Must be willing to work with the school board

I was forwarded the following from a reader from Seattle. A must read!
-Jeffrey J. Ortiz



Must Be Willing to Work for Dysfunctional Board
Do you wonder why more and more cities are sacking their school boards and turning the schools over to mayors? Come sit in on a Seattle School Board meeting. If that doesn't convince you to hand over the system to the mayor, nothing will.

What's wrong with the Seattle school board? Name a dysfunction, this one has it: lack of vision, lack of urgency, lack of leadership, inability to cooperate or accept the consequences of its decisions, misunderstanding of its role and, to top things off, spinelessness. All these flaws came together in mid-October when, confronted by a boisterous group of protesters, it voted 5-2 to cancel plans to consolidate several schools in its rapidly shrinking system.

Superintendent Raj Manhas, who had worked hard for the past three years to restore fiscal order to the system (he inherited a $35 million deficit in 2003), promptly announced he would leave at the end of the school year. And who can blame him? He had delivered a school-closure plan requested by the board, endured insults from protesters (one bellowed "go back to India!" at him), only to see board members cave in.

School system observers were disgusted. "What this board did was make it perfectly clear that if you can mount enough public protest, you can break them down," the director of an education think-tank at the University of Washington told the Seattle Times. "It's very questionable now whether the board can make any kind of hard decision."

Now, of course, it has an even greater task ahead: finding somebody willing to take the difficult job of superintendent and work for such a dysfunctional board. "The first question a candidate (for superintendent) usually asks is, what is the board like?" the head of an academic search firm told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Some worried that the chaos at the top will seep down in the system, making it harder to attract schoolteachers. "Who's going to want to come to work here?" a ninth-grade teacher asked. "As a teacher, who is going to want to come now that they see how we treat our leaders?"

So is the Seattle School Board ashamed of itself? Some members are, but others aren't. The board's vice president said after Manhas' resignation announcement she felt the board had "hit a new low that I've never seen before, but it's my hope that we reflect and ask ourselves throughout the city, 'Why are we here?' "

Yeah, right. The school board president told the Seattle Times after Manhas' announcement that she hadn't asked him to reconsider. "That's his decision," she said curtly.

Footnote: One state representative has drafted a bill to place two appointed members on the school board. The "inconsistency of decisions" from the board, he told a reporter, "continues to undermine the public's confidence." But would adding two sane people improve things very much? Perhaps it's time instead to think about closing down the entire circus.