...Not saying that would make him a good sec'y of education, but I can see why he might have named that as a position.'' snag
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That's good to hear. While I was thinking about Powell, I just didn't get it. I was looking for someone who had been a teacher. But what I wanted to see, was someone who had felt the insecurities of the job. (Something you certainly know about) This goes to dismantling NCLB and the whole teacher performance and assesment driven mentality. Like all the other agencies Bush screwed up, Education is going to need a real deep cleaning
Now the lecture, not to snag, but to others who may not know about this stuff...
One of the things that Nixon did to kill the effectiveness of OE's War on Poverty programs to reform and improve local school systems, was he regionalized the central DC offices and staffs and moved them out the federal regional headquarters. The intended political effect was to expose the high minded reformers (he couldn't get rid of) to the conservative local and state power. That bureaucratic shuffle didn't do too much damage to us, because OE's regional office was in San Francisco.
But the effectiveness of OE's WOP programs in the midwest and south were basically killed off by Nixon's regionalization. That decentralized system has never been reversed as far as I know.
The point. If any serious reform in education is developed, Powell or somebody else will have to design a bureauccratic system that makes it work. This idea that sitting back DC and reading reports doesn't work. There are all these little details that need change to: increases in staff of course, bigger travel budgets, manditory field visits and so forth. When Nixon regionalized the system, he also cut out almost all travel allotments. This meant none of the programs's local staff could afford to get back to DC, except once a year for program review.
When Johnson put WOP in place, he purposely centralized the command in DC because he knew these new programs would start havoc everywhere and they would need direct access to federal level protection. He could also keep track of them better. The Chief in our section (Trio) was a civil rights lawyer. So he could get on a plane and go to one of these states elected officials or local district offices and read them the Act!
Our program was run out of a rundown apartment behind a hot dog joint. We served hot lunch everyday. (Most of the eating places on campus and off were inacessable.) So when our Chief came to visit, we all sat around the table and had a homemade lunch, talking politics and program stuff like mad. God, it was grand.
Since the military is very aware of this problem of central control and communication with the outlands, hopefully somebody like Powell will recognize the problem.
Under most circumstances, I hate this kind of hierarchy system. But in the very limited case of my experience with OE in the context of WOP, it was great. We felt supported, our back's were covered so we could face the rather nasty UCB system and go to work.
After regionalization, the next thing to hit the program were the bean counters. Instead of field visits and travel back to DC for reports and reviews, now we had all these statistics to collect and report on a bunch of different forms. Several of these forms were completely irrelevant and had been pulled out of some other division of HEW. We were now under the performance and assestment gun. One of these systems had us take the proposal guidelines, write up a series of goals to achieve that implimented the guidlines, then break these goals down into Man Years, Man Months, Man Days, Man Hours. The shaff of the project where then assigned to prove they were achieving their assigned goals by using some statistic measure, like hours worked on such and such, students served in such and such a capacity.
We all laughted at this bullshit. Is McNamira at HEW? Sure we did our forms and reports and made sure the data looked great. The concrete problem was there were no achievable goals, because we were running an on-going service project. How many students were served was irrelevant. The point was we created services for students who needed them, in a system where there were none.
The year before when our DC Chief came to visit (wish I could remember his name) and came to lunch, he got it immediately. He saw the problems and saw what we were doing about them. For example, why were we running a soup kitchen? That sure as hell wasn't in the guidelines. He saw why, very few accesible places to eat. Bingo. (We had to buy food by a staff contribution system, then those who could do cooking and kitchen work did. It followed the each according to ability, each according to need idea. This was were I learned how to cook for a small crowd of about ten to twenty sometimes more, depending on how many students dropped in. On my days to cook, I usually made chili and bought some sourdough loaves. I could these pretty cheap at the day old bakery down the street. I sound like Martha here, don't I...)
This lunch system was really part of the heart of the whole program. We held our staff meetings at lunch with students around, so they could see what this project was, and their part of it. We could find out immediately if they were having trouble with this or that and figure out how to fix it. This helped defeat the usual top down design system.
Anyway, I went into this story, so people who don't know about all this can see why the War on Poverty was such a big deal. And hopefully imagine why state and local governments hated these projects. We were bypassing the whole local control system. And that was exactly what Johnson wanted.
Other reasons to go into this are government services like public education systems have been purposefully ruined and broken by policy for a long time. It's been so long, I am not sure anybody remembers anything that actually worked to make life better. So I'd like to imagine how that kind of change for the better might work, without the damned sniveling bean counter mentality in charge.
I certainly want Clinton's welfare reform system entirely dismantled and rebuilt. Here the title says it all, Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (1996). See? Personal responsibility for being poor?
I am pretty sure none of the above is going to happen, but I needed to get it off my chest as to how it should be done.
CG