kitchen table math, the sequel: inside the other black box

Thursday, October 29, 2009

inside the other black box

school board member Peter Mayer:
I remember sitting in my first executive session as a school board member, in 1999, and thinking to myself, “This is like getting into Fort Knox.”

I had been a general-interest journalist for some 25 years at that point, and had always had the hardest time cracking institutions that took care of children. They almost always denied journalists access, arguing that it was not in the best interests of the child.

Now, here I was, on “the inside,” on the school board, discussing intimate details about children, parents, teachers, aides, maintenance workers—and I was seeing what I had always suspected. The organization’s leaders were not so much protecting (or caring for or even educating) children as they were caught up trying to manage a bumbling and relatively incompetent bureaucracy.

I am not much more than an interested student of school board history. But my sense of things, after two stints on my local school board—for six months in 1999-2000 and since 2007 to today—is that school boards have been overtaken by the “educatocracy,” by powerful trade unions, certified specialists, certification agencies, state and federal rule-makers and legislators, grants with strings, billion-dollar-contractor lobbyists, textbook mega-companies, professional associations, and lawyers—the list could go on.

Under these circumstances, it doesn’t surprise me that many people think school boards are irrelevant. They are. Boards do a lot of moving the chairs around on the deck, but they’re not really steering the boat. Ask board members anywhere what their biggest problems are and they are likely to say: state and federal regulation. Mandates.

I recall a Nigerian immigrant who had several children in our district trying to explain to someone who was complaining about a school why America was so great. “Here,” he said in halting English, “if you don’t like something, you vote no.” I didn’t have the heart to tell him that, in fact, a no vote on a school budget didn’t really mean no. Because of state law, if voters rejected a school budget, all that happened was the district had to operate with the same budget as the previous year, plus inflation.

And if state and federal regulation ties one hand behind your back, the unions take care of the other by protecting teachers who really should be dismissed.

Then there’s the mind-numbing minutiae. At least twice a month, just before a school board meeting, I receive a packet from the superintendent. It contains the agenda—usually three to four pages long, each item numbered, with subcategories with numbers like 13.1.7—and sometimes hundreds of pages of documentation to go with them. At any given meeting, there also can be several dozen detailed resolutions.

It’s no wonder that “experts” have to be called in to explain it to us board members. “A superintendent’s primary job,” I was once told by one of them, “is to manage the board.” And that’s the problem. School boards have been taught impotence in the face of information, a problem that causes them to act—and fight—like children. I recall one evening being called in to a special meeting to approve $25 million in construction contracts. “I’d like to see the contracts,” I said. My colleagues, so lacking in confidence in their own responsibility, voted 6-1 notto see the contracts.

One year, I had a debate with a board member in a newspaper’s letters column on the question of whether the board should have a curriculum committee. He was certain that it was the school board’s only job to hire a superintendent and then sit back and let him or her run the district. The board shouldn’t be “meddling” with curriculum. It was a view shared by the five other board members, even after someone unearthed for me Board Policy #4200, which clearly stated the “board is committed to establishing and maintaining a coordinated curriculum management process.”

[snip]

For Better Schools and for Civic Life, Schools Must Assert Power
by Peter Meyer
Education Wee
Vol. 29, Issue 07, Page s15

Peter Meyer is a former news editor for Life magazine and a contributing editor at Education Next. He is a member of the school board in the Hudson City School District in Hudson, N.Y.
A special report funded by The Wallace Foundation.
Hudson is a 2-hour drive from here.

5 comments:

Catherine Johnson said...

Meyer is writing posts about his experience as school board member at Education Next. I'm going to post links to everything he writes.

Hope to meet him, too.

Anonymous said...

A long time ago I worked for a major computer manufacturer and lived in a very small town. The town was investigating their first computer purchase and I volunteered to be on the committee doing the investigating.

I managed to convince my company to donate every last bit of equipment just for the PR benefit but the deal fell apart after months of political warfare.

Long story short, the politicos could not agree on whose office would get the printer. It seems the analysis and critical thinking boiled down to this nugget...

The printer 'owner' would have all of the 'power' by virtue of seeing and distributing all the reports that it spit out. Absent an agreement on this nit, the whole deal went down and they continued without a computer system for years afterwards.

That was the beginning and end of my career in the world of politics.

Bureaucracies are all alike!

Doug Sundseth said...

Hundreds of pages of documentation right before a meeting? That's easy.

You vote no.

If you don't understand what's going on, it is your obligation to reject until such time as you do understand. That's is fundamental to the republican system of government guaranteed in the Constitution.

(Are you listening, congress-scum?)

Doug Sundseth said...

"That's is" s/b "That is".

(I'm a professional, don't try this at home.)

Catherine Johnson said...

What I am learning is that there are more than a few elected representatives who don't want to understand what's going on.

'It's always worse than you think.'