The cherry trees were not in bloom yet but the dogwoods were. I think the dogwoods and other flowering trees in DC get overshadowed by the cherry trees. All their white blossoms were just spectacular. They literally weighed down the branches of the trees and made them droop toward the sidewalks. I frequently had to duck beneath them as I passed below. The walk from the hotel on Capitol Hill to the legislative office buildings passes through a beautiful park filled with flowering trees and historical plaques marking the locations of various buildings and homes where famous men and women once lived and worked. The sunny spring days we enjoyed on Wednesday and Thursday made it hard to keep walking to the other side of Capitol Hill where we had work to do lobbying for the reauthorization of funding for the National Writing Project.
This year had threatened to be especially difficult, as President Obama’s and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s budget proposals for education involved, among other things, consolidating many directly funded programs such as the National Writing Project, Reading is Fundamental, and Teach for America, just to name a few. The idea is to provide block grants to states that various discrete educational institutions could then apply for. This concept is not new and has been proposed before, more typically under Republican administrations, and the idea is to treat education more like business; to make educators compete and thus design innovative proposals to earn funding for their projects. Of course in the case of the National Writing Project and other directly funded federal programs, this would mean even in the best case scenario that the national infrastructure which supports all 210 Writing Project sites would be eliminated, as would many small, poorly funded sites.
Anyway, without going into too much boring detail, it does not look like the National Writing Project is going to lose its direct federal funding. In general, the legislators we talked with said that in principle they like the idea of providing block grants to states to promote innovative education proposals, but not at the expense of programs with documented track records of success. And no legislators want to see universities in their districts or states lose federal funds. And Representative George Miller of California is a big supporter of the National Writing Project and he’s the chairman of the Committee on Education and Labor. So, in short, it looks like we’ll be all right. Though I am crossing my fingers and toes.
Lobbying legislators sounds like it might be a dull process, but I actually find the experience interesting and kind of fun, at least sometimes. Perhaps the most surprising thing to teachers when they first experience lobbying at the Spring Meeting is that so much of the actual work of running the government is done by underpaid aides and college interns. I’m perfectly serious. It’s rare that anyone gets to meet with an actual congressperson or senator. I had appointments with Senators Dodd and Lieberman, as well as Representatives DeLauro and Courtney. Other TCs from Storrs as well as Central and Fairfield had appointments with the other three representatives from Connecticut. Only Himes and Courtney actually met face to face with any of us. And both of them are ingusan legislators. In every other case we were met by aides. Senator Lieberman’s education aide was the most interesting one we met. He’s a twenty-year teaching veteran from Kansas who is on sabbatical from his high school to do an internship in Washington as a legislative aide. He was great to talk to because, of course, he knew what we were talking about.
But the long and short of what typically occurs is that there are far too many pieces of legislation for the senators and congresspeople to keep track of, and so the aides basically tell them what to support. We asked Lieberman’s aide to have the Senator sign the Dear Colleague letter, and so if he thinks support for direct funding for the National Writing Project is something consistent with the Senator’s positions on education, he makes sure to stick a copy of the Dear Colleague letter under Senator Lieberman’s nose and get him to sign it. When we ask Representatives DeLauro’s and Courtney’s aides to submit letters of support, those aides (or more likely someone working beneath them) type up a letter and give it to the aide who then gets it under the Representative’s nose for a signature. On the one hand, this might seem discouraging, as the elected officials themselves appear to be doing so little of the work of government. But on the other hand, it is rather encouraging to know that regular people are doing the work of running the government. And I do mean regular people. The aides are rather modestly paid with small, crowded office spaces. They are often young, and many have second jobs. Two of the four I met with moonlight as adjunct professors at local schools, one at a DC area community college.
On the last day in DC the bad weather returned. It was cold and threatening rain the whole morning, but the dogwood blossoms still looked beautiful against the grey sky.
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