boarding school

I was thinking that maybe the best thing for me would be to try to find work as a college/university professor and then run for a school board position or get involved in the politics of education in some other way, since, as important as theory and practice are, I think changes are made primarily through politics (changes which are influenced, hopefully, by theory, and implemented through practice).

But I realized I didn't know how exactly people get on school boards. So I looked up the C-U school boards. People are elected; but no biographies were posted, so I couldn't tell who these people were or how they got elected. (Some more research would help me turn up this information, though.)

Then I looked up the Chicago school board, for K-12 education. They're appointed by the mayor, and they were almost entirely from the world of business. CEOs, bank presidents, etc. Basically no education experience, at any level. This wasn't a surprise, really, but I wouldn't say that I knew it before.

Then I looked up the Illinois Board of Higher Education--I think, in some states, K-12 and higher education are controlled by the same board. It's separate in Illinois. This board is appointed by the governor, and consisted of a mix of business leaders and retired professors and college presidents.

So am I qualified to sit on any of these boards? Well, I could perhaps get elected to the C-U board, or a board like it. However, it seems my best chance at getting appointed to a board like CPS or Illinois Higher Ed would be to become a business leader (which, let's be honest, is unlikely to happen) or to work my way up as a university administrator.

I guess the thing is that I'm actually quite interested in an administrative position that I could combine with teaching. Getting involved in K-12 administration, however, would require (I think) another degree or two, and I don't think I'm ready for that right now. Getting involved in higher education administration would just mean securing a position as a professor and then probably expressing a clear interest in administration--it might help to take some classes in higher education policy and administration in the next year or two. The Ed. Org. and Leadership department even offers a Higher Ed track, so I could shoot for an M.Ed. in Higher Ed in the next couple of years, though I wonder if it'd be smarter to just pick up that stuff on my own while a professor.

I haven't learned anything about policy in my program, in part because I chose not to take these classes, but mostly because these classes weren't part of the program, and I feel like we're not encouraged to take these classes (they mostly fall outside of our department). I might be qualified, at this point, to be a department head, but I don't think I'd be qualified to be, say, a college dean or university president, since I just don't actually know what's going on with higher education. I can learn more about this, of course--it would be many years before I could get into either of those positions (and I'd have to get a job as a professor first, of course, which isn't a certainty)--but I'm sort of wondering whether I should just try to learn it on my own, as I need it, or whether I should take some classes now to prepare myself.

It's odd, I think my program prepares us fairly well to think of education in the abstract, but we get very little acquaintance with how education actually happens. So we learn how to formulate educational ideas and critique educational theories, but I worry that this is usually de-contextualized, so that we don't actually learn how to put ideas into practice or how to use our critiques to influence change.

I could continue to whine about this, as I have for at least a couple of years now, or I could just re-orient my work towards policy. It seems clear now that my dissertation is going to deal with the aims of education, and I think this has obvious policy implications, but I need to learn how to write in such a way as to draw out those implications (perhaps publishing op-ed pieces in newspapers and magazines) and I need to learn how to have an influence on school boards and other groups involved in policy-making. I do think a class or two oriented towards educational politics, policy, economics, finance, etc. (at the K-12 and higher ed levels) would be useful, and I also think it'd be useful to do a better job of keeping up with education news and commentary--find some professors who have some measure of influence on policy and figure out how exactly they do it.

This is all going to have to be self-initiated, I think, since there aren't natural outlets for this in my department. But why not do some reading in educational politics and economics? Why not try to write an op-ed? Even if it's not published, it'd be good practice.

-----

Dissertation:
I. Current American public aims of education--what are they and how were they determined?
II. The History of American Public Aims of Education (and the role of philosophy in this history) (What have they been and how have they been determined?)
III. Contemporary Philosophical Perspectives on Aims
III. Contemporary Alternative Perspective on Aims 1: Bergmann on aims of education
IV. Contemporary Alternative Perspective on Aims 2: Nussbaum/Sen on aims of education
VI. How the contemporary work can help in determining contemporary aims. (In a democracy, who decides aims--how do they decide? What role should various perspectives on aims have on the conversation? What role should educational theorists play? What will aims be and how will they be determined?)