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Topics: Youth

Towards a New Theory & Practice of Civic Education, continued

Index

I. Introduction
II. Public Achievement: Background Information
III. Public Achievement in Contrast to Other Approaches
IV. Lessons from Public Achievement
V. Conceptual Questions and Practical Tensions
VI. Have Public Achievement's Goals Been Realized?
VII. Conclusion, References, Appendices, Notes

Contents

V. Conceptual Questions and Practical Tensions
VI. Have Public Achievement's Goals Been Realized?
VII. Conclusion, References, Appendices, Notes

V. Conceptual Questions and Practical Tensions

Public Achievement puts theory into practice, but not without difficulty: The conceptual framework in action raises many questions.

Self-Interest. Self-interest is one of five or six core citizen politics concepts (depending on how they are presented), and by far the most controversial, especially in practice. The concept of "self among others" has proven exceptionally useful in a wide variety of settings. Recognizing and acknowledging self-interests de-mystifies power relationships in service environments, connecting service providers to their work. In addition, the best community organizers have tied the concept of self-interest to the practice of interviewing for many years. Organizers have found the understanding of relational, dynamic self-interest so useful they claim it as the single most powerful idea in community organizing. Despite its proven usefulness in civic practice, in Public Achievement the idea and use of self-interest has been problematic. Self-interest is introduced early in the Public Achievement process to get the youth participants to discuss their histories and explain what is important to them. It is also used to help the young people define a problem, or choose a project, to which they can commit for an entire school year. This leads into a discussion of what issue the team would like to address, and unfortunately almost always degenerates simply into what the kids want. In turn, this blurs the distinction between self-interest and selfishness, and undermines the importance of public. In addition, coaches have only a limited amount of time to present and discuss the conceptual framework, and many important political ideas do not get introduced at all. So while the goal of discussing self-interest is sound, explicitly focusing on it in this way has not been useful.

Power. Power has also proven to be a difficult concept, not for the young people, but for the adults who oversee their work. While the language of "empowerment" has become popular, few adults recognize the relationship between empowerment and power. For young people to become empowered, they have to have the opportunity to exercise real power, although certainly not absolute power, over a problem or situation they care about. Empowerment cannot be contrived: It is not about children doing what adults have done in the past or what adults alone decide they can or ought to do, especially when the young people have been told they will have a say. This is one programmatic difference between Public Achievement and standard service learning programs. As it turns out, many adults are more comfortable with the service learning model.

Public Achievement Projects. Somewhere between rampant student selfishness and adult authoritarianism lies the middle-ground where young people and adults can work together to set an agenda for Public Achievement. However, the question of what constitutes an "acceptable" Public Achievement project remains. For example, should young people use Public Achievement to get permission to chew gum in class or organize school dances, or should adults steer them in other directions? While there are no "right" answers to these questions, young people can be challenged to justify their proposed projects in light of Public Achievement's broader purpose, which is to further public problem solving. Can the young people define the problem the project would address, and explain why it is a problem? Can they explain in what ways both the problem, and project, are public? Here it is important to remember that the young people's frame of reference is more limited than that of adults. For sixth graders a lack of organized social activities may be a legitimate problem, and anything beyond their immediate group of friends may be public, although they should to be pushed to think in the largest terms accessible to them. Finally, young people can be challenged around the seriousness of their work: Do they really want to devote an entire year to chewing gum? Ultimately, the adults must determine, in relation to the young people whenever possible, how, and to what extent, they should guide the young people's choice of projects, keeping in mind what they can learn each step, or mis-step, along the way.

Civic Learning and Team Projects. Focusing on what young people can learn through Public Achievement, and not exclusively on what they do, serves to emphasize the fact that Public Achievement is first and foremost an initiative in civic education. Although Public Achievement has roots in the community organizing movement, its purpose is less instrumental than typical organizing initiatives. The specific problem solving efforts have value in and of themselves, especially for the young people, but as vehicles for civic learning they are even more important.

Trying to determine exactly what, and how, young people learn through Public Achievement raises important questions about the relationship between concepts, skills, and projects. Ideally, the projects spark "teachable moments," times when coaches can introduce, draw out, or re-inforce a civic skill or conceptual point. For example, as team members prepare to meet with a group of parents, coaches can prompt them to discuss what the parents' interests might be, what power they have vis-à-vis their project, and the importance of working with a diversity of people in their public work. They can practice their public speaking and organizational skills through role play activities and in the course of the "real life" meeting. Following the meeting, the team can evaluate: What went well? What did not? What did they learn? and What are the next steps? Because evaluation can be structured into Public Achievement time, both at the end of an event and at the end of a regular session, it offers the best opportunity to fully integrate conceptual learning with the teams' practical efforts. While coaches have no formal requirements regarding how they structure and make use of their time with their teams, regular evaluation is strongly encouraged. Unfortunately, evaluation is often short-changed, and other means of enrichment are foregone altogether.

Obstacles to Civic Learning. While coaches recognize that Public Achievement's central purpose is educative, many educational opportunities are lost for a variety of reasons. One is simply a lack of time. Evaluation, for example, comes at the end of a rushed fifty minute session, when coaches are frantically trying to get students to remember their tasks for the next week, and the kids are more focused on what is coming up in the next hour than what they accomplished in the hour they are still in. And often that is not very much. Most coaches find that they spend about a third of their time in Public Achievement meetings getting the young people to focus on the tasks at hand.

When the young people are focused, it is on their projects and the specific activities they need to do to reach their goal. This is what makes Public Achievement different from the other things that young people do in school and why young people like Public Achievement. However, "full steam ahead" can leave learning in the dust. Young people are generally much more interested in taking a survey, for instance, than stopping to discuss how taking a survey will make their work more public, especially when the survey in and of itself can take several weeks to write, complete, and process.

Because of time constraints and the focus on projects, coaches and team members have not made extensive use of the Public Achievement curriculum guidebook, Making the Rules. Making the Rules is a short book of stories, lessons, and exercises designed to help young people learn and understand the citizen politics concepts that under gird Public Achievement. As coaches struggle to draw the connections between their teams' specific projects and citizen politics concepts, along with all else they must do, working to integrate Making the Rules into meetings has never been a priority. Because of this, the guidebook has proven more useful as a resource for coaches to use outside of their sessions than as a workbook for the teams to use in their sessions.

Coaching. As has been alluded to throughout this evaluation, Public Achievement coaches have a challenging task. They are asked to guide the young people's projects, teach the conceptual framework, and maintain some semblance of order. In order to fulfill these responsibilities, they need to learn about young people in general, and the young people on their teams specifically. How do nine-, twelve-, and fifteen-year olds think and learn? What are they capable of, and what are their interests? What are the backgrounds and experience levels of the young people on their team? How does one get this particular group of kids to work as a team? Because these are questions that can only be incompletely answered in a preparatory training session, coaches struggle with them to varying degrees, and with varying degrees of success, throughout the year.

As project guides, Public Achievement coaches must learn the culture of the organization in which they are working. A Catholic school is going to have a different mission than a public school; an inner-city school different challenges than one in the suburbs; parent, teacher, and principal involvement will vary from site to site. These factors have real consequences for coaches and teams working on Public Achievement projects. Coaches need to learn to negotiate, with their students, around these issues as they do their work. This raises another important question: How much work should coaches actually do on the projects? In theory, coaches are suppose to act as guides, with the young people actually making the decisions and carrying out the plans. In practice, individual coaches must decide how involved they need to be to help get tasks accomplished. Many coaches have found that it takes success to breed success, that doing project work with the team can get things started, with the team members taking on more responsibility once they understand what they can accomplish.

As political educators, coaches are further challenged. In the first place, coaches are being asked to teach something they do not really know. Public Achievement coaches are introduced to the conceptual framework in one training session prior to meeting with their teams and participate in on-going training that in part touches on the concepts. On the other hand, soccer and basketball coaches are usually required to have played the game for years before they begin coaching younger kids. Second, coaches must know how to integrate the conceptual framework with the projects—certainly not an easy task. Most teachers do not know how to combine academic work with hands-on projects, especially when the academic component is a set of political ideas. Third, the fact that young people can complete their projects without paying attention to political concepts makes teaching them all the more difficult. In service learning projects young people do this all the time, but they lose out intellectually and civically. Learning how to more fully integrate concepts and projects, and learning how to teach coaches to do this are Public Achievement's greatest challenges.

On a week to week basis, maintaining order is usually a coach's greatest challenge. Teams are suppose to operate within the boundaries of school policy, meaning that any behavior not allowed in the hallway or classroom is not allowed in Public Achievement, and in addition, create their own rules of conduct and operation. But for coaches, knowing when and how to enforce school and/or team rules is often difficult. This is especially true when the teams are suppose to be largely self-governing, and coaches are consciously trying to fulfill a role that is distinct from that of teacher. Because coaches do not have the same authority as teachers—they do not give grades, they do not even see the students on a daily basis—their authority must come from elsewhere. Coaches find that their authority comes from being more experienced young adults, being college students, volunteers, and most especially from being resources for the work the young people want to accomplish. However, this is rarely sufficient. Young people also need to know that their coaches have the support of the teachers and principals who exercise more traditional kinds of authority. And even when this is the case, kids will be kids. While this can be frustrating in light of all that coaches want their teams to accomplish, realizing this makes what they do accomplish all the more meaningful.

VI. Have Public Achievement's Goals Been Realized?

Public Achievement was designed to test three propositions. First, can young people learn to impact problems in their schools, churches, and neighborhoods in a serious way, and gain a sense of efficacy around public issues? Second, can young people learn to define their work as politics, and identify themselves as citizens through their work? Third, can the institutions that work with young people integrate a citizenship approach into their mission and everyday activities?

Five years and 750 young people later, the answer to the first question is clearly yes: As explained in detail in Section IV, the most important lesson we have learned is that young people can make a difference in the environments they are in, and they can see how they will be able to impact public issues in the future. Through Public Achievement, young people have initiated peer education programs on sexual harassment, organized community festivals, coordinated school field trips, and changed school policies. Obviously, young people's experiences with Public Achievement are as varied and diverse as the young people are themselves; however, on the whole, Public Achievement has shown that young people can be a force with which to be reckoned. On the other hand, translating the "can have a serious impact" into "having a serious impact" on a consistent basis requires that institutions become more receptive to working in partnership with young people.

Skipping to the third question, it has become clear that institutions can change how they view and work with young people, but few institutions are so inclined. It is not just that they have a stake in the status quo; Public Achievement's philosophy is radically counter-cultural. Youth institutions have never been asked to focus on or truly develop youth capacities. Instead they are charged with remediating youth problems, often to the extent that young people are seen as the sum of their deficiencies (a pregnant high school drop-out, a drug addicted gang member, etc.). In other words, young people become just bundles of problems to be solved. More forward-looking institutions focus on preventing problems in "at-risk" young people. But the focus is still negative, on simply preventing bad things from happening in the hope that then good things will. A related point is that youth institutions, especially schools, see their role as preparatory. They prepare students for the next grade, for college, for work; they prepare them to be taxpayers and voters, the citizens of the future. But what they do not do is see young people as resources for solving problems, their own and society's, today.

Developing the capacities of young people means focusing on the strengths, insights, and creativity young people bring to their lives and their communities. In addition to not seeing this as their role, institutions have not moved to build youth capacities because they have never built adult capacities: Few institutions offer the adults who work in and run them meaningful opportunities to create their work. Disempowered adults cannot seriously empower young people because they do not know, from experience, what empowerment means. If Public Achievement is going to become more than a program and become an approach to education, it needs to pay as much attention to educating the institutional leaders and staff at the sites as it spends with the young people and coaches. While the class last year and the working group meetings this year were to in part serve this purpose, the intention was never realized (see Appendix C).

The second question, whether young people can learn to define their work in Public Achievement in political terms, is the most difficult to answer, and the most important. While a few young people have consciously adopted the language of citizen politics over the course of Public Achievement, most, as seen through end of the year evaluations, have not. What is unclear is whether this is a programmatic problem, whether there is a fundamental flaw in Public Achievement's approach to civic learning, or whether young people, even those ten years old and younger, are so disheartened by what they hear about and see as politics that they cannot, or will not, see their public work as politics of a new sort. What is clear is that Public Achievement will be little more than a service program—and often a self-service program at that—if, regardless of the reason, young people do not see the civic, political dimensions of their work.

There is evidence that the barriers to political identification are tied to the limitations of Public Achievement as a program, not as an approach, and not the young people's preconceived political notions. The idea of teaching citizenship through conceptually grounded public problem-solving activities and projects has been supported by both the young people and the adults who work with them. In other settings, specifically in the civil rights movement's citizenship schools and in the best community organizing efforts, this approach has proven highly effective. In addition, after a year in Public Achievement young people have internalized certain political ideas. Specifically, many young people are able to articulate the relationship and difference between public and private in general and as it relates to their project. This is evidence that young people can learn and use political concepts and language. However, as a program, Public Achievement does have shortcomings. Young people spend about thirty two hours a week in school, at least that time much in front of the television, but less than that in Public Achievement for a whole year. In addition, Public Achievement coaches receive fewer than eight hours of training in total, only a few of which focus on the conceptual framework and how to present it to young people. And on these points, the staff is still struggling to figure out how to best use both the young people's and the coaches' time to build their capacity for political action and understanding. Improving and clarifying Public Achievement's method of experiential learning is going to take an on-going investment of staff time. However, if coach training can be improved, and if teachers and administrators can learn to re-inforce Public Achievement's lessons in the classroom, two significant barriers to civic learning could be removed.

When the programmatic barriers to Public Achievement's success as a citizenship education initiative have been acknowledged and addressed to the point where they are lowered, if not eliminated, then Public Achievement's approach and young people's capacity for political identification will be able to be evaluated fully and fairly.

VII. Conclusion, References, Appendices

Conclusion

Democratic governance is based on the active participation of citizens in politics and public life. Young people need an education that prepares and engages them in their education, their schools, and their communities—their public life. While Public Achievement's success has been incomplete at best, both in theory and in practice it offers young people a more comprehensive citizen education than either of mainstream civics or standard service learning. And these models have been supported for years. Public Achievement has only been in existence for five. The people of the United States have made a commitment to the "American experiment" in democratic governance for over two hundred years. As an experiment in education for citizenship, Public Achievement deserves a commitment as well. Over the past five years, Public Achievement has made in-roads into our most pressing problem —the deterioration of public life—in five more years it should come even further.

References

Bass, Melissa.Making the Rules: A Public Achievement Guidebook, 3rd ed. (Minneapolis: The Center for Democracy and Citizenship, 1994).

____________. "Public Achievement Concept Paper," Draft proposal for discussion (April 25, 1995).

Robert Bellah, et. al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).

Boyte, Harry C. "Reinventing Citizenship," Kettering Review, (Winter 1994).

____________. "Service, Practical Politics, and Citizenship Education," CRF Network, vol. 4, issue 2 (Spring 1993).

Clark, Todd. "Preparing Citizens Through Service," CRF Network, vol. 4, issue 2 (Spring 1993). Dionne, E. J., Jr. Why Americans Hate Politics. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991).

Markus, Gregory B. An Evaluation of Project Public Life, (Minneapolis: Project Public Life Press, 1992).

Shier, Maria T. "Public Achievement and Democracy and Education," unpublished paper (Winter 1994).

Appendix A: Public Achievement Administration

Peg Michels, Former Co-Director of Project Public Life: With the staff, led the Public Achievement class ('93-'94) and oversaw the program as a whole.

Public Achievement Associates

Jim Farr, professor, Department of Political Science: Has offered courses through the Honors and Political Science departments with both required and optional Public Achievement coaching components. His students have coached at St. Bernard's, J. J. Hill, and Calvin Christian schools. He has joined his students at the sites and has helped to lead the follow-up sessions. In addition, he has participated in the coach training sessions and attended the student conferences.

Juan Jackson, independent trainer: Has led the Fall Kick-off conference and helped design and implement the Winter trainings and Spring Evaluation. He has coached the Community Prevention Coalition and Central High Public Achievement teams, and served on the working group.

Beth Haney, graduate student, Social Psychology: Has been investigating the impact of Public Achievement on young people's understandings of efficacy; rights and responsibilities; community; and citizenship through surveys and interviews.

Walter Enloe, Director, Center for Global and Environmental Education; Has been involved with Public Achievement from its founding, participating in the working group and assisting in coach training and conferences.

Appendix B: Public Achievement Organizations,1993-1995

District 14 Community Council: Contact: Sarah Renner. For the past four years, the Macalester-Groveland (District 14) Community Council has hired Macalester work-study students to be Public Achievement coaches at Ramsey Jr. High, and Highland Jr. and Sr. High schools. This year, the council ended its association with Public Achievement due to conflicts around the goals and objectives of Public Achievement. Nonetheless, it would be in the interest of both the council and the Center to attempt to re negotiate a working relationship around Public Achievement and youth community involvement.

Team Sites

St. Bernard's Grade School: Contacts, Dennis Donovan (principal) and Jeff Mauer (teacher). St. Bernard's is a private Catholic grade school in inner-city St. Paul. Public Achievement is in its fifth year at St. Bernard's, involving over 125 fourth through eighth graders this year alone, on a wide range of issues. Future challenges include bringing parents, neighborhood members, and parishioners in Public Achievement; continuing to involve teachers in the program; and encouraging students to address issues that have broader public impact.

J. J. Hill Montessori Magnet School: Contacts, Ginger Mitchell and Lynn Schultz (teachers). J. J. Hill is a St. Paul public school drawing students from throughout the city into its Montessori program. Public Achievement is in its second year at J. J. Hill, involving 60 third through sixth graders on five teams this year. The teams worked on improving school lunches, getting a juice machine, organizing after-school activities, starting a school store, and improving the playground. While support for Public Achievement has spread among students, parents, and teachers, the principal's support has been reluctant. A challenge for next year will be to get the new principal on board before the program starts in late September.

Breck Middle School: Contacts, Ben Olk and Sarah Flotin (teachers); Breck is a private college prep school in Golden Valley, with students coming from throughout the twin cities area. Public Achievement is in its second year at Breck, involving 22 fifth through eighth graders in two teams. This year the fifth and sixth graders worked on improving the commons and the seventh and eighth on expanding eighth grade privileges. While the commons teams made substantial progress, the privileges team did not. Obstacles for both the teams include a heavy academic load which takes up much of the students' time, and a school policy prohibiting fundraising. The privileges team had difficulty sustaining an interest in this issue, or any other issue they could think of. Challenges for next year will be to change the structure of the program so that it is not a burden to be borne in addition to student classes, and to encourage the students to address issues of larger public value.

Washington Technology Magnet: Contact, Jeff Smith (teacher). Washington is a St. Paul Public middle school with an extremely diverse student body. Public Achievement began at Washington two years ago, with two teachers having their students participate. One teacher chose not to participate this year due to misunderstandings about the Public Achievement philosophy and scheduling conflicts. This year the continuing teacher's sixth grade language arts class participated in the program. Unlike other Public Achievement sites, at Washington the program has been contained within a specific classroom and the coach modified the curriculum and standard model to successfully fit this environment. Challenges for next year center around informing the principal and other staff about Public Achievement and building institutional support for the program.

Calvin Christian School: Contact, Simona Goi (graduate student coach). Calvin is a private Christian school in Edina, with a highly educated and involved parent body. Public Achievement began this spring in the school's fifth grade classroom. The students have chosen to work on helping others, sports activities, and improving the playground. In addition to two university students, a parent (also a university student) is acting as a coach.

Central High School: Contact, Michelle Graves (counselor). Central is a St. Paul public high school. Public Achievement began this year at Central High as a SPEAC initiative. Community members served as coaches for approximately 40 students, who organized gender equity, Black issues, and school policy teams. Challenges for next year will be to strengthen training for coaches coming from outside the University and to encourage the students to take action around the problems they have identified.

Minnesota Minority Education Partnership schools: Contact, Bruce Vandall (staff); MMEP integrated Public Achievement into their Student Voices project at two Minneapolis public high schools—Plymouth Youth Center and Henry High. It is likely that MMEP will discontinue its Student Voices project next year, so Public Achievement will have to find alternate means of working with Minneapolis public schools should it wish to continue.

Creative Theatre Unlimited: Contact, Charles Numrich (director). CTU has worked with small groups of high school students to further public problem solving through the arts. Over the past two years, the team has worked to address child abuse, writing and presenting a play on the issue.

St. Columba School: Contact, Paul McCarthy (teacher, no longer with the school). St. Columba is a private Catholic school in inner-city St. Paul. St. Columba offered Public Achievement to its seventh and eighth grade students for four years. During that period of time, the focus of the group shifted toward a drama club focus, and this year they stopped attending Public Achievement events. With the lead teacher leaving, Public Achievement is unlikely to carry on in any form unless the Public Achievement staff decides to actively pursue its continuation.

Expo Middle School: Contact, Joel Swanson (teacher). Expo is a St. Paul public middle school. Joel Swanson has offered Public Achievement as an option for his students for two of the past four years, but has been relatively uninvolved in recruiting students, working with participants, or building institutional support. This year only three students chose to participate, making the program difficult to implement.

Friends School of Minnesota: Contact, Karen Utter (teacher). Friends School is a private grade school in Minneapolis. Karen Utter chose to use Public Achievement as a vehicle for service learning in her fifth grade classroom. The teacher and coach both decided that the Public Achievement model, with its emphasis on student involvement in defining problems and creating, as well as implementing, projects was not what the teacher was looking for.

Community Prevention Center: Contact, Jaime Martinez (project coordinator). Jaime Martinez used the Public Achievement model to involve high school students in the Prevention Center's activities. In this case, the young people decided that Public Achievement was too academically oriented for their taste, and chose to continue their work without using Public Achievement.

Washburn High School: Contact, Liz Young (teacher). Washburn is a Minneapolis public high school. Liz Young tried during the '93-'94 school year to integrate Public Achievement into Washburn's student council. However, the student council had other responsibilities that took up the students' time. The teacher's goal has been to build support within the school to have a separate Public Achievement group. MMEP has also expressed interest in working at Washburn.

Appendix C: Public Achievement Trainings, Conferences, and Meetings, 1993-1995

The Fall Kick-off Conferences have been held in mid to late October at the St. Paul Student Center, running from mid-morning through early afternoon. At the conferences, approximately 120 young people are introduced to citizen politics concepts, apply them to an issue or problem in small groups, and present their work on stage. Coaches and institutional leaders facilitate the small group sessions and help the young people prepare their presentations.

Winter Trainings

The Winter Trainings are held over a two or three day period in late January at the Humphrey Institute. Sites choose to attend one day; approximately 40 young people attend each session. The point of the training is to compress what would normally take young people an entire year to accomplish in Public Achievement, into the span of three hours. Participants are presented with a public problem to solve and work in groups to develop a strategy, which they then implement in a role-play. Adults, with scripts, play the people the young people would involve and need to negotiate with to solve their problem. Young people then evaluate their work, focusing on how they can use what they have learned in their on-going Public Achievement work. Of all of the conferences, the young people enjoy, and learn the most from, the winter training. In the past, the major difficulty has been finding enough adults to coach the small groups and act in the role-play.

Spring Evaluation

Spring '94: Although Public Achievement sponsored evaluation conferences in the spring of '92 and '93, due to a lack of interest there was no conference in '94.

Spring '95: This conference was held at the Humphrey Institute on the morning of April 27th, followed by lunch. 80 students from St. Bernard's, J. J. Hill, Breck, and Central attended. Students were assigned to groups prior to the conference and met, with coaches, to discuss their work and evaluate Public Achievement. Following the group discussions, all of the students gathered in the auditorium for a two short presentations.

In future years, so as to make the most of small group discussions, we need to be able to better record and document student presentations and comments.

Coach Training

Class '93-'94: The Public Achievement staff offered a weekly, then bi-weekly, class in the citizen politics framework and organizing. In addition, coaches shared their experiences and problem-solved around issues that came up in their teams and at their sites. Attendance was sporadic and fell off in the winter, with the class ending in early spring.

Training retreat, Fall '94: Coaches were asked to attend an all-day training at the Humphrey Institute in late September, before they began to coach. The staff described the program, presented the conceptual framework, and gave coaches an opportunity to ask questions to a variety of teachers. Coaches found their time with the teachers most helpful, and have asked that more time be allotted to this.

On-going training, Fall '94: All of the coaches who were not meeting after their coaching sessions were invited to attend bi-weekly sessions at the Humphrey Institute. Coaches gave updates on their teams and shared experiences and strategies. After the winter quarter, the sessions stopped due to lack of interest.

Professor Farr's classes: All of the coaches at St. Bernard's and J. J. Hill, the coaches associated with Professor Farr, met as a group after their coaching sessions. The principal of St. Bernard's and teachers from J. J. Hill often joined the coaches. Coaches updated one another on their teams' progress and received advice from one another and the institutional leaders. Coaches have found that meeting immediately after their sessions, on a weekly basis, is the most helpful way to work as a group.

Institutional Leader Meetings

Class '93-'94: Institutional leaders were asked to attend the weekly/bi-weekly class with their coaches so that they could also learn the conceptual framework. This was an attempt to increase the involvement of institutional leaders with their coaches and teams. In addition, the class connected institutional leaders doing similar work. Participants could apply for continuing education units and college credit, although only 2 chose to do so. Attendance dropped off after the first several meetings, with institutional leaders not finding the academic content useful enough to justify the time commitment.

Working group meetings '94-'95: The focus of institutional leader meetings shifted to an advisory and evaluative role, with participants meeting monthly, separately from the coaches. While the monthly meetings were better attended than the class the previous year, the group never coalesced. The Public Achievement staff and institutional leaders need to determine why they should meet and what role institutional leaders should play in organizing Public Achievement.

Notes

1See E. J. Dionne, Jr. Why Americans Hate Politics. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991).

2The citizen politics framework was developed by the partnership network of Project Public Life. Partners include Harry Boyte, director; Rebecca Breuer, Dorothy Cotton, Dennis Donovan, Jim Farr, Carol McGee Johnson, Pat Johnson, John Kari, Nan Kari, Paul Martinez, Tony Massengale, Peg Michels, Maiasha Mitchell, and Carol Shields.

3Harry C. Boyte, "Reinventing Citizenship," Kettering Review, (Winter 1994) p. 79.

4Melissa Bass, Making the Rules: A Public Achievement Guidebook, 3rd ed. (Minneapolis: The Center for Democracy and Citizenship, 1994). p. 90.

5Robert Bellah, et. al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). p. 121.

6Todd Clark, "Preparing Citizens Through Service," CRF Network, vol. 4, issue 2 (Spring 1993), p. 1.

7Harry C. Boyte, "Service, Practical Politics, and Citizenship Education," CRF Network, vol. 4, issue 2 (Spring 1993), p. 7.

8"Public Achievement Concept Paper," 4/25/95 draft, pp. 3-4.

9 Bass, p. 53.

10Uncredited quote in Gregory B. Markus, An Evaluation of Project Public Life, (Minneapolis: Project Public Life Press, 1992), p. 9.

11Ibid., p. 90

12Maria T. Shier, "Public Achievement and Democracy and Education," (unpublished paper) p. 1.

13Professor James Farr, quoted in Making the Rules, 3rd ed., p. 91.

Index

I. Introduction
II. Public Achievement: Background Information
III. Public Achievement in Contrast to Other Approaches
IV. Lessons from Public Achievement
V. Conceptual Questions and Practical Tensions
VI. Have Public Achievement's Goals Been Realized?
VII. Conclusion, References, Appendices, Notes