WAS LINCOLN JUST AN IDEALIST?

A question any civics teacher should address with his/her students is:  what leads policy proposals to become policy?  For example, why does one legislative bill become a law and another does not?  In common parlance, this question is usually talked about in terms of how much do public wishes play; how much of what the people want leads to our laws; how much the public influences the acts of executive officials and affects judicial decisions?

          In terms of the national democratic bias, Americans tend to savor the Lincoln quote:  “government of the people, by the people, and for the people.”  This bias naturally assumes and/or counts on citizens having quite a say in what policy is thought of, developed, enacted, and implemented in our governance.  But what civics teachers should have their students investigate is whether this is true and if so, how often, and if not, how often does it not happen?

          In an opinion piece published today, the writer offers the following:

Congressional Republicans, meanwhile, have a long agenda of unpopular policy changes they want to make, and they won't be impeded by the fact that the majority of the public doesn't actually want tax cuts for the wealthy, corporate giveaways, or restrictions on abortion. They're going to do them because it's what they believe in, even if the public might not approve.[1]

This pundit does not seem to place much faith in the power of public opinion.

Such a civics inquiry and subsequent discussion would benefit from several issues or facts.  To begin with:  most items of concern that government officials deal with are of little or no interest to Americans assuming the entailed function is being met – the police are protecting, the roads are paved, the fires are extinguished, etc.  For example, which highway builders should be contracted to build or refurbish a nearby highway is of little interest to Joe Q. Public.  Yes, some citizens might care, but by and large, most won’t.  The clear majority of policy questions are just about such details.

          Another related item is:  how much does policy reflect how affected groups lobby policy-makers to issue favorable decisions?  Those highway building businesses, for example, want specific decisions as to who will get that next contract.  And like that case, one can multiply such concerns across all those private interests that are affected by policies that usually mean monetary rewards or losses as in tax policies.  What one can note in terms of these lobbying efforts is that the sought-after policy is usually specific.

          One last issue or concern relating to factors concerning policy making and how democratic the process is is the “collective action problem.”  To quote an expert in this realm of research:

… organizations attempting to affect policy seek a collective good that will benefit every member.  Because everyone will benefit, whether or not they have done anything to win a collective good [such as a highway], it is rational for everyone to let others do the necessary work.  The result will be little or no collective action.  The same argument holds for individuals:  why try to influence policy when letting others do the work will produce the same benefit?  And if little effort is made to influence Congress, such efforts cannot very well have much impact.[2]

The effect of the collective action problem is that most citizen action tends to be  coming only from special interests and not from the general population.  Hence, any input from the citizenry is directed at specific concerns with specific aims and goals.

          In a civics class that adopts a goal of having students engaged in political participation – for example, one that relies on federation theory, as described and explained in this blog – the teacher of that class needs to ask about the above issues.  Such a class would not simply accept that students’ interests are elsewhere, but would call on those students to defend their apathy.

By framing this overall concern repeatedly, the aim is to at least have students reflect on the democratic level of the nation’s governance and politics and on their own engagement and their related values concerning governmental and political engagement.

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[1] Paul Waldman, “Will Donald Trump's historic unpopularity hamstring his presidency?,” The Week, accessed December 16, 2016 from Windows 10 news service.

[2] Paul Burstein, American Public Opinion, Advocacy, and Policy in Congress:  What the Public Wants and What It Gets, (New York, NY:  Cambridge University Press, 2015), loc. 206-217 (in a Kindle reader).  The facts of this posting are derived from this source.

THE SCHOOL DISTRICT MAZE

With this posting, this writer wants to pick up on a theme he visits from time to time: how do you initiate change in one’s local school?  He has indicated that if the change is at all profound, one that calls on teachers and other personnel to change attitudes or even values, the task is quite complicated and difficult.  But he has also indicated that it is such a change that is needed to address the deficiencies in civics instruction which this blog has described and explained in the past.

          To date, he has outlined some of the issue areas that are involved.  For example, he described curricular philosophies and approaches which different educators might harbor that frame how any individual educator might view a proposed change.  In doing so, he hopes he indicated some of the complexities involved.  In this posting, he wants to draw the reader’s attention to the more practical concern of structure.  How is a school and, in turn, a particular class situated within a school district?

          While school districts around the country might vary a bit, they do follow a general model.  They can be summarily described by an organizational flowchart.  One can get a view of such a flowchart on the website http://www.rff.com/school_orgchart.htm .[1]  And for the purposes here, this account will describe this model by starting with a class and from there progressively point out how each level of such an organization is situated.

          Say a social studies class is housed within a department of the school, the social studies department.  That class is, of course, taught by a teacher who belongs to that department.  The department has a department head who usually does not have authority over the class or teacher, but serves more in a bureaucratic function to convey information from the administration to the teachers of the department and, at times, from those teachers to the administration depending on the issue involved.

          In terms of teachers, authority flows from the principal to the teacher.  In this, the principal is assisted by a small number of assistant principals (A Ps).  Each A P has an area of administration that he or she supervises.  These can include maintenance, discipline, counseling, etc.  Again, the level of authority can be highly limited and one who works at a school finds out that the person in charge is the principal.  Of course, some principals delegate authority to trusted A Ps, but in this writer’s experience, most principals are not so disposed when it comes to an issue of any consequence.

          Of course, principals answer to district administrators, but this can also be curtailed.  Most district wide policies can be and are shaped to adapt to the perceived needs of an individual school.  Again, based on this writer’s experience, a principal’s tenure at a school is approximately five years.  One reason a principal might not delegate much power to A Ps is that assistant principal assignments are not the province of principals, but the decision of district officials.  This prevents the principal, to any meaningful degree, from promoting a unified philosophy or approach in is his/her school.

          Principals mostly communicate with the office of an area superintendent.  This official usually supervises the workings of a number of schools in a sub- geographic area of the district.  This, of course, depends on the size of the district; some are quite small consisting of just one such area or maybe two.  Larger districts, for example Miami-Dade (a countywide district), might have three, four, or five sub-districts or regions.  There are also assistant or associate superintendents who supervise district wide functions such as maintenance or personnel.

          Of course, on top of the chart in terms of hired help is the superintendent.  He/she can be either appointed or elected.  This official does have the ability to steer the district in certain directions, but he or she, in districts of any size, is far removed from the realities of the classroom.  In all this writer’s years of teaching, he met only one superintendent and the meeting meant little to his doing his job.

          But there is still one more level of organization:  the school board.  This is a committee of elected officials who determine legal policy for the district and in many cases, hires the superintendent.  In large districts, these positions are highly susceptible to political forces.  Districts buy a lot of things and services from black (white) boards to internet services.  They probably maintain immense control over construction decisions.  As such, they are heavily lobbied by private vendors over the course of such decisions.

In other words, school districts are well established bureaucracies.  In large, urban areas, they match good sized corporations as to their structure, processes, functions, and the like.  How does change or policy change occur in such structures?  Michael A. Roberto provides a list of fundamental processes that he recommends should be followed to initiate what he calls transformative change.  They entail the following:

·        Establishing a compelling direction, a vision for the future, and the strategies for how to get there.

·        Aligning people, communicating the direction, building shared understanding, getting people to believe in the vision, and then persuading and influencing people to follow that vision.

·        Motivating and inspiring people to enact the kinds of changes and vision that you have articulated.[2]

In upcoming postings, this writer will further apply these processes to education and its bureaucratic realities.  I have left the relation of the school district to the state government for some future effort.  In terms of change though, the above description will suffice to account for the type of factors that change efforts need to address.

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[1] Accessed on December 13, 2016.

[2] Michael A. Roberto, Transformational Leadership:  How Leaders Change Teams, Companies, and Organizations, (Chantilly, VA:  The Great Courses/The Teaching Company, 2011), 20.