The future of public engagement

Agenda. After six months of working intensely on several new projects, Dr. Friedman took a 15 minute break to breathe and talk a bit about where public engagement at Public Agenda is headed. The complete conversation is available on Public Agenda's web site: www.publicagenda.org I continued on page 4 iscipline and behavior problems in America's public schools are seriously compromising student learning. They are also driving a substantial number of teachers out of the profession according to a study from Public Agenda released in May titled Teaching Interrupted: Do Discipline Policies in Today's Public Schools Foster the Common Good? The report was prepared for Common Good, a bipartisan legal reform coalition dedicated to restoring common sense to American law. It was the second project Public Agenda has worked on with Common Good to look at how litigation and education policy intersect. Teaching Interrupted dramatically illustrates the impact of discipline problems in schools, reporting that more than 1 in 3 teachers said colleagues in their school had left because student discipline was such a challenge, and the same number personally considered leaving. Many complained about Editor: This is a busy time for the public engagement team at Public Agenda, isn't it? Will Friedman: Right now we're working with a police-community dialogue project in three cities (New Haven, San Antonio and New York City), a statewide education project in Nebraska, and a nationwide initiative to improve community college results for underserved students. There are also a number of important projects in the pipeline. The work in Nebraska is an interesting example. Public Agenda began working with the Department of Education in Nebraska eight or nine years ago when we helped them organize statewide conversations on academic standards. And now the state has come back and asked us to help them engage citizens on a related theme: What are the educational opportunities that should be available to every student in every school no matter where they live in the state? What should be considered an essential education? What's really interesting about the project is where it will go next year, because the question that follows directly behind is really the more contentious one. Nebraska will need to explore how it will go about ensuring that all students actually have those essential educational opportunities, and that's going to bring them into trickier questions. E: You have a new title, but you've been involved in …