A hundred years from now, we will still be arguing about monetary policy. There will be forever conservatives and liberals and the confusion about the meaning of those terms will be just as enduring.  The one economic policy that we can all agree on – simply because it is so obvious – is to invest whatever it takes to make American K-12 education the best in the world.

Some numbers, quoted by Thomas friedman in today’s New York Times, April 22, 2009, “Swimming Without a Suit” say it all:

#The 2006 Program for International Student Assessment ranked American 15-year olds 25th out of 30 in math; 24 out of 30 in science:

#Friedma’s quoting from The Economic Impact of the Achievemant gap in American Schools, a report by MCKinsey, a consulting firm. “If we had raised the 1983 achievement gap between 1983 (When A Nation at Risk came out)  to the level of Finland and South Korea the GDP in 2008 would have been between 1.3 trillion and 2.3 trillion higher.

My knees were shaking, my heart was beating much too fast and I was on the verge of tears. My meeting with a woman whom I respected and admired, the founding head of an extraordinary school where I would have been delighted to enroll my own children, was to begin in five minutes, and I had steeled myself  as her consultant to tell her I thought she should resign. Otherwise, in another year, two at the most, the board which she had recruited would fire her. I was prepared to go on and admit that the board might not have the heart to save the school from the very person who had made it so worth saving – in which case the school would falter and soon not be as worth saving anymore.

Imagine my exhilaration when, before I opened my mouth, she told me she had come to the same conclusion. “It hasn’t been an easy decision,” she said. “I’ve done more than a little grieving. I’m still in love with the school, and with the idea of being its head. But I’m not in love with, nor particularly fit for the kind of leadership and management the school needs now that it is three times the size than when we started.”

The core of the leadership this brilliant educator had provided the school had been in the classroom. She’d focused on recruiting great teachers and leading them in the development of exemplary progressive curriculum. That’s where her talents lay and where her heart was, and the superb program that drew the families to the school in rapidly increasing numbers was the result. Thus the paradox: her success as a leader had created the need for a different kind of leadership: more global, overarching, delegating the work she was best at to someone else. Yes, in a fantasy world, she could have taken on that work as the Dean of Faculty and reported to her successor, but she knew her continued presence as everyone’s hero would have drained the authority from the new head.

In June of that year, she told the board she would resign, effective July 1 of the following year. During her last year, I served as consultant to the search committee for her successor, and had constant contact with the school. I watched her steps get lighter and lighter and serenity imprint on her face as she realized how smart she had been to resign before anyone had to suggest that to her, and what a fine thing she had done. She had caused a great school to exist. Now she was giving it away to the world!

Here’s another, but different, success story:  Twenty-three years ago, a young man, Ben Holmes (full disclosure: he happens to be my son-in-law) started The farm School in Athol, Massachusetts. He didn’t have a nickel to his name, but he did have several credit cards – as did the friends he gathered around himself to be the board of trustees. He rented a small family-run dairy farm from a retired farmer whose children had chosen other professions, made repairs and improvements with his own labor, and invited local public elementary and middle schools to bring groups of children and their teachers to participate in the life and work of a traditional family farm, thus  connecting kids to the land, inspiring conservation and instilling the concepts of sustainable agriculture. And, of course, he was raising funds for, among other things, a bunkhouse (built out of lumber from local sustainable forests, milled by a local mill, constructed  by local workers) to house approximately 30 children and their teachers who would come to the farm for a program which lasts three and one half days. Now, in addition to all the work of operating a farm, raising funds, hiring, inspiring, supervising staff, leading the development of the curriculum, he was recruiting the children in public and independent schools from as far away as Boston and Providence.

The Farm School very rapidly became a success. Its calendar is entirely booked. Last I heard, not one participating school has opted out. It owns the farm, the mortgage paid off. And it has expanded. Three miles away on another farm rented for a very small sum from a retired farmer delighted to preserve her land as a farm, The Farm School operates an intern program for people who want to learn organic farming. The program earns good revenue selling the produce of a thirty-five acre organic garden to local subscribers and high end markets in Boston. On that farm in what was once a very large chicken coop, The farm School operates a one-room school house for 6^th, 7^th and 8^th grade children whose parents want a more progressive education than the public school offers. Two of my grandchildren received a superb education there.

Thus, like my friend’s elementary school, The Farm School has become a much more complex organization than when Ben started it, requiring a different kind of leadership to sustain it. But, unlike the elementary school’s founder, Ben is still at the helm. His decision, equally self-aware and disciplined as hers, was to give away operations  to competent others. Now, if he milks a cow or weeds a garden, he does so for therapy or to relieve someone who needs a break. Likewise for teaching. There was some sadness in saying goodbye to activities that are the source of his passion, but his willingness to delegate to competent others has left him free to see the organization as a whole and thus guide it so as to sustain it. To say nothing of sustaining himself.

Both of these successful founders were able to separate their own identity from the organizations they brought into being. Not easy to do. And they understood that when they recruited a board they were creating an authority greater than their own.

Too bad these two successes aren’t what usually happen.

What too often actually happens instead is a brilliant, charismatic person with a compelling idea for making the world a better place makes a an irresistible  pitch to prospective board members who agree to form a board and start an organization to implement that vision- and then proceed to act not like a board, but instead a loyal rubber stamp to the founder. Most often, the board doesn’t even ask the question whether the founder should be the Executive Director. For, after all, the whole idea is hers, the thinking goes; our organization wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for her brilliant vision, her passion, and commitment to this marvelous idea which has given us the chance to be good servants and brought new meaning to our lives. Thus the board’ relates to the founder as if she owned the organization, and inevitably after awhile, the best board members drift away, leaving the weak ones behind to be even more reverent of the executive director. Why would a strong board member want to continue attending all those meetings to hear what has already been decided? Without a strong board, no non-profit organization will ever emerge from immaturity to reach its potential.

And if the founder/director does not perform well, there is no way to stave off dysfunction. As the organization grows, there is the predilection for the founder/director to stay too closely involved with all the functions, including those for which she has the least talent – or if she does delegate to others, to undermine their authority by changing their decisions when they don’t agree with the way she is thinking – which is often a secret because she “owns” everything. Secret also are the internal problems because the board takes her reports at face value, never asking tough questions, let alone doing 360 evaluations. Valuable employees, tired of waiting for the board to do its job, resign. Soon new hires and resignations resemble a revolving door. Ultimately the dysfunction is so pervasive the organization dies – or the board finally does step in and remove the Executive Director.

Therein lies another paradox: the pain of forcing the separation of the creator from her creation is engendered by the same phenomena which made it necessary: reverence on the part of the board, a sense of ownership on the part of the founder/director.

How much more victorious the outcome if, at the first instant, boards and founding directors would think through to the true nature of their work and their relationship to each other.

To the Editor: 

    Re: “No Picnic for Me Either, by David Brooks (column, March 13)

   Mr. Brooks is exactly right: great teachers build strong relationships with their students on whom they impose high standards.

   Mr. Brooks is also correct in saying that we need to know who these teachers are, and which schools devlop high achievement in their students. Yes, we need data. We need to know, not to guess or hope.

  However, Mr. Brooks ‘s faith in the standardized tests by which we gather data strikes me as naive. I taught English for years and have been an educator since 1957 and have yet to discover a better method of assessing my students’ progress in learning how to write than reading their compositions closely, with a red pencil, usually at least twice. If I could have substituted a standardized test for that process, I could have gone to bed a lot earlier each night.

   Could it be that our faith in standardized testing is based on the fact that it costs much less than assessing real work?

   One reading of Mr. Brooks’s column tells me more about his excellence as a writer than a thousand standardized tests.

Stephen Davenport

Oakland, Calif., March 13, 2009

Those who assert we should get our economy fixed first and then we can turn to fixing education don’t get it.  Shovel ready projects are important and they have the allure of quick pay-back. Likewise, fixing the financial system,  but what will these initiatives serve if we do not make the long-term, rewards-later investment in developing the intellectual muscle to do the work on which the economy depends?  We can no longer afford to accept a culture in which a kid one day out of law school makes more money that the person who taught him how to read -anymore than we can accept a culture in which the mediocre teacher gets re-hired every year. Without the political will to force change, and the financial sacrifcice to invest the money now, there will be no sustainable economic recovery. 

Another quote from David Leonhardt’s article – write your representatives and senators and tell them to read it: “Education helps a society leverage every other investment it makes—. It appears to be the best single bet that a society can make.” 

This is a sad and instructive story about a colleague who at his peak was perhaps the best teacher I have ever known. It is about the danger we face when we don’t take risks. I will assign my colleague the ficticious  intitials: C.F. to protect his identity. I still revere him for how much I learned from him as one of his coaching assistants.

By gesture and statement, C.F.  made it clear to every player on his football team that he thought the world of him, and he never raised his voice except in praise. The players responded by challenging themselves to prove to themselves and him that he was right in his good opinion of them. I have never known athletes at any level to derive as much joy and satisfaction from a sport as C.F’s players did.

A brilliant aspect of  his teaching was that, unlike many coaches who design their schemes on what they think will be most effective in games, C.F. designed his around what worked best in practice, by dividing his schemes into the number of component parts equal to the number of coaches on the staff. His practices were extraordinarily demanding and superbly organized. He turned over their agenda to the student manager who carried a stopwatch and a whistle to signal the end of one section of practice and the beginning of the next. C.F. never forgot that football, like every sport, is played with the brain as well as the body. His schemes were brilliant deployments, interesting intellectually in their own right. I remember how fascinating my father, who never played football, found them when I explained them to him. C.F. made sure that every player understood the whole scheme, not just his part in it; he invited suggestions for improvement. The result was that coaches could take a player out of the game, ask him to analyze what was happening, and together they would make assignment changes on the spot.

But of all the ways C.F. blessed his players, there are two that stand out most vividly: That he played every player in every game, no matter how close. No exceptions. And he never talked about winning. That was not what the esence of the game was about. That’s not why he taught it. Besides, if we did everything right, as coaches and players, winning would take care of itself.

It did. After a few seasons of C.F.’s coaching, some of the teams we traditionally played dropped us from their schedules because they could no longer compete with us. We had to search out bigger schools than we were. We beat them too.

One day, C.F. came into my classroom to tell me he was a finalist candidate for the head coaching position at a college well-known for high academic standards and winning football. The search committee had hinted to him that he was the favorite.

“Wonderful, C.F.!” I said, jumping up from my desk to shake his hand. It was then I noticed that he was frowning. “It shows how excellent you are that a college would choose from the prep school ranks rather than one of their own,”" I told him.

“I think I’ll withdraw,” he said.

“Withdraw? Why?”

“I love it here.”

“You’ll love it there too. Think of the opportunity.”

“We love our house and this school. Our kids are happy here.”

“Yes, I know,” I said. “But there’s more money there. You can buy even a nicer house.”

“Not if you lose. It’s college. You start losing and they fire you. You have to start all over.”

“C.F.! What would you say to one of your players if he talked like that?”

He flushed and looked away. “Forget that,” he said. “I was just cooking up an excuse. The truth is like I said: I love the kids and the community here and there’s still lots to do.”

“So why did you come in here and tell me?”

He shrugged. “So that maybe you could change my mind.”

“I haven’t, have I?”

“No. I’m going to stay. You and I will still be working together.”

“Not for long,” I said. “I’m already restless.”

Now I wish I’d asked him if he could imagine ten years out. Would he still love it here? Would he still be so excited? I didn’t ask those questions and he turned down the opportunity and the next year I left that school and went on to other things in the profession. We moved out of the house my wife designed. She stood in the doorway of the empty house when the furniture was loaded in the truck, and said,”This is all I ever wanted.”

Years went by and lo and behold, the kid who had been the student manager came back to the school as a faculty member and worked his way up the chain, changing jobs every several years and was now the athletic director. On a visit I made to the school, he told me  that the school wasn’t winning football games anymore. Kids were going out for soccer instead. There were stories about C.F. yelling at his players. He was using the same schemes he’d employed when I was one of his assistants. “The other teams have caught on and their killing us,” the athletic director said. “He shows every sign of a person who has stayed in the same position too long.”  The next year, this man, not half C.F.’s age, who as a kid had carried his whistle and clipboard with C.F.’s  practice agenda, had the sad task of calling a man he revered into his office and taking away his coaching position. Last I heard, C.F stayed on at the school as a classroom teacher until he retired.

For the last ten years of his time at the school, he never went to a football game.

Everyone knows who Babe Ruth was. Millions watch the Jerry Rices of the world catch footballs and the Lance Armstrongs race through France. But how many people can name the winner of an award won by a teacher in their own community – if there is actually such an award?

As a person who taught and administrated in schools for years and then consulted with teachers, I offer a plan for the reform of American education: celebrate teachers. Put them on a pedestal and acknowledge the act of teaching for what it is: the most fundamental, critical activity in our society.

But that’s obvious, you might say. Everyone knows that you can’t get anywhere these days without a decent education and that the nation’s welfare depends on an educated populace. Well then, where’s the glory around teaching? Why aren’t teachers being interviwed on TV and radio? Why aren’t thousands of young people asking themselves, “Do you think I can get to be a teacher? Do I have what it takes?”

Perhaps the reason our culture doesn’t award hero’s stature to teachers is that most  people assume they could be good teachers. That’s a fantasy. We have never come to grips with how hard it is to excel in teaching, how rare the required native talent, how much there is to learn, how innovative and flexible one must be, and how self-motivated to improve each year and not go stale in a job where there is no external change, no ladder to climb from one position to a new one. When we understand enough to marvel at a well-taught class as we marvel at a successful heart surgery, we will see true reform. The best and the brightest will apply to be teachers. We’ll focus on training and supporting them, not just with good pay, but with respect. They will do the rest. People who see themselves as heroes perform accordingly.

We see ourselves as we are seen. Year after year, in an annual workshop for experienced teachers of merit, my co-facillitator and I heard teachers tell stories of the status they lost when they entered the profession; many confessed that in their own parents’ eyes, “they were only a teacher.” How hurtfull! Surely those parents were reflecting the culture’s opinion. All that parental love and care, all that money set aside for college, had been in service of a different expectation. We began to focus the workshops on celebrating the teaching profession, helping the teachers  to see themselves as highly skilled professionals providing a service without which every other enterprise would collapse. Some of them told us later that the workshop was one of the reasons they stayed in the profession.

We need to do that on a national scale. For every breathless article about some twenty-something’s performance in a game the outcome of which changes the world not one jot, for every platinum recording of a song that will very likely be forgotten in a year or two, we need to feature a teacher. Let’s put TV cameras into classrroms where star teachers work, with an expert commentator, the way we do for sports, and show what happens in a good classroom, the decisions, minute by minute, the teacher makes. Instead of inviting some famous person to speak at the college graduation ceremony, let’s invite a local public school teacher whose work has opened doors for kids that otherwise were closed – some of whom will be in the audience. (Besides, she’ll probably make a better speech; she’s been making herself clear for years.) Prizes for teachers, parades for teachers: whatever shows we know their value.

 We’ll have reform when, instead of  athletes and rock stars smiling at us from advertisements, holding up  an underarm deoderant, a pill to make us thin, we see teachers holding books.