Beware More Democracy
On a petition to reduce public comment during school board meetings
[Note: Someday I will get back to emailing these out in the morning. Sorry for the delay.]
I.
One view of government is that it is wily, self-aggrandizing, and more than willing to run roughshod over the rights and preferences of the citizens it supposedly exists to govern and protect. And that one must, in turn, remain eternally vigilant and skeptical of its machinations, its means and its ends lest either or both be perverted to benefit the few with power at the expense of the many without.
Within this view of government certain freedoms, processes, and institutional arrangements become very important. Citizens need freedom of speech and a free press because without them we cannot hope to shine the antiseptic light of criticism upon the dank and moldering recesses of power. Whether or not you believe their claim, the Washington Post does at least motion at this idea with their tagline that, “Democracy dies in darkness.”
Government itself responds to this need by promising a certain transparency in its operation. Congress passed the Freedom of Information Act, and the State of Wisconsin has open meetings laws and places strict constraints on when and how elected bodies can do their jobs. And local elected officials often go further in their efforts to promote transparency, engender trust, and maintain legitimacy by formulating procedures that are clearly defined to remove the taint of bias or favoritism and by soliciting the voice of the demos through all manner of public hearings, listening sessions, citizen committees, community surveys, advisory groups, and of course elections.
And because we are a democracy and, at least in some contexts, hold democratic values in high esteem, the response to declining trust or questions of legitimacy is frequently to “just add more democracy.” More listening sessions, more stakeholder engagement, more procedures and processes with clearly identified points for community input, more reviews, and more town halls.
But while I think democratic institutions are important and I do enjoy my own meager attempts at shining an antiseptic light into its dank and moldering corners, I also think democracy is ultimately a means to promote human well-being and not an end in itself. And that one downside, at least on the margins, of heaping on more stakeholder engagement, listening sessions, working groups, advisory committees, and opportunities for public input is that not only can it prevent you from making a poor decision, it can keep you from making any decisions at all, good or bad.
And the more voters focus on such things, the more the resulting system incentivizes and selects for people that might be very good at listening and creating processes and following procedures but less good at executing effective solutions to the problems people actually care about.
II.
Which is to say that I at least partly agree with Support Our Schools (SOS) Wauwatosa’s (Facebook page here, very outdated Wordpress blog here) recently circulated letter/petition that claims school board meetings are really long and that this is a problem.
I’m not sure they accurately identify the reasons why this problem exists, and I’m not sure their proposed solutions will solve it, but I agree that it’s something that could be improved and that a little less community input might be beneficial on the margins.
You can read the letter, but the authors seem concerned that the length of board meetings “prohibits many students, school staff, families, and community members from attending and engaging” and that the best decisions are rarely made at 1 a.m. at the end of a 5 or 6 hour meeting. They attribute at least some of the excessive length of meetings to the many opportunities for public comment that frequently include politicized statements from non-district “stakeholders” that “strain and exhaust our school and Tosa community relationships.”
As a remedy, they suggest:
Starting board meetings earlier,
Having attendees sign-in with their name, address, relationship to the district (resident, staff, parent, something else?), and the topic they’d like to speak on,
Limiting opportunities for public comment by reducing the number of public comment periods on the agenda; prioritizing residents, parents, and staff over commenters who aren’t those things; and restrict public comment to the end; and
Reporting the proportion of stakeholder versus non-stakeholder comments at the end of each meeting.
Reception to this proposal, at least judging by the comments on SOS Wauwatosa’s Facebook page range from, “this seems like a good idea” to “who is the shadowy cabal of biased insiders behind this attempt to shut out dissenting voices!?” Others ask for more evidence that their proposals will work, discuss concerns, and suggest alternatives like more listening sessions or alternating monthly board meetings with town halls at a rotating list of schools throughout the district.
While a shadowy cabal of biased insiders may or may not be trying to push an agenda, I think it is at least worth trying to evaluate the letter on its merits.
On one hand, it’s important to look at what is actually happening. Do the problems they’re describing really exist? A little bit, yeah.
School board meetings in 2022 were, on average, 3 hours and 6 minutes long. The median length of a school board meeting (meaning 50% of meetings were shorter and 50% were longer) was 2 hours and 48 minutes. In comparison, the length of the average meeting in 2021 was 1 hour and 54 minutes while the median length was 1 hour and 36 minutes. This is a big jump. What changed? Was it the policies around public comment? And what is the right length for a board meeting? Is three hours too long? Two?
The time dedicated to public comment is not necessarily a huge component of these meetings but can take up a significant amount of time. At one extreme, the August 22 meeting to approve the new Human Growth and Development curriculum, by far the most contentious meeting I’ve watched this year, was 6 hours and 30 minutes and included 1 hour and 55 minutes of public comment. Another very contentious 4 hour meeting on January 24th about district covid policies had 1 hour 11 minutes of public comment. However, a randomly chosen 4 hour and 30 minute meeting had only 40 minutes, and a 5 hour and 42 minute meeting on May 23rd that came to mind because I’d written about it previously had only 31.
But the concern about outsiders and non-residents derailing meetings seems misplaced. I, for better or worse, have watched or attended most school board meetings (at least since March). There were 1 or 2 at the end of the summer that had some unhinged and somewhat antagonistic people from outside the community provide their opinions. But by and large the people who show up and speak at these meetings are the same ones who show up every week. It is 2 or 3 mothers of special needs students, 1 or 2 people from the city’s disability committee, an alderman with school-aged children, and 1 guy whose story I’m not totally familiar with but who just seems generally skeptical of most of what the board is up to.
So yeah, board meetings are long and have gotten longer, but I’m not sure it’s entirely or even mostly attributable to insane out-of-towners clogging up public comment periods.
On the other hand, while all of the suggestions in the letter are framed as ways to increase participation and engagement from the community, some seem like they’d clearly have the opposite effect. For instance, they’d like to have shorter, earlier meetings to increase participation, but they’d also like to reduce opportunities for public comment and have people wait until the end of the meeting to speak.
I think some of the confusing framing comes from the deeply ingrained feeling that “more engagement” is necessarily better so if you describe everything as increasing stakeholder engagement people will be more likely to adopt your ideas even if some of your suggestions would transparently reduce participation and engagement.
And I’m only saying, don’t beat around the bush! In some cases, less community engagement can be helpful. I agree.
Other suggestions, like prioritizing residents and parents, seem straightforward. It seems reasonable that the people who pay taxes, vote, and are most impacted by the board’s decisions should be the ones who get to speak.
Finally, a common justification for their proposed changes is that many other districts do similar things and that Wauwatosa is somewhat of an outlier. But as an argument this seems incomplete. You don’t just care whether other people are doing what you’re proposing; you want to know whether they’re doing those things and also seeing the benefits from doing them that you care about.
You’d want to know whether these other school districts do indeed have shorter, more efficient meetings, more lively and less fatigued board members, and (somehow) more engagement and participation from community members. Ideally, you’d also want to know whether those positive seeming results were actually attributable to those particular policies and not to other unobserved differences.
Perhaps the Menomonee Falls district not only includes a single public comment period but also has a board president who runs meetings with an iron first, or shorter agendas, or limits the number of rounds of discussion that board members can have before voting on a proposal, or studiously avoids making contentious curriculum changes. This is a high bar, and I’m not saying you need to figure all of this out before making a change, only that we should not consider the bare fact that other school boards do similar things as strong evidence that those things are effective.
III.
So, I mostly agree with SOS Wauwatosa’s claim that meetings are probably too long and that a partial solution would be to reduce public comment. I wouldn’t want to get rid of the opportunity for people to comment on particular agenda items before they’re discussed by the board, but I think restricting comments to two rather than three minutes per person and prioritizing those from residents would be marginally helpful.
But I think other things might be helpful too:
Typically (I think) a proposal gets presented, the public comments, and the board discusses it at one meeting and votes on it at the next. But often at the second meeting before something comes to a vote, the same presentation, discussion, and public comment from the last meeting gets recapitulated. Is there a way to avoid this? Better yet, have these presentations, discussions, and public comments at the subcommittee level. I think this is the direction they are going but it would be nice if they started recording these subcommittee meetings as well so people could “engage.”
One function of public comment is that it allows someone to provide suggestions or seek redress for their grievances. But it also functions as a mechanism for making private knowledge public. Coordination problems occur when many people privately feel one way but are uncertain about the extent to which others share similar private thoughts and feelings and so the true magnitude of problems goes unrecognized and unreported. Letting people speak publicly at board meetings is one solution but so is making correspondence with the board about agenda items a part of the public record. The City’s Common Council publishes the emails from residents expressing support or opposition to agenda items. I am not sure why the school board couldn’t do the same. But it would be a useful way for people in the community to see others’ arguments and opinions without taking time during board meetings.
And more broadly, instead of more community engagement, I think it would just be useful to get the board and administrators to commit to specific, tangible goals that are easy to verify, and then fire them, recall them, or vote in new members if they fail to achieve those goals. I’ve quoted this Matthew Yglesias article on policy making in a low-trust world before, but I’m going to do it again because I like the way it’s worded:
The correct way to respond to a low-trust environment is not to double down on proceduralism, but to commit yourself to the “it does exactly what it says on the tin” principle and implement policies that have the following characteristics:
It’s easy for everyone, whether they agree with you or disagree with you, to understand what it is you say you are doing.
It’s easy for everyone to see whether or not you are, in fact, doing what you said you would do.
It’s easy for you and your team to meet the goal of doing the thing that you said you would do.
Fortunately, the board has recently approved a Strategic Plan with dozens of different actions and metrics for success. I think some of them might be impossible but it does at least provide an objective measure of success that goes beyond the number of listening sessions the superintendent has held or how quickly he responds to your emails. If he fails, then you can find someone else. And insofar as the metrics themselves fail to capture the outcomes people actually care about, you should recall or vote out the board members who approved them.
There are other, more unusual options, like policy prediction markets, that probably deserve their own post, but I think this is a start.
As citizens have grown more mistrustful of government and skeptical of the competence of those who run it, they have come to demand greater accountability and more involvement in its decision making. For the Wauwatosa school district this seems to have been a relatively recent development, but in reality it is part of a larger trend that goes back several decades.
Nathan Glazer, in his 1988 book The Limits of Social Policy devotes a chapter titled “Toward a Self-Service Society” that describes a trend of increased decentralization, local control, and community involvement in government decision-making. As society has become more wealthy people’s choices multiply and they demand solutions increasingly tailored to their individual needs. As society has become more educated, people have become more critical of the bureaucrats and politicians who provide those solutions and less enchanted by their aura of expertise. His description of education leaders seems just as relevant today as it was over 30 years ago:
The superintendent of schools is no longer seen primarily as a nonpolitical expert to whom deference is owed. He has to satisfy his constituency—a difficult matter when it is generally so fiercely divided on questions of progressive versus traditional educational techniques, sex education, and racial integration. His life is harder, and he lasts for a shorter time. He was always a politician, someone who had to make use of available people and resources to achieve an end, but he once did so with the aura of the nonpartisan professional expert. No longer.