School administrators should focus on educating students, not political opinions

Originally published in the Columbus Dispatch, this is a slightly expanded version that goes into more detail. I truly appreciate the Dispatch for their willingness to include contrarian voices and headlines that help to sell newspapers.

Should the personal be political? That was the question at a recent civil discourse event my family and I support at Ohio State. Too many people believe the answer is “yes.”

I asked Dr. Robert Talisse, one of the event speakers, for his perspective on the purpose of politics. His reply: “to create the conditions under which we can devote our lives to worthwhile endeavors that are not themselves politics.”

He’s right.

Politics is less an endeavor itself than a means to a desired outcome, which is discerning the best policies and policymakers to achieve a peaceful resolution of conflicting goals in a pluralistic society. It requires us to see our fellow citizens as equally entitled to their views even when we disagree.

A related question is should the professional be political? The answer is clearly no, unless one’s professional role is explicitly political.

Politics is like flying an airplane with passengers in the cabin. The process is continuous, requiring constant adjustments to the course and attention to aircraft systems, traffic, weather, and terrain. The interplay between pilots, air traffic controllers, maintenance, and ground personnel is crucial, but it’s not the essence of the endeavor.

The real purpose is getting passengers safely to their destination.

As a pilot myself, my job is to accomplish that outcome while not heightening any passengers’ fear of flying. Telegraphing to them any fears I might have hardly serves that goal.

In flight as in politics, some turbulence is common and the recent election was as turbulent as any in my lifetime. Most professional settings should be a respite from the caustic partisan commentary found in the angriest corners of social media.

Perhaps the most obvious haven should be public schools.

Passionate beliefs naturally accompany certain policies and the politicians who espouse them. But when our politics invades an explicitly non-partisan work environment, we’ve lost sight of the purpose of our work.

Case in point: a post-election staff newsletter from a principal in Olentangy schools. The principal appears to have appropriate qualifications and experience. Yet, in injecting her disappointment at the election results into a non-political setting, she lost sight of the purpose of her important work. Her suggestion that the outcome of the election is antithetical to her values and those of her school has been correctly criticized as politicizing an institution that must be politically neutral.

The thousands of students, staff, and parents of this school district who cheered the election results now have reason to doubt the competence and integrity of the school system they fund and rely upon to educate the next generation.

The overt partisanship of this principal’s newsletter also violates the instructions of a September 10 staff memo from the district superintendent.

These precautions were prudent, but the district’s public response has been a meandering word salad of cluelessness. With many district residents appropriately expressing outrage at the principal’s partisan stunt, the district responded with an irrelevant nod to its “culture of inclusive excellence” and other meaningless bromides that obscured their intentions.  

Only after public criticism grew louder did the district place the principal on administrative leave while they conduct an unspecified investigation.

This could have been promptly resolved when district leaders first learned of the principal’s error. A quick reprimand of her actions followed by taking responsibility would have built community trust.

The statement should have been short and bold: “Our district doesn’t take sides in elections. Our mission is educating students, not partisan politics. One of our principals failed to abide by that mission and we placed her on leave while we conduct a thorough investigation. This was a serious error in judgment. We apologize for it. We won’t let it happen again.”

As a member of my local school board for eight years, I worked with fellow board members and school leaders to focus our district on our Statement of Purpose about educating students, not coddling adults.

Enough is enough. I care about public education. Since public school employees continue to use their professional positions to engage in partisan advocacy outside of established curriculum, it’s well past time to force their hand.

That’s why I call on Ohio lawmakers to legislate standards of political neutrality for all public schools. Violations should lead to appropriate reductions in public funding.

The focus of teachers and administrators in public K-12 schools must be to successfully impart foundational knowledge to students in literacy, math, the natural sciences, history, civics and the arts. It is not — which bears repeating — it is not to promote individual views about “social justice”, the environment, or any other partisan political issue.

I’m completely comfortable with high schools offering age-appropriate elective classes that explore controversial topics of interest to students. But any such classes must be explicitly balanced and non-partisan.

I recently had the pleasure to speak with students in just such a class at another Central Ohio school. I was the third speaker on the particular topic and the teacher had done an excellent job of making sure students were exposed to diverse range of opinions.

Those disappointed by an election loss should resist the temptation to relitigate grievances in their professional settings and instead focus on the essential work at hand. Mixing the professional with the political erodes trust, alienates those with differing perspectives, and distracts from the shared mission of serving the public.