Getting Common Sense Back Into Law An Interview of Common Good Chair Philip K. Howard
Rocky Mountain News
Linda Seebach, January 15, 2005 On a recent trip to Colorado, Common Good chair Philip K. Howard was interviewed by Linda Seebach of the Rocky Mountain News. Their wide-ranging discussion touched on Common Good's underlying goal of restoring common sense to American law and on our specific proposals for fixing health care and public schools.
Howard explained:
The premise of Common Good is that our social structures are flawed because we've lost the authority to make common choices: Who can sue for what, what's good care and what's not, who's in charge of the school.
Instead of that we have a society in which any angry person, invoking what they claim to be their rights, has the ability to block virtually any sensible decision.
To give just one example, there was a story recently in Hartford, Conn., about the parents of an autistic child. The law gave them the "right" to an individualized education and the parents insisted that the child be mainstreamed in a regular classroom. The child was violent. He'd hit other children, he hit the teacher. It was so bad that the class had to practice evacuation drills when this child started acting up.
It took two years of legal hearings to finally get an order that the school didn't have to have this child in the classroom. Think about what happened to the learning of the other 30 children in that classroom.
Turning to health care, Howard discussed the broad coalition, including leading patient-safety advocates, coming together behind Common Good's proposal to create special health courts. We need to change our medical justice system not only to protect good doctors from lawsuits, but to improve patient safety:
[D]octors so distrust the system of justice now that it's chilled professional interaction. The Institute of Medicine has done studies showing that it hurts the quality of health care. People don't say "Isn't that the wrong dosage?" because they're afraid to admit uncertainty.
Doctors need judgments that are consistent, so that they can rely on them. The trust comes from consistency, from knowing what you're supposed to do. The current system inverts all the incentives, it fails at almost every level and it's hurting American health care.
In education, Howard said,
Common Good will advocate a massive spring cleaning of the public school bureaucracy. If there are disputes, instead of lawyers and legal proceedings, let's have parent-teacher committees. The same thing with teachers. A principal shouldn't be required to go through two years of hearings to get rid of a teacher who is no longer trying. There should be a mechanism to make sure that teachers are not treated unfairly. But why do you need a criminal trial or the equivalent of it to manage the school? Most important decisions in schools are decisions about people -- teachers' about students, principals' about teachers. Running a good school is all about developing trust and relying on people who have good judgment.
Click to read the full interview.
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