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Sustaining Reform
VUE Number 9, Fall 2005
An interview with Carolyn Akers,  Audio Clip 1
Executive Director, Mobile Area Education Foundation
You talk in your article about a "civic infrastructure." Why is a civic infrastructure necessary for reform and how did you set about building one in Mobile?
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TRANSCRIPT:
For us, history has proven that education reform is not rocket science, but it very definitely is political science. What I mean by that is, researchers and educational experts clearly know what the ingredients of sustainable reform are. You have to have high expectations, you've got to have high standards, leadership, etc., etc., etc. For us in Mobile County, the missing ingredient seemed to be the public. Where was the public in all of this? And more specifically, really, what the role of the community is. Where did they fit in in this whole process of school improvement?
Traditionally, for us, the public had been called upon to support public education, either by voting in additional property taxes or volunteering in the classroom at the local school level. For me, they had been asked to participate in certain activities more than as true partners and owners of the school system. For us, we needed to find a way that we could involve the public in more substantial ways and also, quite honestly, have them be full-fledged partners with our school system in making improvement happen.
David Matthews at the Kettering Foundation defines an engaged public as a committed, interrelated citizenry rather than a persuaded populace. That resonated a lot with me and with the folks that had been working in these vineyards for so long in Mobile County, because we had considered ourselves to be very public-engagement-minded. From our very earliest days, the first funding I received when I was trying to develop the foundation was to go into the community and conduct community meetings to do listening. From the very onset we've always believed that the public needed to have a voice and that part of our work and our mission was to provide some of the conduit for that.
What we've learned over time is that, up until this latest public engagement initiative, that has resulted in all this reform for us, is that what we were really doing in those prior years is that we were going to the public and persuading them. Somebody, somewhere had decided, "Here are the important issues," and then we would go into the community and we would have meetings around those. This time, what we did is we went into the community and we listened. And we said, "What kind of community do you want to live in? And what kind of schools do you have to have to get that?" And so it was really much more citizen-driven than it has ever been before.
This quote from David is particularly significant because it talks about relationships and making these connections between different citizens and putting in programs, projects, things that are going to help you do that. For me, the civic infrastructure is taking that and really trying to figure out how you develop what it is to deliver the community wants and needs. You've got to be strategic and purposeful in developing the civic infrastructure. It doesn't just happen. It's very deliberate and very deep into levels into the community.
So to me, this way is necessary, because most improvement efforts get to a plan of action. I'm sure that many of the folks that will listen to this, certainly clearly for us, we all have long-range strategic plans that are sitting on shelves collecting dust. We've all put forth very valiant efforts to line up what the goals and the objectives are in school improvement, but it doesn't ever get to implementation. We just fall short there. To me, we deliberately and strategically connected citizen concerns to an action framework that could then ensure both accountability for results and could ensure implementation of the plan.
So it's not that the civic infrastructure serves as a watchdog; it's really more it is a key partner with the district on making sure that whatever we collectively decide to do together is implemented, but that also, we take some responsibility on the community side for making sure that we do what we have to do for implementation's sake as well. So there's accountability on both sides of the equation.
To me the role of the public has changed from being a supporter – which still is important – to really being more of a partner with our district. Clearly, part of the partnership is you continue to support. But the new role also includes monitoring progress of the plan, it involves mobilizing the entire community to aligned targets and actions, so that we're not just talking the talk, we're also walking it by everybody lining up over here that's going to be working in certain areas.
There's a certain amount of coordinating and organizing that has to happen. Laughingly, I always say in my office that a vision without action is a hallucination, and I think a lot of times we stop on the community side at trying to just get the vision right, but we don't put in place the things that can certainly ensure that action is there. So for me, ultimately it's all about mobilizing ongoing political will to do what we need to do to implement.
So when I say it's not rocket science, but it's political science, what I mean is that there's a certain amount of little-p politics that clearly has to be connected to this important work, and that to me is what the civic infrastructure is. It's a permanent fixture that brings pressure for change, mobilization of different kind of actors throughout the community, and it also brings support and resources as well. So that, to me, is what it is.
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