School Board Huffing about Culver is Ironic

Last week I took the opportunity to bash the Des Moines School Board in this space for voting to dismiss school 90 minutes early every Wednesday next year. I believe this decision is bad for education. I also railed about the board making little effort to involve parents, students and the community in the decision. Now it appears the School Board got a taste of an ironically similar acrid brew and they are feeling left out.

Des Moines joined the other six large Iowa school districts and refused to sign on to Governor Chet Culver’s entry application for the federal government’s Race to the Top funds. Des Moines School Board president Connie Boesen said, “We’ve had no input, and we’re the ones that have to be accountable and implement it.”

Wow, I bet those words tasted nasty coming out of a school board member’s mouth after spending more than a week telling parents and community members that the opportunity for discussion about early dismissals had past. Hopefully, she and her colleagues will learn how it feels to be excluded from the conversation and revisit their recent actions.

Regardless, Ms. Boesen did the right thing. In truth, she had little choice. The board and the community need to be a part of the process. The Governor and the Legislature were told by the feds months ago that the application for the Race funds would be due January 19. Waiting until this week to push legislation through at record speed and ask for school board presidents to sign on to the application with scant to no public discussion is flat out wrong.

Often, those who pay the price for well intended, yet hastily concocted government programs are the very people the government is supposedly out to help. The Race to the Top looks like a contender for such a program. It is fraught with numerous potentially harmful consequences for our nation’s schools. Let alone the fact the program description and the application itself sound like NBC’s latest reality show. Building better schools will not be done with gimmicky competitions. It is going to take a real commitment to fund schools and empower teachers, parents and communities to reinvent the way we run our schools.

A handful of school boards and states are letting the first of two application deadlines pass without being bullied by the federal government to play a bobbing for dollars contest. If most of them were to do so, perhaps Washington would figure out it is time to stop waving tax dollars in our faces and expect we are going to ask how high when they say jump. Good policy isn’t a race to be won. Good government comes through setting standards and cooperating with each other to get results.


Note: The following was added Saturday, January 16, the day after the original post.
Today, the school board president made statements to the Des Moines Register even more thick with irony than yesterday. “We need to be more centered on students than adults.” Really? Siding with the union to dismiss school early once a week was more about adults than students? Maybe the president will ask the board to reconsider their own actions next week now that they understand that education is more about students than employees.

From the Saturday edition of the Des Moines Register: “Des Moines school board chairwoman Connie Boesen said state leaders made serious missteps in drafting the legislation because they didn’t allow districts ample time to weigh in.

‘We have shown success and we need more flexibility to get schools turned around, not more constraints,” Boesen said. “It was all so hastily done, and I don’t understand that. We want to be able to have the latitude to handle educational programming in ways that make differences for students. We need to be more centered on students than adults.”


This entry was first published as a Des Moines Register blog entry.