Sue Hildick: Is Our Reverence for Local Control Limiting Our Future?
New inequities have to be acknowledged and addressed immediately. Our current reality is a locally controlled system that moves slowly and inequitably.
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Sue has worked in government as Legislative Director to former U.S. Senator Mark O. Hatfield and Director of Gov’t Affairs for Oregon Health Sciences University, in nonprofits as the CEO of the Oregon Trail Chapter, American Red Cross, in philanthropy as President of The Chalkboard Project and Foundations for a Better Oregon, and in her own business Hildick Strategies.
All my life I have been surrounded by educators. I come from a family of teachers and strong women who have created day care centers and Montessori schools throughout Oregon. My grandmother started a day care center out of necessity when her husband was badly injured and she needed to work from home; my mother founded Montessori Northwest which is a nationally accredited training center in Portland; and, my sister is a former Montessori Teacher of the Year. Great teaching is in our family DNA.
You could say I’m the black sheep of the family because I’m not a teacher. But I’m not completely disconnected from the field because I’m a lover of smart public policy. That’s probably why I can still attend holiday dinners. My family members appreciate the fact that I have used my work in public service to increase access to higher quality education.
What ties my family together, regardless of profession, is a shared belief: We believe in education – the earlier the better – as the foundation for our future and have dedicated much of our lives to figuring out how to make it better.
I acted on that belief while serving as President of the Chalkboard Project, a unique collaboration of Oregon’s foundations dedicated to improving K-12 education in Oregon. In that capacity, I worked alongside school district leaders to understand how better supporting the profession of teaching would yield better success for all children. That meant helping school leaders deepen professional support for their educators through independent professional development, authentic performance evaluation based on plans for growth, and individualized coaching and mentoring to help both new and experienced teachers reach their goals. When schools were empowered with coaching and resources to build better support systems, their educators did so with improved success for kids.
This lesson, though, has not been learned across Oregon. We have 197 school districts serving our state’s 587,000 K-12 students. Local officials set policy and guide the learning environment in their communities. About half of those districts have fewer than 1,000 students. Dispersing any one idea through this disparate system is even harder than knocking over a long string of dominoes: even if one district picks up a good idea, there’s no guaranteeing it will spread to others.
Regardless of the size of the district, we honor locally elected officials who take on the difficult job of being a school board member. Many late nights and constant connection to the community make this the hardest job in public service in my view. I was a student school board member in Tigard while in high school and am a deep believer in the value of local decision-making in our communities. I grew up with great appreciation for local control as a critical component of our system, an approach which helps make our schools nimble and responsive.
But today I wonder whether our reverence of local control doesn’t also contribute to our lack of progress as a state and a nation in bringing an equitable quality education to all. We need to answer a few pressing questions:
Can 197 school districts – each engaged in striving to meet state and federal standards – soak up the research and strategic policymaking necessary to propel all kids forward?
Can we expect all of Oregon’s elected board members, each with different backgrounds, motivations, preparation and expertise, to successfully navigate and lead our most complex and highly invested state enterprise?
Do we delegate too much autonomy to the local level and lose the opportunity that centralized leadership provides us to require more for all children?
At Chalkboard we painstakingly helped build better professional support systems for educators with a coalition of the willing – school districts that had the conditions for success and an upfront partnership between teachers and administrators. We saw students benefit from those collaborations. I believe having those educator supports spread across the state – which we did by helping to provide mentors for new teachers in their first 1-3 years in the classroom – would have been better for all children.
Local control frequently stands as the barrier to realizing those support systems in some places. While we honor and revere local decision-making, we sacrifice the pace of faster progress for it. We sacrifice economies of scale and learning from others through successful pilots that could then be extended statewide. Oregon has a rich history of successful pilots (i.e., voting by mail) that even become national models.
Again, I have to ask, “Do we sacrifice too much by leaving it up to 197 different communities to bring our best to our educators and our children?”
I’ve been pondering that question for over a decade and now that I am currently working in local government, it’s still on my mind. I see the closeness to the constituent that local public service rests on and it’s beyond powerful. When the large wheels of policymaking are grinding away at the federal and state level, local governments have to deliver service often in ambiguity, or contingent upon factors that can’t be seen except at the local level.
The decisions made by these local officials are complicated and difficult – and constantly under scrutiny. This dynamic has never been so apparent as in the pandemic where we have needed a mix of local and state decision-making to keep Oregonians safe. We value this closeness to the people as preferable to the distanced policymakers in Salem or D.C.
Yet we need to be honest with ourselves about the vision we have for all children in the future. We have to confront the reality that the deepest impact of the global pandemic has been on our neighbors of color, including our children of color. New inequities have to be acknowledged and addressed immediately. Our current reality is a locally controlled system that moves slowly and inequitably and is perhaps, one that appears to be unable to summon the urgency that a statewide call to action could inspire.
It’s time to step back and recalibrate the balance of strong, effective state policy tempered with balanced local control. We cannot wait for 197 school districts to remedy these issues. Now more than ever Oregon’s children deserve courageous consideration of this uncomfortable but timely question.
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