Category Archives: Current Affairs

Bullying in our schools: a symptom of a larger problem

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Bullying was the topic of Justin Oakley’s online radio program “Just Let Me Teach,” which is broadcast, live, every Wednesday evening at 9:00 PM EDT on IndianaTalks, an online talk radio network. Notwithstanding the number of teen suicides, in recent years, bullying is an issue that must be taken seriously by every school district in the nation. It is a sad reality that some students who suffer from bullying choose to take the lives of other people as well as their own.

No school principal or classroom teacher in these troubled times can afford to ignore even rumors that bullying is taking place in their corridors, playgrounds, and classrooms or that bullies are following their prey home or are stalking their targets through social media.

Brittany Mason, one of the guests on “Just Let Me Teach” shared her own experiences that ultimately led her to choose to be home schooled as it seemed the only way to escape the harassment. Of particular interest in Ms. Mason’s account is the fact that her school principal reportedly suggested to Ms. Mason’s parent that she could be making the whole thing up.

What school principals, classroom teachers and parents must realize is that a student’s complaint about bullying is a cry for help and attention whether or not the child is telling the truth.  If we truly believe that every child is important, how can we turn our backs on young people who are not only suffering but may be in real danger?

Schools need to be aggressive in developing programs to provide comfort and counseling to the victim while thoroughly investigating and adjudicating the bullies themselves. Many imaginative programs have been developed in schools to educate students and faculties about this serious issue and principals and school administrators should be diligent in their search for a program suited to their particular school or community. We all know what they say about an “ounce of prevention.”

What we rarely discuss is the fact that bullying, like so many of the problems in education, is a symptom of a larger problem. The power of the peer group, relative to the influence of parents and families, may be stronger than it has ever been and social media has changed the game for parents and also teachers. It is difficult enough for parents to stay in touch with what is happening in their child’s life whether at school or when they are off with their friends. For all but the savviest parents, following their children through the labyrinth that is social media must seem as difficult as it is intimidating.

The absolute best chance parents and teachers have to compete with the power and influence of the peer group is for parents and teachers to partner up. Such partnerships strengthen the ephemeral connections that keep students linked to the community that is comprised of family and school making it that much more difficult our children to slip off, unnoticed into the Netherlands of today’s sophisticated web of subcultures.

It is relatively easy for schools to become impersonal places where students feel no connection to many of their classmates, particularly those who are different. We have always known that human beings can have irrational fear and hatred for things that they do not understand or for people with whom they cannot relate. We also know how powerful jealousy can be in influencing the lives of children.

Bullying is a symptom that some children have lost their sense of connection to the community that school can offer and are, themselves, struggling to find positive attention and affirmation. We need to work diligently to restore that sense of community. The best place to start is by pulling parents into active partnership with their children’s teachers and their schools. There are many other things we can do to strengthen that community and that will also have a positive impact on the quality of education we are able to provide.

In my book, Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge for Twenty-First Century America, the action strategies that are offered are not independent actions intended to address this problem or respond to that. The plan is a coordinated strategy to address both the educational system and process as integral, interdependent whole. A big part of what we hope such a plan will accomplish, particularly during the elementary period of a child’s time in school is to elevate the level of intimacy and sense of family that embraces the child and makes them feel connected to teachers, parents and classmates.

We know very well, or at least we should, that the level of control and influence we have over the lives of our children during adolescence is determined almost totally by the quality of our relationships with them when they are small. Everything we do at school should be part of a well-conceived, comprehensive plan of action that is designed not only to teach young children but also to nurture them.

What do we want and need from our systems of public education?

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Let’s think about the challenge of reinventing education as if we were creating the system from scratch. To begin with we want to remember that the possibilities are as great as our imagination and that the only limits to our imaginations are those that we, ourselves, create.

Let us also remember that there are neither perfect systems nor perfect solutions, and there is no perfect time.  If we wait around for the perfect idea, time, and place we will wait forever. The best time to act is almost always now. A good system will not be able to anticipate every single exception to the rule but it will accommodate both the unexpected and the peculiar.

We must understand that an effective system must be viewed as an integral whole. It is not a hodgepodge of ad hoc pieces thrown together rather it is a coordinated system in which each component is interdependent and often symbiotic. Each component has its job to do, a job on which each of the other components depend. For such a system to work effectively it must always be in a state of relative equilibrium. Anytime we make even subtle changes to individual components we must recognize that those changes will reverberate across the entire surface, placing the entire system in a disequilibrium. As a result, all changes must be made within the context of the whole.

Systems in a state of unresolved disequilibrium quickly become dysfunctional and our current systems of public education and the educational process that works within the system are prime examples of this phenomenon.

We want our system of public education to be as closely aligned to reality as possible. That means that it addresses the real challenges facing us in the world but it also means that it is based upon the reality with respect to the way children grow, learn, and develop. All systems must be focused on the customer. In the case of a system as complex as education, the customer is not only our students but it is also the community that will someday depend upon those students. As such, we must acknowledge that we have a responsibility to both our students and to the community as a whole.

What do we want from our educational system and process?

  • We want the intimate participation of parents as partners, working and supporting the work that classroom teachers and students do, together;
  • We want every child to be on a unique academic path, tailored to their unique abilities and requirements;
  • We every child to have a special relationship with their teacher(s) like many of us remember when we think back to our favorite teacher(s).
  • We want every child to learn that success is a process that can be mastered by anyone and a process that they will carry with them throughout the balance of their lives;
  • We want every child to feel like a winner and we want them to experience the joy of celebratory victory because we know that winning is contagious and something of which human beings can never have enough;
  • We want every child to learn as much as they are able as quickly as they can, independent of their classmates. Never do we want a child to feel the pressure of having to keep up with classmates nor do we want them to be asked to wait for a classmate to catch up with them;
  • We want every child to learn that mistakes are opportunities, not failures, and we want them to know how to optimize the benefits of the mistakes they make;
  • We want children to experience neither failure, which we define as giving up before knowledge is acquired or a skill mastered, nor do we want them to experience humiliation, which we define as asking a child to perform with inadequate preparation;
  • We want to focus on accomplishment which we will define as demonstrable subject mastery;
  • We believe children thrive on positive attention and will do almost anything to get it and that it is only when they think themselves unable to get positive attention that they settle for the negative attention, which is better than no attention at all;
  • We want learning to be fun, an adventure of exploration;
  • We want children to learn how to respond to adversity in a positive way;
  • We want a child to develop a strong self-esteem which comes from, among other things, having a level of control over the outcomes in one’s life that only a quality education can provide.

 

We must create a system that is engineered to support our classroom teachers and other professional educators as they strive to achieve these objectives. The components of any such system are the people who work within the system, either individually or collectively. The roles of each individual must be clearly defined in terms of the purpose for which they exist to serve and how what they do contributes to the whole. No one in effective organizations or systems works independent of the whole.

In our next post we will take a look at the key players who must work together, as a unified team, to transform public education in America. They are parents, our teachers, teachers’ unions and associations, our school corporations, all levels of government, and our communities. The commitment of each of these players is essential and must be solicited as aggressively as necessary. No one can be permitted to be exempt.

What is the truth about claims that American public education is in crisis and what is the evidence to support such claims?

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As much as I admire and respect public school teachers, and as important as it is that we pledge our support to them, they are no better positioned to judge the efficacy of public education in America than cooks, waiters, and bus persons are positioned to judge the quality of the food their restaurant serves. Such judgments must always be left to the customer and, as we shall see shortly, sometimes our teachers are a customer of the system.

It is clear to this observer that the American educational process is failing in spite of the valiant efforts of the men and women who stand at the front of a classroom. While it is a gross disservice to lay the blame on our teachers, we must look objectively at the system’s performance.

So what is the evidence that suggests that our systems of public education are in a state of crisis?

Let’s start with what motivated the business men and women, whom we often refer to as “corporate reformers,” to focus so much attention on education. These business executives are motivated by the frustration they feel when it is so incredibly difficult to find qualified workers for their operations and it doesn’t matter whether they are seeking skilled or unskilled labor, or professionals.

Applications for work are submitted, daily, from prospective employees who are unable to understand and apply basic mathematical and scientific principles, who are unable to craft a coherent sentence or to express themselves effectively, whether orally or in writing. They are young men and women who demonstrate minimal motivation to do their best and insufficient self-discipline to earn the status and prestige to which they consider themselves entitled.

The quality of this labor force requires that employers allocate enormous sums of money and inordinate time on the part of their trainers, supervisors and managers to teach these young adults what they need to know; what most of us believe they should have brought to the table in the first place. The sheer mass of the resources diverted for such purposes has a measurable adverse impact on both productivity and profitability of business entities.

Not sufficient proof, you say? Then let us ask the classroom teachers in our more challenging public schools, particularly in middle- and high school classrooms, about the disruptive behavior, lack of motivation to learn, willingness to copy a classmates work without the slightest remorse, and about the apathy and/or hostility of the parents of these youngsters who make no attempt to be supportive of their children’s teachers. Yet these parents are fully prepared to accuse teachers of incompetence and of unfairly picking on their children.

Ask the teachers in our best schools how many of their students could do so much better if only they tried; if only their parents were more supportive; if only teachers were able to give them more time, attention, and encouragement. All of these “ifs,” by the way, are activities and investments of time and resources that our current educational process is not structured to support.

Still not enough? Let’s ask the military services how many young men and women, the majority of which are high school seniors or graduates, who are unable to earn the minimum score on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) to qualify for enlistment. Ask them what percentage of the enlistees who do qualify are able to do more than the most basic jobs in the military? How many are qualified for the highly technical jobs or for officer candidacy? The answers are most disturbing.

Need more evidence? Let’s examine NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Process) results that indicate that only forty percent of American eighth graders are able to score well enough on NAEP assessments to be categorized as “proficient” or above. Let’s keep in mind that the definition that has been established for “proficient” is:

“solid academic performance for each grade assessed. Students reaching this      level have demonstrated competency over challenging subject matter, including subject matter knowledge, application of such knowledge to real world situations, and analytical skills appropriate to the subject matter.”

The emphasis is mine and it is vital that we consider the significance of this expectation that students gain the ability to apply what they have learned “to real world situations.”  It means it is not enough that students are able to earn certain scores on the assessments for given subject matter, they must also be able to utilize what they have learned throughout their lifetimes.

This means that a full 60 percent of American eighth graders have not acquired sufficient mastery over subject matter that would enable them to utilize, on the job or in solving other real-life problems, the math, science, reading, and writing skills that they were supposed to have studied in the classroom.

Let’s examine NAEP results further to see that only 10 percent of African-American students and 15 percent of Hispanic students are able to earn the achievement level of “proficient” or above in math, science, reading and writing. This is the most glaring fact in all of education and most teachers and other educators are reluctant to even talk about this performance gap. Corporate reformers don’t talk about the performance gap, either, they simply offer vouchers programs so a handful of such students can escape their “failing schools.” We talk around the performance gap but we do not deal with it.

Ask yourself whether there are any circumstances in which we should be satisfied with these performance levels of American school children. Should we, in fact, be anything less than appalled by these data?

We won’t bother to go into detail about the performance of American students on PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment), as some have questioned the validity of such measures. Shouldn’t we be concerned, however, that our response in the face of unfavorable comparisons with between American kids and their counterparts in other nations, is to cry “foul?” Rather than accept these data as worthy of our serious attention and accept responsibility for them, we revert to claims that such assessments are biased and/or unfairly administered.

The unpleasant truth is that China, India, and other developing economies (not to mention Europe and Japan) are dedicated to replacing the U.S. as the richest and most powerful nations in the world. If we continue to scoff at these challenges, make no mistake, the future of American society will be decidedly unpleasant for our grandchildren and great grandchildren.

It is this author’s assertion that, in spite of the best efforts of dedicated American school teachers, our educational process and the system in which it functions are poorly structured and minimally prepared to meet the needs of American children, irrespective of their relative position on the academic performance continuum, on the affluence continuum, or their race or ethnicity. I would suggest to you that our educational process inhibits all students, even our most accomplished, from reaching their full potential and this reality demands our attention and compels us to action.

The United States is a competitor in a dynamic international marketplace. Like competitors in any sport, success is contingent upon the efficacy of one’s player development program.  I suggest to you that the American “player/student” development program has languished for long enough.

A Case for Action: Countering Misguided Reform Initiatives with a Plan to Transform Education in America!

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Educational reform initiatives that have evolved since President George W. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” Legislation have been gaining momentum and seem to be driven by the belief that public education in the U.S. is in a state of unprecedented crisis. These reformers insist that this crisis results, primarily, from of bad teachers and bad schools, all under the administrative control of local school districts that are poorly managed and unable to respond to the growing challenges for public education in Twenty-first Century America. Further, that even in school districts blessed with capable leadership, the efforts of these professionals are thwarted by teacher unions that make it difficult to respond to the performance issues of classroom teachers.

We believe that these reformers are wrong about everything except the existence of a crisis in public education, but it is a crisis of which these reformers seem to understand neither its nature nor its genesis. But still, they wield a big stick and the impact of the strategies and reforms initiated by these powerful leaders continue to reverberate throughout public-school classrooms, corridors, faculty lounges, and district board rooms; all driven by the mystifying assumption that if only we would run our schools as effectively as we run our businesses, quality education would prevail and expectations, everywhere, would rise.

What the actions of these reformers demonstrate, at least to this observer, is a minimal level of understanding of the forces that contribute to academic success and failure and a blatant lack of insight into the consequences of their actions.

On the other side of the conflict we have professional educators and administrators, men and women who have devoted their lifetimes to public education, who have responded to the legions of reformers by choosing to defend the honor of public education in America. Even the most renown and articulate spokespersons for professional educators have chosen to respond by defending the record of education in America, citing the progress that has been made over the last couple of decades. In this they are wrong, as the evidence will demonstrate.

These ardent advocates insist that the quality of education in America is better than it has ever been and that our students are learning more than they have ever learned. They argue that reformers grossly undervalue the critical role that poverty and racial segregation play in driving down the academic performance of America’s underprivileged children.

The warning that is shouted out by these advocates, is that the actions of the reformers threaten to destroy the very systems of education they have vowed to transform. The strategy of choice of the advocates of education in the U.S. is to complain loudly, voicing their predictions of the havoc being wreaked on our nation’s most vulnerable students and their schools.

 

Analysis and Recommendations

 

The reform initiatives of the government and corporate reformers of education are a runaway train that does, indeed, threaten to destroy our system of public education and our schools in communities all over the nation, to the great disadvantage of American children.

The reformers are correct, however, that public education in the U.S. is in a state of crisis that has ominous implications for the future of our nation.

It is the conclusion of this observer that the combined impact of this unprecedented crisis in public education in America and the misguided actions of the self-ordained reformers of education will be catastrophic for our children and for the American way of life, the future of which will soon rest upon the shoulders of these same children. We also suggest that the progression of this catastrophe is aided and abetted by the intransigence of our professional educators.

It is this author’s belief that our only hope for viable future for the United States of America, the richest and most powerful nation in the history of the world, is for the professional educators throughout these United States to stop complaining and take action. Complaints are the useless weapons of the weak and the unimaginative. The principles of positive leadership suggest that, rather than complain, powerful leaders offer constructive alternatives.

It is imperative that professional educators unite behind an alternate plan of action designed to fix the real problems with public education and work relentlessly to sell it to the American people.

Our next post will be focused on three objectives;

1)      We will examine evidence proving that the crisis in education is real;

2)      We will demonstrate how the professional educators working in our public schools are as much victims of a dysfunctional system as are the children whom they teach; and,

3)      We will identify the specific components of our systems of public education, and the educational process that works within the system, that compel us to action.

In subsequent posts we will begin, item by item, to outline the specific action strategies that, if implemented and properly executed, will transform public education in the U.S. These action strategies were first introduced in my book, Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge for Twenty-First Century America. As is always the case in a dynamic environment, I have learned much since the book was published a year ago and the strategic action plan we will be presenting will benefit from the wisdom and knowledge that has been gained.

That process of learning and adapting is relentless and self-perpetuating and the plan will continue to evolve as our teachers and principals come on board and begin adding their own wisdom and knowledge to the equation. Strategic action plans are very much like organizations and human systems in that they are living, breathing entities that evolve, incessantly.

How Do We Stop the Runaway Train of Misguided Educational Reforms?

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The educational reform initiatives that threaten to destroy public education in America are like a runaway train and cannot be stopped by the complaints of teachers, individually or collectively. Complaints are the useless weapons of the weak and the unimaginative. What teachers must believe is that, by banding together, they have the power to alter this untenable reality in education, but only if they open their hearts and minds to a new way of thinking about the educational process in which they have been immersed for so long.

The principles of positive leadership suggest that, rather than complain, powerful leaders offer constructive alternatives. In the case of education, that alternative cannot be a return to the status quo. We must acknowledge that the one and only thing about which corporate and government reformers have been correct is that the existing educational process is not meeting the needs of Twenty-first Century American children.

These reformers are wrong about everything else. They are wrong that teachers are to blame and that if we hold them accountable on the basis of student performance on annual competency examinations it will magically alter the outcomes. Such a strategy will not produce the outcomes we seek because teachers control only a small portion of the forces that are leading so many American children down the precipitous path to failure.

The reformers are wrong to think that privatization, financial incentives, charter schools, and removing our schools from the control of the communities they exist to serve will reverse the hopelessness and the powerlessness of a growing percentage of Americans who have lost faith in the American Dream.

These reformers are wrong to think that entrepreneurial principles and state-of-the-art technology can mitigate the value of trained and committed professionals in our classrooms. These reformers are wrong because they are pushing the wrong business principles; they are wrong because they have forgotten that, no matter how sophisticated it might be, technology will never be more than a powerful tool in the hands of people who know how to effectively and productively utilize it; and, they are wrong because they are blind to the reality that American public school teachers are victims of the same educational process that victimizes their students.

What educators must recognize is that the power that drives these reformers is a function of the public’s loss of faith in professional educators, in American public schools, and in an educational process that has left millions of American men and women bitter, resentful, and disillusioned.

It is not too late for American educators to re-establish themselves as our nation’s leaders of choice as we work to reinvent the American educational process. Time has become a commodity in short supply, however. We dare not waste another day, week, or month before we recognize the challenge before us come together to face it. If we wait a year we might as well throw in the towel because our envelope of opportunity will have re-sealed itself.

In this eleventh hour we need a comprehensive blue print for reinventing the American educational process and I offer my book, Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge for Twenty-first Century America (REHAD) as a starting point.

The next couple of posts will be devoted to re-presenting the action strategies offered in the book (REHAD) into a strategic action plan that requires only a definitive decision to act. That decision to act is the responsibility of the professional men and women who preside over teacher associations and unions; over associations for principals and administrators; over the boards of entities established to promote education in the U.S., and over school districts and corporations, whether public or private.

As an author, I have no illusions that my strategic action plan, as comprehensive as it may be, will be the final iteration of a new vision for education in the U.S. but it is a place to start. What must follow is an analysis on the part of a diverse population of professional educators working diligently for ways to improve and enhance this initial blueprint.

Professional educators must harbor no illusions that they can pare this vision back until it is no more than the current reality, in disguise. Any such pretense will be quickly recognized and rejected and there will be no second chances.

The Vergara Ruling in California will do more harm than good!

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Wouldn’t it be more productive to focus our energy and attention on supporting and protecting our good public school teachers?

It seems that we always focus on the negative. Bad teachers can already be fired, tenure or not. Tenure does not prevent school corporations from dismissing incompetent teachers it simply requires that they take the time to do it right and to make a well-documented case.

At a time when teachers are already under attack, falsely accused of being the cause of the failure of so many American students, this decision comes across as more of a “witch hunt” (or witch/warlock hunt if we want to be politically correct) than as a reasoned decision in an attempt to address our nation’s most important issue – the crisis in education!

It is similar to what happens so often in the work place when a few problem employees abuse the rules and privileges of their employer. In these instances, management rushes in to create more rules or take away privileges and the only people they impact are the good employees who come to work every day and do the best job of which they are capable. The new rules and restriction of privileges are like water off the proverbial duck’s back to the abusers because the problem employees do not care and will not abide by the rules, new or old.

In education we are in a state of public panic in which government officials, corporate reformers, and other policy makers are rushing around like incorrigible children, looking for someone at whom to lash out—looking for someone to blame. Teachers just happen to be the most obvious target.

Few if any of these officials and reformers, and also judges, have ever spent so much as a single day in a public school classroom, striving to understand the challenges with which our teachers are confronted.

Instead, they see teachers as easy targets. They tell themselves and the world that they are taking bold action and they puff out their chests in false pride over their bravado, oblivious to the great harm they do.

Not only do they hurt all of the good public school teachers who come to work every autumn to continue an important and seemingly impossible job from which the majority of us would abruptly shirk. What they also do is distract us from taking the time to understand the dynamics of our educational process and taking meaningful action to fix real problems.

If the critics of teachers would take the time to walk in the shoes of our public school teacher these high profile reformers, officials, and policy makers would see that teachers are as much the victims of the  dysfunctional system that is American public education as are the students whom they strive to teach under what are often adverse circumstances. They would see minimal support from parents in our most challenging schools and an alarming lack of motivation to learn on the part of the children of those parents.

They would see the damage that is done when they provide incentives, in the form of vouchers for the small number of families who are motivated to take advantage of them, to abandon our most challenged public schools. In the process they leave the teachers and students of those abandoned schools in their wake to deal with the unforeseen and often invisible consequences of their action. They also deprive those abandoned schools and their teachers of much needed revenue.

It is the symbolic equivalent of washing their hands of the problems facing those schools and their teachers and, most of all, our nation’s most vulnerable kids.

This is unacceptable and it will not do! It is time for teachers to rally together and fight to put a stop to the misguided and paralyzing reform initiatives of people who know not what they do!

It is time for teacher unions and associations to re-examine their mission and work together with school administrations to develop meaningful measures to improve teacher skills on the one hand and to develop measures of true accountability on the other.

Just last night, on “Just Let Me Teach” a program host by Justin Oakley on Indiana Talks, an online radio network, a caller told us about a peer review program called PAR in Anderson, Indiana. It is a program making real strides to improve rather than harm our public schools and their teachers. It is a program in which teachers and administrators are working together to create real, meaningful, and sustainable accountability.

These are the kind of programs our elected officials and so-called reformers should be supporting and replicating all over the nation.

And, why are these high profile leaders not talking about the important role that parents play in the education of their children? Why are they not brainstorming with local educators to come up with meaningful programs to reach out into our communities and pull parents in as partners in the education of their children? Why are we not taking the obscene amount of money that is being squandered on meaningless reforms and investing it, instead, in a nationwide initiative to Pull Parents in as Partners?

We need to recognize that the absolute most important things we can do to fix the systemic deficiencies in the American educational process is for teachers, both individually and collectively to partner up with school administrators to work on teacher training and accountability while, in our classrooms, parents and teachers partner up to give our nation’s children the best education possible!

 

Excerpt #10 – Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream – Part I, The Educational Process

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The gasoline combustion engine that powers our automobiles offers a perfect analogy for education in America. On the one hand, we have an engine that was designed more than a century ago that, simply, is unable to meet the demands and specifications of the Twenty-first Century. Even in perfect condition, however, the engine’s performance is dependent on the quality of the fuel that powers it. No matter how much we might tinker with the engine, it will sputter and fail if the quality of fuel is poor. The fuel that powers education in America is the level of motivation of children to learn and the commitment of their parents to the educational process. In the current reality, as we face the unprecedented challenges of the Twenty-first Century, we are dependent on an obsolete engine powered by what may be the lowest level of motivation to learn in the history of education in America.

 

Given the challenges presented by the dynamic international marketplace of this new century, we need to elevate both the engine that represents the educational system and fuel that powers it. If we hope to seriously compete with China, India, Europe, and the other developing economies we need a ferocious commitment from parents and an equally ferocious level of motivation on the part of our children. We also need to reinvent an educational system utilizing state-of-the-art technology that can unleash the full power of that fuel, with optimal efficiency, and without the nasty by-products of failure and humiliation for our children and burn out for our teachers. The outcome we are seeking is a system in which teaching is as much fun for teachers as learning will be for our children.

 

We begin our recommendations for reinventing education, hope, and the American dream with the educational process. In Part II, we will make our argument that the greatest problems with education in the U.S. is a growing cultural disdain for education manifested by minimal motivation to learn on the part of far too many children and a corresponding lack of commitment to the importance of education on the part of the parents of those children. That being said, addressing the issue of a cultural devaluation of education is a monumental challenge that will require that we take the time to lay down a philosophical foundation for our point of view. In the interim, the educational process, itself, is fundamentally flawed and until we fix it, nothing else we say or do will be believed by those who are disenfranchised.

 

We choose to start with the educational process partly because it is the lesser of the two challenges. Fixing the educational process is a formidable challenge but, clearly, policy makers and legislators have the power to bring about any and all of the changes that we will be recommending. The things that make this particular challenge so difficult are not the issues themselves but the fact that it requires that we change the way we think about education. We must ask people to challenge their basic assumptions about the way we educate our children. The changes that need to be made are structural and systemic and they cannot be accomplished through incremental change. We will walk the reader through the logical framework behind these proposals and then will introduce the specific proposals in the form of action items that require only that policy makers and decision makers make a commitment to act.

 

 

 

Vignette #1 – Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream

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It is not very often that a substitute teacher actually has an opportunity to teach. One of the few occasions when I was able to teach was in a week-long assignment for a middle school math teacher. After two days of work on material having to do with prime factoring, rules of divisibility, and reducing to lowest terms, the students in three separate classes took a quiz, which the teacher had prepared in advance. It included twenty-five problems; all very similar to the problems that had been included on the several worksheets on which we had been working. This particular teacher went to great lengths to insure that his students did not cheat. The students sat at round tables, four students per table. He had constructed interlocking boards that were about twenty-four inches high for the purpose of dividing the table into four equal sections. Prior to every quiz or exam, the students would retrieve the boards from behind a cabinet and would set them up. As a result it would be difficult if not impossible for a student to copy off of a classmate without being seen.

Given the time we had spent on the subject matter and the relatively straightforward nature of the material, I had high expectations, believing the students would do well. To my surprise and disappointment, the results were that better than fifty percent of the 85 students scored below 60 percent and 75 percent of the students scored below 75. Only eight of the 85 students scored above 85 percent, and only two out of the 85 students scored better than 95 percent. In other words there were 43 Fs, 21 Ds, 13 Cs, 6 Bs, and 2 As.

The next day, prompted by my surprise at the results, I spent the entire period reviewing the same material. I did not return the quiz to the students, however, and chose not to review the actual questions from the prior day’s quiz. We worked problems as a class on the whiteboard and I worked one-on-one with the students who appeared to need that level of attention. Great care was taken to avoid doing the work for them.

The following day, I had all three classes retake the quiz. In advance of the retake they were told, in broad strokes, how poorly the class had done, although no one had access to their own results. They were also assured that this was a risk-free venture as I would throw out the lowest of the two test scores. The hope was that this opportunity would motivate the students to improve their scores while alleviating performance pressure.

The new scores showed dramatic improvement by all but a handful of students. Better than ninety percent of students earned higher scores on the second quiz with several improving by two, three or more letter grades. A few students improved from failing grades to As and Bs. Roughly 80 percent of the students from the three classes scored 75 or better and a full third scored 85 or higher, 10 of whom scored above 95 percent (See Figure 1). Given the unlikelihood that the students remembered specific questions or problems, it seemed reasonable to conclude that their scores on the second quiz represented a substantially higher level of mastery.

While this may not have been the most scientific of studies, the level of improvement certainly was not a result of pure chance. The operative question is: Is it worth an extra two days to get such a dramatic improvement in subject-matter mastery. I’ll let the reader decide for themselves.

The Politics of Abandonment

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The most appropriate way to describe the policies of educational reformers, educational policy-makers, and government officials with respect to their support of charter schools and vouchers to pay for them is the word “abandonment.” Think for a moment about what these powerful men and women do and examine the underlying logic of their actions.

In response to our most challenged public schools that almost always exist in areas populated by Americans of low income, these reformers, policy-makers, and their government supporters rarely, if ever, talk about what we can do to fix these low-performing schools. Instead they are indignant and decry the performance of such schools, implying that things would be different if only they were in charge.

These powerful men and women, often with the support of billion-dollar foundations and wealthy business people, make a great show of demanding accountability from such schools and their teachers. They threaten dire consequences for both the teachers and their schools corporations and demand that they demonstrate what they call “documented” or “verifiable” improvement on the basis of annual competency exams. When, as almost always happens, the test scores for the students of these schools show no improvement or even fall to a lower level these reformers and policy makers throw up their hands in figurative despair; their voices loud and echoing.

They respond by encouraging the creation of charter schools in those communities to provide what they anticipate will be attractive and high-performing alternatives. They then institute voucher programs that allow families to take the stream of revenue that follows their sons and daughters and transfer them to their school of choice. Parents who are sufficiently motivated to take advantage of such incentives are able to choose from the newly created charter schools and also parochial and other private schools within or close to their communities. Some even opt to go to nearby suburban public schools that are able to boast of the impressive performance of their students on annual competency exams.

That many of the charter schools are unable show improved performance of their new student populations seems not to matter. Rarely noted is that many of the parochial schools, all of which are thrilled to enjoy the increased revenue from vouchers, are poorly resourced and have faculties that receive insufficient training to help them deal with this influx of new and more challenging students. We often forget that many of the parochial schools are unable to compete with their public counterparts on the basis of teacher salaries. These schools typically attract teachers who share religious convictions or who are seeking what they believe will be a more stable and rewarding teaching environment.

Even the high-performing suburban public schools may struggle to welcome the “voucher students” and incorporate them into their mainstream academic and social cultures.

While many of the new students in charter, parochial, private, or suburban public schools make a successful transition and demonstrate a higher level of academic performance, many others do not. What seems to matter is attitude and level of commitment of the parents of these transferring students. Just because such parents are motivated to take advantage of the opportunities that vouchers present does not mean that they are sufficiently motivated to become actively involved and accept responsibility as partners in the educational process. Many of these parents are more likely to conclude that their job is done and now it is up to the new school and its teachers to turn their children around.

In the interim, the abandoned public schools from which voucher students have fled are left with fewer students with a strong motivation to learn, fewer parents that care, and less revenue with which to work. We should not be surprised that the progress these schools claim to be making is often obscured by their more challenging student population.

When these schools clamor for more revenue with which to rise to their escalating challenges and to pay their teachers, their requests are denied. More often than not they are met with even more emphasis on annual competency exams accompanied by sanctions and other consequences as a result of their presumed failure to rise to expectations.

When the teachers in these abandoned schools, and the unions and associations that represent them, lobby for more resources and better contracts those requests, too, are rejected. In many cases, the legislators in these states respond with bills and proposals to restrict the collective bargaining power of teachers’ unions and, in some cases, threaten to eliminate the unions, altogether.

Consider the social and economic consequences when our government offers lifelines to only the most motivated families in our most troubled schools and then confines the remaining families to what we publicly label as our worst schools. Consider the consequences when the actions of our government seem directed at increasing the level of segregation, not just in our schools from the perspective of race, but more importantly segregating both our schools and entire communities on the basis of the “haves” and the “have-nots.”

With righteous indignation our leadership is charting a course toward unmitigated disaster for our cities and, ultimately, for our society as a whole. We are fast becoming a house divided at a time when we can least afford it.

Our only hope of competing effectively in the ever-more dynamic and demanding world marketplace requires the very best that a people united by a common purpose can give.

Somehow we must reverse our course. Doing so requires that each and every one of us make a commitment to change the way we think; to solicit the support of our friends and colleagues; and, to act on the basis of our shared values and principles. And, we need to do so damn quickly!

Read my book, Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge for Twenty-First Century America to see exactly what we can do and how!

Excerpt #9 from Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream – The Introduction

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The True Challenge

This author suggests that the two major problems in education are 1) the level of motivation of the students and the corresponding commitment of their parents. It takes exceptional teachers to overcome the lack of student motivation and parental commitment, and 2) an educational process that is obsolete and poorly designed to meet the needs of students and to place teachers in a position to be teach effectively.

Bringing about the necessary cultural transformation and returning education to the top of the American priority list is a formidable but not impossible challenge. Public education is the single most important issue on the American agenda and we must declare it as such. This is an issue on which our entire future depends. It is my sincere belief that if we do not turn this situation around, in fifty years, China will be coming to the United States for its supply of cheap labor.

What differentiates this book from the many others that have been written about education in the U.S. is 1) that its focus is outward on the growing cultural disdain for education; 2) that it is focused on taking action by proactively engaging parents as full partners in the educational process; and, 3) that the specific educational reforms it proposes are the result of a systems-thinking approach that challenges our conventional wisdom and traditions.

Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream has been written from the perspective of an organizational leadership consultant rather than that of a social scientist or professional educator. I am convinced that we must take a pragmatic business approach if we are to effectively address the problems plaguing public education, which, not coincidentally, are the same problems that plague our society as a whole. If we can fix education we will also, to one degree or another, be addressing poverty, hopelessness, drugs, gangs, violence, and the very roots of our socio-economic foundation.

This project was motivated not only by my experiences as a substitute teacher in a public school system but also as a result of my experiences as a manager responsible for hiring new employees for my organizations and also for training them. Also contributing was my experience as a juvenile probation officer during the first nine years of my professional career and, more recently, while administering the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) which serves, among other things, as the entrance exam for prospective enlistees in the Armed Services of the United States.

Other authors proceed with critiques of public education’s declining performance followed by prescriptions for training better teachers, reorganizing schools in creative ways, making preschool more accessible, for improving curricula, and tailoring instruction to the unique needs of children, revamping assessments, and building true accountability. All of their focus is internal as if the cultural forces that relentlessly devalue the primacy of education and the corresponding decline in the motivation of American children are unalterable givens.

These are the realities that are having a devastating impact on the quality of education and we go about our important business as if we are powerless to address them. Like so much of American society and its government, we have acquired, over the last half century, a misguided belief that we have all the answers; that we can solve everyone’s problems for them; that we bear full responsibility. Possibly, we have forgotten that ensuring that children receive a quality education is a shared responsibility. Possibly we have come to believe that it is politically incorrect to call parents out; to get in their face and demand that they accept their responsibility as partners in education. We behave as if the poor and the nonwhite are too pathetic to take responsibility for their own futures. Possibly, poor people and minorities have written us off because they feel powerless to affect the outcomes in their lives. This is a reality Americans must alter at all cost.

In Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream we will provide vignettes from my own experience as a substitute teacher in the classrooms of the middle and high schools of Fort Wayne Community Schools. The focus of each will be to provide the reader with a glimpse of what takes place in the classroom and also to illustrate the importance of parental commitment and participation. Also included will be a vignette from a first-year teacher’s experience in an inner city elementary school in Washington DC. We believe these anecdotes provide compelling evidence of the mounting disdain for education and for our assertion that parents are abdicating their responsibility as indispensable partners in the educational process.

The “action focus” of Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream will be divided into two sections. Before we can challenge the American people to begin changing the cultures and subcultures of American society we must demonstrate that “we mean business.” It is not enough to make empty promises because empty promises are all many Americans believe they have heard, each and every day of their lives. We need to speak with our actions, demonstrating that we are making real and substantive changes in the way we will teach their children. We want parents to be able to look at the changes we have made so that they can truly believe that we will be giving their children the education they will need to make the American dream a reality. We want them to believe that this new educational process will truly empower their children to take control of their young lives and to seize an array of opportunities, from a huge and diverse menu, according to their unique talents, interests, and abilities. We want parents to want the best for their children even when they have given up hope for themselves.

Only when the parents of our nation’s children can reach out and touch these things can we reasonably expect them to believe in a new reality; and, only when they believe in the reality of this new educational process can we ask them to begin, once again, to have faith in the American dream and to have real and meaningful hope in a better future. Only when we are able to give American men and women a realistic hope for a better future for their children can we begin asking them to change the way they live, think, and feel.

As we turn our focus to the process of education in America, we will begin by comparing the way children learn during their pre-school years whether at home, in daycare, pre-school or head start programs with what we offer them when they arrive for their first day at school. What the reader will see, in this simple analysis, is that our educational process seems to work at cross purposes with the way the natural learning process functions. The result is that the fun of learning is soon replaced with a stress-filled, esteem-damaging process that sets many children up for failure.

We will also examine:

• Compulsory education and the fact that unmotivated students are allowed to be a disruptive influence on students who want to learn and teachers who are striving to teach;
• Teacher accountability and the trust between teachers and parents;
• The way we structure our schools and group children in classrooms, together;
• The way we identify an educational path for our children and then direct them down that path;
• The way we utilize teachers and facilitate their ability to teach and interact with students and their parents;
• Our current educational system’s focus on failure;
• Protecting children from humiliation;
• Homework, practice, and the manner in which we deal with the mistakes our students make;
• The way we assess a student’s level of competency over the subject matter within the context of educational standards;
• The allocation of scarce resources to serve our mission to the optimal advantage; and,
• The effectiveness with which we utilize the technology of the Twenty-first Century.
•

After re-thinking our assumptions about the educational process, we will present nineteen specific action strategies that will enable us to re-invent the educational process in order to better meet the educational needs of our children and to prepare them for the unprecedented challenges of the balance of the Twenty-first Century.

Through the implementation of these nineteen action strategies, we will show how we can structure the educational process in such a way that the structure supports and facilitates our teachers and students as they go about their important work. We will show how we can create real trust between parents and the teachers of their children in order to engage them as full partners in the educational process. We will illustrate how we can shift the focus away from humiliation and failure, focusing instead on teaching children that success is a process that all can master within the context of their individual talents and abilities. We will show how, utilizing Twenty-first Century technology, we can integrate the assessment of student competency and mastery into the educational process very much like industry has integrated quality systems within the production and assembly process.

It is a national tragedy that so many students reach a point in their academic careers where they have given up on themselves. It is a national travesty that we have given up on them. It is imperative that we place teachers in an environment in which they can make a real difference in the lives of the children in their classrooms. We want our teachers to be developing rich and nurturing relationships with our children and their families; relationships that will endure and that will be remembered with the same warmth that all of us feel when we think back on our favorite teachers. We want to eliminate the meaningless activity in which so many teachers become entrapped so that their time and energy are focused not only on helping children learn how to be successful but also helping them remember how much fun learning can be. We want teachers to re-discover how much fun it is to teach.

Simply by changing our thinking we can irrevocably alter the current reality of education in America and help our children develop the knowledge and skills necessary to compete successfully in an ever more complex international arena. We believe we can show, emphatically, that all of these things are well within our power to accomplish if only we open our hearts and minds and view them without prejudice.

Few if any of these first nineteen action times will require an act of the legislature. They can almost all be implemented by individual school corporations acting within the parameters of their legislated authority.

After we have presented our blueprint for the reinvention of education in America, we will shift our focus to the formidable challenge of changing our culture to one in which every American has faith and hope in the American dream, for their children if not for themselves, and where we are each committed to a portfolio of shared values constructed on the principles of freedom and democracy in which “. . . all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. . . .”

We will begin by examining what takes place in our public schools, particularly in urban America. We will also look at the vital role education has played in the development of American society as we have evolved into the richest and most powerful nation in the world.

We will examine the results from state competency exams, using Indiana as our example. These data clearly illustrate that the performance gap between white students and blacks and other minorities is as real as it is disturbing. What we will also see is that all students in urban public schools, whites included, underperform when compared with students in private and parochial schools and in rural and suburban public schools. That we misinterpret the reasons for this underperformance places our future in jeopardy.

It is also vital that we understand how American culture has evolved to present day and we will take an in depth look at the impact this cultural evolution has had on education in America, both public and private. We will show how several cultural phenomena, beginning after the Great Depression and end of World War II, transformed our nation and society in such a way that the core values that contributed to our nation’s greatness became obscured.

We will take a particularly close look at the culture of African America because the most significant and alarming performance gap in all of education is the chasm that exists between the educational performance of white children and their black classmates. This reality demands direct, unapologetic attention. That discourse will involve a close look at the work of John McWhorter, author of Winning the Race: Beyond the Crisis in Black America . Dr. McWhorter suggests to us that the problem is a culture in which it has become a symbol of “black authenticity” for African-Americans to shake their finger at “whitey” for institutional racism and degradation that no longer exist to any relevant degree, and to flip a certain other finger at education and the other responsibilities of citizenship. These responsibilities are essential to the ongoing viability of a democratic society. We hope to dispel, irrevocably, even the notion that there is an entire race of people who are predisposed to academic failure, and replace it with a challenge to African-Americans and other minorities to take their rightful place as full partners in meeting the economic, social, and political challenges facing our nation. That challenge must come with the commitment that parents can count on the partnership of their children’s educators.

We will also devote time to a discussion of “entitlement mentality.” Typically, when people feel entitled to something they do not believe they should be required to do anything to earn it. We believe this is part of the problem with public education; that we have come to view education as an entitlement for which we should not be required to be responsible. Today, our entire society spends too much time talking about rights and entitlements rather than talking about responsibility. Aided by the literal eruption of electronic communications and computer technology, the power of the peer group has become more powerful than at any time in the history of our nation and now threatens to replace the family, church, and schools as the dominant socio-cultural force.

We will suggest that changing our culture is the categorical imperative of our time. Talk is cheap, however and we will offer a strategic plan of action designed to bring about massive and comprehensive cultural change. We will suggest that, as formidable as this challenge may seem it is nothing more than a sales and marketing plan of enormous size and scope. Because sales and marketing are two of the areas in which the U.S. is unsurpassed, this challenge is within our power to overcome.

Our action strategy to alter the culture of America will commence with a clear statement of purpose followed by a focus on the utilization of the principles of positive leadership , and will be manifested in fourteen specific action items directed to the community.

We will show how educators and other community leaders can reach out into the community and pull parents in. We will show how we can parlay one of President Barack Obama’s early campaign challenges to parents to accept responsibility for their children into a nation-wide initiative to rally the American people, across all cultural boundaries, to the idea that education is the ticket to a new, Twenty-first Century version of the American dream. Somehow, we have to sell Americans on the idea that the American dream still exists. We need to re-instill hope in the hearts and minds of men and women from across the entire spectrum of the American panorama that the dream is both real and achievable. For those who are poor and disadvantaged, we need re-ignite the hope and belief that they can make it real for their children and that a quality education is a pass of admission to the dream. Education has become something that these youngsters do not value and it is imperative that we alter this reality. The reader is urged to understand that this is not something that would be nice to accomplish; it is something that must be accomplished or our children and grandchildren will find themselves in an entirely different world where being an American is not something about which one can feel proud. Neither will it be a world where our children and grandchildren can feel safe and hopeful in rearing their own children.

The reader is encouraged to believe that each of things is possible if only we will proceed with an open mind and hold on to the idea that anything man can imagine, man can do. Educators must be encouraged to believe that these things are possible if only they will challenge their biases and assumptions and, most of all, if only they will accept responsibility for finding a solution. You will hear this axiom, in one form or another, again and again as you proceed through this book, as it is central to our purpose:

Instead of blaming other people, our government, or the world for our problems, it is only when we accept responsibility for those problems that we begin to acquire the power to solve them.

The bottom line is that the problems facing American society and the problems facing our systems of education are the exact same problems and they cannot be solved by educators working unilaterally. We must involve the entire community.