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Good Teaching and Good Schooling Grow a Whole Child

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If you talk about improving student academic performance today, invariably someone will say “We need to be more concerned with the whole child than just test scores”. The comment is meant to dissolve the discussion of objective curricular performance by wrapping arms around the subjective developmental characteristics of childhood. The implication is that those focusing on curricular results are not interested in the socio-emotional development of a child and, more implicitly, that increasing a focus on curricular outcomes decreases consideration for the holistic well-being of a child. Whoa!

Take Away

The education of children always provokes the question of “to what end”. Five generations past and more, white, male children were educated to become literate citizens. Female and children of color or any disability were not publicly educated. Three generations past, children from elite families received pre-professional educations and most other children were educated to be productive in the local and national economy. Post-WW2 children were educated to strengthen our nation in a Cold War and for international leadership. A generation ago children began to be disaggregated by their observed characteristics of gender, race, ethnicity and language, and disabilities and disadvantages and education was purposed to close achievement gaps between disparate groups. Across generations there is a common theme that school prepares a child for adulthood, adulthood needs being defined by the times.

A three-legged stool historically supported the rearing of children. The first and most significant leg was family. The second leg was church. And, the third leg was community, including school. A phrase embraced this triad: “These are the parents’ children, the community’s kids, and the school’s students”. Today, almost 50% of marriages end in divorce, only 12% of the population attends church once per month, and traditional institutions, such as Scouts and 4H are under suspicion due to some disreputable adults . The Y (no longer an MCA) and Boys and Girls Clubs provide day care. School, despite its detractions, remains the constant over time in the lives of children, kids and students.

The “whole child” interest is valid and wholesome. It also is either uninformed, misinformed or purposefully distracting.

What Do We Know?

Who the speaker is matters. The commenter may be seeking help. A parent advocating whole child may be addressing the lack of support from the other two legs and looking to the school for non-educational support. Or, the parent may be facing a significant challenge or problem in raising the child and looking for non-academic help from school. Or, the commenter could be a social worker or law enforcement officer who understands the implications of an “unwhole” child and knows that school through mandatory attendance represents a singular, and positive constant in the life of most children. And, the commenter could be a politician needing to make answers to confrontative problems, like community violence and drug and alcohol addictions, and so he legislates that schools will address mental health issues.

Educators have a simple and direct response. It is – “Good teaching and good schooling grow a whole child”.

Why Is This Thus?

Good teaching understands the concept of readiness to learn. Readiness means that a child is physically, intellectually, and emotionally prepared to engage with a teacher and prepared instruction for the purpose of learning. Even though a child may be present in the classroom, sitting at a desk, and looking ready to be taught, this may not be the fact. Good teaching looks closely at the child to appraise “is this child or are these children ready for this?”. Good teaching listens to other teachers, parent communications, counselors and school health personnel and understands when a child is not ready to or may be significantly distracted from learning. Readiness to learn considers all facets of the child.

Readiness to learn are daily measures taken several times each day. A child’s night before and amount or quality of sleep affect readiness to learn. Breakfast or its absence affects readiness. A bus ride or walk to school affects readiness. A child’s experiences in the morning classes and at recess and passing from class to class and at lunch can affect subsequent readiness to learn. Good teaching is a child first attention to each student and looks for any of these enhancers of or distractions to learning. A child who is not ready or clearly distracted will not learn.

A balanced curricular program understands and helps to educate the whole child. Balance is access to curricular, co-curricular and extra-curricular opportunities. Interestingly, adults seem to think that all children seek opportunities to sing and play an instrument, and be on stage in a play and make the varsity each season and to paint and make pottery and be on the debate team or Key Club or dance team and take a load of academic classes. While some may, most do not. What they want is opportunity to explore what they want to explore. And, opportunity to extend learning in the areas they choose. Balanced curriculum provides an expanse of experiences and open choices that help grow a whole child.

Today a whole child must be a contemporary child. When adults don’t like what is happening in education, they either make comparisons to what life, childhood and school was like when the adult was young or they call upon theory as blatant truth. From the get go, yesterday is past and there is no getting it back and the past was not perfect. Believing that school in the 80s or 90s was more focused on the whole child than today is just plain wrong. Additionally, believing that school can operate on a theoretical model of whole child education is tantamount to believing every girl should look lie Barbie and every boy like Ken.

To Do

Good schooling and good teaching facilitates a whole child by:

  • offering a wide variety of educational opportunities for all children and letting children choose. Inclusive options let children explore and develop their skills and interests and talents, not just those that adults prescribe.
  • celebrating child successes. Some children who do not have supportive homes or family networks do not know what a celebration of success feels like. Success begets more success and celebrations are part of that begetting.
  • making 360 degree observations about each child. Listening to parents, bus drivers, cafeteria servers, hall monitors, custodians – everyone who makes a comment about a child helps good teaching to grow a whole child. At the same time, good teaching filters commentary that pertains to teaching and learning and passes non-teaching and learning commentary to other school resources.
  • helping children grow from their failures and mistakes. Neither of these close children from future teaching and learning. Instead, they make it more compelling. A whole child experiences bumps in the road to her future.
  • engaging with every child as frequently as possible. When a child is able to ghost through a school day without a direct teaching-learning conversation with a teacher, this child is falling toward unwholeness. We must know that some children choose this silence and invisibility. If we are listening to all our sources about children, we will know when a child may needs to be left alone and when to re-engage them. Otherwise, engage all children continuously. Children shall not be ghosts.
  • lastly, the assessment and measurement of learning in all areas of academics, activities, arts and athletics should be embedded in our attention to the whole child. The fact that a state mandates schools to test all children in reading and math is not a negative. In advocating for a well-rounded education for all children, the state and each school should have an assessment and measurement system informing us about each child’s growth in art, music, world language, history and civics, and financial literacy. We should have measurements in tech skills. And, please, we should have strategies for assessing a child’s social and emotional well-being and abilities to be collegial and collaborative. Without systems of assessment how will we know a child is whole?

The Big Duh!

Good teaching is all about the whole child.

Informed, Nuanced, Experienced Veteran Teachers Are Rain Makers

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Accumulated knowledge, skill sets honed over time, and perceptions sharpened by experience lead to this observation: “At the point of retirement, most teachers know more, can do more, and have more value as teachers than any preceding year in their career”. A veteran teacher who persists through decades of teaching has high value to children, colleagues, and a school in her pre- and post-retirement years.

Take Away

How do schools make the most, in fact exploit, the valued commodity of a veteran educator? The answer is – we don’t. The teaching assignment and expectations for a veteran teacher mirror the expectations of a first-year teacher. We treat teachers with proven talents and teachers of unproven talents as similar “plug and play” personnel.

Teachers, of all ages, still operate in the block box of a classroom. A veteran teacher’s knowledge, skills and perceptions shine in their classroom, but are seldom known or discussed in whole school or faculty settings. The black box syndrome and mentality defeats the value of experience because of its isolationism. Whether the veteran is a Kindergarten teacher with decades of success in causing our youngest children to read or a high school AP teacher with years of causing our college-bound children to earn college credit while in high school, teachers work in isolation of each other and nominally alone within their school.

Informed experience is a value-added commodity that is achieved over time. A recent graduate knows the latest pedagogical theories and best practices and is ready to apply them. A veteran who is up-to-date on the latest theories and best practices adds the value of knowing which theory and practice works best with some student but not with others. The discernment of what, when and why children need specific teaching is an acquired judgment that is earned with experience, yet is undervalued in school.

It is essential to appreciate that all veteran teachers are not created equally. Some vets grow and ripen and enrich with time while some only repeat their first year of teaching over and over again every year.

A faculty group photo helps us observe many truths about our teacher corps. We see many contrasts. Faces and, to some degree, hair color portray two-thirds of the faculty as looking younger and less than one-third looking older. If we compare annual faculty group photos, we observe fewer and fewer of same veteran faces. There is a gradual yet steady decline in the number and in the continuity of older, veteran teachers. We believe that the work force in our nation is “graying” but, in public education, the work force is getting younger and younger. This means that we are losing the professionally-developed talent, knowledge, experiences, and perceptions faster than we are growing the talents of our young teachers.

What Do We Know?

In the 2015-16 school year, teachers in public schools averaged of 14 years of experience. If we interpret this in age as experience, the average teacher is in her mid 30s and has been working as a teacher for about one-third of her anticipated work life.

http://neatoday.org/2018/06/08/who-is-the-average-u-s-teacher/

In that year, the most common public school teacher is in her first three years of teaching. These data are supported by the fact that 44% of first year teachers leave the profession before their fifth year. That means that most schools have a continuous turn over of young and inexperienced teachers. We see this in the faculty group photo – so many look so young.

http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/teacherbeat/2018/10/today_teaching_force_richard_ingersoll.html

The average retirement age for teachers hovers around 59. Interestingly, many teachers retire before they are eligible for social security. Part of the reason is that salary tables tend to top out with little to no annual salary improvement after a set number of employment years. Some states and districts enact “rule of 30” incentives that encourage teachers to retire when they gain 30 years of experience or “rules of 55” that set the retirement incentive at a combination of age and years of teaching experience equaling 55. A teacher’s annual income of pensions and social security may be equal to or more than their annual working salary well before their anticipated retirement year. Why stay? Why not start a second career with earnings on top of teacher retirement benefits? We have created professional structures that purposefully diminish our teacher talent pool.

https://smartasset.com/retirement/why-your-retirement-age-matters

School leaders know the teachers in their faculty who perennially cause the greatest student learning. They know the “rain makers”. Principals know this through applying Effective Educator processes, comparing student assessment data, and sitting in classrooms observing teaching. They know it through their work with students and parents. And, they know the journeyman teachers who annually do a satisfactory job of teaching. However, this knowledge remains tight-lipped behind screens of confidentiality. If it were discussed, the parent demand for placement in “rain maker” classrooms would be impossible for satisfy.

Why Is This Thus?

In most school systems, a teacher with 40+ years of teaching is at the top of the district’s salary and benefits scale. The first consideration school boards make toward veteran teachers is financial. In many school districts, a veteran may cost twice that of a first-year teacher. If finances drive the decision making, “helping” expensive teachers to retire is a school board and administrative priority.

There is a large scale failure to understand the cost of less effective teachers. Successful initial learning is the most cost effective instruction. When a teacher must re-teach lessons to classes of children or extend the planned time for a unit of instruction, there will be instruction at the end of the year those children will not receive. That instruction must be taught the next year. The accumulated effect of ineffective teaching is graduates who did not learn all of their curricular objectives. Tier 2 interventions requiring “specialists” in addition to classroom teachers add significantly to the cost of a public education. Remedial summer school adds cost in large doses. The greatest cost is the sum of lost knowledge, skills and attitudes children suffer year after year that diminish their capacity for success in college and career. These are not costs in the hundreds of dollars, but in the millions nationwide. Getting teaching and learning right in initial instruction is the gold standard.

Most observers assume that veteran teachers with 30-40 years of teaching are slowing down. Their best years are behind them. They miss the point. Doing the same thing over and over diminishes energy, not the talent to work. Give a proven veteran a new assignment or change the challenges of the children the teacher instructs and the combination of informed experience and expertise takes over. Intellectual adrenalin makes vets act and look like younger teachers.

Too often principals respond to student and parental wants and demands and place veteran teachers in high popular demand or politically visible assignments. Parents want rainmakers teaching AP and college prep track courses. Rarely do parents of low achieving children stress principals to assign rainmakers to children performing below grade level. Some times teacher assignments are made for parents and not for children.

Lastly, phasing veteran teachers toward retirement is the way schools always have approached personnel. As institutions, schools are slow to change past practice, even poor past practice.

To Do

Use the informed experience and talent of veteran teachers for customized assignments, such as underachieving regular education children or children living in poverty who lack out of school resources. The vet’s understanding of chunked instruction, pacing, modeling, tutored guided practice, and interval reinforcement work well for children needing nuanced teaching.

Use the wisdom for instructional design. We engage large groups of teachers, most of whom are inexperienced or less experienced, to write curriculum and units of instruction. One of our misapplied thoughts is that every voice has equal value. Engage “rainmakers” in designing best strategies for making more rain for everyone.

Assure that talented veteran teachers work with small, discussion groups to refine student understanding. Too often, vets are assigned to large group information sessions because they are more entertaining. Knowing the right question to ask at the right point in a child’s learning is an acquired talent.

Weight employment using the value-added of informed experience and past records of causing significant student learning to create combinations of teaching and teacher coaching. First-year teachers graduate from mentored student teaching assignments straight into “you are on your own” classrooms. And, if they are assigned a mentor, mentoring seldom includes mentor observations because of their respective teaching classroom assignments. Give a proven and productive veteran released time to coach one or two inexperienced teachers.

Create emeritus teaching assignments for retired teachers. With closed-minded thinking, many states make it difficult for a retired teacher receiving a teacher’s pension to re-enter the classroom. An emeritus assignment need not be full-time or full-year. A highly trained veteran-in-retirement can work a very customized teaching assignment to cause children to learn. It may be an assignment that is “on demand” when children need talented and personalized instruction the most. Be creative.

The Big Duh

More than 40% of all teachers who start in the profession leave before their fifth year. The majority of teachers in any school are inexperienced due to this constant turn over. Among teachers who persist in the classroom are those who sadly repeat their first years of teaching over and over again. These often seek their first opportunity for an early retirement. And, there are talented rainmaking teachers whose experience, continuous professional development, and refinement of acquired art and science of teaching make them high valued veteran teachers. School leadership needs to optimize the use of their rainmakers and be creative in keeping rainmakers in the most productive of teaching assignments. A veteran teacher is a talent we cannot afford to waste.

Prep Time: A Mismanaged Resource and Professional Bone of Contention

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Fact: Public education suffers today from a shortage of prepared and licensed teachers. Fewer undergraduates are enrolling in baccalaureate teacher preparation programs and the largest generation of teachers, Boomers, is retiring. We need teachers.

Fact: 40% of teachers leave teaching within five years. A multitude of factors dissuade them for continuing in the profession they trained for and entered.

Fact: Teacher burn out is a reality and too many teachers resign not retire from teaching. These pre-retirement leavers who accommodated most of the factors that chased initial teachers from the classroom find late in their careers that the same factors erode their commitment to teaching

Given these three facts, to what extent are schools working to retain high quality teachers and to what extent are schools exacerbating the problem with practices that defeat a veteran teacher’s professionalism?

Professionalism may be at the heart of the matter. Is a teacher a laborer in the classroom or is a teacher a professional expert in causing children to learn? There is a significant difference. We anticipate turnover in the labor market. We anticipate the lifespan of professional careers. Daily schoolhouse practices that are based upon these two different anticipations have a lot to do with the three facts cited above.

I will use preparation time for teaching as an example of a daily schoolhouse practice that is a misused resource and a contributor to diminishing professionalism.

Take Away

Today’s classrooms contain more diversity of culture, socio-economic background, native languages spoken, academic proficiency, and motivation to learn than ever before. This is not necessarily a bad thing, because it reflects our community and contemporary culture in the United States. Such diversity is, however, a challenge for clinical teaching. For clinical teaching, each child presents a unique and challenging mind to be taught. Clinical teaching engages each child individually, assessing their current level of understanding and skill, and causing each child to learn from that beginning point. And, in a clinical teaching model, this assessment is the basis for preparing each day’s lesson plan.

Daily preparation of lesson plans is more critical today than ever before. The following illustrates four attributes of preparation for effective teaching and learning:

• Motivation – The immediate lesson piques each child’s interest in learning. From a unique question or the “hook” of a surprise to a review of yesterday’s lesson, effective teaching actively connects children to what they are to learn. The literature is replete with the connection of non-motivated children and failed learning. No motivation, little learning.

• Differentiation – The lesson includes materials for children at different reading levels. Even though the vocabulary and complexity of the text must differ, the prepared material helps each child to reach similar understandings and competencies relative to the lesson objectives. The objective is learning, the pathway to learning will be different for different children.

• ESL – Students whose native language is not English require help in being ready to learn, such as previewing vocabulary, interpretation of terms in their native language, physical models and, most importantly, time in each lesson to check for their understanding. Knowledge is reached no matter the language.

• Engagement – The lesson must ask each child to actively respond with “this is what I think” or “this is what I feel” and provide teacher feedback a child’s response. If a child is not actively engaged in the lesson, the child is a spectator.

• Good lessons do not happen by accident. They are carefully constructed and refined. Good lesson planning, review, and improvement require time.

What Do We Know?

Teachers in one-room schools did not have prep time. My grandmother taught in a very rural one-room school in southwestern Wisconsin. Her assignment was to teach 40+ children in grades 1 through 8. From the moment children arrived at school to the moment they departed, she was the only adult in the school and was constantly on duty. She prepped at home.

The provision of prep time for daily teaching is borrowed from a collegiate model. College professors and instructors typically worked within a balanced schedule of student instruction and professional work, including office hours for meeting with students and preparation for next instruction. The collegiate model includes the expectation that professors consistently engage in professional reading, writing and research.

Prep time in most schools is a product of collective bargaining. It emerged in teacher contracts in the 1950s and 60s as teacher associations aligned with the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) or National Education Association (NEA) and engaged in bargaining. The provision of prep time was treated as a benefit subject to the give and take of contract negotiations. Minutes of prep time were argued and depending upon the contract was approximately one class period to prepare for all other classes of instruction.

In 2018, a study of prep time revealed “that out of an average 7.5-hour workday, the most common amount of planning time provided to teachers is 45 minutes per day. Across the country, prep times vary, from 15 minutes per day day to more than an hour in some districts.”

https://www.k12insight.com/trusted/teachers-don’t-have-enough-prep-time/

Why Is This Thus?

The bargaining origin of prep time muddied the issue of prep time. The argument of who directs teacher prep time – teacher or administration – was argued but not answered. Is prep time within a teacher’s teaching assignment or is it a benefit outside of the assignment? If it is within, then administration can direct how a teacher uses prep time. If it is a benefit beyond a contracted teaching assignment, a teacher determines how prep time will be used.

Teachers have not helped the argument that prep time is personal time. Historically, students and parents had a distinct perception of how teachers used their non-teaching time. Back when people were allowed to smoke in schools, teacher lounges were smoke-filled havens. Student stories of looking into a lounge clouded with smoke shaped the common image that a teacher prep period was a bathroom stop and time for a cigarette, nothing more.

In the No Smoking era, the use of prep time as personal time extended beyond the teacher lounge. If prep time is personal time, then a teacher can leave school during a prep period to accomplish personal errands, such as banking, going to a pharmacy, or quick shopping. Parents and community members who greet a teacher who is shopping during a school day do not make a critical connection of prep time with the need for instructional preparation.

From the administrative perspective, prep time is part of a contracted teaching assignment and is vulnerable to reassignment based upon daily school needs. As there is a shortage of teachers, there also is an ever-greater shortage of substitute teachers. Principals look at prep time schedules to fill daily substitute needs in classrooms, hallway and cafeteria supervisions, and other non-teaching work. Some teachers report losing more than half their prep time each month to administrative re-assignments. If prep time is part of a teacher’s daily contract, then prep time is available for reassignment. Needs must be met!

Reassignment is a creeping problem. Covering a class for a colleague who is absent from school due to illness or family emergency seems very collegial and natural for a professional teacher. It is a reciprocal agreement – I will cover for your incidental need and you will cover for mine. The creep is that coverage moved from an English teacher covering for an English teacher to an English teacher covering the auto shop and physics class and a lunch shift. Reassignment of prep time has become a generalized practice without concern for a teacher’s preparation to teach the new assignment or the concept that “we need a body” in the halls for a class period.

Perhaps being a “helper” is in the DNA of most teachers. One of the first things out of a teacher’s mouth whenever a problem arises is, “How can I help?”. The outcome of this frequent response is that a teacher willing to help with coverage does more and more instructional review and preparation for teaching at home.

Is reassigning a teacher during a prep period to cover an additional assignment a use of an administrative resource or a misuse of a teaching and learning resource?

This returns us to the Take Away above. The unprofessional treatment of teacher prep time erodes teacher professionalism and career sustainability. In a recent national survey, 60% of teachers who reported that they are considering leaving teaching and it was not the teaching that caused their dissatisfaction. It was the overwhelmingness of everyday non-teaching factors, including constant loss of prep time.

To Do

The following steps will not immediately alleviate a school’s shortage of teachers or substitute teachers. These steps will make an immediate repair to and bolstering of teacher professionalism in any school.

1. Make a clear and inviolate connection between quality preparation for instruction and effective teaching that causes all children to learn. Make this an earthquake policy – broken only in the event of earthquake (valid everywhere but California). Establish a quid pro quo – high quality instruction for the protection and support of instructional preparation.

On a daily basis, the administration demands a continuous progress instruction for each child that is based upon a clinical assessment and alignment of each child’s learning readiness and needs, and, each teacher will use daily preparation time, including before and after school time, to create such continuous progress instruction.

2. Provide administrative support for instructional preparation. The new mantra, “How can we assist your preparation for causing each child to learn?”, replaces “We need you to be a hall supervisor this class period”. The absence of support of instructional preparation cannot be a cause for less than effective teaching. Part of administrative supervision of teaching includes the supervision of instructional preparation. Principal oversight of prep time assures that prep time remains protected and is targeted on effective instruction.

3. Make a clear and inarguable connection between protected preparation time and the achievement of annual curricular goals. Too often a defense of low achievement is the lack of instructional support or the constant interruption of instruction and its preparation for non-instructional reasons. There should be a reciprocal here. Better preparation will beget better instruction that will beget improved learning performance.

Imagine a month of school in which every teacher is provided with protected preparation. Equally imagine a month in which principals casually yet purposefully oversee instructional prep time to provide their support of needed resources. Finally, imagine a year of school and the learning outcomes that can be attained when a school prioritizes prep time, clinical instruction, and student learning. Then, imagine the professionalism of principals and teachers in a school that connects protected prep time with improved student learning.

The Big Duh!

Trends are phenomenon that have a life cycle. The trending perception that teaching is not a desired profession can be altered by our professional practices. I wager the proverbial dime that a school that protects and supports instructional preparation and connects protected prep time with effective teaching and learning outcomes will be a school that both attracts teacher candidates and retains veteran teachers.

A school leader may say “We cannot afford to protect teacher prep time. We don’t have alternative resources to cover our daily demands.” I respond by saying, “As a profession of teachers and educators, we cannot afford the continuation of non-professional practices. Change now or continue the trend of diminishing teacher professionalism and the perception of a teaching career”.

Leaders and Legacy: Work In Progress

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Why does a person take a leadership position? After all the hoopla of interviewing, recruitment and hiring have faded, after new pay checks have been received, and after your name is on the letterhead, most say they assumed leadership in order to make a difference in the life of the organization – in this case, a school or school district. Being hired to be a school superintendent is personally and professionally exciting. There is a honeymoon period of getting to know each other and egos bloom. However, the clock is ticking. The opportunity to make a difference began on day one not the end of the honeymoon. Now, what? Will you be a placeholder or will you have made a difference?

What Do We Know?

School boards typically hire a new superintendent who is different from the prior superintendent. This is not a slam on the predecessor, it is just the way things work. Also, school boards do not hire a superintendent to continue the work of the prior superintendent. The intention of the employer and the employee is that something new and better will happen.

Thus, the dilemma. The length of tenure and the time it takes to implement a meaningful program are not equal. Change takes time.

The mean tenure for a superintendent in the same position is five to six years. Interestingly, this is slightly more than a decade ago when the mean was 3-4 years. Tenures are somewhat longer for smaller school and suburban leaders than large, urban school district leaders. With an annual turnover rate of 14 to 16 percent each year, superintendents have roughly six years to do their significant work.

https://www.aasa.org/content.aspx?id=740

A six-year tenure is a superintendent’s window of opportunity. Because six years is an averaged number, some leaders arithmetically will have more years. On the other side of the statistic, an equal number of leaders have fewer years to implement the programs the newness they were hired to bring to their schools.

https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/SuperintendentsBrown-Center9314.pdf

The truth is this – time runs out.

Why Is This Thus?

Organizational change theory is well-studied and it pertains to school leadership.

“Change takes tremendous effort. It takes as much effort to organize and manage a significant change initiative as it does to manage the daily operations of the ongoing school operations. In effect, it takes twice as much human effort to affect a significant change because the humans also must do their daily work.”

https://nwi.pdx.edu/NWI-book/Chapters/Franz-5b-(system-change).pdf

“It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things.”

https://hbr.org/2008/07/choosing-strategies-for-change

Because change can be difficult for people and processes that do not want to be changed, leaders find their being responsible for change to be a precarious employment position. For this reason alone, leaders are often tentative in initiating significant change early in their tenure before they have developed sustainable working relationships.

From beginning to end, a change process takes up to eight years to realize the results that were intended by those initiating the change. Eight years!

Pick your theory and model for implementing organizational change. I have looked at each. They all take time.

MAJOR APPROACHES & MODELS OF CHANGE MANAGEMENT
1) Lewin’s Change Management Model.
2) McKinsey 7 S Model.
3) Kotter’s change management theory.
4) Nudge Theory.
5) ADKAR model.
6) Bridges’ Transition Model.
7) Kübler-Ross Five Stage Model.

https://www.cleverism.com/major-approaches-models-of-change-management/

Change in education is slightly different than change in other human industries. The research on change is largely informed by research organizations where the results of change can be observed within a short period of time. Research has concentrated on business, especially health care. When change is directed at instructional practices, curricular reform, and teacher professional development and the critical outcomes of interest are measures by school and/or student performance, it takes evaluation over four to five years to observe meaningful performance differences and to correlate the movement to the implemented change.

Consider changing a reading program in elementary schools. If the goal is to improve reading proficiency by the end of third grade, a change starting this year in Kindergarten will take four academic years to demonstrate comparable data to the proficiency data of the prior program. If the change is an instructional model, implementing Danielson’s Frameworks of Teaching for example, it will take three to four years for a teacher to eliminate a prior model and thoroughly implement the new. This makes the timeline of planning, preparation for change, implementation of change strategies, regression of old strategies and practice of new new strategies, and evaluation of results stretch to eight years.

For most school leaders, given the average six years of tenure, the necessary six to eight years of time runs out before they can affect a significant change in their schools.

To Do

The “do no harm” approach: Follow the Hippocratic Oath for medical doctors and “do no harm”. Lead and manage your schools so that they are as strong on your last day as they were on your first day. This is the approach taken by most superintendents.

The “do some good” approach: Each school year presents opportunities for small changes and small improvements that can be achieved without the turmoil of organizational change. Changing a bell schedule requires staff and students to adjust their usual routines, but it can realize a reprioritization of time. A bell schedule change process from first discussion to accepted practice may take an academic year. Changes to school operations, such as new security systems, monitored entrances and exits, and visitor badge wear constitute very valid and worthwhile changes that require changes in behavior. These should be implemented without causing much organizational turmoil. Changing a school mascot or reducing school programs may seem easier to accomplish than they really are. Some small change opportunities can become professional graveyards.

The “do great things” approach: Time, opportunity, convergence of personalities, and money present singular opportunities for a superintendent to affect major and significant change. This convergence makes all the difference between dreamers and doers. When a school leader is at the junction of these factors and has the personal leadership skills and drive to make things happen, great things can happen. A superintendent may have one opportunity in a career to to build a significant new school. The economics and politics of successful school mergers and closings are dicey, but can be accomplished. Installing curricular reform, such as K-12 reading/ELA or K-12 math, big change initiatives requiring time, professional development, money, and planning and argumentation can be achieved. For the superintendent and school board, these types of changes spend a great deal of relationships capital, but they succeed everyone wins. Some succeed wonderfully while others succumb to the weight of the effort and cost. Perhaps all superintendents dream of doing great things then find they are subject to time, place and circumstances.

The Big Duh!

Your legacy is yours to create.

Most school leaders do not think of the legacy they will leave in their current position until it is time for their departure. Then, it is retrospective and reconstructive work.

Some school leaders consider legacy opportunities, the ways in which they can affect major improvements in their schools, all the time. When they have a schools-first not a my-reputation-first mindset and when they are at the convergence of the “do great things” factors, these leaders can cause their schools to emerge from change with outstanding improvements.

Where are you in your legacy work?

No Bucks, No Buck Rogers. Bucks Launch Great Results

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A great line from Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff explains what caused the development of the jet planes that broke the sound barrier: “…no bucks, no Buck Rogers”. Bucks as in money. Test pilot courage and skill and the aerodynamics of the Bell X1 aside, funding was the propellant necessary for moving man past the speed of sound and into outer space. Money makes things happen.

The presence or absence of bucks also explains a lot about schools. Money is not the the singular characteristic of successful schools, but the constant lack of money is a regular characteristic of struggling schools. Money that is well spent has the power to propel student learning just as it did NASA’s rockets. Money committed to a specific educational outcome can accomplish great achievements in student learning. What would it take to make your school district a Buck Rogers launch pad?

Take Away

Public education is a public expense derived from the collection of taxes levied for public purposes. I accentuate the word “public” because the responsibility for educating our youth is assigned by the Constitution to each state’s government. Although the federal government contributes large bundles of money through Title programs, a majority of education cost is paid by state and local tax money. Public education taken in total is one of our nation’s major businesses. National spending on education in 2019 approximated $690 billion. A huge number! The number is more understandable as a per pupil expense of $12,201 in 2019.

Turn the numbers sidewise. The average 2019 teacher salary in the USA is $60,000. Tack on a benefits package of $20,000. Using averages with an instructional year of 180 days and a workday of 8 hours, an hour of instruction costs $65.

What do we know?

Education is an intentional cause and effect relationship. We are instructed and we learn. We can be educated about many things at little to no cost. Self-instruction. The difference between self-education and public education is scope. Part of the scope is the number of students. Consider all the children in your community and that is your target scope. Another part of scope is time. As a rule, we educate children for 13 years or from enrollment in 4K to graduation from grade 12. The third component of scope is the breadth and depth of curricular and co-curricular programs. This scope is all the academic, activity, arts and athletic programs sponsored by the school board.

Programming over time has cost and these costs vary according to the population. Consider the 1.1 million children in New York City’s public schools and the 503 children in my local school district. NYC requires $25 billion to per year fund all its programs for its population of 4K-12 children and our local schools require $11 million per year. Each is a lot of zeroes; the scope of cost is in the zeroes.

Dazzling dollar signs aside, there is no scientifically-derived amount of money that equals a quality education. Children can succeed in schools with low per pupil spending as well as in high spending schools. And, low spending schools can achieve superb educational outcomes for all children and high spending schools can sputter to cause below basic educational outcomes. Returning to The Right Stuff, some schools send their children into space and other schools fail to leave the ground. The critical attributes are well-trained teachers connecting with well-written curricula and a variety of learning support systems to assist children with challenges.

The question I raise is “What prevents all schools from sending all children into the educational equivalent of outer space?”.

As long teachers are paid a fair, living wage for the community in which they reside and work, the answer is not spending more money on salaries and benefits.

Instead, the answer is “What is the cost of the educational outcomes you want for all children?”. The answer is “The amount of money needed to create my school district’s Buck Rogers”. I understand Buck Rogers may be a different educational goal and outcome in each school school district.

Why is this thus?

Local control. National averages show that 47% of public education costs are paid by state funding. 8% is paid with federal funds. 45% of educational costs are borne by local taxes. Political processes complicate or eliminate the possibility of state legislatures or Congress significantly increasing the dollars available to educate the children in your community. School boards levy local taxes to raise, on average, $45 of every $100 spent in local pubic school. If school boards need more money to provide their Buck Rogers education, their local control of the tax levy is the tool to do so. As Kevin Bacon said in A Few Good Men, “These are the facts and they are undisputed”. If a school board wants Buck Rogers results, the school board has the power to raise the necessary money.

To Do

• Prioritize your educational outcomes. What is a Buck Rogers educational outcome in your school district? Remember that Rogers did not just get off the launch pad, he reached into outer space. Your Buck Rogers educational outcome needs to be very significant.
• Commit to assuring the achievement of your highest priority outcome. Create a community consensus agreeing to your significant Buck Rogers educational outcome. Publish what Buck Rogers looks like in your schools.
• Determine a strategy of actions required to achieve your Buck Rogers outcome. Plan the work. The plan undoubtedly will require time for educator training, curricular organization, development of support services, and monitoring and adjusting along the way. Take the long look in developing your outcome strategy. A big Buck Rogers is worth doing well.
• Create a funding strategy to pay for these required actions. Fund the work. Simply remember this: No bucks, no Buck Rogers. Most strong Buck Rogers outcomes require initial and continuing funding – create funding that goes the distance.
• Implement your strategy of actions. Work the plan. Remember that all other educational programs within your schools will continue to operate while you develop your Buck Rogers. If you allow other programs to diminish or fail, Rogers will crash. Buck Rogers is inside the district’s total programming not instead of its programming.
• Achieve your local Buck Rogers education.

It is surprising how simple planning for a Buck Rogers educational outcome is once you commit your school district to achieving a Rogers outcome. The most difficult part of the scheme is selecting your district’s Buck Rogers outcome. As soon as you make that your #1, the rest of the #s fall into place.

The Big Duh

School Boards are not required to create Buck Rogers plans. A board can adopt an annual educational plan that meets state standards and statutory requirements. No more than that is required. A board can levy the minimum amount of money required to achieve their minimal educational plan. Today, when school boards meet the statutory and mandate requirements, boards are meeting the responsibilities of their elected office. However, meeting the mandate and statutory requirements in my state and across our nation result in a majority of our children achieving below proficiency on all academic standards. Read this again. The outcomes that schools achieve by implementing only the mandated and statutory requirements are academic inproficiency.

Buck Rogers flies well above the proficiency barrier. Local control gives a school board the option to provide Buck Rogers educational outcomes. Buck Rogers requires bucks and spending of those bucks stops or starts at the school board.