When Your Chickens Come Home to Roost

It ain’t pretty when your chickens come home to roost.

In education, we are often guilty(far too guilty) of not policing our own. Examples of that would be ineffective teachers left to damage student learning year after year. Unprofessional behavior left unchecked. Superintendents that love the Baldridge Award more than their own system. Board members who serve Nashville and not Kingsport – reference Race to the Top. Promoting people into jobs for which they are not competent – the Peter Principle.

All of that has downstream effects. The biggest problem is that offending schools systems get absolutely pillaged of their best employees. Why? Nobody wants to work for systems which lose balance. In one school a few years back, they lost three of their best intermediate teachers during a six week time frame. In another school a few years later, they lost 17 people in two months. Both schools took over a decade to recover. The rich culture which preceded the exodus never returned.

What happened in those aforementioned buildings? It is called quiet quitting.

People who quit quietly are not intrinsically lazy. They have simply lost faith that their hard work makes a difference, and they are actively seeking a new opportunity. Quiet quitters believe their energy is better spent on job hunting than on trying to make their current job work. ~ The Gavel

I am reminded of what has just recently happened to the Democrat Party. They protected a President(who had lost his mind) at all costs. They supplanted a new candidate in his place after all primary votes had been cast. They usurped the primary election process. They lost bigly in this past election. People had simply had enough. People quietly quit the Democrat Party. For the Democrat Party, their chickens came home to roost.

Underpinning this past election was a seismic demographic shift of people who were just tired of being promised things but nothing delivered. This included people who are Hispanic and men who are African American. Even in the NFL, the Trump dance became in vogue. People know that Donald Trump will act. He will work to reform this government.

I don’t know how it will happen, but in Kingsport City Schools our chickens are going to come home to roost if we don’t transform Central Office(ASC) by bringing in more people who are grounded in the real world. The mistake by superintendents is believing they can do this with the people already there. We need an influx of fresh, conservative educational thinkers and do-ers. More importantly, we need people who will reshape our vision, and bring us into the 21st century. We have too many holdovers. I have said this often…the one competent ability of many long termers at ASC is to simply survive the transition from one superintendent to the next. Then those same bureaucrats bring down the next superintendent. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

We have been promised by successive BOEs that this large scale turnover would happen. I had a close family member tell me they wouldn’t do it. I confidently told him that they would. He was right. I was wrong. He is smarter, and wiser. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Political promises aren’t worth much.

People leave managers, not companies. ~ Marcus Buckingham

I can’t relate to lazy people. We don’t speak the same language. I don’t understand you. I don’t want to understand you. ~ Kobe Bryant

ProTip: Bill Bennett used to be the United States Secretary of Education under Ronald Reagan. Bill Bennett has been both a Republican and Democrat. I enjoy listening to him talk. I don’t always agree with him(though I do agree with him about a lot things), but he is open and honest. He speaks plainly. He once sat down with educators who had waited to share their beliefs with him. Bennett and some of the educators had a polite dispute over what schools should actually teach. Many of the educators disagreed with the American people. Bill Bennett reminded them, “But they’re their(the American people) schools; they’re not your schools.” He went on to note, “Well, clearly this is not a hard one to figure out. They are the American peoples’ schools. The education bureaucrats, or “educrats,” are hired hands and they should do the peoples’ will. But they are not doing the peoples’ will, and the reason they are not is that they have a wholly different understanding of what the schools should be about.”