The Problem with Policy

Since last spring, I have developed a habit of using the slide pictured here when I present to groups. I heard someone say love your students not your policies when I attended Amarillo College's Poverty Summit in May, and it stuck with me. As I ask people to get comfortable with uncomfortable realities of our students' rates of success, I'm often drawn back to this notion of what do we love more. And if we truly choose to love the people we serve (I wrote about the topic a while ago) more than we love our policies/rules, what does that mean in practice? What does that even look like? This part of my presentations always gets mixed reactions. There are of course, nodding heads and smiles as people picture a situation which might have gone differently, but there is always a sense of discomfort and maybe even disapproval I can feel in the room. I've spent a lot of time thinking about why that is, let me try to explain.

So, first let me say I get the uneasiness when we start looking at policy. My current job is Vice President of Academic Affairs, which means I have responsibility for a large number of policies. In fact, one of my year-one tasks is to review all academic policy for my college with my team. Colleges are large, complex organizations, and policy and procedures are needed to keep us open and able to do the work we do. I think some folks get nervous when I talk about students vs. policy because they think I mean anarchy:), but I'm really talking about embracing the gray areas and the difficulties of the work we do. In fact, my colleague Josiah Litant and I had the opportunity to spend a day at the Minnesota State System office early in my tenure visiting with our Vice Chancellor. Our wide-ranging discussion touched on a number of topics as I oriented to the system, but we were particularly focused on the statewide initiative called Equity 2030. In the course of that discussion, we talked about eliminating achievement gaps and barriers to doing so. I honestly can't remember who said it, but eventually someone said policy was, by design, inequitable because it tried to make blanket rules that treated everyone the same. We can quibble about the truth of the statement, but it seemed profound to me. If being poverty-informed is an equity-minded approach, we need to consider our policies and our use of them very carefully. I think we find our next point of discomfort right there.

Policy can save us from personal pain. It's not fun to make a decision which impacts someone else negatively. I will be spending this week analyzing appeals from students who have struggled academically who want to return to school. Our policies on this are pretty clear, and if I wanted to, I could use them as the reason I am choosing to take away someone's opportunity to go to school. That's what I mean when I say policy can save us from pain. The simplest thing would be to figure out if students were in compliance with stated policy and then decide if the student "deserved" to be reinstated. Well, anyone who has read my writing knows I hate the idea of "deserves", so I'm going to agonize over those decisions. I don't know if I will get them right, but I think we are obligated to live in that discomfort and look for the spaces in-between our policies if those spaces support students, particularly students built for norms they might not match. In a business like education, we can't run things strictly off flowcharts and decision trees. If we could, we could just be automated. I would argue gray area decisions are what makes us professionals, those difficult decisions where we have to wrestle with outcomes mentally and emotionally. So, I think asking people to love students more than policies can make people uncomfortable because owning the consequences of our decisions is difficult. I agree it is hard, but I believe a poverty-informed college commits to being in that difficult space.

Ideally everyone in education would be there for the right reasons, but we know it just isn't true. So, I think there are darker reasons some people attach to policy without evaluating it for equity, fairness, or desired effect. These reasons can include wanting to be in control of others from a position of power and using policy to do so. I sincerely hope this is a small number of people, but I've run into it personally, so it seems worth bringing up. This tends to manifest in a mentality that people have to "earn" what they get, and when they don't, we talk about their lack of commitment or "grit". This particular branch of bad policy use is very dangerous in my opinion because it can always be couched in words like "it's just policy." On a micro-level, this can be course requirements for students which ask more of students than we would ever ask of staff. On a more macro-level, this can look like policies built on middle class norms that make students in the crisis of poverty "other" and deficient by definition so when they fail, it is their fault. A policy which puts blame on the less powerful is a very convenient way to absolve ourselves of responsibility for helping. The poverty-informed approach I'm advocating for has a default to helping and an ownership culture as opposed to absolution through policy. Dr. Donna Beegle challenges us to look at policy and assess if it supports students or punishes students. I would agree her approach is a great place to start assessing policy and how you implement policy.

Reconciling loving students, equity, policy, and being poverty-informed isn't easy. I don't think it will ever be, but it is what is required if we want to add humanity to our organizations in the way I think we should. The folks at Amarillo College have a talent for finding a turn of phrase worth envying, and I do have some envy. "Love your students more than you love your policies" is just about a perfect summation. It acknowledges the need for norms to run a large complex organization, while challenging us to look at policy through an equity lens. I would say it pushes us to go even further. It not only gives us permission to make exceptions to policy, it challenges us to examine policies and see if they are helping us move where we want to go. Policy at a poverty-informed college might look very different than what we are used to, in fact I would expect it to, given our current results. Thinking about the work of building policies like these (and living with the exceptions) gives me excitement and anxiety at the same time. As I get comfortable being uncomfortable, I suspect those feelings mean I'm on the right track.