Tag Archives: Educational process

Learning is a Process, Not a Competition!

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The way we grade the academic performance of our students in the overwhelming majority of American schools, public or private, suggests that we view the educational process as a competition rather than a pure learning process.

State standards lay out very specific academic expectations for all students beginning in first grade and progressing up to the point that we assess their readiness for graduation at the end of the twelfth grade. Toward the end of the child’s third year, at least here in Indiana, we begin administering the ISTEP+ exams to evaluate whether our students are where the state thinks children should be by the second semester of the third grade and each grade, thereafter.

Given the wide disparity that exists on an academic readiness continuum between young children who arrive for their first day of school, one can only wonder why we would ever consider it realistic that students should all arrive at the same place, relative to state standards, by any arbitrary point in time.

If the ISTEP+ exams and the standardized exams used in other states were meant to be purely diagnostic they could provide useful information that would help teachers adjust their classroom strategies to the unique needs of their students.

The moment, however, that we begin evaluating teachers on the basis of their students’ performance on such exams, it becomes a competition. If we stop and think about it, the same could be said for the grades children receive at the end of each grading period or semester. If those grades were meant to gage which children need more help and which are ready to move on to new material, the grades could be useful tools. We all know that this is not the way it works, however.

We do not set aside the time to provide extra help for students who are unable to demonstrate sufficient mastery of the subject matter unless they are so far behind their classmates that moving them forward seems problematic but, even then, we agonize over the decision. Do we hold them back in spite of the perceived social and emotional consequences to insure that they will have more time and attention to master the subject matter or do we move them forward with their classmates even though we know them to be woefully unprepared for success in each succeeding grade?

What this dreaded dichotomy should tell us is that a system that requires educators to make such choices is dysfunctional and ignores the needs of our most vulnerable children, to their great disadvantage.

It makes no more sense to evaluate students on the basis of their ability to keep up with their peers than it does to judge teachers and schools as failures when the percentage of students who are falling behind crosses some arbitrary line of demarcation. Teachers and schools have no control over the aggregate levels of preparation and motivation of the students assigned to their respective schools and classrooms. Even more importantly, students have no control over how well their parents have prepared them for academic success.

What kids who arrive poorly prepared need is a process that acknowledges their unique situations and is structured to give them the time and special attention they need to be successful academically. What teachers and schools require is a process that is designed to give them the latitude necessary to respond to the “special needs” of these children.

Let us take great care not confuse our use of the phrase “special needs.” A student who is developmentally delayed due to environmental circumstances is not the same as a student who has a clearly defined learning disability or an emotional or psychological “disability.” Quite possibly, many students are diagnosed with some learning or emotional disability simply because we have not been cognizant of the fact that they were held to expectations that were unreasonable given their level of preparedness.

In effect, the thing we have been most successful in teaching these students is that they cannot learn as well as the majority of their classmates. The reality is that these kids got off to a late start and the professional educators on whom they depended were unable to recognize and respond to the unique realities of their situations.

The standard response to this dilemma, on the part of many educators, is to throw up their hands in figurative despair and respond “what are we to do?”

The answer to the question “what are we to do?” is relatively simple. We simply need to come to an agreement that the structure and flow of our current educational process has become so brittle, over time, that it no longer meets the needs of an incredibly diverse population of Twenty-first Century students. All that is necessary is to reinvent the structure to give both teachers and their students the time they need to learn within the context of a unique academic path with ever-rising expectations. When these children and their teachers, discover that they can be successful, academically, everything changes from their view of the world to their belief in themselves.

Providing one example of how this can be accomplished is the purpose of my book Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge for Twenty-First Century America.

They Are Destroying Public Education Just When We Need It the Most!

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The events in Ferguson Missouri illustrate just how far apart we have drifted as a people. Somehow, we must find a way to repair the damage that has been done and the trust that has been lost and begin closing the gap between the white community and the communities of African-Americans and other minorities, between the rich and poor, the sick and the healthy, and the hopeful and the hopeless.

If we have learned anything from the last sixty years it is that we cannot legislate a change of heart. The only thing we can do is see that every American child; irrespective of race, religion, creed, color, sexual preference, or relative affluence has an opportunity for a quality education. It is only through education that a young man or woman can emerge from childhood with sufficient skill and knowledge to make a place for themselves in the world; to be able to choose from an array of meaningful opportunities; to be able to exert control over their own lives and destinies; and, have sufficient strength of character to persevere through life’s hardships and disappointments.

The federal government, corporate reformers, and state governments across the land are engaged in a relentless attack against public schools, community control of education, and the public school teachers. Now they are even attacking programs for our nation’s special needs children. These powerful men and women are no more qualified to fix public education in America because of their success in business than they are to perform surgery at a local hospital. As for our elected and appointed government officials, maybe they should fix our executive and legislative branches of government before they try to tackle something they know even less about.

It is, however, understandable that these reformers feel compelled to act because our professional educators have not stepped up to acknowledge the deficiencies in our educational process; deficiencies that only they are qualified to address.

The would-be reformers of public education have not taken the time to understand that the problems with education in America exist in spite of the valiant efforts of our public school teachers and not because of them. The reformers aggressively promote standardized testing, a process that distracts educators from what is important, and they drain resources from our most vulnerable community school corporations with vouchers to encourage parents to send their kids to a small number of unproven charter schools and to other parochial and private schools that cannot begin to meet the needs of every child in their communities. To offer what they believe to be a lifeline to parents who want the best for their children is a cruel strategy, indeed, if it can bear the weight of only a small percentage of the families of our communities.

These corporate reformers have not spent time in our public school classrooms so that they can witness, first hand, the deplorable lack of motivation to learn on the part of children across the spectrum of our student populations and they have not made the effort to investigate the absence of parental support in so many of our public schools.

If they did they would discover that many of the parents of our most vulnerable children are themselves victims of an outdated educational process and have no more trust in our systems of education, public or private, than they do in our systems of justice. These reformers would also discover that far too many of these men and women have lost hope and faith in the American dream.

Our systems of public school corporations and the obsolete educational process that functions within may be need a transformation but they provide the only hope to begin narrowing the breach that divides this nation and that we observed so graphically, this week, in an American community. The misguided policies of our corporate and government reformers of education can only divide us even more than we are divided today.

It is time for our professional educators who teach in or manage our public school corporations to step forth and acknowledge that our systems of public education are struggling and to accept responsibility for leading us to a new reality. A new reality in which every child is given the opportunity and the time to learn under the tutelage of qualified teachers, in an environment in which they are evaluated against their own performance rather than against the performance of their classmates.

Creating such a reality is our only hope for a future in which our aggregate dreams can be realized.

A to F Grading Makes No More Sense for Our Children than It Does for Public Schools!

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When we grade schools “A to F” on the basis of standardized test scores like ISTEP+ in Indiana it is as “Absurd” at one end of the grading continuum as it is “Farcical” at the other. This is especially true when the powers that implemented the “A to F” measure envisioned that so-called “failing schools” would be gradually shut down with the kids shuttled off to charter schools from which they could expect immediate turnaround.

If that logic is not “Absurd” I do not know what is and most professional educators concur.

It was also envisioned that the failing schools could be transformed by getting rid of bad teachers and their unions, replacing them with less-educated teachers trained to embrace the use of more sophisticated technologies that would, again, transform the quality of education.

If that logic is not “Farcical” I do not know what is and most professional educators agree.

Most of those same educators would be just as critical of “A to F” grading for the students in their classrooms but the “A to F” mindset has been in place for so long that it has become engrained. It has become one of those fundamental assumptions that defy logic.

Many schools corporations have experimented with other grading methodologies, particularly at the primary level. As far back as the early 1950s, my local school district began using a “V to U” grading system which was essentially the same.

Today, the overwhelming majority of report cards that are sent home to parents throughout the U.S. utilize “A to F”. Is it our intention that we will shut down the children who are given “Fs” and are considered failing?

Of course it is not, but what we are asked to do with these kids is not much more effective. As they move from grade to grade (the word “grade” has become part of our lexicon and subtly shapes our thinking even here) we struggle to know what to do with “F” students. Holding them back is believed to have negative emotional and psychological consequences but moving them along with their classmates is just as problematic.

For generations, most of these children would become drop outs before high school graduation and enter the society as adults poorly prepared to accept the responsibilities of citizenship. In more recent times, our schools have worked hard to keep these young people in school but the ultimate outcome of being poorly prepared is still the norm for far too many of these kids.

This is the reality that the critics of public education point out, with great passion, and it is the driving motivation behind the corporate reform movement that began in the business community and has been aggressively sold to federal and state government through one of the most powerful and effective “lobbying” strategies in history.

The problem is that it is all based upon an erroneous, rarely challenged assumption about what it is that kids need, today. Whether poverty, hopelessness on the part of parents, diluted values, the unprecedented power of the 21st Century peer group, or some combination of the above what these kids need cannot be provided by privatized schools with teachers who are trained rather than educated, and using the wonders of modern technology.

Modern technology can play a powerful role in the hands of a qualified teacher if we took the time to understand what we need it to do for us. Simply distributing tablets and IPads and using digital learning tools will not magically cure what ails 21st Century education.

What kids need are more time and attention from people who care and who have the time to develop trusting and nurturing relations with them. They need us to treat them as unique individuals coming to us at a unique point on their physical, emotional, and intellectual developmental continuum. They need us to teach them how to learn, successfully, which takes longer for some than others, and they need our protection against the failure and humiliation that diminish self-esteem.

And, they need even more from us. The absolute best chance a child can have is when parents and teachers work together as partners on a child’s behalf. When parents do not embrace such relationships with their children’s teachers it is not sufficient to put our heads down and think we can do it on our own.

We must do more to close the distance between our teachers and schools and parents and their communities. We need to sell them on the idea that their child can grow up in a world where they have a menu of positive choices from which to choose that will not only provide a good life for them but will also help them fulfill their civic responsibilities.

Reaching out to the disenfranchised to pull them in is a formidable challenge, indeed, but it is nothing more than a human engineering problem that has a solution that is within our power to achieve.

In the interim, we cannot allow a single child to fail on a single lesson.

We have no expectation that every child that enters kindergarten will arrive at the same destination at the end of their thirteen years of schooling but yet public school teachers are asked to work within a structured educational process that forces them to move students down comparable paths at relative speeds. Our job must be to make certain that students learn as much as they are able within the time they are under our protective wings and that they can use what they learn effectively on the next lesson module and as they face the challenges of citizenship.

Many teachers cannot envision how this could happen within the current structure and they are correct; the structure of the educational process must be altered if we wish to alter its outcomes. Making such alterations is not all that difficult if we are willing to step back and view the process objectively. The truth is, particularly at the primary level, we could start doing things differently, almost immediately; with little or no cost.

Forget “A to F” and shift our focus to an expectation that nothing less than an A or B is acceptable (85 percent or better mastery of subject matter). Let us remember that intellectual development is only one aspect of a child’s development and it works interdependently with their emotional and physical development. Public education must not degenerate into force-feeding content into a child’s brain like they are a computer that just needs more data to process; which is pretty much where we seem to be heading.

What our children and their parents need is that special relationship that many of us had with a favorite teacher whose care and affection we could trust, absolutely.

The educational reforms that are sweeping the nation will destroy us as surely as Mother Nature will punish us if we continue to abuse our environment. Current educational reforms are like a powerful tug boat pulling a safe harbor ever farther away from a dock that has broken loose and is drifting from shore. It is a dock that is full of people who have become separate and apart from the whole and who have become hopeless and powerless. Every time we send a child out into this sea, unprepared, what is left for them but to scramble on to that already over-crowded dock?

The one thing of which we can be sure is that the farther apart we drift the more tragic will be the consequences for the future of our society.

Reject “A to F” for schools, teachers, and children and reinvent our educational process. My book. Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge For Twenty-First Century America, will show exactly how this can be accomplished.

Public schools our best hope to strengthen communities

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I wrote the following article for today’s edition of the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette (October 3, 2014).

Published: October 3, 2014 3:00 a.m.
Public schools our best hope to strengthen communities

Supporting the emergence of charter schools as an alternative to public education is one thing. Subsidizing, with vouchers, a family’s choice to transfer their child to a charter or other private or parochial school is another.

“Choice” is one of the key components of the educational reform movement being pushed by the federal government, by the Pence administration and by corporate America. Candidates who support such reforms announce with great passion that education is at the top of their priority list. Voters need to understand that these candidates are not talking about “public education.”

Advocates of “choice,” holding teachers and schools accountable on the basis of ISTEP+ scores, Common Core, taking control of schools out of the hands of communities, and diminishing the influence of teachers unions are what might be called “the politics of abandonment.” These reform initiatives include no provision to help the public schools that are being abandoned and that are losing much-needed revenue.

The sad reality is that charter schools are not the solution to the challenges of public education, if for no other reason than because there will never be enough private classrooms to hold all of our nation’s public school students.

This movement away from strong public schools can only aggravate what is already a two-tiered society of haves and have-nots in which the latter is made up of our nation’s poor and the disadvantaged. It is a burgeoning population that includes the majority of our nation’s minorities and also those for whom English is not their language of birth.

This population is separate and apart from main-stream society. By weakening our public schools and the relationships between those schools and their communities, we are burning the bridges between us; a practice that will have tragic consequences for our future.

Recent events in Ferguson, Missouri are but one example of what happens when the ties that bind us are weakened. What kind of future can we expect when more and more Americans are unable to trust the agencies of government charged with public safety; officials who look on certain neighborhoods and their populations with inherent suspicion? If we want to be a healthy society, we must all be willing to trust one another.

The only way we can begin closing the gap and tearing down the barriers that separate us is to strengthen our public schools and the relationship between those schools and their communities.

We must come together to support our public schools and the educators who do their important work under the most adverse circumstances.

We must return control of our public schools to the communities they serve and to the professional educators upon whom our children depend.

We must restructure our educational process to focus on learning not test preparation. We must create an environment in which our children have time to learn and in which our teachers have time to teach.

Advocates for public education are coming together here in Indiana and all over the U.S. to counter the “politics of abandonment.” Those readers who were unable to attend the Oct. 4 viewing of the video “Rise Above the Mark” are encouraged to check it out and even host another viewing.

Our public schoolchildren and their teachers and schools need Americans to take a stand for public education.

Why is the educational process structured more to support earning grades and standardized test scores than it is to support learning?

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In business, we know that organizations are structured to get the outcomes they produce. This is certainly true with the educational process that drives public schools all over the nation. The educational process is structured to support the objectives of earning grades and producing test scores.

In the case of grades, it is not so much a matter whether the grade is an A or an F rather that there is a grade to report. This suggests that we have completed our job for that grading period or semester and now it is time to move on. What do we know at the end of this process? We know that some students learned the material and some did not. We also know that there is a big group of students in the middle and we simply cannot be sure whether they have learned or not.

The fundamental question public school teachers and other professional educators must ask is, “are grades and test scores the outcomes we really want for our students? Most educators will respond that, “no, our true objective is to help kids learn.” The more astute educators, after taking a moment to think about what their job should be, would add that their goal is not only to help students learn but also to help them learn sufficiently well that they will be able to apply what they have learned in the face of real-life situations throughout the balance of their lives.

Those real-life situations might be applying what they have learned in past lessons or classes to subsequent lessons and classes throughout their rest of their academic careers; whether primary, secondary, vocational, or post-secondary. The real life situations might also be the application of the knowledge and skills individuals have mastered to earning a living; to fulfilling one’s civic responsibilities; to helping society find solutions to a never-ending stream of economic, ecological, political, and sociological challenges; to the mastering their unique crafts; to exploring the mysteries of science, theology, or philosophy; to finding joy through our relationships with other people; or, ultimately, to the never-ending quest for wisdom.

If educators could all agree that their purpose should be to help their students learn and master subject matter sufficiently well that they can then utilize what they have learned, the next question would be is the educational process structured in such a way that it will support us in that shared mission?

Questions we might ask would include:

Should the educational process be structured so that it starts every student off from the same point of embarkation or should we identify a unique starting point based upon the level of preparation and motivation that the child brings with them on their first day of school?

Should all students be guided to a common destination or should their destinations be determined by their unique talents and interests, along the way?

Should all students be expected to move along an academic path at the same velocity or should each be guided down the path at their own best speed so that no child is forced to move forward until they are ready and no child is asked to wait, idly, while others strive to catch up?

Should the educational process be structured in such a way that kids are evaluated against the performance of their classmates or should it be structured to support our efforts to evaluate them against their own progress?

Should the educational process be structured in such a way that some kids must, inevitably, fail or should it be structured in such a way that kids are taught that success is a process that all can learn?

Professional educators can, no doubt, add to this list so that we can determine whether or not the existing educational process is acceptable within the context of our mission, vision, and values.

If we were to determine that the current educational process is unacceptable, our attention should immediately shift to questions about how can the process be re-engineered to produce the outcomes to which we have all agreed and committed? In other words, what do we intend to do about it?”

Educators must also understand that if we default to passively accept a reality that is less than we feel we want or deserve then we are also accepting responsibility for the status quo and we need to stop complaining. Ultimately, we have the power to either accept or alter the reality in which we live. In the case of altering the educational process, no matter how daunting the challenge may seem, it is simply a matter of choice. Not someone else’s choice! Our choice!

Chapter 9 of “Reign of Error” by Diane Ravitch: “The Facts About College Graduation Rates” – Our ongoing review!

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In Chapter 9 of her book, Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools, Diane Ravitch challenges the assertion of many that “Our economy will suffer unless we have the highest graduation rate in the world.” Ravitch says there is no evidence for this claim. In this Ravitch is correct.

Ravitch is also correct to wonder whether college degrees “obtained under pressure to reach a target represent real learning or will they be reached by credential inflation, credit recovery, and other schemes that devalue the meaning of the diploma.”

This has certainly been the case with high school graduation rates and diplomas.  The attention on graduation rates and test scores distracts us from the more important question, “what are our students actually learning?”

It is difficult to have a meaningful dialogue about some of these issues when Dr. Ravitch and I are in such disagreement over the existence of a crisis in public education. Meaningful dialogue requires that there be a common premise, somewhere. I continue to assert that we need to stop defending public education and start defending our schools and teachers. The problem is not schools and teachers but rather an educational process that does not allow teachers to do what we need them to do and that does not meet the needs of a majority of American children. We cannot fix something until we are willing to acknowledge its inefficacy.

Is there any doubt that the world marketplace is an economic competition on a grand scale? Are not the results of any competition, irrespective of scale, contingent upon the relative performance of the competitors? Is not performance a function of the level of skill, knowledge, and preparation of the performers?

The generation who emerged from the Great Depression and led us through World War II understand that the US has not always been the dominant economy in the world marketplace. Their children and grandchildren, on the other hand, have never lived at a time when the US was not the dominant economic force on the planet. We have come to take American economic power for granted.

Any student of history should be able to tell you that America’s rise to economic preeminence came at a time when the playing field was anything but equal. In the aftermath of World War II, while the American industrial and commercial capabilities were in full bloom, having been ramped up during the war, the economies of Europe, Japan and the Soviet Union were faced with the challenge of rebuilding in the aftermath of a devastating war. The economies of China, India, South Korea, other Pacific-rim nations, and the Middle East were either non-existent or embryonic.

Not only was the US production process in full gear following the war but our employers, thanks to the American systems of public education, were able to draw on the most highly educated workforce in the world. This was also a time when the nation had great confidence in itself, when there was great clarity in values, and when the populace was highly motivated to insure that their children would not be subjected to the deprivation they experienced during the Great Depression. Just as importantly, American society was not yet confronted with the series of social challenges that would commence with the civil rights movement and, soon thereafter, the anti-war movement.

In the ensuing five-and-a-half decades, while the United States was beginning to believe that its economic supremacy was a God-given right and while we were also becoming more and more distracted by our nation’s social challenges, the world was in the midst of transformational change. The rest of the world, led by Western Europe, Japan, and the other emerging economies of Asia and Eastern Europe were working furiously to catch up with the US. As we approach the last half of the second decade of a new century these nations have pretty much caught up and are, in some cases, threatening to surpass the US in economic production and wealth.

Many of these nations, but certainly not all, have less poverty, offer better healthcare, provide a comparable level of personal liberty to their people, and are also challenging us with respect to the effectiveness with which we education our children. That they are doing this at a time when we are destroying our systems of public education with nonsensical reforms has frightening consequences.

The American people, immersed in their many social and political challenges, are only beginning to understand the ramifications of what can only be described as a re-balancing of global economic power; with the loss of jobs and devaluation of the dollar the most obvious examples. The future consequences of a reality in which the largest percentage of ownership of America’s economic assets is in the hands of foreign investors cannot yet be fully envisioned.

So, Ravitch is correct in saying that there is no evidence that U.S. college graduation rates is connected to our success in the world marketplace. Unfortunately, it is a pointless issue and we are asking the wrong questions. The appropriate questions begin with whether or not our high school and college graduates are able to utilize, in the real world, the knowledge, skills, and level of understanding about the world that will be necessary to keep the U.S. in the game, economically. This question must be followed with “Are we teaching our children what they most need to know?”

We cannot answer the second question until we are able to identify the fundamental purpose of an education. This, however, is a topic for another day.

Graduation Rates – Ongoing Review “Reign of Error” by Ravitch – Chapter 7

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Graduation rates may be the most meaningless of all the educational statistics we hear about. The most cogent point from Ravitch’s Chapter Seven may be

“A high school diploma signifies, if nothing else, the ability to persist and complete high school.  Certainly, all people should have the literacy and numeracy to survive in life, as well as the historical and civic knowledge to carry out their political and civic responsibilities. Unfortunately, the pressure to raise graduation rates—like the pressure to raise test scores—often leads to meaningless degrees, not better education.”

It would be a rare public school teacher from an urban high school that would be unable to cite examples of the pressure to help kids qualify for graduation when they have done little or nothing to earn it throughout the semester or school year. My observations as an employer and an administrator of the ASVAB would support the assertion that, for many students, a high school diploma is meaningless as a predictor of an individual’s ability to do a job or qualify for the military, not to mention to fulfill their “political and civic” responsibilities.

My experience with the GED is not much different. The performance on the job or on the ASVAB of young adults who have completed their GED is even more uninspiring than the performance of high school graduates.

While it is clearly not scientific evidence, my experience as a sub in a GED Prep class was surprising. Given that these students were not required to study for their GED and were doing it, ostensibly, to improve their chances to find meaningful employment, I was shocked to see that the level of motivation to study, work diligently on assignments, or even pay attention in class was not perceptibly different from my experience in many high school classrooms.

Our entire educational process is more focused on moving students along, making sure they are prepared for annual standardized exam or qualified for graduation than it is about learning. And no, this is not an indictment against teachers. Teachers have no authority to slow down to give a child more time to master a lesson. That is simply not the way the game is played nor is it consistent with the manner in which the game is scored.

If learning were the first, if not the only objective, there would be no question that the appropriate course of action when a child is struggling would be to slow down and give him or her more time to practice and more time with the teacher to help them understand. The reality is that public education is not structured to support learning as the primary objective and there is precious little that a teacher in the classroom can do to alter that reality.

I would suggest to you, that in even teachers in our most successful public schools do not find it easy to slow down to give a child the time they need any more than they are free to allow children who are performing well to move ahead on their own, without waiting for the class.

The only real difference between high and low performing public schools is the percentage of students who come to class with a high level of motivation to learn and who are supported by parents who consider themselves to be partners in the education of their sons and daughters.

Once again, we feel compelled to criticize Diane Ravitch, arguably the most well-known advocate for public education and one of the most ardent, for squandering the power of her platform in defense of the image of public education rather than shifting our focus to the substance of it.

The point I want to make to all educators and their advocates is that we should not waste a precious moment defending the American educational process or the results produced by that process. The system is in crisis and the evidence, which I shall discuss in my next post, is as compelling as it is overwhelming.

What we need to defend with all of the passion we can muster are the children who depend on our systems of public education and the teachers who labor tirelessly to do the best they can for their students. The absolute best way we can defend our children and their teachers is to examine the educational process as an integral whole and with a critical eye and then do everything we can to restructure that process in order to support those teachers and their students.

Check out my column in this mornings Fort Wayne Journal Gazette “All pulling together, we can defeat poverty!

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Published: July 24, 2014 3:00 a.m.

All pulling together, we can defeat poverty

Hawkins

Citing a U.S. Census Bureau report, The Journal Gazette recently reported that 77 million Americans, nearly a quarter of the population, live in what have been designated as poverty areas and that this population has increased significantly over the past decade. A poverty area is a census tract in which 20 percent or more of the households have incomes below the poverty level.

The relationship between poverty and the failure of so many of our public school students is central to the debate between corporate and government reformers of public education and those who defend traditional public education in America.

Reformers are pushing for privatization of our schools; Common Core; standardized testing to hold teachers and schools accountable; and vouchers to help parents pay for their school of choice. It is ironic that the reformers are focused on enticing the most motivated families away from our “failing schools” while doing little or nothing to fix those schools or to help the families who remain in them. We have described this as the “politics of abandonment.”

The defenders of traditional public education insist that our schools are better than ever and suggest that it is unreasonable to expect more from our public schools until we do something about poverty, which they consider the biggest cause of academic failure. These well-meaning Americans, most of whom are educators, are engaged in what could be described as the “politics of intransigence.”

Neither side seems to recognize that poverty and failing schools are symptoms of the same pathology, nor do they understand how their actions contribute.

This current chapter in the history of poverty has evolved, since the end of World War II, as the population of people for whom neither the free-market economy nor the system of public education has worked has mushroomed. Over time, these Americans have become increasingly less hopeful and more powerless in the face of the challenges of life. What we have also seen is that attempts on the part of a benevolent government to soften the blow have failed to alter the reality for this population. What those efforts have created are dependencies.

We cannot continue to support those dependencies, nor can we simply abandon this population without our society reaching a tipping point after which the people who produce economic value will be unable to support those who do not. If the U.S. is to compete successfully in the dynamic world marketplace of the 21st century, we desperately need the best efforts of virtually every American man and woman.

What we must do is to attack the fabric of hopelessness and powerlessness under which so many Americans have been draped. Here is what we can do if only we work together:

We can repackage and resell the American dream to give people hope that they can, indeed, have a better future.

We can develop an educational process that will teach children that success is a process all can master. We can create this in such a way that it gives teachers the time and resources they need to teach children how to be successful.

We can teach parents how powerful parents and teachers can be, working together as partners and how, with a little help from teachers, they can literally change the world for their children.

Finally, we can create a sense of community in which we are united behind a set of shared values; a community in which we do care about one another and in which we are all willing to help.

We cannot accomplish any of these things, however, until we stop the runaway train of misguided reforms before it can damage, forever, our way of life.

 

 

 

Mel Hawkins, of Fort Wayne, is the author of “Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge for Twenty-First Century America.” He wrote this for The Journal Gazette.

From Terry Heick and the Bad Ass Teachers Association: “10 Things I Wish I Knew My First Year of Teaching!” also Applies to Positive Leadership!

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Terry Heick’s insightful comments entitled “10 Things I Wish I Knew My First Year of Teaching,” posted on the Facebook page of the Bad Ass Teachers’ Association, could have just as easily been written for a course in “Positive Leadership,” which, not coincidentally, could be offered to principals and other administrators.  

Prioritize—and then prioritize again. Positive Leaders relentlessly remind their people and themselves of the essential purpose of the organization and each individual’s job. It is so easy, in the heat of the challenges we face, to be diverted by secondary agenda’s and objectives.

 It’s not your classroom.   Organizations belong to the people and the customers they exist to serve and one of the biggest mistakes managers and supervisors make is to forget that their primary purpose, their over-riding priority, is to help their people and organizations succeed by doing the best job of which they are capable. Teachers and leaders need to remind themselves, often, that it is not about “me.”  

Students won’t always remember the content, but many will never forget how you made them feel. The most important component of human motivation is to make people feel important and it is amazing how forgiving employees can be when they know that the mistakes their leaders make were made within the context of helping them learn how to be successful. It is equally amazing how the level of trust that we earn is based almost totally by the way we interact with people rather than the things we say. It is also amazing how much the people of an organization are willing to give of themselves, when they know their welfare and best interests are always at the top of their leader’s list of priorities.

Get Cozy with the school custodians, secretary, librarian. One of the core principles of positive leadership is that every job well done adds value to the organization and its customers and also adds beauty to the world. Paying positive attention to people who support production and sales staff always pays dividends at crunch time when you need people to step up with their best efforts.

Longer hours isn’t sustainable. Quality always trumps quantity when it comes to how leaders and teachers allocate their time if for no other reason than it allows us to refresh ourselves and to “sharpen our saw” as Stephen Covey would say.

Student behavior is a product. In organizations as well as classrooms, how people conduct themselves, whether they have positive or negative attitudes, how much they are willing to give of themselves, and their commitment to their purpose is all a product of the kind of organization and environment the leader or teacher creates and sustains. It is also a product of how well they understand the process of success and whether they think of themselves as winners, as being a part of something special. Remember how you felt when in the classroom of one of your favorite teachers.  

Don’t get sucked in to doing too much outside of your class.  Activities that are separate and apart from our purpose can provide enrichment that refreshes and re-enthuses us or it can be an irritant that creates friction, and saps our energy. The process of getting sucked into something that is counterproductive is just one example of being distracted from one’s purpose and being drawn to secondary agendas. Pick and choose, carefully, the extra activities in which to become involved.

 Help other teachers. Everyone in an organization knows and respects the people to whom they can turn for help and support. It’s central to the adage that the more we give of ourselves the more we receive in return and this is powerful where ever people come together including classrooms and organizations.  

Reaching students emotionally matters. A lot. Ultimately our joy in life is a function of the quality of our relationship with other people. The more we understand that people are more important than things and that connecting with another person on an emotional level is the key to our sense of self and theirs, the more control each of us will have over the outcomes in our lives.

Literacy is everything for academic performance. Whether in business, in school, or in our personal lives it is our ability to read and understand and also our ability to communicate what we observe, think, and feel effectively that determine our power to create joy and meaning in our lives, and to seize the opportunities that present themselves to us.

 

The only thing I would change in this list of things we might wish we knew at the outset of any endeavor, whether as a leader, as a teacher, or as a friend is to:

“beware of the naysayers who are so immersed in bitterness and resentment that they find it necessary to drag us down to their level rather than elevate themselves up to ours”

The common theme through all of these items has to do with the quality of the relationships we are able to create and sustain. Ultimately, the value of our lives is measured against the quality of our relationships with other people.  So important is this central theme “that relationships are central to what we do” that I advocate that the entire educational process be re-structured in such a way that it supports a teacher’s ability to build and sustain close, personal relationships with their students, with the parents of their students, and with the other members of their teaching teams.

Part 2 of the Action component of our Strategic Action Plan to Reinvent Public Education – Engaging Parents and the Community

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As we shift our focus to the community we must call on our political leaders for leadership, resell the American dream, and to educate all Americans on the paramount role of parents in improving the motivation to learn.

 

It would be so easy to stop at this point, thinking that our job is finished but, in reality, it has just begun. Education is simply a tool to help us prepare each new generation for the challenges our nation will face in an ever-more competitive world marketplace. It is a marketplace in which it will be impossible for us to compete, effectively, if we do not have the full participation of our entire citizenry. We simply must bring them on board.

 

As challenging and overwhelming as this may seem it is nothing more than an enormous marketing and advertising campaign to repackage and resell the American Dream. For all of the progress other economies have made with respect to their ability to compete with the U.S. we are still the unparalleled leader in marketing and advertising and we need to capitalize on this strength to re-engage every American to join their fellow citizens in rising to the challenges facing our nation. It is a perfect opportunity for African-Americans and other minorities to assume their rightful place as full partners in the American enterprise and in American society. We simply need to sell them on the idea that the time and the opportunities are prime.

 

The beauty of education is that nothing we do as a nation reaches into as many homes and as many families as our systems of education and it provides the perfect opportunity to not only transform public education but also to transform American society. It is an initiative in which the leaders of our school districts throughout the nation will be the point persons carrying the message of our political leadership. It is an initiative where our school superintendents and principals will be supported by leaders from government, professional athletics, entertainment, and the full spectrum of businesses. It is an initiative in which every single American man and woman will have a meaningful role to play.

 

What follows is the blueprint for action in the form of our final fourteen (14) action items.

 

 Action Item #20 – Our Presidents, present and future, must initiate and sustain a movement to re-sanctify the American dream, calling on leaders at every level of governments and business, and men and women in every community to believe in the American dream with their words and deeds and to ask American parents to accept responsibility for the education of their children. Further, that every American mother and father work hand-in-hand with their children’s teachers as full partners in the educational process. This is the categorical imperative of our time.

 

 Action Item #21 – Leaders at every level are challenged to ask parents everywhere, irrespective of race or economic circumstances: “Is your son or daughter a future President of the United States?  Is he or she a future CEO, physician, attorney, teacher, engineer, school superintendent, or other professional?” And then, those parents must be challenged to help their children achieve the best success of which they are capable.

 

  Action Item #22 – Educators accept that the over-riding objective must be to improve the motivation of students and that this requires the active partnership of the parents of those children. Toward this end, school boards need to re-establish expectations for their superintendents and principals to work toward this objective and determine how performance against those expectations will be evaluated.

 

  Action Item #23 – School Corporations must first target those segments of their community that are the lowest performing but no segment is to be overlooked.

 

  Action Item #24 – Educators must hit the streets using all available means to draw parents into their children’s schools and to engage those parents in the educational process. They must also work to enlist the assistance of community leaders toward that end and must hold themselves and their staffs accountable for the outcomes.

 

  Action Item #25 – Educational leaders must engage the creative energies of the entire community, including charitable foundations, for the purpose of developing and evaluating programs to help pull parents in as partners and to help them learn how to be effective in supporting the academic efforts of their children.

 

  In order to accomplish these objectives our school corporations must re-establish the expectations and priorities of principals and administrators.

 

 

  Action Item #26 – Superintendents must remove the administrative burdens from the shoulders of their principals, freeing them to devote their time and energy to their primary objective, even if it means employing more administrative support. Districts must create the expectations that principals and administrators spend 75 percent of their time in direct contact with parents, students, teachers, and staff.

 

  Action Item #27 – School Corporations must place a premium on positive leadership: Relying on positive leadership skills as the criteria for selection of principals and administrators and making real investments in ongoing leadership development for those principals and administrators.

 

  Finally, we must identify the communities with the greatest needs and we must use every tool and resource at our disposal to engage those communities and their leaders and to enlist their commitment to make education of our children the over-riding priority of every citizen. We must then replicate that process in each and every community in the nation.

 

 

 Action Item #28 – We need to call upon our presidents, present and future, to challenge celebrities from every venue, large and small, to make a commitment to public education by reaching out to their fan bases, asking them to accept responsibility for the education of their children. This challenge must be extended to every adult American, asking them to do whatever is within their power in order to make a difference.

 

  Action Item #29 – Initiate a cultural transformation using the African-America community as a model, on both a national and local front, in which black Americans, as a community:

  • Accept responsibility for their futures with no reliance on “The Man” to solve their problems for them;
  • Stop blaming the white people for the plight of blacks, whatever one’s opinion about the culpability of white society, simply because blaming others is a debilitating strategy;
  • Place a premium on education;
  • Raise expectations of black children in the classroom and relentlessly encourage our children to exceed those expectations;
  • Work as partners with our local school systems, both public and private, to support the teachers of our children.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Action Item #30 – Local superintendents should encourage head start and other preschool programs in their school districts to redouble their efforts to pull parents into the process so that our children can continue at home the important work they do at their school.

 

 

 

 Action Item #31 – Superintendents of each district should establish a community advisory organization with representation from key members of each high school’s community: parents, churches, social and community organizations, neighborhood associations, and businesses. As noted earlier, these specific examples are specifically targeted at the African-American community because this is where the most glaring deficiencies can be found but they can easily be modified and local advisory organizations will tailor their activities to the unique requirements of their community. Examples of activities for which this organization will be responsible include:

 

 

 

  •          Reaching out to the community to solicit broad-based participation and support of the community;
  •          Asking all leaders of the African-American community to carry President Obama’s challenge into the homes of their community and to engage the community in the process of creating a new culture; one that challenges black children to assume their rightful place as players in the business and professional playing fields much as they have done in the world of professional athletics and entertainment;
  •          Brainstorming with people from across the spectrum of the community for innovative programs that will create the support systems necessary to facilitate this objective;
  •          Recruiting volunteers from among the ranks of professionals, business executives, craftsmen, tradesmen, athletes, and artists to reach out into the communities with which they have a connection and to connect with parents and students;
  •          Invite each school’s population of parents to a free lunch with their children, once per month;
  •          Using the same creative marketing techniques we use in promoting fundraising ventures, we can invite parents to workshops in the evenings or on Saturdays, to teach them how to help their children with homework;
  •          We can solicit parents to volunteer at their son or daughter’s school and, where necessary, we can enlist some of them to provide babysitting for those who have young children still at home;
  •         We can ask churches, neighborhood library branches, Boys and Girls Clubs, Big Brothers-Big Sisters, scout troops, and many other community programs to provide organized study, reading, and writing groups and to recruit tutors from among their ranks;
  •          We can find more creative ways to develop mentoring programs to bring young people into direct contact with men and women who demonstrate each and every day of their lives that success and achievement are within our power; and,
  • ·         We can ask families and neighbors of parents with school age children to support these parents in this process in every conceivable way.

 

 

 

 Action Item #32 – Successful men and women of each community should be challenged to reach back to their communities: to support the efforts of educators to pull parents in as partners in the educational process and/or to mentor to a child in need until there are not enough children to go around.

 

 

 

 Action Item #33 – Urge all Americans to give support and encouragement to the children in their lives: grandchildren, nieces and nephews, our children’s friends, kids from our neighborhood, even our own children. Let them know how important it is that they do their best and that we are rooting for them.

 

 

 

Conclusion

 

Fixing public education must be the categorical imperative of our time and the process will require the participation of the entire community. It is essential that parents be full partners in the educational process because these are the men and women who have the best chance of bringing a child to their first day of school, motivated to learn even in the face of the obstacles with which they will surely be confronted. If the child has wandered off the path, teachers and parents working together offer the best hope that these children can be redirected.

 

Improving the motivation to learn on the part of students and increasing their level of preparedness when they arrive for their first day of school must be the ultimate objective of every single thing we do and we must evaluate the efficacy of every program and investment on the basis of how well it services this purpose. We cannot afford to waste a single moment or dollar on things that do

 

We must also step back as educators, at all levels, to view our system of public education as an integral whole. We must apply a systems-thinking approach that will allow educators and policymakers to challenge their fundamental assumptions about public education; to understand how what we do contributes to the problem; and, ultimately, to re-engineer the system to do what we need it to do to optimize the power of a child’s motivation to learn. It must be a system focused on success that will help each child progress along their unique path at the best speed of which he or she is capable.

 

The entire educational community must reach out also to the current and future Presidents of the United States, urging them to fire the starter’s gun and lay down the challenge to every mother and father to accept responsibility for the education of their children and for partnering with their teachers and principals.

 

These things must be accomplished with an unprecedented urgency because the very future of our way of life is in jeopardy. If we fail to seize up this opportunity then the outcomes we will experience in the coming years will be decidedly unpleasant and we will have no one to blame but ourselves.