School boards as an element of democracy and strengthening citizen participation in local civic affairs

I love how Charlie Kirk said some murders were acceptable collateral damage from having a strong Second Amendment providing for gun ownership rights (the US has gone far beyond the reading of the original meaning of this amendment in expanding gun rights to individuals rather than to militias.

The same goes for democracy more generally, and citizen oversight.  Sometimes it's messy  and fractious.  Sometimes it leads to fraud and corruption.  The solution isn't to eliminate the oversight when it's problematic but to improve it.

For example, with DC's Advisory Neighborhood Councils, to reduce financial abuse, I argue all the bank accounts should be run through the city system, with checks beyond the existing ones when an ANC has an account at a local bank branch.

Calgary.

As importantly, in response to complaints about effectiveness of neighborhood councils, my response is to say we don't provide a training and technical assistance infrastructure for them--whereas cities like Seattle and Calgary ("Community association planning committees a hidden gem?," Calgary Herald, "New life for community associations," CREB) do, very effectively ("On the Role and Future of Calgary's Community Associations," University of Calgary).

In Calgary, community associations run recreation centers, not the city, such as the Thorncliffe-Northview Community Association with 800+ members and a recreation center with community functions.  "Calgary's 151 associations include approximately 1,800 board members, along with another 18,000 volunteers who run programs, said FCC."

-- "National Community Planning Month | Civic Involvement" (2025)
-- "Setting up DC's Advisory Neighborhood Commissions for success" (2022)

School boards.  The same goes for school boards.  Citizen oversight has been problematic for a long time.  This was true when NYC in the 1960s created community boards to provide input.  And with school boards in inner cities and suburbs both.

My solution, unlike what is suggested in Ontario, ""Getting rid of school board trustees is the right thing to do" (Toronto Star), is a training and technical assistance infrastructure with participation tied to salaries--often school board members get paid, at least in the US.

From the Star:

Perhaps they tried to persuade you that trustees embody true grassroots governance of our schools. More probably, you have no recollection of ever seeing or hearing from your local trustee, let alone voting for him or her. Possibly you have no clue what their name is after all these years — and all those elections. The reality of local democracy today is that turnout for most trustee elections is abysmally low — typically in the range of 10 to 30 per cent of eligible voters.

Yet our freshly empowered trustees gain a free hand to meddle in massive school board budgets. And then point fingers in ideological or tangential debates about what’s taught in classrooms across the province. Trustees weren’t always so disconnected.

More than 200 years ago, school trustees were Ontario’s first elected politicians, predating by decades the MPPs and MPs who later sat at Queen’s Park and on Parliament Hill. In a province dominated by one-room schoolhouses, they played a pioneering role as “trustees.”

All these years later, trustees are no longer the leading edge of democracy, they are a lagging indicator of dysfunction and distrust. Today, trustees have been overtaken in relevance and importance by senior levels of government — municipal, provincial and federal — on measures of accountability and also accounting.  ... To date, a record seven local school boards have been taken over by outside supervisors

I know there are professional associations for school boards, plus conferences (often citizens criticize attending such meetings as a waste of money) and they do get technical assistance and training, but obviously there needs to be more and better and accountability about it. 

From the Education Week story "School Boards Are Struggling. Could a New Research Effort Help?":

... Jonathan E. Collins, an assistant professor of political science and education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Education research focuses more heavily on the work of teachers and administrators, and there’s a dearth of national data on how school boards form, how they function, and how their stewardship affects student learning.

Collins founded a new research lab this month to help provide solutions and paint a clearer picture of how the most local of local governing bodies operate. The School Board and Youth Engagement Lab, or S-BYE, plans to assemble a national data set on factors such as how boards are elected and how they interact with the public. It also will partner with local boards to pilot new communications tools.

An angry crowd at a Loudoun County, Virginia, school board meeting in June, 2021. Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters

Separately, an issue in the US is fractious opponents filling school board meetings with vitriol and even threatening members to the point where they choose to no longer serve ("School boards get death threats amid rage over race, gender, mask policies," Reuters, "Mitigating Threats Against School Board Officials," Princeton, "School boards around the country are under fire. What exactly do they do?," CNN, "Culture Wars Could Be Coming to a School Board Near You," Time Magazine).  That's a different issue but one that needs to be addressed.

Constituent services funds disbursements.  Another area where I've brought this up is with constituent services funds available from Councilmembers.  I think that the decisions should be made via participatory budgeting techniques executed by citizen committees within the office ("More on ethics: discretionary funding-constituent funds," 2011).

National Community Planning Month | Civic Involvement

Public meeting in Denver.  "Ten Steps for a Great Community Meeting"

Community Involvement.  Can take so many forms.  

From DIY self-help, to Friends of the Library, Friends of the Parks organizations, grassroots councils like DC's Advisory Neighborhood Commissions or LA's Neighborhood Councils--both elect members to represent small sub-districts of the council, or to sit on various city committees, Planning and Zoning Commissions ("Few people vote in LA neighborhood council elections. And this year, turnout hit a historic low," LAist) and the like.

Outsiders tend to criticize such boards as anti-change, and against appropriate development (nimbys).

One of my criticisms of DC's ANCs is that the city doesn't invest much in the professional development of the representatives.  Theoretically there is technical assistance available, but a training infrastructure is not ("Setting up DC's Advisory Neighborhood Commissions for success").

Theoretically, a training infrastructure could help representatives be more objective and capable.

Unlike Seattle ("Building civic engagement systematically: Seattle's Department of Neighborhoods"), Los Angeles, or Calgary ("Community association planning committees a hidden gem?," Calgary Herald).  Even so, the LA Neighborhood Council system has issues ("L.A.’s Neighborhood Council members decry lack of City Hall support at annual Congress," LA Daily News).  

Like DC, LA's councils don't get much money ("Budget Reductions Proposed for Neighborhood Councils," Larchmont Buzz).  LA's don't get enough voter turnout because unlike DC, the elections aren't held during the normal election cycle, but specially.  That being said, DC's ANCs don't get tons of votes either.

New York City has Community Boards, but people are appointed by council members and Borough Presidents.  That has to effect their ability to be independent.   

WRT DC, and Friends of Libraries and Friends of Parks groups, I argue we should focus on the power of the network, and build out from it.  

WRT Library and Parks groups, I think there should be one formal organization with affinity groups/subcommittees devoted to each unit, rather than incorporating separate ones for each, with the parent group providing back office support, 501(c)3 status etc.

One thing about single commissioners is that they should be required to hold at least one public meeting per quarter (usually the overarching Commission meets monthly).  I argue that one of the meetings could be a community service event of some type, such as picking up litter.

Wendy Kheel from the NoHo Neighborhood Council volunteers at the Clean California community cleanup on Oct. 11 in North Hollywood at Lankershim and Sherman Way. (Photo courtesy of Clean California)

The LA Daily News article, "Thirty volunteers picked up two truckloads of litter and trash in North Hollywood," about a community cleanup mentions in passing that one of the participants is a member of the North Hollywood Neighborhood Council. 

Which gave me the idea that ANCs/Neighborhood Councils should also do at least one community service event, followed by a barbecue or block party each year as well.

Separately, the Mayor of Los Angeles has created a monthly cleanup day event ("Mayor Bass kicks off Shine LA clean up initiative with event in Hollywood," CBS-TV).

-- "Want to get connected in Denver? Joining your registered neighborhood association might be the move," Denverite
-- "Is a Better Community Meeting Possible?," Century Foundation

Washington Trust for Historic Preservation publishes a quarterly magazine.

Historic Preservation Groups.  States, cities, counties and/or neighborhoods may have historic preservation or local history associations, focused on presenting community history and maintaining historic buildings and neighborhoods.  

Often advocacy is organized on rehabilitation or new projects, as a neighborhood or city-wide committee is charged with reviewing and commenting on them.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation has an annual conference.  So do many state level groups.  They can be great opportunities to learn a lot very quickly.

Main Street Commercial District Revitalization Program.  Was originally created out of a desire by residents "to save local neighborhood business district historic buildings," but the National Trust for Historic Preservation soon recognized the issue was fixing broken micro-economies, because the reasons buildings were empty was because the local downtown economy wasn't working.  

Now the organization is separate from the National Trust, called Main Street America.

-- Washington Trust for Historic Preservation Main Street resources

The program is organized into committees focused on business development, organization, business promotion, and design (technically the committees may have different names).  

The groups bring together residents, business owners, property owners, the city government and other stakeholders to work together on improvements.

I think the way Main Street groups are organized is a good model for other types of organizations.  I know some museums use the model.  I'd like to try to use it as a guide to restructuring the Sugar House Park organization.

The Main Street program has an extensive technical assistance program and some publications (sadly mostly out of print) that are very good.

Biking and walking/Sustainable Mobility.  Many communities have bicycle and/or walking advocacy groups.  Active Transportation Alliance in Chicago and Transportation Alternatives in NYC focus on biking, walking, and transit.  Many communities and/or states have bicycle groups, but few communities have walking advocacy groups.

A variant is Safe Routes to School ("Why isn't walking/biking to school programming an option in Suburban Omaha? | Inadequacies in school transportation planning") which is a way to improve a community's infrastructure for kids getting to school in ways that also support broader community improvements.

Some schools organize group walk to school programs or "bike buses" ("Make Way for the Bike Bus," New York Times).

Neighborhood Planning Guidance.  I argue that neighborhoods, especially those with "recognized community organizations" like Philadelphia or Salt Lake, and sanctioned commissions ought to have at least a thumbnail plan of what they want to be, what to focus their energies on, what consensus priorities are, etc.

-- Neighborhood Planning website

It doesn't have to be a full blown master plan requiring hundreds of thousands of dollars, it can be based on some community meetings with a facilitator, ideally with some training about best practice, and the production of a framework or action plan for the community.

While my Silver Spring series on "Creating a Silver Spring "Sustainable Mobility District"

- Part 1: Setting the stage (2017)
- Part 2: Program items 1- 9 (2017)
- Part 3: Program items 10-18  (2017)
- Part 4: Conclusion (2017)
- Map for the Silver Spring Sustainable Mobility District (2017)
- (Big Hairy) Projects Action Plan(s) as an element of Comprehensive/Master Plans
- Creating the Silver Spring/Montgomery County Arena and Recreation Center (2017)

or New Carrollton ("Making over New Carrollton as a transit-centric urban center and Prince George's County's "New Downtown") "plans" were developed out of my thinking and field visits, you could argue they do provide some models.  

In "real life", the University District neighborhood of Buffalo created its own infrastructure plan, leveraging its transit connections ("Better on Bailey: Infrastructure Plan").  

So did the University District Neighborhood Council in Seattle, creating the University District Station Area Mobility Plan.

The summary is two pages.  It's a great model for what I think of as "thumbnail" plans, simpler than the plans engaging consultants costing many tens of thousands

I worked with residents to create a neighborhood priorities plan in Foggy Bottom, DC 18!!!! years ago etc.  Although it was more than two pages.

The PPS workshop "How to Turn a Place Around" and related Place Game planning tool are models of how to do a more simple kind of neighborhood planning.  

I also think the workshop serves as a potential training mechanism for interested residents, community associations, and city/county staff.  The idea is to move the workshop around a city or county, annually meeting in a different place.

I participated in an "informal" one more than 20 years ago, a training for Scenic America staff in 2004, and even though I was from the area and most of the participants were not, I found the insights and ideas developed by being on the site, but also infused by the reactions of others with a fresh approach (because they didn't live there), were powerful ("Eastern Market Metro Plaza").

In the blog entry "Outline for a proposed Ward-focused (DC) Councilmember campaign platform and agenda," I suggested that Councilmembers do this for their ward, obviously with citizen involvement, with recommendations about data collection and presentation (like where traffic accidents occur) and involvement structures.  But that can be ported down to the scale of neighborhood commissions.

Urban Design neighborhood plans.  Something else I've come to recommend, which does require a formal planning process, is the creation of urban design and placemaking plans for neighborhoods concerning streets, civic assets, and public space.  Instead of focusing on "a mode" I suggest "walkability" (which was just discussed in the previous entry, "October is National Community Planning Month | Thirteen characteristics of walkable neighborhoods | Characteristics of great places").

Besides my Silver Spring writings, I did a piece on the Dupont Circle neighborhood and 17th Street NW.  (They're iterative.)

-- "Planning urban design improvements at the neighborhood scale: Dupont Circle, DC," 2018
-- "More about making 17th Street between P and R a pedestrian space on weekends," 2019
-- "Planning for place/urban design/neighborhoods versus planning for transportation modes: new 17th Street NW bike lanes | Walkable community planning versus "pedestrian" planning," 2021

I also did a thumbnail plan, don't know where it is, for the greater area of L'Enfant Plaza and the now no longer new Wharf District ("The Wharf in D.C. Makes a Splash," Urban Land, "The Wharf, D.C.'s massive waterfront development, is now open," Architect's Newspaper).  

This 1990 photo shows the area.  L'Enfant Plaza is on top, next to it is I-695, the Southeast-Southwest Freeway.  On the bottom is the old "Waterfront District" dating to the urban renewal period.  It was redeveloped in the 2000s as "The Wharf".

The connections between the two can be much better, and taken to a quantum level with capping I-695.

The Bloomingdale neighborhood association in DC created a similar plan because the city's Office of Planning punted ("Bloomingdale Village Square Initiative will be holding its third Community Forum on the proposed North Capitol Deck-over Park").

Signage in Springfield, Missouri

Adopt-a-Street - Adopt-a-highway - Adopt-a-bus stop - Adopt-a-stream/creek - Adopt-a-storm- drain type programs.  Go for it. "Keep it Clean."

-- Adopt a Stream in Grand Rapids, Michigan
-- Adopt a storm drain, Salt Lake
-- Adopt a bus stop, Utah Transit Authority
-- Adopt a roadway, Murray, Utah

Transit stations as entrypoints to neighborhoods.  This is something that I've written a lot about.  For various reasons, stations aren't usually planned while considering their gateway, civic asset, and transportation infrastructure effects on neighborhoods ("Transit, stations, and placemaking: stations as entrypoints into neighborhoods," 2013).

Upholstered cushions affixed to a wall bench by a bus stop on wall by a bus stop on Hackney Road (Bethnal Green/Shoreditch, London) upholstered by the trainees in the Shoreditch Design Rooms upholstery program.

Bus stops and shelters too ought to be addressed in systematic ways to engage local residents and community associations ("Bus shelters as social spaces," 2020).

It'd be hard, because the stations can be quite noisy, but what about meeting rooms, office space for community groups, etc.

In the 1970s, there was an exhibit of artworks by employees of the NYC transit system, at the 57th Street Station.  

NYC Subway has big problems filling up retail spaces as the nature of ridership travel and work for home has changed how riders use the system.  They are offering some spaces to community groups, or for art exhibits ("MTA struggles to fix dead mall under New York City," Crain's New York Business).

I've also argued that transit stations should have some historical interpretation signage about the history of transit in that particular area.

Depending too on the nature of the station, there can be visitor information functions incorporated into stations.

Volunteers helping with plant maintenance at Red Butte Gardens in Salt Lake City.

Formal volunteer programs.  So many.  Museums.  Parks.  Libraries.  Visitor Centers. Public Gardens. Etc.

Big Ideas for a Better Pittsburgh | and a point about world class cities

I did some work in Pittsburgh in 2008 and got a good sense of some of the revitalizing neighborhoods there, in particular Lawrenceville, the Strip District, and East Liberty, and the city dynamics.  A couple years later, I responded to a Richard Florida piece when he was at Carnegie Mellon, calling out what I saw as Pittsburgh's advantages, which he re-tweeted.

-- "Urban economic development strategies: do you invest in people or places? ... yes," 2010 

Pittsburgh is considered one of the cities that did urban renewal, at least downtown, right (people say it failed in the Hill District, and it did; some developments on Penn Avenue towards East Liberty were torn down later.

Because "de-"vitalization started earlier there with the decline of the steel industry, they've had longer to decline, and also to experiment.  So it's a good city to pay attention to for programming.

For example, one of the first urban Main Street programs was on East Carson Street.  When we lived in DC, we vacationed there a bunch.  Etc. So I've written a bunch of pieces on it, including:

-- "Economic restructuring success and failure: Detroit compared to Bilbao, Liverpool, and Pittsburgh" 2014
-- "One hidden element of the revitalization of Pittsburgh's East Liberty neighborhood," 2015
-- "Revisiting Pittsburgh," 2019
-- ""Why do Rust Belt rivals Cleveland and Pittsburgh have diverging economies?," 2021
-- "Revisiting Pittsburgh and Allegheny County as an opportunity for city-county consolidation: The "RiversCity" proposal," 2023
-- "It's not the age of the housing stock, but the ability of property owners to maintain it: Disinvestment in Pittsburgh," 2022

Pittsburgh has strengths.  I like Pittsburgh a lot, and given the relatively un-innovative nature of DC, I think they do a lot with the resources that are present.  Local foundations really invest in the community and there are strong grassroots networks.  They have world class medical facilities and universities like Carnegie Mellon which help to cluster business development.  I mention within broader entries best practice arts initiative there, including the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust and the Penn Ave. Arts Initiative (one of the best conference tours I've ever been on!).   The Allegheny Regional Asset District is a national best practice for arts and culture funding.

The Post-Gazette seems, at least online, to do a pretty good job covering the city and region.  The city, for its size, has decent transit, including a "free fare" zone Downtown. They've got good visitor centers, a great local history museum, the Carnegie Library system, Schenley Plaza, the rivers and outdoor activities.  Stadiums on the river.  Great historic building stock from the rowhouse era.  Strong historic preservation programs.  Besides "eds and meds" there are advanced business clusters developing, even though it's a much smaller city. Etc.

A desperate willingness to experiment.  I used to say that cities like Pittsburgh have a desperate willingness to experiment because they have no other choice. From afar, it seems like an innovative place, when all is said and done, but without enough resources in an overall conservative state.

So I, not being there all the time, am less negative that the chief editorial writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette but I sure do appreciate his insight, and I figure he's probably right.

"Big Ideas for a Better Pittsburgh" is a new series for the paper's editorial section.

Which reminds me of a great past feature in the newspaper, on Sundays, on big ideas, called "The Next Page.  One author, Robert Firth, wrote a bunch on mobility and transit.

• The Long Squiggly Line That's Killing Our Transit System (and News of a Brazilian Cure), January 28, 2007 (on Circulator buses)
• The Big Leap in Transit We Didn't Get -- But Could, June 28th, 2009

• A Life in Pittsburgh ... With a Lot Less Car in It: The 12-Step Program, May 2nd, 2010

• "Ditch the Port Authority"), March 12th, 2012

• A bicyclist's lament: imperfect humans drive cars ..., August 12th, 2012  

Big Ideas.  The new series builds from some columns by Brandon McGinley, "How Pittsburgh’s delusions of grandeur hold it back," "McCormick summit shows that leaders matter, and that Pittsburgh needs more of them," and "What Pittsburgh progressives got right — and how Corey O’Connor can accomplish what they couldn’t."  From the last article:

There was a time when Pittsburgh’s political-corporate-philanthropic leadership was united and, if not cutting edge, at least innovative and creative. But that time has passed.

This isn’t meant as a personal criticism, but as an observation about the lifecycle of institutions and leadership cohorts: They necessarily become stale without an infusion of fresh talent and purpose — and those usually come from external challenges and competition. It is neither the 1970s nor the 1990s nor even the 2010s any longer. The strategies that worked then, from the nonprofit sector to the nitty-gritty of economic development, don’t work as well, or at all, today.

The Mayor of Pittsburgh can’t fashion the region’s leadership all by himself, but he can set the tone — one of openness to new ideas and new people, including ideas and people considered beyond the narrow range of respectability defined by the existing establishment. He can also take the lead by empowering people, both in government and through his influence beyond government, who represent a new generation and who have the ambition to challenge incumbent leaders by forging a new establishment, or co-opting the current one.

Interestingly, when I read those columns (I tend to look at the newspaper once/month, and review the backfile of local coverage) and it spurred a still in draft blog entry about visionary campaigning/transformational projects action planning as a positioning device for Mayoral elections.

So I think this is a great idea.

From the article:

Losing ground. One of the most noticeable trends in Pittsburgh in recent years has been a steady retreat from ambition. Nascent plans for maglevs and gondolas from years past are remembered scornfully today as vain and unrealistic — which they may have been! — but they also represented a willingness to swing for the fences, to think about how Pittsburgh could make a splash in the Allegheny rather than hit a few singles here and there.

At the same time, the biggest projects regional leaders have taken on have been increasingly abstract, such as eliminating inequities based on class, race and gender. These are very real problems worthy of significant attention, but they are also largely beyond the scope of a city or county to solve.

Further, we believe that Pittsburgh can make greater progress in mitigating inequities, especially in resource-intensive areas like affordable housing, if the region is more economically dynamic. That won’t just mean more tax dollars to deploy, but also more opportunities for everyday people to find jobs with family-sustaining wages and to start businesses of their own, and more chances for people to begin community projects.

Squandering Potential. This should be Pittsburgh’s time to shine. Yet generating enthusiasm about Pittsburgh’s present and future, and a plan for deploying the region’s assets in a strategic way, has proved challenging. 

We believe this is due in part to confoundingly complex institutional structures (both governmental and nongovernmental), in part to a relative lack of savvy and inspiring leaders who can organize competing interests and in part to a habit, related to the first two, of thinking small rather than thinking big.

Thinking Big. Big Ideas for a Better Pittsburgh will present proposals for improving life in southwestern Pennsylvania that go beyond the usual policy tweaks and small-time building projects. They will generally be speculative, which means we don’t plan to endorse ongoing projects but rather to introduce something new to the conversation, and plausible, which means there’s potentially a real path toward funding and completion. 

Sometimes they will reflect ideas that are in circulation, but are considered to be politically risky, and therefore never progress beyond conversation. But that’s exactly why needed changes never happen.

 =====

Cities must keep striving to improve, but innovation is risky.  At a conference, Martin O'Malley--then mayor of Baltimore and later governor of Maryland--made a joke that cities want to adopt something new, but only after it has been proven elsewhere.  Because there is almost no room for error, and that any mistake or hurdle in a project is immediately excoriated, making them extremely resistant to risk and failure.

World class cities give rise to innovation in other places.  Riffing from a presentation by arts-based revitalization writer Charles Landry, I came up with the belief that "world class" cities don't just take from elsewhere, "they give to other cities," in how once they adopt and/or scale best practices, other cities adopt the ideas for improvement.

The two best cases in the west are Paris and London.  

While not necessarily the first, Paris introduced bike sharing at a massive scale, leading to adoption in hundreds of cities across the globe.  It has probably the most ambitious transit program of any major city outside of Asia--although the cost of transit hasn't led to widespread adoption.  

It is a leader in sustainable mobility programming, to the point where the result of less driving is cleaner air.  They've made the River Seine swimmable.  And these are only some of Paris' accomplishments.

London, like what O'Malley said, isn't necessarily first, but its adoption of a couple motor vehicle control mechanisms put them on view internationally in a manner that the earliest adopters couldn't.  

A key example is the congestion zone, introduced in 2003 (finally adopted by NYC 22 years later), and a newer zone banning higher polluting vehicles, called the Ultra Low Emissions Zone.  It also has big investments in bike sharing and sustainable mobility.  Has a world class transit system, and was one of the earliest adopters of a transit card, called Oyster.  Has the double deck buses.  Wayfinding signage.  The London Underground map and history of marketing. Etc.

The other lesson, and this pertains to Pittsburgh's Big Ideas Initiative, is that you can never stop striving to improve (my point about "continuous process improvement").  Other cities leapfrog, technologies improve superseding older programs, etc.  

I'm not into sports, but read articles as a way to not think about Trump.  Years ago, there was an article about why the Washington Football Team didn't improve the next year over the previous.  They thought they were fine, and didn't need to improve.

You can always improve.

Also see "Michelle Wu stands up for cities, not just for Boston," Boston Globe.

Dr Oz at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services: a chance to improve food service in hospitals

The people Trump proposes for the cabinet are mostly unqualified. And except for the fact that Trump wants to tear down government ("Trump takes aim at government as public faith in US institutions continues to erode," USA Today, "A big win for the Blow It Up Party, but what then?," Washington Post) not aiming for innovation ("Healthcare innovation: process redesign and innovation in DC and Prince George's County," 2011), so goes it for Dr. Oz, who has promoted Medicare Advantage plans, which tend to be a bad deal for patients and government spending ("Mehmet Oz loves promoting this inferior Medicare substitute," MSNBC, "The Great Medicare Advantage Marketing Scam," American Prospect). 

I have been admitted to the hospital a lot this year--5 times--once for 8 days (covid, pneumonia, myocarditis). One of the things that has surprised me about the hospital I use, which is a for profit owned by the largest hospital chain in the country, is that depending on time and availability, they send people from various units to talk to the patients, room by room (all private).  It turns out all for profit hospitals are not the devil.  And this one hasn't outsourced food service.

Last week when I was hospitalized, the leaders of the food service department happened to come around, and I had a long conversation with them (given my background in hospitality and familiar with some industry trends, it was pretty lively).  Despite various limitations, a few of their items are restaurant quality already, but certain key dishes are not and a majority of dishes are not.  

Opal Gordon and Sumei Rodriguez prepare fruit plates for patients at Lenox Hill Hospital. (Jeenah Moon for The Washington Post)

CMMS, among other things, regulates hospitals in many ways, including food service.  

While there are programs at various hospitals to improve ("Corewell Health among healthcare systems leveraging local farms for healthy food options," Rapid Growth, "Hospital Food You Can Get Excited About," New York Times, "Hospital food is a punchline. These chefs are redefining it," Washington Post) some of these efforts are hindered by CMMS.

One of the requirements is cooking proteins to extra well done.  Which makes eating cooked meat and fish--salmon should be medium rare--often intolerable when it comes to eating.  And I'd prefer to order salmon when it's offered because it is heart healthy.

"Dissatisfaction with food quality" was an element mentioned in the academic paper, "Hospital Food Service Strategies to Improve Food Intakes among Inpatients: A Systematic Review," Nutrients, 2021.

During his unsuccessful campaign for Senate two years ago, Oz complained about the high cost of crudités (a vegetable plate), for which he was pilloried for being out of touch ("Mehmet Oz’s crudité video gave opponent John Fetterman a golden opportunity," NBC News).  Regular people offer vegetable platters or trays and don't call it a crudité.

Instead Oz could redeem himself and focus on improving food service outcomes in hospitals.  

Except for that fact that the last thing the second Trump Administration cares about is improving services.

People claim government can't do (and there are serious problems with this, which I will write about), but Obama, Pelosi, the Affordable Care Act, Utah voters forcing the government to expand Medicaid, and Medicaid have saved my life.

I'm certain that is the case at least a million other times.  And there is plenty that the federal government does that is exemplary.  However, Republicans by focusing on cutting taxes, have made it impossible to provide the right amount of money to agencies necessary to fully fund services.

Chicago has elected local school councils

 It was very controversial in the 1960s, when New York City introduced local school councils, but I don't think they were elected.  For a variety of reasons, they didn't last long.

Many school systems have formal councils that bring parents, teachers and school officials together on a committee that isn't powerful, that deals with "school transformation."

For decades, in Chicago, the Mayor runs the school system.  As a book pointed out, if that doesn't communicate that Mayoral control isn't the solution, nothing does.

They are moving to a hybrid school board, half appointed by the Mayor, and half elected, starting this fall ("Chicago’s first school board elections mean crash course time for voters, candidates," Chicago Sun-Times).

Modeled after Chronicle of Higher Education, a newspaper for higher education, that we used to subscribe to and read at the University of Michigan student government, Education Week provides the same type of in depth and feature coverage of K-12 education.  

I've never seen a public library that subscribes.  Most teachers don't know about it.  Plus there are other publications like Radical Teacher, blogs and other online resources, etc.

But separately, not unlike how DC has Advisory Neighborhood Commissions that weigh in on matters before the DC Government that touch on specific geographies of the city, and are comprised of elected Commissioners representing a specific geography called a Single Member District, it turns out that Chicago elects local school councils too ("There’s another important election in April. It’s for local school councils, a force for parent empowerment," CST).

LSCs act as mini-school boards and are composed of parents, teachers and neighbors. They have the power to hire and fire principals, take actions to support academic progress and approve budgets. The creation of LSCs goes back to the reform movement under the late Mayor Harold Washington. In 1989, the first LSC election was held; 17,256 people ran for seats, and 6,000 were elected. LSCs received a lot of attention then for empowering parents and being a unique tool of democracy in the nation.

Robinson emphasized the power that LSCs hold over budgets and school improvement plans. “Is there something in your school you’re not happy with? Old textbooks or not enough toilet paper?” she asked. “LSCs can help create change to get the school what they need. I say your voice matters. I’ve come across parents who feel like they don’t matter and can’t make change.”

I asked Pauline Lipman, an education professor at the University of Illinois Chicago who has long studied LSCs, about the challenges in recruiting people to run for election. She pointed to the demobilization of parents and communities. “The disinvestment of neighborhood schools and the establishment of choice and markets in education has really disconnected people from their neighborhood schools,” Lipman said.

Selective-enrollment schools are emphasized in the district, and they draw students from outside neighborhood boundaries. Charter schools don’t have LSCs. So the attachment to neighborhood schools has waned, she said.

Now they have a hard time getting enough candidates.  

While I don't know for sure, I bet like DC's ANCs, there's very little investment in board development, providing technical assistance etc.  

I mean how could the schools advocacy publication Catalyst, which was focused solely on Chicago's schools, go out of business ("Linda Lenz, founding editor of Catalyst Chicago, dies at 77 | Technical assistance for local schools advocates") if there were serious technical assistance provided to Chicago's LSCs.

In my writings on ANCs I've made this point frequently, about the need for technical assistance and a training structure (the Calgary Federation of Communities might be the best current model) and also that the opportunity to treat and leverage ANCs as a network is ignored.  

-- blog entry on technical assistance for land use organizations, "Framingham Massachusetts creates Citizen Participation Officer position" (2018)

I've suggested a small stipend too, and there isn't a stipend for the LSCs.  I found out in Salt Lake City that city committee members get $30 per meeting.  It's not much, but it's something.

FWIW, I do plan on writing a proposal to the Salt Lake City Library about creating a technical assistance program for civic groups, modeled after some of the programs and resources discussed in the above blog entry.

Another way to think about gap analysis/planning

 I joke that I might not be a good planner, but I'm great at gap analysis.  I meant to read this Financial Times column last week, "The secret to finding the best idea ever? First think about the absolute worst  When looking for a business breakthrough, a design innovation, or a flash of artistic insight, it’s smart to think in reverse," but I forgot.

The title puts gap analysis in perspective.  There are so many bad ideas and implementation, how can I not excel at gap analysis?  

But it's also about brainstorming.  People make important, interesting points, or share ideas.  I build on them.  And it's two-way.  People improve and extend ideas I put out there too.

From the article:

Creativity gurus have termed this approach looking for the “worst possible idea”. When looking for a business breakthrough, a design innovation or a flash of artistic insight, it can be hard to think of much when challenged to dream up a good idea. Far easier, less intimidating and more fun to write down a list of terrible ideas, then see what those terrible ideas suggest once you turn them on their heads. 

Sometimes the worst-idea exercise is little more than a warm-up, getting the imaginative sparks flying before the real creative work begins. Sometimes, however, focusing on what makes an idea bad shines the spotlight on what might make an idea good. If the bad idea is to make a product look clumsy and ugly, that suggests it’s worth paying more attention to the product’s elegance and beauty. If the bad idea is to ship the product with bewildering instructions, the good idea is to hire an editor to hone the instructions. 

... So let’s hear it for wilful contrarianism in the search for inspiration. Sometimes looking for a bad idea gets the creative juices flowing. Sometimes a bad idea perfectly highlights what would make an idea good. And sometimes, the bad idea is actually the best idea of all.

Learning what not to do from the New England Patriots football team

Before I came up with the Transformational Projects Action Planning approach ("Why can't the "Bilbao Effect" be reproduced? | Bilbao as an example of Transformational Projects Action Planning," 2017), earlier I came up with a method I called Action Planning, which incorporates design thinking and social marketing into the planning process, based on best practices I observed in Arlington County and the Tower Hamlets borough of London ("Social Marketing the Arlington (and Tower Hamlets and Baltimore) way," 2008, "All the talk of e-government, digital government, and open source government is really about employing the design method," 2012).  

From "Design Thinking," American Libraries, 2008

I used action planning concepts when I did a pedestrian and bicycle plan for Baltimore County ("Best practice bicycle planning for suburban settings using the "action planning" method," 2010).

Basically, I'm interested in continuous process improvement and iterative learning ("Incrementalism as a concept of iterative improvement in government project development no longer a legitimate public administration theory," 2023) applied to government and social program improvement.

I have a bunch of posts on this for government:

-- "Big data/Machine Learning/AI as a policy savior," 2022
-- "I get tired of all the talk about rewarding "failure" because it shows people are trying, and won't be penalized for it," 2017
-- "Creating the right program vs. the hype of big data," 2013
-- "Does the focus on big data mean we miss the opportunity for better use of "little data"," 2015
-- "For a lot of "urban problems" the issue isn't knowledge about what to do, but willingness to engage that knowledge," 2017
-- "Helping Government Learn," 2009
-- "Positive Deviance and DC Public Schools," 2007
-- "Positive Deviance in New York City (public schools)," 2009
-- "3 R's of Transforming the school system," 2007

Digging deeper to learn the right lesson.  Sometimes I tell the story of the first project I did at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a report on the presence of a potential carcinogen in alcoholic beverages.  We sold a fair number of copies through press mentions.  It happened that the chief author, editor of the newsletter, and I were eating lunch together in the basement lunchroom (it had a stove, a luxury for an office), and we ended up doing an after action analysis.

I was certain the report sold because of the policy comparisons between the US and Canada.  The newsletter editor said no, it was because of the list of test results included, and people wanted to check if what they drank was potentially tainted.  In short, it wasn't about policy it was about self-help.

It was an important lesson to me about not learning the wrong lesson from success.  But to dig deeper for the right lesson.

Learning from sports teams.  There are tons of "leadership books" and seminars and articles about leadership lessons from sports team coaches.  Then again, there's a lot written about abuse by coaches ("Beneath NCAA gymnastics’ glow, a familiar ‘toxic’ culture," Washington Post).

Because I went to the University of Michigan, a big sports school, I got turned off by large team sports. I don't watch sports on television for the most part.  I don't go to games.

It seemed futile to witness people getting in fights when Michigan lost.  I used to say "whether or not they win or lose, I still have to take my finals."  That being said, I hope they win, but I haven't watched four full quarters of football equivalent of the team over the past 40 years.

However, I find the business, politics, and societal aspects of professional sports interesting, and of course relevant to urban revitalization and policy.  And I have been reading sports stories a lot more in the past 12-18 months because the rest of the news--the US's slow but steady march to authoritarianism pushed forward by Trump ("Trump and allies plot revenge, Justice Department control in a second term," Washington Post, "Trump and Allies Forge Plans to Increase Presidential Power in 2025," New York Times)--is so depressing.

(Rory Smith of the New York Times/The Athletic, who writes about European soccer, writes many interesting stories along these lines.)

Learning from the New England Patriots: it's easy to learn the wrong lessons.  In the same vein of my lesson from CSPI, there is a great column about the decline of the New England Patriots football team ("The fall of the Patriots: An obsession with ‘value’ has led to the lowest point in 30 years," Boston Globe).

Under the coach, Bill Bellichick, the team became famed for finding "value" players, e.g., a fifth round selection for half the cost of a name player, who performed just as well or better.  The coaches all thought their success was them, not fully acknowledging the role Tom Brady, the quarterback and a diamond in the rough late draft selection, played in pulling it all together.  Since Brady left, the team has languished, really badly.  From the article:

“To be good in the business of football today — and good to me is not being good one year, but try to sustain it year in and year out — you have to understand economics and you have to understand value,” Kraft said near the end of his team’s almost-magical 2007 season. “I think every discussion I had with Bill, he understood value.”

The concept of value helped the Patriots win six championships and dominate the NFL for 20 years. On the field and on the salary-cap ledger, the Patriots were better than any team at working the margins, identifying undervalued assets, and exploiting loopholes.

It worked brilliantly when Tom Brady was leading the franchise to unprecedented heights. But “value” has since become a negative in Foxborough. The Patriots’ obsession with finding value — constantly looking for ways to spend 50 cents on the dollar — is why they are 2-8 and at their lowest point since Kraft bought the franchise 30 seasons ago. That obsession has seeped into every crevice of Gillette Stadium, weakening the core of a once-dominant franchise.

The coaches and owner learned the wrong lesson.  Value mattered and matters, but it works in a certain set of circumstances, and to keep working, a great amount of flexibility and serendipity is required.  

“If you gave us any of the top 15 [quarterbacks], we could do it. I don’t think the coaches view Tom as special as everyone else in football does.”

They thought it was them, but they were just a piece of a whole that they didn't truly understand.

Failures in Design Thinking.  The Stanford Social Innovation Review has published articles over the years about application of design thinking to social enterprises and social issues.  The current issue has an article, "Design Thinking Misses the Mark," about the failures of the applications of design thinking.  That's what I've been writing about for years, obviously, as indicated by the text above.  From the article:

However, design thinking has not lived up to such promises. In a 2023 MIT Technology Review article, writer and designer Rebecca Ackerman argued that while “design thinking was supposed to fix the world,” organizations rarely implement the ideas generated during the design-thinking process. The failure to implement these ideas resulted from either an inadequate understanding of the problem and/or of the complexities of the institutional and cultural contexts. One of Ackerman’s examples is the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD), which hired IDEO in 2013 to redesign the school district’s cafeterias. The five-month design-thinking process resulted in 10 recommendations, including creating a communal kitchen and using technology to reduce cafeteria lines. However, Angela McKee Brown, the consultant SFUSD hired to implement the recommendations, told Ackerman that IDEO failed to account for the operational and regulatory arrangements required for their implementation.

We reject design thinking as a singular tool kit prescribed to solve social problems. In what follows, we explain why design thinking as typically practiced has not been able to create impactful and sustainable solutions to complex social issues. Instead, we call for a critical stance on design, where critical means both discerning and important. We invite designers to adopt a continuously reflexive and questioning stance akin to what scholar and activist Angela Davis called “a way of thinking, a way of inhabiting the world, that asks us to be constantly critical, constantly conscious.”

... The social sector is inherently complex because it consists of a multitude of actors across different contexts, timelines, and political realities. Any approach that purports to easily solve for such complexity is more likely than not to be reductive and therefore ineffective. Design thinking tends toward oversimplification in at least three ways. 

Design thinking is formulaic

Design thinking is decontextualized

Design thinking is short-termist. 

The article goes on to provide recommendations on how to improve the approach.

Conclusion.  My form of design thinking, effectuated through the concepts of wider scopes for planning, action planning, and transformational projects action planning (also see "A wrinkle in thinking about the Transformational Projects Action Planning approach: Great public buildings aren't just about design, but what they do," 2022), aims to avoid those faults.

Post columnist Colbert King says the DC Council needs to do more oversight

In "An example of oversight from the D.C. Council? More of that, please."  Duh.  He makes the point that the Council probably needs more staff to be able to do so.  One of the comments on the article made a point about a local "Government Accountability Office" function.

The article mentions Councilmember Robert White questioning at a hearing, Brenda Donald, director of the DC Housing Authority, asking about her $40,000+ bonus for the year, after the agency was ripped to shreds by a HUD inspection report ("D.C. Housing Authority’s leadership is failing, HUD report says," Post).  After the Executive branch restructured the board in ways that didn't necessarily improve functioning and oversight--the Council pretty much rolled over on that.

Speaking of oversight, how is that the DCHA, which was revitalized during the administration of Anthony Williams, has in 15 years, deteriorated to one of the worse in the country?  Doesn't say much for executive branch competence.

I've written about how to improve the legislative branch and oversight over the years, "Continued musing on restructuring DC's City Council (mostly)" (2013), is probably the most complete summation of recommended changes.

In "Outline for a proposed Ward-focused (DC) Councilmember campaign platform and agenda" (2015), I suggest more tools for ward-specific oversight.

But I realize it's yetanother post, where I reference organizations like the Municipal Research and Services Center of Washington State or the Independent Budget Office of New York City, and I never mentioned the Congressional Research Service, which besides the GAO and the Congressional Budget Office, provides such resources to Congress, along with Committee staffs.

Organizations like the MRSC or IBO provide a lot of deep research which is almost uniformly lacking when it comes to DC policy development and program practice.  Although to be fair, the same goes for plenty of other cities.

-- "For a lot of "urban problems" the issue isn't knowledge about what to do, but willingness to engage that knowledge" (2017)

DC has Inspector Generals and an Auditor who reports to Council.  The auditor, former Councilmember Kathy Patterson, has done a lot of good reporting.  But again, the Executive Branch doesn't seem to want to engage with it, and the Council doesn't push.

In some cities, more independent offices, like the New York City Comptroller--currently Brad Lander--who is elected, do this kind of work as well, and bring more attention to the ins and outs of better governance.

=====

Note that separatelly I argue for training, assistance, and capacity development systems for the city's Advisory Neighborhood Commissions and citizens groups more generally.

-- "Framingham Massachusetts creates Citizen Participation Officer position," 2018
-- "Building civic engagement systematically: Seattle's Department of Neighborhoods," 2022

And in general across the board in other cities too.

Big data/Machine Learning/AI as a policy savior

The Post has an article about how Virginia Congressman Don Beyer is getting a masters degree in machine learning so he can apply AI to government and creating better policy ("A 72-year-old congressman goes back to school, pursuing a degree in AI").

Over the years I've written about the hype about big data and "apps," making the point that there is plenty of "little data" and academic analysis of policy that is already being ignored, despite the richness it offers for improvement in policy and practice.

-- "All the talk of e-government, digital government, and open source government is really about employing the design method," 2012
-- "Creating the right program vs. the hype of big data," 2013
-- "Does the focus on big data mean we miss the opportunity for better use of "little data"," 2015
-- "For a lot of "urban problems" the issue isn't knowledge about what to do, but willingness to engage that knowledge," 2017

In fact, the Post has another current article, "How Black activists in Northern Virginia transformed the way children learn to read," about how despite persistent--over decades--lagging outcomes in Fairfax County Schools for black students in learning how to read the school district wasn't doing anything about it, until the local NAACP chapter stepped in.

Positive deviance theory: Hope amidst failure.  Years ago I read an article, "Your Company's Secret Change Agents, in the Harvard Business Review about "positive deviance" theory, how in even the worst performing organization there are pockets of excellence, and you can use those clusters of best practice to reshape the organization.

I believed in the approach for a long time, but the reality is that most organizations, even poorly performing ones, are highly resistant to change, improvement, and innovation, and they can counteract pockets of excellence with incredible resistance and inertia.

For example, I was really troubled by an example in Boston, where a junior high school improved to the point where it was an international best practice example, yet the people who helped the school succeed were pushed out, and over time the school reverted back to the mean of mediocre performance.  In fact, now it's slated for closure.

-- "A positive deviance failure in Boston: Timilty Middle School," 2022

What an incredible waste.

Like my frustration with DC Government.  After two terms, eight years, the reelected mayor is looking for innovative ideas?

-- "I can't help but laugh... DC Mayor's third term as a platform for transformation"

Similarly, the reelected Mayor of Toronto says he's best placed to reverse the city's last 8 years of decline, decline that he ruled over.

-- "Brutal performance art criticism of Toronto's Mayor, John Tory, and his "austerity" agenda"

Transformational Projects Action Planning. ("A wrinkle in thinking about the Transformational Projects Action Planning approach: Great public buildings aren't just about design, but what they do"). By contrast, I propose the concept of transformational projects action planning, leveraging master plans and projects to push innovation forward in a variety of ways.

TPAPs should be implemented at multiple scales: 

(1) neighborhood/district/city/county wide as part of a master plan; 

(2) within functional elements of a master plan such as transportation, housing, or economic development; and 

(3) within a specific project (e.g., how do we make this particular library or transit station or park or neighborhood "great"?); in terms of both 

(4) architecture and design; and 

(5) program/plan for what the functions within the building accomplish.

At the master plan scale, I've written about this in terms of Bilbao ("Why can't the "Bilbao Effect" be reproduced? | Bilbao as an example of Transformational Projects Action Planning") and Edmonton ("Downtown Edmonton cultural facilities development as an example of "Transformational Projects Action Planning""), and for infrastructure projects, the Purple Line light rail program in Suburban Maryland ("Codifying the complementary transit network improvements and planning initiatives recommended in the Purple Line writings") and the Silver Line Metrorail in Fairfax and Loudoun Counties in Virginia ("Using the Silver Line as the priming event, what would a transit network improvement program look like for Northern Virginia?").

At the scale of an individual project, the best example comes from my piece about best practice development of libraries, focused mostly on branch libraries, but not exclusively.

-- "Neighborhood libraries as nodes in a neighborhood and city-wide network of cultural assets," 2018

Flickr photo by Laura Billings of an Idea Store, with a farmers market out front.

One standout is how the Tower Hamlets borough of London merged their workforce development programs with the libraries, and relocated the libraries to well located places instead of in out of the way otherwise vacant buildings, using forward architecture and advanced branding and identity systems, to create "Idea Stores" ("The Idea Story," "Is this the library of the future?," BBC).

It's a particularly great example of how architecture is not enough.  They retained a now renowned architect, and he gets a lot of library commisions as a result.  But the other libraries afterward prove that it isn't design, but program, that makes for an innovative library.

Innovation Officers.  Along with the focus on big data, "Apps for Democracy," etc., a number of cities created "Chief Innovation Officers."  

I think that thrust has pretty much fallen by the wayside ("Whatever Happened to Innovation in Government?," Federal Computing Week) although Bloomberg Government News doesn't agree, "Chief innovation officers reconnect as their movement grows."

I was so impressed by the book Reinventing Government, back in the days of the Clinton Administration.  A promise that was never realized.