Who is @melhawk46 and What Is His Agenda?

After a brief respite to spend time with my four grandchildren, it is back to work.

In response to my last blog post, Twitter user and educator, @thenerdyteacher, reacted negatively to some of the points I made in the article. He wrote:

“If you wanted to say it was something learned at school because of the system that accepts “C” as good enough, that would be one thing. Teachers do not teach mediocrity. They push students to do their best.”

And, of course he is correct, teachers do not set a goal for their students to be mediocre. They do their best to help their students do their best, to the extent the education process allows.

It occurred to me that @thenerdyteacher had not been a part of an ongoing conversation I have been having with educators, on Twitter. Had he been involved, he would know that expressing concern that “the system accepts a C as good enough” is exactly my point; a point I have been making for over five years. I would add, “the system also accepts Ds and Fs.”

For the record, I believe teachers are unsung American heroes and that blaming them for the problems in public education is like blaming soldiers for the war they were asked to fight. The problems in public education are not the teachers, rather they are the result of an education process that has grown obsolete. The education process at work in American public schools impedes rather than enhances the ability of teachers to respond to the unique needs of their students.

Ask yourself a simple question. Did someone sit down and design the education process (the process by which we teach students in our schools, today) because it was perceived to be the best way to teach our children or, did it evolve over time?

If it evolved over time, why not reinvent the process so that it is specifically designed to provide the best way to teach our society’s children in this 21st Century? The education process is no different than any other service-delivery or production process. It is a logical construct created to produce certain outcomes. Just because the existing process has been in place for decades does not mean it cannot be changed.

In case you are wondering, I am categorically opposed to the education reform movement with its focus on “Choice.” I believe the education reform movement places the future of public education and community schools at grave risk, making it imperative that we go back to the drawing board and reinvent our obsolete education process as if the future of our society depends on it; because it does.

Charter schools are not the solution to preparing millions of American children for leading our nation through the challenges the balance of this 21st Century will present for two fundamental reasons. The first is that most charter schools rely on the same education process used in the public schools they are intended to replace and, routinely, prove incapable of outperforming those schools. Moving kids to a different building with different teachers changes nothing. Different teachers and facilities are not the solution; what matters is what we do in those buildings—what matters is how we teach.

The second reason is that simple logistics make it impossible for charter schools to fulfill their “professed” promise that they will ensure the highest possible quality of education for all children. We cannot solve the problems of millions of children with a handful of charter schools, scattered here and there, serving a few hundred students at a time. We already have school buildings in every community in the U.S., full of students, and staffed with teachers trained in our best colleges and universities. This is where the challenges lie, and it is with those same teachers and in those same buildings that they must be met.

It is my assertion that no child should be allowed to fail. Our colleague, @thenerdyteacher, commented that “Failure is good for students as they learn new things.” I choose to distinguish between failure and mistakes and I believe our colleague would concur. We all make mistakes and we all experience disappointing outcomes. These are not failures and do not become a failure until we throw up our hands in defeat and stop trying. When teachers are required, by the education process, to record an F or other low score and move a class on to the next lesson, knowing there are students who are not ready, the system is forcing them to accept failure or less than a student’s best.

For these students, this is not an isolated event rather one that will be repeated lesson after lesson, semester after semester, and year after year. The longer it goes on the more improbable the odds that these kids will ever overcome their disadvantage. Kids are learning, but they are not learning the correct lessons; they are not learning how to create success for themselves.

Teachers do their best to help kids learn from their mistakes. At the end of a lesson, teachers take as much time as they can to help students who are struggling and are not ready to move on to the next lesson, but that only works when the number of struggling students is small. When the percentage of struggling students in a teacher’s classroom grows to 25, 50, 75 percent or more, the amount of time the education process gives teachers to help these kids is insufficient. There is no policy that tells teachers not to help these students, but circumstances often make it impossible. The pressure to move kids down the path established by academic standards is relentless. This arbitrary schedule is created, not to serve the best interests of our students, but to serve organizational efficiency and administrative convenience.

None of this is the fault of public school teachers and administrators but they are the only people in a position to do anything about it.

State legislators do not understand it and the powerful forces that influence them understand it even less. If we wait for people outside the field of public education to solve the problem, nothing will happen. It is only when we accept responsibility for a problem that we begin to acquire the power to change it. It is time for public school educators to accept responsibility, not for the blame, but for finding a solution. And, yes, I understand that this is easier said than done and this is where I come in. Whether what I am offering is an end-solution or a catalyst, it has been motivated by nothing other than the interests of our nation’s children, their teachers, schools, and communities.

If they are to learn at their optimal level, what students need is an model built on the essential variables of the education equation =

Warm, nurturing relationships with teachers for a sustained period
+ they need to start with what they know
+ they need our patient attention to give them sufficient time to learn from their mistakes
+ they need to build on their successes
+ they need the support of their parents.

Garnering the support of parents is a challenge and not something over which teachers have direct control. Providing the first four of the essential variables in the education equation, however, creates the best opportunity to pull parents into the process as partners, sharing responsibility for the education of their children. Success is contagious even for those sitting on the sidelines.

The existing education process does not ensure that teachers have the time and environment to form those important, sustained relationships; it does not ensure that we begin teaching each child at the unique point on the academic preparedness continuum where we find them when they arrive at our door; it does not make giving students as much time as they need to learn from their mistakes an over-riding priority; it does not allow all students to build on their success because one cannot build on success until one begins to experience it; and, the education process does not make parental support a priority and is not designed to facilitate the formation of such relationships.

Teachers do the best they can to make these things happen despite the education process but both teachers and their students deserve more. What teachers, students, and parents deserve and what school corporations must be compelled to do is provide an education process that is designed to facilitate the education equation. They require a process that is molded around the work that teachers, students, and parents must do together, much in the way the cockpit of an airplane is molded around the needs of a pilot.

I understand that many teachers reading this post are proud of the work they have done and of the success of their students and they should be proud. It took sustained effort to achieve that success within the context of a process that does not make it easy.

What teachers across the spectrum of public education must be willing to acknowledge, however, is the process does not work for every child, for every teacher, and in every school. And, if it does not work for every child it is not good enough. Every child counts or none of them count.

What all public-school educators must do is be willing to step back and think about how you would structure the education process if you were starting from scratch. Over the past dozen years, that is what I have been doing by applying my experience working with kids, leading people and organizations, finding innovative solutions, and applying what I learned over my ten years as a substitute teacher. I simply went back to the drawing board.

It may seem arrogant to say it, but I believe everything I have done and learned over the last 50 years has prepared me for this purpose: to change the way we teach children in order to ensure that every child learns as much as they are able, at their own best pace rather than an arbitrary schedule, and are driven by their own unique interests and potential.

I ask you to take the time to think about a new model designed to support teachers and students as they go about their important work. I am also asking for help in finding at least one superintendent willing to test my model in one of his or her district’s struggling elementary schools. The outcomes in these schools have not changed in years and they are unacceptable. That means we must try something other than what we have always done. My model can be found at https://melhawkinsandassociates.com/education-model-white-paper/

For those who would like to have a better understanding of why I believe I am uniquely qualified to introduce a new education model, I offer the short bio, below.

After a career that included: a summer running a churchyard playground and game room on Germantown Avenue in Philadelphia, in 1966, for the purpose of keeping teens and preteens away from gang recruiters; 9 years as a juvenile probation officer working with a similar population of kids; thirty years in organizational leadership positions and as an independent consultant, I left my consulting business to pursue a lifelong dream of writing books.

During a ten-year period from 2002 through 2011, during which I wrote 3 books, I worked as a substitute teacher for my local public-school district. This was the same district my three kids had attended.

During this same period, and up to present day, I also administer the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) to potential enlistees in the Armed Services and, also, to high school students as part a Career Exploration Program developed by the U.S. Department of Defense. I have Masters’ degrees in both Education (psychology) and Public Affairs (public management).

Among my specialties as an organization executive and as a consultant had been to help organizations address their dissatisfaction with the unacceptable outcomes of their production and service-delivery processes. I did this by conducting an organizational assessment and then applying the principles of systems thinking, positive leadership, and operations management to reinvent the process to produce the desired outcomes. My work was guided by a simple axiom I have observed in operations management that:

“If a process continues to produce disappointing outcomes no matter how hard people work or how qualified they are, then the process is flawed and must be replaced or reinvented.”

In her book, The Flat World and Education: How America’s Commitment to Equity Will Determine our Future (2010) Linda Darling-Hammond made a similar point:

“A business world maxim holds that ‘every organization is perfectly structured to get the results it gets.’ A corollary is that substantially different results require organizational redesign, not just incentives for staff to try harder with traditional constraints.”

It is time to go back to the drawing board and reinvent the education process to ensure the success of every child.

What I proceeded to do, first, in my book, Reinventing Education Hope, and the American Dream: the Challenge for Twenty-first Century America (2013), and in my blog Education, Hope, and the American Dream, and through tweets and other forms of communication is clarify the mission or purpose of education; identify the key variables in the education equation; and, then design an education model that insures that every child receives the time, relationships, and support they need to learn as much as they are able, at their own best pace. No child should be pushed ahead to keep up with classmates and neither is it acceptable to ask other students to slow down and wait for classmates to catch up to them.

My book is now over five years old and I have learned a great deal since then, thanks to the many professional educators with whom I have had the opportunity to converse. I am working on an updated version to incorporate what I have learned, and to alter things I wrote, then, that I no longer believe to be true. I am striving to complete the book before the end of the summer.

In the interim, I have published an updated version of my education model and a white paper. The latter provides the logical foundation for the model and an overview of the other findings and conclusions from the book. The reader is encouraged to check out the white paper and model at https://melhawkinsandassociates.com/education-model-white-paper/

My blog now has over 200 articles written about the challenges facing public education and can be accessed at https://melhawkinsandassociates.com/blog/

You are invited to share your comments and criticisms through the blog or Twitter. I also encourage you to subscribe to my blog, and to share this message with your colleagues. However well your own school may be doing, I know you all share grave concerns about schools and students that struggle and I know you are concerned about the future of community public schools. This is an opportunity to make a difference that extends beyond the walls of your classrooms and schools.

Separate and Apart – Again and Again

What happened in Dallas will happen again. These acts are symptomatic of the degree of separation between us. Although interactions between police and African-Americans bring the matter into the sharpest focus, these acts represent only the surface of the deep, dark place where racism resides in the collective consciousness of the American people. It is just one of the divisive issues that creates sufficient anger, resentment, and mistrust that so many Americans want more authoritarian leadership and are willing to support Donald Trump for President. It is an American tragedy.

We have also witnessed, in Dallas, an expression of grief that is shared by well-meaning Americans of every race, color and creed. We saw protesters from each side of an issue reaching out to embrace and comfort one another. This is a sign of hope. For healing to occur we, first, must grieve but we cannot legislate an end to the racism that exists in the hearts of man and neither can we wish it away. If we want a future in which all are truly equal, we must address the conditions, other than the color of our skin, that separate us as a people and that lead to police and African-American confrontations.

More often than at any time in our history, white Americans see well-educated African-Americans move into their neighborhoods and rub elbows with them on the job. Coming in contact with these black neighbors and co-workers begins to produce subtle shifts in the attitudes and perceptions of white Americans. We also see more inter-racial friendships and dating. It is hard to be prejudiced against a people who look like someone you have loved.

For many white Americans, however, their core values do not change. Instead, they carve out space in their mental view for the exceptions that these neighbors and co-workers represent. Yes, “he’s black but he’s a good worker or a good neighbor.” When these same white Americans see stories about drive-by shootings, black men arrested and sent to prison, or even when they pass judgment on the contents of a welfare mother’s grocery cart, all of their deeply-rooted stereotypes are re-confirmed.

We must challenge our fundamental assumptions about our society and about the way we educate our children. Poor people do not choose to live in economically depressed neighborhoods in America; they live there because it is the only place they can afford to live. They lack the knowledge and skills needed to qualify for good jobs and that give them choices of where and how to live. Poor Americans, whatever the color of their skin, lack such choices because the educational process at work in American public schools is neither structured, tasked, nor equipped to teach disadvantage kids.

We are not powerless to alter this reality. Solving the problems of poverty and academic failure are possible but only if we are able to imagine a different reality. They are simple human engineering problems that will yield to the fertile imagination of the human mind.

People will remain poor for as long as we continue to defend a system of public education that consistently fails the poor and the disadvantaged, with African-American children affected the most. In spite of all the talk about education reform in the U.S., we do nothing to help disadvantaged kids but try to entice families away from our most challenged public schools with charter schools and vouchers or we tinker with a flawed educational process with one meaningless, education reform after another. We fail to see that incrementalism has the same destructive power as erosion and that it is subverting the very purpose of public education.

If we cannot address the problems in our public schools, the social crises these problems create will continue to prompt people to reach out for a more authoritarian leadership and Donald Trump for President might be the least of our fears. The problems in our society are functions of the choices we make and if we want better outcomes we must be prepared to make better choices. Those choices must begin with how our public schools respond to the challenge of disadvantaged kids.

A Challenge to American Teachers: Positive Action Trumps Negative Reaction and is Desperately Needed in the Arena of Educational Reform!

While there are few things as satisfying as a well-conceived and well-timed complaint about the injustice of this or that, there are also few things that are more unproductive. Right now, our American system of public education is at a crisis point. It is because they believe there is an absence of effective leadership in education that business and political leaders have entered the fray and are using all of their power and influence to fix what they believe to be a dysfunction educational system.

If that were not sufficiently scary, these corporate and government reformers are proposing what they believe to be sweeping educational reforms without taking the time to understand the problems of public education in America, in all of its complexity. They believe that if only we would run our schools as effectively as they run their businesses it would transform public education.

These powerful Americans are charging forward on what I like to call “the runaway train of misguided educational reforms” and the train is racing toward disaster for American public schools and for American children.

All the complaining that teachers, other professional educators and their advocates have done has had no perceptible impact on slowing, let alone stopping these misguided reforms and that reality will not change no matter how high we raise our voices.

One of the principles of positive leadership, as outlined in my book The Difference Is You: Power Through Positive Leadership is that effective people rarely complain. Instead, they propose positive solutions designed to produce better outcomes. Like the laws of physics, the powerful force of misguided educational reforms can only be countered by a positive force of equal or greater power.

I call upon educators at every level to come together in support of a blue print to reinvent education in America. It is a blue print that takes the time to understand how children learn and what teachers need in order to teach effectively. It is a proposal designed to give teachers the resources that they need to do the best job of which they are capable. It is a proposal to shift the focus away from standardized testing and away from failure to one in which children can learn how to be successful and how to master subject matter in a positive, nurturing environment. It is a plan to pull parents into the educational process as full partners with their children’s teachers because it is only through such partnerships that the motivation to learn can be inspired, nurtured, and sustained.  Finally, it is a blue print for strengthening rather than severing the critical bond between schools and the communities they exist to serve.

This blue print for transforming education in America and countering the misguided efforts of corporate and government reformers is presented in my book, Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge for Twenty-First Century America. It is a proposal that lays out a very specific plan of action with 33 action strategies to give our nation’s children the future that they deserve and that our nation so desperately needs.

Professional educators at every level and venue are urged to take the time to review this positive proposal for action.

Part 7 of the chapter by chapter review of “Reign of Error” by Diane Ravitch – What about PISA?

Whether or not Ravitch is correct about the validity or significance of PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) and other international student assessments, and she may well be, it is still embarrassing when we argue that the test itself was biased, unfair, or otherwise flawed whenever the results do not suit us.

The most important thing we need to learn from PISA is something that no one seems to recognize or acknowledge. The very existence of PISA and its assessment process signals a desire on the part of other nations to demonstrate that they can compete.

Dr. Ravitch may also be correct that we have no significant enemies that threaten to conquer us. What we do have, however, is a growing number of significant challengers in the “competition” that we know as the world marketplace. These nations are committed to competing with us economically and even surpassing us as the preeminent economic power. There is little evidence to show that we take this competition seriously. Most Americans seem to feel that we are somehow invulnerable to such challenges.

We need to remind every American citizen that our nation did not acquire its status as the richest and most powerful nation in the world as a birthright and we cannot sustain it because we feel entitled. That status was achieved because we had the best educated and the most productive workforce in the world. As we speak, other nations are working hard to change that reality and we need to be cognizant of the zeal of their efforts and commitment.

Competition is a bad thing only for those people who are unprepared or unable to compete. In the case of the U.S., it has been a long time since we have been sufficiently challenged that we have felt any need to work hard to sustain our advantage. That reality has been and is being altered irrevocably and we must respond. It is imperative that we view this challenge not as a threat but rather as an opportunity to expand our limits and raise our expectations.

Whatever one’s opinion about PISA, it is only one small piece of a growing body of evidence that the American education system is in crisis and that our national well-being is at risk. It is ironic that the only people who seem to recognize the risks are people who have no clue what to about it while the people who have the expertise to address the problems of American public education seem to be in denial and are more focused on defending their profession.

Far more important to us than PISA, the other evidence seems, to this writer, compelling and overwhelming:

1) According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, the NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) results show that only 40 percent of American eighth graders are “proficient or above” in math. The achievement levels that have been defined by NAEP are “Below Basic,” “Basic,” “Proficient,” and “Advanced.” (The reader is referred to the May 13th segment of our chapter by chapter review of Reign of Error, explaining why we reject Dr. Ravitch’s assertion that the benchmark should “basic or above” in favor of the far higher threshold of “Proficient or above.”) Our nation’s NAEP results for eighth grade reading, science, and writing were 31, 30, and 33 percent respectively. I don’t see how anyone can feel good about the fact that only 30 to 40 out of every 100 children have developed sufficient mastery of the subject matter to be able to apply what they have learned to real-world situations.

2) The performance gap between white and minority students, whether measured by NAEP or state competency exams, clearly indicates that the educational needs of minority children are not being effectively addressed in American public schools. Saying we have closed the gap a few percentage points over the past decade does not even approach acceptable. NAEP results show that 44 percent of white kids scored a Proficient or better compared to only about 15 percent of African-American students and 20 percent of Hispanics. This is an untenable situation and we dare not rest until we have altered this reality.

3) Employers throughout the U.S. are frustrated that young people entering the work force are poorly prepared to do the jobs for which they are being hired. (See the May 19th column by Paul Wyche of the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette headlined: “The Young and Unreliable: Millennials’ work ethic appalls employers, who can’t find skilled help”) As a result, employers must incur significant costs to assess and provide remedial training for huge numbers of new hires.

4) The frustration in public school classrooms in communities throughout the U.S., on the part of teachers who must devote significant time and energy to maintain order – the lack of which deters millions of other students from taking full advantage of their opportunity for a quality education.

5) The burgeoning population of American parents who have lost hope and faith in the American Dream and no longer view an education as a ticket to a better life for their children.

The author’s personal experience as an ASVAB test administrator for the Department of Defense validates the existence of a crisis in education. Let there be no doubt that the military service will be only one of many doors of opportunity to close on young men and women unable to meet minimum eligibility requirements for enlistment in the Armed Services of the U.S.

Ravitch offers an eloquent argument for rejecting the focus on standardized testing, whether international student assessments or state competency exams, and preserving the educational traditions that contributed the U.S.’s rise to the top.

Yes, what we have been doing has brought us to where we are today but that does not mean it will take us where we need to go from here. Let us not forget that this same educational process that has gotten us where we are today also gave us a performance gap that is staggering in its scope and will continue to have crippling consequences.

And, NO, we cannot blame that all on poverty. One of our great weaknesses is our inability to step far enough back that we are able to see how our educational process contributes to the failure of so many of our children. It is a process that both contributes to and exacerbates the problems of poverty. These things are both interdependent and symbiotic.

One of the great misfortunes of the current corporate reform movement with its focus on privatization, choice, standards, testing, and accountability is that it distracts us from what should be our real mission. Our professional educators, justifiably or not, have chosen to slip into a defensive mode rather than use their experience and wisdom to evaluate and address the weaknesses of our current and obsolete educational process.

Quoting Yong Zhao, a Chinese born professor at the University of Oregon, Ravitch brings us to the crossroads but then sends us down the wrong path. Ravitch quotes Zhao, “that China wants to transform itself from ‘a labor-intensive, low-level manufacturing economy into an innovation-driven knowledge society. . . . Innovative people cannot come from schools that force students to memorize correct answers on standardized tests or reward students who excel at regurgitating spoon-fed knowledge. Zhao then writes, “If China, a developing country aspiring to move into an innovative society, has been working to emulate U.S. education, why does America want to abandon it.”

China seems to be beating us to the logical leap to where we should already be as illustrated by Valerie Strauss’ report in the May 26th issue of the Washington Post, “No. 1 Shanghai may drop out of PISA.”

Quoting Yi Houqin, an official of the Shanghai Education Commission the article shares that they are no longer interested in a focus on standardized testing. “What it [China] needs are schools that follow sound educational principles . . . and lay a solid foundation for students’ lifelong development.”

If anything should alarm American leaders, this shift in direction on the part of China’s educational leaders, should.

In the U.S., we tell ourselves that this is what we are about but our actions speak the truth. We say we want to develop the individuality of students and teach them to think and to explore but the way we structure the process is to ask all students to rush down the same path on the same schedule. Our educational process (not our schools or teachers) is focused on grading rather than learning; on failure rather than success.

If our objective is that kids learn something, why do we grade and then record their unsuccessful attempts. All those mistakes on practice worksheets and failed quizzes do is tell us that the child has not yet learned and is not ready to move on. So what do we do? We grade the worksheet or quiz, record the “C,” “D,” or “F” and move them along to the next lesson, module, grading period, semester or grade. What those practice worksheets and quizzes are really telling us is that our job on that particular lesson with that specific child is not yet completed.

Our real issue with testing, standardized or otherwise, should be on the purpose for which the test is designed to serve. Testing should always be, first, diagnostic: asking the question what has the child learned and how prepared are they for future; or, second, documentary: has the child mastered the lessons that we have striven to teach them? How they rank in comparison to other students is no more consequential than how the U.S. ranks compared to China or other nations on PISA assessments.

We come back to the only question that matters. How far has the child progressed; what are his or her strengths and weaknesses; and, where do we go from here.

The nation that is the world leader in economic performance will be the nation with the best educated workforce, with the best work ethic, and with the highest level of productivity. Economic laws and principles care nothing about the political, racial, or ethnic make-up of the population, only about what a people can accomplish.

We have already experienced, as a nation, what it is like to lose huge chunks of low-paying jobs to China, Mexico, and parts elsewhere. Imagine the consequences if we begin to lose chunks of our highest paying jobs for skilled or professional workers.

Imagine the impact if the average American household income was to drop by 10, 20, or even 30 percent. As earned income shrinks, how do we continue to bear the cost of the millions of baby boomers who are withdrawing from the workforce and can be expected to live until they are in their 80s and 90s. How do we continue to bear the cost of the growing population of Americans who are under-employed, unemployed, and unemployable when fewer people are working for fewer and fewer dollars.

If we want to get a different outcome we must begin doing things differently. Sadly, the opportunity cost is staggering when the powerful platform of Diane Ravitch is distracted from the real issues.

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