Sam:

Same issues on my end.

I had a small grad program in Planning and Policy. The program director loved to,once a month, find the public figure in the deepest trouble at the moment, invite them over to the Hopkins Club, get them drunk (back when people still did that stuff), and get all the dirt and intrigues behind the crisis of the moment.

Local politics is often dirty, nasty, and very personal, even when, as in Illinois, that local politics is carried onto a state or regional level. It's hard, complicated, challenging and dangerous work, and a highly specialized sphere in its own unique right.

My wife is an educator, and media specialist for a huge regional high school, so I know enough about your little professional education world to be dangerous, and more than I should about Dewey and his decimals.

I served on a lot of panels and committees on alternative school structures in the early-mid 2000s---urban school restructurings, charter school fights, alternative k-12 systems and strategies (magnets, alternate grade spans, decentralized schools, KIPPs, etc...). Nothing as bracing and "real" as going into a local community, or board of ed meeting, to delve into these kinds of issues with them. Yes, I've done those kinds of meetings where the walls of a gym are lined with police...(But I just do facility planning/organizational/finance stuff, not actual eduction (where the real politics of love and death reside).

It certainly would be fun to take some of our US diplomats into a few intense community meetings to make them realize what a safe and clean job they have (no heavy lifting).

Hard to get across to the uninititiated that, fighting aside, COIN is about that nasty local public community stuff, and conflicts are inherent in them---all by themselves,and especially at home.

Want to know about education? Call an educator.

Steve