When I became a classroom teacher in 1970 my principal and I came to three essential understandings. The school district would provide me with an approved curriculum of subject content and academic skills for my grade levels of students. I would provide the teaching and learning strategies to cause the children in my classes to learn their grade level curricula. The principal would evaluate my teaching performance through an objective and subjective assessment of student engagement and achievement in learning the assigned curriculum. For five decades these three understandings guided my work as a teacher, principal, superintendent, and school board member. I believe these three understandings are critical for the educational success of teaching and learning: the school board decides the curricula, the teacher decides the teaching, the administration supervises teaching and learning.
School Boards Decide Curricula
I cherish the pedagogic freedom of a teacher to use the best teaching strategies to cause students to learn. This is not a license to teach whatever and however. According to Wisconsin Statute 118.01(1), school boards will decide the curriculum, course requirements, and instruction consistent with the statutory goals and expectations for educating children in the school district. Teachers in public education do not have total academic freedom. That’s okay. Using the language of our state statutes, my school district in consultation with district faculty, content area specialists, and administrators, selected the best curricula for our children to learn.
The role of public educators is not to teach one standardized and sanitized version of anything but to teach children how to think critically, objectively, and dynamically. Educators teach children to go beyond who, what, when and where and to ask deeper questions of why and so what and how did this affect people. Children are taught to base their conclusions upon a foundation of facts, as best as they are able to develop these at their state of learning. Educators scaffold student learning over years so that children create more complete and complex understandings of what they learn.
To direct and support scaffolded learning, school boards are required to annually review and adopt the curricular standards that guide student learning. Adoption is posted on a board agenda and made in a regular meeting of the school board. Critical thinking skills are embedded in all adopted curricula.
Pedagogical Specialists Decide Instruction
A teacher’s academic freedoms lay in how the teacher meets the group and individual learning needs of the children in their classes by designing teaching that causes all children to learn. Classroom teachers, as pedagogical specialists, decide how the curricula will be taught. Teachers are trained professionally to consider the nature of what is to be learned and the best teaching/learning strategies. Different content and skills and dispositions about learning require different teaching and this teaching may differ within a content or skill lesson depending upon the needs and abilities of learners. A teacher chops the curriculum into bites that can be taught and learned successfully and uses the art and science of teaching to teach each bite. The “how to teach” decision is the teachers.
These two decisions – what curriculum will be taught and how the curriculum will be taught – are tied together by administrative evaluation of teaching and learning. Administrators exercise quality control decisions. These decisions are based on statute and proven practice over time.
New Demands on Decision Makers
Bob Dylan sang “… the times, they are a-changing…”. His words presage a challenge in public education today regarding who decides what is taught and how it will be taught. The issue of these challenges is monumental, because these decisions affect not only the education of children today but how education shapes the future thinking and behavior of the adults these children will become. Who decides these things is important. Will the decisions be based upon statutory authority or upon the challenges of the moment?
Many school districts around the country are embattled in a public argument by non-educators wanting to determine curricula, the teaching of curricula, and the ways in which schools treat different categories of children. A polarization of people based upon a laundry list of issues – a person’s success in realizing or not realizing the American Dream, identification with partisan leaders, cultural identity, empowerment as a member of the traditional majority, a preferred version of history, support of pac-funding, and fear of others unlike oneself – is causing an historical challenge to teaching and learning. A focal point of the confrontation is the determination of what stories of events, facts, and interpretations of the human experience will be taught in school classrooms and how will children of differing characteristics be treated in school.
I observe in the news that school board meetings are disrupted by local residents demanding the teaching of preferred and selective curriculum. Board meetings are unraveling in chaotic bouts of audience yelling and disorder. By the challengers’ design, the business of the school district is stopped because boards cannot conduct their posted agenda. If the Board wants to conduct its business, the Board must acquiesce to the demands of the disrupters. Board members are physically confronted at board meetings and in the community.
Demands are made of school boards that only preferred versions of history are taught, that literature reflects only mainstream writing, white authors and their points of view, and that the diverse and rich heritage of our nation be narrowed to exclude the stories of and by anyone who is not like these curriculum challengers. I read of school boards abandoning their approved policies of diversity, equality, and equity in the face of these demands.
Statutory Processes for Disagreements
In our republican form of representative government, we elect members from the constituency to serve as decision-makers. Our constitutional design is to create a control of government at the closest local level – state, legislative district, county and town, and school district. Lay, not professional, officials are elected and serve terms of office that are regularly open for re-election. The ballot is intended as the electorates’ opportunity to choose leaders based upon their pre-election statements and history. A qualified person in disagreement with local decisions can run for office in the next calendared election. The loss of an election is an intended consequence when the electorate does not agree with an official’s decisions.
A second intended process for change is for those in disagreement to participate in the agendized discussions of government. For example, attend a school board meeting, volunteer to serve on district committees, and engage with the school board and administration. Regular meetings of the school board are not public meetings where those in attendance vote on matters. Regular meetings are open to the public with agendized opportunities for persons to speak directly to the board. Committee participation requires more “roll up your sleeves and get involved in the details” work. In most districts with board members, faculty and staff, and parents involved in committee work, committees are where different ideas are freely discussed and reasoned recommendations are formulated for Board consideration.
Thirdly, the ballot provides the electorate an opportunity to remove an elected official. Article 13, Section 12 of the WI Constitution describes the process for recalling an official one year after being elected. No reasons for a recall are required to be given, according to the Constitution. Members of the community in disagreement with the decisions of elected officials have a clear pathway to change their elected decision makers through recall. Wisconsin is 2nd in the nation in filing petitions for recalling local school board members (CA is 1st). Recall is an intended consequence when the electorate does not agree with an official’s decisions. This is a clear statement of who decides and how decisions are made.
The recall process, though distracting, does not disrupt the proper and regular business of a school board. It is intended to cause a change in who decides and potentially what is decided. In the mean time, timely decisions of the school board, such as approving budgets, procuring school supplies and approving payment of bills, hiring and employing school personnel, legislating policy, and approving school calendars, go on.
Contrary to statutory change, disruption and chaos are intended to make the confrontation of loud voices the new “who decides” what is taught and how it is taught for school district decisions. Already I observe school board presidents ending board meetings without completing a posted agenda because of a hostile take over the board room. I read of agendas being changed to avoid items of controversy. I read that boards are limiting or eliminating opportunities for their community to speak at board business meetings. Board members report being threatened at their meetings, their places of business, and at home by those in disagreement with them. Each of these reactions is counter to the statutory duties of a school board but deemed necessary at the time.
Although Thomas Jefferson wrote, “A little rebellion now and then can be a good thing”, he did not advocate an abandonment of majority rule, representative government, or approval of mob rule. Making a clear and cogent argument is one thing; closing down the meeting where arguments are to be presented is quite different.
Is This The New Normal of School Governance: Children Pay Attention To This
The consequence of disrupting the business of a school board is not just a change of decisions. The unintended/intended outcomes assure that the next crucial and controversial decision of the district will not be decided by the board but by the presence of loud and disruptive voices It is probable that any group adopting these strategies will be able to force the elected representatives of school government to accommodate their demands if the board is to conduct its required business.
At the end of the day, adults in the community must remember that our children are watching. What and how we teach them in the school house matters a great deal to their continuing education. What and how adults behave in the business of the school house matters a great deal to how these children will behave as citizens of the future. An unintended consequence of disruptive and chaotic behavior is to teach that our children that disruptive behavior is an accepted norm.