I know how it works

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I read the op-ed piece by John Boehner and Mitch McConnell that was in the Wall Street Journal the day after the mid-term elections, and I have surfed the net reading articles where the new majority in the House and Senate announced the wonderful things they intend to accomplish now that they are in the majority.

I saw a parallel to an experience I once had.

In the “aughts” when I was advocating first to have workshops for teachers to let them know there were Gay kids sitting invisible in their classrooms so that teachers might be a little more sensitive about things they might say, just as they had had for students who belonged to other groups based on race, color, creed, nationality, and handicap, and then to have “sexual orientation” added to policies on Bullying, Harassment, and Nondiscrimination so that their inclusion in those policies would not be dependent on the personal, religious, and political opinions of school employees, there was a great deal of resistance because of the personal, religious, and political opinions of the people in charge , and the fears of school administrators in a district in the Buckle of the Bible Belt to d the right thing.

They may have wanted to do the right thing, but they were concerned about how local churches and politicians would react to any positive actions, and preferred to let the Gay kids put up with whatever came their way rather than have their names appear on some document which could affect their paycheck.

The school district leadership had created a middle management, ghost position on campuses whose sole purpose was to quietly retain administrators and their paychecks while claiming that their fiscal responsibility had reduced the number of administrators within the district while they merely changed the names of the position those people held, and rarely, if ever, uttered the new name.

In some cases two vice-principle positions were reduced to one, but the other VP was still on campus making the same money in the ghost position while the public accepted that there had been a 50% reduction in administrators and administrator salaries.

It worked quite well.

But without a clear job description, those in these new positions were at the mercy of their principals, and, living with the hope that loyalty would lead to administrative advancement if they played along, these people did whatever they were directed to.

The person holding the ghost position on my campus held the often expressed hope that when the principal retired she would get his endorsement for the job, and then the job itself.

The principal, who eventually stated that he saw the advocacy for Gay students to be a personal attack on him, put our ghost administrator in the position of obstructionist, and she did her job all too well.

After proclaiming to me in the presence of a witness that there were no Gay kids in high school, only those who wavered back and forth until they settled one way or the other in later years, this administrator helped the principal obstruct any progress by coming up with newly invented policies as needed to prevent any progress to better the school experience of the Gay students.

Sometimes these would border on the absurd, but she always managed to defend them by quoting school policies that she thought justified her actions and by extension the Svengali principal who was directing her.

Where she could have educated the principal to help him grow and change his attitude, she bolstered him in his mistaken beliefs because she wanted his endorsement to replace him upon his retirement.

Times were changing, and with No Child Left Behind, the old incestuous system of patronage for running the district was giving way to a new system designed by those hired to bring the district into compliance with the new law, and this introduced a whole new class of self-serving administrators whose future and salaries depended on at least appearing successful in raising student achievement regardless of reality, while the old guard lost its power.

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Not needing to please anyone anymore, the ghost administrator, seeing no chance for advancement and no further need to be used, now began to implement the very pro-Gay student things she had obstructed before, but not because it was the right thing to do, but because it would annoy and inconvenience the new principal.

She first kept the Gay students from getting included in policies that affected their everyday lives, or even workshops for teachers to inform them of the existence and needs of these kids, and then began to allow these things so as to be able to frustrate the new principal.

In both cases, she used the Gay kids for her own purposes.

Sometimes she was too obvious about it, and after a really complicated strategy to use me to get at the new guy, I was able to explain reality to him by showing documents and emails that revealed the past and on-going strategies. She continued her games, but she did so totally unaware that she had simply become entertaining, and her game playing transparent.

She was not so much making life difficult for the new principal as she was digging her own professional grave.

I was shown an issue of a national, now defunct, Gay publication that had an article about the ghost administrator and all that she had accomplished in her advocacy for the Gay students at the school.

What the author of the article clearly did not know about were the years of obstruction that went before her suddenly allowing the very things she had prevented, and her not only taking credit for it, but claiming that no one else had been able to do what she had done.

She carefully omitted to mention to the person interviewing her that the others could not accomplish those things because of her obstruction.

This is how I see the upcoming House and Senate,

After using the filibuster to prevent legislation in the Senate, Mitch McConnell will now bring up for debate and vote in the Senate those bills that benefit the American people, relying on the poor memory of those easily led who will not remember that these bills would have already passed had McConnell and the other GOP senators not blocked them.

He and the other GOP Senators will now pass the bills that they have been obstructing, adding in a few new ones that will help pay back what they owe to those who gave big money to their campaigns, claiming that they could only get passed if the GOP was in the majority.

They will attempt to take credit for finally being able to pass bills they could have already passed.

Sadly, as the Ghost administrator had hoped with her game, people will buy it.

 

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