Below is the unedited email I sent out on March 12, 2024:
“Dear Friend and Community Member,
“I apologize for my lack of communication lately. I developed a hernia, and had to have it surgically corrected. I have been in a mental fog for the last few weeks, but am now on the mend.
“Before my medical issues arose, I sent you a letter presenting the two predominant perspectives that I hear from community members. These are a) that the school is doing well and is on the right track and, given time, will be a great school; and b) that public education and our school is not the best option for educating our community’s youth; that essentially people only enroll their students if they feel there is no other workable option. I would like to share my own personal perspective with you. But first, I’ll outline some of the background upon which my perspective is built. The below list includes only general dynamics that I’ve identified in the educational industry, and all contribute to the environment in which our school operates.
“Public schools in general have lost a lot of support from communities. Any given day, people can look up the news and find headlines about schools making poor decisions, ignoring their communities to pursue a personal agenda, or taking action that adversely effects students in order to secure some funding, or championing ideology over academics. The list goes on and on. Whether or not this is the case locally doesn’t matter. This is what many of us see, nearly every day, and seeing it erodes trust in the institution of government-provided education.
“The system measures itself. Where an institution has little to no competition in their market for apples-to-apples comparison, what can you compare the institution to? Compulsory public schooling is also a very new concept as a standard or requirement, leaving little history to compare today’s outcomes to. The federal Department of Education is younger than many of you are, and the last state in America to require kids attend elementary school did so in 1929. Even if a long history of compulsory public schooling was available in the USA, the measures of success change often. This eliminates the ability to compare our schools to their own past performance (i.e. did the goalposts change or did the school change). The point is that the standards of success are constantly in flux, making success a moving target. For any given scorecard, there exists a large number of variables which changed during the time period measured, providing endless excuses as to why any score may have been achieved by a school (this goes for good scores and bad).
“An institutionalized sense of entitlement. Public K-12 schools seem to have an attitude of all of their problems being the State’s fault. Given that the State funds public schools and establishes the framework within which schools are required to operate, officials in many localities like to play the victim. “We wouldn’t have financial problems if the State funded us better,” and “We wouldn’t have behavioral problems if the State would provide us special education departments” are very common phrases among those who don’t practice ownership of their school. Institutions tend to perpetuate themselves. Therefore, they are forced to market themselves as indispensable and virtuous in order to be successful in their self-perpetuation, usually with the aim of increasing their budget or getting community support. If an organization is indispensable and virtuous, they can’t possibly be the cause of any problems, right? If you’ve ever read the book “Extreme Ownership” by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin, you’ll know why I’m bothered by the victim role so much. It hamstrings an organization’s ability to be exceptional.
“Elected officials tend to be motivated by personal desires. While the State owns the education system and the yardstick used to measure success, each district is governed locally by people with personal agendas. I bet that most of you believe that your elected representatives typically don’t represent the electorate nowadays, regardless of which office they hold. Many run for office because they have strongly held personal beliefs and selfish ambitions of their own. Anyone popular enough can govern, say, a school district, leaving them able to implement their own personal vision or pet project. We hear about this happening all the time during board development trainings, and it is the norm rather than the exception.
“The State of Idaho only requires a one year “strategic” plan, sometimes referred to as a Continuous Improvement Plan or CIP. As nearly every adult will attest to, planning one year at a time is more of a tactical plan than it is a strategic plan. Most major goals take several years to achieve, and require incremental milestones along the critical path to those larger goals. Most organizational strategic plans span the course of five to ten years, depending on the state of the organization when the strategic plan is developed. Strategic plans are typically developed to support an organization’s Mission Statement (the reason an organization exists) and Vision Statement (what it looks like when an organization is fulfilling its mission). What are Cascade School’s mission and vision?
“Here is my perspective regarding our school, summarized:
Lack of community support or involvement. Only a handful of parents regularly step up to support the school in a meaningful way.
We, the community, have not compiled our success criteria in a way that can be shared and measured.
Our school’s woes are ours, personally, to solve. The victim card cannot be played if we want the best possible educational experience for our kids. We can request help from the State, but in the end, we must decide our own fate.
There is no benchmark to gauge an initiative’s merit, or whether or not an initiative or change fits our community.
Our latest long-term strategic plan expired last year and, in my own opinion, was incomplete. A one year CIP is useless without overarching parameters of long-term success and growth targets.
“I will share in my next letter what I believe our next steps should be to address every single one of our fundamental challenges. Before I do that, I want to make sure that I have a complete picture of the community’s perspective. What do we do with this information? Do you have thoughts that don’t align with mine? Do you think I left an important dynamic off of this list? I want to hear from you personally. No matter your opinion, I’d like to hear your perspective on the best paths forward.”
Brad Howlett