When President Biden announces a federal initiative to reduce crime with mental health and community policing methods, St.Louis should step up with an optimistic proposal that “engages the entire region,” as Mayor Lyda Krewson has said. Not with a stingy allocation of resources. Open the coffers and pave the way for young people to assume a new generation of Advocacy, Reform and Community Health (ARCH) for Justice.
Two of the biggest projects in St. Louis are the construction of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the demand for a multi-service police department, one better adapted for community policing. The NGA has the advantage of start-up funding beyond imagination and a curriculum called STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) designed to turn out graduates to work for the monolith of technology under construction. The funding and the jobs are ready and waiting.
Less defined, but just as significant are the needs of social justice reform, dramatized by the murder of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis Department this summer. The slogan “Defund the Police” as a solution was calculated to go nowhere–without a constructive goal. President-elect Joe Biden has tried to redefine the needs of police departments to include social and psychological services, the stingiest-funded services in most cities.
Recently I wrote about the potential of Sumner High School as a magnet for social services occupations (https://wtucker.edublogs.org/2020/12/18/social-justice-education/) Recently I wrote about the potential of Sumner High School as a magnet for social services occupations (https://wtucker.edublogs.org/2020/12/18/social-justice-education/) and it occurred to me that the social services lacked the career map that STEM occupations have boasted for decades. The demand for STEM professionals has been its own financial magnet to draw students into the supply chain, and there is no shortage of money to pay young people who want to enter STEM professions.
Not so true of social service occupations. Resources for these jobs have always been in short supply, and students seem to enter these occupations more by accident than design. In fact, until now, criminal justice and mental health education have run on parallel tracks, intersecting by accident in occupations like parole officer or youth counselor.
If the Biden administration makes good on its goal to expand policing services to include the social and psychological, there will be start-up funding from Washington, both for police departments and university programs in criminal justice and mental health. Grants will be temporary magnets for students to choose jobs that emphasize justice reform. Then we will need local resources to sustain career tracks that will support students from high school to job recruitment in community policing and youth services.
Local resources include expanding the budget for education and recruitment of these positions by the city itself, with funding from professional units such as the police unions, from the business community (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fHTi9HThGE&list=PLtxwUv5r5kpUtJv9jXUmzu3tLhQ8_loVc), from professional organizations, from local schools, and even from churches providing mentors and scholarships for promising young people. There will be no magic spring of funding from the desert of social service professions; it will be local pocketbooks opening to make something where there was nothing before.
Collaboration is the lynchpin of this model of orientation, recruitment, and apprenticeship. We need a model of education that reaches from ninth grade to on-the-job training. I’ll call it ARCH for Justice. ARCH stands for Advocacy, Reform and Community Health. Yes, it is an idea forced into an acronym, but it is indeed an arch of progress for service-minded young people to prepare for jobs that may not exist yet, but must evolve from the need to humanize police departments.
A very flawed model for this kind of recruitment was “Teach for America,” which attracted bright young people to teach in urban settings with the prize of tuition partially paid. The model was flawed from the point of view of training and sustainability– meaning the training was poor and the rewards were insufficient. The incentives kept new teachers on the job for three years at maximum. Teachers are not even proficient until after three years of service, so most of the recruits left the profession about the time they were getting good at it. The methodology preparation was so superficial that teachers were handed few tools for success. It was not a program to develop career teachers.
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In ARCH for Justice students could receive from 25% to full tuition remission if they remain in the profession for 3-5 years. Or they could receive an education savings account for future study whether undergraduate or graduate. The goal is to reward commitment beyond three years activity in the profession. An education savings account could accrue from 1-10 years to accommodate the growth and promotion of the student.
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Secondary Level: ARCH for Justice would start with basic classes in criminology or mental health at the high school level. A liberal high school curriculum could include at least four classes in English, social science, health science and mathematics that orient students to problems of social justice reform. In the case of a magnet school, such as the model I proposed for Sumner High School, you could offer as many as eight courses that meet core requirements as well as professional introductions to criminal justice and public health with job shadowing (https://wtucker.edublogs.org/2020/12/18/social-justice-education/).
Post-secondary: we need programs that cross over between criminal justice and the health sciences. Local universities, like SLU and WashU, have strong departments in criminology and mental health, but no cross-over majors. These disciplines are traditionally complementary. If Washington D..C. has any influence this could change. How are students prepared for community policing, family interventions or youth mentorships? Even alternative education can be adapted for offenders on parole or finishing their GED while caught up in the legal system. At this level we can plan summer internships for secondary or post-secondary, who are exploring social justice professions.
Professional: In teaching there are always mentor teachers who take a special (often humane) interest in the induction of new teachers. I don’t know how this ethic plays out in other social professions, but it should be an essential professional standard. Interns could be any age from 14 to 25 and their level of participation on the job and can vary as well. It might be valuable to hold weekly seminars with participants from diverse careers, from community policing to alternative education, to broaden the perspective of social justice reform.
In the future grants and budget proposals should reward connecting one level of education with another, such as secondary with post-secondary or undergraduate with professional internships. These are always the Achilles heel of professional education, so providing funds to target connections is essential. Unlike the STEM professions, the progress from one level to another is not self-explanatory. That’s why we need an ARCH for Justice framework.
If the devil is in the details, I have not given the devil his due. The goal of increased collaboration for the levels of education and the profession needs illumination, and I am glad to shed some light. It is time for all levels of secondary, post-secondary, and professional schooling to conceive of education as meeting a social need and conscientiously collaborating to address it.
Ultimately the commitment and resources St. Louis brings to this goal will show young people that we want motivated and talented people for this cause. We can’t build a monolithic structure like the National Geo-spatial Intelligence building, but we can construct professional highways that provide both direction and resources for social justice reform.
To editorialize a little, we need the business community and universities to step up their funding and focus on induction of young people to a worthy cause. When Michael Neidorff pointed out it was hard to recruit talent because of the city’s reputation for crime, he addressed an issue he could remedy with funding part of the career path to social justice occupations. If he led local businesspeople in funding part of the professional highway, he could become part of the solution.
Universities play a critical role in developing students for the crossover professions of criminology and mental heath. They could develop majors, minors and certificate programs to recruit teenagers to the causes of low visibility and high-stress. They need to raise the visibility and fund scholarships to go where no recruit has gone before. To develop programs, fund scholarships, and work hard in the fields -both secondary and professional, where the real learning takes place.
Social justice funding and promotion is on the horizon. As we prepare, think about creating magnet schools at the secondary level (https://wtucker.edublogs.org/2020/12/18/social-justice-education/), inter-departmental majors and minors at the post-secondary level, and pilot programs for policing/ mental health positions in the police department. Let ARCH for Justice be prepared for social reform.
Advocacy, Reform, and Community Health.