Author Archives: Stephen Seyfer

The Sweet Spot – Enjoy It While You Can

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There is a sweet spot in public education. What is a sweet spot? When you are in the sweet spot, you feel it and when you are not, you know it. A sweet spot does not happen often, and I have known schools and educators to have gone decades between such sweetness. Some never find their true sweet spot though they get close. Other educators seem to find themselves in sweetness more often causing me to think that a sweet spot is a creation rather than a random occurrence.

To mix some metaphors, the sweet spot in schooling is a time when all the stars align, and every day feels like sunshine. Children, teachers, principals, and parents are on the same page and are happy being there. All the tangibles and intangibles of schooling seem to harmonize. The usual obstructions and distractions of school operations – transportation, campus maintenance, food service – are of no consequence. The usual human tensions ease and do not impede successes. There is agreement on goals and people collaborate on how to achieve them.

To paraphrase the characterization of a perfect golf swing in Bagger Vance, it is when the player reads all the elements of nature and the swells of the ground and finds the exact arc and speed to swing a golf club to cause the perfect golf shot. In a school sweet spot, teachers understand the personal and learning needs of each child, each child is open to being taught, parents are keenly supportive of their child’s education, all personnel in the school are harmonized on the success of each child, and the community focuses on providing all the resources needed for high-quality teaching and learning.

In the sweetness, student achievement is improved if not high. Beyond academic test scores, achievement in the arts, athletics, and student activities enjoy equally visible successes. School and community pride glows.

Sweetness is not perfection nor is school an Eden in the sweet spot. There are hiccups and problems, but they do not derail the harmony. And that harmony may be the critical attribute of the sweet spot. Everything and everyone harmonize.

Sweet spots do not last long. Public education is dynamic and its elements are constantly changing. An unforeseen event, a change in key personnel, and a change in laws and mandates – a shift in the stars – can cause a sweet spot to disharmonize. Like in the crumbling of empire, some elements of sweet success continue but the totality of sweetness slowly erodes.

What do we know?

First, everything above is true. Sweetness happens. Every year you can name schools that are in a sweet spot and list the attributes of harmonized success that make those schools different. These are not necessarily schools that receive national Blue Ribbons or are named top schools in the state. Those criteria are mechanistic and not sweet. Most sweet spot schools are Blue Ribbon and state honored schools in the making.

Second, as Crash Davis in Bull Durham taught us, “don’t mess with a winning streak.” A winning streak is a delicate harmonization. It can be brittle and fickle.

The reality is this – just as school sweet spots are created, they also are deconstructed. Deconstruction is either the eventual dissolution of the harmonized elements or the employment of mechanistic efforts to artificially sustain sweetness. In a perfect world, a school in a sweet spot would keep all the children, all the faculty and staff, all the administration and school board members, all the revenues and resources, and all the infrastructure that live in the sweet spot in place forever. And they would be free of every unforeseen and tragedy that occurs in life. But that is not the nature of public education nor of life. Time and unforeseen occurrences mess with the winning streak and it ends.

Crafting a sweet spot.

Just as it takes two to tango, it takes partners to craft a sweet spot in a school. There to two concepts that are hot topics when a school is NOT sweet – culture and climate. Climate is the feeling tone of the school, its daily weather. It is related to school morale and spirit. Culture is the effect of commonly held beliefs and values, traditions, and goals, and how these bind everyone and everything together. When a school is in its sweet spot, the partners work at being highly efficient with low levels of friction. A school’s climate or morale is positive and high when its culture meets the daily demands and challenges of its complex interactions. People trust their systems.

Trust is not easily given or earned in schools today. It takes work and significant trial and error and persistence to achieve. Education is replete with theories of teaching and learning, human relations and professional development, and school improvement. Every theory has its practices. And any or all these theories and practices are available for educators in a school to implement. Which ones a school adopts is not necessarily important, the importance is agreement on and commitment to what they adopt.

In school environments, principals are the “princes or princesses” of the school district. Superintendents and central office staff may have higher rank, but it is the relationship of principals to faculty, staff, students, and parents that matters. The proverbial “bucks” of school start and stop are the principal’s office. Thus, the crafting of a sweet spot begins and ends with a principal. These are several aspects of sweet spot craftsmanship that can move a school toward its sweet spot.

  • Everyone understands the dual concepts of professional freedom and responsibility. No one person leads or changes a school alone. A principal understands the theories of freedom and responsibility and uses these judiciously and broadly. A principal builds a shared belief that every adult in the school has the freedom to do their job as best they can AND the responsibility to do their job as it fits into the total design of the school. When teachers, coaches, custodians, food servers, bus drivers and all others feel the principal’s trust in them to do their job well and that they are respected because they do their work responsibly, the climate of trust builds on itself. Trust is a key to every sweet spot.
  • Principals know each adult in their school by name and take time to talk with each person during their shared school day. When the principal knows your name on sight and talks to you personally, you are inside the sweet spot. Greeting drivers as they bring their buses to school, checking with cooks as morning snacks and lunch are prepared, talking with custodians during their first sweeping of school halls in the morning, sitting with a secretary to talk not standing and looking down – this is easy and common sense. The benefit is more than worth the time it takes.
  • Leaders build cadres of leadership. Waiting until every member of the faculty and staff is committed to a new initiative or plan is ridiculous – unanimous approval can be impossible. Effective leaders develop working groups or cadres who are intrinsically committed to a change. Initially the principal is a key player in the cadre but gradually releases responsibility to faculty and staff leaders in the cadre. The cadre will garner new and more members over time. Given a sizable faculty, it is possible to have several non-conflicting cadre groups at work simultaneously. Cadres create sweet spots within the sweet spot.
  • The first order of a sweet spot is to move the school assessment needles. A sweet spot without educational improvement goals is just a picnic or a party. It is a feel-good time. With goals, sweet spots can significantly move the measurable qualities of school achievements. The forward momentum of goal setting is a powerful tool for focusing school faculty on essential improvement. It spurs professional development, data analysis, and data-based planning, and gives everyone a visible target for their work efforts. And when the target is reached, moving the needle is a cause for school-wide celebration. Moving assessment needles keeps the sweet spot alive.
  • The best sweet sports put children first. It is possible for school leaders and faculty to focus and collaborate to achieve faculty or staff goals that result in the glow of a sweet spot. Given today’s less than favorable public opinion about schools, efforts to improve faculty and staff compensation, benefits, and work life are important. Successes in these areas create professional satisfaction. Though it is possible to draw connections between working conditions and the quality of child education, these accomplishments lack the glow of being child centered. The more powerful sweet spots arise with the improvements in child education. It is a fact; without children there are no schools.

The Big Duh!

Public education is arduous work. There are thousands of moving pieces in a school, and everyday there are points of friction and confrontation. People and programs can appear to be at cross purposes. It takes leadership and consensus to sort these out to create efficient and effective schools. When all the pieces are moving and working well, schools can achieve a sweet spot. Recognizing a sweet spot while you are in it is rare yet real. Sweet spots are a time of distinct of ease, clarity, and mutual presence not the moment. There is clarity of vision, cumulative forward momentum, and a readiness to solve problems.

We can create sweetness! It is a choice.

A Baccalaureate Keeps Giving

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What is the half-life of a baccalaureate degree? The concept of half-life understands the reality that many things erode, fade, or lose their vitality over time. We get this from carbon dating – measuring the residual amount of carbon-14 in dead organic matter to estimate its age from the current date on the calendar. The radioactive potency of the carbon-14 erodes over time at a constant rate. Is an education like carbon-14? Does education have half-life? If so, once awarded, how many years is the education celebrated by a college degree relevant in an ever-changing world? What aspects of a college education are durable and what aspects erode? What is the half-life of a baccalaureate?

What do we know?

There is a structure to most baccalaureates. First-year students must prove they belong in higher education and must take foundational courses. Some frosh took AP courses in high school to get a head start; most frosh did not. One or two courses are known in the student body as “culling the herd” courses meaning they are purposefully difficult and students who do not do well often give up on their baccalaureate goal.

Second-year students begin to focus on a major, a sequence of that builds the student’s knowledge and understanding of facts, concepts, and skill sets necessary to be competent in the field of study. In the third or fourth year, a student may narrow the major to a specific discipline within the major. A student may need to complete a practicum, an on-the-job field experience, doing the work of the discipline prior earning a baccalaureate.

I earned a BA in secondary education with majors in social studies and English. My credits included 36+ in geography, history, and political science and 36+ in literature and composition. I completed education coursework in my junior year. In my senior year I was a student-teacher for one semester in a high school social studies classroom. I graduated with a degree and a state-issued teaching license. That was in 1970.

Research today says that the half-life of a degree refers to the length of time during which 50% of the specific knowledge and hard skills learned in college lose their market value or operational relevance. The duration of value and relevance have diminished over time. In the 1960s half-life was 30 years. A baccalaureate had value and relevance for the duration of a career. In the 1980-90s half-life was 10 to 15 years. A baccalaureate required mid-career retraining. Today the half-life is 3 to 5 years due to the acceleration of new tech skills and applications. Tech permeates how durable knowledge and skills are applied.

At a cost of $50,000 to $125,000 (the averages of in-state and out-of-state tuition and fees)!! Three to five years!! How does a baccalaureate make any sense?

A ticket to ride.

First and foremost, a baccalaureate is a ticket to ride into the future. Once you have it, you cannot lose it.

A baccalaureate –

  • Is an accomplishment. It says you can set a goal and complete it. You can persevere. Today when many do not seek a college degree because of cost and time, your accomplishment tells employers and others that you can see a goal through to the end. You invested 4+ years and thousands of dollars in You.
  • Is a game changer – it opens doors. Written or unwritten, a baccalaureate is a requirement for access to interviews and candidate selections. If you have it, you are in the door. If you do not have it, you are not even considered. This is a reason for many people completing a baccalaureate later in life. They are doing what is necessary for their life goals.
  • Increases in value with higher education and training. In my field, education, a BA led to an MA and the MA led to a PhD. Each later degree opened opportunities otherwise closed to me. With increased education, I added knowledge and skills, but just as importantly, jobs that I wanted became available.

One can bemoan cost and potential student debt till the cows come home, but at the end of the day college degrees are tickets to ride where those without cannot go.

The humanities and liberal education of college are undervalued.

Educated men wrote the idea and ideals of our nation. 55% of the signers of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution were college graduates and 80% were classically educate and read. They knew and studied the works of Greeks and Roman and early European political and economic writers. They valued concepts of human rights and responsibilities learned in their studies. The humanities and liberalized thinking were at the foundation of our nation.

America is replete with stories of leaders born in log cabins and rags to riches successes. However, in each of these stories lies a brain that self-educated and built a future upon learning.

Too many of today’s leaders build their following on the biases of the undereducated, underemployed, and uninformed. It is easier to create fears among those under-read in the humanities than among those who know and understand philosophies and rational thought. They attack universities and colleges because educated and informed citizens are anathema to their political goals.

The Big Duh!

The ladder of education is a life necessity. A quality PK-12 is just a beginning. A post-high school education builds employment and fulfillment capacities. A baccalaureate degree, though costly in time and resources, is a game changer and door opener. Parallel to that degree is technical college training combined with humanities studies. A young adult with either of these passkeys is prepared for her or his future.

A baccalaureate and a technical education are each victim to half-life erosion because technical knowledge and skills constantly change. The humanities and philosophical learning do not erode, they are durable. They gain value and power with life’s experiences. To offset the half-life reality of our non-durable learning, an educated person who has invested in learning and knows how to succeed in collegiate and technical education continually hits the “reset” button of their knowledge and skills. Unlike Carbon-14, the human brain and willpower have a “reset” button that renews and replaces what time erodes.

Non-Academic Attributes of a K-12 Education Last Longer. We Prioritize the Wrong Data.

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The correlations of a child’s ability to read by grade 3 and proficiency in Algebra by grade 8 to late life success are well documented. These attributes cause a variety of midlife advantages. But are those the later life qualities that really matter? Instead, evaluate each child on the non-academic attributes of education. The correlates of non-academic traits with later adult life quality are far more important than we acknowledge. It is time to re-center our priorities of what constitutes a quality K-12 education and begin looking at core life values. Forget academic assessments, grade point averages, and class rankings.

What don’t we know? – Core life values

I usually open with “what do we know?” but that is the wrong question today. We know about the predictive value of a child’s academic achievements, or lack of achievement, on adults’ early and career-long earning power, incarceration rates, and socio-cultural status. Learning to read early and to think algebraically have predictive earning power. Yet we do not discuss the reality that these academic assets fade out over time. Early advantage does not translate into later life satisfaction. Early abilities to read and do algebra are not the attributes we use to measure a high-quality adult life.

What we do not measure and know much about, or at least we do not discuss, are the core life values that sustain a person throughout their life span. Ironically, these values are developmental, we see them early in childhood, and they continue throughout life. Also, they are measurable throughout the K-12 grade span, but not with tests. These values often are recorded in teacher notes and comments, but are eliminated from transcripts, the record that counts. They are lost to us because of our stubborn reliance on the numbers of test scores. Americans love hard data.

What are core life qualities? They are:

  • Self-regulation, the capacity to monitor, manage, and adapt your internal mindset to meet new challenges, changing demands, and long-term goals. It is the ability to adjust to your life.
  • Conscientiousness, a fundamental personality trait noted for orderliness, thoroughness, strong impulse control, goal-directed, and feeling a deep responsibility for one’s commitments.
  • Perseverance, the ability to sustain a purposeful effort to achieve long-term and high-value goals over time, to weather setbacks, fatigue, and repeated failures.
  • Self-control, the ability favors deferred gratification over immediate, the override of impulses, immediate urges, and temptations, and not follow others away from your priorities.
  • Emotional stability, the psychological ability to keep a steady temperament, not dissolve under pressure, and control stress and anxiety.
  • Empathy, the mental and emotional ability to perceive, understand, and share another person’s life experiences.
  • Conflict resolution, the mental and emotional skills to navigate competing interests and to cause others to accept mutual agreements.
  • Collaborative problem solving, the ability to be synergistic by causing others to consider a complex problem from different perspectives, use unanticipated skills, and reach solutions they could not reach individually.

These were labeled were labeled “soft skills” in the industrial age of America when the rugged individualist was a national hero. That era’s “hard skills” the time-proven academics of reading, writing, and arithmetic. In this century, core life qualities are the organizational skills that move people, production, and society from point A to point B.

One who believes that humankind walked on the moon because of the science of rocketry alone is ignorant of human work using all eight of the above core life qualities that put an astronaut there.

What should we know and value?

Core life values are not just an academic discussion; they correlate with the quality-of-life people feel and know after they have forgotten their high school gpa and class rank. The self-regulation and conscientiousness children learn and display in their K-12 years are among the most reliable psychometric predictors of adult physical health and lifespan.

Adults with developed qualities of self-control present lower rates of substance abuse, stress-related illness, midlife problems of high blood pressure, abnormal blood sugar, and obesity.

Adults who learned conscientiousness, perseverance, and emotional stability as a child have higher rates of financial security and career stability. They have lower rates of underemployment, longer job tenure, and steady financial growth, no matter their high school gpa or test scores.

Adults who have stronger K-12 school connections show greater emotional resilience during life’s ups and downs. They report increased later life satisfaction and lower issues with psychiatric distress.

And adults with developed qualities of empathy, conflict resolution, and cooperative problem solving also have fewer court appearances, lower rates of family break-ups, and are more civically involved.

The Big Duh!

The valedictorian/salutatorians, and honor roll students are typically honored at every high school graduation. Not mentioned are the graduates whose pictures in the class yearbook list them as the

  • Friendliest
  • Most likely to succeed
  • Most school spirited
  • Did the most for the class
  • Most well-adjusted

and all the other “soft qualities” that distinguish classmates.

When the class gathers for its 50th anniversary reunion, what will matter most – a classmates K-12 academic status or the high core life values that sustained them for half a century of living? I am betting on high core values.

We measure and honor the wrong attributes of an education.

Our PISA Scores Are Low Because PISA Is Meaningless to Our Students

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The 2026 PISA international education scores are published, and we once again wring our hands because the achievements of our students stay low or declined. Asian and Nordic children continue to dominate achievement on international assessments. We wail that – Low achievement is due to the pandemic! Low achievement is due to failed instruction! Low achievement is due to too much screen time in school! Low achievement is due to too many immigrant children in our schools! We have been bemoaning these same red herrings for years. These are not the reasons why US students do not score well on international assessments.

The Big Duh!

I usually leave “The Big Duh!” for my conclusion, but not today. The causation for the low status of the United States on PISA assessments is this – our children are transactional and they perceive no benefit for giving their best efforts on the PISA. What matters to our children gets their attention and PISA test results do not matter. If we want to increase our students’ achievement on the PISA tests, we need to make the test results important to our children. If we cannot do this, then our nation needs to stop fretting about the PISA. It does not matter.

How do we know this?

Test analysis. US children spend less time considering and answering questions on the PISA tests than their international peers. And US students guess at more responses. And US students show more test fatigue with shorter response times and more guessing in the latter parts of tests.

The time a student commits to reading a question, reading the possible answers, considering the possible answers, and selecting a response to the question is their response time on each question. The PISA is computer-based. Not only does the system record student demographics and student responses to questions, the psychometrics of the test also records the time lag between when a student clicks to open a question and then clicks their selected answer. This is thinking time when a student considers the question, reads the possible responses, assesses what she knows about the responses, weighs the responses that are partially correct or seem correct, and clicks the answer she thinks is the single correct answer.

High performing international students spend an average of 100 to 110 seconds before responding to a question. If 100-110 is the average, many are taking even longer to parse out the correct answer. US students spend 80 to 90 seconds before responding. Also, responses in less than 5 seconds are termed “blind guesses” and US students make many more blind guesses than higher performing students. And test response analysis shows that US students begin to make more blind guesses in the latter parts of tests than do higher performing international students.

Being personally engaged with a test says that the test and its results matter to the test taker. The test analyses say that students in the United States are not engaged in taking the PISA. Why is that?

There are several reasons. Children in the US are over-tested and under-instructed. Every year a child takes mandated state assessments of reading, ELA, and math. At least twice and often more often a child takes progress monitoring assessments to evaluate the child against normative expectations for a grade level or age. And every unit and chapter is tested. Instruction in the United States stresses knowledge and understanding of facts packaged into shorter, more concise units and every unit has a test at the end. We also conclude units of instruction before all children have accomplished unit learning goals. One reason for ending instruction before all children have learned is our false assumption that our spiraled curriculum will teach them what they did not learn now in a later unit or grade level or course. But the real reason is that the school clock demands that “we move on” to teach all that is packed into a grade level or course curriculum.

American educators have studied Asian and Nordic schools to learn from their systems of education. From Asian schools we learned that education is much more important in their culture than in ours. Performance in school connects with the opportunities open to children out of and after school. Better performance opens better opportunities. Performance in school connects with family identity and Asian parents closely check what their children do in school each day. Education is status.

Nordic schools, especially those in Finland, approach education with less stress than in the United States. Units of instruction are more protracted in both breadth and depth. Where instruction in our schools is satisfied with factual answers, their instruction asks why the answers are correct and why some answers are more correct than other findings. And their model of instruction does not accept “you’ll learn this later;” no children are left in the lurch of unfinished learning. Students take fewer tests and their tests require a higher level of critical thinking. Finally, teachers in Nordic schools enjoy a much higher community and public respect than teachers in the United States. A teacher’s instruction and correction matter more there.

Finally, students never see their scores on the PISA tests. There is not prep for the test, no fanfare, and no explanation that “the pride of all children in the United States rests on how well you achieve on this test.” On the other hand, our students know that PSAT test results connect to scholarships and ACT and SAT test results decide the colleges and schools they are admitted to after high school graduation. The PSAT, ACT, and SAT matter because they connect to reality. PISA tests do not matter to schools, students, or parents in the United States.

In Conclusion

We know what we know. Because we know that the PISA tests do not matter to our schools, our students, or our parents, we should not fret about the published PISA test results. There are too many other and more worrisome things in public education for us to fix than PISA. Let’s get at those!

Ethical or Transactional. Which Will Our Children Be?

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“When you have the chance to do what is right, try to do it.” We listened to late-night radio back in the 70s and 80s and this was the sign-off statement of one of the after-hours talk shows. We all hear innocuous phrases that float on the airwaves but this one stuck with me. It stuck because the number of life occurrences when events present choices of expediency, self-interest, conformity, and ethics never ends. In those moments, the congruence of choice, what is right, and the action to do it belong to everyone, and the choice made matters more than we know.

What do we know about right?

When I was growing up in the 1950s Disney presented a TV series on the American folk hero Davy Crockett. I can still hear Fess Parker, as Crockett, give his personal advice – “Be sure you are right, then go ahead.” For a long time, Crockett’s words told me to pause in front of every decision to take a breath and consider the rightness of my options. It may have been easier in the last century; things may have been less fuzzy. Why are principle-based decisions so hard to make today?

When I was a child everyone I knew went to a church on Sunday. Kids went to Sunday School and then sat with their parents for a church service. I cannot say that everyone knew their Bible. Most churches, mine included, made two obligatory recitations of Old and New Testament verses as part of the weekly service but gave no interpretation or application. Sunday School followed our denomination’s published curriculum that included child-adapted Bible stories, but nothing about Bible-based living. The 23rd Psalm, Lord’s Prayer, the story of the Good Samaritan, and Sermon on the Mount were the heart of our religious education. I was raised in a Christian household with little knowledge of what it meant to lead a Christian life.

The Golden Rule from the Sermon on the Mount was as close to Crockett as I got.

Folklore provided children with stories of people doing the right thing. We heard Parson Weems’ fabricated story of George Washington chopping down one of his father’s cherry trees. When challenged, young George said, “Father I cannot tell a lie. I did it.” The lesson of not to lie was a lie in the telling.

Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac served as guidelines for how children should behave. “Search others for their virtues, thyself for thy vices.” “Don’t throw stones at your neighbors, if your own windows are glass.” “Diligence is the mother of good luck.” Most Franklin verses were easier to quote than to practice.

The concept of true direction was not easy to discern. Early in our history, the North Star became a symbol for directing people. Frederick Douglas published an abolitionist newspaper in 1847 under the banner, North Star. Douglas used Polaris, the celestial marker of north on a compass, as a directional target for enslaved people on the Underground Railroad. To follow the North Star became synonymous with moving from slavery to freedom. Harriet Tubman was our hero leading runaways to freedom using the Big Dipper and North Star.

The North Star returned to our vernacular in this century. In 2007 Bill George, a former CEO, wrote True North. He argued that every individual and organization needs an internal moral compass based on a set of core values, ethics, and purpose. Without a moral compass, leaders and people in general are swayed by short-term pressures, greed, and self-interest. George gave us the reference point for figuring out Crockett’s “Be sure you are right” – follow the ethics of your true north.

But principled decision making still eludes us.

Being right and being transactional.

Being right today has become a matter of transactions. When faced with a question of a right or wrong thing to do, a person reduces the decision of what is universally right to a decision of what is self-benefiting. The transaction is – “If I do this, what do I get in exchange? And the more I get in exchange, the better the decision.” Transacting deals make a successful outcome the justification of a self-proclaimed right decision. For the transactional person, justification for a decision is idiosyncratic not principle based. This person uses the royal “we” as in “we won” or “we gained” to generalize and popularize the personal benefit that their decision brought them, but that is only a matter ego bloat. “Me” is the most important person in transactionalism.

How is this different from ethical decision making? An ethical framework treats people as an end in themselves with every person having inherent value. The first lines of our Declaration of Independence are based on such ethics. An ethical person aligns daily decisions with their values, the promises they have made, and to act without deception. An ethical person respects the rights of others and treats them fairly and honorably. And an ethical person accepts responsibility for mistakes and honestly tries to correct their errors.

Transactionalism reduces every person to the means of an end. People only have value if they can be used for useful leverage to achieve a personal goal or profit. Friends, colleagues, and others are only tokens to be used, they are not valued. Moral duties become conditional – keeping a promise is only worth doing if the return on investing in the promise is personally beneficial. If not personally beneficial, transactionals break promises with impunity. They treat their good deeds as bank accounts in which one good deed can be paid against a bad deed. Social trust is a quid pro quo proposition.

What to do.

We do not teach children what to think, we teach them how to think.

The first part of the above sentence is politically contentious. Today, more than ever before, every topic can be approached from multiple perspectives, especially political perspectives. Also, now more than times past, free-thinking people must honor different perspectives. This honor is in our national DNA. We defend every person’s right to speak, write, join with others, and publicize their ideas. In public education, we honor these by teaching about topics and their perspectives not teaching to inculcate a particular perspective on any topic.

To teach about a topic is to teach how to think about it. Children in school learn to think as historians and to understand human stories that tell us how perspectives about a topic developed. Children learn to think mathematically and to consider a topic quantitatively, statistically, and proportionately. They learn to think scientifically and to analyze the classifications and properties of things and how they work in a natural world. And children learn to think literally and figuratively. They learn to consider an idea for what it really is and means as well as how the idea can be interpreted and applied in different contexts.

Public education is not parochial. We do not teach a limited or dogmatic point of view. Public education also is not partisan, at least it is not supposed to be. Totalitarian states dictate what their people think, control what they write, and restrict their public meetings. Public education opposes mandated thinking, that is why those who mandate oppose public education.

With the caveats of our Constitutional rights and public education policies, we can teach about ethical and transactional thinking. Through literature and history, we can use human stories to illuminate examples of each. And we can extend their thinking with problem-based scenarios. The more they think about thinking, the better they will understand their thinking.

We can teach children the value of developing personal value systems within the mores of our society and with their informed perspectives how to evaluate life decisions.

The Big Duh!

Not to be too simplistic, we can teach children to be Crockett-like in considering the implications of and responsibilities for the decisions they make. This curriculum will not display on their transcript but will be noted in the proverbial book of life. We can teach them that a “True North” is either an ethical process for decision making or it is the endgame goal to be achieved regardless of process. It is their decision to make.

In 2026 educating about ethical and transactional decision making extends not only to children but also to the crafters of artificial intelligence. AI makes decisions that impact humans and our children will be the next crafters of AI.