Are Political Lines Less Sharp When It Comes to Getting Kids Off on the Right Foot?

Politics divides the country. Ideology divides the country. Often, place divides, too, with states labeled red, blue, or purple, depending on past voting patterns. 

But for the last 10 years, EdRedesign has been able to bypass those common dividing markers by staying focused on what got them started in the first place: partnering with others to make sure that all kids have access to good opportunities, a good education, and ultimately, a good life.

Recently, Executive Director Rob Watson, Ed.M.’18, talked about the initiative’s decade-long success working with local leaders in neighborhoods and schools and city halls in more than 100 very different communities across the country and how this coming together — and giving Ed School students the chance to experience this coming together — is what gives him hope. 

Why hasn’t politics or ideology disrupted the work EdRedesign has been doing for the past decade?

The topic of what to do about improving outcomes for young people and families can be a unifying theme for communities. And we've seen this in red, purple, and blue America. It's not to say we don't have all sorts of politics around education that spans the political spectrum and divides people, but at a fundamental level, at the local level, it’s about a neighborhood, a city, a county, or a region.

So topic wise, helping kids is generally less polarized than other topics?

One of our national partners, the Children's Funding Project, has done some really good polling that I use in the course I teach at the Ed School with Professor Paul Reville that talks about how there's widespread agreement across the American public on a number of things related to kids. The majority of Americans, for example, are willing to tax themselves to see their kids get a strong start to life. We see people willing to create new locally generated revenue sources for things like early childhood and afterschool expansion. And this is happening in all sorts of geographies — red, purple, blue. There are a set of things, when you talk about what people want for their kids, that tend to not know political lines the way we might think about political lines.

It's really compelling stuff and shows that there's an opportunity for us, despite the hyperness of these times, to develop concrete strategies that can both help children but also bring us together as a community. It's not just, can we expand early childhood access? It’s, through expanding early childhood or out-of-school time in our community, can that be a galvanizing strategy for bringing actors together to build trust for things that go beyond just that one initiative and build a civic infrastructure over time that's durable and restores the social fabric of a community.

When you're working with your partners around the country, does it ever get political or are people really coming together?

I think it's both. There's no such thing as real bridging work without putting differences on the table and being clear about where we stand and what we're willing to move on, what we aren't. I'll just say as a practitioner myself, I've done this work in my hometown of Poughkeepsie, New York. We have a Republican majority county in a blue city, my hometown. As a matter of existence, when we started our children's cabinet years ago that I co-founded and now am board chair of, we had to work with Republicans and Democrats all the time in the Mid-Hudson Valley in New York state. That required people with different views of the world, some whose top concern is a question of equity or social justice, others who cared about improving outcomes, but were also deeply committed to themes of accountability and sometimes austerity or a certain approach to fiscal management. I know what it's like to have to look at the values, the beliefs, and the ideologies that different actors hold, but then say, we can all agree that our kids aren't getting the outcomes we want them to get. And what are the three to four things we can find in common that will move the needle?

The other thing that we have to our advantage here at EdRedesign is that people can now go see things in other places. Because of our networks, we convene folks. We have the ability to show people what's possible by going to see the work on the ground and bringing people here to talk about their work, for communities to trade notes. That's how you build a movement.

For example, we’re taking a bunch of our local leaders later this month to Spartanburg, South Carolina, to see the work of one of our former senior fellows, Russell Booker, and his whole community in Spartanburg. They've raised more than $100 million dollars in philanthropy and public money on a regional strategy to improve and create pathways to economic mobility for kids in Spartanburg. And to do that, they've had to work across the aisle in many ways. In Poughkeepsie, New York, we're eager to learn from Spartanburg just like we are from our friends in the Northeast. I think this is a bit of the ‘unlock’ that we need to make more common in the years ahead.

Does this come up with students when you’re teaching?

What we do with our students, first and foremost, is provide them with examples. Our course, A314: Collaborative Action for Children, Redesigning Education for Equity, that I teach with Paul Reville is a field course jointly listed with the Kennedy School. On a week-to-week basis, it's not uncommon for students to hear directly from practitioners leading this work across the country, and we show examples from the deep south to the coast to the Midwest. They hear directly from people on how they've been able to, as that book goes, make change when change is hard. We also talk about the types of skills, dispositions, and leadership qualities that are needed to bring people together across difference and across sectors to get things done. Then students finally have a chance to work on teams with organizations throughout the United States, with organizations in places like Boston, Dayton, Ohio, and my hometown of Poughkeepsie. All very different political, institutional, socioeconomic, and racial demographics. By the end of the course, most students believe us that this field can be an antidote to some of the things that plague us on the national stage, and they've been able to roll up their sleeve and actually experience it.

What are some of the skills students need to be successful in working in places or with people that don't share the same beliefs?

A few things come to mind. One is — this is true of all sorts of social impact and educational leaders — we have to bring in some type of adaptive leadership when leading without formal authority. So many of our partner’s cross-sector collaborations bring together superintendents and mayors, grassroots leaders and politicians and philanthropy, but the partner isn’t the boss. So first and foremost, how do you lead something and keep people at a table when you don't hold formal authority over them? You have informal authority. You have the power of persuasion. You have to establish a value proposition to different sectors with different beliefs, and not always just around partisan views like left or right. You can have two organizations or two leaders who are both Democrats or both Republicans but have an entirely different view on the best thing to do for early childhood. That requires adaptive leadership. You have to be able to get people to the table and keep them there. Why is it in my interest as the school district to come to a table with 15 other partners to think about improving outcomes for kids? Well, because we know schools can't do it alone. Hopefully this can take the burden off of them. That's one reason why I might give to a superintendent to get involved in this work.

You also said students should learn to connect dots and “see the field.”

Yes, another skill set is being a chief dot connector. In any place, there are resources, there are assets, some of them known, some of them lesser known. How do you think about connecting all of the dots, all the resources and assets and strengths a community has, from when a household is expecting a child all the way until that kid is 24 or 25 and trying to earn a thriving wage in the workforce. What are all the supports and experiences that you would provide that child? And then how do you do that at scale? How would you do for all kids, as Paul says, what middle class kids get as a birthright?

To do that, you need to be able to see who's doing what in a community. Who are the five or six early childhood organizations? What neighborhoods do you need to think about where disadvantage looks most? What are the out-of-school time opportunities that exist that you need to connect? What are the three to four moves you need to do to get kids in high school into a thriving post-secondary pathway? What do they need to do to become civically engaged in a lifelong way? That requires seeing the field. It requires a bit of air traffic controlling. It requires a bit of quarterbacking. It requires a bit of shuttle diplomacy. These are the kind of skill sets that the best of leaders in our field have.

So, after a decade helping kids, is local collaboration the way to go?

Yes, I think that's right. I think our community partners are feeling the pain of this moment, like everybody, but I would say this movement that's focused on the locally led, cross-sector efforts is deeply, uniquely positioned to be successful in a time such as this, because there's obviously a pushback to states and localities from the federal government. The places that stand best positioned to do well in that new environment are going to be places that have already been thinking together across sectors for some time and are committed to the belief that no one sector can do it alone. As money shifts, as policy priorities change, it's going to be those places who already have a strong social fabric that I think are going to come out of this most successful, just like we saw in the pandemic.