Politicana

Below the fold, I have include a copy of the letter I will be sending to our future president.  It contains two long-standing suggestions I have for him.  I have no idea if he will ever see it but, at least now somebody will.  As I have not yet sent the letter, suggestions are welcome (though likely ignored).

Dear Sir:

I would like to congratulate you on a hard won and well earned victory.  I am more proud and hopeful than I could sufficiently say in this letter.  Simply put, I believe in you.

For this reason, I wanted to write you a letter and offer a couple of suggestions to you.  I know you are busy and I am sure you get many suggestions, so I appreciate any thought that you (or one of your aids) gives to these ideas.

When you are president, you will face the tremendous challenge of bringing the American people along with you as you try to transform this country.  Change is hard and we all often resist it.  If you hope to be successful, you will need the support of average Americans.  As such, here is my first suggestion:

Once in office, establish a Presidents Blog on the White House website.  Every week, post a video of you talking to all of us.  It needn’t be longer than 15-20 minutes.  Sometimes you will be at your desk in the Oval Office, other times you might be in the residence with Michelle or the children, and other times you might be talking to the camera while touring a disaster site or in the kitchen preparing a late night snack.  Some of these blogs would be humorous, some reflective, and some very serious. 

Your blogs would be all over YouTube and the nightly news and would be sent around the world.  They would serve as your version of FDR’s fireside chats.  When it came time to propose healthcare reform (or whatever), you could talk to Americans first, prepare people, reassure them and inoculate them against the inevitable attacks from your opponents.  If the American people believe that they have gotten to know you as a person, they will trust you and, if they trust you, they will follow you.

My second suggestion is a more complicated one because it tackles a complicated issue: education reform.  I work in one of the toughest middle schools in one of the toughest communities in California and I have learned a lot from my 9 years there.  A great deal of lip-service is given to this issue and some of the same old suggestions are mentioned (eg more pay and accountability for teachers).  However, if we are going to truly address this issue, we must address it systemically; we cannot fix our educational system without addressing its relationship to poverty, crime and access to healthcare.  I have thought about this issue for years and certainly do not have a comprehensive answer but I have a suggestion for a two-pronged expansion of the VISTA program that could be added to any plan:

The first prong would be to create an educational wing of VISTA.  This program would pay all or a portion of newly graduated students’ college loans (it would pay an increasing percentage based on time served) if they volunteer to serve in low income/at risk schools.  One of the problems I have seen is that there is a huge shortage of people to do the things that need to be done.  These volunteers could be teachers’ aides giving one-on-one attention in the classroom to students who are struggling.  In addition, they could help run after school programs, provide tutoring at school or in the home, or take the role of school counselor now that many schools can no longer afford to have one.  In my experience, many students are so far behind that their teachers cannot give them the individual attention they need to catch up.  They get discouraged and they act out.  If every student at my school who was academically behind had someone who had the time to make sure he/she understood the work (be it in class, after school or at home), it would make a significant difference for the whole school.  In addition to this one important role, the volunteers could also work closely with the PTA and other community programs to develop and implement projects designed to increase parental involvement in the school.

This leads me to my second prong: a locally based VISTA program.  If we are to strengthen schools, we must strengthen their surrounding communities.  The students at my school walk past fresh graffiti, broken windows and step over dirty condoms between classes; it is hard to respect your education when nobody else seems to.  However, people are understandably resistant to outsiders trying to “improve” their communities.  I would suggest a program that hires people on the most local level possible.  In other words, the national program would hire state coordinators who would in turn hire program managers in each city.  Those managers would then identify critical neighborhoods and hire people from those neighborhoods.  They would find somebody respected in that neighborhood, give that person some income, something positive to put on her/his resume, and a chance to help the neighborhood.  That person would be involved in planning projects and hiring neighbors for those projects.

This plan would bring employment to several members of an under-employed neighborhood.  It would also create investment in the projects the neighbor leaders developed; it seems to me it would be harder to continue littering, spray painting, or stealing if the programs designed to stop those things were being run by your uncle, former baby-sitter, best friend’s mother, etc.  I envision that the program would focus on three areas in each neighborhood: improved safety, beautification, and increased opportunity (for education and work).  In that last capacity, the neighbor leaders would work with the VISTA volunteers from their local schools to create cross-over programs, with the hopes of eventually replacing the volunteers with involved members of the neighborhood. Eventually, healthcare providers and a reformed criminal justice system could also have programs designed to enmesh with these existing ones. We need this sort of holistic approach if we are going to make headway on entrenched issues. 

Thank you so much for letting me share my ideas and hopes with you.  As I said earlier, I greatly appreciate any time you take considering my suggestions.  I share these ideas with you freely, without any expectation of acknowledgement or remuneration.  If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.