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.