The public first became aware of the Aspen Group on February 26, 2002, when they made a presentation to the school board. On March 12, 2002, with the strong advocacy of Kathleen Harkey, the board agreed to pay $100,000 for training in "policy governance" as it was called, and undergo training in the following school year. Harkey's motives and insights were not clear at that early point. She had observed Pedro Garcia's typical detachment in meetings interrupted by boorish remarks on occasion, but he was at his crest of popularity as a new "change agent." Without appearing to challenge Garcia, she wanted to have in place some method of accountability in the future years. She once explained her philosophy of wanting a system that allowed school board members to "ask the hard questions."
The basic concept of policy governance was the same that Lee Pasquarella had presented twelve months earlier in school board training. The school board should limit themselves to setting policy and they should let the staff, led by the Director of Schools, carry out the policy. The Aspen Group added to this concept a multitude of "expectations" and "executive limitations." It sounded good in theory. When the training started, however, the trainers presented 126 expectations. They ranged from the most significant: obeying state law and contracted obligations; to the most obscure: assuring that selected textbooks met the needs of a variety of learners. With that number of expectations, a blizzard of paperwork would be invited, and true failings would be hard to discover among all the thicket of accomplishments and alleged successes. Impossible as this was, the school board decided to adopt the plan, possibly thinking that it would be harmless enough, or that it would die of its own weight.
Technically, the framework was there, based on the best political science standards, to achieve accountability from Garcia's Administration. However, this elaborate system would not be a substitute for the political will to face tough decisions. In actual practice, the policy governance was background activity. The foreground was test scores, Garcia's attempt to move to Miami for a new job, the school budget conflict with the Mayor, the mistreatment of the teachers, and finally the possible renewal of the contract between Garcia and the board.
A key component of board decision-making supposedly was data. "Data-driven decisions" was the catch phrase. But with Garcia actively subverting independent data, the board, whenever they dealt with expectations, could never sink their collective teeth into something that was truly a failing. One expectation was fair treatment of the staff. Expensive surveys were conducted to see how contented the staff might be. But the questions were confusing, and the results were secret. No comparison could be made year-to-year. At the same time, traditional reports to the board of teacher resignations were abolished. So one real independent test of staff satisfaction would be to compare turnover rates. Now it could not be done. Or if it were done, it would be done only by a person answerable to Sandra Johnson, which caused the data to be suspect.
The training by the Aspen Group took almost a year. The whole approach was adopted on April 22, 2003. In the process, a big book of board policies, a remnant of the 1960s origins of the school system, was abolished. The board policies would be a relatively small document, comparable to the Acts of Congress, and the "Administrative Regulations" would be much larger, based on the concept of the Code of Federal Regulations. Unclear in that process was the method by which the administrative regulations would be produced. The MNEA was fearful that any central office person with a word processor could send out final regulations with no comment period or opportunity for proposed regulations to be modified. In a large organization like the Federal Government, a plan would exist to prevent impulsiveness in the forming of regulations. In a small operation like the Metropolitan Schools, a great deal of staff time, client group involvement, and overall trust and good will would have to be present to keep this new system from being abused.
Harkey's goal of accountability may have ultimately worked in an almost invisible way. By continually bringing up the varied range of problems that the school system faced, and by--ever so gingerly--pointing out the failings, a slow realization may have crept into the collective thinking of the board members that they should make some kind of hard decision.
According to a story in the Nashville Scene, October 13, 2005, Garcia exploded in a retreat setting when confronted about some aspect of the EE (executive expectations) and stormed out of the meeting. According to that report, a majority of the board members decided then to dismiss him. His most extreme partisans, however, were able to get a postponement of the decision, and then persuade Garcia to return and make amends. By early December, however, Garcia once again pushed the board to give him a straight up decision on whether his contract would be renewed for 2007-2008. When the Board adopted a plan to wait until the test scores were available in the summer of 2006, Garcia loudly proclaimed that he had been given a vote of "no confidence" and started looking for another job.
For public consumption, Garcia claimed that he was doomed to be working for a divided board. He was attacking board members on a point that they had worked so diligently for four years to avoid, after their early training by Lee Pasquarella. He would be hard pressed to find evidence of board division, however. In virtually no public vote over four years was a dissenting vote cast. No board member criticized Garcia publicly in any type of news outlet. Whatever divisions might have existed were no more than any other school board anywhere in America. The Nashvillians had gone out of their way to maintain their polite decorum. Any school board member from another part of the country should carefully double check any story that Garcia might bring of having a divided school board in Nashville.
[Three board members who had supported Garcia from the first vote back in June of 2001, stood with him: George Blue, Kathy Nevill, and Pam Garrett. Three board members who had preferred another candidate back at the beginning wanted to delay a decision: Ed Kindall, George Thompson, Kathleen Harkey. Three new board members split 2-1 against Garcia: Marsha Warden siding with Blue, Nevill, and Garrett. Mebenin Awipi, and Lisa Hunt joining with Kendall, Thompson, and Harkey.]