Category Archives: Blog

Tell Me What You Learned Today. I’m Listening.

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I watched my granddaughters skip up the walkway to their elementary school and wondered. What will they learn today? How well will they learn today what is important for them to know? How will they handle their learning frustrations? How will each feel about herself as she compares herself to her classmates?

I listened to the parents dropping of their children. There are a few fellow grandparents; our white and gray heads are badges of grandparenthood. I heard a common theme in what they said as their drop-offs headed into school. “Have a good day. Have fun today. See you after school.” Some kids waved back at these words; most did not, as they heard the same words every day.

My wondering derives from a career as an educator with a constant charge to “cause all children to learn” everyday. It is that causation piece that drives my wondering about my grand girls. What purposeful teaching will they experience today and what learning will they be expected to achieve? How will their teachers present today’s lessons? How well will their teachers monitor all their students to see how well they all are learning? And what will these teachers do to assist those children who don’t “get it” right away. Will the teacher persist until all children have met the learning expectation of the lesson? And, how will children feel about themselves as learners at the end of the day? Will they run out the doors at the end of the day to celebrate another day of learning will they escape out the doors to the great reward of “after school”? Sometimes my wondering is a pain!

At the end of their school day, when I see them next, my grand girls know the questions they will be asked. My queries will not be “What did you have for lunch?”or “Did you have fun today?” They and I know what was packed in their lunch boxes and they and I know that school is fun for them because they come from a heritage that extols schooling. Expect fun – have fun. No, they know I will say, “Tell me one thing you learned today.” “Not really a question, Gramps,” they always say. “More like a command!” They also know they are not only expected to tell me the what they learned, but also to explain how it was learned and how well it was learned. They know that sometime in the next several days I will return to what they learned today just to see how well they retained it in their thinking.

These girls are living a tradition. Their mother smiles, or is it a grimace, when they tell her that Gramps “Quizzed us again when he picked us up at school!” She was tortured in the same way, as were her two brothers. And, as are her cousins when they visit Gramps. They all know that “Nothing special” or “I don’t remember” or “I don’t want to talk about school right now” will not satisfy Gramps. They simply know what Gramps always tells them. “At your age, school is a great exploration and adventure. When we talk about your day at school, I ask you to share with this old man your stories of the new things you have seen and done. Now, what about your adventure today.”

This routine was created by design. “You’re torturing us,” the say, but they do it anyway and they do it everyday. The design is this – parenting for strong learning. Too much of family life is compartmentalized. Mom and Dad go off to work. Kids go off the school. Mom comes home and takes care of the home things she does. Dad comes home and takes care of the home things he does. Mom and Dad have their friends. Kids have their friends. And, it is easy for everyone to go to work or go to school and live their life in their compartment. Some find it safer and easier, because it avoids the messiness that other lives bring into their life. Parenting for learning is designed to bridge the compartments. I, as an adult, ask them, as children, to tell me about their school experiences. Sharing their adventure assures them that someone else knows and cares about what they do at school and understands and reinforces the importance of their daily education. I can’t imagine the pain of a child who goes to school everyday for thirteen or more years and never is asked to talk about what was learned on any one day. That would be child abuse and I will not tolerate it. Not on my watch.

So, “Tell me what you learned today. I’m listening.”

Self-Interest Drives School Choice

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School choice is self-interest and self-interest is what it is, self before all else. One can parse out all the other motives and characteristics that underlie school choice and the one common denominator is “I want to choose who my child will associate with in their school attendance.” Is self-interest a good or a bad thing? Not necessarily either. In a world that places the highest values upon “the Dream,” American or otherwise, giving people the opportunity to express their self-interest by choosing the school their children will attend seems an American thing to do.

Lest we forget, school choice is not a new phenomenon. Parents in our nation have made choices relative to the school their children will attend for hundreds of years and almost always on the basis of social association. Parochial schools, preparatory schools, military schools, and finishing schools have been part of the K-12 landscape since colonial times. In my hometown in the 1950s, my childhood friends spun off in many school directions. Whereas, most attended their local neighborhood public school, kids in my neighborhood also attended Catholic and Lutheran parochial schools. We played street ball and kick-the-can without any consideration of where our school desks were housed. When we left our elementary schools for junior high, several kids left the neighborhood for military school, most notably Shattuck Academy or St. John’s Military Academy. I remember overhearing our parents talk about “a need for discipline” and the next time I saw my friends they were home “on leave” with very short haircuts. And, when it was time for high school, the last culling sent several friends to selective college preparatory or finishing schools. They sent letters from Exeter and Phillips Academy and Patricia Stephen’s Finishing School.

Did these choices truly make a difference in the lives of the children they affected? That is a difficult answer to make. For my parochial school friends, their parent’s choice of a Catholic or Lutheran education was a commitment to sustaining their chosen family values. “Everyone in our family goes to St. Patrick’s” was a way of saying “we are and will be a Catholic family.” And, many still are these many years later. Attending a prep school in New England was a variation on the same theme as a parochial education. Going to Exeter said, “these are my peers and being in their social cum economic circle is an investment in a powerful professional future.” Most of my friends who went East to school stayed East in their professional and cultural adult lives. They truly became doctors, lawyers and business leaders. And, the girls who attended Stephens made the social register when they married; they were debutantes.

School choice has been with us a long time, but the choosing of a school in yesteryear was different than the burgeoning school choice issues of today. When we look at the child in the school choice discussion, school choice still is about associations. It is the parental determination of “who will my child attend school with and what advantages will accrue from those associations” that drives the specific selection of a school. Parents give lip service to matching their child’s learning needs to a particular pedagogy or curriculum. School choice is an aggressive election to move away from undesirable school associations and to move toward more desirable associations.

When we look at the adult in the school choice discussion, school choice is about power. It is the power of a parent to make the decision of school attendance and the political and economic mechanisms that support the parental power to decide. Whereas, parents always had the power to send their children to parochial, military, prep and finishing schools, they personally funded their choices. Today’s school choice discussion is all about the reallocation of public funds to support parental school choice decisions and getting at these large public funds is all about state and local politics.

One does not redirect tax-based dollars without writing new laws. Moving another step, one needs elected lawmakers to write new laws. And lastly, elected lawmakers need financial backing to assure that they remain elected. Hence, school choice today is not about a parent in the neighborhood who wants his or her child to attend a different school in order receive a more advantageous education. School choice is about getting candidates, and enough candidates, elected to office so that new laws will direct state money that otherwise would be allocated to public schools redirected to “schools of choice” and to vouchers for the public payment for a child to attend a school of choice.

Or, from a different perspective, school choice today is about reinstitutionalizing a child’s education. The old institution of public education is being taken down and the new institution of consumer- and commercialized-education is being raised up. The power brokerage necessary to create new institutions needs organization and funding and there is plethora of political action groups ready to funnel the dollars of large and small donors to purchase and sustain the legislative votes necessary to create charter and for-profit schools of choice.

Self-interest is a powerful human motivation. One should understand a person’s self-interest in order to predict their future human behavior. When the nominated Secretary for the US Department of Education, Betsy DeVos, states that she is “…in favor of charter schools, online schools, virtual school, blended learning, and any combination thereof, and frankly, any combination or any kind of choice that hasn’t yet been thought of…”, then one can predict that we have not yet conceptualized the extent to which school choice will be institutionalized. The fact that a wealthy political activist like DeVos is even nominated to head the USDE moves the actualization of self-interest in school choice from choice as an alternative to choice as the new mainstream.

One thing we can know is this, the school choice available to our grandfathers will be nothing like the school choice available to our grandchildren. In fact, public school may become so deinstitutionalized that PS #1 in your community will be the school of choice for only those who cannot or will not choose to send their children elsewhere.

Stop Coddling the Hare; Tend to the Tortoise

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Aesop spun a fable about a race between the tortoise and the hare. The tortoise won! However, that was just a fable and not likely in real life where tortoises are what they are – slow and late to the finish line. Aesop aside, most races are dominated by the hares. The daily news is replete with stories of hares and scant mention of tortoises. A banner runs at the bottom of the TV screen with scores of games – winners in bold. Social media texts the day’s stock market activity – gains before losses. As Billy Bean said in Money Ball, “Nobody remembers who came in second in the World Series.” Winners matter and they get the attention; but, there are a lot more tortoises in the world than hares and the quality of the world’s life is shaped by the status of the tortoise not the bling of the hare.

Hares in most races are the genetically gifted, the economically advantaged, and the lucky-in-birth who most often are at the head of the pack from start to finish in every race, game and contest. Most people don’t choose to be hares; they are born with quick twitch muscles, funds for training, and into the cultivation of their winning ways. Although there are real-life “boot strap” kids who blaze like comets out of poverty and disadvantage, seldom do tortoises become hares. The hares win at the Olympics, in pro sports, and in the general elections. They also win in school races, on school tests, at spelling bees, and whenever school work is graded. This is where our real story begins. We can abide the hare winning at most things, but we must not abide the tortoise losing in education.

It is up to us to make Aesop’s fable into a new reality in which tortoises, more common and greatly more numerous than hares, win in school. And, win with regularity. This is exceedingly hard to do in a contemporary culture that adores winners and cradles every newborn in the hope that he or she will be a star. But, absent star power, what will it take to create school winners of all the tortoises?

Surprisingly, not much – just two things. Let the hares run.  Stop coddling them.  And, calmly tend to the tortoises.

Let the hares run is easy. Star students most often are self-directed and self-starting. The greatest dilemma they face in school is not being allowed to run. So, let them. “I see you completed today’s assignment and did well, as always. What would you like to do now? Great, what do you need?” Say and do no more, because the hares will run happily and they will learn and grow and succeed. In fact, the more you tend to their needs, the less and the slower they run.

Interestingly and politically, parents of the hares have made schools feel guilty when their hare-children are not receiving constant attention. Stop feeding the speed frenzy of the speedy. Just say, “If your hare really is one of the special children, they don’t need someone else telling them what, when, or how to learn.  We’ll point them and let them run.” Attending to hares who run fast and in many directions is a never-ending commitment. Stop with the endlessness.

Calmly tend to the plodding tortoises. Sit beside each tortoise, they won’t run away from you, and frequently make this single, simple inquiry. “Let’s see where you are now on this assignment. Tell me (show me).” And, follow their reply with instruction that causes them to continuously advance their work until the assignment is successfully completed. It should not surprise us that most tortoises fail in school not because they cannot understand and complete the assignment, but because they run out of time. When the hares finish the same assignment that the tortoises work on slowly, time runs out for everyone and the entire class moves to the next assignment. There is a long trail of uncompleted assignments behind every tortoise, assignments they could and should have completed if the race was not all about the hares.

An educational system focused on student learning success, not student speed in learning, will let the hares run and tend to the tortoises until all, hares and tortoises, have crossed the finish line.

Professional Pay for Teachers in Five Years Not Twenty-one

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“How long will it take me to reach the top annual salary in my profession?”, the newly hired teacher asked. Her first-year salary was just above the national average for starting teachers. “Twenty-one years,” the district’s Human Relations officer told her. Twenty-one years.

Why must teachers wait more than two decades before they receive their district’s top salary?

First, let’s set this scenario, one that is so common that it should be accepted as the norm. There is a real difference between the observed and evaluated job performances of first year and veteran teachers. The first year on the job is expected to be a major learning and refining experience for qualified new hires. But, by the young teacher’s third year on the job there is very little difference between the job performances of “high performing” young teachers and “high performing” veteran teachers. Observations and evaluations show that teachers in these two categories equally cause all students in their instruction to successfully learn their respective curricula. Yet, the salaries for “high performing” young teachers and “high performing” veteran teachers are tens of thousands of dollars apart. Why?

The constraint is archaic. It is based upon these three imposed concepts.

1. Local school boards cannot afford to pay all teachers a top salary. There is a planned and artificial distribution of low, mid and high salaries that school boards must maintain to stay within their annual revenues. School board budgets are always sum pre-determined and never sum sufficient.

2. Once a teacher has committed five or more years in a district, it is to their advantage to stay. All new hires start at the bottom of the pay ladder. A teacher who moves to another school district goes back to the beginning of the pay schedule.

3. Teaching is a low-paying profession. The public expects teachers to accept low pay for seasonal (nine months) work.

How wrong is this? The answer is “really wrong.” While it might have been adequate in the 19th century, it certainly is not in the 21st.

I watched woodpeckers drill holes in a 55-foot tall red pine. They were chasing bugs and, to get the daily food the required, they made more than a dozen holes, some four or five inches in diameter and three to four inches deep into the tree trunks. Why is this mentioned? Because that tree was dead but did not know it. Holes drilled by woodpeckers were the tree’s death knell. Within several years’ time the tree above their holes will die from lack of nutrition.

The teaching profession is like the tree; dying and not knowing it. The profession’s slow death is driven by visible and invisible causes. Among the visible causes is “edu-politics.” Public education is an easy and soft target for politicians who want to cut state spending, arouse a voting base with promises of school choice for parents, and find a cause – we need to improve schools by …. Edu-politics is eradicating teachers’ unions and their ability to mount a professional argument. More to the point, in the name of cutting taxes, edu-politicians promise to cut the cost of public education, and 80% of that cost is salary and benefit. Tax reformers hold up each homeowners’ local tax bill and point to the school levy tax. Cutting taxes cuts revenue to schools which requires diminished salaries and benefits which diminishes an interest in the profession of teaching.

The invisible cause of the profession’s death is the low esteem college undergraduates have for teaching. When planning for their post-college careers, college students consider teaching a soft occupation for those disposed toward care giving and social work. It is not the chosen profession for go-getters. And, when comparing earning power, college students see a 21-year pay ladder to a top professional salary that college graduates in other careers can achieve in less than a decade. So, why be a teacher? The answer is, college graduates aren’t.

Sadly, the disease of ed-politics is difficult to eradicate. Politics is what it is. But, the perception of teaching as a valued career choice can be changed.

We return to the original question. “Why must teachers wait more than two decades before they receive their district’s top salary?” The answer is “they must not have to wait.” The solution has two steps. School boards must retain only high performing teachers, and, teacher salaries must be performance based and not experience regulated. At the end of the probationary employment period, only high performing teachers should be provided with continuing contracts. School boards that advance young teachers from probationary educator to continuing contract status based upon the observation and evaluation of the teacher’s professional work should pay a professionally-equivalent salary. And, that is a top-of-the-ladder salary identical to the highest salary an identical “high performing” colleague receives.

Teacher pay ladders must be four or five steps from bottom to top and not twenty-one steps. When school boards take the necessary and decisive action of releasing low performing probationary teachers, they can take the high ground of providing all teachers with appropriate high performing salaries. Teachers who are “high performing” by the end of their third year should be paid a “high performing” salary.

Lastly, there is a widely-held myth that teachers do not teach for the money; they teach so that they can help children learn. While the second part of the statement is very true, money matters to everyone. It matters to those who are teaching and to those who want to teach. Money matters because it connotes value. To attract and retain the “high performing” teachers that our children need, this myth must be debunked and teacher pay must be competitively professional. School boards and school communities, just like all other economic enterprises, get what they pay for and the best educational talent needed today and tomorrow will cost more. It is time to change the antiquated system used to hire and retain teachers.

In the Business of School, No News Is Bad News

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When perception is reality, bad news about your school is terrible news, no news is bad news, and good news is the only news with a future. If your local school is not generating and publishing good news about its students, its programs, its teachers or its alums, it is losing ground in the swamp of no news viewed badly. Scan your local news sources to check this out; schools that are working their “good news” enjoy a stronger reputation and a positive perception. Schools for which there is scant good news are seldom even in the communal conversation. After the start and end of this reality check there is one truth: how a community perceives its local school is the school’s responsibility.

Cultivating a good news aura begins when school leadership understands the cycle of school and community relationships. Good news about the school begets good perceptions in the community; good perceptions in the community begets support for the school’s needs; support for the school’s needs begets more school success; and, published school successes beget good perceptions. This cycle is apparent in successful school communities and even more apparent in communities where the local school is invisible in the news. While few powerful processes in successful school organizations are “top down,” cultivating a good news aura is one that is top down. School perception lives in the work of school leaders.

There was a time when “publishing” good school news was singularly lodged in the local newspaper. A school could feed its good news to the “education” reporter and good news articles were widely distributed to community homes and businesses. The concept of “feeding” good school news has not changed, but the conduits now are multiple not singular. The local newspaper remains an important publisher of school news, but school leadership must cultivate each of their community’s news outlets – print, broadcast, and web-based. While there may be an “official” community newspaper, there are many other printed publications that make their way into mail boxes and distribution stands at groceries, gas stations, and markets. Each of these will have its own community of readers and using all available print publications assures a wider spread of good news. Television is a more difficult conduit to cultivate because TV follow the “if it bleeds, it leads” credo, but a continuous feeding of good news to a local station will result in some coverage. Radio on the other hand, especially the proliferation of small FM stations, will transmit good school news to the thousands of homes and businesses where a local station plays daily as background.

Social media has become the queen of a school’s good news network. Postings of brief nuggets of school news are friended, shared, and re-posted with such frequency that a single feeding of a good news story to social media rapidly outpaces a feed to print or broadcast media. While once scoffed at by school leaders, Facebook and Twitter work exceptionally well in getting school news to the socially connected.

Feeding and nurturing a school’s positive perception in its community pays off. While it is easy to connect this positive perception to the success of school referenda issues, that type of pay off happens only once across a span of years. The more immediate pay offs lie in how the school’s public perception attracts new families to live in the community, how its positive reputation advances the future of its graduates, and how its good aura promotes the hiring and retention of talented teachers and educators. When a school enjoys a steady stream of good news spreading throughout its community, that school is a constant source of community pride.

Bad news that turns terrible most often is a thunder bolt that a school cannot anticipate. Equally sad is the fact that every year a handful of schools suffer the tragedy of terrible news. Every school has protocols for responding to bad news turned terrible. A conscientious exercise of these protocols slowly dissolves the tarnish of terrible news. But, sadly, the half-life of terrible news is several decades long.

No news is a stagnating community perception in which many schools find themselves. No news is just that – a lengthy absence of any news about the school. Ironically, no news about a school builds a bad perception. When there is no good news to offset the absence of news, the tendency is to believe that “nothing good must be happening there.” The absence of good news is avoidable. It is correctable. It is a condition that can be reversed and quickly, if there is a concerted leadership effort to assume new practices of publishing good news.

When one wants to, one can find positive, good news stories every day in the life and times of a school. Stories about people. Stories about events. Stories about smiles or even frowns turned into smiles. Stories about children and teachers abound, but do not neglect the seldom reported stories from the cafeteria and kitchen, school bus, and custodial carts. Every person in school can be the source of good news. However, someone must want to see and find and publish the school’s good news.  It starts at the top – if the proliferation of good news is a priority of the superintendent, it will happen. If it is not a priority for the superintendent, it will not.

So, check the current community perception of your local school. Can people you ask cite any recent good news they have read or heard about the school? If they can, give your school a good news high five. If they cannot, your local reality is no news is bad news.

Now, what to do about the truth of your local school. You, yes you, tell the superintendent that “No school news is bad school news. If you (the superintendent) will give me one good news story every week, I will spread the good news.” If ten people did this in your community, the no news is bad news drought would end and a prosperous good news cycle would begin. And, probably the superintendent would quickly assume a new role as the good news “teller” for the schools. Everyone wins when a school engages in a good news cycle.