When I saw Mary J.’s and Scott’s tweets, I was reminded that what we do either opens or closes the door to opportunity for each child who walks into our Statue of Liberty schools. Currently, multiple states have initiatives pending to return to the days of failing children in school who do not meet literacy objectives. In most cases, the “powers that be” seem to be pinpointing children around third or fourth grade. Decades-long research shows that labeling children as failures and then holding them back in school is a sure-fire way to not just leave children behind, but to contribute to their truancy, mental health, and discipline problems as they move through school.

It’s been pretty much documented that retaining students who don’t meet achievement benchmarks will increase dropout rates. Period. At the same time,  research is also pretty clear that children who struggle to read and get passed on, social promoted,  from grade to grade despite their literacy disconnects, also continue to have difficulties. They become a different kind of example of high truancy, disciplinary, and, inevitably, dropout rates.

Could it be that in our “holding back” children for their failure to read, we skip the obvious failure in all of this? I believe that eight- and nine-year old children aren’t failures at all. Maybe, just maybe, we ought finally accept responsibility for a system that’s  the real failure, not the kids. I know we educators employ some pretty archaic practices when it comes to determining who gets promoted and who does not, but we haven’t provided much support for educators to do anything much different either.

We average factors into grades that have nothing to do with meeting academic achievement standards. We put a lot of stock in measuring aspects of achievement with quick and dirty tests that tell us little about what kids really know, understand and can do. We choose some standards for success that aren’t what really matters most as indicators of deep learning, but which we can measure efficiently and cheaply. We create curriculum that demands “mile wide, inch deep” coverage and then wonder why we lose kids as we fly through piles of worksheets, scripted lessons, and mind-numbing teaching at the wall.

worksheets

What’s scary is that this begins in some districts, in some schools, as early as in kindergarten. Then, when some children, as they always have done, check out, can’t make sense of what’s being taught, or find themselves lost amidst a stream of letters and sounds, we sit around table assigning blame and determining whether the child will be assigned the trauma of being passed on – or the trauma of being failed. We pick who will get held back in a grade, creating a role for children in a macabre educational version of the movie Groundhog Day – children who go through the motions of the same curriculum, same worksheets, same teaching, and same tests with little attention to how they learn and their personal needs for learning support.

The reality in all this comes down to this. Our schools are the Statue of Liberty for America’s children. We take every child who walks through our doors, regardless of handicap, language of origin, race, religion, ethnicity, economic background, gender, or any variable which differentiates one from another. That isn’t true in some countries to which we are compared; countries such as China or India where children may be excluded from school or never get access to school for one reason or another. It’s also not true in many of the elite private or charter schools that exist today in communities across this country.

I’ve also not seen a five-year old enter public school with the idea in her head that she’s going to become a failure. Most novice teachers also don’t enter the profession with the idea that they’ll be failures at teaching. Unfortunately, somewhere along the way, some children fail to learn to read well enough to succeed in school and some teachers fail to learn how to teach. The system fails both.

Is there a solution? We can look to other countries that don’t have similar problems. Finland figures prominently in the twitter verse, but it’s not the only success story out there.

We know that the most highly educated nations in the world understand the power of safety nets for young children, beginning long before kindergarten. Children in those countries benefit from a family support package that educates parents about parenting and provides children with services of health care, decent nutrition, early childhood stimulus learning, and preschool.  It makes a difference. Countries with a commitment to educating all children well level the playing field of poverty and erase the face of poverty in school. When I asked colleagues on #Finnedchat if they fail kids, I had to explain what I meant. They said, “Our kids learn to read. It’s our job.” They had no concept of failing a grade level because of not reading well.

We don’t have a commitment in this country to comprehensive educational safety nets for young children to increase the likelihood they will enter kindergarten on the starting line, not behind it. Instead, we accept that the children who enter our schools will include a certain percentage who will never catch up, even if we do get them over the multiple choice test hurdles of every state in the union. For those who don’t, we consign them to repeating a grade or two or three. Or, we  move them up through the system with little sense of control over their capability to learn and a lot of what we call remediation support. Either way, we fail children. I don’t think it has to be that way. As Bill Glasser, the creator of reality, control, and choice theory once said to a room of educators including me, ” I hesitate to give this advice to a paying audience, but if you are doing something and it isn’t working,  consider whether you should stop doing it.”

Unfortunately, we’ve stopped very little of the things we know don’t work in education. Instead, we repackage our traditions with different labels under the guise of new programs as we continue to repeat our past. When politicians repackage reform, it’s simply another way of  doing what we’ve always done. The unfortunate downside of reform is we keep getting what we always got. So, we set ourselves up to pass laws that ban social promotion, dooming some children to fail in our schools. Then we act surprised at all the negative impacts of retention already documented in stacks of research from prior cycles of using the same strategy from different chapters in the history of American education. (At least, if it occurs again, it will fuel a current crop of graduate students with more opportunities to confirm prior studies of the effects of failure on young people in school. )

So in the spirit of not just pointing out that we need to stop doing some things, we should at least pause to consider what we know works. If we did these things and stuck to them, our nation and children would both benefit:

1) Create and fund a family support safety net that begins before a child is born and continues onward throughout school – nutrition, health care, family leave, quality child care,

2) Fund preschool learning to jump start  playful, high interest, high vocabulary-building academic background opportunities and “doing school” skills- the kind of early learning experiences that parents know help a child enter school on or in front of the starting line, parents such as the President of the United States who enrolled his own children in a “money does make a difference” private school in Washington, D.C. and Rahm Emanuel who did the same in his return to Chicago.

3) Revolutionize teacher education so college students actually apply “how children learn” neuro-research in simulation centers and practitioners’ learning spaces as they learn to set up learning situations that make sense and ensure that children get all the right “verb” opportunities. In doing so, we must select for pre-service educators who have the capacity to inspire young people to engage, process, acquire, use, create, analyze, choose, imagine, wonder, and then take learning with them for a lifetime. The medical schools are doing this, why not education schools?

UVA medical school learning studio

4) Elect political leaders, regardless of affiliation, who understand that education is not cheap and, neither are the outcomes of cheaply funding education. We need to attract those with the capability to teach well to enter and stay in the profession- not merit pay which we know doesn’t work but simply pay commensurate with doing the most important job in America- teaching. We need to reboot the profession and our professionals. Our kids need access to top-notch teachers, the learning tools to accomplish the contemporary work of “search, connect, collaborate,” and the time necessary to learn whether it’s less, more or about the same. Needing more or less time should not come with penalties as it often does today.

5) Expand the concept of literacy as the acts of “getting information into and out of learners’ minds. We know that even though a majority of children learn to read with comprehension and fluency, America reads on average somewhere around a sixth grade reading level. We need to use the comprehensive literacy research that exists and is continuously evolving to inform practice, professional learning, teaching and learning expectations, and structures that are time dependent.  We need to acknowledge and address that the lack of high quality early learning leads to some children failing at literacy, not because of their lack of capability, but because of the system’s failure. We need to realize that some children have such significant lifespan literacy disconnects they must have accessibility tools (TTS and SST) to enter the world of literacy.

Of course, I could generate change orders for public education to fill more than a few blog posts, but listing those has little meaning unless we follow Glasser’s advice and stop doing what’s not working.  I appreciate that Scott McLeod and others at least recognize and are resisting the legal imposition of retention of students as one of those traditions of education that’s a system failure. It’s a long way from the full scope of what we need to do to imagine an education system that works for kids and teachers, one whose members resist the urge to sustain conventions and traditions because they’re comfortable and known.

Challenging the current push to return to a future of holding kids back in school is a start. Thank you, Scott.

Inequity of Opportunityhttp://www.scribd.com/embeds/79012369/content?start_page=1&view_mode=list&access_key=key-207b2vo4q2r2f2hpddmx//

Setting high academic standards for schools and students is important but relatively easy to do. The harder, yet more effective, strategy is to adopt and implement standards that create optimal conditions for learning. This means ensuring that all children, regardless of where they live, have access to high-quality schools. (Boykin and Noguera, 2011)

While having high expectations for each and every child to succeed in school is important, regardless of where they come from or where there school is located, in the end, all of the state, national and international tests and studies conclude its not enough. Yes, there are “pockets of excellence” sprinkled across the country but typically the results are not sustainable over the long haul and not replicable on a larger scale. Many factors go into creating successful schools and without adequate resources, the children who attend under-resourced schools are not likely to be successful.

…throughout the United States, public schools exhibit a high degree of inequality that is fostered by both inequities in per-pupil spending and the personal resources that families provide. Throughout the country, school funding policies are characterized by an allocation gap; we typically spend the most on children from the wealthiest families, and we spend the least on children from the poorest families. (Reed, 2001 cited in Boykin and Noguera, 2011)

As superintendents and other district leaders, we have a moral responsibility to ensure we collectively foster an educational system that provides equity of opportunity for all kids, not just the ones who attend schools in our own district. My state of Michigan in particular has done poorly at closing the equity gap despite the promises and intent of Proposal A in the mid-1990′s. The state has taken over responsibility for public school funding yet our political leaders continue to perpetuate a system that fails to recognize that a growing number of children have significant disadvantages that require more resources to be successful in school. These deficiencies are not effectively resolved simply by raising the bar on the tests or opening more mediocre charter schools.

Closing or at least reducing the opportunity gap is essential if disparities in achievement are to be lessened. We should not be surprised to find that disadvantaged students…do not perform as well as affluent students who attend schools with abundant resources. Inequality in school funding, combined with a pervasive and growing inequality in income and wealth, creates an environment that makes closing the achievement gap challenging. It is unreasonable to expect that poor children will do as well as middle-class children if we ignore these inherent disadvantages and pretend to promote equity by holding all students to a common set of academic standards. (Boykin & Noguera, 2011)

I encourage you, if you have not yet done so, to read my posts below from earlier in the week. They expand on this topic and include specific examples of how inequity in funding impacts education. Then I encourage you to act.

K-12 Funding Perpetuates the Inequity of Opportunity

Successful School Reform Must Include Equity of Opportunity in Funding

Setting High Standards for All But Ignoring the K-12 Opportunity Gap

Citation: Boykin, A. Wade and Noguera, Pedro. Creating the opportunity to learn: moving from research to practice to close the achievement gap. ASCD, 2011.

• Are you willing to do whatever we can to meet the needs of all students?
• Are you ready to try something new so you can produce better results?
• Are you willing to ignore the negative and focus on the positive?
• Are you ready to learn?
• Are you ready to LEAD?

I’ll be the first to admit that my perspective is biased. Today when I walked into my office and looked around the cluttered space I saw a total lack of management. An office cluttered because I didn’t take the time to put it back together after a flurry of activity.  An activity that had me digging through old files, rereading sections from the last three or four books I read and compiling notes from online research I had plowed though, guided by my PLN. I admit, in these thoughts I have applied my lens to a big issue, and management and detail are a weakness of mine. I go 100 miles an hour and work like my hair is on fire. I try to do too many things at once. Sometimes I speak when I should listen. I am a flawed leader. I take my lumps with the best of them and admit my mistakes more than I would like. But my belief is strong, we can’t change our system for the better if we spend all our time managing, too afraid to lead.

I have been struggling for a while with the negativity that abounds in education today. Negativity piled upon us because when we simply manage our systems, we let others tell our story.

• YES, the public is less than enthralled with us as a system.
• YES, legislators across the State and Nation are bashing us at every turn and enacting legislation for a variety of reasons that will effect our next steps.
• YES, teachers are feeling the stressful effects of change.
• YES, our students aren’t “testing” as well as their global counterparts. www.oecd.org/edu/pisa/2009

YES, I could continue for a page or more full of affirmations of negativity. I have made a choice not to, because I “CHOOSE” to focus on the positive……… I choose to lead.

We are leading and learning in the most exciting educational time in history! Opportunities for learning abound. We have a chance to craft and tell our stories in ways some educators never thought possible. That won’t happen if we focus on management. What can happen when we lead is endless and I look forward to those stories being told. For a long time, management and closed door teaching and learning got us by. Getting by has never been good enough for our students. It isn’t good enough for my children and shouldn’t be good enough for yours.

What we do is clear……We educate kids. How we educate kids is clear (insert my lens here)……in single classrooms, based on an industrial model, executed through a time-bound, agrarian calender. Why we do it……..now this where I get excited! Why? Because every child deserves a chance to learn and create, to be prepared for anything and everything when they walk across that stage and we call them graduates. Graduates of one portion of their life, ready to continue to learn in the next stage of their life. To do that we have to focus on educating students for their future, not our past. We have to embrace change and being comfortable with uncomfortable. Willing to live on the edge of our knowledge, moving between success and failure, willing to embrace that we will never arrive.

I am excited for tomorrow, purposely ignoring the negative. I am blessed to be able to lead in an organization that wants to grow and provide personal experiences for our students with exceptional results. I acknowledge the position education has created for itself and work everyday to shake up the status quo, to embrace learning and support educational experiences for adults and students alike. As an educational system we made the bed we have today, but I choose not to sleep there. I get up everyday looking for opportunities to craft a new reality for education.  We won’t eliminate the negative unless we embrace the can’s and find a way around the can’ts. For me, I may not be great at managing, but everyday I look forward to being able to lead. Now is not the time to end with periods, it’s time to start with questions.

If Popeye the Sailor was a school superintendent in an impoverished district, his mantra would likely be, “I’ve had all I can stand, and I can’t stands no more!” Unfortunately, there’s no magical can of spinach that will help me or any of my peers in districts facing similar challenges. But, it’s long overdue that more of us speak out on the inequity of opportunity that confronts our kids, and that’s just what I’m fixin’ to do. You can choose to read the rest of this post and gain a better understanding of the problem, or, like many of my contemporaries and our political leaders, you can bury your head in the sand and act like there’s no problem.

Read the full post:

K-12 Funding Perpetuates the Inequity of Opportunity

Related information: Does Money Matter in Education?

Technology has changed the way virtually every industry in the world operates – from farmers to physicians – by supporting people’s relationships with one another and their work. Just as eBay altered commerce, iTunes changed the music industry, and Amazon forever changed the corner bookstore, technology innovations are poised to transform and disrupt the decades-old model of school as we currently define it. While some school districts have embraced technology to manage the complexities of the education enterprise, not nearly enough have experienced the efficiencies and academic successes that exist when all of the right elements are in place.

Superintendents should be working with their boards to lead this transformation.

Read her entire post including current trends that are driving this change at http://blog.eboardsolutions.com/accountability/why-school-boards-should-focus-on-education-technology/

Learning Begins with Access

I have to admit that two years ago, I didn’t, in general, use the terms access, accessible, or accessibility as a frame for beliefs about learning. Of course, as with most educators, I’ve been quick to embed phrases such as learning for all, eliminating achievement gaps, and opening the door for all learners into my edu-speak, but I’m shifting how I think about what accessible learning for all actually looks like.

I began to define the concept of access over twenty years ago through the lenses of a close colleague. She was a Jedi Knight for creation of an inclusionary community in the elementary school where we worked together in the early ‘90s. I was the principal. She was the teacher. A summary of what I learned from her? See special education children as – children. Back then, access was a term typically used to talk about special education kids being allowed to participate in PE or use communicative devices that seemed to function almost like Ouija boards to those of us on the outside looking in at special educators at work.

Soon after I was appointed principal, the entire staff gathered together during a series of school days – every teacher, every teaching assistant, the librarian, the custodian, cafeteria workers, the office staff, and me – to dig deep into what we valued for children in our learning community.  This wasn’t easy to do since we had to cover classes with substitutes and school volunteers. Today, given the economy and new volunteer “rules”, this kind of work likely wouldn’t happen during the school day. I also had to get past that some people in the room questioned why certain “others” were there. It had felt important to me that any one whose work brought them in contact with children be present, so everyone had been asked to participate – every last one.

The special education teacher (a woman whom I came to think of as a close critical friend) and I had tangled a bit philosophically in a prior year over the “new” concept of neighborhood school placements of high needs special education students. She’d been a teacher of moderately and severely handicapped children in another school. Her class was being disbanded and kids were being placed in neighborhood schools. That didn’t make sense to me. I respected her expertise as a teacher, but worried she didn’t understand the impact of moving high needs students into schools where they would be “one of a kind.”  I think, in hindsight, a lot of us were just scared of children whose needs we didn’t believe we could meet.

After she came to work with me, I came to understand that she was a teacher not just of children, but also the adults with whom she worked. Over the years under her tutelage, I came to realize that every child is “one of a kind” and it’s the labels we assign that filter our capability to see children as individuals.

I will never forget one of those pivotal, epiphany moments in one of our more heated “vision” sessions that began to shape the concept of access differently for me. We were sitting in the crowded library of the rural elementary school where we worked, trying to incorporate something about the importance of community into our belief statements. This special education teacher stood up and with grace drew a simple circle on a flip chart sheet. She then drew a series of “X’s” inside the circle and then put one “X” outside the circle like this:

Then, she asked us a question, “ Is Erin inside our community circle or outside it?” Erin (pseudonym) was “moderately handicapped” according to all the state special education formulas. She was the first child with that label to attend our school and we reluctantly had placed her in a regular early childhood classroom because we couldn’t bear to isolate her from peers. Her voice was garbled, her processing limited, and she lacked all kinds of small and large muscle coordination. Parents of “regular ed” children questioned her presence in “our” school. We were all, I think, a bit afraid of her. The children seemed to be the only ones who saw her as just another kid in the classroom and, they ultimately became the best teachers of teachers about the value of an inclusionary community as a space in which to learn relationship skills for a lifetime.

But, that question, “ Is Erin inside our community circle or outside it?” stopped us all in our tracks. No one seemed to know what to say. The special education teacher stood there and the wait time stretched out. She was good with wait time. I knew that from watching her at work with kids.  Someone was going to have to fill the void of silence in the library and, I realized,  it would be up to me.

I remember the next few moments as if it happened yesterday, even though it’s now been over twenty years ago. I first acknowledged how hard it was for adults, including me,  to make sense of this new neighborhood model for delivering special education services. Next, I spoke of the challenges of inclusion which we all felt had become another “buzz” word in the educational lexicon. Then, I looked at our soft-spoken custodian, a man of great compassion and wisdom. I saw him kneeling in the hall at the beginning of a school day beside a child, the  one whose “X” was outside the circle, helping her tie her shoe. When he looked the child in the eye, there seemed to be some sort of kinship there.

I thought about the fact that some in the room had questioned the custodian’s presence in our work and imagined he knew that as well. He represented, in some ways, another “X” outside the community circle. I had a mentor who believed that in our work we just have to stand up sometimes and say what we think is right even if we know others might not agree or question the rightness of it. The special education teacher had done so. I took a deep breath. It was my turn.

I stood and said something like this, “We all say we value community. As long as I’m here with you, I”ll do everything I can to make sure that everyone is an X inside our community circle. If any of us ever allow any child or adult to be placed outside the circle by our actions, then we can’t call ourselves a community, we are simply a group of people who show up to work every day. If that happens, we need to acknowledge that what we say we believe isn’t what we believe at all.” While it was no great speech, it was a first step in defining access and accessibility differently in my own mind, and within our school community. Because of  that teacher, we took on inclusion as a way of being. It was hard work, but it was the right thing to do.

Today, I’ve come to understand another evolution emerging in my understanding of accessibility. Accessibility applies to everyone, not just the Erins in our lives. We need to stop thinking about the concept of access as isolated to those with federally determined labels – Special Ed, 504, LEP, Title I, gifted, talented. We need to reboot our beliefs about access. And, it’s as true for adults as well as children.

When I recently asked adults with whom I work if they wanted to read a book together on a specific topic, they told  me they wanted options of titles. Some of them wanted a paper book. Others preferred to download a copy to an e-reader. Others didn’t want a book in any form, they wanted to watch a video, participate in a webinar, or take a class. Some of them wanted to get together for face to face discussions, others struggled with doing that. Some wanted to meet in school spaces, others preferred a local watering spot. Adults want personalized learning for themselves. Our kids need that, too.

We adults simply mirror what our kids want and need as learners. They also have different preferences for how they access information. They, too, prefer different tools and different modes of input. They find comfort in different kinds of spaces for learning and in different configurations of interaction. Just like adults they can all benefit from adapting and flexing some of the time to fit into different learning situations. It strengthens them, and us, as learners and community members to do so.

But, if we expect any of us to learn well – regardless of our age – by sitting in the same way, using the same tools, and interacting when and how our teachers choose, then we will get the same learning results we’ve always gotten.  Some will attain great success, some will get by, and some won’t learn much at all. Some will love school, some will tolerate school, and some mostly will hate the experience. We’ll just maintain the faux nature of the Bell curve.

Kids Preferring the Floor

Teachers Preferring the Floor

_________________________________________________________________________

However, changing our viewpoint on access to the learning tools, environments, and experiences learners need for learning could, if implemented well, change the game regarding discipline, management, achievement, and test scores. It also could change the game regarding motivation, drive, curiosity, interest, and commitment. I believe if we were to change the game, think of our job as providing universal accessibility, we’d achieve results beyond our wildest dreams; indeed a j-curve of learners who attain great success and love their spaces for learning for a lifetime.

There’s no profit in fixing poverty and inequality, but there’s a fantastic amount of profit in high-stakes testing and charter school management. The education reformers will continue to ignore what drives Finland’s success. (my words)

Anu Partanen, a Finnish journalist based in New York City, writes a compelling year-ending post for the Atlantic Journal titled: What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland’s School Success. The most compelling thought is the sub-heading of the online article: The Scandinavian country is an education superpower because it values equality more than excellence.

Here are several key points from her article but I strongly encourage you to go to the link and read the entire post:

• Finland owes their fame to one single study, the PISA survey.
• Finnish schools assign less homework and value creative play.
• There are no private schools in Finland. Only a small number of independent schools exist and they are publicly funded. There are no private universities, either.
• Finland has no standardized tests except for an exit exam following the equivalent of high school.
• Teachers are trained to assess students in the classroom using teacher-created tests (what a novel idea).
• The Finnish system focuses on responsibility, not accountability.
• Teachers are given prestige, decent pay, and a lot of responsibility.
• A master’s degree is required to enter the profession (in America, the reformers argue a master’s degree is not necessary in teaching).
• Education policy is driven not by competition but by cooperation.
• The PISA results were a surprise to most Finns. They thought it was a mistake. They were not focused on test results, instead they were focused on eliminating inequality of opportunity.

As Partanen points out, Pasi Sahlberg’s new book Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland? makes a similar argument and Sahlberg himself admits no one in America wants to tackle the real problem. We don’t even want to talk about it:

Americans are consistently obsessed with certain questions: How can you keep track of students’ performance if you don’t test them constantly? How can you improve teaching if you have no accountability for bad teachers or merit pay for good teachers? How do you foster competition and engage the private sector? How do you provide school choice?

In other words, the solution in America involves (1) give more tests, (2) fire more teachers, (3) destroy the unions, and (4) open the market up for ginormous profiteering through charter school management.

All of these focus on the bottom financial line. None of these focus on student learning. Superintendents and other community-based K-12 leaders must band together to help Partanen, Sahlberg and others get this message across once and for all. The future of our kids depends on it.

The data on homeless children and those living in poverty reflect a magnitude of disregard for poor children within the American community that overwhelms the senses. Homeless children who live on the extreme edges of American poverty represent 7 place digits of young faces. Expected to learn in schools as middle class children do, they do not go home over the holidays to shelves full of children’s picture books or a new iPad loaded with the best apps for work and play. In the cities in which they live, they don’t often walk into museums or libraries unless it’s to warm up and get off the street for a while. They are expected for the most part to carry on invisible lives apart from the middle class. They’re only distantly touched by most of us when we, in our Pavlovian response to the clanging bell of the Salvation Army, drop a buck or two in the red buckets hanging in front of the big box stores or hit the donation button on a web page dedicated to helping those in need. Our acts of charity salve the American conscience as we load our cars with presents for our own families or click the “okay purchase” button on website after site. But not everyone forgets the faces of poverty over the winter holidays.

Saying Goodbye for Break

Teachers and principals and, yes, even superintendents carry the faces of poverty with them through the break, wondering about children who may lack food, shelter and medicine or who’ve been left home or on the streets alone. We worry about children such as Rudy in San Francisco who need us the most for all the right reasons we chose to become educators.

We superintendents know winter as the budget season. It’s a time of numerical constraints when we look at dollars saved, expenses reduced, revenues diminished, all of which translate into spreading resources thin once again for a fourth year in a row. In the triage we do to sort programs and people into those we save, and those we can not, we do everything we can to not take away possibilities and opportunities for children, especially those with the greatest need for support. We anticipate that this current budget season likely will bring a new chapter in the story of losses to public education across the United States in 2012-13 – another round of cuts to teachers’ jobs, arts programs, intervention support, professional development, health and retirement benefits.

Despite it all, I want Americans to believe in the magic of educators who make a difference for children against all odds rather than corporate heads, media, and politicians who don’t begin to have the solutions they purport to have. I see glimmers of hope that “we, the people” are beginning to wake up and realize that public educators are not the problem, the failure lies in the system itself, not the people who work inside it. We’ve allowed more than a decade of multiple testing and test prep curricula to define our educators as the problem rather than the lack of safety nets for children who come to school hungry, sleepy, sick, stressed, or anxious about where they will spend the next evening. The real story that needs to be told by America’s media, addressed by America’s politicians, and “resourced” by America’s foundations isn’t one about the failures of schools. It’s one about the failure of America to create an adequate safety net for children living in poverty, a story that’s not a new one to our nation.

We need a new beginning to the public education story as told through the lives of children who enroll in our Statue of Liberty Schools. What if our measures of success were framed through the accomplishments of young people who grow up to build bridges, skyscrapers, and rocket ships of the future? What if we dreamed of children who wake at night and imagine themselves becoming the next Maya Angelou and, yes, even Lady GaGa?  What if our children were driven to learn through their experiences as creators, inventors and designers in their work, not driven away from learning by the dreary repetition of filling out worksheet after worksheet?

Imagining the Future

We can’t write a new story by attempting to restore a past that never worked well for many kids who came through the doors of public schools, especially those who live in poverty of any kind – rural, urban, or suburban. We need courageous, intellectual politicians who are willing to admit that they’ve been proposing the wrong answers and asking the wrong questions. We need to get the right questions in front of politicians and the media. We need to look far beyond the industrial plant model as a rehashed solution for educational challenges. Our kids don’t go to work in factories anymore.  The robber barons outsourced that model decades ago and “offshored” their corporate profits, too. That’s what I’ve been thinking about over break.