Schools do little to reduce or enlarge the gaps in skills that are present when children enter school

The American Family in Black and White: A Post-Racial Strategy for Improving Skills to Promote Equality

James J. Heckman

NBER Working Paper No. 16841
Issued in March 2011

In contemporary America, racial gaps in achievement are primarily due to gaps in skills. Skill gaps emerge early before children enter school. Families are major producers of those skills. Inequality in performance in school is strongly linked to inequality in family environments. Schools do little to reduce or enlarge the gaps in skills that are present when children enter school. Parenting matters, and the true measure of child advantage and disadvantage is the quality of parenting received. A growing fraction of American children across all race and ethnic groups is being raised in dysfunctional families. Investment in the early lives of children in disadvantaged families will help close achievement gaps. America currently relies too much on schools and adolescent remediation strategies to solve problems that start in the preschool years. Prevention is likely to be more cost-effective than remediation. Voluntary, culturally sensitive support for parenting is a politically and economically palatable strategy that addresses problems common to all racial and ethnic groups.

Education and the budget

Lots could be, and doubtless will be, said about the budget. But it is worth looking at some of the changes regarding education. The increase in higher level fees is 500Euro and only for the first child in the family (no increase for the second kid). So the government has gone out of its way to protect the relatively well off who dominate university. Meanwhile the Educational Disadvantage Budget has been slashed by 60% and student grants are to be cut by 4%.
Well at least you know what the government's priority is: protect the middle class.

Core Dilemmas of Community Organizing in Milwaukee: Community Organizing and Urban Education

[For other entries in this series, go here.]

I have been playing around with a way to frame the key challenges that seem to block the emergence of a robust ecology of community action organizations in my city, which is probably fairly similar in many ways to a range of mid-sized, segregated U.S. cities. I tried to get it on two typed pages, but ended up with three. Many of the basic issues won't seem particularly surprising to people familiar with organizing, and it repeats some points I've made before (as usual) but it seemed useful to put them all together.

Core Dilemmas of Community Organizing in Milwaukee

Note: these different dilemmas are deeply intertwined with each other.

1. Training
1. Organizations with their own training programs may be limited by the “dogma” of a restricted set of strategies.
2. At the same time, groups without their own training programs often end up either “recreating the wheel,” or picking up scattered training here and there.

RESULT: Robust cross-fertilization of ideas and strategies between different groups is limited, and new groups often lack coherent training.

2. Recruitment
1. Existing organizations sometimes compete for the same restricted categories of constituents (e.g., churches and unions), giving the impression of a shortage of possible recruits.
2. Some key organizations (e.g., ACORN) are essentially missing from the city, so that many residents are never approached at all.
3. Many identifiable groups with social justice interests (e.g., foster parents, child care workers) lack robust social action organizations, and thus have little or no collective power.
4. There are few existing efforts to recruit and form new organizations.

RESULT: Many constituencies are never organized, and many issue areas remain unaddressed, while existing groups run up against limits in their possible size and power.

3. Single vs. Multiple Issue Groups
1. Multiple issue groups can draw in a range of constituents with different interests. But these groups have limited “attention,” generally focusing on a single project at a time in each of their issue areas.

i. This means that, for example, in the area of health care for kids, dental care may get attention while vision care gets none.

ii. At the same time, prior “wins” can be lost as attention shifts to new campaigns.

2. Single issue groups have more limited recruitment possibilities than multiple issue groups. But a large number of such smaller groups have the potential to maintain a wider range of campaigns at the same time and may be able to maintain accountability better on past “wins” because of each group’s clear ongoing focus.
3. A robust process for bringing single and multiple issue groups together on different campaigns over time is lacking.

RESULT: Prior “wins” are sometimes not maintained and the number of issues addressed in the city are limited by our small number of organizations, despite the incredible need for action on a wide range of important challenges.

4. Service vs. Organizing
1. Organizers have generally found that it is a mistake to have social action groups directly involved in social service. Historically, doing “service” has tended to dilute efforts to confront power, and has also opened the service aspects of groups up to retaliation (e.g., “If you fight for more health services, I’ll shut down your clinic.”)
2. However, many of the poorest residents in our city need services of a range of different kinds before they will have extra time to participate in organizing.
3. Also, unless organizing groups can provide basic supports, like child care, meals, and stipends to partially reimburse residents for the cost of their participation, it is unlikely that they will get full participation from impoverished members.

RESULT: Organizing groups too often fail to successfully recruit and sustain a broad range of impoverished and/or overworked community members.

5. Funding
1. Social action is the only community function that cannot be funded by the government.
2. Financial support from constituents is a key measure of organizational sustainability, but the money available from low-income populations cannot fully sustain even small organizations.
3. The focus of foundations on project-based or initial seed funding forces organizations to constantly scramble for dollars and reduces organizations’ capacity for maintaining clear long-term focuses as foundation interests shift.
4. The need for funding to survive fallow periods forces many organizations to turn to funding for “service” or non-organizing “political” projects to maintain themselves, diluting their focus and reducing long-term growth and strength.
5. The need to acquire foundation or other donor funding creates resource barriers to entry for new organizations. This means many new organizations never emerge in the first place, or end up dissolving fairly quickly.

RESULT: Existing organizations struggle to survive, often losing a focus on organizing in favor of fundable service efforts, or shifting too quickly between issues in response to funder preference changes. At the same time, many new organizations never get the chance to emerge because of their lack of fundraising connections, knowledge, and skills.

Key Questions

• Training
• How can existing groups come together with emerging groups in contexts where their different visions can inform and challenge each other?
• In what ways can training be provided to help ongoing organizations look outside the “box” while bringing new organizations “up to speed” on the “basics”?

• Recruitment
• Single vs. Multiple Issue Groups
• What mechanisms can be developed for recruiting and forming new organizations without threatening the constituencies of existing groups?

• Funding
• How can the ongoing maintenance costs of existing organizations be reduced to allow these groups to survive and focus more on action than fund-raising?
• How can entry costs for new organizations be reduced to allow the emergence and survival of new collections of committed groups around key areas?

• Overall
• How could we develop overlapping answers to these questions, creating a synergy across different organizations and long-term, shared, institutional support for sustaining old and developing new organizing groups?

KEY SUGGESTION: A Milwaukee Organizing Retreat

In conversations, a number of key organizing leaders have expressed discouragement about the extent to which groups in Milwaukee work independently instead of as a collaborative team. They noted that the emergence of the (c)3 Table is a good sign, and have expressed interest in creating other contexts to explore ways to overcome these barriers.

One key suggestion was for a retreat that would bring the major organizing groups in Milwaukee together with other interested leaders to explore how to improve our ability to nurture organizing in Milwaukee. Such a retreat would focus on issues external to the day-to-day concerns of individual organizing groups and seek to create a roadmap for addressing these challenges.

For such a retreat to be successful, however, organizers and other over-worked local leaders would need to understand how participation would pragmatically serve their self-interests at the same time. For this reason, it seems likely that a retreat will only succeed if:

• It was co-sponsored by one or more significant funders of organizing in the city, and if
• Retreat participation was linked to potential new funding to support emerging plans.

Other possible solutions

• Co-location of organizing groups to share costs and allow cross-fertilization.
• Creation of an "incubator" where new and old groups can come together and support each other.
• Endowing basic infrastructure for groups (a building, training, recruitment, and basic support staff) but requiring groups to find support for themselves, allowing long-term support while retaining flexibility in organization development (and, where necessary, die-off).

Analysis Developed by: Aaron Schutz, Associate Professor, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, (414) 303-1395, Schutz@uwm.edu, www.educationaction.org.

Core Dilemmas of Community Organizing in Milwaukee: Community Organizing and Urban Education

[For other entries in this series, go here.]

I have been playing around with a way to frame the key challenges that seem to block the emergence of a robust ecology of community action organizations in my city, which is probably fairly similar in many ways to a range of mid-sized, segregated U.S. cities. I tried to get it on two typed pages, but ended up with three. Many of the basic issues won't seem particularly surprising to people familiar with organizing, and it repeats some points I've made before (as usual) but it seemed useful to put them all together.

Core Dilemmas of Community Organizing in Milwaukee

Note: these different dilemmas are deeply intertwined with each other.

1. Training
1. Organizations with their own training programs may be limited by the “dogma” of a restricted set of strategies.
2. At the same time, groups without their own training programs often end up either “recreating the wheel,” or picking up scattered training here and there.

RESULT: Robust cross-fertilization of ideas and strategies between different groups is limited, and new groups often lack coherent training.

2. Recruitment
1. Existing organizations sometimes compete for the same restricted categories of constituents (e.g., churches and unions), giving the impression of a shortage of possible recruits.
2. Some key organizations (e.g., ACORN) are essentially missing from the city, so that many residents are never approached at all.
3. Many identifiable groups with social justice interests (e.g., foster parents, child care workers) lack robust social action organizations, and thus have little or no collective power.
4. There are few existing efforts to recruit and form new organizations.

RESULT: Many constituencies are never organized, and many issue areas remain unaddressed, while existing groups run up against limits in their possible size and power.

3. Single vs. Multiple Issue Groups
1. Multiple issue groups can draw in a range of constituents with different interests. But these groups have limited “attention,” generally focusing on a single project at a time in each of their issue areas.

i. This means that, for example, in the area of health care for kids, dental care may get attention while vision care gets none.

ii. At the same time, prior “wins” can be lost as attention shifts to new campaigns.

2. Single issue groups have more limited recruitment possibilities than multiple issue groups. But a large number of such smaller groups have the potential to maintain a wider range of campaigns at the same time and may be able to maintain accountability better on past “wins” because of each group’s clear ongoing focus.
3. A robust process for bringing single and multiple issue groups together on different campaigns over time is lacking.

RESULT: Prior “wins” are sometimes not maintained and the number of issues addressed in the city are limited by our small number of organizations, despite the incredible need for action on a wide range of important challenges.

4. Service vs. Organizing
1. Organizers have generally found that it is a mistake to have social action groups directly involved in social service. Historically, doing “service” has tended to dilute efforts to confront power, and has also opened the service aspects of groups up to retaliation (e.g., “If you fight for more health services, I’ll shut down your clinic.”)
2. However, many of the poorest residents in our city need services of a range of different kinds before they will have extra time to participate in organizing.
3. Also, unless organizing groups can provide basic supports, like child care, meals, and stipends to partially reimburse residents for the cost of their participation, it is unlikely that they will get full participation from impoverished members.

RESULT: Organizing groups too often fail to successfully recruit and sustain a broad range of impoverished and/or overworked community members.

5. Funding
1. Social action is the only community function that cannot be funded by the government.
2. Financial support from constituents is a key measure of organizational sustainability, but the money available from low-income populations cannot fully sustain even small organizations.
3. The focus of foundations on project-based or initial seed funding forces organizations to constantly scramble for dollars and reduces organizations’ capacity for maintaining clear long-term focuses as foundation interests shift.
4. The need for funding to survive fallow periods forces many organizations to turn to funding for “service” or non-organizing “political” projects to maintain themselves, diluting their focus and reducing long-term growth and strength.
5. The need to acquire foundation or other donor funding creates resource barriers to entry for new organizations. This means many new organizations never emerge in the first place, or end up dissolving fairly quickly.

RESULT: Existing organizations struggle to survive, often losing a focus on organizing in favor of fundable service efforts, or shifting too quickly between issues in response to funder preference changes. At the same time, many new organizations never get the chance to emerge because of their lack of fundraising connections, knowledge, and skills.

Key Questions

• Training
• How can existing groups come together with emerging groups in contexts where their different visions can inform and challenge each other?
• In what ways can training be provided to help ongoing organizations look outside the “box” while bringing new organizations “up to speed” on the “basics”?

• Recruitment
• Single vs. Multiple Issue Groups
• What mechanisms can be developed for recruiting and forming new organizations without threatening the constituencies of existing groups?

• Funding
• How can the ongoing maintenance costs of existing organizations be reduced to allow these groups to survive and focus more on action than fund-raising?
• How can entry costs for new organizations be reduced to allow the emergence and survival of new collections of committed groups around key areas?

• Overall
• How could we develop overlapping answers to these questions, creating a synergy across different organizations and long-term, shared, institutional support for sustaining old and developing new organizing groups?

KEY SUGGESTION: A Milwaukee Organizing Retreat

In conversations, a number of key organizing leaders have expressed discouragement about the extent to which groups in Milwaukee work independently instead of as a collaborative team. They noted that the emergence of the (c)3 Table is a good sign, and have expressed interest in creating other contexts to explore ways to overcome these barriers.

One key suggestion was for a retreat that would bring the major organizing groups in Milwaukee together with other interested leaders to explore how to improve our ability to nurture organizing in Milwaukee. Such a retreat would focus on issues external to the day-to-day concerns of individual organizing groups and seek to create a roadmap for addressing these challenges.

For such a retreat to be successful, however, organizers and other over-worked local leaders would need to understand how participation would pragmatically serve their self-interests at the same time. For this reason, it seems likely that a retreat will only succeed if:

• It was co-sponsored by one or more significant funders of organizing in the city, and if
• Retreat participation was linked to potential new funding to support emerging plans.

Other possible solutions

• Co-location of organizing groups to share costs and allow cross-fertilization.
• Creation of an "incubator" where new and old groups can come together and support each other.
• Endowing basic infrastructure for groups (a building, training, recruitment, and basic support staff) but requiring groups to find support for themselves, allowing long-term support while retaining flexibility in organization development (and, where necessary, die-off).

Analysis Developed by: Aaron Schutz, Associate Professor, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, (414) 303-1395, Schutz@uwm.edu, www.educationaction.org.

Community Organizing and Urban Education XIV: Parables of the River

[To read the entire series, go here. A one-page version of the entire series is here.]

I have been working on introductions to learning modules for a community organizing course I will be teaching online in the Fall. One of the things I wanted to include was what some community organizers call the “Parable of the River” (or sometimes a waterfall) that is often attributed to Saul Alinsky. I was searching across the Internet to find a good representation of the parable and found a wide range of different versions. (To avoid writing introductions, I seem to have ended up writing this post . . . .)

Interestingly, it seems like there are versions of this parable with a different perspective than that used by community organizers. And this different version seems somewhat more prevalent among those oriented towards more traditional social service.

First an example of a “community organizing” version of the parable:

Once upon a time there was a small village on the edge of a river. The people there were good and life in the village was good. One day a villager noticed a baby floating down the river. The villager quickly swam out to save the baby from drowning. The next day this same villager noticed two babies in the river. He called for help, and both babies were rescued from the swift waters. And the following day four babies were seen caught in the turbulent current. And then eight, then more, and still more!

The villagers organized themselves quickly, setting up watchtowers and training teams of swimmers who could resist the swift waters and rescue babies. Rescue squads were soon working 24 hours a day. And each day the number of helpless babies floating down the river increased. The villagers organized themselves efficiently. The rescue squads were now snatching many children each day. While not all the babies, now very numerous, could be saved, the villagers felt they were doing well to save as many as they could each day. Indeed, the village priest blessed them in their good work. And life in the village continued on that basis.

One day, however, someone raised the question, "But where are all these babies coming from? Let’s organize a team to head upstream to find out who’s throwing all of these babies into the river in the first place!"

Now a different version of this parable:

While walking along the banks of a river, a passerby notices that someone in the water is drowning. After pulling the person ashore, the rescuer notices another person in the river in need of help. Before long, the river is filled with drowning people, and more rescuers are required to assist the initial rescuer. Unfortunately, some people are not saved, and some victims fall back into the river after they have been pulled ashore. At this time, one of the rescuers starts walking upstream

“Where are you going?” the other rescuers ask, disconcerted. The upstream rescuer replies, “I’m going upstream to see why so many people keep falling into the river.” As it turns out, the bridge leading across the river up- stream has a hole through which people are falling. The upstream rescuer realizes that fixing the hole in the bridge will prevent many people from ever falling into the river in the first place.

In both parables, the key issue is that those trying to rescue the drowning people are making an error by focusing on the current emergency rather than on what is causing the emergency. As a result, they have no hope of actually solving the problem.

A key distinction between them is that in the first parable an agent is assumed to be causing the babies to fall in the river. In the second the problem is simply technical, with no agent attached. The bridge “has” a hole (note the passive voice).

This tendency to obscure the agents behind oppression and social harm may be a key difference between what I would term a “community organizing” approach and more familiar “social service” and “social science” approaches. From social service and social science perspectives there simply are these problems that need to be solved. The highest level of action is identifying and addressing the (usually impersonal) causes of shared problems.

Importantly, this approach generally obscures the activity of the agents who are perpetuating social challenges through their action or inaction.

Perhaps some of the tendency to avoid seeking out responsible agents is a result of the enormous challenges involved in identifying someone or some institution that one can definitively say is causing a particular problem. But maybe part of the problem is this focus on “causes” in the first place. In fact, the “cause” question can become a pretty complex, ultimately unsolveable existential challenge with no clear solution. Is the cause of pollution from a coal plant the owners of the plant, or bad government standards, or perverse incentives that make clean production unprofitable, or any of an innumerable set of other influences? What is the “cause” of the fact that so many poor kids have difficulty reading?

In my experience, as social scientists, most educational scholars tend to draw from the second version of this parable rather than the first. There “are” problems and we need technical solutions to solve them. In fact, to the many scholars who tend to avoid thinking about “causes,” even the limited insights of the second parable seem like a revelation.

In contrast, when organizers are looking for targets (see earlier post) they aren’t really worried about who or what is the “cause” of a problem. Instead, they try to figure out who can or should be made responsible for the problem now that we have it. In other words, the challenge for a community organizer is to identify the agent that can be induced to solve the problem, regardless of the vast chain of influences that produced it. The aim is to build a coherent link between specific agents and a specific social problem, and the substance of such a link can vary widely.

From an organizing perspective, many people and institutions have resources that are not fairly shared, and the aim is to find ways to force some subset of these agents to use their resources in more equitable ways

To simplify the distinction I am making, here, one might say that social scientists and social service people tend to focus on “what” caused a problem and “how” to solve the problem, while organizers focus on “who” can solve the problem. And in many cases, answering “what” and “how” questions seem like pre-organizing issues. Sometimes, of course, getting people to figure out the answers to these questions themselves in a collective manner can be tools for engaging, educating, and organizing them, but often this does not seem to be the case.

One limitation of a focus on causes and solutions without focusing on agents is that each agent will be linked to different resources and different possible actions. In other words, different agents imply different solutions. Perhaps more problematically, failing to focus on the identification of realistic agents of change often creates an enormous unbridgeable gulf between theoretical solutions and actual solutions.

Here is a somewhat relevant example that indicates some of the differences between the social science approach and the organizing approach:

We have been working on the beginnings of an effort to transform dental care for low-income urban children. For a range of reasons, we want to fight for a school-based dental treatment program. And we have identified an agent and avenue of change—the state health department and the state health insurance program. But there is no clear established “blue chip” model or “solution” to fight for. So we have stepped back, and I have been working with the state dental school and local district officials to get a pilot school-based services project funded. A local “proof of concept” effort would provide the basis for a program blueprint that we could then fight for on a state level. To a large extent, however, this social science investigation work is “pre-organizing.”

Two final observations:

First, there is a key problem with this parable in both of its versions. It represents those who are harmed as powerless victims, often babies. But people are rarely entirely powerless, and organizers never approach people as if they were powerless or babies. It seems odd that this central parable used by many organizers contains such a disempowering metaphor at its core.

Second, it is interesting to note that in a version that Stanley Cohen says he got from Alinsky, “a fisherman is rescuing drowning people from a river. Finally, he leaves the next body to float by while he sets off upstream ‘to find out who the hell is pushing these poor folks into the water.’ According to Cohen, Alinsky used this story to make a further ethical point: ‘While the fisherman was so busy running along the bank to find the ultimate source of the problem, who was going to help those poor wretches who continued to float down the river?’”

Community Organizing and Urban Education XIV: Parables of the River

[To read the entire series, go here. A one-page version of the entire series is here.]

I have been working on introductions to learning modules for a community organizing course I will be teaching online in the Fall. One of the things I wanted to include was what some community organizers call the “Parable of the River” (or sometimes a waterfall) that is often attributed to Saul Alinsky. I was searching across the Internet to find a good representation of the parable and found a wide range of different versions. (To avoid writing introductions, I seem to have ended up writing this post . . . .)

Interestingly, it seems like there are versions of this parable with a different perspective than that used by community organizers. And this different version seems somewhat more prevalent among those oriented towards more traditional social service.

First an example of a “community organizing” version of the parable:

Once upon a time there was a small village on the edge of a river. The people there were good and life in the village was good. One day a villager noticed a baby floating down the river. The villager quickly swam out to save the baby from drowning. The next day this same villager noticed two babies in the river. He called for help, and both babies were rescued from the swift waters. And the following day four babies were seen caught in the turbulent current. And then eight, then more, and still more!

The villagers organized themselves quickly, setting up watchtowers and training teams of swimmers who could resist the swift waters and rescue babies. Rescue squads were soon working 24 hours a day. And each day the number of helpless babies floating down the river increased. The villagers organized themselves efficiently. The rescue squads were now snatching many children each day. While not all the babies, now very numerous, could be saved, the villagers felt they were doing well to save as many as they could each day. Indeed, the village priest blessed them in their good work. And life in the village continued on that basis.

One day, however, someone raised the question, "But where are all these babies coming from? Let’s organize a team to head upstream to find out who’s throwing all of these babies into the river in the first place!"

Now a different version of this parable:

While walking along the banks of a river, a passerby notices that someone in the water is drowning. After pulling the person ashore, the rescuer notices another person in the river in need of help. Before long, the river is filled with drowning people, and more rescuers are required to assist the initial rescuer. Unfortunately, some people are not saved, and some victims fall back into the river after they have been pulled ashore. At this time, one of the rescuers starts walking upstream

“Where are you going?” the other rescuers ask, disconcerted. The upstream rescuer replies, “I’m going upstream to see why so many people keep falling into the river.” As it turns out, the bridge leading across the river up- stream has a hole through which people are falling. The upstream rescuer realizes that fixing the hole in the bridge will prevent many people from ever falling into the river in the first place.

In both parables, the key issue is that those trying to rescue the drowning people are making an error by focusing on the current emergency rather than on what is causing the emergency. As a result, they have no hope of actually solving the problem.

A key distinction between them is that in the first parable an agent is assumed to be causing the babies to fall in the river. In the second the problem is simply technical, with no agent attached. The bridge “has” a hole (note the passive voice).

This tendency to obscure the agents behind oppression and social harm may be a key difference between what I would term a “community organizing” approach and more familiar “social service” and “social science” approaches. From social service and social science perspectives there simply are these problems that need to be solved. The highest level of action is identifying and addressing the (usually impersonal) causes of shared problems.

Importantly, this approach generally obscures the activity of the agents who are perpetuating social challenges through their action or inaction.

Perhaps some of the tendency to avoid seeking out responsible agents is a result of the enormous challenges involved in identifying someone or some institution that one can definitively say is causing a particular problem. But maybe part of the problem is this focus on “causes” in the first place. In fact, the “cause” question can become a pretty complex, ultimately unsolveable existential challenge with no clear solution. Is the cause of pollution from a coal plant the owners of the plant, or bad government standards, or perverse incentives that make clean production unprofitable, or any of an innumerable set of other influences? What is the “cause” of the fact that so many poor kids have difficulty reading?

In my experience, as social scientists, most educational scholars tend to draw from the second version of this parable rather than the first. There “are” problems and we need technical solutions to solve them. In fact, to the many scholars who tend to avoid thinking about “causes,” even the limited insights of the second parable seem like a revelation.

In contrast, when organizers are looking for targets (see earlier post) they aren’t really worried about who or what is the “cause” of a problem. Instead, they try to figure out who can or should be made responsible for the problem now that we have it. In other words, the challenge for a community organizer is to identify the agent that can be induced to solve the problem, regardless of the vast chain of influences that produced it. The aim is to build a coherent link between specific agents and a specific social problem, and the substance of such a link can vary widely.

From an organizing perspective, many people and institutions have resources that are not fairly shared, and the aim is to find ways to force some subset of these agents to use their resources in more equitable ways

To simplify the distinction I am making, here, one might say that social scientists and social service people tend to focus on “what” caused a problem and “how” to solve the problem, while organizers focus on “who” can solve the problem. And in many cases, answering “what” and “how” questions seem like pre-organizing issues. Sometimes, of course, getting people to figure out the answers to these questions themselves in a collective manner can be tools for engaging, educating, and organizing them, but often this does not seem to be the case.

One limitation of a focus on causes and solutions without focusing on agents is that each agent will be linked to different resources and different possible actions. In other words, different agents imply different solutions. Perhaps more problematically, failing to focus on the identification of realistic agents of change often creates an enormous unbridgeable gulf between theoretical solutions and actual solutions.

Here is a somewhat relevant example that indicates some of the differences between the social science approach and the organizing approach:

We have been working on the beginnings of an effort to transform dental care for low-income urban children. For a range of reasons, we want to fight for a school-based dental treatment program. And we have identified an agent and avenue of change—the state health department and the state health insurance program. But there is no clear established “blue chip” model or “solution” to fight for. So we have stepped back, and I have been working with the state dental school and local district officials to get a pilot school-based services project funded. A local “proof of concept” effort would provide the basis for a program blueprint that we could then fight for on a state level. To a large extent, however, this social science investigation work is “pre-organizing.”

Two final observations:

First, there is a key problem with this parable in both of its versions. It represents those who are harmed as powerless victims, often babies. But people are rarely entirely powerless, and organizers never approach people as if they were powerless or babies. It seems odd that this central parable used by many organizers contains such a disempowering metaphor at its core.

Second, it is interesting to note that in a version that Stanley Cohen says he got from Alinsky, “a fisherman is rescuing drowning people from a river. Finally, he leaves the next body to float by while he sets off upstream ‘to find out who the hell is pushing these poor folks into the water.’ According to Cohen, Alinsky used this story to make a further ethical point: ‘While the fisherman was so busy running along the bank to find the ultimate source of the problem, who was going to help those poor wretches who continued to float down the river?’”

Community Organizing and Urban Education XIII: Public vs. Private

[To read the entire series, go here. A one-page version of the entire series is here.]

Note: Much of this is elaborated from pp. 96-99 of Commonwealth by Harry Boyte.

Innumerable books have discussed different ways to conceptualize differences and similarities between “private” and “public” realms, mapping these across history, different cultural groups, and different conceptual frameworks. Here, I discuss the model developed in the context of community organizing.

According to one of Saul Alinsky’s lieutenants, Ed Chambers, one of Alinsky’s many shortsighted attitudes was about the private lives of organizers. “Indeed, Chambers spoke with visible pain of Alinsky’s cavalier, dismissive attitude toward his associates’ family life and retirement and security needs.” Chambers noted that “’He called me up long distance to order me to Rochester’” to work on a famous organizing campaign (Boyte, 96).

This refusal to respect people’s personal lives created numerous problems. Not the least was the tendency to burn people out. Many organizers speak of the revolving door through which many experienced organizers and leaders fled, never to return to the field. In this way, their hard-earned skills that could have supported future efforts were lost.

Post-Alinsky, many organizing groups realized that they needed to fundamentally change the way they supported organizers. Over time, to the extent possible, major organizations like the Gamaliel and Industrial Areas Foundations have tried to make organizing more humanly “doable,” something one could continue for a long-term career. At least in these flagship organizations, pay rates have increased, retirement and other benefits are more likely to be planned for, and thinking has gone into making jobs more family friendly.

One of the approaches developed in the wake of these issues was a new way of framing a distinction between “public” and “private” relationships. These new distinctions were designed to help them and the leaders they work with navigate the enormous emotional and time challenges inherent in any organizing effort. Like all concepts in organizing, these distinctions are meant as flexible guidelines. They are pragmatic tools for helping organizers and leaders make ethical and practical choices in a world that is always too complex to be captured by such binary frameworks. And it’s important to understand that these principles were actively constructed. They were not simply found lying around, but were developed and are still in the process of being developed in response to ongoing experience.

In trainings, organizers started by distinguishing between two columns of different kinds of relationships. On the private side they listed the more intimate relationships one has with one’s family and friends. On the public side they listed the more instrumental relationships one generally has with organizational colleagues, politicians, strangers, and others outside of one’s relatively narrow circle of intimacy. This is all summarized in the following table:

Roles Played in Private vs. Public Relationships

PRIVATE Relationships	PUBLIC Relationships
Family	Church Members
Friends	Students at School
Oneself	Political Actors
	Co-Workers
	People on the street

They also distinguished between what had emerged for them through their organizing experience as the key differences in the characteristics of relationships in these arenas.

In the private, people tend to encounter people who are mostly like themselves in the characteristics that are important to them. Private relationships are often given or inherited—few people, for example, can choose their families. They are relatively permanent. One might want to disown a sibling or a parent, for example, but we rarely do. Similarly, once we decide people are our “friends,” we become much more likely to tolerate their imperfections (and to expect imperfections to be tolerated in ourselves). In private, we have the right to expect to be relatively safe in a range of different ways; we can be honest about our feelings and fears and needs.

In the public, we encounter people that are often very different from us. If we conflict with them, we are much more likely to vote with our feet rather than try to work things out. If we are “stuck” with them (on the job or in politics, for example) our engagements with they are likely to be guarded, since public relationships are inherently less safe than private ones. Part of the reason for this lack of safety is that public relationships are much more likely to be instrumental. We engage with other people in public because we have something we need to accomplish or deal with. Partly as a result, these relationships are often quite fluid, with old acquaintances fading away while new ones emerge, often as a result of changes in our institutional or geographical location and not because we have necessarily chosen new people to engage with.

The table below summarizes these key characteristics of public and private relationships:

Characteristics of Private and Public Relationships

PRIVATE	PUBLIC
Sameness	Diversity
Commonality	Difference
Given/Permanent	Fluid/Temporary
Intimate	Guarded
Safe	Unsafe
Restricted to small number of intimates	Open to a large number of acquaintances

Finally, our expectations of what we can get out of public vs. private relationships are quite different. In the private, we expect to be accepted. We expect some level of loyalty, regardless of how problematic we may be at any moment and we often have a need to be liked or loved by our family and friends. Furthermore, in private we give without much expectation of getting anything in return.

In the public, as I have already noted, our relationships are much more pragmatic. We have relationships because there is some instrumental reason why we need them. Instead of wanting to be liked, in public, we expect respect (regardless of whether others like us or not). Instead of letting it “all hang out,” we must be much more guarded about what we say. In fact, in public, we generally take on a particular kind of dramatic “role.” This is common to teachers and politicians and bosses and workers. In these contexts, to one extent or another, all of us present a particular kind of “face” to the world. The point is not that one must necessarily be dishonest in public—in fact, persistent dishonesty can destroy public relationships even quicker than private ones. Instead we must be careful about how we frame what we think, what we reveal about ourselves, and the topics we discuss. While we can expect un-judgmental loyalty in private, in public we expect to be held accountable for what we say or do, and to hold others accountable in the same way. In general, then, what is most important to understand in public relationships are the self-interests of the different people involved. What motivates us and others to act? {In a future post, I’ll talk more about the broad way organizers frame self-interest.)

The table below summarizes the benefits and aims of public and private relationships:

Benefits and Aims of Private vs. Public Relationships

PRIVATE	PUBLIC
The need to be liked	The need to be respected
Expectation of loyalty	Expectation of accountability
Altruistic/self-giving	Quid pro quo/self-interest

Again, I want to emphasize that these distinctions are not definitions that can be followed strictly and unproblematically. Instead, they are flexible guidelines for “’appropriate behavior’ in [these] different realms” (Boyte, 96). Organizers, perhaps better than most people, understand that “’universals,’ principles that seem to apply across widely varying cultural and communal contexts, need always to be contextualized to have any real meaning. Thus, IAF teachers argue that nothing is ever completely ‘either-or.’” One organizer pointed out, for example, that “’public’ would have a qualitatively different meaning in most African societies . . . . And different settings partake of different ‘public’ and ‘personal’ or private qualities—a church . . . is far more personal than a convention or a political rally” (Boyte, 97).

I often use the example of my own “public” role as a teacher in my community organizing course. But at the same time as we talk about how I need to be held accountable and to hold my students accountable, we also talk about how there are private aspects of the teacher-student relationship as well. To some extent, it is important for me to be loyal to my students, and to balance accountability with a more personal kind of caring. No role is ever completely public or private (although teacher-student roles may be especially fraught with these kinds of tensions).

One way these conceptions of “private” and “public” are useful to organizers are in helping them distinguish between ways of treating people who are intimate relations and those who are public acquaintances. They allow one to draw relatively clear boundaries between people one should expect to be liked by and those from who one demands respect. They help limit one’s responsibilities to those who fall outside of one’s private arena and clarify the responsibilities, benefits, and burdens involved in admitting new people into one’s private circle. One organizer noted, for example, that he used to try to treat everyone like they were friends. He just ended up totally exhausting himself and actually damaging his relationships with people who really were his intimates—like his family. Learning to distinguish between “private” and “public” relationships helped him let go of relationships with people in his organization who weren’t living up to their responsibilities and concentrate on people who he could depend upon.

Despite limitations, it is in the realm of power, politics, inequality, and oppression that these distinctions between “private” and “public” come into their real power. In general, organizers argue that powerful people often try to control those who are less powerful by intentionally confusing private and public relationships.

A few examples:

On the east-west highway in my city right now there is a large billboard advertising a bank that says “it’s not business, it’s personal!” This is a perfect example of an effort to make people feel like a public relationship is really intimate. The fact is that the bank doesn’t care about individual clients. It understands quite clearly that its relationship with those it serves is not private but public. And if you don’t live up to your responsibilities to a bank you will find this out quite quickly, regardless of how nice the tellers and mortgage brokers may be.

Recently my wife and I went to buy a car. We had decided not to purchase a particular vehicle from a salesperson, and he started in on a passionate appeal to us, telling us that he needed another sale to get his bonus for the month. In other words, he was asking us to be loyal and altruistic towards him, even though he knew quite well that his relationship with us was entirely temporary and that any intimacy on his part was really an act that he performed with every customer who came onto his lot. Needless to say, we walked away from that deal.

Waitresses know quite well the power of fake private relationships. There is clear evidence that patrons who are touched lightly during a meal will give a larger tip than those who are not. Of course, in a sense at a restaurant one is paying for a kind of manufactured intimacy. But much of the impact of the strategies used by people like waitresses is quite invisible to patrons. They “feel” more personally connected, and this activates their “private” tendencies.

An organizer I know spoke of a campaign in which his organization was in conflict with a major bank in our city. The bank director used to call him up and the first thing the director would do was ask about the organizer’s family, his children, etc. The organizer said he would patiently wait out this “private” discussion, and then move directly to the “public” part of their discussion.

Frequently, politicians and others in power positions will say something like “I’m a nice person. Why are you doing this to me?” They’ll ask leaders and organizers to lunch or dinner in relatively intimate settings and try to create a personal relationship. But these relationships are not personal, they are public. They involve citizens putting on public faces and engaging with the powerful in their public role. And when social activists don’t understand this, they are open to being used.

One classic way to fight against absentee landlords in the central city who are letting their properties become blighted is to force what they want to be private into the public. A couple of years ago, the organization I work with went to the neighborhood in the suburbs where a notorious landlord lived. Leaders left leaflets with her suburban neighbors with pictures of her properties and a description of how her lack of upkeep was affecting her residents and their neighborhoods. This forced the landlord into a public relationship with her neighbors. This act essentially argued that people who do harm like this should not be able to hide in the private realm. Not surprisingly, if I remember correctly, this landlord very quickly made a deal with my organization.

These distinctions between “private” and “public” help social action organizations decide what kinds of actions are and are not ethical. An ethical action, these distinctions imply, will be one oriented towards the public roles played by an individual or an institution. It’s not legitimate, for example, to bring someone else’s family into the fight unless there is some specific reason why this has become fair game.

During a fight with the school board a couple of years ago, the board president, who was opposing us, declared that at a public meeting that anyone could come to his house any time they wanted. His door was always open for discussion. I thought that this opened him up to a very effective action where our organization might come in force to his house and present him with demands collectively. From my perspective, he had tried to use this as an example of how he was really a “personable” kind of guy as an effort to resist our efforts. This action never happened, however. He had younger kids and there was legitimate disagreement about whether this would overstep ethical bounds and exactly how to do something like this in an ethical way. I’m still not sure, myself, about this strategy.

Whether a relationship is public or private is a result of the role a person is playing at any particular time. For example, two US senators might be married. At home, they would have a “private” relationship under this rubric, but on the Senate floor, their relationship would be “public.” This is something that politicians and powerful people generally understand quite well. It’s why very conservative and very liberal Senators can say terrible things about each other’s views on the airwaves and then go play an amiable game of golf. And the fact is that a personal relationship with and between the powerful can be useful tools in a range of ways as long as the individuals engaged understand when they are playing different roles.

As Boyte notes, the distinction between public and private has

proved significant in teaching leaders the dynamics of effective political action, from the parish level to the life of communities. “We would never have been able to challenge the priest to stop acting like our ‘father’ without this sort of training [about public and private’ said Beatrice Cortez, a president of San Antonio COPS [a congregational organizing group] . . . . ‘You learn what is appropriate and inappropriate for politicians. They shouldn’t try to get us to love them, for instance.’

Cortez frequently tells a story about her daughter to illustrate how children can quickly pick up the point. During her tenure as president of the organization, Cortez had a COPS phone in her house. One day the mayor, Henry Cisneros—whom she had known for years—called up on the line. ‘My daughter answered and at first didn’t know who it was. ‘Who should I say is calling?’ she asked. Cisneros said, “Tell her it’s a special friend.’ ‘Then she recognized his voice,” Cortez said. “She said, ‘On this line, you’re not a friend, I know who you are. You’re the mayor!’ I told her, ‘You’ve got that right, honey!’ (Boyte, p. 98)

In general, Boyte argues that

The self-conscious recognition of the public realm in which IAF [and other community organizing] organizations functioned as significant actors thus began to make explicit and clear what had often been known intuitively but never quite identified: public life had its own distinctive dynamics, its own principles. . . .

But public life . . . also stands in a different relationship to private life than has been classically conceived. Indeed, the groups partially reverse the traditional attributes of public and private . . . The private . . . is the more self-sacrificial and idealistic realm, while the public is the world view of quid pro quo and self-interest. (Boyte, p. 98)

In a future discussion of the practice of “one-on-one” interviews developed by community organizers, I will discuss a range of other issues related to the rich conceptions of public and private that inform much contemporary organizing work.

[For discussions of “public” and “private” that influenced the development of the specifics of this distinction in community organizing, see Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, and Richard Sennett’s The Fall of Public Man.]

Community Organizing and Urban Education XIII: Public vs. Private

[To read the entire series, go here. A one-page version of the entire series is here.]

Note: Much of this is elaborated from pp. 96-99 of Commonwealth by Harry Boyte.

Innumerable books have discussed different ways to conceptualize differences and similarities between “private” and “public” realms, mapping these across history, different cultural groups, and different conceptual frameworks. Here, I discuss the model developed in the context of community organizing.

According to one of Saul Alinsky’s lieutenants, Ed Chambers, one of Alinsky’s many shortsighted attitudes was about the private lives of organizers. “Indeed, Chambers spoke with visible pain of Alinsky’s cavalier, dismissive attitude toward his associates’ family life and retirement and security needs.” Chambers noted that “’He called me up long distance to order me to Rochester’” to work on a famous organizing campaign (Boyte, 96).

This refusal to respect people’s personal lives created numerous problems. Not the least was the tendency to burn people out. Many organizers speak of the revolving door through which many experienced organizers and leaders fled, never to return to the field. In this way, their hard-earned skills that could have supported future efforts were lost.

Post-Alinsky, many organizing groups realized that they needed to fundamentally change the way they supported organizers. Over time, to the extent possible, major organizations like the Gamaliel and Industrial Areas Foundations have tried to make organizing more humanly “doable,” something one could continue for a long-term career. At least in these flagship organizations, pay rates have increased, retirement and other benefits are more likely to be planned for, and thinking has gone into making jobs more family friendly.

One of the approaches developed in the wake of these issues was a new way of framing a distinction between “public” and “private” relationships. These new distinctions were designed to help them and the leaders they work with navigate the enormous emotional and time challenges inherent in any organizing effort. Like all concepts in organizing, these distinctions are meant as flexible guidelines. They are pragmatic tools for helping organizers and leaders make ethical and practical choices in a world that is always too complex to be captured by such binary frameworks. And it’s important to understand that these principles were actively constructed. They were not simply found lying around, but were developed and are still in the process of being developed in response to ongoing experience.

In trainings, organizers started by distinguishing between two columns of different kinds of relationships. On the private side they listed the more intimate relationships one has with one’s family and friends. On the public side they listed the more instrumental relationships one generally has with organizational colleagues, politicians, strangers, and others outside of one’s relatively narrow circle of intimacy. This is all summarized in the following table:

Roles Played in Private vs. Public Relationships

PRIVATE Relationships	PUBLIC Relationships
Family	Church Members
Friends	Students at School
Oneself	Political Actors
	Co-Workers
	People on the street

They also distinguished between what had emerged for them through their organizing experience as the key differences in the characteristics of relationships in these arenas.

In the private, people tend to encounter people who are mostly like themselves in the characteristics that are important to them. Private relationships are often given or inherited—few people, for example, can choose their families. They are relatively permanent. One might want to disown a sibling or a parent, for example, but we rarely do. Similarly, once we decide people are our “friends,” we become much more likely to tolerate their imperfections (and to expect imperfections to be tolerated in ourselves). In private, we have the right to expect to be relatively safe in a range of different ways; we can be honest about our feelings and fears and needs.

In the public, we encounter people that are often very different from us. If we conflict with them, we are much more likely to vote with our feet rather than try to work things out. If we are “stuck” with them (on the job or in politics, for example) our engagements with they are likely to be guarded, since public relationships are inherently less safe than private ones. Part of the reason for this lack of safety is that public relationships are much more likely to be instrumental. We engage with other people in public because we have something we need to accomplish or deal with. Partly as a result, these relationships are often quite fluid, with old acquaintances fading away while new ones emerge, often as a result of changes in our institutional or geographical location and not because we have necessarily chosen new people to engage with.

The table below summarizes these key characteristics of public and private relationships:

Characteristics of Private and Public Relationships

PRIVATE	PUBLIC
Sameness	Diversity
Commonality	Difference
Given/Permanent	Fluid/Temporary
Intimate	Guarded
Safe	Unsafe
Restricted to small number of intimates	Open to a large number of acquaintances

Finally, our expectations of what we can get out of public vs. private relationships are quite different. In the private, we expect to be accepted. We expect some level of loyalty, regardless of how problematic we may be at any moment and we often have a need to be liked or loved by our family and friends. Furthermore, in private we give without much expectation of getting anything in return.

In the public, as I have already noted, our relationships are much more pragmatic. We have relationships because there is some instrumental reason why we need them. Instead of wanting to be liked, in public, we expect respect (regardless of whether others like us or not). Instead of letting it “all hang out,” we must be much more guarded about what we say. In fact, in public, we generally take on a particular kind of dramatic “role.” This is common to teachers and politicians and bosses and workers. In these contexts, to one extent or another, all of us present a particular kind of “face” to the world. The point is not that one must necessarily be dishonest in public—in fact, persistent dishonesty can destroy public relationships even quicker than private ones. Instead we must be careful about how we frame what we think, what we reveal about ourselves, and the topics we discuss. While we can expect un-judgmental loyalty in private, in public we expect to be held accountable for what we say or do, and to hold others accountable in the same way. In general, then, what is most important to understand in public relationships are the self-interests of the different people involved. What motivates us and others to act? {In a future post, I’ll talk more about the broad way organizers frame self-interest.)

The table below summarizes the benefits and aims of public and private relationships:

Benefits and Aims of Private vs. Public Relationships

PRIVATE	PUBLIC
The need to be liked	The need to be respected
Expectation of loyalty	Expectation of accountability
Altruistic/self-giving	Quid pro quo/self-interest

Again, I want to emphasize that these distinctions are not definitions that can be followed strictly and unproblematically. Instead, they are flexible guidelines for “’appropriate behavior’ in [these] different realms” (Boyte, 96). Organizers, perhaps better than most people, understand that “’universals,’ principles that seem to apply across widely varying cultural and communal contexts, need always to be contextualized to have any real meaning. Thus, IAF teachers argue that nothing is ever completely ‘either-or.’” One organizer pointed out, for example, that “’public’ would have a qualitatively different meaning in most African societies . . . . And different settings partake of different ‘public’ and ‘personal’ or private qualities—a church . . . is far more personal than a convention or a political rally” (Boyte, 97).

I often use the example of my own “public” role as a teacher in my community organizing course. But at the same time as we talk about how I need to be held accountable and to hold my students accountable, we also talk about how there are private aspects of the teacher-student relationship as well. To some extent, it is important for me to be loyal to my students, and to balance accountability with a more personal kind of caring. No role is ever completely public or private (although teacher-student roles may be especially fraught with these kinds of tensions).

One way these conceptions of “private” and “public” are useful to organizers are in helping them distinguish between ways of treating people who are intimate relations and those who are public acquaintances. They allow one to draw relatively clear boundaries between people one should expect to be liked by and those from who one demands respect. They help limit one’s responsibilities to those who fall outside of one’s private arena and clarify the responsibilities, benefits, and burdens involved in admitting new people into one’s private circle. One organizer noted, for example, that he used to try to treat everyone like they were friends. He just ended up totally exhausting himself and actually damaging his relationships with people who really were his intimates—like his family. Learning to distinguish between “private” and “public” relationships helped him let go of relationships with people in his organization who weren’t living up to their responsibilities and concentrate on people who he could depend upon.

Despite limitations, it is in the realm of power, politics, inequality, and oppression that these distinctions between “private” and “public” come into their real power. In general, organizers argue that powerful people often try to control those who are less powerful by intentionally confusing private and public relationships.

A few examples:

On the east-west highway in my city right now there is a large billboard advertising a bank that says “it’s not business, it’s personal!” This is a perfect example of an effort to make people feel like a public relationship is really intimate. The fact is that the bank doesn’t care about individual clients. It understands quite clearly that its relationship with those it serves is not private but public. And if you don’t live up to your responsibilities to a bank you will find this out quite quickly, regardless of how nice the tellers and mortgage brokers may be.

Recently my wife and I went to buy a car. We had decided not to purchase a particular vehicle from a salesperson, and he started in on a passionate appeal to us, telling us that he needed another sale to get his bonus for the month. In other words, he was asking us to be loyal and altruistic towards him, even though he knew quite well that his relationship with us was entirely temporary and that any intimacy on his part was really an act that he performed with every customer who came onto his lot. Needless to say, we walked away from that deal.

Waitresses know quite well the power of fake private relationships. There is clear evidence that patrons who are touched lightly during a meal will give a larger tip than those who are not. Of course, in a sense at a restaurant one is paying for a kind of manufactured intimacy. But much of the impact of the strategies used by people like waitresses is quite invisible to patrons. They “feel” more personally connected, and this activates their “private” tendencies.

An organizer I know spoke of a campaign in which his organization was in conflict with a major bank in our city. The bank director used to call him up and the first thing the director would do was ask about the organizer’s family, his children, etc. The organizer said he would patiently wait out this “private” discussion, and then move directly to the “public” part of their discussion.

Frequently, politicians and others in power positions will say something like “I’m a nice person. Why are you doing this to me?” They’ll ask leaders and organizers to lunch or dinner in relatively intimate settings and try to create a personal relationship. But these relationships are not personal, they are public. They involve citizens putting on public faces and engaging with the powerful in their public role. And when social activists don’t understand this, they are open to being used.

One classic way to fight against absentee landlords in the central city who are letting their properties become blighted is to force what they want to be private into the public. A couple of years ago, the organization I work with went to the neighborhood in the suburbs where a notorious landlord lived. Leaders left leaflets with her suburban neighbors with pictures of her properties and a description of how her lack of upkeep was affecting her residents and their neighborhoods. This forced the landlord into a public relationship with her neighbors. This act essentially argued that people who do harm like this should not be able to hide in the private realm. Not surprisingly, if I remember correctly, this landlord very quickly made a deal with my organization.

These distinctions between “private” and “public” help social action organizations decide what kinds of actions are and are not ethical. An ethical action, these distinctions imply, will be one oriented towards the public roles played by an individual or an institution. It’s not legitimate, for example, to bring someone else’s family into the fight unless there is some specific reason why this has become fair game.

During a fight with the school board a couple of years ago, the board president, who was opposing us, declared that at a public meeting that anyone could come to his house any time they wanted. His door was always open for discussion. I thought that this opened him up to a very effective action where our organization might come in force to his house and present him with demands collectively. From my perspective, he had tried to use this as an example of how he was really a “personable” kind of guy as an effort to resist our efforts. This action never happened, however. He had younger kids and there was legitimate disagreement about whether this would overstep ethical bounds and exactly how to do something like this in an ethical way. I’m still not sure, myself, about this strategy.

Whether a relationship is public or private is a result of the role a person is playing at any particular time. For example, two US senators might be married. At home, they would have a “private” relationship under this rubric, but on the Senate floor, their relationship would be “public.” This is something that politicians and powerful people generally understand quite well. It’s why very conservative and very liberal Senators can say terrible things about each other’s views on the airwaves and then go play an amiable game of golf. And the fact is that a personal relationship with and between the powerful can be useful tools in a range of ways as long as the individuals engaged understand when they are playing different roles.

As Boyte notes, the distinction between public and private has

proved significant in teaching leaders the dynamics of effective political action, from the parish level to the life of communities. “We would never have been able to challenge the priest to stop acting like our ‘father’ without this sort of training [about public and private’ said Beatrice Cortez, a president of San Antonio COPS [a congregational organizing group] . . . . ‘You learn what is appropriate and inappropriate for politicians. They shouldn’t try to get us to love them, for instance.’

Cortez frequently tells a story about her daughter to illustrate how children can quickly pick up the point. During her tenure as president of the organization, Cortez had a COPS phone in her house. One day the mayor, Henry Cisneros—whom she had known for years—called up on the line. ‘My daughter answered and at first didn’t know who it was. ‘Who should I say is calling?’ she asked. Cisneros said, “Tell her it’s a special friend.’ ‘Then she recognized his voice,” Cortez said. “She said, ‘On this line, you’re not a friend, I know who you are. You’re the mayor!’ I told her, ‘You’ve got that right, honey!’ (Boyte, p. 98)

In general, Boyte argues that

The self-conscious recognition of the public realm in which IAF [and other community organizing] organizations functioned as significant actors thus began to make explicit and clear what had often been known intuitively but never quite identified: public life had its own distinctive dynamics, its own principles. . . .

But public life . . . also stands in a different relationship to private life than has been classically conceived. Indeed, the groups partially reverse the traditional attributes of public and private . . . The private . . . is the more self-sacrificial and idealistic realm, while the public is the world view of quid pro quo and self-interest. (Boyte, p. 98)

In a future discussion of the practice of “one-on-one” interviews developed by community organizers, I will discuss a range of other issues related to the rich conceptions of public and private that inform much contemporary organizing work.

[For discussions of “public” and “private” that influenced the development of the specifics of this distinction in community organizing, see Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, and Richard Sennett’s The Fall of Public Man.]