Category Archives: Blog

A Charlie Brown Take on Protecting Student Data

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The adults say, “Millenial children. You intuit the use of technology. Bravo! It is difficult to imagine your generation without your ubiquitous connection to the digital universe.”

The children raise their eyebrows without taking their eyes from the screens they study and nod.

The adults say, “Now that you are engaged with the digital universe 24/7, we will take steps to protect your identity from unscrupulous people who could do you harm.”

This pronouncement causes the children to quickly glance at who is speaking to perceive if that person is credible. But, just a glance.

The children say, “And, how will you protect us?”

The adults say, “We will not allow the unscrupulous people to have access to your Internet identity.”

The children say again without looking away from their screens, “Like you won’t let them know our e-mail addresses, our cell phone numbers, our social media handles, and our Face Book addresses.” They say it as a statement but with the inflection of a question.

The adults say, “Yes, like that. And, we’ll protect your sacred school performance data so that they cannot prey upon you with Internet ads and solicitations. We don’t want them to sell your identities for unapproved purposes.”

This has piqued the children’s attention. “Will you protect our identities as well as you protect your own?”

The adults say, “You have our word.”

The children slowly turn their hands so that the adults can read their screens.

The closest screen read

In 2014 alone, financial institutions and major retail outlets reported the theft of more than 400 million customer identities. The thieves gained access to the customer names, credit card numbers, banking information and electronic identities. These corporations suffered the greatest number of identity losses.

TK/TJ Maxx                    94,000,000

JP Morgan/Chase          76,000,000

Target                            76,000,000

Home Depot                  56,000,000

Citigroup                          3,900,000

Countrywide                    2,600,000

Another screen displayed twenty-five examples of cyber terrorism in which sovereign nations have been invaded with malware and records thefts. No government is immune.

Another screen steamed the movie Identity Theft.

One of the children said, “And, you will protect us this well.”

The adults did not respond. Now and again, adult hypocrisy knows no bounds.

“Arrrrgh!”

The Political Importance of “Sally, Down the Street”

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“Sally” is the name we give to a local person who lives “down the street.” She is our figurative representation of the public at large. Often, when we are considering a proposition we want to present to the public we ask this question as a litmus test to check the verity and clarity of our thinking: “Can Sally down the street understand this?” If this was a partisan blog, she would be a plumber named Joe.

Interestingly, Sally has changed. From neighborhood Sally, she has become community, Wisconsin, and “I’m here to tell you, Mr. President” Sally. It used to be that when Sally didn’t understand something, she didn’t want to draw attention to herself so she allowed herself to fade into the background. She let those who understood, or at least said they understood, form a group opinion and she would nod in agreement. Sally and the non-understanding followed along behind those who understood. Not so much anymore. Today, when Sally, especially “Consumer Sally”, doesn’t understand something, she demands that someone explain the proposal again and as many times as it takes so that she can understand it. Sally “down the street” is no longer a passive citizen.

And, it used to be that when Sally looked at the source of new information and, if that source was known and previously trusted, then she would trust the new information without too much examination. “You’ve trusted me in the past; you can trust me now,” carried many accepting Sallys along in a speaker’s wake. Today, how many television advertisements use well-recognized celebrities or retired politicians who always smile when they say “Trust me.” Not so much anymore for Sally in the trusting department either. Trustworthiness for Sally is a short-lived effect today.

Public leaders have come to the realization that if Sally “down the street” doesn’t understand what they are talking about, their proposition is dead in the water. Sally no longer goes along to get along. Because of her importance, the need for Sally to understand now dictates both the substance and the form of every contemporary public conservation. Sally is who local politics is all about and everything today is political.

“Sallys” everywhere have changed the dynamic of acceptance and acceptability in our society. Consumer Sallys, individually and collectively, rise up today to demand safer products, higher quality products, more cost-efficient products, and to give product-providers everywhere fair notice that “no one shall take a consumer around here for granted.”

Sallys also have risen up to demand consumerism in education. Sally is the large and growing group of mothers who demand choice in education. Some started as home schooling Sallys, but the education choice market has exploded. She has formed the new political dynamic in most states. Governors and state party leaders know that they must have the Sallys on their side at the polls, because the Sallys have become a large voter bloc. For this reason, many governors favor school voucher plans, open enrollment, charter schools, more and more transparency in school governance, and any option that satisfies a parent’s opportunity to control their child’s schooling.

Local school leaders have become savvy about the Sally Moms. At least those leaders who will still be in their leadership positions next year have become savvy. They must, because everything about school and education is now political. In a local school issue, the number of children in fourth grade grew from the anticipated 21 per section to 26 per section. The increase in enrollment is good for this small, rural school district. However, a tradition of keeping elementary sections to a very small student to teacher ratio, usually around 20 to 1, set off the fourth grade Sallys. The number of community members who regularly attend board meetings can be counted on one hand minus the thumb. The fourth grade enrollment issue brought out more than two dozen Sallys, several with children in second and third grade who wanted to assure no such bad decisions in the future. Whereas, most school districts in Wisconsin would be pleased with only 26 children in its fourth grade sections, the local board was faced with demands to hire an additional fourth grade teacher – immediately. An administrative survey indicated that, should an additional section be formed, only a handful of the 52 children in fourth grade would voluntarily move to the new section. The reframed issue moved from a lower student-t0-teacher ratio to maintaining child friendships. The problem was settled with the employment of a teacher-licensed classroom aide to assist with reading and math instruction in each of the two fourth grade sections. Sally became satisfied with a lower student to teacher ratio in essential academic areas and child happiness.

So, why the local interest in satisfying Sally? The local School Board, as with each of the other school districts in this county, relies upon taxpayer support of frequent referenda that allow the school boards to exceed the state-imposed revenue limit of school levy amounts. Keeping Sallys satisfied better assures that the community will support these necessary referenda for additional tax revenues. Satisfied Sallys causes community support and that equals fully funded school programs.

Keeping Sally satisfied is not limited to local officials. Colleges and universities have learned the importance of Sally. In the past, they would publish their academic studies knowing that only those in the field would understand that material. Now, their publications must be written so that Sally “the state funding taxpayer” understands what she is paying for as well as the findings of the study that the colleges and universities hope will create new and important public information.

“Those who are involved in funding academic research are really keen to see that it’s going to lead to something practical,” said James Ryan, the education school’s dean, who was trained not as an academic but as a lawyer. “If faculty are interested in their work having influence, paying attention to the language that they use is really important.”

As an example, he cites research about the benefits of pre-kindergarten education that someone thought to explain in the simplest possible way: by calculating that providing it would save more money than it would cost.

“That was genius,” Ryan said. “It’s a brilliant way of making the research not only accessible, but compelling.” And compared to a dense treatise advocating for pre-kindergarten using terms such as cognitive development and holistic instruction, “which one is going to make a better case?”

Another strategy is assuring that those communicating with Sally are really focused upon her as an information consumer and not their own egos as communicators. Too often those talking with Sally focus upon themselves, their organization, and a self-importance that forgets Sally.

Stony Brook University has established an entire center for Communication Science, named for the actor and director Alan Alda, who inspired it out of frustration with the scientists he met as host for 13 years of the public-television series Scientific American Frontiers.

“I must have interviewed about 700 scientists,” said Alda. “I just listened and tried to understand what they were saying. But they were in lecture mode most of the time.”

The actor remains involved in the center—there he’s called Professor Alda—and uses improv and other techniques to teach graduate students how to better convey their findings.

“The improvising games and exercises we do force you to pay attention to the person you’re communicating with,” he said. “That contact, that intensified observation, and being forced to play by a set of rules forces you to concentrate on the other person and forget about yourself.”

http://hechingerreport.org/content/needing-public-support-academics-try-make-work-clear_18397/

A third strategy in making Sally understand is finding the right words that tie into her emotional understanding. Frank Luntz is a pollster and international political consultant. His specialty is “testing language and finding words that will help his clients sell their product or turn public opinion on an issue or a candidate.” Luntz uses focus groups and interviews to “cause audiences “to react based upon emotion.” He says, “80% of our life is emotion and only 20% is intellect. I am much more interested in how you feel than what you think.”

Luntz suggested and helped the G. W. Bush administration policy to craft the right words regarding environmental issues. It was his idea that administration communications reframe “global warming” as “climate change” since “climate change” was thought to sound less severe.

http://www.luntzglobal.com/

Luntz and every national, state and local political opinion-maker understands that Sally “down the street” has become the modern political play maker. The world of political decision-making has changed from wondering if Sally understands to assuring that Sally understands to sculpting her understanding and finally to changing the political agenda based upon what Sally wants and needs. Sally has become “the Man.”

Certified Reading Teachers in Every K-3 Classroom = A Good Decision

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Put strong instructional resources where they can maximize later school success. School leaders in fourteen states are doing this by ensuring that all K-3 classroom teachers not only are highly qualified in elementary instruction but also are certified to teach reading.

When teachers of my generation were hired to their first classroom positions, it was accurate to say that elementary teachers were generalists and secondary teachers were specialists. Teachers in grades K-5 majored in general education and teachers in grades 6 – 12 majored in a subject area, like math or English/language arts. This statement remained accurate for the vast majority of regular education teachers in K-12 public ed through the first decade of the 21st century. Generalists were responsible for teaching reading to all children during their formative years, K – 3. For most of the adults who attended public school in the 20th century, the level of reading required for an industrial-age career was adequately met by an elementary reading instruction taught by generalists. However, the demands of the information-age require adults to have better developed reading comprehension, analysis and application skills.

A growing number of state departments of public education are recognizing the need for all elementary classroom teachers to be specifically certified in reading instruction. “Reading proficiently by the end of third grade (as measured by NAEP at the beginning of fourth grade) can be a make-or-break benchmark in a child’s educational development. Up until the end of third grade, most children are learning to read. Beginning in fourth grade, however, they are reading to learn, using their skills to gain information in subjects such as math and science, to solve problems, to think critically about what they are learning, and to act upon and share that knowledge in the world around them. Up to half of the printed fourth-grade curriculum is incomprehensible to students who read below that grade level, according to the Children’s Reading Foundation. And, three quarters of students who are poor readers in third grade will remain poor readers in high school, according to researchers at Yale University.”

http://www.aecf.org/m/resourcedoc/AECF-Early_Warning_Full_Report-2010.pdf

These states are making the right move to strengthen K-3 reading, and several are going beyond to ensure reading expertise in K-5 instruction.

State-Developed or Unspecified Test of Reading Instruction Foundations of Reading Test Praxis Teaching Reading Test

  • California (EC, EM, SE)
  • Mississippi (EM)
  • New Mexico (EM)
  • Ohio (EC, EM)
  • Oklahoma (EC, EM, SE)
  • Virginia (EC, EM, SE)

 Foundations of Reading Test

  • Connecticut (EC, EM, SE)
  • Massachusetts (EC, EM)
  • New Hampshire (EC, EM)
  • North Carolina (EC, EM, SE)
  • Wisconsin (EC, EM, SE)

Praxis Teaching Reading Test

  • Alabama (EC, EM)
  • Tennessee (EC, EM, SE)
  • West Virginia (EC, EM)

The following shows how Indiana, Ohio and Wisconsin have added reading requirements to their statutory language for teacher licensure.

Indiana: IND. CODE § 20-28-5-12(b)

“The department may not grant an initial practitioner license to an individual unless the individual has demonstrated proficiency in the following areas on a written examination or through other procedures prescribed by the department:

(1) Basic reading, writing, and mathematics.

(2) Pedagogy.

(3) Knowledge of the areas in which the individual is required to have a license to teach.

(4) If the individual is seeking to be licensed as an elementary school teacher, comprehensive scientifically based reading instruction skills, including:

(A) phonemic awareness

(B) phonics instruction

(C) fluency

(D) vocabulary

(E) comprehension.”

Ohio: OHIO REV. CODE ANN. § 3319.233(A)

“Beginning July 1, 2017, all new educator licenses issued for grades pre-kindergarten through three or four through nine shall require the applicant to attain a passing score on a rigorous examination of principles of scientifically research-based reading instruction that is aligned with the reading competencies adopted by the state board of education.”

Wisconsin: WIS. STAT. ANN. 118.19(14)(a)

“The department may not issue an initial teaching license that authorizes the holder to teach in grades kindergarten to 5 or in special education, an initial license as a reading teacher, or an initial license as a reading specialist, unless the applicant has passed an examination identical to the Foundations of Reading test administered in 2012 as part of the Massachusetts Tests for Educator Licensure. The department shall set the passing cut score on the examination at a level no lower than the level recommended by the developer of the test, based on this state’s standards.”

http://www.ecs.org/clearinghouse/01/16/81/11681.pdf

Prior to 2014, a reading specialist was a unique assignment in a school. Students with significant reading deficits were assigned time with the specialist, but for most, this time was small and sporadic. Specialists were itinerants in the schools and could not spend enough time with the most reading-needy children. Wisconsin’s DPI has taken significant steps to ensure that all children, especially those with special needs, get consistent instructional attention to their reading needs from teachers who are trained in reading.

“Beginning on January 31, 2014, candidates in Wisconsin applying for an initial teaching license in grades Kindergarten through 5 or special education, or for a license as a reading teacher or reading specialist, as listed below, will be required to take and pass the Foundations of Reading test:

• Early Childhood – Regular Education (70–777)

• Early Childhood – Special Education (70–809)

• Early Childhood – Middle Childhood (71–777)

• Middle Childhood – Early Adolescence (72–777)

• Middle Childhood – Early Adolescence Cross Categorical (72–801)

• Middle Childhood – Early Adolescence Specific Learning Disabilities (72–811)

• Middle Childhood – Early Adolescence Emotional Behavioral Disabilities (72–830)

• Middle Childhood – Early Adolescence Cognitive Disabilities (72–810)

• Early Adolescence – Adolescence Cross Categorical (73–801)

• Early Adolescence – Adolescence Specific Learning Disabilities (73–811)

• Early Adolescence – Adolescence Emotional Behavioral Disabilities (73–830)

• Early Adolescence – Adolescence Cognitive Disabilities (73–810)

• Early Childhood – Adolescence Visual Impairments (74–825)

• Reading Teacher (316)

• Reading Specialist (17)

http://www.wi.nesinc.com/PageView.aspx?f=GEN_FOR.html

These are the academic objectives of the Foundations of Reading test.

Foundations of Reading Development

1 Understand phonological and phonemic awareness

2 Understand concepts of print and alphabetic principle

3 Understand the role of phonics in promoting reading development

4 Understand word analysis and strategies

Development of Reading Comprehension

5 Understand vocabulary development

6 Understand how to apply reading comprehension skills and strategies to imaginative/literary tests

7 Understand how to apply reading comprehension skills and strategies to informational/expository texts

Reading Assessment and Instruction

8 Understand formal and informal methods for assessing reading development

9 Understand multiple approaches to reading instruction

Integration of Knowledge and Understanding

10 Prepare an organized, developed analysis on a topic related to one or more of the following: foundations of reading development, development of reading comprehension; reading assessment and instruction

http://docs.nesinc.com/SA/SA_090_FW.pdf

Given these new credentials, a new hire to an elementary classroom will have the instructional tools to cause all children to be better readers by the completion of third grade.

The Common Core Tests: A Test of Adult Integrity

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The Common Core challenge this year is not for children taking the new academic tests aligned with the Core but for parents and teachers and politicians who must consider what the “re-centered” test scores say about students and education in the United States. Are the adults in our nation up to the task of academic honesty or will they buckle under and blame the Core and its tests should student achievement not meet their preconceptions? Implementing and living with the Common Core really is a test of adult integrity in the United States.

Why is there an onus on adults to understand and honestly respond to the anticipated angst that will rise when student scores on the Core tests are made public? Simply put, the lowered test scores are what honest adults should have expected when education standards and expectations in this country were adjusted to improve the competitive achievement of our children with their international peers. The honest appraisal is that a score of proficient on a traditional academic test in the United States was not equal to a proficient score on an international test. The academic performances of many children will not match the image that uninformed adults have of our school children. What will the adult response be? Will it be Horatio Alger redux – commitment to future success through hard work – or will it be a damning of the new data with an homage to Lake Woebegone?

Let’s examine the world of educational achievement that led to the Common Core State Standards. “For years, the academic progress of our nation’s students has been stagnant, and we have lost ground to our international peers. Particularly in subjects such as math, college remediation rates have been high. One root cause has been an uneven patchwork of academic standards that vary from state to state and do not agree on what students should know and be able to do at each grade level.

Recognizing the value and need for consistent learning goals across states, in 2009 the state school chiefs and governors that comprise CCSSO and the NGA Center coordinated a state-led effort to develop the Common Core State Standards. Designed through collaboration among teachers, school chiefs, administrators, and other experts, the standards provide a clear and consistent framework for educators.” These were the words and actions of the collective governors and state school superintendents of our nation. And, forty-three states concurred by adopting the Core as their new state standards.

http://www.corestandards.org/about-the-standards/

What were the governors and state school superintendents thinking? Actually, they did nothing more than listen to and respond to the roused finger pointing of American business interests and politicians. The United States lost the historic economic advantage it had held over the rest of the world due to the success of public education in this country. Education in the US was universal and focused upon college or the industrial skills of pre-World War Two. Education in the rest of the world was for privileged children only. When European and Asian leaders observed the connection of a rigorous education system to economic growth, they quickly reformed their national school systems and their academic performances climbed above the academic achievements of the United States which languished with a 1950s educational system.

Specifically, what was this data? “Among the 34 OECD countries, the United States performed below average in mathematics in 2012 and is ranked 27th (this is the best estimate, although the rank could be between 23 and 29 due to sampling and measurement error). Performance in reading and science are both close to the OECD average. The United States ranks 17 in reading, (range of ranks: 14 to 20) and 20 in science (range of ranks: 17 to 25). There has been no significant change in these performances over time.

Just over one-quarter (26%) of 15-year-olds in the United States do not reach the PISA baseline Level 2 of mathematics proficiency, at which level students begin to demonstrate the skills that will enable them to participate effectively and productively in life. This percentage is higher than the OECD average of 23% and has remained unchanged since 2003. By contrast, in Hong Kong-China, Korea, Shanghai-China and Singapore, 10% of students or fewer are poor performers in mathematics.

While the U.S. spends more per student than most countries, this does not translate into better performance. For example, the Slovak Republic, which spends around USD 53 000 per student, performs at the same level as the United States, which spends over USD 115 000 per student.

The analysis suggests that a successful implementation of the Common Core Standards would yield significant performance gains also in PISA. The prominence of modeling in U.S. high school standards has already influenced developers of large-scale assessments in the United States. If more students work on more and better modeling tasks than they do today, then one could reasonably expect PISA performance to improve.”

http://www.oecd.org/unitedstates/PISA-2012-results-US.pdf

So, how should the use of Core-aligned tests be viewed by honest adults? Adults need to understand the changes in academic expectations that require a more rigorous test. And, adults need to be honest in understanding that when children are given a more rigorous test, their initial achievement results will not resemble their results on the former, less rigorous tests. Adults accustomed to inflated pre-Core test results will be dismayed with their children’s performances on the new tests. This happens whenever large scale tests are “re-centered”. It is similar to the problem that the College Board faced with the national results on the SAT in 1995.

“The primary problem with the pre-1995 scale is that test scores are still linked to the 1941 and 1942 reference groups of students, and the test-taking population changed significantly in the decades after World War II.”

In the post-World War years, the annual average on the SAT slowly crept higher and higher. This was not the result of changes in educational quality but rather the result of using outdated reference points in determining test scores. The SAT suffered from score inflation or scores that did not clearly represent academic performance. As a result, the College Board re-centered its testing reference points in 1995. This resulted in a new scoring system that was different than the 1995 system.

http://www.erikthered.com/tutor/sat-act-history.html

In 2015 we face another re-centering event. The systems of labeling educational performance will change and scores before 2015 that were in the mid to lower ranges of proficiency will no longer be proficient. The same will be true of scores in the advanced range. Or to say it differently, children who were considered academically proficient or advanced before 2015 may not be academically proficient or advanced in 2015 and beyond.

How do we know this? Two states already have experienced re-centering. “In New York and Kentucky, two states that adopted Common Core tests early, the percentage of students considered proficient in reading and math plummeted. In New York, about two-thirds of students were proficient on both on pre-Common Core tests; after the new tests were introduced, fewer than one-third were considered proficient.

Results in Kentucky were similar. And the same thing is likely to happen nationally. Seventeen states worked together on a new standardized test as part of a coalition called Smarter Balanced. In November, Smarter Balanced predicted that less than half of students will be considered proficient in reading and math this year.

http://www.vox.com/2015/1/1/7477495/common-core-2015

What should we expect when the 2015 scores on Core-aligned tests are released? It is too easy to anticipate the response of those without integrity. They will complain that the fault is in the Core and the tests. The tests are too hard. They are not the tests we want for our children. They do not represent education in our state or community.

However, unless our states and communities have seceded from the United States or the world, the 2015 test scores will clearly represent a more honest appraisal of local, state and national academic performance than the pre-2015 scores. And, the 2015 scores will point to the areas of improvement that will be necessary if the adults of our nation really want their children to be academically competitive internationally.

This also has historic precedents. When the Russians launched their Sputnik in 1957, leaders in the United States were dismayed at how the Soviet Union had beaten this country into space. “American concerns that they had fallen behind the Soviet Union in the race to space led quickly to a push by legislators and educators for greater emphasis on mathematics and the physical sciences in American schools. The United States’ National Defense Education Act of 1958 increased funding for these goals from childhood education through the post-graduate level.

U.S. citizens feared that schools in the USSR were superior to American schools, and Congress reacted by adding the act to take US schools up to speed.

In 1940 about one-half million Americans attended college, which was about 15 percent of their age group. By 1960, however, college enrollments had expanded to 3.6 million. By 1970, 7.5 million students were attending colleges in the U.S., or 40 percent of college-age youths.”

http://www.ask.com/wiki/National_Defense_Education_Act?qsrc=3044

Historically, education systems in the United States have responded to national challenges with improved results. One response to the challenges posed when we again re-center education in the United States is to understand the dynamics of change and allow schools, teachers and students to successfully adjust to new academic standards and tests. This is the Horatio Alger tradition, a story of success that the people of the United States have lived over and over again.

Of course, there is another recourse. We can ignore the disconnection between what adults want from their schools and what they are willing to do to achieve what they want. We can warm ourselves with the words we love to say and hear. Thank you, Mr. Keillor, and I paraphrase:

“That’s the way it is in these United States where all women are strong, all men are good looking and all children are above average.”

Leadership Longevity Is Tenuous

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Leaders, who are not self-employed, live in a fragile world of employment security made increasingly more tenuous with each passing year. Making a career as a leader is a role to which many aspire but few will achieve longevity. Their reality is that leadership is the art of swimming in deep water while carrying the weight of their decisions. The sign on the leader’s office door says, “No lifeguards on duty.”

In The Anguish of Leadership (2000), Jerry Patterson describes a leader as a person always swimming in deep water. At the beginning of his tenure, a leader swims quite well. He enjoys the honeymoon of employment when his employers and most employees wish him well and their support gives him buoyancy. Also, his pockets are empty. He has no experiential record, good or bad, in this employment.

I paraphrase Abraham Lincoln with “You can be successful with all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot be successful with all the people all the time.” Every time a leader is unsuccessful, a rock is placed in the leader’s pocket. Events that are hugely unsuccessful load in larger and heavier rocks. And, rocks in the pockets make it increasingly more difficult to swim in deep water. On the positive side, rocks may be taken out of his pockets by professional successes. Interestingly, there is no correspondence between the rocks taken out for a success and rocks placed in for a failure; the rocks of failure are heavier and more numerous than the rocks of success.

Adding a second paraphrase, this from John Wayne in Big Jake, “ … my fault, your fault, nobody’s fault, I am going to hold you responsible.” Patterson believes that a leader’s professional well-being is affected by the successes and failures of everyone in the business for whom he is responsible. When a subordinate is unsuccessful, rocks may be placed in that person’s pockets but always some rocks will be placed in the leader’s pockets. When President Truman placed his famous “The Buck Stops Here” sign on his White House desk, he also was saying “This is my rock pile – all grievances, disagreements, and disenchantments with my leadership go here.”

Eventually, Patterson writes, the total weight of the rocks in his pocket will pull almost every leader under the water. Or, the constant burden of swimming with heavy rocks in his pocket wears down the leader and he succumbs. Few leaders escape significant drowning as they work through their careers. Some leaders will re-emerge in a similar leadership position in a different organization and many may enact a resurrection several times over the length of their career, but almost all will drown once.

Head coaches for professional sports teams are a case in point. As the person leading a professional team, the coach is ultimately responsible for the success of the team as expressed in the team’s win and loss record. Wins are good and losses are “rocks”. Too few wins and too many losses creates a heavy pocket of rocks. On Monday, December 29, the day after the final game of the 2014 National Football League season, four head coaches and two general managers were fired. Each had accumulated too many rocks in their pockets. 2014 is not unique. The average tenure of a head coach in the NFL is 2.39 years. The average tenure in the National Hockey League is 3.0 years, 3.03 in the National Basketball Association and 3.8 years for Major League Baseball head coaches. Leaders drown in the deep water of professional sports every year and sometimes at mid-season.

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/sports/story/2012-02-29/managers-coaches-tenure/53376918/1

Public education is no different. The keeping of wins and losses is not as dramatic in education as it is in sports, but school leaders are handed rocks just as often as head coaches. The average tenure of a school district superintendent is 5.5 years. The rocks for urban, super-large districts are heavier. Their average tenure is 3.3 years. Approximately 15% of all superintendents professionally drown each year.

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

Superintendents are hired and drown in the shadow of the Lincoln paraphrasing. Few are fired due to a criminal act or professional malpractice. These do happen, but they are rare. The great majority of drownings are the result of a general loss of confidence in the superintendent. A loss of confidence make occur with major stakeholders in the school district, such as parent groups or special interest groups. These groups control large piles of rocks. Local religious and business leaders have their own stockpile of rocks. Students, the most important group of people in a school district, also control rocks albeit smaller rocks. And, of course, the confidence of the Board of Education is essential. When the Board loses confidence in the superintendent a professional drowning is soon to follow.

A superintendent making important decisions for a school district will inextricably offend some rock holders even with the best of decisions. It is a fact of life for a leader. Creating smaller class sizes is a good thing for students, teachers and most parents, but it stirs the rocks of taxpayers who object to increased costs. Cutting costs is a good thing for taxpayers, but diminishing the resources for schools and classrooms stirs the rocks of the teacher’s union and PTAs. Allowing school events on Wednesday evenings wins the admiration of sports and fine arts fans who enjoy more games and concerts, but it raises the rock throwing ire of church leaders who lose time for religious education generally held on that night of the week. No matter, rocks find their way into the pockets of every school leader and even the best eventually sink lower and lower into Jerry Patterson’s deep end of the pool.

So, knowing the reality of a leader’s professional world, those who aspire to be leaders, those who are still above water in the deep end of the leadership pool, and those who employ leaders should honor Robert Herrick’s verse to The Virgins. Leaders must lead as well as they are able to and for as long as they are able to remain above water because no leader survives the eventual weight of the rocks in his pockets.

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,

Old Time is still a-flying;

And this same flower that smiles to-day

Tomorrow will be dying.

http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/virgins-make-much-time