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Why School Boards Are Bullies and How to Beat Them
How average people can fight school bureaucracies using their Constitutional rights and creative interventions.
Like everyone else, I have been following the upheaval at school board meetings across the country. Parents are confronting school boards over a wide variety of issues like Critical Race Theory, transgender bathroom issues and events at sports games.
I think these parents are missing the boat.
School boards are bureaucracies. That’s what makes them so aggravating. But if parents understood what bureaucracies are and how they work, they would know how to stand up to them.
Mature bureaucracies are inward facing. They aren’t very concerned with things happening outside their boundaries. They don’t care about results and instead focus on their expanding their power by using internal procedures. Administrators have an unshakable belief that as long as they focus on process outcomes will be acceptable.
That’s nonsense, of course.
My school district — Salem-Keizer, in Oregon — made national news in 2017 when teachers received notification they faced discipline if they failed to report students they thought might be having sex…
