The Grownups are Ruining Everything
Taking a break from school district activities and reflecting on what we've learned.
I have spent the last year deep-diving multiple areas into our local Texas school district, and it has truly been eye-opening. From volunteering on district committees, learning how things work in the community collaborative, joining the local dad program, and generally pestering the administration with long calls, I have learned a lot within a short amount of time.
Further, I have been internally comparing these experiences of public school districts with how other public entities function, like Municipal Utility Districts (MUDs), or private Homeowner Associations (HOAs). I currently sit as President of both within our community, and I can say with certainty they differ immensely.1
Putting all that aside, I’d like to take a moment to reflect on this new knowledge, as well as share writings from others also concerned about the future of our children and the world we must prepare them for.
Recently, I have begun reading from Generation Z authors (up to 27 years old), as many of them are either recently done with education or still moving through secondary schools. As an elder millennial (a.k.a., Oregon Trail Generation), it has been concerning to me on how recent generational shifts have driven our youth to rotate into never-ending crisis.
Recognizing that the last 25 years have been tumultuous, from 9/11, the wars in the Middle East, the 2008 housing collapse, never-ending debates on gun control and mass shootings, COVID, to the rise of extreme identity politics, and record inflation…we have been through a lot. And our youth have been part of those experiences.
Kids today are not growing up in the America anywhere close to what previous generations would call “normal”, and they haven’t been for over 20 years.
Arguably, the 90’s have become associated with the last decade of the “the good times”, even for those who did not live it. There is even a term referenced in an article below you should come to know:
“There is a beautiful and melancholic word I like called anemoia. It means nostalgia for a time or a place one has never known.
This is a sentiment I often sense from my generation, Gen Z—especially in recent years. I see it in the YouTube videos of old concerts that get millions of views. I see it in our fascination with polaroids, vinyls, vintage cameras, and VHS tapes. And I see it in our reaction to gut-wrenching videos about how life has changed…”
That was written by Freya India, a popular Gen Z author. At 24 years old, she is writing the most honest and truly insightful content about her generation, and at times it includes her fears of what will happen to the next generation (Gen Alpha).
We have three Gen A kids, so we are doing our best to pay attention to how their world works today and may look tomorrow. Learning words like skibidi or sigma can only go so far to understanding Gen A (I know, it’s giving…old).
At risk of losing you for the rest of this post, I encourage you to read the following two articles from Freya (they aren’t too long):
My key takeaway from her writing is that although we see the typical misunderstandings between generations, Millennial parents are needing to recognize that Gen Z and our Gen A children are dealing with or going to face challenges that we did not. We had the benefit of our youth’s prosperity (pre 9/11); much of their struggle revolves around understanding their place in the world and the purpose of their lives, as they continue to see us adults consistently fail to make things better for them.
For us, the future was bright, and the world was whatever we dreamed it could be. For them, it is an orphan crushing machine.2
Growing up between the 80s to early 2000’s, we had the instruction and confidence that we could do or be “anything we want”, and we had the freedoms from technologies like social media to build the relationships and social skills needed to navigate the stresses of a complex world.
This is not to say that Millennials have not borne the brunt of multiple “once-in-a-lifetime” events, but at least many of us had the foundation of happier childhoods to keep us on course for what we know our world can be.
Freya recently began writing for After Babel, where they focus a lot on mental health of kids and how technology is ruining nearly everything about growing up. The creators of After Babel have poured a great deal of research into the topic, so much so that I used it as part of the research collected during the CISD Cell Phone Committee meetings.
Moving on, I have also been reading books on school boards:
The Essential School Board Book: Better Governance in the Age of Accountability, by Nancy Walser - Amazon Link
The Essential School Board Book highlights effective practices that are common to high-functioning boards around the country—boards that are working successfully with their superintendents and communities to improve teaching and learning.
This book focuses on areas for how school boards can improve results, much of which is focused on how the board consumes data. There is a lot more to this, but I’ll save this for another post.
Great on Their Behalf: Why School Boards Fail, How Yours Can Become Effective, by AJ Crabill - Amazon Link
Step by step, the exercises in this book inspire board members to adopt a student-outcomes-focused mindset as they reevaluate their impact on those they serve. It challenges them to explore effective ways to focus on what students need. Then, it provides the necessary knowledge and skills for school boards to empower their students for success.
I found this book very interesting as it puts focus on ‘adult inputs’, pointing out that school board members often bring in baggage, bias, and a desire to use their personal or professional experiences as their primary toolkit as a board trustee.
The focus should instead be on student outcomes and the methods to improve them.
As an example, I have worked in IT for almost 20 years. My natural inclination to joining a school board may be that I can help tackle the technical challenges that schools have. It may lead me to believe my best contributions could be anything related to technology.
In reality, focus must be placed where it is needed. I would need to change my mindset to focus on how things should be improved, versus how I believe I could personally improve them with my experiences (and thus biases).
The book breaks down steps to help focus school boards on changing how they improve their knowledge, skills, and mindset as it relates to improving student outcomes. It further goes into how school boards get stuck focusing on adult inputs3 and how nothing can be improved until the focus of the board is prioritized.
I highly recommend this book for current board trustees or those running for the board. You can get a peek into the author’s thought process in this interview with him:
Can This School Board Be Saved?
Quotes from this interview:
The things that school boards focus on actually do, in fact, matter. When school boards focus on student outcomes, they’re more likely to create the condition from improvements in student outcomes. If school boards focus on the color of the cheerleaders’ uniforms, we’re more likely to have the proper color of uniforms.
How can elected boards manage controversies like the recent spate of book censorship arguments?
This is like the difference between debating the placement of a single stop sign versus debating about safety. The job of the board isn’t to pick and choose where to put stop signs. The job of the board is to get underneath arguments about stop signs and figure out, OK, what is the community value that is really at stake here? Safety.
The same principles apply to the books’ example. The board should be very aggressive about codifying community expectations to protect the values beneath. These are what I refer to in the book as “guardrails.” On certain books, communities will differ. One might say, the value that we have around book selection is: We want them to be inclusive. We want all of our curriculum and learning materials to be representative of the diversity of our student body. But another community might say, the thing that we value about books is how they represent and lift up a view of American exceptionalism. If they don’t match that, we don’t want them in our libraries.
We’ve also learned a lot in the last year about how Texas public schools work, and it is obvious where the most issues are needing to be resolved. As the Texas legislature continues to consolidate its control over schools, with decades of moving power and funding from local districts to the capital, the primary blockers to improving schools is not at the school board level. It is in Austin and in the voting booth.
A school board can absolutely impact the local community with its policies, but these are symptoms of a larger question about our community values, which we know are being questioned in every community in the country. These values are then reflected in who we vote for at the State and local levels.
We live in Montgomery County, Texas, a majority conservative area. The one question I have been trying to understand is this:
Do we, as a whole, value public education in Montgomery County?
I have not been able to answer this question, as we continue to elect people who focus on the adult inputs of the day, rather than actual student or education needs. There is obviously a lot of history to cover on this topic.
Where do we go from here in Conroe ISD?
There are new Board elections happening this November, along with a well-followed Presidential election. Montgomery County conservatives will once again show up in record numbers and vote down-the-line for conservative candidates.
For Conroe ISD, this means a new Board with a full slate of ‘Mama Bears’ Trustees. I haven’t been able to form an opinion on what this means for the school district, or overall public education within the County.
What I do know is that what we have today is not working for the long term. Whether the Mama Bear’s win or lose this election, I have little faith that a new Board will make the significant changes needed to resolve the ever-mounting issues found within our schools. This includes focusing on teacher retention (and everything around it), rethinking our student discipline process, the overcrowding of schools and driving support for growth (i.e. bonds, VATREs), better supporting special education programs, fixing our poor lunch nutrition options, and doing better at resolving local disputes before they reach a courtroom, to name a few.
Only some of those things can probably be tackled at the district level anyways. What we need is for our Texas school boards to use their voice at the State level to fight for the resources needed. As we know with the debate on the Governor’s drive for vouchers, that is a likely a losing battle until vouchers become a reality.
Thus, we are stuck fighting at school board meetings over the distractions that are book policies, health curriculum, and what is in science textbooks. These are indeed important, but not anywhere near the level of urgency needed for sustaining our district for the decades to come.
As parents, all we can do is focus on what is within our control, and drive for the best outcomes possible by voting and supporting our educators.
For our house, we will continue to learn and volunteer where we can within the district, but I am of the opinion that Texas public education will get worse before it gets better. It will be a long while before there is a sense of “normal” within education (and the world), and my hope is that at least one of our children will be able to experience it.
Thanks for reading.
Being on an HOA Board, MUD, or City Council can certainly prepare you for the type of work required to be a school board trustee, but it doesn’t prepare you for the public positions you will be forced to take or the decisions you will make that impact the future of people’s children. That, and people have become a bit wilder at school board meetings, which coming from an HOA President says a lot.
Orphan-Crushing Machine is a metaphor that highlights “heartwarming” news stories that address immediate effects of sociopolitical issues but ignore their root causes. It satirizes these stories by comparing them to raising money to save orphans from a crushing machine, without questioning why the machine exists in the first place. - KnowYourMeme.
“Adult inputs” refer to the biases, personal experiences, and professional backgrounds that school board members bring to their roles, which can often hinder their focus on improving student outcomes.