Hawaii Teacher: Where is Education’s Steve Jobs?
It hurts me every time I see another smart, ambitious, intellectual teacher leave Hawaii.
But over the past few years, I鈥檝e seen too many go because they couldn鈥檛 envision a pathway toward professional development here.
I remember watching the John Stossel expos茅, 鈥淚s College Worth It?鈥 and hearing an interviewee say that he could take any innovative young person, like a Steve Jobs or Bill Gates when they were in high school, lock them in a closet for three years, and when they got out, they would still go on to become more productive than most of America.
The basic idea that he was trying to express was that what Steve Jobs and Bill Gates knew about their fields didn鈥檛 matter nearly as much as their individual mindsets and beliefs.
We can teach those mindsets and beliefs, and we need to. But before we can pass them on to our kids, we have to integrate them into our leadership.
Imagine if a Steve Jobs or Bill Gates of education existed today 鈥 an innovative, visionary genius who could create a system for administration and curricula that was comprehensive, substantive, effective, and powerfully engaging.
Would they find a network of leaders in Hawaii capable of encouraging their growth and of incorporating their ideas? Or would they be stymied, constrained, and forced to leave education and move toward a field that valued and adopted their ideas and talents?
This is what is happening every year, over and over, in our education system in Hawaii. We have a 56-percent teacher turnover every 5 years. I have, in recent years, watched colleagues with incredible abilities and potential leave the state or the profession because they felt undervalued and unrecognized.
People who want to become administrative leaders in Hawaii’s schools don’t get the job thanks to raw talent or intellectual ability. It is about having the right number of years of teaching experience to apply. And there seems to be skepticism toward people who choose a field that allows them to grow. Instead, we should develop a sense of reflectiveness about why our schools are hemorrhaging great teachers.
Great leaders don鈥檛 always take the road most traveled. Some of the great teachers and potential leaders I know struggle because they are more committed to doing the job in front of them to the best of their abilities than they are willing to sacrifice their students鈥 learning so that they can chase some famously meaningless online professional development course or night class on administration. This has created a situation in which the teachers with the best attributes for leadership are often ignored, while some people with the least desirable priorities and attitudes appear to be the most qualified in terms of the sort of professional development that shows up on a resume.
Education and years of experience do not make an individual qualified to be a leader. Mindset and beliefs make a leader. Education and experience give a leader the knowledge that he or she needs to apply their mindset and beliefs to their work.
Pick up any book on great management and leadership and what you will find inside is not information on balance sheets and legal requirements, but on philosophy, relationships, vision, and mindsets.
We need to recruit people with mindsets that say: We can make Hawaii鈥檚 education system the best in the country. Sound bold? Yes, it is. And we need bold people. They are out there, but we keep letting them leave. Our current system just doesn鈥檛 value them.
We need to start finding ways to keep those people, and we need to teach the right mindset in our leadership programs.
Growing up, my dad was a Southern Baptist minister, so I received a double dose of rhetoric on what I should believe, and while not all of it stuck, I did learn some valuable lessons about the power of beliefs.
Our beliefs can limit our capabilities. No one who believes that our school system can鈥檛 be fixed will ever fix our education system. Sadly, nearly every school leader I鈥檝e spoken with has told me that our system cannot be changed. Long ago, such people might not have believed that human beings could build a craft that could fly, and if they were the engineers, we surely wouldn’t have succeeded.
Most educator- and education-leadership programs are essentially agnostic about whether all kids are capable of learning at high levels, whether schools can or should be hubs for social improvement, or whether school leaders should create a vision for their school, much less work intensively to invest in teachers, administrators, and students.
Such beliefs should be at the core of a school leadership program, and they should be driven with an almost religious fervor.
The DOE and Hawaii State Teachers Association must break with the idea that taking a class on administration makes you a leader. Hawaii needs additional pathways to leadership roles. We also need recruiters who can look for the best and brightest teachers, and bring them into leadership.
And we need leadership courses that incorporate real, comprehensive and ongoing training to move education forward.
Michael Wooten is a former sergeant in the U.S. Army and University of California Berkeley graduate who came to Hawaii as a Teach For America teacher in 2008. He earned his masters degree in education from the University of Hawaii and currently teaches English and film at James Campbell High School in Ewa Beach.
