Some Advice to Advocates

Now that the battleground has been staked out (see “The Beatings Will Cease When Your Morale Improves“), many of my colleagues and friends are preparing to engage our adversaries.
In this article, I’ll offer some advice to those, especially public educators, who plan to talk with their legislators, whether with letters, email, phone calls, or committee testimony.
First and most important: Confine yourself to our issues. Of course you have opinions about other issues; we all do. But if you speak as an education advocate, talk about education and leave your other causes at home. As an educator, you know something about schools and students, and many people will value your observations on them. But you’re probably not an expert on life and choice, gun control, the death penalty, or health care, and people generally don’t value your opinions on those topics in the same way.
(A corollary to this principle: just because it’s provided by a government agency, don’t confuse public education with the government services enshrined in the liberal pantheon. Public schools aren’t some New Deal or Great Society program dreamed up by a liberal Democratic President; they were enshrined in the laws of the early colonies over 350 years ago and incorporated in the Articles of Confederation. The Ohio Constitution language calling for a “thorough and efficient system of common schools” is over 150 years old. When you incorporate public education into liberalism, you don’t gain any more support from liberals, and you lose the support of conservatives.)
Second: Stay within your experience. Chances are that you haven’t memorized every fact about the topic. Generalizations tend to sound like conjecture after a while. Talk about how the issue under discussion affects your work, especially your students and their families. You know those best, and if you’re honest you can’t make a mistake. Tell your stories.
Some fifteen years ago, I testified on tenure before the Ohio Senate. I chose to emphasize the impact that I thought a proposed weakening of contract protections would have on the discussions I had with my principal about my annual evaluations and on the academic climate within my school. Because I was talking about something I knew well from my own experience, I was on pretty solid ground through the encounter. And that proved to be a good thing: following my three-minute statement (which of course I had been able to craft carefully), the Senators grilled me for eighteen more minutes (which of course I couldn’t have prepared for). Staying within my own experience helped me to negotiate the traps some of them tried to set.
Third: Don’t overreact. You and I probably agree that whatever bill you’re opposing is clearly aimed at destroying our profession; but even the legislator who submitted it may not know that. Remember Hanlon’s Law: “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.” He or she probably didn’t actually write it and almost certainly doesn’t know all its implications.
For all our sophistication, we have never devised a foolproof system for looking into a person’s soul. The person you’re dealing with believes in his or her position, even if it’s hard to believe that any right-minded person could do so. Even the best people are sometimes wrong. Their being wrong doesn’t make them less good, unless through pride, malice, or self-interest they cling to their error. But their being good doesn’t make them less wrong either, and if their facts or reasoning are faulty, you have every right to correct them, perhaps vehemently. As you do so, remember that intemperate language only gives our adversaries an excuse to discount what you have to say.
Without exaggeration, I will say that we are embarking on the legislative battle of a lifetime. We didn’t ask for it, but we can’t shrink from it. If you’re going to be a soldier in this battle, fight honorably, fight hard, and fight smart.

The Beatings Will Cease When Your Morale Improves

The newly-elected Ohio General Assembly has submitted its plan for educators in the new Ohio of Governor John Kasich and the Tea Party. Without (and even, perhaps, with) strenuous intervention, Ohio’s public schools will be poorer in nearly every conceivable way.

We thought we might be in trouble when the STRS Board swallowed hard and produced the plan which became House Bill 69, which will cut teacher pensions. We knew we had an enemy when a Fairfield representative submitted House Bill 21, which would incorporate student test scores in teacher licensure, make exceptions for Teach for America alumni, and permit unlimited licensing of e-schools, which replace teachers with computers.

Pernicious legislation grows in Columbus like kudzu, but we’ve been able to beat back legislative assaults before. This time we face an attack which would change the very rules of the game: last week, Senator Shannon Jones (R-Springboro) submitted Senate Bill 5, which would neuter unions and thus drastically limit our ability to do anything about other legislative horrors.

And as if that weren’t bad enough, Governor Kasich, while steadfastly refusing to have any communications with public employee unions, has indicated that Senator Jones’s bill doesn’t go far enough, and that he may incorporate anti-union language in the 2011-13 budget which the law requires him to submit by March 15.
In forty years of watching Ohio defy its constitution’s call for a “thorough and efficient system of common schools,” I have never seen this concentrated a campaign against public schools and the people who work there. If you care about public education in Ohio, you need to take whatever steps are necessary to make sure that your voice is heard.
Look for more in this space.

Lessons of 2010

Governor Ted Strickland’s election-night email to supporters says that last night, he “thanked the Congressman [Kasich] and his supporters for a hard-fought race that allowed all Ohioans the opportunity to consider the kind of future they want for themselves and for their families.”
If this campaign was in fact an “opportunity to consider the kind of future” we want, it probably didn’t provide that opportunity in the way Governor Strickland meant. It may have given us an opportunity to consider the kind of campaigns we want, but that’s not the same thing.
Governor-elect Kasich articulated a vision for the Ohio he wants to see. In many ways, it’s the wrong vision: he says he intends to balance the budget, but he was never required to identify just how. It is clear to me as a retired public educator that in some way or another my colleagues and I will pay part of the bill: he said as much in the campaign, and he refused even to meet with education union leaders.
But as wrong as his vision is, he wasn’t shy about articulating it. Governor Strickland, a good man with a lack of imagination, never articulated a vision for his second term as Ohio governor, instead relying for the most part on attack ads that made the point that Kasich was a Wall Street insider. Unfortunately, many taxpayers probably figure that being a Wall Street insider is nice work if you can get it. (The problem with class warfare as a campaign strategy is that many people are Democrats but aspire to be Republicans.)
More damaging, by using limited campaign resources to beat a dead horse, Strickland lost opportunities to use those resources to expound his own vision–which, granted, presumes that he had one.
George W. Bush showed us how far you can go by being wrong and strong; consider the power of slogans like “No Child Left Behind” and “Mission Accomplished.” Ted was right, but he was weak, and voters don’t reward that.