“What you see is what you get; what you don’t see gets you.” That line appears in an article in the February 21 issue of The Economist magazine entitled “Full Disclosure.” In fact, the article’s focus is on transparency’s costs, mainly in financial markets. Doing disclosure right can be hard, and doing it in a ham-handed way can do harm. Nevertheless, the article concludes that “for all its difficulties, transparency is usually better than the alternative.”

Where school board-union contracts are concerned, the standard approach now is hush-hush, followed by rush-rush. A better alternative might take either of two forms.

1. The minimalist option. This would involve something like our present Taj Mahal Act (for school construction proposals) applied to all large, multi-year contracts (e.g., anything expected to cost $10 million or more over the duration of the contract). Key elements: allow 20-30 days for public comment before bringing these contracts to a board vote; during that period hold a public hearing explaining the terms and why they are advantageous to the district’s educational mission. But public disclosure of proposed contract terms occurs only after board and union negotiators have arrived at what they presumably think is a reasonable deal.
2. The explain-the-issues-early option. Boards and unions would disclose their formal, written proposals shortly after presenting them and would explain why the proposals are what they are. The two parties would continue to negotiate in private. They’d not be required to hold a public hearing until they had a tentative agreement. But they’d usually start out closer together than they do now because neither side would want to go public from the start with something blatantly unreasonable.

This second alternative does involve one real risk. Some people are sure that boards would make unreasonable offers and then whip up anti-union sentiment — making it almost impossible to reach any deal at all. That could happen although I’m sure that it would occur less often than the opposite result occurs now. By “opposite result” I mean contracts that are pushed through fast simply to avoid a strike, driving up costs although neither side even bothers to pretend that the added money will have any positive educational impact whatsoever.

I prefer the second, explain-the-issues-early, option. But either alternative would be better than what we have now, and it’s hard to imagine a principled objection to the first one. (“We’d have to listen to a lot of uninformed griping,” doesn’t qualify.) In any case, I think The Economist has the main point right: “What you see is what you get; what you don’t see gets you.”