Democracy Inaction — Or In Action

Is this the best way to run a city?

That question has popped up repeatedly over the past year, along with the broader question about how much and in what ways to involve citizens in day-to-day government decision-making.

The latest episode to spark those questions occurred this week. After a year of internal squabbling and endless recrimination-laced public meetings over how to go about selecting a new schools superintendent — during which two leading candidates withdrew their applications because of the political infighting — the Board of Education Monday night made a choice. On a 4 – 3 vote. In a room filled with hundreds of angry people who disagreed with the choice. In a raucous meeting punctuated with personal accusations and yelling interruptions, ending with a board member threatening to sue the chairman — and the chairman challenging the board member to a ​“duel” at Bowen Field before being escorted from the room by a cop.

For real.

The meeting capped a process in which the board changed the rules of the search process several times and the selection of a top administrator took on the trappings of a political election campaign. Students and parents got the chance to see and question the three finalists in person. Proponents of candidates mobilized supporters. Finalists barnstormed around town. Thousands of students, parents and teachers and the majority of 1,400 readers responding to an Independent ​“True Vote” poll made clear that they overwhelmingly supported either of two candidates … while the Board of Ed instead picked the third.

Now, before the winner, Carol Birks, has even begun the job, high schools students are planning a Monday walkout in protest.

Amid the wreckage, some involved in or watching the controversy concluded this week that the answer may have less to do with the exact process New Haven chooses for making decisions — and more to do with civility, transparency, communication, and sticking to one set of rules. Or, put another way, acting like adults and walking the walk.

The Post-DeStefano Era

This week’s explosion of incivility and division was the culmination of moves by New Haven officials to make education policy, and decision-making in general, more democratic. At least that has been the theory.

For two decades the previous mayor, John DeStefano made choices for top administrative jobs like police chief without extensive public processes. He fully appointed and controlled the Board of Education working closely with Superintendent Reggie Mayo, who ran the schools with little or no dissent. Board of Ed meetings featured little if any debate. DeStefano acknowledged in 2009 that the schools were not performing well and needed a radical ​“change” plan, and he and Mayo oversaw the introduction of new policies.

Big decisions were made faster, with less public acrimony, not just in the schools, but in the police department and other agencies. The voters got to weigh in every two years at election time. Whether the public bought into decisions made that way — and whether they were vetted enough or benefited from adequate public input or buy-in — remained a subject of debate.

How New Haven operated started changing dramatically in 2011.

That year, a labor-organized political team gained control of the Board of Alders with a promise to strengthen the legislative branch as a check on executive power and a conduit for grassroots input. As part of that quest, the alders succeeded in changing the city charter that so two adult members would be publicly elected to the Board of Education and so that more mayoral appointees would need alders’ approval.

The change also added two high school students to the board, elected by their peers. Those students have turned out to be active, productive board members adding a youth perspective to debates — and sometimes keeping wayward adults in check and preventing ill-considered decisions. But those students don’t get to vote at the board. If the two student members had been allowed to vote Monday night, the outcome would have been different, more in line with popular sentiment.

Meanwhile, neighborhood community management teams, born under community policing, have become first-stop grassroots vetting venues for developers looking to build in New Haven.

And the city elected a new mayor in 2013, Toni Harp, who promised a more inclusive, ​“collaborative,” ​“consensus-building” decision-making process in city government.

That has meant extended, public search processes for police and fire and schools chiefs, in which committees of neighbors take part and the public debates the merits of the candidates before Harp makes her pick. The idea was to make the public feel more included in a democratic decision-making process.

That ended up with an amicable resolution for the fire chief, who was hired from outside the city. The police chief process, like the schools chief process, featured public protests and political divisions, charges of favoritism— particularly after internal and quasi-local candidates were chosen, leaving the losers’ supporters convinced the process was rigged.

Board of Ed meetings have lasted long into the night with factional fighting and personal attacks, arguments about process, and the need to dedicate months rather than weeks to some hiring and budgeting decisions.

A good way to govern? Too much democracy? Not enough? Just enough, but poorly executed?

A Good Mess

Democracy is supposed to be messy, two close and independent observers of city politics noted.

The problem is how people have been conducting themselves in some of these passionate public debates like at Monday night’s board meeting, argued Quinnipiac University political scientist and regular NPR pundit Khalilah Brown-Dean.

“Democracy was never intended to be a neat and conflict-free process and passion has its place in deciding important issues like education,” Brown-Dean argued. ​“Indeed we’ve spent the last year watching people assert their voice from NFL games, to Charlottesville, to Washington. I don’t have a problem with people vehemently defending their preferences or expressing their opposition. Dissent and engagement are critical to growth. But vitriol has no place in civil society.”

More important than who will lead the school district are ​“the values we want to develop and promote as a school district and as a city” and ​“the behaviors we model for and expect of the young people who look to us,” Brown-Dean continued. ​“Until we reflect on those questions and develop a comprehensive plan to address them, we will continuously pervert the democratic process as privileging personality over people. We can all want what’s best for children while disagreeing on the path to pursue it. Democracy isn’t a one-shot deal. It’s about a genuine commitment to sustained engagement. If we don’t start from a place of agreement on what the process is and commit to following that process, then we usher in conflict over transparency and accountability.” 

“This is needed democracy and accountability. Democracy was intended to be adversarial to an extent, an open display of competing ideas,” agreed the Rev. Samuel Ross-Lee ​“Those who are ​‘turned off’ by that fact, should consider how ​‘turned off’ they would be with a dictatorial process that allows no involvement from the public, i.e. ​‘the people.’”

That said, Ross-Lee argued that the ed board’s selection of a new superintendent did follow the rules of democracy. The city’s charter allows the mayor and fellow board members to pick that superintendent. They have the right to go out and listen to public opinion and still make a different decision if they believe that’s best. If the public disagrees with that system, it needs to change the charter.

However, if the Board of Ed was sincere in wanting to hear what the public had to say about the superintendent search, it should have done a better job of publicizing forums with adequate notice and time for people to engage, Ross-Lee added.

Reflecting on the extensive arguments during the search, Mayor Harp too said the board failed in carrying out a consistent process. The problem wasn’t in having a public search process, she argued on her latest appearance on WNHH radio’s ​“Mayor Monday” program; it was in changing that process in mid-stream. ​“It wasn’t stuck to,” she argued. ​“Nor was it well-defined.”

“I do think it’s important to have a public process. But I really wish the public would understand that we interviewed everybody. We asked them in-depth questions. They gave us in-depth answers. We know who these candidates are. We know what they can do,” Harp said.

Ross-Lee noted that American government doesn’t pretend to be a ​“pure” democracy in which the citizens make every decision; instead, they elect representatives and ​“empower them to make decisions for us. That is what happened here. The Board of Education ​‘heard’ the voices of ​‘the people,’ as much as they did, and then a majority of the board disagreed with ​‘the people.’ ​‘The people’ need to take that disagreement up at that next election, but the process was democratic insofar as it was supposed to be.” Ross-Lee also called the current hybrid ed board ​“a joke” because the mayor appoints most of the members. Only two of the seven adult members are elected.

Trust Building

Watching the debacle this week, a veteran city schoolteacher activist involved in the search process debate concluded that the problem with the board lies not in its makeup (though she’d like to see more elected members and to see students members allowed to vote), and not with long meetings and disagreements. The problem lies in the need to build trust through ​“Transparency and oversight.”

The city government is able to send her informative robocalls about the Yale-Harvard Game and street sweeping. It has a website and a Facebook page. Yet it couldn’t get the clear word out to the public about opportunities to participate in the superintendent search process, observed the teacher, Leslie Blatteau, an organizer of the New Haven Educators Collective. The group lobbied hard to have the board name anyone other than Carol Birks the next superintendent.

Rather than blame individuals or organizations for the breakdown in trust between the Board of Ed and the community, Blatteau suggested, leaders should ​“take a page out of the Comer Model for School Improvement and engage in no-fault problem-solving. I want to work collaboratively with the mayor, the BOE and NHPS to make sure these kinds of trust issues get resolved. What can we do as leaders, community members, parents and teachers in New Haven to repair the harm that has been done and work to rebuild trust? What is each of us willing to do? This must be addressed as we work to move forward. “

She recommended some specific fixes, too: Moving public comment to the beginning of board meetings. Publishing agendas promptly and openly. (Sometimes special meetings get called with the minimum 24-hour notice.) Doing more board business out in public rather than in executive session.

A fellow teacher and Collective organizer, Nataliya Braginsky, did fault the board for not taking into consideration more the clearly expressed preference of teachers, parents and students for a superintendent other than Birks.

“The board should not only ask for public opinion, as they have repeatedly done but should actually consider these views when making their decisions,” Braginsky argued. ​“The public — including students, families, teachers, and community members — made their views about the superintendent search clear to members of the Board through public comments, phone calls and letters, and through petitions with over 1,000 signatures. The mayor and three members of the board chose to disregard the views of their constituents, who also happen to be the people most affected by this decision, which seems very undemocratic.”

“The public had already lost confidence in this Board of Education long ago,” observed Justin Elicker, a former alder and mayoral candidate and current New Haven Land Trust executive director who attended Monday night’s meeting. He called it the angriest and most divisive public meeting he’s ever seen in New Haven.

“After years of dissension, inappropriate behavior, lack of accountability and leadership, it’s no wonder that the public feels the board isn’t concerned about what they think. At the end of the day, I believe we need to honor the board’s decision to hire Birks. I am hopeful and optimistic that, if she accepts the job, she will thrive as the leader of our school system. However, she will be starting her task already facing incredible obstacles that have been created in large part by the slow and steady disintegration of public trust by the very board to whom she will have to answer.”

Elicker supported the creation of a hybrid education board when he ran for mayor in 2013. Watching the dysfunction of the current board, he has reexamined his position, he said. In the end, he concluded that the addition of two elected members didn’t cause the problem. ​“The current board’s disagreements and lack of civility don’t originate only from the elected members. And any person can always run against the two elected members should they feel dissatisfied with their performance,” he reasoned. ​“For example, in my opinion, we have a United States president who is incompetent and whose values are contrary to the vast majority of mine, but I don’t then jump to say that we should dismantle democracy.”

Previous coverage of the superintendent search:

• Wanted: Schools Chief To Rebuild Trust
• Infighting Puts Super Search On Hold
• Super Search Gives Nutmeggers 2nd Look
• ​“Tonight Has Been An Embarrassment”
• 2 Superintendent Candidates Withdraw
• Read Their Resumes
• Supe Candidates Split On Charters
• Student Rep: School Board Should Reconsider
• Opposition Mounts To Birks
• Highsmith: No Deal For #2
• Divided Ed Board Selects Birks
• Ed Board Combatants Urged To Apologize