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What’s Going On in Schools?
BY TOM SALTER / American Association of School Administrators / Full Article



If we had a nickel for every time someone claimed “I don’t know what is going on at the school—they are not teaching, they are just wasting money!” as an excuse for not supporting public education, there would be no need to ask for more funding. Unfortunately, there may be some truth to their lament, and it is our fault.

Not every parent or community member reads page 57 of section Q in the daily newspaper (where they bury the positive stories about education). And we spend too much time in public education blaming our lack of success in promoting our schools on our old pal “If only ….” If I only had a bigger budget, I could … If I only had more staff, we could … If there were only more … Rather than wasting time taking inventory of all the things you are missing, consider some items you have in your tool kit that you may have overlooked.

The issue, as framed by Tom, is the public's belief that schools are not teaching and wasting money. Let's see what Tom puts in his tool kit to answer the critics.

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Public Events

Athletic events offer a great public relations opportunity. Have the announcer at a basketball or football game promote the new computer lab; congratulate an outstanding student for an award or scholarship; thank a volunteer for hours of dedication; mention a teacher’s recent award; congratulate an academic team for its accomplishments. And ask the booster club to give you a page in the program booklet to promote the school system.

Tom's first tool has nothing to do with academics (not teaching). Some believe public school sports programs serve the few at the expense of the many and that whatever the merit of sports programs, especially in relation to other unmet academic needs, it doesn't answer the question, "Who should pay?" To some, sports programs are budgetary "fat."

But Tom's first choice is to use sports events as a public relations tool. That's fine, although Tom's interest is in giving the public a gilded view of the school rather than a fair and balanced view from which citizens can make informed decisions about whether schools need or deserve increased funding.

Using sports programs is not likely to be very effective in changing public attitudes because the vast majority of attendees are already onboard in supporting schools. In general, the critics aren't at school sports events.

Be sure the facilities, including the restrooms, are as clean and neat as possible. If that means having a custodian working during the event, it is worth the expense.

Tom's second tool is to hope that people will infer great teaching and sound management from outward physical appearances. Although educated people will always tell others not to judge a book by its cover, that's exactly what Tom hopes community members will do. Sadly, way too many people fall for this trick. They will foolishly pay a lot more for a piece-of-junk car that's washed and polished.

The same tips apply for plays, band concerts and other events where the public visits your schools.

These increase the chances of manipulating the perceptions of critics. Manipulation? Certainly. Tom has no intention of disclosing controversy, waste, disadvantages and failures; only unity, efficiency, advantages and successes.

Consider actions we have taken with good intentions that end up creating negative feelings. Consider the sign affixed to each school’s front door instructing visitors to check in at the office. Most read, “WARNING—All Visitors MUST Report to the Office.” Try instead: “WELCOME! To Ensure the Safety of Our Students, Please Come to the Office for a Visitor’s Pass Before Entering Other Parts of the School. Thank You!”

Tom's third tool is to use psychological tricks to soften the messages to community members that they are not part of the team. Tom knows that few people know how to read between the lines to see that "welcome" messages are really messages of control and exclusion. The reason Tom knows the public doesn't know how to read between the lines is because he knows public schools don't teach students how to do it. In fact, it's not in the interest of public schools to educate people on how to read between the lines. See, e.g., The success side of American education, wherein Walter Williams writes:

In keeping Americans ill-educated, ill-informed and constitutionally ignorant, the education establishment has been the politician's major and most faithful partner. It is in this sense that American education can be deemed a success.

A recent survey suggests parents rely on report cards as a primary source of information about their child’s school. Why not include a district newsletter with every report card?

Critics don't read school newsletters, especially if the school has repeatedly demonstrated that it will publish only good news and keep bad news safely locked in closets. I note there is little downside to some of Tom's ideas, but in moving from announcements at school events to newsletters in report cards, Tom has started to increase school expenditures with little chance of changing anyone's mind.

To ensure media coverage of an event, ask a reporter, anchor or editor to participate. Let a media representative serve as master of ceremonies at a spelling bee. Ask a reporter to judge a science fair or art contest. While it doesn’t guarantee coverage, it makes it much more likely.

Tom's fifth tool is to use the media. Many schools do this. Many schools also send glowing press releases to the media, which dutifully prints it without analysis. This tool has promise for reaching critics--it's also free--, but as Tom says, "Not every parent or community member reads page 57 of section Q in the daily newspaper (where they bury the positive stories about education)."

Offer your school system’s faculty as experts to the news media to comment on major news events. TV and radio talk shows are always looking for people they can call on when big events happen. Positioning your teachers and administrators as experts in their fields will also greatly enhance your system’s credibility in the community.

Tom's sixth tool is the hope that people will infer academic excellence and sound management from hearing a very few educators speak in public. He knows that most people will make illogical conclusions because public schools don't teach students how to avoid falling for illogical fallacies.

While this tool may expose the public to a star or two from the district, it may also expose some idiots. Use of this tool is risky. Moreover, using educators as commentators on issues affecting schools generally exposes assumed but unrevealed biases and sometimes solidifies the opinions of the critics. This tool has some upside potential and a lot of downside potential.

Notice that we are six tools into Tom's tool kit and he hasn't once suggested that educators directly address the concerns of critics about not teaching and wasting money. He has not suggested that anyone do the work to demonstrate efficiency and effectiveness on a system-wide scale. His approach is not to treat citizens as trusted partners in an adult-adult relationship, but to treat them as objects with vulnerability to psychological manipulations of perceptions. No properly educated person of ethics and principles would intentionally do this to their neighbors. Yet, education is lousy with professionals who think like Tom, which is an important reason why this website exists.

Succinct Communication

Hundreds of people see the message signs in front of your schools each day. Be creative, brag, congratulate, inform, and, if possible, entertain passers-by. Ask someone to look at it each morning to make sure some prankster hasn’t changed it or that a letter hasn’t fallen off. Change it often.

Few people have time to read in-depth articles. Your publications should have short, informative, bullet-pointed articles written on a 9th-grade level. Use callout boxes, colorful graphs and pictures of happy kids doing something. Be creative in the way your information is distributed. Consider asking a supermarket or discount store to put your publication in checkout bags and distribute it in doctors’ offices and public libraries.

Every first-year principal knows if you want to pack them in at PTA meetings, have the kids do something. Ask principals to divide their PTA meetings between students, teachers and extracurricular programs, and feature as many different programs as possible. Ask the PTA officers to keep the mundane items to a minimum. Brag on all the great things happening at the school and in your system. Above all, resist the temptation to always ask parents for something.

Ask teachers and administrators to visit the PTA meetings of their feeder schools. Ask the host school to introduce them and let them share one or two exciting things happening at the school these parents’ children will soon attend. Elementary teachers and administrators should visit nursery schools, day care centers and head start centers.

More of the same from tools 7 through 10.

Gift Horses

Keep your eyes open for help with your PR efforts:

• Chambers of commerce may welcome articles written by the superintendent or board president on how education affects business. Likewise, banks, local boards of real estate agents and various other civic groups produce publications that may welcome input.

• Establish a speaker’s bureau where trained school district presenters can be scheduled to speak to local clubs and business organizations.

• Ask a local billboard company to donate a board to promote education. Make sure the board shows that it was donated and no public funds were used.

• Offer to do a public service show once per month on local radio stations. Feature interviews with teachers, administrators, custodians, bus drivers and mechanics.

There you have it. Fourteen tools to increase support for public schools and not one of them was crafted to respond to the issues Tom framed--the lack of proper teaching and the wasting of money.

Educators believe this approach is effective. Schools pass the vast majority of budget votes and referenda. But how much better could they do if they openly and honestly reported fair and balanced information and persistently and publicly worked to correct deficiencies rather than brag on their successes--way too few for the money spent--and hide their failures?

Unlike NASA, public schools do not have mission critical disasters that shake them out of their complacency and force them to see that even when you're the best space agency on earth (or the best public school), the "lies" believed by the organizational culture are fundamentally detrimental to mission success. Columbia-like disasters occur in public schools hundreds of thousands of times each year when students drop out or fail their classes. Yet, public schools reject the notions that they are wasting money and failing to teach. If all these students were to come speeding to earth through the atmosphere in one large group, burning up with fragments of their remains crashing into the earth, I'd bet professional educators would be shocked out of their complacency and start creating schools for The 21st Century Student.

Remember, doing something and not talking about it is like winking in the dark.

Tom Salter is membership director for the Alabama Association of School Boards. . . .

Physical education teachers became certified archery instructors while preparing to reintroduce the activity to their students.
By JULI PROBASCO-SOWERS / Des Moines (IW) Register Staff Writer

See, related, Archery Class. What's going on in PE?

Iowa's archers are helping the state's physical education teachers put a new spin on an old school sport.

"Archery is one more lifelong skill students can take out into the world and continue to use," said Keith Slifka, a PE teacher from Cresco . . . .

A lifelong skill. Are we all moving to Sherwood Forest? Sure, some people target shoot, hunt and/or compete at the Olympics with arrows, but it takes all of 15 minutes to learn the basics. You don't need to pay a PE teacher $75,000 a year (in many NY schools) to teach archery. Moreover, few people have easy access to bows and arrows, and because of potential injuries to children, many don't want them in their homes. So, how effective of a lifelong sport is this?

* * *

[V]olunteers with the Iowa State Archery Association and the Iowa Bow Hunters Association are trying to encourage the reintroduction of archery into physical education classes in Iowa middle schools.

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Slifka sees archery as one more way to combat the growing problem of childhood obesity by promoting lifelong activity and health. Those ideas have become a focus for the Cresco school district's physical education programs in the past year.

This is utter nonsense. Converting to sports like archery would likely increase obesity, not decrease it. And, what a surprise! Many schools around the country do teach archery and obesity has increased!

No cause and effect, you say? I wouldn't be so sure about that. A 130 lb person burns 207 calories an hour in archery--the same as walking at 3 miles an hour or golfing with a powered cart. That's substantially less than what a person would burn in the old-fashioned regimen of situps, pushups and running.

In two weeks of five archery classes, my daughter shot six arrows in each 40-minute class. The rest of the time she sat and talked. How much exercise is that? It's ridiculous. She could have gotten more of a workout from intensely playing 40 continuous minutes of computer games. Perhaps that's why some PE instructors want to add computer games to PE!

* * *

Slifka said students generally are enthusiastic about archery and have the opportunity to continue with the sport, especially with the high-tech bows that are available today.

Spend lots of money to produce inferior results--the motto of public education. Situps, pushups and running can be done for free. Yeah, students aren't excited about it, but these do much more for fitness than archery. PE is more about staying fit than having fun.

"I have been very impressed with this program" Slifka said. "The bows are high-tech, top of the line. This isn't your old fashioned curved bow and archery class." Students "can target shoot in the back yard for fun, join an archery club, or take it to another level and shoot competitively or go hunting."

Rural students may be shooting in their backyards, but are parents going to let their urban and suburban children do this? It's an invitation to disaster for almost no gain in physical fitness. Only a nut would recommend it.

Archery clubs and hunting are fine. Few students will take it to this level and in many schools no students will.

* * *


By the end of Monday's session, the teachers would be certified archery instructors. The program is affiliated with the National Archery in Schools Program and is modeled after a program in Kentucky. In three years, Kentucky's program went from a few students at one school to being a club sport with competition among schools and as many as 190,000 students involved in archery, said Olympian archer White.

That's nice. I wonder how many overweight archers there are? I wonder how many can't run a 10-minute mile without being completely winded and exhausted. Middle and high school students should be at the peak of their physical fitness. They aren't going to get there by having PE classes like archery. Every PE class should qualify as a complete workout to achieve and maintain top fitness. From Fitness Fundamentals (Developed by the President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports):

Here are the amounts of activity necessary for the average, healthy person to maintain a minimum level of overall fitness. Included are some of the popular exercises for each category.

WARMUP - 5-10 minutes of exercises such as walking, slow jogging, knee lifts, arm circles or trunk rotations. Low intensity movements that stimulate movements to be used in the activity can also be included in the warmup.

MUSCULAR STRENGTH - a minimum of two 20-minute sessions per week that include exercises for all the major muscle groups. Lifting weights is the most effective way to increase strength.

MUSCULAR ENDURANCE - at least three 30-minute sessions each week that include exercises such as calisthenics, pushups, situps, pullups, and weight training for all the major muscle groups.

CARDIORESPIRATORY ENDURANCE - at least three 20-minute bouts of continuous aerobic (activity requiring oxygen) rhythmic exercise each week. Popular aerobic conditioning activities include brisk walking, jogging, swimming, cycling, rope-jumping, rowing, cross-country skiing, and some continuous action games like racquetball and handball.

FLEXIBILITY - 10-12 minutes of daily stretching exercises performed slowly without a bouncing motion. This can be included after a warmup or during a cooldown.

COOL DOWN - a minimum of 5-10 minutes of slow walking, low-level exercise, combined with stretching.

Folks, archery is a "cool down" exercise. It should never be the main exercise of a PE class.

In his job for the archery manufacturing company Brennan Industries and its sister company, Mathews, White travels throughout the United States, helping to begin and teach the archery programs.

Archery is mainly about jobs and sales. That's it.

Various archery groups and suppliers helped raise more than $32,000 to begin the program in Iowa schools, said Laverne Woock of Waterloo, project coordinator for the Iowa Archery in Schools Program.

The program budget gives the schools one or more sets of modern archery equipment. Each set is worth $4,500. Southeast Polk, if it implements the archery program, would receive more than $9,000 worth of equipment.

Public education is filled with these kinds of costs. It's fat that should be cut.

The curriculum emphasizes safety, proper stance and archery etiquette. The curriculum includes integrated curriculum information so math teachers, physics teachers and history teachers can be involved, White explained.

Arrow flight and bow flexing aren't so conceptually complex that students need to experience them to apply them to math, physics and history. Teachers are screaming around the country that we don't spend enough on education. We have higher priorities, and if we don't, then we are spending more than enough for education.

Brian Town, a Southeast Polk physical education teacher, is excited about teaching archery.

* * *

Town also likes the fact he can adapt the class for students with physical and mental disabilities. "Shooting a bow is something a student can do from a wheelchair," he said.

So, let the wheelchaired students do archery. But let's not reduce the fitness of all students to the level of fitness of those in wheelchairs.

White noted that Kentucky school officials found that archery helped students who might not otherwise be very involved in school become active.

Archery. The magic bullet. It does it all, doesn't it? I'll bet test scores improve in schools when archery is taught. I'll bet more students go into math and science.

Educators have got to stop using PE and sports as a crutch to attract students to boring classes. The right thing to do is to create academically rigorous courses that are compelling and cause students to want to come to school. See, e.g., The 21st Century Student and The best question comes from a third-grader.

"What I find with archery, although it can be a team sport in some aspects, is that it is very individual," White said. "Students can go out and have fun and not have to compete with other people."

That kind of makes archery a politically incorrect sport, doesn't it? On top of that, the purpose of bows and arrows, like bullets, was to kill. These are implements of violence. None of this bothers me, but I'm sure it bothers some.

Finally, I have absolutely nothing against archery. My beef isn't with archery. It's with PE teachers who are failing to keep our children fit and using flashy language like "lifelong skills" to justify it. It's not only unprofessional, it's a scam.