By Jarret Liotta

WESTPORT — Incumbent Board of Education member Karen Kleine’s decision to drop out of the race for reelection means that in its next iteration the board could potentially be composed of four newcomers, one member appointed a year ago to fill a vacancy, and two just halfway through their first terms.

The cold question is, however:  Does it really matter?

The answer depends on just how anxious any BOE member ever is to open worm cans.

Well-intentioned though they might be — and I know personally that all of Westport’s sitting school board members are sincerely caring, concerned and dedicated people who truly want what they believe is best for students and the district at large — most elected education officials don’t really understand the problems infecting public education.

The public school system is a top-down — top-heavy — bureaucracy first and foremost. The very nature of a bureaucracy is that it has to justify its existence through unwarranted creation of purpose.

The school system accomplishes this in a never-ending reshuffling and regurgitation of what it describes as curriculum and curriculum initiatives — paperwork practices that ultimately add little value to what goes on in a classroom.

In the public school systems the art and craft of teaching — known best and often brilliantly executed by the teachers, who are trained to do it — continually takes a backseat to bureaucracy-driven initiatives to quantify results and pointlessly map the minutia of a process that doesn’t need to be mapped nor quantified to such an extent.

In their own right, most of the administrators who drive these initiatives probably believe they’re doing Horace Mann’s work with well-intentioned focus, but in a sense they’re victims too — albeit well-paid ones — who do their dance in response to dysfunctional state (and federal) mandates that tend to be at least 20 years or more behind the time.

(Ever wonder why a whole new math or science program is implemented every few years, with new books or manipulatives, why teachers waste hours and days learning it, why parents are told it’s the ultimate panacea to the subject … and then one day it’s swapped out for another? … Nah, don’t ask!)

At the same time, it’s hard for the public to find motivation to fix a long-standing operating system if it doesn’t appear to be too broken.

That’s why it perpetuates.

With all the money it’s able to pump into things like sports, clubs, technology, and even facilities — and with all the system-affirming accolades it continues to receive from different agencies that are part of the same system — it’s hard for a town like Westport to build an argument for changing anything.

Likewise, anyone with firsthand knowledge of districts like Bridgeport knows Westport is a veritable Shangri-La. Whatever its faults may be in terms of redundancy, irrelevant content, a tendency to overlook average students, wasted spending or failures to offer more enlightened modes and methods of instruction, the town is rightly very grateful to have it in place.

Because I consider Westport such an overridingly sophisticated and even somewhat enlightened town, however, I suggest there’s a level of amazing possibilities it could embrace in terms of real forward-thinking education.

Things like the Reggio Emilia early childhood system in Italy, and elements of the Montessori approach, come to mind. Giving true attention to different learning styles and different intelligence strengths, per Howard Gardner, and a vastly larger focus on that ridiculously late-to-the-table buzzphrase “social and emotional learning,” are also key parts of the equation.

Add to that in-depth instruction on the real tenets of wellness — including emotional and perhaps even spiritual wellness when people are ready to broach the topic without baggage — and true instruction on how to steer your way safely and discerningly through a new world inundated with mass and social media, unfiltered content and high-level strategic consumer marketing.

On the other end sacrifice things like Algebra II, which is still a bewildering focus amidst some likewise bewildering requirements. Balance the amount of offerings for students whose strengths are in different areas, such as mechanics or music, as well as balancing the definitions of achievement.

I could go on, but the worst part about considering these ideas is that none of them are new. It’s just that, owing to the painfully glacial movement of progress in public schools — owing to a bureaucratic system that needs to stay in its box to stay alive — these kinds of reforms have to fight their way through veritable cement for decades before school administrators suddenly embrace them as new groundbreaking concepts.

But then they stomp them back into the ground by institutionalizing them and spending untold dollars on creating quantifying measures around them, rather than just implementing them organically.

That’s because school administrators are critics and not creators, and that’s what the bureaucracy will have them do.

But one can’t fault Central Office, as I said, for its operating within a state system inherently damaged by a top-down management style — a business mindset — that ultimately invalidates, restricts and distracts teachers from teaching.

And sadly, for all their care and concern, school board members deep down don’t trust their own instincts when faced with the esoteric Education-ese and curriculum doubletalk of these administrators and so-called educators.

Consequently, they’re more than happy to yield to people who appear to know what they’re talking about.

Writer Hunter Thompson once told me, “If it works, don’t fix it.” He had a point.

The role each board member will play next term poses a complicated question — one each won’t honestly decide until they’re seated in that chair before live television cameras, suffering under a bubbling fountain of Education-ese, witnessing irate parents expressing passionate grievances, being bombarded by emails and 200-page documents likewise muddled in Education-ese …

Maybe there’s a real value to being the gatekeeper for the status quo anyway.

Many people like the status quo. It makes them feel safe and comfortable. That’s why real change tends to be so glacial.

I couldn’t fault them for doing just that.