There's an Elephant in Our School

Is there an Elephant in your school? The belief of those in positions of power that they can improve student achievement with the stroke of a pen constitutes the pathway by which herds of elephants find their way into our local boardrooms, district offices, and classrooms. Elephants represent the programs and priorities initiated by education administrators to increase student achievement and graduation rates in response to such dictates. Such initiatives often seem counter to what teachers know to be in the best long-term interest of their students. While an Elephant can represent any number of such short-sighted initiatives, "The Elephant in our School" really represents the culture that has emerged within our schools where critical skills such as effective communication, collaboration, work-ethic and creativity take a back seat to easily measured and increasingly irrelevant short-term measures of student performance.