Questions? YES!

Questions are our friends.

Without questions, we cannot improve. But what if they aren’t the right questions? Or we’re not interested in improving?

As we witnessed at the annual joint meeting of the Commissioners and Board of Education, the level and subject of questions must go beyond those that have little if any purpose other than to create controversy, division, or serve as a distraction from the real work of improving our school system.

Improvement requires asking profound questions.

Improvement requires an unprecedented willingness to examine practices, processes, and procedures that seek to identify and understand root cause.

Improvement requires transparency in discussions including the motives, agendas, beliefs, and values of those asking the questions as well as those responding.

Improvement requires humility, truth telling, and transparency.

Lastly, improvement requires a mindset – a different mindset that acknowledges and accepts that achieving different results will not come from continuing to do, continuing to behave, and continuing to believe in those practices and programs that caused the Anson County Schools to be where we are -

Two Questions – Fundamental

1. Do you want all Anson County students to learn to high standards?

2. Do you believe that all Anson County students can learn to high standards?

I think the following statement captures for me the mindset that underpins my response to these fundamental questions.

"I spent along time trying to come to grips with my doubts when suddenly I realized that I had better come to grips with what I believe. I have since moved from the agony of questions that I cannot answer to the reality of answers that I cannot escape."

Thomas Skinner

What we believe matters – moreover how we behave matters more


As a point of context, consider the questions asked of you that in turn you ask of administration, to what degree do the questions relate to the desire for all students to succeed or do they have a different purpose?

Do these questions in any way lead to a different solution, strategy, or practice to achieve the ends we seek for our learners? 
Let me be clear, many of the questions asked point more to a lack of understanding, awareness, or connection to the work, necessary work to improve our school system.

Without hesitation or reservation administration has a responsibility to make sure information is not only accessible, but also freely available to all. Leadership also has a responsibility to “make sense” or “make connections” of the work. 


The day of information as power has long since past. 


Bane of our Existence


The initiatives we have implemented have resulted in many improvements. However, we should be further ahead than we are. The bane of our existence remains the inconsistency of implementation of effective practice. The inconsistency of implementation is more or less attributed to two factors.

1. Ineffective training; or


2. Intentionally choosing not to implement


To address the inconsistencies underpinning these two factors is to look directly at leadership – central office, building administration, and classroom. 


If our leadership is not fully committed to implementation fidelity we cannot expect our classroom teachers and support staff to be fully committed. 


If our leadership team, therefore, does not embrace the aforementioned different mindset, how can we expect our classroom teachers to embrace it?

Simply, if our beliefs, values, and behaviors are not those that are steeped in the reality that all students can learn to high standards then we will continue to produce inconsistent results.

However, it should be clear that if we don’t achieve the results expected, this time, the State of North Carolina has no choice but to take over the school system.

Choice


The choice, therefore, is all ours.

We can choose to stay in place that is more or less about staying at the same level of performance or returning to past performance levels, or we can choose to move forward. 


Going forward will require asking different questions. Yet, it may be time that we give voice to the answers we can no longer avoid, no longer dismiss.