The "Buy-In" Tar Pit
by Frederick M. Hess • Sep 10, 2010 at 10:53 am
Cross-posted from Education Week
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The "buy-in" tar pit is located adjacent to other similar geographical oddities, like the "consensus-seeking" sinkhole and the "capacity-building" briar patch. These are all easy ways to blame process rather than substance when the complaint is really about substance. So efforts to close lousy schools, trim benefits, or toughen up evaluation are inevitably attacked for a lack of buy-in or stakeholder support, no matter how much time was spent on just those things. (Meanwhile, you hardly ever hear any complaints that across-the-board pay raises were decided with insufficient input.)
Right now, the Washington Teachers Union (the AFT's D.C. local) is throwing everything it has behind D.C. City Council Chairman Vincent Gray in a push to unseat Mayor Adrian Fenty. The media have reported mass mailings, nightly phone banks, and big bucks, in addition to the hard-to-miss radio ads. This all follows, by just a few months, the groundbreaking collective bargaining deal between the WTU and Fenty's schools chief
