What Glenn Youngkin is Going to Tell Us

Today Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin is scheduled to unveil his 90 Day Achievement Gap Report on Virginia Education at a press conference. 

He will say 

After two years of the deepest pandemic in 100 years students are behind in their learning; graduation rates have dropped; and discipline issues are up. He will say that local school districts and their teachers have failed our children. 

He will say

The way to fix the learning loss and graduation

   rates his data points reveal is 

More money and supports to private schools

Opening more charter schools,

Teaching students to do a job at the local company 

Doubling down on More testing, More data collection, and More harsh discipline in public schools.. 

He will say 

His Education cabinet and his new replacements on the Board of Education will implement these education salvation policies for Parents of Virginia.

He will Not tell us

Schools did not create the pandemic. 

After two years of chaotic upheaval, loss of family members, and disrupted life rhythms, of course students do not test well, and some have had to go to work or become caregivers rather than focusing on their studies.  This is not the fault of Virginia’s parents, students, or the schools in our communities.  

Learning with a few early childhood exceptions does not have an expiry date.  

Whether a student learns their multiplication tables this year or next year, does not alter their ability to learn them. If we leave the schools to their jobs and support them well, our kids will recover any learning they missed.

Our families will rebound 

If our communities and children are supported with the care, consideration and the schools they deserve. The worst thing you can do to all of us is to test more, punish more, and separate us into broken up enclaves suspicious of our neighbors.

Mr. Youngkin will not tell us

            All the recommendations he is presenting were tried for 20 years in other states and failed.

He is simply doing what his job training taught him to do-  Sow distrust, Disrupt the system;  take it over; sell off the assets. He was trained this is the way to make himself, and his wealthy mostly out of state friends, richer at the expense of Virginia and her parents and children.

CRT -Let's Clear This Up

 Back in June, Elizabeth Schultz, a former FCPS School Board member who lost her last bid for election, published an OpEd in the Fairfax Times promoting quite a few oft-repeated, rabid-right talking points about Critical Race Theory and ominously said CRT is being taught in Fairfax County Public Schools.  She is not alone in glomming onto a quick soundbite as a way to attack the other political party and liberals. Lots of politicos all across the country who are trying to hold onto or return to power are doing it.

I did not see the article until the other day, but her points are so distorted that I can’t let her piece or this question go unanswered, even if it’s a couple of months later.

The points she put forward were:

•       Our local schools do teach Critical Race Theory to students.
•          It is a Marxist theory that promotes race as the most important thing about an individual.
•          That CRT is the same thing as equity, justice, diversity, and culturally responsive learning.
•          That FCPS incorporated CRT into its curriculum through a curriculum rewrite in 2018 by Colleen Eddy and Fairfax County supervisors adopted it through its OneFairfax program.

All of these points are, well- not really true- at least the way Schultz and her friends distort and misrepresent them. 

Critical race theory is a very specific collegiate and legal form of analysis. It is part of a collection of graduate level Critical Analyses studies that can range from Economic (sometimes Marxist, sometimes Capitalist), to Feminist, to Racial, or other perspectives in their focus. The most notable thing about Critical Analyses is that each type looks at an unsolved problem from a perspective that has been traditionally overlooked and looks at aspects of a situation that have been left out of the problem-solving cycle.

Critical Analysis can influence how teachers and policy makers choose what they teach and how they teach it, or determine what policies are most fair, but it is not a good choice for direct K-12 instruction because it requires understanding words like structural determinism, epistemology, and deconstructionism- among a lot of other philosophical and critical analysis terms.

It is true that Gloria Ladson-Billings, the president of the National Academy of Education, and author of The Dream Keepers recommends teachers learn Critical Race Analysis to better their understanding of pedagogical choices, but nobody is proposing to teach 7 year olds post-modernism and deconstruction.

Once teachers or decision makers apply the analysis, they are able to see how laws, regulations, and societal norms have affected people of a particular category. Insights from looking at policies through the lens of race can be fairly obvious. 

For instance, anti-slavery can be thought of as the original application of critical race analysis, even though the term CRT  would not be created until 1989 at a workshop led by Kimberle’ Crenshaw.  In the 19th century, anti-slavery people looked at how slavery was affecting black people on the ground in real terms and determined it was a harmful legal institution to them- Yes, it’s just that simple.

Today, we apply CRA when we ask ourselves how our zoning ordinances or subsidized housing rules affect communities predominantly of color. Or how our school boundaries and funding formulas affect families of color or poverty. We also apply Critical Feminist Analysis when we ask how does this policy or practice affect young mothers or elderly women.  Thinking and analysis is not something to be afraid of, but a problem solving tool to be used among others.

Though CRT/CRA does examine how views on race have been embedded and highly influences our cultural practices, it does not propose that a person’s race is the most important or only thing in forming anyone’s character, intellect, personality, or actions. Institutional racism may hamper a person’s chances of getting healthcare, an education, finding higher paying jobs, and acquiring property and financial security, but certainly other family and personal conditions are important in creating the intersections of values, traits, and opportunities that combine to make up our lives. It does look at how individual racism becomes more pervasive, invisible, and powerful when embedded into societal rules.

For instance, if a businessman/plantation owner believes s/he is dependent on free labor to stay wealthy, s/he might move heaven and earth to protect that ability to have free slave labor, and when those slaves are deprived of pay for their labor, their daily lives suffer from the limits that imposes.

Society wide that structure affects the whole race of people who are enslaved, and affects their descendants, who also do not have access to that money they could have earned without the structural racism of slavery. Eventually that view, embedded in government policy, led to a bloody and divisive war that had massive destructive effects for the plantation owner as well.

Similarly, critical race analysis might reveal that today’s tax codes, pay scales, and access to property skew the economic potential of most people of color and continues to affect the opportunities of black and brown families. CRA also asks if there is a way to ameliorate the negative consequences of structural bias and racism.

So, No. Racism as the most important thing in an individual’s life is not what CRT/CRA is about, but it is apt to reveal how insidiously destructive policies built on bias are.

According to Ms. Schultz, efforts to address cultural and racial diversity and to create a school system equitable to all began in 2018 with a rewrite of the social studies curriculum.  (Right before she lost her seat on the board in 2019).

I don’t mean to demean Colleen Eddy’s work, but in reality, Fairfax County schools had been grappling with meeting the needs of an increasingly diverse student population for about 20 years before that, and the 2018 rewrite Ms. Eddy oversaw was a reflection of what had already been happening in the classrooms across the county.

I know this because in 1998 when I was a FCPS parent of elementary students and began teaching, individual schools were already adapting toward a world view, rather than a one-ethnicity view.  Elementary concerts were featuring songs from a variety of cultures around the world, and picture books were being incorporated with heros of varied ethnicities.

As early as the late 1990’s schools in the county were adopting programs like International Baccalaureate which incorporated a more global cadre of creators into the curriculum in lieu of only western-centric authors, art, and ideas.  Those programs also seeped into the general curriculum of our schools, so that all students were getting a wider education.

Deliberate choices to expand the curriculum toward a more diverse and inclusive canon were not initiated to address the concerns of poor or black or brown families, but to address the concerns of those economically stable and well educated families who knew their children needed a wider education to become well-functioning adults in the broader society of the 21st century that would include many nationalities. They were driven by parent involvement.

In truth, though, those expanded horizons resonated with the colors and cultures of the students we were seeing in our classrooms, and enabled students to be excited about a curriculum that reflected them and their heritages.  White students were not left out, but all students got a more universal view of what it means to be human in this world.

Because the county’s population continued to diversify, and because those program changes were so successful at building a highly regarded system, by 2018 those changes were becoming codified in the central office to reflect what was already happening across the county.

Similarly, the Board of Supervisors had a growing awareness that the county was developing pockets of economic disparity which threatened the unity and common prosperity for the county. They knew they were looking at a growing level of diversity, and an economic disparity in which the average family income on one side of the county was about half what it was in other parts of the county.  Without a problem solving model taking that into account, Fairfax ran the risk of becoming a bifurcated rich-poor economy with haves and have nots that would change the reputation which had built a highly attractive community. One Fairfax was a reflection of that awareness.

So, much as Ms. Schultz and many of her friends would like to frighten us all about the threat of Critical Race Theory, there is nothing to fear from a step on the problem-solving wheel that asks, “Have we taken the needs of all our residents/students into consideration?” 

Do we really want to be two, or three, or five Fairfaxes? Or two, or three, or five nations? 

Gaslit School Nation Redux: The Democratic Version

 

Education policy may be the one place real bipartisanship exists in Washington, but that may not be a good thing for children. 

Wednesday, March 24, 2021 almost exactly one year after Covid-19 closed most of the nation’s schools, Dr. Miguel Cardona, Joe Biden‘s new Secretary of Ed kicked off his first big public event: a 3-hour virtual Return to Schools Education Summit. The summit featured an all-star cast and almost flawless supporting company. 

The opening speaker was well loved and revered, Dr. Jill Biden and the summit wrapped up with the President himself.

This was President Joe Biden’s chance to convince the teachers and parents of America not only that the disastrous four years of Trump and DeVos’ corruption and lies were done, but that we have collectively turned the corner on C19 and are now ready to re-open our school buildings and our communities for the children and families of the country. What great news to deliver! 

Dr. Cardona’s second major speaker of the day was Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the new head of the CDC who has been on most major networks every day for weeks already assuring the nation that though we are not ready to reopen adult venues completely, we are ready to reopen children’s areas at the reduced 3ft distance (as long as they all wear masks). Both Dr. Cardona and Dr. Walensky both referenced lovingly their own children. Each of whom would be able to graduate this coming year. The new Covid variants were given a short phrase, “Yes, we’re concerned,” but there was little about the high plateau of cases, or the potential for post spring break outbreaks. The message was: 3 feet is safe. 

This first Summit was also the moment when the Biden administration and Secretary Cardona had the chance to establish the direction, vision, and positions they would chart for the future of US Schools. In today’s view of the education landscape, divided between billionaire investors and working class teachers and parents, everyone was waiting to see. 

Who would they listen to? 

Whose perspective would they deem valid? 

And whose expertise would they respect with action, not just well worn phrases?

 Were it not for the weary reality on the ground, the smiles and cheerful demeanors might have gone completely unchallenged, and the determinedly intense, unbreakable smile of Dr. Cardona (who is under fire for requiring Spring 2021 standardized testing) might have been convincing. 

 The presentation team consistently portrayed gratitude, chipper determinism, and plucky optimism, but more importantly the selection of presenters was perfectly designed to affirm and uplift the past and future reform-charter-business model of school management. 

 Reports from the field kicked off with Cleveland Ohio’s CEO (not superintendent) Eric Gordon and Chief of Schools Lisa Farmer-Cole, who had been integral to implementing the charter-portfolio-schools Cleveland Plan.

Cleveland is one of a minority of places that still is under “takeover.” It has a mayoral controlled and appointed school board, and 15 charter schools that represent over half the students in the 32K district. Gordon in his presentation even gave a shout-out to JEB Bush’s Chiefs for Change. 

No mention was made of the study from Stanford’s Hoover Institute that showed Ohio charter students learn 36 days less math and 14 days less reading than traditional public school students.

The second district featured was Tulsa Oklahoma’s Superintendent Deborah Gist, who was the DC State Superintendent during Michelle Rhee’s tenure as superintendent and is a proud alum of both the Kennedy School of Government and the Broad Academy class of 2008. Tulsa is about the same size district as Cleveland, but has fewer charters, with 7 in a 32K district. At least three of which have experienced newsworthy scandals in the last several years: Epic, Dove Science Academy, and Langston Hughes Academy. 

For labor coverage, the two representatives were Cleveland teachers’ new union president Shari Obrenski (AFT), and NYC’s UFT President Michael Mulgrew both of whom messaged the importance of collaboration with administration. Notable is that none of the major leaders of the unions, grassroots movements, nor large districts that have fought for their staffs’ safety during the pandemic were there. 

The pedagogy reports were about exciting summer programs that should be offered this year and was coordinated by long time presidential ed advisor, Stanford’s Linda Darling-Hammond. 

She brought with her a collection of teachers expressing deep gratitude for being allowed to be there and cheerfully reporting “best practice” plans to teach first graders how to learn outside and choose a job path this summer as part of their social-emotional learning. After a year of traumas like their family losing jobs, homes, and lives, it is bound to be great fun for first graders to learn how they can one day fill a slot in the corporate-worker-world of the future economy. 

 The Portrait of a National School System painted by the new Democratic administration is a picture of positively resilient school managers, lots of messaging about collaboration and data, with Spring 2021 universal testing, all buildings open, large scale summer school, a business model management plan, a high value for school choice and charters, and lots of well-trained workers for US companies. 

By the time President Biden came on to announce the $130B for schools included in the Covid relief package, the four note chord that sounded in my head, was 

“That’s great! 

What strings are attached?

Whose pocket is that earmarked for?

And the American Enterprise Institute is going to love this!”

Requiem for A Great School System

Donald Trump & the conservatives’ response to coronovirus has been deadly for many things; people, families, mom and pop businesses, concerts, movies, the theatre.  But of all the things dying, the one I am mourning this morning is our education system, and though the bigger U.S. education system from PreK-Grad school now needs hospitalization-

There have been 6 Covid cases in schools
since this photo earlier this week.

Today we are about to take a relatively famous and spectacular  school system off life support. Fairfax County Public Schools is the 10th largest school system in the country, serving a sprawling and hugely diverse population that runs from inner urban style communities through the suburbs to still mixed farm and mini-mansions exoburbs. The wealth of it’s cultural diversity and benefits is legendary, rivaled only by a handful of the largest and most densely populated cities. 

Fairfax County Public Schools has been the jewel in the crown of Virginia’s status as first in attractiveness to businesses.  At least three governors of Virginia have related stories of negotiating with CEOs to come to Virginia, and all three expressed pride that the deal maker companies came for is Virginia’s schools. 

After today, that is unlikely to be the reality. We are losing more than most Fairfax residents can possibly imagine. 

Fairfax County Public Schools has long had a stunningly skilled teaching force and staff that could do miracles and has had almost unlimited dedication to the welfare and learning of their students. With 70% of teachers holding master’s degrees and many multiple certifications, they still taught even though lower education requirements and higher pay was available to them. 

As immigrant populations came to the county, it was the school staffs that enabled them to reach mainstream functioning at almost lightspeed; taking students who spoke no English to 96% pass rates on the barrier English SOL in 3-5 years of instruction, and delivering math scores that monolithic and wealthy communities envied.

The instructional force in FCPS has offered and produced award winning numbers on advanced level courses in every field, from math to civics, theatre and robotics, not just in the star school TJ, but in almost every pyramid in the county, consistently bringing home the kinds of opportunities and launches for their students that only the most privileged of families dream of for their children. 

The ratio of students, poor, working class, middle class, and wealthy who have made it to highly competitive universities has been more than impressive.  

Today that work force is being dismissed en masse unless they are willing to come in to work- Now; regardless of the numbers, regardless of the risk.  

Without evidence that aging ventilations systems have been updated to handle the virus.

Without PPE that was promised to be there

Without testing of students or fellow staff

Without required social distancing or masks for students.

While the school board is still virtual

While central office is still virtual

While numbers are still rising

By the end of day today, most of the staff of FCPS are being forced to take a stand to be available at call to go into buildings now or resign, with no option for change. (the only other options are a year’s LOA without pay or health insurance, or retire). 

Even if most of the staff decide to come into the buildings, even if most of them manage to survive the cavalier use of their dedication and lives, the teaching force that made Fairfax County Public Schools great will never be the same, not as the premier place to teach, and likely neither will the great school system it made. 

The #OpenFCPS group that is demanding the schools fully open do not care about that though. Using the language and tactics of Trump, passing on misinformation: 

• Children don’t get it (There have been 3072 of age 0-19 cases in Fairfax and 1943 cases of 70+ age people) 

• It’s not a serious disease for children (unless the child is immune impaired or get MIS-C) 

• Children don’t transmit it (both the CDC and Princeton studies say otherwise.)

#OpenFCPS uses the repertoire of Trumpisms like a playbook: 

• What aboutism (Delivery services are working)

• Name calling, accusing, and demeaning (lazy, union thugs, selfish)

• threatening (they have already threatened two school board members with recall campaigns if they do not open schools now.)

Which is the tipoff that this is a political game, not a genuine concern for children or our community. The push to open schools is the act of a political minority trying to regain political clout in a county they just lost- and regain that clout by bullying. 

So, today the School Board and Dr. Brabrand’s administration will collaboratively kill the goose that laid the golden egg, in nursery rhyme terms, to satisfy them. 

In July when school board member Abrar Omeish asked health Department head, Gloria Addo-Ayensu if there’s a guaranteed loss of life if schools reopen, Dr. Addo-Ayensu said the short answer is, “Yes.” 

The only question is who: Will it be my child, your child, my child’s teacher or yours. Whose family member: the teacher’s spouse, or parent, the student’s parent or grandparent.  It will be more than a few someone’s. And who will represent FCPS at the funerals?

In Memoriam FCPS

Why DMV Educators Must Say NO! to Trumps' Demand to Re-Open Schools

In an article titled "Trump Urged governors to get going on school re-openings," the Hill reported: On Monday April 27, the President had a conference call with Governors.  Afterward, Monday at a press conference detailing his administration's ongoing efforts against coronavirus, The President, told reporters, "Not a long way to go in the school system right now… for this year. But I think you’ll see a lot of schools open up, even if it’s for a very short period of time." (The Hill)

Reports had already been circulating stories of him pressuring Gov. Hogan of Maryland, Mayor Bowser of DC, and Gov. Northam of Virginia to open schools.

Though I’ve been a union member for 22 years, and an organizer for Educators United grassroots actions, I am not a big advocate for strikes.  I’ve always seen them as a last resort when other options have been exhausted, and when the problem was so extreme compromise could not be the answer. However right now, the Educators of the Mid-Atlantic and the nation have to become the voice of reason.

In the last 3 days there have been 1,941 new COVID cases in Virginia, 2,865 in Maryland, and 193 in DC. (in DC, figures are for 2 day only, no figures for 4/27); making the total DMV new cases 4,999 for just the last 3 days. (Wikipedia)

But the administration and the financial sector is antsy, and wants baby-sitting so it can call back its workers. Returning students to school in these high-risk circumstances cannot be rationalized as for any other reason.  It is too late to do serious recovery work, and little would be academically accomplished with this short burst of days.  

Now is the time the Educators of the DMV must band together and refuse to allow schools to open. 

The Maryland Education Association, the Virginia Education Association, the Washington Teachers Union, and American Federation of Teachers units in Maryland and Virginia must all call on their teachers to stay out should the state and District governments cave to Trump’s demands.

Non-unionized educators and the Educators United movements of the area must likewise refuse to return to work in buildings should the call come to do so before it is fully safe for students to attend.

Parent Groups from the PTA to local PTOs, and grassroots groups like Parents Across America, and the Opt-Out Movement must stand with their Educators and local schools to refuse to send their children as sacrificial lambs to the craven call of politicians and the financial sector. 

Economic and Social Justice groups must likewise refuse to allow our children to be sacrificed for the continued profit of the elites.

Our state, local, and district school boards must refuse to ‘follow orders’ and say no to sending our students into harms way for the sake of oil and stock prices.

When we are at school Educators are charged with protecting and defending our students from harm, and Educators have done so in numerous dangerous circumstances. That is no less necessary or true now.  I recognize it is illegal in all three regions the DMV to strike. However, it is also illegal to kill children, and when it comes to the choice, Educators must participate in the first, not the second. There are some things which should remain non-negotiable.

Should the order come down to resume in-building classes, Educators must refuse and not allow schools to reopen until it is safe for our students to return to their classrooms: Regardless of what the President, the Administration, the States, or any other authority says.

Out of Kilter - The Extreme Polarities Exposed by Covid-19

The author with Lily Eskildsen Garcia
and Randi Weingarten delivering
DeVos report cards

                  

Yesterday morning I saw the notice for the upcoming live stream unveiling of the National Assessment Governing Board’s National Report Card on Civics, Geography and US History. Another sign that not much has changed, in spite of the daily reality that everything has changed.

The data in this report card will be like the report cards students receive this year, an incomplete rating due to circumstances beyond control, yet still a reflection of a society wildly out of equilibrium.

Educators have become accustomed in the last 20 years to collecting data on a myriad of minutia about their students and their practice, and having it used to competitively measure their students, their professional lives, and their communities.  It is mandated. Even the educational resistance got in the spirit of measurement, facetiously giving Betsy DeVos her F report cards from teachers across the country at the end of her first year in office.

Then came 2020 and Covid-19, which turned everything we had been told was “best practice” on its head. All the meticulously developed standards, tests, and step-by-step delivery methods have become suddenly impossible to implement.  The measurements which revealed children and families were in widespread poverty and deeply distressed no longer needed standardized tests to expose the situation. 

Even if we could by some amazing stretch of effort develop testing capabilities in the middle of a pandemic, there is no way to deliver the instruction in a way that would allow our students and us to be safe, and no way to compare the wildly variant conditions of student trauma or student exposure to learning, much less create uniform testing conditions. Literally, abandoning competitiveness has become a life or death choice.

Everything we were told was required is no longer possible. 

Simultaneously, the economic system we had all come to rely on as the condition for daily life, and the standards and measurements related to free-market-capitalism began a free-fall which all the king's horses and all the king's men could not prevent or stop. 

Everything we believed about how life ran is no longer how things are. 

Policy makers across all sectors of society are scampering to figure out how to recover from a total disruption of the status quo. Yet, others are recognizing that a return to the status quo is both impossible and unwise because it would leave us all vulnerable to the next disaster. 

So, this morning I was struck, not just by how hollow National Report Cards are at this point, but by their connection to all the other competition driven components/sectors of our society. 

Education reform and how we conduct our society has long been driven by two complementary opposites: Collaboration and Competition. 

A complementary opposite is also often called a polarity. They are two ideas that appear to be opposites, and in either/or thinking one solves the problem and the other is the problem, depending on which pole you prefer. 

To those who prefer competition, collaboration is often seen from it’s weaknesses as ineffectual and less productive. To those who prefer collaboration, competition is viewed from its negative traits, and seen as destructive and elitist. Yet when both sides of a complementary pair are exercised in punctuated equilibrium from their strengths, the deep dives into dysfunction can be mostly avoided, and timely response to problems are more possible.  When we move from an either/or dichotomy to a both/and view, the pair can create a dynamic energy flow that is more successful. 

The standardized tests and school report cards of our recent education policies have been based heavily on the competition side of this particular polarity or c-pair. Those who have promoted standardization and assessment consistently maintain that it is about global competitiveness of our children. Just as radical free-market capitalism is about an intense competitiveness dependent on competing against and defeating other vendors or providers. Indeed we have reached the point that we use the competition model of free market capitalism as the basis for most of our sectors of society, including education, government, and even religious organizations.

Those who have resisted the education “reform” movement have often done so based on an argument for the other side of this c-pair- Collaboration or cooperation. As competition measures participants in an activity against one another, collaboration approaches endeavors as a mutual effort among participants with the goal being for all to achieve as much as possible without it becoming an extreme win-lose scenario. What measurement there is becomes more concerned with progress for all than winning for one or a few. 

The irony about polarities is that while they are often seen as exclusive opposites, in reality they are both necessary. Neither can function without the other. Each is positive and useful when functioning at positive levels, and when both sides of the pair are in dynamic equilibrium, functioning in their healthy ranges, both are effective.  Similarly, when either is over emphasized, it becomes dominant, and swings into it’s unhealthy range. When that happens, that side of the pole can create a world of problems, including a collapse of the system. 

All dictators and empires are based on an extreme form of competitiveness. The leader or country must have ultimate control of all others. Communes and Kibbutzes are based on collaborative ideas, and old fashioned communism as practiced in the 20th century was a failed attempt at collaborative economics and government. Neither of the extremes - either dictatorships or communism were the positive iterations of their side of the polarity, but both sides of the polarity are required to develop a functioning system. 

I am watching as those in decision making positions try frantically to figure out how we can return our systems to the way they were, even doubling down on more of what was. This week Michael Petrilli from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and Stanford was making the case in the Washington Post that we should hold children back, and double down on increased seat time and do double testing to make up for the measurements missed to re-establish who is ahead and who is behind. There have been others suggesting that we abandon students deemed less able to focus on the ones whom we expect to be successful.  Paul Reville of the Harvard Graduate School of Education has been writing for The74 and Boston Globe, quickly trying to recover dominance of influence by acknowledging poverty and systemic failures without acknowledging HGSE and its promotion of competitiveness as having contributed to the entrenched dysfunctional competitiveness that created those failures.

But, if we are to survive this crisis with the least damage possible, and be ready to meet the accelerating next crises- whether it be a pandemic, food or water shortages, or intense weather patterns, or wildfires, or rising seas- we will have to recalibrate our emphasis about this polarity. 

Collaboration does not preclude knowledge of the variables and conditions in a situation; in fact, it may involve incorporating more details, just not in the same way and not for the same purposes. Nor does recalibration involve a total abandonment of healthy competition. It just avoids the dysfunctional by-any-means mentality that has us on the brink of collapse.

When Covid-19 arrived, we were already crippled by our own deep dive into the competitiveness side of this polarity, and our win-at-all-costs mentality continues to deepen the crisis.  We were receiving multiple signals that we were too far in dysfunctional overemphasis on competition. Yet, we were insistently ignoring those signals. Even our outrageous salaries for CEOs and professional athletes is a symptom of that disequilibrium. Now we realize the effects of that lopsided emphasis has much deeper and more damaging effects than a few out of whack salaries.

The time when we can ignore those signals is past. The stakes have gone up, and societal survival is at stake.  More measurement, whether by national or local report cards or digital tracking may give us a false sense of understanding, but will not solve the failures of our societal disequilibrium.

For more information about Managing Polarities or Both/And Thinking see the work of Barry Johnson, Cliff Kyser, Beena Sharma, or Michael DePass at the Center for Creative Leadership

#10&10in2020

Why Virginia Educators United’s 10% and 10% pay increase

is the Reasonable and Appropriate Choice for Virginia 

Governor Northam’s proposed 2 year Virginia budget calls for 0 increase for teachers in the first year, and 3% in the second year.  Virginia Educators United, the campaign begun in 2018 to raise funding for public schools, is putting forward a 10% and 10% Demand structured to reach all by making it easier for localities to accept the state funding. 

“Good luck with that, never happen.” Is the reflexive response many people knowledgeable about school funding in Virginia have to that recommendation.  But a look at just the facts, reveals a strong case that #10&10in2020 is the more appropriate number for this budget than either the Governor’s or other proposed lower figures.

First of all, educators in Virginia are $8,000 per year behind national average pay in spite of Virginia being 10 or 12 in wealth (depending on whose figures you use). Two years ago the legislature passed legislation that directed a goal of at least national average salaries for public school employees.  No attempt has been made as yet to start monitoring or scheduling attaining that goal.  It would take a  9% and 9% increase during the next two years to just reach the legislatively directed goal of the national average.

Secondly, for several years the issue of teacher shortages has been widely publicized as a major concern for the commonwealth. The Governor’s budget, which would be the equivalent of a pay cut, is likely to make the shortages far worse, accelerating the growing flood of teachers from Virginia schools, and making it nearly impossible for districts to compete against other states in attracting qualified candidates. The 0% & 3% is also likely to discourage college students from enrolling in education programs which have dropped in enrollment to dangerously low levels already, at least in part because $31K less than your other graduating classmates is too big a hit to take with today’s heavy student loans. With anything less than the national average, the exodus will continue as well because no one wants to work in the lower half of the market. 

The third reason 10%&10% is appropriate is because virtually every elected official in the state’s aspirational campaign message was about supporting education.  To renege on K-12 educators, students, and communities now would expose the Democratic party and individual electeds to accusations of falseness which would undermine looming and future elections by breaking trust with the families of Virginia in a glaring way.  

However, taking the bold move to fully fund the SOQs as recommended by the Board of Education at $2B (which would provide adequate dollars for the 10% increases), would give credence to a grand new vision for the Commonwealth as a point of destination for the best schools in the country. Since educators already achieve rankings that place Virginia near the top (4th in the nation) with their current miserable provisions, it makes sense to take pr advantage and give them some real funds to work with, which would affirm both their achievements and the state’s commitment to high quality schools. 

The fallback argument that there is not enough revenue for #10&10in2020 is seriously embarrassing. Whatever combination the legislature decides on – from distributed Corporate returns to the lowlow 40 year old corporate tax with loopholes that allow 40% of large corporations to pay no tax, to the $500M in revenues that exceed expectations announced in December, to a more progressive income tax structure, to the gaming funds, the potential marijuana funds, and, and, and- there are clearly enough ways to provide for the schools without making anyone too uncomfortable. 

Why would Virginia not be proud to be first in the nation in education instead of 40th in funding, even if it meant dropping to 2^nd or 3^rd in the nation for business? Yet, educators are not asking for top pay in the nation, or even top levels for all school funding. They are only asking for the national average – 25^th- and what the Board of Ed says is needed to make up for prior losses. It is what is needed before the public service disruptors in both parties collapse the school system that contributed so heavily toward making us first in the nation for business.

#10&10in2020 is neither outrageous, nor unattainable.  It is what our educators should be receiving already without having to ask.  

Pass it on #10&10in2020- the sensible and appropriate choice.