Hey, I'm Home...and I learned some things while I was away...

You might not know it but as School Directors, of which I am one, we have a small budget for Professional Development. That means, that the job we were elected to do is enormous and comes with very little training so we set aside some funds to educate ourselves. Luckily, I am a business owner and have some ideas about running a business, not an $80+ million one, but nonetheless, I do understand businesses. That is what your school district is, right, a business where the product is educated kids.

Well, I just got back from 3 days of School Board director immersion at the National School Board Directors Conference. Yes, this trip is paid for by the taxpayers, and I will argue until the day I am un-elected to serve (which I hope is never because I truly love the job of school board director as I get to be in the fore front of helping 5500 children), that the more I know about being a School Director the better the taxpayers and students of William Penn School District will be.

But I digress...here is what I learned, in brief and more details will be forthcoming...I plan to share lots.

This is what you should know about education in our country and in WPSD:
1. Unfunded mandates run rampant. The No Child Left Behind legislation is being changed, goals and time lines moved, and while we might have thought Obama got it...he and Education Secretary Arnie Duncan might really do some damage.
2. We, as a country, have almost no plan on how to best educate kids in poverty or in rural areas. They are asking good folks like Geoffrey Canada, president and CEO of the Harlem Children’s Zone in Harlem, New York, an organization whose goal is to increase high school and college graduation rates among students in Harlem, but our Nations plan is really not developed. For more on Canada see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Canada
3. WPSD is doing some things really right, but clearly our work is going to become even more challenging as we wrestle with funding, mandates from up above and pensions.
4. We are not alone...many, many school districts have issues very much like ours.

I come home tired and, quite frankly, pretty depressed that there is so little to help kids in poverty learn, but I also come home angry. Angry that we spend more on our jail system then our education system, angry that the job of school districts is made so difficult by top-down legislation that professes to help and yet, supplies no help, just pages and pages of rules and mandates, that even the experts are not sure what they mean or how to best implement them.

Bottom line, its frustrating, but I am way smarter then I was 3 days ago. I intend to take those smarts right into our schools. ALL children are our future, not just the middle class and upper class ones...we need to act like it. We need our country to get it, as a lack of a national commitment to educating EVERY child works its way to little Lansdowne with a huge effects.