Communication Communication Communication

We’ve been having a couple of weeks of medical adventures here with my 92-year-old mother, and it has reminded me of some of the things we get wrong in public education.

Here is Northwestern PA, most medical care comes one way or another through the folks of Unimaginable Piles of Money Collected. There are advantages to dealing with such an institutional behemoth, most notably a digitized medical record that is up-to-date and available to the patient and the family. It is routine for my sister to see and share test results before the doctor can make it around to the room to talk to us about them, and this is invaluable in terms of coming up with useful questions to ask.

Hospitals deal with people who are extremely vulnerable, and that makes communication important. Our hospital quality check folks who sometimes amble into the room to ask questions about how well your health care professionals are communicating with you (best question asked-- “Do you know what you are waiting for?”)

But this time we went through some real communications whiplash. We knew what they were doing, what they expected, what the goals were-- and then one morning we were moving--rapidly--in a whole other direction. Not because of any new change in the patient’s condition; just in how the hospital was responding to it. No real communication about the what or why, catching both us and the facility on the other end of these choices flatfooted. It was an odd moment-- for about 24 hours, while nothing really changed for Mom, it still felt like we were handling an emergency situation.

It sucks enormously to be in a vulnerable medical situation and have nothing communicated to you beyond “We know what we’re doing, so just sit there and trust us.” It’s frustrating and alarming, and if you have a family member who’s good at interrogating the functionaries involved, you may make some progress.

The education world should take all of this to heart.

While it may not be a life and death situation, it feels hugely vulnerable to hand your child over to the care of others-- especially if you don’t know those others personally. And it surely doesn’t help if the school’s answer to “What are you going to do with my child” is a hand wave and vague, “You know, school stuff.”

Many districts have an administration-level policy that opposes communication. Not that they phrase it quite that way, but the basic principle is “If we tell people about this, I will get phone calls, so let’s just not tell them.” This trick never works. Years ago my district contemplated closing an elementary school and decided to deal with the anticipated fallout by keeping the whole business quiet as long as possible. All they got for their trouble was members of the public who were angry about the proposed closure AND the lack of communication.

And it doesn’t count as communicating if what you are really trying to do is use a carefully crafted line of baloney to “manage” the public. That is the opposite of communication, and its shiftiness is not hidden if you wrap it in shiny AI slop.

After roughly 100 very lonely parent open house evenings, I absolutely get that attempting communication from the school side can feel like shouting into the void. And we have made progresses-- the pressure to keep that digital gradebook up to date may be annoying some days, but from the parent side, it is a huge blessing. Digital gradebooks, e-mail, even those damned learning platforms-- it is easier than ever for parents to hunt down the information they want.

But none of that means that school districts, school buildings, and classroom teachers cannot do better at communicating to parents. Asking parents to add yet another app to their phones doesn’t count. Information passed through channels that are already available and easy does count. For districts and buildings, this may mean spending some money. It is astonishing to me how many school websites do NOT have current information, but I know why it happens--because website maintenance has been assigned to someone who is expected to do updating work in spare minutes between the demands of their actual real job. I know how much time it takes to keep a website current; many school administrators have not a clue.

It is easy, living the dailiness inside the bubble, to imagine that the whole world is awash in the information of what’s going on, what people are doing, what is the Usual Stuff of the school. When I passed out of that bubble at retirement, even I was surprised at how little information makes it outside of that bubble. (I wrote to my old district’s leadership and board about the issue. “Do you want to do the job,” they snarked back. No, because one, I’m retired and two, it needs to be done by someone inside the bubble.)

If you are a district administrator, a building administrator, or a classroom teacher, and you are not reaching outside the bubble at least once a week, you aren’t doing enough. Talking to your students doesn’t count-- they are inside the bubble with you. For the love of God, do not have an AI agent do it, because the resulting bloated bland and boring product is just noise. You have to let people know what you are doing.

Yes, I know-- lord, I know-- that you don’t have time for this. But I am telling you that you can’t afford not to take the time. It is how you build trust and support and partnership in your community. It is how you reduce the total amount of unnecessary fear and uncertainty and anxiety in your community (and really, these days, we all need less of that). Will you sometimes get pushback? But the correct response to pushback is to A) examine your premises and practices, B) make your case, and C) listen to the cause of the pushback and decide if it might be worth considering.

If we were better at this in education, reformsters over the last forty years would have heard a lot more, “I don’t know what you’re going on about. I know what my school does and your claim that they are a disasterific mess are just wrong!”

It’s a big ask. It’s one more damned thing. But right now I’m living through the difference between navigating with clear complete communication and being left to fumble through opaque and spotty communication, and the difference just feels really huge and the world, including the education portions of it, would be a much better place with less of the latter and more of the former. Inside the bubble, it may not feel like a big deal, but outside the bubble, it’s huge.