COMMENTARY
Current school system had enough chances
By Drake Beil
School Superintendent Pat Hamamoto is Lucy, holding the DOE football and persuading the Charlie Brown public to give her another chance, one more chance, try me this time, I'm really gonna hold it.
Really. You can feel confident with me holding the ball for you, Charlie Brown. Kick the football. Go ahead, kick it. Trust me. She smiles. Inevitably, despite experience, Charlie wants to believe and charges with new hope and spirit as Lucy pulls the ball away, smiling all the while. Charlie Brown goes flying, crashing again, and when he recovers, she will get ready to convince him yet one more time of her sincerity.
In her recent State of Education Address, Hamamoto said she has been a teacher working, in her own words, "around the system," a principal "working around the system," and for two years has been in charge of the system.
She acknowledges not much has changed in the past few decades, but she wants more time and more money from the public.
"I look forward to working together in this challenging and noble pursuit," she assures us.
The Board of Education has been the primary architect and principal supervisor of the current situation. It is accountable for the system and it wants you to think that adding four new members will be the answer. These new people will hold the secrets of public-school improvement that for decades have eluded it.
The working definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Hamamoto was right in saying, "our students are excellent scholars, future scientists, inventors and CEOs, future legislators and perhaps a governor or two."
It is exactly these pockets of incredible excellence that have allowed the rest of the bureaucracy to exist far too long. But it is not a credit to the system that they persevere despite the prevailing and often overwhelming obstacles. These amazing people do exist, but the point is they survive despite the system, not because of it.
Here's the superintendent's strategic plan, her vision for the future. The first thing she says is, "the board and the department are calling for help as we reinvent our schools."
Doesn't that mean they know they have to do something else and yet they have no idea what it is? Cynics might conclude that they have no real plan of their own except to preserve their power.
Next in her address, Hamamoto made seven vague points framed by generalities.
Point one is that "we must empower the schools and the principals — and make sure that students meet standards. For example, by the end of third grade, every student must read."
She jumps from one notion of empowering schools to another of developing new CEO-type leaders, and her example is frightening. If you set learning to read by third grade as a goal for our children, at best you are educating our kids to be the gammas and deltas of this brave new world.
Worse, it's a poorly constructed goal because realistically, not every student can or will ever be able to read. The DOE deals with developmentally disabled people and while reading is desirable, other goals are more relevant.
The DOE used to use a PR slogan "Second to None." With goals like third-grade reading, it will be "Second to Everyone."
Point two, Hamamoto says: "Parents must know how their child is doing. We will give parents and children user-friendly feedback report cards that parents and students can easily understand."
Does this mean that they are not easily understandable now? For how long has that been known? The reality of this is that the DOE is designing new report cards to pilot in the coming year, and that will provide excellent diversion away from any meaningful reform.
Creating a new baseline frustrates or ends any long-term evaluation and plants both DOE feet firmly in midair. And since the same people designing the new, easy-to-use forms are the ones who gave us the present confusing ones, what makes us think the "new, friendly" report card will be any easier or any better? It will be an expensive bureaucratic process with design, field testing, improvements and roll-out, plus a few hundred meetings.
None of this has anything to do with direct instruction.
Point three, Hamamoto says "we will overhaul SCBM (School-Community Based Management). In its current form, it simply doesn't work."
She's right about this, and the designers were the DOE and the Board of Education. The promised overhaul will be in the hands of the same DOE and BOE that has been in charge of education since the SCBMs were introduced. Exactly why haven't they worked since then, and why wasn't the problem corrected before now?
Point four, the superintendent says she wants to pay for performance cooperation with her partners in organized labor. How long do you think those negotiations will take before they get something that everyone likes?
Can we really afford to wait?
Points five and six, Hamamoto says she wants the principals to work year-round and the teachers to work 11-month years. Most already do without pay, but what will the financial costs be for these extensions? Will that money come from existing programs, or are they supplementary to the more than $1.7 billion we already spend on operations? There is already plenty of money.
Last, "and most important" the superintendent says, point seven is "to unshackle the DOE from other state departments."
Other departments are not the problem. What we need to do is unshackle the schools from the bloated central, controlling DOE bureaucracy.
Hamamoto is going to host an education summit in March and wants everyone to participate. "We will collectively decide what we need to do to reinvent our public school system," she says.
Perhaps they'll listen to everyone and write the ideas down on lots of flip charts. Then, she can have her staff summarize all the ideas and we can discuss them some more. Maybe form a few task forces, or by then, a blue-ribbon panel.
Enough already. This becomes too much theater with too little content. The education of our state and the futures of our children are at stake.
Drake Beil, Ed.D., CMC, an organizational development specialist and management consultant, is President of Solutions, Inc. Reach him at drake@drakebeil.com or (808) 587-5832.
