Week 1

So I've never actually blogged before, but here it goes anyway....

This blog is not necessarily intended to be read by anyone but me. The reason for this is not because I am embarrassed to share my writing style or experiences with anybody, but mainly because this will most likely be pretty boring for anybody to read except for me. This blog is simply intended to be a record of my summer as a policy fellow.

Let me give you a little background: I have always been interested in politics, and have recently discovered that I could actually someday make a career out of this passion. After two years in the classroom as a Teach For America corps member, I was desperately searching for some job/internship/activity that would satisfy this need to discover the day-to-day life of a policy wonk. Needless to say, I spent many hours searching through idealist.org and TFA's LEE site to find any job opportunity that I could take advantage of this summer. Then, I saw it: TFA was looking for applicants to the PALI fellowship program, and the description was "seeking recent corps members who are interested in getting into policy work, but have no policy experience whatsoever." Yep, that pretty much described my situation in a nutshell. So I applied, and sure enough I was lucky enough to be one of 8 fellows to be placed at a policy organization in DC.

One week after my last day of teaching for the year, I had already moved across the country, and began my fellowship with Knowledge Alliance, an education policy organization that focuses on bringing R&D into education policy by lobbying Congress to increase funding for education R&D and increase existing infrastructures to help the dissemination of educational research as a way to influence best practices. I feel very lucky to have been placed with Knowledge Alliance because already in my first week, I feel like a valuable team member and advocate for advancing the Alliance's mission. Since I have had a very fulfilling week already, I figured that for my own sake, I would like to keep a detailed record of what events and meetings I have attended, so that I may look back at the end of the summer and reflect wholly on this once in a lifetime opportunity.

6/29/2010- My First day at KA. Met with Augustus to discuss organizational history, go over the internship manual, and begin to discuss our government relations strategy. (Totally overwhelmed at this point with terminology and a lack of context for many parts of the discussion). After being taken to lunch by Augustus, we headed over to the Hill to take part in 2 meetings with Rep. Rush Holt's (NJ) and Rep. Susan Davis' (CA) chiefs of staff to discuss progress on Leg. Council's review and editing of the Knowledge Bill to be proposed. We received bad news from Rep. Holt's office- Leg. council still had not sent back a finalized copy of the bill, even though it has been over 3 months since its submission. However, good news from Davis' office, because the bill has been finalized, and will be ready to "drop" within the next two weeks.

6/30/2010- For my second day on the job, Jason, Augustus and I attended Education Sector's conference on Teacher Evaluation Systems. This event was comprised of a panel of prominent education policy leaders working for both the Dept. of Ed, New Haven Schools and DCPS. Meeting was interesting not necessarily from a policy intern's perspective, but more so from a teacher's perspective. Basically the meeting discussed ways that certain school districts (such as DC) are beginning to evaluate teacher performance in a more authentic way than just test scores. It sounds as though using observation-based models, such as DC's Impact program, is just the beginning of a long and necessary discussion on how to fairly evaluate the performance of teachers. In the afternoon, Jason, Augustus and I headed back to the hill to sit in on the testimony to the Federal Deficit Commission (with co-chairs Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles) to show support for one of KA's members who was testifying to ensure that education funding does not get cut when this commission makes their recommendation to Obama in December. Although each person only gets to testify for 4 minutes before their mics get shut off, it was still interesting to see the gamut of people and organizations that were pleading their case to the commission as well. I think the highlight, however, had to be seeing Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform come and try to convince this panel to basically do away with taxing altogether. This created an interesting back-and-forth between Alan Simpson (who is very conservative himself) and Mr. Norquist for quite some time. Pretty entertaining. Also, I learned that one room inside the Dirksen Senate building has pictures of the zodiac scattered around the ceiling. Interesting decor choice if you ask me.

7/1/2010- This morning I participated in my first "leadership meeting" with my office staff. We all came together and went over our progress on meeting last week's stated goals, as well as set new goals for the upcoming week. It felt nice to all meet together as an office, and I felt very welcome into this circle of people. During lunchtime, I attended my first brownbag lunch with the other DC PALI fellows. Every week or so, we will all be meeting together for lunch, and will have a guest speaker come and talk with us about some education policy issue. This week we got to hear from Michael Usdan, a man who has certainly well-known in DC for his involvement with ed. policy. He is currently a senior fellow with the Institute for Education Leadership. He came to discuss with us the history of education policy in this country, and put perspective on the current path that ed. policy is headed. He taught us that historically, ed. policy has always been fairly removed from government, in the sense that it was mainly handled by both state and local jurisdiction, with very little intrusion by the federal government. Ironically, however, it was a republican president (Bush 2) who increased the federal government's role in education more so than any other president before with his reauthorization of the ESEA in the form of No Child Left Behind. This legislation was really the first time that the federal government took such large control over education, and Obama's administration is continuing this trend through his Race To The Top efforts. Mr. Usdan's prediction (even though he claims that his predictions are always wrong), is that eventually education will become nationalized in the sense that the standards for student achievement will be set by the government on a federal level. It was a very interesting conversation, and one that I am sure I will be having many times over the summer. In the afternoon, I headed back to the office, and the staff all came together again to discuss the retreat that will be held in New Mexico this August. I basically learned how important this retreat is in terms of strategy and planning for KA's members, and how we need to make sure that every detail gets thought through before the event. We even got a little silly and decided that this year's conference gift would be a vuvuzela in the spirit of the world cup.

7/2/2010- Today was a low-key day at the office considering that it was a day before a holiday weekend, and Congress had the day off for the July 4th recess. I did have the opportunity to set up my google reader and twitter accounts so that now I am showered with the latest and greatest ed policy news coming to me in real time. I am starting to get a hang of the lingo, and am getting pretty involved in reading as many blogs and articles as I possibly can in the span of a day. Augustus and I finished discussing KA's government relations program, particularly the recommendations the organization has for the reauthorization of the ESEA and ESRA bills. In the afternoon, we watched a little world cup as an office, and I spent my time reviewing KA's website with "fresh eyes" to make sure that it was user friendly. I think that I came up with a pretty good list of comprehensive changes that I would make to make it a more efficient website. Other than that, I got to leave work around 3 PM since it was the Friday before a big holiday weekend.