Tag Archives: positive leadership

The Danger of Donald Trump

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As far back as twenty years ago, I became concerned that our nation was losing its sense of purpose and that the American people had begun to take democracy for granted. Democracy is a delicate concept that requires an equilibrium between freedom and responsibility. For democracy to work, people must share the same or at least a similar vision for our nation and its people. They must be willing and able to find common ground—a solution with which all parties can live.

When views become so disparate and extreme that people are unable to forge amenable agreements, democracy is put to a severe test. This is what we have seen in recent years with a Congressional gridlock where the best Congress can do is pass temporary legislation to hold off a government shutdown for a few weeks or months. Passing substantive legislation has become problematic, so great is the discord in Congress. This is also what happens when the focus of the principal players is to attack their opposition rather be a positive advocate for their own platform. It is a lack of positive leadership.

It has taken me 2 weeks to sort through my thoughts and feelings while watching parts of the Republican convention. I must confess that I could not make myself watch more than snippets of the major speeches during the convention. The rhetoric was simply too. . . . I cannot seem to come up with a word that accurately describes the disgust, fear, and even anguish of watching the Republic Party’s candidate for the Presidency of the United States calling people names, insulting their character, pandering to the racism and hatred in the minds of so many Americans, and making absurd promises that only the most gullible adults could believe. As I have written before, Donald Trump is the antithesis of positive leadership.

What I have come to realize is that watching Donald Trump at the Republican Convention is the scariest thing I have seen in my lifetime. It is not simply the things he says or the way he bullies people but something far more subtle but at the same time more profound. Donald Trump and many of the people who support him seem willing to trample the rights of people of whom they do not approve or with whom they do not agree. There is a viciousness to it that says no one matters but me and mine. This is hardly a recipe for democracy.

Throughout my lifetime, there has been simple concept that I have heard in many contexts and stated in many different ways that says “everyone counts or no one counts.” Is there anyone on God’s Earth that you would be willing to grant the power to pick and choose to whom we should extend the protections of the Constitution of the United States as delineated in the Bill of Rights?

During the entire Obama administration, attacks against our nation’s President have been nothing short of virulent and the overwhelming majority of the accusations are absurd and found to be untrue by any of the independent fact-checking services. The same is true of Hillary Clinton. You do not see Donald Trump attacking her ideas and accomplishments rather you see him brand her as a liar, much as he did with Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio during the primary elections.

Our focus in determining to whom we wish to give our vote for President of the United States should be looking at their body of work and their overall integrity. In doing so we need to keep in mind that the longer one has been in public life or business the more mistakes they will have made and the more misstatements will have been uttered. It is simply a reflection of the fact that none of us are perfect, not even our candidates for the Presidency.

When we compare Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump you have two extremes in terms of career activity and objectives. Hillary Clinton has spent most of her life in some form of public service, whether working as a community activist or as a public official. Donald Trump has spent all of his life focused on his business interests. Both career choices are noble. If they are to be judged they can only be judged on the basis of the number and types of victims left in the wake of their respective careers.

Measuring overall integrity is problematic but what we can measure is the relative truthfulness of the two candidates. Truthfulness may not be the same thing as integrity but it is certainly a reflection of integrity.

Recently, Politifact, the Pulitzer Prize winning fact checking service that spares no one, found that 55 percent of Trump’s public statements were “false” which Politifact defines as “not accurate” and half of those received Politifact’s “Pants on Fire” rating which is defined as “A statement that is not accurate and makes a ridiculous claim.” (http://www.politifact.com/personalities/donald-trump/)

This is compared to 13 percent of Hillary Clinton’s statements that were found to be “false” and only 2 percent of her statements were judged as “Pants on Fire.” (http://www.politifact.com/personalities/hillary-clinton/)

Looking at the two candidates from the perspective of truth, 72 percent of Hillary Clinton’s public statements have been judged to be “mostly true” compared to 29 percent of Donald Trump’s public statements.

If he acts true to form, one would expect Donald Trump to declare that Politifact is “unfairly biased against him.” It seems only fair to point out that other Republican candidates such as Jeb Bush and John Kasich were found by Politifact to be truthful roughly 70 percent of the time. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, by the way, were found to be 35 percent and 59 percent truthful, respectively. Bernie Sanders was truthful 72 percent of the time and had no “pants on fire” falsehoods.

In case you are wondering, President Barack Obama, according to Politifact, is mostly truthful 75 percent of the time, compared to Rush Limbaugh, who was found to be truthful only 17 percent of the time. I point that out only because so many of the outrageous accusations against President Obama and Hillary Clinton were originally voiced by radio and other talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh. That people are so willing to believe such people says a lot about Twenty-first Century America.

The rude surprise that awaits Donald Trump is that, should he be elected, his authoritarian approach will face the same gridlock as his predecessors. The only way he can implement any of the ideas reflected in his campaign promises would be if he were to circumvent or otherwise subvert the democratic process. This, my friends, is what makes Donald Trump so scary.

If the differences that divide the American people continues to expand, it is only a matter of time until someone like Donald Trump is elected to the Presidency who believes they have sufficient power to impose their will on the American people and the democratic process. This would mean the end of the American democracy as we know it.

When I began to grow concerned, twenty years ago, I began writing a novel about how things could go horribly wrong if we were to lose our faith in democracy and elect an authoritarian outsider to the Presidency on the basis of his pledge to restore domestic peace and prosperity (make America great again) at any cost. My novel, entitled Light and Transient Causes, was published in 2013. I encourage the reader to check it out. If we want to prevent something like this from happening we must understand just how bad things could be if we abandon our faith in democracy. You can check my novel out at https://melhawkinsandassociates.com/light-and-transient-causes-a-novel/

Positive Leadership Involves Building Positive Relationships

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Most often when men and women are struggling in their role as leader their problems are a function of their relationships with the people with whom they interact. Rarely does it matter whether the relationship issues are with the leader’s employees, fellow supervisors, the people to whom they report, or members of their supply chain, both internal and external. The dynamics are pretty much the same in all human relationships, with the exception of romances and friendships. What distinguishes love/partnerships and friendships is that these relationships exist in the context of choice.

All other relationships typically happen as a result of us coming into frequent contact with others through work, team play, neighborhoods, or other serendipitous event. When our daily lives bring us into close contact with another human being, the extent to which we get along and are able to interact on a positive basis goes a long way in determining our happiness and success. If we like the people with whom we must spend time, then life is so much easier, less stressful, more productive, and happier. Sometimes these relationships blossom into friendships or partnership but rarely are we able to make this happen.

For people who are having relationship issues, in the work place or other non-intimate situations, there are two simple rules at play. The first, is if you are unhappy with the way other people are treating you, start by taking a critical look at how you treat them. Inevitably, how others treat you is a reaction to your behavior toward them.

The second rule at play is one of the core principles of positive leadership. It is only when we accept responsibility for relationships/problems that we begin to acquire the power to change/solve them. In this case, we have no direct power over the way people are treating us or responding to us. We do, however, have control over how we choose to interact with them and respond to the negative nuances.

Never be afraid to ask people for their help in improving your relationship with them but asking for that assistance in the right way is imperative. If they interpret your request as “I don’t like the way you are treating me and we need to change it!” you can be sure they will view your request as self-serving.

Simply approach the person(s) with sincerity and acknowledge that the relationship seems strained. Ask what you can do to improve it. Once that subject is broached it becomes easier to arrive at a point where you each accept responsibility for the friction that exists between you. Very few people welcome friction in their relationships but that friction persists because few are willing to take the initiative to do something about it. Most people will respond to an olive branch, however, if they sense sincerity.

Accepting responsibility and reaching out to others is the essence of positive leadership and it can change your life and the lives of the people around you. My book, The Difference is You, Power Through Positive Leadership will show you how much power you have to make a difference.

Donald Trump: The Antithesis of Positive Leadership

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As an American who has spent his entire career as a student, advocate, and practitioner of the principles of positive leadership, it is staggering to think that not only is a presidential candidate spreading a message of prejudice and hatred but also that he is garnering the support of a significant percentage of Republican voters. The man behaves like a bully and a name-caller of the same ilk as a rising political leader in Germany, eighty-five years ago. If you do not agree with someone, call them names, threaten to do harm to them, persecute an entire religious group, or deport millions of others.

Over the last couple of decades we have seen the emergence of bitter enmity on the part of Americans who are so full of hatred and prejudice that they will believe even the most outrageous accusations against President Obama, a man whom they despise. No doubt, someone recently spouted that “Obama probably paid protesters at a recent political rally for Trump” and now those accusations are sweeping across the internet, taken as gospel. Equally ridiculous are the accusations that “Obama arranged and paid for the assassination” of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

How can people be so full of hate that they are willing to believe such unsubstantiated nonsense about the President of the United States?

The sad thing about Donald Trump is that the man is correct about some of the things that need to happen to keep our nation healthy and “return it to greatness.” Support of Trump on these few issues becomes impossible, however, when the man preys on the ignorance and prejudices of millions of Americans and when his political strategy poses the biggest threat to democracy in my lifetime.

We do need to put the restoration of the U.S. infrastructure at the top of our nation’s priority list. We do need to take control of immigration. We do need to put people back to work. We do need to replace politicians who have become little more than puppets of some of our nation’s richest and most powerful political action committees. We do need leadership that is beholden to no one other than the American people.

We desperately need positive leaders who recognize that the issues with which we struggle, today, did not just happen rather that they are the consequence of 65-years-worth of ineffectual policies, whether liberal or conservative, republican or democrat.

What we need most of all is a positive leader with a vision for the future. A leader who recognizes that poverty is a consequence of an obsolete educational process that has set generations of American children up for failure and that makes it almost impossible for even our best teachers to do what they dreamt of doing when they chose their profession. It is an educational process that can only be further damaged by reforms focused on privatization and standardized testing.

We yearn for a positive leader who understands that the strongest economy during the latter third of the 21st Century will be the one that has ended its reliance on fossil fuels and has mastered the production of renewable sources of clean energy. It will also be an economy that is committed to responsible stewardship of the environment.

We hunger for a positive leader who believes that all Americans are entitled to comprehensive healthcare and prescription drugs as a right of citizenship and who understands that we can provide such healthcare without socialized medicine if only we open are hearts and minds to a new way of thinking.

And, finally, we need a positive leader who can help us renew our faith in democracy and in each other; a leader who can show the American people that our greatest strength as a nation is, has always been, and will always be our diversity. We seek a leader who can rebuild a nation in which the American dream is an achievable reality for all of its citizens; not just a privileged few.

My novel, Light and Transient Causes, is about one way things could go horribly wrong if a man like Donald Trump was elected President. https://melhawkinsandassociates.com/light-and-transient-causes-a-novel/ The reader is invited to take a look.

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

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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 Tipping Point with Ominous Implications is Fast Approaching!

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Note to the reader: This article is an updated version of one that was posted shortly after my blog “Education, Hope, and the American Dream” was created and at a time when the blog’s readership was minimal.
Because I believe it is even more timely now than it was then, it is being re-posted with modifications.

As you read these words, it is vital that you realize that the United States of America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, is fast approaching a tipping point that will irrevocably alter the reality in which we live.

As a result of decisions we have made as a nation, since the end of World War II, a society of second class citizens has emerged. These Americans are not full participants in the American dream. Many of these men and women have effectively become disenfranchised and why should we be surprised by this.

These are Americans who have not been well-served by our systems of public education; have little or no access to quality healthcare for their families, Obamacare notwithstanding; and, if they are employed at all, they have low paying jobs with no eligibility for healthcare benefits and no opportunities for advancement. These are Americans who have given up on the American Dream for themselves and their families. They have succumbed to a self-perpetuating cycle of powerlessness and hopelessness.

Although the demographics of this group spans the full spectrum of the American population, African-American, Hispanic-American and other minorities are over-represented. For blacks and other minorities, the sense of disenfranchisement is compounded by their lack of faith that the American justice system will treat them justly.

Mainstream Americans resent the dependency of this segment of our population every bit as much as these men, women, and children resent their lack of access to the American Dream. For a huge portion of this population the American Dream is nothing more than a failed promise.

The bitterness and resentment on both sides of the invisible barriers that separate us as a people are enhanced by the racism and discrimination that permeate our society. How ironic is it that the election of our nation’s first African-American president has proven that racism in America is alive and well.

That there is an equally large and fast-growing population of retirees who are checking out of the game at an age from which they are likely to live another quarter of a century, adds greatly to this burden. It does not matter that these retiring men and women have worked hard for their entire lives to earn their Social Security, Medicare and pensions. These facts do not change the economic dynamics that make this population a burden to the Americans in the middle who must work harder to pay the bills.

Fortunately, many of these men and women have invested well and their money is working for us even if they are not. We are only beginning to understand, however, how this aging population will begin to overwhelm an already inadequate healthcare system over the next two decades.

Add the weight of the disenfranchised and the burden is fast approaching a tipping point after which our national misfortune will accelerate and we will all begin to feel both hopeless and powerless.

The Republican Party, driven by the strong conservative dogma of the tea party movement, is choosing to ignore the needs of Mitt Romney’s imfamous “47 percent” and focus only on the needs of the middle class and, even more so, the corporate elite. These political leaders believe they can turn back the clock to a time when the white man ruled the roost and when values seemed clearer.

The Democratic Party continues to pursue its traditional liberal agenda that has become equally ineffectual.

In the meantime, China, Europe, Japan, India, and other developing nations are challenging our supremacy in the international marketplace; Al Qaeda and ISIS are seeking to spread terror to weaken “the evil empire;” and, Mother Nature is meting out the consequences of global warning.

We cannot continue to trudge down the dry and dusty paths of 20th Century political dogma, conventional wisdom, or business as usual. Somehow we must pull the disenfranchised back into the game as full and equal citizens, as believers in the American dream, and as partners in rising to the challenges of this new century. We need to do this not out of altruism, however compelling the argument, rather because we desperately need the committed participation of every single able-bodied American.

We must demand that our elected representatives cease their paralyzing bickering and begin working together in what is a conflict of historical proportions in which the very survival of our nation and way of life are at an unprecedented level risk.

We desperately need new leadership with fresh ideas to respond to these extraordinary challenges of this young Twenty-First Century and we do not have so much as a single nanosecond to spare.

I invite you to follow this blog, “Education, Hope, and the American Dream,” in which I offer innovative solutions to the problems we face as a society.

I also invite you to read my four books.

1. The Difference Is You: Power Through Positive Leadership, in which I offer the reader powerful principles that enable individual men and women to change the world around them;

2. Radical Surgery: Reconstructing the American Health Care System, that offers a way to provide universal healthcare and prescription drugs to the American people without socialized medicine;

3. Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge for Twenty-First Century America, in which I offer a blueprint for reinventing the educational process to one that focuses on teachers and students working toward success, absent the risk of failure; and

4. Light and Transient Causes, a novel that tells a story of what could happen if we lose faith in the principles of democracy and with one another.

View Part 2 of my Interview on “The Verbal Edge” re: my book, The Difference is You: Power Through Positive Leadership

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View the second segment of my 2-part interview with Elizabeth Nulf MacDonald on her show, “The Verbal Edge” to talk about my book The Difference is You: Power Through Positive Leadership.

View Part 1 of my interview “The Verbal Edge” to talk my book The Difference Is You: Power Through Positive Leaders

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View the following excerpt from part 1 of the two-part segment of my interview with Elizabeth Nulf MacDonald on her show The Verbal Edge, to talk about my book The Difference Is You: Power Through Positive Leadership.

The Verbal Edge, The Difference is You: Power Through Positive Leadership, Part 1

Even our System of Public Education is Within Our Power to Change

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One of the most important things people in organizations must learn is that there are always opportunities to bring about positive change. That ability always begins with a sense of awareness about the system of events, objectives, and activities that swirl about us, immersing us in the flurry of our individual lives and moments.

We can teach ourselves how to take a few steps back to a point from which we can view all that takes place around us as if we were standing apart. It takes effort to acquire this skill but it is still just that, a skill that men and women can learn to master and utilize like any other tool.

Once we are able to gain that perspective, it is a matter of evaluating all of the activities of the organization, system, or process within the context of our essential mission and purpose. What we learn, rather quickly, is that distractions, secondary agendas, and the ongoing friction of human beings working together is that it is easy to be diverted from one’s mission or purpose. Over time, the consequences of these ancillary activities begin to accumulate like weeds in an unkempt garden and they literally eat away at the productive output of the entity.

Periodic maintenance of your organization will bring things back in line, if not permitted to go unnoticed. When too much time has elapsed, it becomes necessary to reconstruct the organization, system, or process to make sure that it is not only focused on mission and purpose but also to assess whether the ramifications of the changes in the world around us have been factored in.  Very often changes in the reality of the world in which the entity operates have not been incorporated and the process has become antiquated; sometimes obsolete.

In business, the process of addressing these systemic dysfunctions on a comprehensive basis is often referred to as “turnaround management” or “transformational leadership.” It is all constructed on the premise of one of the basic laws of systems and one of the principles of positive leadership:

“The only point at which a product, service, process, organization, or system can no longer be improved is the precise point in time that it has become obsolete.”

This transformational process is, itself, a complex tool that can be applied to systems of all sizes, shapes, and purposes by positive leaders skilled in the application of “systems thinking.” It is a powerful tool that can transform even something as complicated as our systems of public education.

It does require, however, 1) a willingness to believe that such change is possible and within our power to create, and 2) a willingness on the part of people to come together as a unified and committed force behind a set of shared principles and common purpose.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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