For the past twenty years, I have spent a lot of time thinking about—and advocating for—accountability in public education. I wrote about some of that experience in my recent paper, Inside the Mississippi Marathon, in which I chronicle Mississippi’s twenty-year climb from worst to first, when adjusting for demographics, in reading and math outcomes. Education advocates like me frequently talk about what adults in schools and positions of leadership should be doing (or not doing), and how we should hold them accountable for it. We rarely talk about what accountability means for most of the people generating education policy ideas.
Now that I have joined the ranks of national education reformers, I am thinking more and more about that question.
I have strong feelings about the responsibilities of policy wonks for good reason. Years ago, I was working on a major piece of education legislation in Mississippi, one of the many I worked on over the course of my career. A person from a national organization came down from Washington, D.C.—we will call this person “The Snob”—and met with several policymakers about the bill. I do not recall exactly how I came to be in this particular private meeting between The Snob and Mississippi Senate Education Chair Gray Tollison, but I do recall that it was not quite clear to me why The Snob had come down. She did not represent any constituency that was critical to the passage of the bill, nor did she have the standing in Mississippi to matter too much one way or another. And though she was on our side of the debate, we also did not need any more “experts” from D.C. I had already mastered the ins and outs of the legislation after spending years reading all the credible research and talking to other specialists and practitioners.
All of this would have been news to The Snob, though, who clearly felt her opinions were of the utmost importance. The meeting went off the rails almost immediately after finishing the usual niceties. “I totally disagree,” The Snob emphatically declared when we explained why one section of the bill did not exactly match the theoretical ideal that she believed in. We tried, very diplomatically, to explain again that this was an aspect of the bill that had been a source of enormous trouble and that it had taken significant work to find a solution palatable to everyone involved. “Well, I get to say whatever I want because I’m not from here,” she sniffed. “I can go back to D.C.”
It was a shocking thing to say, especially with the tone she took. Had she shared either her critique of that portion of the bill or her belief that she could bear no consequences for her words either in public or to any other Mississippi legislator than the one sitting beside me, I likely would have had to spend the next month trying to salvage the bill from the jaws of death for the umpteenth time. It took everything in me not to yell at her from across the table. The best I could do was shoot her a Julia Sugarbaker-worthy death glare.
