A cure for what ails us?

Just curious, what is the approximate cost of juvenile crime in Flint, MI? I wonder if it is more than the cost of running quality afterschool programs in our  local schools.  At one time Flint was a worldwide leader when it came to community education, but, sadly, we are now often the butt of jokes. In fact,  I have a friend who frequently kids me about there being six degrees of separation between Flint and anything bad that happens in our world.  At one time Flint, MI was a GREAT place to raise children; now we are frequently near the top of any list of the worst cities in the United States.  What happened?  I would suggest that going "back to the future" may be a step in the right direction.  Revisiting the idea of community schools may be part (just part) of the answer to what plagues our once great city.  Of course some may argue that we no longer have much of a community at this point in time.  Point taken, but perhaps the synergy created by Frank Manley's and Charles Stewart Mott's unique partnership may be just what is needed in our city.  The link below is to a video that addresses the genesis of the community education and clearly shows a "golden age" in Flint's history.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrGCpJGyx5E

Link from the Detroit News

The link below will take you to an op-ed piece I wrote for the Detroit News.


.http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20130222/OPINION01/302220330/1008/Matheson-Charter-schools-through-prism-economics

Be a Great Teammate!

Everybody cannot be a great player, but everybody can be great teammate.  For the past few weeks I have been reminding my wife of this simple truth.  Many of our recent discussions have centered on the rash of transfers seen in area.  For one reason or another many student-athletes are leaving their home district and transferring to another district for what appears to be primarily athletic reasons.  My wife and I are in serious disagreement over this practice.  She believes it is permissible to engage in this practice if it provides your child an opportunity to be on a team or greater playing time.  I am opposed to this practice because I believe it has a domino effect: Student-athlete from school “A” transfers to school “B”, thereby pushing out a student-athlete from school “B” who may transfer to school “C”—get the picture?  So, my wife asks me what do we do if our daughter gets cut from the team?  Better yet, how can we make sure she doesn’t get cut from the team?  My reply is simple:  Make sure she is a great teammate.  Coaches don’t cut kids who are great teammates.  Coaches love kids who are great teammates because there are not enough great teammates out there.  My wife followed up with, “What makes a great teammate?”  To be honest, I never thought about what specific characteristics or behaviors constitute being a great teammate, but after giving it some thought, I came up with the following four behaviors.

1.       Work hard.  By working hard you will assist in keeping others working hard.  It is so much easier to begin to slack off if you know others are doing the same.  However, if you take it upon yourself to set a standard for the team, your behavior will become contagious and others will start to follow your lead.  Working hard is something each and every one of us can do; we are all capable of giving our best effort day-in and day-out.

2.       Communicate positivity.  We are social creatures, so we are going to communicate with one another, but the question is this: How are we going to communicate with one another?  This is vitally important on any team.  Putting a positive spin on things, focusing on the behaviors we want to see instead of the behaviors we do not what to see, offering constructive criticism, and looking for solutions rather than fixing blame are all characteristics of positive communication.  It is easy to fall into the trap of negative communication—don’t do it, rather choose a postiive attitude!

3.       Have your coach’s back.  When things go wrong—and they will go wrong—people often look for the nearest scapegoat, and that is often the coach.  Encourage your teammates to own their mistakes and not give in to the temptation to place blame elsewhere.  Moreover, do this with those outside of the team as they will often be the first one to point a finger at the coach (as if the coach runs drills on how to miss lay-ups or turn the ball over).  This is going to be difficult to do and it may make you unpopular for a brief period of time, but consider the alternative.  A failure to truly own our mistakes prevents us from becoming all we can be and will serve to hold your team back; that is, your team will never realize their true potential.

4.       Put the team first and don’t do anything to hurt the team.  This may be the hardest thing on this list to do.  Recognizing that the team is more important than we are and subjugating our ego to what is best for the team is a difficult task for even the most emotionally intelligent person to do.  However, the rewards are great.  It is very special to be part of a team because it allows you to achieve things you simply could not do on your own.  With this in mind, don’t jeopardize your position as a member of the team through negative or irresponsible behavior.  Do what is expected of you, when it is expected of you, to the best of your ability. 

When preparing this post it was evident to me that this topic transcends athletics.  I frequently hear people talk about the “team” in business and educational settings, but generally that is all it is— talk.  So few people truly understand what it means to be on a team, much less the incredible responsibility it entails.  I believe the four principles laid out above would allow any of us to become a better teammate no matter what industry we are in or team we are on presently.  Being on a team certainly requires sacrifice, but it also allows us an opportunity to be part of something special.  No matter how badly we want to be the superstar who hits the game-winning shot or closes the major deal, we have to recognize that this may not be the role we are equipped to play.  However, each of us possesses the potential to be a great teammate and to assist others in achieving these feats.  And, at the end of the day, their success is our success because we are on the same team!

Links on Leadership Tuesday, February 19, 2013

1. Steve Tobak identifies eight ways to be a courageous leader.  Mr. Tobak offers some practical advice to current and aspiring leaders.
http://www.inc.com/steve-tobak/the-most-important-leadership-attribute.html

2. Susan Engel makes a case for the importance of curiosity and suggests leaders and educators need to create an environment that cultivates curiosity.  For what it is worth, I would suggest this is one of the most important things we can do as educators.
 http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/feb13/vol70/num05/The-Case-for-Curiosity.aspx

3. I think Dan Rockwell is well worth following on Twitter and I suggest you check out his blog whenever you have the opportunity.  I never fail to learn something from him on a weekly basis.  This particular post is very good and I am going to do my best to implement these techniques as soon as possible.
http://leadershipfreak.wordpress.com/2011/07/23/15-techniques-that-build-loyal-followers/

4. What do Bruce Banner and the Hulk have to do with school leadership? Read this article to find out!
http://www.quickanded.com/2013/02/the-bruce-banner-philosophy-of-school-leadership.html?utm_source=feedburner

Five Great Articles on Education

1. Does Preschool Actually Help Kids Succeed?
I know the jury is still out on the benefits of preschool, but speaking from experience I am quite certain a high-quality preschool program would benefit large segments of our population.  Put simply, many of the children showing up at my school are ill-equipped to begin school when compared with their suburban counterparts.
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/02/does-preschool-actually-help-kids-succeed/273122/


2. De-mystifying Math
Jamon Smith, an excellent writer for the Tuscaloosa News, takes a look at the Capitol School in Tuscaloosa, AL and their utilization of Singapore Math.  Here is a quote from the article: "Spencer said Singapore math relies on problem solving and higher-order thinking, not just numbers and word problems. She said it’s about figuring out how math is done."
http://www.tuscaloosanews.com/article/20130215/NEWS/130219858/1007?Title=De-mystifying-math


3. Teacher Gets Valentine's Day Card 67 Years Straight
This story is sure to warm hearts and bring a tear to many an eye.  What a great testament to the power of teachers.
http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/teaching_now/2013/02/teacher_gets_valentines_card_67_years_straight.ht
ml?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter


4.  Education Experts Tackle Cage-Busting Leadership in Washington DC
James Swift discusses Frederick M. Hess's book Cage Busting Leadership and feedback from an American Enterprise Institute panel held in Washington DC.
http://www.youthtoday.org/view_article.cfm?article_id=5859


5. Cage Busting Leadership and the Culture of Can't
This article takes a deeper dive into Hess's book and explores some of the fallacies about school reform.  According to Hess, school leaders have much more power than they believe.
http://www.aei.org/outlook/education/k-12/leadership/cage-busting-leadership-and-the-culture-of-cant/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=021613

Leadership Lessons from Tuscaloosa, Alabama

Nick Saban is arguably the greatest college football coach of this generation.  Love him or hate him, there is no arguing his success: four total national championships and three of the last four national championships.  In addition, he consistently sends a great number of athletes on to the NFL and then annually reloads with one of the nation's top recruiting classes.  In short, he is at the top of his profession, so it comes as no surprise that many believe Coach Saban could teach us a thing or two about leadership.  In a December 2012 article on Forbes.com Monte Burke identified five leadership lessons from Nick Saban.  The five headings are Mr. Burke's, but the commentary beneath is mine.

1. Surround yourself with talent.  Interestingly enough it was the University of Alabama's most famous coach, Paul "Bear" Bryant, who said, "I don't hire anybody not brighter than I am.  If they are not brighter than I am, then I don't need them."  Surrounding yourself with talent would appear to be a no-brainer, but many leaders are reluctant to share the spotlight and therefore avoid building a team filled with potential superstars.

2. Create a process.  Processes, procedures, and protocols are not the buzz words of control freaks, but rather the practices of those wishing to maximize the resources available to them.  Establishing a process not only serves to keep people focused, but is also lends itself to creating a culture of achievement and attracting top performers to your team.

3. Manage the message.  As the leader, you should be the primary communicator.  You do not have to be the only person communicating, but it is up to you to ensure that there is only one message no matter how many voices.  The leader must continually and consistently communicate the vision for the group to various constituencies.

4.  Keep it simple.  Put simply, pick a direction and go.  Do not get caught up in the "soup of the day" mentality; do what you do and  do it well.  Leave the gimmicks to others and focus on building a simple system that produces the results you wish to see.  Once you figure out what works, continue to deconstruct it and break it down to its very essence.  This will allow you to better understand what you want done and it will make accomplishing the first three items in this list much easier.

5. Make wise investments in the future.  Spend time with key people, because you do not have time to waste with people not key to what you are trying to accomplish.  Make decisions based upon what is best long-term, not for what is best in that moment.  This will allow you to continue to move forward rather than force you to continually revisit decisions made in haste and for short-term gains.

I enjoy looking to the world of athletics for leadership and management principles because this is a field where the score is kept and there are tangible consequences for actions and behaviors.

Five Commitments

This school year is my very first year "in charge" and what a different experience it has proven to be.  You have a whole different perspective when the buck truly stops at your desk and it is quite humbling to know that the decisions you make on a daily basis touch so many different people.  Nonetheless, I am enjoying the experience and I am blessed to have an absolutely fantastic staff, a terrific group of students, and supportive parents.  One aspect of school leadership I was looking forward to with this change was the opportunity to create a culture of achievement in our school.  In fact, I could not wait to make our school's culture our primary focus.  I believe that a school's culture serves as the difference maker in the building.  It is not only what we do, but how we go about doing it that makes a difference in the lives of the young people we are fortunate to serve.  With that in mind I asked our staff to make five commitments this year; commitments I believe will lay the foundation for a positive school culture and will prove to be the bedrock of all we do in the future.

1. Commit to model the way.  Perhaps the most important thing we can do as educators is model the behavior we would like to see from other members of our school community.  As my friends Ashley Hamilton and Jeana Carrasco are fond of reminding me, Gandhi said: "We must be the change we wish to see in the world."  Each and every day hundreds of little eyes (and many larger eyes) are watching us and woe to the educator caught doing something that runs contrary to what they are preaching!  If we want a school community based upon respect, we must recognize that the obligation for modeling this behavior begins with us.  Whatever behaviors we wish to see on the part of our students, we must be willing to model.

2. Commit to choose a positive attitude.  Have you ever had one of those before-and-after moments?  I am talking about the kind of moment that changed your life or the way you approach life; there was life as you knew it before the moment and then there was life as you now know it after the moment.  Meeting Roger Soweid was one of the many before-and-after moments in my life.  Roger is without a doubt the most positive person I know and I believe it is impossible to be around him without being changed for the better.  No matter what happens, Roger always chooses to respond with a positive attitude; this is the type of attitude all schools need to cultivate.  So much of what happens to us on a daily basis is beyond our control, but our response to what happens to us is always completely within our control.  Moreover, when we choose our attitude, that is our response to what life brings our way, we are actually seizing power over our lives and relinquishing the yoke of victimization.

3. Commit to the pursuit of excellence.  Why choose to do something if you do not want to be good at it?  Moreover, why choose a high stress occupation in which people rely upon you on a daily basis if you are not going to commit to being the best you can be?  Education is far too challenging to approach it without the intention of delivering your absolute best day-in and day-out.  We need educators willing to look high and low to discover the best methods to reach, motivate, and engage students.  We need educators willing to seek out help from those both in and out of the profession.  We need educators committed to learning and implementing the best practices.  We need educators dedicated to lifelong learning in an effort to continually meet the needs of a very dynamic and, often times, challenging student population.  An ongoing commitment to excellence far surpasses any commitment made to an arbitrary benchmark on a standardized test.

4. Commit to professionalism.  What is it you are most sensitive about in regard to your appearance?  I am willing to bet that if you spend any time with 6th, 7th, and 8th graders they will discover this sensitivity and mention it in conversation at some point during your first week--if not your first day--with them.  The point is this: no matter what happens to us in the school, we must commit to maintaining our professionalism.  We are, in fact, the professionals in this relationship.  We have to be bigger than the moment, whatever that moment may bring.  We will be criticized, ridiculed, second-guessed, insulted, have our credentials, integrity, and ethics questioned, but we must rise above and maintain the professionalism our students deserve from us.

5. Commit to the success of our students.  We must be "all in" when it comes to the success of our students.  As difficult as it may prove to be, we need to own their successes and their failures.  Imagine what would happen if our nation's educators flipped that mental switch and viewed their students' potential failure as an impossibility--what a momentous change we would see!  So often we are willing to accept a certain percentage of failure, to buy-in to the belief that the Bell Curve is an immutable fact.  Just for the sake of argument, what would happen if we refused to accept this as our reality?  Doesn't it stand to reason that if we changed our attitude toward failure that perhaps we may see a change in the behavior of students?  Indulge me and allow me to brag on my staff and students for just a moment.  Currently 96% of the students under our care are at a "C" average or above; 75% of our students are at a "B" average or above; and 33% of our students are at an "A" average or above--I am not making this up!  Moreover, less than 1% of our students are currently failing!!!  At the beginning of the year we clearly stated a goal of not having one student fail the 2012-2013 academic year and we are on track to make this a reality, but it only came about because a highly talented group of educators went "all in" on the success of their students.

I believe these five commitments can work together to change the very nature of a school.  Moreover, once made they work together to strengthen one another; it is much easier to commit to a positive attitude and to professionalism if you are committed to the success of your students.  It is much easier to commit to modeling the way if you are committed to the pursuit of excellence.  Committing to one will help strengthen your commitment to the others  If you decide to try these commitments, please stay in touch and let me know how they are working for you.

Who is on your team?

Who is on your team?  It is a very simple question that provoked some funny answers from my former 9th graders: "I'm not on a team."  "Me, myself, and I."  "Nobody, I was cut, remember???"  It almost always took me a good 10-15 minutes to get them to understand what I was getting at with this question.  I wasn't talking about athletics, nor was I attempting to give them a hard time about being cut during tryouts for some athletic team.  Rather, I was attempting to to get them to think about who was on their team in life.  Who was invested in their future?  Who could they count on when the going got tough?  Who loved them enough to tell them when they were on the wrong track?  These were the teammates I was referring to with my original question.  This very simple question never failed to provoke very profound and meaningful conversations with the young people I was so fortunate to serve.  Throughout the course of these conversations the past 9 years, we discovered that good, positive teammates have at least three readily identifiable benefits.

Good teammates will help you find a Starbucks in Cairo, Egypt!  Thanks, Benjamin, Sam, Jeff, and Christy.

Teammates help you to navigate life's challenges.  Life is far too tough to go it alone.  We need people willing to walk with us from time-to-time.  We need people to lean on (thank you, Bill Withers!).  We need a helping hand and a listening ear, along with the wisdom of others to make sense of our trials and tribulations. Put simply, we need help!  And contrary to popular opinion, there is absolutely no weakness in acknowledging this and reaching out to others for this help.  It takes strength to ask for help.  Be strong.

Abdullah Idilbi  and Stephan Kleynhans--two of my best  friends and wonderful teammates!

Teammates help you to accomplish great things.  John C. Maxwell said, "Nothing of significance is ever accomplished alone."  Truer words have never been spoken.  I get irritated when I see someone affix "self-made" to their Twitter or Facebook ID--what a crock of crap!  There is not one single person who ever got to where they are in life solely as a result of their own efforts.  To think otherwise is the height of arrogance and foolishness.  We all, each and every one of us, have benefited from the assistance, support, or guidance of another.  Personally, I am not sure I could even begin to thank all of the people who chose to invest in me over the past 43 years; in fact, I am quite certain I would run out of future years before I recognized past support!  If we can get there alone, it is probably not a very desirable destination.

Abdullah Idilbi, Dylan Luna, Zahra Sarfaraz, and Jeff Londraville--four teammates who work to make me a better person!

Teammates love you enough to tell you the truth.  One of the most difficult responsibilities we have as good teammates is to tell one another the truth, even when we know it is going to hurt.  People invested in our future success and our current well-being will let us know when we are wrong, or on the wrong track, precisely because they care about us.  This is perhaps the greatest responsibility of being a good teammate.  I challenge you to work to surround yourself with quality people invested in your success, but who care enough about your well-being to keep you on the straight and narrow.  We need people in our life willing to call us out on our behavior.  We cannot rely upon ourselves because humans are peculiarly wired to engage in self-delusion, that is we have the unique ability to justify our thoughts, words, and behavior even when it goes against what we know to be right.  This is why we need those good, positive, high-quality teammates in our respective lives to keep us on the path to success.

Teammates like these make life better!

Build your team.  Build your team continually, at all times.  Reach out to others who have made it to where you want to go and ask them for help.  Search out strong, positive mentors and recruit them to your team.  Surround yourself with positive people, people invested in your future success.  Build relationships with people willing to tell you when you are wrong, people who love you enough to say what needs to be said even when you are not open to hearing it.  Build your team as if your future depends upon it, because, in fact,   it does!  So, I ask you, who is on your team?

It's not them, it's us!

We are robbing our children of the opportunity to develop the skills they will need later in life.  Figuratively  robbing them by preventing them from developing the requisite skills most of us developed during our early years.  Yet, at the same time we bemoan the shortcomings of young people constantly, without realizing that we are contributing to--if not actually causing--the deficiencies and behaviors we find so troubling.  Let's face it, adults are screwing things up for this generation.

Our youth live in a world largely, if not totally, constructed and supervised by adults.  Think about it, when was the last time you observed kids out playing by themselves without adult supervision?  Had a chance to observe any "pick-up" games on the court, field, diamond, etc.?  I cannot recall the last time I saw children participating in any type of athletic contest without the direct supervision of at least one adult.  Is it any wonder they have not developed the skills to work out even the smallest, most insignificant problem faced by previous generations in these exact same circumstances?  Growing up, my friends and I were forced to develop coping and negotiation skills or we ran the risk of someone taking their ball and going home.  If they weren't the owner of whatever ball we were using, we were at the least in danger of them walking away and leaving us with an odd number and uneven teams.  To prevent this scenario we learned how to negotiate and to compromise.  Moreover, we learned how to navigate life when we didn't get our way.  These are skills largely absent from the playgrounds of today.  Far too often a disagreement over a call or a dispute involving the score brings competition to a screeching halt.  In fact, it is even difficult to find children playing by themselves on playgrounds; rather, they are registered for all sorts of activities facilitated, supervised, and coached by adults--many of them living out their childhood dreams through their children.

Parents,out of love, attempt to create a pain-free environment for their children.  This is why everybody gets a ribbon, trophy, or certificate telling them how special they are even when they have not done anything special. God forbid that a child discover there are other children out there more talented than they are--what will happen to their self-esteem?  In addition, rather than allow their children to work out their differences with other children, parents today are far too eager to jump in, to attempt to make things right.  As a first-time father I truly understand the desire to prevent your child from experiencing any pain, but pain is often the best teacher.  When we discover we don't like the way something feels, we have a tendency to learn from that experience and do our absolute best to avoid the behavior and associated pain at all costs.  Failing to allow this to happen just delays the learning experience and often raises the stakes of the experience.  It is much better to learn these lessons and to acquire the associated skills at a younger when there is less at stake--the pain is not as severe as it may prove to be later in life.  Moreover, the acquisition of these skills at a young age serves to allow us to successfully navigate the greater challenges life brings our way throughout our lifetime.

Put simply, we are what is ailing our youth.  We have robbed them of precious opportunities to develop skills that will serve them throughout their lives.  We have delayed the maturation process and then pointed to the resulting immaturity and fixed blame on those very children we prevented from learning life's lesson.  This current generation of young people is just as talented, just as capable, and can be just as resilient as previous generations if we will just allow them to be and get out of their way.

Weekend Reading

1.  Six Traits Agile Leaders Must Have--Larry R. Nordhagen suggest leaders must possess six traits in order to be able to respond to their workers' needs and motivations.  I really like this article and I believe Mr. Nordhagen hits some key points.  This is perhaps my favorite article of the past few weeks.  Please let me know what you think, as I may write more about this article later.
http://clomedia.com/articles/view/six-traits-agile-leaders-must-have

2.  Regulating School-Choice Markets--Interesting article by Michael Q. McShane on the need to find the proper balance in school-choice programs.
http://www.aei-ideas.org/2013/01/regulating-school-choice-markets/

3.  Why I support School Choice--Michael Q. McShane of the Huffington Post provides three reasons as to why he supports school choice.  Mr. McShane was a teacher at St. Jude, a historically Catholic African-American school in Montgomery, Alabama. The following is a great quote from Mr. McShane's article: "Rather than judging schools by who manages them, we should judge them based on how well they serve the cause of public education."
http://www.aei.org/article/education/k-12/school-choice/why-i-support-school-choice/

4.  Teachers Share Advice From Their First Year--These posts from Twitter and Facebook contain some pearls of wisdom for even the most veteran teachers!
http://storify.com/usedgov/teachers-share-advice-from-their-first-year?awesm=sfy.co_fE0p&utm_medium=sfy.co-twitter&utm_source=t.co&utm_content=storify-pingback&utm_campaign=

5.  Making Americans: UNO Charter Schools and Civic Education--Good article by David Feith on a charter school with a clear mission that has clearly differentiated themselves and uniquely positioned themselves in the marketplace.
http://www.aei.org/papers/making-americans-uno-charter-schools-and-civic-education