Campaign 2013: Education's Insider Problem

This recent oped by former LAUSD Board members Yolie Flores and Marlene Canter has me thinking about whether education has an outsider problem or, really, an insider problem.  

I'll leave the outsider argument to others, who have been repeating it ad neauseam -- and to reformers who've been falling into it over and over again (ie, disclosing a $250,000 campaign donation from Rupert Murdoch within 24 hours of primary day).

Let's focus for a moment on education's insider problem, in which public schools are invisible or inscrutable to anyone but those inside the system.

According to Flores and Canter -- good Democrats, both of them -- teachers, stakeholders, and community members used to working with them don't like it when their schools, systems, and the like are meddled with by anyone else. Their calls for democracy and local control are really just code for "go away."

Nowhere is this better illustrated than union leadership elections and school board elections, where the turnout is typically very low and thousands or even hundreds of votes make determine the outcome. According to Terry Moe, turnout for local school board elections is typically less than 10 percent.  In places as big as LAUSD, that means that control over the school board can be won by board members who receive fewer than 20,000 votes -- in some cases fewer than 10,000.

Of course, reformers stand like deer in the headlights when accused of being outsiders, make weak apologies (most of them) about campaign donations or mutter something about it being a broken political system that needs to be fixed.  But there's nothing particularly special about "insider" status, nor particularly awful about being an outsider -- especially when all it means is that you're doing or saying something that insiders don't like. 

For futher reading:  Terry Moe 2006 The Union Label on the Ballot Box  Image via Education Next.

Comments

[Mary]

Alexander, this is such a weak defense of the attempt to unseat Zimmer I have to wonder...

Are you trolling yourself?

[CarolineSF]

This is not what we saw in Los Angeles:

"Of course, reformers stand like deer in the headlights when accused of being outsiders, make weak apologies (most of them) about campaign donations or mutter something about it being a broken political system that needs to be fixed."

We saw the best-defense-is-good-though-incredibly-silly-offense tactic of claiming that insiders have no right to make donations because they're self-interested. As I've said elsewhere (ad nauseam, if you will, except that was in response to the barrage of ridiculous commentaries from the reformy propaganda shops), based on this reasoning, communities should not be allowed to vote on their own issues, because they're self-interested.

And we saw absurd, false-equivalence charges that teachers' unions that represent teachers in the district are "outsiders" on a par with millions flowing in from Bloomberg, Rhee etc. The "reformers" certainly tried to fire back.

Oh, and we already saw at least one of those laments about low voter turnout that didn't take into account the high percentage of voters who vote by mail nowadays. "Reform" goddess Gloria Romero write a completely inaccurate commentary about that for the right-wing Orange County Register after the last election, after her pet union-busting measure, Prop. 32, was defeated in California.

[CarolineSF]

Here's the inaccurate (willfully or not?) Gloria Romero commentary with comments at the end correcting it.

http://4lakidsnews.blogspot.com/2012/11/gloria-romero-gets-it-wrong-half.html

I predict more of the same from the "reformers" after their slapdown in their showpiece race in L.A.