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The High Stakes of Stakeholder Engagement: A Plea for Careful Planning from Public Agenda
This post was written for the 20 community colleges participating in Completion by Design, a five-year Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation initiative that aims to significantly increase completion rates for low-income students under 26. As a “National Assistance partner” for Completion by Design, Public Agenda provides direct assistance to the colleges to help them build capacity for solutions-oriented dialogue among faculty, staff and administration. Here, Public Agenda's Alison Kadlec discusses best practices for authentic internal stakeholder engagement. While the post is geared toward Completion by Design planning teams, the principles are useful for any authentic engagement process.
***You Can't Do It Alone: A New Guide to Creating Sustainable Change in Education Reform
Far too often, throughout our work in the education field, we've seen even the most earnest and promising ideas from experts and reformers for improving schools and ramping up student learning met with confusion, anxiety or even anger from teachers, parents, students or community members.
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I heard somewhere that payroll payments, that is contributions to the Social Security fund actually go into the general fund and the federal government issues treasury bonds to the Social Security fund to secure its loan from the Social Security fund. Doesn't that mean that we're paying interest to ourselves when we brorrow money from ouseelves - we are both the debtor and creditor?
Buying bonds would be one way to get your tax money back. During past times of big government spending there was an active push for citizens to by things like war bonds during World War II.
The difference now is that the amount of debt owed by foreign banks and other international investors has increased to the point that more than 2 of the 9+ trillion dollars in the debt that we owe are being financed by other countries. China is our second largest lender ($420.2 billion) and the fourth largest source comes from oil exporting nations ($113.0 billion).
Even if the debt was paid for with bonds held by US citizens, we would still have one additional problem, other than paying out interest and having put more into the pay out of Social Security than is being paid in. The money used for bonds is money that is not available for other credit needs, making credit funding scarcer and therefore more expensive. Without money for investment, the economy slows.
Thank you for the chart, pictures do indeed save thousands of words. I would love to see this in a historical context. A snapshot, while informative, is less informative than a series of pictures that can show the historical changes.
Thank you
Surfgeezer
Just spend 5 trillion!
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