By Peyton Wolcott
Friday, March 21, 2008
www.peytonwolcott.com

 

Call me the Boswell* of the national online school district check register transparency movement. Because Texas in a very short period of time already leads the nation in the number of local school districts with their check registers online -- the number has jumped from 3 to 148 in just 17 months -- folks in other states have begun to take notice and are attempting to replicate our success. Encouraging, but because many are stumbling, National Sunshine Week offers a great opportunity to share how we built the three fundamental legs of our four-legged stool so that others can replicate our success.

 

So here, in this order, is the Texas four-legged stool.

 

1. Governor - Rick Perry / Executive Order RP 47 (Aug. 2005)
2. Grassroots - Peyton Wolcott / National School District Honor Roll (Oct. 2006)
3. Texas Education Agency Commissioner - Robert Scott / Check register online (Feb. 2007)
4. FOIA issues (2000 to present) and proposed legislation - HB 2560 (Spring 2007)

 

The first leg of the four-legged stool appeared when Governor Rick Perry signed Executive Order RP 47 in August 2005 requiring all Texas public school districts to move towards spending at least 65% of their dollars in the classroom. If that percentage sounds familiar, it was inspired by Patrick Byrne's (the Overstock.com guy) First Class Education. Although Gov. Perry had specified the National Center for Education Statistics formula for spending, almost before the ink was dry on the executive order then-Texas Education Commissioner Shirley Neeley invited Texas superintendents to Austin to help modify (read: dilute) the NCES formula, with the result that the bar for reaching 65% was significantly lowered such that for a school district to not make the 65% target pickup trucks would almost have to be leaving the district filled with either cash or copper tubing. How it worked:  The Financial Integrity Rating System of Texas (FIRST) plan called for a three-step implementation in as many years; any districts not achieving 65% by 2008-09 could as a cure elect to post their check registers online the following year, in 2010.

 

The second and perhaps for many the most improbable leg is the grassroots movement. Why it happened at all is simple. Having observed for many years now our powerful state education lobbyists and their way of working behind the scenes, I was concerned that by the time 2010 rolled around with two Leges in the interim (2007 and 2009), the 65% rule and subsequent check register option would have been sufficiently diluted such that no school district would have failed to make the 65% mark and therefore there would have been no online check registers in Texas and financial records in our local school districts would have been just as inaccessible as before. Rather than risk this, on October 1, 2006 I started The National School District Honor Roll on my website to encourage, honor and recognize those districts voluntarily posting their check registers online well ahead of any state requirements, reasoning that a national roster would give form, function and impetus to a grassroots movement not only here in Texas but also the other 49 states. Although the roster was small at first, consisting of 3 small Texas districts, it grew quickly; what superintendent and school board exist who would want to be perceived by their community as being opposed to transparency?   The present tally:  at least 164 districts in 14 states, with $46 billion in annual transparency.

 

The third fundamental leg was then-Chief Deputy Commissioner of Education Robert Scott's posting the Texas Education Agency's check register online in February 2007; after Robert was appointed Commissioner by Governor Perry in October 2007, he started mentioning in speeches to Texas public school administrators that more financial transparency was coming to Texas public education. This leg was crucial because it told local school superintendents and trustees that Texas' executive branch was serious about public school accountability and transparency.

 

The biggest, shiniest and mostly loudly promoted last leg -- and the one that has proven to be of the least significance to either the statewide or the national online check register transparency movement -- arrived in two phases. First there were years and years of Texas parents and taxpayers filing public records requests in their home districts in order to learn more about their districts, with the savvier of the parents cutting to the chase and asking to view superintendents' expense reports. Too often this turned into an acrimonious exercise on both sides' parts, worsened by some administrators' making it as difficult as possible for the public to view public records. To cure this, proposed legislation (HB 2560) was written by a conservative think tank for a member of the Texas House of Representatives sitting on the public ed committee; unfortunately, both the state representative and the writer although no doubt experienced in other areas were relatively new to the unique particularities of public education politics and therefore did not have a significant history of working with or support from public ed lobbying elements. Further, rather than being written in the language of RP 47, the original draft of the proposed bill was geared towards the wants and needs of the think tank and considered by many in the public education community to be over-broad and over-reaching, extending far beyond the requirements of RP 47; for example, the bill asked for payroll checks** to be posted, which RP 47 did not. Although the bill in diluted form finally passed the Texas House after several tries, it failed on the last possible day in the Senate, sunk by an 11th-hour letter from a Houston banker representing the largest district in Texas, with the letter circulated by -- drum roll -- the district's paid professional lobbyist. I know all this because I was there. I saw the letter being circulated by the lobbyist, and, unlike the think tank folks who'd taken the weekend off, I was in the Senate gallery that weekend, through the last late-night Senate session.

 

What can we learn from this
I will state for the record that I am a staunch defender of the importance of the public's right to view public records including what's on a district's front door.  For instance, in August 2006 I was detained by three armed school district police officers because I thought the public had the right to view photographs of that district's misleading signage (it had prominent "TEA Recognized" -- the second of our state's four tiers -- signs on their front door and in the main lobby of their admin. building two days after the state had announced they'd sunk to "TEA Academically Unacceptable," the lowest of the four tiers). The officers all

had real guns with real bullets; to provide greater context, the same ISD police department had recently been written up in the local newspaper for having followed a person several blocks off campus; after a scuffle the person was shot.

 

While fiscal transparency in the form of online check registers is a popular idea among conservatives, including conservative think tanks and the folks funding them, attempting to get legislation written at the state level is the wrong first step -- and it is the first step many conservative think tanks in many states are taking or attempting to take. Further, going strictly on my own observation, the failed bill appeared to have been one of many more or less thrown at the wall by that group in hopes that some would stick. (None did, that I know of.) Public education lobbyists on the other hand have a much bigger stake, again based on my observation of legislative sessions here in Texas, and they play not to play but to win. Until now at least many conservative think tanks appear have been more interested in going through the exercise, able in that way to win points with their funders -- "We tried!" -- whether they succeeded or not.

 

While I will continue to champion public records rights so long as I continue to draw breath, I posit that for parents and taxpayers to have any success in their communities -- for this bright and shiny fourth leg to be strong enough to help support the stool -- public records for the sake of public records change little or nothing in our local schools, and parents and taxpayers must learn to share their findings immediately in a meaningful way with their communities on a website, with the information presented in a clear and concise manner. As a practical matter, they also need to make clear to their communities why this information is important and also organize their communities around this information, using it as a springboard to political action such as placing more folks on the local school board. I know this is possible because this is the approximate route my own community took on the rocky road from a pricey school convention steak dinner receipt that led to our superintendent's conviction that led to eventually our placing all five of our reform-platform candidates on the school board in a single election. On the other hand, the couple who were named as the chief reason for our worsened public records laws here in Texas filed well over a thousand public records requests, did not share their findings with their community for several months, and then not until after the district's school board had already voted to file a SLAPP*** suit against them; although the suit eventually failed, including the district's appeal, the sheer numbers of the couple's requests were enough justification to the state Lege to impose far stiffer fees on all parents and taxpayers in the form of HB 2564 during the 80th regular called legislative session, the same session

as the failed check register bill; the dad of the couple ran for a spot on the local school board not as a slate but by himself and lost by a wide margin, which the community and the school district's administration took as evidence that he did not have the full and clear backing of his community. Yes, he had the right to file public records requests. Yes, he did not have grassroots majority support.

School district politics are the purest form of local power and as such can be dirty, messy and unpleasant. Addressing a local school board during an open meeting can be a daunting proposition for even the most self-composed business executives and other professionals used to TV cameras and the like. I've watched bank presidents stutter for the first time since junior high, and don't blame anyone for not wanting to get involved, especially my cerebral think-tank friends whose reaction to suggestions that they actually talk to their own local superintendents and boards has generally been to make a face and a sound along the lines of "EW!" I can see the appeal of sidestepping the "EW" and hopscotching ahead to proposing state legislation as it appears the tidier alternative. 

 

Start small, start local, start simple
There must be evidence of widespread grassroots success at the local individual school district level in terms of numbers of school districts who have already voluntarily posted their check registers online to help legislators to feel secure enough to codify this by voting in the affirmative at the state level; the pressures on our state senators and representatives by the public education lobby are strong, intense and constant, and our conservative think tanks would do well to remember this and revise their strategies accordingly.    Local success is also important because we cannot improve public education in our great republic until we are able to track specific local dollars, and improve public education we must in order to have a strong and independent populace able to think for itself.

 

Suppose you're not as fortunate in your state as we are here in Texas to have a conservative governor and education commissioner blessed with both courage and vision. To be effective, you're going to have to start building your sturdy stool with grassroots momentum, beginning with -- EW! -- asking your own local school district to voluntarily post its check register online, then strengthening that leg by persuading friends in other districts to do the same, and progress from there. When folks follow the steps as suggested on my site they have met with 100% success.  Your state leadership will take notice and want to join a transparency movement already vetted at the grassroots level.

Friends, I've described our four-legged stool so that you can build one just as sturdy or better in your state.  All things really are possible. 

_______________________________________
*     James Boswell was the 18th century lawyer remembered as being Dr. Samuel Johnson's biographer; in addition to having

written "A Dictionary of the English Language," Johnson was also known for his aphorisms, including, "It matters not how a man

dies, but how he lives."
**    My suggestion is that when school districts finalize their annual budgets in July-August each year they simply post their

payroll/stipend schedule somewhere on the district's website as a one-time deal; it seems a bit silly to ask districts to post

repetitive, identical payroll checks month after month.
***  Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation.

 

LINKS:
How to ask your own local district: www.peytonwolcott.com/NationalSchoolDistrictHonorRoll_AskingYourDistrict.htm

 

Also useful:
www.tea.state.tx.us/rules/commissioner/adopted/0706/109-1002-ltradopt.html
http://www.tea.state.tx.us/tea/check/fy07/
http://www.tea.state.tx.us/tea/check/fy08/


Copyright 2008 Peyton Wolcott

Published March 21, 2008