On Civility: Five Rules for Engagement

Education leaders should not avoid weighing in on the hard issues of the day, but who wants to be caught between polar extremes?

As education leaders, we are navigating through a triple threat of arguably the most challenging set of disruptions in our professional lifetimes. We are attempting to restore school in the midst of a global pandemic, to manage catastrophic budget reductions and to lead our communities through difficult and emotional conversations about race and equity.

Any one of these challenges alone would be enough to put a strain on a school system leader, but the combination creates an unprecedented mixture for which there is no established answer or set of best practices. More often than not, we must choose be-tween wicked choices involving excruciating tradeoffs. And getting good counsel is not easy — often the messages we hear are a cacophony driven by fear, self-interest and polarized political agendas.

Genuine community engagement has become increasingly difficult in the current era. The causal forces are complex and inter-connected, and they include such elements as the dynamics of social media interactions, the proliferation of fake news designed to ignite political extremism and both foreign and domestic political actors who seek to propagate dysfunction and make consensus difficult.

Taken together, winner-take-all and “damn the opposition” political attitudes have put down deep roots and most school leaders could not be blamed for thinking twice about opening themselves and their organizations up for feedback and critique.