It’s mid-May and everyone at school is counting down the days. Zero is the last day of school or the first day of summer vacation; it depends upon your goals. Summer officially starts for children and their families, and teachers and everyone who works at school when the last day of the school year is history.

School’s out, school’s out; teachers let the monkeys out. Can you hear the voices of elementary children singing?

Two contrasting memories about school and summer vacation come to mind the closer we get to summer.

Memory one. For years, teachers were responsible for securing their classrooms for the summer vacation. I recall large rolls of butcher paper on a four-wheeled cart being pushed from one end of the school to the other. At each classroom door teachers tore off enough paper from the rolls to cover their bookshelves. Every book in the room was hidden behind butcher paper and masking tape not to be exposed until the next September. When children walked out of school on the last day, after they cleaned out their lockers, they carried home papers and art projects and gym clothes and music instruments. Children of all grades said good-bye to their public school. But, they carried no books. Books and the reading of books stayed at school.

Memory two. Several summers ago a high school junior-to-be was my caddy at a golf tournament. Jake attended a private school. I couldn’t help but ask what else he was doing during the summer besides caddying. Up and down the fairways, he told me of his summer reading list. Most were pre-reads of books that would be studied during his junior year. The others were re-reads of books he wanted know even better. All were college-preparatory reads. I asked him why he was committed to such a rigorous reading list and he said, “What I read this this summer assures me that I am ready for next fall. If I don’t read and learn over the summer, I will fall behind. I’ve been doing this for years.”

These are two very different memories about summer and they present two completely different expectations of how children can or should use their summer time.

We public educators are trapped in the pattern of nine months in school and three months out of school that perpetuates itself and nothing else. There are state statutes that limit the school year and local teaching contracts that limit the time when teachers can teach. We have rules that act to prevent children from engaging in summer learning. (I am not including children who are required to attend compulsory summer school as a condition for grade level promotion. In most instances, this is compulsory time and not compulsory learning.)

We also have acculturated ourselves into thinking that children need time away from learning. Parents are excited to have their children home in June, but by July 1st they want them back in school. Kids who are used to seeing their friends at school every day become lost and lonely in their own backyards. Summer is effectively over after 30 days of vacation but our culture says that it must be prolonged for another two months like it or not.

So, how do we break the cycle of lost summers? We do this by proclaiming loudly that if children don’t read and learn over the summer, they fall behind in their potential for learning growth. It’s as simple as that. Three months of little or no learning for a second grader means that this child will return to school not as a new third grader but as a kid whose stagnation places his learning growth back in the spring of the second grade year. Instead of a full year’s learning connecting to the next academic year, children accumulate seven or eight months of learning due to summer regression. As a result, very few students begin high school with a high school reading ability and very, very few graduate with a pre-college reading ability.

Even though we know this is not what children need, we continue doing less for them than we could. Instead —

We need to tuck a summer reading list into each child’s backpack at the end of each school day in April. Children and parents need to be prepared for a new kind of summer and two months of run-up information is a good beginning. The second grade teacher will prepare the first grade student’s list and each successive grade level teacher will continue the pattern.

We need to add a second list to each child’s backpack in May. This is a list of places in the community, including the public library, where parents can obtain each book on the April list. Everyone needs help and then they need more help if we want them to change habitual behavior. The reading list tells them what children need to read. The second list tells them where to find what children need to read.

We need to connect children to their summer reading. On June 1st we need to install several books on each child’s tablet or laptop. Children will use their devices to play games and communicate with each other. If we also make their devices reading machines, it is more likely that they will read.

On July 1st and August 1st we need to e-mail happy notes to each child to remind them that summer reading is important. The e-mail will contain lists of new vocabulary a child will need to know in September.

And, most importantly, in September and October we need to weave summer reading into our children’s daily instruction. The weaving will include vocabulary, concepts, and background information gleaned from the summer reading. If there is no weaving, children will think that all we were interested in was busy work and they get enough of that. The more we weave summer reading into fall instruction, the more likely children will read the next summer.

There is every reason for us to do all five of these things. Children beginning second grade will reduce their summer regression. Every summer children will expand their vocabulary and background knowledge. Instead of falling behind as a result of a lazy summer, children will be ahead and continually getting ahead.

There really is no reason that prevents us from doing these five things, except we never have. Will never have mean that we never will?

I also remember a talk show host who always signed off with “when you know what the right thing to do is, try to do it.”

In the movie Moneyball, Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland Athletics, says to Art Howe, the team’s coach, “If you don’t win the last game of the season, nobody gives a damn.” Coach Howe responds, “So, now it’s on me.” (Losing the final game of the American League playoffs to the Yankees). Beane says, “No, it’s on me.” And, with that exchange Billy Beane sets about to reform the way in which baseball management conceives of building a winning team. He knows that winning or losing is not on one person, but on the way that everyone conceives of their responsibility for success. Ownership, management and players began to think of baseball not as a team of “great” players but as an organization of diversely talented players assembled to increase the number of games won each season. Public education must address reform in the same way. Leadership, teachers, students and parents must re-conceive what it means to be educationally successful and then work cohesively to create new successes.

Thus far, educational journals and public media have treated educators with a “so, now it’s on you” attitude. The US Department of Education and respective state governors have issued new mandates for and assessments of educator effectiveness using the “old baseball” adage that ownership can “put the spurs” to school leadership and school leadership can “put the spurs” to employees and that vigorous spurring will improve the academic achievement of children.

This improvement model looks and acts like every reform effort since A Nation At Risk was published in 1983. It is no surprise that every reform effort since that landmark publication has done little but spawn a next reform effort. Reformers have manipulated what happens in the classroom by looking for a new breed of teachers, a new slant on curriculum, and a new trend in teaching. It is time to stop looking for educational success in the singular venue of the classroom and using a new view of how each of the relevant players in public education can work in the aggregate to create more educational wins.

Today, we are looking at parents as players.

First, parents like Harriet Nelson, Donna Read, and Mrs. Cunningham are no more. When our grandparents went to school, the majority of children were sent to school by homemaking mothers who fed them breakfast, prepared their school clothes, packed their lunches, saw them out the door and seemingly waited at the door until their children returned home from school. Once back at home, moms watched over their children at play, prepared their supper, assisted with their homework and tucked them into bed. This parenting model happens so infrequently today that it is the exception and we must accept a new rule for describing the parent as an educational player.

The majority of children today are raised by working parents. The majority of moms and dads are fully engaged in the struggle of economic survival or in the daily turmoil of their occupations. Work to earn money is the full-time, every day focus of most parents.

A growing minority of children live with a single parent of a mixed family. The majority of families does not eat meals together, go to church together or sit together in the evening to talk about “what did you do today.” A majority of children do their homework, if they do it, in their bedrooms or a room away from their parents’ supervision. A majority of children engage with electronic media – social media, video entertainment, games, television – as their primary activity at home. Most parents find reassurance that a child engaged thusly is not a parenting problem at the moment.

Most high school aged children fit into these two categories. Children have found their niche in school and/or their positive community activities and find personal worth in these, or, due to a lack of success in school or community activities have become externally apathetic and have quit trying to succeed in traditional youth activities. The former are ready for parent engagement; the latter are not.

All of that said, when it comes to educating their children, especially elementary and middle school age children, parents “it is on you, also.” Teachers, curriculum, and teaching cannot fill in the gap of a child’s parent. These are essential things parents need to do as part of a reformed team committed to building educational wins.

Make learning matter. When I have asked children across K – 12 how often their parents talk with them about what they learned at school “today,” they typically cannot remember the day and they say “now and then.” Talking about your child’s most important childhood enterprise is not lip service; it is a daily testimonial of parental interest in what a child learns. Initiate talk about what your child learned today. Don’t stop with a kid’s time-tested first response of “Nothing. We didn’t do ‘nothing’ at school today.” If you know what your child learned yesterday, it is easy to initiate talk about what they learned today. If you don’t know what your child learned at school yesterday, start with today and ask again tomorrow.

Talk about the specifics of what your child has learned today and do it every day. You are tired from a day’s work. No one disagrees. But a day without positive talk about learning from a parent at home builds another thin layer on the callous of disinterest. When a child think’s her parent is not interested, it is hard for her to be interested.

Attribute learning successes to your child’s work at learning. Success begets success but only if the successful child believes that she has been successful, that current success is the result of what she has done, and that she possesses what is necessary for success again in the future. No cheerleader in a child’s life is more important than a child’s parent. No one can make a child feel more capable or more incapable than a parent. So, make your child understand that current success is due to what your child has done to be successful and that they can be even more successful in the future by continuing to work for their success.

Be your child’s cheerleader for success every day. Know your child’s aspirations and how she can make dreams come true. We all had dreams which did not transpire; but one or two did. When we can help a child make one of her dreams come true, we are paying success forward to future generations.

Make continuing education matter. In the last century, a college education was at the pinnacle of each family’s American dream for their children. Today, the economics of a college education make a baccalaureate more and more difficult to achieve. However, today there is much more to education than a baccalaureate degree. Education remains the best predictor of economic mobility and there are many flavors of education, especially technical and career specific education. A technical or career specific education is economically feasible for most. Further, a child must understand that education is a continuing life activity for tomorrow’s adults. Skill sets are changing too rapidly for any person to work a full fifty years based on the skills they learned before they were twenty years old. Careers will evolve and skill sets will change. Education is the constant tool for preparing a person for what comes next.

Assure that your child understands that constant learning is essential for their successful adult life. Education is not a school. It is not a teacher. Education is a personal investment in oneself.

Don’t get your pants in a bunch because someone is telling you how to be an educational parent to your child. No parent held his or her first child and said “I know all there is to know about parenting.” No parent said at her child’s fifth birthday party, “I know all there is to know about your sixth year.” We all need to hear lessons that we can use. I can give testimony to this truth every day.

This blog is not prescribing the education your child needs. Public education, traditional, charter or voucher. Private or parochial education. Alternative education. Home schooling. It doesn’t matter, as long as you are an educational parent who promotes learning, the attribution of success to personal effort, and the need for continuing education.

Educational success is “on” and “because of” educational parents.

What am I supposed to think about this and where do I begin? This question finds its way into our thinking on many occasions, especially when we are responsible for the success of children. Often the words of others assist us in understanding the imperatives we face. One proven strategy for setting the stage for action is to conduct a task analysis that creates a clear vision of the work to be accomplished. A task analysis is an essential step in presenting effective instruction that causes all children to learn.

“If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could better judge what to do, and how to do it.” Abraham Lincoln

“By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.” Benjamin Franklin

Lincoln gives us our first thought. In teacher talk, he tells us that when we know what children know at this moment and what future learning they are to achieve, we are more likely to find the strategies for moving their education forward. Franklin gives us the kick in the pants to begin action – in positive terms, by preparing for success, our success is prepared. Hard to argue with Ben!

Task analysis helps us to transcribe complex objectives into an instructional design. The Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Mathematics present teachers with an extraordinary set of objective outcomes for children to achieve as the result of each grade level of instruction. In their entirety and as individual statements, the CCSS are powerful aspirations for learning, however they are exceptionally rigorous, complex and complicated. In order to understand how a standard causes learning, teachers need to strip a standard/objective down to its parts and rebuild the parts into an instructional design.

The ELA literacy standard for writing for third grade children serves as a case in point.

• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.3.1 Write opinion pieces on topics or texts, supporting a point of view with reasons.
• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.3.1a Introduce the topic or text they are writing about, state an opinion, and create an organizational structure that lists reasons.
• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.3.1b Provide reasons that support the opinion.
• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.3.1c Use linking words and phrases (e.g., because, therefore, since, for example) to connect opinion and reasons.
• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.3.1d Provide a concluding statement or section.

In our task analysis, we must identify the component parts of the learning objectives. What is an “opinion” and an “opinion piece” and what do the children in this third grade class already know about opinions and opinion pieces. Each operative subject and predicate in these objectives must be parsed and a realistic understanding of Lincoln’s “first know(ing) where we are” must be established. If there are 20 children in the class, there could well be 20 different “where we are(s)” to be found. As an example:

Stripping the objective down to its incremental parts is necessary for our diagnosis of what each child needs to learn and how we are to instruct them. This allows us to answer, “Who needs to learn what and in what order do they need to learn it.”

We begin Franklin’s “preparing for success” processes by reassembling our assessment of the parts of the objective into an instructional design that might look like this.

• Verification of and/or instruction of background knowledge and skills.
• Class discussion of “meaty” topics from which they can form an opinion.
• Initial instruction of new knowledge and skills related to paragraph organization, supporting ideas, and writing skills.
• Modeling of new knowledge and skills
• Collaborative work for creating an “organizational structure” or graphic organizer of what the paragraph(s) might look like, including statement of an opinion, supporting sentences aligned with reason that supports the opinion sentence, and a concluding sentence.
• Individual work to write an “opinion piece” using the organizational structure developed collaboratively.
• Teacher monitoring of individual work and support of children with weaker background knowledge or skills (tutorials).
• Presentation of student work.

Task analysis not only addresses the immediate standard(s) to be taught, it also helps a teacher verify background knowledge for the learning of other standards in the future. The analysis entailed in a third grade literacy/writing standard confirms each child’s readiness of any other standard involving opinion, opinion pieces, the organizational structure of an opinion piece, and the process of using collaborative work to establish a framework from which individual work can be completed.

If you are ready and prepared to do something important, the doing is much easier and the result is much more likely to be exactly what you anticipated it would be. Readiness points a person toward success!

We can learn a lot about the importance of preparation by looking at real world examples of readiness. President Kennedy announced in 1960 that the United States would put a man on the moon by the end of that decade. It took nine years between JFK’s announcement and Neil Armstrong’s moon walk. Each aspect of every minute task was rehearsed hundreds of times. In the photo below, astronauts wearing full gear in a training center on Earth practiced unloading their equipment, using tongs and scoops to collect samples from a simulated moonscape, bagging and sealing the samples, tagging and labeling the samples, and storing the sample bags in the practice model of the lunar module. NASA pre-thought the incremental steps of every activity the astronauts might need to make related to a landing on the moon and rehearsed each step over and over again.

Many surgeons prepare for surgery by interviewing their patient and studying their records. However, surgeons who warm up for a surgery by going through the hand motions of the procedure prior to beginning surgery had eighty percent fewer errors than surgeons who did not rehearse their hand motions. http://indianapublicmedia.org/amomentofscience/how-your-surgeon-prepare-operation/

Tiger Woods hits 500 or more golf balls on the range every day in preparation for a round of golf when he wants to make fewer than 72 golf shots.

Olympic athletes can be seen rehearsing the body mechanics of a dive off the high platform or the landing from the balance beam or the configurations of how they will navigate the downhill slalom on the ski hill. Using video, they isolate how they move their arms and their legs, how they tuck into aerial flips, and the timing of each physical movement. From take-off to landing, they have a clear visual in their mind of every aspect of what they need to do.

A child learning to write a poem or do long division or play the flute or weld a leg onto a metal stand needs to be ready for success just like an astronaut and surgeon and world-class athlete.

How do we make children ready to learn?

Preparing a child for learning is our moonwalk. Remarkably, there are hundreds of decisions that pertain to a child’s successful learning. In most instructional designs, however, we are concerned with three very straight-forward readiness targets.

One – Do we understand the critical attributes of what is to be learned so that a sequence of instruction can be accomplished? Having a clear map of what must be learned and the order of instruction is essential if instruction is to cause learning. Effective learning cannot begin halfway through a sequence of ten attributes, but must build successful step upon successful step. When children know that the teacher is following a clear map of instruction, they can confidently give their full effort to learning.

This stage of readiness should be accomplished well in advance of initial instruction. Identifying and staging the critical attributes of a learning task is a complex process and cannot be efficiently performed in a prep period an hour before children are to begin new learning. A graphic organizer is a valuable tool in seeing the map of learning a child must complete in order to successfully learn new content, skills and thinking processes.

Two – Is the child aligned with the first of these critical attributes? This step engages and questions the quality of each child’s prior learning. If the critical attributes require that a child knows, can do and thinks in a prescribed manner, we need to be sure that each child is confident in these three areas. If they are not, we need to pre-teach the background content, skills and thinking process before we begin the new instruction.

Historically, teachers may have generalized their observations that children in their class were confident in the prior knowledge required for new learning. Bell-weather children often were checked; if the middle achievers of the class were ready, then the more competent children were undoubtedly ready and special assistance would meet the needs low achievers. This may have met historic measures of accountability, but it will not meet the needs of our reformed mandates – not by half.

Three – Is the child motivated to begin new learning? We need to pre-think our strategy for engaging each child with a “hook” that personalizes, challenges them with a doable unknown, and engages their curiosity. The same strategy seldom works for each child in a class, so multiple strategies must be exercised so that all children in a class are motivated to learn.

Getting ready for success is only a first step. Readiness alone doesn’t guarantee that everything will be perfect. However, without readiness, successful learning is left to chance and chance is not an adequate predictor of future achievement in the era of educational reform.

Have you ever had that sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach that a small disaster is imminent?

The dream is real. I woke in a sweat the other night. A consistent dream of incompetence haunts my sleep now and again. I am playing golf on a bright and sunny day. The course is crowded with foursomes and play is clipping along at a good pace. That is until my ball comes to rest in the worst of stony brambles. It’s lodged among rocks and roots and there is no way I can get a club head on the ball. If it was not a dream, I would call an “unplayable lie”, determine the correct direction and distance of two club lengths, drop the ball, and play on. Except this is a dream. I can’t find my bag! Where are my clubs? My playing partners have moved on to the next hole! Now, I can’t find my ball! Everything unravels until I have shrunk from my six feet to about four foot two inches in height with clubs that are too long, a ball that is all but invisible, and stress that would crush a submarine’s hull. Ineptitude, incompetence, lack of confidence, lack of knowledge and skill, and unrelenting surrounding conditions that demand immediate forward progress – these are the makings of my bad dreams. But, it is only a dream about golf!

If I was still a practicing teacher or principal or school superintendent, my nightmare would not be about golf. It would be about the looming mandate that all children in Wisconsin will be instructed in the English/language arts and mathematics Common Core State Standards and a new statewide assessment will be used to not only grade each child’s achievement, but each teacher’s and each principal’s professional effectiveness. Egads!

Crunch time is now. In 2010 the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction adopted the Common Core Standards as part of the Department’s application for a waiver from the mounting tensions of the No Child Left Behind Act. http://standards.dpi.wi.gov/stn_ccss Nationally, most states were floundering in their efforts to meet the escalating performance demands of NCLB. Without relief, many states would have been declared educationally bankrupt. As a result, US Department of Education Secretary Duncan encouraged states to seek a waiver from NCLB. There were many required puzzle pieces that states were required to adopt in order to secure USDE approval of their NCLB waiver. Adoption of rigorous academic standards at each grade level with a more accountable assessment system and reformed measures for assessing teacher effectiveness were just three of the puzzle pieces. Now, meeting these reform mandates has the same feeling as the NCLB requirements that were waived.

2010-11 was a year for teachers to understand the scope of the challenge. 2011-12 was committed to professional development of local curriculum and alignment of curricular resources in units of instruction that would cause students to learn the objectives of the CCSS. 2012-13 and 2013-14 are committed to developing activity (lesson) plans that integrate the instruction/learning of multi-CCSS objectives so that children can accomplish the demands of real world, complex assessment problems. Gone are the old-school multiple choice and true-false exams that teachers used for generations. Here are multi-part problems that require comprehension, analysis and evaluation of several sources of data, collaboration with other students, integration of technology, and reporting of conclusions in an information-style essay.

Wow! Put my golf ball back among the rocks and roots. I would rather play from there.

2014-15 is show time! Children will take their new, problem-rich state tests and conclusions will begin to form regarding the progress of each child’s academic achievement and the effectiveness of each local school and faculty. America loves to keep score and the news media will be waist deep in numbers to report.

Egads! Hear the voices of golfers, now teachers, caught in the brambles of their classrooms questioning their competence, knowledge and skills? A study by the Editorial Projects in Education (Education Week) indicates that almost 50 percent of surveyed teachers feel unprepared to teach the CCSS English/language arts and math standards as of March, 2013. http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2013/02/27/22common_ep.h32.html One of the new wrinkles is that ALL children, advantaged as well as disadvantaged, English speaking as well as non-English speaking, regular education as well as special education, are required to learn the same standards and take the same problem-rich assessment. This is the conundrum that many teachers voiced in the survey; teach all students the same standards and assess all students using the same test. This really is different than it used to be. Egads! no longer is a strong enough exclamation of exasperation.

Interestingly, if education was any other national industry, training the industry’s labor force would be quite different. Boeing trains a required number of workers to understand the design of the new Dreamliner and once they understand, they to begin construction of a Dreamliner. They do not construct 767s while they train. They are relieved of prior work to learn how to do new work. General Motors, Honda and BMW shut down production lines while they retool for a next year’s model. Employees are trained in the new line of autos, not while they are making last year’s model, but while they concentrate on the new line.

Teachers will teach children every school day in 2012-13. They are given professional training on the CCSS after school or on half-days when they must prepare for their substitute teacher and often reteach that half-day’s instruction the next day. The 2012-13 production line of child learning does not stop for teachers to learn the demands of the new production line. And, in Wisconsin, the politics of education continue with new options for parents to choose schools for their children where academic achievement may provide their child an advantage for life. This year’s test scores and school report card scores have ever-increasing meaning for a teacher straddling the 2012-13 curriculum while trying to learn the 2014-15 assessment requirements for instruction in 2013-14. Do well today or lose students tomorrow. This is the way it is. Sounds crazy, but egads! this is a Wisconsin teacher’s reality. And, this is why so many teachers declared that they were not prepared for the CCSS in the Education Week survey.

So, what to do. First, if NCLB was Leave No Child Behind, CCSS should include a corollary of Leave No Teacher Behind and Leave No Teacher Alone. We have too many schools with one, two or three teachers of the same grade level or subject. This is not a large enough work group to get this essential work completed. It is time to cross district lines and combine forces for professional development. Groups of 8 – 10 teachers with a common assignment should be gathered during significant released time to formulate new and innovative instruction of blended CCSS objectives. Combine faculties from different schools. Combine teachers from different school districts. There are no Lone Rangers in preparing for the CCSS.

Second, significant time is at least five days in a block of time several times each year when teachers are released from the demands of their respective classrooms. Education has a measly history of eeking out bits of time at the worst time of the day for teacher training. After school is bad because teachers are weary from a day’s work and this is when they need to be moving from employee to family member. Saturdays are bad because weekends are necessary family time. Time and timing are important and need to be treated as important. That is why released time is necessary.

Third, each group needs a trained trainer to assist them. Trainers can rotate from group to group within a county or CESA. However, every trainee group needs oversight and assistance. BMW does not send its middle management on vacation while workers retool. Everyone is committed to the new product. Superintendents, district office, principals, and all faculty no matter what they teach or do must be involved in retooling for a new instructional design.

Last, each group needs to see validated instructional units they can use as models. These exist. There should be no mystery as to what a quality activity plan looks like. BMW doesn’t tell employees who will make a Z4 roadster, “make it up as you go.” No one is interested in “cookie cutter” instruction, but knowing what cookies taste like helps us to create many variations on that successful taste.

Tempest fugit! Test results will be published in June, 2015. Now is the time to not only put the golf back into play but into a scoring position. Fore!