Early in January, Pete heard the news of this new virus from a Wuhan, China, wet market. Pete researches disease and drugs for a living, and since he’s talking with friends, he occasionally lets himself be wrong for dramatic effect. 

Coronavirus was big. His posts were dramatic, and when the rest of us teased him, he pushed back, explaining how “we’re screwed.” Over the next month, Pete would be proven entirely correct. By mid-March no one on earth hadn’t heard of Covid-19 and its cause, the novel coronavirus. Even Congress was listening. 

Two disasters loomed. The millions likely to die would only be outweighed by the total failure of the global economy that could impoverish the world in a way never seen in modern times.  There was a health crisis and an economic crisis.

For the first time in a decade, Democrats and Republicans in Congress started talking. The health crisis required instantaneous action, and the power to take those actions rested already within the statutory authority of the Executive branch. The economic crisis needed legislative action.

People needed to stop moving around and spreading the virus, and it had to happen immediately. This meant no one who couldn’t work from home could work at all. No work meant no money. No money meant no food and no home. People with no money in the bank, which meant most Americans, needed money immediately or they would go to work and spread the virus because they would have no other choice but to work and risk their health.

I need to defend Congress here. The President dithered, but the Majority and Minority leaders in the House and Senate moved quickly to act. 

Quick action reveals instincts. When you’re in a crisis, you respond using the reasoning capacities you’ve built up prior to the crisis. When in the crisis itself, you react. Congress reacted, and the subsequent bill tells us a lot about the default positions of the Democratic and Republican parties. 

What is the Act?

It’s called the CARES Act, the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act. You’ve already heard it’s $2 trillion. The government is spending money, so that’s why it’s being called a “stimulus.” There are good reasons not to call it a stimulus, since governments take stimulus actions to encourage economic growth. This bill is doing the opposite. It’s encouraging people to stop economic activity, or at least to stop economic activity that is not essential. The goal of the bill? ”Freezing the economy in amber“ or ”putting the economy into an induced coma” are two metaphors explaining the goal of the stimulus, but for those of us who live in a partisan world, a world where government is either spending or not spending money, this is massive government spending that can comfortably be called a stimulus.   

Who are the winners?

There are three big winners in the bill. Individuals get 30% of the stimulus. Big corporations get 25%. And small business, state and local governments and public services share the remaining 45%. Democrats insisted on the direct payments and the unemployment increases, and Republicans insisted on saving big businesses, especially the airlines. 

The remaining 45% breaks down with 19% for small businesses, 17% for state and local governments and 9% for public services, mostly hospitals.  

It’s already clear the next bill will help states and local governments. Lobbying is happening at a furious, socially distant pace, but state and local governments cannot run deficits like the federal government. That is, states and localities cannot simply print money, like the The feds will have to provide them support or the downstream effects will create an economic tsunami as great as the coming federal one.   

It may seem like Congress acted quickly, but plenty of horse trading went into the preparation of this bill. Only the cruelest free marketeers can stand up and say government should stay out of this crisis. Those people exist, and they seem to want a certain number of dead bodies before they act. Luckily, enough Americans understand the gravity of the crisis and drown out partisan drum beating in the name of saving our loved ones’ lives. 

Who are the losers?

The worst losers are people on fixed incomes and future debt payers, like today’s college and younger kids. No matter what the feds call it, the US is taking on debt. Since Donald Trump arrived in office, the debt went up $3 trillion bringing the pre-coronavirus stimulus to $23.5 trillion or $70,000 for every person living in the US. Now that debt will be $25.5 trillion. Future generations have to pay. 

A quick side note, this stimulus is a necessary and good kind of debt. As Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff has said, "The whole point of not relying on debt excessively in normal times is precisely to be able to use debt massively and without hesitation in situations like this." Borrowing costs money, but saving lives at this scale is worth it. 

The primary losers, then, are future generations. But that’s a generic reality for government debt. The primary losers that could have been named in this bill but weren’t are more interesting. 

Small businesses are definitely losers. Unlike the checks written to individuals, small businesses has strings attached to most of the money in the stimulus. Small businesses are asking right now whether they are able to keep everyone on their payroll, which is the stated purpose of the stimulus loans. The primary question is whether, if they are already heavily leveraged, they will be able to take on this additional debt. The stimulus provides that any small business that keeps paying its workers will receive forgivable loans, but small businesses aren’t sure how or if that will really work. Small businesses face this uncertainty despite the desire of Congress to pass a decisive bill that would remove uncertainty in the economy. Why? 

At least a sectional of the Democratic Party does not like business. They are still reeling from the Great Recession when, according to the left, bailouts should have gone to individual homeowners and not big banks. Democrats make little distinction between big business and small business. Terms like “profiteers” and “capitalists” don’t allow for subtle distinctions like separating Boeing from your corner mom and pop coffeeshop. Blue Chip Republicans don’t care about small companies much either. They want to ensure companies already running and already providing big products and big services to big quantities of people keep running. That’s why the second biggest winner of the stimulus are large corporations. 

Small business is a blend of Democrat and Republican, so when the crisis arrived and wish lists were created, small business took a back seat to the Democrats’ individual payments and the Republicans’ corporate payments. 

Losers in the stimulus are the environment, education, youth, poor, infrastructure and essential workers. 

Carbon offsets and clean energy incentives like solar, wind and nuclear never made it into the bill. The impact of climate change like mass migrations, regional armed conflicts, ecosystems failed and lives lost will make this pandemic’s worst death toll estimates of 2-5% of those infected truly seem like the seasonal flu. 

Education got money in the stimulus, but it’s not what you think. States run education, not the feds, and federal involvement in education is, compared to the big money spent by states and local governments, miniscule. Schools that are keeping staff won’t be doing it for long. Tax revenues will be small as the effects of shelter-in-place kick in. Schools will be the hardest hit since in most states schools are the largest recipient of state and local revenue that will disappear. Schools will likely hold onto all their workers, even if they know they’ll have to borrow to pay them. States and local governments assume federal help is coming, and Speaker Pelosi has already said the next legislation will help state and local governments, which is code for schools and other less expensive essential services like police and fire. But it’s notable that education didn’t make it into the first stimulus bill. It signals, however slightly, that neither the Dems nor the Republicans care to prop up the existing school system exactly the way it exists today. 

Youth are a big loser in the stimulus. College kids dependent on their parents will not get a check, which should draw the attention of college kids who are going to join the workforce in what’s shaping out to be another Great Recession. Bigger is the future bill youth will have to pay for the excesses of this generation. 

Are you under 30? If so, consider that you will live in a world your parents and grandparents created that benefitted them enormously but that you will never enjoy. China will be the world’s biggest economy soon, and just as the US set the rules when it was the biggest economy, you can be sure China will set the rules when it’s number one. You will be working in a smaller economy and paying bills your parents ran up today based on poor planning. 

Another loser in the stimulus is the poor. Cataloging the ways the stimulus fails the poor require too much space, so let’s focus on the big, obvious ways. First, poverty means people are less likely to file taxes, which means they won’t get a check. Second, poverty means jobs are more precarious, low wage workers were the first to be let go, and they will be the first to run through the additional unemployment benefits in the stimulus, if they can get through to their state’s unemployment agency before they are evicted, have the internet turned off at home or don’t have time to file because they are homeschooling their children since the schools are closed. If the poor have jobs, they will likely need to go and have fewer protections to avoid catching the virus. Mobile phone location data is already coming out showing poor neighborhoods are staying-at-home far less than wealthier areas. But most of all, the stimulus targets the economy as a whole. The American economy as a whole never did much for the poor. They still don’t have quality health care or any health care. They still have worse schools. They still have worse food. This stimulus improves nothing for the poor. 

Buzz in Washington is that another $2 trillion bill for infrastructure is being negotiated. If the feds want to inject a big stimulus in the economy, it should have passed that infrastructure bill in the first bill. We have all heard the list of infrastructure needs, but each is essential. First, the US needs national broadband. Second, the US needs a web of connected transportation options, from transit and air to railways, roads, and waterways, as a means to reduce congestion, protect the environment, and stimulate economic development. Third, the US needs a massive workforce development program to transform workers for the digital economy. Fourth, the US needs to up its funding of Pre-K-12 and higher education to ensure every child is ready for the new economy. Fifth, the US needs a far better public safety program including offering federal leadership for technical assistance that helps all levels of government develop evidence-based community policing programs that build trust, improve community relations and reduce racial tensions and crime rates. 

Essential workers were losers in this stimulus bill, too. The stimulus provides big money for Covid-19 responses that should include making sure essential workers are well protected and well paid. Other countries like the UK and Germany have provided additional benefits to essential workers, identifying them by name and marshaling national resources to ensure they have protective gear and abundant equipment. The stimulus echoes the current US response. It’s vague and indirect. Chicago where I live keeps sending emergency  notifications to all cell phones even while almost every health care worker I know on the front line is telling me they want to quit. Spain is the worst example of endangered essential workers. Garbage bags, old shirts and duct tape do not provide the kind of protection they need, and the US isn’t doing much better. 

Why should we care?

Crises come suddenly, and they reveal core priorities and levels of preparedness. How prepared the US was for this crisis will be readily apparent in the next 6-12 months. What core priorities the US holds is already apparent. We should care about the apparent core priorities of our elected leaders because, if they don’t match our priorities, they need to be held accountable at election time. 

That Republicans support big business and the Democrats support individual workers is no surprise. This is the first crisis felt by all Americans with such far reaching effects. Being optimistic, let’s say a vaccine is developed quickly and life returns quickly to close to its pre-pandemic rhythm. No one will ever forget that when a crisis hit, government was called on to solve it. No matter whether you have a righty Republican’s healthy mistrust of government or a lefty Democrat’s exuberant trust of government, responding to catastrophes is what governments need to be prepared to do. To the extent we are not prepared, it’s time to make a mental note for the future.  

We need to care about the winners and losers of the first stimulus for two major reasons. First, the first time a big bill is passed, it sets the cap on what will be passed in future legislation. The stimulus was the bigest gun Congress could fire in defense of the US. Future legislation could go bigger, but if the infection rate doesn’t decline, and if a vaccine isn’t discovered quickly, the gun wasn’t big enough. Once the infection rate declines a bit, we can expect more politics, more friction, slower decision-making and less powerful effects from the next rounds of legislation.  

Second, when in crisis and you have to negotiate, you resort to your biggest wants. We need to work to ensure the environment, education, youth, poor, infrastructure and essential workers are front of mind, as we continue responding to this crisis and for the next one.  

 The macroeconomic effects of this global shock will almost certainly be felt for decades. China’s claim of a V-shaped recovery seems overblown for China, so the odds of that happening in the US are slim. A big drop is rarely followed by an equally big increase. Make a gun with your left hand. A gun-shaped recovery seems more optimistically realistic. The thumb is the drop, and the pointer finger is the recovery. In other words,  return to normalcy will likely come slowly as winners build their strength and losers lose even more. 

Pete my friend’s worst fear seems right now to be untrue. It’s still early days understanding this virus, but if it mutates, come back annually in winter or never leaves and keeps mutating, the harm to lives and economies will return annually as well. The Spanish Flu came back a second time and killed more people in the second wave than the first. Right now, rumblings from scientists are that this virus isn’t mutating. If it’s not, that means that once there is a vaccine, it will stop the virus completely and allow us to rebuild our economies before they impoverish too many people. 

The question we should be asking ourselves in the moments we can see beyond the immediate crisis is this. Are we happy with the winners and losers Congress chose to create with the largest economic stimulus bill in the history of the world? 

John Heintz is based in Chicago.

That’s not unusual. Advances in neuroscience and child development research continue to heap on the evidence that education investments in Early Childhood Education produce disproportionate lifelong benefits. Even as the research heaps and politicians hesitate, teachers know what really works.

Modernizing the Missionary Past

Tanzania and Zanzibar teachers offer a unique perspective. The Madrassa Early Childhood Program arrived around 2010. Parents heralded its arrival. Most parents here practice Islam, so replacing the old missionary Christianity with local religious values amplified support for the Madrassa Program. All public pre-primary schools follow the Montessori model. Only private schools may choose other curricula approved by Tanzania’s education ministry, the International Baccalaureate or Reggio Emilia.

Montessori is a good start.

Montessori is a child centered teaching approach focusing on physical, social, emotional and cognitive development. Classes in Montessori schools include arithmetic learning, alphabet learning, physical education, playtime, creativity-enriching activities using Play-Doh or Legos. Teachers individually observe each child and assess thought processes and interpersonal skills.  The Montessori approach uses structured learning built upon individual eagerness for knowledge and individual initiative for learning.

Montessori in Tanzania has been a success. Students display exemplary knowledge and superior abilities to traditional desk-and-row programs. The Ministry of Education reports improvements in a host of skills with particular successes in idea abstraction, concept adaptation, thinking logic, nonverbal expression, information reception, activity transition and relationship building.  

Reggio Emilia is better.

In recent years, small private early childhood schools have introduced Reggio Emilia. Like the Montessori program, Reggio Emilia is child centered. Unlike Montessori, Reggio Emilia focuses more on self-directed and experiential learning in relationship-driven environments. In layman’s term, Reggio Emilia prioritizes child’s play. Reggio Emilia is a growing global trend.  In Tanzania, schools that have adopted this approach too Montessori to the next level of student freedom. Teachers quickly noticed that freeing a child’s thought process both intellectually and emotionally occurred best without long hours of structured teaching under Montessori. Teachers saw three advantages, improved relationship-building, thought-expression, opinion-expression and empathy-signaling.  

Reggio Emilia roots its curriculum on respect, responsibility and community. Those principles match the other preferred global curriculum, the International Baccalaureate Primary Years Program. Both programs’ principles are derived from research requiring curricula recognize individual student personalities, learning styles and intelligence types. Starting from the assumption each child needs a tailored education program, Reggio Emilia is self-guided.

Teachers observe, gauge and engage students based on demonstrated student interest. Planning follows observation. Teachers are co-learners, mentors and advisors. On the ground, Reggio Emilia students paint, perform, play, talk and listen. Theatre, music, art and show-and-tell happen every day.

Children succeed.

On the social-emotional side, Reggio Emilia children exhibit more confidence, expressive skills, oneness and compassion than their peers. On the academic side, they exhibit exemplary creativitiy in academic performance. Local elementary school teachers report that children who have exited the Reggio Emilia approach echo the same gains. They note disproportionate advantages in adaptability, academics, relationships and persistency in their areas of love, such as art or arithmetic.

Teachers of this program believe Reggio Emilia offers three advantages over other curricular systems.

1. Children grow into the individuals they ought to be.

2. Children focus on their own best traits.

3. Children enhance their own best traits to the extent of their capacity.  

Touching, moving, listening, and observing happen routinely in Reggio Emilia schools. Full sensory engagement improves perception and comprehension. Teachers knew that. What teachers didn’t know and learned in Tanzania is that Reggio Emilia’s whole-life-experience approach to learning creates gains far beyond academics. In a time when learning-to-learn is the focus of K-12 and higher education systems, no goal is greater than raising students who know themselves and are happy with what and who they are.

Donaldina Lugeumbiza is a Tanzania-based freelance writer.  She writes on the cross section of diplomacy, international development and education. She enjoys medical novels, medical dramas, deep sea diving and experimental cooking.

Ravaging was widespread. The owner of a bakery killed himself after he saw what angry mobs did to his business. At night, you could hear gunshots popping like fireworks on New Year. Some businesses were not looted only because owners and security personnel slept on the roof and were armed with pistols and shotguns.

It was like Mad Max, The Purge and a Western got mixed up in one terrible nightmare.

One of those days, I was in a long line outside a market trying to buy some food –whatever I found, for my family. In the line, there were a couple of people talking about the looting of a business the previous day.

 “They were selling everything too expensive, they deserved it.” “You know, I even helped one guy move a juice cart he took. But he was too stupid to grab some fruit. How is he going to make juice now?” And then some people laughed.

Let’s move further to the month of June.  In Maracaibo, where I live, the electrical situation was not solved: we still had (and have) daily power cuts of somewhere around 6 and 14 hours. In a good day, you may only have a 3-hour cut, in a bad one you may spend the whole day without power.

Also, the gasoline situation is hideous. 2-day lines to fill 20 or 30 liters of gasoline are the norm. If you want a full tank you have to give alguito to the tanker: a pack of rice, a coffee, a $1 bill or so.

 If you’re having a good day, you may fill your tank in 10 hours. Obviously, there are ways to fill your tank in an hour. You pay $20 to the tank guy or the National Guard (yes, the stations are militarized) and you’ll fill your tank quickly. In a country where the minimum wage does not reach $10, that is not an option for many.

One of those days I was around 36 hours in a line. It was hell. People were selling their spots; others were trying to wriggle around the line. Dozens of people paying the guards to pass first, some paying to fill 20-liter containers to then re-sell them (20 liters of gasoline cost somewhere around $15 and $20 on the black market).

And it’s the same everywhere: if you want to renew your passport, you have to pay a hefty sum if you want it to receive it faster. If you need some dollars for traveling or saving, you’ve got to go to the black market. Maybe you need to register your college degree and do not want to lose a whole week coming and going to the registry? Then pay. And it’s all perfectly fine.

You see all this and you may reach the same conclusion of many Venezuelans: The crisis of Venezuela has a cultural root.

After all, we are the culture of Tío Tigre y Tío Conejo (Uncle Tiger and Uncle Rabbit), a group of Venezuelan folk tales where Tío Conejo always won using his wit and tricking Tío Tigre. We are a culture that applauds viveza criolla. That expression is a bit hard to translate directly, but it basically means being like Tío Conejo: not playing by the rules, being “street smart” to achieve your goals.

Is there a cultural and civic education problem in Venezuela? Definitely. Is that the root of our problems? Definitely… not.

After all, we are also a culture of hard-working people. Millions of Venezuelans have fled the country and there are many complaints about us in the host countries: that we are loud, that we take people’s jobs, that we complain too much about communism, and that our women rob husbands (In Peru they even made a song about that!), but they never complain about Venezuelans being lazy. Also, take a look at the people that are still here: Many of them earn a wage between $8 and $15 a month and still decide to wake up every morning at 5 a.m., walk for half an hour or more to the bus stop to reach their jobs where they probably won’t have electricity for around 6 hours, get back home around 6 p.m. and have a power cut at 8 p.m. And they still decide to go to work every day.

Also, if you read a bit about countries during great disasters like war, a natural disaster or a hardline socialist rule you’ll see the same stories: black markets, general loss of civility, and rampant corruption. When external conditions force it, the law of the strongest imposes: many people only care about surviving and many others see an opportunity in people’s pain. That’s not culture, it is biology.

Culture is dynamic. What builds civic culture is institutions and education. If institutions play by the rules and work correctly, if people earn livable wages and have access to decent services, the incentives for corruption are greatly reduced. If the government leaves their hands out of production and promotes a strong private sector, then a black market makes no sense. If people knew about the importance of being a citizen and cultivating civic virtues, maybe things would be different.

Venezuela has a cultural problem, but that’s not a root of the issue. It’s a systemic crisis: we have a social and political system that rewards being a Tío Conejo, not being a good citizen.

Edgar Beltrán is a 22-year-old political scientist and philosophy student from Maracaibo, Venezuela. He is passionate about discussing how politics affects the daily lives of people and about untangling the hidden structures of reality through philosophy. Follow Edgar on Twitter here.

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]]>Venezuela's Cultural ProblemeducationoperationsleadershipJohn HeintzSat, 30 Mar 2019 07:10:36 +0000https://www.secondrail.com/posts/2019/3/30/q-school56c89aef627c545f7c9def8c:56c8f6a53c44d8347934aede:5c9f0e13e79c708fd5227381This June 28 is the fiftieth anniversary of Stonewall. The Stonewall Riots mark the birthday of the modern gay rights movement, and contrary to popular belief, same-sex marriage did not end the movement. Successful achievement of gay rights remains in the distance and out of focus. The minimum is a world of free of discrimination, and America, much less the world, hasn’t even passed a federal prohibition on LGBTQ discrimination. The world may have come a long way since 1959, but LGBTQ people, and especially children, still face an uphill challenge. 

School is still a painful place for most LGBTQ kids. Research and advocacy groups like my favorite, GLSEN, the LGBTQ educator’s network, continue to produce studies showing that 90% of students at school face harassment because of their sexual orientation and gender identity. Over 60% feel unsafe.

The Foundations of Q School

The idea for a school serving the LGBTQ community and its friends and allies isn’t new.

1. The call came first from the data. Folks, school kids still say nasty things about gay kids. Spend a day as a fly on the wall in a 7th grade class. If that’s not enough, the annual Student Culture Survey, GLSEN’s own surveys and bountiful academic studies highlight the significantly different life path LGBTQ discrimination forces upon innocent kids. Illinois in particular isn’t as progressive as the progressive and well-funded schools like Evanston and Oak Park claim, much less the schools without significant LGBTQ parent populations. The need in Illinois for a school free of harassment is a reality for large numbers of kids every day. It’s hard to learn when you’re afraid of getting punched.

2. The second call for a Q school came in comparing Chicago to its peer cities. Chicago is the only major US city with no school for the LGBTQ community and its friends. New York has the Harvey Milk School. Los Angeles has a gay charter school housed in its community center.  Even Milwaukee, Denver, Dallas and Atlanta have dabbled with LGBTQ schools. Chicago is a notable outlier. 

3. The third call came from the desire to combine the positive values of the LGBTQ community with best educator practices. I tend to lose people here. LGBTQ Values are what unifies our community.

   Growing up gay and finding the LGBTQ community taught valuing patience, kindness, compassion, freedom, originality, perseverance, diplomacy and excellence. These are the foundations of an LGBTQ school. The idea is to build the perfect school, where every student goes on to happy careers and lives. It’s building a school rooted in LGBTQ Values to act as a beacon for show all schools the way to success.

The Path to Q School

I lived in Uptown when I started work on the school. Uptown is a gem. It’s a racially, ethnically, sexuality, gender-identity and socio-economically diverse neighborhood on the north side of Chicago. It’s located between Andersonville and East Lakeview, two of Chicago’s most famous gay neighborhoods. Most gay people I know who live in East Lakeview don’t have families, though the proportion of LGBTQ families in the city generally is increasing rapidly. The preponderance of families I know in East Lakeview are Jewish friends, and most of them are straight couples who embrace the intellectually and culturally robust civic culture found in the heart of urban gay capitals like Chicago. East Lakeview is great, but the even greater cluster of LGBTQ family friendliness is on the north side of Uptown, in Andersonville.

Andersonville is a small neighborhood surrounded by highly gay Edgewater. Andersonville had more LGBTQ families, so it or nearby Edgewater seemed like a better place to start Q School.

Finding a Home for Q School

As ground zero for midwestern LGBTQ families and our friends, Andersonville works as a community that will support the Q School project. I started by proposing a charter school. My motivation for going the charter route was not political. In Chicago, that’s an oxymoron. Chicagoans cannot say “charter school” and not think “political” simultaneously. Chicago and the State of Illinois are so polarized politically that ”charter school” is one of those litmus test words that signals friend or foe. After very few conversations, I saw that the class politics surrounding the charter idea would eclipse the LGBTQ school idea. One story: one of the local politicians running one of the gay neighborhoods for a long time said it to me point blank. He could never support a charter school in his neighborhood. He loved the idea a Q School, but if it was going to work, it needed to be a private school. I heard a similar tale from most politicians. 

Funding Q School

Public or private, Q School needs to accept poor kids, especially poor LGBTQ kids. Being the idealistic dreamer I am, I was hoping the school could be public but accept children from a hundred miles away. I want a multi-jurisdictional school, a school that crosses school districts and city boundaries. If you know anything about Illinois politics, you recognize the audacity in this bold idea.  

I want to create a school that could accept kids from Chicago as well as the suburbs around Chicago. In Illinois, this idea disrupts the near-religious obsession with local government control. This is especially true within school districts. I promise you that if you try to take per student dollars for a public school in Chicago from Evanston, Oak Park, Lincolnshire or any suburb, you will start a riot. Illinois came up with a plan to allow students to attend schools wherever they wanted, the Illinois Charter Commission, and I wanted to use it. I’m nonpartisan, but once I proposed that, I stopped being the cute gay activist and became the big bad corporate pig. The way the Commission worked was simple. If a local school board didn’t approve a charter, the State Commission could approve it for that district or whatever combination of districts around it. I could care less about how I ensured every student could attend Q School. I just wanted the doors to be as open as possible.

Public Funding for Q School. 

Public money should pay for LGBTQ kids because most of them can’t afford private schooling. My mission in life is educating youth. I’ve learned how to fundraise, but we know what it costs to educate a kid, about $25,000 a year. Educating youth is the future, and that’s a public responsibility. My real passion is running inspiring and successful schools. Since education is a social good, the public should pay for it, regardless of how the school is structured or what community is serves. 

I also like the idea of a publicly-funded school over multiple districts because, for far too long, the oppressive distinction between districts and funding levels has held Illinois back from progressing in any meaningful way with education improvements. This is a complicated problem, but if the harms outlined in Jonathan Kozol’s 1991 book Savage Inequalities have only worsened. 

If we locate Q School in Andersonville, I wanted to welcome kids from anywhere in Illinois. All the arguments excluding suburban kids had nothing to do with teaching and learning, so the Commission gave one a way to integrate. 

Supporters of Q School

GLSEN, the biggest national LGBTQ education advocacy group, transformed in Chicago into the Illinois Safe Schools Alliance. Talking with them was the next stop on my journey. They loved the idea of a school rooted in the values of the LGBTQ community.  I didn't mention that I was considering configuring the school as a charter. After hearing from politician after politician that charter is a dirty word in Chicago, I decided to set aside the idea of funding as much as I could and focus on the idea.

My biggest support came from a mother who volunteered for a neighborhood Chamber of Commerce. The mother had a 4-year-old who was gender non-conforming, so she loved the idea that I was planning a school where she could be sure her daughter would be welcome.  

Designing Q School

Design challenges took most of my time. Like the funding challenge, the design challenge wound up a political challenge. Milwaukee’s Alliance School taught me a valuable lesson. I spoke with the LGBT school in Milwaukee called The Alliance School. The head of the alliance school was a teacher who’d been elected to the position for less than a year when I spoke with him. He explained to me that, for better and occasionally for worse, The Alliance School had become am “island of misfit toys" in the Milwaukee school system. 

I wanted to confront this challenge head on. LGBTQ parents who would send their kids to Q School understand this. I wanted straight parents who would send their kids to Q School to understand this as well. Yes, the LGBTQ community is an oppressed minority. No, a school serving that community would not focus on that oppression. 

Q School will prepare students for college, career and life better than any other school. Achievement at the school will be so extraordinary that Mitch McConnell will want to send his great-grandkids there. 

Building a Q School community

Q School is still in the planning. If you’re intrigued, reach out. First, share your thoughts or questions. Reach out to us. Tweet at us. Email us. Second, we’re looking for partners, educators, parents, students, board members, thinkers, activists, designers and programmers. Contact us or add your name to our mailing list on our website to receive updates.

John Heintz is an educator building Q School from the ground up.  

To learn Mandarin, pack at least a year’s worth of clothing and get on a plane to China.

Classroom study lays groundwork, but there is no avoiding the need to move. Serious language learners need to live in the country where the target language is spoken. Snarky speakers of more than a few languages give another tip. If you really want to learn a language, once you get to that new country, start dating a local.

There’s a playful truth to bedroom language study, but finding a local boyfriend, girlfriend or any friend reinforces the same idea. Even if you’re happily tied to a partner, living abroad is still essential.

The more you immerse yourself in a language, the quicker you’ll learn.

Immersion works.

Why is learning Spanish so much less successful in class than learning Spanish in Mexico City?

Partly it’s the failure of classroom instruction. Professional educators admit this begrudgingly. Foreign language teachers defend their work but readily admit how much better it is to immerse oneself in the culture of a new language. Surrounding yourself by the voices, writings and signs of a foreign language all day every day is far superior to once-daily language classes.

In math or science, classroom teaching works just fine. Traditionalists and reformers debate whether classroom instruction works better in flipped, personalized, project-based, competency-based or traditional classrooms. But for math or science, all of them could work.

Foreign language learning is different. Moving to an immersive environment makes the whole world a classroom.

People agree nearly universally that immersion is the best way to learn. People also agree nearly universally that the world is shrinking. Travel today is cheaper, faster and easier. Jobs are more global. Cultures are more connected. Most people know these truths yet most people continue to find excuses not to make a priority of learning a new language.

The excuse triangle

Excuses abound for why everyone from the young to the elderly don’t learn new languages.

Technology utopians make the provocative claim that learning languages is becoming unnecessary. They dream of digital devices that create fluid, live, distinctive translations. Older students use the excuse that they are just too old. Some say certain languages are no longer relevant. Still others say they just can’t do it. The implication of this “I Just Can’t” crowd implies they lack some nebulous combination of will, ability and resources.

All the excuses are wrong. Everyone can learn languages.

Excuse one: Technology

Technology will never replace the value of knowing multiple languages. Technology will never come close to connecting people with the depth of connection that comes from people speaking the same language. Learning a language is learning a culture. Just translating words doesn't come close to understanding the subtle meaning and beauty behind different linguistic structures.

Digital translation loses the rhythm, pacing and flow of two people speaking. Translation machines destroy context. Digital translators see no facial expressions or hand gestures. They skip relevant histories and miss vocal musicalities.

But what about the future? The Great AI Awakening, an article by Gideon Lewis-Kraus in the New York Times told the story of Google Translate’s overnight transformation. The day before, Translate produced nearly meaningless translations. The next day Translate had grown instantly into an eloquent and literary-grade professional interpreter. It’s a fascinating story of the rapid growth of artificial intelligence. But it’s not a story of languages or language learning.

Despite Google’s impressive leap, Translate still misses far more than it catches. It can’t see and doesn't translate body movements. It misses social contexts. If you see a red octagonal sign on a post near an intersection, you can guess the word inside is “stop.” Seeing 停 by itself won’t do much if you don't know Mandarin.

Digital translation misses visual and audio context. If you hear creepy music in a movie, see a cape-clad man with fangs hide around a dark alley corner, notice that he gives a devious look around and see note his increasing excitement as a young woman approaches innocently to her doom, and if that vampire mutters words in a foreign language, you can guess at his words better than Google Translate.

Cues are context. Digital technologies are far from understanding subtle contextual differences like humans.

The real value of knowing languages is knowing context and culture. Any human living today who uses the excuse that learning a language is unnecessary because of tech misses the larger value of language learning. Language learning teaches cultures, connects people, builds inter-cultural trust and inspires those who want to live, work and play together. Digital translators miss all of life.

Excuse two: Relevance

If you speak English, Spanish and Mandarin, you can talk to two-thirds of the planet.

China’s students are studying English. Parents in China understand the value of preparing their kids for a global future.

Few American parents by comparison push their children to learn Mandarin. Even those American parents wanting to give their kids an early foundation in a language typically choose a more familiar European tongue over a more distant Asian one. This both an innocent and intentional mistake.

Economists agree that the future of work is international. Tom Friedman famously admonished American children to learn Mandarin. Without it, he warned, tomorrow’s workers won’t understand what their bosses are telling them. When American parents hear Friedman’s warning, it stings. They feel fear, anger and denial. Muc of those feelings are rooted in judgements about Asian values, governments or politics that are rarely considered when pushing their child toward Spanish or Italian studies.

The reasons for a fearful and angry reaction aren’t rational, but the causes are easy to find. Fear of the unknown is part of it, and China’s government is its own worst enemy in this arena. But fear of the unknown is not the whole story. Arguing a child shouldn’t learn a language when you know it will benefit the child is a good reason to slow down and do some reflection.

Explicit and implicit biases peek out from behind the thin veil. Keeping children close and pushing them toward only the languages of familiar places and cultures prioritizes nostalgia over practicality. Defending liberal democracy and human rights is important, but parents don’t prohibit their children from studying business because Amazon messed up last week’s delivery.

The American Dream is alive and well. It’s just in China, certainly in terms of optimism. Sure, China’s economy will slow down, but the long game favors its growth. Already today, plenty of twentysomethings are buying one-way tickets to Shanghai and getting good growth potential jobs where they live for a few fun years, earn more than they could imagine in the US and save half their incomes. They have to hold their nose at the stigmatizing authoritarian government, but for enterprising spirits, China is the wild west of possibility.

On top of that, Francis Fukayama may be right. Greater freedom, human rights and liberal democracy may be in China’s future once it grows confident in its own ability to thrive in the global order.

Regardless its government, China’s parents are betting on the value of intense English immersion. American parents would do well equally betting on the value of their kids learning Mandarin. Knowing Mandarin is a key to future opportunities.

Excuse three: “I’m too old” and “I just can’t”

You are never too old to learn. The mind is designed to learn, and you learn those things with which you fill your days. Spend all day reading, and you learn reading. Spend all day complaining, and you learn complaining. Spend all day studying Mandarin, and you learn Mandarin. Spend your days making excuses, and you learn excuse-making.

The social language

The social language of a school matters. Students can learn a language in school, if the social language is the target language.

Most of us forget or ignore the importance of the social language of a school. Most of us mistakenly overemphasize what happens in class and underemphasize what happens in the hallways, between classes, at lunch, at basketball games, during theatrical performances and during school dances. If you want to ensure your child learns a new language, make sure the social language of the school is the target language.

If you thought about it, you already knew the language used for socializing matters. But even if you already send your child to schools that claims to immerse children in Spanish, French, Mandarin or Italian, you probably see the social language slip back to English.

Creating nudges encouraging socializing in the target language works because immersion is linear. The more students immerse, the more they learn. This is just a school organizational numbers game. Many students will seek refuge with peers speaking their mother tongue. But when the critical mass of students in a school socialize in the target language, most of them will learn the target language.

When the social language of a school isn’t the target language, parents are naïve thinking the school will do much to help children learn that new language.

A second priority for parents should be getting to kids into language study early. When you are young, it’s not even language study. It’s just living in a time of pre-myelination brain development. Sure, it would be most valuable to send your child to China when they are barely out of diapers, but most parents aren’t comfortable with sending their children away that early. The earlier, the better is still a good rule of thumb. Parents who see the value in their children learning Mandarin and willing to let go for a couple months will discover their 4th and 5th graders are rather well prepared to learn Mandarin.

Traveling to a host family and a host school in China for just a couple months will have a greater impact upon a learner than years of classroom study. Repeat this process often, and the benefit is lifelong fluency.  

Linguists know this. Teachers know this. Parents know this.

Why schools don’t build large-scale international exchange systems into their programs is the question.

A large-scale, annual multi-month program of international study is not that hard to arrange. Plenty of excellent schools in China would take cohorts of kids for 8-week stints in exchange for the US school taking cohorts of Chinese kids. Travel abroad, learn and socialize, and then repeat.  

If you’re interested in hearing more, reach out to me. I’m producing a pathway to Mandarin-English bilingualism for schools tied to exchanges, partnerships and projects. Sign up here to get the pathway when it’s ready.

Based in Shanghai, John Heintz is a consultant, writer, teacher and attorney working on cross-sector issues facing the global community. John Heintz’s experience as an education sector legal advisor and management consultant contributed to the range of issues presented in his most recent writing at Second Rail Education, his resource for school leaders. Follow John here.

Follow Second Rail here.

Secret negotiations control most public education spending.

The place I’ve seen the greatest impact of secrets is in deal-making between school boards and teacher unions. Deals between Illinois teacher unions and school boards are negotiated in secret before being made public. Most decisions about education happen in those negotiations, so secret dealings between unions and boards control almost all educational decision-making. Union contracts make up most spending in education, so secret union-board negotiations mean almost most public education dollars are bargained in secret. The decisions that are left to talk about in the light of day are minuscule by comparison.  

Ordering a pizza

Most of the secret deals between unions and board are made even more secret because few if any real decisions are made at the bargaining table. I worked in a school where the union brought ten people and the board brought ten people to the negotiation table. Twenty people in a room will have trouble negotiating what toppings to put on a pizza much less come to agreement on how to run a school.

This leads chief negotiators to use backchannels. The backchannels might be secret, but they aren’t anything special. The meat of union negotiations comes during formal negotiating breaks while walking to the bathroom or while smoking cigarettes shivering in subzero temperatures. I worked with one lawyer who didn’t smoke but was frequently seen puffing next to chatty smoking union leaders on negotiation breaks. Collective bargaining law allows secret negotiations, and the knock-on effects of those secrets play out in schools across the country.

Should unions bargain in secrecy?

Voices today reject the value of secrecy for collective bargaining much more than in the past. Liberal democracy requires open government, and nothing about union-board negotiations is open. 

Cultural and political expectations of privacy and openness vary wildly, often with ironic twists. I live in China. In traditional Chinese schools, student performance information is posted on the classroom door for the world to see. The US passed the Federal Education Rights and Privacy Act to keep personal student information secret. At the same time, we have no problem with most schools in the US accepting free Gmail for schools despite knowing that Google sells it. We know Facebook sells our data, but we still willingly login and give them more. Values are cultural. Why we expect government to be transparent in all things except when negotiating contracts that will spend the majority of public dollars is worth considering.

Having worked for government in the US most of my life, I err on the side of freeing secrets. In schools, ending union-board secrecy is an essential next step to opening and therefore improving public education.

Some laws have made moves in that direction. Years ago, Illinois passed one statute requiring unions and boards to publish their final offers to the public. The law was a start, but boards and unions bypassed it. The law simply pushed ahead secret negotiations. Now boards and unions are careful not to call any offer a “final offer,” which triggers public disclosure.

Cardinal Richelieu and the dark side of secrecy

“If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged.”

Richelieu fears others’ taking advantage of openness. Fear drives secret-keeping today. Fear of harm from our secrets keeps us quiet, whether it’s letting our competitors know our plans, letting our boss know our true feelings, letting the government know our highway speed, letting our friends know our finances or, for some of us, letting Facebook see personal photos.

Richelieu ruled France before the French Revolution. His words reek of distrust and fear. Fear and distrust continue to drive board-union relations today. Richelieu lived and worked in a world where nation-states vied for power. Today’s America is equally about opposing forces vying for power. Richelieu’s wisdom is still our conventional wisdom. We praise shrewd, savvy, cunning dealmakers because we believe dogs eat dogs more than neighbors help neighbors.

Having the courage to trust each other is the only hope to improve education.

More openness builds trust. Ending secrecy in board-union dealings will have a greater effects on the quality of schooling than almost any other change proposed. States across the US have done a poor job moving in the direction of more trust and openness. 

To support greater transparency in public education, these secrets need to

• Negotiations between unions and boards. This is the granddaddy of all secrets. Until unions become transparent, the public has to exist on an equal playing field.

• School leader meetings. Open-door policies are common for individual leaders, but far more happens in secret than in public.

• Union meetings. I’m a big supporter of unions, but public sector unions must be more transparent. Public sector union meetings are no different from public sector school board meetings. These are all public entities and need to follow open meetings laws.

• Communications by board members. Boards needs to consider issues publicly. Most communication is electronic, so all those communications need to be transparent to the public.

• Contract negotiations. Secret negotiations create a net disadvantage to communities. Public sector boards and unions need to do all their work in public, including negotiating for contracts. 

Trust flourishes in transparent environments. Increased trust increases our engagement with and commitment to schools and all of our public sector institutions.

After Jeff Besos bought the Washington Post, the newspaper adopted an alliterative quote from Judge Damon J. Keith of the US Court of Appeals. Judge Keith’s quote supporting the First Amendment is heavy-handed yet attention-grabbing in today’s information-saturated world. Democracy does die in the dark.

Secret backroom dealing has existed as long as humans have communicated with each other. Schools improve when the public demands greater transparency.  

Based in Shanghai, John Heintz is an advisor, writer, teacher and thinker on the education, economic, legal, justice and social issues facing the global community. John Heintz’s experience as an education sector legal advisor and management consultant contributed to the range of issues presented in his most recent writing at Second Rail Education, his resource for school leaders. Follow John here.

Follow Second Rail here.

Or you might have got something even bigger--you might have experienced secure attachment for the first time.

Attachment theory was first articulated by psychologist John Bowlby who studied the effects on children who were separated from their caregivers in the 1940s-50s.

In 1969, he detailed his theory in Attachment and Loss. American/Canadian psychologist Mary Ainsworth worked closely with Bowlby through her field research using a test she devised called The Strange Situation. The test puts an infant through a variety of experiences with and without their mother and a stranger.

The infant is assessed on how they play in an unfamiliar room, react to their mother's departure, interact with the stranger, and behave upon the return of their mother. It is this last reaction that most vividly shows the infant's attachment schema: secure, anxious-avoidant, anxious-ambivalent, or disorganized (the last three demonstrating different forms of insecure attachment).

In 2013, the American psychologist Louis Cozolino linked attachment theory to teachers in his book The Social Neuroscience of Education: Optimizing Attachment & Learning in the Classroom. He argues that due to neuroplasticity (the brain's ability to create new pathways), a child who has developed an insecure attachment schema can nevertheless experience secure attachment with a teacher.

The key is that the teacher needs to know how to identify the manifestations of insecure attachment and how to help those students reach a state of equilibrium.

A child with insecure attachment is usually stressed since they don't have a stable and safe environment at home with a caregiver who is consistently emotionally available. Teachers can reduce students’ stress levels (and consequently make their brains more open to learning) through strategies such as providing clear boundaries, emotional sensitivity, and compassionate feedback.

Sometimes a classroom is the only place a child experiences reliable consistency where they are intentionally seen and heard by their teacher. Who wouldn't remember someone like that?

Cara Naiman

People who live here, including the ex-pats, become desensitized to the air. I still wear a mask when the Air Quality Index goes over 100, but I’m in the tiny minority. Just to compare, Chicago is usually 10 and Barcelona is usually 3. Over my twenty-minute commute, I might see ten people out of the thousands I pass wear masks. I don’t want to downplay the importance of air quality, especially on children, but if that’s what’s keeping you from visiting China, let it go.

Visit China if you want to see a culture more like the US than you probably think. The US and China are both big, mostly inward-looking countries that love their flags. Bigness drives most of the similarities I’ve noticed. I see the way many foreigners come to China and don't feel welcomed. This is what I’ve noticed in the experience of many foreigners coming to the US. Another similarity is that Americans and Chinese work mostly with people from their own country. That just makes sense since there are so many people, there are plenty of workers in each. Lack of exposure other countries comes from bigness, and lack of familiarity breeds discontent.

One area of difference I know well is education. China wants to be a world leader. That means educating its best and brightest with the best learning systems in the world. A growing portion of China’s well-to-do parents send their kids abroad for university education and, increasingly, even for secondary education. China’s in-country education has certain weaknesses, such as massive class sizes, an almost exclusively lecture-based class format, constant testing and whatever-it-takes desire to win akin to Wall Street’s take-no-prisoners desire to win. That last one cuts both ways, as a strength and a weakness. America respects hard work, perseverance and determination. The flip side, as we know, is overambition, flying too close to the sun and putting money ahead of friends, family and love. The whatever-it-takes education mindset in China creates a reputation, again much like the US capitalist reputation for getting ahead, of cheating. The SAT is not offered on mainland China because the College Board doesn’t feel it can ensure test security here.

If you come to China, you’ll see parents who work hard to help their kids succeed. Moms like Amy Chua’s Tiger Mom exist as the norm. In a light most generous to parents who push their kids hard, they do it to give them an edge because they know global competition and the value of a high-quality education in building a great future.

Come to China to see its weaknesses, too. If you come you’ll see that although the country’s education infrastructure is growing, it’s far from perfect. One glaring example of this is China’s aversion to standards-based learning. If schools in the US fear moving to standards-based learning models and ending once measuring success by how long students sit in classes, schools in China don’t even have this as a distant blip on their radar.

If you haven’t visited China and you work in education, come visit. It’s a powerful example of what’s different, not better or worse, in a rapidly changing education culture.

Based in Shanghai, John Heintz is an advisor, writer, teacher and thinker on the education, economic, legal, justice and social issues facing the global community. John Heintz’s experience as an education sector legal advisor and management consultant contributed to the range of issues presented in his most recent writing at Second Rail Education, his resource for school leaders.

I worked with an educational consultant on a project in China, in both Beijing and Yichang, which is a third-tier city I call China’s equivalent of St. Louis. Yichang is near the Three Gorges Dam and sits on the third biggest river in the world.

The consultant was a former English teacher from the Boston area who started consulting for a team of Chinese 30-somethings who built an education-related startup with the support of the government. China is deregulating its education industry, though China’s deregulation differs wildly US education deregulation. Rather than the US model of using public funds for privately-run schools, China is allowing third party contractors into traditional government schools to create competition in-house. 

The Beijing startup designed and implemented a program they hoped to replicate in other top-tier Chinese public schools. Their model grafts an American high school onto an existing public school. 

Middle-class Chinese parents increasingly want the best education for their kids. The exploding rich middle and wealthy classes will pay for it. Large numbers opt out of the China's schools entirely. They frequently choose US and Canadian schools. They want to position their kids to be successful in the global job market, so they need to get their kids into top US universities. US higher education is still America’s Number One export. China’s parents look for the best option to prepare their children for success on US exams like the AP, SAT and ACT. 

The Beijing startup sought to offer an alternative to parents. They wanted to offer high quality American high school education in China’s schools. Families could stay together until kids left for college like in the rest of the world. While in China, students would maintain global competitiveness. 

The consultant was helping the start-up design its academic program. She was a data-sceptic, and like most US educators dubious about data, she trusted her teaching instincts more than any testing regime. 

The consultant went further. She wanted no part of 21st Century Learning. That’s today’s shorthand for technology skills students will need in a digital future. The consultant's solution to students who used their smartphones too much was to ban them. Prohibiting phones was a synecdoche for the entire Beijing and Yichang project. When I proposed introducing digital assessments that could be shared across classrooms, I could feel her getting uncomfortable. She told me hours later that, after forty years in the classroom, she trusted her instincts more than formal assessments. She had yet to see a test score, other than a test she designed for her own students, that helped her know what to teach the next day. 

Deescalating her stress, I reminded her that good teachers have always blended instruction and assessment. They do it in real time, and it’s essential for good instruction. Teachers ask questions, assess what students understand and then speed up or slow down based on the feedback. If a lesson’s learning goal is extracting themes from a text, and if none of the students did the reading homework, the teacher changes the plan. 

Tying instruction to assessment happens at the organizational level as well. Gauging stakeholder commitment to work is always a first priority for schools. In business it’s a market analysis, and angels fear to tread too near businesses that haven’t done one. Tying instruction to assessment is always a good idea. Good teachers have been doing it forever. With the help of new digital tools, high-testing will be nothing more than daily assessment for learning.

John Heintz lives in Shanghai, China. He is a writer, teacher, researcher, editor, podcaster, blogger and thinker on the education, economic, legal, justice and social issues facing the global community. Most known for his work in education, John Heintz explores a range of issues in his writing for Second Rail Education, including most recently an analysis of misunderstood effects of technology on elementary education.

The talk today of a universal basic income is appealing specifically because people are giving up on figuring out how money will be made in the future. If robots do everything and the owners of the robots have all the wealth, the ostensible solution is taxation of the rich and redistribution to everyone else. That’s the plan for universal basic income. 

It won’t happen any time soon. Universal basic income can’t be offered universally since there is no universal government. The best we have is the painfully inadequate United Nations, which doesn’t tax wealth at all. Taxation solutions need a world taxation system, and the Security Council can’t even agree whether chemical weapons were used in Syria. There is no way the General Assembly will agree on a progressive UN income tax on global wealth. Try to imagine a Russian oligarch filing a tax return with the United Nations. Nation-state governments as they are currently configured are almost parochial compared to the power of global capital. 

I flew from Hong Kong to Shanghai the other day. Next to me sat a 30-something mechanical engineer working in Shanghai’s rolled steel industry. The flight was delayed for hours, and the gate’s air conditioning didn’t work. While we sat and sweat, we talked about jobs. Less than a week earlier, the US announced tariffs on China’s rolled steel that his company sold. He wasn’t all that concerned about the tariffs. His company has a sister company in the US. Instead of rolling the steel in China, his company planned to ship it unrolled to the US and have his US-based sister company in Nevada roll it. 

He was less concerned about his job than the future of the flight attendants on our plane. China Eastern was the airline, and the engineer started by asking me if I noticed that flight attendants in China are younger and more attractive than flight attendants on US carriers. I nodded and smiled in silence. He looked up at the flight attendants running around offering water to annoyed passengers. A slight change came over his face after he glanced up. It went from smiling to concerned. He said that even though it’s nice seeing younger servers, he did wonder what would happen to them when they are older. He assumed they would be tossed aside for newer, younger workers. 

I didn’t tell him about my street sweeper. I thought about him, though. The street sweeper on my block is not as young as the flight attendants, though many of the street sweepers I see are young. It’s nice to see a good-looking street sweeper, but I feel sure they aren’t being swept aside for younger workers. Neither do I mention to my traveling companion the other concern I have about Shanghai’s clean streets. I look at beautiful construction and generally think the same thing. I often wonder what’s more valuable to the country and the world, a clean street or me walking along it. 

John Heintz lives in Shanghai, China. He is a writer, teacher, researcher, editor, podcaster, blogger and thinker on the education, economic, legal, justice and social issues facing the global community. Most known for his work in education, John Heintz explores a range of issues in his writing for Second Rail Education, including most recently an analysis of misunderstood effects of technology on elementary education. 

The economic answer is pretty simple. In a country of 1.4 billion, if even a small percentage of the population is rich, it’s still a lot of people. These are China’s Average Wealthy. They reside mostly in Shanghai, Beijing and the cities of 10-million-plus like Suzhou surrounding those first-tier cities. Job salaries don’t matter much for the Average Wealthy. They got most of their money from real estate. The government came in, paid a boatload for previously worthless property so the government could build a factory, and suddenly the poor became rich. Buy a new apartment and get bought out by the government again, and the rich become very rich. Wealth from real estate creates odd side effects. 

Driving a luxury car in Shanghai doesn’t signal one is educated, professional, career-advanced or particularly capitalist. China’s Average Wealthy wear some of the worst Gucci I’ve ever seen - like white onesies patterned with the Gucci logo from toe to neck. Since all this money is from real estate, it’s not from people getting great incomes from great jobs earned after great educations. For the generation of China’s children who were sent to North America for their educations, incomes are still not great. Twenty-somethings return to China fluent in English and with a solid American education. Many return to China and don’t need to work. Some work good jobs for the family business, and some continue to live off the former sale of a single grandparent's apartment. A professional class is growing, but even for China’s well-educated kids, most aren’t earning incomes anywhere near at par with their equally-educated western counterparts.   

It makes me wonder about jobs. Jobs mean income, and income is not wealth. Thomas Piketty summarized the income gap well using data mostly from Europe and the US, but the trend is consistent worldwide. Capital is growing while incomes are falling. 

I wonder about kids in China, the US and worldwide. Globalism has pulled much of the world out of poverty, but it’s increased the income gap. What work all our kids will do in the future is a big question for me.   

Working in education, I need a longer-term answer. The benefits of education accrue over decades or even lifetimes. Some students need real job training while others need a broad education they can apply to new as-yet unimagined forms of work. Students and parents trust their education systems to know what students need and prepare them for success. School leaders  need to ask the hard, long-term questions about what will drive success for today’s kids tomorrow.  

John Heintz is a writer, teacher, researcher, editor, podcaster, blogger and thinker. Based in Shanghai, he writes on the education, economic, legal, justice and social issues facing the global community. John Heintz has lived and worked in Scotland, Illinois, California, Texas, France, Spain, the Netherlands and China. He writes regularly for Second Rail and other media outlets. 

Hong Kong is dirty. My last trip, I rode a bus from the unattractive Cyberport on the south side of Hong Kong Island to the airport. Coming around a turn, I glanced into a park and noticed the litter. Hong Kong streets and sidewalks have the familiar dirt, age and mess of my old homes, Chicago and Los Angeles. Hong Kong Island feels even dirtier since I couldn’t help but juxtapose it with Shanghai’s well-staffed streets and sidewalks. Shanghai is swept clean daily of trash, leaves and fallen cherry blossoms. 

Chicago has worse problems than dirt, pot holes and gum stains. Murder rates continue to make international news. Pension liabilities are crushing the economy. The population continues to drop as young people move away permanently to the western sun and eastern jobs. Entrenched political interests paralyze progress in law, policy, education, infrastructure and employment. Making a priority out of ending gun violence, however, has to be top of Chicago’s agenda. In 2016, four gun murders happened within one block of my apartment in Uptown. One was in the middle of the day when I was within earshot. 

The longstanding solutions among Chicago lefties for gun violence are gun control and the beat cop. Beat cops still exists in some parts of the world but I never saw one in Uptown. With beat cops, police officers walk, on foot, a “beat” of a few city blocks and stop crime before it starts. In the ideal, every neighborhood’s Officer Friendly builds relationships, knows neighborhoods and resolves petty disputes before violence escalates. The British Bobby spinning a night stick while walking London’s Victorian streets is my stereotypical beat cop. But beat cops are rare today. The fact that I have to go back over 100 years to find a popular reference to them signals how unlikely it is that they’ll be walking Uptown anytime soon.  

The economic link between street sweepers in China and beat cops in Chicago is easy. Paying employees to provide a public service by walking a geographic area of a city is too expensive for Chicago. Costs in Shanghai are lower, so Shanghai is loaded with street sweepers. Not only does every street of Shanghai have a human street sweeper, in an amazing fit of sustainable living, thousands of street sweepers build their own brooms with dead tree branches. They look like fanned-out bush branches made from tied bamboo sticks. I don’t speak Mandarin, much less the Shanghaiese spoken by these sweepers. But I see the men and women street sweepers on my daily route to work. I smile, wave and nod.  As I’m coming home at night, I see them sitting and laughing and smoking on corners with other similarly sky blue-uniformed peers.

John Heintz lives in Shanghai, China. He is a writer, teacher, researcher, editor, podcaster, blogger and thinker on the education, economic, legal, justice and social issues facing the global community. Most known for his work in education, John Heintz explores a range of issues in his writing for Second Rail Education.

On opening day every year, school heads spend more time recounting success stories than charting statistical successes. Data retreats, all the rage a decade ago, have disappeared from the landscape. Why despite the influx of data do school leaders continue to tell stories more than review data?

Teachers are down on data reviews because they see little relevance to their work responsibilities. After recent discussions with Chicago Public Schools educators, the need is coupling insights from the data with staff empowerment.  

Chicago teachers and administrators explain why most data retreats don't work. 

• The City of Chicago doesn't establish a stable school calendar with a set number of instruction days. Fall semesters are shorter than second semester by two weeks. Ten days’ less instructional time impacts the reliability of course data for fall and spring semesters. Data reviews rarely consider actual instruction time, so even for reviews of subsequent fall semesters, without consistent instructional time, comparisons offer little additional value. 
• Advanced Placement exams are in May on the same day every year. Schools with more instructional days before those exams have a competitive advantage over schools that start later in the fall and get two or three fewer weeks of instruction before the AP exams. Given the importance of AP, correctly setting the school year calendar is a far easier fix than finding themes in the data regarding absences, which is a typically data retreat topic. 
• Sufficiently standardizing all sections of a course in order to gauge relative effectiveness in the data necessitates time alignment of courses offered each semester. Semesters of unequal length signal de-prioritization of course standardization. 
• In schools making last second changes to instructional time such as the negotiated furlough days of a year ago, the impact on instructional time is even more variable making data comparisons in the relatively small data sets reviewed less meaningful. 
• Data reviews rarely result in organizational adaptation. Policy, resource and governance changes developed in the wake of data reviews are critical signals to teachers and school leaders of commitment to systemwide improvements. 
• Finally, one art class may have 8 students, and the same course later in the day will have 50 students. Unpredictable class numbers and structures mean more on-the-fly instructional planning. Business people understand this. Business likes predictability because you can plan for it. The same is true in schools. Teachers will tell you that Art 1 with 50 students in not the same course as Art 1 with 8 students, no matter now brilliantly teachers manage them. 

Fixing the scheduling system that creates such imbalances is, to school-based faculty and leaders, much more important than reviewing data identifying macro issues like increased or decreased test scores. Factors outside the control of building-based educators, like scheduling the school day and years calendars, are more likely to impact test scores than classroom-based factors. Data highlighting needed a student intervention, such as a math student stuck on the quadratic formula who needs, as an example, an hour with a tutor, needs the resource and support follow through to ensure those interventions happen. Teachers know they hold responsibility for children success without the budgetary and resource authority to provide needed individual interventions. 

Good school leaders know the power in changing that story. Improved faculty and administrative empowerment reaps sustained rewards. That’s why first-day-of-the-school-year meetings are usually aimed at motivation and empowerment over student growth scores or attendance rates. 

School leaders who empower teachers and administrators with the freedom to review academic challenges broadly and intervene with funded resources when necessary help students more than any data-driven measures typically on offer in most schools. 

Watching what happens on the first day of each school year is a great way to assess what school leadership values. Most schools start the year trying to motivate teachers, to get them to change the story from the previous year. Most day ones are loaded with motivational speakers, tear-jerking success stories and inspirational cheerleading. Stories predominate, and it’s the best approach for school leaders. Motivating employees works.

John Heintz and the Second Rail team provide this resource to aspiring and practicing educational leaders. 

The Allure of the American High School

Paris, France has some great schools. An American friend of mine lives near the Bastille with her French husband and two primary school-aged kids. She likes her kids’ school. But she still wants to move her family back to the US when they get to high school.

They want an American high school experience. The allure of US high schools isn’t math, science or history. It isn’t academic, college and career preparation. The Paris parents want cheerleading, prom, homecoming, football games, school spirit and sports. In other words, they want the comprehensive US high school experience, which isn’t offered in a French system that focuses almost exclusively on academics. 

Schools have changed. 

School-aged kids’ parents disagree with me all the time on how much schools have changed. I’ve worked with many public, private and parochial, secondary and higher education institutions in three states and five countries, and I’ve advised parents, teachers and leaders. Helping my friends navigate schools is rewarding. They are passionate about their choices, and I know that those choices matter. I listen to them talk about conversations about whether it’s better to learn physics before biology, the best novels to introduce to teens, the value of studying abroad in China or Argentina and whether private school is worth the cost. We typically do not disagree about extra-curriculars like prom and sports, so when I heard my friends in France say they wanted to move back to the United States for high school extra-curricular like sports, a light bulb clicked on.

Many of the parents I advise spend their days working in data rich environments where their jobs often revolve around their ability to analyze and act not on emotion but on verifiable information. It seems reasonable that for one of the biggest decisions of their lives, these parents would rely on fairly detailed research and data, quantitative and qualitative, to support their decisions about where to send their kids all day every day for nearly two decades.

Decisions about schools aren’t made that way. When it comes to choosing schools, most parents go with their gut. Choosing a school based on cheerleading and prom exposes deeper assumptions about how schools work- or don’t work. 

Parents generally hold that schools haven’t changed much, and the popular literature saying schools look today like they did in the 195s is generally accurate. Even if parents notice minor changes, they simultaneously dismiss those changes as insignificant and conclude that what was good enough for them is good enough for their kids. When I try to persuade them that school today is fundamentally different, I usually fail. 

• Schools are different because increased competition for selective college spots, including from international students and especially competitive children from China which topped 300,000 this year. 
• Schools are different because of increased student stress due to the increased competition, which even parents who retreat to the safe suburbs can’t avoid. The competition is all the more cut-throat given increased academic accountability from accurate new assessments that mercilessly sort students leaving little room for consideration whether a child is nice. When I was in school, being nice was at least as important as performing well. Those days are over. 
• Schools are different because of macroeconomic issues that have created a wildly different world. It’s unclear what work students will be doing in the future, so schools have a hard time creating highly targeted programs. 
• Higher education costs continue to increase disproportionately to the economy overall. There are increasingly vocal questions about whether the big student loans for the big degrees are worth it. Even as the economy improves, there is  the concern that salaries are not increasing at pace with increasing education costs, and children turning 25 in 2050 will very likely have a lower quality of living than today, if they haven’t already.

Parents hold romanticized view of schools.

The evidence I give for a fundamentally different approach to school doesn’t move them. Parents seem incapable of handling bad prospects and/or are hold such romanticized views of their school days. They are blind to the coming tsunami. They speak positively of their kids’ schools, and most of their evidence, from what I can tell, comes from comparisons about their school experience, which just isn’t applicable in this global market.  

Just yesterday, a teacher spoke with a father in China who complained about his daughter’s experience at school. He remembered getting an assignment on Romeo and Juliet in tenth grade, and the fact that his daughter got a shorter Shakespeare assignment with more online analytical work was a negative sign to him. 

Parents send their kids to school thinking what their children experience is fundamentally similar to their own childhood experience. I’m gentle with those parents because they aren’t running schools, and they don’t understand how different schooling looks every day on the ground. I also let them go because I figure it doesn’t matter too much. I know parents are the central educators in their children’s lives but also am comfortable letting them stay in their lane, parenting while I stay in my lane, running schools. Today, I realized the problem with that argument. I arrived today at the best example of how schools have fundamentally changed. 

Technology has made research easy.

It’s research. 

Twenty years ago, most high school English classes taught research in high school when seniors did “the research paper.” Today, students would think it’s a joke to wait until twelfth grade to introduce research. Why? Students in third grade and earlier perform research every day, multiple times per day far more rapidly than any twelfth grader of the past. 

It’s old news saying that the internet has changed everything. It means a world-sized asteroid collision for schooling. A totally new approach to teaching and learning is needed that embraces these changes, yet most schools are plugging away at practices and pedagogies they’ve been doing for decades. Many are banning technology, sending their kids ever further into the Twilight Zone where students as young as 10 are asking why they can’t look up the answer on their phones. 

What needs to be updated? 

• Research needs to be taught directly and at a much earlier age than high school. The curricular plan need to be comprehensive and discuss reliability of sources and how to give credit where credit it due. 
• Research need to be taught by whatever means necessary. Students in Shanghai research on their phones. Why? It’s easier to have Virtual Private Networks, big business in China, on one device, and students often can’t afford big fancy computers. They are masters of working with thumb-typing, and, as I was amazed to learn early, they know where to find everything. 
• Students need to be encouraged to do it with fast processors, fast internet and good online support. This is a hole-in-the-wall-like idea is that kids will research and learn on their own. It’s not forcing them to rifle through piles of papers in the controlled stacks of books in the Harvard Library. Every kid every day already researches information. They want to do this, so channeling this positive energy toward more productive directions is a great idea. 
• Schools and universities are not gate holders to information. All the information out there is easily available. Schools that don’t take advantage of this by telling students not to use tech are ignoring reality and will soon become unable to function. 
• Plagiarism. Traditional schools are futilely trying to control this tsunami of information and research by making increasingly tough rules against plagiarism. This is misinformed. Tech an opportunity for teaching and learning, not a time to legislate rules. 
• Parents of little kids need to understand this and a get on board. If you as a parent think your kid will get the same education you got, you’re not only wrong, your expectation is hurting your child. Parents need to  advocate for things to look like they did when the way information was introduced in the past is gone, now and forever. 
• Schools must commit to teaching skills. This has been true for decades and has been repeatedly highlighted in the research literature. With easy access to info, it’s more crucial today than ever to have the skills to manage it. In 1993 when I started teaching, I had colleagues who said all students must know Death of a Salesman or Moby Dick. Today naming a single text as a source of all good is insufficient. Content is more important than ever, but the curating function of schools is decreasingly necessary. Young students research constantly now. They instantly look up up everything they don’t know. If I give them Moby Dick, they will read the summary online before the book. There is no point to stopping it. We need to teach to it. Students need the skills to know those online summaries are woefully insufficient to provide them with the content they, themselves, need and want.
• Schools can try to require kids to reading certain content and take away tech to avoid temptation, but if the kids don’t support it, it’s a short-term ”solution.“ All that matters now is giving students ownership of the content they find, read and ultimately respect. The content that motivates and garners their respect they will read, and that content will change their minds and expose them to culture. Schools ignoring that little kids are researching are missing this.

Sadly most schools are missing this because of parents. Parents aren’t the only ones who think their own education is good enough for today’s youth, but they are the most powerful ones. Parents still control more of their children’s education than a school ever could. When parents come to see how fundamentally schooling has changed - regardless whether parents think they are sending their kids to a “traditional” school or not - then schools will have the latitude to fundamentally change how they approach reading, writing, research and, most imperatively, learning.  

John Heintz and the Second Rail team provide this resource to aspiring and practicing educational leaders - like you. Second Rail never sells your personal information. Nothing here is intended to be taken as legal advice, and, should you need legal advice, reach out to us for a reference to a good one.

Second Rail is accepting new writers. If you care about educational leadership and the many lenses through which Second Rail analyzes it, contact us here.

I once worked with a frustrated chief financial officer at a public school district. She came from the private sector. As a former bond trader, she was a non-traditional leader for a public school finance department. Most traditional public school leaders emerge from within the public schools. She and I had many discussions about public school finance. The discussions usually ended with her shaking her head and concluding that good finance in the public sector is not good finance in the private sector.

A public-private divide exists in more than finance.  There is a deep divide in leadership development programs in the public and private sectors. Private sector leaders get MBAs.  Public sector leaders get Masters’ of Public Administration, or occasionally for school leaders, doctorates in education.

Harvard’s Leadership for the Common Good series seeks to bridge this public-private divide. It is a book series that is a partnership between two Harvard departments: Business Administration and Public Leadership. The partnership defies conventional wisdom. The knowledge and skills needed in public and private sector leadership are well aligned, according to the project.

Ron Burt, a professor and communications expert out of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, offers an important insight that bolsters the need for cross industry experts. Burt talks about people being bridges or hubs. Bridges are people that cut across traditional industries, sectors and job categories. An accountant that spends his days talking to other accountants is a hub. An accountant that spends his days talking to teachers is a bridge. This article is about would-be bridges. It is a call for more bridges in education.

In the last 10 years an increasing number of public school leaders including superintendents have been getting MBAs instead of education school doctorates. Education traditionalists resist this change, and perhaps for good reason. The traditional career path for a school administrator begins with teaching and then moving up the totem pole: department chair, assistant principal, principal, assistant superintendent, superintendent.  The path to additional principal or superintendent licensure is often the same path that leads to a doctorate. Depending on whether one thinks schools are succeeding or failing, this well-worn path has worked or failed at creating effective school leaders.

Public opinion polls and international test scores suggest schools in the US are not succeeding. Criticism of public schools in the United States is increasingly vocal. Some criticism is not made in good faith. I have a cousin who dislikes teachers because they make too much money, get too much vacation time and have overly generous pension benefits. She would say US schools are failing because they spend too much for the results they produce. I have a creeping suspicion that she is a little envious of public school teachers. I don’t want to downplay this envy-based criticism. I have explained elsewhere that envy of generous pensions is a significant source of the anger that non-union workers direct at unionized teachers, especially in Illinois with its worst-in-the-country pension situation.

More informed criticism about the failure of US schools cites problems that are more quantifiable.  Each of these concerns warrants significant attention: decreasing international test scores, the skills gap, lack of cost-success proportionality, the achievement gap, antiquated systems and many other quantifiable, non-envy-based criticisms.

US schools are not succeeding, but even reasonable criticism faces resistance from deeply entrenched interests. Good luck finding a school superintendent, school board or even local teachers’ union that will admit to having a failing school district. Failure is always the problem of the neighboring school, district, state or country. Removing those entrenched interests from the analysis, the more informed critics are comfortable saying that US schools are failing. If they are failing, leaders are not facilitating the transformations needed to make schools succeed. School leaders fail because they have not been trained to succeed.

School leaders are trained through credential programs. Administrative, principal and superintendent credential programs generally start with regulatory standards. State governments create standards listing what the programs need to cover, like bullying, staff evaluation systems, monitoring student progress, using technology and working with parents. Universities offering credential programs do not innovate. Rather, they design courses around mandated standards, usually covering them week-by-week in a syllabus. This is the first significant difference between MBAs and public administration credential programs. The goal of the MBA is to prepare students for a changing work environment. MBAs are designed by universities given the latitude to adapt program goals to a changing world. There are no statutory mandates for what an MBA program must address. Education programs seek to cover a list of regulatory rules. The effect is this difference is enormous: education administrators are not taught to be visionaries. They are taught to be functionaries.

Here are a half dozen reasons school leaders need MBAs:

1.     Talent management. Traditional school leaders do not make a priority of merit-based hiring. School insiders always propose friends, family members and political allies for jobs. In previous work with a school system with a litigious teachers’ union, around the same time that the union filed grievances to ensure all jobs were posted and created a fair shot for them to be filled with the best candidates, a president of that same union asked for a job for his wife. My attempts at creating blind hiring processes went nowhere.

When comparing my MBA to my education leadership credential program, the contrast in how each program taught hiring methodology was among the most significant differences. The MBA focused on systems of identifying clear outcomes for the company and then matching recruitment and hiring to those goals. The education program discussed none of that. My administrative credential program assumed teachers could perform any school leadership function. No credential course proposed hiring systems designed to ensure matching the best people with the right work.

I once spoke with the president of a teachers’ union about specialization of the work of school leaders. It was one of my first meetings with him. As we were getting to know each other, he said, “you know, John, I have no idea what you do.” I took it as a peculiar comment. I knew exactly what he did. I had been a teacher and union leader in the past. I knew the roles he played: teaching kids, negotiating contracts and managing grievances. His not knowing my work seemed reasonable to me. Back when I was a teacher, I knew little about what was needed operationally and legally to run a school.  It made sense to me that there existed experts whose precise role in the complex management of a school district I would never know. That work was not my job, and I accepted the need for specialists. The union president’s lack of trust in what he does not understand echoes the priority of education leadership programs. Talent management in education programs focuses on politics, not outcomes like improved student learning. This is a significant contrast between education and MBA programs. Education programs focus on adults. MBAs focus on outcomes.

2.     Operations. No administration program effectively tackles operations. Operations courses in MBA programs typically involve ways to efficiently and effectively provide a product or service. Operations courses in education administration programs do not exist. Courses in curriculum theory, school finance and human resources touch on creating systems tied to educational goals, but the goals are not clearly defined.  Since school leader programs do not clarify school goals, teaching how to efficiently and effectively achieve that goal is impossible. This should not be surprising. Looking at school operations today, they are similar to the way they were run 100 years ago. Principal training programs in particular focus on improving instruction. This is crucial but not sufficient to create systemic improvement in schools. 

3.     Accounting. By way of full disclosure, accounting was my worst subject in my MBA. Accounting rules are just conventions. The accounting world could have chosen other ones, so learning accounting is memorizing rules. Couple my lack of interest in drill-and-kill memorization with my accounting professor’s big personality, and it is understandable why I had such an unpleasant experience in my MBA accounting class. I understand rule-based systems. I am an attorney, and law, too, is a rule-based system. The bar for lawyers and the CPA exam for accountants are exercises in memorization, not my favorite pastime. Still, I learned enough accounting to lead an organization and allow the experts to dive into details.

Education administration programs do not teach accounting at all. When school reformers say they want public schools to look more like private companies, they are usually talking about financial accountability. When public school critics look at educational leadership programs and find out that school leaders never learn accounting or investing, their worst fears about the capacity of schools to effectively manage finance are reinforced. Public administrators replying that schools are different miss the point. Schools, just like families and corporations, have limited resources, and education leaders benefit from increased financial expertise including accounting.

4.     Leadership. Both MBAs and education administration programs teach leadership. Leadership is courage, savvy, candor, peacemaking, mindfulness, teamwork and a host of other qualities. Having school leaders in MBA leadership classes highlights the universality of great leadership. Teaching public sector leadership classes only to public sector leaders reinforces an unnecessary segregation. Education leaders often say “schools are not businesses.” Segregating public and private sector leaders perpetuates this belief. In my experience, MBA programs do a better job teaching leadership. Education programs focus on politics; MBAs focus on outcomes.

5.     Finance. This is the area cited most frequently when distinguishing public and private sector leadership training. Crystallizing the arguments, public leaders say private leaders only focus on profit. Private leaders say public leaders spend too much. Both these arguments are overly polemical. Public and private leaders seek many common financial goals in their work: directing resources to key programs and personnel, focusing resources to achieve needed outcomes, increasing efficiency, seeking to improve the organization’s overall financial health. MBA programs teach finance with these goals in mind. Education programs focus taxation rules.  Education programs spend little time on universal financial goals. Public educators would benefit from MBA finance courses.

An added benefit is having public sector leaders be able to speak to and understand their private-sector peers. An example of bad public sector finance that makes private sector leaders scratch their heads is when school districts increase taxes not because they need the money but to ensure maintenance of future taxing capacity. This was the most common complaint from my chief financial officer colleague. There are occasionally good reasons to increase taxes when you don’t need the money, but it is usually a bad idea. Financial leaders in the public and private sectors need to know how to build more efficient organizations.

6.     Relationships. Leadership programs create networks. Building cross-sector and cross-industry bridges through leadership programs create the conditions from which good ideas emerge. Diverse networks discourage silos, encourage fresh thinking, increase idea sharing, increase partnerships, decrease partisan politics and, at the risk of offering too great a benefit, decrease worldwide xenophobia. MBAs are far better at bringing together diverse leaders. Local school control has its advantages, but bringing together global leaders is not one of them.

Great leadership training

How leadership differs across sectors is important. MBAs and public administration degrees differ unnecessarily. When I became a school leader, I knew plenty about education. What I needed was training in tying resources to goals. The more insular the profession, the more insular the professionals in it. My experience as a public sector leader with an MBA bridged traditional boundaries and improved schools.

Schools are organizations. Schools, police forces and restaurants have similarities. They all have a product or service they provide. They all have people. They all have financial considerations. To say that a school principal needs to be more focused on curriculum than hiring and supporting the right people is not always the case.

Education leadership needs to be less insular. Bridging the public-private divide is the greatest hope for our schools. A good place to start is giving MBAs to more school leaders.

John Heintz and the Second Rail team provide this resource to aspiring and practicing educational leaders - like you. Second Rail never sells your personal information. Nothing here is intended to be taken as legal advice, and, should you need legal advice, Second Rail encourages you to contact an attorney sooner than later.

Second Rail is accepting new writers. If you care about educational leadership and the many lenses through which Second Rail analyzes it, contact us here.

Support follows investment. 

Once people have invested time, career, money and passion into an organization or system, they stand by their investment. You might be critical of your company, your city or your school, but you likely do not want them to disappear and take you with them. Everyone has had some form of education, and we overwhelmingly tend to support schools that look like what we experienced.

“Transforming education” sounds frightening to many. It often sounds like out-with-the-old-and-in-with-the-new, and rejecting the old often makes parents, teachers and other education insiders feel like they are rejecting themselves and their histories. Today’s students, parents and teachers neither want to eliminate the schools they knew nor be crash test dummies for new schooling that might not work. Most insiders, despite being in the best position to transform schools, are instead the first line of resistance against developing the kind of transformation our children need.

What needs to be fixed

Resistance aside, non-partisan and progressively-minded experts continue to come from the outside and evaluate school systems with fresh eyes. Dispassionately calculating the state of education today reveals that all is not well. Most metrics signal bad news: decreasing international ratings, decreasing job prospects for graduates, an increasing skills gap, sparse use of improved pedagogies, disproportionately increasing costs, weak accountability and other weaknesses. An easy example: schools still meet on the agrarian calendar even though it will come as no surprise that there is no proven causation between the agrarian school year and improved learning.

The first impediment to transforming education is this: the public needs to understand what needs to be fixed, why it needs to be fixed and how close these issues strike to home. In a nutshell, more people need to look closely at how students learn and insist school are designed around what students need. The belief that what-was-good-enough-for-me-is-good-enough-for-my-children is the first great impediment to transforming education.

Ending the pension crisis

The economics of education is the second great impediment to transforming schools. When most people talk about education today, they talk about costs and pensions. The public pension system has become a political football for highlighting some of the greatest perceived excesses of public education.

There is broad public agreement that a functioning economy rewards risk-taking. As Thomas Piketty notes in Capital in the Twenty-First Century, in Jane Austen’s time people accepted that mere land ownership justified lifetime financial security. Most people in Victorian England accepted an upstairs-downstairs society that approved of people not working and living off their investments or the investments of their ancestors.

Today, people talk about a society where rewards are based on merit. Criticism of the income gap today is shorthand for labor being made less valuable than capital. Piketty explains that a strong economy needs to balance the two: it needs to be lucrative to work and save. Despite polarized political messages, fixing the income gap is relatively simple. We agree that hard work and merit ought to be rewarded. The greater the challenge, we believe, the greater ought to be the reward.

Public pensions, for significant swaths of the population, feel like an unbalanced and unmerited windfall for public sector employees. The obvious reason for this is that few people have pensions at all. I wish the frustration felt by most Americans about education was uncertainty about what schools need to be successful.

Having a community fret over how high to set the bar for schools is a fantastic problem to have, but the public does not focus on student outcomes. Members of the public may support or reject The Common Core, but I will bet you know few people who can name even one Common Core standard. When education makes the news, it is about pensions. The frustration felt by most Americans about education comes from comparison and envy of education professionals.

An electrical engineer earning $60,000 who lives next door to a teacher also earning $60,000 feels like life is unfair. The engineer knows that she will likely be laid off in the next seven years since most companies fail. The teacher living across the street earning the same $60,000 will continue to receive raises and know that the public school will never go out of business. On top of the extra job security, the teacher also has a pension.

The engineer knows that even if she is lucky and her company continues to exist and grow for the next thirty years, her retirement will still be worse than that of a public sector retiree. If the company is one of the remaining few that offers a pension, it will be modest, likely under $10,000 a year. If the company goes under after the engineer has retired, the pension payments will stop entirely. The teacher will get nearly 100% of his salary for the rest of his life, with annual raises likely in excess of the cost of living, and the state providing the pension can never go out of business.

It feels really unfair to the engineer, and getting past the politics of pension economics means addressing the comparisons and envy underlying the economic anxieties of average Americans. We will not get any cool-headed discussion of what schools need to be successful when the engineer wakes up every day feeling like she was a fool for taking a riskier and less financially rewarding career path.

Fixing pensions will open the public discourse logjam and allow the public to have rational conversations about what levels of funding are needed for great schools. Illinois has the largest unfunded pension liability in the country, so the solving the problem in Illinois will solve the problem everywhere.

Michael Lewis in his insightful and occasionally glib economics-focused book Boomerang is easily talking about Illinois when he compares Europe to what is coming to the US. Illinois is essentially the Greece of America, and Lewis suggest that at some point economically strong states will reject Illinois when Illinois comes around asking for a bailout. There are clear and compelling economic reasons to solve pension crises around the US, even if Lewis makes an oversimplified comparison. The pension crisis has become a metaphor for unfairness to most Americans, so solving the crisis is essential to improving public discourse about education. There are many possible solutions.

One simple solution is making sure all financially exposed parties are at the table during any negotiations that affect pensions. In Illinois, teacher contracts are negotiated by teachers’ unions and school boards. Pensions are paid by the state, but the state has no negotiating authority during teacher-school board negotiations. One forward-looking solution is having an empowered representative of the state at the table during every contract negotiation. Under this plan, all contracts under the public pension system would need to be signed by three parties: employees, school board and the state. This legislative change would solve the problem, but it is not the only solution. What is important is that the crisis is ended.

The pension crisis needs to be solved, but even in its worst form, it is a problem is for the relative short term.  New teachers and other employees have already been redirected statutorily to a new, much less lucrative pension system. The only remaining issue is what to do with public employees in the system before the early 2000s who will collect what most people would call big pensions for the next few decades. The solution to that problem has to be increased taxes or reduced benefits, assuming the economy continues to grow relatively anemically. Once the pensions are fixed, the conversation can turn from pension-envy to how to create the right level of funding for great schools. The pension crisis has shined a bright light on income inequality. Solving income inequality generally is a good idea, but inequality can be solved in education relatively painlessly. Society will progress when public discourse rises above education compensation envy and focuses on imagining what is possible in life for us and our children.

Transforming education for our children

Educational transformation is coming. As I have explained elsewhere in these articles, traditional public schools can be part of the solution or part of the problem. If there is one thing the digital age has shown us, it is that technological improvements affect each of us every day and in every aspect of life. We all know intuitively that teaching and learning can improve. The first step to creating more adaptive and responsive schools is accepting that school will not look the way it did fifty years ago. The second great challenge for transforming schools is ending political posturing about education economics. The pension crisis needs to be solved with a simple, common sense solution. Once the crisis is ended, we can focus on more meaningful conversations about transforming education: designing fantastic schools that build a better future for our children. 

John Heintz and the Second Rail team provide this resource to aspiring and practicing educational leaders - like you. Second Rail never sells your personal information. Nothing here is intended to be taken as legal advice, and, should you need legal advice, Second Rail encourages you to contact an attorney sooner than later.

Second Rail is accepting new writers. If you care about educational leadership and the many lenses through which Second Rail analyzes it, contact us here.

This is a trick question. The top-performing schools in most major urban areas - like Chicago - are already far outperforming even the wealthiest suburban schools. But that response avoids reality for most students outside suburban areas. In Chicago, your child’s chances of being admitted to Northside College Prep are worse than being admitted to Harvard. The real question remains: when will quality in the city for most students be better than the quality of schooling for most students in the suburbs?

This old question applies to almost every major urban area in the United States. This article uses Chicago as an exemplar. No suburb can compete with Chicago for money, resources or talent, but city schools underperform on just about any measure you might choose: academic progress, school environment, student quality, teachers, administrators, graduation rates, persistence scores, instructional time, activities, university attendance or almost any other measure.

Historic reasons for Chicago’s relative underperformance are that middle-class parents move to the suburbs and take their political power with them. This conventional wisdom is that the routine movement of middle-class parents to the suburbs leaves city parents with less political power and less capacity to demand excellent schools. Conventional wisdom also holds that navigating the city’s schools is really hard compared with the ease of sending your kids to most suburban schools. Navigating city schools is so tough that wealthier parents opt out of the system entirely and move out or send their kids to private schools.

A colleague who swore she would never leave Chicago recently gave up and moved to the suburbs. Central to her decision were some easy comparisons. Compared to the suburban school where she planned to move, her high-quality city school had no busing, a shorter school day and school year, larger class sizes, a lower employee retention rate, minimal athletics and arts facilities and a budget a quarter smaller than the suburban school.

Funding underlies the problem. Illinois has the most inequitable school system in the country, with the wealthiest districts spending almost $30,000 per year per pupil and the poorest ones spending around $8,000. Illinois is one of a few states that still funds schools this way. A funding system based on local property taxes makes downstate districts the poorest, north suburban districts the richest and city schools left hovering in the middle. Suburban public officials talk about the joys of local control, but the dirty underside of that argument in Illinois is the system of grossly inequitably funded schools. In the north suburbs schools routinely spend $15 million on a pool while city schools struggle to find a few thousand dollars to remodel student bathrooms.

Despite these structural economic constraints, Chicago is taking steps to be more competitive. The success of Chicago’s selective enrollment schools – Brooks, Hancock, Jones, Lane, Lindblom, Northside, Payton South Shore, Westinghouse and Whitney Young – shows that the city unquestionably has greater talent than the suburbs. Those schools put higher-spending suburban districts to shame by producing some of the most competitive students in the country even though the students in those schools typically come from much more financially humble homes.

Local control of schools creates gross inequalities. The city will surpass the suburbs when legislators fix school funding. 

John Heintz and the Second Rail team provide this resource to aspiring and practicing educational leaders - like you. Second Rail never sells your personal information. Nothing here is intended to be taken as legal advice, and, should you need legal advice, Second Rail encourages you to contact an attorney sooner than later.

Second Rail is accepting new writers. If you care about educational leadership and the many lenses through which Second Rail analyzes it, contact us here.

To date, innovations have been piecemeal. An entrepreneur comes up with a good idea to increase efficiency or effectiveness, and schools adopt them piecemeal. The big guys like Pearson and Google roll up these little companies over time, and the big guys’ bandwidth increases with each roll up. Communication has never been systematic and efficient between educational professionals. It has been easy for students to get lost in the system. For a long time, the odds that a student’s math teacher knew the student’s English teacher were slim.

Information sharing and the capacity to act quickly on new information will improve with Learning Management System improvement. Those improvements are coming quickly. Top of the wish list is adaptability. An LMS that adapts curriculum to individual student needs will provide teachers, coaches, tutors, parents and other dynamic support people with the information they need to more closely align their work with individual student needs.

Digital tracking of student progress continues to improve. A decade ago, schools had some data to track year-by-year progress.  Though that data was less than reliable, it was all the schools had. Increasingly year-by-year data is improving. More importantly, there is the possibility of semester-by-semester, week-by-week and day-by-day tracking. This is good news.  Digital technologies are becoming increasingly personalized and, soon, everyone will expect them. Schools and school leaders know this is coming. The question is whether it will be imposed on schools from the outside as a disruptive event or whether existing schools will be able to adapt to the improvements.

Schools are deeply adaptable.

Schools are adaptable and have the potential for absorbing would-be disruptions. It is true that schools have not changed much from the schools of fifty years ago - at least structurally. It helps to put that quick criticism into context. When people say that schools looks similar today to schools from long ago, they are typically talking about a few key features. First, the school year still generally follows the agrarian seasons, i.e., students are off in the summer. Second, schools still meet for around eight class periods daily, just as in the past. Third, attendance is still the primary measure of school, teacher and student success. Attempts to clearly define performance, student achievement and accountability have been fraught with politics and uncertainty, so the Carnegie Unit continues to prevail as the way schools are funded and measured. Fourth, instruction and assessment are still quintessentially separate. As one teacher colleague used to say, "every day we teach them or we test them," just schools have done since at least the 50s. 

Having these same structures in place signals to the nothing-has-changed crowd that schools cannot change and are ripe for external disruption. Looking only at these structural consistencies misses the deeper innovation that occurs within those standard structures. Putting aside the major structural consistencies that make schools look boringly similar to schools of the 1950s, innovation does occur frequently in most schools. The issue is not that schools lack innovation; they lack the ability to scale successful innovations. When school systems learn to scale their successes, they will preclude outside disruptors from stealing the show. Some districts will be better at this than others.

Which districts can transform?

Identifying the school systems that can transform and preclude disrupting legacy schools is the question on the mind of every school leader and ed tech CEO. Where can companies and school leaders look to forecast the future? This article proposes that there are two powerful clues in existing school systems that help identify which districts will absorb disruption and which will be disrupted.

The importance of school board leadership

Effective school boards permit management to make the tough decisions needed for change to occur. Without school board resolve, a school district cannot make intentional progress. This is true not only for technological change but every form of school improvement. Split boards, weak superintendents, technocrat managers and personally interested board members are chronic problems in most school districts. The dark side of local control of schools are these weaknesses. The number one reason schools are fundamentally structured as they were in 1950 is because every change prompts a response from locals, and when the heat gets turned up, most boards flip. Prior decisions frequently crumble under political pressure. This is the sign of democratic responsiveness, but it is also a sign of inability to follow through on commitments. Anyone running for or sitting on school board needs to understand this.

The role of a good school board member is setting policy and hiring a good CEO. Beyond those duties, leaders need to be given the latitude to get the work done. This is not a popular position for parents running for a board seat, for example, to give their child an advantage over the child's peers. It is, however, central to effective board governance. Additionally, boards that set clear policy, hire a good CEO and avoid micromanagement have an additional advantage. Those are the districts likely to adapt to technological disruptions. 

The lesson of technology departments

A second indicator of success in the face of future disruption is in information technology departments. These departments have gone by many names: information services, technology, information technology, audio-visual, digital services, network services and others. The growth of this department in a district signals how that district handles technological change.

Different districts have wide varieties of hardware and software, from end user operating systems like Apple and Windows through network software. A decade ago, platform decision-making was a momentous decision school districts. Although choosing a platform today is an almost insignificant concern, in the early 90s web-based software was less prevalent. It was very expensive to get hardware and software that worked across platforms to keep an entire school district functioning. If the school district in the early 90s was able to have an information services department with enough persuasiveness to provide a standard platform for technology, those districts will likely be among the survivors in the face of future disruptions.

The pick-a-platform decision of the early 90s signals the capacity of a school district to change. If a school district is so absorbed with its internal processes and incapable of making a unified decision in terms of technology, it is unlikely the district will be able to adapt when a major disruption arrives.

Districts that make clear policy decisions and apply them even-handedly will do well in the future. The story of past technology adoption is a signal for the future. Excellent leadership at the board and CEO levels means consistent application of policy decisions in all areas: governance, hiring, budgeting, contracting, labor relations, technology decisions, curricular design and every other aspect of school leadership.

An organization making even-handed decisions is a good sign. The same decision-making processes apply to creating and enforcing budgetary constraints, HR decisions and curricular standards. The ability to make solid technology decisions a decade ago indicates a likelihood the district will be able to avoid disruptions in the future.

Finally, the third and possibly the most important clue as to the future success of a school at absorbing disruptive technologies is the integration of information services into operations. The average story over the last decade has followed this storyline. When computers first came into the schools, no one wanted to take responsibility for them. In fact, they were viewed as so specialized that only computer scientists or engineers could manage them. Computer engineers and computer scientists were the experts, and the superintendent's office, English department, counseling department, business department and human resources department wanted no part of running, installing, managing, budgeting for or learning about computers - at first.

Computer technology departments were created because no one else wanted the responsibility, and that continued through the early 90s. The departments grew quickly because every time anything touched a computer, it was given to that department. The problem is that as technology became ubiquitous, the matters that had been handled by the English department, the science department, the physical education department, the human resources department or another department never returned from those booming information technology departments. Looking at staff trends, information technology departments grew wildly disproportionately to every other area.

A district that was capable of scaling back the size and scope of their technology departments and distributing those responsibilities to other departments are likely going to be able to absorb disruptive change. Those school systems know how to look at new technologies and integrate those decisions to the entire institution. Today, there is significant variability in the size and scope of IT departments. One of the first places to look to gauge the adaptability of a school system is those departments. 

The lessons of the past are good indicators of future behavior. School leaders that have responded wisely to past technological changes are poised to better absorb future disruptions and, possibly even create new ways of working without simply reacting to changes thrust upon them. Leaders that have let isolated departments, especially IT departments grow without integrating their work into the work of existing legacy departments signal systemic inability to change.

The goal of all school systems is to provide the best possible learning environment for every student. Schools have always had brilliant innovation inside their walls. The challenge now is grabbing those good ideas and giving them to every student. 

John Heintz and the Second Rail team provide this resource to aspiring and practicing educational leaders - like you. Second Rail never sells your personal information. Nothing here is intended to be taken as legal advice, and, should you need legal advice, Second Rail encourages you to contact an attorney sooner than later.

Second Rail is accepting new writers. If you care about educational leadership and the many lenses through which Second Rail analyzes it, contact us here.

Good teams are great

In Joseph Conrad’s 1904 novel Nostromo, a main character commits suicide when he has to hide on an island alone for months. He ultimately found the loneliness unbearable and hanged himself. Until then, he was part of a tight team of good friends on the mainland. His team defined him. 

Most workers would not describe their work teams as fundamental to their being. People generally dislike teams at work, yet lacking a team can be a punishment, too. If working together was rooted more deeply in basic human needs, teams personally and professionally would be much more effective.

The last several pieces in this series have addressed the value of big data in education and why teams of coworkers often fail. As the last part of this series, the two come together to put forth some answers about how to create the high-power teams so sorely needed in educational institutions.

The advantages humans gain from being together provide a window into the advantages of teams. People come together to provide each other support and take advantage of collective strengths. High-performing teams start with the same premises. Members of the 1986 Mets, The Beatles and The Manhattan Project included teammates with technical strengths and relationship value beyond individual members’ technical expertise.

Democracy amplifies the importance of teams. If Louis Brandeis was right and the states are “laboratories of democracy” then local school districts are hyper local opportunities to see democracy’s successes and failures. There are almost 100,000 public school districts in the United States today. Taking the passions, competencies and drives of each of those district’s stakeholders, the possibility for innovation is vast. High-performing local school boards are effective teams that substantially alter children’s lives for the better. Great school boards are great teams and evidence of the effectiveness of the democratic model.

Work itself is fundamentally a form of teaming. As the old saying goes, people don’t quit their jobs, they quit their bosses. They also quit their colleagues. If a team is effective, then the outcome is shared, work is enjoyed and the next success will be even greater. Finding a really successful team at work is tough, but when they arrive, their impact is undeniable.

Using data to find effective teams leads to some important lessons.

Regardless where one falls on the team-individual preference continuum, improving teams is crucial. Google researched teams and learned that effective teams can be much more easily destroyed than created. Team effectiveness decreases with bad chemistry among members. That is obvious. Team effectiveness improves when team members increase the psychological safety of other team members. If the team is a safe place to take risks, team members come up with better ideas and improve the team’s outcomes overall.

High-performing teams start with mindful leaders.

School leaders need to know how to develop high-performing teams. Creating psychologically safe spaces is a challenge when diverse groups of stakeholders hold wildly divergent agendas. Teachers, parents, students, administrators, board members, community leaders, legislators and staff have few aligning intentions. Starting meetings with a check-in to ensure everyone is psychologically present, getting agreement on the term of team participation and calling out team members that violate the integrity of the team are essential beginnings for building risk-taking, high-performing teams in complex educational environments. 

John Heintz and the Second Rail team provide this resource to aspiring and practicing educational leaders - like you. Second Rail never sells your personal information. Nothing here is intended to be taken as legal advice, and, should you need legal advice, Second Rail encourages you to contact an attorney sooner than later.

Second Rail is accepting new writers. If you care about educational leadership and the many lenses through which Second Rail analyzes it, contact us here.

“L’enfer, c’est les autres” is Jean Paul Sartre’s famous quote that one could easily say is a rebuke of teams. Workers dislike teams for many reasons. Teammates are often assigned, not chosen. Teams work in meetings, and ineffective meetings mean wasted work time. Supervisors have been said to "meet for a living."

School teams of faculty members are notoriously low performing. Required monthly faculty meetings are generally unpopular. Many teachers take partial personal days and sit in their classrooms and work instead of participating. Teachers agree on neither the content nor the methods to best teach the same children, so it is little surprise that they do not enjoy working together on projects. At the extreme, there have been some teachers in the same department who disagree and have not spoken in years. 

A curriculum written by a faculty committee is usually watered down. No one owns it, and it is not the creative act of an individual. The idea of a “committee” itself conjures up negative images of routine bureaucracy and gray, uninspired and obligatory gatherings. The word “routine” in French is always pejorative. Americans will occasionally talk about “a healthy routine” but not the French. For them, routine is always humdrum. Support for another’s curriculum is rarely as energetic as support for one’s own creation. 

Teams at work, especially committees, suggest obligation, drudgery and compliance, and leaders often match this energy. Most administrators are technocrats. They work as neither innovators nor leaders but rather technicians and compliance officers. These are administrators that view their role as merely enforcing the rules passed down to them. Technocrat administrators lead teams in the same humdrum, routine, bureaucratic way they perform their work. Many of them are uncomfortable even being called “leaders.”

The dislike of teams among adults in schools is no surprise given that faculty and staff teams do little more than go through checklists. Checklist Manifesto was a popular book a few years ago among administrators embracing this leadership-as-compliance perspective. Checklists catch errors but ignite little enthusiasm.

Humans acting as humans and not mere workers crave self-expression, uniqueness and principled action. As long as work teams fail to reflect those needs, Sartre was right: hell is other people, especially when they are forced to be on your team.

Next time, how to create great teams. 

John Heintz and the Second Rail team provide this resource to aspiring and practicing educational leaders - like you. Second Rail never sells your personal information. Nothing here is intended to be taken as legal advice, and, should you need legal advice, Second Rail encourages you to contact an attorney sooner than later.

Second Rail is accepting new writers. If you care about educational leadership and the many lenses through which Second Rail analyzes it, contact us here.

The power of big data is not new. It is rooted in a lesson that scientists have known since at least Galileo but amplified considerably in the digital age. Observations reveal reality.  Multitudes of observations reveal more and unexpected realities. If zero vaccinated children get sick and millions of non-vaccinated children get sick, the vaccination works. Before the digital age, scientists did one experiment at a time, tracking observation data in a lab book. Today, scientists use factory-labs with robots, conveyor belts and grids of test tubes and perform thousands of simultaneous experiments, tracking the observations in automated systems to find the experiment that works.

If a high school has sent zero graduates to the Harvard University and 20,000 graduates to the local community college, it is fair to wager that this year’s graduates will not attend Harvard. If one teacher gives only As and another teacher only gives Cs, it is rational for students to expect an A from teacher one.

The implicit message is that at some point when the data set is big enough the observations reveal reality.

Educational institutions have more data.

Conclusions from ever increasing data sets are leading to more and newer conclusions, knowledge that was not before known or was relegated to the world of stories about common sense. Big data indicates reliable truths. After reviewing billions of searches, if Google sees that people who type a “C” into the search box usually want Craigslist, it makes sense to have Craigslist pop up as an option. If absence data show that after a certain number of absences, performance drops precipitously, it makes sense for a school to design a policy acknowledging that reality.

Statewide school report cards are increasingly popular. These report cards include the results of big data analyses offering information about average class size, per-pupil spending and test scores. Parents are using this information, and schools are noticing. No parents seek out a failing environment for their child, so these school report cards are gaining in importance.

Budgets are big data sets, and finance and accounting analysts embrace the truths found there. Changing budgets mean changing values and priorities. National aggregate test scores are big data sets. The SAT, ACT, PISA, NAPE and other big database exams highlight trends with good reliability.

Educational leaders knew big data was coming. Foresight of larger data sets ushered in the data-driven decision-making movement that swept through educational leadership circles a few years ago. Schools held team meetings to review data on attendance, grade distributions, discipline trends, test validity and extra-curricular participation. Occasionally the data sets were not sufficiently large to provoke a compelling case for change, but they often did.

The last enactment of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) passed at the start of the Obama administration, Race to the Top, focused on big datasets from schools and teachers, and Race to the Top prompted most schools in the country to evaluate teachers, usually to a tiny degree, on student growth data, which is another big data set. The newest enactment of ESEA, the Every Student Succeeds Act, continues to look at big data sets through a local lens.

Data is not a panacea for education, but at a certain effect size, educational leaders have to take notice. Data sets in education offer increasingly compelling truths about the student experience, curriculum needs and educator teams. 

John Heintz and the Second Rail team provide this resource to aspiring and practicing educational leaders - like you. Second Rail never sells your personal information. Nothing here is intended to be taken as legal advice, and, should you need legal advice, Second Rail encourages you to contact an attorney sooner than later.

Second Rail is accepting new writers. If you care about educational leadership and the many lenses through which Second Rail analyzes it, contact us here.

The federal government is making it easier for foreign-born entrepreneurs to move to the US. The change in visa rules signals a shift in national priorities. The US today – more than ever – embraces entrepreneurship. Having a good idea and the wherewithal to make it a reality is quintessentially American and increasingly universal. Good ideas can change the world, promote economic growth and increase everyone's quality of life. The education sector is no exception. 

Elsewhere in this resource, we have discussed the need to ease credentialing rules for teachers and educational leaders. The unintended consequence of complicated credentialing hurdles is that people who think differently – creative people who see possibilities – feel less welcome in the education sector. Put candidly, the education sector is not where aspiring entrepreneurs go as a first stop.

How does a highly regulated, slow-to-change industry like education engage with the  call for system-wide transformation? An increasing number of forward-thinking school boards are hiring leaders with cross-industry, international and even entrepreneurial experience. "Innovative" is an increasingly important word employers look for in job applications. 

Innovating in the education space is no small undertaking. Low turnover rates for public school employees suggests public schools and universities are good places to work. People who have a good deal want to keep it. Innovators craving transformation receive warmer welcomes in start ups or incubators. If education is to change from within and adapt to its increasingly frequent challenges – technological disruption, decreasing budgets, increasing social demands, widespread disagreement on the goals of education – educational leaders need to release themselves from their histories, their credentials, even their careers and begin to see themselves as entrepreneurs.

Cultural transformation comes first. Institutions follow. Culture in the US today embraces those who undertake projects hoping to change the world. Undertaking transformation in education may be the greatest benefit of this cultural shift embracing innovation. Schools, universities and other learning institutions will respond to culture when (a) elected board members and trustees demand leaders with cross-industry, cross-discipline and cross-geography experience and (b) existing educators and leaders stop defending the old ways of working, seek continuous improvement and embrace innovation. 

John Heintz and the Second Rail team provide this resource to aspiring and practicing educational leaders - like you. Second Rail never sells your personal information. Nothing here is intended to be taken as legal advice, and, should you need legal advice, Second Rail encourages you to contact an attorney sooner than later.

Second Rail is accepting new writers. If you care about educational leadership and the many lenses through which Second Rail analyzes it, contact us here.

Teacher tenure is quickly disappearing. Administrators of the past that held in the back of their minds that they can always return to the classroom ought to be less confident, and younger administrators have clear reason for caution. Would-be administrators thinking they will be the exceptional one who survives usually end up on one of two paths, settling for the status quo and being ineffective or challenging the status quo and departing quickly.  Retention rates for administrators are terrible compared to teachers. Even worse, the few studies measuring retention for transformative leaders highlight dismal chances for a long career.

Before making the commitment to leave teaching, every would-be administrative leader is obliged to understand the greatest legal risk, loss of indemnification.

What do CEOs and teachers have in common? Both are effectively indemnified for legal costs when they get in trouble. Indemnification is one of the strongest forms of legal protection. CEOs usually have indemnification agreements. If the CEO gets in trouble with her own company, the agreement kicks in and funds a defense. Teachers are indemnified in a different way. The teachers union funds the teacher’s defense. Administrators? They have to fund their own defense. The public feels that administrators earn enough to fund their own defenses, but comparing legal spending by union and CEOs to public school administrators highlights the paucity of protection enjoyed by administrators.

Transforming education requires empowered leaders. Leaders push harder when insulated from politics. Before considering any career move, teachers need to consider carefully whether and how they would be empowered as administrators. The root of the empowerment is economic, and this article is highlighting one form of economic empowerment, having a strong indemnification agreement. Empowerment is more than economics; it's emotional,  psychological and social. A disempowered school leader facing political headwinds faces not only salary loss but massive bills for funding a defense when political winds shift. And political winds always shift.

It’s risky to move from the relative security of teaching to heightened vulnerability of administration. Few people do it, and the inability of education to attract and retain the best talent is the primary challenge for any industry seeking to improve. Administrators need to have a personal attorney and remember that despite supervisors offering take-it-or-leave-it contracts, there is always room to negotiate. 

The Hole in the Wall Project highlighted the power of self-organized learning. John Heintz saw Sugata Mitra’s Ted Talk almost a decade ago. The Hole in the Wall Project gave children access to a single computer embedded in a wall. With no guidance, groups of students taught themselves a wide variety of topics, including English. The takeaway is that groups of children can teach themselves anything if adult intervention is removed.

The even more notable takeaway was what the children said. After being left with the technology for some time, the researcher approached the children. The first request from the children was for more memory and a faster processor.

If you can afford it, always buy technology with the most memory and the fastest processor. Anything less shortens the useful life of your technology, but it also slows one’s own life learning.

The bigger issue: if education is best when self-directed, where does that leave the massive education industry? The digital age may make educational institutions irrelevant. John Heintz often confronted this reality as a teacher, professor and student when, even in his District 219 days, he consistently noted that almost all students, at any given point in their learning, were either bored or overwhelmed. Planned, lock-step, highly directed education is coming to an end. Technology is the newest reminder that we need to release children from structures that hinder learning and provide children with access to structures that foster it. 

What matters now is creation. Allowing children the freedom to explore and learn is what John Dewey appreciated in saying: “Education is not preparation for life; it is life itself.” All of us need access to the internet and machines with faster processors and more memory. We all want to keep living. 

Educational leadership positions are most often filled with managers, not leaders. Managers preserve the status quo and enjoy long, lackluster careers. Leaders challenge the status quo and rarely remain more than a few years. Schools are filled with far more managers than leaders.

Leadership in traditional public schools, which continue to serve most students in the United States, including superintendents, principals, department heads and other managers usually come from the ranks of former teachers. There are a couple of good reasons why this happens.

1. Formerly being a teacher increases a CEO’s credibility. In The Prize, Daniel Yergin recounts New Jersey’s complaints that those leading change in the schools came more frequently from Silicon Valley and its board rooms than New Jersey and its classrooms. How much do the skills needed to teach students align with the skills needed to operate a school system? The answer for most teachers is emotional and consistent: we like leaders like us. The answer in terms of measurable educational change is less clear.
2. Credentialing systems are another major reason schools are run by teachers and not management, finance, operations, governance or content area experts. The first step toward an administrator license is a teacher license. Non-education industry people need years of graduate work to become school administrators. Most don’t bother, so teaching is the track to management.

The effect of the shrinking pool of would-be leaders and increasing the pool of would-be managers is that most schools are full of managers. Managers have little incentive to shake things up. They usually invested 5 to 10 years of their lives and tens of thousands of dollars getting job credentials, and those credentials aren’t highly regarded outside education. Managers are not going to shake up a system to the point where they have no job or can’t imagine a different system. Leaders with a strong incentive to rethink schools are rare.

Education faces a classic incentive problem. Economics teaches us to get the incentives right. Current incentives discourage change leadership. The solution to the leadership crisis is twofold: recognizing non-school leaders can effectively lead schools and liberalizing credentialing standards to increase the pool of leaders committed to genuine educational transformation and growth. 

John Heintz

The US Department of Education recently announced millions in new grant money for states to investigate how to reduce testing of students. Assessment – and especially mass testing of students – has become the new education political hot button. There is a growing political movement toward “wiser” testing. The federal money targets plans that recognize the need for data but use fewer tests to do it. In the midst of the current political noise, it's important to keep in mind the big picture that no one sees.

Here’s the big idea: the promise of personalized education is the integration of learning and assessment. Learning and assessment are not cats and dogs. They can live together happily, and in fact, they do. For most people realizing assessment and learning can live happily in the same world requires a mindset shift.

Standardized tests like the ACT and SAT are greatly distinct from the assessment a teacher does daily in class. There is an enormous gap between those two: standardized test and what teachers do every day, or even every minute, to assess their students. Great teachers assess learning constantly. They assess students’ prior learning before deciding where to guide students next. The big standardized tests are used for sorting purposes, to determine which kid gets into which college or, eventually, which career.

It would be fantastic if the level-headed voices could drown out the political voices. Instruction and assessment go together. Education has a long way to go to bridge the gap between real-time assessment for learning and frozen-in-time assessment for sorting. It’s unlikely the advocates of assessment for learning will be louder than the opponents of standardized testing any time soon. There are too many entrenched adult interests.

Optimism is warranted, however.  Innovators continue to find new ways to use technology, emotional intelligence and school structures to once-and-for-all merge assessment and instruction. The long-term prize is worthy of everyone's time. At their best, instruction and assessment together create responsive, adaptive, personalized learning for every student that means making every moment a teachable moment. 

John Heintz

I grew up in a world where no one went to a car dealership for repairs. Dealerships charged too much. The other day my headlight went out. I have an old car, and this happens every spring. Although I dreaded the idea of taking it to a dealership, I was in a hurry and made the exception. I got a new headlight for $17.50 with no service charge; They installed it in five minutes and washed the car as well. It was my first experience in a car dealership spending $17.50 on a repair.

The experience was so far removed from my understanding of service that I realized change, even in deeply entrenched and historically underperforming organizations, is possible. When leaders talk about creating efficiencies and increasing productivity, this is it. 

The service that education is supposed to provide continues to this day to be mired in inefficiencies and lack of productivity. Most students in school are either bored or overwhelmed.

Last week, a new study released in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management showed that in at least one state charter school students are more successful systemwide than traditional school students. Central to the model of change proposed by charter schools generally is competition. Former teacher union president Albert Shanker supported charters and competition as a way to improve school accountability, and his vision seems to be working. Education is a service, and though education is a much more complicated service than changing a headlight, the lesson is the same: competition at its best improves service. 

Education is loaded with insiders. For outsiders, education seems like a monolith. The reality that is well known to insiders is that education is highly fragmented. Addressing fundamental challenges in education is the central mission of any leader’s work. With that in mind, here are the top four pain points across the education space.

1. No question is more relevant than this one: who is best at running schools? Teachers, administrators, board members, business leaders, entrepreneurs, technology advocates and local, state and country leaders all have something to offer, but everyone-is-welcome models in education usually result in delays and denials. Having too many cooks in the kitchen doesn’t work. School leaders’ first priority is navigating politics, and any company that can help leaders get ahead of the politics is a winner.
2. What are the primary goals of education? Higher education enrolls increasing numbers of academically challenged students borrowing a lot of money for degrees that don’t always lead to better careers. Elementary and secondary schools have ignored mission statements. Students who don’t attend traditional schools do as well as students who do. Albert Shanker said schools need to hold students accountable, but unions are more concerned about keeping jobs intact than achieving goals. Helping schools set a goal and stick with it is a major pain point for educational leaders.
3. How do schools ensure that students progress from hour-to-hour, day-to-day, year-to-year and course-to-course? This is the 500-pound gorilla of challenges for educational leadership. Eighth grade math is not the same in every state, district, school, class period or even two classes across the hall from each other during the same class period. Students rarely get what they need when they need it. Students sign up for a teacher more than a class. Part of the challenge is a human one: people learn at different rates. The greatest challenge is building good leadership.
4. How can education align incentives with goals? Lack of leadership is another major challenge for education. Certifications and licensures create significant barriers to entry and discourage risk-taking by those who have spent the time and money obtaining expensive licenses. Salary and benefits are based on a model used for teachers, mostly based on seniority and degrees, not reward for achieving goals. Leadership and management are different. The vast majority of administrators in schools today are managers. They check boxes off, one task at a time. Leaders are by definition non-traditional. Education has few leaders because incentives push leaders to be mere managers. One of the greatest challenges for education is moving to compensation systems based entirely on performance. Companies that can help are in high demand.

Big system solutions appear all the time. For the greatest challenges, however, effective solutions from companies, individuals, non-profits, legislators or educators are still rare. Any innovator seeking real educational transformation needs to start with these challenges. 

Luddites aside, the promise of personalized learning for students is undeniably pleasant. Students untethered from bell schedules and classroom desks, free to exercise at the times that best suit their moods, rhythms and motivations and liberated to read or study when they are most receptive to reflection, language and learning, freedom is enticing. The barriers to this utopia are countless, but one of the most popular villains is the Carnegie Unit. A Carnegie Unit is a period of time that is used to measure learning. As anyone that has sat through a boring lecture knows, sitting in class does not equal learning. The time you sit in class is a Carnegie Unit. The first step to personalizing learning, then, is allowing students to control the time, place, path and pace of their learning.

Carnegie Units are entrenched in the education laws of all fifty states. Untethering schools from seat time is as daunting a task as untethering office jobs from the 9-5. Yahoo famously adopted and then backed away from its work-anywhere culture. The trend is only in the direction of more self-directed work. Gallup reports the trend toward anywhere, anytime working continues unabated. Over 37% of employees don’t go to traditional offices.

People appreciate control of their time. Talent expert Robin Erickson’s work last year highlights that among highly skilled workers, the exchange value of working asynchronously at a self-chosen location is a primary reason people choose one job over another.

Students aren’t the only ones tethered to schools. Education professionals are tied to the schools, too. Teachers have rigid schedules. It is difficult to imagine judges or lawyers needing to jump up every fifty minutes after a bell rings that tells them to move on to the next case. Few administrators telecommute because few school districts have formal teleworking policies for managers, and even when they do, supervisors trust precious few direct reports with telecommuting. Despite these pushbacks, net telecommuting will continue to increase.

High-performers value flexibility and are more motivated, efficient and productive than other workers regardless where and how they work. High-performers create success for any organization, and schools need to compete for talent today more than ever.

Developing workplaces that allow work anywhere helps organizations succeed. As any human resources executive will report, most supervisors do a bad job of defining what they want from an employee. Thinking about what an employee will do while telecommuting forces supervisors to clarify expectations at the office. Structuring schools around expectations rather than seat time changes the fundamental expectation of teachers and students from minutes at school to ownership of learning.

The process of untethering educators from classrooms and offices clarifies responsibilities and roles. Untethering children provides freedom from one-size-fits-all bell schedules.

Professional musicians are listening to big data. The musicians want to find out the moments when a listener has the strongest emotional reaction to a song, the moments when the listener is most engaged and the moments when the listener tunes out. Progressive musicians plan to use this information to drive music-making decisions in the future. The musicians want to create music that does it all. Education needs to do the same.

The best education possible leaves a child brilliant and healthy through learning that is challenging, inspiring, engaging, and entertaining all at once. If educators are able to use big data to better facilitate that goal, why wouldn’t they? Schools already collect more data about schools than they like to admit. Microsoft has sponsored numerous information sessions for parents warning them that the increasingly ubiquitous Gmail available to students through schools means Google is collecting a lot of data. Personally identifiable information is removed, but Google has the data. Student information systems, social media providers and countless other providers have loads of data, and they all consider it valuable. Schools have even more data, and they are using little to none of it.

Big data represents an opportunity for education. Online, distance and blended learning environments are popular. Debates aside about the relative value of those experiences versus face-to-face, people want to learn whenever and wherever they want. If analyses of camera data on a student reading a book can specify the moment when a student laughs, reflects on her life, has an epiphany or checks out, why not know? Private and non-traditional public schools increasingly create knowledge through big data. All schools can do it.

Right sizing hasn’t often been applied to public education. In the GDP formula, increasing G increases GDP, and growth is good. Taxpayers are the only ones with the incentive to put on the brakes. And why would they? Lawyers have created a cottage industry suing school districts with taxing complaints, but these are small numbers compared with school revenues. Parents' top priority after safety is education, and parents make major life decisions based on schools.

So why right size a school?

Right sizing needs to be a priority for at least two reasons. First, right sizing requires schools to clarify goals. Second, right sizing means maximizing productivity. Traditional schools do neither well.

1.     Most schools have a deceivingly singular-sounding goal – usually including “increasing student achievement.” But what does that mean? Local school investments are rarely aligned to the goal, and even a casual walk-through a school makes it clear that schools are usually built for the adults in them more than increasing student achievement.

School leaders in fact target a long list of goals for students: college, career, salary, creativity, logic, literacy, culture, socialization, values, mental health, sports, community. This hodgepodge of goals drives most curricular, programmatic and personnel decisions. Ever-changing goals means ever-changing priorities. Priorities shift based on the complaints of the loudest interest groups.

The first step in right sizing is agreeing on a goal. This doesn’t happen well at the local level. Listening national leaders is even more vacuous.

2.     Productivity defines the right size of any organization. How does a community know if its schools’ employees are productive? In the private sector, employees target key performance indicators, usually tied to revenue. Traditional public schools rely on often-contradictory proxy metrics to measure productivity. Currently, some of the most popular ones include ratios related to college entrance test scores, staffing efficiencies, satisfaction survey rates, advanced course enrollment rates and costs per pupil. These goals often contradict. Increasing the number of students in advanced courses sounds great; but what if this results in increasing failure rates for those students? Productivity in public schools is highly-politicized because goals are unclear. Even the most well meaning locally elected officials usually have no idea what success looks like other than for their child. Knowing target ratios that include costs is even more foreign.

Creating the most effective and efficient school possible is the goal. Making right sizing a priority means making measurable improvements in schools.

A public school administrator sat in a meeting with the teachers’ union leadership. The purpose of the meeting was to analyze increasing benefits costs. As every finance executive knows, benefits costs are increasing far more quickly than salaries. In the administrator's district, salaries had been increasing around 3.7% while benefits hovered near 10%. The business world gasps at that number, and the union leadership said “So what?”

The discrepancy between salary increases and benefits increases is easy math. What’s hard – and was the purpose of the meeting – was to highlight the drivers of that discrepancy. Why are school districts spending so much more every year on health care? 

The administrator at the meeting understood the bottom line, but she did not understand the specific ways her employees were spending health insurance dollars. She neither wanted to know nor had the time to review the difficult-to-understand data. Like most organizations, the administrator brought in a benefits consultant. The consultant was tasked with analyzing spending patterns and highlighting increased costs.

The union leadership didn’t want to be at the meeting. They had a contractual obligation to meet and talk about benefits, but each one of the three union leaders at one point or another pulled aside the administrator and made it clear that that they didn’t really care that health care costs were increasing disproportionately. The administrator was sympathetic to their argument. The union leaders argued that health care is a right, even if their argument doesn't comport with how health care works under current US law. The union leaders argue that making patients comparison shop for cheaper health care only works if those patients have sufficient information to make an informed choice, and patients have nowhere near enough information to make informed decisions. Even though the administrator was sympathetic to the idea that health care ought to be a right, the administrator had to point out that, at this moment in this country, it’s not. The administrator’s job was to reduce run-away health insurance costs and reallocate that money to teaching and learning. 

Picturing the meeting room, there were the union leaders, the administrator and the health insurance consultant. The union leadership put aside their desire for universal, free health care and tried to dive into a more immediate concern. Pulling the administrator aside, they wanted to know “Who is this consultant, and how do we know we can trust him?”

The biggest challenge in education today is not about funding or control. The most significant issue in education today is trust. A meeting to discuss drivers of health care costs and win-win ways to control them is pointless if the people at the table don’t trust the expert. I’d be rich if I had a dollar for every meeting where a union leader asked the question “Who is paying this guy?” The underlying assumption is that if the Board of Education is paying for a consultant, then the consultant is going to say whatever the Board wants. The argument is logical to a point. Following the money exposes the incentives. But if we assume experts and everyone else can never offer independent assessments, no one can be trusted. 

If a business leader starts a school, she starts by looking at expected revenues and figuring out what she can spend. Leaders of existing public schools reverse that. Public school leaders's first question is always “is this politically palatable?”

Why is anyone surprised that there is a trust gap between these people? They are coming at education from different planets. Teachers' union leaders don’t trust education entrepreneurs. Union leaders have said many times some form of this question: “Who is this consultant/statistician/bus company/food service provider/demographer/economist?” Persons pursuing a profit are not to be trusted. Education entrepreneurs don’t trust public schools and the many people, including administrators, working in them. The entrepreneurs assume the unions don’t care about bottom line costs and just want to push for whatever the local political climate can handle.

The profit motive undercuts trust on one end, and ignoring costs and focusing on politics undercuts trust on the other end.

This trust gap means any crossover leaders, either public entrepreneurs or change-focused union leaders, are in a bind. No one at all trusts them. 

The need for trust goes beyond union-board relations in traditional public schools. All education stakeholders need to shift to a problem-solving mindset. It is far easier to criticize and destroy than build and create. Everyone working to improve learning has something to offer and needs to work together, assuming in every first case positive intent. The first and most important way to cooperate is to recognize that everyone is to be trusted. 

The United States does not recognize a fundamental right to education. This is peculiar for several reasons.

All fifty states already have the Right to Education in their constitutions. Even though education is not among the federal government’s enumerated powers, it’s clear that the right to education enjoys wide nationwide support.

Education spending is over 5% of the United States’ gross domestic product. The federal government spent $3.7 trillion on education in 2015. Education is already a top federal priority.

De facto standards continue to emerge in education curriculum, whether driven by Common Core, standards-based education, education technologies or crowd-sourced best practices. Recognizing a federal right to education matches where education is headed.

The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, a treaty that the United States signed but didn’t ratify, includes a right to education. Once the US ratifies, everyone in the US has a right to education.

Ratification will create a federal right to education. It will re-assert the US as a leader in international human rights. The United States is virtually the only developed country that hasn’t ratified. The US is already party to international human rights laws, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the subsequent International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Ratifying the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights is not a major shift.

This is a good time to ratify. The United States has exerted most of its international relations efforts negotiating important agreements on climate change, non-proliferation and global trade. Working with the rest of the world to define fundamental rights and is the best form of American leadership. 

Stakeholders is a word used frequently in management circles. It has gained additional currency in education recently, and, as I'm cautious when using vague language, it’s a word worth breaking down. Education leaders should be cautious when using the word. .In many cases, the term circumvents using a specific list of constituents and interested parties that can and should be listed individually.

Short list of Educational Stakeholders:

• administrator groups,
• administrators,
• alumni,
• chambers of commerce,
• community organizations,
• competitors,
• foundations,
• future generations,
• legislators,
• librarians,
• library officials,
• local business owners and
• local businesses,
• media outlets,
• municipal employees,
• municipal officials,
• nonprofits,
• parents,
• professional organizations,
• prospective residents,
• researchers,
• school board members,
• school boards,
• students,
• suppliers
• teacher union leaders,
• teachers,
• teachers’ unions,
• trade groups, and
• voters.

A local hotdog stand has stakeholders, too, such as people concerned about how it provides tax revenue, jobs, a gathering place, local flair or a good meal. Schools hold an almost mythic importance to a community, and the long list of stakeholders reinforces the importance of schools.

Why avoid use of the term “stakeholders”?

In almost every circumstance, naming the people and groups that care about a specific issue helps guide the school leader to solutions. If a school foundation supports an issue, it is worthwhile bringing them into the discussion early and explicitly. Naming opponents is an honest way of empowering those people and groups to engage in the discussion as well.

Taking the time to think through who will be affected by a decision, who will support it, who will oppose it and naming them, is the best way of ensuring more transparent decision-making. 

Curriculum is more and more aligned. Grade level expectations, common assessments, professional learning communities, Common Core standards and easily sharable course content makes it easier than ever for every school to have a guaranteed and viable curriculum.

What makes a school a reliable means to student success?

The best schools take no chances at helping every student succeed. The best schools prioritize everything: highly competitive teacher and administrator salaries, small class sizes, abundant technology, frequently updated facilities, loads of clubs and sports and always-available support specialists. Which of those makes a school reliably successful? No one really knows. If your child gets a radically different experience in sophomore English from your neighbor’s child, one thing you can be sure of is that the curriculum isn’t aligned.

Curricular leaders are almost organically moving toward greater alignment. Common Core is a powerful example of this. In the 1990s I saw departments that had difficulty agreeing on what novels were must-reads for juniors. If you can’t agree on what novels to read, you’re surely not going to agree on the best way to teach those novels. Things have gotten better, but an old structural tension still exists.

There's a tension between local control of schools and the guarantees and viabilities of the best schools’ curriculum. School board members are elected to represent the interests of their constituents. One local school is supposed to be able to have a curriculum more responsive to its population than a neighboring school. This runs directly counter to the idea of state or national standards. The tension between local control and widely-held standards is a challenge for school leaders.

Bridging the gap between local control and national standards is a challenge for school leaders. The only logical way the system can work is with effective school leaders balancing local and global curricular priorities. In terms of people, school leaders need to balance school board members’ priorities with teachers’ priorities.

The book Organizing Schools for Improvement took a strong position that is playing out heavily in Chicago Public Schools and nationally today. The way to a guaranteed and viable curriculum is through principals. Principals must be instructional leaders with the power to run their schools independent of oversight from either district-level managers or school boards. The way to a guaranteed and viable curriculum and school improvement: empower principals as instructional leaders.  

If you can’t beat them, join them.

Placing relationships ahead of structural or data-driven decision-making may not be the most efficient path to educational change, but human networks are the foundation for most real-world decision-making. Schools are human institutions, and sustainable school improvement requires cultural transformations to match. Every strategy needs to consider culture, not as an excuse for inaction but as an opportunity for the most powerful system-wide improvement.

Where to begin?

Thomas Arnett at the Christensen Institute highlights the four “jobs” teachers do, often unspoken elements of culture, that schools need to recognize:

1. Help me lead the way in improving my school

2. Help me engage and challenge more of my students

3. Help me replace a broken instructional model so I can reach each student

4. Help me to not fall behind on my school’s new initiative

Building relationships is the best way to address all these jobs. Strong relationships help to identify and establish sustainable improvement. School leaders need to enjoy the company of talented, hard-working experts seeking excellence in their work. One of my colleagues spent significantly more time than his peers developing trusting relationships. Measuring the value of that time was hard, but he often succeeded where others failed. Knowing who can get the work done is essential to success in any project, and matching goals to the talented people who can accomplish them is the best path to strategic and cultural improvement.

What’s your default? Nudge, the 2008 book about the power of defaults by University of Chicago economists, Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler, highlight the importance of defaults in public policy, economics and psychology. If you have to opt-out of a savings plan at work, more people are more likely to stay in the plan. We have default beliefs as well, and when a situation calls for quick decision-making, we rely on our defaults. School leaders rely on their defaults all the time, and the biggest default on which leaders rely is their answer to this question.

Are schools locally, statewide, nationally and internationally generally doing well? There are plenty of arguments on either side, and I’m going to outline a few today.

Education needs to change. Here are the arguments of this camp:

1.     Test scores in the US are not increasing despite increased spending on education. The Program in International Student Assessment (PISA) and National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) sample students in the US and worldwide. They are the go-to assessments for determining national education health. The US education system is doing worse than 29 other systems worldwide (according to PISA). The US system is spending more (but doing showing no gains since the 1970s (according to NAEP). This signals that at marginal levels - at your at the school district, school or classrooms - something is wrong.

2.     The majority of students in school are either bored or overwhelmed. This is a common refrain of believers in the promise of personalized learning. They believe that that there is a way for students to be constantly engaged, motivated and inspired. This camp argues that the majority of what happens today in schools is students sit and listen. Technology can personalize learning.

3.     School calendars, school days and daily student experiences look very much the same now as they did in the 1950s. If the structure hasn't changed then it's likely that content,  presentation, delivery and effectiveness haven't changed either, those in this camp believe.

4.     School systems that are doing better than national and international competitors cost far too much. Another reason to be in this camp is thinking that schools cost too much for what they do. The key comparison high-cost people notice is the lack of a reasonable relationship between increased dollars spent and increased educational achievement. For example, it is fairly common in Massachusetts, a state known for high-quality education, for cost-conscious people to compare the per-pupil cost of education in Massachusetts and Florida and say, “Hey, Florida is spending way less and getting similar results.” They also say, in Illinois to give another example, where the operating expense per pupil varies wildly from $24,000 in wealthy north-of-Chicago districts to $10,000 downstate, the increased cost does not provide value to residents when are educational outcomes in the north-of-Chicago districts are not twice as high as downstate.

5.     In the good old days, schools did better. Some people believe there is a significant need for change because schools have deviated so much from the “good old days.”  This is a bit of a backward argument since these people are calling for change that's tantamount to rejecting changes of the last century. Nonetheless, there is a major constituency for this argument supporting a default that schools are generally not doing well.

Education is doing just fine. These are some of the arguments by people whose default position is that schools are doing just fine.

1.     Test scores have not decreased. In fact, schools continue to do a very good job with the increasing numbers of students staying in school. This camp argues that as schools are preparing a greater number of students for college, schools are doing a better job than they were in the past. This argument says that schools are doing just fine because national test score averages do not reveal the incredible diversity of effectiveness of schools, classrooms and teachers. The US is large, and averages do not come close to telling the full story, this camp argues.

2.     Teacher-student relationships have never been better. This argument for why schools are doing well is based on a belief that school effectiveness is a bad way to assess education. Education should be measured by the effectiveness of individual teachers with individual students. The existing model for structuring schools has worked for a long time. Even if teachers can become more effective through unfettered access to new technologies, looking at any data at the school level misses measuring where learning is really happening. This is an argument frequently made by teachers' unions that argue that granting teachers the supports they request and need will do the most to increase student achievement.

3.     Natural growth of children has not changed. People who believe schools are fine often argue that a lot of what schools do is permit the natural development of the human brain. This is the schools-as-babysitters argument. Schools can seek greater efficiency, but brain development limits also set school efficiency limits. If schools can't get much more effective or efficient because the brain only develops so quickly, this group argues, there is no reason to invest more or seek to improve schools. Schools have hit a performance ceiling.

4.     If it was good enough for me, it is good enough for my children. Education is unique because it is one of a few experiences in life that virtually all parents have experienced themselves. Few people will argue that they understand how to do brain surgery. They do not understand brain surgery because they have never studied it or experienced it. Schooling is different. Everyone has been through school, and many schools-are-fine people argue that if it was good enough for me it is good enough for the next generation of students.

What's the impact of your default?

Schools need to do a better job of selecting leaders based on their defaults about education. Once identifying whether things are generally good things or generally in need of change, the school knows whether the leader will defend change or defend the status quo in shoot-from-the-hip situations. Most decisions require more than shooting from the hip, especially decisions that garner the attention of higher-ups, but leaders confront all kinds of issues where they need to rely on their gut. The decisions simply come too quickly to do otherwise. Change leaders have a duty to put themselves in harm’s way and make risky decisions. I can hear responses to this thinking already: "Well, if you have to shoot from the hip, then stop and think before you make an impulsive default-based decision." Even this response betrays a default position, the default is that schools are doing fine and the best proposition is leaving them alone. If you are a everything-is-fine person, this is likely what you'd say. Our default beliefs affect much of how we live and work.

Mead reviews AltSchool's funding backdrop and attempts at bridging the gap between (a) insights from big data in schools and (b) on-the-ground teaching of children. The level of detail is compelling, as with all New Yorker articles. But the article adds little to the education transformation discussion. We know schools haven't changed much since the 1950s, and we know Silicon Valley is planning to change that. The article raises a few points worthy of a response. 

Mead is clearly not an educator. She correctly assesses that there remains an enormous gap between the aspirations of the ed tech community and on-the-ground schools. We already knew this. Content is lacking in many areas moving online, not just education, and education is bigger than most. The goal right now is taking on the low hanging fruit of existing data. Picking low hanging fruit is reasonable.  The fact that it hasn't been picked yet shows how little schools use already-existing data now. For example, it would be wonderful if software could identify the moment when a student first gets confused on the timeline in Toni Morrison's Beloved. If that seems a little pie-in-the-sky, it is. No one is writing code to do this. The fact that AltSchool's coders are looking for insights in relatively easily obtainable data is going to lead to meaningful discussions. But discussions about data use in schools isn't even close to the level providing core curricular intervention and support. 

Let me put this in perspective: Not only is data not being used to guide students reading The Great Gatsby toward a more profound reading of the novel, few schools today analyze their own attendance data. Attendance data is readily available at every school in the country, yet schools do only the most haphazard, half-hearted analyses of it.  The strongest recommendation coming out of many schools is that attendance should be better. 

The distance between "ed tech" and "ed" is still massive, and that's not news. More interesting is finding out what we really want to know. What can we do to help students learn more? AltSchool is giving attention to school data in an unprecedented way. Ed tech, ed and everyone agree that knowing more is better than not knowing.

John Heintz

Our world prefers specialists. We prefer a surgeon with the most precise understanding of the body and a lawyer who knows exactly how to get that patent approved. We believe expertise is developed by masters, and masters are specialists.

We similarly love well-rounded people. How do we resolve those two? Where does our love of professionals make space for uniqueness, difference and variety?

Years ago, I interviewed for a job at the Department of Justice. The attorney that interviewed me took a lot of time to read my resume. It was two pages, but it highlighted my nearly embarrassingly wide variety of academic preparation and professional experiences. To the recruiter’s credit, she looked me in the eye and gave me the bad news. She said, nearly pointing a finger in my face, “Every item on your resume that highlights a skill or background that isn’t exactly what I want, those items detract from my candidacy overall.” Suddenly, what made me different made me non-competitive.

I always considered diversity of experience a strength. But as my interviewer made clear, many employers view diversity as a liability. If one candidate spent the last ten years doing the exact job for which she was hiring, and another candidate held a variety of jobs, it seemed like a good bet to go with the expert.

Malcolm Gladwell implicitly reinforced the value of mastery in his now-famous recounting that 10,000 is the number of hours needed to become a master. He implied we all want to be masters. Most people on the job market know it’s true. We all want to work with masters.

Or do we?

Schools are different. Schools historically employ people with a greater diversity of interests and backgrounds than is found in other workplaces. Part of the reason education embraces diversity is due to the nature of learning. Learning, unlike mastery, requires starting out as a non-master. We dont’t have to learn what we already know. Education loves that learning curve. Education loves non-mastery.

A second reason schools embrace diversity is tied to the people who become professional educators. Educators are a peculiar lot. People with diverse academic, professional, experiential, geographic, linguistic or cultural backgrounds often self-select into education in the first place.

Expertise may be desirable in every other profession. In education, the debate rages. Is it better for your child to have a teacher or principal with little expertise but much enthusiasm? Or, is it better for your child to have a teacher or principal with loads of expertise but immense passion? And what is expert teaching anyway? If Oliver learns well with experience-based learning, and Gabriela learns well going off to a corner and reading books, no one teacher works for every child in every situation. Educators love a good debate, debates best fleshed out from a marketplace of ideas emerging from a diverse group of educators.

Education happens amidst diversity.

Hiring managers for schools both know and don’t know this. Since most people who enter education early in life never leave (it’s that great of a profession), few professional educators understand how their own profession needs to welcome awkward, frustrating, slow-moving, challenging, upstart-loaded diversity in schools. In fact, most school leaders seek to recreate their own teaching and learning experience with all their hires. Work is much easier when the people with whom you are working think, look, sound and act like the person you see in the mirror every morning.

If you lead schools, you hire and promote people. Knowing when to seek and promote diversity is an essential element of the job, but most inexperienced school leaders understand this.

Successful school leaders follow these steps when hiring. Diversity is enormously valuable, but school leaders who go through these steps reap far greater diversity dividends over the long term.

First, is the work you want done better suited to a deliverables contract? This questions essentially asks whether the work you want done needs an employee at all. Few school leaders ask, much less answer, this question.

Work is almost always better suited to a deliverables contract when you know what you want. Think of it this way. Even if it's a repeated deliverable - let’s say you want a task completed annually, monthly or even weekly - a deliverables contract is almost always better than hiring an employee.

Schools are becoming increasingly sophisticated in using outcomes-based contracting. But most school leaders aren’t even given the authority to do this kind of non-employee contracting. At every learning institution I’ve visited over decades, much of the work being done would be better suited to a deliverables contract. The reason school leaders don’t use them is simple. School leaders have a hard time defining what they need. There are other reasons. Lack of authority for non-employee hiring, lack of incentive to take on the status quo, the reflex to re-fill positions that were previously filled, reticence to take the time to educate a school board or school owners about the value of contracting. For all those reasons and more, in the end school leaders have many more incentives to hire than to contract.

If you have answered the is-a-deliverables-contract-better question in the negative, the next step is asking whether you know exactly what you want from the person you will hire.

If you do not know what you want from a new hire, ask yourself why. Odds are good that you don’t know what you want because you are looking for innovation and creativity. You might have some essential duties, but if you don’t know exactly what you want, it’s because you want a new face and voice in the organization. If you recognize that you need a creative and innovative worker, you simultaneously realize that you want a diverse worker. You want a worker who will bring diverse learning and experiences to help your organization grow.

Once you’ve made the decision to hire, and now that you know you need a worker who might not be a specialist, it’s your chance to dream big. Look for the person with the most diverse background and take maximum advantages of the strength, innovation and inspiration that comes from difference.

For creative, innovative, or advisory work of all kinds, make sure your candidates are committed and inspired. Then, go out and hire the candidate with the most diverse background.