill that we want to have—not just talked about in a civics class but rather have students live every day—it is their assessing the integrity of a situation and advocating for change.  Without their voice and their honesty—which is really risky for the game players—we’re not developing that skill. I think our world needs this.  People feel better, too, when what they think and feel can be expressed and help shape their world—to have personal agency.  So that’s every student.

AD: Do you ever hear that from high performing students?  Do they ever say,  “Look, this doesn’t feel authentic to me?”

HB: All the time.  All the time.  There’s a field of research about this issue.  One of my leadership team members was a principal who interviewed the high flyers in his high school and they all said, “Our getting A’s does not have a correlation with learning.”

AD: That’s fascinating.

HB: Rob Fried, who’s on my advisory board, wrote a book called Playing the Game of School.  There’s a lot of research out there that says there are a ton of students who are playing it.  That’s not a bad life skill, but it’s sad to me that you are basically submitting to being disengaged and subject to less than engaging teaching and learning so that you can survive and move on—“doing your time.”  Although it bothers those students, they see the risk of giving voice to their concerns and the potential costs of speaking up.  It shouldn’t be a risk to give good feedback to a teacher that what they’re doing isn’t quite working for that student and probably for other students.  Or, the other side, to be able to communicate that what the teacher is doing is awesome and please do more of it.  You know, help them in partnership shape an engaging classroom.

AD: YATST teams have piloted programs in which students play a larger role in classrooms, as teaching assistants for example, and teams have sparked curricular and administrative changes as well.  Isn’t this collaborative, power-sharing work kind of counter-cultural, given current demands for greater accountability to state standards, school boards, and concerned parents—demands that have fueled the high-stakes testing trend?  If the dominant institutional culture tends to be hierarchical and top-down, how can YATST thrive?

HB: The paradox is that students will do better academically when they are actively engaged and valued; our job is to help adults see the reasons for an alternative route to a shared desired end. The good news is that everyone wants to help young people develop the skills and confidence to pursue their interests and reach their goals—we have the same vision.  But you are right, the path to get there that we have chosen requires a shift in the dominant mental model for adolescence in America. That model underestimates the desire and capacity of young people to play a more meaningful role in shaping their world.  So, if we can demonstrate, through both our process and our outcomes, that it is a “win-win” situation to tap into the natural desire of young people to make meaning of the world—to make a difference in the world—we will be successful.   And I have seen enough instances of adult “ah-ha’s” in this regard to be hopeful.   The bottom line is that most adults care deeply about young people and want to help them be successful, whatever the chosen path.  When shown a means to that end—one that brings out the very best in young people and surfaces untapped potential—they generally are responsive.  In fact, when a youth-adult partnership in learning is fully embraced, both students and teachers thrive.  Our job is to help people experience this different route to a shared end.

AD: You mentioned earlier that when you came to Vermont you experienced a primary care facility that treated patients with respect and permitted them a kind of voice that you hadn’t seen as strongly previously.  This leads me to ask my standard “this is Vermont, after all” question.  Vermont has a history of participatory democracy, with town meetings and progressive politics.  Is YATST successful because it is in Vermont or can students and educators in other states effectively use the tools you have constructed?

HB:  The YATST model is based on a core attribute of human nature; thatpeople have a natural desire to feel valued, have a voice, and be engaged in meaningful work.  YATST is also firmly grounded in current brain research.  This means it crosses state boundaries.  I do not have evidence of YATST being replicated in other states, but I do have a compelling example of how a similar initiative I have been leading for the last five years based on the same principles has thrived in Albuquerque, New Mexico, an urban and culturally diverse setting.

YATST is under the umbrella of the bigger organization, UP for Learning–or Unleashing the Power of Partnership for Learning.  A common thread through UP is having young people utilize data as a platform for them to create community dialogue and initiate change.  Data gives them immediate credibility and heightens community intrigue—who doesn’t want to know about what the survey they took revealed about their school?  So, five years ago I implemented an initiative called “Getting to Y: Youth Bring Meaning to the Youth Risk Behavior Survey” in partnership with the Agency of Education.  It is now under the UP for Learning umbrella.  The YRBS is a national survey out of the Center for Disease Control in Washington, DC.  Young people develop the skills to lead a student analysis of their own Youth Risk Behavior Survey (or YRBS data), facilitate a community dialogue night, and take action.

Researchers at the University of New Mexico were following this work in Vermont and decided to replicate the model.  They secured Kellogg funding to help them implement the process in a Native American school and a large, urban predominantly Hispanic school, which was fairly notorious in the district for the level of behavioral and academic challenges they confronted.  Ultimately, the students in the Native American school decided that they would bring the data analysis process back to their individual reservations over the summer, as many travelled into the city from different pueblos and wanted to have a more immediate impact on their home community.  The principal at the Hispanic high school, who was initially reluctant to give the students the time off to attend the trainings, has become an ardent supporter and is helping one of the students implement a mentoring program, which was initiated as a direct result of the program.  Both schools have embraced the model and decided to institutionalize it on an annual basis.  Adults can not help but be inspired when watching young people take on these meaningful roles—to see the potential of tapping into their wisdom, passion and optimism.  It reminds us, as adults, to remain hopeful.  This phenomenon crosses state borders.

AD: Is there anything else you’d like to add about the value of student partnerships and more participatory cultures in schools that we haven’t discussed?

HB: I would just like to talk about our choice of focusing on youth-adult partnership rather than “youth voice,” which is a fairly typical title for similar work.  For both adults and young people, the term “youth voice” often invokes an image of a youth-only “take over”—a complete swing of the pendulum from adult dominated to youth dominated control and decision making—a sort of antidote to the existing power imbalance.  We think the answer is when the pendulum rests squarely in the middle, with a partnership between youth and adults as the means to the ends.

If we believe that learning must evolve to partnership, with students the co-creators of their learning and teachers as their guides, then the change process should mirror this same dynamic of partnership.  Youth and adults bring differing skills and life experiences to the table.  There is an unmistakable synergy when you meld the creativity, insights, commitment, and optimism of young people with the systems savvy and organization skills of adults.  As with any group, it must be nurtured so that old patterns do not take over.  It can be hard work to change our own mental models of that relationship.  But when youth and adults share their work and their passions in this way, both equally empowered and equally humbled, it can be quite magical.  It is as if we all become our better selves.

Work on this project was done in partnership with the Kettering Foundation.
Images provided by Albert Dzur and Helen Beattie.
More of this interview can be found at the Boston Review.

Democracy in Schools 2: A Conversation with Helen Beattie

Conversations on Participatory Democracy

Innovative democratic professionals are encouraging greater participation in some of our most fundamental institutions, yet what they are doing is rarely the focus of political theory, social science research, or what politicians talk about when they are talking about renewing American democracy. The conversations in this series aim to shed light on new democratic practices taking shape and to find out more about the dynamic people involved.

Helen Beattie is the founder of YATST (Youth and Adults Transforming Schools Together), a set of ideas and tools she and her colleagues have developed with schools all across Vermont to increase and deepen student engagement through collaborative action-research teams.  YATST teams, made up of students, teachers, and administrators, have conducted and analyzed dozens of surveys on school practices and facilitated school-wide conversations on their results; sparked changes in student government structure; created pedagogical videos; helped reform student assessment processes; piloted a classroom assistant program giving students a role in instruction; and altered the ways many teachers consult students for guidance on technique and course themes.  We talked recently about how she got involved in the work of transforming institutions and about why it is important that youth and adults are working together as partners to change their schools.

Albert Dzur: You began your career in health care, not education, but you noticed early on certain debilitating problems shared by these domains.  In health care organizations, you experienced how disempowering the organizational structure could be, how people were sometimes treated as objects rather than human beings with independent voices.  When you subsequently went into school psychology, you discovered that educational structures sometimes blocked rather than enabled development.  Can you tell me more about these early institutional experiences?  What did they mean to you?  Why did they prompt you to try to change organizational practices?

Helen Beattie: I worked for the American Cancer Society, an independent nonprofit, in two capacities.  My entry job was program director, but then I became director of service and rehabilitation for the state.   It was all patient and family related programming.  My next job was coordinator of the Cancer Information Service, a toll free hot-line.  All day I listened to phone calls from patients and family members about their experiences with their healthcare institutions.  I wasn’t based in one hospital or clinic; in fact, I was hearing from patients and family members throughout Massachusetts, about what was happening for them.  So a lot of my understanding and my deepening concern about the loss of empowerment and voice of people in the healthcare system came from those professional positions.

What made my going to the cancer society so meaningful was that my dad had just died of cancer.  I had had some very powerful experiences both with extraordinary providers and a couple of horrifying instances when he was utterly stripped of his dignity in situations where professional power and personal ego played big roles.  So I guess if you really peel this all the way back, my passion and my intolerance comes from that as much as anything.  I’ve just followed that thread throughout my life.

AD: One way of handling a disappointing experience with a professional institution is to chalk it up to some bad apples, but you took a more organizational viewpoint and held institutional structures responsible.

HB: Right.  So I had this deeply personal experience and then I started to understand it and explore it very much at an institutional level as I listened to patients and family members.  I developed programs for them to help them feel as if they could be more valued and integral to decision-making in their health and I started to work with providers to help them see the importance of that.

AD: Were there things that institutions were doing that shut down patient voice?

HB: The system of medicine in general offered very few opportunities at that time for patients to raise their questions and concerns, or to be partners in decisions about their health. They were basically passive recipients of their care delivered by well-intended practitioners—who really do have this extraordinary field of knowledge to do their work.  And so much like the parallel in education, there was the power structure.  Though inadvertent, often in both situations the outcome is learned passivity, helplessness, hopelessness, and the devaluing of one’s voice.  Individuals start to believe quiet compliance is the only way they can survive in the system.

To me it quickly became an institutional issue: not one of fixing the bad apples but rather fixing a way of providing healthcare that did not highlight or even take into consideration the healing power that comes with giving people, who are subject to that system in such a vulnerable place, their dignity and voice.  I immediately began to see on an institutional level that you could choose to attack the bad apples but that’s really going to go nowhere.  Firing the bad doctors or teachers would be ineffectual.  Instead, we need to change the paradigm under which they are working to elevate the role of the recipients and really see them.  In both situations the desired outcome of healing and learning happens better when you ignite the capacity within individuals to be players in it.  We know that patients do better when they feel like they have some control over their healing process and have hope.  They do better than patients who just feel utterly powerless in the face of their disease. It’s the same thing with learning.

I felt as if my impact would be far greater if we really looked at root causes and the deepest one is the cultural shift around the fundamental relationship between the provider and the recipient whether it’s physician-patient or teacher-student.

AD: This same kind of issue came up when you became a school psychologist.

HB: It did.  It also came up in between, when I did my doctorate in education.  In fact, that doctorate involved helping cancer patients and family members understand how to deal with going through radiation or chemotherapy from the position of the patient.  I created two teaching videos from information provided by patients. Instead of a nurse saying, “This is what’s going to happen to you and this is what you should do,” the videos had patients in a focus group sharing what they’d experienced, what they came to know, and what strategies had worked for them.  The videos affirmed, “You’re not alone in your questions; you’re very capable of finding these answers; other people who have been in your situation can help you do that; and there’s a provider in the room who’s ready to listen to you and coach you and be there at your side.”

That was an interim part of my story about trying to make tools.  Then I became director of primary care with five health centers up in Vermont and they were pretty community-oriented.  Much of what I saw as the needed paradigm shift existed in the way these people practiced in that primary care setting.  That was really wonderful to see a model that was patient-centered.

AD: So you saw that things could be different in practice.

HB: Right. Certainly on a primary care level.  I think it gets much tougher when you get into acute care settings with their level of sophistication and knowledge. The knowledge base is big everywhere, but it’s packed when you get into acute and tertiary care facilities.  But, anyway, that’s the story about my institutional experience in health care.  So then, lo and behold, I leave that job and go into education and I see very quickly the exact same thing happening.  Through doing evaluations with students, I notice that those who are struggling most are also feeling voiceless and often hopeless, and they see no way that they can influence the system for their or others’ betterment.

AD: You see the exact same thing happening with students that you had noticed with patients.  Can you help me understand that a bit more concretely?

HB: Right.  As a school psychologist, my referrals were children who had cognitive struggles with reading, for example, or with content areas because of disabilities or social and emotional issues.  And often what I saw was that they felt that they were the problem.  It wasn’t just that the system wasn’t addressing their needs, which it wasn’t, it was that they saw themselves as the problem.  And when they lived with the weight of being named in this way, they often progressively withdrew.  They felt as if they had no venue to influence what was going on—they essentially lost their voice.

Most heartbreaking was when they just started to feel hopeless: “It’s me,” “I’m deficient,” “They’re right,” and “There’s no way I can fix it.”  They couldn’t advocate for themselves because they believed what the system was implicitly telling them.  These insidious messages—which are really loud when you’re the one who’s the recipient—say it was their inability to be a “good” student that put them in that place.

That was equally as intolerable as when patients felt as if they had to be good, with “good” meaning “being silent and taking it as it was provided without question.”  So that was the parallel that was pretty pronounced to me.

AD: Instead of seeing the student who’s in your office as the problem, you’re seeing the institutional environment as a contributing factor.

HB: Huge contributing factor.

AD: The institution is labeling them and, in a sense, encouraging them not to succeed.

HB: Right. It was not the intention, but it was too often the outcome. By stripping them of their ability for self-advocacy.  By not acknowledging a primary responsibility to listen and respond rather than tell and instruct.

AD: Just to get more clear on what might be happening at a typical school that would serve as a barrier, can you say something about a specific student who comes to mind when you’re talking about this? You don’t have to use a name.

HB: One student comes to mind who exemplifies a number of system issues.  When I took her family history, she had been in 18 foster homes within 6 years.  She was extremely withdrawn: her bangs were hanging over her face and I could barely even make eye contact with her.  And she engaged in the whole evaluation process with me.  She wasn’t resistant to participating, but she just seemed so hurt and so hopeless about being understood, being met. The system had no idea what to do with her.  That’s an extreme case of withdrawal and in her case, too, mixed with anger and acting out.  And that’s really hard for schools to deal with. They don’t know what to do with that.  Those who become quiet and disengaged just fade away.

AD: So you’re saying that there was nothing especially problematic about the school, it just wasn’t reaching out to her.  Teachers weren’t able to get through to her.

HB: Right.  They were overwhelmed and unable to reach her—to create a relationship so that they could sort through, from her perspective, what she needed both as a learner and in the much more complex social and emotional realm.  She had been “the problem” for so long, in so many settings.  Some were judgmental of her, given her difficult behaviors, perpetuating the message that she was a “bad” person rather than a person who was struggling.  Most cared, but felt unable to help.

AD: What the school was seeing was a package of deficits.  And at least partly because of this standpoint, it was not able to form a relationship with a young person struggling to get through some problems.

HB: Right. There were some really good people in that school who were trying to do that.  But in general, if you look at intake systems for schools they’re generally deficit-based systems.  We create a problem list and then we pick away at that problem list.  Rarely does a school say, “Okay, let’s name and look at your coping strategies and the strengths that are reflected in your resilience in this situation and then let’s construct a problem list. We’re going to look at that problem list but we’re always going to be cross-checking with those things we know already are strengths of yours to be able to shrink that problem by building on those strengths.”

Affirming strengths has not been the approach of schools.  Their deficit approach goes along with the punitive behavior management systems, which are often in place.  Thankfully, schools are starting to go more to the positive psychology side now, but for years and years we would punish bad behavior and relate it to bad students.  That line needed to be broken.  I did a ton of work in Vermont using the resiliency model, which gives very pragmatic ways for people to say, “I should be looking at strengths first.  I could look at this person as oppositional or I can look at their strong will as a potential strength and try to work with them to try to have it work more on their behalf.” It’s that half full or half empty adage: it’s so simple, but that’s not the frame that education institutions tend to use.

AD: It’s what you would do if you had a friend or relative who was having these troubles. You would seek to understand the whole person.

HB: Right, and particularly help them see what strengths and anchors they already have as they grapple with an issue because so often a person feels totally overwhelmed and inadequate.  So first help surface those pieces of resilience for them—and for you—to create balance in a perspective of the situation.  Those pieces of resilience can be evident for an outsider but may not be to the person experiencing difficulty.  And also listen to the deep concerns or problems and really unravel them in balance rather than in isolation.  Psychology has driven us to a deficit approach and our institutional practices have been designed using that, too, but we now know that we don’t have to do it that way.  When we do it this other more balanced way it better serves the child.  The whole field of resiliency helped take certain kinds of judgments away from the practitioners.  We needed a different set of tools that can help us have this new lens.  That’s been the approach in medicine, too.  The bottom line for me is to assume best intentions: nobody’s been doing this because they wanted to hurt a child or hurt a patient.  It’s the way the system has been, and now we know better, we can do better with some pretty simple strategies that reshape our thinking.  That’s also what YATST or Youth and Adults Transforming Schools Together, is doing.  This is the initiative we developed for schools to promote youth-adult partnership.

AD: Another thing that is interesting is that instead of simply saying standard practice—well-intentioned as it may be—is not helping students with certain learning problems, you have made a larger claim: the struggles students bring into your school psychologist office are a window into problems all students are having.

HB: Right.  Absolutely.  Everybody does better when they feel valued, they feel hopeful, and they’re engaged in meaningful work in a meaningful way.

AD: Help me understand that.  You refuse to see this as a just a problem with poorly performing students.  What are you seeing in well-functioning students that makes you think that they need a different program?

HB: There are lots of students who are just playing the game, getting their A’s and B’s, building their portfolios for college.  They’re never questioning the teaching or what is happening instructionally in the classroom, which may actually be very poorly designed for learning.  Those students are learning the skills to play life’s games but they’re not learning the skills to be active advocates for something better, something that has integrity. And if there’s a life skill that we want to have—not just talked about in a civics class but rather have students live every day—it is their assessing the integrity of a situation and advocating for change.  Without their voice and their honesty—which is really risky for the game players—we’re not developing that skill. I think our world needs this.  People feel better, too, when what they think and feel can be expressed and help shape their world—to have personal agency.  So that’s every student.

AD: Do you ever hear that from high performing students?  Do they ever say,  “Look, this doesn’t feel authentic to me?”

HB: All the time.  All the time.  There’s a field of research about this issue.  One of my leadership team members was a principal who interviewed the high flyers in his high school and they all said, “Our getting A’s does not have a correlation with learning.”

AD: That’s fascinating.

HB: Rob Fried, who’s on my advisory board, wrote a book called Playing the Game of School.  There’s a lot of research out there that says there are a ton of students who are playing it.  That’s not a bad life skill, but it’s sad to me that you are basically submitting to being disengaged and subject to less than engaging teaching and learning so that you can survive and move on—“doing your time.”  Although it bothers those students, they see the risk of giving voice to their concerns and the potential costs of speaking up.  It shouldn’t be a risk to give good feedback to a teacher that what they’re doing isn’t quite working for that student and probably for other students.  Or, the other side, to be able to communicate that what the teacher is doing is awesome and please do more of it.  You know, help them in partnership shape an engaging classroom.

AD: YATST teams have piloted programs in which students play a larger role in classrooms, as teaching assistants for example, and teams have sparked curricular and administrative changes as well.  Isn’t this collaborative, power-sharing work kind of counter-cultural, given current demands for greater accountability to state standards, school boards, and concerned parents—demands that have fueled the high-stakes testing trend?  If the dominant institutional culture tends to be hierarchical and top-down, how can YATST thrive?

HB: The paradox is that students will do better academically when they are actively engaged and valued; our job is to help adults see the reasons for an alternative route to a shared desired end. The good news is that everyone wants to help young people develop the skills and confidence to pursue their interests and reach their goals—we have the same vision.  But you are right, the path to get there that we have chosen requires a shift in the dominant mental model for adolescence in America. That model underestimates the desire and capacity of young people to play a more meaningful role in shaping their world.  So, if we can demonstrate, through both our process and our outcomes, that it is a “win-win” situation to tap into the natural desire of young people to make meaning of the world—to make a difference in the world—we will be successful.   And I have seen enough instances of adult “ah-ha’s” in this regard to be hopeful.   The bottom line is that most adults care deeply about young people and want to help them be successful, whatever the chosen path.  When shown a means to that end—one that brings out the very best in young people and surfaces untapped potential—they generally are responsive.  In fact, when a youth-adult partnership in learning is fully embraced, both students and teachers thrive.  Our job is to help people experience this different route to a shared end.

AD: You mentioned earlier that when you came to Vermont you experienced a primary care facility that treated patients with respect and permitted them a kind of voice that you hadn’t seen as strongly previously.  This leads me to ask my standard “this is Vermont, after all” question.  Vermont has a history of participatory democracy, with town meetings and progressive politics.  Is YATST successful because it is in Vermont or can students and educators in other states effectively use the tools you have constructed?

HB:  The YATST model is based on a core attribute of human nature; thatpeople have a natural desire to feel valued, have a voice, and be engaged in meaningful work.  YATST is also firmly grounded in current brain research.  This means it crosses state boundaries.  I do not have evidence of YATST being replicated in other states, but I do have a compelling example of how a similar initiative I have been leading for the last five years based on the same principles has thrived in Albuquerque, New Mexico, an urban and culturally diverse setting.

YATST is under the umbrella of the bigger organization, UP for Learning–or Unleashing the Power of Partnership for Learning.  A common thread through UP is having young people utilize data as a platform for them to create community dialogue and initiate change.  Data gives them immediate credibility and heightens community intrigue—who doesn’t want to know about what the survey they took revealed about their school?  So, five years ago I implemented an initiative called “Getting to Y: Youth Bring Meaning to the Youth Risk Behavior Survey” in partnership with the Agency of Education.  It is now under the UP for Learning umbrella.  The YRBS is a national survey out of the Center for Disease Control in Washington, DC.  Young people develop the skills to lead a student analysis of their own Youth Risk Behavior Survey (or YRBS data), facilitate a community dialogue night, and take action.

Researchers at the University of New Mexico were following this work in Vermont and decided to replicate the model.  They secured Kellogg funding to help them implement the process in a Native American school and a large, urban predominantly Hispanic school, which was fairly notorious in the district for the level of behavioral and academic challenges they confronted.  Ultimately, the students in the Native American school decided that they would bring the data analysis process back to their individual reservations over the summer, as many travelled into the city from different pueblos and wanted to have a more immediate impact on their home community.  The principal at the Hispanic high school, who was initially reluctant to give the students the time off to attend the trainings, has become an ardent supporter and is helping one of the students implement a mentoring program, which was initiated as a direct result of the program.  Both schools have embraced the model and decided to institutionalize it on an annual basis.  Adults can not help but be inspired when watching young people take on these meaningful roles—to see the potential of tapping into their wisdom, passion and optimism.  It reminds us, as adults, to remain hopeful.  This phenomenon crosses state borders.

AD: Is there anything else you’d like to add about the value of student partnerships and more participatory cultures in schools that we haven’t discussed?

HB: I would just like to talk about our choice of focusing on youth-adult partnership rather than “youth voice,” which is a fairly typical title for similar work.  For both adults and young people, the term “youth voice” often invokes an image of a youth-only “take over”—a complete swing of the pendulum from adult dominated to youth dominated control and decision making—a sort of antidote to the existing power imbalance.  We think the answer is when the pendulum rests squarely in the middle, with a partnership between youth and adults as the means to the ends.

If we believe that learning must evolve to partnership, with students the co-creators of their learning and teachers as their guides, then the change process should mirror this same dynamic of partnership.  Youth and adults bring differing skills and life experiences to the table.  There is an unmistakable synergy when you meld the creativity, insights, commitment, and optimism of young people with the systems savvy and organization skills of adults.  As with any group, it must be nurtured so that old patterns do not take over.  It can be hard work to change our own mental models of that relationship.  But when youth and adults share their work and their passions in this way, both equally empowered and equally humbled, it can be quite magical.  It is as if we all become our better selves.

Work on this project was done in partnership with the Kettering Foundation.
Images provided by Albert Dzur and Helen Beattie.
More of this interview can be found at the Boston Review.

Democratic Public Administration: An Interview with Kimball Payne

Conversations on Participatory Democracy

Innovative democratic professionals are encouraging greater participation in some of our most fundamental institutions, yet what they are doing is rarely the focus of political theory, social science research, or what politicians talk about when they are talking about renewing American democracy. The conversations in this series aim to shed light on new democratic practices taking shape and to find out more about the dynamic people involved.

Photo by Michael Weizenegger
Photo by Michael Weizenegger

Kimball Payne is the city manager of Lynchburg, Virginia, where public engagement has become a regular feature of local government. We talked recently about how constructive citizen involvement can be encouraged, how it can connect to more formal and technical decision-making, and how public engagement has redefined what it means to be a public administrator.

Albert Dzur: Public meetings come in different shapes and sizes. Some of them go nowhere while others can generate a really good conversation. How do you create productive meetings?

Kimball Payne: Sometimes I think it is hit or miss. Food seems to be key, though we do not generally provide it. We had a meeting at the library last Wednesday to talk about some plans for renovating our municipal stadium. We sent out announcements to the neighborhood and we had about half a dozen people there. Those who were there were engaged—they were neighbors of the stadium—but there were not many in attendance. Then last night we had a meeting for the business community—we do an annual report for them—and we had 150 people there. We had food and drink.

We keep experimenting with when to do these. The meeting Wednesday night was at 6 pm, rather than waiting until 7:30. The invitation is important, too: getting it to the right people and then giving them a reason to come—whether it is food or the topic.

AD: Can you tell when a meeting is going well?

KP: Yes, it has to do with whether you have engaged. One of the ways to improve it is to get some one-on-one engagement. We are not overly concerned about being too formal. If the room is buzzing and people are talking, we do not have to worry about starting right on time. I let the buzz and the conversations go. You can hear when it lulls or pauses and then you start the formal part of the meeting. We also hang around after the meeting to talk to anyone who wants to talk with us one-on-one. I think that is important for people to understand that they have been heard.

AD: It sounds like you try to generate small group discussions as opposed to inviting people to events where they get talked to.

KP: It is usually a combination. Sometimes we will talk to them and then break them up into small groups because we feel the need to give them some background information to set the stage for the smaller group discussions. Then we make a point of letting them report out to the whole group so that we know that everybody gets heard.

AD: We have talked about formal meetings where the regular curmudgeonly people get up and make their normal complaints and then sit down.  That is a sign that a meeting is not going anywhere.  By contrast, are there signs that a meeting is going well, where you come out thinking, “That really worked?”  What are indications that a meeting is going to produce something useful?

KP: Sometimes it is just the general feeling that you have had a good interaction and a lot of discussion and something will eventually come from that. Often at the end of meetings we will talk about next steps we need to follow up on—what needs to be done by citizens or staff or both of us working together.

AD: We have talked about study circles, public forums, and your citizens’ academy. Have you done any brainstorming about other forms you would like to experiment with in Lynchburg?

KP: We have a new initiative right now called “Lynchburg is Listening” on the front page of our website. Actually there are two things on there. One is “Lynchburg is Listening,” which is new. The other is something called “First to Know,” where people can sign on to our mailing list for periodical reports, press releases, and announcements. They will get these delivered directly rather than reading about them in the media. “Lynchburg is Listening” is designed to create a forum for discussion. People can post ideas, comment on other people’s ideas, and vote on them. This is so new there are only a couple of ideas on there right now, but the goal is to see if there is any enthusiasm or interest in generating online discussion about community events, community initiatives, issues, and ideas.

AD: Have you considered how to get more young people involved?

KP: We think that “Lynchburg is Listening” is one way to do it. Of course, we have Facebook and Twitter for some of the other things. We do use social media to try to push the word out. We are trying to be sensitive to that as well.

AD: There are potential bridges between K-12 schools and city government, such as youth programs where students in high schools play various roles in city government especially along school issues. Has that ever come up?

KP: No, it has not come up. I know some communities let the students do a mock city council meeting or sit in and shadow the city council members for a day. We have never talked about that here though.  We do have a Mayor’s Youth Council, composed of representatives from all of the public and private high schools in the city, and even a homeschooled representative, that discusses community issues from the young people’s perspective.  Recently, an eighth grade student from a private school spent part of a day shadowing the Deputy City Manager and me.

Community-driven solutions to divisive racial issues

AD: On this topic of formal meetings, you have mentioned a sobering point that attendance and quality of conversation at city council and school board meetings, for example, have not really been affected by the study circles and other kinds of engagement you have been doing. Do you have any ideas about how the formal system might be more welcoming or interesting to people?

KP: It tends to be so issue specific. We had a council meeting last week that included a public hearing about AT&T’s plan to erect a cell tower in a residential neighborhood. Boy, the neighbors came out for that one. And these are folks we would not normally see attend anything. They came out in full force, spoke, went through the public hearing process, and certainly had their voices heard. The issue got tabled for further analysis and more work. The interesting thing is that AT&T had not talked to the community prior to appearing before council. A number of these folks said, “Why didn’t you come and talk to us?” So there is this expectation now. We will do that if we have an initiative: we will go into the neighborhood and talk to people. This company had not done that and they really got criticized.

AD: So you are seeing somewhat of a culture change.

KP: Yes, and council members even said to the AT&T people, “I wish you had called and talked to the neighbors before you brought this to us.”

AD: To restate this, you are saying that city council and school board meetings are what they are and when certain concrete issues pique the public’s interest or a specific community’s interest you will have attendance and participation and when they don’t you won’t.

KP: That is correct.

AD: I want to shift focus and ask about how to educate or socialize public administrators as professionals who can help public engagement flourish. Reflecting back on your own university training in public administration, has that training helped you work with the public? Or have you simply learned from other people who have been doing this?

KP: I think it has really been more a matter of learning by experience. My public administration program was based on the federal model. The curriculum did not have much about local government. That is what they had when I was at the University of Virginia. Although a lot of the classes were really good, it was not about engaging citizens at all. That never came up. In fact, when I first started to get exposed to ideas of participatory democracy about 20 years ago, I was pretty resistant to it.  “Look, I’m the professional” was my thinking. “We know what we have to do and letting the public run this is not going to work.” So my thinking has changed about that over the years.

Through ICMA (International City/County Management Association) and through our state organization, the Virginia Local Government Management Association (VLGMA), we started to bring more of that into our repertoire of tools for local governments to use. And it is something that I do teach in my class. The other instructors and I have been in an ongoing conversation about how to integrate more discussion of citizen engagement into our classes. We are part of a four-course certificate program at Virginia Tech offered to mid-career people and MPA students at the university.

AD: What do you highlight in your classes that did not come up when you were an MPA student?

KP: Well, just the whole idea of engaging the citizen. I do not think it ever came up in my MPA program. It was more philosophy, theory, public policy, and constitutional issues. So through the case studies that we use now and just addressing it in our class, we talk about the need to engage the community, the need for a partnership between the citizen and the city, and the need to just have that interaction.

AD: Are your students receptive to this?

KP: I think so.  Yes, yes.

AD: The same reluctance you said you had early on and then grew out of is still part of the culture to some extent. People want to be professionals. They are spending money and time to get a degree, after all.  But you are sensing that your students are receptive to public engagement?

KP: Yes, I think they are receptive. What we are telling them is, “Look, you are going to have to deal with this one way or another. It is out there: the noise, the interest. You may as well embrace it and use it.” But as we have talked about before, you have to pick your issues. It is not about the technical day-to-day operational things that people just expect to always work. It is about the more general policy issues. For example, the local newspaper just found out recently that the county to the north of us stopped using fluoride 2 or 3 years ago. They have a public authority that runs their water system. And the public just let them have it: “Why didn’t you tell everybody? Why didn’t you have a discussion about this?” Those sorts of policy issues spark public interest. And sometimes you may think you have the right idea or you think this initiative is going to be of interest and it may not be. Or you may say, “Oh, nobody cares about this,” but then somebody does. Be flexible, I guess, is the lesson here, and be agile in responding

AD: So you communicate to your MPA students that this is a different playing field than when you became a city manager. On this playing field the public is going to require consultation—not every day, but for sure on the big issues.

KP: I think you have to be open to any consultation when the public shows interest. We try to embrace that: “Thank you. We are glad you are involved.” I did not have to deal with Facebook or Twitter or any of these social media 30 years ago. We go to orientation now and tell our folks that when someone comes into city hall and has a good interaction that is pretty much what they expect to happen. When they walk out, that is the end of it. But when they come in and have a bad interaction and they walk out the door and Tweet and put it on Facebook, now a thousand people know about it. So you have to be aware of those sorts of things. The world has really changed on us.

AD: What are the tools that emerge from the case studies you present to your students? What tools do you find yourself using in your daily work?

KP: I think a lot of it is an attitude that conveys that folks in the community have a voice, should have a voice, and we want them to have a voice. We want to do what we can do to promote and respect that. This means when they say something we need to listen. We need to be aware that they have input; they have useful experiences; they see the service delivery on the other end from us; their input is valuable in helping us learn to be responsive and learn to do our jobs better. So it is an attitude: you have to listen to these folks; you have to treat them with respect; you have to help them to understand where they just misunderstand, but you really need to have these conversations.

AD: That point about attitude is interesting because one thing that strikes me in talking with you is that while you are committed to listening and being respectful and being inclusive, you will also tell people when they are wrong and you will tell people when they need to step up and do some work. We have talked about this issue of responsibility and how you can do some things as a city manager but not other things. This is not an easy role to play: listening to the citizen, but also saying from time to time, “Hey, you need to do some of this work too.”

KP: Yes, one of the characteristics of my career is I have often been described as being blunt and honest about the reality as I see it. And really that is the only way I know to operate: tell the truth as I see it and not mince words. I think people respect that. The other part is that you have to listen to the response. You have to be receptive to hearing something else.

AD: Can you think of examples in Lynchburg of policy issues where you felt that people just needed to learn more, times when they had complaints or problems, but they also needed to hear your side of the story more clearly?

KP: Our budget process and discussions about the budget over the years come to mind. We needed to talk about some of the services we provided and the alternatives so people understood that we had explored and were aware of those, and we were not ignoring other options. That is one area.

Another example happened around ten years ago when we changed the trash collection system. People were using anything to put their trash out—using their own personal garbage cans. So we went to a cart system where the carts are actually owned by the city. And we put them throughout the city. This initiative was, in part, to get better control over the cash flow and pay for the system, which was operating in the red. First of all, I do not think city council or the public understood our thinking on this, so we had a series of a half dozen community meetings explaining the situation and presenting the alternatives. We created this little cartoon creature called Bart the Cart to help people understand where we were going with this. And it became very well accepted. I often tell people that if we had been a private company we would have had a board meeting, changed the service delivery, moved the bottom line into the black, and we would not have consulted with anybody. It took us six months to make a decision that was obvious to the staff in the beginning; it took six months to convince the citizens and city council that that was the way we needed to go.

But that is what we call democracy. It is not supposed to be efficient.

AD: Six months is a small price to pay for democracy.

KP: And we are getting ready to change it again. We are keeping the carts for a little longer, but then we are going to pre-pay bags. We have had a tag system for people who were not using the carts or had extra trash that could not fit in the carts and we had a lot of complaints about people abusing the system. So we are going to get colored bags and if your garbage is not in a colored bag with a Lynchburg logo we are not going to pick it up. At least that is the threat.

We are already planning for community outreach on that change and talking about how we can explain to people what we are doing and how we are doing it.

AD: What is the best way to mentor public administrators in other cities who might be inclined toward greater citizen involvement?

KP: The Virginia Local Government Management Association (VLGMA) meets twice a year and a big part of those meetings, besides the informal networking and interaction, is sharing best practices. So we have had people from the city of Hampton come in, for example, to explain what they have done with citizen interaction. One of the most popular events we do at these meetings is called “How I Manage.” A manager or a group of managers will get up and address an issue or will simply talk about their approach to management. So we do a lot of that, trying to learn from each other at these conferences. That works pretty well. One of the things we pride ourselves on in Virginia is supporting each other. We are pretty open in saying, “If you have an issue or you want to learn about something, give us a call.” One of our staff people at the Weldon Cooper Center at the University of Virginia keeps an active listserv. If there is an issue in any community, he will send out an email blast to everyone saying, “Hey, this community has this issue. Do you have anything to help with this?” People always respond, so the community with the problem can follow up with any one of us.

AD: Have you been on call on any of those cases?

KP: We usually respond. A lot of times it is a request like, “Do you have an ordinance on this, or do you have any document on this, or do you have any experience with this?” And we are pretty responsive. Every once in a while we will ask a question that will generate some conversation.

AD: You have mentioned best practices. I wonder if you ever talk about worst practices: “Hey, I tried this and it really failed.”

KP: That is what we do at the bar! Actually, we have a statewide group of assistants, department heads, and others below the executive level who meet on a regular basis.  Every so often a manager would go and talk to them. And we finally got the message: “You guys are just telling these horrible war stories and we don’t want to be mangers.” So we had to reflect and adjust, thinking we had to tone that down a little bit. So yes, we do talk about things that do not work.

AD: One traditional concern is size: getting enough people there but not so many that you cannot have much of a conversation. I suspect that the most important thing is just recruiting—getting that attendance level up.

KP: We find that 75 to 100 is a good workable number. We will have enough staff members there. We will have 7 or 8 staff people there so we can make small groups of no more than 10. That seems quite manageable. We tend to have these meetings in schools—cafeterias not in big auditoriums. So that group size tends to work pretty well.

AD: One last question, on sustainability: how do you keep this culture of engagement going in Lynchburg after you retire some 50 years or so from now.

KP: Or two years!  It is interesting, we had a budget retreat with city council last Tuesday and at the end of the retreat we said, “OK, what do you think about citizen engagement about this budget? We do not think there is a whole lot to talk about here; things are in pretty good shape. How enthusiastic is city council about this?  The staff is not really enthusiastic about citizen engagement on this budget—other than the things we normally do, obviously: we have to have a public hearing and we always do something informal right before the public hearing.” And council said, “Oh no, no, no, no, no. We are definitely going to have citizen engagement. That is expected. We like it. We are going to do it.” So we are going to have three citizen engagements—one at each middle school. My point is that I think the culture has changed and there is this expectation that we are going to be doing these things, that they are part of the way we operate here.

We are continuing to look for ways, as social media changes, to reach out to folks. It really has become an expectation. For example, we had a young man who died in August while being pursued by police officers. The police have been having small neighborhood group discussions and we are going to follow up with a larger community discussion. So it has really become just the way we do things here. We have to keep it going, but I think it is at the point where it is sustainable now.

AD: That expectation seems like it is coming from both directions: from your staff and other people in city government as well as local organizations.

KP: As well as the neighborhoods, because if we try to do something now and we do not consult them, we are going to be asked, “Well, wait a minute why weren’t you here talking to us about this?”

 

Work on this project was done in partnership with the Kettering Foundation.
Images provided by Albert Dzur.
More of this interview can be found at the Boston Review.

Democratic Public Administration: An Interview with Kimball Payne

Conversations on Participatory Democracy

Innovative democratic professionals are encouraging greater participation in some of our most fundamental institutions, yet what they are doing is rarely the focus of political theory, social science research, or what politicians talk about when they are talking about renewing American democracy. The conversations in this series aim to shed light on new democratic practices taking shape and to find out more about the dynamic people involved.

Photo by Michael Weizenegger
Photo by Michael Weizenegger

Kimball Payne is the city manager of Lynchburg, Virginia, where public engagement has become a regular feature of local government. We talked recently about how constructive citizen involvement can be encouraged, how it can connect to more formal and technical decision-making, and how public engagement has redefined what it means to be a public administrator.

Albert Dzur: Public meetings come in different shapes and sizes. Some of them go nowhere while others can generate a really good conversation. How do you create productive meetings?

Kimball Payne: Sometimes I think it is hit or miss. Food seems to be key, though we do not generally provide it. We had a meeting at the library last Wednesday to talk about some plans for renovating our municipal stadium. We sent out announcements to the neighborhood and we had about half a dozen people there. Those who were there were engaged—they were neighbors of the stadium—but there were not many in attendance. Then last night we had a meeting for the business community—we do an annual report for them—and we had 150 people there. We had food and drink.

We keep experimenting with when to do these. The meeting Wednesday night was at 6 pm, rather than waiting until 7:30. The invitation is important, too: getting it to the right people and then giving them a reason to come—whether it is food or the topic.

AD: Can you tell when a meeting is going well?

KP: Yes, it has to do with whether you have engaged. One of the ways to improve it is to get some one-on-one engagement. We are not overly concerned about being too formal. If the room is buzzing and people are talking, we do not have to worry about starting right on time. I let the buzz and the conversations go. You can hear when it lulls or pauses and then you start the formal part of the meeting. We also hang around after the meeting to talk to anyone who wants to talk with us one-on-one. I think that is important for people to understand that they have been heard.

AD: It sounds like you try to generate small group discussions as opposed to inviting people to events where they get talked to.

KP: It is usually a combination. Sometimes we will talk to them and then break them up into small groups because we feel the need to give them some background information to set the stage for the smaller group discussions. Then we make a point of letting them report out to the whole group so that we know that everybody gets heard.

AD: We have talked about formal meetings where the regular curmudgeonly people get up and make their normal complaints and then sit down.  That is a sign that a meeting is not going anywhere.  By contrast, are there signs that a meeting is going well, where you come out thinking, “That really worked?”  What are indications that a meeting is going to produce something useful?

KP: Sometimes it is just the general feeling that you have had a good interaction and a lot of discussion and something will eventually come from that. Often at the end of meetings we will talk about next steps we need to follow up on—what needs to be done by citizens or staff or both of us working together.

AD: We have talked about study circles, public forums, and your citizens’ academy. Have you done any brainstorming about other forms you would like to experiment with in Lynchburg?

KP: We have a new initiative right now called “Lynchburg is Listening” on the front page of our website. Actually there are two things on there. One is “Lynchburg is Listening,” which is new. The other is something called “First to Know,” where people can sign on to our mailing list for periodical reports, press releases, and announcements. They will get these delivered directly rather than reading about them in the media. “Lynchburg is Listening” is designed to create a forum for discussion. People can post ideas, comment on other people’s ideas, and vote on them. This is so new there are only a couple of ideas on there right now, but the goal is to see if there is any enthusiasm or interest in generating online discussion about community events, community initiatives, issues, and ideas.

AD: Have you considered how to get more young people involved?

KP: We think that “Lynchburg is Listening” is one way to do it. Of course, we have Facebook and Twitter for some of the other things. We do use social media to try to push the word out. We are trying to be sensitive to that as well.

AD: There are potential bridges between K-12 schools and city government, such as youth programs where students in high schools play various roles in city government especially along school issues. Has that ever come up?

KP: No, it has not come up. I know some communities let the students do a mock city council meeting or sit in and shadow the city council members for a day. We have never talked about that here though.  We do have a Mayor’s Youth Council, composed of representatives from all of the public and private high schools in the city, and even a homeschooled representative, that discusses community issues from the young people’s perspective.  Recently, an eighth grade student from a private school spent part of a day shadowing the Deputy City Manager and me.

Community-driven solutions to divisive racial issues

AD: On this topic of formal meetings, you have mentioned a sobering point that attendance and quality of conversation at city council and school board meetings, for example, have not really been affected by the study circles and other kinds of engagement you have been doing. Do you have any ideas about how the formal system might be more welcoming or interesting to people?

KP: It tends to be so issue specific. We had a council meeting last week that included a public hearing about AT&T’s plan to erect a cell tower in a residential neighborhood. Boy, the neighbors came out for that one. And these are folks we would not normally see attend anything. They came out in full force, spoke, went through the public hearing process, and certainly had their voices heard. The issue got tabled for further analysis and more work. The interesting thing is that AT&T had not talked to the community prior to appearing before council. A number of these folks said, “Why didn’t you come and talk to us?” So there is this expectation now. We will do that if we have an initiative: we will go into the neighborhood and talk to people. This company had not done that and they really got criticized.

AD: So you are seeing somewhat of a culture change.

KP: Yes, and council members even said to the AT&T people, “I wish you had called and talked to the neighbors before you brought this to us.”

AD: To restate this, you are saying that city council and school board meetings are what they are and when certain concrete issues pique the public’s interest or a specific community’s interest you will have attendance and participation and when they don’t you won’t.

KP: That is correct.

AD: I want to shift focus and ask about how to educate or socialize public administrators as professionals who can help public engagement flourish. Reflecting back on your own university training in public administration, has that training helped you work with the public? Or have you simply learned from other people who have been doing this?

KP: I think it has really been more a matter of learning by experience. My public administration program was based on the federal model. The curriculum did not have much about local government. That is what they had when I was at the University of Virginia. Although a lot of the classes were really good, it was not about engaging citizens at all. That never came up. In fact, when I first started to get exposed to ideas of participatory democracy about 20 years ago, I was pretty resistant to it.  “Look, I’m the professional” was my thinking. “We know what we have to do and letting the public run this is not going to work.” So my thinking has changed about that over the years.

Through ICMA (International City/County Management Association) and through our state organization, the Virginia Local Government Management Association (VLGMA), we started to bring more of that into our repertoire of tools for local governments to use. And it is something that I do teach in my class. The other instructors and I have been in an ongoing conversation about how to integrate more discussion of citizen engagement into our classes. We are part of a four-course certificate program at Virginia Tech offered to mid-career people and MPA students at the university.

AD: What do you highlight in your classes that did not come up when you were an MPA student?

KP: Well, just the whole idea of engaging the citizen. I do not think it ever came up in my MPA program. It was more philosophy, theory, public policy, and constitutional issues. So through the case studies that we use now and just addressing it in our class, we talk about the need to engage the community, the need for a partnership between the citizen and the city, and the need to just have that interaction.

AD: Are your students receptive to this?

KP: I think so.  Yes, yes.

AD: The same reluctance you said you had early on and then grew out of is still part of the culture to some extent. People want to be professionals. They are spending money and time to get a degree, after all.  But you are sensing that your students are receptive to public engagement?

KP: Yes, I think they are receptive. What we are telling them is, “Look, you are going to have to deal with this one way or another. It is out there: the noise, the interest. You may as well embrace it and use it.” But as we have talked about before, you have to pick your issues. It is not about the technical day-to-day operational things that people just expect to always work. It is about the more general policy issues. For example, the local newspaper just found out recently that the county to the north of us stopped using fluoride 2 or 3 years ago. They have a public authority that runs their water system. And the public just let them have it: “Why didn’t you tell everybody? Why didn’t you have a discussion about this?” Those sorts of policy issues spark public interest. And sometimes you may think you have the right idea or you think this initiative is going to be of interest and it may not be. Or you may say, “Oh, nobody cares about this,” but then somebody does. Be flexible, I guess, is the lesson here, and be agile in responding

AD: So you communicate to your MPA students that this is a different playing field than when you became a city manager. On this playing field the public is going to require consultation—not every day, but for sure on the big issues.

KP: I think you have to be open to any consultation when the public shows interest. We try to embrace that: “Thank you. We are glad you are involved.” I did not have to deal with Facebook or Twitter or any of these social media 30 years ago. We go to orientation now and tell our folks that when someone comes into city hall and has a good interaction that is pretty much what they expect to happen. When they walk out, that is the end of it. But when they come in and have a bad interaction and they walk out the door and Tweet and put it on Facebook, now a thousand people know about it. So you have to be aware of those sorts of things. The world has really changed on us.

AD: What are the tools that emerge from the case studies you present to your students? What tools do you find yourself using in your daily work?

KP: I think a lot of it is an attitude that conveys that folks in the community have a voice, should have a voice, and we want them to have a voice. We want to do what we can do to promote and respect that. This means when they say something we need to listen. We need to be aware that they have input; they have useful experiences; they see the service delivery on the other end from us; their input is valuable in helping us learn to be responsive and learn to do our jobs better. So it is an attitude: you have to listen to these folks; you have to treat them with respect; you have to help them to understand where they just misunderstand, but you really need to have these conversations.

AD: That point about attitude is interesting because one thing that strikes me in talking with you is that while you are committed to listening and being respectful and being inclusive, you will also tell people when they are wrong and you will tell people when they need to step up and do some work. We have talked about this issue of responsibility and how you can do some things as a city manager but not other things. This is not an easy role to play: listening to the citizen, but also saying from time to time, “Hey, you need to do some of this work too.”

KP: Yes, one of the characteristics of my career is I have often been described as being blunt and honest about the reality as I see it. And really that is the only way I know to operate: tell the truth as I see it and not mince words. I think people respect that. The other part is that you have to listen to the response. You have to be receptive to hearing something else.

AD: Can you think of examples in Lynchburg of policy issues where you felt that people just needed to learn more, times when they had complaints or problems, but they also needed to hear your side of the story more clearly?

KP: Our budget process and discussions about the budget over the years come to mind. We needed to talk about some of the services we provided and the alternatives so people understood that we had explored and were aware of those, and we were not ignoring other options. That is one area.

Another example happened around ten years ago when we changed the trash collection system. People were using anything to put their trash out—using their own personal garbage cans. So we went to a cart system where the carts are actually owned by the city. And we put them throughout the city. This initiative was, in part, to get better control over the cash flow and pay for the system, which was operating in the red. First of all, I do not think city council or the public understood our thinking on this, so we had a series of a half dozen community meetings explaining the situation and presenting the alternatives. We created this little cartoon creature called Bart the Cart to help people understand where we were going with this. And it became very well accepted. I often tell people that if we had been a private company we would have had a board meeting, changed the service delivery, moved the bottom line into the black, and we would not have consulted with anybody. It took us six months to make a decision that was obvious to the staff in the beginning; it took six months to convince the citizens and city council that that was the way we needed to go.

But that is what we call democracy. It is not supposed to be efficient.

AD: Six months is a small price to pay for democracy.

KP: And we are getting ready to change it again. We are keeping the carts for a little longer, but then we are going to pre-pay bags. We have had a tag system for people who were not using the carts or had extra trash that could not fit in the carts and we had a lot of complaints about people abusing the system. So we are going to get colored bags and if your garbage is not in a colored bag with a Lynchburg logo we are not going to pick it up. At least that is the threat.

We are already planning for community outreach on that change and talking about how we can explain to people what we are doing and how we are doing it.

AD: What is the best way to mentor public administrators in other cities who might be inclined toward greater citizen involvement?

KP: The Virginia Local Government Management Association (VLGMA) meets twice a year and a big part of those meetings, besides the informal networking and interaction, is sharing best practices. So we have had people from the city of Hampton come in, for example, to explain what they have done with citizen interaction. One of the most popular events we do at these meetings is called “How I Manage.” A manager or a group of managers will get up and address an issue or will simply talk about their approach to management. So we do a lot of that, trying to learn from each other at these conferences. That works pretty well. One of the things we pride ourselves on in Virginia is supporting each other. We are pretty open in saying, “If you have an issue or you want to learn about something, give us a call.” One of our staff people at the Weldon Cooper Center at the University of Virginia keeps an active listserv. If there is an issue in any community, he will send out an email blast to everyone saying, “Hey, this community has this issue. Do you have anything to help with this?” People always respond, so the community with the problem can follow up with any one of us.

AD: Have you been on call on any of those cases?

KP: We usually respond. A lot of times it is a request like, “Do you have an ordinance on this, or do you have any document on this, or do you have any experience with this?” And we are pretty responsive. Every once in a while we will ask a question that will generate some conversation.

AD: You have mentioned best practices. I wonder if you ever talk about worst practices: “Hey, I tried this and it really failed.”

KP: That is what we do at the bar! Actually, we have a statewide group of assistants, department heads, and others below the executive level who meet on a regular basis.  Every so often a manager would go and talk to them. And we finally got the message: “You guys are just telling these horrible war stories and we don’t want to be mangers.” So we had to reflect and adjust, thinking we had to tone that down a little bit. So yes, we do talk about things that do not work.

AD: One traditional concern is size: getting enough people there but not so many that you cannot have much of a conversation. I suspect that the most important thing is just recruiting—getting that attendance level up.

KP: We find that 75 to 100 is a good workable number. We will have enough staff members there. We will have 7 or 8 staff people there so we can make small groups of no more than 10. That seems quite manageable. We tend to have these meetings in schools—cafeterias not in big auditoriums. So that group size tends to work pretty well.

AD: One last question, on sustainability: how do you keep this culture of engagement going in Lynchburg after you retire some 50 years or so from now.

KP: Or two years!  It is interesting, we had a budget retreat with city council last Tuesday and at the end of the retreat we said, “OK, what do you think about citizen engagement about this budget? We do not think there is a whole lot to talk about here; things are in pretty good shape. How enthusiastic is city council about this?  The staff is not really enthusiastic about citizen engagement on this budget—other than the things we normally do, obviously: we have to have a public hearing and we always do something informal right before the public hearing.” And council said, “Oh no, no, no, no, no. We are definitely going to have citizen engagement. That is expected. We like it. We are going to do it.” So we are going to have three citizen engagements—one at each middle school. My point is that I think the culture has changed and there is this expectation that we are going to be doing these things, that they are part of the way we operate here.

We are continuing to look for ways, as social media changes, to reach out to folks. It really has become an expectation. For example, we had a young man who died in August while being pursued by police officers. The police have been having small neighborhood group discussions and we are going to follow up with a larger community discussion. So it has really become just the way we do things here. We have to keep it going, but I think it is at the point where it is sustainable now.

AD: That expectation seems like it is coming from both directions: from your staff and other people in city government as well as local organizations.

KP: As well as the neighborhoods, because if we try to do something now and we do not consult them, we are going to be asked, “Well, wait a minute why weren’t you here talking to us about this?”

 

Work on this project was done in partnership with the Kettering Foundation.
Images provided by Albert Dzur.
More of this interview can be found at the Boston Review.

Democracy in Schools: A Conversation with Donnan Stoicovy

Conversations on Participatory Democracy

Innovative democratic professionals are encouraging greater participation in some of our most fundamental institutions, yet what they are doing is rarely the focus of political theory, social science research, or what politicians talk about when they are talking about renewing American democracy. The conversations in this series aim to shed light on new democratic practices taking shape and to find out more about the dynamic people involved.

Photo by Michael Weizenegger
Photo by Michael Weizenegger

Donnan Stoicovy is the principal—or, in her words, the “lead learner”—of Park Forest Elementary School, a public K-5 school in Pennsylvania. Albert Dzur spoke with her recently about the participatory culture in her school.

 

 

 

 

 

Albert Dzur: Last year you held a series of Town Hall meetings that led to a Constitutional Convention at Park Forest school and you started with a pretty basic question: “How do we want our school to run?”

Donnan Stoicovy: Exactly! We started with discussions about “What kind of people do we want to be?” and “What is an ideal school?”—I encouraged the kids to do a little dreaming. And, of course, they know what’s realistic and what’s not–they know you can’t have chocolate covered hallways. But it was fun imagining with them. And then, “What do we value in our schools?” “What do we need to do so we can all get along in our space?” They were good discussions. Legwork for the discussions was done in their classrooms ahead of time and then students chose representatives for the Town Hall Meetings. We used a representative democracy to do all that.

AD: How did you decide to have the Town Hall meetings for the school?

DS: Well, I had been at the League of Democratic Schools meeting at the end of the school year and one of my colleagues there, Dianne Suiter, who at the time was a principal in Ohio, talked about doing something similar. She did questions like “What do we value in our school?” “What do we want to maintain in our schools?” So, as I started thinking about what she was doing, I thought this would be a great way to address what the Pennsylvania Department of Education is trying to do with what is called a “school-wide positive behavior plan.” Having been through many professional development experiences about classroom management and behavior, I wanted to approach the process of developing a plan with everyone’s voices being heard and developing something that we could all agree with as our school plan. Doing it democratically seemed to me to be the right way to engage everyone.

Two years ago, I had facilitated some conversations with parents about what kind of people they want their children to become. They didn’t talk about filling in the bubbles or doing some sort of standardized testing. They wanted their children to be people who could think critically, question authority, and make our world a better place. There was a whole list of things. I did the discussion twice and I had about 50-55 parents attend. So these conversations with our Park Forest Elementary school community members, plus hearing what Diane Suiter had done at her school inspired me. So I started thinking about it and talking with my colleagues here in our school.

AD: Did anything surprise you? Did you hear anything from the kids that you didn’t expect or that you hadn’t heard from teachers and parents?

DS: Nothing surprised me, but it did impress me that even kindergartners in my own “small school gathering” group had ideas of what kind of people they wanted to be. I remember thinking “Oh they get it!” My thoughts were, “Wow this is wonderful: they really do know what they want our world to be like and what they want their role to be in it.”

AD: So the kids really took it seriously.

DS: Oh yes, you could put your teeth into it. They talked about local environmental issues, for example, and wanted to solve some of those.

AD: Do you feel like it has had an impact on how the school was run last year and into this year?

DS: Definitely. Ultimately, we used all the information to create our school’s constitution. So this year we reviewed our Park Forest Elementary constitution on the federal U.S. Constitution Day. (PFE Constitution) Everybody got a printed copy to post in his or her classroom and we talked about what the different values meant.

So, going back to the Town Hall meetings at Park Forest, each of the small school gathering groups were assigned common areas to establish guidelines for: the ways we should be when we use the restroom, the ways we should be in the hall, the ways we should be when we’re on our buses, etc. Then they presented those at our All School Gathering in which everyone participates. Each of them was assigned a different week so they would present theirs with their small school group. Then everybody had a copy of those to review with kids over time.

AD: Was there any dispute over any of it? Did a group ever present a rule that other people disagreed with?

DS: No. They’re very realistic about things when you set the right tone. In the “Ideal School” part I wanted them to dream what would be fun. Every classroom came up with a poster about what an ideal school would have in it—so there’s chocolate covered slides and so on. But then they have values like “Respectful,” “Friendly.” One has “Helpful–the cafeteria is a helpful place,” “Caring everywhere,” “Kindness,” “We recycle,” “It’s an awesome place.” Another one did a little more of the big dreaming. They wanted a movie theater here and a computer café. And there are already computers everywhere here! They wanted a place where pets could be and a bug room. Another poster says: “No bullying,” “Helping others,” “Quiet areas for reading.”

This Town Hall information became the supporting evidence for our Constitutional Convention, which we convened several months later.

AD: You weren’t surprised by what came out of the Town Hall meetings, but I wonder if there were any ideas that came forward from the students that made you think: “Oh, they really do care about this.”

DS: Bullying was one thing that they talked a lot about in numerous conversations. What their definition of what bullying was. They felt like it isn’t here and they don’t want it to be here. They talked about how we head it off—each student doing his or her best to prevent it from happening here. Our fifth graders wrote a song and created a skit that they presented in every classroom.

AD: So they were taking some of the responsibility. It’s not just that they want the school to do something about bullying. They were saying “we’re going to be part of making sure we don’t have this at Park Forest.”

DS: Right. They demonstrated to me that they wanted to be proactive about it. Their song was really cute and they were very enthusiastic!

So, getting back to our school’s constitution. In the constitution, the kids wrote: “In order to form a better school, create a place where people want to be, establish fairness and kindness.” The kids wrote all this. We helped guide the process—we let them narrow down the words and that’s all. “To ensure the safety and well-being of all and promote learning and citizenship, we hereby create this constitution for Park Forest.” And their rights: “Feel safe in our school; Speak what we believe and not be judged for it.” That one’s pretty sophisticated. “Be appreciated and recognized and celebrate our success; Experience creative, engaging, and fun learning; Learn and help others learn; Have a safe learning environment both inside and out; Be respected; Help the community both inside and outside; Be treated fairly; and Have opportunities to serve our school.”

AD: It seems like you really got to some core issues.

DS: Yes. And then their responsibilities were really cool too: “Learn and teach others what we’ve learned; Work hard and do our personal best; Respect our school and those in it; Use our manners; Care for others and our environment; Actively engage in learning; Work with others and cooperate.” This one’s cool: “Share appreciation of others, take notice of their needs and show faith in them.”

AD: This took a lot of time and effort. Not something you would do every year.

DS: It was a much longer process than have a committee of teachers create the rules and tell the students what they were as many schools do in their school-wide positive behavior plans. Plus it was more effective in connecting our school’s community by creating a constitution. We’ll renew it in a few years since it did take some time. We’re going to keep it the way it is right now unless there’s an issue with something. After three or four years quite a few of the kids will have moved on from our school to the middle school. We can start from the frame of what we have and see: Is this what we really want or do we need to revise it? I realize our country doesn’t do that every year! But you know if we just hang it on the wall, it doesn’t live.

The other part of the process that was really powerful was how homerooms selected their representatives.

AD: How did that work?

Well our fifth grade used the Electoral College process. Because they were trying to teach what the Electoral College was.

AD: Those smart fifth graders!

DS: Yes. So the teachers did that with the kids and it was great. Kids who thought they would get to be a representative sometimes didn’t get chosen because by Electoral College it worked differently. There was a video clip on the CBS Sunday Morning Show that explained it. So the teachers used that video clip as a good model for the kids and then they experienced it.

Some of the other classrooms had elections. The kids did speeches as to why they thought they should be selected. Each classroom had a representative and an alternate for the convention so we let both students come. We had 44 kids total who were at our constitutional convention.

We met twice. After the first meeting, they went back to their classmates, and shared what had happened. One fourth grader set up a Google doc and put all of the information that we had shared with them in it and asked her classmates to add to that Google doc. And they were just learning how to use Google docs so she put that up and the teacher was blown away. The student took it really seriously: she asked the other students things like “Okay, so what do you think about these? I have to narrow this down…” and her classmates gave her input.

AD: Let’s talk now about some of the barriers you’ve encountered in moving your school in a more democratic direction. You’ve mentioned a problem of pedagogical philosophy, which is the conventional mindset of teaching subjects rather than people. I wonder if you have encountered other barriers to this work?

DS: It takes time. That’s probably the biggest barrier for some people. “Like why don’t you just tell us what to do?” Obviously, I want it to be a shared situation, so I say to people: “It’s really important that we construct this together. It doesn’t have to be the way anybody else’s school is but it has to be what fits us.”

When we changed our lunchroom, one of the teachers said to another teacher: “Why doesn’t she just tell us what the rules are?” “You know,” he said, “it would be a whole lot easier and take less time.” And the other teacher took the opportunity to teach him what I was doing and why I was doing it that way. Yes, it would be easier and take less time, but it would be my rules for our place. The more ownership into something, the more people will come together to do the hard work we need to sustain this place.

Some surprises have sometimes emerged as we work with everybody. The teachers and I came to realize that our students really do think about things like to be mannerly, to be kind to each other, for example. They are important to them. Some teachers reacted: “Oh wow, I didn’t even know that they really got this, that they came to school with all of this.” I have found that our belief in students gets higher and more established when we allow students to have voice and when we provide the platform for them to share it.

AD: As you were talking, I was trying to think of why somebody would say: “Why doesn’t Donnan just tell us what to do?” It could be that they’re worried about making a mistake. They feel like they don’t have enough experience. They don’t want to take on the responsibility. Do you think that is what’s going on?

DS: Sometimes people are just used to having somebody telling them what to do: “Here’s the rules and that’s the way it is and let’s do this as a school.” The only rules we have provided are through our effort to develop citizens; we’ve said to everybody that these rules include characteristics of citizenship like Trustworthiness, Active Listening, No Put Downs, Personal Best. We could develop our own school rules and have everyone participate in that, but we just felt using those ideals fit what we think of as citizenship so nobody here had any issues with having those be our rules.

But, yes, I think you’re right that a person can think it would be just easier if the principal told us what to do and we did it. Then they don’t have to have that responsibility or ownership if things fail.

AD: I think what you’re asking your colleagues and students is, “I want you to be co-owners of this school,” and maybe that’s a lot to ask somebody who is not quite sure whether that’s what they want to do with the rest of their life.

DS: Exactly. That’s what’s going on. Hopefully the kids are getting that it is really important for them to be involved. That’s the most important message for me to be giving them. We can change things, but everyone has to be involved in it.

There are mechanisms out in the world for everybody to be involved. But fewer people are getting involved in their community unless it’s an issue that really upsets them. But there are other issues where we need to be aware of what’s going on. So hopefully they’re learning some lessons here. If those lessons continue through the later years of their schooling and later in life, they should encourage involvement and citizenship.

AD: This raises the issue of buy-in from other schools. I can well imagine you have colleagues at other schools who think: “We’re doing OK. Maybe we’re not excellent. But we’re very good and we don’t feel the need to do anything different. And surely we couldn’t possibly take the time to have a constitutional convention, Town Halls or All School meetings or any of this stuff. We’re doing OK as we are.”

DS: Actually, some of my principal colleagues do have some sort of meeting each month in their schools. They do some sort of assembly. But it is often connected to their school-wide positive behavior plan where they’re rewarding kids. And it isn’t like at Park Forest where we have a concerted effort to have children run the meetings.

AD: What sorts of arguments or rhetoric have you found useful in talking with colleagues at other schools who think “we’re OK with where we are?”

DS: I think that they are following the plan that was outlined for them through the Pennsylvania Department of Education workshops that they attended. Some schools are having difficulties with students. They have school-wide positive behavior plans, but they are putting the principal and teachers into the role of “police officers” handing out reward tickets. The kind of student involvement we have at Park Forest offers a different approach. We have a more intrinsic model of doing the right thing because it is the right thing not because there is a reward for doing it.

AD: So there may be problems that emerge in other schools and you can start talking with other principals about more democratic practices—but you don’t use those terms. You don’t wave a big Democratic Schools flag in their face.

DS: No. That’s the quickest way to turn somebody off. But I’ll say, “Have you thought about this?”

AD: It is not an ideology you’re communicating but a set of practices that might be useful to other people.

DS: Right. Just showing people step by step how to do it. Some of my colleagues say, “Oh you think a little differently over at Park Forest.” And I quickly come back and say, “No. If you involve students in this, there is power.” So helping them to see that. Some of them don’t want to do it and that’s fine. But it would be great if they did.

If schools are having difficulties then it is very possible some of their students are not feeling their voices coming out. I am thinking of my visits to Rwanda. There is no student voice there in a classroom at least in a verbal way. The student voice that comes out there is in the carving they put on the desk where they’re writing the bad words—the nice American words that have managed to come there. Or writing all over the walls. And that’s what the students do. So their voice is coming out in a different way. And somebody has to paint it every now and then. And paint is very expensive in Africa. And so is making wood products. So there’s no voice as our students experience it there.

And consider, too, how the Rwandan government is working to save the gorillas. And the gorilla population is now coming back because they offered the people who were the poachers the opportunity to make a living wage by protecting the gorillas.

AD: So schools with difficulties would have fewer problems if they gave young people more voice.

DS: Yes, that’s my belief. Lots of my colleagues and a number of researchers I’ve read, such as Dana Mitra, Adam Fletcher, Stephanie Serriere and others stress engaging student voice is important. And not just the voice of the top academic kids. Student council in a high school is always the most popular kids. If I’m going to pull together a student group I want the kids who don’t care. They’re the ones where I’m going to find out more information about what I need to be doing.

If I have an issue here about something I want to hear from the kid who’s disconnected, who’s writing in the restroom. We rarely have writing in the restroom issues. Sometimes it’s an experiment. Somebody does it and then they realize: “oh…” Because other kids catch them. “Hey, stop doing that!” I don’t have to do that. They don’t want their school to look like awful.

AD: Let’s move on to the question of resources. You’ve talked about time. That’s a major resource. Are there other sorts of resources that you wish you had or had more of?

DS: Time is the biggest thing. And I think the other is opportunity to collaborate with other people across the country—similar people who are thinking about this.

AD: Could universities be helpful resources? Another principal of a democratic school once told me he wished universities would identify teachers who would be good at this work and direct them toward schools like his.

DS: I would want everybody to know about democratic schools. I would want universities to be teaching more about democratic schools, in general. I would like more of the work at universities to be helping open students’ minds to thinking about having a responsive classroom, eliciting student voice and engaging students in their school. Not just “here’s what discipline is.” And oftentimes they don’t even teach that until they end up in school and it is modeled for them by whoever their mentor is. Universities need to go back to essential questions like “What is the purpose of public education?”

Universities could also model a more democratic approach. Some of them are getting better at having more engagement work, but without modeling it is hard to open peoples’ minds.

AD: Last question. Fifty years from now when you’re off in the mountains canoeing and only thinking of the school once and a while and there’s a new principal, is Park Forest going to continue to be a democratic school?

DS: I hope so! I am trying to put the structures in place and have the things so that people value what we do. I don’t know if that will ensure it. When one of my colleagues retired they had promised her that her school would stay committed to democracy, student voice and participation, but it has quickly eroded.

A new principal can always walk in and say, “We’re not doing that anymore.” So I don’t think there is any way you can totally ensure that it continues other than if you’ve nurtured somebody who understands the importance of this culture and can then take over. Sometimes school boards let that happen and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes it’s dependent on who the superintendent is and what their goals are.

My community is very committed to what we do—I’m talking about the parent population. Some people move here so that their children can participate in the ways we have been talking about. I hope the things we’re doing—the All Schools, the small schools, Town Halls, etc.—all of those things become so institutionalized as simply “ the way we do things here.”

Everyone has the opportunity to learn and live within our school’s democratic practices and hopefully those will be carried into life as they become thoughtful, engaged citizens. At least that is my hope!

Work on this project was done in partnership with the Kettering Foundation.
Images provided by Donnan Stoicovy.
More of this interview can be found at the Boston Review.

Democracy in Schools: A Conversation with Donnan Stoicovy

Conversations on Participatory Democracy

Innovative democratic professionals are encouraging greater participation in some of our most fundamental institutions, yet what they are doing is rarely the focus of political theory, social science research, or what politicians talk about when they are talking about renewing American democracy. The conversations in this series aim to shed light on new democratic practices taking shape and to find out more about the dynamic people involved.

Photo by Michael Weizenegger
Photo by Michael Weizenegger

Donnan Stoicovy is the principal—or, in her words, the “lead learner”—of Park Forest Elementary School, a public K-5 school in Pennsylvania. Albert Dzur spoke with her recently about the participatory culture in her school.

 

 

 

 

 

Albert Dzur: Last year you held a series of Town Hall meetings that led to a Constitutional Convention at Park Forest school and you started with a pretty basic question: “How do we want our school to run?”

Donnan Stoicovy: Exactly! We started with discussions about “What kind of people do we want to be?” and “What is an ideal school?”—I encouraged the kids to do a little dreaming. And, of course, they know what’s realistic and what’s not–they know you can’t have chocolate covered hallways. But it was fun imagining with them. And then, “What do we value in our schools?” “What do we need to do so we can all get along in our space?” They were good discussions. Legwork for the discussions was done in their classrooms ahead of time and then students chose representatives for the Town Hall Meetings. We used a representative democracy to do all that.

AD: How did you decide to have the Town Hall meetings for the school?

DS: Well, I had been at the League of Democratic Schools meeting at the end of the school year and one of my colleagues there, Dianne Suiter, who at the time was a principal in Ohio, talked about doing something similar. She did questions like “What do we value in our school?” “What do we want to maintain in our schools?” So, as I started thinking about what she was doing, I thought this would be a great way to address what the Pennsylvania Department of Education is trying to do with what is called a “school-wide positive behavior plan.” Having been through many professional development experiences about classroom management and behavior, I wanted to approach the process of developing a plan with everyone’s voices being heard and developing something that we could all agree with as our school plan. Doing it democratically seemed to me to be the right way to engage everyone.

Two years ago, I had facilitated some conversations with parents about what kind of people they want their children to become. They didn’t talk about filling in the bubbles or doing some sort of standardized testing. They wanted their children to be people who could think critically, question authority, and make our world a better place. There was a whole list of things. I did the discussion twice and I had about 50-55 parents attend. So these conversations with our Park Forest Elementary school community members, plus hearing what Diane Suiter had done at her school inspired me. So I started thinking about it and talking with my colleagues here in our school.

AD: Did anything surprise you? Did you hear anything from the kids that you didn’t expect or that you hadn’t heard from teachers and parents?

DS: Nothing surprised me, but it did impress me that even kindergartners in my own “small school gathering” group had ideas of what kind of people they wanted to be. I remember thinking “Oh they get it!” My thoughts were, “Wow this is wonderful: they really do know what they want our world to be like and what they want their role to be in it.”

AD: So the kids really took it seriously.

DS: Oh yes, you could put your teeth into it. They talked about local environmental issues, for example, and wanted to solve some of those.

AD: Do you feel like it has had an impact on how the school was run last year and into this year?

DS: Definitely. Ultimately, we used all the information to create our school’s constitution. So this year we reviewed our Park Forest Elementary constitution on the federal U.S. Constitution Day. (PFE Constitution) Everybody got a printed copy to post in his or her classroom and we talked about what the different values meant.

So, going back to the Town Hall meetings at Park Forest, each of the small school gathering groups were assigned common areas to establish guidelines for: the ways we should be when we use the restroom, the ways we should be in the hall, the ways we should be when we’re on our buses, etc. Then they presented those at our All School Gathering in which everyone participates. Each of them was assigned a different week so they would present theirs with their small school group. Then everybody had a copy of those to review with kids over time.

AD: Was there any dispute over any of it? Did a group ever present a rule that other people disagreed with?

DS: No. They’re very realistic about things when you set the right tone. In the “Ideal School” part I wanted them to dream what would be fun. Every classroom came up with a poster about what an ideal school would have in it—so there’s chocolate covered slides and so on. But then they have values like “Respectful,” “Friendly.” One has “Helpful–the cafeteria is a helpful place,” “Caring everywhere,” “Kindness,” “We recycle,” “It’s an awesome place.” Another one did a little more of the big dreaming. They wanted a movie theater here and a computer café. And there are already computers everywhere here! They wanted a place where pets could be and a bug room. Another poster says: “No bullying,” “Helping others,” “Quiet areas for reading.”

This Town Hall information became the supporting evidence for our Constitutional Convention, which we convened several months later.

AD: You weren’t surprised by what came out of the Town Hall meetings, but I wonder if there were any ideas that came forward from the students that made you think: “Oh, they really do care about this.”

DS: Bullying was one thing that they talked a lot about in numerous conversations. What their definition of what bullying was. They felt like it isn’t here and they don’t want it to be here. They talked about how we head it off—each student doing his or her best to prevent it from happening here. Our fifth graders wrote a song and created a skit that they presented in every classroom.

AD: So they were taking some of the responsibility. It’s not just that they want the school to do something about bullying. They were saying “we’re going to be part of making sure we don’t have this at Park Forest.”

DS: Right. They demonstrated to me that they wanted to be proactive about it. Their song was really cute and they were very enthusiastic!

So, getting back to our school’s constitution. In the constitution, the kids wrote: “In order to form a better school, create a place where people want to be, establish fairness and kindness.” The kids wrote all this. We helped guide the process—we let them narrow down the words and that’s all. “To ensure the safety and well-being of all and promote learning and citizenship, we hereby create this constitution for Park Forest.” And their rights: “Feel safe in our school; Speak what we believe and not be judged for it.” That one’s pretty sophisticated. “Be appreciated and recognized and celebrate our success; Experience creative, engaging, and fun learning; Learn and help others learn; Have a safe learning environment both inside and out; Be respected; Help the community both inside and outside; Be treated fairly; and Have opportunities to serve our school.”

AD: It seems like you really got to some core issues.

DS: Yes. And then their responsibilities were really cool too: “Learn and teach others what we’ve learned; Work hard and do our personal best; Respect our school and those in it; Use our manners; Care for others and our environment; Actively engage in learning; Work with others and cooperate.” This one’s cool: “Share appreciation of others, take notice of their needs and show faith in them.”

AD: This took a lot of time and effort. Not something you would do every year.

DS: It was a much longer process than have a committee of teachers create the rules and tell the students what they were as many schools do in their school-wide positive behavior plans. Plus it was more effective in connecting our school’s community by creating a constitution. We’ll renew it in a few years since it did take some time. We’re going to keep it the way it is right now unless there’s an issue with something. After three or four years quite a few of the kids will have moved on from our school to the middle school. We can start from the frame of what we have and see: Is this what we really want or do we need to revise it? I realize our country doesn’t do that every year! But you know if we just hang it on the wall, it doesn’t live.

The other part of the process that was really powerful was how homerooms selected their representatives.

AD: How did that work?

Well our fifth grade used the Electoral College process. Because they were trying to teach what the Electoral College was.

AD: Those smart fifth graders!

DS: Yes. So the teachers did that with the kids and it was great. Kids who thought they would get to be a representative sometimes didn’t get chosen because by Electoral College it worked differently. There was a video clip on the CBS Sunday Morning Show that explained it. So the teachers used that video clip as a good model for the kids and then they experienced it.

Some of the other classrooms had elections. The kids did speeches as to why they thought they should be selected. Each classroom had a representative and an alternate for the convention so we let both students come. We had 44 kids total who were at our constitutional convention.

We met twice. After the first meeting, they went back to their classmates, and shared what had happened. One fourth grader set up a Google doc and put all of the information that we had shared with them in it and asked her classmates to add to that Google doc. And they were just learning how to use Google docs so she put that up and the teacher was blown away. The student took it really seriously: she asked the other students things like “Okay, so what do you think about these? I have to narrow this down…” and her classmates gave her input.

AD: Let’s talk now about some of the barriers you’ve encountered in moving your school in a more democratic direction. You’ve mentioned a problem of pedagogical philosophy, which is the conventional mindset of teaching subjects rather than people. I wonder if you have encountered other barriers to this work?

DS: It takes time. That’s probably the biggest barrier for some people. “Like why don’t you just tell us what to do?” Obviously, I want it to be a shared situation, so I say to people: “It’s really important that we construct this together. It doesn’t have to be the way anybody else’s school is but it has to be what fits us.”

When we changed our lunchroom, one of the teachers said to another teacher: “Why doesn’t she just tell us what the rules are?” “You know,” he said, “it would be a whole lot easier and take less time.” And the other teacher took the opportunity to teach him what I was doing and why I was doing it that way. Yes, it would be easier and take less time, but it would be my rules for our place. The more ownership into something, the more people will come together to do the hard work we need to sustain this place.

Some surprises have sometimes emerged as we work with everybody. The teachers and I came to realize that our students really do think about things like to be mannerly, to be kind to each other, for example. They are important to them. Some teachers reacted: “Oh wow, I didn’t even know that they really got this, that they came to school with all of this.” I have found that our belief in students gets higher and more established when we allow students to have voice and when we provide the platform for them to share it.

AD: As you were talking, I was trying to think of why somebody would say: “Why doesn’t Donnan just tell us what to do?” It could be that they’re worried about making a mistake. They feel like they don’t have enough experience. They don’t want to take on the responsibility. Do you think that is what’s going on?

DS: Sometimes people are just used to having somebody telling them what to do: “Here’s the rules and that’s the way it is and let’s do this as a school.” The only rules we have provided are through our effort to develop citizens; we’ve said to everybody that these rules include characteristics of citizenship like Trustworthiness, Active Listening, No Put Downs, Personal Best. We could develop our own school rules and have everyone participate in that, but we just felt using those ideals fit what we think of as citizenship so nobody here had any issues with having those be our rules.

But, yes, I think you’re right that a person can think it would be just easier if the principal told us what to do and we did it. Then they don’t have to have that responsibility or ownership if things fail.

AD: I think what you’re asking your colleagues and students is, “I want you to be co-owners of this school,” and maybe that’s a lot to ask somebody who is not quite sure whether that’s what they want to do with the rest of their life.

DS: Exactly. That’s what’s going on. Hopefully the kids are getting that it is really important for them to be involved. That’s the most important message for me to be giving them. We can change things, but everyone has to be involved in it.

There are mechanisms out in the world for everybody to be involved. But fewer people are getting involved in their community unless it’s an issue that really upsets them. But there are other issues where we need to be aware of what’s going on. So hopefully they’re learning some lessons here. If those lessons continue through the later years of their schooling and later in life, they should encourage involvement and citizenship.

AD: This raises the issue of buy-in from other schools. I can well imagine you have colleagues at other schools who think: “We’re doing OK. Maybe we’re not excellent. But we’re very good and we don’t feel the need to do anything different. And surely we couldn’t possibly take the time to have a constitutional convention, Town Halls or All School meetings or any of this stuff. We’re doing OK as we are.”

DS: Actually, some of my principal colleagues do have some sort of meeting each month in their schools. They do some sort of assembly. But it is often connected to their school-wide positive behavior plan where they’re rewarding kids. And it isn’t like at Park Forest where we have a concerted effort to have children run the meetings.

AD: What sorts of arguments or rhetoric have you found useful in talking with colleagues at other schools who think “we’re OK with where we are?”

DS: I think that they are following the plan that was outlined for them through the Pennsylvania Department of Education workshops that they attended. Some schools are having difficulties with students. They have school-wide positive behavior plans, but they are putting the principal and teachers into the role of “police officers” handing out reward tickets. The kind of student involvement we have at Park Forest offers a different approach. We have a more intrinsic model of doing the right thing because it is the right thing not because there is a reward for doing it.

AD: So there may be problems that emerge in other schools and you can start talking with other principals about more democratic practices—but you don’t use those terms. You don’t wave a big Democratic Schools flag in their face.

DS: No. That’s the quickest way to turn somebody off. But I’ll say, “Have you thought about this?”

AD: It is not an ideology you’re communicating but a set of practices that might be useful to other people.

DS: Right. Just showing people step by step how to do it. Some of my colleagues say, “Oh you think a little differently over at Park Forest.” And I quickly come back and say, “No. If you involve students in this, there is power.” So helping them to see that. Some of them don’t want to do it and that’s fine. But it would be great if they did.

If schools are having difficulties then it is very possible some of their students are not feeling their voices coming out. I am thinking of my visits to Rwanda. There is no student voice there in a classroom at least in a verbal way. The student voice that comes out there is in the carving they put on the desk where they’re writing the bad words—the nice American words that have managed to come there. Or writing all over the walls. And that’s what the students do. So their voice is coming out in a different way. And somebody has to paint it every now and then. And paint is very expensive in Africa. And so is making wood products. So there’s no voice as our students experience it there.

And consider, too, how the Rwandan government is working to save the gorillas. And the gorilla population is now coming back because they offered the people who were the poachers the opportunity to make a living wage by protecting the gorillas.

AD: So schools with difficulties would have fewer problems if they gave young people more voice.

DS: Yes, that’s my belief. Lots of my colleagues and a number of researchers I’ve read, such as Dana Mitra, Adam Fletcher, Stephanie Serriere and others stress engaging student voice is important. And not just the voice of the top academic kids. Student council in a high school is always the most popular kids. If I’m going to pull together a student group I want the kids who don’t care. They’re the ones where I’m going to find out more information about what I need to be doing.

If I have an issue here about something I want to hear from the kid who’s disconnected, who’s writing in the restroom. We rarely have writing in the restroom issues. Sometimes it’s an experiment. Somebody does it and then they realize: “oh…” Because other kids catch them. “Hey, stop doing that!” I don’t have to do that. They don’t want their school to look like awful.

AD: Let’s move on to the question of resources. You’ve talked about time. That’s a major resource. Are there other sorts of resources that you wish you had or had more of?

DS: Time is the biggest thing. And I think the other is opportunity to collaborate with other people across the country—similar people who are thinking about this.

AD: Could universities be helpful resources? Another principal of a democratic school once told me he wished universities would identify teachers who would be good at this work and direct them toward schools like his.

DS: I would want everybody to know about democratic schools. I would want universities to be teaching more about democratic schools, in general. I would like more of the work at universities to be helping open students’ minds to thinking about having a responsive classroom, eliciting student voice and engaging students in their school. Not just “here’s what discipline is.” And oftentimes they don’t even teach that until they end up in school and it is modeled for them by whoever their mentor is. Universities need to go back to essential questions like “What is the purpose of public education?”

Universities could also model a more democratic approach. Some of them are getting better at having more engagement work, but without modeling it is hard to open peoples’ minds.

AD: Last question. Fifty years from now when you’re off in the mountains canoeing and only thinking of the school once and a while and there’s a new principal, is Park Forest going to continue to be a democratic school?

DS: I hope so! I am trying to put the structures in place and have the things so that people value what we do. I don’t know if that will ensure it. When one of my colleagues retired they had promised her that her school would stay committed to democracy, student voice and participation, but it has quickly eroded.

A new principal can always walk in and say, “We’re not doing that anymore.” So I don’t think there is any way you can totally ensure that it continues other than if you’ve nurtured somebody who understands the importance of this culture and can then take over. Sometimes school boards let that happen and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes it’s dependent on who the superintendent is and what their goals are.

My community is very committed to what we do—I’m talking about the parent population. Some people move here so that their children can participate in the ways we have been talking about. I hope the things we’re doing—the All Schools, the small schools, Town Halls, etc.—all of those things become so institutionalized as simply “ the way we do things here.”

Everyone has the opportunity to learn and live within our school’s democratic practices and hopefully those will be carried into life as they become thoughtful, engaged citizens. At least that is my hope!

Work on this project was done in partnership with the Kettering Foundation.
Images provided by Donnan Stoicovy.
More of this interview can be found at the Boston Review.

Trench Democracy: Conversations on Participatory Democracy

We’re happy to announce a new long-running series with Albert Dzur. His dispatches from the front lines of civics will be available in full here and excerpts will run on the Boston Review website.

Read Albert Dzur’s new piece in the Boston Review on civic practice, introducing the series:

Bringing lay people together to make justice, education, public health, and public safety—when done as a routine part of the normal social environment—helps fill in the erosion produced by the destructuring of public life. It is accomplished in part by repairing our frayed participatory infrastructure—the traditional town meetings, public hearings, jury trials, citizen oversight committees, for example—but also by remodeling this and creating new civic spaces. Democratic professionals in schools, public health clinics, and prisons who share their load-bearing work are innovators who are expanding, not just conserving, our neglected democratic inheritance.

Editorial Board Member Peter Levine discusses the project here.