Tag Archives: public school teachers

In our public schools we need to change the way we keep score, Part I

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In any game, the strategies of the participants are driven by the manner in which the game is scored.

We evaluate student performance in the classroom by assigning a letter grade to the quality of work the student completes during a grading period or semester. We evaluate teacher performance, and also school performance, on the basis of their students’ performance on annual, standardize competency exams.

Public school teachers are rebelling against the heavy reliance on state competency exams as a measure of their performance. “It forces us to focus on test preparation rather than real learning,” they say. Teachers assert that how well a student performs on such standardized testing is influenced by much more than just the quality of instruction they were given by their teacher(s).

Teachers are correct that exam scores are an unfair assessment of the quality of effort teachers put forth because the exams do not take into account the myriad of problems with which teachers must contend. They are asked to accept responsibility for a diverse population of students with a wide variance with respect to academic readiness; motivation to learn; and ability to conduct themselves civilly. That variance extends to the level of support teachers receive from parents and the students and their family’s relative position on a poverty-affluence continuum. Some educators also argue that test results are an unfair comparison when their school is being compared against other schools with fewer special needs children.

All of these criticisms of the utilization of standardized competency examination results as a basis for school and teacher accountability are correct. These educators are absolutely correct when they say that the reliance on test results shifts focus to test preparation and away from real and sustainable learning.

Standardized competency examinations provide little if any benefit in improving the quality of education for the students who are taking the tests. With the exception of such tests that, in Indiana, are called End of Class Assessments (ECA) in English and algebra that must be passed before a student is eligible for graduation, there are very few formal processes to provide remediation for students who perform poorly on annual exams. Students unable to pass ECA exams are given one or more opportunities to retake the exams, often after having spent time in remediation classrooms that we often call math and English labs. If still unable to pass, students are given the opportunity to obtain a waiver by providing other evidence demonstrates their readiness for graduation.

In my book, Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge for Twenty-First Century America, I point out that annual, standardized competency exams are like quality inspections of an earlier era. I wrote that:

“Formerly, inspections were done at the end of an assembly line to insure that only output of the highest quality would end up in the hands of a customer. By the time the inspections were completed, however, the damage was already done and the discrepant material would only provide clues to indicate what had gone wrong, when, where, and, why. In the interim, production would continue producing both good and bad product and the scrap pile of discrepant material would grow, along with its cost.”

One could make the point that the English and math labs are the Twenty-first Century education equivalent of a 1950’s scrap pile in a manufacturing plant. The cost to the taxpayers of our communities is staggering; the cost to the lives of our children is a lifetime of unfulfilled expectations. We have taught them how to fail when our job was to teach them that they can learn.

From the 1960s until present time, manufacturing and assembly plants have developed sophisticated quality systems and companion performance management systems so that such problems can be identified at the time of production and then remedied to insure the highest possible quality of product while minimizing production costs.

The only thing preventing us from integrating quality and performance management systems into the traditional American educational process, much as we have done in industry, is our intransigence. In my book, Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream, I show exactly how to assure a child’s success and how to integrate quality into the educational process.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Questions we might ask would include:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Denying the Crisis in Public Education a Strategic Error on the Part of Bad Ass Teachers and Their Colleagues.

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The Bad Ass Teachers Association, Diane Ravitch, and every other teacher advocacy group make a strategic error when they argue that there is no crisis in American public education and that our public schools are doing better than they have ever done.

It is a strategic error for several reasons all of which weaken the argument against the corporate reforms that are sweeping the nation. It is a strategic error because it portrays public school teachers as being in complete denial and overly defensive.

The truth is that our systems of public education are in a deep state of crisis and it is a crisis in which teachers bear only a modest share of the responsibility and are as much the victims of the crisis as are the students in their classrooms.

While it is true that our nation’s top students are learning more than at any time in the history of public education we could make an argument that even the interests of these accomplished youngsters are being compromised by the crisis in education. The sad truth is that the students at the other end of the academic success continuum may be learning less than at any time in the history of public education.

The overwhelming majority of our nation’s public school teachers are heroes of the first order as they dedicate their lives and careers to serving the interests of our nation’s children. Yes, there are bad teachers just like there are underperforming members of every other population of professional men and women. Do teachers need to do a better job of policing their own? Absolutely! Do teachers’ unions and associations need to do a better job of serving the interests of both their members and the teaching profession? Absolutely!

When examining the problems of our systems of public education, no one is guiltless, teachers included. The flip side of that statement is that when examining the problems of our systems of public education, no group of people does more for the children in America than the men and women who stand in front of our classrooms. When examined with an objective eye, in the midst of all of the forces that conspire to thwart their efforts, what public school teachers accomplish is nothing short of remarkable.

The truth is that teachers deserve all of the support we can give them and they deserve none of the mounting blame and criticism that is heaped upon their heads and shoulders, unmercifully.  It is also true that teachers need their unions and their associations. These are, after all, the only entities that support the efforts of teachers consistently. We do not plan to let the teacher organizations off the hook, however, as they are no different than any other business organization and need to relentlessly re-examine their mission, their strategic objectives, and retool themselves in an ever-changing political environment.

The one thing about which we can be sure is that very little of that which has worked in the past can be expected to work in the future.

Let us examine the evidence for the argument that our systems of public education are in a state of crisis. For the benefit or our teachers we are going to save the empirical evidence for later. The compelling truth is that teachers know in their hearts that public education is in crisis because they deal with the reality of it every single day in their classrooms.

You know it every day when the emphasis you are asked to place is more on test preparation than sustained learning. You know it every day that you must move your class on to a new lesson when you know there are students who are not yet ready; students who do not yet understand yesterday’s material and will be even less prepared to understand what is presented to them tomorrow.

You know when you deal with the disruption of students who will not behave and will not try and when their parents are convinced that you are being unfair to their child.

You know it when you deal with students who could be honor students if only they would try. You know it when parents of such students seem to have no more ability to motivate their children than you do.

You see it when you experience, first hand, the performance gap between the white and minority students in your classrooms and you know that many of the students who are failing place no value at all on education and neither do many of their parents.

You know it when, at the end of a school year you are approached by administrators asking what you can do to help a student improve his or her grade so they are able to graduate with their class; students who have done little or nothing to earn that grade for an entire semester or school year.

You know it when you look at children who are weighed down by the crushing burden of a range of disadvantages: disadvantages with which the students are as powerless to deal as are you, their teachers.

The empirical evidence for the crisis is so overwhelming is seems almost pointless to rehash the data. That teachers are unfairly blamed for the results of the standardized competency examinations administered in their respective states does not mitigate the fact that far too many children are failing.

There is the performance gap between white and black students, and between white and other minority students a gap that show no sign of narrowing and yet is rarely the topic of frank discourse.

NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) results that show that a full 60 percent of American students are below proficiency in virtually every subject of inquiry and anywhere from 85 to 90 percent of minority students are below proficiency. Contrary to the arguments of so many of the defenders of public education, the demarcation line between proficiency and below is the one that counts. NAEP defines “proficient” in several ways but the most noteworthy is the assertion that students must be able to use in real-life situations what they have learned in school. Anything less than this is simply unacceptable no matter how much we might wish, otherwise. After all, if we cannot use knowledge or skills in real life then we have not really learned.

So, the reader may ask, what are teachers to do in the face of the unreasonable scrutiny and the unfair burden of blame heaped on them by reformers and many of the families they exist to serve? It is so easy for teachers to feel overwhelmed by the forces that impede their ability to do what they know must be done.

The answers to these questions are the subject of my book Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge for Twenty-First Century America.

For the purpose of today’s subject, the answer is that teachers need to stand tall and declare, going beyond what the Bad Ass Teachers are declaring:

“Damn right the system is in crisis and we’re through taking the blame for an antiquated educational structure and process that has not been substantially altered for more than a century.”

“We are through taking the blame for what may be the lowest level of student motivation to learn on the part of students in decades.”

“We are sick and tired of being held responsible for the cavernous disparity in the levels of preparation of students when they arrive at our door for their first day of school.”

“We are fed up with being blamed for the burgeoning population of American parents who have lost hope and faith in the American Dream and no longer believe that an education provides a way out for their sons and daughters.”

And, “We categorically reject responsibility for a reality that the combined power of the influence of the peer group and social media, both of which are fueled by the power of Madison Avenue, has made it exponentially more difficult for parents to sustain their role as the biggest influence in the lives of their pre- and post-pubescent children.”

When parents have ceased being the major influencing force in the lives of their children it will be that much more difficult for teachers to preserve their own level of influence in the lives of those same children.

But complaining about these realities will only take teachers so far. The operative question is what can be done about these challenges and right now, in this point in history, the only ones coming forth with what they believe to be a solution, however ill-advised it may be, are the corporate and government reformers with their “runaway train of misguided educational reforms.”

The Bad Ass Teacher Association, by taking a stand and shouting that they “aren’t going to take it anymore,” has positioned itself to play a lead role in countering the “reformers” with real and meaningful reforms of our educational process. In my next post, I will publish and open letter to the Bad Ass Teachers of America challenging them to take the lead in changing this reality and offering a comprehensive plan of action as a place to begin.

What is the truth about claims that American public education is in crisis and what is the evidence to support such claims?

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As much as I admire and respect public school teachers, and as important as it is that we pledge our support to them, they are no better positioned to judge the efficacy of public education in America than cooks, waiters, and bus persons are positioned to judge the quality of the food their restaurant serves. Such judgments must always be left to the customer and, as we shall see shortly, sometimes our teachers are a customer of the system.

It is clear to this observer that the American educational process is failing in spite of the valiant efforts of the men and women who stand at the front of a classroom. While it is a gross disservice to lay the blame on our teachers, we must look objectively at the system’s performance.

So what is the evidence that suggests that our systems of public education are in a state of crisis?

Let’s start with what motivated the business men and women, whom we often refer to as “corporate reformers,” to focus so much attention on education. These business executives are motivated by the frustration they feel when it is so incredibly difficult to find qualified workers for their operations and it doesn’t matter whether they are seeking skilled or unskilled labor, or professionals.

Applications for work are submitted, daily, from prospective employees who are unable to understand and apply basic mathematical and scientific principles, who are unable to craft a coherent sentence or to express themselves effectively, whether orally or in writing. They are young men and women who demonstrate minimal motivation to do their best and insufficient self-discipline to earn the status and prestige to which they consider themselves entitled.

The quality of this labor force requires that employers allocate enormous sums of money and inordinate time on the part of their trainers, supervisors and managers to teach these young adults what they need to know; what most of us believe they should have brought to the table in the first place. The sheer mass of the resources diverted for such purposes has a measurable adverse impact on both productivity and profitability of business entities.

Not sufficient proof, you say? Then let us ask the classroom teachers in our more challenging public schools, particularly in middle- and high school classrooms, about the disruptive behavior, lack of motivation to learn, willingness to copy a classmates work without the slightest remorse, and about the apathy and/or hostility of the parents of these youngsters who make no attempt to be supportive of their children’s teachers. Yet these parents are fully prepared to accuse teachers of incompetence and of unfairly picking on their children.

Ask the teachers in our best schools how many of their students could do so much better if only they tried; if only their parents were more supportive; if only teachers were able to give them more time, attention, and encouragement. All of these “ifs,” by the way, are activities and investments of time and resources that our current educational process is not structured to support.

Still not enough? Let’s ask the military services how many young men and women, the majority of which are high school seniors or graduates, who are unable to earn the minimum score on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) to qualify for enlistment. Ask them what percentage of the enlistees who do qualify are able to do more than the most basic jobs in the military? How many are qualified for the highly technical jobs or for officer candidacy? The answers are most disturbing.

Need more evidence? Let’s examine NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Process) results that indicate that only forty percent of American eighth graders are able to score well enough on NAEP assessments to be categorized as “proficient” or above. Let’s keep in mind that the definition that has been established for “proficient” is:

“solid academic performance for each grade assessed. Students reaching this      level have demonstrated competency over challenging subject matter, including subject matter knowledge, application of such knowledge to real world situations, and analytical skills appropriate to the subject matter.”

The emphasis is mine and it is vital that we consider the significance of this expectation that students gain the ability to apply what they have learned “to real world situations.”  It means it is not enough that students are able to earn certain scores on the assessments for given subject matter, they must also be able to utilize what they have learned throughout their lifetimes.

This means that a full 60 percent of American eighth graders have not acquired sufficient mastery over subject matter that would enable them to utilize, on the job or in solving other real-life problems, the math, science, reading, and writing skills that they were supposed to have studied in the classroom.

Let’s examine NAEP results further to see that only 10 percent of African-American students and 15 percent of Hispanic students are able to earn the achievement level of “proficient” or above in math, science, reading and writing. This is the most glaring fact in all of education and most teachers and other educators are reluctant to even talk about this performance gap. Corporate reformers don’t talk about the performance gap, either, they simply offer vouchers programs so a handful of such students can escape their “failing schools.” We talk around the performance gap but we do not deal with it.

Ask yourself whether there are any circumstances in which we should be satisfied with these performance levels of American school children. Should we, in fact, be anything less than appalled by these data?

We won’t bother to go into detail about the performance of American students on PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment), as some have questioned the validity of such measures. Shouldn’t we be concerned, however, that our response in the face of unfavorable comparisons with between American kids and their counterparts in other nations, is to cry “foul?” Rather than accept these data as worthy of our serious attention and accept responsibility for them, we revert to claims that such assessments are biased and/or unfairly administered.

The unpleasant truth is that China, India, and other developing economies (not to mention Europe and Japan) are dedicated to replacing the U.S. as the richest and most powerful nations in the world. If we continue to scoff at these challenges, make no mistake, the future of American society will be decidedly unpleasant for our grandchildren and great grandchildren.

It is this author’s assertion that, in spite of the best efforts of dedicated American school teachers, our educational process and the system in which it functions are poorly structured and minimally prepared to meet the needs of American children, irrespective of their relative position on the academic performance continuum, on the affluence continuum, or their race or ethnicity. I would suggest to you that our educational process inhibits all students, even our most accomplished, from reaching their full potential and this reality demands our attention and compels us to action.

The United States is a competitor in a dynamic international marketplace. Like competitors in any sport, success is contingent upon the efficacy of one’s player development program.  I suggest to you that the American “player/student” development program has languished for long enough.

How Do We Stop the Runaway Train of Misguided Educational Reforms?

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The educational reform initiatives that threaten to destroy public education in America are like a runaway train and cannot be stopped by the complaints of teachers, individually or collectively. Complaints are the useless weapons of the weak and the unimaginative. What teachers must believe is that, by banding together, they have the power to alter this untenable reality in education, but only if they open their hearts and minds to a new way of thinking about the educational process in which they have been immersed for so long.

The principles of positive leadership suggest that, rather than complain, powerful leaders offer constructive alternatives. In the case of education, that alternative cannot be a return to the status quo. We must acknowledge that the one and only thing about which corporate and government reformers have been correct is that the existing educational process is not meeting the needs of Twenty-first Century American children.

These reformers are wrong about everything else. They are wrong that teachers are to blame and that if we hold them accountable on the basis of student performance on annual competency examinations it will magically alter the outcomes. Such a strategy will not produce the outcomes we seek because teachers control only a small portion of the forces that are leading so many American children down the precipitous path to failure.

The reformers are wrong to think that privatization, financial incentives, charter schools, and removing our schools from the control of the communities they exist to serve will reverse the hopelessness and the powerlessness of a growing percentage of Americans who have lost faith in the American Dream.

These reformers are wrong to think that entrepreneurial principles and state-of-the-art technology can mitigate the value of trained and committed professionals in our classrooms. These reformers are wrong because they are pushing the wrong business principles; they are wrong because they have forgotten that, no matter how sophisticated it might be, technology will never be more than a powerful tool in the hands of people who know how to effectively and productively utilize it; and, they are wrong because they are blind to the reality that American public school teachers are victims of the same educational process that victimizes their students.

What educators must recognize is that the power that drives these reformers is a function of the public’s loss of faith in professional educators, in American public schools, and in an educational process that has left millions of American men and women bitter, resentful, and disillusioned.

It is not too late for American educators to re-establish themselves as our nation’s leaders of choice as we work to reinvent the American educational process. Time has become a commodity in short supply, however. We dare not waste another day, week, or month before we recognize the challenge before us come together to face it. If we wait a year we might as well throw in the towel because our envelope of opportunity will have re-sealed itself.

In this eleventh hour we need a comprehensive blue print for reinventing the American educational process and I offer my book, Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge for Twenty-first Century America (REHAD) as a starting point.

The next couple of posts will be devoted to re-presenting the action strategies offered in the book (REHAD) into a strategic action plan that requires only a definitive decision to act. That decision to act is the responsibility of the professional men and women who preside over teacher associations and unions; over associations for principals and administrators; over the boards of entities established to promote education in the U.S., and over school districts and corporations, whether public or private.

As an author, I have no illusions that my strategic action plan, as comprehensive as it may be, will be the final iteration of a new vision for education in the U.S. but it is a place to start. What must follow is an analysis on the part of a diverse population of professional educators working diligently for ways to improve and enhance this initial blueprint.

Professional educators must harbor no illusions that they can pare this vision back until it is no more than the current reality, in disguise. Any such pretense will be quickly recognized and rejected and there will be no second chances.

The Vergara Ruling in California will do more harm than good!

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Wouldn’t it be more productive to focus our energy and attention on supporting and protecting our good public school teachers?

It seems that we always focus on the negative. Bad teachers can already be fired, tenure or not. Tenure does not prevent school corporations from dismissing incompetent teachers it simply requires that they take the time to do it right and to make a well-documented case.

At a time when teachers are already under attack, falsely accused of being the cause of the failure of so many American students, this decision comes across as more of a “witch hunt” (or witch/warlock hunt if we want to be politically correct) than as a reasoned decision in an attempt to address our nation’s most important issue – the crisis in education!

It is similar to what happens so often in the work place when a few problem employees abuse the rules and privileges of their employer. In these instances, management rushes in to create more rules or take away privileges and the only people they impact are the good employees who come to work every day and do the best job of which they are capable. The new rules and restriction of privileges are like water off the proverbial duck’s back to the abusers because the problem employees do not care and will not abide by the rules, new or old.

In education we are in a state of public panic in which government officials, corporate reformers, and other policy makers are rushing around like incorrigible children, looking for someone at whom to lash out—looking for someone to blame. Teachers just happen to be the most obvious target.

Few if any of these officials and reformers, and also judges, have ever spent so much as a single day in a public school classroom, striving to understand the challenges with which our teachers are confronted.

Instead, they see teachers as easy targets. They tell themselves and the world that they are taking bold action and they puff out their chests in false pride over their bravado, oblivious to the great harm they do.

Not only do they hurt all of the good public school teachers who come to work every autumn to continue an important and seemingly impossible job from which the majority of us would abruptly shirk. What they also do is distract us from taking the time to understand the dynamics of our educational process and taking meaningful action to fix real problems.

If the critics of teachers would take the time to walk in the shoes of our public school teacher these high profile reformers, officials, and policy makers would see that teachers are as much the victims of the  dysfunctional system that is American public education as are the students whom they strive to teach under what are often adverse circumstances. They would see minimal support from parents in our most challenging schools and an alarming lack of motivation to learn on the part of the children of those parents.

They would see the damage that is done when they provide incentives, in the form of vouchers for the small number of families who are motivated to take advantage of them, to abandon our most challenged public schools. In the process they leave the teachers and students of those abandoned schools in their wake to deal with the unforeseen and often invisible consequences of their action. They also deprive those abandoned schools and their teachers of much needed revenue.

It is the symbolic equivalent of washing their hands of the problems facing those schools and their teachers and, most of all, our nation’s most vulnerable kids.

This is unacceptable and it will not do! It is time for teachers to rally together and fight to put a stop to the misguided and paralyzing reform initiatives of people who know not what they do!

It is time for teacher unions and associations to re-examine their mission and work together with school administrations to develop meaningful measures to improve teacher skills on the one hand and to develop measures of true accountability on the other.

Just last night, on “Just Let Me Teach” a program host by Justin Oakley on Indiana Talks, an online radio network, a caller told us about a peer review program called PAR in Anderson, Indiana. It is a program making real strides to improve rather than harm our public schools and their teachers. It is a program in which teachers and administrators are working together to create real, meaningful, and sustainable accountability.

These are the kind of programs our elected officials and so-called reformers should be supporting and replicating all over the nation.

And, why are these high profile leaders not talking about the important role that parents play in the education of their children? Why are they not brainstorming with local educators to come up with meaningful programs to reach out into our communities and pull parents in as partners in the education of their children? Why are we not taking the obscene amount of money that is being squandered on meaningless reforms and investing it, instead, in a nationwide initiative to Pull Parents in as Partners?

We need to recognize that the absolute most important things we can do to fix the systemic deficiencies in the American educational process is for teachers, both individually and collectively to partner up with school administrators to work on teacher training and accountability while, in our classrooms, parents and teachers partner up to give our nation’s children the best education possible!

 

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

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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.

A Response to Diane Ravitch Blog Post, Poverty Matters

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Poverty Does Matter, but not the way we like to think!

Poverty is important and it does matter, very much, in fact. And no, poverty is not a state of mind; it is a tragic condition in which millions of Americans languish.

Poverty is also an excuse for throwing up our collective hands as if the outcomes are out of our control. It is an excuse for continuing to do the same things we have always done, unquestioningly, convinced we are doing the best we can for the children in our classrooms, under adverse circumstances.

We cry out: “If only Congress would raise minimum wages; change the tax structure to more equitably spread the burden; if only they would find a way to lift the horrible mantle of poverty we could really help these kids.”

And, before you rush to stereotype reformers and their pseudo-counterparts and shut down your minds, I grew up in a low-income family and attended a school that, sixty years ago, was 30 percent black and 50% impoverished. In my first job as a juvenile probation officer I sat across a rickety card table that served as the dinner table for a mother striving to rear 4 children on welfare, drinking coffee while trying to find a way to keep her sons in school and out of the juvenile detention facility.

I sent my own three children to city public schools so they would learn to feel at home in the midst of diversity and not grow up to be elitist, upper-middleclass Americans, out of touch with how so many of our fellow citizens must live.

What I have learned from my own parents and from a lifetime of experience is that it is not poverty that keeps children from succeeding in school. For generations there have been children from the poorest families who have somehow learned how to excel academically; and these were not outliers to be discounted as not relevant to our discussion. Almost without exception there is a characteristic common to all of these youngsters. These children are blessed to have a parent or guardian who somehow still clings to hope that their child can have a better life.

Let’s cling to no illusions about the difficulties these parents face or that such parents are always successful. Sadly, many do fail in spite of the heroic efforts that are made . What matters, however, is that many do not fail and, as a result, their children enjoy some level of academic success.

It is not poverty that keeps children in poverty, it is the hopelessness that so often accompanies poverty. Poverty is, indeed, a very real condition but hopelessness is very much a state of mind. The operative question is why we do not attack hopelessness, ferociously. Hope and expectations are inextricably connected.

As much as I admire and respect public school teachers our public educators, as a whole, whether policy-makers, professors in college departments of education, administrators, or teachers cling to the traditions of an early twentieth century educational process that is woefully inadequate in a twenty-first century world; totally unaware of how what they do contributes to and reinforces the hopelessness of our nation’s disadvantaged.

These educators are blind to the fact that our educational process is focused on failure and sets the most vulnerable of our nation’s children up for failure and humiliation. Is it any wonder that these youngsters grow up to spawn new generations of children with little if any motivation to learn and even less hope for a better life.

For the love of all that is precious in life, can we not abandon our outdated assumptions and biases and open our hearts and minds to a new way of thinking about education in America? If only we will relinquish our obsession with tradition and open our minds to new possibilities we will discover answers that have existed, right in front of us, just beyond the illusory horizon of intransigence.

To you, Diane Ravitch, who for so long has been one of our best and brightest advocates for excellence in education, we need you seek to understand rather than rebut. We need you to think exponentially and to provide a whole new level of leadership in a fresh paradigm.

I am not suggesting that there is a perfect solution to the challenges of education in America; there is no such thing as a perfect solution. With each stride down a new avenue of thinking, however, we will discover new and better ideas and each new answer will lead to whole new sets of questions followed by even more answers and even better ideas.

You know better than any of us that time is of the essence. We must act before those who are rushing to privatize education, place even more reliance on standardized competency examinations, and who want to separate our schools from the communities they exist to serve lead us to disaster.