MAUREEN W. McCLURE

Networks to Reduce Expensive Isolation

The GINIE project is headquartered in the Institute for International Studies in Education (IISE), School of Education, University of Pittsburgh. GINIE is sponsored by the Human Capacity Development Center at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in partnerships both with U.S. and international educational organizations. Its primary partnership is with an interagency consultation on education for humanitarian assistance sponsored by the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) International Bureau of Education (IBE), the International Council of Voluntary Agencies (ICVA), the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), and the United Nations Department of Humanitarian Affairs (UNDHA). The consultation's office is housed in the Education for Humanitarian Assistance Unit of the IBE in Geneva and is headed by Gonzalo Retamal, currently on a long-term mission in Iraq.

A Strategy of Responsible Neighbors

GINIE is a rapid response strategy for education in nations in crisis and rapid transition to democracies or market economies. Its mission is to provide rapid access to information and expertise related to humanitarian aid, technical assistance, and economic partnership for those working in education in these nations. It helps link people concerned about education in these countries with each other and with counterparts internationally. It accomplishes these goals through (a) an Internet repository of existing information and expertise that can be shared both on- and off-line; (b) complex, multilevel comunications networks (phone, lax, e-mail, lists, on-line conferences); and (c) programs of research, technical assistance, and training. GINIE's intent is to (a) promote the formation of human capital through international networks for professionals and communities by lowering information and transactions costs for educational improvement; and (b) demonstrate to the general public the ongoing contributions of education to humanitarian aid, technical assistance, and economic development.

GINIE's long-term interest is educational improvement that leads to community and regional development, not only internationally but domestically as well. It considers a community or regional education sector as a whole, along with its related social service and commercial links, as an education economy. An education economy grows out of a response to both public and private needs for learning and innovation across generations. The GINIE strategy does not seek to coordinate these efforts through a centralized bureaucracy; rather it provides opportunities for professionals to leverage scarce resources more efficiently. This approach focuses on helping institutions and professionals lower their decisions costs by providing access to information and expertise that can help them "map" their position relative to others under constantly changing conditions. For example, if potential donors and investors can "see" what others are doing, they may be able to make better decisions about leveraging their own scarce resources.

The GINIE strategy treats education as a "supramarket" activity. It asserts that the relationships across children, parents, and teachers are too complex to be captured by a metaphor of commodity markets of supply and demand, driven by private property rights. It argues that the consequences of today's educational relationships for current and future generations cannot be adequately captured by contemporary measures of return to personal or national income. Education is deeply linked to more than income measures. It is necessary for the legitimacy of states and economies. Democracies and market economies assume personal political and economic responsibilities for sustainability because they are necessary for participation in selfgovernance and markets. The public duty to protect children's futures cannot be relinquished either in the voting booth or in the marketplace.

The consequences of this generation's investments in education, its finance, and its technology for the world's children will be experienced for many generations. GINIE challenges education professionals throughout the world to begin thinking about their responsibilities for children of the next millennium. Most education reform efforts in the United States and internationally focus on changing systems, not on sustaining civil and creative relationships over time. Reformers need to ask how education professionals, both in the United States and internationally, intend to contribute to the well-being of the world's current and future children. GINIE's longer-term relationship approach extends reform thinking to include a "dialogue of duty" for the next 50 generations.

Global Shared Resourcefulness

The GINIE strategy intends to avoid relationships of donor-recipient dependence by encouraging a longer-term "neighborly" approach that emphasizes cooperative self-interest across education professional communities both internationally and in the United States. It uses Inter/Intra/Extranet networks to help educational communities stay in close contact and keep each other informed as they respond to nations in crisis and rapid transition. The establishment of longer-term GINIE networks of communication for "shared resourcefulness" also helps contribute to the prevention of future crises by through shared lessons learned.

GINIE's structure rests on a repository and on complex sets of networks that focus on (a) narrow professional themes such as land mine awareness education or improving educational quality at the classroom level under conditions of chronic economic stress, and (b) country casebooks that share and analyze education efforts. GINIE's meta-network helps create a "one-stop shopping" site for those interested in education in nations in crisis and rapid transition. For example, communities in crisis may need rapid access to information and expertise about planning and financing in emergency conditions. Later, they may need access to materials and expertise about planning and financing recovery, reconstruction, and economic renewal. Teachers may also need rapid access to materials and expertise about methods such as active learning that can help traumatized children regain their resiliency. Later, teachers may need access to information and expertise about helping children and communities overcome the lingering effects of trauma.

Education Economies and Rapid Growth

of Professional Capital

The core of GINIE's strategy of shared resourcefulness is a belief that the academic colleague metaphor for professional development and the responsible neighbor metaphor for community development can work together to make good economic and political sense in communities in crisis and chronic economic stress. Professional experience is encouraged to be widely disseminated at relatively low costs. By lowering information and transactions costs through shared expertise, professional capital, like knowledge capital in the academy, can form quickly, thus creating and renewing an information infrastructure for the profession. Educational improvement can be enhanced more rapidly if professionals offer to share pro bono some of their work and experiences rather than remain isolated.

The neighbor metaphor is also helpful for shared development across education communities. Sometimes neighbors need a hand up, sometimes they need advice, and sometimes they have something to share or to trade. Neighbors are involved for the longer term. Only by working together can they preserve and enhance their property, keep their communities safe from bullies, and create a responsible generational legacy. Good neighbors share tools and experience, giving something with the expectation that something as good or better may come back to them someday. GINIE focuses on the intersections of professional and school communities in the hopes of creating more efficient communications for neighbors so they are less isolated and more innovative.

The Children's Generals

Strategy is too complex to be modeled. It plays out in stories. Here is one GINIE story; there are others. Apollo-Ridge School District, a rust belt community nestled along the bucolic Kiskiminetas River in rural western Pennsylvania, struggled with lost local industry, the costs of environmental renewal, and an expensive and aging telecommunications infrastructure. The resulting economic problems are not unique to western Pennsylvania, as parents in many parts of the world worry that their children may have to leave home to find work.

With more wit than money, the community of Apollo generated innovative ways of leveraging scarce community and school resources to help children learn about development. Bill Kerr, the school district superintendent, directed many local development activities. He asked students to serve on the Apollo Area Economic Development Committee. Middle school teachers designed state-of-the-art, active learning, interdisciplinary curricula based on Apollo's revitalization project surrounding the town's old canal system. The tiny Apollo Trust Company, under the leadership of Ray Muth, became the first bank in the United States to act as a low-cost Internet provider for the community, creating free access to children and residents who kept a checking account with the bank. This small community bank also won the international top corporate banking web site award in 1996.

shortly after the Dayton Accords, Emily Vargas-Baron at USAID and Rob Fuderich, the senior education officer for UMCEF/Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), were concerned that "surviving the peace would be as difficult as surviving the war." UNICEF sponsored a trip to the United States for the author of those words, Srebren Dizdar, then Permanent Secretary for the federation Ministry of Education, Culture, and Sports in BiH. The visit to Apollo was organized by the GINIE project at the University of Pittsburgh. Dizdar had worked tirelessly under extraordinary conditions to keep children and teachers safe and connected with each other in "war schools." A network of education professionals, the "children's generals," spent the war years, mostly without pay, risking their lives daily to preserve education continuity for the next generation. These real-life heroes were remarkably successful.

Dizdar met with Apollo's community leaders and schoolchildren. He told them that Bosnians were grateful for U.S. sacrifices to end the war and ensure a just peace. Now that the war had ended, Bosnians were concerned about what would happen to them "after the CNN camera lights go out." He said the country needed to rebuild quickly so that U.S. troops could return home to their own families.

Dizdar said Bosnians were headed back to the future. They faced three problems, all at the same time. First, the economy was operating at seven 7% of its prewar capacity. It would take a long time to fully recover from the war. He said teachers joked that they had been on a "4-year sabbatical from the world" during the war and needed to catch up on developments in education that they had missed. He said he hoped that GINIE would use telecommunications technology to help Bosnians create domestic and international networks of educational colleagues and neighbors who would be interested in sharing information, expertise, and dialogue about new developments in education.

He said the international and Bosnian communities had few resources to help local communities make the transition from the war and reconstruction to decentralization and economic trade. He hoped that education exchanges could help ease these painful transitions. He invited both Apollo community leaders and the Secretary of Education for Pennsylvania, Eugene Hickok, to think not only about educational aid and assistance but also about initiating trade delegations. He suggested that not only would a system of teacher and student and policy counterpart exchanges be good for children and professionals, but credible education networks would also be good for business as well.

The second problem Bosnians faced was that the Dayton Accords mandated that the Bosnian educational system be devolved to the cantonal (county) level. The Bosnian educational system was highly rated before the war, but it was a very centralized national system in the former Yugoslavia. This rapid devolution created serious planning problems, as there was very little resident expertise in education administration or finance. New cantonal ministries were being formed, and there were highly experienced professionals in education, but few with the skills and experience needed to plan for decentralization. He said he came to Apollo to learn how communities in the United States worked closely with their schools in a decentralized tax collection system. The United States has one of the most decentralized educational systems in the world, so U.S. professionals had a lot of experience with helping the public understand how local schools contributed to local communities. Dizdar hoped that a small network of education administration and finance professionals might be willing to share some time from their busy schedules to act as mentors in exchanges with Bosnian counterparts.

Third problem was that the introduction of new telecommunications technology created education opportunities that were not available before the war. Bosnians wanted to take advantage of these new technologies to "leapfrog" into an educational system that prepared children to work in a global economy and to build a sustainable domestic democracy. Dizdar hoped that children in the United States and in BiH would use the Internet to "grow up together" in this new technological environment, teaching each other now, trading with each other in the future.

He said Bosnians needed and wanted partnerships, not handouts. They needed longer-term, ongoing counterpart networks to exchange educational information and expertise. He said that Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian teachers, students, and townspeople, like their counterparts in the United States, were trying hard to protect their children's futures by providing them with the best education possible. Like parents in Apollo, they too needed to develop their communities so that their children would not have to leave home to find work.

During the war, school buildings were devastated, and many teachers fled the country or were killed. Groups of committed teachers and parents founded war schools and created safe havens for children to learn. Many teachers took great risks in their personal lives for 4 years to ensure that children did not lose a single year of schooling. In Mostar, for example, where there was heavy fighting, one elementary school was shelled more than 50 times, sometimes for sport. Defiant teachers helped children travel to and from school throughout the war and not miss a single year of schooling. Djulsa Bajramovic, the dean of the Pedagogical Academy in Mostar, lost her home, her husband, her only son, and later her dog. She stayed on to provide leadership for the war schools. Their record? Arpazingly, not a single casualty for students traveling to and from school.

Strong networks of teachers were formed to share the materials they created and the lessons they learned. Clever teachers continually invented clever new ways to help students learn under extreme conditions. These creative networks held the system together during the war and became the core for the reconstruction of the educational system after it. Teachers during and after requested training in active learning methods from UNICEF so they could help children too traumatized by the war to be able to return effectively to more traditional pedagogies. Seth Spaulding at the University of Pittsburgh responded to these requests by establishing a field office in BiH headed by Lynn Cohen. Later, a team of University of Pittsburgh faculty members traveled to BiH to provide training workshops throughout the winter after the Dayton Accords, often without heat, electricity, or water. Instead of investing their time and efforts in earning consulting fees in safe, sunny climates, these professors skidded across icy roads with land mines close by.

Dizdar told the people of Apollo that a long-term commitment to mutual responsibility and respect was necessary to rebuild the country. He said that long-term, stable democratic relationships and market economies rested on the development of mutually respectful exchanges. He said that teachers and students need a deep continuity of support in their lives. Most project-oriented assistance could not provide it. School communities and professionals in other countries could. He asked if he could return with other Bosnian educators to visit Apollo and other school districts to learn more about public education and community partnerships in the United States.

In October 1996, the University of Pittsburgh professor Noreen Garman, codirector of the Institute for International Studies in Education and a seasoned traveler across icy Bosnian back roads, headed a technical assistance project with the Bosnian Ministries of Education for participatory planning for the renewal of teacher education programs in BiH, sponsored by the World Bank and the U.S. Information Agency (USIA). GINIE was an implementing partner. Now the president of the UNESCO National Commission for Bosnia and Herzegovina and a University of Sarajevo professor, Srebren Dizdar led a team of 14 Bosnian federation Muslim and Croat educators to Pittsburgh and Washington, D.C. The team consisted of many of the war schools' children's generals. For almost all of them, it was their first trip out of BiH since the war. Many of these cosmopolitan European professionals (one had been a diplomat before the war) had been unable to leave their communities because they were under siege for 4 years. During the war, all of them spent long periods of personal terror without the comforts of electricity, heat, water, and sometimes food.

Apollo was their first experience with intact schools similar to their own before the war. The contrast between the devastation in their own communities and the scrubbed schools of Apollo was very difficult to observe, even for real-life heroes. Mira Melo walked into the school library and said softly, fighting back a tear, "Ours used to look just like this." Apollo teachers, students, and community members rose to the occasion, showering the team with warmth, sensitivity, and compassion. Soon, frivolity emerged over a pickup game of basketball in the gym.

At the closing ceremonies for their visit, the Bosnian team, seated on stage, asked if anyone in the auditorium had served or had family members who were serving or who had served with the U.S. military in BiH. A few people in the audience stood. The Bosnian team rose to their feet and applauded them, no longer fighting back the tears in their eyes.

Humanitarian Aid, Technical Assistance,

and Economic Partnership

The GINIE project encourages the development of networks of educational counterparts to exchange information and expertise about issues they have in common. It uses technology as a base for linking education professionals and school communities through humanitarian aid, technical assistance, and economic partnership. The strategy asserts that (a) education professional and community relationships, where possible, should be long term, civil, and creative (b) educational relationships should emphasize shared responsibility, self-help, and development for each side; and (c) aid, assistance, and partnership relationships should be considered together as an ongoing national and subnational regional effort for cooperation across the education sector.

U.S. education efforts for aid, assistance, and partnership activities internationally are often initiated and performed by different well-intentioned people and agencies, nonprofit organizations, schools, colleges, and universities, often with little coherence or continuity. On one hand, the U.S. economy can no longer absorb the waste created by these isolated institutional efforts for aid, assistance, and partnership. On the other hand, a centralized coordinating bureaucracy would only exacerbate the inefficiency created by over fragmentation. The GINIE strategy of shared resourcefulness at the community level suggests that flexible electronic networks of rapid access to information, materials, and expertise, structured with regional education economy hubs centered in research universities may offer one way of lowering the costs of institutional planning, implementation, and evaluation.

The GINIE approach to development complements more traditional approaches or "big aid." The post-World War II Marshall plan approach infuses large cash flows into a post-crisis economy to help it build momentum. Unfortunately, many of today's crisis regions have economies that are too weak to respond adequately to a Marshall plan approach of an intense quick boost to the economy through reconstruction as public works projects. Most of these regions faced conditions of chronic-to-severe economic stress before the crisis, making it very difficult for post-crisis reconstruction efforts to build and sustain political and economic momentum. In the past, the Marshall plan helped restore legitimate economies that helped support legitimate states. All too often today, crisis creates illegitimate economies that gather momentum during the war and persist into a fragile peace.

These illegitimate economies profit from war and have little to gain from a stable state, a legitimate economy, and peace. Today's at-risk and crisis regions often have poor tax collection systems and weak militaries that can neither contain nor control these "gang" economies. Gang economies are sometimes so privatized that they protect themselves through the use of paramilitary or mercenary troops, many of them with equipment and training superior to those of the local police or even the nation. Even more troubling, the new crisis economies are not found only in developing countries. Pockets of gang economies now erode the quality of education and threaten children's futures in communities in developed countries as well.

This wrenching disjuncture between a weak legitimate public state and a powerful, privatized illegitimate economy requires new responses more effective than the post-World War II Marshall plan alone. How can today's forces for legitimate governments and markets overcome or subvert the momentum of illegitimate gang economies? What credibility will education have to a child with no access to a legitimate economy? In the United States and internationally, much of the education reform movement is focused on improving educational efficiency. Increasingly, in regions in crisis, rapid transition, and chronic economic stress, however, educational reform is a powerful and painful struggle for political and economic legitimacy.

GINIE' s presence offers a kinder, gentler approach to complement Marshall plan efforts through providing and sustaining a low-profile long-term international presence across transitional polities and economies.

One of the great lessons Bosnian teachers on all sides of the war have taught the rest of the world is that basic education is more than teaching literacy in school buildings. It is more than a traditional civil service job with a small but steady paycheck. It is more than a new building or a winning athletic team. It is a fundamental moral commitment to the protection of children's futures. This protection lies not in buildings or government mandates but in the civility and resource fulness of people who chose not to allow their ethnic identities to overwhelm their professional ethics.

Much of the educational reform rhetoric in the United States focuses on the financing of systems. The debate is important, but it too often diverts attention from the core of teaching: the ongoing civil and creative relationships that teachers, students, and community members make with each other. All else is a prop, useful but less essential. Bosnian teachers, faced with the loss of school buildings, taught in basements. Faced with the loss of electricity, water, and heat, they taught with flashlights, creating books with special paper that could be used in dim light. Teachers in Gorazde, faced with violent sieges aimed to disrupt schools and civil life, gathered children in the streets after a shelling to sing songs and play music. The real heroics of Bosnian teachers remind the rest of the world of what it too often forgets, that children are precious gifts that civil societies must protect.

These moral commitments to "zones of peace" are public and cannot be privatized. Democracies and free markets rest on the assumption that people are sufficiently well educated to make informed decisions at the polls and in the markets. A nation's continuing well-being rests on the civility and creativity of its citizens. Civility is not genetic. Each generation must learn it anew. It must be modeled by both parents and teachers. Education reform is as much about relationships of dignity, respect, and innovation as it is about systems of bricks, budgets, and buses.

The current rush to privatization may unleash consequences that will be regretted. In a world where birth control privatizes the childbearing decision, the rationale for investment in children's education can turn ugly. Parents want what is best for their children, but what about the children of others? The most rational decision for parents is to maximize the welfare of their own children. In a world of scarce resources and competition, that welfare can be maximized in two ways. The first is by enhancing their own children's access to educational resources. The second is by minimizing the access of competitors.

Why should parents invest in educational opportunities for their own children's future competitors? Liberals traditionally counter that children in a school district or a state "belong" to it, and so the wealth of the district or state as a whole should drive education funding. Conservatives traditionally imply that those who chose to have children should bear the primary responsibility for their education, so parents need to have as much control over education subsidies as possible to make the best choices.

Highly decentralized financial systems funded primarily through residential property taxes tie children's educational opportunities to the wealth of their parents and not to the wealth of the nation as a whole. Is there a tacit abdication of personal responsibility for a public duty to future generations of children embedded in current reform arguments? Is there a growing popular cultural acceptance of the notion that the privatization of childbearing means that children can be treated as durable goods? Is the direction of policy that one may chose either to buy a refrigerator or to have a child? The purchase and maintenance of a refrigerator is not subject to government subsidy, so why should those who chose not to have children be taxed, since those who chose not to buy refrigerators are not taxed? This argument is echoed quietly in many suburban communities: "Why should we pay for those who chose to have children they cannot afford to educate?"

The GINIE strategy resists the commodity argument, claiming that children cannot be equated with consumer goods. Children are supramarket. One has relationships with children, not with refrigerators. The moral duties of one generation to the next cannot be traded away. Each generation of children must learn how to successfully inherit or create and maintain both civil democracies and responsible market economies. Refrigerators do not vote.

The GINIE strategy argues that learning is primarily a public event because its consequences are relational and thus not easily privatized through property rights. Children, not refrigerators, grow up to be drug dealers. Children, not refrigerators, renew their economies. Refrigerators do not construct or maintain legitimate governments, outwit criminal gangs, or preserve the ecology.

In Sum

The GINIE project is a bold new educational development strategy that connects educational counterparts internationally through professional and community networks. GINIE is concerned about sustaining high-quality teaching internationally, especially in nations in crisis and rapid transition to democracies and market economies. The project promotes that idea that educational systems rest on networks of responsible cross-generational relationships of teaching and learning. It asserts that education is more than a commodity to be traded in the marketplace-it is a public duty to distant generations. The GINIE strategy poses the following tenets:

Resources

Those who are interested in sharing their resourcefulness with others are invited to contact the GINIE project through the Internet at www.pitt.edu/~ginie, by e-mail at ginie+@pitt.edu, by phone at (412)624-1775, by fax at (4128 624-2609, and by snail mail at GINIE c/o IISE, 5KO1 Forbes Quad, University of Pittsburgh, PA, 15260, USA.