People Are All We Have

School is out for summer.  Kids and instructional staff have about 10 weeks to not work, to not come to school.  As I think about the kids we teach and the staff who teaches them and the administrators, superintendents, and school boards that serve them it strikes me that the only people available for all these positions and roles are people.  We are stuck with people.

And none of them are perfect.  We are all flawed.  We are all precious.  We are all different.  So how shall we judge the performance of human beings in all of these roles?  Is it OK to be flawed?  Is it OK to err?  Is it OK to be different?  Is there such a thing as a poor human being?

For our youngest children in school we are more than willing to forgive and support despite the errors.  We know that trial and error, emphasis on error, is a great way to learn.  Some 4 year olds still wet their pants.  We do not punish.  Some 6 year olds do not know their colors, letters or numbers.  We do not punish.  Some 7 year olds may not be able to tie their shoes.  We do not punish.  We forgive.  We promote their learning.

By the time kids are in 3^rd or 4^th grade our forgiveness wanes, our standards for acceptable behavior wax.  We introduce standardized high stakes objective multiple choice accountability tests.  The very notion of a standardized objective test belies the human experience.  There is nothing about the human experience that is standardized.  We are all flawed, we are all precious, we are all different.  Let’s see how 9 year olds do on a standardized test?  Ludicrous.  Perhaps we could use such an instrument to assess and plan, but we should never use such an instrument to judge, place, punish, label, or rank human beings.  How can a 9 year old be a poor performing person? 

It gets worse.  By middle school age our desire and demand for conformity really escalates at a time each kid is trying to figure out who they are and where they fit.  The tests mean more; the consequences of falling outside the bell curve get worse.  We help label kids as losers, those who have cooties, and those who are “in.”  If kids cannot achieve the adult labels, they will seek to achieve the same labels from their peers leading to all kinds of different behavior.  By high school, we see kids in little blocks of time denoted by bells.  The groups morph, the subject changes, and the adult at the front of the room changes.  We attempt to stress compliance here, but as children become young adults they seek to be unique and celebrate who they are.  How dare we label them incorrigible?  How dare we label them losers?  How dare we label them academically unacceptable based on their willingness to comply, behave and regurgitate on a standardized test? 

Are we to assume there is a way to teach perfection, to create perfect little humans?  Is that what we need, more metrics to measure degree of perfection and more negative sanctions for those humans who fail to achieve such?  If so, we are in trouble because the only children we have to teach are human children, precious and flawed, never capable of achieving perfection.  And the only folks who could design and require such a test are people.

How about the adults on the payroll?  Are they people too?  Does each of them have issues, concerns, pressures, heartbreaks, celebrations, desires, dreams, successes and failures?  Yes.  They are humans as well.  They will make mistakes; they will fail to be the perfect employee.  We can measure their behavior all we want to.  We will learn they are all flawed and precious, none of them are perfect, and some are good and some not so good at performing in ways other imperfect humans have prescribed.  We can even reach conclusions about these adults by judging them based on the behavior of the children they are hired to teach.  This doubles the flaw in the evaluation as we add the sin of being a human child to the sin of being a human adult, compounding the possible failure rate.  Why would we ever want to do that?  Perhaps only perfect people seek to evaluate adults, children and schools in this way.  If so, they should come forward and accept their award for perfection, knowing full well it is likely to be a death sentence.

And how about the administrators, the principals, the business managers, the curriculum folks, the superintendents?  Are they human as well?  The answer long kept secret is yes, they are human as well.  They carry the attributes of flawed and precious as well.  But their job descriptions are likely to read, “Be perfect in all that you do.”  Promote learning, but do not upset anyone.  Promote order and control but do not offend anyone.  Promote accountability but do not allow anyone to be in the lower quartile.  Be loved and respected.  Ensure that every one is above average and every program is above average.  Be feared and trusted.  Be liked by all except for those that it is OK to dislike.  Be omnipresent and totally out of the way.  Dress better. 

If it makes little sense to judge students based on standardized tests, worse to judge teachers based on how their students do on such tests, then it is really sinful to judge administrators based on how the adults and the kids do on standardized tests.  This compounds the error in this thinking 3 fold and in no way is an indicator of the performance of the leadership.  For a leader to attempt to change student outcomes when he or she teaches no children would require additional pressure and harassment of the teaching adults in the system.  That pressure and harassment will promote intolerance on the part of the teachers of the humanness of their students.  The entire system will be corrupted by an external standard of perfection that assumes some humans at the top of the curve are excellent humans, and some humans at the bottom of the curve are lousy humans, and that this test accurately measures such. 

How in the world can this possibly be a way to promote learning, promote the adults who promote learning, and promote the leaders who promote the adults who promote learning?  Such a system is a clever design to undermine all we know about ways to help and support human beings to become better, wiser, and smarter than they currently demonstrate.  Who would promote such a system?  Ah, only perfect people it seems to me would inflict such a model on humans.  Again, those people should step forward to receive their just desserts.

How about school board members?  Are they human as well?  (And in this group we could lump all elected officials responsible for educational policy at the local, state and national level.)  Sadly, as far as I know, they too are human beings, flawed and precious.  But though elected officials attended school does not qualify them to run schools any more than taking medicine qualifies one to prescribe medicine.  Like oh so many, they fear being discovered as imperfect persons and so they act with a superficial authority that they hope conveys superiority.  It does not.  They know schools less than students, teachers and administrators and yet are empowered to set policy and direction and protocol.  Worse, they bring notions of school from their own history and from others who do not know schools to implement in systems of humans.  Elected policy makers begin less perfect than the rest of us regarding schools and lead us to a state of declining humanness and humanity.  They hold office at the whim of a fickle public so their goal is to please that public rather than teach, lead, and support that public.  So sad.

As people are all we have to work in this place called school and as all of them are flawed and precious, and as all of them will look poorly on some metrics and well on others, how might we judge our schools and the people and kids within?  That is the question we have been asking and it is the wrong question.  There are no benefits or positives to judging humans, only sanctions and negatives.  Why would we want to do that to our children?  Why would we want to do that to those who serve our children?

How might we support and promote the people in our schools?  That is the right question.  How do I know?  Because that is the question we ask of every person we know in crisis.  How can I help?  What can I do?  Those are questions people ask of people in time of need.  We do not ask, "How might I measure your current performance so that I can draw attention to your flaws?"  We seek to help.

Schools are like families.  They are not like assembly lines.  Assembly lines dehumanize people, though we are learning that by empowering those on the line to act with autonomy rather than conformity we actually improve the production.  At the same time schools, the most human operation there is save the family and church, are more and more put in the role of conformity and compliance as though someone knows what a perfect school looks like, a perfect student looks like, a perfect teacher looks like, a perfect superintendent looks like.  No one knows such things. 

Nor do we know what a perfect family looks like or a perfect church and congregation look like.  We will not improve our families or our churches by increasing and applying metrics, much less high stakes metrics.  Application of such metrics to families, churches and schools demeans the purpose of those hallowed organizations.  Why are they so valued?  Families, churches and schools are the nests from where we all spring to the skies of our future.  Those nests should be feathered in love, acceptance, tolerance, support, forgiveness, and hope.  Not fear or dread or failure or lower quartiles.  Not retention or termination or public ridicule.  These nests must be feathered in other ways if we are to promote people, help people, improve people and help them grow.

Are there school employees who should leave?  Yes.  Are there families that need intervention?  Yes.  Are there churches torn apart and ripped from their missions by petty differences and squabbles?  Yes.  But none of those exceptions are improved or reduced by the addition of more metrics and more judgment.  In fact, adding such will exacerbate the problems.

People are all we have.  I am so sorry, but the members of your family are human beings.  I am so sorry, but the members of your church are human beings.  I am so sorry but the children and the adults in a school system are all human beings.  All humans are flawed and precious.  Each time we punish or banish a human from any of these institutions we diminish our own humanity.  Each time we help and support humans in need we promote not only our own humanity, but by modeling we promote the degree of humanity everywhere.

People are all we have.  Celebrate them, love them, forgive them, promote them, defend them, support them.  To do otherwise is a denial of what it means to be humans, made more sinful in a system devoted to promoting the success of humans in the future.  We have had enough carrots and sticks.  It is time for a hug.

To every adult in public education I wish you a wonderful, restful summer.  Enjoy your humanity before returning to promote the humanity of little and younger people.  We are all people, after all, flawed and precious.  My heart goes out to you as members of my professional family, just as my heart is tied to my own family.  Be good people.  You are all we have.

Soccer vs. Football

Is it just me or are you overwhelmed with the coverage and commentary regarding the World Cup Soccer Championship games in Brazil?  I have not done a tally but it appears to me that this coverage far exceeds even Super Bowl hype.  Well, maybe not since the World Cup is like the sum of all our football playoff games in one fell swoop.  Regardless, I am overwhelmed by the coverage.  Is the media trying to tell us something?

First, nomenclature:  Bottom line is terms, football and soccer came to us from England and the history is very interesting.  Needless to say, the world identifies “soccer” as football because hands are not allowed.  We call football football because of the spin-off of Rugby from the original soccer teams wherein hands are allowed, and eventually the forward pass.  Rugby became the American football game and what the world calls “football” became soccer in the US.  I think both terms are misleading.  Soccer could be called “head ball” and football could be called “arm ball” more accurately reflecting the body part usage in each sport.  Or, soccer could be called “kick ball” and football could be called “tackle ball” based on the most frequent events in each game.  Regardless, when the Brits got together in a pub in 1863 to codify the rules of both soccer and rugby and football the terms evolved and have stuck.  When football gained steam in the US we shifted to the term soccer.  We are virtually alone in this, save Australia where the term soccer also persists because Australians have their own football, a descendant of rugby.

Position terminology is equally confusing in both sports, but football is worse.  Calling a soccer player a defender, a midfielder or a forward connotes an intuitive sense of what these player positions include.  Sweeper and striker not so much.  There are no players with brooms or boxing gloves on the soccer field.  And “wing man” projects divine intervention in the game.  In football, however, a quarter back has a full back, as does a half back, otherwise their deformity would probably prohibit playing.  A receiver does not have a receptacle.  A nose guard does not guard a nose.  Guard, tackle and punter make sense, but safety and running back do not.  Picture a “running back” crab-like, scurrying down the field face-up, or the “safety” position whose job it is to keep everyone safe.

Few soccer teams have cheerleaders.  There are no marching bands, no dance teams, but there are half-time shows so perhaps the same groups could perform.  We would have to change the final game names from “cup” to “bowl” because bowls are bigger than cups and we would not want the name of the event to be confused with a vital piece of equipment.  Nothing much would change for fans as everyone at either game is clearly an athletic supporter.  I would prefer that soccer refs throw a yellow flag and blow a whistle rather than holding up a card.

So, why would an educator even care about all this?  Kid health and money.  Soccer ranks 6^th in the list of injuries in the sport and football ranks 3^rd.  (Boxing is the worst, obviously, as the event is not over until someone is too hurt to go on.)  More kids get hurt playing football than soccer.  The injuries in football tend to be more severe despite all the equipment.  Most 40 year old men I know still complain about their high school football injuries.  Technically, soccer is a non-contact sport though there is plenty of contact.  If we are interested in student safety then promoting soccer over football makes sense.  Both sports require high levels of physical exertion, teamwork, camaraderie, and can benefit players’ health, as long as they do not get hurt, etc.

Cost is a huge consideration as well.  There are 11 players on the field for both a soccer match and a football game.  But the US National Soccer Team has only 3 coaches.  The Seattle Seahawks, winners of the 2014 Super Bowl, have 23 coaches.  Most high schools will have one or two soccer coaches but even small schools will have 12 to 15 football coaches.  Further, there appears to be some sort of improved or implied status in football when a group of men in the same shirt stand on the sideline during a game.  They may have nothing to do, but they sure look pretty.  The cost of coaches on the payroll is enormous both financially and instructionally.

The equipment is cheaper for soccer.  Shoes, shorts, shirt.  No helmets, no shoulder pads, no hip and knee pads, etc.  Stadium cost would be about the same.  The cost of balls needed for play would be about the same.

The ideal player is different in each sport.  In soccer being quick, lithe, coordinated with great eye-foot coordination is a distinct advantage.  It is good to use one’s head in a soccer game.  In football, we look for big, strong and fast.  Using one’s head results in a penalty.  And what about the kids who are the large, strong lineman in football?  They would not do well in soccer.  Schools may consider beginning a wrestling team as well.  Injuries in wrestling are less than either football or soccer.

And, women can play soccer every bit as well as men opening up a huge sport to accommodate female athletes.  Not so much in football.

It appears to me that for a variety of reasons public school students and budgets would be best served by shifting from football to soccer.  The issue in making such a shift will be cultural. 

Few in our country have grown up in the soccer culture.  Most have a rich background in football and have a sense of play and players in football.  Shifting to soccer would be hard on all of us, especially those adults who played high school football.  High school football somehow has become a rite of passage for young men in our culture.  Abandoning that for a game that discourages contact and rewards different talents and abilities is probably impossible.  So yes, the media may be trying to tell us something:  learn soccer.  But until every dad and mom encourages their kids to play soccer rather than football it isn’t going to happen for 25 years or so.

If an effort were made, however, to replace football with soccer those in public school would be safer, wealthier and we would all get a real kick out of it.  If even considering such change triggers anger on your part, I will drop back 10 and punt.

Tenure: That’s not how it works

There has been a great deal of ballyhoo this week regarding a California judge’s ruling that teacher tenure is unconstitutional in California.  The decision has been praised by conservatives as well as Obama’s Secretary of Education.  I am aghast. 

Have you seen the commercial where Beatrice posts her vacation pictures literally on her wall and her friend says, “That is not how it works.” 

Beatrice is so far off base one is stumped to know where to begin to explain to her how misguided her perceptions are.  I feel much the same in discussions of tenure.  Perhaps more remarkable is the fact that I am a public school administrator and superintendent of schools.  Somebody is nuts, and I guess it could be me.  So let me lay out the arguments for tenure as a good thing and you decide.

First some assumptions that I hope are commonly accepted, but I suspect are not:  I have never experienced a political climate that is as polarized and hostile as today.  Neither party, neither side, appears to be willing to compromise for the sake of improvement.  So sad.  For a democracy, that is not how it is supposed to work.

I have never seen a time where education policy, practice and rules are made almost entirely by lay people dramatically influenced by private sector billionaires.  Professional educators are out of the loop.  Many will argue that is a good thing.  I disagree, and I watch elected judges, and elected legislatures mandating education practice with little understanding of the educational process.  And the mandated processes are based mostly on private sector notions.  That is not how it works.

Teachers in general are different than other people in that market motivation has little or nothing to do with how they perform their duties.  You may not like that realization, but I have seen it verified over and over again.  Yes, some teachers may migrate from one school system to another to earn more money, but in general we are talking minuscule changes.  No one enters the teaching profession to make money or become rich.  People who are motivated to make money enter private sector endeavors, not teaching.  Offer a teacher homemade brownies for doing bus duty today and they will be thrilled.  Offer a teacher $10,000 to fail a successful student and they will call the cops.  Teachers are as different from most folks as preachers are, they are motivated by a noble cause, and accept a certain degree of poor income for the sake of making a difference in the future lives of kids.  Teachers improve with collaboration, not competition.  Any effort to apply private sector assumptions to teachers is a pointless and fruitless effort.  I could go on and on, and in fact I have elsewhere on this blog, but the bottom line is treating teachers like assembly line workers is a huge mistake.  That is not how it works.

Teachers are degreed, certified professionals who for the most part work in total isolation.  The bell rings, the door closes, and the teacher is alone with no telling how many young people in a setting where the teacher is not only responsible for the discipline of the students, the health and well-being of the students, but is also responsible for ensuring the mastery of content prescribed elsewhere in a one-size fits all model.  Worse, teachers are now accountable for the measure of their success via a high stakes standardized test.  Nothing is more ludicrous.  Holding teachers accountable for student performance on a test assumes that the teacher is the sole variable in learning, which is not true, and that the test is somehow valid, which is not true.  In other words, the entire reform movement is based on a poor understanding of how teaching and learning occur.  The assumptions of reform are not how it works.

How does it work?  The reason so-called incompetent teachers remain on the payroll is an indictment of the quality of the administration, not the teachers.  Are there incompetent, lazy teachers who simply ride from year to year on the payroll untouched and unchallenged by competent administrators?  Yes.  But I would argue they are very few in number and continue to remain on the payroll due to fear and incompetence on the part of the administration.  Some teachers are sacred cows, well connected in the community and supposedly safe from any accountability and some administrators are too fearful to milk the sacred cows.  I know of no state where it is impossible to terminate an incompetent teacher. 

In fact, in California where the judge ruled that tenure was unconstitutional, the process to remove a teacher is clear and simple, though it may be expensive and time consuming.  An administrator delivers a “Notice of Intent to Dismiss” whereby the administration lets the teacher know they do not intend to keep the teacher around.  Clearly to deliver such a notice would require documentation and homework as a prerequisite, but those are administrative functions.  Once notified, a teacher has 30 days to request a hearing before a Commission on Professional Competence.  This CPC is comprised of a teacher selected member, an administration selected member and an Administrative Law Judge.  The teacher must be given an “Accusation” documenting the administration’s rationale for dismissal.  The teacher has the right to full discovery and will see all the administration’s evidence prior to the hearing.  The results of the hearing are final, though the teacher may appeal to the courts.  That is how it works.

Teachers in California may be fired for any or all of the following reasons:  (1) Immoral or unprofessional conduct; (2) Dishonesty; (3) Unsatisfactory performance; (4) Evident unfitness for service; and (5) Persistent violation of or refusal to obey the school laws of the state or reasonable regulation prescribed for by the government of the public schools by the State Board of Education or by the governing board of the school district employing him or her.  Clearly it is possible to terminate incompetent teachers.  Difficult?  Maybe.  Why haven’t there been more terminations?  Ask an administrator.  And yes, I am sure the union supports the teacher.  That is how it works.

I absolutely admit that it is easier either to simply live with an incompetent teacher or play the dance of the lemons whereby the teacher is consistently passed from one setting to another.  That is an administrative short coming.  I further admit that we tend to practice a philosophy that assumes the best teachers teach the kids who are easiest to teach.  Some teachers who work with very challenging kids would prefer to work with kids who arrive in their classrooms ready and eager to learn.  As administrators we sometimes have difficulty in assigning our “best” teachers to the most challenging subjects and students.  None of this has to do with tenure.  It all has to do with administrative courage.  That is how it works.

Add to all of this the simple fact that judging the quality of a teacher is much like judging the quality of a piece of art.  It is not scientific.  I know what I like, but I do not know why.  I know who is good, but am hard pressed to tell you how I know.  No single measurement of the quality of teaching performance will ever suffice.  That is not how it works.

Why does tenure help kids?  I have worked for school boards who wanted to terminate teachers because of the bumper stickers on their car that indicate the teacher thinks differently in ways political from the board member.  I have worked for school boards who wanted to terminate teachers because their surname implied they might be Muslim.  I have worked for boards who will protect to the nth degree their niece, sister, wife, cousin who is on the payroll.  I have worked for boards who will judge a teacher based on behavior outside the profession that is not illegal but is in conflict with the board’s sense of values.  I have worked for school boards who believe sexual orientation is a key determinate of teacher competence.  Every one of those teachers needs the protection of tenure.  In a system where who you know means more than what you do, tenure is a necessity.

(Interesting to me is that the Harvard professors who testified at the trial in California against teacher tenure were both tenured.  One wonders if they would give up their tenure to prove their commitment to their thesis that tenure hurts kids.  Yes, universities practice tenure but these two profs have drunk the Kool-Aid of the reform movement.  They also live in a La La Land that assumes student failure in public schools is the teacher’s fault and student failure at the collegiate level is the student’s fault.)

Finding good teachers is very hard.  Investing in their improvement makes little sense if we can simply terminate the ones that may need some help, or who happen to think differently than the prevailing values in the community.  Why would a young, bright, altruistic person decide to become a teacher in a setting where they are held accountable for kids’ performance on a mandated standardized test that purports to measure the mandated standardized curriculum prescribed by lay people, and have no sense of job security at all?  If doctors were judged by mortality rates, who would chose to become an oncologist?  The loss of tenure is much more likely to lower the overall quality of the teacher corp. 

Beatrice clearly does not own or operate a computer, much less a membership in Facebook.  She will likely never get that her perception is not how it works.  The same is true for elected officials who propose to prescribe improvement for public education oblivious to professional educator input and based on a private sector model. 

Ask a professional and they will tell you how it works.