At the Spring Conference of the Missouri Association of Secondary School Principals these past few days, I heard great messages about what is right with public schools and how we can get that perception out. What do we need to do? We need to change our language, give people an emotional connection to our school, and tell individual, specific success stories.
Why change our language? As NASSP President B. J. Paris so succinctly stated, "the language we use speaks volumes about what we value." What does that mean for schools? We need to stop talking about 'dropout rates' and instead view 'every child as a graduate'. We need to take the term 'faculty lounge' (think about how our public perceives a lounge for a second) out of our vocabularies and start calling those areas something like 'teacher think-tank'. (I'm sure there's a better term out there, but that's the best I could come up with at the moment!) We need, as educators, to consider carefully how we name things and what those names convey to non-educators.
Dr. John Draper also indicated that we need to quit comparing ourselves to neighboring schools, states, and other countries. We need to compare ourselves to....ourselves! It is really irrelevant to our students, parents, and communities how a standardized test score stacks up against another education institution. What is relevant is the growth and progress of each individual student! It is so easy to find negatives in data when using comparisons. Take the US 'so called' underperformance on international testing measures. According to Draper, the US has never tested well due to a number of issues. In fact, the first time international tests were used, the US finished 11th out of the 12 countries tested! Since that time, we've 'fallen up' to about average which is real progress. Another misconception he addressed was that the average ACT/SAT scores are continually falling. Of course the average is falling, more students are taking the test! When these tests were first scored, only the top 10% of students even took the test. Now that about 60% of kids take the test shouldn't the overall average drop? What's important to recognize (and you never hear this in legislative halls or the mainstream media) is that EVERY SUBGROUP has shown continuous improvement on these tests for the past several decades! Why aren't we hearing that piece of the story? It's because we don't tell it! The US also scores high on the Global Competitiveness Index (a measure of the number of original patents and other creativity measures) while those scoring high on standardized tests are lagging in this area. Let's start sharing data like this with the media and legislators.
So how do we change the dialogue in our favor? We all have to work together. The best thing we can do is to tell specific, individual success stories about kids in our school. These stories will create an emotional connection between the listener and the school. The more emotional connections we create, the more we turn the tide in our favor. Draper suggested four things we should do every week to start the change.
- Focus on the positive! We must celebrate even small victories.
- Stop bad-mouthing other educators/education institutions in public. We are all in this together and negative talk about one another adds to the current perception.
- Share ONE positive story per week with a non-educator. If every educator in the country would do this for the next 52 weeks imagine the impact on non-educators!
- Monitor your progress. This doesn't mean look at achievement data. It means hold yourself accountable to the above three steps on a weekly basis.
I know that I came back from the Spring Conference at MASSP motivated. I learned much more than I can share in one post. Most of all, I came away feeling positive about the state of public education in our country. Thank you MASSP, Dr. John Draper, and B. J. Paris for helping the principals in Missouri feel empowered to continue the good work we do while leading our schools.
