Leadership's Future: Think Short-term, Fail Long-term
by Miki Saxon
I found a great quote on JD Prickett’s blog by Harvard’s Roland Barth.
“Show me a school whose inhabitants constantly examine the school’s culture and work to transform it into one hospitable to sustained human learning, and I’ll show you students who graduate with both the capacity and the heart for lifelong learning.”
I agree passionately that the school’s culture is the basis for its accomplishments and that the principal’s MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) is the source, whether active, passive or by benign neglect.
Unfortunately, the culture described above is constrained, distorted or totally destroyed by education policy—Dallas Independent School District is a great example of how truly bad policy can destroy learning.
Prickett, a school administrator (not in Dallas) hit the nail on the head when commenting on the pressure to produce good test-takers he said “the price of short-term success is long-term failure.”
No Child Left Behind, test performance-based funding and similar idiocies over the years have focused education directly on short-term results.
And that sounds like any number of banks, auto companies, insurance carriers and other corporate entities whose short-term thinking and drive for quarterly results left them constrained, distorted and totally destroyed.
Short-term thinking and quick profits of any kind are incapable of breeding long-term success in business or education.
Too bad. It’s solid K-12 education and life long learning that truly fuels our economy, underlies our democracy and makes for a strong, engaged populace.
Of course, the full effect of actions such as DISD’s are a long-term function that won’t be felt until long after the members of local, state and federal legislators are out of office leaving a mess significantly worse than the current economic debacle.
Even when Congress does do something it’s often botched. They’re rushing out a $150 billion education aid package spread over two years and more than doubling the current DOE budget. A flash flood of money that will be hard to manage and too much is bound to be wasted.
And, of course, there’s the ideological fight as opposed to whether it will work.
“Representative Howard P. McKeon, Republican of California and the ranking minority member of the House education committee, said, “By putting the federal government in the business of building schools, Democrats may be irrevocably changing the federal government’s role in education in this country.””
True, but maybe the federal government’s role does need to change, especially in mandating expensive requirements—No Child Left Behind, multiple security measures—and leaving the States to find ways to pay for them or be penalized; an action similar to a company mandating doubling the number of new products in development with no increases in budget or head count (yes, that’s been done many times).
When did ‘decade’ and ‘long-term’ become dirty words?
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Image credit: flickr
