Education as we know it is in its final days. Are these scary or exciting times? To me, it's the latter as I believe we are entering a new age and the change is no more frightening than how the farmers must've felt when people left the fields for the factories. In the days ahead, we must challenge not only the status quo, but the foundation structures that have been a part of our operating system for well over 150 years. These times call for bold leaders. Join me moving into the unknown.

1. 1
Leadership in Times of Transition presented by Chris Shade
Leadership in Times of Transition presented by Chris Shade
What is the single greatest impediment to your organization’s
greatness?
The state standards outline curricular expectations lack specificity
and relevance. Our curriculum is “a mile wide and an inch deep”
requiring students to be a “jack of all trades and master of none.”
According to Robert Marzano, “If you wanted to teach all of the
standards in the national documents, you would have to change
schooling from K-12 to K-22 .”

2. 2
According to Sir Ken Robinson, last year, the NFL was a nine-billion-dolla
industry.
Hollywood was an eleven-billion-dollar industry.

3. 3
Standardized assessment? A sixteen-billion-dollar industry. This sounds
like big business to me; and to that I say, “education is none of your
business.”
http://www.jamievollmer.com/pdf/the-list.pdf
Government policymakers, in an effort to correct what they
perceived as inefficiency and ineffectiveness in publication, have
over-mandated and over-regulated the local function. Multiple and
largely punitive accountability provisions were created to ensure
compliance. Though the continual proliferation of prescriptive
rules and requirements is probably well-intentioned, its impact on
schools is inherently counterproductive. Rather than focusing
efforts on student success, school districts have been forced to
behave like inflexible and unresponsive bureaucracies, more
accountable to policies set by the government and their
enforcement agencies than responsive to meeting the needs of
their students and the communities they serve. This shift in power
has stripped the local community of a sense of ownership of its
schools and denied its citizens the right and opportunity to make
meaningful choices about the quality and nature of education it
desires for its youth. [Visioning Document]

4. 4
Bureaucracy Test [from Gary Hamel]
• Do you feel there are too many rules and policies in your
organization, too much red tape?
• Do those rules and policies often get in the way of doing
the right thing for customers?
• Do you feel over-managed, as if you're not really
trusted?
• Are there internal processes, like budgeting and the
annual performance review, that seem to absorb more
time and effort than they're worth?
• Does it seem unnecessarily difficult to start something
new, to get a bit of seed funding and carve out some
time to experiment with a new service, product, or work
practice?
• Does it feel like speaking up, challenging your
manager, or questioning a decision, could be a career-
limiting move?
• Are you or your teammates sometimes reluctant to take
risks for fear of being punished for failure?
• Do internal staff functions, like HR and finance, seem
more focused on enforcing their rules than facilitating
your success, more meddlesome than generally helpful?
• Does it often feel as if employees are treated more like
resources than human beings? That profits come first,
and people come second?
• Do you feel there are too many layers in your
organization? Too many managers who spend their time
managing other managers?
• Do leaders seem more inclined to protect their decision-
making prerogatives than to empower those around
them?
• And does it often seem as if it's the best politicians who
get promoted rather than the best leaders? So that's a
dozen questions.

5. 5
http://www.garyhamel.com/blog/3-trillion
Reform strategies have repeatedly been introduced with such acts
as the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, Goals 2000, No
Child Left Behind, and the recent Every Student Succeeds Act.
Image borrowed from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:No_Child_Left_Behind_Act.jpg

6. 6
Yet each new reform is merely putting lipstick on the pig. Like its
predecessors ESSA emphasizes standardized assessment despite
knowing that weighing the pig won’t make it fatter.
And what CEO would offer to be rated on the price of company
stock on an arbitrary day of the year?
Why?

7. 7
Name some of the greatest breakthroughs of the past 150 years.
All of humanity’s scientific advances would have contributed little
to our quality of life if they hadn’t been accompanied by equally
astounding breakthroughs in management science. Over the past
century, much of this innovation was focused on getting people to
be as reliable as machines, a challenge that required a new and
systematic approach to the problem of control. The name for that
approach: bureaucracy.
The challenge may seem intimidating, but take heart. Those early
management pioneers had to turn free-thinking, obstreperous
human beings into obedient, kowtowing employees. They were
working against the grain of human nature.

8. 8
In routinizing work, we risked routinizied human beings. Indeed,
this was inevitable, since the goal of bureaucracy was (and is) to
excise the human factor, to turn people into machines made of
flesh and blood.

9. 9
When we think of factories, we think of Henry Ford, Model T’s, and
assembly lines. Yet, with the burgeoning success and growth, the need
for a new type of worker was born, the white-collar workers.
Interestingly, however, these white collar workers were still factory
workers. Whether pushing a pencil or hammering away on a keyboard,
or calling on customers, the work was planned, controlled, measured
and routinized.
If you paid attention in school, followed instructions, showed up on
time, and tried hard, you were promised to be taken care of, paid a lot of
money, given job security, offered health insurance and retirement
benefits. It was the American Dream.
My father worked in the factory, in a white collar, in sales. Every day he
would fight Houston traffic going from one place of business to another.
Meet with an office manager, ask, “What paper products do you need?
Paper towel? Toilet paper? Cleaning supplies? Chemicals?” He would
take the order; get back into his car and drive to another place of
business, church, or school. “What paper products do you need? Paper
towel? Toilet paper? Cleaning supplies? Chemicals?” He was
extraordinarily talented and extremely successful.
In routinizing work, we routinized human beings.

10. 10
No corporation or school can thrive in the absence of creativity,
innovation, and learning, and the greatest threat to all three of
these is disengagement. [Daring Greatly by Brene Brown]
Engagement may have been irrelevant in the industrial economy, but it's
the whole game now.
http://content.gallup.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Production/C
ms/POLL/ifgznd_do0qhwo_o3oc5sg.png

11. 11
The Texas Center for Educational Research reviewed a number of
estimation models and studied three representative Texas school
districts. They concluded that the districts spend 20% of a
departing teacher’s annual salary to replace him or her, amounting
to a conservative estimate of $329 million statewide each year.
In a 2004 study of teacher retention, the Alliance for Excellent
Education estimated that the costs associated with teacher
attrition are about $12,500 per teacher, and conclude that the cost
in the 2000 school year could have been nearly $2.1 billion across
the nation.
1,000 teachers x 15% turnover = 150 departing teachers
$30,496 x 20% = $6099.20 to replace one [first year] teacher
$6,099.20 x 150 = $914,880 total annual expense
[Building Engaged Schools by Gary Gordon]

12. 12
How can you expect engagement at work if work isn't engaging?
Teachers are shackled by standardization, standards and standardized
assessments. There is little room for autonomy and creative liberty.
Technology has changed everything. The white-collar jobs that were
once machine-proof are now being replaced by machines. When it’s
time to do taxes, many no longer call on an accountant, but instead
go online. When shoes are ordered from an endless supply online,
they are shipped in the correct size the next day with a click of a
button having never left home.
Today, I can do what my father did in eight hours in a matter of
minutes.
But in the face of competition and technology, the bargain has fallen
apart. Job growth is flat at best. Wages in many industries are in a
negative cycle. The middle class is under siege like never before, and
the future appears dismal. People are no longer being taken care of—
pensions are gone; 401(k)s have been sliced in half; and it’s hard to
see where to go from here. It’s futile to work hard at restoring the
take-care-of-you bargain. The bargain is gone and it’s not worth
whining about and it’s not effective to complain. There’s a new
bargain now, one that leverages talent and creativity and art more
than it rewards obedience.

13. 13
In their viral video Shift Happens, Karl Fisch and Scott McLeod state,
“We are currently preparing students for jobs that don’t yet exist
using technologies that haven’t been invented in order to solve
problems we don’t even know are problems yet.”
Until 1900 human knowledge doubled approximately every
century. By the end of World War II knowledge was doubling every
25 years. Today, knowledge is doubling every 13 months.
According to IBM, the build out of the “internet of things” will lead
to the doubling of knowledge every 12 hours.
Or put more simply…

14. 14
If there is one thing you can always count on to happen in life, it’s
change.
"If you don't like change, you're going to like irrelevance even less." Eric
Shinseki
You can't outrun the future if you don't see it coming...

15. 15
Because an influx of monies for education is unlikely, we must
innovate “inside the box.” George Couros
We need to turn the assumption of “organization first, human
beings second” on its head. Instead of asking, how do we get
employees to better serve the organization, we need to ask, how
do we build organizations that deserve the extraordinary gifts that
employees could bring to work? The most important task for any
manager today is to create a work environment that inspires
exception contribution and that merits an outpouring of passion,
imagination, and initiative.

16. 16
To create an organization that’s adaptable and innovative, people
need the freedom to challenge precedent, to “waste” time, to go
outside of channels, to experiment, to take risks and to follow their
passions.
Policies and rules are important—no organization can survive
without them. Most organizations, though, are overcontrolled.
That’s because control works like a ratchet. Managers are
incentives to create rules, not abolish them. More rules mean
more things to control, and that means more job security and
more power.
If you’re a formally appointed leader, and you want to turn sheep
into shepherds, you have to take off your leadership mantle and
say to people, “I don’t have a plan, what’s yours?” That’s
humbling, but it’s the only way to release the latent talents within
your organization.
Let people find the work that best suits their interests. This is the
key to building a community of passion. When you force people
into slots, you get slot-shaped contributions; you don’t get bold
and astonishing contributions. If you want the unexpected, you
have to give people the freedom to do the unexpected.
Three things are critical to engagement: first, the scope that
employees have to learn and advance (are there opportunities to
grow?); second, the company’s reputation and its commitment to
making a difference in the world (is there a mission that warrants
extraordinary effort?); and third, the behaviors and values of the
organization’s leaders (are they trusted, do people want to follow
them?)]

17. 17
Show me an organization where compensation is largely correlated
with hierarchy, I can tell you that’s not going to be a very
innovative or adaptable organization. People are going to spend a
lot of their time managing up rather than collaborating. There will
be a lot of competition that goes into promotion up that formal
ladder rather than competing, really, to add value. So, increasingly,
compensation has to be a correlate of value created wherever you
are, rather than how well you fought that political battle, what you
did a year or two or three years ago that made you an EVP or
whatever.
The problem is with the technology of management, the systems,
processes, tools, methods, that we use to mobilize and organize
human beings to productive ends.
We have a name for this technology. It's called bureaucracy. And
though that word seems archaic, like horsepower, bureaucracy is
still very much with us. In fact, it's pretty much inescapable.
Bureaucracies are disempowering. Bureaucracies partition
thinking, and doing. Those in the top envision, while everybody
else simply enacts. And deprived of any real influence, most
employees feel emotionally disconnected from their work. Unless
your organization is truly exceptional, it contains a lot of people
who are phoning it in.
Three things are critical to engagement: first, the scope that
employees have to learn and advance (are there opportunities to
grow?); second, the company’s reputation and its commitment to
making a difference in the world (is there a mission that warrants
extraordinary effort?); and third, the behaviors and values of the
organization’s leaders (are they trusted, do people want to follow
them?)]

18. 18

19. 19
http://brenebrown.com/wp-
content/uploads/2013/09/DaringGreatly-EngagedFeedback-
8x10.pdf
Rehumanizing work and education requires courageous leadership.
Honest conversations about vulnerability and shame are
disruptive. The reason we’re not having these conversations in our
organizations is that they shine light in dark corners. Once there is
language, awareness, and understanding, turning back is almost
impossible and carries with it severe consequences. If you give us a
glimpse into that possibility, we’ll hold it as our vision. It can’t be
taken away.” [Daring Greatly by Brene Brown]
What about our children?

20. 20
http://dangerouslyirrelevant.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/2015-
Gallup-Student-Poll-1.jpg
Learning is passive. For 13 years, we learn to consume info.
Why?

21. 21
America’s schools were not designed to teach all children to high
levels. They were designed to select and sort young people into
two groups: a small handful of thinkers and a great mass of doers.
It started with Thomas Jefferson who considered it essential all
children be educated “well enough” to a) transact business, and b)
effectively participate in the civic life of the community.
In the Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson proposed teaching
the 3 r’s, reading, writing, and arithmetic to children three years
“gratis.” A visitor was to chuse the boy of best genius in the school
whose parents are too poor to provide an education, and to send
him forward to one of the 20 grammar schools for further teaching
in more complex subjects. From there, the best genius of the
whole was raked from the rubbish and continued for six years at
the public expense.
The choosing continued until the turn of the century and the
industrial revolution. The country was filling up with factories; and
these factories need workers. Factories replaced farms as the
primary place of work. Rural Americans flocked to the cities where
they seeking greater comfort and security. They entered the
regimented world and were closely monitored and tightly
controlled. They were paid to do what they were told—no more,
no less.

22. 22
Here’s the deal our parents signed up for: Our world is filled with
factories. Factories that make widgets and insurance and websites,
factories that make movies and take care of sick people and
answer the telephone. These factories need workers. If you learn
how to be one of these workers, if you pay attention in school,
follow instructions, show up on time, and try hard, we will take
care of you. We will pay you a lot of money, give you health
insurance, and offer you job security. It was the American Dream.
It worked.
Those workers were not only adults, but children…and the adults
were incensed. “Children can’t work in the factory…They’re taking
our jobs.” Factory owners insisted that losing child workers would
be catastrophic and said they couldn’t afford to hire adults. And a
deal was struck. They were sold on the idea children would
actually be more prepared to be compliant, productive members
of the workforce if educated to sit in rows, follow the rules, and do
as they were told told. Mass education was designed churn out
adults who worked well within the system. The economy needed
an institution that would churn out compliant workers, so we built
it. Factories didn’t happen because there were schools; schools
happened because there were factories. The reason so many
people grew up to look for a job is that the economy has needed
people who would grow up to look for a job. Jobs were invented
before workers were invented. [Stop Stealing Dreams: What Is
School For? http://sethgodin.typepad.com/files/stop-stealing-
dreams-print.pdf]
Factories didn’t happen because there were schools…schools happended
because there were factories.

23. 23
School, no surprise, is focused on creating hourly workers, because
that’s what the creators of school needed, in large numbers. Think
about the fact that school relentlessly downplays group work. It
breaks tasks into the smallest possible measurable units. It does
nothing to coordinate teaching across subjects. It often isolates
teachers into departments. And most of all, it measures,
relentlessly, at the individual level, and re-processes those who
don’t meet the minimum performance standards.
Today, we face a new and different challenge.
Technology is ubiquitous.
The white-collar jobs that were once machine-proof are now being
replaced by machines. When it’s time to do taxes, many no longer
call on an accountant, but instead go online. When shoes are
ordered from an endless supply online, they are shipped in the
correct size the next day with a click of a button having never left
home.
In their viral video Shift Happens, Karl Fisch and Scott McLeod
state, “We are currently preparing students for jobs that don’t yet
exist using technologies that haven’t been invented in order to
solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet.”

24. 24
“If I can google your questions, your questions suck.”
If you use google, I consider your resourceful. If kids do it, they're
cheaters.
There’s no competitive advantage today in knowing more than the next
person.
“We can no longer operate a 19th
century system using 20th
century
accountability and expect 21st
century learners.” Dr. Jeffrey Turner,
Superintendent

25. 25
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericaswallow/2012/04/25/creating-
innovators/#41dd65553d7a
Innovation is a team sport.
Problems today are too complex
to solve alone.
Innovation is a team sport. Problems today are too complex to solve
alone.
Innovation is cross disciplinary and explores solutions from multiple
perspectives.

26. 26
Multiple and largely punitive accountability provisions were
created to ensure compliance. [Visioning Document]
The present bureaucratic structure [is a] system based on
compliance, coercion, and fear. If proper focus is to be restored,
the system must be transformed into one based on trust, shared
values, creativity, innovation, and respect. [Visioning Document]
“We don’t like to use fear, but it’s the only tool we’ve got.” Director
at the Texas Education Agency, ACET Spring Conference 2013
Innovation is grounded in taking risks and learning via trial and error.
We are a very failure adverse society.

27. 27
First
Attempt
In
Learning
Innovative learning cultures teach creation, not consumption.
Extrinsic incentives have driven learning: carrots and sticks, As and Fs.

28. 28
Innovators are intrinsically motivated and aren’t interested in grades or
reward systems.
http://novemberlearning.com/educational-resources-for-
educators/teaching-and-learning-articles/students-as-contributors-
the-digital-learning-farm/
Johnson_1920_HighPlains.jpg
Is the idea of completely changing school as we know it scary? Yes,
but I think no more frightening than how the farmers felt at the
turn of the century when people were leaving the fields for the
factories. Over the next 50 years, America entered its most
prosperous time in history.

29. 29
Don’t think of how it is, but of how it could be.
cshade@dentonisd.org
www.underwhoseshade.com
@underwhoseshade
Chris Shade
Coordinator of District Improvement & Innovation Coordinator of
Federal & State Programs Denton ISD Professional Development Center
1212 Bolivar Street Denton, TX 76201 (940) 369-0676
cshade@dentonisd.org
www.underwhoseshade.com
@underwhoseshade
Follow
@underwhoseshade

30. 30
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