An article in Nova Scotia’s Chronicle Herald today reports that a group called the Small Schools Delegation has asked the province to make schools the economic engines for their rural communities. The group says that in a rural landscape, education cannot be regarded as separate from health, economic development, or tourism.

They point out, for example, that doctors are not likely to want to settle in a community without a school at its center, nor are young adults likely to want to buy homes in a community without a local school.

Other posts on this blog about the relationship of schools and  local economic development are include one asking could schools grow a local economy  and another on communities as school revenue streams. I’ve also written several posts about the importance of encouraging entrepreneurship as both an educational and an economic tool.

The news media are gearing up to cover the outcomes and the controversies.

This time last year I was reading 25 local news sites each morning for EmpirePage.com. The school board stories for the week looked something like this:

• Monday: stories saying tomorrow is the school board voting
• Tuesday: stories saying today is the school board vote
• Wednesday: stories giving the outcomes of the vote
• Thursday: stories about school superintendents handing in their resignations
• Friday through Sunday: stories about how next year is going to be an even tougher year for school budgets.

I suspect we’re going to see history repeat itself.

A chapter in the Harold Bell Wright’s novel Their Yesterdays is about knowledge. In the chapter, the nameless hero enters the workforce and realizes that he doesn’t know nearly as much as he thought he knew when he finished school.

See if you don’t think this passage from Wright’s novel  is as relevant as any topic trending on Twitter.

To repeat what others have thought is not at all evidence that he who remembers is thinking. Great thoughts are often repeated thoughtlessly. A man’s Occupation betrays him or establishes his claim to Knowledge. That which a man does proclaims that which he thinks or in his thoughtlessness finds him out.

Of course, when the man had learned this, he said at first, quite wrongly, that his school days were wasted. He said that what he had called his education was all a mistake—that it was vanity only and wholly worthless. But, as he went on gaining ever more and more Knowledge from the thing that he was doing, and, through that thing, of many other things, he came to understand that his school days were not wasted but very well spent indeed. He came to see that what he had called education was not a mistake. He came to understand that what was wrong was this: he had considered his education complete, finished, when he had only been prepared to begin. He had considered his schooling as an end to be gained when it was only a means to the end. He had considered his learning as wealth to hold when it was capital to invest. He had mistaken the thoughts that he received from others for Knowledge when they were given him only to inspire and to help him in acquiring Knowledge.

Their Yesterdays was the number two bestselling novel in the United States in 1912. Today it is available free online from Project Gutenberg. I will post a review of  Their Yesterdays later this year on my blog of vintage novel reviews, Great Penformances.

Educators should read Saul Kaplan’s new book, The Business Model Innovation Factory: How to Stay Relevant When the World Is Changing, so that when public education sector collapses they can’t say they weren’t warned.

After working as a private sector businesses consultant and doing a stint as “an accidental bureaucrat” in Rhode Island government, Kaplan founded the Business Innovation Factory, which he still serves as chief catalyst.

That job title is revealing.

Kaplan sees the function of  leaders as predominantly one of bringing together people to respond to challenges and giving them the freedom and support they need to get the job done even when the solution is totally disruptive to the way the organization has always done things.

Kaplan points out that in the industrial age—the era in which American public schools got their start—business models persisted for decades. Now a business model may last only a decade. It’s clear, Kaplan says, that in this century tweaking old business models is not an answer. He uses Blockbuster as an illustration of an organization that went under because it refused to see how Netflix, with a different business model, could do a better job of providing the value customers wanted.

“A business model,” Kaplan says, “is a story about how an organization creates, delivers, and captures value,”  whether the organization is a for-profit business, a social service organization, or  an educational institution.

• Creating value is solving a problem for a customer or meeting a customer need.
• Delivering value is merging people, processes, and technology within the institution to deliver the promised solution or meet the customer need.
• Capturing value is making a profit adequate to finance fixed assets and to support ongoing operations and growth.

Schools as well as businesses have to define those three points.

Two major problems Kaplan mentions I think are particularly difficult for educators are to answer:

1. Who is the customer?
2. What is the customer paying for?

To find the customer, you have to find who pays for the product or service. In education, often the folks who pay the bills—for public education that’s taxpayers—are not the same folks who get the value. When teachers say they “work for the students,” they may be expressing an emotional relationship, but they aren’t expressing a business relationship.

For educational organizations, the second question is even less easily answered.  What the school may think the taxpayers want and what the taxpayers really want may be different. The extent to which schools accurately identify the problem the customer has and deliver solutions to the customer at a reasonable price will determine how long they will survive. It doesn’t take much imagination to see that the public education model could easily be replaced by a different education model soon: charters and online schools are already experimenting with alternatives.

A hypothetical case may help to explain why getting the answers to those two questions right is so very crucial for public schools.

Suppose that a Bigg County School District decides its customers are parents of students and that those customers want students prepared for college work. To that end, BCSD cuts vocational education and puts the savings into providing college courses at the high school.

Now suppose that Bigg County School District’s analysis of its customers is wrong: most of the taxpayers don’t have students in school. Suppose the majority of taxpayers believe students never come back to Bigg County after they’ve been to college. Those taxpayers may well regard the college prep program as a welfare for the rich paid for twice over by childless folks who pay taxes and then see their property values decline as the population dwindles.

That hypothetical situation suggests how an outdated business model can be suicidal to an organization.

The business model solution Kaplan suggests for existing organizations is to create “adjacent innovation platforms” within their organizations. The platforms require freedom to experiment with different ways to create and deliver value while the rest of the organization operates under the existing business model.  For that to occur, the innovators need to be allowed to borrow resources from inside and outside the organization and combine them in new ways, even when the innovations disrupt the current business model.

I’ve written about how some schools are already doing that, as well as about alternative revenue streams for schools.

One last admonition from the book:

All leaders should spend more discretionary time outside of their industry, discipline, and sector. There is more to learn from unusual suspects who bring fresh and different perspectives than from the ideas circulated and recirculated among the usual suspects. The big and important value-creating opportunities will most likely be found in the gray areas between the silos we inhabit. Get out more.

You can learn more about Saul Kaplan’s ideas on his blog, It’s Saul Connected, or on Twitter @skap5. If you require more highbrow venues, he’s a regular contributor to Harvard Business Review, Fortune, and Bloomberg Business Week.

Photo credit: “Six Silos” uploaded by runrunrun http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1130509

What is your name?

People tend to assume that the way things are done in their world—their family, their community, their country—is both right and natural.  Yet someone around the corner may have an entirely different concept of what’s right and natural.

A brief passage in Alexander McCall Smith’s novel The Full Cupboard of Life illustrates provides a delightful example of how that human bias operates in the realm of language.

Though Mma Precious Ramotswe, proprietor of the No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency in Gaborone, Botswana, and her assistant use mainly English, both grew up speaking African languages. One day when Mma Makutsi uses the Ikalanga word for foot in the middle of an English sentence, the odd juxtaposition takes her boss by surprise. Mma Makutsi  explains,  “Gumbo is foot in Ikalanga. If you speak Ikalanga, your foot is your gumbo.”

“I see,” said Mma Ramotswe. “That is a very strange word. Gumbo.”

“It is not strange,” said Mma Makutsi, slightly defensively. “There are many different words for foot. It is foot in English. In Setswana it is lonao, and in Ikalanga it is gumbo, which is what it really is.”

Mma Ramotswe laughed.  “There is no real word for foot. You cannot say it is really gumbo, because that is true only for  Ikalanga-speaking feet. Each foot has its own name, depending on which language the foot’s mother spoke. That is the way it works, Mma Makutsi.”

Photo credit: Feet uploaded by rett http://www.sxc.hu/photo/798090

I see entrepreneurship as the most likely way for a rural area to retain of its young people after high school. Students who go off to college with an eye to getting a good job are unlike to return to rural communities where there are few good jobs to be had. That loss of young people is a significant concern in the rural areas, as this 2011 survey in the Guilford NY community shows.

If students need more training than their high school provided—as they almost certainly will—the Internet makes it possible for them to get advanced training, often for little or no cost.  And those who want more than just vocational training can get that in a rural area, too, if they have access to the Internet. Massachusetts Institute of Technology alone has 2000 free college-level courses available.

VanWickler saw distance learning as the only way small rural school districts could overcome the challenges of demographics and geography and provide quality education at affordable prices. Under his leadership,  the Board of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES) in New York’s Delaware, Chenango, Madison, and Otsego counties had an nationally recognized distance learning program.

In that pre-Internet era, classes were created by dial-up connections between computers, which delivered graphic content, while audio was provided by speakerphone. The program’s best teachers, such as  Michael Foor-Pessin of Otselic Valley Central School District, former Colgate University and Norwich High School teacher Raymond T. Howes, and College of Saint Rose professor  Edward Pieper, understood how to overcome the audiographic technology’s limitations by focusing on its assets: it was an almost ideal medium for small group instruction.

Unfortunately, the policy makers of the BOCES could not see understand how students could possibly learn when they could not see a teacher lecture. And today’s drivers of online education–declining funding, teacher reductions, emphasis on post-secondary education–were years away.

Distance learning seemed silly waste of money to school boards and administrators.

VanWickler relentlessly sought publicity and funding for the program, but it was a battle he lost. When VanWickler retired,  under his successor the distance learning program was dismantled.

Today VanWickler’s successor has retired, and distance learning is the fastest growing segment of education.

In Memoriam
Freeman A. VanWickler
June 18, 1927 – April 13, 2010

One of the most popular posts on this blog is my list of questions for school superintendent candidates.  Because that list was in such demand, I decided to start a list of generic questions that could be asked of potential school board candidates across America.

School boards in America are responsible for setting policy. In effect, a school board tells its superintendent, “This is what we want to see happen in the district.” The board hires a superintendent to turn the board’s vision and goals into reality. The responsibility for the day-to-day management of the school system rests with the superintendent. Typically a school board evaluates the superintendent at least annually.

Two notes:  (1) There’s no significance to the order of questions under different headings.  The numbers are just for easy reference. (2) Twitter hashtag for discussion of school board issues is #boe

Preparation for board service

1. In what ways have you attempted to prepare yourself for the job of a school board member?

2. What information sources do you rely on for news and analysis of education news and education policy?

3. Approximately how many students in the district qualify for the free and reduced lunch programs? What impact do those figures have on the district’s budget and its academic programs?

4. What are two or three technological learning tools you personally use regularly, and what do these technology tools do for you?

5. Describe two or three learning activities you engage in regularly that provide a model of lifelong learning. How do you make people aware of your ongoing learning activities?

6. In every community and organization there are entrenched interests. Describe a situation in which you had to deal with entrenched interests, and explain how you established a positive working relationship.

7. What is your experience with complicated budgets?

8. If you were to be elected to the school board, what do you think you would be able to contribute to the board operation immediately?

9. For boards that are authorized to establish charter schools: What do you know about charter schools? On the whole, do you think charter schools expand educational opportunities for students or reduce them by siphoning off money from the non-charter public schools?

Vision for the district

1. Today’s students are different from students 20 years ago. What are three issues arising from the differences in today’s students that the school board might need to deal with by creating district policy?

2. What are three challenges for which this district must prepare the class of 2024?

3. As you look at the local community, what employment opportunities are available here for which the school ought to be preparing its graduates?

4. We frequently hear that high school graduates must be “college and career ready.” What would distinguish a graduate of this district who was college and career ready from one who was not?

5. Aside from educating children, what, if any, responsibilities do the school board and school district have to the community?

Awareness of the board member’s role

1. When you attend a board meeting, whether it’s the city council or the school board or some other public body, what behaviors do you consider indications that the board is doing a good job?

2. If a parent were to come to you with a concern about a teacher, for example, or a teacher with a concern about an administrator, what would you see your role as a board member to be in resolving that issue?

3. Drawing on what you know about the roles and responsibilities of a board member, if you were elected, what are the first three challenges you’d face and how would you address them?

4. All human beings have some biases as a result of their experiences and personal preferences. What are two or three of your biases that you would need to guard against allowing to affect your judgment on matters before the school board?

5. What do you see as legitimate ways for a school board to support the district’s teacher evaluation process?

6. What criteria would you apply when making decision as a school board member about the best course of action? Please use an example from your personal or business experience to show  how you apply those criteria when making a decision that affects people other than yourself.

7. Schools have all sorts of special programs aimed at achieving a variety of goals and objectives. How do you determine when a program has been successful?

8. What role, if any, do you see school board members playing in advocating for support for education and learning outside the board meetings in the community or beyond the local community?

9. For boards whose members represent geographic areas of the district: If the wishes of the residents you were elected to represent clash with the wishes of the majority of the board members, how do you resolve the conflict?

Awareness of district assets and needs

1. What in your opinion is the single biggest asset of this school district and its single biggest liability?

2. Of the ways currently used by the district to inform the community about academic progress the district is making, which one in your opinion is most the effective and which is the least effective?

3. What, if any, community assets do you think the school is not using to their fullest potential?

4. What demographic and economic trends in the school district do you see as likely to have significant impact on the school’s program and thus its budget, in the next 10-15 years?

School budgetary concerns

1. How would you enlist taxpayer support for school spending or for bond issues, particularly from taxpayers with no children in public schools?

2. What should be the board’s policy with regard to allowing homeschooled children in the district to participate in extracurricular activities ?

3. In cases where parents who live outside the district wish to have their children attend school in this district, should the board charge those parents tuition? If you think tuition should be charged, do you believe their should be any exceptions to the policy?

4. What in your opinion are the three to five most important groups of stakeholders in the school district?

5. What capital needs does the district have right now? How do you think those needs should be addressed?

6. Many student groups within the school population have identifiable support groups within the wider community. It is fairly common for booster groups to claim that one group is getting a portion of discretionary funding that’s disproportionately large in comparison to the number of students involved.  If such a situation were called to your attention, as a board member what action, if any, would you feel would be appropriate for you to take?

7. For school boards that depend on a county or other taxing agency for funding: Since the school board cannot raise revenue for itself, how would you facilitate the process of securing necessary funds for the school district from the county (or other taxing agency)?

Are there questions that should be asked that aren’t on this list? Add them as a comment here or tweet your ideas @LindaAragoni with the hashtag #boe.

Thanks to these folks who suggested topics or resources and prodded me into starting this list: to Teri Pinney, @teripinney,  a board candidate and now a school board member;  Jerry Blumengarten, @cybraryman1; Ted Bauer of learningmatters.tv,  @lmtv; and Michael Josefowicz, @toughLoveforx.

Photo credit: “Passage” uploaded by tripeak http://www.sxc.hu/photo/112427

Hospital waiting room

People ask questions because they want to know the answer.

Pretty obvious, right?

Maybe not.

As a newspaper reporter, I had to interview a doctor who was to head the newly created open heart surgery program at Winchester Medical Center. The interview followed the outline in the media release the center’s public relations staff had prepared, except for my last question.

My final question to the cardiac surgeon was,  “Do you have any tips for readers who might want to do this procedure themselves at home?”

Without flicking an eyelash, the surgeon replied, “Boil lots of water.”

When I got back to the newsroom, my phone was ringing. The call was from the public relations staffer who had been at the interview.

“You always ask questions nobody else would think of,” Chris said, “but why did you ask that one?”

I told him that anyone who needs heart surgery has a lot of questions. Lots of them may be really stupid questions, like my question about doing open heart surgery at home.

“I have no way to personally evaluate the surgeon’s medical skills, but I can evaluate his people skills. The answer to my stupid question told me this guy doesn’t fly off the handle when somebody asks a stupid question.”

When I wrote the story,  the quote about boiling water was the lede because it told readers the essential bit of information that wasn’t in the news release.

Within school settings, too,  stupid questions often mask smart reasons.

Teens are masters at asking questions that appear to be requesting factual information, but in which they are really interested in how the question is answered.   The teens are not evaluating content knowledge or pedagogical skill; they’re evaluating people skills. They’re looking for clues to appropriate behavior in the adult world.

Some days when “stupid questions” just keep flying, it helps to remember that fact.

Photo Credit: Waiting Room  uploaded by Carin  http://www.sxc.hu/photo/128071

One of the down-stream effects of this economic rift is the rise of the entrepreneurial information worker who sells his/her skills on a job-by-job basis.  The education community at large has not come to grips with the significance of this economic trend.When educators talk about entrepreneurs, most of the time what they have in mind is a Steve Jobs-type figure creating a vast corporate empire. The reality is likely to be a single-owner business with at most a couple of employees.

If most students from the middle and lower class are going to have any chance of surviving without a college degree—which many of them won’t be able to afford—schools need to make “what you can do with this skill” a part of coursework across the curriculum so students graduate high school with entrepreneurial skills. That doesn’t require a special program.  It does require doing some digging to see what skills are needed in the local community that students could master within existing courses.

For example, right now I could use someone with skills to prepare e-book covers. Designing book covers doesn’t require a college degree, or even a high school diploma. It requires computer skills, math skills, art skills, plus the ability to read and follow directions and to copy text accurately. There’s no reason the required skills couldn’t be taught in a high school art program. Eric Azcuy does it in his art classes at Urban Assembly school for Applied Math and Science even with sixth graders.

There are hundreds of e-book producers like me across the country, and they all need book covers.  Put “e-book cover design” into your search box and look at what designers charge. Even design services that use templates pull in several hundred dollars a cover.

Existing small businesses like mine are willing to pay someone to do something they could do but don’t have time to do without taking time from their main focus. Those small businesses are places where Josh and Caitlin, even at age 15, can get paid for doing something they enjoy. In the process, Josh and Caitlin might even decide they need to learn something else from their school classes.

We can always hope.

Photo credit: pic file icons, uploaded by ilco. Property releases  photo #980850, photo #999032 photo ##1063691