Personalization vs. systems and structures in government

The progressive movement to "improve government" in the early part of the last century was an effort to constrain the worst aspects of machine politics. In some respects it was an anti-democratic movement, designed to limit the impact of immigrant-based political machines to control local government.

In some respects, you could argue that the progressive movement (and the creation of the civil service before that) was about the professionalization and regularizing of government vs. personality-based politics and favors.

Maybe at the level of local government, we haven't moved all that far forward in 100 years.

DC's government is characterized by personalization over structures and systems.

The push to "reform" the schools is a perfect example.

Yesterday's Harry Jaffe column in the Examiner, "Democracy and King Fenty," states that democracy is worth scuttling when government doesn't work.

But the real issue is to improve government--to identify why the systems and structures don't work, and correct the problems, thereby building the capacity from within in order to maintain and extend improvements.

Instead, begging the question, the solution is to hand off the problem to the Mayor.

As Colbert King wrote in last week's Saturday column in the Post, "Who Left D.C.'s Schools to Decay?"

The problems with the school system are much deeper than the particular governance arrangement although the recent debacle over funding impropriety in the charter school division demonstrates that a goodly part of the problem is personalization over professionalism.

I joke that the reason that the school system is perhaps the least well functioning unit in DC Government is because that's where local control of government first happened.

The issue is why did the machine (Barry etc.) allow personalization to trump professionalism?

A good resource, although it is about Baltimore, is the book Amazon.com: Black Social Capital: The Politics of School Reform in Baltimore by Marion Orr. According to the website on the book:

Deindustrialization, white flight, and inner city poverty have spelled trouble for Baltimore schools. Marion Orr now examines why school reform has been difficult to achieve there, revealing the struggles of civic leaders and the limitations placed on Baltimore's African-American community as each has tried to rescue a failing school system. ...

The book features case studies of school reform activity, including the first analysis of the politics surrounding Baltimore's decision to hire a private, for-profit firm to operate nine of its public schools. These cases illuminate the paradoxical aspects of black social capital in citywide school reform while offering critical perspectives on current debates about privatization, site-based management, and other reform alternatives.

Orr's book challenges those who argue that social capital alone can solve fundamentally political problems by purely social means and questions the efficacy of either privatization or black community power to reform urban schools. Black Social Capital offers a cogent conceptual synthesis of social capital theory and urban regime theory that demonstrates the importance of government, politics, and leadership in converting social capital into a resource that can be mobilized for effective social change.

It is telling that local experts at GWU and UMD, who have been managing a National Science Foundation cross-city study on urban education reform, haven't been consulted at all in terms of proposals for school system change in DC.

Colbert King, the Post columnist, has also written about the response of the Council on Great City Schools to the current Administration's proposal. It is not favorable.

The solution is to fix the democracy, to build the capacity for civic engagement and the demand for good government.

Something I figured out when dealing with telecommunications issues back in the 1990s, with the "Telecommunications Reform Act," and when a colleague asked me what I thought the impact would be, I said for the most part, big companies would be allowed to become much much bigger.

1. There is a difference between first order change (moving things around) and substantive, second order change. (See Change: Principles of Problem Formation and Problem Resolution)
2. If systems and structures aren't working, that's where the focus needs to be. (My reading of the "hygiene" part of Herzberg's theory. (2 Factor Hygiene and Motivation Theory.)
3. The flip point of the idea of the "Wisdom of Crowds" is the need to build our capacity to function as participating citizens. When we don't build the capacity of our democracy, we don't function very well.
4. Reform isn't necessarily "change."
5. And "change" isn't necessarily "transformation."