Blame doesn't lead where I want to go.
Over the past year I've shown to myself what previously I had only theorized: that we can make change without making anyone the enemy.
Together with others who also see this wholeness, we have accomplished something amazing.
Community conflict does not have to divide us
My whole school community has been engaged in a dramatic budget fight, reflecting challenges facing many districts around California.
It is tempting to see the problem with decisions that a single person has made on the school board, or in the union, or in the PTA, or in the school, or in the media. We saw that play out.
But we tried to look beyond that for the narrative we had in common. We wanted to make sure we understood the whole problem before we tried to find solutions.
For me synchronicity is more than just a fad. It's a conviction that everybody is doing their best from where they stand. It's a belief that circumstances may be hard but people are not my enemy.
We stood up at many school board meetings and implored people to look beyond our borders, to look for the systemic underlying cause of our budget failures and local arguments.
Discovering a much bigger, global problem
Indeed when we ourselves looked, we found more than we suspected. There is a detail that stands out very clearly in the data below: as of 2021, schools around the state have been outsourcing various jobs, especially special education staff, at an escalated rate.
Special Education teachers and staff serve one of our most vulnerable populations of students, those with disabilities. Because they are in high demand and staffing needs change continuously throughout the year, there is a big market for them.
The dashed line in the figure is the spending on private contracts for services provided by outside companies. The solid purple line is specifically spending on substitute services and contracted services, such as special education aides and educators. The yellow line is our in-house staff. The pattern is clearly a jump in privatized outsourcing.
The conflict being dealt with at our local School Board meetings is that we are operating at a deficit; it’s hard to say a precise number but I've heard around $60 million a year. If you look at this graph, the difference in spending on external contracts, per year, between five years ago and today is about $55 million.
Coincidence? I don't think so. This is a key driver of our budget crisis.
Who should we blame?
Every quarter the fiscal crisis team FCMAT, who oversees state schools, publishes a list of all fiscally distressed districts. This year it had 45 or so district names, the highest since the pandemic.
We ran the data on as many of them as we could. You can see the pattern below: Around 2021 there is a dramatic increase in slope in the purple line, for every school district. This increase is well-known, due to emergency relief COVID funds, which had to be spent that year. However, the pandemic ended, and yet the costs continue to escalate. This is the budget crisis school districts face today.
We have 30 other similar graphs for school districts around California showing the same trend!
Why has this outsourcing accelerated so much? Are district officials to blame? Is there massive, widespread incompetence? Mismanagement of public funds?
That’s FCMAT’s reasoning. Some others here locally share that belief.
But that didn’t make sense to us. It’s clearly a widespread problem with deep roots.
A cycle of wealth extraction and dependency
We also discovered that the companies we hire to do this work are sometimes private equity companies, conglomerates who acquire and aggregate many subsidiaries. Not only do they engage in refinancing schemes to pull out dividends from their revenue for investors, they're very proud of their recruiting efforts. They seem to have gone out of their way to recruit many thousands of workers across the US from local communities. They brag in their marketing materials about being on the top 100 list of fastest growing companies for 10 years in a row, with 250% 3-year revenue growth and 4x growth in employee workforce.
These are workers who are no longer showing up to job interviews for school districts, but are certainly available to work through the contractor for a higher fee. Mind you the worker doesn't get a higher fee. They just provide the contracting company (and their investors) a chance to skim money off the top.
The private market captured the workers, creating a cycle of dependency for the public school districts.
Solutions can exist without blame
At each step, we encountered new people and new information that clued us in to the next step.
Last summer, I reached out to a former school leader Madeleine with a reputation for community engagement. She's the mom of one of my colleagues at school and had, unknown to me, been watching my speeches at the school board meetings via Zoom. We hit it off, collaborating together because we both saw where this was leading. Synchronicity!
Just this month when our hopes were almost dashed for success this year, I followed the thread of an email from a recent acquaintance Greg at the State Council on Developmental Disabilities which led me to California Assemblymember Josh Lowenthal's website where I happened to see a bill he sponsored for private prison contracts, which exactly reflected our situation. Synchronicity!
We didn't give up, and we didn't give in to blaming others. We knew a solution existed, and it is our job to find it.
People here and there might get in the way of our plans, like when Assemblymember and Education Committee Chair Darshana Patel's office told us they had a different theory about this issue, but with a growth mindset we were able to creatively adjust. With a little more research, we proved their theory wrong, and in the process gained a whole new understanding of the details of the issue, which led to the next step with seeing the connection to Lowenthal's bill (for prisons).
So what did we do? We wrote an amendment to the bill for transparency in prison contracts to include school contracts too!
We've contacted many legislators and had a meeting with the staff of Appropriations Committee Chair Buffy Wicks' staff just yesterday. (She just happens to be our personal area representative, AND the chair of Appropriations, where the bill is currently being examined! Synchronicity!)
We don't control the outcome, but each step of the way we've found the next thing that can be done without vilifying anybody.
So if companies are extracting money from school communities, aren't they to blame? Not really, they are working within a system of investment finance which gives them a particular view from where they sit.
The investors probably aren't aware of the impact they are having because there's no feedback loop for them to get that message. It's a system that “allows” investors to “support” schools through these necessary services for our highest needs kids, but there is no feedback loop for them to know that this industry is hurting schools as a whole in the long term. Those investors might be you and me investing through a mutual fund and we might not even know it.
An Escher Staircase
At every step in the cycle of budgeting for California schools, the process makes sense. But as a whole it perpetuates a systemic harm.
The school board passes their budget to reach certain goals.
The county office of education has certain limited responses in their toolbox to constrain the districts and make sure their budget balances.
The state oversight committee has its own reasoning for what it does.
The union and the schools themselves are similar.
The district looks for contractors when they can't fill positions in-house and the contractors fill the void with available workers.
Everybody does their job according to the environment they feel and sense around them.
And yet as a system it's like an Escher staircase: You walk up the stairs but you end up at the bottom again and you wonder how you got there.
Nobody's at fault, nobody's to blame, aside from an unwillingness to see things differently when the time is right.
Choose what you feel based on where you want to end up
I've come to wonder if the reason we like to blame is to feel powerful. Feeling disempowered sucks and, at least for me, it makes me feel insecure.
If finding something or someone to blame makes us feel more certain, it puts us back in the driver's seat. That’s a strong motivator.
Feeling blame is not wrong. Feeling resentment is not wrong. I feel those things a lot—I feel them right now, so much that my fingers and my jaw don't work like I'd like them to, making it hard to write—but I try not to make choices from there. I've learned that they don’t lead to where I want to go.
When it comes time to speak or act, I think about what I want to create and where I want to end up. I try to prioritize where I'm trying to get to over how I feel right now.
I feel upset about the state of the world, and I also feel joy that my body works and I can be part of all of this.
I feel resentment for times I've felt misunderstood, I also feel happy with who I am.
I feel jealous of other people who have gotten things I want, and I also feel gratitude for so many good things that I have like my family and friends, meaningful work and abundant opportunity.
It's not a lie to act from joy, happiness, and gratitude, even if I also feel resentment, jealousy, and upset. I feel all of it, but emotions are like a budget: I get to choose which feelings I spend on my relationships and my life, and then having a healthy way to honor the other emotions and spend them somewhere else (like at the gym!).
Just like I want to think carefully about where I spend my money, I want to think carefully about where I spend my emotions. Where is each investment going to take me?
Next step for us is to follow the path, be active and patient. We are hoping one of the legislators will decide to amend the bill and include schools as we suggested. We'll see!
We can succeed even without making others wrong just by knowing a solution exists and committing ourselves to following the synchronicity path.
Learn More…
If you want to read more about the work we're doing, here's our community building website.