Where are our Educational Leaders?

Tactics emerge in state budget fight

The Title above was the headline Friday in the Detroit Free Press. Below you can read some of the cuts proposed by state lawmakers.

RELATED INFORMATION
Controversial cuts
* Promise scholarship grants: $120 million - qg says ... so much for "Promises"
* Aid to K-12 public schools: $348 million (solution could cut it in half)
* Mental health programs: $40 million - qg says ... Wayne County Sheriff Benny Napoleon says over 60% of people in jail in Wayne County have a Mental Illness!
* Job retraining programs: $35 million

It continues to amaze me whether it is leaders in education, business or government on how they follow each other like Lemmings when it comes to creativity and innovation – THEY HAVE NONE!
I am referring to proposed cuts in education and job training. Why do we sacrifice our future for present and past mistakes? The reason is because our leaders have no foresight except the next election or the next bottom line quarterly report.

Another reason, it has to do with incompetence and taking the easy road out to make them look good. Why can’t for once you represent the people you SERVE! In case you don’t know who they are they are your constituents and employees.

We never learn, result measures for education improvement and business measures go month to month, quarter to quarter and year to year. Like traffic accident reports these are nice to know (What) but in education I never see action plans and measures (How) to improve the system.

Short term educational results are not an indicator of good leadership. Business leaders for years have shown us that it is easy to show results by cutting training, removing workers and providing meaningless measures.

Current educational result measures do not help students learn math or how to read. They make no contribution to improvement. They only make conversation of ignorance.

School accreditations and assessments are nice but the attention and focus given by leaders are before, during and for a short time after the accreditation or assessment is done. In between the visits, reports and so-called improvement measures it’s business as usual and no means of actual improvement is done except for annual standardized reports that are not process improvement but a means used for recruitment brochures.

Certifications and Assessments of an educational system (school) are result measures. School official’s year and after provide results and “cursory” plans that have no structure, time or means of measurement to show they are implementing process improvements or if they do that they actually work.

Education Improvement will not come from accreditations or certifications, it will only come through improvement to the on-going improvement of the system (end-to-end) and this can not be done through actions that are result driven and not a combination of process and result measures led by an “active” leader.

Many Governmental and Educational Leaders are EXPENDABLE. What value do they bring? Are they more important than your customer facing and producing employees?

Does Sara Lee “pay” more attention to their Finance VP because of the paper results or to the employee who makes and sells the company products? People who create and present paper results do not make bread.

I continually look to see some improvement in local, state and national educational systems. All I see are roller coaster plans, targets and goals with no one taking charge, responsibility or accountability.

Educational Czars and State Educational Leaders are like CEOs that come in from outside the system for a short-term and change direction that actually deprives the educational system for lasting improvement. Why does this happen? It’s simple, they do not know the interdependencies of the system nor do they take charge they delegate their responsibilities to committees, task teams and assessment teams that use subjective measures that do nothing but continue to tamper and already out of control system.