• Salaries. (In independent schools, most employees do not know how much one another earns. In public schools, salary schedules, open meetings laws, and union rules usually make such information public knowledge).
• White privilege, racism, sexism, economic disparity, and social justice issues as applied to your school.
• Sex and sensuality.
• Spiritual and religious issues.
• Incompetency. Insubordination. Inequity.
• Deaths (especially suicides) within the school community, or incurable disease.

We approach each of these topics with our own emotional baggage in tow. They are laced with legal and privacy issues, and tempered by the care, concern, and love that members of a school community have for one another. When confronted with such issues, people want to do something, but aren’t sure what to do, and often end up feeling inadequate, uninformed, and confused.

If we feel and think this way as adults, consider our students, who lack our emotional maturity and life experience to place perspective on such issues. Enormously adept at reading the emotional state of the adults around them, students react to our nonverbal clues, read more (or less) into what we say and write, and struggle to come to grips with it all.

In a learning community, one would hope that nothing would be off-limits for discussion. Of course, individuals have the right to maintain their own rules of privacy and we must respect them. We must also respect legal constraints.  Yet anyone should be free to at least ask any question, if done in a respectful and honest way. But sometimes even asking the question can mark you as a malcontent, a rabble-rouser, or an insensitive lout.

An example…

Not too long ago, the ISED-L Listserv featured an email thread about the disparity between the salaries paid to heads of schools and faculty. I followed this thread with great interest. I fully agree with those who pointed out that that the demands placed upon the head of school are extraordinary, and have grown at a faster pace than those placed upon most other faculty and staff. The Head can often determine the path of success or failure for a given independent school.

But at the heart of this issue is, I think, a discussion about equity and social justice that is worth pursuing, even though it may make us uncomfortable. When one member of an organization makes 5, 7, 10 times or more than the lowest paid member of the same organization, it raises these issues, and we need to discuss them head on.

Further adding to the difficulty of these discussions is unequal access to hard data. For example, the NAIS salary data is available only to the top five school officials. This puts all other faculty and staff at an unfair disadvantage when salary discussions are underway. I believe that greater transparency by the NAIS with regard to this data would be a significant first step in leveling the playing field of information.

Money is difficult conversation for many of us, but I have found that when I am experiencing discomfort about something it is often a signal that there is some work that I need to do in my own life, something worth examining to discover its source and determine if it is healthy or unhealthy.

What are the areas for tough conversations in your school ? How do you deal with them within the real community, and within your virtual community? Is it easier to talk about hard issues in the anonymous ether of social networks, or is it easier to do it face-to-face with a trusted friend or adviser? And how do we have tough conversations with students who are looking to us for guidance and modeling?

Tough questions, about tough conversations.

In the Unites Stated, children under the age of thirteen are prohibited from using most online services by the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. So by law, children 12 and under are not using Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, et al. Hmm.

Facebook Users by Age and Gender. No One Under 13. Yeah, right!

Most school’s Acceptable Use Policies (AUPs) read like laundry lists of what students are not supposed to do online. Keeping such policies up-to-date is a nightmare, for it seems every over month some new use of the Internet comes along that the policy doesn’t cover.

The result is is that the AUP gets longer and longer. Students, who tend not to read such policies anyway, continue to use and innovate as new online services become available, and schools wring their hands and issue more rules.

Schools and parents are caught in the middle of all of this, wanting to abide by the law and do what is right for their students and children. It is in the area of determining what is “right” where controversy takes root. For some, what is “right” is black and white, with no shades of gray, no negotiating based on the individual differences between and among children. It’s simply easier to have a one-size fits all set of policies and procedures.

But educators are supposed to take individual differences into account in their teaching, and most do every day. Teachers realize the need to vary instructional approaches based on a multitude of factors, and many do it with such great grace and ease that we may not even notice.

And yet when it comes to school policies, it seems as if many school administrators stop being educators and become, what? Cops? Judges? Executioners?

Clearly most school administrators don’t want to cease to be educators at any point in their role within the school, including the enforcement of school policies. But it is hard to show any flexibility without being accused of favoritism. I understand the allure of “one size fits all” and “zero tolerance” policies. They just don’t make sense.

So it is that we come to the point of this whole post: What should schools do about students and their presence in the online world?

Most schools have media policies determining the circumstances under which a child may be identified by name in publications, including online publications. Identifying a child by name, especially when accompanied by a photo, is generally considered to be verboten unless permission has been granted by the child’s parents or legal guardians. The idea is to prevent strangers from using such information as means to approach the child for purposes of abduction or worse. Who can argue with that?

But has the online world turned this practice into a relic of the past?

Millions of photos, complete with captions, are on Flickr, Picassa, Facebook, and MySpace. While many are available only to the poster’s “friends,” the definition of  friend varies widely among users, and friends of friends may still have access to this information. Once children reach the age of 13 and legally have access to these sites, many of them may post captioned or tagged photos of themselves and their friends, which may or may not be available to the general public.

Added to this are the officially sanctioned photos in events covered by the press, including the arts, athletics, and all forms of public events, academic fairs, and other competitions—all of which end up on media web sites. “Security through obscurity,” at least when it comes to keeping images of oneself private, is becoming increasingly difficult, perhaps even impossible.

My advice to educators is not to throw out all of their policies and guidelines, but to engage in a discussion of their relevance in the face of new technologies and social norms. Don’t despair about there being nothing you can do when, in fact, these changes represent a wonderful opportunity to engage parents and students in deep and meaningful conversation about the changing landscape of privacy and anonymity.

As any science fiction fan can tell you, the Borg are relentless foes, conquerors of thousands of civilizations, a persistent nemesis that won’t take no for an answer. “Resistance is futile.”

Well, the Borg never met an American teacher.

My review of Robert Evans’ The Human Side of School Change continues with an examination of school culture, a culture that is resistance to change at the most fundamental, sub-conscious level. Evans calls such conservative forces “invisible, and nearly invincible.”

…”one of the chief benefits people seek in the organizational affiliations is protection from change.” In this short phrase, Evans sums up why one must understand the culture of a school before attempting to change its practices. Agents of change must earn their admittance to the school culture, which does not “admit newcomers freely, especially those who challenges its values and practices.” Evans cites a portion of the American Declaration of Independence that I had completely forgotten. (My apologies to Mr. Montgomery, my junior high history teacher).

All experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

Cultural changes take time, often a generation or more. Evans ends his chapter on “The Culture of Resistance” with a rhetorical question: “Is there any hope for rapid culture change in school?—the answer is no!”

What a downer!

I never thought I’d want to be a Borg, but those of us who favor change in schools can learn from their persistence, their single minded (or hive-minded) striving toward a goal. If you want to change schools you better commit yourself to the long haul.  But nothing is more important than our children. If that’s not enough of a motive to persevere, I don’t know what is.

I graduated with a Bachelors degree in English education from Central Michigan University, received a Master’s and Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction  from Michigan State University, and for seven years was the Director of Teacher Education and Associate Professor of Education at North Dakota State University (NDSU). In that capacity, I was in charge of our student teaching program, taught foundations programs and graduate-level courses, and worked closely with the state to assure that our students were qualified to obtain a teaching license in North Dakota. While at NDSU, I was part of our department’s self-study team went through a successful re-accreditation process with the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE).

As a high school teacher, I was a member of the Michigan Education Association (MEA), a branch of the National Education Association (NEA). The MEA actually went to my defense at one time and benefited from their legal team. While at NDSU I was a member of the North Dakota Education Association (though the campus was not organized), and the faculty adviser to the Student  NEA.

Which means that I know whereof I speak, at least a little bit, when it comes to teacher education, unions, and licensure.

Make no mistake, teacher education, licensure boards, and unions have done much to improve the state of teaching and learning in the United States and the world. I am a better person because of my association with them and, I hope, that in some small manner I was able to give back to them as well.

But make no mistake as well that such organizations have hindered real educational reform. They have not done this out of malice. Rather it is due to their nature as mature organizations that have come to that point where they can no longer see the world except through their own lenses—lenses which like the aging human eye can form cataracts or lose their ability to see ahead due to macular degeneration. As bureaucracies they protect and covet power, when the healthier response to the accumulation of power is to give it away.

Within independent schools I have noted occasional disdain for faculty candidates who come from teacher education programs, thought to be less rigorous in their academic expectations. And indeed there are embarrassing instances when fully licensed teachers cannot pass the same basic skills tests we expect their students to have mastered. But these are fortunately rare circumstances, and the vast majority of America’s teachers are working hard to do the best they can. But their best efforts are not good enough, and our children deserve more. And our teachers do to.

Great teachers sometimes have no formal training in education. But these same great teachers nonetheless have a gift for reaching children. And sometimes teachers with Master’s degrees in Education have checked-out and, are just going through the motions, moving their yellowed transparencies to PowerPoint slides and calling it a day. Teacher unions may offer outstanding professional development programs, and at the same time have a knee-jerk  reaction to any promising practice that they perceive to threaten their power base, such as charter schools, vouchers, pay for performance, or tenure reform. State licensing boards sometime equate formal training with knowledge and skill, conflating degrees and coursework with the extraordinary craft and artistry of teaching.

We in independent schools need closer ties with unions, colleges of education and yes, even licensure boards if we are to create 21st century schools that truly work for all children and teachers alike. For too long we have stood apart and aloof from the business of education that holds sway with the overwhelming majority of America’s schools. We are independent for a reason, and we are not beholding to these groups. But we all share an interest in making all of our schools better, and that can only happen when we are in dialog with one another.