Did I Just Waste Three Hours of My Life at a Facilities Meeting?

I just came back from the school district’s “community workshop” on facilities planning.  Here are a few of my immediate thoughts.  

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The basics: Everyone was seated at tables of nine or ten.   At the start of the meeting, the school district’s consulting firm put on a presentation about the latest scenarios to address facilities planning.  They then asked the groups to do two different “work activities” to respond to the scenarios.  There were (by my rough estimate) about three hundred attendees.

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I went into the meeting skeptical that the consultants’ numerical data could be very meaningful, and had even less confidence in it after the consultants’ opening presentation.  The capacity numbers obviously hinge on lots of subjective, value-laden assumptions about what we want from our schools, yet no one explored those assumptions or asked us if we agreed with them.  The consultants also gave each scenario a numerical score on “educational adequacy” and “cost benefit ratio”—as if we all agreed on what “adequacy” means and on how different costs and benefits should be weighed, and just needed someone to do the math for us.  

The consultants’ presentation on “educational adequacy” was particularly depressing.  The consultants appear to have uncritically accepted every fad and buzzword from today’s headlines: we’re in a war for “global competitiveness,” Bill Gates and Microsoft are fonts of educational wisdom, the standardized-test-driven Common Core standards will make our schools more “student-centered” and will promote “critical thinking.”  In fact, there are good reasons to think that none of those things are even remotely true.  In particular, the top-down, lock-step, test-driven, nationally-uniform-standards approach to education is about as far from being “student-centered” as it could possibly be.  I certainly hope that no one who thinks like this will be in charge of teaching my kids “critical thinking.”  

What’s going to happen if liberal Johnson County starts to see all these trends in “Twenty-First Century education” as right-wing, corporate-driven, and anti-democratic – as many people already do?  In my view, the vision of education that the consultants presented is one we should be running screaming away from, not eagerly planning for.  Nor does it seem wise to confidently assume that what’s in fashion today will still be in fashion ten years from now.  In any event, the subjective assumptions about educational quality rendered all of the capacity numbers suspect: tweak the underlying value judgments, and you could get a very different set of numbers.  

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The first “work assignment” was very frustrating, for similar reasons.  Each group was asked to rate each scenario on five criteria: “Equitable,” “Right-Sized,” “Neighborhood Schools,” “Financial Efficiency,” and “21st Century.”  Many of these terms were defined in ways that rendered them either entirely meaningless or subject to a dozen different interpretations.  (For example, “Equitable” was defined as “Schools provide equitable opportunities including access to academic and co-curricular programs, educational environments.”)  To make matters worse, no one asked whether any of us agreed that these were the five most important criteria, or what their relative weights should be.  At the end of the night, the consultants totaled up the results on each one and simply added them together, as if we all agreed that these were the five important criteria and that they all had equal weight.  

At best, this work session was forty minutes almost entirely wasted.  At worst, it was an effort to use the attendees to create a fictitious consensus on value judgments that no one asked us about.  It was hard not to wonder whether the consultants’ decisions – in their choice of criteria and their definitions of “adequacy” and “cost benefit ratio” – were designed to push people toward closing older schools and building shiny new ones.  (For example, “cost benefit ratio” was defined to assign precisely zero benefit to the preservation of neighborhood schools.)  If so, it wasn’t a success: once again, the clear favorite choice of the evening was the scenario that didn’t close any schools.

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The second work session was more productive.  It asked us to think separately about the way the scenarios treated elementary schools, junior highs, and high schools.  Some people wanted to choose the high school aspects of one scenario and the elementary school aspects of another, and this gave people a chance to voice that preference.  The consultants didn’t have time to tabulate those results for us, but my guess is that Scenario 1, which wouldn’t close any schools and would stick with 7th-and-8th-grade junior highs, was the favorite across the board.  

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I am very puzzled by one thing:  Whenever I talk to people who are more active in the school system, I am told that the school board is “definitely” going to close Hoover Elementary and give the property to City High.  Yet the public has never been presented with a scenario that closes only Hoover, and has repeatedly chosen the scenarios that do not close any schools.  (Full disclosure: I am a Hoover parent, though my kids are old enough that they will have moved on before any closing could occur.)   

If the board is really harboring a desire to close only Hoover, why wasn’t that scenario included in tonight’s (or any other night’s) packet?  Given the strong sentiment at all the meetings against closing schools, there’s every reason to think that a scenario that closed Hoover would not have been popular.  The board has now had numerous opportunities to pose that question to the public, and has chosen not to.  Did they not ask because they didn’t want to know the answer?  At this point, it’s hard to see how the board could close only Hoover and still claim that the process had any legitimacy.

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My own feeling is that yes, there would be benefits to closing Hoover, just as there would be benefits to closing Mann, Hills, Lincoln, or other older schools. But a commitment to the idea of central neighborhood schools has to mean something.  Hoover is no less a neighborhood than Mann, Hills, or Lincoln.  (Though it took in a lot of SINA transfers a few years ago, the fact remains that everyone in the Hoover attendance area lives within walking distance of the school—something that is not true of Hills, Lincoln, Longfellow, Shimek, or Mann.)  If the board decides that other concerns trump the value of neighborhood schools in Hoover’s case, there is no reason to think it won’t make the same decision about another school a few years down the road.  They’ll never close them all at once; one at a time is how it happens.  

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In general, I was encouraged by my fellow participants’ refusal to let the “data” make decisions for them.  Empirical data, even if it’s accurate, can’t tell you what to want.  There’s no way to put a dollar value on preserving older central neighborhood schools; the issue calls for a value judgment, not a mathematical calculation.  

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So did I waste three hours of my life at this meeting?  The answer depends on how the school board reacts to the public input it received.  The sentiment at these meetings has been strikingly consistent on one central issue: don’t close older schools.  If the board members are of a different opinion, they have failed to persuade the public of that view.   

Elected officials don’t have to be weathervanes, following poll numbers on every issue.  But they shouldn’t invite large-scale public participation about particular issues if they have no intention of heeding it – especially when the input turns out to be so consistently in one direction.  

Keep in mind that none of the candidates in the last school board election uttered even a word about closing older schools.  Leadership doesn’t mean concealing your preferences during the election and then imposing them against public sentiment once the election is over.  Moreover, a facilities plan is designed for the long-term, and will need to have enough public support to survive several election cycles before it is fully implemented.  Before we settle on a plan that closes older schools, wouldn’t it make sense to see if any candidates can get elected on that platform?

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Think of all the time and energy people in our district have put into discussing school buildings and boundaries.  Wouldn’t it be great if we had that much discussion of the actual education that goes on inside those buildings?  In the eleven years since No Child Left Behind was enacted, the school experience has changed significantly.  Despite all the talk about “critical thinking” and being “student-centered,” our schools have a more and more single-minded focus on raising standardized test scores, regardless of what other values have to be sacrificed in the process.  When was the “community workshop” about that?

Chris Liebig blogs about local and national educational issues at A Blog About School.  You can also follow him on Twitter.