The Canary In The Mine Shaft, Feb. 2009

This is what I wrote then.

It seems to be a little prescient now, even if it's me saying so.


"We have allowed Dr. Hall to not only prevent true public scrutiny of this very important decision but to actually eliminate the possibility of dissent.

So how can one municipal employee outmaneuver a Community Panel of very smart, distinguished Atlantans?

Here's how:

By asking for a Community Panel to "assist" with a recommendation for the new hire (a recommendation she is in no way bound to follow or even acknowledge), Dr. Hall is able to maintain the appearance of inviting public scrutiny.

But here's where it all goes wrong: by insisting that

(a) all applicants have their anonymity preserved (an unnecessary and, frankly, ridiculous requirement for a publicly funded school administrative position), and that

(b) all Community Panel representatives agree to keep secret all deliberations, and that

(c) no documents, such as CVs, may be copied or distributed outside of the room where the top-secret deliberations are being held, and that

(d) the Community Panel agree not to release a statement about its recommendation until that statement is "approved" by APS

--by insisting on all of this, Dr. Hall has created exactly what she wants: a lapdog of a panel that cannot bite back --or even bark, unless that bark is "approved" in advance by APS public relations.

Look: being allowed into the door; being allowed to participate in the meetings; having the feeling that Dr. Hall is really, really
listening to your opinion--that might feel good... but if it means I'm just gonna be a passenger on this ride, and not allowed to touch the steering wheel or my power-window button, or yelp when we run a red light, well, then--thank you, but I'll just take MARTA.

And don't forget what happened in the months leading up to now, when APS blithely ignored its own deadlines for establishing the new school boundaries, sent officials to meetings who delivered no new information and then refused to answer parent questions (how arrogant is that?) and refused to answer --despite repeated prodding--any of the reasonable, well-though out questions the MES panel posed in its open letter on the MES website....

Why in the world are we putting up with this crap?

APS bureaucrats get away with this because we don't hold their feet to the fire.

It really is that simple.

They're not evil or malicious, they're just mediocre. And they believe they're not really accountable to us, or maybe another way of saying it is they don't really have the time to be accountable to us because they feel they have much more important problems to focus on, like a whole bunch of horrible schools in horrible neighborhoods.

Well, too bad. I'm not willing to accept mediocrity as the price I have to pay for that, although I'm not unsympathetic.

(Someday, once we get established, let's establish a parent volunteer group to "adopt" a sister school in APS that could use our help. Let's get some paint and some playground equipment and go over there. Let's take this opportunity to set another good precedent. Anyone else want to run with this?)

Now, getting back to my rant:

Contrast Dr Hall's model, which serves only to consolidate her power and does not serve the public in any meaningful way, with the kind of approach we should have taken, as a PTO, independent of APS if necessary:

1. Fundraise for the purpose of advertising this position REGIONALLY;
seek to attract the best and brightest principal candidates from around the region. (There is no reason in the world this new
principal had to come from APS or even Georgia. How about attracting a principal from a school district that ISN'T among the worst-performing in the country? Somebody with really, really high standards?) Don't you think the idea of a brand new, gorgeous school in a thriving community full of affluent, involved parents would be a little bit appealing to
some gifted teacher or asst. principal out there looking to move up?

2. Make it clear up front that anybody who applies for this very public job is going to have to undergo some level of public
scrutiny if they make it to the "finalist" round.

3. Preserve the anonymity of all applicants, if you want, up until three finalists have been identified. Then release every relevant document about them and do so online.

(At this same time, release the CVs of all other applicants with
their names redacted. This is a public job. There should be no expectation of privacy, but we'll be empathetic and just give them a little privacy).

4. Invite public comment, but filter it through your designated Community Panel. Allow no disrespectful or inappropriate commentary.

5. After a finalist has been identified, insist that the Superintendent forward her recommendation to the School Board for approval rather than make the decision herself, unchecked. The School Board should accept the Superintendent's recommendation in most cases but if there is an egregious error or public outcry, this is one last opportunity for a poor decision-in-the-making to be corrected.

Designate one School Board meeting, therefore, for public comment, before the Board votes on whether to accept the Supt's recommendation.

Finally:

At all times the CVs and bios of our currently serving school principals should be posted online, period.

Wouldn't this simple rule have prevented the Morningside principal fiasco a few years ago?

We need more transparency, but it's one of those things in life you can't get unless you are willing to be ferociously persistent.

So, my fellow parents, while I'm for courtesy at every turn, please: don't just go along to get along. Confront! Be nosey! Ask
questions! Summon your inner journalist! If you have to be a pest, at least you really are doing it for your kids."

Questions I asked Dr. Hall about Yolonda Brown....

....but never received an answer.



1. The hiring process for Ms. Brown was, if you believe what you read on the email listserv for the New School parents, badly flawed. Parents object to not having a chance to scrutinize the candidates' qualifications, and many of us feel the process should be much more transparent, especially in light of the fact that APS's current superintendent believes herself to be a reformer. How does this dismayingly opaque selection process, which, among other conditions, requires all members of the so-called Community Panel to take a vow of secrecy, serve the parent stakeholders at this new school?

2. What possible hardship could be suffered by, say, the three finalists for an APS principal's job, were they to be named publicly and their records made available for public scrutiny? And would any such hardship outweigh the right of the parents to scrutinize the finalists before a winner was named?

3. Do you agree with the premise that when critical hiring decisions are made in a secretive way within a highly political structure, public unease with the outcome is almost inevitable? And will you, as a reform-minded principal, pledge to err on the side of transparency and not opacity when it comes to making critical personnel decisions in the future? Will you commit to making public the CVs of all "finalists" for any public school position before a decision is made to choose one of them? Or, failing that, will you at least allow the members of any Community Panel to discuss the relative merits of any finalists with their constituent parent groups before a hiring decision is made?

The law of unintended consequences is a bitch, part II

So this is how it's going to shake out. The new Health Care Reform Act will put the screws to insurance companies, forcing them to stop dropping customers who get sick, making them pay claims for pre-existing conditions (congratulations, smokers--enjoy some free chemo!) and taking away the geographic protections these companies have long enjoyed.

But if you take away the conditions that allow a company to be profitable--and those mentioned above are some pretty big fucking conditions--the company may not only become unprofitable, it may go bust or (at the very least) decide it wants out of the health care niche.

So what happens when private insurance companies see a surge in their cost of doing business? Do we really just think they'll suck it up and keep doing business as usual?

If they want to raise rates but the government tells them they can't, what will happen then? No government can tell you you must stay solvent despite a cataclysm in your industry.

Okay, so maybe that's a little dire. Let's just say the private insurance companies stay in business, but see their margins shrink dramatically. What happens then?

First of all, they will pass their increased cost of doing business onto us in the form of even more intense scrutiny of claims, even more diligent efforts to deny coverage, and even more "lost paperwork" than we have to deal with now.

I don't know if you realize it, but insurance companies use the same business model that rebate-fulfillment vendors use. They make it so fucking hard to collect that you just give up. Or at least they hope you will give up and go away.

Can insurance companies make it even harder on us than they do now? You bet your ass they can. Can you even imagine the next level of hell underneath being treated the way insurance companies treat us now? Does the Dante chart even go down that many levels?

This is where you Fantasy-Island Democrats usually start whinnying about the public option. Well, the public option is being pitched to us as a small, niche operation that would not seek to gather in many of us who are privately insured now. Even the GAO says that initially at least, the Public Option will probably be  a prohibitively expensive choice for most of us now using private insurance.

But if our private insurers go out of business, we will not have to come over to the public option? What other choice will we have?

And if and when this influx of reluctant new customers causes the public option to grow monstrously big, how will this new, ostensibly self-sufficient enterprise succeed and remain solvent when its direct competitors--private firms run by smarter and more successful people--couldn't?

There's only one way.

We'll have to constantly bail it out with more and more public money.

Meanwhile, what level of service do you think you are going to get from a government-run insurance company that has grown way beyond its original projected size, into that realm where it is literally unmanageable?

Visualize, for a moment, your current typical insurance company customer service interaction. Now imagine how it would be if a disinterested, undertrained and underpaid government employee was handling your claim.

Now imagine it's five years hence, and the government program has quintupled in size, and it's running a huge deficit because it's a government program so of COURSE it's running a huge deficit, and panicky administrators are trying like hell to rein in spending; starting, it appears, with your life-or-death kidney transplant.

Look, maybe it'll all work out, and I mean that. I am not rooting for it to fail; I'm rooting for it to succeed.

For one thing, there is no doubt that the insurance companies have been playing us for a long time. They've been unforgivably cynical--and even malicious. It's easy to see why: it is a wildly contradictory thing to simultaneously tell a patient you're going to provide good benefits, yet tell your shareholders you're going to spend the least amount possible on that patient's care, and yet that is what private-sector insurance companies do.

It would be easy to look at these private insurance juggernauts and say, fuck you, I hope you get it in the neck, and root for them to suffer a slow, painful death--like, for example, newspapers, and, one still hopes, cable TV providers.

But given the following choice, which would you choose?

1. Profit-driven private sector customer service rep, trying to do whatever she can to avoid paying your claim; feeding you one bullshit lie after another (i.e., the status quo);

or,

2. Languid, union-protected government employee, yawning noisily as she tries unsuccessfully to find your patient record so she can refer you to an appointment 14 weeks from now with a Caribbean-degreed "specialist."

This is actually the choice we are now being asked to make. Fortunately, there is a third choice: make a shitload of money and pay cash for your care whenever possible.

You'll be able to get fine care and see really good doctors this way, but it'll be extremely expensive.

Don't worry about the assholes who say Obama will prevent doctors from moving to the private sector and providing "elite" care for cash. In this country, nothing is stronger than the profit motive, and our society's elites are not easily dislodged.

We have capitalism in our veins, and it'll prevail. And that means it'll prevail at election-time, too.

Doctors are, and should be, affluent relative to the population at large. They will be able to raise a lot of money for some candidate. Don't worry about doctors. Their biggest obstacle is their own desire to do good for people. But if you really piss them off, they might remember that they have a lot of money and a lot of clout, and they might figure out how to use it.

The law of unintended consequences is a bitch.

Making people buy health insurance is fair in the exact same way that making people buy auto insurance is fair. You use the system, you gotta pay. You gotta pay because the rest of us need protection in case you create a big expense (e.g., cause a crash, go into a coma, etc.).

The only problem with this parallel is, you can always opt not to drive a car.

(But you can't promise to never use the healthcare system and expect the rest of us to think you're actually going to honor your promise when you crash your uninsured car and go into that coma, you poor miserable shiftless fuck).

So then the argument comes down to this: is it ever fair for the government to make you pay for health insurance, even though you're dirt poor and need all available funds to feed your family and buy crystal meth? And the answer to that is, of course, stop asking stupid questions. Fair's got nothing to do with it. You will always have to pay taxes. Some of your taxes will always go to pay for stuff you strongly disagree with. As taxes go (if we define a tax as something the government makes you pay, regardless of whose pocket the money ends up in), mandatory health insurance is one tax I think most of us would willingly pay.

Cranky Libertarians, including some people I really admire (like Boortz and Instapundit Glenn Reynolds) say government has no business forcing us to pay for health care or anything else that isn't on their very short list titled "If I Were In Charge, These Are The Only Things We'd Spend The People's Money On."

1. National Defense
2. Go Fuck Yourself.

But this is where I part company with Libertarians. They just aren't aligned with human nature. To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, you don't go through life with the fellow scumbag humans you choose, you go through life with the fellow scumbag humans who also happen to occupy the planet as the same time you do.

People being what they largely are (equal parts irresponsible and opportunistic), you wind up with a whole bunch of uninsured folks, which is the situation we have now.

Many of these are people who could choose to buy insurance instead of spending their discretionary income on things like satellite tv and beer, but as I could not live without these items either, I won't get preachy about that.

Anyway, the result of the equation is indisputable. It's what we have now:

Human Nature + Desire For Pleasure Vs. Self-Sacrifice - The Legal Requirement That Everyone Purchase Health Insurance = Whole Bunches of Uninsured Deadbeats.

And that means we responsible types are put in the uncomfortable position of having to decide if we're going to pay for your care when the rest of youse get sick.

Which would not be such a dilemma save for the fact that often it's your children who need the care, and while I'd gladly say no to you and be, in the immortal words of former Grady CEO Pam Stephenson, "conscience-free," I can't accept the idea of denying health care to any child for any reason, no matter how big a screw-up their parents may be.

And you can't, either.

So either we have to find a way to make at least most of the irresponsible opportunists join the giant risk pool that is health care insurance, or we have to keep paying for their illnesses out of our own money, or we have to let sick children die for want of adequate care. There is no fourth way.

That's why making people buy health care insurance is not only fair but appropriate, and we should have started requiring it long before now.

So what happens to people who ignore the new mandate, and then get sick? Comments, anyone?

"The test of a first-rate intelligence is...

...the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." (F. Scott Fitzgerald).

So let's see how smart you are.

Examine the following seemingly contradictory ideas and see whether you agree if both statements in each pair are true.

A. The Atlanta Public School system is doing a fantastic job transforming itself from the execrable wasteland it was before Bev Hall arrived into something better.

However,

B. The Atlanta Public School system is still, statistically, one of the worst-performing school districts in one of the worst-performing states in the country.

A. Bev Hall has been widely recognized and lauded by her peers around the country for the job she has done, especially given the severe difficulties any administrator would face in an urban environment like Atlanta with its terrible history of low standards, parent indifference and institutional corruption.

However,

B. Bringing your school district up from Horrible to Mediocre is not the same thing as creating excellence. In other words, Bev Hall deserves her accolades, but let's put her record of slow, steady progress in context. She has not taken something good and made it great. She took something terrible and made it acceptable. As a parent, though, do you aspire to "just acceptable" for your child's education?

A. The overall progress of the Atlanta Public Schools reform effort under Bev Hall has been steady and substantial, if not earth-shattering.

However,

B. Parts of the APS, such as the Program for Exceptional Children, have been badly neglected by Dr. Hall, who allowed the PEC to languish for a year and a half without leadership and who thereby created a catastrophic mess that her new PEC director, Aaron Fernander, will have to clean up.


A. The built-in inefficiencies and dysfunction in APS (or virtually ANY large urban school district in the U.S.) should preclude the existence of any truly excellent schools under the umbrella of such a bureaucracy.

However,

B. Schools like Morningside and particularly our new school Springdale Park, if they are lucky enough to have a truly great principal (like Ms. Brown and Ms. Pruitt) and great teachers (and we have them!) and a strong parent community (check!) can be little oases of excellence in a desert of mediocrity.


Here's what you should have gained from this exercise: just because APS is on the rise doesn't mean it is where it needs to be, or that we should be satisfied with its progress. Just because Bev Hall has won some awards (and is likable as a person) doesn't mean she gets a pass for her terrible neglect of the PEC or her other missteps, such as failing to swiftly identify and punish test-score cheating.

If you want a great school, it's your job to make it great. If that means you ride herd on the APS staff and the PTO to get some stuff done, that's what it means. You do not delegate your child's education to a large urban public school system and expect great--or even good. You only get great if you are relentless about pursuing it.

I Would Never Join Any Club That Would Have Me As A Member, pt.1

Are we really doomed to two political parties in this country, the Government Can Fix It, Just Give Us Another Few Whacks At It Party and the Government Is Evil, Government Sucks, Please Elect Us So We Can Show You Again How To Do More With Less (because we kind of screwed that part up last time) Party?

I can't call myself a conservative, even though I hold many strongly conservative views, because when people think of conservatives nowadays they think of idiots like Glenn Beck and megalomaniacs like Sean Hannity. (I don't mind Rush Limbaugh, though--although he's far to the right of me, and often intellectually dishonest, he's a legitimately talented and thought-provoking broadcaster and entertainer, and I am willing to accept him for what he is).

I can't let myself be identified with any group that would have Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity and even poor beleaguered Sarah Palin and Dick Cheney as their Sunday morning talking heads.

And I can't really call myself a libertarian because I think most libertarians are deeply unrealistic about what we really need from government, and (much more importantly to me) they don't care about helping other people, they're just obsessed with how much their own government is trying to steal from them (in the only two currencies that matter to libertarians: liberty and taxes).

And I sure as hell can't be a Democrat. Democrats protect unions with great vigilance, but don't want to protect children from murderous radical Islamists. (If there are children in mass graves anywhere in the world, Americans aren't supposed to wring our hands and think about whether to fight. We are supposed go there (regardless of who else is willing to go or not go with us); kill all the bad guys, pack up our Humvees and leave. It is not that complicated).

Democrats actually think the same government folks who bring you the Department of Motor Vehicles are going to be able to make your health care experience better and cheaper. Do we really have to even dig deeper into their position than that?

As economists like Thomas Sowell (a fine thinker) point out, you cannot determine the price for something by assigning a price to it. The price is going to be what it is, and if you make it cheaper, there is going to be less of it available, and if there is too little of it now available as a result of your meddling, the fact that it has a cheaper price assigned to it is absolutely irrelevant, because now you can't get it.

I'm a big Barack Obama fan and I'm even a bigger Michelle Obama fan, but those two could take me to dinner and a show in New York and I would be no closer to ever voting Democrat.

But if I think the Democratic party caters to wimps and cowards and those unwilling (NOT unable) to help themselves to the American Dream (and I do), I am even more angry with Republicans, whose hypocrisy disgusts me.

You Republican creeps are anti-abortion, but also against providing young people with free birth control? This exposes you as being deeply unrealistic, because you can teach and counsel sexual restraint all day and all night, but then biology and human nature take over and shove you aside. You can't talk teenagers out of wanting to fuck. Okay? Update your list of things NOT to mess with, starting right now with biology, hormones and human nature.

You ever-classy Republicans are against the adoption of children by gay couples (and against gay marriage). What a principled stand. And all the while our world is overrun by horribly irresponsible heterosexuals who have children without the means to support them; who do a terrible job of child-rearing, and who don't deserve the children they were reckless enough to spawn.

You conservatives especially disgust me, because the parts you get right (emphasis on personal responsibility, emphasis on higher standards for public schools, focus on shrinking the size of government, keeping a strong military, being willing to stick our collective neck out when we must, understanding the responsibility that comes with being the U S of A) are the parts I hold very dear. But you totally blow it up on the social end, and this whole thing with you trying to shove your religion down my throat is just such an obvious example of a totally unfounded superiority complex it makes me want to vomit.

What this country needs is an ex-Marine secular conservo-libertarian who refuses to allow Christian nutcases to ever set foot in the Oval Office; who's married, yes--but to his partner, Ned; who has two super fabulous adopted children; who wants to kill every Taliban and Al-Queda thug in the world and has to be physically restrained by his Joint Chiefs from doing so, and who spends the people's money like it's his own and he's still living in base housing and shopping at the BX.

Yes, here I am, a married heterosexual guy, campaigning for my fantasy candidate: an openly gay ex-Marine. I realize that's going to make some of you think I'm a little swishy. Whatever. You don't have to act like a homophobe to project an image of masculinity.

Anyway, if you know of a candidate who matches this description, email me and I'll Paypal him a campaign donation right fucking now.

The decidedly unexceptional workplace culture of the Program for Exceptional Children

I have clients. If my clients email me with a question or request, I make it a high priority to answer their emails quickly--but always, always the same business day. No inquiry is so trivial that it doesn't get a comprehensive written response.

This doesn't make me special. This kind of behavior is so fundamental to success in the world of business that to do otherwise just isn't an option.

Let me put it another way: people who don't answer emails from their clients are unprofessional. They are not qualified to hold a job of high importance in, say, a program as critical to thousands of taxpaying Atlanta families as the APS Program for Exceptional Children.

But in the APS Program for Exceptional Children, there is a different ethic. An ethic that says, "we need not answer parent emails at all, but if we do deign to answer your email, you may expect a bureaucratic, ungrammatical non-answer that was typed in a great hurry without the benefit of forethought or, for that matter, spell-check."

Now, that's quite an accusation, so let's back it up with some facts.

Our family has had four permanent (and one very short-term temp) PEC liaisons in the three years we've been in the program.

Let's look at their track records:

LIAISON #1: (2006-2007) HILLARY MILLER, Morningside Elementary School

Claimed to not be able to operate her school-issued laptop. Rarely responded to email inquiries. Terrible follow-through on meeting requests and in general.

LIAISON #2: (2008-'09) CECIL DALTON, Morningside Elementary School

Ignored pointed and extremely important emails about our child's IEP throughout the school year, despite many follow-ups by phone and email. Flat-out refused to answer questions sent via email. When he did reply, this employee seemed unable to compose a single sentence in clear English.

LIAISON #3: (2009-2010) FAUSTINA THOMPSON, Springdale Park Elementary School

Failed to answer most emails, including a number of extremely critical, time-sensitive inquiries that had to do with the placement of our child in the new school. Behaved inappropriately at IEP meeting, and then quickly vanished altogether on medical leave, without bothering to inform any of her parents that she was abandoning their case files.

LIAISON #4: VERNITA BURFORD, Springdale Park Elementary School. Has refused to reply to most emails. When confronted about this at IEP meeting, only shook her head, as if to say, I have no real reason for why I have refused to correspond with you. (I'm not certain if this is what she was trying to tell me with her sad little head-shake; maybe it was more like, "you arrogant, insufferable bastard; how dare you put me on the spot in front of all these other people.")

And our liaisons are not the only people who have refused to answer our emails.

What is the problem with the PEC's workplace culture, that the employees feel emboldened to ignore inquiries from parents?

PEC employees exist to serve special-need children. The advocates for those children are us, the parents. We are the PEC's clients. We are also collaborating partners in the enterprise that is the IEP team.

PEC employees would probably think twice before ignoring emails from their bosses, Constance Goodson and Aaron Fernander.

But they have no problem at all ignoring questions asked by us, the PEC's real constituency.

When you run into this problem (for it certainly cannot just be the case that our family has happened to encounter the only four PEC liaisons who do not meet any sort of professional standard for communicating with their collaborating team members), speak up about it. Constance Goodson's phone number is 404-802-2612 and Mr. Fernander's number is 404-802-2686.

I suggest you telephone, rather than email. Yes, I know it's 2009, and we've had email for 16 years now.

But a workplace culture is a slow ship to turn around. I hope Mr. Fernander is tugging with all his might. He'll need to.

Start talking about your kid's IEP--now.

Getting an IEP for your kid in the Atlanta Public Schools (and, from what I've read, just about anywhere else) is like buying a car from a traditional car dealer. You go in there, you try to make a good deal for yourself; the salesman says yes yes yes, then mysteriously departs to check things out with his "manager"; he comes back shamefaced and says, "you know, I thought we could do this deal but my manager says we have to add the rustproofing back in."

You walk out of there not knowing whether you made the best deal you could or not, and not knowing whether the next guy who walks in there will make a much better deal than you did. Maybe you got screwed--but you've got no way to find out.

School IEP officials don't want us to compare notes on the services we secure for our children. They're banking on the fact that we're embarrassed to have to go hat in hand and ask for something special for our kids, or that we're reluctant to even admit to other parents that we have a special-needs child.

They will also invoke the idea of "confidentiality" whenever you even THINK of trying to compare your situation to another one you've heard about. This actually happened to us. The parents of another autistic child, whose condition was (in some key ways) remarkably similar to our child's, were generous to give us their child's entire file--his whole IEP.

We tried to use the precedent this child had set to secure a similar arrangement for our child, but our liaison wouldn't even let us describe the precedent in our meetings. As soon as we started talking about this other child, she started ranting about how we were violating all sorts of confidentiality clauses, even though the other parents had explicitly given us their permission to use their child's data.

You might think that the confidentiality of your child's IEP information is yours, as a parent, to preserve or waive, and that APS has no legal standing to fight to keep your case confidential should you, as the parent, wish to waive confidentiality for the sake of exploring precedent cases.

But this shrieking loon of a liaison wouldn't even let us speak aloud about the matter. She literally tried to drown us out in the meeting, like a five-year-old child trying not to hear something unpleasant.

Parents, it's time to share. Come on this blog, or other blogs, and talk about what you've gone through in IEP meetings; what you were able to secure (or why you were turned down); talk about the comportment of APS PEC employees in your meetings (were they prepared? Were they professional?).

Let's create a database of cases so the next parents who come through this pipeline (and you know many more are coming) won't have to negotiate in ignorance with shady double-dealers.