Why we need more inept bureaucrats in our schools.
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 11/23/2008 - 13:08Unfortunately, learning how to deal with inept bureaucrats is a lesson in life that too many of us have to face. We spend too much of our time on permahold waiting for the chance to talk with someone who at best does not know how to address the problem we are facing and will provide us with yet another number to wait on hold at. Sometimes we have to face these bureaucrats at offices or at schools and the face to face confrontations can be even more distressing.
We may find ourselves, after such encounters frustrated beyond belief and venting to our friends, in our online journals, or to anyone that will listen, using words that some might find offensive. Yet if our venting is done online and the son of an inept bureaucrat reads it and passes it on to his mother, it is reasonable to expect that the inept bureaucrat will act in a spiteful and petty manner and perhaps even violate our civil rights only to see the whole thing end up in the Federal courts.
What may seem worse is if the inept bureaucrat is part of the education system who in their narcissistic injury ignores the pedagogical imperative. Examples of this from the State of Connecticut may come to mind for some of the regular readers of this blog.
Yet there is something valuable that can be learned from such inept bureaucrats and providing students a chance to learn from them while they are in high school may serve the students well later on in their life.
One student, after experiencing a scenario very similar to the one I described above, decided not to head straight to college, but to spend a year of her life as a volunteer with AmeriCorps. In a recent blog post, she writes about her frustrations as she answers the phonecalls of people who have been trying and trying to get in touch with FEMA, of people in unimaginably helpless situations that “you can just feel the pain, stress, exhaustion, and just sadness in their voices.”
She writes about having “a reputation in the JFO PPI section for being the one always badgering my supervisors or just people who really know what they are doing”. It is this spirit of fighting for what is right that can get a high school student in a lot of trouble, but if they escape, without having their spirit crushed, and having learned lessons of how to deal with inept bureaucrats, the potential for doing good that they hold can be awesome.
So, take a few moments, and read what Avery Doninger wrote about her experiences when she was asked, “this time tomorrow where will we be?” Then, ask yourself, what have you learned from inept bureaucrats. Has your spirit been crushed, or have you learned how to more effectively challenge what is wrong?
Personal Stuff
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 11/22/2008 - 21:08Today, we started batch two of hard cider. We bought more bottles for bottling the first batch, some Belgian Ale yeast and five gallons of cider. The second batch is starting to ferment on the kitchen table. However, given how cold the house is, especially during this cold snap outside, it may take a while to ferment.
Afterward we went over to Kim’s parents’ house to celebrate my mother-in-laws birthday. Now, late in the day, we are back home. I’m feeling particularly run down. I believe I’m fighting a virus. So, I’ll wait until tomorrow to follow up on the emails I’ve received today and put up a more in depth blog post.
The Citizens Election Program
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 11/21/2008 - 11:49The State Election Enforcement Commission is holding hearings on Citizens Election Program. Their first hearing was held last Wednesday and the next hearing will be held on December 5th. Susan Haigh’s article in the Journal Inquirer, Feedback sought on Conn. campaign finance provides a useful background to the hearings.
As I read the article, I was struck by the list of witnesses at the first hearing. Just about everyone mentioned in the article, it seems, has been involved in electoral politics for some time. How ‘citizen’ oriented were these hearings?
Sure, the focus has been to reduce the impact of special interest money on elections; money that makes it harder for a regular citizen to have a strong voice in the political process, and sure, the hearings were all about the petitioning, fundraising, and reporting aspects of the new program, which is less interesting to the average voter, but I had to wonder where the citizen is in this process.
When my wife ran for State Representative in 2004, we were shocked to find the number of people who did not know who their state representatives were. People even asked Kim if she would have to move to Washington if she were elected. We clearly need some sort of program to get people more involved. Is the Citizens Election Program helping in this area?
These hearings aren’t giving us any indication. What I would be interested in hearing is testimony from people that paid closer attention to the state legislative races because of the program. Did you pay closer attention this time around?
It may have been harder to pay closer attention because the Presidential election got so much attention, yet we clearly received much more information about the candidates running because of the Citizens Election Program.
Was there better coverage of the state legislative races in the local papers? Not only did Presidential election take up much of everyone’s attention, but the difficulties of the local papers may also have prevented them from more in depth coverage of the state legislative races. In spite of all of this, there was some great coverage of the races, and I wonder what we would have seen if it wasn’t for the Citizens Election Program.
The same applies to debates. Here in Woodbridge, there wasn’t a state legislative race debate. We’re new to Woodbridge and I don’t know when there was a state legislative race debate here. Organizations that sponsor such debates have been struggling to get by in recent years. Did the Citizens Election Program result in more debates, or at least help stem a decline in the number of state legislative debates? Again, this is hard to tell.
What would be most interesting would be a survey to find out if voters heading into the polling places felt better informed about the candidates and the issues this time around then they have in previous elections. It would probably be difficult to construct a poll that would accurately gather this information, but it would be great to find out.
So, while people argue about how much the reduction in special interest money in state elections has brought about a more informed and involved voting population, it is worth looking at how the money that was provided also helped involve and inform the voting population.
One final note, my wife, Kim Hynes, is an organizer and lobbyist for Common Cause here in Connecticut, and Common Cause, along with several other groups, continue to work hard to promote citizen involvement in our government through programs like the Citizens Election Program.
The Future of the Newspaper, Part 2
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 11/20/2008 - 20:57My blog post yesterday about The Future of the Newspaper has received a bunch of comments on blogs in several locations and I felt that it was important to follow up on them.
First, I want to make this clear that this is not intended as a criticism of Steve Collins. Before reading Rick Green’s interview with Steve, I didn’t know who he was. I suspect that while Steve and I may disagree with some of the particulars about what the effect that the closing of the Bristol Press might have, I suspect that we also agree on many aspects about the importance of journalism and what can be done to improve journalism. I especially applaud his work with The Tattoo and encourage people to check out his blog, bristolnews.blogspot.com.
One of the key differences that Steve and I have is about how quickly the vacuum will be filled should the Bristol Press cease operations. Bill Densmore, the director of the New England News Forum (NENF) posed the question about how NENF could “rally j-schools around New England to incubate local online news communities in Bristol and New Britain”.
With Central Connecticut State University (CCSU) in New Britain beginning to offer a major in journalism, there is the potential for a great center right in New Britain.
Meanwhile, David Cohn of Spot Us, has been talking about alternative ways of funding journalism projects. Spot.Us is centered in San Francisco and is an opportunity for direct funding of investigative reporting by the public. They have just completed funding The Return of the Hooverville: Car and Tent Cities on the Rise in San Francisco.
Spot.us is open source, which means that anyone can download it, modify it and run their own version. Geeks can check out the code here. David does not that the code needs further refinement before it is launched in other cities, which he is hoping to be able to do sometime in 2009. Could Spot.Us be used to fund an online replacement to the Bristol Press? Perhaps. Instead of focusing on investigative reports, it could perhaps also be used to fund a beat or other aspects of running a newspaper. Spot.Us might work well in collaboration with a project like the Online Journalism Project which Paul Bass runs.
Yet much of this is focused on how content can be created and the creators can be paid. Another issue is distribution. Steve notes that many of the Bristol Press’ readers are older and may not be online, or if they are online, may be limited in what they can do online. The Pew has found that only about 34% of people 65 or older are online, so Steve’s concern here is important.
However, I suspect that many of the older newspaper readers do have cable television and getting people to produce a public access show reading from an online news source might address a large portion of this issue. Today, in a completely unrelated discussion, I received an email from another person wanting to set up a public access television show in Fairfield County. Beyond that, I view some of this as a digital divide issue. If demise potential demise of a local newspaper could encourage people to address the digital divide, that would be another silver lining to the dark cloud.
Related to all of this are the efforts of the Journal Inquirer to better connect with other media sources online. As a result of this, I now have links to recent stories from the Journal Inquirer on my Connecticut and Politics pages. The two most recent article in my political section show on the Journal Inquirer pages. With that, I’ve been following articles in the Journal Inquirer more closely and found the story about Rell wanting her critics’ e-mails. It is a fascinating story that I would love to see get some legs and some discussion. Perhaps when I get a moment, I’ll write more about this.
Will the Bristol Press get shut down? Will online news rush to fill in the gap? Will people find ways of taking online news beyond the Internet to those that are offline? It’s hard to tell. Yet the way I see it, there are a lot of interesting possibilities and I look forward to seeing how they develop.
The Future of the Newspaper
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 11/19/2008 - 19:38The future of newspapers took on a new urgency in Connecticut when Editor and Published wrote about Two Connecticut Dailies Facing Shuttering if a Buyer isn’t Found. Those of us that follow media discussions at conference after conference may have grown a tad weary of the topic. Sure, there is a constant stream of stories about newspapers cutting back and dire predictions about the impact this will have on news coverage and our democracy, but the world continues to function. This, however, if something different, people warn me. Two newspapers may shut down completely.
I remain unimpressed. I remember when cities lost their morning or evening newspapers and continued to function. I remember when small towns lost their papers and everyone still seemed to know everything that was going on. No, the concern about the possible demise of local newspapers sounds an awful lot like the possible demise of banks or car manufacturers, and I expect that we’ll get through all of these events just fine.
Rick Green, of the Hartford Courant has an interview with Steve Collins, who is a reporter for one of the newspapers facing potential demise. Rick writes, “News blogs, which are popping up all over, aren't the answer, Collins said, because they can't possibly provide the breadth of a local paper.”
I appreciate Collins’ situation. He may be out of a job soon. Yet, I’m not sure that I agree that blogs can’t possible provide the breadth of a local paper. I’m not finding much in the local papers around here about the Woodbridge Board of Education meetings or the Woodbridge Democratic Town Committee meetings. With the exception of the videotaping of the Board of Education meetings for the government channel, I don’t believe there is anyone besides me reporting on these meetings. As to finding news about local births or high school sports scores, I’d much rather read the blog post by a grandmother whose daughter has just delivered a new grandchild or the father who has just seen his daughter win a swim meet.
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