Reign of Error, by Diane Ravitch, a Journaled Review by Mel Hawkins, Entry #1

Posted on November 18, 2013 by admin

This is the first installment of what will be a journaled review of Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools, by Diane Ravitch; her latest and possibly most important work.

In her Intro, Diane Ravitch says that her purpose is to answer 4 questions:

1. Is American Education in crisis?
2. Is American education failing and declining
3. What is the evidence for the reforms now being promoted by the federal government and adopted in many states
4. What should we do to improve our schools and the lives of children?

Ravitch says that American education is in crisis “because of persistent, orchestrated attacks on them and their teachers and principals, and attacks on the very principle of public responsibility for public education.” She adds that “these attacks create a false sense of crisis and serve the interests of those who want to privatize the public schools.”

This statement begs the question of why did the orchestrators of such attacks find it necessary to attack public education in the first place? While I agree with her that the evolving focus on privatization is a bad thing, there must be some acknowledgement of responsibility for the outcomes to which these unidentified forces are reacting.

While it is natural for educators to be defensive and feel unfairly blamed while in the midst of the criticisms raining down on them, claiming the criticisms to be unfair without addressing the outcomes about which the critics are concerned is simply not acceptable. Educators are no more able to fairly judge, unilaterally, the efficacy of their product than members of a production line in a manufacturing operation are able to judge the performance of the goods they produce outside the context of the customer who pays for those goods.

The only people who can fairly judge the value of education are the people who rely on the ability of public school students to perform in the marketplace upon completion of their schooling. As a former employer, I can tell you that it became increasingly difficult to find young men and women who have the minimal academic skills necessary to do the work for which we were prepared to pay them. Employers have a right to pass judgment on the performance of our public schools.

As an tester responsible for administering the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB), I am in a position to judge the efficacy of an educational system that produces so many young men and women who are either unable to meet the minimum requirements for enlistment eligibility or who, if eligible, are able to perform the work required of them after induction in only the lowest career areas.

If teachers, particularly of middle and high school students, were able to set aside worries about who is to blame for the problem, they would be in a great position to tell us that far too many students are either unwilling or unable, either, to do the academic work on the one hand or display good citizenship on the other.

The question is not whether or not our systems of public education are in crisis, because it most surely is, rather it is what and who are responsible for the crisis.

Sadly, most of these critics assign responsibility for the poor performance of our public schools on the wrong things. We blame poverty, we blame racial discrimination and segregation, and we blame our teachers and our schools.

As was noted in my initial review of Ravitch’s book, as well as in my own book and blog, we misinterpret the causes of the disappointing performance of our public schools. Because of our incorrect assessment, we fail to see that teachers, rather than bearing the brunt of the responsibility for what is clearly a crisis in public education, are as much victims of the system as are their students.

As is always the case, if we are unable to come up with an accurate diagnosis of the problem, we are rarely able to identify meaningful solutions.

Were we able to discover and agree on the true causes of our educational crisis we would know, with a high degree of certainty that testing, privatization, vouchers and other tools to give parents more choices are not the solution to the problems of public education. These things make it more difficult for teachers and schools to do their important work rather than easier.

The true causes, as we have so frequently pointed out, are 1) a growing cultural disdain for the value of education on the part of far too many American parents and the resulting lack of a strong motivation to learn on the part of their children, and 2) that the educational process that has evolved, over the last century or more, is poorly designed and structured to produce the outcomes we so desperately need. The American educational process is the equivalent of early twentieth-century design and technology striving to compete in the Twenty-first Century. No amount of tinkering with the system with incremental modifications will work. The system must be reinvented to produce the outcomes we need from it.

Let us return to Ravitch’s purpose which was to answer her four questions. The American systems of public education are clearly in crisis and it is failing to meet the needs of both American school children and the society which will someday depend on their contributions.

As far as question number three is concerned, there is no evidence for the reform initiatives being promoted by the federal government and other policy-making forces as they are all premised on faulty logic. Any solution constructed on a faulty foundation must, inevitably, crumble.

The answer to question number four is that we must do nothing “to improve our schools and the lives of our children?” until we take the time to understand the root causes of the problems of public education in America. For that reason, finding the root causes is the categorical imperative of our time.

It was for this very purpose that my book, Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge for Twenty-First Century America was written.

Ravitch, correctly, goes on to say that our schools are not “fine just as they are.” She then lists what she believes “American education needs,” and while none of these things are bad for our public schools, not a single one of them addresses the root causes for our system’s problems. As a result, they will not only make no appreciable difference, they will be harmful because of the opportunity cost they engender as they keep us from doing what we should be doing.

The sad thing is, that we already have the capability to fix public education in America even though it will be a formidable challenge.

Ravitch is absolutely correct, however, when she says that “The purpose of elementary and secondary education is to develop the minds and character of young children and adolescents and help them grow up to become healthy, knowledgeable, and competent citizens.”

She is also correct that the solution is to give schools and their teachers the resources that they need to do their jobs. We simply must rethink what those resources are.

Another area where Ravitch and other opponents of many of the “privatization” reform initiatives are wrong is in seemingly suggesting that schools and teachers should not be held accountable through the independent measurement of outcomes. As we will discuss later on, we need to develop an integrated quality system much like modern business organizations have done. What the skeptics will discover, if they make an effort to understand how such systems work, is that such quality systems actually help rather than hinder the worker’s ability to do his or her job. The same will be most assuredly true for teachers.

Dialogue with Russ Walsh, an educator and blogger

Posted on November 15, 2013 by admin

Below is the original blog post by Russ Walsh on his blog Russ on Reading which you can find at http://russonreading.blogspot.com/

What follows will be my comment to Russ, his response, and then my reply.

Thursday, October 10, 2013

Chris Christie and the “Failure Factories”

Chris Christie is tremendously popular in New Jersey primarily because he casts himself as a truth teller and New Jersey tough guy in the Tony Soprano mode. In these days of wishy-washy politicians and an endless stream of political correctness coming over the airwaves, Christie’s in-your-face style resonates. He will likely skate to an easy re-election in a few weeks.

Unfortunately, the characteristics that make the Governor popular do not make him a good leader. Certainly in the area of education, Governor Christie is more demagogue than leader. The truth of this was brought home again by Christie’s recent characterization of 200 public schools in New Jersey as “failure factories.” This kind of rhetoric makes a good sound bite, but it does irreparable harm to the children, parents and educators of New Jersey.

Why would the Governor of the State of New Jersey demonize children and educators in this way? For political purposes, of course. Christie is anti-teacher union and pro privatization of education. He looks to increase the numbers of charter schools and push a voucher measure through the legislature. Both of these initiatives take money away from public schools and place it into private hands. If you are still under any delusions that charter schools are public schools, please read this from Anthony Cody of Education Week.

Of course, there is a major problem in the inner cities of New Jersey and doing nothing to improve the educational opportunities of children in these schools is not acceptable. But what would an actual leader do when faced with the daunting issues of turning around education in the State’s urban areas? Well, a leader might look around and notice that his State has the third highest educational achievement of any state in the country, behind only Massachusetts and Vermont. That must mean that many public schools in New Jersey are doing very well indeed. A leader might try to find out what these schools are doing right.

What that leader would find is many high achieving schools and school districts throughout the State of New Jersey. That leader would also find that virtually all of those schools had strong teacher unions, tenure and seniority rules, reasonable working conditions and competitive pay and benefits. The leader would also find a healthy mix of experienced and newer teachers, programs for continued professional development and a staff of teachers, support staff and administrators dedicated to student well-being and achievement.

The leader might notice that these schools had a rich curriculum that included lots of opportunities in the core subjects, but also in arts education, athletics and co-curricular activities. The leader might also note that the school buildings themselves were in good repair and had an adequate supply of educational materials, including well-stocked and well-staffed libraries, to support the teachers and children.

A leader might then conclude that unions, tenure and seniority are not what is wrong with the schools. That conversely strong unions, competitive salaries and benefits and good working conditions actually make a school attractive to a prospective teacher. The leader might further conclude that a bare bones curriculum, crumbling infrastructure and staffing reductions would not be in the best interest of a thorough and efficient urban education.

Finally, this leader would go back to the office and have some Department of Education minion bring him a socio-economic map of New Jersey. There he would see, in living color, the answer to school improvement. “Wow!”, he might say to the minion, “Did you notice that all the high achieving schools in New Jersey are in relatively wealthy areas and all the “failing schools” are in high poverty areas?”

“But poverty is no excuse for poor schools, Governor.” might squeal the minion. “No,” the wise leader might respond, “it is not an excuse, but it is a reason.”

A real leader could only then conclude that vouchers and charter schools were not going to change the calculus for the inner city child. Only through a combined effort to do something about poverty and to ensure that urban schools were properly funded could real inroads be made.

A leader would then try to move forward with a plan on two fronts.

What we get from Christie is not leadership, but demagoguery. We get a cynical appeal to our baser emotions and prejudices, instead of a visionary plan that might make a real positive difference in children’s lives. With his sound bite outbursts about “failure factories”, Governor Christie continues to throw urban children, parents and educators under the school bus.

Here is my comment on the blog post:

You and others are correct to reject the arguments of politicians like Christie and the many so-called business gurus who advocate privatization of education, vouchers, and reliance on testing to assess both student and teacher performance and who blame teachers and their unions for the problems with education in America. Critics of these initiatives are wrong, however, to cite them as examples of the danger in applying business principles to problems in our schools. These proposals have nothing to do with business principles.

These same critics are also wrong to defend the state of education in America as something less than a crisis. Administrators, educational researchers, and policymakers are poorly positioned to judge the performance of public education.

If you wish to know the truth about the quality of education in America, ask the employer who is struggling to hire people who can read, write, and enumerate with any level of sophistication. Ask test administrators like myself, who see only minimal improvements in the number of young people, over the past decade, who can earn the minimum score on the ASVAB (Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery) to gain eligibility for entry in to the Armed Services of the United States. Ask the middle school and high school teachers of our urban public schools who devote so much time to dealing with behavior issues in their classrooms that teaching has become problematic.

Draw your own conclusions when you examine the results of the performance of American children, as documented by PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment), when compared to children of other developed and developing nations.

Our systems of education in America derive no benefit when their advocates lash out at critics and pull their heads inside their shells while claiming that everything is getting better.

The crisis in education in America is real and we stumble along making the same mistakes that we’ve been making for generations and offering up the same excuses. It is poverty, they say as if the acknowledgement somehow absolves them of their responsibility.

The problem is not poverty and it is not racial discrimination or segregation; it is not bad teachers and schools; and it is not fractured families living in deteriorating urban and rural communities. I suggest an alternate hypothesis that the relationship between poverty and the failure of our educational systems, along with deteriorating urban communities, is not causal, rather that they are all symptoms of the same pathology. It is our unwillingness to challenge the conventional wisdom about theses systemic issues that blinds us from the real truth.

When we look at the problem and study the children who are failing we are looking through the wrong end of the microscope and we are asking all the wrong questions. There is only one question that we need to ask and the answer to that one question will tell us everything we need to know to solve the problems of education in America, which, by the way, will lead to the solutions of poverty, and deteriorating communities. What is that one question?
That question is not “why do children fail?” rather it is: “what do children who succeed have in common with one another?” Or, re-phrased, what is the one characteristic shared by almost every single successful American primary and secondary education student?

We will be surprised to discover that it is not affluence because just as there are poor children who excel academically, there are affluent students who fail as badly as some of their economically disadvantaged classmates.
It is not race, because the list of the academically excellent includes white children, and black children, and children with skins that span all of the hues and colors in between.

It is not fractured families because there are children who excel in school who live in single-parent homes or with families that are otherwise distressed just as there are children from intact families who fail, miserably.
It is not bad neighborhoods because there are children from the most dreadful surroundings who somehow perform well in school just as there are children at the other end of the performance continuum who live in the best neighborhoods in America.

Finally, it is not bad schools populated by bad teachers, because students from both ends of the performance continuum can be found in our best and in our worst schools.

The one single characteristic that most links our best students, wherever we find them, is that they are supported by one or more parent(s) or guardian(s) who are determined that their children will get the best possible education and who consider themselves to be partners, sharing responsibility for the education of their children with teachers and principals.

Think for a moment, about how this one distinguishing characteristics of successful school children changes, profoundly, everything we think we know about the educational process.

The problem with education in America is that we have a burgeoning population of American mothers and fathers who live under a stifling blanket of hopelessness and powerlessness. These men and women are effectively disenfranchised and no longer believe in the American Dream for themselves or for their children. As a result, they do not stress the importance of education to their children and they make little if any effort to prepare their children for learning; they offer no support to the educators of their children and, in fact, view their children’s teachers and principals as adversaries; and, finally, more often than not, they have lost control over their children and can no longer claim status as the guiding influence in the daily lives of their sons and daughters.

We have two challenges if we wish to secure any semblance of a competitive advantage for the U.S. as we proceed through the balance of the Twenty-first Century.

1. The first is that we must utilize every resource at our disposal to pull parents into the process as fully participating partners in the education of their sons and daughters. It is the absence of this partnership that results in the lowest level of motivation to learn on the part American children in generations.
2. The second is that we must be willing to admit that our current educational process is poorly structured to get the results we so desperately need to achieve. It is a system that is focused on failure and that sets the overwhelming majority of students up for failure and humiliation simply because it sets all children out on the same academic path, regardless of the cavernous disparity in the preparation they bring to their first day of school, and it judges their performance against that of their classmates.

The first challenge is formidable because it demands that we strive to change the culture of American society to one in which the American dream is real and achievable, if not for every man and woman in the nation, at least for their children.

The second challenge offers no excuses for failure because each and every school corporation in America has the authority to change the educational process by decree. That we choose to continue our practice of stumbling around in the dark is nothing short of malpractice and it places our entire future as a society in jeopardy.

I invite you and your readers to check out my book, Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge of Twenty-First Century America. What you will find is a different approach to the challenge of identifying and then rectifying the problems with education. We offer a business approach but not in the way you might think.
What businesses do not do is rush headlong into the fray implementing unproven solutions to their most challenging problems. With their focus on customer satisfaction, businesses seek practical solutions to real life problems, aggressively but not recklessly. If we are not getting the outcomes we seek, we search for alternate solutions. To paraphrase the wisdom of Zig Ziglar, if “you keep doing what you’ve been doing you’re going to keep getting what you’ve been getting.”

Businesses also understand that we must structure our production processes to get the outcomes we seek. Tinkering with a dysfunctional process will create nothing but disappointing outcomes. What is needed is a systems-thinking approach in which we examine the educational process as an integral whole, identify what it is we want to accomplish, and then re-design or, if you will, reinvent the process to produce the desired outcomes.

In Reinventing Education, Hope and the American Dream I walk the reader through this systems-thinking process, systematically.

I also invite you and your readers to visit my blog THE LEADer (Thinking Exponentially: Leadership, Education, and the America Dream). This blog was created to explore the cultural challenges we face as we strive to re-instill faith and home in the American dream.

And Russ Walsh’s thank you and response:

Mel,

Thank you for reading my post and for your thoughtful reply. I don’t believe I, or most of my colleagues blogging criticism of education reform, insist that we can do nothing about education improvement because of poverty. As I said in the post we need a two pronged approach: fight poverty and improve education through improved instruction, recruiting of top notch teachers and strengthened curriculum.

You sight success stories from impoverished areas and failure stories from affluent areas. The truth is you are citing outliers. I have taught in identified poverty areas and in affluent areas over a 45 year career. One of the advantages that affluent children have is parental advocates as you say. Parents who are not struggling against poverty have the time, energy and sense of power that allows them to be advocates. Disenfranchised parents do not live in a vacuum. They are disproportionately located in poor areas.

The schools in affluent areas where I have taught are preparing young people at a very high level indeed. One that is competitive against any nation in the world. I am not saying that the education system does not need improvement, but that it is clear that impoverished children face a disadvantage from the start.

And, Finally, my response to his response:

Russ,

Thank you for taking the time to respond to my comment. I enjoy the opportunity for dialogue.

I have great respect for your 45 years of experience as I do for teachers in general. Many are heroes and all are victims of a system that is poorly designed to allow them to do what is needed in a classroom. As a profession, teachers are unfairly blamed for the problems in education but they are not without culpability.

I believe the two most important elements in successful education are 1) parental support and encouragement and the motivation that flows from that support, and 2) the relationship between teachers and both students and their parents.

I have 44 years of experience and two masters degrees (Psychology and Public Affairs). My experience includes 9 years as a juvenile probation officer and ten years as substitute teacher. I began subbing after leaving a job, initially while striving to resurrect a consulting practice and while writing books. In the intervening 20-plus years, I hired, trained, and managed employees, often rejecting discouraged young men and women who were unable to pass our very basic screening exams in math and English.

During this period, I also developed expertise in the application of a systems thinking approach and problem solving. As a consultant, I could almost always walk into an operation and, with a fresh perspective, find practical solutions to the operational problems of my clients.

More recently I have also served as a part-time test administrator of the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) to both prospective enlistees and also to high school students as tool for guidance counselors to use in helping students plan for their future. It is disturbing to see how many high school graduates, current high school students, and young adults who earned a GED are unable to get the minimum score needed for enlistment eligibility (a 31 out of 99). Many more barely score higher than the minimum score and are considered qualified for only the least attractive military jobs.

You are correct that there are great schools in which the majority of students excel and there are many other schools with honors programs in which the schools’ best students flourish. The system works pretty well for students that have learned how to be successful, academically. The remaining students do not fare so well.

I also know about poverty and have spent many an hour sitting at a kitchen table (often a card table because that is all they have) consoling mothers and grandmothers of my probationers, striving to find a way to keep their children out of trouble.

Poverty creates terrible disadvantages but I have come to believe that the greatest contributor to the disdain for education on the part of many poor Americans, and the poor performance of their children, is the sense of hopelessness and powerlessness that seems always to accompany the impoverished. Even in the poorest communities, a few parents cling to hope that their child can have a better life and, as a result, their children have a chance and often do well in school.

My daughter taught sixth grade at Garfield Elementary School in Washington DC. It was a distressing place to see. In a class of 30 students, she might have four kids who tried always to do their best, who earned good grades and were well-behaved in the midst of a chaotic atmosphere of disruption. The parents of these students would be the only one to show up for parent/teacher conferences and back-to-school night, or to respond to a call or offer to help out with something for the class. These families were not outliers. They lived in the same tenements and row houses as their classmates and their families.

It was the hopes these parents had for a better future for their children that were the difference makers for these students.

Poverty is a condition that we cannot change from where we work. Fifty years ago LBJ declared war on poverty and it is a war we have never come close to winning. Hopelessness, however, is a state of mind and something that we can attack relentlessly, even if only one family at a time. Hope is a powerful force and that creates an opportunity for parents and teachers to work together as partners. When you combine the motivation that children from such families bring with them to school with the partnership of parents and teachers, wonderful things can happen.

How many programs can you name, in any of the communities with which you are familiar, that focus primarily on pulling parents into the process as early in their children’s lives as possible? What percentage of local funding, federal funding, or grant monies are allocated to programs with such a mission? One rarely hears even a discussion about such programs. It is my belief that his should be the focus of every single reform initiative and the vast majority of the dollars we spend should be allocated for such programs.

In my book, Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge for Twenty-First Century America, I walk the reader through a systems-thinking process, much like I offered to my consulting clients, in which the educational process is examined as an integral whole. The result is a strategic action plan to address what I believe are the two most important aspects of education:

1) Pulling parents in to the process as partners to create a better future for their children, and
2) Reinventing the structure of the educational process to optimize a teacher’s ability to do what they do best, without the pressure of standardized tests, without arbitrary time lines or measuring a child’s success against the performance of their classmates.

What matters is that children learn as much as they can at the best speed of which they are capable and that what they have learned they can apply to future lessons, assessments, or to real life challenges and opportunities.
I encourage you to read, Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream as I believe many of these ideas will make sense to you. The objective is also to prompt more and hopefully better ideas from accomplished and experienced professionals like you, simply by showing you how the systems appears to an someone with a different perspective.

Other than making better use of the technology that is available, today, to support what teachers do you will find no experimental approaches and a clear rejection of privatization, vouchers, profit incentives, and reliance on standardized competency examinations to evaluate the performance of either students or their teachers.

I welcome your thoughts and reaction and ask that you consider whether or not this work is appropriate for your colleagues and also the readers of your blog.

Here are a few comments from professional educators who reviewed the book, and also from a couple of professional book reviewers.

From professional educators:

-“As an educator, I see the truth in so much of the author’s ideas. It’s refreshing to see someone willing to buck the trend towards implementing “experimental” programs foisted upon our innocent children. Thanks, Mr. Hawkins.”
-“. . . it is something, particularly Part I, that should be read by a wide variety of audiences. In general, on a scale of one to ten, I would consider American Education (not Public Education as Mr. Hawkins identifies it) to be no more than a two. If totally implemented, Mr. Hawkins recommendations would move it up to at least an “Eight”. . . . his well-researched suggestions would advance our culture by light years.”

-“Chapter 6 entitled, “The Role of Culture” was one of the best, well-written/easily read overviews of the impact of the culture wars on the preparation of our young I have ever read. Not sure that there is anything new in this, but it is so comprehensive, yet so concise that the words literally jumped off the page at me.”

-“Every school staff should read chapter 1 and 2 and use them to evaluate their programs and attitudes toward young people and learning.”

-“The other tremendous positive is Mr. Hawkins point-blank, simple attack on the ridiculous system of placing young people in grade levels based upon age. In my entire professional life, I have never found any study which supports this. Every learning theorist I ever read gives a wide variance in brain/social/background readiness for every academic objective in every grade level. If learning were the true goal of schools, common sense would tell us to evaluate current status and build from there.”

-“This book is a timely message about critical concerns in education. Ideas or suggestions for change are outlined as agenda items and have prompted discussions between my colleagues and me. Mr. Hawkins emphasizes community support, parent involvement and positive leadership as critical to the future of education. He suggests changing the way we teach and urges teachers to teach for mastery.”

-“Reinventing Education, Hope and the American Dream conveys a strong message that needs to be heard and shared.”

From professional reviewers:

-“This is one of the more important books to be released this year and certainly MUST be read by all who have fears of the current status of our educational system. This book is a brilliant achievement.”

-“An invaluable resource for anyone with an interest or passion in improving education.”

-“Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge for Twenty-First Century America” is nothing short of brilliant. . . .”

-“Hawkins is brilliant- He is saying the hard things, he is opening eyes and he is doing it in a way that is logical, easy to understand and will incite a passion in you to change the way we view education and it’s important in this nation.”

-“A must-read for parents, teachers and all those involved in improving the state of education.”

-“. . . . Mel Hawkins, provides a critical look at the current state of education in America and follows through with innovative, inspired and crucial steps to reviving the standard of education in America. . . .”

What if We Are Asking the Wrong Question about Public Education in America?

Posted on November 13, 2013 by admin

When we talk about public education and the challenges it faces and when we talk about reform initiatives there is a question at the center of those discussions. That question is: Why do children fail? Or, “What are the characteristics of the children who perform poorly in school?” Or, more often, “Who is to blame for the failure of education in America?”

We then talk about poverty, racial discrimination and segregation, deteriorating urban and rural communities: and, we talk about bad schools and bad teachers, teachers unions, about giving people choices with charter schools and vouchers; about Common Core; about holding teachers and schools accountable and standardized competency examinations. In the last couple of decades we have begun talking about the privatization of education and other related issues having to do with taking education from the control of communities and making it more accountable much like businesses are held accountable.

What if “Why do children fail and who is to blame?” are the wrong questions? Maybe we are looking at the problems of education from the wrong perspective.

Returning to the challenges of education in America, consider a different question, for just a moment.
“Why do children succeed in school?” Or, more specifically, “what do successful students have in common and what can we learn from those common characteristics?”

We will likely discover that it is not affluence because, while there are many successful students who are affluent there are also poor children who excel academically. Conversely, there are affluent students who fail as badly as some of their economically disadvantaged classmates.

We will discover that it is not race, because the list of the academically excellent includes white children, and black children, and children with skins that span all of the hues and colors in between.

We will learn that it is not fractured families because there are children who excel in school who live in single-parent homes or with families that are otherwise distressed just as there are children from intact families who fail, miserably.

We will learn that it is not bad neighborhoods because there are children from the most dreadful surroundings who somehow perform well in school just as there are children at the other end of the performance continuum who live in the best neighborhoods in America.

We will also discover that it is not bad schools populated by bad teachers, because students from both ends of the performance continuum can be found in our best and in our worst performing schools.

The one single characteristic that most links our best students, wherever we find them, is that they are supported by parent(s) or guardian(s) who are determined that their children will get the best possible education and who consider themselves to be partners, sharing responsibility with teachers and principals for the education of their children.
Now, flip the question around and ask, what are the common characteristics of children who are failing in school? If we are honest with ourselves we will discover that the single most common characteristic of children who struggle academically is that they are not supported by parents who are determined that their children will receive a good education. Many parents of struggling children might vocalize that education is important but they do none of things that determined parents do. They do not talk constantly about the importance of education. They do not make certain that their child has resources that will help them be successful in school. They do not ask, routinely, “How was school today?” nor do they ask to see homework or tests and other papers sent home by their child’s teacher. They do not call and talk to their child’s teacher to see how their son or daughter is doing or to ask what they can do to help and support the child? They do not go to parent/teacher conferences or back-to-school night. Whatever they might be vocalizing their actions provide no evidence that a real commitment exists or that the parent recognizes and accepts responsibility as a partner in the educational process.

Think for a moment, about how the answers to this new set of questions changes, profoundly, everything we think we know about the educational process.

The problem with education in America is that we have a burgeoning population of American mothers and fathers who live under a stifling blanket of hopelessness and powerlessness. These men and women are effectively disenfranchised and no longer believe in the American Dream for themselves or for their children. As a result, they do not stress the importance of education to their children and they make little if any effort to prepare their children for learning; they offer no support to the educators of their children and, in fact, view their children’s teachers and principals as adversaries. Many of these parents have lost control over their children and can no longer claim status as the guiding influence in the daily lives of their sons and daughters.

Because the quality of the education our children receive will determine whether or not the U.S. can maintain any semblance of a competitive advantage as we proceed through the balance of the Twenty-first Century, we are facing two challenges:

2. The second is that we must be willing to admit that our current educational process is poorly structured to get the results we so desperately need to achieve. It is a system that sets the overwhelming majority of students up for failure and humiliation simply because it starts all children out on the same academic path, regardless of the cavernous disparity in the preparation they bring to their first day of school, and it judges their performance against that of their classmates. We must create a reality in which children are given sufficient time to master their subjects before they are permitted to move on because we have no illusions that they all will have achieved the same things by the end of twelve years of formal education. We do not need them to achieve the same things. What we need is that they will have learned as much as they are able to learn and that they will be able to apply what they have learned when they enter the next stage of their lives, whatever that may be.

The second challenge offers no excuses for failure because the educational leaders in each of our fifty states has the authority to change, by decree, the educational process in their state.

If we continue down the same path, we place our entire future as a society in jeopardy.

Gov. Christie, “Failure Factories” and other Follies in the Debate on Education

Posted on November 13, 2013 by admin

Our systems of education in America derive no benefit when their advocates lash out at critics and pull their heads inside their shells while claiming that everything is getting better.

Finally, it is not bad schools populated by bad teachers, because students from both ends of the performance continuum can be found in our best and in our worst schools.

Think for a moment, about how this one distinguishing characteristics of successful school children changes, profoundly, everything we think we know about the educational process.

We have two challenges if we wish to secure any semblance of a competitive advantage for the U.S. as we proceed through the balance of the Twenty-first Century.

I invite you and your readers to check out my book, Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge of Twenty-First Century America. What you will find is a different approach to the challenge of identifying and then rectifying the problems with education. We offer a business approach but not in the way you might think.

What businesses do not do is rush headlong into the fray implementing unproven solutions to their most challenging problems. With their focus on customer satisfaction, businesses seek practical solutions to real life problems, aggressively but not recklessly. If we are not getting the outcomes we seek, we search for alternate solutions. To paraphrase the wisdom of Zig Ziglar, if “you keep doing what you’ve been doing you’re going to keep getting what you’ve been getting.”

In Reinventing Education, Hope and the American Dream I walk the reader through this systems-thinking process, systematically.

I also invite you and your readers to visit my blog THE LEADer (Thinking Exponentially: Leadership, Education, and the America Dream). This blog was created to explore the cultural challenges we face as we strive to re-instill faith and home in the American dream.

Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools, by Diane Ravitch; A Review by Mel Hawkins November 5, 2013

Posted on November 6, 2013 by admin

Reign of Error, by Diane Ravitch is a powerful work by a woman who is one of the most articulate voices in the field of education in America. On one hand she is dead on in her assessment of many of the current reform initiatives from privatization of education; to reliance on competency testing as the primary assessment tool of students, teachers, and their schools: and, the practice heaping the majority of the blame for the problems of education in America on teachers and schools. She offers eloquent rejections of privatization of schools, the concepts of charter schools, vouchers, Common Core, as well as the head long dash to implement broad and largely untested reforms initiatives. Thank you, Dr. Ravitch.

When it comes to helping us determine what we should do differently, I came away disappointed. What a missed opportunity and she comes so close to the truth; so close to utilizing her remarkable platform to provide the dynamic leadership our nation so desperately needs. While I will continue to hold her in high esteem, she is caught, as are so many of her colleagues, in what I like to think of as a paradigm rift in which she is constrained by her assumptions and preconceptions. This is surprising in someone who was able to look back to a prior and quite popular work and recant her “earlier support for what is now known as the “reform” agenda.” Not an easy thing for a writer of any ilk to do, let alone someone of Ravitch’s stature. It is a testament to her character.

My hope is that this review will prompt Ravitch to take a few additional steps back to where she can view our systems of education as an integral whole and, then, challenge her underlying assumptions about why so many American children are failing and what we need to do to alter that reality.

Let us examine a few examples of how simple truths can escape the scrutiny of even the best and brightest of our stars.

Ravitch starts out with the statement that “Yes, we have problems, but those problems are concentrated where poverty and racial segregation are concentrated.” This is conventional wisdom in its purest form. We have been blaming the problems of our society—not just our schools—on poverty, racial segregation and discrimination, and deteriorating neighborhoods for so long that we that it has become an unspoken truth; a unalterable given.

What I want to suggest to Dr. Ravitch and others is that while there is, indeed, an interdependent relationship between poverty, racial segregation, deteriorating neighborhoods, fractured families, drugs and violence; that relationship is not causal. Consider the idea that educational failure, poverty, and deteriorating neighborhoods and all of the associated problems are symptoms of the same pathology; one that transcends race and relative affluence.
Is it not true that there are many children from families who are not poor whose academic performance is as bad as their impoverished classmates? Is it not true that, even though the single greatest disparity with respect to academic performance is the gap that exists between white and black students, there are many African American students who pass their state competency exams and excel academically? Conversely, is it not true that there are children from affluent families living in vibrant, middle class neighborhoods who are performing just as badly as their classmates from deteriorating urban and rural communities? Is it not true that there are many children from intact families who are failing just as miserably as their classmates from families that are, in some way, fractured?
Consider the possibility that there may be forces at work below the horizons of conventional thinking that are influencing all of these demographic groups; forces that transcend them all.

In my own book, Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge of Twenty-First Century America, a book in which Ravitch is quoted several times, I suggest that the problem with education in America is a burgeoning population of American citizens who have lost hope and faith in the American dream. These men and women have become effectively disenfranchised. By this I mean that these men and women, many of whom are mothers and fathers, live under a blanket of hopelessness and powerlessness. They no longer believe that they possess the power to control the outcomes in their lives. The American dream does not exist for these citizens and, therefore, it does not exist for their children. This is a cultural phenomenon.

These mothers and fathers are products of the same dysfunctional education system to which they are asked to send their children. They send their children willingly, not because they believe education to be a ticket to the American Dream rather because it gives them eight or more hours a day, 36 to 40 weeks per year when they are relieved of the obligation to be responsible for their children. These mothers and fathers do not teach their children that education is a path to a better life and is worthy of their hard efforts and sacrifices. As a result these youngsters show up for their first day of school with precious little preparation and little or no motivation to learn. In spite of our best intentions, the American educational process is poorly prepared to handle the challenges that these children and their apathetic parents present, placing teachers in an almost impossible situation.

In spite of what experts like Dr. Ravitch and so many of our policy makers wish to believe, no matter how diligently we strive and how much money we spend, we cannot undo for this expanding population of children the damage that results from a culture of hopelessness and powerlessness. Our existing educational process is not only poorly prepared to respond to the challenges these students present but it sets children up for failure and humiliation. The result is that by the time these kids reach middle school, if not before, they are as turned off and apathetic as their parents. In a few years, these youngsters will be sending their own children off to school with the same lack of motivation and commitment.

Now, let us think about some of the exceptions that every professional educator has seen, where a student from poor and often fractured families, living in the midst of the most dreadful poverty in America, who show up at school with a seemingly inexplicable motivation to learn and to get the best possible education. We can recognize these boys and girls not only because they, themselves, stand out from the midst of their classmates but also because they almost always have a mother, father, or grandparent who encourages them to work hard and who shows up for parent/teacher conferences, who accepts responsibility as partners in the education of their children, and who support the teachers of their children.

More than anything teachers and schools can do it is the partnership of these remarkable caregivers and the motivation of their sons and daughters that are the difference makers in education. Add a dedicated teacher to the equation and magical things happen and it makes not the slightest difference whether buildings and classrooms in which these forces come together are modern or antiquated. Modern, attractive, and well-designed facilities might help but they are not the difference-makers in education.
Somehow, we need to carry a message to all mothers, fathers, and caregivers that their children can benefit from the same magic.

We acknowledge that this is not an easy sell and it is especially difficult if all we have to offer these skeptical guardians is the same dysfunctional educational process from which they emerged, battered, bruised, and beaten. Somehow, we must offer these parents and their children something new and exciting.

Here again, Ravitch comes so tantalizingly close to the secret. She recognizes that “what works are the very opportunities that advantaged families provide for their children.” She goes on to identify “. . . with adequate resources, children get advantages that enable them to arrive in school healthy and ready to learn.” And she mentions the importance of “Discerning, affluent parents demand schools with full curricula, experienced staffs, rich programs in the arts, libraries, well maintained campuses, and small classes.”

These few sentences point to the incredibly subtle yet profound logical leap that diverts us from the truth. We allow ourselves to get hung up on the importance of “affluence” when the relative economic status of families is almost totally inconsequential.

What is most important is that these parents demand substance and, to a lesser extent, that they have been taught to “discern” the difference between things that are consequential from those that are not. Yes, affluence makes life easier for both parents and children but the percentage of children who do well in school with parents who care and accept responsibility will be far higher than the percentage of students who do well because their parents are affluent.

Most important of all is the idea of parents demanding excellence. We do not demand things that we do not value no matter how affluent we might be. Neither will we value things that seem unimaginable or impossible. Without hope and faith, the power to create our own outcomes will elude us.

It is absolutely improbable to believe that we can give every parent in the U.S. the affluence to create an advantage for their children. We have neither the resources nor the necessary mechanics to make such things happen. We do have the power, however, to do something that is even more important. Even if it is too late for the parents, we can help every mother, father, and legal guardian learn how to hope; to believe in the possibility of something better for their children. Although it would certainly help to have sufficient resources at our disposal, all we really require are two things, 1) the willingness to believe that giving hope is possible, and 2) the commitment to make it happen.
Hope, faith, confidence, commitment, energy, determination, and momentum—as powerful as they can be—can melt into a puddle of self-doubt and timidity if not rewarded, consistently. Somehow we must create a reality in which our children can learn how to be successful. In the business world, we structure organizations to produce the results we need. In education, the process is structured with a focus on failure.

Ravitch identifies the importance of setting age-appropriate goals; blending work and play, art and academics; creating an intimate learning environment in which students get the attention they need; limiting focus on testing to diagnostics to determine next steps; and rejecting the concept of judging educators on the basis of test scores. While all are worthy objectives, the system as it is currently structured is not set up to support these priorities.

If we are to have any chance of turning our systems of education around so that our nation can compete in the ever-more demanding world marketplace of the Twenty-first Century we must change the way we think about education. With a new vision in place, we must re-structure the educational process to:

• Establish pulling parents into the process as full partners with the teachers of their children as our top priority;
• Assess the unique starting point of every child that arrives at the door of our schools;
• Tailor a unique educational path for each child;
• Commit to helping these children progress along that path at the best speed of which they are capable;
• Never push them ahead before they are well-prepared to be successful on subsequent subject matter;
• Abandon our senseless practice of expecting children to move forward at the same pace and measuring their performance against the performance of other classmates,
• Commit to teaching these children that success is a process which each of them can master,
• Eliminate reliance on standardized competency examinations given once a year, in favor of small quizzes given often throughout the school year to assess not only their mastery of the material but also their readiness to move on,
• Create a structure that makes it easier for teachers to forge close, long-term, personal relationships with both students and parents.

Each of these things is possible if only we structure the educational process in a manner that fosters these objectives. In Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream, I offer the reader a detailed action plan to accomplish these and other objectives designed to transform our educational process while preserving the important relationships between schools and their community.

As I go back to reread Diane Ravitch’s, Reign of Error, I will continue to review the work using a journaled approach offering an ongoing commentary. You are cordially invited to follow along.

“Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream” a review by Grady Harp, a Top 50 Reviewer

Posted on November 1, 2013 by admin

‘Our goal is to re-infuse faith and hope in the American Dream into the hearts and minds of every American parent and child.’, October 31, 2013

This review is from: Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge for Twenty-First Century America (Kindle Edition)

Mel Hawkins opens his impressive while staggeringly factual book REINVENTING EDUCATION, HOPE AND THE AMERICAN DREAM with the following words: ‘The world is in the midst of unprecedented economic, political, cultural, technological, sociological, and ecological changes that will forever transform human society. One of the drivers of American preeminence has been our systems of public education that gave the United States the most well-educated and productive workforce on the planet. As we enter the second decade of the Twenty-first Century, the U.S. is like a professional sports franchise that has seen the quality of its player development program languish over a period of years. That our competitors in the international arena are placing the education of their children at the top of their priority list while the American educational system remains a relic of times past has tragic consequences for Americans and our way of life.’ He quietly states facts, that millions of Americans have become disenfranchised and have lost hope in the American dream, given up on finding meaningful employment, accepted the fact that they and their children have little access to quality healthcare, and ‘they are chewed up and spit out by the American educational process’ – education becoming a ticket to nowhere.

The fortunate aspect of his observations is that Hawkins believes that since our educational system is the failing nidus of our current dismay, then addressing our educational system to correct the flaws provides a pathway for changing many of the frustrating, even terrifying aspects of our current status. A first objective is to alter our educational system to focus on success, on that prepares your youth for the unique challenges of living in the 21st century. Another pathway is to study and diagnose why our students are underperforming, and when that knowledge is available to us we must re-think our current status and use of system of education to unite Americans and re-infuse faith and hope in the American Dream. He is against compulsory education: our youths value the things they choose, not the things fostered upon them in an arbitrary and hap-hazard manner. If learning were the true goal of schools, common sense would tell us to evaluate current status and build from there. As one critic phrased it, ‘all work is honorable and all humans are uniquely designed to function in ways that benefit the entire society. The student who likes to tinker with machines and is not at all interested in literature should not be held in less esteem at school than the lit student. The larger social system will value some skills more than others and will obviously pay more for those skills, but the culture has to find a way to communicate to its young that the guy that gets your plumbing right enhances the quality of your life just as much as the mayor of your city.’ Hawkins mentions some of the ‘causes’ for our current failed educational system – poverty, bad teachers, outdated facilities and technology, curriculum, race and ethnicity, student behavior, fractured families – and lets us know that the facts that must be examined to change our current system are Compulsory education and the fact that unmotivated students are allowed to be a disruptive influence on students who want to learn and teachers who are striving to teach, Teacher accountability and the trust between teachers and parents, The way we structure our schools and group children in classrooms, together, The way we identify an educational path for our children and then direct them down that path, The way we utilize teachers and facilitate their ability to teach and interact with students and their parents, Our current educational system’s focus on failure, Protecting children from humiliation, Homework, practice, and the manner in which we deal with the mistakes our students make, The way we assess a student’s level of competency over the subject matter within the context of educational standards, The allocation of scarce resources to serve our mission to the optimal advantage, and The effectiveness with which we utilize the technology of the Twenty-first Century. ‘We must involve the entire community.’

This is one of the more important books to be released this year and certainly MUST be read by all who have fears of the current status of our educational system. This book is a brilliant achievement.

Another 5 Star Review for Reinventing Education Hope and the American Dream!

Posted on October 29, 2013 by admin

An invaluable resource for anyone with an interest or passion in improving education., October 28, 2013
By
Jay Mittener
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

This review is from: Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge for Twenty-First Century America (Kindle Edition)
This book “Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge for Twenty-First Century America” is nothing short of brilliant. This book is exactly what everyone needs to read and understand about the state and future of our nation. Our standards of living, our income potential, our successes and ability to advance on life are all directly related to the education we received in this country.

It’s very eye opening and honestly very scary to see how little education is valued in today’s society and the reasons behind it. We are a nation who have slowly lost faith in our own systems and in our own ideals and truths. We are no longer seeing ourselves as a land of opportunity because we were not given, and we are not giving our children the educational tools needed to realize the American dream.

Hawkins is brilliant- He is saying the hard things, he is opening eyes and he is doing it in a way that is logical, easy to understand and will incite a passion in you to change the way we view education and it’s importance in this nation.

The Positive Principle

Posted on October 23, 2013 by admin

This is the second in a series of articles introducing the Principles of Positive Leadership!

The philosophical foundation of our Theory of Positive Leadership begins with the positive principle, which was introduced by Norman Vincent Peale in his seminal work, The Power of Positive Thinking, first published in 1952. Twenty-First Century readers are encouraged to read this work with the caveat that it was written by a Christian clergyman within a strong evangelical Christian context. Nevertheless, the message has great secular value.

The essence of the positive principle is that anything man can imagine, man can do. It is only when one has a belief in the possibility of a thing that it becomes possible. The positive principle also incorporates the belief that human beings are children of our creator and are essentially good. The message suggests that the world is full of negative forces and influences that will eat away at the esteem in which men and women view themselves, individually and as part of the world around them. The work is full of examples that demonstrate that “you do not need to be defeated by anything, that you can have peace of mind, improved health, and a never-ceasing flow of energy.”

Dr. Peale writes that we all want the same things out of life, “What every one of us wants, more than anything else, is life. Life is vitality; it is energy; it is freedom; it is growth.” Peale suggests that the differences between people, of whatever race, creed, or heritage are insignificant when compared to the similarities. Once one accepts this axiom, that we all want the same things out of life – that we are, in fact, interdependent – it becomes much easier to work toward win-win opportunities in both our personal and business relationships. Think about this in the context of supply chain management, that all members of a supply chain are interdependent and that the success of any one member is contingent upon and serves the success of the other members.

For leaders, irrespective of venue, this suggests that all the people within the organization are interdependent and that this interdependency extends beyond the boundaries of one’s organization to includes both those who serve and those whom are served by the organization and its mission.

The positive principle suggests that most of the obstacles that stand in the way of the achievement of our goals and objectives exist in our mind, not in the real world. Peale writes that “too many people are defeated by everyday problems of life,” and that this is “quite unnecessary. . . . People complain about the bad breaks they receive without any sense of how they, as individuals, can control and even determine those breaks.”

Positive Leaders understand that anything we can imagine is possible and that all human beings are linked by common objectives of the most fundamental kind. Positive leaders also understand that one’s focus on the positive is powerfully energizing on the one hand and serves to bring negative influences and factors into a manageable perspective. Positive leaders also believe that their relentless pursuit of ever higher levels of excellence serves the interests of all of the partners of a supply chain. It is based on the fundamental belief that every job done well contributes an element of beauty to the world.

Can We Really Blame Bush and Obama for the Problems in American Public Education?

Posted on October 14, 2013 by admin

In a recent post on Diane Ravitch’s blog a reader suggests that “It will take years, maybe decades to recover from the mess Bush and Obama have generated in our schools.”

To blame Bush and Obama for ruining education is like trying to blame the EPA for the polluted lake they were striving to clean up. What we have been doing for the last fifty years, both in terms of business as usual and also in terms of a half century’s worth of failed reforms, are the things that led us to our status as a second class educational system. The way we should approach our current challenge is something that teachers, more than anyone, should understand. When something doesn’t work, we do not blame someone for trying rather we strive to understand how and why what they did failed to work. In other words, we need to learn from our mistakes.

Think of the scientific principle. We develop a hypothesis and then we test it. Based upon what we learn from the outcomes of our efforts we make adjustments in our hypothesis and then we try again, repeating the process until we are able to consistently predict the results of our efforts.

Imagine what the world would be like today if, throughout the history of mankind, we blamed people for their failures and chose to cling to past practices rather than trying something new. Had that been the protocol of historical man, we would now be living in an extended version of the stone age.

The reason why education as evolved into the a system where an unacceptable number of children fail is because we have spent the last fifty years trying to make incremental improvements in a technology that has become obsolete. This is what educational professionals have done and this is what policy makers have been doing whether their backgrounds are in education or business.

If the reader will pardon another historical metaphor, imagine if we were still striving to make incremental improvements in horse-driven transportation technology.

I do not envision that privatizing education can get us where we need to be but that does not mean that business principles are irrelevant when addressing the problems of education in America. What happens in business is that the world in which our customers live and conduct business is undergoing relentless and often revolutionary change. For a supplier to be successful, they must take the time to understand what has changed in our customer’s business environment and find new solutions for them. More often than not this means replacing rather that re-working old technology. Failure to understand and effectively respond to ever-changing customer expectations means loss of market share followed by business failure.

What we must understand about this Twenty-first Century is that the playing field in which the United States must compete is undergoing relentless, radical, and transformational change. In response to these changes, our competitors are leaping into the future where they are finding new and innovative ways to respond to these changes. In the meantime, Americans trudge along, yearning for the good old days that are forever lost to us.

The reality in Twenty-first Century America is that our educational process is failing to produce the kind of results necessary to compete in the international marketplace and if we don’t figure out what to do about it right now, the golden era of the United States of America, once the richest, most innovate, and productive nation in the history of the world, will grind to a sudden and unpleasant halt.

I encourage the reader to check out my book, Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge for Twenty-First Century America in order to understand how to utilize a systems-thinking approach. Only through such an approach will we be able to challenge our fundamental assumptions about the educational process and then re-engineer the system to do what we so desperately need it to do.

The one certainty facing us is that, should we fail to transform our systems of education, both public and private, in fifty years China and other developing nations of the world will be looking to the U.S. for their supply of cheap labor because that is all the American people will be qualified to provide.

America: A Leadership Crisis of Great Urgency!

Posted on September 17, 2013 by admin

During the recent crisis with Syria, the Russian government as stepped up to offer a solution. What was most interesting was that Vladimir Putin, the Russian President, chided the U.S., in response to a statement by President Obama, noting that “It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation.”

However much we might resent Putin’s audacity to say such a thing, maybe we need to stop and think about the possibility that he could be correct.

Any illusions we might have had regarding the invulnerability of the United States as the richest and most powerful nation in the world were surely shattered in the wake of Standard and Poor’s decision to downgrade our nation’s credit rating in 2011. Our inability to dictate our political and military will in the Middle East and the blatant hatred demonstrated by the people who have attacked our Embassies are examples of a recurring theme that challenges our nation’s belief in itself as somehow special.

Maybe it is time for the American people to step back and take stock of who we are and how rate when compared to other developed and developing nations in the world.

The U.S. national debt is measured in trillions of dollars, with China, the single greatest challenge to our economic supremacy, our largest creditor. Our ability to compete in the world marketplace over the next half-century is dependent on the quality of the American workforce, which, itself, is powered by the American educational system. According to The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), the U.S. ranks 25th in math, 17th in science, and 14th in reading out of the 34 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries.[1] That China ranks first in all three areas should strike fear, if not outright panic, in every American heart.

We are in the midst of a crisis of historic proportions in which our way of life as a people is in jeopardy. It is a crisis that cries out for positive leadership and yet our elected leaders in Washington stomp around like spoiled and stubborn children who have yet to learn how to work and play with others.

The challenges facing our nation and its people are immense. Whether our burdensome debt; an economy that is only a shadow of its former self; a natural environment that seems to be stumbling under the weight of a burgeoning population that fouls the very air that we breathe and the water we drink; a system of public education that is laden with failure; a health care system that fails to meet the needs of nearly a full third of its citizens, we place our future in jeopardy unless we meet these challenges.

We use oil, a diminishing natural resource, to fuel our demand for energy even though the future will belong to the first nation to develop reliable, alternate sources of energy whether solar, hydrogen, or nuclear fusion. Worse, we are dependent on foreign suppliers of oil that are friendly to us only as long as we are able to pay.

We are a people who have forgotten that the historical strength of our democracy has always been our rich diversity as a people living together, in harmony, under the rule of law. Today we govern ourselves with a two-party system in which loyal opposition has given way to enmity and distrust to such an extent that each side feels the other is out to destroy America.

We must understand that the problems of the Twenty-first Century are of such magnitude that the politics of the past are no longer adequate to meet our needs. We must find fresh solutions that satisfy the needs of the masses on the one hand and that foster a strong economy on the other. We need the kind of leadership that will demand that its people replace a rampant entitlement mentality with an abundance mentality centered on the belief that there is enough for everyone as long as each citizen is willing to give one hundred percent of themselves through hard work and participatory citizenship.

We need leadership that understands that we cannot preserve our nation’s status as the richest and most powerful nation in the world just because we think it is our right and privilege.

We are like a baseball or football team that has been in first place for so long we have forgotten what it took to rise to the top and we have become complacent. Right now, people of other nations, with China and Russia leading the way, are working hard to challenge our nation’s status. Just as importantly, the children of China and other nations are working hard to gain what they believe is an educational advantage that will seal the deal for their people and economy in the Twenty-first Century and beyond. That they are outperforming American children by a wide margin is simply unacceptable and we must answer the bell.

It is unreasonable to think that one nation will be able to dominate the future the way America has dominated the past but if we want a place at the head table, we have to elevate our game. To do so, we must reunite as a people and demand the best from ourselves, from our fellow Americans, from our children, and from our political leadership. We can ill afford to waste a minute let alone a generation.

Stand up, toe the mark, and get moving while we can still see the coat tails of our competitors. We need positive leadership and it must start with each and every one of us. That means me and it means you!