Last night the Longmeadow School Committee held a public discussion with the School Department’s entire 10-member administrative team that proved to me that the political firestorm ignited by the School Committee’s 4-3 vote not to renew the Superintendent’s contract has exacerbated a serious problem that is far bigger than the Superintendent. For my analysis of this controversy to date go here, here, and here.
The Longmeadow School Committee has lost the trust and confidence of the town’s professional educators. Last night the administrative team explained how and why they no longer trust the School Committee and even told the Committee how it could begin to regain their trust. The School Committee Chair, speaking for the Committee as a unit but only for the actual will of four members of the seven member board, listened to the administrators’ pleas and while expressing great sympathy and respect for them, flatly refused to take the steps requested by the administrative team to help heal what the administrators called a “fractured” relationship between the Committee and the administrative team. Instead, she implored administrators to simply put the superintendent’s already sealed fate behind them and find ways to move forward in a trusting and collaborative way.
The performance of the Superintendent is obviously debatable, while the legal authority to replace him is not. The School Committee alone has the legal authority to replace a Superintendent. To do so, they need the votes of at least four Committee members to dismiss a Superintendent and the votes of at least five Committee members to hire a new Superintendent. Four members of the School Committee decided last November to dismiss (via a contract non-renewal vote) the superintendent, who they believe to be untrustworthy, unprofessional, and unresponsive to both Committee and parental concerns. Though there are clearly some town residents and parents who share the Committee majority’s view of the Superintendent’s performance, it is even clearer that the town’s professional educators and three of seven School Committee members very strongly disagree with that view. This reflects the legal, procedural, and political contexts within which the School Committee four-member majority voted against renewing the Superintendent’s contract, and against even extending it for one year.
It is very clear to me that the four members of the Committee who want to dismiss the Superintendent largely ignored two out of three of these important contexts. Relying entirely on their legal authority to dismiss a Superintendent, the four members of the Committee majority failed to properly consider both the procedural and political obstacles to the accomplishment of their desired outcome. They pushed ahead without a viable procedural or political plan. They ignored the procedural fact that at least one of the three dissenting Committee members would have to be persuaded to help them implement their choice to replace the current superintendent and they also failed to appreciate the damaging political fallout that their decision would produce.
What this means is that despite the clear procedural and political obstacles described above, four elected representatives of the Longmeadow voters entrusted with the oversight of the School Department took an action that has generated enough political opposition to force town residents to have to consider, at a Special Town Meeting called for this purpose, a petition to amend the Town Charter to add a provision allowing citizens to recall local elected officials whose conduct is thought to warrant removal prior to the expiration of their elective terms. This political over-reaction was caused by the Committee’s under-appreciation of their political responsibilities.
Responsible leadership requires sensitivity to and accountability for both the intended and unintended consequences of one’s decisions and actions. For public leaders (elected or appointed) this responsibility is complicated significantly by the range of interests and perspectives among those to whom accountability is owed. The reality that public leadership sometimes requires displeasing some of those to whom accountability is owed often compels public officials to retreat to legalistic notions of responsibility. Harry Truman’s famous line, “the buck stops here,” conveys the idea that the public hires officials, officials do the job as they see it, and if the voters disagree then their recourse is to choose not to re-hire the officials. The beauty of this legal contract theory of responsibility is that it is clean and uncomplicated.
In many contexts this legal contract approach has considerable merit. In emergent situations when high impact leadership decisions must be made quickly, this sort of command and control approach can be a necessity. However, this approach can be very counter-productive in other contexts. With high impact leadership decisions that are not as time sensitive and will have lasting, serious, and complex impacts, a more democratic or dialectical approach is more prudent. Such an approach, frankly, ought to be the default for day-to-day public policy making in a democracy because it fosters the kind of disciplined exercise of critical self-reflection in decision making necessary to routinely earn the acceptance and cooperation of stake holders.
Public officials commonly feel cross-pressured in dealing effectively with cross-cutting stake holder interests and perspectives. Public officials committed to critical self-reflection as a rule of thumb reserve the more legalistic notion of responsible decision making for cases requiring it because in cases not requiring it the employment of a “buck stops here” approach creates unnecessary and counter-productive dissent and even handicaps the decision maker’s ability to mitigate the resultant harm to unit cohesion and mission accomplishment going forward.
I believe that the School Committee’s approach to this highly controversial non-renewal decision fostered the present conflict and left the Committee Chair and members unable to satisfactorily explain or justify their actions. The inability to clearly and methodically walk stake holders through their reasoning indicates that the Committee didn’t clearly, methodically, and self-reflexively walk themselves through their own reasoning prior to the final vote. The anger at the scripted, platitude-rich statements of the Committee majority on the night of the fateful vote was based on the perception that the Committee’s decision was not properly and thoroughly considered. This perception, real or imagined, is very problematic in its own right and any responsible public tribunal should take pains to prevent it. Because the Committee majority sees its responsibility to decide in a legalistic and black and white way, they failed to consider the substantive problems that their inability to explain this decision to stake holders would have on their ability to effectively lead the School Department going forward.
The present focus by some folks on both sides of this conflict on personal umbrage and procedural etiquette, rather than on the substance of the controversial decision itself, is highly counter-productive and should have been anticipated and accounted for by the Committee before finalizing the non-renewal decision. When people personalize public conflicts it is usually because they lack the experience and knowledge to engage more substantively and productively. Several folks have scolded those calling for the resignations of Committee members, arguing that this was an inappropriate personal attack that should have no place in this situation. However, had the Committee taken greater time and care in their effort to replace the Superintendent, the folks calling for their heads immediately after the vote almost certainly would have themselves taken more time and care in formulating their tactical response. Instead, they were offended and did what frustrated and offended people often do, they expressed their feelings of frustration and offense. The Committee asserted its legal authority without adequate sensitivity to stake holder perceptions and angry stake holders returned the favor by asserting their political power to resist without adequate sensitivity to School Committee members’ feelings or perceptions.
This is not a surprising reaction from citizens not directly involved in the issue at hand. Indeed, in her own defense of the difference between her view and that of the folks supporting the Superintendent, the Chair of the School Committee pointed out that she has much more information and understanding of the issue that they do. While this is undoubtedly true, what the Chair seems not to realize is that her greater scope of knowledge is why she should have anticipated the impact of this asymmetry of knowledge and factored it into the method (and time) used to make the decision that has now deeply fractured the community. In other words, she not only has greater knowledge to make the call, she and her colleagues also have greater responsibility to justify (or at least thoroughly explain) the call to the stake holders to whom the School Committee is accountable in a substantive ongoing functional way, not merely an electoral procedural way.
At last night’s meeting, the folks displaying the greatest professionalism, discipline, and respect for the authority and integrity of the policy makers, the policy process, and the public were the professional educational administrators who run our schools. I left the meeting feeling as though these dedicated career professionals deserve more of our deference on both education policy and education policy making and even more convinced that only the intervention of Longmeadow’s voters can extricate the community from this unfortunate situation.