30 July 2002

Settling In

When we started late on Sunday in our coats and ties, Roger told us it would be 45 one-and-a-half hour iterations. By my count we are down to 39 to go.  I feel better already.

It was easier today. We weren't doing a case study about my Agency, so I wasn't as worried talking out of turn. The other students can have whatever feelings they want on my arguments regarding statistical analysis of School Standards. That is what we did in the morning. Case Study the first: Barry McCaffery, a man in a horrible situation at the ONDCP. The professor was Phil Heymann, a very smart guy. He headed the Criminal Division at Justice in his time. He is typical of the people that teach here at the JFK School of Government. They were the actors in these dramas. The principals, in some of them.

My seminar group is very aggressive. They voted to take half of our break to talk about the second lecture topic. We are still meeting in a classroom for our eight-to-nine home room. The other seminars are meeting at tables in the cafeteria and have moved their breakfast back an hour. Getting civilized, starting the real day with the lecture at nine.

We are organized into two eight seminars, and then split into two large groups. They are titled "Group A" and "Group 1" to avoid any possible stigma regarding pride of place.

The second lecture was about metrics and measurement. Steve Kelman is the lecturer, a thin academician with an animated manner. He is a political Scientist who specializes in performance metrics. Interesting and engaged. We talked about standardized school testing. How it works, what is tested. Solving for variables like socio-economic conditions that might mean a school in a poor area is actually performing better than an upper-class school where the kids come in already knowing a lot.

Then we lurched into what we had read, the NYPD and the COMPSTAT program, the computerized statistical analysis that let Commissioner Bratton focus resources on beating down street crime. It worked, but letting the cops off the leash had the predictable consequences and they did not measure the increase in brutality. Like many New Yorkers, I suppose I don't care if the bad guys are inconvenienced. But that wasn't the point.  The point was to get us to think about what information we collect and what is really important.

The only New Yorker in the crowd was our Belosrussian from Westchester County who works for the UN. I asked him at the break if he had been a Young Pioneer when he was growing up in Minsk. He said he had been, just like the Boy Scouts. Weird.

At lunch there was a chicken buffet with a nice salad. I talked to Charlie, a Staffer from the House Science Committee. He was an older guy, like me. We discussed cross-cutting jurisdictional issues between his Committee and Armed Services and the Intel guys. Where the National Science Foundation and DARPA intersected. Then I fled to the steaming streets of Cambridge to clear my head and walk for an hour.

I paralleled the river, walking west. I stumbled onto a park that featured a bust of the poet Longfellow. It had an Inscription to help you remember: PoET, it said, the letters out of case size. The angular park led  to a yellow colonial house with real shutters. The place had been the Headquarters of George Washington in the siege of Boston, 1775-76, and later Longfellow's home. It had stayed in the Longfellow family until 1950, when it passed to the State. There were workers laboring in the heat, refurbishing the visitor center now located in the stables.

I wandered back toward the school, taking digital pictures on the way. I checked my e-mail in the Library in the basement. Cool in there, my green polo shirt clung to my back.

Then the last class of the day, an analysis of the Desert Survival exercise we had conducted yesterday. I had a pretty good score, but I had not ranked the overcoats high enough and Jill, the Desert Mouse, had achieved the highest individual score in all the groups. The class ran over fifteen minutes, and I walked back to graduate housing to start the reading for the next day. I covered Mayor Williams and his metric scorecards for improving the DC Department of Motor Vehicles and the other broken agencies he inherited from Marion Barry, an impenetrable article on issues in Government metrics, a fascinating analysis of how the Reagan White House handled the issue of IRS tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University and the political bombshell that resulted from doing the right thing- or one of the right things- at the wrong time. The last piece was about the security of Social Security on the web.

By the time I had plowed through it all I had missed dinner. I had a drink and walked back up to Cambridge and my feet led me back to the Burger Cottage. Katie was still behind the counter and I watched with fascination the process of assembling a fine burger on the steaming grill.

I ordered a Bill Clinton, which turns out to be a fine piece of meat seared to perfection with melted cheddar and BBQ sauce.

I walked slowly back to the dorm as night fell, and listened to the oldies station on my headphones as I read about the Achille Lauro high-jacking, and how it all played out. Oddly topical these days.

I fell asleep just before 11:00 PM. When the alarm woke me at 5:00AM, I found myself thinking about Haiti. It was seven years ago this morning that we were coming out.

I got it all done. I feel like I am settling in.