When I was a working school superintendent, I would rise in the dark on mornings when significant snowfall was predicted and drive the back roads to discern if school buses would be able to drive their morning routes. My priority was making an informed and safe decision about closing school, delaying the start of the school day, or opening on our regular clock schedule. Sometime this was a tough call as critics called if school was open and other critics called if school was closed and almost no one liked a delayed start.

As a retired superintendent, my early morning priority is to assure that the satellite dish is clear of snow so that my wife and I can watch the Golf Channel. When the snow flies I roll out the green practice mats and Michael Breed helps me with my short game. Determining the degree of the wedge I will work on is another tough call, but I am up to the challenge.

One person’s snow day may not be the same snow day for another.

Never bet against self-interest.

Simple enough, but what does this statement mean?

In any human interaction, each individual will have a set of intrinsic needs that will bias and shape the manner in which they act in any and every scenario they enter. Boil it down and you will reach these concepts – “this is my bottom line” or “beyond this point there can be no further discussion” or “this is my must have.” Every conversation contains these concepts, although many conversations do not push far enough to expose them.

In our undergraduate days, we learned about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

Maslow conceived of the lower four sets of needs as “deprivation needs.” When aspects of these needs are not satisfied, the individual is motivated to take action to satisfy the need. Hunger spurs action to find food and thirst the action to find water, just as feeling cold spurs the action to find warmth and endangerment the action to feel physically safe. When the physiological and safety needs are met, an individual has the opportunity to be motivated to fulfill the needs for “love and belonging” and “esteem.” Self-actualization is different – it is not a deprivation need, but a need to become the person the individual aspires to be.

It is with interest and frustration that many of the contemporary issues that face us today should exist on the plane of community welfare or doing what is best for others without prejudice but fall quickly to the “bottom line.” Opportunities to show respect for others and their points of view and to engage in consensual problem-solving to0 frequently dissolve into conflicts with “no conversation necessary.” The outcome is defined by self-interest.

So, let’s examine the players in the issue of school choice and how they are influenced by their needs.

Who are the self-interested players of school choice? In the first rank are the parents. Parents who demand the right to choose how their child will be educated face off with parents who are committed to a traditional neighborhood school for their children. In the second rank are the educators. Charter and alternative education providers who find the opportunity to create an elective and selective schooling oppose school boards and teachers who are committed to traditional or reformed public schools. These players are engaged at various need levels, ranging from moral choice and “inalienable rights” to tradition and family loyalty to job security and livelihood.

Parents typically begin with higher motivational characteristics. Choice parents embraced self-actualizing growth needs early in the campaign and interlaced a lot of esteem issues. Gradually, as recent and ongoing studies that are indicating that charter and choice have a significant effect upon the achievement of disadvantaged, urban children but little effect upon the achievement of advantaged children, their self-interest is sliding toward esteem and belonging. Initial interests of public education parents lay in esteem and belonging to the community of their school-life that they knew as children. As the conversation continues, traditional parents have migrated toward safety needs.

Another and distended rank of self-interested players includes taxpayers and social reformers. Taxpayers who live in the school neighborhood and understand that a decline in the reputation of the community school lowers local property values have a vested interest in this discussion. Typically, these folks do not have children in school and are viewed as protestors against change. Taxpaying property owners strive to protect their economic self-interest, which is a safety need, with a small helping of community development, which is belonging.

A smaller number of players are the reformers who initially saw charter schools as a strategy for improving education for disadvantaged, urban children. They have been joined by new realists who understand that the value added nature of public education cannot be abandoned but must be reformed to accommodate 21st century problems. Reformers struggle with the data and the difficulty of empirically proving their point of view. Without empirical data proving which source of education is better in causing children to learn, reformers will raise their motivation to self-actualization and toil on to create better schools.

A last rank of players includes the politicians and national political-financial interest groups. Choice is not necessarily partisan, but more commonly is a Republican initiative for divesting Democratic policies and entitlement programs. In my state of Wisconsin, the Governor and his Republican majority are committed to forcing school choice options, initially in all urban and large enrollment communities, and indubitably in all schools. For the Governor, the question of choice is not open to discussion. His political strategy and maneuvering is thoroughly funded by conservative, Republican money, such as The Heritage Foundation.

It may be best to characterize the motivational needs of politicians and financiers as base. I recall a Wisconsin legislator’s guidance to newly elected state representatives when he said, “Now that you are elected, your job is to be re-elected.” Campaign rhetoric is abandoned. Securing election leads to party strength and incumbency leads to party dominance and once dominant a party enacts policies that will ensure the likelihood of continued dominance. This is not self-actualization, but a basic, physiological need.

A second need of politicians is to influence governance while you can because when you have power you can enact your will with the realization that the pendulum will swing and another politician will hold your seat at some time in the future. Motivation may be to construct something new or to deconstruct what the opposition has created. Regardless of the homage to citizen freedoms or relief from government or an improved life, politics is about the exercise of power and in the final analysis seldom is able to rise above deprivation needs.

How will the dance be played out? Interestingly, we will not ask children how they wish to be educated, even though many of them are of an age and intellect when they can constructively contribute to that question. And, the dance will not be decided by parents acting in their perception of the best interests of their children. Taxpayers will always be present and never satisfied with the level of any taxation. Reformers come and go with the times and with the latest fad of reforms.

Public education remains a political melody to be played by politicians using the instruments of power. Without exception, their self-proclaimed interest is not in educating children but in determining the management of education. Just examine how many candidates for office stand for educational improvement. “Elect me and I will ….” What’s that all about, Maslow?

We learned these things when we were children in school.

Carson City is the state capital of Nevada.

Carson City is named after Kit Carson, scout and trail leader for John C. Fremont’s expedition to California in the 1840s. Fremont named the river that runs through an area of western Nevada the Carson River and the camp along its bank became Carson City.

Carson City has the smallest population of any state capital. The population in 2011 was 55,439.

Now we are approaching “so what.”

When I taught United States History including geography and economics and government to 8th grade children, proudly they learned these facts among other trivia about the fifty state capitals. They read these facts in text books and atlases. They completed tables of state names, capital names and “interesting facts.” Nobody could claim that these children did not know their state capitals!

They met the social studies objectives of their time. They performed well on the label the map and multiple choice questions used to assess their learning. Later, when these children were in 10th grade American History, their teacher undoubtedly lamented that they did not know much about the fifty states or our nation’s geography. That teacher, as was the general practice, started the “learn your capitals” all over again.

We taught the heck out of this objective. However, from today’s educational vantage point, we taught to the wrong objectives. That “so what” statement three paragraphs ago should have been asked then. When children knew their capitals, what could they do with the knowledge?

Some of the more informative questions revolve around “why is this city the state capital?” Why Albany and not New York City or Annapolis and not Baltimore? Why Harrisburg and not Philadelphia or Springfield and not Chicago? The answers involve the stories of personal interest and economics and geography within both the nation’s and the state’s history. How many early capitals needed to be on rivers for transportation and economy? Many current state capitals were not the original capital of their state. What led to a relocation of the state government? What economies attach themselves to the capital city?

To what extent does a current state capital represent its state? Des Moines lies in the middle of Iowa and in the center of its agrarian culture. There is some symmetry in that state’s access to its capital city. Omaha lies on the Missouri River on the eastern border of Nebraska. It is at the convergence of river, wagon trail and railroad and there is no similar geo-political location like it in the state. Helena, Montana, is in the cluster of Boise, Butte, Bozeman and Missoula and the confluence of mountain gaps and valleys and mining industries. The populations of Nebraska and Montana diminish rapidly the further one gets from their capital cities. St. Paul is the state capital, yet one thinks of Minneapolis and the Twin Cities more than one thinks of St. Paul.

That brings us back to Carson City. The story of this capital city includes an influential founder, conflict with Mormon leadership in Utah, nearby gold and silver strikes, railroading and Chinese rail workers. Nevada is traditionally a conservative, Republican state, yet has a significant Mormon and is home to some of nation’s largest gambling and gaming cultures. Certainly, Carson City’s renown is surpassed by Las Vegas and Reno. In their study, would children today relocate the state capital to either Las Vegas or Reno or retain it in Carson City? Listening to their reasoning using history, geography and culture, we could expose their understanding of learning objectives with much greater importance than “find Nevada on this map of the United States” and “Which of the following is the state capital of Nevada.”

Yesterday’s learning objectives may not satisfy today’s learning needs. Learning must always be targeted at the right objective.

Annie Savoy provided us with an educationally sound closing line for many arguments. “…it’s a fact. You could look it up.” (Bull Durham)

We have danced around the proposition that a college degree is the goal of American public education for years. Depending upon the place and time and the audience, the argument has been made that a college-level education is the best ticket to career success. Against that argument many believe that college is overrated and increasingly irrelevant. Or, college is too expensive and the subsequent years of student debt are unacceptable. Or, a technical education provides more powerful employment skills than a baccalaureate degree. Regardless, few have contemplated a well-prepared future generation without their education. Liberal arts education, professional education, technical education – it doesn’t make a difference. An education is a key to adult success. It’s a fact; you could look it up.

There are many variables that correlate with school success, but few are as compelling as the early educational advantage of children with large basic vocabularies. Although pertinent studies connect a child’s vocabulary with parental socio-economic status, the more relevant correlation is that school success is academic and the depth and breadth of a child’s academic vocabulary is a strong predictor of school success. Further, the quality of a student’s vocabulary is not only advantageous for early education but exceptionally advantageous for college and career entrance exams. Gateway exams are unforgiving of candidates whose vocabulary limits their ability to adequately make a response let alone understand the question. Academic gateways are correlated with the aspirant’s vocabulary. It’s a fact; you could look it up.

This being true, why then does vocabulary remain a subject apart in the mandated curricula of most schools? Reading, writing, spelling, language usage – these ELA topics receive the priority of our time and effort and vocabulary is treated as their very poor step-sister. The most commercial reading basals present vocabulary as a preparation for the next story the child will read. Words are treated as isolated words and are the words that the publisher or teacher believes to be interesting or important to understanding the text.

Seldom does instruction teach children the skills necessary for vocabulary building. Studies point to three linguistic skills that propel vocabulary building. http://www.edweek.org/media/proctor-silverman-harring-montecillo2012.pdf Instead of teaching words as words, vocabulary instruction should teach a student to use morphology, semantics and context as skills for building a greater depth of vocabulary. Breadth of vocabulary is a quantity of discrete words; depth of vocabulary is the quality of word relationships. Morphology, semantic and context skills help children understand the words they use as well as the new words they encounter. It’s a fact; you could look it up.

An exception to the few states that are committed to the instruction of vocabulary is the Tennessee Academic Vocabulary project that provides a vocabulary-building manual for Tennessee educators. http://www.tn.gov/education/ci/doc/VOCABULARY.pdf The Tennessee project promotes the linguistic skills of morphology, semantics and context for the instruction of approximately 400 terms and phrases per year. Of these, 131 are prescribed and 269 are to be selected by a teacher.

However, even the Tennessee project comes up short if vocabulary remains the assignment of an English/Language Arts teacher alone. 400 words annually times 13 years of schooling may produce a 5,200 word vocabulary. This is not enough! Every teacher assigned to a child must instruct the vocabulary of their subject, be it math or social studies or music or health or physical education. The Marzano study shows that the social sciences have the greatest number of basic terms and phrases, 4,352 terms as compared with 773 science terms. If left to the language arts teacher singularly, content area special terms will not be adequately learned. If five teachers, a minimal number, teach vocabulary to a child every year for thirteen years they may produce a vocabulary of 26,000 words. This is a beginning considering that an average adult will encounter 88,500 words in a lifetime of reading. It’s a fact; you could look it up.

The real proposition about the educational endgame is not the resultant degree, BA versus AA, but is the quality of the education sufficient to prepare the graduate for a successful future. One measure of this preparation must be a graduate’s ability to prosper in a world that is adding about 20,000 new words every year or one word every two minutes. It’s a fact; you could look it up.

Vocabulary cannot be an afterthought. We need to teach more and more words or our children’s academic health will starve to death.

What should you do when you reach a decision and the decision stinks?

You’ve done it and so have I. We know how it feels and as uncomfortable as it is, we usually understand that we have few options for going forward yet forward we must go. The “it” is living out a decision that was fouled from the get go. Usually we think that we exercise sound planning in considering the parameters of a decision, previewing of what a successful decision should look like, and setting the plan in motion. Usually, the plan takes a trajectory looking like what we projected. Sometimes, it does not. In our experience, when the outcome we anticipated and the outcome we achieve do not jibe, we either accept the outcome with the errors in thinking that caused it, do not accept the outcome because the errors in thinking are not acceptable, or dump the outcome and the precipitating errors and start over again. But, that is us. What happens when it is not us who have a plan that is in the dumper, but a much larger entity like a state agency? Can the big boys face the music and correct a plan that was headed wrong from the beginning? Or, like Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove, do they ride the misguided mission right into the ground?

Public education in Wisconsin is undergoing many significant reforms. One major component of reform is the creation of a statewide student information system. The new SIS connects all elements of an individual child’s school life, including the child’s ID number and enrollments, the child’s SES information, grades earned, school attendance, all significant test scores, and the names of teachers who provided the child’s instruction, into one data base.

In the planning phase, it was clear that the state of student information was all over the place. Three vendors, Skyward, Infinite Campus and PowerSchool, were the major players in educational software. Some districts used locally developed software. Some data still resided in teacher grade books and reams of printed records stored in a central closet. Decision makers looked at the state of data affairs and, not liking its disorganization, drafted criteria for contracting with a single software vendor for organization and management of the new SIS. State decision making took its time, in fact, it let the process dawdle for almost two years. Now, the state has a winner! Or, do they? As soon as the plan was launched several years ago, the current stink about the selected SIS vendor was preordained by fundamental thinking that was very suspect.

Fundamentally, why do Wisconsin schools need a single SIS vendor? One vendor can create singular simplicity because all data will be defined, collected, managed, and reported using one vendor’s software. However, when there are multiple component vendors, why just one? What drove this parameter? Even though many inputs advised the benefits of a multiple vendor contract, state decision makers insisted on a single vendor contract.

Fundamentally, when three vendors provided the majority of SIS service for Wisconsin schools, why not set the contract criteria for meeting the design parameters of SIS service and if one or all of the major vendors can meet those parameters, contract with each of those vendors? SIS services in other states use parameters that allow multiple vendors to comply with the state requirements and share in the contract. What is wrong with a preferred vendor contract?

Fundamentally, if the state contract pays the winning vendor $15,000,000 for providing SIS services, what will be the cost of conversion for school districts that currently use non-selected SIS software to convert to the selected software? The greatest SIS cost is not in linking districts to the state, but in organizing and managing all of the initial data at the school and district level. What should a local district do if it has created local effectiveness and cost efficiency by unifying its administrative software for financial management, classroom grading, transportation, building management, student discipline, and special education with a single vendor, but that vendor is not the state’s winner? There always are winners and losers, but why create a system that requires extensive costs in order for the losers to align with the winner? Those districts face very large financial burdens, probably in the $100s of thousands even for small districts, in converting to the SIS vendor’s software and in training all of its personnel to use that software. This is more problematic given that the state reduced the mandated amounts of per pupil allocations for each year of the current biennial budget in order to move Wisconsin from a deficit to a surplus state budget.

Fundamentally, what if the state’s selected vendor does not reside in Wisconsin and the non-selected vendors are Wisconsin residents? And, what if the losers move their operations from Wisconsin to another state where they also do major educational business as a result of losing all of their Wisconsin school contracts? Yes, there always are losers, but can the current state of Wisconsin’s economy lose hundreds of highly paid, technical jobs and believe that the parameters of selecting a statewide SIS vendor were properly thought out?

Fundamentally, what does this model for decision making tell us about future bidding for large state contracts? Will the fundamentals of future plans result in sweet outcomes or stink like the selection of the SIS contract?

What would you or I do?