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Mock Election Fraud (Released to the web October 31, 2008) Don't blame our teachers or even their supervisors for the lack of comprehensive, district-wide participation in a mock election for students. Some of our individual teachers and administrators, who are concerned about dwindling time for social studies in general, have worked on make-do efforts for this election cycle. No, this missed opportunity to deeply engage our students in civics started at the very top levels of our administration and it seems to reflect a set of priorities unrelated to anything outside of math and language arts test scores. At the September 23, 2008 school board meeting our administration told board members and the public that we would be participating in the New Jersey Student/Parent Mock Election coordinated by the New Jersey Press Foundation. When some school board members asked if students could vote at polling places in this presidential election with their parents--just as students had been strongly encouraged to do in the March 11, 2008 poll when the question in the voting booth was about the school budget--the answer was that the County Board of Elections was not supporting such an arrangement this time. After some school board members reiterated the importance of student participation in the election process during this historic year, we were assured by our top two district administrators attending that school board meeting that extensive efforts would be made in the schools themselves and that a further investigation of available resources would be made. Several school board members were adamant at the time that this be a priority for the district. The official list of schools participating in the New Jersey Student/Parent Mock Election does include Readington Middle School, so school officials must have at least submitted an application for the 6-8 grades. But, did our superintendent and his office create the kind of comprehensive student mock election called for by our school board and by some members of the public? How do our efforts compare to those in other districts? In many other schools across New Jersey, students are holding mock elections with actual county election board voting machines and with the actual candidates for choices. In Fort Lee, elementary students were profiled on a nationally televised story, detailing how they used real voting machines in their mock election. Students in a Jersey City High School have already made their choice using real machines. So, too, have elementary students in Manchester, in Rahway, in Cape May County's Upper Township Middle School, and even in the private Cumberland Christian school used real voting machines in their mock elections. In some cases the machines were rented by the district. In comparison, Readington's efforts look like an anemic hit-or-miss affair. If we could not hold a student mock election in the real polling places, why didn't we put resources behind the idea of renting real voting machines for our students? Where was our administrative leadership? In other New Jersey school districts, even at the early elementary level, educators created wide-ranging civics programs to talk about the electoral process and they studied the real candidates and the real issues. In those places there were district-wide coordinated efforts to take advantage of the teachable moment that is this historic election. They set up displays about the three branches of government, created classroom political party affiliations and chose party symbols, registered students to vote using their student IDs and extensive mock paperwork, built learning stations staffed by teachers and eighth grade students to teach students in the lower grades, monitored media coverage of the real election, and made special efforts to include all grade levels, even though the curriculum normally would not call for it. By contrast, our efforts on the elementary level did not include participation in the NJ Student/Parent Mock Election, but in one case only a paper-based student vote to choose between two fictitious characters. In the middle school some students apparently voted by email for real candidates, but, inexplicably, the major party presidential candidates had been separated from their vice presidential candidates. Students could vote for them individually instead of as a party ticket. There was no coordinated, overarching district-wide effort to take advantage of this election cycle, and only students fortunate enough to be in certain classrooms were taught with special attention to this election. It is telling that the last mock election effort, made when the primary thing at stake was the school budget, was far more comprehensive and far better publicized than this one. It seems there is much less interest on the part of the administration when the primary thing at stake is not a school budget but simply an historic opportunity to teach our children how to be good citizens. Overall, Readington as a district barely went through the motions, provided a false sense of the real voting process to students, and appeared almost pathetic in comparison to the work of other districts in our state, even smaller ones. Some parents, and perhaps some district educators who had little choice but to go along with the flow, are disappointed or embarrassed. Interestingly, The New Jersey Student/Parent Mock Election FAQ recommends setting up computer-based voting kiosks for students, with links to a specific website to vote. Organizers of that effort note: "This is the recommended voting method because it gives students a realistic voting experience. The system has generated a 16-digit kiosk code (Voter ID) for each school that signed up to participate in the Mock Election. Schools can set up numerous Internet-connected computers as voting machines." With Readington's never-ending worship of technology, it seems a wonder that such kiosks were not set up and used for all of our grade levels. Certainly the experience in other districts, some with kids as young as pre-K, proves that the students can handle it. Certainly we now have the enormous internet bandwidth and truckloads of desktop, laptop and tablet PCs to get the job done. Oh well, we talk the talk, anyway. New Jersey elementary and middle schools are are also reaping the rewards of positive press coverage in print and on screen. The New Jersey Principals and Supervisors Association has even published a guide on how to gain press attention for election-based teaching efforts. A link to that guide and to some examples of press coverage are below. In Readington, where public relations and press coverage has been a problem for some years, there has been no effort by our administration to take advantage of this softball media coverage--coverage which might help erase the memory of the nationally distributed pennygate story. Unfortunately, there is really no story to tell, since our mock election efforts are so limited. (Similarly, the same public relations opportunity was squandered with the recent Rachel's Challenge event, since the superintendent's office never made an attempt to engage the media on that subject either.) Using the search function provided on the Readington district website and searching for the term "mock election" turns up no results as of this writing. There is no coverage of the district's efforts even on their own website! Wealthy districts like Readington, where taxes are high and expectations by parents follow, might appear to have distinct advantages in comparison to other districts. Yet, money or parental expectations don't necessarily translate to educational leadership. In point of fact, it would appear that other New Jersey districts, even those in much less affluent areas, have made our efforts at teaching civics and social studies in this election year look amateurish at best. We need to demand better from the top level of our administration. The educators in the trenches, after all, need the leadership, the time and the resources from above in order to create programs with depth. In the meantime, parents who have not already taken matters into their own hands have some work to do at home with their children. References and for further study:
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