Don Roach: Good Intentions Often Lead to Hell

Wednesday, November 20, 2013

Don Roach, GoLocalProv MINDSETTER™

Or so the saying goes. On the heels of my interview with Deborah Gist last week I wanted to share with you all some of the responses I have received to my educational crusade and my opinion on where I think we’re going wrong. As I have come to expect from you, feel free to agree or disagree.

Rhode Island cares about education

If I had any doubt that the good people of Rhode Island cared about education that has been obliterated. I’ve received e-mails from parents, teachers, and administrators about what needs to be done about education in our state. From some educators decrying Common Core to students talking about reworking the education funding formula, everybody has a passionate opinion about education.

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There are two things that nearly everyone agrees about from comments I have received; education is in Rhode Island is not where it needs to be and secondly; there is a “group” that has failed the Rhode Island education system.

Whether that is directed towards Commissioner Gist or whether that is directed at the General Assembly for not giving communities and towns enough money or whether that’s directed at parents for not being as involved, everyone believes that they know what “group” is to blame.

I’ve entered my crusade with no preconceived notion of why education isn’t where we’d like it to be but really do want to do an – albeit anecdotal – objective analysis of what’s going on in the state and come up with some concrete solutions. To be blunt, I have no clue who is at fault but I want to get at the real reasons why many of our schools are failing.

Communication is NOT a characteristic of the Rhode Island educational system

Not included in last week’s interview with Gist were some or any of my thoughts around her comments. In the two months since we met, there are two things that I just can’t get out of my mind. The first is the disconnect that exists between her ideas/goals and how they are perceived by teachers/administrators.

This is a gulf as wide as the one east of Mexico and that may be an understatement. In speaking with an administrator this past week, this administrator intimated that Gist was out of her mind with some of the policies she’s trying to implement. This administrator went on to say (paraphrased) that Gist was heading in the wrong direction with testing and she didn’t support any of those initiatives. This is coming from an administrator who, in theory, should be toeing the party line but freely commented about her distaste for some of Gist’s policies and really, Gist herself. If I were to say this incident was isolated in responses I’ve received thus far, I’d be lying.

I’ve also had a few teachers tell me that they feel the focus on testing is idiotic and not serving to the student. I don’t particularly consider myself who has rose colored glasses on and when I interviewed Gist, I sincerely believe she is doing her best to make students successful. She isn’t trying to stick it to teachers but is trying to equip them to be successful. That message is definitely not filtering down the line.

Gist and I did discuss testing in particular and my comments at the time went something like this – when you want to be an accountant you go take a CPA exam that’s standardized and evaluates your knowledge of accounting. Without such a test, how would an employer or client know if you really had a base level of understanding of accounting? They wouldn’t.

I don’t see the difference with a high school diploma. Again, that’s my naiveté speaking but if we want kids to succeed in the real world, why wouldn’t we subject them to a standardized test which may replicate some of the standardized evaluation methods they encounter in the future?

But before I veer too far from the point, I do believe that the chasm that exists between Gist’s policies and those that must implement them is the direct result of a communication breakdown.

This communication breakdown is a result of the second thing that I have observed thus far - everybody is in a silo. By this I mean, people are talking to me from their perspective and their perspective only be they a parent, teacher, student, administrator, or whatever. It’s like I’m talking to people in an assembly line and they only know their part of the widget process, can’t speak to other processes, but certainly think that it’s someone else’s fault that things are going wrong.

Everyone feels powerless

Here’s another way to put it, when I interviewed Gist I felt as though there were certain things she could not control or better stated, didn’t have the capacity to directly influence. Those areas may have a significant impact on education but they were things outside her control points.

I have had the same feeling when talking to students and teachers. It’s as if there is a ‘Big Brother’ who really runs things and no one who has the power to really make any changes. To students and teachers ‘Big Brother’ is Gist. To Gist ‘Big Brother’ may be the General Assembly or the feds. Overall, no one truly feels efficacious, meaning everyone feels powerless to a certain extent.

In my own school community, we just lost our Principal. I’m not sure about why we’re losing our Principal but come January she’s moving to a different school. We learned through an e-mail and received no advance notice. You’d like to believe that moving a Principal during the middle of the school year should have some pretty solid justification behind it. Several parents have contacted Superintendent Lundsten and are hopeful we can get some answers. One parent commented that they feel powerless in the situation which is a refrain that I hear over and over with respect to education. There could be a perfectly reasonable justification for why our Principal was moved to a different school in the middle of the year sans advance notice. But unless parents are provided with that justification all we can do is speculate and come up with our own opinions. And you can probably see where that could lead.

And we’re not powerless and that’s why I’m on this crusade. But, we will continue to like this if we live in our silo’d world as parents, educators, and students. We need to meet together and tackle our educational challenges from a holistic perspective. There are many well intentioned people, Gist included, who are trying to do the right thing for our students. Intention doesn’t always lead to successful outcomes and in some cases leads to the opposite.

Every cog in this educational wheel must have skin in the reform game for this to work and that includes unions whom I have not intentionally left out of this conversation thus far. I just don’t equate teachers with the unions that represent them. Nevertheless, unions play an important role in this as well whether any of us like it or not.

We’ve all got great intentions and need to turn those intentions into action by respecting the fact that we need each other to figure this out. Yes, I said need. No one should be barred from a seat at the table and we won’t arrive at the best solution by excluding particular groups. This doesn’t mean we’ll agree on direction but it does mean that the left hand can meet the right hand and perhaps learn that doing a pull-up is easier with two hands than one.

What a novel concept.

Don can be reached at [email protected] . He’s also on twitter @donroach34. If you have an opinion about education in Rhode Island, Don would love to hear from you.

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