Who Will Teach the Children?

23 10 2009

“Who Will Teach The Children?” The Root, 21 October 2009.
Obama’s education policy seeks the right mix of change and stability in the heated debate over the importance of teachers.

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President Barack Obama had more homework than usual this week. In the wee hours of Monday morning, Obama surprised administrators at Washington’s Sidwell Friends Academy, where his two daughters attend school. He and his wife showed up for the quarterly ritual known as the parent-teacher conference. After hearing about Malia and Sasha from their teachers, Obama stopped by Viers Mill Elementary School in Maryland, where he led a group of local students in chants of “read, read, read, read!”

The whole first family has been focused on education. The first lady penned an op-ed in U.S. News and World Report in which she sang the praises of the men and women who are training the next generation of America’s leaders: “We all remember the impact a special teacher had on us—a teacher who refused to let us fall through the cracks; who pushed us and believed in us when we doubted ourselves; who sparked in us a lifelong curiosity and passion for learning,” she wrote, citing data that shows “the single most important factor affecting students’ achievement is the caliber of their teachers.”

Michelle is right: A 2006 Brookings Institution report notes that “having a top-quartile teacher rather than a bottom-quartile teacher four years in a row would be enough to close the black-white test score gap.” In the face of distressing recent reports that the racial achievement gap is as wide as it has ever been, that is an important statistic.

But is any teacher a good teacher? Is a smaller class a better class? That’s been the subject of a fierce debate in education-policy circles for years.

Lawyer and media mogul Steven Brill jumped into the fray with a lengthy screed about bad teachers last month in New Yorker magazine. He argues that teachers’ unions are too powerful; that the political cost of firing bad teachers is so great that the city of New York tolerates enormous monetary costs just to avoid doing it. One such teacher, “Patricia Adams,” was found passed out in her classroom: ‘There were 34 students present in [Adams’s] classroom,’” Brill reports. “When the principal ‘attempted to awaken [Adams], he was unable to.’ When a teacher ‘stood next to [Adams], he detected a smell of alcohol emanating from her.’ ”

Needless to say, this doesn’t describe the teachers at posh Sidwell Friends. And the Adams case is an extreme example of incompetence. But what is to be done about the bad apples teaching the 50 million school-aged children, including the majority of black children, in the nation’s public school system?

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Categories : America, Books, Education

Our Bodies, Our World

30 09 2009

“Our Bodies, Our World,” Democracy, September 2009.

The fight for reproductive righs extends far beyond America’s shores.

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The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World
By Michelle Goldberg • Penguin Press • 2009 • 272 pages • $25.95

On the third day of Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings, Senator Tom Coburn asked, “Do you believe that the court’s abortion rulings have ended the national controversy over this issue?” Sotomayor was curt: “No.” Coburn went further: “You don’t have to name them, but do you think there are other similarly divisive issues that could be decided by the court in the future?” A measured Sotomayor again declined to get specific. “That, I can’t answer,” she said. “I can only answer what exists. People are very passionate about the issues they believe in.”

From the May assassination of Dr. George Tiller, a provider of therapeutic and late-term abortions in Kansas, to the first of what may be a string of Supreme Court vacancies, reproductive rights have returned to the American political spotlight. The exchange on the Senate Judiciary Committee was one of several involving abortion law during the confirmation hearing, highlighting a still-violatile domestic political debate surrounding how and under what circumstances women reproduce.

Yet according to Michelle Goldberg, nearly the entire conversation about sex, access to contraception, and abortion in America is a shibboleth. The 150 million women of the United States enjoy some of the greatest reproductive freedoms on the planet. Eighty percent of the world allows abortion in only the first 12 weeks of pregnancy; the United States permits therapeutic abortions until the sixth month. Three quarters of American women use modern birth control to plan their families, while in many countries birth control is inaccessible, if not illegal. Women abroad suffer under restrictions on their reproductive choices, including cultural stigma against condom use.

Ironically, Goldberg points out in The Means of Reproduction, it is the United States that exercises extraordinary and often restrictive control over the rest of the world’s ability to promote women’s health and family planning–not least because it is the largest funder of family planning programs worldwide. The current administration will give $545 million this year for such efforts to the United Nations Population Fund (also known by its French acronym, UNFP) and other international bodies. Indeed, while dramatic, the dispute between Coburn and Sotomayor over the threatened but consistent protections of Roe vs. Wade obscures a 30-year proxy war that’s produced catastrophic outcomes for women outside the United States.

Religion has played a particularly destructive role. Goldberg, a journalist who has written on feminism and religion, unpacks the workings of a new alliance between religious conservatives around the world that aims to shred reproductive freedoms for women. American Protestants and Latin American Catholics join with the Mormon church, and Iranian clerics join with the Holy See, to prosecute a moral crusade for chastity, one that, in the age of international law and globalized culture, has become a high-stakes geopolitical fencing match.

“The globalization of the culture wars,” writes Goldberg, “was revealing something important about the significant fissures dividing the world. Religious rivalries . . . masked an equally important polarization, both inside of countries and among them, between secular, liberalizing cultures and traditional, patriarchal ones.” The longstanding conflict over women’s bodies, she concludes, shows this particular clash of civilizations in high relief. And unlike traditional conceptions of grand strategy, it has never been a fight between East and West, left and right, or rich and poor. Instead, it is “a battle between a cosmopolitan network of reproductive rights activists and an equally cosmopolitan network of religious conservatives.”

Goldberg reports from the front lines of this genteel but deadly conflict, describing sex and fertility as pressure points critical to reshaping the global conversation on not just women’s rights but the entire global economy. Allowing women access to reproductive choices, she asserts, is central to the cause of international development: “Underlying diverse conflicts–over demography, natural resources, human rights, and religious mores–is the question of who controls the means of reproduction.”

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Categories : Abroad, Africa, America, Culture, History, Politics, Religion, Women

New World Order

28 09 2009

“New World Order,” The Root, 24 September 2009.

How the Group of 8 became the G20.

g20NEW YORK—On the eve of the international political conference in Pittsburgh known as the Group of 20, President Barack Obama addressed a packed main hall of the United Nations General Assembly in New York. Making his first appearance before the international diplomatic and peacekeeping body, Obama stressed that expectations of global cooperation now drive American foreign policy.

“In an era when our destiny is shared, power is no longer a zero sum game,” he said. “No world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed. No balance of power among nations will hold. The traditional division between nations of the south and north makes no sense in an interconnected world.”

After eight years of unilateralism under George W. Bush, the message of outreach and inclusion was received with enthusiastic applause. But as Obama lands in Pittsburgh, it’s worth remembering that until recently, a smaller, more elite group of eight countries dominated global discussion. Leaders from those nations will have their own meetings during the two-day conference devoted to climate change, nuclear security and restabilizing the global economy. Yet it’s almost guaranteed that you’ll hear more about the G20 than the G8. Suddenly, the organization, created in 1975, is “no longer the board of directors of the world,” but a more inclusive organization, said David Wessel of the Wall Street Journal, while addressing the Council on Foreign Relations last week.

But just when did the G8 become the G20?

Originally, the G8 was the Group of 7—which included finance ministers from the U.S., Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Canada and Japan. In 1998, it became the G8 for “political reasons,” according to former President Bill Clinton. The massive and resurgent Russian Federation could no longer be credibly excluded from the debate. Similarly, says Clinton, the dozen other countries at this week’s G20 gathering have earned a seat at the table by representing the increasingly diverse elements of a more interdependent world order. “It’s not a bipolar world, as it was during the Cold War, not a polar world, as it was briefly in the aftermath of the Cold War,” Clinton told The Root.

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Categories : Abroad, Energy, Europe, History, Politics

“Taking Back the House”

22 09 2009

“Taking Back the House,” The Root, 17 September 2009.

The onscreen and real-life politics of Bill Cosby.

billcosbyNostalgic recollections of The Cosby Show place Cliff Huxtable—Cosby’s duck-walking, sandwich-loving, mugging alter ego—as the smiling patriarch of a well-adjusted nuclear family with two professional incomes in a Brooklyn brownstone barricaded away from the first stirrings of the crack era. It was gently political: “There were no “whitey” call-outs à la George Jefferson, no power-to-the-people pronouncements—just an upscale black family trying to keep it together.

Normalcy itself was the message: “All I ever wanted was … to take the house back,” Cosby told The Root in a recent interview. “I just wanted … to show people that this is parenting, this is home, and this is deep.”

Throughout the series’ eight-year run, Huxtable-style parenting meant making a tough-love case for responsibility and self-development—delivered with a mix of humor and stern incredulity. Witness the pilot, when Theo makes an impassioned defense for mediocrity and the right to be a “regular person.” “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard in my life,” Cliff snaps. “You are going to try as hard as you can—because I said so.”

A somewhat grouchy, slightly punitive approach has characterized much of Cosby’s output, both personal and professional, for years. Behind the scenes, The Cosby Show was a carefully calibrated treatise on race and “positivity,” says Dr. Alvin Poussaint, the Harvard psychiatrist, longtime collaborator and close friend of Cosby’s.

“We wanted to show black people not in a buffoonish way,” he says. “We didn’t want any stereotypic humor.” Poussaint served as a consultant to every script of the show, and recalls a scene in which Cliff’s daughter, Rudy, is having her hair combed by her mother, Clair. “Rudy was crying bloody murder,” Poussaint says. “And I said, ‘I don’t think we should be reinforcing the idea of black girl’s hair as being difficult and nappy without anything positive being said about it.’” The white producers of the show, he says, didn’t see what all the fuss was about. After some heated back and forth, the entire scene was scrapped.

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Black Techies, Web Redlining and the Digital Divide

16 09 2009

“Black Techies, Web Redlining and the Digital Divide,” The Root, 16 September 2009

Perhaps #peopleofcolorintechnology should be a trending topic?

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At last week’s Gov 2.0 gathering—dedicated to exploring the ways that the Internet can improve public policy—Silicon Valley and Washington came together to discuss biometric security, open-source policymaking, geo-targeting and other breakthrough technologies. Roaming the halls? Internet luminaries like Google vice president Vint Cerf, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark and Vivek Kundra, chief information officer of the U.S. government.

Yet of the hundreds of attendees, less than a dozen were African-American. “I would have expected more,” says Darwyn Harris, director of research and development at 21st Century Cloud Computing. “I was actually very surprised.”

The Internet age has spawned remarkable advancements: enhanced communications, instant connectivities, and more and better ways to solve political problems. The election of Barack Obama was the prime example of smart technology paired with progressive politics in a way that attracted millions of Americans of all races. But when it comes to race and culture, does the Internet liberate the country from social categories—or does it reinforce them?

Danah Boyd, a researcher at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, believes that social-networking Web sites demonstrate the same kinds of self-segregation of real life. Boyd, who is white, presented her controversial work on “The Not-So-Hidden Politics of Class Online” on June 30 at the Personal Democracy Forum, another popular conference on technology and politics in New York. Conventional wisdom has it that the Internet is a classless, colorless democracy, but Boyd’s findings suggest the opposite.

“I want you to step away from the techno-hyperbole for just a moment,” she told the majority-white audience, “and think about issues of inequality and social stratification with me. I want you to think about the ways in which technology is not equally available, or equally transformative.”

Boyd could well have been discussing the so-called “digital divide” between groups of differing socioeconomic status. According to a report from Internet for Everyone, even in some of the most functional, tech-savvy cities, in the most technologically advanced nation on the planet, “many urban residents are locked out, unable to participate fully in the digital era.” This means many inner-city dwellers can’t easily apply for jobs online; or telecommute; they can’t easily take online courses, or even finish their homework. Some urban areas have been “redlined” by Internet service providers that don’t see a financial payoff to wiring poorer communities. Nationwide, only 38 percent of black urban households are connected to broadband, compared with 60 percent of non-Hispanic white homes. In Washington, D.C., which is roughly 55 percent African-American, only half the homes are connected.

But Boyd’s point is larger even, than that—she says blacks and whites use Internet technology differently, and in ways that send a troubling message about supposedly post-racial America. “Social media does not magically eradicate inequality,” she says. “Rather, it mirrors what is happening in everyday life and makes social divisions visible.” As evidence, Boyd compared two popular social-networking giants: Facebook and MySpace. She found that whites, the educated, the rich and the tech-savvy were “more likely to leave—or choose—Facebook.” Teenagers used words like “ghetto,” “barely educated,” “obnoxious” and “lower class” to describe users of MySpace. This division may have its roots in the Ivy League-origins of Facebook, and in the entertainment-focused nature of MySpace. Or in the way that euphemisms for blackness are often used to mean variations on the idea of “not good.” But it amounts to what Boyd terms “modern day ‘white flight.’”

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Categories : Culture, Education, Politics, Race

“The Time For Games Has Passed”

14 09 2009

“The Time for Games Has Passed,” The Root, 9 September 2009

The president outlined the case for health reform before a rowdy Congress. When he wasn’t pulling at heartstrings, he was being tough as nails.
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Nobody ever said the man can’t talk. And if President Barack Obama’s words alone could breathe vigor into Democrats’ effort to rebuild the health care system, we’d be on our way. If only it were so.

Obama opened and closed his speech by finally departing from the fiscal case to make the moral one, invoking Sen. Ted Kennedy’s “large-heartedness” in civil service, the “terror and helplessness” of being without affordable care. He called the status quo “heartbreaking and wrong,” and masterfully branded government as something heroic, compassionate and deeply American, rather than something to fear. It was compelling stuff that progressive Democrats at least were happy to finally hear. “Too often these days this moral responsibility is shunted aside and this becomes about process,” said Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut. “We come here with a moral obligation to do right by the people that we represent.”

When Obama wasn’t being compassionate, he was being tough as nails—he came just short of calling Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley a liar for his on again/off again embrace of the “death panel” myth. But amid his tough talk for foes (“If you misrepresent what’s in this plan, we will call you out”) and his steely resolve (“The time for games has passed. Now is the season for action”), Obama didn’t say the one thing that matters most: whether or not he’ll accept a bill without a public plan. Here’s as far as he did go: “I will not back down on the basic principle that if Americans can’t find affordable coverage, we will provide you with a choice. And I will make sure that no government bureaucrat or insurance company bureaucrat gets between you and the care that you need.”

That sounds firm, but it doesn’t say much. More telling was Obama’s broader framing. He directed the bulk of his argument not toward the Beltway but toward Middle America, making the case that health care is not just for those on welfare, and that reform is not just for the uninsured. “It can happen to every one,” he said. He also blamed all comers—the left, right and the media—for giving the public option an “exaggerated” place in the debate. That’s dishonest at best, given that he’s the one who made the idea a cornerstone of his presidential campaign. But it also suggests the White House is, as many have speculated, playing for a deal with Maine Sen. Olympia Snowe.

Snowe supports a plan that would allow a public option to kick in only after private insurers get a chance to reduce costs and cover more people on their own. Indeed, inside the chamber, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius cornered Snowe for several minutes of what appeared to be intense lobbying even as they awaited the president’s remarks.

The speech had been billed as an attempt to draw “lines in the sand” around specific reforms Obama considers non-negotiable. But the president offered nothing new on that score. He restated the consumer protections he’s been emphasizing for weeks: no denying coverage for pre-existing conditions; no “arbitrary” caps on coverage in a year or a lifetime; no sudden changes to coverage when subscribers get sick and need it most, among others. On the more politically charged questions, he said he won’t sign a bill that adds “one dime to our deficits, either now or in the future.” And he reclaimed Democrats’ mantle as defenders of Medicare.

But while Obama offered no new substance, he significantly tweaked his messaging. In addition to making the moral case for reform, he wagged his finger at both the left and the right for using the public option “as a handy excuse for the usual Washington ideological battles.” You’ll recognize this emotional triangulation from the campaign trail—by scolding both sides, he sells himself as the sensible, refreshing solution to frustratingly old problems.

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“The Van Jones Affair”

8 09 2009

The Van Jones Affair,” The Root, 6 September 2009

Green jobs guru Van Jones resigned under fire for his political past. Did the White House sell him out?

57703850Shortly after the news that President Barack Obama’s “green jobs adviser” Van Jones had resigned over the weekend, Republicans were rejoicing and claiming the “scalp” of the man that Fox News host Glenn Beck had branded a “socialist” and an “ex-con.” For weeks, Beck had launched an extensive on-air campaign against Jones. And on Sunday, he was claiming victory, posting this statement: “The American people stood up and demanded answers. Instead of providing them, the administration had Jones resign under cover of darkness. … Judging by the other radicals in the administration, I expect that questioning to continue for the foreseeable future.”

In a FoxNews.com commentary, Phil Kerpen, a policy director for Americans for Prosperity, a right wing political advocacy group, declared that Jones’ resignation was “one of the most significant things I’ve ever had the honor or being involved in.” (Kerpen’s organization was one of the main groups behind the Tax Day Tea Party protests from last April. It also created Patients United Now, an anti-health reform campaign.)

Meanwhile, Democrats and others who have supported Jones’ policy agenda and personal ambition are crying foul, blaming the administration for not defending one of its own. “Jones was one of the only movement progressives in a policymaking position in the Obama White House,” wrote progressive columnist David Sirota on the day of the announcement. “No more—and that’s a damn shame.”

“I think this is bad for democracy,” says James Rucker, co-founder, with Jones, of Color of Change, an online advocacy group that launched an effective advertiser boycott of Beck’s program in July. “Van is someone who’s been great at getting a spotlight on lower income communities in the context of greening America. But because he [was] associated with Color of Change, he’s a target. It’s shameful.”

Jones’ resignation comes in the wake of a quick and dirty partisan battle. He had come under fire from conservatives, most notably Beck, for his political past, which included organizing for income equality, prisoners’ rights and environmental justice. Last week, criticism against Jones took on added furor when news broke that he’d signed a 2004 petition speculating that high-level government officials were involved in planning the 9/11 attacks on the United States. For an administration focused on delicate negotiations on health care reform, defending Jones’ controversial association was a bridge too far.

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Categories : America, Green, Politics

Lunchtime Lessons from New Orleans

28 08 2009

“Lunchtime Lessons From New Orleans,” The American Prospect, 28 August 2009

As the Gulf Coast struggles to redevelop, its children build a thriving food justice movement.

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President Obama’s daughters get healthy school lunches. Why don’t I? So asked a pigtailed black girl plastered on buses and billboards around Washington, D.C. The White House blasted the political ad, which promoted healthy food options in public schools, as exploitative — but the little girl’s complaint should resonate with an administration that has prioritized healthy eating and food security, from both the East and West Wing of the White House.

In 2006, a group of New Orleans elementary school children, freshly returned from displacement after Hurricane Katrina, took up a similar refrain about public school cafeterias as part of a citywide leadership-development program known as Rethink. Their version: “We hate sporks!”

Initially used throughout the New Orleans Parish school district as a cost-saving measure, the plastic spoon-fork combination was all that remained after Katrina swallowed dishwashing equipment at school cafeterias — leaving hundreds of students with a bad taste in their mouths. According to a survey of some 500 middle-schoolers, the spork was the most humiliating thing about going back to school. “In Louisiana,” said one Rethinker, standing on a chair to reach the microphone at one of the group’s awareness-building press conferences, “our food culture means eating with a knife, fork, and spoon.” The crowd roared — and in the summer of 2008, the kids notched a significant policy victory: The state-run New Orleans Recovery School District (RSD) wrote into its charter that the sporks would be no more.

The dysfunctional, disposable flatware, however, was just one symptom of the city’s bankrupt educational system. During lunch periods capped at 30 minutes, students were also subject to fat-filled, sugary offerings, long lines for food, and “silent” cafeterias used as a punitive measure in crowded, troubled schools.

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The national debate on obesity and health is gathering steam — thanks in no small part to Michelle Obama’s White House Kitchen Garden. The 1,100-square-foot plot grows kale, rhubarb, lettuce, broccoli, figs, and countless herbs. And Obama has used America’s youngest generation as a way to draw attention to the massive problems associated with food sourcing in the United States. The first lady, who planted the garden with local fifth- and sixth-graders, believes empowering kids can have remarkable outcomes. They have “really learned some lessons about nutrition,” she said in May. “They’re making different choices because they’re a part of the process of planting and tilling the soil and pulling up the food.”

But a better example of progress on food justice comes from New Orleans, where the crop of youths in Rethink have discovered that education and nutrition in America goes far beyond Obama’s Washington outreach and picture-perfect plot. As seventh-grade Rethinker Renaldo Herald put it: “We are experts in education. We go to these schools every day.”

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Categories : America, Education, Green, History, Politics, Race

“Where’s the Beef in Africa?”

20 08 2009

“Where’s the Beef in Africa?” The Root, 17 August 2009

Hillary Clinton’s tiff with a Congolese student obscures the real American mission in Africa: investment.

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On Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s recent visit to the Democratic Republic of the Congo—part of a seven-nation tour of sub-Saharan Africa—a flurry of attention focused on her sharp reply to a local student who seemed to question her role as chief diplomat of the United States. All the attention overshadowed the substance of the student’s question, which concerned mining contracts between China and Congo. It was another missed opportunity to discuss the one issue that could really make a difference in Congo and the other failing states of Africa: foreign direct investment and private-sector economic development.

Just weeks after President Barack Obama’s brief stop in Accra, Ghana, Clinton’s 10-day jaunt echoed similar themes but was by far the more hands-on experience. In South Africa and in Kenya, she emphasized the dynamic economies of each country, pushing for more and better growth. In Somalia, she met with President Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed, an embattled but critical ally in fighting terrorism in the Horn of Africa. In Nigeria and Liberia, she stressed good governance, the democratic process and the rule of law: “I think the people of Liberia should continue to speak out against corruption,” she said at her meeting with Liberian head of state Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, adding: “The United States officially supports what this government is doing.”

Yet for all of the bold statements and fluency with local issues that Clinton and her entourage brought to Africa, the trip looked a lot like jaunts previously taken by other U.S. diplomats. Visiting health clinics and housing projects as well as the national assemblies of her host nations, Clinton assumed the mantle of humanitarian-in-chief.

There’s no doubt that Clinton brings passion and eloquence to this role. During her visit to the Congo, she placed particular emphasis on the prevention of sexual violence in the country. With forceful language, she decried the use of rape as a war tactic: “People need to be not only ashamed if they commit rape and other sexual violence, but they need to be arrested and prosecuted and punished so that it serves as a strong message that this will not be tolerated.”

The secretary of state has been an outspoken advocate for women’s rights since her time as first lady. And the Congolese example fairly cries out for intervention. UNICEF estimates that hundreds of thousands of Congolese women and girls have been raped since 1994—more than 1,000 victims per month. Adam Hochschild, author of the indispensible King Leopold’s Ghost, recently noted that the tradition of violence stretches back to the days of Leopold’s depraved, monarchic rule:

His private army of black conscript soldiers under white officers would march into a village and hold the women hostage, to force the men to go into the rain forest for weeks at a time to harvest lucrative wild rubber. “The women taken during the last raid … are causing me no end of trouble,” a Belgian officer named Georges Bricusse wrote in his diary on November 22, 1895. “All the soldiers want one. The sentries who are supposed to watch them unchain the prettiest ones and rape them.”

In the Congo, Clinton announced a $17 million plan to fight military violence against women, specifically promoting better documentation of rapes and the training of female police officers and doctors.

The programs will help. But the real focus, says John Prendergast, co-founder of the Enough Project and a tireless advocate against the violent conflict in eastern Congo, “should be on the fuel that drives the violence: the contest over the conflict minerals extracted from the eastern war zone and helping to power our electronics industry.” As Maurice Carney, executive director of the nonprofit Friends of the Congo, says, “The violence against women is inextricably linked to the conflict in the Congo, the root cause of which is the scramble for those resources.”

It’s not just that solving the nation’s dreadful economic situation may make soldiers less likely to pillage and rape. As Clinton pointed out, economic security has been historically linked to social stability and the advancement of women. (A pioneering Namibian project is tracking how “basic income” improves social outcomes.) But by constantly seeing humanitarian crises and thus military and aid-based solutions, the U.S. obscures the more important goal for any Western policy in Africa: creating sustainable trade and economic opportunity.

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Categories : Abroad, Africa, America, Energy, History, Politics, Race, Women

Live From Washington, It’s Urban Affairs

2 08 2009

“Live from Washington, It’s Urban Affairs,” The Root, 27 July 2009.

The president’s promised office of urban policy gets off the ground. Will it stand out in a crowd?

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After weeks of uncertainty and anticipation, the White House Office of Urban Affairs has rolled off the assembly line. The office is designed to facilitate and coordinate programs that improve the lives of city dwellers, from the food served in urban classrooms to the bolts that gird subway lines.

President Barack Obama has finally addressed what had been a prominent pledge during his campaign, to “stop seeing cities as the problem and start seeing them as a solution.” Via a combination of city-centric forward planning in the 2011 federal budget and Recovery Act projects already underway, Obama plans to enact “a vision of vibrant, sustainable places that provide our children with every chance to learn and to grow, and that allow our businesses and workers the best opportunity to innovate and succeed.”

The crowd at the rollout of the office spoke to the multifaceted mandate it has been given. From Labor Secretary Hilda Solis to green jobs adviser Van Jones to drug czar Gil Kerlikowske, the White House gathering underscored the ambition of the Urban Affairs office. “This is a full-court press,” said Adolfo Carrion, the Bronx borough president turned director of the Office of Urban Affairs, speaking for the first time in public about the office. “We need to run on two tracks. We’re dealing with a current crisis, and we also have to look at long-term events.”

It’s this tension—between a national mandate and Washington bureaucracy, sweeping ambitions and desperate immediate needs—that defines the office’s unique challenge.

The White House has certainly faced its share of criticisms about the office’s efficacy and the authority of Carrion, who reports to senior adviser Valerie Jarrett. Carrion doesn’t have oversight over any of the Cabinet secretaries or agencies that deal with urban affairs, and the office’s mandate still does not include either funding or regulatory authority—but it may have something else more valuable: a place at the White House agenda-setting table.

Shaun Donovan, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development who has worked closely with Carrion, stressed that Carrion’s White House perch is crucial. “There has to be this kind of work between agencies and the coordination between the White House—otherwise we’re not going to be successful.” Another senior administration official likened Carrion to a conductor: “His job is to make sure he knows who is playing what instrument, and that they are all playing at the same time,” the official said.

Carrion echoed some of Jarrett’s reflections on the need for an office of urban policy in the first place. “Local government officials feel like there is a disconnect between the national government and local municipalities,” he said. “There is too much noise and too many bottlenecks in the way.” Marilyn Katz, a Chicago businesswoman and developer who was among those at the stakeholders meeting before the president’s announcement, adds that, “It took us seven years to get [Bill] Clinton to come to the South Bronx to see that cities could change.” However delayed, the sudden attention from the first urban president and his largely urban senior staff is very welcome.

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Categories : America, Culture, Politics, Recession

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