Whining Vs. Complaining Smackdown

Whining is never okay. But complaining--pointing out a specific, real problem--and its accompanying obligation, suggesting a solution--is not only okay, it is a tool you are going to have to get used to using as your child progresses through one of the lowest-performing metro school districts in one of the lowest-performing states in the country.

If you are going to wrestle a good education out of this system, you are going to have to occasionally flex some muscle. And yet I see parents who would willingly run in front of a bus to save their child step meekly aside in confrontations with APS personnel for fear of being seen as a privileged white racist. That's just lame.

I complained long and loud about the selection process for the new Springdale Park Elementary principal. I pointed out that asking parents to serve on an advisory panel to Bev Hall without any actual power to approve or veto the final decision (which was always going be made by Bev Hall alone) was simply co-opting the parents who served on that committee; making them feel good but giving them no authority.

During that process, the "right" of the job applicants not to have their resumes reviewed by the parent community was placed above the much more compelling interest of the parent community to thoroughly review the CVs of all finalists.

Our parents should have insisted on publishing the CVs of the three finalists for the job and inviting vigorous parental participation in the selection process, as well as the power to veto any decision with which it did not concur. There are ways to get this power. One way is to demand it and say that if it is not given, the parent community will protest any hiring made over its objections. This would have the effect of forcing Bev Hall to collaborate more fully, because she would not dare drop a new principal into a pool of outraged parents.

Another way is to use the Georgia Open Records law to force APS to release the CVs, and challenge in court any APS refusal to do so. In the University System of Georgia, exactly this sort of legal challenge was made, with the result that now, college president applicants (and other crucial school officials) must expect their CVs to be released if they are named among the three finalists for a job.

Are not school principals the most important individuals in our entire public educational system? I would argue that they are. So much can go right--or wrong--for a school based on this one hire alone.

Here is the exact text from the law:

At least fourteen (14) calendar days prior the meeting at which final action or a vote is to be taken for a university president, school superintendent, or other similar executive, the public agency making such decision shall release all documents which came into its possession in connection with the three or more finalists for the position. Prior to the release of these documents, the public agency making the decision may allow a finalist to decline being considered further for the position rather than have documents pertaining to her or him released. In that event, the public agency shall release the documents of the next most qualified person under consideration who does not decline the position.

(See here for more).

Anyway, my point was that we should not have settled for a seat, we should have demanded a vote.

I was so vocal that the then-president of the Morningside PTA, Susie Lazega, wrote me the following email, and here I quote her directly:

Dear Rick:

SHUT UP!
WE ARE SICK OF IT!!!

I got a good laugh out of that. I wasn't about to shut up, of course, nor be the least bit intimidated by Susie, but the fact that she thought she could order me to go over in the corner and take a time-out did give me some insight into how she viewed her role and her collaboration with parents.

I also got a phone call from the husband of our then-PTO-president, who wanted to tear me a new one for criticizing the process and "being negative."

And that's important, because it begs the question: is it important to be "positive" at the expense of insisting on what's right? Of course we'd all answer no to that question. But many of our PTO reps (with some notable exceptions, like the exceptional Bob Silvia when he was on the Morningside PTA) are waaayyyyy too deferential to APS.

APS counts on this. APS could not withstand the level of parental scrutiny we should be giving it. APS would improve a lot faster (much faster than Bev Hall can achieve on her own) if parents were more aggressive in overseeing their childrens' educations. But many parents--particularly low-income parents--shuffle their kids off to school and just hope for the best, figuring they can't affect the outcome and don't have the time or energy to try in any case.

As it turns out, we got an excellent principal after all. But Yolonda Brown is so talented and charismatic that she could have easily withstood all the additional scrutiny I'm talking about here and come out in front. So why did we feel we had to agree to protect her--and the other candidates--from it?

Look, if you're applying for an extremely important public job--the job of principal of an elementary school--you have no reasonable expectation that everyone is going to keep it hush-hush. Your interest in keeping your application quiet is massively, massively outweighed by the interest of a parent community in getting to vet you properly.

Complaining. Nobody likes the idea of it. But it is a tool in your toolbox as a parent with children in this district. We have a great school and a great principal. But our school lives in the swamp that is the APS. Bev Hall is wielding her little machete and trying to clear the swamp, but she's got years of work still ahead of her. Are you going to play nice or are you going to do what your kid needs you to do?