by Dennis Green
I’ve been meeting with the Alameda Superintendent of Schools and several school board members, working on a series of articles for the local newspapers and blogs. While trying to get a sense of their perspective, almost as an aside I discovered the great divide between ordinary citizens and community leaders such as these.
All three of them are, to varying degrees, policy wonks. So focused, so intent, sometimes even so obsessed with the arcane details of their world that they forget how to relate to those of us who do not live inside it.
“FTEs and SpecEd, intra-district students, restricted funds, charter schools, academies, flexible learning spaces, reduced class size, magnets, enriched, Franklin vs. Earhart, the Gold Coast vs. the far West End…” It’s not just the jargon that is so distracting.
A blizzard of distinctions swirls all around them, blinding them sometimes to how the real world looks to those of us who live outside of academe. And to an outsider, ultimately, many of those distinctions just don’t matter.
Every field can take us captive in this way. As a journalist and blogster, I can get wonky with the best of them. For many years, it was advertising and marketing, health care and real estate, and before that trade publishing. I’ve been a specialist now in many different professions, working in many different fields. At one time, working for Chevron, I knew all about gas and oil.
So I understand the tendency to become enwrapped in one’s own field of vision and expertise, but as an old politico, I also know the need to communicate your goals and needs and values to the common man, the voter. And that requires getting outside your own skin, and getting inside of his.
It requires a sleight of mind, letting go of your own preconceptions and seeing them from the outside, as an observer might. Adopting such a dispassionate objectivity, however, is very difficult, especially if you are dedicated to your cause, as these school officials are dedicated to the cause of public education. It’s tempting to just try and get other people to see the world as you do.
But what I see is essentially an echo chamber — where the people most passionate about their own particular facet of public education are stuck talking to each other and very often to themselves. These are in some situations the parents of young children attending those schools, in other instances the teachers whose livelihood and well-being depends on their careers and in yet other cases the career administrator who may move from one school district to another, or from the bottom to the very top.
The average voter and taxpayer, however, is none of the above. Only 12% of Alameda households have children in the public schools. Very few of us are teachers, or even, as I am, retired from that profession. And the professional school administrator is in a very tiny minority, having a perspective unavailable to probably 99.99% of the general population.
Most school board members are parents, and have children in the public schools, and that is often how they get involved in district management issues to begin with. And very quickly, they are initiated into the Illuminati. That is both an advantage and a liability.
School board members — like all public officials and all government leaders in fact — can become all too easily insensitive to the feelings of their constituents. And they may even forget that their constituents are not the teachers, the Superintendent, or even the students, but rather the general public, the voters and taxpayers they must depend on for achieving their goals.
From all my recent meetings and conversations and exchanges of emails I have come away from their wonderfully wonky world with the conviction that the Alameda Unified School District is remarkably, and unfortunately, out of touch. Policy wonks may just be undiagnosed sufferers of Asperger’s Syndrome, a mild form of autism that makes people very accomplished in their chosen fields but socially retarded.
And while there’s no cure, there’s always treatment.
©2010 Dennis Green
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