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?

Is Fast ForWord right for your child?

With a little persistence and the help of the new PEC overseer Aaron Fernander, who seems to be a guy who's really on the ball, our son, Vance Lockridge, is about to become the first child (so they say) in the PEC to have Scientific Learning's Fast ForWord computer-based instructional software made part of his daily school routine.

If you've never heard of Fast ForWord, you can find more information here. Basically, it's a series of games based on the idea that the brain is very plastic, and weak connections can be improved. The software is used mostly to help kids who aren't reading very well for their age level, but I think an obvious and much higher-impact application is helping autistic kids like our son overcome a spoken-language deficit.

Here's a video of Vance that we made to show our IEP team. I'm very gung-ho about this particular product; it commanded our son's attention in a way that no human teacher or therapist has ever been able to do. Many autistic kids seem to have more of an affinity for computers (and, in Vance's case, the iPhone) than for people. Why not go with that, and ride it as far as you can take it?

What is the appropriate tone to take when dealing with school officials?

This is a tricky one. Race and class play a role here, as they do in all interactions between a mostly white constituency and a mostly black government bureaucracy. We all wish that it weren't so, but if you could read the thought bubbles above our heads in some of the school meetings I've suffered through, this is what you might see:

(Me): "I can't understand how this dude has this job. He can't write a sentence in clear English; he won't answer emails; he is just a passive-aggressive, do-nothing bureaucrat with a limp, damp handshake, and the fact that he somehow persuaded someone to give him a Ph.D only cements the truth that if you write enough tuition checks to certain colleges, eventually they will print you out whatever kind of degree you want."

(Him): "Why is this man so angry? I am just doing my job. My job is not to say yes to everything these rich white people ask for, not when poor black kids from East Atlanta ain't getting half as much resources as the kids at this midtown elementary school. He talks to me like I'm an idiot. But I have a Ph.D., and I have this job, and I am going to do it the way I'm going to do it."

(Me): "This guy and all his bosses have created a culture where nobody really has to push themselves too hard; nobody has to be uncomfortable, and where they're willing to declare themselves satisfied with a level of performance that I, as a fairly successful professional, would never accept from people who work for me or around me. So if you're wondering why I resent you, it's because your standards are too low, you expect too little of yourselves, and your number one goal is to protect your cozy little enclave."

(Him): "You don't get to tell us how to do our jobs. There are all sorts of historical and cultural reasons why you don't get to come in here and act all superior. We are running this operation, so get used to it."

This reminds me of a true story of an encounter I had with another City of Atlanta employee, right down the street from my house. I was coming home from an errand one mid-morning, and right in the middle of Greenwood was a garbage truck, positioned so nobody could pass it to either side.

Cars started lining up in both directions over the next several minutes, and yet as the truck lurched down the street, the driver never made an effort to move a foot or two over to one side to let at least one of the backed-up lanes of traffic start to pass.

I finally got out of my own truck and confronted one of the workers. "Why can't you move over and let some of this traffic go by?" I asked him. He looked at me with a big grin, so that I could see his big stupid-looking gold front tooth, and said (and this is an exact quote):

"You on our schedule now."

I don't know why I'm reminded of this story now. Maybe it's because there has always been more than a whiff of payback, a whiff of "OJ justice" in the way I have perceived my treatment at the hands of certain City of Atlanta bureaucrats over the years, from DMV to Watershed Management (!) to APS.

However, while I know how I feel, I'm quite sure I've mischaracterized how the other side feels. Because I have no way of knowing how they really feel; I'm just guessing.

Given all the uncertainty and the tension, it's hard to know what tone to take when entering into a conversation with APS over, for example, the need to resolve the parking issue at DHUMP.

Our PTO leaders have decided to let the process play out at APS's pace, and to not be very aggressive. I would argue this is a good time to set a tone for our relationship now, and going forward: do not think you can jerk around our PTO, because this particular group of parents is not going to allow that.

It is not necessary to be uncivil or unreasonable to set the proper precedent and tone. All we need to do is go to APS, tell them that we have decided we are no longer going to embrace the position of waiting patiently for them to get around to doing something they should have done (and promised to do) many months ago, but that we want them to agree to a reasonable and utterly firm deadline for finishing the deal.

Then hold their feet to the fire.

In my 3+ years dealing with APS as an IEP parent (which is to say, dealing with APS on a constant, almost daily basis), I have seen that APS does not have a workplace culture that respects the deadlines it promises to parents and PTAs. It regards deadlines as casually as you might regard a to-do list of chores on your refrigerator. Sure, you'd like to get to them all in a timely way, but you probably won't, and when you don't, there probably won't be much of a backlash. So -- hey, let's hit the couch, and if somebody doesn't like my pace of accomplishment, they can kiss my ass.

Ladies and Gentlemen, your tax dollars at work!