One of my guiding principles in life is to never let the perfect stand in the way of the good.
Perfection sounds great. Why wouldn’t you want to strive for perfection? And as a lofty goal, it’s fine.
But it’s also impossible to achieve. Perfection is unattainable. It exists only as an ideal.
That makes it easy to deploy as a rhetorical weapon. Why should we do this, when we can do something even better? Any real policy is going to pale in comparison to a perfect alternative.
Recently, the district implemented universal pre-k for three and four year old children who live in West Orange. In a perfect world, we’d hire all the teachers, house the classrooms in our elementary schools, and immediately admit every student who was eligible.
But none of that was possible. While the district was still considering whether or not to adopt the policy, its opponents raised these objections. We don’t have the space in our schools. We can’t afford to hire these teachers. So why should we bother?
Still, we did have an opportunity. Governor Murphy made funds available to support districts who were willing to implement universal preschool. It required a mixed delivery model, where districts partnered with existing private providers. This required the district to give up control, but it also helped solve the problem of space and capacity. The state also required the district to phase the program in, so enrollment would be limited for several years.
Those first couple of years presented challenges. We had to onboard new private providers as partners, and we had to determine a way to fairly allocate a limited number of spaces. This was hardly perfect. But it was undeniably good. With each passing year, we continue to expand and to improve.
If we held out for something perfect, we’d never have been able to change the status quo. Today, hundreds of families are sending their children to preschool for free.
All too often, this rhetorical device is employed to hold up progress in town. Proposed policies are compared to a perfect alternative and then they fail. As a town, we’re stuck with undeveloped properties and mounting debts.
We need to deal with real choices and real alternatives. The perfect is the enemy of the good, and instead of comparing a proposal to a perfect ideal we should compare it to the actual possibilities.
At the end of the day, we need to move forward and make progress. This has been my approach as President of the West Orange Board of Education, and it’ll be my approach as Mayor, I’m interested in progress, not perfection. That’s how you change the status quo.