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Book
Reviews
Rita Schweitz and Kim Martens (Eds),
Future Search in School District Change. Lanham, Md: Rowman and
Littlefield, 2005.
“Future Search” is one of many of the innovative ways of
incorporating deliberation and dialogue into important policy making
and planning processes that evolved during the latter part of the
20th century. Despite being frequetly used, with a great deal of
success, it, along with its brethren, are not popularized by the
mass media and the American public is pretty much ignorant of their
theory, designs, and many success stories. Despite this, they grow
in use and efficacy.
This book is a collection of essays written by the designers and
experimenters of 16 “future search” projects that were all devoted
to improving various aspects of school systems in the United States
and Canada from the early 1990s to date. So, what exactly is a
“future search?”
In essence, it is a “D+D” style planning process that involves
many “stakeholders” and experts in a conference or conferences that
run anywhere from a day to several days...and there may be two or so
at a time. It’s flexible. The underlying theory is that
fundamental to mediation and conflict resolution. The goal is to
focus on future solutions to present problems and to assume
responsibility for implementing agreements, not continue to lay
blame for the problems, crises, and/or problems that led to hiring
the “Future Search” consulting team in the first place. The real
key to success are adroit facilitators and professional consensus
builders.
Each of the case studies follows a format explaining how each
phase of the “Future Search” went in each of the school districts
involved, ranging from small ones like Lawrence, Kansas to large
ones like Toronto, Canada. Each of them makes a persuasive case
that the process, although overcoming many difficulties, ultimately
succeeded in “institutionalizing” and “transforming” the educational
system from one rife with conflict and a wide variety of problems
and failures to one of collaborative and positive decision making
involving political, educational, and community leaders and
participants. From the illustrations, quotes from participants, and
knowing how well mediation works anyway, I remain convinced that
this process would be well worth using in any school district and if
used universally, would greatly improve the educational experience
of students and the satisfaction of their parents....and would truly
"leave no student behind."
That being said, and this being the Journal of Public
Deliberation, I kept on asking myself, where’s the “public” in the
“future search” process? For starters, “future search” does not use
random sampling techniques, nor even an stratified sampling to get a
“representative” sample of the public to the table. Cutting to the
chase, those who attend are a self-selected group of the elites and
counter-elites of the school district and/or “community.” In all
candor, even getting these folks to an open discussion is a major
improvement over most educational (and just about any other public
function) planning–where the inside elite is very, shall we say,
incestuous.
So how do they do it? They get school superintendants, mayors,
other officials, some teachers, some parents, some students to come
and “represent” a wide array of interests. How? They rarely say
and then only generally. How do they involve the rest of the
“public” in their continuing efforts at implementation and further
planning in the future? They make public announcements, they send
out newsletters, they send out emails, etc., keeping everyone in the
loop. I know what I do when I get such “information” via snailmail
where I'm supposedly represented in some process. It goes into the
circular file. I know what I do with such emails, when I’ve not
been personally involved in the process. I delete. However, this
seems to satisfy the “future search” participants that “the
community” is involved and is generally satisfied. Perhaps.
There is no doubt in my mind that the “future search” process is
a great improvement over the same old, same old way of doing things
in most American and Western governmental decision making. There is
no doubt that the results are far more “representative” of the
public’s views on such matters. It’s just that the “public” and the
“community” are not really involved...and if they were...well....it
would probably lead to greater expense, more problems, more time
taken, and be messier. But that’s what “public deliberation” is all
about....because the final result would much more genuinely reflect
the “deliberated public opinion” than the results of “future
searches.”
What future “future searches” could really use is what the
Journal of Public Deliberation was established to do: merge
professional academic, scientific research with the ongoing work of
practitioners in the field of public dialogue and deliberation.
This book is a great example of how the practitioners and
experimenters of “Future Search” could have greatly benefited by
having some good social scientists around to help measure validly
and reliably the process and the results. Then, instead of just
believing the plaudits from those involved, we could have some good,
hard data and rigorous analysis to support them.
Ted Becker
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