You've probably seen makeover shows like Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares and Restauarant: Impossible. They typically take a venerable restaurant that has lost its way, months or weeks away from bankruptcy, and give them a second chance. That usually means: everything must go! The decor, the menu, the sloppy / dirty kitchen, sometimes the chefs.
Aren't our school districts in roughly the same condition? Fifty years ago it was seemingly wonderful, rigorous, disciplined, and a financial marvel by today's standards. In came the unions and the experts. Out went accountability. Up went the cost. Down went the results. Old are aging buildings, not kept up, some unused for years. New are what should be wholly unacceptable acheivement gaps.
And yet, our school boards and administrators continue to promise "A Future Without Limits" (Anoka-Hennepin) while "Uniting Communities of Excellence" (Osseo). We get welcoming speeches every fall and gushing tributes every spring. And a jeremiad about inadequate funding every Legislative session - and election. It's not working, the whole system, at every level. End it, don't mend it.
I must allow some reality, that vouchers or some other private sector enabling system won't happen. But I can see a world without elected school boards. The easy case would be outside the metropolitan area. Let the county board hire the superintendent. And when they don't perform, they get sacked promptly like a sheriff unable to cope with a rising crime rate or internal corruption. It would much curtail the Kabuki dance that typifies far too many board meetings.
In the Twin Cities, it may not be the County that decides, there being too many districts and/or some conflicts of interest. But I think an appointed joint powers board from the cities would still be an improvement over traditional school boards whose elections are heavily influenced by the unions. Like their outstate county board equivalents, they have one job: hire and when necessary fire the superintendent.
There's more. The school districts per se should be stripped of all responsibility for property management, the reasons obvious enough. Let the cities who own and manage other city properties own the school properties and lease them to the districts. If Plymouth residents want Pilgrim Lane reopened, make District 281 a lease offer they can't refuse.
I am obviously rambling a bit, but that's what we need, this sort of rambling - brainstorming - to get rid of the school board metaphor, an institution of the last century that we can do without in this century. For if this doesn't work for you liberals out there, then privitization is the only thing left.
Schools are very much a community thing. Most of us don't interact with government on a regular basis. Families with kids in school interact with government on a daily basis. Public schools are part of our neighborhoods. I happen to live within easy walking distance of four of them.
County government is about the most remote form of government I know. The county board consists of mostly political dead enders who conduct their election campaign in obscurity. The one thing the Hennepin County board did that I know of was build the Twins Stadium. The deal they made for that was perhaps the worst deal any public entity has made for any public facility that I have ever heard of. The idea that we should turn over our schools for their management, those buildings which I live so close to, simply shocks me.
Posted by: Hiram | Monday, September 05, 2011 at 06:31 AM
"If Plymouth residents want Pilgrim Lane reopened, make District 281 a lease offer they can't refuse."
Do you really want to turn over control of Plymouth property to people who live in Minneapolis?
Posted by: Hiram | Monday, September 05, 2011 at 07:17 AM