Tag Archives: ethos

Ethosing Through The Pandemic

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Walk into any school.  Read the signs on the door and the protocols for entering the school.  Look around, especially at the walls for signs of school life.  Listen to the sounds; pay attention to whose voices you hear.  Check the housekeeping of the hallways and stairways and restrooms.  Consider who greets you and understand the meaning of the first words spoken.  Smell the air.  The air, you wonder?  Check for the telltale smells of integrity or mendacity.  Tennessee Williams wrote that they have an odor we can detect.  These are all signs of the ethos of the school; those distinguishing signs of the character of a school.  All schools have it – ethos.

Then comes the reality; the pandemic has changed schooling in countless ways.  Each pandemic challenge has pinged against the school ethos bouncing off, leaving dents, and some gashes.  There is nothing in public education that has been easy during the pandemic.  Arguments about in-school versus at-home learning, protecting teachers and school staff from infection, effects on student learning, effects on student social and emotional well-being, stress of schooling at home on families, effects of closed campuses on local economics – all are made in the context of school ethos.  How have a school’s values and standards stood in the pandemic when critical issues arise?  “What are we to do?”, is the constant bell ringing question.  The school’s ethos tells us.  Your ethos should be telling you, “Pay attention to me”.

The nifty thing about a school ethos is that it is a resolute clearinghouse for sorting what is important.  A clear ethos – think of school vision, mission, values, goals, standards, and traditions wrapped up in a statement of “we stand for …” – helps to define a school’s pandemic plan.  It is impossible to have a clear ethos and waffle on questions like continuing education for all children, health and safety for everyone in the school, inclusion of students, communications with all school constituents, and fiscal responsibility and resource management.  It also is possible lose connection to your ethos and make decisions that drift you away from core beliefs.

That said, what part of your school ethos still stands?  What parts have been compromised?  What parts have been reshaped?  As we enter a second year of pandemic education, what does your ethos value?

How this plays out in real time is fairly easy to observe in local schools.  For example, a campus that was opened to in-person teaching and learning reflects a different set of value statements than a campus that remains closed to in-person school life.  No matter the explanation or rationale, there are real and unarguable differences between an open and a closed campus; why they are open or closed.  For example, a school where teachers taught and adhered to their school board approved curriculum reflects a different set of value statements that a school that substituted commercial curriculum and units of instruction.  For example, a school in which teachers made constant, daily personal connections with every at-home learner displayed a value statement different from a school that taught to students as at-home screens.

Daily practices and routines in the pandemic are based upon school policies that are based upon school values.  These values are reflected in the

  • stories the school tells about its provision of continuing education in the pandemic.  Is there connection between the ethos and the stories being created?  Is the ethos driving the pandemic plan and its stories or are the stories of a time apart from the ethos?
  • data the school collects to illustrate student achievement and growth.  Is ethos the foundation for data collection or is the data being collected without consideration of the ethos?  Is this usual school data that illustrates the ethos over time or stand-alone data? 
  • relationships between the school and its families that are evolving as a result of a school’s  pandemic education.  Is a pandemic plan based on the school ethos binding school families to the pandemic plan?  To what extent have self-interests separated from the ethos presented themselves?  Is the school family still intact?
  • perspectives of students about their current education and educational future.  Students are at the heart to the ethos; are they at the heart of the pandemic plan?  How do the success of their educational experience during the pandemic?  To what extent has the ethos helped to make their education pandemic-proof?
  • breadth of goodwill expressed by the community toward the school as a result of pandemic programming.  A community that supported a pre-pandemic ethos should be able to identify how the ethos shaped the school’s pandemic plan.  What do the community’s stories say about this?

There will be a post-pandemic time.  The ethos will be the compass that helps school leaders assure the post-pandemic school is on the school’s “right” educational track.  A strong school ethos will have been the anchor keeping a school connected to “what it stands for” during times of extreme crisis. 

When Everything Is An Equal Priority, Nothing Is A Priority

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We are the authors of our own slide into mediocrity. We want all our children in all their school programs to be successful – perhaps, equally successful. To make this happen, we give every program all the funding, staffing, supplies and equipment, time and commitment requested to assure that the school board and administration are 100% supportive of everything our students do. Our unwritten mantra is “We will not hold back a dollar if that dollar is the difference between a student having or not having the educational experience he or she wants.” We are providers of educational experience. To paraphrase an older Ford Motors motto, “We will Provide” became our Job #1. We suborned Ford’s statement “Quality is job #1” and, as a result, lost our quality and like any statistic knows it will, we drifted toward the averageness of public education.

Marshall Field, founder of the Chicago department of the same name, created a store-customer ethos based upon this statement. “Give the Lady what she wants.” A happy customer is a return customer. Our school board and administration again paraphrased. “Give students and parents what they want.” Do not argue or cause a school board meeting riot, again.

Our unswerving commitment to providing blinded us to our looking at the qualitative results of the provision. We provided. Voila! Everyone should be happy. The outcomes, however, are not what we expected and we are no longer happy.

Once known around our state as schools of educational excellence, we slipped toward an average benchmarked by an increasing of children whose annual learning achievement is categorized as basic or below basic. Like too many schools in our state, the majority of our children now are not proficient in reading and math. If you prefer reference to grade level – more than half of our children are below grade level in reading and math. We no longer are the top performing schools in our county. Parent conversation about open enrolling to other schools increased, and were those schools not 40 to 65 miles further away for self-transporting parents, more families would have migrated.

Interestingly, all was not totally lost. Our AP-level children continued to take AP courses and AP exams and their success maintained some school reputational luster. But, 90% of the school district’s children are not enrolled in AP classes. And, although the school’s One Act performers have been to the state competition fourteen years in a row with a boatload of honors, most school programs struggle to reach a .500 season.

Our dilemma is this. When everything is of equal importance and requires undebated organizational support, the importance of everything makes nothing important. The graph of priorities is a flat line at the top of the page. When everyone understands that no programs will ever be diminished or eliminated, the discerning edge of organizational scrutiny and evaluation evaporates. And, the overwhelmingness of everything being important flattens teacher, coach, director and advisor efforts to make a difference.

We lost our ethos, that essential, positive spirit within our school that is our unifying focus. “Provision is Job #1” is not a rallying cry.

The loss of school ethos is debilitating. Years ago, the school board’s charge to school leadership was “We provide a private school education in a public school setting.” The hallmark of our private school education was excellence in academics surrounded by extensive arts, activities and athletic opportunities for all all children. That charge was qualitative. A private school education meant that high quality teaching would cause all children to demonstrate high quality learning. Because funding was available, funding would be used judiciously to support high quality teaching, directing, advising, and coaching. And, because we are small schools, we were expected to monitor and adjust annually to ensure we always were pointed toward quality achievements.

The core of our charge was academic success supported by success in the arts, activities and athletics. Our ethos was that quality teaching caused quality learning. Job #1 was academic success.

We need to reclaim our ethos.