It may seem as though I am painting all politicians with a
broad stroke, and indeed I am, with some justification. Public education is
under attack, as it has been arguably since the 1980s. Rightwing politics is
the politics of privatization and corporatization; and that ethos has dominated
across elected governing bodies, from local school boards to state legislatures
to the halls of Congress, for forty years. So-called local control has not
ensured that public schools operate for the common good because local
governance, even when a community’s elected officials are centrist or liberal
in orientation, often is overwhelmed by regulations laid down at higher levels
and mired in the multilayered bureaucracy by which they are enacted.
Local school bureaucracies are as much to blame for the woes
of public education as is the distant machinery of state and federal entities.
Superintendents and lower-rank administrators often rise in the profession
because they are politically savvy, rather than because they are knowledgeable
about education or committed to public schools that truly serve their local
community. The common law phrase “in loco parentis” has been applied to
teachers, in particular, and other persons or organizations who function “in
the place of a parent.” I suppose the phrase “in locum a legislatore” might
equally apply to a superintendent or other bureaucratic functionary who serves
“in the place of a legislator.” I have written previously that school leaders
need to stop viewing themselves as vassals of the state and instead reclaim
their intended role as servants of their local community.
Parents and teachers are justifiably frustrated when they
see firsthand the demise of learning and the destruction of potential among
their children and students because local leaders, instead of listening to and
acting on community concerns, are marching to the faceless corporate cadence of
distant masters. For example, testing instead of teaching is a counterproductive strategy if
real learning is the goal. But that’s a big “if.” Learning for too many
politicians is not the goal at all; control is. And money pays for control.
Public education is expensive, and more and more public money is being funneled
into private enterprises where a significant portion is used to line
politicians’ pockets to keep them voting “right,” which is invariably counter
to the common good.
The simple solution—though one that is hard to attain—is to
vote out those politicians at every level who act contrary to public will and
the common good. But that’s not really enough. Local communities also need to
root out bureaucrats who work “in locum a legislatore” and by so doing fail to
serve the public that employs them.
