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.

Teacher Performance Evaluations are the First Step in the Right Direction, But. . . ?

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As I am still getting requests for copies or links to this article, which was shared more than 500 times on Facebook, I have elected to re-run the piece on this Memorial Day,

Teacher Performance Evaluations are the First Step in the Right Direction

Whatever one feels about the reliability of the data regarding “school staff performance evaluations” released by the State [Indiana] Department of Education and reported in Tuesday’s (April 8, 2014) Journal Gazette, just having a system of evaluation in place and reporting results to the public is a positive step for our state’s educators.

Performance evaluations in any venue are an uncertain science but the fact that they acknowledge a responsibility to be accountable to the public is the first step in the right direction. The results of these evaluations are far more credible than the off-hand assertions of skeptics that the “results do not provide a true and accurate assessment.” References to what would appear to be contradictory evidence provided by the performance of students’ on ISTEPs are equally nonsensical.

It has become fashionable to blame teachers for the poor performance of their students but this should be construed as evidence that critics of our systems of public education have an over-simplistic understanding of why so many American children are performing poorly in school. Those who advocate the use of state competency test results to punish schools and teachers are simply out of touch with reality and demonstrate, with each shouted breath, that they are clueless as to the reasons for failure in our schools.

The reasons why children fail in school are many and they are complex and can be discussed in detail at another time and place; but, let there be no doubt that far too many of our children are failing and this is, without question, one of the most important issues on the American agenda. It is because this issue is so critical to the future of our society that it demands thoughtful examination on the part of men and women who are more concerned about understanding the dynamics of the issue than they are about assigning blame or spouting meaningless platitudes.

Blaming teachers for the problems in public education in America is like blaming soldiers for the war they were asked to fight. Teachers are as much victims of an obsolete educational process as are the students that they teach. It is bad enough that they are asked to perform miracles in the classroom without the necessary structure, support, and resources; can we at least spare them the ramblings of an uninformed public?

I am not suggesting that the teaching profession is without culpability and they certainly must bear a significant share of the responsibility for changing the reality that is education in 21st Century America. Performance evaluations can play an important role in that process and they can be a powerful tool in driving organizations toward their objectives and in holding employees at all levels of an organization to the highest possible expectations. Unfortunately, the quality of performance evaluations are often a function of the caliber of management in the organization. If they are to work in an educational environment, principals must be thoroughly schooled in their use. Interestingly, this is an area where school corporations and teachers associations could work together toward a common purpose.

Performance evaluations are also another area where schools can learn from business. While the value and functionality of performance evaluations in a business environment span the continuum from pathetic to outstanding, many industries have been engaged for decades in the development of meaningful instrumentation. The concept of integrated performance evaluations would be one innovation that would offer great promise in an educational environment. Integrated performance management systems are designed to provide ongoing, real-time interface between worker and supervisor and are focused upon helping workers, both professional and non-professional, maximize their ability to provide products and services of the highest caliber.

It seems to this observer that it would be in everyone’s best interests if teacher associations would take the lead in working with their school districts to mutually develop such capability. Nothing drives innovation like the compelling need to satisfy demanding and unhappy customers and there are few people who are happy with the state of public education in America in this second decade of a new century. If ever a time would be right this would seem to be it.

Things You Can Do, Part 8 – A Positive Leader’s Vision and Relentlessness

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A positive leader’s ever-expanding vision for the future of his or her organization is an energizing force. In this, as in so many things, positive leaders are relentless.

If you are a leader and your vision has grown stale, your organization is in trouble and you need to do whatever it takes to recharge and revitalize yourself. The very future of your organization depends on it – your organization depends on you!

Put this quote on the wall of your office and at other high visibility locations throughout your facilities:

“The point at which an idea, process, product, service, or organization can no longer be improved is the precise moment in time that it becomes obsolete.”

There are no leaders who can afford to become complacent and there are no organizations, whether for-profit or not-for-profit; whether manufacturers, assemblers, or service providers that can afford to become stagnant.

The pressure to survive, let alone prosper, in the economy of the Twenty-first Century decade will be extraordinary and whatever one’s venue, entities that cannot compete will surely disappear. This places an exceptional premium on positive leadership.

Many leaders feel over-whelmed by the challenges of leading their people through incessant change and relentless improvement – continuous improvement does not cut it anymore.

Listen carefully – positive leaders neither live nor work in isolation. Positive leadership recognize that every member of their organization is a partner and bears a share of the responsibility for the “relentless improvement” process. Positive leaders enlist the full participation of the people and they establish incentives for creative thinking.

Any leader that guards the creative and decision-making process and restricts participation to a select few is doomed to fail. Make relentless improvement an expectation of everyone in your organization and include it in your performance management system. If your organization does not have a performance management system, create one. Create ad hoc brainstorming teams, pulling people from all departments and levels of the organization. Celebrate excellence and creativity at every opportunity. Share information about performance and work to create an ownership mentality throughout your organization. These are characteristics of winning organizations.

As a leader, take the time to talk to as many of your people as possible. Thank them for their effort, share your vision and elevate both your expectation and theirs. Teach your people to feel like winners and you will discover that there are few things in the work world more exciting than being a part of a winning organization.

Being part of a winning organization creates a self-perpetuating cycle in which a leader’s vision seems to expand magically. Just like an answer to a question will lead to multiple new questions, the introduction of a new idea spawns creation of a chain of new ideas.

Black Kids, White Kids, Asian and Hispanic Kids, All Kids Can Learn!

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Let’s clear up any confusion, misconceptions, or lingering doubts about whether or not there are certain groups of children who can or cannot learn. The fact that so very many children do not learn has nothing to do with whether or not they can. What we have seen in public schools all over the U.S., as well as in private, parochial, and charter schools, as well as in experimental schools, is that kids from every racial, ethnic and cultural heritage can learn, irrespective of their economic circumstances.

The question is, what do we as a society do to insure that all children do learn; each and every one of them to the full extent of their unique genetic capability? Notice that I did not say what “can” we do. The use of the world “can” suggests that something may or may not be possible.

We have the power, individually and collectively, to create a reality in which every child learns to the fullest extent of their capability. Given that we have such power, it is absolutely intolerable that we allow the existence of a reality in which so many children are allowed to fail.

Please ask yourself what you can do, whether you are in a position to reach out to a single child or to an entire generation. And then, make a commitment to do it.

In my book, Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge for Twenty-First Century America (REHAD). I wrote:

“. . . the mathematical and scientific laws of the universe care nothing about the color of a man or a woman’s skin. The only reason children of any racial or ethnic group are not masters of the sciences and mathematics is that their fathers and mothers do not insist that they learn these things. The only reason girls and boys, whatever their lineage, do not read and write proficiently is because their mothers and fathers do not insist that they become proficient.
The only time children of any cultural heritage do not become loving partners in the process of rearing their own children and teaching them these values is when we, as parents, do not teach them by our example. The only time any child grows up with an unhealthy self-esteem is when we do not teach him or her, each and every day of their lives, how very special they are; because we do not demand that they learn responsibility and self-discipline.”

Conveying this message as part of a coordinated plan of action is, I am convinced, the most important thing any American can do for our country at this point in our history. In REHAD, I outlined a blueprint for action that involves two components.

The first component is to fix an educational process that is more than a century old and that no longer meets the needs of children of the Twenty-first Century. It was a system that sets children up for failure and humiliation and that has left full generations of American men and women not only bitter and resentful but also hopeless and powerless that they can effect the outcomes in their lives. These men and women no longer believe in the American dream and no longer teach their kids that an education is important and offers them a pathway to a better life. As a result, the children of these men and women show up for their first day of school poorly prepared and with precious little motivation to learn.

The performance gap that we refer to so often is simply an illustration of that fact. That the most disparate performance gap is between white and black students is not proof that African-American children are less able to learn rather it is proof that the culture of much of the African-American community is one in which this disdain for education is most pervasive. In fact, this disdain for education transcends culture and is growing more pervasive each and every day that we stand by and do nothing.

The real performance gap exists between children reared in an environment where belief in the American dream is real and abiding and where families are hopeful and believe they possess the power to create a better life for their children, if not for themselves; and between children raised under a shroud of hopelessness and powerlessness.

Fixing the educational process is just the first step.

The second component of my blueprint for transformation is that we must come together as one people, in all of our diversity, united by a common purpose. That purpose is to repackage and resell the American dream and then take that message to the people. It requires that we ask every American who is hopeful and powerful to reach out into every nook and cranny of our community and engage the hopeless and the powerless.

We want all of our neighbors to believe that they can create a better life for their children and that they need not do this alone. We want them to understand that their entire community, across the full cultural panorama, is available to help them.

We want them to understand that the most important thing they can do is to partner with the teachers of their sons and daughters; teachers that offer a new educational process that is focused on helping each and every one of our children learn how to be successful and acquire the knowledge and skills that will enable them to control the outcomes in their lives. Knowledge and skills that will enable them to create their own future.

This is a plea to each and every one of you who is reading these words to make a commitment to action. That action begins by sharing these ideas and your commitment with everyone in your sphere of influence.

What are you waiting for?

Blaming teachers in our schools is like blaming soldiers for the war they were ordered to fight.

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Blaming public school teachers for the problems in education is like blaming soldiers for the war they were asked to fight.

On the battlefield, soldiers have no control over the level of commitment, courage or resiliency of their opposition. They have no control over the efficacy of their command structure or quality of the strategy flowing through the chain of command. Neither do they control the timeliness and reliability of their supply lines or the relative primacy of their weaponry. While we might second guess the strategic decision making in war, we do not attempt to hold soldiers accountable for the success of their efforts, measured after-the-fact, using unproven metrics. These valiant men and women can only give the best of themselves and in this they are very much like our teachers.

How is it, then, that we can ask the teachers in our most challenging schools to overcome the lack of support of parents? How can we expect them to fight through the disruptive behavior of students with widely disparate levels of preparation and motivation and then guide them down the same path, toward the same destination, at the same pace?

We ask them to rise to these extraordinary and unreasonable expectations while we shower them with criticisms and disrespect? And, as if the job were not sufficiently challenging, we promote vouchers and charter schools that siphon off motivated families and their children from our most challenged public schools? Each child that escapes to an alternate school leaves teachers with fewer students that care and the school with less revenue with which to work.

Such a strategy might be justified if it included a plan to re-infuse the abandoned public schools with additional resources, innovative programming, extra training, and curricula tailored to the unique requirements of their students. Instead the strategy seems to be that we will turn our heads and shut our minds to the plight of such schools. “We can’t do anything about these schools until someone addresses the problem of poverty,” we tell ourselves.

The overwhelming majority of our elected officials and the powerful interest groups that lobby for what they call radical educational reforms have not taken the time to understand the realities with which these teachers, their schools, and their students must contend. They act on the basis of abstract principles that are as clichéd as our traditional American educational process; a process that has not been significantly altered for decades. It is a process that has chewed up and spit out millions of children, leaving generations of Americans bitter and resentful.

Meanwhile, our government and forces of corporate reform talk about privatization of schools and such business principles as investments, competition, and entrepreneurialism. They push for teacher accountability using annual test scores as if this is leading-edge thinking. The truth is that American industry has, long ago, replaced “end-of-the-production line quality inspections” with quality systems that are integrated within the production or assembly process.

These advocates do all of these things as if their leadership and initiative can magically solve the problems of public education; problems that they do not fully understand.

The worst objective these advocates pursue is separating schools from the communities they exist to serve. One of the primary problems in education is a pervasive sense of hopelessness and powerlessness on the part of Americans who no longer believe in the American dream nor do they see an education as a way out for their children. Separating schools from their communities and its people can only serve to reinforce that sense of powerlessness and hopelessness.

Business principles are needed if we are to reinvent public education but they are not the principles of the board room but rather the principles from operations. They are focus on purpose and customer, structuring resourcing the organization to support its objectives, problem-solving, team building, innovation, appropriate utilization of technology, and performance management.

It is imperative that we abandon our current educational process’s focus on failure. We must teach for mastery of subject matter, not test preparation, and we need to teach children how to be successful. It is only when a child has learned how to be successful that he or she can begin to see how they can control the outcomes in their lives. It is only when young men and women believe they can control the outcomes in their lives that they begin to feel hopeful for a better future and sufficiently powerful to make it happen.

What we need from corporate and government reformers is very simple. We need them to cease and desist. We need them to begin providing positive leadership in reselling the American dream to the people, in all of their diversity. We then we need them to find ways to support rather than subvert local innovation and initiative.