Cannibalization of Public Education

Cannibalization of Public Education is a series of blog entries responding to the school district’s assertion that as an elected member of the Board of Education, I am have cost the district $75,000.00 (as of December 2014) due to the Government Records Access Management Act (GRAMA) requests I have filed over the past two years.

That accusation is actually an indictment against the school bureaucracy. As a policy maker, I should not have to submit GRAMA requests to the very organization that by the authority of State law, I have oversight for.

Ironically, in September of 2014, the Superintendent’s fulltime attorney submitted 15 GRAMA requests to various elected officials and public agencies seeking all records of my interactions with them!

I submitted a GRAMA request seeking copies of those request. I also asked for an explanation as to how the superintendent finds the time and resources to monitor my activities. State law has it the other way around, I am to evaluate and monitor his performance.

The blog entries in this series will explain why I was compelled to file GRAMA requests to the very agency that I was elected to provide a checks and balance for.

The results of the latest GRAMA request (monitoring elected officials) demonstrates how the  school bureaucracy brings to bear the resources of the school district, i.e. fulltime attorney, fulltime public relations officer, fulltime external communications director, full time superintendent etc.. to work against the duly elected members of the Board of Education.

Thus the title of this series, I predict the implosion of public education as we know it, if we cannot right this ship and place the governance of our local schools back into the hands of the public, not the school bureaucracy that has run amuck.

Follow the Superintendent

An echo chamber is a situation in which information, ideas, or beliefs are amplified or reinforced by transmission inside an “enclosed” space, often drowning out ‘new’ or ‘outside’ views. In this blog the ‘enclosed’ space referred to is the room in which the School Board meetings are held.

Inside the Echo Chamber is a new blog category that will highlight the Salt Lake City School District’s insular communication space where everyone agrees with the information given by the Superintendent or the bureaucracy and no questioning is encouraged or allowed. The category in the blog will simply be listed: ECHO CHAMBER.

In this case the Echo Chamber is a contained space (school board meetings) where noise is amplified and fed back to the originator (Superintendent).

In my opinion, school board meetings have de-evolved into an ECHO CHAMBER for the self serving interests of the adults. This is due in part to the role-reversal that has been methodically adopted over the years, the majority of the school board are under the illusion that they work for the Superintendent. According to State Law the superintendent works for the School Board who are elected by the people.

From what I can observe, it appears that over a period of time my predecessors have allowed the school district to de-evolve into a pathological bureaucracy which is best defined as an organization whose culture, traditions, structures and operations have subverted the institution’s mission. This type of pathology also encourages and indeed facilitates the degradation of civic discourse and the erosion of the capacity for collective critical thinking within the ECHO CHAMBER (school board meetings).

I have chosen to use the following illustration for this new blog category: Devo – which is short for DE-EVolution – believed that humanity had stopped evolving and had started de-volving. This was reflected in a lot of their songs at the time – “Freedom of choice; is what you got. Freedom FROM choice; is what you want.”

They made a lot of comments about society and the herd mentality. In much the same way the current school board has allowed a type of ‘herd mentality’ to set in where questions and course corrections are not allowed and all decisions are relegated to the dysfunctional bureaucracy.

Those who operate solely within the School District’s ECHO CHAMBER seem disconnected from the lives of the teachers and students, uniformed about what is going on in their own system, and reluctant to accept any responsibility for the increasing achievement gap and rising dropout out rate of our most vulnerable students.

As long as there is an absence of a countervailing power to insist on something akin to professional results. The results will continue to be a situation in which the district bureaucracy can constantly administer failure and not feel like failures, protected both by the complexity of the dysfunctional organizational structure and by the passivity of the current School Board.

donMiguelSLC@gmail.com