{"id":3712,"date":"2011-07-30T14:42:02","date_gmt":"2011-07-30T18:42:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wordpress\/?p=3712"},"modified":"2011-07-30T15:18:30","modified_gmt":"2011-07-30T19:18:30","slug":"public-protests-are-not-policy-workshops","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/?p=3712","title":{"rendered":"Public protests are not policy workshops"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m not at the Save our Schools<\/a> march today in D.C. but I am reading coverage (including the Twitter feed for #sosmarch). I think a number of observers such as John Merrow<\/a>\u00a0and Patrick Riccards<\/a> are both right and wrong in arguing that the march organizers don’t have specifics to carry an argument. It is true that in this march, there are folks whose views are not entirely clear, and there are some clear examples of where attendees disagree on important issues–I recently read a tweet from an attendee who was opposed to letting Pedro Noguero speak. ((“I wish Pedro wasn’t speaking. He’s a charter guy and I lobbied to remove him from the stage,” tweeted<\/a> by a blogger who goes by the moniker The Frustrated Teacher<\/a>.))<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

But this event is not really about focused policy issues. ((Update<\/strong>:Sara Goldrick-Rab has pointed out on Twitter that none of the guiding principles mention higher ed. For that matter, they don’t mention early childhood ed, either.)) As an historian I generally don’t look to public marches and rallies as being about wonkish things. Of course, I could be wrong, and if any of you have video of town-hall meetings or rallies in 2009 and 2010 where people started up pro-IPAB ((Independent Payment Advisory Board, which is a key mechanism for controlling health-care costs in the Affordable Care Act)) chants, please let me know and I will acknowledge my error. But public protests are malleable events, not policy workshops, and their meaning is determined by participants who usually have multiple perspectives. ((Okay, maybe policy workshops also have constructed meanings, but the goal is usually more focused.)) Rallies are just not generally designed for Capitol Hill bill markups, and there was no clear causal line an historian can draw between a rally on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in summer 1963 and the passage of specific civil-rights legislation in the following two years. I think it would be a mistake to judge any public protest event by how cohesive and actionable its written (or online) materials are.<\/p>\n

One instead looks at whether there is any evidence of an event providing evidence of or an organizing impetus for something specific. Things that matter in this regard are attendance, the providing of opportunities to plan either before or after the event, organizational followup, and so forth. In the case of Save our Schools, from the pictures tweeted thus far this afternoon, it looks like there are hundreds rather than tens of thousands of attendees, so the relevant questions for the long term are about the organizing opportunities rather than massive crowds. From Kenneth Bernstein’s twitter comments<\/a>\u00a0on a pre-march meeting yesterday, it was partly speeches and partly small-group discussions, with tomorrow slated for a four-hour organizational meeting. ((I fully expect tomorrow to end up with a statement of general principles that is no more specific than what is currently online. Again, I’m not sure that means much given the huge success<\/del> failure of education policy manifestoes in the past few years.))<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m not at the Save our Schools march today in D.C. but I am reading coverage (including the Twitter feed for #sosmarch). I think a number of observers such as John Merrow\u00a0and Patrick Riccards are both right and wrong in arguing that the march organizers don’t have specifics to carry an argument. It is true […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[16,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3712","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-accountability-frankenstein","category-education-policy"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-XS","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3712","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3712"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3712\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3718,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3712\/revisions\/3718"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3712"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3712"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3712"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}