That is how families, students and teachers need to start approaching the matter of education reform — “Nothing about us, without us.” These are our children, our tax dollars, our schools, our communities, our careers and our futures. We cannot accept being pushed to the margins of our own domain.

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Last week, the National Education Policy Center published a review of a Public Agenda report which detailed how to use effective communications strategies to convince angry, skeptical parents and community members to accept school turnarounds and closures. William Mathis, the review’s author, noted that “the report was not intended to be useful for developing substantive public policy. It is, rather, a mechanism for advancing public acceptance of turnaround policies,” policies that– as the NEPC’s and other researchers have pointed out– are often disruptive and ineffective.

The review also noted how little respect the original report’s authors seemed to hold for parents’ opinions and views about the origins of their school’s problems, or the best ways to solve those problems.

The report’s criticism of parents for not knowing what’s good for them (“Many parents do not realize how brutally inadequate local schools are.” [p. 9]), and its notion that parents should be taught to accept the dissolution or take-over of their community schools, could be perceived as inappropriate attempts at social engineering. That is, this perspective could be interpreted as paternalistic and arrogant. Thus, What’s Trust Got to Do With It? is ironically titled. Trust has everything to do with the problem. Yet, perhaps the greater problem is in the authors’ complete lack of trust in the views of the parents.

These attitudes, and these communications strategies, are familiar to anyone who has spent significant time being involved in education policy activism. Parents, teachers, students and community members who are connected to so-called ‘failing’ schools can all tell you stories of passionate-to-chaotic “feedback sessions” and all-night board meetings, where public school supporters argued– usually in vain– to invest in our schools instead of closing them. We can all share examples of times when district or government officials pretended to listen to community input for a school improvement plan, only to push us in the direction of a pre-determined outcome.

(This isn’t just cruel, it’s pointless. How can anyone hope to solve a problem they don’t understand? And how can they understand a problem when they refuse to listen to the people who know the most about it?)

These and other outrages have been increasingly well-documented, thanks to a growing army of determined activists who have recognized the importance of telling our own stories. But as we continue to be engrossed in near-constant local, state and national defensive actions for the future of our schools, it’s easy to lose sight of what it is we’re fighting for. Read More→