Rest in Peace Michael Jackson

Who gives a fuck?
Plenty of people have made this point during the insane MJ coverage. Insane is a good word for anyone that can temporaily shut down twitter and google. I'm normally the most anti-celebrity mourning person out there; the first to say this is just colonialism manipulating our little minds into ignoring real injustice in the world. In particular, the excessive attention paid to Princess Diana and JFK junior too me were examples of our celebrity-obsessed culture. We were mourning people who had everything, absolutely everything, who had come from the most obscene privilege, living lives as elites that most of the masses who mourned them would never come close to grasping. And in death, they would distract us from thinking critically and organizing around other important issues.

I seethed each time at the lopsidedness of everything.

But I do.
I couldn't believe how sad I was this time. What makes MJ different? Well, a lot obviously (talent, accomplishments, and upbringing just to name a few), but the essential question is, why does someone like me care about someone like him?

Wait, maybe I can intellectualize it?
Maybe I can tie MJ's passing to some form of social justice. Did MJ make Barack Obama possible? Was it important that he made MTV accept black music? Did he make people of color, African Americans love themselves in new ways, find places for themselves in America that people of so many different backgrounds have been struggling for? I don't really know. Those questions and discussions are above my pay grade. Though I'm happy to read any essays/articles on the topic(s)....

But wasn't he a (possible) child molester and do other messed up stuff?
Picasso was a womanizer. Legend says that Rembrandt was so miserly that his studio assistants painted gold coins on the ground to trick him into trying to pick them up. And he probably passed off their work as his own. These are just some of the examples off the top of my head of great artists who were far from great people. And I don't know if MJ was child molester. A saint or sinner? I don't care to really try to parcel it out. For me, it's not the point. I'm not sad because the world lost a "good" man-though to people close to him, I'm sure he was.

It's all just fucking irrational. Accept it.
Damn straight. It didn't seem to make sense for my mom, a Korean immigrant who toiled as a nurse for 30 years to care when someone of JFK Jr.'s privilege died. Let me have my celebrity sadness!

Someone I feel a connection to as illogical as it may be...

I'm sad because this was part of my childhood. I memorized the words to Beat It, I sang along not even understanding the damn words. My parents gave me the tape of Thriller I think for my birthday and played it constantly. I had no idea what any of the lyrics were about. All I knew was that Michael Jackson, and singing his songs as a little chubby, geeky Asian kid with glasses that were way too big, hair that was way to bowled, pants that were too damn tight, felt like about the most American thing I could be/do. Growing up in Park Slope, as one of the few (then) Asian kids navigating a mostly white gifted elementary program and a fairly diverse neighborhood, Michael was a cultural common denominator.

I guess selling 20 million-some records will do that.

Of course, as he descended into more and more weirdness and I started branching off into other music he became just another relic of my childhood and I stopped paying attention to him. More recently, as I got into dance, I gained a new appreciation for him as an artist and performer, not just the guy who sang all those songs I memorized as a kid. I watched a lot of him dancing. I had done enough dance classes and tried to (late in life) force my body to do enough (for me) unnatural things that I appreciated how effortlessly he moved, how captivating, just one guy could be on stage in front of thousands...




So does any of this make sense? I don't know, I don't care. We're all masters of our own contradictions. Rest in peace, Michael. Thank you.

Highline

I never thought I would walk on these tracks. What a beautiful public space.

Fun with Unitards.

From pin the salsa on the Jason

Happy birthday

Beautiful picture from today's NY Times.

Clawback

Merit Pay for teachers?
When I taught elementary school one of the ideas that got kicked around was a bonus pay system tied to student achievement. It was our first year and we were a start-up charter school and this was 2002, years before Mayor Bloomberg started a pilot bonus program in the DOE . It was just a proposal that the then-Director proposed in a staff meeting (I don't know what the school has done since), but incredibly controversial even as just an idea. Some of the reasons teachers protested were:

• Difficulty assigning credit (what percentage of increases in student achievement to to the receptionist, the classroom teacher, the subject teachers etc.)
• How do you account for where students are when you have them and other factors beyond a teacher's control?
• Does it change the way people teach (e.g. ignoring high and low achievers in favor of the students who were right near the threshold of meeting standard)

Not spoken as explicitly, but very clear in the tone of my fellow teachers' responses was indignation that they needed more money to be motivated to do more, to be better.

Teachers in general are a pretty intrinsically motivated lot, teachers at our charter school, who had given up union protections and other benefits for higher pay, but longer hours, more independence in exchange for higher accountability were probably even more so intrinsically motivated. They didn't like the idea of adding this aspect of competition to a job they felt they already did professionally.

The Right Carrots
One basic law of economics is that people respond to incentives. I don't remember too much from micro, but that seemed like a pretty important one.

We also talked a lot about intrinsic and external motivation in Joe Magee's intro class Managing Public Service Organizations. By and large, those of us in the public sector are motivated intrinsically, by the desire to do a good job to simply do good.

The most interesting part of the incentives discussion we had was the role of money as an external incentive. Magee pointed out that people rank money very high as an incentive (typically top 5), but it is not number one. There are other more important incentives (if I only remember what they were!). But interestingly, we perceive importance of money to be higher to others than in ourselves. In other words, we assume other people rank money as higher as an incentive than we do ourselves. Which leads to us assuming that money is a more effective incentive than it really is (again, this is matter of degrees and relativity, money is probably an effective incentive). This is not to say people don't want to be compensated fairly and even generously, but it may be dangerous to assume that money is the most effective incentive for all employees in all sectors in all situations.

Clawbacks
So I've been fascinated by the idea of clawbacks. What's the simplest argument against performance pay for teachers? That measuring their success (the education and development of a human being) is hard to measure quantitatively and perhaps even harder to fairly assign credit for. But not so for people in the business world supposedly. Performance is tied to things like shareholder value, revenue generated, seemingly straightforward numbers that are easy to trace.

But I've been reading about "clawbacks", first in reference to the Bernie Madoff scandal, but more recently in reference to employees who's actions may have led to short-term gains (enough to trigger bonuses), but were actually really bad for the long-term health of the firm. The problem is that these consequences didn't occur until long after they had left and earned their bonus(es):

Clawbacks are more common among private-equity firms and hedge funds, essentially giving the employer an insurance policy in case trades or deals come back to haunt the firm. In a memo Monday, Morgan Stanley Chairman and Chief Executive John Mack announced that an unspecified portion of year-end bonuses for eligible employees will be "subject to a clawback provision that could be triggered if the individual engages in conduct detrimental" to the Wall Street company.

"We're making what we see as a good-faith effort to more closely tie employee ompensation to longer-term performance," said Morgan Stanley spokesman Mark Lake.

Wall Street Journal

“Poorly structured pay packages encouraged the get-rich-quick mentality and overly risky behavior that helped bring financial markets to their knees and wiped out profits at so many companies,” said Amy Borrus, deputy director at the Council of Institutional Investors. “And yet many of these C.E.O.’s have pocketed enormous compensation.”

New York Times

I'm no finance expert but it seems like a lot of the destructive financial engineering we're experiencing came as a result of incentives that didn't take long-term sustainability acct.

How do we make sure our incentives are tied to the long-term health of students, schools and communities? Can we?
What would clawback provisions in a teacher and school performance pay structure look like if their short-term gains horribly corrupted a school's and a student's lifelong performance?

How complex would these performance structures have to be? Wall Street can't get this right and their performance measures seem much simpler.

Some examples of the educational equivalent of this is pumping up test scores through a variety of less than optimal educational means ranging from the legal, but not so ideal, focusing on test prep rather (junk food), ignoring content area instructional (science, history, the arts music etc), cutting out recess and physical education, to the straight-up illegal (re-bubbling your students test scores like in Freakonomics).

Clearly, a lot of this financial engineering ignored the long-term health of a lot of financial institutions and investors. What happens if we build in performance-based bonuses for teachers and school principals that encourage short-term gains at a long-term cost? When kids, years later, when they have the freedom to do so, drop out of school because they hate school, or when they continue and they enter middle and high school and are completely ill-quipped to navigate their learning environment. Can't do research independently, can't ask critical questions?

Maybe the most sobering thing I ever head about public high school from a former teacher was, "it's actually not so bad [compared to teaching elementary school], by the time [they] get there, the ones who are showing up actually on some level want to be there. The really bad ones just don't even show up."

What triggers clawing back that bonus money?

The question I have is essentially--

how is what we're learning in this financial meltdown about incentives and compensation packages applicable to the debates about how we treat educators, schools and their role in student success?

Discuss.

What the fuck pisses you off about the world?

This month is career panel season in Rhode Island or something. I've participated in my second career panel this month (RISD and RI Campus Compact) and I think I'll be doing another one next month (Brown) and I turned down another one because of scheduling conflicts (Leadership RI).

It's funny being at a point in my "career" where I've reached a stature ("Nonprofit Executive Director" sounds pretty good on paper huh?) where I'm supposed to have words of wisdom for college students interested in careers in the public sector. I'm trying to be careful not to let all this stuff go to my head and fall into the "professor trap" of being the wise old grizzled vet with all the answers.

I told one young woman today that it was easy for me to look back at the jobs and organizations I've worked at and retroactively impose a clear and logical narrative. But the reality is that my "career" has really been a series of accidents, luck and opportunity mixed in with a little bit of my vague sense of anger at the way things are in the world and wanting to somehow to do something about it, however small.

Hopefully, I helped her chill out and be more zen about how her career will unfold. It's easy to look at other people and see logic, order and a natural progression. But you can't believe the hype! Sometimes you just have to be the gourd in the river.

In addition to being a panelist today, I led a group of 15 college students who are involved in RI Campus Compact. These are students from colleges all across Rhode Island, who are involved in a variety of service-related work. This summit was an opportunity for them to network with each other and meet some professionals doing public work (like me).

In my experience, as much as I don't like to say it like this exactly, a lot of us doing this work are motivated by a deep sense of anger, of some (or many) injustice in the world and a desire to address that. I heard about one nonprofit that actually had "anger" as one of their criteria in looking for a new executive.

I'm not sure if I was supposed to take this approach, but instead of getting into the nuts and bolts of the jobs I've had and the skills I look for when hiring people, I just asked--

"what drives you to do the work that you do? What makes you angry? What's wrong with this world as it is? What do you want to do about it?"

Maybe I shouldn't have framed it so negatively or in such a deficit-based way, or even framed them as world fixers, but man, was I inspired by the passion and sense of justice that moved these students! Some of the things that came up was,

• Ignorance, the way we fail to acknowledge our unconscious biases towards each other.
• Bikes, that learning to repair, ride and own our own bicycles can free you from dependence on a consumer culture, make a healthier society
  
• Religious faith as source of motivation to make the world a better place and frustration that religious Christians and Catholics just get dismissed as "Jesus freaks"
• Starting a pre-school literacy program and because just a few extra hours by a well-trained volunteer can make all the difference between the reading skills of a child from a low-income family compared to a wealthier one
• Ignorance about issues such as Abu Ghraib and the middle east. Distorted and biased media coverage about Israel and Palestine.

We talked about how hard it was to put these things into words, into clear action steps. I tried to stress them that it was ok. That it was ok to be vague, to be confused, to be unable to clearly articulate what it was that moved them, but to continue to talk about it. New Urban Arts exists because Tyler started something that he couldn't quite put into words. He spent 10 years trying to put words around a way of doing teaching and learning that didn't quite exist when he started.

I selfishly framed the discussion to these young people this way because, having just passed my own one-year mark, I am asking myself this same question to re-center myself.

What the fuck pisses me off so much that I do this work?

Disclaimer, this is not a complete, nor well-thought out list. Some of these bullets are ill-thought out, simplistic, maybe irrational and maybe even unfair characterizations. But this is me doing the same exact thing I asked these students do today, which is to messily, and clumsily talk about what makes me angry:

• That we say some people are creative and others aren't
• That we privilege the stories of some people over others and art is ultimately, to me, about stories and excluding narratives is essentially denying the humanity of others.
  
• That teaching and learning too often breeds dependency. Dependency on others (people like authority figures or things like test scores) to tell you that you are smart, talented, gifted whatever. And as much as this dependency gets bred across the socioecononmic scale, even in priveleged schools and elite colleges and institutons, this definitely happens way too much more to poor young people and people of color
• That we condition people to wait. To wait to be told what to learn, what to do, what matters. Fuck waiting. Do. Make your own criteria, do your own thing. This is maybe what I love about New Urban Arts the most. Our young people don't sit around and wait.
  
• That all this shit serves to psychically oppress people.
• That making art, being encouraged to create, can change this but may be why it really doesn't happen enough. That we'll liberate too many people if we radically change this shit.
  
• People who run soul-killing schools for poor inner-city youth that they would never send their own children too and justify it by saying that "I wish we could be more creative and hands on like [the name of the fancy private school my kids go to] but we can't because these kids are so deficient." Yes, I heard a charter school's board member say this in a meeting with me and not even blink (no school I've ever worked with thankfully).
• And so much more...
  

This stuff probably isn't going in the need statement, problem-to-be solved section of a grant application anytime soon.

But I do think its important to time to time, to try to find that anger in you to channel it.

7ARTS

I just passed my one-year anniversary as the Executive Director of New Urban Arts.

Holy shit it went by fast.

It's also been about a year and a half since I ended 7ARTS, the program that was my heart and soul for a good four years of my life.

In the last year in Providence, I've deliberately avoided looking back at my old 7ARTS documents. I mean, I've been kind of busy, transitioning into a new position and city. But really, I didn't want to remind myself that I stopped something I loved and force myself to think about what could have been maybe if I had been better, smarter, more organized, if I could have been more anything more than what I had been.

Bored at home tonight, I started browsing through my old files, everything from recommendation letters, to program plans, to interviews with potential funders, students. I saved a ton of shit electronically from those four years. It's an amazing archive for me to look at. An electronic record of my failures and successes in folders, subfolders and sub-sub-folders.

It's weird, I'm only 30, so I guess I'm pretty young still (kind of), but reading though my old files I feel like some grizzled world-weary nonprofit veteran looking back at myself as some naive young dumb passionate kid, trying to start some new program that would "change the world".

"Easy there rookie..." I feel myself saying as I read all this old shit.

I guess what I'm saying-it's easy for me to look back now and see where I screwed up, where I should have eased up and where I should have put much more energy. I see what I did that was so smart in some places, and incredibly dumb in others. To use the sports analogy, my court vision is a lot better than it was just a few years ago, hopefully I still have enough of the youthful enthusiasm (athletic ability and hops!) to balance it all out before my body gives out completely.

So in no order and no system, here are some things I'm looking at....

Brain Fart 2/16/06
The one thing we primarily work towards is that when our kids have an idea or spark there are concrete steps they can take to make that idea happen. So many time people and kids especially have an idea a thought and it just dissolves or they put it away in their pocket. Our space gives them an opportunity and the belief that they can make that idea into something tangible. It’s so important to becoming an artist but not only that but any kind of transformation and social change. You have to believe that you can make something happen. I have kids calling me saying-“I thought of an idea for my next project” and I realize that their excitement is that they have a space where that idea, that spark, can become something, a space where people will listen to them and give them feedback on their idea is something they wouldn’t otherwise have. Isn’t this how social change or any change begins? By believing that the things you imagine can actually be?

[So much of this time period-2003 to 2006-for me was trying to figure everything out that I was trying to do and put in language funders could "get", tangible language. When I had this brain fart, I got really excited because it helped me understand a little more clearly why I loved doing 7ARTS (and New Urban Arts years ago and now) so much. Not that this is great grant language-no social venture fund ever seemed to ever find this thinking compelling but whatever...]

My notes from conversation with Melissa Krinzman of Venture Architects:

You have a program that has a history of support (financial and institutional)

Strategy build on existence and support for your program
Have an existing program
Have 2-5 year old project
X # of students
Kind of program
Goal-take this successful program and take it to the next level

ID a space housing artists
Existing programs
Unique environment based on research in the area
Direct access to artists to in their studio environment

What’s unique about it-learning environment-Art school
Resources+mentorship+peers+working space+knowledge and experience=a meaningful creative experience

[Through a social entrepreneurship student group at Wagner I got a free consultation with Melissa Krinzman, a consultant to start-ups. Surprisingly, she was actually very positive about the 7ARTS' model and approach and importance of it. Of course-she wasn't quite sure where the funding would come from! Neither was I.]

Student phone conversation

I never did writing like that before e.g. free writing. Certain topics that I never got to write about e.g. poems about my parents, my neighborhood, picking our own topics.

I liked the art class because it wasn’t a “class” but more of a “session." Its a class where I get to do what I want. You’re not like a teacher but a mentor that gives advice and not directions and instructions, not telling us what to do.

Nothing to fix.

What do you tell your friends about the program?

“I tell them that there is a cool guy named Jason, he’s funny.” He asks us to write and draw about certain things. The class is fun, not serious. Not like the atmosphere of school. My writing improved. I applied for a job at Ecko and had to write a 3 paragraph essay. I focused less on “strategy" and more about thinking about expressing myself and writing about what I feel. My writing was honest.

[I wasn't that diligent about surveying and interviewing students in 7ARTS but one session we were good about it and got some really nice feedback. This student really did call me cool. To be honest, he meant funny/cool in a really kind of dorky way. That was (is) my schtick with youth.]

The Official 7ARTS Policy regarding fucked up shit that we hear from kids that we don't know how to respond to (I didn't really have an official name for this-I think I euphemistically called it "Health Outcomes"):

What is our responsibilities as youth-workers in a studio arts environment?

a. As artists we do not censor youth. Anything a kid says is fair game. A kid at 7ARTS should feel comfortable bringing up his/her substance use, lifestyle choice(s) etc. However if a kid says something offensive, hateful, dangerous or indicative of self-damaging tendencies we have a responsibility to confront the issue directly. It does not necessarily have to be at that exact moment. A delayed effective intervention is better than a knee-jerk poor one. We have a responsibility to respond in a reasonable amount of time with a thoughtful response consistent with how other responsible and effective youth/education organizations would. This is part of our education as an organization/program.

b. As youth workers we have a responsibility to promote healthy behavior and lifestyle choices when possible and to avoid endorsing or modeling dangerous or unhealthy behavior. This includes but is not limited to: unsafe sex, alcohol and substance use/abuse and physical or verbal violence.

[Man-I forgot how many conversations we had about this! I wrote this after talking to a number of people in different youth organizations, social workers etc. It never came up that much, but because 7ARTS was such a casual environment for our youth, things came up we never were quite sure how to deal with as "adult role models." I wrote this "policy", but it's still kind of vague and I never figured out what this policy should have looked like in our program. But the most encouraging thing I heard was from a social worker with 20 years of youth experience who told me that if we had students comfortable enough to talk openly about things like drug use, drinking etc. that they must feel comfortable around us and trust us so we must be doing something right. As awkward as it may be!]