Episode 10: On Civil Dialogue

[MUSIC] You're listening to Community Crafted Education, where we explore alternatives to conventional K-12 education and their potential impacts on society and culture. I'm Eric Wairn, Director of the National Hybrid Schools Project. On this episode, I'm joined by Michael Ford, Director of the Wisconsin Institute for Citizenship and Civil Dialogue. We'll talk about civil discourse in a fractured school landscape, school boards, and viewpoint diversity. Hello, we're joined today by Michael Ford from the Wisconsin Institute for Citizenship and Civil Dialogue. Thanks for joining us, Michael. Well, thank you very much for having me, Eric. Yeah, well, so just to start off, could you tell us in general a little bit about your background in public policy and education, and especially your work with civil dialogue? Yeah, for sure. So I've been working in this space since 2005, which is actually kind of hard to believe. But started off working at an advocacy organization called School Choice Wisconsin, which is really the premier lobbying group, advocating for school choice policies in the state of Wisconsin. So I worked there for, I believe, seven years and had a couple of roles. As a researcher, eventually lobbied work on a few budget cycles and was part of the school choice expansion there. But really focused on Milwaukee, really focused on the urban ecosystem of school choice. Then I moved on to the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, which is a free market bank tank in Wisconsin. And I served as research director there for two years. And that was really a interesting experience, because it allowed me to expand the more of a statewide role, less focused on Milwaukee, and we'll get the on just education, public education policy, and more into the role of people at diversity, civil dialogue, etc. While I was doing all that work, I was going to school at night at UW Milwaukee, first my master's at MIT HTE when I finished my wife, who's from Madison, Wisconsin, with very kind and such, and with anywhere in the world for me, it was in state of Wisconsin. I was a little bit trouble up and down at UW-Ashkosh as a public administration professor. I was fortunate enough to apply and get it in the head of their master's of public administration program for about 10 years. I also founded a, my fantasy organization, but a plan research center, called the Whitford Center for Governance and Policy Research, where we worked with local governments, school districts, all across the state of Wisconsin, trying to help them improve their governance practices. And then finally, I'd been for the past four or five months in this role of universities at Wisconsin, working on civil dialogue, free speech issues, across all 13 UW campuses. And I guess the one thing I want to point out is that throughout my career, I've always been very practitioner, focused, being to make things work. And that regard, I've made the mistake, no, I've had the pleasure of serving up the, the Ashkosh City Council. I did that for four years, and then I, you are a local school board back in April. So I study this stuff, I have the cable, this stuff, I try to live this stuff. Yeah, that's great. So yeah, how about, so you've just landed at this new institute? Can you talk a little bit about its mission and what you do there? Yeah, yeah. So it's the Wisconsin Institute for Citizenship and Cell Dialogue. Our acronym is Wicked, which is not my favorite acronym, because we're not in Boston, we're headed to musical theater, or not spooky. But we've found it, I believe, two years ago, really in response to concerns about the culture of academic freedom, free expression and viewpoint diversity on the 13 UW campuses. So there was a big student survey that was done of undergraduates, really just asking questions about where they thought comfortable, where they didn't feel comfortable. And a couple of things that survey identified was one, a lack of basic civics knowledge in some areas, a lack of knowledge about first amendment. And really just a culture of too much self-sensorship, where, where all our students didn't necessarily feel like they couldn't speak out, but just didn't feel comfortable dealing with. So it really kind of set and opened up, opened up some eyes, I think, across the state of Wisconsin, of the need for us to have a deliberate focused effort within the University of Wisconsin, which is just the entire system. But how do we, how do we advance a culture of free expression? So we're really producing critical vendors. So more specifically, Wicked has five focus areas. So we provide support and trainings and grant program for faculty and staff and all 13 campuses that help promote anything they're doing that that's in the realm of viewpoint diversity, free expression, academic freedom, civil dialogue, or civic participation. So trying to connect the role of the university, which was happening in P&D. And I guess I approach this a little more broadly. I really think our mission is to build this citizenship pipeline, where the university is helping to give students and external stakeholders. And that's broad. That's taxpayers, that's legislators, that's communities, that's everyone. But trying to, trying to give them the tools to flourish in a functioning, pluralistic society. So I think the ultimate goal here is how do we create a society, or at least a state in my case, where we can harness that, that tension of disagreement for advancement, rather than allow all of our policy, cultural, political disagreements, divide us and really stall progress in the state. Yeah, that's great. So high-read and K-12 schools and teachers and students have kind of different rules, you try to goal considerations and constitution rules and all this, regarding free speech and things like that. But you've got experience in K-12 and it's with school choice. So I'm sure you've heard this. I just wanted to jump right into this common argument that school choice in general kind of balkanizes society. We've got with conventional schools, we've got your exposed to other kinds of people. The experience might not be great, but at least it's shared. But when in a school choice regime, kids go various places and they maybe don't have the same kind of exposure. These community-crafted schools maybe take it a few steps farther, right? They're often really high identity. They're not comprehensive. They have viewpoints. So you one might argue that they're even more susceptible to balkanization. So how would you think about all that? I think those are really good questions and really good points. It's certainly a place where I'm still highly influenced by those experiences I had working in school choice in Milwaukee 20 years ago. Because even then when I started net role, I did a lot of school tours and people would always ask me, like, " Aren't you worried there's going to be a school for the Taliban that gets public funding or a school for witches?" I'm like, "Well, one, I'm not sure how many of the market is for parents wanting to send their kids to those schools, so I'm not so concerned." I guess what I'm going with this, it's a place where the rhetoric for our school choice and the operational would-howities are often misaligned. I haven't talked much about my academic research, but one thing I was always focused on is still an academic research on school choice is the logistics. How is it actually operate in practice? There's so much work being done around the politics of it, and that can devolve into this rhetoric, and the rhetoric about the buffetization, but I think the operational reality is so much more important. Like I said, visiting schools all kinds of Milwaukee about your program, different religions, various levels of concertism versus more left-leaning, I don't know what you call left-leaning, but like a wall door school type situation. Sure. I always found that these schools have much more common than they differ, despite their affiliations. I don't think having a viewpoint, a perspective, or tradition, is divisive by nature. I don't think that's baked into the structure of schools, even if they have different perspectives. I don't think that that must really mean sufficient. The key is ensuring that students are becoming critical thinkers. There are many paths to get to that endpoint. We can recognize through different paths to get to that endpoint, and that parents might have different desires for their children to get to that endpoint. As long as they get there, I think we're okay. To the broader point, my current position, part of being in a pluralistic society is recognizing, tolerating, and having legal protections for abuse, we disagree with. I really do think that a case school may be made, it needs to be made, that a pluralistic society functions better with civil discourse. I would think that most of what you call community crafted schools, I almost said micro schools, didn't select, tell me who to craft the schools. I think they would recognize that because their very existence is owed to the fact that they have tolerances and legal protections for these institutions to have a unique viewpoint. All that said, I mean, I do get the concern, especially in the broader context of this cultural moment, where there's so much sorting along social lines, along political lines, people living in political realities. When I don't, and all the anybody wants education reform to desensurate that sorting, but I also think we have to realize that racial, socioeconomic, cultural, and local sorting already shows up in our school system. That's not a new thing. It's reflected in where people lived, and even within public systems, I have a school board meeting tonight. And one of the things we're always talking about is we're disaggregating data, results, demographics, by schools. In each of our schools, we serve about 9,000 students. They all have different identities, attract different types of parents, have different types of cultures. They have, again, I think more in common than they have, not in common. Like whether it's through a community crafted school model through a traditional education form, like voucher, charter model, gosh, that's a old I am. I'm calling school vouchers a traditional education. There was Godson, they'd been around since 1981. Or the legacy public school system, this idea of different viewpoints, different cultures, that it's not new. It's always been part of public education. So that's a very long way of saying that, that knowing that it's overly concerned, concerned with it, as an existential threat. No, certainly if it shows up and there's tangible evidence, it's something that needs to be addressed, but I'm not, not something that keeps happening. - Yeah, yeah, okay, great. So when you think about the idea of, I mean, it's in your wicked title, right? Civil dialogue. Does the word civil mean to you that everybody just has to moderate? I mean, a lot of these school founders, and I mean this in the most loving and complimentary way possible, are kind of extreme personalities, right? Because they're taking on a huge project on a conception of education that they feel very strongly about. So they just have really strong opinions about things in various directions. We have an annual conference, and I'm happy to platform people with really strong views. And sometimes it, my judgment is what it is. Sometimes it plays, sometimes it doesn't. But I think it's, well, I won't say what I think, I only hear what you think, what can these extremes kind of coexist? - Yeah, it's a challenge, something I struggle with, even from the day I stepped into this role, I decided to apply for this position because we are an institute that is trying to defend through speech and expression, but also promote civil dialogue, and most things can be in touch. Because that means that we have to be in the business of protecting and defending speech and dialogue if it isn't so simple. So the case I always try to make is that that civil dialogue is more productive. - Really? - You're gonna give more results when you're able to speak in a civil matter, interact with civil matter, recognize other people's right to their viewpoints, even if you disagree with it. And I think we also have to understand that there's moments where people don't want to act in a civil matter. And there's times where that can be totally understandable. We did a series of focus groups last summer. And we were asking about all kinds of things, but one thing that came up was questions about civil dialogue. It's someone stood up and said, "It is really strongly at meeting you moderating." And well, why would I have to civil matter? People have taken my right to a way or find being trust. You basically tell me to roll over and make it official. And again, I get that. But I think you can make a suspension of a community crafted school example with some of these strong personalities. We have that ability to coexist in a metallurized for overview plots is what enables you to exist as an institution. And to be part of this rich ecosystem of community crafted schools, which I think can be a powerful thing in a powerful model for how a pluralistic society can operate and how we can still be part of a greater whole even if we have strong viewpoints that might be totally color to our neighbors. We can still believe in this America experiment and this color commitment to pluralism. So I know it's a bit of a rambling, a rambling answer, but I just go back to that idea that in a true functioning democracy we have to be able to articulate a role for Evan Watt. Not to agree with everyone, but recognize people's rights and have that opinion. - Yeah, I wonder if you have any, I mean, you spent time in the state capital too. So I wonder if you have examples of this. A lot of these schools, no matter say they're whatever to diametrically opposed schools look like, they are fellow travelers on a lot of things, right? They're operating with the same, or if they're in the same state, the same home school laws, they have, they're all fighting off, local zoning ordinances or things like that. So I mean, strange bedfellows are a real thing in this space. - Oh, one of those powerful projects I did, this was years ago, is we created, this is as a school of social science, we created a work team that included folks from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, which is like the state department of ed, so the regulators were there, a couple elected officials there, we had public school superintendents, we had private school, voucher school leaders, while we were all there just trying to figure out what are the common areas they're choking us that we're not able to do the things we want to do, whether that's from a human capital, attracting teachers, whether that's just, just, point was building regular, but building regulations that are making our life more difficult, and I could go on and on, but that was again, another one of those eye opening experiences to your point that, yeah, you are a couple of travelers, and so many of these educational policies that are governing one-on-one sector, but not hurting everybody. So going back to community drafted schools, even two or three schools that maybe diametrically opposed, and what they believe, they're gonna have a lot of common interests in creating that policy environment, that's funding environment, that allows them to thrive. Again, that's another example, we're still, I can be a portal, 'cause having those that the tools have to be able to say that, okay, we don't have to agree on everything, but if we have a common interest here, we need to be able to keep the eye of communication open, and you may not hear us something that's good for all of us when those moments arise. - Yeah, right, whoever you think of as your weird friend is still your friend, right? - This is true, it's always the one you grew up with. - Yeah, how do you do it off to two as your own, right? - Yeah, yeah, yeah. I wanted to ask you a little bit about your, other academic work on school boards, because I feel like there are some aspects of public school boards, and I don't, that are affecting the growth of this sector, and I don't know if there are solutions to that, or if the train is too far down the tracks, and there are two things that I wanted to see if you could respond to. One is, I know you've done a paper on this, on the fact that school board races are just generally not really that competitive, right? Like sometimes not, literally not competitive, because no one shows up to oppose a candidate, right? And the other thing, if you could just reflect on this a little bit, the composition of school boards, I think is changing over time as fewer people have kids, the chances you're gonna get school board members who don't have kids and never had kids rises, just as a, it's just math, right? The proportion is gonna go up. And I think that could have lots of different implications. So I don't know, what do you think about these things? - Yeah, well, I'll start by saying that one form that I think is important, for the recognize that the context of school boards has changed so dramatically out, or are you in the last 10, 15 years? So, if I were to dissertation on school board governance in back in 2012, and the biggest question I got was, why would anybody want to study these things? I could curse, you know, fast forward 10 years, it's like everybody wants to talk about this. And I do think there's growing realization that one school board's do matter, I think we have a growing body of evidence about how governance activities can connect directly to student outcomes. But then also the fact that depending on the funding model by state, you know, very Wisconsin, property taxes are not the primary funder of public education, but the primary thing that school board has some control over. And that's something that's paid by everybody. So to your point again, Eric, there is, I think there is more people getting involved, more people paying attention as he start to realize it. Hey, there's a big chunk of my text dollar going to these schools, and you know what? School's tentative microcosm of their community will what's happening on these institutions is going to bleed over or the very least reflect what's happening in the broader community. So we ought to be paying attention. I think it's a relates to things like community craft of schools, education reforms. My hope, and I'm not going to say this happened yet, but I think you're just a public school board and to shift their thinking a little bit. How does this protectionism mode? Because there is still a lot of that. And I, again, my state is a very rich school choice environment. We have public school choice. We have statewide voucher program. All of these programs that have a very real impact. And primarily, I'm how money is sourced to our traditional public school systems. The bottom line has impact. And I think the school districts that fare a bus in this environment recognize the fact that, okay, we need to find a way to, to one, coexist with these reform models that are coming from the state legislatures. They're not things that we can control correctly. So it might feel good to complain about them and might be a convenience-state goal, [BLANK_AUDIO] That's not really helping the bottom line. That's not making our schools perform many better or attracting anymore students. I think it's more about how do we find a way for us to try to be the premier provider of education in this school. And more to the point, we're trying to, I mean, we're a community here. We're trying to educate all of our kids, regardless of where they go. The other place where civil violence is voting, how can we collaborate and find those areas of mutual focus to the benefit of the community? And otherwise, we have this perpetual war going on about who gets to exist, who doesn't get to exist. Meanwhile, while Chima is being hurt all over the place. So in 2017, I wrote a book about vouchers in Milwaukee and that was kind of my point that we've had lost decade in the city of Milwaukee where we're finding about all of these things that are totally unrelated to the point, which is to advance student achievements. So Chima just keeps going down and down, and now I'm in the larger school district in the state of Wisconsin. And then by the way, the voucher, schools in Milwaukee on aggregate are doing pretty comparable. There's huge success stories. And more recently, there's some evidence of some gains compared to public schools, but that's really not the point. The point is that if you had, if you had some common interest there, you could probably do a heck of a lot more to advance the cause of a perfect student outcomes. So again, another question, more cooperation that are then fighting about things that fight, you can't control. So yes, so I take a broad view of what a school word does. Yes, we oversee a school system, but we're also overseeing a community. And the stakeholders don't just entail folks who happen to be directly using our schools. It's amenable to be paying for this. - Right, yeah, Keito, the Aketo Institute's public school battle map has plenty of stuff to add to where this is a map that tracks fights that happen within public schools because people are trying to control each other. So I think a lot of these community crafted schools are kind of release valves where people can get out and do their own thing. So yeah, yeah, so I wanted to go back and ask something else about Wicked, some practical stuff about Wicked. So you do things like you have workshops, you give grants to promote civil dialogue. Can you talk about some of those things and are there things like that that either individual micro or hybrid schools could do or maybe a little group of them could do to promote dialogue? - Yes, I mean, the one thing that I can install valuable is we created, this was universities of Wisconsin policy. So a system-wide directive was that every every use coming in as a freshman has a basic course, not an academic course, but like a training in free expression, first amendment rights and some of the basics of civil dialogue. So we created Wicked, that is some training modules that we can offer, the campuses if they want to use them or we'll go and we'll do some of the person stuff if they request that or if they have their own, they're allowed to develop it on their own campus and we just basically, yeah, keep track of it and how many students are exposed to it. And I think that's been a very powerful thing, but I continuously surprised how a freshman college come in with frankly not some knowledge gaps, let's just say around the first amendment around basic civics. So one of the things that we're trying to do at Wicked is get more involved in the K-12 level and that is something that's baked into some of our follow-up documents, but that's a place where being able to clock or eat with some of these community craftless schools could be a real growth area. So that students are exposed to some of these basic concepts or the younger age, because it's all about building that citizenship pipeline and it's just like teaching a kid math, it's a lot easier when you're not trying to get them up to grade level when they're coming and at grade level. So the earlier we can get there the better. And I guess an example of this is we're partnering with the James Miller Center. I don't know if you know them. They're out of the fill I believe to do a civics summit targeting high school teachers, teaching civics. And we're offering a stipend, but basically the goal is to have about 50 social studies teachers from around the state come in and get some good speakers and have some of the, so ideas sharing in hopes of integrating some of Wicked's concepts into more great schools. But from a work for more great schools at high schools, more practical standpoint. Duration of public school systems can be difficult to practical to work with and they certainly can difficult to work with. But the idea of the hey, we have this new program if we come in and try it, it's like, no, there's a lot of rules, there's a lot of the opposite. So I do think that there's a lot of potential for partnership with innovation with some of these alternative smaller models that can serve as a proof of concept for some of the things that Wicked might be doing at the college level and bring it down to the K-12 level. - Yeah, okay, great. So project out a couple years. We don't have, we're not gonna grab, majority market share of K-12 students, but we've got a good spread of these models and they're all over the board politically, they're all over the board with curricula and pedagogy and we live in a society, right? So what you're taking on what that's gonna look like in a few years, are we gonna fraction more, is it gonna be better? Are we gonna have lots of kids with lots of hard feelings towards out groups or are they gonna get used to kind of having deal with other people or what's it gonna look like? - Yeah, that's a really tough question, 'cause I'm an optimistic person by nature, but I'm so optimistic right now, but this current moment, that's nothing to say about the model of key crafted schools. That's more of just the broader context about our political moment here where our divisions seem so intractable. So I don't know, I can tell you that my goal as the director of this institute is to make sure that every graduate from the overseas at Wisconsin 13 campuses has at least a basic understanding of First Amendment issues of Primo speech, for expression, you know, kind of the roots of tolerance, the benefits of civil dialogue and more importantly, the ability to think critically and I think that that's a point that I wanna keep pressing home with policymakers and really anybody else that'll listen, that the skills to exist in a pluralistic society, the skill set to compromise, navigate this agreement, continue working together despite your most, you know, very strong differences. That's not just an existential or an abstract idea. That's something that it's going to be useful in any workplace context. That's something that's gonna be useful in your family life. That's something that's gonna be, I don't know, I think I was on my church council. I saw more of this agreement in my church council of seeing my elected experience. These are people that I'll share right at the city of Religious, I mean, great, that's just, that's reality. If we wanna pluralistic society to work, we have to have a true understanding of the role of, right, the role of these concepts, the legal concepts, the more part of the cultural concepts. But now I'm ran away a bit, but I think the idea of institutions is really important as well. And this is where I do think that community crab school can serve a valuable role and do give me some reason for optimism. As if we're really creating an ecosystem of strong institutions where people feel hurt of them. And those institutions are connected to a larger whole of this pluralistic society. That's the work of a community, though, but that's the work of bridging social capital. There's something to be said for that. That's something that has been lost in a lot of quarters. That's something that a lot of large public school systems struggle to create, 'cause they try to be all things for everyone and networks for some people, but for some people they don't feel part of that community. That's probably doing more harm than good, to being alienated by part of this large system. So I do think there's potential there for a little bit of a renewal of civil society from these different community crafted schools, a sense of community to develop. - Yeah, I like ending on the hopeful side, right? - Yeah, I do have one last question for you, which is just for you, for everything that's going on at Wicked. What's the most interesting thing that you're working on that someone who is thinking about founding a school or has founded one or a tens one, what would they like to hear about with your work? - Yeah, I think the most important thing is, goes back to this idea of trust. And we're at a time when there is declining trust in government, the claims trust is in a lot of our institutions. So the pitch that I make to a lot of the local partners we work with, and we do civil dialogue trainings and sessions with some local governments with campus groups, et cetera, is always that. If you want your organization to perform well, you need people to trust it, and these are reinforcing things. The more higher performing you are, the more trust you're going to get, and round it around, round it around a week, though. So I keep wanting to study the connection between civil dialogue viewpoint diversity and a commitment to these traditional liberal values with performance. Performance, both of your organization, but also societal performance is measured by trust and buy-in, and stability, et cetera. And I see a derand, I need to work on my elevator pitch for that, but to get to your, to finally get to the direct question you ask, is pushing, we're pushing, you have $180,000 in grants every year out to faculty and staff across the system. And we're really creating a push to fund research that is looking directly at that question, but the so what? That these are not just interesting concepts that-- yeah, everyone should be nice to each other because it's-- we're more comfortable, we're kind to each other. But no, this is about actually improving the performance of your organization, your university system, of your local government, of your community. I think the more data we have on that, and the more support, one, we can get better in terms of the types of programming that we're offering, but also start to show why these types of programs, these types of ideas are important. Yeah, great. This is a great one, and Michael Ford, from the Wisconsin Institute for Citizenship and Civil Dialogue. Thank you for being with us today. Oh, thanks very much for having me, Eric. Thank you for listening to Community Crafted Education, a podcast hosted by the National Hybrid Schools Project, and Kennesaw State University's Michael J. Cole's College of Business. If you have any questions about the topics we discussed on today's show, or want to learn more about what we do, please look up the National Hybrid Schools Project or reach out to us directly at coalscollege.com/hybrid.