Tag Archives: decision making

The Hard Work Is The Right Work

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Being responsible for the education of children is not easy.  The speed, complexity, and complications of 21st century life is making this responsibility more and more difficult as every day we hear of a school controversy and crisis somewhere.  A board meeting in Timbuktu easily becomes headlines on national nightly news given how a social media post can explode sensationally.  And what is done in Timbuktu becomes a burning issue at a local meeting where most people cannot spell Timbuktu.  Being responsible requires leaders to understand the essential issues of their place and time, to sort the here and now from the Timbuktu, and not be afraid to tackle the hard stuff – the right work – of educating children.

Why is this thus?

There are several givens whenever we gather to talk about our local schools.  Our Constitution ensures our right to speak freely.  Wisconsin’s Open Meetings Laws ensure that school board meetings are open to public attendance with an opportunity for the public to speak to the school board.  And because almost everyone in the community attended a school of some sort, many people speak to their school board with the expertise of their personal school experience.  In summary, we are free to express our opinions about school and the school board is obligated to listen.  These are good things.

From the moment we labeled it public education, people felt compelled to express their opinion about how children should be educated.  Any adult who has or can biologically create a child feels authorized to explain how children should be raised and educated.  Today they express themselves standing at the lectern in front of the school board and from the screens of their computers, IPads, and smartphones while sitting at home.  This guaranteed exchange of “you speak, and we listen” is now part of posted school board agendas.  This is a healthy thing.

All board agenda items are not of the same importance.  The annual and daily operations of a district school require boards to consider, discuss, and approve items of routine business investigated and proposed by administrators.  These are the usual business of the board that once approved in the committee process need only a cursory airing in public and a vote.  It is true to say that many boards of education live on a steady diet of usual business agenda and shy away from controversy.  That said, the usual business is easy stuff and the controversial is the hard.  The hard points a board to the right work it must do.

Lastly, there is nothing inherently wrong with controversy; controversy being a voicing of oppositional points of view.  Good leadership understands that important educational issues will raise differing points of view and it is the work of the board to resolve conflicting points of view for the prosperity of the schools.  Best leadership does not shy away from controversy but tackles it honestly.

What should we know about this thusness?

Controversies abound!

The pandemic gave most school boards a rude awakening to the hard stuff.  As experienced ad nauseam, no school boards were educated or trained to deal with either pandemic education or the controversies of how schools should behave during a pandemic.  Few boards, if any, escaped this public crisis and the argument of battling points of view.   In fact, seated board members resigned, did not run for re-election, and were recalled by their electorate because of pandemic controversies.  The board table was not for the faint of heart when spittle and spite flew from impassioned parents and residents who knew best about public health and public education in an emergency.

Concurrent to the pandemic, other controversies brewed and erupted in school board rooms.  Events of police violence went national.  BLK begat an introspection of systemic racism that begat renewed white nationalism that begat a legislative rewriting of US history that could not be taught in public schools.  Speakers, despite historical fact, are making CRT their argument and the board room their arena.

Quietly then loudly gender identity and the evolving status of children claiming non-conforming gender expression forced the public, like tug-of-rope teams, to dig in their heels regarding who can use which bathrooms and locker rooms in schools.  Parents care more about this issue than their children.  The parent who cries “Protect my daughter!”, claims the media headline while distorting issues of discrimination and fairness. 

There are quiet controversies afoot.  As federal pandemic relief monies expire, school districts everywhere face financial crisis.  Usual school funding is not adequate to sustain the technologies and school staffing wrought by the pandemic.  While inflation diminishes family spending, school boards are proposing increases in local school taxes.  The controversies of cuts to school programs and school closing will clog the school board agenda for years to come.

A second quiet controversy is teacher shortage.  Teacher preparation programs in colleges and universities are dying for lack of enrollment.  As baby boomer teachers retire school boards are hard put to find qualified replacement teachers.  The controversy is this – state legislation is lowering the standards for a teaching license, persons who are not fully prepared to teach children to high standards of learning are being hired to assure a teacher in every classroom, student academic achievement is diving, and someone is to blame.  Hello, school board member!

What is a board to do?

Do these three things to succeed.

  • Grab each controversy by both ears, look it in the face, and deal with it.  Ignoring a controversy builds anger in the partisans and they will damn you for your lack of action.  Pussyfooting around a controversy allows it to grow constituent bases who demand action.  If you cannot provide the action, constituents will find someone who can.  Deal with it!
  • Know that school governance is not a democracy; it is representative government and only board members vote on school decisions.  As provided in law, the public has the right to speak with the school board and the board is obligated to listen.  Do not take anything said personally, even from the most spittle mouthed.  Do not take anything said as expert opinion or fact.  At the end of the meeting everyone else goes home and only board members vote on how the district will respond to a controversy.  Discuss and decide; that is what school boards do.
  • The board speaks for the education of all children in the district not for the happiness of parents, residents, and dissidents.  Self-interest, though denied, is the primary motive of every person who addresses the board – this is fact.  A board member’s only self-interest is the best education for ALL children, with ALL in capital letters.  A parent speaks for her child and her child’s peers.  A teacher for her grade level or those in her class.  A coach for her team.  The business manager for the budget.  Board members must consider ALL children, not just some, while ensuring that each child is provided an equal and equitable education and school experience.  This is the rub.  How to advance the cause of all while protecting the rights of the one.

Being responsible for the education of children is not easy.  If it were, anyone could do it and we don’t want just anyone to be responsible for the education of ALL children.  We want board members who can look inside the issues they confront to find humane, high ground, child-centered resolutions for tough questions.  I would like to think that if one of the two women claiming the child in the Bible’s Solomon “the wise” story had not said to spare the child and thus created a true claim as mother, Solomon would not have cleaved the child in two but adopted it as his own.  Board members consider ALL children your own and be willing take the forsaken child to your home.  This is your school board standard.

Inform Yourself Globally – Act Locally

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“Water, water everywhere.  Nor any drop to drink”, wrote Coleridge in the Rime of the Ancient Mariner.  We feel the mariner’s pain today when we write, “News, news everywhere.  Nor any idea to validate”. 

There was a day when I awaited the postman for my monthly subscriptions to educational journals and periodicals.  Today’s in-box is flooded with both subscribed and unsolicited postings.  As soon as I seek educational info on the web, the all-seeing eye of its hosts provides a torrent of information.  News information cascades in such a flood that it is often difficult to find one uncontradicted idea to pursue, one idea that is can be validated and is worthy of implementing.

Still, it is essential for an educator to read and inquire globally.  Reading with such a wide lens creates an understanding of the scope and depth of issues.  Case in point – the pandemic is worldwide and pandemic effects on education are worldwide.  Its manifestations lead to intriguing and unnerving stories that will affect today’s students and our educational institutions for decades.  Gaps in educational achievement caused by poverty, interrupted access to instruction, and personal social-emotional distress are evident across the nation.  Teaching and learning are changed by the pandemic.  The entire educational enterprise in our pandemic world is changed in ways we cannot yet fathom.

The lingering question is – all indications tell us that pandemic school is and will not be like pre-pandemic school – how does this information affect our local school?

What do we know?

One strand within the flood of news is this – pandemic children returning to school in 2022 are not like pre-pandemic children who left school in 2020.  Strengthen this strand to include teachers.  Students and teachers in 2022 are not like students and teachers in 2020.  Globally, all indicators tell us that this statement is true.

What to do?

This may be a lottery-winning question.  Hundreds of thousands of schools in our nation are on the cusp of this question.

Test the questions above.  Will the 2022 students and teachers in your school be like the 2020 students and teachers you knew?

We are at Robert Frost’s fork in the road.  We either –

  • Like our 2020 school so much that we reinvent that iteration of teaching and learning, student and teacher relationships, and educational services, or,
  • Accept that 2020 is history and 2022 is the present and has more to do with the future than 2020.  We analyze our current, local conditions and create/reform educational services that address the changed nature of students, teachers, and teaching and learning.

Why is this decision necessary?

Globally, the news tells us that pandemic education is caught in a whirlpool.  We are spinning around in a cycle of indecision – make schooling continuous, 2020 and beyond or acknowledge that true changes have occurred.  Test this statement in the evidence of your own reading. 

A local school needs to jump out of the spin cycle and decide its future.  It cannot be both – a 2020 and 2022 school.  Until a local school makes this decision and acts locally, that school and everyone associated with it remains in a quandary of a lack of focus.  Our children, teachers, and community deserve a focus.

Look at the state of education at large then act locally to bring your school out of the pandemic whirlpool.

“When You Know What Is Right, Try To Do It” – A Mantra For Leadership

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“When you know what is right, try to do it” was often used as a sign-off by the late Bruce Williams, longtime radio talk show host.  It is a mantra that should be a constant beacon for guiding school leadership.

School is a complex intersection of competing interests, sometimes harmonious but mostly not.  There are mandates and demands, wants and needs, and a myriad of human personalities.  One may believe that school is a one-way street, a set of rules and regulations without exception, and too often a monolith without compassion – it is none of these.  School is a human organism made up of you and me and the entire school community.  Consider all of a school’s populations converging at the place called campus and any school becomes a Times Square at rush hour every day.  Regardless of the size of the school or community, any decision made at this intersection can be complex and complicated.  Leadership tries to find a “right thing to do” pathway through the congestion that results in a sound decision and action.  Mr. Williams’ words provide a consistent flashlight for leadership.

“How can this be”, a reader may ask.  “School is simple.  It educates children.  The law is straightforward.  Children between the ages of 5 and 180 are to be in school.  The profession is ancient.  Teachers teach and children learn.” 

Gadzooks, were it that easy!

Let’s look at three examples of complex issues.  The annual school calendar.  Student use of cell phones in school.  School mitigation protocols during the pandemic.  Here’s looking to you, Bruce Williams.

Some decisions are very complex, but resolve once leadership makes a decision.  For example, the first day of school.  It is just a date on the calendar, but it causes annual debate because so many are vested in the calendaring of a school year.  In our state, the school start date is after September 1 as a protection of the tourist industry.  However, school sports begin in mid-August, an adjustment that creeps earlier in that month every year in order that spring sports do not extend too far into June after school is dismissed.  School leaders try to explain that school does not begin until the first day of classes, but families, coaches, school maintenance staff, and principals know that school really starts on the first day of fall sports practices in mid-August.  And, the last day of school is not the day classes end in May or June, but after the last scheduled event of the spring sports season.  The calendar is a complex issue with assorted legitimate vested interests and leadership needs to acknowledge and fit all interests into a decision.  It is not easy to decide “what is right” because so many school staff, school families, and local businesses are in conflict on their “right”. 

Oh, and then there is spring break.  Pedagogically the break should be between the third and fourth quarters of the instructional year.  Traditionally the break has been attached to the Good Friday and Easter weekend.  Economically the break wants to be before airlines and resorts and hotels in the south change from winter to summer rates.  School assessments say that the break should not interrupt the annual schedule of statewide assessments and college preparatory ACT and AP examinations.  The sport schedule again speaks up and says the break should be after the winter sports state tournaments.  Complex?  Do you think.

I hear Mr. Williams and respond with “when it comes to the school calendar, comply with state mandates, prioritize school instructional and assessment needs, and school programs”.  Right is creating a calendar that allows the school to achieve its educational purposes.  Criticism of such a calendar will arise, but when school programming is the deciding factor, leadership has done what is right for children in school.

Now, how about something more challenging.  Cell phones in school are today’s chewing gum, only its more complicated than a pack of Wrigley’s.  At face value, school is not opposed to chewing gum or cell phones.  Both are inanimate, do not pose safety risks, and are small enough to be unseen, most of the time.  It is what children do with chewing gum and cell phones that raises them from innocuous to troublesome.  The chewing of gum became attitudinal.  The sound and sight of gum smacking chewers looking at a teacher while smacking away pushed some teachers over the tipping point.  And, the incessant wad of dried gum stuck under desks and table tops is so disgusting.  Hence, the right thing to do:  “no gum chewing in my classroom”.

It is what children do with cell phones, like gum, that is the problem.  Children divert their attention from what is being taught and what they should be learning to what they hear, see, and do on their cell phones.  For some children, it is attention to school work or attention to the cell phone, and it is clear that in most classrooms there can be only one focus for a child’s attention.  Hence, the right thing to do:  “no use of cell phones in my classroom”. 

Once again, it would be nice if doing the right thing were that easy.  Children have learned to text on a phone while the phone is in a pocket of clothing.  Cell phones kept on a lap during class time are, unlike the smacking of gum chewing, out of sight of the teacher.  Worse by far, some children are belligerent enough to not turn off the ringer of the cell phone and will answer a call or text in the middle of class as if they were in their bedroom at home.  This is a straightforward challenge of school authority.

Is the proper decision, “no cell phones in school”.  This does not fly for many parents who want their child always to have access to their parent.  Truth be told, this access is a good thing, even for school purposes.  It does not fly for parents who insist their child is responsible and should not be punished because other children abuse the use of cell phones in school.  It even does not fly for the many lay coaches and activity advisors who are not teachers and use texts and e-mail to communicate during the day with their athletes, actors, and activity kids.

Mr. Williams would wisely add, “… every decision has unforeseen consequences, so be careful about your decisions”.  Is it really a good idea to collect each child’s cell phone at the beginning of every class in order to prevent any possible in-class use of the phone?  Collection and redistribution create their own problems.

Hence, the right thing to do:  “keep your cell phone turned off and put away during class time.  Respond only to the abusers.”  Mr. Williams’ advice tells us that the right thing is to protect teaching and learning time and to assure that the protection does not give rise to new and unanticipated problems.

Last and certainly most, not least, is the issue of pandemic protocols in school.  Remote education, limiting group attendance, and masking being three focal points.  The right thing to do is always to protect the health and safety of children in school.  The question arises, what should school do when some parents support protective school actions and some parents oppose the steps taken to create this protection?  The question is exacerbated when the protocol is “either/or”.  Early in the pandemic, school campus was either open or it is closed, the number of people gathering inside for a school event was either limited or it is not limited, and people in school either wore masks or they do not wear masks.  By their nature, either/or issues immediately create oppositional groups and pandemic protocols are the perfect examples of oppositional issues.

From the school leadership perspective, the right thing to do is to protect the most vulnerable people in the school from a school-based spread of the virus.  The vulnerable include those who are immunocompromised, those over 60 years of age, and those not eligible for vaccination.  Closing the campus does this in a large and complete way.  Limiting the size of indoor gatherings to create social distancing does this arbitrarily.  Requiring everyone to be masked does this in a very personally demanding way.  Each of these three protocols has definite anticipated and unanticipated reverberations. 

The most prominent argument has been “who makes the decision to protect a child – school or the child’s parent?”.  Some parents want complete school protection and other parents want only the protections they choose for their child and they may choose none – no campus closure, no social distancing, and no masks.

Mr. Williams, help!  Interestingly, Mr. Williams also was a prominent financial advisor who was neither a risk seeker nor risk adverse.  “Everything has risk, so what is the worst that is at risk”, he might ask on the air and then listen to the caller enumerate.  “Don’t risk what you cannot afford to lose” was a common follow-up and that is where school leadership enters the issue of pandemic protocols.

The right thing to do is a “no child will die or suffer serious health damage due to a decision I make” decision.  Leadership can risk the loss of parent opinion and even a parent’s removal of their child from the school.  Leadership can risk the anger of people who cannot attend a basketball game.  School can risk the “I hate wearing a mask at school” complaints of children and employees.  Leadership can risk being forced out of their job or recalled by the electorate.  These can be outcomes of leadership doing what they know is the right thing.  But, risking the life and health of children – not on my watch leadership says.  All other arguments shrink to “I want what I want”. 

Determining the right thing to do and then sticking with that decision is like standing in the middle of a busy intersection as traffic passes by.  Unnerving is understatement.  But, conviction in a “do the right thing” decision is a bulwark against those who want leadership to do less.