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The Governance Corner

A forum for discussing issues in Independent School governance in the third decade of the 21st Century

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The Situation with Ethics

3/14/2022

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I attended a governance workshop a couple of weeks ago. And, because the faciliator knew that I was going to be in the session, she asked me to comment to the group about one of her slides. 
The slide was entitled "Ethical Conduct of the Head of School".

The audience was all sitting Heads and I pointed out to them, that seeing as no Head was completely ethical in her or his conduct, there was no need to even talk about this topic. The real title should have been "How much unethical conduct can a Head of School get away with?". Most people survive by knowing where that line is.

When a Head is addressing a strategic priority, the Board has the right to expect them to be effective in achieving the desired outcome, and prudent and ethical in their means of getting there. Prudent usually means "don't bankrupt us to do this" and ethical is understood as "don't put us at legal risk by the tactics that you use". These are reasonable expectations, and most Heads, wisely, are sure to hit these benchmarks.

Having said that, in my days accrediting Canadian independent schools I saw some spectacular failures on the ethical front. Like the Head (aided and abetted by his Finance Director) who covered operating deficits each year by borrowing money from the school's Foundation and replacing its hard assets with promisorry notes from the operating side of the school. On paper, the Foundation remained flush with cash, but after seven or eight years of this tactic, the Foundation's resoucres had been drained and the Head and Finance Director were gone. In another case, a Head met the Board's objective of a 100% success rate on government exams, by pulling potentially failing student exam papers before their submission to the Ministry, and marking them absent.

Such major and public unethical behaviour is pretty easy to identify and address and usually ends up with the Head looking for work elsewhere. Day to day however, ethics are more of a shade of grey rather that black and white. I gave the group that day this as a self assessment quiz. Have you ever: backed a teacher in a conflict with a parent/student evern though your knew that your staff member was in the wrong? found a placement space for the child of a major donor (or sibling) in a class that was "full" with a waiting list? promoted someone without posting the position (or advertising a position when the "fix" was already in)? poached a teacher/administrator from another colleague without a reference check that might tip off the other school about what was happening? offered an under the table atlhletic scholarship to recruit a student athlete? hiring additional staff to cover for weak/underperforming faculty members or administrators rather then conducting a performance review and contructive dismissal or demotion?

The list is pretty endless and these "minor" ethical lapses are often excused by expediency or simply as ways of avoiding challenging situations and uncomfortable conversations. Do I think that these people are particularly unethical? Not really, but a tendancy to always take the easy way out, may mean that the Head is in the wrong profession!.

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4 things that the Russian invasion of Ukraine reminds us about global governance

3/9/2022

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I grew up during the Cold War. My memories of elementary school are punctuated by images of my mother stocking up on canned goods or filling the bathtub with drinking water whenever tensions escalated between the Soviet Union and the West. Because we lived relatively close to the massive hydro generating stations in Niagara Falls, our region was seen as a primary target for a nuclear strike. That war never came, and the hours spent crouching under desks in the school basement have always seemed like a slightly surreal recollection.
Until now.
 
The images coming out of Ukraine – streams of refugees leaving the country – roads and trains leading west choked with primarily women and children fleeing the chaos, starkly reminded me of the black and white films that I used to show my students of the Fall of France under the Nazi blitkreig.
 
Even during my time posted with the Canadian Armed Forces at our NATO base in Lahr, West Germany I never imagined that war could ever come again to Western Europe. At that time, the Soviet Union was teetering on the brink of collapse, and the inevitability of the democratization of the “Eastern Bloc” and reunification of Europe seemed assured.
 
Fast forward forty years and that equilibrium has been turned on its head.  Today, it has become evident that peace can be shattered by the ambitions of a single person, unchecked by the natural constraints of demographic institutions and international law. The invasion of Ukraine has been driven by the desire for self-aggrandizement by a small oligarchy of autocrats and their reckless leader, and has been resisted by the strength democratic values and a clear desire for peace and autonomy.
 
There are three takeaways for me from this appalling human rights crisis being imposed on the people of Ukraine and the response from the rest of the world:
 
  1. For all of its challenges, international economic integration has emerged as the strongest weapon in our global arsenal. Through collective action, we have cordoned off the Russian state from the benefits of economic collaboration;
  2. Our belief in common values and principles have trumped narrow self-interest particularly among the members of the European Union and the NATO alliance. I am sure that no-one was more shocked than Vladimir Putin to discover that his enemies would unite so quickly to oppose him;
  3. The need for the complete banning of all nuclear weapons has never been clearer. This war would possibly already be over if the threat of nuclear retaliation hadn’t been hanging over the heads of the western alliance. Leaving these weapons in the hands of rogue nations ensures that they will feel empowered to engage in reckless behaviour without fear of reprisals; and,
  4. That it is time to reconsider our model of global governance. In the face of overwhelming condemnation of Russia’s actions by the General Assembly of the United Nations, it is incomprehensible that the guilty party can veto any direct action that would impede its illegal war of conquest.
 
I am hopeful that someday the world will (without irony) thank Vladimir Putin for reminding the post-1945 generation of the danger of trying to appease global bullies. It is a lesson that our parents and grandparents knew, but we seem to have forgotten.

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Canaries in the Coal Mine: Sending kids back to school

4/29/2020

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As startling as it was, closing schools was a much simpler process than reopening them will be. Recently, as the numbers of infected persons has begun to trend downwards, and the degree of "cabin fever" being experienced by most members of society has increasingly ramped up, there has been growing pressure on governments to begin to ease restrictions, restart commercial and retail operations, and, of course, to reopen schools.

The arguments in favour can be categorized in three areas: a seemingly low infection rate among children; the need for childcare to allow parents to return to the workforce; and, a general restlessness among families to try and move things back to be closer to normal.

​Social isolation is not a natural state for children. There are legitimate concerns that lack of peer contact and the tight restrictions on the ability to play, explore, and collaborate together might have a long-term developmental impact on them. In addition, as time has gone by, there has been a growing discussion about the impact of remote schooling on learning.

Education is, in general, a very egalitarian process. In theory, any student coming to school has access to the same instruction, resources, technology, and support as their peers. Even though, as we know, this is not totally always the case, trying to replicate the school experience in thousands of different home environments has definitely laid bare the inequities in opportunity that teachers witness every day. Remote learning experiences can vary for a number of factors: family dynamic; access to technology and internet connection; and competing responsibilities for work, sibling care, etc.

So, when you put all those factors together, reopening seems like a no brainer - but it isn't.

Setting aside all of the theories, models and speculation about how a return to school would work, the fact of the matter is that nobody actually has a clue! In a desire to reopen the economy, governments see schools as a problematic sticking point. Unlike the world that I grew up in during the 50s, schools are the primary caregiver in most families. And, without that caregiver, it is extremely difficult for people to go back to work. So, school re-openings are seen as the tipping point for a return to normal.

But, in spite of the proclamations of pundits, and political leaders, and "experts", this virus still remains a mystery and a return to school is a massive societal crap shoot. No matter how the adults strategize about it, young kids cannot maintain physical distancing. You can limit attendance, you can spread people out, you can regiment hand-washing and desk sanitizing, but still people are going to socially spread the virus. And, while it may turn out to be true that children are not seriously affected by the contagion, they will invariably share it with their teachers, tutors, and the adults in their homes. Everyone knows this, but nobody knows what the heath impact will actually be until it happens. So, in this case, children and educators will become the canaries in the coal mine. Not until they start dropping will we know what's happening.

Last week the Mayor of Las Vegas was interviewed on CNN where she advocated the reopening of all of the casinos. In a rambling account of how the economy had to reopen, she was asked about the potential health risk to customers and workers. The exchange then went like this: The mayor then asserted that if businesses reopen and then collapse when they become a source of COVID-19 and infect their customers, well, that’s just the free market at work.
“That’s the competition in this country,” she said. “The free enterprise, and to be able to make sure that what you offer the public meets the needs of the public.”

Some days, when I hear politicians and economists advocate for the quick reopening of schools, her voice just echos in my head. We are in a crisis, but you don't get out of it by potentially sacrificing one group to serve the needs of another. We don't want our kids and our teachers to become the canaries in our pandemic coal mine.


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Crime and Punishment or Truth and Consequences?

7/3/2019

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Recently there has been a bit of an online go-around about characterizing the assignment of consequences for inappropriate student behaviour as "punishment". Having been strapped for turning around in class as a middle school student, I understand the concept of punishment, and writing letters of apology or missing out on a class field trip as a consequence for misconduct are hardly in the same category. Somewhere along the line the scales of justice have skewed to make taking responsibility for their own actions to be too onerous a demand on our students.

Twenty years ago, when I was completing my doctorate, my school law prof contended that we (teachers and administrators) regularly denied students their fundamental rights when we were dealing with discipline issues. His argument was that when a student was called into the office to account for her or his behaviour, there was such a power imbalance that there was no way that the child would get a fair and impartial hearing. Administrators like me straddled the roles of judge, jury, and executioner. 
This stuck with me over the years and I have always tried to provide the student with an adult advocate (usually one of our counsellors) in the room to ensure that the student felt that someone was looking out for their interests. Having said that, I increasingly have the feeling that the power imbalance that seemed so clear to that academic back in the 1990s has actually shifted in the other direction. At the end of the second decade of this century, it tends to be the student who holds a majority of the cards in these discussions. To begin with, it has been my experience that in the brief time between most such incidents and the school's response, the student has already articulated their planned defence and version of events either by phone call or text to a parent. In this version of recent history, the accusing students become liars, the witnessing teacher becomes a biased bully, and the blundering Head of School (that would be me) has clearly been so misinformed that he assessed dire consequences (such as staying in at lunch) on the perpetrator rather than on those conniving victims!
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Two recent illustrative events stick in my mind. In one case, a student flattened another with a roundhouse punch on the school grounds. He was given a one day in-house "suspension" where he had to work on assignments in the Student Services office, and had breaks and lunch separated from his peers. His grandfather came in to see me, steamed that there had been no equivalent consequences for the victim whose role in the incident amounted to being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The version of events that the grandparent told me were so far from reality that it was laughable, but the bottom line was that he refused to send the student back to school until the suspension was lifted. After spending three days home with the student, and no capitulation on our part, the grandparent relented and the student returned and received his consequences. A few days later I received an email from the grandfather in which he told me that after two days of questioning the student had finally admitted that his attack was unprovoked. There was no apology in the email, only a question about the school's inability to prevent his grandson from hitting someone else - "where were the supervisors?".

The second involved a group of four elementary boys who decided that it would be a great idea to urinate into a bottle, fill a squirt gun with the liquid and terrorize their friends on the playground. Fortunately, one of our teachers got wind of the plan and intervened between the filling and the shooting stages thereby thwarting the boys from carrying out their campaign. Three out of four families responded as you would expect - they were mortified, supported the school's consequences and imposed far more stringent ones at home. The fourth blamed the other students, the school (who had admitted such hooligans as their child's friends) and the teacher who had accused their innocent bystander son. They subsequently withdrew their child in search of an institution with far less draconian codes of conduct. 

Most good schools have clearly defined behavioural expectations for students and faculty. These Codes of conduct run the gamut from norms of dress, acceptable tech use, and inappropriate language to harassment, assault and illegal activity and everything in between. Published and shared with staff, students and parents, they should form a clearly understood Social Contract for the school community and the consequences for ignoring them should be well-defined and consistently applied.

To be honest, most students have a pretty well developed sense of natural justice. They don't like to see others get away with something without consequences but, like all of us, would rather that they personally escaped accountability if at all possible. That is all part of being a child or adolescent. It is our job as the adults in the room (teachers, parents, administrators) to not only enforce social norms and expectations, but also to ensure that the young people in our care understand that they have to take responsibility for their actions and to suffer whatever consequences that are assigned as a result. This is not punishment, it is a life lesson towards becoming a responsible and socialized adult.

​The alternative for parents is to expect that the next text or phone call home from your child might be to post bail!

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Considering the Hidden Costs of Staffing Schools

3/25/2019

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In my last post, I wrote about the unintended negative outcomes on learners that come from arbitrary class size caps and composition constraints. Although intended as reasonable working condition demands, they invariably result in hardships for students "on the margins" - those with additional learning needs and those in small schools. It is no coincidence that in the face of these contractual restrictions on staffing, that school districts resort to consolidating and closing their small schools in order to maximize the use of their budget allocations. This not so hidden cost is borne by students and local communities. It is also highly predictable that students with low incidence designations find themselves exiled from school due to staffing shortages caused by these constraints.

Education is a people business. The "clients" are young people looking for a teaching and learning situation that meets their personal needs. The service providers are highly professional and dedicated teachers who give everything that they can to deliver what their students require. Adequate funding is the grease that keeps the wheels of the system turning. Anytime that a government announces that it is going to freeze or reduce funding, the immediate "victims" are teachers who are now declared surplus but the ultimate price is paid by students whom no longer receive the education that they need.

Independent schools are a microcosm of the larger public school community. Charging fees that are double or triple the local per student grant rate, they offer small classes as an incentive to parents as an alternative to their larger public counterparts. As a result, schools often justify ever increasing fees by the need to preserve these small classes - cuts to public education are a perfect foil to support them in their arguments.

However, the rising costs of independent education has little or nothing to do with class size. In actual fact, average class size in most private school has not changed over the past ten years while, meanwhile, fees have increased many times the rate of inflation. So the question is, "where is all of that money going?". Two easy answers have been an increase in the number of instructional support staff since 2008/9 from one to every 153 students to one to every 53 students today and an increase in administration staff from one to every 45 students to one in every 26. Add to this rising benefit and pension costs and you have half of the story.

The other, virtually hidden, rising cost of staffing is focused on workload. For example, in the last decade, a typical staffing assignment might require teaching 30/35 blocks per week - in other words, one paid preparation period per day. In many schools that number has drifted down to 25/35 blocks per week - two paid preparation periods per day. In a school with 100 teachers, that reduction would necessitate an increase in staffing of 20 additional teachers to maintain current class sizes. At an average of $80K - $100K per teacher (salary and benefits) you are looking at an increased cost - with no additional service to students - of between $1.6 and $2 million dollars per year. 

Looking at independent school statistics, the result has been status quo in class size and a drop of between 10-15% in the PTR in those same schools. Keeping in mind that that decrease in PTR has had no direct impact on students (the client) it can only be seen as a pure working condition expense.

It is no wonder that provincial governments and public boards see working conditions as the area in which the greatest savings and cost efficiencies can be found. Can independent schools be far behind? Taking an ostrich approach to this issue can only lead to education systems and independent schools driving themselves into bankruptcy.

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Tilting at Windmills: The Class Size Debate

3/23/2019

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There has been a predictable outcry about the Ontario government's pronouncement that they will phase in larger class size maximums from Grades 4-12 over the next few years. While there is no question that smaller classes increase the possibility of greater individual attention for some students and definitely lessen teacher workload and stress, class size has long been wrongly held up as the gold standard for determining the quality of a learning environment. Research has consistently shown that after Grade 3, the statistical effect of class size on student learning is marginal at best. Other factors such as educator/student ratios, teacher/student contacts, or even teacher teaching load can have a far greater impact on both learning and the financial bottom line.

Traditionally, in most jurisdictions, staffing was allocated on a PTR formula. That is, for example, for every X number of students, there is funding for 1 teacher. It used to be that that was the end of the story. Schools would be allocated the requisite number of staff as per the formula, and the Principal would assign teachers as she/he saw fit. This often meant that a large history class might be used to off-set a small German language cohort or learning resource programme. However, over the years, class size maximums began to be legislated by provincial governments or negotiated through Collective Agreements. While meaning improvements in working conditions for teachers, it resulted in staffing nightmares for administrators. All of a sudden, that History class of 30 students had to be split to adhere to a lower maximum. The result was that schools had to make the hard choices of cutting other programmes (goodbye German!) in order to staff under the new guidelines. This was particularly challenging in small rural schools where one or two students over the max could result in staffing shortages or a variety of split grade classes in order to comply. It may sound like heresy, but in my experience, a class of 30 elementary students, with two teachers is a far more productive learning environment than two classes of 15 with a single instructor in each.

The "solution" was to tie funding to students, not staffing. As a result, school districts were given a pool of dollars to allocate under the constraints of class size maximums and other negotiated staffing requirements. The result was the disappearance of librarians, music programmes, counsellors, etc. from schools. Classes were smaller, but the quality of the educational experience was diminished.

Currently, British Columbia is suffering under the limitations to staffing flexibility imposed by a Supreme Court reinstatement of class size and composition restrictions negotiated in 2002. Needless to say, education has changed in the past more than 15 years, and the imposition of outdated guidelines on the new realities of schools has created disruption in the quality of programming, particularly for students with special needs. While there is no question that in the next round of negotiations, both sides will work to fix this situation, it points to the problematic nature of staffing by formula, rather than by need.

Back to Ontario where the nonsensical arguments that larger classes will build "resilience" (here's the ultimate legacy of the "grit" movement!) and that students can help each other, or that parents can hire tutors are just cover for the fact that some politicians are more than willing to write off marginalized groups of students, and raise the drop-out rate, in order to streamline the education system and lower costs (fewer students = fewer teachers). As long as education remains a political football between big government and big labour, meaningful change will remain out of reach.
 
In the final analysis, this is a two pronged problem. School districts need to be better resourced to ensure that the complex needs of their learners can be met. Government purse-strings need to be opened further, not tightened, in order to make this happen. Secondly, staffing constraints need to be loosened up or eliminated. Class size and composition requirements are discriminatory and restrictive and focus on working conditions rather than the quality of education for all learners. School districts and Principals need to be given more autonomy to determine the best local allocation of their resources and to be answerable to students and their parents, not Provincial governments and unions as to how to best serve their communities. 

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Work-Life Balance? Forget about it!

9/24/2018

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In the 90s when I moved from Toronto to become the Head of a school in Montreal I was told that the main difference between the two cities was that in Toronto you "lived to work", while in Montreal you "worked to live". In those days, no-one talked about work/life balance. Instead, it was assumed that in your 20s and 30s you worked hard (or played hard if you were in Montreal!) and that as you got older, got married and started a family, your career drifted through balance and then moved towards the other end of the spectrum.

Fast forward 20 years, and because technology has ensured that we are now all connected twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and twelve months of the year, this connectivity has given rise to the mantra of the necessity of maintaining a healthy "work-life" balance. It's a nice theory, and one that keeps life coaches in business and most of us feeling guilty but, in reality, it remains as nonsensical a notion today as it was two decades ago. 

Kim Scott, in her book Radical Candor, states: "Don't think of it as work-life balance, some kind of zero sum game where anything you put into your work robs your life and anything that you put into your life robs your work". ​ Instead, she says that what we have now is not an either/or but rather it is an integration of work and life throughout our entire day. 

I call it grazing. Around our house, mornings begin somewhere between 5-5:30 with the obligatory scanning of our overnight emails - not uncommon on the west coast - with quick replies or flags to be looked at later. Then comes ironing, making lunches, dragging our boys out of bed, etc. You know the drill. There might be one more quick check to see if someone has called in sick and then off we go.

Once we get to our respective schools the workday unfolds in the usual fashion, but I try to build some "life" into the work. Going for a run, having a coffee with a colleague, taking the dog to the vet's or making the occasional Subway trek to take a special lunch to the boys' schools all find their way into my day. I find that as long I prioritize my work, and work smart, everything gets done - not by 5 pm - but by bedtime. You see, if I graze a little life at work, I also graze a little work at home. If my wife and I go out for a glass of wine, it is not long before the conversation drifts to a consideration of a challenge that one of us is facing at school, or an initiative that we have heard about, or might want to introduce. Our kitchen counter becomes a de facto home office where one of us prepares dinner while the other one works on a powerpoint - yapping to each other the whole time about school, or kids, or weekend plans. It all just kind of blends together.

You see, we both enjoy our work and are committed to making it as meaningful and as rewarding as we can. And, we love our family life and value every minute that we spend with our sons and each other. Because, at the end of the day, there is still time for going on hikes with the dog, enjoying Little League baseball games, swim meets, dance shows and play productions while, coincidentally, getting reports written, presentations polished, and emails responded to.

In the final analysis, even though we live on the side of a spectacular North Shore mountain, we have imported an amalgam of our Toronto/Montreal psyches. We live to work and we work to live. We are grazers of the first order!




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Et tu Op-Ed? Governance in the Age of Backstabbing

9/9/2018

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Now don't get me wrong. There was no-one more entertained than I was this week with the one-two combination of the release of Bob Woodward's new book on the 45th President and the appearance of a devastating insider op-ed in the New York Times about the level of chaos gripping the Oval Office.

Having said that, these two co-incidental events were graphic evidence of the total breakdown of the Checks and Balances framework that is designed to be the core vehicle of effective governance and oversight in the US Constitution. If the system was functioning properly, erratic behaviour of the President and the wild swings in policy directions would have been the subject of Congressional investigations and legislative safeguards to ensure the smooth running of the Republic. Instead, Congress has sat on the sidelines like a fascinated by-stander watching a slowly unfolding train wreck.

In its place, a palace coup has been in effect whereby the inner circle surrounding the President have undercut and blunted his worst impulses. It doesn't always work, as evidenced this past summer at the G-7 and in Helsinki, but one can only imagine what might have happened without it. However, even if we have been inadvertently saved from nuclear annihilation, it is in actuality a real failure of governance practices which are supposed to protect stakeholders (in this case American public) from catastrophe!

Unfortunately, such an abdication of fiduciary responsibility is often evidenced in the actions (or lack thereof) of Boards of Governors or Trustees in schools and school districts across the country. Rather than maintain an active oversight role with respect to the effective operation and administration of their schools, Boards are often made complacent by glowing reports by Senior Administrators about how great things are or, conversely, become convinced that things are going to hell in a hand-basket when they receive concerns or complaints raised by parents or faculty.

There is no greater evidence of this kind of governance breakdown than the sudden dismissal (or face-saving resignation) of a Head or Superintendent. Without a clear process of performance review, or the monitoring of key performance indicators on a governance "dashboard", it is often difficult for a Board to effectively execute their oversight function. Instead, things go along "great", until they don't, and without clear evidence to back up their decisions, Boards are often swayed by highly critical and vocal minorities of parents or by petitions and complaints from faculty members. The easy solution is not to investigate and admit that they have dropped the ball, but rather to act "decisively" and get rid of the flashpoint in order to buy themselves some time and to take the heat off. However, if their own behaviour and approach to governance doesn't change as a result, they are only setting up the school or district for an endlessly repeating cycle with the same outcome.

This week, I actually find myself feeling a little sorry for Donald Trump. Even though he clearly lacks the skill set and temperament for the job; and even though he has deliberately surrounded himself with sycophants who act as his own personal echo chamber; he was elected to the position and should have been constrained not by guile and flattery, but by governance and oversight. The current President is a comic-tragic figure who is destined to live on as a standing joke long after his term in office is over. But, the real failure here, lies in the hands of Congress. They have abdicated their responsibility in return for short-term personal gain and, like Boards that let incompetent Heads do significant damage to the school that they govern, it is they who will be held accountable by history.





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The banality of zero tolerance: A Donald Trump Story

7/11/2018

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People who follow my governance blog will be familiar with my series of posts on the lessons to be learned by school leaders from the actions and reactions of the current U.S. disrupter in chief in the White House.

This past week however opened up a new and significant series of events that are also instructional for not only administrators but teachers and parents as well. The separation of refugee children from their parents created a communications, logistical and human catastrophe on multiple levels. Based on a newly proclaimed "zero tolerance" policy for dealing with refugees entering the country illegally, the administration proudly proclaimed that arresting parents and seizing their children would create a "deterrent" that would prevent future violations of the laws and policies surrounding immigration. The result of taking this step, as we now all know, resulted in a human rights crisis and a public relations nightmare. And, even in backing down (while typically blaming everyone else), Trump and his leadership team demonstrated a remarkable degree of both tone deafness, and incompetence. Doubling down this morning, the President tweeted that all illegal refugees should be immediately deported to their native country without any legal remedy and offered to reunite families at the airport if the parents agreed to be shipped home without having the chance to make their case for asylum. Due process by damned!

So what are the lessons here for schools?

1. To begin with, zero tolerance disciplinary policies are invariably losers. In institutions that pride themselves on valuing the worth of each individual student, and that are committed to personalizing learning, the idea that "one size fits all" with respect to discipline runs counter to the expressed ethos of any school. That doesn't mean that you shouldn't have clear expectations, and a range of possible consequences, but they have to be tailored to the individual and applied with care and with a clearly articulated rationale. Arbitrary punishments are most often seen as unfair and lead to an "us and them" attitude towards school climate rather than a collaborative "we".

2. The threat of punishment is a very weak deterrent. Most people in our society operate on the assumption that when they break the law they probably won't be caught and therefore the potential consequences of their actions are immaterial to them. I would hazard a guess that there isn't a car-driving adult reading this blog who doesn't speed on a regular basis, or roll through the occasional stop sign, or check messages when stopped at a light. The fines are often quite hefty for these actions but our normal response is that we are "unlucky" when we get caught rather than seeing ourselves as guilty of an offence. Kids are the same way. They are not being defiant, or reckless, or sneaky when they break the rules. They are just being kids. Getting caught gives us a chance to act as educators with respect to acceptable behaviour - not  as judge, jury and executioner.

3. Due process is important! We are rightly outraged when people are incarcerated or deported without the benefit of a fair hearing and representation, but we violate the rights of our students that way every day. We isolate students from their supports, extract confessions, pressure them to testify against their peers, threaten to contact parents, and then mete out consequences in a kind of Principal's Court of Star Chamber. Like Donald Trump, we often convince ourselves that the ends (compliance, contrition, confession) justify the means. As the U.S. administration has found this week, fast tracking the process is fraught with peril and often results in unintended consequences for the school. In our case we have found that providing a student advocate (counsellor, trusted teacher, parent etc.), while making the process a little more convoluted and messy, usually results in a deeper student understanding of the issue at hand and results in a reduction in repeat offences.

4. Most parents, teachers and kids want a calm, positive and productive learning environment for everyone. Tom Bennett (@tombennett71), the leader of the researchEd movement worldwide, notes that "Low level disruption sounds cute, but it’s kryptonite for any lesson. It normalizes rudeness, laziness, and grinds teachers down over weeks and months. It is no small issue. It is the most common reason for classroom behaviour to disintegrate." He is right! And the best way to counter low level disruption is by setting and enforcing clear guidelines, expectations, and classroom norms. Buy-in comes from consistency, and peer community acceptance, and not from Draconian enforcement measures. Unfortunately, driven by the debasing of discourse through social media, we have become a society of "low level disruptors" which is why the extremism of the past week, while repugnant, was not particularly shocking to anyone. Schools are the key place to reverse that trend by reinforcing civility and social norms and expectations and not by turning a blind eye and a deaf ear towards breaches of classroom community norms.

There are a lot of strident voices in the United States right now falling on either side of the refugee debate. Illegal immigrants are either seen as innocent victims of the system or potential gang members trying to jump the line in order to get easy access. Currently there is little middle ground consensus on how to effectively address what is clearly a problem without trampling on people on the way.

Schools are like that too. An administrator friend told me recently that they had developed a "zero tolerance" policy for skipping school. If a student accumulated so many undocumented absences that they were affecting her or his academics, they were to be suspended for a week. When I gently pointed out the absurdity of exclusion as a consequence (reward?) for skipping, she looked at me blankly and said "There have to be consequences for skipping beyond simply failing the course!"

I guess we still all have a long way to go!

If you are interested in reading my ebook "Avoiding the Trump Trap: A Primer for Aspiring School Leaders" you can get it free on iBooks or by clicking this link: 
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/797724




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Armed and Dangerous: Unexpected behaviours in Schools

2/22/2018

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​There should be no place in the world more safe for a child to enter, than a school. Yet, as we sit and watch the tragic side show that is taking place before our very eyes in the United States, it would seem that this simple fact is no longer a given in our society. While the focus of the world is riveted this week on the horrific events that took place Parkland, Florida, and the all too predictable and bizarre responses from various political "leaders", a small basic aspect of this tragedy has been, so far, underplayed. The fact is, this is the story of a student, returning to his former school from which he had been expelled, and exacting his revenge. 

This sort of stuff happened when I was growing up, but it didn't involve guns and mass killings. Pent up frustrations were taken out on property - bricks through windows, slashed tires, and profane graffiti splashed on the outside walls. Troubling, yes. Deadly, never.
So, while politicians twist in the wind debating the "merits" of allowing anyone off of the street to buy semi-automatic weapons and live ammunition, we educators should take the opportunity to figure out why kids sometimes leave school feeling aggrieved and resentful.

Our school is currently taking part in a series of "Instructional Rounds"(IR). Based on a practice originating out of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, IR is a process through which teachers and administrators develop a "problem of practice" which represents a tricky, systemic issue which, if solved, could improve the quality of the learning experience for kids. One issue that has bubbled to the surface for us, and one that is typical of most schools, is how we can more effectively manage "unexpected" behaviours by students that have a negative impact on the learning environment for their peers.

We currently have the following policies and practices in place: clearly articulated Codes of behaviour (including escalating consequences) for elementary and secondary students; three academic blocks each week, in every grade, of Social Emotional Learning led by one of our five counsellors focusing on social thinking, personal problem-solving, anti-bullying, zones of regulation, self-esteem, making friends, risky behaviours...(you get the drill!); and, a Social Development (behaviour intervention) Unit staffed by three excellent full-time, highly trained staff members who handle the vast majority of our exclusions and re-entry plans. We have pro-active administrators and supportive parents.
And yet, it is still a "problem of practice" and our classrooms, hallways, and playgrounds remain characterized by outbursts of the unexpected resulting in the usual range of consequences.

So, when a team of our teachers (along with some outside educators from two other schools) took a look at the problem, their preliminary observations identified five key barriers that seem to be preventing us from reaching our goal:
1. Lack of awareness: To be honest, some staff members were oblivious to what was percolating in their classes until it bubbled over into a problem. 
2. Lack of knowledge: In spite of the sharing of comprehensive policies and procedures online and in print form, many of our teachers, parents and even some administrators, simply didn't know the rules or how to manage specific behaviours or how to access available in-house resources.
3. Lack of consistency: Expectations varied widely from class to class; between genders and age groups; and, even among students within a single classroom.
4. Lack of effective communication: Among staff members, with parents, and with supportive outside agencies.
These four barriers led to the fifth and most important one:
5. Lack of Fairness: Kids have a natural sense of justice. They can spot differences in treatment from student to student, teacher to teacher, administrator to administrator, and family to family. They know when we educators act as judge, jury and executioner without due process and consistent approaches.

We have a good school and great kids. As a full spectrum special education school, it is critically important that we support our students in developing socially acceptable solutions to problems, and make sure that every student has a chance to learn. So this is our "problem of practice". At the end of the day, no matter what the final outcome for a student, it is our goal to ensure that they have been treated fairly, and with respect. Hopefully that will mean that when we part company, it will be on relatively good terms.

Or, we could simply implement the alternative approach recommended by the President of the United States:


Teachers should be armed...This would be obviously only for people who were very adept at handling a gun, and it would be, it's called concealed carry, where a teacher would have a concealed gun on them. They'd go for special training and they would be there [in case of trouble].

But that would be just nuts!

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    Author

    Dr. Jim Christopher
    has been working with Boards and Heads on Governance issues for the past 15 years. He is a former Superintendent of Schools, ED of the Canadian Association of Independent Schools and Canadian Educational Standards Institute and is the author of a number of books and articles of education and governance. His latest book, Beyond the Manual: A Realist's Guide to Independent School Governance is available on iTunes or at https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/388729

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