It’s probably a safe bet that you do not know what your school board accomplished this past year or what their priorities are. Typically, school board decisions only get on our radar when there is something controversial like a school closure, a book ban, a bathroom gender policy, or a tax increase. Board work only gets attention when there is a problem. For most people, it still doesn’t drive them to action.
As a result, the average citizen is not prepared to vote based upon their interests or to accurately share their opinions with the board.
This is a lost opportunity to strengthen our democracy. Addressing it will require our norms and habits around public communication to change. In the best of cases, our public institutions acknowledge they have a duty to inform. It’s rare for an institution to go beyond that or to operate as though they have a duty to communicate.
Informing and communicating are two different things. Informing means making sure information is available. Communicating means making sure the other person understands the information and its significance. It is the difference between telling you the road is closed and providing guidance through an alternate route.
We need boards that are committed to communication.
Providing meeting agendas, board attendance, meeting recordings, and voting records is not enough. Especially when too many school boards posts these items as non-searchable pdfs, without written transcripts, and usually several clicks into a hard to find website.
While I am usually an AI skeptic, democratizing access to school board meetings is a promising use of the technology and one that we are exploring here in Chicago.
Imagine an AI bot that has access to all of the meeting materials from the school board and has been trained to limit the bias in its conclusions. This bot uses board governance models from multiple organizations to share information and feedback on the work of the board. You can also share your address with the bot and it will share information about your specific board member. Now think about how the bot is also able to gather all of the questions asked by voters across the city and elevate what people most care about when it comes to our schools.
In Chicago, we’ve begun piloting a “BoardBot” that can do all those things. The goal is to ensure that every voter can take less than a minute and learn enough about the board in order to make an informed vote in the ballot box. We don’t need to have external organizations telling us who to vote for; we need the ability to let busy people get the information they care about.
There has been a significant drop in the level of trust Americans have for one another. The BoardBot is our bet that if people have agency to learn about their school board without someone putting a thumb on the scale, we can trust that they will make good decisions in service of our young people. Come November, we hope to have some real examples of what authentic board communication about their work looks like.
If you could ask one question about your community’s school board, what would you want to know?
