“What will it take?”

“What will it take?”  I asked our leadership team this week.

Seriously, what is it going to take for each of us to do what is right, true, and good on behalf of each learner in our school system?

This question is not reserved for leadership alone.  It is a question that each individual must ask irrespective of position in our school system.  It is also a question that each citizen must ask as well.

This question is not rhetorical.  In fact, it demands a response.

There is a “new” normal forming emerging with significant implications for educators.  The “new” normal has far reaching implications – it will take educators further than they ever imagined, cost more than most are willing to pay, and keep them longer than they wanted to stay.

This "new" normal requires unprecedented focus, alignment, and courage.  Without these three, it will be easier to regress, retreat, and resist the change, the improvement that is needed.  There is propensity to become recalcitrant without focus, alignment, and courage.

Focus requires clarity.  The purpose, mission, and vision of what the work, the change, the improvement produces must be clear. The past as well as the present informs our focus. Informing requires reflection, reviewing, planning, constant and consistent monitoring, and adjusting and corrective action when necessary. 

The "new" normal requires alignment. The alignment however begins with the values, beliefs, convictions, and commitments of "why" we are in this work.  Without an aligned “core”, alignment of programs let alone the practices, the decisions, the choices made daily to move the work forward will not happen.

This alignment of individual and organizational core is critical.  In fact, improvement alone cannot achieve the expected or desired results without core alignment.  Though an organization will experience initial success, enduring long lasting improvement will never be realized. We have achieved much and there is a sense that we are so close to achieving unprecedented results.  Yet, our “core” is not aligned fully and completely. 

The "tipping point" for breakthrough results is the alignment of the core followed by the alignment of programs and practices.  As we have learned aligning programs without aligning the core has prevented fidelity of effect and systemic utility of powerful supplemental instructional programming.  We will get there but understanding the importance of aligning the core must take priority.  Yet, how long do we wait?  Moreover, how long can our students wait for their teachers, their principals, and central office leadership to demonstrate the values, the beliefs, convictions, and commitments commensurate with the calling of being an educator?

Courage is the operating system for the "new" normal.  Courage is not a heroic act of bravery or extraordinary or Herculean feat.  Rather, it a choice, a deliberate decision to act according to what is right, what is good, and what true. 

Lacking is courage to be a "truth teller" irrespective of the cost, the price, the popularity, acceptance, and consequences being truthful in our schools and in our community.

Let me be clear, I am not talking about reckless or careless, insensitive, caustic, or possibly toxic discourse.  We live daily the incivility that, like a cancer, has spread indiscriminately throughout our community, state and nation as if by attacking, putting down, or humiliating others is playing “sport” or a “game” where there are winners and losers.  Haven’t we learned we all lose?

Civility and the motivation to build up, support, encourage, and help others takes courage.  It appears, this too has been replaced with a distorted and possibly perverted practice that although is often privately condemned is somehow allowed, tolerated, or even dismissed in the public square. 

We are better than this!

Suffice, courage like focus and alignment is a deliberate choice to act in word as well as deed. 

The “new” normal comes with a price.  It may cost us discomfort, conflict, and a gamut of emotions.   Currently however, our students are paying a price that only the adults have the responsibility, accountability and authority to control.

I circle back to my question, “what will it take?”

Further, “if not now, when?”

“If not here, where?” and

“If not you, who?

The time is now to embrace the “new” normal to truly and authentically do what is right, good, and true for each child.