Politics In The Classroom: How Much Is Too Much? (Diana Hess and Paula McAvoy) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Politics In The Classroom: How Much Is Too Much? (Diana Hess and Paula McAvoy) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice:

Politics In The Classroom: How Much Is Too Much? (Diana Hess and Paula McAvoy)

In an earlier post, I pointed out the obvious fact that tax-supported public schools were political institutions. Not in the partisan sense of Republican and Democrat but in serving the community politically in socializing community values in the next generation .  The following post comes from nprED showing another aspect of the political role that classroom lessons play in the U.S. 

Steve Drummond interviewed Diana Hess and Paula McAvoy on their new book on Politics in the Classroom. It was published August 6, 2015.

The Confederate flag. The Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage. Policing minority communities. Nuclear weapons and Iran. Summer often brings a lull in the news, but not this year. And, come September, students are going to want to talk about these headlines.

But how should teachers navigate our nation’s thorny politics?

Do politics belong in the classroom at all, or should schools be safe havens from never-ending partisan battles? Can teachers use controversial issues as learning opportunities, and, if so, to teach what? And then, the really sticky question: Should teachers share with students their own political viewpoints and opinions?

In their book, The Political Classroom: Evidence and Ethics in Democratic Education, Diana E. Hess and Paula McAvoy offer guidelines to these and other questions, using a study they conducted from 2005 to 2009. It involved 21 teachers in 35 schools and their 1,001 students. Hess is the dean of the school of education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and McAvoy is the program director at UW-Madison’s Center for Ethics and Education.

Schools, they conclude, are and ought to be political places — but not partisan ones. I talked with them recently about how, in today’s highly polarized society, teachers can walk that very fine line.

Sometimes it seems there’s a belief that schools should be political … sort of. With students taking on issues – like smoking – that are political but not too political. Did you find that in your study?

Hess: You’re absolutely right, there are a number of schools that encourage students to get involved in political campaigns, but they tend to be political Politics In The Classroom: How Much Is Too Much? (Diana Hess and Paula McAvoy) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice:

Pop Quiz | Will the burgeoning opt-out movement save Colorado schools—or endanger them?

Pop Quiz | 5280:

Many parents and students are fed up with what they view as excessive standardized testing. Will the burgeoning opt-out movement save Colorado schools—or endanger them?

Hollywood agents would never cast Zach Cheikho in the stereotypical rebel role. The 16-year-old maintains a 3.5 GPA at Denver’s South High School and speaks in a measured manner that brings to mind airport public service announcements. With his glossy, dark-rimmed glasses, he seems more likely to play the sensitive, bookish kid in a smart, quirky coming-of-age story.

But, as it turns out, Cheikho is the kind of politically motivated rabble-rouser school administrators have come to fear in recent years. 

Since the eighth grade, Cheikho has refused to take most standardized tests—and he’s campaigned for other students to boycott testing too. Last March, he spent his lunch periods distributing opt-out letters to fellow students, many of whom signed the handouts and filed them with South High’s leadership. “The tests take a huge amount of time away from actual classwork, and I just feel like I’m being cheated out of my education,” Cheikho told the audience at First Christian Reformed Church in Platt Park, where he was invited to speak as part of an opt-out panel discussion this past May. Fellow panelists included two Denver Public Schools (DPS) parents, two DPS teachers, former DPS board member Jeannie Kaplan, and Peggy Robertson, an Aurora Public Schools teacher who co-founded United Opt Out (a national organization that urges families to “choose to refuse”). “The opt-out movement is about civil disobedience,” said Robertson, prompting applause. 

In the nation’s larger school districts, including Denver Public Schools, students take an average of 113 standardized tests each by the time they graduate. Most are administered between grades three and eight, when kids typically take 10—and as many as 20—standardized tests per year. Critics say it’s too much, for many of the same reasons Cheikho cites.

But with students’ test scores determining which schools receive the exalted top status and which get restructured as a result of poor performance, schools do all they can to produce favorable numbers—including pressuring kids to show up. Cheikho, whose mother supports his protests, says South’s administration confiscated his fliers. A parent on the panel says she was told by principal Peter Castillo that her son wouldn’t be welcome at K–12 Kunsmiller Creative Arts Academy the next year if he opted out. (Castillo disputes this account and says students who opt out of testing because of personal beliefs are not penalized.) An audience member later explained how a man removed her daughter from math class, told the seventh-grader she couldn’t return until she took the TCAP test, and wouldn’t let her call her mom when she asked. “The principal at Skinner [Middle School] told all the eighth-graders that they wouldn’t be allowed to walk at their continuation if they didn’t take the tests,” another parent said (Skinner’s principal says no students were denied participation). “Can they do that?”

The response was a chorus of angry replies: “No!” 

If you’re savvy to the varying grades of graphite, that’s likely because you grew up taking the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills, which required the use of a No. 2 pencil to fill in bubbles answering multiple-choice questions. Following their 1935 debut, the tests gave administrators and families a way to assess academic achievement based on a national standard. The goal was to give schools the ability to compare results against this standard, so that a test score in Alabama meant the same as the equivalent score in Wyoming.

The No Child Left Behind Act, which former President George W. Bush signed into law in 2002, put some teeth into testing. Federal requirements amount to 17 standardized tests—one each year in reading and math from third through eighth grade, and one round of English, math, and science tests in high school (typically in 10th grade). If students don’t show annual improvement—with, for example, this year’s seventh-graders outscoring last year’s—the school is subject to sanctions, such as allowing students the option of transferring to other schools, replacing school staff, and, after six years without betterment, completely restructuring the school. “An accountability system must have a consequence,” Bush said in 2001. “Otherwise, it’s not much of an accountability system.” 

With an increased emphasis on testing, the state and districts have layered on even more exams to try to forecast student performance and boost it appropriately. The 2012 Colorado READ Act instituted three literacy tests each year for kindergarten through third grades (children who are proficient on the first test can skip the remainder of that year’s exams), and districts administer their own interim Pop Quiz | 5280:

Jersey Jazzman: Marilyn Zuniga and the Plight of Teachers of Color

Jersey Jazzman: Marilyn Zuniga and the Plight of Teachers of Color:

Marilyn Zuniga and the Plight of Teachers of Color

As we approach the beginning of the new school year, I think it's important to go back and recount the story of Marilyn Zuniga.

You'll recall that Zuniga was a third grade teacher in Orange, NJ, a district that is almost entirely comprised of black and Hispanic students, 81 percent of whom qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. Zuniga had exactly the sort of training any district would look for in a novice teacher, including degrees from Montclair State and Columbia (!), and was hired last year to teach at a school where she had already worked as a substitute.

Zuniga self-identifies as a Peruvian-American. I don't have precise data to say how many Ivy League-educated candidates send their resumes to districts like Orange, but my guess is it isn't many. I've not met Zuniga, but on paper, she is the ideal candidate for a career in urban education. And the fact that she's a first-generation immigrant from a Spanish-speaking country makes her even more desirable as a potential staff member.

By all accounts, Zuniga was a fine first-year teacher; certainly, there were no accusations about her work prior to the incident in question. Zuniga was apparently committed to social justice education, and gave assignments to her students that were designed to get them to think about issues of racial and other forms of equality.

For one of those assignments, she used a quote from Mumia Abu-Jamal as a writing prompt: "So long as one just person is silenced, there is no justice." Let me add here that I have no better than a layman's understanding of the Abu-Jamal case. I was a high school student living in the Philadelphia suburbs at the time of Daniel Faulkner's death, but even my politically naive mind could tell that the trial and subsequent appeals were about far more than the particulars of the case. Abu-Jamal's story, like the stories of the MOVE bombings or Rodney King or OJ Simpson or Trayvon Martin, created spaces where America conducted its stilted discussions of race in the post-Martin/post-Malcolm world.

According to Zuniga, her students came to her sometime last spring with the news that Abu-Jamal was ill. In fact, just this month, Abu-Jamal filed a lawsuit alleging that he has

- See more at: http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2015/08/marilyn-zuniga-and-plight-of-teachers.html#sthash.LRw1NAgG.dpuf

Perdido Street School: MaryEllen Elia Offers Counterattack To Hillsborough School Board Allegations Of Financial Mismanagement

Perdido Street School: MaryEllen Elia Offers Counterattack To Hillsborough School Board Allegations Of Financial Mismanagement:

MaryEllen Elia Offers Counterattack To Hillsborough School Board Allegations Of Financial Mismanagement

The Tampa Bay Times reported last week that former Hillsborough School Superintendent MaryEllen Elia, now the new NYSED Commissioner in New York State, was accused by both members of the Hillsborough school board and the man who replaced her as superintendent of leaving a financial mess in the school district.

Elia, who couldn't be reached for comment by the Tampa Bay Times for two straight days before the original story ran, wrote an op-ed piece on Saturday to pushback against the allegations.

As is always the case with Elia, her pushback is a mix of aggression and diverted responsibility:

Former Hillsborough County school Superintendent MaryEllen Elia said Friday she takes full responsibility for the district’s depleted reserve funds, but that doesn’t mean she was the only one who knew the money was dwindling.

In an op-ed column appearing in Saturday’s edition of The Tampa Tribune, Elia shot back against accusations that she kept school members in the dark while more than half of the district’s $360 million reserve fund was spent in just two years. She insisted that her replacement, Superintendent Jeff Eakins, and school board members were “fully aware” of the state of the reserves.

“The same Board members who routinely micromanaged and overstepped their roles, showed a peculiar lack of interest and lack of understanding of the larger financial issues,” wrote Elia, who landed a job as commissioner of education for the state of New York after being fired from the Hillsborough district in in January.

“My most vocal critics routinely failed to show up or cancelled meetings with me. Their lack of accountability is astounding.”

Here's what some of the board members said in the initial Tampa Bay Times article about how Elia hid the true picture of the district's finances:

Some board members said the budgets that were made public were difficult to understand and they did not get clear answers when they asked direct questions of Saunders and Elia.

"I tried to dig for information," said Harris, who ran for her board seat in 2014 and cast the tie-breaking vote to fire Elia. "But unless you are an expert, it's impossible to get a real budget and real figures."

Stuart, who often asked questions about spending, said she was stonewalled, and despite all her questions was as surprised as the others to learn about the spending issue.

"We had no idea. We honestly had no idea," she said. "We never got the full picture."

Here's more:

Stuart and Harris, who was elected to the board in September, both said they had trouble getting budget documents from Elia Perdido Street School: MaryEllen Elia Offers Counterattack To Hillsborough School Board Allegations Of Financial Mismanagement:

‘I refuse.’ — Teacher rejects Florida’s wacky new program to give bonuses to educators with high SAT/ACT scores - The Washington Post

‘I refuse.’ — Teacher rejects Florida’s wacky new program to give bonuses to educators with high SAT/ACT scores - The Washington Post:

‘I refuse.’ — Teacher rejects Florida’s wacky new program to give bonuses to educators with high SAT/ACT scores

Here’s an update on a kooky new plan that I wrote about in Florida to spend $44 million to award big bonuses to teachers who got high SAT or ACT scores before they went to college — even if they took the test decades ago. (Fine way to spend millions of public dollars, don’t you think?)

Jeffrey S. Solocheck wrote in this Tampa Bay Times story that the Florida’s Best and Brightest Teacher Scholarships didn’t actually make it through the  Republican-led Senate during the legislature’s spring session, but, somehow, was resurrected in a June special session and was included in the 2015-16 Florida education spending budget. To qualify for bonuses of up to $10,000 a teacher “must receive a ‘highly effective’ evaluation rating and have scored at or above the 80th percentile on the SAT or ACT they took in high school,” the story says, and, “for new teachers, just the test score would count.”

It’s just too bad for teachers who never took the SAT or ACT, such as  Faye Cook, a fifth-grade teacher at Wilson Elementary in Plant City, who gets top evaluations, but started her college career at a community college, which did not require either college entrance exam. Cook is a fine teacher who used to get a state-funded bonus for earning National Board certification — but she doesn’t anymore because the state decided that program wasn’t worth funding.

Many teachers have attacked the program for a number of reasons, including that single test scores aren’t representative of what an individual knows or can do, and that the state has better things to do with the money.

Now Solocheck has a follow-up story, saying that a lot of teachers in Florida — despite the criticism of the scholarship fund — have sought to find out how they can apply. But he  also wrote about veteran Pasco County teacher Celeste Richter, a highly rated AP government teacher who doesn’t want to be part of the program. She is quoted as saying:

“I refuse. A test I took in 1991 is not valid to say what a quality educator I am…. As a moral principle, I don’t believe this is an effective way to reward teachers for a good job”

Richter, who is starting her 19th year as a teacher, remembers that she did well on her SATS but won’t bother looking them up to apply.

Solocheck’s story says:

Lawmakers put $44 million into the program, modeling it for 4,400 teachers. But they also stipulated that the award would be prorated based upon the final number of teachers who qualify. In 2013-14, the last available data, more than 68,000 Florida teachers were evaluated as “highly effective.”

If 20 percent of them had SAT or ACT scores in the 80th percentile or higher, as required, the bonus would drop by two-thirds. That doesn’t count new teachers, who don’t have to show evaluation results.

Every time you think you’ve seen it all, something happens and you realize ‘I refuse.’ — Teacher rejects Florida’s wacky new program to give bonuses to educators with high SAT/ACT scores - The Washington Post:

A critical look at the annual high school rankings by U.S. News - The Washington Post

A critical look at the annual high school rankings by U.S. News - The Washington Post:

A critical look at the annual high school rankings by U.S. News

U.S. News & World Report is famous for its college rankings — but it does others too, including an annual ranking of high schools. Are the schools declared the best really the best? Kevin Welner, the director of the  National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado Boulder, examines this issue in this post and the following post. Welner is an attorney and a professor education policy at the UC Boulder. He is also the co-founder of theSchools of Opportunity project, an effort to identify and highlight high schools that use research-based practices to ensure that all students have rich opportunities to succeed.

A version of this appeared on The Conversation, and I asked U.S. News to comment. The magazine took issue with Welner’s argument in a statement, which you can find at the end of this post.

By Kevin Welner

PART ONE

Rankings hold an odd sway over Americans. Assigning a numerical order somehow transforms a subjective opinion into an objective fact. It seems to matter little how the rankings are calculated or the care with which those calculations are undertaken.

I have recently been taking a closer look at the U.S. News and World Reportranking of “best high schools,” the nation’s most influential high school recognition program. In addition to surprising instances of carelessness, I discovered that the publication had deleted evidence concerning the earlier mistakes, and I found a troubling pattern whereby the rankings, which are supposed to recognize quality schooling, actually reward elite enrollment instead.

Given that this write-up is a bit lengthy, I will divide it into two separate parts. The first points out specific technical problems with the rankings. I briefly summarize the key problem that Carol Burris, Sean Feeney, and John Murphy identified and described here on The Answer Sheet, and I then provide additional evidence of how this problem plays out. I also describe how U.S. News apparently responded by removing evidence.

The second parts explores more fundamental problems with the rankings that would remain in place even if the technical problems were fixed. I will look at the results of the U.S. News ratings process, and I question whether it yields rankings that meaningfully identify “best” high schools.

 A Big Problem, Now Concealed

The U.S. News rating process this year altered its past approach for determining whether a school’s students attained proficiency. To illustrate, imagine students A, B, and C entering high school in Grade 9. In the past,U.S. News used what is known as a “cohort” approach to evaluate school quality (e.g., a cohort is the group of entering ninth graders at a school). The question it would ask is whether these three students passed their state-level proficiency exams.

This year, the publication instead took a snapshot of test results in a school in the measured year. So the test scores of A, B, and C may or may not appear, depending on whether they took a proficiency exam that year. Further, the test scores of students outside their cohort might appear, if those non-cohort students took a test that U.S. News decided to include. Moreover, in high-performing districts, one or more of these students might be accelerated and A critical look at the annual high school rankings by U.S. News - The Washington Post:

5 facts about America’s students | Pew Research Center

5 facts about America’s students | Pew Research Center:

5 facts about America’s students



 In a few weeks, America’s roughly 53.5 million K-12 students will head to the classroom. Trading in swimming pools and summer jobs for math problems and history homework, these students will hit the books at one of more than 129,200 schools across the country, including about 5,700 charter schools and 30,900 private schools.

Pew Research Center has found today’s American students as a whole to be more diverse –and on track to be better educated – than their parents and grandparents. Here are five key findings about these students:

1As a whole, America’s K-12 students are more racially diverse than ever. The U.S. Department of Education projected that minorities would outnumber whites at public schools by fall 2014, due largely to fast growth in the number of Hispanic and Asian school-age children born in the U.S. Since 2000 there has also been a large increase in the number of states where at least one-in-five public school kindergartners are Latino.

These changes reflect a broader shift toward a majority-minority youth population. Young Americans are far more likely than older Americans to be racial or ethnic minorities. Data from the Census Bureau show that half of Americans younger than 5 were minorities in 2013, compared with just 17% of those ages 85 or older.

2Yet, even while school-age children as a whole have become more diverse,most white students still attend largely white schools. Just 17.1% of whites attended a school where minorities made up at least half of all students in 2012. Meanwhile, more than three-quarters of Hispanics and blacks (and six-in-ten Asians) attended these majority-minority schools. But many of these minority students are going to school with classmates of their same race or ethnicity. For the 2011-12 school year, the average Latino student attended a school that was 56.8% Latino, and the average black student attended a school that was 48.8% black, according to a recent report from the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles. (The average white student attended a school that was 72.5% white.)

3Students today are more likely to stay in school. As of 2013, America’s high school dropout rate had reached a record low: Just 7% of 18- to 24-year-olds that year had dropped out of high school, down from 12% in 2000. The decline can be attributed to falling numbers of black and Hispanic dropouts. The dropout rate among black students fell by nearly half, from 15% in 2000 to 8% in 2013, while the rate for Hispanics tumbled to a record low of 14%, down from 32% in 2000. Yet while a growing share of Hispanic youths are finishing high school and attending college, Hispanics still lag behind whites in obtaining four-year college degrees.

4America’s students have improved in math and science over the past 20 years – but remain behind students in many other industrialized nations. The United States ranks 35th out of 64 countries in math and 27th in science, according to a cross-national test known as PISA. Although the U.S. spent more per pupil than many countries in 2012 ($115,000), its students performed the same in math as those in Slovakia, which spent $53,000 per student.

Americans are critical of the quality of the nation’s K-12 science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) instruction: Only 29% believe U.S. STEM education is above average or the best in the world, and 29% say it is below average. At the same time, Americans believemath and science skills are less critical to success than communication and reading skills: 90% say communication is one of the most important skills for American children to get ahead, while 79% name math and only 58% name science.

5While they may lag their peers in other nations, American students are outperforming one group: their grandparents. In fact, Millennials are on track to be the most educated generation in history compared with older generations when they were the same age. This is partly due to increases in higher education among minorities, as well as to educational gains for women. Millennial women are nearly four times as likely as women in the Silent generation to have at least a bachelor’s degree.

5 facts about America’s students | Pew Research Center:

Even As States Continue to Leave, PARCC Sets Last Year's Cut Scores | Mercedes Schneider

Even As States Continue to Leave, PARCC Sets Last Year's Cut Scores | Mercedes Schneider:

Even As States Continue to Leave, PARCC Sets Last Year's Cut Scores

On August 07, 2015, NPR released an article concerning setting the cut scores for the PARCC tests that 5 million students took in the spring.

Originally entitled, "Who Is 'Good Enough' in a Common Core World?", the NPR article title was changed to "New Tests Push Schools to Define 'Good Enough."

Perhaps it was a bit too close to the true, original intention of Common Core to turn all of American public education into a "Common Core World" for NPR to actually allow as much in the title of one of its pieces.

In that piece, NPR writer Cory Turner makes this statement:

...Until last year, it was all but impossible to compare students across state lines. Not anymore.

This is not true. States have been required to participate in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) as part of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB).

What is interesting is that the Fordham Institute's grading of state standards (and finding in favor of Common Core even though it did not give Common Core a higher rating than all state standards) demonstrates no connection between their ratings of state standards and NAEP scores.

So now, we have PARCC, and according to NPR, we have a number of individuals meeting to "nail down cut scores for those 5 million tests."

If anyone tells you that PARCC or any other standardized test is by definition objective, don't buy it.

Instead, believe what Center for Public Education director Patte Barth says in that NPR piece:

"Establishing cut scores is part science. It's part art. But it's also part political."

I wonder which part dominates.

Tough call, eh?

So, it seems, this group in Denver is going to make sure that states cannot produce an "illusion of improvement." What is missing, however, is any established connection between PARCC, it's Denver-ballroom-basement-meeting-set cut scores, and previous tests used by the states.

My Louisiana teaching colleague, Herb Bassett, observed as much regarding the NPR link:

Explains how a committee is in process of determining which students passed and which failed the PARCC this year. The scores required for passing (the cut scores) have not yet been set even though the tests have been taken.

This radio piece sells the point that for the first time, proficiency tests will be comparable across some states. However, there is no way to compare them to the tests (LEAP and iLEAP) from years past. Thus, there is no way to determine if 

Even As States Continue to Leave, PARCC Sets Last Year's Cut Scores | Mercedes Schneider:

25 Leadership Quotes Even The "Dumbest" Leaders Can Learn From | Aleksandr Noudelman | LinkedIn

25 Leadership Quotes Even The "Dumbest" Leaders Can Learn From | Aleksandr Noudelman | LinkedIn:

25 Leadership Quotes Even The "Dumbest" Leaders Can Learn From

Not everyone is meant for a leadership position. Unfortunately, with this uncertain economy we may be put in one, whether we like it or not.  And when that happens, we have to act and learn fast. And if and when we don't, we could find ourselves unemployed in a heartbeat. Here are 25 leadership quotes even the "dumbest" leader can learn from.

1. "The key to successful leadership today is influence, not authority." --Ken Blanchard

2. "No person can be a great leader unless he takes genuine joy in the successes of those under him." --W. H. Auden

3. "Good leaders make people feel that they're at the very heart of things, not at the periphery. Everyone feels that he or she makes a difference to the success of the organization. When that happens people feel centered and that gives their work meaning." --Warren Bennis

4. "No man will make a great leader who wants to do it all himself, or to get all the credit for doing it." -- Andrew Carnegie

5. "A leader takes people where they want to go. A great leader takes people where they don't necessarily want to go, but ought to be." --Rosalynn Carter

6. "Perhaps the most central characteristic of authentic leadership is the relinquishing of the impulse to dominate others." --David Cooper

7. "The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality." -- Max DePree

8. "Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it." --Dwight D. Eisenhower

9. "A boss creates fear, a leader confidence. A boss fixes blame, a leader corrects mistakes. A boss knows all, a leader asks questions. A boss makes work drudgery, a leader makes it interesting. A boss is interested in himself or herself, a leader is interested in the group." --Russell H. Ewing

10. "Leadership is practiced not so much in words as in attitude and in actions. " -- Harold Geneen

11. "One of the true tests of leadership is the ability to recognize a problem before it becomes an emergency." --Arnold Glasow

12. "All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership. " -- John Kenneth Galbraith

13. "The very essence of leadership is that you have to have vision. You can't blow an uncertain trumpet." --Theodore Hesburgh

14. "The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in other men the conviction and the will to carry on... The genius of a good leader is to leave behind him a situation which common sense, without the grace of genius, can deal with successfully." --Walter Lippmann

15. "Leadership is getting someone to do what they don't want to do, to achieve what they want to achieve." --Tom Landry

16. "Leaders must be close enough to relate to others, but far enough ahead to motivate them." --John Maxwell

17. "The real leader has no need to lead-- he is content to point the way." -- Henry Miller

18. "The leader must know, most know that he knows, and must be able to make it abundantly clear to those about him that he knows." --Clarence B. Randall

19. "The person who know "how" will always have job. The person who knows "why" will always be his boss." --Diane Ravitch

20. "A true leader is hated by most, and respected by all. A follower is liked by all, and respected by none." --Scott Smigler

21."Outstanding leaders go out of their way to boost the self-esteem of their personnel. If people believe in themselves, it's amazing what they can accomplish." --Sam Walton 

22. "You know what makes leadership? It is the ability to get men to do what they don't want to do and like it." --Harry S. Truman

23. "Nothing so conclusively proves a man's ability to lead others as what he does from day to day to lead himself." --Thomas J. Watson

24.  "Efficiency is doing the thing right. Effectiveness is doing the right thing." --Peter Drucker

25. "If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader." – John Quincy Adams

I put "dumbest" in quotations because no one is ever dumb. A leader may just be unnatural. But as they gain the experience, skills and confidence, I am sure they will flourish in the job. 

Take me as an example. I first wanted to work at Tim Hortons as a supervisor until retirement. Then I went into Administrative work and thought that's the ideal work for me. It wasn't until I went into teaching that I found my true passion and realized that I was under selling myself. 25 Leadership Quotes Even The "Dumbest" Leaders Can Learn From | Aleksandr Noudelman | LinkedIn:

That’s Rich. Across Country A Scramble Is On To Find Teachers: (NYT 8/10/15) | DCGEducator: Doing The Right Thing

That’s Rich. Across Country A Scramble Is On To Find Teachers: (NYT 8/10/15) | DCGEducator: Doing The Right Thing:

That’s Rich. Across Country A Scramble Is On To Find Teachers: (NYT 8/10/15)

This is no surprise. For years we have been predicting the demise of a great profession because of so–called “reform”. Ms. Rich writes a great deal in this article about this shortage but neglects to point out how changes in education over the past 15 years created this problem.

I’ve drawn on quotes from my book (Doing The Right Thing: A Teacher Speaks (published in December 2013) or posts that are at least a year old to show the point.

• Barbara Tuchman, in her 1984 book, The March of Folly, from Troy to Vietnam, defines folly as the “pursuit of public policy contrary to self-interest, where people pursue the same failed policies and expect different results.” What better example of folly is there than current public education policy?
• Reformers live by the standard of industrial America developed a full century ago by Frederick W. Taylor. Captains of industry (robber barons) supported scientific management, as it was called, in order to make their employees more productive. Today’s policy makers want to turn teachers into industrial employees, churning students out like Ford workers churned out Model T’s.
• Our nation’s media, conservative and liberal alike spread misinformation. They vilify the teaching profession, regardless of how successful many teachers are with children of all ages. Our politicians implement laws and plans based on that misinformation. Foundations give huge sums of money based on that misinformation. Corporations profit from that misinformation.
• Instead of “getting rid of bad teachers,” more good and excellent teachers are leaving. Teaching colleagues, who three years ago said they loved their job and would stay until someone carried them out, are now saying they That’s Rich. Across Country A Scramble Is On To Find Teachers: (NYT 8/10/15) | DCGEducator: Doing The Right Thing: