Multi Missions

As I review the issues that always hit my desk at the beginning of each year I revisit the early work of Dr. Larry Lezotte in the Effective Schools Network for patience, perseverance and insight.  Larry does really great thinking.  Though best known for his articulation of the Correlates of Effective Schools, I find solace in his thoughts regarding the competing missions of public schools.  This solace is needed even more now than when I first read it as decision making for public schools has pretty well been taken out of local hands and has matriculated to the state and federal governments.  Further, schools are asked more and more to solve societal problems in ways that in fact are counter-intuitive to our mission, or missions.  (And, because some of my dear friends at the new high school are going home and sticking pins in their Bob Wells dolls, I figured I had better at least ground my most recent decisions in sound theory.)

Schools are highly complex social institutions.  Simple monitoring of the children of our community on a daily basis, feeding them, transporting them, and ensuring their safety is a major logistical accomplishment.  Add to that all the state and federal standards and mandates, the need for ensuring an education across a variety of curricula and co-curricular courses, and winning football games moves our role so far beyond mere child supervision and fully into the role of child change agents.  We have a wide array of college educated, certified professional employees with expertise within the confines of their room and assignment.  And we have a wide variety of parental expectations for individual students.  This interaction among adults on behalf of kids under the rubric of compliance makes our system highly complex.  Lezotte did an insightful job of outlining these competing missions of public schools, herein shared a la Bob.

The custodial mission outlines our responsibility for the safety, well-being, and monitoring of all students in EISD.  We have a bunch of policies to ensure this safety including requiring adults to be on duty at buses and doorways, requiring parents to check their kids out so we know who leaves with whom, etc., etc.  Also included in this mission are our discipline policies and procedures, including dress code and closed campus, all designed to increase our ability to know where our students are and what they are doing.  The federal and state governments have added tremendously to this mission in terms of student fitness, vaccinations, obesity, anti-bullying, date violence, teen pregnancy, etc.  All these requirements and responsibilities accrue to the custodial mission.

The sort and select mission regards all our programs where kids are determined to be in the program or out of the program.  In other words, the programs that sort then select kids.  These programs include GT, Special Education, Athletics, Cheerleading, Honor Society, AP, etc., etc.  For each of these programs the rules are extensive because sometimes parents challenge the selection process and we must be able to clearly define why a student was selected “in” or “out.”  Many parents value the sort and select programs more than the core programs because they are by their very nature sorted and either a source of pride or stigma.

The adult control, safety and convenience mission involves our employees.  We must keep our employees safe and provide an environment where they are most likely to be successful.  We need to pay a fair wage and provide appropriate benefits.  We need good facilities and good resources.  We have come a long way in this area, but the convenience mission and control mission always erupt.  Sadly, each teacher does not have his or her own office and secretary and kitchenette and phone.  We just cannot afford it.  We do bend over backwards to provide opportunities for teachers and others to have input in decision making.  Our district and campus teams meet regularly, and if there is a specific issue we will meet with those involved.  Bottom line, we cannot ignore this mission either.

The teaching for learning for all mission is what most folks outside our profession think we are all about.  This is the mission that consumes most of our time, resources and focus.  We want every kid to be academically successful.  We work hard at that.  We have tutorials and tiers and progress reports and parent portals and report cards and teacher conferences and textbooks and computers and CSCOPE and hours and hours of teacher preparation and staff development to make this happen.  We will never be content if a student fails.  This is our main mission as far as I’m concerned.  It’s why I am in this business; it is the motivation to ensure a quality education for all.

But these missions compete.  They compete for resources including time.  We could provide higher salaries and more perks for adults if we had fewer of them.  But that would not help us accomplish our main mission.  We could have the best athletic equipment, more coaches than anybody and fancy Greyhound buses for our athletes, but that would take resources from our instructional mission.  We could hire police officers, and hire security guards to keep our kids safer, but that would take resources from our instructional mission.  It is a balancing act.  How can we ensure a quality core curriculum and offer GT, athletics, vocational education, etc., and still ensure that we are competitive when it comes to staffing and focused when it comes to instruction?  That is a leadership decision.

Most of the issues that hit my desk at the beginning of the year are not around the teaching for learning for all mission.  They are around the sort and select mission or the adult convenience mission.  That’s the way it is and likely will be.  I think it is very important for our parents, staff and kids to know that we attend to all our missions, but I for one will consistently land on the instructional mission as our main mission.