Tag Archives: teachers

What Makes Teaching Such a Difficult Job?

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Imagine any job where the people who arrive at your workplace are so lacking in the skills needed to be successful in your unit that training them seems problematic. Imagine, further that the people you work with or serve, capable or not, are unmotivated to perform the work or activity that is expected of them; are unwilling or unable to conform to acceptable standards of behavior; have families that may or not be supportive or, in some cases, may actually interfere with what you are striving to accomplish; and, that the most important influence in the lives of the people for whom you are responsible is their peer group. If they must choose who to disappoint it will be you and/or their families, not their friends.

Your education and training suggests many management and supervisory strategies that work in some settings but seem to be meaningless in others. You have also been taught that some individuals need more patient time and attention in order to learn from the mistakes they make but in far too many settings there is insufficient time to give them. Part of the problem is that you are expected to conform to arbitrary schedules that require that you reach certain checkpoints within a predetermined period of time. You are also expected to comply with arbitrary standards of performance and production that appear to have been written by someone who has never actually done your job.

These arbitrary schedules, standards, and production goals might even appear to make sense in the abstract but when applied to your assigned work space and to the unique characteristics of the people to whom you are assigned, they make no sense at all. These challenges, viewed in the aggregate, are difficult enough but imagine that your work will be inspected, routinely, as will the production results of your people. It would be one thing if these inspections and production reports were adaptive to the performance capabilities of your work group but, of course, they are not. Rather, your efforts are evaluated within the context of what we are told is an even playing field that is as arbitrary as are the schedules, standards, and objectives against which you and your people’s performance is measured.

If this was not bad enough, imagine that when your results fail to meet arbitrary expectations, you are asked to accept responsibility. When the results in your unit are particularly disparate when compared to other workplaces filled with people with a diverse range of capabilities, imagine that you are asked to bear the brunt of blame.

Finally, when you are evaluated by your leaders, imagine that they view their job not so much as a support system to help you achieve your objectives but rather as an inspector to police your performance, seeking evidence that what you are doing is wrong or insufficient.

Imagine the evaluation coming to a crushing crescendo when you are told that the problem is that you are not sufficiently engaged with your people and that you need to work harder to build relationships with them. There seems to be little, if any, recognition that building relationships with each and every one of the individuals for whom you are responsible requires that you allocate more time; time that has not been allocated to you.

Imagine that when you strive to improve your level of engagement, although a few individuals may actually respond, that some of your people, if not the majority, are far more challenging than others and not only require more time and attention than you are able to give them but actually resist your efforts.

The icing on the cake or, more appropriately the thorns in your crown, is that, at the end of an arbitrary period of time, you are assigned responsibility for a whole new group of people with which one of your colleagues has had a similar results. This requires that you start from scratch and go through the same process over and over, again, with no reason to anticipate better outcomes.

Can you imagine any way the job you are being asked to do will produce quality outcomes, given the inherent deficiencies in the process?

The challenge is that the production, assembly, or service delivery process within which you are expected to work is neither tasked, structured, nor resourced to enable you to provide your people—a group with a diverse range of personalities and capabilities—with the time and attention they require to be successful.

When you suggest to your leadership that what you are being asked to do does not work for all or part of your people you are told to “work harder.” They tell us that, “This is the reality with which we are expected to deal,” and that “we must suck it up and do our best without complaining.”

If you and your colleagues are sufficiently brave to ask the questions “What about my well-being?” and “How am I supposed to find any job satisfaction in such conditions?” imagine that your leaders look at you as if you are speaking an alien language.

Finally, when you commiserate with your colleagues in the staff lounge, over a drink in a neighborhood bar, or at your union or association meetings nothing ever changes. Oh, forget what I said about sharing a drink in a neighborhood bar. You have work to take home! There is no time for a drink however much you might feel you need it.

If you want to hear the final irony it is that this environment in which you are asked to perform miracles, mirrors the environment that your students must endure, like a parallel universe. The difference is that, unlike you and your colleagues, many of your students do not care. They feel free to take the easy way out and just stop trying. This enables them to spend their eight hours a day, five days a week looking for ways to have fun and make your lives more interesting in what they perceive to be a consequence-free environment. It will only be later in life that they will discover how wrong they were about the lack of consequences.

My recommendation to you—and, yes, I know I’m an outsider—is to go beyond pondering the absurd idea that their must surely be a better way and ask your union and association leaders help tackle the challenge of finding a new solution. I can assure you that there is always a better way but all the complaining in the world will not help you find it. You might also consider going to outsiders like me who have been paid to find solutions to other dysfunctional workplaces very much like yours.

Consultants like me have the advantage of being able to step back to a point from which we can view your work place as an integral whole and apply the principles of positive leadership, systems thinking, and organizational development to find all of the “disturbances in the force” that make production, assembly, or service-delivery processes like yours dysfunctional. Software engineers do exactly the same thing in their very specialized field working with computer applications.

As it happens, I have the added advantage of having actually walked in the shoes of public school teachers while working as a substitute teacher in a diverse, local public school district. In fact, I have already applied my 45+ years of expertise and experience, along with two master’s degrees, to examine the education process I observed and to reinvent it to achieve the outcomes we are seeking.

I can tell you with absolute confidence that the education process I have developed, if implemented as an integral system, will work to create an environment in which your students can actually learn and in which teachers can find job satisfaction and take pride in their work. I will also tell you, with absolute confidence, that mine is not the only solution; there is always another way. The advantage of my re-invented education process is that the work is already done and needs only a little tweaking.

I suggest that you use the education model I have developed as a point of embarkation. Use it as a tool to help you challenge the fundamental logic and assumptions of the existing education process and begin to view it objectively as just that, a complex organizational process with which we are expected to teach our nation’s children.

Maybe you will discover your own solution and maybe you will come to believe that my model will work. At least you will be moving forward rather being stuck in complaint mode, where nothing ever changes. Beware of the temptation to take the easy route, however, and drift away from systemic solutions and opt for incremental reforms with new strategies and technologies. The latter are probably good ideas but I can assure you they will not work within the context of an obsolete education process.

In an earlier piece I used the parable of “new wine in old wineskins” to illustrate that the new ideas and technologies, however inventive, will not work within the context of an obsolete process. This is the reality you have today and you know in your heart that not only does what you are asked to do not work, you know that it cannot work. Even in some of our highest performing public schools there are students we cannot seem to reach.

You can visit my website at www.melhawkinsandassociates.com where you can examine my education model and an accompanying white paper, as well as my blog, Education, Hope and the American Dream with more than 150 articles about the challenges in public education and about the false promise of current education reforms.

You will also have access to my books, the most appropriate of which will be The Difference is You: Power of Positive Leadership, based on my many years of organizational leadership and consulting experience and my book on education, Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge For Twenty-First Century America (REHAD). While the book has much to offer and I would never discourage anyone from reading REHAD, please know that I am now writing a follow-up book as I have learned a great deal from all of you over the 5-year period sense the REHAD was published. An expanded version of this blog post is one of the chapters in my new book.

Thank you, educators, for the heroic work you do and please cling to the hope that better days will come if you reach out for them. Here is a simple test of whether or not there is reason to hope. Do believe children are capable of learning? Do you believe you are capable of teaching? If you believe both are true then the reason your students are not learning has to do with the process, not the people. Fix the process so that it supports learning and teaching in every conceivable way and both you and your students will be successful and you will have the job you envisioned when you chose to enter the profession.

Black or White They’re Just Kids: They Need Us & We Need Them; a refrain!

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The original version of this article was written two-and-half years ago but events in the intervening months suggest to me that it needs repeated; with a few updates. It will be followed by a related article on bullying and peer pressure.

It is incredibly difficult for a white person to understand what it is like to be black. Sadly, most white people are perfectly content to know as little as possible about such things. For others like my white daughter and son-in-law who are parents of a black son, it is imperative that we understand as much as we possibly can.

My wife and I have now have four grandchildren. The eldest is a little girl who was adopted by that same daughter and son-in-law. She is of Mexican descent with beautiful, thick black hair, brown eyes, and golden brown skin. The second is a little boy whose skin is a beautiful, rich brown with eyes to match and who came out of his birth mother’s womb with a natural Afro. Our youngest two grandkids are the biological offspring of my youngest daughter and her husband. The eldest (and our third) is the palest of whites, bordering on pink, and her hair is as red as her father’s beard. Our fourth, now 18 months of age, has skin not quite as pale as his big sister’s but hair every bit as red.

Each of them have magnificent smiles that light up our lives even more than the lights of the holiday season and laughter that warms us during the coldest of times. Their smiles have reminded me that throughout my whole life, whenever I have been blessed to see a child smile, I am blind to any of the other features, that for reasons that are difficult to fathom, cause some human beings to pass derisive judgment. For me the smile of any child is a source of incalculable joy that is as common to the shared universal human experience as anything else in life.

These children represent our family’s beautiful rainbow and like all grandparents we love them so much that it hurts.

When our daughter announced that they were adopting a black infant we knew he would face challenges but we did not yet grasp the whole of it. In the four-and-a-half years since the birth of this sweet child, our nation has been rocked by racial violence and hatred. We have known that the American people have been divided, politically, for decades but could we ever have imagined that the President of the United States, through his words and actions, could model such rhetoric and enmity?

It is bad enough that so many citizens could interpret our President’s words and actions as a license for the public expression of embittered hatred but are we truly so divided, ideologically, that good men and women would choose to tolerate such enmity out of hope that this President can “make America great, again.”

Is there any reason to believe that a man who builds walls, figuratively and literally; who condemns one of the world’s great religions for the radical violence of a few (as if Christians have never done a despicable deed); who provokes confrontations; calls people names; who brands the free press as liars; who challenges the legitimacy of our election process; ignores and ridicules the advice of his diplomatic, intelligence and law enforcement advisors; who rejects the research of the overwhelming majority of the world’s scientists; and, who blames others when things go wrong can be the kind of leader who will unite a culturally diverse nation? Can a bully provide the kind of inspirational, positive leadership we need, so desperately?

Through the escalation of the violence and hatred over the last four-and-a-half years we have become painfully aware of the dangers our sweet and beautiful little guy will face; not because of anything he has done but only because of the way the color of his skin will affect the attitudes of a huge population of Americans.

I have spent my entire lifetime striving to understand why our world is so full of hatred over issues as insignificant as the color of one’s skin. I still struggle to understand why differences in eye or hair color are perceived as different shades of beauty while differences in skin color produce such extremes of bitter passion.

I was blessed to be born to parents who taught that we are all children of Creation and that we were blessed to live in a country in which we are all considered to be equal under the Constitution.

I was equally fortunate to live in a neighborhood and attend an elementary school where I learned to be friends and playmates of my black classmates before I ever learned of the existence of bigotry and racism. Somehow, I never noticed that when I was playing with my black friends that my white friends were off doing something else and vice versa.

When I first witnessed the hatred that my white friends had for my black friends, I was devastated. Innocence was forever lost but I never lost my perception of diversity as something to be cherished as beautiful.

Later, at the age of 20, I was privileged to spend a summer working in a churchyard in Philadelphia, providing a place for young children to gather and play, safe from the reaches of the gangs whose territories sandwiched our little oasis. All but one of these kids were black. While I was responsible for the boys and girls between the ages of 8 and 16 who came to play in our churchyard and game room, I played with them far more than I supervised. While my job was to keep them safe, I must confess that these youngsters taught me far more than I ever could have taught them.

For the first nine years after college and the military, I worked as a juvenile probation officer where I supervised a multi-racial group of boys and girls between the ages of 9 and 17 and worked with their families. Later, I was one of the founders of a local Boys and Girls Club where, once again, I was privileged to be around and play with a diverse group of children. Later, when I decided to focus on my life-long dream of writing books, I worked part-time as a substitute teachers for my local public school district and glimpsed, first hand, the challenges that both students and teachers face.

What I learned about children during these significant chunks of my life was that whether black, white, or shades of brown; rich or poor; male or female they are all just kids.

They all laugh when they play or act silly; cry and bleed red when they get hurt; get mad when they lose; celebrate when they win; get embarrassed when they are made fun of; yawn when they get sleepy; respond to warmth and affection with warmth and affection; and, suffer egregiously when abused by their parents or society or when bullied.

These boys and girls all have the ability to learn; they are all curious about the world around them; and, they all get discouraged and feel humiliated when they fail. They all suffer great loss of self-esteem when they give up on themselves after repeated failure and no longer believe in their ability to compete.

They all deserve our respect not only as individual human beings but also as members of their unique cultural traditions. The only difference, once they arrive at school, is their level of preparation and motivation. They all deserve the best we have to offer and the very fact that so many children fail provides irrefutable evidence that what we are doing does not work for everyone.

I truly believe that, in spite of the heroic effort of our teachers, it is here, in our elementary schools that we will find the roots of the problems that beleaguer us as a nation and society. Whether we are teachers, administrators, policy-makers, or deans and professors of schools of education, educators must be willing to pull our heads from the sand and stop defending the indefensible.

The fact that so many children are failing, particularly minorities and the poor, is not a predisposition of birth or a fact of nature. That children are failing is nothing more than an outcome of a flawed system of human design. The performance gap between black and white children and other minority classmates is an outcome our traditional educational process is structured to produce. Like any other production- or service-delivery process it can be reinvented to produce the outcomes we want and need.

This flawed system is not the fault of teachers and other professional educators. Rather, the culpability of educators is that they are the people in the best position to identify the failure of this flawed educational process but they hold back as if they are afraid to act. It is critical that we understand that this lack of action is not because they are bad people or incompetent professionals rather it is because they have learned to perceive themselves as powerless.

Teachers must be challenged to accept that powerlessness and hopelessness are functions of choice.

The over-riding truth as we move deeper into this exponentially complex 21st Century is that we need each and every one of these boys and girls just as desperately as they need us. Our ability to compete in the world marketplace will require the absolute best of every single American and if we do not pull together as one beautifully diverse nation of people—the proverbial melting pot—the results will be tragic for all of our grandchildren and great-grandchildren, black or white or any of the colors of the rainbow. What we see happening, today, is a preview of the rest of this 21st Century unless we choose to act.

It is only when we have gained an understanding of the forces that impede the education of our children and accept responsibility for our outcomes that we begin to acquire the power to implement meaningful changes in policy and practice. This is what positive leadership is all about.

I invite the reader to check out my Education Model and White Paper to see one way we can reinvent the education process to produce the outcomes we need.

Focus on Success in Education – Part 4 of “Inequality and Education”

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This is my fourth video in my series on Inequality and Education and this one discusses the importance of a focus on success in education. Kids must learn more than just academic lessons. They must learn that success is a process; a process that is a skill that must be learned to sustain ongoing success in whatever they do.

In our last segment we talked about the importance of partnerships between parents and teachers. Today, we shift our focus to success, one of the key variables in the education equation.

In my book, The Difference is You: Power Through Positive Leadership, focus on success is one of the core principles of positive leadership. A crucial lesson for leaders in any venue is how to create and sustain a motivated workforce. The answer is: make people feel important and, no, it is not enough to just like them and treat them nicely. People know they are important when their leaders demonstrate, through both words and actions that they are dedicated to the success of their people.

This is true for leaders in business organizations, for public school principals, and for teachers in a classroom.

Winning is a form of success but success is more than just winning. Successful people win often but they also lose, sometimes and get disappointing outcomes. What distinguishes these powerful men and women from others is that they’ve learned, both, to accept responsibility for their outcomes and that success is a process. They’ve learned not to be discouraged by their mistakes and disappointing outcomes and they understand that they are opportunities to learn and grow. This confidence eliminates the fear of failure and, in turn, enables them to strive for ever-higher levels of achievement. It fosters and sustains a motivation to learn.

We all want to be successful at what we do but it doesn’t just happen. Learning how to master the process of success is a skill just like learning how to read, write, add, and subtract. In the classroom, it involves giving kids however much time they need to grasp the underlying logic or principles of a lesson and to learn from their mistakes.

When the child succeeds, that success is celebrated and the student is ready to move to a new lesson. When that process is replicated, over and over, the child is not only learning specific academic lessons, they are learning how to be successful; they are learning the process of success.

The challenge for teachers is that kids, by definition, lack maturity and are prone to be discouraged by failure. They are quick to give up on themselves in the face of difficulty and often choose the easiest path which is to stop trying. Letting students fail has devastating consequences for young lives, not to mention society.

The best time to prevent failure of these kids is during their first few years of school. If we wait until middle school or high school, the damage is already done the odds of turning these kids around diminishes, significantly.

One cannot learn how to be successful without having experienced success, particularly hard-won success. If you are a teacher, examine your classroom and ask yourself:

How many of your students experience success, routinely?

How many experience repeated failure?

We are teaching kids how to fail every time a teacher records a low or failing score in their gradebook and then moves the class on to a new lesson before some kids are ready.

This is not what teachers want to do rather it is what the education process demands of teachers. This education process sets kids up for failure.

Please take the time to read my education model and white paper to see one way we can reinvent the education process to focus on success and eliminate the kind of failure that destroys a child’s motivation to learn. Examine it not in search of reasons why it won’t work rather seeking reasons why it can.

Please, share this video with everyone you know and ask them to join you in a quest to transform public education. Millions of children are desperate for your help!

It is public education on which the futures of our nation’s children depend and it is our children on whom our nation’s future depends.

Remember, It’s all about the kids!!!!

Check out Part 3 – Inequality and Education

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In this third segment of my series of videos on Inequality and education, which is the civil rights issue of our time, I answer the 2nd of the two most important questions in education:

Why do some kids succeed in spite of the tremendous disadvantages they face?

The first question was “Why do so many kids fail?

Today’s question is the most important of the two because as important as it is that we understand why kids fail, it is even more important to understand how some kids overcome their disadvantage and enjoy academic success.

When we begin to understand what works we can work to replicate that success.

The key to success of these wonderful exceptions is that the kids who break out of poverty to become successful, academically, and go on to lead productive lives is that these children were supported by a parent or guardian who was fiercely determined that an education would provide a way out of poverty for their child.

These parents, grandparents, or other guardians worked hard to instill a powerful motivation to learn in their son or daughter; they did everything they could to prepare their child for academic success; they make sure their child does their work; and, when their child struggles they work patiently with them to make sure they learn.

What they also do is show up at school and get to know their child’s teacher. They often initiate this contact out of suspicion and mistrust because they are fearful that the teacher will not be looking out for their child’s best interests. These parents and guardians are, after all, part of multiple generations of men and women who have always failed in school and have always been poor. Their experiences with their own teachers are often unhappy memories.

Once they get to know their child’s teachers and begin to witness the success that their child enjoys and hear how much their child loves that teacher, these parents or other family members become committed partners, sharing responsibility for the education of their kids.

This partnership is a powerful thing that not only preserves the child’s motivation to learn; it fuels that motivation. It is a crucial variable in the education equation.

It is the creation of such partnerships that we need to replicate. Such replication is easy if the parent is already engaged and committed but it becomes an extraordinary challenge when they are not so engaged. Very often, in addition to their suspicion, these parents and guardians are indifferent and have few positive expectations. How can they have positive expectations when their own experiences were disappointing and disillusioning?

In Part 4 of my series on education and inequality, we will talk about what it is that teachers must do to pull these parents in as partners. Inevitably, the answer depends on creating opportunities for the child to enjoy success.

It is such a sad thing that so many children are failing and the adverse consequences for both the children and society are incalculable. It doesn’t have to be that way but we cannot alter this reality until we change the way we task, structure, support, and resource the education process that is the milieu in which teachers live and work. This requires positive leadership from our principals, superintendents, college professors who train teachers, and policy makers who are in charge of the mission, vision, and values of public education; the people who have strategic responsibility.

What is frustrating is that it is so easy to change. All we need to do is refuse to let kids fail. Teachers, however, are unable to “refuse to let kids fail” when the education process is focused on failure than structured to focus on success.

More about this in my next post.

Students must be able to build on success, not failure!

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It is incredibly frustrating that public school teachers and administrators have been unwilling and/or unable to take seriously the education model I have developed. It is exasperating because I know teachers want to do what is best for their students. I also know how frustrated so many public school teachers are and that the prospect of burnout is something many of these dedicated men and women fear. That teachers are blamed for the problems in public education must be especially galling.

It is even more frustrating that advocacy groups for black children and other children of color seem totally uninterested in a solution that will end the failure of millions of disadvantaged kids and shut down the schoolhouse to jailhouse pipeline that is transporting these kids to a life of poverty, failure, crime, and early violent deaths.

If only all of these dedicated men and women would open their hearts and minds to the possibility of a new way to educate our nation’s most precious assets.

“This will not work in my classroom(s)!” is what public school teachers and administrators say when they first review my model. I hear it all the time.

Of course, they are correct, but this is exactly my point. In the current education process, nothing different will work because the process is flawed. To paraphrase Linda Darling Hammond, “the existing process is structured to produce the outcomes it gets and we will not get better outcomes if all we do is ask teachers to work harder.”

There are many teachers in high-performing schools who feel good about what they do but there are also many teachers in low-performing schools who are frustrated, daily, because they are unable to get through to unmotivated students.

Odd as it may seem, African-American leaders, who jump through the roof in response to symbols of oppression, do not even bother to respond to the possibility of a solution that will attack the roots of that oppression.

I ask public school educators to take a figurative step back and imagine an environment in which they are expected to give each and every student however much time they need to learn each and every lesson. Imagine an environment in which teachers are expected to develop longer term relationships with students and where the process is structured to facilitate the development of such relationships; with both students and parents.

My challenge to public school teachers and administrators is that they consider that the education process can be re-designed and re-configured to produce whatever outcomes we want.

My challenge to advocates for black children and other children of color to consider the possibility that African-American students and other disadvantaged children do not need to fail.

My education model is constructed on the premise that academic success is no different than success in any other venue. Success is a process of trial and error, of learning from one’s mistakes and applying that knowledge to produce better outcomes. Success is built upon success and the more one succeeds the more confident he or she becomes. The more confident he or she is the more successful one becomes. Success is contagious and can become a powerful source of motivation.

The key, of course, is that one cannot master the process of success until he or she begins to experience success, routinely. In school, kids learn and each lesson learned is a success. Very often, success on subsequent lessons requires that one apply what one has learned from previous lessons. When a foundation of success is laid down in school, young boys and girls approach adulthood with a wide menu of choices in terms of the kind of future that can be built on that foundation.

Imagine, however, when there is no success on which to build. When kids fail, or even learn only part of a given lesson, they are less like to learn the next lesson. A pattern also emerges in this scenario but it is a pattern of failure rather than success.

For many of these kids, failure is the only thing they know. It is only a matter of time before they give up, stop trying, and begin acting out in class. Third grade is when many states begin administering competency examinations. Right from the beginning, a significant percentage of third grade students are unable to pass both math and English language components of their state exams. Although African-American students have the lowest passage rates, the poor performance extends to a percentage of students from all demographic groups, including white students.

By the time these students reach middle school the scores are even lower. In many middle schools, as many as eighty percent of black students fail to pass both exams. Middle school teachers throughout the U.S. can attest to the incredibly low level of motivation displayed by their students. Any illusions that high schools are able to turn the performance of these students around in four years are just that, illusions; high graduation rates notwithstanding.

When they leave school, the overwhelming majority of these low-performing students return to their communities, unqualified for jobs or military service. For many, it is the final station on the schoolhouse to jailhouse line. Far too many suffer early, violent deaths. Those who live spawn a whole new generation of children who will start from behind and will never be given a realistic opportunity to catch up. They are entrapped in a maelstrom of poverty and failure.

It is an American tragedy of unprecedented breadth and scope and it is at the core of our nation’s greatest political, economic, cultural and civil rights challenges. The chasm that divides the American people is very much a function of the bitterness on the part of some citizens because of their resentment that they are asked to support our nation’s poor and infirm.

The magnitude of this reality makes public education the civil rights issue of the 21st Century. That it is a crisis that can be prevented so easily, however, is the greatest tragedy at all. The ambivalence of the people who can bring an end to this tragedy is the greatest mystery of all. Do they not care?

We can end the failure simply by making sure every child has however much time they need in order to learn. If there is a reason why we should not do this, I truly wish someone would explain it to me.

Please check out my model at https://melhawkinsandassociates.com/education-model-white-paper/

“Say it ain’t so, Joe!”

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These words were shouted at the great Shoeless Joe Jackson when news of the 1919 Black Sox scandal hit the press. Shoeless Joe’s fans did not want to believe that their star could have been involved in throwing the 1919 World Series between Jackson’s Chicago White Sox and the Cincinnati Reds.

As we prepare for the 2017/2018 school year it is business as usual for both private and public schools throughout the U.S. Having made no substantive changes in the education process, we can expect the same disappointing outcomes that we have seen in previous years, for as long as any of us can recall. Sure, there are many schools where kids do well and this lulls us into a false sense of security that all is well with public education. However, in schools serving large populations of disadvantaged kids, a disproportionate percentage of whom are black or other minorities, are failing in great numbers. This is an American tragedy of historic proportions and as a fan of public school teachers, I do not want to believe that they will permit this American tragedy to continue. These are children who will suffer their whole lives because we are not willing to change what we do and how we teach.

“Say it ain’t so, teachers!”

Beginning now and over the next several weeks, a whole new class of five and six year-olds will be starting Kindergarten just as others have done in the past. Wherever their public schools may be, they will be greeted by professional teachers who will give their best effort on behalf of their students—our nation’s children. The fact that there is a cavernous disparity in terms of the academic preparedness of the children who will be arriving for their first day of school will not alter the teaching plans that have been developed and approved to help prepare these boys and girls for the first grade.

People underestimate how much of an adverse impact this disparity has on the academic performance of these children. Some of the more advanced students are already reading, can count and maybe do some basic arithmetic. Students on the other end of the academic preparedness continuum may not know or be able to recognize the letters of the alphabet and may not know numbers, colors, or shapes. The challenge to get such a diverse population of students ready to move on to first grade by the end of the school year is formidable. Fortunately, in most states, teachers need not yet worry about high stakes testing, which adds greatly to the pressure to move kids quickly.

Kindergarten teachers do their best to prepare their students for first grade but giving each and every student the time and attention they need in order to learn is neither a priority nor an expectation against which teacher performance will be evaluated. In classrooms where all students are relatively well-prepared, the year will go smoothly. In classrooms where few, if any, are well-prepared things will not be so easy and teachers will struggle to give each child the attention they require. There are just too many of them. When they do move on to first grade, this latter population of students will be as ill-prepared to meet first-grade expectations as they were when they began Kindergarten.

By the third grade when high stakes testing rears its ugly head, the number of students who are struggling will have grown and the results of their first competency exams will reflect that lack of preparedness. Already, there will be many students who are beginning to give up on themselves because they are not learning to succeed, they are learning to fail.

Three years later, when these kids arrive at middle school, the majority will have already stopped trying and will have lost hope. Don’t take my word for it. Pull up the websites of any state’s department of education and you will find that in poor urban and rural school districts, roughly 75 percent of black, middle school students will have been unable to pass both math and English language arts components of that state’s competency exams. In those same schools you will often see that as many as 50 percent of white kids are unable to pass both math and English language arts components.

What you will find in these schools is a cultural disdain for education that transcends both racial and economic boundaries. By the time these kids move from middle school to high school the one lesson they have learned best is that they are unable to learn and that learning is not worth the effort. Let me rephrase that statement. This is not a lesson they have learned on their own, it is the lesson they have been taught simply because the education process has allowed them to fail. We allowed it because teachers were unable to give these kids the time and attention they require and because those same teachers were unwilling to shout out at the tops of their lungs that what they are being asked to do does not work for disadvantaged kids.

Is it any wonder that education reformers are essentially abandoning public schools in our nation’s distressed communities in favor of charter schools? It is unfortunate that reformers lack the insight to recognize that they are making the same mistakes as those made by the leaders of underperforming public schools. At present, charter schools are no more successful in meeting the needs of disadvantaged kids than any other school.

Now, ask yourself how we can go from 25 to 50 percent of middle school students unable to pass state competency exams in math and English language arts to 90+ percent graduation rates from the high schools to which these middle school students will be going. If you think we were able, somehow, to turn these students around during four years of high school, then think again. It would take an extraordinary effort on the part of teachers and students, with the full support of parents, to make up in four years what these kids were unsuccessful at learning during their first nine years of school. Most teachers would be willing to make that effort but that is not what they are being asked to do; it is not the way the education process has been designed to work.

Ninety percent of these young men and women will leave high school, after four years, with a diploma in hand but, for many, it is a meaningless piece of paper. The real world in which these young adults must now make their way is unforgiving and intolerant of shoddy effort and performance. These young people will be confronted with the stark realization that they are unqualified for all but the most menial jobs and they will find this to be true whether they seek work in civilian life, or seek to enlist in the Armed Services.

And, we wonder why education reformers have lost faith in our nation’s public schools. As long as public school superintendents, principals, teachers, and advocates are unwilling to open their eyes, hearts, and minds to the reality that is happening around them, reformers will continue to work, with great zeal, to put public schools out of business. If we allow that to happen the tragedies that the poor and minorities endure, today, will pale in comparison to the consequences of a world in which a quality education is not even available to them. Ours will have become an elitist society and there will be precious little any of us can do about.

Say it ain’t so, Joe!

The Challenge to Leaders of Public Education

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In all business organizations, it is the top executives who bear responsibility for assuring that the entity is focused on its mission and that the mission, itself, properly serves the needs, interests, and expectations of customers. The process must also be structured and resourced to support the people on the line. This is the essence of organizational leadership; of positive leadership.

Positive leaders are guided by three principles or axioms of organizational development:

1) It is not until one accepts responsibility for a problem that he or she begins to acquire the power to solve it;

2) If a process continues to produce unacceptable outcomes no matter how hard people work or how qualified they are, then the process is flawed and must be replaced; and

3) The point at which a process can no longer be improved is the exact point in time that it becomes obsolete.

In public education, the top leaders are superintendents and the people on the line are principals, teachers and their students. In spite of a procession of incremental improvements over the last half century, disadvantaged students still struggle to pass state competency exams. More importantly, when these students leave school they find themselves at an even greater disadvantage in society. This reality has enormous adverse consequences for American society and is at the root of our nation’s greatest social, economic, and political challenges. The opportunity cost that these young men and women represent is incalculable.

Assertions by public school educators and their supporters that public education is better than it has ever been are difficult to comprehend, given the data. Even a cursory examination of the process shows that kids who start out at a disadvantage are not given the time and attention they need to learn. The proof of this assertion can be found in teachers’ grade books, everywhere. If a teacher records a failing grade, it means the teacher has moved his or her class on to a new lesson even though some students have not yet learned. These kids are pushed ahead with the rest of their class, ready or not, and it is only a matter of time before they give up, stop trying, and begin acting out.

The education reform movement, with its focus on high-stakes testing and privatization through the creation of charter schools and vouchers is a response from dissatisfied customers of public education. These powerful men and women leading the education reform movement are justified in their concerns but their solutions could not be more wrong. They are wrong because of their lack of understanding of how kids learn. They are doing great harm to our nation’s most vulnerable children and to their teachers, schools, and communities.

The education process at work in schools, both public and private, has become obsolete and no longer meets the needs of a diverse population of 21st Century students. Over the decades, while the process has deteriorated, public school teachers, administrators, and policy makers have learned to tolerate what they consider to be an acceptable level of failure. Public school educators blame poverty and segregation for these failures and suggest that it is up to society to address these issues.

Somehow, educators have lost sight of that fact that society has already taken action to address the issues of poverty and segregation. Society has created a system of public education; has built public schools in every community in the U.S.; has allocated trillions of taxpayer’s dollars to support this purpose; and, has hired professional educators who have been trained to teach a diverse population of 21st Century American children. At no time has society carved out exceptions with respect to which children will be taught and at no time has society said there is an acceptable level of failure.

This reality exists for no other reason than we allow it. If we want to put an end to the failure we must completely reinvent the education process. Such a reinvention is a straightforward organizational development project in which we design the education process so that teachers are expected to give every child the time, attention, and support they need to learn. All it requires is a little imagination and a willingness to acknowledge what we all know to be true. What do we know?

That the current education process is set up as a race to see who can learn the most, the fastest. Our response to students who are unable pass practice assignments, quizzes, chapter tests, and state competency exams is, first, to record their Cs, Ds, and Fs in the teachers grade book and, second, to report those grades to parents and the school corporation. Those grades then become part of a child’s permanent academic record and color both our expectations of our students and our students’ expectations of themselves.

We cannot change this reality through incremental changes or through the introduction of new and innovative programs unless they are part of an integral whole. Transformational change requires that we deal with the education process as a systemic whole and that we create a structure with the same diligence and attention to detail that is utilized in developing a software application in which every piece of code is written to serve and support the application’s purpose.

We must take action to transform public education in America before it is too late. The responsibility for this transformational change rests on the shoulders of all public school educators but superintendents—the CEOs of public education—bear the ultimate responsibility. It is time for them to step up and become the powerful, positive leaders that our society needs them to be.

I challenge The School Superintendents Association (AASA) to take the lead and guide its members through the transformation process. Our children and the American people are counting on them, as are public school teachers and administrators. This is the only way to stop the drive to privatization and high stakes testing that threatens our children, their schools and communities. If our superintendents do not accept responsibility and act, to whom can we turn?

I offer a model that I have developed and that was initially presented in my book, Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge for Twenty-First Century America (Createspace, 2013). The model has, since, been refined to accommodate all that I have learned since my book was published over four years ago. The model and an accompanying white paper that lays the logical foundation for the model are available for review at my website at https://melhawkinsandassociates.com/education-model-white-paper/.

I challenge the AASA to assemble its most creative members and use my model as a starting point. I believe they will discover that it will work and that authorizing its implementation will be within the statutory power of local school boards. That being said, these leaders of public school corporations throughout the nation are invited to come up with a better solution, if they can. I also challenge teachers, both individually and collectively, to do whatever is in their power to influence their leaders to act.

Is this not the most important issue on the American agenda? Is it not worth our best efforts?

The reality is that if The School Superintendent’s Association, the American Federation of Teachers, the National Education Association, the Bad Ass; Teachers Association, and every other advocacy group in support of public schools, would set aside their differences and focus on their common interests, they would have more than enough power to make education work for all children, even disadvantaged students.

The coup de grace would be that the education reform movement with its focus on testing and privatization would become irrelevant.

We Need To Have a Conversation!

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Since I began promoting my education model and reaching out to public school teachers, administrators, and policy makers, I have been baffled by the unwillingness of public school educators to accept responsibility for the failure of so many of their students. Please note that I said responsibility, not blame!

I love teachers and consider teaching to be a noble profession. I want teachers to be successful and to be respected for the vital work they do. I want them to find fulfillment in the art and craft of teaching our nation’s children. For many, however, teaching has become stressful and unfulfilling and too many teachers are leaving the classroom well before retirement.

Sometimes, each of us is required to tell people whom we love the honest truth; the words they need to hear whether or not they want to hear. I want to tell teachers that “what you are doing is not working for all of our nation’s students and it is harming children. Our nation’s children deserve better and so do you.”

In the case of millions of disadvantaged students and/or the non-white, the current education process is doing great harm, often sentencing them to a life of poverty. A life of poverty often means a life of crime, incarceration, and/or an early, violent death. The economic cost of supporting this population of poor, uneducated Americans is enormous and it saps American society of its strength, its spirit, and its shared values. This is unacceptable.

How many of our public school teachers go home every night and feel good about their jobs; how many feel a true sense of accomplishment? There are many schools where teachers do feel good about what they do but there many other schools where the greatest sense of accomplishment a teacher feels is that they have survived the day.

Teachers, principals, and superintendents rarely have an opportunity to see what happens to their students when they leave school and enter the real world. Sure, some students stop in to say hello, but most often these are the students who did well in school. What teachers do not see, up close and personal, is what happens to young people who leave school unprepared for the responsibilities of citizenship, unprepared to compete in the job market, and unable to keep jobs they are fortunate enough to land. What teachers do not see is what happens to their former students, now young men and women, when they find themselves crashing head first into the hard realities of life in the Twenty-first Century.

I wish teachers and administrators could be with me every Thursday evening when I administer the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) to young men and women who want to enlist in the Armed Services. A significant majority of these young people whom I test in Fort Wayne are from high schools throughout Northeast Indiana. There are a few testers who are 11th graders, received a GED, or who dropped out and did not finish school, and also a few who have one or more years of college. A significant majority of the young men and women I test, however, are high school seniors and recent graduates. While I am not authorized by my employer (the Department of Defense) to share official data regarding ASVAB scores, I can provide some anecdotal information that I think tells an important story that public school teachers and administrators need to hear.

The ASVAB is the entrance exam for the Armed Services and is, also, a vocational aptitude assessment used to determine the types of jobs and training for which candidates are most qualified. In addition, the ASVAB is offered in many high schools as a vocational aptitude test to help students plan for their futures, whether or not they are interested in military service.

For enlistment purposes, applicants must earn an “AFQT” score at least a 31 out of a possible 99. The AFQT score is a composite score of 4 of the 10 tests that make up the ASVAB and includes “arithmetic reasoning,” “word knowledge,” “paragraph comprehension,” and “mathematics knowledge.” While 31 is the minimum score for eligibility and is accepted by some of the Services, some Services have a threshold of 45 or, even higher.

In addition to enlistment eligibility, the DOD uses the scores to determine “desirability” for military service. While 31 is the minimum score for enlistment eligibility, the military does not consider someone to be a “desirable” candidate for enlistment unless they score 50 or higher. Only around half of the young men and women who seek to enlist in the Armed Services score well enough to be considered “desirable” candidates. The proportion of candidates who are ineligible for enlistment because they were unable to score 31 or higher is about one quarter of the testing population.

If a young man or woman is not eligible for enlistment and, therefor, are considered unqualified for jobs in the military, for how many civilian jobs will he or she be qualified? Apply that same comparison with respect to being considered “desirable” for enlistment. Most shocking of all is the number of these young men and women who score below 20, or who earn a single digit score. These latter two groups of young Americans, products of our nation’s public schools, are functionally illiterate and innumerate.

Is it any wonder that the education reform movement has been driven by leaders from business and industry? These powerful business men and women who want to reform public education in America are motivated by the difficulty they have in finding qualified candidates for their businesses.

Some educators scoff at this suggestion and I have heard more than a few declare that it is not their job “to train automaton’s for someone’s company.” As a former business executive, I can assure the reader that neither civilian nor military employers are looking for automatons. Employers are looking for young people with a solid academic foundation; a good work ethic; an ability to communicate effectively with co-workers, suppliers, and customers; are able to think creatively and find solutions to problems; and, are willing to show initiative.

What our teachers should do—what they must do—is prepare kids so they will be able to work wherever they want, according to their interests and abilities and so they can participate in their own governance as citizens of a democratic society.

What I would love for public school teachers and administrators to see are the faces of these candidates for enlistment when I hand them their score as they walk out of the testing room. They arrived at the ASVAB test site with high hopes and expectations that they will find a place for themselves in the military. It is a crushing disappointment when they realize that they are unqualified for enlistment.

As a civilian employer, I recall the same crushing disappointment in the faces of applicants when they were denied employment because they could not demonstrate basic proficiency in math and reading.

What kind of life will a young person have if they are virtually illiterate and innumerate, and unemployable at age 20? What is the opportunity cost to our nation when these young people are unable to provide for themselves and their families? What is the cost to society if they end up in our jails and prisons?

Maybe if educators could see the faces of these young people, up close and personal, they would begin to see that what they are doing in their classrooms does not work for a significant percentage of their students. Maybe they would be less likely to boast about improved graduation rates. Maybe they would be willing to step back and truly examine what they do and why, not for the purpose of rebuttal, but in search of a better solution. What they would see by stepping back is that the education process is failing to meet the needs of far too many of their students.

It is not sufficient for public school educators to say there is nothing they can do until society addresses the problem of poverty. Our society has done something to address the issue of poverty. Our government has created a system of public education, we have built schools in every community, and we have hired professional men and women who have been trained as educators, and we have taxed the American people to pay for those schools and teachers. It is not acceptable for teachers to look around at society and say “who, me?” Is there any other profession in American society where it is acceptable to produce unacceptable outcomes, repeatedly, and do nothing about it?

We all need to understand that it is incredibly challenging to teach children who arrive for their first day of school unprepared, unmotivated, and with minimal parental support but that does not make it okay when they fail. Here is my message to public school teachers throughout the U.S.:

It may not be your fault that the education process is not working but it is your responsibility to do something about it. It is not until we accept responsibility for the challenges we face that we begin to acquire the power to overcome those challenges. The best way to stop the attacks and criticism of misguided reformers is for public school educators to come together as a unified group of professionals and shout out, loudly, that what you are being asked to do does not work. It is not until you have made such a declaration that you will be in a position to create an education process that will work for all children and that will also work for you, our children’s teachers.

Please consider the education model I have developed as one way to meet the needs of all children and, also, as a way to restore teaching to the rewarding endeavor you were seeking when you chose to be a teacher.
https://melhawkinsandassociates.com/education-model-white-paper/

If you think you can do a better job, then go for it, but remember, a little bit of tinkering will not work. If we want a solution, we must be willing to create a system that is engineered to meets the needs of children, that will teach them how to be successful, and in which every activity is designed to support teachers and students in the vital work they do. This new solution must be put together with the same diligence and attention to detail as a software application in which every piece of code is written to serve and support the application’s purpose.

Please understand that what you are doing today and the outcomes you are producing will never be satisfactory and will never prepare our nation’s children for the unprecedented challenges of the Twenty-first century. What it will do, however, if you cling to the obsolete process at work in our schools, is assure the success of education reformers who are working hard to shut down public education in America.

Educators and Billionaires: Adversaries or Partners?

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Anyone who has worked with kids knows that when an adult has a real connection with a child, amazing things happen. Clearly, some proponents of “personalized learning” or “digital learning” seem unaware of the importance of such relationships and this is tragic. These powerful advocates from the Gates’s to the Zuckerbergs and beyond are squandering hundreds of millions of dollars on initiatives that will ultimately fail. More tragically, the combination of their zeal and power has pushed us further away from a solution.

We need to embrace the utilization of technology in education but rather than involving professional teachers to learn how technology can be folded into the art and craft of teaching, these reformers have drawn a line in the sand. They want to diminish the role of teachers because they have not taken the time to understand why so many children are failing.

In the education model I have introduced, first in 2013 with the publication of my book, Reinventing Education, Hope and the American Dream: The Challenge for Twenty-First Century America (CreateSpace, 2013) and more recently on my website under “Education Model and White Paper, my conclusion is that if our goal is to bring an end to the failure, we need to enhance the relationships between teachers and students (and parents) rather than diminish them. The problem with public schools, today, is that the education process is rigid and obsolete and does not support improving relationships and giving students more time to learn. Rather, it is a system that is structured like a race to see who can learn the most, the fastest, and where there are both winners and losers.

Once we have addressed that issue, as I have done in my model, it opens the door to the utilization of technology to help professional teachers guide their children down an academic plan that has been tailored to the unique needs of the child. The categorical imperative, however, is that the relationships are the key to every interaction between people, and the more fragmented our world becomes the more important these relationships become.

My model changes the structure of the education process and classroom in such a way that teachers are supported in their efforts and that such relationships are an expectation, not something that happens every so often. Anyone reading this who has had a special relationship with a favorite teacher at school, or a favorite boss or supervisor at work, knows that it was during these periods that we were the most productive and achieved the best outcomes. We look back on these special times with regret, particularly when we were in school, that such relationships were not allowed to continue. These relationship could not endure because the education process required that we move kids on to a new grade and a new teacher at the beginning of every school year. The existing education process is focused more on preserving traditions than it is meeting the needs of 21st Century children.

My model changes this reality and makes the formation and preservation of such relationships our highest priority. No matter what we do in life, even if we are programmers writing code in a secret location, our success is ultimately determined by our ability to interact, communicate, and form relationships with other human beings.

Technology in any form, whether “digital learning software” or making full use of our smartphones, will always be tools to help us achieve results and produce outcomes through our interactions with other people. As I wrote in my book, The Difference is You: Power Through Positive Leadership (Create Space, 2013), even in their purest form, the value of assets whether land, money, or time is always measured in terms of their utility to people. The challenge is to keep abreast of new developments and discoveries, in the context of a dynamic environment. This is the job of leadership, in any venue, including public school corporations.

In education, whether public or private, the relationships between teachers and students are paramount whether we are talking about five and six year olds in Kindergarten or teenagers in high school. The second priority for teachers in my model are to pull parents into these vital relationships as partners with their child’s teacher. When there is a positive and enduring bond between the key players in education’s cast of characters, truly amazing things happen.

In her insightful blog post, “The Edu-Tech Billionaires Promote ‘Personalized’ Learning That Lacks the Personal Touch,” Jan Ressinger notes that true collaboration would involve the “billionaires” working with teachers through the NEA and AFT, and through college departments of education.

There is a simple lesson from operations management that “if a process continues to produce unacceptable outcomes no matter how hard people work or how qualified they are, then the process is flawed and must be replaced or reinvented. The one thing of which we can be sure is that the outcomes produced through the initiatives of our “billionaires” have been no more acceptable than the outcomes produced by far too many of our public schools. Our best chance of success is when the business community, even through retired consultants like this author, and professional teachers work together.

The irony is that the outcomes from the charter schools promoted by our billionaire reformers are rarely any more acceptable than those from the public schools the charters were intended to replace. And, why should we be surprised at this? With rare exceptions the charter schools rely on the same obsolete education process as public and most private schools. When are we going to admit that putting different teachers into different classrooms while using the same process will never produce the outcomes we need.

I invite the reader to check out my model and white paper to see how professional teachers, parents, and students can utilize the tools of the 21st Century to transform public education in America. Once we put talented professionals in an environment that is tasked, structured, and resourced to produce the outcomes we want, success is always within our reach.

Every Kid Needs a Favorite Teacher, Even in the Age of Digital Learning

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Most of the people reading these words can recall a favorite teacher. If we are lucky, we may have had two, three, or more. However many, these special men and women played an important part in our development and academic success. With the spread of both digital learning and personalized learning, it is imperative that we clarify that the relationships between teachers and students, must always be at the core of academic success.

Relationships are everything in both public education and private, but it is also necessary that teachers have at their disposal and are trained to utilize, fully, the latest in instructional technology. No matter how good a farmer might be in plowing behind a team of beautiful horses or how much such a sight may stir the purist’s heart, their production will never approach that of farmers using the latest agricultural technology.

The impact made by our favorite teachers is the best way to illustrate the importance of the relationship between teachers and students and how powerful those relationships can be, even in the age of digital and personalized learning.

What did our favorite teachers do differently than the others who clutter our memory? Our favorite teachers treated us as if we were special. They liked us and they listened to us and they made us feel important. They believed in us and held out ever higher expectations, challenging us to push beyond our comfort zones, knowing they were close by to help us if we stumbled. They cheered us on and helped us celebrate each of the victories we worked so hard to achieve. They also smiled at us and it was genuine, heart-felt smile that made us glow. They treated us with respect, they trusted us; they wanted us to be the absolute best that we could be. They let us make mistakes without fear of consequences and taught us that mistakes are learning opportunities and the building blocks of knowledge and wisdom. They made learning fun and taught us that learning is a great adventure. We owe a great deal to these special men and women.

For children, relationships are everything. Relationships with their parents, siblings, extended family are vital to the healthy development of children. As their world expands to daycare, nursery schools, head start programs, or regular schools, relationships continue to be the most important ingredient in their ongoing growth and development. Whether their social skills, psychological and emotional development, or formal learning, kids need to feel safe and secure and they need to feel that the people with whom they interact care about them. Security builds confidence, and confidence builds motivation, and motivation leads to success, whatever the level to which we aspire.

The relationship between teachers and students is one of the two most important variables in the formula for academic success and this is true throughout a child’s thirteen years of school. As children get older and must learn to deal with temptations of peer pressure, solid relationships with teachers become more important, not less.

The other is vital variable is the support and commitment of parents. Parents, particularly those of disadvantaged kids, are suspicious because many of their own experiences with schools and teachers were negative. Most of them must be won over, but that won’t happen until teachers are able to demonstrate, in very real ways, that they are having a positive impact on the child.

If the reader has doubts about the importance of parental support and commitment, consider disadvantaged students who excel in spite of the incredible disadvantages they face. What is different about these success stories?

Almost always, when a disadvantaged child excels in school it is because of a parent or guardian who somehow clings to hope that an education will provide a way out for their children. These parents are ferocious in their commitment to make sure the child is motivated to learn and is working hard to learn. These mothers, fathers, grandparents or other guardians are fully prepared to seize their child’s teacher by the throat, figuratively of course, if they think their son or daughter is being treated unfairly or if the teacher is not giving their child the best effort of which they are capable. In these uncommon but almost miraculous success stories, it is the powerful parental commitment that is the difference maker. Without that parental commitment disadvantaged children fail, routinely.

It is only after their son or daughter begins to come home, every afternoon, bubbling about how much he or she loves their teacher that the parents are curious enough to want to learn what is happening. The same is true as parents begin to see their child enjoy success at school and be excited about the new things they have learned. Winning is contagious, even for those sitting on the sidelines. Teachers must be prepared to seize these opportunities to pull parents into partnership.

All educators know these things to be true, and many of you who are reading these words are nodding your head in agreement. What I want the reader to understand, however, is that the current education process is not structured to support and encourage teachers to reach out to parents. It is not an expectation held out for teachers and it is not something for which teachers are held accountable.

If these relationships are as vital as we believe them to be, then working to develop them must be at the top of every educator’s priority list. The reader is invited to read my education model and white paper to see how these expectations and the utilization of personalized learning are integral and interdependent components of a new education process.