OEA Chooses a President

On Friday, the Ohio Education Association Representative Assembly elected my friend Becky Higgins to be OEA’s next President. Some mutual friends have encouraged me to post a few thoughts, and I’m happy to do so.

Most of the readers of this blog are educators, most of those are OEA members, and most of those are North Eastern OEA members; but if you’re not one of those and you run across this blog and wonder what in the world all the fuss is about, I’ll try to explain that too. The OEA presidency matters here because OEA is Ohio’s largest union and largest education organization. But its influence goes beyond our borders because Ohio has become a pivotal state, in both national political campaigns and all the ideological issues at play throughout the country.

To get to the statewide battle, Becky had to win a “primary” at NEOEA’s fall Representative Assembly. Last fall, Becky and André Taylor ran a spirited campaign as friends and competitors, and NEOEA’s delegates chose Becky to advance to the state contest. By then, valuable time had been lost in starting the statewide campaign, and it’s probably fair to say that Becky started the statewide campaign as an underdog.

After all, her opponent, Bill Leibensperger, was OEA’s sitting Vice President. He had served an apprenticeship as OEA Secretary-Treasurer and Vice President covering twelve of the last thirteen years. Since OEA, like many organizations, frequently elevates sitting Vice Presidents to the Presidency, a lot of smart people regarded him as the prohibitive favorite.

So why did Becky win? (Notice, I didn’t ask “how”: I suspect that insiders on both sides have already begun  formulating answers to that question.)

I don’t think it was because of dissatisfaction with Bill’s performance as Vice President. During the Senate Bill 5 repeal (the historic 2011 defense of Ohio public-employee collective bargaining rights), Bill had met privately with representatives of Ohio’s governor, and he had been criticized widely for that. Bill posted a defense of his actions online, but Becky didn’t use the incident as an issue in her campaign.

I don’t think it was because of NEOEA’s numeric superiority. Neither NEOEA nor Central OEA/NEA (Bill’s district association) has enough delegates to carry an election without winning over significant numbers of delegates from other parts of the state.

So if those things weren’t part of the picture, what was? I think it comes down to three things: first, Becky herself; second, campaign style and substance; and third (surprisingly, perhaps), experience.

First: people who have worked with Becky have found that she is approachable and kind, yet tough and knowledgeable. And I think that those qualities came across even among people who doubted her credentials. As OEA’s President, I think she’ll benefit from members’ good will–even from members who didn’t support her candidacy.

Second: I think the campaigns had something to do with it. OEA campaigns have often been based on candidates’ résumés, connections, and personalities, not so often on actual issues. This isn’t surprising: in organizations like OEA, candidates frequently agree on most issues, and voters have to base their decisions on something. But Becky ran an unusually substantive campaign, publishing weekly position papers on critical issues. (You can read them at beckyhiggins4oeapresident.wordpress.com.) Those “Weekly Issues” may have convinced  people that Becky had a good grasp of OEA’s situation and should be considered seriously as a candidate. Bill never really seemed to match that level of detail.

Finally, Becky was able to cite her experience as a local and district President. In questions from the delegates, Becky pointed out that presidents face situations and decisions that other officers don’t face. Bill pointed out that he comes from a large local and a district association that don’t change their presidents very often, so the opportunity to show what he could do as a president wasn’t open to him. A lot of the RA delegates are local presidents, and other delegates consider their presidents’ opinions when casting their own votes: I suspect that local presidents may have found Becky’s argument to be persuasive.

My own hope is that this contest has permanently raised the bar for these campaigns: that OEA delegates will expect more substance from future candidates for Association office, and that that expectation will trickle down to district associations and locals. I hope that delegates will have a better idea of what sort of experiences to look for in future candidates.

I also hope that within OEA, we will learn that the best use of Ohio’s unique district structure is not to form voting blocs but to give potential leaders an opportunity to demonstrate what they can do.

But most of all, I hope that delegates and members come to realize that sincerity, humility, and openness, when coupled with intelligence, toughness, and drive, can form a basis for effective leadership. That’s what I think Becky Higgins will show us in the years ahead.

(A disclaimer: Nothing here is any sort of official statement from NEOEA, and nothing here is based on insider information; it’s based on my own personal observations of this election as it took shape and was eventually decided, and the opinions and observations offered here are my own.)

Character Matters

Tomorrow’s Election Day comes without my writing much about this year’s Presidential race. Really, at this late date there’s not much reason to do so: everyone who knows me knows who I’m supporting, and I imagine that virtually everyone who might read this has made his or her decision–in fact, has probably voted already.

It won’t change a single mind or a single vote, but I wouldn’t feel right if I didn’t write something about this most unusual Presidential campaign, and especially about the Republican candidate, because he poses a new problem for me.

I’ve been working on political campaigns for 48 years, and I’ve made it a point to respect my political adversaries and to assume
that whatever beliefs they hold, they probably hold sincerely. That habit has served me well: even when you suspect that it’s not realistic, it’s an approach to politics and politicians that keeps you humble and avoids bitterness.

But I haven’t been able to muster that attitude for this year’s Republican nominee. I don’t claim to have some ability to see the state of a person’s soul. I understand that he is a caring family man, he is said to be a generous benefactor, and he appears to show great personal discipline. But in a person who seeks the most powerful position in the world, we expect character that goes beyond  personal rectitude.

His constant changes of positions make it clear that he has no core political values except the desire to be elected. His manipulation of facts makes it clear that he will say anything to gain a vote. And his refusal to distance himself from the bigotry and hatred voiced by the President’s more extreme opponents shows that he lacks the courage needed in a Commander in Chief.

In Eyewitness to Power (2001), David Gergen quotes Alan Simpson as having said, “If you have integrity, nothing else matters.  If you don’t have integrity, nothing else matters.”

Those two Republicans have it right. Because of Mitt Romney’s lack of integrity, nothing else matters. Quite simply, he is not worthy of his followers’ loyalty.

Nothing Extra about Extracurriculars

I spent Saturday night in Chicago, attending my graduating class’s 45th reunion at St. Patrick High School. It was my first time back at the school since a few months after I graduated. While it was great seeing some of my classmates again, the highlight of the evening was reuniting with my old chorus director, Brother Konrad Diebold. And that made me think about the importance of extracurriculars, both in my own life and in general.

A great friend of ours believes that American schools should drop their emphasis on interscholastic sports and allow cities and clubs to organize recreational sports, as they do in Europe. And with all respect, I don’t think I can agree. Like it or not, extracurriculars are an integral part of the education process, and one of the great tragedies of education today is the obsessive pursuit of high test scores to the exclusion of almost everything else.

St. Pat’s is generally thought of as a fine school. It has been able to continue its mission of providing a faith-based education for young men as it did when it was founded in 1861. And yet, with a few exceptions, what I remember about St. Pat’s isn’t the academics. I was an indifferent student, working hard on things that interested me and not at all on things that didn’t. What St. Pat’s did have was an outstanding lineup of extracurricular activities. I have always had widely varied interests, and I belonged to a lot of extracurriculars in school. I very nearly lived at school, staying late many nights and working there on weekends. Forty-five years after graduating, I am still using things I learned in the extracurricular activities offered by my high school.

  • In our tour on Saturday, one of the sites we visited was the gym. There in a loft above the gym was – as it was then – the TV studio. In the sixties, when videotape was an exotic technology and black-and-white TV cameras were the size of suitcases, St. Pat’s had a TV station that delivered news broadcasts to the freshman building (which had closed-circuit TVs) and televised basketball games to overflow audiences. As a director and cameraman, I had a chance to work with that technology, and it began a romance with photography that continued into college and beyond.
  • How many schools have a Political Science Club? St. Pat’s did, and it was there that I learned about parliamentary procedure. When the club also sent me to interview a Congressional candidate, it led  to my volunteering in the first of many political campaigns.
  • Not enough schools have speech and debate teams, but St. Pat’s did: it was called the Sheen Club, named after the powerful Catholic preacher Bishop Fulton J. Sheen. As a member of the Sheen Club and a speech and debate competitor, I learned to become more comfortable talking in front of people.
  • As a writer and editor for Green and Gold, the school newspaper, I learned to write nonfiction on a deadline, as I continue to do today.
  • When I was a junior, the chorus needed an organist, and Brother Konrad signed me up for the job. Since the chorus already had a pianist and used the organist only occasionally, that meant that I also had a place among the singers, which began a lifetime love affair with choral singing.
  • Later that year, St. Pat’s staged Oliver, our first musical. At Brother Konrad’s request, I learned to play mallet instruments in the percussion section of the orchestra, which re-ignited a love of musical theater that had been dormant since eighth grade. I performed in the cast of Fiorello in my senior year, and those experiences helped me years later when I became a school drama director.
  • (It’s worth mentioning here that the benefits weren’t all professional. St. Pat’s was and is all-male. The chorus performed with nearby girls’s schools, and plays recruited female cast and orchestra members. These extracurriculars in particular were opportunities to meet girls, and I found I liked them.)

You may notice that I pretty much ignore athletics here. As a high school student, I generally avoided physical activity; I enjoyed being a spectator at interscholastic sports, but never participated in any. It’s clear to me, though, that athletics are just as important to many students as my non-athletic extracurricular activities were for me.

So it will come as no surprise that I think of extracurricular activities as critical to the mission of schools, at least for some students. Among the tragedies I see in school today are 1) the replacement of experiential learning with uniform, regimented instruction; 2) the equation of learning with testing; and 3) the epidemic of play-to-play schemes, which are based on the idea that extracurriculars aren’t integral to education.

For many students, it’s the extracurriculars that give them a reason to go to school every day. They did that for me.