Excerpt #3 from the Preface of Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream

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[Opposite the corporate reformers are] Advocates who support traditional, community-based public education and who oppose the forces of privatization, Common Core, reliance on standardized testing to hold schools and their teachers accountable, expansion of voucher programs and charter schools claim that while our schools are far from perfect, they are not failing. These advocates suggest that the quality of education being provided to American children is higher than it has ever been. They insist that poverty is the biggest problem in public education and that we should attack poverty and the disadvantages it creates for our children while protecting our educational traditions.

The purpose of this book is to show that both sides of this debate are terribly wrong and that both sides grossly misjudge the efficacy of education in America, both public and private. We suggest that both sides misinterpret the role of poverty and the other forces that contribute to the educational failure of an unacceptable number of Twenty-first Century American school children. It is the cultural equivalent of spending all of our resources on new and improved thermometers and fever reducers at the expense of attacking the cause of the elevated temperature. In the interim, the infection festers, unabated, while we poison the educational process with our intransigence.

How our nation responds to these challenges of the Twenty-first Century will determine the future of the American way of life, not to mention the American dream. Parents of children that we now refer to as baby boomers were fortunate to live in the world where there was great clarity with respect to core values, and at a time when the external forces that compete with the influence of parents and families were relatively insignificant. In each succeeding generation, parents have seen diminished clarity with respect to core values while the power and sophistication of external forces have grown, exponentially. Today, in this second decade of the Twenty-first Century, the external forces that compete for the attention of our children are unprecedented and of a power and magnitude that was unimaginable even a decade ago.

That these internal challenges come at a time when emerging economic powers, with laser-like focus, are working to challenge American economic and political supremacy places our future in grave jeopardy. It is vital that Americans understand that competition is a bad thing only for the player who has lost his or her ability to compete. Healthy competition brings out the best of all competitors. If we continue to slog down the same path, the health of our society and our ability to compete effectively will deteriorate at an accelerating pace.

The beauty of our situation as members of an ailing society, however, is that our educational system, both public and private, in addition to being the barometer with which we are able to identify and measure the severity of the crisis, also provides the most viable point of attack in quest of a solution. It is viable, however, only if we come together as one people, in all of our diversity, and work to restore our competitive advantage with the same sense of urgency that our competitors demonstrate. This crisis demands action and meaningful action requires that we challenge our fundamental assumptions and expand the boundaries of conventional wisdom.

Vignette #2 – Fort Wayne, IN – Middle School Social Studies – Substitute Teacher

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The five language arts classes all had a packet of worksheets that they were to work on during class but which were not due until Monday.

For many students, the moment you say something isn’t due until the next day their first reaction is to put off working. “It’s not due today, so I’ll do it later.”

All of these classes required an initial effort to convince them to settle down but once settled they worked well for the entire period. One of the incentives I offer students when there seems to be sufficient work to keep them busy for most of the period, is to promise them five to ten minutes of free time at the end of the period, provided they cooperate. Each of these classes received some free time.

As usual, there were a number of students in each class who did not work very hard but they did, at least, make a show of doing the assignment.

After a great day, the last period was a different story. This particular middle school ends the day with a 25-minute period that is called SSR (Sustained Silent Reading). On this day the students were to finish watching the movie Shrek, which they had begun the previous day.

Problems began as soon as students began arriving.

The telephone began ringing as students arrived and while I was taking the call an argument erupted between two students. One student apparently has a history of problems as he was seated, by himself, at a small table against the front wall. He was a tall, thin youngster who wore big glasses with thick lenses. Not infrequently, students of this ilk are the target for harassment by many of the other students.

I approached the students right away and separated them. The second student was quite angry and did not want to settle down. He insisted that the other boy had thrown his calculator into the trash and he was insisting that the boy dig it out of the tall waste basket. The accused student did not deny that he had tossed the calculator rather he insisted that the incident had begun when the other boy hit him. Several times the second student would say that he was going to get the other boy kicked out of school. He said that one more referral and the boy would be suspended.

As the two would not stop arguing, I took them out in the hall way but, in spite of my efforts, the argument only got louder and more heated. Finally, I sent the second student to the office just to get them separated. I immediately went to the phone to notify the office of my action, explaining that I could not determine who was the instigator but just needed to separate the boys. What I did not explain is that my gut instincts told me that the second boy was harassing the first and that this is probably an ongoing pattern. In the meantime, students were bounding around the classroom engaged in a full menu of horseplay with only a handful seated at their desks. I then began to try to get them in their seats so I could take attendance. Another student had started the DVD player but, although the movie was playing, only a few were watching. Taking attendance was complicated by the fact that the seating chart was full of scratched out names with others inserted and there were few last names. I never did get all of the students in their seats nor did I finish attendance.

By this time one student was chasing another around the classroom. The lead student dived to the floor and the other grabbed his shoe and jerked it off of his foot and tried to throw it into the waste basket. Before I could intervene a handful of other students had joined the fray. As I was attempting to restore order, I heard the telephone ring, which given the noise level in the room was, itself, remarkable. By the time I got to the T.V., which was directly above the telephone, lowered the volume and then picked up the phone, the ruckus throughout the room had escalated.

The telephone call was from another teacher who was attempting to reach the individual for whom I was subbing.
During the call three additional students had joined the two who were chasing and wrestling each other. When I was able to separate the five students who, thankfully, were engaged in rough play rather than actually fighting in anger, I glanced at the clock and it was 2:32. The last period of the day ends at 2:35. It was then that I noticed that a full third of the students were gone. They had taken advantage of the diversion and had left early. It was then that end of the day announcements began, many of which were bus changes. The remaining students, many of whom were heading for the door, paid no attention at all to the announcements. The noise in the room was still so loud it is doubtful that they could have heard the announcements had they tried.

By the time the bell rang, only four students were still in their seats, waiting patiently. Although I was too preoccupied during the abbreviated period to notice, I have no doubt that these same four students sat quietly in their seats for the entire twenty-five minutes of the period. These four pupils are examples of the other heroes in our public school systems. They sit quietly amidst the turmoil, doing their best to follow directions and do their assignments, often unnoticed by their teacher. At the end of the period these same students go on to their next classes where they do the same thing, day after day.

Excerpt # 2 from the Preface of Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream

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Page 10 -12

America’s schools, both public and private, are the grounds upon which a battle is being waged for the very future of the United States and we are losing the battle. Many communities throughout the nation are perceived to have exemplary schools yet in cities across the United States the percentage of students unable to pass state competency exams ranges from twenty to over eighty percent. More often than not, the lowest passage rates are found in urban public schools. While outperforming their urban counterparts; even our best schools, whether public, private, parochial, or charter are not performing well enough to propel the U.S. into the top-twenty list of developed nations with respect to the performance in math and science. That we rank as high as 15th in language literacy is hardly cause for celebration. That China, arguably our biggest competitor in the international marketplace and also our nation’s largest creditor, ranks first in all three categories should be cause for alarm if not outright panic.

The consequence of this systemic indifference is that the number of children exiting our public schools with little in the way of marketable skills and who are functionally illiterate is growing at an untenable rate. Under the misguided belief that greatest problems with public education in America are poverty, bad schools, and bad teachers and in the wake of such federal initiatives as President George W. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB) legislation and President Barack Obama’s “Race to the Top” our educational leaders and policy makers are under great pressure to reverse the declining performance of American school children.

Under the leadership of what are thought to be the best and brightest minds from the world of business and public policy think tanks, and with the backing of billionaires and private foundations we are in the midst of a rush toward privatization of our schools, Common Core, charter schools, holding schools and their teachers accountable on the basis of standardized competency examinations, minimizing if not eliminating the role of teachers unions, and the expansion of voucher programs. With full support of federal and many state governments, the sentiment is that private enterprise can do a better job of educating our children than community-based school corporations.

It is even suggested that, with the application of business principles such privatization can even bring an end to poverty, which is widely believed to be the root cause of the problems of education and almost every other social problem in America.

That poverty is an outcome of the evolution of our free-market economy, along with the federal government’s ineffectual tampering, begs the question of why we would ever think privatized schools will somehow create different outcomes. The one thing we can say with certainty is that free market forces will follow the money. This will remain true whether the marketplace is producing goods and services or educating our children. We can also say with some certainty that there “ain’t no money” in the poorest neighborhoods of urban or rural America.

Opening Paragraphs from the Preface of Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream

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The golden age of the United States of America, the richest and most powerful nation in the history of the world, is nearing an end according to some forecasters of Twenty-first Century trends. The world is in the midst of unprecedented economic, political, cultural, technological, sociological, and ecological changes that will forever transform human society. One of the drivers of American preeminence has been our systems of public education that gave the United States the most well-educated and productive workforce on the planet. As we enter the second decade of the Twenty-first Century, the U.S. is like a professional sports franchise that has seen the quality of its player development program languish over a period of years. That our competitors in the international arena are placing the education of their children at the top of their priority list while the American educational system remains a relic of times past has tragic consequences for Americans and our way of life.

That many of these nations reject the principles of democracy only heightens the magnitude of an already alarming situation. While the American economy is under relentless attack by emerging economies, its system of core values are eroding from within. Culturally, millions of Americans either have become or are becoming disenfranchised. They have lost hope in the American dream, no longer believe they possess control over their own lives and destinies, and no longer believe their government cares what happens to them. The disenfranchised have given up on even the idea of meaningful employment; they are denied access to quality healthcare for themselves and their children; and, they have been chewed up and spit out by the American educational system.

Education, historically viewed as the ticket to the American dream, is no longer relevant to this burgeoning population of our citizens. For these men and women, education has become a ticket to nowhere. As a result, millions of American parents do not teach their children that education is important and do not infuse their children with a moral compass sufficiently strong to withstand the pressure of an ever more powerful peer group. The children of these parents show up at a school that is dreadfully unprepared for them; arrive with little or no motivation to learn; precious little preparation; and, demonstrate no commitment to cooperate with their teachers or abide by rules of behavior. Then, they repeat the cycle, all over again, when they send their own children off to school a generation later.

Excerpts from Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream

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Periodically, we will be using this blog to post excerpts from the book. This first excerpt is represents the first couple of paragraphs taken from the Preface.

Things Positive Leaders Can Do, Part 5 – As an Employee

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This is the fifth in our series of articles about things positive leaders can do to make a difference in the world around them.

Give your best effort each and every day, all day long. Take pride in the work you do regardless of how menial or sophisticated. Focus your mind and your energies at all times on the end-customer who will derive benefit from that which you do whether that is someone outside of your organization or within. Accept as your mission the responsibility for giving that customer the best product or service possible given the resources with which you are provided.

Value your job as an opportunity to contribute something of value to society. Each and every job is part of the fabric that is our socio-economic system. As complicated and remote as it may seem, each job done well, contributes value to the system. In J. D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, Zooey Glass reminds his younger sister Franny of something their eldest brother Seymour said, “do it for the fat lady.”

Seymour’s “fat lady” was a symbolic representation of Jesus Christ. The point Seymour wished to make for his younger siblings was that they should always do and look their best for Christ. Doing so adds an element of beauty to the world. The universe, which is the Creator’s gift to mankind, may be vast and complicated but the contribution of individual men and women is still the primary determinant of the overall quality of life for all creatures.

Think in terms of primitive man’s early days when society was the extended family or tribe. No matter how primitive the community, a clear division of labor existed in which all participants were expected to contribute according their talents and abilities. The whole tribe derived benefit from a job well done and the whole tribe suffered if it was done poorly. Although modern society is complex, things have not changed all that much. What you do is still important to the welfare of the community and it is your responsibility to do it to the best of your ability.

Do not ask “what’s in it for me?” Do not take the attitude that I will do it only when I’m certain of the reward. Do it for the customer who will benefit, whether internal or external. Do it for the community that depends on everyone to do his or her best; do it for your own pride and self esteem. Positive leadership is both life-affirming and self-affirming.

Put your trust in your employer. Yes, there is risk that an employer may take advantage of you, that you may be exploited. There is risk in all of life. Someone has to break the cycle of mistrust, however, so why not let it be you? And, do not be afraid to ask management to put its trust in you.

Do not complain about things you don’t like or that make it more difficult to do your job. Instead, propose a positive alternative. Think through the issue and talk to other people who view the problem from a range of perspectives. Then prepare a brief but simple action proposal and submit it to the appropriate authorities. Do not worry about whether or not it will be approved. Many of your suggestions will be ignored; some, however, will be accepted. Some will be filed away for future reference and will re-surface when the time is ripe. Other proposals will be scorned; and, some will spark a germ of an idea in the mind of someone else and will be a catalyst for change.
Something else will happen, as well, as you develop a pattern of preparing action proposals. If your ideas are positive and practical you will acquire a reputation as a problem-solver, as a positive leader, and as an employee to be listened to and respected. Most important of all, the customer whom you serve will derive real benefit. As this happens you will also earn the respect of your peers who will view you as an individual who can get management to take notice. As a result, people will begin to recognize your leadership. Never under-estimate the power of committed men and women or the power of positive leadership. They can and do change the world! It happens every day, everywhere. You can too!

Talk to people and listen to them. Listen empathically. Smile at them and be friendly. Help people to learn how to do their jobs. Reach out to them. Set a good example. Don’t feel compelled to knuckle under to peer-pressure but instead, stand up for your values and principles.

Be a hero. When we were children we pretended to be heroes who would display our courage under even the most trying and dangerous circumstances. The workforce daily presents opportunities for heroism and the world needs you every bit as desperately today as in wartime. And, the benefit to be derived from your leadership is vital to our society. So go ahead! Be a hero! The worst thing that can happen to you as a result of your courage is that a few individuals with little minds and weak spines may make snide remarks. They are inconsequential. It is heroes that the world needs so earnestly.

Work hard, be honest, stay late, volunteer for the tough assignments, innovate, streamline, establish a new standard, communicate with management, demonstrate your loyalty, say what needs to be said even in the face of danger. Have strength and courage. Dedicate yourself to doing the best job you can and expect – even demand – the same from those around you. Our entire society, our way of life, is threatened by a lack of commitment and heroism; by the unwillingness of men and women to stand up for what is right and to give unselfishly of their talents and skills. You can make a difference! It is your duty to yourself, to your children, and to your children’s children. It is also your duty to your sense of honor. It is this kind of effort and courage that made America the beacon of hope for the world and it is this type of courage and effort that will revitalize and re-energize our nation, today and in the future.

Chapter 5 – Journalled review of Diane Ravitch’s Reign of Error. “The Facts about Test Scores.”

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In Chapter 5 of her monumental work, Reign of Error, Diane Ravitch offers the results of The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) assessments as compelling evidence that “students in American public schools today are studying and mastering far more difficult topics in science and mathematics than their peers forty to fifty years ago.” On the basis of this evidence she believes that “Test scores are at their highest point ever recorded” and, therefore, claims that “the educational system is broken and obsolete” are simply not true. It may be true that scores are higher than ever for the students at the elite end of the academic continuum but it ignores the stark reality that is the performance of the majority of American school children.

It is somewhat ironic that Ravitch is critical of the value of standardized testing in assessing the efficacy of public education on the one hand but cites NAEP results as evidence of the health of public education in America on the other. Her argument is that the NAEP assessment process is a different sort of testing and is far more meaningful that they typical standardized competency examinations used in states throughout the U.S. About this she is correct and we will examine the NAEP assessments and their results, shortly.

It is also important that we examine the context in which Ravitch’s arguments are made. Like most educators, Ravitch is frustrated at the savagery with which our schools and teachers are being blamed for the perceived failure of public education in America. Being attacked, even when criticisms are justified, is far more effective at putting educators on the defensive than it is as a catalyst for meaningful educational reform. When the criticisms are unfair and based upon claims that are unfounded or prejudicial, the intensity of one’s defensive posture is magnified.

As we have said throughout this “journaled review of Ravitch’s Reign of Error,” she is right to challenge the basis for such claims and also the solutions proffered by the “evil corporate reformers.” Where she is wrong is to insist that the documented improvements in the performance of our public schools, as measured by NAEP, are acceptable and that they prove that public education in America is not failing. We would suggest that the NAEP results prove rather clearly that public education is, indeed, failing.

Let us digress for a few paragraphs and take a look at the NAEP assessment process. Ravitch is correct that the NAEP assessment process is a meaningful tool and that the NAEP, which is part of the US Department of Education, and its independent governing board, the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB) are a highly reputable, bipartisan body comprised of educators, elected officials, business people, and members of the general public.

The NAEP measures student performance in reading, math, and other subjects over time and reports results in two ways. The first is by scale scores, ranging from zero to 500 which reflect what students know and can do, without making judgments about whether the performance is good or bad. To use the vernacular, the results “are what they are.”
The second component is that Achievement Levels have been established in an attempt to put the raw results into some sort of meaningful context. It is acknowledged that these achievement levels are somewhat arbitrary and have created opportunities for over-interpretation.

On the NAEP assessments, an “advanced” level of achievement denotes “superior performance at each grade assessed.”
“Proficient” is defined, by the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB) as “solid academic performance for each grade assessed. This is a very high level of academic achievement. 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 NAGB defines “Basic” as “partial mastery of prerequisite knowledge and skills that are fundamental for proficient work at each grade assessed.”

The NAGB “believes, however, that all students should reach the Proficient level; the Basic level is not the desired goal, but rather represents partial mastery that is a step toward Proficient.”

“Below Basic” represents students who are unable to demonstrate even partial mastery of the work at each grade assessed.

We must maintain an awareness that these achievement levels are determined by the judgment of a panel of people on the basis of the performance of actual testers using percentiles. In effect, we are superimposing a distribution curve over the scores in order to make it more meaningful for us. As we shall see, later, the results tell us how much students know but it does not even begin to tell us where they should be performing at a given grade.

We can draw meaningful conclusions from the scores that will help us chart a course for the future, however and we will discuss this in some detail.

An important distinction with respect to NAEP results is that the scale scores of 0-500 change very little over time and actually show how students are moving up the scale, i.e. from the 4th grade assessment to the 8th grade assessment. In essence, the assessment shows how much kids know and can utilize at a given point in time. It might be helpful to think of it as a continuum along which students move as they gain increasing levels of mastery over the subject matter with no ceiling as to how far they can progress other than topping out at a score of 500.

Now, we want to compare the NAEP assessment process with state competency exams and we will use Indiana’s ISTEP+ simply because of the author’s relative level of familiarity with it.

Right out of the gate, be aware that we are going to over-simplify this process but it is the logic of the process that we want to illustrate.

On ISTEP+ for Grade 3 Math, for example, there is an expectation that a given number of areas of content will have been presented to the students by the time the ISTEP+ for that grade level is scheduled to be administered. The primary question the ISTEP+ is designed to measure is whether or not students “have learned what we expect them to know.” Specifically, what they are expected to know is defined within the context of state standards. What is not obvious from the published data are such questions as “How were passing scores determined?” In other words, how high was the bar set? For example is passing 60 percent? Eighty percent?

So, in the case of NAEP we are assessing how much a child of a given age knows and can utilize, without regard for how his or her classmates might be doing. For the ISTEP+ we seem more concerned about how a given student’s performance compares to the performance of his or her classmates.

Returning to our discussion of how NAEP results are to be interpreted, Ravitch disagrees with those who “assume that students who were not “Proficient” on the NAEP were “below grade level”.” “That is wrong” Ravitch insists and she suggests that having “76 percent” or some comparable percentage of the student population at “basic or above” is something to be touted.

I tend to agree with the NAGB that “Basic” is not our desired goal and that all students should reach the “Proficient” level of achievement, which is a point at which they have “demonstrated competency over challenging subject matter. . . .” and can apply “that knowledge to real-world situations. . . .”

Think about the difference, here. Ravitch is stating that the NAEP results in which 71 percent of eighth grade students are at “Basic or above” is validation that our schools are not in a state of crisis.

I would suggest just the opposite, and the NAEP would seem to agree, that it is clearly unacceptable that only 44 percent of eighth grade math students are “Proficient or Advanced.” Why would we ever think our job is done when any student has achieved only “partial mastery of prerequisite knowledge and skills that are fundamental. . .” to achieving proficiency rather than “Proficiency” itself? Why would we ever think it acceptable that 56 percent of eighth grade math students are not at a point where they have mastered the material sufficiently to apply that knowledge to real world problem-solving?

And, let us not forget about the 29 percent of eighth grade math students who have yet to demonstrate even partial mastery of the material. The two realities taken together spell crisis in this author’s mind in bold upper-case letters.

Other points of concern include:

The fact that we have no sense at all about whether or not the bar has been set sufficiently high;
The fact that only 6 to 8 percent are performing at an advanced level;
The fact that the variance between the 10th percentile and the 90th percentile is a cavernous 94 points (for eighth grade math students); and
The fact that the performance gaps between white students and their black and Hispanic classmates remains at an unconscionably high rate and that closing the gap from 32 points to 25 points for African-American students over a twenty plus year period is an accomplishment about which we should feel embarrassed rather than proud.

In American educational thinking, we are caught up in the idea that only 6 to 8 percent of students can be A students. In the business world, no production manager would be content to have such disparity of performance. The expectation would be that 75 percent of more of employees are working at the highest level of productivity and that those employees who are not are receiving aggressive remedial attention.

What we can say with some certainty, when talking about American public education, is that few if any students are performing at the highest level of which they are capable and the vast majority are nowhere close to achieving their potential. Helping individual students reach the highest tiers of their potential should always be the goal of our schools and teachers and we should not be squandering a single second worrying about whether Child “A” is keeping up with his or her classmates.

The NAEP Assessment tools appear to offer a high level of utility in judging the efficacy of our systems of public education. What we need to focus on is closing the gaps and raising the bar.
Let us not forget that the biggest fallacy in over-reliance on standardized testing, of any kind, as the ultimate measure of accountability for schools and teachers is that schools and teachers are only a small part of the equation for academic excellence.

To suggest that our current level of achievements provide evidence that no crisis exists in American public education is nothing short of absurd.

Charter Schools Are Not the Solution to Public Education in the US

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While I would enthusiastically support the concept of creating a charter school to test a new instructional model and would certainly approve the use of incentives to encourage families to place their children in that school, that is not the way charter schools are being utilized here in Fort Wayne, Indiana nor, I suspect, in most other communities in the US.

The Charter schools with which I am familiar are might posture themselves as innovative but, in reality, they are little more than lifeboats floated out into the murky sea of public education to give the few families that are so inclined a place to which they can escape from the public schools.

There are insufficient numbers of these lifeboats to accept more than a miniscule percentage of the total population of children who are in the figurative “damaged ships” that are our urban public schools; thus, such schools can have no more than a marginal impact on the challenges facing public education in America.

The fact that we create these avenues of escape for the most motivated families and their children and still expect the teachers of the abandoned school to improve scores on standardized competency examinations is absurd. Charter schools may be a lifeline for a small number of families but they are a virtual sentence of death, or at least imprisonment, to the abandoned schools and to their students and educators.

The message this sends to the community at large is “we cannot do anything to fix our most challenged public schools so let us, at the very least, help a few families and their children escape.

The practice of using school vouchers is also creating its own series of adverse impacts. Not only do vouchers drain scarce tax dollars out of the accounts of our most challenged schools, those dollars are not creating outcomes that are significantly better for the students as, at least locally, the performance of charter schools on competency exams is disappointing. Worse yet, is that a portion of the tax revenue siphoned out of the budgets of our public schools is being utilized for purposes other than the education of our children.

I know, personally, of two Catholic parishes in Fort Wayne that have found vouchers to be a profitable enterprise and have used the revenue to pay off the parishes debts to the Dioceses or to address non-school related financial concerns while requests for school related uses of the funds have been denied. Now that this practice has come to light, that unfortunate and inappropriate practice will be discouraged, hopefully, if not discontinued.

We say that our purpose is to fix public education and that is expressed in our collective mission statements. Our behavior suggests that we have given up on at least our urban public schools as lost causes.

The fundamental problem with education reform is that it amounts to little more than tinkering with obsolete educational processes that contributes, greatly, to the failure of its students and the overwhelming majority of educational reformers, “corporate reformers” or “traditional,” seem oblivious to this reality. No matter how many times we keep re-shuffling the same deck we will continue to get the same 52 cards. Unfortunately, they are the wrong cards.

If the reader can allow his or her mind to consider, imagine that we have landed on another planet with a couple of million families and we want to set up schools for our children. If we were to take advantage of this unique opportunity and design and educational process from scratch, would it appear anything like public education looks in the United States of America, today? If we were to apply any amount of imaginative, exponential thinking the answer would be that the system we would create would bear little resemblance to what we have here and now.

The saddest fact of all is that reinventing our educational systems and processes would not be all that difficult if only we would open our hearts and minds to a new way of thinking about education. With but a few exceptions, most of the things we would do differently would require nothing more than a majority vote of the local school district.

I am proposing that we apply a systems-thinking approach utilizing present day business principles to reinvent education in America. I am not talking about such business principles of the corporate board room as financial incentives, competition, privatization and entrepreneurialism. In fact, these are the exact wrong business principles.

The business principles to which I refer are the principles learned in an operational setting such has: focus on one’s customer; identifying and focus on one’s mission, structuring the operation to meet its objectives, problem-solving, teamwork, integrating quality assessments into the learning process, and giving the people on the production line (teachers and administrators) the tools and resources they need to do the best job of which they are capable.
In my book, Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge for Twenty-First Century America, I offer a comprehensive blueprint for change.

My request to educators and reformers alike is: let us pause for a moment, clear our minds, and listen to the ideas of someone with a fresh perspective. What do we have to lose other than a few minutes of our time? This is something else smart businesspeople have learned. They often seek out consultants with a broader perspective to challenge their assumptions and paradigms. They even pay for this service, which is the best indicator of its perceived value.

Things Positive Leaders Can Do, Part 4 – Be Active in Your Community

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How much time and energy one devotes to one’s community will vary greatly according to the time of one’s life. What is important is that each of us acknowledges a responsibility to our community, to society, and to the world as a whole.

Remember to think about things in the context of our most basic values:

1. That every human being on the face of the Earth is a child of Creation and deserves our respect and concern,
2. That the Universe is the Creator’s gift to us, and
3. That every job well done, great or small, adds an element of beauty to the world.

We have an unyielding obligation to cherish life and the Universe. Everything we do must be judged in this context:
“Does it or does it not affirm life.”

We must:

• Respect all life and each and every human being,
• Reject racism,
• Conserve and protect the Earth’s resources:
• Participate in our government at the local, state, and federal level by:
• Help our neighbors
• Take care of our property
• Support the less fortunate with our energy, compassion, time and money
• Support our economy by doing our job to the best of our ability
• Give something back to our community

None of us can afford to live in isolation or to abdicate responsibility for the world and its challenges. Whether we accept it or not, the problems of the world will have an impact on our lives and on the lives of our loved ones. None of the world’s problems can be effectively resolved without the help of each of us. None of us are insignificant and each effort on the part of every individual makes a difference.

Remember the thoughts of Jane Goodall,

“The most important thing people can do for the future of the world is to realize that what they do matters.”

Every child that grows up hungry, angry, ignorant, illiterate, and estranged from the mainstream of our society threatens the safety and quality of life of the entire community. These children are our responsibility and the sooner we acknowledge that responsibility the better our chances of making a positive impact. If every gainfully employed man or woman would reach back to help one disadvantaged child, there would not be enough disadvantaged children to go around.

Most of us look out at the immense problems in the world and feel overwhelmed and powerless. This is a normal human feeling but it is just that—a feeling. We are not powerless and we need not feel overwhelmed. We have the power to make a difference if only we will do whatever is in our power to do; if only we will take the lead as a positive leader.
Give of yourself fully and practice the principles of positive leadership.

Former President George H. W. Bush’s 1988 campaign strategy of promoting “a thousand points of light” was an important acknowledgement that our government cannot solve all of our problems. In fact, just the opposite is true. More often than not our government tends to create more problems than it solves. When government attempts to solve our problems for us it tends to create dependencies rather than foster both independence and interdependence. The best solutions to our problems rest in the hands of individual men and women, acting in concert with their friends and neighbors, and acting on principle.

You can make a difference. More importantly, you must make a difference. The whole world is counting on you. Be a positive leader!

Response to the Column on Culture and Poverty by Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post

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Bravo for the rejection, by @eugenerobinson of the @washingtonPost, of Rep. Paul Ryan’s assertion that culture is to blame for poverty in the U.S. It is what I have been trying to say in my book, Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream, but Robinson has said it better. Such proclamations do, indeed, provide an excuse for doing nothing. Such thinking also provides fodder for corporate reformers of education who want to privatize our schools and minimize the amount of influence a local community will have over the schools their children must attend.

Ironically, when traditional educators challenge such corporate reform agendas they make the same excuses by claiming that poverty is the cause of the problems with public education in America and, yes, I know this sounds counter-intuitive. Blaming poverty gives educators license to lower their expectations because “there really isn’t anything of significance we can do until our government effectively addresses the problems of poverty.”

I wish I could go back and add Robinson’s comment on culture, in the section of my book where I say that the problem with education in America is not poverty, it is the hopelessness that so often accompanies poverty. That hopelessness and powerlessness also contribute to a cultural devaluation of education on the part of a growing population of Americans; citizens who have become effectively disenfranchised and have given up hope that a quality education can create a better life for their children.

I wish I had done a better job of saying that the problems of poverty and educational failure are not the result of the many subcultures of American society; whether African-American, Hispanic-American, or other ethnic groups.

Why can we not recognize that this cultural diversity is not a weakness of American society but rather a strength that adds rich textures, flavors, sounds, and perspectives to a pluralistic democracy.

Blaming poverty for the problems in education, like blaming culture for the existence of poverty, is convoluted logic that blinds us to pragmatic solutions and is nothing more than an excuse for continuing to make the same mistakes we have been repeating for generations. Until we change this thinking our schools will continue to chew up and spit out huge numbers of American school children.

Even though this cultural devaluation is prevalent in many African-American communities in cities and poor rural communities throughout the U.S., it transcends race and exists anywhere that people have given up hope and no longer believe that they can exert control over the outcomes in their lives.

Poverty and the problems with education in America are symptoms of the same pathology as is the cancerous, cultural devaluation of education. They are all functions of hopelessness and powerlessness. The operative question becomes, “why don’t we attack hopelessness relentlessly.”

In my book, I suggest that education not only provides a barometer with which we can measure the severity of the problem, education also provides our society with the best opportunity to alter this reality. Make no mistake, if we continue to allow the spread of hopelessness it has ominous implications for the future of America. This is particularly true given the emergence of whole new economies that are challenging American supremacy in the dynamic and highly competitive world marketplace of the Twenty-first Century.

We must transform the educational process in America from a system that is focused on failure to one that acknowledges the cavernous disparity with respect to the level of motivation and preparation that young children carry with them on their first day of school. We must have a system that puts teachers in a position to help their students learn how to be successful rather than the current system that sets up huge numbers of children for failure and humiliation. And, then, we wonder why they begin to lose hope that an education provides a pathway to better opportunities.

We must urge Americans of all backgrounds and economic circumstances to believe that we are anything but powerless to change the outcomes that flow from our society’s shortcomings.

Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge for Twenty-First Century America, offers a blueprint for change that outlines thirty-three specific action strategies for transforming American public education and also for infusing hope and faith in the American dream in the hearts and minds of every American man, woman, and child.