Blame is not wrong; It just doesn't lead where I want to go.

Emotions are currency

My body is carrying so much emotion that it's hard to write. My fingers and my jaw don't work like I'd like them to. Don't worry, I have practices to help me relax and a doctor's care to deal with my old age, but emotions have to be dealt with. They are part of the currency of being human.

I'm not only upset, I'm also joyful. I'm not only resentful, I'm also proud. I'm not only jealous, I'm also grateful.

Upset about the state of the world, joyful that I have agency and freedom. Resentful about not being understood the way I think I should be, but proud of who I am. Jealous of how other people have been acknowledged, but also grateful for what I have, for my family and friends.

Over the past year I've shown to myself what up till that point I had only philosophized: that we can make change without making anyone the enemy. I've collected around myself others who also see the wholeness, and together we have accomplished something amazing.

Getting into the Weeds

My whole community has been engaged in a dramatic budget fight, reflecting challenges around many districts around the state of 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.

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.

Indeed when we ourselves looked, we found what we suspected. There are certainly many problems and many complicated nuances to school budgeting, but there is one fact that stands out very clearly in the data: as of 2021, schools around the state have been outsourcing various jobs, especially special education staff, at an escalated rate.

The dashed line is all contracts for services provided outside of staff employees. The solid purple line is specifically substitute services and contracted services, such as aides and special ed paraeducators. The yellow line, which is usually more flat, is the staff we've hired as employees in-house. The pattern is clearly a trend towards privatized outsourcing in many districts.

Yes, our school district, West Contra Costa USD, is 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 external contracts, yearly spent, between five years ago and today is about $55 million. Coincidence? I don't think so.

Every year 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.

Who should we blame?

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.

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.

Solutions can exist without blame

We also discovered that there is a bill in the state legislature currently being considered to address this exact issue: for prisons!

So what did we do? We wrote an amendment to that bill to include schools. It's only logical. 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 representative!)

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. We're not vilifying the investors either. They don't know what they're doing. 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. It's simply a result of broken feedback loops. Those investors might be you and me investing through a mutual fund and we might not even know it.

One thing became clear: at every step in the cycle of budgeting for California schools, the process makes sense.

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. 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 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've just found that it doesn't lead to where I want to go. I feel those things a lot—they are making it hard to write tonight because they are real and they affect me—but I don't make choices from there. When it comes time to speak or act, I think about what I want to create and where I want to end up. 

I feel many things at once so it's not untrue to act from joy, pride and gratitude. I do really feel those things. I like the currency metaphor: 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?