Emerging from a two-and-a-half hour school board meeting the other night ? a short one! ? as I emerge from most of these sessions (drained), I was anxious to read Rick Hess's Ed Week post, ?School Boards as a Sympton, not the Cause,? which was a reply to Mike Petrilli's ?The problem with `school boards are the problem'? post.
At most school board meetings I attend I do feel that I'm living in some kind of disease that I had nothing to do with causing. Our board Agenda the other night was four pages long ? this is a K-12 district with fewer than 2000 students and we meet twice a month ? and included things like appointing a new board member to fill a vacancy, setting dates for board ?workshops? on Communications and Goals, and approving a Special Ed busing contract for ?a total anticipated cost of $346.00,? a ?sustainability consultant? (for $22,500), and an ?external evaluator? ($30,000). There were some 50 individual items like that, not counting several dozen staff appointments, transfers, tenures, and terminations. ?And this doesn't count the dozens of pages of ?documentation? that go along with all these items. And then there are things not on the agenda: a report on a school building under renovation that had suffered ?water infiltration? because workmen had forgot to cover a hole in the roof, a report on how our kids did on the new proficiency standards (bad), and a discussion by our attorney of a property tax suit against the town, the county and the district (I'm one of the plaintiffs!)
Hess!? Help!
Unfortunately, what Hess suggests is not going to help me this term ? and perhaps not in my lifetime (which has undoubtedly been shortened by school board service). As much as much as I don't trust my colleagues on the board to do the right thing (and they feel the same about me), at least I know where they live!
In fact, I had come to the school-boards-as-symptoms-not-causes conclusion last fall, arguing in an Education Week Commentary that their irrelevance was a sign of trouble not the trouble itself.? And I would surely agree that we've created a system that is, in Hess' words, ?a series of contiguous bureaucratic monopolies.?
I continue to believe that more robust and accountable school boards can and should be part of the arsenal?in breaking up these monstrous bureaucratic monopolies, contiguous or not.? Hess seems to suggest that?in changing?the system?we won't need school boards.??He lays the groundwork for the argument?in a Phi Delta Kappan story last spring and says that he'll have more to say in his forthcoming book, The Same thing Over and Over. Sounds like?your regular?board of ed meeting.
?Peter Meyer
