MAP 150

MAP 150 has truly required a leap of faith. I repeatedly find skepticism everywhere–(subject of my next post). But if you haven’t checked out Students Speak Out or Property Tax Facts lately, you should. You’ll see firsthand the power of involving citizens.

We have many new members on Students Speak Out, as a result of Carolyn Avaire’s presentation at the Minnesota Asssociation of Alternatives Program annual meeting that students attend. 122 students responded! 38 said they were interested in being student leaders. This suggests to me that students do have something to say and they will take the time to be involved if given the opportunity.

They continue to say important and thoughtful things.

Ashley writes: I was in the district and I needed help and they basically told my step mom to sent me to Irondale which was the district next to us.

Kasie writes: When you reach High School you are supposed to be older and mature and know right from wrong. Well why don’t they give us one chance to show we are?? From the minute you step into the door they are looking for you to screw up.

Can there be any doubt that we need to listen to students?

Property taxes can be a pretty dry subject. But citizens from three counties took their time to discuss with us what they’d like to know. One hot issue is school referenda. The citizens said that they felt like it was impossible to get good, unbiased information– instead, they feel heavy pressure from both sides. So we put together a very basic drop down menu on the website where people can look up their district’s data. We had over 5500 visits in one week. Two-thirds of those who took our survey said that the information did or might influence their vote.

What might this mean? Perhaps that people do want good information and that they are willing to learn. Again, if provided the right opportunity, they will involve themselves.

My faith in “citizens”– regular people– keeps growing. Sean and I made a presentation about MAP 150 to the Minnesota Public Health Association, where one woman very insightfully commented: “Experts think about systems, people think about outcomes. Experts talk about the health care system, people talk abouyt health. Experts talk about the educational system, people talk about learning. Experts talk about the transportation system; people talk about traffic.”

Hmmm… It makes sense. When experts and special interests talk about an issue, they are consumed with the “rules” of the system (see previous Policy and a Pint blog posts.) When people talk about an issue, they sense simply that the outcome is not right, and thus they are far more inpatient and frustrated with all the gibberish about how this or that won’t work…

In yesterday’s New York Times, Gary Bass, associate professor at Princeton, reviews a book by economist Bryan Caplan. Caplan argues that voters are “biased, irrational, manipulable and plain ignorant.” Bass writes:
“Of all the people who deserve blame for the debacle in Iraq, don’t forget the American public…the two sides (doves and hawks) implicity agree that the public has been dangerousy unsure, or easily propagandized, or ignorant.”

This just gets my blood boiling. Congress authorized the damn war, and surely they had access to far more unfiltered information than the American people. Rather than viewing Americans’ turnabout on the war as people being weak minded, how about giving them some credit to paying attention to what’s going on? Yes, there was some information to the contrary leading up to the war, but if I recall these people were being called traitors and unpatriotric by the Administration. Congress bought the war hook, line and sinker, and they, the Administration and the media sold the war–there was no public discourse. Hey, the New York Times apologized for missing the boat on the war. Just where is the American public supposed to get its information if it can’t trust the media or the people it elects?

The lack of public discourse on Iraq compelled me to create a web page on Iraq. I guess it’s my own personal MAP 150 experiment. I wondered whether the outcome might have been different if we had all chimed in at the time. Many argue that the outcome was inevitable. Perhaps so, but you never know what an honest discussion will produce.

I do have to give Bass credit. He wonders at the end of the review whether it’s the politicans letting the voters down. Amen, hallelujiah and the like.

I confess: I’m an American Idol fan. It’s not that I like the music or the celebrity hoo-ha. Rather, each week a group of young adults put their hearts and souls on the line. A waitress from a small town. A backup singer who never thought she had the talent to star. A farm girl who had never been on an airplane until she was flown to Los Angeles. They are inspirational.

Of course, Idol is a mega-mega-million dollar hit. So whoever has that knack of striking for gold came up with the idea of “Idol Gives Back.” Broadcast last night, it featured the starving and AIDs-stricken children of Africa. The all-star singing guests were background.

It may have turned me off of Idol forever.

Exactly what Fox and the Idol judges Cowles, Abdul and Jackson were giving back wasn’t clear. Coca-cola’s five million was amply rewarded in commercials. Con Agra’s donation? Hmmm… who profits from food aid to Africa? The rest of us saps were implored to donate any dollar we could. (Oh, did I mention that Idol got 70 million votes for that show, almost double the norm? Who’s giving and who’s receiving here?)

The scenes and stories from Africa were heart-wrenching. An orphaned 12-year old boy serving as surrogate father to his 7 year sister and living in an 8×10 “house” is a lesson to us all. Forget Idol Gives Back. Here’s the real lesson.

Dollars do matter. But let’s not use the occasional donation to blind us from what’s really going on. Bad stuff around the world doesn’t just happen. Everybody is complicit. Each of us is complicit. The truth is that American food policy serves American interests far more than the starving people in Africa, and we could demand that it be changed. The truth is that our over the top consumption of energy is contributing to global warming, which is having the most devastating effect on the poorest countries around the world. American farm subsidies combined with NAFTA have put Mexican corn farmers out of business, encouraging illegal immigration to the U.S.

Things happen for a reason.

Last Tuesday I was in a car accident in Minneapolis. It wasn’t my fault, and it wasn’t serious, but it was interesting. It happened next to Bob’s Java Hut in Minneapolis– my car was parked there at the stop sign in the picture.
I went in to buy a cup of coffee, and the kind person behind the counter said that the coffee was on her. Really?? Yes, she replied, these accidents happen here all the time. Same time of day? Yes– (I happened to be at this corner because I needed to go south on Lyndale from Lake, and left turns are prohibited from 4-6; this was the first path back to Lyndale)– lots of school buses restricting vision and my guess, lots of traffic winding through from the prohibited left turn.

Turns out lots of people at Bob’s Java Hut were aware of the frequent accidents. They also knew that it would take the police an hour or more to show up– “they have more important things to attend to.” It would seem to me that paying attention to what these folks know in a coffee shop could reduce accidents and help the police attend to more critical matters. I didn’t even bother to ask whether anyone tried to contact the city about this though. I think I know the answer.

As a post script, there were three cars involved. One was driven by a young African American. Apparently the police asked whether he had anything on him (after an hour or more of waiting, you’d like to think he would have gotten rid of it if that were the case.) His girlfiend complained that she sees this all the time. Being Iraqi, she gets it too. She didn’t want to call it racism, but clearly she thought it was. I said, call it what it is.

As I was leaving, she motioned to the driver of the first car and said, “Those damn Somalis, They come to this country and they don’t know how to drive.”

I attended the popular (and always well done) Policy and a Pint “Health Care Handcuffs” event last Tuesday. However, I had the same feeling of unease that I usually do at events like this. Something’s missing…what is it?

It seems that whenever “experts” get together to talk about issues, no matter what the issue or how sociable the expert, there’s this something more that people are looking for. The experts may have the technically correct answers, but they don’t seem to have the societally correct ones…and this is what we’re looking for. Fundamentally, I think people want the right thing to be done.

For example, when asked why health care costs were increasing so much, one of the presenters said that that’s what wealthy societies spend their money on. Health care has replaced other sectors such as transportation for its role in driving the economy. In fact (he said)…health care might beome 25% , maybe even 50% of our economic output, and would that be a bad thing?

I know that people around me at the event were thinking this: Bad for whom? I know this because they chucked when the speaker made his point. It might be a great thing for the economy, but for people who have trouble affording health care, costs that rise at twice the rate of inflation is not good news under any circumstance.

People have a sense that the common good is not being served. So when they hear the usual technical or theoretical arguments, their natural response, is “But wait a minute!” A recent New York Times survey fund that two-thirds of Americans favor providing health care for the uninsured over lowering costs for everybody. 60% are willing to pay more in taxes for everbody to have access to insurance, and 49% are willing to pay $500 or more.

How do we refocus on the end goal– on what needs to happen– and away from all the reasons we’re told it can’t?

I see MAP 150 everywhere I go– in almost every news story, conversation, public problem. I’m referring to the power of regular people (virtually unused at this point) to help solve public problems.

I’ve been trying to pay attention to how “stuck” things are in old, habitual ways of thinking. For example, a Pew Survey shows that more than three-quarters of school superintendents think that the low academic standards in their local schools are not a problem. Yet, in a just-released survey by the University of Indiana, two-thirds of students (81,000 from 26 states!) say that are bored every day in school.

Pundits and school administrators will quibble that these are two very different questions. Yet there is no mistaking that students and superintendents have very different ideas about what is happening in schools. How can we possibly expect the “experts” to improve education when their views are so different from students– and the students are the ones who have the ultimate decision-making authority over whether or not they will learn?

Here at home we have the bruhaha over North High. Kudos to Don Samuels for being brave enough to raise the issue. It matters less whether he’s right or wrong, and much, much more that he’s calling attention to the need for improving education. It’s clear that there are differences of opinion on the quality of North High…just as there are differences of opinion on the quality of education more generally. We need to be able to confront these differences, to have civil discussions about what we want from education, to bring in those who are at the receiving end of policy decisions, namely the students.