Watch how an institution behaves under pressure, and you will learn who it believes it answers to.
In 1848, Horace Mann argued that a republic cannot sustain itself on an uneducated citizenry. Public schooling was not charity extended to children. It was infrastructure, as foundational to self-government as roads or courts.
Mann was right then. The question worth asking now is whether the institutions he inspired still understand who they were built to serve.
Too many districts, under pressure, defend institutional equilibrium instead of the students and taxpayers they were built to serve. Every dollar spent insulating an administrator from consequences is a dollar that never reaches a classroom.
The union exists to correct an absolute power imbalance. But when a representative manages a member toward the path of least institutional resistance instead of advocating for them, it has stopped representing and started managing.
The connection between the dysfunction inside our schools and the dysfunction in our public life is not metaphorical. It is causal, and it is long-running.
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