By CandidProf, who teaches physics and astronomy at a state university. He shares his thoughts and experiences teaching today’s students anonymously every Thursday—anonymously because that’s the only way he can be truly candid. Read all of CandidProf here.

Wes Ball, Tuesday’s regular guest, posted his response to my posting about the Dallas Independent School District grading policy.

He makes a point that a nurturing approach is a good one.  And I agree with him that giving students the opportunity to fix mistakes within defined boundaries is a good learning strategy, and one that I routinely use for my college students.

However, the key point is in the definition of those boundaries.

DISD has virtually removed boundaries. That is not acceptable.  If you go to a doctor for a serious illness, would you trust your doctor’s treatment if you knew that he or she virtually never got it right the first time?  Just what are the defined limits of acceptable shortfalls?  Sometimes, you just have to get it right.

Just look around and you will see the consequences of teaching people that they don’t have to be held responsible. If you teach students that sort of thing, then they will go into the workforce with that attitude.  And then you will have such things as lenders not thinking through who they lend money to, borrowers not thinking if they can repay loans, and top executives for major corporations not looking towards the future of their companies.  After all, if everything goes bust somebody will come along and bail them out and make everything OK, right?

But I think that the attitude that it is OK to set up policies that do not hold students responsible for their own misdoings is simply a carryover from the DISD’s top leaders’ own philosophies.

Now, it turns out that they don’t want to be held responsible for their own screw ups.  Apparently, DISD hired some new teachers last year, but forgot to think about how to pay for them.  This led to a $64,000,000 budget shortfall in 2007. That is expected to soar to nearly $84,000,000 this year.

How can top executives in charge of such a large district foul up enough to miss out on the fact that they were spending 64 million dollars more than they were taking in through taxes? This is not a small sum of money.  This is not simply a minor accounting error.  This is not just someone putting some expenditure in the wrong column of a data table or listing it under one account instead of another.  This is a major blunder.

But are the top school district executives held to account? Uh, no. The ones being held to account for this are the teachers who are facing losing their jobs.  Up to 700 teachers may be laid off in the middle of the school year.

What effect will that have on students who started learning from one teacher only to be shoved into another, over crowded, classroom with a different teacher?

And what of the teachers, themselves?  If they lose their jobs, they lose their way to make a living.  Teaching jobs don’t pay a lot to start with.  And teaching jobs are keyed to the academic year.  Teaching jobs begin at the start of the school year.  It is almost unheard of for a teacher to be hired in the middle of the year.  So, these teachers are out of a job until next August at the earliest.  Is that fair to them?

No, I think that accountability is important.  I think that standards need to be held fast.  I think that the bar needs to be set, and students, administrators, employees, and everyone needs to make it.  A good leader needs to encourage his followers to meet the challenge and to make the grade.

And if they don’t, then there must be consequences.  If the leader screws up, then he needs to face the consequences, too.

I’m including links to various news stories for more in depth information.

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/091708dnmetdisdcuts.1bd57b1.html

http://cbs11tv.com/business/education/disd.teacher.layoffs.2.819119.html

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/localnews/stories/DN-disdbudget_23met.ART.State.Edition2.26b709a.html

Your comments—priceless

Don’t miss a post, subscribe via RSS or EMAIL

Image credit: hollowed CC license

By Wes Ball. Wes is a strategic innovation consultant and author of The Alpha Factor – a revolutionary new look at what really creates market dominance and self-sustaining success (Westlyn Publishing, 2008) and writes for Leadership turn every Tuesday. See all his posts here. Wes can be reached at www.ballgroup.com.Building future leaders takes creative nurturing, because leaders are both born AND made.  It’s up to us to do the “making” part.

There is a lot of failure on the track to leadership competence.  It’s doubtful any of the leaders I know could have gotten there, if they had not been nurtured through failure.  Even so-called “natural” leaders that have the combination of dominant and influencing personality styles need nurturing to make them successful.

A couple of weeks ago, CandidProf (guest blogger every Thursday) made note of the 2008-2009 standards for grading policy of the Dallas School District.  He expressed some concern about the fact that, in an effort to reduce the high school dropout rate, this school district mandated that teachers give students multiple chances to pass tests, not give any student a “zero” score for any test or assignment (no matter what they did or did not do), and accept overdue assignments with no or minimal penalty.

While the policy seems like an easy one to condemn and seems to embody all the laziness and attitudes of entitlement we see in young persons applying for jobs these days, there are some interesting aspects of this that have application in business leadership development.  Many persons have complained that this kind of approach to education in no way mirrors what those students might encounter in the working world.  The reality, however, is that good management that has as its objective to develop strong leaders does use similar techniques.

The problem may be not so much in the policy itself, but rather in the lack of accountability that this approach seems to provide.  I would go further and say that the real problem is that students are not given any vision for why they need to learn what is being taught.  Every person needs to understand why they must do something painful — and learning can be very painful for children without a proper vision for the future.  Employees also need that kind of vision-casting.   Without a clear vision for why they are required to work harder and learn more, most people will resist.

Every leader I know has been nurtured by a mentor.  Every one has been given the opportunity to fail along with support to understand how to succeed. Everyone has been given the opportunity to make mistakes within defined boundaries, because learning happens best in such an environment.

Within my own company, I made a point of creating mentoring relationships with and among employees.  I continually created opportunities for employees to learn through failure while providing a “safety net” that meant they knew they would not be fired for failure, except in certain areas of behavior or where there was a clear indication that they were not capable of doing the job needed.  They certainly were not put in a position where a failure could irreversibly harm the company, because that would have been bad leadership.  But they were given the chance to experiment with making decisions and even making recommendations to our customers where appropriate to the level that they had proven themselves capable.

I was extremely successful in taking persons with little or no experience and making them not only highly-skilled in the difficult and somewhat obtuse business of strategic innovation consulting, but also capable of leadership of others.  In fact, I discovered that it was far better for me to develop an inexperienced but motivated and qualified person into a leadership role over time than it ever was to hire a person already experienced through another company.  It was far too painful trying to overcome the bad learning that the experienced person had gained somewhere else.

The secret to nurturing and developing these future leaders was simple in concept:

• Give them a vision of what the future could look like for them.
• Give them an “identity” as being part of a great organization that is doing something of real value.
• Give them the basic skills and relational training they needed.
• Provide them with “safe” ways to fail, followed by nurturing learning as to how to succeed next time.
• Encourage them in failure and success.
• Let them grow as quickly as they can take it, always supported by continuing encouragement, nurturing, and training.
• Give them public praise when they have proven themselves of real leadership value.

The results were a highly motivated team that was (by measurements common to our industry) about twice as efficient as the average per salary dollar invested.  They also were a cohesive team that liked each other and liked working there.  And we were able to gain the kinds of clients that even much larger competitors only dreamed of getting.  The biggest problems we had were from experienced persons who thought they should be given the chance to “lead” before they even understood what our company was all about.

So, if you want to develop strong future leaders (or just good employees), I would say the Dallas schools idea is not a bad one; it just requires strong vision-casting, nurturing, and encouragement to make it work.  

What do you think?

Your comments—priceless

Don’t miss a post, subscribe via RSS or EMAIL

Image credit: thanx  CC license