School Board Nominating Commission Meets For the First Time; Decides to Hold Secret Hearing to Discuss its Bylaws

On Thursday, January 17, 2008, the Anne Arundel School Board Nominating Commission met for the first time. The meeting was publicly announced the previous afternoon in a blurb in the Capital. Four members of the public were present at the meeting, the Chief of Staff for Speaker of the House Mike Busch, the Capital education reporter, Tom Frank, and me. The primary decision made at the meeting was to hold a secret meeting, scheduled for the evening of January 23 (tonight), to formulate bylaws. There was a great sense of urgency to compose a set of bylaws so the candidate recruitment and selection process could begin.

The School Board Nominating Commission was appointed by the Governor on November 6, 2007. It has eleven members, five appointed by interest groups (publicly described as "stakeholders", a term popular with politicians but not political scientists) and six appointed by elected representatives. I shall call the former group the "Interest Group Commissioners" and the latter the "Political Commissioners."

The Interest Group Commissioners were appointed by the five interest groups: business community (Anne Arundel County Chamber of Commerce) teachers union (Teachers Association of Anne Arundel County), administrators union (Association of Education Leaders), parents (Anne Arundel County Council of PTAs), and higher ed (Anne Arundel County Community College Board of Trustees). Five of the Political Commissioners were appointed by the Governor; the sixth was appointed by the County Executive.

The bill creating the Commission was incredibly sketchy, a slapdash piece of legislation that delegates huge legislative powers to the Commission. Some of the mess was cleaned up in the midnight rush before the bill passed (when an amendment was introduced to increase the size of the school board from 8 to 9 members to fix an unanticipated inconsentency caused by the change in school board districts). Maryland's Attorney General is being called upon in unspecified ways to clarify other ambiguities (such as the degree to which the Commission must follow laws created for other appointed bodies). Still, there are vital issues and apparently unanticipated scenarios the Commission must sort through before it can get down to business. (Alan Lang provided an outstanding, if incomplete, summary of these unresolved issues in an email to individual legislators on March 22, 2007, which I highly recommend reading.) Such problems aren't unusual for new laws coming out of America's legislatures; they are nevertheless worthy of note, not only because of the carelessness they reveal, but also because the result is to delegate very significant and unspecified powers to unelected bodies.

So what kind of political body is the Nominating Commission? The answer to this question is by no means self-evident. The part that is most explicit is that this is an appointed political body granted substantial powers. The most important power is the power to limit the Governor's choice of school board members to one of two candidates for each available position. If the Nominating Commission chose to act strategically—by selecting one candidate it knew the Governor would not choose—it would actually have essentially both nominating and appointive powers. Given that the school board administers approximately $1 billion of taxpayer funds (about half of local taxes and a large fraction of state taxes), this is a truly remarkable set of powers for a body that has no elected members and, of its appointed members, only approximately half appointed by elected representatives. An added wrinkle on the lack of direct representation is that more than 80% of those appointed by elected representatives are appointed by the Governor, a very distant representative who represents 23 other counties in addition to Anne Arundel. Imagine if the president of the U.S. was given the responsibility of appointing school board members in every school district in the U.S. Obviously, the Governor is not so remote a figure, but this thought experiment helps clarify the political logic of the situation.

Still, the above analysis of the Nominating Commission's democratic accountability is very superficial because it relies on the explicit text of the bill. There are many other ingredients that go into determining whether a political body is democratically accountable. Upon close inspection, we will see that the Nominating Commission embodies an inconsistent set of democratic accountability principles. Sorting through the extent to which the resulting system is a muddled mess or a brilliant creative synthesis will largely depend on the Commission's currently unwritten rules of procedure.

Before we can move ahead with our analysis of the Nominating Commission's democratic characteristics, we need a little more conceptual background on what makes an appointed body democratic. An appointed political body with democratic powers may attain democratic legitimacy (which I define as the perception of democratic accountability) by being accountable to elected representatives or by being intrinsically representative of the public.

A body that is representative of the public need not be under the thumb of elected officials in order to be democratic. A jury, for example, is democratic despite not being appointed by elected officials. It is intrinsically representative due to random nature by which its members are selected. Such a body can be completely independent of elected representatives yet democratic.

Since democratic representation is defined in terms of interests (i.e., to what extent does the body represent a microcosm of the public's interests?), it is possible that a body that appears to be intrinsically representative by obvious descriptive characteristics (e.g., gender, race, and geography) may in fact be anything but representative in a democratic sense.

The most common type of appointed political body created by elected officials is granted no democratic powers; it is purely advisory. As such, it needs to makes relatively minimal claims on democratic legitimacy. The federal government has more than 900 such advisory bodies. I am not aware of a single federal body with formal democratic powers whose members are appointed by interest groups.

The hallmark of an advisory committee is that it is made up of experts—often, as is the case with the Nominating Commission, experts representing politically important stakeholders. This stakeholder diversity of expert opinion is often confused with democratic representation. But it is no such thing, as demonstrated by the fact that if such bodies had democratic legitimacy, they would be granted formal legislative powers. But legislators rarely grant such committees such powers because they recognize that an advisory committee of experts intrinsically lacks democratic legitimacy.

All poltical bodies that seek democratic legitimacy must also be transparent in their actions so that the public can hold their members and those who appoint them to account.

So with this conceptual scaffolding, let us now ask three questions that should be asked of any appointed body when assessing its democratic accountability: 1) how independent is it? 2) how democratically representative is it? And 3) how transparent is it?

Independence. The five interest group representatives on the Nominating Commission are clearly highly independent of our elected representatives. They are appointed by the interest groups, and elected officials have no statutory power to veto their selection or recall them.

A less easily answered question is the degree to which the interest group commissioners are independent of the interest groups that appoint them. Here there is already some controversy. It is clear that the political commissioners are appointed for four year terms and that there is no provision for them to be recalled by the elected official who appointed them. However, the ability of an interest group to recall its representative is less clear. For example, the representative of the Community College is expected to leave the Community College in July. Will he continue on the Nominating Commission for his four year term or be replaced by his interest group in July? Presumably, the interest group can change its representative on the Nominating Commission whenever it so desires. The significance of this is that the public should assume that the interest group representatives will be tightly controlled by those who appoint them.

The independence of the political commissioners from those who appoint them would appear to be greater because they have four year terms (except for the first set of commissioners, whose terms end in January 2009) and cannot be recalled during that term. Their jobs would also appear to give them more independence because they are not directly linked to their performance on the Nominating Commission. The representative appointed by the County Executive works for the County Executive and thus has an obvious financial interest in maintaining the goodwill of the County Executive. However, none of the Governor's appointees directly works for him. On the other hand, it is hard to imagine why it would be in their self interest, especially for the two professional lobbyists, including the chair of the Nominating Commission, to do anything that might anger the Governor (or their local legislative sponsors). As one of the lawyer-lobbyists complained during the organizing session of the Nominating Commission, he is doing this pro bono and his partners want to know why he is leaving the office at 5:30 pm without his time clock running. The obvious answer is that lobbyists are in the business of cultivating goodwill among the powerful—and the governor (and their legislative sponsors) are powerful people. The struggle to create goodwill, for example, is why the Chair of the Commission presumably gave some $20,000 to politicians during the last election cycle (this is just his personal contribution, his firm gave many, many times more).

All in all, then, we should assume the political appointees are highly dependent on the person who appointed them. This is not necessarily bad. Indeed, it might be considered the key democratic characteristic of this political body. But it is very important to keep in mind when assessing responsibility for the success or failure of this democratic body. (It is also important to keep in mind that the key district legislators the governor relied upon in choosing a particular nominee may never be publicly known because this information need not be disclosed.)

As is evident to everyone who observes politics closely, politicians have strong incentives to blame others for bad outcomes and take credit for good outcomes. The problem with political bodies that are ambiguously independent is that politicians may be able to play the blame game to the detriment of democratic accountability. All bad outcomes will be attributed to the independence of the political body whereas all good things will be attributed to themselves. The result is that the public is effectively disenfranchised. I would recommend that the public assume that, despite all appearances to the contrary, the political appointees have minimal practical independence.

Thus, the Nominating Commission has a confusing mix. The six political commissioners have minimal practical independence but the five interest group commissioners are in the opposite camp. This will make it very hard for the public to assess political accountability.

Another important observation regarding independence is that all five political commissioners appointed by the Governor are loyal Democrats. Unlike the public, most political scientists like partisan politics because choice of party is the prime characteristic the public uses for judging elected representatives in low profile offices such as state representative. Party labels are the branding system that makes the public politically relevant. By giving the Nominating Commission a clear partisan bias, Democrats will be in a position to claim credit for its successes and Republicans for its failures.

However, the public tends to disagree with political scientists' assessment that partisan politics is good for democracy. This is especially true for school politics, where the word "partisan" is as bad as a four letter word. So how did this happen? When the Commission was being set up, no one debated whether such partisan accountability would be desirable. I don't recall a single politician saying he wanted to shift Anne Arundel school board politics from a non-partisan to partisan system; indeed, it was one of the major arguments used against having elections for school board members.

Another twist is that partisan bodies usually have members of both parties. For example, the SEC, FTC, FEC, and FCC seek partisan balance among commissioners. Similarly, legislative committees include members of both parties. In this case, presumably, the interest group representatives will take on the role traditionally assumed by the minority party.

Another effect of the Commission's level of independence is whether it is fundamentally a negotiating or deliberative body. We can take it for granted that all commissioners will describe their views as deliberative in nature; as disinterested discussions motivated by a desire to find the common good. But to the extent commissioners are not in fact independent, their fundamental mode of operation will be bargaining on behalf of their external backers. Such bargaining will be kept out of sight because the commissioners know it is embarrassing. Still, the public can use the Commission's level of independence as a cue to likely hidden bargaining behavior.

Perhaps the key characteristic the public should look for is whether the governor appointed chair of the Commission acts according to majoritarian or consensus norms. In local education politics, as opposed to traditional party politics, there is strong pressure to act according to consensus norms. In traditional party politics, legislatures merely strive to get a majority to pass legislation. In consensus politics, a premium is placed on no overt public conflict and unanimous or near unanimous votes. As a practical matter (rarely publicly acknowledged), consensus results are usually achieved by giving minority interests veto power over the final recommendation. It may be presumed, then, that if the political appointees act as a block and the Commission strives hard to reach consensus, then one or a few interest group commissioners hold de facto veto power over the recommendations of the Nominating Commission.

I'm not saying that consensus politics is necessarily bad. Many European governments operate on such principles to avert civil war. (In contrast, most U.S. politicians go out of their way to hide evidence of non-majoritarian politics because they sense such politics is not popular; i.e., majoritarian.) What I am saying is that this is a very important attribute of the Nominating Commission that the public should be aware of. My guess is that future governors will largely evaluate the work of the Nominating Commission's chair by whether he can achieve consensus (because this is not an area where governors can be expected to welcome controversy). When the public is told that the Commission reached consensus based on the merits of an issue or candidate, it should react with a healthy skepticism: the result may have been obtained through antimajoritarian means.

Representation. There is no question that the Governor and other elected leaders went out of their way to make the Nominating Commission look representative of the public. According to what political scientists call "descriptive representation," this body is highly representative of the public by gender, race, and geography. Of the eleven members of the Commission, four are women and two are black. Each of the Governor's five political appointees must reside in one of the five legislative districts (although it should be noted that one of the five districts is only partly located in Anne Arundel County, and these district boundaries are subject to change with each census, taken every ten years). Overall, the Commission members appear to hail from representatives geographic areas within the County.

Similarly, the Nominating Commission features stakeholder representation, with designated represenatives from the parent, business, teacher, administrator, and community college communities. The Community College is an important stakholder because a large fraction of its students come from the County's K12 public school system.

Neither descriptive representation nor stakeholder representation assures democratic representation. They may be indicators of it but, at best, they are highly imperfect indicators.

It may be instructive here to contrast the representation of the new Nominating Commission with the old Nominatnig Convention. The vast majority of the members of the Nominating Commission were citizens with kids currently enrolled in the Anne Arundel County public school system. Much of the balance had been attending the Nominating Convention for years and continued to attend even after their kids graduated. Most members of the Nominating Convention had participated in local citizen advisory committees or otherwise had established reputations in their communities as parental representatives.

I am only aware of a single member of the Nominating Commission who has kids currently enrolled in the Anne Arundel County Public School system. In the member introductions at the iniital organizing event, a number of mumbers highlighted that they formerly had kids in the school system or expected to in the future, but only one said she currently does (and she is not known as a parental activist).

This marks a radical departure from the type of parental representation traditionally found in the school board nominating convention. The Chair of the Nominating Commission proudly noted that he had three kids--ages 5, 2, and 9 months--and that his wife thought this would be a good opportunity for him to learn about and shape the school system.

On the other hand, the Commission members excel in educational experience within the Anne Arundel County school system. In addition to the experience represented by the teacher and administrator interest groups, two members claimed a combined total of 68 years teaching within Anne Arundel County school system. Adding the close relatives of other Commission members, the total experience level would probably rise to over 150 years.

This is an extraordinary amount of direct experience in Anne Arundel County public schools for a body of this size. It clearly suggests a huge level of expertise. But that expertise is not a substitute for direct parental experience. It therefore marks a great departure from the tradition of the Nominating Convention, where those without any direct or indirect work experience in the county schools overwhelmingly predominated.

Transparency. In the modern, developed world, all leaders, whether they are in generally recognized democracies or autocracies, make some effort to claim the mantle of democratic legitimacy. All the other major modes of claiming government legitimacy have been discredited. In practice, our leaders often find democratic procedures very inconvenient and unwelcome, but these reservations are rarely publicly stated.

A key democratic norm is transparency. If the public lacks the information to hold its representatives to account, then democracy becomes meaningless. The legislation creating the School Board Nominating Commission is almost wholly silent on issues of due process in general and transparency in particular. The legislation stipulates that the Commission will hold two public hearings, but that is about it. It doesn't stipulate what it has to discuss at those hearings or what it cannot discuss in private. Apparently, as a public body appointed by the legislature, the School Board Nominating Commission is subject to Maryland's open meeting, records, and ethics laws. But these laws represent minimal standards of openness (moreover, since they are rarely enforced and incur minimal penalties when enforced, public bodies routinely ignore them when it is convenient for them to do so).

For example, the School Board Nominating Convention publicized the date of its key hearings months before they took place. This included a significant information outreach program to the community. The Convention also established that the interactions between its members and the candidates would be public. Deliberations about changing the bylaws were also public. In contrast, the School Board Nominating Commission publicized its first meeting one day before the meeting (a small blurb in the Capital was deemed to be adequate notice to satisfy the Open Meeting Law) and ruled that its discussions about how to operate (and to what extent it would copy the public deliberative features of the Nominating Convention) would be discussed in secret ("executive session") on the evening of January 23.

During the organizing meeting, all the Commission members who spoke up about the openness issue claimed that it was of great importance to them and they would seek to do everything important in open and comply with all the relevant laws. These pronouncements are surely to be applauded. But given the track record of at least some of the Commission members, the public should keep its attention narrowly focused on verifiable commitments manifested in actions taken.

Even during this specific meeting, there was a discrepancy between the stated general commitment to openness and the specific actions taken. For example, the Chair did not hand out an agenda to members of the public and set no time aside for public comments. He did accept unsoliciated questions from the public near the end of the meeting. But he did so with a noticeable frown and pointedly reminded the audience that the first meeting of the Commission was merely organizational in nature. But if the Commission members could ask procedural issues, why couldn't the public, too? And why would an organizational meeting necessarily preclude asking questions about the actual procedures of the Commission and the means by which the Commision would create those procedures?

As the meeting appeared near its end, I raised my hand and asked a few questions about the proposed bylaws, to which I got no answers. Would the Commission make the candidate interviews public? Would it include the candidate interviews in the two public hearings? Would it use the County's multi-million dollar government access TV network to televise the proceedings? The commissioners then arranged to discuss these issues in executive session at an undisclosed location.

When I told the Commission how difficult it was for me to find out about their first meeting and asked to be put on an email list for future meetings, I got blank stares and one comment that the folks on the Commission were working pro bono and this would be an unreasonable burden placed on the Commission. In mid-December, four weeks after the Governor set up the Commission, I had called the Governor's appointments secretary to ask when the first meeting would be held. She said she didn't know and would contact the Commission Chair and get back to me in a week. Not having heard back from her, in early January I called her again. She said she had had no response but would try the Chair again and hopefully one of them would get back to me within a week. She also asked me out of curiousity if I intended to run for one of the open school board seats (to which I answered "no"). Then, almost two weeks later, without having received any response from the Governor's aide or the Commission's Chair, my wife pointed out to me a blurb in the Capital for a meeting the following day. Unfortunately, the day of the meeting was also the day of the big snow storm that led to the early cancellation of school and the cancellation of many other meetings. In the end, I decided to brave the weather and risk showing up at a cancelled meeting because I had no reliable way of otherwise finding out if the meeting had been cancelled. No wonder that only one other member of the public—other than the Capital reporter and Chief of Staff for Speaker Mike Busch--showed up at this ostensibly "public" meeting.

Key Issues Ahead

I see my contribution to this process as providing the critical analytical perspective of a political scientist—someone who can apply basic principles of democratic theory to this particular problem of electoral design. If I had my druthers, the County's system of school governance would either be based on municipal (county) executive appointment (as recently instituted in Washington, DC) or a citizens assembly school board member appointment process (which would be a variation on the current nominating convention process; see elsewhere in this blog for the details). But at this late stage, those are not practical recommendations. Needed now are proposals to fine tune the present process. The Commission has a very tight timeline to get its recommendations to the Governor by May 1 or earlier. Tim Mennuti, president of the Anne Arundel County teachers' union, stated it eloquently when he observed: "We're sailing this ship while we're building it." Meanwhile, the Commission's Chair has submitted a number of procedural questions to Maryland's Attorney General and is awaiting a response.

A surprising development is that the Chair appears quite concerned that the School Board Nominating Convention, which never had a statutory basis and whose recommendations were purely advisory, could be a competitor to the School Board Nominating Commission. I had simply assumed that the School Board Nominating Convention was dead and gone and could not be a threat to anybody.

At the end of the meeting, the Chair requested that the bylaws of the Nominating Convention be copied and distributed to the Commission members for discussion at the secret meeting on January 23. Those bylaws have some excellent precedents I hope the Commission will adopt.

I would strongly encourage the CACs and other members of the public to ask that language be included in the Nominating Commission's bylaws requiring:

1) that all interviews with candidates for the school board be made public,

2) that the dates, time, and place of such meetings be made public at least a month in advance,

3) that making a meeting public includes not just a blurb in the Capital but an email to the head of every public school citizens advisory committee in the County and every member of the County who signs up to receive such emails,

4) that public Commission meetings be televised on the County's new multimillion dollar government and public access TV channels and video web server,

5 ) that Commission meetings to discuss its bylaws and procedures be made public,

6) that the Commission create and post on its website a statement of principles explaining in some detail the qualifications it is looking for in a school board nominee (the statement "we are looking for the best qualified individual" is wholly inadequate; the type of clear statement of principles judicial nominating committees issue can be used as a model),

7) that the Commission state whether it intends to operate according to majoritarian or consensus principles,

8) that the Commission commit to taking public, recorded roll call votes on all its votes held in a public meetings,

9) that the Commission will post all its public proceedings, including its minutes and roll call votes, on its public website within one week of a public meeting and that these documents will be stored in perpetuity,

10) that the Commission website include brief biographies of all Commission members including basic factual information, such as what legislative district each political commissioner represents, and what they believe are their credentials for serving on the Board (the one sentence description provided by the Governor's office was inadequate for this purpose).

Commission members will say that such detail is unnecessary. Experience with such bodies, however, demonstrates that such written rules are necessary. The well established pattern of such bodies is to do the minimal amount legally necessary whenever they face a controversial issue—exactly the type of issue that is usually most important for the public to learn about.

Over the next few weeks, I'd encourage CAC members and other parent activists to email Joshua Greene, Chair of the Nominating Commission, to let him know that you think it's important that he follow through on his stated commitment to openness. In particular, Joshua Greene should commit to passing bylaws only after holding at least one and preferably two well-publicized hearings to get public feedback. Notice and a link to the text of the proposed bylaws should be sent out at least a week in advance. In addition, the text of the proposed bylaws should be posted on the Commission's website at least 72 hours before any vote on them is made. In addition to emailing Joshua Greene, parent activists should cc: their Maryland House of Delegates representative, their Maryland Senate representative, and their County Councilor. Contact information for your state reps can be found here: http://mdelect.net/electedofficials . Contact information for your county councillor can be found here: http://www.aacounty.org/CountyCouncil/index.cfm . Joshua Greene's email address is: joshuacgreene@yahoo.com.

Note that the political commissioners were probably all appointed based upon the advice and consent of the legislators in the districts from which they come, so the political commissioners will be especially responsive to whichever legislator was their sponsor. Note also that Joshua Greene has contributed $4,000 to a bipartisan cast of county councillors over the last legislative cycle.

Don't accept any excuses that the Commission is under a very tight schedule and doesn't have the time to engage in standard democratic due process. These issues are too important to be glossed over. There is still plenty of time left to allow for meaningful public input in the development of the Commission's procedures. Remember, too, that the Commission members have already had three months since they knew they would be taking on this responsibility (the actual announcement was November 6--eleven weeks ago).

A Call for a More Healthy Style of Democratic Deliberation

Here is a prediction about how the politics of the School Board Nominating Commission will play out over the coming years. During its first few years, our political elites will be highly critical of anyone who dares to publicly criticize any part of their handiwork. They will demand that we give the Nominating Commission "the benefit of the doubt" and they will have an arsenal of arguments, not least the friendly community people placed on the Commission, to support their case. Accordingly, critics will be dismissed as cranks and marginalized by whatever means possible. To the extent the critics offer politically compelling ideas, the elites will respond that they always intended to act on those ideas anyway. In five years, however, the tides will turn. It will now be the elites who are the chief castigators of the Nominating Commission. Their past behavior will now be forgotten and rationalized away and now they will seek to paint anyone who defends the Nominating Commission as a crank.

Where have we seen this pattern before? Consider, most recently, the attitudes toward former Superintendent Eric Smith. When he came in, our elites took him at face value. They treated him like a godsend. Anyone who dared to publicly criticize his actions during his first few years was treated as a mean spirited, evil egotist. Then, after only three years in office, the tides turned. Now, no one could be found to publicly defend Eric Smith and anyone who dared raise his voice in support of the superintendent was treated as evil incarnate. With Smith gone and now head of the State of Florida's educational system (with a budget more than twenty times the size of Anne Arundel County), the history of people's actions is now once again being rewritten.

This is not a democratically healthy way to conduct public policy debates. It is the politics of demagoguery and intimidation and faddism; it debases rather than strengthens public discourse; it appeals to the worst in us rather than the best. A better way to go about politics is to create a respectful environment for diverse points of view, for those who criticize the actions of our elites as well as those who praise them; for those who seek a more tempered balance in discourse in recognition that public policies and their creators are neither the works of saints nor devils but the imperfect hand of man and always subject to incremental improvement. Following such advice is not easy; it is in fact very painful and contrary to the most basic human instincts, which seek immediate gratification and punishment of anyone who disagrees. But it constitutes the essence ofa population's democratic education. Democracy got a bad name in Ancient Athens—most famously in the trial and killing of Socrates for unpopular views—because the political culture of that time did not adequately recognize the necessity of a spirit of toleration and dissent for the long-term healthy development of democracy. All the leaders in our County give lip service to such values; what I'm asking is that they now act consistently with those values.

Perhaps the most important reason for encouraging alternative points of view is the incredible sloppiness of our politicians and media when alternative viewpoints aren't forced upon them. The incentives for today's politicians are to spend their time raising money, running for office, attending community events, and projecting a certain type of public spirited persona. Paying attention to the details of bills doesn't fit in that job description. The local media are often even more sloppy; I'd be shocked, for example, if the Capital's editorial board even read the bill (even though the entire bill can fit on a single page). Recall the electric utility deregulation fiasco. Who was minding the store and paying attention to the details of the legislation when it mattered? Did any politicians pay a political price? Has the Capital lost any subscription or ad revenue? Unless the public demands more from its political elites in designing a democratically accountable school governance system, I believe the results we'll see five or ten years out will not be all that different from what that carelessly drafted electric utility bill got us.

Concluding Thoughts

If I were to summarize in a single phrase the underlying political logic of the new system of selecting school board members, I would call it "insiders appointing insiders to appoint insiders on behalf of insiders." Admittedly, this is too cynical, as the Commission is still largely an unshaped entity. Its current structure is more a back-of-the-envelope outline than a complete, polished draft. The outline may be flawed, but the overall work can be greatly improved by rigorous attention to detail, which at this point in time means shining a light on key democratic procedural issues that must be addressed in very short order. It is my philosophy that the public (and press) ultimately gets the quality of government it deserves. If each citizen rationalizes his or her apathy and expects someone else to look after his or her best interests, the predictable result will be a weakened democratic process.

Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the School Board Nominating Commission is not that, of the more than 14,000 school boards in the United States, it is unique in the way it selects a school board. It is the way that such a striking and important policy innovation was never subject to public deliberation. This is remarkable because the legislature spent more than a decade deliberating over how to replace the current nominating process and held multiple hearings to that effect. But this particular and unprecedented method of selecting school board members was never discussed in public with anything more than soundbite quips. Those with reservations about the particulars of this innovation were not granted a hearing but shunned. Ridicule, rather than reasoned argument, was the response to concerns voiced by the public.

I hope that that culture of ridicule will not now be insensibly passed on to the Nominating Commission. The members of the Nominating Commission avowed lofty democratic principles at their first meeting. The question now, as they make critical decisions over the coming weeks affecting our children's education, is whether those words will be translated into deeds. Too often in the past there has been a great chasm between the democratic rhetoric and deeds of our education leaders. Let's try to create a school board nominating process that will reveal the hypocrits and reward those who act as the true representatives of the parents and kids.

Capital Article: School board nominators off to slow start

Newspaper: Capital
Title: School board nominators off to slow start; Law that established panel was light on details; 2 will be named in 2008
Date: January 18, 2008
By: Elisabeth Hulette

School Board Nominating Commission's First Meeting Announced

Newspaper: Capital
Title: New school board process kicks off
Date: January 16, 2008

Annapolis - The county's new School Board Nominating Commission will hold its first organizational meeting tomorrow.

The 11-member commission, which was created last year, is charged with submitting nominees for the county school board to the governor. The governor must then appoint new school board members from that list.

The commission was the legislature's answer to calls for a more democratic school board. Under the previous system, the governor was under no obligation to appoint candidates named by the local nominating convention.

The meeting is open to the public and is set for 6:30 p.m. in the Anne Arundel County Delegation Room in the House Office Building at 6 Bladen St.

Governor Announces Appointees to School Board Nominating Commission

Newspaper: Capital
Title: Officials name school appointees
Date: November 6, 2007

ANNAPOLIS - Officials yesterday announced the appointments to the county's first School Board Nominating Commission, part of a revamped process to appoint and retain members of the county Board of Education.

The 11-member commission, formed by legislation passed earlier this year, will generate a list of candidates to fill board vacancies as they arise. Beginning next year, Gov. Martin O'Malley will select appointees from that list, and those people will face a yes-or-no vote from county residents during the general election following the appointment. Members of the commission will serve four-year terms.

Mr. O'Malley's five appointments are:

Joshua C. Greene, an attorney from Crofton who will serve as the commission's chairman.

Christine Davenport, a one-time Anne Arundel County teacher and assistant principal from Glen Burnie.

Lee Roy Payne, a recently retired guidance counselor from Millersville.

Matthew C. Tedesco, an attorney from Odenton.

Konrad M. Wayson of Harwood, a former school board member and the managing partner of Wayson Land Holdings.

State law says the other six members of the nominating commission should be appointed by specific organizations. Those members are:

Yevola Peters, director of minority affairs for Anne Arundel County (appointed by County Executive John R. Leopold).

Tim Mennuti, president of the Teachers Association of Anne Arundel County (appointed by the teachers' union).

Sandra Anderson, who does community relations work for Comcast (appointed by the Annapolis and Anne Arundel County Chamber of Commerce).

Anita Owens, president of the County Council of PTAs (appointed by the PTA council).

Arthur Ebersberger, chairman of the Anne Arundel County Community College Board of Trustees (appointed by the board of trustees).

Richard I. Kovelant, an Annapolis attorney (appointed by the Association of Education Leaders).

What is the explanation for the extraordinarily high turnout at this year's Nominating Convention?

I checked the turnout for the last 15 years of the Nominating Convention and discovered that this year the turnout was the highest it has been in the last 15 years. The second highest was in 1999 with 214 votes. The average during the fifteen year period was 141 votes. This year there were 248 votes. Does anyone have an explanation for this anomoly? Was there some unpublicized recruitment going on? For example, were any CACs lobbied?

By way of a possible explanation, consider a trend I’ve noticed. The Nominating Convention is most likely to be subverted when there are minimal political consequences for doing so. For example, the only two times in the last fifteen years when the Governor overlooked the Nominating Convention’s choices occurred when the Governor was in his 8th year in office and there were thus no long-term political consequences for bypassing the Nominating Convention’s recommendations. That is, there is a one-to-one correspondence between being in the 8th year of your term as governor and avoiding the choices of the Nominating Convention; it’s a perfect correspondence.

A rational explanation for this behavior can be found in a branch of political science known as “game theory.” In the last move of a political game there are no reputational effects to consider, so the political calculus tends to be dramatically different than in the earlier moves. This year was the last move for the Nominating Convention. Is it possible that some folks recognized and exploited that fact? Again, this is just a hypothesis and most hypotheses are wrong. But I think this is a worthy question to put out there to eliminate any nagging doubt.

One of the nice things about the Nominating Convention is that enough people are involved and there is enough transparency in the process that any large scale political corruption is hard to keep out of the sunlight. If something wasn’t quite right, I’m confident that at least some people on this mailing list would know about it and share their information via at least word-of-mouth. The Nominating Commission, in contrast, involves a handful of people--half appointed by only one person--and a much more secretive process. The opportunity for backroom deals that would not withstand the light of day is thus commensurately greater.

Consequently, whatever corrupution there might or might not have been with this year’s Nominating Convention (and by corruption I mean hidden exercise of power in a way that violates the democratic norm of political equality), the incentive for such corruption will only increase with the new Nominating Commission, not in its early years when the sunlight will shine most brightly and everybody will be on their best political behavior, but in its later years when its underlying political logic will work itself out.

Media Coverage Since the November 2006 Elections

Our say: Attack on school board selection reforms is ill-advised, Capital, May 10, 2007, Capital Editorial Board

Four nominated for school board: Governor has final say in filling two positions, Capital, May 10, 2007, Ryan Bagwell.

Simonaire still fighting for elected school board: He is spearheading petition drive to get referendum, Capital, May 8, 2007, by Liam Farrell

Both houses OK bills on selection of school board, Capital, March 27, 2007, Liam Farrell and Jeff Horseman, Staff Writers

Bills take shape in General Assembly: School board, panhandling move ahead, Capital, March 18, 2007, Liam Farrell, Staff Writer

School Board Bill: No Election, but More Say for Public, Washington Post, , March 15, 2007; Page AA03, William Wan, Staff Writer

Our say: School board selection reform finally on track, Capital, March 11, 2007, Capital Editorial Board.

Local senators OK compromise bill 3-2, Capital, March 10, 2007, Liam Farrell.

School board bill dropped: Legislator won't seek referendum to require directly elected panel, Baltimore Sun, March 9, 2007, Susan Gvozdas

Letters to the Editor, Maryland Gazette, March 3, 2007, p. A8.

Your say: Which school board system do you prefer, elected or appointed? The Maryland Gazette, March 3, 2007, p. A8

Letters to the Editor, The Capital, February 28, 2007, p. A10.

Guest Column: Wanted: A voice, not a commission, The Maryland Gazette, February 28, 2007, p. A10, State Senator Brian Simonaire

A Push for New Way To Fill School Board: 2 Bills Give Momentum to an Old Debate, Washington Post, February 22, 2007, p. AA03, William Wan, Staff Writer.

Our say: Delegation should pass Leopold's school board plan, Capital, February 16, 2007, Capital Editorial Board.

Lawmakers face choice of school board bills, Capital, February 15, 2007, Pg. A1, Liam Farrell, Staff Writer.

A Lesson in School Rule: Assembly leaders oppose elected boards, but many Marylanders are demanding the choice, Baltimore Sun, January 29, 2007, Justin Fenton.

A Leader for the Schools: Mayoral Control Is The Path to Results, Washington Post, January 20, 2007, p. A23, Joel I. Klein.

General Assembly Preview, 9 of 20 in county delegation new, face learning curve; School board, panhandling, top local issues, The Capital (Annapolis, MD), January 7, 2007, Pg. A1.

Election of school boards resurfaces: Old issue returns as dissatisfaction with panels grows, The Baltimore Sun (Maryland), January 4, 2007, Pg. 1A, Justin Fenton and Mary Gail Hare, Sun reporters.

Letters to the Editor, The Capital (Annapolis, MD), January 4, 2007, Pg. A10.

Senator to offer bill for elected school board, The Capital (Annapolis, MD), December 21, 2006; Pg. A12, JEFF HORSEMAN; Staff Writer.

SPEAKOUT, The Baltimore Sun, December 17, 2006; Pg. 4G.

Our view: Legislators should fix school board system, The Capital (Annapolis, MD), December 15, 2006; EDITORIAL; Pg. A8.

Leopold promotes elected school board, The Maryland Gazette, December 9, 2006; Pg. A1, DAVID ABRAMS; Staff Writer.

Elected school board bill will return, The Capital (Annapolis, MD), December 8, 2006; Pg. A1, DAVID ABRAMS; Staff Writer.

Our view: Votes speak louder than pols' words, The Capital (Annapolis, MD), November 6, 2006; EDITORIAL; Pg. A12.

School Board Change Killed: Bill would have let panel create list of candidates, The Capital (Annapolis, MD), April 4, 2006, pg. A1.

Change School Board Selection? Baltimore Sun, March 20, 2005, p. 5G.

Reflections on Senators Greenip and Simonaire's petition drive to place HB1114 on the ballot

There is an old saying, "never say never."  I genuinely thought that my last post on the school board reform legislation would be my last, at least until the School Board Nominating Commission was implemented.  I knew that a petition to put HB1114 on the ballot was under consideration.  But I didn't take it seriously.   I was wrong.

 

Senators Greenip and Simonaire have now created an organization, Citizens for an Elected School Board, to get signatures for a petition to put HB1114 on the ballot in 2008.  To get on the ballot in 2008, they need 10,000 Anne Arundel resident signatures by May 23 (less than three weeks away) and another 9,000 by June 20.   Senators Greenip and Simonaire have widely e-mailed a letter regarding the petition and their new organization to County opinion leaders.

 

Citizens for an Elected School Board describes its mission as follows.

 

Citizens for an Elected School Board was formed in April 2007 in response to legislation passed by the General Assembly which significantly reduced citizen participation in the school board selection process in Anne Arundel County.

 

Currently, the organization is focused on gathering enough signatures in a petition drive to give citizens the final say over a school board selection scheme which all but eliminates citizen input in the entire process and turns control of the school board over to a handful of county special interest groups.

 

I'm not clear how serious Senators Greenip and Simonaire are about this initiative.  It's one thing to file a petition and send out a news release.  It's something very different to do the hard grunt work of getting 19,000 people to sign the petition.    The former is a good and inexpensive PR move when you're in the opposition.  The latter involves blood, sweat, and tears--all for a very uncertain outcome.     Having looked at their classy website and seen their e-mail  campaign, I'm now inclined to believe they are more serious than when I got the first e-mail from them a week ago.    According to their website, they went door-to-door last weekend and intend to go door-to-door again this weekend. 

 

I support the petition to put HB1114 on the ballot, but not for the reasons laid out by Citizens for an Elected School Board.  Citizens for an Elected School Board links their petition drive to support for an elected school board, but I think the issue of electing a school board can and should be separated from giving the public an opportunity to debate the merits of HB1114.

 

I'm not necessarily opposed to an elected school board.  I do oppose the type of non-partisan, winner-take-all (also known as first-past-the-post) electoral system that has been proposed.  Another pet peeve of mine is the overwhelming focus  on the design of the general election as opposed to the primary, which I tend to view as at least as important as the general election. 

 

From my perspective as someone trained as a political scientist, I believe there is a reason why only authoritarian systems have single party, non-partisan electoral systems.  The public has been trained to hate partisan behavior and applaud non-partisan school boards, but mass democracy requires parties; without them, you tend to get the worst type of special interest politics, especially in low visibility elections in large political districts (like we have in Anne Arundel County). 

 

Winner-take-all electoral systems predominate in the U.S., so most Americans think of electoral systems and winner-take-all  voting rules as synonymous.  But proportional representation systems actually predominante in the rest of the world and have even been used in some large school districts in the U.S.  Whatever the virtues of winner-take-all for most U.S. elections--and the virtues of winner-take-all are great--they are arguably weaker in a large, diverse, school system with multi-member districts (such as in Anne Arundel County).   In a winner-take-all system, minority interests--whether they be ethnic, geographic, socio-economic, or otherwise--are less likely to get a chance at represenation than in a proportional system where voters express rank order preferences for candidates and minority interests can get a fairer chance of representation.  Fairness, by the way, is a precise, technical term.  It refers to the degree of correspondence between the preferences of voters and candidates elected to office.  The higher the correspondence, the fairer the election (for a discussion of these concepts, see www.Fairvote.org).  The way the electoral issue has so far been framed, only an appointed system can ensure a diverse school board with representation of minority interests.  But that is based on an incorrect assumption that equates winner-take-all with all electoral systems. 

 

Still, I don't think even a conventional proportional electoral system is the best system.  As you may know, I favor a "citizens assembly" based system; that is, a statistically representative version of the school board nomination convention that we already have. 

 

But whatever type of electoral system  you might ultimately prefer shouldn't determine whether you support this petition.  The value of this petition, from my perspective, is that it would force a public debate on HB1114's proposed system of selecting school board members.  That's a debate the legislature should have had but didn't. 

 

After all, our leaders have repeatedly said that passing HB1114 was one of their most important accomplishments during the last legislative sesssion.   Given this apparent consensus about the bill's importance, a full and open public airing of the issues was the democratically appropriate course of action.  Since our leaders abrogated their democratic responsibility to hold such a debate, I support this petititon because it will force such a debate.  At the end of that debate, the public might decide that the legislature actually did its due diligence and picked the best feasible alternative.  But I don't think we can know that until both the legislators and public have exposed themselves to some divergent points of view. 

 

Thus, I plan to sign this petition and would encourage you to sign it, too.    Senators Greenip and Simonaire have put together an excellent action center for this purpose.  I'd encourage you to look at it if you want to support their petition.

 

Petition drive from senators Greenip and Simonaire to place the school board reform legislation on the ballot for the 2008 election

From: Senator Janet Greenip [mailto:Janet.Greenip@senate.state.md.us]
Sent: Thursday, May 03, 2007 10:48 AM
To: Janet.Greenip@senate.state.md.us
Subject: Anne Arundel County Elected School Board Petition Drive

Dear Friend,

During this past session, I co-sponsored SB 28 (sponsored by Senator Bryan Simonaire) which would have change the Anne Arundel County Board of Education to an elected board beginning in 2010. Despite my strong support and endorsement for this overdue change in how school board members are selected, this important bill did not receive a favorable report in the Anne Arundel County delegation.

Instead of passing our bill, the Anne Arundel Legislative Delegations passed HB 1114, a bill which puts the selection of the School Board into the hands of a few people. Under current law, the Governor appoints members that are nominated by the Nominating Convention. This new legislation requires the Governor to choose a nominee from a select Commission. The Governor appoints 5 of the 11 members of this new commission, the County Executive appoints one and there are five spots reserved for the Teacher’s Association, one of Anne Arundel County’s Chambers of Commerce, Anne Arundel Community College Board of Trustees, Association of Education Leaders, and the Anne Arundel Parent-Teacher Association. These appointed school board members will only face a “yes or no” vote for continuance in office after they are in place. There is no real electoral say in who represents us and our children on the county school board.

Because of this, concerned citizens of Anne Arundel County, led by Senator Simonaire and myself, are collecting signatures on a petition to place HB 1114 on the ballot for the 2008 election. We want to overturn this legislation and go back to work to get an Elected School Board. We need to give the taxpayers of Anne Arundel County a real say in who is on the school board.

Attached are the two sides of the petition document that must be printed on one piece of paper. All signatures must be from Anne Arundel County voters. Do not sign and date the bottom of the page until you are ready to send it in. If these instructions are not followed all signatures on that sheet will be invalid. Print as many as you would like and return the signed petitions sheets to Senator Bryan Simonaire’s office, information listed below.

We need nearly 19,000 Anne Arundel resident signatures by June 20^th, but must also have 10,000 by May 23^rd. If you can return them as you fill them it will give us an idea of our progress and how much further we have to go.

Mail petitions to:

Senator Bryan Simonaire
Miller Senate Office Building, Room 401
11 Bladen St.
Annapolis, MD 21401

Also, please visit http://www.voteonschoolboard.com/ for information and to volunteer for door-to-door and shopping center efforts.

Thank you for your time. Please feel free to contact me with any questions or concerns.

Sincerely,

Janet Greenip
Senator, Legislative District 33

Post mortem on the school board reform legislation

On April 9, the school board reform bill passed through the legislature with virtually no opposition.   Capturing what I believe was the general sentiment of the Anne Arundel delegation to the General Assembly, the Capital reported that the Speaker of the Assembly, Mike Busch, described the bill's passage as "monumental."  Senator Ed DeGrange, in the same Capital story, summed it up differently but to the same effect: "We won't have to talk about [school board reform] for another 20 years."  

 

Clearly, the Anne Arundel delegation believed this  school board bill was one of the legislature’s most important accomplishments during the session.  But what amazes me is that there was virtually no public forum to debate it in the legislature or in the newspapers.   Yes, there had been substantial public debate over the years about the merits of elected and appointed school boards.  But for this particular proposal, which, I believe, is a radical departure from the various systems used to select school boards in any of the more than 14,000 other school boards in the United States, there was virtually no public deliberation.  It is true that the Capital  gave it tremendous coverage--perhaps more coverage than anything else the legislature did this session--but it was overwhelmingly horse race coverage (the odds of the bill making it through the legislature), not substantive coverage (the pros and cons of the legislation).

 

Going into the home stretch, many bills often get their most intense public scrutiny.  But that was not the pattern here. The strategy of the bill's supporters was very simple and effective.  The message was this bill is a "done deal" and it has overwhelming support, so "don't bother me with the details."   When Alan Friedman, Director of Governmental Relations for County Executive Leopold, made the appeal for passage of the amended bill at the sponsor-only public hearing for SB324, he kept his message correspondingly simple and,in a mere sentence or two, told the assembled delegates of the overwhelming support for the bill.  That was all they needed to hear before giving it the go ahead.

 

My guess is that it will not take long for the public to understand the radical nature of the school board reform the General Assembly has passed but that it will take at least ten years and perhaps as many as twenty for the public to develop a consensus about the reform's effects.  My own prediction is that in its early years the new system will work pretty well.  The press will give it close scrutiny, and its backers will be on their best behavior.  However, over time, the selection process will increasingly become dominated by backroom politics and lose democratic legitimacy in the eyes of the public. 

 

At the end of the day, the bill's passage can best be explained by the fact that the status quo system of selecting school board members had virtually no defenders, so the debate boiled down to what reform could get enough votes for passage.   The effort focused on getting the votes, not carefully thinking through all the implications of what was being proposed. 

 

Perhaps my biggest surprise was the leadership's visceral attack on the position of the student member of the board at the 11th hour--literally moments before the final House vote for the bill--and with no publicly stated explanation, let alone public debate about this major change.    (For a discussion of the policy merits of this amendment, see my last post and the letter to the Anne Arundel Delegation from the previous two student members of the board.)   When, shortly before Senate passage of the amended bill,  I asked the leadership to explain its momentous break with past precedent, all I got by way of an explanation was a scornful look saying "give me a break" and the verbal observation that no one in the delegation had objected to the change.    In other words, the reasons for it were self-evident.    

 

Of course, there were other provisions in this bill that were similarly  considered "self-evident" and that  in coming years, I can pretty safely predict, will be considered controversial  decisions.  That's hardly an unusual prediction when it comes to the after effects of the me-too frenzy that often accompanies the passage of legislation.  Only time will tell whether I'm right or wrong.

 

Now, barring an unexpected development, I intend this to be my last post on school board reform.  My guess is that when the Nominating Commission is constituted there will be unexpected problems and it may, of necessity, assume unexpected powers to help solve them.  At that point, I might wade into these waters once again.

In last minute decision, House amends school board reform bill to undercut position of student member of the board; hearing on amended bill set for 1pm tomorrow

In the last few weeks, legislation on school board reform moved quickly. On Thursday, March 22, the Senate approved SB324 and the House held a public hearing on HB1114. On Saturday, March 24, an amendment to the House bill was introduced, and then on Monday, March 26, an amendment to that amendment was introduced, followed immediately by a vote and passage of the bill.

The big surprise was the House amendments to HB1114, including the amendment of the amendment. The two major changes in the first amendment were the addition of a ninth member to the school board (the current school board has eight members) and increased compensation for all school board members. The major change in the amendment to the initial amendment was that the student school board member would not receive compensation and thus henceforth be treated differently from all the other school board members. All the amendments were to be effective beginning with the school board taking office in 2008 (the next school board takes office July 1, 2007).

The two major changes contained in the first amendment were, in my opinion, excellent. I give Andy Lang a lot of credit for the first one, as he pointed out to the delegation the unexpected problems associated with retaining an eight member board with the proposed new school board selection system.

The second amendment to give school board members compensation ($12,000 for regular board members; $14,000 for the board president) should also, in my opinion, be applauded. In many spheres of life we accept the maxim that you get what you pay for. Only a small fraction of people have been willing to apply that maxim to school boards, especially so in Anne Arundel County where the Capital reports that of the 24 counties in Maryland only three, including Anne Arundel, don’t pay school board members a salary.

What are the consequences of asking school board members to devote a huge amount of time to school board affairs and then not paying them? Obviously, the effects are hard to pin down, partly because no rational school board member would ever admit that compensation rather than love of kids might influence his or her behavior. Still, there are a few things that can be said. One is that not paying school board members restricts the type of person who can serve on a school board. The democratic vision of school board members is that they would be lay people broadly representative of the public. But if lower income working people are prevented from serving on such a board, the result is a highly skewed pool of individuals from which school board members can be drawn.

A second likelihood is that school members who aren’t paid will tend to be lazier. Consider the school board’s judicial function as a court of last appeal for student/parent grievances. Many members of the public don’t know that this is a major and very time consuming function of the board. School board members may have to rule on as many as five student/parent grievances a month. They are given this power because there is no other entity in the school system with the same democratic legitimacy that allows it to act as a court of last resort. The public doesn’t know about these grievances because they are heard in private, school board members cannot talk about them in public, and the press therefore doesn’t cover them. In any other sphere of activity, how would you predict someone would behave faced with such incentives? Quite possibly, school board members behave that way, too.

The amendment to the amendment both reduced the compensation of school board members (from $12,000 to $6,000 for regular board members and from $14,000 to $8,000 for the board president). Most important, it excluded the student member of the board from receiving compensation. Although at first glance this might appear to be a minor and very reasonable amendment, it represents a huge policy change that sends a very strong message that the student member of the board is a second class member.

Until now, Anne Arundel County has stood out for having a student member of the board that was a full and equal voting member of the board of education. Now, without any public notice, discussion, or explanation, the House has created legislation to radically undercut this principle of equality. Since, as I have said, there was no public deliberation on the merits of creating this inequality, one can only surmise the reasons of those who pushed this amendment at the last moment.

One possibility is that the advocates of the amendment dislike the position of student member of the board and wanted to undercut it. But the most obvious explanation is the presumption that student members of the board don’t really need the money. This, of course, is an indirect way of saying that student members should be second class board members. But, taking this argument at face value, it is still of dubious merit. Indeed, one could argue that if anyone needs compensation, it’s the students. Most adults, for example, already have cars, so attending the countless school board meetings has a relatively small marginal transportation cost—just gas. In contrast, most students don’t already have their own car and cannot afford one. A student without a car and without compensation to purchase one would be unlikely to run for student member of the board, resulting in a highly skewed set of students who would run for student member of the board. Alternatively, a student member of the board could rely on parents to drive him or her to meetings, but this would be highly demeaning to the student (and position of student member of the board) even if the student belonged to one of the few lower income families with a non-working parent who could devote a large fraction of his or her time to chaperoning their child.

Why is a stay-at-home mom, retired worker, or wealthy professional more deserving of compensation than a student member of the board? I think the answer is by no means self-evident. Another theory might be that it costs more to become an adult board member than a student member of the board. But this overlooks the fact that many student members of the board have in fact devoted far more effort to achieving a leadership position than the adults who are appointed to the board. Some student members have spent four or five years gradually moving up the school government hierarchy to be considered a credible student member of the board. Many adult members, in contrast, have been appointed with only a small fraction of that upfront investment.

If the argument is that student members of the board are too young to use money responsibly, why not provide the money in the form of a college scholarship? A second benefit of the scholarship approach (or any type of compensation for serving on the school board) is that some student members of the board must work –as well as attend school like a regular student--in order to be able to attend college. Making such students sacrifice their chances of attending a good college as the price to serve on the school board doesn’t seem desirable to me.

Regardless of whether you think these amendments were good or bad, they certainly belie the widely promoted notion that the provisions in this bill were for years carefully debated and subject to public scrutiny. The Capital got it right when it observed: “the amendment came at the 11^th hour, when there wasn’t much opportunity for public debate. Until that point, the issue was fixing a faulty system that occasionally puts people on the board who haven’t been vetted by a nominating convention.”

If the legislature had a rule that bills had to be available to the public for 72 hours before they were voted on, I wouldn’t have as much cause to complain about the process. What we know from abundant experience with legislatures is that legislation introduced and passed at the last minute tends to be full of both special interest and ill-considered provisions. Similarly, there was no good reason to rush through this legislation at the last second. There is an organization in DC called ReadtheBill.org devoted to just making sure that such bills cannot be rammed through the legislature at the last minute.

For those of you who have concerns about the amendments, all is not lost. Yes, passage of the basic school board reform package, even with all its warts (now partially cleaned up), is a foregone conclusion. But the House and Senate bills are now different and thus must be reconciled in conference committee or via another “public” hearing. If you’re upset that the amendment radically undercutting the position of the student member of the board was sprung on the public only a matter of minutes before bill passage (at least the first set of amendments was public for about 48 hours), you have at least one more chance to voice your concern.

If the bill is going to be changed in conference committee, you can let the conferees know of your concerns. You could, for example, ask them to withdraw the amendment so that there is time for public deliberation before undertaking such a radical measure.

However, the current thinking appears to be that the differences between the two bills are too trivial to deal with in conference committee. Thus, there is expected to be another sponsor only public hearing in the House and Senate to pass a bill agreeable to both chambers. The House hearing is scheduled for tomorrow, April 4, in the House Ways and Means Committee Room at 1pm. Although you cannot speak there, you can still submit formal written testimony (as long as it is submitted by noon) and catch the attention of your local delegate. Although, too, the hearing is being held in the House, the version of the bill that is listed for review is SB324, with the chair of the Senate Anne Arundel Delegation listed as the sponsor. Things are likely to move very quickly after that hearing as they did after the last hearing, so time is of the essence. It may yet be that the chair of the House Ways and Means Committee (Sheila E. Hixson) or the Chair of the Senate Education Health and Environmental Affairs Committee will create a conference committee and appoint conferees. But, as of now, that appears unlikely. Since the Chair of the Senate Anne Arundel Delegation is John Astle, it would appear that he would be the best person to contact between now and 1pm tomorrow. But I’m told that he might appoint someone else to speak and that this change might happen at the last minute.

To conclude on a more general note, the policy logic that has driven this bill is that the current school board selection system is awful. Therefore, any proposal to change it is an improvement, even if the change isn’t optimal. I’m not inclined to defend the school board nominating convention, except to say that awful as it is, I’m doubtful that the bill as passed is a significant improvement (this paraphrases Winston Churchill’s famous quip that democracy is an awful system of government, except for all the alternatives.)

The politics of the bill are actually quite brilliant. It builds on the great discontent with the status quo—discontent that is likely to significantly increase in the next 18 months as the public comes to understand the implications of the school system’s structural deficit for FY2008-9. People would then most likely look to this new system, which will be implemented when the current system is in most disrepute, as the savior to get us out of the mess.

But the bottom line is that this bill from A to Z undercuts the culture of citizenship and parental involvement that is important for the long-term health of a functioning democracy and our school system in particular. It’s already incredibly difficult for parents to have an impact on school system policy. The last thing we need to do is send yet another message that “the public is not wanted.” Of course, that is not how this bill has been framed for public consumption. But, as a political scientist and parent, that’s how I read it. I’m reminded of how Caesar came to power in Rome and destroyed the Republic. This change was not done in the name of elite control. It was done in the name of strengthening Republican institutions. Admittedly, we’re not talking about abolishing democracy here. But democracy comes in many degrees; it’s not an all-or-nothing proposition. And the democratic enhancing features of this bill have clearly been oversold.

Other than leveraging the discrepancies between the House and Senate bills is there anything else that can be done at this point? I would suggest focusing on the ill-defined “public hearings” responsibilities of the new school board nominating commission. The tendency in this county has been to hold “public hearings” merely because they provide democratic legitimacy and therefore political cover for policy makers. The trick has too often been to convey the appearance of democratic legitimacy while, to the extent possible, actually disenfranchising the public so the backroom deals and insider players are not in fact constrained. The way the nominating commission is currently set up, I’d expect that political logic, especially after things settle down, to become the routine way of doing business. But it need not be. The public could insist that the commission hold “real” public meetings. For example, they could be televised and with open public participation. Members of the Commission could be subject to strict conflict of interest disclosure. And the backroom procedures of the Commission could be made as transparent as possible. Hopefully, too, members of the press could be encouraged to look at the credentials of the commissioners with the same rigor that we would expect them to cover the school board candidates themselves.

Report on today's House Ways and Means Committee hearing on HB1114

This afternoon I attended the House Ways and Means Committee hearing on HB1114, the bill to change Anne Arundel County’s system of appointing school board members. The event was labeled a “hearing” on the Maryland General Assembly website and on the agenda distributed at the event. But for those of you familiar with local hearings, it was a most peculiar hearing because no live public testimony was accepted and only the sponsor of the legislation was given the opportunity to testify. (We can only hope that the vaguely specified requirement in HB1114 that the Nominating Commission “shall hold at least two public hearings on the selection of nominees” is not similarly such a sham.)

The hearing was supposed to begin at 1pm but due to a delay in another meeting didn’t actually convene until 1:45pm. About half the delegate seats in the committee room were vacant. I was very lucky because HB1114 was the first bill on the agenda, which included 20 bills. Delegate Love, the lead sponsor of the bill and head of the Anne Arundel County delegation, was the only witness to speak. She started with the potent symbolism of noting that Alan Friedman, Director of Governmental Relations for County Executive Leopold, was sitting next to her. Friedman himself said nothing; his role was purely symbolic.

The testimony lasted all of about five minutes. Delegate Love summarized the bill by essentially paraphrasing its contents. That took maybe three minutes. Then there was one question from the Committee. A delegate wanted to know why the Maryland Senate last year rejected a very similar bill. Delegate Love replied that “the Senate passed it out earlier today, so we’re in a lovefest, no pun intended.” That was it. Delegate Love and Alan Friedman got up and left the room, and the Committee went on to attend other business.

There were only two statements submitted into the record for this hearing: my statement mostly opposing HB1114, and a one page statement from AFSCME 67 (the section of AFSCME representing several thousand non-professional school employees in AACPS) giving HB1114 a ringing endorsement. Unfortunately, AFSCME 67 did not post its statement on its website (at least when I last checked around 10:30 pm today), so I cannot provide a link to it. Basically, in a few paragraphs, it endorses HB1114 for creating an elected school board and empowering the public.

In addition, Alan Lang, the former chair of the School Board Nominating Convention, sent out a written statement criticizing HB1114 to the entire County delegation. His comments are elegant and very substantial (far more substantial than mine). Indeed, in their meticulous attention to the subtleties and implications of seemingly innocuous clauses, I would call them brilliant. If you are interested in discovering why this is a carelessly drafted bill (good for a first draft; lousy for a final draft), you need to read Alan’s comments.

It is, of course, hardly unusual to have poorly drafted legislation filled with ambiguities, inconsistencies, and vital omissions. For example, a primary role of federal agencies is to take such language drafted by Congress and through the rulemaking process develop workable regulations. The problem here is that there is no such agency. Presumably, the Nominating Commission would be forced to deal with many of the problems Alan has identified. But giving the Nominating Commission such dramatically enhanced powers is certainly an unintended consequence of the way this bill is drafted. This is work that legislators should take on themselves, or, at the very least, explicitly delegate to others.

On the whole, the hearing was pretty sad for me. According to standard legislative norms, major pieces of legislation—and this is major—should be subject to public deliberation. All the real deliberation on this bill, however, has been conducted behind closed doors. And, as reflected in Alan’s keen observations, I have yet to be convinced that even that deliberation reflected a careful consideration of the policy issues as opposed to an astute political calculation that this fresh approach to school board reform could break the political logjam, which it has.

This bill is being sold as a bipartisan done deal with no significant controversy attached to it. Delegate Love’s characterization that the bill was being treated like a “lovefest” was right on the money. But, in my experience, the momentum behind such bills, even when it seems unstoppable, can quickly change. All that needs to happen is that a credible grassroots effort raises some valid concerns and wins an outspoken and credible supporter within the political elites. Then the aura of inevitability can quickly dissipate. If you have any concerns about provisions in HB1114, this is the time to contact your delegate and let him or her know. If you wait until after the vote has already taken place, it will be too late.

My written statement for the hearing today before the Maryland House Ways and Means Committee on HB1114

My written statement for the hearing today before the Maryland House Ways and Means Committee on HB1114, the proposed reform of the school board selection process in Anne Arundel County.

On Thursday (tomorrow) the House Ways and Means Committee will hold a public hearing on HB1114, the bill to reform the school board appointment process

On Thursday, March 22, the Maryland House of Delegates will be holding a hearing on HB1114, a bill proposing to change the school board selection process in Anne Arundel County, in Room 130 (the House Ways and Means Committee Room) of the Lowe House Office Building.  I encourage anyone with concerns about the provisions in this bill to both attend the hearing and submit written testimony for the public record.  Unfortunately, the Committee will not accept any live public testimony on this bill.  To submit written testimony for the public record, you must submit it in person in Room 131 of the Lowe House Office Building at least one hour before the hearing begins (that is, by noon on March 22). You should submit 35 copies.  The legislative session adjourns on April 9, 2007 (less than three weeks from today) and some version of this bill is widely expected to pass before it does so.  This may be your last and best chance to have your voice heard on this vital issue concerning the future of our public school system.