Tag Archives: representative government

The Hard Work Is The Right Work

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Being responsible for the education of children is not easy.  The speed, complexity, and complications of 21st century life is making this responsibility more and more difficult as every day we hear of a school controversy and crisis somewhere.  A board meeting in Timbuktu easily becomes headlines on national nightly news given how a social media post can explode sensationally.  And what is done in Timbuktu becomes a burning issue at a local meeting where most people cannot spell Timbuktu.  Being responsible requires leaders to understand the essential issues of their place and time, to sort the here and now from the Timbuktu, and not be afraid to tackle the hard stuff – the right work – of educating children.

Why is this thus?

There are several givens whenever we gather to talk about our local schools.  Our Constitution ensures our right to speak freely.  Wisconsin’s Open Meetings Laws ensure that school board meetings are open to public attendance with an opportunity for the public to speak to the school board.  And because almost everyone in the community attended a school of some sort, many people speak to their school board with the expertise of their personal school experience.  In summary, we are free to express our opinions about school and the school board is obligated to listen.  These are good things.

From the moment we labeled it public education, people felt compelled to express their opinion about how children should be educated.  Any adult who has or can biologically create a child feels authorized to explain how children should be raised and educated.  Today they express themselves standing at the lectern in front of the school board and from the screens of their computers, IPads, and smartphones while sitting at home.  This guaranteed exchange of “you speak, and we listen” is now part of posted school board agendas.  This is a healthy thing.

All board agenda items are not of the same importance.  The annual and daily operations of a district school require boards to consider, discuss, and approve items of routine business investigated and proposed by administrators.  These are the usual business of the board that once approved in the committee process need only a cursory airing in public and a vote.  It is true to say that many boards of education live on a steady diet of usual business agenda and shy away from controversy.  That said, the usual business is easy stuff and the controversial is the hard.  The hard points a board to the right work it must do.

Lastly, there is nothing inherently wrong with controversy; controversy being a voicing of oppositional points of view.  Good leadership understands that important educational issues will raise differing points of view and it is the work of the board to resolve conflicting points of view for the prosperity of the schools.  Best leadership does not shy away from controversy but tackles it honestly.

What should we know about this thusness?

Controversies abound!

The pandemic gave most school boards a rude awakening to the hard stuff.  As experienced ad nauseam, no school boards were educated or trained to deal with either pandemic education or the controversies of how schools should behave during a pandemic.  Few boards, if any, escaped this public crisis and the argument of battling points of view.   In fact, seated board members resigned, did not run for re-election, and were recalled by their electorate because of pandemic controversies.  The board table was not for the faint of heart when spittle and spite flew from impassioned parents and residents who knew best about public health and public education in an emergency.

Concurrent to the pandemic, other controversies brewed and erupted in school board rooms.  Events of police violence went national.  BLK begat an introspection of systemic racism that begat renewed white nationalism that begat a legislative rewriting of US history that could not be taught in public schools.  Speakers, despite historical fact, are making CRT their argument and the board room their arena.

Quietly then loudly gender identity and the evolving status of children claiming non-conforming gender expression forced the public, like tug-of-rope teams, to dig in their heels regarding who can use which bathrooms and locker rooms in schools.  Parents care more about this issue than their children.  The parent who cries “Protect my daughter!”, claims the media headline while distorting issues of discrimination and fairness. 

There are quiet controversies afoot.  As federal pandemic relief monies expire, school districts everywhere face financial crisis.  Usual school funding is not adequate to sustain the technologies and school staffing wrought by the pandemic.  While inflation diminishes family spending, school boards are proposing increases in local school taxes.  The controversies of cuts to school programs and school closing will clog the school board agenda for years to come.

A second quiet controversy is teacher shortage.  Teacher preparation programs in colleges and universities are dying for lack of enrollment.  As baby boomer teachers retire school boards are hard put to find qualified replacement teachers.  The controversy is this – state legislation is lowering the standards for a teaching license, persons who are not fully prepared to teach children to high standards of learning are being hired to assure a teacher in every classroom, student academic achievement is diving, and someone is to blame.  Hello, school board member!

What is a board to do?

Do these three things to succeed.

  • Grab each controversy by both ears, look it in the face, and deal with it.  Ignoring a controversy builds anger in the partisans and they will damn you for your lack of action.  Pussyfooting around a controversy allows it to grow constituent bases who demand action.  If you cannot provide the action, constituents will find someone who can.  Deal with it!
  • Know that school governance is not a democracy; it is representative government and only board members vote on school decisions.  As provided in law, the public has the right to speak with the school board and the board is obligated to listen.  Do not take anything said personally, even from the most spittle mouthed.  Do not take anything said as expert opinion or fact.  At the end of the meeting everyone else goes home and only board members vote on how the district will respond to a controversy.  Discuss and decide; that is what school boards do.
  • The board speaks for the education of all children in the district not for the happiness of parents, residents, and dissidents.  Self-interest, though denied, is the primary motive of every person who addresses the board – this is fact.  A board member’s only self-interest is the best education for ALL children, with ALL in capital letters.  A parent speaks for her child and her child’s peers.  A teacher for her grade level or those in her class.  A coach for her team.  The business manager for the budget.  Board members must consider ALL children, not just some, while ensuring that each child is provided an equal and equitable education and school experience.  This is the rub.  How to advance the cause of all while protecting the rights of the one.

Being responsible for the education of children is not easy.  If it were, anyone could do it and we don’t want just anyone to be responsible for the education of ALL children.  We want board members who can look inside the issues they confront to find humane, high ground, child-centered resolutions for tough questions.  I would like to think that if one of the two women claiming the child in the Bible’s Solomon “the wise” story had not said to spare the child and thus created a true claim as mother, Solomon would not have cleaved the child in two but adopted it as his own.  Board members consider ALL children your own and be willing take the forsaken child to your home.  This is your school board standard.

Educational governance in the long view

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April school board elections remind us that the officials we elect shape the future of the school district.  The local news media post and League of Women Voters host “get to know the candidate” information and forums to highlight “…this is what I will prioritize if you elect me”.  Individual candidates tell us “I will…, vote for me.”  We read and listen to understand the differences between candidates.  There are so many issues that confront school today that a voter truly needs a score card to keep track of where the candidates stand on any one or all issues.  The bottom line, however, is this question:  Does board membership make a difference in the long run of educating children?  Yes, it does.

The electors of the school district vote to elect board members.  Once elected, board members determine the policies and priorities of the schools.  Democracy elects and representative government leads.  Representatives can make a difference.

A school board’s work is measured by the unique voices of its individual members when they speak and when they vote on board motions.  Electors look for promises made to be promises kept.  For the most part, campaign promises today speak to contemporary, hot issues and the pandemic has spawned strong sentiments about virus mitigation protocols and student well-being resulting from remote education and masking.  Masking, quarantining, and school closures are hot buttons and easily seen as the apparent and immediate issues for respective candidates. 

Subliminal to the pandemic-based discussions are arguments of who should make school decisions – the school board or activist parents.  That is the key issue of the 2022 school board elections.  The argument is what will be taught, how it will be taught, what rules will govern teaching, and what powers will parents have in regulating teaching and learning in school.  Check the numerous and growing small, partisan, as in liberal or conservative, politically vocal web sites in your community to observe how and who is crafting these arguments.  People in your community gather regularly to rally their causes and memberships are growing. 

Read nationally to understand models of parent engagement and protest.  Some seem radical and over the top until you read that activist models are being copied and played out more and more often.  Small groups of parent voices a commandeering school governance and creating minority voice rules.

What does this mean?  It is a long view change in how the writers of state constitutions envisioned and formulated school governance.  Our current model is democratic election of representatives who make policies that govern local schools.  A new model is governance by political activism.  In this model, elected boards make policies that reflect the wants of politically active parents, a minority of the constituency.  Policies may “ping pong” between the most active of activist groups and the media coverage of their demands, but the premise is the same regardless of parent group – school boards must represent the immediacy of parent activism. 

This is a watershed argument for a change that flies in the face of the community.  School boards are elected to represent the entirety of a community not just the parents of the moment.  Board members are elected by residents whose children did not attend the local school or attended local schools decades ago.  They are elected by taxpayers whose interest is that schools educate all children to be the good and productive future taxpayers of the community.  They are elected by adults who want children to be prepared for the unknowns of their future.  School curriculum is not to be partisan but broad and leading to objective, informed, and inquisitive student thinking.  Teachers are not hired based upon their leanings but upon their abilities to cause children to learn.  At least, that is the constitutional design.  New argument changes school reality into only serving and protecting the points of view of activism. 

The election of school board members matters because schools reflect their school boards.

What Do I Need To Know To Feel Normal About School?

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Newton taught us for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.  Our science teachers demonstrated this by applying a force to a pendulum at rest.  The pendulum swung in the direction of the applied force, reached the apex of its arc and then swung back in the opposite direction of the applied force past its normal resting point on an opposite and equally long arc.  Inertia eventually caused the pendulum to return to rest in its normal, perpendicular resting position.

The pandemic defied Newton.  The new normal of the post-pandemic at rest will not be in the same position we observed as pre-pandemic normal.  To put it bluntly, schools of the future cannot be what schools were in the past.  The forces unleashed by the pandemic not only moved the pendulum of the school in a multitude of wildly swinging arcs but relocated the center point of where the post-pandemic pendulum of the school will come to rest.  Reactionary forces have not equaled initial forces of change.   The descriptors of school normalcy are being rewritten and we must understand the location and realities of our new normal.

We must find our ability to be normal with the following descriptors

Facts and evidence are propositional.  When the national leadership repeatedly declared facts to be false and falsities to be true, people questioned the truths they could trust.  Questioning is never wrong, but unquestioning acceptance of untruth is.  Fact bashing went beyond political banter when the rewriters of facts and truth carried this strategy from partisanship into declaring the pandemic a hoax.  Almost 900,000 dead Americans later, we are still arguing whether covid is a health crisis or a conspiracy.  New normalcy will not rely upon universally held and evidence-based facts.  In the new normal, more than ever before people will align self-selected facts with what they want to be truth.  Evidence will not matter to those who will not believe it; all facts are propositional to the purpose of the speaker.

The concept of leadership is frayed.  From President to principal, a first response to what leaders say is growing to be either distrust or rejection.  The first face of this growing public response is “Who is he/she to tell me?”.  The second response is to look to others for different ideas.  In both responses, the key issue is “what has the leader done to improve my condition in life, including school life?”.  Leaders, because they are central figures, are blamed for every lessening of daily conditions.  Whether measured in popularity polls or in voiced support and action aligned with a leader, most measures today disfavor our elected and appointed leaders.  Instead, anti-leaders with oppositional messages and proposals garner the support of adults and students who feel disconnected from daily decisions.  In the new normal, representative leadership will be more and more difficult.    

Distancing will be more than physical space and remoting will continue.  The air-born spread of a respiratory virus caused social distancing to be our protocol for keeping space between us and potential covid carriers.  Mentally we moved through the first two years of the pandemic within six-foot bubbles to diminish the possibility of catching covid from the breath of others.  Bubbling affected more than where we stood.  It put distance between family members and friendships, collaboration and collegiality at work, and children and their best friends.  It became a psychological and emotional distance as much as a physical distance.  When schools returned to in-person teaching and learning we enforced the protocol of social distancing.  We now observe a new normal that lacks the proximity and close sharing of the pre-pandemic.  In our new normal we are not close to one another in any facet of our interactions – we remain at arms length and will not achieve the same levels of personal connection we once held.  No touch.  No hugging.  No one in our personal space.  No closeness.

Children in remote education and adults in remote working learned that aspects of working independently of place and others are okay and preferable to being in-person.  In fact, some will never return to the school or office or workplace because they can work remotely and they enjoy being remote.  Coincidentally, Sunday church attendance increases when parishioners can attend remotely.  Go figure.  Educationally, introverted children prospered in remote education without worrying about the eyes and words of their peers.  In the new normal, we will remain distanced from one another.  It is more comfortable.  Demands for remote and independent teaching and learning will increase.  We will mange a hybrid of remote and in-person living.

Personal demands rise above social responsibility.  Greek philosophers discussed the relationship between freedom and responsibility and perhaps every generation must find its own balance of these two values.  We observe that the pandemic has deepened and widened the chasm between what many Americans accept as their role in the commonwealth of their community, state, and nation.  It may be that the threat of pandemic death only made the tear in our social fabric greater.  Or, it may be that the pandemic gave us excuses for a further erosion of community in favor of personal demands.  Or, it may be that pandemic fatigue wore down a sense of community and people are expressing personal wants that have been repressed for two years.  Whatever the reason, pandemic protocols for the good of the many are coming down.  Masks are off.  Travel is on. Large groups are gathering.  It is not because we think the danger of covid is past.  We no longer want to follow protocols that intrude into the life we want.  In the new normal, individuals will satisfy themselves more than they will honor behaviors recommended for the common good.  They will attack sponsors of community responsibility.

Anger is weaponized.  Peter Finch’s character in “Network” (1976) yelled “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore”.  He weaponized anger against his employer in seeking personal revenge and resolution.  Government at all levels today is confronted with angry constituents in the pandemic, some like Finch’s Howard Beale.  Board meetings have been disrupted and threats made.  By no means is this universal across the 430+ school districts of our state.  Yet, even civil board meetings experience seething anger in those who disagree with a school’s pandemic protocols.  Whether real or perceived, anger affects the people who are elected to govern when district residents are covert in their demands.  If Newtonian law holds, there will be equal angers rising to confront the force of voiced angers.  Our new normal will be measured and tested by how it responds to anger; angry people about something will seem an everyday experience.

Once waived, it is difficult to reinstate a rule or requirement.  An unenforced rule is not considered a rule.  In our state the length of a school year, hours of required instruction, truancy laws, definitions of school attendance, parameters for home schooling, requirement of homework, use of college admissions testing are among many long-standing school rules and standards that were were waived in the early pandemic.  Just turning on a computer at home qualified a student to be counted as present on a school day.  Does it matter?  In September and October 2021 regular student absenteeism and tardiness are real challenges.  Three days of school attendance out of five is as much as some students will commit.  Soft accountability told many parents that strict attendance and completion of assignments may not matter and in 2021-22 families extend weekends into three- and four-day weekends.  In the pandemic, school day and school year were determined by resistance factors not educational goals.  In the new normal, we will continue to struggle with apathy toward rules and standards, many of which were waived in the pandemic. 

Lowered bars of expectation set new levels of acceptance.  Remote education will haunt school expectations for some time.  At the start of remoting, we credited logging in, seeing a student’s face, some level of participation, and submission of some work on an assignment.  “Some” counted. Remoting led us to make assumptions about what children were learning and some were not learning.  Being remote, we did not really know.

The return to in-person teaching and learning displayed many children whose grade level and subject knowledge and skills were below to well below where they could have been if there were no pandemic.  No duh, eh!  Children in art, music, second language, technology ed, business and marketing, and computer science, to name a few, experienced remote learning on an individualized basis divorced from studio, rehearsal hall, laboratory, and community-based experiences.  They learned but not what they could have or what their next grade level or sequenced course or graduation diploma required.

Academic testing profiles slipped.  Some children in above the 75th percentile slipped to above the 50th.  More worrisome, the number of children below the 25th percentile increased.

Schools everywhere face the compensatory challenge of raising the level of each child’s education to non-pandemic levels.  “Thelma And Louise” (movie characters) taught us “you get what you settle for”.  In the new normal, we cannot settle for the level of educational achievement our students have gotten thus far in the pandemic.  In our normalizing, we must reinstate high expectations for each child’s education, and we must work diligently to raise the current level of each child’s learning achievements toward pre-pandemic standards.  This goes for reading levels, skill in playing the saxophone, throwing ceramics on a potter’s wheel, solving quadratics, and milling a tool on a lathe.

Decline of teaching as a career.  Nightly news tells us weekly that the unrelenting pandemic demand on medical responders, nurses, and hospital workers is causing a personnel shortage in their profession.  More are leaving and fewer are entering.  This also is true of schoolteachers.  The trend line of new teachers entering the profession has been in decline for more than two decades.  Pandemic demands topped off teacher struggles with increasing demands for educational accountability, partisan-divided support for public schools, increasing class sizes, and flattened salary compensation.  The result today is even more administrators and teachers leaving school and the classroom and even fewer entering.  State legislators try to increase teacher numbers by diminishing the educational preparation for a teaching license and approving alternative and easier ways to be licensed.  Districts posting for school administrator and classroom teacher positions for the 2021-22 will be pressed to find new applicants let alone highly qualified applicants.  Normal in the post-pandemic will be schools and classrooms with younger and less experienced administrators and teachers and a constantly revolving door of these.

The transition of the pandemic to endemic provides other challenges.  Each of these will also contribute to defining a new normal, that place where things will seem to come to rest and be less volatile.  That place will be nowhere close to the pre-pandemic normal.  It will, however, be our new reality.  Buckle up.  We have work to do.