Education's Transparency Problem

Transparency has been part of the second wave of issues following hard on the heels of critical race theory panic, leading to a variety of ill-conceived ideas for transparency laws, some of which are bad faith attempts to dig up more items to add to the long list of things "hiding" crt in schools, and some of which are simply redundant, giving parents rights they already have.

But despite the fact that much of this current movement for transparency is opportunistic baloney-mongering, education does have a transparency issue--and always has, and always will.

Robert Pondiscio gets at some of this in a piece transparently titled "Yes, American education has a transparency problem." After opening with some of the further-out-there political postures being struck, he points out that "To a degree most people don't fully appreciate, the American public school classroom is a bit of a black box." He's not wrong.

He's also not wrong to point out that all the classroom "creating, customizing, and tinkering is not evidence of teachers subversively undermining officially sanctioned curriculum." Part of the job is to adjust, adapt, differentiate, and just generally respond on the fly to what's happening with your students. That's why "post every piece of instructional material you're going to use this year" laws are a waste of somebody's time--either parents or teachers, depending on how a district responds.

He's also not wrong to point out that teachers are government employees, though I always thought of it as working for the public or the taxpayers. Either way, a teacher is accountable to the people who are paying the bills.

School districts tend to have coms issues. There are reasons for this, some legit and some less so.

The bubble. School is a bubble, mostly because there is so much going on inside the bubble that adults working inside it rarely have time to look outside, and even less to see how it looks from outside. When I retired, I was surprised at how completely invisible the inside of the bubble became, like I had suddenly stepped through a blackout curtain. When you're in there, you think what you're doing is seen and known all over the community; it isn't. (I actually wrote a letter to my board about this, saying in effect that the district needed to do a better job of communicating to the community than an outdated Web 1.0 site--they responded with something along along the lines of "Sure--you wanna come back and do it for us? Har de har har.")

Schools that aren't aggressively actively letting their public know what they're doing are missing the boat. 

That said, there's the matter of confidentiality. Cameras in the classroom is a dumb idea for many reasons, but the biggest reason is the privacy rights of all those minors in that classroom. I guarantee--within 24 hours of a classroom camera going live, there will be a parent phone call saying, "What are you going to do about that no-good kid in my child's English class."

Confidentiality is a challenge for schools. Always be cautious about "the school did this to my kid" stories, because the school cannot tell their side. If a student goes wide with accusations that he was harassed by the principal for being gay, the school cannot share that the kid was actually in trouble for starting fights with guys he thought were hitting on his girlfriend. 

Teachers and schools have sooooooo much personal and private information about students, and part of being professionally responsible is making sure to keep it all confidential. This carries over to instructional matters, e.g. "We're doing an extra day of pronoun practice because Pat and Sam don't get it yet" is not really anybody's business but Pat's and Sam's and their parents.

Communication fatigue. Definitely more of a high school thing. My old friend the band director used to say, "When they're just starting out in fifth grade and sound like screaming cats, every single relative is there to hear it. The auditorium is packed. But by the time they're in high school and the band is making real music, you can't drag the families in with a giant tow truck." My wife the elementary teacher talks to parents all the time. It would be a big year for high school open house if I saw more than three parents in my room. Email helped a little. Google classroom and its ilk ought to help a lot, but old colleagues just told me a tale of parents who still haven't gotten on the platform in December. Sometimes schools and teachers get tired of reaching out to no effect. That's no excuse to stop trying.

Fear. Some teachers are just anxious about being viewed in their classroom. They get super-worried at observation time, get worried when anyone gets into their classroom. I can't say that this ever bothered me (I even invited a well-known reformer to sit in my classroom for part of a day, and it didn't hurt a bit). The best solution I know of is to do more of it. A principal who just pops in regularly for no reason has a better handle on what's going on in the building, and teachers stop equating "principal in my room" with "somebody's in trouble." 

Evaluation fatigue. We've had twenty-some years for teachers to be under attack by one bad evaluation system after another, much of it premised on the notion that schools are riddled with Bad Teachers and we must somehow Root Them Out. When there's witch hunt going on, you really don't take much comfort in knowing that you're not actually a witch. Lots of teachers and schools are reflexively curled up in defensive balls (nor does it help that so many schools have become "hardened targets").

Really bad administrators. Almost nobody likes transparency less than a bad administrator, particularly one who doesn't know what he's doing and is hoping to avoid any situation where that might become obvious. Also, I've had more than my share of leaders who thought that the best way to handle unpopular news was to stonewall until people forgot all about it. Pro tip: they never do, and trying to put off the inevitable only makes things worse as well as eroding the trust you need for all other operation.

And the old Bad News Loop, where schools only contact home to complain about the kids and parents only contact the school to complain about a teacher. This is a hard one to break because the adults in this loop barely have time to do the meat of their work, and sending Happygrams seems like an expendable add-on. But regular communication matters.

There are other obstacles, but these, ime, are the major ones. Plus, I suppose, the Dilbert Effect Problem, where management makes you spend so much time explaining what you're doing on the job that you can't actually get back to doing the job. And the Pandemic Effect, where you have trouble being transparent about your decisions because you just made them five minutes ago. 

As with virtually every major issue in education, this is really a balancing act, a maintenance of tension between several different pulls, and if any one side won, it would be a disaster. Schools can't be secret fortresses and they can't be completely transparent fishbowls. Transparency is necessary, appropriate, important, and absolutely appropriate for a publicly funded organization like a school, but too much of it would be bad for students and the function of the school itself. Once again, no simple answer that we can just lock in forever.

I'm also going to point out that this is one more issue that free market education is poorly equipped to face. The free market hates transparency--proprietary techniques, secret recipes, business secrets--and opacity is a smart and necessary way to navigate the market. We've already seen plenty of this, from charter schools defying state audits to test manufacturers zealously hunting down anybody who spills secrets from an exam. Free market education would guarantee far less transparency than the recent transparency stans are calling.