It continues to amaze me that the Michigan's leaders in education (except Kalamazoo), and 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 leaders represent the people you SERVE! In case you don’t know who they are they are your constituents.
We never learn, result measures for education improvement and business measures go month to month, quarter to quarter and year to year (MEAP Tests). 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. Newspaper results give us the "What and the Who" but never the "HOW."
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. In short they are STUPID!
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.
STUPID, STUPID and more STUPID!!!
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