Chris Herrington decided years ago that his reality was much more fun…
and he’s ready to tell you why.
Sit back and relax.
It’s going to be a bumpy ride.
Common Sense 2.0
We all laugh that statistics can be made to say or support any ideology; both sides of an argument can use the same data for proof. What we also know that no matter how we slice it, education must improve, and that’s no joke.
We can blame and shame and game, but the long and the short of it is that our children are depending on us to make better decisions about how they are going to be given the wind up and the pitch if they are going to learn how to hit the ball out of the park. It’s one smart metaphor after another, isn’t it?
Ultimately, what are we to do?
It’s the teachers’ unions. It’s the FED. It’s NCLB. It’s conservatives, who want “X.” It’s liberals, who want “Y not.” Everybody has a little one liner, a sound bite, a tidbit for the media to kick around, but hardly anyone has a word to say about what to do. Say something inflammatory, get on national TV. Say something that actually fixes the problem, and it gets an award, a grant, or a sound bite, but then it is back to the salt mines. The overnight success, after ten years, who has been so successful in the area of turning around a school is Geoffrey Canada, the CEO of the Harlem Children’s Zone, 97 blocks of tough neighborhood streets.
He had a vision that if he could get the community working behind him, he could create a school system where students could focus on academics and dream of a future where studying now would pay off later with college advancement, and he has been successful. The climb has not been easy (The Harlem-Project), but he seems to be among the rising stars who have come up with the better mouse traps. If the students and their families, and their neighborhoods are doing better, the students will have a better chance at getting an advanced education. The single thing that seems to be the common denominator with the Ron Clarks, the Ruby Paines, and the Geoffrey Canadas of education is personal dedication to a vision of excellence. They have to go above and beyond, in time, money, and hours spent making transformation happen.
As they have demonstrated, a difference can be made, but in order for the difference to stick, the work has to be ongoing. If the price of liberty is vigilance, then the price of a continuously successful education system is our constantly paying attention to the real costs of not doing it right. Once it gets out of whack, we have to work like the Dickens to keep our children from becoming the tired and huddled masses who are looking overseas for the opportunity they were promised at home. Once we lose sight of the asset we have as a natural resource in having an educated work force, we become bogged down in the liability we have in an untrainable population that thinks of public welfare as their job. If the worst of socialism is the lack of incentive to get an education and work on self-interest in order to dream of ownership and become a businessman, then the problem with capitalism is that it fulfills the needs of only a few and concentrates power in the hands of those who see no real value in the rest of the population as people, who have lost any incentive to better themselves or who have lost the dream of what it might have been like to be judged on their character alone. The documentation of our national spiral into poverty rests on the extent of the welfare state itself.
We have created a nation that does not seem to understand its own potentially fatal flaw. Instead of giving away fish, we should have been teaching our people to fish. It is not too late. We must, as Canada seems to see so well, incentivize the system, uncork the genie, put our patriotism where our mouths are and our wallets where our hearts are. He had his best luck with getting the families involved and getting the neighborhoods on track thereby opening the way for children to dream of going out into the world free to leave or return. That’s empowerment. It is less about money than it is about focus. That’s good business. Canada changes what he can, but it is time to let families deal with their own internal problems and for us to pay attention to that which we can change, like overhauling the entire welfare system to point everyone towards accountability. Everyone should help, but especially the one being helped, right? Teachers, parents, and students all need to want it for our students. When we all work towards the common goal of making sure that our children are prepared to meet the challenges they will face in life, that’s common sense.
Having completed 32 years of public school service, Chris Herrington lives, with his wife, in Appleby, Texas, and his writing consists of blogging and essay writing concerning an array of topics including education, mediation, self-development, and human interests. He teaches at the Martin School of Choice, plays racquetball, and enjoys his job.
Chris Herrington can be reached at herrington@everythingnac.com
Great read!