Buzzwords, Beehives, and School Leadership

Global – Interdisciplinary – Green – Technology-mediated – Multicultural – Design-thinking

What do these have in common?

They’re all buzzwords that have been hovering and swooping around independent schools like a persistent swarm of bees for the past couple of decades. Some are older, comfortably familiar, while others are newer, seemingly more urgent, potentially disruptive in ways that make some educators want to head for the hills.

All of them, one way or another, are mandates for our time, words or phrases that represent an educational zeitgest that in turn reflects the moving trendlines in social, cultural, and—in times of uncertainty, especially—economic thinking and concern.

More importantly, none of these are concepts that are easily embraced and “implemented” (whatever that might mean) by a single teacher at a school or even meaningfully realized by a handful of teachers or a single department.

To truly infuse students with their power, these buzzword concepts require institutional backing. To offer students an education that is authentically global in scope, is truly interdisciplinary, is steeped in the concepts and practice of environmental sustainability, fully leverages technology as a tool for inquiry and learning, prepares students to thrive across a range of cultural terrains, and fully embraces creativity as an engine of intellectual exploration, schools cannot rely on a teacher here or there, a single workshop, an intriguing article passed around, or even a series of mission-statement bullet points.

Buzzwords reflect both a yearning and an uncertainty or anxiety—they pop into usage because they stand for, or encapsulate, both the definition of a problem and some promise of its solution. “Global,” for example, serves as shorthand for an understood need for students to see themselves as part of a connected—or flat, to use Thomas Friedman’s version of the buzzword—world culture, polity, and economy, where no nation and no individual is entirely immune from the effects of discovery, boom, bust, or tumult on the other side of the globe. Educators have instinctively embraced the concept to be engaged in authentic and effective ways, through curriculum, extracurricular programming, travel, and exchanges, and schools continue to seek ever-better approaches.

A teacher may of course “take on” an buzzword as a kind of theme or cause, of course, and may accomplish much good by doing so. But his or her students will only gain a kind of fractional experience, a limited perspective.

Most schools have realized—or at least have had plenty of opportunity to realize—that learning with a broad perspective requires something along the lines of an immersive experience. One classroom cannot truly be “multicultural,” for example; it takes a school, and discourse involving all of its constituencies, facilities and systems, to fully prepare students for the multidimensionally diverse world in which they will live and work. By the same token, one teacher’s recycling bin and constant reference to environmental issues can’t spur critical thinking and action in the ways that making environmental awareness part of an entire school’s culture can. The same is true, we know, for “leveraging” (to use yet another buzzword) the potential of technology.

My point here is that schools, not just teachers, bear the responsibility for exploring the buzzwords of each era, determining which are worthy, and then building the best of them into their programs and policies. This means that leaders must shoulder the burden of learning about (I want to say “unpacking,” if we can stand another buzzword here) new ideas, and as they find them worth embracing, they must become evangelists for them within their school communities.

This is nothing new, of course, but the challenges of our time—the knife-edge on which cultural survival seems to be balanced some days—make this work ever more urgent, and ever more the institutional mandate of which I wrote above. Schools need to move quickly and strategically to become the beehives in which real value is extracted from the promise of the buzzwords and added to the experience of students.

This means, incidentally, that the key ideas behind the buzzwords must be front and center in strategic thinking and professional and curriculum development initiatives, and that exploration and implementation must be supported by the allocation of sufficient resources and by active leadership from the highest levels on down. From trustee to department chair, from school head to classroom teacher, there must be an understanding of—and an active and well communicated belief in—these ideas as significant, even fundamental elements of the school’s reason for being.

School leaders, this means you!

The Last Post for My Father

We've become accustomed to the moving spectacle of funerals of firefighters and police officers, where comrades from many jurisdictions show the colors, ride in formation, and remind us by their solidarity of the perilous and valuable work they do. Since September 11 of 2001 those events are even more emotionally gripping, more significant as reminders of the fragility of life and the weird and unpredictable forces at work in nature as well as humankind.

Of course we don't expect such for teachers, and we don't much tend toward uniforms (tweeds for men, colorful scarves for women?) and flags. But my father's memorial service the other day was as close as I expect ever to come to one of those funerals, and it brought me strangely face to face with some aspects of this work than I have been reflecting on.

First, there were scores of my father's old students, some of whom had also been my grandfather's--men who had been in the classrooms at my father's school sixty years ago and more. A line my siblings and I became accustomed to hearing that day was, "You know, your dad (or your grandfather) saved my life."

These men are dyslexic and make no bones about it. The realization that they had a learning disability was the first step toward building lives that weren't going to be defined by the other labels that peers, family members, and (I regret to say) even teachers were delighted to put on dyslexic kids in an earlier day: "stupid," "lazy," "uneducable"--even "retarded." Students at The Gow School unanimously recount their relief when they realized that everyone else in their classes had the same challenge, and they can still--all these years later--recite some of the strategies they applied as they learned to compensate for their dyslexia. And they remain grateful, perhaps extravagantly but I think not, for the "life-saving" education they received. They're doctors, lawyers, writers, filmmakers, entrepreneurs--doing all the work that bright, educated adults can do. And they see their education, and their teachers, as having rescued them from lives less focused, less satisfying--the frustrated lives of good minds limited in scope and cut off from opportunities by a learning disability.

So, a theme of the day was life-saving. I was never so proud.

But there was a second, more surprising thing, something I could have anticipated but that thirty-seven years of living in what we jokingly call the "Buffalo diaspora" had pushed from my mind. There was a kind of parade of figures from my own educational past: the wonderful high school math teacher who came into my life too late to save me from a life of uncertainty when faced with problems more complex than Algebra I; my fourth-grade teacher (imagine!), the only male classroom teacher at the suburban elementary school to which I had traveled each day from our tiny village and later the principal of the new elementary school (now closed) to which my younger brothers had gone; a host of former teachers from Gow whom I had known before, during, and after my couple of years as a teacher there; a high school classmate and close friend--my own supportive wingman when my grandmother had died in her home across the street from mine when I was a senior in high school.

My classmate's own dad had been my seventh-grade English teacher and the man who had suggested I start reading the sports pages and the comics so as to be able to actually converse with real people; I was apparently a bit abstracted from the agony and sweat of the human spirit in junior high. His son, my friend, now in turn teaches writing to people of all ages and has achieved what was once my dream of being a regular columnist, wry and funny and engaged and generous in his love for his community, for the local weekly newspaper--a mentor not just to his students but to his town. (Check out "The View from Right Field" in the East Aurora Advertiser, if you're a fan of that estimable branch of journalism.)

These teacherly types and former, appreciative students made concrete for me something I already vaguely suspected: that teachers belong to their students at least as much as to their families. The best and most confident teachers are truly themselves in their classrooms perhaps as nowhere else, and so their students see them and know them intimately and have the opportunity to understand them--and care for them if the right chemistry is at work--better, perhaps, than their own households.

It's comforting, then, and kind of awe-inspiring to know that memories of my father will stay not just with my immediate family but with the thousand men he taught. Even if there weren't uniforms (if you don't count the school blazers that the current head and a few current students were wearing and the Gow tartan tie sported by one of my nephews), the feeling was there--that we were saying goodbye to a guy who had saved lives, and that we were well supported by our own kind, sharing as teachers do our peculiar understanding of the weird and unpredictable forces at work in our own quiet and pretty humble profession.

I hate to add a political note, but I couldn't help wishing that all the politicians who have been bashing teachers lately could have been there.

In Memoriam--David W. Gow

My father's school is a bit subdued today, as the former head, my father, died this morning. It's a lovely, green campus, with some imposing brick edifices and a couple of the original converted farm buildings that still do good service. Despite its location in prime Snow Belt country south of Buffalo, New York, there's no snow on the ground, but the air has a damp bite to it that generally means something white is on the way--but in the age of global climate change, who can tell any more?

This all may seem a little personal, but My Father's School just lost the guy who kept it alive when times were tough and who believed in its mission enough to give it a lifetime of arduous service--this was a headmaster who taught six classes while running the place for years with an administrative team that included a bookkeeper and an associate head, period. He could never understand the proliferation of titles and jobs that seemed to seep into schools after the 1980s, and he really could never quite understand what the people at other schools--including mine--had to spend so much time meeting about. He saw what to do, and he, along with a generally pretty happy and compliant faculty, just went out and did it. The times, the scale of the school (160 students), his vision, and the straightforward mission of the school made that possible in a way that seems incomprehensible just a couple of decades later.

I suspect that, as is the case with many teachers, his students might have known him even better than his own children did. He was at ease in a classroom as he was almost nowhere else, and his belief in his students--even when sorely tried--was pretty amazing. Like all good heads, he grieved when a student had to be sent away, and no expulsion saddened him more than when the trusted, bright, congenial boy who helped him pick up and sort the mail from the local post office turned out in 1971 to be supplying pot to his schoolmates. He took from this a key lesson: that drug-using kids were not depraved or evil (this in a time when most schools hadn't quite figured that out), just adolescents making spectacularly bad decisions. I don't think he ever judged students through the same lens again.

It's a theme in prep school literature that school heads are continually torn between expediency and school-building and doing the right thing, but I don't have a sense that this was ever much of an issue for my father. If it was, it didn't much show, and there didn't seem to be any sign of the corrosive effects of such petty corruption or grand hypocrisy in the form of moral compromise.

I learned from my father that schools can be built and shaped and guided by people and their ideas (and not just by money and tradition, as I had sort of assumed after spending too much time reading F. Scott Fitzgerald and Louis Auchincloss), and Not My Father's School is a celebration of the possibilities that are opening to schools in the future and certainly no repudiation of the way things were done in an era that looks simpler to us but probably didn't feel that way to the people doing the work back then.

RIP, My Father, and thanks on behalf of all the students and young teachers (like me) who benefited from your patient guidance and from your faith that the young might some day manage the world as well as our seniors. Some months ago I proposed the idea here of schools as "heart trusts," and your school was, is, and ever shall be. I hope that Not My Father's School will be the same.

What Our Schools Must Be: Behind the Manifesto

Other than being a kind of sideways tribute to my heritage, then, what is Not Your Father’s School supposed to accomplish? And where does this self-styled “Manifesto” come from, and where do I think it should take us?

Since I was a kid reading the Rover Boys at School and watching Goodbye, Mr. Chips on the afternoon TV movie, independent schools have fascinated me. It helped that I was growing up on a campus, eating dinner and sometimes breakfast and lunch with students, having them in and out of the house (along with many of their teachers) and, at times, living upstairs as a small dormitory. Later, when I was a student. I was as fascinated by our independent school athletic rivals as I was by my own school.

In a nutshell, I was predisposed pretty much from birth to be excited about and frankly impressed by independent schools—by the presumed quality of the education and experience they offered, by their traditions, the differences among them, and probably (at least when I was a kid) their aura of prestige and specialness. The head of the school I attended assured us that we were receiving the finest education in America, a line that too many of us bought, making us feel a little sorry for the lads at places like Andover when we encountered them in ice hockey tournaments. It wasn’t until I was almost out of high school that I realized that schools aren’t always what they are cracked up to be and that elitism is generally manifested in arrogance, and that I had swallowed a heaping helping of self-delusion.

What I became interested in at that point—a senior in a very traditional boys’ school in 1968, when idols were teetering on their pedestals all over the place and “prep schools” were queasily adrift on the roiling waters of historical change—was what I would now call “improving the breed.” How could, in particular, my own school begin to examine itself and make some adjustments that would allow it to continue to be as excellent as we had been told it was and as authentically confident as it might have been a decade before? For my senior project, I took a survey, wrote up the results and some suggestions, and passed in a lengthy report. I think I received a good grade, but that was it for feedback. (Although the next year, when I was in college, the head wrote me that he had been “disappointed” by the implied criticism.)

Fast forward six years, and I was an “administrative assistant” at my father’s school, doing lots of the gopher work and research required to complete the process of becoming a nonprofit and starting a development office. What was cool about the work—wedged in among classes, coaching, study hall duty, and serving as the floating dorm sub—was that it was right in at the ground floor, and it was about making a school better—really better, with more resources, a stronger brand, a more systematized administrative structure, and even better teaching. I loved it.

For the next decade or so—and a couple more schools—I focused on teaching, working on my chops and figuring out what mattered in making a classroom a place of success for kids and for myself. It was good work, but I could never stop myself (as is true for so many teachers) from trying to figure out how administrators thought and acted and how they perhaps could have done even better. What I ultimate cared about—sensibly, as they were by bread and butter—was whether the schools I was working at were as good as they could be.

Another couple of decades on, I’ve realized that I have had a mission in life: it’s all about improving the breed. I desperately want independent schools, all of them, to be the best versions of themselves that they can be: with the most appropriate and engaged students, the best trained and most excited and happy teachers, sustainable in all five dimensions (demographic, financial, environmental, global, and programmatic), and above all delivering at the highest level possible on their brand promises (the “covenant” between school and family, as my friend Patti Crane calls it). Along the way, I’d like to see arrogance supplanted by pride in authentic accomplishments, kid by kid. I’d also like to see some pretty serious re-examination of values and priorities.

Maybe it’s leftover arrogance, but a big part of me believes that independent schools are our nation’s last, best hope for real education reform. One day, I dream, we’ll wake up from the long national nightmare that school reform, and in particular test-driven school reform, has become for millions of public school students and their teachers, and on that day the country will be looking around for proven, rock-solid, common-sense and commonly decent ideas about how to teach kids and run schools. I think we have these ideas, and I think many of us are trying to live them.

Not only do I want the rescuers of American public education to notice us, but I want us to be ready to respond. We can only do that if we are really and truly doing the best we can, delivering ethically and energetically on our most highly refined and ever-improving student-centered, high quality, high value kinds of education—education diverse in its types and methods and missions, but unified in its commitment to integrity and excellence for all the children we serve. And let’s not forget that among us all, we really do serve all kinds of children.

Independent schools, in other words, have to stop thinking of themselves—and letting others think of them—as versions of the “school on the hill,” lofty and remote. We have to start seeing ourselves as, working to be, and above all deserving to be “cities on the hill”—worthy exemplars of the highest educational ideals.

We’ve got a long way to go, but this work ought to be a helluva lot more inspiring than just filling seats and generating woo-woo! lists of next-schools and colleges.

Let’s get to it!

A Not Your Father’s School Manifesto

Previously I have told the story of how I came to be here, and perhaps at a later date I will write more on this, but since I have stated that Not Your Father’s School is “a kind of idealized place,” I think I am obligated to lay out those ideals. So here is a manifesto, I guess, for this “construct,” this “test-bed for new ideas.”

Not Your Father’s School must be a place

· where students come first; students work first and foremost on behalf of their own learning and growth and not for the greater glory of the school

· where teachers and administrators quest ceaselessly for the most outstanding, engaging, challenging, effective, and worthy learning experiences to offer students

· where successes are measured not in grades, win–loss records, and graduate placement but in the deep inner satisfaction and development of each student and of each adult

· where failure is viewed not as a calamity but as a step toward a richer success

· where complacency and arrogance have no place; pride in authentic accomplishment and true excellence and personal growth are the engines of confident progress

· where integrity rules, everywhere

· where advancement goals and practices grow directly and palpably from the school’s mission and from the desire to have ever-improving student experience drive the institution’s growth forward

· where compassion and a sense of equity and justice inform all endeavors from classroom culture to extracurricular programs and goals to the recruitment and support of students and faculty

· where authentic and multifaceted engagement with the community and the world is the norm

· that recognizes, respects, and responds mindfully and energetically to the developmental, cultural, and personal differences among students

· where intellectual curiosity, creativity, and athletic prowess are celebrated equally

· that strives to help each student become, at any given moment, the best possible version of her or himself

· where new ideas are sought and welcomed as grist for an ever-turning mill of institutional progress to improve the experience and learning of students

In my ideal world, Not Your Father’s School would deliver on 100% of the school’s mission and “brand promise,” 100% of the time—a tall order, demanding qualitative and quantitative metrics we don’t yet have and perhaps the ability to change the course of mighty rivers, bend steel in our bare hands, and leap tall buildings in a single bound. (A few years ago Pat Bassett entertained and challenged us all at the NAIS Annual Conference with Captain Independent; maybe we really need this kind of superhero right now.)

Optimistically, I would guess that the very best of our schools deliver on that promise somewhere around 80% of the time; the other 20% remains as the aspirational part of most missions. But I suspect that many schools deliver somewhat less, not out of lassitude or inattention but because of inertia—like Marley’s Ghost, weighed down by chains forged of compromise, complacency, and obliviousness to consequences.

Circumstances are changing—in classrooms, in politics, in society as a whole—and complacency, above all, has no more place among us. Each independent school has to become the best possible version of itself—not just to fill desks and coffers, but because we must do a better job telling our collective story and have better stories to tell. We have to show and tell, in the most compelling ways, the nature of our missions and our covenant to a world prepared to view us in the most materialistic or cynical ways.

We have to be better than just that, folks; we have to deserve to be viewed as we most want to be! We must be not anyone’s father’s school but schools for our own children and other people’s children—real schools: excellent, accessible, innovative, and ready.

School--It's a Family Thing for Me

I’m feeling a bit staggered by the last month, having taken on far too many tasks, and family events have me thinking it’s time to tell a story that might also involve coming clean about the title of this blog.

You see, there was, and in fact is, My Father’s School; it actually started out as My Grandfather’s School. I even worked there many years ago before going off on a journey to the East that hasn’t yet finished.

Right around World War I my grandfather, who was teaching at the fine Nichols School (I’ll name names, and anyhow, it’s my alma mater) in Buffalo, New York, became engrossed by the question of why some of the obviously bright boys in his English and Latin classes seemed to struggle so with reading and spelling. They could do other things very well, so it wasn’t a matter of intelligence. What was it?

By the early 1920s my grandfather—he was Peter Gow, too, incidentally—had found an answer, and, bolstered by a very fruitful collaboration with one Dr. Samuel T. Orton in New York, he had worked out a scheme for teaching his students to overcome their “dyslexia”—the new-fangled word he had learned from Orton—and was running a summer tutoring camp on some country land he had purchased in the hills south of Buffalo.

In 1926, with six young kids and a wife who really preferred to live in the city, my grandfather decided to make the move to the country permanent and start a school of his own. Half dozen boys from all over the U.S. became the student body of what he perhaps immodestly called The Gow School. (There does seem to have been a bit of that going around a century or so back.)

The school grew and thrived (an alum just put together a nice video of the school’s history). In time my grandfather, who taught me to read at his tweedy, ash-strewn side, died, and first my uncle, then my father, became heads. My dad retired about 20 years ago, having overseen the transition to a nonprofit organization, some major fundraising and campus development, and a doubling of enrollment—not a bad showing for a great career!

When I taught at Gow in the 1970s it was a place bound by tradition, not unlike many schools in that era. There was mandatory evening study hall in a giant room—jackets and ties left on, you bet, and no talking on pain of having the evening run a bit longer (a sanction to be used only in extremis, I found one dreadful night). Teachers were “masters,” and my name became “Sir.” Part of the Orton-Gow method involved maintaining a very structured program, then and pretty much still considered important in educating kids with language-based learning difficulties. Dorm duty was a bear, but the kids were pretty interesting and cool—that’s where I really fell in love with, instead of just falling into, teaching.

I went my merry (actually “marry”) way after a couple of years, and I’ve had a pretty good run at a couple of other fairly straitlaced boys’ schools and my current very forward-thinking coed place.

“Not Your Father’s School” is of course, then, “Not MY Father’s School,” but it’s not really a place at all. It’s a construct, a kind of idealized place, maybe a test-bed for new ideas—but all the time I find myself thinking about my father’s and grandfather’s school. I’m blessed to have forebears who were pretty amazing educators in their day. There weren’t too many middle-aged, Ivy-educated Latin teachers 90 years ago who were obsessed with figuring out how to help adolescents learn to read well enough to go to and succeed in college; my grandfather was a pretty forward-thinking guy, as it turns out, even if his school had 150-minute evening study halls. And former students still drive across the country to catch some wisdom from my Aged P.

Maybe because of my heritage, I try to use this space to figure out not just how to do all the new stuff, but to do it in a way that holds onto and where appropriate honors the legacy of great work and great teaching that has come before us all—and which we forget, or ignore, at our peril when we get so obsessed with the new that we utterly dismiss the old.

So, I’m glad you’ve found Not Your Father’s School.