Red Pilled
The term “red pilled”, borrowed from the movie The Matrix, is currently used to describe the transition from liberal thought to conservative thought. I had that experience in my working for the state well before the movie was released (1999). My career was mostly around public policy, with the title senior policy analyst. The job was to work with the hiring agency, to participate in the development of potential legislation that supports the agenda of the agency. I worked for a number of agencies throughout my career and was the executive director in a couple. In the late 1980’s my work with legislators, the governor’s office and staff, and other interested parties led me to engaging and working closely with folks from both sides of the political spectrum. I was quick to learn to keep my own politics (at the time liberal) out of the conversations: you can’t be very productive in moving legislation if you can’t maintain a neutral perspective.
One of my executive director positions involved an initiative called the Family Policy Council, comprised of five state agencies, four legislators and the Governor. The initiative was designed around the efforts of the National Governors Association and ten states were funded to approach engagement of non-fiduciary citizens (not-government) operating within their communities and designing, funding and promoting local level initiatives. It was an eye-opening experience.
For the purpose of this article, I’ll not go into great detail about this initiative, but two things became immediately apparent: community members are closer to their communities (duh); and staff and leadership in government were not very supportive of turning over policy design to the citizens of our state. I began swallowing red pills on a daily basis! At one staff meeting, a very talented and effective staff member, who had been a legislative lobbyist and quite liberal, joked that we were all becoming Republicans. I didn’t comment or snicker.
Flash forward many years and I was hired by an educational agency, part of the Superintendent of Public Instruction. I was back into policy work, and the agency was created by the legislature to improve teaching practices. I was fortunate to be in this effort with an accomplished and well-connected researcher who I immediately recognized as a value that is often difficult to come by as a policy analyst. Again, to shorten this story, we eventually designed a testing strategy for determining “effective” teachers and passed legislation that empowered our board to move towards better standards for teaching credentials. Because we had no solid evidence That our required standards were effective, I suggested, and the agency director approved, a strategy that we could modify or even eliminate the standards should our” trial period” not produce the results we hoped for.
This becomes, now, quite a bit more complicated. Research by multiple universities on teacher performance had long established that the distribution of teacher competency was a rather challenging issue. The description in a nutshell without citing studies was that 5% percent of teachers were at the very top of the distribution showing remarkable success with students. At the bottom end of this distribution 5 % of teachers had little impact on student success: so, 90% of teachers were generally “just ok”, lacked clear support for improving, and became entrenched in the standards articulated by individual school districts, but little improvement was shown over time. This was our goal: to improve teacher performance.
Again, the complexity of this was challenging. Our initial findings from our initiative did not offer clear evidence of effectiveness. Just as important, the local school districts were not happy with the requirements that potentially removed teachers from the classroom with little options for district managers to challenge results. It soon became a major political battle.
I learned that the director of our small agency was coaching the board members with false information that were counter to our own research. My research colleague was un-ceremonially fired. I was relieved of my “policy analyst” duties. Almost half of the agency employees left, and some approached board members. One staff member suggested to the board chair that he contact me. I became a whistle blower.
The short version is that after months of conversations with the board chair and his conversations with the State Auditors Office attorneys the director was fired. Exactly one year later, I was fired from 44 years of service to the state. I was devastated, but as I recovered, I was happy to be able to retire and start my own business around my passion of fly fishing.
I share this story because the status of our federal government looks all too familiar to me. Corruption and deceit are a seemingly expected part of government. A lifetime of commitment to the citizens of my state became my downfall. Obviously, this is a long story, and it’s healthier for me to not dive much deeper into this in my writing. I’d rather write about fly fishing.