Would you encourage family members to study to become teachers or other government employees? Unless we can answer “yes”, government is failing as an employer.
Can you hear the voices of elected officials berating and blaming their employees for government performance problems, laziness, and being “thugs”? Employees are tired of it. They want respect and fair treatment. Continue reading Legislators should learn from Ed
In the school district where I live, Asheboro High School has recruited a highly successful mid-career football coach; and fans are already speculating about taking the program from good to great. The coach has an excellent reputation, a consistent winning record, and a state championship to his credit. There are good reasons for high hopes.
Success breeds more success in any endeavor; and it also attracts more participation. When an athletic program succeeds, more students try out for the team and more fans show up for the games. The same is true for community theaters, colleges, hospitals, and charities. People join and support successful organizations.
This made me wonder; what would happen if we treat academics the same way we treat athletics? We hire physical education teachers to provide basic classes for everyone, intending that all students will achieve some level of regular physical activity and competence along with basic understanding of personal health. For those who have the will and ability to excel, something different happens. Student-athletes who want to push themselves to the limits of their abilities are matched with coaches who have the skills and desire to help them achieve their best. We don’t match the basketball coach with the clumsiest kids just because they seem to need the most help. To do that would frustrate both the coach and the students. Instead, we match the student athlete with the coach who can provide the most help. What might happen if we apply that model to academic subjects?
Suppose that for our most highly motivated and talented students, we hired teachers who have the specialized skills and desire to help them achieve their best. Because these students have already achieved the basics and are motivated toward exceptional performance, their teachers would be expected to function like coaches. The goal would be to develop each student to the maximum extent of her or his ability and motivation.
Suppose that students and teachers achieve results comparable to sports programs. A few, like the three sport athlete, will excel at several academic areas. They will be the ones who choose to put in an astonishing amount of work for the thrill of learning, and we won’t know who they are until they have the opportunity. Their intensity is like that of the football player who does more after two-a-day workouts. They need a teacher-coach who can take them to their limits.
The successes of a few students are likely to inspire others. When a high school sports program has a winning tradition, more young children take up the sport. So-called “minor” sports such as swimming grow at schools with traditions of success. The same phenomenon can occur in academics.
Such challenging academic programs are not for everyone, just as varsity sports are not for everyone, but it’s exactly what some students crave after they find the right subject and a coach who inspires excellence. Like dedicated athletes, there are few limits on how hard they will work or how much they can achieve.
Teacher-coaches for these classes will need freedom to adjust subject matter and teaching style to their students and community. Their students have already mastered the basics so they don’t need a standardized curriculum. Instead, they need opportunity and inspiration to follow their own interests as far and as fast as they can go.
Consider the sports analogy again by thinking about the 2017 Mens NCAA basketball tournament. There were 68 teams featuring various styles and coaching philosophies. Everyone worked and played as hard as they could to achieve excellence. In that sense, there was not a loser among them. One reason for their success is the work of high school coaches. What if we encourage teacher-coaches and allow them to prepare our most highly motivated students the same way sports coaches prepare athletes?
Once this change is made, many parents will demand admission of their children to schools that provide such opportunities. The exodus of families with high academic expectations from our public schools will reverse itself and public support (including funding) will blossom. Academic volunteers and boosters will be just as common as they are for varsity sports.
Some (many, I think) of our kids have the will and ability to achieve academic excellence if we rigorously select and encourage teacher-coaches as we do sports coaches. Let’s give our students and their teachers opportunities and encouragement to reach the limits of what they can achieve.
Apparently taking their cue from right wing talk radio and Fox News pundits, leaders of the North Carolina Legislature have begun an assault on the Common Core Standards for education. Some want to repeal the standards which our school systems have been working to implement since they were adopted in 2010 by you know who – the North Carolina Legislature.
What better way to finish demoralizing underpaid and underappreciated educators than to give them the monumental job of organizing to achieve specific goals and then, at the last minute, repeal the goals? The Republicans in charge at the legislature often argue that government should be more efficient and productive, like a successful business. Today it is those legislators, not the educators who need lessons in successful business practices. The idea that we can greatly improve (or damage) education by adopting a set of standards is foolishness. It is the actions taken to achieve the goals that will make a difference. As Russell Ackoff, a renowned professor from the Wharton School of Business put it, “The only problems that have simple solutions are simple problems. The only managers with simple problems are those with simple minds.”
For many years we have known that the educational achievement of American students is lagging behind the achievement of students in many other developed nations. Since public education is largely a responsibility of states, not the federal government, the National Governor’s Association commissioned a project to study the situation and make recommendations. It was strongly supported by governors from both parties and the funding was mostly from the private sector – especially from businesses and foundations which were concerned that American graduates were not prepared for the jobs of the future (or even the present). Educators, psychologists, business leaders and other qualified people worked for years to produce the Common Core Standards which were then adopted voluntarily by 46 states. Only after this was done did the federal government begin to use the standards too.
The Common Core Standards specify very little about curriculum (books, teaching techniques etc.) In fact, the standards anticipate that there will be variance across the country in that regard, and that there may be variance from one classroom to another based the unique styles of individual teachers or the needs of students. If there is to be standardization of curriculum or teaching techniques, it would be done by states or school districts.
How should those of us who are not educators think of the standards? I see them as mileposts for each student to pass on the journey of preparation for successful employment after high school or for college. That was also the goal of the National Governor’s Association and of the private organizations that paid for much of the research on which the standards are based.
One state, Kentucky, has led the way in implementing the standards and more recently they have begun testing to measure how they are doing. The bad news is that their educational performance still lags behind other nations. The very promising news is that in two years their test scores rose 2 percent while their high school graduation rate rose 6 percent. It is too soon to attribute that progress to the common core standards but certainly they can take pride in the achievement.
Edward Deming, who is often credited with introducing scientific process improvement as a business practice, said “Management by numerical goal is an attempt to manage without knowledge of what to do.” It is vital for legislators to understand that. The Common Core Standards provide a yardstick with which we can measure progress. They should be used for planning and improvement, not for appraisal of individual performance. Repealing them will leave educators no generally accepted and standardized measurement and will take away their ability to compare results from various school districts and teaching methods – leaving us in a situation where policy changes will be based on opinion rather than data. Replacing them with state standards will take away our ability to compare our results with other states and will present new opportunities for politicians to insert their personal biases into educational policy. That is the opposite of good business practices.
Rather than taking the goalposts off the field, the legislature can be most helpful by doing its own job – not the jobs of the educators. There is massive evidence that children, especially low income children, do best in nations that provide high quality public pre-schools. The legislature should study how best to create and fund that service. Many legislators (in both parties) want performance-based pay for educators. If that is the case, legislators and school boards must provide management education for whoever will do the performance appraisals and the ongoing communication and coaching throughout the year. Successful performance appraisals don’t surprise people – they are merely summaries of discussions that have been ongoing. They are based on multiple job expectations, not on the results of a single test.
The most critical factor in business success is hiring the right people. That means that we need to provide adequate salaries. We have some great teachers who are terribly underpaid. We have lost some great teachers who had to leave their chosen profession in order to adequately support their families. The legislature can help by funding salaries comparable to professions requiring similar levels of education, skill and stress.
So, legislature, what’s it going to be? Will you choose a businesslike approach to improving quality or more tampering based on the opinions of talk show hosts?
