Problems in American Education - Part 9: Boards of Education and the Question of Local Autonomy

I have worked under the Boards of Education system for well over 30 years and I think that the system stinks. Let’s start with a little background and then examine how things have evolved over the years.

If you were to ask most people why Boards of Education (called School Committees and other names in difference places) exist, I think that most would tell you that they are part of the American system of checks and balances under the Constitution. Wrong. Boards of Education were not envisioned by the founding fathers. Actually, the Constitution indicates that responsibility for education should fall under the auspices of state governments. Why then, you may ask, does every state in the union save one (Hawaii) delegate that Constitutional responsibility to local towns, cities, and regions and keep for themselves only the role of monitoring what the localities do and administering guideline regulations for education in their states? In the interest of accuracy, it should be indicated that some of these regulations are quite stringent and that they force localities to follow paths prescribed by the states; but the actual day-to-day, year-to-year, exercise of administrative authority over most schools is done by the Boards of Education and falls under the resources provided by budgets supported by local property taxes.

I think that there are two reasons that American education has evolved in this direction and away from state control over the years. One of them is that there is a basic American distrust of bureaucracy and Americans perceive state departments of education as classic examples of bureaucracies, subject to the excesses and inefficiencies of bureacracies. Secondly, and, I am afraid, more insidiously, local control is a way for people to geographically segregate where the money goes and allows them to channel that money to where it will help their own children. It takes the reasoned premise that all children should be given an equal opportunity to resources and replaces it with the premise posed earlier that some parents feel that their accomplishments, power, and money should be transmitted on the local level to the reality that their children (who, in most cases, have never earned a nickel of money that supports education) should enjoy the benefits of their parents’ success in life. Granted, laws have been passed in an attempt to mitigate the effects of this practice; but, to this day, the phrase “ability to pay” is still a key phrase in understanding American education localities, especially in the dichotomy of offerings between urban and suburban education.

In breaking it down further, even if you accept that this is the way things should be, what is the report card for Boards of Education in their attempts to exercise local autonomy. After working over these many years with many, many different Boards, here is what I have seen and experienced. When the mode of approach has been to push money at educational issues, I have observed some successes, especially in communities where money is available and where the citizenry has enough children in their population to want the best. Other times, however, what I have seen are:

- highly questionable approaches to problem solution;

- attempts by Boards to forget their roles as child advocates and fall prey to the political pressure to act more like Boards of Finance;

- successful candidacies for membership on the Boards by people who have personal vendettas and become one-issue members;

- a failure by many Boards to treat their professional educators as respected professional advisers and, instead, a tendency to allow their personal biases to play a greater role in decision-making than research and the opinions of people who have been trained to understand educational issues;

- a susceptiblity of some members on Boards of Education to relate more to cronyism than the best interests of children, leading to problems related to nepotism and issuance of “favors,” especially in hiring practices; and,

- a tendency to be swayed by local political interest groups, many of whom provide candidates for future elections.

While I understand the concern about state bureaucratic influence, the question has to be whether the state could do much worse than what I have outlined above. We question and complain about where American education is going, yet we fail to recognize that it is on the local levels where most significant decisions about education are being made, at least as they effect individual schools. Why do we fail to understand the answer to that question? Go back to my second reason for the maintainance of local autonomy, the one I called “insidious,” and you will see the reason we turn our heads while vociferously complaining. Other than that judge in Boston a number of years ago and a few other limited measures that have been attempted in several staes, we fail to act because too many people believe that it is not in their self-interest to act. The solution, they believe, creates a bigger problem, even if it is a just solution. Rather, they pinch their noses and tolerate the smell.

Problems in American Education - Part 8: Financial Support for Public Education

It would be foolish to argue that throwing money at problems is the way to solve all of those problems; but it would be equally foolish to state that funding for public education is unimportant. The way our economic system works, an institution that struggles to obtain a working budget is an institution that spends its time managing struggles. My experience tells me that way too much time in public education is taken up managing matters related to passing school budgets; and, let there be no doubt, this is time that is taken away from programs related to education. Indirectly, therefore, it means time taken away from those innocent and vulnerable children that keep getting mentioned in these essays and who unknowingly and repeatedly find themselves at the end of the food chain.

In a free society, of course, everyone has the right (and duty) to vote according to the dictates of his or her conscience. Like most of us, I would fight to the death to protect that right. It bothers me, however, to see communities in a wealthy country defeat school budgets time after time, year after year, until those budgets are whittled down to bare minimums (and sometimes below bare minimums). Granted, it could be asserted that these budgets are defeated for good reason. That voters do not agree with the programs promoted by their school districts. I have seen evidence, however, that many times the reasons relate more to tax levels than program agreement.

The Puritans in colonial New England tended to be a bit extreme for my tastes, but I do think they had a few good ideas. One that I particularly admire is the one that says a community is a community because of a covenant of interconnectedness that its people enjoy with one another. In my opinion, whether we are young or old, whether we have children of our own or not, we all have the responsibility, as members of the community, to support the children of the community. I look at that tenet of responsibility to one another as one of those cornerstones of civilization that makes us civilized. The Puritans gave this notion very religious overtones; but I don’t think we need to go that far to see its merit.

I have heard many stories, usually accompanied by jokes, from educators who complain about how you can see all the old and retired people come out in all kinds of weather to vote against school budgets. They don’t have children in school now, the reasoning goes, and they are out there to keep their taxes down. They don’t care, so the story goes, about rationales and programs. All they care about is the tax rate.

I personally have seen members of Boards of Education defend this position on behalf of senior citizens and others. The argument normally bases it’s logic on the difficulty fixed income people have in dealing with ever-rising taxes. My position is that, while I feel badly about that reality, people choose in a free society to live wherever they believe they can afford to live. I am not certain that affordability is a fair concept when it comes to support for education, and I will deal with that matter in a future post; but it is a reality. To put it another way, children should not suffer because people make mistakes about where they can afford to live, now or in the future.

Problems in American Education - Part 7: Misconceptions about Grades and a Few Other Matters

I almost quit writing this series last night because I am feeling a bit uneasy about a few things. Very few people are reading it, and that’s one reservation; but it’s not really a big deal to me. Part of me just wants to get this stuff out there; and, if few read it, so be it. My soul is mixed in with the words, so the activity in itself does offer some satisfaction.

The biggest reservation, the one that gives me caution, is that I don’t feel too comfortable biting the hand that fed me and my family for so many years. I was part of the system and, as an American, I loved most of it and was proud of most of it during all the years of my career. The issues you see here are more a matter of a spat between lovers than they are an attack on the core of what still is an American system. I love my country and what it respresents and hope that no one interprets my words in any other way. I am still writing today because I do love what we are trying to do and feel that I have a responsibility to explain the serious reservations I have about what I saw over those many years. If I am nothing else, I like to see myself as an advocate for children, the most innocent and most vulnerable people in our civilization. Whether I am accurate in my admonitions or misguided, I believe advocacy is my motivation. I want to see change, and my options for promoting that change are now very limited.

The topic for this morning is our systems of grading or evaluating student performance. Maybe it’s because I taught social studies and English, subjects that dealt with more conceptual content, but I never understood how we can so emphatically evaluate student performance numerically. The amazing thing to me is to observe how seriously people accept those numerical results and look at them as a way to make schools accountable. It’s like we try to measure human beings like you would measure the distance between New York and Chicago - like human intelligence can be represented by discrete sequential numbers. To put it another way, it’s like trying to measure the effect of an explosion with a yardstick.

At least when we use letter grades there is some recognition of the fact that we are simply incapable of measuring the complexity of human progess to any precise degree, but I have always been amazed at the pressure educators feel to produce exact number grades. I see this as a problem in national standardized testing, state standardized testing and even with individual class evaluations and I suspect that the problem is more political than it is a question of accurate evaluation.

Who among us feels qualified to say, for instance, that 70% or 60% mastery of any subject is connected in some way to success in life. As a friend of mine once said when I was in high school, if you had a kidney problem, would you want to go to a doctor who had a great reputation, a great percentage of success, but who flunked kidneys when he was in medical school. I suppose that doesn’t quite match up with my issue here, but it does call attention to what a misconception it is to believe that grades mean a great deal.

To my way of thinking, the problem is compounded even more in its imprecision the further down you go in grade level and age. The younger the child, the more unpredicatable they are and the more difficult it is to evaluate their progress at any particular point. Granted, you can calculate the percentage of material they have mastered. But what does that mean? What if their mental capacities and developmental maturity are about to take a quantum leap next month and they are not scheduled for testing again in a certain area for another year? Does that mean that we should make important decisions about their programs based on what we see today? These things do happen. My hypothetical example is not far fetched. Actually, it happens quite often.

Another reason why I have been feeling uncomfortable about my writing over the past couple of days is that I feel I am running the risk of a “glass half-empty” approach that indicates there are problems; but an approach that offers precious few solutions. My solution for this problem is to ask educators and parents to not take themselves and their tools so seriously. Why attempt to precisely measure what is unmeasurebable? Why do we need to place kids, especially little kids, into categories with fences they can never climb over once they are perceived to be certain “kinds” of students? Once again I am calling for flexibility and inclusion for all children. Understanding learning disabilities is important reasons to study student progress, but most of those disabilities, if serious, are profound and easily recognizable. We need to address them, but we cannot and should not try to make a science out of what is an art.

Problems in American Education - Part 6: The Vicarious Problems Related to Pushing Children

This next concern covers a cultural phenomenon so widespread that it touches virtually all pursuits in education. It is undeniable that our society puts a very high premium on success. That may seem so obvious that it does not warrant a mention; but what is important is the extreme to which we honor the concept in this country. We are a competitive people who are not satisfied with second place. While other citizens of the world also love to compete, my position here is that we tend to be obsessed with it as part of our culture and our value system.

When you couple that obsession with the connection we feel to our children that I described in my previously developed issue, the possibilities for an unhealthy intensity naturally follow. The phenomenon has taken many, many evolutionary years to develop; but the result is tremendous pressure to succeed put on children by many parents - a pressure that fulfills a vicarious desire on the part of those parents to live a better life through their children’s accomplishments. It is seen time and again in the classrooms, at policy meetings of Boards of Education, and even on the school athletic fields. Unfortunately, at least from the school’s point of view, the phenomenon often makes it very difficult for schools to effectively communicate and work with parents. The school is responsible for working in the best interests of all the children, but a minority of parents often fail to even take that mission into consideration when they prepare to fight for what they want for their children.

I cannot contend, therefore, that most parents are like this. Most are reasonable and sincerely want to work with the school to advance the interests of their children and to cooperate in the education of all children. The problem addressed here relates to the small minority of aggressive parents whose aggressively adversarial promotions for their children consume a psychic energy in the school that is markedly disproportionate to their numbers - causing a significant disruption and distraction from what the school is supposed to be doing.

As an administrator, the object I hated the most was the telephone. So much of my time was taken up by parents who, even when operating under what they felt were the best of intentions, would argue and debate endlessly to gain some advantage for their children. Often they did not even recognize that their argument was severely colored by self-interest. They would contend that compliance with their position was in the best interests of the school as a whole. In truth, these were the parents who believed that it was their duty to advocate in an adversarial manner in order to get the best possible education for their children. All they unwittingly achieved was the building of fences, the breakdown of communication, and the creation of distrust between the school and the home.

Often, these were the same parents who would apply the same kind of pressure directly on their children - pushing them to strive for excellence in all things. What’s difficult in all of this is the realization that these parents are not far from where they should be in monitoring their children’s progress; but that small distance makes all the difference in the world. Good parents should be challenging their children to strive for excellence. Good parents should advocate for their children in the schools; but we need to ask the question about how far they should go. My experience tells me that more and more go too far. No one wants to really challenge them because to do so leads to charges of failing to communicate.

Our society at the turn of the century is confronted often by a massive lack of trust in what used to be our most trusted and most wholesome institutions - and schools are definitely among those institutions. The constant questioning by parents moves beyond healthy advocacy when it becomes obsessive and automatic. Seeking ways to motivate our children becomes unhealthy when children are subjected to parental pressure in ways they are not equipped to handle. We now have growing problems with holding our families and social institutions together and I submit that part of the reason is that we have lost our ability to nurture with healthy perspectives. There is no sense of community and trust, and our schools are some of the first places to consider as places where that sorry situation is evident.

Problems in American Education - Part 5: Elitism and Hypocrisy

You know, for a country that claims to be the center of democracy in the world, we seem to have way too much social stratification in our schools. I will try to make this entry a little shorter, especially since I touched on the subject a little in my last essay on ability grouping; but I do believe that elitism, though sometimes subtle, is a very large and very hypocritical erosive element plaguing American education. Let’s just stop and think about it for a while and describe it for what it is.

Once again, in considering the logic and consistency behind our programs in education, it may be wise to go back to Jefferson’s thoughts on equal opportunity for all. We do present such ideas to the world as cornerstones on which our society is built. At the same time, however, we also support the notion that people should be free to send their children to elite private schools, parochial and other private church-related institutions, and to programs in which certain students are given an advantage over others.

Again, consider the logic. If we are truly a democratic society with equal opportunity for all, why are some children given advantage over others? I am guessing that the first line of argument in favor of such discrimination will be related to freedom of choice - the idea that parents who have earned the financial and/or social power to make decisions about how their children will be educated should have the freedom to do so. My essential question is this: Even if the parents, through hard work, good decisions, effort, and good fortune in a free society, have earned the freedom they wish to exercise, what have their children done to equally earn such privilege? Unless I am missing something, it seems to me that all they did was find themselves born into power. Why is it that the poor child, born into an inner city family, does not get similar advantage in a society that is supposed to be based on equality of opportunity. This is more than just a disconnect - it is hypocrisy.

I want to make it clear that I am not opposed to private schools. They have a place and a role to perform in a democratic society. I believe that private schools should exist to work with children who have special needs that mainstream public schools cannot service. I have worked in the past decade as an administrator and teacher in two schools designed to work with at-risk youth. There is no greater calling. These schools were set up to help troubled kids who needed a helping hand to climb back into the main currents of life. That is just one example of a proper role for private education. There are others.

What I cannot defend are private schools and privileged circumstances in public schools that seek to hand advantage to children just because their parents or some perceived notions about their state of childhood competence dictate that they should be segregated. Such practices are not democratic and run counter to the concept and development of equal opportunity. Let us not fool ourselves; these practices are widespread and largely accepted as normal patterns in American education. I contend that they undermine the culture of education and send subtle but strong messages about what our society is supposed to represent.

Supporting all of this is the unstated notion that parents own their children - that children are extensions of themselves and are thereby entitled (that’s the word!) to special consideration. I know that there was a judge in Boston a number of years ago who got into a great deal of trouble trying to use buses to attack this problem; but he was right. There was and is a basic inequality of opportunity in our country and the situation not getting any better. In his case, he was trying to battle that inequality as it related to the disparities between urban and suburban schools; but that is only one corner of the problem. The bigger picture has to do with innate prejudice subtly harbored in the heart of the way our portion of civilization thinks. As one sage recently noted in something I read somewhere, we like democracy when it makes us feel free, but we don’t like it when it gives freedom for others to become unwanted competition. Makes you think a little bit about ancient Rome, doesn’t it?

Problems in American Education - Part 4: Myths Related to Ability Grouping

I wanted to start my chronicle of problems with one that is particularly important to me - an issue in which I could really sink my teeth and release some passion. Any of you who have worked with me know that the question of ability grouping (sometimes called “homogeneous grouping”) is just such an issue.

Ability grouping before high school is a bad thing. I used to say that it was evil, but people would look at me in a funny way when I said that, so I thought I would try to avoid scaring you away by restraining myself a bit in this blog. You probably already think I am using extreme rhetoric on what seems to be a pretty mundane subject; but I would like to ask you to bear with me a little while I make my case. I hate ability grouping before high school; and, to tell the truth, I’m not really all that excited about it in high school. At least in high school, however, there are some solid reasons to allow prerequisite course requirements that dictate the sorting of some students into certain classes with other students who have completed similar course requirements. I do not see that as the same issue as ability grouping in the lower grades.

Thankfully, pre-high school ability grouping has been fading away (although very slowly) over the past couple of decades in many American schools. My contention is that the speed of change is not nearly fast enough when you consider the harm that the practice has done to millions of children over the years. Ability grouping still has its proponents and these are the people I want to take on in this blog. Understand, I do believe that most of them are well-intentioned; but I believe they are dead wrong about this practice and that children continue to suffer because of the practice. We need to trace back a bit to put all of this into context.

Let’s start with Thomas Jefferson. When Jefferson and the other founding fathers (but especially Jefferson) developed the foundations of our egalitarian society, they spoke about all men being created equal. Granted, they were particularly focusing on white males, but it was the late 1700’s and that limitation in their thinking was somewhat understandable at the stage of evolution in which they found themselves. In the context of my case development today, the important thing is to understand Jefferson’s working definition of equality. He is often misunderstood. By that I mean that he was not contending that all people are born with the same talents or equal proportions of the same abilities. Jefferson was a brilliant man with a very logical, though sensitive, mind. He was not naive. What he meant by the equality he espoused in the Declaration of Independence was that a democratic government had the reponsibility of promoting equality of opportunity. We have clung to this democratic principle ever since, proudly claiming that to be born American means that we should all have the same opportunity to develop in positive directions and stake out our claims to a happy, fulfilling, and successful life. We say that it is true; but, as we all know, saying something does not always mean that it is true. Much blood has been shed on this issue in American history and, believe it or not, I am about to be so bold as to contend that this question of ability grouping has and is quietly part of that battle for attempting to live what we have preached for well over 200 years.

Why did we ever group students according to their perceived ability levels? The simple answer to that question that is always offered is that it allows teachers to approach students who have similar understanding of the subject matter in an efficient manner. Proponents believe that it is efficient because students who are not ready for the level of delivery do not slow down those who can take on the challenge. The need for individualization, therefore, is not there and the teacher can concentrate on pure instruction and progress. Subjects are covered more quickly and progress takes place with few obstacles. Students who are not ready for higher levels of study, they contend, also benefit because classes for them are formed at a lower level of challenge, allowing them to work at their own pace and make progress at a slower pace. It sounds neat and analytical and it appeals to those who argue that we pay too little attention to common sense solutions in education.

The problem is that it doesn’t make common sense when you really take a look at it and, as noted, it does great harm to children and to our educational delivery systems.
But wait, I must remember to follow my own admonition about moving slowly on this subject and in developing the thought process. In order to lay out the framework and to provide some context, here is a list of what my experience tells me are the real reasons why some schools still group according to perceived ability levels:

1. It is easier for teachers to teach classes that are ability grouped.

2. There are serious misunderstandings about the ability levels of young human beings.

3. It is easier for teachers to teach classes that are ability grouped.

4. Parents of students who are perceived to be in the higher ability groups think that their children can benefit from the accelerated opportunities found in schools where ability grouping segregates their children from slower learners.

5. It is easier for teachers to teach classes that are ability grouped.

6. Certain skills-oriented subject teachers (particularly in math) feel that some of their students can advance much more quickly if not slowed down by less capable students who cannot deal conceptually with the higher level thinking skills required in some of the course work.

7. It is easier for teachers to teach classes that are ability grouped.

8. Special education teachers (some of them) believe that their students hit a wall at about middle school age and that they cannot do the work done by mainstream students.

9. It is easier for teachers to teach classes that are ability grouped.

Do you get the picture? My contention, of course, is that all of the above thinking is erroneous and that it does not take crucial factors and research into account. Analytically, it does not take into account research findings that the whole line of thinking is faulty in the first place. Quite frankly and very directly, there is no research that I have ever seen to suggest that we can reliably determine ability levels of children before grade 9. The development of the maturation process is such that children grow at different rates. Aside from infancy, the fastest and most volatile rate of growth takes place during adolescence, the middle school years. To rate students on ability levels before high school is unfair and far from democratic. To do so is to falsely label them and doom them to a track that ultimately makes it impossible for the late bloomer to bloom.

Now, to get away from data-driven analysis, my more serious point is that the actual result of ability grouping is that kids are either emotionally and motivationally crushed by seat-of-the-pants evaluations that many adults accept as accurate, or they are placed in an entitled group of elite that would reflect proudly on medieval European class systems. All this in a democratic society!

Why do some school systems still believe that it is necessary to maintain such an archaic system? Is it that the tail of the math curriculum wags the dog, especially in smaller schools where math grouping creates scheduling impediments that maintain de facto grouping in all subjects? If so, I don’t understand why that should be the case. The argument is always that early grouping in math allows students to advance to the point where they can take calculus and other advanced math offerings in high school, preparing them for college work. But I have to ask how many students, what percentage, are serviced by such a philosophy. The truth is that the percentage is tiny; and even if you accepted the needs of those students as a reason to shape an entire school system, you would find that there is usually plenty of time in the senior year in most high school for most students to take whatever they want. In fact, most of our high schools have difficulty finding challenging and motivating offerings for most seniors to keep them busy during that terminal year. Why then do we need to push higher levels of math to students in grades 6 and 7? Why can’t they take basic and needed courses in areas like computer math and consumer math, for example, subjects that do not require advanced skills and that can bring beneficial skills to all students? I think the answer has something to do with social political correctness, teacher preferences, and political pressure from parents and others. I also believe it is part of a half-century tradition that has not been put under the scrutiny of what I call “zero-based” curriculum planning. In other words, we just don’t seem to go back to the basic mission to determine what is right for all students in regard to what they need for the future and what research tells us about what they can do and what they will be able to do. Rather, we indulge ourselves with positions that indicate that we should pursue the values we have pursued in the past.

This whole debate begs the question as to what intelligence really is. My experience in dealing with both teachers and parents is that most still believe that the measure of intelligence is a straight line projection - a single number (or IQ) that rates people from unintelligent to intelligent. Most theorists, however, tell us that intelligence (or ability if you prefer) is multi-faceted and that virtually all human beings are “intelligent” in some way. To me, it is the ultimate arbitrary, capricious and presumptuous act to believe that we have the resources to believe we can sort out kids and, in effect, determine their futures when they are at the tender ages of ten or eleven years old.

I have seen how the cruelty of this act reflects from the eyes of our children when they realize that they have been placed in lower groups or that their special education designation resulting from a legitimate disability has seriously compromised their opportunity to be in the mainstream that leads to success in life. The actual words are not spoken, but the message they receive is that they need to compensate so that they can lower their sights in the game of life. Please understand, I don’t think there is anything wrong with compensating. In fact, I admire it. What I do resent and attack, is the implied notion that these children cannot do what others do. It may take a little longer in some cases, but everything I know and have seen tells me they can catch up if we do not institutionally trample on their confidence to do so.

I know, the educational community continues to slowly come around to my way of thinking on this; but why should we wait forever for the dawn to break on this? In the meantime, how many more children are hurt by the dictates of educational pragmatism? I don’t think it is right to allow this to happen. In fact, it is simply wrong.

Problems in American Education - Part 3: A Preview Outline

I hope some of these topics whet your appetite. They are some of the issues I would like to address with my unvarnished, seat-of-the-pants opinions. Take a look. Maybe you can figure out where I am likely to go with some of them and you can start sharpening your own opinions to take me on.

- The myths related to ability grouping

- Elitism in education
Public vs. Private
Parents owning children - the sense of entitlement
Inequality in a democratic country

- Pushing kids too early - vicarious and counterproductive

- Grades - an imprecise science at best

- Boards of Education and the Constitutional responsibility for education

- Public support for education - What happened to the covenant?

- Parents may be the biggest problem

- The problems related to the career path for educators and leadership

- What is curriculum? Is there really a definition?

- Every place needs a mission

- Teachers’ unions / associations and the concept of professionalism

- Nutrition and the lunch program. Does curriculum stop in the classroom?

- Role of sports and school spirit

- Middle school vs. Junior High School

- Providing a real-life education
Student Team Learning
Performance based assessment
Structure
Differentiated instruction

- Progressive vs. Permissive

- Passive individualization - Why not?

- Computer assisted instruction

Problems in American Education - Part 2: More about where I am coming from

Credibility in this exchange needs to be based on trust in the author as a person and as an educator. I wrote the following statement of philosophy a few years ago when I was still hoping to extend my career in application for various administrative posts. It should tell you a bit more about my perspective and beliefs.

Most of my friends know that I just love to talk philosophy of education. My experience has been that educators either relish the opportunity to look at that philosophical forest or look at it with disdain, preferring to study the individual trees and emphasize the practical side of working with kids. One of my cornerstone beliefs is that a successful educational program needs a philosophical vision and a mission statement that is constantly in the focus of that vision.

This in no way implies any personal desire to chase windmills while practical realities are ignored. I feel strongly that any comprehensive educational institution must pay close attention to day-to-day needs and always put great value on a rigorous, practical, challenging, and individualized program for all of its students. One of my great fears in education, however, is that we too often get caught up in the necessities of every day survival. If we are not careful, that can lead to a very pragmatic approach to teaching in which vision, or a sense of direction, is lost to legitimately practical concerns that serve the moment, but not future. By working to build trust (and that can only be done by demonstrating that you are true to yourself), an educator provides the opportunity for growth and collective achievement, thereby providing the foundation for adherence to an educational vision.

When I look back at my career as an educator, I think of three areas of accomplishment that make me feel proud and reflect my most basic philosophical tenets and vision. In no particular order, the three areas of accomplishment are: (1) my advocacy for and active promotion of a middle school philosophy for twenty-one years in the school where I spent most of my career while teaching and leading on both the middle and high school levels, (2) my involvement in the same school district’s Senior Project movement and program during the 1990’s, and (3) my efforts in starting a charter school for at-risk, inner-city students in Hartford.

Plain and simple hard work was very much a part of those accomplishments, and it is not too old fashioned or trite to claim that leading by that example was important. I am passionate and committed in the way I approach my work, and everyone around me knows it. Healthy disagreement and different points of view are always accepted in that environment; but I have found that students tend to trust and follow those they admire for their commitment. The balance of tolerance for differences is implied in the atmosphere I am promoting; but so is the tendency to rally behind the leader who shows commitment to an ideal.

As noted, one of the highlights of my career was the development of a Senior Project program on the high school level during the early to mid-90s. A performance based assessment program that received national recognition, the Senior Project program was a celebration of the human spirit and gave students the opportunity to demonstrate that they had mastered the requisite skills, in a real-life situation, to take their place as effective and skilled adults in the community. It was controversial, but Senior Project was a great achievement for our high school, and it provided a direction for that school’s future and, I hope, for other schools of the future.

The Senior Project movement was the direct result of the school's commitment to the published competencies it developed for graduation and the strenuous requirements of performance based assessment. By definition, it was a reform for grade 12, but its impact traveled all through the high school and the middle school. One of our original goals for Senior Project as a grade 12 program was to create an exit image that could become a model for performance assessment throughout our program, grades 6 through 12. In many ways, Senior Project borrowed from the middle school model in the manner in which it valued process without diminishing the importance of content. In retrospect, it fit everything I came to believe when I broadened my approach to teaching in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, while translating those beliefs to an end product developed in the year of high school graduation. The history of the successful struggle to make Senior Project a requirement for graduation gave great romance to the mission, and the tremendous bond among the team of teachers and administrators who fought for the program added yet another level of satisfaction in what was accomplished.

My struggle to establish a charter middle school for disadvantaged children in Hartford tends to speak for itself. I am very proud of our attempt to overcome great odds to provide something special for those children. When I think of the middle school notion of providing a nurturing, caring environment where self-esteem is a crucially important ingredient, I think of that initiative, and the attempts to help those children, the neediest I have ever known.

Quite honestly, there were not many visible and obvious successes in the program; but I do believe there are times when success has to be defined in different ways. That thought is very much a part of what I believe comprehensive educational philosophy to be. The accomplishments described here all played key roles in helping me to understand the nature of successful education.

Problems in American Education - Part 1: The Good Side

I have to admit that I come from a family of whiners. They were always the kind who saw the glass half empty. It's far fetched, but I used to think of it as an ethnic thing. I grew up in eastern Rhode Island among first and second generation Portuguese immigrants. Although Latins, my perception is that the Portuguese are far from volatile and intense. Rather, they lived the quiet lives of immigrants trying to find a level of success for their families in America through hard work and conservative habits. My upbringing was one in which great value was put on conserving what we had for a better day and taking little risk in regard to taking any kind of bold position. Life was tough and it was always better to be careful.

As an adult and as a professional educator, I have always kept this in mind. Usually what I had to do was fight off that tendency to keep everything too close to my vest and to expect Murphy's law to come into play after every turn in the road. I was conditioned to think that way, and I soon realized that creativity would be stifled if I let that somewhat negative position dictate my approach to my work.

That's why I need to write here that everyone should consider the good things in American education before examining all the flaws that I will pursue in upcoming blogs. My upcoming critiques are labors of love for a system I think is based on great merit; but which has lost its way in maintaining some very precious American ideals. The ideals are still there, however, and I feel very motivated in my attempts to push for their return. Here are some of the things that I really admire in American education and that I believe are still existing somewhere in the confusion:

- the perception that education in a democratic society is based on egalitarian and humane principles dedicated to the proposition that every child deserves an opportunity to succeed in life.

- the understanding that progress in the art and science of educating children is based on the development of new theories, ideas, and practices that incorporate the most recent understanding of the learning process and the belief that change requires constant reevaluation.

- the realization that we are a wealthy country and that we need to share our wealth with our children and all children as part of a covenant of reciprocity we have with the ideals that made us wealthy and successful in the first place.

Those perceptions, understandings, and realizations are, I think, starting points for discussion and represent foundation principles. As you will soon see if you continue to read my series, I feel that we have lost our way on these principles to some degree; but that does not mean that they are gone. Rather, it means that we need to review them and, in some cases, resurrect them. They are my "back to basics" list. I have come to dislike that term in the way it is used in education today and in the recent past, but it does apply in this context.

One of my complaints about life in general is that we sometimes forget to go back to our most basic roots, our common denominators, to determine if we are still in touch with the mission. I think that is what has happened in American education and it is my intention to examine what has happened in this series. Educators and theoreticians, as a whole, sometimes get too close to the situation and miss the forest for the trees. I will make a concerted attempt here to back up and look at the forest. I believe in philosophical application and mission review when attempting to solve institutional problems, and I will apply that belief to what I write here.

I hope you will join me in analyzing the problems.

A couple of words about my credentials

I don't consider myself to be the world's "foremost authority" - on anything!
On the other hand, however, I'm not just the guy on the street claiming to offer a common sense solution to the country's problems in education. There have already been too many of those guys shouting things like, "Back to basics," over the last 20 years or so. I am just a guy who is finishing a 38-year career in the field doing the following things at one time or another:

Teacher: Both in public and private schools - mostly social studies, but some English - mostly middle school, but some high school and some short stays in elementary education and college teaching.

Administrator: Social Studies Department Chairman for high school and middle school (1972-early '90s); Chairman of Steering Committee for school evaluation on high school and middle school level; Activities Director; District Director of Public Relations for a couple of years; Coordinator of special performance based assessment program in high school; assistant principal of a middle school for a year; Founding Director and Principal of a charter school for children-at-risk (middle school level) in Hartford, Ct; assistant principal in a junior high school for 3 1/2 years; Interim Principal for a middle school in Fairfield County, Ct. for six months

Coach: Girls middle school softball; Boys high school basketball

Army: Instructor of Effective Communication for Officer Candidates

That just names a few of my jobs. In American education, you get to do quite a few things in 38 years. In some ways, that's part of the problem; but, in other ways, it certainly does make for great variety. As noted, you don't get to be an expert, but you do get to measure the length and width of the path along the terrain. My one contention here is that it allows me to give you a long and experienced look from the inside. I want to start to look at specific issues, reflecting both the good and bad in American education, in the next few blogs. I hope that I can get some return opinions.

Major series coming on problems of American education - I hope

It's Father's Day and this is the week that I plan to retire from the field of education after a tumultuous, and, I think, successful 38 year career in public and private education. Four more days in my current job and that's it.

Right now I am trying to muster the energy and motivation to do something I have wanted to do for years and this blog thing might be just the right vehicle if I can get anyone to read the darn things.
You can't work in education for as long as I have without nurturing some opinions and ideas about the line of work you are immersed in. That is certainly how I feel about American education at this point. I have lots of opinions about what is right and what is wrong with American education as I remember my years, "on the inside" as both a teacher and an administrator.

What I would like to do is to write installments here about the various topics that have been circling in my mind over the many years. Don't misunderstand. I believe that there is much that is right about American education; but I also believe that the public at-large understands very little about what is wrong. As everyone knows, the public does know that something is wrong; but it is my contention that they bark up many of the wrong trees. I hope to address topics that really count - the ones that I have seen as really hurting kids in our country over the last 38 years and especially the ones that still haunt us today.

If you are reading this, my first hope has been realized. There really are people out there who care. That would give me a big leg up on the motivation piece. Please let me know if I can assume that to be true by replying here or contacting me at Friar4@aol.com. More should appear soon as I jump that last hurdle this week and break away from the field (so to speak).