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Monday, August 27, 2012

The New Commish

Here we go again.  Once more our governor has failed to appoint an educator to the top spot in the Texas public education system.  His last appointment was an attorney.  Now, Governor Perry has named Michael Williams to serve as our new Commissioner of Education.  I am not sad.  I am mad.
“High standards and accountable public schools are essential to our state’s future success, and no two people understand that better than Michael and Lizzette. Together, they will build on the improvements achieved during the tenure of Robert Scott and Todd Webster, and will ensure our children are prepared for the challenges of college and the workplace,” Gov. Perry said.  Williams is a past chairman of the Governor’s Competitiveness Council and Governor’s Clean Coal Technology Council, and past member of the Southern State Energy Board, National Coal Council and Interstate Mining Compact Commission. He is also past chairman of the Texas Juvenile Probation Commission, former honorary chairman of Big Brothers Big Sisters of Texas, and a past board member of the Arlington Chamber of Commerce, Texas Public Policy Foundation and Our Mother of Mercy Catholic School.  Williams received a bachelor’s degree, a master’s degree in Public Administration, and a law degree from the University of Southern California.
So, here is what we know:  He has never worked in a public school and he has been on the board of a private school.  He clearly believes competition is the “cure” for public education and that we should be held more accountable.  One wonders if his stints relative to coal mining make everything else over his head.
I remember a conversation I had with previous Commissioner Robert Scott.  He was an attorney and a former bureaucrat in Washington and TEA.  We informally sat together at a food court, and I asked him if he would support my appointment to the State Bar Association.  Mr. Scott sat up and looked at me and said, “Bob, I didn’t know you were an attorney.”  I said, “I’m not.”  Mr. Scott said, “Then you are not qualified to be on the State Bar.”  “My point exactly,” I said.
To Scott’s undying credit, he spent enough time interacting with us in public education to see the light at the end.  He took a stand against high-stakes testing and had to resign shortly thereafter.
When will elected officials understand that this is a profession that deserves self-governance?  Lawyers govern themselves.  Engineers govern themselves.  Doctors govern themselves.  We are governed by people who could not survive one day in our PreK program, much less teaching English IV AP.  We know public schools, we know what works, and we know kids.  Asking us to do more with fewer resources does not work in the public sector any better than the private sector.  Holding us accountable based on a spurious state-wide high stakes test is professionally unethical.  Those who support moving funds from public schools to charter schools, or even worse, vouchers only undermine public schools more.
Please Governor Perry.  Find an educator!  We desperately need leadership at the state level who is a professional educator we can respect.  We do not need another Perry-Winkle or Wonk.

Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Welcome Back!

August 10, 2012

Dear Edna ISD Employees,

We have had a great summer, though it felt really short!  School year 2012-2013 is right around the corner!  For all of you who had the opportunity to leave Edna and chose to stay I want to say a personal thank you and I can’t wait to see you back.  For those of you who are new to our system we are very glad you are here and look forward to getting to know you and to support you while you begin to feel at home.  For all the rest of you I am equally glad you are here and look forward to seeing you.

We enter the second year of severe budget cuts, but we are doing OK.  The Board, as you know, approved major raises for everyone and I hope you are as pleased as I am.  The Academic Building of the new high school is not quite ready as we hoped, but will be in early September.  All other construction is right on schedule.  The football team, band, volleyball team, spurs, and cheerleaders are already hard at work for an exciting fall.

We will have a welcome reception for our new administrators and returning administrators in new positions on Thursday, August 16th from 4:00 to 6:00 p.m. in the EES cafeteria.  Please drop by and meet these great folks.  New teachers will report to EES library on Friday, August 17th, 8:00 a.m. for a day of new teacher induction.  Teachers and paraprofessionals report to Edna Elementary at 8:00 a.m. on Monday, August 20th for our Welcome Back breakfast!  Further, our wonderful friends at First Baptist have invited us all to lunch at noon on Wednesday, August 22th.  Students return August 27th! 

I hope your summer was all that you wanted it to be.  We are really glad you are here.  Our mission is to ensure a quality education for all.  Each year we must do a better and better job of that!  We can do it thanks to you, and I look forward to seeing all of you on August 20th.

Sincerely,

Bob Wells

Sunday, August 12, 2012

Mental Models for Public Schools: Competition or Collaboration

I am the father of two wonderful human beings (a clearly objective statement):  Son Bill and daughter Lacey.  They are all grown up and living their own lives now, Bill a high school science teacher in the Fort Worth area and Lacey a high school math teacher in the Austin area.  (Lord knows why with a father who is employed as a superintendent and a mother who is employed as an elementary teacher they chose teaching as a profession, but each of them did.)  When they were young, they competed.  They got jealous.  They talked about things being unfair because one of them got something the other didn’t.  Sibling rivalry.  We (wife and I as a team) recognized it and constantly worked to communicate that each of them were loved equally and totally, each of them had value and gifts, and as parents we would never favor one over the other but attempt to do the best we could for both.  We were a family, that bond transcending petty rivalries. 

A family works to help, promote, love and support all members.  If a family member was sick or injured our resources and attention went to that member.  If a family member had success in anything, our celebration was family-wide, we were all proud.  I have loved watching my kids grow up.  By high school and beyond the sibling rivalry disappeared and with their growing maturity they really got it, each of them supporting the other.  When Bill got married, Lacey really celebrated.  When Lacey got engaged, Bill really celebrated.  Families (in the best and healthiest ways) are wonderful mental models to use when thinking of mutually supportive, collaborative groups.  A group of friends works well too.  A church family works well too.  A high performing military unit, a civic organization, a group of neighbors, a team on an assembly line, and on and on, there are multiple examples of groups of humans who work for each other to promote and support each other in ways that exemplify mutually supportive, highly collaborative human groups.  I love being a member of such groups.  The feelings I experience in such groups is so much more positive, more caring, more productive than any other groups of which I am a member.  When I am in need, I turn to such groups.  If another member of the group has needs, I am there to help and support.  In my mind, these groups are the highest evolved human organizations we have.

So, what about public schools?  Should teachers compete or collaborate?  Should we reward some teachers for higher performance or should we promote teams of teachers working together for the best results?  What about schools?  Should we reward campuses for higher performance or should we promote a school-wide team that not only works together for higher performance, but also works with other schools in the system to help them?  What about school districts?  Should we promote competition and reward for one district performing better than another, or should we promote a mental model of public schools that empowers collaboration among and between school systems for every increasing success with kids?  Should we think of public schools using the model of Ford vs. Toyota, or think of schools using the model of the family and the church?

As I look at the current reform models for public education it appears to me that we have two distinctive philosophical camps.  One promotes competition, one promotes collaboration.  One would increase the number of charter schools so that public schools must compete with other tax supported schools.  One promotes rewarding some schools and punishing others.  One promotes allowing parents to move kids from one school to another and take their tax dollars with them (vouchers) to promote competition.  One promotes ever increasing reliance on standardized testing to measure the merits of the classroom, school and district so that schools may be ranked, so that it can be determined who wins the school super bowl.  In short, one promotes classroom, school and school district competition.  This model of reform was not developed by school folks.  It was developed by and superimposed by private sector thinking.  It is, in my opinion, seriously intellectually flawed.  It is moving us in directions that do not help kids.  It is the application of the wrong mental model to the wrong organization.  It is immoral.

Why?  Because the taxes collected to teach kids are universally collected and should be spent to support a universal support for student success, however we measure such success.  Amazing to me is that anyone would ever promote competition between schools and systems, especially using universally collected tax dollars.  That model sets schools to compete for money from a common pot.  This is not Ford vs. Toyota competing for consumer dollars from individuals.  This is schools competing with each other for money from the common pot.  Every dollar that goes to charter schools takes universally collected tax dollars away from public schools.  The public still pays the same amount, but some school district somewhere is losing money and kids so that a so called “competitor” for public schools gets money.  That philosophy neither helps the public nor the schools.   It helps promote the wrong mental model.

If I am a teacher and I find a way to help kids learn I should be motivated as part of the family of teachers to share that strategy.  If I am a principal and I find a way to promote student success on my campus I should be motivated as part of the family of public schools to share that strategy with other schools.  If I am a superintendent (well, OK, I am today) and I find a way to help promote student success that works in my district I should be motivated to share that strategy with other districts so that their students do well too.  That includes personnel.  If I have a truly gifted teacher, a truly gifted principal, a truly gifted central office administrator who has found ways to help promote student success and highly performing collaborative teams, I should be willing to share that person with others.  Public education is for all kids.  Any effort to encourage teachers, principals or superintendents to withhold information from other classrooms, schools or districts should be abolished.  That hurts kids.  All the “reforms” push us toward competition, not collaboration.  In my value structure, that’s immoral, akin to a doctor discovering a cure for something and refusing to share it with others in the medical profession for the sake of self gain.  Such thinking is worse, because the gain is from the common pot, not from individual consumer choice.

We spent a lot of time last year working on the components of what we called “Active Engagement” or “Ride for the Brand.”  It is what we believe are the key elements of being a professional in EISD.  We narrowed the vast array of attributes down to six.  One of them is “We are team oriented.”  That is crucial; it implies collaboration, not competition.

At the state level and in each district, superintendents have spent a lot of time over the last few years working on a common vision for public schools as an alternative to the “reform” movement.  This document, entitled “Creating a New Vision for Public Education in Texas” can be found at http://www.tasanet.org/sites/tasa/files/visioning/workinprogress.pdf.  It is a response to the reform movement, a statement of what professional educators would envision for public schools in Texas.  It is mostly very good, but in my mind misses the crucial point, fails to identify the mental model we should use for public schools.  It does say in the very last article, “Article V: Organizational Transformation, Supporting Premises, letter Vm: We hold that: Operating and social systems exist in all organizations including schools.  Transforming these systems is the only way to transform schools into the type of organization needed.”  This is as close as the new vision comes to addressing mental models for schools, and stops woefully short of simply saying schools should collaborate, not compete.  Until we in the profession agree and act in a collaborative way rather than a competitive way, we are failing our kids and everyone else’s kids too. 

Do not get me wrong, there are times and a places for schools and kids to compete.  Learning how to handle the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat in a mature way is an essential skill.  All UIL competition is set up for competition.  (Interesting, though, that in this most competitive subset of public education that the rules for competition are developed collaboratively for the sake of leveling the playing field and ensuring that no school has an advantage.)  But competition is a lower level skill, not a highly evolved human skill.  Learning to collaborate is upper level stuff.  We do not have to learn to compete, animals in the jungle do that, young children do that, even many adults have adopted the competitive model for their way of viewing the world.  Some of these adults see the world as a racial competition.  Some as gender competition.  Some as religious competition.  Some as income and status competition.  So be it.  I suspect for each of these adults when they are stressed, or pressed, or hurt, or in need of support, they do not turn to a competitive group, they turn to a collaborative group to get through the pain and thereby reveal that the groups they value most are not competitive.  And I wonder why they promote the notion that we in public education should all compete.

If I can help a fellow superintendent or a fellow school system I will do so, and have.  If principals can help each other, they should.  If teachers can help each other they should.  And if I can work to promote the entire public education in this state I will do so.  Any effort by the legislature or by fellow educators to promote the notion that one should win and the others lose I will oppose and perceive it to be immoral.  Not so that I can win.  So that kids can win.  That is our mission and I am convinced that is the appropriate and moral mental model for public education.