Seeing the Forest through the Trees

How is it that some of the nation’s most intelligent and accomplished people overlook a simple truth. As trite as it may be, the expression “can’t see the forest for the trees!” is as true as it is timeless. In the midst of the trees, or any other complex reality, it is incredibly difficult to see the whole of which we are apart. The consequence of being so immersed in the detail is that we are not fully aware of the external forces that influence whatever it is that we do. Without that broader perspective and the knowledge and understanding it provides, we find it difficult to resolve the challenges we face.

The analogy is very much like the reality in public education. Public school teachers, administrators, and policy makers work hard to address the challenges they face, particularly those in communities populated by large numbers of disadvantaged students, and yet satisfactory solutions elude us. Public school teachers and administrators seem disconnected from what outsiders perceive as the reality. Educators judge their work by the effort and commitment they put into teaching our children while those outside of the system judge the work of our schools by the performance of its graduates. Far too often those assessments are on opposite ends of the curve.

That raises the operative question. How do we judge any process developed to produce a product, service or any other outcome? Do we judge those outcomes by how hard people think they work and how much they say they care, or by the quality and utility of the outcomes, themselves?

The incremental improvements made in public schools over the last half century are comparable to course corrections of a ship at sea. The corrections are intended to allow the ship to arrive more quickly to its destination. If the destination, itself, is incorrect, however, the course adjustments are not only irrelevant, they might divert us even farther from our destination.

With respect to our system of public education, the education process as it is currently designed is neither tasked, structured, nor resourced to optimize each child’s academic success, particularly disadvantaged kids. The data from public schools in communities all over the U.S. supports this assertion. What we hear so often from public school educators is that “public schools are better than they have ever been.”

How these educators respond to challenges about the low performance of disadvantaged students provides insight into our dilemma. What educators say is that the performance of these kids is a consequence of poverty and segregation and fixing these socio-economic issues is the responsibility of society; not public schools and teachers. The unfortunate result of this disavowal of responsibility is that, in response to a half-century of poor performance of the disadvantaged, public school educators have made no substantive changes to the education process. They have, instead, relied on incremental improvements that are as irrelevant to American society as the course corrections at sea, by ships steaming toward the wrong destination.

It is clear to this observer—one who has spent an entire career working to help my organizations and clients fix ineffectual processes on the one hand and who has walked in the shoes of public school teachers while subbing, on the other—that the education process at work in our schools is fatally flawed. Because it is flawed, it has proven almost impossible for children who start at a disadvantage to acquire the knowledge and skills they will need to escape poverty and become fully productive and responsible citizens. The fact that public school educators have done nothing to address this critical deficiency is the motivating force behind the education reform movement.

What we need from public school educators is for them to acknowledge what they know to be true. The process does not work for disadvantaged kids.

The good news is that the reinvention of the education process is a relatively easy thing to do. All it requires is that we take the time to re-examine what it is that all kids need, including the disadvantaged, and then engineer a structure that is designed for the express purpose of meeting those needs. This is what this author has done in creating a new education model.

So what do kids need?

1) What kids need is more time on lessons with which they struggle. They must not be pushed to move on to the next lesson before they have mastered a current one. As success on many lessons depends on a student’s ability to apply what they have already learned, struggling students are set up for failure, are rarely able to catch up, and fall further behind. This repetitive bruising of young egos is devastating. .

2) What kids need is a fair starting point on a unique academic plan that builds on what they know and what they can do. What matters is whether each of the children for whom we are responsible learns as much as they are able at their own best speed. Students are not competing with one another in the classroom rather they are each laying their own foundation and building for their own unique futures.

3) What kids need are warm and nurturing relationships with all of the adults who share responsibility for teaching, protecting, caring, and advocating for them and the more such people there are the better off the child.

4) Children need the people who care, protect, teach, and advocate for them to work together as a team. The more these educators, mentors, and care givers communicate with one another and work together, the better it is for the child. This need places a premium on the parents and teachers working together as partners to be a positive force in the lives of our children.

5) Children need these relationships to be stable and enduring. We want each child to have the same quality of relationships that many of us recall when we think back on our favorite teachers. Often, it takes an entire school year to create these special bonds and, far too frequently, it never happens within as single school year. Once formed, why would we want to sever such relationships because it is May or June?

6) Kids need to experience and celebrate success at every opportunity. They must also learn that success is neither a destination nor a trophy. Success is a process in which we learn how to set goals and objectives, how to achieve them by learning from the mistakes we make along the way. It is the child’s mistakes that point us to areas where they need more work. We want children and teachers to think of mistakes as the building blocks of success and accomplishment.

7) Our children need to master the skills, knowledge, and discipline they will need in order to have real and meaningful choices available to them when they leave school. This is only possible when our children are able to utilize in the real world that which they have learned. If they cannot use it, they have not learned it and our job on with that child is not yet done. It serves no one’s interest when a child is allowed to fail.

Creating an education process that is tasked, structured and resourced to help children meet their needs is our responsibility and it is eminently doable. It simply requires that we acknowledge that the existing process is irreparable and then go back to the drawing board.

The Primary Purpose of Public Education

Because we live in a participatory democracy that depends on its people to accept the responsibilities of citizenship, the overriding purpose of public education is to prepare children to understand and accept their civic duties when they reach maturity.

Democracy exists on a precipice that represents a delicate balance between the rights of individuals to choose how they wish to live while accepting the responsibilities of citizenship. Implicit in those responsibilities are expectations that individuals will:

• Abide by the laws of their communities, state, and nation;
• Share the burden of government by paying their taxes; and,
• Participate in their government through prudent exercise of their right to vote.

The ability to participate in one’s governance and to have choices in life requires a sufficient level of literacy, numeracy, cultural awareness and tolerance, and common sense. Providing the populace with that knowledge, skill, and wisdom is the shared responsibility of parents and our systems of public education.

How we respond to the economic, political, ecological, and socio-cultural challenges of this ever-more-complicated Twenty-First Century is totally dependent upon the quality of our systems of education and the efficacy of the educational process that drives it.

There are some educators who seem to resent the inference that at least part of their purpose is to prepare young people for the workforce. Given the rampant greed with which so many corporate leaders seem consumed there is a sense that the corporate world wants a workforce of unthinking, unimaginative, uncultured worker bees.

As a former business leader, I can assure the reader that automatons are the last thing the vast majority of employers want and there is a real frustration among employers that young people entering the workforce, today, cannot think creatively; lack literacy and the ability to do basic math; are unwilling to work hard; and, are selfish and unmotivated.

The community is the customer of our systems of public education and if the customer is unhappy with the quality of the product, educators must respond or the customer will take its business elsewhere. In that sense, public schools are no different than any other producer of goods and services. When we become dissatisfied with our meal at what was once our favorite restaurant, we start exploring alternatives. Providing alternatives to public schools would seem to be exactly what reformers are striving to do.

Dissatisfied customers are the driving force behind the educational reforms that are sweeping the nation. That the reform efforts of the corporate and government leaders are misguided is a result of their arrogance and ignorance regarding the real challenges in our public schools. They do not understand the challenges because they have not taken the time to walk in the shoes of public school teachers.

The only people who can fix what is broken in American public education are the educators themselves. Because public school teachers are being pummeled with blame for the problems of which they are, themselves, victims, they struggle to separate themselves from the problems. It is also natural that when we are immersed in our daily activities and challenges that we forget to step back to review our purpose and challenge our assumptions about what it is that we do. As professionals, however, this is exactly what educators must do.

Our teachers are in a perfect position to fix what is wrong in our schools and the answers are right there in front of them. It is like a painting with a design hidden within its content and texture. We know it is there but it is not until we step back and view the work from alternate perspectives that the embedded image begins to reveal itself to us.

Educators must have the strength of character and faith in one another, as members of an honorable profession, to acknowledge the things that do not work. They must then accept responsibility for addressing them. Only then can we begin to work together to resolve them.

It is vital that we all work together to maintain the equilibrium between rights and responsibilities and that we assess, unapologetically, the challenges we face as a society in the Twenty-First Century. What we have is a cherished thing but it is jeopardized when we live and interact on the basis of our biases and prejudices rather than the wisdom of an educated populace.

The reader is invited to read my book, Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge for Twenty-First Century America, in which I offer a blueprint for a solution to the challenges of public education with a focus on teachers, students, and success.

Blaming Teachers in Our Schools is Like Blaming Soldiers for the Wars We Ask Them to Fight!

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

How is it, then, that we can ask the teachers in our most challenging schools to overcome the lack of support of parents? How can we expect them to fight through the disruptive behavior of students with widely disparate levels of preparation and motivation and then expect them to spur those same students to comparable levels of academic achievement as their highly motivated classmates?

We ask teachers to rise to these extraordinary and unreasonable expectations while we shower them with criticisms and disrespect? And, as if the job were not sufficiently challenging, we promote vouchers and charter schools that siphon off motivated families and their children from our most challenged public schools? Each child that is lured away leaves teachers with fewer students that care and the school with less revenue with which to work. That the charter or other alternative schools may be no better prepared and produce disappointing results with these kids is pure irony.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The reader is invited to read my book, Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge For Twenty-First Century America where I offer a blue print for the transformation of our nation’s public schools and the educational process that drives them and for supporting our public school teachers.

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

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.

“Rise Above the Mark” viewing on Saturday, Oct 4th at IPFW

If you have not seen the video Rise Above the Mark, take the time to go to the Rhinehart Recital Hall on the IPFW campus at 2101 E. Coliseum Blvd in Fort Wayne, this Saturday, October 4th at 2:00 PM.

This is a video that should be seen by all citizens interested in public education from any perspective.

It is vital that people understand the truth about the current wave of “corporate reforms” being pushed by the federal government, Governor Pence, and leaders of corporate America.

These reform initiatives place our nation’s children at risk and voters cannot make an informed decision about which candidates to support until they have heard the rest of the story.

Check out the following link on the website of the Northeast Indiana Friends of Public Educaton at the following link:

http://neifpe.blogspot.com/

Remember:

It’s all about the Kids!!!

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

The True Challenge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We will also examine:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Powerful forces are poised to rip control of education out of the hands Teachers and communities

Yesterday’s (5/8/14) report, by Kimberly Hefling of the Associated Press, under the headline: “Nation’s students not improving: Exam finds no gains in seniors’ critical skills since ’09,” is certain to renew exclamations that our teachers are failing America’s children.

However absurd such proclamations may be, it is time for teachers, working collectively and with their communities, to take the lead in advocating substantial reforms of the educational process. If teachers permit educational reforms to remain exclusively in the hands of the government and corporate reformers, they are putting America’s children at risk and are leaving the teaching profession unprotected.

It is not sufficient to take a defensive posture and cry out against such reformers. What is needed are proactive proposals that the entire teaching profession can support with all of its political influence and might at the local, state, and federal level.

The reforms themselves must be substantial and they must literally reinvent the American educational process so that it:

• Is focused on success in real and substantive ways that allows teachers to teach children how to be successful;

• Shifts the focus back to subject mastery rather than test preparation, using the NAEP definition of “proficient” as a model where the expectation is to help students acquire the ability to apply what they learn to real-life situations;

• Puts teachers in a position to teach in an intimate environment in which they can form close, nurturing relationships with both students and parents;

• Help children experience the fun of learning under the tutelage of a “favorite teacher” rather than deal with the stress of looming annual, standardized exams;

• Integrate student assessment and teacher accountability into the instructional process, much like industry has done with quality systems, obviating the need for annual standardized examinations to demonstrate competency;

• Provides teachers with state-of-the-art technology and other tools to facilitate rather than obstruct what they do, where the technology is as seamless and productive as the smartphones most of us carry in our pockets and purses; and,

• Begins the challenging process of re-establishing the highest possible level of trust between parents and their children’s teachers.

Teachers must also use their collective might to aggressively pursue grants for creative programs that engage parents as partners in the education of their children (I encourage teachers to count the number of such programs of which they are currently aware).

I offer my book, Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream, as a model for implementation at the local level in schools and communities all over the nation. It is a model that can also serve as catalyst for brainstorming or as a springboard for the development of other models.

In any case, it is time for teachers to act before their credibility is completely tainted and their social capital squandered.

Review of “Reign of Error,” by Diane Ravitch, Chapter 4

[My apologies to my readers for the delay in fulfilling my commitment to review Reign of Error, by Diane Ravitch, chapter by chapter. My holidays were sandwiched by bouts of illness that played havoc with all of my efforts to achieve a long list of goals and objectives.]

Ravitch notes that students of forty to fifty years ago did not get the “high quality of education that is now typical in public schools with Advanced Placement courses or International Baccalaureate programs or even in regular courses offered in our top city and suburban schools.” She goes on to note the increase in special needs students, students that do not speak English, and children who from troubled families. . . . “

Ravitch is correct that the world has changed and I have no doubt that the schools of fifties and sixties would never be able to respond to the challenges with which present day public schools must contend.

In response to the claim of critics who say that our public schools are in decline, Ravitch notes “there is a tendency to hark back . . . to the mythical good old days. But few people realize that there was never a time when everyone succeeded in school.

She continues, “. . . corporate reformers insist that the public schools are in an unprecedented crisis. They tell us that children must be able to ‘escape’ their ‘failing public schools.’ They claim they are “for the children,’ unlike their teachers, who are not for the children.”

In almost all of this, Ravitch is absolutely correct and we concur with her that all of the things these reformers say they want to do for our children are based upon a flawed understanding of what is really happening within our schools. The contention of these reformers that they possess some magical insight and tools and resources that will transform our schools is blatantly false and the unbridled enthusiasm and zeal with which they will rush forward will not change the reality that they are simply wrong. What is very clear, and I concur with Ravitch. is that these reformers can do great harm to our children and to our communities.

The reformers are correct, however, when they say that our “public schools are in an unprecedented crisis.” Here it is Ravitch who is wrong and the enthusiasm and the zeal with which she counters these reformers will not change this reality. Her powerful advocacy also masks the reality that our current schools, policy makers, administrators, and teachers have no more clue what must be done to salvage education in America than do the reformers.

While “corporate reformers play to our anxieties” in claiming that our society and future is at risk, Ravitch and her supporters, which includes the overwhelming majority of public school educators, play to our defensive mechanisms and our blind prejudices. They fight the battle in much the same way opponents of healthcare reform do when these ardent advocates cite the “dangers of socialized medicine” with the full knowledge that mainstream Americans will salivate, in response, with Pavlovian predictability.

While the reformers “scare us with warnings of dire peril [and] mask their agenda with rhetoric that is soothing and deceptive” according to Ravitch, “preservers of the status quo” lull us with the soothing and deceptive elixir of “traditions and stability.”

Let us not, however, be too critical of Ravitch who details, in point after salient point, the fallacy of the reformers agendas. She is so very right in so many cases that one almost feels disloyal to challenge the other half of her argument.

Here are just a few:

“When they speak of ‘reform’ what they really mean is deregulation and privatization.

    Ravitch is correct.

When they speak of ‘accountability’ what they really mean is rigid reliance on standardized testing as both means and the end of education.

    Ravitch is correct.

When they speak of ‘effective teachers’ what they mean is teachers whose students produce higher scores on standardized tests. . . not teachers who inspire their students to love learning.

    Ravitch is correct.

When they speak of ‘innovation’ they mean replacing teachers with technology to cut staffing costs. Here Ravitch is incorrect in defending the assertion that innovations utilizing technology pose a threat to the teaching profession.

    This plays on the fears and misconception on the part of teachers who struggle to envision that such technology can, if properly designed, empower them to do more for their students. Such technological advancements arm educators with powerful tools. The reader is reminded to think about how smartphones have empowered Twenty-First Century people, allowing them to do so much more with less effort.

When they speak of ‘no excuses’ they mean a boot-camp culture. . . .

    Again Ravitch is incorrect. While a few of the most ardent advocates may envision a “boot-camp culture,” most are addressing the compelling need to rid American classrooms of disruptive behavior that diminishes the quality of the classroom experience as well as the quality of the outcomes. This can be accomplished without resorting to drill instructor tactics.

When they speak of ‘personalized instruction,’ they mean putting children in front of computers with algorithms that supposedly adjust content and test questions to the ability level of the student but actually sacrifice human contact with a real teacher.

    As noted above, Ravitch demonstrates her own inability to envision a utilization of technology that can actually enhances the interface between teachers and students because they are not distracted by activity that that eats up valuable time while contributing no instructional value. If one of our most accomplished advocates for quality education cannot open her mind to new possibilities, how can we expect open-mindedness from the men and women who must stand at the head of our classrooms?

When they speak of ‘achievement’ or ‘performance’ they mean higher scores on standardized tests.

    Here Ravitch is correct even though the problem is with standardized test scores and not with ever-rising expectations, the performance against which can be measured in any number of creative and positive ways if we arm teachers with the right tools.

When they speak of ‘data-driven instruction,’ they mean that test scores and graduation rates should be the primary determinant of what is best for children and schools.

    Ravitch has a point but, oddly, relies on test scores and graduation rates to support her own argument that school performance is improving.

When they speak of ‘competition,’ they mean deregulated charters and deregulated private schools.

    Once again, Ravitch is correct, up to a point. Sadly, the advocates of privatization do envision that competition will result in a clear delineation between schools that are effective and those that are not. What is odd, is that traditional educational practices are set up in a way that students must compete with their classmates, to the great disadvantage of the majority of American public school students and most educators, apparently Ravitch included, seem oblivious to the fact.

When they speak of ‘a successful school,’ they refer only to its test scores, not to a school that is the center of its community, with a great orchestra, an enthusiastic chorus, a hardworking chess team, a thriving robotics program, or teachers who have dedicated their lives to helping students with the highest needs (and often the lowest scores).

    Ravitch is correct.

The reformers define the purpose of education as preparation for global competitiveness, higher education, or the workforce. They view students as ‘human capital’ or ‘assets.’ One seldom sees any reference in their literature or public declarations to the importance of developing full persons to assume the responsibilities of citizenship.

    While Ravitch is correct that the “reformers” to whom she refers may seem to be placing too much emphasis on students as a “resource-in-development” for American producers of goods and services, traditionalists seem oblivious to the reality that American society, including the commercial segment, is the end customer of our schools. Schools would do well to be more cognizant of the importance of one’s customer. The reality is that while standardized test scores may be a poor assessment of student performance, employers that depend on our young people to be able to read, apply mathematical and scientific principles competently, and write coherent sentences are the ultimate judges of the performance of our educational systems.

Of equal importance are the topics that corporate reformers don’t talk about. Seldom do they protest budget cuts, no matter how massive they may be. They do not complain when governors and legislatures cut billions from the public schools while claiming to be reformers. They do not protest rising rates of child poverty. They do not complain about racial segregation. They see no harm in devoting more time and resources to standardized testing. They do not complain when federal or state or city officials announce plans to test children in kindergarten or even prekindergarten. They do not complain about increased class size. They do not object to scripted curricula or teachers’ loss of professional autonomy. They do not object when experienced teachers are replaced by recruits who have only a few weeks training. They close their eyes to evidence that charters enroll disproportionately small numbers of children with disabilities, or those from troubled homes, or English-language learners (in fact, they typically deny any such disparities, even when documented by state and federal data). They do not complain when for-profit corporations run charter schools or when educational services are outsourced to for-profit businesses. Indeed, they welcome entrepreneurs into the reform community as investors and partners.

    While Ravitch’s criticisms, here, are fair overall; she misrepresents the value, or lack thereof, of testing children in Kindergarten or pre-kindergarten. The advocacy of such testing, at least on the part people like myself, is not to judge the effectiveness of early educational programs and teachers, rather it is to assess the level of preparedness of children as they approach their first day of school and to help the school prepare an appropriate and unique educational plan for each child.

While Ravitch is often right, she paints everyone who wants to challenge conventional wisdom into the same corner and suddenly the word ‘reform’ takes on the same pejorative connotations as socialized medicine in the context of healthcare reform and triggers a shutdown of the minds of the majority of Americans educators and taxpayers.

Ravitch writes:

The central theme of this movement is that public schools are in decline. But this is not true. The public schools are working very well for most students. Contrary to popular myths, the scores on the no-stakes federal tests—the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)—are at an all-time high for students who are white, black, Hispanic, and Asian. Graduation rates are also at an all-time high.

This may be the most inexplicable of Ravitch’s statements. In our review of Chapter 5 of her Reign of Error we will examine her analysis of test scores and challenge many of the conclusions she draws from her own evidence.

Reign of Error by Diane Ravitch; the 3rd Installment of my Journaled Review

In her second chapter of this monumental work, Ravitch begins by providing an historical overview of Federal initiatives in response to what many believe to be an urgent need for massive reforms in our systems of public education,leading up to the George W. Bush administration. Under Bush’s administration the “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB) legislation was introduced and it was to have a far-reaching adverse impact on our systems of education, according to Ravitch, many others in the field of education, and of this author/blogger. The NCLB declared that all students in grades 3 – 8 should be tested annually; that states were to monitor schools re: their performance; and, that “failing” schools were to be labeled and face consequences up to and including closure. She notes that, given the unreasonable standard many schools, even some of our very best, failed year after year. She also notes that schools with high proportions of poor and minority students “were the likeliest to be labeled as failing.”

Ravitch writes “Let’s be clear: 100 percent proficiency is an impossible goal.” She makes a wonderful comparison to applying this standards to an expectations that cities were to become crime free and that cities that failed to rise to such expectations would see the closing of police stations and the firing of police officers. She writes “the first to close would be the police stations in the poorest neighborhoods, where crime rates were the highest.”

As I stated in my book, Reinventing Education, Hope and the American Dream, referencing teachers, “it’s like blaming the soldiers for the war they were asked to fight.” What it shows is just how dreadful is the understanding of legislators and policy makers with the problems facing education in America.

What seems to most concern Ravitch is that NCLB demands utilization of testing to assess the performance of both schools and their teachers and also that it “opened the door to huge entrepreneurial opportunities . . . .” It also “encouraged the growth of the charter sector by proposing that charter schools were a remedy for failing schools.”

She notes that when the concept was first introduced, charter schools were envisioned as a way for teachers to find “innovative ways to ignite the . . . Interest in education” speaking specifically of “lowest performing students, the dropouts and the disengaged.” She points out that it was also envisioned that the lessons learned in charter schools were to have been applied to our most challenging public schools.

She notes that the earliest proponents of charter schools never “imagined a charter school sector that was 90 percent non-union or one that in some states presented profit-making opportunities for entrepreneurs.”

The federal government, Ravitch tells us, promoted the concept of charter schools as a way to “compete with neighborhood public schools for higher test scores. . .” absent any evidence that the concept would work.

What has resulted, she suggests, is that the “incessant” focus on testing, creative ways to incent and fund charter schools, the use of vouchers, and privatization have had and continue to have a devastating impact on our neighborhood public schools, the teachers that populate those schools and the most vulnerable population of American school children that is served by those schools and their teachers.

Ravitch argues that, just as “this unnatural focus on testing produced perverse but predictable results; it narrowed curriculum; many districts scaled back time for the arts, history, civics, physical education, science, foreign language, and whatever was not tested.” She cites the widespread cheating that we are seeing; wasting huge sums of money on test preparation and administration; and “teaching to test” by teachers who feel pressure “to save their jobs and their schools.”

As a substitute, I have seen this occur where teachers are introducing material as “these are the kind of questions or problems you are likely to find on ISTEPs (the State of Indiana’s student competency examinations).

Anyone who does not agree with Ravitch’s concerns about the fraud and mismanagement of funds as a result of the privatization of education should think for a moment about Medicare and Medicaid fraud where doctors (supposedly the most trusted professionals in all of American society) and other health professionals and institutions are being charged for manipulating the system for their own financial interests. When there are big dollars at stake it seems to bring the greed and larceny out of even the best of us, and as Ravitch shows, dollars amounts being utilized to provide incentives and grants for these reforms are enormous.

The election of President Obama, Ravitch suggests, raised hopes of new directions in federal education policy that were quickly dashed. She cites what amounts to little more than a feeding frenzy as states and others compete for huge sums as a result of Obama’s Race to the Top, Common Core, et al.

Ravitch writes, “By picking a few winners, the Race to the Top competition abandoned the traditional idea of equality of educational opportunity, where federal aid favored districts and schools that enrolled students with the highest needs.”

We have seen it in other venues where the sudden availability of incentives through federal funding has spawned spectacular growth in the number of consultants and other for-profit entities that carve out enormous chunks of scarce dollars that will never, ever be spent in the direct benefit of a single American boy or girl.

Ravitch is absolutely correct that “reformers support testing, accountability and choice.” and that this blind commitment to unproven ideas is leading to the destruction of the public school systems on which Americans have depended for generations.

She concludes this chapter by saying that “the debates about the role of schooling in a democratic society, the lives of children and families, and the relationship between schools and society were relegated to the margins as no longer relevant to the business plan to reinvent American Education.”

Her last line is an unfortunate choice of words, from the perspective of a writer who has entitled his own book about educational reform as Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream; The Challenge for Twenty-First Century America. I suspect that just the word “reinventing” has rendered my book as valueless in her mind, assuming she has even glanced at the correspondence I have sent inviting her to read the book or at the comments I have made in response to posts on her blog, as well as the posts on my own blog.

I agree with her completely that the direction of these national reform efforts is placing the very future of our nation and its children at risk. We seem to disag

The reinventing that I advocate is designed to come from inside of our schools reaching out to our community not the other way around. They are ideas that demand that the links between our schools and their teachers and the communities that they serve are strengthened rather than weakened. They are ideas that cherish the vital role that teachers play in the lives of their children and that are meant to improve the ability of those teachers to make a difference in those lives.

They are ideas that reject reliance on standardized competency assessments as a dangerous intrusion that not only distracts teachers from their purpose but puts emphasis on the “timed regurgitation of facts, figures, and formulas” rather than on sustained, meaningful mastery of subject matter that the men and women whom these children become will carry and utilize throughout their lives.

They are ideas that borrow from things we have learned, from an operational perspective, in a business environment and not from the boardrooms and their focus on financial incentives, investments, and entrepreneurialism. The lessons from which I challenge educators to learn have to do with things like problem-solving, teamwork, integrating quality assessment into the learning process, and giving the people on the production line the tools and resources they need to help them do the best job of which they are capable.

They are ideas at risk of being branded as more of the same by the real educators who are being forced to defend themselves and the important work they do when, in fact, these ideas will empower educators rather than bind and restrict them.

The author and the readers of Reign of Error are urged to have faith that not all re-inventers are out to do them harm and to give Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream a chance to open their eyes to a new way of looking at what they do.