The CBC’s re-rigging of its flagship national news program is a reminder of an educated public’s exponentially expanding thirst for information about everything and its preferences as to how that information might be delivered.
For government, that provides a challenge in terms of sating the thirst on a daily basis, and for other publicly funded services, especially school districts, the same pressure applies.
Many years ago, when I was first assigned the task of developing a community-relations program for a mid-size school district, I sought the advice of the then long-term community-relations officer for a major urban school district.
“How can we go about marketing public education?” I asked him. He set me straight by explaining: “The public have bought and paid for public education — what we owe them is the courtesy of an explanation.”
Good point, and I never forgot the advice or the importance of explaining, not selling, public education.
In those days, working with the media was a fairly straightforward task. There was always lots of material because public education is a lively event that happens in thousands of classrooms, hallways, cafeterias and staff rooms for 190 days every year.
It is, after all, about good stuff, such as the growth and development of children.
But as with any organization involving thousands of adults and half a million kids, mistakes were inevitably made from time to time. Those were the things that, for the most part, were dealt with at the school level or at school board in-camera meetings, along with personnel, property and labour-relations issues.
This was not a matter of “sweeping under the carpet,” but more a matter of dealing with stuff on a “need to know” basis. This meant referring some events and issues to people who had the experience, the judgment and the legislated authority to deal with whatever had happened.
But that was also at a time when there existed a degree of trust in the integrity of governments at all levels, along with some confidence about the reliability and trustworthiness of those elected or employed to run public institutions such as school systems.
Two things have changed all that.
First, while the essential building block for trust exists in the credibility of those who take on the task of being leaders at every level (and I include teachers in that category), we don’t have to look very far to find evidence that the credibility of leadership has taken a beating in recent years.
Second, the whole concept of “media,” as the Times Colonist’s Pat Coppard pointed out in a column on Saturday, has evolved dramatically over the past 10 to 15 years.
As Coppard wrote: In “an online free-for-all where it’s impossible to know what’s true and what’s not … there is no way to assess credibility of information. What passes for online ‘research’ is often just a hunt for dubious ‘facts’ to support what you already believe.”
The alignment of those two developments is a nightmare for people trying to do a straightforward job explaining to an increasingly skeptical public what public education is all about — especially the unfettered and ungoverned nature of online information.
While transparency in organizations such as schools and classrooms might be a good thing in some ways, I always advise young teachers: “Remember that if you do or say something inappropriate in a classroom, you will be front and centre on YouTube before you get home from work.”
The same caveat applies to administrators or trustees who, while they would be extremely thoughtful about the implications for their organization of any statement made to a reporter on an issue before their school or school board, will enthusiastically bare their innermost thoughts on the issue along with their large “P” political beliefs on a Facebook page.
Despite this, public confidence in public education is still alive and well. Based on the 2013 General Social Survey on Social Identity as reported by StatsCan, three in four Canadians still rate confidence in public education higher than banks, the justice system, the courts, the media, Parliament or major corporations.
Canada in general and B.C. in particular have one of the world’s leading education systems, according to most international assessments.
But public education, now more than ever, needs to be “blowing its own horn,” and remember what legendary boxer Muhammad Ali said: “It’s not bragging if you can back it up.”
Geoff Johnson is a former superintendent of schools.
