Legislators: What I Wish You Knew

Earlier I published a post identifying what I wish school board members knew.  I have not detected a sudden increase in the wisdom or performance of school boards, but I shall post on.  There are a variety of concepts I wish legislators, state and federal, senators and representatives, knew about public schools and the legislation they enact regarding such entities.  Evidence mounts almost daily that legislators do not know these concepts and evidence mounts almost daily that legislators are not interested in knowing such things.  It is extremely difficult to inform those who already know everything.  I will attempt such a feat, however, because in fact, the emperor was naked despite what he believed to be true.

First please know that a majority vote of those who actually vote on Election Day empowers you to take office.  It does not gift you with a genius level IQ or professional degrees in a wide variety of fields.  You will not be smarter.  You will not have magically climbed down the mountain with new stones.  You will be who you are, elected by those who voted for you on Election Day, to serve a given constituency.  You may have the political power to help set policy on education, budgets, NASA, universities, child welfare, etc., etc.  But you are not a professional in any of these areas.  Seek wisdom from those who are.

I wish you knew that just as each child is different each and every public school building, classroom, district and state are very, very different.  If you have a monolithic view of public schools your view is wrong.  The very notion that you would discuss what is wrong with public schools or what needs to be done to improve public schools is a discussion no one is qualified to conduct.  I could conduct such a discussion for each of the schools in my district, but I am not qualified to discuss each of the classrooms.  You surely are not.  If you could simply let go of the notion that you can improve schools by twisting a few screws here and there and thinking that somehow the wisdom to improve lies in Austin or Washington D.C., public schools would dramatically improve, or at least have a wonderful new opportunity to do so. 

I wish that you knew that once the legislature or Congress tinkers with the operation, goals, evaluations, etc., of public schools that you are the ones who are accountable for outcomes, not the schools.  If an NFL owner calls the plays, the coach or the quarterback is not responsible for the outcomes.  If a school board wants to hire an athletic director, then that board, not the superintendent, is accountable for the outcomes.  If you are going to tell all the schools in Texas what to do from Austin or from Washington then the schools are not accountable, you are!  I remain amazed that non-educators, particularly very wealthy individuals, want to fix schools via their pet programs.  Educators know it will not work.  Educators know in many cases it will actually harm kids.  And yet our legislature tells us what to teach and how to teach it and decides how to test it and how to rate schools based on the outcomes.  If schools are their factories then the failure of the factory does not lie anywhere but on the shoulders of those making the rules.  Legislators.  I laugh every time I hear one of you talk about our failing schools.  Look in the mirror, dim-whit.  Thanks for all your help to make that happen.

I wish you knew that the brainstorms of non-professional educators are never likely to work in public schools.  Charter schools have not worked.  Vouchers have not worked.  High stakes standardized testing has not worked.  Very, very few professional educators support these notions and you keep implementing them.  You implement them to reward rich, private sector folks at the expense of mostly poor children.  Scrooge could learn from you.  Of course private sector folks salivate at the large public school budgets and wish they could get some of that money.  Their lust for bucks does not make good policy.  If any of the strategies supported by ALEC, Broad, Gates and company really worked we would have tried and implemented them ourselves. 

I wish you knew that privatizing a public service does not yield positive results for anyone save the private sector folks who now have public dollars.  I double-dog dare you to find one example of privatization of public service that saved money and improved outcomes.  Did not happen with the phone system, did not happen with the electricity grid.  So why would we think it would happen in public schools?  Each of those moves raised prices for the users and increased the wealth of the new providers.  Is that our goal?  Play around with public schools so private folks can make profit from public dollars?  I think not.  Private enterprise should not be trusted with public service.  That is not their mission.  Their mission is to generate income and the market is immoral.  Schools should not operate more like a business.  They should operate more like a family or a church.

I wish you knew that teachers, principals and unions are not your enemies.  We are folks dedicated to improving the future through helping kids and the people who serve kids.  Attacking us is the equivalent of ranting about fires that are out of control and then attacking the professionalism and autonomy of fire firefighters.  Such an effort helps no one and not only does not put out the fires, it ignites others.

I wish you knew that most of us are not stupid, though there is increasing evidence that we are.  By “us” I mean Americans who vote.   We can see if you accept campaign contributions from ALEC that your future votes are bought.  We can see the outcomes of your much lauded standardized tests and ridiculously know that the very tests you support continue to prove you do not have the right set of answers.  We have had 30 years of school reform and we are right where we started:  wealthy kids in schools with good resources and parental support do very well.  Poor kids in schools with limited resources do not do so well.  The issue was, is and will be economics more than education.  You make it considerably worse by reducing dollars not only for public education, but for health services, mental illness, food stamps, etc., etc.  It makes so much more sense to raise the minimum wage to improve schools than it does to move public school money to the private sector.  Why don’t you see that?

I wish you knew that as an elected legislator you are public servants, not servants of the private sector.  Hoover cleared it up for us.  “What is good for business is good for the USA,” is a false statement. 

If you knew these things our education system would be number one in the world.  You are listening to the wrong voices.