Category Archives: Blog

Human Talent Is The Key to Tech Advancement

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You may read this article as a presentation of an employment concept or as an endorsement of a person; either way, you are right.

Which is more valuable when you are short on each – human talent or tangible, highly desired, working things? Which is the better investment when dollars are scarce? How do you tell people who want things now, “Be patient, please. We’re working on it.” We picked talent and never asked the question again.

Technology in a small school district always has been a conflict of competing interests. Small enrollments produce small revenue streams that must nourish everything the small school strives to do. Small schools wanting to provide contemporary instructional and learning technologies face the wall of reality; technology is expensive. For these reasons, many small schools in the 90s and first decade of 2000 lingered in the backwater of educational technology.

The Gibraltar Schools (Fish Creek, WI) were in that eddy in the late 90s. Our K-12 enrollment of 600 children enjoyed many advantages; first and foremost was a very favorable teacher-student ratio resulting in small class sizes. In ’97 our students had access to two, small iMac computer labs and most teachers had older Apple desktop models in their classrooms. Gibraltar is on the northern Door County peninsula where early Internet lines hung from highway telephone poles in a single loop circumnavigating the peninsula. It was a fragile, low capacity structure that fed our small, low capacity technology and we supported our technology with a part-time IT employee.

As with many systems in small schools, when one component of the system is disrupted, the entire system falters. In 2000 our part-time IT man left us, making the right decision to pursue a better financial future for his family. Without the Man, our two computer labs, our array of desktops and low-incidence applications were in jeopardy of tanking because we had lost our support system.

The ensuing search for a new IT person resulted in a series of similar conversations with similar candidates. There was one question, however, that drastically changed the course of Gibraltar’s technology. When asked, “Specifically and conceptually, what qualities do you bring to the life of Gibraltar’s educational technology?”, most candidates spoke well and at length about personal specifics and whiffed on the conceptual. However, one candidate said, “My resume and recommendations explain that I am a good ‘screw driver’. I can build and maintain computer operations.” Then, he lit us up talking about the “potentials” and “possibles” of how technology could be used by students and teachers and school leadership; brainstorming ideas, one after another. This was the talent we were looking for in spades. We knew immediately that his talent for seeing both our technology needs and our technology potentiality made him THE man.

We bought him. We bought his talent of insight and foresight. We bought the vitality of a new administrator/IT partnership committed to “what comes next.” From that partnership, the Gibraltar Schools blossomed with a rebuilt internal backbone of linked servers and classrooms where every user had access to essential applications. We watched the stringing of higher speed copper wire later replaced with fiber. We listened to his networking with Verizon as they replaced copper on the phone poles with fiber and then, magically sawed through the bedrock of our campus to attach our school to their fiber. He made what everyone said could not happen happen.

We chased a small, annually renewable federal grant and installed a “one laptop per student” program for all high school students; theirs for school, home and for keeps. In addition to a small cadre of permanent laptops in each K-8 classroom, we installed a “laptop per student in school” program with mobile labs that gave every teacher access to classroom laptops whenever their instructional plan required each student to have a hands-on laptop. Every classroom wore an interactive white board. Our new systems integrated real time instructional management of student data recording, reporting and analysis (attendance, grading, and testing with parent notification, including homework and assignment posting). For a small, rural school district, we became rich in instructional and learning applications.

The uniqueness of our administrative/IT partnership was its “skunk works.” Talent thrives when it has the opportunity to experiment with the “what ifs.” Our talent developed a “skunk works” that field tested many laptops in preparation for our OLPS program, built working mini-stations driven by cell phones, and, before school security was a hot issue, installed an in-school and campus camera system on a “dime.”

For more than a decade, THE man fretted the constant need to add more servers, replace old servers, and commit too many dollars and too much time to the management of our in-school server system. It was an “anchor” of heavy weight and he wondered, “why?” Our partnership conversations became laced with his discussion of “off-site servers”, “server farms” and “renting space where we have instant and constant access to our programs from afar.” All of this was conceptual until the day he began talking about Amazon. Recently, the Gibraltar Schools became the first public school district in the nation to move its educational technology systems to Amazon Web Services and operate within the “cloud.” Causing this concept to become reality will save the schools 25% of what they would otherwise spend on owning and maintaining in-house server systems over the next five years. Migrating school-wide applications to AWS means that district human resources needed to monitor and sustain these workloads can be directed to the “next” concepts that will advance the Gibraltar Schools into an even more conceptually sophisticated future.

Human talent is the essential element in causing organizations like schools to move from their status quo into a future of possibilities. While the conceptual development of new ideas may come easier to the talented, it is their capacity to create networks with others that creates the push-pull of organizational advancement. The Gibraltar Schools would have remained in the herd of tech “wannabes” if it were not for THE man we hired. The answer to the earlier question clearly is “talent.”

(Steve Minten is the Gibraltar Schools’ “talent.” Mr. Minten has been the district’s Instructional Technology Director for 15 years. He is the only certified AWS Solutions Architect in Wisconsin. Mr. Minten can be reached at sminten@gibraltar.k12.wi.us)

The Attack on Teacher Prep – A Last Bastian At Risk

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The idea that teachers in public schools need not be professionally prepared by licensed teacher preparation programs is circulating in my state. So that I am clear on the issue, I believe that this idea is an unadulterated wrong. The idea is propagated by the self-interests that have continuously whittled at the institution of public education until it teeters on the edge of extinction.

The idea that public education teachers do not need professional licensing finds its roots in four political-economic scenarios that have risen to dangerous heights. These scenarios are the politicization of public education, the trading of educational consumerism for votes in the ballot box, the use of PAC funds to overwhelm the public with anti-public education campaigns, and the inability of public education to defend itself.

Once, the tradition in our nation was that public education was locally governed with oversight by the state. Local school boards crafted local educational policy and programs that complied with generalized mandates from the state legislature. For almost two centuries, public schools served their communities by educating youth, inculcating American values, and preparing graduates to be contributing citizens of the community, state and nation. It worked. Our state constitution guarantees an “equitable and quality education” for every child funded by state and local tax dollars. The right to a free and public education was a given regardless of the political party in the majority in the state capital. It worked. For decades the liberalism of our state’s urban areas argued with the conservatism of the rural areas and always found a common ground that best served the children of the state. It worked.

That WAS our tradition. Today it is not.

Public education has become a commodity branded by partisan politics. In 2001 President Bush elevated partisan manipulation of public education with the enactment of No Child Left Behind and attaching reforms of regulation and accountability espoused by the Republican Party. In one fell swoop, the President appropriated tax payer angst regarding property local property taxes, a bruised and declining status of our nation as the world leader in international educational assessments, the always popular appeal to American pride, and conservative demands for data-driven accountability into an indelible plank of Republican politics. Notwithstanding the faults of NCLB, the GOP has beaten the drum that Republican politicians at all levels are committed to lowering school taxes, demanding higher performance-based accountability, and continuing the reconstruction of public schools into more effective learning centers. At the same time, Republicans successfully painted Democratic opponents as high cost and unaccountable traditionalists. Conservative Republicanism is synonymous with unending educational reforms; their bandwagon requires continuous reform in order to sustain itself as the “leader for change.”

Parallel to public education becoming a political commodity was the emergence of educational consumerism. Young parents with scho0l-age children found the partisanship of public education to be unbelievably receptive to their consumer demands. Any and every parental concern with their local school could be bundled into the demand for “choice.” Politicians soon found powerful political allies, especially Republican governors and legislators, in the “I want this for my child” demands of young parents. Because public education is a state issue, the statehouse became the epicenter for enacting educational reform and meeting these consumer demands. It was easy and expedient for a campaigning state legislator to identify “educational choice” as a voter rallying cry and to position an electoral campaign on satisfying school choice demands. It was easy to divert state and local tax revenues for education to private and parochial schools and programs of choice. Money was attached to children not to schools. And, as the “leaders for change” found office, they needed to continuously advance the opportunity for further change cloaked as “choice” in order to remain in office.

At this date, consumer-driven reforms in my state have reduced levels of state funding for local schools, increased the requirements for performance-based accountability for public schools, required published report cards for all public schools, expanded the opportunity for parents to select schools of “choice”, and expanded state funding for all schools of choice, while disallowing any performance-based accounting for or reporting of the educational achievement of students in “choice” schools.

The third scenario calls to point the old political adage – follow the money. State elections in my state are preceded with unprecedented advertisements aligning candidates with consumer demands for educational reform. The frequency and fervency of television and radio time devoted to attacking the cost of public education, the unchanging achievement gaps of children left stranded in stripped-out metropolitan schools while continuing to advance any and every demand for “choice” increases every spring and fall. Noticeably, the small print at the bottom of these television and print news ads attributes the support for the ads to political citizen groups with out-of-state origins and funding sources. Or, to in-state activist groups heavily funded by out-of-state partisan PACs. PAC money funds campaigns to elect politicians who redirect money from public schools to schools of choice.

So, who is left to argue the counter point. This is the fourth scenario. Certainly not teachers or public school educational leaders. In my state, teacher unions were immediate victims of educational politics. Unions were not banned, but their political potency was stripped when partisan legislation eliminated their scope of collective bargaining. When teachers could no longer use their union dues to advance their wages and benefits through bargaining, union membership dropped immediately and the ability of state teacher organizations to compete against PAC money was eliminated. Teacher unions in my state are ghost entities.

Additionally, any collective action by teachers in opposition to partisan legislation carries immediate negative repercussions. The legislature only meets in the months when school is in session. Teachers who rally for their pro-public school political interests are accompanied with partisan claims that “kids in school are being ignored and their education diminished by self-interested teachers.” Or, because teachers are paid with public tax funds, their activism uses “tax payer money” to argue against “choices” demanded by parent activists. It is a lose/lose proposition for public educators.

Hence, the idea that teachers need not be prepared by their jobs through accredited educational institutions and licensed by the state department of instruction is gaining ground. It follows. If we reduce state funding for public schools, increase the accountability and reporting mandates for public schools, provide increased opportunity for parents to choose non-public schools at public expense, align voter interests with partisan politics, denigrate teachers as political players, then why not allow anybody who wants to be a public school teacher to be one.

There is one more scenario that must be attached to this story. The rate at which employed teachers are leaving public schools in my state is at an all-time high. Three-out-of-five teachers with less than three years of classroom experience will leave before the end of their third year. A career in public education is no longer economically or professionally viable for college graduates. With a greater than 60% abandonment rate, it is understandable that the next partisan action is to remove professional licensing as a requirement for employment as a public school teacher. In addition, the rate at which non-traditionally trained teachers leave the class room is double the rate for traditionally trained teachers. Even the unprepared who are hired as teachers find that teaching no longer is a viable professional career.

We would appreciate it if the last teacher out the door will kindly turn off the lights.

Ernie in the Back Row – The Reality of Educational Reform

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“Hey, Ernie! Yes, you in the back row of the faculty meeting where you have been sitting it seems like forever. Do you remember telling us ‘I’ve seen educational changes come and go. All I have to do is sit here and do nothing. I can teach the way I always have taught. It is all a tempest in a teapot and in the end nothing will have changed.’ Were you right? Have any of the reform mandates of the past thirty years done anything to change your teaching?”

In the 1980s and 90s Dr. Madeline Hunter was nationally active helping classroom teachers better understand the connections between learning theories and instructional design. For many teachers, her insights into how teaching using motivation, retention and reinforcement theories, to name just a few, significantly improved the ability of all children to learn and to repeat exceptional learning year after year. For other teachers, Dr. Hunter upset the applecart. Hardcore veteran teachers like Ernie had been using the same teaching techniques that their teachers had used in the 40s, 50s and 60s in their own teaching for years, if not decades,. Dr. Hunter recognized that educational reform was a process that some teachers would engage in gladly, others would learn over time, and some, not many, would be “Ernies.” Ernie was her name for the veteran teacher who was change oppositional. Ernie believed that his tried and true teaching, generally based upon lecture and rote learning, had worked over the ages and would work for him as long as he was in a classroom.

Needless to say, Ernie has seen an eyeful in the last thirty years. Just the intellectual reforms based upon learning and teaching theories have been amazing. Hunter’s Instructional Design. Outcome-Based Education. Understanding by Design. Framework for Teaching. Assessment FOR Learning. Whole Child Education. And, the list goes on. Interestingly, none of these reforms every threatened Ernie’s unwavering opposition to change. Why should they. Ernie observed that no teachers in the 80s and 90s were removed from their teaching positions due to their non-changeability.

Ernie probably sat up a little straighter in 2001 when No Child Left Behind was enacted as a federal plan for reforming public education. It was not the voice of President Bush expounding the urgency for the United States to repair its declining international status in educational assessments. It was not the infusion of federal dollars into Title programs that opened new teaching positions and purchased a flood of new teaching materials. And, it was not state governors extolling their legislatures to adopt NCLB regulations so that state budgets could be buffered with educational dollars. What caught Ernie’s attention was the doomsday clock of Adequate Yearly Progress. No matter the level of reading and math achievement of the students in Ernie’s school in 2001, by the spring of 2014 100% of all students were required to be proficient in state assessments or teachers would be fired and schools were going to close. It was the law.

For the first time in Ernie’s long memory, federal and state leadership said “What you are doing right now is not good enough. Do whatever it takes to meet the mandates of NCLB. If you can’t get the job done, we will fire you and find someone who can.” A mandate with the promise of enforcement was entirely new to Ernie, but as often as he was told “NCLB is the law and it is for real,” he still wondered what would happen if a great number of schools failed to make AYP. Would the Governor really fire all the teachers and take control of all those schools? So, Ernie waited and continued to teach as he always had taught and the academic achievements of his students continued to fall into the bottom of the “bell curve.” By 2007, 28% of all schools were failing to make AYP. The next year 38% of school failed to make AYP and USDE Secretary Duncan warned Congress that by 2011 82% of all schools would fail to make AYP if the rules of NCLB were not changed.

“Ah,” said Ernie. “Told you so.” State after state petitioned the USDE for relief from the AYP mandates of NCLB. “Ain’t nobody going to close schools or fire teachers now,” said Ernie, who had not changed his teaching practices one iota. He knew from his seat in the back of the faculty meetings that “change comes and change goes and, if you are smart, just sit back and do nothing. It will all blow over.”

But. Wait. NCLB did not entirely go away and the quid pro quo of the waivers caught Ernie’s attention. Academic standards were still in, but not the Common Core. School Report Cards replaced AYP and schools would be graded according to student performance in reading and math, attendance and graduation, and the quantitative gap in the academic achievements of mainstream white children and children of color and children with learning disadvantages. And, all teachers would be given a Teacher Effectiveness Index score based upon their use of effective teaching strategies and annual student achievement in reading in math. To top it off, all of this data would be publicly accessible on a statewide data base – the School Effectiveness Dashboard. Anyone in Ernie’s school district could dive into the data to find out how well Ernie’s students performed on the state assessments and how his school principal rated Ernie’s application of the Framework for Teaching.

“Really,” said Ernie. “I have been in my classroom since the 80s and after all the huffing and puffing I am still in my classroom. Let’s wait a little longer and see.”

Ernie was right once again. The state legislature botched the contracting for a statewide data system, renamed and adopted the Common Core academic standards saying “it would be nice if you taught these”, and dropped the evaluative features of the School Report Card system. The Report Card became an annual snapshot with no accountability features.

It may be that Ernie will retire this year. He has been in the classroom long enough to receive a full pension. Actually, it may be that Ernie has been retired for years but did not choose to leave his classroom. After all, his annual salary is greater than his annual pension and regardless of what he did in the classroom he still collected his paycheck. Next fall, we’ll look to the back row of the first faculty meeting of the year. Ernie may still be there. And, if not our Ernie, there still will be other Ernie’s slouched down low in their chair gazing out over a constantly reformed schoolscape that never really changes.

Building New Faculties

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If a faculty of teachers is the heart of any school, then high quality instruction by caring teachers is the end game of faculty-building.

Faculty building is the recruitment, hiring, sustenance and bonding of an array of expert teachers into a synergistic group whose total professional work is a harmonious teaching environment that causes all children to learn.

Today we are in faculty crisis. Our school districts are bottoming out in their ability to attract and retain end game teachers. A generally recognized low compensation and low appreciation for teachers and increasing governmental abandonment of traditional public schools are taking a toll. As the career teachers of the Baby Boom generation retire, how will we fill their roles with new end game teachers? And, as nearly fifty percent of seated teachers leave the profession before the end of their fifth year, the capacity of school districts to build new faculties is more and more important.

http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/10/why-do-teachers-quit/280699/

Certainly, we cannot anticipate a national or even state-led strategy to build our next school faculties. While the US Department of Ed champions the improvement of teaching across the nation, there is little political appetite for a new federally-led initiative. The banner of conservative politics safeguards public education to state and local control. Yet, states are poorly able today to lead a resurgence in faculty-building. Too many governors balance annual budgets by squeezing their allocations for education and too many state politicians have embraced school choice as a strategy for building their political base. Reinvesting by the statehouse in faculty building in public schools would contradict their current alliances. Hence, if a new faculty is to be generated, it will be up to local school districts one school at a time.

The recipe for building a new faculty begins with a school governance commitment to do what it takes to recruit, hire, sustain and bind a diverse set of teachers into a faculty. “What it takes” requires the dedication of money for salaries up front, money for salaries and benefits going forward, and money for professional support. It is ludicrous to believe that a new faculty can be generated without new investment. This is why. When undergraduates in colleges and universities consider their potential careers and do a side-by-side analysis of what life in each career would be like, in growing numbers they reject education. They look at the low entry level compensation and the low rate of salary growth. “A night manager’s starting salary at a fast food restaurant was 20% higher than mine.”

http://blog.octanner.com/appreciation-2/why-teachers-and-nurses-are-among-the-least-appreciated-jobs

Low starting salaries are followed by pay schedules of miniscule annual increases and, depending upon the state’s revenue collections, frequent years of frozen wages. As teachers consider the totality of a career, they check the status of teacher retirement funds and find too many state pension plans going bankrupt. Compensation is a problem for young teachers who have a chance to change career pathways before they lock in with a family and mortgage; especially talented teachers who will be successful in almost any other career they choose.

This is why there must be a new investment in faculty building. Entry level salaries must be raised and the progression from entry level to the district’s highest salary level compacted from 15+ years to six or seven. After six years, all teachers should have reached a comparative level of instructional quality, student-centered expertise and professional integrity. If they haven’t, they don’t belong in the new faculty.

Parallel to compensation, starting teachers consider the public perception of teaching and, as a national generalization, find teachers to be held in modest to low esteem. “Teachers are female, familiar, ubiquitous, and it is difficult to quantify their value.” What a terrible generalization, but generalizations are the bane of teachers.

https://www.quora.com/Why-are-teachers-not-respected-in-American-culture

The list of indistinguishing characteristics goes on. Seasonal work. Short-term relationships with students and most families. Too many reports in the press about the bad acts of teachers. A “do gooder’s” profession. Bad experiences with a teacher are all you hear from peers. And, teachers are too rule orienting and conforming. At the end of the day, these generalizations are fully inaccurate of the vast majority of teachers, but in our society singular stories get generalized and spread broadly. Consider the daily news and the ratio of good stories about teachers to bad stories. Bad stories make the news. And such generalizations beget a lack of appreciation for teachers.

Gladly, even with low compensation and low appreciation, there are bright and talented individuals who still want to be teachers. However, they are counted as individuals when the majority of their bright and talented classmates choose other career paths.

The second ingredient in faculty building is creating an environment of professional integrity. In a 2014 Gallup Poll, teachers ranked last among 12 professional groups in agreeing that their opinion at work matters.

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0823-rizga-mission-high-teacher-retention-20150823-story.html

A teacher’s being told what to do did not start with No Child Left Behind and the standards movement, but these two phenomenon left all other reasons in the dust. NCLB ushered in a flood tide of “to do” mandates that have not yet left the house. Every teacher needed to submit their credentials to prove they were “high quality” and began to attend staff meeting after staff meeting to understand the meaning of Adequate Yearly Progress and AMOs .

http://eddataexpress.ed.gov/definitions.cfm

Schools everywhere charted the percentage of students attaining proficiency or better on statewide reading and math assessments and schools that did not make the mark quickly implemented new curricula and teaching models in order to make the mark on the subsequent year. Teachers were manipulatives just like paper and pencils. Data overwhelmed opinion.

Fast behind AYP came the need for more rigorous state academic standards and once again teacher input was not sought. State legislatures adopted appropriately rigorous academic standards in order to comply with federal fund-ladened mandates. And, once again teachers met in large rooms to be told what they would teach, how they would teach it, and how their job stability hinged on their students’ achievement.

http://www.corestandards.org/assets/WI_Adoption_CCS_2_June_2010_dpinr2010_75.pdf

The remedy will begin with a new era of professional integrity between school district leadership and the teaching faculty. A high level of professional integrity understands, accepts and benefits from a degree of tension. Every day is not one of sunshine and roses. Good arguments are healthy when they are undertaken by people who respect and trust each other. And, good arguments will improve organizational health and vitality. Arguments turn bad when they are not undertaken with respect and trust, but with animosity.

These are synonyms for making an argument: advance, allege, argue, assert, challenge, claim, confute, contend, contest, debate, disagree, dispute, elucidate, emphasize, enunciate, establish, explain, expostulate, express, oppose. They all are verbs that apply to an environment in which everyone cares about what their colleagues think and believe is best. These could be symptomatic of the professionalism that teachers want and deserve – the expectation that their well-argued opinions matter.

http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/make+an+argument

The third ingredient for building a new faculty is sustenance. Sustaining a new faculty is the expectation/requirement that every teacher will engage in professional learning. This is not the district’s usual presentation of professional development necessary for organizational fidelity. The district has the need and obligation to inculcate its personnel with procedural matters. Certainly, school safety and security today require every teacher’s attention. This is organizational development not professional learning. Professional learning feeds a teacher’s personal need for advanced education. It is teacher-centric in that a teacher decides and engages in studies that advance their professional talent. “Idiocentricity” is what makes professional learning an essential part of life in a new faculty.

http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/teaching_now/2016/03/best-deliverer-of-PD-may-be-teachers-but.html?intc=es

Some states have implemented personalized professional development strategies for teachers. Wisconsin’s PDP is an example, although it was implemented as a substitution for a faulted PD system of credits and units required for licensure renewal. Take away the relationship to license renewal and a PDP assumes the purpose of professional sustenance

http://dpi.wi.gov/tepdl/pdp

The last component of a new faculty is inspired principal leadership. An inspired principal is an effective instructional leader, a superb role model for children, an efficient administrative manager plus one. That “one” is the ability to bring out the “best and brightest” qualities of each and every member of the new faculty. Sometimes leading a large group of talented people is best served by underleading. Throw in examples of collegiality, participatory leadership, community, and “fun” and a principal begins to look inspired. When a faculty has an inspirational leader for a principal, often they find that appreciation, integrity, and sustenance become “just the way the new faculty is at our school.”

The Necessity of Sifting

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I bake, so I sift. I live, so I sift. So, I borrow the saying, “sift happens.” And, to create better and more delicate bakery and to develop better and more impactful life decisions, the more one must sift. Bakers sift of necessity. For leaders, a decision that has not been sifted is an educated guess. I sift continuously and encourage every school leader to refine their sifting skills. If not, that other thing also happens.

http://www.craftsy.com/article/sift-happens

As a bread baker, I sift because flour and other dry goods settle, become compacted and clotted, and sometimes contain packaging debris I don’t want to taste in my end products. Sifting flour, for example, creates clarity. A sifted and weighed eight ounces equals a sifted and weighed eight ounces every time. I smile when asked to measure out a cup of “fill in the blank” and blindly add it to my bowl. A cup is not a cup and seldom is it exactly eight ounces regardless of how well you dip and use a straight edge to level at the rim. Sift to know what you have and when you know what you have, you can predict your results.

One also must sift continuously in the world of contemporary school leadership. Your weekly, even your daily, interactions present you with hundreds of bits of information, opportunities, dilemmas, and challenges. The topic does not matter, everything must be sifted. Every student problem, parent demand, professional development program, curricular program, learning assessment, and management decision contains ideas with and without merit. Unsifted decisions contain unspoken assumption, unseen costs, and unintended consequences. If you don’t sift well, how can you predict the effectiveness and the efficiency of your processes or the efficacy of your outcomes? So, how does one decide?

One sifts the school scene with the seine of their Big Picture or “this is the image of what total school success looks like.” The Big Picture is multi-dimensional, timeless and founded upon informed values and objectives. Achieving the Big Picture may not occur within a leader’s career, but the struggle to achieve the bigness and clarity of the picture is always conducted without favor or affection for any unsifted variables.

When baking, I have a clear picture of what will come out of the oven and how it will be presented for eating. Sifting the ingredients is my insurance that what I want is what I will get.

When leading a school, I have a clear picture of the ultimate educational outcomes that should be the result of our public school. Sifting the elements and workings of the many sub-organizations that constitute schooling – teaching, curricular and co-curricular programming, community support, child needs, and government mandates and finances – insures that each decision I make will continuously and consistently create the reality of a Big Picture quality education for all children.