What is the Role and Responsibility of Elected Officials?

When I served on the school board I attended a conference where the speaker was a Philip Boyle (at the time a professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and now a private consultant) he was an excellent speaker who really understood the role of elected officials. That conference clarified for me, my role as a school board member and helped in some ways to explain why the BOE had (and still has) such difficulties making decisions at times. This article explains very clearly what the role of elected officials should be.

Here are some excerpts from the above article:

We call them public values, because they come into play when we act or are affected as citizens. We can group them into four core values (Note: for more detailed discussions of these values and how they shape public policy and political theory, see O'Toole, Stone, Okun, and Brinkley et al.):

Liberty, which includes freedom, choice, access, autonomy, mobility, openness, transparency, individual rights, voluntary, opportunity, individuality, exemptions, privacy, due process, independence, personal responsibility, self-determination, and self-sufficiency.

Prosperity, which includes economy, efficiency, growth, productivity, profit, cost reduction, development, incentives, competition, consolidation, centralization, privatization, standardization, specialization, performance measurement, benchmarking, return on investment, using market rules to make decisions, and quantity of life.

Equality, which includes fairness, justice, tolerance, acceptance, diversity, equity, inclusion, representation, equal rights, equal opportunity, equal treatment, equal results, grandfathering, and a level playing field.

Community, which includes safety, security, a sense of connection and belonging to the people and places where we live and work, a sense of place and identity, health, aesthetics, preservation, restoration, conservation, tradition, customs, the sacred, uniformity, social and moral order, and quality of life.


As shown below, each of these public values represents a competing vision for public education:

Public Education and Liberty
Let parents choose schools, control how education dollars are spent
Charter, magnet, cyber schools
Private schools, home schooling
Open enrollment and transfers
Academic freedom, freedom of speech
Local control and governance
Open meetings, transparency, public input

Public Education and Prosperity
Meet global standards
Further economic progress
Compete in 21st century workplace
Career preparation, real-world learning
Apply market principles to education and schools
Treat parents as consumers
Continuous school improvement
Measurement and certification
Commercialization
Operate schools like a business

Public Education and Equality
Equitable funding
Equal opportunity
Eliminate race, gender, class, ethnic, and cultural biases
Teach all history and cultures
All courses and sports available to all students
Alternative, special, bi-lingual education
Free and reduced breakfast/lunch programs
Non-discriminatory policies governing public use of school facilities
Close achievement gaps
Title IX

Public Education and Community
Meet social and emotional needs
All children learn together
Avoid competition, ranking, social sorting
Strengthen families and communities
Smaller classes, neighborhood schools
Art, music, civics, character education, service learning
Health, exercise, diet, nutrition, physical education
Drug testing, dress codes, zero tolerance
Safe, clean, secure, comfortable, welcoming schools
Raise children, don't just teach children
Save recess!

While there are statements I agree with in all 4 values, my values run much more to the Community/ Equality set than the other 2 (though there are one or two statments in the community set that I do not agree with) as I think anyone can see there are others who were or are on the board whose values run much more to Prosperity and somewhat to Liberty. As the article indicates, no one value is better than any other, the key for elected officials is to balance all the values and leave everyone better off than before they started. It is a tall order and since many officials are not even aware of the struggle with these values, this is rarely the approach taken.

An educational system isn't worth a great deal if it teaches young people how to make a living but doesn't teach them how to make a life. -- Unknown

Private organizations and institutions can promote one value over the others, but government cannot. We expect the American Civil Liberties Union to promote liberty, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to promote equality, the YMCA and Sierra Club to promote community, and the chamber of commerce to promote prosperity. But only one institution -- government -- is responsible for protecting and promoting all four public values. We prevent anarchy and tyranny, as the Founders intended, by making room for each public value in the public sphere.

And we ask our public officials -- both elected and appointed -- to make good public choices by balancing these values. In this context, public school leadership is not about power, authority, or public opinion. As James Madison might have put it, school boards and administrators are charged with refining and enlarging the public views so that they may best discern the true public interest.

So what do you think? Does this make sense? Does it explain to some degree why the BOE gets stymied? Please keep the discussion ON TOPIC... I will delete ALL posts that stray from this topic.