Bad Priorites -> Bad Process -> Bad Results

I have never asked the school district to do anything that they didn't promise to do. The fact that I have to ask them to do things so often is a testament to how rarely they do what they promise they will do.

We hear - all the time - about how there is a division of authority with the Board focusing exclusively on policy and governance work while the administration and management decisions are delegated to the superintendent. If that were true, then the school assignment decisions should never have been subjected to a Board vote. Drawing attendance area boundaries is clearly an administrative or management decision - not a policy decision - and should have been delegated to the superintendent. Policy 3130 is nearly all that the Board should have to say about student assignment.

One mistake leads to others. Putting it before the Board for a vote made it a political decision. The more political the decision, the less it is based on data and reason, the more it is influenced by factors other than data and reason, and the poorer the quality of the decision,

The Board should have delegated the decision to the superintendent from the start. The only thing they need to add to the policy would be a reminder to the superintendent to live up to the District's stated values like transparency and community engagement, and to direct him to comply with laws and policies. But since the entire thing was going to culminate in a Board vote, and since Board votes are political decisions, the data, the reason, and all of those values and rules became subordinate to the political process. The staff didn't need to adhere to data or reason, they didn't need to be transparent or engaged, they didn't need to adhere to policy, because the whole thing would be dumped in the Board's lap in the end and the Board would be responsible for all of it. That's part of the reason that community engagement for the decisions was poorly conducted when it wasn't completely non-existent. The Board's charge to the superintendent should have put more emphasis on talking to the people who are directly impacted by the decisions.

This could have been done well if it were not politicized. It could have been done well if the focus had been placed where it belonged instead of on the politics.

A de-politicized process could have started with a round of meetings held with one to three school communities at a time to inform them of the issues and to gather their input. Smaller meetings with a narrower focus would facilitate a deeper conversation in which the staff could have described the needs, the facts, and the factors that shape the problem and must be addressed by the solutions before any decisions were made. Smaller meetings could also have provided the community with an opportunity to provide better input, more clearly express the unique factors in their area, their needs, their wants, and their concerns, to gain an understanding of the requirements for a solution, and to not only feel like they are active participants in forming that solution, but to actually be active participants in forming that solution. These meetings would have been focused on communicating the needs and generating some ideas for solutions that meet the requirements of the problems.

Then, as the staff researched possible solutions, they could have stayed in close communication with the impacted communities, keeping them informed about the solutions as they were developed, and continuing to gather their input, the benefit of their collaboration, and allowing them to continue to feel involved in the development of the solution. All of these meetings would be smaller, calmer, and more conversational. Think of the "Let's Talk" meetings that Tracy Libros held. They weren't filled with demonstrations or drama. They felt collaborative. People around the table kicked in to help form workable solutions.

Then, after the solutions were formed and the decisions were made, there could be a final round of meetings - held in the same small groups - to present the decisions. These meetings, like those before, would be conversational. Members of the community who participated in the process would be present to say how their needs, wants, and concerns were addressed. There would be buy-in because the people impacted by the decision would be invested in the decisions because they helped to craft them. There wouldn't be the sort of uninformed, knee-jerk opposition or bumper-sticker sloganeering in opposition because people would be informed, they would know the larger needs, would have had a chance to think things through, and would have a sense of the context.

Instead, the process was political from the start because everyone knew that it would be political in the end. Therefore they handled it as a political process: there were mass meetings where no one felt heard, decisions that fell out of the sky without any explanation, and then sudden reversals of those decisions with no explanation.

An example of how the politicized process failed to deliver a good decision, consider the middle school assignment of students living in the Wedgwood attendance area.

The first version of the plan didn't include any change in the Wedgwood middle school assignment, and the families there didn't participate much in the process. They didn't feel any need to participate because they didn't feel that it impacted them. Same for the second version. Then, in a third version, presented very shortly before the Board vote, the middle school assignment for Wedgwood was changed. Then this community exercised their political muscle.

A vocal group of Wedgwood families didn't want their children to be assigned to the new Jane Addams Middle School because it was too far away (just over two miles). Instead, they wanted the District to assign other children to that school, students who lived six to eight miles away. Someone should have talked to them like adults, but that never happened. Instead, they were handled like children throwing a tantrum, and handled badly. The District gave them the slice of cake they wanted and put 300 other children on a long bus ride.

And who did that for them? The Board. Two members of the Board wrote an amendment to the plan which usurped the superintendent's authority to place programs and services, and the rest of the Board adopted it. Worse, they did it without any community engagement at all, they did it in violation of their program placement policy, and they did it without regard for the data. Had this decision not been politicized that could never have happened.

I'm a little hard on the Wedgwood families, but I don't blame them. They were set up to behave that way. While they didn't consider the impacts on anyone but themselves and their children, their reaction to Version 3.0 was as much to the suddenness of the change in plan as to the changed plan. What else could their reaction be other than outrage and righteous indignation? If someone had met with them from the start and began the conversation with "We need to assign about 900 middle school students to Jane Addams. Here are the rules that guide our work. Here is the data on where students live. Please work with us to determine middle school assignments in the northeast." I think we would have seen a better solution with less drama.

This is just one example. There are many. The decision to make Dearborn Park an option school with a language immersion program was made without talking to the Dearborn Park community at all. Not once. Not at all. The gerrymandering of the Washington attendance area was done to appease opposition. Mercer and Aki Kurose swapped Wing Luke and Hawthorne for rather poor reasons, but when Hawthorne went back to Mercer it was, inexplicably, Kimball that came out and it went to Washington instead of Aki Kurose. That made no sense.

The District's process was designed around the knowledge that it was a political decision, first and foremost. As a result, it became a warped process to suit a warped set of criteria.

For contrast, regard the series of meetings that Director Carr held with families in her district to find reasonable solutions to small changes in their attendance areas. While these meetings and decisions came very late in the process, they are examples more like of the sort of process that should have been followed from the beginning and they resulted in a better outcome. You didn't see anyone protesting her amendments at the meeting, did you?

While you may not think well of the process that I have outlined here, the point is that the process is a manifestation of the political nature of the decision and that a less politicized decision would result in a less political process which would deliver better results. The decisions for next year have been made. The political process calls for these decisions to be re-fought for each of the next six years. That's six chances for the Board to do the right thing and delegate the decisions to the superintendent.