Reform is a loaded word.When I speak of union reform, I am thinking of efforts to democratize unions and make them more responsive to membership.Others however may be attaching union reform efforts to specific neo-liberal "reforms."Some, such as Rick Hess, even suggest Labor Management Collaboration (LMC) as a way to get unions to participate in their own demise.A good friend of mine on the labor left referred to the Teacher Union Reform Network (TURN), a group with which I’ve been active, as “astroturfy.”
We must separate LMC as a public good from specific policy prescriptions.If a local or state affiliate decides for some unknown reason that merit pay, privatization, or exotic flavors of teacher evaluation is good for its members, I can’t speak for those people.But there is no reason that LMC can’t lead boards, administrators and unions into deeper and more refined work on conventional collective bargaining agreements, featuring single salary schedules and considerable opportunities for teacher leadership and autonomy.
The term "Comprehensive Unionism" can better denote efforts to create a type of unionism responsive to the unique characteristics of education.In TURN, we use Three Frames as a lens analyze and improve our work.
Industrial Unionism refers to the war fighting capability of the union, its capacity to use adversarial methods to promote bread and butter issues and enforce the collective bargaining agreement.A robust capacity is the foundation for the other two frames.
Professional Unionism speaks to our capacity to be the arbiters of quality in the profession, to improve instruction for the betterment of teachers and students.
Social Justice Unionism demands that we see the big picture: unions exist not just for the betterment of members, but for the betterment of all.The recent Chicago Teachers Union strike was a shining example of Social Justice Unionism in action.
My work as a local president has focused on the Professional Unionism lens.In my 20 year career, I’ve lived through 16 principals and 7 superintendents in 5 schools located in 3 different Vermont supervisory unions.This experience has taught me that the quality of teachers’ (and therefore students’) lives on a day to day basis is profoundly affected by the quality of administrative work.
I have sat through endless union meetings that focus on administrative failure, where administrators and boards are trashed, where eyes roll and sarcasm abounds.This culture encourages a type of defensive bargaining, where participants lead by asking, “What would happen if the worst administrator in the world got a hold of this contract language?”And on the other side they lead by asking, “What would happen if the worst teacher in the world received this benefit?”
As teachers, we ought to know through our experience with students that if you treat people like idiots, you get….idiocy.
What if we flipped this and used collective bargaining as a tool to promote excellence rather than to eliminate incompetence?What if we gave flexibility to administrators to administer schools with the expectation that along with this assistance comes a high bar.And what if boards and administrators took a risk, and gave teachers autonomy and leadership opportunities, along with an expanded definition of what it is to be a professional educator, with the expectation that we would provide evidence of improved professional practice and student learning, evidence which could be readily seen by reasonable citizens?
In such a system incompetence would be noise.When you have to hire millions of teachers and administrators a certain amount of noise is inevitable.We should focus on the music, so that it drowns out the noise.
Professional success promotes the happiness of teachers.When students are learning and growing, it improves the quality of educators’ lives through a profound sense of professional accomplishment. In my world view, unions are great American institutions which exist to promote well-being.See the connection? Let's raise the bar.
Policy is ultimately concerned
with building systems and institutions to support human well-being. For decades, a basic premise of American
civic life was that the success of our society rested on a foundation of government
providing for the public good. This
consensus was expressed succinctly in the words of the Republican Dwight Eisenhower:
“Should any political party attempt to
abolish social security unemployment insurance and eliminate labor laws and
farm programs you would not hear of that party again in our political history.
There is a tiny splinter group of course that believes you can do these things.
Among them are a few other Texas oil millionaires and an occasional politician
or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are
stupid.”
In 2012, their number is no
longer negligible, and they are no longer considered stupid. To varying degrees this perspective dominates
both political parties such that working people really have no alternative
which supports a concept of public good in electoral politics, except for the
occasional outlier like Bernie Sanders.
Neoliberalism is the political
and economic philosophy driving our politics in 2012. Many people have never heard of it, or if
they have, do not understand that the engine of our political life is the same
one which motivated the criminal regime of General Augusto Pinochet in Chile in
the 70’s and 80’s.
The term itself is
unfortunate. I suspect many people have
positive connotations when they consider the word liberal outside the political
context: to be liberal minded, to be liberal with one’s friends (generous) etc. The prefix neo is something we associate with
pleasant styles which evoke nostalgia: neoclassical, neo-romantic, neo-gothic, etc.
Neoliberalism is neither pleasant nor liberal.
According to Corpwatch, the main tenets
of neo-liberalism include:
The
rule of the market. Liberating "free" enterprise or private
enterprise from any bonds imposed by the government (the state) no matter
how much social damage this causes.
Cutting
public expenditure for social services like education and health care.
Reducing the safety-net for the poor, and even maintenance of roads,
bridges, water supply.
Deregulation.
Reduce government regulation of everything that could diminish profits,
including protecting the environment and safety on the job.
Privatization.
Sell state-owned enterprises, goods and services to private investors.
This includes banks, key industries, railroads, toll highways,
electricity, schools, hospitals and even fresh water.
Eliminating
the concept of "the public good" or "community" and
replacing it with "individual responsibility."
Rather than building up the
institutions of public good, neoliberalism seeks only to tear them down. Yet actions based on neoliberal thinking are
still commonly referred to as policy! In
education, NCLB and Race to the Top are not policies in any traditional sense
because they have the effect of diminishing public education, and weakening the
bonds between citizens and their institutions.
These are not policies; they are antipolicies.
Antipolicies are being advocated
by both political parties. On the one
hand we have Republicans who advocate decapitating our institutions swiftly. On the other, Democrats advocate doing it
slowly, the death of a thousand cuts. Oh
yes we’ll preserve our civic institutions they go, we’ll just make everything a
little better by instituting a few market reforms here and there, give people
some “choice,” make government “accountable” through the miracle of the
invisible hand, encourage personal responsibility through welfare “reform,”
etc.
Being a little bit neoliberal is like being a little bit pregnant.
Public policy is rooted in a
robust concept of public good. We need
to stop dignifying actions divorced from a concept of public good with the word
“policy”. These are antipolicies.
We also need to stop dignifying
the purveyors of antipolicies with the term neoliberal. They are criminals.
We count healthcare costs twice
in policy discussions, once when talking about per capita health care costs and
again when talking about any costs of government which have an employee health
care component. A prime example is education funding: in calculations of per
pupil spending there is a substantial component of healthcare costs for education
workers and their dependents. By double dipping, and counting these costs once
on the health care ledger, and again on the education ledger, we are inflating
the costs of government and distorting the policy discussion.
This distortion plays into the
radical right's push to "shrink government until it can be drown in the
bathtub." If we debate public
policy on the basis of funny numbers, if we don't even acknowledge how the
books have been cooked, we are not going to have decent outcomes.
How can we compare ourselves to
countries like Finland, which pays for universal healthcare from a healthcare
budget and universal education from an education budget? Of course their per-pupil spending is going
to be lower! They don't use revenue
raised for the purpose of educating children to pay for private health
insurance for education workers and their dependents. They don't use schools as a mechanism for
keeping employees and their families healthy.
That makes so much sense.
As Pasi Sahlberg explains, you
can't understand Finnish education outside of the context of their wraparound
social democracy. And a corollary must
be that you can't understand American education and its successes and failures
without taking into account our context. This includes the growing momentum of the
neo-liberal program which is systematically dismantling government and
consigning public good to the for-profit sector.
There is another subtler
distortion. When you have a childhood
poverty level approaching 25% (which no other advanced nation tolerates) the
effectiveness of every dollar spent on education is diminished. When children arrive at school suffering
health, food, transportation, or housing insecurity, or when they arrive from
families stressed by the threat of those things, they are not going to be as
ready and able to learn. Families under
economic stress lack the capacity to effectively support children as learners.
A nation which heaps the
inefficiencies of its own injustice onto its education system is going to have
to pay a lot more for any type of educational outcome. It doesn't mean that education has failed,
just that we are asking unreasonable things.
You have to use the right tool on the right job. You don't plow fields with a family
sedan. You don't cut boards with a
hammer. Yes, we need great public
schools. But we also need to provide
those schools with comprehensive institutional supports so that children arrive
ready to learn.
That would require acceptance of
a concept of public good. It would
require us to accept that the health, education, transportation, nutrition and
housing of individuals in our society is not just a matter of private interest
to them, but also a matter of great public interest, because societal failure
is the sum of vast numbers of personal tragedies. JFK put it in positive terms: "A rising
sea lifts all boats."
I have two principles which drive
my actions in the political/policy sphere: citizen voice and democratic engagement.It is very useful to have principles which inform
decision making, if for no other reason than that the existence of principles
tends to confuse bad actors, who tend to be un-principled.They don’t understand what makes you tick.
Principles also provide a filter
to evaluate policy.When examining
education or union policy, I have a two part test: 1) Does this empower teacher
voice? 2) Does this enhance democratic engagement
of teachers and other stakeholders such as parents and students?If something can pass this test I’m all ears.If not, it’s time for push back.
The development of voice means
helping others grow a capacity for advocacy and activism.This can mean learning to speak in public, to
write for publication, to make phone calls, to knock on doors – the nuts and
bolts take many forms.
Democratic engagement looks like
people simply taking interest, acting with passion and commitment about the
issues which affect their lives.Cynicism and disengagement, the sense that nothing can be done, that bad
policy is inevitable and must be suffered silently, is a path to
totalitarianism.
The beauty of this approach is
that it is relatively content neutral.I
don’t worry so much about what your voice advocates because it is more important that you are engaged.Engagement is critical
to great public policy because it brings information to the table.Decisions based on incomplete or degraded
information tend to have negative consequences.
Of course if you advocate a
Grover Norquist style drown-the-government nihilism you don’t have a place at the
table because you are trying to burn it.You are a vandal.
While I am a denizen of the
political left, I appreciate real old-fashioned conservatives, the
ones who advocate for great policy from the perspective of individual freedom,
personal responsibility and sound fiscal management.I share those values too – I just have
different beliefs about how they should play out.There is common ground.
The cacophony of a democratically
engaged citizenry is messy and inconvenient.Sort of like a Vermont town meeting.Too bad. Get over it. Great public policy requires
the participation of the public. As it
says in The Declaration of
Independence:
“….Governments are instituted among Men,
deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed….”
The following is my reaction to an Education Week article, States' Costs Skyrocket on Master's Degree Pay for Teachers by Stephen Sawchuk on July 17, 2012. The narrative is familiar: master’s degrees add no value in terms of student test scores, therefore, they represent the misappropriation of resources. Read the original, then cool your jets:
Let's flip this and consider the single salary schedule for
what it is: a
deferred compensation system. It is
not that senior teachers with advanced degrees are overpaid, but rather that
beginning teachers are underpaid, unless you count the IOU represented by that
top level salary twenty years in the future plus the pension. The highest paid teachers are being paid for
their work, plus an amount representing work they performed many years before. Retired teachers are paid entirely for
services rendered in the past.
Since single salary schedules contain both steps and
columns, master’s degrees, and arrangements which subsidize them, represent a
mechanism for states and localities to control the pace that individuals move
across the schedule towards those top level salaries. In other words, requirements for advanced
education string people along and allow the polity to delay the day which it
has to pay professional salaries.
Rather than pull
deferred compensation from the future into the present, while honoring current
commitments, political expediency leads to attacks on the single salary
schedule itself, including masters degrees, pensions, and tenure, the glue
which gives deferred compensation legitimacy. A social contract is being
broken, without recompense, with the people charged with caring for our
children. Our nation is morally debased
as a result.
The real problem with master’s degrees is that they are
driven by an economic arrangement, rather than an educational one. Many teachers do use them as an opportunity
to improve their practice. Perhaps the
imperfections of advanced degrees stem from not really being intended for this
purpose. The real focus is on delaying
payment for services rendered, with the added bonus of being able to walk away
from the deal when the debts become inconvenient.
The role of teacher leader is fraught
with challenges. In my union work, it became apparent to me that there
are at least two different mutually exclusive definitions. First, is the
definition some superintendents have: a teacher leader is a sort of
non-commissioned officer in the chain of command of a district, with a role of
carrying out policies determined by higher-ups. This traditional role
includes roles like department chair, and service on district committees, the
latter because in a top-down hierarchy administrators merely use committees for
cover, so they can lend a sort of pretend legitimacy to their decisions.
The second definition is exciting and
cutting edge: teachers having an actual voice in making local, state or
national policy. This idea might seem self evident to those of us who are
practitioners, but in reality it is quite alien to the policy process in many
places.
The traditional venue for this role,
and the one in which I cut my teeth, is the union. Negotiating and
administering a collective bargaining agreement gives one a voice in local
policy. Joining with others in state and national organizations which
lobby for wider policy and legislation creates a collective voice. In the
current environment, with public sector unions under serious and sustained
attack, union activism is fluid and challenging.
One thing which school districts and
unions share is that they are hierarchical organizations. The bureaucrats
who live farther up the hierarchical food chain have a significant advantage
when it comes to policy: they can spend all their time working on it.
Those of us with classrooms live with the joy and challenge that the best hours
of our day are spent with students. Any time or thought that we have for
policy or politics comes out of our hides or out of the hides of our families
and relationships. I can say this from personal experience – my union
work is unpaid. Each cycle of negotiations comes at a personal cost of
200-300 hours of my personal, unpaid time. That doesn’t count grievances,
trainings, rep and executive council meetings, Regional Bargaining Councils (I
have 3 to attend), meetings with the superintendent, or, now, my work on the
VT-NEA Board of directors, which requires a Saturday each month.
I’m not saying this so that anybody
feels sorry for me – I love the challenge of this work. But it does give
me a clear eyed view of the very real impediments to the development of effective
teacher leadership in the best sense. People go into teaching because
they want to work with kids. This we all know is an all -consuming
passion. On top of this teachers, legitimately, need to tend to families
and relationships. We are human, and we cannot sustain ourselves without
love from friends and family.
When I challenge a colleague to step
up to a leadership role in our local, I do this with trepidation because no one
knows better than me the human cost of what I am asking them to do. On the
other hand no one knows better than me the absolute necessity of accomplished
practitioners taking a role in the governance of the educational
enterprise. As a leader, I am stuck between human empathy for my
colleagues, and the enormous peril of my own empathy.
And this brings me to another thing
that I learned: the three meanings of leadership. So far I’ve
spoken in detail of just one: the ability to influence followers, the rank and
file of an organization. Influencing their behavior, inspiring them to
try some little bit of activism – this is encapsulated by the term
organizing. I think this is what most people think of when they consider
the word leadership. But there are two other equally important aspects of
leadership: influencing peer leaders, and influencing those leaders above you
in the hierarchy of an organization or government. These two aspects
require different skill sets than organizing
Influencing peer leaders is the sort
of thing I’ve done on the VT-NEA board, in regional bargaining councils, and in
our discussions on the Teacher Leader Network Forum. It was the bulk of
the work in our debates on the New Business Items and resolutions at NEA
Representative Assembly. In a friendly environment like this it is about
developing consensus around the best course of action, and it involves building
relationships, and ability to be persuasive.
It takes place in adversarial contexts
as well, such as negotiations and grievance hearings. Insofar as a local
president is the peer of the superintendent, there is an art here of refusal,
of parrying, and of persuasion, each of which one deploys according to the
problem.
Finally there is influencing top level
leaders in an organization, those “above you” so to speak. While a
premium is placed on the “elevator speech”, I think top leaders are bombarded
with these and probably have filters. My own approach is two fold.
First I like to identify the people who advise the leader in question and seek
to influence those people. Second, I like to identify those places I
agree with the approach and send a positive message, in part by working for and
actively supporting initiatives.
This second point is very important in
my estimation. In the present environment, the messages tend to be negative
– opposed to what various policy makers are doing. I believe however,
that the policy landscape is subtler than that, and that people need to hear
what they are doing right as well as what they are doing wrong. Without
positive feedback when they get it right, policy makers are flying on
instruments.
As a Teaching Ambassador Fellow, and a
Bernie Sanders style socialist, it was a challenge for me to find a point of
contact with the Department where I could support their efforts with freedom
and integrity. Yet I did find one: The Department under
the current administration works to build the capacity of teachers to lead in
the best sense of the word. An example of
concrete action that support teachers as real leaders was the Denver Labor-Management Conference, a high profile event designed to help teachers and their
unions deal creatively and pro-actively with the current political and
policy environment. Unfortunately this event was over-shadowed by
events in Wisconsin.
I would be the last to say that
efforts of this sort are perfect, or that the outcomes are satisfactory to all
parties. But I take it as evidence of positive
disposition towards teacher leaders, and a willingness to build the capacity of
teachers to participate in the policy conversation. Encouraging
engagement is in the spirit of democracy and helps to overcome the very real
impediments to teacher engagement that I outlined earlier.
In my work, I’ve done my best to
encourage the Department to build the capacity of teacher leaders and
unions. I think many people want immediate results, an impatience which
is the result of the uncertainty of the political cycle. Taking a longer
view, an empowered and policy savvy teaching profession is the best route to
better education policy, because policy will be rooted in the wisdom that is
the product of actual practice.
That said, I tend to be shocked and
saddened by the dearth of our most accomplished teachers in union leadership. I was shocked at the antipathy of NEA delegates to NBCTs at
the recent NEA Representative Assembly in Chicago. I was saddened that of
124 NBCTs in the State of Vermont, only three of us were at VT-NEA
Representative Assembly in March. Taken together, these indicate to me
that most union members have not experienced NBCTs as people who use their
achievement as a tool to help others. I find this very disappointing.
Those of us who are high achieving and
have excess capacity have an obligation to our colleagues as well as to our
students and families to lighten their burden. At the same time, the rank
and file of the profession needs to see that policy and engagement is simply
far too critical to be left to “the other.” Federal, state and local
policies that encourage all varieties of genuine practitioner leadership and
engagement are in the long term best interest of our profession, of grounded
education policy, and, ultimately, fantastic student learning.
In his farewell speech
in 1961, Dwight Eisenhower famously warned of the dangers of the new
military-industrial complex. What he
perhaps did not foresee was how that complex would become a paradigm for policy
making outside the field of defense. In
the excerpt below I changed a few words, such as “military” to “education” and “federal
contract” to “foundation grant”, and am struck by how Eisenhower’s prescient
warning rings true for education in 2012.
"This conjunction of an immense education
establishment and a large education industry is new in the American experience.
The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every
city, every state house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize
the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend
its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so
is the very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must guard
against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought,
by the education-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of
misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this
combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take
nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the
proper meshing of the huge commercial and education machinery with our peaceful
methods and goals, so that we may prosper together.
Akin to, and largely responsible for the
sweeping changes in our industrial-education posture, has been the
technological revolution during recent decades.
In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more
formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for,
by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.
Today, the solitary teacher, toiling in her
classroom, has been overshadowed by task forces of researchers in foundations
and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the
fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a
revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs
involved, a foundation grant becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual
curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic
computers.
The prospect of domination of the nation's
scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is
ever present and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and
discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and
opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a
scientific-technological elite."
The structure of the military-industrial
complex has become a meme. It has recreated itself in the schools and universities
of America. A shadowy, revolving door
world of government and quasi-government agencies, think
tanks, foundations, corporations, universities, political
and advocacy groups, and private contractors, form the ecosystem of education policy. Oh yes – and unions, to be fair. We need to call this out – it is the Education-Industrial Complex.
A self-reinforcing scientific-technological elite,
detached from the everyday realities of the work, performs vast social
engineering experiments behind closed doors in a cloud of group-think
and acronyms. Fueled by the endemic soft
corruption of revolving six figure sinecures, as members pass easily from
government to foundation to university, etc., this elite presumes to manipulate
the masses of citizenry for their own good.
I have seen this with my own eyes.
It will take an “alert and
knowledgeable citizenry” to deal with the consequences. But where will that citizenry come from if
their education is being engineered by people whose interests are money,
status, and power, rather than democracy?
Working for the US Dept of Education last year, I
encountered high officials who expressed astonishment at the disconnect between
Federal influence on public education and on higher ed. Federal influence on public schools is
purchased at less than ten cents on the dollar.
Looking at the influence of IDEA, NCLB, RTT, SIG and now NCLB waivers,
to name a few, the Feds leverage relatively small amounts of money for big
returns.
By contrast, the federal student loan programs run by ED
literally bankroll the higher ed enterprise, yet the Feds have little influence
on substantive policy in higher ed, including matters like cost control, and
accountability for results. This is
illustrated by the way regulations
designed to limit the predations of for-profit colleges were gutted, after
a vigorous lobbying effort.
Of course higher ed has something to offer policy makers
that public ed lacks - sinecures. The
revolving door world of education policy is as insidious as that of defense
policy. If you were a policy maker,
would you rather have your next job at a university sponsored think tank, or
perhaps as a professor, or in a third grade classroom? I'm skeptical of the prospects for meaningful
higher ed reform in the context of this endemic soft corruption.
So with no meaningful prospects for accountability from
universities and colleges, where does accountability fall? Squarely on the shoulders of individuals, in
the form of student loans which cannot be discharged by bankruptcy. Cost control in higher ed may only be
achievable by making student loans subject to bankruptcy again, so some of the
risks of the system are again borne by the institutional players who milk the
system.
"In the United States, education is mostly viewed as a
private effort leading to individual good....By contrast, in Finland, education
is viewed primarily as a public effort serving a public purpose."
In Finland P-12 AND
higher ed is free to all residents.
The caveat emptor philosophy of higher ed funding we have in
this country has saddled our most educated and ambitious citizens with a
trillion dollar ball and chain which is dragging down our economy. Had the same money that was poured into
trickle down corporate bailouts been injected into the bottom of the economy as
an investment in the middle class, we might have seen some real economic
recovery.
30 years of bitter experience has shown us that trickle down
is a vast boondoggle for the well connected.
It's time to try some trickle up economics.
Two events which are instructive for great education policy hit the media in a big way
in the last week. The first was the
debut of the infamous
talking pineapple; the second was when New Jersey single dad Stu
Chaifetz planted a recording device on his ten year old autistic son and
captured a day’s worth of abusive and inappropriate behavior on the part of
several of the adults in his son’s self contained autism classroom.
What did both of these events have in common? They were the product of things that go on
behind closed doors. They are worst case
scenarios, examples of what can happen when transparency is abandoned for long
periods of time, and people run amok.
The irony
of the talking pineapple is that these were the sort of divergent questions
we want to have in our classroom bag of tricks.
Many questions in real life have no correct answer, and there is a useful
place in education for introducing that incontrovertible fact to students. That place, however, is most certainly not a
bubble test, which measures convergent thinking.
No, encouraging divergent thinking requires discussion,
something that New York State teachers are forbidden with respect to this
test. Had there been some transparency
around this test, had it been vetted by real teachers, if test items did not
have to hide behind a veil of secrecy, somebody might have flagged this
idiocy. The silver lining here is that
maybe the talking pineapple will increase public skepticism about high stakes testing.
Testing companies like secrecy because it allows them to
recycle items, keeping costs down and profits up. We are, however, in an era where tests can
destroy people’s careers and hurt children. Therefore good
and fair public policy demands transparency.
We cannot use discredited instruments to hire and fire, to award “merit”
pay, or close neighborhood schools. The
public interest here is at odds with the interests of for-profit testing industry, and the quasi-public education policy apparatus which feeds off it.
The
case of little Akian Chaifetz calls for a different type of
transparency. As I listened in horror to
the aggrieved Dad, and to the excerpts of child abuse one thing became
abundantly clear to me. Nobody was
supervising these people. The door of
that classroom was never being opened.
They were in private practice and they had absolutely no idea what they
were doing. The evidence points to this
going on for years, so long that abusive, inappropriate adult behavior had become
the cultural norm in that classroom.
In the 21st century, teaching is a team sport. Had that classroom door been open, had some
knowledgeable supervisor or colleague learned early on that these people were
clueless, maybe they could have gotten some training, or maybe they could have
been encouraged to find a different line of work. This is not to excuse bad behavior; it is to
point out the tragedy that a dad had to wire his kid to achieve the sort of
transparency which millions of parents assume when they send their children to
school in the morning. This is why we
have administrators and instructional coaches.
Ultimately this was an institutional failure.
Let these be cautionary tales for the education policy
world.
On the one hand, the closed door meeting is a lubricant for
decision making. It allows you to get
things done. The messiness involved in
transparency can be inefficient. That
conference room meeting can also leverage expertise, allowing policy experts to
deploy their knowledge without having to bring novices up to speed. People can say things in these meetings and
make decisions in the relative safety of privacy which can be genuinely useful.
On the other hand, closed doors are inherently undemocratic
and elitist. They carry the assumption
that the public is too stupid to participate in public policy. They create echo chambers and encourage group
think, which makes smart people stupid.
Faulty assumptions go unchallenged, and elaborate policy structures are
built on sand. Key stakeholders can be
left out, leading to needless conflict when policy is rammed down the throats
of those not invited to the table.
The world of education policy is a murky revolving-door world
of government agencies, private contractors, foundations, academia and unions,
among others. Sometimes it rides off the
rails, like Akian’s teachers, in Jonah Edelman meltdown
moments and Wisconsin-style bolt-out-of-the-blue attacks.
The question of the balance of transparency and closed doors
is a divergent question, very much like those about our talking pineapple. There is no absolute answer. There is always a trade-off between the benefits
of efficiency, and the capacity of transparency to preserve and promote the
public good. Given the choice, I would
tend to err on the side of transparency.
You can always fall back on the truth.
