What I learned serving as a state school board member
By Chester E. Finn, Jr. 03/26/2019
A surprising array of events are arranged in four-year cycles: leap years, the Olympics, presidential elections, and many “terms of office,” including those on the Maryland State Board of Education, where I just concluded my tour of duty.
There’s much that I won’t miss, including the obese briefing books we were sent every month, the depressing old Baltimore building in which we met, the decrepit garage next door where we parked, and the congested interstates that strained to get me there and home. I won’t miss tussling with lobbyists, politicians, and bureaucrats who don’t want anything to change (except, please, send more money!). I surely won’t say that my four-year sentence flew by. I will, however, miss board colleagues who, with almost no exceptions, struggle to do right by the state’s children, especially the neediest among them and who, for zero compensation, have committed—and, in my absence will continue to commit—many, many hours to earnest, albeit exceptionally difficult, efforts to give those kids the education they deserve.
Most states have such a board, and in many—as in Maryland—its members are appointed by the governor, often—as in Maryland—with confirmation by some branch of the legislature...
First, as a state-board member, you’re now part of a high-stakes political process, so understand that, if you and your colleagues set out to change anything of consequence, you’ll have enemies and you’ll need allies. Don’t suppose that you’re actually in charge, no matter what constitutions, statute books, and regulations may say...
Second, be wary of the bureaucracy that nominally works for you. State education departments are as set in their ways and as attuned to traditional stakeholders and their interests as are schools and districts. The first response to any reform suggestion is sure to be some combination of “here’s why that would be really hard to do” and “let’s consult the stakeholders and get their reactions and ideas.” The state superintendent is somewhere in between, formally (in Maryland and many states) accountable to the board that hired him/her but also enmeshed in the state’s longstanding assumptions, obligations, bureaucratic procedures (and capacities), and intertwined educator-career paths...
Third, do your utmost to control the agenda and contain the interruptions. Every organization with a board is capable of drowning that board in so much paperwork, so many information items, and such a long list of trivial issues for review as to prevent board members from even getting enough airtime to present their ideas and raise other matters. What’s more, any veteran executive (and every state superintendent comes from that tribe!) knows that control comes from managing the agenda, paper flow, and lines of communication. At our agency, save for a handful of carefully vetted exceptions, staffers and board members were barred from communicating directly. Everything had to channel through the front office...
Fourth, be aware that sunlight sometimes burns. Many states have “government in the sunshine” or “open-meeting” laws. Maryland’s is pretty rigid: save for obvious “executive session” matters such as personnel and quasi-judicial issues, pretty much every policy body and its sub-units must not only hold all meetings in public but must also give public notice of when and where it will meet. There’s an elaborate enforcement mechanism and a bunch of enforcement-minded attorneys...
Fifth and finally, despite all of the foregoing, don’t give up. It’s not totally hopeless. Moments of opportunity arise. Stars have been known to align. Gains, however incremental, can be made. Once in a while, the step backward is only a half-step, and then you can inch forward again.
Constrained as we were by legislators, we still managed to create a wholly new school-accountability system that was—and is—better than anything that preceded it. (Schools now get “star” ratings, for example. Gifted kids qualify as a “subgroup” whose progress must be disclosed. There’s more.) Our efforts to overhaul high-school-graduation requirements and teacher-certification practices, though resisted by stakeholders’ addiction to the status quo, coincided with the work of an influential statewide education-reform commission and produced a unified array of worthwhile, if imperfect, recommendations for change. And on those occasions when the state superintendent’s own priorities turned out to align with the board’s—well, even the bureaucracy could end up helping more than hindering!...
