Tag Archives: integrity

Two Rules: Administer the Policy and Do What Is Right for Children

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“Rocks in the pocket” eventually cause most school administrators to leave their current position, wrote Jerry Patterson in The Anguish of Leadership (2000). Rocks are negative baggage. They are the unfavorable stories attached to a person’s reputation by those who are dissatisfied with the direction of leadership or did not get their way on an issue. They are the residue of scorn accrued by leaders who make leadership decisions that cause some to smile and others to frown. The weight of rocks, like the chains forged in life by Marley in Dickens’ Christmas Carol, eventually cause career mortality, because their accumulated weight drowns their owner in the political waters of public education.

It is impossible to be an active school leader and not pick up some rocks along the way. The simplest of decisions, such as keeping children indoors for recess on a rainy day, will cause someone to say “it was not raining that hard, “they could have gone outside” and that someone deposits a pebble in the principal’s pocket. On the other hand, sending all children out in a rainstorm would cause many people to drop a lot of pebbles in the principal’s pocket with the aggregated weight of a hefty rock.

Some pebbles and rocks are avoidable and may even be returned to sender if a principal follows two rules of the leadership road: execute the policy and do what is right for children.

“Here, fill this pocket with rocks,” is what a principal says when he tries to make children or parents or community members happy by “customizing” school rules or school board policy. Softening the consequences prescribed by policy may be a principal’s initial thought when looking into the sad face of a child alleged with a school rule infraction. “Do something to appease this sad child,” a principal’s inner voice says. Bending the rule “just a bit” may seem okay when confronted with a very supportive parent who understands the rules, but ekes out an “is that really necessary in this case.” “Just a bit” is the length or rope that that winds up being a noose. Letting something slide is the same as standing watch on quick sand; there are no secrets in schools and very quickly others expect the “bent rule” or the “let it go this time” to be the new status quo on school policies and rules. Within a few years, a principal’s pockets are so heavy with rocks that this principal begins to avoid making decisions, especially critical decisions. “How can I be blamed, if I don’t make the decision?” Decision avoidance doesn’t bring rocks; it brings boulders.

The easiest way to remain a “pebbles only” school leader is to be clear about your duty. You are hired to maintain an orderly and positive learning and teaching environment by doing the work assigned by your employer, the School Board. Number one on the job description for most principals is “administer Board policies and school rules” or a variation of that mandate.

Executing policy is not an act of compliance that is blind to the moment or the people involved. Being an educator first, a principal has perfect teachable moments to explain the rationale for a rule or the background to a policy. When a school board reviews and revises policy frequently in order to craft appropriate organizational and behavioral guidelines, policies have a context that should be explained and can be taught. As an enforcer of policy, a principal by design is a player in the writing of policy as well as a reviewer and reviser of policy. There should be very few school policies of which a principal can say “I was unaware of…” or “… am unfamiliar with this rule.” An active principal reads and studies and understands school policies and rules and purposefully talks with district leadership and the school board when policies and rules seem out of date or ineffective in guiding student, parent and community decisions. Policies and rules are living statements in a school and a principal is responsible for the quality of their life.

To enforce a rule is to provide clarity between acceptable and unacceptable behavior. It is personally impersonal work. The resulting clarity of what the school expects and accepts can create a very positive and productive margin within which children and adults can use policy and rules for their individual and group success. At the same time, the margin allows these same school people to be creative in “pushing the envelope” of policies or rules to open new possibilities and opportunities. Principals who understand policies and rules and can help students and adults to explore new areas of behavior and school culture without falling into conflict with the school’s need for orderliness. Enforcing rules can be very liberating when a leader understands their intentions and goals. A leader who does this begins to unload rocks from his pockets, because he engenders respect as a leader rather than a “by the rules man.” School principalship, however, begins and ends with administering policy with integrity.

The second rule of the road is to always find the high ground of “doing what is right” for children. Sounds easy and sounds right, eh! But, what do you do when “what is right” for children is not shared by teachers and staff, or community adults, or parents? Seems odd that this contradiction might exist, but it rises all the time. The special interests of specific groups of people often are in conflict and the core of each conflict is control. Whose opinion will control the behavior of others? What students wear, how they behave in school, what they can say and do, how they use their time, what they eat and where they eat it, when they go to the bathroom – the list is endless – all are control issues. Some may say that decisions on these issues have safety and organizational implications or are based on “common sense.” Whose common sense will control the issue?

In almost all of these issues, the principal must be the spokesperson for children. Because children are not formally at the table for a discussion and decision of the issues that involve them, their opinions are given short shrift. Enter the principal! The principal’s high ground position must be “I will speak for what is right for the children in my school.” This white knight role does not mean the principal should uphold nonsensical child-based positions. Some things children want to wear, do, say and have in their school will go beyond every adult’s common sense. Nonsensical as they often be, children still need to be represented at the adult’s table and that representative person must be the principal. There is a sincere sense of pride and purpose when a principal self-acknowledges that “this decision is right for children” and that is what really matters.

A principal who conscientiously administers Board policies and school rules and takes the high ground of doing what is right for children is a school leader who will not be drowned by the weight of rocks in the pockets.

Building New Faculties

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If a faculty of teachers is the heart of any school, then high quality instruction by caring teachers is the end game of faculty-building.

Faculty building is the recruitment, hiring, sustenance and bonding of an array of expert teachers into a synergistic group whose total professional work is a harmonious teaching environment that causes all children to learn.

Today we are in faculty crisis. Our school districts are bottoming out in their ability to attract and retain end game teachers. A generally recognized low compensation and low appreciation for teachers and increasing governmental abandonment of traditional public schools are taking a toll. As the career teachers of the Baby Boom generation retire, how will we fill their roles with new end game teachers? And, as nearly fifty percent of seated teachers leave the profession before the end of their fifth year, the capacity of school districts to build new faculties is more and more important.

http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/10/why-do-teachers-quit/280699/

Certainly, we cannot anticipate a national or even state-led strategy to build our next school faculties. While the US Department of Ed champions the improvement of teaching across the nation, there is little political appetite for a new federally-led initiative. The banner of conservative politics safeguards public education to state and local control. Yet, states are poorly able today to lead a resurgence in faculty-building. Too many governors balance annual budgets by squeezing their allocations for education and too many state politicians have embraced school choice as a strategy for building their political base. Reinvesting by the statehouse in faculty building in public schools would contradict their current alliances. Hence, if a new faculty is to be generated, it will be up to local school districts one school at a time.

The recipe for building a new faculty begins with a school governance commitment to do what it takes to recruit, hire, sustain and bind a diverse set of teachers into a faculty. “What it takes” requires the dedication of money for salaries up front, money for salaries and benefits going forward, and money for professional support. It is ludicrous to believe that a new faculty can be generated without new investment. This is why. When undergraduates in colleges and universities consider their potential careers and do a side-by-side analysis of what life in each career would be like, in growing numbers they reject education. They look at the low entry level compensation and the low rate of salary growth. “A night manager’s starting salary at a fast food restaurant was 20% higher than mine.”

http://blog.octanner.com/appreciation-2/why-teachers-and-nurses-are-among-the-least-appreciated-jobs

Low starting salaries are followed by pay schedules of miniscule annual increases and, depending upon the state’s revenue collections, frequent years of frozen wages. As teachers consider the totality of a career, they check the status of teacher retirement funds and find too many state pension plans going bankrupt. Compensation is a problem for young teachers who have a chance to change career pathways before they lock in with a family and mortgage; especially talented teachers who will be successful in almost any other career they choose.

This is why there must be a new investment in faculty building. Entry level salaries must be raised and the progression from entry level to the district’s highest salary level compacted from 15+ years to six or seven. After six years, all teachers should have reached a comparative level of instructional quality, student-centered expertise and professional integrity. If they haven’t, they don’t belong in the new faculty.

Parallel to compensation, starting teachers consider the public perception of teaching and, as a national generalization, find teachers to be held in modest to low esteem. “Teachers are female, familiar, ubiquitous, and it is difficult to quantify their value.” What a terrible generalization, but generalizations are the bane of teachers.

https://www.quora.com/Why-are-teachers-not-respected-in-American-culture

The list of indistinguishing characteristics goes on. Seasonal work. Short-term relationships with students and most families. Too many reports in the press about the bad acts of teachers. A “do gooder’s” profession. Bad experiences with a teacher are all you hear from peers. And, teachers are too rule orienting and conforming. At the end of the day, these generalizations are fully inaccurate of the vast majority of teachers, but in our society singular stories get generalized and spread broadly. Consider the daily news and the ratio of good stories about teachers to bad stories. Bad stories make the news. And such generalizations beget a lack of appreciation for teachers.

Gladly, even with low compensation and low appreciation, there are bright and talented individuals who still want to be teachers. However, they are counted as individuals when the majority of their bright and talented classmates choose other career paths.

The second ingredient in faculty building is creating an environment of professional integrity. In a 2014 Gallup Poll, teachers ranked last among 12 professional groups in agreeing that their opinion at work matters.

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0823-rizga-mission-high-teacher-retention-20150823-story.html

A teacher’s being told what to do did not start with No Child Left Behind and the standards movement, but these two phenomenon left all other reasons in the dust. NCLB ushered in a flood tide of “to do” mandates that have not yet left the house. Every teacher needed to submit their credentials to prove they were “high quality” and began to attend staff meeting after staff meeting to understand the meaning of Adequate Yearly Progress and AMOs .

http://eddataexpress.ed.gov/definitions.cfm

Schools everywhere charted the percentage of students attaining proficiency or better on statewide reading and math assessments and schools that did not make the mark quickly implemented new curricula and teaching models in order to make the mark on the subsequent year. Teachers were manipulatives just like paper and pencils. Data overwhelmed opinion.

Fast behind AYP came the need for more rigorous state academic standards and once again teacher input was not sought. State legislatures adopted appropriately rigorous academic standards in order to comply with federal fund-ladened mandates. And, once again teachers met in large rooms to be told what they would teach, how they would teach it, and how their job stability hinged on their students’ achievement.

http://www.corestandards.org/assets/WI_Adoption_CCS_2_June_2010_dpinr2010_75.pdf

The remedy will begin with a new era of professional integrity between school district leadership and the teaching faculty. A high level of professional integrity understands, accepts and benefits from a degree of tension. Every day is not one of sunshine and roses. Good arguments are healthy when they are undertaken by people who respect and trust each other. And, good arguments will improve organizational health and vitality. Arguments turn bad when they are not undertaken with respect and trust, but with animosity.

These are synonyms for making an argument: advance, allege, argue, assert, challenge, claim, confute, contend, contest, debate, disagree, dispute, elucidate, emphasize, enunciate, establish, explain, expostulate, express, oppose. They all are verbs that apply to an environment in which everyone cares about what their colleagues think and believe is best. These could be symptomatic of the professionalism that teachers want and deserve – the expectation that their well-argued opinions matter.

http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/make+an+argument

The third ingredient for building a new faculty is sustenance. Sustaining a new faculty is the expectation/requirement that every teacher will engage in professional learning. This is not the district’s usual presentation of professional development necessary for organizational fidelity. The district has the need and obligation to inculcate its personnel with procedural matters. Certainly, school safety and security today require every teacher’s attention. This is organizational development not professional learning. Professional learning feeds a teacher’s personal need for advanced education. It is teacher-centric in that a teacher decides and engages in studies that advance their professional talent. “Idiocentricity” is what makes professional learning an essential part of life in a new faculty.

http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/teaching_now/2016/03/best-deliverer-of-PD-may-be-teachers-but.html?intc=es

Some states have implemented personalized professional development strategies for teachers. Wisconsin’s PDP is an example, although it was implemented as a substitution for a faulted PD system of credits and units required for licensure renewal. Take away the relationship to license renewal and a PDP assumes the purpose of professional sustenance

http://dpi.wi.gov/tepdl/pdp

The last component of a new faculty is inspired principal leadership. An inspired principal is an effective instructional leader, a superb role model for children, an efficient administrative manager plus one. That “one” is the ability to bring out the “best and brightest” qualities of each and every member of the new faculty. Sometimes leading a large group of talented people is best served by underleading. Throw in examples of collegiality, participatory leadership, community, and “fun” and a principal begins to look inspired. When a faculty has an inspirational leader for a principal, often they find that appreciation, integrity, and sustenance become “just the way the new faculty is at our school.”

The Common Core Tests: A Test of Adult Integrity

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The Common Core challenge this year is not for children taking the new academic tests aligned with the Core but for parents and teachers and politicians who must consider what the “re-centered” test scores say about students and education in the United States. Are the adults in our nation up to the task of academic honesty or will they buckle under and blame the Core and its tests should student achievement not meet their preconceptions? Implementing and living with the Common Core really is a test of adult integrity in the United States.

Why is there an onus on adults to understand and honestly respond to the anticipated angst that will rise when student scores on the Core tests are made public? Simply put, the lowered test scores are what honest adults should have expected when education standards and expectations in this country were adjusted to improve the competitive achievement of our children with their international peers. The honest appraisal is that a score of proficient on a traditional academic test in the United States was not equal to a proficient score on an international test. The academic performances of many children will not match the image that uninformed adults have of our school children. What will the adult response be? Will it be Horatio Alger redux – commitment to future success through hard work – or will it be a damning of the new data with an homage to Lake Woebegone?

Let’s examine the world of educational achievement that led to the Common Core State Standards. “For years, the academic progress of our nation’s students has been stagnant, and we have lost ground to our international peers. Particularly in subjects such as math, college remediation rates have been high. One root cause has been an uneven patchwork of academic standards that vary from state to state and do not agree on what students should know and be able to do at each grade level.

Recognizing the value and need for consistent learning goals across states, in 2009 the state school chiefs and governors that comprise CCSSO and the NGA Center coordinated a state-led effort to develop the Common Core State Standards. Designed through collaboration among teachers, school chiefs, administrators, and other experts, the standards provide a clear and consistent framework for educators.” These were the words and actions of the collective governors and state school superintendents of our nation. And, forty-three states concurred by adopting the Core as their new state standards.

http://www.corestandards.org/about-the-standards/

What were the governors and state school superintendents thinking? Actually, they did nothing more than listen to and respond to the roused finger pointing of American business interests and politicians. The United States lost the historic economic advantage it had held over the rest of the world due to the success of public education in this country. Education in the US was universal and focused upon college or the industrial skills of pre-World War Two. Education in the rest of the world was for privileged children only. When European and Asian leaders observed the connection of a rigorous education system to economic growth, they quickly reformed their national school systems and their academic performances climbed above the academic achievements of the United States which languished with a 1950s educational system.

Specifically, what was this data? “Among the 34 OECD countries, the United States performed below average in mathematics in 2012 and is ranked 27th (this is the best estimate, although the rank could be between 23 and 29 due to sampling and measurement error). Performance in reading and science are both close to the OECD average. The United States ranks 17 in reading, (range of ranks: 14 to 20) and 20 in science (range of ranks: 17 to 25). There has been no significant change in these performances over time.

Just over one-quarter (26%) of 15-year-olds in the United States do not reach the PISA baseline Level 2 of mathematics proficiency, at which level students begin to demonstrate the skills that will enable them to participate effectively and productively in life. This percentage is higher than the OECD average of 23% and has remained unchanged since 2003. By contrast, in Hong Kong-China, Korea, Shanghai-China and Singapore, 10% of students or fewer are poor performers in mathematics.

While the U.S. spends more per student than most countries, this does not translate into better performance. For example, the Slovak Republic, which spends around USD 53 000 per student, performs at the same level as the United States, which spends over USD 115 000 per student.

The analysis suggests that a successful implementation of the Common Core Standards would yield significant performance gains also in PISA. The prominence of modeling in U.S. high school standards has already influenced developers of large-scale assessments in the United States. If more students work on more and better modeling tasks than they do today, then one could reasonably expect PISA performance to improve.”

http://www.oecd.org/unitedstates/PISA-2012-results-US.pdf

So, how should the use of Core-aligned tests be viewed by honest adults? Adults need to understand the changes in academic expectations that require a more rigorous test. And, adults need to be honest in understanding that when children are given a more rigorous test, their initial achievement results will not resemble their results on the former, less rigorous tests. Adults accustomed to inflated pre-Core test results will be dismayed with their children’s performances on the new tests. This happens whenever large scale tests are “re-centered”. It is similar to the problem that the College Board faced with the national results on the SAT in 1995.

“The primary problem with the pre-1995 scale is that test scores are still linked to the 1941 and 1942 reference groups of students, and the test-taking population changed significantly in the decades after World War II.”

In the post-World War years, the annual average on the SAT slowly crept higher and higher. This was not the result of changes in educational quality but rather the result of using outdated reference points in determining test scores. The SAT suffered from score inflation or scores that did not clearly represent academic performance. As a result, the College Board re-centered its testing reference points in 1995. This resulted in a new scoring system that was different than the 1995 system.

http://www.erikthered.com/tutor/sat-act-history.html

In 2015 we face another re-centering event. The systems of labeling educational performance will change and scores before 2015 that were in the mid to lower ranges of proficiency will no longer be proficient. The same will be true of scores in the advanced range. Or to say it differently, children who were considered academically proficient or advanced before 2015 may not be academically proficient or advanced in 2015 and beyond.

How do we know this? Two states already have experienced re-centering. “In New York and Kentucky, two states that adopted Common Core tests early, the percentage of students considered proficient in reading and math plummeted. In New York, about two-thirds of students were proficient on both on pre-Common Core tests; after the new tests were introduced, fewer than one-third were considered proficient.

Results in Kentucky were similar. And the same thing is likely to happen nationally. Seventeen states worked together on a new standardized test as part of a coalition called Smarter Balanced. In November, Smarter Balanced predicted that less than half of students will be considered proficient in reading and math this year.

http://www.vox.com/2015/1/1/7477495/common-core-2015

What should we expect when the 2015 scores on Core-aligned tests are released? It is too easy to anticipate the response of those without integrity. They will complain that the fault is in the Core and the tests. The tests are too hard. They are not the tests we want for our children. They do not represent education in our state or community.

However, unless our states and communities have seceded from the United States or the world, the 2015 test scores will clearly represent a more honest appraisal of local, state and national academic performance than the pre-2015 scores. And, the 2015 scores will point to the areas of improvement that will be necessary if the adults of our nation really want their children to be academically competitive internationally.

This also has historic precedents. When the Russians launched their Sputnik in 1957, leaders in the United States were dismayed at how the Soviet Union had beaten this country into space. “American concerns that they had fallen behind the Soviet Union in the race to space led quickly to a push by legislators and educators for greater emphasis on mathematics and the physical sciences in American schools. The United States’ National Defense Education Act of 1958 increased funding for these goals from childhood education through the post-graduate level.

U.S. citizens feared that schools in the USSR were superior to American schools, and Congress reacted by adding the act to take US schools up to speed.

In 1940 about one-half million Americans attended college, which was about 15 percent of their age group. By 1960, however, college enrollments had expanded to 3.6 million. By 1970, 7.5 million students were attending colleges in the U.S., or 40 percent of college-age youths.”

http://www.ask.com/wiki/National_Defense_Education_Act?qsrc=3044

Historically, education systems in the United States have responded to national challenges with improved results. One response to the challenges posed when we again re-center education in the United States is to understand the dynamics of change and allow schools, teachers and students to successfully adjust to new academic standards and tests. This is the Horatio Alger tradition, a story of success that the people of the United States have lived over and over again.

Of course, there is another recourse. We can ignore the disconnection between what adults want from their schools and what they are willing to do to achieve what they want. We can warm ourselves with the words we love to say and hear. Thank you, Mr. Keillor, and I paraphrase:

“That’s the way it is in these United States where all women are strong, all men are good looking and all children are above average.”