Author Archives: Gray Rinehart

The Local School Board’s Deeply Flawed Goal

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Or, “Why I Didn’t Apply to Fill the Vacant School Board Position.”

Here in Wake County, North Carolina, one of the school board members passed away suddenly last year and left her seat vacant. Just before Christmas, the Wake County Public School System (WCPSS) began taking applications to fill the seat, which represents District 7. The application period ended yesterday. As noted, I did not apply.

You might think that I would be interested in applying, having just released the new edition of Quality Education a few weeks ago. I admit it, I was interested, and I wouldn’t mind helping the school board if the opportunity arose. But I didn’t apply for two reasons.

First, and you might have seen this coming: I’m in the wrong district. So even if I applied, they’d toss my application automatically.

But that’s a technicality. Even before I found out I was in the wrong district, I had decided not to apply. Why? The application package required a “letter of interest outlining your background and listing three strategies for advancing the board’s strategic plan,” but I couldn’t bring myself to support the strategic plan’s primary goal.

At first blush, there’s a lot to like in the WCPSS strategic plan. Despite some questionable editorial choices here and there, I particularly appreciated a couple of their Core Beliefs, such as treating each student as “uniquely capable” and that they intend to “promote and support a culture of continuous improvement, risk-taking, and innovation.” That’s what Quality Education was about when it was first published, much less now.

Then I came to the “Goals” section. There’s only one goal: “By 2020, WCPSS will annually graduate at least 95% of its students ready for productive citizenship as well as higher education or a career.”

As Queen sang in “Bohemian Rhapsody,” “No, no, no, no, no, no, no!”

Strategic Plan Template

(Image: “Strategic Plan Template,” by Scrum Alliance, on Flickr under Creative Commons.)

 

Ignore for the moment the unclear verbiage (is it that 95% of the students graduate, or that 95% of the students will be ready?). The web page for the strategic plan clears that up when it says,

We’ve had many conversations about our goal to improve graduation rates to 95 percent. It is clearly ambitious. It is also a goal we must aspire to if we are going to provide students with the best possible future.

No, Wake County, it’s a goal you must aspire to if you are going to set yourselves and everyone in your school system up for failure.

Let’s ignore also that WCPSS asked people who want to serve on the school board to suggest strategies to advance the strategic plan — that sounds a bit redundant, but that’s what they asked for. Any such strategies should have been part of the plan when it was conceived and published. It seems a bit late to ask newcomers to the board to suggest them.

Instead, let’s concentrate on the goal itself. The strategic plan website offers no background into how this goal was developed, and frankly I’m not of a mind to dig through the minutes to find out what kind of discussion went into it. I feel comfortable in saying that it appears to be both historically ignorant and inherently flawed. It certainly fits the pattern of goals in industry, as noted in a recently-published book on improving education:

Production goals, cost goals, and even safety goals are usually set arbitrarily, with no knowledge of the system’s capabilities to reach the goals. Often the goals are simply numbers that are stated without any workable plan or program to meet them. As [W. Edwards] Deming has pointed out, this raises the following question: if you can meet this goal now, without a plan, why did you not meet the goal before now?

When I say the WCPSS goal is historically ignorant, I mean that it appears that the district either was unaware of the failed “National Educational Goals” from 1990, or chose to believe that they were an aberration and that Wake County will somehow succeed where previous efforts have failed.

My original edition of Quality Education predicted that those 1990 goals, which were targeted at the year 2000, would fail. I explained why, and was not surprised when my predictions proved accurate.

My new edition devotes an entire chapter to their failure. In this case, the relevant example is the second of the “Goals 2000” goals: “by the year 2000, the high school graduation rate will increase to at least 90 percent.”

Where did this arbitrary figure come from? Why not 99, or 99.99 percent? This is a classic example of an arbitrary numerical goal set by management without any idea of what the system was capable of. How would those 90 percent be kept in classes they hate, with teachers they despise and grading practices they fear? Education today, as it was at that time, is working to capacity in this regard; the system itself has to be changed before any significant improvements can be measured.

For this goal, we have actual statistical evidence of its not being met. On 15 December 2015, the U.S. Department of Education reported a “record” graduation rate for the nation, achieved in 2013–14. What was that record rate? Eighty-two percent.

The Wake County school board, then, has followed in the footsteps of the failed national goals by selecting both an arbitrary figure (95%) and an arbitrary date (2020). In addition, they did not take into account the system’s capabilities (87% graduation rate, as reported in 2016) or lay out a plan by which to implement improvements. As with the predictions I made a quarter century ago, I feel confident predicting that the WCPSS 95% goal will fail.

Again, from Quality Education:

… goals, in and of themselves, are not bad—every person and every organization needs goals to work toward, aims to achieve. The problem is that the goals are often set without reference to a plan of action to achieve the goals, then are used to measure performance. Goals that are rationally and responsibly set, and are used to provide focus rather than to measure incremental performance, are positive and necessary. All too often, however, the goals are poorly determined.

Choosing numerical goals arbitrarily without knowing what the system is capable of doing—in the sense of being able to make a confident prediction of the system’s capabilities—sets those in charge of managing the system up to fail. When the goals are not met, explanations are demanded and careers threatened. Even if the goals are met, no one will know why or how or whether the figures have been creatively manipulated to protect those responsible.

Back in 1992, when I was a panelist at a workshop at the University of Rhode Island, I rather audaciously claimed that I could increase the graduation rate to 100% today if pressed to do so. The audience was dubious, as you might expect.

But I pointed out that the graduation rate is a measure of efficiency, not a measure of effectiveness, and that maximizing it is absurdly simple: hand every student a diploma and send them out the door. Teach them? How quaint. Educate them? How noble. Graduate them, that’s what’s important. (Or, in this case, graduate 95% of them.)

My absurd example was meant to emphasize that what we need are schools that are effective, much more than schools that are merely efficient. And what we need are goals and plans that set students and teachers up for success, not ones doomed to failure. For that, we need leaders who can look beyond numbers on spreadsheets to the inner workings of schools in which real people teach and learn.

I hope Wake County can find such leaders among the candidates who did apply for the board.

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Why I’m Not Self-Publishing My Novel, Part III

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(If you’re interested, Part 1 of the series is here and Part 2 of the series is here.)

Since 2016 was a year ago already (!), a brief recap: my near-future science fiction novel, Walking on the Sea of Clouds, is in the pipeline to be published by WordFire Press. Way back last year (!) a newsletter reader sent in this question: Why did I go with a small press instead of self-publishing? I came up with three reasons. The first two are linked above, and lead in sequential fashion to:

Third, and Possibly Most Important: Publishing is Hard

I say that with the authority of experience, because I’m already a publisher. I produced and published my two CDs — though I reckon the term is “released” in the music business — and that wasn’t a trivial effort. Granted, I didn’t engineer or master them and my performance on them was limited to what I could reasonably do, but once the tracks were mastered I handled the rest of the production process.

I also say “publishing is hard” with the authority of vicarious experience. Several friends of mine are in the self-publishing business, writing and publishing and art directing and marketing their own work. Some of them have enjoyed very high degrees of success. For my novel I could learn from their examples and follow in their footsteps and take on all those responsibilities as well, but, as Simon Tam said in an episode of Firefly, “That thought wearies me.”

Books

(Image: “Books,” by Moyan Brenn, on Flickr under Creative Commons.)

 

The thought wearies me because I know how much effort it entails based on my experience in the nonfiction world. As my blog and newsletter readers alike know, late last year I self-published the revised and updated version of Quality Education — available here (and you and all your friends in education should definitely check it out). Not only did I restructure the book so that it’s nearly unrecognizable from the original print version, but I got it formatted for e-book as well as for print-on-demand production, consulted on the cover design (I knew better than to try to do it myself), and have since been trying to market it in the midst of everything else I’ve got going on.

The thought of self-publishing my novel wearies me because the experience of self-publishing my music and my education book nearly wore me out.

So, when we get down to the proverbial brass tacks, I really like the idea of participating in the publishing process with my novel, rather than running the process. And I hope that by leaving the details of production to the good folks at WordFire, I might actually free part of my brain to write some more songs and more stories — short and long!

___
P.S. For a different take on self-publishing’s place in the larger publishing universe, Larry Correia recently “fisked” an article from a “literary” author who had little good to say about self-publishing.
P.P.S. As noted at the outset, this brief blog series was originally an issue of my every-once-in-a-while newsletter. You can subscribe to get the latest on my shenanigans.
P.P.P.S. Seriously, I would greatly appreciate it if you would take a look at Quality Education, and encourage your friends in education to take a look at it, too. Thanks!

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Monday Morning Insight: New Year, New Things

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(Another in the continuing series of quotes to start the week.)

 

It’s the first Monday of 2017 — and for many folks it’s still a holiday, so that’s not a bad way to start the year!

The first quote I’ll present in this series this year is a promise from the 21st chapter of the Revelation of Saint John:

He that sat upon the throne said, “Behold, I make all things new.”

Sunrise!

(“Sunrise!” by Larry, on Flickr, under Creative Commons.)

 

Other translations render the verb tense a bit differently, but I like this one because it’s a statement of intention and purpose: not “I would like to” or “I am in the process of” but “this is what I do,” specifically, “I make all things new.” And not some things, not most things, but all things.

If we believe the one saying that is the one through whom all things were made in the first place — as the Gospel of John presents in its first chapter — then it is no great stretch to believe that he can remake the old into the new and even that he intends to do so. We might even go so far as to think that he delights in doing so.

And that’s a nice thought with which to start this New Year.

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Monday Morning Insight: The Angry Truth

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(Another in the continuing series of quotes to start the week.)

 

It’s the last Monday of 2016, and I think everyone will agree it’s been quite a year.

One characteristic of this year, and especially this political year in the US, has been the sometimes difficult relationship both sides of our cultural divide have with the truth. From presenting things as true that are unverified, to believing things to be true in the face of reasonable doubt, to “news” from various sources that ranges from fake to simply untrustworthy, truth has sometimes been hard to find.

With that in mind, it seems like a good time to focus on a little piece of wisdom I read a long time ago from Wally Bock, a Marine veteran and management consultant here in North Carolina. I wrote it down when I first read it, and it’s a warning many of us should take to heart:

You can hide from the truth, but it will find you. When it does, it will be angry.

Truth ->

“Truth ->,” by Jeremy Brooks. (On Flickr, under Creative Commons.)

 

It may seem odd for me to focus on an idea like that; after all, my first album was called Truths and Lies and Make-Believe. “Perceptions and illusions,” I sang, and I meant it.

But the idea that angry truth may find me one day gives me pause. So I don’t offer any commentary on the quote, just a suggestion — for myself as much as for anyone — for this week leading up to the New Year and maybe, just maybe, for the New Year itself: Don’t hide from the truth. Face it. Acknowledge it. And either learn to live with it, or find a way to alter it.

___
P.S. If you want to know more about Wally Bock, here’s his web site. And here’s his June 2009 blog post that ended with this week’s quote.

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A Christmas Eve Poem

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I put an early version of this on the Book of Faces earlier today. Putting it here, just because.

Christmas Eve

“Christmas Eve,” by looll. (On Flickr, under Creative Commons.)

 

‘Tis another Christmas Eve,
Whether bustling or still —
A day, a night, of anticipation
Of love, joy, peace and good will.

Satisfied or hungry, in company or lonely,
Rich or poor, in bondage or unfettered —
‘Tis another Christmas Eve,
When we stand in hope of brighter things, and better.

I hope everyone has a wonderful Christmas, a happy Hanukkah, a blessed Kwanzaa, or joy in whatever winter festival they celebrate.

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Monday Morning Insight: The American Crisis

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(Another in the continuing series of quotes to start the week.)

 

On this date in 1776, the first article of a series known as “The American Crisis” was printed in the Pennsylvania Journal. Written by Thomas Paine and signed “Common Sense” — after his own pamphlet which had been published in January and was fundamental to the case for the colonies’ Independence — the series was meant to encourage the American public to remain steadfast in the Revolutionary War.

Paine wrote the first article in a particularly dark moment of the war, when General George Washington had been forced to retreat across the Delaware River. Washington had the article read to his troops to bolster their morale. And how could it not, with an opening like this?

These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.

The American Crisis

The first page of “The American Crisis,” number one (1776). (Image on Wikimedia Commons.)

 

Two hundred forty years later, our republic — for which Paine and so many others risked so much — is in the latest of a series of recurring but relatively minor crises over how best to govern our affairs. In some respects this may be because “What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly,” and a great many of us have obtained a great deal with far less labor, risk and cost than our forbears.

I don’t think this latest internal strife is the existential crisis that some have made it out to be; in spite of all our faults and foibles, I remain optimistic about our prospects. But this passage from further on in “The American Crisis” seems particularly apt:

‘Tis surprising to see how rapidly a panic will sometimes run through a country…. Yet panics, in some cases, have their uses; they produce as much good as hurt. Their duration is always short; the mind soon grows through them, and acquires a firmer habit than before. But their peculiar advantage is, that they are the touchstones of sincerity and hypocrisy, and bring things and men to light, which might otherwise have lain forever undiscovered. In fact, they have the same effect on secret traitors, which an imaginary apparition would have upon a private murderer. They sift out the hidden thoughts of man, and hold them up in public to the world.

In the days of our Revolution, panics spread through word of mouth and the printing press: how different from these days of mass media and rapid messaging! And in this modern age, many people — whether secret traitors or not — are all too quick to reveal their hidden thoughts even without a panic, especially when those thoughts are hateful or destructive or degrading. The concept of shame has fallen out of favor, after all.

It is hard to deny that recent events have been “touchstones of sincerity and hypocrisy” in our ongoing discourse, and have brought things to light about many of us … about our prejudices and preferences, our desires and depravities … “which might otherwise have lain forever undiscovered.” These are just the latest in long lines of events, monumental and minuscule, that have prompted outpourings of angst, turmoil, and passion. Yet I still remain optimistic about our future, that we stand a reasonable chance of getting through these strange days with our nation intact.

And in the end, as The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy points out, some of the best advice may simply be, “Don’t Panic!” Because this panic, too, will come to an end.

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Why I’m Not Self-Publishing My Novel, Part II

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(If you’re interested, Part I of the series is here.)

To recap: my near-future science fiction novel, Walking on the Sea of Clouds, is in the pipeline to be published by WordFire Press, and a few weeks ago a newsletter reader sent in this question: Why did I go with a small press instead of self-publishing? I came up with three reasons.

Last week I laid out my first reason: the value a publisher adds to a novel. So here we go with:

Second, I Value Publishers’ Selectivity

I may be more aware of this aspect of publishing because I’m on the front lines of selecting novels for a major publisher — Baen Books — but in general novels selected for publication by big houses and small presses alike have crossed a certain threshold of quality, simply by virtue of being selected from a large number of submissions.

Be the first to read...

Imagine that you can only afford one (or maybe two) out of all the books on all those shelves — that’s what a publisher faces in selecting novels to publish. (Image: “Be the first to read…,” by Thomas Leuthard, on Flickr under Creative Commons.)

 

The “threshold of quality” assumption may not be equally true in all cases — some publishers take chances on novels and other books they might not usually take, for various reasons — but in most cases a novel gets into the publication pipeline because someone declares it good enough to carry the publisher’s logo. In fact, often it’s multiple someones: an initial reader (or two or three), maybe a senior editor, perhaps others in the marketing and management end of things, and of course the in-person publisher.

I consider that a vote of confidence in my favor, and I appreciate it.

The publisher’s selectivity is not, of course, a guarantee of success. There are no such guarantees. I don’t know if the story will capture people’s attention, though I certainly hope it does. We’ll see, won’t we?

Meanwhile, next week I’ll cover the third reason I’m trusting a publisher with my novel instead of self-publishing it.

___
P.S. This blog series was originally an issue of my every-once-in-a-while newsletter. You can subscribe to get the latest on my goings-on and projects.

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Monday Morning Insight, from the First U.S. Chief Justice

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(Another in the continuing series of quotes to start the week.)

 

Today is John Jay’s birthday (born in 1745). Jay was President of the Continental Congress in 1778-79, wrote five of The Federalist Papers in support of the U.S. Constitution, and once the Constitution was ratified he served from 1789-95 as the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

Before and after presiding over the Continental Congress, in 1777 and again in 1785, Jay — a slaveholder himself — tried to get slavery abolished in his home state of New York. In a 1785 letter, he wrote,

That men should pray and fight for their own freedom, and yet keep others in slavery, is certainly acting a very inconsistent, as well as unjust and, perhaps, impious part, but the history of mankind is filled with instances of human improprieties.

And he wrote in a 1786 letter,

It is much to be wished that slavery may be abolished. The honour of the States, as well as justice and humanity, in my opinion, loudly call upon them to emancipate these unhappy people. To contend for our own liberty, and to deny that blessing to others, involves an inconsistency not to be excused.

Upon leaving the Supreme Court, Jay became Governor of New York. He served in that office from 1795-1801, and in 1799 he signed into law an act to emancipate the slaves in that state. In order to pass the legislature, the emancipation was only gradual, but by the time Jay died on 17 May 1829, there had been no slaves and no indentured servitude in New York for nearly two years.

Chain expressing freedom

(Image: “Chain expressing freedom,” by Stepph, on Wikimedia Commons.)

 

Like other Founding Fathers of our great nation, Jay was a complex and sometimes contradictory fellow. Some would chide him for not doing enough to abolish slavery, for not being forceful enough or speeding up the process. But even if he did not take the final step, he had the courage to take the first steps.

May we all have the courage to take the first steps toward whatever we deem important.

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Why I’m Not Self-Publishing My Novel, Part I

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One of my newsletter readers asked this question, so I obliged and answered it in a newsletter issue, but I thought some other folks might be curious about the inner workings of publishing … so I’ll answer it here, too.

We pause here for a word from our sponsor: Yes, you too can subscribe to my newsletter and get the latest news or whatnot I decide to send out, and even get to ask me questions like this one. And now, back to our story…

If you hadn’t heard, my near-future science fiction novel, Walking on the Sea of Clouds, is in the pipeline to be published by WordFire Press, a small press in Colorado. A few weeks ago a reader sent in this question: Why did I go with a small press instead of self-publishing? The question is even more appropriate now, since just last week I self-published a new edition of my first book, a nonfiction examination of education and how the system might be improved.

I came up with three reasons why I was happy to join forces with a small press instead of trying to self-publish my novel, and I’ll hit them one at a time in three separate posts. First,

I Think a Good Publisher Adds Value

The continuum of opinions on this is probably pretty wide, so let’s see if I can explain my position. Each time we read a book (or listen to a CD, or watch a movie, or whatever), we evaluate it, whether we write a review or not — this is where I might ask you to post a review of one of my CDs or of my book(s), except that I’m terrible at doing reviews myself — that is, we assess the book’s subjective value in terms of our reading experience against its objective value in terms of what we paid for it.

EDIT>

(Image: “Edit,” by Matt Hampel, on Flickr under Creative Commons.)

 

What goes into our subjective evaluation is different depending on our expectations and what adds to or detracts from the experience. A major factor in fiction is the story itself: does it flow well, does it transport us to a time and place we enjoy, do the characters and their situations resonate with us, etc. A good publisher can put a book through successive stages of editing to improve the story. For instance, my novel has gone through the “developmental” edit stage and will go through additional edits as the process continues.

One thing that can affect our enjoyment of the story is simply how easy the book is to read, not in terms of style but in terms of presentation. With respect to that, a book that is well-edited and laid out nicely so that it’s easy to read will probably score higher than one that is sloppy; a good publisher can therefore add value by making an average book better, and a good book beautiful. We may also factor in such things as cover art, and a good publisher can often retain better cover artists than a self-publisher can.

So, even before we consider that a good publisher has marketing and sales connections beyond what most self-publishers can muster, they can add value to the product, the book, itself.

And that’s the first reason I’m not self-publishing my novel.

I’ll cover the other two reasons in future posts. In the meantime, I need to get back to the day’s writing and editing.

___

P.S. Before I go, here’s where I ask you for your help: If you know a parent, teacher, or anyone interested in ways we might improve our educational system, point them to the new edition of Quality Education — completely restructured and updated from the original version — available now on Amazon in both electronic (Kindle) and trade paperback formats. When I released it last week, it reached as high as number 13 on Amazon’s “Education Policy and Reform” list.

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Monday Morning Insight: Physics and Creativity

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(Another in the continuing series of quotes to start the week.)

 

In one of the strange coincidences that makes our world so interesting, on this date 115 years ago two great but very different innovators — Walt Disney and Werner Heisenberg — were born.

German physicist Heisenberg (5 December 1901 – 1 February 1976) received a Nobel Prize as one of the founders of quantum mechanics, and formulated the principle of uncertainty that bears his name. That principle refers to our inability to know all the complementary states of a particle at the same time; specifically, Heisenberg said that as we determine the position of a particle with higher and higher precision, our knowledge of its momentum loses precision.

The uncertainty principle is a bit different from the “observer effect” in which our efforts to measure something end up affecting the thing we’re measuring — something that’s been noticed in everyday life, as well as in particle physics — but Heisenberg wrote about the observer effect in Physics and Philosophy:

We have to remember that what we observe is not nature herself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.

That reminded me of a story I once heard about Walt Disney (5 December 1901 – 15 December 1966), whose creation of Mickey Mouse and all that followed — cartoons, movies, theme parks — has been well-chronicled.

As I heard it from Dr. Howard Hendricks at a National Youthworkers’ Convention many years ago, when Disney was in school his class was given an assignment to draw a picture of flowers. Disney drew his flowers with faces on them, and when the teacher told him that flowers didn’t have faces on them he told his teacher, “Mine do.”

Creativity

Something of an uncertainty principle of creativity? (Image: “Creativity,” by Denise Krebs, on Flickr under Creative Commons.)

 

That story about Disney may be apocryphal — as I heard Russell Ackoff say once, “An apocryphal story is one that may not be true, but ought to be” — but if it’s true it seems to me a great example of Heisenberg’s quote. Disney was not observing nature itself, but his observation of nature was affected by what he brought to it: a sense of playfulness, a degree of whimsy, that could not be extinguished by a teacher’s admonition. To be creative, we have to allow ourselves to play and trust more to our inner vision than to what our senses (or other people) might be telling us.

The paths Heisenberg and Disney took in their lives were quite different — one the path of hard science, one the path of business and entertainment — but both gave us new ways of seeing the world.

And as you look at the world this week, I hope you can see its wonders in exciting new ways — and let yourself play.

___
P.S. A reminder: My completely-revised-and-updated edition of Quality Education has been out for almost a week, and so far it’s gone as high as number 13 on Amazon’s list of “Education Policy and Reform” titles. It’s available on Kindle and in Paperback. I’d be pleased if you’d check it out, and share the link with a friend!

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