In Collusion
March 31st, 2008The easy part of any problem is pointing fingers. It’s much harder to come up with a solution and to put it into action—and when the problem is as large as the ones facing a school district, it becomes harder to see where solutions might be found.
The fundamental truth is there are many problems, some in the schools and some in the community. Like any long relationship, there’s a history of both sides, and both are locked in a collusion not unlike any bad or failing relationship—both sides pointing fingers at what is really a problem much deeper and more involved.
It looks a little like this¹:
I don’t want anyone to think there’s one side to blame in this. There isn’t. Personally, I think a large part of it rests on the school—partly because we’re the professionals who should know better. But the fact remains that the bulk of the students who stay in this area were not as well served as they could have been by the system.
The MRSD is full of talented teachers and people who can put a child wherever they want to go. We’ve had students go everywhere in the world and be successful with any endeavor—from Harvard to flying fighter jets. I was well served by the MRSD—but in my group of friends, I am the only one with a college degree who stayed in the area.²
It’s not an unusual story. One of my former students called the other day. She’s an honor student at Quinnipiac. Her family lives in Fitzwilliam. She was in college when the vote came by and didn’t fill out a ballot. Her family, none of whom went to college, voted “no” on everything. It looks like this:
Sooner or later it breaks down. For how many years can someone “work harder” and not be appreciated, or be told they’re not doing enough?
I said before that we can’t have a bad table in the school system. The problem is we haven’t quite figured out what that means, or how to implement it effectively.
But I have some ideas. Both sides in this have to stop the diagram. They need to break out of the cycle we’re in, and we do that by recognizing we’re in it, taking a deep breath, and then looking at solutions. I have a couple:
Kelly E. Middleton wrote in Sending Teachers on Visits to All Homes of the remarkable success Kentucky’s Mason County Schools were able to have by asking teachers to visit families at home. There was a stipend involved for gas, but really all it took was time—and that’s not a bad thing. We can do time as teachers, and coming to a home and meeting the whole family is not a hard task.
In fact, it ought to be the first thing we do if we want to have a contract. It’s really hard to hate a group of people who come out on their own time to meet with a family—and if there’s a chance to talk about the challenges facing the district, even better. This problem only gets solved if we start talking about it and get off the diagram.
We also need to get parents involved in the schools more—we need their help.³ But that’s Wednesday’s post.
1 I didn’t come up with the diagram—it’s borrowed from The Anatomy of Peace: Resolving the Heart of Conflict and I wasn’t the one who applied it to the district. However, I was the first one to make a snazzy graphic and post it on this blog. ↺
2 Nor am I saying a college degree is a requirement to either be educated or successful. I spent Sunday night with one of my best friends who is doing well and never got his degree—but it also means he doesn’t feel like he owes the school anything. After all, what did it do for him? When pressed, he admits it did—but he needed to think about it for awhile. We all like to think we got to where we were on our own. ↺
3 I’d like to point out the single best idea ever published on this blog was exactly this—put out there by Tom Matson and seconded by Sue Scuito. We need the community to work with us. ↺
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Education, Monadnock Regional School District, School Change, School Funding
