Educators: Get In the Game or Stop Playing

We’re losing the battle for public education, and it’s mostly our fault.

We’re friends, right? If you’re reading this, you likely know me or know of me… or you’re arriving here because someone who knew me forwarded you this article (yay, content marketing). To me, one of the most important parts of being friends is telling your friends the truth, regardless of how difficult it can be to say or hear at times. Well, friend, here is the cold, hard truth:

We in K-12 public education must get in the game, or stop playing altogether.

A Bit of Background

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve worked in public education my entire life. Whether as a public servant or private contractor, K-12 education has been my life’s work. During that time working with schools, you can imagine the breadth of issues I’ve seen, both good and bad.

Over the past year, our team at SchoolStatus has been researching the most effective strategies to help school districts increase outcomes. I was actually surprised by the body of research that exists around parental engagement and student outcomes. In education, there are few activities that are as effective in nearly every socioeconomic and cultural makeup.

Increased teacher efficacy through a professional feedback loop, a properly implemented Response to Intervention (RtI) process, and using known strategies to increase parental involvement — all are proven to be effective if districts take the time to implement them properly, evaluate often, and refine them constantly for optimal results.

We’re Losing the Battle

The thing that’s been on my mind lately is how we in public education are losing the battle for public education. It’s not just that we’re getting outplayed, we’re not even showing up, most days. By not competing, we’re abdicating the largest mechanism for upward mobility in human history: a free public education for all.

Whether due to our actual performance, or simply our perceived performance, over the past 10 years, we’ve seen an increased movement toward charter schools, vouchers, and other reform methods of the education choice movement. (To be clear, I’m not opposed to anything that will help kids and improve outcomes, but there’s no ‘one-size-fits-all’ in education — research differs on which methods are most effective). In true fashion, we’ve complained, held rallies, called our elected officials, and, finally, sulked. It’s time to move through the other stages of grief and arrive at acceptance.

Virginia, make no bones about it: There is no Santa Claus. You are competing today and the very nature of competition indicates you’re going to continue to compete until someone is declared the winner. The toothpaste isn’t going back in the tube… Pandora’s box will never close… you now live in a competitive landscape we’ve never seen before.

You are fighting for survival. In order to survive, you must adapt, improve, and get in the game.

So what next?

Pick Up the Phone

While at a recent conference, I spoke to two friends of mine, both of whom run school districts. We spoke about school climate, interacting with parents, and generally getting ahead of issues before they arise. Both school districts, which I consider pretty great, reported several students were leaving their district for private schools. This intrigued me. Why would anyone PAY when they have such a great district ALREADY PAID FOR?

When I inquired as to why they were leaving (aside: the concept of asking a parent to keep their child in your school when they’re leaving is akin to asking a student to stay when they’re dropping out: both are highly ineffective), neither sets of parents would say why. They’d already made up their minds and no one was changing it.

I dug a little deeper and asked both if their principal knew the parents planned on withdrawing their kids in advance and what had they done to prevent them leaving— both principals were caught completely off guard. The students we’re talking about are good students, well adjusted by most measures, involved in activities, etc — this isn’t just a case of angry parents or some sort of custody issue. Then the words hit: “They’re good kids. We really didn’t hear too much from their parents.”

Friends. This is the crux of the problem. If you are not communicating with all parents (strong students, weak students… rich families, poor families…) on an ongoing basis, you’re doing it wrong.

When your parents don’t hear from you, they generally assume the worst. The public perception of a school is often based around communication initiated outside of the school (rumors, conjecture, misinformation), not what’s actually going on in the school.

We do a pretty lousy job of getting the positivie narrative out in the community and are shocked when ‘blast’ communication (the communication equivelant of a bull horn) fails to deliver positive results.

Schools have great success stories to tell, but unless we tell them, they do no good. The absence of information is almost worse than potentially unflattering information. No one can tell a good story in a vacuum. Engagement is way more than a Twitter account, press releases, or Facebook page.

Nothing ‘Just Happens’

In nearly every scenario, the local public school district is the largest employer — usually by large margin. Without a doubt, in every school district in the country, more citizens interact with public schools on a regular basis than any other entity. With all this interaction, one might naturally assume that communication just ‘happens’. This, too, is a fallacy.

Communication is deliberate. It requires real commitment and hard work. Like anything worth having, it’s not automatic.

We believe positive engagement and communication in a school requires, at a minimum, three components:

• A common message — Your staff needs to be on the same page. If we’re working this quarter on attendance, then we need to be talking to parents, not just about the discipline involved when students don’t come to school, but how truancy leads to dropping out and lower ACT/SAT scores, which affect college scholarships.
• A method — Ultimately, what are we trying to achieve as a district? What does communication look like? What communication methods are we using? Text? Voice? E-mail? Carrier pigeon? Are we striving for a culture in which parents can reach teachers 24/7 or only during business hours? Do parents know how to reach your teachers? Is it uniform across all teachers and schools?
• A benchmark — Finally, who’s expected to call? How often? How many? How do we know our messages are effective? How are we measuring this? Paper logs? Google Doc? Honor System? Divine Intervention?

Strength in Numbers

Traditional public schools should be winning. In sheer volume, budget, and staffing numbers, traditional public schools have the upper hand… and we’ve been at it much, much longer. But we’re still getting killed in community perception and in our statehouses. Why?

We aren’t using the resources we have to our maximum potential — we’re not competing on a New York Yankees-level.

Let’s say that Anytown School District has 500 teachers in grades K-12. Dr. Joan Brown, being the transformational administrator she is, reads the body of research and becomes sold on winning community perception and engagement and playing for keeps… getting out there and changing public perception of her ‘C’ rated district.

Dr. Brown starts the school year strong. She sells her staff on the concept (make no bones about it, admin and teacher buy-in is critical in engagement) and sets a goal that every teacher will make positive contact with 1 new parent every day. “Positive contact” is physically speaking with, texting, or e-mailing a parent with positive outreach on a 1:1 basis.

Ultimately, Mr. Jones, the classroom teacher, should be reaching out to many, many more parents on a daily basis. Often, however, these interactions are negative, surrounded by discipline or academic issues. Those conversations are important, but remember: we’re trying to change hearts and minds, here. If the first time a person hears your name is in a negative context, you’ve started off on the wrong foot.

In any case, back to the math: Let’s say we extrapolate this ‘1 positive say every day’ campaign across the 500 teachers in the district. That’s 500 positive interactions every. single. day. Think about that.

In a 180 day school year, that’s over 90,000 positive interactions with stake holders. You can do the math on the back of a napkin for your district.

Oh yeah, and because of our interactions with parents… students are present more often, have fewer discipline issues, and are less likely to drop out. Over time, Dr. Brown’s district moves from a ‘C’ to a ‘B’.

How are you NOT doing this starting the first day of school?

Trust, but Verify

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention managing this process on paper is going to be a nightmare. Imagine the act of logging and manually analyzing thousands of calls, text, and e-mails — the math becomes mind-boggling pretty quickly. There has to be a better way to manage this situation — the process is too important to get wrong.

For this reason, and several others, if you’re a SchoolStatus customer, you can access voice calling for free. That’s right. If you’re an existing customer of Logic, our data analytics suite, you can do almost everything I just mentioned… completely free of charge.

At SchoolStatus, we’ve anticipated that voice calling alone wouldn’t be enough, but would be a great start. We’ve worked hard for many months on this issue, and launched Channel two weeks ago. Channel by SchoolStatus allows teachers to reach out seamlessly via voice, text, and e-mail. Equally important, administrators can verify things are happening according to plan… measuring who is calling, how often, for how long.

Using Channel, you can even see the content of calls and messages as an administrator… and you can even search for voice conversations by content (show me all the calls where keywords like ‘bully’ or ‘homework’ were mentioned, for instance).

Reviewing our past work is our #1 method for improving in the future. The same is especially true at your school.

We think it’s the best work we’ve ever done and is bringing about transformational change in our districts. As our Founder & CEO, I’ve never been more proud of our team and the work we’re doing.

Getting in the game isn’t just about working hard, it’s about working hard and smart.

If you don’t feel like you are in the game yet, or you feel like you’re not winning, come join our team. We want to be in your corner and believe we’re better together. You’ve got a great story to tell the world. We’ve just got to start telling that story on a 1:1 basis. Today.