Athens Area School District, Propaganda, and Going Too Far

UPDATE - The school...over the course of the last 2 hours...pulled the front page!
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I'd like to think that when organizations grow larger a certain amount of dysfunction emerges. Hopefully when mistakes are made the organization tries to fix them and take steps to minimize repeating them in the future.

But some mistakes make you sit back and wonder if they even see them as mistakes in the first place.

The Athens Area School District, like many other districts, are in the middle of contract negotiations with teachers and staff (although for the rest of this post I'll refer to them collectively as staff.) teachers have been working for a few years now without a new contract, and the board has, in several cases, refused to talk with them. It's a pretty typical game that gets played out (although I find it horribly irresponsible of a board to even allow staff to have a contract term lapse, then have a pretense of an interest in professional behavior. But that is simply my opinion.)

As the non-contract-negotiation-period continues to drag on there tends to be an escalation in pressure tactics. Meetings are held in auditoriums for "informing the public". Editorials are published in the local paper. Today the public gets to share their half-formed opinions on newspaper websites to parrot displeasure in the existence of unions or the unfairness of benefits a union-backed group negotiated for staff in the past.

Same song, different band, played out every few years. Usually conflicts get worked out (eventually) and teachers go on teachering and support staff continue supporting and the community continues to disapprove of their favorite sports team generating babysitting service.

Did I word that in a way that you can infer how I have felt about public schools or the attitude other people have towards them?

Maybe. If you have reading comprehension skills.

Sometimes this is done on purpose. It's a way of using bias to spread a particular viewpoint. Some call it spin. Some call it framing the argument. Others use the blanket term "propaganda," and it's a skill that can be highly lucrative for people in public relations. When this skill is poorly executed, the spin is not only obvious, but insulting to the target audience.

That is what makes this latest escalation so horrifically terrible on so many levels.

(DISCLOSURE - yes, I have family working there. No, I don't get information on what's going on beyond things that affect work schedules. I've had family and friends of family working for various school districts in the area in positions ranging from custodial staff to teachers to principals, and I pay way too much in taxes to a school district as it is. I've seen the contract negotiation rodeo dance many times in my life. I've become familiar with many of the tactics used when groups drag out negotiations. I've stayed out of this back and forth mud slinging...it was routine, as far as I knew, and I got information everyone else got through local paper headlines. But this...well...this was more than a basic attention grabber, and quite frankly, it moved me to do a little more digging. These are my words. These are my opinions. If you accuse me of parroting or speaking for someone else, you're insulting and implying I'm incapable of...or don't have a right to...having my own opinions.)

On October 10th the students logged into the school computers and were greeted to a press release "in response to" an article in a local newspaper. I hadn't seen the article, or if I did I don't remember it...I've long grown numb to the whining of salaries and benefits and assurances that the board is just trying to keep taxes down and there's no money blahblah. But the content of this press release tells me it had something to do with salaries of administrators with a dose of healthcare costs tossed in for good measure.

Blanked out phone number. I want to illustrate what they saw, not be petty or childish...

Think about this for a moment. The students were greeted with a message about salaries, how expensive the teachers are, and it was in the form of a rebuttal to an article that the school didn't link to for information.

That in itself is a subtle message. It says the administration, and/or the school board, has no respect for their staff. They couldn't keep mommy and daddy's fighting behind the closed doors of newspaper articles or their own websites, or even documents available from links on the school website...they made it a top page, in your face article for students to see when they first log in to the computer and open a web browser.

Keep in mind that teachers are ROUTINELY hammered in evaluations for a thing called classroom management. Do you think having other adults...teachers bosses...sending a message that they don't respect the teachers helps teachers maintain respect and order in the classroom? Even if the effect is subtle, it'll contribute to a further inability to properly maintain order in the classroom.

I'd be horrified as an employee to see this. A tacit reminder that my employers hate me. Front page. Not bothering to hide it anymore. And most teachers keep their thoughts on such matters to themselves because who would they talk to? The people in a position to help are the people who appear to be actively setting them up to fail. Since this appeared on the school website, that would mean at least it was endorsed by the administrators and was an extension of the ongoing arguing between the union and school board.

Worse, the bias and bullying is simply obvious.

• It's placed on the front page of a website that is set by default to come up on computers in the classroom.
• In the release's own words, certain salaries were released "because the administrators have graciously agreed to share those figures and the district feels it is important information for the community at large to have." That implies this is special information pried from their cold dead hands. Hate to tell you but such state secrets are literally available from the state. Public employee salaries are publicly available. A quick visit to OpenPAGov.org will give you all the salary information. It is generous to say characterizing this otherwise is only disingenuous.
• Numbers, numbers everywhere. Numbers are funny things. Any decent statistician...or presenter dealing with numbers...can tell you that they can be bent to show just about anything, especially if your audience is not versed in critical analysis. Much of the presentation documents frame salaries as "number of professional staff earning greater" and salaries on a table for position wherein many are filled with N/A (you didn't have a superintendent that year? Or you are focusing on a particular person?) and there is a mention of staff being paid more than others in the area. You don't give those numbers, though. I can say that in NYC public school janitors make over $100,000 on average.  Wanna keep playing "we need to pay what others pay" game?
• In addition, the numbers are usually veiled to hid other details. Ask yourself...why are there so many percentages in one list? When they add up to 515%, you should probably stop and think about what it's really measuring and how they're used to possibly distort a point. (Hint...percentages are supposed to add up to 100. If they don't, something else is being measured instead of parts of a whole.)
• It says it's in response to a press release in the newspaper. Why isn't it linked to? Or reproduced, so I know what exactly you're talking about? It's a press release. I would think they wouldn't object to having the text reproduced or linked to. Unless you don't want people to see it.
• The article says information is available to the public on their own website. The website I'm reading it on. The website in the URL. Why didn't you just...I don't know...say it's available here. Not re-state the website URL. Worse, it's not restated as a link. It would still be weird, but it would show some effort for the medium on which you're writing.
• It's interesting to note that in this format there's not a place to respond. No comments enabled. No contact information or author taking credit for the information. Who wrote it? Who do I write to if I have questions? The change log is publicly accessible, but the person listed vehemently denied having anything to do with the content he posted.
• I like the use of terms like "Cadillac plan." Is that the technical term? Or is it used because it stirs up imagery of indulgence and negative connotations? I'd be interested in knowing if that is the proper term for it given that Cadillac, I thought, was a legally protected term.
• The cuts in numbers for healthcare. There seems to be an implication that you want to drastically cut what the employees get. I suppose some of those savings are going to be given to the employees as part of their salary? After all, several employees are already opting out of your healthcare plan and instead going on their spouse's healthcare plans. Do your numbers reflect that in what you're feeding to the public, the number of insurance buyouts you have and what is saved in that process?
• I also like the end implication of school staff not being community members. Do you have numbers on how many of your staff aren't living and paying taxes in your district? How many of your staff are shopping in your district, paying into the people who in turn pay taxes to your district? What is the definition of community member? Because it might be nice to not have people staying to host and chaperone your proms and sports events if they are somehow considered "not community members." Let them go home instead of contributing to events for your community members.
•  Ooh! I did find some numbers for other districts in a separate presentation graphic from your public presentations. You made it easy to find (given you didn't give a link or discussion in the text so I had to search around your other material.) The graph used a technique I was recently acquainted with by a graphics designer friend from work. That bar graph looks REALLY big, jumping from $42K to $50K for average starting salary with a bachelor's degree! Although the survey of schools...what schools? What is the cost of living in those areas? And the vertical axis...was there a reason the spacing was chosen in increments of $2K? And the size of the graph must have made the difference look HUGE on the projector. In the future you can use $1k increments to make it look even bigger, if you keep the same spacing between lines.
• Why was that chart in a link called a collective bargaining report? It was just a slideshow. Who made it? Did the union have a reply to this or input on the information?
• How come all the reports are slide shows? I was under the impression a report was usually in the form of words. Lots of words with information. Margins. Graphics interspersed occasionally to illustrate a point. These reports in the form of town hall graphics. With big fonts. And no text explaining what was said in the town hall, hopefully elaborating on points. Was there a prepared speech, or were the slides just read to the audience?
• Another reason numbers, numbers numbers are fun? I'm totally zoning out after the third chart. I don't know what it's trying to tell me other than "we have lots of numbers." How is it relevant except to overwhelm you with information that may or may not be relevant to the point? Does anyone actually explain what is happening in these negotiations in terms not meant to obfuscate?
• Is the union going to get a chance to reply to this press release? Or is the school only allowed to show one side of the argument, the one that makes the person in the front of the room look bad?
• According to the agenda, the meeting appears to be...the school board. So the school board gave the presentation to the public? Is there an equivalent set of information available from the union, or is it only the school board that determines what information the public should know about and be given a voice on the school district website?
• I also see that in your agenda you had a lawyer give the status of negotiation talks. There is a lot of talk about how much staff costs, and how much effort is going into saving money. How much is the lawyer costing the district? How much are stalled negotiations costing the district, on average, per day, and how much have they cost so far?
• Did the lawyer create your slideshow materials? They don't really have authorship information or contact information. But I saw through a quick search that the lawyer named seems to have extensive experience...and relationships...specializing in negotiations with many many public schools in the area.
• Is there a reason contracts were allowed to expire and drag on this long so that retroactive pay is even an issue? Isn't that someone's job, to actually have contracts negotiated and renewed before they are due? How many people "in your community," as contract workers, would keep working without a valid contract? Is someone not doing his or her job, seeing as the teachers and staff have continued providing services to your community without a valid contract?
• If a union is a group of individual workers working together to have a collective bargaining unit, someone to represent them and work for a group's benefit, while the board is often cast as the plucky community representatives trying to work in the best interest of the community, where does it fit in when your lawyer's name is attached to several districts with recent or ongoing contract negotiations? It didn't take much Googling to see that his name is attached to other school district work (just Google his name and a school district)...and that would make him privy to information among those bargaining units, I would think. And it's no secret that districts rarely want to be the first to do anything...they tend to make decisions based on what their neighbors do (Ah, fond memories of watching school winter closings...we knew that if a particular district closed, there was a 90% chance our district would soon be calling school as well...) So does that kind of sharing information kind of make the board working in a "psuedo-union" capacity?
• The self-imposed battle lines seem to be drawn between the community and the union. But upon digging, I have been seeing more services being outsourced to other companies. Is it a little strange to give jobs to companies that aren't community members, sending dollars outside your tax base?

These are just thoughts that occurred to me as I read the information being forced into my face and the links to what were labelled as reports but actually were presentation materials. I didn't get into other subtle means of manipulating the public, such as...you really had security show up for the public meeting? What subtle message did you want to send, that you hired thugs and criminals to educate your kids, and needed protection from your own staff? And how much did the taxpayer crusaders protecting community wallets pay for security on top of a lawyer, who is not a local lawyer nor member of your community, to travel up to the district for a presentation?

Does anyone bring up what contributed to the district being in a position where there are so little funds, or take responsibility for decisions leading to this point, or is the accepted attitude that these things just sort of magically happen in a vacuum? Because as a lesson to the students, that...is wrong.

Using the school website as a tool for forwarding a biased agenda...is wrong. 

If you had a separate section where you can both air your grievances and explanations and give an equal voice to both sides, that would be one thing...but putting a press release...with obvious biases against the people in the classroom, members of your community educating your kids, from one side of the dispute...is wrong. 

The lessons this teaches kids about how to handle disputes...are wrong.

The toxicity of what this says to your staff through implications of a total lack of respect and value in the classroom...is wrong.

Placing such material as a tacit agreement of negative attitudes towards your staff on the part of the school board and administration, knowing that your staff can't say anything about it or have a chance to reply without fear of retribution...is wrong. And you should recognize that from the messages barraging your students through the use of your ongoing character programs. It's bullying.

What should be done is removing that material from the front page of the website. If you want to make it an outlet for "informing the public", make it a link to its own page. And give equal access to hear from the unions. You don't have to let public comments in...your prerogative and probably a bad idea if students are reading what is published. This should be presented with a pretense of professionalism despite the disagreements.

This kind of bias and bullying is something I would sooner expect on a playground. Not from the people holding school staff to a higher standard.

It's strange to constantly hear about "Athens Pride." It's a slogan on their shirts and banners. Apparently it's only a slogan, though. What do your staff have to be proud of? A community that hates them? A leadership that despises them? A job where their authority is undermined, then they are judged in part by this same professional sabotage? 

What effect do you think it has when your staff are teaching kids in an environment where pride is simply a hollow, meaningless word to be slapped on t-shirts? That there's no effect whatsoever on morale of students if you make your staff feel whipped, undeserving, and overprivileged despite the effort they put in, often above and beyond the terms of their contracts? (Although it's hard to make a case that the contracts are worth much when they can't be given the courtesy of having contracts negotiated in a timely manner.)

(Afterthought...normally at this point a third party is brought in to arbitrate with fact finding. Funny how I didn't see anything about that emphasized? Because there was a third party brought in. The report was rejected. Why? I don't know. But the report itself is public record, if you go digging for it yourself. Why wasn't that in an announcement with explanations for why it was rejected?

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What I Learned About Functional Specs And Mockups

We've been having discussion in our department regarding workflow, communication, and automation. There came a point in these discussions where I described a system that I thought would make things simpler for us as a group with an interface that we and new hires alike would find useful.

I thought I was describing it eloquently. But then again, I knew what I was describing.

But there are other practical obstacles to communicating such ideas. For example, your team may feel they have better things to think about. Maybe they are biased towards their own ideas, or that this is a waste of time because dammit the current system works fine if only you weren't whining so much, or whatever their mind has wandered off to at that point of the meeting.

In the end the boss decided to steer the meeting by relenting to a "write something up and work with <coworker> on this, we'll discuss it after that" approach.

I should back up a little bit here...I'd grumbled about a lack of documentation on the state of the in-house project growing in our department for awhile, but because grumbling isn't seen as productive, I felt the concerns were dismissed. What I later understood was it wasn't a lack of documentation so much as a lack of a functional specification. Others on the team didn't understand the problem until we were in a meeting and three people had three totally different ideas on how the system did something. Because the application was in a functional state, there wasn't a problem seen. It was doing things, right? No alarm bells, nothing broken...move fast and break things then fix them later. Whiners were just falling behind.

Observation One: Functional specs aren't necessary to have a "working" system, but they can keep people on the same page.

Maybe that works until it dawns on everyone that what they know is wrong.

"But you're not describing a functional spec," you might say. "How a system does things is a technical spec!"

That's true, but sometimes the how something works affects the user interface and interaction...in this case there are ways of doing things that the system may mysteriously change behind your back without notice. That's an interface interaction that ideally is covered in both a technical and functional spec. The proper workflow should be baked into the functional spec.

The immediate reaction...thinking this is a documentation issue...was to have people document how the system worked. Which isn't bad to have for reference. But it's a band-aid; a reaction rather than pro action. Reading it didn't give me a sense of what the end product was going to do or how it would fully address the future integration of automation...it was a snapshot of what had already been done.

In a way, it was kind of a postmortem.

Observation Two: Documentation is a blanket term with many sub-categories. Sometimes you have to identify what kind of documentation is missing before identifying that as a problem.

I spent some time reading up on functional specs and pondering how I would approach the problem. Turned out I knew someone who had written some nice introductory material on functional specs freely available on the Internet.

At its heart a functional spec is a description of how an application is expected to work with the users. It describes, in detail, how the application works with the user.

I then started writing. You would think this is easy. You would be wrong. Maybe if you have a really clear idea of every bit of the proposed application in your head coupled with experience in writing specs, you'll find the task easy. Chances are you'll find that clear idea of how you want to interact with and configure the system is just a set of highlights you expect in a working system. You don't realize the number of things you just don't think about or take for granted in a system that a decent spec calls for you to spell out. ("Oh...yeah...logout button? Or a logout link? Is it in a menu?")

Observation Three: The Functional Spec was longer than I thought it would be.

This was a relatively simple web application, or so I thought. Then I started describing the pages I had in mind.

One thing led to another which led to another. It didn't take long for the first draft to hit 15 pages.

Observation Four: Mockups make specs come to life, and bring out glaring errors.

I thought the mockup was best for presentation purposes. The spec tutorials heavily rely on humor for keeping people engaged enough to slog through the details of what I think a website should look like. As you can guess, I'm not really entertaining enough to keep my team reading my proposal.

A mockup, however, is a picture worth thousands of words. After I completed my first draft of a spec, I pulled out a copy of a mockup application called Balsamiq. I had never used it before and dreaded the learning curve; fortunately, the fears were largely over nothing. It wasn't long before I had the initial pages staged.

I also discovered several places where my descriptions, so clear and useable in my head, were simply impractical or felt wrong once they were applied on the mockup. In other places I discovered redundancies in function that overcomplicated the workflow. Trying to map this in my head from words on the page didn't quite work; the pictures illustrated what turned out to be glaring errors, and when I went back to the page on the spec, the errors on the written page were such that I could not unsee them. Doh!

Other times I discovered ways of doing things better on the mockup that didn't occur to me on the written spec. More notes were scribbled down for future reference.

Observation Five: A good mockup program can make a good presentation tool.

Mockups are new territory for me. I never had a job where spending time on a mockup of an application would be potentially useful. It turns out that Balsamiq is more than Powerpoint for interfaces.

I discovered that this program allows for linking pages together, a natural display of features for mocking up a web application. I can also export the pages to PDF and it looks like those PDFs will be interlinked as I set up the mockup project. Balsamiq also allows for the use of comment notes that can be hidden, describing features and workflow within the mockup itself. If my functional spec weren't so wordy, and if there weren't some features and description that aren't really illustrated in the mockup, I'd be tempted to just dump the functional spec text into a series of comments in the mockup and forego the use of the separate functional spec altogether.

Observation Six: The mockup has given me more notes for the rewrite of the spec.

Aw, dammit...more writing.

The first draft of the spec was a page-by-page description of the web application. After seeing the pages illustrated, I now have many notes scribbled on post-its and in the margins of a printed copy of the spec. Now I have to go back and re-write parts of the spec.

The first draft isn't horrible, if I do say so myself. But it if I am to present this to the team, it needs to have I's dotted and T's crossed, and it needs to be in line with the mockup.

There will no doubt be mistakes. That's no excuse to not try fixing errors.

Observation Seven: Order of dependencies matter, as does the ability to reference information in the spec.

This is something I learned about in a Ruby talk about communicating with developers. It's meant to be a good practice for giving presentations, but I think it also makes sense in certain types of writing.

In a technical description, you should not have a dependency on something later.

That is to say, if you're talking about something technical, you should avoid whenever possible a situation where you describe something but "if you don't understand X, it's okay, we'll get to that in a bit." I'm sure you've run into that before; I know I've heard it. In the talk, the presenter said that he's given his thesis statement, the most important bit of information, as a "header" to the discussion. If the attendee fell asleep at some point in the talk, he would already know the idea that the presenter thought was most important, and in the process of the talk there were little to no loose ends.

As I go back through the spec I'm going to try keeping an eye on my descriptions to see if they need to be rearranged a bit for clarity. I'll bake in descriptions when necessary and minimize references to other spots in the spec; that way if I eliminate sections or change how something on a page works it won't make another spot reference a non-existing bit of information.

I'm also going to try making the spec referenced with a table of contents, so pages and sections can be quickly searched even if printed. A spec is a living document. If you can't easily navigate it as it grows, it won't be useful.

Observation Eight: Specs and mockups can become a skeleton of a user manual.

The more I wrote and the more I illustrated, the more I saw the beginnings of a user manual for an application take shape. It makes sense...if a functional spec outlines how a user is supposed to interact with your application, and it describes the expected behavior of the application, well...that's the basics of user documentation.

This documentation...proto-user-manual...not only takes care of the initial design work that goes into the application, but also takes care of the initial steps for the dreaded technical writing involved in documenting how things work! Two birds, one stone! As long as it's kept up to date, that is.

I harbor no illusion that this work will not be for naught. This is a proposal for something that may never see the light of day. And while specs are not fun for most people, I'm finding that the work that goes into the initial stages of planning the application can be rewarding. It's quite a mental exercise to map out an application in your head, try to communicate that to the written word, translate the written word into a mockup, and then refine the written word again.

Even the tutorial for specs pointed out how often this step...the functional spec...is skipped. People like to jump right into coding in some kind of shoot-from-the-hip coding style and fix issues as they crop up. But after trying my hand at my first attempt at a spec, I wonder if spec writing and review is akin to the lack of respect for editors in print news; the industry knows they can cut editors and still have a product to churn out, and they justify it by citing the speed of their competitor, the "Internet," with which they're competing.

They completely ignore the number of glaring errors and botched headlines that slip through. And poor quality writing. The difference between a good editor's refinement of a news story and the shoveled crap that makes its way to print is the difference between a showman's presentation like Steve Jobs' Apple events and those painful talks where every third syllable on stage is an "um."

Another point; how much time is lost having to re-code for errors or changes that would have been caught had it been properly spec'd in the first place?

But those are speculation and opinion. I still have work to do...several more pages to be mocked up and then the second draft to work on. The hard part is squirreling away the blocks of time to work on them. The surprising part is that I'm actually enjoying the process!

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