The Echo-Chamber of Public Input
Posted by BKisida | Education, Fayetteville, AR, Politics | September 17, 2009
(Guest post by Jay P. Greene)
The Fayetteville school board and district leaders fully supported a plan that was soundly rejected by the voters this week. How did school officials so badly mis-read what voters wanted? It’s especially puzzling how school officials could have seriously misjudged their constituents given the years of deliberations, countless hours of public meetings and charrettes, and even a commissioned opinion poll.
Unfortunately, these countless rituals of public input are exactly what misled school officials to support an unpopular plan. They were misled because these rituals of public input are better indicators of the views of the self-selected, small minority of people with the most intense (and often the most extreme) preferences than they are indicators of what the electorate would want. School officials mistook the opinions of this self-selected few as the voice of the people.
School officials also hired consultants to lead these public conversations, but in doing so they were steering discussions in a pre-determined direction. Bringing in education consultant Tony Wagner and requiring all school employees to read his book steered the plan toward a high school divided into small learning communities. That idea didn’t come from the voters. It came from certain school officials, was made the topic of discussion in schools and community events, and then was echoed back to school officials.
Similarly, the design “charrettes” led by consultants from New Orleans were not truly open brain-storming sessions about a new high school. If they were, how did several small break-out groups independently arrive at the same Trail of Tears design concept?
There is nothing inherently wrong with holding public discussions on important decisions or with bringing in expert consultants to inform and direct those conversations. The problem is in falsely believing that what results from those discussions is in fact the opinion of the community. They are more like echo-chambers, repeating back the preferences that school officials had going into them.
But school officials saw the community discussions as a sign of general public support for their vision. They even went so far as to describe the plan that was developed from these events as “The People’s Plan.” And then when asked why voters should support the millage, the advocates and editorial writers told us that it was The People’s Plan and had come from us so we should support what the community had developed.
This People’s Plan campaign strategy almost felt like bullying. If you weren’t among the tiny, minority of atypical people who could spend evening after evening in community discussions, you had lost your chance to have a say. It was time for you to get in line and support what the involved people had already determined.
Perhaps for this reason opponents of the millage stayed generally quiet during the campaign. Yes, there was a handful of active letter writers and a Facebook group with fewer than ten members, but there was no organized opposition, no “vote no” yard signs, and a string of elite (even if tepid) community endorsements. But in the privacy of the voting booth, people clearly felt free to open-up and clearly say no. Once the result had been announced, opponents discovered that they weren’t so isolated, and Facebook pages began to light-up with people explaining their reasons for opposing the millage despite their commitment to education and their understanding of shortcomings of the existing facility.
The solution is not to hold even more public input rituals to scale back the cost of the project but leave all other decisions in place. Presumably, the $116 million price tag followed from all of the design and policy decisions that had preceded it. If all of the design and policy goals could have been met for a lower cost, why wasn’t the initial millage for a lesser amount?
Instead, the solution is to stop the echo-chamber decision-making of meetings, charrettes, and consultants, and start with real leadership. School officials should step-up and tell us what they think would be educationally desirable at a reasonable cost. Of course, it is difficult for them to gauge what the community would consider a reasonable cost without public input, but the election result has given them better feedback than any town-hall discussion or charrette ever will.
Superintendent Vicki Thomas is particularly well-positioned to offer her vision of our educational future. She bears no responsibility for the development of the failed millage plan and can start with a fresh slate. We hired her to lead our schools and leadership is what we need. She has enough information from voters and past public meetings to assess the community’s priorities. Now she can give us a new plan and convince us that it is what she thinks is best, not what she thinks we told her to say.
Jay P. Greene is endowed professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas and a parent of three children in Fayetteville public schools.
There are several books out there (most recently James Surowieki’s “The Wisdom of Crowds”) that talk about how the benefits of working in groups can be diluted when there is no diversity of viewpoint. The example used by him is the Bay of Pigs invasion–the group that ordered it thought it would work even though no one else did. This seems like another example, and for the same reasons–politicians in positions of authority draw hangers-on who are effective sycophants, and this combined with any healthy ego whatsoever (not to pick on politicians, many people have one) leads one to think his idea the best solution. The virtue of democracy is that it allows the common man the opportunity to inject his view into the discussion, here rudely awakening the establishment to the fact that the idea is not at all popular.
Thanks for this: another elephant in the room with some sunshine on it.
Here is a link to an paper about the education of economists, which I believe can be generalized to education as a whole:
http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/15691/
It outlines a code of conduct for economics, in the form of a pluralist benchmark for Quality Assurance in economics education. This is a necessary corrective to the publicly-recognised failure of economics in the face of the 2008 crisis, which Colander et al (2009 term its “systemic failure”. This systemic failure is analysed as a consequence of the regulatory capture of the academic profession of economics, arising from and institutionalised by its present peer ranking procedures.
Pluralism is the necessary antidote. It affords two decisive benefits: it produces good economics and better economists.
Mr. Green’s essay is one fine piece of writing.
It belongs in bold type on the editorial pages of the local newspapers (while we still have them) and should be read into the record at the next School Board and City Council meetings.
Greene is beautifully on point regarding the real motivation behind all these transparently biased public input forums.
Many people I know have felt insulted for years by these PT Barnum side shows and the clowns that run them.
Mayor Jordan, City Council Members–please pay attention.
Yo! I like you guys. Let’s do an anonymous hangout sometime.
The public schools are public. As school facilities are used by the public at large as well as students and serve the public in a number of ways, the public has every right to expect to have some input in developing a schema for a school; I would consider it an obligation.
As I recall, the school district made a broad effort to solicit input for the design of the new school. Meetings and charrettes were held on different days and at different times in order to make it easier for a variety of people to attend. If that wasn’t an adequate approach, blame it on the apathy of the excluded, not the school district. It’s not like the thing was run in secret.
Newspaper reports of the charrettes indicated that the break-out groups came up with different scenarios. (A few of them were displayed on the district’s web site.) When the groups came together, the small-group concept was adopted by consensus. It might have been consensus of the loudest, but it was not a directed result as Mr. Greene claims.
Mr. Greene’s commentary almost sounds as though he thinks parents shouldn’t be engaged in their kids’ education. The suggestion that the building scheme should come from on high sounds to me like the same attitude that has led to so many problems in the public schools: the professionals know best; let them take care of everything.
I’m not saying that the school district administration shouldn’t get some hammering for the failure of the millage. But I think that Mr. Greene is using the wrong hammer.
David, I think you may be misreading Jay’s post. He did not say that holding public input sessions is a bad idea. He simply states that relying too heavily on this type of input can lead to serious miscalculation. As evidence he cited the very broad defeat of the millage. In the end he encourages, and I think rightly so, our education leadership not to dictate from on high (as you suggest), but to be the leaders they were hired to be.
The tone of the piece and its partial basis on misinformation makes it appear to me that he believes that leadership and public input are mutually exclusive.
[...] Mid-Riffs . [...]
David,
I believe that you have misunderstood my post. I explicitly say that seeking public input was fine. The problem was in mistaking that input for the voice of the people, which it definitely was not judging from the election result.
Leadership involves combining input from vocal, but atypical participants in public meetings with the leader’s assessment of what is educationally desirable and likely to garner broader popular support.
It’s not easy, and I believe that school officials tried in good faith to gather input. But I think they gave that input too much weight and failed to anticipate what the broader community might say.
And the way that consultants directed the public discussion was sometimes obvious and heavy-handed, as in the case of Tony Wagner, or more subtle and perhaps even unintentional, as in the case of the Concordia consultants for the charrettes.
If you want to see an indication of how Concordia led the discussion toward the Trail of Tears, see p. 8 of their report: http://www.fayar.net/imagesBoard/FHS_Final_Report.pdf .
On it they provide a “Site Description” that consists of 207 words. Of those 207 words 89 (43%) were about the Trail of Tears. It is clearly the most prominent part of the site description that informed the design discussions.
Personally, I like the Trail of Tears theme, but my point is that consultants have a way of leading the discussion in certain directions even when everyone is trying to seek open and diverse input. That’s a fine thing to do, but no one should mistake it for the voice of the people.
Mr. Greene–
Thank you for your reply. You said in your piece that the breakout groups arrived at the same concepts. They did not. The charrettes were held as a way to gain public input on the physical form of the buiding and they resulted in a variety of physical forms. The fact that the Trail of Tears was given as an underlying concept for the genius loci of the site did not result in the homogeneity you say it did. Most members of the public would not be able to make a connection between “the Trail of Tears” and a school building if they tried. (I will not claim that they would be able to if they had attended the new Fayetteville High School. Aesthetic and symbolic sensitivity in relation to the environment support athletics even less than art and music do.)
How would you get to the genuine ‘voice of the people’ then?
Is there a way to conduct the public input process that would ensure less intrusion by consultants and respect a diversity of ideas in the final product?
Or is polling the way to go?
The public needs to be involved. Let’s not let the mishandling in this particular incident be used as a rationale for disregarding the public’s voice.
Unfortunately, there is no perfect substitute for the election as an indicator of the voice of the people. But we did just have an election, so there is information there. Voters said no by a large margin in every area of town and in the highest turnout school election in Fayetteville history. That is all useful information.
Polling is another useful way for school officials to gather information. Unfortunately, the poll they commissioned seemed more like a way to gather support for what was already decided than a way to collect information. The poll was done after most if not all major decisions had been made. And it is expensive to conduct polls, so school officials can’t employ this technique very often.
In the end, school officials have to act like leaders who gather bits of information from a variety of sources, including public meetings, polls, past elections, and their general familiarity with the community. And then they have to take all of that information and lead the community toward what they think is educationally desirable but within political feasibility.
Others are picking up the echo-chamber meme. Over at the Morning News, Doug Thompson writes: “The school board spent years crafting the plan with lots of public input, we’re told again. I meekly submit that a plan that’s voted down by 3 to 2 does not reflect accurately gauged, broad public input.” (http://www.nwaonline.net/articles/2009/09/18/columns/doug_thompson/091909thompson.txt )
And Bob Caudle writes: “there are people who don’t listen to the will of the people, are out of touch with the common person and attempt to go spend money willy-nilly planning a pie-in-the-sky project. We call them members of the Fayetteville School Board.” (http://www.nwaonline.net/articles/2009/09/19/columns/bob_caudle/092009caudle.txt )
And Brenda Blagg writes: “Significantly, they took false encouragement from polls taken in March and May that suggested they could win. Those poll results were screened to reflect only the views of voters who had participated in special elections over the past few years, not the broader electorate that showed up in record numbers on election day.” (http://www.nwaonline.net/articles/2009/09/17/columns/brenda_blagg/091809blagg.txt )
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