The new paroxysm in our school district: now the administration plans to turn Yankee Ridge (OK, there is a contender, Thomas Paine) elementary school into the Spanish Dual Language one. This would reduce the total number of regular, “neighborhood” elementary schools in the district from 6 to 4, over just two years. To say this is disruptive, is not to say anything. The administration managed to upset two elementary schools, scattering (or planning to scatter) hundreds of kids all over the district, some of them to be moved several times over as many years. The teachers and staff are shuffled around in barely legal moves.
This, of course, comes after the exhausting campaign to conduct an Equity Audit (does anyone remember what it was supposed to do?), the tortuous evaluation of the Dual Language program, the dramatic attempt to take away Leal school from WUNA, truly Falstaffian (short and pointless) tenure of fresh principal Nance, and an ongoing initiative to reorganize language education with TTIITs and suchlike.
That’s a lot. What’s worse, this all is happening in the background of the biggest, baddest, acutest issue the district faces: the steady deterioration of educational outcomes.
The critical problem with the reorg galore1I do not think this is pure ineptitude or pure corruption or pure patronage. Some mixture, rather, – on the spectrum, so to say. is not even that it costs a lot. It takes over the administration’s attention span, so that the key elements of a functioning school (stable classes, experienced, or gaining experience teachers who know they can plan their lives for a few years ahead, real investment in real professional development, and other boring elements of K-12) are utterly neglected. The administration is thrashing around in their desire to find a silver bullet that will magically resolve the district’s biggest problem, but instead exacerbates the matter.
(Observers of Russian politics coined the term “Mad Printer” to describe the state of Russian legislature from around 2013 on: it started to produce bizarre, Kafkaesque bills with immense speed, in the shortest time completely transforming the fabric of political life in the country. Back there, the reason was clear: the emerging middle class wanted the direction of Putin’s regime to change; Putin decided that he’d rather submerge the middle class.
I have no idea what is behind this district’s frenzy of innovations, but, boy, if this is not a Mad Printer-grade insanity, then what is? )
In sum, the bright minds of the district administration are in disarray.
Yet, the administration is (mostly) able to get all of their initiatives approved. How?
There are two superficial reasons, and one fundamental.
The first superficial reason: any administrator worth their salary knows verse-and-chapter the tricks of the trade. They are pushing half-truths (when outright lies are infeasible), splitting the opposition, planting their own people as district general public, manipulating agendas etc, etc, etc. Our educational leaders might be bad in that education thing, but excel in the art of bureaucratic leadership.
The second superficial reason is that the Board is extremely constrained in what they can do. I wrote already about the prohibition of the group communications outside of the Board meetings. It turns out that they are also prohibited to… reconsider their decisions. Once they vote on something, they are not supposed to return to the issue! This insanity even includes a gag order. You don’t believe it? Here’s what the Board policy manual says:
- All board members are expected to support the board decision. Once the decision has been made, it is time to move on to the next critical issue. Efforts by board members to revisit previous decisions or secure belated public support will only distract from the future work of the district.
- Member may wish to state, “I didn’t vote for the proposal but the decision was made and I support the work of the full board.” …
- Expressing your opinion (in previous bullet) to individuals is acceptable to fellow members. However, sending information electronically to groups is a function performed by the district on behalf of the full board.
- Media related interviews will be handled by the board president or the superintendent at their discretion…
These provisions are identical to those from the CPSU charter2see XIII. Party Discipline, p. 83, but, of course, contradict the basic principle that the members of the Board can and should “seek changes in<…> decisions” they disagree with…
I do not know how the Board tolerates this Stalinist code of conduct, but the administration is not shy to put an explicit reminder about it at the end of the presentation on why they won’t reconsider the decision to shutter Yankee Ridge (or Thomas Paine).
So, the Board is constrained, and is meek in general. And this is the root reason, why we have to resort to reading useless citizen statements, forming various groups and publishing long online screeds. It is because the Board, which should be representing us, responding to us, reflecting what we believe is important, just doesn’t.
And why should they? We, the citizens, get active only when one’s neighborhood is affected. Once in a while, that group has enough social power (that’s how Leal got spared), but mostly it doesn’t. And so Wiley got crushed, and French DL program, and Yankee Ridge will be. We all see the Board rubberstamping whichever the Mad Printer exudes, but still thank them for their hard work, and don’t even try to force them to address the big, systemic issues we all are aware of.
The biggest of which remains the shameful, intolerable failure to give good education to the kids from the most disadvantaged groups, minorities, immigrants, and the poor. Just about everyone understands that the administrative circus unleashed by the Superintendent and her team on the district is not a solution to this problem, but a hurdle. Yet, we let them to go on, and on, and on, for years.
Do we still expect a different result?