Courageous Education Leaders = Oxymoron

The history of American mainstream education for nearly the last five decades has been characterized by lots of changes but no significant improvement in our performance versus the best global competition. In fact they are improving steadily at a pace that even if we improve will leave us further behind year after year. The changes we have pursued have been;
 • Greatly increased costs
 o Admin increases have been huge in both numbers of people and the pay they receive.
 o Advanced ‘education school’ graduate degrees have become ubiquitous. This is because districts have policies in place that give people who get the advanced degree an automatic pay increase. For example; Arthur Levine (former president of Columbia Teachers College) wrote in his 2005 Educating School Leaders that the education doctorate “had no value for any public school administration job.”
 o The ancillary “trappings” that used to be very rare are now “necessary” so that schools are more and more expensive to build and maintain. The husk is beautiful but the core is rotten.
 o Massive amounts of money are spent on “doing the wrong things better” which is much more expensive and only preserves the unacceptable status quo of poor performance. Terms such as best practice, special education, response to intervention, etc. all fit the “do the wrong thing better” approach.

 • States generally set low proficiency standards and the national level NAEP testing which has a more rigorous standard than the states also is set below the global best competition by 2-3 grades and sometimes more.

 • The best performing global competitors use a rigorous, direct instruction process taught by teachers who have robust subject knowledge. Our education philosophy is to use the discovery/constructivist approach championed by Dewey et al about a century ago. Our performance cannot improve significantly unless we discard the dumbed-down constructivist approach and replace it with the direct instruction process. This will require ‘retreading’ teachers in both subject knowledge which is currently weak but also in pedagogy which is currently tailored to the constructivist process that E.D. Hirsch says “hasn’t worked and can’t work” because it is technically flawed.

 • The political climate has increasingly moved toward more state and federal control and less local control over the education process. This added bureaucracy only serves to increase costs and cast the current technically flawed process in concrete so that needed change is extremely difficult.

 • Education entities have essentially transformed themselves into propaganda operations whose main objective is to ‘con’ the public into believing that they are doing as well as can be expected but more money to spend would always help the kids.

 With all of that it is easy to see why educators take the comfortable and easy road of ignoring (masking) their performance in the core mission to educate children to their potential. However, just suppose for the thought of it that some brave district leadership team decided to work on the real issues impeding education performance. It isn’t likely but just suppose it did happen. What process might they use to travel the road to self-respect and satisfaction in tackling a difficult task and succeeding?

 A good first step would be to put out a press release and parent, patron, and staff letter to inform everyone of the truth of the district’s poor performance and also that they were committed to fixing the problems as soon as possible. This could be considered analogous to Cortez’ burning of ships to prevent his men from feeling that retreat to Cuba was an option. Their only option was to go forward or die. That brave district would inform everyone that the ways of operating would be very different than they had been in the past.

The days of milling around trying to avoid making a decision that might cause painful but productive change would be past. The focus would be on implementation of “technically correct” education processes. There is absolutely no need to discuss, experiment or go slow, what needs to be done is well known. The other countries whose kids get much better educations than ours do have proven what works, we only need to implement their good practice.

 A specific outline of actions to take immediately no matter what part of the school year you are in;
 • Immediately start rigorous subject matter training for teachers. Start with elementary teachers who as a group have the most to learn. Concentrate on math and reading first. This training cannot come from education school faculty. They don’t have the knowledge required as is shown by the poor subject knowledge of education school graduates.

 • Immediately discontinue all constructivist curricula. Replace all texts currently in use with more rigorous material. For example, the Singapore math texts are cheap and much better than the commonly used EveryDay Math which does not provide the foundation required for success in middle and high school math studies.

 • Immediately train district leaders to be competent change leaders. Education school training and the leadership role models all work to create maintainers not “change masters” as Rosabeth Kanter called them in her book The Change Masters.

 • Eliminate political correctness and Group Think as they stand in the way of robust dialogue, a primary requirement for performance organizations.

 • Value honesty in identifying problems. Do not allow a “kill the messenger” approach. You must face the bald-faced truth of your performance no matter how uncomfortable if you hope to make real progress.

 • Report often to stakeholders about progress being made.

 • Stop paying more for advanced degrees. If the advanced degree results in better performance then pay more for that performance, if not, do not pay more. This was recommended by Arthur Levine in Educating School Leaders.

 • Use a short-cycle, data driven, prioritized management process.

 Is there just one district out there that has the integrity and honesty to face and fix the problems so that all kids can actually have the opportunity to learn to their potential?