No community is an island, and the communities of inquiry described in the
previous chapter are no exception. As units of public action, their vitality
depends upon continued funding and many other kinds of support. As the
discussion thus far shows, their very existence and activities result from a
bureaucratic center in the process of effacing itself. Whereas this
administrative center set policy and tried to assure that ground-level units
executed that policy under the command-and-control bureaucratic scheme, it
exists principally to support the problem-solving activities of its component
communities of inquiry in Street Level Democracy. It is a "supportive center"
that makes local units more effective by linking them to one another and by
holding them accountable to the discipline of pragmatic deliberation. Caught in
a seemingly endless debate between centralized and decentralized political
power, the notion of a center that is supportive rather than directive is
unfamiliar to democratic theory. However, the idea is quite common in other
areas. For instance, SLD's supportive center employs the Catholic
organizational principle of "subsidiarity" which prescribes that "social
organizations should be ordered in interdependent and cooperative forms, with
attention to the natural subsidiarity in which larger and more powerful
political and economic institutions sustain smaller communities instead of
dominating them" (Bellah et. al. 1991: 282). In the area of school
reorganization, Anthony Bryk and his associates (1998: 275-309) have
recommended a "new system center" of school authority that resembles the
supportive center described below. Paul Hill has proposed a school system in
which a central authority contracts for educational services in a manner
similar to SLD's prescription (Hill et. al. 1997).
In this chapter, we develop the notion of a supportive center in the ideal and
examine its partial construction in Chicago school reform and community
policing. We specify its roles by deducing what assistance local units may
require in their deliberative problem solving activities. Four main functions
stand out: (i) assuring the practical and moral integrity deliberative problem
solving within the communities of inquiry; (ii) adjusting background conditions
to enhance communities' activities; (iii) connecting them with one another to
share successful strategies; and (iv) focusing assistance to least capable. We
find that the centers of public education and policing in have implemented, to
various degrees, programs that implement these measures. For example, one study
of post-1988 changes in the CPS central office administrative departments found
that:
Most department heads cited changing relationships between the schools and the
central office as the major impact of reform. Of the 21 departments questioned,
14 had developed new mission statements and had reorganized the structure and
content of their school services in response to new needs under reform. Most
described the changing relationship with schools as a shift in power, a
reversal of the "old top-down system," where the central office is supportive
rather than directive. Although there was general acknowledgement of the
changed governance structure, evaluators also reported central office confusion
and uncertainty about the level of initiative or leadership to take in
relationships with schools. (Stewert and Hixson 1994)
The integrity of pragmatic citizens and their deliberations produces SLD's
democratic virtues. For our purposes, the integrity of citizens is just the
intensity of their motivations to contribute to the public goods that they
depend upon, knowledge of participatory opportunities, their deliberative
abilities and skills of purposive association, and their moral willingness to
constrain the pursuit of self-interest according to the demands of
reasonableness (see chapter 6). When citizens or their discussions lack this
integrity, SLD breaks down; it degenerates from a fair and effective system for
deliberative problem solving into adversarial or unitary interest articulation
(Mansbridge 1980). Unlike some institutional conceptions of democracy, SLD does
not accept the deep features of persons as it finds them but seeks to mold them
through state actions. Furthermore, it recognizes that deliberative processes
can be fragile and flawed, and so endorses checking mechanisms to help insure
that deliberation stays on track. For reasons of both scale and incentive, some
of these measures can more effectively be executed by a central body than by
disparate local units.
First, a central body can provide information that reduces the search costs to
would-be participants. Citizens can't join communities of inquiry unless they
know about avenues for participation--about the program itself, times and dates
of various meetings, etc. In disadvantaged communities with restricted channels
of communication, such information costs can pose a substantial barrier to
participation. Propensities to participate will also depend upon perceptions of
institutional efficacy. Suppose that communities of inquiry have made schools
better or neighborhoods safer; citizens will be more likely to participate when
these "success stories" are well publicized and well known.
The Chicago Police Department and CAPS section of the Mayor's Office have
spent considerable energy on exactly this kind of propagandizing through both
mass media and community organization channels. Primarily as a result of these
efforts, a Northwestern University study found that by 1996, "over half of all
city residents were aware of CAPS (53 percent)... To put it in perspective,
national surveys conducted during the 1980s found that only one third of
Americans knew the name of their U.S. congressional representative, and about
one-quarter could name both their U.S. senators." (Chicago Community Policing
Evaluation Consortium 1996). In its 1997 budget, the city included $2.2 million
for CAPS outreach efforts (Heard and Kass 1996). This money was used to fund a
cable television program called "CrimeWatch," post frequent radio and
television advertising spots, and to retain the services of MK Communications,
a public relations firm.
Second, a central body can provide services to enhance the deliberative
capacities and policy expertise of citizens. In Chapter 6, we argued that the
capacity--the potential--to deliberate about practical matters inheres in every
fully functioning person. However, factors such as education, family, work
experiences, and associational life in large part determine the development of
these capacities, and so we generally observe that some people deliberate
better than others.[1] Individuals' knowledge
of particular policy issues--about crime or education for example--no doubt
varies more directly with relevant training. Since the absence or development
of both these general and particular kinds of skills have public consequences
in SLD, it is appropriate that a public action be taken to enhance them.
Central bodies can, for example, provide training for SLD participants.
Chicago school reformers have always been aware that many LSC members would
require substantial training to perform proficiently. The original 1988 school
reform law, for example, required LSC members to receive training in areas of
school budgeting, educational theory, and personnel selection. Many LSCs have
also received training in deliberative skills such as group dynamics and
parliamentary procedure.[2] In addition to this
official effort, several community organizations have also provided LSC
training to clusters of schools.
Chicago community policing reform has also emphasized the importance of
training:
From the start, the Chicago Police Department identified critical areas for
change... Other cities showed that community policing could not succeed without
adequate training for officers... An immense training effort, mounted using
non-traditional teaching techniques, employed both civilians and trainers.
(Chicago Community Evaluation Consortium 1994: 11)
That program consisted of twenty four hour sessions held over four weeks in
1993. Overall, 1,779 patrol officers, sergeants and lieutenants received
training in the problem-solving orientation of CAPS, leadership development,
and "the decision making and interpersonal skills believed essential to CAPS'
success... communications, problem solving, alliances, goal setting and
ethics" (Chicago Community Evaluation Consortium 1995: 22). Training
expanded to encompass "civilian" participants in the form of J.C.P.T. in 1994.
Both of these training programs have ended, and may have been a product of the
initial enthusiasm for community policing (Fung 1997e). At this writing, it is
not clear what the shape of community policing training will look like for
either patrol officers or residents. The Mayor's Office has committed itself to
provide such training and technical assistance through its own staff, and the
independent group Chicago Alliance for Neighborhood Safety (CANS, see chapter
5) is still working with a number of groups throughout the city.
Third, a central, neutral body can arbitrate disputes in cases of deliberative
break down. In the ideal scheme described in 7.1, reasonableness at the
individual level and deliberation at the social level regulate the problem
solving process to generate outcomes that all support. It would be neither
realistic nor prudent, however, to place too much confidence in the
self-regulation of these deliberative mechanisms. Sweet reason will sometimes
give way to raw interest assertion that results in domination of one faction
over another, paralysis from gridlock, or political exclusion.[3] In community policing groups, one faction of residents may
dominate another or police officers may refuse to heed resident concerns. In
LSCs, principals sometimes dominate deliberations and policy issues can set
members against one another. A central authority can check this potential
pathology by (i) detecting such break-downs and (ii) authoritatively
facilitating community discussions back to the deliberative mode. Both
community policing and education reformers have implemented mechanisms that
partially perform this checking function, but neither has fully articulated the
need or developed a full-blown solution.
A central body can actively attempt to detect deliberative failures by
searching for procedural violations or sub-standard performance among its
component communities as indicators of break-down. For example, inspectors may
require documentation such as meeting minutes and the problem-solving forms
reproduced above (§7.2-§7.3), and outside review of such reports may
reveal poor deliberation. Both the CPS and CPD require their operational units
to file these forms at central locations, but the forms are not then
extensively audited or analyzed. Since misrepresentation on these forms is a
simple matter, it is furthermore uncertain that such auditing effectively
detect deliberative failures.
Sub-standard performance may also indicate faction, or domination, and so a
central body may focus its monitoring efforts on identifying those communities
that do not perform well. The CPS has implemented exactly this mechanism
through its probation and remediation programs. Schools whose average student
standardized test scores fall in the bottom 15% of all schools are place on the
"probation" list (Martinez 1996; Druffin 1998; see also 4.4 above). A
department of CPS called the "Office of Accountability" then audits each school
through site visits and personnel interviews to develop improvement strategies.
Frequently, deliberative failures in the LSC are one cause for the poor
performance of the school, and in such cases the CPS center has intervened with
facilitation-type services.
In addition to active monitoring, a central body might detect deliberative
failures through a passive, "fire-alarm," mechanism in which dominated parties
call for outside assistance.[4] Such a system
would impose a kind of tort against unreasonableness that triggers action from
a central body. No such developed formal mechanisms exist in the Chicago
reforms. Informal practices, however, do reveal the need for such mechanisms.
In both LSCs and community policing groups, wronged parties frequently appeal
to the Solomic authority of charismatic officials such as a District Police
Commander or some figure at "Pershing Road."[5]
Presuming that one or more of these methods can effectively detect failures of
deliberation, the nature of optimal corrective intervention is not obvious. The
basic problem is that too forceful intervention from a central body simply
reduces the relationship between operational unit and center relationship to
command-and-control and thus sacrifices SLD's benefits over standard
bureaucracy. For incorrigible cases, there may be no better alternative. If
possible, however, the object of intervention should be to restore the
integrity deliberative mechanisms that regulate a community of inquiry.[6]
To see how this might work, consider the real case of a non-performing LSC
whose members had clustered into stable factions that opposed one another on
almost every substantive issue.[7] The CPS
Office of Accountability dispatched a team to review school operations and a
facilitator to work with LSC members. Patricia Harvey, director of the Office
of Accountability, explained that the object of these intervention efforts was
to not to issue commands, but to re-focus LSC members on the ultimate goal of
school improvement and to create space in which they would be able to
re-consider their conflicting positions in light of their deeper commitment to
this common goal. When many in the LSC voiced their concern that the report of
the review team supported this or that position, Harvey responded that,
The one page is about a group of professionals coming in for a day with their
point of view.
It [the report] is a snapshot, not a command. The command is that you sit
down... and use it to come up with a concrete action plan....
The content of the assessment [report] provides an x-ray reflection of the
school's activities. What they [the reviewers] do is to write down what they
see from an objective perspective...
It is only when we step back that we see the whole picture. Only when you step
back from your immediate, daily activities and re-focus your attention can you
see the other dimensions of the problem. We have all taken that test for
looking at the picture of the old lady, and then you look again and it is a
picture of a young woman.
What makes us professional is that people who second-guess us actually help us
out. None of us would go into surgery--a radical procedure--without a second
guess.
Unfortunately in education we have not done this enough. Teachers go into a
classroom at twenty, close the door, and continue the same methods [whether
they are working or not] for the next few decades.
We are saying: let's plan for our kids [and] let's be confident enough to take
another look at our plans and defend them--this brings the discussion to the
next level.[8]
Dr. Frank Gardner, a former School Board President and former district
superintendent, is the probation manager that CPS headquarters sent to Harper
High School in Chicago. There, he has facilitated meetings between various
elements of the school staff in order to restore deliberative capacity.
Principal Richard Parker comments that, "When Dr. Gardner came in, he helped us
clarify and define what we were going to do, but he also warned us that what we
said we were going to do, we would do" (Williams 1997: 20).
The degree to which masterful facilitation and ironic visioning techniques
such as these can restore failures of deliberation is of course a matter of
great speculation, probably more art than science. These examples merely
illustrate promising interventions aimed at restoring deliberative integrity
where it has failed.
All problem solving efforts, those of individuals as well as of our communities of inquiry, depend for their success upon a background of receptive institutions. SLD in any particular area of public action--such education or policing--is one institution whose fate depends upon the actions of many other parties: city agencies, elected officials, markets, laws, courts, civic organizations, and labor unions to name just a few. A central body which derives its power and legitimacy from the public virtues of its component communities of inquiry can improve the disposition of institutions upon which those communities depend, but which they themselves cannot affect. This is one sense in which SLD provides institutional mechanisms and content to Dewey's pragmatist political notion that the experimental social institutions will continuously generate discoveries that lead to the reconfiguration of the generative institutions themselves.[9]
Secure funding is the least imaginative, but perhaps most important,
service that the center can provide to it member communities. While extravagant
funding does not automatically yield safe streets or effective schools, poor
funding makes education and policing difficult indeed. For realism's sake, we
have not imagined SLD to be self-financing, and so it depends upon external
actors for its revenue. In the case of public functions like education and
policing, financing comes from taxes, which are themselves decided in the
electoral and interest group arenas. In this area, a centralized representative
of SLD's communities, in either policing or education, acts as one lobby among
others to push for stabilization and expansion of its funding base.
Beyond such obviously desirable conditions as greater funding, many goals for
environmental change arise out of the experimental discoveries of communities
themselves. Early experiments in school reform schemes of site-based management
revealed, for example, that problem solving requires time. Typical of municipal
contracts, the collective bargain between the Chicago Teacher's Union (CTU) and
the Chicago Board of Education (CBE) specified strict work rules whose object
was to minimize local discretion and maximize the amount of teacher classroom
time. The contracts simply did not leave time for planning or problem solving,
and no single school could modify this collective bargaining agreement which
covered some 560 schools. The CTU and CTE negotiated a waiver system in which a
voting majority of a school's teachers could exempt themselves from the
time-structuring provisions of the collective bargain (Thomas and Griffin
1988). A great majority of school faculties and LSCs have utilized this waiver
to implement a "time banking" scheme which extends the length of the class day
by ten or fifteen minutes for four days every week to create an extra hour of
"banked" time each for faculty planning and problem solving activities.
Another instance in which central authority salubriously modified
institutional background conditions comes from Chicago drug houses. Many
Chicago neighborhoods have properties used for narcotic trafficking and
consumption. Due to the density of urban life, these criminal activities harm
nearby residents through associated crimes like shooting, robbery, burglary,
and battery; in the city, no fences can be high enough to make good neighbors
out of crack dealers. It is unsurprising, therefore, that many local community
policing efforts have targeted their problem-solving energies upon drug houses.
Often, these drug houses are owned by absentee landlords who collect rent but
care little for the property's maintenance or the negative externalities of
tenants' behavior.
Dozens of groups have independently converged upon the following strategy for
dealing with these situations. Residents try to persuade the landlord to clean
up his property through, for example, eviction of problem tenants, reporting
criminal activity on the property to police, and screening out potentially
problematic would-be tenants, and maintaining or upgrading the property's
condition. If a landlord responds to these entreaties, resident groups may
assist his efforts in various ways, and their partnership is often sufficient
to eliminate the problem. If the landlord refuses to cooperate, then residents
begin to build a legal case that can be used in housing court to seize the
property and thereby down the drug house. According to the Illinois nuisance
abatement law, a court may act against a drug house by "restraining all
persons... from using the building for a period of one year" if it establishes
that "nuisance was maintained with the intentional, knowing, reckless or
negligent permission of the owner."[10] The
nuisance in such cases is the trafficking of a controlled substance, and
establishing negligence under this law requires three narcotics arrests on the
property in question. To use this law, then, groups residents worked with
police to concentrate patrol, surveillance, and undercover action that would
result in three arrests. Then, residents would press the case in housing court
by testifying that narcotics activities did in fact severely burden
neighborhood life. This strategy to persuade first, then prosecute has shut
down many of the city's drug houses.
Two very recent changes in the institutional background make it easier for
organized communities to pursue strategies of this kind. First, a 1996 city
ordinance whittled away \real estate property rights by enacting a stricter
version of the Illinois nuisance abatement law.[11] This ordinance imposes the burden of monitoring against
illegal activities on the property owner and creates a fine for allowing a
nuisance to occur. It subjects "any person who owns, manages or controls any
premises and who encourages or permits illegal activity... shall be subject to
a fine" for each day of the offense. Furthermore, whereas the Illinois law
requires the illegal activity to occur inside the premises,[12] the new law only requires a geographic nexus between the
problem property and nuisance. This provision is important because, as one
officer told me, "your classic drug houses don't really exist any more because
the dealers know that you can take the house away. Most of the action happens
on the street in front of the house."
Second, the City's Law Department, called Corporation Council, has created a
Drug and Gang House Enforcement Section that helps community policing groups
utilize this law. They send staff lawyers to community beat meetings to provide
legal expertise in the formulation and implementation of problem-solving
strategies.[13] If residents identify and
prioritize a drug house, the lawyer will independently deploy the Law
Department's resources to eliminate that drug house. According to Dawn Bode,
the Section's Supervising Attorney, the office uses the same strategy of
persuade first and prosecute second, but with all of the power of city behind
it.[14] When corporation council targets a
property, they first send city inspectors to document all code violations in
addition to the nuisance. It then invites the landlord to a meeting to discuss
the situation. The goal of this discussion is voluntary compliance and
awareness as documented with a resolution letter signed by the property owner.
If the landlord doesn't respond to initial letter, rejects voluntary
compliance, or doesn't show up to the meeting, corporation council pursues
measures in administrative court. It asks for fine, and then for criminal
contempt charges that can result in 180 days imprisonment. These two background
measures, then, put the jackboot of the state at the disposal of
problem-solving communities in their efforts to eliminate drug houses by
generalizing and strengthening a strategy that those communities themselves
invented.
As this anecdote about drug house strategies suggests, communities of inquiry
dedicated to the same public function (policing or education, say) may face
similar problems. In such cases, some communities may develop effective
strategies while others fumble. A third function of a central body, then, is to
network the inquiries of similar communities together so they can share
techniques and learn from one another by pooling information and experience.
Continuing our metaphor of experimentation, each community of inquiry executes
public action in the form sequential experiments: the strategy is a hypothesis,
implementation is experiment, and evaluation analyzes its results. Networking
communities together, then, vastly expands the quantity of trials--from one to
279 in the case of policing and to 560 with school governance.
Teachers' desires to communicate their experiences with one another surfaced
in the course of grant development effort of the Traxton Area Planning
Association's (TAPA).[15] TAPA is a Chicago
civic organization that has for many years supported various educational
initiatives in its community. One of its post-reform projects was to develop a
"teacher resource center" that would be a networking and professional
development hub for teachers at the community's high school and its seven
feeder elementary schools. The resource center would provide common facilities
for curriculum development and seminars on education. When asked how the idea
to create a networking hub originated, one participant explained that "We
conducted focus groups of teachers of broken up by subject matter, and the idea
kept popping up [in various focus groups]. It really came out that teachers
need to talk to one another."
Beyond generic information pooling through seminars and other such venues,
formal arrangements for connecting communities might also utilize
performance-based "benchmarking." So, just as the CPS "probation" list selects
the bottom 15% of schools for special action, standardized tests and other
measures might identify high performing communities so that other community can
consider reproducing their strategies and techniques.
The CPS "Exemplary Schools Program," first piloted in the 1995-6 school year,
implemented just this strategy. Every school was invited to demonstrate itself
to be an "exemplary school." To qualify for consideration, elementary schools
had to demonstrate improvement in student standardized test scores and that
"student achievement on [standardized]... tests substantially exceeds
schools serving similar students" (emphasis in original, Children First
1995). Beyond these minimal screens, schools were asked to explain their
success in terms of instructional program, capacity to implement change in the
school, LSC governance, collective faculty action, strategic planning, parental
involvement, school discipline, and other measures. Selected schools (up to 25)
then received several thousand dollars each to create "learning sites" at their
school to propagate these best practices to the staff and LSCs of other
schools.
Two features of this program should not escape notice. First, designers did
not pre-judge a specific educational theory as best. So, the CPS did recommend
a set of best educational practices, but the application specifically stated
that "Schools will not be judged based upon the specific best practices in the
Self-Analysis Guide, but on the overall coherence of their activities in
these areas, in support of Quality Instruction and student achievement."
Second, the ability to articulate the sources of one's success is itself a
component of excellence: "Schools must be able to explain how their Quality
Instructional Program, as well as their [other] practices... have made it
possible for them to achieve exemplary results" (emphasis in original). These
points illustrate once again SLD's fundamental assertions that the center no
long claims to know what is best. It does, however, have a role in identifying
and percolating best practices outward as they are revealed through
street-level experiments.
So far as I know, the Chicago Police Department has not yet implemented
programs to compare the performance of beats against one another or to elicit
explanations and lessons from those who excel at deliberative problem-solving.
To be sure, there are police officers and community activists who have hit upon
best practices and spread them from beat-to-beat on an informal basis. The
Mayor's Office and the police department sponsor periodic community policing
conference with workshops and seminars, but they have yet to incorporate the
discipline of horizontal comparison and communication into daily routines.
Nevertheless, police officer and resident activists feel the need for such
machinery that networks inquiry. One police sergeant expressed it this way:
Author: What do you find most frustrating for you in community
policing?
Sergeant: The frustrating part is that I know what the model is, but
the model isn't... being done right now. I don't really know they're doing
[other] districts...
There are other districts that are doing things completely differently than we
are doing them here. I think it would be nice to have a forum, perhaps every
six months.
In [CAPS] training, they would take 25 sergeants, one from each district. So,
now your in there with someone from each of the other districts, so you can
talk about what's going on in the other districts. I think that maybe once a
year they should do this.
Actually, it's been over a year since I've been to that training, and I really
believe that now would be a great time to get us back down there, and get us
back together, and kick it around a little bit.
And so [the greatest frustration is] the isolation of being here and doing my
thing here. I feel a great sense of accomplishment. I feel like I am doing the
best I can do at this point with what I have to work with. I pretty much get by
and I pretty much feel like I am doing a good job, but I think that there are
more creative ways I could find to do things or other things that I could do
that I haven't thought of that it would be nice to get input from other people.
Just to kick some of this stuff around with other people who are in the same
boat.
Left to their independent devices, some would surely flounder while others
excelled at problem-solving due to their superior wealth, deliberative
capacity, or brute luck. Since problem-solving capacity generates outcomes in
SLD, unequal capacities mean that some will receive better services than others
(Weir 1994). If we suppose that there is a broad-based commitment to equity in
the provision of services like education and policing, then the center should
address such inequalities among its communities. Much of the variance in
problem-solving outcomes can no doubt be attributed to background conditions of
social and economic inequality, but since an administrative center is
relatively powerless to affect this background, SLD treats such inequalities as
parameters rather than objects of institutional design. Much of the remaining
variance in outcomes can be attributed to the differential problem-solving
capacities between communities of inquiry. The supportive center can, then,
focus its resources on developing the capacities of those who are least
able.
To implement this equity strategy, a central body would allocate some portion
of resources toward remediation. It would then rank order the performance of
its component communities of inquiry according to the best metrics available in
order to identify "needy" communities. In the public schools, comparison of
student standardized test scores across time and with other schools, attendance
rates, graduation rates, active auditing of schools, parent and community
surveys, and more subtle measures might compose such a metric. In neighborhood
police beats, participation rates, quality of problems prioritized and solved,
survey instruments, and comparative supervisor reports could all be employed to
generate such rankings.
A redistributive center would then use its remediation resources to assist
"needy" communities sometimes through the direct injection of resources, but
probably more often through the kinds of supportive measures described above.
So, low participation in SLD communities and lack of deliberative capacities
are two sources of failure that may be caused by background social and economic
inequalities.[16] To offset these biases, a
redistributive center might channel publicity and outreach resources to boost
participation and focus training efforts in deliberation (8.1) to these least
able communities. According to William Julius Wilson's social isolation
hypothesis, the most disadvantaged underclass communities lack connections with
powerful institutional actors in the political arena, the private economy, and
other city agencies (Wilson 1987: 58-62). As we discussed (8.2), access to
these resources determines in no small part the success of urban
problem-solving efforts and a central body can improve connections with such
outside actors. It is therefore appropriate that a central body channel these
efforts to connect communities of inquiry with useful outside actors toward
those disadvantaged communities that most lack such linkages. Networking
inquiry employs the discoveries of the successful to teach the rest (8.3). A
redistributive center might use subsidize these kinds of peer learning
initiatives to link the best communities with the worst to channel experimental
expertise where it is desperately needed.
Unlike the first three supportive functions of maintaining deliberative
integrity, creating favorable institutional background conditions for
deliberative problem solving, and networking inquiry, the CPS and CPD have thus
far failed to develop programs that explicitly perform this redistributive
function of channeling resources to the most needy communities. Some of their
programs do, however, perform this function inadvertantly. The probation and
remediation lists of the CPS, for example, provide resources of training,
managerial consultation, and occasionally additional funds to the worst
performing, and therefore most needy, schools. Within the unified Chicago
school district, per-pupil funding levels are distributed to schools according
to a formula that allocates more money to schools with higher proportions of
students from low-income families; Chicago schools with more poor students,
therefore, enjoy higher per-pupil funding levels than those with more wealthy
ones. In community policing, the distribution of officers takes into account
crime rates in the determination of beat boundaries; high crime beats tend to
be geographically smaller than low crime ones. Since Chicago school and police
agencies perform redistributive functions minimally and somewhat accidentally
through these measures, this CPS and CPD fall substantially short of SLD's
prescription for an administrative center that transfers problem solving
resources to the worst-off local units.
Even a more comprehensive redistribution, however, would almost certainly be
insufficient to equalize problem solving outcomes between communities vastly
unequal communities. Though the ultimate aims of SLD--achieving fair and
effective outcomes in public action--would undoubtedly benefit from substantial
redistributive measures, the justification of the scheme does not depend upon
them. Why? The main competitor to our proposal--bureaucracy--certainly has not
achieved even roughly equal outcomes in areas such as education or public
safety. SLD's strategy of justification is essentially comparative; what we
must establish, then, is that SLD will achieve more equitable outcomes than
competing schemes for state reconstruction, given the background of existing
social and economic inequality.[17] In
the next two chapters, we turn to the reasons why the abstract architecture of
SLD's citizens, local units, and supportive center can be expected to generate
outcomes that are more fair and effective than the command and control
bureaucracies that they seek to replace.
[1] This point about peoples' real ability to
deliberate (and the need for enhancement) is curiously absent, beyond gestures
to the importance of public education, from most contemporary treatments of
deliberative democracy. Perhaps this is a result of the hyper-idealization of
speech and its conditions. See Gutmann and Thompson (1996: 65-6).
[2] Illinois Compiled Code of Statutes,
Chapter 105, Article 34, para. 2.3, "Local School Councils-Powers and Duties"
(1996).
[3] One 1993 study of elementary school LSC
created four categories of LSC politics: "Principal Dominated" (39% to 46% of
sample), "Adversarial politics" (4% to 9%), Maintenance/Complacent Politics
(14% to 24%), and "Strong Democracy" (23% to 32%). While their categories do
not map directly onto our deliberative scheme, "Adversial Politics" and
"Principal Dominated" definitely do not count as deliberative politics. So,
according to this study, at least 43% of schools exhibited deliberative
breakdown in 1993. (Consortium on Chicago School Research 1993).
[4] The "fire-alarm" metaphor comes from
McCubbins and Schwartz (1984).
[5] The labyrinthine headquarters of the Chicago
Public Schools is located at 1819 West Pershing Road. Individuals who work in
the public education simply refer to the site as "Pershing Road." Like
"Washington," the vague appellation connotes a mysterious and far-away
bureaucratic center whose radiating power fades with distance, but becomes more
arbitrary thereby and is never completely escapable.
[6] To the extent that deliberation is
autonomous, the center must, if it can, force communities to be free by
restoring deliberative regulation. See J.J. Rousseau, Social Contract,
Book I, Chap. 7, para. 8.
[7] This case is examined in detail in Chapter
15.
[8] Patricia Harvey's statement was recorded by
the author at a Local School Council meeting on 18 February 1997.
[9] See generally Dewey's The Public and Its
Problems (1927), esp. 28-36, 194-202.
[10] 720 Illinois Compiled Statutes, Sec.
37-4 (1996).
[11] The ordinance described in this paragraph
went into effect on November 11, 1996. See "Amendements of Titles 8 and 13 of
Municipal Code of Chicago Concerning Liability of Property Owners and
Management for Unlawful Activities on Property." Chicago City Council
Journal (July 31, 1996): 27730-27735.
[12] The state statute was originally
targetted against prostitution.
[13] This program, called the "Corporation
Council Program," is presently being tested in five "prototype" police
districts. It began on November 1, 1996.
[14] Telephone interview (27 February
1997).
[15] The name of the actual Chicago community
has been changed to preserve anonymity. This case is discussed in Chapter 16
below.
[16] So, one of the most robust findings of
empirical political science is that lower SES individuals participate less
frequently in all democratic channels. Verba and Nie write that:
Citizens of higher social and economic status participate more in politics.
This generalization has been confirmed many times in many nations. And it
generally holds true whether one uses level of education, income, or occupation
as the measure of social status.
See Verba and Nie (1987), especially Chapter 6 and Chapter 8.
These SES sources of differential participation will also hobble SLD, though
preliminary evidence suggests that SLD institutions will be somewhat less
vulnerable to these effects. Participation data from Chicago community policing
shows that individuals from lower income beats turn out to community
beat meetings at a higher rate than their counterparts in wealthy
neighborhoods. The most obvious explanation for this pattern is that low-income
people have more intense crime and disorder problems to solve. (see chapter
11)
[17] More equitable outcomes in areas like
education and public safety may in turn reduce social and economic inequality,
but that speculation is beyond the scope of this analysis.