Inferential commentary abounds. Talk radio. Op ed pieces in the press. Blogs. Chat in the store check-out line. The President. The economy. Taxes. A quarterback who threw three interceptions. The climate. These are background noises to my ears. In almost all instances, I hear lay people who feel compelled to air their thought of the moment. It is all noise, except when the words “school” or “public education” are uttered. Then, my ears perk up faster than a cat hearing the tab of a Fancy Feast can being pulled back. Ffffft! I listen and pay attention and fume. I can abide lay opinions about many things, but not education.

Starting backwards with the solution to my fuming, I am resolved that we attempt to teach too much to children and we do not teach our too much successfully. We need to teach less well.

First, in order to teach less well, we need to identify the less that is important to be learned. This really is not that difficult. Take the great body of information in each subject area, identify only enduring concepts, skills and empirical processes that are essential for thinking like an expert-to-be in the subject area, and teach until all children have learned these. The real list of what is essential is not very big once all of the “oh, and did you knows…” are set aside. The barrier to doing this is that colleagues in our discipline may not want to reduce their “too much”. If they don’t, how will our reduction be perceived? Strange that the world was flat until a man they thought sailed over the edge came back.

We are abused by game shows that infer that the learning of trivia is the result of K-12 education. The facility to know that the Volga is a river that empties into an inland sea, the Caspian, is learned and remembered by studies that exceed the academic standards of our public schools. Books of facts are just that and, as books, the facts they contain can be referenced on demand when an educated person who knows how to use references needs to know a fact.

Second, take your time to explain clearly and until all children can explain their learning to others. Take your time to grow each child’s confidence in what they have learned and shed their inhibitions about inquiring into what they should learn next. Take your time, because there is no race against the clock or the table of contents. Children who know important things and how to think importantly can learn all the rest on their own.

These are not new thoughts. I began talking with colleagues about reducing the quantity of teaching in order to increase the quality of learning in the 80s. And, in the 90s and 00s. Talk about changing long ingrained habits did not lead to immediate change back then and leads to little change now. My colleagues are creatures of how they were taught by their teachers in grade school and how they were taught how to teach in their undergraduate and graduate programs, and their habits over time are reinforced by their faculty-mates. The common belief is that the body of knowledge we learned must be taught to children and that body just keeps getting bigger and bigger so we have to teach it faster and faster. How wrong! There is not enough time and even if there were, our efficiency at covering so much would be overwhelmed by our ineffectiveness at teaching any of it.

S0, when I feel admonished by lay critics of public education who criticize with the “…isn’t it awful that children don’t know…” or “… I was surprise that my sophomore can’t…”, I fume silently and consider that these adults are products of the way we should no longer teach. How could they know better? But, in a world with an ever growing universe of information and a need for generations of better educated adults, can we afford to teach children as we taught their parents? Not if I can help it.

I always envied my colleagues in art and music. They were experts in growing a child’s skills and understandings so that the child changed from an “I don’t know how to do this” to an accomplished “doer.” Time and again, I watched these teachers change a class of beginners into children who made art and music that displayed learned skills and earned pride. And, I looked for instructional analogies for my English and social studies classroom.

When a child’s clay on the potter’s wheel remained just a blob after all children were given an initial instruction in how to work clay on the wheel into a small mug, Mrs. Hays took the seat at the wheel. She leaned over with her arms extended and hands pointed down with her fingers slightly bowed on the outside of the blob and thumbs inserted into the top of the clay. Then, with the dexterity of her experience, a nicely formed mug began to grow. As she began, she quietly explained what the clay felt like in her hands and how she judged the amount of pressure to apply and with which fingers to apply it in order to make the walls of the mug stand up. She talked about the quality of the clay and problems that too much or too little water could create. When the child reclaimed the seat and tried to emulate what Mrs. Hays had done, Mrs. Hays told the child to explain what she was feeling in her fingers and talk about the use of finger and thumb pressure. For many students, the teacher’s showing and talking was enough to give them a successful beginning point. For other children, if the glob began to resemble a mug for just moments before caving in, Mrs. Hays would take the child’s hands in hers and begin again with her explanation only this time helping the child to adjust her younger hands to feel what older hands were doing. The teaching moment of holding and forming the child’s hands into an artist’s hands and causing a great “oh, my” was something I wanted for my teaching.

Mr. Klun was the just the best when he sat next to a young trombonist whose ear was not yet matched to the length of the slide and the notes being played. Mr. K took the trombone and made sweet notes come forth and then talked about how he extended and retracted the slide to conform the sound to the notes that the music requested. He played. He stopped and explained and showed. He played some more and stopped to explain many times. As a musician, he knew what the child was and was not doing on this non-valve instrument to create what they both wanted to hear. His talking the child through the feel/sound moment moved the child from a “don’t know how to do this” to “I can play that note.” It took a lot of such moments to grow a school concert trombonist, but time and opportunity were available in the rehearsal hall and Mr. K knew how to move from telling to explaining and showing so that the children of his bands could play any music presented to them.

Absent a classroom these days, I pose this lesson.

“We’re going to read five source documents in order to identify what each author thought about isolationism as the best foreign relations policy in the 1930s. Then, we’re going to compare and contrast the strengths and weaknesses of an isolated nation and apply those to three international problems our nation faces today. Finally, we will write a letter to our US Senators with our recommendations for the kinds of legislation they should support to address these problems.”

This meaty assignment was laced with Common Core Standards, crossed disciplines, developed constructivist skills, but after my initial instruction in reading and document analysis I saw a need for Mrs. Hays’ and Mr. E’s “hands on hands” in order to grow my social studies children into informed students of foreign policy. I looked more fervently when children who were not cognitively meshing with the assignment gave every indication of “I don’t know how to do this.” It did not take much listening to understand that the documents contained terminology the children did not know and referred to historical events and stories from 80 years ago that were completely foreign to them. These where children whose hands did not feel the clay and whose ears and feel for the instrument were not yet developed. They needed a skillful explanation with hands on.

That was when technology once again became my friend. A document projector became my potter’s wheel and the pages projected on the screen became my clay. On one side of the classroom children who were well on their way with this assignment worked independently under my frequent gaze. On the other side, my novices gathered around the projector and, as I read the document aloud to them, I stopped on terms they did not know and references they had not heard. We marked up our documents together. We looked up some references together and they looked up others independently. We made a table showing authors at the head of the column and ideas from each author in the rows below. We labeled those rows with a word that summarized the row. In pairs, they discussed the ideas for similarities and differences and refined the table to display what they had gleaned from the source documents.

Using the projector attached to a student’s laptop, in small groups they initiated a new table with each of the given contemporary international problems atop the columns and each row headed with an idea from their source document reading. They filled in the table with their judgment of the applicability of the author’s ideas to the international problem.

With a new partner, they drafted a letter to a Senator explaining their take on one of the international problems and how isolationism would or would not be a valid policy for addressing the problem. They read their letters to each other and then combined what they thought were the best parts of their individual letters into a single letter. This small group smiled when they placed a stamp on the envelope and pressed the send key for their e-letter.

In retrospection, I found Mrs. Hays and Mr. Klun in this assignment. I heard my voice instead of their voices in the explaining and showing. At the end of the assignment, my children had grown new academic skills that were well matched with the skills they learned in art and music.

Public Education as a Schmoo.  If educators must conform to all demands, how can a school be anything more than a schmoo?

Tony Wagner’s article in SchoolAdministrator, September 2012, asks the right questions and, when connected with Pasi Sahlberg’s article just a few pages away, many of the answers begin to fall into place. And, public education in the United States is a humongous schmoo.

Wagner’s “Accountability for What Matters Most” asks if public education is being held accountable for what really matters in preparing our children for the best of their potential futures. Sahlberg’s “Quality and Equity in Finnish Schools” analyzes schools in his native Finland with schools in other nations, most notably the United States, and it is not what he says about Finland that is eye catching – it is what he says about our educational systems. Together, Wagner and Sahlberg confirm that public education, as practiced in our country and states, is in a world of hurt because everything assigned to public education matters and what really matters is lost in the accountability for everything.

A quieter reflection about the standing of the United States in an international comparison of student performance might begin to narrow the evaluation of our educational systems to what really is important. Decades ago Al Capp, a nationally-syndicated cartoonist, created a schmoo. A schmoo is a doughy-bodied animal that would conform its body into whatever shape or function would satisfy the needs of the moment.

Public education in the United States has become the biggest schmoo of all time. As our nation’s greatest public institution, school also is our nation’s most abused institution. No politician or social reformer ever saw a cause that could not be assigned to the local schools for resolution. The little red schoolhouse no longer looks like a schoolhouse, but like a smiling schmoo needing to please every demand and in so doing is unable to satisfy very many. The education of children is just one of the myriad of missions for which a school is accountable and too often it has become attached to non-educational demands that suborn student learning.

• The United States ranks 14th among OECD nations in reading, math and science.
• Children in our nation are obese. School lunches must conform to new mandates.
• Children are subjected to cyber-bullies. Schools must protect them from each other the world at large.
• Children may not be safe in school. Schools must fortify.
• Concussive injuries in athletics endanger children. Schools must provide access to neurologic assessments, train all staff to protect children from head injuries and respond if they occur, and assure that all athletic helmets conform to NO—standards.
• A community’s socio-economic status determines the level of academic achievement in its schools. Schools must provide compensatory education that accommodates all possible disadvantages.
• Children today do not know the history of unionism in the United States. And, all other stories related to any special interest or ethnic minority.
• Children are not involved in their communities. Schools must provide community service education and verify that every graduate has been a significant local volunteer.
• The number of children living in split or blended families increases every year. Schools must respond to the needs and demands of ever-changing family structures.
• Although 8% of the workforce is unemployed, schools are not preparing enough skilled machinists to meet the demands of computer-assisted manufacturing.

Our schmoo-schools are responsible for each of these and thousands more. Most are legislatively mandated by our federal and state governments. Most are unfunded. Others are locally-mandated responding to interests or needs presented to a board of education. However, seldom is a new mandate is ever matched with a revoked mandate. The schmoo just gets bigger and bigger and less and less accountable for much. It is not surprising that the first item in the above list gets a large press attention, but each of those that follow and another thousand mandates get our educational time.

By comparison, Sahlberg explains how educational systems in Finland evolved from national mandates and regulations to local determination of educational values. Schools in Finland appear to be schools and not schmoos. It is no wonder that Finland ranks #2 among OECD nations in student achievement in reading, math and science. The Finns insist that schools focus upon what really matters in the education of their children and their accounts are very enviable.

So, when Wagner wonders if public education is being accountable for what really matters, we should not be surprised when our schmoo looks bewildered and the answer is “probably not.” There is every reason for the Virginia Beach City schools to point at critical thinking and problem-solving as their refocused priorities and make these the outcomes for which they will be accountable. Nothing else made sense. This does not mean that the schmoo in Virginia Beach City has shed the weight of all governmental mandates; it has not. Federal and state mandates for achievement must be met. School lunch programs must be in compliance. OSHA rules rule. But, each of these can be made routine if what matters that district comes first in their priorities.

It’s time to shuck our schmoo.

A review of two works published in the 1990s indicates that strategic planning as practiced by most in public education may have strengthened a school’s public relations but may not have led to improvements in school performance, in particular in student achievement. In the Winter 2012 issue of the Harvard Educational Review, “The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning and Strategic Planning in Education” (http://www.hepg.org/her/abstract/310) by Edward Meich reviews The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning by Henry Mintzberg (New York: Free Press, 1994) and Strategic Planning in Education: Rethinking, Restructuring, Revitalizing by Roger Kaufman and Jerry Herman (Lancaster, PA: Technomic, 1991).

Meich’s review indicates that strategic planning in both the business and education realms failed to produce significant increases in profit or performance. He points to the fact that strategic planning is essentially an analytical tool for evaluating the past and present data but fails to synthesize these evaluations into strategies for the future. The missing ingredient, he claims, is the absence of training for the planners in strategizing and the real disconnect between the representative stakeholders called upon to analyze multi-faceted data and the employees who will be expected to execute a new plan. Meich states that “to do” lists and timelines with expected outcomes is not a strategy but lack the organizational changes of an encompassing strategy that will institutionalize the completion of tasks and timelines and achievement of outcomes for the organization’s future prosperity.

It may be that smaller enterprises such as school districts where the data analyzers also are the plan executors and there is a continuity of leadership have the best likelihood of benefiting from strategic planning designs. In this scenario, the disconnects found in Meich’s review may not be present and the efficiencies of a smaller scale may prove an exception to the review.

This article will discuss a potential conflict between the performances indices of the School Report Card and the traditionally strong programs of a school. This will apply to all schools rated and ranked by mandated educational outcomes.

It’s the American Way. Our culture loves to keep score. Scores allow us to point to winners and point at losers. (The prepositions “to” and “at” are significant!) We score sports, movies, cars, pizza and toilet paper. Everything has a score and ranking. Knowing the score allows consumers to make wiser choices, we are told. Scoring also holds athletes, producers, manufacturers, bakers and the paper industry accountable for what they do.

Accountability also is tied to financial efficiency. The more accountably efficient will produce quality indicators a lower cost; the less accountably efficient will produce less quality at a higher cost. All Wisconsin schools now are rated based upon quality indicators of school performance. (The DPI points the public to the School Report Card and then to the DPI’s larger web site where per pupil expenses and school-to-school financials can be found. A future iteration of the School Report Card will include a cost/benefit rating.) Once a score is assigned to a school, the public immediately can identify a school’s success or lack of success by its state assigned number. Winners and Losers. Accountability. However, a love affair with legislated scores may not make for happiness in the home.

My local schools now have numbers that score and rank their performances as effective schools. The scores are: elementary = 79.1, middle school = 73.9; and, high school = 81.8. (http://reportcards.dpi.wi.gov/rc_gibraltar) The scoring key indicates that these are very good, above average scores but not yet the best. As a point of reference, no school has earned a score in the 90s and 100 is hypothetical. Each school meets and exceeds the mandated state standards but there always is room for improvement. But, at what cost will an improved score be achieved?

According to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, “The School Report Card will help parents understand how their child’s school is doing and where it can improve. The new report cards will help all Wisconsin public schools get a better picture of how well they help children learn, advance to the next grade, and graduate ready for college and career. Our goal is to help every student in a Wisconsin school succeed, graduate, and be ready to pursue further education and a career.” (http://reportcards.dpi.wi.gov/files/oea/pdf/parentrptguide.pdf)

Interestingly, the local high school earned “Best High School in America” honors from Newsweek and US News and World Report for each of the past four academic years. Daily attendance, promotion and graduation rates, and technical school and college preparation have been solid, and academic performance on state assessments and ACT have been well above the state average. A good high school performance usually follows good elementary and middle school performances by students during their K-12 enrollment and that is true of our local schools.

So, what is the concern about legislated accountability, especially an accountability that equates success with an indexed score? Our local schools emphasize a “Four A” education for all students. A “Four A” education is a balance of academics, activities, arts and athletics. Besides creating a history of solid academic profiles, our local schools have even stronger traditions in the arts and activities. Each school has full-time music and art teachers. Seven full-time art and music teachers are employed for a K-12 enrollment of 550. All K-12 students have access to the art and music classrooms and the theater. High school students “go to state” every year with One Act theatrical performances. The high school musical has won multiple state awards for student on-stage performances. 80% of the high school students play in the bands or sing in the choirs. Middle and high school students take their forensics skills “to state” every year. Door County (WI) is known nationally for its artists and middle and high school student art work is highly supported by community artists and galleries throughout northern Wisconsin. Students in each school win awards in local, regional and state competitions with their creative writing, especially poetry. Rounding out the final “A”, more than 75% of the middle and high school enrollment is a student-athlete.

This description is not unique to our local schools. It is an accurate description of many small, rural school districts throughout Wisconsin where strong traditions and local support are attached to specific academic, arts, activity or athletic programs. In these small schools the two major complaints about public education do not typically apply. Politicians especially complain that public education does not provide an equal educational opportunity for all students and that school district bureaucracies are stacked too deeply to allow reforms to be enacted. Hence, the wide sweeping reform for accountability through mandates.

So, what should our local schools do? The effective schools research from the University of Michigan shows that with “enough time and resources we can cause all students to succeed with our learning objectives.” However, time and resources, especially time, are finite commodities in rural schools where almost all students are bussed to and from school and bus times can be an hour or more each way. Time is the school day. In order to increase student learning time and teacher time for preparation and instruction of the Common Core Standards, more time will need to be allocated to instruction of the Standards.

Here’s the dilemma. The mandates demand that schools meet increasingly more stringent performance indicators. Meet the mandates or be identified locally and statewide as a non-compliant school. Improvement on the mandated indicators will require a reallocation of resources – time and staff. In the finite world of school resources, reallocating to one area of programs typically results in a loss of resources in another area of programs.

What is the price of keeping score?