When I attended the Board of Directors meeting of Wisconsin Association of School Boards (WASB) last week, I was curious just how my fellow directors were reacting to all the noise coming out of Madison. A couple board members were right there with Governor Walker wanting to do away with collective bargaining. But several other members had gone to state capitol rallies and stood side-by-side with the public employees in opposing the Governor’s budget repair bill.
Around the state, reactions were coming back to WASB. Some school boards stated that they would withdraw from WASB if the organization sided with the public employees. Other school boards stated they would withdraw from the organization if WASB sided with Walker.
But the one thing virtually all the directors agreed on was that school boards have less and less to say about how they run their districts. WASB has asked for more authority in the bargaining process in such areas as picking health insurance providers, management rights, and some control over wages. But WASB has never called for a virtual ending of collective bargaining. Judging from what we heard from around the state, there seems to be no consensus on the matter.
WASB members have called for educators to share the burden during these tough economic times, but when it came to setting an exact percentage that educators should pay, a lot of delegates at the WASB convention in January wanted to leave it up to each individual district. They just wanted more tools in negotiations. Most school boards would just like to have the state butt out of a lot of areas and let school districts, school boards and unions, work together to get the job done.
The folks in Madison, both legislative and administrative, continue to create a patchwork of rules, regulations, and laws that are often contradictory and counterproductive. Just because these elected official all went to school at one time or another doesn’t mean they are experts in education.
That doesn’t mean that citizen school boards are experts either, but at least they have to live under the rules that they create for their districts and listen to hours of presentations by their superintendents and the heartfelt testimonies from parents, teachers, and taxpayers. Lawmakers in Madison listen for a few hours, pass a law, have the governor sign it, and move on.
It also means that school districts are just as sick of the mandates coming from the Wisconsin State School Superintendent and the U.S. Department of Education. Milwaukee is sick of bureaucrats telling us what to do that never taught in an urban setting and have no understanding of the complexity of our problems. I have told them so on more than one occasion.
No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was a well-meaning but misdirected law which drives school districts to spend too much time in test preparation rather than real education.
We all understand that more and more money comes from state and federal coffers than from local property taxes. We all understand that both the state and federal authorities have a vested interest, even a right, to have some say in the educational outcomes for the common good.
But it would help if occasionally folks at these higher levels of government would spend a little more time listening and a lot less time talking at us – that means Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, State Superintendent Tony Evers and Governor Scott Walker.
