Govern Ants

A hot, humid morning and I slowly traverse the damp space between back door and garden, still in robe and slippers, coffee cup in hand, to check my tomatoes. Ah, there is one, low on the vine, just turning. If I pluck it quickly the mocking birds will not get it. I set my cup down, stoop, one hand on mulch one reaching in for the ripe fruit, when a sudden stinging draws a gasp and jerk. My support hand is covered in fire ants, biting, stinging, swarming. I frantically swipe the fierce little insects off my hand, but not without multiple wounds, now on both hands. I retreat. The birds may have this tomato and I will add something stronger to my coffee to relieve the pain.


I have a good friend who is a superintendent. He has had a rough spring and may be on the verge of hanging it up for good. The issue for him, as it almost always is with others of his position, is governance. When practicing superintendents are asked why they are leaving a school system for another or finally retiring, they typically say it is governance issues. Read that as the supe’s relationship with the board of trustees. My friend is being swarmed by govern ants.

Via a complicated mix of variables kids go to school dragging their family background, culture, abilities, gifts, interests, expectations and values with them to sit at the feet of degreed certified teachers who drag their family background, culture, abilities, gifts, interests, expectations, values and training with them, who work in a building governed by a principal who drags his or her family background, culture, abilities, gifts, interests, expectations, values, training and experience with them while they report to a superintendent who drags his or her family background, culture, abilities, gifts, interests, expectations, values, training and experience with them, who reports to an elected school board who drag their families’ backgrounds, cultures, abilities, gifts, interests, expectations, perceptions and values with them all for the purpose of educating the kids who showed up in the first line of this long sentence. This all happens in a context of politics and funding and mandates and local priorities and perceptions. Amazing anything gets done in this highly complex human environment!

If it were possible to send a memo telling everyone to do better and be successful then we would be done. That does not work with humans. It works with computers and robots, but not with humans. Humans must be cajoled, convinced, lobbied, trained, informed and believe in the possibility of something better before they jump into a change. Change is scary, and change is seen as unreasonable if one feels successful already, or has a great excuse grounded in some external factor for current failure. Sometimes local boards want change and are frustrated that it does not happen quickly enough. Sometimes local boards want the status quo and are frustrated that change is inevitable. Regardless, boards can get frustrated. They really only have one person to receive the focus of their frustration – the supe.

School boards are really interesting governing bodies. The only requirement to run for the Board is to be a registered voter and live in the district. These are elected officials who oversee a highly complex operation that in Texas alone costs billions of dollars, employ hundreds of thousands of degreed, licensed professionals, and serve millions of children. The mandates from state and federal legislative bodies are highly complex. The curriculum is highly evolved. The assessments are highly challenging. The financial and educational accountability is so vast that few understand all the complexities. Running a public school requires knowledge and expertise of such scope and breadth that few master all of the nuances. Add to that the attributes of a highly complex human institution described in the third paragraph above and it is apparent that leading a school system is very demanding. School board members enter office with no background, no training, and no experience in any of the facets of public education. They are not required to have a college degree and most do not. They are not required to have studied the parameters and variables of professional practice prior to approving contracts. They are not required to have mastered the school finance system prior to approving the budget and setting the tax rate. They are not required to understand the sociological and psychological leadership dynamics in motivating a labor intensive group of professionals to change their behavior. There are few quantitative measures to judge the quality of the performance of school systems despite decades of legislative attempts to create such metrics. The event horizon for successful schooling is decades away, not months when the scantron sheet results arrive. Board members are good people, arriving on the job to serve their communities and possibly to accomplish some personal agenda relative to an individual employee or program. But, they are people, both precious and flawed, and they are not educators, not professional, and they swarm over superintendents as though they know more about schools than the hired CEO. The governance issue is one of govern ants, and it is the supe that gets stung.

This is much more common in small systems. Texas has over 1,000 school systems, but the median sized district is just under 900 kids. That means most school systems in Texas are small. In small towns everyone knows school board members and school board members know everyone. This dynamic alone is like bait for govern ants. A father mad at the football coach does not talk to the football coach; he talks to his childhood friend the school board member. A mother mad that she cannot take a cupcake to her elementary daughter’s classroom during the day does not talk to the principal; she talks to her neighbor, the school board member. A set of parents exasperated and embarrassed that they cannot help their 6th grader with math homework does not talk to the teacher or the principal; they call a school board member. Board members form opinions regarding staff and programs from informal feedback that occurs outside the professional evaluation loop. Sometimes, the professionals are ignorant of the opinions being formed, sometimes not. Once formed, however, it is almost impossible to change.

(This informal, unprofessional evaluation system also happens in larger systems, but usually as the result of some negative media coverage. Let an employee do something stupid and it will be on the 6:00 news and everyone wants to know what the school system is going to do about it. Again, that falls typically on the supe. I find it interesting, however, that boards in large systems do not intervene in personnel nearly to the degree they do in small systems. Most large systems have delegated personnel decisions to the supe and remain out of it. If a system has 70,000 kids and 9,000 teachers, the 7 member board is not likely involved in individual professional evaluations and surely does not know all the teachers. In a system with1400 kids and 120 teachers with a board the same size as the large system, all 7 members of the board are likely to know the teachers. They know the principals even better.)

So let us say that a highly successful teacher is perceived by the board as incompetent. That perception is formed by informal parental complaints fed to board members by parents of the students in the class. The teacher is too hard. She expects too much. She cannot explain the material as is evidenced by the fact that the child does not understand. Her sense of rigor, standards, expectations are too high and she has the gall to award grades of less than an “A” to students of parents of stature. Board members hear this over and over, but do not share it with the supe nor encourage the parent to meet with the teacher. Rather, the board members assure the parents they will take care of the problem; after all, they are a member of the board. The supe and principal and teacher, however, continue to celebrate and support the outcomes achieved in the classroom. Clearly this teacher is outstanding. Not just from standardized test results, but by the level of work, the level of success, and the ongoing measures of continual student progress all indicate students in her class are learning and learning very well. This teacher is perceived as a leader, a star, by many parents, peers and students. When graduates are asked who best prepared them for a post high school future, this teacher is consistently named. She is a keeper, and the principal and supe know if their own children were in the building this is the teacher they would want.

The principal recommends to the supe who recommends to the board that this teacher’s contract should be renewed and extended. The board votes no. Chaos ensues. The chaos is a governance issue. Who should evaluate professional staff? Who should decide who continues in employment or not? Who manages the districts personnel? These are governance issues. And they are intense in small towns. Sometimes this intensity is generated over a teacher, sometimes over a principal, sometimes over a coach. Regardless, when a board and a supe are on different pages and hold different attitudes regarding personnel the system wobbles. Principals need to know that not only will the supe back them, but that the supe will have the backing of the board. Teachers need to know that not only will the principal back them, but that the supe will back the principal. When there is evidence that this is not the case, folks tremble and begin to evacuate.  The evacuation can begin to resemble a tsunami.

The evacuation can start for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it is the parent loop regarding staff. Sometimes it is the staff loop regarding administrators. Sometimes it is parents and staff regarding a coach. Regardless, when the feedback loop does not follow prescribed legal channels and the response is not a professional response, chaos ensues and evacuation happens.

When the evacuation begins, typically the board will turn to the supe to stop the flow of staff out of the district. Via an amazing set of cognitive dissonance, the board holds the supe accountable for staff while being willing to overrule the supe on staff, and then blame the supe for the consequences of doing so. Go figure.

Ultimately, the supe will leave as part of the evacuation. Having been swarmed by the govern ants he or she will be stung so deeply survival is not possible. Ultimately the board will be blamed and citizens will elect another board to stabilize the district via a new supe who hires new principals who hire new teachers. Each school system appears obligated to go through this confirmation of chaos theory every so many years – districts that are stable will move to chaos, districts that are in chaos will move to stability. The new board will be determined to support the new supe and will follow his or her recommendations because it is in the board’s best interest to make the new supe successful and stabilize the system. Once that board rotates off, an incoming board will want to flex their political power and hold the new supe more accountable and a new ant hill is formed full of govern ants with issues.

How do we stop the govern ants from swarming the system? There are policies and procedures in place that could or should stop it, but they tend not to be followed. Such policies say that only the supe can oversee professional evaluations and only the supe can make contractual recommendations to the board. There are policies that say when board members receive complaints they are to refer the complainant to the appropriate administrator and notify the supe. There are policies that require the supe and the board to annually work together as a Team of 8 to ensure that they are following the above. In systems moving from stability to chaos these are not followed.

There are some other remedies I think we should consider. If you want to seek election as a judge you better be an attorney. If you want to serve on a board that oversees the management of a system designed by law to create college-ready students, you should have a college degree. If you want to hold office as a judge, you are required to recuse yourself if someone you know or do business with shows up in your court to avoid conflict of interest. If you want to serve as a board member, you should recuse yourself on any issues that impact your own children or family members in the system. A board member with a son in athletics should be recused from all decisions relative to athletics. Seems reasonable to me, but in fact it is the opposite that happens. Folks get on the board because they have kids in the systems, programs they want to influence and employees they want to get rid of. It is the opposite of objectivity and clearly a conflict of interest, but it is local school politics. Other remedies could include placing all personnel decisions, (hiring, firing, contractual), in the hands of the supe and requiring the board to simply evaluate the supe and his or her ability to move the system toward board approved goals.

The above could help, but it is not likely to happen. Other remedies get kicked around like appointed boards, which makes little sense to me considering the question of who would appoint the boards. The system will be even more politicized. Perhaps the superintendent should be elected. Makes less sense to me than appointing boards as the possible conflict between boards and supes will escalate and the system will be even more politicized. Perhaps supes should be appointed by an outside agency. Maybe we should move from the Baptist model of hiring superintendents where each system hires their own, to the Methodist model where an educational bishop, i.e. commissioner, assigns a supe to serve a district. I kind of like that idea, but given how political it has become at the state level that carries worries of its own as well.

Regardless, in an age of high stakes accountability a supe must be even more professionally prepared than ever. In this same context where decision making at the local level has been removed to the state and federal level, boards have little to do except drift into the professional decision making arena. School systems are not designed to be efficient or effective while being held accountable to be both.

Schools are intensively human endeavors. Humans take their children and their tax dollars very seriously so there will always be passion around schools. Who will lead the system and make the decisions will always be a source of strife. In the best of scenarios, it will be open and collaborative, a lay board listening to a professional supe and a professional supe remaining attuned to the perceptions of the lay board. When that open and honest communication fails, chaos ensues, the earth moves, a tsunami arises and folks evacuate. After the wave, the first to return will be insects.

Govern ants.

The birds can have my tomatoes. At least until I find a way to eliminate the ants and not destroy the fruit of my garden.