Trusting Democracy at the School Board Level
Dear Diane,
Your blog on Tuesday is a powerful statement. We are, I do believe, in a fight over the most fundamental building blocks of democracy.
Alas, many of my best friends are wary about democracy when it gets local. But as someone (Thomas Jefferson, in fact) once said—to paraphrase: The only protection a democracy has against ignorance is education itself. Knowledge shall set us free and all that. But it gets hard when it becomes difficult to trust any of the sources of information to which we have access. Democracy requires a full range of sources, so that it's hard to fool all the people all the time. It needs adults who were educated themselves in decision-making, not bubbling in the "proper" answer. I get overwhelmed by clichés when I start down this path of argument. Forgive me!
It's hard these days to draw out from friends what forms of democracy they are willing to "trust"—not to make the right decision, but to make legitimate decisions. All the smart people seem to agree: not school boards!
Why not school boards? And, I literally mean boards that oversee particular schools or a small cluster of schools.
Not enough people vote in them is one excuse. We could decide on a quorum? Or we could accept responsibility for bringing those numbers up. Or we could agree that those sufficiently interested constitute the